[sho_hn]

Economically, important competitive factors will be: Access to resources required to build batteries (e.g. mining rights), battery manufacturing capacity, location of manufacturing plants (as regulation on energy footprint is sensitive to the energy mix used in manufacturing and shipping). In terms of business success, making the right decisions on these strategic factors will likely matter just as much as designing appealing products and implementing them well.

Geopolitics will matter: People and their governments will find further regulation appealing also because it can be a tool to drive local employment in manufacturing and related business. If a car manufactured in China, or using batteries manufactured in China, has an inherently worse CO2 footprint for a European consumer (because of the coal-heavy energy mix in China and the energy footprint of shipping to Europe) and this is penalized by regulations, you get factories in Europe as a result. This build-out will take some decades to settle, and there may yet be new tech surprises along the way that change the game.

As for car tech itself becoming a commodity - this has been the case for a long time already, even with ICE technology. Automotive supply chains are famously broad, long and overlapping between OEMs. Bob Lutz (GM, BMW, Chrysler, ...) said in 2015 "There are no bad cars anymore, only bad designs".

There's still tech competition for sure, and it's fun to follow - the Mercedes EQS will outdo the Model S in most respects and raise the bar of what's possible with an EV, heating things up a bit at the top end. Progress continues, egged on by regulations if nothing else, and by consumers seeking the best value for their money. But if you don't sweat the details, the good-enough options are plentiful.

[browningstreet]

I think a lot of the “it’s already commodified” comments are belied by the differences of reliability and cost of ownership across brands. That’s a differentiator and may continue into the EV future, as you can see how different they are just in the reviews and characteristics of current EV models. Range, weight and electronics do produce pretty different products.. it’s not just motors and batteries and over-the-air updates.

[sho_hn]

I don't think you're wrong, but I think there's at least some hope that differences in reliability will shrink as a result of the electrification as well.

It's a simpler power train with fewer moving parts, requiring less maintenance and replacing of parts. Recuperative breaking means less break pad wear, etc.

Of course there's other stuff emerging, like costly screen replacements and we're yet to fully appreciate how the batteries will age, and what the second-hand market will be like at scale.

There's probably first interesting data on the Tesla and other EV fleets and the maintenance averages for their customers ...

Beyond this of course you can't cheat physics. Structural engineering stays the same, material wear still happens and some car designs (or even form factors) are simply less sound than others in terms of their effects on the expected usable lifetime of a car. With EVs that matters significantly, because of the high upfront energy cost to manufacturing them - you have to drive them for a while for them to really make sense.

I guess we can conclude that automotive will probably stay as interesting as any other business. Cars are a choke-point of doing high-tech yet industrially manufacturing at scale, the baked-in conflicts make it an interesting challenge.

[throwaway0a5e]

>belied by the differences of reliability and cost of ownership across brands.

But these differences are razor thin compared to consumer perceptions of them.

For every fanboy on Reddit screeching about muh million mile 4Runner he leased for 36k there's a fleet manager who just spent an afternoon reviewing records and crunching numbers before confirming that yes we are going to buy another round of Pacificas as our current ones hit the "old enough it's not the image we want to project" threshold.

Compare the lap times of boring commuter sedans and compacts to the "sporty" and "good handling" sedans and compacts if you really want to see slim differences.