The ongoing discussions about profit margins on the “first” [mass scale] generation of EVs from the Big Three supposedly being razor thin or even leading to loses has left me wondering if anyone be it the US DOT or a NGO has attempted to estimate how much the total cost for retooling the US automotive industry towards BEVs might look like in the end.

Obviously, I understand a lot of factors -from funding streams at every level of government, to international relations, to even just timing- can play an immense role in the calculation of such an estimate but I’m curious if there’s even a ballpark estimate. Have any analysts attempted to come up with with a “realistic” estimate of, say, when GM will have fully absorbed the setup cost for Ultium and vehicle unit cost will just be determined by the opex overhead of a given production line rather than having to also account for the upfront capex of the whole platform and production chain buildup?

  • ExurbainOPBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    Thank you so much for this phenomenal breakdown! I knew LFP production was set to continue to ramp up but I didn’t realize dry electrode tech was already projected to reach production so soon.

    On top of this, right around 2025 is when we see core compute become a mature, commoditized phenomenon, and when OEMs start having single, integrated software and compute hardware packages. You’ll sometimes hear this referred to as the “software-defined vehicle” paradigm, or “multi-domain compute”.

    This has been a long time coming and it’s nice to see vendors converge on using a single modular firmware solution across their range instead of having every design team cobble some bespoke headunit interface. Given the recent hiccups with OEM led software development like at CARIAD or Volvo just outright contracting out portions of firmware development to Google (I’m not entirely clear if Android Automotive actually assumes control of the drivetrain or is effectively just a frontend for whatever firmware Volvo has running on their motor and battery control units) do you think we’ll see the industry end up shifting to an industry wide base OS as a way to pool resources or do OEMs seem set on sticking to their in-house software stacks?

    • Recoil42BEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      I’m not entirely clear if Android Automotive actually assumes control of the drivetrain or is effectively just a frontend for whatever firmware Volvo has running on their motor and battery control units

      More of the latter. This is the multi-domain part of multi-domain computing: The cars run multiple operating systems simultaneously, and the multiple operating systems talk to each other.

      Right now that happens over separate boards and separate chips, but in the future, it’ll all just happen on one physical chip with multiple cores, with all of the different bits and pieces essentially running on their own VMs.

      do you think we’ll see the industry end up shifting to an industry wide base OS as a way to pool resources or OEMs seem set on sticking to their in-house software stacks?

      I’d say we’re converging on a set of common standards, like everyone seems to just be using Android for IVI, but it doesn’t matter what the base layer is underneath Android — just that it talks with the same APIs.