Electric Vehicles (Cars, Planes, and Ships)

I feel like it's a combination of manufacturer and dealer issues here. At one point, Ford made a move to go direct-to-consumer with its EV division, but that got shut down.

Edit: Remember when Ford was going to destroy Tesla, and GM "led"?

Edited by Fighteer on Mar 28th 2024 at 4:01:50 AM

Carrots specifically, for comparison.

I still find it amusing the door could also be used as an impromptu vegetable peeler.

Edited by RainehDaze on Mar 28th 2024 at 9:43:23 AM

Gonna have to explain to my wife why I need a bag of carrots...

Teslarati: Fisker bailout deal falls through as it faces delisting from the stock market

Looks like Fisker is on the chopping block. It has ceased production of its Ocean EV after failing to secure additional funding to continue operations. Add it to the pile of failed EV startups. Guess it was kind of hard after all. I hope its founders managed to extract some value from their stock holdings. (/sarcasm)

Edited by Fighteer on Mar 29th 2024 at 11:51:07 AM

Wasnt there a wait list for the F-150 lightning just 2 years ago?

Did ford over correct production, or was the market that backed up from not having been serviced.

I don't know the exact causes of its woes, but in my understanding the F-150 Lightning is just too expensive for its class, especially given reports of massive dealer markups. There were probably also some external Osborne Effect ripples from market anticipation of Cybertruck.

There could be other causes: initial quality, poor charging options (before Ford adopted NACS), dealer recalcitrance, and of course the quality hold on 2024 models. But that hold can't explain why there's such an overstock of inventory.

Edited by Fighteer on Mar 29th 2024 at 12:02:05 PM

I said I wouldn't obsessively post about Tesla quarterly updates unless there was interesting information in them, and there definitely is this time, so here we go.

Tesla announced its first-ever quarter-on-quarter decline in sales for Q1 2024, with production of 433K vehicles and delivery of 387K. Factory shutdowns and production ramps were blamed: Giga Berlin lost a week or more because of the arson attack, and the Red Sea conflict forced shipping diversions.

Tesla does not report in-transit vehicles as delivered, which could account for some of the gap. It will be interesting to see the full report, which will come out on April 23. For those curious, Cybertruck and Semi are included in the "Other Models" line, so we don't know their specific numbers.

A big win this quarter is Tesla's energy storage business, which deployed 4 gigawatt-hours.

Edited to add: Reuters: BYD hands back top EV seller title to Tesla after Q1 sales decline

If you thought Tesla's drop was big, BYD's Q1 2024 sales fell 43% compared to Q4 2023, although they were still up from Q1. Looks like a bad quarter overall for EVs. China's auto market has been hit by price wars amid a general slowdown.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 4th 2024 at 11:07:14 AM

Sorry for chain-posting, but we have some numbers from other automakers.

• Ford sold 20,223 EVs in Q1, a substantial increase.
  • This constituted 9,589 Mach-Es, 7,743 F-150 Lightnings, and 2,891 E-Transits.
• GM sold 16,425 EVs in the US for Q1, a 20% year-over-year decline.
  • Broken down: 7,040 Bolts, 5,800 Lyriqs, 1,668 Hummer EVs, 1,061 Silverado EVs, 600 Blazer EVs, and 256 BrightDrops.

Reuters: Tesla scraps low-cost car plans amid fierce Chinese EV competition

So apparently Tesla has dropped its plans for a low cost entry level EV in the face of competition from Chinese marques like BYD.

Elon Musk denied that directly, and I saw counter-reporting stating that Reuters got the specifics wrong. Trying to dig it out of my history now.

What actually appears to be happening is that Tesla's engineers are so excited by the performance of Supervised FSD that they are shifting resources away from the $25K car to the robo-taxi. That doesn't mean the former won't happen, but it's going to get a lower priority.

Musk posted on X that the robo-taxi unveil will occur on August 8.

Edit: Here's a Bloomberg article that mentions Musk's rebuttal.

Edit 2: We should bear in mind that one of Tesla's primary goals has, for a very long time, been autonomy. The cheaper consumer model is and always has been intended as a hedge against FSD not working out, or taking much longer than expected.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 6th 2024 at 10:29:15 AM

Tesla’s PR is Tesla’s PR, not fact. There’s no “actually”.

Dropping the plans for a low-cost EV for individuals may or may not be due to Chinese competition, but even if it was, Tesla would obviously have reason to reject that a characterization and put a positive spin on it.

Edited by Galadriel on Apr 6th 2024 at 10:59:15 AM

Okay, fine. "Allegedly."

The narrative that China — meaning BYD — is beating Tesla with low-cost EVs took a hit when that company's sales dropped substantially in Q1. In point of fact, the Chinese economy is in a general slowdown right now, with falling consumer demand translating to reduced overall auto sales. We don't have an official narrative for the fall in Tesla's Q1 sales; I suppose we'll have to wait for the earnings report on April 23 for that. Tesla doesn't break down its sales by region.

Almost every pundit with any credibility who's opined on the overall situation for electric vehicles has said that their prices need to come down before they can reach mass-market appeal. That must be a goal for any manufacturer that intends to serve said market. Therefore, Tesla will serve that market. It's a matter of timing, but it's also a matter of technology.

To make a profit selling a cheap car, you have to do everything possible to reduce the cost of building it. Every other US EV maker — Ford, GM, Rivian, Lucid, Fisker — has reported negative gross margins, and those are on higher-end vehicles. (The Chevy Bolt is on the lower end, to be sure, but GM still lost money on every sale.) Tesla is the only automaker outside of China that can build EVs profitably. There is no reason to expect it to sell its "$25K car" at a loss, therefore it will take whatever time it needs to get that right.

Anyway, for BYD to cash in on the global demand for economy cars, it would have to enter the North American market, and that seems very unlikely. So even if Tesla were to allow it to grab the European and Asian markets, which seems equally unlikely, we'd still need that niche filled over here, and I don't see anyone else stepping up.

This is all simple facts and logic. Ascribing nefarious motives to the players is unnecessary and petty.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 6th 2024 at 2:27:29 PM

Tesla claims that its prefabricated Supercharger units (PSUs) can be activated in four days from delivery. It's a pretty cool innovation. They assemble everything at the factory, including mounting the chargers on a concrete base. The entire structure, including four chargers plus their power supply, can then be loaded on a truck (three at a time for a total of twelve units) and sent to the site. Once there, all that's required is craning them into place and connecting them to the grid.

The long tail is utility hookups. Honestly, if we're going to get electric vehicles widespread, we need to get our electricity supply infrastructure tased awake. That's the biggest general obstacle right now.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 8th 2024 at 5:04:18 AM

I don't think assembling components at a factory and then assembling them on-site is an innovation per se, I'm fairly sure we do a lot of that all over the world for normal infrastructure too. Probably not been applied to charging infrastructure, granted, but it hardly seems revolutionary.

Cutting installation time down from a year to four days is pretty good, I'd say. Innovation doesn't always mean inventing something brand new. 90% of what goes into commercializing products is innovation, it's just the quiet kind that we don't appreciate until shit that cost $1,000 a few years ago costs $10. (And they make something new that costs $1,000, but that's beside the point.)

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 8th 2024 at 5:22:58 AM

Do EV really emit less carbon? I get that they don't emit on the street, but in most countries electricity is generated by fossil fuel.

It is overall less but not zero.

The initial carbon footprint of an EV is also larger due to manufacturing compared to gas cars.

Edited by M84 on Apr 14th 2024 at 8:54:42 PM

Economies of scale are a positive factor even with fossil fuel power stations. 100 ICE cars generate more pollution then the equivalent number of gas/oil power plants would generate producing the same amount of energy.

That’s before we include carbon capture technology that exists on most such plants.

Unless you are charging your EV via a private coal furnace in your house the power used by the EV will be cleaner then the power used be a ICE vehicle.

That’s due to the large number of electronic components though, which are increasing even in ICE cars.

Edited by Silasw on Apr 14th 2024 at 1:59:45 PM

Yes, they do. There are a lot of factors that go into this, and we've linked the studies before, but I'll attempt to summarize.

When determining the overall energy usage of any vehicle, you have to look at the following:

1. The cost to manufacture it
2. The efficiency with which it converts its fuel/power source to motion
3. The efficiency of bringing the fuel/power source to the vehicle

Manufacturing

Generally speaking, an EV uses more energy to manufacture than an ICV because of the battery. This additional cost then gets spread out over the lifetime of the vehicle. It is, of course, possible to sustainably power a factory, and many are, so this is a highly variable number.

Vehicle efficiency

Mechanical efficiency can be expressed in terms of the energy lost to convert the inputs of a system to its outputs. The input of a car is the fuel/electricity and the output is the force delivered from the wheels to the ground. Internal combustion engines have a maximum theoretical efficiency of around 35 percent because most of the energy is lost to heat. Battery-electric vehicles can achieve around 90 percent efficiency. Thus, you get three times more useful work from the same input.

Transmission efficiency

Gasoline has to be pumped out of the ground, transported, refined, and transported again before being pumped into a car. These are non-negligible costs and create their own pollution.

Electric vehicles use electric transmission lines, which have their own losses. The best possible scenario is to charge them on renewables like wind and solar. However, power plants — even the dirtiest, like coal — are much more efficient than car engines at producing power from their fuel.

The worst-case scenario, an EV charged entirely on coal-generated electricity, is still about twice as energy-efficient as a gasoline-powered car.

In summary, when you buy an EV, you are incurring an up-front additional energy cost to manufacture the battery, which is then amortized over the life of the vehicle. The break-even point depends on how much you drive it and the power source used to charge it. For most typical usages, an EV will use less energy and thus have lower total emissions over its life span.

If I can find the studies again, I'll link them.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 14th 2024 at 9:08:21 AM

Unfortunately, when it comes to things like particulates and microplastics, they're just as bad as conventional vehicles, if not worse—that's all from friction with the road, and EV's are generally heavier because of the batteries. Plus noise pollution at anything above low speeds (where it's not the engine making most of the noise anyway).

Noise pollution? EV’s are silent in the city; they even had to add sound so blind people could hear them.

Plus, many places don’t get electricity from fossil fuels. In Canada’s largest provincesm it’s mainly hydro and nuclear. France is mostly nuclear as well, I think. Obviously the shift to EV use should include a shift to more non-fossil-fuel electricity sources. The ability to switch to powering cars from by non-fossil-fuel sources is one of the huge advantages of an EV.

EDIT: I checked, and nearly 40% of global electricity production is non-fossil fuel, and that’s growing.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-stacked?stackMode=relative

Edited by Galadriel on Apr 14th 2024 at 6:21:47 AM

Then this EV push seems to be a distraction from much better solutions like walkable cities and public transits.

Not everybody lives in a city, and public transit is not an efficient solution for all locations.

Like it or not, most of the people on the planet get places in cars, and our infrastructure is designed for them. Making that sector more energy-efficient is a necessary step even if we also improve urban mobility. Did you know that India has more private passenger vehicles than the US and Europe combined?

The social and economic costs of redeveloping all of our living spaces would be massively higher. Something to consider in the long-term, but completely useless in the short term.

Edited to add: Electrification of mass transit is already underway in many places. Electric buses are a rapidly growing sector. As Silas said, below, we can do more than one thing at a time.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 14th 2024 at 9:25:52 AM

We still need to electrify public transport, plus it’s not like we can’t do both. The car lobby in the US may also simply be to powerful to break, at least until it kills itself by failing to transition to E Vs.

I love how we focus on the US, which is far from the most car-heavy nation in the world. As I mentioned above, India beats the US and EU handily, and the EV market share there is infinitesimal at the moment, although its government is working to change that.

Europe, by the way, had 18.3% market share of BEVs in 2023. It's also a huge auto export region, so dunking on the US specifically is kind of hypocritical. The calls are coming from inside the house.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 14th 2024 at 9:29:55 AM