The Chevy Bolt Is the Ugly Car of the Near Future
bloomberg.com
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I've got a Model 3 reservation myself and wouldn't even think of switching to the Bolt. I want a nice car, not just an electric one, and Tesla's got that in spades.
> I want a nice car, not just an electric one, and Tesla's got that in spades.
And I suspect many Bolt owners want an economical car, not a luxury one, and the Bolt's got that in spades.
See my other reply in this subthread - Bolt/Model 3 will be equivalent in terms of price, so I don't see how the Bolt is more "economical".
The Model 3 is still vaporware.
It's an old, yellowed page out of the Microsoft book: "what we have in the pipeline is better than what you can buy today!"
We know nothing of the as-yet-unshipped Model 3. Let's hold off on those side-by-side comparisons. Because if you want to compare, we should weight the "can buy today" column quite heavily.
People looking for luxury would be better suited buying Mercedes, or BMW for that same price range.
Tesla is a luxury car, but not of the 'lovely interior' type. It's more like Porsche---luxury in terms of an extreme in high technology related to driving.
Translation: I can afford a luxury car, Tesla is one of the nicer luxury cars and happens to be electric.
Additionally Chevy allows people to buy parts for their cars and you can service it yourself or at an independent shop.
Electric AC induction motors have very few breaking parts. The things that can break are more along the inverter/controller (capacitors, FET avalanche wear, etc) and auxiliary systems (A/C, etc.)
One great thing about electric cars is that you don't need oil changes, belt replacements, or spark plug tune ups!
No real issues with engines other than maintenance. I think I had a bad EGR valve on the Pilot 10 years ago. Know what breaks? Electronic crap. Doorlock servos ($400), side door motors and rails ($800), various little modules, AC sensors, airbag crap not covered by recall, defective key cylinders, etc.
Name two of those three things I haven't done to our Scion (Toyota) xB in 12 years and 80K miles.
Happy Leaf owner here, but the reality is that, other than oil changes, modern cars are just as maintenance-free as an electric. Okay, I take that back, I did have to do a pads/rotors/calipers brake job on the Scion, whereas I expect the pads on the Leaf to last the life of our ownership (or maybe I'll have to do the same job due to minimal use).
A friend had one that had problems. Getting it towed to Jersey a few times was not fun. When he got into a fender bender, getting it towed to a certified body shop on Long Island was extra not fun.
Or I can pop into the local Chevy dealer about a half mile away.
I live in a small city. There's probably 25 different auto makes sold by at least a dozen different dealership groups in my area.
It's not like Tesla is trying to put the indie repairman out of business, they're trying to sidestep the big car companies' control of the industry even in the distribution side.
It's not clear to me if the humanity saving efforts are 100% genuine on Musk's part or if part of them are intentionally conceived as marketing but it works either way.
The best word I can come up with describe Toyota's car designs is "inoffensive". They aren't necessarily bad, and they are easy to drive and comfortable to ride in, but they are mainly generic and forgettable. Being mass market cars like they are I guess that is kind of the point.
(Also, 99% of electric cars also mostly burn fossil fuels - the exception being the ones deployed in Iceland, Norway and France, where fossil fuels are being phased out.)
You apparently have not seen the latest incarnation. Move over, Pontiac Aztek.
While it may sound like I'm anti-Tesla, I'm really not. I'm glad they're pushing this market forward, and I have many friends who have one and are very happy with it. I'm just saying that I don't buy the argument that it's a great car for the price if you ignore the fact that they "happen to be electric."
http://gas2.org/2016/02/15/tesla-model-s-outsells-mercedes-b...
Model s is outselling BMW 7 series sedans and Model s is outselling mercedes S-class sedans.
It's definately not a blanket statement, the volumes of mentioned lines are low
However, if you already had a tesla and the competitors were offering you better interior materials and longer range as long as you were ok stopping at a gas station every week or two and having service appointments at a dealer at least once a year (or more depending on model) and losing a lot of the satisfying low end torque you might not think it was a great deal. Oh and you have to stop getting software updates also! Your phone will continue to be better than your car's computer in every way and the car won't even try to mitigate that problem.
Anyway, I think the idea that some competing car is MUCH nicer is mostly about your prior assumptions or at best what particular aspects of vehicles you care most about.
GM has the benefit of selling everything from heavy trucks to tiny cars. Tesla has to invest lots of capital in chargers and a direct sales model.
Personally, I think the ROI on any car is crap, and I don't buy fancy vehicles. The Bolt makes a lot more sense to me.
Does it? TFA talks about Tesla quite a bit, e.g.
> It's unlikely the Bolt will crush Tesla’s nascent Model 3. It has made essentially the anti-Tesla, a vehicle long on utility and short on sexy. What the Bolt will do is lure thousands of buyers who would otherwise buy a conventional car
What makes the Model 3 "nice" in a way that the Bolt isn't?
The Model 3 is just cashing in on the fact that it's cool to drive a Telsa. If the same exact car came from Toyota, then the response would be exactly as it is for the Bolt: "eh, it's not a Telsa." And probably mention of how awful the interior looks.
"So how did GM pull off a $30,000 car with 200 miles of range?" It didn't. It is $30k only after $8000 of federal tax credits.
Why are people so bitter that GM is competing? Is this not a good thing?
Many people wanted to buy their EV-1 but instead they sent them to the crushers. Like other people have said, GM is doing this to offset their truck/suvs and not out of a real interest in EVs.
The Bolt isn't like the electric Fiat they they just shoved a battery into.
Offsets are nothing new. Ford used to sell Escorts near or below cost in order to sell Crown Vics.
This is simply incorrect, and is like saying Tesla is building EVs for the subsidies. GM are doing it because the future is EVs, and Tesla is to thank for that.
If by "people" you mean the general population, I'd propose that the majority of people don't even know the EV-1 ever existed.
Like other people have said, GM is doing this to offset their truck/suvs and not out of a real interest in EVs.
GM's selling an EV, does the motivation matter? Especially if it's to offset the trucks that people were going to buy regardless?
The Model 3 doesn't exist yet, so how do you know? Where are these advertisements you are seeing?
It seems like the battery packs on cars are engineered to manipulate people, and this would be an easy way of making two very different cars seem the same.
Lithium batteries degrade. With heat, with time, with charge cycles. Article after article writes about how Tesla's battery packs barely degrade! 8% capacity loss over 100,000 miles.
This has to be a lie. Unless they've come up with a new magical battery chemistry.
Lithium batteries degrade. 15-20% capacity loss per year. 2-5% per hundred cycles.
There are ways to cheat though, design your battery electronics to pretend to have a lower capacity at first and then gradually allow them to discharge more and more as the battery ages. It's true that there's a small boost to capacity retention if you don't fully discharge.
A new Tesla might well have an actual 400 mile range the day it comes off the lot, but they figure consumers would be really disappointed if that 400 mile range went to 350 after a year and so on... instead I'm guessing they pretend the battery capacity starts lower so that it's more consistent. In the end when they run out of spare room they'd initially left themselves the battery would fail fast.
What's to prevent a competitor to cut just a few corners on this strategy – don't give yourself as much future wiggle room so that you can say your capacity is higher?
I would actually love to be wrong, but what you see from the battery performance metrics just doesn't match up with any of my existing knowledge about how battery cells work.
If you don't leave plenty of spare sectors over the very inevitable bad sectors will cause the drive to fail outright.
Perhaps that's a decision I'd like to make myself but it's still an essential function no matter what.
Leaving spare capacity in my battery isn't an essential function. That extra hundred or two miles the first few years of ownership has value and if I use it right away I don't lose anything (except marginally faster wear on the battery pack)
The disk issue is about essential function. If I left no spare room the disk would have unrecoverable failures in days or weeks.
The battery issue is only about perception. If I left no spare battery charge the battery would function exactly the same. It's life would only be reduced in that I'd be using it more (this is assuming that my above theory is correct)
(I've been working at a low level with disks for over a decade, writing data recovery apps and such)
I have found in practice that by the time a HDD develops a single bad block, 99% of the time it's on a death spiral and it's going to completely die within a month or two.
It seems like none of this bad block remapping, spare space, or anything of the sort has any effect whatsoever. The only thing that keeps them alive is being well enough engineered not to break at all.
Please correct me if my experienced misinformed me and I'm wrong.
My understanding was the traditional "bad block" behavior was actually hidden - there are bad blocks that occur but the firmware silently remaps everything.
When you see a bad block at the level you can see via e.g. smartctl program, that means the space set aside for bad block remapping is full - the drive has already been silently failing for a while now.
Lets say you have a battery with a capacity of 100. Empty it completely 100 times and the capacity might be around 95.
Empty it only 20% 500 times (for the same total energy usage) and it's capacity might have only degraded to 97.
Better, but not nearly enough to erase the other effects.
Table 2 shows the lifespan of a typical Lithium Ion battery based upon various discharge depths. 100% discharge rates degrade to less than 70% of original capacity after only 300-500 cycles.
25% discharges hit the same value after 2,000-2,500 cycles. That level of discharge is fairly common with cars like the Tesla.
Having said that, you do have a point about overbuilt batteries too. Some Teslas do have much bigger than rated batteries that are software limited. It is completely possible for someone else to "beat" them on range by utilizing more of the available capacity.
This is exactly the point (and easy to miss)
The degredation per energy used is about the same.
1 cycle of 100% = 4 cycles of 25%
So the 300-500 cycle loss is equivalent to 500-625 when you divide the number of recharge cycles by 4. You _must_ do this for an apt comparison because what you should be interested in is how your capacity deacys with usage.
Artificially smaller capacities also means that using the supercharger is more common. Another feature of lithium battery chemistries is losing capacity faster at higher charge/discharge rates. Trickle charging overnight will cause significantly lower cycle decay than supercharging in an hour (or whatever period it is)
With 300-500 cycles at 100% utilization, a 300 mile car would have degraded its battery to 70% after 90,000 - 150,000 miles. With 2,000-2,500 cycles of 25%, the car would have traveled 150,000 to 187,500 cycles.
That seems like a significant improvement to me?
Your point about supercharging is similarly valid, but also a little misleading. The big factor there is temperature and the Tesla packs use active cooling to reduce the hit from more aggressive charging. I'm not sure that anyone has really seen a significant impact from this.
Basically, battery quality and management matter. Tesla does those things pretty well.
E.g. Only display a range of 350 miles at the start of a battery pack's life even if the real range is 400 miles. To the user, the batter pack performance would appear static (to some limited lifetime, anyway). At the end of life the margin would be zero, and the actual life would be equal to the true battery capacity at that time.
I know Tesla and GM would much more happily report the new battery range than that of a tired, old pack...
This does mean that you can see the capacity very slowly decrease over months and years, but I would personally prefer to know what's actually happening and be able to get the maximum range out of my car that I can.
Imagine the batteries that are like a gas tank that shrinks over time.
My assertion is that (for example) a car starts out with a 30 gallon tank that shrinks over time. When the car is new, it's engineered to be "empty" when the tank is half full.
It'll take the same 15 gallons to refill on the first day as it does a few years down the road when the tank has actually shrunk to be 15 gallons in size.
100,000 miles at 265 per charge (85kWh) is 377 charges. During typical behavior (commuting) the car will remain above 70% charged at all times. That by itself cuts the degradation roughly in 3rds. So we're looking at a 125 full charge cycle equivalent after 100,000 miles. So about 8% capacity loss sounds about right. No additional trickery required.
Apparently there is significant room for improvement here too:
> CEO Elon Musk once referred to a battery pack Tesla was testing in the lab. He said that the company had simulated over 500,000 miles on it and that it was still operating at over 80% of its original capacity.
https://electrek.co/2016/06/06/tesla-model-s-battery-pack-da...
I have an original Tesla Roadster, bought in 2010, with a battery that is basically the first thing they figured out how to do in order to put a car together. (The Model S battery is much more advanced). I drove the Roadster daily for 6 years, and I had about 12% capacity loss after those 6 years. This was a much better situation than Tesla projected (I don't remember what they said at the time, but it was something like 30-40% loss at 7 years, and for a relatively low price they sold an optional battery replacement plan that kicks in at 7 years).
Supposedly the Model S's chemistry is much, much better. Just saying "they're lithium batteries" is kind of a red herring, because there are many many subclasses of lithium battery, and at least according to Musk the fact of lithium is not nearly the most important part, but what really matters is the composition of the cathode and anode: https://chargedevs.com/features/tesla-tweaks-its-battery-che...
[Edit: And the theory that they would have preemptively hobbled the car's maximum range by (.85^6) is just crazy, because it means they could instead have advertised a car that had THREE TIMES THE RANGE on its initial launch, and "range anxiety" was one of the biggest issues they had to overcome. They could have said OUR CAR GOES SIX HUNDRED MILES ON ONE CHARGE, which would be way more important than hiding some degradation.]
My four year old rMBP has barely degraded at all and my 2.5 year old Nissan LEAF has barely degraded as well.
Try getting some more real world experience with these products before quoting a bunch of internet horseshit.
This is a gross overgeneralization. There are many different lithium-based battery chemistries available, with wildly differing lifespans.
The voltage at which you stop charging also makes a huge difference in lifespan. Charge a li-ion battery 10% less full and it can make an order of magnitude difference in its lifespan. When you charge a li-ion battery to full, it's not really truly "full"; the charging system just stops you from charging any further past a certain point, in order to stop you from degrading the battery too much. It's up to the device manufacturer to decide exactly when the battery is "full", based on what kind of tradeoffs they're willing to make on capacity vs lifespan.
High temperatures can also really increase the degradation rate for li-ion batteries, and Tesla employs a sophisticated cooling system to prevent the batteries from getting too hot while they're charging or discharging. The original Nissan LEAF had no active cooling, and their batteries degraded quite quickly, especially in hot climates. This was partially addressed in later model years, but it's now clear that this makes a huge difference.
Like most people, you're probably used to seeing heavy degradation over time in your cell phone or laptop battery. Just bear in mind that it's much easier for companies like Apple or Samsung to advertise "our phone gets 20% longer battery life!" than "our battery capacity degrades 5% less per year than our competitor!" Add to the fact that many people replace their cell phone every few years anyway, and the incentives are clearly aligned to keep pushing higher charge voltages, leading to greater short-term capacity at the expense of longevity. It's also a hell of a lot harder to fit a good battery cooling system in a smartphone than a car.
My Nissan has over 30% loss after four and a half years. They clearly use lithium ion/polymer, the lightest but least durable chemistry.
Meanwhile, I have a lithium ferrous phosphate battery pack for a robot that has lost very little capacity over the same time.
It's pretty clear that different manufacturers use different design margins already.
Lithium batteries degrade. 15-20% capacity loss per year.
I'll correct you with empirical evidence: there are a ton of five year old Nissan Leafs that, by your math, shouldn't be able to pull out of their own driveway by now. My wife drives ours to work every day five years after we bought it.
There are ways to cheat though, design your battery electronics to pretend to have a lower capacity at first and then gradually allow them to discharge more and more as the battery ages.
After five years, given the geekery surrounding the Leaf and other EV, I'd be shocked that someone didn't figure out that the Leaf doesn't really have a 24Kwh battery.
That's not cheating, that's responsibility. That's presenting an honest product expectation. Cheating would be implying that the initial capacity would last.
It's also probably not the case, as people are pointing out. But even if it were it would actually make me think more highly of the company.
> What's to prevent a competitor to cut just a few corners on this strategy – don't give yourself as much future wiggle room so that you can say your capacity is higher?
Does it make it through the warranty period? If so, then what's wrong? For N years those customers had an X/kwh battery.
If not, lawsuit.
> In 2015, Tesla spent over $700 million on research and development while selling about 50,000 vehicles. If Tesla reported gross margins like other automakers, gross margin would have been reduced by $14,000 PER VEHICLE.
Tesla also has huge sales expenses that they don't subtract from their margins. Take that into account, and Tesla isn't making any profit per car anymore. To make matters worse, they also need to raise an enormous amount of money in order to manufacture the model 3 at scale. It's questionable if they'll be able to do that.
Tesla is operated very much like a silicon valley startup. They're growing rapidly in the hope of becoming profitable when they reach scale. But they sure as heck aren't profitable right now.
Source: http://seekingalpha.com/article/3994655-teslas-gross-margins...
They have already reached scale, and are already profitable. They're just pouring their profits back into further growth. Yes, they're spending a lot on R&D, but that's not sending money into a vacuum, that's investing in the future expansion of the company. The article you link even admits this: "Would it be fair to include the billion-plus dollars spent to bring the Model 3 to fruition in a few tens of thousands of Model X and Model S gross margins? Probably not."
Incidentally, I would take anything from Seeking Alpha with a huge grain of salt. Anyone can post an article on there, and people often try to use that site to skew investor perceptions in their own favor. In fact, the author of the very article you link openly confesses at the bottom that he "may initiate a short position in TSLA over the next 72 hours." Conflict of interest, anyone? If you want to see how profitable Tesla is, I would recommend the GAAP numbers from their last quarterly report, rather than some Seeking Alpha author's selective reinterpretation of the facts.
Compared to the rest of the car industry? They are a fraction of a percent of the market.
>and are already profitable.
They cashed in all their ZEV credits to achieve one quarter of profitability. How did they do with those backed out?
I mean, they could be profitable, but going by last quarter is deceiving.
>They're just pouring their profits back into further growth.
You assume that the car industry isn't capital intensive, and that the other manufacturers are not also spending heavily on R&D. But they are.
>Conflict of interest, anyone?
Uh, no. It's an investing site. If you have a negative view of a stock why wouldn't you possibly short it? Or do you believe that these small-time Seeking Alpha authors are moving the market?
Attempting to, yes.
> It's an investing site. If you have a negative view of a stock why wouldn't you possibly short it?
Oh yes, of course. But if you write an article about it first, to try to cause the effect you're warning about, you might just be a scammer.
This justifies adding back R&D per unit, but not sales expenses.
Seeking Alpha is a mixed bag, but the authors are no more biased than the average wall street analyst. People who comment here also have their own agendas. Bias should be expected everywhere. As for your claim that anybody can write an article on there, that's not strictly true. They have a real name policy and failing to disclose properly can and will get you in trouble with the SEC.
By the way, having a short position and writing about why you are short (or the inverse) isn't a conflict of interest by any stretch of the imagination. The seeking alpha model is adversarial (like the justice system). People at opposing sides make their case and clearly state on which side their financial interest resides. Poor arguments get pilloried in the comments section. I think this model works remarkably well in practice. In order to figure out what's really going on forensic investigation is necessary, and that goes way beyond the plain GAAP figures.
Tesla's sales last quarter were 24.5k cars, hardly "barely 15,000". Q4 is expected to meet or exceed that, despite being a shorter quarter.
If you pick the biggest car manufacturer in the world to compare them to, then of course they're going to look small. There are plenty of well-established, profitable car manufacturers that build far fewer cars than Toyota.
I don't want to argue semantics, so I'll leave it open for debate as to whether or not they're "at scale", but comparing them to a startup that hasn't figured out how to turn a profit yet seems highly disingenuous.
> They've been "profitable" for a single quarter by selling Tesla's at a deep discount.
If they can sell cars at a deep discount and still be profitable, then clearly the margins must be pretty good.
Tesla has 1/6th the market cap of Toyota but produces a tiny fraction of the cars. Tesla is exactly like other silicon valley startups in that they could have been profitable if they had chosen a different business model, but now they need to grow massively or they'll become insolvent. That's what I mean when I say they haven't hit scale yet.
Will Tesla actually deliver 100,000 Model 3 cars in 2017 as promised? I'm skeptical to say the least, but if anybody can do it it's Musk.
R&D costs should not be subtracted in order to calculate gross margin. They are a part of net margin only. Payroll is not part of gross margin either.
Here's a source: http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/122314/what-differen...
"Gross margin is generally considered the incremental profit margin delivered by the sale of a product"
This is not remotely correct. The author is confusing Gross Margin with marginal profit, sometimes referred to as variable margin.
It's important to know that fuel mileage regulations are calculated on a fleet basis, not per model. So manufacturers are actually trading off optimizations across their entire product line. The Bolt is just an iteration on the existing strategy of using cheap small cars to offset the emissions from larger (higher margin) trucks.
(This isn't a hypothetical, btw. You don't have to guess what will happen, the system has been in place for many years)
(And it's both Canadians & Americans that have a weird dislike of hatchbacks)
[though I suppose from their perspective, I have a weird liking of hatchbacks, what with their practicality, effective use of space, and good looks 0;-]
Americans love the high seating position. I imagine Europeans would too, if they had the option to buy one.
Audi and BMW are adding even more CUVs in Europe after the success of the Q3 and X1 respectively. So Europe's not just getting these because of their success in the USA, it's because the segment is strong and growing in Europe too.
(all stats from http://carsalesbase.com)
Just follow the money.
Still, the specs are hard to beat. When I get my payout from VW for my polluting TDI it's either the Bolt or the Volt for me. Probably the latter.
Plus like another comment said, many crossovers are just tall hatchbacks too. Subaru Outback, Ford Escape, Nissan Rogue, Toyota Rav4, taken to the extreme with the Buick Encore/Chevy Trax.
Headlining a review with "it's ugly" just seems like a bad idea. Tastes change, and not everyone thinks the same things are ugly anyway. Focus on what it does, how it drives etc. and let people make up their own minds about whether it's too ugly to be purchased.
Tesla doesn't care that much if they get beat to market, in fact I would posit that the more EV's come to market before the Model 3 the better (for the world anyway). The iPhone was always an iPhone and many (not a majority) people have one, however over time all the other phone manufacturers decided to go with Android (as it was open source) and made their own phone, now they all fight for supremacy in the phone market. All the various androids have a way bigger market share than iPhones but the important thing is that we had a smart phone revolution. Most [read all] phones are smart phones these days and all cars will be electric cars soon.
"Tesla and Panasonic have entered into a non-binding letter of intent under which they will begin collaborating on the manufacturing and production of photovoltaic (PV) cells and modules in Buffalo"
That can be read as the two companies will work on manufacturing cells and modules together, but I think that isn't the case, given that that same press release states:
"The parties intend for Panasonic to begin PV cell and module production at the Buffalo facility in 2017. Tesla intends to provide a long-term purchase commitment for those cells from Panasonic."
If that conclusion is correct (corrections welcome), I would guess (again: corrections welcome) that that includes quite a few bits of software and hardware components on top of that that control charging and battery longevity.
So, is the Tesla-Panasonic really that different from the Chevy-LG one? From what I can see, the main difference is that the former are more committed to each other, with the advantages and disadvantages that that brings.
"Tesla’s current custom 18650 battery cells produced by Panasonic are estimated to have an energy density of ~250 Wh/kg"
The Sonic starts at $15,000, which seems to be the ICE equivalent of the Bolt.
Are they counting R&D costs? If not, why would Bolt cost $15,000 more (not counting the battery) than the Sonic? Is GM selling the Sonic at a $15,000 loss?
So their tech is so crude that there is no regenerative braking built into the standard floor mounted brake pedal? Even my 2006 Prius does regenerative braking based of the brake pedal, with no need for such hacks.
Is there any fast recharge system for these? Eg, does GM have a supercharger network? If I buy a Bolt, can I purchase / rent access to the Tesla superchargers? Or is the tech different?
Also incredibly easy to put behind a toggle(including creep) which Tesla does.
If you're talking about Americans, that number is going to be much, much lower than you'd think. Very few Americans have ever even seen a manual transmission.
tl;dr - no, the paddle is for an additional regen braking mode that regen brakes harder than letting off the gas without using the physical brakes.
Adding a paddle "shifter" on the steering wheel to "drop to the low gear" is something borrowed from manual and semi-automatic sports cars, but an interesting new use here for signalling to the car to heavier regen break.
Tesla has a fanclub because they're making electric cars into a sports brand. Motor Trend asked a bunch of current Tesla owners (and model 3 reservees) what they thought of it. The general consensus was "moving in the right direction, but not enough to make me switch." http://www.motortrend.com/news/what-tesla-owners-think-about...
:)
Still, you get guys who haven't bought a new shirt in 5 years, their homes are filled with mismatched Ikea junk, they don't give a fuck about how anything looks until you bring up cars, and suddenly passions are inflamed.
What's worse, is that the fixation is all about the car itself, when in reality they come bundled with all sorts if infrastructure that's almost exclusively hideous. Nobody looks at a gas station, a parking lot, or a freeway interchange and says 'my, what a beautiful sight, I want to build my home right here so my livingroom window can overlook this fabulous vista'. Block that shit out and fixate on the car itself.
It's not because of aerodynamics. Trains are designed with aerodynamics and look fantastic. Buses are plain rectangular but still work. There's something unhealthy in car aesthetics.
Also, most diesels are noisier, and diesel fueling stations are further apart, and the federal tax is higher, and gasoline-electric hybrids have much better consumer branding.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/06/automobiles/as-the-world-e...
Both of these are myth.
Having driven a Q5 and Q5 TDI, they are totally and completely indistinguishable, noise level wise. Same with BMW/Mercedes, if you prefer people passing newly stringent emissions tests (IE EPA gave them a special proctology exam in 2017 before approving those models).
"further apart" is also certainly not true, unless you live in a very very weird area. Yes, not literally every gas station has diesel. But that's about it.
To whit: Over 55% of gas stations in north america offer diesel. http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1094908_fewer-gas-statio...
As for air quality, in the US, we seem very happy to require things that are better in the air for the environment but much worse in the air for people[1], so i'm going to reserve judgement as to whether it's truly better in the relative scheme of things
[1] As a random example: low-voc regulations have pushed coatings manufacturers towards 2k isocyanate based polyurethanes. Previously, the solvents used in wood coatings and auto coatings and what have you were not great for people, or the environment, but not often horribly toxic either (in a relative scale). By contrast Isocyanates are horribly toxic to people, and by the time you can smell them, you are many times over the PEL. Thus, spraying them requires supplied air. They easily cause permanent asthma, etc. However, in the amounts being used, they are better for the environment.
So yeah, worse for people, better for "air quality". Meanwhile, tens of thousands of workers end up with serious overexposure issues. (and if you read the studies they use to justify doing this, the level of emissions wasn't really that high in the first place. Now they are finally going back and saying "hey, we also think you should get rid of isocyanates, too". At some point, at least they'll run out of chemicals to regulate)
So a 2017 diesel SUV is as quiet as the gasoline model. That really doesn’t override the common experience of diesel in connection with either trucks and buses, or ancient Volkswagens. All of which are much more common, and much louder, than modern TDI vehicles.
Also, only 55% offering diesel automatically, mathematically, makes diesel fueling stations farther apart than gasoline. Exactly how much farther is something I don’t care to model at this time of the night. Except to say that that there do seem to be about twice as many gasoline-only stations as diesel stations in San Francisco, and the only Costcos vaguely in the Bay Area that sell diesel are in Concord and Santa Cruz.
As for the air quality, that was one thing that drove me to my current general anti-fossil-fuel sentiment. I was raised in a conservative family, and back in the late 90’s it was fashionable to be suspicious of the fuel, because of the oxygenation requirements satisfied by MTBE and ethanol. And then Al Gore did his spiel, and the Heartland Institute got into global warming denial, and conservatives here are positive about buying and burning fossil fuels again. I feel it is most consistent to simply be against emitting poisonous pollutants near population centers. Whatever the case, there is certainly a difference in air quality between gasoline-congested Los Angeles and diesel-congested Paris. Which is also partly because of the tough California emissions standards, which severely cut into the fuel efficiency and hassle-free operation that made diesel attractive in the first place.
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-summer-smog-2016...
Diesels emit lots of toxic crap and are awful, especially in the city. Winter starting is a bitch too.
Can't wait for the day they start mandating natural gas trucks.
Never again.
Apart from the lies about emissions...
Diesel is great for highway driving, and has good torque at certain RPMs. But it's shitty for stop-and-go driving. The fuel economy is only good when you're doing steady highway speeds.
I also have a 30 horsepower utility tractor for my hobby farm. It belches nice clouds of black smoke when I start it and lifts hundreds of pounds. I like diesel in that machine, but not in my car.
Bob Lutz, a former GM CEO, said once that a compact diesel would need to sticker for $5k more than a comparable petrol engine to be as profitable. A TDI Jetta starts at $24k in the US while a base Jetta is under $18k; and a base Chevy Cruze is $17k while a diesel version is almost $26k. So his statement appears to be accurate. (Yes, there are package differences, but those are largely needed to justify the costs differences).
Of course, not even European taxes can put diesel engines at price parity with petrols. Super-cheap cars like the Renault Twingo aren't even available with diesel engines in the UK.
I suspect the fact that it's ugly is a feature: it will hamper sales a bit and reduce the chance that they'll need to produce lots of this car.
Is the mileage credit on electric cars calculated as a formula of the range? If so, that would explain why they focused on getting a 200 mile range.
Edit: selling this car will also eat into the U.S. limit on tax credits for electric cars, which hurts their competitor Tesla.
I doubt that. I'm sure GM would be perfectly happy selling millions of these things if consumers were willing to buy. They're in the business of selling cars, after all.
But I also doubt they'll put much effort into it.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-gm-bolt-idUSKBN1300PM
GM has also recently announced that they are idling several plants in January because they aren't selling enough cars.
http://www.freep.com/story/money/cars/general-motors/2016/12...
https://www.irs.gov/irb/2009-48_IRB/ar09.html#d0e2504
It's also not real clear to me if the regenerative braking paddle does more regenerative braking than pressing the brake peddle (I mean, it tautologically does if you entirely avoid using the friction brakes, but I mean it isn't clear that pressing the paddle operates the capture system at a higher power than depressing the peddle).
If they didn't want it to sell, they wouldn't have given it a 60 kWh battery. A car company can get all the fleet credits they need by selling a gasser with the engine ripped out and 20 kWh of batteries shoved in the trunk. I'm getting a little sick of people not giving GM _any_ props at all for doing something pretty amazing here.
I am amazed none of the other purveyors of electric cars have managed to figure this out. Even the BMW offering ranks high on the "God what the hell" scale in terms of its design.
The Prius started this stupid trend of cars friendly to the polar bears looking like hot garbage and I have never once understood this logic.
It's all fine if Tesla is competing with Mazda but they aren't. And frankly they need to do much better in the future to go against the likes of Mercedes, BMW, Range Rover etc.
It's like they are having a competition to make the ugliest car ever.
Part of the allure of these is to say "Hey, look at me, I care!"
Part of the reason is that Tesla's are electric-only. You know it's electric just from the badge. For other manufacturers you would actually need know which specific models are electric. Because of the Prius (which was designed for aerodynamics over styling in its iconic second generation) people have been taught that "eco" cars are "ugly" (at least compared to "normal" gas cars) so the other manufacturers play off that association and make their "eco" cars "ugly" to call attention to their eco-friendliness, reinforcing the association.
It's the first time I'm hearing about that, the good news is that with electric cars and regenerative breaking you barely use the mechanical break.
Also, I wouldn't qualify it as being "Most". Most of the particles yes, but not most of the green-house gas, which could reach a theoretical 0 if the production of energy is managed correctly.
I guess it all depends on everyone's definition of "pollution"
I found this paper about brake pads and their impact on micro particles: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4315878/
For what it's worth, electric cars use heavy regenerative breaking. If driven properly, the brake pads on an electric car will almost never get used, eliminating the majority of those emissions too.
The direct economic incentives favor short-sighted purchases. I am not intending to blame you for the statement, but just agreeing that it's true if only for now. The problem is obvious to anyone living in Paris just two weeks ago. They had an emergency shutdown of traffic in the city due to pollution from cars.
There needs to be a balanced economic system that reflects the harm that oil causes to our environment and countrymen. Same thing goes with plastic waste, where some countries have added an environmental tax for plastic packaging.
It can be a tax on CO2, on oil, a deductible on electric cars, solar, etc. But it needs to be large enough to reflect the harm. Some taxes exist, but they are not obviously not enough to balance the harm to the environment.
It seem that the Model S has become the yardstick for any new EV coming out now; but that extremely unfair, we don't compare other cars coming out to super cars to justify calling them slow and bad looking..
Well, that explains a lot.
Why does an electric car have a gear selector?
I've got a crumby idea: How about a long range EV with a dual pack system, like a dual tank pickup truck. You could get away with half the charger and half the wire capacity, and still get nearly 2x the range.
Be very skeptical of European manufacturers talking about their EV range in press releases, they are usually talking NEDC.
Model X to go, please.