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Mercedes-Benz scales back electric ambitions as EV pessimism grows
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2024
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Someone more educated, please explain to me, why it’s impossible to just take the existing industry, take all the know how and engineering and direct efforts into electrifying (converting) existing cars instead of building new ones.
If the world was perfect and there was no nuance, no bad actors, no human factor involved - would it be a viable solution to cut back on the emissions without getting rid of the comfort that a car affords?
You'd need to gut the car completely and rebuild it, it would be more work than starting from scratch.
When you mass-manufacture things, they’re made in a very specific way using a very specific amount of material in a very specific size and shape in a very specific spot in order to accommodate the exact stuff that goes into the final product.
This is sort of true in theory but in the reality of vehicle powertrains it's not an issue.
As far as I’ve seen with EV’s, it’s especially true. Their configurations are usually wildly different from gas cars.
Yes... They are wildly different...
...And the drive setups fit well in gas cars.
Engines, transmissions, and fuel tanks take up a lot of room. People have been mounting electric motors in cars and stuffing them with batteries for decades.
Some people even leave the whole subframe from a Tesla complete and mount it directly under a car. Obviously different cars are able to accept different solutions.
Recall that we are not talking about EV cars but converting gas cars to EV.
First, EVs don't have powertrains...
Who is talking about EV powertrains?
You can absolutely and fairly easily convert pretty much any car to electric power. It's been done a thousand times.
But that doesn't make anybody any money.
Of course it does, there's a shitload of parts that needs to be sourced, and most people will need someone to perform the conversion. There's a substatial amount of money changing hands in that kind of rebuild.
The bigger issue is getting the car approved for public roads after the rebuild. Depending on the country, that is nearly (if not entirely) impossible.
I think it's extremely unlikely. Very, very few modification shops make any money at all. Let alone on modifications that are prohibitively expensive and have an extremely niche market such as gas to EV conversions.
The industry did that during the “compliance” era where they had to hit emissions targets in places like California. The cars were much heavier and didn’t go as far as current EVs. A lot of vestigial metal designed to hold parts that weren’t present in the EV version. A lot less space for batteries since the car was designed for a different layout (gas tanks, engine parts, transmissions).
There are cheap EVs in other markets like Europe. The VW ID3 is a good example. They aren’t shipped here because the industry believes that Americans only want SUVs and giant trucks. This is a problem that plagues combustion cars as well. Ford completely stopped shipping sedans in the US, and companies like Mazda no longer ship smaller trucks in the states.
To which cars are you comparing the vw id3? In Germany, the cheapest settings will result in a price of 40.000€ which is expensive for my taste. But I don't have a clue about the us ev market.
I am “the other market” haha. But even in Europe it’s mostly Tesla’s that you see. At least in the parts that I’ve lived in.
The American truck culture is weird to me.