I've had a rough time with the last two EVs I've owned. I bought a Honda e in 2020 because of its retro-future charm, but ended up being disappointed by several things:
- the range was miserable
- the software quality was bad
- no OTA updates ever (despite Honda's promises)
- slow charging
- poor public charging infrastructure in Germany
I should have known that a 35 kW battery wouldn't deliver great range or charging speed. But I didn't fully appreciate how limiting it would be.
Last year, I bought a new Mini Cooper e. Larger battery. Better software. BMW's quality actually delivered this time. The car feels objectively nice. The software is polished. There are updates. Few bugs. But the range still leaves something to be desired. In summer it's okay. During winter 30-40% of the range just melts away.
Public charging in Northern Germany still sucks:
- too few public chargers
- chargers are often broken or out of service
- pricing is intransparent
Municipal utility companies ("Stadtwerke") seem especially bad at maintaining their charger fleets. Every second charger that I want to use is out of service. The one next to my apartment has been labeled as "defective" for a couple of weeks now. Nobody seems to care...
I still like (love during summer) my car. It's a cool car. It feels luxurious. It's comfortable. It's fun to tear around corners. It's still compact enough to maneuver through the city. And it looks cool. But it also costs 40-50k EUR and only has limited range. And public charging really needs to improve.
I really don't know why EVs necessitate a new software platform. Car makers are shit at software. Actually nearly everyone is shit at software. I know they want to turn their cars into mobile subscription-based analytics platforms for the money but combining it with the concept of the drivetrain power supply is just unnecessary and it's actually potentially lethal for the future company. Yes it's a nice try to bamboozle people into thinking that it's normal and actually somehow necessary for a car to be a wheeled iPad when it's electric, but that only works if the iPad side actually works.
When people see you your EVs are a bug ridden mess and say no thank you, they're not rejecting your electric cars because they're electric. The answer isn't to retreat from electric and then excrete the same shitty software from the shelved EVs into the legacy ICE models. Now you just made people annoyed by the remaining cars that you do sell.
If the manufacturer downclocks your car for safety, can't you sue them for the loss of value? Surely they're admitting that they sold you an unsafe vehicle.
In theory if you bought your phone from one of their vendors you could get your cash back. In practice, the phone was old enough to have already been resold and there's no way you could claim that rebate
Inversely I leased a Fiat 500e for a year in Detroit Michigan and had no issues with range ~130 miles. I would plug it in nightly as I had a level 2 charger installed at my house.
The experiment was quite successful. I just didn’t like front wheel drive on somedays with heavy snow.
I used it for commuting to work, buying groceries and visiting friends nearby. It met my needs and I feel a slightly bigger car with 4 doors and 200-250 mile range should be sufficient for most of the people (assuming it is affordable)
Dunno, had a trip through it last year, there are more than enough chargers. Some of them were literally free.
I have 70kWh battery though. Also, I paid much less than 40k for my chinese SUV. The software is buggy though, a random reboot on motorway doesn't feel nice.
Sounds Bad in the north. In the south I have a charger max 10 min away in every direction. And 300kw charger are also the norm for long distance charging. I was surprised to see that even some Aral gas stations removed some of their pumps and replaced them with high speed chargers around here.
You're making me very happy with my decision in 2021 to resist the appealing design of the Honda and buy an id3 with a reasonably sized battery.
Also your in winter are you running the heater constantly? I find just dressing for outdoors, leaving the heater off and using heated seats/wheel means I only lose maybe 15% range.
Seams to be a non issue in the south, I can charge near my house, everywhere I have to do something and at work.
Aka, every super market has at least one charger. Most parking spaces have 2-3 chargers. From various vendors. Some even for less money then you can get for your own house per kWh.
I also had no issues in the north east so far or in north rein westfalia.
Chargers usually don’t break but get shut down when the grid can’t handle their load currently.
Public AC charging in Germany isn't great, but DC/Fast charging is quite good. I traverse the entire country with a Kia Nero EV, and that's not really a problem using either EnBW, Tesla or Ionity chargers. Besides these networks there are enough others with mostly nation-wide coverage (but not as cheap as these).
(EnBW and Ionity for 39ct/kwh, tesla for a bit more or less, depending on time and location)
The Mini Cooper E, the one adapted from the i3 platform from 2013 but without the nice parts of the i3 such as the light carbon fiber monocoque, the aluminium frame, and the rear wheel engine and rear wheel drive?
The other day I was joking with friends about how I'd love to have a car with a deployable surveillance drone to help with parking and so if I'm stuck in traffic I could have my drone scout ahead and see what's up.
VAG group has EVs (and pretty good ones) across the board: VW with ID series, Škoda with Enyaq/Elroq/Epiq, Audi with eTron series (SUV, sedan and estate), SEAT with Cupra Born and others. BMW just launched Neue Klasse, with iX3 selling like hot cakesa nd i3 looking amazing, with i7 in pipeline. Mercedes also launched a great new platform with CLA which is coming to other sizes as well.
Meanwhile, Renault 5 is selling very well with Renault 4 in the pipeline. Zoes have been selling well too. Peugeot also has good EV models (208 is really fun to drive).
There pretty much isn't a single European car manufacturer that wouldn't have a compact car or an SUV in EV market and most of them have good range, decent pricing and are moving to 800V platforms as well.
Weird headline: Japanese carmakers are doing the same error, while Tesla (an American company) is the one of the leading electric carmakers... I'd just replace it with Legacy Carmakers (e.g. Ford, GM, Toyota and so on).
The “retreat” framing is too US-centric. I’m in Sweden and European OEMs aren’t retreating — BMW Neue Klasse just launched, Renault 5 is a hit, Skoda Enyaq/Elroq are everywhere. These are competitive new platforms shipping right now.
And the Iran/Hormuz situation actually strengthens the case for EVs, not weakens it. Swedish electricity is almost entirely hydro, nuclear and wind. When oil spikes, petrol drivers feel it immediately. EV drivers barely notice. Pulling back from electrification right now is doing exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time.
This is less about carmakers and more about what customers wants and what infrastructure offers. People are just not buying unless EVs are heavily subsidized. And infrastructure is real pain in the butt.
I see arguments in the comments about 'I had a disappointing experience a few years ago' where the entire point is that China has been betting on the future and putting the work in to get there. They had disappointing experiences too, but they learned and improved. We just give up. The whole point of this article and the rise of china in general is that the west keeps looking at just the now and 5 years ago and saying 'meh' while china looks at 5+ years from now and figures out how to build for that. Charging speed is slow? Start investing now in megawatt infrastructure at all levels expecting it to be the norm. Range worries? Invest in better batteries. Etc etc. Get people using the tech and the rough spots will work out more quickly. Instead we have governments retreating from subsidies in EVs while fossil fuels continue to get massive ones that keep growing in cost each year. (war is a subsidy. pollution is a subsidy. cheap/free drilling leases are a subsidy. etc etc) Fossil fuels are dead. EVs are the now. The only reason we still see fossil fuel vehicles on the roads and still in production is because we have no vision and the wrong incentives.
The Western carmakers have been responding rationally to market signals in moving away from EVs, meanwhile Chinese carmakers are responding rationally to government mandates and subsidies.
It's actually the Western approach that is logically more sustainable, modulo global warming impacts. So it's odd to say that selling what people actually want to buy right now is "dooming them to irrelevance." The Guardian and the people it quotes are actualy saying "car buyers are wrong" but by way of blaming the companies responding to their signals. In the absence of, say, a carbon tax, what they are doing is highly relevant.
Fracking led the U.S. to be a net oil exporter, meanwhile EVs have infrastructure costs Western governemnts are not prepared to subsidize any further. Those charging stations can easily cost $50k to install. The batteries are not cheap or easy to make, and the low price of Chinese vehicles is down to heavy subsidies, and much of Western demand was also propped up by subsidies that have been going away. Gas stations are built out, ICs are well understood. Yes the Iran situation has pushed up prices but that doesn't mean they'll stay high long term.
There is very little evidence the market actually wants EVs. They are nice to drive, probably net better for the environment and our health, long term will likely "win," but none of that makes them "relevant" today or ICs "irrelevant."
Western car makers learned the hard lesson that, at least in most of Europe, electricity prices are far too high, EV prices are too high, and customers do know how to use their calculators. In Germany, the only thing propping up the EV market are tax subsidies for commercially used EVs, so company cars are very likely to be EV or at least hybrid. For the rest of sales? Only idealists buy EVs, and then only those with deeper pockets, their own home charger, etc.
The current third oil crisis won't change much in this picture, because while fossil fuel prices have gone up, electricity prices are also starting to react and rise. That's because electricity demand rises, some industrial users can either use electricity or gas. And because gas prices are rising, which influence a small but very important part of electricity generation: on-demand gas power plants, that smooth out the sharp variations in renewable generation and demand.
And in the one important area of EV construction that makes a real difference, batteries, they tried and failed horribly. Everything else isn't really that special or EV-specific. So this winding down is just admitting that they already failed when the likes of Northvolt went boom. And the imho realistic assumption that production lines can be changed again if EVs should see more demand in the future. After all, some car brands to produce EVs, hybrids and ICE cars on the same line even now.
I think Ferrari, Lambo, Rolls Royce, Bugatti, Zonda etc. will do just fine with selling luxury ICEs with many cylinders that go vroom to rich people. In fact they'll probably do better as global wealth gap increases.
It's the Audis, BMWs, Mercedes, etc of Europe they'll probably end up the way of Philips, Blaupunkt, Alcatel, Grundig, Nokia, Thomson, Gigaset, SAgem, etc. meaning selling off their consumer civilian operations to chinese OEMs and all that remain will be the recognizable name badge put on imported Chinese components assembled in EU, while the small remaining European operations focus on vehicles and powertrains for defense/naval/aerospace/etc.
US automotive companies are backing away from EVs because they would have a huge impact on the automotive adjacent industries. They are more reliable and have little to no maintenance, whereas ICE cars prop up multiple billion+ dollar industries. We would spend far less on an automotive industry if we switched predominately to EVs, and so the existing industry is pushing back. End of story.
Embrace and skip to extinguish. Remember the EV-1 anyone? The standard strategy for a Detroit mfgr is to half-heartedly go through the motions of EV offerings so they can "prove" "no one wants them", it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that also discourages change influence on the customer side as well. Marketing, advertising, and investment with intent and impactful efficacy would manufacture consent for different products.
But what about Hydrogen? Many ICE companies would be better to focus on that. It would allow legacy vehicles to stay on the road, and fix the range anxiety in places like the US which is way bigger than all of the EU and bigger than the populated parts of China.
* in the ICE world, California and EU norms created a tight barrier to entry. the patent portfolio protected the old automotive industry. they only built their patent protected ICEs, and they bought everything else from suppliers.
electric circumvents that barrier and that enabled dozens of new automotive OEMs: the first big disruptor
* automotive has created amazing r&d processes for the mechanical vehicle design. they are centered around early decomposition, isolated component engineering and then composition. integration in that world men's: screwing and plugging the pets together. if the hinges and flanges are to spec things integrate nicely.
too bad the hard part for software instead is system integration. consistency cross all components.
all the great hardware engineering processes are completely ND utterly misguided for software system engineering.. integrate rely, often, continuously vs clearly specified interfaces and isolated component engineering with expensive and thus relatively rare integration.
that's IMHO the second disruption for automotive.
355 comments
- the range was miserable
- the software quality was bad
- no OTA updates ever (despite Honda's promises)
- slow charging
- poor public charging infrastructure in Germany
I should have known that a 35 kW battery wouldn't deliver great range or charging speed. But I didn't fully appreciate how limiting it would be.
Last year, I bought a new Mini Cooper e. Larger battery. Better software. BMW's quality actually delivered this time. The car feels objectively nice. The software is polished. There are updates. Few bugs. But the range still leaves something to be desired. In summer it's okay. During winter 30-40% of the range just melts away.
Public charging in Northern Germany still sucks:
- too few public chargers
- chargers are often broken or out of service
- pricing is intransparent
Municipal utility companies ("Stadtwerke") seem especially bad at maintaining their charger fleets. Every second charger that I want to use is out of service. The one next to my apartment has been labeled as "defective" for a couple of weeks now. Nobody seems to care...
I still like (love during summer) my car. It's a cool car. It feels luxurious. It's comfortable. It's fun to tear around corners. It's still compact enough to maneuver through the city. And it looks cool. But it also costs 40-50k EUR and only has limited range. And public charging really needs to improve.
When people see you your EVs are a bug ridden mess and say no thank you, they're not rejecting your electric cars because they're electric. The answer isn't to retreat from electric and then excrete the same shitty software from the shelved EVs into the legacy ICE models. Now you just made people annoyed by the remaining cars that you do sell.
Updates should not be neccesary. An update can affect the resale value of my car by downclocking it "for safety"
In theory if you bought your phone from one of their vendors you could get your cash back. In practice, the phone was old enough to have already been resold and there's no way you could claim that rebate
> poor public charging infrastructure in Germany
Dunno, had a trip through it last year, there are more than enough chargers. Some of them were literally free.
I have 70kWh battery though. Also, I paid much less than 40k for my chinese SUV. The software is buggy though, a random reboot on motorway doesn't feel nice.
It used to be actually true in the 1990s, but right now, I definitely expect better public services in Poland than in DE.
Also your in winter are you running the heater constantly? I find just dressing for outdoors, leaving the heater off and using heated seats/wheel means I only lose maybe 15% range.
Aka, every super market has at least one charger. Most parking spaces have 2-3 chargers. From various vendors. Some even for less money then you can get for your own house per kWh.
I also had no issues in the north east so far or in north rein westfalia.
Chargers usually don’t break but get shut down when the grid can’t handle their load currently.
(EnBW and Ionity for 39ct/kwh, tesla for a bit more or less, depending on time and location)
Turns out BYD have one of those already! https://www.theverge.com/news/622963/byd-dji-vehicle-mounted...
Meanwhile, Renault 5 is selling very well with Renault 4 in the pipeline. Zoes have been selling well too. Peugeot also has good EV models (208 is really fun to drive).
There pretty much isn't a single European car manufacturer that wouldn't have a compact car or an SUV in EV market and most of them have good range, decent pricing and are moving to 800V platforms as well.
Sooo... where's the retreat?
And the Iran/Hormuz situation actually strengthens the case for EVs, not weakens it. Swedish electricity is almost entirely hydro, nuclear and wind. When oil spikes, petrol drivers feel it immediately. EV drivers barely notice. Pulling back from electrification right now is doing exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time.
It's actually the Western approach that is logically more sustainable, modulo global warming impacts. So it's odd to say that selling what people actually want to buy right now is "dooming them to irrelevance." The Guardian and the people it quotes are actualy saying "car buyers are wrong" but by way of blaming the companies responding to their signals. In the absence of, say, a carbon tax, what they are doing is highly relevant.
Fracking led the U.S. to be a net oil exporter, meanwhile EVs have infrastructure costs Western governemnts are not prepared to subsidize any further. Those charging stations can easily cost $50k to install. The batteries are not cheap or easy to make, and the low price of Chinese vehicles is down to heavy subsidies, and much of Western demand was also propped up by subsidies that have been going away. Gas stations are built out, ICs are well understood. Yes the Iran situation has pushed up prices but that doesn't mean they'll stay high long term.
There is very little evidence the market actually wants EVs. They are nice to drive, probably net better for the environment and our health, long term will likely "win," but none of that makes them "relevant" today or ICs "irrelevant."
The current third oil crisis won't change much in this picture, because while fossil fuel prices have gone up, electricity prices are also starting to react and rise. That's because electricity demand rises, some industrial users can either use electricity or gas. And because gas prices are rising, which influence a small but very important part of electricity generation: on-demand gas power plants, that smooth out the sharp variations in renewable generation and demand.
And in the one important area of EV construction that makes a real difference, batteries, they tried and failed horribly. Everything else isn't really that special or EV-specific. So this winding down is just admitting that they already failed when the likes of Northvolt went boom. And the imho realistic assumption that production lines can be changed again if EVs should see more demand in the future. After all, some car brands to produce EVs, hybrids and ICE cars on the same line even now.
It's the Audis, BMWs, Mercedes, etc of Europe they'll probably end up the way of Philips, Blaupunkt, Alcatel, Grundig, Nokia, Thomson, Gigaset, SAgem, etc. meaning selling off their consumer civilian operations to chinese OEMs and all that remain will be the recognizable name badge put on imported Chinese components assembled in EU, while the small remaining European operations focus on vehicles and powertrains for defense/naval/aerospace/etc.
* in the ICE world, California and EU norms created a tight barrier to entry. the patent portfolio protected the old automotive industry. they only built their patent protected ICEs, and they bought everything else from suppliers.
* automotive has created amazing r&d processes for the mechanical vehicle design. they are centered around early decomposition, isolated component engineering and then composition. integration in that world men's: screwing and plugging the pets together. if the hinges and flanges are to spec things integrate nicely.