Average car price in 2002 was ~$19k.
Adjusted for inflation is ~$33k.
Average car price in 2024 is $48k.
Have you checked Tesla prices over the last 12 months?
The automotive industry is known for bad margins. Interest rates go up, willingness to pay for large ticket items goes down. We won’t see anything like 0 percent rates for possibly 100 years.
One interesting outcome: near shoring of production drives local labor wages up for the long, permanent term. Maybe more in India/Mexico than the US, but still significant. And better for all than the past.
I'll give example on Brazil. Cars were ridiculous expensive lately. Then BYD came in.
There were rumors of them launching Seagul (they call Dolphin Mini here) for R$ 100k.
Renault had Kwid E-tech for R$ 142k. They had to lower TO R$ 100k. They had to cut 30% out of nowhere because of Chinese competition.
GWM and Chery is also going well here as far I know.
[1]: https://www.motorauthority.com/news/1121372_why-mazda-is-pur...
If that isn't brake by wire, then what is?
<thing>-by-wire means there is a control with no physical connection to <thing>.
for example, older tesla cars can steer themselves, but the steering wheel still connects to the front wheels mechanically.
The newer cybertruck has a steer-by-wire. The wheels are turned side to side by motors, but the steering wheel is not mechanically hooked to it, it's just an electronic controller.
With [traditional] power-assisted brakes, there is always a direct connection between the pedal doing the braking and the wheel cylinders. It's assisted (usually, but not always, by vacuum), but that direct mechanical connection is always there.
With one-pedal driving that only uses exactly one pedal, there is never a direct mechanical connection between that singular pedal and the braking system. That connection is only electrical; there is no direct mechanical (or hydraulic, to split hairs) connection at all. It is entirely brake-by-wire, unless one chooses to place a foot on the brake pedal and thereby do something other than one-pedal driving.
Thus: Unless there's hydraulics connected to the accelerator pedal, then: As long as mechanical braking (pads-on-rotors friction) can be performed in one-pedal mode (and it can be), then one-pedal mode must perform braking-by-wire.
We're already there; people use brake-by-wire every day. (That we also have a functional hydraulic brake pedal as a backup does not mean that brake-by-wire is not a thing in one-pedal mode.)
People have been saying this for decades now and conveniently forget that replacing CD cases with Internet downloads doesn't eliminate the fact that software engineering is expensive in itself.
Crazy how TurboTax isn't $5 or Tesla FSD doesn't come standard. So much for zero marginal cost.
The music companies simply got too greedy and now their market has imploded and most people only pay for Spotify.
We might get a rerun of asian producers dominating the car market and making a panic in USA car makers.
Is there any car software that’s “open”?
0. https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/say-hello-to-an-fsd-...
Batteries specifically does make sense, ex. Model X has 100 kWh battery. if I price out 100 kWh at $200 right now (high) and its $100 a decade from now, about $20K.
"Software" is hand-waving.
Electric motors being easier does make sense.
BMW i4,i5,i7,iX built in mid to late 2023 use an outsourced system that widely failed in cold temps. Tesla has a famously ingenious simpler but efficient custom in house design.
There are videos of hobbyists making heat pumps from compressors salvaged out of fridges or ice makers, and other scrounged parts, maybe an Arduino controlling it! They're amazingly simple when you see what they're made up of.
Sure, it sounds like there were problems with this system used in BMWs, but that's likely just a design issue. Pumping a coolant around a battery and then through a heat exchanger (that is part of the heat pump) is not that difficult compared to the cooling of an extremely complex internal combustion engine!
The parent comment to which i replied was listing significant systems in an EV, and hadn’t mentioned thermal regulation.
BMW’s outsourced Vitesco (part of Continental Power Trains originally) design differs in engineering (materials, components integration), with more disjoint components and more components therefore needing interconnections, and had cars (service bulletins applied to thousands) across Finland, Germany, Canada, US, UK, failing and leaking in a juncture not present on the Tesla design. (“Ask me how I know…twice.”)
EVs are complex, but in ways that are much more subject to economies of scale.
For example, much of their value is in the software, which replicates for nearly zero marginal cost. Electric motor assembly is highly automatable and a fraction of the cost of assembling engines. There are no emission control systems, fuel systems, exhaust systems.
That leaves battery materials and construction, and these are dropping fast. Goldman Sachs just predicted pack-level prices will be below $100 KWh by 2025 and continue dropping by 11% per year throughout the decade.
In fact, BYD already sells a perfectly-reasonable EV in China for around $11,000 US equivalent.
There will, of course, always be premium priced EVs in the market, but I believe the lower bound of the market will be much lower than the Corollas, Tercels and Honda Fits of today.