
VW to Rework $56B Battery Push on Samsung Deal Risk - lawrenceyan
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-27/vw-to-reshuffle-56-billion-battery-push-as-samsung-deal-at-risk
======
okket
Previous discussion from 5 days ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20030618](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20030618)
(22 comments)

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konschubert
Both for the Tesla-Panasonic fallout and the Volkswagen- Samsung fallout, I’ve
been unable to understand what caused the conflict?

Can somebody with more insight than me explain?

Further question: Are these unrelated cases? Or is there a broader market
dynamic at the root of both?

~~~
konschubert
Since nobody has answered, here is my take on the Volkswagen-Samsung deal.

\- Samsung got a better offer from somebody else du to high demand \- Or: The
prices of raw material have increased due to high demand and Samsung needs to
raise prices to be profitable.

\- Volkswagen is unable or unwilling to match that higher price.

\- To save face, Samsung is still delivering some of the capacity to the
originally agreed-on price.

In other words, prices for batteries are rising and they are making it hard to
produce EVs at the competitive prices that Volkswagen had in mind.

Let’s hope that this is a temporary situation and that supply is elastic
enough to make prices fall again in the mid term.

Or else, the EV revolution is in trouble :/

~~~
Scoundreller
I predict that electric vehicles will be so expensive up-front and so
efficient that nobody will personally own them. They’ll exclusively be
structured as pools of rentals, with or without a driver.

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akvadrako
This Bloomberg title is unreadable English.

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Roritharr
An interesting side-aspect is the different battery supplier for the chinese
market. I wonder if Samsung, LG, etc. will see their battery IP "unwillingly
transferred" to Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. when these deals come to
fruition.

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stefan_
This is a broken blogspam site reposting

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-27/vw-to-
res...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-27/vw-to-
reshuffle-56-billion-battery-push-as-samsung-deal-at-risk)

~~~
dang
Ok, changed to that from [https://evbite.com/samsung-struggling-to-fulfill-
volkswagen-...](https://evbite.com/samsung-struggling-to-fulfill-volkswagen-
battery-needs/). Thanks!

~~~
lawrenceyan
I would sort of disagree that EV Bite is just a spammy blog site. I get a lot
of great EV news from them among others like CleanTechnica, Electrek, etc.

By the way, I know you have discretion as a moderator to change things dang,
but I would hope that you try to place at least some good faith in posters.
All the submissions I make are from my personal RSS newsfeed, which I've tried
to prune throughout the years to build what I believe is an extremely
comprehensive information portal, if perhaps somewhat biased towards the
technology industry and technical engineering.

~~~
gpm
Blogspam doesn't mean spammy blogsite, it means copying the content of a
source article without adding anything.

There are good reasons to do that, e.g. to be a one stop destination for news
on a topic, but from aggregators like this it's preferable to link to the
original source because errors are less likely to have been introduced by
broken telephone, and to give credit where credit is due.

~~~
lawrenceyan
Fair enough, I can see how even with a citation, aggregators might dilute the
credit received to the original poster because most people prefer the more
convenient option of just staying with the aggregator.

Though I would still argue that by definition, sites like Hacker News are also
aggregators in the same way, so I think it's slightly disingenuous to pick on
one and not the other.

~~~
dandandan
I think that there’s a bug difference between a site that’s clearly an
aggregator (HN) and something with original content and thin wrappers around
another site’s content.

~~~
lawrenceyan
I do have some thoughts in regards to your statement, but this discussion is
probably better made on a different thread somewhere else.

