Another premium EV for a premium price. I wonder if it manages to find a spot in the market. It seems that at the moment there is a lot of premium EV supply while demand is cooling down.
We in Europe foolishly thought we are beyond that and here we are.
Thanks german industrialists.
Western companies are completely asleep at the wheel, pun not intended.
The U.S. is trying to do some good old fashioned protectionism to protect its industry but it’s either gonna fail, or it’s gonna reveal the massively lagging U.S. economic system which is incapable of building infrastructure and is increasingly incapable of encouraging R&D and new industries.
The only thing that could hold the Chinese back right now is the Chinese govt which has already managed to destroy 2-3 industries over the past few years (the extremely fast growing tech industry comes to mind) with arbitrary policy and decision making.
If I were a Chinese company right now, I would try and diversify my supply chain, R&D and even top talent into safer Western countries with auto making talent like Germany. However, fierce price competition in China may mean they don’t really have the luxury to do so.
I think now would be the time for the EU or individual European counties to sprinkle some light protectionism on their auto industry to give Chinese EV makers a reason to shift there without angering their Chinese govt overlords.
(BTW the tech industry is not destroyed by any means. Since the goal at that time was anti-monopoly...it did limit the market power of top players though hard to tell its net utility)
This is because in real politik vehicle manufacturing means the ability to make war machines and artillery. If we subsidize China more it is just asking for military losses.
They ordered new NLAWs to be produced, in peacetime, and the lead time on a small batch is like 3 years. I do not see any possibility of winning a prolonged war against any enemy that wears shoes more sophisticated than sandals.
The Western military-industrial complex was dissing primitivity and backwardness of Russian army, and with 10x the budget, I thought they were right. I thought Ukraine would lose militarily, or politically, or lose morale, thank kind of thing.
I never imagined that western military complex is so proud of having it's few expensive and fancy toys that it has actually grown incapable of producing abundant supply of shells and bullets. South Korea supplied more artillery shells to Ukraine than US or EU. Looking at the state of affairs, i cannot help but thing corruption and fraud.
But how can this be? We are comparing to the two most corrupt countries on the plane, Russia and China.
All of western military leadership that is currently antagonising China must be barking mad, China has 10x industrial capacity of Russia.
All of Europe drives steel production out by taxing energy to crazy levels. Can’t eat a cookie and have a cookie. Environment or military security.
There is a big influx of these to Malaysia and Singapore. Pretty sure other countries too but these two stands out because they already have some local Chinese population; which makes the Chinese feel more at home. I am also reading that Chinese low-skill manufacturing is trying to find a foot in Africa; though not sure if that's going to work out.
Every time a new model with better battery chemistry, longer range, faster charging is released, it makes a bunch of older models with previous-gen batteries, shorter range, slower charging obsolete to the point of unsellability. Then they end up rotting in an overgrown lot somewhere. https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2023-china-ev-graveyards/
Because of the fast release cadence, a model might become outmoded before it sold enough cars to recoup the development cost, but of course manufacturers can't just stop to save money while everyone else is putting out new models at breakneck speed and eating into their market share. So they're caught in a hamster wheel, burning cash while hoping that someone else will go bankrupt first. WM Motor looks like a candidate: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/chines...
There's some techlore floating around https://pandapawdragonclaw.blog/2023/12/03/bri-notebook-the-... claiming that the overcrowded market is actually good for the industry as a whole because it makes it more competitive abroad, but that's cold comfort for investors who hoped to make their money back and then some.
Ironically Chinese government has quite a lot experience handling overcapacity, sometimes caused by them sometimes not :/
We were supposed / dearly wishing to have solved that by now, thanks to all the "battery breakthroughs" that made it to the front page of HN in the last decade.
Won't prevent us from waiting, though...
Sure, it's a worst case scenario.
How about "someone who's traveling on the exact same bank holiday as the rest of the country, and will not for the love of any deity wait for an hour on a packed highway station while every one is recharging ?"
My point is not that "it's what people actually need 99% of the time", but that "the worst case" is the bar to clear.
Ironically, it's kinda the same issue as electricity grids, except you can't buy range from your neighbors.
Oh, and it has to be cheap, too, by the way.
I honestly though it would be done by the 20s. It's getting harder and harder to argue for EVs every year that goes by without such a model - which also happens to be "every year that goes by without me being able to afford an EV".
I completely agree this is a giant waste of resource to do that with the current battery tech, and that it results in completely unaffordable, suboptimal cars that most people can neither afford nor agree to buy.
Which is also why we need better tech yesterdecade.
The situation really has to improve a lot before the end of the 20s arrive, otherwise we'll see civil unrest unlike anything you can imagine. Our next election cycles in Europe will be 50/50 immigration ("they're coming from your job") and transportation ("they're coming for you car !"). Guess who wins this game ?
Unless you're flying directly into your final destination, I would argue driving is probably faster for everything assuming you need to leave in 12 hours or less. Not to mention exponentially cheaper (ignoring depreciation).
In Europe, I would agree that flying could often be easier and/or cheaper. In the US, I can drive 500 miles (800~km) in 8 hours or less, passing through a few major cities with light/moderate traffic.
When you take into account airport travel, security time, the actual flight time, and leaving the airport, that is often 4+ hours for a 1 hour flight. Short haul flights also only tend to run once or twice a day unless you're traveling between busy cities, so you need to factor that waiting time in as well.
For a middle-age (+) person with friends and family that are starting to die of old age, being able to drop everything and drive overnight to say goodbye could be really important to them. This is something I had not really considered before when thinking about EV charging speeds. Until now, I had really only thought about vacations or business travel, which is not that time sensitive.
Or something like that.
This is the kind of fucking around that eventually leads to finding out. There is a reason Professional drivers aren't allowed to drive for more than 11 hours in a day, and have to take regular brakes.
Is this kind of highway fantasy or just US car culture?
In Europe I do not know a single person that has ever driven 1,000 km in one day. Let alone without stopping to refuel.
You don’t know any Eastern European who drives from the UK to their home country twice a year? London to Warsaw is 1000+ miles and can be done with the ferry in under 24 hours. Here, an estimate from Google maps: 18 hr 19 min (1.015,6 mi) via A2 and A2.
There are thousands of those people on European roads every year before Christmas and after NYE, and in holiday season. I did it myself a couple of times years ago.
> There is a reason Professional drivers aren't allowed to drive for more than 11 hours in a day
Yes, 7 to 40 tonnes of reasons and legal rest breaks required between work shifts. Professional drivers do a job, not just driving.