VW (and their other brands) and BMW have good new EVs coming to market now, while Toyota is waking up too. They will survive I think. Stellantis though, not sure about them. And many Chinese carmakers will be gone too.
Yeah, that's kinda how Cuba winds up with everyone (well, the small portion of society who can obtain one) driving 1950s cars around. It's not a good approach.
Doing it to to yourself is a special sort of stupid.
Import limitation is more catered towards saving local economy and minimise dependency.
They trade, limited by their own poverty, with countries that can't be easily bullied by the US.
But it has to be said: the entire car market in Cuba is few thousands cars per year.
Canada and the EU trade fine with Cuba. Spain alone accounts for 20% of the trade.
In fact, both EU and Canada have regulations that prosecute any European and Canadian company that complies with foreign embargoes (Council Regulation (EC) No 2271/96 for Europe and Foreign Extraterritorial Measures Act for Canada).
Of course US can pull its gigantic economic and financial levers to out-out specific companies to choose "you either sell here, but don't sell in country X" like it has done with ASML, but it can only push so much.
US laws apply to US citizens and companies.
It has rarely worked in history, and when it did, it only did so for very short specific time frames intended to kickstart a sector, never to protect it in its mature state.
Examples are south korean and japanese post ww2 protectionism of key sectors, but again, only to kickstart them.
We're in capitalism, capitalism is about competition and efficiency.
The moment you're shielding your local companies all that happens is that they can raise prices and have even less incentives to compete and innovate.
And I don't buy the "but China fuels money into their EV industry" either.
So what? How many incentives, bailouts, manufacturing credits, sales credits etc do the European and US industries receive regularly?
And why would I care if Chinese taxpayers subsidize my car? I really don't.
Stellantis, a 20B market cap auto conglomerate has received more than 200B euros in help by the Italian government across the last 3 decades. And what did it achieve? Nothing.
Just made the fiat group less relevant, less competitive, and didn't protect jobs in the long term anyway.
Well, you’re wrong. There’s not much else to say bout that.
> And why would I care if Chinese taxpayers subsidize my car? I really don't.
Because it prices the vehicles below points where others can compete. Then they go out of business, and then the remaining winner raises prices. If you are Germany, Japan, or the United States that means lots of bad things for jobs, and starting a new automaker to bring down high prices later is very difficult.
It’s like, who cares if Amazon or Walmart comes in to your country, subsidizes the prices, and then runs all the competition and small mom and pop stores out of town until you have nothing left but Amazon or Walmart. Right?
That's an opinion, not a fact.
> Because it prices the vehicles below points where others can compete.
This is way too expensive for something like that to last. The rush to the bottom is already killing so many chinese automakers locally. The idea that they can sustain such a money bleed globally is hard to believe.
It’s not an opinion. You’re welcome to go read China’s own self-published strategic plans on this or a litany of news and policy journals discussing this.
> This is way too expensive for something like that to last.
How can you claim it’s too expensive if you’re claiming you don’t even buy that it’s happening??
> The rush to the bottom is already killing so many chinese automakers locally. The idea that they can sustain such an money bleed globally is plain asinine.
Look at German automakers in China for a view of the future.
As Chinese automakers compete and then consolidate they’ll raise prices of course but the level of competition and capacity build out will still have them underpricing other automakers due to economies of scale, cheap labor, and advanced manufacturing. They don’t need to sustain it really, globally they’re already poised to win which is why US, EU, Japan are going to have a lot of import controls, tariffs, and will utilize other tools to protect domestic industries.
I didn't say they don't prop their carmaking, battery or ev industries. I said that I don't buy the argument it's bad for us.
It's the Audis, BMWs, Mercedes, etc of Europe they'll probably end up the way of Philips, Blaupunkt, Alcatel, Grundig, Nokia, Thomson, Gigaset, SAgem, etc. meaning selling off their consumer civilian operations to chinese OEMs and all that remain will be the recognizable name badge put on imported Chinese components assembled in EU, while the small remaining European operations focus on vehicles and powertrains for defense/naval/aerospace/etc.
Nearly all these carmakers already do make plenty of EVs. If I’m very wrong and people there wish to buy EVs exclusively, that’s what will sell and what will get made.
A law made up on the way the economy and purchasing power was going in 2020. The reality now is way different. If you don't adjust laws based on economic reality you're gonna have a bad time.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/volksw...
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/volksw...
* in the ICE world, California and EU norms created a tight barrier to entry. the patent portfolio protected the old automotive industry. they only built their patent protected ICEs, and they bought everything else from suppliers.
electric circumvents that barrier and that enabled dozens of new automotive OEMs: the first big disruptor
too bad the hard part for software instead is system integration. consistency cross all components.
all the great hardware engineering processes are completely ND utterly misguided for software system engineering.. integrate rely, often, continuously vs clearly specified interfaces and isolated component engineering with expensive and thus relatively rare integration.
that's IMHO the second disruption for automotive.Meanwhile, Renault 5 is selling very well with Renault 4 in the pipeline. Zoes have been selling well too. Peugeot also has good EV models (208 is really fun to drive).
There pretty much isn't a single European car manufacturer that wouldn't have a compact car or an SUV in EV market and most of them have good range, decent pricing and are moving to 800V platforms as well.
Sooo... where's the retreat?
As the article says; "In the US"
American car marques are nearly completely irrelevant outside the US.
After the huge hits of the focus and to some extend Mondeo, the Kuga has sold subpar. There were only a few new ones around here. Now you see some new EV Ford Explorer SUV and just a tiny account of the big old Explorer. (Yes, the traditional Explorer suv counts as big here.)
In the mean time there is an explosion of BYD, Volvo, Skoda Enyaq, etc happening. Mostly driven by which model has the most beneficial tax package for lease.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gqyyly9v8o
Volkswagen has said it will cut 50,000 jobs in Germany by 2030 as its profits dropped to their lowest level since 2016.
It said it was hit by US import tariffs, intense competition from China and high restructuring costs from the shift to electric vehicles.
Honda to lose as much as $15.7 billion this fiscal year.From Google, first page.
Article seems to be gibberish, carmakers don't seem to be retreating from EVs.
The easy explanation is that it's because it is there. The article is about the rapid decline of companies that believe otherwise. They aren't doing to great.
The US grid is already stressed by all these new data centers, where is the power to send 10kW of power minimum to tens to hundreds of millions of vehicles every day going to come from?
100M vehicles times 10kW divided by one million is One Million Megawatts.
One Thousand Gigawatts. That’s five hundred 2GW power plants. Four thousand solar panels make 1MW, four million solar panels make 1GW, four billion solar panels make 1000 GW.
And that’s 40% of the fleet converted to EVs, and does not account for diesel semi-tractors being converted to EV.
That is not a tech problem, which is the claim I was replying to.
I saw your deleted comment about four charging stations costing $200,000 or so. Four petrol stations also cost that much. Nobody is saying infrastructure is free, but phasing out infrastructure is simply a matter of time and political will, not a fundamental tech problem.
Edit: You nailed it, it’s a political problem in the US.
Would certainly happen a lot faster if, for example, America spent the $200 billion the Pentagon just asked for the Iran war on infrastructure instead. It would even benefit Americans, imagine that! America is the wealthiest country in the world by far, it has the capital to facilitate the process, but taxpayers would rather blow it on bombing schools across the world.
The US is plenty wealthy per capita, around the same or more than Norway. It has plenty of money to upgrade it's infrastructure, it just chooses to spend it on other goals such as bombing Iran.
Saying EV tech isn’t there to replace gas is like saying gas tech isn’t there to replace diesel.
Gas powered cars are niche or legacy.
of newly registered cars were BEV. Only Norway reaches 89% you are talking about. The total average of newly registered BEV cars in European Union was 13.6%.
The EV tech is here,but the grid in most EU countries is certainly not. The proliferation of heat pumps in the local area caused 3 blackouts caused by a failure of a local transformer - something that hasn't happened before or at least not as frequently. And in most countries you are looking at doubling the electricity consumption if all road transport was to switch to electricity.
[1]: https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/indicators/new-registr...
Everyone's willing to admit that.
EV tech is there to replace the vast majority of gas powered cars.
We don't need to get to "fully" to have a replacement event. Horses can travel down trails that cars cannot, that didn't save them.
It's impossible to go on a long off-road travel with the EV equivalent of 50L of gas in a jerrycan.
But some are twisting the narrative to say that because of that reason EV will fail.
Millions of people could use an EV in their daily life, just like I can go without a pickup in my daily life and rent one whenever I need one.
I’m not sure it’s the infrastructure so much as the cost for these vehicles. Well, Tesla has political problems but Rivian and Lucid don’t - but they are priced quite high.
Of course there are also new vehicles that cost quite a bit less than a base Model 3, but they invite a discussion of not being all that comparable.
Lucid and Rivian don’t have those problems but they are quite expensive relatively speaking.
I also know a lot of drivers who plan to get an EV when their current car stops working. A lot of people are feeling economically anxious right now. They know gas is a dead end so they are squeezing every last mile out of the cars they currently own. Car companies can't exist on the wishes of their customers. Everyone is doing a lot of hoping that its the right time. The EV rebates were a great tool in getting to that tipping point but they were cancelled too son in my estimation.
Also charging at home is a significant part of EV infrastructure which is also sorely lacking in the US
The current third oil crisis won't change much in this picture, because while fossil fuel prices have gone up, electricity prices are also starting to react and rise. That's because electricity demand rises, some industrial users can either use electricity or gas. And because gas prices are rising, which influence a small but very important part of electricity generation: on-demand gas power plants, that smooth out the sharp variations in renewable generation and demand.
And in the one important area of EV construction that makes a real difference, batteries, they tried and failed horribly. Everything else isn't really that special or EV-specific. So this winding down is just admitting that they already failed when the likes of Northvolt went boom. And the imho realistic assumption that production lines can be changed again if EVs should see more demand in the future. After all, some car brands to produce EVs, hybrids and ICE cars on the same line even now.
Skoda and Cupra are thriving, and it’s not just because of their affordability. They are steadily increasing their EV sales percentages while heavily promoting them as first class citizens within their portfolios. Porsche, by contrast, is hitting roadblocks because they are trying to retrofit their new EV first models to accommodate ICE powertrains. Meanwhile, Volkswagen Nutzfahrzeuge just posted their best quarter ever, driven specifically by their ICE lineup.
The main problem for German automakers was losing their core identity by chasing a "Modern Luxury" business model prioritizing low sales volume in exchange for high per unit margins. Electricity prices are simply not a factor in their demise.
The EV industry in general is growing quite well in Europe. It's just that China is capturing the biggest share of that growth.
- the range was miserable
- the software quality was bad
- no OTA updates ever (despite Honda's promises)
- slow charging
- poor public charging infrastructure in Germany
I should have known that a 35 kW battery wouldn't deliver great range or charging speed. But I didn't fully appreciate how limiting it would be.
Last year, I bought a new Mini Cooper e. Larger battery. Better software. BMW's quality actually delivered this time. The car feels objectively nice. The software is polished. There are updates. Few bugs. But the range still leaves something to be desired. In summer it's okay. During winter 30-40% of the range just melts away.
Public charging in Northern Germany still sucks:
- too few public chargers
- chargers are often broken or out of service
- pricing is intransparent
Municipal utility companies ("Stadtwerke") seem especially bad at maintaining their charger fleets. Every second charger that I want to use is out of service. The one next to my apartment has been labeled as "defective" for a couple of weeks now. Nobody seems to care...
I still like (love during summer) my car. It's a cool car. It feels luxurious. It's comfortable. It's fun to tear around corners. It's still compact enough to maneuver through the city. And it looks cool. But it also costs 40-50k EUR and only has limited range. And public charging really needs to improve.
Turns out BYD have one of those already! https://www.theverge.com/news/622963/byd-dji-vehicle-mounted...
Makes me happy for once about the restrictive drone policies where I live.
His idea was like a back up camera, but front-facing and elevated (retractable).
If you want to make synthetic fuels it’s similar effort and efficiency to make methane as it is to make hydrogen. In fact converting one to the other is trivial and the conversion from methane is how we actually make hydrogen today.
Hydrogen has a lot of issues. It’s a pain to store since it’s corrosive and does not liquify or stay liquified without cooling and extremely strong pressure vessels. Methan is already used pretty commonly. A lot of busses run on methane today.
So we’re taking methane, a fuel that’s used in transit already and that we gave a shortage if right now since it makes fertilizer and the hormuz straight is blocked. We’re taking that precious methane and converting it to hydrogen (not at all green to do this and the carbon goes into the air at this point) and then we’re awkwardly transporting this and storing it in cars with all the problems that has just to burn the hydrogen in the car pretending that we never released co2 in the process.
Now you might say ‘yeah but in theory you could use electricity to make hydrogen’ and I’ll point out that’s grossly inefficient to just using a battery electric vehicle and it’s not at all done at an industrial scale due to the reality that it was always just a way to sell fossil fuels with an obfuscation of where the release of carbon occurs and never intended an actual reasonable way to store electricity.
It's actually the Western approach that is logically more sustainable, modulo global warming impacts. So it's odd to say that selling what people actually want to buy right now is "dooming them to irrelevance." The Guardian and the people it quotes are actualy saying "car buyers are wrong" but by way of blaming the companies responding to their signals. In the absence of, say, a carbon tax, what they are doing is highly relevant.
Fracking led the U.S. to be a net oil exporter, meanwhile EVs have infrastructure costs Western governemnts are not prepared to subsidize any further. Those charging stations can easily cost $50k to install. The batteries are not cheap or easy to make, and the low price of Chinese vehicles is down to heavy subsidies, and much of Western demand was also propped up by subsidies that have been going away. Gas stations are built out, ICs are well understood. Yes the Iran situation has pushed up prices but that doesn't mean they'll stay high long term.
There is very little evidence the market actually wants EVs. They are nice to drive, probably net better for the environment and our health, long term will likely "win," but none of that makes them "relevant" today or ICs "irrelevant."
tahoeskibum•1h ago
impossiblefork•1h ago
a-saleh•1h ago
tpm•1h ago
vel0city•1h ago
They have some incredibly reliable hybrid drivetrains, but have weak EVs and ancient battery technology throughout.
Ifkaluva•1h ago
They also spend a lot of money lobbying against electrification regulation, because they really don’t want to make EVs.
jfengel•48m ago
But the hydrogen infrastructure doesn't exist, and they haven't solved any of the real problems with it. So they're stuck flacking technology that was amazing in the 90s.
chii•12m ago
By betting on hydrogen, it's possible to take the lead in a smaller pond as a bigger fish. Tho i'm not a believer in hydrogen - it's too difficult, and costs just as much to transition to that as it would electric. It'd be easier to synthesize carbon-based fuels, and that leverages the existing infrastructure for petrol in place for use.
bastawhiz•43m ago
kube-system•30m ago
fullshark•1h ago
jacquesm•26m ago
DennisP•19m ago
One is that their stock is priced for extreme growth, so they need to be in businesses that can justify that. Cars are not that kind of business. They were for a while when Tesla was much smaller and the only decent EV maker, but not anymore. For any carmaker with a typical carmaker PE, cars can be a fine business.
Tesla's other problem is that Elon did serious damage to their brand, and they're not even getting the growth that other EV makers are getting.
siim_osur•46m ago
qwerpy•25m ago
whamlastxmas•22m ago
kuschku•12m ago
xp84•45m ago
Or if you’re one who thinks home charging isn’t a necessary prerequisite to make EVs attractive, it’ll take that long for fast charging tech to improve even more, and for those public fast chargers, which cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and need tremendous amounts of power which needs to be brought in, are gonna get built.
And you might argue either is a roadblock that can simply be blown up by strategically placed money bombs, but no Western government has that much money just lying around. The $7,500 handout (that mostly padded EV margins) was the best they’re gonna do. The government isn’t going to bankroll every shopping center in America to put in 10 350kw fast chargers at a cost of $5,000,000 per site, or pay $7,000 for every home to get a service upgrade. And even if they did this, it would take a decade just to build and install all that to get to 90% EV adoption. My point is gas cars are going to be popular and sell well for 1-2 decades more at least. “Retreating” from those would be the real bonehead move.
freshpots•35m ago
I'm charging just fine with a decent commute, using only a 120V 12A circuit. You don't need a 240V 50A circuit to charge your car in 4 hours.
Technology Connections does an excellent video on this:
https://youtu.be/W96a8svXo14
It will help update your knowledge on this topic.
Cheers
dimmke•14m ago
I've also owned a house before that had old electricity - knob and tube (this was before I had an electric car) and paid less than 10k to get the entire electricity system upgraded to something modern. I dont think your 5k-10k thing is accurate for the vast majority of houses.
nullpoint420•11m ago