The book, The Innovator's Dilemma, totally changed how I view situations like this. Logically it makes sense that Ford or GM could use their existing resources to build a electric car factory, and use their existing dealerships to sell those cars under their existing brand.
But in reality those existing assets are why GM and Ford cannot catch up. Dealerships make money on services and maintenance. They don't want to sell an Electric that will never need much maintenance. Trying to convert a factory that was designed for ICE cars isn't as easy as building a new factory. And the union employees that have specialized in ICE parts do not want to switch over to Electric. So GM will end up delaying plans so long that they will not be able to compete on price due to Tesla's existing economies of scale.
It was obvious in 2012 that Tesla was a threat to ICE, GM and Ford have done very little since then to catch up.
You say that, but I actually love my VW ID.4. I test drove Audi's eTron, Tesla 3 & Y, and ultimately bought an ID.4. I liked that it wasn't a Tesla (especially in the Bay Area where it's gotten BMW-asshole status.. and I say that as a previous BMW owner), was more comfortable, bigger interior, had CarPlay, more like a traditional car (no single middle screen), and was quite a bit cheaper. Were there things I liked better about other cars? Sure. But they largely weren't the important factors for me. I also got 3 years of free charging with the Electrify America network, which is no small thing, although I primarily charge at home now.
I wouldn't downplay any competition. It can take a while to catch up, but cars are fickle things that people buy for all kinds of reasons. It's not like pre-Tesla everyone owned only one brand.
And that is why everyone expects them to own the car market in the coming years. When the competition's best marketing opportunity is selling to people who've pre-decided to buy something else, you've already won. No one decides to buy a car because it's "not an Audi".
(As a Y owner, btw: the ID.4 absolutely does not have a larger interior.)
"It's not a domestic" is basically the entire value prop of the Toyota pickups and SUVs these days (last 5yr) though they have fancy marketing ways of saying that.
This is an unusual take. Toyota pickups and SUV's are generally chosen because of their reputation for being the most reliable manufacturer bar none. Tacoma's and Land Cruisers are near indestructible. It's why out in the most remote places in the world with scant access to parts, terrorist orgs and the UN drive Hiluxes and Land Cruisers, respectively.
Got a source on the "terrorists drive Hiluxes" comment? Genuinely curious. We don't get Hilux in North America so I've never been in one, and I wonder what makes it terrorist-friendly.
It's not just wikipedia though, you can find it all over.
Hiluxes are extremely durable and widespread is why. Tacoma is the closest we get to a Hilux in NA. They use to be the same, but NA market likes things a bit bigger and luxurious so the Tacoma's just don't come in single-cab and generally have more amenities.
I mean, people don't really buy not-domestic for the sake of it, they buy non-big-3 cars because the big 3 have a terrible reputation for quality control and reliability.
Which is ironic since Toyota pickups and SUVs are all made in the USA due to bizarre outdated tariffs on importing consumer trucks that have never been repealed.
The tariffs are bizarre because they don’t apply equally to passenger cars. Just pickup trucks. I believe they don’t apply to the new unibody crossover SUVs, making the situation even more confusing.
And if you disagree, it's enlightening to read the very first opening sentence in Google's first response to the Epic Games lawsuit against Android Play Store. No, not the case against Apple (which Apple largely won) and not a case which has anything to do with Apple—but the case against Google and their Play Store.
INTRODUCTION
Android, Google’s open-source mobile operating system (“OS”), is a critical source of competition against other operating systems, such as Apple’s iOS.
This wasn't really the case early on. The early android phones had LTE before the iPhone and also had turn by turn nav which was a critical feature. They also supported more networks than just AT&T.
With the iPhone 5 Apple caught up (and arguably has continued to increase its lead since then).
I thought it would have worked for Windows Phone. Those Nokia's were actually nice phones at the end and the UX was decent enough...but it was too late.
The App Ecosystems were too developed by the time Windows Phone arrived. I think they should have either (a) added the ability to run APKs in a well optimized emulator or (b) spent literal billions getting app developers to compile Windows versions.
That's for sure. Still, I held on to my Nokia for longer than I would have thought. Ultimately, I needed the Didi taxi app to have any decent chance of hailing a taxi in Beijing, so switched back to an iPhone. My MIL then got it and used it until she broke it.
We talked about all those things in Microsoft at the time. Even the running android app solution, which I might have been roped in to work on if it wasn't shot down. The reasoning being that "running android apps would discourage people from writing WP apps", which wasn't wrong. My feeling on this is that Microsoft was just way too late, you need the right thing at the right time.
but it hardly matters, it's comes in 2nd to the Model 3/Y in every other category. If ugliness was a category, the ID.4 would certainly win that though!
I haven't seen that number before, and seems somewhat spun having looked closely at both cars. The most commonly cited metric in EV circles is Bjørn Nyland's "banana box" test[1]. Both cars held 9 boxes in the back in a standard configuration, but the Y went up to 26 with the seats folded vs. 25 in the VW. And the Y has a frunk which holds another, where the ID.4 skipped that feature (somewhat inexplicably).
The Tesla is also just a somewhat larger car, to the tune of 8cm of width and 17 in length. It's definitely "bigger" for basically all reasonable consumer use cases. I'm sure there's something that fits in it that won't in the Tesla.
[1] So-named because, well, it's obvious. Nyland is probably the single best source for EV comparisons out there Definitely a must-follow youtube channel if you're into this stuff.
Does it matter how long it takes? Doesn't just total output matter?
Heck, "throw more servers at it" has been an accepted practice. Who cares if it takes 30 hours as opposed to 10 if you can have 3x the number of cars under construction at one time.
First of all worker 30 hours of labor * factory workforce is a significant fraction of the cost of a car, and not easy to improve.
Additionally a plant that takes 30 hours per car is typically going to have less output than a plant that takes 10 hours per car. Typically each minute during production the car is taking up space, being worked on humans or robots, etc. Additionally efficiencies favor shorter pipelines. Generally a 10 hour pipeline is physically shorter than a 30 hour. Parts, staff, troubleshooting etc is easier on a smaller pipeline. Additionally having each car bridge 4 working shifts for the workers has overheads of it's own compared to 1-2 shifts. Doubly so if you are trying to iterate quickly.
Imagine an assembly line moving at 0.5 mph, for the same physical foot print you could have 3 lines that are 10 hours each instead of a single line that runs for 30 hours. Now imagine there's a issue that shuts down a line for an hour, it's better if it's 1/3rd of your capacity down instead of 100%. If you try an improvement, it's better to put 1/3rd of your production capacity at risk instead of 100%.
For a typical car, only about 10-15% of the manufacturing cost is labor. And that's talking about Toyota Corollas and euro econobox hatchbacks. For a premium electric car, it's probably a single digit
Also, the whole claim would really need a citation, and careful parsing of the methodology. 3x difference in a mature industry like car assembly is very unlikely, and requires a very strong proof to back that statement up.
Tesla gives tours, and frequently discusses optimizations in reduced part counts, design tweaks for manufacturing, etc. I'd think someone with some expertise could tell if Tesla's claims are true.
Some highlights: front 3rd of chassis is one piece, rear 3rd of chassis is one piece, the glass roof is a huge piece and before that's installed things can be installed by robot (steering wheel, dash, seats, etc). Many things are radically simpler, like the interior, dash is basically a aluminum bar the width of the car with an arm for a 15" monitor. Even the ventilation system is simple, few parts, and easy to install. Most cars spend quite a bit of complexity for gauges, displays, buttons, vent controls, temp control, fan control, fans, emergency brake, air valves, etc.
Monroe on youtube (engineer with significant experience, used to work at Ford) took apart an early model 3 and wasn't impressed, didn't recommend it, and called out many details that were expensive, labor intensive, etc. He did a new model 3 and model Y and left quite impressed. Many innovative changes to make things easier to produce, cheap to reduce, reduced parts counts, etc. Monroe claims tesla is iterating their production faster than anyone else he's looked at, and he's looked at a very wide variety of cars (and other products for that matter).
Monroe also reviewed the VW ID.4 and left quite under impressed. Ironically he didn't expect much from the Ford Mach E, but was very pleasantly surprised to see innovative engineering, impressive design, and overall was quite impressed. Although he was horrified by the complexity of the cooling system and has serious doubts about it's long term reliability.
30 hours does not necessarily mean 30 man hours. And part of the difference seems to be that parts are assembled before they get to the line with Teslas (the front and rear 1/3's) , so it could be that they have the same labor costs baked in there.
Meanwhile, I assume that space is the cheapest part of the car factory, dwarfed by robotics.
I mean, the VW is cheaper than the 3, so that implies they aren't spending that much more.
I’d be curious to know what’s QA in that breakdown, or where you got that data, and what Tesla’s numbers have been over time.
But let’s assume that’s true. Tesla has been building electric cars for how long? VW is basically just getting started for real (modular platform for all their cars unlike the eGolf), and still makes ICE cars as well.
It’s never a good idea to discount your competitors. I doubt Elon does even if comments on HN do.
The economics of scale trickle down into cost savings for the consumer, even if it is by only a fraction of what the manufacturer saves. There's a reason the id.4 costs about the same as a base Model 3 and you get less of a car for it (not factoring in federal tax credit, which might be returning to Tesla soon anyways).
The manufacturers no doubt. Musk, and by extension Tesla, has been seriously focused on ease of manufacturing. Probably since the huge problems Tesla faced in the late 2010s.
They should be. The longer the build cycle the more errors there will be in the build.
Each job is a dependency for the next job. A long build time either indicates that individual assembly technicians have too many steps in their job (it is much harder to remember 25 steps than 5 steps) or that the plant is assembling more parts locally than their competitors. If you have an engine shipped in complete from your supplier that is less time your plant spends assembling a dependency at build time.
Electric cars should in theory assemble much faster than gas. Fewer parts. Less complexity in the mechanical assembly of the drive train.
When corporate overlords dictate that an assembly plant meet production numbers that it isn’t capable of accurately producing they shell out complete garbage. Inspection lines flag errors that managers ship with disregard in order to meet numbers. Every time.
Teslas are much simpler designs to build at scale, while traditional automakers have perfected the ICE design and manufacturing, they see everything through that eye and bring the warts and complexity from the devil they know (as an example, most non-Tesla EVs do not have a floor battery architecture). It is not at all inconceivable for Tesla to leapfrog the traditional automaker in building EVs they design. That does not contradict VW's ability to produce ICE at scale.
Of course there will be other brands. The iPhone is by far the most successful phone brand, and they ship less than 30% of new phones each year. Something similar could happen here, where GM loses share like Nokia did, and new companies like Lucid take a market segment, like LG does with phones.
The most recent numbers I've heard of is 75%. So android is typically a battle to the bottom, with various mostly failed efforts, consolidation, various vendors giving up on markets, etc. Motorola (bought and then sold by google), Sony, HTC and many others are not making much profit. Samsung is doing better, but constantly fighting cheaper competitors. Seems like Samsung is doing as well as it is, because of synergies relating to their production of CPUs, having a chip fab, screens, dram, flash, and cameras for the world wide market.
Android's a tough market to be in, you are competing with Google (who makes pixel phones), numerous low cost manufacturers, Apple, and your ecosystem taxed by google through the app store and the market is split among many companies in the android system so it's hard to catch google's services, play store, etc. Not that android manufacturers aren't trying. Amazon made an effort, but seems to have largely given up on calling their devices android.
I wonder if driverless cars could follow that same android lath with Waymo being the alternative car OS that all the other companies have to use - but this time having to also pay google a lot more!
Please, please - could people stop making this analogy?
Cars are not phones, and will never be. American lower class or Chinese middle class are not going to shell out $70k for a new toy every two years. Cars are not going to be made with 60% margins. You cannot wear a car in your pocket to show it off to your relatives or business partners.
Apple's business model, in short - is selling mediocre hardware for premium prices, and mask it with excellent software. Optimizing software to make it 10x better, faster, using less battery - fairly common. For any activity that interfaces with the physical world - forget it - we're tapped out, making 2-5% improvements per year. No amount of refinement will make a $20k econobox sellable for $60k
(also, ironically, LG dropped out of phone business)
>You cannot wear a car in your pocket to show it off to your relatives or business partners.
There's a few striking errors in your post, and this one is the most glaring - in that it's very visual, and also very wrong.
Consider the photo of the Tesla (Model 3) key fob [1]: it's a small car that one does, in fact, wear in one's pocket to show it off to one's relatives or business partners.
Similar with the Tesla App [2] - it shows a desirable car on your phone's screen for the very same reason; the rest is nice extras.
It took them way too long to switch over from the initial "sell electrics only to a niche crowd that wants to be unique", leading to absolutely ugly cars like the BMW i3 and whatever Citroen calls their abominations.
Check the top selling electric car list and it's all normal looking cars with electric drivetrains. It wasn't just the production that messed up, but also the design and marketing department.
My assumption is the ugly design of early electric cars was intentional to make sure they didn’t sell too well. Tesla broke that cartel and showed the reason those early cars didn’t have universal appeal is because they were horrible vehicles not because they were electric.
The fact that even BMW created an abominably ugly electric car is proof enough for me that it was an active decision to uglify them as a disincentive to purchase.
BMW must have been in a very difficult spot to release that swollen pug-face of a car into public view.
It's "smart" business, but "smart" business almost always overlaps entirely with "X unfriendly" (where X = consumer, environment among others).
This was one of the high points for my ID.4. It was futuristic enough while still being accessible. No button to unlock the door, no weird Tesla door handle to get in. No strange wanna-be look like the i3 as you mention it. Yet because it was electric, the back seat's floor is completely flat which my dog loves, and wouldn't be possible in an ICE. The turning radius is also INSANE (and better than a Tesla) because they were able to push the wheels much further out.
We leased the ID4 knowing how much competition would be out there in a few years. Honestly the last two points are the main take aways that we'll look for in any new car. Living in a city and being able to do a U-turn from a parallel parked position without making it a 3 point is just magical, especially on a compact SUV.
Do they even have to be electric or hybrids? Is it that EV buyers specifically prefer normal looking cars or is it the case that cars are getting uglier and uglier and demand for non-goofy cars have been brewing for years?
Why do people talk about only Ford and GM, as if they’re even relevant in the car world anymore?
The danger to Tesla is not these companies, aside from some
competition in the electric F-150. The real challengers are those like Kia, Hyundai, and the Japanese and European brands. Kia is already making all electric cars, so it’s proof that ICE manufacturers can switch over. Brands like Kia have decades of experience making dozens of different models every year, iterating on them, and creating new ones. Tesla barely manages with three or four models. My Kia Optima SXL has better fit and finish than any Tesla I’ve been in. I also find the Teslas I see on the road very bland. They look like old cars, because they are (in terms of their overall design).
I’ve also been in several Chinese brands, including Nio. Nio blows Tesla out of the water in terms of interior design, and I like the external look better. It’s much more luxurious feeling. We’ve yet to see if Chinese brands can compete in the west, but Nio and WM Motor are very nice cars. There are also several, and I mean several, all electric car makers in China that make quite nice cars. I’ve ridden in several where I was like, whoa, what is this car?
I personally will be quite surprised if Tesla can outlive the hype it’s gotten from first adopters and its poor practices alongside increasing competition.
The Japanese have largely closed their eyes to any problem and pretend EV don't exist.
VW among the Europeans is the only one that seriously has invested in battery capacity and supply chain. BMW has not even switched to creating dedicated EV platforms yet. Daimler is a huge company that has very high aspirations for profitability and they are partially unwilling to that kill their cash cows.
Hyundai is fine and they will be a good in the market.d I mean several, all electric car makers in China that make quite nice cars. I’ve ridden in several where I was like, whoa, what is this car?
Nio is small yet and they are selling only premium cars and they are really design for cities in China more then anything esle.
> I personally will be quite surprised if Tesla can outlive the hype it’s gotten from first adopters
If at this point your are still talking about first adopters you have missed what is happening.
The idea that Tesla would go bankrupt is crazy, they literally have years long waiting list for some of their products. Yes, of course they will not have 100% market share. The point is, Tesla is far ahead right now in terms of how many BEV they produce. They are expanding really fast and they are doing really well on margin. They are well ahead of going down the supply chain, making their own cells and even their own battery factories.
Tesla has proven to be very porfitable making only EVs, non of the other non-startup companies have done that. In fact they do everything they can to not share that information.
> The idea that Tesla would go bankrupt is crazy, they literally have years long waiting list for some of their products.
Plenty of companies have gone bankrupt while customers waited for products - this does not strike me as so unrealistic as to warrant being written off entirely
Related anecdote: mega-brand Kodak died because film retailers threatened to stop carrying film if Kodak made serious moves into digital photography, as retailers relied on foot traffic driven by film (enter store once to buy film, again to return it, again to pick up photo prints). Kodak couldn’t risk its money printer, so couldn’t be ready when consumers switched to digital practically overnight.
Ditto cars. Manufacturers are beholden to dealers, who need complex vehicles that need extensive repairs. Related, fueling stations need customers who can’t power vehicles at home.
If I remember the Kodak case well - their own research predicted that digital cameras will massively shrink the total addressable market. Which is exactly what happened. Outside of professionals or hobbyist, who even buys a camera nowadays?
No amount of innovation, pivoting or clever engineering could have saved Kodak. They were not flabbergasted at the technological change. The best course of action was to milk the existing market for as long as possible, which is exactly what they did
The real irony is that parts of Kodak where totally on top of digital photography before anyone else. They built both the first digital stills camera and the first commercially available digital SLR. In fact there was a time in the 90s where they owned the (admittedly very small) digital SLR market. However the film side of the business convinced the senior executives to kill the digital side of the business, to protect their film margins.
I think this explains their delay to electrify, but at this point they all realize Tesla is an existential threat that must be competed against. They essentially let Tesla prove the market and now they know what their competing with. Dealers and service revenue is the analog to the buggy whip industry, it has to go. On what time horizon is the question.
Clayton and his friends at Harvard did a great job justifying how Tesla would not be a long-term disruptor when it expanded into the $35,000 vehicle class. It was a safe and justified thing to say in 2015, but it turns out they were pretty darn wrong about Tesla's future!
In 2015 it was a question whether Tesla figures out mass production before the others figure out EVs. I guess it was draw, Tesla figured out a way to build the existing model range reasonably well at scale while the others figured out EVs well enough to prevent Tesla from being the "only" EV manufacturer. Tesla still has to do face lifts for the existing range so. And Tesla has to show that they can build cheap EVs for a mass market.
In the luxury segment, sure Tesla is a serious contender. In the compact segment much less so.
Tesla will be a series competitor in that segment when they strategically decide to play in that segment.
The cheap Tesla are cheaper then much of the competition. And Tesla are produced at higher rates from single lines then literally any other EVs.
It simply doesn't make sense for them to go into compact segment yet. They are still growing 50% a year just on Model 3/Y and Cybertruck has gigantic potential. They simply don't have the batteries or chips to grow more. Why introduce more models if you are limited by the supply chain?
Once Tesla actually launches a compact it will be coming to all China, Europe and the US being manufactured in each place with their own battery production located near by.
A point I want to make about the "Innovator's Dilemma" with regards to my other comment: It does not happen when everyone gets together and just agrees that "X is true" with zero critical thought. It happens when a group of radicals abandon old ideas and rethinks the problem, leading to radical new ideas.
But the problem is that everyone here is just convinced that it can't happen, usually using very facile thinking. Few are asking any hard questions. As long as this stays true, hydrogen will continue to pose an enormous threat to Tesla.
Hydrogen will not be a threat to any electric personal vehicle simply because it’s 3x less efficient (electrolyze water to split it) and thus 3x more expensive to run.
Really just a meme at this point. The risk here is that hydrogen cars end up being cheaper to run than electric cars. A real possibility due to the production of hydrogen from curtailed renewables, higher battery costs, hydrogen being much more efficient than believed, as well as cheaper distribution costs since hydrogen can be piped in natural gas pipelines.
> hydrogen being much more efficient than believed
God/Allah/Nature obviously don't understand disruption, growth mindset and can-do-spirit. facepalm
There are hard physical limitations that no amount of human ingenuity can do anything about. 237kJ/mole is the theoretical minimum of energy required for water electrolysis. energy->electrolysis->energy round-trip efficiency won't exceed 45%, even if everything, from the energy source to the car wheel spinning, is perfectly frictionless and operating at peak theoretical efficiency. No, you cannot use existing gas pipelines for transporting hydrogen.
For passenger cars, EVs today are already better than what physics allow hydrogen cars to ever be.
It will likely be a transition from blended hydrogen before reaching 100% hydrogen later. Just because it won't happen all at once doesn't mean it hasn't already started.
I am not against hydrogen, but seems to me as if nobody in the space is noticing the disruption what electrical batteries already are. If battery trends continue by 2030 the value of refitting infrastructure to hydrogen easily becomes questionable [note], when there's a way to both transport and store energy more efficiently and at the same price if not cheaper. There are no signs of battery improvements to stop anytime soon or price to stop dropping.
[note] for pure hydrogen eventually everything except the pipelines will have to be replaced
I think those people are simply living in the past. It is hydrogen disrupting batteries, not the other away around. In fact, I see a flattening of the pace of battery improvements, meaning the speed of this disruption event should be moving faster than expected. By 2030 the battery "revolution" might have already collapsed and left for obsolescence.
It's important to remember that hydrogen fuel cells are batteries too. There is no reason for the metal lithium to have magic properties over other battery technologies.
Nope. Both NiMH and lead acid batteries are less efficient in this regard. And supercaps have lower energy density, although they are improving quickly too.
NiMH is around 90% efficient too. Lead-acid around 85%. Also, li-ion don't do well under high discharge rates and can drop to <70%. It's not a perfect cell technology by any means.
Tesla Model 3 is a very popular car, but aside from that, it's competitive across the field.
Japanese will fill in while US makers lag a bit but my bet is these things take time to change, and GM/Ford have incumbency advantage esp. with trucks etc..
Tesla will end up being 'another car company'. Amazing feat to break into the business, but really, if you look at EV sales over time, Tesla was just one of many players.
The problem is that now it's hydrogen's turn to do the same with batteries. Tesla is facing it's own disruptive threat, something it is completely unprepared to deal with.
You have made this and similar claims over and over again on HN, but you seem much more interested in making such claims than in supporting them, and your response when challenged has mostly been just to reiterate your statements that hydrogen fuel cells are better (for energy storage in cars) than batteries, or are inevitably going to replace batteries.
It reads more like advertising than like actual discussion.
What evidence is there that should lead us to expect hydrogen fuel cells to win over batteries, given (1) their currently much much higher costs, (2) their lower efficiency in turning electricity at the power station into kinetic energy of the car, (3) the currently much greater complexity of mechanisms required for a fuel-cell-based vehicle?
In my estimation, the ultimate problem with hydrogen isn't any of those three - it's that it's simply far less convenient than battery.
Once someone has experienced what it's like to be able to "fill up" overnight at home for all their day-to-day driving, the idea of reverting to the old "visit the fuelling station once a week" routine seems decidedly passe.
It could work for long-haul commercial vehicles though.
Except no one drives at home. Every EV fan still complains about lack of public charging stations. I suspect few people really find home recharging as any kind of game changer.
We've owned an EV for two years and charging at home has been a huge deal, especially for my SO.
She needs to get to bed early, so when hanging out with friends she hated having to go to the gas station on her way home. Often resulting in panic the next day. More than once she ran out of gas cause she forgot to look when driving off in the morning.
It takes about 3 seconds to plug in the car when we get back home, and we never have to worry about running out when we drive away in the morning.
Hydrogen would have to be significantly better in price and range to offset this for our future vehicle purchase. A mere 2x range increase over pure EV won't cut it.
For you maybe. For my SO I can assure you it's absolutely not.
Having owned an EV for two years now, it's clear that it's been good enough for us. Yes range is a bit limited, but for us it hasn't been an issue. It has some upsides like fairly trivial home-charging if you got a garage.
As such, hydrogen can't just deliver the same to be competitive. Hydrogen will have to deliver more. Longer range at same cost wouldn't be enough for us, the negatives would make it a no-go. So it would have to be longer range for much cheaper.
But I don't see how cost can be significantly cheaper, given the process inefficiencies and infrastructure required.
Looking at the concepts[1] I can't imagine them being cheaper than a home EV charger, which is about 1000-1500 USD installed. Never mind that we don't have any space for such a huge thing.
And I'm doubtful as to how much H2 we'll be able to generate here in Norway during winter.
Then I will have to disagree. I insist that it is still post-hoc rationalization.
Sooner or later, hydrogen cars will be cheaper to own than a battery car. Once this happens, none of this reasoning will hold up to scrutiny.
Should be noted that you can have hydrogen delivered in the same way propane/LPG can be delivered. In fact, gasoline/petrol could have been delivered since the first days of the automobile. None of these ideas really mattered in the end.
My experience is that complaints about lack of public charging stations tend to be more from those considering buying an EV than those actually with one.
(Those who drive an EV tend to complain more about the maintenance of the public stations than the number of them).
They really don't. Pretty much anyone with the ability to charge at home, charges at home for all their day-to-day driving, with stops at charging stations used only for infrequent longer trips.
Why do you think so? The convenience of taking a few moments to plug in when you park for the night, over taking a specific trip to a charging destination, seems pretty hard to beat (and that's before factoring in that home electricity rates are in general considerably cheaper).
In the Northeast, people often use fuel oil delivered to their house for heating. Except that this fuel oil is basically diesel/kerosene, meaning we already had a system of delivery fuel to people's houses. And yet there was never an outcry for home refueling for their cars. It clearly wasn't something that people wanted even when they had it. So it's hard to see why now all of a sudden this is a real selling point.
Probably because the idea of "you have to be home with the car waiting for the fuel guy to turn up" destroys a lot of the convenience, and the fact that car fuel tanks are more than 15 times smaller than typical heating oil tanks means you'd be paying a lot more overhead.
You have a big tank of fuel that can be stored up until you need it. It also takes a few minutes, not the hours you have to wait until a battery is full.
To clarify: Considering how popular it is to get other frequently-used consumables home delivered, like food and alcohol, it is on the face of it somewhat surprising that the same is not true of liquid vehicle fuel. My prior comment was suggesting some possible reasons this might be so.
Thinking through it some more, the objection around the vehicle needing to be home at the time the delivery is made can be overcome by having the deliveries made late at night, as long as there was some way to give the delivery driver access to the car's fuel tank. At the end of the day it may just be too inefficient to have liquid fuel delivered weekly in 30-60 litre quantities, the overhead being too great.
Home charging was one of the primary reasons I bought an EV in the first place, I hate going to gas stations especially when they're out of the way or when I'm not driving through a great area.
I do a lot of driving and still I have only had to use public chargers a handful of times over 2 years. Even if not staying at home I can usually at least plug into a 110v outlet somewhere or I stay at a hotel that has an EV charger.
Even a 110V plug still counts as a public charger. The point is that you still care about them. Even if you go out of your way to not think about them, you're still forced to use them from time to time.
The problem with (1) is that complaining about this is usually the last bastion of a dying industry. This is particularly true if the alternative is a completely new idea it would normally be much more expensive to begin with. So it would really just be a countdown until it is no longer true.
The problem of (2) is that all attempts to generate electricity with renewables (and with no fossil fuel backups) have resulted in extreme problems. In short, when it is windy or sunny, you have too much electricity and no way of storing it. When it is not windy or sunny, you have nothing and are forced to resort to fossil fuels. Ultimately, it's being found out that being able to store electricity is far more important than making it efficient.
And (3) is just dumb Ludditism. As if the small increase in complexity is any kind of problem. Fuel cells are far simpler than internal combustion engines after all. Batteries are actually worse from a supply chain standpoint since now you have a much higher need for certain elements that are not widely available.
Your reply feels to me like blustering, and trying to shout down the question.
Some data on why you think systemic hydrogen costs are going to catch up with systemic battery-electric costs, for example, would contribute to (1) far more than your posturing.
You'd be a better advocate if you spoke to the issues.
So far as I can see, literally nothing in your reply has anything to do with hydrogen fuel cells. You could say all the exact same things if what you were proposing was little nuclear reactors in cars, or storing energy in very heavy flywheels, or literal magic, or going back to burning hydrocarbons.
Therefore, nothing in your reply can give us any reason to think that hydrogen fuel cells in particular either should or will win out over batteries.
The difference is that for fuel cells, it has mostly already happened. It's quickly becoming a kind of denial where the haters simply pretend that it doesn't exist or insist on unsolved problems that have long been solved. It frankly reminds me of how Blackberry executives denied the viability of the iPhone even after it launched.
Every one of the three points I mentioned is a thing that has not, in fact, already happened. The vehicles are still more expensive than otherwise similar electric vehicles, and hydrogen is still more expensive than equivalent quantities of electricity; from a given amount of sunlight or natural gas or whatever we can still produce more car-movement via electricity than via hydrogen; fuel-cell vehicles are still more complex and difficult to make than battery-electric vehicles.
You have still not made any actual attempt to address any of these points, preferring to bluster about how people who disagree with you are stupid, ignorant, or insincere.
I am curious. Do you have any financial interest in the success of hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles, and/or in the failure of battery electric vehicles?
Yes it has happened or is nearly about to happen. FYI, the LR version of the Model 3 is $50k, about the same as the Mirai. By many metrics they've reached cost parity. Even if you angrily deny this, remember that EV are produced in larger quantities and benefit from greater economics of scale. It's pretty obvious the fuel cell cars are going to get a lot cheaper from here.
And as countries invest more into renewable they're are quickly running into a dilemma: Wind and solar are too unreliable to directly replace fossil fuels. This requires seasonal energy storage to solve, which as of today is only solvable by hydrogen energy storage: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/236723/1/Ruhnau-and-...
In short, even EVs will be hydrogen powered to a large extent. You can easily imagine a kind of plug-in hydrogen car that matches EVs on efficiency in broad strokes.
Ultimately, this is not really a difference of opinion but rather a difference in understanding of the facts. You simply haven't realized that fuel cell cars are already here and have already solved the fundamental problems of green energy. Batteries cars have not, and barring a miracle battery discovery will not either.
It wouldn't shock me if the Mirai has even bigger profit margins. Fuel cell systems aren't that much more expensive than internal combustion engines to build.
If the Mirai really had those losses, Toyota would be literally losing billions on the Mirai by itself.
This is very short sighted thinking then. They could end up disrupting the car industry. Especially in heavy industry where they might clean house against companies that haven't invested correctly.
Also, all of the cost is R&D. The cost of building fuel cell cars is probably very low.
What I've read lines up with the three points you've made, so I tend to agree. However:
What we're seeing in Australia is federal government support for hydrogen power after over a decade of strong resistance to alternatives (specifically renewables: wind and solar), and no support for electric vehicles at all. I'm definitely mixing together a few different areas of power / electricity / energy here, but the fact the Australian government is seizing upon hydrogen just makes my cynical mind assume that hydrogen manufacture and usage fits better with the status quo and therefore is easier to understand by those in power - ie. centralised / consolidated control as opposed to more consumer-level control.
This could be Hydrogen's killer feature in the end.
the infrastructure bill working its way through the US includes a few $billion in subsidies for hydrogen fuel, too.
there’s a couple takes on why, but the most charitable one is that solar/wind/batteries have enough momentum that they don’t need subsidies, and govt views energy diversity as a valuable thing and is subsidizing hydrogen to achieve that.
There is the possibility that Australia is simply correct in their assessment. They're a long ways away from both Silicon Valley and Brussels, and may be acting as an independent entity that is free from external influences.
I doubt physical distance has much to do with it. Australia is closer to China than the US, for example.
Australia gets a LOT of sunshine and has a LOT of empty space, which is conducive to being solar friendly. Australia also exports a lot of coal and a lot or iron ore (which is then processed using coal-generated heat), which is conducive to promoting its value and suppressing any alternatives.
Electric vehicles, however, work towards solving a specific national security problem for Australia in it's "domestic fuel security"[0][1][2][3]. A problem of which the UK is kindly highlighting the importance.
Australia is a major suck-up to the US, the government of Australia is infringing on it's citizens freedom and releasing more co2 into the atmosphere per capita than any other country.
Actually they exist now. You can generate hydrogen directly for sunlight and a photocatalyst. Although we don't know how cost effective this is right now, and the traditional way of having a separate electrolyzer might be cheaper for the time being.
How easy is it for someone handy to set up? Can the home hobbyist install a hydrogen refueling system in their garage with some panels up on the roof? (related: Does conduit handle hydrogen at 10,000psi or do I have to build it out of black iron?)
Possible. In fact a company called LAVO is building a home hydrogen battery for energy storage. Although compressing it to 10,000 psi at home is not quite ready yet, although companies are working on it.
But in reality those existing assets are why GM and Ford cannot catch up. Dealerships make money on services and maintenance. They don't want to sell an Electric that will never need much maintenance. Trying to convert a factory that was designed for ICE cars isn't as easy as building a new factory. And the union employees that have specialized in ICE parts do not want to switch over to Electric. So GM will end up delaying plans so long that they will not be able to compete on price due to Tesla's existing economies of scale.
It was obvious in 2012 that Tesla was a threat to ICE, GM and Ford have done very little since then to catch up.