Ford CEO: 40% Less Labor To Build Electric Vehicles 162
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CleanTechnica: Ford CEO Jim Farley made a blockbuster of a statement this week. According to the somewhat jovial and optimistic cousin of late comedic actor Chris Farley, producing electric vehicles requires about 40% less labor than producing the same number of fossil-powered cars. The fact that electric vehicles are "simpler" than internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles has long been a talking point of electric vehicle fans and evangelists (aka EVangelists). This has mostly come into play when talking about lower maintenance costs. There aren't all the belts, tubes, hoses, etc. that you find in a gasmobile. That means fewer parts that can break and less maintenance over time. What is less discussed is what Jim Farley has highlighted this week -- that it also means simpler production and a smaller labor force manufacturing the world's cars and trucks.
Interestingly, Farley is also taking this difference to shift Ford back to more vertical integration. Rather than lay off workers, Farley aims to retrain them to produce more parts within the walls of Ford. As Farley says it, "we have to insource, so that everyone has a role in this growth." Nonetheless, that's not easy and certainly not going to be 100% smooth. Farley noted that the transition to EVs would involve "storm clouds." Recall that Ford aims to reach 50% EV sales by 2030, up from just a few percent in 2022. Making that massive transition provides the opportunity for a new approach and retraining, but also plenty of likely hurdles and challenges.
The FT highlighted that back in the days of Henry Ford, vertical integration was the name of the game. "A shift in corporate strategy towards more vertical integration at Ford would hark back to the company's early days when founder Henry Ford owned forest, iron mines, limestone quarries and even a rubber plantation in Brazil to wholly control the company's supply chain," the media outlet stated. "If Henry Ford came back to life, he would have thought the last 60 years weren't that exciting, but he would love it right now because we're totally reinventing the company," Farley said.
Interestingly, Farley is also taking this difference to shift Ford back to more vertical integration. Rather than lay off workers, Farley aims to retrain them to produce more parts within the walls of Ford. As Farley says it, "we have to insource, so that everyone has a role in this growth." Nonetheless, that's not easy and certainly not going to be 100% smooth. Farley noted that the transition to EVs would involve "storm clouds." Recall that Ford aims to reach 50% EV sales by 2030, up from just a few percent in 2022. Making that massive transition provides the opportunity for a new approach and retraining, but also plenty of likely hurdles and challenges.
The FT highlighted that back in the days of Henry Ford, vertical integration was the name of the game. "A shift in corporate strategy towards more vertical integration at Ford would hark back to the company's early days when founder Henry Ford owned forest, iron mines, limestone quarries and even a rubber plantation in Brazil to wholly control the company's supply chain," the media outlet stated. "If Henry Ford came back to life, he would have thought the last 60 years weren't that exciting, but he would love it right now because we're totally reinventing the company," Farley said.
Great (Score:3, Funny)
That means a large portion of the money saved can be given to the workers in the form of higher salaries rather than stock buybacks, right?
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That means a large portion of the money saved can be given to the workers in the form of higher salaries rather than stock buybacks, right?
Uhhhh, yeah....OR perhaps a large portion of that savings could be reflected in an MSRP that is somewhere south of what 90% of a country can fucking afford.
But hey, kudos for recognizing the starving union-protected worker. I'm sure a lack of sales on those $40K+ vehicles will sustain their employment somehow...
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The high MSRP is not just the manufacturing cost. It's designed to steer buyers towards finance deals, which are very profitable for the manufacturer and more affordable for the customer. At the end of the finance if the customer returns the vehicle they can ship it overseas and sell it again.
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Sounds a lot like American college tuition. I wonder what college would cost if gov set the loan limit to 1% or something reasonable.
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Sounds a lot like American college tuition.
Except you have a car, rather than a degree in X Studies.
I wonder what college would cost if gov set the loan limit to 1% or something reasonable.
You know what college cost before gov't takeover of the student loan business. A lot less. Gov't involvement is one of the reasons that costs have been rising far above inflation for decades. Amazing, increase the borrowing potential and the cost of a goods/service rises, classic willingness to pay pricing. Gov't increased borrowing to match willingness. Prior to gov't takeover one could work part time and graduate debt free, or close to it, assuming
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There is (or was) a valid reason to be selective with loans second only to a mortgage in size. Same reason we still have credit scores.
That too is considered wrong by government. Also in that era before gov't entered the student loan business one would find credit cards offers from major banks on bulletin boards around campuses. A STEM major would receive a credit card with a thousand dollar limit. Traditional humanity majors that led to career opportunities (again, typically management, unrelated to major) would get a lower credit limit. The faux-degrees that are low on academic rigor and high on political dogma, they would be denied a cr
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What do you mean "returns the vehicle"? There's no option to just turn your car back in to the dealership after you pay the loan off. Unless you mean trading it in for a newer one. And anyway, why would they go to the trouble and expense of sending it overseas when they could just sell it locally?
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Maybe it's different where you are, but here you can get a car on finance for say 3 years. At the end of 3 years you can choose to keep the vehicle and extend the finance, buy it outright for a price agreed when you took the finance out, or hand it back to the finance company.
If you hand it back, they will resell the vehicle. You can also trade it in with a dealer, based on that price you agreed 3 years prior.
It has upsides and downsides. On the one hand you have a predictable monthly payment, and there are
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Oh I see, that's referred to as leasing in the US. If you finance a car (again US terminology), you take out a loan from a bank to purchase it.
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It's not a lease, because you are paying off a loan on the total value of the car. It's just that you have the extra option of handing the car back or paying a pre-agreed price after X years, or continuing to pay the loan. You own the car, unlike a lease, but the loan is secured against it.
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Interesting, I don't think I've heard of such an arrangement.
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Why? (Score:2)
Oh... maybe you thought Ford was excited about transforming into some sort of shining star, a beacon of ethical behavior?
Ford makes noise, the noise is intended to make the share prices of the company go up. Or even better, make them go up and down in a rhythmic and predictable pattern. That allows people to buy and sell
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That means a large portion of the money saved can be given to the workers in the form of higher salaries rather than stock buybacks, right?
Salaries should be fairly independent on that either way, but based on the skills needed and the competition for labor in the marketplace. Also, while there are fewer and simpler parts, EVs have one large and expensive part not used for fossil cars: The battery. In total, the price is currently higher.
Of course, if this resulted in a lower total price of the car that should result in cheaper cars, not higher wages/profits - unless there was a monopoly, or only one car manufacturer managed to do this cheap
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Indeed.
Your salary isn't based on what your employer can afford to pay you.
It is based on what it costs your employer to replace you.
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That means a large portion of the money saved can be given to the workers in the form of higher salaries rather than stock buybacks, right?
The workers are likely to have higher salaries, if my assumption is correct that most of the roles needed to build electric cars are on average higher skilled than those building gasoline powered cars. But other than that factor, the salary of the workers shouldn't be too dependent on how much total work it takes to build the car. The car price should be dependent on it.
Worker salaries raise because of the increasing skill of the workers and the general availability of similar workers. Whether or not they a
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Or, crazy idea, lower priced cars?
My understanding is that labor costs are about 10-15% of the price of a car, so this should result in them being at least $5k cheaper, usually?
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Or, crazy idea, lower priced cars?
Yeah, crazy, when was the last time something mandated by the government went down in price? :-)
No money saved, but jobs saved (Score:2)
That means a large portion of the money saved can be given to the workers in the form of higher salaries rather than stock buybacks, right?
What money saved? Ford will be moving to more vertical integration, building more parts and subsystems in house, note this will help avoid laying off their workers. This means a wave of investment in capital equipment and worker retraining.
Of course the 3rd party suppliers will get screwed.
Before criticizing Ford with respect to managing finances, note they did *not* require a government bailout in 2008.
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What money saved? Ford will be moving to more vertical integration, building more parts and subsystems in house, note this will help avoid laying off their workers. This means a wave of investment in capital equipment and worker retraining.
And after that it should result in savings, right? Because they're not paying a third party who needs their own profit margin.
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What money saved? Ford will be moving to more vertical integration, building more parts and subsystems in house, note this will help avoid laying off their workers. This means a wave of investment in capital equipment and worker retraining.
And after that it should result in savings, right? Because they're not paying a third party who needs their own profit margin.
"After" could be many years. At first those saving have to pay off whatever funded the capital expenditure.
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Indeed, and of course the CEO needs to convince the shareholders that the timeline for payoff is worthwhile. Maybe an easier task for a mature stock?
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That means a large portion of the money saved can be given to the workers in the form of higher salaries rather than stock buybacks, right?
Or to customers as lower prices or investors as higher dividends (or share price). Most likely a combination of all three. Win, win, win. Productivity gains are wonderful for all concerned.
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The problem is with sacrificing peasant ... (Score:2)
The trick is to get rid of money at the same time you get rid of Capitalists.
The problem is that the Marxist plan, and history, involves a lot of intentional killing of peasants to accomplish their goals. From Stalin to Che, peasants had to be sacrificed to spark revolution. Some of those fool peasants did not know what was good for them and didn't see a need for revolution.
Sort of like the Ukrainians not seeing the benefits of becoming part of Putin's Russia. As many of their ancestors did not see the benefits of Stalin's USSR.
Insource, what a novel idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Rather than lay off workers, Farley aims to retrain them to produce more parts within the walls of Ford. As Farley says it, "we have to insource, so that everyone has a role in this growth."
And we have idiot beancounters here like thegarbz who defend firing workers because they assumedly don't have the exact on-paper skills.
Companies can actually retrain workers, often much more cheaply than trying to hire new workers to fill the new gaps, when they actually fucking want to.
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Rather than lay off workers, Farley aims to retrain them to produce more parts within the walls of Ford. As Farley says it, "we have to insource, so that everyone has a role in this growth."
And we have idiot beancounters here like thegarbz who defend firing workers because they assumedly don't have the exact on-paper skills. Companies can actually retrain workers, often much more cheaply than trying to hire new workers to fill the new gaps, when they actually fucking want to.
It's all a business decision. I wonder what will all the unnecessary robots do? Will they fire all those robots? However, don't hold your breath. We don't have nearly enough electricity to switch to electric cars. We will drive gasoline powered cars for decades to come.
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Show us your working for that statement, wouldja? The one about not having enough electricity.
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You know how I said "show us your working?"
I meant more than just an assertion. I meant even the tiniest bit of maths.
You know, miles per day driven in the US, miles per kWh, gWh of electricity needed, length of transition period, gWh currently supplied, historical trends in electricity supply, that kind of thing.
I know you can do it. After all, you're a real programmer who drives a gas car, so this kind of quick back of the envelope maths would be trivial for you, right? A few sources, plug in the numbers
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Do you want to sit down for a minute and have even the tiniest of thinks about whether the two assertions you've made here -- "no need for math" and "The mere fact that we consume everything we generate is enough " might need to be revised?
Of course you need some math! And electricity consumption and production changes dramatically over time! And of course consumption matches production at every point in time! It has to, because we don't store electricity at any meaningful scale at the moment, so production
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If you'd merely "expressed a suspicion" or even *asked a question*, then the onus wouldn't be on you. But you flat-out stated the thing you are now claiming as a mere suspicion to be a fact.
And you've now posted an article that's about the rate of power delivery as though it has some relevance to this question! An EV can charge at anything between 3kW and 350kW. This variable doesn't affect how much power it needs overall.
Anyway, here's a very basic primer on the topic, covering both the US and UK grids. It
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OK, are you trying to show yourself to be really really dim in public?
The ban in 2030 is a UK (not US) ban on the sale of *new* ICE cars. Not the ownership of existing ICE cars. The average British car is on the road for about 8 years, so it will take about 20 to 30 years from today to get to 80% EVs on the road. That is *not* overnight. A growth in electricity supply of 10% over 20 years is totally manageable, and indeed it's already happening in the UK with net new renewables being added at a rate well ab
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Here's the link to the paper explaining the maths, seeing as you're probably incapable of finding it yourself:
https://www.nationalgrideso.co... [nationalgrideso.com]
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Why are you now talking about wind and solar, specifically? You began by talking about total energy generation, and now you’ve veering wildly off-track.
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The concept of necessity is not the same as the concept of sufficiency.
Just because the UK is doing it this way, doesn’t mean it’s the only way it can be done.
The point I was making was “not only can the necessary capacity be added, the UK shows you can even add it with renewables if you choose”
It is really fucking tiresome having to explain this very basic stuff to you
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We don't have nearly enough electricity to switch to electric cars.
Bullcrap. Your claim has been debunked over and over.
Switching to 100% EVs will require only about 20% more electricity than is currently generated.
Since most of the demand will be for overnight charging when utilities have plenty of spare capacity, no net additional capacity will be needed.
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Of course, if we replace all our 24-7 power plants with Solar, overnight charging won't be practical.
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Of course, if we replace all our 24-7 power plants with Solar, overnight charging won't be practical.
Sure, but since absolutely nobody is proposing that we go 100% solar, that is a total non-issue.
Most new renewable capacity is wind, not solar. The wind blows at night.
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It will require 20% more, which means that we don't have enough.
Bullcrap. Generating electricity isn't like milking a cow. You can't put the extra in the refrigerator and drink it later. It is use it or lose it.
So we have enough capacity to provide power for the middle of the day, which means we have plenty of idle capacity in the middle of the night.
EVs charge using that currently existing idle capacity.
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We don't have nearly enough electricity to switch to electric cars.
Every developed country has. No idea bout your country, though.
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Retraining is quicker, cheaper and easier. (Score:5, Informative)
I've trained many aircraft and other techs and find it easier by far to train experienced people because they previously internalized how to function in an industrial world. OTOH someone fresh off the block doesn't just need to add tasks to their skill set, they need to learn how to function safely in a completely new unfamiliar environment.
Hardcore techies may forget most people are not tech enthusiasts so they must start from scratch learning principles, workplace safety and especially the tactile experience of working with/on machinery. That tactile experience is key to working on everything from jet fighters to a push mower or a radar to a microwave oven. For most humans hardware is not intuitive! They don't "see" a screw in geometric terms. They must be taught every of many details required then training reinforced by experience.
It's an old adage that farm kids make good jet mechs because they have that tactile feel for machinery acquired working with tractors, harvesters etc. They have it far easier than I did coming from a well-off suburb without an auto mechanics class. (I encourage anyone interested to take formal mechanic and/or machinist training because it changes the way you relate to materials and mechanisms.)
Adult education and training is easier on instructors too. When my machine shop and welding classes had prior military or industrially experienced students they got down to business immediately thanks to knowing how to learn. That put them ahead while letting them get much more out of training than someone who had never touched a welder or lathe .
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The bureaucracy of the BEA isn't lying about the fucking numbers.
The BEA's apparatus isn't beholden to any political interest.
But I know what's better than official numbers given by the people who can produce such things- a known sock puppet account of a known troll.
Fuck off, pond scum.
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40% less labor (Score:2)
They also need a fraction of the maintenance (Score:5, Insightful)
Our entire economy is built on endless growth and a if you don't work you don't eat system of distributing goods and services. We are either going to figure out a solution to the problem of automation or we are going to have mass unemployment leading up to a strong man handing rifles to gen Z for a promptly going to crack our skulls in with them. It's your call
Not like the bad old days (Score:3)
This isn't like the old days when you lost your job at the buggy whip factory and went to work for Henry Ford. Your job is being eliminated and not replaced.
This also isn't like the old days when you had one job for your entire working life. The modern worker has around 10 jobs during their working life. The labor force (and labor market) is far more dynamic than it used to be. Young workers just entering the labor force may well end up finishing their career with a job that doesn't even exist right now in 2022.
I've been hearing that for decades (Score:2)
When people say "may well end up finishing their career with a job that doesn't even exist right now in 2022" it's just an excuse to sweep the problem under the rug. A problem we've had since th
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Compared to the 80s, the number of tech jobs that didn't exist then is far more than a handful. Software development alone has exploded in the decades since then. However you're right that at some point this creation of new jobs that didn't exist before is going to taper off as robots get better and better at doing all the things humans can do. And if we don't manage it well it will be a disaster.
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The rate of job destruction is much higher than the rate of job creation.
False.
Re:They also need a fraction of the maintenance (Score:5, Insightful)
Look at the labor share though [wikipedia.org]. What this shows is the percentage of corporate income that labor commands. It is shrinking, which indicates that capital (e.g. "robots") are in fact taking over.
Yeah, we'll probably never run out of make-work for people to do, but those don't pay well enough to live on.
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Gig economy is its own problem.
Certainly some are working delivering peoples food rather than cooking it in a fast food restaurant.
But the stats show that there has not been some downward trend in quality of employment.
One would expect that number to fall consistently [statista.com] if jobs replaced by automation were being replaced with fast food or Gig economy jobs.
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30% of all jobs are not "gig work". Maybe within some narrow cadre of the workforce, but not across the entire American labor pool.
Also at least through 2019, median wage growth was rising faster than inflation (~4% vs 2.2-2.9%).
Good job on the topic derail, though. Instead of having an interesting and cogent argument about EV cost BoM, we're debating class warfare rhetoric. Again.
Hoses (Score:2)
Lots of hoses still in an EV. The really interesting thing to me is EVs is that they are so much easier to automate production than ICE vehicles. That 40% labor savings might become 80% before too long.
Vertical Integration (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Vertical Integration (Score:5, Informative)
The River Rouge plant used to take iron ore in at one end and roll cars out of the other end. I don't think they made their own glass or tires, but pretty much everything else was made in-house.
shake it off (Score:2)
This is how you shake off 100 years of auto manufacturing and dealerships. Out with old, in with the new profit increasing version.
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What does this have to do with dealerships?
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Dealerships is step 2.
Step 1, Cut outsourcing and labor.
Step 2, Cut out the middle man Dealers.
Step 3, Profit.
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You'll see, its a progression. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
More Electronics and Software (Score:2)
Thankfully with all the electronics and software that has to work in harmony, we can look forward to new vehicles acting like WindowsME boxes for the next few decades.
And until the automatic windshield wipers work flawlessly, can I have a hand control? Please?
If you prefer simplicity buy an older vehicle. (Score:2, Interesting)
I never wanted a new car or truck as I consider them a waste of money. I buy proven used models several years into their production runs. I ask mechanics with experience on those vehicles which parts suck, which don't and how to address problem components. I only buy vehicles with strong aftermarket parts and performance parts support.
Unless it burns down, rusts out or is flooded by salt water it's easy to get twenty or more years out of good vehicles with reasonable maintenance so I do and the money saved
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There's probably also 40% less maintenance (Score:2)
Because of the lack of transmission, and also because the electric motors are much more durable then ICE engines
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Also the coolant system is different. The batteries still generally need cooling, but the dynamics of the heat load are different enough that hopefully EV cooling systems are (or can become) more reliable.
Nice to move into this century, right? (Score:5, Insightful)
If it were not for Elon Musk, all the major auto manufacturers would have no EVs for sale and would be explaining through position papers how battery EV cars "are not economically viable at the current level of technology." In this year, 2022.
lol (Score:4, Funny)
"If Henry Ford came back to life, he would have thought the last 60 years weren't that exciting, but he would love it right now because we're totally reinventing the company," Farley said.
the newly-awakened ford added, "hey is hitler still alive? i'd like to give him some money for his birthday"
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"If Henry Ford came back to life, he would have thought the last 60 years weren't that exciting, but he would love it right now because we're totally reinventing the company," Farley said.
the newly-awakened ford added, "hey is hitler still alive? i'd like to give him some money for his birthday"
His name is Donald now and Henry, he's always got his hand out for money.
Direct Labor as Percent of COGS (Score:3, Interesting)
Its quite interesting but at this point not going to have any dramatic impact. The reason is that direct labor has been falling as a percentage of cost of goods sold for many, many years and is now very small.
Every few years people on the political left start talking about something called 'automation' which they seem to have just noticed, think is something new and unprecedented, and claim that its creating social problems that have to be addressed.
In fact, automation has been going on since the start of the industrial revolution, since roughly 1800. One effect is to increase labor productivity. The most striking example is the adoption of the spinning mule and associated technology in the late 1700s and early 1800s. The increase in productivity was extraordinary and far exceeded anything the move to EVs will bring to the auto industry. Its a logarithmic curve. The early increases in productivity were huge, but as labor costs fell as a proportion of COGS the later increases are proportionally smaller.
The other effects of automation are to increase quality (defined as proportion of production conforming to standards), and to reduce the amount of manual intervention and make the work itself safer and less demanding. With automation one of two things happen, depending on the industry. Sometimes more goods are manufactured with the same labor costs. Sometimes the same goods are made with lower labor costs. And sometimes wholly different products become competitive for the same market, as when word processors replaced typewriters.
Circuit board and electronics assembly has seen the same process of course, and its the reason why you can now buy a smart phone or laptop for fairly small outlay.
The original Marxist argument still appears in disguised form in these debates. It was that there was an inexorable process of worker impoverishment. What was supposed to be inevitable was that as production was automated, there would be more competition among workers for jobs, and this would drive wages down to the level barely sufficient to support life and keep them there.
Obviously this has not happened, for a variety of reasons, and Marx got the dynamics of labor and employment and production totally wrong. There have been falls in living standards, and there has been a shift in ownership of wealth, but its come after a period of improving living standards which Marxism could not and cannot account for. And its due not to this thing called automation (which is actually just normal manufacturing management, and not really a thing any more), but to mistaken political and social choices in the political domain as a whole.
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And its due not to this thing called automation (which is actually just normal manufacturing management, and not really a thing any more)
Not a thing any more? Automation is the main reason there are now so few manufacturing jobs in the US. There's still a lot of manufacturing happening in the US, just very few people needed to do it.
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Labour productivity has been rising since about 1800. It is due to process improvement. The result of process improvement is to reduce the number of hours of direct labor in manufacturing a given product.
'Automation' is a term which has been used to describe this process, usually with the assumption that something new and different is happening in manufacturing in recent years, and that automation is a thing in itself, something separate from and independent of the normal management of manufacturing proces
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And I am also saying that the lower the percentage of direct labor in COGS, the less impact further automation will have.
I think we're just about done with that in the US and probably Europe. There are already "lights out" factories, and the ones that aren't have very few workers. Now picture that scenario with office work, food service, and transportation. Nobody is ready for that.
Less Maintenance? (Score:4, Interesting)
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My only thought on this is that EVs are still a developing technology.
As someone else commented, ICE vehicles haven't been perfect either. I'm sure a modern EV is probably light years ahead of your Leaf simply because a decade has passed since you bought it.
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The ptc heater has failed. When the ptc heater fails it also fries some portion of the dc to dc junction box. Total bill to repair "Drum Roll Please!" $6,977.14. Nissan will accept no responsibility for any of this. ... The reality is that electric cars have a life span of less than 100,000 miles.
You can find this type of anecdote for any brand and most models of car, most of them fossil fuel of course. And then you find the opposite anecdotes of people driving 300 000 miles or more with their cars and saying they are still in perfect condition. So it's best to just ignore anecdotes. More reliable sources indicate that these days cars can last [wikipedia.org] 12 years [capitalone.com] and 200 000 or more miles [caranddriver.com] and even 300 000 miles [cascadecollision.com] for electric cars (but probably not Nissan Leafs due to their poor battery design).
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The only believable number from any car company is "What is the warranty?" 100,000 is their number and that is what the real world reports are revealing for all EV's.
Not really a very good measurement. The warranty on a car engine may be as little as 5 years and 60,000 miles, but that doesn't mean you should expect it to fail at that point. 3 times that would be a very ordinary lifetime, so by the same metric 300,000 miles for a EV battery would be believable.
Stock Options (Score:2)
CEOs are paid in stock options. Stock options are worth more if the stock price goes up. Ford stock price is worth 1/10th that of Tesla or lower. Ford CEO is struggling to get his company's stock to rise up that's why you have been seeing all these publicity articles for the last few months trying to push the stock up.
But what Ford CEO is missing is the maniac reality distortion field (trademark Steve Jobs) of Elon Musk and his acolytes that prop up the pump and dump valuation on Tesla.
Learn to Code? (Score:2)
But then why... (Score:2)
If the part count is so small, and the labor is so minimal, and the moving parts so few, does it turn out that EVs are the least reliable among all cars tested by Consumer Reports?
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Just taking a guess without looking into it. CR tends to count all failures equally, so if EVs have a greater tendency to put more functions into the "infotainment" system, that could explain it, because those tend to be less reliable than knobs and buttons. So maybe EVs are experiencing issues with the menu system (which admittedly could be a significant problem depending on what's in there and how it's malfunctioning) while gas cars are experiencing more mechanical failures. As bemoaned often, gas cars
China is not coming for your jobs. Automation is. (Score:2)
Ignore the politicians.
The world you grew up in is gone. Will not return.
China is not coming for your jobs. Automation is.
If you want to be relevant, retool every few years.
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Hmm, so the whole out-sourcing to China could have been a convenient diversion, to make automation taking away jobs less obvious?
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He can't just say stuff like this it has a significant impact on the stock price. He would be criminally liable if he was making this up. This is very, very real. You need to deal with it or it's going to bite you in the ass personally.
Re: sound like he doesn' know what he is talking a (Score:2)
Has there ever been any year that you and your kind don't refer to as an economic crisis?
You need to stop panicking dude. Boom and bust cycles have been happening since time immemorial. Such is life. Overthrowing capitalism or occupying wall street will not change that.
Re: sound like he doesn' know what he is talking (Score:2)
Oh hi there Putin, so how's that little special military operation of yours going? I heard you lost the Moskva a while back. I've been meaning to ask though, how does a ship just randomly catch fire and sink all by itself?
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Sounds like the person who doesn't know what they're talking about is you. Battery packs are most assuredly designed to accommodate the failure of one or more cells. Otherwise you'd see a whole bunch of EVs stranded in the middle of the road.
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No to mention the several billion that we carry around in our pockets all day.
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"... one cell is wrong the whole battery does not work ... "
If only there were some way to test for defective batteries ....... Oh wait, there is!
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Volume!
Products become cheap at volume production. All but one manufacture is producing EVs in dribs and drabs with one-off modifications of old ICE lines and lots of manual customization's. As a result none (but one) are even making a profit off of their EV sales, they're all sold at a loss!
The one volume manufacturer (not counting Chinese BYD) is running around 25% profit per car. While they could reduce prices substantially, they're selling every vehicle they can make and funneling the high profit into a
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The Board may have fired Diess, but VAG is still using the MEB platform and will see costs fall as a result, no?
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That's the idea but I'm seeing reports of VW Board pushback on this already as too costly an investment. Along with their disaster of a software suite that is rumored to now be delayed to 2030.
No verified information yet, just hearsay.
WATCH THIS SPACE
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Here's hoping that Taycan, id3/4 and Cupra Born sales etc all give them a reason to stay the course.
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This may be hard to believe, but new technology is more expensive than established. Blu ray players were $1000 initially while a DVD player would cost you $50. Did that stop Blu ray adoption?
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Gallium is about four times more expensive than lithium. And while the bulk of a chip is silicon, it's insanely expensive, super pure, very expensively processed sand.
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No, I saw it. Did you miss the part about the silicon also being ridiculously expensive?
It's a silly comparison. The price of both batteries and chips, and most other manufactured goods, is mostly things other than their raw materials. The price of batteries has fallen on an exponential curve, much like the price of chips, despite the price of lithium being pretty much the same until 2021.
Also, you're extrapolating a short term rise in lithium price in 2021 and 2022 due to a sudden spike in demand to "oh no