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Fiat Chrysler CEO: Please Don't Buy Our Electric Car
schwit1 (797399) writes "The CEO of Fiat Chrysler said he hopes that people don't buy his company's electric car, the Fiat 500e, which he is forced to sell at a loss because of state and federal mandates. 'I hope you don't buy it because every time I sell one it costs me $14,000,' Sergio Marchionne told the audience at the Brookings Institute during a discussion of the auto bailout. 'I'm honest enough to tell you that I will make the car, I'll make it available which is my requirement but I will sell the limit of what I need to sell and not one more,' said Marchionne. Fiat Chrysler produces two Fiat 500s. The gas-powered Fiat 500 has a base price of $17,300. The electric Fiat 500e runs $32,650. In his candid remarks, Marchionne blamed regulations set in place in California and by President Obama." (Also at USA Today.) If they find they're selling too many for comfort, couldn't they raise the price?
No, they can't. CA Regulations don't allow electric alternatives to be n% more than gas.
Seriously slashdot, you ask why they can't raise the price when a couple of sentences above you mention state mandates?
Yergh...
This is in effect an indirect tax. Buyers of non-zero emission cars are effectively paying for the loss that automakers make on the zero emission cars. It would be much more honest to tax them directly instead of letting the auto industry act as an intermediary. But then again: taxes and honesty are probably not words that one should use in the same sentence.
Interesting marketing technique.
Toyota & Honda, heck even GM, can all make zero emission cars. I do like what California did though. They set _sales_ qoutas_ instead of manufacturing qoutas, so they companies couldn't weasel out of getting real zero emission cars on the road. It's rare to see regulations that have teeth in them. I suppose with the amount of Smog California has (insert South Park Smug jokes here) that's pretty important though. But I wish Arizona would do it. We have days when you're not suppose to go outside because the smog is so bad...
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they could produce an electric car that people actually want. Tesla can sell at a higher price because there is actually demand, who the hell would want this?
How much did it cost to setup their infrastructure to produce these cars? It seems like it would be a loss if they don't sell any at all. Why wouldn't they raise the price? This sounds like it's more about politics than sound business decisions. That makes me question Sergio Marchionne's ability to run the company effectively.
So, we are to believe that the electric variant costs $46,650. I can only believe that must include a huge amount for the sunk costs - designing the electric car, rather than each electric car being $30k more expensive than the gas equivalent.
Chrysler still makes the least reliable of American cars. Fiats, while cute look to me like an Italian version of the Mini, another notoriously unreliable vehicle. They can keep them. I will do him a favor and not buy any of them.
Have gnu, will travel.
I wouldn't buy your crap gas car, why would I buy an expensive pile of electric crap?
...why Chrysler is doomed.
And as for Fiat - you're doomed as well, because clearly you were stupid enough to buy Chrysler after they already failed miserably in a disastrous merger a few years earlier.
Why don't these companies just tell the regulators to go fuck themselves and build the shittiest EVs they can. No A/C, no stereo, just the bare minimum piece of shit they can call a car and legally sell as a zero-emissions vehicle. Nobody will buy it, they can claim X% of their car models are zero-emissions - problem solved. Sell it under a different brand name so you don't tarnish your own.
Toyota despises electric cars and has publicly stated this on many occasions. They plan to sell exactly the number of RAV4EVs that they need to meet CARB requirements (about 2,600) and not one more than that! Toyota believes (foolishly) that the future is hydrogen... It is unfortunate because the Fiat E is actually an excellent electric car! Far better than the gas version, in fact!
So, we are to believe that the electric variant costs $46,650. I can only believe that must include a huge amount for the sunk costs - designing the electric car, rather than each electric car being $30k more expensive than the gas equivalent.
(Disclosure - I am a cost accountant)
Wouldn't be surprising actually. The powertrain is completely different than the gas powered car and there are non-trivial engineering, tooling, and other fixed production costs that have to be amortized across lots of units if you are going to sell at a relatively low price. Plus I imagine the powertrain is not produced in big enough volumes to realize real economies of scale so the unit costs I would expect to be fairly high. Given the state of the art in electric vehicles I really don't see an electric vehicle being significantly profitable at less than $50,000 right now. There simply aren't enough of them out there to drive the unit costs down. I expect that number to fall over time but it will require investment by companies and maybe some government subsidies here and there.
On the other hand, enough with the whining and make a car that is worth what it costs to manufacture. Tesla makes a genuinely good car and sells it for a price that should bring a profit (eventually). The Fiat 500e is rather pathetic by comparison. It's a little runabout with a short range rather than a serious attempt to build an electric car. Regulations are not to blame for their inability to make a profit with an electric car. Their lack of engineering prowess and lack of commitment to the technology is why they are where they are.
You are correct that Chrysler could in theory choose to leave the California market entirely. But in order to sell any cars in states with emissions and fuel economy rules like those of California, an automaker has to sell these compliance cars.
California doesn't regulate the prices of electric vehicles: they require that either 1% of vehicle sales be zero-emission, or that the car manufacturer buy zero-emission credits.
Nobody is forcing Fiat to build an electric car, and nobody is forcing them to sell that car at a loss. They have decided to sell an electric car at a loss because they believe the loss incurred will be smaller than the cost of the zero-emission credits, and they're selling it at a loss because they don't believe consumers would buy the car unless it's sold below cost.
One is a terrible american automaker, the other is a terrible italian automaker.
Combine two awful managements together and watch your defects go through the roof.
I work in the industry and work closely with Chrysler personnel. None of them personally own Chrysler products. That's 'none' as in not a single one of them will purchase a Chrysler product with their own money.
Surly, it's more a case of stupid governments bailing out industries that manifestly failed due to lack of innovation. When the financial pressure came on they should have been allowed to die so that people who do have ideas and capability are allowed to succeed in the marketplace.
Afaik Tesla can manage to sell are car and make money... apart from in states where those who cling to an industry model that cannot innovate now try and use legislation around direct sales to defend their inability to sell cars! Yet here we have their CEO moaning about their own inability to sell at a profit due to legislation.
Legislation happens in all industries and good business, with a few brain cells, can operate within such an environment. This lot are trying to use legislation to cripple innovators then crying over legislation when it's not in their favour. ... I somewhat lack sympathy in this case.
And that, my friends, is why CAFE[1] standards are a stupid way of reducing emissions.
Just figure out what the social cost of the emissions is, charge that much through a tax, and let everyone decide on their own whether that trip, or that vehicle, is still worth it.
Not equitable enough? Rebate everyone an equal share of the money raised this way, which protects from consumption losses at low income levels while preserving the incentive to cut back.
Going to complain about "lol wuts the point of collecting it all to refund it"? I guess you missed the fact that emissions are harmful.
[1] Corporate Average Fuel Economy i.e. cars you sell must on average be this fuel efficient.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
It's a fantastic car. I've had mine for about nine months and after having owned an number of rather expensive (and inexpensive) cars, this is probably my favorite.
I've never driven a gas-powered Fiat 500, but I imagine the build quality is similar. It's surprisingly comfortable and well built for a car in its price range. I'm pretty particular about the noise levels in my cars and the electric model is reported to have more sound dampening than the standard model; external noise is probably more obvious when there's no engine to mask it. Quiet, fantastic acceleration, and virtually no maintenance. There's a lot to like about this car.
I hope they continue selling them. I've leased mine since the technology changes quickly enough that I expect better range / faster charging, or both within 3-4 years (plus competition from Tesla in that market segment), but if there were no other option I would definitely purchase mine at the end of the lease.
This is my first electric car, but I can say unequivocally that I will never purchase another gas-powered car (unless it's an exotic / sports car). It really is that much of an improvement over internal combustion.*
*For me. Obviously electric cars are not for _everyone_(yet). If you need to haul bales of hay up a mountainside four times a week, buy a truck.
another way is to say that automakers are shifting their costs. Dirty air and smog lead to lung disease and cancer, ergo higher medical costs. The health problems also lower worker productivity.
Why should I have to pay for the damage done by cheap cars?
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The issue is that in California they have to sell a certain portion of their fleet with zero and low emissions. He is saying that in order to convince people to buy the zero or low emission vehicles in adequate proportion, they have had to subsidize the price by $14,000. He does not expect that they will "sell too many" â" they picked this price because it's the number they expect will sell exactly the right amount.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Sadly, environmental issues, and limited resources, isn't something that the free market will handle when left to its own devices. I have no sympathy for automakers that need to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century.
Now I want to buy an electric Fiat out of spite!
No, I will not work for your startup
The Fiat 500 has also a very very efficient Diesel mult-jet version, which can do 76 MPG (in UK gallons or 63 MPG US gallons). Unfortunately you can't buy that in the US.
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I just dropped my daughter off at the gym. In a 15 minute round-trip drive, I counted 5 Leafs. Nissan isn't trying to stop people from buying their car. Neither is Tesla.
BEFORE you took the bailout money. It would have been better, Chrysler, if you hadn't put yourself in the position of needing to be bailed out by the taxpayers twice in 25 years.
I have a Fiat 500, the non-electric one. For $17,000, it's a good car. But it's clearly a sub-$20K car - and unless they completely redesign major sections of it that are completely unrelated to the propulsion, they aren't going to be getting it to a be worth $30K even with the value of an electric engine.
Just for one example of what isn't good, the sound system supposedly supports USB. It does, technically, but it does so in the least competent way possible. You would expect it would support folders - like it does for data CDs. It does not. You would expect it to play songs in filename order. It does not. It plays every song on there, in the order of file creation. I noticed in the manual that the entertainment system runs on Windows Phone 7 - I have a very difficult time believing that Windows, in any version, has such broken support for FAT32.
Another example? The seat belt warning alarm activates even if the car is in park, within a second of turning on the car. I've had to get into the habit of buckling up before even turning the key.
The Fiat 500 is a cheap car. I'd say an electric version is worth about $25K (I couldn't actually use one myself - I use street parking, so I literally have nowhere to charge it up).
Tesla got one thing right - because electric cars, for the foreseeable future, are going to add $20K-$30K to the cost of the car, you're better off doing so in high-end cars where that's an extra 10-20%, not double the cost.
I'm moving to California this summer, and since I'll be in an area with terrible public transit, I'll need a car for the first time in years. Given that the economic incentives (especially the tax credits rolled into lease pricing; electric cars basically cost $199.99 a month in California to lease) and the availability of charging stations are unparalleled anywhere else on earth, I figured I'd look at electric cars.
I was going to look at some other manufacturers, but Chrysler just shot way up my list. My partner suggested wanted a (non-electric) Fiat anyway, now we can kill two birds with one stone.
Thanks CEO of Chrysler.
This is the same mindset automakers had back in 1994, when the California (CARB) emissions standards were going to (eventually) require a tiny percentage of all cars sold had to be zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs).
Ford's Th!nk and Chrysler's EPIC were piles of crap ("compliance cars") produced just to minimally meet the regulations. GM thought they could one-up them, and produce an actually NICE ZEV that people would WANT, which would then allow them to sell MORE conventional vehicles, which is where the infamous EV1 came from. Toyota had a similar mindset as GM, but couldn't compete on ZEVs, and invented their Prius as an alternative to meet the standards.
The successful court challenges to the CARB rules set back ZEVs by two decades, and we're repeating history again, today. GM makes a nice ZEV (with some inspiration from Tesla and Toyota this time), while Ford and Chrysler sell crap ZEVs they have to give away, and Toyota doubles-down on their Prius with longer range and plug-in capabilities.
Nissan is the only surprise, being quite competitive this time around, while their previous Altra attempt, despite pioneering lithium-ion battery EVs, wasn't noteworthy at the time.
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Taxes on businesses are *always* passed on to the consumer. In order to make up for losses on the electric cars, auto manufacturers jack up the price on their non-electric cars. So consumers still pay that tax, but it is the consumers of the non-electric cars that ultimately pay it.
Those who are not prone to thinking things through imagine that taxing a business means taking some money away from a rich and successful person (or group of people) instead of the poor people at the bottom. But all that money comes directly from the people who buy the products the business offers...and the business isn't there to offer those products but to make money. So, when taxes go up, prices go up to cover it.
If you try to correct this with more legal price controls and what-not, the result is even more clever price-burden shifting, or the business just pulls out and operates elsewhere (happy to export to you, provided you pay what they ask).
If you're spending that much for Fiat you might as well spend a bit more and get a Maserati.
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we are to believe that the electric variant costs $46,650
Sure. These cars involve a large quantity of nickle, cobalt and copper. The 500e in particular is a traditional nickelâ"cobaltâ"manganese lithium-ion battery, just large and expensive. All the high current lines running around between the motor, battery and regen brakes are copper. Seen copper prices lately?
If not for imports it wouldn't be possible to buy these in the US; we can't produce these metals in quantity any longer. Or rather, there is no way to credibly compute how many times more these cars would cost if they were made with domestically produced metals; the only thing you can be certain of it that you couldn't possibly afford it. Nickel, cobalt, manganese and copper mining and refining â" all huge sources of industrial contamination â" are essentially impossible in the US beyond a few legacy, declining sites.
These cars are the epitome of third world pollution shifting.
n/t
How are they going to do that without cost controls?
Uh, economies of scale? Using technology advances to lower price? Increased cost of gas? Remember when people complained that Amazon lost money on every book and that they'd make it up on volume (as a joke)? Look at Amazon now.
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How can the state of California guarantee that without price controls, then.
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They don't have to; this is one area were competition will take of it.
Economies of scale? The more cars you build, the cheaper they get to build. If you've built a car that's good enough in the first place, people will buy it (see: Tesla). The more people buy it, the more you need to build, and so the lower your costs become.
Improved technology? That too comes from competition - not from the auto makers, but from their component suppliers. Component suppliers will be in competition to reduce their own costs or get a leg up on the other suppliers - whether that's higher capacity batteries (need fewer of them), batteries made cheaper (new tech, or found some way of reducing materials needed), vertical integration (battery supplier starts its own lithium processor to reduce materials bill), etc.
with a moron like that in charge.
enough said.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
I'm never buying a Chrysler anyway. Perfectly happy with my 2005 Ford Escape Hybrid with 145k miles and routine maintenance.
This guy could do with learning about Gerald Ratner. Never heard of him? Google will help. He's not saying the cars are 'crap' of course, but it certainly seems like a very odd way to promote his brand.
> How can the state of California guarantee that without price controls, then.
The same way they guaranteed retail electricity prices in 2000/2001 without guaranteeing wholesale prices http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... Oh... wait.
I'm not repeating myself
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Just about everything that makes your life possible to make your comment about eeeeevil taxes was paid for by... taxes.
An electric car is a much simpler system than an internal combustion car.
It has many fewer different parts.
If you applied the economy of scale cost reduction curve that happened with the expansion of regular vehicle sales volume to EVs, you should be able to sell them for less than regular cars.
All that's missing is the courage and vision to make the leap (oh, or a carbon tax, to provide a boot in the pants to the manufacturers that don't do the courage or vision thing.)
The real reason they don't want to sell them is there will be next to no money for the manufacturer and dealers in the maintenance lifecycle of EVs.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
You got that backwards. It's claiming a "free market" solution to a regulated market. There's almost no flexibility in the CAFE rules; the current round was designed specifically to hurt a particular manufacturer who thumbed their nose a particular politician.
There is no legitimate for them to loose money on a 30K+ car ... I call bullshit on all excuses.
It is that expensive simply because they do not want to make it, in the long run run electric cars are going to have fewer maintenance issues and they don't want that.
Gee Mr. CEO, I'm sorry you shat upon the electric version's research and development so heavily that the final product is too expensive. Maybe next time you could make a serious effort to produce an affordable electric version of the car so you don't have to feel constrained by the laws and can actually profit from the product.
Car makers cried and pitched an absolute shit-fit about seat belts, air bags, and fuel efficiency standards.
In theory, the free market should produce incentives for solving for safety and efficiency. In reality, it just optimizes the local maxima, since no one wants to be the first to "blink" by making these new technologies standard (thus greatly lowering the cost), ensuring they stay high-priced luxuries.
If we leave it to the free market, we'll be stuck on gasoline engines for another century at least, with all the negative impacts that will have on our economy as the increasing cost of oil and various shocks hit. That's not even dealing with the environmental or global climate change issues.
Government regulations can jump-start the industry and so far it appears to be working for electric vehicles. We are still in the early-adopter stages; they'll get better and cheaper as long as we keep at it.
Fun fact: government almost always leads the way into uncharted territory. It wasn't private industry that built trans-continental railroads (which makes Atlas Shrugged hilarious). It was the US government. The government gave the rights of way, passed a series of massive funding bills to give the railroads free money and tax breaks, sent in the army to protect the rails from Native Americans, robbers, etc. Without federal government involvement, the US rail network would not exist in the form it does today.
For that matter, neither would the interstate highway system.
Nor would computing: it was massive US federal government spending that paid Grace Hopper to invent the first compiler! And it was government spending that created the Internet, both TCP/IP via ARPA and the WWW via CERN.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
The autoguide link made me laugh when I read this line: "Tesla, a company that’s exempt from the CARB mandate, "
It might be exempt, but even if Tesla was selling as many cars in California as GM, it wouldn't give a hoot about CARB mandates because it doesn't produce ANY gasoline vehicles. It's sole concern would be selling enough credits to the other companies.
I don't read AC A human right
So what you're saying is that I can fuck chrysler over for over 10,000$, after they took government bailout money? I've got the money, this is very tempting.
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every time I sell one it costs me $14,000
At least he's being honest about where all the company's revenue ends up.
They have worse gas mileage than a car twice its size.
Given the state of the art in electric vehicles I really don't see an electric vehicle being significantly profitable at less than $50,000 right now. There simply aren't enough of them out there to drive the unit costs down. I expect that number to fall over time but it will require investment by companies
Facts congruent with your last sentence disprove your first sentence. The Nissan Leaf sells around $29,000 (thus $22K if you get the EV tax credit) and in November 2013 Nissan claimed it is profitable. The difference between the Leaf and compliance cars like the Fiat 500e (and the Ford Focus EV, GM Spark EV, Honda Fit EV, Smart ED, Toyota RAV4 EV, etc., etc., etc.) is that Nissan has invested hundreds of millions in the Leaf, building its own battery plants near the production sites in USA, Europe, and Japan. Result: there were "34,000 Leafs on US roads today and 75,000 worldwide", and thousands more since then.
Maybe Fiat and all the other compliance car makers thought their component suppliers would magically sell them cheap battery packs, motors, inverters, on-board chargers, etc. That may come with standardization and aggregate volume, but Tesla and Nissan (and maybe BMW with its big investment in the i3 brand) have shown that to drive costs down, you make it yourself in volume and/or order tens of thousands of parts. Car companies grudgingly building 2,000 compliance cars over 3 years can STFU about costs.
and maybe some government subsidies here and there.
The tax credit for buying an EV is enough.
=S
Well, they don't magically get cheaper to build just by building more. They get cheaper to build as the manufacturer refines the process, improves the technology, and scales the production lines to amortize the fixed costs of a production facility over a larger number of vehicles. That is, it takes work to make them cheaper, above and beyond just making more.
As long as there's sufficient demand, producers will have enough reason to scale up the production and work to bring the production cost down. Eventually, if all goes well, this begins a virtuous cycle where decreased price increases demand, and increased demand drives further cost reduction and innovation.
This works great if there's enough demand to kick-start the process. Unfortunately, the price of EVs today is too high to drive sufficient demand. Hence the carrot-and-stick incentives to try to jumpstart the virtuous cycle. On the carrot side are tax breaks and government subsidies / loan guarantees. On the stick side are fleet-wide fuel economy standards, price caps and quotas.
Right now, it seems as if most traditional auto manufacturers treat their electric cars either as halo cars, or as tasks they're required to do by law/regulation/whatever but would rather not. I doubt anyone at GM is staking the quarterly numbers on Chevy Volt sales, for example, but it doesn't stop them advertising it. The only competition at this point, though, is positioning, posturing and establishing a brand. That is, competition on the marketing front. The market's still too small to have meaningful competition driving the product development. At least, that's how it seems to me.
Eventually they'll figure out how to bring the costs down. Meanwhile, the early adopters hopefully help build interest and therefore demand in the future. When that happens, I'd expect the real competition to start. You'll see Toyota or GM or someone get into the mega-battery business, like Tesla is currently. Or some other major, bold move like that.
In the meantime, the carrot-and-stick will push both the supply and demand curves to the right, elevating the total units shipped to a modest number until the market can sustain itself.
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Maths and logic are not conditional on doing what they describe yourself.
Imagine Feynman's criticism of the Challenger disaster being rejected with "If you think we were wrong then launch your own shuttle." That's what you're doing here.
Toyota & Honda, heck even GM, can all make zero emission cars.
That's old-timey thinking. The solution to pollution is to get Google, Facebook, and Microsoft to make cars! Those guys can figure out how to build a car that runs totally on advertising and your personal data! Out of fuel? Provide your mother's maiden name or ten of your friends' secret email addresses! Ka-ching! That's twenty miles worth of fuel for you!
Too much pollution causing global warming? Just tell your car whether you prefer Pepsi or Coke and your car manufacturer will donate $20 in carbon tax to offset all that free fuel you got for the previous personal information.
Come on tech companies, step up and make these cars! America needs you!
their mistake was electrifying the fiat 500 to meet compliance instead of the chrysler 300. a 300e would be an awesome car
Pushing hard to increase demand and manufacturing is only one step. Another is to subsidize where necessary - ensuring the current tax credits continue (and hopefully making them a point-of-sale rebate) and considering making ZEV purchases sales-tax-free if necessary. There are a half dozen others. The governor's ZEV plan is two seconds of googling away: http://opr.ca.gov/docs/Governo...
I've had to get into the habit of buckling up before even turning the key.
Good. Sounds like it's teaching you how to operate a car. Rule one in driving lessons is always seat belt first. Before the engine is on and before you release the parking break.
really slashdot?
Its a mouth piece for the republican party. It where they go to shotgun 'alarmist' information to see what sticks so they know what to harp on during the election cycle. Facts need not apply.
All this crap talk about forcing people to use more electric cars ( which in the end is what it is, since the only way to get more of the population in electric cars is some sort of coercion ) so that they drop their carbon foot print 50%. Instead they can reduce their carbon emissions closer to 99% by just not driving: by walking, bicycling, or taking public transportation.
The mechanism for this is quite simple, legislate business, malls etc ( the one exception residences ) can only supply enough parking for 10% of the maximum occupancy of their buildings. For businesses absolutely no reserved spots, however malls, stores, fast food places can limit parking to one or two hours. They can also reserve 10% of their parking for employees.
At first there would be problems yes ( actually allow the percentage to go down slowly to 10%, this will give everyone time to adjust ), but in the end businesses would adapt with the result that car usage would greatly decrease causing a significant improvement in the environment.
As for public transportation, I can attest that there is nothing more polluting then a year old bus. The solution is simple. Chicago used to have a great set of electric busses . We could just start using those again.
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Oh no. It would be the Wild West of selling and buying. Everything would instantly catch on fire, gunmen would roam the streets, and somehow slavery would come back even though the law didn't apply to organisms. The state and central government regularly punish and reward businesses to enforce policy. A shame.
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How can the state of California guarantee that without price controls, then.
The things sounds more like a political goal.. Not something they plan to enforce by law... And if they plan to do so, it'll probably be through added taxes to conventional cars..
Either way, this smells of a CEO who didn't invest electric car development now wants to stop politicians from promoting electric cars...
Really, solar power is as cheap as coal now. If that is true then why don't I see solar panels popping up everywhere? Perhaps its because solar is not cheap. What makes solar power expensive is that it does not work at night. Storing that solar power is expensive.
Assuming we can produce wind and solar power cheaper than nuclear, and do so when accounting for the storage infrastructure too, nuclear still wins out. The goal is, presumably, to reduce carbon output. That's why we have electric cars, right? Nuclear has a lower carbon output than wind and solar. If we are going to ignore price of producing electricity to account for "externalities" like climate change then the best answer we have with current technology is nuclear power.
If you want to claim that solar is as cheap as coal then I can play along. Problem is the carbon produced in making those solar panels. Only hydroelectric dams can beat nuclear power for carbon emitted per kWh and we've already dammed up every river worth a dam. Now the best option is nuclear. If you want solar and wind power over nuclear then you are the bad guy here for wanting to bring on "climate change".
I agree that both electric and gasoline cars need iron and aluminum. Gasoline cars don't need lithium though. Lithium is not cheap, iron is. Because a gasoline car does not need expensive lithium a gasoline car will always be cheaper than an electric one. Total cost of ownership for an electric car may be cheaper than a gasoline car but a person would have to put a lot of miles on the car to notice the savings. Few people drive that much. Even fewer people are willing to put up with the long charge times.
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They seem to be sticking their heads in the sand and hoping that EVs go away. Rather than seeing how Tesla is doing and worrying about the affordable model coming in a year or two they just churn out a lazy compliance car by shoving batteries in an ICE car, shove their fingers in their ears and hope no-one buys them.
Fiat Chrysler is a dinosaur, and is going to be killed off by evolution unless it makes a real effort.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
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You've got i bass ackwards son. EVs are presently useless unless you can go everywhere that you need to go in a day in under c. 50m(factoring in for the majority of us that live in cold weather states which significantly impact EVs).
Also, God forbid you forget to charge that puppy overnight, as it's not like you can run down to the gas station for a fill up in c. 10m or less(probably similar for fuel cells).
IOW unless some miraculous battery technology appears which allows full charging in minutes and 100s of miles of range, EVs are already dead, not to mention that they're fscking expensive.
Auto makers: ALWAYS (or at least since the 90s when professors would mention certain things were because of CA, and I'd imagine since before the 90s or whenever it was that CA got to be bureaucrat heaven as well as the land of fruits and nuts) paid attention to CA regulations as well as federal. IIRC it's because of CA that cars have always on headlight now, for example(I'd REALLY appreciate if they did something about turn signals though as some newer cars have godawful difficult to spot signal designs, either too dim, just poorly placed or a combo.)
So what? If buying the electric version makes sense to me, I'd buy one. I don't care about what your company is doing to make money. I got 99 problems, but running a poorly management megacorp into the ground ain't one.
Electric cars may work one day but the current Tesla is a horrible car. Most of the owners of the Tesla use it as a third car. They have an entire SUV parked in the garage for actual road trips. Tesla's range and recharging requirements are a joke.
IIRC electric cars have been around as long as those with ICEs (late 19th century). But the range of a modern electric car is no greater than those over a century old.
Toyota may "only" be making hybrids, but they are spreading their development costs across a range of models - they started with the Prius, but now they have hybrid Yaris, Auris, and something else as well. They are especially attractive with rising gas prices, and they work really well in traffic - when you're stuck in traffic you're not wasting gas idling - the engine is off. I'm getting spectacular range out of mine - over 900km out of a tank, and the tank holds less than 10 gallons.That's one of the reasons I was looking at hybrids rather than electrics.
Toyota's approach must be solving the mass-production problems effectively, because their hybrids are barely more expensive than the same luxury level on a gas engine.
I'm enjoying driving my little car, too. I can park it in tiny spaces (the reversing camera helps, too).
"Yes, the Carbon tax is a great idea"
No it isn't; it's proof of just how bad the education system has become in western countries that the left-wingers can now so-easily convince average people that the most basic building block of all carbon-based life (carbon) is an evil toxin that will kill us all and destroy the world if we don't eliminate it. It's a clever tactic for the left as a political justification for ever-growing government because they can justify taxing and regulating everything, knowing the "problem" will never be "solved" as long as there's life on Earth ..... as long as they can keep the public stupid by keeping the education system in the hands of the most-rabid-left part of the Democratic party: the teachers unions.
We HAVE the damnable "cap-and-trade" (invented by that paragon-of-virtue: ENRON) scam on carbon here in California ... and it's PART of the basic problem. California is the hippie-run joke of a test lab for all things tree-hugger and fascist; The Dems control the legislature (by 2-to-1 margins) and the courts and the executive (even when CA elected Ahnold, we had a left-of-center Republican who'd married into the Kennedy tribe - and then joined in the tribal tradition of cheating on his wife...). In CA the state decides what cars can be sold, the prices and/or availability of some types relative to others, etc. After the consumer buys the car, the state taxes and regulates and monitors different models at different rates and according to different rules. In CA the state encourages people to do varous things it wants by "nudging them" with taxes, subsidies and/or regulations and then changes the rules to take-away the carrots, sometimes retroactively. The big electric-vehicle related scam on the horizon is that they encouraged people to get electric cars in-part by pointing out "lower operating costs" partly provided by the fact that users would not be paying the super-high gas tax... but now they're upset those people are not paying the gas tax and they are talking about adding a per-mile-driven tax.
While I agree that SOME Chrysler products were "sub-optimal", they were the makers of the Jeep line for many years and I've always had great experiences with those. I hold my current Jeep like Chuck Heston held his rifle. So, no, some divisions of Chrysler do not deserve to be linked with Fiat.
The non-union employees of Chrysler and the Chrysler investors also did not deserve what was done to them: Obama stole the investors' shares in their company and the retirement benefits from the non-union employees (on the pretense that those things had no value due to bankruptcy) then sold the company to Fiat for next-to nothing (again, on the claim that it was worth nothing) then bailed it out (making it worth a lot and saving the pensions of only the unionized workers). NOBODY in the transaction DESERVED (either for good or for ill) what happened.... and like so many things this administration does, there was no law giving him that power, but there were corrupt judges willing to tell the injured that they "had no standing" to seek relief.
But the range of a modern electric car is no greater than those over a century old.
False.
"After enjoying success at the beginning of the 20th century, the electric car began to lose its position in the automobile market. A number of developments contributed to this situation. By the 1920s an improved road infrastructure required vehicles with a greater range than that offered by electric cars. Worldwide discoveries of large petroleum reserves led to the wide availability of affordable gasoline, making gas-powered cars cheaper to operate over long distances. Electric cars were limited to urban use by their slow speed (no more than 24-32 km/h or 15-20 mph.[24]) and low range (30-40 miles or 50-65 km[24]), and gasoline cars were now able to travel farther and faster than equivalent electrics."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
Modern EVs do at least twice this range, and the Tesla Model S 7-10 times it.
This could be marketing, telling people they are getting a steal. Think Bernays!
Those who wish to control their own lives and move beyond the existence as mere clients and consumers- those people ride
.... I went into this thinking, gee, how much could a minimal set of tools [to repair a car] cost? For god's sake, it's absurd how many tools you need to take them apart, it's just one tool after the next after the next. I mean, how many bolt sizes and shapes could you possibly need to build a car?
It is crazy. I work on cars as a kind of hobby, and now have thousands of tools. The first car I had needed only eight different sizes of spanner (Unified series from 1/4" to 3/4" Across-Flats) apart from one or two specials like the 2" wheel bearings nuts. I still have that set. But my present car has a mix of Unified, Metric and Whitworth (FFS!). I am constantly having to get out from under the car to go back to the tool cupboard as there are too many different spanners needed to keep them all by me.
... (you get the idea), and no nation would agree to an international standard unless their previous national standard was included as at least a sub-set. Even bolts which have the same thread size often have different head sizes on them for no good reason other than the designer's whim. Really, all that was needed was a logrithmic progression like 8-10-13-17-22.
Metric is the worse offender because it is "international". That means the "standard" (if it deserves to be called that) had to include eg 12mm AF because that was in Nation A's previous standard, 13mm AF because that was in Nation B's previous standard, 14mm AF because that was in Nation C's previous standard, 15mm AF because
That's just spanners. Don't get me started on screwdrivers. I have enough of those alone to fill a large toolbox - flat, pozidriv, allen, philips, hex, torx, each of them in as many as 10 size variations permutated with different lengths.
They seem to be sticking their heads in the sand and hoping that EVs go away.
They have a legitimate gripe. The regulators are forcing them to sell the car at a loss by regulating the price in relation to other cars that they sell which forces Fiat to either eat $14,000 for every 500e sold or raise the prices on all of their non-electric vehicles to compensate. Who gets hurt by this? It isn't the rich man driving his luxury Tesla Model S. No, it's the middle and working class Californians who pay for this subsidy with higher prices on low and mid market vehicles. California has found yet another back door way to tax the middle class while leaving the rich untouched. What will they think of next?
Rather than seeing how Tesla is doing and worrying about the affordable model coming in a year or two
The affordable model is always two years away with Tesla. Frankly, I don't think that Musk cares very much about offering something that the average American can afford. Oh, he'll pay lip service to that idea because doing so is politically correct, but privately he almost certainly doesn't care. Actually it makes sense that the Model S costs $70,000+. It's not so much environmentally friendly as it is a way for rich people to enjoy some conspicuous luxury consumption. It's conspicuous because it's Tesla and luxury because it's both expensive and impractical. The rich driver of the Model S is signaling to the average peasant that he can afford to spend $70,000+ on an impractical car, driven on weekends for pleasure, while they are forced to drive a 10 year old beater or take public transportation and struggle to pay the bills.
they just churn out a lazy compliance car by shoving batteries in an ICE car, shove their fingers in their ears and hope no-one buys them.
Which is the most economically sensible thing for them to do. They know that electric cars are money losers for them, so they try to minimize their losses if they cannot avoid them entirely. If I were the CEO of Fiat I would order my production plants to incorporate non-removable weights into the frame of the 500e to further reduce the attractiveness of the car to potential buyers by radically reducing both the range and the cargo capacity.
Fiat Chrysler is a dinosaur, and is going to be killed off by evolution unless it makes a real effort.
I doubt that. Fiat Chrysler makes practical cars that ordinary working people can afford. In fact, the luxury car brands historically end up being bought and owned by the mass market companies. For example, Porsche, Lamborghini and Bugatti are owned by Volkswagen Group while Fiat owns Ferrari. I would be very surprised if the Tesla investors turned down an attractive buy out offer from one of the big auto groups, keen to run Tesla as a luxury brand, in the years ahead.
Tesla does not make a gas car at all. And the Tesla is a LOT more expensive then the Fiat 500e.
Not really apples to apples plus the fact that Teslas are now a brand that holds extreme cache with the rich tech crowd. It is sort like a Prius. It does not matter that the Honda Civic Hybrid is a very good hybrid or that the Chevy Volt is a very good plug in hybrid. For some people just owning a Prius makes a statment. THe same is true with the Tesla.
Honestly I would like a Tesla but I can could get an Audi RS7 for the same price and.... Or I could get a Nissan Leaf and an VW Passat TDI with a enough left over to buy a Kia Rio.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Fiat Chrysler is a dinosaur, and is going to be killed off by evolution unless it makes a real effort.
Someone said that about Marlboro 20 years ago too.
These companies are in it for profit, not to save the world. They will only switch to electric if it is more profitable to do so.
They have identified their target audience and they are targeting them only. They consider these "compliance taxes" the cost of doing business... much like when they donate to congress members' election campaigns.
Modern EVs do at least twice this range, and the Tesla Model S 7-10 times it.
Not really. Take the Nissan EV as an example. Realistically you're looking at driving ranges around 30 to 40 miles, and even with a 440 charging receptacle it's a good 20-30 minutes to recharge. So while it would suffice as a daily commute car, assuming your employer has charging receptacles available, it's pretty much worthless for taking any kind of road trip at all. I live in Montana, and there are plenty of places to go where you won't see another town for 100 miles or more, let alone an EV-capable charging station. If you really want to spend time off the beaten path, it's a simple matter to grab a few spare gas cans and double the range of your combustion engine vehicle.
What EV's need in order to really succeed is either some kind of massive revolution in battery charging & life, or someone who comes up with an easy way to pop used up cells out of the car and swap them for fresh ones. This would allow filling stations to keep fully charged modules stocked for fast swapping so you don't have to wait for a recharge, and if people wanted to take longer trips they could also toss some extras into the cargo compartment. But even then the spares will be far more expensive, costing hundreds or thousands of dollars each compared to $2 at walmart for a 5 gallon gas can.
But that still doesn't make up for other problems which EV's have, such as not operating at "extreme" cold temperatures. We had several weeks this winter where the HIGH temp was 0 degrees F. Batteries do not like that kind of cold at all- they charge slower and don't hold charge nearly as well. The cars are generally not very good at driving on dirt roads or in the snow and ice, and almost useless for hauling any significant cargo.
EV's are still primarily only useful to people with enough wealth to use them as a second vehicle, and unless there are major changes in energy technology that isn't going to change any time soon.
Excellent! Everyone is buying windmills and solar panels. Now we can stop the subsidies, right? I mean if wind and solar power is now as cheap as coal then we've reached the goals that the subsidies was supposed to give us, get over the "hump" on adoption of wind and solar over coal. Now that we have achieved that goal we can end the subsidies and allow the free market to replace coal with cleaner energy on its own.
Seems like whenever I propose ending wind and solar power subsidies people backpedal all of the sudden. That for some reason now that the government money might come to an end that wind and solar aren't so cheap any more.
The other possible outcome of proposing ending wind and solar subsidies is that someone will point out how coal is subsidized too. OK, end those subsidies as well then. Let wind, solar, coal, and everything else stand on its own in the market. Since we've established that wind and solar is as cheap as coal then we should expect wind and solar to win. There should be no one objecting to the end to the subsidies now.
People talk about the evil "big oil" and "big coal", I say what about "big wind"? Am I to assume that wind does not lobby in DC. Of course they do. Whenever there is a hint of someone dropping wind subsidies I get a letter in the mail on how I should write my congresscritters to keep them. Wind is big around here. If the government pulls the subsidy then a lot of people lose their jobs. I say good, we don't need government leeches. I say let them find work that is profitable. If they cannot make wind power profitable then find something that is, like nuclear.
Problem is that nuclear power has it's own political issues because of it's association with weapons. This is unfortunate. Modern nuclear reactor designs are useless for making weapons. Yet regulations for nuclear power were written in the 1950s and no one bothered to fix them.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
I have a 2011 Mazda 3 and am in California. My car doesn't have Daytime Running Lights. As far as I am aware, it's never been a legal requirement here, and likely not anywhere in the US. Some manufacturers offer them because of "safety", but it's not legally mandated.
I do agree with you on the light placement, some new models just aren't well designed in that area. Then again, I'm used to drivers not actually using their signals, so placement doesn't matter for that.