Howard wrote:Below is a link to a very long article in Spiegel online - Will Tesla and Google Kill the German Car?
It's a German journalistic view of the major challenges facing their car manufacturers. And it doesn't underplay the seriousness of their situation.
Worth a read or a skim.
https://www.spiegel.de/international/bu ... 93415.htmlregards
Howard
I can understand why spiegel introduces this as being about the german sector as a whole, given their audience, but what they actually talk about is mostly Daimler, and BMW.
I'm hardly going to argue that Waymo isn't a world leader in AD, I've been making this point consistently for some little time, although it might have been worth mentioning that the company with a Level 3 AD for sale which you aren't allowed to use because the law still requires the driver to pay attention at all times is ...Audi...
The amount of room given to the fact that Tesla use robots is ...baffling. It's not like nobody else uses them, or uses them better. Musk's aim may have been to build the machine which builds the machine and show legacy auto how mass manufacture was done, but that was before he discovered he didn't know how it was done and decided that Tesla's future dominance would be based on robot taxis, or the number of 80's arcade games you could play or whatever it currently is. The only thing we learnt from that is that Tesla's big break through is always just around the corner, no no, the next corner... it's almost as if the man is talking his stock price up. If you want to see a well automated factory check out the Taycan production line:
https://youtu.be/A_cV4D2EX80The first two figures are of questionable use. Yes, alphabet has a very high market cap. We knew that. It makes buying a chunk quite difficult we knew that too. The prospective value of Waymo whilst incalculable would actually be meaningful. BEV output 2018 ...let's just say it's about to change quite dramtically, we know it is, it even said so in the first paragraph of this story... Zwichau + Chattanooga + Embden + Hanover + Anting + Foshan is going to make the high score on that list look tiny. I'm fairly sure we all knew that cars make up a lot of Germany's exports too, so that's fig.3 wasted...
The power of 150 PC's? please... Tesla no more came up with the idea of smart summon than they came up with the idea of wheels, it's been used in discussions of AD and promotional material for years, and sentry mode has been a staple of sci of for decades. These are not ideas Tesla 'came up with'.
The coverage of Tesla is hyperbolic fanfic.
...ok, first page was mainly Daimler, second is heading down the mainly BMW route... and back to Daimler...
The companies reacted to political pressure with their e-offensives, but policymakers, Oettinger believes, weren't precise enough with the incentives they offered. EU regulations, he argues, allow producers to sugarcoat their CO2 balances: They are allowed to calculate 0-grams of CO2 emissions from their electric vehicles, even though the production of those vehicles alone produces several tons of the greenhouse gas. "It's not always accurate to view electric vehicles as climate-neutral," says Oettinger. "It also depends on how the electricity is generated, whether it comes from renewable sources or not."
...sounds familiar! Sensible man.
Even if customers begin buying more electric automobiles in the future, there is no guarantee that they will be German models. A car reviewer from the French daily Le Monde expressed astonishment in May at the purchase prices of 82,600 euros for an Audi e-tron and 78,950 euros for the Mercedes EQC. They are certainly attractive, comfortable cars with a 400-kilometer range and 300-kilowatt output, he wrote, but the steering is "less technically mature" than in comparable Tesla models. More than anything, though, he wrote, the two models are lacking a dose of boldness: "They feel like electrified conventional vehicles and not like a new generation of cars."
He, much like Ody appears to have missed the point of the e-tron. The punters haven't though, see graph in above post.
Electric motors have maybe 100, maximum 200 parts. In electric mobility, the battery is the most valuable part and accounts for around a third of the value added. And the batteries will not be coming from Germany, but from Samsung and LG Chem in South Korea or from CATL in China. The race to establish at least one European battery producer seems to have already been lost.
It's called Northvolt. The author should really like it bearing in mind it was founded by two Tesla alumni, and is 20% owned by VW...
Hardly anyone is doing as much to ward off that fate as VW CEO Diess.
Now we are talking!
...oh no, back to the doom and gloom!
I'm not sure there's anything in that article you won't find somewhere in this thread, the unsubstantiated adulation of Musk for was certainly very familiar as are the questions about the viability of manufacturers who only produce 2.5 million cars a year.