Quote:
Originally Posted by Wyzz Kydd
I think I owe you an apology on that post. I need to read more carefully, I misread the 5 to 10 minutes as EV time, not gas refueling.
Given you acknowledge that EVs are appropriate for some, perhaps many consumers don't you think that GMs move to all EV is inappropriate?
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Missed the
bold part of your question. Short answer: Not really, but it has some risk.
Long answer: By the time 2035 gets here, the automotive landscape will look a lot different than it looks today. Especially infrastructure and vehicle portfolio options. The two biggest impediments to EV adoption today are
- People who do not have dedicated parking and charging at their residence.
- Charger availability in rural areas, particularly “fly-over states”.
There is work being done now to address both those issues. By 2035, people with more expertise in those areas than either you or me will have developed and implemented solutions to both problems. I am very aware of some of those solutions in progress, because we are providing those companies everything from vehicle registration and census tract info to vehicle miles driven statistics and other metrics they need to build business cases.
In those fly-over states, GM does not do particularly well today
except in larger trucks and utilities. More than likely, GM will have trucks and utilities in both EV and gasoline configurations until 2035. Silverado and Silverado EV. Blazer and Blazer EV.
And they will also likely continue to have commercial vehicle gas and diesel options beyond 2035. They specifically said all
passenger vehicles would be zero emissions by 2035. They also said timing for 100% zero emissions
commercial vehicles was still to be determined. A Silverado 2500 (and 3500 and 4500 and so on) is categorized as a commercial vehicle, even if it is purchased for everyday personal use. That is what the $900M spend for new V8 engines is for. Cleaner engines for commercial pickups and utilities.
Finally, as I had mentioned before, the real financial benefit to GM shifting to EV is that it will save them shit-tons of capital on vehicle platform development, maintenance and manufacture. Today GM has to support Alpha, Gamma, Chi, Delta, Epsilon, ZERV, 31XXN, and T2 platforms. Some of those have multiple derivatives. Add to that about 6 or 7 engine families and 6 transmission families. Each vehicle platform requires billions with a B dollars to maintain and update. The engine and transmission platforms require tens to hundreds of millions, depending on the number of variants. In the EV skateboard environment they will have two basic vehicle platforms (BEV3 and BET) that they can use to flexibly produce a wide range of vehicles by mixing and matching 5 electric motors that are all very similar in design, plus 3 electric drive units. They can put whatever type of tophat on them they like. Look at Blazer EV. They can produce FWD, RWD, or AWD just by where they decide to put the motor(s). They can use one small motor, one big motor, a small motor plus a big motor, or (SS) two big motors.
So basically, the cost and time required to develop new derivatives is significantly reduced, and time is money.
The risk for GM is
if the solutions for people who don’t have availability to charge while they are at home don’t come by 2035. From what I see, they’ll be fairly commonplace by 2026. 2030 at the latest.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Wyzz Kydd
I'm not an urban resident, but unless things change radically being forced into an EV would have major lifestyle consequences for me, setting aside the fact that it would eliminate the enthusiast part of driving as I currently enjoy it. Not to mention having to add garage space to park the things, or having to start parking cars that I would prefer to preserve out in the weather so I can recharge the things.
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You keep saying that you would be forced into an EV. That is not true. Even in the states that intend to ban non-ZEV vehicles by 2035, new vehicles can be purchased through the end of 2034. After that, used ICE vehicles can still be purchased in state. And there’s (for now) a loop hole that would allow for purchase of a new ICE in another state and later transported to the ZEV state.
FWIW, Georgia is not a ZEV state, so you can purchase new even beyond 2035. Thing is, since so many automakers are going the same route as GM, the variety of options will be scarce. Sadly for this forum, performance vehicles, other than Corvette and maybe Mustang are the first to go away.