GM Says They Will Dominate Tesla

[Irace86.2.0]

Originally Posted by soundman98

have you seen this?
https://jalopnik.com/tesla-model-y-d...ere-1842698386

they're saying that tesla appears to be adapting with every new model pretty well.

tesla's main problem has always been that they insist on starting from the ground and ignoring that anyone else has attempted to tackle similar problems. as a result, they hit the same snags everyone else hit, but they're doing so in a more modern era, where such mistakes are more obvious, and less acceptable.

i believe that gm will eventually outsell tesla, but not in the same market space. it is and has been interesting to watch tesla attempt to move downmarket with their product selection, while every business plan in the world involves moving products upmarket.

the people that want a tesla are not really the same as the people that want a gm. same with toyota.

it's like an article proclaiming "pizza to outsell kobe steak" the headline isn't wrong, it just pays no attention to the metrics or reality of how and why more people will buy pizza than kobe steak.

I have been watching a few of Monroe's videos on the Model Y teardown. Overall, he seems to be very impressed. The car isn't problem free, but he is often giving it praises above anything he has ever seen in the past.

Tesla is designing the cars to last a million miles. Many people would not use a car that long, but if they did accomplish such a thing, it might cannibalize vehicle sales in general, yet this might be the plan all along.

[bcj]

Will the batteries last for the full million?

Saw on TV ads for 84 month payment schemes for new cars. That's 7 years.
Might as well lease. They'll wear out well before they're paid off.

[soundman98]

Originally Posted by Irace86.2.0

I have been watching a few of Monroe's videos on the Model Y teardown. Overall, he seems to be very impressed. The car isn't problem free, but he is often giving it praises above anything he has ever seen in the past.

Tesla is designing the cars to last a million miles. Many people would not use a car that long, but if they did accomplish such a thing, it might cannibalize vehicle sales in general, yet this might be the plan all along.

it's not all that different historically from the other car companies, just on a different timeline.

way back, all the automakers did build stuff to last. then around the 50-60's, they realized that 'planned obsolescence' could be spun to their advantage, which helped spur import companies to come into the market later and easily be a higher quality.. of which, they're still fighting somewhat today, though all companies have come leaps and bounds with all of it.

[Irace86.2.0]

Originally Posted by bcj

Will the batteries last for the full million?

Saw on TV ads for 84 month payment schemes for new cars. That's 7 years.
Might as well lease. They'll wear out well before they're paid off.

The loss depends on the frequency and recharge vs discharge percentage and only charging to 80% versus charging to 100% all the time, etc. Teslas with 400,000 miles on them that were used for taxis, which regularly charge to 100% and often, show more degradation or loss of capacity than the average battery. The capacity drops the most right away then tapers off some.

In 500,000 miles, if the battery range dropped from 350 miles to 80% or 280 miles then that would still meet the needs of most users, and even if it wasn't, it would be easier to sell a used electric car at 500,000 miles than a used ICE car, is what is being suggested.

[Irace86.2.0]

We should expect batteries to continue to improve with less degradation (controlling of dendrites, increased cycles, longer range, faster charging, etc). With more manufactures entering the electric car game, things should only improve faster. I can total see the potential of a million mile car. Obviously this will hurt manufactures, but I see the end coming soon.

[wbradley]

I have a question for GM.

Will they still be making my grandfather's Oldsmobile?

LOL

I am the youngest possible "boomer" so I do remember when GM had a majority, that's correct, a majority (as in more than 50%) market share in Canada. That's history.

I sold Chev Olds when I was 23, first job selling cars in '87. At that point they had lost market share to the extent that none of my relatives or friends were interested in them.

Compare MR2 and Supra, RX7 Turbo, 300ZX Turbo to Iroc Z/Trans AM. The end of an era.

[Dadhawk]

Originally Posted by wbradley

I have a question for GM.

Will they still be making my grandfather's Oldsmobile?

Wish they did! This is the Oldsmobile my Grandfather drove to town when he was doing business that didn't require his truck (well not the exact one, but it looked like this....)

[Irace86.2.0]

Originally Posted by wbradley

I have a question for GM.

Will they still be making my grandfather's Oldsmobile?

LOL

I am the youngest possible "boomer" so I do remember when GM had a majority, that's correct, a majority (as in more than 50%) market share in Canada. That's history.

I sold Chev Olds when I was 23, first job selling cars in '87. At that point they had lost market share to the extent that none of my relatives or friends were interested in them.

Compare MR2 and Supra, RX7 Turbo, 300ZX Turbo to Iroc Z/Trans AM. The end of an era.

America is all about their trucks, and protects that product with high import taxes on trucks compared to cars, or GM would have lost even more ground to competitors, so I feel like them saying they will dominate is just a publicity stunt. They still have decent market share, but no where near 50%, gawsh times change.

[wbradley]

My Mom bought this '68 S convertible from my aunt who replaced it with a new '72 Cutlass S convertible brown with beige interior. Ours had black vinyl seats and was a gold colour, though we immediately painted it a similar green to TCoat's new 86.

That was our only, and not your grandfather's Oldsmobile. My mother always drove cool cars for their time.

[Irace86.2.0]

My grandpa had an Oldsmobile too... just not when he was younger:

[Jordanwolf]

Boy I can't wait for my Honda Corvette S3000 Z06 EV.

[why?]

Originally Posted by soundman98

have you seen this?
https://jalopnik.com/tesla-model-y-d...ere-1842698386

they're saying that tesla appears to be adapting with every new model pretty well.

tesla's main problem has always been that they insist on starting from the ground and ignoring that anyone else has attempted to tackle similar problems. as a result, they hit the same snags everyone else hit, but they're doing so in a more modern era, where such mistakes are more obvious, and less acceptable.

i believe that gm will eventually outsell tesla, but not in the same market space. it is and has been interesting to watch tesla attempt to move downmarket with their product selection, while every business plan in the world involves moving products upmarket.

the people that want a tesla are not really the same as the people that want a gm. same with toyota.

it's like an article proclaiming "pizza to outsell kobe steak" the headline isn't wrong, it just pays no attention to the metrics or reality of how and why more people will buy pizza than kobe steak.

It better be better, but you know there will still be problems. And you're exactly right about Tesla. Musk is far too ego driven for his own good. He could have this all fixed by simply hiring someone from the auto industry with actual experience, instead of floundering around looking totally incompetent.



And yes the wealthy will always buy Tesla's because they don't care if their 4th car is a piece of crap sometimes. They love their status symbols. I don't care how inexpensive they become, normal people will absolutely not put up with the issues Tesla's have always had. Tesla is still using the equivalent of 50's era quality control like that wasn't 70 years ago and wondering why they keep making piece of crap vehicles.

[AnalogMan]

For me, the more relevant consideration is not Tesla vs GM vs any other electric car, but do battery electric cars in general make sense at this time (from an environmental or energy usage perspective)?

The scientific data on climate change are overwhelming. We need to save our planet and do whatever we can to combat climate change. After all, this is the only planet we have, so not killing it - and ourselves in the process - seems like a really good idea. But no matter how much some people wish it were true and how often they might say it, a Battery Electric Vehicle (BEV) is not on its face necessarily ‘environmentally friendly’. The hard facts are that it primarily depends on how the electricity is generated to charge the EV.

Electricity is not ‘free’. It doesn’t just come out of a wall socket on its own. Some other primary energy source must be used to generate the electricity. Most promotion of BEVs ignores this.

The fundamental problem is that right now, fossil fuels still provide about 63% of the electricity generated in the US, with nuclear an additional 19%. There are significant regional differences, but overall only about 11% of US electric power is generated from renewable sources -

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3

A BEV can make more sense in a place like Oregon that gets 70% of its electricity from ‘clean’ sources (hydro and wind), but not so much in Minnesota that is heavily dependent on coal and natural gas, or the country at large.

Globally, China currently gets 60% of its electricity from fossil fuel, mostly coal, which changes the BEV calculation there. Shockingly, Japan recently announced they were building 22 new coal powered electric generating plants, which together will release about as much CO2 as all the cars sold in the US:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/c...fukushima.html

As a result, in aggregate BEVs essentially have a ‘long tailpipe’ to whatever form of primary energy was used to generate the electricity. A report in Scientific American estimated that a Nissan Leaf and Toyota Prius both produce on average about 200 grams of CO2 per mile (though it would be about 100 grams/mile CO2 in California, and 300 grams/mile CO2 in Minnesota):

https://www.scientificamerican.com/a...ssarily-clean/

There is also a fundamental problem with how BEVs are promoted and the resulting perception of their ‘environmental friendliness’. The way MPGe numbers used for BEVs are calculated assume 100% efficiency in converting fossil fuel to electricity. This violates the laws of thermodynamics. In actuality, only 30-40% of the energy contained in fossil fuels can be converted into electricity in any thermal process (though newer combined cycle natural gas power plants can reach 50%). That means about 2/3 of the energy is wasted (plus about 10% lost in transmission). This has been widely discussed and reported:

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/08/m...electric-cars/

https://personal.ems.psu.edu/~radovic/Chapter4.pdf

https://www.forbes.com/sites/warrenm.../#54dc4b4929de

https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy17osti/67645.pdf

With only about 30-35% of the energy contained in fossil fuel actually converted into usable electricity, this means that to put 85 kWh of electric charge into a BEV requires 269 kWh of fossil fuel or nuclear energy. Thus, a Nissan Leaf that is advertised with ’99 MPGe’ in an apples-to-apples comparison is actually getting the equivalent of 28-36 real world MPG. Not bad, but certainly significantly different than what the flawed MPGe number suggests, and objectively not much better than a modern ICE car.

When financial subsidies are taken into consideration, the picture gets murkier (though of course multi-millionaire Tesla buyers enjoyed getting unneeded discounts on their purchases):

https://www.politico.com/agenda/stor...ronment-000660

The calculation becomes even less favorable when taking into account the environmental impacts of lithium and rare Earth metal mining, battery disposal at end of life, etc.

Nuclear fission energy is also not the answer. Nuclear energy (being a thermal process) is also about 30% efficient in converting the heat released by the fission of uranium into electricity. Nuclear power generates 19% of the electricity in the US and does not directly generate carbon emissions. However, mining and processing of uranium requires massive amounts of energy, impacts water supplies, as well as the thorny problem of disposing of nuclear waste (spent fuel), so nuclear fission might not be the best option for increased electric power in the future (fusion is another story, but unfortunately we’re not there yet).

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/es702249v

Of course the situation would be completely different IF electricity were predominantly generated from renewable sources (solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, etc.). But at present, only 11% of electricity in the US comes from renewable sources. Hydro generates an additional 7% but has its own issues, including the environmental impacts of flooding regions when dams are built, questions about the future reliability of hydro power because of climate change, and the fact that it’s already fully developed in the US with little expansion ability.

Like most things in life, the solution is going to be complicated, and not simply buying more electric cars. At its core, a fundamental need is to change the US, and world, electric generating grid to renewable sources. That will take a lot of money. Just for the US it would cost $5 trillion:

https://www.renewableenergyworld.com...e-spending-go/

So unfortunately, the bottom line is that with the CURRENT US electric energy grid, one would probably be better off simply burning fossil fuel directly rather than converting it into electricity to then power a BEV. It still comes back to having to change the US electric grid and how electricity is generated. Unfortunately, we are not going to save our planet one Nissan Leaf at a time. Until then, we’re just kidding ourselves with artificial and inaccurate ‘MPGe’ numbers that might make some people feel good, but don’t reflect reality.

If we really want to save the planet - and ourselves - we need to elect political leaders with the courage, wisdom, and willingness to make the massive financial investments needed to create an electric power grid fueled by renewables such as solar, wind, and tidal sources. With the current administration’s actions of cutting corporate taxes and reducing government revenues, and the increasingly short-term thinking by private companies focused on instant profits, it’s hard to see where all the money will come from without some dramatic changes.

Wishful thinking about BEVs doesn’t change the facts that they don’t really make sense as long as the electric grid is primarily generated by fossil and nuclear fuels. The pesky thing about science is that it’s true whether you choose to believe it or not.

[Dadhawk]

Originally Posted by AnalogMan

The scientific data on climate change are overwhelming. We need to save our planet and do whatever we can to combat climate change.....

In the end, the planet will take care of itself. To my mind "climate change" is exactly that, the planet taking care of itself. If the climate on Earth changes to the point that humans are no longer viable, the planet will heal, it's in it for the long game. It's done this hundreds of thousands of times over billions of years (a stat I just made up, but you see my point). Heck, we humans exist because of an event that created an environment where our tiny ancestors were able to thrive without being swallowed whole by a moving building with teeth!

Really what the focus needs to be on is "survival of the species" by us stopping doing things that could potentially kill our future generations. The answer may be the same, but the problem is not around saving the planet.

I'm going to have to disagree on whether nuclear is part of the solution or not. It is a much more efficient, and from what I've seen is less environmentally impactful solution, than most of the so called "green" solutions.

I do agree though that there is very little "green" about electric cars, and right now other than making you feel good, there is no true advantage to them.