The biggest irony in all of this is that the European carmakers have lobbied and continue to lobby the EU against too strict of a mandate for EVs or too large subsidies for EVs, while also lobbying against stricter emissions controls (which indirectly means they don't have to build as many EVs for their fleets either).
Meanwhile, the same European automakers seem very willing to adopt China's super-strict schedule for EV adoption over the next few years in the country.
The European auto-makers should count their lucky stars that on one hand Tesla is pushing them to go into EVs from the consumer side, and on the other China is doing the same through those strict regulations I mentioned.
Without these two, the European carmakers would have probably gone bankrupt one by one (or purchased by multi-billion dollar Chinese companies in the future). At least now they have a role in the future of cars. But losing their leadership in car-making is pretty much guaranteed already. They just don't know it yet.
I grew up near Mercedes and Porsche in Germany and from what I remember they were always very reactive. Every time something like catalytic filters, safety belts or emission standard became mandated they always fought and claimed the world would go under. And soon after they adopted these things and did really well.
They're just buying more time. German automakers are quite risk-averse but usually they have the details sorted out before they go to market. Porsche already has hybrid cars and they're working on the Taycan. Audi has the e-tron in production. Daimler has the EQ concept which will go into production by 2022. What they don't have yet is the charging infrastructure. It should be standardised amongst all German automakers if they're smart.
Sounds like a classic flaw with innovator's dilemma. Established players try not to cannibalize themselves and the world passes them by. Kodak is one infamous example.
Hm? I thought Kodak was killed by the demise of demand for film cameras. They didn't have a significant leg in the world of high-end glass lenses or in the world of smartphones, which are the only, I think, significant photography markets left.
I mean, sure, they could have come up with a digital point-n-click and been okay for a bit longer, but they would still have been stomped by the rise of the cellphone camera destroying the low-end camera market.
The problem was that everything they were good at was no longer required. Really, the best they could have done is started renting their brand to digital camera makers sooner, while they still had a strong brand.
Kodak was a very early innovator in digital photography and there was a time when Kodak was the market leader in high end digital cameras. But they didn't want to cannibalize their film market so they killed that business.
My point is that today the digital camera market on the high end is all about the lens, something that is difficult and that Kodak didn't have a lot of expertise in, Just like the film camera market was. There was a period of time when having a better CCD would get you market share, but that was a relatively short period.
Although the paper proposes to merge all kinds of EU-based EV and battery companies together, the issue is still that the European market is 1% of the global market. EU companies will be likely selling to Asian EV markets for a long time.
It won't be a big market until there's an actual offering that grows the market. In Europe gas is very expensive, but electricity is mostly cheap. The grid is solid. The fundamentals are there.
As I see it, in a few years time the market for batteries for electic cars will be a little like the market for DRAM or Flash today. The upfront costs to be able to produce competitively at volume are very high, and although the market is large, there will be just enough competition and cells will be commodity enough that profit margins will be both slim and volatile. I'd much rather be in the business of making cars to use those batteries, where there's potential to differentiate your product with good design (like say, Apple in computers and phones) than in the business of making batteries.
Looking out 5 years, there will be significant battery shortages blocking the legacy automobile manu. from making EVs in volume to compete with Tesla and Chinese companies. It will take 5 years if they start building new factories soon to get them in production - and they don't seem to be hurrying. So in another 5 years, I see the Europeans (BMW, Merc, Audi/Porsche/VW) will stop arguing away the hit to their sales (did you see what Tesla did to them in q3!?) and react, but it will be late. Same thing for other American manufacturers. Some Japanese companies like Leaf are already getting with the program.
So for the first 5 years, it will be like the days when there wasn't enough ram to go around, and it got more expensive and valuable like right after a technology transition. But in 10 years we should be back to more widespread production. Whether much of that is in the US or Europe or its all in Japan on China remains to be seen.
I've never quite understood why our industry heavy weights didn't push heavily into battery technology. It seems fairly obvious energetic density is a big bottleneck in a number of industries. I'm under the impression all the attention went into theoretical research and patenting schemes, but nothing into actual production processes.
In that respect, I'm quite thankful to Tesla for pushing the envelop with Panasonic.
I think because it's a solved problem, where we can't advance. This has a few reasons:
1) All the obvious avenues (like simple battery chemistry) are explored and provide no obvious avenues for success
So you can't reasonably expect to advance here. Otoh, we could just stumble on a huge advance.
2) it is perfectly well known how to make ridiculous capacity, light batteries. There's even 2 known ways:
* chemical energy storage
* magnetic/electrical energy storage
In both cases it's solved ... only in the theoretical sense. If we have a way to arrange individual atoms on a large scale (or even 100nm portions of material) and fuse them, we would be able to make awesome batteries. But we don't know how to do this.
So this is now a manufacturing problem where you just won't get anywhere without incredible amounts of knowledge and fundamental advances.
3) What Elon Musk is doing is standardizing existing battery technology and making it widely available.
On the plus side, we need this. The standard batteries from decades ago can be improved electrically (e.g. fast charging by actually having 10000 batteries instead of one big one and charging all of them, which also enables fast discharging by discharging a lot of batteries at the same time, or even charging and discharging at the same time). An electrically complex, but well understood problem.
On the downside, this doesn't actually solve any issues we have with batteries. They're a little too big, a LOT too heavy. Elon Musk's batteries ... are a little too big, and a LOT too heavy.
There is another short term problem that has to be resolved before we get to EV cars in Europe. The E.U. car market is in a bit of a holding pattern due to Brexit. This is cramping the style of the European manufacturers even if they have no components coming from little Britain, no manufacturing plant there and no customers there. You would think companies like FCA (Fiat) or Mercedes would be exempt but they are not.
I am an evangelist when it comes to EV cars however I don't think that everyone is so keen, particularly in the cynical UK. Relatively speaking Americans are falling over themselves to buy Tesla cars, Tesla being a great American success story, even with Elon Musk upsetting people in his own special way and the prices being so high.
With the European brands there are tells, if VW come out with a new car there is nobody asking where the EV version is. Same with other makes, that is just not on most people's radar, exhaust note matters more. I think it is a sad state of affairs. There are promises that they will be fully electric/hybrid by such and such a date and then they launch a 'G-Wagen' type behemoth with a monster ICE engine in it. It is like they are hooked on heroin and promise they will give up next week.
China is showing leadership and it is about their domestic market and having cleaner cities. You can't get permits to drive an ICE car into some cities now, unless you live there and already have an ICE car then your only option is EV. That is fantastic. The Chinese know that they really will be conquering the world with their EV cars. We may mock their cars as not being crash worthy and rip-offs of European designs but we said that about the Japanese and their sub-compact cars. And the Koreans. It is not rocket science, just poach the design team from another company and get styling from an Italian specialist - Italdesign, Pininfarina, there are plenty of good ones.
The Chinese cars I am looking forward to seeing are the basic electric cars. When you have a quiet car with no gearbox or vibrations there is no need to make up for having an ICE with cupholders galore, speakers galore, carpets galore and other cruft. People in China have cottoned on to this already through buying second cars - EV cars - to enter the city with. They find that they don't really need that 'luxury' car after all.
Once these things enter the EU market the European marques will be doomed, maybe with a few exceptions. The Nissan Leaf/Renault Zoe is a product that is going somewhere but consumers are not that interested apart from evangelists. I also doubt that the insistence on 500 km range will be lasting forever - range anxiety. In China you can have 50 mile range and with a supercapacitor that can be achieved with far less batteries. Anything further just hop on a plane. Can't do this in Europe where it takes four hours to get in and out the airport.
The European makes and the European customers had their chance and they blew it. Tough. I look forward to the 5 year plan of China and a flood of Chinese EV Volvos coming over to Europe to be totally taken up by millenials with kids, leaving fuddy duddy ICE addicts to grow old and die off.
It is quite clear that at motor shows the electric cars have the interest of people that attend. Everything else is boring, has-been, seen-before.
Motorsport is where it gets really interesting. You may laugh but Formula E is where the action is. Just ask Nico Rosberg, now a shareholder in it. Or last years DTM (German touring cars) winner who has jumped ship. Or any of the big names in motorcar manufacturing that can't be bothered running teams in F1 or DTM but proudly have their names plastered on a Formula E car.
Porsche - now part of VW - have also jumped ship. Sure they will be selling 911s with big v10 engines in for a while but they see their future on the race track and on the highway as electric. They are bringing performance to the charging problem, in a matter of minutes you will be able to charge your Porsche to have a full battery. As for the rest of the VW group the 'ID' range of EVs is happening and the Audi E-tron with 4WD is happening too.
Nissan/Renault are fully committed, BMW are making the MINI into their EV. Jaguar Land Rover have the i-Pace.
Ford, GM and FCA don't get it. GM want more time to get it right and have had a go with those Bolt things.
Peugeot/Citroen don't get it either, however they do have a grander vision for selling mobility services rather than actual cars, with a view to re-enter the US market unencumbered with dealerships.
It is easy to dismiss noises and efforts made as green-washing but it isn't. Ships don't turn on a dime plus it is quite hard to make money from cars, hence in the US there are trucks, with the financial incentives that go with making trucks (Chicken Tax etc.)
The reluctance of 'petrolheads' to show enthusiasm reminds me of the time I excitedly showed my father the internet when the Mosaic browser was what you had. That was circa 1993 and he was underwhelmed. I thought it was 'must see', he only saw the lack of speed and didn't think it would catch on. Oh how I wish I had a video of that now - I could post it to him on WhatsApp, which has replaced the phone for him. He still reads a printed newspaper and still watches the TV when the news comes on, but has accepted the internet for eBay, YouTube instruction manual things, maps, search and everything else.
I think 'petrolheads' (not a pejorative term) are attached to car noises, manual gearboxes and the smell of petrol much like how my father clings onto his printed newspaper. The printed newspaper isn't such a bad analogy, there are understandable rituals that go with it - Sunday morning leisurely reading is the 'dream', with coffee in hand. But a new generation has come along that get their news from their hand rectangles. This new generation wonder why you would want to get all this grubby newsprint on your hands, go on a special trip to the shop to pay money for this pile of read-once paper and clutter the house with these fire-hazard dead tree things. Even the broadsheet (or tabloid) format is not convenient. Not to mention how do you search, why is it out of date already and so on. They don't have problems paying hundreds for a hand rectangle though.
Electric cars are like that, a new generation will wonder why you want an old fashioned 'grandpa' car with unreliability, fumes, noise, that expensive trip to the petrol station, the lack of cabin space, the complication of changing gears and the lack of torque.
I would say that the GM electric car that got killed is like the aforementioned 'Mosaic' browser and EV cars seen on the roads (generation 1 Leaf, compliance cars) are analogous to Internet Explorer 6. The Tesla cars are analogous to the first iPhone. Remember how Microsoft genuinely believed that nobody would buy an iPhone, oh how they laughed... So it is a bit like that.
Clearly you can still buy printed newspapers but quite a few have gone online only. I doubt that any newspaper nowadays really cares about the print editions, they know their readers ...
Also I'm not sure what you class as German manufacturers but Vauxhall/Opel have a factory in Ellesmere port building Astras (Opel and Vauxhall), and Opel is a German brand.
Alternatively Minis are made I Cowley and owned by BMW.
I assume RR and Bentley are still in the UK also and they too are owned by German companies.
As to parts suppliers. I cant point to any one supplier that supplys German car companies but I cant believe there aren't any.
I just saw the street outside and all the cars are German, although there is a Renault Zoe looking good without the tailpipe - had to check that. But yes, you are right, German cars are what everyone wants to buy in the UK.
Opel and Vauxhall were owned by GM until a year ago, they are now owned by Peugeot/Citroen - 'PSA group'. When the Astra gets to the end of its life expect Ellesmere Port to close. Regarding Luton there will be vans made there on the PSA platform, this will be badge engineering with the same vans having many different inprints, possibly for other non PSA brands as that already goes on a lot in the sector.
PSA also bought Chrysler Europe many aeons ago and only kept the Ryton plant going in the UK, the Peugeot 309 was supposed to by a Chrysler originally. That really was decades ago and it kind of vanished, much like how GM/Ford dropped a few brands after 2008, closing production here and there.
Bentley do have some British badge on them but they make the Bentayga alongside the Porsche and Audi SUVs somewhere in the Czech Republic or Slovakia, I would have to fact check there, but you get the idea. They might send them off to England to have the badges slapped on but the point is that it is an integrated supply chain.
Rolls Royce have invested in plant in the UK but that again is part of a complicated supply network, the engine is German in a Rolls, originally - a century ago - Rolls did the engine and chassis, you were having to shop elsewhere for the 'coachwork', in 2018 they do just the 'coachwork'. Rolls Royce is ultimately a halo brand, bespoke but very much made possible by BMW 7 series type of platforms.
MINI production is in the UK however there is also a lot of MINI cars made by Magna in Austria (the MINI Clubman things) as well as in the former DAF factory in the Netherlands. MINI are well placed to shut up shop completely, for good in the UK. Notionally they are changing the UK production facilities for the EV models promised.
Getting back to Vauxhall, they were not just Opel with a different badge, in the days before the common market GM had lots of different subsidiaries with their own design and engineering. Same with Ford, British Fords were different to German Fords.
In that era there was a cross licensing deal with components so Lucas/Girling in the UK did not compete in the same markets as Bosch in Germany. With things like disc brakes, lighting and much else that was how it worked, Lucas could make the whole range for the UK and Bosch could for their markets, sharing patents and IP. Lucas got merged, acquired, split up and sold, so some bits of it are owned by companies in Germany like ZF. These companies know no borders though.
On some levels you appear to know more about this than me.
For example I didn't know "When the Astra gets to the end of its life expect Ellesmere Port to close." But then when I check up all I can find is a threat from March which isn't quite so definitive. And theres no mention on wikipedia either, so do you have a better source?
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-43300201https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vauxhall_Ellesmere_Port
It is a loss making concern. Hence offloaded to PSA. There is over-capacity in the market, too many cars, not enough buyers. Life is on hold due to Brexit plus there are unions, politicians and the media to manage.
They have cut the shifts from two to one, let go of a few hundred workers, so, as of now it is half closed already.
There is another Opel plant in Poland making the Astra, the Astra being the only model they make there. The next Astra model comes along in 2020, which is two years away. There is no money on the table from the UK government to make this happen.
The plant in Poland is brand new, Ellesmere Port is vintage. Wages are cheaper in Poland, Poland will also have better access to the EU market if Brexit happens. Brexit is happening unless there is some fluke event that obliterates parliament and miraculously restores sanity.
The engines, transmission and much else that lurks beneath the Astra all comes from Europe, none of that is made in the UK. In Poland these important sub-assemblies can come from over the border in Germany, no post-Brexit WTO tariffs needed.
Everyone wants crossovers these days, the Astra as it exists is at the end of the model life, is not a crossover and limps on in the UK market because it is notionally British.
Luton is a different story, vans come from there and PSA like their vans. Right now their main van is a joint venture with Renault, effectively from the purchase of GM Europe PSA get to where they need to be with vans.
There are dealer networks as well as factories, the former, particularly with vans, is of interest to PSA.
Renault have ended the joint venture with PSA, they now have a partnership going with Mercedes. The depths of this I don't know, they share engines and South America is a big part of the plans.
Here is an earlier story about how Ellesmere Port must 'shape up', note how the Corsa (made in Spain) already has plans laid out for the new Corsa and electric Corsa. There is no 'electric Astra' mentioned. The 'electric Astra' (if it ever exists) won't be designed from scratch for some people in The Wirral to put together with their existing screwdriver operation, you can good-as-guarantee it will be an electrified PSA model with a different badge on it, if at all.
Your link just seems to mirror mine, and came out at virtually the same time. The only mention of job cuts at Ellesmere port that I could find are 400 jobs last year and sales are down all over Europe so even if shifts were cut I dont see what your point is.
Look. The first paragraph of your first post claimed German manufacturers sold no cars in the Uk, didn't manufacture there, and didn't source any parts from there. That quite obviously isn't true so I challenged it. Your followup response suggests a factory is going to be closing, when that isn't really true. If you have a point to make you'll make it much better by not surrounding it by things that aren't accurate.
You misread me, the brands that are not British are not exempt from Brexit fallout with that being regardless of whether they sell anything in the UK, regardless of whether they have components coming from the UK and regardless of whether they have assembly plants in the UK.
You read into that something else.
Regarding Ellesmere Port, there is no plan for it after the current Astra model goes. This was decided a long time ago but the deal is to keep it open until 2020 and the new owners have not renegaded on the deal.
You're right I did mis read you.
I took you to mean there were no German companies with manufacturing in Britain. And none with any customers.
Re Ellesmere port. We will have to see. Brexit is a massive unknown. But hopefully wont be by 2020 (ha). But 2020 will probably be an election year so I'm not sure that the Torys will want the factory closing 'due to Brexit', so I'm sure some big juicy 'grants' will be offered.
Because the Chinese government is pushing electric vehicles very hard. It is doing this for several reasons
1) to counter global climate change
2) to reduce local pollution
3) to reduce dependency on foreign oil
4) to establish global dominance in batteries and vehicles.
From what I have read, the experts expect that falling battery prices will lead to electric cars costing about as much as ICE ones by around 2025, and this will lead to EV sales skyrocketing and ICE sales plummeting. All the traditional manufacturers will be in deep trouble then except the ones that had decided a number of years before to focus on switching over to electrics. Unfortunately in the US the President is deeply committed to fossil fuels forever.
ICE manufacturers produce ICEs because they are cheaper than EVs and that's where the market is at right now. You can't expect the average buyer of a vehicle to pay $15k - $20k more (depending on the model this is a 100%+ markup) just because it is electric. This is a problem that solves itself automatically by simply waiting for cheaper batteries which is the strategy ICE companies are following right now. Almost every ICE company already produces EVs but the price makes them completely uncompetitive compared to ICEs except as a luxury product.
Just look at the statistics...
When VW released the e-Golf 3 years ago it outsold Tesla in Norway [0] by a factor of 2x but nobody is making news about it today because it's not as trendy as a $100k Tesla or $50k Model 3, it's just a damn expensive golf and it will stay that way until battery prices come down.
[0] "Sent i går kveld offentliggjorde Opplysningsrådet for veitrafikken (OFV) registreringstallene. De viser at det ble nysolgt 25.779 elektriske personbiler i Norge i 2015. De tre bestselgerne delte 62 prosent av markedet: Volkswagen e-Golf (8.943), Tesla Model S (4.039) og Nissan LEAF (3.189)." [0]
People would be talking about the eGolf if they had significant production. The problem is that they simple can not make profitable EV and that's why they don't do it.
>ICE manufacturers produce ICEs because they are cheaper than EVs and that's where the market is at right now.
That's correct. But as I said, battery prices are falling and so around 2025 they won't be more expensive.
>This is a problem that solves itself automatically by simply waiting for cheaper batteries which is the strategy ICE companies are following right now.
The problem with that strategy is that an auto company can't just one day switch over from almost all ICE's to majority EV's. It takes at least half a decade to do so, so a company needs to be working very hard on the change-over before it comes.
One example is batteries. If VW should want in 2025 to switch over, it couldn't do so because there would not be remotely enough batteries being produced, and building new battery factories will take many years. So what VW and every other ICE manufacturer needs to be doing right now is investing billions in battery factories.
However they just are not doing that, or many of the other things needed to get ready, and so when the time comes they are going to get totally clobbered by Chinese manufacturers who have been ramping up EV production at a very rapid rate, and Tesla.
And the reason the Chinese companies are rapidly expanding EV production is the government is pushing them so hard. But in Europe, not to mention the US, the governments are mistakenly assuming that it is going to be ICE's forever, or at least that the EV revolution will be two or three decades from now.
Don't forget, these are the same automakers that faked their diesel results for years - poisoning (their own) cities with noxious fumes. Its fair to say that the environment is not high on their agenda.
Instead, its simply that ICE cars offer higher barriers to entry, and higher revenue. Higher barriers to entry since the engines and fuel systems are incredibly complex, and higher revenue since they need more repairs and spare parts.
EVs by contrast are much simpler, and will encourage the commodification of vehicle transport - look at what is happening in China with 'Low Speed Electric Vehicles'.
Its kind of a shame that countries like Poland havn't launched their own low-cost EV companies, to take over the low-end of the European market. But its unsurprising as Europe, even the East, is indeed very bureaucratic and unaccommodating to startups. The continent would help itself massively if all countries adopted English as an official second language.
You still need to replace the battery pack, sell the car at a hefty discount with a degraded pack or pay for a new and expensive pack replacement. Don't worry, the barrier of entry into EV is still high. The complexity moves from the mecahanical side into the battery cooling and adaptive charge/discharge strategy, adaptive software for drive assist and instead of the spare parts costs you've got a hefty battery replacement cost that's like 20-30% or a new car. Plus less competition from used cars, since they come with degraded batteries.
This article is irritatingly wrong in the numbers it gives. It says tesla will make 100k cars in the us and 500k in china. Tesla is already producing at the rate of 300k cars in the us, and it's increasing (200k m3, 100k s&x). The US battery factory isn't even at full size. This article says telsa is producing more batteries than all the rest of the world together - [0].
I'm sure the rest of the world can catch up and pass Tesla in battery production - but they have to try. According to info available from recent articles (see above), Tesla does have half battery production at least. There's nothing that stops Tesla from making more factories, or anyone else. They just have to spend the money to get started. The weakest auto company was able to do this (weakest in finances), so other ones can do it too if they want to. They don't want to because auto companies would lose all their expertise in drivetrains if they switch to evs. They are being reluctantly drug into it. see [1].
I do agree with the basic idea that the European automobile companies will get decimated in about 10 years unless they react to this. Also Tesla plans massive new investments in batteries - [2]. (that includes the new China factory but also giga factory #2 and 3).
"Chairman Kees Koolen told CNN that Lithium Werks was investing in China because the infrastructure is better and it's easier to get the permits needed to build a factory. The company said it was put off by the amount of red tape needed to invest in Europe."
I don't really see a path to Europe becoming relevant in emerging technologies with comments like this from what few companies they do have.
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[ 0.27 ms ] story [ 97.1 ms ] threadMeanwhile, the same European automakers seem very willing to adopt China's super-strict schedule for EV adoption over the next few years in the country.
The European auto-makers should count their lucky stars that on one hand Tesla is pushing them to go into EVs from the consumer side, and on the other China is doing the same through those strict regulations I mentioned.
Without these two, the European carmakers would have probably gone bankrupt one by one (or purchased by multi-billion dollar Chinese companies in the future). At least now they have a role in the future of cars. But losing their leadership in car-making is pretty much guaranteed already. They just don't know it yet.
I don't see a big rise in other cars yet. Not even a lot of EV's. Probably the EV's will come when the car manufacturers are ready
I mean, sure, they could have come up with a digital point-n-click and been okay for a bit longer, but they would still have been stomped by the rise of the cellphone camera destroying the low-end camera market.
The problem was that everything they were good at was no longer required. Really, the best they could have done is started renting their brand to digital camera makers sooner, while they still had a strong brand.
Come pay the prices in Southern Europe.
In Portugal gas reigns in households. Most people would never have electricity based heating or stoves, given the cost spike if they did so.
It's somewhere around average for petrol too, so I don't see Portugal being much different here.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
So for the first 5 years, it will be like the days when there wasn't enough ram to go around, and it got more expensive and valuable like right after a technology transition. But in 10 years we should be back to more widespread production. Whether much of that is in the US or Europe or its all in Japan on China remains to be seen.
In that respect, I'm quite thankful to Tesla for pushing the envelop with Panasonic.
1) All the obvious avenues (like simple battery chemistry) are explored and provide no obvious avenues for success
So you can't reasonably expect to advance here. Otoh, we could just stumble on a huge advance.
2) it is perfectly well known how to make ridiculous capacity, light batteries. There's even 2 known ways:
* chemical energy storage
* magnetic/electrical energy storage
In both cases it's solved ... only in the theoretical sense. If we have a way to arrange individual atoms on a large scale (or even 100nm portions of material) and fuse them, we would be able to make awesome batteries. But we don't know how to do this.
So this is now a manufacturing problem where you just won't get anywhere without incredible amounts of knowledge and fundamental advances.
3) What Elon Musk is doing is standardizing existing battery technology and making it widely available.
On the plus side, we need this. The standard batteries from decades ago can be improved electrically (e.g. fast charging by actually having 10000 batteries instead of one big one and charging all of them, which also enables fast discharging by discharging a lot of batteries at the same time, or even charging and discharging at the same time). An electrically complex, but well understood problem.
On the downside, this doesn't actually solve any issues we have with batteries. They're a little too big, a LOT too heavy. Elon Musk's batteries ... are a little too big, and a LOT too heavy.
What exactly do you mean by this? Fuse them in what sense? What advantages would there be at a smaller scale?
But we can't build those designs.
I am an evangelist when it comes to EV cars however I don't think that everyone is so keen, particularly in the cynical UK. Relatively speaking Americans are falling over themselves to buy Tesla cars, Tesla being a great American success story, even with Elon Musk upsetting people in his own special way and the prices being so high.
With the European brands there are tells, if VW come out with a new car there is nobody asking where the EV version is. Same with other makes, that is just not on most people's radar, exhaust note matters more. I think it is a sad state of affairs. There are promises that they will be fully electric/hybrid by such and such a date and then they launch a 'G-Wagen' type behemoth with a monster ICE engine in it. It is like they are hooked on heroin and promise they will give up next week.
China is showing leadership and it is about their domestic market and having cleaner cities. You can't get permits to drive an ICE car into some cities now, unless you live there and already have an ICE car then your only option is EV. That is fantastic. The Chinese know that they really will be conquering the world with their EV cars. We may mock their cars as not being crash worthy and rip-offs of European designs but we said that about the Japanese and their sub-compact cars. And the Koreans. It is not rocket science, just poach the design team from another company and get styling from an Italian specialist - Italdesign, Pininfarina, there are plenty of good ones.
The Chinese cars I am looking forward to seeing are the basic electric cars. When you have a quiet car with no gearbox or vibrations there is no need to make up for having an ICE with cupholders galore, speakers galore, carpets galore and other cruft. People in China have cottoned on to this already through buying second cars - EV cars - to enter the city with. They find that they don't really need that 'luxury' car after all.
Once these things enter the EU market the European marques will be doomed, maybe with a few exceptions. The Nissan Leaf/Renault Zoe is a product that is going somewhere but consumers are not that interested apart from evangelists. I also doubt that the insistence on 500 km range will be lasting forever - range anxiety. In China you can have 50 mile range and with a supercapacitor that can be achieved with far less batteries. Anything further just hop on a plane. Can't do this in Europe where it takes four hours to get in and out the airport.
The European makes and the European customers had their chance and they blew it. Tough. I look forward to the 5 year plan of China and a flood of Chinese EV Volvos coming over to Europe to be totally taken up by millenials with kids, leaving fuddy duddy ICE addicts to grow old and die off.
This is pretty much the entire auto industry in a nutshell.
Do you honestly think they’re ever going to give that up, unless they are forced to?
It is quite clear that at motor shows the electric cars have the interest of people that attend. Everything else is boring, has-been, seen-before.
Motorsport is where it gets really interesting. You may laugh but Formula E is where the action is. Just ask Nico Rosberg, now a shareholder in it. Or last years DTM (German touring cars) winner who has jumped ship. Or any of the big names in motorcar manufacturing that can't be bothered running teams in F1 or DTM but proudly have their names plastered on a Formula E car.
Porsche - now part of VW - have also jumped ship. Sure they will be selling 911s with big v10 engines in for a while but they see their future on the race track and on the highway as electric. They are bringing performance to the charging problem, in a matter of minutes you will be able to charge your Porsche to have a full battery. As for the rest of the VW group the 'ID' range of EVs is happening and the Audi E-tron with 4WD is happening too.
Nissan/Renault are fully committed, BMW are making the MINI into their EV. Jaguar Land Rover have the i-Pace.
Ford, GM and FCA don't get it. GM want more time to get it right and have had a go with those Bolt things.
Peugeot/Citroen don't get it either, however they do have a grander vision for selling mobility services rather than actual cars, with a view to re-enter the US market unencumbered with dealerships.
It is easy to dismiss noises and efforts made as green-washing but it isn't. Ships don't turn on a dime plus it is quite hard to make money from cars, hence in the US there are trucks, with the financial incentives that go with making trucks (Chicken Tax etc.)
The reluctance of 'petrolheads' to show enthusiasm reminds me of the time I excitedly showed my father the internet when the Mosaic browser was what you had. That was circa 1993 and he was underwhelmed. I thought it was 'must see', he only saw the lack of speed and didn't think it would catch on. Oh how I wish I had a video of that now - I could post it to him on WhatsApp, which has replaced the phone for him. He still reads a printed newspaper and still watches the TV when the news comes on, but has accepted the internet for eBay, YouTube instruction manual things, maps, search and everything else.
I think 'petrolheads' (not a pejorative term) are attached to car noises, manual gearboxes and the smell of petrol much like how my father clings onto his printed newspaper. The printed newspaper isn't such a bad analogy, there are understandable rituals that go with it - Sunday morning leisurely reading is the 'dream', with coffee in hand. But a new generation has come along that get their news from their hand rectangles. This new generation wonder why you would want to get all this grubby newsprint on your hands, go on a special trip to the shop to pay money for this pile of read-once paper and clutter the house with these fire-hazard dead tree things. Even the broadsheet (or tabloid) format is not convenient. Not to mention how do you search, why is it out of date already and so on. They don't have problems paying hundreds for a hand rectangle though.
Electric cars are like that, a new generation will wonder why you want an old fashioned 'grandpa' car with unreliability, fumes, noise, that expensive trip to the petrol station, the lack of cabin space, the complication of changing gears and the lack of torque.
I would say that the GM electric car that got killed is like the aforementioned 'Mosaic' browser and EV cars seen on the roads (generation 1 Leaf, compliance cars) are analogous to Internet Explorer 6. The Tesla cars are analogous to the first iPhone. Remember how Microsoft genuinely believed that nobody would buy an iPhone, oh how they laughed... So it is a bit like that.
Clearly you can still buy printed newspapers but quite a few have gone online only. I doubt that any newspaper nowadays really cares about the print editions, they know their readers ...
The UK is a large market for German cars. https://www.acea.be/statistics/article/motor-vehicle-trade-b...
This one says 20% of the market https://www.express.co.uk/finance/city/906047/German-car-fir...
Also I'm not sure what you class as German manufacturers but Vauxhall/Opel have a factory in Ellesmere port building Astras (Opel and Vauxhall), and Opel is a German brand. Alternatively Minis are made I Cowley and owned by BMW. I assume RR and Bentley are still in the UK also and they too are owned by German companies.
As to parts suppliers. I cant point to any one supplier that supplys German car companies but I cant believe there aren't any.
Opel and Vauxhall were owned by GM until a year ago, they are now owned by Peugeot/Citroen - 'PSA group'. When the Astra gets to the end of its life expect Ellesmere Port to close. Regarding Luton there will be vans made there on the PSA platform, this will be badge engineering with the same vans having many different inprints, possibly for other non PSA brands as that already goes on a lot in the sector.
PSA also bought Chrysler Europe many aeons ago and only kept the Ryton plant going in the UK, the Peugeot 309 was supposed to by a Chrysler originally. That really was decades ago and it kind of vanished, much like how GM/Ford dropped a few brands after 2008, closing production here and there.
Bentley do have some British badge on them but they make the Bentayga alongside the Porsche and Audi SUVs somewhere in the Czech Republic or Slovakia, I would have to fact check there, but you get the idea. They might send them off to England to have the badges slapped on but the point is that it is an integrated supply chain.
Rolls Royce have invested in plant in the UK but that again is part of a complicated supply network, the engine is German in a Rolls, originally - a century ago - Rolls did the engine and chassis, you were having to shop elsewhere for the 'coachwork', in 2018 they do just the 'coachwork'. Rolls Royce is ultimately a halo brand, bespoke but very much made possible by BMW 7 series type of platforms.
MINI production is in the UK however there is also a lot of MINI cars made by Magna in Austria (the MINI Clubman things) as well as in the former DAF factory in the Netherlands. MINI are well placed to shut up shop completely, for good in the UK. Notionally they are changing the UK production facilities for the EV models promised.
Getting back to Vauxhall, they were not just Opel with a different badge, in the days before the common market GM had lots of different subsidiaries with their own design and engineering. Same with Ford, British Fords were different to German Fords.
In that era there was a cross licensing deal with components so Lucas/Girling in the UK did not compete in the same markets as Bosch in Germany. With things like disc brakes, lighting and much else that was how it worked, Lucas could make the whole range for the UK and Bosch could for their markets, sharing patents and IP. Lucas got merged, acquired, split up and sold, so some bits of it are owned by companies in Germany like ZF. These companies know no borders though.
They have cut the shifts from two to one, let go of a few hundred workers, so, as of now it is half closed already.
There is another Opel plant in Poland making the Astra, the Astra being the only model they make there. The next Astra model comes along in 2020, which is two years away. There is no money on the table from the UK government to make this happen.
The plant in Poland is brand new, Ellesmere Port is vintage. Wages are cheaper in Poland, Poland will also have better access to the EU market if Brexit happens. Brexit is happening unless there is some fluke event that obliterates parliament and miraculously restores sanity.
The engines, transmission and much else that lurks beneath the Astra all comes from Europe, none of that is made in the UK. In Poland these important sub-assemblies can come from over the border in Germany, no post-Brexit WTO tariffs needed.
Everyone wants crossovers these days, the Astra as it exists is at the end of the model life, is not a crossover and limps on in the UK market because it is notionally British.
Luton is a different story, vans come from there and PSA like their vans. Right now their main van is a joint venture with Renault, effectively from the purchase of GM Europe PSA get to where they need to be with vans.
There are dealer networks as well as factories, the former, particularly with vans, is of interest to PSA.
Renault have ended the joint venture with PSA, they now have a partnership going with Mercedes. The depths of this I don't know, they share engines and South America is a big part of the plans.
Here is an earlier story about how Ellesmere Port must 'shape up', note how the Corsa (made in Spain) already has plans laid out for the new Corsa and electric Corsa. There is no 'electric Astra' mentioned. The 'electric Astra' (if it ever exists) won't be designed from scratch for some people in The Wirral to put together with their existing screwdriver operation, you can good-as-guarantee it will be an electrified PSA model with a different badge on it, if at all.
https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/motor-shows-geneva-motor-...
Look. The first paragraph of your first post claimed German manufacturers sold no cars in the Uk, didn't manufacture there, and didn't source any parts from there. That quite obviously isn't true so I challenged it. Your followup response suggests a factory is going to be closing, when that isn't really true. If you have a point to make you'll make it much better by not surrounding it by things that aren't accurate.
You read into that something else.
Regarding Ellesmere Port, there is no plan for it after the current Astra model goes. This was decided a long time ago but the deal is to keep it open until 2020 and the new owners have not renegaded on the deal.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-26342093
It is an old plant and it is as good as gone. There is no point trying to argue otherwise unless you work there.
Re Ellesmere port. We will have to see. Brexit is a massive unknown. But hopefully wont be by 2020 (ha). But 2020 will probably be an election year so I'm not sure that the Torys will want the factory closing 'due to Brexit', so I'm sure some big juicy 'grants' will be offered.
Why are there less customers in Europe or US?
1) to counter global climate change
2) to reduce local pollution
3) to reduce dependency on foreign oil
4) to establish global dominance in batteries and vehicles.
From what I have read, the experts expect that falling battery prices will lead to electric cars costing about as much as ICE ones by around 2025, and this will lead to EV sales skyrocketing and ICE sales plummeting. All the traditional manufacturers will be in deep trouble then except the ones that had decided a number of years before to focus on switching over to electrics. Unfortunately in the US the President is deeply committed to fossil fuels forever.
ICE manufacturers produce ICEs because they are cheaper than EVs and that's where the market is at right now. You can't expect the average buyer of a vehicle to pay $15k - $20k more (depending on the model this is a 100%+ markup) just because it is electric. This is a problem that solves itself automatically by simply waiting for cheaper batteries which is the strategy ICE companies are following right now. Almost every ICE company already produces EVs but the price makes them completely uncompetitive compared to ICEs except as a luxury product.
Just look at the statistics...
When VW released the e-Golf 3 years ago it outsold Tesla in Norway [0] by a factor of 2x but nobody is making news about it today because it's not as trendy as a $100k Tesla or $50k Model 3, it's just a damn expensive golf and it will stay that way until battery prices come down.
[0] "Sent i går kveld offentliggjorde Opplysningsrådet for veitrafikken (OFV) registreringstallene. De viser at det ble nysolgt 25.779 elektriske personbiler i Norge i 2015. De tre bestselgerne delte 62 prosent av markedet: Volkswagen e-Golf (8.943), Tesla Model S (4.039) og Nissan LEAF (3.189)." [0]
https://web.archive.org/web/20160206212025/http://www.elbil....
That's correct. But as I said, battery prices are falling and so around 2025 they won't be more expensive.
>This is a problem that solves itself automatically by simply waiting for cheaper batteries which is the strategy ICE companies are following right now.
The problem with that strategy is that an auto company can't just one day switch over from almost all ICE's to majority EV's. It takes at least half a decade to do so, so a company needs to be working very hard on the change-over before it comes.
One example is batteries. If VW should want in 2025 to switch over, it couldn't do so because there would not be remotely enough batteries being produced, and building new battery factories will take many years. So what VW and every other ICE manufacturer needs to be doing right now is investing billions in battery factories.
However they just are not doing that, or many of the other things needed to get ready, and so when the time comes they are going to get totally clobbered by Chinese manufacturers who have been ramping up EV production at a very rapid rate, and Tesla.
And the reason the Chinese companies are rapidly expanding EV production is the government is pushing them so hard. But in Europe, not to mention the US, the governments are mistakenly assuming that it is going to be ICE's forever, or at least that the EV revolution will be two or three decades from now.
1) to reduce dependency on foreign oil
2) to reduce local pollution
3) to establish global dominance in batteries and vehicles.
-----POWERGAP-----
4) to counter global climate change
Instead, its simply that ICE cars offer higher barriers to entry, and higher revenue. Higher barriers to entry since the engines and fuel systems are incredibly complex, and higher revenue since they need more repairs and spare parts.
EVs by contrast are much simpler, and will encourage the commodification of vehicle transport - look at what is happening in China with 'Low Speed Electric Vehicles'.
Its kind of a shame that countries like Poland havn't launched their own low-cost EV companies, to take over the low-end of the European market. But its unsurprising as Europe, even the East, is indeed very bureaucratic and unaccommodating to startups. The continent would help itself massively if all countries adopted English as an official second language.
I'm sure the rest of the world can catch up and pass Tesla in battery production - but they have to try. According to info available from recent articles (see above), Tesla does have half battery production at least. There's nothing that stops Tesla from making more factories, or anyone else. They just have to spend the money to get started. The weakest auto company was able to do this (weakest in finances), so other ones can do it too if they want to. They don't want to because auto companies would lose all their expertise in drivetrains if they switch to evs. They are being reluctantly drug into it. see [1].
I do agree with the basic idea that the European automobile companies will get decimated in about 10 years unless they react to this. Also Tesla plans massive new investments in batteries - [2]. (that includes the new China factory but also giga factory #2 and 3).
0 - https://electrek.co/2018/08/02/tesla-gigafactory-1-battery-p....
1 - https://cleantechnica.com/2018/09/25/tesla-an-uncomfortable-...
2 - https://electrek.co/2018/11/02/tesla-multi-billion-investmen...
I don't really see a path to Europe becoming relevant in emerging technologies with comments like this from what few companies they do have.