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Comment by redisman | Hacker News Reader

Interesting to see so many new entrants to the car manufacturing market. I guess internal combustion manufacturing was so dominated by the big boys in US-DE-JP that no one really had the muscle/margins to get into the fight at that point. From what I've gleamed, electric motors are a lot simpler (less moving parts).

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In the early days of the automobile there were hundreds of manufactures in the US alone IIRC. This seems similar in terms of seeing a lot of folks taking a shot at it.

We're seeing a similar thing in China.

Most of the companies have no chance as they're behind the ball on tech, logistics, etc.

Yeah the smart money has really gone into batteries because that's where all the "secret" sauce is. Induction motors are pretty well known at this point. There are companies working on better motors but the expected ROI is rather low and the expected effect on the car overall is low. Advances in batteries in terms of weight or density would be very dramatic because most electric cars are designed around the battery pack.

> Induction motors are pretty well known at this point.

So what about this switched reluctance witchcraft that apparently gives the newer Teslas a significant advantage?

It doesn't. Power to weight of ordinary well done motors is approaching 5kw per kilogram, and top tier ones even passed 10.

Weight of a motor is not an issue for practical considerations for EVs

So why do they have a huge Wh/km advantage over rivals such as Porsche? https://www.xautoworld.com/opinion/taycan-201-tesla-range/

Less aggressive regenerative breaking to compensate for cooling deficiency, and less efficient inverter.

Tesla being able to "turn off" front motor, and lack of differential probably also adds a little bit to efficiency.

I thought switched reluctance was about cost reduction (with maybe a few percent efficiency increase). Maybe weight too.

It's more efficient than an induction motor. An induction motor has the most torque when it's at rest but then generates its own resistance as it spins up and so loses efficiency. In the dual motor setup, Tesla use both types to get the best of both worlds: induction to accelerate and then it cuts off at some point and uses only the switched reluctance for efficiency.

Man, induction motor has 0 torque when at rest

My mistake. It has the most torque when it first starts spinning.

I lately saw presentation of VW also claiming how EV is several times “simpler” and “less parts”, and then the next slide was that their next gen similar size car is “only” about 2 times more expensive than ICE. 2 times simpler should convert to 2 times cheaper also, or what I miss here? Lithium is so expensive nowadays?

No, lithium price makes very little difference to lithium battery price. All those "industry analysts" from McKinseys and such suggesting it have never set their foot in a battery factory.

The biggest price components of lithium cells is cobalt oxide used in cathode plates, followed by nickel in cell chemistries using them. Both are not cheap at all, and their supply is famously unstable. Metallurgical cobalt goes at $30-40 per kilo in China, and battery grade cobalt oxide at almost the same price.

So for a 200kg battery pack, you will be paying 2000-3000$ only for the cathode material.

Second after this is plainly volumes. Tooling costs are very high. Even model 3 and BAIC EU are rather low volume by industry standards. You have to add to that that EVs don't share chassis/platform with any other high volume car, and thus can't share the bodywork tooling costs.

We start to see platform sharing between thermal and electric. E.g. Peugeot new e-208 have very high part commonality with regular 208.

Certainly more copper in an EV compared to an ICE vehicle, and the batteries more expensive as well, I presume. I know Tesla's use electric brake calipers as oppose to the normal hydraulic ones, not sure if other manufacturers are doing the same. Since the electric motor is so much smaller than an engine/transmission combo they'd have to rearrange most of the front end crumple zones. Add to that the cost of x5-10 software and UI devs.

> Add to that the cost of x5-10 software and UI devs

That problem seems to be self-inflicted, though.

I'd love to see a Mazda-designed, touchscreen-free EV.

Does there even currently exist a consumer EV without a touchscreen?

Bollinger's models, but they're trucks.

And also absurdly expensive, to the point of making Tesla look affordable.

Until Apple or Android can unify car's entire UI it'll be up to the manufacturers or whoever they contract it to.

And who's going to design and build an EV without a touchscreen these days?

ICE cars don't have a moderately complex subassembly that is repeated thousands of times per car. "Less parts" is only true if you count classes instead of instances (pardon the OOP nomenclature).

It's just not scaled up enough yet.

what you’re missing is that complexity doesn’t correlate to price

Doesn’t it? In very basic level price=cost of input materials+workforce+profit. Amount of needed work is directly correlated to complexity. Therefore with other variables same simpler should mean cheaper. Here some other variables may be not same. Either economy of scale is not in favor yet, standardization and production levels are still low. Or higher profits are taken.

Price is determined by what people will pay, not by the cost to produce something. This is driven by supply and demand, while complexity can reduce the available supply it is not the only factor and for many products it’s not even close to the dominant one.

As well complexity in design doesn’t absolutely correlate to manufacturing costs. Usually that’s dominated by labor, and extremely complex systems are designed to be made with less labor.

For EV's the cost is about the batteries and manufacturing scaling. I think the cost of battery grade lithium isn't the full story on battery costs. Guestimation on my part is it's around $1000-2000 per car.

A 100 pound bar of gold is 100 times simpler than ICE cars. Guess which one is more expensive?

This is a purely political statement. It is pretty easy to release cars on paper.

A market for political statements has always had a pretty low entrance barrier, all you need is a good PR manager.

Perhaps also the demand for them is large, and the 'big boys' either ignoring or actively hampering their development requires others to step in.

> so many new entrants to the car manufacturing market

Electric cars are easier to make than modern ICE vehicles.

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