alt Hacker NewsWhy western carmakers' retreat from electric risks dooming them to irrelevance
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The other day I was joking with friends about how I'd love to have a car with a deployable surveillance drone to help with parking and so if I'm stuck in traffic I could have my drone scout ahead and see what's up.
Turns out BYD have one of those already! https://www.theverge.com/news/622963/byd-dji-vehicle-mounted...
VAG group has EVs (and pretty good ones) across the board: VW with ID series, Škoda with Enyaq/Elroq/Epiq, Audi with eTron series (SUV, sedan and estate), SEAT with Cupra Born and others. BMW just launched Neue Klasse, with iX3 selling like hot cakesa nd i3 looking amazing, with i7 in pipeline. Mercedes also launched a great new platform with CLA which is coming to other sizes as well.
Meanwhile, Renault 5 is selling very well with Renault 4 in the pipeline. Zoes have been selling well too. Peugeot also has good EV models (208 is really fun to drive).
There pretty much isn't a single European car manufacturer that wouldn't have a compact car or an SUV in EV market and most of them have good range, decent pricing and are moving to 800V platforms as well.
Sooo... where's the retreat?
Weird headline: Japanese carmakers are doing the same error, while Tesla (an American company) is the one of the leading electric carmakers... I'd just replace it with Legacy Carmakers (e.g. Ford, GM, Toyota and so on).
Western car makers learned the hard lesson that, at least in most of Europe, electricity prices are far too high, EV prices are too high, and customers do know how to use their calculators. In Germany, the only thing propping up the EV market are tax subsidies for commercially used EVs, so company cars are very likely to be EV or at least hybrid. For the rest of sales? Only idealists buy EVs, and then only those with deeper pockets, their own home charger, etc.
The current third oil crisis won't change much in this picture, because while fossil fuel prices have gone up, electricity prices are also starting to react and rise. That's because electricity demand rises, some industrial users can either use electricity or gas. And because gas prices are rising, which influence a small but very important part of electricity generation: on-demand gas power plants, that smooth out the sharp variations in renewable generation and demand.
And in the one important area of EV construction that makes a real difference, batteries, they tried and failed horribly. Everything else isn't really that special or EV-specific. So this winding down is just admitting that they already failed when the likes of Northvolt went boom. And the imho realistic assumption that production lines can be changed again if EVs should see more demand in the future. After all, some car brands to produce EVs, hybrids and ICE cars on the same line even now.
Isn't it over and China owns this market anyway? How can any other country possibly compete?
America clearly has an EV industry (Tesla, Rivian) but its adoption is pretty limited by infrastructure.
I see two things discussed too little:
* in the ICE world, California and EU norms created a tight barrier to entry. the patent portfolio protected the old automotive industry. they only built their patent protected ICEs, and they bought everything else from suppliers.
electric circumvents that barrier and that enabled dozens of new automotive OEMs: the first big disruptor
too bad the hard part for software instead is system integration. consistency cross all components.
all the great hardware engineering processes are completely ND utterly misguided for software system engineering.. integrate rely, often, continuously vs clearly specified interfaces and isolated component engineering with expensive and thus relatively rare integration.
that's IMHO the second disruption for automotive.The Western carmakers have been responding rationally to market signals in moving away from EVs, meanwhile Chinese carmakers are responding rationally to government mandates and subsidies.
It's actually the Western approach that is logically more sustainable, modulo global warming impacts. So it's odd to say that selling what people actually want to buy right now is "dooming them to irrelevance." The Guardian and the people it quotes are actualy saying "car buyers are wrong" but by way of blaming the companies responding to their signals. In the absence of, say, a carbon tax, what they are doing is highly relevant.
Fracking led the U.S. to be a net oil exporter, meanwhile EVs have infrastructure costs Western governemnts are not prepared to subsidize any further. Those charging stations can easily cost $50k to install. The batteries are not cheap or easy to make, and the low price of Chinese vehicles is down to heavy subsidies, and much of Western demand was also propped up by subsidies that have been going away. Gas stations are built out, ICs are well understood. Yes the Iran situation has pushed up prices but that doesn't mean they'll stay high long term.
There is very little evidence the market actually wants EVs. They are nice to drive, probably net better for the environment and our health, long term will likely "win," but none of that makes them "relevant" today or ICs "irrelevant."
perhaps super efficient hybrids that blend the best of both worlds are really the future?
I think Ferrari, Lambo, Rolls Royce, Bugatti, Zonda etc. will do just fine with selling luxury ICEs with many cylinders that go vroom to rich people. In fact they'll probably do better as global wealth gap increases.
It's the Audis, BMWs, Mercedes, etc of Europe they'll probably end up the way of Philips, Blaupunkt, Alcatel, Grundig, Nokia, Thomson, Gigaset, SAgem, etc. meaning selling off their consumer civilian operations to chinese OEMs and all that remain will be the recognizable name badge put on imported Chinese components assembled in EU, while the small remaining European operations focus on vehicles and powertrains for defense/naval/aerospace/etc.
In the US, automakers are still a big source of union power, which is at least part of the reason Trump is pushing them to drop EVs. In a fascist state, you want all powerful industries closely tied to the rulers.
Embrace and skip to extinguish. Remember the EV-1 anyone? The standard strategy for a Detroit mfgr is to half-heartedly go through the motions of EV offerings so they can "prove" "no one wants them", it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that also discourages change influence on the customer side as well. Marketing, advertising, and investment with intent and impactful efficacy would manufacture consent for different products.
no one is willing to admit the EV tech isn't just there yet to fully replace gas powered cars?
But what about Hydrogen? Many ICE companies would be better to focus on that. It would allow legacy vehicles to stay on the road, and fix the range anxiety in places like the US which is way bigger than all of the EU and bigger than the populated parts of China.
I've had a rough time with the last two EVs I've owned. I bought a Honda e in 2020 because of its retro-future charm, but ended up being disappointed by several things:
- the range was miserable
- the software quality was bad
- no OTA updates ever (despite Honda's promises)
- slow charging
- poor public charging infrastructure in Germany
I should have known that a 35 kW battery wouldn't deliver great range or charging speed. But I didn't fully appreciate how limiting it would be.
Last year, I bought a new Mini Cooper e. Larger battery. Better software. BMW's quality actually delivered this time. The car feels objectively nice. The software is polished. There are updates. Few bugs. But the range still leaves something to be desired. In summer it's okay. During winter 30-40% of the range just melts away.
Public charging in Northern Germany still sucks:
- too few public chargers
- chargers are often broken or out of service
- pricing is intransparent
Municipal utility companies ("Stadtwerke") seem especially bad at maintaining their charger fleets. Every second charger that I want to use is out of service. The one next to my apartment has been labeled as "defective" for a couple of weeks now. Nobody seems to care...
I still like (love during summer) my car. It's a cool car. It feels luxurious. It's comfortable. It's fun to tear around corners. It's still compact enough to maneuver through the city. And it looks cool. But it also costs 40-50k EUR and only has limited range. And public charging really needs to improve.