Ask HN: What will be the future differentiator in electric vehicles?
[LG's announcement to stop making smartphones is a testament to how the technology and (economy of scale) of Apple and Samsung have evolved to a duopoly of smartphone brands. For most consumers, two choices are enough. Quick: name the third in line: Coca Cola, Pepsi and ...? Or McDonald's, Burger King and ...?)
Will the same happen for electric cars? Ford is already building their EVs on a VW chassis.
For example: whether you buy an electric Kia or electric Porsche, what are the real engineering differences between the car, considering:
- the drivetrain is electric - the center of gravity is lowered in almost all EVs because of the (current state of the art) of battery placement - Many key (security) parts are bought OEM from the same suppliers, including tyres, audio systems and airbags. - The manufacturer with the most driven miles will likely have the least amount of "bugs"
Will car brands go even more the way of fashion brands, where the difference between Porsche and Kia will be like the difference between Balenciaga and Nike: both are functional footwear, but I'd choose the Nikes and save the difference.
Will "internal luxury" and "prestige" take the overtone in marketing and branding for the next 20 years, as opposed to how "clean" a car is and the engineering of their engines? And, of this technology, how will supercar automakers adapt? E.g. why buy a Ferrari if the "soul" (engine) is replaced with an electric drivetrain that is likely less mature in engineering than what would be inside a Tesla S?
241 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 274 ms ] threadIf anyone could do more than idly speculate (probably dressed up with some tropes that play to the audience's confirmation bias to maximize virtue points) OEMs wouldn't be paying millions of dollars per year for the continued existence of their market and customer research teams.
The answers you're asking for don't yet exist. They are so many yet undetermined variables involved in predicting the future at the range you're asking about they're all just possibilities at this point.
- range - safety features - audio system - etc - acceleration
Will be more difficult for high-end brands (Range Roger, Porsche) to use as discerning factors if the "heart" of the vehicle is largely identical between a Kia and a Porsche.
Will luxury car makers go to the way of Vertu vs. iPhone, or Omega vs. Apple Watch?
In the car market, the “heart” has been the same for a long time. The Honda Accord has about as luxurious (at least 90%, you get leather, great driving sensors, strong V6, etc.) of any luxury sedan under 100k, but people still buy those. Those brands mean something to people.
The mental coping mechanism is also the fact that Honda/Toyota make a ridiculous amounts of civics/corollas/accords/camrys, so they have to have efficiencies of scale going for them more so than other company's line ups.
Fixed that for you.
Consumers are fickle.
Here's What The World's Cheapest Electric Car Is Like To Drive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GG1RC7GV0Y
You can already order one of these golf-kart like cars from China for less than $5,000 shipped. An easy to mass produce skateboard platform is bound to emerge, so basically who ever has the cheapest reasonably good batteries and marketing wins.
wins... the market for "cheap golf-kart like cars". But the market for "cars" extends way beyond that very narrow definition of a car.
Also interesting to note that the skateboard platform idea has been floating around for a couple decades now. GM planned a potential one when they dabbled with hydrogen fuel cell EVs back in 2002.
[0] https://www.autoblog.com/2010/09/24/forgotten-concept-2002-g...
Bosch had electromagnetic car suspensions figured out 20 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KPYIaks1UY
The car industry is a perfect example of "worst is better".
The point about the cheap golf-kart car from China is about how little in terms of material costs actually goes into it. It is $5,000 shipped. In actuality it is about $2000 in parts.
The skateboard platform I linked to is already developed, they are supposedly going public this year, not just a concept.
If they can get them to pack flat (or flat-ish), they can ship quite a lot of them around the world for peanuts. Add whatever cab, wheels and branding you want to finish it off.
All of this stuff is about to become a commodity. The most, and basically only, expensive part is the battery.
So called super car brands will pivot to market on subjective qualities like “handling” since they can no longer complete on performance.
“they were surprised to learn that Superchargers could not be used to fill up their Taycan.”
Sounds about right.
EDIT: I incorrectly said CHAdeMO
I look forward to seeing the new Tesla's Nürburgring-Nordschleife time. The progress that performance EVs are making is impressive.
I recall the old (pre2021 facelift) Model 3 Performance either beat or performed very competitively to its various petrol competitors (M3, C63, RS5, Guilia QF, etc.) while being significantly less expensive.
Would be interesting how the facelifted Model 3 Performance fares against the new hog-nose G80 BMW M3/4. Or the upcoming 4cylinder+electricmotor C63AMG.
Now people complain that the Model 3 doesn't have the "soul" to be a true driver's car of course.
Range, charging speed, and availability of rapid charging points that is close to the availability of gas stations are all essential.
The obvious solution to this is a small solar panel to keep the battery topped up.
It had never occurred that I'd have to be very careful to park the van in an area where it has good direct sunlight (it's only a 10w panel so anything less than direct sunlight means it's barely producing enough to support the charge controller). The street in which I usually park is south facing but has tallish buildings on both sides.
The upshot of this is I can can't imagine how frustrating it would be if I was counting on the solar panels on the car contributing to its range.
No way. Who drives that much day to day? A little electric vehicle for commuting / errands doesn't need that kind of range if it can charge fast enough. Sure, some people need more than that, but if you're taking a handful of long trips per year, you can just rent a car with longer range for those purposes.
Of course with both of the ICE cars above I had a particular station that I mostly refueled at, because I learned who had a good price that wasn't too far out of my way. On the long trips I could just fill anywhere and so I didn't think about where I could fuel while planning a trip. EVs are easy to fill in my personal garage, but if you are going on a long trip you better plan fuel stops in advance.
Also you cannot refuel your ICE car at home or at your hotel while you sleep. This is a huge benefit to EVs that makes ICE range comparisons hard to quantify in simplistic terms.
Refueling at home is nice for when I'm home - 95% of the time. That last 5% is the topic here. Most hotels don't have a charger, and even those that do you can't be sure you can park in that spot.
(This isn't needed for all roads, just the major highways and interstates, since those are the roads where people typically are driving long distance.)
The next generation Macan is supposed to be entirely EV. I'm interested what Porsche will do to make it enjoyable to drive. As it stands my next car (this year) will probably be a Tesla Model 3 of some trim, but we'd probably be giving an EV Macan a serious look as the replacement to our CUV.
If I have a normal car, and I'm wearing AR, I can re-skin it with unreal engine. The most interesting technologies aren't about transportation -- they're about human augmentation, transhumanism. A car is just too big to be a great augment. If I were CEO of Apple I would take a hard pass on "Apple Car" project and focus the company on AR.
Plus, cars are expensive. Not always a great investment, or necessary
This is only potentially true in dense urban environments. Its not true in suburban and rural areas, at least in the US. The rural-to-urban transition won't occur fast enough for this to not be true for a few decades at very least.
I agree with the OP's sentiment that cars are mostly not needed. We've just been hoodwinked into building in car-friendly ways instead of people-friendly ways, and so we have these spread-out, fragile, suburban areas that depend entirely on cheap oil to function (if not the gas itself, the manufacturing, maintenance, and support of cars and car infrastructure).
Instead of building too dense (skyscrapers - opposite end of the problem spectrum) or not dense enough (suburbs) we could have built mixed-use walkable neighborhoods and towns and really reduced the need to spend money on cars. But hey, Ford, GM, and Chrysler had great lobbyists back in the day, and the threat of nuclear war with the Soviets meant that getting tanks and troops from one place to another necessitated the construction of extensive highway and freeway infrastructure. Win-win for a segment of the population with specific beliefs. Now we're so used to it that we find it hard to imagine living without it.
It infuriates me whenever I talk to people and they're like "wow Europe is so walkable! You can just go to the cafe down the street." or somewhere like Mackinac Island (aside from the horse poo) where people go to vacation - it's like yea we could just build like that everywhere if we wanted to. But we're dumb and we don't think and construction and automotive jobs need subsidies to keep the economy growing.
The “soul” term is marketing BS like the soul patch mustang logo Ford decided to sticker on to the chin of its EV.
If you ever see one, look at the front. It’s totally got a soul patch. Eww.
As far as engine noise or rumble and that wonderful visceral feeling of the pistons and crankshaft throwing their weight around, I would agree there is something utterly cool about that. As there is of the clip-clop of a cantering horse as well. But again, calling it “soul” is just clever deceptive words that marketing came up with.
If any car has soul, it’s one where the founder poured his passion for years, nearly went bankrupt, persevered, redefined the limits, led a workforce that did the effort of a lifetime to help make the company survive and push out its most successful product that continues to be unmatched, all driven by a mission... now THAT is a story of soul.
The gas car companies want to claim the word for themselves though, just because they have a nice rumble and some fire and smoke, but more because they realize they are in trouble. Fire and smoke are romantic, no doubt, but you can’t replace that with a soul patch.
I've had motorcycle engines with the following configurations (among many others): - 200cc single cylinder - 250cc single cylinder - 650cc single cylinder - 250cc two-stroke single - 500cc two-stroke single - 300cc parallel twin - 800cc parallel twin - 650cc v-twin - 1200cc opposed twin - 900cc inline triple - 650cc inline four - 1000c inline four
Every one is completely unique in how it feels, sounds, rides, and performs.
Add to that the almost innumerable number of other ancillary configurations to the above such as:
- balance shaft (or lack thereof...) - valve timing - firing order - cylinder bank angle - carbeurator vs fuel injection - diesel vs gas - naturally aspirated vs supercharger vs turbocharger - nonstandard engine types like rotary, V5, W configurations, V4 - compression ratio - two vs four cycle operation - low end torque, midrange power, top end power.
If the difference between electric motor personalities is a gap in the sidewalk, the difference between ICE engine personalities is the grand canyon.
I've never had a vehicle with more soul than a high power two stroke with a well tuned exhaust. You can't ever convince me that an exhaust with a resonant chamber tuned like a musical instrument to harness sound waves for forced induction has no soul. I've felt it. This [2] is a good animation of how the two-stroke works. No valves, powered by explosions, and a truly musical exhaust note. There's nothing else like it on the planet, and when put in a soulful body like a dirt bike it lets you know immediately.
While I disagree that the engine is the soul of he vehicle, it is definitely a huge part of it. Beigemobile econoboxes are intentionally designed to suppress the soul of the vehicle, despite how marketing likes to advertise them. Nobody's offroading or tracking their crossovers even though every commercial implies as much. The buyers of those vehicles are largely (and the commenters in this thread say as much) looking for the most generic and unsurprising vehicle possible. They are designed as much as possible to make you forget that you're in a vehicle. Even 'interesting' vehicles are being regulated into this generic future. See: Fake engine sounds being played through speakers [1].
The most different electric motors will still feel largely the same, while two mostly similar gas motors can feel completely different. Call it soul, personality, or anything else, but the future of vehicles is going to be much more bland, even if they go faster on paper.
You can't ride a motorcycle and say with a straight face that gas engines have no soul. They embrace it, they don't hide from it. There's still cars out there with souls, but they are forced to blend in for fear of losing theirs as well.
I don't really know where I'm going with this. I get that the metaphysical is frowned upon around these parts. But it definitely exists, even if we can't precisely define or measure it.
Electric is better in pretty much every metric that can be measured. And disastrous for the things that can't. Someone mentioned in this thread mentioned that vehicles are probably going to become white labeled from foxconn as electric gains traction, and I can't help but see that as the future myself. That's what it means to sell your soul.
[1] https://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/a7923/the-rise-of-the-...
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But have you had one with FOUR TURBOS?
https://youtu.be/NeaxbS1mNPw
I've never actually owned a motorcycle with a turbo before. It kind of scares me. I've been caught off guard by hitting the power band on a small 2-stroke many times, I can only speculate about the turbo lag on a bigger motor and it sounds kind of scary.
I get that “soul” is a good word for the sounds and rumbles of the machinery and the sense of something alive that anyone feels when exposed to such things. And EVs lack that particular flavor of soul... just not other flavors. I agree we don’t have to mix this up with the supernatural notions of soul.
One key point is I’m the one —not Tesla marketing — saying Tesla (unnamed in my comment, but I think it was clear) has soul. Tesla is not saying any such thing as far as I know. Yeah not the visceral rumbling kind, but a different kind. (Not asking you to agree with me. Good thing, huh?)
Ford, on the other hand, is trying to say their EV has the “Soul of a Mustang” which I suspect both of us would agree is not really sensible as anything other than a marketing gimmick.
What might be interesting is that currently new engines are a huge investment because of all the emissions compliance work, but that doesn’t seem to exist with electric drivetrains, so there might be a lot of interesting quick iteration there.
Off the top of my head: brand reputation, looks, reliability, quality/roominess/aesthetics of the interior, misc. features, fuel efficiency, and obviously price.
For electric vehicles, all those same things still apply, with fuel efficiency being replaced by the range/energy density of the battery and efficiency of the motors to get more range from that battery.
Cars are already mostly sold on image. Image is the main differentiator already.
Here is what I think most people think about when buying a car: will be affordable (if you are not wealthy), the type of car (SVU, minivan, cross over, sedan, etc.), performance oriented (Mazda Zoom Zoom, or a Shelby, Mustang), whether it is ultra green/granola (Prius), Luxury (Audi, BMW, Lexus), or whether it is a high end status symbol (Porche), it is viewed as highly reliable (Toyota), and what is the resale value (Toyota.)
This will likely continue.
Plus, dominance is not indefinite. One car maker will innovate, leading to better quality and/or lower prices, and will ride a wave of outsized market share, until its competitors catch up, and so on.
Even if someone is cross-shopping between several generic midsized family sedans (a genre that is arguably the epitome of "cars-as-a-generic-transportation-appliance"), other than significant price differences, people will probably choose the model that looks best to them.
People buy a Toyota Corolla or Prius because it's below the median price, reliable and efficient. They will buy it and then never think about it again because it'll "just work."
People buy a Ford F150 because they either have some real use for a full-sized truck or, as we know is often the case, they want to feel like they are in the "big" vehicle, the "fancy" but "powerful" looking truck.
People buy a Porsche 911 because it's a symbol for having the money to throw at a fun, slightly exotic machine.
People buy a Tesla because it's a symbol of embracing the future, seeing cars as technology, and freeing them from generating exhaust and visiting gas stations.
People buy a Honda CR-V because it can do enough things well that they can just use it, fit people and stuff inside, feel safer when it snows, and so on.
People buy a Kia Soul because it's a little off the beaten path and comes in crazy colors.
Obviously the exact reasons behind each car purchase vary a little per person, but that's kind of the point. People want a car that feels like "them", and has enough practical use to justify their decision.
Automotive maker consolidation isn't new, just like any other industry, and it certainly would leave many unhappy if the options narrowed severely, because there are different use cases and preferences out there. For now, the market is so big that Toyota can have 6 different SUVs that are all slightly different, and you can configure a Ford F150 about a million different ways. (Though with colors converging back on black, white and gray, we're nearly back to the days of "You can have it any color, as long as it is black."
I'll add one more thing: there are enough cars sold that there is enough market to support developing lots of different cars.
Internet car enthusiasts: "What an awesome car! It's RWD, great power, stick shift, awesome handling! It's going to sell amazingly well! I'm definitely going to buy one......."
".....used in five years!"
Meanwhile all the consumers that buy (or more often these days, lease) new cars are snapping up FWD (or FWD biased AWD) 4cylinder automatic CUVs.
I'm definitely ready for an EV but my car sits in a parking lot at home (for at least a couple more years) rather than a driveway or garage and my work has no chargers. It seems kind a dumb decision right now to purchase an EV only to rely on availability public charging stations. I guess that's kind of what I do now with regards to filling up on gas, I don't own my own gas pump at home. But, I know where to reliably find fuel that I can pay for. Maybe gas stations can start to offer charging stations for a small fee. They would be competing with grocery stores that offer free charging but I'd imagine the free part will go away quickly once there is major demand for a public charger.
That sounds very optimistic. Don't forget that these new cars are increasingly powered by software!
Geopolitics will matter: People and their governments will find further regulation appealing also because it can be a tool to drive local employment in manufacturing and related business. If a car manufactured in China, or using batteries manufactured in China, has an inherently worse CO2 footprint for a European consumer (because of the coal-heavy energy mix in China and the energy footprint of shipping to Europe) and this is penalized by regulations, you get factories in Europe as a result. This build-out will take some decades to settle, and there may yet be new tech surprises along the way that change the game.
As for car tech itself becoming a commodity - this has been the case for a long time already, even with ICE technology. Automotive supply chains are famously broad, long and overlapping between OEMs. Bob Lutz (GM, BMW, Chrysler, ...) said in 2015 "There are no bad cars anymore, only bad designs".
There's still tech competition for sure, and it's fun to follow - the Mercedes EQS will outdo the Model S in most respects and raise the bar of what's possible with an EV, heating things up a bit at the top end. Progress continues, egged on by regulations if nothing else, and by consumers seeking the best value for their money. But if you don't sweat the details, the good-enough options are plentiful.
It's a simpler power train with fewer moving parts, requiring less maintenance and replacing of parts. Recuperative breaking means less break pad wear, etc.
Of course there's other stuff emerging, like costly screen replacements and we're yet to fully appreciate how the batteries will age, and what the second-hand market will be like at scale.
There's probably first interesting data on the Tesla and other EV fleets and the maintenance averages for their customers ...
Beyond this of course you can't cheat physics. Structural engineering stays the same, material wear still happens and some car designs (or even form factors) are simply less sound than others in terms of their effects on the expected usable lifetime of a car. With EVs that matters significantly, because of the high upfront energy cost to manufacturing them - you have to drive them for a while for them to really make sense.
I guess we can conclude that automotive will probably stay as interesting as any other business. Cars are a choke-point of doing high-tech yet industrially manufacturing at scale, the baked-in conflicts make it an interesting challenge.
But these differences are razor thin compared to consumer perceptions of them.
For every fanboy on Reddit screeching about muh million mile 4Runner he leased for 36k there's a fleet manager who just spent an afternoon reviewing records and crunching numbers before confirming that yes we are going to buy another round of Pacificas as our current ones hit the "old enough it's not the image we want to project" threshold.
Compare the lap times of boring commuter sedans and compacts to the "sporty" and "good handling" sedans and compacts if you really want to see slim differences.
I'm afraid there will be none.
Hull shape, and the battery size is pretty much the only thing existing EVs differ from each other.
Mechanically, they are all very, very simple. Simpler than any IC car.
Compact wishbone suspension is used on pretty much every one of them, since all EVs are city cars, and you want as much space for batteries as possible, and as lower centre of mass as possible
And since all EVs are very heavy, you don't have much innovations in body design either, it just needs to be very strong, and very rigid to securely accommodate the battery pack.
This way the vision of "White Label, off the shelf cars" produced by some Foxconn like maker swallowing the market is very much real.
That seems like a strange thing to say.
We see front-wheel-drive, rear-wheel-drive and all-wheel-drive electric vehicles on the road today, driven by 1, 2 or 3 motors. We've seen designs (I don't think any of them are in production yet) with 4 motors - one for each wheel.
There's about an order of magnitude difference between the horsepower in a Renault Zoe and a top-of-the-line Tesla Model S.
Not all EVs use the same suspension either - Tesla's S and X use an air suspension, and Jaguar offers air suspension on the I-Pace as well.
I certainly agree that taking the ICE out of the vehicle takes away one of the big differentiators between car brands, but I think expecting there to be no differentiators between EVs seems pretty silly. There will always be cheaper, simpler models and more expensive, extravagant models. There will always be innovators trying new features, some of which will succeed and trickle down to other cars, and some of which will be expensive curiosities.
This differentiation is superfluous with EVs, and I believe we will not see this living much longer.
There is not much differentiation besides linear cost/performance progression.
Motors? Suspension? Horsepower? All basically more money for bigger motor, hp, and performance.
There's probably still room for different approaches. Dodge seems to be known for cheap power - you can get a Challenger with a ton of horsepower for way less than say, a Porsche with equivalent horsepower. The Challenger is still based on the Challenger that was released in 2008 (Dodge gets more for their design money by using designs longer) and won't be appointed with interior materials that feel as nice.
Future Dodge might do the same - "let's make the most powerful electric coupe we can for $40k!" as opposed to something like "let's make a nice, comfortable, safe, well-rounded car for $40k".
Am I understanding your statement correctly? Are you implying that FWD/RWD/AWD doesn't matter for an EV? Because from a handling and safety perspective, it matters just as much in an EV as it does in an ICE.
Nobody will be racing them, otherwise the stability provided by weight should be very good.
However, I don't see a real reason for FWD electric cars other than those being retrofit models.
> However, I don't see a real reason for FWD electric cars other than those being retrofit models.
FWD cars are far more stable than RWD. This is important when driving in the rain as it helps lessen the likelihood of hydroplaning. Non-performance cars aren't just FWD because it's cheaper than RWD to make, but because they're safer.
And if you live in a climate with a lot of snow, you'll definitely want AWD.
> However, I don't see a real reason for FWD electric cars other than those being retrofit models.
As I said, safety. Yes, the traction control in an EV works amazing, arguably better than an ICE, but even better is a drivetrain setup that reduces the need for it entirely.
No, when your centre of mass is not that engine block you don't get any of those benefits. FWD vehicles would otherwise be less stable than RWD because of having to fight the pendulum effect.
Remember, economic FWD only became possible thanks to computers both for nailing the best dynamic characteristics on design stage, and helping with dynamic control. That's why FWD were much more crashier before early-mid-nineties.
If there was an option to disable all safety electronics on a modern FWD car, most people would've decided against them in an instant after the first test drive.
We haven't seem much improvement on the market since second gen ternary hit. All coming improvements will be very gradual.
Cars on the market already hit possible upper/lower weight, and size limits for the battery pack.
> Weight distribution
Any other than low, and centre?
> Software updates
Do you want to play videogames on your car? Will you pay few thousand dollars more for a UI skin update once a year?
> in-wheel motors
May be, but that will only work towards killing the differentiation even more, at least in the low end.
> Will you pay few thousand dollars more for a UI skin update once a year?
What ? no.. I never said that these were paid updates, I said this was differentiator. Do you want security updates ? Or just to have the software abandoned once it ships.
There are also interesting innovations that become more possible as more and more vehicles become "smart" and connected - imagine a metro area that is influencing smart vehicles +/- a few kph to smooth traffic, or route vehicular traffic like networking traffic around outages/problems.
The differentiator(s) won't be ways to make tires spin around an axle differently.
And this "differentiation" will be easily retrofitted to every other vehicle since there is nothing inherent to vehicle construction that is required for that.
Well, the idea itself is not bad, and I'd see this being as the one, and only way any form of "self" driving will appear — as some kind of centralised "air traffic control" for car traffic, instead of each car doing the very fragile SLAM based navigation, and complex sensor suite based driving, which is one dirt splat away from the crash all the time.
Imagine a Tesla cuts your average commute from 30 to 10 minutes, while you AFK and enjoy your coffee, vs the Ford vehicles that can let you AFK and enjoy your coffee, but you're still getting there 30 minutes on average. These kinds of "fringe" innovations are going to explode I think and even if they aren't innovative, they will help differentiate.
I think you’re correct that there will be less appeal from a technical performance perspective to buy an individual brand. All EVs have fast enough acceleration (some dangerously so.) So competition there is not going to continue. The new monstrous Hummer from GM has 0-60 times that rival super cars from a few years back.
There’s still some room for competition on handling, but eventually the skateboards will all have very similar suspensions.
So I believe we’re left with aesthetics, material choices, secondary features, and brand appeal. Are your vegan leather air conditioned seats hand stitched? Are your steerable headlights auto dimming with infrared vision?
1) Price
2) Reliability
3) Self driving
The first 2 are already standard.
Self driving will be a mix of capability and safety record. The latter being more important I suspect. There will be endless websites reviewing which one is the safest. And when you choose a robot to let you drive that is going to be a massive part of the equation. Even if accidents are extremely rare across all platforms, social media will make accidents feel far more common than they are + they will likely be for stupid 'human avoidable' error. This will drive fear, one of the most powerful marketing tools out there.
As self driving becomes commonplace we will see deaths go up both actual, and the coverage around deaths as you note. Building safer software that receives input from a chaotic, random, ever changing, heterogeneous world is a much harder problem than a lawmaker stepping up to regulate self driving and becoming the public hero of the story in the process. Personally, I also think there are more important problems for these engineering minds to be working on.
I'm less sure about that. I think it will remain a distinctive feature that people will actively choose for or against, at least.
The new Mini EV from BMW (and which is replacing the i3 as BMW's 'flagship' EV) has only 0-60 in 7s which is not very interesting at all. But they're not aiming at the performance crowd (plus it can only do about 150 miles on a charge). Meanwhile Tesla can boast sub 5s 0-60 in almost every vehicle so anyone who wants that "slammed into the seat"/"first away from the lights" experience will still lean towards them.
A sub 5s 0-60 will be a selling point for me when it's time to go electric. If I must go electric, I want some dopamine-inducing benefit for it, and beating the remaining petrol cars off the lights will be a big selling point for me even if I'm buying a 7 seater SUV or whatever ;-)
So if you want to be beating people off the line, you better get into electric now, because the roads are filling up with 'em and quick!
Cross licensing is fairly common in cases like this as well. Every car company has enough R&D as to produce some interesting patents. Want our more comfortable seats in your luxury car - give us good terms for your patent and we will give you good terms.
It isn't unheard of for companies to automatically freely license safety related patents. (someone who doesn't die in a competitors car might buy your car next time) So there is another option that might happen.
The above assumes there actually is a breakthrough that is patentable. If all we need is a large enough machine learning data set - those are easy enough to create (just very tedious), and so there are not patents to take out. If your system depends on some sensor - there are lots of different ways to make a sensor and work around the patent.
The idea of self driving has been around for long enough that you can't patent it. There is plenty of prior work to cite. Companies have been known to be working on it long enough that any idea patents would have expired before now.
For me, a car is an appliance. It's a nuisance when it costs money. It's a nuisance when it breaks. It's good when it sits there and does nothing (other than taking up space), or gets me from A to B.
If I could get the equivalent of the $15 refurbished LG phone, in an electric car, I'd buy it. It has to be big enough to carry a double bass, no bigger.
Let's see what the younger generation thinks. I have two kids in college. They are both mostly ambivalent about cars. The car makers may be in a kind of last gasp, trying to appeal to those of us who can afford a new car before we're too old to drive.
From my standpoint, it will be interesting to see how things shake out when decent reliability data become available.