Ford to put $500M into electric vehicle startup Rivian
reuters.com
reuters.com
Edit: To clarify, my basis for this is something Mike Levine said (he is Ford NA Product Comm Manager):
"Ford’s battery electric F-150 has been under development for some time and will continue as planned. Ford is using Rivian’s skateboard platform as the basis for an all-new vehicle."
A PHEV version wouldn't need nearly as much battery though.
One of the reasons I like Tesla vehicles is that while they look decent they don’t try to overly differentiate themselves. They look like standard mid-market cars.
I would think that if Rivian is targeting the truck/full-size SUV crowd then they would lean on a more traditional look?
Oddly they are both beaten by the Audi A4 sedan and several others.
The Chevy Bolt is a wonderful vehicle, but it looks almost exactly like a legacy gasoline car. A regular person could easily mistake it for the current Chevy Spark. Similarly, the Chevy Volt looks almost exactly like a Chevy Malibu. And a Nissan Leaf looks fairly similar to a Nissan Note.
I'm aware that they don't want the car to look too "scary" or unusual, and it's a huge cost savings to re-purpose existing parts/designs. But just as a personal preference, I wish the more EV-focused concept-car-styled designs could actually make it to market.
Same reason purses don't NEED logos all over them. A lot of buyers of EVs aren't doing it to save the environment - they are doing it to let everyone know they are saving the environment. If your car just looks like a Ford Focus, you lose that.
See http://freakonomics.com/2011/04/21/conspicuous-conservation-... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspicuous_conservation.
In a way, they do. [0]
- it is new
- it is gonna to replace the old
- it has better karma / feng-shui
- it has some improvements in user experience - even if there are disadvantages
- there is this "want have" feeling
The Leaf looked awesome, it was the best looking car I ever owned.
The Gen-II Prius ('04-09) was smoother and looked more uniquely-Prius, but it still had pretty normal headlights and stuff. I think it was the most normal of the bunch.
The Gen-III Prius ('10-14) took the Kammback profile even more seriously but still doesn't look totally alien. Unmistakably Prius, though.
The Gen-IV Prius ('15-present) is where the design went completely off the rails, jarring slashy features on an otherwise-watermelon-seed-shaped car.
The pickup truck is the new SUV, but come on. At least let me pretend to consider if I can fit a sheet of drywall in there.
Also, I hate,hate,hate the trend of putting the spare under the bed floor, instead of under the frame. Clearly a design decision by someone that doesn't use their pickup bed for picking things up...
To be fair, this is the vast majority of truck drivers. Exceedingly few trucks sold today will ever be asked to do something that requires a truck, most are commuter vehicles driver for social status reasons. A few occasionally might tow a boat.
Kind of like all of the "never been off-road" "off-road vehicles"?
In a sign that the universe has a sense of irony, the F-150 factory promptly caught on fire when they announced this.
A F-150 was sold in 2018 every 35 seconds. They sold 450,000 of the things in 2018, and that’s not even counting any other truck made by Ford or anyone else. I guarantee you a huge percentage of those do nothing but commute.
And that’s not how status symbols work. It would be more accurate to say that luxury trucks are status symbols, not trucks. Nobody buys a truck as a status symbol, but maybe they buy a nice truck as one. The same statement applies to cars.
Truck owners are buying trucks largely for the feeling of self sufficiency, a fake one given the sheer amount of resources required to operate a modern vehicle, which is what makes it a status symbol. Its exactly the same as someone who “needs” a Jeep because it occasionally snows, even though their neighbor’s Honda Civic is doing just fine in the same conditions.
Also, the idea that a truck is a good snow vehicle makes me giggle. My Subaru always outperformed them in snowy conditions.
But if you want to attack my vehicle choices; I ditched the Subaru when I left Colorado, a location where it was useful, and switched to a small sedan when I moved to LA. More reasonable, more efficient, and cheaper to operate.
Seems like a reasonable engineering trade-off for an EV to me; unless you can figure out an equally aerodynamic solution with the spare under the frame. You want to maximize range all the time (by reducing drag), but you only rarely need to access the spare.
If you badly need access to spare all the time and you're willing to sacrifice range 24/7 for it, I'm sure there will be after-market solutions, similar to bike-racks.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/11/att-takes-strategic-stake-...
Rivian will be building products with Ford's assistance (and Ford will be building products using Rivian's tech). Ford has been building cars at scale for more than a century, and I'd bet a pretty penny that Rivian will take their advice on how to structure their manufacturing process.
Indeed, Gwynne Shotwell over at SpaceX shows what a Tesla without Musk would look like: functional, industry-leading, and with a history of actually reaching its goals on the timelines set forth.
Personally I think Musk is smart but highly overrated. He makes a lot of dumb mistakes by ignoring advice, and seems to have a lot of impulse control issues. As an ideas man he’s one of the best, but hike badly needs an “adult in the room” to moderate his worst impulses.
I get uneasy when I see a company without proven tech spend more time on marketing videos than showing off the car. If it works, where is the footage of it working up to par?
The reasoning is that there is very limited positive upside from showing off an ugly prototype with all its beta-testing flaws, but a huge potential for a bad demo to kill the market prospects for the model.
I just want more than an overhead shot of it driving through a forest with cuts every half second.
Concept: Might as well be cardboard cutouts. A physical representation of pie-in-the-sky design with little basis in reality. An example would be the VW ID Buggy.
Functional: Usually a Frankenstein vehicle cobbled together from catalog parts with intended purpose of vetting a design or idea. An example would be the EV and Hybrid variants of the Porsche 718 Boxster.
Manufacturing: Very close to the final production model but still with a few kinks. Examples would be the Honda e Prototype, or the Ford Mustang Shelby S560
Rivian doesn't give any clear indication of what they're showing off but want you to believe it's the later when it could be the former.
As with Tesla, Rivian is being judged by its hoped future successes, not its actual track record to date.
(NB: I own a Tesla Model 3 and have the various "self driving" options.)
There's not nearly enough data to make a claim like that.
Safety features can also be considered a convenience, but that doesn't mean they aren't safety features.
Humans zone out, they get tired, they have slow reaction times, they only have 2 eyes, they get complacent. Computers do not.
I mean if you're right and reaction times are all that matter then we don't actually need self-driving cards for the safety benefits, just somewhat improved emergency collision avoidance/braking systems. Much easier problem to solve.
It seems like people are saying it's a big new idea, but it's how things used to be done before uni-bodies. Are uni-bodies not as suited to electric with their large low-slung power packs?
Seems straightforward to me. Modern full-size trucks are still essentially body-on-frame.
Everything built on the F-150 frame looks like an F-150 (F-150, Expedition, Navigator), but something like VW's MEB platform can have a lot more vehicle shape variety (ID 3, ID Crozz, ID Buzz, etc.)
It's a lot like body-on-frame, I suppose, but the idea is all of the powertrain is in a more-or-less flat device, and the seating area is completely disambiguated from the drivetrain.
It didn't seem to think about the danger of removing a crumple zone, but it was definitely eye-catching.
But owning the 3 has definitely made me think a lot of the skateboard model:
* Flat floor, no transmission/exhaust tunnel.
* User interface (screen) is indepenent from body control modules and drivetrain. You can reboot the tablet while you're driving. Your turn signals stop making noise, but still flash! You can walk up to the car and it unlocks even if the tablet isn't working.
IT's interesting ,you can really feel how discrete certain components are, how they can be rearranged and put into a different model. I'm sure there are more dependencies than I realize, though.
It’s used in comparison to “conventional” EV sedans from Ford, GM, and older lead-acid/bulky battery tech where carmakers would take an existing car design (that’s meant for an ICE engine and drivetrain) and merely replace the engine with a motor and put the batteries somewhere where they would fit, usually in a tall box shape under the rear cargo area, under the rear passenger seats, and in the front engine compartment as doing so means not having to drastically reengineer the car to put the batteries in the floor - but it means there’s less space for batteries and they consume car volume that would otherwise be free for use by the passengers.
I imagine if the Ford Focus Electric was skateboard then they could get 200-250 miles of range and and a fully open frunk and trunk - whereas instead you lose more than half the trunk space (no spare tire either!) and the engine compartment is still full of legacy components with no passenger storage area - for only 150 miles of range.
This contributes towards the perception that the legacy automakers aren’t taking BEVs seriously enough because none of them have developed and shipped a true battery-first (I.e. skateboard) car design.
Do you mean off their main production line? They’ve been testing the base platform for years, and their demo vehicles look to be complete.
Perhaps I've been driving people crazy all these years, but "we" usually sounds so much better (even if it is just you) and a lot less ... lousy and self-centered. Maybe he really is the guy -- it just rubs me a little wrong, especially when I suspect it really is we -- as in, the team.
There are marketing videos but for all I know that's an F-150 with a new skin.
You would assume if they really had something with 410 mile range they would have a journalist come and do some long drive, I.E. Tesla going from LA->SF two days ago.
Or showing off it's acceleration. I really don't think they have even a single working truck that does what they say it does yet. Not to say they're a fraud, just that they're not there yet.
Everyone said the X was an SUV, but it looks more like a hatchback! I can't imagine it'd be capable offroad.
It’s big - but not Escalade-big. It’s more accurately described as a large crossover (CUX? XUV?) than a true SUV. Confusingly Tesla refers to the smaller Model Y as a Crossover even though it’s closer to an MPV (Ford C-Max) than a Crossover like a Honda Pilot. I think they’re justifying it by the fact you can get it in a 7-seat config.
Haven't Tesla explicity forbidden the vehicles from going off-road through voiding the warranty?
Note that IANAL -- just a consumer who often sees very clearly wrong "voids your warranty" statements far too often. I don't claim to know the precise hypotheticals here either, but I am confident that it's truly difficult to void your entire warranty (at least in the US).
Sure, pulling your touchscreen out and damaging it in the process = no warranty for the touchscreen. But if an axle subsequently snaps, the manufacturer cannot legally (in the US) deny your warranty claim based on other unrelated vehicle modifications.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson–Moss_Warranty_Act
The onus is on the manufacturer to prove the consumer’s actions caused the product to fail. And off-road use (not rock climbing but driving on dirt roads) is normal use of any vehicle.
See https://www.edmunds.com/auto-warranty/what-voids-your-vehicl.... Car industry experts agree that off-roading will generally void the warranty of any car not sold as an off-road model, or with off-road capabilities that are advertised as such (like 4WD). This is because, as I previously stated, the demands placed by off-road use are very different from the demands of normal road use.
Also see the insurance/warranty limitations for any vehicle rented on the Big Island of Hawaii, which all deny coverage related to the off-road use of any vehicle that doesn't have 4WD.
At least Tesla and VW ID are real and on the road doing real driving.
The Chevy EV1 proved electric vehicles "desirable" before Tesla existed.
I mean, in BTTF II/III, the DeLorean was upgraded with a Mr Fusion and made a flying car but it still used an ICE to drive. How weird is that?
Meanwhile, it's no longer a question that solar and wind are going to comprise a large fraction of our energy supply in the near future; it's only a question of how much, how quickly, whether it will cut CO2 emissions enough, and what the waste/lifecycle costs will amount to. Electric cars are the way things are going; even if Tesla collapsed into its own hype-bubble, every other car manufacturer now produces electric cars, people are buying them, the charging infrastructure is getting built out. The only questions left are what (large) fraction of the market electric vehicles will eventually grow to, how quickly they'll reach it, and whether it will again help our CO2 emissions enough, fast enough, and what waste/lifecycle problems will EV introduce.
It's weird to me that between renewables and EV we have a real chance at Y2K'ing global warming.
Electric cars are older than gas cars, and never really went away, though they spent a long time as niche vehicles.
I can understand where all the car manufacturers have the same problem. They're afraid of building one too many generations of IC-powered designs (which are also following a Moore's Lawish rule of increasingly complex design) but aren't really sure what's next.
For clarity, I assume you are referring to the elimination of sedan models from their lineup. They are producing more crossovers and SUVs, pickups than ever.
They didn't really have a choice, sales on sedans have been dropping like a rock.
But to be clear, this is about 40 minutes east of Peoria.
Looking at their product line up this is strictly for US markets right? This thing would be wildly out of place in any town/city I've lived in.
Global sales of just one truck similar in size to the Rivian - the Ford F-150 - topped 1M units in 2018, making it the best selling vehicle globally, beating out the corolla and the civic by 140k and 250k units respectively.