Howard wrote:Has Fred been reading our comments on this site? If you look back some of us have made virtually the same statement a week or two ago.
There's a new BEV insurgency in town, converting the Tesla masses!
dspp wrote:Indeed VW / VAG are one of the more likely survivors, ironically courtesy of dieselgate.
However they do have a problem and that chart illustrates it, and everyone shares the same problem. VAG are converting one factory to EV production, of 300,000 cars per year, and plan [that factory] to be fully converted by 2021. So clearly they are lining up the battery capacity to support that. Unfortunately VAG produce about 11 million cars/year.
Globally cars are about 70 million/year, and commercial vehicles 20 million/year.
This is going to be a long-haul changeover. However being a laggard in that process, at the point when ICE vehicles are worse than the comparable EV, is going to be a real "burning platform" moment. For some vehicle types, in some countries, that moment is now (I'm thinking Norway, or the upmarket sedans in the USA).
regards, dspp
The problem you are highlighting is that VW is big enough to make a granular conversion, taking ICE capacity out without significantly damaging output and converting it to BEV as and when it suits. The range of cars it produces is wide enough that it can move segments across to electric partially or fully as and when suits, with for example the up!, Mii and Citigo going completely electric whilst the Taycan introduces BEV's to that segment of their range. The number of cars they produce is so high that the unit cost of electrification which is giving producers which make 2.5 million cars a year some real problems are much lower than the competition, which gives them added potential for selling their MEB platform, and all the time making 14 billion euros a year in profits... To have such problems!
redsturgeon wrote:https://1buv.com/bernstein-teslas-competition-is-crushing-model-s-model-x-sales-model-3-could-be-next/
This could be a worry for the future, It seems that Model 3 sales are cannibalising model s and x sales and new entrants from the likes of Jaguar and Audi are not growing the overall EV market but are taking Tesla sales too.
There are some great fights BTL in articles reporting this, with the devout so desperate to deny anybody but Tesla a win that they are trying to argue that Tesla's falling sales of it's higher margin cars is entirely due to the model 3, and is a good thing for the company...
Howard wrote:Can I add: "Forget about engineering minutiae and daft features. Make a quality product which delights the average customer and meets their needs for sensible motoring with a price range which starts at around £30,000. Offer VW quality sales and service and you have a winning formula for a BEV which will compete with ICE models and sell in volume around the world."
redsturgeon wrote:It will be interesting to see what happens when the ID3 appears.
The people's electric wagon!
redsturgeon wrote:Wherever all four elements come together, "our sales are great," the CEO said in July on a conference call to discuss second-quarter earnings. "So we're rolling out service centers like crazy," he said. "Service centers are the key to sales, not the retail locations."
https://www.autonews.com/service/tesla- ... ce-central[/quote]
So that's another round of cost cutting blown then?
I would say it's encouraging that Musk has actually acknowledged the problem, but that then leads me to consider how big a problem it would have to be for him to acknowledge it.
Tesla closing in on Lower Saxony, Germany as final Europe Gigafactory location: report
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https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-europe- ... y-germany/I found this report quite interesting. Guess which car company the state of Lower Saxony owns 20% of?