You fail to realize two things. 1) car compabies are retooling already every couple of years with each model change. They are good at that, that's what they do. Due to scale it seems that it takes longer, but given the headaches Tesla had with the Model 3 the effect is not as big. 2) EV are actually a lot easier to build than ICE powered cars. So the only thing that held incumbents back was low expectations on the sales volume. And that is changing.

This also explains to large degree the momentum these compabies have once the move. And don't even talk about first time pass yield for the Model 3 compared to other companies out there.

EDIT: Typos

How does the sales organization at your dealer sell the model of the future without trash-talking all the other gas-guzzling vehicles in the lot? How do you convince a dealer dependent on the revenue from servicing those engines to go against their self interest and sell something without that revenue stream?

I agree with your line of thinking. They are absolutely married to that ball-and-chain for whatever amount of time it takes them to go all out.

It seems like the thing that helped American auto makers "bounce back" after things went extremely south before 2010 is also their biggest Achilles heel outside of being inherently gas-based vehicles: their choice to create entire lines of cars that's profitability hinged on the interchangeability and cross-model compatible frames and parts is also the reason they can't simply "re-tool" or redesign any of their models without completely scrapping the ideas and starting from scratch.

In a sense I almost feel like if these car companies decide to do as much they may have to entirely scrap previous car models and start anew. Imagine Ford saying goodbye to the F-150 / general truck models, the Mustangs, the Explorers. Chevy and Dodge saying goodbye to the cars and trucks they are able to sell to law enforcement, military, and government.

I really can't. Maybe I'm oversimplifying things but from my outside, rookie POV it seems like these are huge reasons due to the fact that their entire manufacturing supply line is reliant on this model that's helped them all but die off in competition to foreign auto makers.

Ford is scrapping selling cars in the American market. Only the Mustang and some Focus crossover variant will be sold. Maybe they are planning to come back with pure electric vehicles sold only at dealerships they own under a different sub-brand? Sort of like Saturn. One could hope that a legacy car company could take such a radical departure from their previous sales strategy, but who knows. It might even be illegal for Ford to open up their own dealerships for an all-electric brand near existing ones.

> Maybe they are planning to come back with pure electric vehicles sold only at dealerships they own under a different sub-brand? Sort of like Saturn.

They're betting their entire North American future on light trucks and SUVs.

That is what it looks like and what all the PR says. Definitely where their current profit margins are. I am just hoping that a company with such a long history of making great vehicles can make the transition to electric cars. This might be a possible pathway.

They tried but didn't get much market traction. They had the flex vehicles that could take different fuel mixtures, and they had a few hybrid cars, and eventually some battery cars but they were nothing compared to a tesla, and against leaf and volt never seem to get much market traction. The ford family person who lead the company tried a little bit but they could never seem to overcome the existing investment and exiting investment in designing ice cars.

sales people have no problem with cognitive dissonance, they do it all day for thousands of years now.

The question is not their ethics, it is whether their bosses would let them do it.

A bit of propaganda, sure, but "Big Auto can't stop bellyaching about the 'burden' of electric vehicles".. has made me somewhat rethink how quickly traditional automakers will be able to catch up.

https://evannex.com/blogs/news/excuses-excuses-big-auto-can-...

> car compabies are retooling already every couple of years with each model change

They're putting new nests in existing machines. The fundamentals are largely unchanged. Yeah, the dies in the presses for forming body panels change shape. But they are still made the same way. And, for example, the shape of the engine mounts are not compatible from one year to the next...but the vehicles all have engine mounts.

Just a guess, but you are no mechnical engineer, are you? Once you change your dies, your castings and all these things you end up with completely new set-up. The only things that didn't change are the presses (even that is a stretch due to aging and increased performance of new machines) and the fact that you have a steel mfoundry and a steel mill somewhere.

Changing the form of engine mounts or getting rid of them all together is in effect the same thing and purely driven by design. In fact, getting rid of engine mounts makes production a lot faster and cheaper. So yeah, retooling in that regard means re-tooling. They will loose some benfits from their plattform strategies, but that is the main reason most EVs from traditional car makers are, as of now, based on existing plattform. Given a positive business case new plattforms will be developed soon enough, if need be. And EVs can still benefit from other common parts.

EDIT: The exption to the plattform usage is BMW, they went the opposite way. Also to develop knowledge on the use of composite materials that can be used in oter model lines. So yes, there are some generalizations in my post one can find counter examples to.

It's more complex than that. If you have the same basic shape then you can more or less use the same basic process to move that shape through the assemble line. Swapping out a fuel tank for a battery happened because it really is much cheaper for them to keep 90% of the process unchanged.

Not really. As soon as you change the dimensions, not the shape, of a pressed or forged or cast part you need new tooling. That is during production.

During assembly the dimension of a particular beam don't matter that much. The fact that this beam has to moved through an assembly line does. Once you remove that beam assembly is getting a lot easier.

You are right regarding swapping a fuel tank for a battery. But that was before they went to re-tooling assembly lines for EV vehicles. So it is easoer to run both cars through the same, specialized line. But that is the whole point, isn't it? Once these manufacturers did the re-tooling that doesn't matter anymore. And as soon as number go up even existing plattform are not that important as the are now.

> During assembly the dimension of a particular beam don't matter that much. The fact that this beam has to moved through an assembly line does.

You're right, I'm not an ME. I'm a controls engineer...and it's the same software, controls, and 90% of the machine that run your different tools for different years.

But the quoted sentence is the important one. You can change the shape of a beam...but that beam is there in your process because you assume that there's no structural battery pack to take the load instead, or that there is a huge, heavy, rigid engine block under the hood that needs to be accomodated. If you changes those assumptions you would need more than new tools to go on the current presses and robots and conveyors, you'd need a whole new process.

I have installed brand new machines less than a mile south of Greenfield Village at the Ford Product Development Center, where they're willing to spend millions on new equipment to develop new products but not really thinking about building new processes.

They dont retool all that much. Plastics and panels, mainly. The Tesla approach is materially different in pretty substantial ways. Using the battery as a structural member means that before its glued in the frame must be handled more delicately. The drive unit mounts are totally different and potentially require almost the whole suspension to retool conpared to normal.

The little differences can have huge impacts: Tesla batteries are just a few inches wider than the Bolt's, but those few inches mean wiring has to go through the roof or side rails instead of a more conventional route. That's a really seriously large change for some cars. They potentially have to run wiring before the interior, drive or battery goes in- completely changing the factory floor.

the ability to Retool is not the point - it's will the organisation let you make the big choices during that retooling. The battery position is a good one, because so much then flows from it - but an even better example is the Tesla dashboard - there is a big shiny screen in the middle and it is where everything comes together- previously software was divided and conquered - the software for the brake system and the software for the lights were written by third part suppliers.

but now if you want that integrated glass screen, you put software division and that new CTO just hired from AmaGooSoft, right at the top of the tree - want your lights susystemn to have screen real estate - talk nice to the new guy. If you think the other division heads will take the new guy lying down, I have a bridge to sell you.

The point being that it's easier sometimes to let Schumpter destroy a company with the wrong PoV and let the market raise a couple of others with the right pov. After POV is worth 20'IQ points.

The real shame is that the big carmakers have finally redesigned their platforms for EVs, after dragging their feet for a decade and a half on repackaging ICE platforms into EVs, and their new platforms are still not as good as Tesla's, which means their cars won't be as good for at least another decade.

Intriguing hypothesis!

To chase it down a little more, is it true that legacy car companies don't use the "skateboard battery" approach, since this hypothesis predicts they would not?

They mostly haven't, because it was simpler for them to have a few bigger batteries, maybe that was easier to get from suppliers too? Also tesla didn't have to fit their design into factories and cars made for a long central drive shaft down the middle. There are some evs with the skateboard, the porsche coming in a year will have that format, and use lots of little batteries like the t.

I think the real advantage Tesla has is not that it builds cars, but that it builds batteries. Lots of them. The battery is the most significant part of an EV, cost-wise.

Having a massive production capacity in batteries means not only EVs, but also battery storage for utilities, power walls, possibly electric aviation, utility drones, etc.

Battery cooling and heating is their real tech advantage over the competitors in the car, plus superior software overall, superior ui integration, world wide supercharger network. And the best battery supply by far. That's all. And a ceo who like amazon's is content to add new tech and roll all potential profits into adding new tech to their vehicles.