The Electrify America charging network operates with all the rigor, quality and user-friendliness you’d expect from a product that a car company was forced to build after getting aggressively sued by the U.S. government for cheating on diesel emissions. So if you’re wondering why so many automakers have announced a switch to Tesla’s electric vehicle charging standard, rage at Volkswagen may be a good place to start.
That leads off our morning roundup today. Also on today’s menu: Porsche has a new fast hybrid, Alfa Romeo has a new supercar and it’s workers vs. C-suite executives in America’s auto union fight. Let’s have at it.
Electrify This, Why Don’t Ya
I don’t know how many folks here have taken a road trip in an EV yet, but when you do, an Electrify America station is a welcome sight on the roads. You then get the exact opposite feeling when you realize how many of those EA fast chargers are down, working too slowly or have a huge line of cars waiting for the few ones that might be functional.
Thus, every time an automaker has joyously announced “Three years of free Electrify America charging!” with the purchase of some hot new EV, rooms full of journalists in my line of work would erupt in audible groans. Or expletives. Sometimes both. I hear the same complaints from owners, too; EA’s persistent quality issues, recently knocked again by J.D. Power, make it not up to the task of powering some EV revolution in this country.
I’ll say for the record that I blame the automakers here, too. They’re too used to a century of making cars and engines and letting the ecosystem around them handle everything else, including fueling. They’ve never wanted to be in the charging game. Except for Tesla, of course, and not only building out their Supercharger network but making it functionally the best one, period, is possibly the smartest thing that company’s ever done.
A new report in ChargedEVs from Autopian contributor, longtime EV expert and known Isuzu Impulse enthusiast John Voelcker dives into the drama behind the other automakers’ Tesla turn. JV spoke to more than a dozen executives, engineers and analysts from the car business and around it, and while none would go on the record, they all had plenty to say:
Overall, this year’s developments reflect deep dissatisfaction among automakers other than Tesla with the state of US fast charging—accompanied by fear that Tesla’s ultra-reliable and deeply integrated Supercharger network has given it a permanent competitive advantage.
It’s hard to overstate the disgust and anger at Electrify America among virtually every person we interviewed. The network has come to be viewed, fairly or not, as the most minimal effort VW Group could have exerted to comply with the 10-year, $2-billion settlement it jointly negotiated with the EPA and the California Air Resources Board (CARB).
Five years after its first fast charging station went live in May 2018, Electrify America continues to have sites down for weeks or months and other locations where only one or two cables (out of four, six or eight) actually deliver a charge. While a majority of its stations will recharge an EV, the widely touted standard uptime figure of 97 percent still translates to 11 days a year of downtime for every location. Would you have confidence in your local gas station if you knew it might be dark almost two weeks a year—at random?
Now, very few of these (non-Supercharger) EV charging stations are great, honestly. Even the ones that start well inevitably suffer from downtime or speed issues. So is EA really that bad? Turns out maybe:
While EVgo, Shell Recharge (née Greenlots), ChargePoint and others were included in reliability complaints, those networks are seen—rightly or wrongly—as less unreliable than EA. “EA is by far the most difficult network for us to work with,” said one automaker employee. “It’s just not clear they believe in it, or that they’re in it for the long haul.”
In other words, non-Tesla automakers have had it with EA. Initial hopes that EA would provide a new, large-scale, nationwide network of fast charging stations have now curdled into a desire to see EA out of the game altogether—with “lots of bad blood” directed at the VW Group as a whole. One engineer and one executive even suggested that Volkswagen deliberately did a subpar job. “Remember Dieselgate?” said one. “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice…”
Basically, they all just hoped EA and a few other companies would handle the “charging” thing while they just focused on making cars. And it’s not going well.
For Part 2 of this series today, JV dives into the future of Tesla’s NACS plug standard, which may not be as simple as every Ford and Chevy and Rivian on the road magically getting access to all those Supercharger stations.
Here’s the important part: Engineers are still figuring all that stuff out. And many modern EVs are built to handle faster charging speeds than the current max Superchargers can provide:
It’s clear that the decision to ally with Tesla was one made at CEO level, then foisted on the engineers who must integrate it into future EVs within a 3-year deadline. Indeed, three days after the press release, the lead vehicle engineer on one highly publicized future EV from a large maker said, “The announcement caught us off guard and we still don’t know exactly what was in the agreement they signed.”
Tesla is said to have a document with roughly 40 non-negotiable technology requirements—or what the engineers would have to do to incorporate NACS into their largely complete vehicle design.
You Could Do A Lot Worse
Nowadays many of us are thinking more about our carbon footprints. One way to do that is to consider a hybrid for your next car purchase. And here’s a very good hybrid: the new 2024 Porsche Cayenne Turbo E-Hybrid, which has a combined 729 horsepower and 700 pound-feet of torque and is now the most powerful version of Porsche’s big SUV.
Here are the specs from Car and Driver:
The previous Cayenne Turbo E-Hybrid was a rocket ship for the road, and Porsche appears to have fine-tuned that road-going missile with the updated plug-in-hybrid powertrain. It starts with the twin-turbocharged 4.0-liter V-8 that has been extensively revised to make 591 horsepower. The hybrid system has been upgraded too, as the electric motor now makes 174 horsepower—up from 134 in the outgoing Turbo S E-Hybrid. Combined, the new system produces 729 horsepower and 700 pound-feet of torque.
Compared to its predecessor, the new Turbo E-Hybrid has nearly double the battery capacity, increasing from 14.1 kWh to 25.9 kWh. Porsche claims the increased battery capacity provides more pure-electric range. It didn’t give specifics, but the last generation was capable of 20 EV-only miles, so we expect the new car to be closer to 30 miles. Along with the bigger battery, a new 11.0-kW onboard charger brings charging times down to a claimed two-and-a-half hours for the new version.
Unfortunately, saving the planet at such a tire-destroying level will set you back at least $148,550, or $153,050 for the “coupe” version. Sounds fun, though. [Editor’s Note: To be clear, this large V8-powered hybrid car with probably under 50 miles of EV range isn’t actually going to save any planets. But if you can make your commute fully electric everyday, and do that for many years so you can offset emissions from building this thing, that’s a step in the right direction. -DT].
Alfa Romeo To Debut A New Supercar Tomorrow
Speaking of hybrids, Alfa Romeo has one debuting tomorrow and it’s an electrified car of the exotic variety. Our friends at Motor1 say it’s expected to be called 33 or 6C, both historic race car names, and its debut will be livestreamed from the Alfa Romeo Museum in Italy:
Alfa Romeo has done an excellent job of keeping its supercar under wraps. The rumors suggest that the model might share underpinnings with the Maserati MC20. The powertrain allegedly consists of the twin-turbo 3.0-liter Nettuno V6 with an electric motor. This would result in a total output of around 800 horsepower versus 621 hp from the MC20, which is not a hybrid.
Alfa Romeo CEO Jean-Philippe Imparato said the supercar looked “iconic, super-sexy, and recognizable,” and described it as “something that I could put aside the 8C in the museum of Arese.”
Not bad. But as the story notes, this one could be rather limited-production and nearly all are spoken for at the moment.
In The UAW’s Fight, It’s C-Suite Execs VS. Workers
Executive pay has become a real sticking point in the United Auto Workers’ ongoing contract negotiations with the Big Three, which could lead to an unprecedented strike on the entire American auto industry. As Bloomberg reports, workers are seeking a 46% pay increase, a 32-hour work week and a restoration of benefits they had before the Great Recession.
Naturally, the auto execs (current and former) say that’s insane:
In fact, higher labor costs contributed to Chrysler, Ford and GM’s lack of price competitiveness against foreign brands in the 1990s and 2000s. But pressure is on [UAW President Shawn Fain] to deliver a good deal, since his margin of victory was so slim.
“The car companies cannot possibly agree to his demands and even if he succeeds, his members still lose because the car companies will go bankrupt,” Johan de Nysschen, a consultant and former GM and Volkswagen executive, said in an interview. Fain, he added, is “promising the sun, the moon, the Earth and the stars to people who are, frankly, easily impressed.”
But as the UAW points out, those same claims are coming from executives who are literally admonishing workers from their beachside vacation homes:
Fain bristles at the notion that his blue-collar members are asking for too much. He sees the companies’ arguments about being competitive as code for “a race back to slave labor.” He points to Stellantis North American Chief Operating Officer Mark Stewart, who recently lectured workers on economic realism from his vacation home in Acapulco, Mexico. Stellantis declined to comment on Stewart’s whereabouts.
“When your CEOs are making 300 to 400 times more than the average worker, and they want to talk to you about economic realism, that’s pretty pathetic,” Fain said.
Finally, this:
Fain displays particular contempt for the company he worked for and its CEO, Carlos Tavares, who’s been outspoken on the need to cut overhead and people. Their only meeting, Fain said, came before official bargaining began where the executive used the word “brutality” about 40 times to describe government mandates on the transition to EVs.
“I came back and said, our workers have had a brutality imposed upon them,” Fain said. “You close plants and they have to uproot their lives.”
As contract talks come down to the wire, Fain’s ambitions go well beyond the meat and potatoes issues. He is out to change the way people think about — and treat — factory labor.
“Workers are fed up,” Fain said. “If Covid taught anybody anything, it taught people what’s important in life. And it sure as hell isn’t living in your workplace seven days a week so you can scrape to get by and barely survive.”
Hard to disagree on that part.
Your Turn
Who is ultimately responsible for making EV charging work? I don’t think this is something the auto industry can just outsource anymore. Not if they truly want this technology to catch on.
And Fain makes ~$200k/year on the work of Union member employees…
So 2-3 times the average UAW salary, versus the 300 to 400 times for the CEOs? I’m having trouble ginning up anger for the Union president’s salary.
This. Talk to a 35-year old software developer in a major city — and I’m specifically EXCLUDING San Francisco and Seattle — at a decent but non-AmaGooFaceSoftFruit company, and they’re basically earning the same as their base comp.
$200K for running an organization as large as the UAW is a damn bargain.
this was a dumb post
I don’t know what you are on about, but Tesla’s network is open to other manufacturers. Their cars have the highest customer satisfaction rate in the industry, and aren’t much different from the average premium vehicle in terms of frequency of repairs. If you go by total time in the shop, anything that needs oil changes is going to be in the shop many times as often as a Tesla, which might have a few minor initial problems that Tesla will send somebody to the owner’s house to fix.
The problem is that so many manufacturers have agreements with EA for “free” charging for three years or so. If there are problems with other networks, all a driver needs to do is pull up a map and find any available station. But a person with EA charging for free will seek out an EA charger.
What the article does not cover is what sort of agreements are in place with manufacturers. What sort of recourse do they have? At what point can they find EA in breach of contract, and would it be possible for automakers to shift to other providers? If they do, are there any customers who would complain that they bought the car with EA charger locations in mind and that it’s a negative? There’s lots of talk about the problem but none about what can be done about it.
In the meantime, Tesla is opening up its network. But until they deploy V4 chargers with longer cables and 1000V support, not to mention magic docks so they can support cars with CCS connectors, it leaves Tesla with a network of zero usable chargers for some brands of EVs. They have the only reliable network, but their prices are creeping up.
We have a built-in pro-CEO and anti worker bias in this country for whatever reason. I can’t say I disagree with Fain though. It’s really ridiculous how much the Executives make and it’s frustrating the contempt they have towards workers.
I know I said this on the Cayenne standalone article, but I NEEEEEED ITTTTTTTTTTTT.
Goshdarnit, that Cayenne sounds like a riot. A+ towpig, let me tow my parsh with THAT parsh. Do they make high-speed-rated car trailer tires???
As for charging, I think it should fall on the automakers. That’s the one thing Tesla did right: they knew they would have to provide places to charge if they wanted any hopes of folks buying their cars, so they ensured there was a reliable charging network. Automakers who want to actually sell their EVs need to put more effort into maintenance of these charging networks, installation in places people actually want to use (like, stops with toilets! and places to get coffee! or places you’ll spend a longer time at anyway in the course of your day! and well-lit, closer spaces that don’t feel scary to use!) and rally behind one open connector for standardization’s sake. Maybe it’s NACS after all, although it is pretty annoying that North America would get one more thing that’s North America-specific versus the rest of the world.
Yurop seems to get all the cool stuff. Chargers being in decent locations at most Autobahn rest stops (complete with toilets, restaurants and shops) kicked ass, and Porsche seems to be taking the “hey, gas stations and rest stop plazas evolved as they did for a reason” concept and running with it with their “charging lounge” concept: https://newsroom.porsche.com/en/2023/company/porsche-first-charging-lounge-33230.html
Finally, Herbert Diess will get a handy-dandy charger-adjacent spot to poop, I guess. Now if only Ionity did a better job with maintenance, too…it’s always the damn maintenance problem! Hopefully someone on staff at these dedicated charging lounge things will do a better job of fixing chargers that break on the spot, not unlike on-site gas station employees who want to make sure each pump has as much uptime as possible.
Anyway, going to the bathroom and getting a coffee took roughly the same amount of time as a fast charge when I had a Taycan loaner over there, and that ruled. Do more of that, auto companies. Well-lit, close-in spots, fast chargers that work, clean places to poop, and somewhere to buy caffeine. That’s it. That’s what I want.
In other words, you want Buc-ees to add more chargers.
That is really how automakers should be approaching charging. I disagree that each automaker should be responsible for charging their own cars. That just leads to proprietary standards for each mfg. Tesla had to do build the supercharger network to make their cars a viable option, because no one else believed in them enough in the early days to make such an investment.
But now the EV future is generally accepted as a reality (yeah, I know there are still those who are refusing to accept this) and travel centers like Buc-ees and Love’s should take ownership of putting chargers in their locations since they will get a captive audience for up to an hour or so. There is now a genuine financial gain for them to add and more importantly, maintain chargers.
Why not both? I like both ideas. Automakers have a vested interest in making the ownership experience not suck and I think that’ll also push towards one standard for charging, too. Whether they settle on CCS, NACS or something different, pretty much everyone can see that having a wad of dongles for every chargepoint isn’t ideal.
Travel centers want to keep making money even among folks who don’t need gas/diesel to fuel up, so that makes sense, too. I still think they’ll need an extra push from auto companies to actually do it, though. Gas stations are still tied to the oil and gas industry, which uh, hasn’t been the most receptive to alternative fuels cutting in on their profits.
Considering charging time, I’m thinking they should be more like truck stops, with pay showers, souvenir shops, and maybe even outcall prostitution…
Wait, no. We can’t have that. Forget the souvenir shops.
Charging time is not the problem. Reliability is the problem. Even EVs from almost a decade ago can make a 400 mile trip with a stop for lunch and a later rest stop, with a driver plugging in while stopped anyway, with no extra time taken. People need to eat and use the restroom, and despite the “what if I need to drop everything and drive to Alaska tomorrow” crowd, most people realize that it takes just as long to drive somewhere and then have a meal as it does to drive somewhere with a meal stop.
It’s a different situation for people who can’t charge at home. Those who can charge at home can start road trips with a complete charge, and shouldn’t have to experience delays. Those who can’t charge at home don’t want to go to any sort of stop. They need to be able to charge where they’d be stopped anyway, preferably where they’d park at home. It’s an infrastructure issue that still needs to be addressed.
As opposed to EVs from a decade ago, there are new ones that have 516 miles of range that can add 200 miles of range at a 12 minute charging stop, assuming that the 350kW EA charger is actually available and working properly. It all falls apart without reliability.
Eh, it doesn’t take that long on a functional fast charger anymore.
Exactly this isn’t rocket science. Decent gas stations have been doing this for literally decades
I think Tesla originally set up their chargers that could be located at the back side of a grocery store or a mall b/c they were just trying to build a reliable charging network as fast as possible, which ment not spending the additional time & money to get all the needed permits to create little charger stores for thr humans to buy their coffee/tea/snacks & bio break. Plus the added cost to set them up in a gas station format with rain protected pull through islands.
Yes it IS still early adopter days whixh is the perfect time for entrepreneurs to step up & fill a need in the market, I would expect ev ‘stations’ like existing nice gas stations to start popping up in areas with a fast growing ev market like between LA & SF or BA to NYC or DFW to Austin
IIRC, they also set up shop when charging was a tad slower, so it made sense to aim for locations where folks would naturally linger a big longer. Here, they put a bunch of charging setups at Collin Street Bakery locations, which have one of my favorite cookies of all time. The restaurant/shop setup made a lot of sense, both for the business owner (a lot of people discovered the cherry icebox cookies this way!) and for Tesla. Plus, folks gotta eat on longer trips, so planning around folks having Food Time at strategically located restaurants really helped move along that goal of a nationwide charging network.
Maybe I spoke too soon on Yurop getting all the good stuff. Looks like Merc is pushing a similar concept to North America now: https://www.automotivedive.com/news/Mercedes-Benz-high-power-EV-charging-station-opens-Atlanta/692110/
Hey.
> If you read this and insist it’s still a good thing, you’re just too fucking stupid to have an opinion on the matter. Non-negotiable.
Be nice.
He’s right tho.
VAG taking quality and reliability shortcuts? Who would have thought.
Trusting VAG with anything electrical is always a mistake.
Voelcker is one of about two reporters who has bothered to get charging reporting right; Stacy Noblet is the other. The Ford exec seems to’ve strategically not mentioned how they screwed up their own onboard software on the Mach-E such that it would not charge at all on one of the more common types of DC charger in the wild for a few months, but you can’t win ’em all.
I think the biggest potential change is to stop thinking of charging as equivalent to filling up with gas.
Instead of pumps in a parking lot, think of a coffee shop/lounge/rest area with chargers.
No one thinks twice about hanging out for half an hour for a drink at Starbucks. Drive that type of experience and you’ll get more profit, and a better end product. Heck get the folks at Buc-ee’s to buy into electric charging and problem solved.
That’s how EV drivers already think of it in most places. The idea is to charge at home when asleep, and that typically accounts for 90% of charging. That’s in terms of miles, not trips. So a person who drives 12k miles per year and has 1200 miles worth of road trips over the course of several periods of a few days each is still having almost all charging sessions at home. Those who charge on the road want to do it when stopped anyway, such as for a meal, or a restroom break while having a coffee perhaps.
A big difference between the gasoline paradigm and the EV paradigm is that one tries to avoid the inconvenience of filling a tank by having more range, and the other assumes that most people will start each day with about 90% of rated range. So a lot of the “how long does it take to charge” questions don’t consider that most people charge to make up for whatever they drove that day, or what they need to get home or to the next stop on their trip. People don’t wait for a needle to point to E before charging.
Totally agree. I have a PHEV and have never charged it anywhere other than at home over 110v at night. The challenge comes from people making the change where they’re used to the instant gratification from a pump, and want the same experience with their EV.
You are so right.
I am kind of surprised VW has not actually made the stations good and charged up the ass for the electricity to pay for the dieselgate and what not. Currently the Tesla Chargers are almost double the cost per KWH, Almost the same per mile as good old Gasoline at 25MPG.
I’m confused by your math. Based on my local gas prices, my old 30mpg car cost $.13/mi while supercharging my Model 3 costs $.06/mi. My local utility charges $.17/kWh and based on my 70,000miles of usage costs me $.04/mi. The solar panels drastically skew that math based on how long I live here (I think of it as having bought 7 years of electricity up front), but that’s another story.
That’s the cost at home, not at a supercharger (and a good one at that – I’m paying upwards of $0.20/kWh in Michigan). A supercharger user might be paying $0.50+, which does indeed compare unfavorably with cost per mile at my local gas prices, but maybe not at California’s.
In California, I’m seeing around 46 cents/kWh at Superchargers along major routes that I’d take on typical trips. I’m seeing premium gasoline at about $5.39 at random spots along the same routes, with some stations in those areas being at $5.69. Regular gasoline would be cheaper, but cars with similar performance specs to my EVs all use premium gasoline. With something like a Lucid, that would work out to about 10.5 cents per mile for electricity. A car that got 30 mpg would be closer to 19 cents. So a large EV would cost about half what gasoline would cost. A car that got 52 mpg with regular gas would be break even. It would lack the features and performance of an EV though.
An efficient EV wins. When the Model S came out, efficiency was based on comparisons to ICEVs, not other EVs. These days, a less efficient decade old Telsa would cost more, except that it will have free charging. Newer more efficient EVs are a lot cheaper than gasoline in California, especially if you do 90% of your charging at home and use public chargers only on road trips.
Those figures are at peak times, which I think is fair. The closest Supercharger to me is 26 cents/kWh off peak, and 37 cents mornings until 1 pm. Gasoline doesn’t get cheaper at night. So there’s a lot more to digest depending on a person’s circumstances.
Isn’t $0.46 below the residential peak electricity rate in CA? Sounds like a bargain. Supercharge your car and sell the electricity back to the grid.
Also… oh man, $5.39 is brutal. I filled up on 93 on Tues @ $4.25 and thought that was bad. I don’t know why it is that premium fuel prices always rise faster fall slower/not as much as regular, but it’s convinced me to shun premium-required engines in the future. I have a car that, when bought it 2013, could be fueled for a $0.30/gal price premium over regular. Today it’s a buck everywhere but Costco.
I actually pulled some BLS inflation-adjusted price data so I could make a chart to illustrate my point, but I’m not sure I believe what I have in front of me. According to this, you could buy 93-octane for $4.86 in 2022. I vividly remember paying $6.40. I would post the chart anyway, but now that I try, it doesn’t look like this commenting system supports images…
Ding Ding DIng, also we just got a rate hike for electricity between the hours of 4PM and 8PM that raises price per KWH 6 to 8 time depending on what plan you are forced to take. They say to wait until after dinner to go plug in your BEV. Pretty crappy for those of us not yet on that band wagon.
6-8x? That sounds pretty extreme. Are you in Texas?
Time of use pricing only came to my area in the last few months, taking us from an all-in flat rate of ~$0.19 to (I think) $0.16/0.22 off-/on-peak. I was annoyed at the forced change, as AC during peak hours likely accounts for essentially all of my power usage, but it hasn’t made much difference. My electricity usage is low, though, with no electric vehicles and efficient mini-split AC.
MIdwest. Evergy is the company. they are trying to get you into a higher flat rate or keep the rate a bit lower than the flat rate hike by charging 6 to 8 times more during the new later peak hours between 4pm and 8 pm
I just checked the closest Supercharger to me and it’s 46 cents/kWh right now, and drops to 26 cents off peak. It cost me about 3 cents at home with solar, and is actually cheaper the more I use it. That figure is based on minimum delivery charges divided by electricity used, and I can use a lot more electricity for no extra money.
Tesla’s chargers have become ridiculously expensive, and the saving grace is that it’s cost effective because it’s still cheaper than gasoline and most people will do 90% of their charging at home.
Came here to drag Johan and I see you’ve done it already well enough.
You are the Lewis Black of this commentariat.
Except Lewis Black is funny.
Those Electrify America charging stations look exactly like the ones that were put up in the grocery store parking lot near my home MONTHS ago.
They still have plastic/foam wrapping on the chargers themselves, and the only cars that I have seen parked in those spots are older ICE ones.
Ok well that one is almost certainly on the utility (or their transformer supplier…)
Wow, it turns out having a bunch of pissed off lying bs artists (VW) build your Ev charging system as punishment does NOT give you a good result. Wow!
Am I correct that 30 miles from 25.9KwH is 39MPGe? Seems a bit inefficient. And, by the way, as a business owner, 32 hour work week? 46% pay increase? I would shut my business down and fire everyone before I’d let those demands be shoved where the sun don’t shine… Union is the primary reason I don’t buy American cars. Second reason is most are built in Mexico (why I’m not buying another 3 series). Third reason, GM bailout in 2008. Horrific screwing stock and bond holders. If you don’t pay the CEO wheelbarrows full of money, they’ll go CEO elsewhere. That’s how capitalism works Shawn Fain.
And your “capitalism” is broken. 400x what the line workers make? That’s obscene.
So you only buy Chinese cars? Unions built this country. To be anti-union is to be anti-American which it sounds like you are.
I’m not anti union, and car companies aren’t allowed to interfere with employees’ ability to unionize or not unionize. So I wouldn’t hold it against an American automaker that’s not unionized because they literally have no right to expect their employees to unionize nor are they stopping them.
Well you’re obviously living under a rock. I can get a non-union American built car from Toyota, Tesla, VW, Mercedes-Benz, BMW to name a few. Have to steer clear of the Korean child labor made cars. Unions were necessary when factories were abusing their workers. Labor laws have caught up. Unions have reduced down to corrupt organizations that steal from their workers.
Let them CEO elsewhere. I’ll fly around on corporate jets and slash headcount at random for half what any of the current CEOs make
Stock and bond holders add nothing to society, or to the companies they invest in outside of stock offerings. When a company is mismanaged, the investors who trust management are justifiably the ones who get hosed.
The engineers, designers, and workers actually make the cars. They’re the ones who need to get paid.
Tesla is American made and non-Union. They never had a government bailout or bankruptcy.
39MPGe is terrible. A Model 3 is 126MPGe, but Tesla’s range numbers are exaggerated. Lucid is 131MPGe with reasonably accurate range numbers. It’s also American made without unions.
They survived only by selling billions worth of carbon credits which were basically pre-paid bailouts.
Because those benefits were clearly sustainable, as evidenced by the fact that all of the automakers went bankrupt, or essentially so in the case of Ford, during the Great Recession. I know everyone has forgotten that recessions happen because it’s been so long since we really had one (I’m ignoring the covid dip because it reversed so fast and turned into a historic bull market), but it will happen again.
Gonna need a fact check on that. I doubt anyone in the UAW is living at the plant and barely scraping by. As I understand it UAW wages are rather good, even today. Especially if you were working that kind of overtime.
There’s such a vast chasm between their demands and their claims of how things are today that I can’t take either end of it seriously. I’m well aware there’s a major problem with wealth disparity in this country, but I’m not at all convinced the UAW is a competent enough organization to usefully address it. The UAW is everything bad about unions wrapped up in one neat package.
That said, it’s going to be fascinating to watch this and the writer’s/actor’s strikes because it’s apparent that people are starting to realize their employers are screwing them over and want to do something about it. I wouldn’t bet anything I cared about on the outcomes, but I won’t be at all surprised if the people holding the purse strings come out ahead again.
Ford didn’t go bankrupt though. The second oldest publicly traded automaker in the US is Tesla, which has never gone bankrupt. The other big players came into existence after their former incarnation went bankrupt.
Which is why I said “or essentially so in the case of Ford”. They didn’t go bankrupt, but they mortgaged basically the entire company to avoid it. None of the big 3 were financially healthy at that point in time.
That’s why I said “though.”
GM and Chrysler didn’t go bankrupt because of the salaries of the line workers.
Maybe not salaries, but as I recall they had crazy benefit costs for things like pensions. I’m pretty sure those got cut post-bankruptcy and I’m also betting that’s what the UAW wants back.
They went bankrupt because their supply chain was not designed to have people stop buying cars all at once.
Straight up bullshit here. Standards live and die on how useful they are in the real world. There’s nothing sacred about a standard, and they are by definition compromises. There are a ton of standards out there that are never used because they suck. Tesla based NACS and it’s associate infrastructure work well. Plug and charge? Built in from the word go, still a clusterf*ck in progress on CSS1. System reliability? NACS appears to have it. CSS1? Oh look… no. I guaranty that the bizdev folks at the automakers know *exactly* what those 40 technology requirements are and know they can live with them, or they wouldn’t have signed the contract.
Johan de Nysschen commenting on anything other than the art of randomly mixing letters and numbers together is rich. And he wasn’t even good at that.
It makes me laugh, in an uncomfortable sort of way, that someone out there might be paying him for any amount of “consulting”.
Hoo boy, Johan would flop when the Bobs ask, “What would you say you do here?”
“Well, I suggested the whole “Move to New York” thing….
“Remember names? Yeah, I ditched those.”
I literally laughed out loud at “car companies will go bankrupt”
At this point, I think it’s baked into the cake, even if the UAW got zero of their demands met. Of course, if/when it happens, the workers will wrongfully be accredited the blame.
Negotiations always start with the union wanting everything and the moon, and the company demanding concessions. Neither gets what they want in the end, but they end up with pretty much what both sides expected from the beginning. Both get their reputations sullied by the headlines, and no one ends up happy with the result.
An arbitration panel could do a more efficient job, if the negotiations were handled like a trial.
Contract negotiations are like making sausage – you don’t want to know how it’s made, what it’s made of, or who is actually handling the ingredients, but if enough people are willing to eat it, then it will continue to get made in the same way.
The more I know about BEV and the charging thereof, the less I am inclined to ever own one. I think I’ll buy a 2024 Tacoma, whose life expectancy ought to be 20 years which is conveniently also my life expectancy.
I almost had a panic attack in the middle of the Ohio Turnpike when I stopped to charge in a EA location. First stall never started, second one down, the screen was off. This was the only charging station around miles and miles and I had 15% left. I opened Plugshare and saw the terrifying comments, station #3 was supposed to work. Yes it did, after 10 min of my parents looking at me playing with the cords and moving the car between spots lol that was my last road trip. The next one I took my Volt, no issues
It would cost Ford a little over 6 billion dollars a year to raise their average salary from $66,872 to just under 100k. I guarantee you, they would have an easier time maintaining quality at those wages, still be profitable, and probably save enough from dealing with poor quality and recall issues to gain that profit back from reduced COPQ.
They can afford it.
Just to play devil’s advocate here a bit. With such a raise I see 2 thing happening. 1. Good workers will be more likely to stay and continue to do a good job. These type of people are always in demand. And on the flip side 2. Bad workers will continue to do a bad job but get more money.
I know a few guys that were union reps in the 80’s and they both said that the bulk of their time was spent defending the same bad apples over and over. I think it would be in the union’s interest if there was a way to clear out the bad apples.
100% there needs to be, and the failure to do so is an example of poor management. (I’d argue bad management/leadership/failure to take responsibility is the cause of the majority of modern problems)
The solutions are simple, but simple solutions are rarely easy. An actually enforced code of ethics and a willingness to go to court about it would nip most of it in the bud. Litigation is expensive, and that fear helps keep bad actors in place. Solving that means funding the justice system better and maybe changing how we deal with civl matters, but picking at those threads sounds like a great way to spend a lifetime suffering.