Will Electric Vehicle Manufacturing Mean Fewer Auto-Parts Manufacturing Jobs? (cnbc.com) 147
In 2021, 9% of the world's auto sales were electric vehicles, reports CNBC (citing statistics from the International Energy Agency). Yet CNBC also notes that electric vehicles "require 30% fewer parts and components manufacturing than conventional cars," according to researchers for an Industrial Heartland case study."
So will that create problems in America's heartland? "Large swaths of the Midwest have economies based around the auto parts manufacturing trade..." "When we look carefully at what goes on on the factory floor, it won't be less workers," Keith Cooley, former head of Michigan's Labor Department, told CNBC. "There will be different people building the cars." Researchers believe modern factory jobs will require more education and could be less available than they were in the past. They estimate that electric vehicles could require 30% less manufacturing labor when compared with conventional cars. "The lines that run to drive oil or gas around an internal combustion engine aren't going to be there," said Cooley.
This change could hit the parts suppliers in the auto industry.
So will that create problems in America's heartland? "Large swaths of the Midwest have economies based around the auto parts manufacturing trade..." "When we look carefully at what goes on on the factory floor, it won't be less workers," Keith Cooley, former head of Michigan's Labor Department, told CNBC. "There will be different people building the cars." Researchers believe modern factory jobs will require more education and could be less available than they were in the past. They estimate that electric vehicles could require 30% less manufacturing labor when compared with conventional cars. "The lines that run to drive oil or gas around an internal combustion engine aren't going to be there," said Cooley.
This change could hit the parts suppliers in the auto industry.
Yes, stupid. (Score:4, Informative)
This question is not even worth asking. That's the whole fucking conversation, "Will..." "Yes."
This is even dumber shit, though:
No, there will be fewer workers, not less, chucklehead. (I guess he just measures worker mass, rather than counting workers. In that regard he may be right — America keeps getting fatter, so the mass may remain constant.) For the most part, it will be the same workers, only a smaller subset of them. They will be "retrained" from operating the machine they operate now to operating a different machine. They will still not have to know anything about engines, motors, or cars.
Of course there will be fewer workers, there will be less work. There are only four major assemblies in an electric motor: rotor, stator, and two bearings. The bearings are made by machines in a remote factory, so the automaker is only making two of those assemblies. Motors are wound by machine, so the total human labor involved is approximately fuck all. There's more man hours just in assembling a four banger engine block, let alone the rest of the motor (where most of the complexity lives.)
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I'm sorry, but people would most certainly buy a stripped down style car if it cost $10k. Cars have a significantly higher safety bar to get off today then they did 50 years ago. All that added safety complexity adds to the cost.
Also, seems these days all these manufacturers are embracing making fewer cars and charging more for them. These days you will most likely be putting an order in for the car you want or you will accept dealership markups on models you likely don't want but will settle for if you can
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I'm sorry, but people would most certainly buy a stripped down style car if it cost $10k.
The problem with a $10k car is that most of the people who are in the market for a car in that price range typically have bad credit and don't have $10k in cash. Yeah, you'd probably sell a few of 'em to people who are especially frugal, but the real profit is in selling marked up fully-loaded urban assault vehicles to the folks with excellent credit.
Similar economics are in play when it comes to mobile gaming. It's more profitable to release freemium garbage that a handful of whales spend big bucks on, r
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Plenty of people buy them by choice - they choose to spend their money on something other than a glorified shopping trolley.
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I'm sorry, but people would most certainly buy a stripped down style car if it cost $10k. Cars have a significantly higher safety bar to get off today then they did 50 years ago. All that added safety complexity adds to the cost.
I think the cheapest brand new cars are in the 12-14K range. It would be interesting to see how many people buy the absolute cheapest base new car. Myself I would think it would be better to spend that 12-14K on a couple year old used or off-lease car, where someone else has taken the biggest depreciation hit and you still get a fairly new better equipped car for the money. (or at least this was true before the current supply-chain woes, where used cars are now selling for new car prices anyway).
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It would be great if less labor going into a car meant it would cost less, but I think we'll have fewer workers yet higher car prices. Partially because those workers, though fewer in number, will be higher-skilled and higher-paid on average. But mainly because automated manufacturing is highly capital-intens
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Robot is a capital good (Score:2)
The robot is a physical means of production, also called a capital good [wikipedia.org].
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The higher cost of EVs is not because of the cost of automation but the cost of the materials. Lithium, cobalt, neodymium, and copper are more expensive than steel and aluminum.
Re:Yes, stupid. (Score:5, Informative)
It would be great if less labor going into a car meant it would cost less, but I think we'll have fewer workers yet higher car prices.
If the labor cost were the only cost, then less labor going into a car would mean it would cost less, because of competition. The market is too large and complicated for a pricing cartel to succeed, there are simply too many actors involved. But because of current battery prices, the up-front cost of an EV is higher than that of an ICEV. And those prices are due in part to supply and demand, and in part just because making batteries is nontrivial.
The decreased labor for producing things is potentially great and even a necessity with low birth rates and the resulting super-elderly population we're heading into. But capital ownership is highly concentrated, so a decreased labor share means income will also continue to be more and more concentrated. And no, I'm not marxist. But we're going to have to figure out some workable way to distribute wealth when it's largely pumped out by machines.
Yes, this is a very real problem. IMO the biggest part of the problem is this idea that we need people to work hard to justify their existence. We actually need to do somewhere between 50 and 33% less work as a species, because we are currently exceeding the biosphere's ability to supply resources. Or we need to get a lot cleaner and more efficient about it, but... heh.
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In that if you're doing 1.5* production a year, and do not have a massive debt burden,
I note https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNWYk4DdT_E This is a teardown of the Tesla 3/y and looking at the changes over 5 years.
120 parts to one.
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There will be less jobs and less money going into car manufacturing when consumers decide to start spending less on their cars.
EVs cost more than ICEVs, so what does that have to do with reality?
It's not just sticker price, there's a thing called "TCO".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Automakers also have to pay for regulations and safety features, be it airbags, rear camera, bumper height, self-destructing crumple zones of plastic, and so on. If a Chevy Corvair had modern safety features, it would be priced as a modern midsize sedan sold today.
Re:Yes, stupid. (Score:5, Insightful)
EVs cost more than ICEVs, so what does that have to do with reality?
Well, that's not really much of a point; EVs cost more because they have one very expensive component: the battery. So the public is spending less money on all the other gubbins that go into an ICEV. An EV battery *was* expected to cost about the same as a new engine, but I expect the labor content is a lot less. And think of all the wear parts in an ICEV; with the exception of tires, all of them are either eliminated (exhaust systems) or have greatly extended service life (brakes) in an EV. This also means less auto repair labor. The TCO for an EV over its lifetime is less than the TCO for an ICEV. So overall if your only priority is maximizing the number labor hours consumed by the personal transportation sector, switching from ICEV to EVs is bound to be a bad thing.
And EVs costing more than ICEVs is a temporary situation. I remember having this exact same debate *here* twenty years ago, about photovoltaics, but since then the price per watt of a PV module has dropped 96%. While I don't expect batteries to fall *that* much, the situation is ripe for many years of incremental improvements, with a few price/performance jumps on the horizon.
Tons of people would buy cars like that,
I suspect this is true, but only because of human cussedness and misplaced nostalgia. The truth is cars of the 60s and 70s were crap; I know this because I *drove* those suckers. If you want the experience of driving a 60s sports car, rent a U-Haul truck and race it through a slalom course. As for quickness, a base Honda Civic will beat a 1970 base Dodge Charger in a quarter mile drag race. 60s and 70s cars were dirty, sloppy, slow death traps.
If you made it legal to sell a 60s technology car, it wouldn't become a treasured possession like an actual antique; it'd become a poverty marker. Fleet buyers might purchase them, probably without radios, for pizza delivery drivers. That is if operating and insurance costs don't actually negate your purchase savings. Remember you're going to be doing oil changes twice annually, and spark plug, wire, distributor points and *manual* engine ignition timing every year. And you'll be replacing it after it falls apart or rusts apart in 50,000 miles. You might be better off equipping those pizza delivery guys with modern Chevy Sparks.
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By the sixties there was electronic ignition, ironically in some Mopar vehicles (they were first to standardize on it in fact, but not until slightly later) and using modern oil means you could go longer between changes in those vehicles. The slant six would last as long as any modern engine, although you'd probably have to rebuild the carburetor at least once. Just using modern metallurgy with those old designs would make a big reliability improvement; same with other parts, notably seals.
People think of o
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Just using modern *oil* would improve those old engines. You certainly wouldn't put a distributor on your new/old engine, nor would you use manual or (shudder) vacuum controlled engine timing. But if you're talking about putting computer controlled electronic ignition on and old engine design, it's no longer an old engine design.
There are also *huge* improvements in steering, suspension and car bodies since the 1960s, when cars still routinely had leaf springs and body-on-frame construction.
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Just using modern *oil* would improve those old engines. You certainly wouldn't put a distributor on your new/old engine, nor would you use manual or (shudder) vacuum controlled engine timing. But if you're talking about putting computer controlled electronic ignition on and old engine design, it's no longer an old engine design.
Nope. There is something in between points and having a PCM. Electronic ignition, as opposed to electronic control, only replaces the points with a hall sensor and a driver transistor (sometimes called an "ignitor".) You can literally buy a module which goes inside of your classic points distributor and completely replaces the points with such a system. It's "electronic" because there is a transistor, not because it has a microcontroller (which it doesn't.) The hall sensor triggers off the cam lobe that use
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My '86 C10 pickup had an electronic distributor much as you described. The only part of the distributor that could really fail was the module itself, which was essentially a pair of transistors embedded in epoxy, and the replacement cost was less than $25. Sure, the module might have to be replaced every 75,000 miles and the timing occasionally had to be tweaked, but for me that beats the potential to need to replace a $3,000 ECU. The '86 got about the same mileage as my ECU'd 2002 Sierra with coils on e
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The average age of a vehicle in the USA is about 12 years, so there's a lot of people driving around in clunkers. Things will get really interesting when that means vehicles with batteries that have started getting long in the tooth.
And noting that 12 is the average also means there is a not insignificant number of ~20 year old cars out there. Cars that people of limited means can buy for a few thousand dollars and that are still serviceable basic transportation. It will be interesting to see what happens to that market 20 years from now.
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The average age of a vehicle in the USA is about 12 years, so there's a lot of people driving around in clunkers. Things will get really interesting when that means vehicles with batteries that have started getting long in the tooth.
And noting that 12 is the average also means there is a not insignificant number of ~20 year old cars out there. Cars that people of limited means can buy for a few thousand dollars and that are still serviceable basic transportation. It will be interesting to see what happens to that market 20 years from now.
I have a 1999 RX300, a 2002 Jetta, a 2010 Rogue, and a 2011 Forrester.
The RX300 has 335k miles, the rest range from 90k to 120k miles. I expect to get many more years out of all of them.
I have the means, I just don't spend it on new cars.
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EVs cost more than ICEVs, so what does that have to do with reality?
As battery situation evolves, this may change. But toward his point, you can ignore EVs. Cars in general have gotten cheaper to produce the same sort of thing. E.g. in the mid 60s a Chevy Chevelle, adjusting for inflation, would be about $25k today. However, they could build such a thing for much cheaper, if they were allowed to and wanted to. Even adding all the modern safety and emissions requirements, it'd still be cheaper. In the intervening time, so many features have been introduced and many beca
Re: Yes, stupid. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: Yes, stupid. (Score:2)
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Old classic mechanical ICE cars are like Rolex watches. Neither destined for a land fill.
Being fully mechanical means that someone could reasonably make any replacement part for a vehicle. But it doesn't mean they could do it economically, which is why most old cars hit the junkyard eventually. As a model's numbers dwindle, it becomes less and less viable to make a buck making parts for it. Consequently, old classic mechanical ICE cars are destined for the landfill (or the recycler, anyway — automobiles are the single most aggressively recycled consumer product on the planet) just like al
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The problem I see right now and perhaps itâ(TM)ll change is that EVs are not DIY fixable
OTOH not much of what you're currently "DIY fixing" will go wrong on EVs, either because EVs don't use those parts or because they're way more reliable when they take electronic form.
There's no plugs to changes, no timing belts to swap, no lifters to adjust. Brake pads will still be brake pads (although EV brake pads last longer thanks to KERS). You're not going to tell me you're "DIY fixing" glitches in your ICE car's infotainment system.
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Exactly. When I think back to the shitboxes I dove as a teen, I repaired or replaced timing belts, aternators, fuel pumps, spark plugs, bunch of different filters, head gasket, exhaust systems....probably the only thing that an EV is going to have that I used to DIY might be windshield wipers, fluid, and pump.
And that's why the 5 year TCO of EVs comes out even with Camrys and Accords, despite them costing more. When you remove nearly all the shit that used to require regular maintenance, you come out ahead.
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This will end up hurting maintenance shops that will really only have brakes and alignments because nearly all the fluids will to change will be gone. Shouldn't really change the amount of workers on the factory floor or possibly some may shift to other areas because the factory doesn't need as many but perhaps post factory finishing needs more.
Or possibly you just need fewer people. A lot of jobs that use to need 7 are now done with 3 because of advances in technology and honestly the greediness of compani
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When I think back to the shitboxes I dove as a teen, I repaired or replaced timing belts, aternators, fuel pumps, spark plugs, bunch of different filters, head gasket, exhaust systems
I had a bit of an apples-to-apples comparison for that a few years ago. I had to replace the power steering pump in my pickup, and I replaced the power steering cooler while I was at it. Total cost for that was about $150 in parts, about $6 for the fluid, and 45 minutes of my time. When the power steering went out in my Hyu
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OTOH not much of what you're currently "DIY fixing" will go wrong on EVs, either because EVs don't use those parts or because they're way more reliable when they take electronic form.
I've experienced enough computer parts going bad and various consumer electronics failures over my lifetime that I know this is a load of crap. In fact, the day before yesterday I was just up on a ladder replacing one of my exterior security cameras that was slightly over a year old when it croaked. BEVs will still have failures, it will just be on parts that are infeasible to be repaired by a shade tree mechanic.
BEV reliability will be exactly like Apple's old "It just works" slogan. It just works, unti
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The problem I see right now and perhaps itâ(TM)ll change is that EVs are not DIY fixable
OTOH not much of what you're currently "DIY fixing" will go wrong on EVs, either because EVs don't use those parts or because they're way more reliable when they take electronic form.
There's no plugs to changes, no timing belts to swap, no lifters to adjust. Brake pads will still be brake pads (although EV brake pads last longer thanks to KERS). You're not going to tell me you're "DIY fixing" glitches in your ICE car's infotainment system.
Actually my brother had to DIY fix his GM Uconnect system after it went into an endless reboot loop. I think it was some issue with the "AirConnect" card.
The GM dealers will only replace the entire expensive unit.
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I'm Europe there is a whole cottage industry working on Nissan Leafs. People do everything from fixing an issue with the struts to refurbishing the battery by replacing failed cells.
Tesla is bad with parts availability, although there are pattern parts and salvage. But some fossil cars are the same. Opening the bonnet isn't allowed, there is no lever for it and they will try to void your warranty if you get in there. The car records the event and demands to be serviced until someone resets the error code. M
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This question is not even worth asking. That's the whole fucking conversation, "Will..." "Yes."
Nope.
It's a headline that ends with a question mark so the answer must be "no".
"Auto parts" covers things like parts for charging points. There's going to be a lot of demand for those.
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The industry size for auto parts will shrink because the total replaceable parts count for EV will be less. So you still need car parts, but fewer of them. We also don't really know the amount of replaceable parts on ICEV vs EV of the same model just yet.
So the overall demand will drop because there are overall fewer replaceable parts.
Those same people can also learn to code along with all the other of millions of displaced workers over the next 10 years, right? By that time, with EVERYONE learning to code,
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Kind of a tangent but with so many people on the proverbial chopping block, what will society do?
The same thing it has done with every other technology that has caused displacement in other industries.
Why would it be any different?
"Oh noes, not my buggy whips!"
Re: Yes, stupid. (Score:2)
Someone will have to build up those battery packs.
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Of course there will be fewer workers, there will be less work. There are only four major assemblies in an electric motor: rotor, stator, and two bearings. The bearings are made by machines in a remote factory, so the automaker is only making two of those assemblies. Motors are wound by machine, so the total human labor involved is approximately fuck all. There's more man hours just in assembling a four banger engine block, let alone the rest of the motor (where most of the complexity lives.)
Car engines are made by the engine manufacturer, which is often not the car manufacturer, and probably never happens at the same plant as the car assembly. I think a large percentage aren't even built in the U.S.
When people say that there will be the same number of people building cars, they typically mean *assembling* cars. And the number of parts in an ICE car and an EV are similar when you compare it at the large component level rather than at the individual part level. Instead of a fuel pump and fuel
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This whole thing is ignoring the other dimension of labor involvement in car manufacturing: will the car last longer? That seems likely to be the case with EVs. If cars start lasting 50% longer, that means less cars need to be built and that means less labor.
In a word... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes.
In a few more words, of course it will. Hell, the Industrial Revolution (ongoing for the last century and a half now) has been all about making more stuff with fewer workers.
Which allowed us to create whole new jobs that weren't even conceived of before. After all, it's pretty much meaningless to come up with a brand new thing if you don't have the manpower to make enough of the "brand new thing" in to supply pretty much everyone.
Yeah, some of the "brand new things" are going to be needed in smaller numbers than others (steamships vs cars, for example), but it's still all about making more stuff with fewer people...
And probably always will be...
There were gaps (Score:4, Interesting)
The luddites weren't supposed to progress they were people who lost their livelihoods and weren't given new ones. Buggy whip manufacturers didn't just head down to the auto plan for a job. An auto manufacturers can't just learn to code.
What's especially fun is seeing all the people furious at student loan debt forgiveness who are also convinced we're not going to have a problem with retraining our workforce for new jobs. But again even if we did entire new lines of work that nobody can imagine take decades and decades of basic research being done that were not doing because we cut all the funding to that basic research.
Basically we really do have a disaster brewing that we're just kind of ignoring. Sure maybe our great grandkids will have work. I mean when the bombs drop and we send a quarter of the population off to die in trenches they'll all have jobs rebuilding the cities we blew up I guess. Ukraine's going to be at 100% employment for a long time. But it seems like there should be better ways
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An auto manufacturers can't just learn to code.
I bet they can learn how to install fancy car-charging points at people's homes, etc.
Upgrading the power infrastructure is going to create an awful lot of manual jobs for the next couple of decades. Probably orders of magnitude more than are currently in car manufacturing.
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An auto manufacturers can't just learn to code.
I bet they can learn how to install fancy car-charging points at people's homes, etc.
I wouldn't take that bet. Licensed electricians are sometimes stymied by simply being asked to install a 30A RV outlet, and frequently hook it up to 240V instead of 120V — the result is an RV with a bunch of cooked equipment. The idea that someone whose former job is operating an automobile assembly machine is going to get the right wires hooked up to an EV charger is an unproven one.
The trouble is so can anyone (Score:2)
We *could* hold back the automation job losses with a massive, WWII style push to shift from fossil fuel to renewables, but nobody wants to pay for it. The left wanted to with their "Green New Deal" but they put some SJW stuff in a preamble bill and that immediately turned 30% of the country against it because "woke"
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As you said, Green New Deal was more about trying to changing how our society ran then addressing our climate needs. Had the bill stuck to the core focus, it may of had a lot more success. Instead, they put a bunch of poison pills in the bill that made it unpassable.
Personally, I think they knew their Green New Deal was unpassable from the get go but wanted to use it as a way to paint the Republicans as the disagreeable ones. Would of been more helpful had they just tried to pass a more focused bill that co
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You may first have to become a certified electrician or otherwise go through a long lowly paid (minimum wage) apprenticeship. Believe me, I wish I would of know about it so I could of started that at 18.
The corporate inflation handout bill Biden just signed does have a lot of talk about solar installers. So plenty of jobs climbing on top of roofs in the blazing sun making a few more dollars more then minimum wage. Ironically, if they are all union or otherwise have higher wages, installing solar panels will
Re: There were gaps (Score:2)
we send a quarter of the population off to die in trenches
We don't use trenches anymore. Get with the times.
Full self driving (Score:3)
Yes.
In a few more words, of course it will. Hell, the Industrial Revolution (ongoing for the last century and a half now) has been all about making more stuff with fewer workers.
Which allowed us to create whole new jobs that weren't even conceived of before. After all, it's pretty much meaningless to come up with a brand new thing if you don't have the manpower to make enough of the "brand new thing" in to supply pretty much everyone.
Yeah, some of the "brand new things" are going to be needed in smaller numbers than others (steamships vs cars, for example), but it's still all about making more stuff with fewer people...
And probably always will be...
The article was click-baity, trying to provoke yet another dose of outrage over the "OMG, more jobs losses!".
But... consider the loss of jobs if full self driving ever becomes a thing. How many jobs rely almost exclusively on driving? Long haul truckers, US postal service, delivery vehicles for UPS, FedEx, Amazon, cabs, subways and trains, and every local auto parts store. Also container ships.
Take a road trip across the country on any major highway and you'll find a truck stop every 40 miles or so, sometim
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I feel like Manna is overrated.
For one, it presents a scenario where the only hope to dig them out is some benevolent super rich person. A government is only able to get onboard once a person of that inclination and influence appears to get the ball rolling. Historically, such folks have never turned out so benevolent even when given the chance. The fact that the author chose to lean on the concept of a critical mass of people to just concentrate their wealth in a particular individual in exchange for *may
Change is inevitable (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not surprising that factory jobs will require higher skills - robotic assembly will need a few techs; not a lot of bodies turning nuts and bolts in an assembly line. The techs will make a good living, but a factory will not support a town like it did before.
Another area that will change is repair - mechanics will need different skills and a lot of diagnostics will probably be done remotely; and maintenance will not be the money maker for dealerships. Tire manufacturers will do OK because you still need tires, but oil changes, tuneups, etc. will decrease as EV use grows. The increased dependence on software to operate car systems will give rise for opportunities to build in system monitoring. I suspect predictive analytics will track systems and diagnose potential failures, such as a motor bearing failing, and allow for repair before it breaks; much as is done currently in other industries.
Re:Change is inevitable (Score:5, Interesting)
With EVs the drivetrain is a lot simpler than with ICE, so there are fewer parts and those parts tend to be factory sealed modules that don't require any maintenance for the lifetime of the vehicle.
That's one of the reasons that many Japanese manufacturers were late to the EV revolution. Hybrids are complex and keep part suppliers and factory workers going. There was a TV documentary about it a few years ago, lots of companies that supply drivetrain parts starting to panic as it becomes obvious that most of their business won't exist in 10 years.
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With EVs the drivetrain is a lot simpler than with ICE, so there are fewer parts and those parts tend to be factory sealed modules that don't require any maintenance for the lifetime of the vehicle.
I saw an interesting show on a company that uses tesla power trains to convert ICE to electric; mainly Porsches and VWs where is is basically a bolt in replacement for teh engine, coupled with a custom control module and batteries in front. Basically a power train in a box. I can’t remember if they sel it as a DIY as well.
That's one of the reasons that many Japanese manufacturers were late to the EV revolution. Hybrids are complex and keep part suppliers and factory workers going. There was a TV documentary about it a few years ago, lots of companies that supply drivetrain parts starting to panic as it becomes obvious that most of their business won't exist in 10 years.
It will be interesting to see how countries where there are strong labor laws / unions adapt as the jobs and employment levels change. The push for rapid switch to electrified veh
Re:Change is inevitable (Score:5, Funny)
robotic assembly will need a few techs; not a lot of bodies
In the 1960's, my father told me what, at the time, I thought was a "Dad Joke":
The factory of the future will have two employees. A man, and a dog. The man's job will be to feed the dog. The dog's job is to keep the man out of the machinery.
Damn. Dad was correct again.
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Back in the early 2000s, Panasonic had a "lights out" factory making plasma TVs. The plant was so highly automated that the lights were redundant, there were no humans involved and the robots didn't need them.
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You would just enter into a lifetime lease that you could upgrade or downgrade on the kind of car you felt like driving. Since all EV, really won't even need to worry about mileage as much either.
That could be a REALLY cool system for anyone that has to work and own a car anyway. It runs into a hard wall for anyone trying to retire since the idea for a lot of people is to get a car new car paid off right at the beginning of retirement and then it last 20 years because you don't use it much.
I guess they'll b
What about Germany? (Score:2)
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A lot of the stuff they sent away actually is affected. For example, Bosch sold their 12V starter and alternator business to China (they licensed the name to them too, disingenuous fuckers.) There's no 12V starter or alternator on an EV, nor even a hybrid, though there is a 12V system and usually a 12V battery too because the tier 1 suppliers are all waiting for the automakers to pay them to design 48V electrics.
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A lot of the stuff they sent away actually is affected. For example, Bosch sold their 12V starter and alternator business to China (they licensed the name to them too, disingenuous fuckers.) There's no 12V starter or alternator on an EV, nor even a hybrid, though there is a 12V system and usually a 12V battery too because the tier 1 suppliers are all waiting for the automakers to pay them to design 48V electrics.
48V? Did you miss a zero there? Some hybrids use 48V packs, but true EV packs are measured in hundreds of volts. Realistically, you'll have to do voltage conversion no matter what, and there are good safety reasons to not use 48V when low voltage DC will do. Also, a lot of components need 12V (e.g. DC outlets, fans, bulbs) or less, and there's a cost associated with every step-down, both in terms of extra components and in terms of power loss. So moving to 48V seems like a rather strange thing to do.
Ei
Yes but no (Score:5, Interesting)
If we actually got rid of ICE vehicles as per California 2035 then yes.
However we're not replacing all ICE across the country by then or maybe ever, at least not with current technology.
Why?
2 reasons. One fixable if we choose to, the other maybe not so much.
1) The grid will need upgrades. As it stands now we're already in trouble by 2035 without adding EV load just through normal growth. This is fixable but we have to start now/very soon and I don't see that being taken seriously. Just lots of talk. California already has "flex" energy days where people are asked to use less power and I was there the last time we had scheduled rolling black outs in the middle of the work day. You can't run a modern economy like that long term.
2) Lithium and rare earths required for EV. Mostly coming from China right now. We don't really know how much is available to dig up but estimates are there simply isn't enough. And being dependent on China is a _really_ stupid idea. As colossally stupid as being dependent on Putin for energy. Don't put your future in the hands of your enemies/frenemies.
My guess is 2035 is going to be pushed back until both those problems are solved.
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If we actually got rid of ICE vehicles as per California 2035 then yes.
However we're not replacing all ICE across the country by then or maybe ever, at least not with current technology.
No one is proposing to get rid of ICE vehicles in California by 2035. The plan is to stop selling them here by then, and even that will certainly have exceptions for specific commercial uses if history is any indication.
The grid will need upgrades. As it stands now we're already in trouble by 2035 without adding EV load just through normal growth. This is fixable but we have to start now/very soon and I don't see that being taken seriously.
Yes, Newsom has consistently given PGE a handy, and so have his predecessors. Fuck those guys, all of 'em. This actually is a real problem.
Lithium and rare earths required for EV. Mostly coming from China right now.
Wrong, most of it is coming from Australia right now.
We don't really know how much is available to dig up but estimates are there simply isn't enough.
Wrong, even the sources we know about now are more than enough. Current production is insufficient,
Re: (Score:2)
Australia has 1/10th what China has. How long is that going to last the West?
Irrelevant. Most of the world's readily accessible lithium (about 54% of currently exploitable deposits) is in salyars in Chile.
Rare earths per country
Currently exploitable developed reserves. Also, the amount of rare earths used is small, and shrinking.
You people are so funny, you think I come here and spew random shit out of my head based on my feelings.
No, I think you come here and spew ignorant shit that's irrelevant because you're ignorant.
Re: (Score:2)
> The 2035 date is actually meaningless here in the
> real world because who will still be making
> significant number of ICE by then anyway?
Companies that want to sell cars in die hard trump states like Texas, Florida, Kentucky, and South Carolina where, like mass transit, EVs equate to gay communism makes the baby Jesus cry? Hell... I wouldn't put it past the red states, especially those four, to ban EVs entirely, just to spite California. They already engage in shenanigans like "rolling coal", bar
Re: (Score:2)
2) Lithium and rare earths required for EV.
There's plenty of sodium and even iron batteries on the horizon.
Plus there's new types of magnets on the way which will improve electric motor efficiency (and therefore car range - smaller batteries!)
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/0... [hackaday.com]
Re: (Score:2)
The iron batteries are very exciting for site based energy backup and storage. The size/weight of iron batteries makes them impractical for cars/light trucks but maybe for trains and boats but most definitely usable for home and downright great for commercial and grid backup.
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I hope so but we've both been here a long time and how many times have we heard about the next magic battery technology?
Until it's here and in production use available for general consumption I no longer believe anything about future battery tech or any other tech.
Take a look at how much batteries have improved over the last two decades before saying that.
There haven't been any miracles but there have been a lot of strides.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes lots of great strides. EVs for consumer cars are practical now. But we're nowhere close to approaching the energy density, ease of handling, and fast loading, of chemical fuel storage. Choosing the battery EV as the winner at this stage to the exclusion of all else has been a pretty bad decision on the part of activists and governments everywhere. Many applications just aren't well served by battery EVs and never will be. It's too bad we didn't pump as much money into means of efficiently and econo
Re: (Score:2)
California already has "flex" energy days where people are asked to use less power and I was there the last time we had scheduled rolling black outs in the middle of the work day. You can't run a modern economy like that long term.
drinkypoo tackles most of the misrepresentations and distortions you have piled in here, but skipped on this one.
There are two situations that have led to limited blackouts in recent years - summer heat waves and wind storms which risk power-line sparked fires.
There was only one actual heat wave outage period in recent years and that was in August 2020. And the problem was not that the grid was insufficient, or there was inadequate power available, the problem was that CAISO (Calfornia Independent System O
Re:Yes but no (Score:4, Insightful)
The left wants public transportation, which is a sustainable way to transport the masses, but the right keeps attacking it. You see, the right has a solution to everything: just burn it down, and praise jebus.
Re:Yes but no (Score:4, Informative)
The left wants public transportation, which is a sustainable way to transport the masses, but the right keeps attacking it. You see, the right has a solution to everything: just burn it down, and praise jebus.
That's borderline disingenuous.
I live in New York, where we have one of the best public transport systems in the country...and it has major issues. The MTA asks for a pile of money every year, with their options invariably being "increase fares" or "cut service". Those who own cars are largely unaffected by this, but those who are reliant on the MTA quickly find themselves being stuck holding the bag either way. There are constantly cancellations and reschedules, and God help you if an entire line is canceled; you're stuck getting a cab (i.e. the car we're supposed to be replacing).
The last few years, their plan to fund the MTA's massive deficit has been "congestion pricing", effectively saying that drivers who aren't going to be using buses and subways are now going to start getting charged to pay for their sin of not-using mass transit. Shockingly, this isn't going over well, especially since residents just outside the congestion pricing zone are understandably worried about the influx of traffic and already-difficult parking situation being compounded even further.
Meanwhile, construction projects are constantly boondoggles. The electrification of the northern LIRR line got a pile of cash to be completed in 2018; a quick google search indicates that officials are asking about it again. The East Side Access tunnel that connects the LIRR to Grand Central Station is finally going to be completed in December 2022 (supposedly), but the initial plans indicated a 2019 completion date...and something tells me that it was ridiculously over budget, too.
The Left saying "we want public transit" is all well and good, and I think there would be more openness to public transit if it were Japan levels of reliable and affordable. The problem is that those who say "public transit isn't the answer" are unlikely saying it because they are inherently against mass transit, but instead see existing mass transit authorities as being expensive and unreliable, and have understandable hesitation to making it a 1% privilege to avoid using them.
Re: (Score:2)
Sure, and if I had brought party into it, it might have been fully disingenuous. But what I've seen myself is allegedly liberal politicians oppose public transit for their own benefit, while actual liberal citizens, residents, and voters support public transit.
Re: (Score:2)
Buggy Whips (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is this type of stuff posted over and over. It is so cliche, so I will use the standard cliche response:
There are fewer horseshoe-making jobs.
There are fewer wagon-wheel-making jobs.
There are fewer buggy-whip-making jobs.
Things change. Industries change. Consumers will get transit that is more reliable, quieter, more efficient, more convenient, has has fewer parts, is easier to service, and (eventually) a lower total cost of ownership. How horrible.
There will be more battery-making jobs.
There will be more electric-motor-making jobs.
Etc. We don't need people cutting, hauling, and delivering ice to every home either. The change to EV has been slow but evolving over the last 15+ years now and picking up pace as consumers' interest increases, more models are offered, more problems are solved. Demand is building steadily.
As long as we don't try to FORCE the change, there is plenty of time to adapt along with the change. Otherwise, we will have little infrastructure to support them, angry consumers, major grid problems, and higher prices.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
As long as we don't try to FORCE the change, there is plenty of time to adapt along with the change.
Unless we force the change (and others as well) there will not be any chance to adapt to ecological conditions.
We're in this mess because we let big oil be our energy provider for too long. If we hadn't done that there would be no crisis. Now we have to rip off the bandage, and it's gonna hurt. But faster is still better.
Because it took a while (Score:2)
The point is the rate of job destruction is still many times higher than the rate of job creation. You have multiple economists warning us of this fact but as usual we ignore experts.
I mean we're in the process of making education co
Re: (Score:2)
>"I mean we're in the process of making education completely unaffordable"
Yes, and the more the Federal Government keeps pouring money into it, the more expensive it becomes. The colleges eat it up, hire more useless administration, blow the money on stuff that doesn't matter, churn out more people with useless degrees, and leave tons more people who never finish (who probably shouldn't have started in the first place). All while having HUGE endowments. The schools should be taking the loan risks.
>
Re: (Score:2)
The colleges eat it up, hire more useless administration
Why would colleges do this? They are cutting into their own financial efficiency by doing so. In reality, they are not hiring lots more administration.
churn out more people with useless degrees
Is it not up to the customers to decide what they want to study? Colleges don't offer courses that they can't fill.
The schools should be taking the loan risks.
In many ways they do. Build a load of labs and if everyone decides to do basket weaving, they lose out.
Re: (Score:2)
>" Why would colleges do this? They are cutting into their own financial efficiency by doing so. In reality, they are not hiring lots more administration.'
Then explain why costs go up every year such that a degree 40 years ago now costs an inflation-adjusted 180% more? I don't think loan guarantees are the ONLY cause, just a major contributor.
>"Is it not up to the customers to decide what they want to study?"
If they end up paying for it, yes. If you pay out of pocket or with a private loan, no prob.
Re: (Score:2)
Then explain why costs go up every year
(a) Inflation is greater than zero, (b) inflation of items consumed by the academic sector often runs at higher rate than CPI, (c) people demand a better quality product so the comparison is not equal year-to-year (d) maximum willingness to pay, (e) scope creep, (f) possible other increases. In terms of better quality product then we are talking things like more contact hours with tutors during a degree, better quality labs, nicer chairs in the lecture theatres, more customisation, etc. When I went to colle
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>"Inflation is greater than zero, "
I already said "inflation adjusted." Some other of what you list is certainly valid, like scope creep, campus features, etc. And "maximum willingness to pay" ties back into too-easy loans."
>"Why? Do banks get to decide on the floor plan of houses?"
In a way, yes. Banks do, indeed look at what you want to buy and where and what the cost is, the condition, as well as your ability to pay and credit history. The house is their collateral. Would YOU loan YOUR money to
Re: (Score:2)
The point is the rate of job destruction is still many times higher than the rate of job creation. You have multiple economists warning us of this fact but as usual we ignore experts.
I agree with your comments about the previous industrial revolutions, and am very much concerned with this process being repeated now. But at the moment the data does not show it happening. There is a full employment economy right now, and we are still waiting for the data that shows automation, or technology switching, is causing jobs to disappear faster than they are created.
You are getting ahead of things to claim that it is happening now but this is when we need to start addressing the likelihood of it
Re: (Score:3)
As long as we don't try to FORCE the change, there is plenty of time to adapt along with the change. Otherwise, we will have little infrastructure to support them, angry consumers, major grid problems, and higher prices.
Except, of course, that "we" are trying to force the change.
Won't someone think of all the unemployed whalers? (Score:2)
Progress is progress.
And when this shit can program itself, I will also have to move on.
Deal with it.
Save me (Score:3)
replacement parts (Score:2)
Since a large portion of people will do whatever it takes to not have to drive a car with a limited-life major part (the battery), IC autos will remain popular for a long time, necessitating a supply of replacement parts.
Re: (Score:2)
Since a large portion of people will do whatever it takes to not have to drive a car with a limited-life major part
There is no such thing as a car without limited-life components. The only way to win is not to play.
Re: Are you a mechanic? What kind? (Score:2)
I asked because I strongly suspect not or you would instantly know better.
Engines and gearboxes were always life-limited and modern systems are so marginally designed (for decades, automatic gearboxes are notable) they break very expensively.
I'm a lifelong mechanic from jet fighters on down and can (which really is more tedious than difficult) overhaul most anything. I'm looking forward to BEVs since they're far cleaner and simpler to R&I wear parts than late-stage ICE systems diesel or gas.
Yes! (Score:2)
Was 'found out' 10 years ago.
Next question?
Yes, there will be less auto-parts... (Score:2)
Replacement (Score:2)
All those laid off parts workers will get new jobs as tow-truck drivers for EVs that have run out of charge out on the road.
Tesla 10 hrs vs VW 30 hours (Score:3)
It only takes Tesla 10 hours to assemble a car vs 30 hours for VW.
VW's Diess wanted to improve the assembly time and warned that this would take fewer workers. Unions were upset and management was not willing to go along so they fired Diess... Of course, denying reality will only be bad for VW.
Yes and it's good (Score:2)
Look under the hood of any late model ICE car and you will see a ridiculous number of belts, hoses, wires, connectors, etc. It is truly amazing that any ICE vehicle is cost effective to manufacture, with such insane complexity - it is only possible due to 100yrs+ of supply chain development. This is something that needs to die.
Yes, Yes, and More Yes (Score:2)
Yes, the part count on an EV is significantly lower than on a ICE engine. An EV is essentially a computer with a battery.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Precisely. At the end of the day, it's still a CAR. It's subjected to the elements and sometimes the rough and tumble impacts with poor roads and accidents. Tires will wear out, brakes will (albeit more slowly) wear out, suspension components will still wear out, etc.
All the hand wringing is akin to linotype operators losing their minds as desktop publishing ran them over. Things change. Adapt or be left behind.
Best,
Re:No - but parts will be more expensive (Score:4, Informative)
People will be still breaking the same quantities of bumpers, mirrors, windscreens and suspension elements because those are actually the parts which break the most in any car, not engines.
So what? How does that address this? Those parts, like all parts, are made with ever-decreasing amounts of manual labor. And that doesn't at all address the issue of manufacturing, only service. While what you said was true, it was irrelevant to the point being addressed.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
What hopefully will happen is that system complexity will increase, so there will be more components going into implementation resulting in the same total labor.
No, that's flatly not how it works. There is no hope of that. When you go from ICEV to EV the system complexity might well increase, but literally all of the added complexity is in electronics, and all of the other parts either stay the same, get simpler, or go away. The electronics are assembled automatically, so the total number of workers decreases even when the complexity increases.
We can see this by looking at a horse and buggy as a system and comparing it in complexity to a car.
No, that's exactly the opposite of the truth. The horse is a bag of bacteria with a brain. It's orders of magnitude more co
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
While the horse is more complicated than internal combustion engine, the entirety of horse is produced by "biology", so part that humans assemble that related to horse and buggy is much simpler than a car.
In some ways yes, in some ways no. Blueprints don't have to be fed and watered. They don't get sick when you're not using them. They don't die if something goes wrong in production. Factories have to be maintained, but they can produce a lot of output per dollar invested. No matter how much you spend on a horse, it can only make horses at a variable and typically declining rate. Horses eat whether you're producing more horses or not, and while they will eat more while you are, they eat a significant base am
Re: (Score:2)
The only difference is that parts for EVs are significantly more expensive
They are mostly the exact same parts.
will have it more difficult to buy and keep a car in a working condition,
Apart from drive train and chassis, outside Teslas they tend to be standard parts used on similar models of ICEV. This can even be the case for body panels.
Suicide is the only cure for mental illness. (Score:2)
You qualify. Kill yourself. It will make the crazy go away and you've clearly nothing to contribute to the universe given your schizo font choice and that you imagined your drivel somehow witty.
Do not pass go. You will never get better because crazy is a one-way street and your later life will be even worse. The ethical thing to do is an hero so Slashdot will be slightly cleaner.