[LG's announcement to stop making smartphones is a testament to how the technology and (economy of scale) of Apple and Samsung have evolved to a duopoly of smartphone brands. For most consumers, two choices are enough. Quick: name the third in line: Coca Cola, Pepsi and ...? Or McDonald's, Burger King and ...?)
Will the same happen for electric cars? Ford is already building their EVs on a VW chassis.
For example: whether you buy an electric Kia or electric Porsche, what are the real engineering differences between the car, considering:
- the drivetrain is electric - the center of gravity is lowered in almost all EVs because of the (current state of the art) of battery placement - Many key (security) parts are bought OEM from the same suppliers, including tyres, audio systems and airbags. - The manufacturer with the most driven miles will likely have the least amount of "bugs"
Will car brands go even more the way of fashion brands, where the difference between Porsche and Kia will be like the difference between Balenciaga and Nike: both are functional footwear, but I'd choose the Nikes and save the difference.
Will "internal luxury" and "prestige" take the overtone in marketing and branding for the next 20 years, as opposed to how "clean" a car is and the engineering of their engines? And, of this technology, how will supercar automakers adapt? E.g. why buy a Ferrari if the "soul" (engine) is replaced with an electric drivetrain that is likely less mature in engineering than what would be inside a Tesla S?
People buy a Toyota Corolla or Prius because it's below the median price, reliable and efficient. They will buy it and then never think about it again because it'll "just work."
People buy a Ford F150 because they either have some real use for a full-sized truck or, as we know is often the case, they want to feel like they are in the "big" vehicle, the "fancy" but "powerful" looking truck.
People buy a Porsche 911 because it's a symbol for having the money to throw at a fun, slightly exotic machine.
People buy a Tesla because it's a symbol of embracing the future, seeing cars as technology, and freeing them from generating exhaust and visiting gas stations.
People buy a Honda CR-V because it can do enough things well that they can just use it, fit people and stuff inside, feel safer when it snows, and so on.
People buy a Kia Soul because it's a little off the beaten path and comes in crazy colors.
Obviously the exact reasons behind each car purchase vary a little per person, but that's kind of the point. People want a car that feels like "them", and has enough practical use to justify their decision.
Automotive maker consolidation isn't new, just like any other industry, and it certainly would leave many unhappy if the options narrowed severely, because there are different use cases and preferences out there. For now, the market is so big that Toyota can have 6 different SUVs that are all slightly different, and you can configure a Ford F150 about a million different ways. (Though with colors converging back on black, white and gray, we're nearly back to the days of "You can have it any color, as long as it is black."
I'm definitely ready for an EV but my car sits in a parking lot at home (for at least a couple more years) rather than a driveway or garage and my work has no chargers. It seems kind a dumb decision right now to purchase an EV only to rely on availability public charging stations. I guess that's kind of what I do now with regards to filling up on gas, I don't own my own gas pump at home. But, I know where to reliably find fuel that I can pay for. Maybe gas stations can start to offer charging stations for a small fee. They would be competing with grocery stores that offer free charging but I'd imagine the free part will go away quickly once there is major demand for a public charger.
That sounds very optimistic. Don't forget that these new cars are increasingly powered by software!
I'll add one more thing: there are enough cars sold that there is enough market to support developing lots of different cars.
I think in this light you will have to look and see how luxury cars differentiate, even though a Porsche, Mercedes, BMW, and v6 Honda Accord all go very fast today. Luxury brands have fit and finish that isn't found on the similarly speedy v6 Honda accord. If Tesla would like to remain competitive in their price bracket, they will have to start offering an interior and overall fit and finish worthy of standing among other $30k-$40k cars on the market today. IMO from my own personal experiences with Teslas, some base model cars from other manufacturers on the market have less rattly and cheap feeling interiors, and a giant iPad is a poor (distracting) crutch.
There were some parts like the window buttons that looked of higher quality, and it turns out, those were manufactured by Mercedes.
It being some green choice itself is dubious, considering how much gas and coal is still used in the electric grid and how this car still produces particulate pollution from brake and tire dust, and the fact that you've just brought multiple tons of rare earth materials from around the world together to do the same job the $2000 used corolla that already exists locally at your neighborhood used car lot does, or even a moped for some, only with a higher perceived social standing. The acceleration is on par with the rest of it's class, the range is decent, and the supercharger network is good but still much less convenient than filling up at a gas station, and there's been times on my travels where even the distance between gas stations was dangerously few and far in between.
Imo the worse problem for the car wasn't that we powered it with gas, it was that we insisted on using a vehicle weighing 3000lbs to move our 200lb selves. It doesn't matter how green your energy source is when only 6% of it is used to actually move you, and there are externalities just from the weight alone (the brakes and tires required to stop 3200lbs vs 200lbs e.g. on a bicycle and their associated pollution, the cost to the earth forging these 3000lbs of metal).
OT but I don't get why 400bhp cars with "race" suspensions are even road-legal. Why are cars not fitted with a speed limiter? Road accidents are a leading cause of death and injury, with 1,500,000 people killed annually (or a jumbo jet going down with 340 passengers every 2h). Yet we allow cars that dramatically increase risks and increase pollution (any car with over ~100bhp/ton really only uses the extra power by breaking the law). At the same time we spend billions in "manual" policing! Such inefficiency.
1) Range anxiety
2) Recharge concerns (plays into range anxiety)
3) Novel technology fears (will my trusted mechanic of twenty years be able to handle this or am I stuck with the dealership?)
4) "Handling" -- will this drive like my old ICE car? Apparently a major irritation factor from some EV adopters I know, who disliked how out of control they felt.
5) Technology settling ... my guess is that the standard voltage systems within these vehicles will eventually settle on a standard between these vehicles, because people will be interested in the "pluggability" of EV options if they are that much simpler. Can I just plug in my dashcam, or do I need a voltage converter? I'm driving over to my friend's place, can I use his charger?
I'm probably missing a few.
Given my other comment about the massive variety of cars (not just EVs) that people want to buy, people want choice, and right now you do not get great choices when it comes to charging station networks. I believe that mass adoption will not happen until interchangeable charging stations are ubiquitous, even if more than half of car owners could get by on charging overnight at home 363 days a year.
[0] https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/average-new-car-price-202...
So looking forward not to have to take the car to any kind of mechanic at all except for brakes and wiper fluid. Sure, anything else probably means swapping something out, but if you've ever had your gasoline engine out of your car, you'll know swapping out an electric motor is trivial by comparison.
Being able to get access to the parts and information necessary to fix things can make a lot of difference when things fail and the warrantee is expired. This is basically the "right to repair" issue. Some people care about it a lot and some people don't.
You won't even need to go to a mechanic for brakes.
Regen breaking means your brake pads are rarely actually used and will probably last a million miles.
AFAIK, the only maintenance item you'll likely be taking an EV to is tires.
I owned a Nissan Leaf gen1 and it was painful. It was about 2.5yo when I purchased it, and it claimed nearly 50mi range according to the range estimator (famously called the guesstimator in leaf community). Within about 6 months it fell to barely 40mi range on a good day. My wife hated to drive it due to range anxiety, and more than once I ended up sitting outside a restaurant using either 120v and a beefy extension cord or when lucky a hotel using their complementary Level 2 charger.
That feeling has completely flipped with our Chevy Volt. We usually last weeks or more on a tank of gasoline, thanks to much more reliable 50mi range of the Volt. Compared to the Nissan Leaf gen1, my Gen2 Volt has a highly accurate range meter. And if I'm at risk of depleting my electric range, I can still drive on gas until I can charge up, with no risk/concern for the EV systems.
I wish 5 was less of a concern than it currently is. While I applaud Tesla for it's initiative concerning wide availability of a charging infrastructure, I wish they wouldn't have created an incompatible charging infrastructure.
For the most part, the North American EV industry has a rather cross-compatible charging port, the SAE J1772. I believe this is equally common in Europe, but I haven't kept up with that. Functionally, the Tesla charger operates very similarly, except they use an auth handshake to enable charging for Tesla vehicles. This means that while Tesla vehicles can take advantage of non-Tesla infrastructure, it's harder for those with non-Tesla vehicles to make use of Tesla infrastructure, though I can understand why they made that choice as a company.
I think the best result we could hope for would be a solid and standardized federal infrastructure with some kind of point-of-use charging system. Ideally, something like a gas station for charging, where you can pay at the pump without need for registration or signup. I've tried once or twice to 'pay at the pump' with these privately owned charging kiosks and each time was unable to get to the point of charging due to network issues and/or being unable to register, which does not help with range anxiety in any way.
If they are selling cars for 40K, then those cars need to be cheap to maintain and service, so they can stay on the road for 30 years with say, 5K parts costs over those 30 years. Or stay on the road for 40 years with 20K parts costs, etc. There are many Toyotas and Hondas as well as good trucks that last forever -- basically with a lifetime limited by body rust. If you have a 2000 Celica, even if you aren't a mechanic, a brand new retail OEM AC compressor is $700 and you can get it replaced for $100 in labor. Strut replacement will cost you $400 retail parts with maybe $250 labor. 2000 Toyota Celicas drive great, you can pick one up for 2-3K, and maintain it for $500/year, it'll last another 10 years. 20mpg city, 30 mpg highway, handles well, with nice styling. When I start seeing numbers like that for 20 year old Teslas or Leafs, I'll know they are seriously addressing the mass market of ordinary car buyers, as it is the experience of users on the tail end of a car's life that determines the depreciation paid by those who buy the car new - which is the single largest cost of ownership for new car buyers - and so long term repair costs determine the overall value provided by the car for everyone who owns it across its lifecycle, even if they are only rotating through a series of three year leases.
I have a 2015 Model S 70D with a range of about 330 km. In the three years and 70 thousand km that I have been driving it I have had only three occasions when I was anxious about the range. Most new EVs have better range than that so most buyers of new EVs from now on should have even less reason to be concerned. And of course most EVs are bought by people who can charge them at home which means that the car is almost always fully 'fuelled' when you need it. It won't be long before 500 km is a normal range for EVs which is comparable to a lot of petrol cars in the US: https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/fact-939-august-22-2016... (2016). The Hyundai Ioniq 5 is almost there.
it also affects early buyers who knew it, like our 2014 BMW i3's range, original small battery, is around 70 miles.
I imagine range anxiety is a function of total battery capacity, to your point somewhat. But my 70 miles (or so) range means i have to be very aware where i can recharge.
I agree that for routine day-to-day driving, visiting friends running errands or even shorter trips, electrical is the way to go but it really depends on you situation.
Consider the Lotus Elise and the original Tesla Roadster. The Elise weighs in around 2,000 lbs. The Roadster is around 2,800 lbs. It's not 4,000 lbs, but it's a good chunk o' change more. I think we'll get closer eventually.
Are most drivers aware though, or only racing enthusiasts? I think on a daily driver car, the weight increase has been masked since most people drive on smooth paved roads where there's no loss of traction (especially with ABS brakes and some form of traction control being standard). ICEs have improved power and efficiency to compensate.
My wife has little interest in the driving and performance aspect of cars, and generally isn't into the blingbling aspect either. However she loves Porsche because she thinks they are some of the most beautiful cars in the world.
She is a fashion designer by trade, so her perspective is the opposite of yours - she would choose the Balenciaga because she feels the design is worth the premium despite being functionally the same (if not worse) than the Nike.
Speaking of Porsche, as well as other sporty manufacturers such as say, BMW (let's ignore the oldtimers cries of "BMW has lost its way!" for now), I think they're pushing the aspect of handling and "driving feel" as a differentiator even for their EVs vs. say, Tesla's offerings. Porsche can kinda do this IMHO because of their traditional market position, but other brands might have a harder time.
For example - Mazda. Praised by journalists and auto enthusiasts for having superb handling and driving feel. However most people in the market for a Mazda (Miata being an exception) probably don't care at all about how a car/CUV handles.
I think you’re correct that there will be less appeal from a technical performance perspective to buy an individual brand. All EVs have fast enough acceleration (some dangerously so.) So competition there is not going to continue. The new monstrous Hummer from GM has 0-60 times that rival super cars from a few years back.
There’s still some room for competition on handling, but eventually the skateboards will all have very similar suspensions.
So I believe we’re left with aesthetics, material choices, secondary features, and brand appeal. Are your vegan leather air conditioned seats hand stitched? Are your steerable headlights auto dimming with infrared vision?
1) Price
2) Reliability
3) Self driving
The first 2 are already standard.
Self driving will be a mix of capability and safety record. The latter being more important I suspect. There will be endless websites reviewing which one is the safest. And when you choose a robot to let you drive that is going to be a massive part of the equation. Even if accidents are extremely rare across all platforms, social media will make accidents feel far more common than they are + they will likely be for stupid 'human avoidable' error. This will drive fear, one of the most powerful marketing tools out there.
As self driving becomes commonplace we will see deaths go up both actual, and the coverage around deaths as you note. Building safer software that receives input from a chaotic, random, ever changing, heterogeneous world is a much harder problem than a lawmaker stepping up to regulate self driving and becoming the public hero of the story in the process. Personally, I also think there are more important problems for these engineering minds to be working on.
I'm less sure about that. I think it will remain a distinctive feature that people will actively choose for or against, at least.
The new Mini EV from BMW (and which is replacing the i3 as BMW's 'flagship' EV) has only 0-60 in 7s which is not very interesting at all. But they're not aiming at the performance crowd (plus it can only do about 150 miles on a charge). Meanwhile Tesla can boast sub 5s 0-60 in almost every vehicle so anyone who wants that "slammed into the seat"/"first away from the lights" experience will still lean towards them.
A sub 5s 0-60 will be a selling point for me when it's time to go electric. If I must go electric, I want some dopamine-inducing benefit for it, and beating the remaining petrol cars off the lights will be a big selling point for me even if I'm buying a 7 seater SUV or whatever ;-)
So if you want to be beating people off the line, you better get into electric now, because the roads are filling up with 'em and quick!
Cross licensing is fairly common in cases like this as well. Every car company has enough R&D as to produce some interesting patents. Want our more comfortable seats in your luxury car - give us good terms for your patent and we will give you good terms.
It isn't unheard of for companies to automatically freely license safety related patents. (someone who doesn't die in a competitors car might buy your car next time) So there is another option that might happen.
The above assumes there actually is a breakthrough that is patentable. If all we need is a large enough machine learning data set - those are easy enough to create (just very tedious), and so there are not patents to take out. If your system depends on some sensor - there are lots of different ways to make a sensor and work around the patent.
The idea of self driving has been around for long enough that you can't patent it. There is plenty of prior work to cite. Companies have been known to be working on it long enough that any idea patents would have expired before now.
Fixed that for you.
Consumers are fickle.
- range - safety features - audio system - etc - acceleration
Will be more difficult for high-end brands (Range Roger, Porsche) to use as discerning factors if the "heart" of the vehicle is largely identical between a Kia and a Porsche.
Will luxury car makers go to the way of Vertu vs. iPhone, or Omega vs. Apple Watch?
In the car market, the “heart” has been the same for a long time. The Honda Accord has about as luxurious (at least 90%, you get leather, great driving sensors, strong V6, etc.) of any luxury sedan under 100k, but people still buy those. Those brands mean something to people.
If anyone could do more than idly speculate (probably dressed up with some tropes that play to the audience's confirmation bias to maximize virtue points) OEMs wouldn't be paying millions of dollars per year for the continued existence of their market and customer research teams.
The answers you're asking for don't yet exist. They are so many yet undetermined variables involved in predicting the future at the range you're asking about they're all just possibilities at this point.
Cars are already mostly sold on image. Image is the main differentiator already.
Here is what I think most people think about when buying a car: will be affordable (if you are not wealthy), the type of car (SVU, minivan, cross over, sedan, etc.), performance oriented (Mazda Zoom Zoom, or a Shelby, Mustang), whether it is ultra green/granola (Prius), Luxury (Audi, BMW, Lexus), or whether it is a high end status symbol (Porche), it is viewed as highly reliable (Toyota), and what is the resale value (Toyota.)
This will likely continue.
Even if someone is cross-shopping between several generic midsized family sedans (a genre that is arguably the epitome of "cars-as-a-generic-transportation-appliance"), other than significant price differences, people will probably choose the model that looks best to them.
Plus, dominance is not indefinite. One car maker will innovate, leading to better quality and/or lower prices, and will ride a wave of outsized market share, until its competitors catch up, and so on.
For me, a car is an appliance. It's a nuisance when it costs money. It's a nuisance when it breaks. It's good when it sits there and does nothing (other than taking up space), or gets me from A to B.
If I could get the equivalent of the $15 refurbished LG phone, in an electric car, I'd buy it. It has to be big enough to carry a double bass, no bigger.
Let's see what the younger generation thinks. I have two kids in college. They are both mostly ambivalent about cars. The car makers may be in a kind of last gasp, trying to appeal to those of us who can afford a new car before we're too old to drive.
From my standpoint, it will be interesting to see how things shake out when decent reliability data become available.
I'm surprised how many people don't realize that a VW Passat is a dressed down Audi (A/S/RS)6 is dressed up as Porsche Panamera.
Why do people spend hundreds of dollars on a brand of jeans, when they can buy levi's for 50 bucks (or other brands even cheaper).
The same can be said for many industries. Why did you buy the computer or keyboard you're currently typing on. Much of it may have been due to signaling, or it appealing to your tribe.
So will there be a "killer feature" for a car in the future? I suspect there isn't a killer feature today, and I don't suspect that change.
This is why economic models based on high-information, rational consumers fall short. You and I may put more thought into purchasing a vehicle, but cars have been sold because it was featured in a movie or a myriad of other reasons we might consider superficial.
Re: Badge engineering, it's called that in automotive circles, but I'm not sure about other industries. The point I was trying to make is that this isn't specific to cars.
Once there is a self-driving (electric) car that you can order from your phone and that will — cheaply! — take you from point A to point B, the need in owning a car will (mostly) disappear.
The people would stop being car buyers. Instead, robo-taxi companies will buy most of the cars. For these, there would be no need in brands or marketing; some of them would just assemble and service their own fleets from readily-available parts, similar to how Amazon/Google/Microsoft self-assemble their own cloud servers (instead of buying them from Dell/HP).
Some people would still want to own their cars, like today some people own horses. They would be a negligible minority. There, it's likely that at least some of the manufacturers would be those who still don't exist today; they would disregard the no-longer-relevant mechanics (internal combustion engine, gearbox, etc.) and focus on overall end-user experience while utilizing readily-available parts.
When I need a car, I rent it by the minute, $.17 for one minute, minimum fee of around $2. It's electric, it's usually filled (or if I do the filling for free I get a lot of points that I can use to get the car for a day), they're scattered all around the city and have parking paid with the municipality; they're insured and you just hop on and hop off where you need.
For when I need to make a road trip or something, I just rent out a larger truck from a rental company, and for how often I make them (a couple of times per year), it's really not such a big bang for my buck. I can get a small car for like $5 / day, or a larger one starting at $10.
So... I really don't see the benefit of owning my car at this point, it takes up real estate space, mental space, and it's outdated compared to what I usually drive.
Amazon/Google/Microsoft don't assembly their own servers, rather than they buy servers directly from OEMs who were previously selling to Dell/HP
I don't see that being terribly likely, but the next best thing would be one with software that isn't openly hostile to me. I don't want my car phoning home or being updated without my permission. I don't want my car lying to me, hiding, or refusing to disclose the status of sensors. I don't want an entertainment or navigation system I can't rip out and replace with one of my own choosing.
I'd prefer fully open-source hardware/software, and there are projects in that direction, but I'm also okay with using proprietary black boxes that each do their job and can be configured by the end user and can be replaced by an equivalent component from any of a variety of vendors.
Doing a conversion is obviously a lot of work and not for everyone. I wish there was an easier way to get an easily customizable car. There is at least a fair bit of knowledge now about how Tesla and Leaf components work, to the point that people are swapping Leaf motors and Tesla drive units and used battery modules into conversion cars and getting it to work.
I'm afraid there will be none.
Hull shape, and the battery size is pretty much the only thing existing EVs differ from each other.
Mechanically, they are all very, very simple. Simpler than any IC car.
Compact wishbone suspension is used on pretty much every one of them, since all EVs are city cars, and you want as much space for batteries as possible, and as lower centre of mass as possible
And since all EVs are very heavy, you don't have much innovations in body design either, it just needs to be very strong, and very rigid to securely accommodate the battery pack.
This way the vision of "White Label, off the shelf cars" produced by some Foxconn like maker swallowing the market is very much real.
That seems like a strange thing to say.
We see front-wheel-drive, rear-wheel-drive and all-wheel-drive electric vehicles on the road today, driven by 1, 2 or 3 motors. We've seen designs (I don't think any of them are in production yet) with 4 motors - one for each wheel.
There's about an order of magnitude difference between the horsepower in a Renault Zoe and a top-of-the-line Tesla Model S.
Not all EVs use the same suspension either - Tesla's S and X use an air suspension, and Jaguar offers air suspension on the I-Pace as well.
I certainly agree that taking the ICE out of the vehicle takes away one of the big differentiators between car brands, but I think expecting there to be no differentiators between EVs seems pretty silly. There will always be cheaper, simpler models and more expensive, extravagant models. There will always be innovators trying new features, some of which will succeed and trickle down to other cars, and some of which will be expensive curiosities.
This differentiation is superfluous with EVs, and I believe we will not see this living much longer.
There is not much differentiation besides linear cost/performance progression.
Motors? Suspension? Horsepower? All basically more money for bigger motor, hp, and performance.
There are also interesting innovations that become more possible as more and more vehicles become "smart" and connected - imagine a metro area that is influencing smart vehicles +/- a few kph to smooth traffic, or route vehicular traffic like networking traffic around outages/problems.
The differentiator(s) won't be ways to make tires spin around an axle differently.
We haven't seem much improvement on the market since second gen ternary hit. All coming improvements will be very gradual.
Cars on the market already hit possible upper/lower weight, and size limits for the battery pack.
> Weight distribution
Any other than low, and centre?
> Software updates
Do you want to play videogames on your car? Will you pay few thousand dollars more for a UI skin update once a year?
> in-wheel motors
May be, but that will only work towards killing the differentiation even more, at least in the low end.
Porsche and certain other manufacturers will always be handling kings. (even if the lower center of gravity, means that all electric cars kind of handle well)
> Manufacturing consistency and quality
We see Tesla struggle with this, But, Toyota and Honda have this down to a science like no other manufacturer. There is a reason the Civic/Corolla/Camry/Accord quadrilateral is impenetrable.
Excellence in manufacturing also saves a lot of money.
Toyota and Honda have a reputation for reliability, but it is by no means a given. Toyota had to low key rebuild a division after the unintended acceleration scandal. Honda has had persistent issues with their transmissions. It's a never ending battle and there is a limited number of employees who understand how to build the culture necessary for it. If someone manages to poach them or somehow impede your global operations (all automakers have intercontinental supply chains), you're in trouble.
These same older employees will be less effective if "poached" into another company though, since so much of the experience they have gained is with proprietary tech. Institutional knowledge is very real, and Tesla has only just started accumulating lifers with whom they can leverage that knowledge.
A lot of us overestimate what can be done in a year, underestimate what can be done in five and can't even guess what can be done in a decade.
I've heard the exact same sentiment said about the Detroit automakers when compared against a Datsun - unquestionable dominance (or Nokia or Ericsson).
Not to say Tesla will be the winner here. But it only takes another oil crisis for this to snowball in a new direction.
If you want a close enough comparison on how dominance can hurt you, compare what's going on with Harleys in the last 5 years vs what an Indian Scout or a Husky EE 5 looks likes inside & out.
Nokia and Detroit automaker's collapse was tied to a certain lethargy and dysfunction in these companies. The economic downturn was the metal straw that broke the camel's back.
Tesla will undoubtedly keep growing, but I find it unlikely that their margins will ever justify their stock price.
So called super car brands will pivot to market on subjective qualities like “handling” since they can no longer complete on performance.
“they were surprised to learn that Superchargers could not be used to fill up their Taycan.”
Sounds about right.
Range, charging speed, and availability of rapid charging points that is close to the availability of gas stations are all essential.
(This isn't needed for all roads, just the major highways and interstates, since those are the roads where people typically are driving long distance.)
The next generation Macan is supposed to be entirely EV. I'm interested what Porsche will do to make it enjoyable to drive. As it stands my next car (this year) will probably be a Tesla Model 3 of some trim, but we'd probably be giving an EV Macan a serious look as the replacement to our CUV.
But until that point, it's all based on luxury status and branding (imho).
Prior to the Model 3, nearly all EVs were weird looking "futuristic" (usually in a bad tacky way) dwarf mutant hatchbacks that looked rather cheap - like a ICE car that cost half its MSRP.
The Model 3 introduced a (relatively) affordable EV that actually looks "normal", even desirable and premium.
I think it would be a shame if all EVs ended up being essentially clones of each other. Maybe as the technology matures we'll start to see more variety of vehicles like pickup trucks (whether the cybertruck or just an ordinary pickup), off-road vehicles, and so on. I'd love to see someone start making EVs with manual transmissions, for people who actually like driving stickshift, but that seems to be an unpopular opinion.
The “soul” term is marketing BS like the soul patch mustang logo Ford decided to sticker on to the chin of its EV.
If you ever see one, look at the front. It’s totally got a soul patch. Eww.
As far as engine noise or rumble and that wonderful visceral feeling of the pistons and crankshaft throwing their weight around, I would agree there is something utterly cool about that. As there is of the clip-clop of a cantering horse as well. But again, calling it “soul” is just clever deceptive words that marketing came up with.
If any car has soul, it’s one where the founder poured his passion for years, nearly went bankrupt, persevered, redefined the limits, led a workforce that did the effort of a lifetime to help make the company survive and push out its most successful product that continues to be unmatched, all driven by a mission... now THAT is a story of soul.
The gas car companies want to claim the word for themselves though, just because they have a nice rumble and some fire and smoke, but more because they realize they are in trouble. Fire and smoke are romantic, no doubt, but you can’t replace that with a soul patch.
I've had motorcycle engines with the following configurations (among many others): - 200cc single cylinder - 250cc single cylinder - 650cc single cylinder - 250cc two-stroke single - 500cc two-stroke single - 300cc parallel twin - 800cc parallel twin - 650cc v-twin - 1200cc opposed twin - 900cc inline triple - 650cc inline four - 1000c inline four
Every one is completely unique in how it feels, sounds, rides, and performs.
Add to that the almost innumerable number of other ancillary configurations to the above such as:
- balance shaft (or lack thereof...) - valve timing - firing order - cylinder bank angle - carbeurator vs fuel injection - diesel vs gas - naturally aspirated vs supercharger vs turbocharger - nonstandard engine types like rotary, V5, W configurations, V4 - compression ratio - two vs four cycle operation - low end torque, midrange power, top end power.
If the difference between electric motor personalities is a gap in the sidewalk, the difference between ICE engine personalities is the grand canyon.
I've never had a vehicle with more soul than a high power two stroke with a well tuned exhaust. You can't ever convince me that an exhaust with a resonant chamber tuned like a musical instrument to harness sound waves for forced induction has no soul. I've felt it. This [2] is a good animation of how the two-stroke works. No valves, powered by explosions, and a truly musical exhaust note. There's nothing else like it on the planet, and when put in a soulful body like a dirt bike it lets you know immediately.
While I disagree that the engine is the soul of he vehicle, it is definitely a huge part of it. Beigemobile econoboxes are intentionally designed to suppress the soul of the vehicle, despite how marketing likes to advertise them. Nobody's offroading or tracking their crossovers even though every commercial implies as much. The buyers of those vehicles are largely (and the commenters in this thread say as much) looking for the most generic and unsurprising vehicle possible. They are designed as much as possible to make you forget that you're in a vehicle. Even 'interesting' vehicles are being regulated into this generic future. See: Fake engine sounds being played through speakers [1].
The most different electric motors will still feel largely the same, while two mostly similar gas motors can feel completely different. Call it soul, personality, or anything else, but the future of vehicles is going to be much more bland, even if they go faster on paper.
You can't ride a motorcycle and say with a straight face that gas engines have no soul. They embrace it, they don't hide from it. There's still cars out there with souls, but they are forced to blend in for fear of losing theirs as well.
I don't really know where I'm going with this. I get that the metaphysical is frowned upon around these parts. But it definitely exists, even if we can't precisely define or measure it.
Electric is better in pretty much every metric that can be measured. And disastrous for the things that can't. Someone mentioned in this thread mentioned that vehicles are probably going to become white labeled from foxconn as electric gains traction, and I can't help but see that as the future myself. That's what it means to sell your soul.
[1] https://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/a7923/the-rise-of-the-...
But have you had one with FOUR TURBOS?
Geopolitics will matter: People and their governments will find further regulation appealing also because it can be a tool to drive local employment in manufacturing and related business. If a car manufactured in China, or using batteries manufactured in China, has an inherently worse CO2 footprint for a European consumer (because of the coal-heavy energy mix in China and the energy footprint of shipping to Europe) and this is penalized by regulations, you get factories in Europe as a result. This build-out will take some decades to settle, and there may yet be new tech surprises along the way that change the game.
As for car tech itself becoming a commodity - this has been the case for a long time already, even with ICE technology. Automotive supply chains are famously broad, long and overlapping between OEMs. Bob Lutz (GM, BMW, Chrysler, ...) said in 2015 "There are no bad cars anymore, only bad designs".
There's still tech competition for sure, and it's fun to follow - the Mercedes EQS will outdo the Model S in most respects and raise the bar of what's possible with an EV, heating things up a bit at the top end. Progress continues, egged on by regulations if nothing else, and by consumers seeking the best value for their money. But if you don't sweat the details, the good-enough options are plentiful.
It's a simpler power train with fewer moving parts, requiring less maintenance and replacing of parts. Recuperative breaking means less break pad wear, etc.
Of course there's other stuff emerging, like costly screen replacements and we're yet to fully appreciate how the batteries will age, and what the second-hand market will be like at scale.
There's probably first interesting data on the Tesla and other EV fleets and the maintenance averages for their customers ...
Beyond this of course you can't cheat physics. Structural engineering stays the same, material wear still happens and some car designs (or even form factors) are simply less sound than others in terms of their effects on the expected usable lifetime of a car. With EVs that matters significantly, because of the high upfront energy cost to manufacturing them - you have to drive them for a while for them to really make sense.
I guess we can conclude that automotive will probably stay as interesting as any other business. Cars are a choke-point of doing high-tech yet industrially manufacturing at scale, the baked-in conflicts make it an interesting challenge.
But these differences are razor thin compared to consumer perceptions of them.
For every fanboy on Reddit screeching about muh million mile 4Runner he leased for 36k there's a fleet manager who just spent an afternoon reviewing records and crunching numbers before confirming that yes we are going to buy another round of Pacificas as our current ones hit the "old enough it's not the image we want to project" threshold.
Compare the lap times of boring commuter sedans and compacts to the "sporty" and "good handling" sedans and compacts if you really want to see slim differences.
Off the top of my head: brand reputation, looks, reliability, quality/roominess/aesthetics of the interior, misc. features, fuel efficiency, and obviously price.
For electric vehicles, all those same things still apply, with fuel efficiency being replaced by the range/energy density of the battery and efficiency of the motors to get more range from that battery.
Given this model shift, what differentiators exist? In a service world, it's all about timeliness, fitness for purpose, driver professionalism and cost. Nobody gives a shit about which hardware widget the manufacturer stuffed in the body anymore. It's literally irrelevant. They've lost the customer to the service provider, in the same way that telcos lost their customers to mobile device manufacturers. Telco data was commodified and SMS and phone use nosedived, just as vehicles are now commodified and demand for abnormal features is surely dwindling. Smart manufacturers will become the service provider, thereby vertically integrating to gain maximum profit, at the same time removing old customer-facing assumptions around vehicle maintenance and related logistics paths to minimize downtime and cut costs. Driving, at least in cities, will be seen as something poor people do to earn/save money. Fully autonomous EV fleet maintenance stations by 2035.
I believe low-cost "city shopping bag" is the future of electric cars and biggest market. And if some sort of modular platform emerges, it will dominate the market. It may even be required by law (like EU requires USB chargers on phones).
I am from EU, but I believe China, India, Russia markets are similar. Look at Dacia Spring or Citroen AMI for examples.
One big thing is that they are closed ecosystems and you can't really modify or work on your car. In some cases, it seems that they make it intentionally difficult to fix it modify the vehicle, like Tesla.
I think options are another big thing that falls under this. They do have a bunch of options, but there aren't any stripes down versions. I get that the margins are low so they have to offer higher end, more expensive vehicles. I just want a simple work truck...
Oh, and physical buttons/switches for vehicle controls.
With only electric vehicles the air will cease to be continually poisoned by emissions and then roads and streets will start to move indoors. Covered roads will become practical with electric only vehicles and the majority of those e-vehicles will be a lot smaller than the current average ICE car because electric technologies make smaller vehicles much more practical. The current boom in e-bikes is just the beginning of a major trend to electric smaller vehicles.
A lot more quickly than you expect ICE vehicles will be restricted to the highways and periphery of towns and cities because they'll be too big, heavy and poisonous. In a word they'll become unsafe for urban transport and our cities will become much more healthy and livable.
Hopefully Biden's infrastructure push will help the industry consolidate into a standard that works as well as Supercharger, but for all EVs. Going on a road trip in a non-Tesla EV requires a lot of planning and a little bit of luck, since you've got to make sure you can find Level 3 chargers along the way and hope they're actually operational. IMO one of the goals should be to put good L3 chargers pretty much everywhere a gas station is today. The fact that this isn't already happening suggests that this simply isn't profitable (not enough demand, expense of installation).
Here's What The World's Cheapest Electric Car Is Like To Drive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GG1RC7GV0Y
You can already order one of these golf-kart like cars from China for less than $5,000 shipped. An easy to mass produce skateboard platform is bound to emerge, so basically who ever has the cheapest reasonably good batteries and marketing wins.
wins... the market for "cheap golf-kart like cars". But the market for "cars" extends way beyond that very narrow definition of a car.
Also interesting to note that the skateboard platform idea has been floating around for a couple decades now. GM planned a potential one when they dabbled with hydrogen fuel cell EVs back in 2002.
[0] https://www.autoblog.com/2010/09/24/forgotten-concept-2002-g...
Bosch had electromagnetic car suspensions figured out 20 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KPYIaks1UY
The car industry is a perfect example of "worst is better".
The point about the cheap golf-kart car from China is about how little in terms of material costs actually goes into it. It is $5,000 shipped. In actuality it is about $2000 in parts.
The skateboard platform I linked to is already developed, they are supposedly going public this year, not just a concept.
If they can get them to pack flat (or flat-ish), they can ship quite a lot of them around the world for peanuts. Add whatever cab, wheels and branding you want to finish it off.
All of this stuff is about to become a commodity. The most, and basically only, expensive part is the battery.
Thus, there will always be a diverse set of EVs to choose from, catering to different market segments.
What might be interesting is that currently new engines are a huge investment because of all the emissions compliance work, but that doesn’t seem to exist with electric drivetrains, so there might be a lot of interesting quick iteration there.
If everything goes fully electric, we'll just be back into pre-2000 territory, where every car was ICE and they differentiated on handling, interior features, styling, and engine power.
What? MPG is one of the things people care about most! At least in the UK.
Sure, they'll care about the MPG difference between Tiny3CylSubcompactHatchback and GiantThreeSeatV8SUV, but not between two GenericMidsized4cylOrV6FamilyCUVs.
Which is why you'd see something like 4cylinder BMW 5 or 7 series in Europe a long while back, but in the US until relatively recently a 4cyl 5series would have been seen as a joke for an expensive luxury car.
Even now I don't think the smallest engine size tier of vehicles get imported into the US - we get (at least) one level up as our "entry" trim.
Sure, appearance matters. Most people don't want to drive around in an ugly car. But functionality is pretty important too. Fuel economy. Safety. How many people or how much stuff fits inside. How much gas does it use per mile (if it's a gas car). How easy is it get parts. Is it expensive to maintain.
https://siamagazin.com/a-self-balancing-two-wheeled-motorcyc...
The most common use case for cars for many (most?) people is driving alone or with just one passenger. Back seat is often treated as misc. cargo space.
Something like the old BMW Z3 Coupe (AKA "The Clown Shoe"). Essentially a two seater hatchback.
Creates a neater interface for various subsystems as well. Rather than centralizing all the signals and doing it there.
The advertising industry has made billions and billions trying to convince very similar products are the unique and different.
Comparing one product vs. another is a certain type of advertising. It's a type of advertising that targets a certain type of demographic, basically negative advertising. (don't know enough to know which group.)
While type a response... it occurred to me and slightly off topic. Where else do they use negative advertising? Political advertising maybe?
And there you have it... a whole another topic of discussion that would be pretty interesting.
RC and Wendy's immediately came to mind.
basically being able to make a 6-7 hour drive without stopping would be great for beach trips without having to worry about finding a charger halfway through your trip.
charge before you go, charge after you get to your destination would be ideal
Just for some frame of reference, lots and lots of people replace internal combustion engines in their cars, either to restore a vehicle, or to upgrade it. Spoiler - they often cost more than $3000 (before factoring in labor)!
Let's me take a step back in time and talk about a different domain.
I've been flying electric powered RC planes and helicopters since the early 80's. Back then it was very rare to see people at flying fields with electrics. I was usually the only one at a field with 20 to 30 flyers. In fact, I used to design and manufacture motor controllers because the available ESC's were shit. The point is, it was "the early years".
All we could use back then was Nickel Cadmium (NiCd) cells. They could deliver the necessary current, yet imposed a size and weight penalty. My most powerful plane used a pack consisting of 27 NiCd cells. It was a rocketship and could go straight up at an impressive rate, but the thing was heavy (don't remember, I think it was about 8 lbs).
Nickel-Metal Hydride (NiMh) came along and looked promising but didn't really make a huge difference, certainly not for high current, high performance applications --which is most of what I was interested in.
And then we got Lithium-Polymer (LiPo). This was a technology that delivered (just guessing) twice the volumetric energy density, which meant a battery half the volume and half the weight of the old NiCd pack delivered substantially more energy while being able to supply high currents. This is when my planes went from 27 NiCd cells to a LiPo pack with just six cells. My helicopters use one or two of the same packs. And, of course, LiPo's made drones possible due to the same energy/weight ratio.
Back to cars.
This is it. Energy storage technology with twice the volumetric energy density is where the inflection point will be. Same metrics, half the battery pack volume and mass, two to four times the energy storage capacity.
And yet it doesn't end there. There are two more factors. Cost and charging.
Cost should be self-evident. The battery pack represents a massive portion of the COGS of an electric vehicle. This needs to be cut in half and, eventually, half again.
Charging is the elephant in the room. This is particularly evident during emergencies. I still remember when fires here in CA caused massive problems for electric vehicle owners. One of the worse things one could face as a parent is having an emergency and realizing that your vehicles are range limited and impossible to charge.
And so this key differentiator is both an internal and external factor.
I think the external is portion is easy to understand: The installed based of gas stations dwarfs the installed base of electric charging stations. Not only that, even if we had the same number of available electric stations, the realities of charging are not in favor of electric vehicles. This, once again, has two elements to it.
First, batteries take a long time to charge. If we establish this at 10x fuel filling time (3 minutes for gasoline, 30 minutes for charging), this means you need 10x the charging systems per station in order to service the same number of vehicles per unit time when compared to a typical gas station. In most places this is impossible.
Even if you could install 10x the charging systems in order to be able to service the same number of vehicles, you now face the next --and very serious-- problem: Energy demand.
Stated in the simplest possible terms: A rapid charging network with enough capacity to service a non-trivial number of electric vehicles would require an equally non-trivial amount of energy production capacity increase.
The only way I see a path to deliver this would be nuclear energy. In a place like the US you would probably have to build somewhere in the order of twenty new nuclear power plants distributed across the nation. Each country in Europe would likely need a few. Asia, a bunch of them.
Here's where the electric equation collides with reality: Transition to electric vehicles today, with current technology, and face the reality that we might actually produce far more pollution due to the massive step change in energy requirement.
Distributed solar network? Beyond massive, whatever that means. What's the energy, pollution and CO2 footprint of what it would take to manufacture, I don't know, 10x the solar panels we make today? Not to mention the resource utilization, mining and environmental damage this might cause. Likely not a solution. I think nuclear is the only solution. And, at least in the US, it could take thirty years to build just one nuclear plant; with twenty being almost unimaginable. If we started today the energy infrastructure would not be there until 2050. We should have gotten serious about nuclear energy a few decades ago.
This simple analysis tells me that the key differentiator (and the missing link to achieve mass transition to electric vehicles) has got to be something fundamentally different from the battery technology we use today. I think this means some kind of a fuel cell-type technology where recharging can be delivered in a few minutes through the exchange or replacement of a consumable/recyclable/rechargeable liquid.
I am not sure what else would make sense.
And, of course, all of this has to be evaluated on the basis of whether or not we are actually making the world a better place. It is easy to think that electrics make things better while not realizing that electrics at scale --done wrong-- could actually bring forth an ecological disaster the likes of which we have not seen yet.
Again, think 1.4 billion electric vehicles, don't think about your Tesla on your driveway. You have the ability to have that vehicle on your driveway because the source and nature of the energy it requires to operate doesn't quite move the needle, in terms of local or global scale. Also, the origins and source of that energy can remain, shall we say, conveniently ignored.
I am NOT down on electrics. We were ready to buy a couple of Teslas a few years back. When the California fires happened and we saw what was going on with Teslas we had to think things through. Living in fire and earthquake country you have to be aware of these things. We ultimately decided to wait until the infrastructure matured. Not the vehicles, the infrastructure. We want electric vehicles, but they cannot impose restrictions we don't currently have on their usage. That's our metric. Others are free to develop their own.
Which brings me to what I do not think is a key differentiator/technology for electrics to be successful: Self driving.
In my opinion this is a solution looking for a problem.
The evidence is simple: There are somewhere in the order of 1.4 billion cars on the road. People are driving them around every day. No problem to fix. For us this represents exactly 0% of the many variables involved in making a purchasing decision. It isn't important to most people (1.4 billion vehicles without it) and I don't think this is what will compel mass transition to a technology that currently has serious infrastructure issues.
If I have a normal car, and I'm wearing AR, I can re-skin it with unreal engine. The most interesting technologies aren't about transportation -- they're about human augmentation, transhumanism. A car is just too big to be a great augment. If I were CEO of Apple I would take a hard pass on "Apple Car" project and focus the company on AR.
Plus, cars are expensive. Not always a great investment, or necessary
This is only potentially true in dense urban environments. Its not true in suburban and rural areas, at least in the US. The rural-to-urban transition won't occur fast enough for this to not be true for a few decades at very least.
I agree with the OP's sentiment that cars are mostly not needed. We've just been hoodwinked into building in car-friendly ways instead of people-friendly ways, and so we have these spread-out, fragile, suburban areas that depend entirely on cheap oil to function (if not the gas itself, the manufacturing, maintenance, and support of cars and car infrastructure).
Instead of building too dense (skyscrapers - opposite end of the problem spectrum) or not dense enough (suburbs) we could have built mixed-use walkable neighborhoods and towns and really reduced the need to spend money on cars. But hey, Ford, GM, and Chrysler had great lobbyists back in the day, and the threat of nuclear war with the Soviets meant that getting tanks and troops from one place to another necessitated the construction of extensive highway and freeway infrastructure. Win-win for a segment of the population with specific beliefs. Now we're so used to it that we find it hard to imagine living without it.
It infuriates me whenever I talk to people and they're like "wow Europe is so walkable! You can just go to the cafe down the street." or somewhere like Mackinac Island (aside from the horse poo) where people go to vacation - it's like yea we could just build like that everywhere if we wanted to. But we're dumb and we don't think and construction and automotive jobs need subsidies to keep the economy growing.
I've heard this before... ah yes. Five years ago[0].
Now, I'm not saying this won't happen. But predicting timelines on something that does not yet exist is tricky.
More to your point though... right now a lot of people value having "their" car despite all the drawbacks you listed. It can certainly vary (i.e. city vs suburbs vs rural) but people like just leaving stuff in their car, hopping in it the moment they are ready to leave, rather than trying to gather their kids, stuff, pets, etc. while waiting an unpredictable time for a summoned vehicle to arrive, and then going through the loading process, and then making sure nothing gets left behind.
I think it's possible we'll see a divergence, where people that begrudgingly own a car today will happily move into the future you envision, but quite a large portion of car owners will still want to own cars pretty far into the future.
[0] https://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/2016/04/29/...
The first are car enthusiasts. They like the cars Tesla is producing.
The second are robotaxi/FSD evangelists. They want Tesla to spearhead the movement of ultimately eliminating (or significantly reducing) car ownership in favor of the robotaxi network. In fact, some of them even want Tesla to stop selling cars to the general public in favor of retaining them for the robotaxi fleet.
For the vast majority of suburb dwellers, buying a car will be more cost effective. Most of the costs are the same either way, but you have no need for a profit margin, and you don't pay as much fuel (electrons are still fuel!) to run around empty getting to the next passenger. By owning your own car you can in turn leave your stuff in it just in case. By owning your car you ensure it is there when you want to go as opposed to waiting for one to arrive.
We already see autonomous vehicles offered by non-robot taxi networks... And... what so?
> Customers will no longer have to worry about maintenance, charging, insurance, parking, cleaning,...
It's called taxi...
> Only very few companies can create/train the self-driving technology, e.g. Tesla, Google,... The outcome will be that we will see a lot less car companies.
There is no dramatic differentiation to current "AI" driving systems what-so-ever, they are all quite dumb, and have to act on the lowest margin of caution, just like all "self-driving" attempts working on the same principle in the last 30 years.
