Quote:
Originally Posted by Faust
Wasn't i3 the first from the ground up BMW EV?
.... it's hard to see it as much more than an electric X5 from a certain perspective.
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Legacy auto makers are waking up to the fact that a good EV is certainly great software (which they don't have), but also custom hardware (meaning bespoke circuit boards and chips, which they also don't have). E.g., Tesla's battery conditioning algorithms automatically preheat the battery when the car senses it's pulling up to a supercharger or Porsche Taycan's ability to automatically heat/cool via heat pump tech and software integrated with all systems of the car.
And then, in order to do that stuff, you gotta have a vertically integrated supply chain - Tesla has proven you can't halfass it by pulling random generic parts off a shelf and cobbling them together - on a BEV, that causes massive complexity and inefficiency, not to mention underperformance (in both range and acceleration). Musk is famous for saying, "the factory is the product" after being in "production hell" with the Model 3. You can't just slap some generic motors onto a chassis, grab some LiOns, wire it up and call it done.
In short, a best-in-class BEV has to be custom / bespoke engineered from the ground up, including computer hardware and software, if it's going to compete; otherwise, yeah, it's just an electric X5.