It just seems to me these legacy automakers who haven't done much at all are in for a rude awakening. If battery costs keep declining, anyone who isn't using a battery is going to get smoked on costs, and this is in a carbon-tax free scenario. In many economies with environmentally friendly policy, we should see EV's smoke ICE vehicles on cost MUCH sooner.
Not very much. It really doesn't matter what kind of powertrain you have in your vehicles, the biggest part of the manufacturing process is everything else that makes up a vehicle. Frame, suspension, brakes, doors, windows, seats, dash, cabin interior, lighting, electronics, safety systems, sensors, testing, inspection, etc. etc. etc. On top of that, plenty of automotive plants these days get fully-assembled engines and sometimes driveshafts as well from other factories for efficiency and bolt them into vehicles rather than doing build-up from scratch.
I've spent quite a bit of time in vehicle factories of several OEMs. I would estimate that less than a quarter of an average factory line is used for powertrain.
*Note: Parts here means only powertrain parts. Tesla, for example, is notorious for having massive delays in repair parts availability for things like doors, trim, and windows.
VW group is pushing EVs via all of its major brands (VW, Audi, and Porsche at the very least). These models are also not being treated as one-off afterthoughts (GM style) or cars with a totally different design language from the core brand (BMW i3 style), but match the design language and performance characteristics that I would expect of each brand, all with increasingly impressive battery ranges.
They have the global manufacturing/supply chain well figured out, design modular chassis that see use across almost every vehicle in its brands' portfolios over each decade, and this translates to getting nearly-unbeatable pricing from intermediate parts suppliers.
Tesla has a lead on both the battery and software, but while other brands are catching up significantly on these fronts, Tesla does one thing better that I don't see any other manufacturer daring to tackle: vehicle purchases. Every stage of buying a car at a dealership is worse than the last, and maintaining these frustrating middle-men and their shopping lots full of unsold vehicles adds unnecessary cost to every vehicle's consumer price.
To date, EV sales are still a bit of chicken-and-egg, and Tesla does have a clear charger network advantage in parts of the world. But EV sales are a very small fraction of overall automotive sales, and until that changes, any doom and gloom on the traditional automakers is still exaggerated.
Tesla built GF1 in the Reno desert because, at the time (2013) [1], they forecast that at 500k/vehicles a year (which they're almost at), they would be consuming worldwide battery cell manufacturing capacity. And here we are with everyone else playing catch up trying to eek out the batteries they need to deliver EVs to compete against Tesla.
[1] https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/blog_attachments/g...
Well you wouldn't have to worry about this regardless unless you are the competition. But otherwise it's like saying "I'll worry about EVs when I can charge them in 3 minutes at every corner". If you worry only when the threat already materialized then it was pretty short sighted. Which is an ironic attitude considering we're literally talking about companies ignoring reality until it hit them in the face and the threat materialized.
Demand ^ Emphasis mine.
VW is not behind most of the market; they're leading it. Tesla's huge early lead will stick around for a very long time, if not indefinitely. They'll become a player as big as VW and Toyota. But, these other manufacturers will catch up and begin to compete just fine.
There's plenty of manufacturers that should be concerned (Ford being the biggest one). VW (and by extension, Audi, Porsche, etc) is not one of them.
Personally I have been very positively surprised of Tesla after owning one for a few months and I it would take very much to make me give up all it's niceties but I think the Polestar is a sleeping tiger when it comes to sales. It seems to generate a bit of grass root buzz in the EV communities here in Norway.
So some of the incumbents are finally taking the shift to new power trains seriously, but there will be slaughter for those who can't keep up in the long term.
They also spend €13.6 billion on r&d every year.
Learning curves are a tricky beast though. While the incremental benefit during the early stages is enormous, it doesn't act as a particularly good competitive moat.
Someone with say a large budget and global operations can easily stomp on it. The fact that VW's INITIAL planned capacity (800 p/d this spring [0]) is almost equal to Tesla's total capacity after all their ramping up should be quite informative as to how fragile Tesla's lead is.
The traditional car makers clearly got sucker punched here by a masterful Musk move...but I didn't hear any giants drop yet. Which to me suggests they might be swinging back somewhere in the future.
[0] https://insideevs.com/news/380318/vw-id3-production-30-day/
The big problem is what will they do with all the unemployed workers? One of the big things coming out of the GM negotiations was the question of the future of a reduced size of the workforce needed to build electric vehicles.
Or rather it's more likely that they're just taking the big switch as a chance to redesign everything. Incl production processes.
That would have happened by next cycle anyway in my view. Electric merely hastened it a bit.
Going from 0 to 1k is very difficult. Going from 1k to 30k, much easier.
Tesla's Chinese Gigafactory is just popping out it's first Model 3's now, and will ramp up to a similar output in the coming months, so they're about to double their output, and start building another Gigafactory in Europe starting next year.
That would leave some, but not much time for VW to get their house in order before they face a serious challenge. But that assumes that Tesla's and VWs markets are the same, whereas I believe VW also has much lower-priced market segments than Tesla.
Right now, Tesla's GF1 and 3 have that locked down with a significant head-start in time as well as tech. They started in 2013 because they foresaw that 500k cars per year would use up the entire world's battery production. They also acquired Maxwell tech to further stream line their cell production with denser and easier-to-manufacture cell chemistry. All of that will be big hurdles for other OEMs to overcome (and that is IF they dedicate resources to it without half-assing it for compliance purposes).
Tesla makes ~1k cars a day. VW is at 30k+....and has been for years.
Propulsion tech aside that's one hell of a learning curve advantage.