This is a big deal. Car of the year, when you're talking about normal internal combustion cars, doesn't really matter that much. When you start talking about new (and, for $30000, scary) tech like electrics and hybrids 10-12 years ago, it makes a big impact on purchasing decisions. I bought my 2005 Prius largely based on the car of the year recommendation on the 2004 Prius (among other research, sure). That recommend…
I don't think it's such a big deal. The Volt won in 2011, and that car didn't change the automotive world substantially.
This is a great point. Tesla is, to me, fundamentally a battery company.
To me, Tesla feels like a "marketing" company. And I don't mean that in a bad way. Yes, their battery tech is improving, and they make pretty damn good cars, but most of all Tesla is getting people excited for electric cars. Before they came around, electric cars were shitty ecoboxes that were worse in just about every way to an ICE car. They were ugly, had no range, were missing features, expensive, slow charging, e…
it's also a quality assurance company, similar to apple. "we put these different parts together, and guarantee they function the way we say they do."
similar to intel and microsoft making first party hardware, their core becomes more valuable when oems get better.
The article only briefly touches on this, but LG Korea is a huge part of this. They make the motor, battery & drivetrain, basically everything that makes this car an electric car. Chevrolet is just manufacturing the parts that would be mostly identical to any of their other cars. Rather than Tesla being worried about Chevrolet, I think they'd be more worried about the likes of LG & Samsung in the longer term.
Isn't Tesla's battery tech developed by Panasonic? And I believe that some of their initial Autopilot tech was sourced from Mercedes. It's very difficult to find an auto manufacturer that can build a car from the ground up, primarily because the economics aren't scalable.
I think Tesla was relying on MobileEye for Autopilot. Now they are using NVidia chips instead.
The article only briefly touches on this, but LG Korea is a huge part of this. They make the motor, battery & drivetrain, basically everything that makes this car an electric car. Chevrolet is just manufacturing the parts that would be mostly identical to any of their other cars. Rather than Tesla being worried about Chevrolet, I think they'd be more worried about the likes of LG & Samsung in the longer term.
This is a great point. Tesla is, to me, fundamentally a battery company.
Tesla will inevitably be a battery company because battery energy density, charge time and cost are the #1 things holding back electric vehicles from prime-time, and because of the huge investment into Gigafactory.
I wouldn't be surprised if Tesla ends up licensing their battery tech and that supercharging becomes a standard.
I still don't understand why anyone would buy a Bolt (or a Tesla) over a Volt. Since I heard about the Volt initially back in 2006, it was the most logical and practical approach to powering a vehicle that I'd ever heard. Eliminate gas usage on 95% of your driving, but have gas available for long range and fast refueling against the entire infrastructure of the US. Pure EV's are nothing more than "around town" cars i…
Wife has the minivan for when we all are going somewhere, daughter has a beater ('95 Buick) after she wrecked(totaled) my Impala(and two other peoples cars), All I need is an around the town car. I drive 3.6 miles to work, home for lunch then back to work and home again in the evening, sometime a few errands. The only practical drawback is how low slung these small cars are. As a backup if my wife's van is in the shop, we need something higher off the ground as the wife has had six back surgeries and getting in/out of something low is hard for her. If Chevy would do an all electric equinox...
This is a pet peeve of mine, but I don't get why cars need to change design (subjective: and make them ulgy) just because they are EVs?
Tesla showed the world that a car could look like a "car" and still be electric. I'm all for innovations in design, but weird/ugly designs are also a reason that stops people from buying electric cars.
Great to see a really middle class electrical vehicle coming to the market with a good range. The big question though is: how many of them does GM plan to make? I have read that the first year production is planned to be 30k units with a possible extension to 50k units later on. That would be rather small numbers compared to what Tesla today sells and especially to the 400k preorders for the Model 3. I hope, that GM does ramp up numbers more.
I still don't understand why anyone would buy a Bolt (or a Tesla) over a Volt. Since I heard about the Volt initially back in 2006, it was the most logical and practical approach to powering a vehicle that I'd ever heard. Eliminate gas usage on 95% of your driving, but have gas available for long range and fast refueling against the entire infrastructure of the US. Pure EV's are nothing more than "around town" cars i…
Consumer Reports touches a bit on that. One advantage is for example that you don't have to worry about the maintenance and reliability of the combustion engine.