I get what this is trying to accomplish but the result seems like all the downsides of a hub motor and an axle mounted motor with the only upside being slight potential weight savings and slight packaging space efficiency gains. I could see this having some uses for oddball industrial equipment but I will be very surprised if this even makes it onto a concept car.

That assumes people in charge of crunching numbers at GM are perfectly rational and have even studied the possibility. As far as I’m aware there wasn’t even so much as an off hand comment from an engineer at a trade show about looking into reusing the Voltec system on any other platform before killing off the whole line.

It’s entirely possible they did look into recycling the tech elsewhere but GM has a track record of just writing off tech right as they iron out the kinks.

It’s truly is exasperating to think how much R&D went into perfecting that system only for GM to throw it all in the trash. The fact Toyota of all companies is doing a better job selling the concept of the Volt with the Prius and Rav4 Prime trims is just rubbing salt in the wound.

Who would even bail them out at this point? They’re such a weird mega merger that they cover legacy brands in 5 states.

It’s one thing for the French to bail out Citroen and Peugot but would they also want to bail out Opel and Vauxhall too? Do the Italians want to foot the bill for Fiat and Chrysler eating dirt? Plus on the American end this would be, what? The 5th time they’d be asking for a bailout and this time a good chunk of the rescue capital wouldn’t even be guaranteed to maintain jobs Stateside. At this point the doomsday scenario of 79 and 08 of just having GM strip Chrysler for parts would probably seem preferable.

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?

Right. Sorry I should have clarified I was also including battery manufacturing set up cost in the platform buildup/start up cost. Even assuming China-US relations weren’t what they currently are I would assume a significant amount of battery manufacturing capacity would need to be built Stateside just to support the volume of vehicles being produced and reduce the logistical headache of shipping cells and packs across the sea.

Thank you so much for the detailed answer! Guess I should have figured capex would be hard to delineate as being purely BEV or ICE related if nothing else just on the basis of how many components vendors are trying to share across their platforms.

I was not aware of the 2026 industry estimate, do they have a range of different dates assuming better or worse market conditions and government support levels?

OK the funniest part of this has to be the section about the goddamn golf association of all entities doing this:

The Monash Health charging ban follows the National Golf Club suspending electric vehicles – including golf buggies – from being recharged at the facilities it owns, following a fire at its Eastern Golf Club in the Yarra Valley which was attributed to lithium-ion batteries.

How the hell is a golf club supposed to work without functional golf carts? Amazing work on their part demonstrating how little they under the issue given golf carts still usually use lead acid cells that don’t pose the same thermal runaway risks.

I kind of understand a hospital network being skittish about EV fires given that while ICE fires are definitely still the bigger threat those are better understood by fire fighting teams in the region and the potential issue with pack fires lasting anywhere from a few hours to days depending on how the thermal runaway occurs.

While this is somewhat extreme they do seem to understand the issue from a technical POV given they’re not outright banning EVs from parking on their sites and while pack damage can result in a fire outside of charging, pumping current through damaged cells definitely increases the chance the cell will enter a runaway state. Moreover, while the author is confused by the ban not applying to the EVs leased to the group that actually makes sense given they manage that fleet directly and presumably get regular inspections that would pick up on pack damage before anyone would try to charge a vehicle with a damaged pack.

Hopefully they’ll just inspect the existing charging stands with specialists from the FPA Australia and lift the ban. Really, it wouldn’t be a bad idea for fire codes to start mandating brine or sand tanks be placed above or near EV chargers, if nothing else just to ease the minds of the insurance companies. After all, gas stations also typically have specialized fire suppression systems so it wouldn’t be that out there of a proposal.

And that division appears to be a complete mess so I wonder if they’ve gotten cold feet about further expansion in North America.

It’s really quite impressive how many systems have tested and ordered their buses only to back out despite them trying to get a foothold for over a decade now. Aside from any political considerations, given how many QA issues, long replacement part lead times and general sub-par support reported by agencies that tried BYD buses, I don’t know that I would trust a BYD car built in the States if it’s the same group of middle managers that would be put in charge of that plant.

Even in Europe, their bus division seems to be struggling (one especially funny but also alarming story out of the UK even states they had issues with the first batch of Enviros built on BYD chassises had their steering wheels coming off in revenue service) while Yutong has quickly gained ground across the continent.

True. For all the shit people can give BMW about their cars I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone ever complain about their bikes. And looking at it, while the MSRP is giving me sticker shock BMW does seem to throw in a fairly generous warranty period and roadside assistance.

Only concerns I have with the CE04 is I’m really not sure how comfortable that washboard seat would be for trips over 20 km and I’m not clear on how feasible it would be to swap out battery modules if one of them were to degrade or outright die.

Any idea if any reviews or owners blogs/forums have talked about those two subjects?

I get owners feeling burned when they buy right before a price cut but also, it’s a car. Outside of this weird period where the used market is stupidly overheated, you’re kind of supposed to expect the value of a vehicle to just drop like a rock the moment you leave the dealership. Nobody bought a Pinto or Chevette thinking it was an investment.

How is this relevant here though? South Korea appears to have the same issue as NA despite KATS apparently adopting CCS as the standard connector over 5 years ago.

South Korean Ioniq 5 drivers seem to be just as SOL as North American Ioniq 5 owners when it comes to having access to the Supercharger network outside of the handful of locations with the magic dock.

Yeah figured prices would be steep just because of the battery and maxis not being a big enough product segment up here to justify mass scale import so fees per unit must be pretty high for the resellers.

Any recommendations for makes and models? Was looking at the Honda PCX Electric early on given Honda does seem to do oddball imports but I’m not even clear if that was even launched outside Asia.

It’s very odd to think an actual minivan (the ID Buzz) is going to lap this thing performance wise while being shorter and probably having more cargo space.

I don’t understand this trend of sticking to SUV design language just to make something that’s worse at a task than minivans on every level.

I’d be curious how upfront capital to set up LiFePO4 plant compares to the new sodium-ion offerings.

Sodium-ion definitely has some very appealing advantages over LiFePO4 from a transport/logistics (having the cells get moved around at 0 V is huge in terms of mitigating the liability headache of existing chemistries) and fixed installation perspective (know someone that’s already considering supplementing their solar storage LTO bank with sodium cells) but I’m struggling somewhat to see the advantages it offer for BEVs and if manufacturers will find it worth mass producing over other conflict mineral free chemistries.

It’ll be interesting to see of BYD details lifecycle cost for the different chemistries given they seem to be dumping capital into testing every proposed chemistry under the sun.

Only problem with the Bolt is GM keeps threatening to kill it. Also I dont know what it is with GMs inventory system but they seem to have a glut of Bolts in some markets and two year waiting lists in others.

Honestly was continually baffled this operation was freestanding so I don’t really see this as a bad thing so long as they keep their own R&D team (knowing GM though, they probably sadly won’t).

Creating a weird pseudo freestanding brand can’t have been confidence inspiring to procurement people looking at getting an EV fleet. At least now they’ll be able to leverage existing commercial customer relations and offer the vehicles with a badge that has 100 years of history behind it and not one from a team out of Detroit larping as a Silicon Valley startup.

All things considered this isn’t a great first showing but given how badly Japanese vendors have managed to fumble EV rollout so far it could have been a lot worse. It seems like a perfectly serviceable platform to build on at least but my god at that price tag and especially without a heat pump option I don’t see this moving many units. As it stands, in NA it would be a very hard sell compared to a Bolt EUV and the competition is going to be much stiffer in Europe.

I do wonder what Honda’s plans are here. Are they pushing this out to market just to get some form of return on tooling costs even if they only move a couple thousands while they work on a second gen vehicle?

Side note, I’m kind of amazed vendors are still shipping review samples out with low-resistance tires, especially in this case given this platform does not seem calibrated for them given the reported traction issues.