10 ms·

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 Wi

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 burn gas. The notion that electric vehicles might be something more than compliance nightmares, that they might actually be better cars than gas-powered vehicles is foreign. It's like the Microsoft execs saying "of course the e-reader should also be able to open spreadsheets and what-not." Meanwhile, the Kindle is better as an e-reader because they started from the ground up. Same thing with Tesla. (With whom, none of these companies would be talking about going electric.) They started from the ground up. If BMW wanted to make money on electric vehicles, Tesla has proven that you can sell an $80-$100K+ electric car (with a ~$50K interior) with profitable unit economics. I'm pretty sure an electric 7-series would sell like hotcakes, and make money. Instead, you get the i3, which some people love, but it's certainly an acquired taste, and the 3 series e, which I drove recently-- it has about 11 miles of electric range. ;( If they just made it all electric, I'd buy one tomorrow at the already high 3-series prices. But the culture isn't there yet...

davewritescode 9y ago
I think you’re way oversimplifying the situation. BMW isn’t anything like Microsoft. It’s important to remember that, if you count hybrids, BMW already sells more electrified cars than Tesla and the vast majority of them at a more affordable price point than Tesla (the i3 is a pretty good value). BMW sells a ton of cars and has made pretty good progress on the electric front. They’re just not a hype machine like Tesla.
- erikpukinskis 9y ago
  Hype aside, we can say for certain that Tesla is _trying_ to ramp to five figure weekly production. The evidence we’ve seen is the Gigafactory, and Tesla’s official (legally binding) production plans. I haven’t seen any evidence that BMW or anyone other than perhaps Nissan, is currently trying to ramp production to 10k weekly. It’s not that I don’t think any of these cars are serious about the ramp—surely at least one is. There’s just no evidence any specific one is serious about it, besides vague “we’re serious about it” statements.
  - Havoc 9y ago
    >Tesla is _trying_ to ramp to five figure weekly production. For context BMW produces 40k cars a week in total vs the 2k of Tesla. So when BMW says "not profitable enough to scale up for volume production" - they probably know what they're talking about. Sure it's 40k old fashioned petrols, but they seem pretty knowledgeable about scaling.
    - kokx 9y ago
      I think they are both having trouble scaling up different parts of the production line. So far, it seems that Tesla has been focussing quite a lot on getting great at producing batteries, including the logistics for that. Which is what they seem to be good at (given that they produce industrial size battery stations and batteries for home use as well). But they do not have as much experience in managing a mass production line for cars. BMW on the other hand has a lot of experience in mass producing cars, but they do not have as much experience for batteries. The hardest bottleneck for BMW might just be getting the batteries themselves. Tesla has worked hard on that by building their Gigafactory for example.
      - Havoc 9y ago
        I don't quite see lithium battery tech to be a market dominating advantage. Case in point - despite branding Gigafactory is at least in part a Panasonic operation. Don't believe me? See panasonic annual report: https://www.panasonic.com/global/corporate/ir/pdf/panasonic_ar2017_e.pdf https://www.panasonic.com/global/corporate/ir/pdf/panasonic_... Largest lithium battery supplier in the world? Panasonic. https://www.statista.com/statistics/235323/lithium-batteries-top-manufacturers/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/235323/lithium-batteries... BMW doesn't need experience in batteries - they'll buy them from a battery manufacturer. The real difference here is that BMW can afford a wait and see approach for another year or so. Tesla is all-in committed right now & it has to work out asap since they're making huge losses. For each dollar in sales they're incurring 1.3 in costs. Which brings us back full circle to BMW's comment: >"not profitable enough to scale up for volume production"
- sweden 9y ago
  I don't think the situation isn't being oversimplified, I think OP's post is a good summary of the whole situation. I also don't think the i3 is good value. If you compare it to a BWM series 1, you can get a better car for a better price. On the other hand, a Tesla Model 3 is perfectably comparable to a BWM series 1. Tesla has been making good electric cars since 2012 and the BMW i3 was very limited in range until last year or so. The range was limited to 100km in a single charge and the car was being sold for more than 40000 euros (at least in Europe) which is very steep for such a crippled car.
  - davewritescode 9y ago
    In the US a a couple years ago you were seeing leases for the i3 starting $250/month thanks to tax incentives. There were a couple of municipalities in my area who caught flak for giving public employees BMWs to use on the job but they were quite literally the cheapest option.
  - kmonsen 9y ago
    I have an i3, I would say it is more fun to drive even then a fully loaded 3 series but it is compromised and terrible value.
  - bobsil1 9y ago
    Model 3 was designed to go head-to-head with 3 Series.
  - kokey 9y ago
    I think the reason why a Tesla is comparable to consumers in price/value to a BMW series 1 model are down the Tesla price being brought down through a combination of subsidies and a clever financing structure which isn't really profitable and sustainable long term. It's a deliberate strategy by Tesla to enter the market and reach critical mass to start benefiting from more economies of scale. It will probably only start to turn into a profitable strategy around 2020. BMW is not pursuing such a strategy to try capture market, as they sell about 2 million cars per year and at a profit. Tesla only made 300k cars, ever, at a loss. At some point BMW will grow their portion of electric cars as it becomes viable to do so profitably and hopefully that will be around the time that Tesla is also doing it profitably.
- what_ever 9y ago
  I always find at least one completely unrelated comparisons or story in HN threads. I also hate the sorting of comments on HN. Is there a way to change it by hot/top like on Reddit? So often the first comment is completely off-topic/with examples in GP and turns into a thread of few more unrelated comparisons and anecdotes. BMW and Microsoft are in way different situations. State of electric cars right now (mainstream) is nowhere close to state of ebook readers before Kindle.
  - thinkloop 9y ago
    It is sorted by top comments, with brand new comments getting top spot temporarily so they are not instantly buried.
    - mattigames 9y ago
      It's a bad system; it promotes upvoting the already top-comment and commenting on it or the initial replies to it; the best way would be to pseudo-randomize posts order but biased towards those with higher score (e.g. so the top-rated-comment sometimes appears second, some rare times third; and some extremely rare times forth [regardless of how old any of those comments are])
      - ianai 9y ago
        I wonder if a two or three column view would be better. Could have a current best and newest sort. Third column could be random.
      - FabHK 9y ago
        An option to hide/expand comment trees might help, as you could easily hide the first comment (and everything that hangs off it) and check out the next ones (without having to manually scan indentation).
      - pathseeker 9y ago
        IIRC people replying to a comment without upvoting it will down-rank it. So OT discussions survive only if they are highly upvoted.
- clarky07 9y ago
  why are we counting hybrids? I'd really like an all electric car, but right I literally only have 2 options right now because i have a long commute. Tesla or Bolt. Nothing else has long enough range for me to get to work and back with any kind of leeway if I need to run to the store or something after work. It's incredibly frustrating that there aren't more competitors making serious cars that aren't just compliance efforts. 80 miles of range is just silly.
  - semi-extrinsic 9y ago
    What's the problem with decent plug-in hybrids? For most people, 50 miles of pure electric range (Chevy Volt, Hyundai Ioniq, Honda Clarity) is more than enough for daily driving, and if you run out of electricity once or twice a month, you just run on petrol.
    - greglindahl 9y ago
      The only problem with hybrids is that everyone's predictions of their popularity appears to be wrong. If you'd like a head-to-head comparison: note that Chevy's Volt has become unpopular as Bolt as become popular.
  - kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
    Electric cars still suck in the winter. Air resistance, electric heating, and poor cold weather performance of LiIon batteries deplete the usable range. At the very least manufacturers need to provide auxiliary fossil fuel heating systems that aren't a hazard like current kerosene heater hacks. There is also the problem that pure electrics are largely off limits to the rentier population with no access to a plug where they park their car.
    - djrogers 9y ago
      > rentier I don’t think that word means what you think it means... [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rentier https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rentier
- djrogers 9y ago
  > if you count hybrids With the imminent 48volt revolution in ICE cars, any vehicle can be a hybrid with next to no engineering at all. The leap from electrified to electric is huge, so comparing the two is kinda silly.
  - hvidgaard 9y ago
    Going from ICE to Hybrid is not "next to no engineering at all". Not even close. To be a hybrid you take an existing car, put in everything you would in an electric car, except smaller and you have to place alongside the ICE. The gearbox is none trivial to make to incorporate both efficiently. It's simpler to make a fully electric car, than a hybrid, 48v ICE or not.
    - ianai 9y ago
      Anecdote: my rav4 hybrid really impresses upon me how complicated hybrids must be to engineer. It’s tempting to see it as “just two electric motors, a battery pack, and an ICE drive train”. But it’s clearly juggling many factors to figure out the optimal source of each increment of force.
XJOKOLAT 9y ago
The i3 is shit.
ggg9990 9y ago
Microsoft would have never succeeded with an e-reader even if they had shipped it. Amazon succeeded because they already had a stranglehold on the print book market and skeptical publishers had little choice but to go all in on the Kindle. Consumers bought Kindles because Amazon was able to give them basically any book they wanted on the Kindle at the price they wanted (later deemed illegal), which Microsoft would have not been able to do.
- petra 9y ago
  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.
  - ggg9990 9y ago
    Apple was able to do that because MP3 piracy was already rampant. e-book piracy was not.
    - toyg 9y ago
      Ebook piracy has always been rampant (and still is), ereaders just introduced slightly better formats than pdf.
      - ggg9990 9y ago
        I don’t think ebook piracy has jeopardized book sales though? Music piracy certainly did.
        dingo_bat 9y ago
        Why do you think so? I'd think both would have the same effect.
        girvo 9y ago
        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.
mmalone 9y ago
This is a whole lot of conjecture. Auto manufacturers were investing in alternative fuel way before Tesla came around. BMW lost some ground on electric because they made a huge bet on hydrogen in the late 90s/early 2000s that didn’t pan out (which is too bad because it probably would have been better and easier to transition to). There will always be nostalgia for the “purity” and raw mechanical feel of older big gas engines, but car people tend to like better cars, regardless of tech. Gas engines are getting smaller across the board. Many of the newest hypercars incorporate electric motors, and they’ve been generally well received. I think what’s most likely is that they are right: they can’t reliably produce electric cars at scale that meet all of their requirements and customer expectations. Tesla is having trouble doing it, why wouldn’t BMW? Musk is charismatic and well liked. He is able to speculate wildly and miss deadlines with little consequence. I think BMW is right that they wouldn’t be given the same affordances by investors and consumers.
- tzakrajs 9y ago
  I wouldn't rule a hydrogen fuel cell revolution out yet. If humans develop technology that allows hydrogen fuel to be safely generated at the pumping station, then transportation costs for hydrogen fuel would be greatly reduced and thus the efficiency over batteries could be realized. I used this as my source for efficiencies: https://electrek.co/2017/10/26/toyota-elon-musk-fuel-cell-hydrogen/ https://electrek.co/2017/10/26/toyota-elon-musk-fuel-cell-hy...
  - Pulcinella 9y ago
    I think the cifficulties with hydrogen FCs right now are: 1. Efficient production of Hydrogen at the pump station. 2. Storage of hydrogen in the vehicle. Even liquid hydrogen isn’t very dense and has a rather low energy per volume. 3. FC catalyst. I think right now FC catakysts require precious metal catalysts like platinum and palladium.
  - blkhawk 9y ago
    Yes, only even the absolute best case for utilizing hydrogen takes more energy than for a battery powered system. I am talking physics here (I am discounting creating hydrogen from biomass or oil here for obvious reasons). And even if you solve that -somehow - a hydrogen car will always be more complex to build than an EV. Simply because you need the plumbing and storage at the very least.
ForHackernews 9y ago
IMHO, this is nonsense. General Motors (the stodgiest of the big old-school car companies) is already, today, mass-producing two EV models (Bolt and Volt) in much bigger numbers than Tesla. Car companies see the writing on the wall. They don't love gas-burning motors, they love making money.
- djrogers 9y ago
  The Volt is not an EV, it’s a hybrid. If it has an ICE it’s not an EV, it’s a hybrid.
- greglindahl 9y ago
  Bolt+Volt sales: January 2018: 1,177 + 713 = 1,890 February 2018: 1,424 + 983 = 2,407 Model 3 deliveries: January 2018: 1,875 February 2018: 2,485 Now add in Model S and Model X at ~100,000/year, and who is producing what in "much bigger numbers than Tesla"? Bolt and Volt are not "mass produced" to the likes of GM. They're experiments.
KaoruAoiShiho 9y ago
Bad example, Surface >>>> Kindle. Putting windows on their tablet is absolutely the right decision. Missing out on the tiny ebook reading market is pretty irrelevant for MS.
- hrktb 9y ago
  A few months ago the number of ebooks outnumbered the physical books in Japan. I don’t know if that what we’d call a tiny market, and even if Kindle devices are not the primary support, it helped tremendously to anchor Amazon as the first choice provider for ebooks.
- reubenswartz 9y ago
  The Surface and Kindle are very different devices-- I was referring to the first MS reader efforts, ~2 decades ago, long before the Surface.
  - KaoruAoiShiho 9y ago
    Yes I'm aware. MS had all kinds of eink efforts before the surface. My point is that I agree with MS execs that efforts are a waste of time. The market for Windows on a tablet is massive and they needed to focus on that and get that to market ASAP. Eventually we saw it realized as the Surface.
- StreamBright 9y ago
  Are you sure? https://www.statista.com/topics/1474/e-books/ https://www.statista.com/topics/1474/e-books/
  - KaoruAoiShiho 9y ago
    Specifically talking about ebook devices like the Kindle and the Courier not all ebooks in total. Most people read ebooks on their phones.
netcan 9y ago
I think the comparison is slightly unfair. eReader OS choice is a purely "cultural" decision in a literal sense. If they really wanted to, they could have put two secret teams in two secret buildings. Doing what Tesla did, that costs serious money, carrying serious risk In fairness, at least bmw has the i3 and that's better than most. Also, what he says is true. The i3 is crap cost performance. It's just the only thing on the market, and so it sells. Tesla's plan was impressive in it's decisiveness. Start at the top of the price pyramid and work down as battery prices get cheaper. That way, you can be close enough to cost competitive and have a decent range at all times. Destroy the cliche of golf carts on freeways. Launch a car to space. BMW (and everyone else) went straight for mass market cars. They're just expensive (about 2X) for their categories and had a craps range. Range just got better. Still... between incentives, general interest and such they would inevitably sell some cars. A 100k car won't sell that many units either, so the strategy will sell roughly the same numbers at the same growth rate. The economics will get better when they do. You'll already have been making that model for years. profit. BMW want(ed?) to do this across models, and I suppose transition everything smoothly over a decade. Anyway, a year or two probably won't make a difference to the big picture. Early mover doesn't get you that much in cars, it's not messaging apps or digital marketplaces. Most manufacturers seem willing to lose more tan that. Tesla moved the needle. It took big risk. Very impressive. Imagine how much it would have cost if BMW had taken that risk and failed. They took the safer option, but the risk here was real. MS' risk aversion was all in their heads.
- reubenswartz 9y ago
  For MSFT, I don't think it was risk aversion. As you note, they could have spent a relatively small sum to test it out. But that's not the way the culture worked. Creating a fully electric car is a bigger investment, but if they produced a limited edition high end vehicle, they would sell out and make money. (The i8 is something like ~$150K. There are other smaller volume vehicles with 6 figure price points in the line up that would support profitable electric variants.) I'm not saying they could just cut over the 3 series to electric right away, but I think the reason they haven't offered an electric option at the high end of the range, which would be faster than what they've got, with a great low center of gravity, is cultural, not economic.
- 9y ago
mirimir 9y ago
> Meanwhile, the Kindle is better as an e-reader because they started from the ground up. I bought one of the first gen Kindles. And discovered that it wouldn't display PDFs. Unless you uploaded them to Amazon, and converted them somehow. But, given that these were confidential PDFs, that was unworkable. So I returned it. But damn, a Linux-based reader would have been very cool.
kentm 9y ago
I'm not sure the article supports that conjecture. BMW said in the article that the current models are not "profitable enough" to scale up, meaning that they have profitable unit economics but think they can do better. Specifically, they think that the fifth generation is better than the fourth, and are working on a sixth generation. > “We wanted to wait for the fifth generation to be much more cost competitive,” Chief Executive Harald Krueger told analysts in Munich. “We do not want to scale up with the fourth generation.” Taking that into account, I would wager that scaling up would require big capital investments, so they want to optimize the timing based on when they feel the technology reached a certain profitability threshold.
gwbas1c 9y ago
2020 is very soon. In car terms, it's "tomorrow."
- erdle 9y ago
  this... it's less than 24 months for every big, international, well run company this is basically like saying it's next year... when i worked on marketing for target... they kicked off planning for their 2-day sale 18 months in advance... not sure it was smart, but they did it...
- adrianN 9y ago
  It also neatly coincides with 2021, which is when car manufacturers have to reduce their fleet consumption to 95g CO2/km in the EU; a reduction of about 20-30% that will be very hard to achieve given that they all try to sell more and more SUVs. In China hard quotas for electric cars will be introduced around that time too, I believe.
blub 9y ago
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.

davewritescode 9y ago

I think you’re way oversimplifying the situation. BMW isn’t anything like Microsoft. It’s important to remember that, if you count hybrids, BMW already sells more electrified cars than Tesla and the vast majority of them at a more affordable price point than Tesla (the i3 is a pretty good value). BMW sells a ton of cars and has made pretty good progress on the electric front. They’re just not a hype machine like Tesla.

erikpukinskis 9y ago
Hype aside, we can say for certain that Tesla is _trying_ to ramp to five figure weekly production. The evidence we’ve seen is the Gigafactory, and Tesla’s official (legally binding) production plans. I haven’t seen any evidence that BMW or anyone other than perhaps Nissan, is currently trying to ramp production to 10k weekly. It’s not that I don’t think any of these cars are serious about the ramp—surely at least one is. There’s just no evidence any specific one is serious about it, besides vague “we’re serious about it” statements.
- Havoc 9y ago
  >Tesla is _trying_ to ramp to five figure weekly production. For context BMW produces 40k cars a week in total vs the 2k of Tesla. So when BMW says "not profitable enough to scale up for volume production" - they probably know what they're talking about. Sure it's 40k old fashioned petrols, but they seem pretty knowledgeable about scaling.
  - kokx 9y ago
    I think they are both having trouble scaling up different parts of the production line. So far, it seems that Tesla has been focussing quite a lot on getting great at producing batteries, including the logistics for that. Which is what they seem to be good at (given that they produce industrial size battery stations and batteries for home use as well). But they do not have as much experience in managing a mass production line for cars. BMW on the other hand has a lot of experience in mass producing cars, but they do not have as much experience for batteries. The hardest bottleneck for BMW might just be getting the batteries themselves. Tesla has worked hard on that by building their Gigafactory for example.
    - Havoc 9y ago
      I don't quite see lithium battery tech to be a market dominating advantage. Case in point - despite branding Gigafactory is at least in part a Panasonic operation. Don't believe me? See panasonic annual report: https://www.panasonic.com/global/corporate/ir/pdf/panasonic_ar2017_e.pdf https://www.panasonic.com/global/corporate/ir/pdf/panasonic_... Largest lithium battery supplier in the world? Panasonic. https://www.statista.com/statistics/235323/lithium-batteries-top-manufacturers/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/235323/lithium-batteries... BMW doesn't need experience in batteries - they'll buy them from a battery manufacturer. The real difference here is that BMW can afford a wait and see approach for another year or so. Tesla is all-in committed right now & it has to work out asap since they're making huge losses. For each dollar in sales they're incurring 1.3 in costs. Which brings us back full circle to BMW's comment: >"not profitable enough to scale up for volume production"
sweden 9y ago
I don't think the situation isn't being oversimplified, I think OP's post is a good summary of the whole situation. I also don't think the i3 is good value. If you compare it to a BWM series 1, you can get a better car for a better price. On the other hand, a Tesla Model 3 is perfectably comparable to a BWM series 1. Tesla has been making good electric cars since 2012 and the BMW i3 was very limited in range until last year or so. The range was limited to 100km in a single charge and the car was being sold for more than 40000 euros (at least in Europe) which is very steep for such a crippled car.
- davewritescode 9y ago
  In the US a a couple years ago you were seeing leases for the i3 starting $250/month thanks to tax incentives. There were a couple of municipalities in my area who caught flak for giving public employees BMWs to use on the job but they were quite literally the cheapest option.
- kmonsen 9y ago
  I have an i3, I would say it is more fun to drive even then a fully loaded 3 series but it is compromised and terrible value.
- bobsil1 9y ago
  Model 3 was designed to go head-to-head with 3 Series.
- kokey 9y ago
  I think the reason why a Tesla is comparable to consumers in price/value to a BMW series 1 model are down the Tesla price being brought down through a combination of subsidies and a clever financing structure which isn't really profitable and sustainable long term. It's a deliberate strategy by Tesla to enter the market and reach critical mass to start benefiting from more economies of scale. It will probably only start to turn into a profitable strategy around 2020. BMW is not pursuing such a strategy to try capture market, as they sell about 2 million cars per year and at a profit. Tesla only made 300k cars, ever, at a loss. At some point BMW will grow their portion of electric cars as it becomes viable to do so profitably and hopefully that will be around the time that Tesla is also doing it profitably.
what_ever 9y ago
I always find at least one completely unrelated comparisons or story in HN threads. I also hate the sorting of comments on HN. Is there a way to change it by hot/top like on Reddit? So often the first comment is completely off-topic/with examples in GP and turns into a thread of few more unrelated comparisons and anecdotes. BMW and Microsoft are in way different situations. State of electric cars right now (mainstream) is nowhere close to state of ebook readers before Kindle.
- thinkloop 9y ago
  It is sorted by top comments, with brand new comments getting top spot temporarily so they are not instantly buried.
  - mattigames 9y ago
    It's a bad system; it promotes upvoting the already top-comment and commenting on it or the initial replies to it; the best way would be to pseudo-randomize posts order but biased towards those with higher score (e.g. so the top-rated-comment sometimes appears second, some rare times third; and some extremely rare times forth [regardless of how old any of those comments are])
    - ianai 9y ago
      I wonder if a two or three column view would be better. Could have a current best and newest sort. Third column could be random.
    - FabHK 9y ago
      An option to hide/expand comment trees might help, as you could easily hide the first comment (and everything that hangs off it) and check out the next ones (without having to manually scan indentation).
    - pathseeker 9y ago
      IIRC people replying to a comment without upvoting it will down-rank it. So OT discussions survive only if they are highly upvoted.
clarky07 9y ago
why are we counting hybrids? I'd really like an all electric car, but right I literally only have 2 options right now because i have a long commute. Tesla or Bolt. Nothing else has long enough range for me to get to work and back with any kind of leeway if I need to run to the store or something after work. It's incredibly frustrating that there aren't more competitors making serious cars that aren't just compliance efforts. 80 miles of range is just silly.
- semi-extrinsic 9y ago
  What's the problem with decent plug-in hybrids? For most people, 50 miles of pure electric range (Chevy Volt, Hyundai Ioniq, Honda Clarity) is more than enough for daily driving, and if you run out of electricity once or twice a month, you just run on petrol.
  - greglindahl 9y ago
    The only problem with hybrids is that everyone's predictions of their popularity appears to be wrong. If you'd like a head-to-head comparison: note that Chevy's Volt has become unpopular as Bolt as become popular.
- kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
  Electric cars still suck in the winter. Air resistance, electric heating, and poor cold weather performance of LiIon batteries deplete the usable range. At the very least manufacturers need to provide auxiliary fossil fuel heating systems that aren't a hazard like current kerosene heater hacks. There is also the problem that pure electrics are largely off limits to the rentier population with no access to a plug where they park their car.
  - djrogers 9y ago
    > rentier I don’t think that word means what you think it means... [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rentier https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rentier
djrogers 9y ago
> if you count hybrids With the imminent 48volt revolution in ICE cars, any vehicle can be a hybrid with next to no engineering at all. The leap from electrified to electric is huge, so comparing the two is kinda silly.
- hvidgaard 9y ago
  Going from ICE to Hybrid is not "next to no engineering at all". Not even close. To be a hybrid you take an existing car, put in everything you would in an electric car, except smaller and you have to place alongside the ICE. The gearbox is none trivial to make to incorporate both efficiently. It's simpler to make a fully electric car, than a hybrid, 48v ICE or not.
  - ianai 9y ago
    Anecdote: my rav4 hybrid really impresses upon me how complicated hybrids must be to engineer. It’s tempting to see it as “just two electric motors, a battery pack, and an ICE drive train”. But it’s clearly juggling many factors to figure out the optimal source of each increment of force.

XJOKOLAT 9y ago

The i3 is shit.

ggg9990 9y ago

Microsoft would have never succeeded with an e-reader even if they had shipped it. Amazon succeeded because they already had a stranglehold on the print book market and skeptical publishers had little choice but to go all in on the Kindle. Consumers bought Kindles because Amazon was able to give them basically any book they wanted on the Kindle at the price they wanted (later deemed illegal), which Microsoft would have not been able to do.

petra 9y ago
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.
- ggg9990 9y ago
  Apple was able to do that because MP3 piracy was already rampant. e-book piracy was not.
  - toyg 9y ago
    Ebook piracy has always been rampant (and still is), ereaders just introduced slightly better formats than pdf.
    - ggg9990 9y ago
      I don’t think ebook piracy has jeopardized book sales though? Music piracy certainly did.
      - dingo_bat 9y ago
        Why do you think so? I'd think both would have the same effect.
      - girvo 9y ago
        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.

mmalone 9y ago

This is a whole lot of conjecture. Auto manufacturers were investing in alternative fuel way before Tesla came around. BMW lost some ground on electric because they made a huge bet on hydrogen in the late 90s/early 2000s that didn’t pan out (which is too bad because it probably would have been better and easier to transition to). There will always be nostalgia for the “purity” and raw mechanical feel of older big gas engines, but car people tend to like better cars, regardless of tech. Gas engines are getting smaller across the board. Many of the newest hypercars incorporate electric motors, and they’ve been generally well received. I think what’s most likely is that they are right: they can’t reliably produce electric cars at scale that meet all of their requirements and customer expectations. Tesla is having trouble doing it, why wouldn’t BMW? Musk is charismatic and well liked. He is able to speculate wildly and miss deadlines with little consequence. I think BMW is right that they wouldn’t be given the same affordances by investors and consumers.

tzakrajs 9y ago
I wouldn't rule a hydrogen fuel cell revolution out yet. If humans develop technology that allows hydrogen fuel to be safely generated at the pumping station, then transportation costs for hydrogen fuel would be greatly reduced and thus the efficiency over batteries could be realized. I used this as my source for efficiencies: https://electrek.co/2017/10/26/toyota-elon-musk-fuel-cell-hydrogen/ https://electrek.co/2017/10/26/toyota-elon-musk-fuel-cell-hy...
- Pulcinella 9y ago
  I think the cifficulties with hydrogen FCs right now are: 1. Efficient production of Hydrogen at the pump station. 2. Storage of hydrogen in the vehicle. Even liquid hydrogen isn’t very dense and has a rather low energy per volume. 3. FC catalyst. I think right now FC catakysts require precious metal catalysts like platinum and palladium.
- blkhawk 9y ago
  Yes, only even the absolute best case for utilizing hydrogen takes more energy than for a battery powered system. I am talking physics here (I am discounting creating hydrogen from biomass or oil here for obvious reasons). And even if you solve that -somehow - a hydrogen car will always be more complex to build than an EV. Simply because you need the plumbing and storage at the very least.

ForHackernews 9y ago

IMHO, this is nonsense. General Motors (the stodgiest of the big old-school car companies) is already, today, mass-producing two EV models (Bolt and Volt) in much bigger numbers than Tesla. Car companies see the writing on the wall. They don't love gas-burning motors, they love making money.

djrogers 9y ago
The Volt is not an EV, it’s a hybrid. If it has an ICE it’s not an EV, it’s a hybrid.
greglindahl 9y ago
Bolt+Volt sales: January 2018: 1,177 + 713 = 1,890 February 2018: 1,424 + 983 = 2,407 Model 3 deliveries: January 2018: 1,875 February 2018: 2,485 Now add in Model S and Model X at ~100,000/year, and who is producing what in "much bigger numbers than Tesla"? Bolt and Volt are not "mass produced" to the likes of GM. They're experiments.

KaoruAoiShiho 9y ago

Bad example, Surface >>>> Kindle. Putting windows on their tablet is absolutely the right decision. Missing out on the tiny ebook reading market is pretty irrelevant for MS.

hrktb 9y ago
A few months ago the number of ebooks outnumbered the physical books in Japan. I don’t know if that what we’d call a tiny market, and even if Kindle devices are not the primary support, it helped tremendously to anchor Amazon as the first choice provider for ebooks.
reubenswartz 9y ago
The Surface and Kindle are very different devices-- I was referring to the first MS reader efforts, ~2 decades ago, long before the Surface.
- KaoruAoiShiho 9y ago
  Yes I'm aware. MS had all kinds of eink efforts before the surface. My point is that I agree with MS execs that efforts are a waste of time. The market for Windows on a tablet is massive and they needed to focus on that and get that to market ASAP. Eventually we saw it realized as the Surface.
StreamBright 9y ago
Are you sure? https://www.statista.com/topics/1474/e-books/ https://www.statista.com/topics/1474/e-books/
- KaoruAoiShiho 9y ago
  Specifically talking about ebook devices like the Kindle and the Courier not all ebooks in total. Most people read ebooks on their phones.

netcan 9y ago

I think the comparison is slightly unfair. eReader OS choice is a purely "cultural" decision in a literal sense. If they really wanted to, they could have put two secret teams in two secret buildings. Doing what Tesla did, that costs serious money, carrying serious risk In fairness, at least bmw has the i3 and that's better than most. Also, what he says is true. The i3 is crap cost performance. It's just the only thing on the market, and so it sells. Tesla's plan was impressive in it's decisiveness. Start at the top of the price pyramid and work down as battery prices get cheaper. That way, you can be close enough to cost competitive and have a decent range at all times. Destroy the cliche of golf carts on freeways. Launch a car to space. BMW (and everyone else) went straight for mass market cars. They're just expensive (about 2X) for their categories and had a craps range. Range just got better. Still... between incentives, general interest and such they would inevitably sell some cars. A 100k car won't sell that many units either, so the strategy will sell roughly the same numbers at the same growth rate. The economics will get better when they do. You'll already have been making that model for years. profit. BMW want(ed?) to do this across models, and I suppose transition everything smoothly over a decade. Anyway, a year or two probably won't make a difference to the big picture. Early mover doesn't get you that much in cars, it's not messaging apps or digital marketplaces. Most manufacturers seem willing to lose more tan that. Tesla moved the needle. It took big risk. Very impressive. Imagine how much it would have cost if BMW had taken that risk and failed. They took the safer option, but the risk here was real. MS' risk aversion was all in their heads.

reubenswartz 9y ago
For MSFT, I don't think it was risk aversion. As you note, they could have spent a relatively small sum to test it out. But that's not the way the culture worked. Creating a fully electric car is a bigger investment, but if they produced a limited edition high end vehicle, they would sell out and make money. (The i8 is something like ~$150K. There are other smaller volume vehicles with 6 figure price points in the line up that would support profitable electric variants.) I'm not saying they could just cut over the 3 series to electric right away, but I think the reason they haven't offered an electric option at the high end of the range, which would be faster than what they've got, with a great low center of gravity, is cultural, not economic.
9y ago

mirimir 9y ago

> Meanwhile, the Kindle is better as an e-reader because they started from the ground up. I bought one of the first gen Kindles. And discovered that it wouldn't display PDFs. Unless you uploaded them to Amazon, and converted them somehow. But, given that these were confidential PDFs, that was unworkable. So I returned it. But damn, a Linux-based reader would have been very cool.

kentm 9y ago

I'm not sure the article supports that conjecture. BMW said in the article that the current models are not "profitable enough" to scale up, meaning that they have profitable unit economics but think they can do better. Specifically, they think that the fifth generation is better than the fourth, and are working on a sixth generation. > “We wanted to wait for the fifth generation to be much more cost competitive,” Chief Executive Harald Krueger told analysts in Munich. “We do not want to scale up with the fourth generation.” Taking that into account, I would wager that scaling up would require big capital investments, so they want to optimize the timing based on when they feel the technology reached a certain profitability threshold.

gwbas1c 9y ago

2020 is very soon. In car terms, it's "tomorrow."

erdle 9y ago
this... it's less than 24 months for every big, international, well run company this is basically like saying it's next year... when i worked on marketing for target... they kicked off planning for their 2-day sale 18 months in advance... not sure it was smart, but they did it...
adrianN 9y ago
It also neatly coincides with 2021, which is when car manufacturers have to reduce their fleet consumption to 95g CO2/km in the EU; a reduction of about 20-30% that will be very hard to achieve given that they all try to sell more and more SUVs. In China hard quotas for electric cars will be introduced around that time too, I believe.

blub 9y ago

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.