On May 23, 2014, at 9:06 PM, Michael Ross <[email protected]> wrote:
> No, there is no economy of scale with the low numbers they are building. > That is a fact. Not on the electric drivetrain, no. But on the wheels, body panels, dash board, seats, and everything else it has in common with the regular Fiat 500, you bet there is! > > I developed cam and crank sensors for a while. The tooling for a cam sensor > with 10 small components in it (I am even counting tiny neo magnets and some > discreet electronic components and an IC) will easily exceed $300K - 10 years > ago. I am fairly sure the cost is higher for an OEM (I was doing cost > conscious aftermarket). > > Or if that doesn't help - what would it take for you to build an entire car > that meets all the homologation, safety, blah, blah, blah? It is incredible > how much capital expense there is to bring out a car. You have to make a lot > of cars to break even - whole lot, and you have to be pretty good at it or > you will fold. R&D and NRE are not the same as production cost. When budgeting for new product development, you do want to amortize it over expected sales, but to come out & grouse that you lose money on each car you sell because you previously spent a lot on NRE is disingenuous. By that measure, Tesla is still losing money on every car it sells because they spent so much investor money on development, so they should just close up shop because there's no money to be made. By the same measure, Apple lost gobs of money on the first 1000 iPads they sold -- they should have come out and whined and asked people to stop buying them because they were losing 1000's of dollars on every one. I get that EV's are still a niche market and it's hard to recoup development costs. Hence why I'm wondering if the compliance car mandate is obsolete -- let the companies like Nissan and Tesla who want to invest have an easier time recouping THEIR investments with less competition from unwilling and whiny rich people. -Ben _______________________________________________ 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)
