8 ms·

China is crushing Europe's electric car dreams

61 points by malshe 8y ago

mtgx 8y ago
The biggest irony in all of this is that the European carmakers have lobbied and continue to lobby the EU against too strict of a mandate for EVs or too large subsidies for EVs, while also lobbying against stricter emissions controls (which indirectly means they don't have to build as many EVs for their fleets either). Meanwhile, the same European automakers seem very willing to adopt China's super-strict schedule for EV adoption over the next few years in the country. The European auto-makers should count their lucky stars that on one hand Tesla is pushing them to go into EVs from the consumer side, and on the other China is doing the same through those strict regulations I mentioned. Without these two, the European carmakers would have probably gone bankrupt one by one (or purchased by multi-billion dollar Chinese companies in the future). At least now they have a role in the future of cars. But losing their leadership in car-making is pretty much guaranteed already. They just don't know it yet.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  I grew up near Mercedes and Porsche in Germany and from what I remember they were always very reactive. Every time something like catalytic filters, safety belts or emission standard became mandated they always fought and claimed the world would go under. And soon after they adopted these things and did really well.
  - petre 8y ago
    They're just buying more time. German automakers are quite risk-averse but usually they have the details sorted out before they go to market. Porsche already has hybrid cars and they're working on the Taycan. Audi has the e-tron in production. Daimler has the EQ concept which will go into production by 2022. What they don't have yet is the charging infrastructure. It should be standardised amongst all German automakers if they're smart.
- NicoJuicy 8y ago
  The world would have ended many times over, but it still hasn't. I don't see a big rise in other cars yet. Not even a lot of EV's. Probably the EV's will come when the car manufacturers are ready
- Nasrudith 8y ago
  Sounds like a classic flaw with innovator's dilemma. Established players try not to cannibalize themselves and the world passes them by. Kodak is one infamous example.
  - lsc 8y ago
    Hm? I thought Kodak was killed by the demise of demand for film cameras. They didn't have a significant leg in the world of high-end glass lenses or in the world of smartphones, which are the only, I think, significant photography markets left. I mean, sure, they could have come up with a digital point-n-click and been okay for a bit longer, but they would still have been stomped by the rise of the cellphone camera destroying the low-end camera market. The problem was that everything they were good at was no longer required. Really, the best they could have done is started renting their brand to digital camera makers sooner, while they still had a strong brand.
    - dagw 8y ago
      Kodak was a very early innovator in digital photography and there was a time when Kodak was the market leader in high end digital cameras. But they didn't want to cannibalize their film market so they killed that business.
      - lsc 8y ago
        My point is that today the digital camera market on the high end is all about the lens, something that is difficult and that Kodak didn't have a lot of expertise in, Just like the film camera market was. There was a period of time when having a better CCD would get you market share, but that was a relatively short period.
forkLding 8y ago
Although the paper proposes to merge all kinds of EU-based EV and battery companies together, the issue is still that the European market is 1% of the global market. EU companies will be likely selling to Asian EV markets for a long time.
- Bayart 8y ago
  It won't be a big market until there's an actual offering that grows the market. In Europe gas is very expensive, but electricity is mostly cheap. The grid is solid. The fundamentals are there.
  - malshe 8y ago
    I agree. Some of the European countries like Germany have invested heavily in solar energy too and that makes much more sense to move to an EV
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    Mostly cheap? Come pay the prices in Southern Europe. In Portugal gas reigns in households. Most people would never have electricity based heating or stoves, given the cost spike if they did so.
    - Symbiote 8y ago
      Portugal is slightly more expensive than the EU average for electricity. It's somewhere around average for petrol too, so I don't see Portugal being much different here. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Electricity_price_statistics https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
mhandley 8y ago
As I see it, in a few years time the market for batteries for electic cars will be a little like the market for DRAM or Flash today. The upfront costs to be able to produce competitively at volume are very high, and although the market is large, there will be just enough competition and cells will be commodity enough that profit margins will be both slim and volatile. I'd much rather be in the business of making cars to use those batteries, where there's potential to differentiate your product with good design (like say, Apple in computers and phones) than in the business of making batteries.
- raphaelj 8y ago
  While this kind of commodity products might not make huge profits, it might still be a huge provider of low to mid class jobs.
  - marak830 8y ago
    Or, more likely I'm home, a huge provider for robotics line production suppliers
- Latteland 8y ago
  Looking out 5 years, there will be significant battery shortages blocking the legacy automobile manu. from making EVs in volume to compete with Tesla and Chinese companies. It will take 5 years if they start building new factories soon to get them in production - and they don't seem to be hurrying. So in another 5 years, I see the Europeans (BMW, Merc, Audi/Porsche/VW) will stop arguing away the hit to their sales (did you see what Tesla did to them in q3!?) and react, but it will be late. Same thing for other American manufacturers. Some Japanese companies like Leaf are already getting with the program. So for the first 5 years, it will be like the days when there wasn't enough ram to go around, and it got more expensive and valuable like right after a technology transition. But in 10 years we should be back to more widespread production. Whether much of that is in the US or Europe or its all in Japan on China remains to be seen.
Bayart 8y ago
I've never quite understood why our industry heavy weights didn't push heavily into battery technology. It seems fairly obvious energetic density is a big bottleneck in a number of industries. I'm under the impression all the attention went into theoretical research and patenting schemes, but nothing into actual production processes. In that respect, I'm quite thankful to Tesla for pushing the envelop with Panasonic.
- candiodari 8y ago
  I think because it's a solved problem, where we can't advance. This has a few reasons: 1) All the obvious avenues (like simple battery chemistry) are explored and provide no obvious avenues for success So you can't reasonably expect to advance here. Otoh, we could just stumble on a huge advance. 2) it is perfectly well known how to make ridiculous capacity, light batteries. There's even 2 known ways: * chemical energy storage * magnetic/electrical energy storage In both cases it's solved ... only in the theoretical sense. If we have a way to arrange individual atoms on a large scale (or even 100nm portions of material) and fuse them, we would be able to make awesome batteries. But we don't know how to do this. So this is now a manufacturing problem where you just won't get anywhere without incredible amounts of knowledge and fundamental advances. 3) What Elon Musk is doing is standardizing existing battery technology and making it widely available. On the plus side, we need this. The standard batteries from decades ago can be improved electrically (e.g. fast charging by actually having 10000 batteries instead of one big one and charging all of them, which also enables fast discharging by discharging a lot of batteries at the same time, or even charging and discharging at the same time). An electrically complex, but well understood problem. On the downside, this doesn't actually solve any issues we have with batteries. They're a little too big, a LOT too heavy. Elon Musk's batteries ... are a little too big, and a LOT too heavy.
  - frozenport 8y ago
    They seem to be working for him pretty well.
  - pso 8y ago
    > it's solved ... If we have a way to arrange individual atoms on a large scale (or even 100nm portions of material) and fuse them... What exactly do you mean by this? Fuse them in what sense? What advantages would there be at a smaller scale?
Theodores 8y ago
There is another short term problem that has to be resolved before we get to EV cars in Europe. The E.U. car market is in a bit of a holding pattern due to Brexit. This is cramping the style of the European manufacturers even if they have no components coming from little Britain, no manufacturing plant there and no customers there. You would think companies like FCA (Fiat) or Mercedes would be exempt but they are not. I am an evangelist when it comes to EV cars however I don't think that everyone is so keen, particularly in the cynical UK. Relatively speaking Americans are falling over themselves to buy Tesla cars, Tesla being a great American success story, even with Elon Musk upsetting people in his own special way and the prices being so high. With the European brands there are tells, if VW come out with a new car there is nobody asking where the EV version is. Same with other makes, that is just not on most people's radar, exhaust note matters more. I think it is a sad state of affairs. There are promises that they will be fully electric/hybrid by such and such a date and then they launch a 'G-Wagen' type behemoth with a monster ICE engine in it. It is like they are hooked on heroin and promise they will give up next week. China is showing leadership and it is about their domestic market and having cleaner cities. You can't get permits to drive an ICE car into some cities now, unless you live there and already have an ICE car then your only option is EV. That is fantastic. The Chinese know that they really will be conquering the world with their EV cars. We may mock their cars as not being crash worthy and rip-offs of European designs but we said that about the Japanese and their sub-compact cars. And the Koreans. It is not rocket science, just poach the design team from another company and get styling from an Italian specialist - Italdesign, Pininfarina, there are plenty of good ones. The Chinese cars I am looking forward to seeing are the basic electric cars. When you have a quiet car with no gearbox or vibrations there is no need to make up for having an ICE with cupholders galore, speakers galore, carpets galore and other cruft. People in China have cottoned on to this already through buying second cars - EV cars - to enter the city with. They find that they don't really need that 'luxury' car after all. Once these things enter the EU market the European marques will be doomed, maybe with a few exceptions. The Nissan Leaf/Renault Zoe is a product that is going somewhere but consumers are not that interested apart from evangelists. I also doubt that the insistence on 500 km range will be lasting forever - range anxiety. In China you can have 50 mile range and with a supercapacitor that can be achieved with far less batteries. Anything further just hop on a plane. Can't do this in Europe where it takes four hours to get in and out the airport. The European makes and the European customers had their chance and they blew it. Tough. I look forward to the 5 year plan of China and a flood of Chinese EV Volvos coming over to Europe to be totally taken up by millenials with kids, leaving fuddy duddy ICE addicts to grow old and die off.
shmerl 8y ago
> Building electric cars in China makes sense for companies because that's where most customers are Why are there less customers in Europe or US?
- woodandsteel 8y ago
  Because the Chinese government is pushing electric vehicles very hard. It is doing this for several reasons 1) to counter global climate change 2) to reduce local pollution 3) to reduce dependency on foreign oil 4) to establish global dominance in batteries and vehicles. From what I have read, the experts expect that falling battery prices will lead to electric cars costing about as much as ICE ones by around 2025, and this will lead to EV sales skyrocketing and ICE sales plummeting. All the traditional manufacturers will be in deep trouble then except the ones that had decided a number of years before to focus on switching over to electrics. Unfortunately in the US the President is deeply committed to fossil fuels forever.
  - imtringued 8y ago
    Is this some kind of joke? ICE manufacturers produce ICEs because they are cheaper than EVs and that's where the market is at right now. You can't expect the average buyer of a vehicle to pay $15k - $20k more (depending on the model this is a 100%+ markup) just because it is electric. This is a problem that solves itself automatically by simply waiting for cheaper batteries which is the strategy ICE companies are following right now. Almost every ICE company already produces EVs but the price makes them completely uncompetitive compared to ICEs except as a luxury product. Just look at the statistics... When VW released the e-Golf 3 years ago it outsold Tesla in Norway [0] by a factor of 2x but nobody is making news about it today because it's not as trendy as a $100k Tesla or $50k Model 3, it's just a damn expensive golf and it will stay that way until battery prices come down. [0] "Sent i går kveld offentliggjorde Opplysningsrådet for veitrafikken (OFV) registreringstallene. De viser at det ble nysolgt 25.779 elektriske personbiler i Norge i 2015. De tre bestselgerne delte 62 prosent av markedet: Volkswagen e-Golf (8.943), Tesla Model S (4.039) og Nissan LEAF (3.189)." [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20160206212025/http://www.elbil.no/nyheter/elbiler/3698-nesten-26-000-nye-elbiler-i-fjor https://web.archive.org/web/20160206212025/http://www.elbil....
beerlord 8y ago
Don't forget, these are the same automakers that faked their diesel results for years - poisoning (their own) cities with noxious fumes. Its fair to say that the environment is not high on their agenda. Instead, its simply that ICE cars offer higher barriers to entry, and higher revenue. Higher barriers to entry since the engines and fuel systems are incredibly complex, and higher revenue since they need more repairs and spare parts. EVs by contrast are much simpler, and will encourage the commodification of vehicle transport - look at what is happening in China with 'Low Speed Electric Vehicles'. Its kind of a shame that countries like Poland havn't launched their own low-cost EV companies, to take over the low-end of the European market. But its unsurprising as Europe, even the East, is indeed very bureaucratic and unaccommodating to startups. The continent would help itself massively if all countries adopted English as an official second language.
- petre 8y ago
  You still need to replace the battery pack, sell the car at a hefty discount with a degraded pack or pay for a new and expensive pack replacement. Don't worry, the barrier of entry into EV is still high. The complexity moves from the mecahanical side into the battery cooling and adaptive charge/discharge strategy, adaptive software for drive assist and instead of the spare parts costs you've got a hefty battery replacement cost that's like 20-30% or a new car. Plus less competition from used cars, since they come with degraded batteries.
Latteland 8y ago
This article is irritatingly wrong in the numbers it gives. It says tesla will make 100k cars in the us and 500k in china. Tesla is already producing at the rate of 300k cars in the us, and it's increasing (200k m3, 100k s&x). The US battery factory isn't even at full size. This article says telsa is producing more batteries than all the rest of the world together - [0]. I'm sure the rest of the world can catch up and pass Tesla in battery production - but they have to try. According to info available from recent articles (see above), Tesla does have half battery production at least. There's nothing that stops Tesla from making more factories, or anyone else. They just have to spend the money to get started. The weakest auto company was able to do this (weakest in finances), so other ones can do it too if they want to. They don't want to because auto companies would lose all their expertise in drivetrains if they switch to evs. They are being reluctantly drug into it. see [1]. I do agree with the basic idea that the European automobile companies will get decimated in about 10 years unless they react to this. Also Tesla plans massive new investments in batteries - [2]. (that includes the new China factory but also giga factory #2 and 3). 0 - https://electrek.co/2018/08/02/tesla-gigafactory-1-battery-production-20-gwh/ https://electrek.co/2018/08/02/tesla-gigafactory-1-battery-p.... 1 - https://cleantechnica.com/2018/09/25/tesla-an-uncomfortable-wake-up-call-for-germany-all-hands-on-deck/ https://cleantechnica.com/2018/09/25/tesla-an-uncomfortable-... 2 - https://electrek.co/2018/11/02/tesla-multi-billion-investments-gigafactories/ https://electrek.co/2018/11/02/tesla-multi-billion-investmen...
noetic_techy 8y ago
So Volkswagen is about to be the Nokia of the car industry.
dcgudeman 8y ago
"Chairman Kees Koolen told CNN that Lithium Werks was investing in China because the infrastructure is better and it's easier to get the permits needed to build a factory. The company said it was put off by the amount of red tape needed to invest in Europe." I don't really see a path to Europe becoming relevant in emerging technologies with comments like this from what few companies they do have.
- ASalazarMX 8y ago
  Is that a problem of the EU or China? Things become cheaper when you don't care about the wellbeing of your citizens.

61 points by malshe 8y ago

mtgx 8y ago

The biggest irony in all of this is that the European carmakers have lobbied and continue to lobby the EU against too strict of a mandate for EVs or too large subsidies for EVs, while also lobbying against stricter emissions controls (which indirectly means they don't have to build as many EVs for their fleets either). Meanwhile, the same European automakers seem very willing to adopt China's super-strict schedule for EV adoption over the next few years in the country. The European auto-makers should count their lucky stars that on one hand Tesla is pushing them to go into EVs from the consumer side, and on the other China is doing the same through those strict regulations I mentioned. Without these two, the European carmakers would have probably gone bankrupt one by one (or purchased by multi-billion dollar Chinese companies in the future). At least now they have a role in the future of cars. But losing their leadership in car-making is pretty much guaranteed already. They just don't know it yet.

maxxxxx 8y ago
I grew up near Mercedes and Porsche in Germany and from what I remember they were always very reactive. Every time something like catalytic filters, safety belts or emission standard became mandated they always fought and claimed the world would go under. And soon after they adopted these things and did really well.
- petre 8y ago
  They're just buying more time. German automakers are quite risk-averse but usually they have the details sorted out before they go to market. Porsche already has hybrid cars and they're working on the Taycan. Audi has the e-tron in production. Daimler has the EQ concept which will go into production by 2022. What they don't have yet is the charging infrastructure. It should be standardised amongst all German automakers if they're smart.
NicoJuicy 8y ago
The world would have ended many times over, but it still hasn't. I don't see a big rise in other cars yet. Not even a lot of EV's. Probably the EV's will come when the car manufacturers are ready
Nasrudith 8y ago
Sounds like a classic flaw with innovator's dilemma. Established players try not to cannibalize themselves and the world passes them by. Kodak is one infamous example.
- lsc 8y ago
  Hm? I thought Kodak was killed by the demise of demand for film cameras. They didn't have a significant leg in the world of high-end glass lenses or in the world of smartphones, which are the only, I think, significant photography markets left. I mean, sure, they could have come up with a digital point-n-click and been okay for a bit longer, but they would still have been stomped by the rise of the cellphone camera destroying the low-end camera market. The problem was that everything they were good at was no longer required. Really, the best they could have done is started renting their brand to digital camera makers sooner, while they still had a strong brand.
  - dagw 8y ago
    Kodak was a very early innovator in digital photography and there was a time when Kodak was the market leader in high end digital cameras. But they didn't want to cannibalize their film market so they killed that business.
    - lsc 8y ago
      My point is that today the digital camera market on the high end is all about the lens, something that is difficult and that Kodak didn't have a lot of expertise in, Just like the film camera market was. There was a period of time when having a better CCD would get you market share, but that was a relatively short period.

forkLding 8y ago

Although the paper proposes to merge all kinds of EU-based EV and battery companies together, the issue is still that the European market is 1% of the global market. EU companies will be likely selling to Asian EV markets for a long time.

Bayart 8y ago
It won't be a big market until there's an actual offering that grows the market. In Europe gas is very expensive, but electricity is mostly cheap. The grid is solid. The fundamentals are there.
- malshe 8y ago
  I agree. Some of the European countries like Germany have invested heavily in solar energy too and that makes much more sense to move to an EV
- pjmlp 8y ago
  Mostly cheap? Come pay the prices in Southern Europe. In Portugal gas reigns in households. Most people would never have electricity based heating or stoves, given the cost spike if they did so.
  - Symbiote 8y ago
    Portugal is slightly more expensive than the EU average for electricity. It's somewhere around average for petrol too, so I don't see Portugal being much different here. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Electricity_price_statistics https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

mhandley 8y ago

As I see it, in a few years time the market for batteries for electic cars will be a little like the market for DRAM or Flash today. The upfront costs to be able to produce competitively at volume are very high, and although the market is large, there will be just enough competition and cells will be commodity enough that profit margins will be both slim and volatile. I'd much rather be in the business of making cars to use those batteries, where there's potential to differentiate your product with good design (like say, Apple in computers and phones) than in the business of making batteries.

raphaelj 8y ago
While this kind of commodity products might not make huge profits, it might still be a huge provider of low to mid class jobs.
- marak830 8y ago
  Or, more likely I'm home, a huge provider for robotics line production suppliers
Latteland 8y ago
Looking out 5 years, there will be significant battery shortages blocking the legacy automobile manu. from making EVs in volume to compete with Tesla and Chinese companies. It will take 5 years if they start building new factories soon to get them in production - and they don't seem to be hurrying. So in another 5 years, I see the Europeans (BMW, Merc, Audi/Porsche/VW) will stop arguing away the hit to their sales (did you see what Tesla did to them in q3!?) and react, but it will be late. Same thing for other American manufacturers. Some Japanese companies like Leaf are already getting with the program. So for the first 5 years, it will be like the days when there wasn't enough ram to go around, and it got more expensive and valuable like right after a technology transition. But in 10 years we should be back to more widespread production. Whether much of that is in the US or Europe or its all in Japan on China remains to be seen.

Bayart 8y ago

I've never quite understood why our industry heavy weights didn't push heavily into battery technology. It seems fairly obvious energetic density is a big bottleneck in a number of industries. I'm under the impression all the attention went into theoretical research and patenting schemes, but nothing into actual production processes. In that respect, I'm quite thankful to Tesla for pushing the envelop with Panasonic.

candiodari 8y ago
I think because it's a solved problem, where we can't advance. This has a few reasons: 1) All the obvious avenues (like simple battery chemistry) are explored and provide no obvious avenues for success So you can't reasonably expect to advance here. Otoh, we could just stumble on a huge advance. 2) it is perfectly well known how to make ridiculous capacity, light batteries. There's even 2 known ways: * chemical energy storage * magnetic/electrical energy storage In both cases it's solved ... only in the theoretical sense. If we have a way to arrange individual atoms on a large scale (or even 100nm portions of material) and fuse them, we would be able to make awesome batteries. But we don't know how to do this. So this is now a manufacturing problem where you just won't get anywhere without incredible amounts of knowledge and fundamental advances. 3) What Elon Musk is doing is standardizing existing battery technology and making it widely available. On the plus side, we need this. The standard batteries from decades ago can be improved electrically (e.g. fast charging by actually having 10000 batteries instead of one big one and charging all of them, which also enables fast discharging by discharging a lot of batteries at the same time, or even charging and discharging at the same time). An electrically complex, but well understood problem. On the downside, this doesn't actually solve any issues we have with batteries. They're a little too big, a LOT too heavy. Elon Musk's batteries ... are a little too big, and a LOT too heavy.
- frozenport 8y ago
  They seem to be working for him pretty well.
- pso 8y ago
  > it's solved ... If we have a way to arrange individual atoms on a large scale (or even 100nm portions of material) and fuse them... What exactly do you mean by this? Fuse them in what sense? What advantages would there be at a smaller scale?

Theodores 8y ago

There is another short term problem that has to be resolved before we get to EV cars in Europe. The E.U. car market is in a bit of a holding pattern due to Brexit. This is cramping the style of the European manufacturers even if they have no components coming from little Britain, no manufacturing plant there and no customers there. You would think companies like FCA (Fiat) or Mercedes would be exempt but they are not. I am an evangelist when it comes to EV cars however I don't think that everyone is so keen, particularly in the cynical UK. Relatively speaking Americans are falling over themselves to buy Tesla cars, Tesla being a great American success story, even with Elon Musk upsetting people in his own special way and the prices being so high. With the European brands there are tells, if VW come out with a new car there is nobody asking where the EV version is. Same with other makes, that is just not on most people's radar, exhaust note matters more. I think it is a sad state of affairs. There are promises that they will be fully electric/hybrid by such and such a date and then they launch a 'G-Wagen' type behemoth with a monster ICE engine in it. It is like they are hooked on heroin and promise they will give up next week. China is showing leadership and it is about their domestic market and having cleaner cities. You can't get permits to drive an ICE car into some cities now, unless you live there and already have an ICE car then your only option is EV. That is fantastic. The Chinese know that they really will be conquering the world with their EV cars. We may mock their cars as not being crash worthy and rip-offs of European designs but we said that about the Japanese and their sub-compact cars. And the Koreans. It is not rocket science, just poach the design team from another company and get styling from an Italian specialist - Italdesign, Pininfarina, there are plenty of good ones. The Chinese cars I am looking forward to seeing are the basic electric cars. When you have a quiet car with no gearbox or vibrations there is no need to make up for having an ICE with cupholders galore, speakers galore, carpets galore and other cruft. People in China have cottoned on to this already through buying second cars - EV cars - to enter the city with. They find that they don't really need that 'luxury' car after all. Once these things enter the EU market the European marques will be doomed, maybe with a few exceptions. The Nissan Leaf/Renault Zoe is a product that is going somewhere but consumers are not that interested apart from evangelists. I also doubt that the insistence on 500 km range will be lasting forever - range anxiety. In China you can have 50 mile range and with a supercapacitor that can be achieved with far less batteries. Anything further just hop on a plane. Can't do this in Europe where it takes four hours to get in and out the airport. The European makes and the European customers had their chance and they blew it. Tough. I look forward to the 5 year plan of China and a flood of Chinese EV Volvos coming over to Europe to be totally taken up by millenials with kids, leaving fuddy duddy ICE addicts to grow old and die off.

shmerl 8y ago

> Building electric cars in China makes sense for companies because that's where most customers are Why are there less customers in Europe or US?

woodandsteel 8y ago
Because the Chinese government is pushing electric vehicles very hard. It is doing this for several reasons 1) to counter global climate change 2) to reduce local pollution 3) to reduce dependency on foreign oil 4) to establish global dominance in batteries and vehicles. From what I have read, the experts expect that falling battery prices will lead to electric cars costing about as much as ICE ones by around 2025, and this will lead to EV sales skyrocketing and ICE sales plummeting. All the traditional manufacturers will be in deep trouble then except the ones that had decided a number of years before to focus on switching over to electrics. Unfortunately in the US the President is deeply committed to fossil fuels forever.
- imtringued 8y ago
  Is this some kind of joke? ICE manufacturers produce ICEs because they are cheaper than EVs and that's where the market is at right now. You can't expect the average buyer of a vehicle to pay $15k - $20k more (depending on the model this is a 100%+ markup) just because it is electric. This is a problem that solves itself automatically by simply waiting for cheaper batteries which is the strategy ICE companies are following right now. Almost every ICE company already produces EVs but the price makes them completely uncompetitive compared to ICEs except as a luxury product. Just look at the statistics... When VW released the e-Golf 3 years ago it outsold Tesla in Norway [0] by a factor of 2x but nobody is making news about it today because it's not as trendy as a $100k Tesla or $50k Model 3, it's just a damn expensive golf and it will stay that way until battery prices come down. [0] "Sent i går kveld offentliggjorde Opplysningsrådet for veitrafikken (OFV) registreringstallene. De viser at det ble nysolgt 25.779 elektriske personbiler i Norge i 2015. De tre bestselgerne delte 62 prosent av markedet: Volkswagen e-Golf (8.943), Tesla Model S (4.039) og Nissan LEAF (3.189)." [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20160206212025/http://www.elbil.no/nyheter/elbiler/3698-nesten-26-000-nye-elbiler-i-fjor https://web.archive.org/web/20160206212025/http://www.elbil....

beerlord 8y ago

Don't forget, these are the same automakers that faked their diesel results for years - poisoning (their own) cities with noxious fumes. Its fair to say that the environment is not high on their agenda. Instead, its simply that ICE cars offer higher barriers to entry, and higher revenue. Higher barriers to entry since the engines and fuel systems are incredibly complex, and higher revenue since they need more repairs and spare parts. EVs by contrast are much simpler, and will encourage the commodification of vehicle transport - look at what is happening in China with 'Low Speed Electric Vehicles'. Its kind of a shame that countries like Poland havn't launched their own low-cost EV companies, to take over the low-end of the European market. But its unsurprising as Europe, even the East, is indeed very bureaucratic and unaccommodating to startups. The continent would help itself massively if all countries adopted English as an official second language.

petre 8y ago
You still need to replace the battery pack, sell the car at a hefty discount with a degraded pack or pay for a new and expensive pack replacement. Don't worry, the barrier of entry into EV is still high. The complexity moves from the mecahanical side into the battery cooling and adaptive charge/discharge strategy, adaptive software for drive assist and instead of the spare parts costs you've got a hefty battery replacement cost that's like 20-30% or a new car. Plus less competition from used cars, since they come with degraded batteries.

Latteland 8y ago

This article is irritatingly wrong in the numbers it gives. It says tesla will make 100k cars in the us and 500k in china. Tesla is already producing at the rate of 300k cars in the us, and it's increasing (200k m3, 100k s&x). The US battery factory isn't even at full size. This article says telsa is producing more batteries than all the rest of the world together - [0]. I'm sure the rest of the world can catch up and pass Tesla in battery production - but they have to try. According to info available from recent articles (see above), Tesla does have half battery production at least. There's nothing that stops Tesla from making more factories, or anyone else. They just have to spend the money to get started. The weakest auto company was able to do this (weakest in finances), so other ones can do it too if they want to. They don't want to because auto companies would lose all their expertise in drivetrains if they switch to evs. They are being reluctantly drug into it. see [1]. I do agree with the basic idea that the European automobile companies will get decimated in about 10 years unless they react to this. Also Tesla plans massive new investments in batteries - [2]. (that includes the new China factory but also giga factory #2 and 3). 0 - https://electrek.co/2018/08/02/tesla-gigafactory-1-battery-production-20-gwh/ https://electrek.co/2018/08/02/tesla-gigafactory-1-battery-p.... 1 - https://cleantechnica.com/2018/09/25/tesla-an-uncomfortable-wake-up-call-for-germany-all-hands-on-deck/ https://cleantechnica.com/2018/09/25/tesla-an-uncomfortable-... 2 - https://electrek.co/2018/11/02/tesla-multi-billion-investments-gigafactories/ https://electrek.co/2018/11/02/tesla-multi-billion-investmen...

noetic_techy 8y ago

So Volkswagen is about to be the Nokia of the car industry.

dcgudeman 8y ago

"Chairman Kees Koolen told CNN that Lithium Werks was investing in China because the infrastructure is better and it's easier to get the permits needed to build a factory. The company said it was put off by the amount of red tape needed to invest in Europe." I don't really see a path to Europe becoming relevant in emerging technologies with comments like this from what few companies they do have.

ASalazarMX 8y ago
Is that a problem of the EU or China? Things become cheaper when you don't care about the wellbeing of your citizens.