I really don't understand the whole cars are in league with big oil. What on earth do the car companies have to get out of it?
The big name in the 90s, Ballard, had buy in from a couple of car companies and no oil companies.
It's much more subtle than that. I grew up around cars. My dad races them as his hobby. We restored a few, and spent plenty of time wrenching on a car together. It was one of the highlights of my childhood. It's still one of the things we often talk about when we see each other. I'm sure it's the reason I got a mechanical engineering degree.
When I think back to those times, a bunch of fragments of memories pop up. The sound a racing motor makes the first time you fire it up. The smell of gasoline vs diesel vs oil vs brake fluid vs transmission fluid. The grease on your hands. Knowing all the components under the hood, how they go together. How to start a cold engine with a flakey carb. How to fix a flooded engine.
There is real nostalgia around cars, and that means gasoline/diesel engines. I can barely enjoy modern cars with their plastic engine fairings and electronic controls, much less an electric car with just batteries and motors. I love building robots, and I'm a professional programmer now, but electric cars just don't excite me from the perspective of working on them. (Driving a Tesla is a different story).
Layer on top of that nostalgia, which I believe most of the people that work in the auto industry have, is the reality of 100+ years of IC engine expertise. If electric cars are the future, how much advantage does Ford have over a startup? Certainly some, but not nearly as much as they do in gasoline engines. Every bit of the drive train is completely different in an electric car. Not only are you throwing out the expertise in engines, but transmissions and differentials as well.
I can imagine that makes their position less defendable.
What you've written I agree with, but it's a long way off from the OP's conspiracy. Cars have been around a long time, so the affinity is natural result all that history.
It will change. I'm also a "car guy". I recently entered into four-year lease on a new vehicle, and on the drive home I told my significant other it's probable that this will be the last ICE we ever buy (and perhaps the last car that we actually drive off the lot ourselves). It's funny to think about.
Sure. And as a petrolhead, I will miss IC engines when they go. But it's a long leap from "implicit affection for IC engines" to "strategically presenting a build-to-fail engine technology to discredit alternative fuel".
When I think back... I think back to sitting on top of a horse, as we make a journey together. The feel of his hair in your hands as you lean forward. The fun of sitting back while he eats grass. So relaxing and with a sense of bonding.
I mean... who would replace a living breathing horse, who is part of the family, with a smelly machine that breaks?
There is real nostalgia around horses. And phone booths. and Sony Walkman. and CRTs. And... and... and... .. .
People hate change. Just because "cars = gas/diesel" to YOU doesn't mean that a new generation of kids won't break their teeth, and learn to be engineers, with electric or hydrogen or whatever....
Likewise, once incumbent car manufacturers can't promote some of the things that people fondly associate with cars, new alternative car companies are better able to put them out of business.
The best point in your comment is that alternative car companies may be able to generate some of that nostalgia early enough to use it against incumbents - I think this is possible and that for some people, they will be happy to trade petroleum good feelings for electric good feelings while petroleum-based cars are still a sizeable part of the market.
The issue is whether or not the "crown jewels" of EVs will be worth so much (ie, via patented features or trade secrets) that this will allow companies to extract rents. The problem with this approach is that rents only come out from high prices--and this is what tesla is doing--and this won't lead to enough revenues to replicate the infrastrucure of the current (behemoth) chassis makers.
So I don't think its quite cut and dry that upstarts will win out (winner take all) in the long run. It seems most likely whoever wins will M&A their way to global scale by integrating into the existing business structure of the global auto industry.
Look at facebook--they are only making money by becoming the next generation of Madison Avenue. They didn't really change the world in that regards, they simply integrated into the existing circulation system of the media-industrial complex.
Madison avenue doesn't care which blinking screed you stare at for four to eight hours a day, they just want to print money.
Similarly, the auto industry couldn't care less about whether or not you drive a clean or petrol motor. Seriously, all they care about is that you take out a loan from them to buy a box of metal that costs 30 to 50k and make your payments on time.
In other words, the business model will not really change.
The issueas about fly-by wire and the inability to work on your car are already here. It costs $700 dollars to change the battery on a BMW, because its locked down by SW. But that is a superficial level of business model change. Upgrades and spare parts will always be a busienesss line, but the core sale will always revolve around ownership of a block of metal or composites that locks you into the need to maintain it.
The more fururistic car companies of tomorrow are likely going to be something like uber or zip car combined with driverless cars and provided on-demand. But until you get to a system that fundamentally changes the distribution of transportation assets and the service model on that scale, the existing players will not really be obsolete.
Yeah, nobody would ever "conspire" when trillions upon trillions of dollars in economic activity, millions of entrenched (and often unionized) jobs, hundreds of billions of dollars of sunk cost in infrastructure, the economies of entire nations and regions of nations, and generations of established thinking are at stake. That never happens. The parent poster is just one of those conspiracy nuts.
Sorry for the combative tone, but I'm a bit tired of seeing this kind of naivete. Of course people will conspire and engage in stalling and other underhanded political tactics to stop things that are a threat to huge industries and entrenched ways of doing things. They'll do that and more. They will lie, cheat, kill, undermine democracy and foster political corruption, start wars, you name it.
A lawyer friend of mine explained it to me this way (we were discussing shady behavior in the startup world): "There are people who will beat you up or kill you for a smart phone or the contents of your wallet. What will people do for a million bucks?" I sort of got it. Answer is that people will do everything they'll do for your cell phone or wallet and then some, but they'll do it with far more sophistication and cunning. The higher the stakes the more cunning and otherwise sophisticated the crimes.
BTW, the mention of unionized jobs above highlights that it's not just oil companies and car companies we're talking about here. We are also talking about a massive infrastructure for making, selling, and servicing oil-burner cars that employs minimally tens of millions of people in the US alone. All of that is threatened by simpler, more reliable, grid-connected battery EVs. EVs are downright apocalyptic for entire sectors of the economy. Hundreds of thousands of businesses will die, and millions will find their entire skill sets completely obsolete.
It'd be like if suddenly there were computers faster and cheaper in every way than silicon-based ones but that are programmable through some utterly alien abstraction that has almost nothing in common with present-day programming languages. All your skills are now obsolete. Google is done. Microsoft is done. Etc...
That is, car companies would love to be able to sell cars that don't need oil, and so would not (by themselves) hinder such technologies.
Things are not as rational as many think. Huge bureaucracies fight for stasis, as if governed by inertia. It's true even if they are dying. Look at Kodak, Commodore Computer, Radio Shack, etc.
While perhaps not quite at the same scale as gas-powered cars, I've been up close & personal with two very large industries going from world-dominating to patent-fire-sale in a very short time. Smith Corona used to be the most recognized brand on the planet, dominating the typewriter market alongside IBM; then the PC showed up, "word processing" became a thing, and after a brief attempt to compete by putting databases/spreadsheets/games on typewriters, that industry evaporated fast. Kodak was, subsequently, probably the most recognized brand, dominating photography & imaging; then the digital camera showed up, resellers (using the film/processing/prints model for foot traffic) were confused with customers (actual final buyers), a half-baked attempt at supporting digital was made, and ultimately the photosensitive chemical consumables market evaporated in favor of digital imaging capital equipment.
Core infrastructure industries can, do, have, and will disappear almost overnight. Interesting history.
I don't know if car manufacturers are in league with big oil per se, but I have heard it argued convincingly that the repair and maintenance costs that are implied by the IC engine and its infrastructure in the car are a huge source of revenue for the entire auto ecosystem, and they just cannot give that up.
Oil companies don't like electric cars for obvious reasons.
Car companies on the other hand have a different reasons: electric cars hardly require maintenance, and a large part of the money car companies make is by selling replacement parts. Car makers were perfectly happy with the current situation, and the new-one threatens part of their business model, and nobody likes to switch from a working proven business model to a new-one.
However, the difference between car companies and the oil industry is that the latter cannot adapt to this new situation. Car makers could just postpone introducing pure electric cars, or introduce even more complex 'hybrid' solutions under the pretense of being environmentally-friendly, while selling even more replacement parts and maintenance - which in my opinion was always silly.
They could hold the boat off as long as nobody else tried to make a real production-ready electric car. So it's no surprise that it was a new-comer to the market that made it first. Suddenly, a lot of car manufacturers jumped the electric train: Renault, Nissan, BMW, Mercedes, ... You really think none of them thought of making an electric car before? GM did, just check out the "who killed the electric car" documentary. I don't believe for a second not every single car maker saw what was inevitably coming, but why kill the goose that lays golden eggs? It would be really hard to explain that to shareholders at a time when the industry is going through a very harsh period.
Consider the costs that companies such as (solely as) Tesla are having to front to get a refueling infrastructure in place to make their cars considerable.
This is a large portion of why families can't really get one of these vehicles. If I can't take this thing on a family trip, there is no point in even trying to get one.
In such a situation having the paradigm shift happen in the first place is bad news for you, especially if you're a leader of the old paradigm. Microsoft, RIM and Nokia were all laughing off the iPhone in the first few years, so people would stay away from them and keep buying their "old stuff".
So yeah, I can very much see how companies like Toyota and whoever else is promoting the totally unworkable fuel cell car "revolution" would be in bed with the oil industry. They'd rather push for something that barely changes the status quo, but at the same time is seen as "revolutionary" in the media, than go into electric cars.
I'd guess car manufacturers have two economic interests: 1) The less energy for automobiles costs, the more people will use them, and 2) the less economic harm there is from climate change, the more people will use cars.
I could see #1 motivating auto manufacturers to support the oil industry, and #2 motivating them to support clean energy.
Are the energy costs for electric cars higher than those for traditional cars? I thought they were significantly lower.
1 - Nobody will buy alternative fueled cars
2 - They must appear to support ecologically friendly energy sources