Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 153 posts

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

#81

Post by steve-atx-7600 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #71
Lvl999Noob wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you catch my drift Not OP but I don't. What do you mean? How do you make the kei truck an object they aren't in the business of taxing when they are, in fact, in that very business? Or maybe I have some deeper confusion about the issue here.

> What do you mean? I think they mean it’s easier than many of us suspect to register an imported car as something close enough and get away with it. The most challenging bit would probably be maintenance.

I live outside of Austin TX and have seen one regularly parked outside a house in my neighborhood for 5 years now. Has a license plate. If I had to bet, I’d say it’s registered (taxes paid, has required insurance) because police around here have camera systems in their cars that scan plates looking for unregistered vehicles (found out the hard way one time when I forgot to renew).

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

#82

Post by haritha-j »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #29
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 is that different from what the US and (to a lesser degree) the EU tried to do? Both are examples of capitalism. Actually I know why it's different, I was just doing an online knee jerk response the difference is that western capitalism has a hands-off (but regulated) approach, letting the companies do their own thing. China and their companies are much more involved. I'm sure the US was a lot more directly invol…

Oh yes, the hands off capitalism that involves the CIA forcing multiple regime changes in other countries to beenfit American corporations.

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

#83

Post by throwaway2037 »

XorNot wrote: post #37
culopatin wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if objectively one could agree that currently the products from china are better than the US ones, all the “China so good now” stuff is starting to sound like straight up in your face propaganda.

Or just objective reality? I've been shopping EVs lately and both Tesla and BYD have compelling offerings. One things for sure: somehow Japanese cars aren't in the mix at all (the experience of trying to even see the bz4x at a Toyota dealer felt like the dealer was unhappy I was even there to see it).

I cannot speak for the the complete BYD cars, but I can say their battery tech is outstanding. As well, they are rolling out the world's first 1MW superchargers, than can charge an EV in less than 10 mins. (I saw a YouTube demo. It is pretty wild.)

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

#84

Post by GreenSalem »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #74
GreenSalem wrote: post #10

[flagged]

> One must admit that Jiaqi Liang, senior director of electrical hardware at Ford's Advanced EV team went to Tsinghua University. This is weird English: "One must admit that ..." What are you trying to say? I found his LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jiaqi-liang-6a653b1b/ It looks like after Tsinghua Uni, he moved to the United States and attended Georgia Tech to get a Master's and PhD. Further, he has…

[flagged]

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

#85

Post by gyulai »

cheschire wrote: post #67
gyulai wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The distinction gets at something interesting though, and it's a weird intermingling of culture and politics. I think a truck as owned by a consumer, and as an American would understand the word, is, at least in part, a lifestyle statement derived from maybe overprovisioning on the horsepower. Such a lifestyle statement in Germany seems to be perfectly socially acceptable when it ties in with luxury and doing your "c…

In my experience the resistance seems to come from the sense of “waste” that comes from buying a specialized vehicle. Anecdotally the folks I talk to (all blue-collar “commoners”) are overly focused on buying the eierlegende Wollmilchsau[0] vehicle. They view specialized vehicles, especially luxury-priced specialized vehicles, as an unnecessary waste. Does this relate with your experience? It sounds like your perspec…

I was referring to something slightly different namely that price, horsepower, and socioeconomic status are all monotonically increasing functions of each other when you look at any given lineup of cars -- say you're comparing the different company cars owned by a given company, the different cars in the lineup of a given manufacturer, or the cars parked outside the venue when there's a wedding and the extended family has been invited. The cars themselves are all "trivial" variations of each other. I've noticed this more strongly in Germany than in other countries I've lived in (which is a few). You don't get the kind of variety of styles and designs you would get in the U.S. and many cars that are commonplace in the U.S. like a Ford Mustang or a Dodge RAM, when you encounter it in Germany, would instantly read as "someone desparate to get noticed".

But the variation in horsepower is still there. It's not like cars with 300 HP are forbidden in Germany. It's just that they need to fit in the continuum. The 300HP BMW is the CEO's car, and its existence is justified by the fact that the other top managers drive the 200HP version which is otherwise almost the exact same car, which are in turn justified by the fact that the middle managers drive the 120HP version, and if you're a new-hire individual contributor then anything more than 90HP would cause a scandal if word got out. (I'm painting a mental picture here; obviously not making a universal claim).

I think that culture is part of the reason why a $30k electric pickup truck would ruffle feathers so much, and it's a particularly stupid reason, but I think it's real.

The "Kastenwagen" example from above escapes that calculus by clearly being something that stands completely outside of any established continuum of this kind. The rare Ford Mustang or imported Dodge RAM that you sometimes see in Germany is similarly socially/politically acceptable on the grounds that it would either be expensive as hell, or a car buff's hobby. Both of those cases mean the owner has duly paid for their ticket to the high-horsepower social club (either financially, or by having a respectable hobby and putting in the work), whereas a $30k electric pickup that you can just buy would come across as "cheating the system".

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

#87

Post by formerly_proven »

pjc50 wrote: post #43
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…

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 Amaz…

> 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.

You speak as-if they didn't create EVs. It's just that most of the European EV platforms were resounding failures, be it CLAR, CLAR II (BMW), MEA1 & MEA2, (Mercedes), J1 (Porsche), e-tron (Audi), MEB (VW), of these MEB is pretty much the only one that turned around to generate some kind of volume, but that took many years. Sales numbers for all of these are way below predictions, we're not talking about a 50% miss here. I don't know how much a car architecture costs to develop, but I'd wager it is not a cheap endeavor. Between that and the comparatively large number of battery-related EV recalls these projects probably represent double-digit billions of losses for the European car industry. This seems realistic given the widely publicized $20bn Ford EV write-down. So given these enormous sunk costs and yet they're still somewhat investing in EVs doesn't read to me like they're not trying to compete on EVs. If that were the case, they'd just cut their losses, or done so years ago.

That's where all those European battery factories that were announced a couple years ago went: Consumers do not buy EVs anywhere near the expected volume and therefore there is no demand to finance such factories. The handful of batteries needed for the low volumes of EV production are easily sourced from existing factories and the rest is imported from China.

Stellantis/PSA doesn't appear in this story because they never went beyond compliance car EVs (i.e. their "let's stuff a 50 kWh gross battery and the cheapest electric drive we can buy from a supplier into an ICE chassis" approach).

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

#88

Post by wongarsu »

CalRobert wrote: post #49
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.

In Germany it's mostly US service members and their families who drive US pickup trucks. They can ship personal vehicles to Germany without having to make them fully compliant with German regulations, and generally seem to like them

Away from US bases, pickup trucks are very rare in Germany. The closest thing you will see are 3-ton flatbed trucks as work vehicles, or something like a VW Transporter. But generally tradespeople prefer vans, and commuters prefer hatchbacks or SUVs (which are bad enough)

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

#89

Post by yourusername »

adithyassekhar wrote: post #64
pjc50 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Amaz…

> 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. “Those damn pesky artists still painting by hand. We need to wait for them…

>I know what I said. Engines are an art.

Some engines maybe. Your average 1.5 TFSI is the equivalent of drawing corporate memphis clipart for a paycheck, no one is pouring their passion into that. Maybe not so bad if it gets replaced by an EV/AI.

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

#90

Post by CalRobert »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #71
Lvl999Noob wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you catch my drift Not OP but I don't. What do you mean? How do you make the kei truck an object they aren't in the business of taxing when they are, in fact, in that very business? Or maybe I have some deeper confusion about the issue here.

> What do you mean? I think they mean it’s easier than many of us suspect to register an imported car as something close enough and get away with it. The most challenging bit would probably be maintenance.

My understanding is they generally need to be 25+ years old, but this may vary (or I am out of date?) https://www.kei-trucks.com/blogs/kei-trucks/state-restrictio...
Post reply on HN