This just sounds like VW Group have made a strategic decision to stop ICE development and they are letting each subsidiary announce it separately. Perhaps Porsche, Bugatti and Lamborghini will take longest to admit it?
Edit: VW Group already has a huge range of petrol engines:
VW already has a huge range of ICEs in their portfolio which are shared among their subsidiaries, especially VW, Audi, Seat and Skoda. Even if they all stop ICE development now, they have probably 5+ years until their engines would be out of date, so it makes absolute sense to shift their development focus to electronic drivetrains and use the products you already have on hand.
Certainly a better option to spend money in short term.
While there is very little one can improve about electric drivetrain, because even a highschooler can make a 90% efficient one, acing the manufacturing still needs huge "experience cost."
While an electric drivetrain is relatively simple at its concept, the challenges usually arise when you plan on building millions of that presumably simple drive train.
I work at a bit automative supplier and see the thought that is required for building a seemingly simple component on a huge scale while ensuring high quality and safety. Designing the product is one thing, but designing it in a way where it can be built efficiently and mets a certain quality standard is where it gets difficult. And that is exactly the part where Tesla is struggling and where VW can make an investment that has a significant impact.
They've just launched a modular electric platform that will probably be used in tens if not hundreds of new models (in the US only VW ID.4 has been launched so far).
I wonder how much improvements EV will see now that capitals are going into it hard. Beside economy of scale.. really new battery chemistry, induction motor efficiency etc
Motors? Probably not much, their theoretical efficiency is super high and the practical one is reasonably close.
Batteries chemistry, battery management through software are the main targets. To really beat ICEs we need something like 15-20% more battery capacity per weight and per volume (so both smaller and lighter batteries), faster charging, more charging cycles, less battery capacity loss over time, in about this order.
And at least half this capital should go into infrastructure, in my opinion, primarily charging, better/smarter grid.
Infrastructure is the most important part, IMO. For widespread adoption, EV charging will have to be just as convenient as gas vehicles. They've gotten a lot better in recent years, but there's still a lot of holes.
Maybe they shouldn't -- but Rome was not built in a day, and tomorrow people have to get to work.
A large portion of the world's real estate development since the advent of the car has been designed to work around those constructs. It took us a century to get into this mess and it'll probably take at least that to get out of it. We need to stop burning gasoline today, and EVs are the only way to do it. Erasing the sprawling suburbs that blanket car-centric places today isn't going to happen soon enough, and the environmental impact of the construction that would have to take place to do that is also very significant on its own.
EV charging is already more convenient than gas vehicles for most people. EV charging is done at home, unattended, and takes seconds. Trips to the supercharger are for special occasions, more akin to oil changes (another thing EVs don't have to do) than trips to the gas station.
Not everybody's home supports that, and a few people have driving patterns that require supercharging more frequently. But people who can support EVs find that they're more convenient than gas vehicles, not less. And that number grows larger every day, as apartment buildings and city streets find ways to make charging available.
That will scale roughly as EV production scales. It doesn't require any technological breakthrough. It would be fun if insta-charging happened, but EV owners find it's just not the problem that it's made out to be by people who are "worried". They go home, plug in their car, and never, ever have to go anywhere specifically for the purpose of fueling. In a few years, people are going to look at gas fueling as a waste of their time.
I suspect swappable batteries and/or standardized battery tech would be a huge boon. Plus expansion of available charging stations. Those kinds of things would really move the tech forward.
Of course swappable and standardized would be a huge benefit. Imagine if AA, C, a D batteries hadn't been made a thing and instead we just had every maker of flashlights and transistor radios use their own proprietary batteries. Never mind - we don't have to imagine, as that's where we've now arrived with consumer electronics. Nowadays, companies like "standards" only when used as a weapon to undermine their competitors.
But in the long run, I do suspect a return to swappable and standardized. It many require government regulation.
I don't see swappable batteries in the future. Those things weigh 500kg or more. Sure you could theoretically build a machine which is capable of swapping it but that's a big bit of infrastructure and the constraints it would impose on the design of the car would be huge.
That said, I do have hopes for more standardisation in battery form factors. I'd like for there to come a day when changing a battery is no more hassle than say having a new exhaust installed currently.
Tesla originally planned on swappable batteries, and then realized the logistics of it were not a good use of capital or sense. The latest Teslas use rigid battery packs as part of the structure of the vehicle. I suspect swapping those would be impossible quickly.
VW is also licensing their EV platform to other manufacturers. Ford will use VW's "Modularer E-Antriebs-Baukasten" (MEB) for some (maybe even all) of their new EV models. VW is currently killing it in the EV business and are right in the middle of setting up to lead EV production worldwide.
Many here said VW was slow in adopting EVs but they were working behind the scenes to set up MEB instead of cranking out a few models that needed different components and were all assembled differently. They can now profit from having common components and a unified software that can made into any type of car they want.
Yeah, this title makes it sound like they are different entities. Audi is under the VW group, basically the same company, with different branding and product offering.
> Perhaps Porsche, Bugatti and Lamborghini will take longest to admit it?
Porsche will be the first, as they have the Taycan, the platform is already being exported to Audi and (my guess) will be the basis of a next gen Lamborghini. Bugatti is in a completely different plane of existence though. I'm not sure what will happen with Bugatti but I'm almost certain they will be sold.
As a small volume manufacturer they should still be able to keep producing ICE engines. Their 16.4L W16 is practically a work of art. And because they are that special, it will be easiest for Bugatti to divorce from VW Group.
An electric 911 would not still be a 911. The 911 is defined by engine placement and configuration. I think they are acknowledging that their customers would regard an electric 911 as a travesty.
Exactly. And the great majority of their cars are now sold with automatic (PDK) transmissions. The manual isn’t even offered on the base 911 anymore. Sales have not suffered.
It and the other changes made seems to have had an effect on resale values/interest though, 993's[1] catch a good bit more than 996s[2] looking at BAT auction results. Granted there's nowhere near enough enthusiast interest to justify making them, but I think there's something there.
There are already threads on Porsche forums saying don’t drag race against Model 3s. When the 911 starts getting spanked by every other electric Honda off the line, you’ll hear their customers change the tune.
It was considered heresy for AMG to be anything less than a big V8*. Then came the 4cyl 45s. Then came the non-hand-built 35/43/53 "notareal" AMGs.
Now the next generation C63 is supposed to be a 4cylinder hybrid. The cries of heresy have already started. I imagine the generation after that might be fully electric.
(* yes, I know there were early non-V8 AMGs, but AMG seems to have built their reputation on putting a massively powerful V8 into everything).
The only options Porsche will eventually have for 911s will be to go electric, to kill the 911 brand entirely, or reserve it as non-roadlegal track toy. Might not happen in 5 years or 10 years or 20 years, but it will happen. Assuming humanity hasn't killed itself yet.
I think Porsche will Introduce a new Electric GT car to replace the base 911, the 718, Macan and Cayenne will be electrified, Panamera will be discontinued and the 911 will live on only in the Turbo and up variants with a Stick and DCT and a Hybrid option.
Porsche wont drop the Motor for a while, Bugatti seems primed to be the first to actually drop it as they make one car and the Chiron's successor will absolutely be all electric.
Lamborghini and Porsche will take a while, Lamborghini may re-spin the brand with an electric supercar of sorts that might be a massive hit but also Lamborghini sells its cars to people who want a 'Lambo' and want to be seen in it, they don't care too much about what is under the hood.
Porsche may move 80% of their range to electric, but I think they will keep Gas around the longest of them all. People who buy porsches, many of them, drive them. They drive them hard and take them to the track. Rowing through the gears is part of the whole thing.
Tell this to Formula-e teams which found out that even a 1.5 degree difference in magnet placement can effect performance characteristics of motors tremendously.
Similarly, thermal management of the same motors change their power characteristics enormously. They're trying to simulate and optimize these things in that boring cable spaghetti.
If you read my comment again, you'll see that it's not implying anything. I'd rather watch the competition between EVs and hydrogen powered vehicles instead of making any claims.
But, since you claim there's a flaw in my logic, let's remember some examples:
First rechargeable batteries were NiCads. Low capacity, memory effect ridden inefficient and hard to charge sticks of energy. Today we have Li-Polys which charge faster, last longer, provide more current and can be formed into infinite forms. Moreover, we have experimental glass substrate batteries which are non-flammable and can be cut and damaged during operation (even with full charge) without any explosions or fumes. They continue to work even. People claimed that batteries cannot improve up to that point, yet we're here.
While we're talking about energy, super capacitors were a thing of fiction, until they started to pop everywhere.
ARM CPUs were always touted as slow, low power devices confined to IoT, light load servers and SBCs. X86 was claimed the undisputed king. Yet over iterations, Apple's M1 leaves more power consuming X86 chips in the dust. I use an M1 MacBook Air. I'd repeat the famous words in that Reddit comment: Black. Magic. Fuckery. M1 is literally it.
Diesel, besides being dirty, always touted as high torque, low power devices. Yet we have formidable diesel cars racing in LeMans. Even most powerful Offshore racing boats were Lamborghini Marine diesels when I last looked.
Linux was always touted as a toy operating system until five to ten years ago. Yet, Microsoft is providing Linux images in Azure, building SDN switches and backbone network on Debian, implementing WSL2 in lightning speed to prevent further market share slip and writing a lot of tools running on Linux and contributing to the Linux kernel to make sure that it plays nice with Windows. They've even ported SQL Server to that toy OS.
Linux desktop is continuously claimed to be years away, but it happened already and it's improving steadily. It'd be another tech that people wouldn't have guessed that it'd improve that far.
These are the examples I can remember for now. I'd edit or add another comment if I remember more.
Edit: Changed "five" to "five to ten". Time flies.
Literally none of the excitement in Formula 1 comes from drivers picking the optimium gear to get the maximum power out of the engine - they do it perfectly 99.99% of the time anyway. It's all about the driving style, risk vs reward when it comes to approaching corner, to overtaking, to tyre and fuel management - all F1 cars could swap for an electric engine tomorrow and nothing about this sport would change.
Perhaps F1 should skip that kind of electrification and go straight to virtualization, as an e-sport? :)
I get your point about driver skill being the key currently, though I think F1 was most interesting when the optimal car for the ruleset was not so nailed down. That's what makes BattleBots interesting to me as a sport: design is a huge factor in the outcome. Electric F1 could bring back some diversity of design if the rules can be made flexible enough without compromising safety.
That's not true, they would go much slower and be much heavier. Formula E uses a different layout at Monaco because the cars don't have the energy to make it up and down the hill enough times.
Racing will move to electric too I guess in the future. Already Formula E is gaining popularity, compared Formula 1 which has turned extremely boring in the last 5 years.
> Formula 1 which has turned extremely boring in the last 5 years
I almost died of boredom last year when Grosjean went through a steel barrier, split his car in half, and narrowly cheated death in an enormous fireball.
A lot of the races last year were made more exciting by weather and COVID-related uncertainty. When the weather is nice and traction is good, the racing can often become a parade, at least at the front. I personally think F1 should only race when it's raining.
The writing is on the wall. Most manufacturers are at this point actively milking their sunk investment in ICE for as long as they can while simultaneously developing their EV strategy without killing their ICE strategy. A few have woken up to the notion that this is a losing strategy and that they need to go all in on EV. Basically the market is split between compliance vehicles, limited production EVs also available in ICE or hybrid configuration, or 100% EV only cars. The latter tend to have superior cost margins, performance, etc.
VW basically is doing the latter and is now announcing the status quo that, yes, VW/Audi/Porsche ICE development is dead as a door nail. Porsche sales are already dominated by their EV sales and growing quite nicely. I think the Audi eTron is also considered a success at this point.
In Germany, an added dimension is that the unions are waking up to the notion that their companies need to change in order for their members to stay employed. Anyone employed in ICE production lines is worrying about when (not if) they will be layed off. There seem to be regular announcements from all German manufacturers about layoff rounds. So, this is very real for them.
VW has been converting factories to battery and EV production over the last years and they are ramping up volume production to probably surpass Tesla pretty soon in terms of volume sales. Considering the ID.3 only launched summer last year, that's impressive. I think BMW and Daimler are getting worried about their position in the market at this point (or at least they should be). So, unions understandably want to see realistic plans for the future from these companies. As opposed to e.g. BMW waffling about hybrids as "the future" so they don't have to talk about not having a lot of EV production or a plan for fixing that.
I was talking about their growth more than absolute volume. VW also still has a lot of legacy sales. And of course they will need that for a while. But their growth is coming from EVs.
I looked it up "The song's lyrics tell a story set in a future in which many classes of vehicles have been banned by a "Motor Law."" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Barchetta
first scrapping old but reliable cars with cash incentives to buy "clean" diesel. Then dieselgate pushing for gasoline powered cars and getting pennies on the dollar back. Now killing ICE alltogether.
Not going to buy VW Group cars anytime soon.
The writing is on the wall. In Europe several big cities as well as countries have announced that they'll ban diesel engines in about 10 years, max. Some have announced that they'll ban all ICE cars in about 15-20 years.
Even bigger than the city by city ban is the huge, and ever more demanding EU commission fines on car makers, measured by grams of CO2 averaged across the fleet.
So what's happening is VW is trying to get ahead of the enormous fines which will make it impossible to keep selling larger sized ICE cars in the EU (e.g. SUVs which are becoming ever more popular in Europe).
> According to the EU, fleet emissions in 2018 were 120g/km, which means automakers need a 21 percent reduction overall to avoid fines that could total as much as 33 billion euros this year, according to some estimates. Each gram over the limit, per vehicle, will cost automakers 95 euros.
> Each automaker has a different target, based on the average mass of the vehicles they sell, and only 95 percent of sales are measured in 2020, meaning that some high-polluting cars won't count. Even so, analyst ISI Evercore has warned that the "2020-21 CO2 regulation poses the biggest risk to the auto industry in recent memory."
It's even sooner than that in places. The UK has announced a ban on new ICE vehicles from 2030. To be seen how closely that's followed through on, we have a long way to go on charging infrastructure.
Synthetic fuel and biofuels will probably be required for several decades until legacy equipment like farming machinery (not to mention military veichles) has been replaced/modernized. Regular cars, on the other hand, will probably be mostly electric within 15-20 years.
The main issues are power-grid development and EV range. I suspect those problems will be handled within 10 years.
No one talks about the biggest disadvantage of EVs which is extraction of lithium which is a threat to environment and people who are involved in it. Plus a major disadvantage is where these dead batteries end up! land fills which again is biggest threat to environment. Even batteries are recyclable but up to what extent one day they will end up in landfills [https://www.res-ev.co.uk/problems-with-ev/#:~:text=One%20of%....] . There are some other options like hydrogen powered cars which do not harm environment any way, i think more research should be done to promote them or any other absolutely cleaner biofuel powered cars
Yeah, that's another hurdle that needs to be tackled. Going electric is going to take decades, and we'll probably never be completely rid of combustion engines.
Since synthetic fuels are zero emissions, why would they ever need to be replaced by EVs? A better question is why we need to bother with electrification at all if there are alternative paths to zero emissions?
Particulate emissions can come from the tires. EVs aren't magic on this form of pollution. Plus, you can have particulate filters on the engine exhaust, reducing this greatly.
I wouldn't be surprised if ICE's powered by biofuel/synthetic fuel could be competitive with electic veichles given enough time to improve the technology. Most likely we are going to see some of that development as EV's simply cannot fill all the niches yet.
It changes things. Europe is developed. If Europe and other developed groups don't switch to clean energy, transportation, heating, etc, the future industrializing countries with probably 2-3-4 billion people will fry us all.
It's not a moral imperative, it's simple survival.
CO2 wise the shift to EVs alone will change almost nothing, you just centralize emissions at power plants. It does enable a potential shift to renewable energy sources, though.
IDK, but I won't spend 30K in a car that only allows me to city travel. If I'm forced to live without an ICE I just won't have a car, and that's it.
That's fine for many people, not so good for the car industry and their direct and indirect jobs.
Buying a 6K second-hand car is not only much more ecological than buying a brand new electric car, but I have more range, I can get it cheaply fixed if I go to something like a Renault Clio, a Peugeot 206, Fiat Panda and the like.
Since I live in a flat and I don't have garage, I can park it in my street without worrying about recharging (it's just going to get me a few minutes to get to the gas station, a two minutes to get gas).
With the salaries in my area, spending 30K in a car it's just too much money. It's more than my current yearly salary. And there's plenty of people with lower income than mine.
Also, turns out electric cars come with a lot of bloat that breaks, so the most immediate upside of such car goes away.
As far as I can see, too much has to change for mass adoption. With the current trend they'll remind cars for rich countries and rich people for a lot longer.
I can understand the Fuzz in high-income countries. 30k seems doable when your income is in the range of 60-200k. For me 30K is a lot of money.
And honestly I don't really feel that moving around a massive battery in a newly produced car is better than buying a Fiat Panda and taking care of it. My brothers Panda is nearing 500.000 Km and it's fine.
They said development. Not production or sales. Truth be told all the low hanging fruit with combustion engines was gobbled up back in the 80s and 90s with the advent of EFI. Since then it has been diminishing returns. The engines of today are about as clean as they could be without an insane amount of additional development. These manufacturers will be happy to keep selling their current ICE engines for years to come and devote the lions share of their R&D budgets to electrification efforts.
A lot of work in this field afaik is about finding new materials or using more common materials to do the same thing. Getting more R&D in this field early is definitely worth the pay off, and the right time as well.
It hasn't disappered -- it will be preserved because it's important. The tooling will exist in automotive museums and the expertise will reside in engineering historians and engineering academics -- the first tractor engines are generally still the learning tools for many undergrads. That knowledge just shifts from working proffessionals to another group in society.
The wording of the article title gives the impression that they will stick with the engines they have got. Really they are just going to develop the engines they have and not design from scratch any new engines.
A new engine from scratch rarely happens. Many engines can be traced back decades with there never being a new design, just iterative improvement.
Can anyone think of a new engine developed from scratch? Without any parts carried over?
The VR6 from VW was introduced in 1991. I'm sure you can point to lineage with earlier designs, but it's a unique design. The Freevalve design from Koenigsegg also comes to mind.
> In an exclusive interview, brand CEO Ralf Brandstätter said, “At the moment, I do not expect a completely new engine family to be launched.” Still, he wants to develop the engines currently in use and prepare them for new emissions standards such as Euro 7
So no, they are not ending ICE development. They continue development.
As to what "a new family of ICE" means is anyone's guess.
An, of course, this:
> Depending on which regulations are ultimately applied, the outlook for internal combustion engines could change dramatically once again
So, ending, but not really ending, and the outlook may change again.
> As to what "a new family of ICE" means is anyone's guess.
It's exactly what he said. Modern engine-families are typically developed as somewhat of a modular platform. Then, there are several or even dozens of variations of that platform for various needs, some with different emissions accessories, some with varying displacements, compression ratios, valve/spark timings, etc.
For a tech analogy: it's similar to how CPU manufacturers design a core architecture and then give you varying numbers of cores, cache, thermal designs, feature sets, etc.
"a new family of ICE" is not as confusing as you might think. Automotive engines have clearly defined generations and families of development.
You can think of "new family of ICE" as the equivalent of processor instruction sets. A common "new family of instruction sets" would be something like the development of the AMD x86-64 64 bit instruction sets on top of the original 32 bit x86 set. A smaller "subfamily" or "development" can mean the addition of a new family of SIMD or something like AVX512, etc. However, the processor family is still an offshoot of x86 then x86-64, etc.
In car automotive engines, it's exactly the same process. An ICE engine family can be in use for well over 20 years undergoing iterative improvements.
VW will not continue to push the automotive equivalent of developing new instruction sets for the x64 processor.
postmark: some examples of past "families of development" in internal combustion engines: carburator -> fuel injection; development of the supercharger and turbocharger, and making engines strong enough to withstand pressures from undergoing forced induction; hybridization - adding a battery to the drive train; etc
All of these would be seen as major "ICE new families" - and for example in the VW and Audi world, you would see "families" of engines that would have, for example, a turbo on the engine in a particular model year, vs naturally aspirated only from the past model year car, etc.
In VW, one major family is the VR6 - it's an innovation specific and proprietary to VW alone, and it's been around since 1991, and still in production - you see them still on new generation VW Atlas as a base engine option - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VR6_engine - that's a 30 year run for an "engine family".
The Bugatti Veyron uses 2 VR8 bolted together to make a W16 engine - this is the same VR engine family technology taken to the extreme edges of performance.
VW will no longer develop another internal combustion engine family in the way they kick started the "VR6" project back in the 90's.
Are there any large companies considering doing a turbine electric hybrid? Plain turbine cars were actually done 50 years ago and Jay Leno’s garage has one and he’s actually built one. Even one of Tesla’s co-founder (Ian Wright) has a startup doing this. One advantage is that it can burn any fuel - hydrogen included. This can be practical for larger vehicles especially.
That would be news to me that VW actually had any engine in development by themselves. Last thing I heard were small customizations in their racing department. Before they could announce ending any engine development, wouldn't they need to start one before?
DACH countries are jelous of Tesla. Soon even children in post-Communist countries will be forced to work for German automotive industry, skipping any education. No other opportunities will be available. (Meantime MS, G, and Big Four salesfolks are hysterical to sell them "The Cloud")
Worth noting that PAH3 appears to be Porsche SE - the holdings company that is the largest shareholder in VOW, not the Porsche company that makes the cars - which is 100% owned by Volkswagen AG (VOW).
Yeah, there's a chance VW are playing this to the market. As a commenter opined in another thread; new engines are rarely developed anyway and they stated that they will continue to iterate over current set of engines.
Note that there's no word about VW's EV plans besides this line "None of the executives specified a definite date for when they would exclusively produce electric vehicles".
There's also this line "Completely new engines were unlikely, he said.".
Seems like a planted PR piece by VW to further fuel the stock price momentum.
I'm a Tesla fan and love "electro-mods" - classics outfitted with battery packs - but this seems premature to me. There is 100 years of knowledge of these engines and moving to battery tech does not require quitting ICE entirely.
A cursory glance at the article would reveal that they are not completely ending the development either, only development of new "engine families".
> "At the moment, I do not expect a completely new engine family to be launched." Still, he wants to develop the engines currently in use and prepare them for new emissions standards such as Euro 7
Even if all ICE production stopped today, we'd have existing cars on the roads for a while.
As EV production ramps up, they should get cheaper due to economies of scale and the technology maturing. Currently the public charging infrastructure is awful, but that's also a chicken-egg problem that will solve itself.
EVs already have significantly lower per-mile cost, so it's only the initial cost that's higher. I think we're not far off from the initial cost falling low enough that it won't make sense to buy new ICE, and then adoption will accelerate rapidly.
Look at smartphones. There was a time when they were expensive toys and almost nobody had them, until they reached a tipping point.
> I get the feeling petrol cars will be cheaper than electric cars for the low end of the market for a long long time.
Various reports estimate electric vehicle cost parity to be achieved around 2025 for small cars, and around 2028 for SUVs (source: theicct.org/sites/default/files/publications/EV_cost_2020_2030_20190401.pdf)
Used ICE cars will probably remain a cheaper option for another 10 years.
I agree about a near term possible shift downmarket, but don't forget to consider what could happen if gas stations started to go under due to a shrinking market.
Ease of refueling is a chief advantage, so if it became difficult to locate gas, and the price began to rise, that could be the end.
Multiple non-treehugger analysts like UBS [0] have predicted that upfront price parity between ICE and EVs will be achieved around the middle of this decade. Add to that lower fuel and maintenance costs plus the likelihood of a rising carbon price and the economic case becomes even more compelling.
Good luck driving through the Siberian taiga or the Arozonian desert with a battery-powered car.
Or what about emergency vehicles with electric motors?
“We’re sorry, Mr. Miller, we can’t come to your burning house right now, we need to recharge our batteries first.”
I’m sorry, but battery-powered cars have a very limited usecase. There is a reason why the vast majority of cars beind sold are still using combustion engines.
I would say it’s the other way around. Only minority of use cases (like in your example, what’s the ratio of people using vehicles in environments like that) have a need for combustion engine.
For most people a vehicle that gets from a point A to point B with the distance being 10-50km is enough. And for that EVs even now are more than adequate.
It’s just that there’s always this mythical ”long trip” coming that people use as an excuse for the need of an ICE. vehicle.
And the Tesla Model S LR has a range of 402 miles, but it is increasing every year. Lucid Motors is coming out with a car that has a 500 mile range. The "omg range is a problem" crowd is in for a rude awakening when you can go further on a single charge than most vehicles can on a single tank of gas.
ASP for EVs are dropping slowly over the last few years but it is still higher. But that's not because it's not technically possible to make cheap EVs. Just look at the Chinese market. If it has wheels, you can turn it into an EV for not that many dollars. It's not technically hard to do so. They are looking to enter the European market with EVs priced below 10K even. That would create some issues for ICE manufacturers dependent on selling more expensive ICE vehicles. A high volume market entry could wipe out a lot of cheap ICE cars.
Short term battery supply basically means the market gets squeezed top down. You get better margins putting the same battery in a 30K car than in a 20K car. And since demand is there, you see manufacturers trying to saturate that market before they target cheaper price points.
Some manufacturers that are doing combined ICE/hybrid/EV strategies are essentially pricing their EVs higher because they only produce them in limited volume and customers seem to buy them despite the high price. Also, if they'd price them lower, they'd kill their legacy business and sink that investment. The problem with that strategy is when EV only manufacturers start shipping better & cheaper cars in increasing volume. This is starting to happen and it's a market that looks like it will be doubling every year for some time.
Why do you think that? A standard range Tesla Model 3 starts at 33,190 and is still an absolutely fantastic vehicle. The exact same Tesla that I bought in 2018 (Long range all wheel drive) is almost $10,000 less today than when I purchased it. As the economies of scale improve, the prices go down. As more and more manufacturers move to BEV vehicles, the manufacturing / parts will become more commodity and hence cheaper. Tesla really pushed the needle, but the VW group going entirely electric is going to massively force the issue. Their all electric Porsche, the Taycan, was the best selling Porsche of last year and this year so far. Also now that there are multiple manufacturers making serious electric vehicles, that encourages them to compete amongst each other on price.
All of these leads to the overwhelmingly obvious conclusion that EVs are going to get massively cheaper in the next 2-5 years. One of the biggest selling points is also the lower fuel prices and limited scheduled maintenance. An EV is simply cheaper to operate than most ICE vehicles, and that is not really going to change. Also note that you can get really good EVs used for a massively lower price.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with ICE vehicles, but the writing is on the wall.
China will produce most of the ICE vehicles. VW will simply buy a Chinese company, and hide behind a new 'brand'. It's cheaper to make things in China, ICE engines haven't changed much in two decades. Also, ICE engines aren't going anywhere, it'll just be too hard to make money building them, as China ramps up production. Much like N.America lost out to Japanese cars in the 1980s, now they'll lose out to Chinese ones.
Automotive tariffs are literally made to prevent exactly that. And shipping costs for 2-tonne hunks of steel are substantial enough, far more so than for consumer electronics.
An electric motor is way simpler than an ICE. Even controlling it electronically to increase its performance, efficiency and response should be easily doable with simple MCU's. There's no reason we should accept electric cars with complex computers running complex unfixable proprietary software that only the vendor has access to the source code and is updated over-the-air without owner's consenting.
> There's no reason we should accept electric cars with complex computers running complex unfixable proprietary software that only the vendor has access to the source code and is updated over-the-air without owner's consenting.
All the other systems in the car require sophisticated integrated computers and sensors - automatic breaking, cruise control, speed limiting, suspension management - it's not just about the motors. I'm not sure there's any way to put the genie back in the bottle?
There totally is. All of those sensors are pretty standard fair. If someone made an open source control unit that allowed a technician to calibrate these sensors there is no reason they cannot be universal. Or at least plug and play to a certain extent. Look at a MAF sensor: it's just a heating element and a temperature probe. If you could calibrate the resistance of the heating element to known temperature; the sensors themselves all behave the same.
Electric motors are a little different depending on specification but realistically the software could come prepared for any motor providing the end user sets it up.
Personally I've always wondered why cars have 3 or 4 LCD screens and I still have to see the dealer to find out why my check engine light came on. I'm one of those shade tree mechanics who would be able to handle the technical jargon.
There are regulatory reasons. In Germany all the functional parts of your car have to be certified, often for that specific vehicle and in combination with other parts. To a certain degree that's definitely necessary. I don't want people downloading bugged amateur software that will make the gas pedal stuck and drive into a crowd because they thought it would give them an additional 5 horsepower. This may sound foreign to the typical American who is allowed to drive around in a rusty mad-max vehicle with failing brakes and DIY body work that will impale any pedestrian unlucky enough to cross its path.
Germany is a comparatively small market. Engineers should not be forced to design to the lowest denominator. If anything Germany should be left behind to incentivize changing German regulations.
Regulations should enforce values with clear benefits. If the benefits are not clear then regulation is simply a barrier for entry instead.
If the screen told us the fault we would finally have come full circle. My 89 accord lxi's ECU had a blinking light (under the driver's seat) that communicated the detected fault. Yeah you needed a lookup chart but those were not very hard to find.
It would make total sense to have a semi-hidden menu that displayed all the info the computer has. The computer is already monitoring o2 sensors, injector performance, knocking, etc. Just expose that information. Why make us buy another device when the car already has the analytics built in?
Just to be clear external devices should absolutely still exist. It would just be nice, as a shade tree mechanic, to access the car's data directly.
For example automatic speed limiting works off cameras that read speed limit signs. I really don’t think that’s an off-the-shelf standardised sensor. And standardising it would probably hold back how quickly they could innovate in it.
The vast vast majority of car owners do not want to implement their own components using instructions from a blog. I can't believe that even needs saying. Most people want an integrated car and don't care about swappable sensors or access to engine data. I know I don't.
Open source exists so one person can build off the ideas of other people. This is how we get layers of abstraction that make computers approachable for the next person.
So one person makes the OCR component. Another makes the SBC to control it. Another makes the drivers for interfacing with sensors... ect.
Obviously this is too much work for one person. I think it's still worth it though. Maybe not to you, but then again you obviously don't care so you're free to go buy an off the shelf Chevy that you can never fix.
The difference is that my suspension management software will not auto-update. That bars posterior programmed obsolescence and forces the manufacturer to do it right the first time or they will have to face prosecution or expensive recalls.
My neighbor has a brand new Audi e-tron. Something was borked with the system and it wouldn’t interface with any of the remote services. The dealer couldn’t even get into the thing to do anything about it. The solution was allowing it to sit, plugged in, for 72 hours so the system would restart itself and update from the mythical cloud.
Tesla’s have a similar reputation for being unrepairable by the shade tree mechanic. Check out Rich Rebuilds on YouTube. His entire channel is about fighting Tesla to get access to the tooling and information necessary to ‘own’ the second hand Tesla he bought from a salvage yard.
Another friend has a BMW that will literally refuse to drive if he doesn’t have it serviced at the specified intervals at the dealer.
These are all anecdotes about high end cars but it’s trickling down to everything. The walled gardens are already upon us.
> Another friend has a BMW that will literally refuse to drive if he doesn’t have it serviced at the specified intervals at the dealer.
On one hand this is a great solution to people ruining lease vehicles by not using the free maintenance they include...
But I'd love to know what model is doing this, sounds kind of absurd.
The furthest I've seen them go is letting the dealer know your service interval is coming so they can call you and schedule an appointment, but you can turn that off, and their intervals are extremely long (like 15k, almost triple what one would expect for most of their engines)
I own a used BMW that was previously a leased vehicle and I can confirm from direct experience that I was able to ignore the scheduled service notification and continue happily driving for thousands of miles with no issues. The car did nag me with a notification every time I started it up until I eventually brought it in, but I was fine with that.
It definitely won't by default, after the lease most Connected Drive features are disabled pending reactivation by the next owner
I still feel like something is missing though.
The truth is BMW stretches their service interval insanely long because they're giving "free" maintenance with leases
So if you drive any significant amount of time longer after the interval, there's a real chance of damaging the engine
But the liability issues of disabling a car remotely outside of asset recovery seem like something BMW would not want to mess with
Maybe it was an initial service? Some engines require an initial service immediately after break-in or suffer catastrophic damage, I could maybe see an exception in that case
Edit: I did find someone saying if you go 5k over the service limit, the car will not start immediately, flashing Service Required, but still allow starting normally from there
No one should be going 5k over a 15k interval when maintenance is free
Bear in mind, all of this is still possible, and an issue, on ICE based vehicles. Even my older (pre in dash screen) Mini will throw up fake check engine and engine failure warnings if you don't take it into an authorized dealer for service. All the warnings go away the moment you punch in the service code. Why didn't I take it in for scheduled service? Oh, the engine had to be replaced cause it split open. Figured since I was only 6,000 miles short of my 50k service check before I had the entire engine replaced that I could skip it as the mechanic already checked everything else out...
I should also point out that I can't even replace the CD Player/Stock Radio unit in the car with a more modern aftermarket part because the car's diagnostic system is built into it.
Yes. You read right. Without the stock radio, there is no longer anything to read the sensors.
Worrying about electrical cars being walled gardens is missing the forest for the slightly different trees.
I can already see the repair-ability of electric cars getting as bad as some Apple hardware. Maybe someone should create an open design of a barebones electric car complete with RPi-based ECM or other open hardware/software. Or have a company do all the hard work as in a Pinephone equivalent of electric cars, a market I could see having some viability while leaving others free to tinker and modify to their needs. One configuration for 4wheel offroad truck, one for street car and so on.
Coincidentally, one reason I like to justify OSS is that when we buy things, we typically know how it works or can look under the hood and check things out as with cars but we can't do so with closed source programs. Why should we start to accept that it's ok that manufacturers think we shouldn't know how the things we buy works? The mechanical nature of cars has given them a more open legacy, well disregarding software, sensors and such, and I hope it continues.
We could try to quantify the simplicity of an electric vs a combustion engine car. Let's count the number of different fluid systems in a regular car.
There's the fuel, engine oil, coolant, transmission oil, brake fluid, windshield washing liquid and air conditioning fluid.
Battery acid we don't count as they are sealed nowadays, and you replace it as a unit.
I think an electric car needs battery coolant, I assume fixed ratio gear still has oil that needs changing. Then brake fluid, windshied washing liquid and air conditioning fluid are just the same as in a combustion car.
So I think we got rid of fuel and engine oil, they are the messiest and need most touch labor, but basically all the other was left intact. It's not an insignificant improvement, but there's still lots of maintenance targets left.
For the duration your average new car buyer, and to a greater extend, HNer (this isn't exactly the "put 200k on an Altima u bought new" crowd), will own any given car these things won't be issues or if they are they'll be under warranty.
Everyone circle jerks about how their new 4Runner will last a million miles but you scroll back through the Facebook timeline, see how often they're buying cars, and it becomes pretty clear the people saying these things don't expect that to happen under their ownership (and the stats the automakers pay people to analyze over confirm this). New vehicles don't often get sold to people who will own them to the point where the lower level systems start needing attention.
ICE specific systems are highly refined because they get copypasta'd with minor alterations between multiple products. The stupid HVAC flapper that's specific to your model so some engineer could get a bonus for re-using some existing blower assembly is what's tested less and breaks more. It's rarely the "A to B" bits of the vehicle that give the people who buy new vehicles issue (except when OEMs put unnecessary things in the critical path, like preventing you from taking it out of Park without the consent of the door switches and stuff like that). EVs aren't immune to that kind of stuff that dominates early life (unscheduled) maintenance costs.
Electric isn't a hands down winner yet though it appears to be on that path. If if were we'd see EV Tranit Connect and NV200s and other vehicles that are purchased strictly by the numbers flying off the shelves. But it's probably close and the reason we're not there yet is likely just developmental man hours, not anything fundamental.
There might now be motivation to deliver fully electric brake systems. They would have to be very reliable. A path to there could first be a small hydraulic pump for every wheel.
For AC and battery thermal management, having a fluid is more fundamental. Solid state heat engines have terrible efficiency currently.
Bikes have started using hydraulic disc brakes instead of cables, even when self service is much harder. Going the other way.
Newer cars have more electronics, but that's because electronics became cheap and software features are expected (some even legally required). EV isn't causing this, it's just correlated with cars being new.
ICE cars are already full of proprietary locked-down electronics. What drive train they use is irrelevant. For example, Renault, Peugeot, and Hyundai have cars in both EV and ICE versions, running basically the same software for both versions.
If you're alluding to things like self-driving, then EV has nothing to do with it either. For example, Uber's self-driving prototypes are ICE.
It’s obvious you have no idea what you are taking about. Automobiles are already walled gardens, for obvious reasons. Electric drivetrains are mechanically more simple than ICE, but battery and range management software is very complex. And there is an enormous amount of software required for ADAS, safety, infotainment, cabin control etc.
No safety critical feature should depend on complex software. If I want my car do drive by itself, then it should be opt-in by an easily to disable or remove module.
You're a little late on that. Even airbag deployment software is now extremely complex. There's no way to reduce complexity without reducing functionality and (government mandated) safety. So you'll have to give up on that one.
Sorry, but I don't want just anyone writing and modifying safety critical code. That stuff goes through very extensive testing, and for good reasons. I would not drive a car that was running software not written by specialized and trained individuals and with extensive testing.
Moreover, I don't want to be on a highway with people driving cars with code they modified. Ideally, we would have an model where the source for all of the components is visible, with customers able to make suggestions, but with the vendor responsible for all safety testing.
That is where you are today, any Joe on the road could have changed their own brakes, added a turbo to their engine, or made any number of safety modifications to their vehicle.
That's extremely different. Those parts are made by company's that work with car brands to make compliant parts. Changing the software is a totally different problem.
>Those parts are made by company's that work with car brands to make compliant parts.
You have some written guarantee that Joe didn't zip tie some frozen hot dogs to his brake calipers so he could make dinner and stop his car? I don't.
I don't get why only Tesla should write engine software for their car, and completely lockout "Joe's all pro turbo" from doing the same. I can get a custom rom for my car now, so why can't I for the Tesla? I get it voids warranties, but not at all is a problem.
I don't know if they are that different. I met a biker once who told how he designed his own automatic speed-control. Asked him to see it. What he showed me was a lock on the gas. Seemed very dangerous to me.
Also, another guy showed me a contraption he built himself for a stick car. He put a sensor on the stick and whenever the sensor detected his hand, a servo automatically pressed the clutch pedal. It also automatically slowly releases the clutch pedal when his hand was removed from the stick.
These are all electronic and/or mechanical systems and a mistake on its software or mechanical design may impact the safety of the vehicle. I got negatively impressed in both cases and told them that it was probably illegal.
But well, my car... I would love to be abe to have access to the code. Not that I want to check or modify it myself, but the fact the I know anyone can check. The same reason I like to use FLOSS on my own machine. Actually, for safety reasons, it makes sense for it to signed, but I wan to be able to access it. If it was in ROM, maybe I wouldn't care. If it needs a critical update, would not bother going for a recall. Actually I think forcing ROM for safety critical software would encourage developers to make it right at the first try since it would be way more expensive to fix it later; probably would make engineers design systems as simple as they possibly can.
As someone involved in modified cars, these are very different things. There's only 1 real way to change your brakes. It's like LEGO, except with a couple of bolts and some metal pads.
Adding a turbo increases power (or fuel economy) but isn't going to cause your car to accelerate on it's own. Or lockup steering. Or push timing and blow holes in your engine sidewall. All that stuff is computer controlled in modern cars, and you bet your ass you can cause some extremely catastrophic failures just with poorly implemented software.
The next step is to have cars always log their position in the cloud, so the government will know where you are, that you are driving within legal limits, how often you drive (and it won't be long until insurance companies will have access to it). I think this is going to be introduced EU wide.
I can't help recall that scene in the iRobot movie with Will Smith where he pulls an ICE motorcycle out of storage and the other person he's with reacts with incredulity at the idea of sitting on top of explosions.
It was mildly amusing back then (2004), now it seems inevitable.
Also, if you haven't read the books, the iRobot stories are great. A quick read and maybe even a good exercise in humility for folks.
> Depending on which regulations are ultimately applied, the outlook for internal combustion engines could change dramatically once again – all the way to a scenario that makes it almost impossible to still register internal combustion engines after 2025
This is prescient. Government regulations in this particular area will continue to be revised as it becomes clearer that the shift to electric cars is happening rapidly, and it's obvious that this is the only lever in the fight against climate change. We wouldn't even know where to start when it comes to tackling the emissions from steel and cement (1/3rd of all greenhouse emissions).
In September 2020 California banned the sale of ICE cars past 2035. In a couple of years, that'll change to 2030 or sooner. Most car manufacturers know this and some, like VW, are planning accordingly.
Bill Gates has been running around saying that we simply won’t tackle steel and cement, so we need to go hard on everything else to compensate/get to net zero.
I upvoted you but you vastly overstate what that link actually says
- this 40-80% estimate is from a process that doesn't exist yet. They might discover/invent this process but there's nothing to indicate that they will. As the headline says "they are developing a plan", kinda like how people are developing a plan to power society with fusion reactors.
- Right now, cement works. It's worked for 200 years. There is no incentive or pressure to change. Carbon credits specifically carve out exceptions for cement, so the cost of polluting isn't borne by them.
- Even if money was found to create a new competing substance that polluted less, it wouldn't be trusted as much as cement is with it's 200 year track record.
What I'm getting from this article is that there is no change afoot in the cement industry. At best the energy they use might come from cleaner sources but that it's it. At it's heart it will still remain CaCO3 → CaO + CO2
Thanks for the upvote, but it seems like I didn't misstate anything. They have a plan that they think has the potential to lower greenhouse gasses 40-80%. I'm pulling those numbers directly from the article as more or less a direct quote. How can I be overstating their own literal words?
On cement being a large carbon emitter / greenhouse gas producer for the forseeable future, I think we both agree. But they have a plan!
None of the executives specified a definite date for when they would exclusively produce electric vehicles. Previous targets saw the VW Group launching the last combustion engine platform in 2026, then running until 2040.
I'm 100% for doing everything we can to reducing the environmental impact of ICEs. I try to live minimally and reuse everything I can everyday to reduce my personal (negative) impact on the environment.
With that said, I can't help but wonder if the significant majority of our cars become EVs and the batteries for them are made using rare earth metals and more importantly, are recycled poorly afterward, what's the added benefit of switching to EVs (in other words, what's the sweet spot like how many years would one need to use his/her EV to offset the environmental impact of batteries used in EV)?
If anyone has a credible study comparing on the net positive impact on the environment by transitioning to all EVs compared to say ICE, I'd love to read that. Thanks in advance!
I think you bring up a good point about auto recycling generally. There is a large industry in the US that recycles cars and car parts. About 80% of a car can be recycled. I wonder how the move to electric vehicles will impact a car’s overall recyclability.
If lead acid batteries are anything to go by the recyclability is only going to go up. Lead acid batteries are essentially a fully circular economy and have a stupid high recycle rate.
I am not sure the lead-acid battery is a good analog. Lead acid batteries are very simple constructions and therefore easy to recycle. There is also economic incentive to recycle an old battery core as you get a lower price on a new battery when you turn in a battery for recycling.
I’m no expert but seems like the process of recycling lithium cells is relatively complex.
Seems also that electric motors are more difficult to recycle as well and the market for recycling them is also much less mature.
Lithium Ion Batteries can practically be recycled indefinitely. This is a quote from JB Straubel, the former CTO of Tesla and Elon's second in command for quite some time.
He recently founded a startup based on recycling used EV batteries named Redwood Materials and have landed a few big contracts as well.
Rare earth elements are not used to make lithium batteries. This may seem pedantic but the terminology is important. Fossil fuel front groups try to disparage batteries by linking them to rare earths and all of the (largely fake) baggage that come with them.
Current automotive lead acid battery recycling is somewhere between 98-99.3%. They are the most recycled thing. This is in part due to the fact that lead is really bad for the environment, but also because the batteries are highly recyclable.
Modern Lithium batteries aren't anywhere near as bad for the environment as Lead acid batteries but they're highly recyclable. And like Aluminum and Steel, it's cheaper to harvest Lithium from recycled batteries than it is to mine it.
Electric cars probably won't change the equation much because much of what isn't recyclable in a modern automobile is the plastics used for interior, ducts, cable insulation, etc. Approximately 80% of a vehicle is recyclable.
In a related note I think the space for EV battery repair/reconditioning is going to be huge. All those present and future cars on the road are going to need their battery packs fixed in the future and the manufacturers are not set up for that. If I had $1MM to invest in an idea/company, it would be this one.
Honestly a lost opportunity. Hydrogen, lean running ICE engines with ethanol, opposed piston engines are all really doable options to offer ICE engines. Which are still important for higher speed travel and places where you can’t charge at night. Especially in Germany the charging problem exists and won’t be fixed for many years. The cars are constantly getting older here. And I can see why.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 235 ms ] threadEdit: VW Group already has a huge range of petrol engines:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Volkswagen_Group_petro...
While there is very little one can improve about electric drivetrain, because even a highschooler can make a 90% efficient one, acing the manufacturing still needs huge "experience cost."
I work at a bit automative supplier and see the thought that is required for building a seemingly simple component on a huge scale while ensuring high quality and safety. Designing the product is one thing, but designing it in a way where it can be built efficiently and mets a certain quality standard is where it gets difficult. And that is exactly the part where Tesla is struggling and where VW can make an investment that has a significant impact.
They're the world's second largest automaker (and they tend to switch places with the first one, Toyota, periodically): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_industry#By_manufac...
And they've just announced they're going to invest $86 bn in electric vehicles over the next 5 years: https://www.reuters.com/article/volkswagen-strategy-idUSKBN2...
They've just launched a modular electric platform that will probably be used in tens if not hundreds of new models (in the US only VW ID.4 has been launched so far).
Batteries chemistry, battery management through software are the main targets. To really beat ICEs we need something like 15-20% more battery capacity per weight and per volume (so both smaller and lighter batteries), faster charging, more charging cycles, less battery capacity loss over time, in about this order.
And at least half this capital should go into infrastructure, in my opinion, primarily charging, better/smarter grid.
A large portion of the world's real estate development since the advent of the car has been designed to work around those constructs. It took us a century to get into this mess and it'll probably take at least that to get out of it. We need to stop burning gasoline today, and EVs are the only way to do it. Erasing the sprawling suburbs that blanket car-centric places today isn't going to happen soon enough, and the environmental impact of the construction that would have to take place to do that is also very significant on its own.
Not everybody's home supports that, and a few people have driving patterns that require supercharging more frequently. But people who can support EVs find that they're more convenient than gas vehicles, not less. And that number grows larger every day, as apartment buildings and city streets find ways to make charging available.
That will scale roughly as EV production scales. It doesn't require any technological breakthrough. It would be fun if insta-charging happened, but EV owners find it's just not the problem that it's made out to be by people who are "worried". They go home, plug in their car, and never, ever have to go anywhere specifically for the purpose of fueling. In a few years, people are going to look at gas fueling as a waste of their time.
But in the long run, I do suspect a return to swappable and standardized. It many require government regulation.
That said, I do have hopes for more standardisation in battery form factors. I'd like for there to come a day when changing a battery is no more hassle than say having a new exhaust installed currently.
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a33670482/nio-swappable-ba...
I think Tesla should, if it wants to increase its chance of long term survival, put some partnerships into a battery interface standard.
Many here said VW was slow in adopting EVs but they were working behind the scenes to set up MEB instead of cranking out a few models that needed different components and were all assembled differently. They can now profit from having common components and a unified software that can made into any type of car they want.
> Perhaps Porsche, Bugatti and Lamborghini will take longest to admit it?
Porsche will be the first, as they have the Taycan, the platform is already being exported to Audi and (my guess) will be the basis of a next gen Lamborghini. Bugatti is in a completely different plane of existence though. I'm not sure what will happen with Bugatti but I'm almost certain they will be sold.
As a small volume manufacturer they should still be able to keep producing ICE engines. Their 16.4L W16 is practically a work of art. And because they are that special, it will be easiest for Bugatti to divorce from VW Group.
You’d think that at some point ICE will be no more, and then what?
Porsche kill the 911 brand?
Doesn’t seem likely.
I’ve owned a couple of 911s and I’d happily own an electric one!
[1]https://bringatrailer.com/porsche/993/
[2]https://bringatrailer.com/porsche/996/
Now the next generation C63 is supposed to be a 4cylinder hybrid. The cries of heresy have already started. I imagine the generation after that might be fully electric.
(* yes, I know there were early non-V8 AMGs, but AMG seems to have built their reputation on putting a massively powerful V8 into everything).
The only options Porsche will eventually have for 911s will be to go electric, to kill the 911 brand entirely, or reserve it as non-roadlegal track toy. Might not happen in 5 years or 10 years or 20 years, but it will happen. Assuming humanity hasn't killed itself yet.
I think Porsche will Introduce a new Electric GT car to replace the base 911, the 718, Macan and Cayenne will be electrified, Panamera will be discontinued and the 911 will live on only in the Turbo and up variants with a Stick and DCT and a Hybrid option.
The new 992 platform for the 911 has been modified for electrification, so we'll be seeing a mild hybrid 911, likely for the 992.2 revision.
Volkswagen will retain ownership but move control of Bugatti to Porsche. Porsche will start a joint venture with Rimac to make Bugatti BEVs:
https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/industry-news-corporate/v...
Lamborghini and Porsche will take a while, Lamborghini may re-spin the brand with an electric supercar of sorts that might be a massive hit but also Lamborghini sells its cars to people who want a 'Lambo' and want to be seen in it, they don't care too much about what is under the hood.
Porsche may move 80% of their range to electric, but I think they will keep Gas around the longest of them all. People who buy porsches, many of them, drive them. They drive them hard and take them to the track. Rowing through the gears is part of the whole thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamborghini_Si%C3%A1n_FKP_37
Rimac is an electric supercar company.
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a35865670/bugatti-porsche-...
VW was bankrolling engine development for a big portion of Formulas race teams.
You get 98.5% efficient electric motor with any amount of torque you want.
Or you get another 98.5% efficient electric motor with any amount of torque you want.
That's about all differentiating features.
Tell this to Formula-e teams which found out that even a 1.5 degree difference in magnet placement can effect performance characteristics of motors tremendously.
Similarly, thermal management of the same motors change their power characteristics enormously. They're trying to simulate and optimize these things in that boring cable spaghetti.
A small invention/progress/optimization would change everything about that technology.
I'd rather have my popcorn and watch the competition.
But, since you claim there's a flaw in my logic, let's remember some examples:
First rechargeable batteries were NiCads. Low capacity, memory effect ridden inefficient and hard to charge sticks of energy. Today we have Li-Polys which charge faster, last longer, provide more current and can be formed into infinite forms. Moreover, we have experimental glass substrate batteries which are non-flammable and can be cut and damaged during operation (even with full charge) without any explosions or fumes. They continue to work even. People claimed that batteries cannot improve up to that point, yet we're here.
While we're talking about energy, super capacitors were a thing of fiction, until they started to pop everywhere.
ARM CPUs were always touted as slow, low power devices confined to IoT, light load servers and SBCs. X86 was claimed the undisputed king. Yet over iterations, Apple's M1 leaves more power consuming X86 chips in the dust. I use an M1 MacBook Air. I'd repeat the famous words in that Reddit comment: Black. Magic. Fuckery. M1 is literally it.
Diesel, besides being dirty, always touted as high torque, low power devices. Yet we have formidable diesel cars racing in LeMans. Even most powerful Offshore racing boats were Lamborghini Marine diesels when I last looked.
Linux was always touted as a toy operating system until five to ten years ago. Yet, Microsoft is providing Linux images in Azure, building SDN switches and backbone network on Debian, implementing WSL2 in lightning speed to prevent further market share slip and writing a lot of tools running on Linux and contributing to the Linux kernel to make sure that it plays nice with Windows. They've even ported SQL Server to that toy OS.
Linux desktop is continuously claimed to be years away, but it happened already and it's improving steadily. It'd be another tech that people wouldn't have guessed that it'd improve that far.
These are the examples I can remember for now. I'd edit or add another comment if I remember more.
Edit: Changed "five" to "five to ten". Time flies.
I get your point about driver skill being the key currently, though I think F1 was most interesting when the optimal car for the ruleset was not so nailed down. That's what makes BattleBots interesting to me as a sport: design is a huge factor in the outcome. Electric F1 could bring back some diversity of design if the rules can be made flexible enough without compromising safety.
I almost died of boredom last year when Grosjean went through a steel barrier, split his car in half, and narrowly cheated death in an enormous fireball.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porsche_SE
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porsche
The latter is a 100% owned subsidiary of VW AG which has Porsche SE as the largest shareholder?
i.e. Porsche the company that makes the cars is a subsidiary of VW Group which is then partially owned by Porsche SE which is a holding company.
They're thinking how to introduce "wow factor" to electric cars. They don't want to be just another Tesla.
Apparently Porsche was always about being "exclusive".
VW basically is doing the latter and is now announcing the status quo that, yes, VW/Audi/Porsche ICE development is dead as a door nail. Porsche sales are already dominated by their EV sales and growing quite nicely. I think the Audi eTron is also considered a success at this point.
In Germany, an added dimension is that the unions are waking up to the notion that their companies need to change in order for their members to stay employed. Anyone employed in ICE production lines is worrying about when (not if) they will be layed off. There seem to be regular announcements from all German manufacturers about layoff rounds. So, this is very real for them.
VW has been converting factories to battery and EV production over the last years and they are ramping up volume production to probably surpass Tesla pretty soon in terms of volume sales. Considering the ID.3 only launched summer last year, that's impressive. I think BMW and Daimler are getting worried about their position in the market at this point (or at least they should be). So, unions understandably want to see realistic plans for the future from these companies. As opposed to e.g. BMW waffling about hybrids as "the future" so they don't have to talk about not having a lot of EV production or a plan for fixing that.
Source on this? Because in 2020 the Taycan line sold less than the 718, 911 and Cayenne lines[0].
[0]https://newsroom.porsche.com/en/2021/company/porsche-deliver...
Hardly super visionary :-)
I don't know about that. Red Barchetta was written in 1981 and that law didn't arrive until 1992. 10 years seems pretty visionary to me. :)
The writing is on the wall. In Europe several big cities as well as countries have announced that they'll ban diesel engines in about 10 years, max. Some have announced that they'll ban all ICE cars in about 15-20 years.
So what's happening is VW is trying to get ahead of the enormous fines which will make it impossible to keep selling larger sized ICE cars in the EU (e.g. SUVs which are becoming ever more popular in Europe).
> According to the EU, fleet emissions in 2018 were 120g/km, which means automakers need a 21 percent reduction overall to avoid fines that could total as much as 33 billion euros this year, according to some estimates. Each gram over the limit, per vehicle, will cost automakers 95 euros.
> Each automaker has a different target, based on the average mass of the vehicles they sell, and only 95 percent of sales are measured in 2020, meaning that some high-polluting cars won't count. Even so, analyst ISI Evercore has warned that the "2020-21 CO2 regulation poses the biggest risk to the auto industry in recent memory."
Source: https://europe.autonews.com/automakers/how-automakers-plan-a...
EDIT: Some countries, e.g. Ireland[1] and the UK[2], have decided to ban all new ICE cars completely from 2030.
[1] https://www.newstalk.com/news/electric-vehicle-ownership-sho...
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/18/the-uk-plans-to-ban-sales-of...
And not only that, you can't plan to travel in a lower end electric with their ranges. Recharge is very slow.
You can buy a dirt cheap second hand ICE, and it will give you that, you'll recharge in a minute, and most proven models are easy and cheap to repair.
Electric cars turns out they do fail, and when they do it is super expensive.
I really really want to have one, but currently comparing an electric to, say, a Fiat Panda, it just doesn't make sense for most Europeans.
https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/industry-news/porsche-beg...
The main issues are power-grid development and EV range. I suspect those problems will be handled within 10 years.
It's not a moral imperative, it's simple survival.
People just won't have cars.
They'll just need beat up Opels with 300k km on them :-D
I can't see someone making any useful of a VW ID3 in, say, Morocco.
Source: https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/comparative-l...
That's fine for many people, not so good for the car industry and their direct and indirect jobs.
Buying a 6K second-hand car is not only much more ecological than buying a brand new electric car, but I have more range, I can get it cheaply fixed if I go to something like a Renault Clio, a Peugeot 206, Fiat Panda and the like.
Since I live in a flat and I don't have garage, I can park it in my street without worrying about recharging (it's just going to get me a few minutes to get to the gas station, a two minutes to get gas).
With the salaries in my area, spending 30K in a car it's just too much money. It's more than my current yearly salary. And there's plenty of people with lower income than mine.
Also, turns out electric cars come with a lot of bloat that breaks, so the most immediate upside of such car goes away.
As far as I can see, too much has to change for mass adoption. With the current trend they'll remind cars for rich countries and rich people for a lot longer.
Right? It's like a $30K license to be a four-wheeled member of the working class.
And honestly I don't really feel that moving around a massive battery in a newly produced car is better than buying a Fiat Panda and taking care of it. My brothers Panda is nearing 500.000 Km and it's fine.
I'm not sure how true this is: 80% of ICE CO2 emissions are from driving/servicing I believe.
Not having a car wins in both scenarios.
A new engine from scratch rarely happens. Many engines can be traced back decades with there never being a new design, just iterative improvement.
Can anyone think of a new engine developed from scratch? Without any parts carried over?
I suppose this happened when VW built the Veyron.
> In an exclusive interview, brand CEO Ralf Brandstätter said, “At the moment, I do not expect a completely new engine family to be launched.” Still, he wants to develop the engines currently in use and prepare them for new emissions standards such as Euro 7
So no, they are not ending ICE development. They continue development.
As to what "a new family of ICE" means is anyone's guess.
An, of course, this:
> Depending on which regulations are ultimately applied, the outlook for internal combustion engines could change dramatically once again
So, ending, but not really ending, and the outlook may change again.
It's exactly what he said. Modern engine-families are typically developed as somewhat of a modular platform. Then, there are several or even dozens of variations of that platform for various needs, some with different emissions accessories, some with varying displacements, compression ratios, valve/spark timings, etc.
For a tech analogy: it's similar to how CPU manufacturers design a core architecture and then give you varying numbers of cores, cache, thermal designs, feature sets, etc.
You can think of "new family of ICE" as the equivalent of processor instruction sets. A common "new family of instruction sets" would be something like the development of the AMD x86-64 64 bit instruction sets on top of the original 32 bit x86 set. A smaller "subfamily" or "development" can mean the addition of a new family of SIMD or something like AVX512, etc. However, the processor family is still an offshoot of x86 then x86-64, etc.
In car automotive engines, it's exactly the same process. An ICE engine family can be in use for well over 20 years undergoing iterative improvements.
VW will not continue to push the automotive equivalent of developing new instruction sets for the x64 processor.
postmark: some examples of past "families of development" in internal combustion engines: carburator -> fuel injection; development of the supercharger and turbocharger, and making engines strong enough to withstand pressures from undergoing forced induction; hybridization - adding a battery to the drive train; etc
All of these would be seen as major "ICE new families" - and for example in the VW and Audi world, you would see "families" of engines that would have, for example, a turbo on the engine in a particular model year, vs naturally aspirated only from the past model year car, etc.
In VW, one major family is the VR6 - it's an innovation specific and proprietary to VW alone, and it's been around since 1991, and still in production - you see them still on new generation VW Atlas as a base engine option - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VR6_engine - that's a 30 year run for an "engine family".
The Bugatti Veyron uses 2 VR8 bolted together to make a W16 engine - this is the same VR engine family technology taken to the extreme edges of performance.
VW will no longer develop another internal combustion engine family in the way they kick started the "VR6" project back in the 90's.
Volkswagen AG (VOW) +199% in 12 month, +10,91% today.
Porsche (PAH3) +177,86% in 12 month, +8,50% today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porsche_SE
They are "only" up 27% from 14 month ago.
Note that there's no word about VW's EV plans besides this line "None of the executives specified a definite date for when they would exclusively produce electric vehicles".
There's also this line "Completely new engines were unlikely, he said.".
Seems like a planted PR piece by VW to further fuel the stock price momentum.
> "At the moment, I do not expect a completely new engine family to be launched." Still, he wants to develop the engines currently in use and prepare them for new emissions standards such as Euro 7
If EVs become good enough, investing in ICE at previous levels is unsustainable.
Plus we have a ton of cool tech that's barely used today (steam engines, for examples). That's why we have museums.
I get the feeling petrol cars will be cheaper than electric cars for the low end of the market for a long long time.
As EV production ramps up, they should get cheaper due to economies of scale and the technology maturing. Currently the public charging infrastructure is awful, but that's also a chicken-egg problem that will solve itself.
EVs already have significantly lower per-mile cost, so it's only the initial cost that's higher. I think we're not far off from the initial cost falling low enough that it won't make sense to buy new ICE, and then adoption will accelerate rapidly.
Look at smartphones. There was a time when they were expensive toys and almost nobody had them, until they reached a tipping point.
In what sense?
They are even far from Chinese ones, but the government is looking in another direction to give the time to the industry to ramp up.
And Chinese EVs that are up to safety standards are not cheap.
So I'm not sure your comparison is valid.
Various reports estimate electric vehicle cost parity to be achieved around 2025 for small cars, and around 2028 for SUVs (source: theicct.org/sites/default/files/publications/EV_cost_2020_2030_20190401.pdf)
Used ICE cars will probably remain a cheaper option for another 10 years.
Ease of refueling is a chief advantage, so if it became difficult to locate gas, and the price began to rise, that could be the end.
[0] https://cleantechnica.com/2020/10/22/ubs-predicts-ev-price-p...
Or what about emergency vehicles with electric motors?
“We’re sorry, Mr. Miller, we can’t come to your burning house right now, we need to recharge our batteries first.”
I’m sorry, but battery-powered cars have a very limited usecase. There is a reason why the vast majority of cars beind sold are still using combustion engines.
For most people a vehicle that gets from a point A to point B with the distance being 10-50km is enough. And for that EVs even now are more than adequate.
It’s just that there’s always this mythical ”long trip” coming that people use as an excuse for the need of an ICE. vehicle.
Short term battery supply basically means the market gets squeezed top down. You get better margins putting the same battery in a 30K car than in a 20K car. And since demand is there, you see manufacturers trying to saturate that market before they target cheaper price points.
Some manufacturers that are doing combined ICE/hybrid/EV strategies are essentially pricing their EVs higher because they only produce them in limited volume and customers seem to buy them despite the high price. Also, if they'd price them lower, they'd kill their legacy business and sink that investment. The problem with that strategy is when EV only manufacturers start shipping better & cheaper cars in increasing volume. This is starting to happen and it's a market that looks like it will be doubling every year for some time.
All of these leads to the overwhelmingly obvious conclusion that EVs are going to get massively cheaper in the next 2-5 years. One of the biggest selling points is also the lower fuel prices and limited scheduled maintenance. An EV is simply cheaper to operate than most ICE vehicles, and that is not really going to change. Also note that you can get really good EVs used for a massively lower price.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with ICE vehicles, but the writing is on the wall.
Cars may become the next walled garden.
All the other systems in the car require sophisticated integrated computers and sensors - automatic breaking, cruise control, speed limiting, suspension management - it's not just about the motors. I'm not sure there's any way to put the genie back in the bottle?
Electric motors are a little different depending on specification but realistically the software could come prepared for any motor providing the end user sets it up.
Personally I've always wondered why cars have 3 or 4 LCD screens and I still have to see the dealer to find out why my check engine light came on. I'm one of those shade tree mechanics who would be able to handle the technical jargon.
Regulations should enforce values with clear benefits. If the benefits are not clear then regulation is simply a barrier for entry instead.
It would make total sense to have a semi-hidden menu that displayed all the info the computer has. The computer is already monitoring o2 sensors, injector performance, knocking, etc. Just expose that information. Why make us buy another device when the car already has the analytics built in?
Just to be clear external devices should absolutely still exist. It would just be nice, as a shade tree mechanic, to access the car's data directly.
For example automatic speed limiting works off cameras that read speed limit signs. I really don’t think that’s an off-the-shelf standardised sensor. And standardising it would probably hold back how quickly they could innovate in it.
https://www.mobileye.com/us/fleets/technology/speed-limit-in...
So one person makes the OCR component. Another makes the SBC to control it. Another makes the drivers for interfacing with sensors... ect.
Obviously this is too much work for one person. I think it's still worth it though. Maybe not to you, but then again you obviously don't care so you're free to go buy an off the shelf Chevy that you can never fix.
My neighbor has a brand new Audi e-tron. Something was borked with the system and it wouldn’t interface with any of the remote services. The dealer couldn’t even get into the thing to do anything about it. The solution was allowing it to sit, plugged in, for 72 hours so the system would restart itself and update from the mythical cloud.
Tesla’s have a similar reputation for being unrepairable by the shade tree mechanic. Check out Rich Rebuilds on YouTube. His entire channel is about fighting Tesla to get access to the tooling and information necessary to ‘own’ the second hand Tesla he bought from a salvage yard.
Another friend has a BMW that will literally refuse to drive if he doesn’t have it serviced at the specified intervals at the dealer.
These are all anecdotes about high end cars but it’s trickling down to everything. The walled gardens are already upon us.
On one hand this is a great solution to people ruining lease vehicles by not using the free maintenance they include...
But I'd love to know what model is doing this, sounds kind of absurd.
The furthest I've seen them go is letting the dealer know your service interval is coming so they can call you and schedule an appointment, but you can turn that off, and their intervals are extremely long (like 15k, almost triple what one would expect for most of their engines)
It is under lease and that is the idea but my understanding is that it continues even if or after the vehicle is purchased outright.
I still feel like something is missing though.
The truth is BMW stretches their service interval insanely long because they're giving "free" maintenance with leases
So if you drive any significant amount of time longer after the interval, there's a real chance of damaging the engine
But the liability issues of disabling a car remotely outside of asset recovery seem like something BMW would not want to mess with
Maybe it was an initial service? Some engines require an initial service immediately after break-in or suffer catastrophic damage, I could maybe see an exception in that case
Edit: I did find someone saying if you go 5k over the service limit, the car will not start immediately, flashing Service Required, but still allow starting normally from there
No one should be going 5k over a 15k interval when maintenance is free
I should also point out that I can't even replace the CD Player/Stock Radio unit in the car with a more modern aftermarket part because the car's diagnostic system is built into it.
Yes. You read right. Without the stock radio, there is no longer anything to read the sensors.
Worrying about electrical cars being walled gardens is missing the forest for the slightly different trees.
Coincidentally, one reason I like to justify OSS is that when we buy things, we typically know how it works or can look under the hood and check things out as with cars but we can't do so with closed source programs. Why should we start to accept that it's ok that manufacturers think we shouldn't know how the things we buy works? The mechanical nature of cars has given them a more open legacy, well disregarding software, sensors and such, and I hope it continues.
There's the fuel, engine oil, coolant, transmission oil, brake fluid, windshield washing liquid and air conditioning fluid. Battery acid we don't count as they are sealed nowadays, and you replace it as a unit.
I think an electric car needs battery coolant, I assume fixed ratio gear still has oil that needs changing. Then brake fluid, windshied washing liquid and air conditioning fluid are just the same as in a combustion car.
So I think we got rid of fuel and engine oil, they are the messiest and need most touch labor, but basically all the other was left intact. It's not an insignificant improvement, but there's still lots of maintenance targets left.
The odd thing about the brake fluid change is that because of regenerative braking, the pads usually last a lot longer than the fluid does.
It's not maintenance free, but service every 2 years rather than every 3 months feels substantially different.
Everyone circle jerks about how their new 4Runner will last a million miles but you scroll back through the Facebook timeline, see how often they're buying cars, and it becomes pretty clear the people saying these things don't expect that to happen under their ownership (and the stats the automakers pay people to analyze over confirm this). New vehicles don't often get sold to people who will own them to the point where the lower level systems start needing attention.
ICE specific systems are highly refined because they get copypasta'd with minor alterations between multiple products. The stupid HVAC flapper that's specific to your model so some engineer could get a bonus for re-using some existing blower assembly is what's tested less and breaks more. It's rarely the "A to B" bits of the vehicle that give the people who buy new vehicles issue (except when OEMs put unnecessary things in the critical path, like preventing you from taking it out of Park without the consent of the door switches and stuff like that). EVs aren't immune to that kind of stuff that dominates early life (unscheduled) maintenance costs.
Electric isn't a hands down winner yet though it appears to be on that path. If if were we'd see EV Tranit Connect and NV200s and other vehicles that are purchased strictly by the numbers flying off the shelves. But it's probably close and the reason we're not there yet is likely just developmental man hours, not anything fundamental.
For AC and battery thermal management, having a fluid is more fundamental. Solid state heat engines have terrible efficiency currently.
Bikes have started using hydraulic disc brakes instead of cables, even when self service is much harder. Going the other way.
ICE cars are already full of proprietary locked-down electronics. What drive train they use is irrelevant. For example, Renault, Peugeot, and Hyundai have cars in both EV and ICE versions, running basically the same software for both versions.
If you're alluding to things like self-driving, then EV has nothing to do with it either. For example, Uber's self-driving prototypes are ICE.
The only way VW will be able to make money is through 'servicing' cars.
It inherently demands large network of sensors and connections to all the control systems in the vehicle.
You have some written guarantee that Joe didn't zip tie some frozen hot dogs to his brake calipers so he could make dinner and stop his car? I don't.
I don't get why only Tesla should write engine software for their car, and completely lockout "Joe's all pro turbo" from doing the same. I can get a custom rom for my car now, so why can't I for the Tesla? I get it voids warranties, but not at all is a problem.
These are all electronic and/or mechanical systems and a mistake on its software or mechanical design may impact the safety of the vehicle. I got negatively impressed in both cases and told them that it was probably illegal.
But well, my car... I would love to be abe to have access to the code. Not that I want to check or modify it myself, but the fact the I know anyone can check. The same reason I like to use FLOSS on my own machine. Actually, for safety reasons, it makes sense for it to signed, but I wan to be able to access it. If it was in ROM, maybe I wouldn't care. If it needs a critical update, would not bother going for a recall. Actually I think forcing ROM for safety critical software would encourage developers to make it right at the first try since it would be way more expensive to fix it later; probably would make engineers design systems as simple as they possibly can.
The auto clutch I saw was similar to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2J6uQH-khY
Adding a turbo increases power (or fuel economy) but isn't going to cause your car to accelerate on it's own. Or lockup steering. Or push timing and blow holes in your engine sidewall. All that stuff is computer controlled in modern cars, and you bet your ass you can cause some extremely catastrophic failures just with poorly implemented software.
edit (it's under guise of speed limiting): https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/news/motoring-news/mandatory-spe...
It was mildly amusing back then (2004), now it seems inevitable.
Also, if you haven't read the books, the iRobot stories are great. A quick read and maybe even a good exercise in humility for folks.
This is prescient. Government regulations in this particular area will continue to be revised as it becomes clearer that the shift to electric cars is happening rapidly, and it's obvious that this is the only lever in the fight against climate change. We wouldn't even know where to start when it comes to tackling the emissions from steel and cement (1/3rd of all greenhouse emissions).
In September 2020 California banned the sale of ICE cars past 2035. In a couple of years, that'll change to 2030 or sooner. Most car manufacturers know this and some, like VW, are planning accordingly.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cement-producers-...
- this 40-80% estimate is from a process that doesn't exist yet. They might discover/invent this process but there's nothing to indicate that they will. As the headline says "they are developing a plan", kinda like how people are developing a plan to power society with fusion reactors.
- Right now, cement works. It's worked for 200 years. There is no incentive or pressure to change. Carbon credits specifically carve out exceptions for cement, so the cost of polluting isn't borne by them.
- Even if money was found to create a new competing substance that polluted less, it wouldn't be trusted as much as cement is with it's 200 year track record.
What I'm getting from this article is that there is no change afoot in the cement industry. At best the energy they use might come from cleaner sources but that it's it. At it's heart it will still remain CaCO3 → CaO + CO2
On cement being a large carbon emitter / greenhouse gas producer for the forseeable future, I think we both agree. But they have a plan!
None of the executives specified a definite date for when they would exclusively produce electric vehicles. Previous targets saw the VW Group launching the last combustion engine platform in 2026, then running until 2040.
With that said, I can't help but wonder if the significant majority of our cars become EVs and the batteries for them are made using rare earth metals and more importantly, are recycled poorly afterward, what's the added benefit of switching to EVs (in other words, what's the sweet spot like how many years would one need to use his/her EV to offset the environmental impact of batteries used in EV)?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_aspects_of_the_e...
If anyone has a credible study comparing on the net positive impact on the environment by transitioning to all EVs compared to say ICE, I'd love to read that. Thanks in advance!
I’m no expert but seems like the process of recycling lithium cells is relatively complex.
Seems also that electric motors are more difficult to recycle as well and the market for recycling them is also much less mature.
He recently founded a startup based on recycling used EV batteries named Redwood Materials and have landed a few big contracts as well.
https://chargedevs.com/newswire/jb-straubel-gives-a-tour-of-...
https://autorecyclingworld.com/redwood-materials-signs-batte...
So it's good to keep the terminology accurate.
Current automotive lead acid battery recycling is somewhere between 98-99.3%. They are the most recycled thing. This is in part due to the fact that lead is really bad for the environment, but also because the batteries are highly recyclable.
Modern Lithium batteries aren't anywhere near as bad for the environment as Lead acid batteries but they're highly recyclable. And like Aluminum and Steel, it's cheaper to harvest Lithium from recycled batteries than it is to mine it.
Electric cars probably won't change the equation much because much of what isn't recyclable in a modern automobile is the plastics used for interior, ducts, cable insulation, etc. Approximately 80% of a vehicle is recyclable.