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Western carmakers' retreat from electric risks dooming them to irrelevance

theguardian.com

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Re: Western carmakers' retreat from electric risks dooming them to irrelevance

#321

Post by tetris11 »

silon42 wrote: post #315
georgefrowny wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't know why EVs necessitate a new software platform. Car makers are shit at software. Actually nearly everyone is shit at software. I know they want to turn their cars into mobile subscription-based analytics platforms for the money but combining it with the concept of the drivetrain power supply is just unnecessary and it's actually potentially lethal for the future company. Yes it's a nice try to bamboo…

Yeah, I don't want OTA or "software"... Just make it simple and make it work. For everything complicated that needs"fixing" there's a phone.

You buy a car, and it lasts maybe 10 years, and then you sell it on to someone else and they drive it for maybe another 10 years.

Updates should not be neccesary. An update can affect the resale value of my car by downclocking it "for safety"

Re: Western carmakers' retreat from electric risks dooming them to irrelevance

#322

Post by the_why_of_y »

GenerWork wrote: post #54
applfanboysbgon wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

98% of new car sales in Norway are EV at this point. How do you admit something that is not true?

Remove the EV subsidies and ICE taxes, and what would that number switch to?

A big chunk of the $5 trillion yearly subsidies for fossil fuels is for ICE car fuels. See IMF Working Paper for year 2020.

https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2021/09/23/Sti...

Re: Western carmakers' retreat from electric risks dooming them to irrelevance

#323

Post by beAbU »

masklinn wrote: post #313
beAbU wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public charging can easily be 2x or 3x as expensive.

And being in your car doing nothing waiting for the charge for 25mn is frustrating. Even more so when it’s the height of summer (and that was in a car where the AC didn’t block charging). If you can time it with some errands it’s less of a hassle, but that was one of the main non-car annoyances with my EV rental (the other was the flakiness / unreliability of getting a charging session to start).

I only use public fast charging when on a long road trip. So the 30 min charge always coïncides with me emptying my bladder, so it's never been a hassle.

Re: Western carmakers' retreat from electric risks dooming them to irrelevance

#324

Post by danaris »

epolanski wrote: post #81
ericmay wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And I don't buy the "but China fuels money into their EV industry" either. Well, you’re wrong. There’s not much else to say bout that. > And why would I care if Chinese taxpayers subsidize my car? I really don't. Because it prices the vehicles below points where others can compete. Then they go out of business, and then the remaining winner raises prices. If you are Germany, Japan, or the United States that means l…

> Well, you’re wrong. There’s not much else to say bout that. That's an opinion, not a fact. > Because it prices the vehicles below points where others can compete. This is way too expensive for something like that to last. The rush to the bottom is already killing so many chinese automakers locally. The idea that they can sustain such a money bleed globally is hard to believe.

> That's an opinion, not a fact.

No, that's not how this works.

It's either a correct fact or an incorrect fact. And if you don't know whether it's correct or incorrect, that doesn't mean nobody does, and it certainly doesn't mean it's an opinion.

An opinion would be "I think the way China is subsidizing its EV production is bad."

Re: Western carmakers' retreat from electric risks dooming them to irrelevance

#325

Post by applfanboysbgon »

pqtyw wrote: post #242
speedgoose wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

97% perhaps. EVs are nicer and more convenient there. And cheaper.

Entirely because of taxes. Norway and Denmark are special cases because they already had extremely high taxes on ICE vehicles.

Do you feel that externalities should not be taxed? That individuals should be able to do things that collectively cost everyone else in society money, without any expectation that they pay money into a societal fund to address the problems created by their own actions?

Re: Western carmakers' retreat from electric risks dooming them to irrelevance

#326

Post by danaris »

wasabi991011 wrote: post #80
quickthrowman wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A wealthy nation with a small population that has plenty of money to update their infrastructure is not comparable to upgrading the grid and converting the fleet of 250M cars in the US, which is a mess of 50 states who spend varying amounts of money on their infrastructure. The US grid is already stressed by all these new data centers, where is the power to send 10kW of power minimum to tens to hundreds of millions o…

> A wealthy nation with a small population that has plenty of money to update their infrastructure is not comparable to upgrading the grid and converting the fleet of 250M cars in the US, which is a mess of 50 states who spend varying amounts of money on their infrastructure. The US is plenty wealthy per capita, around the same or more than Norway. It has plenty of money to upgrade it's infrastructure, it just choose…

> The US is plenty wealthy per capita

This is not a particularly useful statistic when talking about the number of cars being bought.

Almost invariably, "per capita wealth" uses mean wealth. This is dramatically different from the median wealth.

When you've got a few individual people worth upwards of $200 billion, that means that each one of them adds roughly $1000 to the "per capita wealth" number, while only ever accounting for something like a dozen cars at the outside.

Re: Western carmakers' retreat from electric risks dooming them to irrelevance

#327

Post by danaris »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #68
quickthrowman wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that we’ll eventually fully convert to EVs, it’s just going to take way longer than a lot of people expect. It’s going to be tens or hundreds of billions of dollars to upgrade electrical transmission, distribution, and premises distribution. Edit: You nailed it, it’s a political problem in the US.

> It’s going to be tens or hundreds of billions of dollars to upgrade electrical transmission, distribution, and premises distribution. Would certainly happen a lot faster if, for example, America spent the $200 billion the Pentagon just asked for the Iran war on infrastructure instead. It would even benefit Americans, imagine that! America is the wealthiest country in the world by far, it has the capital to facilita…

> taxpayers would rather

I think if you look at poll numbers, you'll find that taxpayers, on the whole, would very much rather not be bombing schools across the world.

Trump's pointless (indeed, highly counterproductive) strikes on Iran are not at all popular, and quite the opposite of the platform he campaigned on.

Re: Western carmakers' retreat from electric risks dooming them to irrelevance

#328

Post by danaris »

nullpoint420 wrote: post #302
tw-20260303-001 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they didn’t find power for data centres. That’s one of their problems.

So there's no new capacity that went online for the new build-outs? None of that could've been used for residential capacity?

Sure there is. But some of the datacenters individually use as much power as an entire city.

When you're trying to build out dozens or hundreds of those across the country, there's no way we can ramp up capacity at that rate.

Re: Western carmakers' retreat from electric risks dooming them to irrelevance

#329

Post by DennisP »

sjducb wrote: post #223
DennisP wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electricity costs more in Europe than the US, but so does gasoline, by about the same ratio. EVs in the US have lower running costs than internal combustion cars. The EV industry in general is growing quite well in Europe. It's just that China is capturing the biggest share of that growth.

EVs are more expensive in total. The Volvo XC90 EV is about 90k the petrol equivalent is 60k Then if you drive 100,000 miles in it you’ll spend £20,000 on petrol. 100000 miles / 32 mpg = 3125 gal 3125 × 4.546 L = 14206 L 14206 L × £1.45/L = £20598.70 ≈ £20.6k total petrol cost Even with free electricity petrol wins on cost. If you buy the car used then the story changes.

I just said that China is taking the biggest share of the market, and you counter with the price of a Volvo? Prices are the biggest advantage of the Chinese models. BYD for example has the Dolphin compact at £30K, Atto 3 SUV at £38K, and Seal sports car at £46K.[1]

BMW is coming on strong though, and gives us close equivalents to compare. The 2027 i3 is supposed to start at $53K according to Car and Driver,[2] and Edmunds agrees.[3] It's all-wheel drive with fast bidirectional charging, 440 miles EPA range, 463 horsepower, and plenty of high-tech features. By comparison, the gas-powered all-wheel drive 3-series starts at $50K, and has 255 horsepower.[4] The M340i has 386hp and starts at $62K, and if you want more power then you'll be up into the 70s or more.[5]

For SUVs you could compare their iX3, coming out this summer, with the gasoline-powered X3. The M50 X3 at 393hp costs $67K, and the iX3 at 463hp will start at about $60K, with a 400 mile EPA range.[7]

[1] https://v2charge.com/byd-car-pricing-electric-hybrid-cars/

[2] https://www.caranddriver.com/bmw/i3

[3] https://www.edmunds.com/bmw/i3/

[4] https://www.bmwusa.com/build-your-own.html#/series/3/sedan

[5] https://www.bmwusa.com/build-your-own.html#/series/M3/sedan

[6] https://www.caranddriver.com/bmw/x3

[7] https://www.caranddriver.com/bmw/ix3

Re: Western carmakers' retreat from electric risks dooming them to irrelevance

#330

Post by rjrjrjrj »

danaris wrote: post #327
applfanboysbgon wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s going to be tens or hundreds of billions of dollars to upgrade electrical transmission, distribution, and premises distribution. Would certainly happen a lot faster if, for example, America spent the $200 billion the Pentagon just asked for the Iran war on infrastructure instead. It would even benefit Americans, imagine that! America is the wealthiest country in the world by far, it has the capital to facilita…

> taxpayers would rather I think if you look at poll numbers, you'll find that taxpayers, on the whole, would very much rather not be bombing schools across the world. Trump's pointless (indeed, highly counterproductive) strikes on Iran are not at all popular, and quite the opposite of the platform he campaigned on.

The taxpayers, on the whole, voted for a pathological liar. And that is what they got.
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