"The effort had four different leaders and conducted multiple rounds of layoffs. But it festered and ultimately fizzled in large part because developing the software and algorithms for a car with autonomous driving features proved too difficult.... If it ever came to market, an Apple car was likely to cost at least $100,000 and still generate razor-thin profit compared with smartphones and earbuds. It would also arrive years after Tesla had dominated the market. The company held some discussions with Elon Musk about acquiring Tesla.... But ultimately, it decided that building its own car made more sense...."
From "Behind Apple’s Doomed Car Project: False Starts and Wrong Turns/Internal disagreements over the direction of the Apple car led the effort to sputter for years before it was canceled this week" (NYT).
৬৪টি মন্তব্য:
But it festered and ultimately fizzled in large part because developing the software and algorithms for a car with autonomous driving features proved too difficult
The idiocy and arrogance of the obsession with autonomous driving is astounding, from Musk on down. "It will make us all safer' they boast while lawyers lick their chops and home schooled teens brief their elders on the Peltzman Effect...
I just assumed that they were going to force us to buy electric cars, I never thought that they believed we were stupid enough to buy them of our own volition. Just goes to show that the cabal that runs our country has its own blind spots.
“But ultimately, it decided that building its own car made more sense...."
… And not building its own car made even more sense,
Considering how much their AR product is after it arrived years after competitors had theirs on the market; I can only imagine that the $100,000 price point for an Apple car would be quite ambitious.
When you look at what some of these companies value the MSRP of future self-driving vehicles, most would be shocked to realize it is actually cheaper to buy an Escalade and simply hire a full-time driver at $35-40,000/yr.
Techbro captains of industry would tell you there are Pakistanis and Indians coming across the porous border right now who speak passable English and would name their future children after you for the opportunity to be your chariot-slave for the rest of your life. They'll live in a box in the garage. You could install a bell that you could ring whenever you needed In-And-Out burger at 2am.
Leave the electric cars to Elon.
The word that comes to my mind regarding Apple's car project is 'insane'.
"I just assumed that they were going to force us to buy electric cars, I never thought that they believed we were stupid enough to buy them of our own volition."
They are going to force us to buy electric cars. They were hoping we'd go willingly, but they haven't abandoned the whale. If Biden is reelected they will pursue this with a vengeance.
"The idiocy and arrogance of the obsession with autonomous driving is astounding"
It sure is. The problem is much harder than they thought, though I don't understand how they deluded themselves otherwise. I think AI is similar. Easy gains at first, which will be followed by, "Huh, there's a lot more going on in people's brains that we thought."
The company realized the Apple car was likely to cost at least $100,000, but it wouldn't be bitchin'.
Apple gives up on building a car. Why does this feel like a good thing?
True autonomous driving is an extreme engineering challenge. What you have today (and likely to have for at least the next two decades) requires the driver to be alert to retake control, but that runs into a major problem- humans, if given the chance to relax at a job will pretty much always go too far in doing so. Even when I am using cruise control on the highway, I have found that my reaction time to breaking is a bit slower than it would be had I my foot on the gas pedal. Physically, there is no reason for this- my foot isn't any further from the brake, but the difference is my mental engagement with driving just a little more lax than it was before I got automobiles with cruise control. I dealt with this by setting the speed about 5 mph less than 75% or so of the traffic around me, reducing the need for fast braking.
I doubt Steve Jobs would even attempt an "Apple Car" project. Jobs was attracted to the idea of creating a new class of products rather than tinkering with existing products. Was there anything like an iPod before 2001? There was the Sony Walkman and its clones, but you still had to obtain the media through conventional channels -- either you went to a store or you ordered from a catalog. Audio files preexisted the iPod, but you needed a computer to read them. Job launched a project to create a dedicated hardware system to load, store, and read audio data, and nothing else, and therefore able to be very small and battery-powered. Same with the iPhone. Before Jobs there were mobile phones, some with added features. However, the iPhone concept emphasized the added features. Today it's a camera, a video camcorder, and a handheld computer with telephony capabilities added.
Apple replaced a visionary with a bean counter.
Tim Cook has done an excellent job of squeezing every last penny out the projects that were in the pipeline when Jobs died. But that's it. Now that those projects have all played out, it's time to short Apple.
Apple gave up on the idea because they realized the driver would have to be in control, an unacceptable concept.
It was probably less the 'electric' bit that was causing them grief and more the 'autonomous' bit, and if they couldn't crack the autonomous bit (technical / regulatory or both) then there was little point in them trying to out-Tesla the current and upcoming EV OEMs.
It was always a stretch for Apple to play in this space. Car assembly is notoriously low margin and Apple probably struggled with that. The short term blip in EV take up is also an issue — but it is short term. The tech is improving and costs are falling. It will re-accelerate, and soon.
Musk has a lot in common the late Steve Jobs according to their biographer, Walter Isaacson. He points out that “Musk spends about 10 times more of his mental and physical presence on the factory lines as he does in the design room….” As opposed to Jobs who was more about the design.
While I do like Apple products, when Steve Jobs was not at the helm, things are always worse in the Apple world.
"The short term blip in EV take up is also an issue — but it is short term. The tech is improving and costs are falling. It will re-accelerate, and soon."
No, it won't. Not when the non-early-adopters have it brought home to them that they have to sit in their car twiddling their thumbs for 30+ minutes every time they want to "fill up".
"Apple has struggled to develop new products."
In a word, bullshit.
They've developed newer, faster chips, allowing them to ditch the languishing Intel chip platform, invigorating their computer, laptop, and tablet product lines.
The Apple Watch.
AirPods.
The way some in the press talk, you'd think Steve Jobs directly designed every product personally.
If so, you'd better give him credit for creating the culture at Apple that has allowed it to continue to grow and develop products long after his departure.
I'll bet you anything that although they never ended up with a car, the attempt did have some side benefits. Battery technology alone spreads across many of their products. The lidar sensor tech found its way into their higher-end phones and tablets. I'm sure there were benefits to its mapping and traffic services. And whatever tech was developed could be licensed or sold to other auto manufacturers.
That said, I could never believe Apple would become a car manufacturer. The margins are too thin, and state governments regulate too much of the vehicle sales business model.
The problem is much harder than they thought, though I don't understand how they deluded themselves otherwise. I think AI is similar. Easy gains at first, which will be followed by, "Huh, there's a lot more going on in people's brains that we thought."
@Original Mike, +1
My impression is that they haven’t even figured out all the possible issues with sensors (thinking of the Althouse post from last May, where it is now believed that the driver’s car cameras failed to distinguish the white side of the turning tractor-trailer from a brightly lit sky and didn’t automatically activate the Tesla’s brakes).
Apple followed the mistaken theory that if we're good one thing we'll be good at things we try. They are not the only subscribers to this theory.
I am thrilled to see these sellouts to the Chi-Coms do a face plant.
Apple was NEVER going to be able to actually design and build a physical vehicle using advanced manufacturing at scale.
Never...even if they threw all $168 Billion they have in reserve at it.
And when it comes to AI enabled FSD, this captures perfectly the reality of Apple's (and others) hopeless position:
Teslaconomics on X:
"Let me dumb it down for the ones that think there is a #2 behind Tesla in the autonomous driving space.
- Apple has 67 vehicles testing autonomous driving tech that drives ~450,000 miles per year today
- Tesla has over >5,000,000 vehicles w/ FSD hardware & software in service driving ~50,000,000,000 miles per year
This means the Tesla fleet drives 100,000 miles per minute or in other words, Tesla's fleet drives more miles in 5 minutes than Apple's fleet drives in 1 year!
And soon, by 2030, Tesla’s global fleet will approach 30-40M vehicles in service, driving 400,000,000,000 miles per year. This means over >1,000,000,000 miles are being driving per day or nearly 13,000 miles per second!
Tesla has both an advantage in QUALITY & QUANTITY of data for its AI Neural Net training that no other company has or is even close.
Tesla is #1, and to see who’s #2, you will need a telescope.
Let this fact sink if for all the doubters out there."
Apple is in the news for shutting down a program they once denied having.
David53: "Musk has a lot in common the late Steve Jobs according to their biographer, Walter Isaacson. He points out that “Musk spends about 10 times more of his mental and physical presence on the factory lines as he does in the design room….” As opposed to Jobs who was more about the design."
"That’s why I say prototypes are easy, production is hard. It’s like 10,000 percent harder to get to volume production than to make a prototype in the first place, and then it is even harder than that to reach positive cash flow…"--Elon Musk
@Yancey Ward: True autonomous driving is an extreme engineering challenge. What you have today (and likely to have for at least the next two decades) requires the driver to be alert to retake control, but that runs into a major problem- humans, if given the chance to relax at a job will pretty much always go too far in doing so.
It is even more extreme a challenge than that. In many regards, autonomous flying is a far easier problem: far fewer vehicles to control, the ability to exclude uncontrolled vehicles, and fixed objects much further away.
Yet aircraft are no closer to autonomous flight than with the introduction of Flight Management Systems roughly 30 years ago.
Among the barriers is the "pilot out of the loop" problem, which varies from attention lapses to the pilot being unaware of the active flight mode/FMS targets.
When the out of the loop problem rears its ugly head, the result is "startle effect", which never goes well.
Even when I am using cruise control on the highway, I have found that my reaction time to breaking is a bit slower than it would be had I my foot on the gas pedal.
Our newest car (2021 MY) has adaptive cruise control: speed dependent following distance, automatic braking, and speed limit awareness. Put all the modes on, and it will go through town without the driver needing to touch the brake or accelerator.
Fine. It doesn't have a clue about traffic lights, so if there is no one in front stopping at the red, the car will happily sail right through it.
It also makes decisions about safe cornering speeds, and will slow down, abruptly and without warning, if it decides that, regardless of the speed limit, the corner needs a lower speed.
And because of sensor range limits, it absolutely sucks at anticipation.
This is easy stuff compared to autonomous driving.
Perhaps Apple is just concluding the obvious (EVs are another uneconomically idiotic idea from government) and killing the project to save shareholders more expense....
I love it when Rich puts on his Ward Cleaver persona and makes pronouncements based on his authority as a commenter that always seem to support Joe Biden's position on whatever the issue is today while assuring us he is some kind of traditional Republican.
Trump isn't going to make me buy an electric car, I know that much.
This is the conceit of most U.S. businesses that had some early success. The leaders are sure that they know better than anyone what to do with the shareholder money. Rather than pay handsome dividends and let the shareholders find the next best use of the dollars, they believe that every new product idea they can put on a PowerPoint is a winner. And they waste shareholder money over and over.
I dream of an executive team that sends a letter to the shareholders and says "We've run out of ideas. We've liquidated the company. Here is all your money back. Good luck in your future investments."
If you live in a city with a smog problem, and you have a way to charge it, and you can afford it, one of your cars should probably be electric. Move the pollution out to wherever the power plant is, where there are fewer people breathing it. But there are a few "ifs" in that statement. It's a far cry from telling somebody in a rural, mountainous, state that he has to buy one.
The idea that breakthroughs in the physics of electrical storage are guaranteed to appear, and that we guess approximately when they will, is the kind of nonsense that only liberals can believe.
There are things you hear and immediately know it's a show-stopper. "[R]equires the driver to be alert to retake control," is one of those things. That will not work. Period.
"If you live in a city with a smog problem, and you have a way to charge it, and you can afford it, one of your cars should probably be electric. Move the pollution out to wherever the power plant is, where there are fewer people breathing it. But there are a few "ifs" in that statement. It's a far cry from telling somebody in a rural, mountainous, state that he has to buy one."
If we had room for a third car, we'd buy an EV. But as it is, we need both our car and our truck to be able to take road trips.
Do cities still have smog problems?
I always thought Apple was led by intelligent people.
But it turns out, if measured by failures, Trump fares much better than Apple. Trump is the genius.
There have only been two 'public' product geniuses in my lifetime.
Sure, some behind-the-scenes guys you'll never hear of.
But Jobs and Musk are leagues above the rest.
'The idiocy and arrogance of the obsession with autonomous driving is astounding, from Musk on down. "It will make us all safer' they boast while lawyers lick their chops and home schooled teens brief their elders on the Peltzman Effect...'
Once it becomes mandated by government (to save Gaia) there will be no liability.
See Covid vaccine...
Probably 5 years ago I did diligence on an EV startup. They were installing aftermarket electric assist motors in workfleet pickup trucks. Sounded nuts, but clever engineering made it reasonable.
Anyway, several of the team were ex-Tesla. One mentioned a handful of other startups staffed by ex-Tesla folk. He said, Yeah, Musk is super difficult to work for, so the valley is filling up with disaffected Tesla employees.
Like Apple, and Jobs, decades ago.
Regarding EV, I have leased two, a Fiat 500e, and a Chevy Bolt. Both were fine cars for bopping around the SF Bay area, but we never took them far from home. (Except for the rat-edible insulation on the Bolt wiring, which was a disaster.)
My new hobby is counting the Teslas around me at stoplights. The current record is eight.
Somewhat misstated information regarding EV sales growth. 2023 Q4 EV sales increased YoY by 40%. That is huge. Period. However, it is also less that prior quarter EV sales growth rates. For example, 49% gain in Q3. On a YoY basis, sales were up 52% YoY in Q4. Thus, albeit growing slower, this is still the fastest growing segment of the automotive market by a wide margin.
What is undeniable however is that the market has gotten a lot more crowded, with every major manufacturer bringing EV options. Of course that means early movers that dominated available options (i.e. Tesla), will see a slowdown as sales spread across more makers.
Apple offers premium products at a premium price. Launching into this market with a relatively expensive option, while the economy is still uncertain and competition is heating up? Apple is too late to the game and they know it.
In the mean time Apple is occupying the information side of driving with CarPlay — extending this year to dashboards etc.. Their 10 years of work won’t be entirely wasted.
Original Mike said...
"The idiocy and arrogance of the obsession with autonomous driving is astounding"
It sure is. The problem is much harder than they thought, though I don't understand how they deluded themselves otherwise. I think AI is similar. Easy gains at first, which will be followed by, "Huh, there's a lot more going on in people's brains that we thought."
**************
IIRC that's exactly what happened to the much-ballyhooed "expert systems" of the 1980's, which were among the first AI appliations.
Elon Musk has been pretty cutthroat in the EV industry. He kept prices on Teslas far lower than he could have charged to price out new competitors. Ford was losing tens of thousands on each of it's new EVs produced and sold. This is especially notable given, at least to my eye, that Tesla EVs are a lot cooler than the other options and many people might even pay a premium for a Tesla. (With the notable exception of the CyberTruck which looks like what someone would describe as the Truck of the future if you asked someone from 40 years ago.)
Fine. It doesn't have a clue about traffic lights, so if there is no one in front stopping at the red, the car will happily sail right through it.
Other things it doesn’t have a clue about: signs warning drivers about school zones or playground areas, so the sensors don’t especially search for small children dashing into the street, nor signs warning about blind pedestrians. Even if the sensors could detect red lights, can they read “no right turn on red” signs?
I'm rolling my eyes at how the Times is trying to spin this -- that it's somehow the fault of Steve Jobs not being around. A more truthful take might be that the product trying to be developed isn't worth being worked on.
Rich is enamored with straight-line projections.
Autonmous cars would only really make sense if they could communciate with all the other cars and the road itself. Perhaps that could be done on highways in the future, but I don't think it's now viable on streets where where you have kids, dogs and careless pedestrians.
LLR-democratical Rich: "Apple offers premium products at a premium price. Launching into this market with a relatively expensive option, while the economy is still uncertain and competition is heating up? Apple is too late to the game and they know it."
LOL
Apple never had a "choice" regarding entering or not entering the EV market, whether late to the game or not.
They would NEVER have the capability, vision, discipline, knowledge to mass produce automobiles at scale, globally..period.
Period period.
China is generations ahead in this space. Not only do they dominate manufacturing, they have been securing the entire supply chain for themselves for decades.
While western policymakers where wasting time debating whether electric cars are woke and gay or actually okay because Musk likes them China was gradually stealing a march.
Instead of innovating and pushing the envelope on the inevitability of EVs, western players obfuscated. Billions wasted lobbying governments on the merits of ICE cars, instead of developing batteries. Billions more wasted cheating emissions tests.
It took Elon Musk, a complete outsider, to take the concentrated bet, and whether you like him or not, Tesla is now the last major western automaker. The rest are on borrowed time.
China will gobble up this market, like it has done with solar panels, chemicals, steel and so much more.
When they can be fully charged in ten minutes or less I will be interested.
@Rich: Somewhat misstated information regarding EV sales growth. 2023 Q4 EV sales increased YoY by 40%. That is huge. Period. However, it is also less that prior quarter EV sales growth rates. For example, 49% gain in Q3. On a YoY basis, sales were up 52% YoY in Q4. Thus, albeit growing slower, this is still the fastest growing segment of the automotive market by a wide margin.
Not according to NPR. Bad headlines for electric vehicles have been piling up lately.
Sales leveled off at around 9% of the new car market, and even dipped down at the start of the year. Hertz is selling off a bunch of EVs, citing low demand for them. Ford is slashing production of the F-150 Lightning. GM cut its near-term investment in EVs and is now bringing back plug-in hybrids, which run on electricity and gasoline.
Even Tesla, the all-electric juggernaut that has shaped the rise of EVs in the U.S., warned investors that it's in between "growth waves" and has a quieter year ahead.
The problem with EVs is that, in many ways, they are significantly inferior to what we already have.
I happened to read an article on the new Porsche Maycan E variant of the ICE version.
The article touted its charging ability: 22 minutes from 10% to 80% charge, for an added range of 210 miles. The article claimed that was only four times as long as for an ICE to fill up.
Bollocks. That charge rate gets just less than 10 miles per minute. I put a stopwatch on my 30 mpg car recently. Three minutes forty seconds to add 470 miles range, from the time I got out of the car until I got back in. So, near as darnnit to 150 miles of added range per minute.
Which means an ICE car "recharges" at 15 times the rate as the fastest EV.
NB: As a guess, the average service station has 12 refueling points — three islands, four points per island. Sized, no doubt, to avoid potential customers leaving because the islands are full.
If the US was to go all EV, that service station would need not 12, but 180 charging points.
But wait, there's more!
The first thing I learned in Econ 101 is that there is no such thing as free. Using the Macan EV, as well as current California electricity and gas costs, that 210 mile recharge costs $22.40 for the electricity. Add $5.45 for the gas taxes a 30 mpg ICE car would pay over 210 miles — those roads aren’t paying for themselves — and the real cost for a Macan EV to go 210 miles is $27.85.
Cost for the ICE Macan at 25 mpg? $37.64.
The cost saving per mile for the EV is $0.0467. The base Macan EV cost is near as darnnit to $20,000 more than the base ICE. I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine how many EV miles it will take to make up for that differential. (Admittedly, ICEs cost more to maintain. My 2007 Bavarian Money Waster 530i has taken about $5,000 over 150,000 miles; that's way above the non-Germanic average.)
And passenger EVs weigh at least 1,000 pounds more than their ICE counterparts. Parking structures and pavement might want to have a word.
According to the IEEE, widespread adoption of home charging will reduce distribution level transformer (the ones that supply 10-15 homes) life by 90%.
But, yeah, otherwise, except for at least another twenty or so reasons, EVs are great.
Apple Music can't even manage my music files properly -- duplicate songs all over, stuff I can't get rid of, multiple copies of playlists, etc. -- I for one am glad they're not trying to make a 6,000-lb buggy product.
"If the US was to go all EV, that service station would need not 12, but 180 charging points."
And a nuclear power plant sited next door to power it.
"Bollocks. That charge rate gets just less than 10 miles per minute. I put a stopwatch on my 30 mpg car recently. Three minutes forty seconds to add 470 miles range, from the time I got out of the car until I got back in."
I was in a conversation elsewhere online where the EV guy claimed it took 5-10 minutes to fill the tank of an ICE vehicle. Really? Maybe if, after filling the tank, you go into the C-store to use the restroom or get a coke. Just filling the tank? I timed it once, 11 1/2 gallons in three minutes.
EV drivers must be mostly progressives, they seem to have a fondness for relying on "facts" that are not observed in the real world.
I don't think EVs are practical in large areas of the US. If you live in an area where the weather is never colder than temperate (let's say high 40's low 50's) I think EVs can work provided it is very rare you go on a trip longer than an hour 1-way. If you live in an area where it gets cold during part of the year, then I think that probably cuts down the time on trips outside that very rare trip, to say 25-35 minutes.
Another big factor that I think cuts against the inevitability of EVs is the huge increase in capacity of the grid needed to charge all the new EVs. Random searches online show me estimates of anywhere from 35% to 100% increase in capacity needed for new electric vehicles. If this is paired with the current trendy green energy requirements of wind mills, there could be instances where a winter storm hits an area, power gets knocked out and now people are unable to charge their vehicles or power anything in their home, and suddenly twenty-first century people are thrust back into the nineteenth century without the tools or skills to handle it.
I for one am a big fan of getting energy from combustion. There is a reason humans and all other living things on this planet use it for energy. ( I guess not extremophiles living near volcanic vents on the ocean floor.)
"Instead of innovating and pushing the envelope on the inevitability of EVs"
Which is more likely, the second coming of Jesus, or workable EVs for the masses? The odds of both are based entirely on faith.
That's not to say that we couldn't end up in some kind of Hell world, where EVs were our only option, despite their many limitations.
'Other things it doesn’t have a clue about: signs warning drivers about school zones or playground areas, so the sensors don’t especially search for small children dashing into the street, nor signs warning about blind pedestrians. Even if the sensors could detect red lights, can they read “no right turn on red” signs?'
As far as I know, Tesla software and cameras 'reads' all of the signs and knows if a light is red or green or yellow.
It is done with a series of cameras placed around the car.
I don't have full auto driving on my Tesla, but on the center screen while you drive it shows traffic cones, lights, the cars around you (cars or trucks or motorcycles) and people walking if they are near the road.
It is pretty common now for people to do auto drives of hundreds of miles, including in busy cities like San Francisco and LA.
"And passenger EVs weigh at least 1,000 pounds more than their ICE counterparts. Parking structures and pavement might want to have a word.
According to the IEEE, widespread adoption of home charging will reduce distribution level transformer (the ones that supply 10-15 homes) life by 90%."
All parking structures will have to be replaced, because they are grossly under-built to handle an all EV fleet. All highway guard rails will have to be replaced.
Utilities can't get those transformers now; the back-order log is multiyear.
Winter Will Kill the EV.
"Winter Will Kill the EV."
From the WSJ:
How far will an electric vehicle go on a full battery?
Most EVs are in the 200-to-300-mile range.
How accurate are the EPA range estimates?
Testing by Car and Driver magazine found that few vehicles go as far as the EPA stickers say. On average, the distance was 12.5% shorter, according to the peer-reviewed study distributed by SAE International, formerly the Society of Automotive Engineers.
In some cases, the estimates were further off: The driving range of Teslas fell below their EPA estimate by 26% on average, the greatest shortfall of any EV brand the magazine tested.
Does cold weather lower the driving range?
It does, and sometimes by a great amount. Consumer Reports drove two EVs 40 miles each in 20-degree air, then cooled them off before starting again on another 40-mile drive. The cold car interiors were warmed by the heater at the start of each of three such drives. The result: range dropped by about 50%.
From Autotrader:
There may be times when you want or need to charge up your EV to get maximum range. But charging it to the max shouldn’t be done every night. In general, the SOC for the battery in your electric car should be maintained between 30% to 80% capacity.
So... the estimated range of 200-300 miles on a full charge may be around 12.5% shorter, which would be 175-260 miles. And up to half of that is forfeited if it's cold, which would be 85-130 miles. And if you only charge up to 80% capacity and avoid discharging below 30% in order to extend battery life, that would lower the range to 45-65 miles in many parts of the country over the winter months.
What's not to like?
Chinese Carmaker [BYD] Overtakes Tesla as World’s Most Popular EV Maker ~ Bloomberg
The framing is unfortunate - we are seeing two companies going from strength to strength, both outperforming any industry expectation. The headline should be : "Another record quarter of Tesla, BYD, ridiculing GM, Ford, VW"
The broader story here is that 2 upstart automobile companies are completely displacing legacy players.
The combined age of the two companies is just 48 years.
Hey Skipper, I think you left out the relative costs of a replacement EV battery vs. one for an EV.
Plus the trade-in value of your old EV with that depleted battery.
I'll stick with my Prius hybrid, thanks very much! I can drive it 450 miles on a (small) tank of gasoline, and fill it back up in a couple of minutes. Plus, when the power goes down, I just connect my inverter and run the lights in my house with the car on standby. Not the whole house, but a few lamps, plus my Internet router. I've done this for days at a time before.
Pure EV's are a solution in search of a problem. I also have a Trump sticker on the Prius and my other car is a V8 Jaguar. I'm no green, just frugal.
@effenayright: Hey Skipper, I think you left out the relative costs of a replacement EV battery vs. [replacing an ICE].
Modern ICEs will almost certainly exceed 250k miles before requiring overhaul/replacement.
For my Bavarian Money Waster, that would come to about $7,000 total for a reman motor, all in. Sensible cars are significantly less.
Just the battery pack for a Tesla Model S? $15,000-40,000, depending on capacity. "Luckily" most batteries last 200,000 miles..
EV batteries lose about 1% capacity/year — if they are routinely charged to 80% of capacity, and not discharged below 10%. So at the end of 10 years, instead of having 70% of stated range being what is routinely available, it will be 63%.
These things are just like a joke, except they aren't the least bit funny.
@Rich: The headline should be : "Another record quarter of Tesla, BYD, ridiculing GM, Ford, VW"
Hertz is jettisoning 20,000 EVs, 40% of its EV fleet.
I hope those Chi Com cars come with a free smear of a deadly virus.
My experience with Chinese hardware is that once it arrives I immediately take it apart and rebuild it. This is to get rid of all the debris and unwanted fluids that seem to always occur in the Chinese manufacturing process. Their QA isn't the best,(sarc.).
I am old enough to remember when "Made in Japan" was an insult, until one day, it wasn't anymore. But we transferred our manufacturing overseas, mostly to China, and made them our industrial base, and while it did work to suppress wages in the US, how is it working out for us now?
What happens if we start a war with a country that can manufacture 100,000 anti ship missiles for every carrier we send over? Do we try to buy them from them? Now, largely thanks to our military adventurism, and generals and admirals making the comments that we are going to be at war with them in five years, or it will be too late, they are boosting their nuclear arsenal.
In the immortal words of Rodney King, "Can't we just all get along." No, because there are too many people whose interests are served by conflict, at home, and abroad.
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