Future cars / Driverless cars

[Anondson]

This is half about electric cars and half about solar and wind turbine electricity storage.

Companies are well on the way to making the batteries from electric vehicles find a second life as storage for solar and wind when their suitability for vehicles is spent.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features ... hey-retire

[mplsjaromir]

Is this bad?

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/27/busi ... tesla.html

[Silophant]

Looooool

[Anondson]

Rather than try to drop huge subsidies to get electric 4000 lb cars made for hauling a 200 lb person, India shifted to launching companies making e-rickshaws.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features ... c-vehicles

Not only have they been cleaner (very importantly so), but the e-rick drivers can make a greater income because they are cheaper to maintain and can be used to make many more rides.

India has since sold more e-rickshaws than China has sold electric cars.

[Anondson]

Kinda future car news, GM laying off up to 14,000 (15% of its workforce) partly to place stronger focus on battery electric architectures.

https://www.freep.com/story/money/cars/ ... 112539002/

[bubzki2]

Cheap gas strikes again. This is really a further shift to sell fewer loss leader, fuel-efficient ICE cars, and more crossovers and SUVs for the bottom line. Very much like what Ford did recently. BEVs are coming either way as they'll very soon be cheaper to buy and own than even cheap ICE cars. Interestingly, the Volt PHEV was among the six models killed off, and the Bolt EV hasn't sold particularly well, either.

[Multimodal]

Yeah, something to do with larger vehicles getting a break on gas mileage requirements, pushing American companies to sell SUVs.

Terrible long-term plan, unless the idea is only to make van & bus-like vehicles that makes sense for an autonomous vehicle-based service, where people won’t own cars individually anymore. But I doubt GM is thinking about anything other than short-term profits of trucks & SUVs.

The Bolt hasn’t sold well because GM’s dealers don’t want it to sell well (little maintenance & repairs needed for EVs, so little dealer profit long term), and it probably doesn’t generate much profit for GM, either.

But Tesla builds enough EVs & batteries to bring costs down, so their vehicles are profitable.

In 10 years, the number of car companies will be 1/2 or 1/4 of what we have today. It’s going to be bloody.