I think this is probably more important than people give it credit for. I have an acquaintance who works R&D at a traditional car company (but on self driving features) he says the internal 'fights' between ICE and electric are very real and damaging.

You can experience it first hand if you go try to test drive a Chevy Bolt - Motor Trend car of the year in 2017. I spoke to dealers who (pretended?) unawareness of the model and didn't want to help me find one. Another tried to talk me out of it. Finally one dealer was well informed about its pros and cons, and had several for sale.

Another example: bmw i3. 114 mile range on the 2017 model, really? And that's up from less than 100 miles before that. Painfully token.

The big problem the big auto manufacturers are having is the battery and cost. A mass-market electric car cannot cost as much as Tesla's offerings, and a huge part of that cost is the battery. Even with the most optimistic cost projections of battery costs in the near future, it's hard to see how to offer an electric car which is competitive on both cost and range with an ICE car.

True, if they're going to price under Tesla, they'll need the courage to be unprofitable until they have the volume to get positive.

Another issue is subsidies. Carmakers have enjoyed billions from the states... https://www.reuters.com/article/us-toyota-mazda-jobs-factbox...

That's not counting an $80b bailout... https://www.thebalance.com/auto-industry-bailout-gm-ford-chr...

And what about gas prices being artificially kept low with subsidies... https://www.nrdc.org/experts/danielle-droitsch/time-us-end-f...

So the true cost and TCO of an ICE car is not at all obvious to compute compared to an electric.

It's just a car, to the salesman. If I went in and looked for a Chevrolet Equinox and the dealer didn't have anyt, they'd try to sell me another model.

Just like if you went to Best Buy looking for a certain TV, they'll just try to sell you the one on the shelf

I've had on multiple occasions gone into a dealership and had them tell me that they have the car i'm asking about, but that I don't want that car, and that I want this other car instead.

I went into nissan to look at the Juke a while back, the asshole wouldn't even let me look at it until I literally started leaving. He just kept pressing the Rogue saying that I'd like it a lot more... Then when he finally took me to it, it was still wrapped in plastic and they said they couldn't do a test drive.

Another time I went to go look at the Chevy Bolt when it first came out, they said they had a few in stock, but they would not stop trying to get me to test drive a Malibu instead. They kept pushing how it was a better car, how it was cheaper, how it would go further, how it looks better.

Eventually they let me test drive the Bolt, but the whole time the guy just kept pointing out how all the features in the car were also in the Malibu.

It just left such a shitty taste in my mouth. I literally went in there asking about a single model of car each time, and it seemed like they did everything they could to actively sabotage my ability to buy it.

I went in to dealer, money in hand, to buy a specific car I knew they had in stock and that I'd already picked out. The salesman then proceeded to convince me that I actually wanted this other model which would be much better for me. Fine you've convinced me, how much for that other car. Salesman comes back a couple of minutes later and sheepishly admits they don't actually have that car in stock and won't be getting any for 4-6 weeks. I walk out without buying a car.

This is why online car shopping needs to be a thing. I experienced the exact same thing. I'm a highly informed customer who knew every car I wanted to see but almost every sales guy ignored that fact, besides at a Honda location. Which isn't surprising that I ended up with a Honda.

I would have bought it online if I could and it's very possible I wouldn't have ended up with a Honda, that has to play a role in each company's auto sales.

Same here, I ended up going into an Audi dealer after the Bolt fiasco, and it was a night and day difference. When I asked a question about a car, they answered it happily! When I wanted to look at a car, they took me to a few. When I wanted to test drive one, they pulled up their inventory of cars and asked what one I want to test drive.

No "you don't want that", no "we are trying to keep the miles down on that one", no condescending talk about how some other car is probably more in my range.

And unsurprisingly I ended up getting an Audi!

It's one of the big reasons why I think the whole "online sales" thing is perfect with Tesla. They have showrooms in many places where those who want to look at and ask questions about the cars can go, and when you actually want to buy, you buy it like something off amazon, and it gets delivered when ready.

The Costco Auto Program is worth checking out: https://www.costcoauto.com

You can pick the car and get pre-negotiated pricing online. You still have to go to the dealer to actually pick it up, but you don't need to be "sold to", negotiate the price, etc. The people I know who have used it have gotten excellent prices, but it's always worth comparing to the estimates from Consumer Reports or other sources.

Good to know.

I used https://www.unhaggle.com to find out the MRSP of the car and saved about $2k from the list price, basically the lowest price the dealer could offer. It's basically a lead-gen system for dealerships which I discovered after my experience mentioned above. The dealer was very welcoming with us using it and said it was getting more common.

I worked in a small sales and marketing office for IBM in the early 90's. I remember the sales people, who made very good money from mainframe sales, openly discussing how they didn't even want customers to know about RS6000's. I think the margins were pretty low on RS6000's at the time.

Anyway, internal struggles holding back product lines is a very real thing.

From what I know of at least european car makers, they see the writing on the wall, especially with various governments making noises about banning petrol and diesel cars in the next decase or so, and they are heavily investing in the switch, even if it's not so obvious to consumers at the moment because the industry moves slowly.

This is a good point — remember that Kodak released some of the first digital cameras. They still failed to switch fast enough.

The shift want just digital cameras it was also the iPhone that made the digital camera obsolete.

With digital cameras they were losing film revenue which was larger than camera sales.

Car companies don't own gas stations so they will switch faster and easier than Kodak.

There will be some struggles internally but not as much I suspect.

Plus modern EVs have demonstrated more performance then ice so it's really just a matter of catering to demand as it changes.

The challenge here is more on Tesla to make a sustainable car company than it is on old companies to convert.

If a startup car company in Czech can make a hyper car EV that beasts a Veyron in acceleration then there is nothing proprietary about the tech and incumbents will have an easier time switching as demand evolves.

Kodak wasn't even really a camera company latterly and hadn't been a serious camera maker since the Japanese (mostly)--who still collectively mostly own the high-end camera space--cornered the market. They were primarily a photographic consumables business.

Even had they executed more aggressively and better than they did, they'd have gone through hard times. (See Fujifilm which did a better job with a smaller company and still struggled.)

> more performance than ice

In some axes, WAY more. The new Roadster 0-60 is 1.9 sec, which is 0.3 faster than everything on the production list. That list needs updating now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fastest_production_car...

It's also not all about 0-60 (at least for the motorsport market). Tesla's seem to still have issues under sustained high performance driving[1]. There's many cars with significantly slower 0-60 times that smash the Model S around Nürburgring due to batteries overheating and being put into limp mode. As the technology improves no doubt this problem will go away, but it doesn't look like we're there just yet.

For perspective the Model S made it around the track in about 10 minutes, an old diesel Jaguar S Type with a 0-60 time of 8.5~ seconds did it in about 9 [2 & 3].

[1] https://insideevs.com/news/323053/tesla-model-s-fails-to-lap...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_N%C3%BCrburgring_Nords...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaguar_S-Type

The Roadster hasn't been released yet so nothing needs updating yet.

This made me think of the future of gas stations.

Will they just conver to charging stations, and charge customers to use them?

It'll be tough, most gas stations don't have a lot of space for a lot of charging stations and nothing to do while you wait for the charge. The large truck stop style ones might be able to convert more easily because they already have the larger lots and buildings with spaces to sit inside while you wait.

I have heard anecdotally that gas stations make terrible money on their actual fuel sales and the real margins are on food inside so it may work out in the end but that low but broad base flow may be an important part of the business.

In the end though they'll probably largely die out inside cities with charging mostly happening at home, at work, or in parking decks/lots. There will definitely be a need for them along highways and stuff though to service long drives. In the end that's a looooong ways off, even if you completely ban the new sale and import of ICE vehicles there's going to be a long tail for used cars until electric vehicles become 100x less expensive.

Yeah, at this point inside US cities the majority of pumps have been moving to the model of grocery stores with pumps attached, and that model still works with chargers augmenting and then replacing pumps, because grocery stores generally are useful places to charge while you shop. (Just as malls seem to be good places to add chargers, if you expect and/or want people to linger/browse while they charge.)

Convenience stores and restaurants will still be useful on the highways with or without gas pumps around. (People will always need to use a restroom or grab some grub on long road trips.)

I figure some smart "medium fast" food restaurant that benefits from a lingering dining experience, but doesn't take too much advantage of it (ie, doesn't actively slow the diner down), will integrate chargers into their franchise plans and become the new king of the highways in the way that MacDonald's (and regionally, Waffle House) became synonymous with pit stops along the open road in the 50s and 60s.

It won't work quite as well just because it takes so much longer to charge an EV than it does to gas up a regular car. So the limited lots of existing stations will have a much lower turnover rate than they do now. Also most places around me are very much just the traditional convenience store you can only get a very limited selection of stuff (like a smattering for fruit and milk at best with maybe some cereals or something) those places aren't going to be long stops to shop around in so charging at them isn't going to be a draw.

> Convenience stores and restaurants will still be useful on the highways with or without gas pumps around. (People will always need to use a restroom or grab some grub on long road trips.)

Yeah like I said in my original post I don't think they'll go 100% out of business along highways but it will largely be the larger stops that have some restaurant integrated or just restaurants along the highway that survive not the small snack food and gas places that are a majority today. Charging (today and for the foreseeable future unless there's another breakthrough in batter tech that pans out at large scales) just takes too long for anything without some kind of food or other attraction to make sense as the charging stations on longer trips.

It's eventually going to be something that happens when the car is parked, rather than a specific stop for charging/gassing up. I've already seen parking garages and street side meters equipped with EV chargers (although rarely an EV parked there). Ideally all batteries would be standardized, so you'd just pull up to a place and swap like you would a propane tank, but open standards aren't as inticing to investors as trying to dominate market share with proprietary tech and licensing it to everyone. Probably going to take a law standardizing swappable EV batteries to nip that bad behavior in the bud.

The valet game should get interesting. Pay extra to guarantee charging would be a quick and easy way to gouge a few more pennies.

As far as gas stations goes, I don't see a route where most of them aren't folding. Franchises don't have the resources to retool like a big corporation that can light money on fire every month and still increase in value.

Swappable batteries likely won't be cost effective for cars for safety reasons, if nothing else. Most EVs have the batteries "buried" in impact-protected spots, with firewalls between them, and in such ways that the battery is reliant upon and sometimes in turn contributes to the structural integrity of the car. Even if the packs were standardized by regulation, getting safe access to the packs in most EVs is expensive and unsafe access is potentially hazardous to long-term fire and/or structural safety of the vehicle.

Anyway, yes, the focus on charging inside of cities should be places that cars are already parked. For travel between cities, it will be businesses that can best take advantage of 30-45 minutes of downtime (assuming fast charging), and I do think it's going to be a restaurant chain and/or mini-mall concept that's going to be the best fit for highway travel. It's going to take a smart franchise or two to experiment there, and it may even be an existing franchise like Pilot or MacDonald's perhaps, but it will be a shift away from smaller convenience stores to probably something larger with more to do.

The one spot I see swappable batteries probably happening is on large trucks where space isn't at so much of a premium and the charge time actually costs the operators money. In cars yeah the batteries probably won't be in an accessible area for easy swapping.

I don't think it will be possible. A gas station can refuel 20 cars per hour; there's no way you can do that with a charging station.

Probably they would die out, and hotels would do long distance charging, since you need to charge it when you sleep. People would just not be able to do medium or small distance charging at all except at their home.

Turn them all into Starbucks, but with EV charging stations.

Kodak made more money from film sales then all camera manufactures do today, combined.

If they went all-in on digital, the company would have still 'collapsed'.