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VW unveils ID.3 electric hatchback starting at less than $33k

3K views 45 replies 17 participants last post by  richmond2000 
#1 · (Edited)
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#2 · (Edited)
This is probably the most important EV launch from a mainstream automaker to date. No disrespect to the Bolt, but VW is serious and European mandates for EV adoption are forcing their hand anyway. That said, I'm pretty underwhelmed, especially by the interior (exterior is decent enough). Even the Bolt seems competitive with this despite being a few years old now.

Caveat on the article: the $33k price and 340 miles range aren't on the same car. The $33k base version has ~200 miles range (WLTP rating, which is usually a bit more optimistic than the EPA). The price of the hign-end version that will have a 340 mile range (also WLTP) hasn't been announced yet.

I believe this is currently not slated to arrive on the left side of the Atlantic but I presume that could change depending on how the market shapes up.
 
#7 ·
........................
Caveat on the article: the $33k price and 340 miles range aren't on the same car. The $33k base version has ~200 miles range (WLTP rating, which is usually a bit more optimistic than the EPA). The price of the hign-end version that will have a 340 mile range (also WLTP) hasn't been announced yet................
Details-Shemtails.............. couldn't be much more than $40,000



It's not bad looking but I'd like to see a mainstream EV that doesn't look like an EV.
I want to see a mainstream EV that doesn't look like a subcompact car!
 
#6 · (Edited)
IMHO, the Cadillac ELR is/was the most beautiful "mainstream" EV to date. Too bad they got the intro/pricing wrong!
 
#5 ·
Pretty stark interior. When's the first road test?
 
#34 · (Edited)
GM clearly didn't observe or learn lessons from their good friends over at Toyota. Toyota went full tilt boogie on R&D for the Prius, they were not making money on them for a while. First you establish the market, then mass production and refinements catch up to the profit curve.

Toyota: The Birth of the Prius
The world's most admired automaker had to overcome punishing deadlines, skeptical dealers, finicky batteries, and its own risk-averse culture to bring its hybrid to market.
Fortune Magazine
By Alex Taylor III
February 21, 2006: 10:32 AM EST

New York (FORTUNE Magazine) � In late 1995, six months after Toyota decided to move forward with its revolutionary hybrid, the Prius, and two years before the car was supposed to go into production in Japan, the engineers working on the project had a problem. A big problem.

The first prototypes wouldn't start. "On the computer the hybrid power system worked very well," says Satoshi Ogiso, the team's chief power train engineer. "But simulation is different from seeing if the actual part can work." It took Ogiso and his team more than a month to fix the software and electrical problems that kept the Prius stationary. Then, when they finally got it started, the car motored only a few hundred yards down the test track before coming to a stop.

The Prius is Toyota's hottest-selling U.S. car
The Prius is Toyota's hottest-selling U.S. car
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It's hard to imagine Toyota (Research), with its aura of invincibility, running into such trouble. But the story of how it brought the Prius to market -- a tale of technological potholes, impossible demands, and multiple miscalculations -- reveals how a great company can overcome huge obstacles to make the improbable seem inevitable. The gas-electric auto represents only a tiny fraction of the nine million cars and trucks the Japanese company will produce this year. But it is the first vehicle to provide a serious alternative to the internal combustion engine since the Stanley Steamer ran out of steam in 1924. It has become an automotive landmark: a car for the future, designed for a world of scarce oil and surplus greenhouse gases.

For all its success as a high-quality manufacturer, before the Prius, Toyota had never been much of a pioneer. It was known as a "fast follower," a risk-averse company in which process -- the famous Toyota lean production system -- trumped product. Indeed, Toyota, based in rural Aichi prefecture, 200 miles from Tokyo, enjoys depicting itself as a slow-moving company of simple country farmers. But as interviews with company executives in Japan and the U.S. make clear, Toyota is capable of breaking its own rules when it needs to. In rushing the Prius to market, it abandoned its traditional consensus management, as executives resorted to such unusual practices (at least for Toyota) of setting targets and enforcing deadlines that many considered unattainable.

Toyota's push into hybrids is only going to accelerate. Although the Prius first came to life under Hiroshi Okuda and Fujio Cho, Toyota's two previous presidents, new boss Katsuaki Watanabe wants hybrids to become the automotive mainstream. Watanabe, 64, who became the company's top executive last June, has the deferential air of a longtime family retainer. But he is intent on continuing Toyota's explosive growth of the past five years, in which worldwide production rose by nearly half. In an interview earlier this year at company headquarters in Toyota City, he stressed that a key part of his strategy is making hybrids more affordable for consumers. "We need to improve the production engineering and develop better technology in batteries, motors, and inverters," he said. "My quest is to produce a third-generation Prius quickly and cheaply." By early in the next decade he expects Toyota to be selling one million hybrids a year.

Since no other automaker can even approach that quantity, Toyota is way out in front -- an unusual place for a fast follower. "Is Toyota a conservative company?" asks Jeffrey Liker, an engineering professor at the University of Michigan and author of The Toyota Way. "Yes. Does it seem to be very plodding and slow to make changes? Yes. Is it innovative? Remarkably so. Go slow, build on the past, and thoroughly consider all implications of decisions, yet move aggressively to beat the competition to market with exceptional products." If he's right, Toyota is becoming a double threat: the world's finest manufacturer and a truly great innovator. The story of the Prius suggests that he is.

IGNITION
The car that became the Prius began life in 1993, when Eiji Toyoda, Toyota's chairman and the patriarch of its ruling family, expressed concern about the future of the automobile. Yoshiro Kimbara, then executive vice president in charge of R&D, heard the rumblings and embarked on a project known as G21 (for global 21st century) to develop a new small car that could be sold worldwide. He set two goals: to develop new production methods and to wring better fuel economy from the traditional internal combustion engine. His target was 47.5 miles per gallon, a little more than 50% better than what the Corolla, Toyota's popular small car, was getting at the time.

By the end of 1993 the development team had determined that higher oil prices and a growing middle class around the world would require the new car to be both roomy and fuel-efficient. Other than that, they were given no guidance. "I was trying to come up with the future direction of the company," says Watanabe, who headed corporate planning at the time. "I didn't have a very specific idea about the vehicle."

Direct responsibility for the project lay with executive vice president Akihiro Wada. To lead the team, Wada went looking for an engineer with the right blend of experience and open-mindedness. He found it in Takeshi Uchiyamada. As Wada, now an advisor to Aisin Seiki, a Toyota brake supplier, explains, "Uchiyamada was originally an expert in noise and vibration control. But he was serious and hardworking, and we thought it would develop his capability to make him chief engineer of a product that could go rapidly into production."

At first Uchiyamada assumed he could increase the G21's fuel economy by making refinements to existing technology. In a plan he submitted to Wada in 1994, he wrote that the introduction of an improved engine and transmission system could boost fuel efficiency by 50%. But that wasn't audacious enough for Wada, who didn't want to be remembered for producing yet another Japanese econobox. "It was not enough to be a simple extension of existing technology," Wada says. One possible solution intrigued him: a hybrid power system.

The concept wasn't new. Toyota had been dabbling for 20 years with the idea of placing a traditional gasoline motor alongside an electric one powered by batteries that are recharged whenever the car coasts or brakes. (Honda (Research) was working on a version too.) Masatami Takimoto, now an executive vice president, says he was developing a hybrid minivan at the time but that the project had run into trouble. "There was a split between the engineers and sales executives," he says. "Engineers had the firm belief that the hybrid was the answer to all those questions -- oil depletion, emissions, and the long-term future of the automobile society -- but the business people weren't in agreement." They thought the premium price for the hybrid would make it impossible to sell.

Wada sided with the engineers and ordered the team to develop a concept car with a hybrid powertrain for the 1995 Tokyo Motor Show, just 12 months away. To reinforce his directive, he demanded that they raise the fuel-economy target even higher to compensate for higher hybrid costs. "Don't settle for anything less than a 100% improvement," he says he told Uchiyamada. "Otherwise competitors would catch up quickly."

More at link:
https://money.cnn.com/2006/02/17/news/companies/mostadmired_fortune_toyota/
 
#35 ·
Toyota Says It’s Now Turning a Profit on the Hybrid Prius
By ALAN OHNSMAN
DEC. 19, 2001 12 AM
BLOOMBERG NEWS
SACRAMENTO — Toyota Motor Corp. said it is starting to make a profit from its Prius gasoline-electric hybrid car, four years after introducing the low-pollution vehicle.
Higher production volume of the Prius, introduced in Japan in 1997 and in the U.S. last year, and technological gains are helping the costs of its advanced battery and electrical components, said Hiroyuki Watanabe, Toyota’s senior managing director for hybrid and fuel-cell systems. Toyota has sold about 75,000 Prius cars worldwide.

“I would say we have reached the profitable point,” Watanabe said at an electric vehicle conference here last week. “We are just above the break-even point, but we are not complacent about it. We have to try harder to increase our profitability.”

The Prius, the first hybrid from a major auto maker, and Honda Motor Co.'s Insight were built to meet stricter air-quality rules in Japan, the U.S. and Europe with improved fuel efficiency and low emissions. Toyota has struggled to overcome a per-car expense of as much as $8,000 for a power system combining a gasoline engine, an electric motor and regenerative brakes.

Though the cars are no longer sold at a loss, profit from sales remains insufficient for Toyota to recoup its initial investment and development costs, General Manager Shigenobu Uchikawa said.

Toyota said it will increase U.S.-bound shipments of the Prius, which sells for $20,450, by more than 40% to 17,000 units next year. Annual production of the model at the Motomachi plant in Toyota City, Japan, should reach 36,000 units in 2002, Uchikawa said.

Sales need to reach 50,000 to 100,000 units annually for the Prius to become truly profitable, said technology analyst Menahem Anderman, president of Advanced Automotive Batteries in Oregon House, Calif.

In addition to costs associated with research and development and capital investment, he said, Toyota may be incurring expenses from an eight-year, 100,000-mile warranty on the Prius’ advanced battery and 33-kilowatt electrical system because the model has been available for too brief a time for the company to know how long the components will last.

More:
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-dec-19-hy-prius19-story.html
 
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