Looking Out - The Podcast Ep. 10
The EV inferno
01 November, 2023
Welcome to Looking Out, a newsletter and podcast that connects the dots across the automotive industry, mobility, design, and culture. Looking Out is brought to you by Joe Simpson and Drew Smith. If you like what you see and hear, tell your friends!
If you’ve been reading the news of late, it seems that EV adoption has hit the skids.
Cars, like Mercedes’ EQ range, sit unloved on dealers’ lots.
GM and Honda have announced that they’re scrapping their partnership to build affordable EVs.
And even Tesla is slowing work on extra manufacturing capacity.
This show is all about unpacking why this might be happening.
Here are some of the topics we cover:
The compromises consumers are forced to make
Whether it’s desirability, variety, functionality, or price, many legacy OEMs ask us to make too many trade-offs when considering their EVs
Take the Mercedes EQ or Volkswagen’s ID ranges, for example.
For consumers conditioned by decades of beautifully designed and manufactured cars like the S-Class and the Golf, the EV equivalents simply aren’t desirable enough and it shows in the reviews, the sales numbers, and feedback from the market.
Add in the fact that the cost of borrowing is increasing along with the cost of living and the price of a new car and it’s not hard to see why consumers are asking hard questions about value for money when it comes time to replace their car.
The way legacy thinking squanders a new opportunity
We hate to harsh on the EQS again, but that moment when the guy from CarWow takes a Mercedes engineer to task over the lack of that car’s frunk will go down in history. At least for nerds like us.
Firstly, it shows how Mercedes missed packaging opportunities offered by EV drivetrains. Surely reclaiming space, once taken by a V8 or a V12, to improve the luxury and functionality of a vehicle like the EQS was a no-brainer.
Secondly, the dismissive excuse of the engineer (apparently the cabin air quality system takes up all the under-hood space) shows a wild level of contempt for the consumer. The last time we checked, a Tesla can scrub the air you breathe and fit a decent-sized shop in its nose, all at the same time.
How connectivity can change the way we think about the car
As Joe points out, once you plug your car in and power — electrical and perhaps even compute, can flow in and out of it — what the car is, and therefore what it means, can change. No longer an isolated object, it becomes a node in a network that can share or even trade resources.
Now, given the difficulties most Western OEMs have managing their own cars’ compute, let alone the challenges of rolling out smart power grids in places like the U.S.A, these opportunities sit some way off in the future.
But we wouldn’t bet on seeing some really interesting connected car use cases emerging from China that go way beyond streaming movies and ordering takeout.
The ability to think about different use cases is further supercharged when car makers *really* grasp the opportunity of new packages and new formats.
It allows us to imagine entirely new formats that might allow cars to become legitimate third spaces (i.e. not home, not work, but more like a private recreation space).
Electrification might also allow us to keep the spirit of exploration — that cars gifted billions — alive, by enabling us to explore our incredible earth with a far gentler touch.
As ever, we hope you enjoy this episode, and that you’re enjoying how the podcast is evolving. We’re having a lot of fun making it.
We’ve also LOVED your emails and comments on YouTube and LinkedIn. Sharing your insight and feedback lets us know that we’re not screaming in to the void, which makes it all worthwhile.
It’s also *really* encouraging to know that we’re not alone in how we think about both the challenges the automotive industry is facing, and the opportunities that represents.
Finally, we’ll be making some changes to the newsletter formats over the coming weeks and months.
For each podcast, there’ll be a bit of an explainer and a summary, just like what you’ve read.
On the weeks that we don’t publish a podcast, we’ll let you in on our reading list, with a punchy collection of links and short explainers of why we think they’re worthy of your attention.
And once a month, we’ll be publishing a longer form piece that taps in to some of the topics that Joe and I are batting back and forth.
With all that said, sit back, and enjoy the show!
Cheers,
Drew & Joe
As ever, we’d love to get your feedback:
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