Just like real estate is "location, location, location," the real inflection point of EV adoption will be "price, price, price." As long as they're priced in the luxury range, sales will be restricted. As soon as you can buy a decent new or used EV for $10-15,000, or less, you will see mass adoption. And by "decent," I don't mean golf cart style, I mean a useful, roomy, sedan or hatchback with good range that will appeal to the middle class.
Ask HN: What will be the future differentiator in electric vehicles?
51–60 of 236 posts
Re: Ask HN: What will be the future differentiator in electric vehicles?
#52The lack of differentiation between two EV brands will not be the major disruption to the car industry. It will be the ownership. In 3 to 5 years we should see autonomous vehicles that are offered by robot taxi networks. The same car can offer transport services to 5 families or more and still each family will be able to use the car to similar levels they are currently used to. Customers will no longer have to worry about maintenance, charging, insurance, parking, cleaning,... They will pay less and get more. The outcome will be that the number of cars sold will be a lot less than today. Car companies will not be able to make any margin on maintenance because EVs need a lot less maintenance and can soon drive a million kilometres. Only very few companies can create/train the self-driving technology, e.g. Tesla, Google,... The outcome will be that we will see a lot less car companies.
Re: Ask HN: What will be the future differentiator in electric vehicles?
#53> What will be the future differentiator in electric vehicles? I'm afraid there will be none. Hull shape, and the battery size is pretty much the only thing existing EVs differ from each other. Mechanically, they are all very, very simple. Simpler than any IC car. Compact wishbone suspension is used on pretty much every one of them, since all EVs are city cars, and you want as much space for batteries as possible, an…
>Hull shape, and the battery size is pretty much the only thing existing EVs differ from each other. That seems like a strange thing to say. We see front-wheel-drive, rear-wheel-drive and all-wheel-drive electric vehicles on the road today, driven by 1, 2 or 3 motors. We've seen designs (I don't think any of them are in production yet) with 4 motors - one for each wheel. There's about an order of magnitude difference…
> We see front-wheel-drive, rear-wheel-drive and all-wheel-drive electric vehicles on the road today, driven by 1, 2 or 3 motors. We've seen designs (I don't think any of them are in production yet) with 4 motors - one for each wheel.
This differentiation is superfluous with EVs, and I believe we will not see this living much longer.
There is not much differentiation besides linear cost/performance progression.
Motors? Suspension? Horsepower? All basically more money for bigger motor, hp, and performance.
Re: Ask HN: What will be the future differentiator in electric vehicles?
#54The lack of differentiation between two EV brands will not be the major disruption to the car industry. It will be the ownership. In 3 to 5 years we should see autonomous vehicles that are offered by robot taxi networks. The same car can offer transport services to 5 families or more and still each family will be able to use the car to similar levels they are currently used to. Customers will no longer have to worry…
> In 3 to 5 years we should see autonomous vehicles
I've heard this before... ah yes. Five years ago[0].
Now, I'm not saying this won't happen. But predicting timelines on something that does not yet exist is tricky.
More to your point though... right now a lot of people value having "their" car despite all the drawbacks you listed. It can certainly vary (i.e. city vs suburbs vs rural) but people like just leaving stuff in their car, hopping in it the moment they are ready to leave, rather than trying to gather their kids, stuff, pets, etc. while waiting an unpredictable time for a summoned vehicle to arrive, and then going through the loading process, and then making sure nothing gets left behind.
I think it's possible we'll see a divergence, where people that begrudgingly own a car today will happily move into the future you envision, but quite a large portion of car owners will still want to own cars pretty far into the future.
[0] https://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/2016/04/29/...
Re: Ask HN: What will be the future differentiator in electric vehicles?
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Taycan is not price competitive with Model S and won’t be performance competitive when the S plaid ships this quarter.
Supercar brands have never been about being price-competitive (in some cases, they are even Veblen Goods). Very few people cross-shop Ferraris and Hondas. I look forward to seeing the new Tesla's Nürburgring-Nordschleife time. The progress that performance EVs are making is impressive.
No doubt but they derive much of their prestige from their performance reputation which is why you see them marketing the Taycan’s 0-60 repeatability. As things progress the marketing department will increasingly struggle to come up with reasons why the electric incarnation of the brand lives up to its historical position as a prestigious good.
Re: Ask HN: What will be the future differentiator in electric vehicles?
#56> What will be the future differentiator in electric vehicles? I'm afraid there will be none. Hull shape, and the battery size is pretty much the only thing existing EVs differ from each other. Mechanically, they are all very, very simple. Simpler than any IC car. Compact wishbone suspension is used on pretty much every one of them, since all EVs are city cars, and you want as much space for batteries as possible, an…
What about improved battery tech, Weight distribution, Software updates, Safety equipment, internal computers, in car entertainment, in-wheel motors, drive-train connections to electronic towing, theft deterrence ?
> What about improved battery tech?
We haven't seem much improvement on the market since second gen ternary hit. All coming improvements will be very gradual.
Cars on the market already hit possible upper/lower weight, and size limits for the battery pack.
> Weight distribution
Any other than low, and centre?
> Software updates
Do you want to play videogames on your car? Will you pay few thousand dollars more for a UI skin update once a year?
> in-wheel motors
May be, but that will only work towards killing the differentiation even more, at least in the low end.
Re: Ask HN: What will be the future differentiator in electric vehicles?
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "cars are not a necessity" This is only potentially true in dense urban environments. Its not true in suburban and rural areas, at least in the US. The rural-to-urban transition won't occur fast enough for this to not be true for a few decades at very least.
Well, you're describing how things are today but not necessarily how they could be. I agree with the OP's sentiment that cars are mostly not needed. We've just been hoodwinked into building in car-friendly ways instead of people-friendly ways, and so we have these spread-out, fragile, suburban areas that depend entirely on cheap oil to function (if not the gas itself, the manufacturing, maintenance, and support of ca…
Sure, but you can't just close a milk bottle and expect the spilled milk to come back. Good or not, we have suburbs and rural infrastructure that won't just disappear in a decade.
Re: Ask HN: What will be the future differentiator in electric vehicles?
#58The lack of differentiation between two EV brands will not be the major disruption to the car industry. It will be the ownership. In 3 to 5 years we should see autonomous vehicles that are offered by robot taxi networks. The same car can offer transport services to 5 families or more and still each family will be able to use the car to similar levels they are currently used to. Customers will no longer have to worry…
Will these robot taxi cars require a vaccine passport to operate?
Re: Ask HN: What will be the future differentiator in electric vehicles?
#59> What will be the future differentiator in electric vehicles? I'm afraid there will be none. Hull shape, and the battery size is pretty much the only thing existing EVs differ from each other. Mechanically, they are all very, very simple. Simpler than any IC car. Compact wishbone suspension is used on pretty much every one of them, since all EVs are city cars, and you want as much space for batteries as possible, an…
What is happening to EVs now will not stay constrained to the vehicle itself. We're seeing innovations in terms of integrations - with CarPlay/AndroidAuto, Phone-as-key, wifi APs, surveillance, etc. All of these things are new and have little to do with what is beneath the sheet metal and plastic body panels.
There are also interesting innovations that become more possible as more and more vehicles become "smart" and connected - imagine a metro area that is influencing smart vehicles +/- a few kph to smooth traffic, or route vehicular traffic like networking traffic around outages/problems.
The differentiator(s) won't be ways to make tires spin around an axle differently.
Re: Ask HN: What will be the future differentiator in electric vehicles?
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Hull shape, and the battery size is pretty much the only thing existing EVs differ from each other. That seems like a strange thing to say. We see front-wheel-drive, rear-wheel-drive and all-wheel-drive electric vehicles on the road today, driven by 1, 2 or 3 motors. We've seen designs (I don't think any of them are in production yet) with 4 motors - one for each wheel. There's about an order of magnitude difference…
> We see front-wheel-drive, rear-wheel-drive and all-wheel-drive electric vehicles on the road today, driven by 1, 2 or 3 motors. We've seen designs (I don't think any of them are in production yet) with 4 motors - one for each wheel. This differentiation is superfluous with EVs, and I believe we will not see this living much longer. There is not much differentiation besides linear cost/performance progression. Motor…
Maybe, but I feel like you could say the same about ICE cars. In general, throw more money at the car, get a bigger, more powerful engine.
There's probably still room for different approaches. Dodge seems to be known for cheap power - you can get a Challenger with a ton of horsepower for way less than say, a Porsche with equivalent horsepower. The Challenger is still based on the Challenger that was released in 2008 (Dodge gets more for their design money by using designs longer) and won't be appointed with interior materials that feel as nice.
Future Dodge might do the same - "let's make the most powerful electric coupe we can for $40k!" as opposed to something like "let's make a nice, comfortable, safe, well-rounded car for $40k".