[delfinom]

It's more nuanced than just that.

Repairs? Rivian on at least their first gen pickups used massive single-body-panels. This shot repair costs to the moon because you had to pay freight to ship massive car-sized body panels and also paint and handle attaching them. Other EVs have done similar bone-headed BUT IT LOOKS COOL bullshit.

The other problem besides body, is there will probably never ever be aftermarket manufacturers for things like batteries, motors, inverters, etc. Because they all require tight integration with the rest of the car's system. And electronics/EVs make it too easy for a manufacturer to custom tailor the electronics per car and per model even on a yearly basis. And the real problem, the design of things like motors on the EV are highly patented and custom. So no different than engines for a ICE. This gives manufacturers the ability to make extreme profit on replacement parts.

[AtlasBarfed]

Imo they are trying to turn cars into a disposable consumer products.

Sure, they may gain some me minor manufacturing cost drops with those large castings.

As for EV motors I think this is a temporary state of things. We've been making electric motors for 290 years now. EV transition has just started and there's going to be so many OEM suppliers of motors. Motors aren't nearly as large as ice engines. And patents expire.

[WorldMaker]

Also, tight vertical integration in general may be a temporary state of things in EV manufacture in the longer run. The "inefficiencies" of a multi-vendor supply network eventually get outweighed by the usefulness of redundancy and competitive bidding. As patents expire and vertical integration "secret sauce" loses its shine, there will be a growing use for an expanded parts network.

To some extent you even see that in the competition between Tesla/Rivian and Ford/GM today because the old, classic manufacturers have less (but not no) "secret sauce" in vertical integration and more existing parts networks they want to keep friendly/allied/fed/bidding.

Also, yeah, especially EV motors have a lot more possibility/potential than ICE ever did for "off the shelf" whole parts suppliers, because they are smaller, because they are a "relatively simple", well researched technology with a lot of known characteristics/trade-offs that can be simplified into a relatively small list of "SKUs", but also, and maybe most importantly, we're already seeing that so much of their "power train" and "driving feel" is virtual and software/firmware-defined and any "secret sauce" can be applied as such easily to a programmable enough off-the-shelf part.

Similarly with batteries. We have centuries of knowledge in how to standardize battery units and the production of such. Both GM and Ford already see battery plants as eventual external suppliers and their plants are only partially-owned subsidiaries with co-owners in LG and SK Group, respectively.

[delfinom]

>As patents expire

20 years.