Quote:
Originally Posted by Hack&Lube
From what I've seen the biggest losers are going to be ICE manufacturers in Japan, US, and Europe who cannot transition properly.
Toyota has famously tried to sit on the fence regarding EVs and have fumbled many times. Honda is not developing their own EV drivetrains and is going to rely on GM. BMW/Mercedes are deeply entrenched in ICE engineering and there are many signs they are dinosaurs in adapting.
China is the biggest threat to all these automakers as they have a huge domestic market to build and test out technologies and then they can sell to the rest of the world if approvals and protectionist tariffs don't kill them somehow. I would love to have a Chinese EV choice here in Canada (Norway has some).
For Tesla, I think their competitive advantage (aside from the stock market hype) and how the Model Y is the best selling vehicle in the world right now is that they are trying to focus on those cost cutting manufacturing steps to further increase their margins and allow for price reductions when the real competition does show up.
They are anti-union and actively trying to automate their manufacturing into simple steps like the gigapress which stamps the whole car in one piece rather than having humans or robots assemble and weld parts together.
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Absolutely not. At least with most other manufacturers, we get the jobs and economic benefit. Having China dump their cheaply produced EV's that don't have to follow things like reasonable wages and environmental standards would just mean ceding manufacturing capacity to them, as we have in so many other ways.
The gigapress doesn't form the whole car, it forms the front and back sub assembly frames. It absolutely does save money, time and human labour. But it's not the full car in one piece.
The problem with cost reduction is at some point, you've removed all the reasons people might pick your vehicle in a competitive environment. Without luxury features, like, uhm, grab handles, you start to lose customers.