On Fri, May 23, 2014 at 6:59 PM, Ben Apollonio via EV <[email protected]>wrote:
> How exactly is it that Fiat can't produce a teensy car with a tiny battery > for less than $46k when small (i.e. lacking economies of scale) upstart > Tesla is able to rake in 25% gross margins on a massive, high-performance > luxury car with 3x the battery that starts at 70k (which puts the > production cost around 56k)? And oh yeah, Nissan turns a profit on its > $29000 leaf, too. > Because Fiat, for whatever reason, has decided to amortize all the development and tooling costs for the 500 electrification project over the absolute minimum number of cars they can get away with. What the [bleep] did they expect? Is it possible we don't need compliance cars anymore? Now that > Tesla/Nissan/GM have shown that demand is real and are making money off > EV's, why force them to compete with the deadbeat Fiats of the world? > We don't need compliance cars at all. The OEMs need compliance cars if they want to sell in CA and other states, which make up a sizable chunk of their market. The money lost on compliance cars is the price of admission to those markets. They wouldn't build them if it wasn't worth it. I have no sympathy. I don't think Tesla/Nissan/GM are competing with the deadbeats at all. If you're an informed EV buyer you don't pay all that extra money for compliance cars if you don't have to. When EVs become more mainstream, I think many buyers will remember who was on board from the beginning and who was not. Who would want to buy an EV from a manufacturer who has proven - and actually publicly stated - they don't want to build EVs? Chris -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.evdl.org/private.cgi/ev-evdl.org/attachments/20140523/2dd7eb9a/attachment.htm> _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
