If I can see it then how is it that every car company hasn’t been preparing low cost EV offerings of their own?
A few are but most seem in denial. Ford is the only US one I’ve heard rumors about having something in the works.
Tesla meanwhile spent tons of capital and time on ridiculous microniche products like the cybertruck.
Me too. I was working in the German automotive industry back then, and left when I saw Tesla and China going full steam ahead on all things EV while German car makers were still pushing on diesel, and still do.
>If I can see it then how is it that every car company hasn’t been preparing low cost EV offerings of their own?
For the same reason Kodak invented the first digital camera and then shelved it to not compete with their film manufacturing business long enough for the Japanese to beat them at digital and kill them.
Big corporations are fiefdoms with vested interest to maintain their status quo, not to push to company to self-disrupt itself, meaning they'll just wait and watch someone else eats their lunch.
https://www.fleeteurope.com/en/financial-models/europe/featu...
according to consumer reports, bmw is the most reliable at 9th most reliable automaker, audi and merc are way down
All these companies have massive debt, low margin, need to continue to make money on ICE.l, transition to EV. To also make a profital low cost EV is insanly hard. They are struggling to develop a profitable high cost EV.
A lot of the supply chain is in China, so investing in that is pretty hard.
Its simply impossible for them to scale up the Bolt as is.
Their plan was to rebase the Bolt onto the Ultium platform, but with all the issues they had on that platform, they weren't able to do it.
If it was on Ultium then maybe they could not lose money on it.
Because the low cost Chinese EVs is a dumping operation organised by China thanks to low cost manufacturing and large public subsidies.
You can't necessarily compete against this as a company if your government doesn't protect you.
I'm not sure but I don't believe that the price difference between China and the rest of the world would be the issue.
The biggest problem is killing of the international competition by having artificially low prices.
Chinese car manufacturers probably make more $'s on each car sold than US manufactures.
Like the $7b in subsidies each for ford and gm or the 100bn in free loans? Perhaps the 3bn in subsidies for tesla.
From a legal/WTO case standpoint, yes. Selling at a loss in general is perfectly legal, and lots of companies do that for all kinds of perfectly legitimate reasons. Using price discrimination to sell at a loss only in certain markets with the intention of damaging the domestic market in that region is when you get into trouble.
A Chinese EV is ~$10,000 cheaper in China than it is outside of China. This is a massive advantage to Chinese vehicle manufacturers. They can scale up production using the internal market, and then use that scale to push down the external unsubsidised price.
Pretty much exactly the same as the US. An American EV is about $10,000 cheaper in the US than elsewhere. $7500 because of the rebate, and the rest in shipping and other costs.
They... have, though? As far as I know, most of the European ones have at least one more or less ready to go. Generally not on the _extreme_ low end (ie not competing with the 10k BYD), but Renault, VW and Stellantis all have models in the 20-25k range pre-subsidy due to launch in the next year. The Dacia Spring (20k) has already been out for a bit, of course.
Because they didn't believe that EVs or small cars were something that could be profitable, at least not compared to the high margin, cash cow SUVs. Instead, they did what they did the last few decades - invest into lobbying to keep emission standards relaxed. Only when Volkswagen and a fair few others got caught cheating, that business model went down the drain and suddenly they had to change.
> A few are but most seem in denial. Ford is the only US one I’ve heard rumors about having something in the works.
BMW is investing almost two billion dollars into its Spartanburg plant to produce electric versions of the X series SUVs [1].
> Tesla meanwhile spent tons of capital and time on ridiculous microniche products like the cybertruck.
Indeed. The thing is a joke on wheels... it shows that unlike SpaceX with Gwynne Shotwell, Tesla (and Twitter) don't have an "Elon handler" responsible for pushing back.
[1] https://www.press.bmwgroup.com/global/article/detail/T042217...
Space launch is not like cars or really most other products. Your customer is highly technical and highly informed and they absolutely will not launch on a rocket that doesn't meet certain design criteria and in many cases they will require the ability to review the rocket's actual design blueprints and software (with NDA in place). NASA and the DOD will demand this, full stop.
If SpaceX didn't have someone like Shotwell pretty much running the show there's no chance they'd ever get a customer beyond the low end of the satellite launch market. They'd also have trouble getting the FAA to allow them to fly, and with good reason. A rocket is basically a bomb that explodes in one direction, and many of its failure modes involve it exploding in all directions.
Elon's been great (at least in the past) at assembling teams, getting funding, and motivating people to do really hard shit. (Not sure how he'd fare today with his baggage... his brand has taken a hit.) He also knows enough about engineering to hire competent engineers. Beyond that I see little sign that he's actually good at managing or day to day operation and certainly seems no good at product design. This differs from Jobs who at least had killer intuition there. Jobs would have laughed the cybertruck out of the room.
You should read Isaacson’s biography of Musk - there are sections about SpaceX where Musk questions assumptions and goes against the status quo in assembly, operations, and pricing so deeply embedded in the NASA/Boeing/Northrup dynamics.