Hacker News Reader

Comment by samsolomon | Hacker News Reader

This is why I love Bollinger's approach to trucks. They are electric, but focused on utility and simplicity.

While likely way more than I would ever pay for a vehicle, I appreciate the approach to design.

EDIT: If you've got a little time to kill. There are some videos on youtube that give a better idea of what these trucks look like.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHOuenVXPig

View on HN

Interesting, talks about stripped-down simplicity... $125K. :-/

Could be because a number of parts are made to be easily removable, such as all of that glass.

Could be that is the cost of an EV that doesn't spy on you or sell subscription features.

Most likely, that's the result of zero savings from the economies of scale that tesla and Ford have built up.

When you look at it, it's truly astonishing (well, maybe not) what economies of scale one can achieve going from ~10k EAU to ~1M EAU (with up to 5M across other models to amortize engineering and common parts).

Yes, but thought the electric car part market should have scaled by now. That leaves a smaller job of building the chassis. By how boxy it is should be easy pretty shortly. Hopefully price will come down quickly, because a simple no-telemetry e-vehicle is what I'm interested it.

It isn't the electric car parts that are necessarily the bit that need to scale, though. The custom-manufactured sheet metal goes from being made out of house to owning your own metal-pressing facilities. The screws, fittings and hardware goes from "what we can buy off the shelf or pay to make custom" to "what's on the shelf was made initially for us". Same story for electronics.

It's not even just the input materials that are helped by two-order-of-magnitude scale differences; assembly is also affected. Say you're considering a $100k robot to replace some assembly step that is currently done by a $10/hr human. At Bollinger-scale, that robot needs to save an hour of labor for each unit to pay for itself in a year. At Ford scale, it needs to save 36 seconds.

Past that, engineering is affected too. At Bollinger, a $100k/year engineer can pay their own salary by shaving $10 off the unit cost. At Ford, that same engineer pays their salary if they reduce the unit cost by $0.1.

Lastly, there are huge NRE's that are inherent to developing a car for sale (or any product, really) that scale very sublinearly with volume (think regulatory compliance and crash testing, prototyping, tooling etc), but that are amortized much more quickly at 1M EAU than 10K EAU.

Given all that, it's astonishing that they are (hopefully) bringing this design to market at only ~2x the street price of the mass-produced competition.

We're moving towards a state where simplicity and privacy is the province of the affluent. A simple, reliable product doesn't make for a repeat customer. If you buy what the Bollinger claims to be, you'll probably take care of it, and won't want to trade it in for a new model every year or three. Ideally they don't get to market your telematics data either. That gives them all of one chance to extract the product's value from you. Add that to the small production runs of a niche vehicle, and the price makes a depressing amount of sense.

“But It For Life” is a double-niched category: from the limited number of consumers interested and educated in the value proposition and from the entrepreneurs willing to build the companies and muster the investors who aren’t turned off by the promise of slow and small growth.

I feel like the investors are the hard part there, not the consumers. For instance, all pay software seems to be moving towards a subscription service, and that's not a consumer-led movement.

>We're moving towards a state where simplicity and privacy is the province of the affluent.

No, not really.

The problem of the wealthy being inherently unequal in the US at least is a consequence of our corrupt government.

The law in the US needs to catch up to the computer age regarding privacy (or at least equal the GDPR).

It's not a societal tendency, it's a direct consequence of money having far too much influence in our governing institutions.

Seems like the grandparent is describing what-is and you are what-should-be. Two different things, not necessarily in conflict.

I really like the Bollinger. For the same reasons as you. I'd buy it instead of the Cybertruck if it was price competitive. But I'm not going to pay $50k more just to avoid the smarts of a Cybertruck.

We still have no idea when cybertruck will ever exist nor do we know what it will cost.

To be fair, neither one exists.

Had never heard of them but they look awesome. I'm in love with boxy-looking utility vehicles lately. These look like a less gaudy version of the Mercedes G-Wagon and appeal to my sensibilities.

Thanks!

A lot of pickups are boxy. The Cybertruck isn't exactly svelte, but it apparently has much better aero and mileage. I've been wondering for awhile: Would a sloped bed cover going from the top of the cab to the gate increase the mileage of any pickup truck by some whopping amount? It seems like the aero would go from "ginormously" bad, to just "meh," which could still be a lot.

Probably.

The tonneau cover industry likes to quote a senior-thesis type paper from university engineering students that even one of those improves aerodynamics by 10%.

And modern trucks aren't as bad as they used to be.

Modern trucks are better than they used to be, but they seem to give most of the efficiency back in terms of larger towing/payload capacity. It's absolutely bonkers how capable a "half ton pickup" can be equipped compared to 20 years ago.

With the right kind of aerodynamics you can get a sort of bubble of air of roughly the right shape. Having a hard surface of that shape (wouldn't be exactly sloped as much as a bubble shape without discontinuities on the trailing edge) would be optimal, but you get 'ginormously bad' by having a sharp discontinuity without any turbulence generation.

That can be either the little nubs of high performance cars, or something like Airtabs that are meant for big-rig trucks. And either way you don't get to increase the mileage by a whopping amount as there are still probably shape issues on the leading edge of the vehicle, plus sheer surface area. To do amazing streamlining the whole thing has to be a bubble, including the front edge of the vehicle.

Cool product, but that website sucks. I can't read the paragraph half-way down the landing page because their shitty custom scrolling handler keeps skipping past it.

Why do some webdevs think they need to re-invent scrolling?

This my friend is a deeper problem in our society, not limited to web design. Literally everything sucks if you look at it with a certain pragmatic and utilitarian lens. It's optimized for marketing. We're deranged, confused and unable to function properly - our eyesight has just been limited to quarterly earnings. Our ancestors from 1950s would be appalled at the state of current products and services.

People who were adults in 1950 are often still alive. I don't know that the ones I know have strong opinions either way. They certainly like iPads after never getting the hang of computers...

Wouldn't be street legal here, by the looks of it. No safety for pedestrians. Pure killer machine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com