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How do you design a $30k electric pickup? Inside Ford's skunkworks

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Re: How do you design a $30k electric pickup? Inside Ford's skunkworks

#41

Post by cbg0 »

AngryData wrote: post #39
cbg0 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China, being a superpower, has a vested interest in bringing other superpowers down a peg as well as increasing other countries' dependence on China. Their state has a serious incentive to ship out cheap cars to destroy the automotive industry in the US and the EU for example. When that happens they can double the price on all their vehicles and you can't restart your car factories to compete with them again until ye…

I don't believe at all that China will always be cheaper. And in many cases I wonder if that is even true right now. Labor costs aren't what is keeping US manufacturing cost high, it is capitalist's demands for high and ever increasing profit margins and managerial bloat. Labor is only a small part of the cost of a vehicle. Workers wouldn't care if company profit margins were smaller or if the vehicles they help manu…

According to ChatGPT the labor cost per vehicle is more than twice as high in the US versus China. $1,341/vehicle vs $585/vehicle

https://chatgpt.com/s/t_6a292f0205ec819182b54e48ce9702a3

Re: How do you design a $30k electric pickup? Inside Ford's skunkworks

#42

Post by abc123abc123 »

seydor wrote: post #25
cbg0 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China, being a superpower, has a vested interest in bringing other superpowers down a peg as well as increasing other countries' dependence on China. Their state has a serious incentive to ship out cheap cars to destroy the automotive industry in the US and the EU for example. When that happens they can double the price on all their vehicles and you can't restart your car factories to compete with them again until ye…

How come this price hike hasn't happened with solar panels, inverters, telecom equipment, batteries etc. It's been a while that such industries in europe have become obsolete

It has. There's an enormous amounts of solar panel manufacturers in china that had to close down, due to the governments ordered over capacity, to try and take over the world. This has led to enormous waste of resources in china.

Now the government has ordered massive development of electric cars, to push down prices to loss making levels. In a few years, a lot of chinese elctric car manufacturers will close down, just like what happened with solar.

The trick here for the west, is to copy china, and once the internal bubble bursts, launch its own companies in solar and e-cars based on copied chinese technology.

The hunter has truly become the hunted!

Re: How do you design a $30k electric pickup? Inside Ford's skunkworks

#43

Post by pjc50 »

cbg0 wrote: post #21
GreenSalem wrote: post #10

[flagged]

China, being a superpower, has a vested interest in bringing other superpowers down a peg as well as increasing other countries' dependence on China. Their state has a serious incentive to ship out cheap cars to destroy the automotive industry in the US and the EU for example. When that happens they can double the price on all their vehicles and you can't restart your car factories to compete with them again until ye…

Something I've been trying to articulate for a while is that the EV revolution is a smaller version of the phone and internet revolutions: it requires a bunch of infrastructure buildout, but it's also the result of individual consumer choices. And it's highly synergistic. But along with that, it will create "losers", existing companies whose business can't adapt to the new ways. Sears had a hundred-year start on Amazon as a mail-order business and couldn't adapt, for example.

In the middle of this was Jack Welch's "destroy your business dot com", which is still highly controversial. But he did at least recognize that running a big ossified business in a time of change was going to need a massive kick to get everyone out of their complacency (and if not, out of their jobs!). Cannibalize your own legacy business, or some competitor will.

I think this is a serious problem in existing car companies. They attach too much prestige and career to being "petrolheads", or simply working in the engine division; after all, that's the most expensive to develop and least easy to substitute part of the car. The EV transition threatens to sweep that all away. Probably most of the EU manufacturers won't really get on board until those people retire.

There's probably a whole other essay that could be written about labour relations and the decline of mass car manufacture in the UK while we retain a lot of high-end boutique expertise (Formula 1 etc).

Anyway, I have an EV on order from FCA Poland, so we'll see how that turns out.

Re: How do you design a $30k electric pickup? Inside Ford's skunkworks

#44

Post by pjc50 »

cbg0 wrote: post #41
AngryData wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe at all that China will always be cheaper. And in many cases I wonder if that is even true right now. Labor costs aren't what is keeping US manufacturing cost high, it is capitalist's demands for high and ever increasing profit margins and managerial bloat. Labor is only a small part of the cost of a vehicle. Workers wouldn't care if company profit margins were smaller or if the vehicles they help manu…

According to ChatGPT the labor cost per vehicle is more than twice as high in the US versus China. $1,341/vehicle vs $585/vehicle https://chatgpt.com/s/t_6a292f0205ec819182b54e48ce9702a3

For vehicles in the $20-$100k price range? That feels too trivial to make a difference, is it correct or just a number chatgpt invented?

Re: How do you design a $30k electric pickup? Inside Ford's skunkworks

#45

Post by interactivecode »

cbg0 wrote: post #21
GreenSalem wrote: post #10

[flagged]

China, being a superpower, has a vested interest in bringing other superpowers down a peg as well as increasing other countries' dependence on China. Their state has a serious incentive to ship out cheap cars to destroy the automotive industry in the US and the EU for example. When that happens they can double the price on all their vehicles and you can't restart your car factories to compete with them again until ye…

Clearly the USA has the same vested interest. The difference is they are aggressively initiating war outside their borders to bully and get what they want.

Re: How do you design a $30k electric pickup? Inside Ford's skunkworks

#46

Post by pjc50 »

graemep wrote: post #26
vsgherzi wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US is concerned about Chinese EVs taking over the market. For good reason they’re not happy bad and they’re extremely cheap. I’m no economist nor moralist so I can’t say if banning Chinese evs are the right move or not but I can understand the US wanting to try to create its own market before getting destroyed by the competitor. I don’t think it’s fair to say that speaks to the quality of the US alternatives. The…

There is a national security and sovereignty issue that the European countries (and others) not facing - its similar to dependence on American clouds etc. A lot of these vehicles rely on OTA updates or are controlled through apps. This essentially means the manufacturer controls them. Imagine the consequences if half the vehicles in your country stopped working, or became unsafe? Do you really want to hand this power…

> This essentially means the manufacturer controls them

The thing is, this problem exists regardless of who the manufacturer is, and using nationalism to make it about China disguises the real problem. Tiktok didn't magically become safe or unsafe when it was divested.

Re: How do you design a $30k electric pickup? Inside Ford's skunkworks

#48

Post by snowpid »

gyulai wrote: post #40

I live in Germany and am sure as hell that I will never be driving a $30k electric pickup here. They'll make sure nothing like this ever becomes legal to import or drive on German roads until after there's a German car brand on it, and it costs 10x that while being identical, just to subsidize lots of local jobs that are low-wage, high-tax, and taking away manpower from other sectors/fields where it's more needed.

vw offers a electro pickup for 36k excluding tax (43k EUR with tax, ). https://www.volkswagen-nutzfahrzeuge.de/de/modelle/transport...

Its less than 10x

Re: How do you design a $30k electric pickup? Inside Ford's skunkworks

#49

Post by CalRobert »

gyulai wrote: post #40

I live in Germany and am sure as hell that I will never be driving a $30k electric pickup here. They'll make sure nothing like this ever becomes legal to import or drive on German roads until after there's a German car brand on it, and it costs 10x that while being identical, just to subsidize lots of local jobs that are low-wage, high-tax, and taking away manpower from other sectors/fields where it's more needed.

That sounds similar to the lamentations of American buyers who want Japanese kei trucks.

It’s protectionism all the way down I guess.

Though I see tons of US pickup trucks in the Netherlands, and have seen even lifted ones in Germany too for that matter.

Re: How do you design a $30k electric pickup? Inside Ford's skunkworks

#50

Post by [deleted] »

cbg0 wrote: post #33
seydor wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How come this price hike hasn't happened with solar panels, inverters, telecom equipment, batteries etc. It's been a while that such industries in europe have become obsolete

Solar panels, inverters and batteries are not critical infrastructure and I'd wager the jobs impacted are considerably lower than the automotive industry.

[deleted]
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