This has a lot to do with culture. Microsoft had a mockup of an e-reader before the Kindle, but the powers that be in the company insisted that it should run Windows (not out of malice, but because that's how they saw the world.) When Bezos, who, at the time, ran a giant bookstore, started his Kindle project, he put them on a secret team in a different building.
Car companies are run by people who love engines that burn gas. The notion that electric vehicles might be something more than compliance nightmares, that they might actually be better cars than gas-powered vehicles is foreign. It's like the Microsoft execs saying "of course the e-reader should also be able to open spreadsheets and what-not." Meanwhile, the Kindle is better as an e-reader because they started from the ground up.
Same thing with Tesla. (With whom, none of these companies would be talking about going electric.) They started from the ground up.
If BMW wanted to make money on electric vehicles, Tesla has proven that you can sell an $80-$100K+ electric car (with a ~$50K interior) with profitable unit economics. I'm pretty sure an electric 7-series would sell like hotcakes, and make money. Instead, you get the i3, which some people love, but it's certainly an acquired taste, and the 3 series e, which I drove recently-- it has about 11 miles of electric range. ;( If they just made it all electric, I'd buy one tomorrow at the already high 3-series prices. But the culture isn't there yet...
This is a whole lot of conjecture. Auto manufacturers were investing in alternative fuel way before Tesla came around. BMW lost some ground on electric because they made a huge bet on hydrogen in the late 90s/early 2000s that didn’t pan out (which is too bad because it probably would have been better and easier to transition to). There will always be nostalgia for the “purity” and raw mechanical feel of older big gas engines, but car people tend to like better cars, regardless of tech. Gas engines are getting smaller across the board. Many of the newest hypercars incorporate electric motors, and they’ve been generally well received.
I think what’s most likely is that they are right: they can’t reliably produce electric cars at scale that meet all of their requirements and customer expectations. Tesla is having trouble doing it, why wouldn’t BMW? Musk is charismatic and well liked. He is able to speculate wildly and miss deadlines with little consequence. I think BMW is right that they wouldn’t be given the same affordances by investors and consumers.
Hydrogen is a different kind of ICE. They could imagine it. Electric was hard to imagine.
I'm not even disagreeing with the main premise of the article-- there's no way BMW could shift the bulk of its production to electric right now. I'm just saying the could for some of the high(er?/est?) end vehicles that have low volume anyway, and they can charge ~$100K for the gas versions. Electric would be faster and have more cachet.
Not the "first cars". First machine-powered automobile was a steam engine (1769), first internal combustion engine car was running on hydrogen (1808), first gasoline-powered combustion engine came in 1870 and was installed to a cars well before Benz made his car in 1885, about the same time the first battery-electric car was made by Thomas Parker.
But yes, there were many electric car models in the beginning of 1900's.
Why would electric be hard to imagine? Any kid with a set of Hot Wheels new it could work. The problems 10-20 years ago still persist; range and recharge. Battery tech improves slowly compared to other tech.
I wouldn't rule a hydrogen fuel cell revolution out yet. If humans develop technology that allows hydrogen fuel to be safely generated at the pumping station, then transportation costs for hydrogen fuel would be greatly reduced and thus the efficiency over batteries could be realized.
I used this as my source for efficiencies: https://electrek.co/2017/10/26/toyota-elon-musk-fuel-cell-hy...
I think the cifficulties with hydrogen FCs right now are:
1. Efficient production of Hydrogen at the pump station.
2. Storage of hydrogen in the vehicle. Even liquid hydrogen isn’t very dense and has a rather low energy per volume.
3. FC catalyst. I think right now FC catakysts require precious metal catalysts like platinum and palladium.
Yes, only even the absolute best case for utilizing hydrogen takes more energy than for a battery powered system. I am talking physics here (I am discounting creating hydrogen from biomass or oil here for obvious reasons).
And even if you solve that -somehow - a hydrogen car will always be more complex to build than an EV. Simply because you need the plumbing and storage at the very least.
> If humans develop technology that allows hydrogen fuel to be safely generated at the pumping station
The technology to produce hydrogen from water at efficiencies far exceeding Faraday has been known since the 1970s. It was perfected in the 1990s. Toyota has been sitting on it for two decades. That's why they are still leaning towards fuel cells.
Permanent batteries were also developed in the 1970s. They are currently in use by the military.
The problem isn't technology and hasn't been for a long time.
The problem is the international slavery system runs on oil and will for the foreseeable future.
> The technology to produce hydrogen from water at efficiencies far exceeding
I was talking about safety and locality of generating hydrogen fuel, and I am sure that whatever advance you are talking about from thirty years ago is captured in the numbers I referenced.
> Permanent batteries were also developed in the 1970s. They are currently in use by the military.
Neat, but not relevant to my assertion.
> The problem isn't technology and hasn't been for a long time.
So you are saying that the reason we can't have hydrogen safely generated in pumping stations is because Toyota has some sort of patent or other rights that restrict its use?
> The problem is the international slavery system runs on oil and will for the foreseeable future.
How is Toyota benefiting from oil over hydrogen fuel cell?
> I was talking about safety and locality of generating hydrogen fuel
Hydrogen can be produced on demand from water in a vehicle.
> So you are saying that the reason we can't have hydrogen safely generated in pumping stations is because Toyota has some sort of patent or other rights that restrict its use?
No. I am saying that any attempt to sell technology that would allow decentralized energy production is considered a threat to the stability of the international monetary (petro dollar / slavery) system and will be treated accordingly.
> How is Toyota benefiting from oil over hydrogen fuel cell?
They are not. But if they try to sell their water fuel tech their executives will be killed and their factories will be bombed to dust.
What’s that opinion based on? Apparently 75% of auto execs have a different opinion. I just read the two posts in this thread and it seems the argument is that hydrogen is less efficient to produce and distribute? Well even if that’s true it shouldn’t matter. There’s plenty of clean energy available. Our goal should be to use clean energy, not necessarily to minimize energy use.
The articles are then dismissive that the “only advantage” of fuel cells is energy transfer rate. That’s by far the biggest problem with electric. It’s a big deal.
No major manufacturer is “doing nothing”. They’re all investing in electric. What’s wrong with investing in hydrogen, too? Either would be great and they both have pros & cons. I’d love to have both.
At scale for profit, I'm sure BMW could do it at scale just not for profit. The statement say they do not want to scale up forth generation due to costs. It makes sense, but I hope it will not be too late.
I think you’re way oversimplifying the situation. BMW isn’t anything like Microsoft.
It’s important to remember that, if you count hybrids, BMW already sells more electrified cars than Tesla and the vast majority of them at a more affordable price point than Tesla (the i3 is a pretty good value).
BMW sells a ton of cars and has made pretty good progress on the electric front. They’re just not a hype machine like Tesla.
I don't think the situation isn't being oversimplified, I think OP's post is a good summary of the whole situation.
I also don't think the i3 is good value. If you compare it to a BWM series 1, you can get a better car for a better price. On the other hand, a Tesla Model 3 is perfectably comparable to a BWM series 1.
Tesla has been making good electric cars since 2012 and the BMW i3 was very limited in range until last year or so. The range was limited to 100km in a single charge and the car was being sold for more than 40000 euros (at least in Europe) which is very steep for such a crippled car.
In the US a a couple years ago you were seeing leases for the i3 starting $250/month thanks to tax incentives.
There were a couple of municipalities in my area who caught flak for giving public employees BMWs to use on the job but they were quite literally the cheapest option.
I think the reason why a Tesla is comparable to consumers in price/value to a BMW series 1 model are down the Tesla price being brought down through a combination of subsidies and a clever financing structure which isn't really profitable and sustainable long term. It's a deliberate strategy by Tesla to enter the market and reach critical mass to start benefiting from more economies of scale. It will probably only start to turn into a profitable strategy around 2020. BMW is not pursuing such a strategy to try capture market, as they sell about 2 million cars per year and at a profit. Tesla only made 300k cars, ever, at a loss. At some point BMW will grow their portion of electric cars as it becomes viable to do so profitably and hopefully that will be around the time that Tesla is also doing it profitably.
Hype aside, we can say for certain that Tesla is _trying_ to ramp to five figure weekly production. The evidence we’ve seen is the Gigafactory, and Tesla’s official (legally binding) production plans.
I haven’t seen any evidence that BMW or anyone other than perhaps Nissan, is currently trying to ramp production to 10k weekly.
It’s not that I don’t think any of these cars are serious about the ramp—surely at least one is. There’s just no evidence any specific one is serious about it, besides vague “we’re serious about it” statements.
>Tesla is _trying_ to ramp to five figure weekly production.
For context BMW produces 40k cars a week in total vs the 2k of Tesla. So when BMW says "not profitable enough to scale up for volume production" - they probably know what they're talking about.
Sure it's 40k old fashioned petrols, but they seem pretty knowledgeable about scaling.
I think they are both having trouble scaling up different parts of the production line.
So far, it seems that Tesla has been focussing quite a lot on getting great at producing batteries, including the logistics for that. Which is what they seem to be good at (given that they produce industrial size battery stations and batteries for home use as well). But they do not have as much experience in managing a mass production line for cars.
BMW on the other hand has a lot of experience in mass producing cars, but they do not have as much experience for batteries. The hardest bottleneck for BMW might just be getting the batteries themselves. Tesla has worked hard on that by building their Gigafactory for example.
BMW doesn't need experience in batteries - they'll buy them from a battery manufacturer.
The real difference here is that BMW can afford a wait and see approach for another year or so. Tesla is all-in committed right now & it has to work out asap since they're making huge losses. For each dollar in sales they're incurring 1.3 in costs. Which brings us back full circle to BMW's comment:
>"not profitable enough to scale up for volume production"
I think it's quite the opposite, battery production is the key.
The problem is that no one can mass produce batteries for cars at this scale. As of now the projected capacity of the Gigafactory is enough batteries for 500k cars / year. By 2020 it will be 1.5M cars / year. This is more batteries than the whole world produced in 2013.
By 2020 Tesla is gonna have a lot of experience how to do this efficiently so the cost will be much lower. They are gonna have a new gigafactory in the EU. Lithium mines can't produce enough lithium at this scale so Tesla already makes deals with them to ramp up the production.
BMW makes 2.5 million cars a year. So what's the plan exactly? Just buy the batteries? From whom? When every other large car manufacturer wants to buy batteries and there is not enough on the market the price will go up.
Every time I read something like Volkswagen|Mercedes|Audi|whatever plans to sell x ev cars by 2020 I never see any mention about who is going to make the batteries.
I think the large car manufacturers are already behind, they should start working on their battery factories right now.
>So what's the plan exactly? Just buy the batteries? From whom?
One of the top lithium battery manufacturers as per my link. Lithium batteries are literally everywhere. Do you see Apple proudly proclaiming they make their own batteries for their ipads & how their battery knowledge is their key competitive advantage? No they use a supply chain.
Sure there will be a supply crunch, but even that is exaggerated in my view.
>Lithium mines can't produce enough lithium
See recent (last month) comment from Morgan Stanley:
>“We expect these supply additions to swamp forecast demand growth,”
Panasonic owns a small part. There's over 300 Tesla employees at the factory vs ~50 Panasonic, and Tesla owns the building and the land. Panasonic leases part of the building and owns some of the equipment.
If BMW is buying from the manufacturer, there's a high chance Tesla will be one of them.
Absolutely. "Tesla's" cells that have been showcased are 99% made possible by Panasonic. You don't need battery expertise to build a decent battery pack using off-the-shelf cells.
It's extremely frustrating how people here - who usually are at least moderately skeptical about other technologies - eat up piles of inaccurate battery news with gusto.
Tesla is currently stuck around 800 Model 3 cars per week.[1] They ramped up to that level in late January. Up and down since then. They clearly have some major production line problem, but what it is hasn't come out yet.
They're about to miss a major target next week. "Musk said Tesla was ready for 1,000 a week at the start of the year and would ramp up to 2,500 a week by the end of March." - Bloomberg. They were at 355 a week at the beginning of 2018 and are at 810 now.
Also, assembly lines don't "ramp up" well. Costs are relatively constant regardless of the number produced. Every station on the line has to be manned. An assembly line running at 1/6 speed means a product that costs up to 6x normal to make.
I don't think anyone serious would describe the Model 3 ramp-up as doing just fine. Musk's charisma coupled with the markets perception of Tesla's products as exciting and innovative appears to gives him far more leeway to constantly miss deadlines than would be tolerated at virtually any other automaker. The recent Tesla Roadster announcement was practically an exercise in distraction to divert attention from the Model 3 woes.
Comparing their current poor performance to their past even worse performance arguably does not equate to "doing just fine".
Going from ICE to Hybrid is not "next to no engineering at all". Not even close. To be a hybrid you take an existing car, put in everything you would in an electric car, except smaller and you have to place alongside the ICE. The gearbox is none trivial to make to incorporate both efficiently.
It's simpler to make a fully electric car, than a hybrid, 48v ICE or not.
Anecdote: my rav4 hybrid really impresses upon me how complicated hybrids must be to engineer. It’s tempting to see it as “just two electric motors, a battery pack, and an ICE drive train”. But it’s clearly juggling many factors to figure out the optimal source of each increment of force.
why are we counting hybrids? I'd really like an all electric car, but right I literally only have 2 options right now because i have a long commute. Tesla or Bolt. Nothing else has long enough range for me to get to work and back with any kind of leeway if I need to run to the store or something after work.
It's incredibly frustrating that there aren't more competitors making serious cars that aren't just compliance efforts. 80 miles of range is just silly.
What's the problem with decent plug-in hybrids? For most people, 50 miles of pure electric range (Chevy Volt, Hyundai Ioniq, Honda Clarity) is more than enough for daily driving, and if you run out of electricity once or twice a month, you just run on petrol.
Electric cars still suck in the winter. Air resistance, electric heating, and poor cold weather performance of LiIon batteries deplete the usable range. At the very least manufacturers need to provide auxiliary fossil fuel heating systems that aren't a hazard like current kerosene heater hacks. There is also the problem that pure electrics are largely off limits to the rentier population with no access to a plug where they park their car.
That's hogwash. I can pre-heat my Tesla from my iPhone, with it's heated seats and heating steering wheel, without risk of killing my family from carbon monoxide, all while it's plugged in and not drawing any power from the battery. Our family just took it on a 2000 mile road trip in sub 10 degree temps from the east coast to the midwest and back, and I have the one with the small battery, the Model X 75D. Yes the range is reduced 20-30% but it's completely predictable. An "auxiliary fossil fuel heating systems" sounds like a truly terrible idea.
It depends. When I had a 160 mi round trip commute without a charger at work, that kind of sucked in the winter, when the range dropped to around 140 mi, although not so much that I ever wanted to take the gas car instead. (Maybe if it had been a newer model, with more driving assistance features…)
Now that I can charge the car at each end, it’s better in every way. Apart from the ride, it’s great never having to stop for gas.
The Volvo electric car prototypes (that they distributed only in fleet and car-sharing use in Sweden) had a tiny 3-liter gasoline tank used only for a heater
I always find at least one completely unrelated comparisons or story in HN threads. I also hate the sorting of comments on HN. Is there a way to change it by hot/top like on Reddit? So often the first comment is completely off-topic/with examples in GP and turns into a thread of few more unrelated comparisons and anecdotes.
BMW and Microsoft are in way different situations. State of electric cars right now (mainstream) is nowhere close to state of ebook readers before Kindle.
However, I don't think electric cars are "mainstream", outside of a small slice of people, which probably overlaps pretty well with HN. ;) They have great mindshare thanks to Tesla's marketing (and because they're pretty damn good cars), but they're a blip in terms of overall car sales volume unless you filter by really high end sedans and SUVs.
This gets trotted out all the time. Norway is a very small country, in terms of population and GDP. Approximately 5 million people. Car ownership is about 58%, so roughly 3 million cars on the road. This is a nit, an infinitesimal number of cars. It's like using Arizona as an example. Same general population and GDP.
It's a bad system; it promotes upvoting the already top-comment and commenting on it or the initial replies to it; the best way would be to pseudo-randomize posts order but biased towards those with higher score (e.g. so the top-rated-comment sometimes appears second, some rare times third; and some extremely rare times forth [regardless of how old any of those comments are])
An option to hide/expand comment trees might help, as you could easily hide the first comment (and everything that hangs off it) and check out the next ones (without having to manually scan indentation).
Microsoft would have never succeeded with an e-reader even if they had shipped it. Amazon succeeded because they already had a stranglehold on the print book market and skeptical publishers had little choice but to go all in on the Kindle. Consumers bought Kindles because Amazon was able to give them basically any book they wanted on the Kindle at the price they wanted (later deemed illegal), which Microsoft would have not been able to do.
MSFT might have been too early, and you're certainly right that there was no guarantee of success, but back then, MSFT was the company everyone feared and they had a lot of clout.
Microsoft may have been able to use the threat of book piracy to push publisher to it's system, in the same way Apple did with the iPod and MP3 piracy.
Why would one have that effect but not the other? They’re identical as far as I can see; and you even use the same distribution channels for pirating them.
I don’t have any data... but I suspect that music piracy was more widespread and displacing more sales of music. Anecdotally, I do not recall the publishing industry crying “the sky is falling” over ebook piracy while the music industry certainly was.
Sony was there in the ebook reader market in the timeframe people in this thread are fantasming to Microsoft.
And it didn’t go anywhere, partly because like Microsoft, Sony relied heavily on a host computer for devices that should have been standalone at any cost, and also because unlike Amazon they had no mindshare regarding books. It just looked like an also ran product that could be gone at any time.
Apple started in the music business from scratch with a host computer dependent device as well - execution seems to make all the difference. Of course, today no-one would accept such a device, but back then it was the norm. I think the difference is that Amazon was already in a prime position to grab the digital book market, while for music there was no company in such a position.
I'm not sure the article supports that conjecture. BMW said in the article that the current models are not "profitable enough" to scale up, meaning that they have profitable unit economics but think they can do better. Specifically, they think that the fifth generation is better than the fourth, and are working on a sixth generation.
> “We wanted to wait for the fifth generation to be much more cost competitive,” Chief Executive Harald Krueger told analysts in Munich. “We do not want to scale up with the fourth generation.”
Taking that into account, I would wager that scaling up would require big capital investments, so they want to optimize the timing based on when they feel the technology reached a certain profitability threshold.
for every big, international, well run company this is basically like saying it's next year...
when i worked on marketing for target... they kicked off planning for their 2-day sale 18 months in advance... not sure it was smart, but they did it...
It also neatly coincides with 2021, which is when car manufacturers have to reduce their fleet consumption to 95g CO2/km in the EU; a reduction of about 20-30% that will be very hard to achieve given that they all try to sell more and more SUVs. In China hard quotas for electric cars will be introduced around that time too, I believe.
The Kindle is merely decent as an eReader, now that the Paperwhite is available and only for Amazon's proprietary format books.
If one wants to do something fancier like reading PDFs or free-hand annotations it quickly becomes clear that the Kindle is just a vehicle for Amazon's book business and they developed it exactly as much as it was necessary for that purpose.
Large format eReaders like Sony's DigitalPaper or the reMarkable show a glimpse of what's possible. There's no reason why such a device wouldn't be able to show and edit spreadsheets and also sync with some enterprise server or cloud.
But there are few customers that would be interested in that. The eReader market is propped by the eBook ecosystems, it's not at all a market where the devices offer a competitive advantage.
IMHO, this is nonsense. General Motors (the stodgiest of the big old-school car companies) is already, today, mass-producing two EV models (Bolt and Volt) in much bigger numbers than Tesla. Car companies see the writing on the wall. They don't love gas-burning motors, they love making money.
I think the comparison is slightly unfair. eReader OS choice is a purely "cultural" decision in a literal sense. If they really wanted to, they could have put two secret teams in two secret buildings. Doing what Tesla did, that costs serious money, carrying serious risk
In fairness, at least bmw has the i3 and that's better than most. Also, what he says is true. The i3 is crap cost performance. It's just the only thing on the market, and so it sells.
Tesla's plan was impressive in it's decisiveness. Start at the top of the price pyramid and work down as battery prices get cheaper. That way, you can be close enough to cost competitive and have a decent range at all times. Destroy the cliche of golf carts on freeways. Launch a car to space.
BMW (and everyone else) went straight for mass market cars. They're just expensive (about 2X) for their categories and had a craps range. Range just got better.
Still... between incentives, general interest and such they would inevitably sell some cars. A 100k car won't sell that many units either, so the strategy will sell roughly the same numbers at the same growth rate. The economics will get better when they do. You'll already have been making that model for years. profit. BMW want(ed?) to do this across models, and I suppose transition everything smoothly over a decade.
Anyway, a year or two probably won't make a difference to the big picture. Early mover doesn't get you that much in cars, it's not messaging apps or digital marketplaces. Most manufacturers seem willing to lose more tan that.
Tesla moved the needle. It took big risk. Very impressive. Imagine how much it would have cost if BMW had taken that risk and failed. They took the safer option, but the risk here was real. MS' risk aversion was all in their heads.
Going for the expensive toy niche of the market was really brilliant. Technological teething problems and high cost don't matter there as long as it is fun to drive.
German car manufacturers used to advertise their hydrogen/ electric car experiments as 'green'; targeted at eco-conscious young people and young families. Neither of them had the money for those low-volume cars or could live with the constraints of low range and a sparse network of charging stations. So they concluded that there wasn't a market at all.
For MSFT, I don't think it was risk aversion. As you note, they could have spent a relatively small sum to test it out. But that's not the way the culture worked.
Creating a fully electric car is a bigger investment, but if they produced a limited edition high end vehicle, they would sell out and make money. (The i8 is something like ~$150K. There are other smaller volume vehicles with 6 figure price points in the line up that would support profitable electric variants.) I'm not saying they could just cut over the 3 series to electric right away, but I think the reason they haven't offered an electric option at the high end of the range, which would be faster than what they've got, with a great low center of gravity, is cultural, not economic.
> Meanwhile, the Kindle is better as an e-reader because they started from the ground up.
I bought one of the first gen Kindles. And discovered that it wouldn't display PDFs. Unless you uploaded them to Amazon, and converted them somehow. But, given that these were confidential PDFs, that was unworkable. So I returned it.
But damn, a Linux-based reader would have been very cool.
Bad example, Surface >>>> Kindle. Putting windows on their tablet is absolutely the right decision. Missing out on the tiny ebook reading market is pretty irrelevant for MS.
A few months ago the number of ebooks outnumbered the physical books in Japan. I don’t know if that what we’d call a tiny market, and even if Kindle devices are not the primary support, it helped tremendously to anchor Amazon as the first choice provider for ebooks.
Yes I'm aware. MS had all kinds of eink efforts before the surface. My point is that I agree with MS execs that efforts are a waste of time. The market for Windows on a tablet is massive and they needed to focus on that and get that to market ASAP. Eventually we saw it realized as the Surface.
I don't think there's any "collusion" or other conspiracy to hold back electric vehicles, I think what BMW said is objectively true. Lithium batteries have cost too much in the past decade to put them into more than luxury cars or negative-profit compliance cars. Supply chains don't appear overnight. LG Chem, Samsung SDI, AESC/NEC, BYD, Foxconn, etc have been building factories and securing raw materials for many many years to have the capacity to sell car manufacturers enough batteries for a few million cars a year by the end of the decade. The price per kWh still makes the battery in a car like the Chevy Bolt a $8000 part, which means you're never going to make a $15K car with one inside. That price has been dropping year over year, and around 2020 is when it'll be cheap enough to make cars in the price range people actually buy them that have big batteries inside.
I'm not saying there was conspiracy but there was complacency.
The reasoning "batteries are expensive" is circular.
As Musk said, technology doesn't advance as a function of time but as a function of R&D investment. See atomic bomb or space race for the most dramatic example of how throwing money at the problem compressed the timeline.
Car batteries did not get cheaper because 2 years passed but because Tesla and Panasonic invested 5 billion dollars in a giant batter factory. And by creating a demand for lots of batteries, there's incentive for many others to invest in researching better batteries. And before that, cellphones and laptops were driving investment in battery research.
I see no reason why all this couldn't happen 10 years ago if car makers invested a sliver of their profits into electric car R&D instead of, you know, putting it all in Diesel and then writing software to cheat emission numbers.
And as a corollary, if Tesla didn't push the whole field forward with giant investments, BMW would be "objectively" saying in 2030 that batteries are too expensive to make electric cars viable.
> As Musk said, technology doesn't advance as a function of time but as a function of R&D investment.
Sometimes. Technology is very path-dependent; to invent z, you need to have invented w, x, and y first. And even with infinite resources that takes time. We’ve been working on fusion for half a century and it might be ready in another half century. Will more investment help? Yeah, but tokamaks take time to build, and you don’t know how to build the next tokamak until after you’ve done all your experiments with the current one. You can’t have iPhones in 1986 no matter how much money you throw at it because the underlying processor and battery tech isn’t there.
Without necessarily (or completely) disagreeing, I'm curious if you can further justify your assertion of the strong path-dependency. I am personally amazed when I contemplate the Apollo program or the Manhattan Project, and specifically the number of technologies that did not exist at the time. It strikes me that there's a clear observational bias here. Particularly in the modern era, we really only have a single data point around the development of any given technology (given how trivial communication and coordination are). Are there any examples from history of the same technology being developed independently with different dependencies?
Possibly relevant, given your choice of fusion as an example, is the somewhat famous graph from the 1976 U.S. Energy Research and Development Administration report on nuclear fusion[0]. We're obviously looking at a number of projections and can't know whether they were right or wrong, but it is noteworthy that we're not even pursuing a plan we believe will ever lead to nuclear fusion ("fusion never").
The Apollo program could never have happened without the decades of rocketry work that took place before that time. It's not like the US started from scratch in 1961 and landed a man on the moon in 1969; while the work involved to pull that off was incredible, there were decades of work prior to that, much of which involved the exact same people, that made Apollo possible.
Wikipedia, citing "Ward (2005). Dr. Space: The Life of Werner von Braun. ISBN 978-1-591-14926-2."
> Apollo program director Sam Phillips was quoted as saying that he did not think that the United States would have reached the Moon as quickly as it did without von Braun's help. Later, after discussing it with colleagues, he amended this to say that he did not believe the United States would have reached the Moon at all.
Wernher von Braun worked on rockets since the 1930's, inspired by the writings of Hermann Oberth, whom he later worked with at Peenemünde. The first V-2 rockets were launched in 1944. Von Braun continued working on rockets continuously until he retired in the 1970's, after working on the Apollo program.
You have to remember there’s a huge gulf between building something once and mass producing something, putting it in market and having it produce profits.
Electricly powered vehicles existed before the American civil war, it’s taken until now for them to have any hope of success in the market.
We should absolutely be deploying fission on a wide scale, but the issues with waste disposal and radioactive contamination, while vastly overplayed, also go away with fusion.
Also, fusion could be orders of magnitude more efficient than fission, to the point where we can solve literally all of our sustainability problems just by throwing energy at the problem. Too much CO2 in the atmosphere? Build a factory that uses electricity to extract CO2 from the air, combine it with water, and recycle it back into hydrocarbons. Not enough water? Build desalination plants--the only reason we don't is because they're energy-intensive and energy is expensive. Need a sustainable source of nitrogen-based fertilizers? Extract nitrogen from the air. Batteries don't store as much energy as hydrocarbons? Manufacture EVEN MORE hydrocarbons out of the air and water and then use them to power your airplanes, in a closed-loop system where you're not even increasing the net amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
You can make a great sustainability case with fission. With fusion, you can make an incredible sustainability case and take away all of the fears involved. And by the time we get around to inventing it, odds are we're going to be fucked enough not to have any other choice but to adopt it.
Tokomak is uncharted territory. It’s hundreds of PhDs trying to solve problems literally no one knows how to solve.
A lot of what Tesla has been doing is low hanging fruit. Supply chain optimization. Industrial design. Roboticization. These things aren’t science, they’re engineering. They’re applying known principles to the litany of problems an electric car entails.
There’s not much new science in a Tesla. Most of it could have been done years ago. There is some iteration required of course, but that’s why starting earlier would’ve made a difference.
The whole reason Tesla can exist in the first place, and was founded in 2003 and not 1993 or 1983, is because of advances in battery technology that have already been driven by the consumer electronics industry. They're not solving hard problems now because the hard problems have already been solved by dozens of companies trying to make laptops and cell phones and other battery-operated devices. If they started way back when, they would have to solve those hard problems themselves.
If I remember it correctly, sustainable fuel was a big thing a few decades before these oil businesses started springing up, I believe it was Toyota and BMW who had an electric version back then.
But later, these oil mafias systematically destroyed that to the extent that many people in US believe that climate change is fiction.
My point being, sustainable sources of fuel are being either systematically undermined or for the lack of interest.
if we did not have $$$ from the oil interests against these alternate fuel then just imagine how much R &D would have happened till now!!
Even Nicholas Tesla had an electric car's design back in the 1800s, if that tech had been evolved to say Hydrogen fuel or ethanol or anything that doesn't shoot down our atmosphere then things would have been remarkably different now.
So, yes, there is a path dependent approach to science and technology, but for alternate fuel, the path was made ugly by $$$ from the oil interests
I think all of these things are relative. Imagine if Tesla had started in 1983 instead of 2003. We wouldn't have started mass producing electric cars in 2000 - but we'd probably get there earlier than 2020. I don't think the question of how much to invest and where to focus R&D is easy or straightforward. A lot of technological development is the story of unexpected jumps from one area to another.
Imagine an alternative reality where fast wireless communication was omnipresent and laptops developed as dumb terminals which used little power. Battery technology might be where it was 40 years ago. It's also possible that, in 50 years, people will look back at the Tesla of today as stupid and foolhardy - striving to make electric cars with stone age battery tech, when a revolution in 2025 changes everything.
Even that's idealized - it's not likely a production ready revolution in battery tech simply appears out of thin air. (In fact, there have been a number of revolutions that haven't managed to scale up to production quantity.)
"technology doesn't advance as a function of time but as a function of R&D investment"
Car companies are not in the business of advancing technology but making money. They will advance technology if they can sell more cars. Now with Tesla they have to respond and are slowly doing so.
Musk's motivation is technology for technology's sake. That's a totally different motivation than traditional car companies and that's the reason why Tesla is ahead in technology. It remains to be seen who ends up ahead in terms of business success.
I'd argue that there are some conditional factors here and they largely revolve around human capital. In fields with a very small number of people with prior experience, throwing money at the problem won't necessarily accelerate the path as fast as one where there are a large number of qualified people to tackle the problem.
This said, continuing to throw money at a problem such that it leads to more and more people developing a skill set in the space would overtime help, but then again, they could reduce the amount of investment down the line, and you'd still have people who were highly specialized in said domain to target that problem anyways (abet being paid less).
Yep, especially since those companies really don't start with "we'll build a line that can assemble 100 cars a week and then work from there" like Tesla did - it's either a line that can assemble 10k cars/week, or nothing. And if the supply for whatever component isn't there yet to support that capacity, then it's not going to happen.
This is usually the case. Retooling an assembly line is a ton of work, and NOT producing at scale is impossible for modern, highly automated car factories like VW, Mercedes or BMW own.
Producing 100 cars is simply not possible in these factories, because it would mean massive losses to the factory owner.
Also, car manufacturers do not want one supplier for a part, they want several. Mostly as a backup and also to make sure they are not under any price fluctuations because they have more leverage over the parts supplier.
Making cars is a very, very thin margin bussiness, especially with cheaper cars like the toyota aygo, fiat panda etc. Minutes of downtime in a factory could mean having to sell a ton of cars at a loss to make up the cost.
> I find it hard to believe that the major car plants can no longer make assembly lines that produce more than one design on an assembly line.
this is not the problem i described.
The problem is introducing a new model into an assembly line is a lot of work, and something which is not worth the effort if you are only going to produce a small amount of cars.
Absolutely not true. The Nissan Sunderland plant (which produces over 500K cars per year on two lines) produces both the Nissan Leaf and Infiniti Q30 in low volume on line two (might be line 1, not certain now). The Q30 was introduced from a slow ramp up without stopping production of the line around 18 months ago and is a low volume car.
That's in line with what the parent comment said; it's not cheap at all do add a new vehicle to an existing assembly line, and it's not worth it for low volume production.
Infinity also sold over 25 thousand Q(X)30s in 2017, so it's not as low volume as talked about in previous comments, either.
As an interesting tidbit on this point, the reason robotics is favored by car manufacturers in production plants is not because it's cheaper (it's actually more expensive), but because it's more flexible, i.e. changing a line to manufacture a new line is cheaper. This runs counter to most people's intuition of robotics.
BMW is in a pickle because there is a good chance their premium pricing advantage is going to up and disappear with the shift to electrics. BMW has a customer base that loves their esthetics and brando and ignores the very high cost of ownership. Shift to electric and the esthetic and brando go out the window.
Ugh, Harley Davidson is a company that sells awful, antiquated products at jacked up prices.
Say what you want about how much BMW charges, they make very technologically advanced cars and charge accordingly.
Their major fault is they tend to use very very expensive parts and overengineer everything to a fault. This tends to make them less reliable and very expensive to repair.
Case in point, the very popular and well loved BMW N54 engine used 6 piezo fuel injectors to move massive amounts of fuel. Each injector costs almost $300 at an online parts store. For comparison, a Honda Civic injector generally costs 1/5th the price.
Both Harley's and BWM's have high cost of ownership and are on the lower end of the reliability curve. Yet owners buy them for the esthetics and Brando.
Put an electric motor in each and the esthetics changes. That causes Brando issues because customers will grumble that the new models are 'not really' models.
What? I don't see how electric versus petroleum drivetrain has any impact on esthetics and brand. People buy BMWs because they want to be seen driving BMWs, or they like the styling and performance. It's the same reason people spend 10 grand on a Leica camera and lenses when a $500 Fuji will do just as well if not better at the actual photography.
There’s some truth to this since pretty much all electrics have similar power characteristics. But handling may still be a sufficient distinguishing creature. And then there’s always leather upholstery and the double kidneys :-)
Nowadays, modularization is key. A common toolkit/template, optimized for keeping large parts of the manufacturing process the same.
Take VW for example, with their Modularer Querbaukasten (arguably the most well-known example, although others like Toyota have done this for longer). Cars from the Polo up to the Passat are based on the same platform, retooling is kept as low as possible.
All big players have gone modular. Everywhere, the number of different models based on the same platform has gone through the roof, with new (often relatively low-volume) variants arriving each year. (I swear, one of these days Mercedes is going to run out of letters! :) )
The biggest issue yet: Current toolkits aren't really geared towards EV - but: this is rapidly changing. As soon as the new generation of toolkits arrives, things could happen really fast.
VW has been moving almost all transverse front-wheel drive/all wheel drive cars to the MQB platform for a while now. This includes sub-brands such as Audi, Seat and Skoda. The benefit is that all cars based on this platform become much cheaper to design and build. The downside is that the cars end up being the same, drive the same, feel the same, etc - which I find quite boring, but that might not be an issue at all for the average motorist.
Only the cheapest (and TT) Audi models are based on MQB. From A4 up it’s MLB – the luxury variant. Also, for the new cars Audi will share the tech not with the cheaper makes, but upwards: with Porsche, Bentley, Lamborghini and so on. It already happened with Q7/Q8/Urus/Betayga.
It’s also not exactly true that the driving characteristics are the same across the board.
Usually Seats are on the sporty side with stiff ride and precise handling, Skoda is softer, and VWs are in between. Same chassis, different setup. It’s not FWD vs RWD magnitude of difference, but it’s there.
The same goes for Audi: Q7 is not the same as Urus.
But yeah, the unification is bad from the car enthusiasts POV. The Ateca not only has the same chassis, but the whole body (bar the front fascia) and even the colors palette is straight from Skoda.
Another worrying thing is that apparently someone in Wolfsburg noticed that Skoda sells better than VW, despite the cheap plastic interiors, and now the new VW cars (T-Roc, Tiguan) also don’t have the premium quality that had been reserved for the mother brand. Could be an aftermath of the dieselgate as well.
Sure, a Golf GTI and Leon Cupra has different suspension set up, but the cars more or less drive the same and feel the same, at least on track. I love the EA888, but it’s ubiquitous in the VAG range. I’m super pleased that the hot hatch market is so competitive in 2018 because there is so much consumer choice now.
Do we have some data on how thin the margin is for entry level subcompact cars? I was always under the impression that cars are sold at the "market price", regardless of production costs which usually meant at much higher price than production costs.
Cars have huge costs besides just production - amortized R&D, depreciation/damage to the tooling, union benefits, rework, shipping, amortized cost of future recalls per vehicle, interest on debt payments.
Also, it's one of, if not the most competitive market on the planet. There's a large number of incredibly well funded entrants, with competition in every segment. It's as close to a truly efficient market as you can get, and it's getting more efficient as Chinese and Indian brands mature.
Some manufacturers sell their subcompact cars for little or no profit purely to drive up their corporate average fuel economy. This allows them to make large profits selling larger, less efficient vehicles that customers actually want.
I don't have hard figures but I remember Ford UK saying that the little Fiesta cost 90% as much to build as the big Mondeo ( Fusion in the USA ) but with much less pricing potential.
Sure they do - especially when the supply chain itself already offers services for that kind of volumes. Take Magna for example, they have worked with both BMW and Daimler(-Chrysler) on modern low to mid-volume assembly projects (while also manufacturing the G class super old-school style :) ) and their plant in Austria is specialized for quick retooling to new models. They're starting with the new Jaguar I-Pace EV this year.
BMW is one of the most progressive major auto maker in the world today. This news is not news at all and was in line with previous announcements on BMW i-series, which is the only current BMW line up that contains fully electric vehicles. Mass making electric vehicles at the same being profitable is HARD given the current technology status quo, yet crucial for any auto maker want to be in the game long term.
By 2025, BMW fleet will almost all(25 models) be electrified, and half of them (12) will be BEV (battery eletric, aka fully eletric.) This is the company that's determined to be ALL-IN on electrification on their cars. The current i-series are just too damn expansive to make (carbon-fiber unibody etc.) and not sharing many parts to the existing BMW line ups, which cost it much higher to make. So until the iNEXT platform is ready, they aren't going to mass produce EVs. [1]
"By 2020" -> "By 2025" -> "By 2030". It's all vaporware marketing announcements meant to gloss over the fact that the only pure EV they currently sell is the laughable i3.
The i-Series are not all-electric: only the base-model i3 is - which has an unimpressive range without the optional gasoline-powered range extender, while the i8 is a hybrid with a 3-cylinder engine.
Range extender on i3 is a motorcycle gas engine that serves as a generator to continuously recharge the car's lithium ion batteries. i8 does use the same engine for powertrain though.
There is certainly a relutance from car companies to start making electric cars and the proof of that is Tesla. They have been fighting hard for years to secure supply chains for their battery packs, what's stopping the current car companies of doing the same with their infinite cash reserves? Why are they only starting now when Tesla has been planning it for years?
Also, you are giving those numbers without any source in them, so I will call this a very deceiving comment. Electric cars are marginally less complex than a regular ICE car, which it makes them simpler and cheaper to manufacture.
Way I see it Tesla proves that a mass market EV is still not possible. Either you take it from the fact that they failed to come up with anything revolutionary in terms of the Model 3; price/range still on par with other offerings. Or you take their lowest cost estimates for their battery packs and then you try to build the rest of the car with the remaining $12k (for the total price of a people's car that everyone can afford), and you realise that it is not possible.
The German Post approached VW to have them develop electric cars for deliveries in cities. VW refused, so they just hired a couple of students and started/bought their own company. They get requests from all kinds of businesses now.
If making delivery vans for one of the biggest users of delivery vehicles in Germany (that uses tons of VW vans currently) is "a small project outside their core competency", VW really is in trouble.
Most van companies offer a "chassis cab" option [1] - basically a van with the cab present, but most of the back missing.
There's then an ecosystem of companies that will work with end users to design, build and fit custom van bodies. If you want a mobile broadcast van, or an ambulance or a mobile command centre? That's where they come from.
If you see delivery vans that aren't standard models, they've almost certainly come through the same ecosystem; companies like VW generally aren't in the business of working with end users on custom products.
Deutsche Post uses a fair amount of the standard "van-type" vans by VW, and even if someone else is making a custom body electrifying the chassis is clearly a job for VW.
Given that VW's CEO has been whining to the press about how annoying it is that VW is now not their customer but a competitor, they clearly now think that they should have wanted the job more. My guess is that they did not expect the Post (which as a massive, formerly state-owned company you'd expect to be fairly conservative) to risk going their own way and succeed with it, and thus misjudged the risk involved with letting them pass.
Their core competency, beside ICE engines, it's furnishing out vehicles with all the expensive, heavy cruft customers have come to expect from big brands vehicle makers, even in supposedly utilitarian delivery vans.
The streetscooter, on the other hand, is really just the most barebone thing you could build around a battery. This saves a lot of money for a startup, but at a big brand with all the processes for sophistication, deviating from the established path would eat much of the savings.
But that's not the only problem: many of the same people who are enthusiastic about the pragmatic minimalism of the streetscooter due to the underdog image would punish the same car if it was made by VW or any other of the big ones. And that's not just interior finishing and amenities, the same applies to more serious things like safety and reliability. People will cut streetscooter a lot of slack where they would be unforgiving towards a big brand.
Does VW already know how to make electric vehicles? How many would they sell relative to their total sales of existing ICE vans? Is it worth starting up an entire new business for one customer?
I think this can be explained by VW just deciding its not worth it rather than saying VW is trying to suppress electric vehicle development.
Don't they have an e-Golf? They know how to build an electric car. It's building one that's actually profitable without heavy tax subsidies and at VW's build quality that's a problem. Tesla hasn't figured that out either.
If you want to get serious about developing EV technology, why not start with a big customer that has a use case that makes the problem a lot easier?
Also, small vans for use inside cities is a big market. All delivery services need them, all kinds of workmen need them. With bans for Diesel cars in German cities on the horizon all kinds of businesses are complaining because Diesels are the only offering in that category.
Sure, but can we at least admit that maybe VW did the math and decided it wasn't worth it to them? And that they could have arrived at this conclusion without deciding to sabotage EV development?
Sure, maybe they did the math, maybe they just couldn't be arsed. But whatever the real reason why they didn't take the job - someone else (DHL itself) actually did the correct math and is now actually a viable competitor for VW in this area. So yeah, again, maybe but they failed at it.
Yeah, I know about these. But these are intracity delivery vehicles. The restrictions in their domain of use make the problem simpler. My university has a couple and all they do is transport stuff between the two campuses. I think, although the average commute is probably way lower than a 80km, people would still be reluctant to buy it. For example the Mitsubishi i-MiEV has been around since 2009, is the least expensive amongst EVs (besides Chinese EVs probably) and has a range of 100km to 160km (depending on different metrics) and that didn't sell very well. Only 38.000 units sold.
The market is very niche. One of the best values in cars right now is off lease Volts — my neighbor just picked one up for like $16k.
Personally, I’m an ideal EV candidate. But it just costs more, especially when you price in electrical work for home chargers, etc. The TCO of a nicely equipped Accord is far less, and will be for a long time.
On lease EVs are extremely cheap but only because the market is niche. Dealers desperate to get them off their lots stack up incentives on top of existing rebates until people get to lease 40k cars for 100$ a month
EVs have been around for decades, and that's the issue here. They weren't ever cool and it was never particularly cheap to buy one. California used to (still does?) give rebates and an okay to use the carpool lane, and that didn't even cause a significant bump.
All Tesla did is prove you can sell an EV at a high price point to tech people who love all sorts of trendy things that don't sell outside that sphere. This in no way says EV is a mass-market vehicle yet.
Tesla did bring many infrastructure issues to the forefront, and that's no small feat.
I have to disagree, most of the current electric car offerings on the market are more expensive than the base price of the Model 3 (looking at the BMW i3 in Europe, the base price is 45000 dollars).
Tesla is a company that was built from the ground up, without any prior design and manufacturing experience, and they have been mass producing cars for only 5 or 6 years. You can't simply expect them to have the same business agility as BWM, which is a company with over 1 century old.
The lack of "better" product offerings from Tesla is not due to the technology, is due to the infancy of the company.
The base price on the Model 3 today is $49,000 and Tesla's own IR documents state that they don't expect to have a positive gross margin, even at that price point, until some time in the distant future after production is fully ramped up at both Fremont and the Gigafactory. It's not a very good example of the point I think you're trying to make.
They are selling for a loss currently. Any margins from model S and X are being used to subsidise model 3 and overall they are still losing tons of money, profitability not even on the horizon. I wonder how long their current runway is without raising new cash again.
That is mostly right, but I was responding to someone who said that positive gross margins for the vehicle were only planned for the distant future. Their financial statement for last quarter implied that the 3 would have positive gross margins in late 2018.
Their cash position decreased by about 162 million last quarter and they have ~3.3 billion on hand at the end of Q4. There are a lot of risks still out there due to the production bottlenecks that currently exist (and maybe more on the horizon with S and X), but the cashflow situation isn't as horrible as some want to believe.
No the base price is $35,000. They simply haven't started letting anyone buy the $35,000 versions yet. You can say this is a failure on the part of Tesla. But this is not the first time they've had a lower end model that was planned but not immediately available upon production. Case in point when the All Wheel Drive Model S was announced, they didn't make non-performance versions available for several months after.
Tesla is not proof of that. Tesla is an EV company from the ground up. They also do not have the capacity to produce vehicles at the rate of companies like BMW, Mercedes, Honda, etc.
Moreover, car companies do not have "infinite cash reserves". Retooling factories for EV production is an expensive undertaking. Combined with the expense of lithium cells and supply issues, it's not a simple or cheap task.
Tesla had to raise a lot of money from investors to keep the business afloat. In 2017 alone, they had to raise a debt of $2bn to keep their cash reserves alive so that they could continue investing on their products. Volkswagen, on the other hand, had a revenue of $230bn in 2017 alone.
It doesn't seem to me that money is a problem for the already established car manufacturers. And looking at Tesla's finances, starting an electric car business wouldn't make much of a dent on Volkswagen's finances.
So yes, Tesla is proof that there is some relutance in moving to a fully electric business in the car industry.
It does fund a lot of research. Volkswagens investment into electrical cars exceeds Tesla by a factor of five. The article suggests that manufacturing at large scale is not yet profitable, not that they're not actively working on R&D.
To be fair - the S Class is a relatively low volume car. I don't have exact figures, but I'd expect it to be in the range of 2-3% of the cars Mercedes manufactures.
BMW made nearly 2,000,000 cars in 2015[1], and this year, best case, Tesla will make 150,000. That's an order of magnitude difference in scale.
Yes, but in the context of a single production line that I feel like that reasoning doesn't stand. Yes Telsa doesn't make as much in volume, but we're already only talking about cars in the EV segment.
I think the fallacy in thinking that "supply chains don't appear overnight", is that if no one makes intermediate or full sized investment leaps then they the supply chain may be slow to appear or never appear in the volume needed. If you are too accustomed to a very mature supply chain (like IC drive trains fall into), I think a risk is leaning too much towards waiting for maturity.
It's hard to interpret from just the article if BMW is saying not 'til 2020 as their development of the supply chain isn't ready yet, or that they're waiting longer to capitalize a supply chain until some cost reduction 'appears'. There are statements on either sides if those paths forward in the article. So it could be simultaneously true for different links of the supply chain.
It’s not a conspiracy, its the innovator’s dilemma. It’s the fact that getting to a point where you can compete on margins would force you to invest all of the margins of your existing company (and possibly then some), and being unwilling to do so.
I believe this is shortsighted thinking. They’ll have fat margins for now, and then a few years from now it’ll be too late. Companies like Tesla that are fine absolutely incinerating cash and playing with death in order to make it work will have a serious headstart.
>BMW can wait til 2020, but by then they’ll have missed the boat.
What boat? Are people going to stop buying cars in 2 years?
We aren't talking about cellphones here, 2 years, or even 5 years is nothing in the automotive industry. The current 3-series is 6 years old and a good 3-4 years behind competitors and is still selling strong.
Having a 2-3 years lead in this industry is literally less than half the lifecycle of a model.
That boat is super niche. Numbers of $100k cars Tesla sells per year is very small and actually is not growing. So that boat is quite small and I don't see the issue for BMW.
You have to remember Tesla is losing hundreds of millions of dollars, so clearly that boat is not going to get far until they can start making money. Even Elon Musk won't be able to raise big rounds of new capital indefinitely.
That super niche boat is in a fleet of boats that are killing off old businesses that are lagging behind. Sure BMW may be doing great today, but how long until they’re a Borders.
I don’t agree with you, but I did use your golang auth project the other day. Good work! Thanks!
That would be the boat of early adopter people who are willing to pay top dollar for a car that, apart from Superchargers and a large screen is not on par with BMW and the like in things that actually matter to luxury car buyers, like build quality and comfort and handling? Actually, on build quality Tesla doesn't really compete with cars that are half the price.
Does not seem to be a huge boat to me. Not that BMW couldn't screw it up before then, but they will need to try really hard to screw up.
Also, BMW and Tesla operate and vastly different scales, and I am not sure there are enough people who consider electric more desirable (or feasible) than "a bimmer".
>> That super niche boat is in a fleet of boats that are killing off old businesses that are lagging behind. Sure BMW may be doing great today, but how long until they’re a Borders.
But is it killing businesses? At least from my European perspective I don't see VW, BMW, Daimler losing business to Tesla really, they seem to be doing fine (the only problems they are dealing with are of their own making like the emission scandal). In Asia I also don't see automakers like Toyota losing to Tesla at all. The moment Hong Kong stopped electric car subsidies the number of sold Teslas dropped to 0.
Maybe your American perspective is different? Do you think US car companies like GM, Ford etc are losing badly to Tesla? Is Tesla so popular? I thought owning Tesla was something akin to owning Porsche of Ferrari, it is a status symbol for very small minority of wealthy people. But I don't see Tesla becoming mainstream car for middle classes any time soon.
And then in 5 years when it's time for them to buy a new car and they're sick of the cheap plasticky interior of the Tesla, BMW will be there ready for them.
Exactly! Besides maybe the “entertainment package”.
I’ll end up buying a Tesla because it’s fully electric. I was on the wait list for a Model 3, but my previous volt lemon’d and I couldnt wait until an unknown delivery date, so I bought another Volt.*
The volt for now gets me the round trip. I need to charge anything beyond going to work and back.
I’m at 5000 miles with NO GAS! It’s rad!
* I know “you bought another volt when your first one lemon’d?!” Yeah totally. It was an awesome car and between GM and California’s lemon law I pretty much sold my old one back to GM for just shy of the original purchase price.
Luxury is the wrong word for the segment Tesla is competing in. “Premium” is closer, but still wrong.
“High end” feels a lot closer. A kitchen aid mixer isn’t a luxury item, but it has a good profit margin and people who love mixers will buy it.
Tesla is more like that... there’s no hand stitched Italian leather or whatever, but the software is top of the line, the drivetrain is top of the line, it has unique features that make it a better car, without competing on who can make the prettiest mahogony inlay.
Like, not having to stand at a smelly gas station in your heels and pump your gas is a luxury. But Tesla doesn’t sell you a wall charger with gold accents.
But then it's not even that they are competing in that segment, they are that segment. Outside of people with sufficient disposable income who hate fossil fuels so much they are willing to wait for a full charge (and I've seen some of their supercharger centers; might be better than your average gas station ion a middle of nowhere, but not really a place where I'd want to spend well over an hour for a full charge, when I can be in and out of a gas pump in 5 minutes). It's a legitimate niche, but not necessarily a very large one.
Also, I am not sure if they really make a better car. Unique, for sure. Myself, if it doesn't have AWD, I don't buy it...
They do, eventually, but as many things with Tesla it is sometimes hard to tell what is actually available (as in you can go and buy it) and what is to be available "real soon now" for several years. It is not cheap, either.
October 2014 is when it became available, not sure what you mean by 'widely available' and 'an option'. From launch it was available at both smaller and larger battery sizes, now they've started offering it as the only choice for some battery sizes.
Their build quality is atrocious, too. When stuck behind one on 101, I can see that gaps are uneven right from my driver seat. For a Yugo it might be OK. For a car with a luxury price tag that's just wrong.
2020 is less than two years away. They will not have missed the boat by any stretch of the imagination. Most people will still be buying petrol cars in 2020.
The two are not exclusive. The batteries have indeed cost too much until 2015 or so, which is still 5 years earlier compared to the 2020 target BMW is giving.
However, it's undeniable that the carmakers weren't in a hurry to build EVs because EVs would be too much of a disruption to their businesses. Maybe a linear 0.5% growth per year? Yeah, they could deal with that. But they'd hate it if the EV market explodes to 10% in 2022 and 20% in 2025, and 50% in 2030.
I am wondering if, after 2020, western countries would not need as many cars that they used to have. It feels like new generations do not own as many cars as their parents. If self-driving are indeed coming soon, dropping the cost of transportation, then we might need less cars than we currently use (or not use as they are parked 95% of time, http://fortune.com/2016/03/13/cars-parked-95-percent-of-time...).
So maybe a production of few million electric cars a year might be sufficient in 2020 ? It is 2 years from now, and with Tesla pushing, and giving the pace, the landscape could be very different from today. BMW might need to reassess their prediction then.
I agree, although not sure if the current main legacy car manufacturers (VW, BMW, GM, even Toyota) would necessarily be the leaders in non-western countries. They might be losing on both sides, the high-end electric vehicles (less volume, lower margin) and the cars needed for developing countries.
Feels like, current car manufacturers have a lot to lose in the coming years...
That might very well continue to be a theme. Every time there is a significant tick upwards in EV usage and a corresponding drop in demand, the price of oil drops significantly. It's extremely sensitive to fairly small changes in demand.
- they weigh a lot for the range them can provide
- the recharge rates even on "superchargers" is not good
- the range loss in cold climates is very high, can be a third of your range
- charger standards are not aligned
I hope we solid state batteries can solve all of these, if not the weight component by removing the liquid electrolytes. Is there really much more that can be done with lithium batteries?
I am still a fan of smaller EV range backed by a REX; how that REX is done going forward is up to technology but I don't really want to have to haul a thousand pounds of batteries around just to exceed two hundred mile range in mild to warm weather
What is the cost of a transmission and a fuel tank and exhaust system? Maybe $5000? With LGChem's pricing of $150/kWh, that'll buy you a battery bigger than the Leaf's.
This is just straight up baloney. The Nissan Leaf and the Chevy Bolt show this to just not be true at all.
It's not that car companies like BMW and Honda and others who are being slow to release EVs are colluding so much as they are just dragging their feet because ICE engine vehicles are much more profitable right now (not requiring changes to their supply chain and manufacturing methods, or training of dealerships and service departments, etc.)
The Nissan Leaf, with a 68% smaller battery than a Tesla, cost more to build than its selling price until 2015 (5 years into production and 7 years after breaking ground on the battery factory) according to Nissan's CEO. GM only made about 25,000 Chevy Bolts last year and lost money doing it.
If anything, they're both perfect examples of what I said.
Nissan had to start building a supply chain for the Nissan Leaf in 2008 to make it profitably in 2015. It took nearly 10 years for them to replicate the battery assembly lines, electric motor assembly lines, and car assembly lines for Leaf across 3 continents to sell it worldwide at "mass production" volumes.
> The Nissan Leaf, with a 68% smaller battery than a Tesla
Dude, that figure is kinda bogus. You can't just cite a random number like that. The first Leafs had a 20 Kw battery which is pretty close to your figure compared to a base 60 KWh Tesla Model S. But that was only the very first years, they went up to 24 KWh then 30 KWh and the current Leaf is 40 KWh.
They're still smaller than the base Tesla battery, but they are also cheaper. THey've always been way, way cheaper than a Model S or Model X, and the current Leaf is still cheaper than the Model 3 (and you can actually buy one now.)
> Lots of stuff about the Leaf and Bolt not being profitable.
Companies like to make a lot of hay about how much money they are losing on the stuff they are selling to seem like they're doing us a favor by selling it to us. This is always at least a little misleading. For example, they will roll in the cost of the R&D and building factories and updating their tooling and supply chain and say "Well we are losing money on Bolts this year" because of all those costs.
But those costs are investments. It's not like they are costs that go into every Bolt they make. It's an investment they have to make up front and they get to make this kind of spurious claim they're "losing money" because of it. They aren't any more than the "lose money" whenever they update a model of car.
Technically whenever they update a regular model the "lose money" on some number of them due to the costs of updates to the manufacturing and tooling and supply chain. But you don't hear anything about it because everybody knows it's a stupid way to look at it.
We should pay no more attention to these claims as they ramp up to make EVs.
Again I say; EVs are here, you can buy them, they are great, stop listening to B.S. And most importantly, stop repeating it!
> Lots of stuff about rolling the R&D/factories into "losing money"
Actually that's not the case. This was the quote from Nissan's CEO about the Leaf turning a profit:
"We are getting there. Are we amortizing and depreciating everything we have spent? No. But if you look at margin of profit — the direct cost of the car and the revenue of the car — we are getting into positive, which is good for this technology."
So he's talking about reaching positive gross margins on each car, not the point when they fully cover the development costs.
This is a very good point. But I will see if BMW actually does mass produce EVs.
It's not that expensive. If you can afford $10,000-$20,000 over the life of a car in fuel (plus a few thousand in oil changes and brake jobs), you can afford a $7500 battery. Especially since that pulls thousands of dollars worth of complexity out of the drivetrain.
I love how every time there's a discussion about car operating costs here, at least someone mentions oil changes as if they were a substantial part.
Many European cars with a long-life oil change program have oil changes as far as 18,000 miles apart. While I haven't averaged quite that high, for me oil changes still account for only about 2% of the fuel costs. With any new car the depreciation in value dominates most other individual costs anyway. (Also, a modestly sized car might only need one brake service if you use it for, say, 12 years, although this is more dependent on driving habits.)
And cars retain the value of their gas tanks. The difference is that gas tanks very seldom if ever 'wear out' and are $100-500 to replace. Battery packs are a wear item. Even a 100k warranty seems absurd to me. I have 2 cars with over 200k that need no major work. That steps hard on the narrative that eveltric cars need less maintance. If making cars electric means making them diaposible, Id rather petrol, and so would the environment.
I've only had two ICE cars for a significant length of time, and each time I had to replace failed fuel pumps, both times they were located in the gas tank. They certainly seem to wear out more than rarely to me.
For well-engineered EVs, batteries are definitely not a wear item. Especially in a large-battery (i.e. >200mile range) EV, the battery will easily last over 200,000 miles before significant degradation.
Usually financed at a low interest rate. Electricity isn't free, but in my case costs about the equivalent of $1/gallon for gas (locally, gas is currently about $2.40). So overall, still definitely a win.
For gasoline, I consider it as essentially financed as well. Going to the gas station is basically paying off part of the debt I got by buying a gasoline consuming vehicle. Electricity, too, but electricity is much cheaper, and I can get out of debt there by buying a solar power system (unlike gasoline which is not feasible to produce on your own nor store a car-lifetime's worth).
I think the issue is that it's $7500 in one transaction if a battery goes bad, versus the cost of fuel which is spread out over the lifetime of the car.
Batteries can be repaired, just like an engine. And the battery rarely goes immediately bad. But I think this isn't the main issue, as cars already have to deal with the same problem of being totalled.
Do those come strict conditions though? For example: don’t launch the car, don’t use ludicrous mode more than X times over the lifetime of the drivetrain, etc.
I am curious why people fixate on the battery so much. Several of my coworkers have had Teslas for years now. To my knowledge not a single one has had a battery failure. Of all the many complaints about Teslas, I think the batteries are the least of the worries. Plus Tesla would probably cover most battery failures even if they weren't covered by the letter of the warranty, simply because they can't afford to have bad press about batteries failing.
Because they're used to crappy lead-acid batteries that need to be replaced regularly in ICE vehicles and which cause people to be stranded when they fail. Note that the Model Y will get rid of the 12V lead acid battery, which is a good thing (IMHO) if engineered correctly. One less maintenance item.
Also, consumer phone batteries (which are more aggressively charged/discharged and which usually use a different chemistry) don't last more than two or three years before showing significant capacity reduction.
Also, there were some problems with the early-year Leafs (2011-2012) losing range fast in hot climates. (Nissan solved the problem eventually via chemistry. Note this is not a problem for Teslas or Volts/Bolts due to a battery temperature management system able to cool the battery.)
For all the crap Tesla gets, this shows why they are so necessary. Switching to electric car production is a huge disruption for the existing auto industry. It basically eliminates the dealer service revenue, and turns the supply chain upside down.
I doubt they would be making any effort in electric cars if the threat of Tesla did not exist. Even as it is, they are dragging their feet.
Why would it need to destroy the dealer network and the right to repair your own car? Only because Tesla runs their business like a software house doesn't mean the others need to follow suit.
The German car makers also make gas powered vehicles versions of some of their fleet which are quite different from gasoline cars.
What takes time is building the facilities and technology to create reliable and serviceable electric vehicles.
My experience with BMW dealerships is that they are borderline criminal organizations. I have never taken my car in for a repair without them breaking something else.
I was quoted $15,000.00 for a new head because they failed to gap a spark plug.
They remove the access panel in the aero pan when doing oil changes and don't replace it. They over torque everything (drain plug, filter cover, etc).
They broke a wiring harness mount when doing routine maintenance. Just ripped it off instead of releasing the clips.
They scratch up the interior when pulling the steering column apart for airbag recalls.
They broke a headlight housing when replacing a light bulb.
They curbed my wheels and then told me it couldn't be them because "there are no curbs here". The service manager said this while standing on a curb.
These people are predators. The incentives are perverse and they do nothing but exploit their customers and the manufacturer.
My hope is that Tesla's approach will push the costs of these unnecessary repairs and shoddy workmanship up the chain where the parent company actually has an incentive to fix them.
At this point the only way I would consider buying a new BMW is if I was able to find an independent shop that can still do warranty work. Still searching for that.
I assume the plugs were pre-gapped at time of manufacture. Maybe they dropped this plug, maybe it was a bad batch or a defect, maybe they did it on purpose. For the shop rate at a BMW dealer they can take the time to check the gap. Regardless of the root cause the dealer installed a plug with the ground bent into the electrode which caused a misfire.
They misdiagnosed it as a bent valve and told me that I probably missed a shift at freeway speed and slammed the car into second gear, causing the engine to over-rev and skip a tooth on the timing chain. Somehow this bent only one valve and the other 23 are still fine. Oh and it ran fine until they had it in their shop. Also the timing chain is still in the correct timing.
I told them to get bent and took it to an independent shop that fixed the problem for $45.00.
The BMW dealer claimed there was low compression and a misfire on cylinder 4. My independent mechanic found perfect compression on all six cylinders and a misfire on cylinder 6 (the one with the bent plug).
I went back to the BMW dealer and they refunded me the $4,000.00 in unnecessary repairs they did. At this point I think they are either intentionally sabotaging customer cars because they get away with it or the incentives drive them to employ complete idiots. Either way the most dangerous place to take a BMW is the dealer.
That's pretty strange. It's possible for a mis-shift to not skip timing, but to be high enough to float the valves momentarily and allow for a valve (or more) to kiss a piston. This can lead to a very minor bend in valves to cause an idle misfire, until the valve eventually fatigues and drops. Diagnosable through a leakdown.
A foreign object through the intake tract would be a more likely case for a 0 gap plug, as it would basically require a broken piston or valve to otherwise close up the gap on the plug and you're not missing this.
Either way, absolutely terrible on their behalf and a zero sense diagnosis.
None of that happened, the head and valves are fine. I never missed a shift.
I cut my teeth driving grain trucks so I always heel-toe double clutch. That makes missed shifts highly unlikely as the shifter slips easily from gear to gear, assuming you’re pulling it into the correct gear. Also I’m not an idiot and I have never selected the wrong gate. BMW also puts heavy springs on the shifter to make it unlikely the incorrect gate is selected on accident.
There is no internal engine damage as far as my mechanic can see. The dealer did also do an intake cleaning (allegedly) which involves media blasting the intake runners. It is possible there was FOD introduced at that time. I mentioned that to the dealer and they assured me that is “impossible”.
The dealer did put about 35 miles on the car while they had it for new plugs, maybe they missed a shift but there’s no apparent damage to the engine.
The plug damage appears to be a result of negligent installation.
My most generous guess is they dropped it on the floor. I wouldn’t be surprised if they intentionally re-gapped it to cause a misfire but I have no evidence.
When they told me I needed a new head I called around all the shops in the area that work on these cars. I asked them how this could happen and if they have seen it before. All the shops I talked to in the Seattle area said they have never had an N54 open. They've never seen engine damage on one and doubted the diagnosis. BMW Seattle was the only place that said they had seen this "several times". I think they just use this as a way to make a quick buck or their mechanics are so incompetent that they routinely grenade engines by installing spark plugs and cleaning intakes incorrectly.
What I do know is that the people responsible should be nowhere near a car and probably not allowed outside without close adult supervision.
EDIT: never mind, as later details indicate, the dealer mechanics should not be allowed anywhere near a car because they bent the electrode, then said the car needed a new head because it wasn't firing on that cylinder. You know that dev at your work for whom getting it simply compile is a major victory? Yeah, BMW dealers apparently have the mechanic version of that.
--
I had the same thought. I haven't changed the gap on a spark plug in decades. Oh, I check them before they go in, but they're always spot on.
My only theory is that the dealer failed to torque the plug, and engine compression blew the plug out of the head, taking the threads with it. Because at the very worst, if the plug gap is way too big, the electrode might touch the top of the piston. Even then, the piston would just mash it down. I cannot think of a way to ruin a head by improperly gapping a spark plug.
But I digress way away from parent's original point...
To be fair, every dealship I've ever dealt with is the same. They under pay and under train their mechanics and so have lots of problems, but the real issue is that they have huge incentives to intentionally screw you over as soon as the warranty period is over: they can sell you a new car.
I don't drive any more, but when I owned a couple of cars. The first time it happened the dealer told me I needed new brake rotors. I thought it was kind of strange, but was too preoccupied with my 80 hour a week job to think about it. When I picked up the car, I said, "Just put the rotors in the trunk." because I naively thought that it would be my responsibility to dispose of them. All of a sudden they turned on me and started demanding why I didn't trust them -- which, of course, made me suspicious. I eventually got the rotors after threatening the manager with calling the police and took them to an independent mechanic. Of course they were perfectly fine.
Latest was my wife's car a couple of years ago. My wife took her car to the dealership to change the oil. When she got her car back they told her, "We were looking at your car because your a car inspection is coming up" (In Japan you have to have an inspection every few years and fix whatever the inspector says). They told her it would cost more than $5000 to fix everything, and suggested that they had a wonderful used car that they could do a nice deal on in a trade. That way she could avoid the cost of the inspection (wonderful chaps).
So she said she would think about it. When she got home, I noticed an small oil leak and told her to get them to fix it. She drove back and they refused. "It's an old car", they said. "There is nothing we can do. You should trade it in because it will save you lots of money. But anyway, it's only a small leak, so just top it up every week."
My wife is Japanese and trusts people... sigh... Anyway, about a month later, no surprise, the engine light went on. She took it in to the dealership: "Oh the battery is dead. You have to buy a new one. Also, there is a serious problem with the electrical system. It will cost $2000. Why don't you just trade in your car for this younger model?"
Luckily, down the street from us there was a young guy who was just getting started setting up his own shop (he was working out of his home garage until he could raise enough money to rent a building). I asked him to take a look. Sure enough: the oil pan was over tightened, which cracked the gasket. Oil leaked on the battery lead, which corroded the insulation. This caused a short. It needed a new battery lead and a new oil pan gasket. He also did the car inspection and fixed everything up... all for $800.
TL;DR: Never do your repair work at the dealership. It should be obvious, really. It is run by the same people who sold you the car -- they are out to screw you over no matter how they can do it.
When I bought my car it was still under warranty so I took it in to the dealer. Since they took care of things I didn't notice the damage they did until much later. If this was a ploy to sell me a new car it failed. I will never buy a car from them, there is no way for them to regain my trust.
If I ever buy a new BMW I will consider it as-is unless I can find an independent shop to do warranty work because the dealer can't be trusted. I will also do European delivery to prevent my local dealer from touching the car. This likely makes it impossible to buy another one.
I'm tempted to go back to an older car that I can just fix myself. New cars are apparently intended to be leased for a few years, abused and destroyed at the hands of inept dealers and then thrown into a shredder.
WTF, aren't there consumer protection laws in Japan? In the EU any repair done comes with a warranty and if they screw it up they fix it on their own money.
Sure you might still need to threaten them with the law, mechanics being how they are.
The dealer network is an unnecessary middle man acting as a parasite extracting value from the system.
You can enforce the right to repair through legislation without dealers.
> What takes time is building the facilities and technology to create reliable and serviceable electric vehicles.
The battery supply chain is the hardest part, but EV powertrains are so much more simple than an internal combustion powertrain. There is very little maintenance required on an EV drivetrain as well. That's why Tesla is warrantying their Semi drivetrains for a million miles.
Software is covered around copyright law, which is different than right to repair. I'm fine not owning the software my Tesla runs, nor having access to the source code, but I agree that legislation should require Tesla provide tooling that allows for diagnostics and canbus control for repairs (such as for issuing commands to the powertrain and ancillary systems).
AFAIK Tesla only provides access to service manuals in Massachusetts which has a right to repair law. Online subscription that’s just $30 per hour or $3000 per year.
EV drive trains are more simple but that's not really a problem with modern ICE drive trains. That technology is so mature and well developed that any car is going to go at least 100k miles, well beyond any warranty period.
There are benefits to the electric drive train but that's not the limitation. The rest of the car isn't really any different and because the battery is so expensive (as you point out) the rest of the electric car really suffers.
> That technology is so mature and well developed that any car is going to go at least 100k miles, well beyond any warranty period.
100k miles isn't “well beyond any warranty period” for non-EV powertrains; a number of car brands have a base (not extended) 10yr/100k mile powertrains warranty.
Electric cars have an order of magnitude fewer parts than an ICE car. This ripples all through an established automaker's revenue and production models, from service contracts, supplier partnerships and agreements, dealer networks, warehousing and fulfillment, and so on. There is probably a lot for an established automaker to untangle, some of which they'll be sued for if they try to follow Tesla's route.
With that said I don't think it's the reason BMW is not ready to mass produce electric, and I take them at their word in the article. If you're going to break into the electric market it's going to take a lot of money to shoulder past the three marques that got there first (Tesla, Nissan, Toyota).
As a BMW owner, I don't have a desire to own an electric BMW. The magic of what Tesla's doing is the cool tech that makes one lust after one of their cars in ways you don't lust after other 'boring' sedans. (of course, you might still lust after a gas sports car!)
The secret sauce is the community, the supercharger network, the ability to seamlessly plan a trip with every charge stop pre-populated and supercharger availability right there on the screen and updated on the fly. IMO, it makes everything else feel janky and outdated. An electric BMW looks like an existing car with electric bits bolted on, and good luck figuring out where to charge.
> As a BMW owner, I don't have a desire to own an electric BMW. The magic of what Tesla's doing is the cool tech that makes one lust after one of their cars in ways you don't lust after other 'boring' sedans.
The biggest issue with BMWs is overcomplicated electronics and software leading to bugs or eventual weird glitches. I stopped buying them because of this, and IMO the Teslas looks even worse. I see a lot of used cars in my future.
As to the network stuff, and charger availability on the screen: isn't that purely an early-adopter problem? Why wouldn't chargers be as prevalent as gas stations?
I'd say it's largely an early-adopter problem, but likely will stand for at least the next 5 years, which is critical when making a purchase today.
Tesla charging infrastructure "just works", and charges quickly, at generally-known rates.
I've perused other charging station maps and they're all hit-or-miss. You'll get 220v but not high amperage. You'll find the charger does't work. You'll find the chargers are full and cars are just parked there not going anywhere (Tesla works around this by charging people money for leaving their cars on a charger after they're full). You'll find the charger is private -- can only be used by employees of the office building you drove to, relying on finding a charger there.
That said, this system works fine for 99.9% of daily driving where you charge in known places -- every day at home, or every day at work, or whatever. But the more I've looked into the charging infrastructure for non-Tesla vehicles, the LESS impressed I've been. At many of these public chargers you'll have to be parked for 4+ hours to get even 20-30 miles' worth of charge.
To be crass, fuck their dealer network - and all car dealer networks. What an ass backwards way to do business in this day and age. That model needs to be disrupt at least - die in a fire preferably.
You are right, in theory one can go electric and keep a dealer network. Although, the maintenance is supposed to be dramatically less (less moving parts in EV vs. ICE, no complex engine). So, even if you want to keep the dealer network, they would make far less money than they use to. The dealer network might just die slowly.
Tesla decided to rip the band-aid. Legacy car manufacturers might have to deal with this issue, and repurpose their expensive network.
You still repair an electric car yourself (esp. body). But those electric cars are getting more and more sophisticated, it would be more like repairing an iPhone.
because dealers don't want to sell evs very much because they have less maintenance, they are basically reducing their future revenue for every ev they sell.
Margins on cars alone are small. Dealers make something like a third of their revenue from their service contracts.
(Well, that and undercarriage coatings...)
With EV's breaking down less often and less routine maintenance because they just have fewer moving parts, that's going to destroy the dealer business model.
That's not been my (limited) experience with Tesla. They build all the components in the car. Things like electric seats and door actuators seem to fail frequently. A Tesla still has a lot of parts to go wrong, even if the drive train is simpler and more robust.
Most new ICE cars don't have massive power train problems either. The reliability issues are in auxiliary systems.
But the person you're replying to said "electric cars" not "Teslas."
The non-powertrain components are irrelevant for this comparison.
As far as ICE powertrains being fairly reliable, that is a triumph of engineering and due to literally trillions of dollars of investments. And yet regular maintenance on the powertrain is required even today, whereas electric powertrains do not have such requirements.
Electric cars don't have engines or transmissions. But lately I have not found that that is where problems occur. They still have all the other things that ordinary cars have such as tires, brakes, wheel bearings, suspension parts including shocks, springs, struts, sway bars, bushings and links, steering mechanisms, electronic control systems both for the motor and the interior accessories, all kinds of small things like power windows, power seats, lights, entertainment and navigation, many of which need periodic replacement if not routine maintenance, and all of which may fail unexpectedly and require repair.
How does it eliminate dealer service revenue? If anything goes wrong on a car these days it has been my experience it's quite unlikely to be anything specific to ICE. It'll be electromechanical (mirrors, seats, windows, locks), electrical (heating, cooling), mechanical (suspension bushes, axle boots, springs) and the biggest wear items brake and tires also remain...
The Chevy Bolt's service schedule starts with a coolant flush at 150,000 miles. I've been driving two Nissan Leafs for 4 years (a 2012 then a 2018) that have not seen a dealer since I purchased them. The brake pads are good for the life of the car; you have to purposely slam the brakes every few months just to avoid them sticking and rusting from disuse. Well-made EVs generate virtually no revenue for dealer service centers.
I’d be a little cautious about going 150,000 miles without changing brake fluid. It does break down due over time and of course due to heating and cooling which can lead to sudden brake failure. Brake lines are also made of rubber in all but performance cars and can deteriorate/degrade independent of the fluid.
In an EV it’s possible this could happen when needed most as the brakes are used much less frequent than an ICE car.
I second that. I had Yaris hybrid from Toyota and the biggest problem with it was rust in brakes. As the car typically engaged regenerative braking charging the battery there was too little heat in the brakes. That lead to accumulation of moisture and rust. After Toyota replaced the brakes the second time within 3 years they strongly advise to brake really hard once each few days. There was zero other problems.
Tires are definitely still a factor, but regenerative braking reduces the wear on the brakes quite significantly. You also don't have a lot of the "regular maintenance" items like oil changes, transmission fluid changes, coolant flushing, spark plugs, air intake filters, exhaust gas sensors and so on.
Less wear is actually worse for brakes. The hard use of brakes coats the iron surface with pad material. Without this coating, braking is uneven and not 100%. This is why many mfgs have brake bedding coatings and/or procedures. On a related note, most 'warped rotors' are not warped, but have uneven pad deposits, creating stickier spots on the rotor/drum.
> If anything goes wrong on a car these days it has been my experience it's quite unlikely to be anything specific to ICE.
This is very much correct. For the warranty period (after which the OEM doesn't care and the customer stops taking it to the dealer) most maintenance is suspension components and leaks.
This doesn't eliminate dealer service revenue. If anything it makes it better because you remove the entire class of time consuming but low paying warranty jobs.
Probably not, but they don't care about Tesla either. Tesla is pretty far from being a car industry incumbent. Basically, Tesla is doing all the dirty job of validating the market for the incumbents.
Companies like VW actually have the know-how and years of experience to scale any electric car ambitions very rapidly. Tesla is still trying to figure out how to mass produce cars and based on the current velocity of the Model 3 production they still have a bunch of things to learn and figure out.
This has been said many times, but it feels like all the manufacturers colluded to make EV cars extremely ugly and undesirable. Prime example being the BMW i3.
Of all the nice looking cars they have in their line up, one has to wonder why they went with an i3.
Put that same capability in a 3-series and it would have been a different story.
I'm not sure if you know how innovative the BMW i3 is. They decided to go for an entirely different manufacturing process using Carbon Fibre instead of traditional steel stamping and it's entire supply chain is built on renewable energy. That's a big commitment on BMWs part. Alas, the market didn't think of it the same way.
The i3 might not be a looker but it's probably one of the most innovative cars ever produced in recent history. Horace of Asymco fame did an entire series on the i3 in his Asymcar podcast.
They have also released AMAZING videos showing the entire production process. If you are at all interesting in manufacturing, they're worth watching.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gt1k3BLN7pw
> Alas, the market didn't think of it the same way. The i3 might not be a looker
...from an American perspective. The i3 doesn't sell much in the US, but is I think the second highest selling EV in Europe at the moment, people here apparently don't have any problem with the way it looks.
In Copenhagen it's the only DriveNow car available, and I must admit that although I am a petrolhead, the i3 grew on me.
What might look silly from the outside is an unparalleled experience in accelleration on the inside. Only Tesla's, motorcycles and proper sport cars can match the 0-50 km/h (which is everything you care about in a city commute).
You're interpreting the language of a comment that itself is a subjective interpretation. Why not go straight to the source? Have you done any analysis of what makes for a 'real commercially competitive product'?
Cannibalizing your existing products is a hard sell in an established organization. It's why businesses like Tesla are able to innovate more rapidly. They have no internal combustion product to compete with, and they don't have to save anything for the swim back (succeed or die).
EDIT: This isn't restricted to just the auto industry. Consider the need for Lockheed to create their Skunk Works team [1].
I don't see the similarity to the Skunk Works. Lockheed developed the Skunk Works planes in secret because they were... secret planes. The CIA doesn't make a habit of advertising our surveillance capabilities.
I see the Skunk Works planes as similar to the Corvette or Viper or Supra or i8 or any other top of the line car. It's something you think of in the back of your mind when you buy a Malibu, Neon, Corolla or 3 Series.
Maybe I am blind to some other part of Skunk Works history that you are referring to.
Apologies, I didn't make the connection as well as I would've liked.
You either build the innovator internally (Skunk Works), or you let your innovative competitors eat your lunch. Someone with less bureaucracy and incentive to maintain the status quo is going to innovate.
They want them to look distinctive, because many buyers want everyone else to know they have an electric car. It's the same design strategy Toyota used with the Prius.
>This has been said many times, but it feels like all the manufacturers colluded to make EV cars extremely ugly and undesirable.
Yeah sure. VW takes their ICE models and equips them with an electric motor and battery. The reason why it doesn't sell is that it costs more than 2 times as much as the ICE model and EVs have an extremely low range.
These things are getting better every year. The latest e-golf already has twice the range of the first model at the same pricetag. In 2020 the range of the egolf will probably reach more than 300 miles and it's cost will go down.
Battery costs apply to every car company equally except luxury car manufacturers. It may look like collusion from the eyes of a conspiracy theorist but it's simple economics: EVs are too expensive.
Tesla gets a free pass nothing is "too expensive" in the luxury market.
Teslas are not expensive considering the competition in its own price range.
The reason Tesla started with a luxury car is because they are a new company without the same resources and manufacturing experience as the already established car companies, so anything they built, it would be very expensive anyway.
There is really nothing preventing from the established car manufacturers from selling a cheap electric car, the reason they don't it's simply because their businesses is not geared towards selling non-ICE cars.
Electric cars are much more simpler than normal ICE cars. ICE cars are basically a bunch of controlled tiny explosions and those explosions need to be kept in check so there is a lot of nuances and engineering aspects that can simply be skipped on a electric car.
There are rumors of an all-electric 3 series. I assume the i3 drivetrain would not have been feasible inside a 3 series and scaling it up would have made the 3 far too expensive to be practical.
The i3 is a BMW Prius essentially. Think of it like a modern Isetta. In that context I think it actually looks very nice. At least it doesn't have love handles.
I've had 2 Nissan LEAF so far and I don't agree that all EVs are "ugly and undesireable". But I do agree that the i3 looks a lot more like a flashy concept car than a production design.
You can get i3s surprisingly cheap. Problem is they're older and have pretty poor range. But if that doesn't matter to you, way cheaper than many new low-end cars.
Apparently they fixed the design a bit, previously (at least here in Austria) you couldn't order one without the fugly blue lining in addition to the 2 main colors.
I don't disagree that so many of the EV's are extremely ugly and undesirable, but don't you think part of that is the inherent limitations of energy efficiency on these vehicles? A lot of it comes down to aerodynamic efficiency for something like a Tesla or Leaf or Bolt. The more aerodynamically efficient you are, the longer your range, thus limiting the range anxiety slightly. Some companies handle this gracefully, like Tesla.
Whereas, I feel something like the Prius, Volt, Bolt, Leaf, or i3 deals with the aerodynamics/style poorly. On top of that, these cars may be made to cater to some early-adopter/green person market subgroup. Maybe those traditional makers do not foresee the EV as the top choice, but as a niche and limited scale product?
On top of all that, lithium battery packs for EVs are expensive currently, look at all the problems Tesla has been having making theirs over the years. Once the price drops, I think automakers will be able to make less compromises elsewhere, getting better looks, performance, and features at the expense of pure efficiency.
I've owned a leaf for some time as the family second car. Except for long trips, it's the one car we always prefer. Any short drive will be done in the leaf (unless someone's already taken it).
Its easily the best car I've owned because it's reliable, cheap to operate, dead quiet, and has a nice amount of get-up-and-go.
So no, the current crop of EVs are not undesirable. They may not meet everyone's needs (e.g., in rural Idaho where the nearest town is 40 miles away). But if they do meet your needs, the current set is great.
Why would they re-engineer the the 3-series platform around an electrical drivetrain and make it look exactly the same?
Besides costing an inordinate amount of money, if they did it'd be completely anonymous and if it turned out not so great compared to a standard 3-series (handling, weight, performance) it would tarnish the entire line-up.
The majority of car-makers are Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) expertise shops, plus a design arm, plus a manufacturing arm. Most farm out the design and manufacture of the other components (suspension, brakes, seats, airbags, etc).
Every electric car that Ford or BMW sells is the loss of a sale of a higher margin ICE car. Because of this, none of them have an incentive to switch unless some outside force makes them, or they see a huge percentage of customers demand electric and only electric.
It's not just culture or stubbornness. These companies simply don't want to replace their high margin ICE cars with fairly-invested expertise and tooling, with a lower margin car that will, almost at best, just 1:1 replace the sale of a higher margin ICE car.
So they'll have "options" here and there, but they are going to wait and see for at least half a decade before they commit to anything like meaningful production numbers, a charger network, etc.
from anecdotal experience (my father actually designs and architectures car factory assembly lines for a living), it usually takes around 1 to 5 years, depending on the amount of work involved and what kind of car is produced.
They're also subtly saying you should ignore the Model 3 being shipped in 2018 and 2019. You should really wait for the "real" (read: our) EVs in 2020 and later.
Baloney. I've been driving my Nissan Leaf for almost 4 years. Nissan has sold 300k Leafs. The Chevy Bolt is doing great. The Tesla Model 3 has a multi-year long waitlist.
BMW and some other manufacturers are being slow to adopt EVs because they aren't as profitable right now. So they'd rather keep milking the ICE cash cow as long as they can.
They also know that if they seriously offered competitive EV alternatives, people would buy them.
Why offer an EV version of a 3-Series with a smaller profit margin than an ICE model with a bigger one until they absolutely have to?
That's what it comes down to. The good news is they don't have a lot of time left to keep this b.s. up, but don't believe their lies about EVs. They are here, you can buy them, they are great.
They are quite cool, but not great for everyone (as in the majority of world's population that BMWs and VWs of the world are targeting). Even living in SV I wouldn't buy a Tesla even if I wanted to -- nowhere to charge it at home, and a bit of a walk to the nearest charger from work.
And why should BMW et. al. sell something that isn't profitable? They aren't Tesla and can't just burn through capital. On the other hand, when it does become profitable I somehow think they will have something just as good out, it's not like Tesla had some incredible magic tech that nobody else does. And at least an electric BMW would not have a build quality of a beaten up Yugo like Tesla does.
GM reached the same conclusion when it built the EV-1. I expect that there are tremendous forces inside a company that push back on the sort of radical change that electric cars represent.
The difference between then and now is Tesla. I wonder if anyone asked BMW if they were given the opportunity to mass produce the Model 3, if they would have the same opinion.
As for looks, the i8 looks pretty nice. It is apparently going to be available in an electric version this year.
To be fair to GM, batteries improved a great deal since the EV-1.
I know there is a crowd of people that are enthusiastic about the EV-1 and think GM killed it, but I'm pretty sure GM had a closer look at whether they could profitably produce them than the enthusiasts.
This is the stated reason from the article, "... its current technology is not profitable enough to scale up for volume production" which was exactly the same reason that GM gave for cancelling the EV-1.
Which if you compare that to the state of the world in 2008 when Tesla launched its Roadster you can see the difference of "We can't buy anything to solve this problem" and "This is a problem, what needs to be created to solve it?" mentalities.
It is always a challenge at BigCorp to get them to actually create something new, they don't have to push the state of the art because they already have a profitable business. Sometimes this attitude is responsible for their demise.
Right, but Tesla lost a big pile of money on the Roadster and the Bolt is reasonably comparable to the Model 3. GM isn't generations behind Tesla, they are sitting there forcing Tesla to execute or die.
They really couldn't. If I remember correctly, US law requires that a dealer provide replacement parts for publicly sold vehicles for 10 years. If you have a small run of cars with very custom parts like the EV-1, the cost of maintaining that capacity is likely prohibitive, so you kill them.
GM would only lease them, not let you purchase. When they repossessed them at the end of the lease, they would not let you purchase them; they then proceeded to crush any that were not sent to museums.
My question is, what if GM had offered them for sale for $250,000 (I'm making up an obscene number) because they estimated that their service obligations would cost that much? How well would that have gone over with the enthusiasts?
> I expect that there are tremendous forces inside a company that push back on the sort of radical change that electric cars represent.
In a publicly traded automaker you must present a business case for a vehicle before you are allowed to design and build it. The business case has to show some kind of profit one way or another, otherwise the board or executive committee reporting to the board will not approve it.
It would be fascinating to see the business case for the Bolt EV, as it really looks like it's not making money from direct sales (speaking only from my understanding of public materials, I have no special knowledge of this).
Disclaimer: I work for GM, but not on any of this.
To be fair to BMW, and I’m not being facetious here, Tesla production isn’t economically viable either - and they’re probably further ahead than anyone. They lost $2.24 billion in 2017, with no end to the losses in sight. BMW is just being smart.
This is a bit of a self-fufilling prophecy. It is correct, that battery prices and availability are sinking currently to the point where electric car mass production becomes a reality and 2020 seems a date, where several big manufacturers can present their first generation of true mass-marked electric cars.
But the exact timing also depends on the fact that only Tesla tried really hard to bring the electric car to the mainstream. Actually, BMW was pretty early to the game with the i3 - an excellent car which came to market as early as 2013. Certainly not a huge seller at its price, but quite a good electric car. The main problem was the lack of quick iterations, it has gotten one battery upgrade since then, no variations like the rumored i5 came to be.
As 2020 is almost around the corner, let's hope that BMW comes out with exciting electric cars. Also VW seems to be set to release a couple of very serious electric offerings in that time frame (I.D, Buzz).
I assume for some people, e.g. the type of person that would literally sleep in front of an iStore to buy a new iPhone at launch day because waiting an extra week to just walk in during lunch and buy one is “too long” would find 2 years to be an “eternity”.
FWIW, according to an inside EV journalist friend of mine, Harald Krüger's comment is a reference for Samsung high density cells 2019 availability for a doable price that delivers 200+ miles range. [1]
As an outsider, I forecast that in Europe the demand for the gas guzzling cars will be on a sharp decline in not more than a year. BMW and any other car company that are reluctant in adapting to the future, will be troubled economically for offering units that will not anymore be demanded.
I mean, really, who would buy the old tech (combustion engine) when even the manufacturer itself (BMW) announces that they are soon (in 2 years) to be obsolete? Cars are expensive and not supposed to be such a short-term investments.
They will have to export all their inventories produced in those 2 years to less humanitarian countries like mine, where hardly anybody considers gas emissions as a problem for us to act upon, and government does not promote EVs by any means. It is only logical for them to regard such countries as a market to dump their previous-gen technologies.
Given their repeated failure to reach their target on production numbers for the Model 3, their lack of experience in mass production really seems to be the problem. The question then becomes whether Tesla can figure this out before traditional car companies catch up to them in terms of technology. If they do manage to capture the EV mass market with the Model 3, the others will likely be in trouble.
Even if they mass produced an EV, I still wouldn't buy one from them. Reason - 1. they will nickel and dime customers like crazy and charge for LED lights, 17" wheels, CarPlay subscription 2. iDrive is a relic from 90s, an archaic infotainment systems 3. 3 series drivability is no better than a Honda at this point. I used to own a e92, but F30 is a joks 4. Awful dealer network 5. They probably won't invest in a charging network
I feel like every gas automaker has a vested interest in saying electric cars are not viable until X years out in the future. Perpetually.
They're making money now on the current system, not much incentive to do anything besides look like they're trying to be more efficient whilst moving just quick enough to hit efficiency standards.
Ok so that would be a year and three quarters from where we are right now. This time frame is a veritable blink of an eye in the planning horizon of a large automaker. It implies that they have everything pretty much designed and ready to go right now and are just waiting for battery prices to drop.
Toyota's Hybrid Synergy drive was patented in 1969, and in use 6 years before Tesla was founded. (10 years before Musk was on the scene.)
The drive is available in numerous models, including plug-in hybrids. These cars only perform better with more batteries added. Over the long term, it's interesting to ponder removing the ICE entirely and put a battery pack in its place.
Car companies are run by people who love engines that burn gas. The notion that electric vehicles might be something more than compliance nightmares, that they might actually be better cars than gas-powered vehicles is foreign. It's like the Microsoft execs saying "of course the e-reader should also be able to open spreadsheets and what-not." Meanwhile, the Kindle is better as an e-reader because they started from the ground up.
Same thing with Tesla. (With whom, none of these companies would be talking about going electric.) They started from the ground up.
If BMW wanted to make money on electric vehicles, Tesla has proven that you can sell an $80-$100K+ electric car (with a ~$50K interior) with profitable unit economics. I'm pretty sure an electric 7-series would sell like hotcakes, and make money. Instead, you get the i3, which some people love, but it's certainly an acquired taste, and the 3 series e, which I drove recently-- it has about 11 miles of electric range. ;( If they just made it all electric, I'd buy one tomorrow at the already high 3-series prices. But the culture isn't there yet...