None of the German car manufacturers actually made any worthwhile EVs, and it always seemed like they're making EVs just to satisfy EU lawmakers.
Meanwhile across the ocean, a company with essentially no production line history is able to completely destroy century old companies because they got complacent.
German car manufacturers deserve everything coming to them
That's a total oversimplification of two very different auto markets. Germans relate to their cars very differently than do americans, including on environmental issues.
For one, Germany has a much more well-developed public transport network. An eco-minded German is much more likely to park their car and take a bus/train etc. So if you take the bus/train regularly, you don't feel so bad about having a diesel car for use when you need it. Contrast that with Tesla's home turf: California. Public transport there is ludicrously bad. The car is king. So, lacking proper public transport options, the eco-minded californian will consider electric options much more readily.
I have never met a Tesla owner on a bus or train in north america. I have met many German BMW/Merc/Porche owners on European trains. I have met plenty of Tesla owners on aircraft, going on their holidays. I do laugh at the irony of all those Teslas parked at SFO. How many of their owners are flying business class or better? How many of them have extensive solar panels on their houses? Electric cars in north america are more of a fashion statement than they are in europe.
Another big market difference: Engine size. Germans prefer smaller engines and make them work. Americans prefer larger engines that putter along at 10% capacity. Another: transmission preferences. US = 98% automatic, Germany = <30%. The markets are so different that any direct comparison can only happen after extensive couching of every statistic.
If you move over one country and look at The Netherlands, you’ll see a lot of the same things hold true there, yet Tesla (and other EVs) are wildly successful there. Key differences are EV tax breaks and excellent public charging infrastructure in a smaller, denser country making EV ownership practical and economic. The same people absolutely do drive EVs and use public transport, usually combined with some bicycle rides mixed in.
Or a country in a different direction, Switzerland, where both trains and Teslas are more popular than in Germany despite the lack of many of those EV incentives, as far as I know.
>> a smaller, denser country making EV ownership practical and economic.
Ya. I'm in Canada. The total opposite. Vast stretches of wilderness between cities. Bitter winter cold. Darkness. And in many area less than reliable grid power[1]. If we are listed countries by the practicality of electric vehicles, Canada, Russia, Australia and Mongolia are in leagues of their own.
[1] We are having a windstorm in my area atm. Power has dropped out twice in the last few hours, only for a few minutes at a time, but at this time last year we lost power for three days.
This is such a weird take on Canada. Feel free to comment on the situation in BC but in Ontario and Quebec the population density is such that there are no "Vast stretches of wilderness" for the greater proportion of inhabitants and you can absolutely go from Toronto to Quebec City and find more than enough chargers if you battery is running low.
The cold argument is true though. We have two EVs at home and both see their autonomy drop significantly during winter.
Try a mountain pass in winter. Ontario is flat. Even so, Ontario and BC are each more than 4x the size of the entire UK. Driving between major cities in canada is like driving across multiple countries in Europe.
You quoted only part of my argument: it’s the good charging infrastructure and tax incentives that make EVs so attractive in the Netherlands. However, I did not want to fail to mention that the Netherlands is a much smaller and denser country than Germany and this means it is much easier to put that kind of infrastructure in place.
I assume you mean SUVs, not the cargo-carrying semi trailers.
Banning "trucks" is like banning assault rifles: you instantly get into a huge debate about what is and isn't an truck. Is it to be be size? Weight? (Teslas are heavy) Passenger capacity? Whatever definition you use, the results will not be what you want.
It's like when london allowed electric vehicles to skip paying the congestion charge. They thought this was going to benefit the drivers of small electric cars. Then came all the electric sports/super cars. Now Jeremy Clarkson in his 200mph electric hypercar doesn't pay the tax while James May in a tiny fiat panda does.
A few rich electric super cars not paying the congestion charge is o.k., that helps to promote electric cars.
A 4ft bar/toll gate across the road. Anything under 4ft gets to pass under, anything over 4ft has to pay. Yes, commercial cars would have to pay. Tired of walking around the city and not being able to anything because of large SUVs and trucks.
That’s only true if the battery will export DC and you have an appropriate inverter setup. Tesla batteries won’t supply DC, at least not without hacking. And a big enough inverter to power your house is not that cheap.
But yes, I agree in principle.
On the bright side, there are CHAdeMO and CCS V2H and V2G (Vehicle to House/Grid) standards under development.
You don't. You use a large central inverter to convert to AC for the house load. The problem with Teslas is that they won't supply power at all with the usual home charging setup.
"I have never met a Tesla owner on a bus or train in north america. I have met many German BMW/Merc/Porche owners on European trains."
There is so much wrong with drawing conclusions from these experiences, which itself is "a total oversimplification of two very different auto markets" and public transport markets as you yourself have noted, in addition to the fact that Tesla owners are still a very small minority of car owners which is reason enough that you'd be unlikely to meet one on a train.
"I do laugh at the irony of all those Teslas parked at SFO . . . Electric cars in north america are more of a fashion statement than they are in europe."
You seem to be skewing your view of EVs in America toward Tesla owners so that you can skewer Tesla owners.
while either extreme is bad, I find it much more comfortable in CA vs Germany.
Have you ever been in people traffic in subway during rush hours? Throw in flu season on the mix. I’ll take car traffic any day over that.
Electric self driving cars (land a lot of related infrastructure sounds much more compelling then anything Germany or Europe has to offer right now
I have. The people traffic in the US is far far worse. Hygiene matters more than numbers. I cannot stand the spitting, something that most of the western world made illegal for good reason. I see Americans spit on the subway platform in SF every time I go there. I've never seen that in germany/france/UK. I'm far more afraid of catching something from that single american spitting on the ground than any crowded German rail station. I would consider a Tesla just to avoid disease at BART stations, a balance that would be a non-issue in germany. Again, two very different markets.
Ironically, poop isn't so bad. You can get water-borne illnesses from poop but you get the nasty air-borne stuff (ie TB, measles) via saliva. Water-borne diseases can be avoided by drinking clean water. Air-borne diseases cannot be so easily avoided.
I think that view is a bit simplistic. Tesla is catering to upperclass and upper-middleclass people. 90 % of people in Germany either wouldn’t be able to afford or wouldn’t be willing to pay 50.000 € (what the cheapest Tesla model costs here) for a small sedan when they can get a Diesel car with similar capabilities for 20.000 € or less. And honestly most people don’t care much about emissions, they care about usability and ease of use, and there gasoline cars are just much more convenient than electric cars right now. I have several colleagues that drive Tesla and I find it a bit awkward that they have to plan their hotels and schedule around the available charging infrastructure even for small distances (e.g. for going from Berlin to Leipzig to attend 36c3). EVs would be awesome if the charging infrastructure was there but it isn’t and it won’t be for several years to come.
The thing that gets me is electricity is EVERYWHERE in the developed world.
There are already libraries and other public places that slap a couple of EV chargers in the parking lot.
This was never feasible with gasoline.
It seems that when EV's are common enough, we may reach a tipping point where EV chargers are as ubiquitous as parking meters and free/paid wifi at current business establishments.
Today, a cafe almost can't stay in business without offering WiFi and laptop chargers.
The same may happen with EV charging.
Also, once EV battery capacity doubles (not far-fetched) the density of chargers will become even less important.
And, at that point, ICE cars will be at a staggering disadvantage to EV's, because it easier to put a paid charger in every parking space than it is to expand the ubiquity of gas stations.
And it's also harder to boost the range of ICE vehicles.
> Today, a cafe almost can't stay in business without offering WiFi and laptop chargers. The same may happen with EV charging.
It certainly will. Every fast-food restaurant in the US and most other countries will have EV chargers in the parking lot, with few exceptions. It'll happen extremely quickly as EVs go mainstream. Roughly 20 years from now I think there will be at least one million charging stations at such commercial locations across the US. McDonald's has five or six dozen charging units in Sweden as one example of the chains being eager to seek a competitive advantage. They've said they intend to blanket their locations in the Netherlands next.
There's lots of EV's in Norway, but chargers are not ubiquitous. Yet at least. There's often a few chargers at shopping malls and big public parking lots and so on. Anyway, I have an EV and have never used any public charger. I do all my charging at work (or at home if in a pinch). I assume it's the same for many people.
EVs are only a bit over 10% of vehicles in Norway (though a majority of new vehicles), and most of those were bought in the past few years. The average vehicle in Norway is 10 years old, when EVs were less than 1% of new vehicles.
I don't think that's enough vehicles or a long enough time to see the kind of ubiquity they are talking about. Will be interesting to see in 10 years or so once many of the older ICE vehicles have been taken out of service and electric vehicles are a majority of cars on the road and businesses have had time to adapt to high numbers of EVs.
Your analogy is ironic because there is almost no cafes in Germany with free wifi. The telecommunications infrastructure in general is terrible. Even directly in the city center I barely have mobile internet reception and I have doubt that with EV charging stations it will be different, especially with all the corruption coming from the car manufacturing corporations.
there is many uses where charging will be at least problematic. e.g camping away, or doing a road trip, or doing farm work. It's not enough for cafe's to provide chargers, because it's not as if people park right outside businesses, especially in old european towns.
i live in an island that is powered by an Oil power plant. it would be bad for the environment to use an electric car, power outages do happen, and the city is old and badly designed so that for the vast majority of people it's not possible to charge at home, they d have to add charging stations on every street.
i guess for the tesla's market - which is above average buyers - it is possible to charge easily. or it also happens to be their second car
Thanks for this, it still shows a rather small benefit, however. I do think that in a few years time electric can become the best choice. The mechanical simplicity alone is worth it
In Europe you go to a supermarket that has a large parking space. If you can charge there then you basically don't need to charge at home, especially if you also can charge at work.
Berlin to Leipzig is 193km... shouldn't be a problem for a long range Tesla to do the return trip. I'm sure there's plenty of chargers? There's a supercharger right by Leipzig.
I haven't been to Germany in a long time but when I last visited luxury vehicles were quite dominant. Also doesn't gas cost a lot in Germany? Wouldn't that make the total cost of ownership even more compelling for EVs?
> Also doesn't gas cost a lot in Germany? Wouldn't that make the total cost of ownership even more compelling for EVs?
Electricity also costs a lot in Germany (for consumers at least), which offsets the savings on gas. Currently I'm paying about 30ct/kWh (Euro, so about 33.5ct/kWh in $) plus a 15€ monthly base fee. Gas is at 1.45€/l (or ~$6.14 per Gallon) right now. Last time I ran the numbers I ended up with a slightly higher cost per km with an EV compared to a normal car - before even factoring in the purchase price.
If you want to charge at a public charging prices sometimes go up 55ct/kwH, due to them having rather significant fixed costs for measuring power (each station needs to have a certified meter). This gets even more significant if you consider the fact that most people in urban environments won't have a house with a garage, which forces them to use public chargers.
Model 3 does about 4.1 mi/kWh. So that's 8.1c/mi (your prices). To pick one example, the A3 TDi does 42 mpg highway. That's 14c/mi. It's more like 19c/mi city. I just picked the most efficient car at the first German company I thought of. Perhaps there are other companies that make more efficient vehicles.
Also, at least in the US, most power companies have some kind of incentive pricing for people who own electric vehicles, if they charge at night. For example, during the summer, ConEdison has a plan under which you pay about 1/5th as much for power from midnight to 8AM. Assuming Germany's electric infrastructure is as advanced as that in the US (I hope!), then that reduces the Tesla's cost to about 2c/mi.
(Not factoring the reduced maintenance cost of a Tesla. Of course if you're really trying to save dough you buy a used Nissan Leaf or something sensible like that.)
While not German I need to highlight the fact that in Germany power generation relies much less to fossil and nuclear than in the US, roughly 1/3 less (~30% compared to ~82%, see links below)
That makes Germany a bit more advanced on the generation part but also more expensive - without going into the nuclear debate here. So it is not apples to apples comparison at the end of the day
But Germany appears to rely on Coal more than the USA for power generation.
Coal is the largest source of electricity in Germany. As of 2016, around 40% of the electricity in the country is generated from coal. Germany has been opening new coal power plants until recently, following a 2007 plan to build 26 new coal plants
Compare the energy pie chart for Germany vs USA. (Add brown coal and hard coal percentages)
I should have clarified probably that I was referring to this part of your post:
>Assuming Germany's electric infrastructure is as advanced as that in the US (I hope!), then that reduces the Tesla's cost to about 2c/mi.
Yes there’s a supercharger there but as my colleague explained it you can forget about it when you’re at an event where many other Tesla drivers go, as you’ll have to queue a long time to use it. As I said EVs will be awesome when the infrastructure is finally there, right now it isn’t though so for most people gasoline cars are still more convenient.
Additionally, more people do not have a garage to park in, so loading at home is not an option, and many companies assume their workforce to use public transport and don't provide parking either.
If you own a Tesla the infrastructure is there. Our family regularly takes cross country trips in our Model 3. It is more convenient than our gas car because AutoPilot makes driving long distances on the highway much much easier.
Charging has never been an issue for us, Tesla's SuperCharger network is excellent and routing to chargers on long trips is seamlessly integrated into the car's software using Google Maps.
As for cost, the cost of a base model Tesla has come down more than 50% in the past decade. I highly doubt price reductions stop there. One more 50% reduction and these cars will be on par with the cheapest compact gas cars available today.
Well that would be fantastic, I think the model 3 is a nice car but for what it is I find it quite overpriced right now (probably a good strategy for Tesla though as anyway they need to ramp up their production first so they sell at a price that creates just enough demand for their capacity). I think at 25.000 € I would be happy to buy one. Right now I could still buy a Mercedes C class hybrid for the price of the Tesla here. As I don’t need a car urgently I’ll wait a couple of years in any case, it seems there will be a lot of movement in the EV space in the coming years.
First, rear seat height is much higher. Rear seat couch is much more unadjustable. Climate control for rear seats that really work. Rear passenger comfort is a head above Tesla's
Materials in interior are a grade above Tesla's. Everything feels much less "plasticky." I don't demand unicorn leather, but Tesla's first gen model S materials are of no higher grade than that used in "economy cars with leather"
Suspension is a bit better, Tesla is close though.
And most of the Americans use iPhone too. Not true for the rest of the western world. You always tend to read from online how poor American working class are, but the fact is Americans either have insane amount of disposable income or you spend like crazy. That is why so much ecommerce is focused on Americans and every ad click you make costs way much more than others.
US income and disposable income figures for the middle class are among the highest in the world. Only a few wealthy countries like Switzerland and Norway compare. In terms of household disposable income, the US is the highest in the world. The full-time median US job pays about $50,000 now.
The US household disposable income figure is drastically higher than in most of developed Europe. 50% higher than Sweden, the Netherlands or Finland:
The median household wealth figures are higher in the US than in Germany or Sweden (but lower than France or Britain).
The US also has an extremely progressive income tax setup, with the middle class having among the lowest income tax burden of any developed nation.
At $50,000 in a typical city like Atlanta or Pittsburgh, the typical person will pay 20% in total income taxes. In Texas (no state income tax) you can climb up to around $70,000 and still stay under a 20% rate. In most of the US you can make $200,000 and still be close to a 30% rate. The US middle and middle-upper class is entirely oblivious to how hyper low their taxes are (as a trade-off they are not getting guaranteed universal healthcare either of course, their employer must cover it or they have to).
If the US ever fixed its healthcare disaster and brought costs under proper control (shaving a trillion dollars in annual costs), in financial respects at least it'd be nearly a paradise.
Eh? And now compare with a Honda Civic or a Toyota Camry. Even among just the higher end those three are not nearly as big in market share as they are in Germany - in the US they are just one more model to compete, in Germany they own most of that market.So it does not exactly tell us much if Tesla sold more there. So in sum, I don't see how you are refuting the parent commenter.
I see this argument ("similar capabilities for 20.000 € or less") a lot, and I'm not buying it. I supposed it depends on what "capabilities" you're talking about (number of passengers?), but a Tesla is going to be faster, quicker, safer, cheaper to fuel and cheaper to maintain than any 20.000 € car I can think of.
Not really. An old mk4 golf will let you do 650km at 200kph on the Autobahn with 5m refueling time. But Germans are going hard after no speed limit so that will soon not be an argument.
Curious which German made Diesel cars costs 20.000 € or less. I get the impression from Germans that EVs are not a good solution to replace diesel. Perhaps there just isn't motivation of the populas behind the techonology. Which could be blamed on the lack of infrastructure to support charging. Also in the United States a lot of people have garages that they can install charging stations in. I wonder what the percentage of Germans who have a private garage is.
> Curious which German made Diesel cars costs 20.000 € or less.
All the VW Polos. And around the 20,000 euro mark you can get the majority of the VW Golf Diesel models and my personal favorite, the Skoda Octavia (made just across the border, in Czechia). The first and second-generation diesel Octavias were built like tanks, there are many example of them reaching the 1 million km mark, and the latest ones are pretty decent, too.
Most people in Germany rent, so they even less power to make these decisions. Americans tend to own nice and big houses with a lot of garage space and all the freedom that comes with it.
Irrelevant of diesel, if you only need a city car, say alike the Citroen C1, you can get a gas car with 600km range for about 12,000EUR. That 1.5x better range for 20% of the price and 25% smaller on top of that. For the same package, the Citroen C0 has about 20% of the range for twice the price.
They're quite awful cars thpugh. I had a rental C3 Aircross in Portugal, it wouldn't climb a moderately steep hill without pressing the pedal to the metal.
If you’re living in the countryside it’s usually not an issue, most people in major cities park their cars on the street though, so for EVs to become viable you would need a much better infrastructure. This will happen but I estimate it will take at least 5 more years.
Anecdotally I’d say it’s about the same: if you live in a sub urb and have a detached or semi detached home you have a garage; if yuh live in an urban environment you often don’t. I think these factors are the same in both countries.
I'd be onboard with your view if it wasn't for BMW and Mercedes. (And Audi a bit). None of those are cheap. Not Tesla-expensive, but there aren't really any cheap Mercedes or BMW, and they do sell a ton of those. Tesla is not "too expensive" for people buying new S class or 5/7 series.
To be fair, electric vehicles are generally unprofitable and people who buy cars prefer not to pay more money for less impressive capabilities.
Spending money to develop products that you can't sell at a profit is not generally a winning strategy, which is why the EV market is sort of a waiting game, in which automakers try to time their investments against various government subsidies and regulations — knowing that the moment it really is a more profitable approach, your competitors will all be flooded with capital and trying very hard to seize the same markets that you are after. (Heck, if you do too well against them, you could see government intervention to prop up your competitors in the name of saving jobs, whether the US government or otherwise. See also: the Renault/Nissan merger proposal that made Ghosn a political target. They were trying to do joint work on EVs to keep costs down, and the merger would be the next step — but Nissan is Too Iconic and Important to Japan™ to allow it.)
I would get an electric car even if I didn’t care about climate change at all. I really don’t think that’s why most people bought Model S cars worth six figures...
Electric cars (mostly via Tesla) is a middleground to scaling battery (and eventually solar) production. All those cars displace the use of fossil fuels before EOL, and then go on to become grid storage, reducing reliance on peaker plants and making renewables even more viable.
Making battery development a cost/density competition is what will help us escape fossil fuels.
Can you please provide some evidence for your claim? My quick research showed that about 29% of GHG emissions is from transport and a significant part of that is from cars and trucks
Vehicles are not a single source, they are millions upon millions of single sources and replacing the entire fleet will take decades even with subsidies.
Also, you need to read my comment more closely. The most important part for any of this EV stuff to matter is getting all electricity generation switched to carbon free. The current left-wing thinking in the US is “no nuclear” so EVs will be powered by GHG sources until that changes (or there is some unforeseen breakthrough in battery technology there is not yet evidence or theory of).
EVs are necessary but not sufficient. Without the generation change they are now just natural gas/coal fired vehicles.
Most electricity in the US isn't carbon-free, and isn't likely to become so in the near future.
From a climate perspective, living close to work, and carpooling, bicycling, or riding a motorcycle are all much more effective than buying an electric car.
Heck, even in a city like New York with a good (electric) mass transit system, the main climate savings is that people are close together and go shorter distances. (The carbon emissions per passenger-mile are not very impressive.)
The efficiency of Internal combustion engine is about 25%, whereas a combined cycle power plant can be around 60% efficient. Even with transmission, storage and electric motor inefficiencies, EVs come ahead. Add the fact that more and more percentage of power is come from renewables each day, I’d say EVs are more than feel good BS. Sure, staying closer to work may be a better idea, but we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
You forgot to account for manufacturing and transport of a new car and disposal of the old that wouldn’t have happened if replacement wasn’t forced early.
Also, efficiency isn’t the number to compare. It’s CO2 emissions.
We don't have time to wait for one climate policy to come into full effect before starting work on the next. We need to replace ICE cars with BEV while simultaneously replacing fossil fuels for electricity generation.
Given we need reductions of 90%-110%, electrifying cars (or synthesising instead of drilling for the fuel) is a necessary but not sufficient part of the solution.
American 'trucks' are terrible. The USA has a huge import duty on light trucks, really good ones are kept out. Import duties, cheap gas, and CAFE rules on station wagons skew the market in the USA in favor of light SUVs
Pray tell, what "really good ones" are being kept out? I've driven Toyota, Nissan and Honda trucks; Ford,GM and Dodge are competitive with all of them.
Sorta. They stopped production of the Fiesta, Focus, and Taurus in North America as they were not turning a good profit. They'll continue to produce the Focus and Fiesta for the European market where they far more popular.
That said Ford's also focused quite a bit on hybridization of their more profitable models. The Explorer and Escape are now offered in mild hybrid options, with a FWD PHEV in the Escape coming Q2 to Q3. They've confirmed that the F150 will be receiving both hybrid and EV drive trains as well. IIRC the Mustang lineup will be receiving hybridization as well.
People have been saying this for a while now and all evidence points to it being radically wrong so far. There were numerous new entrants in the EV market this year billed as 'Tesla Killers' and all of them turned out to be massive flops so far because none of them come close to Tesla's range/features and price.
The most recent example of this is the Porsche Taycan which was originally billed as having 311 miles of range when first announced. Once the production model was rated according to the EPA standard it turns out it's range is only 201 miles. You can't buy a Tesla that bad at any price and the Starting price of the Porsche is 50% more expensive than the most expensive Tesla Model S.
Similar stories played out with the Audi Etron, and Jaguar Ipace.
As for the VW ID3, Porsche is owned by VW. If they can't make a great electric car for $150k how the heck are they going to make one to compete for 1/3 that cost? There are even early indications the the ID 3 could be a huge fiasco [0] They are running into huge software problems and are stock piling ID 3's in a storage lot until they have time to fix the software.
>People have been saying this for a while now and all evidence points to it being radically wrong so far.
People have also been saying that Germany needs to 'catch up' and to follow the trend of American or British startups for 50 years and they've been wrong every time.
The German carmakers make as many cars per day as Tesla makes in a year. Over the next two decades, the majority of cars on global roads will still be non-electric.
What the German carmakers need to do is what they have always done. Slowly adopt modern technology while avoiding to buy into the hysteria of the week.
> German carmakers make as many cars per day as Tesla makes in a year
This may have been true three years ago, but Tesla made over 350000 cars last year. By your math the German carmakers are making 128 million cars per year. They are not.
per week then, the gist of it is that the electric car market is small compared to the gigantic scale that the German car industry works at. And that's going to stay this way for a long time, and there is no reason for industry leaders to panic. They're big companies with comfortable profits who have time to adjust instead of trying to overcorrect.
And that's not just true for German carmakers. In the US there's been a trend again towards trucks as Millenials increasingly move to the Sunbelt and away from the coasts and benefit off the cheap gas prices. The idea that everyone is going to start to drive electric seems increasingly dubious to me to begin with. The big problem of the future of electric vehicles is going to be demand.
So your new claim is that the Germans build 350,000 * 52 = 18.2 million cars yearly? You have already been corrected on this point, and the real number, 6.3 million is easily discovered, so one may well wonder why you persist in the error.
Nokia was a big company with comfortable profits too in 2007. If you haven't yet I'd suggest going and driving a Model 3 around for a day. Tesla is supply constrained right now the demand is infinite for these cars and soon trucks as volume drives down price.
The most recent example of this is the Porsche Taycan
The EPA range is certainly disappointing. However, the Tesla and the Porsche have much different design goals and target customers. Porsche sports cars are not meant to be inexpensive and are not meant to compete in the mass market.
For example, the Tesla is strictly direct drive, the Taycan has a two speed transmission. Ratio is 15:1 motor:wheel in 1st gear and 8:1 in second gear. Compare the two cars at a steady speed of 120 mph (if any factory stock Tesla could maintain that speed for long). I'll make a stupid guess and say that the range of the Porsche at that speed is greater than any Tesla.
I know that's not saying much in favor of Porsche for most people. I, for one, have never driven faster than 100 mph in my life. But there are people that do, and there are others that have enough money that it makes them feel good to know that they can go that fast if they want to.
The Taycan is a niche car. It will probably not sell as many units as the Panamera, which is itself a niche car.
Nevertheless, your overall point is quite strong. So many new EVs, so poorly do they compare to the various Tesla models.
It doesn't sound like a huge fiasco tbh. Those cars were scheduled to be delivered in Summer and the software patches are supposed to be delivered over air after they've patched those 20.000 cars. No customer will get their car later because of this.
It's nothing compared to the fiasco they "suffered" through the Diesel manipulations
PS. VW is owned by Porsche not the other way around.
This is incorrect, and the story behind VW buying Porsche after Porsche attempted to buy VW is one of the greatest stories in corporate finance. Additonally the two sides of the Porsche/Piëch (Ferdinand Piëch - VW Chariman - was Ferdinand Porsche's grandson) family were rivals, and Ferdinand Piëch had an affair with his sister-in-law Marlene Porsche.
How would we know ? None of the german automakers are making any of their cars electric.
They are making electric cars - iMobiles and eMachines and Tron-mobiles - one-off islands of manufacturing and design that have no connection to their actual product lines.
These are characterized by model-specific very gaudy exterior design flourishes, big seas of screens on screens on screens in the interior and, worst of all, performance numbers that are cautiously restrained by the existing ICE lines they don't want to cannibalize.
We don't want your electric car. We want your car, electric.
Wake me when there is an electric 7 series or Range Rover or A8 (or Volvo v90).
As a person who in general dislikes big cars and SUVs (even from the perspective of driving them, it just makes me feel like i am in an APC completely disconnected from the world), if Mercedes managed to pull off the electric Gelandewagen properly, they would make some crazy bank. I know for a fact that i would be drooling all over it, despite my distaste for SUVs.
The VW ID 3 is not coming to the US, has a 45kWh battery, 50kW charging, and 50 mile shorter range for $33,180. So both in terms of specs and availability it’s still significantly behind the Model 3.
Size wise it’s about 17 inches (429mm) shorter, which may not be a bad thing. However, it shows they are making real sacrifices to hit that price point.
The EU prices include ~20% VAT, so it's more like $27500 to compare to the US Model 3 pricing. And they said under 30k EUR - we're both assuming exactly 30k.
The lowest end specs you're quoting are smoked by the Model 3, but it's a car made for Europe where low range EVs sell just fine.
The high end spec has a larger pack than the Model 3. Most likely less range as Tesla does well at efficiency, but it won't be anything to sneeze at.
The ID4 is coming to the states. They're skipping their Model 3 and just sending their Model Y equivalent, which I think makes a lot of sense.
It will have a tariff applied, but still be eligible for the full 7500 credit.
They're not going to win over any hardcore Tesla fans, but these cars are a serious effort and they're going to sell well.
You're thinking of the base model. The ID.3 comes in three battery sizes with up to 125kW charging. Here's the selection of ID.3 models with Danish pricing (which isn't comparable to the rest of Europe):
If you look at Tesla's Danish site for the Model 3, the Standard Range Plus has a WLTP range of 409km and costs 369,900 DKK. The mid-range ID.3 has a WLTP range of 420 km and costs 309,995 DKK.
So the mid-range ID.3 has slightly more range than a Tesla Model 3 Standard Range Plus at a lower price point.
I agree it’s a more reasonable comparison. However is that pricing including a tariff on one or both of them? 55,400 USD for the Model 3 is 58% over base US pricing and the ID 3 jacked 36% @ 41,630 euros vs the stated 30k euros in Germany.
VW is being heavily watched by people on reddit. The ID platform has regular news. I don't know the details but it seems VW has changed course substantially.
It's a stats set of Daimler R&D spending from 2011 to 2018 (no paywall with a Google referrer, sorry). It's about doubled in the time, and that looks about the same for the other big ones, I think, certainly some googling on BMW R&D etc. would suggest so.
Personally, I don't think emissions test cheating takes your R&D from 3 bn. to 7 bn, so the parent's comment seems to be oversimplifying or wrong.
> German car manufacturers deserve everything coming to them
What's coming to Volkswagen is that they'll be the world's biggest producer of EVs. It's not that surprising. After all, they are the world's biggest car company.
2020 is the start of Volkswagen's big EV push. This is what Volkswagen's 2020 EV plan looks like:
Taycan and e-tron are both huge flops so far and the ID.3 is off to a bad start as there are reports that they are having massive problems with the cars software and are literally building the cars and plan to store them in a lot for a year while they sort out the software issues.
No, that's just making excuses. The Audi e-tron is in no way aimed at the same segment as the Model 3.
The Audi e-tron and the Jaguar I-Pace both outsell the Model X and the Model S in Europe. The e-tron and the I-Pace are doing well for what they are: expensive luxury vehicles.
> there are reports that they are having massive problems with the cars software and are literally building the cars and plan to store them in a lot for a year while they sort out the software issues
The plan to pre-build several parking lots full of cars before starting to sell predates the issues they face with the software. It was probably made with "let's catch any issues before delivery" in mind (which now paid off), but it's also because VW isn't a company that creates hype through limited availability and pre-orders: once the model is brought to market, you're supposed to be able to go the store and get a car in a few days or weeks.
Given that their previous models were quite software-heavy already, it's not as if this is the first time they have to bring software onto devices. I have no idea how often similar issues happened in previous roll-outs, but this is certainly the most closely watched VW model ramp-up in decades because of the novelty of them going all-in on EV.
The Taycan seems a huge success. The reviews are extremely positive (many pointing how much better it's put together than the Teslas) and production has been doubled to cope with the high amount of reservations
That article was written before two key events that have probably taken a lot of the shine off. First Tesla's Model S Plaid edition was announced and seen racing around the Nurburgring. Second the official EPA range rating was released and it came in a third less than expected. Those reservation holders who's commitment so far is only a ~$3k refundable deposit are going to have second thoughts.
I think you overestimate the importance of the EPA rating for a worldwide vehicle (Europeans really don't care about the EPA for ex). The reviews are overwhelmingly positive and full of superlatives - this is the true "high end electric car" to beat now. Yes Tesla might tweak the Model S to make it a bit faster, and it's significantly cheaper, but it also feels significantly cheaper to sit in and drive, and it's unlikely to magically improve tomorrow because Porsche has had decades of refining those qualities.
The EPA rating of electric vehicle range more accurately represents highway driving range than the WLTP rating which is geared toward stop and go city driving. Hence if you are doing long distance trips on the highway the EPA rating will more accurately represent your real life experience. For those used to gas mileage being worse in cities and better on highways with gas cars electric cars are largely opposite. Lower speeds use less energy in general.
by end of 2021 they only expect 330k total BEV vehicles globally.. that is not a big push from a company making over ten million cars per year. now they expect to reach a million per year by 2023 but that still keeps their percentage very low.
the simple truth is, no they aren't trying very hard. they have to cater both to politicians and unions at home neither of which can sustain the job losses BEVs will lead too; not just in the manufacturing but it cascades into after market, petrol refining, gas stations, and more.
I don't think that is fair. The Japanese, Korean, Italian, French and other Americans still have not made any worthwhile EV cars either. It's Musk's drive that is the anomaly not German complecancy.
> The Japanese, Korean, Italian, French and other Americans still have not made any worthwhile EV cars either.
That's wrong. And pretty US centric.
The Japanese / French have the Nissan Leaf and Renault Zoe that have excellent sells in their respective countries. They however do not fight on the same ground than Tesla.
Yeah, if you want to go around the block a few times before you run out of juice.[1] A lot of Americans need much longer range.
The EPA range of the 2017 and older models was 81 miles. For about a year I did a one-way commute of about that distance. Only for 2019 did BMW come up with a somewhat reasonable range of 153 miles.
I don't take the REx variant seriously. They are a really bad joke. Why not add an IC engine merely to get to a 200 mile range? And at the same time lower your electric-only range to 126 miles because of the added weight. That's beyond stupidity.
Even with all that, I can't buy a new BMW i3 locally.
EVs are simpler products that make lots of knowledge and experience useless. And the most expensive part of EVs is the battery made by Asian companies.
So it you start "too early" you introduce negative scaling effects on your highly profitable combustion business AND have to invest a lot upfront for the EV models.
There is no way to win this game, many workers will lose their jobs and also initial investments will affect profit and dividends. If you are too slow, Tesla will take the profitable segments anyway.
tesla is not aiming at VWs audience. They make sexy, expensive and fast cars that target the market of ... porsche cayenne? It's not clear if tesla's model will lead to economies of scale that will make these cars cheap. it's a bit premature to say that they 'll destroy old companies. There are already pretty good EVs like the jaguar I-pace , but they dont have mass market appeal. If tesla manages to cut into VWs profits, i think you ll see a lot of EVs being pushed out fast.
Tesla has not, as yet, either turned a profit or “completely destroy[ed]” a single “century old company”.
If you remove the constraint of operating profitably, many companies can do the impossible. :)
(I am not saying Tesla won’t be profitable, or can’t be, or that the German automakers don’t deserve some blowback for poor choices—just that you are making false claims and also comparing apples to oranges.)
Tesla cars are profitable after their initial investment. Every Tesla car has turned profitable as far as I'm aware. The only reason Tesla the company does not make profit is because they use the profits from the previous car to invest in the next car and make it even bigger than the previous one.
They will lose over a billion dollars again in 2019. Shifting around expenses to post a single quarterly profit isn't a huge accomplishment, is it? If/when they can hit the SP500 we can talk about profit.
I wonder if Volkswagen Group (one of the biggest carmakers, they own VW, Audi, Bentley, Lamborghini, Bugatti, Seat, Skoda) is waiting for the right moment to buy/take over Tesla... Just one stupid tweet might be all it takes.
The Germany car industry should have seen the writing on the wall a few years back - when Merkel was forced to intervene to water down the European Commission's proposed emissions regulations - and disrupted itself, and if it had, it might have put them in a better position now. But even that would I think have been just forestalling the inevitable: the barriers to entry to the car industry seem to me to be lower than ever before, to the extent that even Vietnam - somewhere that was previously considered a 'developing' country - has its own home-grown electric car manufacturer, and I'm betting it's a lot cheaper to make cars in Vietnam than it is in Germany.
I'm starting to think that the most significant consequence of the mechanical simplicity of electric cars is not the additional per-car reliability or potentially lower TCO. It is that manufacturing cars has suddenly become accessible to a much wider and geopolitically more diverse set of industrial bases. Maybe electric cars will be the new textiles where developing economies are concerned.
Both the Turkey EV (TOGG) and the Vietnamese EV (VinFast) are prototype cars made by Pinafarina in Italy, I believe. They're not as fully homegrown as one might think.
In fact, they did see the writing, BMW for example developed the Hydrogen 7 [0], Mercedes Benz produced Fuel Cell cars[1]. What they didn't expect, was, that simple Lithium based batteries would take over. Obviously they wanted to retain the range of the combustion engine cars
Hydrogen fuel cell concept cars were in the news for as long as I can remember. I consider them nothing more than appeasement to prevent stricter emission standards. German politicians have been prophesying self-regulation towards more efficient cars for more than thirty years now. What we got instead was a SUV boom and cheating on emission tests.
We had EVs over 100 years ago and folks already knew the advantages of electric power over fossil fuel power. However, batteries have been the limiting factor for awhile. Even now, only Tesla seems to have batteries that meet consumers power/range/cost expectations and they exclusively own the largest battery plant in the world.
I'm not sure we can blame VW for being slower to EVs than Elon Musk and FWIW, the VW company seems to be pivoting to EVs the fastest. The Taycan - a VW product - is the first car that's competitive with a Model S.
> The Germany car industry should have seen the writing on the wall
But that does not change anything!
The point is less workers will be needed. What difference does it make to "see the writing on the wall"? I don't even see any reason to look into the claim itself - it's completely irrelevant. Even if they adapt perfectly and Germany becomes a happy 100% electrical-car country, we will lose a lot of employment in the car industry.
BMW also didn't care about it since the main point of the BMW brand was driver engagement and sporty feel aimed at purists.
Autonomous driving goes against that mantra and was seen as something uncool, for old people who couldn't drive or something like that and would get you ridiculed by driving purists.
That, however, was before sporty cars became luxury cars and vice versa.
Thanks to Germany, eastern Europe is a dumping ground for low quality, highly polluting German cars. A sad state of affairs and it shows just how the EU is biased towards a handful of countries.
It's not really Germany's fault. It's our fault in the East for the vanity of prioritizing low cost second hand luxury vehicles above our health and not holding the government accountable for the lack of a functioning public transport system. The Romanian railway system is a national embarrassment.
Germany isn't dumping anything, it's just supplying the demand coming from Eastern Europeans who make lengthy trips there with platform trailers to bring back cheap second hand luxury vehicles that are now longer economically viable there.
I've seen way more BMW X5s and Audi Q7s in Romanian cities than in my time working in Germany and Austria combined. I don't think the Germans came and shoved them down our throats.
Where Germany is at fault is its lack of action after Dieselgate since it decided to protect VW and its executives rather than the health of the EU citizens that are still having their lungs stuffed with diesel particulate from the tens of thousands of TDI engines happily roaming around us.
Countries have laws for exporting used electronics exactly so poor countries dont become dumping grounds. The same should be the case for intra eu vehicles. The German government is blocking such an initiative using the EU, and clocked or high polluting vehicles end up in countries such as a Romania. Poverty and corruption in that country are rampant but that is no excuse to dumping low quality german cars there.
Edit: the gov of romania has already tried taxing old vehicles but was pushed back by the eu. Blind obedience to the eu and self blame wont fix your country.
The two taxes were found to be illegal by the CJEU. It's the fault of corrupt and incompetent Romanian politicians, not the EU. I'm not aware of any German intervention. Why isn't Hungary a dumping ground for old German cars, only Romania and Bulgaria?
Romania and Bulgaria are indeed poor and corrupt, and from what i see you, the citizens of that country, enjoy being a dumping ground for crap cars as well. Enjoy your status and obey the eu and germany.
There are a lot of cliche comments here about Dieselgate and German manufacturers vs Tesla. The threat isn’t Tesla, Tesla will do very well but isn’t going to take over the world, it’s that manufacturing EVs doesn’t need a lot of the established supply chain, and doesn’t need the same level of employment. Mercedes, VW, BMW etc will be fine, but a lot of their specialised suppliers will go bust, and a lot of jobs will be lost.
I agree with everything you wrote and while I also believe that "a lot of their specialised suppliers will go bust" I think that at the same time there are big opportunities for the suppliers and some will prosper.
The reason is that I believe electronics and software will become ever more important.
Traditionally the German manufacturers have outsourced anything to do with software and even most of the electronics. They have no internal knowledge about software what so ever - every bit of software know-how is at the suppliers. That's why I think that at least some of the suppliers will be better off in the future than the manufacturers themselves.
And it is also a question of human resources. In the past and for a long time software developers at German car manufacturers have been looked down on by all the "real engineers" who are in charge. As a software dev you have been much better off at a supplier. This is changing but in my opinion it gives the suppliers a good head start on capable staff for software projects.
This. German auto makers are now just huge armies of managers and consultants since they outsourced most tech/software R&D to suppliers (Bosch, Continental, etc.) to reduce costs by having the suppliers take the financial risks associated with R&D.
Outsourcing R&D was a typical MBA move since it meant they could keep a lot more money in their pockets and have the suppliers bid each other to the ground on price, however, this now means the suppliers have most of the cutting edge tech now and are free to sell it to other lower tier manufacturers which in the past had no resources for advanced tech.
So now you can have a Hyundai with the same tech as a Merc since they all have the same Bosch/Continental ECUs with some minor tweaks meaning the main selling point of the luxury brands is now the design, badge and perceived brand value rather than any proprietary tech.
This is what drove the major suppliers to halt R&D investments in Germany and expand massively in Eastern Europe in a quest to bring costs down and increase their success in the bids for future contracts.
My guess is that, as more companies hop on the EV train, they will spend more on interior features, like better onboard computer, seats, default options, etc. I also believe that the price of car will remain similar even after complete transition to EV, because the real factor here is purchasing power, not production cost. If these turn out to be true, not so many people will lose job, but most will have to change their profession.
Saying that a metal worker can easily switch to a leather craftsman sounds a bit simplistic, no? Many jobs will be lost, new ones will be created in their place, some people will switch careers, others will be left unemployable. A lot of German (and EU) education machinery focuses on the current gen car industry, and that’s not sustainable in the long run. So they will have to reinvent their educational system as well.
Those metal worker jobs were long ago lost to automation. At that level very few - if any - parts on a vehicle are made by a person, the biggest job is to load blanks and to unload parts into machinery.
So how about, in 2020, you make a car that's as good as the 2012 Model S?
It's absolutely bonkers that the car manufacturers are still playing catch up to a car that's almost a decade old at this point.
Tesla are on their fifth model, third complete rework, and the 'traditional' manufacturers still have their dick in hand.
Take a bog standard sedan, put a 200-300 mile range battery in it, sell it for the battery cost more than the ICE version, scrap the ICE line before the government forces you to, job done.
This is going to be the car industry's collective Kodak moment if they don't pull out soon.
Add to that while battery prices and electric motor prices are dropping, the price of developing and producing internal combustion engines continues to rise due to stricter and stricter emission standards.
>Take a bog standard sedan, put a 200-300 mile range battery in it, sell it for the battery cost more than the ICE version, scrap the ICE line before the government forces you to, job done.
I'm surprised no auto maker has yet to my knowledge a) done the above and b) advertise this fact. I'm envisioning a two-page print ad, showing two identical cars side by side, with a headline challenging the reader to answer "WHICH ONE IS ELECTRIC?"
Meanwhile in Italy they are building lithium battery factories and working on converting diesel buses to electric. The infrastructure shift will be huge and new companies will need to raise to tackle that. For instance, Tourin has circa 800 buses for public transport today - you cannot charge all of them at the same time now as there is no infrastructure and not enough power in the grid. I somehow think that if even Italy is embracing electric as the “next thing” while Germany automakers still firmly hold their heads in the sand then it could be a pretty bad blow for Germany in the coming decade. Amazingly enough all of this could still be avoided if German automotive companies accept for once that the world is changing, will they though.
Shenzhen has a modern smart grid designed to accommodate EV charging. It seems likely that BYD and other Chinese EV makers will quickly take over the global vehicle industry. It is the end of an era for european car makers, killed off by environmental regulation and penalties, and EV subsidies
I think the issue with bus charging is that if you want to plug in all those busses at their various depots and charge overnight, the electrical infrastructure can’t support the new load (multiple megawatts per depot). Bus depots were never wired for that kind of load.
You literally need to build new substations and wires to service a fleet of busses. I think there is probably generation capacity but it might not be deliverable to where it’s needed.
I think one contributing factor slowing down progress is the cost of electricity in Italy. It's €0.24/kwh vs $0.06/kwh in the US (at least in PA). You dont see any electric cars in Italy, and it seems super expensive to them. I’m also not sure if there is a tax on top of that €0.24 from what I remember my cousin telling me. I’m hitting a language barrier confirming this.
My dad pays $0.08 / kWh for electricity in Kentucky. San Francisco has very expensive electricity compared to much of the country. The average US electric rate is $0.12 / kWh for reference.
Kentucky is 75% coal powered, mostly using old existing coal plants.
As those plants age out of their usable lifetime, Kentucky utilities will have to choose between some combination of renewables and storage or natural gas or nuclear, all of which have higher costs than operating the defunct coal plants, but lower capital costs than building new coal plants. This will result in a rise in their prices over time.
Of course, comparing the future costs of new non-coal plants doesn't account for the huge existing public health and environmental costs of burning coal for electricity, which would be avoided by any of the other technologies.
Kentucky has been transitioning to natgas for some time now. The TVA shut down three big coal plants and another big utility also shut down a big coal plant last year. They’re not building new coal plants but natgas plants. That’s not going to change the economics much.
I’m hoping Kentucky starts to do more solar as it is pretty decent for sun, but the local politics likely think solar + stationary battery storage is some lib-ruhl conspiracy.
Not just the German economy. Much of the traditional US and Japanese car (and truck) industry is at risk too. Complacency leading to a lack of R&D is enabling new comers to ship products and establish themselves. Toyota, Mazda, BMW, Chrysler, etc. have in common that they don't seem to have plans to mass produce EVs in a market where Tesla is taking the #1 position in several key markets. It's not a given that any of them will survive while their market shares crumble, typically starting with the most lucrative segments. The supply industries around them are suffering a similar fate.
Somewhat relevant, "The Tesla Effect: How Tesla Is Changing the Used Car Game"[1]. People who buy Teslas typically trade in high-end imports, causing a drop in the used-car prices for Audis, Beemers, etc.
Used luxury cars have also become less reliable and more extensive to maintain. The mechanical and especially the electrical parts have become more complex and failure prone. Potential buyers understand that even a minor problem out of warranty will cost thousands to repair, so I suspect that's another factor in lower used car prices.
A lot of entrenched industries that make billions of dollars are being challenged, and will almost certainly have to drastically change or outright end if we have any hope of slowing climate change.
I suspect those earning billions are going to fight tooth and nail to do everything in their power to stop that happening.
I would love to have an electric car but beside nearby trips (office, some grocery) I also drive say twice a year for vacation.
I just checked the way from home (western suburb of Paris) to a ski resort (Val Thorens)
2 x 40 min stops, on the same way as all of the region driving to ski with me.
This is simply impossible, I spend maybe 4 minutes at the pump, there are 10 of them at the station.
To have the equivalent in electric chargers, there should be 40 or 50 of them, with a nuclear plant nearby to bring in the amperes.
By then if batteries are 3 times the capacity and 10 times the charging speed, this will be competitive to fuel. Otherwise it stays as a second car solution, for regional (local) trips
I understand that. I was rather trying to point out hiw far, logistically, we are from mainstream adoption - just because of life constraints (such as vacation)
I don’t really understand the strength of your response, it’s a 6-7 hour trip, wouldn’t you want to stop anyway? Stop off at a restaurant near a 50kW charger, the fuel savings will pay for a good meal, and then you’ll only need another 20 minute top up to stretch your legs at some other point of the trip. And even if you never wanted to stop, this is, what, five hours over the course of a year, it just doesn’t seem that important, for instance what about the time you save from never having to visit a petrol station in daily use of the car?
No, what I meant is that this is not going to be 2x30 minutes, but 2x(30 min charge + n x 30 min waiting in queue for the chargers because there are not enough of them). Vs 10 fuel pumps where people spend 3 min.
When the proportions are reversed then EV make sense for trips with other purple taking the trip at the same time on the same road (as this is the case in France for school holidays)
I did three 12-hour road trips Norway this year, 2 of them in a borrowed Tesla Model S. The Model S trip was less tiring than the fossil car trip. Same amount of stops, only difference is we plugged in the Model S the two times we had a 30-minute break.
If 60 minutes of stopping on a 12-hour drive is a dealbreaker to you, you should go with a fossil fuel car.
No, what I meant is that this is not going to be 2x30 minutes, but 2x(30 min charge + n x 30 min waiting in queue for the chargers because there are not enough of them). Vs 10 fuel pumps where people spend 3 min.
When the proportions are reversed then EV make sense for trips with other purple taking the trip at the same time on the same road (as this is the case in France for school holidays)
We had 10 free chargers to choose from every time we stopped, but I obviously can't say anything about the state of Tesla's charging network in your location.
Non-Tesla chargers are usually over capacity in Norway though. No manufacturers or companies have the guts to actually exploit the market dynamics here, by charging enough to get the free capacity right and building out more total capacity if a location is very profitable.
I do see your point wrt. national school holidays and other ("a few times a year") peak times, but I'm not sure this would be enough of a disadvantage to negate the positives of EVs (economically speaking) in the long term. A typical Model 3 stop will be 15-20 minutes (not 30) if you're able to stop at the right time, and some sort of peak rate could limit the demand at annual peak times if necessary. Roadside charging is only used for road trips when travelling longer than your vehicle's range, and proper EVs have a >400km range in the first place.
There are usually available chargers in my area as well. The problem is when, on one single route (such as Paris to the Alps where there is basically one or two reasonable routes) everybody drives exactly at the same time (which is the case during school vacation).
In that case there will be a queue for the chargers - even if there are as many of them as fuel pumps, the fact that you need to spend 30 min at it vs 3 minutes makes the whole "stop for recharge" very long, at least twice.
Within Europe it's the UK that looks weakest right now. Domestic sales and exports have both plummeted despite the pound dropping. The new trade deal between Europe and Japan lessons the need for Japanese manufacturers to have European plants. Honda have already announced they are leaving. Even the prestige manufacturers are struggling.
Many of them made for exports - especially to the EU. This is the problem. This will be less profitable and more complex. Currently Britain is in the EU and seen as an entry to that market. This will be gone soon.
Much of that manufacturing looks to move to the EU.
It was funny to see some colleagues that moved from here to Germany to work on automotive industry, and almost overnight started to defend "stopgap" alternatives like hydrogen ICEs... IMHO the biggest advantage of an electric car is the 10x gain on mechanical simplicity, I don't care if it costs the same to own and operate.
Why would a regular customer care about mechanical simplicity at all? For 99% of people the car is a magical black box where you put fuel in and drive it. From time to time you need take it to a car doctor to replace something that might as well be a quantum fusion exchanger diffuser for X amount of dollars just so they can drive again. The last two values you say are of no importance to you are of biggest importance to everyone else - the car can have literally whatever under the bonnet, the cost to own and operate are the only two things that matter to anyone. There are certain idealists around for whom the car not burning fuel is a thing worth paying more for, but most people only ever look at the cost of ownership and nothing else.
And replacement costs. How many people have had this discussion with a mechanic?
“The engine will cost $4000 to repair or replace. The car is only worth about $3000 so it’s better just to get a new car”
Engine replacements in cars are crap because all of the other bits and pieces are still wearing out. Meanwhile a new batter makes an electric car like new.
But the overall maintenance is going to cost much more on a well maintained engine.
Oil changes, fan belts, flywheels, spark plugs, alternators, starters, etc don't exist in an EV. These are all components I have paid to have replaced in an ICE I've owned. Additionally, if your EV has regenerative braking (such as all Tesla vehicles), it is kind of like an ICE standard "engine braking" resulting in recharging the battery. This results in a much longer lifetime for brakes and brake pads.
My Model 3 requires scheduled maintenance every 2 years and they recommend a tire rotation every 6,000 miles or so. Good luck finding that little maintenance in a traditional ICE vehicle.
This is not the case for all EVs, but for Tesla, the battery is made up of thousands of individual cells which are grouped into individual "packs". The entire battery doesn't just go bad because the entire battery is thousands of small batteries. Tesla now will replace an individual pack that might go bad, making it cost less.
>But the overall maintenance is going to cost much more on a well maintained engine.
Oil changes, fan belts, flywheels, spark plugs, alternators, starters, etc don't exist in an EV.
Not to burst your bubble but just because a Tesla has fewer moving mechanical parts that can break in a traditional ICE car does not make it automatically more reliable, it's just that the points if failure are now electrical and mostly silicon based.
IIRC there was a story posted here a couple of days ago where someone's Tesla broke down while parked. That doesn't prove anything but just like how in a ICE car a fan belt can fail, so can a flash chip, MOSFET or sensor in a Tesla causing it to break down.
Remember when people thought SSDs would be way more reliable than HDDs just on the basis of having no moving parts? Boy were we wrong. The failure rate of(some) SSDs is staggering, just that now it's caused by electrical faults rather than mechanical.
Right now we have too few out of warranty Teslas to draw any conclusions about reliability.
At least for out of warranty ICE cars there are loads of aftermarket parts and garages that can fix things on the cheap when they break. I'm not sure we can say the same for out of warranty Teslas yet.
This is true, but not what I was responding to, which was parent post about replacement cost. The low maintenance is one of the main reasons I drive a BEV. But the high replacement costs is a major factor in why I lease it.
We're a decade in on BEVs and the whole "replace your battery pack" worry has utterly failed to materialize. Most BEVs will simply never need a replacement.
This is thread isn’t about Teslas, it is about the whole electric car industry. Tesla defenders don’t need to get their hackles up. Parent post said batteries in BEVs will never need to be replaced.
I mentioned it because I used to assume that serious degradation is just something batteries do, but I learned that this is wrong and proper battery management all but eliminates the problem.
Battery prices are still falling 10-15% a year. So needing to replace the battery 5-8 years from now won't cost as much as needing to replace an ice engine. And the way Tesla batteries are lasting so far I think you could probably get a good price for the old battery as well. So the cost people keep talking about battery replacement
wont be as much over time
You can rebuild a 4 cylinder engine for under a $1000 dollars. Maybe half that in an area where labor is cheap. In 5 years, replacing a battery pack will still be 5x or 10x that.
You don't need to replace engines on new cars though, and that's the main discussion to have here - what do people care about when buying a brand new car? For a lot of buyers there's no maintenance cost for the first 3 years, so EVs have zero advantage for new buyers. I had a brand new Qashqai for 3 years, negotiated a 3-year service pack for it to be included in the price, and over those 3 years it needed nothing - no new tyres, brakes, bulbs, servicing was "free" so the car was as cheap to keep as an EV would be, except that it was a lot cheaper to purchase. And sure, over a longer period of time it is going to start costing money in maintenance - but I(as a new buyer) couldn't care less - it's simply not my problem.
Or as another example - we bought a new VW Polo for my wife some time ago, and there was absolutely no way to make a case for an EV instead - the price difference was so big that it will have paid for the fuel for a petrol Polo many times over, getting an EV made zero sense.
i think simplicity is a good selling point, but the dependence on the power grid and charging utilities is an even bigger, negative point. i think it's underestimated how big of an issue charging will be.
It's hard to replace such a manufacturing oriented work culture in any country, especially one revolving around cars in general. I think Germany will be fine, it's still early.
Electric cars accelerated some trends already in motion: The simplicity of electric cars dropped the last few barriers to *horizonalization." As with PCs and smartphones, all players have access to all parts. Vertically integrated players like Apple and Samsung retain some advantages, but are constantly challenged at every horizontal layer by specialist suppliers.
There are about three dozen car manufacturers in China. They will thrive in a horizontalized car business.
The whole point of technology is to make processes more efficient. This in turn drives down prices and increases productivity.
If it takes fewer people and factories to make a more sustainable vehicle, so be it.
This is also the force that propels long-term economic growth (as long as the political system continues to support it). To fight it, and make the auto-industry less competitive, is good for Germany in the short run but the last thing they should do in a long-term horizon.
Last I checked the German car industry was doing fine. Detroit however looks more and more like a scene from some apocalyptic movie. And then there is Japan.
Ford is going electric in a big way. Coming in 2020, the electric Mustang, for which pre-orders are now full. Electric F-150 pickup in 2021.
"Ford says that they can produce 50,000 vehicles in the first 12 months" on the Mustang. That's kind of small, but Ford can probably ramp that up as needed.
Toyota is now making electric car noises but is only selling (or not-selling) that hydrogen-powered thing.
Toyota is pretty much the market leader in hybrids and has been since the beginning, if and when they decide to go all electric I really don't see what would hold them back.
There are still two arguments to be made that electric vehicles themselves are a threat to the German auto industry, independent of cost or where the vehicles are made:
1) There are an order of magnitude fewer parts, due to replacement
of the engine with battery + motor. The part count of ICE engines
was the reason we have such a robust chain of suppliers, which
are now threatened. There are also jobs lost due to loss of
assembly and integration work.
2) Several German (and Japanese) auto manufacturers rest on the
reputation of having the best engines in the business. Electric
vehicles do not have engines. The brand halo from their engine
expertise doesn't transfer directly to EVs.
The supply chain companies in Europe seem to be prepared. Continental has parts for gas, electric, hybrid, and Diesel cars.
Continental announced parts for self-driving, offering flash LIDAR, ruggedized computers, and actuators. But nobody got self-driving to production and ordered a few hundred thousand of those units. Must be frustrating being too early.
>Why is their knowledge so useless? Why are success and failure so intertwined in the tech industry? The right moment cannot be known exactly in advance, so attempts to forecast will typically be off by years or worse. For many claims, there is no way to invest in an idea except by going all in and launching a company, resulting in extreme variance in outcomes, even when the idea is good and the forecasts correct about the (eventual) outcome.
>Progress can happen and can be foreseen long before, but the details and exact timing due to bottlenecks are too difficult to get right. Launching too early means failure, but being conservative & launching later is just as bad because regardless of forecasting, a good idea will draw overly-optimistic researchers or entrepreneurs to it like moths to a flame: all get immolated but the one with the dumb luck to kiss the flame at the perfect instant, who then wins everything, at which point everyone can see that the optimal time is past. All major success stories overshadow their long list of predecessors who did the same thing, but got unlucky. So, ideas can be divided into the overly-optimistic & likely doomed, or the fait accompli. On an individual level, ideas are worthless because so many others have them too—‘multiple invention’ is the rule, and not the exception. Progress, then, depends on the ‘unreasonable man’.
Germans are famous for interiors and safety features, those translate well. also continuous improvement of their lines, I don't like the golf personally but when you get in one you feel the years of iteration and improvements. also transmission, and as a matter of fact they're already experimenting with that on the Porsche Taycan, produced in Germany and that's already doing 3k car/month without months of drama leading up the deliveries.
the rest is just an elaborate broken window fallacy, the economy will suffer not if they just shift the supply chain, as long as the job will be there.
> “There is a transition toward more electric vehicles that have far fewer components and are easier to manufacture,” Bernhard Mattes, the president of the German Association of the Automotive Industry, said in an interview in Berlin. “Therefore, we can expect less employment.”
Any major leap in efficiency eliminates jobs. It causes turbulence as people have to shift jobs or even industries, but it's not really a reason to not do something and it typically works out in the long run.
Won’t be any economy left if the planet is made uninhabitable. It’s like the most sacred thing is profit, not anything about the people that create it. Very odd train of thought.
There might be 50% accounting drop in some reports thanks to all the biomas co-firing making coal plants ECO on paper, at the cost of freshly chopped European forests.
Eh, nobody gets to make rational evidence based policy with nuclear, that ship has sailed. I think once fusion is cracked the 50-years away joke will just shift into the planning permission department.
Fusion may be difficult but math and physics say we should be able to do it. Just because it's difficult and with a long time horizon doesn't mean you should throw it in the bin with "perpetual motion". (Cold Fusion however, you may throw in the bin)
Just saw a talk [0] where they talk about using lasers to create fusion. The current puck used to kick start the process costs $1M, (paraphrased) "it needs to cost 20 cents before Fusion is viable. But hey, we're in the research phase!"
From the point of view of an end user, it doesn't matter if a technology is not possible because it's physically impossible, or if it's so uncompetitive it's economically impossible. The net effect is the same: the technology is dead to them.
Wouldn’t go so far as never. I’m going to go out on a limb and say Fusion power on a space ship will be viable one day if humanity survives long enough.
Fusion is already working. Not well enough to be commercially viable, but it's already working. ITER will produce more energy than it will be using - albeit only enough usable energy to break even. It's not a matter of making it work anymore, it's only a matter of getting it to work well enough.
But maybe all we will ever need are solar panels, after all the sun is providing way enough energy as is... for now.
Let me be more precise (for you and for the people who downvoted me): fusion will never be cost effective. Ever. There is no conceivable material for the walls of a reactor that could withstand the neutron bombardment from the reaction. Maybe there’s some super-inexpensive way to replace the entire reactor core every 18 months... but I seriously doubt it.
We have an excellent material for fusion reactor walls. It's the highly-radioactive waste from a fission reactor.
The neutron bombardment makes the waste less radioactive.
With recycling and purification steps, we can direct the equipment to generate more of the isotopes we value and less of the isotopes that are undesirable.
What you wrote there is 100% absurd. The waste from fission power plants lacks the material properties necessary to form the walls of a fusion plant, and would be nightmarishly difficult to fabricate into anything even if it did.
There has been repeated talk of putting transuranic waste into fusion reactor blankets for destruction or breeding (so called fission-fusion hybrids) but these inherit all the negatives of fission and fusion reactors (the worst of both worlds) without any big advantages to compensate. And this would just be materially passively loaded in blankets, not essential structural elements (that, for one thing, cannot spring any significant leaks without ruining the plasma by allowing coolant into the vacuum vessel.)
That's what Lawrence Lidsky was saying fusion people should work on, in his (in)famous 1983 article "The Trouble with Fusion".
Then his PhD student Todd Rider shot down the very low neutron fuel cycles. D-3He remains possible, but that still produces neutrons, albeit fewer than DT (and requires mining bodies in space to get 3He).
I know but to replace it with coal??? Couldn't they have gone for e.g. LNG or more renewables phased in over time? The speed of the shift seemed mighty fishy.
Part of the reason of coal increase is that there were more than enough hold-outs that expected there to be another exit from the exit (2011) of the exit (2010) of the exit (2000) from nuclear, so that they saw no need to actually do something because surely the nuclear shutdown won't _actually_ happen.
Well, it does and that assumption cost expensive time.
I mean for power generation, I guess sure. But coal is an essential part of steel production. And steel is the thing that literally all modern buildings and vehicles are made out of. So the whole "Green industry doesn't need coal infrastructure" thing is just BS.
"Once fusion is cracked" is almost on par with "once perpetual motion machines are cracked." It presupposes that fusion being "cracked" is a reasonable thing to expect.
> "Once fusion is cracked" is almost on par with "once perpetual motion machines are cracked." It presupposes that fusion being "cracked" is a reasonable thing to expect.
Oof. One need only to peruse your comment history to see where this sentiment is coming from, but even that is no excuse for that obtuse argument.
"Perpetual motion," on the one hand, is quackery outlawed by straightforward thermodynamics, breaking the rules of which allows assertions like "chair seats and door handles should be spontaneously heating up to incandescence essentially at random." Fusion, on the other hand, is a technical problem.
Fusion researchers at MIT, ITER, and other institutions at the top tiers of academia across the globe are not a cabal of greedy grant-dependent charlatans bamboozling their way through careers in bad faith, deliberately ignoring the lone rational voice of Lidsky and his Johnny-Come-Lately-The-Baptist on HN, u/pfdietz. It's perfectly rational (Sane, even!) to cast aside internet naysayers (no matter how zealous) in favor of deferring to, you know, actual experts.
Fusion researchers are people who have irreversibly (or nearly so) committed their careers to something. They have a very strong incentive to not admit they have wasted their lives. It's touching you think that asking such a person if fusion deserves more funding that you'd get anything but a "yes" answer.
In general, you don't want to ask a person in field X if X needs funding. You might ask them what's the best way of spending money in X, but even then you better phrase the question carefully to avoid conflict of interest.
This is either a bad joke, an incredible misunderstanding of physics. "perpetual motion machine" is not compatible with the laws of physics as we understand them. There's many working fusion reactors, we don't know which, if any, designs will be economical.
A cup of water is enough to power a small city, if the atoms in it were perfectly fused. So for all practical purposes, clean fusion IS pretty close to what we imagine when we think of perpetual motion. The sun would burn out long before we ran out of usable fuel in our solar system.
No, I understand that. What I'm pointing out is that if something has no realistic chance of being economically viable, then from the end user's point of view that's just as bad as if it were physically impossible. The only difference is society is spending billions while pretending an economic miracle will happen, even if that miracle is as implausible as discovery of a violation of the law of conservation of energy.
Fusion indeed has a realistic chance of being economically viable. Your comment assumes that current technologies remain entirely static which is the unrealistic position. Enabling technologies like high temperature superconductors, advanced computation/simulation capabilities, new high current/high voltage electronics, as well as recent advances in alternate (non tokamak) concepts bode well for the field.
Your comment is funny, since "assuming current technologies remain static" is what fusion proponents have done. They have to assume the competition doesn't get better. If solar and wind continue down their experience curves they will be delivering power at a fraction of a cent per kWh, when fusion will be lucky to deliver power at a cost 100x that.
Just look at the multiple engineering miracles that would be needed. I'll mention a couple here.
Note that DT fusion is a thermal power technology. It makes heat that drives a thermal cycle. It turns out that all externally heated thermal cycles have become uncompetitive for power generation, just because of the cost of the non-reactor/non-boiler components. This includes fission, solar thermal, geothermal, and coal. So even if a DT fusion reactor is delivered FOR FREE from the fusion reactor fairy, it will not be competitive. Expecting capital equipment to have zero or negative cost is a good economic analogue for a perpetual motion machine.
So, what's the alternative? It's going to have to be something using advanced fuels and direct conversion. That means all the efforts with tokamaks are ruled out (they cannot work with advanced fuels and have no place for adding putative direct conversion.) And what advanced fuels are we talking about? D-3He would require space mining of the outer planets (the much-discussed lunar resource, even if it could be mined at 10 ppb in the regolith, would only last centuries before being exhausted.) And H-11B is extremely difficult, because the energy out is only about 10x the kinetic energy of the particles, so very little loss can be tolerated. In particular, systems in thermal equilibrium will have a very difficult time reaching breakeven, due to large photon losses.
Another showstopper is the absolutely terrible power density of fusion reactors. This follows from general principles (geometry and the square cube law). If you look at all existing fusion reactor proposals, ask what their thermal power/volume is. You will discover they are terrible compared to fission reactors (ITER 400x worse, ARC 40x worse). So ask yourself: why is this going to be cheaper than fission reactors? The fusion reactors are both larger, more complex, and made of much more sophisticated materials. And fission has already lost the economic race.
The larger more complex reactors are really bad news for reliability and maintainability. Estimates for the fraction of time a fusion reactor will be up, given current estimates of MTBF and MTTR, are just a few percent. This is inadequate even for an experimental reactor. There is not much budget space for operating costs from a fusion reactor before just that becomes prohibitive.
From a hard nosed engineering point of view, fusion is just ridiculous. It piles complexity upon complexity in a large machine that will be too radioactive for hands on maintenance. How could you think this would ever make sense?
Perpetual motion machines are fundamentally impossible by current understandings of physics. Fusion, from my reading, is more like a tremendously difficult modeling problem. Like protein folding. We can't sustain a productive reaction because we can't contain it properly, and we can't contain it properly because we can't yet predict the behavior of the plasma.
Perpetual motion is not hard at all. Satellites are in perpetual motion around globe for decades. It doesn't violate anything. Universe is infinitely old and still moving.
Perpetual motion _engines_ violate law of energy conservation, because perpetual source of energy can create infinite amount of energy, thus they are impossible, like perpetual source of water, or perpetual source of anything.
We're pulling the coal plants down, and pushing to do it faster. (It may still not be fast enough, ok.) I'm more worried about the countries with no such plans.
There is pretty much zero chance of the planet becoming uninhabitable in the next few million years, so I'll save you a lot of anxiety. We're gonna be fine.
Source? We are destroying a lot of the negative feedback mechanisms (e.g. clearing rain forests, destroying the tundra, etc) what makes you sure we will be okay? A 4-5 degree Celsius increase in temperature is looking likely by 2100. If that is extrapolated out a few million years doesn’t seem plausible.
We do need to phase out fossil fuels, but we must do so in a way that is not only physically and economically but also politically sustainable.
As we have seen, big changes of any kind that displace or destroy the livelihoods of vast numbers of people always lead to some form of populist or revolutionary revolt. Whether it takes a "left" (populist-socialist/communist) or "right" (national socialist) form depends mostly on which side is able to field the most compelling demagogue that can best harness the anger of the masses.
Abandoning fossil fuels must be done in a way that cushions the public and the economy somewhat or we will have a full scale populist revolt with slogans like "roll coal!"
In this case what "we must" do isn't really in control of a single country. It turns out battery electric vehicles are viable now. Most of Germany's car sales aren't internal to Germany. If they don't produce competitive electric vehicles, Tesla will, or Rivian, or a dozen companies in China and all over the world.
Germany's choice isn't to start producing electric cars or to keep producing the same number of ICE cars they always did. It's to start producing electric cars or lose most of the market to new competitors.
And that means there are going to be fewer jobs making cars, because it's less labor to make an electric car. But you don't bail out the buggy whip makers, they just start making drive belts, or they go away.
I'm not sure the buggy whip makers thing is applicable. Industrialization put a ton of people out of work, but growth created new jobs for them. We are now in a near-zero growth environment, so I'm not sure growth will supply a magic bailout this time. Jobs are going to be lost and they may not be replaced by anything.
The thing about jobs is that they mostly balance out. Some people lose their jobs, but that means cars cost less. It means you get the same standard of living with less income. So you take a lower paying job and still have the same life.
There are effectively unlimited jobs at low enough pay, so as long as the pay meets the cost of living it's fine, so anything that lowers the cost of living is good.
That balance doesn't operate at the individual level. It mostly benefits the people who buy cars and mostly hurts the people who used to make cars. But on net it helps more than it hurts -- it's better to make transportation less expensive than have some more jobs that cause transportation to be more expensive.
The biggest problem with this is that it works best when everything gets cheaper at once. Otherwise that individual-level asymmetry starts to become trouble. And what we have right now is a regulatory environment that makes it hard to get cost reductions in certain industries (housing from zoning rules, education from government subsidies, healthcare from a hundred separate causes), so those keep growing as a percentage of income. And that's going to be a problem if we don't do something about it.
The article is all about how there's much more at stake than just profits, including thousands of people's jobs. I don't disagree that there's plenty of greed clouding people's judgment, but this cartoonish portrayal is unfair. "Let him who is without an ecological footprint cast the first stone".
None of the German car manufacturers actually made any worthwhile EVs, and it always seemed like they're making EVs just to satisfy EU lawmakers.
Meanwhile across the ocean, a company with essentially no production line history is able to completely destroy century old companies because they got complacent.
German car manufacturers deserve everything coming to them