Ford and VW Agree to Share Costs of Self-Driving and Electric Cars

Well VW is due to release cars based on their new electric platform this year and the next few years going forward. They are called id https://www.volkswagen.co.uk/e-mobility/en.html. I don't think they are necessarily late. BMW and Mercedes have made similar investments in all electric platforms. They are all basically going full force in that direction now and have been for a few years. Note that VWs platform will find its way into cars of all of their other brands (SEAT, Skoda and so on).

BMWs CEO left recently because he did not execute quickly enough on their electric strategy squandering their initial lead.

Do note that in many cases those board rooms are not just stuck with executives of the company but representatives of the unions. The later stands to see significant loss in jobs as the needs for labor drop considerably with EV drive trains.

While you suggest 200 miles or forget it, I suggest that 250 or near it is the absolute requirement for ENTRY level cars. Now a rental fleet, like how they do scooters, could fare well with sub 100 mile cars. Premium cars need to set their bottom level at 300 miles or more.

Remember, all these range numbers are at 100% battery capacity and mild to warm weather. Hence we should not accept less than 300 now. Tesla has been there for years and there is no excuse for any premium brand not doing the same.

As mentioned in another article, I really get the idea the BMW exec recent step down was resulting in part because of that laughable new Mini

Are you sure the Chevrolet Bolt is not available where you live? Here in The Netherlands they're everywhere as Opel Ampera's. The latest one has 420km range I think.

>bullshit from most* of the incumbents because the boardrooms can't give up on the idea of ICE

I think its more down to the public. They offer EVs but most buyers stick with ICEs.

VW's e-Golf isn't the best EV, but they have one people can buy in the US. It's not vaporware.

https://www.vw.com/models/e-golf/section/overview/

Yes, this is pretty exact description of a current state of affairs in the EV market. I would also mention Renault and PSA (with Opel), which also trying to ride on EV wave.

I was shopping for an electric car just two months ago and you're right but I'd add that while Nissan now has the Leaf Plus with longer range, if you order one you only get it in 2020. Also, a lot of these options (Bolt, Kia Kona, Leaf Plus) are at price levels, especially if you add any options, that are close to the Tesla 3, but after driving all of them, the Tesla is just a better car.

> ok yeah the Bolt was quite good but they didn't bother launching it in my country (uk) so its not on my radar, and they didn't bother trying to sell any

That's not really fair. You can't buy a Renault Zoe in my country (US), even though it is by most accounts a great electric car. I don't get to ignore their entire lineup, just because they don't happen to sell them here -- the world is bigger than any one particular country.

The Bolt is quite good, it's highly competitive against modern EVs, and the only reason it's sold "at loss" is because they sell out instantly, and can't make more of them fast enough to fulfill all demand -- a problem they are actively trying to fix https://electrek.co/2018/07/03/gm-increasing-chevy-bolt-ev-p...

I see it more as a hedge. I think the prevailing opinion is growing bearish on fully self driving cars. great progress has been made, but as we (the public, at least) learn more, it just seems like production ready vehicles are further away.

my take is that the technology is too valuable (and disruptive) to not invest at all, but so expensive and far away that it doesn't make sense for an established manufacturer to give it the full court press.

The threat is real. Tesla has eaten into BMW sales enough that their CEO just departed because of it.

https://www.ibtimes.com/tesla-domination-reportedly-cause-bm...

"I wonder what the C-suite discussions were like that led to a collaboration between rivals on this topic."

Probably "nobody cares about the technology anyway; we'll differentiate on branding, like always. A car is a car."

Rivals have collaborated on platforms before. (For instance, Mitsubishi and Chrysler)

I doubt it. Contrary to the rose-colored projections of analysts, self driving cars are going to massively increase car usage. Self-driving significantly reduces many of the "costs" of driving: time (because you can do other things while driving), frustration, attention, danger, need for a license, et cetera. When costs go down, usage inevitably goes up. Not to mention the spectre of unattended cars circling for parking spaces or rehoming. And since the human driver is by far the biggest cost of deliveries, that is going to spike massively.

Now it's certainly possibly that sharing will reduce the number of cars sold, and electric cars may increase their lifespan. But with massive increases in usage, I don't think it'll make much of a dent.

No, you made that up. There has been no decline.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/200002/international-car...

We’re going to add another 2 billion people and the world is getting richer. What do you think that will do the car sales?

I agree with this, plus another factor that I rarely hear discussed is the lifecycle of electric cars. If Elon is to be believed, electric cars should have a useable lifespan about 5 times longer than ICE. Are the traditional automakers prepared for Americans to come in for new cars once every few decades instead of once every few years?

Maybe, but more likely car sales are declining as part of the normal business cycles which has seen ups and downs in car sales for a hundred years or so.

The sales numbers are great from Tesla, but the rest of the car industry sells electric cars too. They are a small vendor is you include all car types.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/666130/global-sales-of-e...

Not really. Large automakers have been working together for years.

It is interesting that Tesla thinks they can compete without doing this (I'm not sure how true this statement is).

The problem is then you are driving an "IoT car". One hack of a "central server", one lying or broken set of sensors, one crack or loss of encryption keys, and someone has control over a huge number of cars.

Plus you run into issues of what happens if the central server goes down, connection issues, new or changing scenery or tons of other little issues.

IMO companies working on self driving are on the right track here. That car should be able to fully self drive alongside humans without a single byte of data going in or out of the car.

I think the problem with that is that to be generally useful, autonomous vehicles need to operate in environments with plenty of entities that are not participating consistently in the standard:

Human driven cars, pedestrians, bicyclists (about half of whom dart around unpredictably, ignoring other vehicles and traffic control signals), motorcycles (like bikes but faster), the weather, etc.

So, yes, much cheaper and easier to implement, but also not very useful because they won't be able to drive very many places people want to go.

Cell phone coverage isn't 100%. This is both by coverage area and reliability. I've been in remote areas with no signal (when you don't see even one car over an hour of driving it is hard for cell companies to see the value). I've lost all phone service when a backhoe took out a line. I've lost LTE service for a month when lightening hit the tower. I expect my car to still work correctly in all of the above situations. Only a car that can work without communication counts.

Don't get me wrong, there are advantages to being able to contact a central server. Knowing where they is heavy traffic lets the car plan a less busy route. Knowing the weather is bad can let the car know to force you to stop now rather than get stuck when the road is impassable both ways.

Unfortunately most of the value of an autonomous vehicle comes from it being fully autonomous - all the systems which are only mostly autonomous and may return control to a human driver at any moment are much less useful, because the human has to be there on standby.

Centrally assisted cars could benefit, but what happens when the central service is down because GCP is down? Or just a local disruption to 4G/5G services?

And much of the work of autonomous driving is safety within the human reaction time; doing it centrally is only going to increase latency.

> It seems to me that one could make something that is a lot cheaper, a far easier to implement, a lot safer, more environmental by letting go of the ideal that the vehicle should be autonomous.

As long as it doesn't imply "more profit" it's not something capitalism will naturally converge to.

If we were smart we'd have a single automaker offering 3 models (small city car, sedan, some kind of truck/suv) in 1 color with as few combinations of options as possible, coming out of a few gigantic fully automated factories.

Same with phones, computers, &c. Each industry is basically 10 companies inventing the wheel, perpetually, forever, spending insane amount of work, time and money on the same problems and not sharing their progress.

Why optimize for the 5% case other than "well, that's how we do things now"?

EVs will have a true breakthrough in the marketplace when batteries will hit economies of scale and drop in price enough for the car to hit price parity with ICE. At that point, the mechanical simplicity and lower maintenance & operations costs will make EV's a no-brainer for everyone. And according to which consulting shop's learning curves you look at, that day is only 2-3 years away.

It costs billions to make a self driving system like this. It is hard to fund multi billion open source projects.

I guess at the point where EVs and SDVs gain significant market share

What? Of course it is. Companies develop certain models together and then they sell it under their own brands all the time. Peugeot Partner/Citroen Berlingo and pretty much every van out there is a shared development.

Yes - a market that went full mercantalist companies would not be sane or functional. The only time it becomes illegal is price fixing or similiar.

This is just standardization. If one has something sufficiently better than the standard there is an incentive to defect and use it.

It would only be "illegal" if their collaboration resulted in a monopoly. It clearly doesn't. Two businesses collaborating to fend off threatening competitors is perfectly fine. In fact, it's a good thing insofar as it raises their ability to compete, preserving the competitiveness of the market.

I think it should be the normal thing when is about safety, it would be anti-humanity to say have an invention that makes better breaks and not sharing them with the other manufacturers or for "self driving" to have 20 different implementations, using 20 different training data sets on 20 different OS+frameworks+hardware combinations, if you can get this reduced to a few it should improve safety.

Also keep in mind that this companies do not compete on most of the parts of a car, many of this parts are designed,created and sold by third parties, this third parties can make products for different companies. I assume that now there is not a sufficiently large number of companies building this electric cars parts or self driving hardware and software from which the car producers can buy this parts.

"Is that even legal?"

What law would it break? Why wouldn't that imaginary law also apply to, say, mobile phone manufacturers who have entered into agreements to use each other's patents without specific permission or payments?

VW seems to specialise in having a number of brands that sell similar vehicles that differ in fairly minor ways.

Toyota figured out the Hybrid tech and then licensed it to everyone else, if I remember correctly.

Lol

I think the conspiracy is how much they've overplayed Tesla. Let's meet in the middle.

I'm not sure if there's such thing as a tenured journalist but there ought to be.

If my mortgage payment depended on view count I would definitely have a bias whether I meant it or not.

Tesla? I thought they had gone bankrupt.

Nobody says car buyers of the future have to buy an EV.

This transition is not unlike the shift from film cameras to digital imaging. Film is far from dead, but the economies of scale, particularly in film-camera manufacturing have disappeared. The romance of the photographic darkroom is still alive and well.

If self-driving cars live up to the hype, in the distant future, insurance companies may charge more to insure human drivers, and carbon taxes may make ICEs slightly more expensive to operate, but otherwise, it is an open road.

From a technical perspective, nothing about EV design forbids tight suspension, responsive steering, and quick acceleration/braking. Indeed, stripping all the comfort from a car will tend to make it lighter, and electronic control is likely to permit quicker response times all around.

The only thing that an EV cannot deliver is the noise of an open pipe (without the silliness of a retrofitted speaker). I backcountry ski a lot, in areas shared with snowmobilers who love the 'BRAAP' of a barely-muffled two-stroke. I keep hoping for a competent electric snowmobile, not just for the quiet, but also so snowmobilers might glimpse the life-changing experience of being immersed in both deep powder and silence at thirty miles an hour.

Run silent, run deep. (and, well, when an F/A-18's afterburner rips the sky in half, elate, 'cause that's rad, too.)

Great and all, but I'll never purchase an automobile if I can help it. They are garbage, in my opinion. They feel like cheap toys, like kids' wagons. I've driven and ridden in horseless carriages and, aside from the acceleration, there's nothing special about it. Besides, as a horse rider, even the Ford Model T 0-60 isn't anything magical. It's...mundane to riders (who aren't on donkeys). The Bugatti Type 13, however, is objectively insane. Call me a luddite, but I want to feed and care for my animals. I want an 6 or 8 horse team that puts out gratuitous amounts of power and, yes, NOISE. I want sharp steering feedback and beefy leg muscles and stiff, aggressive saddles. I don't want a damn horseless carriage, I want a real freaking racing horse with all the money poured into the performance, and none into comfort.

There are tons of buyers like me, too. SoCal has a huuuge horse culture of guys who buy old stallions, mares old and new, donkeys, oxen teams, carriages, carts. Tons of us LIKE riding. Tons of us LIKE offensively smelly animals. Tons of us LIKE manually commanding our animal to move. What about us? What happens when other people finally surrender their autonomy to shitty oil powered machines?

What Ford should really do is build a mid/rear saddled mustang-based sport carriage. Enough of the gasoline automobile nonsense. It's over a decade away anyway. Let the people who like riding, ride!

> even the Tesla Model 3 0-60 isn't anything magical. It's...mundane to riders (who aren't on Harleys). The P100D ludicrous mode, however, is objectively insane.

Clearly you weren't in the Model 3 Performance. While not quick as fast as the P100DL's 2.4 second 0-60 time, it still does it in 3.2 seconds, which is only a hair off from the 565 horsepower Nissan GT-R.

> ...NOISE...offensively loud engines...

See, I actually prefer the quiet of an EV for one reason:

When I flex the acceleration of an EV, I like the stealth. Specifically, I like that it doesn't announce to every cop within a 1 mile radius that I'm gunning it.

Also, only other car guys are impressed by your noise. Everyone else rolls their eyes, especially when it's some sub-200 horsepower shitbox that isn't even flooring it. There are too many car enthusiasts that delete their muffler and then talk about how good their car sounds because they equate simply being loud with being good.

Yeah, I currently drive a Subaru BRZ. I love its handling, and shifting the gears is fun, but my next car is going to be a performance EV. Fuel economy plays a part in my choice. I considered a Nissan GT-R for my next car, but I'm only going to own 1 car, and I don't want to have something that gets 20 mpg as my daily driver.

A lot of folks said the same thing about their horses and buggies. 20 years from now, people will roll their eyes at the view that electric vehicles are inferior to gas guzzlers. You'll come around.

There are tons of you, but you are still a small minority.

I'm a car guy myself I've got a '75 F-100 its big its loud and sucks down gas like its going out of style (which it totally is) but we are definitely a minority. I drive an old truck because of the exact reason you listed modern cars feel like cheap use up and throw away appliances, you cant service them yourself because they all require proprietary dealer scan tools.

But for everyone of us there are dozens of Karen in HR who just wants to go to work and the store and have comfortable, easy unoffensive driving experience and that's who car companies target. Car companies don't care about enthusiasts except for maybe a few specialty models because they don't make them their money. Hell Ford makes more profit from extending credit to people than actually selling the cars.

Word of advice I've been giving to my car buddies is grab whatever car/bike you want at this point and hold on to it like grim death cause the used car markets going to go nowhere but up especially for pre OBD cars as more get junked and the cars made with planned obsolescence cant be really resold because they need $5k of sensors replaced, gas might be going away in the future but we can embrace things like Ethanol (objectively a better fuel than gas anyways and carbon neutral) and keep them driving well into the future.