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BMW Says Electric Car Mass Production Not Viable Until 2020 (reuters.com)
BMW will not mass produce electric cars until 2020 because its current technology is not profitable enough to scale up for volume production, the chief executive said on Thursday. From a report: Munich-based BMW unveiled its first battery electric car in 2013, and has been working on different generations of battery, software and electric motor technology since then. The i8 Roadster model, due to hit showrooms in May, is equipped with what BMW calls its fourth-generation electric drive technology. Advances in battery raw materials and chemistry has increased its range by 40 percent over the previous version, BMW said. BMW is working to make electric car technology more modular and scalable to make mass production commercially viable. "We wanted to wait for the fifth generation to be much more cost competitive," Chief Executive Harald Krueger told analysts in Munich. "We do not want to scale up with the fourth generation."
I don't recall anyone saying "never". Most agreed that battery technology had a way to go though.
Legacy equipment and stuff, that's why it's not viable. Retooling a ICE plant to make it electric isn't free after all.
Look, BMW just doesn't want to do this, because of profit factors, not because they are not capable of making a profit doing it.
They can convert easily. There are companies in Asia that produce far more all electric vehicles than BMW does, and they converted much more quickly and scaled up.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
They are waiting for companies to start cranking out cheap solid state lithium batteries. This maximizes their profit margin and they don't actually give a fuck about the environment, just their profit margins.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
I understand electric cars are "the future" but they don't have to be ugly. Futuristic cars in films usually look like plastic toys, real electric cars, except teslas', look like ugly plastic toys.
I don't understand why existing engine bays have not been reused to fit motor/battery into existing car platforms.
Surely there is sufficient volume under the bonnet/hood to include a pretty much self contained motor/battery/control unit that could be a straight replacement for the existing lump of metal that is the engine/gearbox combination.
It shouldn't even affect the car dynamics much, as you'll be just replacing one dense concentration of metal with another. I'd even wager a motor and reasonably large battery would weigh less than the engine being replaced.
Or am I missing something?
We suck!
"We were all about 'diesel' and we got caught with our pants down so we're just going to cede more customer to Tesla and other EV makers for a few more years until we get our act together. "
The statement is optimistically negative:
"BMW Says Electric Car Mass Production Not Viable Until 2020"
instead of
"BMW Says Electric Car Mass Production fully viable in two years"
Recharging overnight is fine but if you forget to plug your car in overnight, you may not be able to get to work the next morning, whereas if you forget to fill up in last night when you noticed the tank was low, you can at least make a short stop along the way to work today.
Plus, of course, if a person doesn't even live in a place where they have the facilities to charge their car overnight (eg, either a communal parking without any electric outlets or having to park their car in the street in front of their residence), electric cars as they exist today are complete nonviable. While not exactly a majority of the population, the number of people in that position is far too large a slice of the pie to ignore (more than 25% nationwide here in Canada, and in some municipalities, it's as high as 70%).
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Is it 1980? Because if not 2020 is 2 years away. That's not even a blip in an industry as large as cars. The headline shouldn't be "not viable until 2020" it should be "will be viable by 2020".
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. . . they will say 2025. Etc.
Electric is a fad. Hopefully BMW never puts out an electric car.
Good thing I didn't buy the BMW i3 electric car I was thinking about getting! Their website tells me it's "the revolution", but here Reuters claims BMW says it's not viable until 2020!
https://www.bmwusa.com/vehicles/bmwi.html
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
It's pushing 15 years now since Dr. Peter Tertzakian, maybe the continent's most distinguished "energy economist", wrote the book "A Thousand Barrels a Second", when the world consumption topped 84.6 million bbl/day. His company, Arc Energy, isn't in oil per se, they consult on the economics of developing various alternatives, whether undersea exploration will pay off, etc.
He accepted that the entire industry had to go, eventually, and provided many contrasts to the all-coal era and how Winston Churchill started the beginning of the end for coal as a transportation fuel (trains, ships) by demanding the British Navy switch to oil in prep for WW1. That required every port to have oil facilities, which then stimulated civilian oil cargo ships, the development of oil-based engines that wound up in trains.
For changing over all cars to an alternative (in 2004, it wasn't clear whether batteries or hydrogen or biofuels or what was the next thing) he noted that the "North American vehicle fleet" takes a minimum of 20 years to turn over. That's the period where both infrastructures have to be around for two kinds of cars. So that's a pretty large societal cost and the flip won't start until everybody can see that there's enough eventual profit to get over the cost 'hump' of the switchover.
I didn't start a mental 20-year clock with the first Tesla or Leaf, however, as they seem still experimental, we don't even have a standard charger settled on yet. (The next Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD war is coming. Presumably, at some point, we'll see a YouTube where "Hitler is told that GM just standardized on Tesla chargers").
2020, however, is an irresistible year for starting a 20-year countdown to the Last Gas Station closing up. Or at least the last ones in small towns.
optimistically negative
The word is pessimism.
Not until 2020... Oh we'll SEE... we'll SEE!
It's almost as if environmental calamity alone is not enough motivation for a capitalist company to change its behaviour. Who would have guessed! You know when even Germany cant force companies to do the right thing, we're all doomed.
99% of car journeys in the USA 95% of trips are shorter than 30 miles and 99% is below 70 mil so the need for a monster amount of charge points is not critical to most journeys
You all still ignore the hell that is apartment complex parking. Absolutely no-one seems to be thinking through the question "what happens when all cars are electric". They cannot be until that question is considered; until the problem of mass numbers of electric cars is addressed electric cars will remain HipsterMobiles.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
..wow, thats way sooner than i expected and i'm pretty optimistic on electric cars.
(i thought we'll be lucky to see model 3 in full swing by then)
Just needs to die already. The newcomers are quite brilliant... well having every piece of knowledge available in an instant since thier birth == genius.
[($)]
Nice of BMW to leave it to Tesla to be the first manufacturer capable of producing over 500,000 BEV's per year. The experience could enable them to continue to be the prime mover in this technology.