US made cars had the reputation of being low quality, too big, too heavy and too inefficient for european cities.
Tesla was somewhat different. People bought Teslas not for their promised "self driving" capabilities (I know no Tesla driver that took those promises at face value or got the FSD option FWIW), but one motivation was to "stick it" to snobbish arrogant european manufacturers wanting to develop "clean" ICEs with "green fuels" or other non-sensical crimes against thermodynamics like H2-cars.
Now, Tesla (and the US in general) has a brand toxicity problem, and it is worsening. People I know that would consider a Tesla some years ago now drive electric VWs or BWMs or KIAs, often times much more expensive cars than the comparable Tesla 3 / Y model.
This trend will probably continue the next years, and I don't see a way for Tesla to repair the brand image.
For what it's worth, Tesla is by a gigantic margin the lowest quality-for-dollar American vehicle you can buy. The EV thing was unique until it wasn't.
Go sit in a $90,000 Tesla then go sit in a $90,000 literally-anything-else.
That price range for Ford and Chevy trucks or SUVs for example are outrageously luxurious by comparison (not even considering their additional utility).
To start you are comparing wrong segments (premium vs luxury), wrong platform (ice vs ev) and wrong generations (plush shitbox vs self driving sports spacemobile).
Compare to Rivian or Lucid and Tesla is actually cheapest (and yes worst interior).
You don't need to be car literate to know that a $90,000 Tesla interior feels on par with a bottom of the line Nissan Sentra. I'm not sure you can even buy another American-made car that feels so cheap? Curious if people have an idea of what American make/model feels worse to sit in.
Nobody cared that the build quality is "a little worse" all around because it doesn't meaningfully affect the vehicle's fitness for purpose like the internet comment sections will pretend it does.
As long as the vehicles were meaningfully different in other ways, those other ways were the dominating variables in the equation that make/break the purchase decision. Only when all else is within spitting distance of equal do Nth order variables like "muh door feel" and upholstery texture and speculative comments about reliability long after it's projected to replaced (gotta throw that one in there for the Toyota fanboys) start mattering....because they don't actually result in a seriously different ownership experience for the average user and the average user knows this.
What you originally said is that there is little variance along any dimension.
What you're saying now is there is variance along different dimensions and different people care about different dimensions.
This is also what the original comment that you replied to said: build quality is bad (Dimension A), people were willing to accept it due to being an EV (Dimension B).
My point is that "bad" build quality is basically a non-difference. It was never a problem, or it's a manufactured problem in people's minds. Sure, tesla is probably "worse" from a statistical perspective but the average buyer could never see this. You almost have to be looking to see it, and so you're not gonna see it unless all your other problems are solved.
Like if every OEM sets out to build a car of the same specs, they're gonna all be within spitting distance of each other. You'll have to scrape the bottom of the barrel (i.e. "muh build quality) to find differences.
Tesla was winning before because they were the only ones who set out to build a car of that nature, build quality was a non-issue because it simply isn't an issue. It only became a meaningful one after the fact when more cars of the same sort arrived on scene and people went looking for minutia.
I’m not arguing from a statistical perspective and nor are buyers using that.
When Tesla came out, its build quality was awful but it succeeded because people wanted EVs.
Now there are EVs that don’t feel like Mattel toys, and Tesla is doing very very badly, in part because its build quality is still very bad which is now a glaring problem in a more competitive field.
I agree pretty much with your entire thread, but if Elon was Warren Buffet people who think Tesla is a premium brand would still buy them. It wasn't the lies or the quality that turned people off, it's the cost, lack of customer support and - most impact-fully - that Elon is a whiney little man child and performs racist actions.
- First they went "camera only", alienating people who knows the tech.
- Then they mocked car industry for so long. It was a necessary poke at first, but they didn't get prepared, and the elephant proved that it can run.
- Then Elon's Trump affair and all the shebang happened.
The broken FSD promises, using non-auto rated parts (and related failures), being negligent of their own errors and acting like they are deaf to the criticism is the cement between the layers.
Tesla‘s “vision only” with phantom braking suicide experiments reached court last year in Germany and for the first time the court proved they exist for real and the cars are dangerous. This will be interesting to watch. I tried often free autopilot in model Y and it hits hard the brakes on empty road every other time. Afterwards I stopped using it completely. The car is nice, but without working assistance systems. Lane keeping also does not work reliably. Model Y is nice electric car for people without much requirements like me - it’s spacious and electric range is acceptable.
They had camera-only tech employing multiple 4k cameras running at over 2000fps. Not your grandma's 480p/25fps webcam many car manufacturers use as parking cameras. 2000fps gives you enormous safety margin even in case of individual frame misdetection. The long-tail issues they hit are present on LiDAR vehicles as well but LiDAR is much slower, more difficult to process and sensor fusion adds its own errors.
> The long-tail issues they hit are present on LiDAR vehicles as well but LiDAR is much slower, more difficult to process and sensor fusion adds its own errors.
The long tail is long no matter what. Which is why the most robust solutions deploy sensors with orthogonal sensing modalities that can compliment one another. By relying on only one sensor type, Tesla has made it hard for their system overly brittle, which has resulted in avoidable deaths and destruction.
> LiDAR is much slower, more difficult to process
LiDAR in my experience is much easier to process, as the sensor stream is just an array of distances. Camera in my experience is much harder to process, as the sensor stream is an array of RGB values from which you have to infer distances. So by what metric are you alleging LiDAR is more difficult to process?
> sensor fusion adds its own errors.
You'll have to do a degree of sensor fusion across all the camera sensors anyway, so going camera-only don't absolve you of having to fuse sensor streams and come up with a belief. Sensor fusion in general tends to decrease overall system error as more sensors are added.
Everything is possible. They also might have used some creative metrics giving 2000+ fps. I don't know. Or they might have found some neat trick nobody thought about before.
That would be something like 371Gbps (some assumptions) raw data to process, per camera. I would assume a lot of shortcuts to get that down, but still an unreasonably huge scope to process in "real time" in a car.
Running at 2000FPS in low light (and getting meaningful data at that sensor size) is also impossible to begin with. Even if you can do constant 60, you're in good shape.
2000 can be good for doing multiexposure and maybe detecting fine movement, but assuming that everything running 2000FPS (and processing 16000 frames/sec) is not a simple thing, esp, if you're running in an uncontrolled and chaotic environment.
I was about to comment the same, 2k FPS means a maximum shutter speed of 1/2000, you need a lot of light to capture an image this quickly, in low light conditions it's simply impossible to capture enough light even if using very high end optics and sensors.
I don't know the specifics, maybe they are timing individual cameras in a way they achieve 2000fps with a crisp image in each camera and merging them together. Or maybe they are using some MIT tech that was able to capture super low light conditions.
Being able to capture in super low light conditions is dependent on two things. 1. Your sensor's noise floor, 2. The number of photons you can get per unit time.
First one is dependent on the manufacturing process, and the second one is dependent on your sensor size.
Currently, the leading sensor manufacturers (namely Sony Semiconductor and Canon) are doing very low noise sensors. However, to get both these low noise levels and convincing images needs full frame sensors, at least. APS-C can somewhat close, but it can't be there (because physics).
Even in that case, you can't do 2000FPS and get meaningful images from every one of them.
There's no way that a Tesla car cam sports full frame or APS-C sensors.
AFAIK Sony and Canon are still using some ancient manufacturing process for sensors as chips have the priority and if Tesla has access to e.g. 5nm process for manufacturing sensors that would drastically expand possibilities. Also you bypassed the possibility of timing multiple sensors separately to achieve 2000fps.
The reason sensor manufacturers use "seemingly ancient" (i.e. huge feature sizes) processes in their sensors is you really don't need a more advanced process like in processors.
When you manufacture something which computes, power consumption and internal noise improvement is more drastic with improved manufacturing processes. When you are measuring something, you don't need or want too small pixels or features to begin with.
So having a small gigapixel sensor just because your process allows creates more disadvantage over having a sensor same size with a lower resolution, from light capturing angle. So, low-light sensitivity and resolution is a trade-off.
Back-illuminated sensors used by all contemporary cameras created this leap rather than reducing feature size via improved processes. You already pack the sensor as dense as possible (you don't want gaps or "smaller" pixels w/o increasing resolution either), and moving data/power plane away from pixels is the biggest contributor to noise in the sensor.
See the link [0]. Top left image is full frame, top right is APS-C, bottom left is M4/3, and bottom right is full frame / high-res (60+MP) sensors.
When you look at the images, smaller the sensor, worse the noise performance. When you compare full-size images of top left to bottom right, top left image is better in terms of noise. I selected RAW to surface "what sensor sees" The selected spot is the darkest point in that scene.
You can select JPEG to see what in camera image processing does to these images. Shutter speed is around 1/40s and ISO is fixed at 12800 since it's the de-facto standard for night photography.
> Also you bypassed the possibility of timing multiple sensors separately to achieve 2000fps.
Working on an image which doesn't reflect real world is a bit dangerous, isn't it?
You don't need to give me lessons in photography. I remember around the time of D750 Sony upgraded their sensor manufacturing process from some ancient 100-200nm or so to something newer which improved night performance tenfold. Quantum efficiency got substantially better on a better process. Nobody is telling you to shrink pixels to get 1000MPx, instead about making a better 30MPx sensor of the same size. Yet they aren't using the latest (2-5nm) processes for sensors as at their sizes that would be too expensive (I guess H100 chip-level prices for a medium-format sensor).
Why 2k FPS? I'm not being facetious; human eye sees, apparently, at around 25fps, which is why this is what TVs and cinemas used to use. At that rate, and 144kph, say, the car moves 1.4m between frames.
Fine, so maybe you think this is too much. But 10x this still gives you 14cm between frames, at what is already speeding in most jurisdictions I know of.
2000 FPS seems to my untrained eye like a problem, not a feature.
What do you mean by "sees"? I'll bet you that you can't walk around wearing a VR headset running at 25 FPS for more than 30 seconds without violently emptying your stomach. Trying to watch a movie on a display that doesn't exhibit motion blur also makes me motion sick.
Human brain doesn't see in terms of frames at all. There's a limit where an increase in FPS likely becomes imperceptible to most people but that limit is at least 10 times higher (from personal experience), likely more.
Because you are processing a sequence of a fixed length in deep learning models and the more frames you have, the more accurate your FSD output is. Driving 1.4m between the frames with single-frame accuracy of 80% is quite risky and input correction quite discrete; 14cm is still risky for a proper trajectory planning. Now make it in millimeters and suddenly your trajectory is nearly perfect with only little noise.
Not detecting overturned semis, road debris, and swerving to road dividers is even more impressive with that tech.
Where a relatively simple radar can prevent without running a slow-motion camera rig and a wannabe supercomputing cluster on the car.
To be frank, I'm not against 2000 FPS cameras, but I can't come into terms with not adding a simple radar to detect something unknown is dangerously close and the land missile needs to stop.
I think it's more like that before only Tesla had working lane following system on highways that allowed one to do mostly hands-free driving during long drives but nowadays even the cheapest KIA has it working well so no need to spend extra money on Tesla. I know working-class EU folks driving Teslas who couldn't care less about any perceived toxicity of the brand typical for German green party voting snobs.
Individual owners may care about brand toxicity or may not, but it affects how much tesla can charge for new vehicles and resale value of used ones. Of course this analysis is just MHO, maybe the real cause why EV market is expanding and Tesla is stagnating is something completely different, like missing "android auto" resp. apple equivalent thing functionality.
Modern ICEVs are super clean [1]. Teslas were bought because of their software advantage and I don't mean "self driving" I argue that Tesla in its core is a software company, the old brands quickly caught up on the software part, that is why you are going to see a shift from the Tesla market. Yes sure there is going to be some political factor but I don't think the % is that high, compared to better/improved software more slick UI and overall better build quality.
I see quite the opposite trend tho.
Hybrids are great this is where the push should have been. Dacia is doing really great in Europe. The old manufactures are again not in the loop. Dacia rebranding is quite something[2] their new Duster/Bigster line looks super cool and modern. The market is already starting to slowly shift less digital more analogue[3]. The whole TV screen cockpit, piano black plastic, AI everywhere is monstrosity its atrocious this is not luxury its grotesque.
> US made cars had the reputation of being low quality, too big, too heavy and too inefficient for european cities. Tesla was somewhat different.
How so? Tesla doesn't produce a compact car by any european standard. Their smallest car, the Model 3, is the same size of a VW Caddy, an utilitary/7s seat Family VAN, bigger than a more refined VW Touran, another 7 seater family van or the popular VW Tiguan, a large (by euro standards) SUV.
> typical middle class sedan size IMHO, like VW Passat, Audi A4, BWM 3, i.e. one size up from VW Golf/Tiguan/Touran.
Which have inflated one size/class bigger than they used to 25 years ago.
The people who now drive these kind of cars today used to drive A6, BMW 5 series and E-Class Mercedes Benz. Cars lass/segments have slided both in size and luxury over a few decades.
If you look at car sales number you will see that the cars that sell the most are in the small and compact segment categories. Here is the top10 in Q1 in Europe:
Rank Model Units Sold Manufacturer Segment
1 Dacia Sandero 42,913 Renault Group Supermini
2 Citroën C3 34,064 Stellantis Subcompact
3 Peugeot 208 33,821 Stellantis Supermini
4 Volkswagen Golf 33,663 Volkswagen Group Compact
5 Renault Clio 31,754 Renault Group Supermini
6 Dacia Duster 31,217 Renault Group Compact SUV
7 Volkswagen T-Roc 30,949 Volkswagen Group Crossover
8 Volkswagen Tiguan 29,733 Volkswagen Group SUV
9 Toyota Yaris Cross 29,226 Toyota Motor Europe Crossover SUV
The BMW i3 was an interesting car, it's a pity they cancelled it and don't offer it with current drive train / battery. There are 3rd party battery upgrades available though if you get a used one.
> but one motivation was to "stick it" to snobbish arrogant european manufacturers wanting to develop "clean" ICEs with "green fuels" or other non-sensical crimes against thermodynamics like H2-cars
Eh? Most European manufacturers (maybe not Stellantis) had at least one BEV by the time any Tesla was available in Europe. I'm not sure any European manufacturer has ever released a production hydrogen car? That's mostly Toyota.
There was also the VW eGolf/eUp, and the pre-Zoe Renault (which IIRC was a bit of a disaster). The first Tesla didn't become available in Europe til after the Zoe came out.
EDIT: Actually, looks like the eGolf was a few months after the Tesla Model S.
I don't know anything about Tesla cars or how good they are, and I don't know anything about BYD cars or how good they are. But I can say that 4 door BYD cars are advertised around here for less then £20,000. While 4 door Teslas appear to start around £40,000. That's a pretty big difference when considering a first time electric car.
A £20k BYD is going to be a super short range model though. I think models that compete with Tesla are more like £30k, which is still a lot cheaper than Tesla but not quite as crazy as you're saying. Let me check:
Yeah Model 3 base is £40k for claimed 323 miles, or £45 for 436 miles.
BYD Dolphin is £30k for claimed 265 miles. Dolphin Surf (which is a lot smaller than a Model 3) is £19, £22, £24k for 137, 200, 193 miles.
I guess £22k for 200 mile range is not as bad as I was expecting actually. But still you can see why people who can afford it would still buy a Tesla. (Or an equivalent not sold by a twat.)
Stripped down Model Y is coming, was unearthed just a day or two before.
Still going to be far more expensive for being overall larger, higher range, better tech. There's no real ways for Tesla to cut cost without building smaller car (all while Americans are demanding larger model lol).
A friend of mine is in the process of getting a car. He insists on having an EV, but never a Tesla as long as Elon is benefiting from it. So he's going for an VW ID3 instead. Many people must be thinking like this as well.
Electric car sales were 20% of all sales, so 26% increase is hardly a "surge". Going from a low base this is supposed to be higher.
I think what we are seeing is that electric car interest isn't as strong as governments hoped for. I used to own an electric car now I'm back to a hybrid.
Q4 sales in the US will be interesting because of the removal of the tax credits and the increasing electricity prices that AI is causing. Low prices of fuel in the US means that it's not exactly cheaper to run an electric car in the US.
I agree with the spirit of your comment, but I disagree on the first sentence. If EV were 1% of all sales, a 26% increase would be very low indeed. A 26% increase when you have 20% of a stable market is basically a company getting from a fifth of the market to a fourth, in a year. That's _absolutely_ a surge. Increase 5% of your market share is crazy high.
I guess pedantically it would be 15% to 20% is what happened. I guess what I am also trying to say is that the capacity for production is there for much higher, but it's just not being utilised. See Tesla sales being flat/down, or the bloodbath in Chinese vehicle pricing.
Well, in this economical situation it absolutely isn't in most people's immediate plans to buy a new expensive car.
But yes, also, the naive hope of many politicians was that the huge, thorny issue that is traffic emissions would just resolve itself by everybody magically switching to EVs, because actually effective measures to curb emissions are rather unpopular.
Much of PM2.5 particles is generated by tires. EVs are much harder on tires, often needing tire replacement after just 1 year. So on one hand, you get rid of PM2.5 from fossil fuels, on the other hand you increase tire PM2.5 five fold.
They are not much harder on tires. Most of the EVs (like 90%, excluding USA behemoths) are only 20-30% heavier than a ICE vehicle of the same class. There are plenty heavier cars on the roads for the last century.
And where did you get this 1 year per tire metric? I see anecdotal reports that on EV with normal tires they last as long as on typical ICEs. I can't find any comprehensive report for either side for now.
Well, given typical speed limits in the city and most of the country roads, neither ICE cars not EVs can really utilize their torque or acceleration. Sure, you can go somewhere quiet on a weekend and rev up, but people commuting or driving for groceries don't really accelerate more than ordinary.
I'm not trying to diminish EV capabilities btw. I'm just saying that "tire scare" is waaay overblown in media.
Yes. Though carbon emissions are of course the most burning issue, with emissions caused by traffic decreasing very slowly if at all, unlike other major CO2 sources. But indeed EVs only really solve a few of the many external costs of personal vehicles.
> I think what we are seeing is that electric car interest isn't as strong as governments hoped for. I used to own an electric car now I'm back to a hybrid.
In France, there is a wide anti-electric campaign. From the "leftist-green" media such as Reporterre, to the right wing ones.
Same for political parties, from the left PCF to the right RN.
I don't know how much the battle matters, compared to pure money.
For example, according to this source, people bought less BEVs in May because... they want to benefit from the government subsidy later this year. So maybe the headline will read "incredible success" six months after having read "terrible failure". [1]
Surprisingly, BEVs are _more_ visible in the country side (where many smaller models make complete sense as a "second car" for a household that needs to drop kids at school, get the groceries, etc...) than in cities. Never mind.
Even more surprisingly, people do buy some French EVs, even though, well... our glorious national brands have spent the last few years working hard on removing the knobs from the autoradio, and that justified all the "R&D tax rebate" they could get, but sadly none was left for chemists and physicists to increase range, lower prices, etc... Again, go figure.
> Surprisingly, BEVs are _more_ visible in the country side (where many smaller models make complete sense as a "second car" for a household that needs to drop kids at school, get the groceries, etc...) than in cities. Never mind.
Not that surprising; countryside folks own houses and can charge at home for cheap, while city dwellers generally can't and have to use overpriced, inconvenient public charging.
The PCF is arguing for development and of a subsidized Kei-like electric car (basically a 10k€ EV), and a retraining of car manufacturing workers before any punitive incentive (ZFE, carbon tax on car fuel). This is hardly anti-electric.
I don't know about reporterre though, I've heard of them but I don't think they really have any influence on anyone other than Greenpeace afficionados.
Also? The R5 is great, and I bet the backlog is really long.
The PCF was strongly against the interdiction of new thermal car sales in 2035. This is the kind of struggle that will kill small electric cars business opportunities.
Even the "punitive" vocabulary is political and mostly comes from right-wind politicians.
Yes the R5 is great and way cheaper than the mean car price.
Question - anyone here have one of those “most popular” VWs? The article says they’re called id.3 id.5 and id.7. I’ve ridden in an e-Golf (California compliance car basically), but not the newer ones. The e-Golf did not impress, so I’m curious if the new ones are any good; range, noise, fit and finish, basically.
I owned an ID.3. It was a great car held back by just passable software. But much of the software issue was a non-issue in real life since Android Auto or Carplay would take over the screen. But the failure was big enough for VW that they went into business with Rivian and paid $1B to get their software tech for future vehicles.
The ID.3 was never sold in the US (too "small"), so you wouldn't have seen it in CA.
The ID series is a ground-up electric platform with a lot more space inside. The e-Golf is just a Golf with a (poor) electric engine and battery bolted on.
Not sure which of the three, but afriend bought one new here in the UK for around £22k - which at the time the dealer assured him he could sell back to them at £15-18k a year later.
He needed the car to tide him over to a work based EV scheme.
A year later the dealer said he'd be lucky to get £8kfor private sale and that the dealership didn't want the car as had 5 on forecourt already.
He's kept the car and loved it, but 2nd hand EV prices here can be great (or bad if you are a seller) - I saw a 10year old Nissan Note EV for £1K the other day - if I already had a charger I would have snapped it up, even if the range was less than 50 miles now.
>I’ve ridden in an e-Golf (California compliance car basically), but not the newer ones.
It wasn't (just?) a compliance car. It was a testbed for EV development by VW. The ID Models have had serious software problems, the ID.7 is the newest and best one. An even smaller car than the ID.3 was announced some weeks ago.
But still. Despite some initial problems, the ID platform is a real EV with high quality and should not be compared to a testbed design from 2014. I think the numbers speak for themselves.
First generation of ID.something was bad joke. Second generation is all right. Some people still complain about software, but I don’t have first hand experience anymore.
EU doesn't really like to do start-ups in traditional fields dominated by century-old players, so the policies all focus on protecting those monopolists and not helping create startup to disrupt them or that could threaten them.
That's why they were anti-EV for so long, since that threatened their lucrative ICE dominance.
> Investing in Renault means investing in new thermal cars.
Not for long though; the EU fleet emmission rules and fines are clear in this regard. If the fossil lobby does not manage to nerf them, no big mfg will build ICE passenger cars for the EU market after 1.1.2035, while since this year the rates got higher and will get higher again in 2030. In some countries ICEs will have only marginal marketshare in a few years already. The manufacturers are preparing accordingly.
It's a really nice car to drive though. Trunk size is too limited and get a hard pass from me (I think my next car will be an utility vehicle for my windsurf). But 25k for the battery size, interior, how nice it is to drive, I think is fair when you compare in the price range (Spring, e-C3).
I agree it's a nice car but value-wise it can't compete even with KIA Stonic. Spring is terrible due to a very low range, agreed. I think we need two more generations of batteries to make EVs fully usable, ideally 800-1000km for a single charge or 80% charge after 10 minutes for a mid-size SUV.
It's 2035 and it is not a strict ban, rather it's a fine of 95 euro/1g of CO2 emmissions above 0g/km, so it's 9500 euro for a car emitting 100g/km, for example. That is to be paid by the manufacturer for every such car sold. So if Porsche decides it can sell their gas hogs emitting 200g/km and the customers will swallow the 20k fine, in theory they could.
The limits and fines are getting progressively tighter since 2020, with steps in 2025, 2030 and the final step in 2035.
To me the article sounds like "The guys we hate have decline" - (from 100k sold to 95k sold) "but the sales of the guys we love surge 26%" (from 10 to 12.6k)
it's nice that I'm getting minus points, but this is the case here. Tesla sold c.a. 100k and the decline is (I was mistaken) 30% which means that they lost 42k models sold, but the 36% increase on the sold cars for VW for example is from 33-44k which is 10k more. That's the basics of percents, +x% is not equal -x% and Tesla is still leading.
Tesla is also leading in the amount of luggage (important for me), however the interior of EU cars looks much better (with exception for model S, which has actual hud, not a wooden plank under the windshield)
Too little and too late. Draconian measures are necessary to push automakers into compliance and to push consumers to buy. It's expensive unless we want to sell out to China completely, but necessary and in the end, affordable.
The carrot will be much more well received than the stick. Price cap chargers and make sure they're everywhere, including kerbside.
Convert public fleets. It's much more reasonable to mandate that local councils and public servant staff cars should be EV-only first; these tend to have short turnover periods of three to five years anyway. That forces the public bodies to actually address the details of adoption.
Not to mention buses and public works vehicles like refuse lorries. Expensive, but if the transition has to happen it has to happen.
But I think the momentum is there on its own:
> In August alone, 154,582 EVs were snapped up, accounting for 20% of all new car sales. Analysts note that a 20–25% share is enough to meet the EU’s emissions targets for 2025–2027 and Europe has just reached that milestone.
There's a self-reinforcing circle that as more people have EVs, they become more "normal", and the more car-centric policy caters to their needs. People who are irrationally scared speak to friends who own one or ride in EV taxis (actually, taxis are nearly always hybrids at the moment?)
Nobody is "irrationally scared" of EVs. We are rationally scared that, once enough well-off people have switched to EVs, this market share will be used as an excuse to stop poor people from driving their petrol or diesel cars. ("Rationally" because this is already happening.)
> We are rationally scared that, once enough well-off people have switched to EVs, this market share will be used as an excuse to stop poor people from driving their petrol or diesel cars.
I don't think that is rational at all. Have you ever looked at vintage car regulations in Europe? There are none, basically-- if your car is old enough, neither accident nor emission mitigation/prevention are required at all.
Why would you expect that this is going to change?
For one, cars old enough to be without emissions or safety equipment are becoming more rare, to the point that they are now worth a significant amount of money. Anything that is currently in that grey, "pre-classic" area is already a very complicated machine that is very hard to maintain without OEM spares and support. Anything newer is designed from the ground up to hit a specified lifetime then get ground up into flakes for recycling. Opinions vary on the positive outcomes of this.
For two - regulations are constantly changing. Many cities have low-emissions zones. The EU is making significant changes to their vehicle end-of-life laws.
"Poor people" are not going to be maintaing classic old cars as a cheap form of transport, like some rose-tinted view of Cuba. They already lease brand-new cars.
This is not true. ULEZ already exist and are mandatory from the EU in several cities of my country. (If your city has a population of more than X, you must implement a ULEZ.) People with 15 year old diesel cars can no longer drive in those cities. Exactly the same people who can't afford to change their cars. We are not talking “vintage” cars. We are talking poor people cars.
Where buying a car is really expensive? The only places that come in mind are those packed cities that require a parking place for a car. Nothing to do with EV.
Europe is not the US, we have somewhat functional public transport in most parts of the continent, you are not _that_ dependent on a car. Also, EVs will become cheaper than ICEs, with or without subsidies or tax incentives, it's only a matter of time. Battery prices on a cell level approach €40/kWh. A new drive-train incl. battery will be < 2000€.
Also, given that polluted air affects poor people the most, getting rid of all that exhaust of old worn out cars with ICEs will be a good thing in any case.
>Europe is not the US, we have somewhat functional public transport in most parts of the continent, you are not _that_ dependent on a car.
That's a case by case basis and not valid blanket-wide over everyone in every city on the whole continent. Outside of HN bubble, not everyone lives in big cities with high speed rail, underground subways or working remotely in small villages with amazing bicycle paths
A lot of tier 2 cities are heavily underdeveloped in that regard and need a car for commute to work outsider or inside the city, unless you wanna spend 1-2+ hours/day, each way, on public transit switching and waiting on buses since such cities sprawled out and grew in size a lot, but public transit infra is still stuck in the 90s with slow busses and no trains. Car ownership is still the only way you can have some free time between work, sleep and commute.
This is all fine and well, but eventually once the peasants have taken enough fuckings on enough axis over enough people's pet issues they will realize the trend and you and all your buddies who think it's ok to just fuck people will lose your heads or get to share a hole or whatever. Maybe it'll be offset by productivity gains and take a few generations to get there but fucking the peasantry because the rulers know better, or whatever the argument is, isn't a sustainable way to run societies.
As the middle class shrinks it becomes clearer that these sort of heavy handed policies are almost exclusively peddled by what marx would call the bourgeois. You don't see the "my car is a significant expense" or "home ownership isn't a given" class people going off advocating for policy like this on minor issues.
Most people where I live, even the poorest, can afford to own a car and almost all of them do. It’s regulations that are making car ownership impossible for those people. It’s the government that is a bourgeois enemy of the people.
EU tried that with Russia, then we were dependent on oil/gas, and somehow the dictatorial regime fscked us on Ukraine, and now all of us are wasting so much more time and money.
Everybody already knows China is going to invade Taiwan. The global chip market is not going to like that, and this will happen only because we played the good guy with a dictator.
And then all of this will be retroactively be seen as aiding and collaborating with evil, again.
"Curse your sudden and inevitable betrayal", again and again.
TSMC (taiwan) is the only company that has reached the latest and greatest chips tech. Apple gets their chips from Taiwan only. AMD. Intel. Everyone.
Taiwan does not let TSMC export the latest tech, exactly because they would lose USA protection.
...basically it's a 160B$ industry with something like 70% of the global output, as per last year data.
Now imagine Taiwan blowing up the industry to prevent China from controlling it, or China destroying the industry to crash the global economy, weaken the USA protection and come back a few years later.
China will not be affected much by the sudden non-existence of Taiwan Chip industry. They produce everything internally. The rest of the world would be thrown 5+ years back in terms of tech, and I don't even want to know how much it will take to ramp up older production elsewhere.
Remember the problems caused by Covid, where the car industry had problems getting chips? That was a mere shift in who gets the chips first, the production was still there.
70% less global chip production? Buy a cars/computers/whatever as soon as China invades, it's going to last you for a while.
> Now imagine Taiwan blowing up the industry to prevent China from controlling it, or China destroying the industry to crash the global economy
While you're at it, you can also imagine an alien invasion. You would have to be out of your mind to destroy your country's economy on purpose this way. Did Hong Kong destroy its financial sector when it was politically overtaken by China? China depends on the global economy, it needs to avoid any crash because it is an exporting country. This argument is so irrational that I really don't know where people are getting it from. This is a total misunderstanding of Asia in general, Taiwan, Chinese culture, economy and geopolitics.
> China will not be affected much by the sudden non-existence of Taiwan Chip industry. They produce everything internally.
Of course they will! In 2024 China imported $385 billion worth of integrated circuits.
The German car industry will not survive and Germany, together with the EU will go through a major economic crisis.
That the Netherlands adds 500 jobs making EUV machines is a tiny consolation for mass unemployment in Germany, Italy, the Czech Republic, Hungary and France with millions of jobs lost.
Again, free trade is an insane idea when the proposition of one side is an existential threat to the other side.
> ASML Holding N.V. (commonly shortened to ASML, originally standing for Advanced Semiconductor Materials Lithography) is a Dutch multinational corporation
ASML just makes the steppers. The EUV secret sauce is made by Cymer in the US and uses US R&D licensed of Sandia Labs. US can always retract the EUV license and sell the Cymer light sources to Canon or Nikon if they wish. ASML has no EU golden goose of its own that's why it has to obey US rules and policies.
> US can always retract the EUV license and sell the Cymer light sources to Canon or Nikon if they wish
Then why are they not doing it? Isn't it in the national interest? Why not create a US company that makes EUV machines like ASML does? Why is there only one company in the world capable of doing it if they are "just steppers"?
btw what is used now in EUV machines are step and scan scanners and ASML builds the whole EUV scanner system (stages, metrology, controls, system integration). Scanners replaced steppers for leading edge nodes.
Oh and Cymer is owned by ASML from 2013, so it’s ASML's own US light source business working with TRUMPF (Germany) for the CO2 drive lasers.
SVG didn’t hand ASML a magic EUV license. ASML bought SVG lithography two decades ago to expand in dry/immersion optical litho and US market access. EUV matured later. SVG had momentum in DUV and still couldn't sustain at 193nm while EUV is an order of magnitude more complex. ASML builds the whole scanner and owns the integration IP that makes the parts actually produce yield at scale. The light source matters but without ASML's stages, metrology, optics integration, contamination control, control software etc etc you've got a science project instead of a tool a fab can run. ASML won because the integration problem beat almost everyone else.
What I meant was that once ASML acquired SVG, it also become a US-based operation, which gave them the leverage over Canon and Nikon when acquiring a EUV license from the US gov as it was now also a US company, not just a Dutch one.
Reading your first comment in full, it seems like you actually did, at least that's the impression I got from the wording you used. Then you toned it down and didn’t address the other arguments.
What I meant is that simply giving a license to company Y is not the same as being capable of producing the EUV machines that ASML produces. It's similar to TSMC, anyone can buy an ASML machine, but there is only one TSMC, because it's not just about the machine and not just about the light source.
And it's a JV with DoE meaning all the usual security rules and in practice the dutch are completely firewalled from everything, they don't even have access to the EUV tech.
You missed this part in the History section:
"In 1997, ASML began studying a shift to using extreme ultraviolet and in 1999 joined a consortium, including Intel and two other U.S. chipmakers, in order to exploit fundamental research conducted by the US Department of Energy. Because the Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) it operates under is funded by the US government, licensing must be approved by Congress."
Just read further into the history section of the same page, you don't have to be obtuse and post the full form of the company, everyone here knows this. The world is nuanced, and this is not reddit.
It's always the same, free market when it goes my way, fuck you if it goes your way.
In 50 years there will be literally nothing left that China doesn't do better than the west, it would be better to build trust and commerce now than attempt to delay it with artificial borders (tariffs, export bans, &c.), we're just delaying the inevitable and making a (commercial) enemy for no reason
> In 50 years there will be literally nothing left that China doesn't do better than the west
This is not at all obvious or inevitable. The exact same concerns where voiced when much of the electronics industry moved to Japan 30 years ago, but "Japan doing everything better than the west" never really happened.
China is facing the exact same challenges that made US, EU, Japanese and Korean industry stumble before: Your own success raises wages and living standards, which inevitably decreases competitiveness. China still has a lot of catching up to do (in living standards/median income) and despite that it already struggles in some sectors to compete with countries like Vietnam or Indonesia.
China is facing the exact same challenges that made US, EU, Japanese and Korean industry stumble before: Your own success raises wages and living standards, which inevitably decreases competitiveness. China still has a lot of catching up to do (in living standards/median income) and despite that it already struggles in some sectors to compete with countries like Vietnam or Indonesia.
And that's totally fine to Chinese people. They don't want to work in a factory forever. They too, would like cushy office jobs.
We Europeans have sold tens of millions of cars in China for decades. The string attached was that you had to make a joint venture with a local company (which, by the way, shared the risks and increased the margins).
Why can't they do so the same here?
And I don't want to hear no "because Chinese EV industry got help by government, it's unfair", so what? In Italy alone we've given more than 200B euros to Fiat, which milks governments from Serbia to Poland out of taxpayer money. Tesla has received 16B+ in direct funding from taxpayers in US alone, got more in foreign countries to open plants there.
European and American auto industries shouldn't rely on artificially gatekeeping foreign automakers.
We've tried with Japan in the 80s forcing them to produce here, now it's China.
I don't like any of this, it's against taxpayers, it's against consumers. Free market goes both ways.
How do you want to push Automakers into compliance? Every single European Automaker is begging people to buy their EVs, yet the amount of buyers is no where near where regulators want them to be. What would you do to Automakers?
Making cars in Europe is getting near impossible, "draconian" measures mean that indeed no European Automaker will make ICE cars any more, because they will all be bankrupt.
The real problem regulators can't regulate away is that people are not buying EVs, even when manufacturers are selling them at prices where they barely break even.
> the amount of buyers is no where near where regulators want them to be [...] The real problem regulators can't regulate away is that people are not buying EVs
To quote the article:
Analysts note that a 20–25% share is enough to meet the EU’s emissions targets for 2025–2027 and Europe has just reached that milestone.
Electric grid is incapable of 1:1 switching to EVs from gas/diesel vehicles. If you want to collapse economy, just enforce it with your draconian measures.
Not sure why this old talking points keeps being repeated?
BEVs are like the best consumers imaginable for our grids. Their owners get hourly contracts and perfectly time their charging when the prices are low helping stabilize the grid.
Some even grid companies even support adding cars charging to the ancillary markets further increasing grid reliability - while also paying the BEV owners for their service.
Taking in the supply chain from producing oil, refining it and transporting it the change in electricity consumption is negigible because especially the refining step is quite electricity intensive.
But if no refining happens in a market then something like a 20-30% increase in electricity usage is expected.
Because it's true. Most EU countries aren't built to have 100% EV. Not every country is Norway. Spanish or Czech grids collapse from hot weather already, how much worse would it be when you suddenly plug millions of vehicles? With 220V one would need 1-2 days to fully charge continuously to get to 100% depending on battery size; perfect timing is a wishful thinking, you'd get peak charging times as well. Speed chargers are very few and their price is now approaching gas prices already, and electric grid can't bear many of them anyway.
Nobody is constantly charging their completely empty EV.
A typical commute of 50km/day at 20kWh/100km means you have to put 10kWh into you car (per day). A 230V outlet can deliver 3,7kW at 16A, so your car would be topped up again after about 3h.
Tesla Supercharger prizes at 20kWh/100km are in the same ball park as Diesel at 5l/100km. Charging at home should approach half that, and charging with PV will amount to <2€/100km.
He is an anti-nuclear troll, randomly posting nonsense about nuclear everywhere he goes. It's always emotionally driven bullshit, crafted to create a reaction.
Just google his pseudo. I wouldn't be surprised if he was sponsored by a foreign agency to destabilize political discourse. Considering he is from Sweden, the potential of Russian influence isn't negligible.
In any case, whatever he says, is at best, extremely idealistic and based on wishful thinking about the true capabilities of renewables (we are still waiting on reliable and cost-effective storage, if that's even possible at scale for European weather patterns).
Please do tell me where I am wrong. I love how someone coming with the near scientific consensus on the cheapest and fastest path to a green economy is branded as a "russian troll".
You truly are completely out of your depth here. As evidenced by your previous attempt [1] where you didn't know that China so far has finished 0 reactors in 2025.
You seem to be talking around the issue? Sprinkled with misinformation. Please do tell me when the Spanish and Czech grid collapsed due to "hot weather".
Of course not at all engaging with the point about BEVs acting like demand response for a grid. Scheduling their charging to not add more load when the grid is already strained, unless forced to do so due to e.g. being on a roadtrip without possibility of timing the charging and therefore paying a premium for expensive electricity.
All in all I see a lot of hand waving and little substance.
Did you miss the portion where on average the refinement of raw crude to gasoline/diesel is neutral in terms of electricity usage compared to just driving a BEV?
Nobody is planning for this magical instant 1 to 1 switch to EV. It will happen gradually.
Most of the world is playing catch up with Norway (97% EV market share) - if their grid will handle the transition then it is possible. If it will not then others will prepare better.
Well I sure did not have EV totalitarianism on my bingo card.
So all the European societies need to be forced and pushed with draconian measures and punishments, while racist excuses are made for why other groups are exempt from these climate punishments.
It is textbook abusive guilt shifting of narcissism. It’s not like most politicians are not grandiose, especially the ones who not only think they are some form of special one’s chosen by God, but have even just effectively declared themselves to be the only God they need (i.e., some form of external regulation). Talk about peak grandiose narcissism, this time with robots and AI.
Into compliance? Compliance of what? Also why do you want draconian measures to push consumers to buy? Shouldn't you let consumers buy whenever they can afford to change their cars? What kind of draconian measures are you thinking of, emission regulations that make it impossible for poor people to drive their cars?
It's not at all clear why poor people should ever want to leave their allocated urban subdivision. We certainly don't want them clogging up tourist spots that should be kept for appreciation by sophisticated wealthy foreigners.
We don't want the CO2 that is created (and other consequences of oil production/consumption), the money can be spent on something better, and we don't want to depend on oil-exporting countries more than necessary.
Tesla was somewhat different. People bought Teslas not for their promised "self driving" capabilities (I know no Tesla driver that took those promises at face value or got the FSD option FWIW), but one motivation was to "stick it" to snobbish arrogant european manufacturers wanting to develop "clean" ICEs with "green fuels" or other non-sensical crimes against thermodynamics like H2-cars.
Now, Tesla (and the US in general) has a brand toxicity problem, and it is worsening. People I know that would consider a Tesla some years ago now drive electric VWs or BWMs or KIAs, often times much more expensive cars than the comparable Tesla 3 / Y model.
This trend will probably continue the next years, and I don't see a way for Tesla to repair the brand image.