‘Not a compliance car:’ GM says it can produce Chevy Bolts annually | Hacker News Reader

‘Not a compliance car:’ GM says it can produce Chevy Bolts annually

hybridcars.com

32 pointsjseliger50 comments

>In response to the charger network concern, Kelly said GM is one of around a dozen automakers committed to the SAE combo connector. Tesla is the maverick with its own standard, and GM has not said it would collaborate on a shared standard, and neither has Tesla in reverse.

I get that Tesla thinks they can out-connector everyone else, but it seems like a shared connector standard would be a huge bonus for all EV companies.

Multiple standards and per-brand charger networks would suck for consumers. Simple solution: make the federal tax credit only apply to cars that cooperate on connector standards (once a standard emerges).

They don't think that, they have already done that. They have supercharger coverage in all of North America and western Europe. The "dozen committed automakers" have nothing.

Adapters are simple though, no? At least wherever I see EV charging stations in malls and such, a variety of cars is connected - Leafs, Tesla S, Chevy Volt, and others. Perhaps this is not the most effective/fast way to charge a Tesla, but it does work.

> The "dozen committed automakers" have nothing.

They have installed way more charging stations than Tesla, by several orders of magnitude. Almost every Nissan, GM, BMW, etc dealership has at least one or two charging stations and they're open to the public. I can see 15 stations within 10 miles of my home, most at dealerships, then a few at malls and stores. Tesla has 3 Superchargers in the entire state, only near highways. The highway already has chargers installed at its rest stops, too (including DC quick chargers), and they're not Tesla chargers, they're the standard connector every other EV uses. PlugShare shows over 50,000 public chargers in the US. Tesla's only built 590 stations.

I drive a Nissan Leaf. They're ridiculously cheap (we're talking $10-12K fully loaded for a recent, low mileage certified preowned). I've charged it at public stations. I also look forward to upgrading to a longer range EV as soon as there's one that doesn't cost as much as a house. There are way more than enough non-Tesla charging stations out there to make me comfortable only owning an EV, by any make.

These are not useful chargers for long-distance travel. They are barely above a 230V/15A outlet, and pretty much only useful for top-up charging at destinations. And guess what, Tesla has adapters for all of these. As I said, they have won this already.

No, looking around me, the Nissan dealers and the highway rest stops have DC quick chargers (480V L3), which are the equivalent of Tesla's superchargers.

You're comparing 80% of 80 miles and 80% of 260 miles, and saying that they're equivalent? One is more than 3X faster than the other. One makes it somewhat reasonable to drive long distances, the other does not.

BTW, Tesla sells an adapter for Chademo.

The Chademo standard supports up to 100 kW of output, while Tesla Superchargers are up to 120 kW. Most of the L3 chargers out there are hooked up to 125A and put out 62.5 kW, but they can be upgraded with no change to cars, and provide comparable recharge times to Tesla's chargers. There are relatively few EVs on the road, and none that have the range of a Tesla, so no customer base to necessitate those upgrades just yet. It's awesome what Tesla has done, but there's really nothing wrong with how the infrastructure is growing for all the other EVs and the standards they've all chosen to support. If the Chevy Bolt flops, it won't be because it takes early adopters 45 minutes at the rest stop instead of 30 to make an occasional long-distance road trip.

Yeah, it'll be because the Bolt's fast chargers are in inconvenient locations and are hard to count on since they're installed in single units.

The way the infrastructure is growing for other EVs sucks. If you had a Tesla equivalent car today that couldn't use Tesla superchargers, it would be terrible for long distance travel. It would be slow, painful, and run a substantial risk of stranding when it turns out the one charger you were really counting on has been broken for weeks and the dealer is too busy selling house-sized SUVs to care about repairing it.

This could change quickly if the big car makers cared to. So far there's no indication that they do, though.

Typical CHAdeMO chargers are half the speed of a Supercharger or less. They're also often installed in single units, making them highly vulnerable to breakdowns, queueing, or blocking by non-EVs.

You're comparing apples and oranges. The vast majority of those 50,000 public chargers are slow L2 AC chargers, not L3 fast DC chargers. Many of those 50,000 public chargers are Tesla L2 chargers, too.

If you want a proper comparison, filter PlugShare to only show CHAdeMO and CCS, and compare that to Tesla superchargers. And consider that "only near highways" is exactly where they're useful. And that Teslas can use CHAdeMO chargers too.

Edit: and go through the non-Tesla fast chargers and see how many are broken down, how many are actually available to the public (some Nissan dealers limit theirs to only LEAFs bought from them), how many are frequently blocked by non-EVs, how many have pathetic power levels like 25kW or less, and in general just how many of those are actually useful for long distance travel. No need to do this for the Tesla chargers, as they're all good. (Except Bethesda. You can count that one out.)

Come March it will be 3 years that Asda (owned by Wal-Mart) also has a network of chargers in the UK I presume elsewhere too. [1]

The are part of the POLAR network [2] which has over 4,000 charge points across the UK for Nissan Leaf, Renault Fluance, Mini ED, Vauxhall Ampera, Chevrolet Volt and Tesla Roadster, BMW i8 and i3, Tesla Model S, Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV, Renault ZOE, Renault Twizy, VW e-Golf ...

[1] http://your.asda.com/news-and-blogs/electric-car-drivers-can...

[2] https://www.chargemasterplc.com/index.php/blog/launch-of-pol...

These are slow AC chargers which are not very useful for long distance travel.

It's not about connectors. Tesla ships adapters for the major connector standards (j1772 and chademo), and presumably will also do so for future standards. What it's about is supercharging, which is very customized to battery pack design and electric gear.

Supercharging is much like CHAdeMO. The car drives the whole process. It requests a certain voltage and amperage, and the charger provides that. This updates continuously as the charge goes on. They use different protocols for this communication (which is why Tesla's CHAdeMO adapter is $450 instead of a simple piece of plastic and dumb metal) but neither one is very specific to the battery pack or other electronics.

One wrinkle is that the charger has to be able to put out enough voltage to actually charge the battery. There are some rumbles about future cars with 800V packs to improve charging speeds, which would make them incompatible with these chargers. But all current and near-future cars could potentially use all current fast-charging standards with an adapter, or with a bit of engineering effort to build in a port.

The company to watch is NRG, which has good fast charging coverage in many metro areas.

http://insideevs.com/nrg-evgo-were-1-with-37-of-the-dc-fast-...

I feel like the entire third party charger thing is an overstated red herring. Bolt just jumped us from 70 miles by default for non Tesla to 200 miles. Next jump in 3-5 years is 350 - 500? So once or twice a year you worry about needing to charge away from home? And that assumes you only have an electric car vs one of each. Seems so edge case (even at 200) but I understand why it can dominate the discussion.

So once or twice a year you worry about needing to charge away from home?

What if you rent? I was going to have my landlord install a $750 outdoor level 2 charger so I could charge my car in under 8 hours. It's a problem for renters.

Would you really go all electric if you didn't have access resolved at your residence? Seems like a headache you'd always be managing.

I would quite happily own an EV if it had a few hundred km range and access to slow chargers at work or while shopping.

Park car, plug in to GPO. Go shopping, come back an hour or two later. Sure, it won't completely cover the day's driving but it will stretch the time between visits to a fast/super charging station.

The car's range is a buffer between fast charger visits.

I think the problem is Tesla's connector is much faster. Last I checked Tesla offered others access to its connectors, too, for a license fee (obviously, it would be dumb to offer it for free).

What I've heard Elon say is that automakers who want to use the superchargers just have to share "costs". I assume that means electricity + property leases + maintenance + some sort of amortized construction costs. I've never heard anything about a license fee.

>obviously, it would be dumb to offer it for free

I'm not so sure. It would cement that connector as standard at any rate. Hopefully the revenue from licensing connectors isn't too critical to their business or they have bigger problems!

You know what they say - it's better to have a small share of a large market than vice versa.

Is there some secret law forcing GM to only hire the absolute worst designers for their cars' aesthetics? Body shape, interior, and especially GM's user interfaces and industrial design are just god-awful. Compare any dashboard GM produces to a BMW dashboard or other tasteful European makes.

I get that GM's cars are cheaper, but for instance, it's not that expensive to just stop using that fucking plastic-orange design for all gauges. If you can't figure it out, just copy someone else who knows how to do it.

And for God's sake, hire someone who knows how to display numbers and data intelligently.

I present to you, possibly one of the ugliest cars to go into production since the Aztec, the BMW i3 [1]

They're pretty common around where I live (as are Teslas, Leafs and other electric cars) and the nicest thing I've ever heard about them is "at least the interior is pretty nice".

1 - http://assets.inhabitat.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/201...

To be fair, the picture you've linked is a concept version, and is taken from an odd angle. Regardless, the i3 does not photograph well.

The interior is indeed nice, and overall, the car is thoughtfully designed. In terms of engineering, I'll argue it's one of the most innovative cars in a decade. That matters to some more than the, shall we say, adventurous styling.

No, it really is a hideous vehicle. I see the a couple every week around where I live and work.

Here's the production model, not too different.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ab/BMW_i3_0...

It's been on the road for a couple years now

http://www.edmunds.com/bmw/i3/2014/long-term-road-test/

de gustibus non est disputandum

I can understand why you feel it is a hideous vehicle, it's certainly not traditionally styled. I think there's a lot more to the design of a car than the curb appeal, for lack of a better term, and with that in mind it is a very interesting car.

Yeah, that's fair.

I think what seems to be bothering people about the design is how much it deviates from BMW's brand styling. If it came out from Toyota or Nissan or something I don't think people would have really noticed or cared.

I think what's kind of odd is how little media coverage electric cars that aren't Tesla get.

The one pictured has "concept" written on it, did this ever go into production ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BMW_i3_01.jpg is the production version.

Yup, I see one or two every week around where I live and work.

Automotive design is in some kind of dark age. It's not just GM.

I'm not sure design is necessarily the problem. Most of the auto manufacturers (even the Korean and Japanese) have design studios in the US and hire the best candidates from the same auto design schools. Concept cars often look fantastic.

The problem seems to be somewhere between design and production. Traditionally it's been a problem with cost... unless it's a luxury model, costs are usually cut as deep as possible and that means aesthetic details get marginalized (literally and figuratively) for higher profits.

That said, manufacturers seem to be slowly realizing that interior design is important to customers and production interiors have slowly improved over the years. It's hard to cut costs in production these days, everybody wants a great car at every price point.

Perhaps the designers are too far from production and "over design." Production folks then pare their designs down but try to keep some spirit of the design intact, yielding half a kitten which as we know is not half as cute as a whole kitten.

I know the same thing happens in architecture and yields a lot of ugly buildings. These buildings look like they are falsely aspiring to be something more... because that is exactly the case.

Yes, at most automakers the designers are literally far from production (and production design/engineering). So I think you're right that is part of the problem. I think the bean counters are the other part of the problem... they obviously don't think they're part of the problem since they're trying to make the company money but sometimes lousy materials and final design makes people look elsewhere.

"Automotive design is in some kind of dark age. It's not just GM."

I disagree.

In the past few years we have seen several very, very beautiful cars come down the pipeline. In no particular order:

- BMW 6-series gran coupe (the four-door) - Maserati Ghibli - Grand Cherokee SRT model ... the cool looking one ... - Current BMW M5

I'm sure I'll think of some more ...

The problem is, although these are beautiful cars, they're not electric. So you have this weird choice between a modern car that actually has non-laughable technology in it or a car that looks good and has a nice interior[1], but it's all just lipstick on a pig.

[1] Tesla Model S interior is almost as nice as an entry level 3-series/A4/c-class. Almost.

That's not universally true, my wife's Cadillac interior is way nicer looking than my BMW interior. That said, I agree that economy and midsized cars could use design improvements. Mazda does a great job at providing nice interiors at a lower price point.

Fully agree. Most GM cars are just fugly, and as a frequent renter, I have found the American designed 4 door sedan (big 3 makers) is the biggest piece of crap out there. At 6'5", I have a lot more head and leg room in a VW beetle than 4 door sedan. Looking forward to what Tesla does with the model 3. If they can make it the opposite of the Chevy Bolt, I'm a buyer.

Car aesthetics conversations being a thing of the past is another reason I look forward to our autonomous vehicle future. This isn't the futuristic racecar I drew when I was 10, but compared to the i3, Leaf, Prius, etc. I'd describe the design as "safe". But, right, these conversations are required to consist of %90 bluster.

Electric cars are the future and anything from the future has to look futuristic and not like anything modern.

Somewhere, buried beneath all that sarcasm and hyperbole, I'm sure you were striving to make the age old "I don't like these asthetics and feel comfortable speaking on behalf of all humanity"

If it were well designed, how would someone know it was a GM.

OT: I'm curious about something with electric cars.

In a gasoline car, if you run out of gas at night on a country road in an area with no cell coverage and so need to wait a few hours for someone to come across you, you can at least listen to the radio and use the interior lights and still use the emergency blinkers, because those are powered by the battery.

Suppose you run out of power in a similar situation in an electric. Do the interior accessories and emergency blinkers and the motors run off the same power pool, so everything dies together, or do they have a separate power pool for the interior accessories and emergency blinkers so they keep working after the car can no longer move?

The Tesla has a 12V battery just like regular ICE cars that is used to power blinkers, etc.

http://insideevs.com/a-peek-under-the-hood-of-a-tesla-model-...

I imagine that wouldn't be a problem for a sensibly designed car. It takes a lot less power to run a lightbulb than to move a car, so a battery too depleted to drive on would still have plenty of juice for small loads.

I have a relatively inexpensive radio control model Piper Cub made of foam. The control surfaces work even when the battery is too dead to drive the motor, for the obvious reason. I don't suppose it's beyond the likes of Tesla to put that technology in a car.

Meanwhile in certain parts of the USA, SUV and F150 sales are starting to spike because of $1.80 gas since 15mpg "doesn't matter"

EV sales are going to be difficult in some parts of the country until gas is back at $3+

It might not be a 'compliance car' but why is it that all of the 'hard work' is being done by LG? The whole drive-train plus the batteries and ancillaries are entirely LG, albeit to GM's spec.

What happens if LG decide they don't need GM any more?

They said they have a contract with GM, so I suspect LG needs to meet production for the entire duration of this generation Bolt plus a certain number of years afterwards for service parts. I've worked in Automotive supply and this is how it typically works.

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