Honda says making cheap electric vehicles is too hard, ends deal with GM::The platform was to use GM’s Ultium batteries.
So, like all the others, while China will produce cheap eCars. Look, I don’t want to predict the future, but if I only have 20-30k for a new car, I simply physically can’t buy a 60k SUV. You can’t jump into a saturated market of other car companies, who almost all seam to want only expensive eCars and expect a good outcome. There’s only so much money in the pockets of people and only so much people are willing to pay for a used eCar, if it needs expensive battery replacement soon. Not going to happen. Build cheaper cars or fail.
Not to mention not everyone has a garage or nearby charging spot to charge an ev.
Perhaps dealing with infrastructure first would be interesting…
Then again, I don’t have a gas station in my backyard either…
Shopping centers/grocery stores need more charging stations, that’s the most realistic place to go to charge when you don’t have the capacity to do it at home.
Workplaces too.
I cannot even charge my phone at work under Italian law (I’m a public employee and it would count as malversation).
Wow that’s a bit of a stretch 😂
Or maybe instead of blocking everything on the theory a complete charging solution will magically appear despite no demand, we can go ahead with the 59% of the population living in a house, and can decide to install a charger. Maybe we can go ahead with charger networks we already have, already allowing most road trips and getting better continuously. And we can use all that demand, all that money to keep building out a better and better charging solution.
FYI - buddy of mine has an EV at a townhouse with no opportunity to charge, and just goes to a supercharger once a week to top off. It may be inconvenient, but it’s not onerous
Good point. It’s a sort of chicken egg problem. Lack of ev and no investment for infrastructure, resulting in even less ev.
Here in Germany, in my local town, they build hydrogen fuel stations instead of charging stations. Very strange.
Hydrogen may not be such a bad idea until there’s electrical infrastructure. Hydbrid hydrogen-electric even?
Hydrogen cars are basically hybrids already. Hydrogen has some issues though that are unlikely to be overcome. Go watch a video of someone driving one around, if you think finding an EV charger is difficult, just try finding a hydrogen charger outside of southern California.
There are two types of hydrogen cars: Fuel Cell EVs and ICE built to run with hydrogen fuel. Both of them are the future of fuel. You won’t see a network of EV charging stations in most south american, african, or Asian countries. The EV revolution is very urban focused. Hydrogen as a fuel that can be transported almost as easily as gasoline is the pragmatic future. EVs are popular because Elon Musk went viral.
Edit: totally aware it’s not successful at the moment: https://www.motor1.com/news/693449/toyota-hydrogen-mirai-not-successful/
Hydrogen doesn’t solve any problem. It’s just a secondary set of infrastructure we’d have to invest in, and it doesn’t overlap with BEV infrastructure (excepting for some grid improvements).
You can’t have infrastructure without the cars, and you can’t have the cars without the infrastructure. The solution to this catch-22 is to force the infrastructure to catch up.
Planning on a 1-to-1 swap between traditional cars and EVs is the crassest mistake. It would take a paradigm shift that emphasizes remote work, carpooling and carsharing in order to make private transportation really sustainable.
EVs are here to save the car manufacturers, not the planet. Literally just a bandaid solution to kick the can of actually implementing the harder solutions that require some societal change down the road a few more years
Charging infrastructure is getting better. I’ve had an EV without home charging for three years now and I’ve managed just fine. Overall it’s no more inconvenient than having to go to a gas station.
Electric cars don’t normally need a battery replacement during the car’s lifetime. If the battery needs to be replaced, the car has usually already been running longer than most ICE cars ever would. The used market for EVs used to be pretty dire, with little supply and awful pricing. But it’s slowly getting better. But of course the fact remains, that there is currently a lot of demand for cheap EVs and little supply. The Chinese are gearing up to eat up that part of the market.
What?
Show me a battery that goes 200k - 300k.
Just because the average consumer is an idiot and replaces cars long before then doesn’t mean the vehicles can’t go that far.
Every car my family has owned for the last 30 years has gone at least 200k, some 300k+. My current 2005 vehicle is at 270k, and I expect many more years from it, barring an accident. Our newest vehicle is from 2016, and is approaching 100k. An electric vehicle would be needing a battery soon, while all mine needs is an oil change, and perhaps a timing belt for $50 (to be fair, I’ll probably spend $250 and replace the water pump, idlers, and primary belt while I’m there. Last time was 100k miles ago).
EV batteries are lasting longer than expected.
Also, when accounting for maintenance over, EV’s can be cheaper over time even with a battery replacement. They don’t need oil, engine coolest, or transmission fluid. There’s a whole life support system for ICE cars that EVs just don’t have, and what replaces it tends to last indefinitely if there are no manufacturing defects or have an abusive owner. Brake maintenance is also reduced; they need the fluid changed, but regen braking tends to reduce the need to replace pads. Manufactures were already seeing pads and rotors on hybrids last nearly the life of the vehicle.
It all adds up, and while the $10k battery cost years down the line scares people as one big number, it often ends up being less than what you would have spent on maintenance over the same time period.
Finally, the batteries may not be worthless at the end of that time. Putting them in houses for backup power is often still feasible. You’re just not getting the same range out of them anymore.
Aside from the Leaf, which does not have any sort of battery temperature management, I wouldn’t expect an EV to need a battery so soon.
Teslas can easily make it to 200k miles at while retaining >80% of peak capacity, according to
.
Most of the other brands don’t have enough vehicles approaching that milestone that I could find data on.
EVs in the US generally come with an 8 year/100k mile battery warranty.
That being said, most of the failed batteries are with early gen Nissan Leafs.
Battery degradation is by and large a non-issue, and newer battery chemistries will easily allow 1 million miles with ~70% battery health.
20-30K?! Holy crap. I’ve never spent more than 10K on a car. But then I’ve never bought a new car…
you’ll spent 10k minumum on replacing a battery on a used tesla
I’ve pretty much resigned myself to the fact the only electric car I’ll ever own will be a 10 year old Nissan Leaf.
There’s always one smug dunger driver in the comments.
Let people have nice things, OK?
I hope to see more cheap cars by 2025 when VW starts doing their id1 and id2. The rest of the manufacturers need to follow suit or lose out of the massive market for mini and micros.
Personally I did get a used EV. It had driven less than 200km in total, but I got it at about 70% of the normal price. The battery is fine. The used market isn’t just for worn out cars. People sell almost new cars for a variety of reasons, so it’s worth looking at the used market already. The batteries in modern cars are generally better than their reputation. I wouldn’t want to get a 7-10 year old EV, but anything newer is just fine.
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07’ Civic here. You distracted drivers better not run into me. Please I can’t afford another car.
08 civic and still going strong.
My Chevy bolt still runs. Shoot, it’s cheaper to drive than my 1986 Honda Civic!
GM has blamed the Ultium bottleneck on an unspecified “automation equipment supplier.”
Rockwell Automation has entered the chat.
Rockwell is like Comcast. You have no opinion on them or a blind raging hostile opinion of them.
Edit: on a serious note the systems engineering folks have been telling this before my parents were born. This should not have been a shock to anyone. Diversity in components means greater ability to withstanding changes, the tradeoff is you are going to run less efficiently even in good times.
I want to talk about trains.
How about trains but we only use electricity to power them, and let’s say put overhead electric fuel lines over them. Trams. I wanna see more trams. Solves most of the issues EV’s have with batteries.
I’m a little sad about this - the planned Honda looked nice, the range would have been fine for us (we usually take our pickup on longer road trips anyway), and I was hoping to replace our Mazda 3 with one if it drove nicely and all that. I admit that I had some concerns about the GM underpinnings, though - my experience with American brands is rough, and our experience with GM is the roughest.
We plan to hit the auto shows next year to get an idea of what we want to look at more closely.
The previously announced cars are still releasing.
Oh thanks. I missed that. Still have the GM influence concern though!
I dunno, my Chevy bolt has been a solid
GM had their chances with us. My wife and I each brought a GM into the relationship; they both developed serious transmission problems - among other random issues…and both had much less than 100k miles. They need to show years of reliability before I’d buy another one.
Fossil fuel mafia dumped a large bribe into Honda’s bank account?
Idk, even if you made almost everything out of aluminum , thats like $2000 for the raw metal for the frame and body, 8k for a 80kwh battery, about 5.5k for a 166HP emrax 228 motor off the shelf… with no transmission, the most expensive components combined are less than 20k. I dont see how even a 35k EV would not be profitable with some sensible off the shelf components.
China does it lol
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Crazy to see how far behind Japanese car manufacturers are getting these days. Japan disrupted the auto market and made small, fuel efficient, cars popular. Now Honda and Toyota are starting to feel like 70’s Detroit.
Meanwhile Hyundai and Kia are absolutely smashing it (in Europe and Asia) with their cheap, reliable cars
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“After studying this for a year, we decided that this would be difficult as a business, so at the moment we are ending development of an affordable EV,” said Honda CEO Toshihiro Mibe in an interview with Bloomberg.
In July, GM had to idle BrightDrop’s production line in Canada due to a shortage of battery cells, and Kelly Blue Book’s sales data for the first three quarters of 2023 show that just 6,920 Ultium-based EVs (which include the Chevrolet Blazer and Silverado EV, as well as the Hummer, Lyriq, and BrightDrop van) were delivered to customers.
GM had said it was ending Bolt production this year at its plant in Orion Township, Michigan, so that it could retool and start building electric trucks beginning in 2024.
The Honda Prologue and Acura ZDX are a pair of electric crossovers that use the same platform as the Cadillac Lyriq and Chevrolet Blazer, and both are still happening.
They’ll even feature Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, which GM has controversially chosen to eliminate from its cars from model year 2024 onward.
And Honda even announced another collaboration with GM earlier today—in 2026, it wants to start operating a robotaxi service in Japan using the Cruise Origin, an autonomous electric vehicle developed by the GM-backed AV company.
The original article contains 606 words, the summary contains 213 words. Saved 65%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
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Conclusion: my next car will be an affordable Chinese car.
Can you import and legally drive those on US roads? I really don’t want to buy a fucking SUV for my next car, but that’s basically the entire electric car market in this country.
The US will probably ban it for geopolitical reasons.
I’m in Europe, BYD already is in this market.
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Yepp, still selling boats, bikes and cars, latest one being the Honda E. Don’t think that model is in the US though
