Big auto companies plan a lot and send away press releases about electric concepts a lot too. It's been like that for the past decade, at least. They should start building and selling, then I will believe them again.
The lip service was in an era of small-m millions for EV investment.
The past 3-4 years have seen capital-B Billions of investment from most of the major automakers. Some are more aggressive than others, but they're all genuinely starting. Money talks.
Obviously Tesla was first, but Renault, Kia, and Hyundai are producing EVs in earnest. VW is starting to ramp up this year. About a dozen companies will kick in over the next couple years.
Do you have any sources for the billion dollar investments? I've seen press releases about billion dollar contracts with suppliers, but not as much about billion dollar investments in factories/tooling/etc.
You can find sources with some digging for pretty much all the companies, and they are all in the “Capital B” magnitude category. In addition, the contracts and agreements for new battery cell factories from LG Chem, Samsung, BYD, etc etc.
You're proving the OP's point with those links i.e. the car makers were lying about their plans for a decade and at this point I'll believe it when I see it.
According to the first article you linked, in January 2018 Ford promised:
>Of the 40 electrified vehicles Ford plans for its global lineup by 2022, 16 will be fully electric and the rest will be plug-in hybrids, executives said.
Needless to say, Ford will not have 16 fully electric cars by 2022.
They'll have Mach E this year, maybe. They promised electric F-150, no date given.
What are those other 14 EVs to be shipped in 2 years when they don't even have a prototype today?
>The Reuters news service obtained the production plans of Ford and General Motors, which showed that SUVs and pickups, not electric vehicles, are what's coming.
>Combined, Ford and GM plan to make five million SUVs and pickups in 2026 while building just 320,000 electric vehicles
This is based not on PR promises but actual plans Ford has.
320k / 40 imaginary electrified models is less than 10k per model, in 2026, not 2022. And 320k is combined for Ford and GM.
I don't know how many they actually make/sell, but Hyundai-Kia seem to be doing a good job. The Kona Electric is 37k before credits and has a 258 mile range, and they can make "up to" 30,000 a year. I think the Nero EV and Soul EV share some underpinnings and are similar in range and price. There's also the IONIQ EV but that's slightly last gen.
Generally though I agree that there's a huge difference between cars on lots and plans for the future someone else has to figure out. I imagine Ford/GM figure most of the electric market will be similar to the sedan and compact market, and plan on ceding it to competitors as they have done with those markets, and will focus on larger and/or more brand-ey electrics like the Mach E versus something like a Leaf or Model 3.
I'll give other manufacturers credit when they start selling EVs in volume. At the moment, in the US, Tesla's EV sales are about the same as the EV+PHEV sales of every other manufacturer combined.
'British Gas', a U.K. utility company has been running a fleet of electric vans for house calls and boiler maintenance since at least 2015 (Nissan NV200).
The technology is already good enough for a large fraction of business use cases. Now it is up to us to us as customers to put our wallet where our mouth is and to pressure businesses and governments to ditch diesel engines for good.
GM has a lot of experience with electric cars. We have had GM Bolts and Volts and have been very satisfied with them. I wouldn't discount their ability so fast.
GM has made far more announcements about electric cars than actual shipping products and their track record with shipping what they say they are going to ship is not great. For example the Chevy Volt only marginally resembles the Volt prototype.
Also, the fact that GM has continued to lobby for laxer CAFE standards and is in a legal battle over California's right to set higher fuel economy standards is a big black mark against them in my book.
A lot of experience has not translated well to their consumer offerings which have not really changed since the rushed the Bolt as a 2017 model. The EUV variant instead of advancing the technology of the Bolt is little more than a stretched variant with the same limited charging.
Yes they have experience but GM is operating from the concept of earning sufficient ZEV credits only. The dropped PHEV (Volt) right prior to the rest of the industry going that direction all because it wasn't worth the cost to ZEV points.
What I am interested in is seeing how invested Ford is, if the Mach E sales take off will they make enough to meet the need to artificially constrain production to just what they need to sale.
The real danger to EV transportation is the big manufacturers trying to keep maximum ranges below three hundred miles. Even luxury makers are barely going there with future products. By keeping ranges in that lower two hundred mile area they can continue to exploit range anxiety issues and consign EVs to local transportation only thereby not threatening their cash cows.
> The dropped PHEV (Volt) right prior to the rest of the industry going that direction all because it wasn't worth the cost to ZEV points.
GM also stated that PHEV was a compromise/transition technology and BEVs have hit certain benchmarks (and so too have charging infrastructure) that the focus should be on BEVs now.
(As a 2012 Volt owner, I'm inclined to agree as one anecdotal owner. PHEV made a lot of sense in 2012, but the compromises needed in PHEV increasingly make less sense in 2020 and I doubt my next car will be anything but a full BEV.)
> What I am interested in is seeing how invested Ford is, if the Mach E sales take off will they make enough to meet the need to artificially constrain production to just what they need to sale.
Ford is playing catch up no matter what. The only hope the Mach E has to working well is how much Ford is paying to external collaborators for outside tech.
GM has pre-announced something like a half-dozen to a dozen new BEV models will be announced in the next year or so and heavily invested in BEV only facilities. Ford is still in the dipping the toes in the water stage of BEV production.
> The real danger to EV transportation is the big manufacturers trying to keep maximum ranges below three hundred miles.
The real danger to EV transportation is thinking ~250 miles on a charge is "local transportation only". I understand Americans have a bloated sense of the miles they need to travel regularly, but range anxiety is overblown and 300 miles/charge is no more useful a magic number than 200 miles/charge in assuaging range anxiety. (Some Europeans were already happy with ~100 mile/charge Nissan Leafs for long distance continental travel half a decade ago.)
As an American and a Texan, range bloat can definitely be a thing, but urban densities vary wildly in the US. My daily commute is on average ~30 miles round trip. But if I add a stop or two, that can quickly slew to 50-60 miles if I have to go downtown. And that's living relatively close to city center (~8mi outside downtown).
I had a Nissan Leaf and the range anxiety was real. I actually couldn't commute to downtown for work, and settled on taking my Leaf to a nearby Park & Ride and rode commuter bus line the rest of the way.
My wife drives a 2017 Volt now, and it's night & day compared to the Leaf. I'm personally ok with the trade-off of carrying a redundant power source for the convenience of never worrying about range again.
Aside from a couple of months where we had an issue with our Level 2 EVSE, we primarily use the battery on it. But it is also our road-trip car, given that our other vehicle is getting towards the realm of unreliable for long-distance driving.
While I wouldn't consider 200mi "local only", I would venture that anything under 100mi is, until destination charging is far more common. At least in the USA (outside the East & perhaps West coasts). Looking at multiple public charging maps, I can't get between Austin & San Antonio Texas without at least 100mi of range, and that's cutting it close.
The scale difference between USA & European countries is rather large, and most people can easily lose sight of that and make statements like 100mi is easily long-distance for Europeans, when most Americans would consider 100mi to be local. I've known people who's daily commute approaches that.
> The scale difference between USA & European countries is rather large, and most people can easily lose sight of that and make statements like 100mi is easily long-distance for Europeans, when most Americans would consider 100mi to be local. I've known people who's daily commute approaches that.
That's why I made sure to include the word "continental". A Nissan Leaf with 100mi/charge in Europe could start in Northern England travel down to Southern Italy (via the Chunnel and France, etc) then back up to Norway because the charging infrastructure is there (and has been built up remarkably in the last 5 years or so from maps I've seen). It might not be the most pleasant trip, but it's more than possible.
Range anxiety is as much a problem of infrastructure as it is what a car is capable of on paper, and range bloat pretty much insures there's no magic mileage that an EV could get to satisfy "every buyer", but infrastructure can get there.
In many cases, too, infrastructure is already there. So many Americans still hear EV mile range and assume they need to do all their charges in a "pump model". Home charging changes the equation and not enough potential EV buyers understand that yet. So many of the people wanting "300mi" or "500mi" as some magic number where they can't imagine having range anxiety don't yet have an intuition for how home charging feels.
The problem with BEV vehicles is we can’t make enough batteries. Right now we could probably make four or five times as many PHEVs which would have a bigger impact.
That's not how markets work and it's only a factor because car makers (other than Tesla) made it so.
If people wanted PHEV in great numbers, the car makers would make 5x more PHEVs.
What the market is telling us is that people would rather buy a fully EV from Tesla (and a few others) than a PHEV. That's why sales of Tesla reached 370k last year when sales of Volt peaked at 24k in 2016.
Volt won't sell 100k a year even if GM made that many.
If Ford and GM started building battery gigafactories in 2016, like Tesla, then they too would have 35+ GWh battery capacity today, enough for 300k+ cars per year.
Today's battery shortages are a direct result of lack of investment 5 years ago.
And Ford and GM will resolve them 5 years from now, if they start investing today. If they don't start investing today, Tesla and Volkswagen will be more than happy to take that marketshare.
In the US, battery production doesn't seem to be the bottleneck. LG Chem and Panasonic battery plants in the US are ramping up much faster than GM/Ford can build cars.
I mean, it's not like this is an exciting new thing; electric vans have been around for a while. They seem quite popular for urban deliveries; I see a lot of DHL and DPD electric vans around here. Also, Electric Ireland (the state company that owns the electric infra) uses them, though its reasons for doing so may be more advertising related.
The big driver of electric vans is operational cost, AFAIK. Dublin doesn’t have emissions rules different from the country as a whole, but delivery companies seem to be keen on the electric vans anyway.
> The big driver of electric vans is operational cost, AFAIK.
Total taxes on gasoline and diesel are significantly higher in Ireland (2.50 USD/gal) than the highest gas tax states in the US (like California with total gas taxes of 73c/gallon).
The incentive to lower emissions is provided indirectly by those those high taxes on gasoline/petrol, which directly manifests in the form of higher efficiency vehicles. There is far less of that incentive in the US.
Electric commercial vans are such an obvious use case with real benefits. I am amazed it took so long. Spoke to a UPS driver who complained about his truck having a ~150 mile range on propane. That's a crime. With regen braking in a stop and start job it's electric for the win. There might even be the possibility to extend the range a percent or two with solar on that big van roof. It's not much, but try extracting gasoline from the sky.
Regen braking isn't yet good enough for most "stop-start" applications. It turns out that unless you make big adapations to your driving style, typical braking generates too much energy too quickly to be able to charge the batteries.
We'd need a breakthrough in battery technology, or some improved supercapacitors, or productionization of flywheels, to be able to take advantage of that energy.
I believe that if people drove exactly the samemas before, they wouldn't get full benefit of regen, but I don't believe people will drive the same as before. I know I don't. Driving without ever using the brakes in my Model 3 is smoother and a bit of a fun mini game. One quickly learns not to accelerate quite as much when there's a visible red light ahead and how much the Regen brakes will slow the car down.
I find my experience to be exactly the same with the couple EVs I've owned. You very quickly adapt to learning exactly when you need to let off the accelerator, and even going from EV-to-EV where the regen curve is different, it only takes a couple tries to adapt to the new vehicle again.
The e-Pedal in the Nissan Leaf is wonderful, if you lift your foot off of the accelerator completely the car will apply optimal regen until the car stops.
Its really freeing not to have to look at the regen gauge at all, I just keep my foot over the brake pedal just in case I need to stop quicker than the regen braking.
What if you’re going down a slight decline where you could normally coast and maintain your speed. Do you have to leave your foot on the pedal and waste battery?
If you want to coast, you have to apply slight pressure to the accelerator. It doesn't use battery. It's a little weird at first, but you get used to it in a couple days, then it's second nature.
Its really intuitive, if you are going a little too fast you just let up the pressure on the pedal. You don't have to think about if it needs to use battery, regen or coast to maintain the speed you want. In that aspect its like using cruise control in other hybrids/ev.
I don't think commercial drivers are going to be paying attention to regen rates as they are trying to make 300 deliveries on their daily run.
For personal vehicles it makes a lot more sense, particularly when you realize using regen braking means less brake and battery wear so it helps lower maintenance. I do similar things with the fuel economy gauge in my car.
Good insight -- the incentives are on maximizing number of deliveries per unit time. I certainly hear (and sometime even see) UPS drivers gunning their giant diesel vans down my street only to hit a stop sign every block.
So the interesting question is can operating costs make their way into the incentive structure (theoretically it should be able to with good vehicle telemetry).
Whether it's worth it or not to adopt that incentive structure is another question: is the cost of fuel and maintenance greater or less than the marginal revenue from each additional package? Because you're right, currently the incentives are infamous for maximizing number of deliveries. However, the famous UPS-minimize-left-turns routing optimization story suggests operating costs do factor in as well.
The more interesting use case for supercaps is in the 60-0 case or in the case of delivery trucks, 30 or 15 to 0. The inefficiency is in capturing the braking energy. If you can use supercaps to capture this inrush then you can trickle it back in to the battery pack. You don't need the capacity to capture all the braking energy nor do you need supercaps to replace the battery. You just need enough buffer to improve your overall efficiency. In something like a delivery truck the battery/cap ratio could even be adjusted with modular packs depending on route. I'm imagining something similar to what Gogoro scooters use but with two kinds of pack.
Supercaps are 28800 Joules per liter, so you'd be needing nearly 700 liters of them to store the energy of the car decelerating from 60 mph once.
700 liters is a lot of volume in a car where you already use a lot of the available volume for batteries - it's more than the trunk and frunk combined on a Model3.
That might still be doable for a delivrry van or a bus, even if it is heavier. Natural gas powered already have quite a big "hump" on top for the pressure botzles with gas, I could imagine putting the supercaps there and the regular batteries inside the chasis to keep the center of gravity low.
0-60 certainly is not the important metric for this application, perhaps aside from rural routes. Most residential delivery, you're maxing out at 30mph.
> Regen braking isn't yet good enough for most "stop-start" applications.
Is this something you have numbers on or just seat of the pants math? Most mileage numbers for electric cars are much better in city driving with start/ stop conditions so I'm a bit skeptical about your methods.
Anybody who has ever driven a Prius, or a Fusion, and looked at their regenerative braking dial will confirm this.
When you hit the brakes on a regenerative-braking hybrid, you will see a bar start to fill up. The bar is divided into two sections.
If you tap the brakes, the bar only fills up a little, and stays in the left section. That means that your regenerative brakes are slowing you.
If you slam the brakes, the bar fills up fully, and is way in the right section. That means that your friction brakes are slowing you.
If you drive 'normally' - like most other people drive, you will never keep the bar in the left section during braking. It will always be half-way in the right section. This means
you are wasting ~half of your braking energy, as friction and heat.
If you drive very smoothly, with no sudden braking, you can keep the bar almost constantly in the left section. But this requires you to start braking a lot earlier than most drivers, when you see, say, a red light.
This isn't a bad thing, since smoother acceleration/braking reduces traffic jams, but it's not how most people drive.
In practice, I have observed that the difference between these two forms of driving (Aggressive braking + accelleration, smooth braking + accelleration) is the difference between ~43 MPG and ~48MPG.
Prius and Fusion are bad examples of how much power a BEV can draw back from regen breaking back into the battery as Prius and Fusion have rather pitiful battery sizes and electronics compared to a typical BEV battery at this point. Current BEVs with "fast charging" electronics in ideal conditions can pull in a lot of regen power even in "slam the brakes" scenarios. The remaining trade-off there now is no longer what the battery can pull off of the regen brakes but that in the case of an emergency braking, physical brakes are still safer than regen brakes.
Well, sure, the Prius does not handle high-torque situations well. You're not going to be pulling a pickup truck out of the mud with it. It's not a great working car - you can't even jump-start another vehicle with it. That's an edge case for most drivers, though.
> If you drive 'normally' - like most other people drive, you will never keep the bar in the left section during braking. It will always be half-way in the right section. This means you are wasting ~half of your braking energy, as friction and heat.
Regenerative braking improves efficiency even without careful driving, additionally you can drive carefully and improve your efficiency even more. This isn't the same as suggesting current regenerative braking isn't "good enough" for start stop applications.
Braking will always involve energy loss, that's just physics. Over time we can improve how much energy is regained during braking but again that it can be better does not prove that it's not worthwhile now.
>
Regenerative braking improves efficiency even without careful driving, additionally you can drive carefully and improve your efficiency even more. This isn't the same as suggesting current regenerative braking isn't "good enough" for start stop applications.
I've never said it doesn't help. When the bar is in the right section, that means that your regenerative braking is operating at peak capacity, with extra friction braking applied on top.
> Braking will always involve energy loss, that's just physics. Over time we can improve how much energy is regained during braking but again that it can be better does not prove that it's not worthwhile now.
The energy loss of regenerative braking is some XY%. The energy loss of friction braking is 100%.
The optimal way to drive with regenerative braking is slow and steady braking. So that you are eating XY% energy loss in your braking energy, and not "Partially XY%, partially 100%". Most people drive in a way that would put them in the latter category.
As another poster mentioned, its quite possible for cars with $10,000 batteries to usefully absorb more energy through their regenerative braking.
Yeah, but for how long? How long does it take you to come to a full stop from 70kph? A few seconds? Even at 30KW, that's not a lot of juice. But parent's point still stands: a Prius weighs a hell of a lot less than a UPS truck, and if one is trying to counter-act the energy required to accelerate, then that truck is going to try and dump a lot more than 30KW into that battery.
And I'm pretty sure your meter is measuring KW, not Wh. Regardless, I question its accuracy in our Leaf. How thick is the cable taking the 30KW and putting it in the batter, when the on-board charger on that thing only puts out 3.3KW? And maybe the answer is, "as thick as your wrist, but it's very short"), dunno, but color me skeptical.
The onboard charger is going from 240 VAC to pack level. That's a somewhat secondary use case in terms of peak load, and has nothing to do with getting up to speed or regeneration, so they don't spend much resources on it.
The main inverter is going between motor voltage and pack voltage, and depending on the car can handle regeneration at upwards of 60 kW (Teslas) to 265 kW (Porsche Taycan).
The cable that is putting 30 kW into the battery? It's the same one that's designed to conduct 80-110 kW from battery to motor in your Leaf.
Even if the benefits of regenerative braking were zero, electric vehicles still make sense for delivery vans. They have known ranges, usually less than 100 miles and the reduction fuel and maintenance costs will be huge. This is why there is so much interest in the Tesla semi and other similar tech where regenerative braking has nearly little effect on milage because the vehicles aren't stopping often.
But existing driving data suggests there will be some non-zero effect on efficiency through regenerative braking so I'm not sure what the point here is.
I'm surprised. I haven't studied this in detail, of course, but regen braking seems to work fine on my Leaf. There is a(n annoyingly) noticeable transition from regen to mechanical braking. The vast majority of the time, it is using regen.
You may be getting stopping power, but the issue is whether you're stopping gradually enough for a meaningful amount of that power to actually be captured in the battery vs. dumped to the environment as heat. I notice this on my electric longboard as well— longer, more gradual brake actions are way, way better for range than stopping more aggressively.
I think to get the power from more sudden stops, you'd need to have some kind of intermediate storage (like a capacitor bank) that could hold that energy for 20-30 seconds while it's streamed at the appropriate rate back into the main battery.
That's neat— I wonder if the gains are simply too small for it to make sense in a mass-market vehicle. Either way, seems like it would be a slam dunk for a delivery truck, city bus, garbage truck, basically any heavy vehicle with a stop-start workflow.
I think it's more that the capacitors are too expensive for mass production - the figures I saw put them at around $10K, for something that contributes a relatively small amount to the performance of the vehicle. Manufacturers would probably prefer to put that towards a bigger battery pack, which would give better overall specs, if a bit less efficiency.
Do you have a source on that? This article, for example, on the Tesla website is clearly aimed at a lay audience, but nonetheless mentions nothing about an intermediate capacitor bank for absorbing spikes of regen braking energy:
I don't get your question. But that is a roadster, not an S or later. But it presumably doesn't mention intermediate capacitors because they don't use them.
I think you and mikepurvis are both saying the same thing - that Tesla and other electric cars are using batteries only, not capacitors.
I will note that the homebuilt electric cars generally had much smaller battery packs, which could not supply the same peak currents that a 50+kWh battery would have.
Sudden stops are not the majority of my stops nor do I suspect that is the case with delivery trucks. In sudden stops, I care more about immediate safety and less about energy recovery, anyway. I would be very surprised if the battery is not soaking up most of the energy under normal conditions.
The Tesla Model 3 can charge at up to 250 KW on a 75KWh battery. That does drop significantly at higher charge levels, but the battery in a van like this should also be significantly higher and the period of time required is significantly shorter.
Does it really require a lot more than 300KW to stop a UPS truck on an average start-stop (traffic light or stop sign) situation?
Heavy acceleration... or a heavy vehicle slowly. F = MA and all that. Tesla's cars are all very heavy for their class though I'm not sure how they compare to a half loaded UPS truck. (On average, a truck is between fully loaded and empty, with emphasis on trying to improve the efficiency in the average case, with an empty truck as the degenerate case.)
My point is that 300 KW is ~400 HP. I can't imagine that these trucks are always stopping vastly more quickly than they accelerate, so this ought to be able to enough to get the majority of the energy, especially taking into account that the regenerative braking is not 100% efficient to begin with.
It just doesn't seem like the issue of being able to disappate the energy with regenerative brakes would be a real problem with a full EV delivery vehicle. I think the people pointing to it as an issue are thinking of either different battery tech or hybrid delivery vehicles that had much smaller batteries (and thus lower peak regen).
This weird claim that evs don't work out in practice because they can't regen is just the latest example of FUD or extreme misunderstanding of the market. Just like people said it was impossible to make a compelling ev, that you could never go a long way, that you could never charge it fast, this latest claim is just silly. Teslas since 2012 (S and later) have had great recharging ability when slowing down. It's not 100%, nothing can be.
This is not accurate about regen technology. Teslas have been having significant regen since their first model s in 2012. What does "not good enough mean"? You don't have to do anything really, you just drive, when you slow down you can have the car do more aggressive regen or less aggressive. Less aggressive gets you less charging. I've had mine on more aggressive charging for 8 years (wow, has it been that long since I got my S?). I actually traded in my first one for the awd model so I could take it to the ski area so my car is 5 years old, 3 years in the first one. Yeah yeah, first world problems, but the take away is regen works great, almost a million people are using it every day they drive (I used to use it every day, but mostly sit at home now).
Regen does pretty well in my Tesla Model 3. I definitely get energy back. Tesla also did a reworking of regen software (in the motor controllers) in 2019 that boosted the fleet's low-speed regen capabilities all the way down to a stop. So it definitely is capturing energy. Also relevant is this great video about using a pickup truck to charge a Tesla, by towing it. They then compare how much energy the Tesla got from the pickup truck, and how much energy the pickup truck burns towing the Tesla. Watch for the very surprising conclusion!
What does good enough mean? It might not be capable of recovering 100% of the energy. And it would be a wonderful thing if it could.
But that's not the only way to define good enough that might be relevant here.
Many electric vehicles have a greater range in city traffic than they have on the highway, which is the opposite of how it is for ICE vehicles. So that means the benefit is quite significant, enough to help with cost savings.
Also, stop/start driving creates a lot of wear and tear on brakes. Maintaining brakes is probably a significant part of operating costs. If regenerative braking can reduce those costs, even if it doesn't eliminate them, it could still be significant.
I think the way my Bolt does regen braking in 'single pedal driving' mode is the way to do delivery trucks. In that mode you almost never use the brakes, it uses regen back-pressure from the motors to stop you. As you let off the accelerator it slows you down. The more you let off, the faster you slow down. If you're stop-starting down the street, I think you'd capture back quite a bit of the power from the little bit of accelerating you're doing between mailboxes or buildings.
In my BMW i3 I hardly ever use the brake pedal. But releasing the "go" pedal all the way seems to add braking to the regen. I know because my brakes are noisy at the moment.
Regenerative braking isn't nearly as efficient on something like a UPS truck or semi, compared to your Leaf. They use hydraulic-based regenerative systems instead.
Why wouldn't it work like it does in a car? If you've never driven an EV, then you might not know that there are three modes of acceleration: power from batteries, regen to batteries, and braking from kinetic. If you don't activate the braking from kinetic but you activate regen to batteries instead, then hydraulic is never activated.
I guess in a semi you brake all wheels and braking just the front ones (where the motors are) wouldn't work?
Although with normal cars, most of the braking is done in the front anyway? And vans can be 4x4, electric motors are probably relatively affordable to put on all wheels, considering things like the Toyota SUVs with AWD system that has electric motor in the back instead of shaft from the engine.
There's a difference between emergency braking and gentle/standard braking. Emergency braking you obviously need physical brakes on every wheel. With gentle braking you can use just the drive wheels, wherever they are, since they can obviously slow the truck down just as quickly as they can speed the truck up, and generally that's all you need.
> Regenerative braking isn't nearly as efficient on something like a UPS truck or semi, compared to your Leaf.
I don't get the point here. If it's 40% effective on his LEAF and 20% effective on a delivery van, then it is. Anything that increases range or decreases the cost of the vehicle is a big win. Regenerative braking is one of many reasons why electric delivery vans make a ton of sense, it's not the only reason.
Workhorse a company that recently bought a closed factory from GM in Lordstown Ohio and got financing from GM to do so has had a concept for an electric commercial van advertised on their website for some time. They used to have a concept pickup truck as well. Believe they were hoping to get the contract to replace the postal services fleet before that got canceled.
Problem is they are a bit of a joke. The pickup they were marketing has an advertised range of like 80 miles and the commercial vans they still appear to be working towards have an advertised range of 100 miles. I think the strategy of going into a market Tesla isn't in yet is a loser if the reason you are doing it is because you can't compete with Tesla. Business isn't going to be anymore willing to accept a crappy product than a consumer is.
It makes a lot of sense from technology, environmental and maintenance standpoints, but unless they can get the price and charging speed down significantly then fleet owners will continue to choose gasoline vehicles.
Swappable batteries, like they have for electric warehouse forklifts, would likely help solve the charging speed issue... but it adds an infrastructure challenge. Someone like the Postal Service would be a good candidate since they have many "warehouses" where they could station battery chargers/swappers. AMZL, UPS, Fedex, etc would be more difficult since they tend to have fewer warehouses that are further from many of their delivery endpoints. It's not impossible, and they'll likely be forced to go electric at some point, but it will require additional infrastructure.
There's a little more going here. GM derives 50%+ of it's income from China at this point. In China the wealthy commonly ride around in vans w/ a servant driving. This work is intended for that market.
I'm sure that market will buy them too, and that market is growing in the US too (mostly NYC and LA) but I don't think that's the intention. The article specifically says, "The GM electric van project is aimed at an important segment of the emerging EV market – commercial delivery vehicles."
It doesn't seem implausible. They're generally outdoors during both operation and storage so they'd get most of the day's sunlight. Though in cities they'd spend a lot of time in buildings' shadows so they'd probably get infrequent direct sunlight.
In pronciple you should be able to do that by extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and combining it with hydrogen from electrolyzed water. It would just need a crazy ammount of energy to get the carbon dioxide (likely by fractional destilation of air) and hydrogen from water, not to mention making the hydrocarbon chains for gasoline.
Using compressed methane could be better (I have seen buses here in Czexh Republic using compressed natural gas, which is basically just methane, very often) or even skipping the carbon and using hydrogen, if you can store it safely and efficiently.
But indeed, if you can store the power directly instead of usinfpg it inefficiently to make fuel, thats the best.
The problem is that battery tech does not scale. To push a bigger, heavier vehicle, you need an even bigger, heavier battery. Its a diminishing returns scenario where to add a little bit more range, you need to add more battery, but the added weight of the battery all but cancels out the range that it adds.
Think of the progression. We have had electric scooters for a while already. We have just started to see electric cars going mainstream. We have seen a lot of interest in large electric vehicles like semi-trucks and commercial vans, but nothing viable yet.
EDIT: Another way of thinking about this problem: Why do Teslas have so much storage space? You could easily fill the frunk with batteries and still have competitive storage space. The reason they don't is because adding more battery really doesn't help.
The diminishing returns argument only holds for aircraft, where the battery has to constantly work to lift its own weight.
For ground transportation, the percentage of the weight dedicated to batteries is important, but so is the ratio of wind resistance to battery power.
For low speed start and stop traffic, it is true that if your car is already 90% battery by weight, adding battery won’t help. For freeway driving, this doesn’t hold at all, since most of the energy is being lost to wind resistance.
The reason teslas have so much storage space is that air doesn’t weigh much, and the empty space helps them design for aerodynamics. Filling the space with batteries would make the vehicle too expensive.
Yes, but battery vehicles are not that much heavier as ICE vehicles and the efficiency of the electric propulsion and the benefit of regeneration works very strongly in favor of the battery vehicles. While it is not released yet, the Tesla Semi even seems to make electric propulsion work for heavy semi trailers.
A big empty frunk makes the car a lot safer and filling it with batteries would make it a lot more expensive.
I agree with your general point, but at the same time, the cost of batteries are getting exponentially cheaper. It's just a matter of time for all transport to be BEV, so it makes sense for companies to want to be ready for the new market realities.
I don't think the price of batteries tells the whole story. Until the tech is viable, people are not going to buy an inferior car.
Most roads, at least in America, have weight limits per axle. A van or semi can only be so heavy, and having batteries take up half your cargo budget is a huge disincentive. This is on top of the severly limited range of a big, heavy, full-of-cargo EV.
I've been wondering how far away Tesla is from a commercial van. The CyberTruck gets a lot of attention and it's been noted that it makes no sense outside of North America.
Except, vehicles with those dimensions and cargo capacity are very widely used outside of NA, they're just covered and called vans. I don't think the CyberTruck could be converted to a van (the glass seems too sloped and the first row too far back), but it seems that when they complete the truck a van program could borrow very heavily.
Imagine they keep the battery capacity, stainless steel exoskeleton design, hauling and carrying capacity, but have a design that has the glass much more vertical, one row closer to the front and a very tall, boxy back. It would sell very well.
Batteries are really HEAVY, Model 3 is heavier than your average Sedan. The trick is to perfect battery weight and its effect on range, in a certain use case.
Commercial vehicles would need 150+ kw batteries, with huge batteries comes huge weight and long charge times. Having said that TSLA is probably best positioned to do well and solve these trade-offs.
It is, but only by ~10-15%. The Camry for instance weighs ~3200-3500lbs, while the 3 weighs ~3500-4000lbs. That includes the dual motor 3 too, whereas Toyota doesn't have the equivalent Camry. The RWD versions of the 3 weigh ~3500-3800lbs.
The C-rate of each cell doesn't change, so the charge time doesn't have to change. It depends on having a suitably powerful charger, but that's not a big issue to install at some warehouses.
The Cybertruck strikes me as a way to scale up materials/technology used at SpaceX to bring down their cost for SpaceX. It very much strikes me as a niche product like the Chevy SSR and not meant to be mainstream like a GMC Sierra or Ford F-150.
It is evident the lower trims of Cybertruck are not tow friendly. But there are lot of people with pick-ups who do not tow, but need a truck bed to carry tools or goods etc.
Honestly I feel like the high trim versions will be the more popular ones for the people who own a truck for image. Those are the people buying the luxury $80k+ Sierras and F-150s.
The CyberTruck isn't even considered legal in the EU because it's dangerous to pedestrians. It's also fairly dangerous to passengers because the monoframe isn't designed to crumple.
They should do an electric version of the Ford chassis in the USA that often gets converted into buses. E450 and so on. Could easily be flexible enough to work for buses, vanlife conversions, minivans, etc.
Disclaimer: I work for GM, anything stated here is solely my own opinion.
I think competition is a great thing. There would be no Tesla without the EV1 (at least not as we know Tesla today). Likewise there would be no Volt PHEV without Tesla, no Bolt EV (My own opinion only).
My point is, the market reacts to what is put out there. There is almost no case where you can find a car without parallel from another company. You can certainly find better and worse, cheaper and more expensive, greater or fewer features, etc; but rarely does the market leave the field open for one player to run wild.
Bit of revisionist history. The EV1 only came about because California was passing laws requiring ~2% of vehicles sold in the state to be EV's by 1997. A regulation which GM campaigned against and then sold their interest in the battery technology to an oil company once they got it scuttled. The oil company proceeded to prohibit NiMH battery technology's use in vehicles through patent licensing and enforcement.
Tesla was only possible because Lithium Ion battery technology came along and supplanted NiMH. They also weren't motivated by government regulation so much as the desire of the founders to make it work.
In 5 years I would be willing to bet GM goes the way of every other company who killed newer technology in order to extend the market for their incumbent products.
Imagine I said: "There would be no iPhone (at least as we know it) without the Blackberry". I guess that could sound like I was minimizing the iPhone. I didn't mean it that way, but if you don't want to give me the benefit of the doubt, ok.
I was only trying to talk about the marketplace, perhaps I should have used more generic terms.
As for the regulatory stuff, it is fair to judge a corporation by outcomes, just remember the employees have their own opinions and viewpoint.
As for what happens in 5 years, we'll see. If gas stays super cheap (it won't) and regulations are removed (they won't be) and EVs stop being more fun than ICE (they won't), then maybe GM will go back to ICE only.
Feel free to be skeptical, but I think a lot of people at GM are excited about EVs.
All of the above is my own opinion only.
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Below is a statement from my company:
"As General Motors continues to drive toward an all-electric future, we’re also ensuring that the charging infrastructure can keep up. To that end, we recently announced a collaboration with EVgo, ChargePoint and Greenlots to establish the largest collective EV-charging network in the United States with access to more than 31,000 charging ports."
Point is that GM leadership did things to inhibit the development of EV's even though they were the first company to develop one. (Blackberry didn't try and kill smart phones they were the MySpace to Apple's Facebook) When you have that kind of culture in the leadership team it's not fixable.
To this day GM continues to announce electric products which they delay or cancel before they come to market (ie: Cadillac Lyriq) and it seems the only reason they have the Bolt at all is to avoid having to buy regulatory credits from Tesla. They also seem to miss the point of why Tesla is successful. Most of the people that buy Tesla's don't do so because they care about the environment. They do it because it is a really great car, that just happens to be electric.
The guys who founded Tesla (not Musk) to produce an electric supercar were coming out of the era where the EV1 had been destroyed. While I don't know if they personally drove an EV1, they were definitely rubbing shoulders with people who were. Did the EV1 product influence their decision to commit fully to developing an electric supercar? We'll never know for sure, but the timing is highly suspect, and suggests that it did.
Using a heat-pump in a vehicle isn't a revolutionary idea, it was just unnecessary as most ICEV can scavenge waste heat from the ICE.
Limited adoption in EVs and PHEVs has largely been due to limited availability as there weren't any commercial adaptations for vehicles. Toyota and Nissan have been using heat-pumps for a while now though.
I'm not sure I would consider it worse. Consider some things:
1) GM chose to put resistive heating in the Spark, Volt, and Bolt.
2) Nissan put a heat-pump in the Leaf.
2) Tesla manages to make the most efficient EVs without using heat-pumps.
So perhaps the choice between a heat-pump or resistive heating goes beyond efficiency? Or maybe in terms of biggest bang for the buck, heat-pumps are low on the list.
Instead of trying to find fault in Tesla for what must surely be the biggest blunder in automotive history and will go down in the annuls of time as the defining moment where Tesla brought utter ruination upon us all, why not consider alternative theories?
Maybe there aren't any commercially available ODM heat-pumps? That would explain why GM didn't use one and why one is absent from the S and Y that are closer to traditional vehicles.
As for the Model 3, it's likely Tesla wanted to minimize space and maximize efficiency by integrating a custom thermal solution and a heat-pump just didn't make sense at the time.
Heat-pumps are more complex than resistive heating and the Model 3's revolutionary SuperBottle integrates all of the vehicles thermal management systems. Perhaps they were playing it safe, or didn't have the time/budget to do a heat-pump. Regardless, the Model Y comes with a heat-pump to feed the Octovalve, the evolution of the SuperBottle.
> Tesla manages to make the most efficient EVs without using heat-pumps
Not in lower temperatures without a heat-pump, which is when a heat-pump is at its most useful. Look how a heat-pump affects the range of the ID.3. There's worthwhile benefit even at 15 degrees Celsius:
> Not in lower temperatures without a heat-pump, which is when a heat-pump is at its most useful. Look how a heat-pump affects the range of the ID.3. There's worthwhile benefit even at 15 degrees Celsius
I'm not sure what you're saying. You're disputing the overall efficiency of a Tesla based on the heat-pump performance of a car that has not yet shipped?
> There's no need for theories. The engineering is well understood. The EV1 got there first.
No one is disputing that the EV1 had a heat-pump first or that heat-pumps are more efficient than resistive heaters.
You slighted Tesla for not having a heat-pump as if it were a serious fault. I am stating that the heating system isn't the most critical system in terms of overall vehicle efficiency.
The two smallest cars in that test are the 64 kWh Kona and the Model 3 Long Range. The Kona has the smaller battery and worse aerodynamics. The Kona achieves 90% of its claimed WLTP range. The Tesla Model 3 Long Range only achieves 78% of its claimed WLTP range. The difference in those conditions is the heat pump. The Kona has one, the Model 3 doesn't.
Again... no one is disputing that heat pumps are more efficient.
Your "road test" video proves nothing. Not only is it not a cold weather driving test, but they test the Kia e-Niro and not the Hyundai Kona. The e-Niro and Kona share the same battery and motor but are not the same car.
The heat pump is optional equipment in the e-Niro and the "road test" video doesn't specify equipment configuration and more importantly isn't testing the climate control system.
If you really want an Apples-To-Apples comparison, why don't you find a comparison of a Canadian Kona to a US one since the US version doesn't come with a heat pump?
Heat pumps provide benefit even at 15c as I have shown you. They were at 7c.
> The e-Niro and Kona share the same battery and motor but are not the same car
Same difference. New Soul EV too.
> The heat pump is optional equipment in the e-Niro
It's standard equipment in Europe. All trim levels have it.
> If you really want an Apples-To-Apples comparison
I don't want this boring brand loyalty from you. It's tedious. Remember where this started: the GM EV1 pioneered automotive use of heat pumps. As you say, "no one is disputing that heat pumps are more efficient". Teslas are less efficient without it. Accept it instead of making excuses for it.
You're going to great lengths to find fault in the only company fully committed to EVs and champion the companies brought kicking and screaming into the market.
> My point is, the market reacts to what is put out there. There is almost no case where you can find a car without parallel from another company. You can certainly find better and worse, cheaper and more expensive, greater or fewer features, etc; but rarely does the market leave the field open for one player to run wild.
That's really only true when the car is intended to be sold in volume. Many vehicles are introduced as compliance vehicles designed to bring down overall fleet emissions levels.
The Volt and Bolt were both compliance vehicles and when the Bolt exceeded expectations in terms of popularity, GM's response was to eliminate the Volt platform entirely as it was redundant to the purpose of the vehicles.
Volt was a stepping stone towards the Bolt. Bolt was intended to be mass volume, not a compliance vehicle. But you are right...once Bolt was good enough there was no need for Volt.
"GM executives wanted an EV that could generate serious volume. The design should be expressive and distinct without veering into “science project” territory, Norris said."
Additionally, if it was only a compliance vehicle it would be sold only in the US. But it was first sold in Korea
"The Bolt is making its commercial debut in Korea, albeit only 400 units initially are being distributed to winners of a lottery draw held among the few thousand applicants who had completed orders. Bolt sales have just begun in the U.S."
I'm not sure how you came to that conclusion, the "olt" in their name and the Chevy badge are the only things they shared in common between the two vehicles. The Volt was designed in Michigan where as the Bolt was designed in Korea.
The Volt is a radically different platform with a completely different drive train, different battery chemistry and BMS, and different cooling solution.
> Bolt was intended to be mass volume, not a compliance vehicle.
Being a mass volume vehicle doesn't preclude it from also being a compliance car. In fact former vice chairman of Global Product Development at GM said it was a compliance car AND Steve Majoros, marketing director for Chevrolet cars, officially acknowledged it's role as a compliance car.
> We can confidently say Bolt EV is not a exclusively “compliance play.”
Bolt was produced 7 years after Volt. I certainly hope it's a radically different platform. I have read previous articles years ago by GM execs acknowledging their battery tech at the time was not good enough for all electric, hence they created the Volt to gain electrification expertise.
By your logic, ANY electric vehicle GM produced would have been a compliance car...because...any electric vehicle would also have met that requirement.
Spark EV was manufacture for compliance. Bolt...no.
> Volt was the unfortunate casualty of an unrelated plant closure to make shareholders happy.
The plant wouldn't have been closed if the Volt, which was a compliance car, were necessary. To my original point, the Bolt's popularity removed the need for the Volt as a compliance vehicle and thus made the plant closure feasible.
> Also, GM argues
That's never a good argument, GM Marketing is never going to issue a statement that contradicts it's actions.
The plant closed because Ford decided Americans don't want an American-built sedan this decade, to great shareholder applause, and GM was forced by activist shareholders to follow suit. The Gen 2 Volt was a sedan in the sedan plant. It had nothing to do with the Volt itself and everything to do with killing the Cruise, with the Volt merely a casualty.
(The Gen 1 Volt was a hatchback intended to push the Hamtramck sedan plant away from being entirely sedans. A huge mistake with the Gen 2 was sedan-ifying it to cut costs at that plant rather than moving it to another plant or following the original Gen 1 plan to move Hamtramck to mixing in more "light cross-overs".)
> That's never a good argument, GM Marketing is never going to issue a statement that contradicts it's actions.
Who said anything about GM Marketing? I'm talking about GM Shareholder reports. It's an arm of marketing, sure, but with the activist parasites chumming the GM Shareholder waters, their Shareholder reports have been quite honest.
The Volt wasn't a compliance car and the only argument you've presented from what I can read is a tautology focused around the fact that it was canceled so therefore was a compliance car, which doesn't make sense given the factors that were involved in it being canceled. It wasn't canceled because it was a compliance car. It wasn't canceled because the Bolt was successful. It was canceled because GM shuttered their entire lineup of sedans.
> In the early 1990s, the California Air Resources Board (CARB), the government of California's "clean air agency", began a push for more fuel-efficient, lower-emissions vehicles, with the ultimate goal being a move to zero-emissions vehicles such as electric vehicles.[50][51] In response, automakers developed electric models, including the Chrysler TEVan, Ford Ranger EV pickup truck, GM EV1 and S10 EV pickup, Honda EV Plus hatchback, Nissan lithium-battery Altra EV miniwagon and Toyota RAV4 EV. The automakers were accused of pandering to the wishes of CARB in order to continue to be allowed to sell cars in the lucrative Californian market, while failing to adequately promote their electric vehicles in order to create the impression that the consumers were not interested in the cars, all the while joining oil industry lobbyists in vigorously protesting CARB's mandate.
Tesla started in California after the EV1 was retired. I seem to recall hearing someone from early Tesla talk about the retirement of the EV1 being a catalyst for them wanting to start Tesla. I don't have a reference for this. They could have been referring to the other compliance vehicles as well.
This is only my own opinion, again.
The section titled "Select historical production vehicles" [0] is interesting.
There were EVs being produced at times before 1996, but they don't really look like anything I would want to drive in traffic. Maybe the Skodas, but nothing besides that.
When it comes to accusing corporations, I think it's fair to judge on outcomes, but also remember that the people who work at corporations have their own opinions and values.
One of the most interesting things I learned from the Brighton veteran car run is that before 1902 electric cars where very much in the running. Along with steam.
Yup, pretty much everything was terrible back then (by modern standards), so there was a very level playing field. The energy density and relative ease of handling of liquid hydrocarbons led to rapid iteration and improvement of internal combustion engines.
Modern battery electric vehicles require power electronics and lightweight, robust batteries, with good power and energy.
Take a look at the top speed of the BEVs in that historical list, then look at the form factor. There are some really good youtube videos out there of people driving them, for example Cheese Louise owned by Simone Giertz (of Truckla fame) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXzcIoq2ing
For GM and Ford, building the vehicle is the easy part. At this point, they all know how to build an electric vehicle.
They definitely need to do a lot more talking. They need to normalize the idea. They need the buyers to believe that it's better. These are commercial vehicles, they need to have a lower cost of operation. And buyers have to believe it. So keep talking (and also build them).
Many consumers believe it's better but can't afford the price of an EV even after incentives.
We don't need more talk, we need better prices. Sub 30k crossovers/hatchbacks is what consumers are buying in droves. These markets aren't exactly flush with EVs or even hybrids.
Those people can’t afford new cars. They probably could afford an LPG conversion kit. Such kits are widely available outside the US, and are a good stopgap technology to reduce CO2 emissions between now and when the fleet is 100% electric.
Plenty of people can afford new cars, just not necessarily expensive ones. The average price of a new vehicle in the united states is around 35k, but the average price of an electric vehicle is closer to 50k.
If you want the average person to be buying an EV, the price needs to come down.
It should also be mentioned that loan terms for new vehicles are insane right now which is partially why the average price of new cars is so high - GM is offering 84 month, 0% loans on its trucks - today!
Also they need to invest in installing a decent charging network, like Tesla has.
Often in the UK you'll see 10 or more Tesla rapid chargers with 200+kw charging rates at key locations, then for everyone else there are perhaps just two 50kw chargers which are either ice'd or broken or both.
Until people see rapid chargers they can actually use in most supermarket and shopping mall's car parks etc it is going to be a hard-sell. We're getting there slowly with things like Ionity, but it is still a rarity to see decent rapid chargers in convenient & plentiful locations.
Of course, for commercial operators this wont be a concern. but for the average joe who doesn't have off-street parking at home then they need a reliable place to refuel.
"At this point, they all know how to build an electric vehicle."
Just not an EV that's profitable that consumers actually want, or can compete with other EV's at similar price point. Tesla Model 3 being best selling car by revenue means consumers are already sold on the idea.
This article is about business vans, not consumer cars. The needs and economics are vastly different.
Do a quick search for 'van upfitter' and see. That's the market they are aiming for. What Tesla offers is completely orthogonal. Given the way that Tesla treats 3rd party repair shops, it's hard to believe that they could possibly make a serious offering in this space.
Ford sold a fully-electric Focus for about 8 years. They've sold multiple generations of plug-in hybrid vehicles, and codeveloped (and sold) a fully-electric delivery van about 10 years ago.
It'd be neat if GM rebooted the Motorhome [0] as an EV, or maybe a plug-in hybrid.
Hell even if they just took the original FWD ICE platform adding a skateboard full of batteries with RWD electric, cover the roof with solar panels, it'd make an interesting plug-in electric hybrid.
Motorhomes are kind of interesting. If you look at the price of a new one it wouldn't be hard to hide the cost of a 150kwhr battery in the price tag. And likely you could run everything off solar panels on the roof.
Would be awesome to see one of these converted into a camper-van/RV, with solar array on roof to charge while parked for days. EV delivery trucks would be a great platform for this because of the space reclaimed from ICE. The same camper EV idea is behind VW's awesome looking "ID Buzz" concept, which alas, has been stuck in concept mode forever.
Should we tell them about the electric vans that we have in Europe for years? Like the Nissan e-ev200 and the Renault Kangoo ZE. Or the PSA vans planned for this year?
These vans don't sell to people doing road trips while sleeping inside. They are for municipalities, local companies, and post deliveries. I don't think it's a lot different in America but I may be wrong.
They might be _less_ appealing in the US, as the US has fewer dense cities, but the US _does_ have dense cities, and these would presumably fit the same package delivery van niche in those that they do in European cities.
The question required to justify a merger instead of partnership: Why would merging make things greater than the sum of the parts? If it doesn't, partner.
I dont see any reason why a GM-Tesla merger makes any sense. But would be happy to hear some.
I thing sgt is alluding to the fact that if Tesla hits an internal economic crisis, its stock price could fall far enough that one of the established automakers could acquire it or merge. And that this would be in their best interest, as Tesla now obviously has a significant lead in EV development and deployment.
But this is contingent on Tesla losing its current trajectory. There would be no incentive for Tesla shareholders to do such a merger the way things look today.
Actually, it probably makes sense for GM, in the same way that the AOL - Time Warner merger made sense for AOL.
GM’s core businesses is threatened by technological change. They might not be around in ten years.
Batteries and self driving cars are a big threat, of course. However, Detroit can probably catch up on those, eventually.
Factory direct sales and service (i.e., “the internet”) are the bigger long term threats, and are ones that GM is contractually forbidden to address. Also, they’ve had 20 years to adapt, and have clearly failed to do so. There’s no reason to expect that to change.
That gives Tesla a sustainable advantage. I’d certainly pay a premium for a car if it meant bypassing the local dealerships’ service counters.
What advantage would Tesla gain picking up all the dead weight that GM has, with its dealerships, unions, pensions, and huge factories dedicated to building ICE's?
If GM went bankrupt and Tesla acquired them, they could get rid of the dead weight you mentioned, dismantle the consumer dealership network, close obsolete union factories, default on pensions, etc.
Most of what would be left is the brand (mostly worthless, except stuff like Chevy trucks and Camero), and the engineering / IP. That might let them expand into more body styles more quickly.
They could also take over GMC’s fleet contracts, and the financing divisions loan servicing. Those are pretty lucrative.
Having said that, I doubt it makes sense, or would go well. Union busting and stealing pensions would severely damage the Tesla brand, and I don’t think they could do any of that stuff outside bankruptcy proceedings. If they could, GM would have already done much of it.
Also, trying to integrate a car company with a completely different business model and tons of legacy baggage is probably riskier than continuing down the path Tesla is on.
> That might let them expand into more body styles more quickly.
Is this positive or negative value for Tesla? A lot of a Tesla's value is it's distinctive look as a status symbol, meanwhile Tesla is primarily production constrained in how many they sell. Expanding into more styles lowers the value proposition of buying a tesla, and they probably can't actually produce enough cars to take advantage of the moderately larger market.
