Slashdot Mirror
Volkswagen To Build Electric Versions of All 300 Models By 2030 (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Volkswagen AG Chief Executive Officer Matthias Mueller announced sweeping plans to build electric versions of all 300 models in the group's lineup as the world's largest automaker accelerates the shift away from combustion engines and tries to draw a line under the emissions-cheating scandal. Speaking on the eve of the Frankfurt auto show, the CEO laid out the enormity of the task ahead, vowing to spend 20 billion euros ($24 billion) to develop and bring the models to market by 2030 and promising to plow another 50 billion euros into the batteries needed to power the cars. Volkswagen is throwing the fire power of its 12 brands behind the push, aiming to catch up with the likes of Tesla Inc. and transform from a battery-vehicle laggard into a leader. Underscoring the enormity of the shift taking place in the industry, Mueller said VW will need the equivalent of at least four gigafactories for battery cells by 2025 just to meet its own vehicle production. At 50 billion euros, the CEO announced one of the largest tenders in the industry's history for the procurement of batteries. By 2025, VW aims to have 50 purely battery-powered vehicles and 30 hybrid models in its lineup, with a goal of selling as many as 3 million purely battery-powered cars by then. The transformation will pick up speed after that to reach the 2030 goal as economies of scale and better infrastructure help bring down prices and accelerate sales.
...but by 2040 we're going to find out those plumes of black smoke coming out of the electric cars weren't actually delicious all-nature chocolate powder.
You say that as if batteries are the only means of energy storage.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
what do the HECK do they have *300 models* for?
I had the same question. That does seem like a lot, but I bet most of them are just variants of a base model that are rationalized for different countries.
But the bigger issue is that it sounds like too grandiose a statement. (Dare I say Trumpish?) I would think they would have had better impact and a better impression of credibility if they committed to making 2-3 models successfully. Do the others once you have proven yourself.
Another problem -- at least for alert observing engineers -- is that both Musk and Nissan have shown that in order to make a successful EV one of the best practices is to design it as an EV from scratch. VW's announcement makes it sound like they are going to squeeze batteries and electric motors into their existing ICE designs. All 300 of them. Yeah you can make it work somewhat but it doesn't sound like you will get a superior product that way. In effect they have announced that they are going to strive for mediocrity.
America! Fuck yeah!
BMW's been milking the same systems data bus since... at least 1994 when they designed the E39 (5 series). It's been so successful they managed to add on GPS, navigation etc to it when all it was supposed to do was anti lock brakes and 6 CD changers. That system bus (down to the connectors) are present now in modern land rovers, making a 2017 land rover navigation unit compatible with a 1995 BMW 5 series.
When you design something for a ton of passenger cars, usually you want to design common systems to cut down on parts; in the late 90s-mid-2000s VW group cars (VW and Audi in particular) had awful window motors that failed all the time due to shared parts. The pontiac solstice sports car was basically assembled out of random parts from the GM parts bin and was even advertised as such.
I would imagine that if you're going to do EVs big, you will need some sort of modern systems bus that handles navigation, self driving CPU + sensors, battery charging, cooling, voltage etc etc, yes there will be a gas or diesel engine in a lot of these but effectively you're designing a shared platform for the next generation of cars; when you have 300 models (or likely sub-models) the more common parts you can use the better your cost savings.
Sheet metal, cars typically get a total redesign every 5-7 years. The mechanics are somewhat easy to retool for, and already budgeted for, but it's all the self-driving sensors, AI, CPU, charging wiring etc that needs to have a solid foundation so that they can make that big step forward and have many many interchangeable parts.
moox. for a new generation.
We will be keeping those fossil fueled power generators around for a long time yet
There's usually an eye roll that goes along with these kinds of pedantic statements, because people who actually understand how things work (and I am not saying you are not one of them, you more than likely are just really simplifying the whole topic, and I understand and respect that) know we're not bringing fossil fuels to 0% anytime soon. The simplicity of your comment might as well have been, "ending usage of fossil fuels won't end hurricanes." That statement isn't incorrect, but it is a really simplified response full of snark to a really general way of thinking of a problem we now face. Which I get, it's bad for people to blame global warming for hurricanes that are happening now because it is not a 100% accurate way of talking about global warming. But I digress before we go down that rabbit hole any further.
Now one day, and that day is long after everyone here reading this comment is dead, we will have ended the usage of fossil fuels for the majority of industrial and metro power generating. It will have more to do with the increasing difficulty of extracting fossil fuels and less to do with some holy war of clean vs dirty power. That doesn't mean the latter will have nothing to do with it, just in case you get the wrong idea here. I'm not standing on a economically reasonable only platform, its a light mixture of the two ideas I just stated, plus a whole lot of global politics mixed in there that I'm going to not be bringing up. But all of that I just stated plus a bit more ultimately will be guiding the world as to what we move to next. But to keep it simple, as it stands, coal is the first causality of this ever increasing difficulty of "access to." Will we ever use 0% coal? More than likely not, but as time goes on we will be less inclined to burn it for lighting someone's light bulb or cooking their Hot Pocket, we will all think that's just stupid considering it has a way better use in something like steel production. That's not today, but I would wager that it is sooner rather than later. So when I say causality, I don't mean death of coal absolute. I and many others mean it in these terms of being more conservative with the resource than we previously have been.
Eventually, all fossil fuels will come to this point. It will seem really silly for us to use natural gas to heat someone's water, or for us to use oil to lubricate someone's car when both of those will be better used for heating a hospital or lubricating a wind farm or whatever. It's about the same state of mind that Slashdot seems to get into when we think about using Helium in balloons. It is a really silly usage of a resource that is limited that can be better used elsewhere. Now don't get me wrong here, I'm not attributing to humanity the notion of always picking the "better" for whatever terms that might mean, method of using a resource. However, the economics of things being an awfully powerful force for changing people's minds.
So that said, I just want to touch real lightly on coal for a second, since it is the first one on the chopping block that we rely on for a majority of our current power production. Again, by chopping block, I mean that in terms of having to rethink its usage, not it's absolute demise. About 53% of the coal that we know about is still left for us to extract and is slightly economical to pull out of the ground. The remaining 47% of the coal that we do know about is just not feasible to extract economically and maybe that will change with some sort of technological leap. Even still, the coal we do know about is but only 30% of all the coal that is thought to exist on the planet. So that 53% roughly represents about ~15% of all the coal we think is out there. At some point as we get close to the bottom of that 53%, with out any clear change to getting at that 47%, we're all going to really be rethinking if we should be burning the stuff for powering homes ver
And yet you're missing the biggest actual reason all of these manufacturers are eyeing electric. Hint: it's not global warming. They want to get in on power sources which specifically do not release pollutants because pollution from exhaust pipes is becoming a major issue in just about every large European and Asian city. Synthetic fuels would change fuck all to that, so nobody's investing in it. If you're not going electric, your only other real option is hydrogen, but that's got even more problems.
As a general rule, if you, average Slashdotter, think you've figured out something nobody in the entire world has, you're probably just missing something.
"what do the HECK do they have *300 models* for?!?!?!?!
Volkswagen Auto Group is one of the largest vehicle manufacturing companies on the planet.
Between VW, Audi, Seat, Skoda, Porsche, Lamborghini, Bentley, Bugatti, Ducati, MAN, and Scania, plus world-wide distribution of different models, 300 seems on the low side.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
Even the very concept is broken. If you want an electric vehicle to be good (and competitive), you don't "electrify" a vehicle designed for an internal combustion engine. You end up needlessly poor aero drag (having the shape designed around containing an ICE), high center of gravity (batteries are best kept as a base "skateboard" at the bottom of the vehicle) and thus poorer handling/safety, poor packing density (little range and/or awkward shaped / hard to manufacture packs), and a bunch of other issues.
EVs should be designed from the start as EVs. Battery at the bottom, everything else sitting atop it, and a shape having nothing to do with the constraints of ICEs. Motors located inline with the wheels that they drive - ideally 2 motors if you can afford it for AWD, otherwise FWD or RWD as per consumer preference (generally RWD). Etc. By the way, the reason that you really want two motors (beyond gaining the benefits of AWD without having to add a heavy front-rear linkage) is that you can gear them differently. This lets you "sleep" the motor that's operating outside of its ideal power band during normal operation (instantly waking it when you need more torque or traction), which means greater efficiency, and thus range. It also lets you combine both high acceleration at low speeds and at higher speeds (with a higher top speed) rather than having to pick.
"Casual hello, it's me, Zoidberg, act naturally."
That's basically how Teslas are built. Model S and X are built on the same skateboard. Model 3 and Y are built on the same skateboard, smaller than the MX/MY one. The two skateboard designs are very similar, although the M3/MY skateboard is updated based on the latest technology and "lessons learned" in the MS/MX line.
As a random example: M3/MY have no battery pack heater. Tesla has always been great with heat management (shunting heat to/from the drive unit(s), battery pack, cabin, compressor, and radiators so that whatever needs more heat gets it and whatever loses it). With the new design, rather than having a dedicated heater, they deliberately run the motor(s) inefficiently (when at a standstill, with 0% efficiency), wasting all energy as resistive heating in the stator which is captured and shunted to the pack. It costs them nothing extra to do this (since the waveforms created by the IGBTs in the inverter are fully customizeable) but eliminates another part (the pack heater) to manufacture, install, and which could potentially break.
"Casual hello, it's me, Zoidberg, act naturally."
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Merely even refining transportation fuels is a much less efficient process than charging li-ions.
Li-ions don't work by oxidation processes, they work by intercalation processes. On one side you have graphite and/or silicon, and on the other you have nickel/cobalt/aluminum oxides. One or both of them are infiltrated with lithium ions in the interstitial space; the charge state is defined by which side the lithium is on.
You seem to be under the mistaken concept that energy density corresponds to safety. Tell me, which is more of a hazard, 100kg of aluminum or 100kg of nitroglycerine? Now tell me, which is more energy dense?
Here's the reality of fire safety in Tesla battery packs. They're so non-flammable that you can generally burn the rest of the car to the ground without burning the pack. Try that with a gasoline car. Gasoline fires in cars are extremely common. 152k gasoline cars catch fire in the US alone every year. Tesla rates of fires are far less than those in gasoline cars.
What boggles the mind *to me* is that gasoline vehicles are allowed to store such huge quantities of a highly flammable fuel in just a big tank. No compartmentalization / isolation system, just pour it in, and there you go!
Simply not true. ICE efficiencies decline over time, and the level of cost required to keep them running at as-of-manufactured efficiency makes it impractical to do for most consumers. Older ICE vehicles are generally much less efficient than new ones. Which also, BTW, reduces range. Proper li-ion packs, like Tesla's, do lose range with time, but only slowly. Click on "charts". Typical degradation is about 4% in the first year, but much slower thereafter. A typical 5-year old car has only about 6-7% total degradation. It's hard to know at this point whether you can continue extrapolating such a slow decline slope over time, but it's at the very least extremely promising. Typical results from Tesla taxis with hundreds of thousands of miles on them are less than 10% degradation.
We're talking "Now, not in a hundred years."
BTW, it also sounds like you're under the impression that EVs remain unusually heavy. Check out the curb weights of the Model 3 variants. SR is 3549lbs (1609kg) and LR is 3814 lbs (1730kg). Its ICE class competitors (BMW 3-series, Audi A4, Mercedes C300, etc) come in a wide variety of configurations:
BMW 3-Series: 1475-1770kg
Audi A4: 1410-1695kg
Mercedes C300: 1630-1715+kg
There's nothing unusual about the Model 3's weight versus its ICE competitors. The LR is a bit on the heavy side, but the SR slots right in the middle.
"Casual hello, it's me, Zoidberg, act naturally."
Tesla is in a close battle with Bugatti on accelerations. The Bugatti Veyron did 0-60 in 2,4 seconds. The Tesla P100D does it in 2,27 seconds. The Chiron now does it in 2,0 seconds. Etc. I can't see how electric isn't ultimately going to win this battle. The Teslas also cost 1 1/2 orders of magnitude less, and while they lose out on high-end acceleration, they clobber anything on the road off the line.
One thing Teslas don't do yet is that they're not track cars; they don't have the cooling level needed for sustained track duty. I expect the Roadster 3.0 to be their first track-duty car.
"Casual hello, it's me, Zoidberg, act naturally."
Tesla comes up with the most off-the-wall engineering solutions. Another good example with the Model 3: have you seen their new "leverless" air-vanes (electronic-controlled direction so that it can remember drivers / passengers and how they like their airflow in what conditions)? Most people assumed that there were a bunch of linear actuators in there ducting the flow, and some were complaining that Tesla would complicate the design and add expensive parts and their controllers for something that's not that important. But that's not how they do it. They actually use computer-case-fan style fans to blow the main airflow in different directions (aka, aiming air with air), while simultaneously also contributing to the total air delivered (you need a given amount of fan power regardless!). And you can plug fans like that straight into your motherboard - they're super-cheap in bulk (even high quality ones) and don't need a separate controller.
"Casual hello, it's me, Zoidberg, act naturally."
I don't know who this VW joker is, but he probably didn't work his way up from the engineering shop.
Matthias Müller started out as an apprentice tool and die maker at Audi and then studied engineering at Munich University of Applied Sciences. After that, he got a job in the product planning at Audi and gradually worked his way up to become the manager in charge of product planning. After that, he subsequently became coordinator of sports brands for the VW Group, CEO of Porsche and, after the resignation of prof. dr. Martin Winterkorn in 2015, CEO of the VW Group.
However, please don't get readily available facts get in the way of your presumptions.
One thing batteries are really nice for is voltage maintenance on long feeder lines. Things like the old Castle Valley battery on the Rattlesnake #22 line. When you have one long line serving a sparse population of customers, having a battery buffer halfway along its length lets you use a smaller, cheaper line (the buffer charges at night and then discharges during the day).
"Casual hello, it's me, Zoidberg, act naturally."