
To See the Future of Electric Cars, Look East - jseliger
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-12-10/to-see-the-future-of-electric-cars-look-east
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jobu
_“The guy who’s making the $100,000 car is not changing the world,” one of
Xindayang 's financiers boasted to Forbes, referring to Tesla's flamboyant
founder Elon Musk. “The guy who is making the $10,000 electric vehicle is
changing the world.”_

That's great for China, but I wonder if a Xindayang car would meet US or EU
safety standards.

Also, wasn't the plan for Tesla to "bootstrap" the electric car market with
higher-end (and higher-margin) luxury cars? After a few years the technology
would be scaled-up enough to make low-cost electric cars feasible.

~~~
Shivetya
Don't matter where its built, but if you are only selling cars the top one
percent can afford you are not changing the world. GM will be first in the US
with a two hundred mile range EV that is priced within the range of every day
new car buyers. While Tesla deserves credit for showing people you can build
an electric for everyday use; heck what can't you build for 100k?; they never
had the resources the big auto companies have. There have been some good
articles showing that GM/LG and BMW have taken the lead in battery tech
already. (GM is already boasting a 145 KwH cost for the Bolt and BMW did a
simple but very effective modular system with cooling)

Tesla's plan was to make money where it could with the limited volumes they
were going to restricted to because they were new to building cars. Big
companies can do more with smaller margins because of quantity.

~~~
vvanders
I think you're giving GM a bit too much credit here, there's one thing that's
sorely lacking: Infrastructure.

Tesla already has a fantastic network of superchargers.

CCS(which GM is betting on) has very low penetration(Sea -> Portland is a
dead-zone, also Portland -> North CA) compared to CHAdeMO.

Telsa has the advantage of a better infra(120kW vs 50kW) and the ability to
use other standards like CHAdeMO.

~~~
mikeash
This is what constantly puzzles me about other manufacturers' plans to get
into the EV market. As far as I know, nobody has plans for a usable fast
charging network.

One could argue that you don't need one. Most people don't take road trips
that often. But they want to be able to. It's one of the most common questions
I get about my Model S: "What if you want to take a road trip?" You can make a
pretty easy economic argument that you're better off with a shorter-range car
for daily driving, and renting something for your once-a-year road trips, but
most people just won't do that.

It's great that the GM has the Bolt and other manufacturers are planning to
make EVs with decent range. But without a fast charging network, what's the
point? I can't see them moving beyond a small niche.

The question I have is, why isn't any other manufacturer addressing this the
way Tesla has and is? Are they, and they just aren't discussing it (or I've
missed it)? Do they think third parties should take the lead? Do they think
it's not important? Are they just incapable? Do they not actually care about
the success of their EVs?

~~~
vvanders
Yeah, and even then most of the standards are 50kW(or less) which means that
Tesla still has a 2.4x charging advantage(yes I'm aware CCS is supposed to go
up higher, but from what I've seen it's limited to 126A vs Supercharger's 300A
and we don't see any of them in production yet).

~~~
mikeash
I'd say an even bigger problem is simply that the installations aren't very
good.

If Tesla had gone with CHAdeMO and put up 50kW CHAdeMO Superchargers
everywhere, that would make road trips somewhat more annoying, but it would
still be doable. You don't get to charge at 120kW all the time anyway, since
the charge rate tapers off as the battery gets full, and temperature matters.
It would definitely slow you down, and I'm glad they didn't do this, but I
think it would still work.

But if you try to do a road trip on CHAdeMO as it stands, it's a major
crapshoot. The stations are almost always single units. That means that if
it's occupied or broken, you could be in trouble. There are a lot of stations
that only do 20-25kW, some by design, some because they're half-broken. Often
they're not maintained well, so they can remain broken or half-broken for
months.

Contrast with Superchargers, where they almost always have 4-8 stalls and are
maintained such that you can count on them.

------
addicted
One of the more genius aspects of Tesla was transforming perceptions of
electric cars from oversized toy cars, to objects of lust and desire.

Selling a 100k (actually, more like 150k for the initial roadsters) was a
necessary part of this.

~~~
stonogo
Except it didn't really work, because Tesla products are not good cars in the
way that other $100k cars are. Sure, they're fast, but you just can't make a
sports car that weighs as much as an F-150 and expect to be taken seriously by
gearheads. This has always been a problem for any electric car company.

Tesla products are cars for people who don't particularly give a shit about
cars. I'm not slagging this as a negative thing -- it's a much bigger market
than "people who care about cars." I just don't think that establishing
themselves as a luxury brand is going to do anything toward the ostensible
goal of "winning" against internal combustion.

A $20k electric car would have a much better chance of achieving this.

~~~
rsync
"Tesla products are cars for people who don't particularly give a shit about
cars. I'm not slagging this as a negative thing -- it's a much bigger market
than "people who care about cars." I just don't think that establishing
themselves as a luxury brand is going to do anything toward the ostensible
goal of "winning" against internal combustion."

Have you driven one ?

Every "car guy" (and I mean, deep, deep car guys) that I have talked to that
has driven one has walked away starry eyed...

Dramatically lower center or gravity, almost perfect weight distribution,
space age shocks and struts that are _way ahead_ of the rest of the auto
industry ... there's more there than just a battery and some electric
motors...

------
mhandley
The very low end cars in the linked story really don't look that interesting,
but there are other recent Chinese electric cars that look more promising:
[http://www.carnewschina.com/2015/12/06/the-jac-iev5-is-a-
che...](http://www.carnewschina.com/2015/12/06/the-jac-iev5-is-a-cheap-
electric-car-for-china/)

------
mkhalil
"Chinese start-up Faraday Future announced that it had chosen a Las Vegas
suburb as the site for a new $1 billion plant to make electric vehicles"

Start-up ---- $1 billion plant. Love it.

~~~
jonhankok
...but it's not a bubble. ;-)

------
Zigurd
If you are looking for potential transformation, keep an eye on Gogoro, in
Taiwan. Although Taipei isn't nearly as smoggy as some Chinese cities, Taipei
moves on scooters. Converting to electric could happen faster and have a much
higher impact on pollution as a local manifestation than electric cars in
relatively lo-smog cities in the US.

While the ready-fire-aim approach that is a wonderful characteristic of China
might be a lab for interesting attempts at changing the architecture of cars
for electric propulsion, I'd rather bet on BMW, for example, to bring high
volume carbon fiber manufacturing technology to market without sacrificing
crashworthiness.

