German Leaders at Odds with Industry Over Electric Cars

German here. My Problem with the German Car Industry is that they still see the car as a product, not as a platform. A car is a major investment and one that sticks to me for a while. I must rely on the car manufactures to continuously push updates and improve the lane-keeping assistant etc. (Maybe even the style of the UI?). I don&#x27;t see this happening, at all. The lane keeping assistants get shipped and then forgotten, everybody is working on a new integration that is maybe coming out in years (crazy to think about if your only used to software-cycles). I don&#x27;t want to be in the situation that i can&#x27;t pair my smartphone with my car next year because mercedes doesn&#x27;t bother updating it&#x27;s software. Tesla does OTA updates and sees it&#x27;s car as a platform, at least in my perspective. Software is all i know and they don&#x27;t understand software yet. Softwares lives, unsupported software is dead.<p>I don&#x27;t think that they are completely missing the electric car trend. They are being cautious, but everybody is at least getting it&#x27;s feet wet. I hope they can then &quot;just&quot; scale their production. I don&#x27;t think this is enough, but i hope they can turn around quickly enough when this gets serious.<p>But overall the future doesn&#x27;t look too good.<p>Besides, i don&#x27;t have the money right now to buy a car (also i don&#x27;t want to).

I worked together with many Japanese CE companies during the transition to MP3. At first I was surprised why they were so slow to adapt and were happy to work with the music industry who tried to ban unprotected MP3s and planned to sell MP3s for $5. It went against everything that consumers wanted at the time.<p>But... once you saw that these companies employed so many terrific engineers who could build tiny miniaturized drives for tape decks, laser pickups that could withstand vibrations, etc... it was understandable. All these engineers, of which many were in their 50s were about to lose their value and their expertise. The company tried to retrain quite a few of them to S&#x2F;W engineering. It was heartbreaking how ashamed many of them were about their struggles.<p>The German ethos is quite similar to Japan. A prime responsibility is employment and valuing their workforce. That is why they are so fearful of a change in the entire eco-system of the internal combustion engine.

I have been around for long enough to see how the German car industry reacted to safety belts, crash safety requirements, catalytic filters and tighter emission rules. Every time they claimed that it would hurt business and cost jobs. But they did perfectly fine or even used the new features as selling point eventually.<p>It&#x27;s pretty safe to ignore objections from industry. Most of the time they just don&#x27;t want to adapt and keep doing business as usual.

Quite interesting -- German government wants to keep the valuable parts of future manufacturing processes in Germany whereas the companies don&#x27;t care where their future manufacturing value comes from and will remain more interested in optimizing for their current revenue stream for some amount of time in terms of how they deal with the German governments. That revenue will eventually disappear though ... I wonder if they could put a hefty tax on the gas powered cars but offer a rebate for that tax for every electric car sold that is proportionate to the amount of the electric car value that was domestically produced. Investment in domestic electric car production would then become a direct mechanism for preserving their existing revenue stream while forcing them to set themselves up for domestic production of electric cars in the future ...

VW made a bad bet on bad Diesel technology, and Toyota is making a bad bet on hydrogen technology. (The Toyota Mirai hydrogen-powered car, at California Toyota dealers now.[1] As of September 29, 2016, 641 cars have been sold. $57,500, including three years of liquid hydrogen.)<p>The German car companies have a problem. They have all that investment in the technology of making precision power machinery. But electric motors just aren&#x27;t that complicated mechanically. Their edge over China disappears.<p>GM seems to get it. Chevrolet is shipping Chevy Bolts to dealers right now.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ssl.toyota.com&#x2F;mirai&#x2F;fcv.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ssl.toyota.com&#x2F;mirai&#x2F;fcv.html</a>

Ever wondered why electric cars from established manufacturers are all ugly? that&#x27;s why: they develop the technology but they don&#x27;t want people to buy them yet. They are too good for the customer and they would not be able to make money off of them, after the initial sale.

The key to electric vehicles is a shift to buy-by-the-ride (since you can get one that will take you wherever you want without worrying about range issues). That shift is also bad for most of the existing car manufacturers

It&#x27;s interesting that the article implies that the German manufactures are so intent on keeping the &#x27;value add&#x27; from the internal combustion motors. For the electric vehicles, value add is shifting, and if you look at Elon Musks strategies with Tesla, he&#x27;s made a bet that it&#x27;s shifting a significant portion to the power generation, and batteries.

&gt; &quot;counting on the idea that the government has no interest in creating a crisis&quot;<p>Yeah, that&#x27;s what they&#x27;ve been doing with the software cheats in VW cars (aka Dieselgate).<p>It&#x27;s a total shame for the undeniably brilliant German engineering, and they&#x27;re handling it - collectively - by pretending it did not happen.<p>The silence is deafening. I doubt it will profit them in the long range.

I wonder if anyone has thoroughly considered the impact of tens of thousands of gas stations closing their doors as the demand for petroleum goes down.

Problem I think is still range. Tesla model S is no doubt a great, albeit very expensive, car, but it&#x27;s real world range on European motorways, is still pathetic. At 100 mph, range is is measly 100 miles, my BMW 535d does 500 miles at this speed, even in the UK averaging 110 mph is quite common, when not too busy. In Germany one regularly sees cars travelling at 140+ mph for long stretches, which would be impossible for a Tesla.

I know HN has a large fanbase of Tesla and Elon Musk, but yet I&#x27;m still surprised to see no one address the problem of the supply side of renewables before moving towards a larger consumer base of electric cars.<p>I would be a very happy man to be able to own a Tesla Model S, but gasoline just has some advantages, especially so if we still are powering the majority of our grid with fossil fuels: 1) it has extremely high energy density relative to lithium ion batteries, 2) IC technology is very well-developed, 3) it is low cost in the near-term, and 4) no energy loss through transmission over the grid.<p>Depending on where you live, most of the juice you put in your Tesla (or other EV) is generated by fossil fuels, anyways. It seems to me that we&#x27;re putting the cart before the horse. We need to solve the problem of powering our grid with renewables first before we should pressure the car makers out of economic equilibrium.

The article makes it sound like electric cars are everywhere and manufacturers are still making gas vehicles.

Too big to compete.

Subsidies in the US will probably vanish next year as well, but I think the benefits still make them viable.

Are there any German start-ups building an electric car?