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VW Says the Next Generation of Combustion Cars Will Be Its Last (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Volkswagen AG expects the era of the combustion car to fade away after it rolls out its next-generation gasoline and diesel cars beginning in 2026. "Our colleagues are working on the last platform for vehicles that aren't CO2 neutral," Michael Jost, strategy chief for Volkswagen's namesake brand, said Tuesday at an industry conference near the company's headquarters in Wolfsburg, Germany. "We're gradually fading out combustion engines to the absolute minimum."
The world's largest automaker has started to introduce its first wave of electric cars, including next year's Porsche Taycan. The rollout across its stable of 12 automotive brands is forecast to comprise about 15 million vehicles, as the company earmarks $50 billion over the next five years to spend on its transformation to self-driving, electric cars. Production of the VW brand's I.D. Neo hatchback will start in 12 months in Germany, followed by other models from the I.D. line assembled at two sites in China as of 2020. VW plans to launch fully or partly electric versions across its lineup of more than 300 cars, vans, trucks and motorbikes by 2030. The company "will continue to modify its combustion engine technology after the new platform is introduced next decade," reports Bloomberg. "After 2050, there may still be some gasoline and diesel models in regions where there is insufficient charging infrastructure, according to Jost."
The world's largest automaker has started to introduce its first wave of electric cars, including next year's Porsche Taycan. The rollout across its stable of 12 automotive brands is forecast to comprise about 15 million vehicles, as the company earmarks $50 billion over the next five years to spend on its transformation to self-driving, electric cars. Production of the VW brand's I.D. Neo hatchback will start in 12 months in Germany, followed by other models from the I.D. line assembled at two sites in China as of 2020. VW plans to launch fully or partly electric versions across its lineup of more than 300 cars, vans, trucks and motorbikes by 2030. The company "will continue to modify its combustion engine technology after the new platform is introduced next decade," reports Bloomberg. "After 2050, there may still be some gasoline and diesel models in regions where there is insufficient charging infrastructure, according to Jost."
That's a bold statement to come from the world's largest car maker. Automotive development cycles are long. What if they get it wrong and EVs don't prove to be universally applicable; for example because some can't charge at their homes?
If I were in their shoes I would want to milk at least some ICE cars for the profit and to have a fallback plan. Wait until demand has fallen sufficiently for these legacy cars and then pull the plug.
Unless of course that is their plan and they simply won't be updating their platforms anymore but continue selling them for as long as possible. Sort of how the Crown Vic soldiered on with the same platform for a quarter century.
The interesting thing is that this is not going to be because of the whole 'green' thing. Sure for some people that is important, and it is a nice add on, but if people really cared about that they would buy city cars instead of trucks or luxury sedans.
No, the reason this is going to happen is because they are better products. I live in a central city area, and after 5 years being carless am looking at buying a second hand car for work. I fix my own cars, but don't have the time to do that anymore. It is extremely annoying having to deal with timing belt changes (thankfully not so common now), potentially expensive emission control problems, changing spark plugs, water pumps, flushing coolant, engine oil every 6 months. As they get older (~100km for many modern cars) you have a whole bunch of gotchas that will empty your pocket. On one model of Nissan/Renault (would never buy) a friend had the direct injectors fail. They basically had to strip the head to fix it, and it was half the value of the car to fix. That's just incredible. Gas cars also have incredibly complicated transmissions and these can cause problems.
With an electric car you don't have to do any of these issues. You just charge and go. You don't even need to change the brake pads these days. And depending on your housing situation, not having to go to a petrol station and having a fully filled car every morning is a positive not a negative.
The other thing is that the cost of these things is going to keep going down. I see another trend on the horizon which will be battery replacements. I expect that once there are enough old electric cars with poor batteries, someone will start making replacement packs enmass. These will be cheap (as batteries have gotten cheaper) or have better capacity. So you can probably keep the same car for much longer and just keep changing the tyres and upgrading the pack as required.
Outside those with the money to burn, most people just want a car that is reliable and cheap to maintain. Electric cars will do that for them, and for that reason alone nobody will want to touch a thousands-of-things-can-go-wrong gas car once the cost becomes competitive.
changes in Brazil.
Why do I bring this up? Because they said they are designing their last generation of ICE cars. That doesn't mean that generation won't last far into the foreseeable future, so long as the profits outweigh the manufacturing costs.
Really, if they were smart, they would be taking the old school VW platform, updating it with limited safety features, then replacing the gas tank up front with a LION pack, and putting a manually controlled electric motor in the back, minimizing cost and maintenance burden for customers. The entire third world with steady electrical access would be buying those cars. The pack location could make it easy to swap for long trips at service stations, and given the recent (current?) third party support for the external aspects of the vehicle, the only real changes would be inside of the frame to ensure the battery wouldn't rupture in all but the worst accidents, and that the driver and passengers would have adequate crumple zones to survive to whatever the current standard is. Done right they can continue selling new cars and even refurbishment frames for decades to come, while producing complicated luxury vehicles for the wealthier markets, supported by a steady sale of staple vehicles that would be lost risk and consistent profit.
You can get vroom vroom from speakers. Seriously, EVs will probably be required to make some noise as a safety feature for pedestrians and cyclists at some point. Especially at low speed, parking lots, crosswalks, etc.
Customers in the suburbs and rural areas have decent access to plugs. With a little infrastructure work, level 2 chargers could proliferate and this could be good for a lot of reasons.
For urban life where on-street parking is the norm, what are you gonna do? It's not like it's practical to deploy level 2 chargers (or anything else) along the sides of the road. Many of them are on the driver's side, which means those plugs would be subject to additional splashing and kick-up from passing road traffic. Additionally, those huge L2 plugs are now going to stick out an extra few inches. How do you do that without creating tripping hazards?
I'm all for increased electric car deployment. I was shopping hard for a pure electric car that would serve my needs, and failing that, a plug-in hybrid. My problem is that I need to go for trips with the Boy Scouts where I can tow a trailer over 1500 pounds (which drops all plug-in hybrids and I think only leaves the Model X for all-electrics) and those trips average 2-3 hours away (range is a problem). Stopping with a carload of boys to charge for 2 hours along the way is ... not going to sell cars.
VW (and the rest of the car makers) have a lot of work to do to overcome those challenges.
It is inevitable. The battery prices have been falling and have reached a tipping point. The battery pack cost estimate varies from 120 $/kWh to 150 $/kWh. (Battery cell prices range between 100 $./kWh to 130 $/kWh). The general consensus is when the battery pack costs 100 $/kWh the cost of electric power train (battery + motor + charger) will equal the cost of ICE power train (engine + transmission + emission control + gas tank). At that point BEV and ICEV will sell at the same price. BEV will cost three to five times less [FN1] compared to ICEV. At that point transition to BEV will be rapid.
People who have never driven BEV are misled by the lack of visible charging infrastructure compared to gas stations. Tesla super chargers few and far between. What they don't realize is every home, every electrical outlet is a gas station. Charging time does not matter. Cars sit idle all night long, enough time to charge. In fact BEV people feel ICEV fueling takes too much time, having to stop by at the gas station every week or so.
Also cars are the second most expensive thing bought by home owners, and the single most expensive thing bought by renters. When they see a big flux coming, things are unsettled, they post pone the decision to buy the next car. It will hurt ICEV companies a lot more than BEV companies.
But vehicles are just the beginning. There is no new breakthrough needed in batteries. The breakthrough needed is in manufacturing, industrial engineering, assembly lines for batteries, volume production, etc, all are known issues with known solutions. We know how to do this, we are just struggling to figure out how to finance this. When battery packs cost 80 $/kWh in 2022 all vehicles, from 18 wheelers to earth movers to train locomotives will run on batteries. Oil demand falling by 50% creating a glut and gasoline price falling to 1 $/gallon .. even that will not stem the tide. ICEV will be more expensive than battery. At 60 $/kWh we can store three days worth of electricity used by the entire grid in batteries. Solar and Wind will be enough and all the coal/gas/oil fired powerplants will go bust.
My friend works in a salt mine that ordered a 130 million dollar HVAC system because they are using diesel earth movers deep in the mine's confined spaces. In today's prices, you can buy 1 GWh of batteries, keep thm on 16 hour charge, 8 hour duty cycle, and run 40 earth movers, each using 500 HP motor operating 24/7. Only problem is 1 GWh of batteries is 2.5% of the world's battery making capacity! Look at the demand, look at the potential, the tipping point has been reached already. It is just a matter of ramping up the production volumes!
[FN1] BEV, Tesla model 3, 75 kWh for 310 miles, 1 kWh = 12 cents, 2.9 cents/mile. Compare to 250 HP BMW X3 25 mpg, 3 $/gal, 12 cents. Ratio = 4.1, plug in your numbers, ratio can down to 2.5 or go up to 6.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Of course things are won:
1. Powerplants can have better scrubbers and run more efficiently than cars, because they're much larger and the load is more predictable.
2. You shift particulate and other emissions out of urban centres
#2 alone is worth its weight in gold. I went to the University of Cambridge. The old buildings there had to have their stone washed down on a regular basis to clean off the soot from vehicles. If that soot were all shifted to the stacks of powerpoints, that would be great
Actually, there still is.... even in areas where electricity production is still dirty, an electric car will still "produce" about 3 tons less carbon pollution per year than an ICE vehicle itself would. While that savings might not be as significant in terms of its environmental impact in areas where energy production is coal based, it is still quite far from "nothing".... and would definitely add up quickly as electric cars become more common.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
While CO2 is wreaking havoc on the planet's climate, it is still a small fraction of air, around 500 ppm, and is chemically inert (well, it's a combustion product, so obviously...). Extracting CO2 from the air is very difficult. You can use current technology with biofuels, though these are obtained by fermentation and have a short shelf life. For example, biodiesel is OK for city buses because they run around regularly, but if you fill your diesel car with biodiesel and park it at the airport for 2 weeks while on holiday, you may find a nasty surprise when you try to start it again and the fuel has precipitated solids.
The infrastructure for EVs is way more pervasive than fossil fuels today. I am en EV owner (Nissan Leaf) and I almost never need to use fast charging: overnight charging at 2 kW covers over 95% of my needs. Just connect it in the evening and it will be ready the day after. Fast chargers are a necessity for longer travels, but charging at home is a whole lot cheaper.
And since I often hear the argument "but what if everyone charges their car at the same time?", well that just does not happen. The grid would collapse also if everyone started their washing machines at the same time, but that does not happen. Sure, the grid will need some strengthening here and there, but there is plenty of time to do it, consumers are not going to buy EVs all at the same time.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y