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Honestly, just take a basic normal car, and replace its engine with an electric one. No on screen entertainment, no cameras, no AI bull shit, no self driving. Just as basic as it gets.
Backup cameras are required on all 2018 or newer vehicles in the US and Canada, so you will need at least one in the back and a small screen for that, maybe hide that screen in the review.
This imaginary basic car should also come with a double-din radio so it can be upgraded like the old days.
I wish they sold me just a double din hole with cables ready for connection. All stock radios single or double din suck ballsack for what they are charging.
With more and more cars these days, you’ve got more than radio controls in the OSD.
The steering wheel heater of all things can only be accessed through the infotainment system on my Dad’s F-150. It’s beneath the Bluetooth button.
Yes, the absolute basic required technology to make it road legal, physical switches and either physical gauges or a non-touch screen for gauges if that’s cheaper.
Physical switches > screens. It’s much harder to develop the muscle memory for a screen. I don’t have to look away from the road with switches.
Absolutely, they’re so much better
The reason everything is on a touch screen now is that it’s cheaper than physical switches, as ridiculous as that seems. And yes, I greatly prefer physical switches.
Buy and wire multiple switches on every car, requiring wiring harnesses, ECM IO pins etc. or pay an intern a minimal sum once so he can put “designed Chevrolet in-dash console” on his resume. Then never update it even though it supports OTA updates and is a glitchy mess, Chevy
This is the same reason so many products come with a stupid Bluetooth app now rather than more than one button. Pay once rather than pay on every unit.
Hmm. In that case, physical buttons is the one luxury I’d pay a premium for.
They don’t know how to market something that doesn’t have a bunch of gimmicky bullshit.
“Get your cheap, reliable EVs here!” Done. You can pay me that $100k marketing salary whenever it’s convenient.
The problem is you can’t efficiently electrify a vehicle designed for fossil fuels. The requirements differ too much.
Actually EV conversions were common before we got intentionally designed EVs and the original Tesla roadster was built on a standard Lotus body and frame, but luckily we’re beyond that now.
You can still choose to electrify a vehicle now but you get poor performance and range, unbalanced handling, and pay way too much for a mediocre vehicle. It’s bot worth it
They mean at the design/manufacturing level, not retrofitting.
They mean just creat a simple ev car with only the needed designs to house the battery, controller and electric motor(s).
They mean discard all ideas of “futuristic” interiors, techs, or anything. Just build a modest car with an electric powerplant and battery storage. Then stop.
Fire any designer who tells you AI could improve the product.
Think this is the idea behind the GM Ultium platform (and probably others). They always held out “skateboard” as the goal, although I don’t know if that’s still a thing. Create essentially wheels and a plank that include all the power and drive components, modify to a small set of sizes, and crank them out by the millions. Then each car is a unique body and interior on top of the “skateboard”. As the platform gets to scale, you can drive the cost down, while still making unique cars on top of it - including low end cars
Fire any designer who tells you AI could improve the product.
That would be pretty dumb. It’s entirely possible to use AI in the design and engineering phase without AI being in the product that’s delivered to the customer. It’s also entirely possible for AI to be used in areas like crash mitigation, improving the handling in poor road conditions, or optimizing charging speed to improve battery life. Those uses of AI are largely invisible but offer a tangible improvement to the vehicle without being what anyone would consider luxurious. Choosing to ignore a design option because it sounds like something trendy is a great way to design a product that’s a worse value for the money.
Batteries will need a frame change if you don’t want to sacrifice the trunk or something. And range will be bad unless you improve areo dynamics and heating. But I think the Bolt and the Nero are pretty close to their ice counterparts.
Yeah that was the problem with the Nissan Leaf. It basically used the same frame as an ICE car, (and it wasn’t like it was a big SUV either) so all the batteries had to go in the back, and you had no storage and also there wasn’t really enough space in the back to have enough batteries to make it have decent range.
They did make the leaf plus that has decent range with the same formfactor though. Also I’m quite sure the batteries are not in the trunk, unless that’s where they put the extras in the plus version or something? Our 2015 leaf had significantly more trunk space than our brand new bolt despite being of similar dimensions. The bolt does have better rear leg room though.
The main issues with the leaf stem from not having any active heating/cooling for the battery and using an uncommon plug for level 3 charging that is going the way of the dodo. If you live in a temporate climate and don’t need to fast charge for road trips the leaf is a totally acceptable car IMO.
What’s the incentive? Most people will have to buy a car anyways, so without a different incentive, it’s better for every manufacturer to sell you a 60k+ car where the margins are way higher. If profit is the sole motive it’s a no brainer.
That’s basically the Mini Cooper EV. Took the guts of a BMW i3 and dropped it in the shell of a Cooper S. They even left the engine vent on the hood.
It’s a fun car, and relatively inexpensive for the current crop of EVs, but its range is limited. We’re already moving past the era where this is a good idea.
Its a nice idea which probably has a lot of complex implications. It would probably be a huge pain to figure out dimensions and compatible electric motors for every brand of non-electric vehicle, so the production of replacements would become very wide. Typically, the battery of an EV isn’t just a brick in the engine room, but it’s a whole range of cells along the length of the vehicle. Using the same space as the combustion engine might leave you with a vehicle with terrible range. Also, the safety of a car takes the engine into account. Replacing a combustion engine with an electrical engine would likely require a whole new safety overview for each individual model.
I honestly really hope that your suggestion would work, but I’m not expecting to see this becoming a wide solution before EVs dominate the market anyway.
I don’t think he meant to literally take the ice out of a camera and replace it with a motor and battery.
But rather he meant, make a new ev, on an EV chassis, but without all the nonsense that drives up costs without adding significant value.
I don’t need touch screen everything with 3d gaming built in, gull wing doors, and custom flush door handles that don’t work if you have a hand injury or any type of disability.
You can buy aftermarket android touch screen headunits with cameras for £150, they are not expensive at all, just a basic android tablet with a few extra ports
There‘s a word for that „Greedflation.“ This is what western car makers do. Luckily, the Cinese car makers grasp their chance and disrupt the market
While that is part of it, the other, bigger part is that Western countries actually do have higher labour costs: better salaries and conditions for our workers.
When China was outcompeting us on undesirable, low productivity, jobs, we accepted that. It was better to raise a billion Chinese out of poverty than to protect our lowest productivity factory workers. And those workers mostly transitioned to other jobs with higher productivity.
But now China is richer and their labour force is shrinking, so they will compete with highly productive factory jobs.
Politically, it is unlikely that car workers will accept unemployment. Nor will other highly paid workers.
So a trade war is brewing, you better brace yourself for it.
China wasn’t “outcompeting us on undesirable, low productivity, jobs”. Corporations were shipping jobs to China to undercut highly productive factory jobs back then, too, so they could save on labor costs. It’s only now that China is undercutting corporate profits that these same corporations come crying and shitting their pants. That’s also why you see a ramping up of negative media pieces on China. It was never about charitably raising people out of poverty. It was always about corporations undercutting labor to gain greater profits. Fuck 'em, bring on the cheap cars.
I hate it when corpos use the “oh we can’t lower prices because our staff is getting paid too much”-narrative. What about the CEO who takes half the profits for himself?
It’s the workers who create value for a company, they don’t take it away by getting paid for their work.The sad fact of the matter is… math
A corporation might have 10 C-level guys dividing $50 million amongst themselves and 10.000 workers earning $70K, which costs about $100K due to overheads (health insurance, retirement, etc). Together, that’s a billion, which is 20x more than the C level guys.
The C level guys aren’t the big expense, not by a long shot.
Labour, government and shareholders divide most of the earnings amongst themselves.
For the record, I do think we need to tax the wealthy more and the workers less.
Without the workers there’s no product, no income. The C-suite is dispensable. The workers aren’t.
Besides, worker productivity has been skyrocketing for the last 50 years, as has cost of living, but worker wages have been stagnant. C-suite pay has kept up with the increase in productivity, though, if not outpaced it.
I have no disagreement on this argument.
But C-suite compensation is not a significant part of prices.
Energy prices, tax, labour costs and the cost of capital (i.e. returns to shareholders and creditors) are what drives prices.
returns to shareholders are what drives prices.
Fixed that for you. They’re raking it in while blaming it on everything except their own profiteering. It’s greedflation , pure and simple.
Dude, I’m old enough to have lived through it.
Making toys and other plastic shit was never a high paying job in the West.
And no, it wasn’t charity, it was a win-win that increased living standards on both sides.
But it did have an impact on low paying manufacturing jobs in the West and that impact was accepted by Labour unions for the two reasons I gave: we (rightfully) concluded there were enough other, better jobs available and didn’t want to keep Chinese workers poor.
Yeah I’m confused by the charity argument. When have American corporations ever done anything out of the kindness of their hearts?
The “good for people” argument (which has been misportrayed here as “charity”) was made by politicians to justify tearing down the trade barriers that allowed wealthiest countries such as the US to be a higher-income bubble.
Once those trade barriers were down, all those jobs which had no other price protections than said trade barriers (jobs like, for example, assembly workers, but not things like Legal professions specialized in a country’s Law and which require registering with a local Law Society to practice) were suddenly competing with similar people all over the World, and a lot of countries in the World are full of people who would sell their work in those areas much cheaper than equivalent workers in high-income nations.
The people it was good for were people in those “open to competition” occupations in Low Income but reasonably safe countries like China (whose income went up as manufacturing moved there) and the people who owned the means of production (who got higher dividends due to the higher profits being made by paying low-income country manpower costs and receiving high-income country prices for products and services) but nobody else as even the eventual fall in prices that occurred (over the years, as all those companies with China costs started competing on price because they could thanks to the bigger profit margins due to much lower manpower costs) was not enough to make up for the faster and deeper downwards pressure on salaries in high-income countries that happenned due to said manpower competition with workers in countries with much cheaper salaries (for example, in the mid-70s about 23% of corporate revenue in American went to salaries, whilst by 2012 it was down to 7%).
Heres the problem with the talking point of needing to bring manufacturing jobs back: we can’t fill the manufacturing jobs that we have
I work for a company that sells services to warehouses and industrial facilities. We can’t fully staff our locations, we can’t keep most of the people we hire and neither can our customers, and it comes down to the fact that the jobs absolutely suck. Who wants to work in a loud, poorly temperature controlled factory with heavy equipment and a high risk of injury while doing backbreaking work when you could work at a store or resteraunt for not much less and put far less risk to your life, limb and sanity? Bring the automation on, these jobs need to become a thing of the past.
Read what I said. Labour Unions, not corporations.
Don’t think labor costs is a big factor. Car production is the sector that is most automated. Just think of this endless bands of hanging cars with robot arms working on it. Tesla even topped this.
It’s mainly the unwillingness to design and sell cheap cars due to less profits. In Germany we had electric cars for 20k€ or even combustion cars under 15k€. But they stopped building it. Although it was sold out in weeks.
In my region there was a Startup by the Aachen University RWTH (which is an elite university in Germany) bulding small EVs for around 20k€. They simply bought all parts from suppliers and just assembled it. And engineered and designed it first. Unionized and still competitive. Unfortunately, they didn’t fly.
EV building is rather simple. The software is key. And this is the missing part at car makers capabilities.
I second your thoughts on trade war. However, I guess it will be much simpler with high taxes, high quality regulations, and may be less support by car workshops. We will see…
There is still a shit ton of people working in a car factory. Tesla had to scale back their amount of robot workers since humans could work much faster. Tesla expects to have 60,000 people working in their Gigafactory in Texas when the production of the Cybertruck ramps up.
The cyber truck is a nightmare that won’t see mass market production.Since it doesn’t have a crumple zone, I doubt it even meets US safety standards.
Chinese manufacturers are being heavily subsidised and even making a loss on their cars.
They’re trying to kill off our domestic car industries.
No reason why western countries also can’t subsidize EV car companies to remain competitive.
Like…what are we supposed to do? Be content with ridiculously priced EVs and be willing to pay a small fortune for them? Fuck off with that noise.
Western corporations have had no problems fucking over the average consumer for decades or laying off thousands of employees at the first sign of trouble. Let them adapt or die I say. Competition is always good. Western corporations have the smarts and the resources to compete, they just need to be forced to.
Controversial take: the problem isn’t car prices. They haven’t increased that much when compared to inflation, and you’re getting far more and far better cars for your money when adjusted for inflation.
The problem is wages haven’t risen and housing prices have risen too much, meaning people have less to spend on a car.
E: I googled. In the US the cost of a median house was 18k in 1953. An average car cost 3.5k.
Now, the median house costs 400k.
400k/18k x 3.5k = If car prices had risen as much as house prices, the median car would cost 77k.
Not a controversial take at all IMHO. You’re not wrong. Housing is absolutely ridiculous right now.
and you’re getting far more and far better cars for your money when adjusted for inflation.
Better at getting me from A to B?
Yes… cars now are faster, safer, and more efficient than they were in the 50s.
Even if you discount all the “features” they’ve added the bare necessities of a car are tons better than mid-20th century cars or even late 20th century cars
Well, most of it are now needlessly oversized, diminishing the better efficiency.
A lot of western countries are subsidizing EV sales. Most western auto companies just waited a decade longer than they should have to start making EVs and are in the thick of developing technology when the early movers are hitting maturity.
On top of subsidies at the national level, most legacy automakers are selling their EVs at a significant loss, but that is because they haven’t reached economies of scale yet… not because they are trying to undercut competition. It’s hard to develop new products and even harder to get them to scale production. Ford has been making cars for 120 years, but that isn’t the same thing as making an EV. They effectively have to start over in a new field… a decade behind companies that invested early.
A lot of the press you hear about EV manufacturers cutting back because demand is low has to do with them cutting back because they are losing $50-70k per vehicle they are selling and can’t stomach the losses. The demand is there, they just can’t make an EV at a price that generates profit. They trim commissions at dealerships to try to help defray cost, but that minimizes incentive for sales teams to try to move them and exacerbates the problem. On top of that, their ICE sales are diminished due to high interest rates and an overall market slowdown in large purchases so every vehicle they sell at a loss hurts the bottom line that much more.
They’re trying to wait to push the cost involved in getting to scale until interest rates go down and it’s more affordable to invest in new technology. They are fucked. Tesla is currently the only American company that is profitable at scale and Elon can’t shut the fuck up on eX-Twitter long enough to stop pissing off the marketplace. The table is set for Chinese EVs to flood the US market, but I don’t think people will be as open to Chinese vehicles with the current data privacy issues and the tense geo-political position between the US and China.
I’m thinking that, if it gets bad enough, the federal government will disincentivize Chinese EVs with tariffs to offset the Chinese gov’t subsidies… if the current US EV tax incentives don’t do enough to spur legacy automakers to kick it into high gear… which it doesn’t seem to be doing. It’s going to be a rough decade for legacy automakers.
Or just let those who can’t compete die, which is totally fine.
I don’t have any loyalty to some specific car brand.
That‘s a terrible idea. Just because China throws irresponsible amounts of cash at cars doesn‘t mean we have to do the same mistake. We can simply say it‘s not OK to sell products under manufacturing costs to gain market share and that‘s that. Let‘s not inflate the already oversized car market even more.
They can simply say they don’t subsidize their manufacturing and operate profitably at those prices.
Just saying something doesn’t make it work unless there are legal things that back up the position. And in foreign trade, that means tariffs… which economists have been screaming about (for decades) having negative ramifications that ripple through the economy.
I agree it’s a bad first step. I’d keep trying idea on the table, but I’d start by working with the European car manufacturers to create huge tariffs on those cars. Make it impossible for them to be sold at those prices in Western markets
Selling at a loss to enter a market or gain market share is a time honored tradition at this point.
It is, but as the article mentions some manufacturers are making a loss of 35k per car.
If those cars are then sold for 5k less than the US/EU/Japanese equivalent, despite lower wages and environmental standards, you have to ask yourself questions.
Yes you just described the business model. Everyone from Walmart to Amazon to Uber uses it. They take a loss in the short term, relying on new investor money or other products.
Or they could be building economies ot scale? You can’t drive down costs making thousands, you need to make millions.
Yep. They‘re doing exactly what we usually call hostile underbidding to heavily inflate prices later when they‘re a top dog. A practice that is not quite legal in most parts of the west. And whoever wants to know when things still don‘t work out for the car maker because subsidies dry up: Search for Chinese manufacturer ‚Weltmeister‘. That will make you think thrice about ever coming near a Chinese EV.
It’s also called dumping:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)
The kind of thing usually results in a trade war, sanctions and tariffs.
The problem in Europe, is that our manufacturers are so reliant on Chinese parts and manufacturing, that they’ve asked our government NOT to intervene. China has them by the nuts, because they’ve outsourced too much. IRC they can’t even make batteries without using Chinese parts.
Sounds exactly like the rest of us
Good
Everyone heavily subsidises their car industry
Greedflation is when you checks notes compete in a market by offering cheaper products?
deleted by creator
Chinese EVs are being sold at a loss of up to 35k per car:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/05/business/nio-china-electric-vehicles.html
The Chinese government is subsidising their car industry, so they can engage in dumping, and decimate our car industries. When our domestic car industries are dead, they’ll raise prices. It’s like Amazon or any other scummy megacorp that kills local businesses.
This being said, it’s hard to feel sorry for companies who also receive plenty of government subsidies and tax breaks, broke the law on emissions testing and likely killed a lot of people because of it, and refused to innovate or lower prices out of sheer greed.
Selling at a loss is how you build volume and reach the economies of scale that drive down costs.
If you fiddle around half-heartedly putting out small numbers of EVs, you’ll never come close to competing with a company that puts out over a million a year. A lot of automakers still aren’t willing to commit, and they’re whining about the position they chose to put themselves in.
China is using subsidies to accelerate the green transition, exactly like the US is doing with the “Inflation Reduction Act” and other initiatives.
China is using subsidies to accelerate the green transition
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDfLWFv3ixk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEMtTtUZXEk
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2023-china-ev-graveyards/
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/09/26/world/asia/china-fishing-south-america.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LFCBTnrMow
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SEfwoqKRU8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLFYChw5c0Y
Yup. Totally green.
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I truly don’t care if China destroy the car industry, it’s fucking ridiculous how expensive some basic shit is. In my opinion if you introduce a feature into your cars, you have ten years before it should become standard.
Nooooo anything but more environmentally friendly vehicles that people can actually afford. Won’t somebody think of the profits?
not sure about environmentally friendly,friendlier sure, but a well developed public transit system and biking infrastructure beats any kind of car based infrastructure
Complements. The reason we’re stuck in this auto-dystopia (are we auto-asphyxiating? ;-) is people wanting one size fits all infrastructure. Let’s apply this more intelligently this time - recognize that some areas are more built up than others and different solutions scale differently . In general that can be a good thing, but we need interconnected services for everyone. That does include cars in many areas, although I agree a worthwhile goal for cities/town centers is that people not need a car
We need the incrementally more eco-friendly options as well. Most pickup truck driving office workers won’t suddenly get a bike and change their ways, so a more eco friendly personal vehicle is probably a lot more likely to reduce emissions for that demography.
Don’t forget working from home. Proven by the lockdown air quality to be the most environmentally friendly option. Remember this when you’re employer is asking you to “return to the office”.
You said the Lemmy catchphrase good job
MAGLEV TRAINS OR GTFO!!
Won’t somebody think of the profits?
This article is literally about people doing this
Hear me out: a bare minimum electronics car extremely reliable, no screens no bells and whistles and with the smallest possible engine battery that costs less than $5.000 💥
Citroën Ami is available. Closer to $8000 and technically a quadricycle. All bare minimum to make it street legal.
It’s great Citroën is making a small, cheap EV … but why did they make it look like a cross between a Fiat Multipla and a pug?
That thing is ugly.
All cheap cars are made ugly on purpose to make the expensive models more attractive to buy.
That thing’s front and back are exactly the same. It saves on fabrication costs to use the same part but it gives a weird look.
“Why is this $8,000 car so terrible,” he lamented, without a trace of irony.
It isn’t “terrible”, it’s ugly because of purely aesthetic design choices: specifically that Fiat Multipla style “forehead ridge”. It’s a styling problem – not a form factor or price point one.
Turns out there are after market mods for that. Spoiler, other front, flame paint job
What a compact thing, also charges to full in just 3 hours from a normal outlet 🤯
You can get an electric motorcycle for that price. Even electric microcars cost more than $5000. Unless you want to buy a Chinese tin can death machine on four wheels that aren’t street legal.
I mean, it’s not like micro cars are safe
gee the market has been clamoring for a decade while the auto industry said “BIG TRUCKS AND SUV’S!”
I mean people also eat it up like good luttle piggies.
Yes, people being dumb is the real source of all issues.
I mean there’s still a good amount of people in my position where you can’t fit 3 car seats in any ev in the market. Haven’t checked in the past year, maybe it’s changed but I also can’t afford to waste 60k+
Or in a five-seater car or crossover. It’s ridiculous. Carseats and boosters are massive, even the ones with the smallest bases. Then after that you need space for sports equipment, musical instruments, other friends, etc. I’m not sure what the solution is here, other than acknowledging that for a few years in a family’s life they’re going to need a bigger vehicle, and it would be great if manufacturers offered a hybrid or EV solution for them, too.
Mazda is finally coming out with a PHEV three row next year, starting around $55k. Not sure who else, besides Rivian with their new fully EV three row at $75k+, which is completely unaffordable for most families.
Kia EV9 has three rows and starts at $55k still expensive but definitely in range for a middle class family
Oh, nice! I didn’t have that one on my radar. Our next family car needs to be either hybrid or EV, and I’ve just started looking.
There were two hybrid minivans on the market a couple years ago when I went shopping for one. One plug-in from Chrysler and a non-plug-in from Toyota. Both cost about as much as a Model 3.
Honestly it feels like most companies producing child seats and strollers and whatnot (as well as the stores that stock and sell them) have stopped putting any focus on solutions for 2 or more children and instead only produce solutions for only children. I’ve got 2 young kids 2 years apart and we had a heck of a time finding a double stroller among other things
Safety and reliability are two of the biggest factors in family cars. You would think they would want to make larger family vehicles with those selling points.
I just looked it up and the only minivan EV is 114k…
Yeah and that is part of my point on being pro-Chinese EV… Not only affordability, but the fact that there is simply no choices for certain segments. Our automakers are so conglomerated that there is very minuscule choice in EV since each puts out maybe 2 or 3 models.
There is also proof that competition is causing local builders to step up… With Citroen offering the ec3 with LFP, and 200 miles of range for $20k… Meanwhile Stelantis is releasing absolute trash in the US because they can get away with it.
You can get a Pacifica PHEV with a whole 40 miles of electric range… that is like your one choice… Though the Canoo could meet that need if it ever comes to market.
There is a similar issue for cargo vans the US has like 3 choices for electric… Meanwhile even European buyers have far more choice.
if only you did your basic research
https://babydrive.com.au/reviews/electric-cars/2022-hyundai-ioniq-5-ev/
I did, I tried to fit my seats in one actually. Before making a snarky comment, you should do your research and know that not all car seats conform to a size. Some are bigger than others and the front seats cannot touch the car seat in a rear facing configuration. I’m tall enough there was no way I could drive the car.
“We can’t lower the prices, it’s impossible so soon”
Yeah but where can I get these cheap Chinese EVs? I’ve never seen any for sale in the States
The $2,000 price was legit, but that didn’t include batteries. It was another $300 or so for heavy lead acid batteries, $500 if I wanted a lithium-ion battery pack (3 kWh), $710 for a bigger lithium pack (5 kWh), and $1,050 if I wanted a giant lithium battery (6 kWh).
The article goes on to say that shipping is a big deal, too. It requires thousands for a space in a container. But the total clocked under $9K IIRC
giant, 6 kWh…
No problem for people who work from home and only need to go shopping once a week.
The “giant” battery should be at least 10x bigger to call it “medium sized”.
Yeah but those aren’t street legal
How much for a sodium battery ?
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Somewhat unrelated: IINM most Europeans don’t drive even a quarter of the max range of EVs on most of their trips. The current range of EVs should be just fine it you plug it in every day like your phone. Getting an EV that can get you to work and back or to a friend and back without charging should already allow to buy an EV that’s quite affordable.
IINM
That’s a new one to me. I’m surprised because I thought abbreviations in that style are starting to die out.
If I’m Not Mistaken. IDK, I’ve seen it quite often 🤔 It’s not esoteric.
Most Europeans have one, max 2 cars per household. A fuckton of Europeans also go on holiday with their cars once or twice a year.
One car needs to work for most use cases. It’s fine if you have more cars than people in the house that one of them is a 100 mile range commuter, but a different kettle of fish if the same car needs to do an 800+ mile trip to the Mediterranean in summer and a 500 mile ski trip in winter.
Then a plug in hybrid or elecric car with range extender motor makes more sense. I think it’s pretty dumb to be carrying around expensive, heavy batteries everywhere you go that only get used fully twice a year.
So they CAN make cars cheaper. I bet they still post profit while claiming they’re losing money.
China isn’t making EVs for the sake of going green and the companies making them should have their manufacturing methods questioned.
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In Southern Ca these are becoming popular, we also have the largest Viet population outside Vietnam I believe.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
LONDON/DETROIT, Dec 8 (Reuters) - The rise of inexpensive Chinese electric vehicles has upped the pressure on legacy automakers who have turned to suppliers, from battery materials makers to chipmakers, to squeeze out costs and develop affordable EVs quicker than previously planned.
“Automakers are really now only turning to affordable vehicles, knowing they’ve got to or they will lose out to Chinese manufacturers,” said Andy Palmer, chairman of UK startup Brill Power, which has developed hardware and software to boost EV battery management system performance.
Palmer, formerly Aston Martin’s CEO, said Brill Power’s products could boost EV range by 60% and enable smaller batteries.
Stellantis (STLAM.MI) is building a European plant with China’s CATL (300750.SZ) to make cheaper LFP batteries and recently unveiled the Citroen electric e-C3 SUV, which starts at 23,300 euros ($24,540).
Vincent Pluvinage, CEO of Palo Alto, California-based OneD Battery Sciences, said that on his recent visits with European automaker customers, every meeting started with the same refrain: “‘Reducing costs is now more important than anything else.’”
Veekim CEO Peter Siegle said using cheaper ferrite and low-cost processes - including 3D-printed copper wiring - can cut an EV motor’s price by 20%.
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My God the Chinese are at it again beating the United States at capitalism
It’s not on, it really isn’t, the Chinese shouldn’t be allowed to engage in the free market. They’re supposed to be the enemy.
They should be sanctioned so that Western car makers can continue to put out vehicles for ludicrous prices, the way God intends.
I know someone is going to read that and not get the implied /s
I don’t know, I feel like it works on both levels really. There are actual people that think like that and it’s insane. The US trade war doesn’t really help, It paints China as the bad guy even though they’re only doing the same thing as every other country in the world.
By all means demand China improves in areas which makes sense such as blatant copyright violation and human rights abuses but not this. Making cheap cars is hardly nefarious.
It depends on how it’s done. If the Chinese government is directly subsidizing the cheap cars then it’s a problem.
Kind of like the US subsidizing farmers and then dumping the cheap corn on other countries such that their local farmers go out of business.
That’s capitalism. You don’t get to complain because someone else gets a better deal.
China will always be able to produce cheaper products because the cost of living is lower there. But that is hardly a major revelation.
You forgot the uyghurs and slave labour…
Convenient.Well the US has 1.2 million prisoners who get paid on average 86 cents a day. So effectively slave labor. That they aren’t directly building cars doesn’t matter because money is fungible. Every dollar saved not paying prisoners is more money elsewhere in the economy.
Yes I did, I mentioned human rights abusers, it’s right there in the comment that I made, I can still see it.
I find it’s always a good idea to actually read the comments before getting angry about them.
