Sure, but that was before European manufacturers started making already-installed seat heating a subscription service, started selling your data - including location - to anyone willing to pay, released EVs which were 5+ years behind Chinese options, and sold them at well over 2x the cost of the alternatives. Oh, and a huge chunk of those "European" brands aren't even European anymore.
Most Europeans happily pay a premium for a well-engineered semi-local product, as we saw with the German manufacturers during the ICE era. But paying significantly more for a significantly worse product, just for that "Made in Europe" label? Not happening.
VW & friends don't even seem to be aware yet that they are in a fight for survival, and that's what is dooming them. They are more interested in lobbying for tariffs and EV rollout slowdowns than in actually building EVs.
Would you be willing to share the full design files? Considering most of the PCB is well-trodden territory, it would be quite interesting to see the details what it actually came up with!
If anything, it is surprising that the LLM is so bad at stealing a ready-made RP2350 design! There are plenty of easy-to-find tutorials like [0] and [1] that handhold you through the entire design process, and a simple search will give you dozens of design files for open-source boards.
At this level of board complexity you almost have to try to make it completely non-functional, so although it is nice to see it in practice I am not exactly surprised that a LLM with a decent bunch of assistance managed to do it. But there's quite a gap between the equivalent of poorly copying a "Hello World" from StackOverflow and making actual production-ready boards.
Even more labor-intensive, actually. Needs significant babysitting for things like electrical fixtures and window opening, and the final wall is a maintenance nightmare if it isn't plastered smooth.
Only because we culturally expect recessed wiring and plumbing. if we went back to knob and stick wiring and external plumbing, 3d printed homes are much easier to make.
That depends on your definition of "fun to drive". Flooring it loses its charm within a week, and with the additional weight most EVs are awful when it comes to taking corners at speed.
EVs might be fun for drag racing, but if you want to drive on a circuit ICE is still the better option for now.
Yeah I can't speak much to circuit racing (nor drag racing for that matter). I just know that the EV's I've driven have been fun to drive. I don't believe that most people talking about "fun to drive" are taking their cars to a racetrack either though.
I guess I haven't taken any corners agressively enough to really notice the problems you describe with weight.
I will say though that at least for non-racetrack scenarios, the extra weight isn't always as noticable as you'd think because the centre of mass tends to be extremely low relative to an ICE vehicle.
Ironically, larger crossovers have been among the least comfortable cars I have driven. Sure, they are a tad higher so someone with knee issues can more easily get in, but it seems most of the extra space they take up is somehow wasted. If you care about your rear seat passengers or carrying capacity, station wagons are far superior.
The whole "higher on the road" thing is a red queen's race: if everyone is higher on the road, nobody is. You've got slightly better sight yourself until all the other people upsize, and in the meantime you are blocking everyone else's sight. Considering SUVs are more expensive, the only people winning are the car makers.
China has already solved the range problem by speeding up charging. When you can recharge 5 hours of highway driving in range during a 5-minute bathroom stop, an additional few hundred miles just isn't that useful anymore.
You could also go the other way and use the improved range to shrink the battery, but with the ongoing battery cost drop that's not exactly a gamechanger either - and fast-charging long-range Chinese EVs are available for their domestic market for a fraction of the cost of entry-level Western models as well...
Don't get me wrong, improving aerodynamics is a nice goal, but with the ongoing push towards gigantic SUVs there's zero chance anything even remotely resembling this concept car will ever see the light of day.
Perhaps not "global", but it sure seems to be pretty much the entire Western world by now. The US was the first to lose its sedans, but over here in Europe the cars are rapidly expanding as well.
Are we sure that's still happening? It definitely did happen, but anecdotally the SUVs I see on the road seem to be shrinking slightly, from mid and full size SUVs to compact and subcompact SUVs. Not down to Sedans, but not as big as 10 years ago. Maybe my location is weird though.
cars WERE expanding. the reason for this were the road-tax cuts for EVs. Now that this is over, people start thinking again and we see a big shift towards sedans and cars like that.
I'm with you, but there's a bit of an arms race where the more people have SUVs, the more unsafe people in non-SUVs feel (due to collision characteristics, but also because they can't see past the damn things).
Both are irrelevant for your sub-100-mile daily commute, and the additional initial charge for a twice-a-year road trip is a rounding error.
The additional range is nice for home charging when you regularly do 500-mile-plus daily round trips, but that's way beyond regular commute ranges, and someone like an on-location service technician will have the company pay for it anyways.
I won't say that nobody does it, but we're definitely talking about edge cases here.
Either way I think the benefit for me would be after the vehicle is well-worn and only has 10 or 20% of its original range remaining.
If it was so much more efficient than average to begin with that could make the difference whether it was still viable for daily use including short commutes for a number of additional years when almost all other vehicle choices would require a new battery at that point.
Batteries are a bit like capacitors, and I think people are aware how some of the shoddiest capacitors were placed on motherboards for a while there before people figured out how substandard their lifetime was after it caused so many premature failures.
However the engineers who used about twice as much capacitance as the minimum to start with, whether it was intentional or not, were not struck nearly as bad.
I partially agree, but this doesn’t totally address the range issue. There are big sections of the western US (for example) where the existing EV ranges are a dealbreaker.
> There are big sections of the western US (for example) where the existing EV ranges are a dealbreaker
Where? I live in Wyoming. The folks who have EVs around me are doing fine–there aren't many public chargers on a square-mile basis, but there aren't many places the public is randomly going. If you're travelling on a highway, you're passing chargers about half as regularly as you're passing gas stations.
My next vehicle will be an EV. (I'm waiting for non-Tesla self driving to get a bit better.)
The western states are fairly well served by interstates, and all the interstates are now well served by chargers. Obviously there are routes that don't use interstates that aren't served, but in the continental US there is no spot that is more than 150 miles from a charger, and very few that are more than 50.
True, but as an EV driver I feel more comfortable when there are a couple of chargers available in an area — I run into too many chargers which aren’t working to enjoy relying on a single option.
This is literally the only reason I have a J3400 adapter, as much as I hate the idea of giving money to a Musk company we have to admit that Tesla are one of only two companies installing charging stations that has an incentive to maximize coverage instead of profitability (the other being Rivian who is largely targeting off-highway areas ignored by the other networks).
Population-wise that's a rounding error, and very few people routinely take 500+ mile road trips without ever encountering a rest stop or town large enough to warrant a charger.
Perhaps there are some farm workers left who would like some additional range, but they can always throw an extra battery pack or two in the cargo bed, Cybertruck-style.
There will always be people who aren't perfectly served by the currently-available options. We shouldn't let the outliers dominate the conversation when the existing options are sufficient for the vast majority.
> There are big sections of the western US (for example) where the existing EV ranges are a dealbreaker.
Not really anymore, at least not as far as places people regularly need to drive for personal reasons. I'm not saying you can't find people for whom an EV isn't a practical option, I don't even have to look outside of my inner suburban neighborhood to find those, but just like in my neighborhood the majority of people even living in the rural west would have no problem having an EV as a daily because they can charge at home.
Most people aren't driving 200+ miles every day or constantly towing things even if they live and work in the middle of nowhere, and the fact that they can install a fuel station that has little to no operating cost basically anywhere that has a good view of the sky offers advantages of its own.
Yes the Chinese have better infrastructure. Probably even better technology out in production available to them at this point. But so what? I mean it's great for the rest of the world. And that's awesome. But how are we plebes in the US ever gonna get access to those vehicles?
It's not as simple an issue as people make it out to be here in the US.
But yes. Good on Europe and China for pushing these technologies forward.
Increased charging rate also means that fewer charging stations can serve more cars. One Megawatt charger can serve 4x as many cars as a 250 kW charger in the same span of time.
Sub-10-minute charging is going to be standard in new Chinese EVs very soon. There are already many new models on the market this year with charging times between 5 and 10 minutes. There will soon be cars with Megawatt charging speeds that sell for $15k.
As I understand it, Chinese manufacturers have optimized for a different set of parameters than European manufacturers. The Europeans emphasize range, but the Chinese are more willing to trade range for cost while optimizing charging rate.
I strongly believe these announcements are simply performance art for the capital markets to keep the share price higher than fundamentals would dictate.
Great, you've designed and prototyped the vehicle. When will they be built at the rate BYD and other Chinese automakers are building EVs? Until then, it's vaporware. All that matters is deliveries (China is exporting ~4M more vehicles per year than VW delivers globally, as of this comment).
I don't know man, they're cutting 100k jobs to keep the dividends flowing (The Porsche-Piëch family controls a majority of VW's voting rights through Porsche SE) while closing factories. That strikes me as "preserve the share price and profits while the ship sinks" versus investment to scale EV sales to compete.
This car is roughly 3-4x more efficient than the average Chinese SUV, which typically consume well above 20 kWh/100 km (which energetically, though not in terms of emissions, approaches what an efficient compact ICE car consumes). It does this range on a 50-something kWh battery pack, instead of a three-digit kWh battery pack. Since consumption is so low, range added per minute of charging is up there. Everything can be smaller, lighter, made with less resources, creating fewer emissions, byproducts and downstream effects etc.
Yes, driving truck-sized cars with two-ton batteries the size of a french-door fridge also works and also easily moves 1.5 people per trip.
The European grocery-bought bag of sugar I have lying around has a regular nutritional label, including a list of ingredients. Spoilers: sugar is made out of sugar and contains almost 100g of sugar per 100g.
Because it isn't a simple loan, and the value of the equipment itself as collateral is highly doubtful anyways.
Nvidia is investing in their customers by buying their stock. Nvidia is directly buying compute from their customers. Nvidia is making "if you can't find a customer, we'll take all of your capacity" deals. Nvidia is making a ton of fake huge-number deals which are supposed to be realized over time but most likely never will.
They are doing everything they can to make that customer look like a healthy and valuable business which everyone should invest in and loan money to - which in turn flows directly back to Nvidia to buy GPUs and boost their revenue. They are essentially creating sockpuppets to keep external money flowing in so they can keep the money printer running.
Most Europeans happily pay a premium for a well-engineered semi-local product, as we saw with the German manufacturers during the ICE era. But paying significantly more for a significantly worse product, just for that "Made in Europe" label? Not happening.
VW & friends don't even seem to be aware yet that they are in a fight for survival, and that's what is dooming them. They are more interested in lobbying for tariffs and EV rollout slowdowns than in actually building EVs.
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