Change is coming

[Istbclass]

Just read that VW is cutting 7000 jobs due to focusing on electric cars, interesting that folk blamed brexit for the decision of Honda to close its UK plant and Nissan to not produce the new x trail in the UK. I also see that Nissan will no longer be selling the Infiniti brand in Europe. I wonder what the car industry will look like in 10 years time. I also wouldn’t like to have shares in heating boiler companies as new houses can’t have gas from 2025. Interesting time ahead.

 

[gramey]

I guess it's because the infra structure is there for electricity as otherwise I can't understand why car manufacturers haven't gone down the hydrogen route, the other thing that I don't understand is the over manufacture of cars, you see huge stockpiles of cars in fields or wherever but the factories keep churning them out.

I'm glad that even though I couldn't afford the the super or hyper cars I've lived in the era that I have, I appreciate we need to reduce emissions but I seriously doubt that you'll see the breadth of development in future cars that there has been with the internal combustion engine?

 

[Abcan]

I think for the hyper car buyer it’s never been such a good time....1900bhp Pininfarina Battista EV can hit 217mph | Autocar

0-60 in under 2 seconds! It’s taken internal combustion engines years to get anywhere near that figure.

 

[Scooby_Doo]

The next step will be to build a diesel burning power station to generate all the power to recharge all the electric cars because there will be millions of litres of diesel at knockdown prices as there'll be no market for it.

 

[clk320x]

I think for the hyper car buyer it’s never been such a good time....1900bhp Pininfarina Battista EV can hit 217mph | Autocar

0-60 in under 2 seconds! It’s taken internal combustion engines years to get anywhere near that figure.

Wow that is pretty, looks like something straight out of a video game!

 

[TwoDogs80]

Honda said they had agreed with Europe on a free import tax deal. They also said they needed a bigger site to build/develop their electric cars which Swindon couldnt offer. So they will all be built back on home soil. This deal was done over a year ago. Who knows....

 

[TwoDogs80]

Honda said they had agreed with Europe on a free import tax deal. They also said they needed a bigger site to build/develop their electric cars which Swindon couldnt offer. So they will all be built back on home soil. This deal was done over a year ago. Who knows....

 

[st13phil]

the other thing that I don't understand is the over manufacture of cars, you see huge stockpiles of cars in fields or wherever but the factories keep churning them out.

Ultimately production capacity will be reduced to match demand, but due to the economics of capital-intensive manufacturing (such as cars), perversely it's cheaper to continue production and sell overproduced individual units at cost, or even a modest loss, than it is to not produce at all - for short periods at least. Remember that the cars are often a means to sell financial products such as loans, so the profit doesn't necessarily get generated from the direct sale of the car.

 

[Istbclass]

Unfortunately we live in an era where it’s no longer enough to make a good profit you MUST expand and grow in order to put the share price up so the executives can get their bonus. The only way they can grow is to sell more cars so they over produce, look at Carrilion, they expanded, bought companies in areas they knew nothing about but it increased the. Share price, the senior managers got huge bonuses, move some money around so it looks like you making a profit and then leave the room before the music stops and your left without a chair. Why can’t companies just be happy with making a decent profit

 

[Deleted member 126969]

@gramey re hydrogen, I think thee are two fundamental issues with it as a mass-use fuel. One you’ve already identified, the infrastructure to distribute and store it, the other one is how to generate it. Currently most is made by cracking hydrocarbons, which kind of defeats the object, the other main one, hydrolysis, isn’t very efficient at about 80%.

Another point I suppose, the fuel cells are currently in the 40 to 60% efficiency range, so again, that tips it against using hydrogen as a fuel.

A vehicle with a fuel cell and a decent supercapacitor to handle peak demands and soak up some braking energy would be a workable solution, but I don’t think we’ll see all that many in cars.

Current(!) battery tech is of course quite sensitive to low temperatures so that can badly impact the “efficiency” figures too, but that’s fairly easy to mitigate to a fair degree with the somewhat counterintuitive notion of using battery power to heat the battery to get more energy and power out.

No denying the thread title though.

 

[Deletedmember130310]

I think a different change is required - instead of cars being promoted as lifestyle accessories, they need to become utility tools.

That should reduce demand for new shiny things.

 

[Istbclass]

Cars will never be sold as a utility items, the profit comes from making the product desirable and then jacking the price up Accordingly.

 

[Bellow]

Unfortunately we live in an era where it’s no longer enough to make a good profit you MUST expand and grow in order to put the share price up so the executives can get their bonus. The only way they can grow is to sell more cars so they over produce, look at Carrilion, they expanded, bought companies in areas they knew nothing about but it increased the. Share price, the senior managers got huge bonuses, move some money around so it looks like you making a profit and then leave the room before the music stops and your left without a chair. Why can’t companies just be happy with making a decent profit

Well said.
My view is that they are sociopaths. They will create large scale redundancies after mergers without the slightest concern for the welfare of those adversely affected just so they - as you allude - can be king of a bigger hill. And for what? Headline salary and bonus of a a magnitude that they'll never spend in their lifetime and is money that would be better left circulating in an economy to the benefit of more. Sociopaths - and it doesn't say much of us that we let it happen - (usually) unchallenged.

 

[neilrr]

I think the car manufacturing business is doomed & with the introduction & increase in use of driverless cars most of today's manufacturers will disappear.

I can see the day not too far in the future when nobody in a city or built up area actually owns a car, the vast majority of vehicles on the road will be self driving mini buses simply called up like an uber to take the callee where they want to go, picking up & dropping off other passengers en route whose journeys approximately match & then they go on to the next journey - basically driverless ride sharing cabs for hire that auto return to one of many depots for cleaning, safety checks , battery charging, storage when out of rotation & when not on call / needed. When on rotation but not in use those on call will park themselves at convenient locations to be able to efficiently handle any calls.

In cities & built up areas the number required will be at most 20% of the cars on the road at the moment, congestion will be a thing of the past, emission problems will be non existent, parking will be abundant & nobody will actually know how to drive.

 

[Scooby_Doo]

So that's all the cities sorted , bloody great , what about the millions that don't live in the city.

 

[400ixl]

interesting that folk blamed brexit for the decision of Honda to close its UK plant and Nissan to not produce the new x trail in the UK.

Where did you get that perception from? It was made very clear by both organisations that Brexit was not to blame for these decisions. Global demand has changed and some vehicles have reached end of life. This was creating spare capacity in factories across the world including (and most importantly) their home nations. As such they negotiated trade deals which made it achievable to ensure that the spare capacity in their home country would continue to be maximised, which meant that production would be moved and some factories in other countries would either lose some or all production as a consequence. Source materials (raw and manufactured) would have also been part of the decision making and when it comes to batteries, the UK or EU is not where these are sourced.

So with spare capacity and supply chain for a new breed of vehicle along with you don't crap on your own doorstep, of course the UK factories were going to come out worse. Nothing to do with Brexit at all. Wouldn't have helped with the level of uncertainty in the risk assessment, but the government had made more than enough assurances they wouldn't be disadvantaged over today's position.

On the car as a utility, it will happen eventually, not next week, but eventually. As urbanisation continues, more and more people will stop owning cars and just gain access to one when they need to be outside of the urbanised areas. Insurers are already adapting to the lower use of vehicles in urban areas with a shift towards insure by the mile As driverless cars become mainstream we will also see even more of an acceleration of younger citizens not even getting a driving license (this has already started in urbanised areas due to ride services which are the first evolution of the carless generation). The day will come where you hail a driverless car which is owned by some corporation and pay for the journey, essentially utility transportation.

We can then get speculative as to whether you will ever get to utility transportation if the form of cars. These are restricted in both capacity and direction by our legacy road system which is sub optimal for mass movement, especially where advanced AI is concerned. I suspect that by the time we get to this stage they may well be levitated vehicles where there is no restriction of legacy. This is where it will then potentially be the tipping point for rural transportation. All very science fiction maybe, but all being considered today.

Another technology which eventually will influence production locations will be things like Hyperloop. If you can ship products at high speed across the globe in ways which are much more efficient and hugely less destructive to the planet than ships and planes, then where you make things will be driven by access to these new transport systems, where raw materials are sourced and of course where is politically / culturally / commercially acceptable.

 

[Deletedmember130310]

Unfortunately we live in an era where it’s no longer enough to make a good profit you MUST expand and grow in order to put the share price up so the executives can get their bonus. The only way they can grow is to sell more cars so they over produce, look at Carrilion, they expanded, bought companies in areas they knew nothing about but it increased the. Share price, the senior managers got huge bonuses, move some money around so it looks like you making a profit and then leave the room before the music stops and your left without a chair. Why can’t companies just be happy with making a decent profit

it will be interesting to see if Martin Winterkorn, former CEO of VW, is held personally liable and has to repay is renumeration


US sues Volkswagen over 'massive fraud'