The Twilight of Combustion Comes for Germany's Empire of Engines

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2019-bmw-electric-car-german-engines/

by pseudolus • 7 years ago

57 57 7 years ago

BMW, the focus of the article, is also in a lot of danger as a brand. For a very long time they had the position as one of the best driving everyday cars because of their mechanical skill in the engine, chassis, and suspension parts of the car.

There appear to be two problems with that going forward.

First, other makes now have good suspension and chassis. This is a mature area of development, so the gains that BMW can make over their competitors is going to be small and expensive.

Second, what will differentiate one EV from another will be more software than hardware, and it’s not clear to me if companies like BMW will be able to dominate in that area.

arethuza4• 7 years ago

I'd have thought EVs will still be differentiated on cost, comfort, appearance, performance, quality, non software features and "branding" - just like current cars?

Edit: Just for the record, I've owned 1 BMW, didn't like it that much (uncomfortable, low quality for cost) wouldn't buy another one.

rad_gruchalski2• 7 years ago

And the whole switch to FWD before going electeric. They're already killing the brand.

gambiting• 7 years ago

Are they? Their FWD cars sell like hotcakes, and I honestly doubt 99% of their customers notice or care what kind of drivetrain runs the car. I'd like to think I'm a petrolhead and I'm constantly shocked by how little people know about the cars they buy. It's a miracle they manage to remember if the car takes petrol or diesel, honestly. Most of my friends bought their cars without doing any sort of research - it was a matter of picking one that looked most interesting + the config was within their price range, engine type/drive train be damned. The pinacle of this is a guy I know who has a GLE63S, so I thought it would be super cool to talk to him about the hand-built V8 in his car - his reaction was literally "custom built....what?". He bought it because he likes the look and the sound(and he's rich enough to afford it), but I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't know that his car is 4 wheel drive for instance.

People generally don't care.

justtopost• 7 years ago

I saw the black flag over the horizon when they switched to mcphearson struts over double wishbone suspension.

prolepunk2• 7 years ago

Anecdotally I heard a few people grumbling about mini-coopers because they wanted basically an FWD BMW but had to settle on something ugly.

Maybe BMW has finally heard from them.

linuxftw2• 7 years ago

Electric will be the death of the brand. BMW's require such expensive service, it's laughable compared to other brands.

Unless they get really inventive on failure items (This one $1200 capacitor failed, proprietary, only available from dealer kind of thing). Even then, I'm assuming there's only so much people will take.

carnagii• 7 years ago

The whole point of a brand is that people make buying decisions based on irrational ephemera as opposed to utility. Once you establish a luxury brand then charging ridiculous prices for the same utility only reinforces brand perception because consumers have no ability or desire to judge things based on utility and so they equate paying more with a better product, or at least with personal prestige.

BMW will do just fine.

billfruit• 7 years ago

I am not familiar with EV internals, but do modern EVs have an electric drive train:ie, are there drive shafts and differentials and clutches in the modern EV or is it just independent motors coupled to the wheels?

What about breaking? Is done on the wheel or on the motor?

bjelkeman-again• 7 years ago

Breaking is generally done with both using the electric motor as a generator and with breaks. A lot of driving in a Tesla for example means you hardly use the breaks at all.

The drivetrain is relatively simple. One motor on the rear or front axel, sometimes one on each. https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-model-3-drivetrain-design-el...

jhayward2• 7 years ago

are there drive shafts and differentials and clutches in the modern EV or is it just independent motors coupled to the wheels?

All of the above, although by far the most common power train arrangement is motor per axle with a 2-speed transmission for however many axles are driven. Regenerative braking is done at the motor and augmented by conventional brakes.

Very few designs use motor-per-wheel.

corbet• 7 years ago

No drive shafts, no clutches. I always thought it should be a motor for each wheel, but nobody seems to be doing that now. Both physical brakes and regenerative braking exist.

(One real surprise with our new Bolt is that you can't do regenerative braking when the battery is full - there's no place to dump the energy. Makes sense once you think about it).

The simplicity of electric cars is one of their big advantages, but also one of the reasons that US dealers (other than Tesla, obviously) aren't enthusiastic about selling them. There's almost no periodic maintenance to be done, and little to break, so little in the way of post-sale revenue.

loolatrix• 7 years ago

braking: both, recuperation is done on engine side, but there are still brakes at the wheels.

Recuperation doesn't cover all necessary brake performance, plus, you don't want to have a car without brakes at the wheels. The moment the driveshaft breaks, you wouldn't be able to brake your car, if braking was only facilitated by the engine.

This actually killed at least one race driver, Jochen Rindt, Monza 1970, in his Lotus 72.

prolepunk2• 7 years ago

Another question about braking.

When the car brakes about 70% of breaking force is at the front wheels, so wouldn't regenerative breaking be more effective for the cars with the motor at the front and not at the back (like in Tesla)?

whb07• 7 years ago

Not to mention that the majority of engineers within the company will not willingly work full steam ahead on an enterprise that will destroy their life's work and make many of them obsolete (as they are combustion engine experts).

jackcosgrove2• 7 years ago

It is very interesting to see the waxing and waning of technical skills and regions over long timescales. Both the Germans and the Japanese are renowned for mechanical ingeniousness, probably because mechanical knowledge was increasing rapidly at the time they began to industrialize. Now that mechanical systems are being replaced by mechatronic systems and software, these regions are experiencing relative decline.

I have always thought the US as the center of the global software industry was a bit incongruous given that this industry took root when the US was itself experiencing relative decline, but it's probably due to the invention of that other IC technology here, integrated circuits, more than anything else. For the same reason aerospace is still concentrated in the US.

It really shows how the first mover advantage in R&D can confer advantages that last for over a century.

arethuza4• 7 years ago

Aren't Germany and Japan still by far the largest exporters of machine tools - i.e. the machines that make our machines?

dsfyu404ed• 7 years ago

Depends what kind of machine tools you're buying and whether you're counting units or dollars and whether you're including tooling in there. Like every other industry the cheap stuff at the bottom of the market moves way more units than the fancy stuff at the top (and as usual, a certain country in the far east makes most of the cheapest stuff).

Yeah, central Europe and Japan/Korea are big players but pretty much every "industrialized" nation has a noteworthy share of the industry.

flexie• 7 years ago

The US is the leader of software

1) because software really got started in English. Since then it has been taught, documented, written about in books, blogs and tutorials in English, spoken about in English. Yes, there are translations, and in major languages they sometimes appear fast, but there is 100 times more in English, and you just don't get around becoming a great software developer without English.

2) because the largest software companies in essence make text based products. It's all about text on screens, text processing, text outputting and inputting.

Re 1: A 13 year old Spanish, French, German or Japanese kid is facing a double hurdle when trying to learn programming. Would Bill Gates or Zuckerberg have mastered programming already as kids if to do so they first would have had to learn Italian or Polish? Other countries that either have English as a first language (UK, Australia) or as a strong second language (Netherlands, Scandinavia) do far better than countries where English is a mediocre second language.

Re 2: Let's pretend that these countries that are not strong in English still somehow managed to produce vast numbers of great developers at a relatively early age, so that they have a large enough pool of potential founders of great companies. Could they then market their products at the local home market as virtually all the now great software companies did? Like Amazon selling books in Bellevue, Washington, Microsoft selling to hobbyists on the West Coast, Facebook to students at Harvard, Google at Stanford?

For text based products (text on screens) that would realistically require they launch in the local language, just like their American counterparts did.

Would an 18 year old Italian student have reached beyond Italy, had he launched his new social network at Bocconi? Or Twitter if it launched in Tel Aviv in Hebrew the first year or two? How far would Amazon have gotten, if it had started with the first 10,000 items in the store described in Russian? Microsoft DOS with Korean-inspired commands? How would a Serbian-first Google have fared in 1997-2000? Could it have beaten AltaVista?

jackcosgrove2• 7 years ago

That's a great point. My only question is, would software still be written mostly in English if Fairchild Semiconductor had been located in Stuttgart?

It may be so, given that English had become the lingua franca of what was after WWII called the first world for political rather than technological reasons.

0xDEEPFAC2• 7 years ago

What a sad day for driving enthusiasts everywhere. Went to the BMW dealer last fall to test drive a 2 series and was told there are no manual 2 series cars in all of North America and I would have to get one shipped in.

But progress is progress I guess and if people want rechargeable, self-driving, ugly crossovers they'll get them.

claudius2• 7 years ago

Are you prepared to cover the full costs of your "driving enthusiam"? Or do you wish for society to subsidize your personal enjoyment, comfort and lazyness at the cost of great financial, environmental and health costs to everyone else?

lagadu• 7 years ago

That's a lot of hyperboles and ad-hominem going on there.

wil421• 7 years ago

A quick Autotrader search for new 2 series shows that is false. They are on the opposite side on the US from me but you could ship it or get your dealer to get it for you.

Crevier BMW in Cali looks like they’re horsing manual M240is.

Why don’t you order one, take the delivery in Munich, and save 5%?

lostlogin• 7 years ago

Im going to guess that it’ll cost a fair bit more than 5% to get it home. Great holiday though.

0xDEEPFAC2• 7 years ago

Well, I did say last year.. In fact, at the time in the Atl dealership they only had 1 new manual car on the whole lot with a full parking garage.

DamnInteresting• 7 years ago

Please pardon my friendly cheekiness:

What a sad day for horseback riding enthusiasts everywhere. Went to the livery stable last fall to test ride a quarter horse and was told there are no racing-trained quarter horses in all of North America and I would have to get one shipped in.

But progress is progress I guess and if people want mechanical, self-propelled, noisy carriages they'll get them.

flyinglizard• 7 years ago

It's different though, because horses are developed and manufactured by nature. They don't require a huge enterprise and depth of engineering to mass produce them, nor do they require fueling infrastructure. When the supply chain supporting the mass produced internal combustion engine dies, the internal combustion powered enthusiast car dies with it.

schrijver• 7 years ago

Not sure what ugly crossovers have to do with technical progress; where I’m from they are all the rage, except they have internal combustion engines and you have to drive them yourself!

ForHackernews• 7 years ago

Hey, there's still options for driving fans: https://www.jaguar.com/about-jaguar/jaguar-classic/authentic...

sandworm101• 7 years ago

Manual transmissions are a skill, albeit a declining one. There are certainly tricks that one can do with a manual that one cannot with any current electric. But there will be electric skills too. With the potential for literally instant response, exact throttle control will become more important than clutch skills. We won't be able to just mash the throttle down at every strait.

I think that some configurations of electric motors (ie one motor per wheel) could open up some new driving controls. F1 might not allow traction control, but there is no rule saying that drivers cannot manually prefer one motor over another. I could see the stick replaced with a stick that determines to which wheel power is sent.

nradov• 7 years ago

The dearth of manual transmission cars in the US has more to do with the franchise dealer floorplan financing system than with electric cars. Right now electrics and hybrids still have only a tiny market share.

Most US customers prefer to buy a new car off the lot and drive it home today rather than ordering exactly what they want and waiting for the factory to build it. So dealers have to forecast what customers want and stock those as inventory. Dealers finance their inventory so they live or die by turnover rates. Thus they mostly only stock the most popular models, colors, and options that sell fast. Customers who want automatic transmissions are usually unwilling to buy a manual, whereas customers who would prefer a manual will usually be willing to buy an automatic. So the dealers hardly order any manuals even when manufacturers still offer them.

Creationer2• 7 years ago

We need better road pricing mechanisms for electric vehicles. If roads can no longer be funded at least by fuel taxes, that leaves an immediate revenue shortfall. Simply increasing registration fees does not consider variable levels and times of car use.

Ideally we would have an open standard used by all vehicles to communicate position in real time to the Government. This could be used for road pricing and integrated into the display panel of the vehicle.

simonsarris• 7 years ago

Roads in the US are already >50% not funded by fuel taxes. What's wrong with tolls and other means, or say primarily taxing large trucks, which primarily do most of the wear, if you're concerned about fairness?

Ideally [...] all vehicles to communicate position in real time to the Government

It is not often that one man's "ideally" is another man's "dystopia" so succinctly.

Creationer2• 7 years ago

That still fails to address congestion. The problem is similar to the electricity sector - we spend a lot of money creating capacity to handle peak-loads. If we simply time-shifted some road demand, or generally reduced the peak levels of road use, it would have a non-linearly positive benefit.

A rough example: people often decide to buy lunch from cafe's at the arbitrary time of 12:00 midday onwards, forming large queues. If more people bought at 11:30am, the actual time difference is minor, but demand can be handled a lot more effectively. Same thing with people arbitrarily deciding to leave work and drive home simultaneously at an arbitrary 5:00pm. If using the road at that time cost $2, and 30 minutes earlier $0.50, you can very effectively shift demand and improve overall efficiency substantially.

This is speaking from the POV of road use in cities. Its also very transparent to road users how to best optimise their road usage, since travel times, congestion levels etc. can be monitored and forecast centrally and effectively, and then signalled with road pricing, instead of individual drivers needing to do all that themselves.

The other problem is that by simply restricting axle weight for highway use, we ignore potential economic efficiencies. For example, a single super-heavy truck might create $100 of road damage, but deliver $1000 on economic benefits (eg. replacing two trucks). The user should be able to pay for the damage that they cause. This could be integrated into a smart road-pricing system that considers vehicle axle weight.

Singapore has such a system which works very well - but it relies on a large box on the dashboard and AFAIK doesn't considered axle weight.

RickJWagner• 7 years ago

It does make the electric car seem attractive.

Waiting for the flood of affordable electric cars that are supposed to arrive soon.

The Twilight of Combustion Comes for Germany's Empire of Engines

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