> The losses go far beyond the cost of building and selling those 10,000 cars, according to Ford. Instead the losses include hundreds of millions being spent on research and development of the next generation of EVs for Ford. Those investments are years away from paying off.
That's missing the forest for the trees. They're losing money on every vehicle they sell. There needs to be a lot more R&D to get the vehicles to a price point that consumers will purchase them and they can actually make a profit. Thus far, their R&D has been a net loss for the company.
I'm sure at least a good portion of it will pay off eventually, but there's no guarantee of how much, or how long it will take.
I'm not sure if that's necessarily a fair assessment as Ford's laid out plan to get from the current 40% loss to 8% profit is pretty reasonable.
Of that 40 percentage points, 20 of them are directly attributable to economies of scale. As they sell additional units those costs will amortize out. i.e. the more they sell the less they lose.
They expect to pick up another 15 points via engineering changes that will unify a lot of parts between the different product lines. They apparently initially just focused on shipping the vehicles so each model has a lot of bespoke parts that could semi-trivially be reworked to de-duplicate them between product lines.
That gets you down to 5% losses. The bulk of the remaining 13 points they expect to pick up via battery design improvements and cost reductions in their supply chain.
And their stated deadline for this is the end of 2026 so it's not exactly like they intend this to take ages. Rather they expect to achieve this within a handful of model revisions.
If you lose 4 billion on the first car you sell and 40k on the 10,000th that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to lose money on the 1,000,000th one you sell even if nothing else changes.
People talk about EV’s underperforming etc, but there’re still steady year over year increases. They are just about to break 10% market share, and everyone sees the writing on the wall.
Ford is cutting back production because they aren't seeing the necessary growth. Even if nothing else changes, they will continue to lose money selling them.
> They're losing money on every vehicle they sell.
Unless I’m missing it, neither article shows the profit/loss of manufacturing the vehicle vs sales revenue of the vehicle itself, so we can’t know that. Even if it’s true, it’s not unusual when bringing up a new product as you optimise for scale.
> There needs to be a lot more R&D to get the vehicles to a price point that consumers will purchase them and they can actually make a profit.
Does there? Maybe all of the retooling and new assembly lines are done, all the designs are finished? Maybe not and they still have R&D budget left? They are also not operating in isolation - If another company comes out with a cheaper battery then Ford can just buy it with minimal R&D, they don’t have to invent everything themselves.
> Thus far, their R&D has been a net loss for the company.
I mean, that’s R&D? It’s an investment. The alternative is to do nothing and end up like Nokia. Even if they are losing money on every vehicle, “shipping fast” is better than not shipping at all and they can control the numbers. Most people want the 2nd or 3rd gen when all of the bugs have been worked out, so having units on the road lets you learn what doesn’t work.
R&D are costs which a company needs to pay to get a vehicle on the road. Whether the car, as a whole, is making a loss or not depends on whether it can pay for the R&D costs over it's lifetime.
Car production is very capital intensive, besides R&D you have the retooling of entire production lines as another major cost factor.
The real question is whether the sales of these cars will eventually pay for the capital expended. At current EV sales number that is not going to happen, but manufacturers like Ford obviously speculate on large future growth in demand for EVs.
At least in the EU expected EV growth was much larger than actual EV growth.
> R&D are costs which a company needs to pay to get a vehicle on the road. Whether the car, as a whole, is making a loss or not depends on whether it can pay for the R&D costs over its lifetime.
You’d think this “101” information would not be needed to be said here, but here we are having to explain it.
> At least in the EU expected EV growth was much larger than actual EV growth.
We should also try to quantify things, because using terms like “much” in italics when it comes to EVs has been so misused that people don’t trust it anymore. We were told that they are much heavier, but then this turns out to be as little as 10-15%. We were told that they lose massive range in the winter, but it can be the same ballpark of 10-15%.
Hard to say. Profit per sale doesn't tell the whole story. Mach E and F150 Lightning help Ford offset the CAFE contribution of their high margin gas guzzling cars and trucks. How much would they be making on Mustangs if they had to pay CAFE penalties?
I'd be interested to know the profit/CAFE for each Ford model and how much they are spending on R&D for EV vs ICE.
Lots of new technology ventures lose money at first; that's necessary. That includes other electric car manufacturers.
You sell what you can and at least offset costs somewhat, and also build marketshare, build infrastructure (dealerships, etc.), and learn invaluable lessons about everything from sales to service to reliability to performance, etc.
Or wait until you have the perfect machine that makes you profitable, then begin sales. That doesn't make any sense.
Oh man, if only it were that simple. A floorplanner has to guestimate what the P&R tools are going to do with the initial layout. That can be very hard to predict -- even if the floorplanner and P&R tool are from the same vendor.
I have not read the latest paper, but their previous work was really unclear about metrics being used. Researchers trying to replicate results had a hard time getting reliable details/benchmarks out of Google. Also, my recollection is that Google did not even compute timing, just wirelength and congestion; i.e. extremely primitive metrics.
Floorplanning/placement/synthesis is a billion dollar industry, so if their approach were really revolutionary they would be selling the technology, not wasting their time writing blog posts about it.
I am not sure these publications were intended to generate sales of these technologies. My assumption is that they mostly help the company in terms of recruitment. This lets potential employees see cool stuff Google is doing, and see them as an industry leader.
Spanner is literally a Google cloud product you can buy ignoring that it underpins a good amount of Google tech internally. The same is true of other stuff. Dismissing it as a recruitment tool indicates you haven’t worked at Google or really know much about their product lines.
More people see the blog posts as it’s a more gentle introduction than the paper itself. Sure it might generate interest in Google but it also generates interest for people to further look into the research. They are not for sales of the tech but I’m not sure the impact is just a recruitment tool even if that’s how Google justified the work to itself.
Spanner research paper was in 2012. Bigtable was in 2006. GFS 2003. The last decade has been a 'lost decade' of google. Not much innovation to be honest.
Yes in combination. Customers generally buy these tools as a package deal. If the placer/floorplanner blows everything else out of the water, then a CAD vendor can upsell a lot of related tools.
From what I saw in the rebuttal papers, the Google cost-function is wirelength based. You can still get good TNS from that if your timing is very simplistic -- or if you choose your benchmark carefully.
They optimize using a fast heuristic based on wirelength, congestion, and density, but they evaluate with full P&R. It is definitely interesting that they get good timing without explicitly including it in their reward function!
The odd thing is that they don't compute timing in RL, but claim that somehow TNS and WNS improved. Does anyone believe this? With five circuits and three wins, the results are a coin toss.
Or...just go through their customer list and revoke the registration of any vehicles that were modified. Customers can then pay for having vehicle inspected at the DMV.
Automakers spend anywhere from $20-$30 BILLION annually on advertising, largely on TV and internet. Good luck to Edinburgh trying to shut off that firehose.
IANAA, but this says we don't have to rely on with the notion of dark matter at all.
The paper proposes a special type of singularity that apparently has all the properties of galactic rotation and bending light normally associated with dark matter.
I’m not 100% sure Tolkien is right for Kubrick. Maybe but I’d be concerned that he’d make it a little too ponderous and symbolic. He’d nail the spooky dark aura around the ring though. But with the Beatles? Nah no way.
Peter Jackson’s adaptation was so authentic it looked at places just like my mental imagery looked as I was reading the book. That’s a tough thing to pull off in and of itself.
Spielberg would have made it campy. Lynch would have made it surreal, might have been cool but like his Dune would be a weird cult film take. (I like Lynch’s Dune but it’s weird.)
For some reason I think Ridley Scott could have done it if he could have gotten his head out of sci fi.
One of Jackson’s smartest move was hiring all the various Tolkien illustrators to work on set design mockups. Really made everything feel right for many people.
Kubrick for sure could've worked in a collab env, like he did with Spartacus (yeah, he distanced himself from it though). If you're interested in how Ridley Scott version might've looked like, look no further than Legend.
Um, Ridley Scott directed Legend which came out in 1985. While it wasn't a critical or commercial success, I thought and still think it is an amazing film, and one of the best pieces of cinematic "high fantasy" out there.
https://www.automotivedive.com/news/fords-ev-losses-q2-earni...
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