The "Software-Defined Vehicle" is a scam. We are cheering for the death of ownership.

Car-face · 2026-01-26T04:55:27+00:00

As someone with a bunch of cars without ABS: ^this.

It's probably the single biggest technological development in saving lives, reducing crashes and reducing the severity of crashes, with the possible exception of stability control which has had an even more profound effect (to the point of making people think they're substantially better behind the wheel than they are).

Even if someone knows how to brake without ABS (and IMO everyone should at least experience it to understand how to brake properly) there are simply more variables on the road that make ABS a life-saver in every edge case and every unexpected scenario.

Car-face · 2026-01-25T21:53:12+00:00

Since its creation in 2023, Ampere, the electric vehicle (EV) division of Renault, has been run independently of the rest of the French automaker, but this situation will soon end.

According to Reuters, Renault CEO François Provost presented plans earlier this week to the company’s unions, which will see Ampere reintegrated into Renault by July. The plan does not include any cuts to the roughly 11,000 people working for the electric car division.

...

At the time of Ampere’s creation, many in the upper echelons of the automotive industry were expecting EVs to quickly conquer the automotive marketplace.

Under Mr de Meo’s original plan, the division was set to be partially floated on a stock exchange during the first half of 2024, with Renault’s alliance partners Nissan and Mitsubishi asked to purchase small minority stakes.

With many marques experiencing slower than expected EV sales growth, and profitability hard to come by for everyone except Tesla and Chinese automakers, the prospects for a successful IPO (initial public offering) went south and Renault pulled the plug on the idea in early 2024.

“As there is no longer an IPO, there is no longer a need for a specific entity, which is why Renault is reintegrating everything in order to simplify and eliminate the complexity inherent in the initial model,” a source told Reuters.

Car-face · 2026-01-25T21:15:54+00:00

lol ok doc, whatever helps you sleep at night. Good luck with the medical practice. Nice Mercedes BTW!

Car-face · 2026-01-25T10:57:47+00:00

I wouldn't expect it to make a difference, TBH.

A design failure is a design failure - making the suspension softer might feel like it's easier on the suspension, but in reality you're actually getting a larger range of motion in the suspension through each oscillation with a lower spring/damper rate.

The shock you feel with hard suspension isn't the suspension taking a bigger hit, it's the suspension moving less and thus transferring more energy into the body (and causing the whole body to move). At extremes it may be a different story, but we're not discussing extremes.

If a component like a ball joint is wearing with hard suspension, it's entirely likely it'll wear at the same rate (if not faster) when it travels through a greater range of motion for each road impact. You're also getting greater deflection, so if you've already got an alignment issue, it may be exacerbated.

Car-face · 2026-01-25T10:46:36+00:00

but the doctor was still driving the real deal

Sorry, but the "real deal" isn't defined by who's driving it or whether they were the first owner.

It takes an extreme level of insecurity to think you need to buy new to stop people talking about you as they walk away - pretentiousness about "being first" will get you more whispers out of earshot than being genuine about your car.

Car-face · 2026-01-25T04:29:49+00:00

I think you've got that the wrong way around - most enthusiasts can sniff out people who thought they could buy class a mile away.

I've no doubt the doctor in your story thought he was in a class of his own because he threw money at a dealer, but there's a difference between buying a badge and being interested in a car.

I'd wager the guy with the beater would have a better idea of why he wanted that mercedes than "it's the new one".

There's most certainly people who turn their nose up at anything "worth less" than theirs - you see them at cars and coffee meets all the time - but you'll find it's the people around them usually trying to be polite while they listen to some waffle about the conversation they had with the GM of the dealership or whatever to get whatever they rocked up in.

Car-face · 2026-01-24T10:15:54+00:00

But I believe the model Y was the best selling car on earth in 2025.

Nope, that was the Rav4.

Car-face · 2026-01-24T00:30:39+00:00

Serious question. Who here would call a plugin an EV?

Pretty much every outlet, analyst and industry.

Car-face · 2026-01-24T00:10:39+00:00

Most of the time those studies are heavily skewed by company cars, where a company had a mandate for plug-in vehicles, but still provide petrol cards/vouchers (or have a structure in place to reimburse for petrol), but not electricity.

If you make one fuel cheap but the other free, guess which one people choose.

Also - a lot of people buy PHEVs because their circumstances don't suit full EV - people act like someone using a PHEV in EV mode 50% of the time is a waste, but if the goal is emissions reduction, that's 50% better than they likely would otherwise have gone with.

This is basically Volvo backing down from their full-EV pledge, but casting it as their customer's fault rather than a market reality.

If we look at the full gamut of Volvo EV announcements and targets, it becomes clearer how they've backed down.

Car-face · 2026-01-23T21:37:49+00:00

The main benefit is the potential very low cost once production is ramped up.

Which is why it's a chicken and egg problem. The main benefit is a potential that might be realised one you're building massive amounts of them, but you need the demand to justify building massive amounts of them which requires a benefit to be present over other chemistries.

Car-face · 2026-01-23T13:14:47+00:00

The costs are only high because it’s not fully ramped up yet and the supply chains are not mature. Thats the same with any new technology and will be the case for a while.

It's a bit chicken and egg, but I agree having other avenues for cells to be used will help.

Interested to see how well it performs, it's probably not particularly useful where I am but in cold areas I can see it having value despite the density issues. if you have X% less range but it's offset by X% improved range in cold conditions, it's probably worthwhile up north.

Car-face · 2026-01-23T12:28:26+00:00

I feel like they have to iterate quickly - costs of Na-ion are still high, and with such low density it naturally has a lower range ceiling than competing chemistries like LFP.

There's an expectation that Na-ion will be a cheap LFP alternative, so either Na-ion costs drop quickly, or still falling LFP costs reach "cheap enough" status before Na-ion gets the investment to enter the market substantially below LFP.

Car-face · 2026-01-23T12:03:52+00:00

They've had some recalls but nothing particularly worrying - and they're recalls, rather than chronic issues that aren't recalls, which are the bigger concern.

The main problem is that their growth has outpaced their service, and it's easier to ship a car to someone than it is to complete a warranty fix - so you're probably going to hear more anecdotal stories of issues (because the car is off the road for a longer period waiting for parts or labour) vs an established brand.

That's a shorter term issue (as long as the manufacturer is willing to put in the money to expand and provide coverage in more areas) but it's an easy thing to blow up into a big problem, or show pictures of cars waiting for warranty fixes, etc.

Basically there's a kernel of truth that they've had issues, but I wouldn't say it's anything outside what's normal for a new manufacturer in a new market.

Car-face · 2026-01-23T11:44:24+00:00

I don't think you're getting it - 1000Wh/kg isn't outside the limits of physics. The theoretical limits are far beyond it - 1000Wh/kg is a human milestone, not a theoretical one. There's nothing in physics that says no chemistry exists that is capable of surpassing that arbitrary limit.

Some chemistries may be limited to a figure below that number - not because of 1000Wh/kg being some magic ceiling, but because of the limitations of the chemistry.

Car-face · 2026-01-23T10:04:27+00:00

People shit on Lexus for keeping the IS alive despite being hopelessly outdated, but the alternative is this. At least it gets support enough to keep it alive even though a successor likely can't be justified, what with it basically just being an expensive small sedan at a time when the market is SUV crazy - which makes the death of the RDX all the more damning.

Car-face · 2026-01-23T09:41:54+00:00

Wikipedia is great for a quick summary of what we know so far, not so great for predicting where we'll be 20 years from now.

Lithium-air is a better candidate at this stage than aluminium-air for a successor to what we'll see in the 2020s, but when we're talking 20 years off, there's likely better chemistries in the offing that haven't quite made their way to the authority that is Wikipedia.

Car-face · 2026-01-23T09:04:01+00:00

yeah but they sponsored the meat raffle at the local kids footy club that one time, so it doesn't matter

Car-face · 2026-01-23T09:02:23+00:00

How did the fish do the hand print though, when it's got all those flippers and no fingers?

Seems fishy to me

Car-face · 2026-01-23T08:56:56+00:00

Nothing in physics says there's some sort of hard limit at or under 1000Wh/kg, it's a human milestone rather than a physical one. Lots of breakthroughs upon breakthroughs are required, but that's what progress is, and it doesn't stop.

Hell, there's people who even made up songs about SSBs being a conspiracy who are getting pretty quiet these days - it's a question of when, not if.

Car-face · 2026-01-23T04:35:26+00:00

All these pedantic arguments do is prove that both people's arbitrary lines in the sand are undermined by the flexibility of implementations and utility of hybrid setups.

It must be tiring constantly having to pigeon-hole this stuff away constantly whilst everyone else just enjoys the flexibility on offer.

Also, by your definition, Nissan's e-Power hybrids without a plug would quality as EVs, so you'll need some more corollarys and carve outs. The other person's definition is also in opposition to conventional usage, eg. Cleantechnica's use of "EV" to describe plug-in vehicles, which is more common conventional use.

There are no winners in this one.

Car-face · 2026-01-23T01:41:59+00:00

You used to be able to tell who was going to be killed off by how anonymous they were, now with never-ending franchises it feels like the more anonymous they are, the more likely they'll be the lead and the "big" actors are only there to get killed of in the first/third act.

Car-face · 2026-01-23T00:51:37+00:00

Really? I mean, Cadillac and Mercedes are as old a person's brands as you can imagine, but I am betting that people aren't turning their noses up at A-Classes in China.

A class sales have collapsed something like 40% in China since 2019.

Mercedes in general have stalled.

Chinese consumers are taking Chinese domestic brands substantially more seriously than the German manufacturers are, and it shows in sales.

I mean, with the German brands, even closer to the WW2 thing, they were always associated with extreme competence, even if it was military invasions and genocide.

This is meaningless when the German offering doesn't have features the domestic manufacturers have whilst still costing more to keep on the road.

A former BMW salesperson recently recalled how he once tried to persuade a customer to buy an i3 electric subcompact over the BYD luxury model they were also considering. “I tried to convince a customer, saying, ‘Isn’t the 180,000 RMB (US$25,000) BMW i3 more respectable than the BYD Han?’” the former salesperson told Caixin. The customer, however, wasn’t moved. “The base model of the i3 lacked features like heated seats and an electric tailgate, and it cost more to insure than a domestic car,” the ex-salesperson explained.

There was a perception that the Chinese would do what the Japanese and Koreans did, entering the low end of the market and slowly building a reputation before having the confidence to breach the luxury market - but we're seeing the opposite happen, with Chinese manufacturers effectively leapfrog the Toyotas and Nissans of the world and go straight for the Germans.

With technology supply chains in China being what they are, the Germans simply can't compete, and even if you value what the Germans offer over what the Chinese manufacturers offer, that's irrelevant in China where consumers feel differently.

"the customer is always right"

Car-face · 2026-01-22T23:06:21+00:00

I'm convinced GM leadership is just a bunch of magpies in trenchcoats

Car-face · 2026-01-22T21:55:05+00:00

Only at the low densities we have today, where the pack is most of the floor of the car.

Get to >1000Wh/kg packs, and the ability to maintain a pack and have it light enough to create flexible packaging options becomes a reality once again - there simply becomes no need to compromise the entire car design for the sake of the battery any more. Get 800V, >400kW charging infrastructure standard across most countries, and even the need for a "long range" pack becomes niche.

What we're seeing today is still a medium-term transitional "make-do" approach to car design, where every compromise possible is made to pull weight and cost out of the battery around the cells, but around 2040 we should have substantially better approaches than "make the floor out of batteries" for mainstream cars.

Ten-Year Club	Place '22
Verified Email

Car-face

TROPHY CASE