MTrauman

FYI--THE TESLA KILLER


Tesla better start making it's production sales number soon or the rest of the auto industry is going to eat their lunch! The future is bright with electric cars it appears but where will Tesla be in the mix?




Tesla Killer? A First Look at the Chevy Bolt
From: Bloomberg
The Chevy Bolt Is the Ugly Car of the (Very Near) Future

With brilliant financial engineering, GM beats Tesla to the punch.

by Kyle Stock @KyleStockMore stories by Kyle Stock

‎December‎ ‎19‎, ‎2016‎ ‎6‎:‎19‎ ‎AM



If you’re in the market for a car, there are some good reasons not to buy Chevrolet’s new Bolt. Maybe you insist on leather seats, take long road-trips to the middle of nowhere, or have a boat to tow around. If not, GM’s new long range electric vehicle will be at the very least entirely sufficient for your needs. At best, it will be a giddy surprise.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The first affordable electric car to top 200 miles on a single charge was expected to be a vehicle of compromise, a bundle of “buts.” Indeed, the most impressive things about the Bolt are the attributes it lacks. The car is not tiny, boring or slow. And it handily topped its goal, coming in with an EPA-estimated 238-mile range, almost exactly the distance between New York and Boston or Washington D.C.


The 2017 Chevrolet Bolt EV is tall, stubby and full of busy design details.
Photographer: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg
It is not, however, a looker. “Pragmatic” is probably the best adjective to describe the car. It looks like a stubby pod, cluttered by a smattering of busy design cues—swooping creases, bits of black plastic, and too many lights. The odd design works like clown-car magic on the interior, however. Chevy managed to peg the driver’s seat high for a commanding view of the road, while leaving plenty of headroom for tall people in the front seats and in back.
The Bolt’s design is neither futuristic nor timeless, but that’s likely the point. GM has boldly designed electric cars in the past and it didn’t go so well. The Bolt simply looks like a lot of other contemporary cars—a little Buick Encore, a little Honda HR-V and a dash of BMW i3. The shape grows on you. It’s athletic; small without being wimpy, sturdy without being bloated.
Darin Gesse, senior manager of GM product strategy, admitted that design took a second seat to function. “We talked to customers about what they wanted and it all came down to range and price and range,” he said. “Everything else wasn’t even second on the list; it was like 9th.”
On the Road

Forget about curb appeal. On the road, the Bolt is charming. It’s quick, even for an electric car, thanks to a relative dearth of weight and clever gearing of the electric motor. It accelerates eagerly all the way up to its 95 mile-per-hour limit.
Steering is tight and precise with plenty of weight and feedback. The ride is simultaneously forgiving and firm, thanks to GM’s chasis tuning expertise and the big slab of a battery. The 60 kwh lithium-ion monolith keeps the vehicle grounded through turns, stiffens the frame and absorbs the typical vibration that comes with pushing a box of metal through the air at highway speed.
That massive battery, however, comes at a hefty price. GM spends about $9,000 on each one compared with a couple hundred bucks it costs to build a small gasoline engine. The yawning chasm of cost is clearly recouped somewhat inside the car. The cockpit is a cheap collage of plastic and hard rubber that feels down-market even on a $30,000 vehicle. It is “nice” in the way Ikea furniture is “nice,” which is to say it is thoughtful, pragmatic, and not terrible looking. You just don’t want to touch it too much.


Plastic and rubber go a long way to keep costs down inside the Bolt, and it shows.
Source: Chevrolet
The important bits are better. The 10.2-inch touchscreen in the dash is both responsive and intuitive to use. There’s WiFi—which actually works. Behind the steering wheel, the 8-inch digital gauge cluster is sharp and useful. In addition to the current speed, it prominently displays a real-time array of ranges: the maximum, minimum, and average amount of miles left on the battery, which are constantly calculated based on how the car is being driven and how hard the climate control system is working. Chevrolet appears to be almost bragging about the car’s range and, like most electric carmakers, it subtly encourages efficient driving by gamifying the experience.
One of the Bolt’s best features is a regenerative braking paddle behind the wheel, which simultaneously slows the car and recharges the battery when pulled. After 20 minutes of driving, I found myself hardly using the floor pedal. It’s addictive, engaging and a constant prompt of the car’s raison d’être.
Financial Engineering

So how did GM pull off a $30,000 car with 200 miles of range? Tesla’s promise to deliver on the same equation is still about a year away (longer if you ask Morgan Stanley). Many have expressed surprise about how soundly GM beat the most innovative car company in the world to the punch. But, this race wasn’t won by engineering brilliance. It was a financial battle between David and Goliath. This time, Goliath won, which shouldn’t shock anyone who understands economies of scale.
At Tesla, unit economics are a brutal reality. With only two cars right now, the company’s fortunes rocket or swoon every time it misses or beats production estimates by 1,000 vehicles. Musk has plenty of magic tricks to throw in the mix—from solar panels to giant garage batteries—but at the end of the day, the per-car calculation is hard to escape.
GM can spread costs and revenue over a fleet of about 40 vehicles and four separate brands. It buys parts by the trainload and sourced parts and engineering solutions from across the company. The Bolt’s gear-selector comes from Buick. The nifty rear-view mirror, which is essentially a camera most of the time, is courtesy of Cadillac.
GM didn’t need to go on a building spree either. It’s had an assembly plant outside Detroit since 1983, and it’s been building Chevrolet Sonics there for five years. Batteries, meanwhile, are just another part that can be ordered. GM was able to source its power-packs from LG Chem in Korea.
The company is expected to lose somewhere in the neighborhood of $9,000 per Bolt, but it likely doesn’t crunch the numbers that way. The vehicle is part R&D exercise and part marketing expense. Battery costs are sure to come down. As they do, expect Chevy to keep the price static and dial up the details a bit. And with electric vehicle mandates escalating in 10 states, the Bolt will let GM sell more swanky Silverado pickups at much fatter margins without paying penalties or buying credits from competitors. In that sense, the Bolt is a 3,600 pound chunk of Musk-level game theory.
“Tesla loses money on every car too,” said Bill Visnic, editorial director of the Society of Automobile Engineers; GM is just better equipped to mitigate that loss and leverage it into gains elsewhere.
The Anti-Tesla

Regardless of what President-elect Donald Trump has planned, California and nine other states will require 15 percent of new vehicles to be zero-emissions (read: electric) by 2025. European countries, meanwhile, are passing resolutions to ban gasoline engines entirely by 2030.
In a few years, a long-range, affordable electric car will no longer be a novelty. Chevrolet has simply made a very good version of that machine before anyone else. It’s a winner-take-all market, but only for the next few months when competitors will begin rolling off the line. Almost every automaker has now committed to making electric vehicles, most recently Fiat-Chrysler and Mercedes.
It's unlikely the Bolt will crush Tesla’s nascent Model 3. It has made essentially the anti-Tesla, a vehicle long on utility and short on sexy. What the Bolt will do is lure thousands of buyers who would otherwise buy a conventional car and immediately make obsolete almost every other electric car on the road. At this very moment, thousands of Nissan Leaf owners are quietly kicking themselves.
“You go after the big piece of the pie and hopefully get a lot of it,” Gesse said of the car’s broad approach to the market.
So how will the Bolt sell? Chevrolet says early demand is outstripping supply, but when we strolled through GM’s Orion Assembly Plant, it was only making about 100 Bolts a day. Chevy churns out Camaros twice as fast. But GM didn’t make the Bolt because it thought it would outsell its most popular models. It made it because it could.

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stever500

I would never, ever get an electric car. RANGE ANXIETY. No way... if I want to drive to Montreal, or New York (from DC), or to my sister's in Florida from DC, I can't take a Tesla. I LOVE being able to gas up ANYWHERE, at pretty much anytime, and just keep going. Quickly. I drive a lot. I never, ever get stranded unless a catastrophic thing happens.

Getting stranded by running out of electricity would never work for me. Cheap gas in the USA. LOVE IT HERE.

Long live our gas hogging cars. I'll be dead in 50 years (I'd be 105). Maybe the next generation will mostly drive electric cars but for me, I enjoy my gas hogs.

Tesla's are stunning, just not for me.

krd2023

stever500, I appreciate your points, but maybe you and I should consider to never say never (I've said I'll never drive a Mercedes again, but I may rescind that if MBUSA decides to give me one after my Mercedes experience which I detailed here: https://mbworld.org/forums/diesel-fo...tml?styleid=19 )

I'm actually considering a Tesla because of my experiences of being stranded in my Mercedes. My first was a few years ago when one of my run-flat factory tires went flat in Billings MT - 8 hours from home on a family trip - where no such tires sized correctly were anywhere to be found nearby, thus forcing us to leave our car behind for days (as MB had decided not to provide a spare tire in the 2010 ML350 Bluetecs).

Another time was our Bluetec's fateful engine failure, fortunately near our home, when the same Mercedes simply powered off and died while I was driving to work. This event prompted my thread https://mbworld.org/forums/diesel-fo...tml?styleid=19 to which MBUSA never attempted to resolve which led me to offload my loss and declare that I'll never drive a Mercedes again.

Some here can't be serious that they'll lock their doors without peering through the windows, that they'll cling to the dinosaur fuels and comforts of the combustion engines, or to the MB brand which is late to the dance for that matter, instead of giving electric a chance with its refreshing innovations and ever-expanding ranges.

WEBSRFR

Cheap gas in the USA? You mean the dinosaur sludge that has helped the Middle East get rich and fund you know what?

You live in a strange world because the Tesla owners who live in the real world drive anywhere they want. We use our Model S as our primary car. From the DC area we have explored the Blue Ridge Mountains, traveled down the coat to Key West, traveled up the coast to NY Finger Lakes area, Cape Cod, simply wherever.

Between Tesla superchargers and Destination Chargers available at just about every resort we stay at we never worry about range any more. The P100D offers 315 miles of range and when the 100D comes out in about a month or two that will be nearly 350 miles and when the Gigafactory is fully operational we will crack 400 miles along with the technology to fully charge the car in about 10 minutes.

While combusting cars languish in innovation electric cars are making major breakthroughs almost every few months. In the US Tesla Model S sales now equal Mercedes S Class and BMW 7 Series sales COMBINED. Fewer and fewer people who experience the EV drivetrain and technology in a Tesla are no longer interested in driving a combusting car that burns dinosaur sludge and comes with a smoke stack as it were a machine from some primitive era.

And you know what is better that cheap gas in the USA? The world's most technologically sophisticated car built right here in the USA with American ingenuity, technology, and labor. And what powers our Tesla is also made in the USA too courtesy of our rooftop solar installation and the giant nuclear reactor in the sky called the sun.

While you marvel at cheap gasoline every day we marvel at the finest American engineering and technology in our garage that is not powered by cheap gasoline but free sunlight.

texex91

Had a early Tesla P85+...biggest piece of garbage I've owned.

Sold it after 4 weeks.

I could careless about gas prices--and most of the US are are buying SUV's not cars.

Tesla is junk IMHO as a former owner.

Gas is SOOOOOO much better. Hence why 99% of the plant prefer them.

El Cid

If I read the WSJ article correctly, Tesla car sales are down by 22.6% for 2016 compared to 2015. Model X sales are up, but last year it was ZERO. The Model X did boost overall Tesla sales.
MB total sales for 2016 was 374,541. Tesla - 39,975.
One problem with the chart is that "Light Trucks" are apparently SUV's, such as Model X.
No EV's made the top 20 in sales.

http://online.wsj.com/mdc/public/pag...autosales.html

Wolfman

Sales were down for the month of Dec. in that report. It shows Model S up 13%. Sounds great until one realizes that this means 3000 cars.

This report does highlight the tiny niche that Tesla represents. 40k cars/SUVs out of 17.5 million sold in the US last year. About 0.22% of US sales.

I will not diminish the efforts of Tesla but it highlights how ridiculous the ongoing sales charts/stats from websrfr really are.

lolachampcar

No one takes BeV seriously.
Tesla proves you can make a compelling BeV (I know, its not an S Class).
MB, VAG, BMW and the like are now all talking about BeVs.
I'd say the little company is having an effect.

Of course, all the talk from the others is just that until they come up with battery capacity to build more than 30K per year compliance car levels. Traditional ICE mfgs have no interest in building BeVs as they compete with their core ICE offerings. Any talk of GM and the Bolt being competition is lacking in critical thought.

Come on folks; petrified liquified dead dyno (and some plants) is not going to last forever. Burning it also really can not be good for anyone's health. From my perspective, I'd like to see this kind of innovation coming from the US so we can contribute in a positive way to the world moving forward.

I know it is good sport to crap on something new but I just do not get the animosity.

El Cid

The expiration of petroleum has been predicted ever since the early 20's. In fact, in the 40's the predictions were that it would all be gone long before now.
Still here and will be for considerable period of time into the future. Not saying we should not develop alternatives and EV's are part of that. But EV's are a very, very small niche.
In addition, the electricity to recharge the EV's is usually produced by petroleum, coal or nuclear. Solar and hydroelectric are minute in comparison. Even natural gas is somewhat of a byproduct of oil production.

lolachampcar

So we should solve all those problems. Being the first to do so would give us a competitive advantage in addition to using our time to solve other's problems instead of creating problems for other people.

The when of it really only matters for those that want to continue to make money off the status quo. It will happen. Our electric grid must increase by a factor of three if we are going to place all our heat, transportation and current needs on electricity. The only sensible way to do so is distributed generation as we are not going to triple the size of a grid we already are not inclined to maintain. Point generation helps address your fossil fuels to generate power issue.

These answers are obvious and simple all be it not easy. The question we should be asking is why or how we have lost the ability use our brains to make obvious decisions.

syswei

A reviewer here likes the 2018 MB S-Class Drive Pilot better than Tesla's current Autopilot.

OTOH, Tesla production beginning late 2016 has a new-generation sensor suite, and the software by the time the S-Class refresh actually ships will imo likely surpass Drive Pilot.

absent

Electricity does not come free, mostly is produced by burning that petrified Dino juice.

syswei

At the margin, new electrical capacity additions in the U.S. have been running more than two-thirds from zero-greenhouse gas emissions sources according to this EIA source.

absent

That source you mention says in plain English that 64% of electric energy produced in USA in 2015 came from burning fossil fuels.
Your post does not make sense.

syswei

My post in "plain English" said "new electrical capacity additions in the U.S."

If 30,000 (or whatever) Americans purchased Teslas last year and as a result the utility industry added additional generating capacity, the expected contribution (according to the link I posted) from fossil fuels was 32%. Of that 32%, the vast bulk was from natural gas, which btw is cleaner than oil, not just in particulates but also carbon dioxide emissions.

absent

I see what exists, you talk of something that supposedly will happen but did not yet.
Keep dreaming buddy.....

syswei

The source I referenced is a government forecast, published March 2016, of 2016 utility-scale power plant capacity additions. It suggested 32% fossil fuel fired additions for 2016. Now, maybe the real number turned out to be 30 or 27%, or 34 or 37%, but assuredly it did NOT turn out to be 60 or 70%, or whatever it might be in YOUR dreams. These things take a long time to build...I somehow doubt there was a sudden burst of fossil fuel power plant orders that came in April 2016, that was built and came on line by Dec 2016. IN YOUR DREAMS, BUDDY. I think your mind is clouded by your hate for Tesla.

absent

Interesting interpretation of a simple information, kudos to you for being inventive.
Your source pasted below:
What is U.S. electricity generation by energy source?

In 2015, the United States generated about 4 trillion kilowatthours of electricity.1 About 67% of the electricity generated was from fossil fuels (coal, natural gas, and petroleum).

Major energy sources and percent share of total U.S. electricity generation in 2015:1

Coal = 33%
Natural gas = 33%
Nuclear = 20%
Hydropower = 6%
Other renewables = 7%
Biomass = 1.6%
Geothermal = 0.4%
Solar = 0.6%
Wind = 4.7%
Petroleum = 1%
Other gases = <1%
You Tesla fanboys need help, I suspect Tesla uses some mind control gas to turn you into a variant of "Stepford wives".
I know a really good psychiatrist who specializes in treating brainwashed victims of religious cults, seems to me Tesla is creating a vast pool of new clients for him.
Please, don't stress yourself, life is good and (like Stuart Smalley on SNL) "you are smart enough, you are good enough and dog gone it, people like you"
Do you need a "safe space" like some of these college kids upset lately?

WEBSRFR

In 2000, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, former oil minister of Saudi Arabia, gave an interview in which he said:
http://energypost.eu/historic-moment...carbon-bubble/

I bet some people never thought the era of the horse and buggy or the steam engine would come to an end either. We now generate more power than what our house and car can use with our rooftop solar installation. Once battery prices come down we can actually go off-grid for energy.

The future is great and soon even luddites will see the benefits of being self sufficient in energy without polluting the air we all breathe. Even if you don't give a rats *** about the environment it is cheaper to power your house with solar if you have good sun exposure. After about 7 more years our solar installation would be paid for and our energy from the sun will cost us nothing.

MTrauman

Yes!


And I bet WEBSRFR does not realize that his beloved TESLA will become extinct in the not to distant future as well. OR MAYBE THE BOLT WILL KILL THE MODEL 3 and not the HYPERLOOP. OR MAYBE THERE IS ENOUGH OF US THAT STILL LOVE OUR GAS GUZZLERS that TESLA will just die a slow death. Not that I hate TESLA. In fact I admire TESLA. I hate the idiotic TESLA Fanboys that act like Cult members.


In today's news they are getting closer to the Pittsburgh, PA to Chicago, IL Hyperloop. SEE BELOW








A Columbus-bred plan to run a shuttle from Chicago and Pittsburgh has been given a boost by a transportation startup.
Hyperloop One has whittled down a list of 2,600 applications to 35 semifinalists in a challenge “to move passengers and cargo between two points immediately, safely, efficiently and sustainably.”


Enlarge

Los Angeles-based Hyperloop One has raised millions from investors.
Hyperloop One











A MORPC plan to create a new Midwestern path that would run from the two major cities with stops in Columbus and Fort Wayne, Indiana, has been chosen as a semifinalist by the Los Angeles company.






















January 27, 2017


See More Events



The promise of the hyperloop – "a near-supersonic train in a giant pneumatic tube" – took off in 2013 in large part because of Tesla Motors Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) founder Elon Musk, though he has no affiliation with this company. Success is anything but guaranteed.
The goal is to transport people and cargo in autonomous pods via airline-equivalent speeds at cheaper prices, and doing it in a more environmentally friendly way.
Details on the Midwest Connect plan offered by MORPC, or the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission, are scarce. The agency’s project overview says it would fill a gap not yet filled by a direct highway or passenger railway.
“This route forges a non-redundant intercity connection linking some of the strongest performing regions and transportation hubs of the Midwest,” the overview says.
Related: Columbus beats 6 other cities to win Smart City Challenge


Hyperloop One sought the applications as part of what it calls a global challenge, and received applications from more than 100 countries. MORPC will spend the rest of the quarter expanding its proposal by partnering with public and private groups before participating in an event in the nation’s capital on April 6.







MORPC is one of 11 U.S. teams chosen as a semifinalist. Hyperloop One expects to pick finalists in May.
Other U.S. corridors of note include Seattle to Portland, Miami to Orlando and Austin, Dallas and Houston.

syswei

I'll try to make this as simple as possible for you, as evidently you never took a basic economics course in college...assuming you even went to college.

You are confusing installed capacity with net capacity additions. This is a bit like confusing distance with velocity.

The utility industry projects growth in demand and then builds new capacity to meet that new demand.

My original post on the subject said "At the margin, new electrical capacity additions in the U.S. have been running more than two-thirds from zero-greenhouse gas emissions sources"





If EVs and other sources of new demand had been zero in 2016, the industry would have had to add zero new capacity in 2016. If EVs and other sources of new demand had been expected to be 2 GW higher than it was, the industry would have installed 28 GW of new capacity instead of 26 GW.

As shown in the chart above, that new 2016 capacity, to serve new demand (which includes Tesla and other EVs) was only 32% from fossil fuels.

Get it?

absent

blablablabla...
Who cares about your "at the margin" or "new electrical capacity"
We were talking about where the electric power comes from and you started talking out of your a**.
This statement is as clear as can be and says it clear but you seem to not comprehend simple English.
Did Tesla screw your brain that much?
Quote from EIA:
" About 67% of the electricity generated was from fossil fuels (coal, natural gas, and petroleum)."

syswei

Let's say that some year in the future, 300k, or 1mm, or 3mm EVs are sold...this could happen even without Tesla, as Audi, VW, MB, etc are talking about major EV ramps. Do you think the utility industry would need to build additional capacity or not?

If they built additional capacity, do you think it would look like the installed base (does that term require explanation for you?), which was largely built before all the concern about carbon emissions, and before Three Mile Island, and the Chernobyl and Fukushima meltdowns? Or would it look more like the 2016 new capacity additions per EIA:




...namely 68% NON-fossil fuels?

Auto industry sells a bunch of EVs, utility industry adds some new generating capacity...two-thirds NON-fossil fuels. See the cause and effect? If you don't, maybe you should finish up that GED and then go to community college and then real college, and we can continue the discussion.

(In case it isn't clear, I am not saying that the utility industry is adding capacity because Tesla exists, I'm saying they're adding capacity because of growing demand for electricity, of which EVs happen to be a part).

absent

Nice one.
Talk started about WHERE the electricity comes from NOW, you conveniently changed it to where it might come from in the FUTURE.
Until that FUTURE arrives, we really don't know that yet.
....and sorry, I can't get GED since I did not go to Elementary school....

MTrauman

Early analysis seems to show that the Chevy Bolt may be in fact a Tesla Model 3 Killer. Or at the very least showing that other car manufacturers such as MB will take business away from Tesla.


Below find a three time Model S owner that just bought the Chevy Bolt thoughts from the Tesla Forum.




Forums

Chevy Bolt Comparison





Submitted by marcustcohn on January 11, 2017
OK - First, I own an S85D - my third Tesla and I think it is wonderful car - not perfect but really excellent in many ways. I also have a Model 3 on order (fairly early) but recently had the chance to buy a Chevy Bolt and took the plunge. So here is what I know about how this stacks up vs. my S85D. The short story is the Bolt is a very good car. Chevy has done a much better job than I thought General Motors could accomplish. Some specifics - range is as advertised - I have limited highway miles but enough urban driving (35-60 mph) to gauge performance which is running about 4.5 miles / kWh vs my S85D at about 3.5 miles / kWh for the same sort of driving. The Bolt relies a lot on Apple Car Play which is OK - the navigation is not as flexible as the Tesla but suffices. The other apps work fine - Bolt can read you your messages and take a verbal reply - dial your phone based on voice commands, etc. I have not explored On Star as I do not intend to subscribe past the free period as this is strictly a metro car for us - the S85D is our road car. Chevy has figured out to protect the battery they only allow charging to 80 percent - there is a 'hilltop' mode that will allow a slightly higher charge but no way to use all the 60kWh battery - it really is a 48kWh battery fully used but it gives the range advertised. Finish interior is on the plastic side but the arm rests and cup holders are good. There is no question that charging options are not in the same league but I personally do not need them - this is a metro car for the most part. It is very nimble and has great regeneration. I can see this fitting a lot of electric car buyer but Chevy plans to produce 'only' 50,000 so this probably will not impact Model 3 that much.