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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.
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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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.
Have gnu, will travel.
...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.
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.
In order for 1% of your sales to be zero-emission vehicles, you have to actually sell some zero-emission vehicles.
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.
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.
http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_ve...
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Taxes on businesses are *always* passed on to the consumer.
I never said they weren't. I just said that the zero-emission cars were the tax levied against the non-zero ones. Consumer-, dealer-, or manufacturer-level tax, it's all the same in the end.
I bought a portable power connection unit and fast charge at home, work and in-laws.
Public charging stations use multiple payment systems and are often occupied.
BTW, welcome to the Golden State, it's a great place to live, in spite of the nay-sayers.
If you're spending that much for Fiat you might as well spend a bit more and get a Maserati.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
n/t
How can the state of California guarantee that without price controls, then.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
What? Think about what you just said.
Are taxes on you always passed on to your employer? No. Why? Because you don't have pricing power.
If a company has pricing power they are already basing their costs on what the market will bear. Increased costs are decreased profits.
If the company doesn't have market power they are actually more likely to pass on the costs, as everybody making the commodity will be facing the same taxes. That presumes no foreign competition.
In any case simply saying 'taxes will always be passed on to the customer' is simply false.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I've bought Chrysler products in the past and gotten good use out of them. For the money they were good buys. I had a CV joint go out pretty early on one of them due to a torn boot that I didn't catch in time. They saw lots of hard usage and served well. I hear this extremism from people all the time "those are garbage!" when a manufacturer is below par for a standard. All in all though just because a car is not at the same level as another doesn't make it junk. The average qualtiy has risen greatly in the past 3 decades and most cars sold today will provide many miles and years of good service. I choose not to pay a premium for cars that are priced way too high for what they are. It's like tools. Snap-On makes great tools and they may be better than craftsman tools but they aren't better enough to justify the 400% or better price premium. Good enough is good enough.
Fiat could give away an electric bicycle with every car they sell and come out far cheaper.
50% zero emissions. Would fuck Tesla over hard by reducing the price of zero emissions allowances.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
with a moron like that in charge.
enough said.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
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
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
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?
Update: Snap-On and Mac have both eaten it in the last 10 years. Their tools are now often Chinese junk.
They still sell some quality tools. But now you have to look _carefully_ or they will sell you Harbor Freight quality for Snap-On prices.
Craftsman is now universally junk. Treasure the old ones you've got cause if you break one, the new one will last like a MTD mower.
Talk to the truck owners; they have _all_ been financially sodomized by the tool companies and many now also carry economical, quality Asian tools on their trucks.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
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.
I wonder if they couldn't they just sell them to themselves. Maybe create a wholly owned subsidiary, buy them, sell them back and cycle through the BS while being technically compliant with the law or regulation.
Hmm..
I have a lot of Craftsman stuff my Dad gave me back in the 70's and like you say it's obviously better quality than the stuff they sell today. The Snap-On stuff we have at work seems top notch but I can't afford that kind of price. It's not that good, nothing is worth those kinds of prices to me.
Craftsman is now universally junk. Treasure the old ones you've got cause if you break one, the new one will last like a MTD mower.
Nah, they've still got lots of good stuff. They do have non-Craftsman tools which are pure shit. Maybe you meant power tools, those are crap. But Sears is looking very like it's going away...
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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.
Program Intellivision!
I'm pretty sure "the system" is smart enough to specify that the EV has to be a "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...
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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I'm specifically thinking of the socket and wratchets. Likely the most common tools sold.
The new sockets are sloppy and break if you torque on them, the new wratchets have about 8 clicks in a 360 degree spin, yet still pop out unexpectedly.
That said I was forced to buy a big old impact socket at sears about 5 years ago. It's OK.
My main point was not to trust any brand of tools. They're expensive, look closely, buy small and test before breaking bread. Don't expect the same quality of steel because it's stamped with the same name. Taiwan, in particular, makes some excellent hand tools along with contain ships of crap hand tools.
Understand how badly the tool truck guys have gotten fucked in the last 20 years. Make 'friends'* with one of the good ones. They are the people who will find those reasonably priced Taiwanese (or wherever) tools. They are not the tool trucks of 20 years ago. 20-30 years ago the big tool companies sold the tool trucks a franchise area, tool trucks were expensive as the operators were more or less guaranteed six figures and could bring in much more. 30 years of tool companies selling as many trucks as the market will absorb while eroding quality and you've got a lot of unhappy tool truck owners. You see completely unbranded tool trucks.
*assuming your not a big enough customer to justify a (business relationship/stop). I catch the unbranded one that stops at the shop up the road from work.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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.
The new sockets are sloppy and break if you torque on them, the new wratchets have about 8 clicks in a 360 degree spin, yet still pop out unexpectedly.
They still sell the ratchets with more clicks. You have to order them. They are not especially expensive. You do have to be careful to get them replaced with like when you break one, but then, they seldom break.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
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!
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.... 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.
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.