Europe's carmakers fret over China's EV prowess at Munich car show
Main points (to make up for the clickbaity title):
Challenge to bring down European EV manufacturing costs
Lower costs to close price gap with China EVs
China EV sales account for 8% of European total through July
Renault's R5 EV to be 25%-30% cheaper than Scenic/Megane
MUNICH, Sept 4 (Reuters) - Europe's carmakers have a fight on their hands to produce lower-cost electric vehicles (EVs) and erase China's lead in developing cheaper, more consumer-friendly models, executives said at Munich's IAA mobility show.
"We have to close the gap on costs with some Chinese players that started on EVs a generation earlier," Renault (RENA.PA) CEO Luca de Meo told Reuters at the car show, adding when manufacturing costs decline, prices will also go down.
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I worked in a big German car maker's EV division. The waste of resources put in to not actually developing a good electric vehicle was staggering.
I was part of a 100 person team who was responsible for one cog of a data ingestion pipeline which read in analytics data from each EV car. It was already about 2 years' in when I joined and it was a total failure. Why the fuck they were spending so much money on something so inconsequential to making a car was initially frustrating; now I think it's just sad.
The reality is that the leadership didn't really care. The brands are so strong that they can afford to move slowly on this. There is also a gravy train going on where money is being pumped into these projects and middle leadership are happy to sit back, do nothing, and still earn free $$$ rather than develop good tech.
Here's one of the stories from my experience (software development perspective): https://www.srcbeat.com/2023/08/sbt/
I really don't think they are strong. The car industry was basically ravaged by the 2007 financial crisis and a lot of what were companies back then are just brands owned by a few of the industry players. It's hard to believe they would survive another situation like that. I think they want to move fast, but they simply aren't able to do so.
From Audi 2022 fiscal year:
The brand is strong relative to Chinese competitors but I don't think it will stay this way forever.
They want to move as fast as they can maintain their profits. I think major shareholders would ideally like to see more tangible results from their R&D division. But it was clear at the time that it didn't matter enough for real action. Middle management I interacted with were actively hostile to me when I spoke about, for example, making source code visible between teams. There was constant calculated behaviour to keep things the way they were and delay completion to maintain funding.
Thanks for the link. They kept repeating that on DW today: they think brand loyalty will save them... :/ strategic thinking, right there.
Interesting. It sort of does save them - but for how long? Depending on who is overseeing what projects the brand loyalty could last long enough for the particular people responsible. It’s a terrible strategy but that takes a lot less work than coming up with a new one!