Well, that you need a dedicated EV plattform is such old news, all OEMs knew that since day -10. Tgat they didn't invest in one for a long had a lot of reasons, being unable to do so was none of those.
German here. Cars are one hallmark of our economy. We are behind as well. The Chinese are absolutely crushing it in Asia and Middle East now.
Volkswagen had a market share of ICE cars of ~20%, for EVs it's now closer to 1%. EVs are way easier to build and a lot of Chinese companies are doing it successfully. They are offering cheaper EVs. They are selling in Mideast/Asia and now start to enter Europe as well.
None of these cars is particularly bad - while I'd still take the Korean EVs before anything else today, the Chinese are coming. German manufacturers only produce premium level cars few people can afford and they produce them badly. ID.3 is too expensive for its segment and too much of the car just doesnt work well.
(EU customer here - this colors my impressions also due to different models availability compared to the US or other markets)
The specs and price gap between a Renault Zoe (Inexpensive, with consequently low acceleration, top speed, handling and range, but absolutely a joy to use in a city or on short trips - perfect balance of price/specs) and a Tesla M3/MY is quite wide and should allow some other manufacturers to wedge themselves into a rather popular segment, with profit.
And yet... there's hardly anything better than a Zoe, they immediately approach or pass the price of a Tesla (looking at you Volkswagen, Cupra, Audi, Mercedes, etc) while being worse by an impressive margin (paltry top speeds, uncomfortable ranges, rather primitive features, etc). You start getting cars something favorably comparable with a baseline Tesla M3 RWD when you add a good 20k to its price, it's ridiculous. And apparently they're hardly breaking even on those, while Tesla has a decent profit margin, what's wrong with them?
I'm also hoping China and Korea will upend this market because established EU/US manufacturers surely won't.
I honestly don't get the obsession with top speed and power, and I live in Germany. I do know the top speed of every single car I ever drove (I had a time I travelled a lot for work, and thus ended up with a nice list of rentals). First, the only place top speed has any, theoretical, relevance in Germany. Everywhere else anything above 150 km/h is wasted, I'll ignore track days here. Acceleration is nice, but again everything below, say, 8-9 sec. for 0-100 km/h is plenty enough.
And practically, even on the German Autobahn, a top speed difference of 220 to the rare 250 km/h plus doesn't show. One traffic jam, or even just enougj traffic, and everybody ends up next to each other anyways.
Power is nice, because cars simply a nicer to drive. Plus you can pull better, which is also important. Going back in time so, 150-180 bhp was considered top knotch performance, the Audi A3 gained a lot of his reputation in the early 2000s due to two models, just below the S3, having that power output.
I din't know, all the engine size, top speed, power and acceleration discussions feel like me playing top trump (the card game for children were you compare numbers for e.g. cars), and less than an adult objevtively evaluating cars. Not that car evaluations and buying decissions need to be objevtive so, mine aren't. But up talking one model / brand by down talking others, based on purely subjective criteria, is childish. It does allow for great marketing campaigns so.
> I honestly don't get the obsession with top speed and power, and I live in Germany.
I do live in Germany too and routinely drive above 140 where allowed on the autobahn - it's a pleasure. So yes it does actually impact me, in a very real way.
Additionally:
- Top speed of 220+ means you accelerate from 130 to 160 easily, so you can safely pass the slowpoke ahead while not becoming an obstacle to faster traffic. A top speed of 160 means it'll take you a whole lot longer.
- A car with a top speed of 150 is at its limit at 150. Brakes are sized for that, wheels are chosen with that in mind, you better be going in a straight line, it's gonna be uncomfortably noisy, etc. You have very little margin for anything. One designed to reach 220 or 250 is basically in the middle of its comfort zone at 150, with ample safety margins on every metric and a more comfortable ride.
--Edit: I'd like to add a reference to the lower tier cars to my reply. I quoted the Zoe because my partner has it, so I'm quite familiar using it and it's really really fun in the city, it's perfect.
I'm lamenting the big gap between Zoe and Tesla with nothing worth buying in between and the fact that I'm being asked 15-25k EUR extra compared to the Zoe, with hardly more car, which is an awful bargain as you reach the Tesla price with half assed specs. I may not care so much about speed and power (I do, that's another story) but I do care to get something worth my money, and all these other cars aren't.
Until recently I commuted on lengthy stretches of unlimited, mostly, roads. On good days I avergaed out north of 160. Bad for fuel economy, but fun.
Top speed has nothing to do with acceleration, a car can be limited at, say, 180 and still accelerate and be speced for 250. Heck, all German premium brands are, for the most part, limited at 250. Theoretically they can all go faster. Sure, there is a floor, but in practical terms it is much less relevant than people think. Also, it only matters in Germamy on select roads, everywhere else speed limits are much, much lower than car top speeds anyway.
And breaksbare sized fornmore than speed, they are sized relative to engine power and car weight. Speed is simply a function engine power, transmission and weight.
While loving to go fast, going fast in a staight line on a road made to do so is the opposite of dangerous or risky. Saying that, I am in total favor of a speed limit, 130 propably won't work in Germany, so. In general, we need one. And we have them any way most of the time, the percentage of unlimited km of roads is way smaller than people think. Once we have them, maybe we can have more realistic discussion about cars and mobility, at the moment everybody drols over their 300+ bhp "race cars". And brands sell on that image. That doesn't help switching to EVs, nor does it help cutting emissions.
Indeed, even premium German cars suck at basic stuff. For example, their HMI is super slow to boot and Porsche still won't allow more than 3 region updates per year over WiFi, because reasons. Even Porsche dealers don't know why.[1]
Porsche can afford to give their customers Dacia levels of digitalization because they're premium sports cars that sell anyway, but the Asians are coming after the other German brands and will steamroll them if they don't start getting their act together.
>What stands out most is Tesla's integrated central control unit, or "full self-driving computer." Also known as Hardware 3, this little piece of tech is the company's biggest weapon in the burgeoning EV market. It could end the auto industry supply chain as we know it. One stunned engineer from a major Japanese automaker examined the computer and declared, "We cannot do it."
Might very well turn out that premium OEMs big failure wasn't being late to the EV game, but failing to switch their behind the scenes marketing game from traditional print journalism, and the online versions of it, to online only, blog-like car journalism.
Still digitalisation so, sure. And still linked to EVs, traditional car journalism still caters to a crowd of ICE fanatics, but overall much more a thing of marketing than engineering. For Tesla, the risk still is Musk. But they seem to be doing a good job of distancing themselves enough from his recent antics to not be hurt by them, while staying close enough to benefit from his personal brand.
but failing to switch their behind the scenes marketing game from traditional print journalism, and the online versions of it, to online only, blog-like car journalism.
Yea, I can't help to notice that my 13 year old, who on the whole knows and cares nothing about cars, thinks that Teslas are the coolest cars ever, has already decided that their first car will be a Tesla and wants our next car to be a Tesla. Brands like Merceds, BMW, Porsche etc. mean very little to them.
If you have proplem with 2012 computing controlling a car, you should never get even close to a modern airliner... What do you need 2023 computing for, running LLMs or mining bitcoin while driving?
There's a difference between technology for the sake of comfort/entertainment and technology for critical elements of a product able to kill you and others.
If I need to get an eye-surgery and the equipment runs on Android, I'd rather go for the one running on Android 4 for 10 years already, than the one running on Android 13 for 6 months now...
Like that story about a Tesla driver driving off a cliff in California and everyone surviving the crash? A story that even ended up in french and German newspapers
The source seems to be a February article from Automotive News interviewing several Toyota execs off-the-record: https://archive.is/0LZYf. The relevant quotes are midway through
Toyota is first and foremost a manufacturing company; they go to absurd lengths to ensure their supply chain is as robust as can be and that the product they deliver is reliable. It just happens to be cars. (And forklifts. And probably lots of other stuff, too)
The downside, of course, being that most of their offerings appear quite, uh, boring.
Upside? Anecdotally, my 26 year old Toyota Land Cruiser (With 300k miles on it!) has cost me less in workshop visits and parts over the 140k miles I've owned it than the missus' 2016 VW Passat has over 30k miles of ownership. And the Passat isn't a bad car at all. Has the Land Cruiser beat on fuel economy, though.
The subsidies the government introduced over a decade ago to incentive sales
were pretty cray. They even exempted electric cars from road tolls.
(This has been removed) has boosted the sale of electric cars enormously-
Norway has the most e-cars per capita in the world.
At least last time I checked.
As a result, I have a lot of friends and coworkers that own Telas.
Nearly all love them and would not trade.
However, the build quality is subpar.
Nearly all have had their car in the shop at least once.
The rather extreme lack of spare parts has been a big problem
for the owners.
I think this has been improved for a while but I am not certain.
Some had to wait months for a spare part needed to fix their problems.
Primarily it has been water leaks, parts that are not "fitting together"
right in interior and exterior.
The second is the touchpad control system.
I have wondered if this could in part be due to the extreme cold we have
every now and again.
But like I said the owers are still in love with their cars and would not
trade it.
The newer Supras and now GR Corolla also seem pretty exciting to me. Toyota is also (one of) the last manufacturer still making mid-sized trucks with manual transmissions.
So, cars are not technology? What about, I don't know, aircraft, power plants, ships, medical devices, laptops and phones (the hardware portion of those?
And which "tech" is top notch with Tesla, self driving? Their marketing is more than just incredibly good so.
Cars haven't changed in any fundamental manner for the better part of a century at the very least, so no cars are not so-called "technology" at this point. Not even the EV fad, because electric vehicles predate cars powered by combustion engines.
What has changed is the technology behind controlling those cars. On that front, it surprises me in absolutely no way that Tesla, an information technology company, does business in ways that the car industry can't even dream of.
Seriously? Try driving a car from, say, the late 80s and one from 2020.
But ok, only software is tech, got it. So when exactly is mechanical engineering no longer a STEM discipline? Seriously, that take is simple hybris of the software crowd, and totally ignoring all the hardware tech all of us use all the time. But ok, a while ago the only measure of car quality was chassis panel fitting (if there ever was a truely German over engineering nonsense, that is it), now it is the feel of the car entertainment system. To each generation their own marketing abuse of technology I guess.
A car has wheels, an engine/motor(s), and a mechanism to make the engine/motor(s) turn those wheels. This hasn't changed more or less since the invention of cars, regardless electric or combustion.
What has changed is the way the car is controlled. No longer are cars controlled by physically connected cables and wires that move to user input, cars are now controlled digitally by computers that respond to user and environmental input. This is where the technology is, and this is where tech companies like Tesla naturally and obviously have an edge on car companies like Toyota.
> Cars haven't changed in any fundamental manner for the better part of a century at the very least, so no cars are not so-called "technology" at this point.
So only new technology is technology? What a daft definition.
You're validating the opposing argument with those examples.
Windows 3.11 and 8086 are no-longer in active development. But the Windows operating system and the Intel x86 chipset are still being developed, and are relevant topics of current conversation.
Similarly, "cars" aren't new as a concept. But recent news developments regarding recently developed cars counts as tech relevant to Hacker News.
Toyota is first and foremost a car company. Top notch car, fifth-rate tech.