GM making moves...

[DavidBoren]

First GM establishes a partnership with Honda to make hybrids... now they are in bed with Nikola to make pure electric vehicles.

This is awesome. Mergers and unlikely partnerships get great minds working together. I think it is good for everyone involved. Good for the industry.

Thoughts?

[gabe]

Nikola is a huge flop as they only have plans to make a vehicle but not even a prototype to show yet. On the other hand GM beat everyone to the party with an electric vehicle (the Chevy Volt) but still managed to lose the entire market share to Tesla.

In short, I'm not super enthusiastic about these moves.

[DocsMachine]

On the other hand GM beat everyone to the party with an electric vehicle (the Chevy Volt) but still managed to lose the entire market share to Tesla.

-Er... which party?

Tesla launched in 2003, and both the Nissan Leaf and the Volt came out in 2010.

And of course that kind of skips over the fact that Studebaker beat all of them by a mere century. The very first car Studebaker sold, in 1902, was in fact an electric. They didn't start selling gasoline cars 'til 1904.

Doc. (Pedant at large. )

[Jordan]

Volts are not purely electric, they're a plug-in hybrid with some sneaky software that lets them claim the ICE isn't coupled to the transmission even though it is.

I'm not sure why GM would have bothered with Honda when Toyota has been making a superior hybrid for over a decade, but hey, why not.

[pghp8ntballer]

Please define superior hybrid...
More reliable? Definitely not. Equal or indistinguishable/negligible on that count.
Better design? Which design?
Honda’s IMA? Which model?
The original insight and first gen civic hybrid would each do 45-50 mpg easy if driven properly.
The original accord hybrid (2005-2007) was just a gimic to say they did the first V6 hybrid.
The second gen insight wasn’t bad but not great with fuel economy.
The second gen civic hybrid was it good for the fuel economy.
The redesign of the accord hybrid for 2015? was more in line with what Toyota does in the Prius. I don’t think that is the IMA system anymore as it functions COMPLETELY differently. This car can and does drive under electric power only decoupled from the engine. Or can engage the engine under certain conditions. I don’t recall the fuel economy of these cars because it’s been 4 years since I worked as a master Honda tech.

Now Toyota has a solid hybrid in the Prius and can be considered the standard for the hybrid. I don’t know how the system operates technically, but I know it will run on electric only only and get great gas mileage is driven properly.

Remember, all of the fuel economy ratings and results are all about driver characteristics and terrain.
If you drive like you are on a nascar track and are in the Rocky Mountains, don’t expect to get 45 mpg.

[Jordan]

Battery pack design.

Personally I'm not a big Toyota fan but I can admire their engineering ability.

[pghp8ntballer]

Having trouble editing from my phone....
the second gen civic hybrid was NOT good for fuel economy.

[Jordan]

There's the one thing I hate about this forum setup - commenting vs. quoting.

[Siress]

Agreed. I hope Nish et al disable commenting. And what's with the goofy loading bar beneath avatars?

[Nish]

It will be interesting to see what they are up to.

[Tarsun2]

i think its funny when people make comments like "i only buy american...". no one has said that here but im sure members have heard that line tossed around before.
Dont forget the 1st GM EV1 (the grand daddy of them all)

but yeah, i can see EV being the dominant power plant for vehicles in the future.

Hell, my 5.7V8 camaro (68) makes garbage HP and gets even worse MPG. And its not what someone would call fast either. And then you have someone in a tesla DESTROYING zooked out fox bodies and the "theres no replacement for displacement" guys on the street. its insane.

this is one time where ill embrace the change rather than fight it lol

[shadow191]

GM had the EV1 in the late '90s. Technically it was the first mass produced electric car - but it was very limited production and people couldn't buy it, had to be leased. Then they just ended the program in '99 and stopped trying it seems. When I was in college, there was one on campus - it was an engineering school so assume one of the professors.

Nikola is a huge flop as they only have plans to make a vehicle but not even a prototype to show yet. On the other hand GM beat everyone to the party with an electric vehicle (the Chevy Volt) but still managed to lose the entire market share to Tesla.

In short, I'm not super enthusiastic about these moves.

[SignOfZeta]

As a long time Honda fan and long time GM hater but also someone who makes money indirectly from both of these companies on occasion...I don’t care.

This is clearly for the North American market. It’s to build some moronic mid sized SUV that everyone buys but nobody needs. This won’t lead to a cool new NSX, Integra, Fit, etc. It’ll be a new Ridgeline or some other such nonsense, and then like the VW Routon and the Geo Storm it will all be done in eight years. The Japanese lineup won’t change but the USDM-only models will, the Designed in Ohio stuff.

I liked the Volt a lot but in the end a real car company with bills to pay can’t compete with what is essentially a dot com burning through billions in venture capital every quarter with no end of investment in site. If it were’t for speculators trying to strike it rich there would be no Tesla. Also, the first Tesla I remember was 2011 and it wasn’t even their car. Like several other cars at the same time all they did was redux a Lotus...which in itself was a car that was only road legal via several exemptions from the DOT which was amusing to me at the time since I was then working for Lotus. So really, they didn’t actually make a car until the Model S, and those lost twice as much money as they cost for years. Only media darlings can get away with that. If the CEO of GM signed off on a $100,000 car that lost $200,000 per car that CEO he would be ousted by the board ASAP, not after years and years of trillions in losses. In the real world you are forced to design your cars with revenue from customers and at Tesla that’s such a small percentage of their operational income they’ve be lucky if it would pay Elon’s weed bill.

People have very short attention spans and little vision these days. The Tesla story just started and people aren’t sick of it yet. There is likely a downside to the no-dealership thing that has yet to fully emerge. The environmental back end is still mostly theory and unexplored. People with $$$ may get sick of driving cars with the most crap feeling body panels this side of fairground bumpercar and decide to go back to Mercedes just as they finally get their e stuff going. When we’re as bored of Tesla as every other car company and they are actually making money then we’ll know how it really turned out.

Personally, I’m driving a paid for 1.5L Fit and spending $28 a month on fuel. No new electric car can touch that in environmental cost or fiscal layout. So far the largest product of the e car revolution has been pollution from insane levels of 24/7 development. You can’t spend $1T on anything without creating pollution. Even Bitcoin creates pollution and it doesn’t even exist. If you really care about the environment and/or your wallet the answer is to buy less crap, simpler crap, local crap. Electric cars are just another product at the moment and all products cost money and create pollution.

[Nish]

I just bought a 3 year old Fit and LOVE the thing so far. I'm getting crazy good mpg. I drive way too much to spend only $28 a month in gas though.

[gabe]

Wow I don't normally agree with you on many things but this is pretty on point. The future is still very much petroleum until the back end of lithium battery creation is figured out or a new battery tech is created that has less environmental impact. Tesla can be valuated on the other half dozen technologies that they are coming out with (self-driving, battery, energy storage, solar, ect) but the cars are still in their infancy and despite having great on-road performance, the longevity is very much in question and the feature set is questionable from a practical standpoint.

Nothing comes without some environmental price. As humans it's so natural to just focus on the things that are easy to see rather than the down the line impacts of what we now deem "environmentally friendly".

[DavidBoren]

Personally, I am more of a fan of Toyota, and would have liked GM to partner with them (Toyota) back around the turn of the millinium. Maybe the minds behind the 2JZ and the 4.2L ATLAS could have come up with something awesomer... all the right ingredients are there.

Regardless, I consider this forward thinking on GM's behalf. Hopefully, it helps Nikola and Honda, too. The auto industry needs mergers like this to stay relevant.

[MrKittyCatMeowFace]

I want honda to make another crx.

crz was not good.

[DavidBoren]

There is already rumors of a Camaro inspired Civic SS. Lol. We will see what happens...

[gabe]

I guess the volt was a bad example (didn't think that through) but otherwise and in pretty much every way GM is a relic and is getting destroyed in the market. If they could bring an EV truck to market that would be a move in the right direction but without the battery tech that Tesla has a massive lead on it would be a pretty range limited application. The other potential downside is Tesla has a corner on the charging stations already out there so they would either have to try and license the fast charging port from Tesla or start over and create their own charging infrastructure. Either way it's a mess for them.

[DavidBoren]

I think the partnership is more directed at hybrids, rather than pure electric vehicles. And, I think the idea is to pirate Nikola's battery tech.

Either way, I think a hybrid S10-sized truck would be a step in the right direction. It could even be surprisingly popular in Europe... they don't have trucks over there, but everyone apparently really likes them.

[pghp8ntballer]

Ultimately the automotive industry and petroleum industry are linked at the head, torso, hip, etc in America. And this is the cause of so many failures of improved engine designs and alternative fuels/power sources. As mentioned the EV1 ( interesting fact: watch the what killed the electric car documentary in Amazon video?) hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, diesel in America, etc.

As much as I want to drop the need to burn fossil fuels, I also don’t want to destroy the earth to build battery packs

[punkncat]

Given the QC issues I had with my last new GM purchase I wouldn't consider one regardless.
With that said...we purchased a small fleet of Prius hybrids for our inspectors. The first year we saved a TON of money on gas and such. Every subsequent year they have cost us FAR FAR more than a gas vehicle and this year will likely surpass the cost of a van in upkeep. TERRIBLE vehicles. We are hoping to talk the owner into a swap to the small van type fleet instead ...um anyway, back to the regularly scheduled programming)