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Like Tesla, I wonder how much non-car companies will shake up personal transport.
Not shaking it up. Cars are now commodities. The barriers to entry of the market are not once what they were. You don’t have to have any expertise or Herat I’ve in making cars any more and the innovation is not on the car-features but in other features that are more the speciality of non-car makers. We’ll see a lot more of it.
My Renault Koleos is a Nissan x trail underneath and built by Samsung in Korea.
Cars have always just been products, until recently the majority have been quite mechanically complex products, mainly due to the fact that they operate by exploding small quantities of refined dinosaur juice several times a second. hence the specialist manufacturers charging disproportionate prices for their horseless carriages...
Now they're on their way to being mostly batteries and motors, so just a fancier Walkman, and those barely ever malfunctioned...
TBH I'd trust a Sony car over a Tesla any day...
The new PlayStation-wagon??
Not shaking it up. Cars are now commodities. The barriers to entry of the market are not once what they were. You don’t have to have any expertise or Herat I’ve in making cars any more and the innovation is not on the car-features but in other features that are more the speciality of non-car makers. We’ll see a lot more of it.
Ha! If only it were that easy! Maybe you could offer James Dyson some words of advice on where he went wrong...
Dyson is a minnow compared to Sony.
It’ll be the new Lancia.
Now they’re on their way to being mostly batteries and motors, so just a fancier Walkman, and those barely ever malfunctioned…
Their Minidisc players on the other hand were fragile shite supported by awful proprietary software. Their laptops weren't much better.
I hear they are using a different type of electricity to everyone else which gives them max power. Still in development though so only the beta version currently available.
Is that the Betamax version?
Looks nice enough. Won’t be in my price bracket I’ll wait until LG bring something out.
Looks nice enough. Won’t be in my price bracket I’ll wait until [s]LG[/s] Grundig bring something out.
Fixed that for....Me.
They didn't even show it parked up with the boot open. Not interested.
Ha! If only it were that easy! Maybe you could offer James Dyson some words of advice on where he went wrong…
Now they’re on their way to being mostly batteries and motors, so just a fancier Walkman, and those barely ever malfunctioned…
Dyson vacuums not the most robust!
We have a Sony TV, PS3 (used for streaming) and Pvr that are all a decade or so old, they all refuse to die
Like Tesla, I wonder how much non-car companies will shake up personal transport.
I'm not convinced they will. Tesla produces premium vehicles but is unable to make a profit on them, whereas BMW make truckloads of cash from traditional vehicles. Legacy manufacturers like Toyota and BMW have some big advantages in the hum-drum production line techniques of welding things together, painting them, etc. Tesla struggled with that and Sony or whoever else will also struggle.
The battery and motor technology is available off the shelf, so legacy manufacturers can buy it in if they don't want to develop their own from scratch. Batteries are still a massive expense, so cheap electric cars will have short range. Less of a problem for the cheap shopping trolleys that the big companies make most of their sales on.
Toyota has 20 years' experience of hybrids, which means they have experience of the electronic control systems. A new entrant will have to catch up on all those basic things. I'm not sure what Sony are aiming for with that video, maybe they are hoping to showcase their technology, but I can't see them successfully starting a car company from scratch. Their Vaio PC business is a major warning - some pretty decent products, but too expensive so they got wiped out by Dell, Lenovo, Apple, etc.
Profit is made on the production line. Specifying and running factories is tough. The challenge is doing the mass manufacturing in an area where you have little or no experience and no infastructure or machinery.
Obviously they have experience in mass manufacturing but it's still a big step.
Whilst I agree I can't see many non-car companies moving into sole EV production I think we'll see a lot more collaborations in future (between tech and traditional car companies). As for Tesla being profitable, they are - admittedly not through pure sales revenue but they're also investing massively (both in technology as well as production facilities) so they have a lot of additional cost that not all car manufacturers have. I'm guessing we'll also see car manufacturers start to cooperate on building extensive charging networks, that's still a big advantage Tesla have.
I think my Walkman based sarcasm missed the mark (again).
There is a bit of a leap from making consumer electronics to automotive transport, and TBH its not really the leccy bits, It's mainly the safety bit.
Developing a new vehicle platform costs what? £4-500 million-ish to develop? And that's for the existing big boys with experience and facilities, it's not expensive because of the styling, it's expensive to engineer structures and systems that protect the meatsacks inside and meet various region's regulations...
What's it going to take for companies starting from essentially no experience in that area? Basically more money...
Yes they can hire in personnel with experience and subcontract some elements but it's not going to be easy to compete with the likes of Ford/GM/VAG who've all made a couple of reasonably successful cars before and who can ease themselves into the EV market with a simple adaptation of their existing cars...
The thing for electronics companies to focus on is probably battery, charger and power distribution tech.
Which is of course the real point of Tesla. The goal was never to really make money from selling cars, it was to make an operating technology demonstrater so Elon could flog batteries, chargers and associated gizmos to the world...
a new electric car entrant would probably come from a big conglomerate/multinational like Fuji, Sumitomo, Fuyo etc. they probably have a technology pool or existing product lines for donor technology. they also have sites for factories and a distribution network or own container ports/ships.
the hardest part is probably driving dynamics and safety as already pointed out, but you just hire the right talent.
i remember watching a program where an industry bod was looking at a tesla and pointing out that the rear 3/4 inner wheel arch panel was assembled from loads of bits to make one complex structure, he said this should and could be one single panel. its’s lighter, cheaper and stronger, why didn’t they do it the right way?
he said this should and could be one single panel. its’s lighter, cheaper and stronger, why didn’t they do it the right way?
Because, at a guess, Tesla are under pressure to develop quickly for business reasons (and probably the attitude of the founder) - and they were founded by someone from the software industry which (rightly) has a different approach to the automotive industry. So they did whatever worked with whatever tech/machines/design they had.
Sony * Tamiya collaboration. I'm in 😎
Fuji is a good shout, they already have Subaru.
If they do one branded like the yellow Sports Walkman I wanted so much as a kid, I’m in. 😀
If they make one that actually looks like a walkman with tape reels as wheels then I'm in.
Profit is made on the production line. Specifying and running factories is tough. The challenge is doing the mass manufacturing in an area where you have little or no experience and no infastructure or machinery.
This is the sticky bit, making the cars the easy part, making it for people to be able to buy is the hard bit.
You also want a finger in the battery pie.
i remember watching a program where an industry bod was looking at a tesla and pointing out that the rear 3/4 inner wheel arch panel was assembled from loads of bits to make one complex structure, he said this should and could be one single panel. its’s lighter, cheaper and stronger, why didn’t they do it the right way?
“In 2018 a patent application assigned to Tesla showed four Giga Press casting machines arranged at right angles for whole-vehicle unibody chassis casting“
I’d hate to be a Tesla fan boi but I think they are all over this.