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Comment by Rinzler89 | Hacker News Reader

>I’m not in the car biz and I’ve seen this coming with clarity for over a decade.

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.

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BMW are doing pretty well growing their EV sales (admittedly not low cost)

https://www.fleeteurope.com/en/financial-models/europe/featu...

A large part of this is also hybrids which I would not consider to be actual electric cars.

German cars are notorious for having unreliable electrical components. Now imagine the whole car is electric.

German cars usually have (together with Japanese, I'd say) the best reputation in reliability. And ICE cars are full of electrical components, perhaps more so than the electric cars (since ICE cars are generally more complex than electric ones). So I struggle to reconcile your comment with what I hear ...

Reputation for reliability doesn't mean reliable! In most top 10 list of reliable car brands (as a whole) there might be one or two German brand in there (with Mini usually being the highest of the German brands).

I've never heard of german cars being known for most reliable. And when they break they are the most expensive to fix. For example audis always had issues with oil leaking and in the US audi mechanics charge the most per hour and they are hard to work on.

according to consumer reports, bmw is the most reliable at 9th most reliable automaker, audi and merc are way down

Oof, BMWs are trash for reliability IMO

I'm told that the Volkswagens made in Mexico are significantly less reliable than those made in Germany. I had a Golf which exemplified this -- all of the motory bits (not a gearhead) seemed fine, but everything else was shit from the windshield wipers that only worked on sunny days to the inexplicable decision to power the automatic locks with the vacuum system.

No need to imagine, just look at the disastrous VW ID line rollout.

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