I see the numbers. I have no frame of reference. I don’t know what it means. I’m not saying Toyota (or VW, or Renault, etc) is too big to fail. I’m saying the idea that only Tesla will survive is harder to believe.
I think we’ll see more off-brand manufacturers, some of which might have big names in other industries or countries. BYD selling EVs in Africa seems less far-fetched to me than Toyota getting its act together…
1 Like
Do not know who recons only Tesla will survive… Most likely for the OEMs that do not go bankrupt, mergers will follow, look at Stellantis:
The full list of brands under Stellantis group looks something like this, arranged alphabetically:
- Abarth
- Alfa Romeo
- Chrysler
- Citroen
- Dodge
- DS
- Fiat
- Jeep
- Lancia
- Maserati
- Opel
- Peugeot
- Ram
- Vauxhall
A lot of merging to try and regain economies of scale, likely today most of these brands sharing platforms, a good thing.
Some OEMs will likely shrink by order(s) of magnitude, some of the big ones will be small ones.
Groetnis
Surprising and concerning to me is the lack of progress in EV production. Most OEMs take 7 years to get a new model to market, including getting the production lines set up. I get back to my original point for SA and Africa in general, where does this leave us?
Tesla is for sure not entering new markets for now. In SA the number of new EVs are about the same as Zero in sales.
Groetnis
I’m not surprised.
You guys have seen the EV press conference from late last year?
What was very funny to me is how much flack Toyota was taking in the press at the time for refusing to jump on the “no more ICE after 2035” bandwagon… and then a few days later, they announce that they are getting into it in a BIG way.
Why funny? Well, you don’t just pull 15 new models out of a hat at short notice. They have been working on these for quite some time. They just aren’t doing the whole vaporware thing…
Then there is this from a few weeks ago.
I wouldn’t call the untertaker just yet…
In establishment of a full line-up of electrified vehicles, Toyota will introduce 15 BEVs, including seven new Toyota bZ BEV models by 2025. Toyota plans to produce the Toyota bZ4X in Japan and China; it hopes to begin worldwide sales of the model by the middle of 2022.
And this will be the first BEV for Toyota… From Toyota themselves
Groetnis
Then there’s still my favourite, the RAV4 Prime. Even Scotty likes it.
Scotty gets it (even if most days I find him mildly irritating). You need to take a trip? Well, now you don’t need two cars…
Intelligence is measurable, stupidity is boundless 
We can apply this to car manufacturers everywhere…
Groetnis
Oops, the Toyota BZ platform to be used for most of the 15 BEVs to be launched. It is conforming to the ICE packaging 
It looks to me to be a copy of ICE packaging, how not innovative.
Groetnis
Aaand the madness continues…. This time Honda screwed the pootch. They claim their new E BEV is a ground up design, you be the judge.
Me thinks, based on the available info, they ripped out the ICE bits from the platform the Brio was build on, strapped a battery pack to the bottom of it, left the rest of everything in place from a packaging perspective and gave it a new frock on top.
Honda China’s e:np1 and e:ns1 will be build in a new plant in China, also for export, capable of producing 120 000 units per year by 2025. Pricing is indicated to be €29 500 for the entry level E BEV.
Oh who cares! It is good if you can leverage existing infrastructure. Remember, ICE is not going away for at least another decade.
Now please complain about the fact that EVs still use existing 12V systems complete with a lead acid battery…
Edit: This actually makes me think a bit about my piano teacher, who is always pushing quite hard in the lessons. So during a pretty intense sheet reading exercise (which I suck at) this happens:
Teach: Hey, what happened to that bottom note!
Me: Don’t worry, we’ll get to it next time.
Same here. Stop worrying. We’ll get to it.
Who worries, me not. Don’t care if EVs take over or not. Don’t care for the climate change alarmists, all BS in my book. I do however care for engineering. What they are trying to do is make an ICE platform into an EV, just dumb and lazy in my book, there are better ways to do that. It’s likely an indication that the beancounters are ruling the roost over engineering 
Could not be bothered to engineer a proper solution or pay to do so, could then just as well have stuck with hybrid.
12V systems, ja well, that ain’t going away anytime soon. All manufacturers are bought in to old parts bins and economies of scale, so no incentives to pay for the development of new HV systems. Things like wiper motors, all new switches (most likely digital switching) new Infotainment, new instrument clusters and stepper motor circuits etc etc etc.
groetnis
1 Like
It is likely that the established manufacturers would try and leverage their existing tech for a competitive advantage. Saving money on engineering for the first few rounds of EVs might result in incremental changes over time and hopefully cheaper EVs upfront.
We can’t really expect them to throw all their existing intellectual properly out the window if they can still make some returns on it in the medium term? Consider Tesla, they started off a blank slate platform. The amount of issues they have had to deal with over time was quite substantial. Perhaps incremental improvement should be preferred over some complete redesign and then trying to fix all sorts of issues later.
Just like brand new platforms came out every now and then during the ICE era, so would brand new platforms come out during the EV era. Japanese manufacturers are in general quite conservative and Honda and Toyota specifically places significant value on the perception of their reliability. It wouldn’t make sense for them to blank slate their first round of EVs.
Haha! Unfortunately there’s no next time with “blad lees”. You can only do it once. Thereafter, it is “practiced”. 
A highly trained engineer working with exact info saying other highly trained professionals in climate, which is not exact, are talking BS.
Note: There is a “fringe element” in every specialist field, in the climate change field too … unless they are right … ? Time will tell.
Packaging is likely not IP 
sooo, using ICE style packaging will likely result in big sub-optimal integration and performance. This in turn leads to bad pricing, bad efficiency and range. The biggest killer in EV is mass and ICE packaging does not help in reducing mass when used as an EV platform.
Just look at how fickle we lot here is, then multiply that with the World population and see what choices are made re. BEVs and hybrids. Not to mention the penalties already metered out to OEMs for bad CO2 performance across the fleets. Nor the legislation that seem to be tightened every year re the banning of petrol and diesel ICE.
All this will leave us up a creek without a paddle.
Groetnis
That’s actually a good point. But I will get back to it.
@Sarel.Wagner makes a good point when he explains what is important to HIM. He cares about engineering, and doing it properly. This is going to vary between people as well, I suspect a civil engineer would be much more likely to demolish everything and start from the ground up than an electronic engineer. Likewise, software people like myself are used to living with legacy stuff and a large part of doing a good job is precisely that: Getting the thing to work properly despite all the legacy. Because we cannot rewrite the entire thing every time something new has to be done.
It must be a personality thing. If you can screw open a Yamaha home entertainment system, and marvel at the old school surface mount design of the amplifier section in the same way as you marvel at the multi-layer surface mount part next to it that now runs the bluetooth and Wi-Fi part… then you get it. It is not stupid. It is actually extremely clever… of course depending on how you look at it.
So that gets me back to climate. That’s a science entirely different to many others, and even within climate there are different disciplines. It irks me no end when a climate-change denier says “oh, they cannot even predict the weather next week… but they want to tell me what it will be like in 10 years!?”. Look, it is okay that you distrust some of the things going around, that is healthy… but you sound like an idiot when you say things like that. Those are entirely different disciplines in the larger “climate” space…
I suppose that what I care about, is not making stupid arguments. It is okay if you (or I) are wrong about something. Just be wrong about it in a reasoned way… 
1 Like
Of course that is also an “argument from incredulity”. Sometimes I yearn for the times when I didn’t know fallacies by their names… such a simple time with less stuff to annoyed over 
That LONG explanation/read (I just had to ) can be said in one line:
Don’t judge unless you walked in the other person’s shoes.
Yes, always walk a mile in another man’s shoes. That way, you’re at least a mile away from him… and you’ve got his shoes.