BMW says electric car mass production not viable until 2020
reuters.com
reuters.com
Car companies are run by people who love engines that burn gas. The notion that electric vehicles might be something more than compliance nightmares, that they might actually be better cars than gas-powered vehicles is foreign. It's like the Microsoft execs saying "of course the e-reader should also be able to open spreadsheets and what-not." Meanwhile, the Kindle is better as an e-reader because they started from the ground up.
Same thing with Tesla. (With whom, none of these companies would be talking about going electric.) They started from the ground up.
If BMW wanted to make money on electric vehicles, Tesla has proven that you can sell an $80-$100K+ electric car (with a ~$50K interior) with profitable unit economics. I'm pretty sure an electric 7-series would sell like hotcakes, and make money. Instead, you get the i3, which some people love, but it's certainly an acquired taste, and the 3 series e, which I drove recently-- it has about 11 miles of electric range. ;( If they just made it all electric, I'd buy one tomorrow at the already high 3-series prices. But the culture isn't there yet...
I think what’s most likely is that they are right: they can’t reliably produce electric cars at scale that meet all of their requirements and customer expectations. Tesla is having trouble doing it, why wouldn’t BMW? Musk is charismatic and well liked. He is able to speculate wildly and miss deadlines with little consequence. I think BMW is right that they wouldn’t be given the same affordances by investors and consumers.
I'm not even disagreeing with the main premise of the article-- there's no way BMW could shift the bulk of its production to electric right now. I'm just saying the could for some of the high(er?/est?) end vehicles that have low volume anyway, and they can charge ~$100K for the gas versions. Electric would be faster and have more cachet.
But yes, there were many electric car models in the beginning of 1900's.
1. Efficient production of Hydrogen at the pump station. 2. Storage of hydrogen in the vehicle. Even liquid hydrogen isn’t very dense and has a rather low energy per volume. 3. FC catalyst. I think right now FC catakysts require precious metal catalysts like platinum and palladium.
And even if you solve that -somehow - a hydrogen car will always be more complex to build than an EV. Simply because you need the plumbing and storage at the very least.
The technology to produce hydrogen from water at efficiencies far exceeding Faraday has been known since the 1970s. It was perfected in the 1990s. Toyota has been sitting on it for two decades. That's why they are still leaning towards fuel cells.
Permanent batteries were also developed in the 1970s. They are currently in use by the military.
The problem isn't technology and hasn't been for a long time.
The problem is the international slavery system runs on oil and will for the foreseeable future.
I was talking about safety and locality of generating hydrogen fuel, and I am sure that whatever advance you are talking about from thirty years ago is captured in the numbers I referenced.
> Permanent batteries were also developed in the 1970s. They are currently in use by the military.
Neat, but not relevant to my assertion.
> The problem isn't technology and hasn't been for a long time.
So you are saying that the reason we can't have hydrogen safely generated in pumping stations is because Toyota has some sort of patent or other rights that restrict its use?
> The problem is the international slavery system runs on oil and will for the foreseeable future.
How is Toyota benefiting from oil over hydrogen fuel cell?
Example: Methanol or ethanol for flow batteries. https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2017/Q2/instantly-r...
It’s not all conjecture.
It’s important to remember that, if you count hybrids, BMW already sells more electrified cars than Tesla and the vast majority of them at a more affordable price point than Tesla (the i3 is a pretty good value).
BMW sells a ton of cars and has made pretty good progress on the electric front. They’re just not a hype machine like Tesla.
I also don't think the i3 is good value. If you compare it to a BWM series 1, you can get a better car for a better price. On the other hand, a Tesla Model 3 is perfectably comparable to a BWM series 1.
Tesla has been making good electric cars since 2012 and the BMW i3 was very limited in range until last year or so. The range was limited to 100km in a single charge and the car was being sold for more than 40000 euros (at least in Europe) which is very steep for such a crippled car.
There were a couple of municipalities in my area who caught flak for giving public employees BMWs to use on the job but they were quite literally the cheapest option.
Except that one cannot buy the Model 3.
Its total production numbers in 2017 (1700 cars) were less than 1 percent of the BMW 1 series (over 200 000 per year).
I haven’t seen any evidence that BMW or anyone other than perhaps Nissan, is currently trying to ramp production to 10k weekly.
It’s not that I don’t think any of these cars are serious about the ramp—surely at least one is. There’s just no evidence any specific one is serious about it, besides vague “we’re serious about it” statements.
For context BMW produces 40k cars a week in total vs the 2k of Tesla. So when BMW says "not profitable enough to scale up for volume production" - they probably know what they're talking about.
Sure it's 40k old fashioned petrols, but they seem pretty knowledgeable about scaling.
So far, it seems that Tesla has been focussing quite a lot on getting great at producing batteries, including the logistics for that. Which is what they seem to be good at (given that they produce industrial size battery stations and batteries for home use as well). But they do not have as much experience in managing a mass production line for cars.
BMW on the other hand has a lot of experience in mass producing cars, but they do not have as much experience for batteries. The hardest bottleneck for BMW might just be getting the batteries themselves. Tesla has worked hard on that by building their Gigafactory for example.
Until they miss a major target by a year, there’s really nothing to talk about. They’re doing just fine.
With the imminent 48volt revolution in ICE cars, any vehicle can be a hybrid with next to no engineering at all.
The leap from electrified to electric is huge, so comparing the two is kinda silly.
It's simpler to make a fully electric car, than a hybrid, 48v ICE or not.
It's incredibly frustrating that there aren't more competitors making serious cars that aren't just compliance efforts. 80 miles of range is just silly.
If you'd like a head-to-head comparison: note that Chevy's Volt has become unpopular as Bolt as become popular.
I don’t think that word means what you think it means...
It depends. When I had a 160 mi round trip commute without a charger at work, that kind of sucked in the winter, when the range dropped to around 140 mi, although not so much that I ever wanted to take the gas car instead. (Maybe if it had been a newer model, with more driving assistance features…)
Now that I can charge the car at each end, it’s better in every way. Apart from the ride, it’s great never having to stop for gas.
BMW and Microsoft are in way different situations. State of electric cars right now (mainstream) is nowhere close to state of ebook readers before Kindle.
However, I don't think electric cars are "mainstream", outside of a small slice of people, which probably overlaps pretty well with HN. ;) They have great mindshare thanks to Tesla's marketing (and because they're pretty damn good cars), but they're a blip in terms of overall car sales volume unless you filter by really high end sedans and SUVs.
And it didn’t go anywhere, partly because like Microsoft, Sony relied heavily on a host computer for devices that should have been standalone at any cost, and also because unlike Amazon they had no mindshare regarding books. It just looked like an also ran product that could be gone at any time.
> “We wanted to wait for the fifth generation to be much more cost competitive,” Chief Executive Harald Krueger told analysts in Munich. “We do not want to scale up with the fourth generation.”
Taking that into account, I would wager that scaling up would require big capital investments, so they want to optimize the timing based on when they feel the technology reached a certain profitability threshold.
for every big, international, well run company this is basically like saying it's next year...
when i worked on marketing for target... they kicked off planning for their 2-day sale 18 months in advance... not sure it was smart, but they did it...
If one wants to do something fancier like reading PDFs or free-hand annotations it quickly becomes clear that the Kindle is just a vehicle for Amazon's book business and they developed it exactly as much as it was necessary for that purpose.
Large format eReaders like Sony's DigitalPaper or the reMarkable show a glimpse of what's possible. There's no reason why such a device wouldn't be able to show and edit spreadsheets and also sync with some enterprise server or cloud.
But there are few customers that would be interested in that. The eReader market is propped by the eBook ecosystems, it's not at all a market where the devices offer a competitive advantage.
So... completely wrong analogy IMO.
January 2018: 1,177 + 713 = 1,890
February 2018: 1,424 + 983 = 2,407
Model 3 deliveries:
January 2018: 1,875
February 2018: 2,485
Now add in Model S and Model X at ~100,000/year, and who is producing what in "much bigger numbers than Tesla"?
Bolt and Volt are not "mass produced" to the likes of GM. They're experiments.
In fairness, at least bmw has the i3 and that's better than most. Also, what he says is true. The i3 is crap cost performance. It's just the only thing on the market, and so it sells.
Tesla's plan was impressive in it's decisiveness. Start at the top of the price pyramid and work down as battery prices get cheaper. That way, you can be close enough to cost competitive and have a decent range at all times. Destroy the cliche of golf carts on freeways. Launch a car to space.
BMW (and everyone else) went straight for mass market cars. They're just expensive (about 2X) for their categories and had a craps range. Range just got better.
Still... between incentives, general interest and such they would inevitably sell some cars. A 100k car won't sell that many units either, so the strategy will sell roughly the same numbers at the same growth rate. The economics will get better when they do. You'll already have been making that model for years. profit. BMW want(ed?) to do this across models, and I suppose transition everything smoothly over a decade.
Anyway, a year or two probably won't make a difference to the big picture. Early mover doesn't get you that much in cars, it's not messaging apps or digital marketplaces. Most manufacturers seem willing to lose more tan that.
Tesla moved the needle. It took big risk. Very impressive. Imagine how much it would have cost if BMW had taken that risk and failed. They took the safer option, but the risk here was real. MS' risk aversion was all in their heads.
German car manufacturers used to advertise their hydrogen/ electric car experiments as 'green'; targeted at eco-conscious young people and young families. Neither of them had the money for those low-volume cars or could live with the constraints of low range and a sparse network of charging stations. So they concluded that there wasn't a market at all.
Creating a fully electric car is a bigger investment, but if they produced a limited edition high end vehicle, they would sell out and make money. (The i8 is something like ~$150K. There are other smaller volume vehicles with 6 figure price points in the line up that would support profitable electric variants.) I'm not saying they could just cut over the 3 series to electric right away, but I think the reason they haven't offered an electric option at the high end of the range, which would be faster than what they've got, with a great low center of gravity, is cultural, not economic.
I bought one of the first gen Kindles. And discovered that it wouldn't display PDFs. Unless you uploaded them to Amazon, and converted them somehow. But, given that these were confidential PDFs, that was unworkable. So I returned it.
But damn, a Linux-based reader would have been very cool.
The reasoning "batteries are expensive" is circular.
As Musk said, technology doesn't advance as a function of time but as a function of R&D investment. See atomic bomb or space race for the most dramatic example of how throwing money at the problem compressed the timeline.
Car batteries did not get cheaper because 2 years passed but because Tesla and Panasonic invested 5 billion dollars in a giant batter factory. And by creating a demand for lots of batteries, there's incentive for many others to invest in researching better batteries. And before that, cellphones and laptops were driving investment in battery research.
I see no reason why all this couldn't happen 10 years ago if car makers invested a sliver of their profits into electric car R&D instead of, you know, putting it all in Diesel and then writing software to cheat emission numbers.
And as a corollary, if Tesla didn't push the whole field forward with giant investments, BMW would be "objectively" saying in 2030 that batteries are too expensive to make electric cars viable.
Sometimes. Technology is very path-dependent; to invent z, you need to have invented w, x, and y first. And even with infinite resources that takes time. We’ve been working on fusion for half a century and it might be ready in another half century. Will more investment help? Yeah, but tokamaks take time to build, and you don’t know how to build the next tokamak until after you’ve done all your experiments with the current one. You can’t have iPhones in 1986 no matter how much money you throw at it because the underlying processor and battery tech isn’t there.
Possibly relevant, given your choice of fusion as an example, is the somewhat famous graph from the 1976 U.S. Energy Research and Development Administration report on nuclear fusion[0]. We're obviously looking at a number of projections and can't know whether they were right or wrong, but it is noteworthy that we're not even pursuing a plan we believe will ever lead to nuclear fusion ("fusion never").
[0]: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._historical_fusi...
Wikipedia, citing "Ward (2005). Dr. Space: The Life of Werner von Braun. ISBN 978-1-591-14926-2."
> Apollo program director Sam Phillips was quoted as saying that he did not think that the United States would have reached the Moon as quickly as it did without von Braun's help. Later, after discussing it with colleagues, he amended this to say that he did not believe the United States would have reached the Moon at all.
Wernher von Braun worked on rockets since the 1930's, inspired by the writings of Hermann Oberth, whom he later worked with at Peenemünde. The first V-2 rockets were launched in 1944. Von Braun continued working on rockets continuously until he retired in the 1970's, after working on the Apollo program.
Electricly powered vehicles existed before the American civil war, it’s taken until now for them to have any hope of success in the market.
Funding a fusion program would be like buying a car while your license is suspended.
A lot of what Tesla has been doing is low hanging fruit. Supply chain optimization. Industrial design. Roboticization. These things aren’t science, they’re engineering. They’re applying known principles to the litany of problems an electric car entails.
There’s not much new science in a Tesla. Most of it could have been done years ago. There is some iteration required of course, but that’s why starting earlier would’ve made a difference.
But later, these oil mafias systematically destroyed that to the extent that many people in US believe that climate change is fiction.
My point being, sustainable sources of fuel are being either systematically undermined or for the lack of interest.
if we did not have $$$ from the oil interests against these alternate fuel then just imagine how much R &D would have happened till now!!
Even Nicholas Tesla had an electric car's design back in the 1800s, if that tech had been evolved to say Hydrogen fuel or ethanol or anything that doesn't shoot down our atmosphere then things would have been remarkably different now.
So, yes, there is a path dependent approach to science and technology, but for alternate fuel, the path was made ugly by $$$ from the oil interests
If what you said was true, only Panasonic would have cheap batteries. Not lg and Samsung.
Imagine an alternative reality where fast wireless communication was omnipresent and laptops developed as dumb terminals which used little power. Battery technology might be where it was 40 years ago. It's also possible that, in 50 years, people will look back at the Tesla of today as stupid and foolhardy - striving to make electric cars with stone age battery tech, when a revolution in 2025 changes everything.
Car companies are not in the business of advancing technology but making money. They will advance technology if they can sell more cars. Now with Tesla they have to respond and are slowly doing so.
Musk's motivation is technology for technology's sake. That's a totally different motivation than traditional car companies and that's the reason why Tesla is ahead in technology. It remains to be seen who ends up ahead in terms of business success.
This said, continuing to throw money at a problem such that it leads to more and more people developing a skill set in the space would overtime help, but then again, they could reduce the amount of investment down the line, and you'd still have people who were highly specialized in said domain to target that problem anyways (abet being paid less).
Producing 100 cars is simply not possible in these factories, because it would mean massive losses to the factory owner.
Also, car manufacturers do not want one supplier for a part, they want several. Mostly as a backup and also to make sure they are not under any price fluctuations because they have more leverage over the parts supplier.
Making cars is a very, very thin margin bussiness, especially with cheaper cars like the toyota aygo, fiat panda etc. Minutes of downtime in a factory could mean having to sell a ton of cars at a loss to make up the cost.
I used to work on the assembly at a GM truck plant, and one of the amazing things was the range of different units that came down the line.
I find it hard to believe that the major car plants can no longer make assembly lines that produce more than one design on an assembly line.
Also by that logic there should be no Nissan Leaf.
Last but not least, if BMW waits too long they will lose customers not only to Tesla but also Porsche and Jaguar as well.
this is not the problem i described.
The problem is introducing a new model into an assembly line is a lot of work, and something which is not worth the effort if you are only going to produce a small amount of cars.
See Harley Davidson.
Take VW for example, with their Modularer Querbaukasten (arguably the most well-known example, although others like Toyota have done this for longer). Cars from the Polo up to the Passat are based on the same platform, retooling is kept as low as possible.
All big players have gone modular. Everywhere, the number of different models based on the same platform has gone through the roof, with new (often relatively low-volume) variants arriving each year. (I swear, one of these days Mercedes is going to run out of letters! :) )
The biggest issue yet: Current toolkits aren't really geared towards EV - but: this is rapidly changing. As soon as the new generation of toolkits arrives, things could happen really fast.
Also, it's one of, if not the most competitive market on the planet. There's a large number of incredibly well funded entrants, with competition in every segment. It's as close to a truly efficient market as you can get, and it's getting more efficient as Chinese and Indian brands mature.
They are basically loss-leaders for the brand.
By 2025, BMW fleet will almost all(25 models) be electrified, and half of them (12) will be BEV (battery eletric, aka fully eletric.) This is the company that's determined to be ALL-IN on electrification on their cars. The current i-series are just too damn expansive to make (carbon-fiber unibody etc.) and not sharing many parts to the existing BMW line ups, which cost it much higher to make. So until the iNEXT platform is ready, they aren't going to mass produce EVs. [1]
[1]: https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/bmw-bets-big-on-solid-sta...
Also, you are giving those numbers without any source in them, so I will call this a very deceiving comment. Electric cars are marginally less complex than a regular ICE car, which it makes them simpler and cheaper to manufacture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StreetScooter
To me that doesn't sound like there is no market, it sounds like big car manufactures want to milk their ICEs as long as possible.
On top of that Boeing said they're not interested in assembling my plane!
Clearly these incumbents are holding me back.
/s
Sarcasm aside maybe it just wasn't worth it to VW to take on a relatively small project outside of their core competency?
Personally, I’m an ideal EV candidate. But it just costs more, especially when you price in electrical work for home chargers, etc. The TCO of a nicely equipped Accord is far less, and will be for a long time.
All Tesla did is prove you can sell an EV at a high price point to tech people who love all sorts of trendy things that don't sell outside that sphere. This in no way says EV is a mass-market vehicle yet.
Tesla did bring many infrastructure issues to the forefront, and that's no small feat.
Tesla is a company that was built from the ground up, without any prior design and manufacturing experience, and they have been mass producing cars for only 5 or 6 years. You can't simply expect them to have the same business agility as BWM, which is a company with over 1 century old.
The lack of "better" product offerings from Tesla is not due to the technology, is due to the infancy of the company.
Moreover, car companies do not have "infinite cash reserves". Retooling factories for EV production is an expensive undertaking. Combined with the expense of lithium cells and supply issues, it's not a simple or cheap task.
It doesn't seem to me that money is a problem for the already established car manufacturers. And looking at Tesla's finances, starting an electric car business wouldn't make much of a dent on Volkswagen's finances.
So yes, Tesla is proof that there is some relutance in moving to a fully electric business in the car industry.
I don't buy that for a second, esp given that they are now out-selling the S Class[1].
[1] https://electrek.co/2017/05/26/tesls-model-s-leading-us-larg...
BMW made nearly 2,000,000 cars in 2015[1], and this year, best case, Tesla will make 150,000. That's an order of magnitude difference in scale.
Tesla made about 100 000 cars in 2017. Mercedes produced almost 2.4 million.
It's hard to interpret from just the article if BMW is saying not 'til 2020 as their development of the supply chain isn't ready yet, or that they're waiting longer to capitalize a supply chain until some cost reduction 'appears'. There are statements on either sides if those paths forward in the article. So it could be simultaneously true for different links of the supply chain.
I believe this is shortsighted thinking. They’ll have fat margins for now, and then a few years from now it’ll be too late. Companies like Tesla that are fine absolutely incinerating cash and playing with death in order to make it work will have a serious headstart.
I’d love to have a BMW. I’m finally in the bracket I can afford it, but I refuse to own a non-electric vehicle.
People want electric vehicles and they want luxury, but Tesla’s are out of the price range for most people (for now).
BMW can wait til 2020, but by then they’ll have missed the boat.
* by mostly I mean a daily commute round trip
What boat? Are people going to stop buying cars in 2 years?
We aren't talking about cellphones here, 2 years, or even 5 years is nothing in the automotive industry. The current 3-series is 6 years old and a good 3-4 years behind competitors and is still selling strong.
Having a 2-3 years lead in this industry is literally less than half the lifecycle of a model.
That boat. It’s red row boat in case you’re curious.
You have to remember Tesla is losing hundreds of millions of dollars, so clearly that boat is not going to get far until they can start making money. Even Elon Musk won't be able to raise big rounds of new capital indefinitely.
I’ll end up buying a Tesla because it’s fully electric. I was on the wait list for a Model 3, but my previous volt lemon’d and I couldnt wait until an unknown delivery date, so I bought another Volt.*
The volt for now gets me the round trip. I need to charge anything beyond going to work and back.
I’m at 5000 miles with NO GAS! It’s rad!
* I know “you bought another volt when your first one lemon’d?!” Yeah totally. It was an awesome car and between GM and California’s lemon law I pretty much sold my old one back to GM for just shy of the original purchase price.
“High end” feels a lot closer. A kitchen aid mixer isn’t a luxury item, but it has a good profit margin and people who love mixers will buy it.
Tesla is more like that... there’s no hand stitched Italian leather or whatever, but the software is top of the line, the drivetrain is top of the line, it has unique features that make it a better car, without competing on who can make the prettiest mahogony inlay.
Like, not having to stand at a smelly gas station in your heels and pump your gas is a luxury. But Tesla doesn’t sell you a wall charger with gold accents.
Also, I am not sure if they really make a better car. Unique, for sure. Myself, if it doesn't have AWD, I don't buy it...
The answer is expansion of these regulations because the industry will be dragged kicking and screaming into the electric future.
Why 2020? It's China's deadline for auto manufacturers to provide mass market options in the china market or be fined/removed.
Regulations? Need MOAr.
However, it's undeniable that the carmakers weren't in a hurry to build EVs because EVs would be too much of a disruption to their businesses. Maybe a linear 0.5% growth per year? Yeah, they could deal with that. But they'd hate it if the EV market explodes to 10% in 2022 and 20% in 2025, and 50% in 2030.
This seems to be a myth, at least in the US https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-22/millennia... https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/30/millennials-like-buying-cars...
- they weigh a lot for the range them can provide - the recharge rates even on "superchargers" is not good - the range loss in cold climates is very high, can be a third of your range - charger standards are not aligned
I hope we solid state batteries can solve all of these, if not the weight component by removing the liquid electrolytes. Is there really much more that can be done with lithium batteries?
I am still a fan of smaller EV range backed by a REX; how that REX is done going forward is up to technology but I don't really want to have to haul a thousand pounds of batteries around just to exceed two hundred mile range in mild to warm weather
It's not that car companies like BMW and Honda and others who are being slow to release EVs are colluding so much as they are just dragging their feet because ICE engine vehicles are much more profitable right now (not requiring changes to their supply chain and manufacturing methods, or training of dealerships and service departments, etc.)
If anything, they're both perfect examples of what I said.
Nissan had to start building a supply chain for the Nissan Leaf in 2008 to make it profitably in 2015. It took nearly 10 years for them to replicate the battery assembly lines, electric motor assembly lines, and car assembly lines for Leaf across 3 continents to sell it worldwide at "mass production" volumes.
Dude, that figure is kinda bogus. You can't just cite a random number like that. The first Leafs had a 20 Kw battery which is pretty close to your figure compared to a base 60 KWh Tesla Model S. But that was only the very first years, they went up to 24 KWh then 30 KWh and the current Leaf is 40 KWh.
They're still smaller than the base Tesla battery, but they are also cheaper. THey've always been way, way cheaper than a Model S or Model X, and the current Leaf is still cheaper than the Model 3 (and you can actually buy one now.)
> Lots of stuff about the Leaf and Bolt not being profitable.
Companies like to make a lot of hay about how much money they are losing on the stuff they are selling to seem like they're doing us a favor by selling it to us. This is always at least a little misleading. For example, they will roll in the cost of the R&D and building factories and updating their tooling and supply chain and say "Well we are losing money on Bolts this year" because of all those costs.
But those costs are investments. It's not like they are costs that go into every Bolt they make. It's an investment they have to make up front and they get to make this kind of spurious claim they're "losing money" because of it. They aren't any more than the "lose money" whenever they update a model of car.
Technically whenever they update a regular model the "lose money" on some number of them due to the costs of updates to the manufacturing and tooling and supply chain. But you don't hear anything about it because everybody knows it's a stupid way to look at it.
We should pay no more attention to these claims as they ramp up to make EVs.
Again I say; EVs are here, you can buy them, they are great, stop listening to B.S. And most importantly, stop repeating it!
Actually that's not the case. This was the quote from Nissan's CEO about the Leaf turning a profit:
"We are getting there. Are we amortizing and depreciating everything we have spent? No. But if you look at margin of profit — the direct cost of the car and the revenue of the car — we are getting into positive, which is good for this technology."
So he's talking about reaching positive gross margins on each car, not the point when they fully cover the development costs.
How long does it take to design and build a car factory, anyway?
It's not that expensive. If you can afford $10,000-$20,000 over the life of a car in fuel (plus a few thousand in oil changes and brake jobs), you can afford a $7500 battery. Especially since that pulls thousands of dollars worth of complexity out of the drivetrain.
Many European cars with a long-life oil change program have oil changes as far as 18,000 miles apart. While I haven't averaged quite that high, for me oil changes still account for only about 2% of the fuel costs. With any new car the depreciation in value dominates most other individual costs anyway. (Also, a modestly sized car might only need one brake service if you use it for, say, 12 years, although this is more dependent on driving habits.)
For gasoline, I consider it as essentially financed as well. Going to the gas station is basically paying off part of the debt I got by buying a gasoline consuming vehicle. Electricity, too, but electricity is much cheaper, and I can get out of debt there by buying a solar power system (unlike gasoline which is not feasible to produce on your own nor store a car-lifetime's worth).
On the order of:
5 years to design and build an all-new car.
2-3 for an all-new factory.
1 year to re-tool an existing factory.
And a bunch of other major car makers,too. It is simply amazing what a change has happened in the last year.
Why are people so focused on looking at the past? I mean, we are going to be living in the future, not the past.
I doubt they would be making any effort in electric cars if the threat of Tesla did not exist. Even as it is, they are dragging their feet.
The German car makers also make gas powered vehicles versions of some of their fleet which are quite different from gasoline cars.
What takes time is building the facilities and technology to create reliable and serviceable electric vehicles.
I was quoted $15,000.00 for a new head because they failed to gap a spark plug.
They remove the access panel in the aero pan when doing oil changes and don't replace it. They over torque everything (drain plug, filter cover, etc).
They broke a wiring harness mount when doing routine maintenance. Just ripped it off instead of releasing the clips.
They scratch up the interior when pulling the steering column apart for airbag recalls.
They broke a headlight housing when replacing a light bulb.
They curbed my wheels and then told me it couldn't be them because "there are no curbs here". The service manager said this while standing on a curb.
These people are predators. The incentives are perverse and they do nothing but exploit their customers and the manufacturer.
My hope is that Tesla's approach will push the costs of these unnecessary repairs and shoddy workmanship up the chain where the parent company actually has an incentive to fix them.
At this point the only way I would consider buying a new BMW is if I was able to find an independent shop that can still do warranty work. Still searching for that.
They misdiagnosed it as a bent valve and told me that I probably missed a shift at freeway speed and slammed the car into second gear, causing the engine to over-rev and skip a tooth on the timing chain. Somehow this bent only one valve and the other 23 are still fine. Oh and it ran fine until they had it in their shop. Also the timing chain is still in the correct timing.
I told them to get bent and took it to an independent shop that fixed the problem for $45.00.
The BMW dealer claimed there was low compression and a misfire on cylinder 4. My independent mechanic found perfect compression on all six cylinders and a misfire on cylinder 6 (the one with the bent plug).
I went back to the BMW dealer and they refunded me the $4,000.00 in unnecessary repairs they did. At this point I think they are either intentionally sabotaging customer cars because they get away with it or the incentives drive them to employ complete idiots. Either way the most dangerous place to take a BMW is the dealer.
A foreign object through the intake tract would be a more likely case for a 0 gap plug, as it would basically require a broken piston or valve to otherwise close up the gap on the plug and you're not missing this.
Either way, absolutely terrible on their behalf and a zero sense diagnosis.
-- I had the same thought. I haven't changed the gap on a spark plug in decades. Oh, I check them before they go in, but they're always spot on.
My only theory is that the dealer failed to torque the plug, and engine compression blew the plug out of the head, taking the threads with it. Because at the very worst, if the plug gap is way too big, the electrode might touch the top of the piston. Even then, the piston would just mash it down. I cannot think of a way to ruin a head by improperly gapping a spark plug.
But I digress way away from parent's original point...
The problem was not a gap that was too large, the problem was 0 gap.
I don't drive any more, but when I owned a couple of cars. The first time it happened the dealer told me I needed new brake rotors. I thought it was kind of strange, but was too preoccupied with my 80 hour a week job to think about it. When I picked up the car, I said, "Just put the rotors in the trunk." because I naively thought that it would be my responsibility to dispose of them. All of a sudden they turned on me and started demanding why I didn't trust them -- which, of course, made me suspicious. I eventually got the rotors after threatening the manager with calling the police and took them to an independent mechanic. Of course they were perfectly fine.
Latest was my wife's car a couple of years ago. My wife took her car to the dealership to change the oil. When she got her car back they told her, "We were looking at your car because your a car inspection is coming up" (In Japan you have to have an inspection every few years and fix whatever the inspector says). They told her it would cost more than $5000 to fix everything, and suggested that they had a wonderful used car that they could do a nice deal on in a trade. That way she could avoid the cost of the inspection (wonderful chaps).
So she said she would think about it. When she got home, I noticed an small oil leak and told her to get them to fix it. She drove back and they refused. "It's an old car", they said. "There is nothing we can do. You should trade it in because it will save you lots of money. But anyway, it's only a small leak, so just top it up every week."
My wife is Japanese and trusts people... sigh... Anyway, about a month later, no surprise, the engine light went on. She took it in to the dealership: "Oh the battery is dead. You have to buy a new one. Also, there is a serious problem with the electrical system. It will cost $2000. Why don't you just trade in your car for this younger model?"
Luckily, down the street from us there was a young guy who was just getting started setting up his own shop (he was working out of his home garage until he could raise enough money to rent a building). I asked him to take a look. Sure enough: the oil pan was over tightened, which cracked the gasket. Oil leaked on the battery lead, which corroded the insulation. This caused a short. It needed a new battery lead and a new oil pan gasket. He also did the car inspection and fixed everything up... all for $800.
TL;DR: Never do your repair work at the dealership. It should be obvious, really. It is run by the same people who sold you the car -- they are out to screw you over no matter how they can do it.
If I ever buy a new BMW I will consider it as-is unless I can find an independent shop to do warranty work because the dealer can't be trusted. I will also do European delivery to prevent my local dealer from touching the car. This likely makes it impossible to buy another one.
I'm tempted to go back to an older car that I can just fix myself. New cars are apparently intended to be leased for a few years, abused and destroyed at the hands of inept dealers and then thrown into a shredder.
Sure you might still need to threaten them with the law, mechanics being how they are.
You can enforce the right to repair through legislation without dealers.
> What takes time is building the facilities and technology to create reliable and serviceable electric vehicles.
The battery supply chain is the hardest part, but EV powertrains are so much more simple than an internal combustion powertrain. There is very little maintenance required on an EV drivetrain as well. That's why Tesla is warrantying their Semi drivetrains for a million miles.
There are benefits to the electric drive train but that's not the limitation. The rest of the car isn't really any different and because the battery is so expensive (as you point out) the rest of the electric car really suffers.
This appears to be what BMW is saying.
100k miles isn't “well beyond any warranty period” for non-EV powertrains; a number of car brands have a base (not extended) 10yr/100k mile powertrains warranty.
With that said I don't think it's the reason BMW is not ready to mass produce electric, and I take them at their word in the article. If you're going to break into the electric market it's going to take a lot of money to shoulder past the three marques that got there first (Tesla, Nissan, Toyota).
The secret sauce is the community, the supercharger network, the ability to seamlessly plan a trip with every charge stop pre-populated and supercharger availability right there on the screen and updated on the fly. IMO, it makes everything else feel janky and outdated. An electric BMW looks like an existing car with electric bits bolted on, and good luck figuring out where to charge.
The biggest issue with BMWs is overcomplicated electronics and software leading to bugs or eventual weird glitches. I stopped buying them because of this, and IMO the Teslas looks even worse. I see a lot of used cars in my future.
As to the network stuff, and charger availability on the screen: isn't that purely an early-adopter problem? Why wouldn't chargers be as prevalent as gas stations?
Tesla charging infrastructure "just works", and charges quickly, at generally-known rates.
I've perused other charging station maps and they're all hit-or-miss. You'll get 220v but not high amperage. You'll find the charger does't work. You'll find the chargers are full and cars are just parked there not going anywhere (Tesla works around this by charging people money for leaving their cars on a charger after they're full). You'll find the charger is private -- can only be used by employees of the office building you drove to, relying on finding a charger there.
That said, this system works fine for 99.9% of daily driving where you charge in known places -- every day at home, or every day at work, or whatever. But the more I've looked into the charging infrastructure for non-Tesla vehicles, the LESS impressed I've been. At many of these public chargers you'll have to be parked for 4+ hours to get even 20-30 miles' worth of charge.
(Well, that and undercarriage coatings...)
With EV's breaking down less often and less routine maintenance because they just have fewer moving parts, that's going to destroy the dealer business model.
Most new ICE cars don't have massive power train problems either. The reliability issues are in auxiliary systems.
The non-powertrain components are irrelevant for this comparison.
As far as ICE powertrains being fairly reliable, that is a triumph of engineering and due to literally trillions of dollars of investments. And yet regular maintenance on the powertrain is required even today, whereas electric powertrains do not have such requirements.
In an EV it’s possible this could happen when needed most as the brakes are used much less frequent than an ICE car.
This is very much correct. For the warranty period (after which the OEM doesn't care and the customer stops taking it to the dealer) most maintenance is suspension components and leaks.
This doesn't eliminate dealer service revenue. If anything it makes it better because you remove the entire class of time consuming but low paying warranty jobs.
Companies like VW actually have the know-how and years of experience to scale any electric car ambitions very rapidly. Tesla is still trying to figure out how to mass produce cars and based on the current velocity of the Model 3 production they still have a bunch of things to learn and figure out.
Of all the nice looking cars they have in their line up, one has to wonder why they went with an i3.
Put that same capability in a 3-series and it would have been a different story.
...from an American perspective. The i3 doesn't sell much in the US, but is I think the second highest selling EV in Europe at the moment, people here apparently don't have any problem with the way it looks.
What might look silly from the outside is an unparalleled experience in accelleration on the inside. Only Tesla's, motorcycles and proper sport cars can match the 0-50 km/h (which is everything you care about in a city commute).
EDIT: This isn't restricted to just the auto industry. Consider the need for Lockheed to create their Skunk Works team [1].
I see the Skunk Works planes as similar to the Corvette or Viper or Supra or i8 or any other top of the line car. It's something you think of in the back of your mind when you buy a Malibu, Neon, Corolla or 3 Series.
Maybe I am blind to some other part of Skunk Works history that you are referring to.
You either build the innovator internally (Skunk Works), or you let your innovative competitors eat your lunch. Someone with less bureaucracy and incentive to maintain the status quo is going to innovate.
Nothing fancy about it.
Yeah sure. VW takes their ICE models and equips them with an electric motor and battery. The reason why it doesn't sell is that it costs more than 2 times as much as the ICE model and EVs have an extremely low range.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OczqMbWB63I
These things are getting better every year. The latest e-golf already has twice the range of the first model at the same pricetag. In 2020 the range of the egolf will probably reach more than 300 miles and it's cost will go down.
Battery costs apply to every car company equally except luxury car manufacturers. It may look like collusion from the eyes of a conspiracy theorist but it's simple economics: EVs are too expensive.
Tesla gets a free pass nothing is "too expensive" in the luxury market.
The reason Tesla started with a luxury car is because they are a new company without the same resources and manufacturing experience as the already established car companies, so anything they built, it would be very expensive anyway.
There is really nothing preventing from the established car manufacturers from selling a cheap electric car, the reason they don't it's simply because their businesses is not geared towards selling non-ICE cars.
Electric cars are much more simpler than normal ICE cars. ICE cars are basically a bunch of controlled tiny explosions and those explosions need to be kept in check so there is a lot of nuances and engineering aspects that can simply be skipped on a electric car.
The i3 is a BMW Prius essentially. Think of it like a modern Isetta. In that context I think it actually looks very nice. At least it doesn't have love handles.
That's pretty undesirable.
Examples:
https://www.autotrader.com/cars-for-sale/vehicledetails.xhtm...
https://www.autotrader.com/cars-for-sale/vehicledetails.xhtm...
I've been checking out the off-lease used ones. In my area, they've been selling for $15k-$20k USD (years: 2014-2015).
https://phoenix.craigslist.org/search/sss?sort=date&query=bm...
https://www.carvana.com/search?SortBy=LowestPrice&models=fr&...
Whereas, I feel something like the Prius, Volt, Bolt, Leaf, or i3 deals with the aerodynamics/style poorly. On top of that, these cars may be made to cater to some early-adopter/green person market subgroup. Maybe those traditional makers do not foresee the EV as the top choice, but as a niche and limited scale product?
On top of all that, lithium battery packs for EVs are expensive currently, look at all the problems Tesla has been having making theirs over the years. Once the price drops, I think automakers will be able to make less compromises elsewhere, getting better looks, performance, and features at the expense of pure efficiency.
Its easily the best car I've owned because it's reliable, cheap to operate, dead quiet, and has a nice amount of get-up-and-go.
So no, the current crop of EVs are not undesirable. They may not meet everyone's needs (e.g., in rural Idaho where the nearest town is 40 miles away). But if they do meet your needs, the current set is great.
Besides costing an inordinate amount of money, if they did it'd be completely anonymous and if it turned out not so great compared to a standard 3-series (handling, weight, performance) it would tarnish the entire line-up.
It is pretty nice to drive though.
I imagine one factor in not putting i3 guts in a 3 series is that the i3 is about 2/3 the size and weight of an F30.
Every electric car that Ford or BMW sells is the loss of a sale of a higher margin ICE car. Because of this, none of them have an incentive to switch unless some outside force makes them, or they see a huge percentage of customers demand electric and only electric.
It's not just culture or stubbornness. These companies simply don't want to replace their high margin ICE cars with fairly-invested expertise and tooling, with a lower margin car that will, almost at best, just 1:1 replace the sale of a higher margin ICE car.
So they'll have "options" here and there, but they are going to wait and see for at least half a decade before they commit to anything like meaningful production numbers, a charger network, etc.
BMW and some other manufacturers are being slow to adopt EVs because they aren't as profitable right now. So they'd rather keep milking the ICE cash cow as long as they can.
They also know that if they seriously offered competitive EV alternatives, people would buy them.
Why offer an EV version of a 3-Series with a smaller profit margin than an ICE model with a bigger one until they absolutely have to?
That's what it comes down to. The good news is they don't have a lot of time left to keep this b.s. up, but don't believe their lies about EVs. They are here, you can buy them, they are great.
And why should BMW et. al. sell something that isn't profitable? They aren't Tesla and can't just burn through capital. On the other hand, when it does become profitable I somehow think they will have something just as good out, it's not like Tesla had some incredible magic tech that nobody else does. And at least an electric BMW would not have a build quality of a beaten up Yugo like Tesla does.
The difference between then and now is Tesla. I wonder if anyone asked BMW if they were given the opportunity to mass produce the Model 3, if they would have the same opinion.
As for looks, the i8 looks pretty nice. It is apparently going to be available in an electric version this year.
I know there is a crowd of people that are enthusiastic about the EV-1 and think GM killed it, but I'm pretty sure GM had a closer look at whether they could profitably produce them than the enthusiasts.
Which if you compare that to the state of the world in 2008 when Tesla launched its Roadster you can see the difference of "We can't buy anything to solve this problem" and "This is a problem, what needs to be created to solve it?" mentalities.
It is always a challenge at BigCorp to get them to actually create something new, they don't have to push the state of the art because they already have a profitable business. Sometimes this attitude is responsible for their demise.
Not as judged by buyers.
According to https://insideevs.com/february-2018-plug-electric-vehicle-sa... Model 3 is already outselling Bolt (in February 2.5k vs. 1.5k)
Model 3 is on track to sell 20k per month within months, which will be 10x Bolt sales.
If buyers show 10x preference of X vs. Y, Y is not "reasonably comparable".
I wonder if they had offered them for sale at prices that would cover their parts obligations if that would have gone over well.
My question is, what if GM had offered them for sale for $250,000 (I'm making up an obscene number) because they estimated that their service obligations would cost that much? How well would that have gone over with the enthusiasts?
In a publicly traded automaker you must present a business case for a vehicle before you are allowed to design and build it. The business case has to show some kind of profit one way or another, otherwise the board or executive committee reporting to the board will not approve it.
It would be fascinating to see the business case for the Bolt EV, as it really looks like it's not making money from direct sales (speaking only from my understanding of public materials, I have no special knowledge of this).
Disclaimer: I work for GM, but not on any of this.
But the exact timing also depends on the fact that only Tesla tried really hard to bring the electric car to the mainstream. Actually, BMW was pretty early to the game with the i3 - an excellent car which came to market as early as 2013. Certainly not a huge seller at its price, but quite a good electric car. The main problem was the lack of quick iterations, it has gotten one battery upgrade since then, no variations like the rumored i5 came to be.
As 2020 is almost around the corner, let's hope that BMW comes out with exciting electric cars. Also VW seems to be set to release a couple of very serious electric offerings in that time frame (I.D, Buzz).
If we can start mass production of electric cars by then, that'd be amazing
[1] https://insideevs.com/samsung-sdi-from-130-whkg-to-250-whkg-...
I mean, really, who would buy the old tech (combustion engine) when even the manufacturer itself (BMW) announces that they are soon (in 2 years) to be obsolete? Cars are expensive and not supposed to be such a short-term investments.
They will have to export all their inventories produced in those 2 years to less humanitarian countries like mine, where hardly anybody considers gas emissions as a problem for us to act upon, and government does not promote EVs by any means. It is only logical for them to regard such countries as a market to dump their previous-gen technologies.
Also, tesla has an enourmous fault tolerance compared to these guys, not to mention they produce cars which are quite more complex.
You cannot afford to "patch up" cars if you are producing thousands a week, that would make you run out of money very quickly.
The increased the aggressiveness of their own schedule. If they hadn't, we'd either be marveling at the speed of their scale-up.
So, it gives their competitors ability to point and laugh a little bit longer while avoiding investing in EV ramp-up.
They're making money now on the current system, not much incentive to do anything besides look like they're trying to be more efficient whilst moving just quick enough to hit efficiency standards.
"Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak."
They are obviously going to say this to keep investors from betting their money on Tesla.
BMW surely has money from their other class of vehicles to continue funding their electric motor expedition.
The drive is available in numerous models, including plug-in hybrids. These cars only perform better with more batteries added. Over the long term, it's interesting to ponder removing the ICE entirely and put a battery pack in its place.
At the rate Tesla is screwing up, BMW might hit 5000 units a week before Tesla does.