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BMW says electric car mass production not viable until 2020

reuters.com

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Re: BMW says electric car mass production not viable until 2020

#301

Post by dingaling »

d1zzy wrote: post #88
kazen44 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is usually the case. Retooling an assembly line is a ton of work, and NOT producing at scale is impossible for modern, highly automated car factories like VW, Mercedes or BMW own. Producing 100 cars is simply not possible in these factories, because it would mean massive losses to the factory owner. Also, car manufacturers do not want one supplier for a part, they want several. Mostly as a backup and also to mak…

Do we have some data on how thin the margin is for entry level subcompact cars? I was always under the impression that cars are sold at the "market price", regardless of production costs which usually meant at much higher price than production costs.

I don't have hard figures but I remember Ford UK saying that the little Fiesta cost 90% as much to build as the big Mondeo ( Fusion in the USA ) but with much less pricing potential.

They are basically loss-leaders for the brand.

Re: BMW says electric car mass production not viable until 2020

#302

Post by RoadKing »

davewritescode wrote: post #229
Gibbon1 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BMW is in a pickle because there is a good chance their premium pricing advantage is going to up and disappear with the shift to electrics. BMW has a customer base that loves their esthetics and brando and ignores the very high cost of ownership. Shift to electric and the esthetic and brando go out the window. See Harley Davidson.

Ugh, Harley Davidson is a company that sells awful, antiquated products at jacked up prices. Say what you want about how much BMW charges, they make very technologically advanced cars and charge accordingly. Their major fault is they tend to use very very expensive parts and overengineer everything to a fault. This tends to make them less reliable and very expensive to repair. Case in point, the very popular and well…

Never seen a women take of her clothes to ride bitch on a BMW.

Re: BMW says electric car mass production not viable until 2020

#303

Post by girvo »

ggg9990 wrote: post #248
toyg wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ebook piracy has always been rampant (and still is), ereaders just introduced slightly better formats than pdf.

I don’t think ebook piracy has jeopardized book sales though? Music piracy certainly did.

Why would one have that effect but not the other? They’re identical as far as I can see; and you even use the same distribution channels for pirating them.

Re: BMW says electric car mass production not viable until 2020

#305

Post by fragmede »

aeturnum wrote: post #145
kjksf wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying there was conspiracy but there was complacency. The reasoning "batteries are expensive" is circular. As Musk said, technology doesn't advance as a function of time but as a function of R&D investment. See atomic bomb or space race for the most dramatic example of how throwing money at the problem compressed the timeline. Car batteries did not get cheaper because 2 years passed but because Tesla and Pan…

I think all of these things are relative. Imagine if Tesla had started in 1983 instead of 2003. We wouldn't have started mass producing electric cars in 2000 - but we'd probably get there earlier than 2020. I don't think the question of how much to invest and where to focus R&D is easy or straightforward. A lot of technological development is the story of unexpected jumps from one area to another. Imagine an alternat…

Even that's idealized - it's not likely a production ready revolution in battery tech simply appears out of thin air. (In fact, there have been a number of revolutions that haven't managed to scale up to production quantity.)

Re: BMW says electric car mass production not viable until 2020

#306

Post by blub »

reubenswartz wrote: post #166

This has a lot to do with culture. Microsoft had a mockup of an e-reader before the Kindle, but the powers that be in the company insisted that it should run Windows (not out of malice, but because that's how they saw the world.) When Bezos, who, at the time, ran a giant bookstore, started his Kindle project, he put them on a secret team in a different building. Car companies are run by people who love engines that b…

The Kindle is merely decent as an eReader, now that the Paperwhite is available and only for Amazon's proprietary format books.

If one wants to do something fancier like reading PDFs or free-hand annotations it quickly becomes clear that the Kindle is just a vehicle for Amazon's book business and they developed it exactly as much as it was necessary for that purpose.

Large format eReaders like Sony's DigitalPaper or the reMarkable show a glimpse of what's possible. There's no reason why such a device wouldn't be able to show and edit spreadsheets and also sync with some enterprise server or cloud.

But there are few customers that would be interested in that. The eReader market is propped by the eBook ecosystems, it's not at all a market where the devices offer a competitive advantage.

So... completely wrong analogy IMO.

Re: BMW says electric car mass production not viable until 2020

#307

Post by blub »

mikekchar wrote: post #245
mulmen wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience with BMW dealerships is that they are borderline criminal organizations. I have never taken my car in for a repair without them breaking something else. I was quoted $15,000.00 for a new head because they failed to gap a spark plug. They remove the access panel in the aero pan when doing oil changes and don't replace it. They over torque everything (drain plug, filter cover, etc). They broke a wiring ha…

To be fair, every dealship I've ever dealt with is the same. They under pay and under train their mechanics and so have lots of problems, but the real issue is that they have huge incentives to intentionally screw you over as soon as the warranty period is over: they can sell you a new car. I don't drive any more, but when I owned a couple of cars. The first time it happened the dealer told me I needed new brake roto…

WTF, aren't there consumer protection laws in Japan? In the EU any repair done comes with a warranty and if they screw it up they fix it on their own money.

Sure you might still need to threaten them with the law, mechanics being how they are.

Re: BMW says electric car mass production not viable until 2020

#308

Post by ggg9990 »

girvo wrote: post #303
ggg9990 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think ebook piracy has jeopardized book sales though? Music piracy certainly did.

Why would one have that effect but not the other? They’re identical as far as I can see; and you even use the same distribution channels for pirating them.

I don’t have any data... but I suspect that music piracy was more widespread and displacing more sales of music. Anecdotally, I do not recall the publishing industry crying “the sky is falling” over ebook piracy while the music industry certainly was.

Re: BMW says electric car mass production not viable until 2020

#309

Post by bgarbiak »

ilovecars2 wrote: post #220
dahauns wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nowadays, modularization is key. A common toolkit/template, optimized for keeping large parts of the manufacturing process the same. Take VW for example, with their Modularer Querbaukasten (arguably the most well-known example, although others like Toyota have done this for longer). Cars from the Polo up to the Passat are based on the same platform, retooling is kept as low as possible. All big players have gone modu…

VW has been moving almost all transverse front-wheel drive/all wheel drive cars to the MQB platform for a while now. This includes sub-brands such as Audi, Seat and Skoda. The benefit is that all cars based on this platform become much cheaper to design and build. The downside is that the cars end up being the same, drive the same, feel the same, etc - which I find quite boring, but that might not be an issue at all…

Only the cheapest (and TT) Audi models are based on MQB. From A4 up it’s MLB – the luxury variant. Also, for the new cars Audi will share the tech not with the cheaper makes, but upwards: with Porsche, Bentley, Lamborghini and so on. It already happened with Q7/Q8/Urus/Betayga.

It’s also not exactly true that the driving characteristics are the same across the board. Usually Seats are on the sporty side with stiff ride and precise handling, Skoda is softer, and VWs are in between. Same chassis, different setup. It’s not FWD vs RWD magnitude of difference, but it’s there. The same goes for Audi: Q7 is not the same as Urus.

But yeah, the unification is bad from the car enthusiasts POV. The Ateca not only has the same chassis, but the whole body (bar the front fascia) and even the colors palette is straight from Skoda.

Another worrying thing is that apparently someone in Wolfsburg noticed that Skoda sells better than VW, despite the cheap plastic interiors, and now the new VW cars (T-Roc, Tiguan) also don’t have the premium quality that had been reserved for the mother brand. Could be an aftermath of the dieselgate as well.

Re: BMW says electric car mass production not viable until 2020

#310

Post by m_mueller »

hrktb wrote: post #266
petra wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft may have been able to use the threat of book piracy to push publisher to it's system, in the same way Apple did with the iPod and MP3 piracy.

Sony was there in the ebook reader market in the timeframe people in this thread are fantasming to Microsoft. And it didn’t go anywhere, partly because like Microsoft, Sony relied heavily on a host computer for devices that should have been standalone at any cost, and also because unlike Amazon they had no mindshare regarding books. It just looked like an also ran product that could be gone at any time.

Apple started in the music business from scratch with a host computer dependent device as well - execution seems to make all the difference. Of course, today no-one would accept such a device, but back then it was the norm. I think the difference is that Amazon was already in a prime position to grab the digital book market, while for music there was no company in such a position.
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