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Forum Index : EV's : Why carmakers hate EV’s
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yahoo2 Guru  Joined: 05/04/2011 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1166 |
I used to watch Jeremy Clarkson rant away about people in LA (celebrities) buying the Toyota Prius and thought he was just trying to be funny. Turns out there is more to that story than I thought. Back in the dim dark ages of the 1980's car makers streamlined their production process, which is code for sold off everything but their core business. When we hear them talking about the just in time manufacturing process they are referring to all the third party suppliers that have to supply "just in time". So what is the core business? well, its the drivetrain, mostly just the mechanical bits of the motor and transmission. The modern car company is a series of factories that punch out drivelines, an engine R & D dept, publicity and sales division and that is pretty much it. So back to California in the early 2000's and Toyota introduces the Prius to America. The cheapest nastiest thing they can make, intended only to capture the fuel sipper market ie poor people that save money on buying fuel. When the sales jumped from 20,000 in 2003 to 100,000 in 2005 they were stunned, what stunned them even more was the buyers, rich YUPPIES. Not only were they buying the prius they were trading in the luxo-barge at the same time. Toyota had cut the throats of every large carmakers in the luxury car market of California. The most profitable segment that they had and even more worryingly they had done it with a car full of gubbins that was not part of the carmakers core business. Now carmakers have been clawing that back recently with sales of the SUV and crossover style vehicles and they thought that it was business as usual. However the trend that spawned the sales of the prius also saw venture capital in silicon valley tip roughly $100 million into a little roadster company called Tesla. So what is the problem with a Tesla electric car? well it is all gubbins, pretty much nothing inside it is part of a traditional car companies core business....and it is driven by software, no car company employs proper software engineers, they never have. So when you look around and see all these car companies "making" small runs of electric cars they are getting someone else to make them because they cant. the only ones that are building their own and investing in this new industry is Tesla. Nissan/Renault and BMW build stuff in house but are still hedging their bets and playing footsies and companies like BYD in China still has a long way to go with the software development side of carmaking. For a traditional carmaker to go all electric they would have to pretty much "gut" their business model, write off their engine factories as sunk costs and start from scratch because they hold none of the intellectual property that is worth anything in an electric car market, everything that is worth something they have to buy in and right now it is a sellers market. They would also have to replace most of their drivetrain management executives with IT savvy executives. I guess my only comment about all this is to ask a question about Tesla's business plan. See, the thing is, they have 500,000 orders for the new model 3. and it is going to take them a couple of years to chew through the backlog while they ramp up the company. So.... You haven't been listening, have you!  car companies dont build cars anymore, they build engines.Tesla could give their plans to a third party company and they could roll half a million models threes before Christmas this year without dropping the ash off their lit cigarette or even raising a sweat. Yet they have chosen not to do that. I'm confused, no wait... maybe I'm not... |
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Gizmo Admin Group  Joined: 05/06/2004 Location: AustraliaPosts: 5012 |
I dont know how much truth is in it, but I heard many years ago the USA uses a fuel tax to pay for roads, and they pay cheap rego. Here in Australia, for our international readers, we pay a yearly "rego" ( Registation fee ) on each vehicle we use on the road. The rego includes a 3rd party personal insurance component, so if you have a accident, your protected for any medical claims by the other people injured. The rego also includes taxes to pay for road improvements, etc. Typically, for a 6 cylinder car, it may be $320 for the insurance and $500 for the taxes, about $800 a year total. It also depends on vehicle type, number of cylinders, etc. A V8 is much more, a 4 cylinder less. If the USA's system gather this road improvement tax from fuel ( I could be wrong here ), then the government would not be too keen on vehicles that dont use fuel, using their roads. Fuel is also very cheap in the USA, just over half what we pay here. If any country should be adopting EV's, it should be us. The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago, the second best time is right now. JAQ |
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| yahoo2 Guru Joined: 05/04/2011 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1166 |
Pure EV sales in Australia for 2016 was a grand total of 219 cars. work in progress! Fuel use is interesting. Car sales in the western world peaked around the same time as we discovered online shopping. That is not a coincidence and it has huge implications for businesses and city planners regarding traffic etc. Even more interesting. The estimates in the slowdown of car buying in the west will not match the acceleration of car use in Asian countries. Rough calculations say there is not enough fuel oil in the world to meet that new demand if the majority of new cars are gas guzzlers. furthermore the status of car ownership is slipping, the ingrained urge to buy a car is getting less, the predictions I have seen is that ride sharing will cut the car fleet by 70%+, Car companies like Mercedes that have trialed this business model on a tiny scale say it is more profitable than selling cars. If nothing is done now the car industry will peak and crash and take down everything that is attached to it. Tesla says they have seen a 40% reduction in road accidents by the drivers that use auto pilot. To put that in perspective South Australia has about 20,000 major accidents a year with 100 deaths (not counting the bingles) if that ratio holds true then the whole of Australia has around 250,000 accidents per year. It is likely that semi-autonomous vehicles (even driver assist) would drive the accident rate down by 60%, that is 150,000 LESS crashes even if the car fleet remains the same size (which it wont). Considering the money that has been spent on driving safety campaigns and what we pay in car insurance you have got to wonder how any govt can argue against this on any moral ground. I'm confused, no wait... maybe I'm not... |
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| yahoo2 Guru Joined: 05/04/2011 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1166 |
The other factor I have neglected to mention is the comparison of energy usage of petroleum vs electricity. If we convert the joules of energy in a litre of petrol to kwh. we get 7.2 kwh but that is not all, refineries use electricity to crack oil, conservatively this will add an extra 1.7 kwh to this figure. If I use my car as an example and my old lady driving style. I get 9.1 litres per 100km in a car that is supposed to average 12.8 l/100km. that equates to 81 kwh! How far could I drive an electric car on 81 kwh Well if I allow 20% for solar inverters and charging losses that still leaves me 65 kwh in the batteries and I happen to know I can get 7 km per kwh in my driving conditions with a Hyundai ioniq EV. This is very close to comparable with the car I drive now. That's a whopping 455 kilometers on the same amount of energy as the petrol car uses to travel 100 km. Now charging cost, at the moment I can charge from solar during the day for 13 cents per hour and AGL is doing a $1 per day EV charging deal I assume for off peak charging. a 50/50 split between day and night charging would be less than $1.90 per day to travel 69 km/day. That's $2.75 per 100/km I currently pay $12.00 per 100/km for fuel, a stunning 77% saving in fuel costs. If I drop that $44.67 per week saving into an indexed super fund after ten years I have $30,000 squirreled away on fuel savings. I think this basic model is just scratching the surface of what is possible. I'm confused, no wait... maybe I'm not... |
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| yahoo2 Guru Joined: 05/04/2011 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1166 |
TIME AND GROWTH How much time does a traditional automaker have? If it comes to it, how much time does Tesla have to make a traditional car sale before the market changes to a pay for service style format? 20 years? I doubt it. Lets explore some of the numbers The problem is that the EV and plug-in hybrid market worldwide is now officially in exponential growth and it appears to be increasing. We have gone from 70% growth last year to 100% growth this year and it appears that 130% is on the cards for next financial year. This year up to June30 2017 there were one million plug in cars sold. This equals the one million sold in total for the rest of previous history. If we do some fishing around through the production ramp orders we can see some companies are only expecting to sell a few thousand plug in units in the next few years. Others like Nissan, Renault, Tesla, BYD will be into mainstream automaker production numbers with their plug in cars this year. Using Tesla as an example, they produced 100,000 model x and s this year. Next year (if they hit their 5000 model 3's per week target early enough) then they can add 200,000 - 250,000 cars to their production numbers. China also has a hidden EV market called low speed EV's (LSEV) that is likely to be counted next year, production estimate, 1.1 million and growing. where does that leave us. With world car production at 96 million, increasing the plug-in cars from 1 million year to 3 million a year is nothing.  The green line is yearly EV sales with growth slowing back to 50% over the next 5 years. Blue line is total plug in cars sold. You can see that by june 2023 the EV and plug in market is 77 million, 80% of this years car sales. I think car sales for 2023 will be less than 77 million. Car makers releasing vehicles onto the market in 2020 have given the early adopters a 3 year/ 25 million car advantage. With an orderly transition out of carmaking I would expect things to flatline then decline from this point. As us Aussies know from experience in our own carmarket, and more recently, energy market, reality and rhetoric are so far apart they are not even in the same postcode, we are likely to see taxpayer funded assistance then huge financial crashes rather than orderly transition. I would expect the scratching, biting and hairpulling to start quite soon.  I'm confused, no wait... maybe I'm not... |
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| yahoo2 Guru Joined: 05/04/2011 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1166 |
 I have had a little play with some cost analysis of the new Tesla model 3 in a spreadsheet using some of my own costs as a comparison ice option is a new semi-luxury car driven for 200,000 over 8 years. I personally think that is a bit optimistic 160,000 km is where they usually start to get real flaky with maintenance and cost big bikkies. ice clunker option is my own personal snot box with a few extra costs added in EV option is the model 3 paid $85,000 and driven 250,000km in 12 years EV shared option is driven 500,000km this is taking advantage of the EV's bulletproof drivetrain and putting the car to work. Originally I shared it between two families but it could equally be any business use or ride sharing arrangement. internal combustion engine luxomobile @ 70 cents per km versus the Tesla model 3 @ 64 cents per km. Well.... there is stuff all in it. when I start moving the tax rate, depreciation, opportunity cost of money, and compounding interest they still stay at around the same money But when I cut the ICE back to 160,000 km over 6 years the savings for the EV jump to $4500 per year or $70,000 over ten year. The interesting one is the clunker versus the shared model 3. There is enough price difference that it is very close to the cost of public transport in the city. Actually the clunker could be free to buy and the running costs are still more than the shared EV I'm confused, no wait... maybe I'm not... |
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