| HN Mirror

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.