OT. GM beats Tesla

Tesla and GM have somewhat different operating philosophies, Tesla wants the world to switch to driving luxury electric vehicles exclusively.

GM wants to sell the world a wide assortment of luxury vehicles of which electric vehicles are just one type you can buy. They are car-agnostic, ideally everyone in America will buy a $85,000 truck from GM, whether it's gas or electric or hydrogen or whatever it does not matter. One of each would be best, actually.

I took a quick look on the Carvana vehicle sales site. The cheapest I found was a

2021 Chevy Spark LS hatchback, $10287. The cheapest sedan was a 2020 Mitsubishi Mirage G4 ES, $10,474. The cheapest pickup was a 2020 Dodge Ram 1500 Tradesman, $18,017. A 2020 Tesla Model X Long Range with 11,300 miles is for sale on Auto Trader for $96588. California's ban on selling new internal combustion driven vehicles starts in 2035. There must be people thinking about the auto parts store business. California mechanics might be king in twenty years or so unless this silly ban is lifted.

Comparing the lowest-price cars you can buy to one of the most expensive luxury EVs you can buy seems hardly fair. The Mirage is a really dreadful car.

The Spark is somewhat better. They sold an all-electric Spark in the mid

2010s in several US states including CA as a compliance car it was much better as an electric runabout with a ~100 mile quick-charge battery pack, and with a mostly direct transplant of the Chevy Volt motor into a tiny car it was absurdly powerful for its size. It was an easy mod. But at the time it couldn't be sold at a profit.

But the MSRP on the lowest trim gas 2021 Spark on Chevy's site is about

14k, don't know how anyone's selling it at a profit at 10.

The margins are very thin down there I don't know if GM is making any more than 2k net off cars that cost 14k, probably less.

The pols here want to force every car to be electric, and are simultaneously destroying our ability to provide a reliable electric supply. There is also a trend to banning natural gas in residences and to not use fossil fuels to make electricity.

I suspect that there aren't many electrical engineers among the state legislature. Most have done nothing their entire lives but be politicians. The press can rarely distinguish a kilowatt from a KWH and freely interchanges "million" with "billion."

About self-driving, maybe it can be made to work on freeways, but it would be a lot more difficult in cities. Around here, there is every imaginable object blasting along the (steep!) streets at all sorts of velocities and directions. Cars, motorcycles, scooters, skateboards, bicycles, shopping carts, wheelchairs, unicycles, battery-powered roller skates, pedestrians, animals, delivery vehicles, all trying to avoid kids and potholes. The cars often run stop signs and red lights and the wheeled people always do. Some people cross the street whenever and wherever they want, oblivious of traffic. We were driving uphill on Swiss street and a wheeled recycling bin was in the middle of the street coming right at us, going maybe 30 mph downhill. At the last second, it swerved and smacked a parked car.

It's going to take a lot more than a few cameras and uP's to manage all that.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

Science teaches us to doubt. 

  Claude Bernard

Sounds like you're making the case that human vehicle operators are pretty terrible - that a few cameras and uPs could in principle be a safer driver than a large fraction of the population doesn't seem farfetched.

The high-profile fatalities with Autopilot seem to have been because the owner trusted it too much, it was too good. It worked great day after day after day after day...operator started to view it as a perfect friend that would always work perfectly. And it kept on working perfectly until the day it didn't and for whatever reason just drives you straight into the side of a truck at 65 mph.

I tried to be careful about the pricing but could've messed up. That car wasn't on Carvana this morning. This one is on Auto Trader. $10,895 I didn't look at anything except price. I've spent a little time looking at pickups the last few days. The manufacturers are sure proud of those things.

Yeah proud of the margins! The low and mid tier US-made trucks and SUVs like Jeep are pretty bland and low-tech by comparison with other vehicles at the same price point, but you can charge a premium for 'em anyway.

A 2021 Silverado crew cab with 2WD and a V8 is well over 40 grand with none of the stuff like rear-cross traffic alert, blind spot monitoring, etc. that comes standard these days on a car that costs 10k less, it's all further options.

to

drivers?

Not sure why you list prices of gasoline econoboxes along with luxury, ele ctric SUVs. But the principle is right. In around 5 years EVs will have a chieved half of the total passenger car sales, in the US at least. I will probably be another five years for the number of fossil fueled vehicles on the road to drop significantly, say by more than 30%. During that time gas oline prices will be in the dumpster slowing adoption of EVs. But EVs have inherently lower operating costs. So the trend will continue as the produ ction costs of batteries drop.

The demand for mechanics will initially increase as people keep their vehic les longer. But at some point ~10 years as the number of fossil fueled veh icles on the road drop the demand for that type of mechanic will drop and d rop rapidly. Autos don't fare well with age. At some point they get repla ced simply because people don't like unreliability.

That's when the EV conversion will essentially be complete.

I still can't figure out what will happen to the gas station paradigm. The y do so much more than sell gas because everyone who drives has to go their once a week to fill up. With EVs most people will never go there and of t hose who can't charge at home, they will be around for some time, 30 minute s or so. I suppose a lot of people can use them like gas stations.. Pull up, plug in, get a cup of coffee pick up the morning paper, eat your egg sa ndwich and be on your way with another 75-100 miles of range. The batterie s charge fastest and last longest if not charged fully. 20-50% gives a ver y fast charge, up to 2 kWH per minute in my car.

Or maybe level 2 charging will become so ubiquitous that charging will most ly be done at work and while shopping using the excess solar generation peo ple seem to get so upset about. In an 8 hour day most EVs can be fully cha rged in a work day.

--

  Rick C. 

  - Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging 
  - Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

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I think you are making up numbers. My understanding is the profit per car approaches zero as the price drops. Given the costs of operating a factory do not scale to zero as the production rate drops, auto makers will contin ue to pump out cars when the volumes drop and profits on the low end cars c an go negative easily.

It's the dealers who don't have much choice in making profit on everything they sell. They have a hard time making it up in the quantity.

--

  Rick C. 

  + Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging 
  + Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

I don't think GM makes cars for years that they're not turning a profit on, even if it's small. GM is ruthless about cutting money-losers. The Volt wouldn't have even got a second generation in 2016 if they didn't expect they'd make a few bucks on it that way, and it wouldn't have lasted through the 2019 MY if they hadn't. IMO

Most people will charge at home or work, mostly at home. cars with fast chargers and 400 mile ranges will make public charging stations mostly irrelevant outside certain use cases like on highways and to support people who live in apartments and condos.

That is to say driving long distances regularly and charger-anxiety and trying to box EVs into a gas-station mentality is mostly things retired people worry about we've been thru this.

My area has probably the highest density of EVs and charge stations outside CA and what's most remarkable about the charge stations is how little they're used, already.

You guys were right, of course. I did a little more snooping.

The US congress is the world's biggest loophole factory.

Since most people who buy electric cars are penny-pinchers, and since it's not very hard to build them, and since they can be built by people who already know how to build quality affordable cars (whose panels fit and roofs don't fly off), Tesla must eventually be in trouble. Most of their "profit" has been from selling energy credits to gas car makers.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

Science teaches us to doubt. 

  Claude Bernard

Electric cars still aren't that cheap. The Model 3 is the best selling EV in the US its average sale price is over 50 grand. Nobody buys a 50 grand car to "save money."

The US CAFE standards (under Obama FWIW) were changed to be footprint-based, there is some evidence this leads manufacturers to favor building larger vehicles:

Maybe places like restaurants and motels can put some charging stations in. People use credit cards to pay for time or whatever. The vehicles would be sitting still anyhow.

There are a lot of restaurants, grocery stores, hotels, malls, etc. in my area that do this already. There are dozens of charging stations like that within 10 miles of me alone.

Problem is the Level 2 chargers take too long, even if they're free, and with the fast chargers there either aren't enough cars that support them on the road, or they're charging too much money, or both, so they're rarely used.

The only public chargers I see that are in regular use and sometimes full-up are ones at the train station, or ones that are right in the middle of a downtown area.