341–350 of 692 posts
Dec 4th, 2024
GM braces for a $5 billion hit as it fights to keep up in China’s intensifying EV price war
SAIC-GM revealed in a regulatory filing on Wednesday (via The New York Times) that it expects to write down between $2.6 billion and $2.9 billion in the fourth quarter. The automaker is also expecting another $2.7 billion in restructuring expenses.
https://electrek.co/2024/12/04/gm-faces-5-billion-hit-ev-bat...
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Umm, yeah. Maybe I wasn't clear. MB Drive Pilot is designed not to attempt to operate outside of a well-defined domain. It will, by design, not operate in a way that is unsafe or in a context in which it's unsafe. You are arguing the system would perform worse in contexts in which you have not seen it perform (because its designers decided to prevent it from such attempts). What evidence do you have for your argument…
> You are arguing the system would perform worse in contexts in which you have not seen it perform (because its designers decided to prevent it from such attempts). Should we also assume that Mercedes cars can fly better than a plane, because we have not yet seen them fly? What kind of logic is that? In other news, OpenAI has solved AGI last year, but is keeping it a secret because it's too dangerous. I have solved s…
GM is hemorrhaging money on several fronts: Dec 4th, 2024 GM braces for a $5 billion hit as it fights to keep up in China’s intensifying EV price war SAIC-GM revealed in a regulatory filing on Wednesday (via The New York Times) that it expects to write down between $2.6 billion and $2.9 billion in the fourth quarter. The automaker is also expecting another $2.7 billion in restructuring expenses. https://electrek.co/2…
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GM and the other automakers should be lobbying to change the dealership laws then.
GM can’t match the lobbying power of local dealers in the state houses. Every state rep has a dealer or two in their district, and they employ staff who vote. And, to be fair to the dealers, there is a long history of the makers trying to screw them over, and the public, too.
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> Small anecdote: I visited a GM dealership this week and the salesperson told me Super Cruise was not enabled for test drives. The excuse was pretty weak, like the dealership would have to pay for the service or something. GM might have the technology but they are completely bungling the strategy. That was a your-dealership issue, not a GM issue. GM doesn't run the dealerships (though they sure have plenty of influe…
That's a "GM's business model" problem, which is again a GM problem. The top-selling EV maker in the US doesn't have any dealerships, so clearly it's not an insurmountable problem. GM just hasn't prioritized surmounting it.
This is just a car dealership tying its hands behind its back and not competing well. If it isn't widespread it isn't a GM problem.
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GM and the other automakers should be lobbying to change the dealership laws then.
Automakers started out with direct sales. Anti-trust issues quickly arose with that business model and that’s where we got dealership laws, as imperfect as they may be. The document is rather one-sided and slanted, but I think it’s interesting to see how a dealership association explains their perspective: https://www.nada.org/media/3267/download?inline Of particular interest is warranty issues. Tesla has an extra-st…
Wouldn't this be served just as well by having independent repair shops certified by the manufacturer to do recall and warranty repairs, without prohibiting direct sales of vehicles?
> GM said in a statement that “... an increasingly competitive robotaxi market” were the reasons for the change. Isn't there basically Google/Waymo and then, seemingly much further behind, Tesla Cybertaxi, Amazon/Zoox, and Uber/Yandex? Cruise allegedly has one of the most sophisticated autonomous driving platforms, and GM's Super Cruise (if they share any tech) is comparable to Tesla FSD. Strange that they would bow…
Supercruise might be comparable to Tesla's "Autosteer" product but its incomparable to Tesla's paid "FSD Supervised" product. The latter is closer to a Waymo or Cruise than it is to a Mercedes or GM driver assist.
Tesla autopilot 1.0 has been around on tesla since 2015. It's actually pretty good on the freeway as traffic aware cruise control + autosteer. I think it's a pretty good balance of driver + assist.
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Based on my anecdotal experience, another issue is that salespeople are not trained on the tech I worked on a feature for new vehicles and the company failed in part because buyers simply didn’t know those features were part of the vehicle. Dealers never set it up for the buyer and it wasn’t something many people would think to do on their own A salesperson isn’t going to jeopardize an easy sale by bungling some fanc…
I don't want to be a jerk but the salesperson couldn't pronounce "autonomous" which tells me they aren't being trained in selling the feature at all. I can't even remember him referring to it by the marketing name.
Waymo needs competition. Who else is even close to being able to provide it? I'd hate to think Tesla is next in line because they haven't even started a commercial pilot program yet.
I don't see how Waymo is going to survive the onslaught that is CyberCab. Cheaper to build and operate, more efficient, much faster to build, and deployable across all cities without any manual configuration. The clock is ticking on Waymo, they have 2 years to figure out how to compete otherwise they're cooked. It's very similar to legacy space and internet, the existing players saw SpaceX coming years out, did nothi…
Beyond, idk, saving my relatives the task of driving me to the airport, I don't see my family using an autonomous taxi at all. I think I'm like many Americans in that I like my personal vehicle because it's mine. I'm comfy in it, it's filled with only my stank, and I have tailored it to my liking.
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Isn't Tesla service worse than the dealerships? Maybe things have changed, my opinion is completely based on what I've read on the Internet.
No, there is a reason they are called stealerships. A Subaru dealership tried to charge $200 to reset a passenger window like this (literally just pushing the button to roll down the window and back up): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXfAKIOxLPQ