Almost 3 years ago the CEO (Håkan Samuelsson) said that he did not believe in pure elecric cars but rather hybrids[1]. Will be interesting to see if that still holds or if he has changed his beliefs.
Here in Europe, we moved from Diesel is king to the specialist press running article on why you can still consider buying a Diesel car in 2017 in some condition. That triggered countries like Germany to announce plan to ban gas car sales in a decade.
Regardless what Volvo CEO thought 3 years ago, the market has shifted in a clear direction and it is his job to adapt.
In a similar fashion Porsche CEO said he did not believe in automated car. You don't buy a 150K Porsche sport car to let it drive itself. That's probably true, but I expect him to change his mind less than a second after it is clear that some countries will forbid non-automated car to access some public road in the near future.
Diesel engines can be ran on DME (dimethyl ether) with a redesigned fuel system. DME is clean and its's storage requirements are nearly the same as for LPG: pressurized containers at 0.5 MPa (roadbike tyre pressure).
Volvo Trucks has partnered with Oberon Fuels and converted several trucks to run on DME.
And where would the DME come from? It would still produce CO2 when burnt, even if there are less toxic byproducts. If created from atmosphere CO2 it most likely would use way more electricity than a battery powered car.
When level 5 self-driving is available, it won't be too difficult to add a wheel back and have modes where the self-driving capability maintains safety for other drivers on the road, but allows the driver to assume some risk for their own car and personal safety.
Different modes could allow the driver to accept different levels of risk to themselves and of their car, while still providing automatic protection and avoidance of other drivers on the road. Probably some more... extreme... modes could require posting a bond with the insurance company or government to cover personal injury.
If someone doesn't mind risking their car (collision insurance would no longer apply in these modes), and can pay for any injuries they sustain, as long as they aren't risking other people's health and safety, the computer could let them drive how they want, within certain risk limits.
I'm not so sure people will bother, though. Once car-to-car transponders are mandatory, creating an intelligent grid of vehicle awareness, what fun is it to zoom around other cars as if they're stationary if they know you're coming?
I don't believe people want the actual risk associated with aggressive driving. They just want to beat other drivers. Computer games should take up most of the slack. Even really simple games like Race The Sun offer plenty of adrenaline and reflex development with no actual risk. If you want actual (substantial) risk, go rock climb above your ability, or skydive without a reserve chute.
This here is one of the reasons why I think manual cars will never go away, or at least they won't be banned outright - new cars will have enough systems to stop you from crashing in almost every situation, while allowing you to "drive" - so why ban it?
I'm not sure what you mean by "manual cars" there. When there are discussions about future bans on "manual cars" that means cars as we have them right now, without any sort of level 5 automatic control. A theoretical level 5 car that also lets drivers have control for fun as long as some set of conditions are continuously met wouldn't be a "manual car" I think, it'd be a self-driving car with an operator recreation mode as allowed by local laws/ordinances. In that situation the system is always ready to take back over should a condition fail, or for that matter should the driver merely decide they want it to. If you meant though that there would be a mix of manual and self-driving cars allowed because the self-driving ones have collision avoidance, then that doesn't make sense, as a manual car could still create collisions that were unavoidable (even by accident). It's not like self-driving cars have force fields.
Having said all that, even if we're talking only about "manual modes" in l5 rather then "manual cars", there are still reasons why they might be banned or at least massively restricted in general, and that's due to infrastructure economics, not crashes. Well developed L5 cars will be capable of operating with a level of precision (in terms of actual road lines and such) and reliability that is beyond the general population, so once all cars reach that level it significantly changes how roads and support infrastructure themselves can be designed. Purely self-driving vehicles simply won't need the lanes to be as wide for example, which directly translates into newly available free space on exisitng roads. That could be used to make them purely thinner (less paving = massive cost savings), gain an extra mechanized vehicle lane for free (higher capacity for the same price), maintain existing numbers of lanes but gain new lanes for walkers/bikers, or some combination. There will be a lot of minor to radical optimizations available with significant economic and quality of life benefits, so long as you don't have to worry about having human drivers at all. That's probably going to tempt a lot of jurisdictions sooner or later.
Douglas Adams on the internet affecting media in the 2000s: ”It's like trying to explain to the Amazon River, the Mississippi, the Congo and the Nile how the coming of the Atlantic Ocean will affect them. The first thing to understand is that river rules will no longer apply.”
Wide-scale fully automated cars will change everything. First, I think fewer people will personally own cars, perhaps a small fraction. Vehicles will need to be less “general purpose,” if they’re not personally owned. One or two seaters, low speed electrics are better/cheaper if you’re getting around a congested city on your own. If we don’t own our own, we don’t always need cars that can fit a family, handle highways…
>>that some countries will forbid non-automated car to access some public road in the near future.
I am sorry, but I don't believe that will happen in anything that could be described as near future. I don't see any actual bans to be introduced any sooner than 30-50 years from now, and even then only if:
1) the technology gets really good, not just "kind of good but only when the conditions are optimal"
2) the technology gets cheap enough that you can put it on a kind of car that nowadays is sold new without A/C and electric windows and don't impact the price of the car too much.
That's my point actually. You can't predict that, like you could predict the sudden demise of Diesel only 3 years ago.
3 years ago you could probably have done exactly the same reasoning with electric cars (eg: London 0-emission goal are for 2050). And I mean, if my country decided to go full electric in 10 years, I have no idea how I could own a car, unless charging speed, or street infrastructure, or millage vastly improved. Nothing of that has a clear 10 years roadmap. Yet here we are.
Beyond gutnor's reply, cars are just fundamentally ripe for disruption. The benefits of personalized arbitrary-point-to-point mechanized transport are so compelling that society has been willing to put up with an enormous price for it, but that doesn't mean the current situation isn't still terrible and ready for a real tipping point effect the instant it becomes feasible. The only reason we've had manual driving at all was because humanity's development of mechanical tech greatly outstripped its development of information capture and processing tech, but that was always a temporary situation. Think about the incredible pressures on the current system:
- Well over a million deaths a year worldwide, if we're talking America then 30k-40k+ here alone. Tens of millions disabled/injured, at ruinous expense. Even more accidents that "merely" cause significant damage, again at major expense.
- The huge insurance and societal costs necessary to sustain the above.
- People who cannot drive in a society where that's immensely limiting. This sandwiches both sides of demographics. Particularly in the First World, demographic trends are resulting in an ever increasing number of elderly who cannot drive any longer. And it's always been a hassle and disruption for parents to need to shuttle around children, or arrange for the same, or just do without.
- A fear, justified or not, that terrorists will make increasing use of the fact that cars are an excellent way to deliver a tremendous amount of energy into a set of targets even without any sort of purpose-made weapons onboard and are not something that can be done without.
- The immense waste in incredibly valuable land resources needed for overbuilding parking, wide lanes, and other support infrastructure needed for human driven vehicles.
- The immense waste in human time and stress due to traffic and other conditions that could be ameliorated or even eliminated by automatic control.
Etc etc etc. The principle problem with both your arguments 1 & 2 is that you make them in a vacuum outside of the massive negatives that we live with right now. As with many disruptive new technologies, self-driving cars don't have to live up to any particular ideal, they merely need to be better then what we've got. And frankly that's just not a very high bar. It's not just economics it's politics, if you look through the above list you should be able to easily identify some of the most powerful interest groups and societal motivators in existence, touching almost all of society in general. Once the avalanche gets going feedbacks are going to reinforce pretty rapidly.
I don't dismiss the benefits of automated driving on society, literally everything you said is true and I agree with it 100% - I'm just saying that I feel like the tech isn't anywhere near ready for mass deployment, it feels like a gimmick or a really fancy adaptive cruise control at best, or that people who talk about it come from a Star Wars universe where being surrounded by super high-tech stuff is just normal and indistinguishable from magic.
Seeing the current state of the best-of-the-best from Tesla and Deimler, autonomous driving is decent, but it seems full of the same issues as image recognition - and that was predicted to take at most few years to perfect 50 years ago. Today in 2017 you can fool the best image recognition algorithm with a sofa in a zebra print - it comes with 90% confidence match for a zebra because the pattern is right. I firmly stand by my feeling that getting to anything approaching L5 autonomy will take half a century, and that's not near future in my mind.
Imagine in the middle of every American interstate a light-weight, elevated track holding up a lane in each direction designed for automated cars. Tech today could easily drive vehicles in such a controlled space at high speed and density. Switch to manual upon exit. At 100mph and 40ft per car one gets a rate of 13200 cars per hour. This is on par with the capacity of the current 5 lane Bay Bridge at 9,000 per hour [1]. This could be the future, if society could embrace it. (Electric?) automatic cars would be adopted very quickly if you got to use such a system for commuting and cross country travel. As driving tech got better cars could travel right next to each other on long trips to get the aerodynamic benefits of trains. Google, Apple - you have billions sitting around. How about building a demo track and start building the system on the 280 and 101 for a nice loop.
Also, new core-tech, new game - especially for those car manufacturers beaten at the market by the great three, this is a chance to recover lost ground.
"Today’s announcement shows how quickly the market is shifting as Volvo prepares to replace gasoline- and diesel-only models with a mix of full-electric, plug-in hybrid and 48-volt mild hybrid variants starting in two years."
Translation: Sometime in the forever-three-years-from-now future we will offer our existing cars in half-assed hybrid form (loud, high vibration 3 and 4 cylinder ICE with 16-18 mile electric only range and no center of gravity benefits since there won't be a "skateboard" design) and we will begin to offer one or two cutesy little electric only vehicles, on a new platform that won't be sold in the US.
We've seen this same press release over and over from BMW/Merc/Audi/etc. - always the same 3 year horizon, always the same mild-hybrid flavors of existing models, and always the same oddball electric model (i3, Merc B series).
Volvo had over ten years to respond to Prius and the market and consumer signals it was clearly showing. Volvo has had five years to respond to Tesla (who erode their highest margin vehicles and represents a big chunk of their consumer base in the US). What did they do with all of that time ? They released a brand new fleet of vehicles with beautiful exterior styling and laughable little ICEs inside (and some token mild hybrid models).
My problem with them is that they don't offer the greatest benefit of electric: the simple drive train. No thousands of moving part kept moving by a handful of fluids and rubber pulleys all needing meticulous care. With the hybrid you get the best of both worlds in convenience and range but the worst in maintenance. Battery aging? Check. Expensive combustion engine service schedules? Check.
Battery aging is less a problem when the battery capacity is less essential. You still get hybrid mileage benefit even if the battery can only hold a single braking charge (and let's face it, it will never go that low during the lifetime of a car).
In any case, there are always going to be advantages and disadvantages, and the market will tell where people's priorities lie. After all, there already is the $100k Model S, with its abysmal range when driving at 100 mph -- and some say that it even has too big a battery for an affordable EV! A hybrid suffers none of that with its more complicated ICE. (They're not that bad, but I'm not going to start arguing about that. I don't even know if you own one to maintain.)
"Meticulous" is a bit of an overstatement,. I've had a Prius for about five years now and I've changed the oil a few times and put in windshield washer fluid. And most of the accessories are electrified anymore, so the only belt is for the water pump.
I wonder how many EV drivers end up in the dealership only once a year.
No, not really. You still need a full-fledged engine. You might be able to simplify it a bit because it doesn't need to produce optimal fuel economy across a large operating range, but it still isn't going to be much different than a normal car engine. For a good example, check out the Chevy Volt, which works exactly the way you say.
The greatest benefit and main purpose behind electric vehicles is reduced emissions. In this regard plugins are a big step beyond cars with just an internal combustion engine.
I'm sure ev reliability will be bad for years as it's young technology but all the more reason not to duplicate risks by having two separate drivetrains.
"Plugin hybrids do seem to offer the best of both worlds right now."
Yes - absolutely. If you are a legacy car maker. You get all the benefits of the halo of "modern" technology and "green" initiative but you still get to hang on to your very lucrative ICE maintenance business (oil changes, fluids, complicated mechanicals, etc.).
As a consumer ? You get none of the technological benefits (dramatically lowered center of gravity from "skateboard" designs and all wheel drive coming from multiple motors, to name just two ...) but you get all of the logistical and aesthetic penalties that come from running a shitty little lawnmower engine inside your fancy new car.
I think the BMW i8 is a perfect emblem for this kind of flawed thinking. A beautiful, modern (looking) "luxury" car that has a 3 cylinder ICE hidden inside.
If I could say one thing to all of the legacy car manufacturers pinning their strategy on hybrids: Don't piss on my head and tell me it's raining gold.
Car makers make essentially nothing from ICE maintenance. The labor goes to the independent shops, even if you have a dealer do the labor the car maker gets nothing for it. The fluids are from a third party (you can buy manufacture fluid in a few cases - but that is someone else's fluid with their sticker on the bottle). Rebuilds are mostly done by independent shops. Sometimes the manufacturer supplies parts, but this isn't a large source of income for any of them (though it is significant enough to keep doing it)
The complicated mechanical are a negative for the most part. They have to spend massive sums of money to keep meeting the latest emissions standards, along with more money on efficiency. The only silver lining in this is the side effect that it costs so much you won't see more competition as only a few companies can afford to design an engine.
In the US these "independent shops" are called car dealerships and they sell all of the new cars in the US. Manufacturers don't sell cars directly to customers and this is enforced by law in many states. Tesla is the only company doing it. The independent shops usually sell only one brand of car and their profits come mainly from service not sales. Think of them as sales floors subsidized by the money brought in when the product breaks or need service you can't do your self. Not a feedback loop that is good for customers, I think.
By independent shops I mean fully independent - no business relationship with the manufacture. Dealers are a mix: they are independently owned, but they get things from the manufacturer that the fully independent shops do not.
The typically model is you take the car to the dealer while it is under warranty and then go to a cheaper shop afterwards. Which means that the dealer gets some maintenance revenue (enough that as you say they are sales floors subsidized by the maintenance shop).
For heavy loads, like pulling trailers over very long distances, this is true, but for most other applications, I think it is the right time now to go full-electric, as you get rid of the combustion engine, which is the most complex and maintenance-intense part of your car.
Here in Europe, we moved from Diesel is king to the specialist press running article on why you can still consider buying a Diesel car in 2017 in some condition. That triggered countries like Germany to announce plan to ban gas car sales in a decade.
Regardless what Volvo CEO thought 3 years ago, the market has shifted in a clear direction and it is his job to adapt.
In a similar fashion Porsche CEO said he did not believe in automated car. You don't buy a 150K Porsche sport car to let it drive itself. That's probably true, but I expect him to change his mind less than a second after it is clear that some countries will forbid non-automated car to access some public road in the near future.