Thread regarding General Motors layoffs

When I stub my toe, it's Trump's fault.
Everyone that disagrees with me is a fascist.

@3mc We can laugh but he's probably on his way to a cabinet post.

Now imagine a kinetic war with China - good old V8s on our side and everything connected, silicon and integrated circuits in their side. We retank with tankers and seas of oil, they are runnng 2000 miles per charge on their side as their battery tech has no limits on improvement. We hit hard and physical limits on ICE engines, they keep innovating in a field where there are no innovation limits. EVs are a matter of survival for both of us, and yet we are trying to portray this as a question of consumer preferences. Look what co-mies are doing with robots and autonomous vehicles, they want to unload twenty million self driving soldier drones onto 🇹🇼 and win without losing a single life. Good luck fighting back with ICE powered devices and we-pons.

@18f
Loser mindset.
You don't control reality.
GM has been making record profits YOY and the stock price is up 94% over the last 5 years.
Ruderless!? You only speak for yourself. 😭

Thank Trump for cancelling cheap wind and solar projects.

Only coal suits him.

Wow electricity prices are soaring. Who could have seen that coming? Certainly not the pump and dumpers on mahogany row. WHAT WILL WE DO? Make more EVs. That's the ticket.

GM has become a hopeless rudderless thing without a reason for being.

That's because of the 14k price premium of EVs over ICE that the article discusses.

If EVs were cheaper than ICE, no subsidy would be needed.

I don't think GM will sell much of anything with an EV powertrain after 30 September...

When Uncle Sammy pulls the credits (takes the subsidies away) the market will remind you of what they want.

GM can sell Chinese IP at a profit when they glue a Chevy badge onto a Chinese EV. What goes around comes around.

Somehow China gets away with stealing our IP (or Tesla's) but we can't steal their IP even if we wanted to. Which we don't 😀.

It's a one way technology transfer.

So how is an EV a better choice for the environment? Over 97% of the ore mined is turned into toxic sludge. The weight of the pack chews through tires at twice the rate of a normal ICE. Charging a battery still takes electrons from somewhere, only our grid cant deliver it and making power to charge the thing with a steam turbine at some yet to be built power plant is way less efficient than ICE. None of it is sustainable as it takes more diesel to mine it, more coal to refine it than it will save in the lifetime it exists let alone recycling the toxic thing at EOL... and by the way the packs have lit off a bunch of cargo ships and a few garages. One fender bender and you may have a pyrotechnic event. The whole thing lasts for maybe 7 years before degradation shortens range down to double digits. Why does this cheer leading persist? It doesn't work economically without subsidies, wont work as a value proposition and is a dead end environmentally.

@dp
"Don't steal China's intellectual property"

At the VEC, we regularly do tear downs of competitors vehicles and we are well aware of China's "IP" regarding batteries. If you saw them, you would laugh.
Slabs of aluminum crudely welded together with battery pouches. The Korean batteries are similar but constructed with skill.
German, American and Japanese batteries are very well made. I would not expect them to experience quality or safety issues. Believe it or not, as lame as Teslas are, their battery setup is probably the best and they have integrated modules we should be striving for. It's funny that Elon was a con man and a joke until he passed everyone up. I am not a fan boy in any way and think Teslas are ug1y. But you have to give them credit for the innovations. If you look a teardown of a BYD car, it's 100% obvious they are a costed-out, crude copy of a Tesla. On the outside it's bling, under the metal, not so much.

We are moving toward a higher efficiency, lower cost battery with superior construction. Would say more, but loose lips sink ships. Moral of the story is this -> we actually have the superior product. There's no need for us to copy something that terrible and unsafe.

We aren't doing what they can do because they steal our IP?

@a4

Don't steal China's intellectual property, but you can let their solutions to problems that make EV cheaper than ICE "inspire" your solutions.

China is notorious for stealing IP outright. Inspiration is actually legal.

Far more people use their cars as a daily driver than for cross country road trips.

EVs work fine as daily drivers, especially if you can charge overnight at home. And I realize that leaves out most people living in apartments.

Because of the lack of chargers, especially away from cities, I'd advise renting an ICE vehicle for your annual NY to LA road trip.

EVs aren't ready yet for normal driving. 'I want to go cross country' in an EV says no one EVER. And ain't cheap or quick to recharge.

@a1
No, we care. I work in engineering and we struggle to lengths you wouldn't believe to try to cut the costs on these EVs. The new goal is to finally break even.
We don't have the full weight of a communist government funding these cars, or the economies of scale that automakers in China have. We also can't just steal intellectual property like it was nothing. Our designs are our own, for better or worse and many of the modules and accompanying software are developed and funded by GM.
EVENTUALLY, we will surpass break-even, but that is only if these EV cars are adopted by the American people. Rome wasn't built in a day. The rebirth of the Bolt will be a significant move forward, even if it doesn't seem that way on the surface because we will finally offer an EV car we aren't losing tens of thousands of dollars on per car.

“People talk about subsidies, but at this point the subsidy effect is pretty minor,” he added.

I wonder if American manufacturers know how to lower EV costs and just don't care because they'd rather just sell 100k pickup trucks.