More and more people that I know are hanging onto their older vehicles, not wanting an expensive smartphone with wheels. This trend is growing across Europe:
ACEA’s latest ‘Vehicles on European roads’ report provides a snapshot of how the ‘fleet’ of vehicles on Europe’s roads is evolving. With vehicles growing older, more must be done to incentivise the switch to the cleanest and greenest models.
Older cars are in demand:
The market is responding. Searches for 10–15-year-old cars on AutoScout24 are up 67% year-over-year
A neigbour had a headlight fail in his new electric car - it caused no end of problems with the electrics.
I just want a car that will get me from A to B reliably, and not one filled with electronic ‘junk’. Seems I’m not the only one:
A reversal in electric vehicle ambitions has resulted in a hit of at least $65bn for the global car industry in the past year as executives warned of more pain ahead in resetting their strategies.
The auto industry is shifting fast, and without some major change, Toyota’s CEO can see the end of the road.
Toyota has always run lean with little appetite for risk. That strategy has worked out well—at least up until now. However, its outgoing CEO, Koji Sato, recently raised a red flag about the state of the auto manufacturing industry. And if Toyota is feeling the heat, you know there’s trouble ahead.
Sato spoke up at a recent supplier summit where 484 different companies gathered. Speaking to the hundreds of executives in attendance, Sato delivered a very clear message that things need to change, or Toyota, the world’s largest car company by sales, “will not survive.”
The auto industry has seen more upheaval in the last few years than it did over the last several decades
Toyota has always had extremely strict quality standards. The brand would reject parts for tiny cosmetic flaws that almost no human would notice. But that could soon change.
God, I hope not. I’ve long admired Toyota’s commitment to reliability. They took over the US market by just having cars that would start every time.
Maybe they can pivot to smaller cars again, simple, reliable, comfortable, hybrid or EV, without lots of doodads.
Yeah, I know the margins are in the larger vehicles, but they took over the market with the small ones. Maybe people will spend on smaller more practical, but still very reliable vehicles.
The funny thing is, there is no reason why an EV must be so complicated. For some reason everyone thinks they need a “software defined vehicle” without really asking if that is all that useful, honestly, to the owner. It creates an enormous amount of complexity (I’m in the software field myself, though via semiconductor industry). It does allow for a revenue stream for the manufacturer if they can exploit it without too much consumer push-back. (See BMW heated seat subscriptions).
Sometimes I have to sit back and realize that my Acura ZDX (built by Cadillac, it’s a Lyric clone) is an EXCELLENT CAR, even if it is not an excellent SDV. And that is more than good enough.
There was no reason MS Word had to have so many options, except there were buildings full of coders who could, so they did. I see the same thing in iOS these days; you can drill down three levels in the “Settings” to find something, only to find they’ve moved it somewhere else, or added an option for the two people in Montana who might use it.
I occasionally have to “touch-screen” 3 levels on my Hyundai os - while driving - to reach an option I never knew I had before, and try to find where they have put it. Bah. Touch screens reduce assembly costs, but introduce a lot of customer angst. If Steve Jobs was designing it he would have a steering wheel, brakes, and at most two levels of options, and buttons for the most used ones.
Coders do because they can. Stevie-o said “don’t unless you can’t live without it.” There are no more SJs around anymore, apparently.
I often recall a holiday to Northern Cyprus many years ago. We stayed at a hotel that did car hire. The man in charge drove a decrepit Hillman Minx, a British car of the 1960’s and early 1970’s:
He was hiring out modern cars and used to get a lot of comments about the Hillman. He seemed to have one stock answer:
“If it goes wrong I fix”
I don’t know what he would make of the modern EVs.
Audi came out with a new Q5 about a year ago. The Q5 came with a touchscreen - Alpine Style I think that it was called. I thought that I might like to upgrade and went to look at one. The salesman spent ages showing me how the screen worked and seemed surprised when I said ‘no thanks I’m keeping my old 2018 model’. This was the petrol version as well. I can only imagine what the EV model was like.
I ran across the following story yesterday. China is not the first Asian country that kicked the US auto manufacturer’s *ss.
Lets go back to 1972.
October 2022:
but Honda was eager to get the news of their achievement — an engine that could pass the strict emissions rules for 1975 without the use of a catalytic converter — out to the press. After the unveiling the EPA invited Honda to Michigan to subject a CVCC engine to their rigorous tests. The only problem was, the Honda Civic was so new, it wasn’t yet ready. So Honda installed their CVCC engines in a couple of Nissans and sent them to Ann Arbor.
The issue with a catalytic converter was that its longevity was heavily dependent on the quality of the burn. Excess fuel would damage the cat by making it run way too hot. The engineers quickly learned that lean combustion was the key, but didn’t know how to achieve it. Prototypes involved multiple spark plugs, increased ignition energy, pre-heating the air-fuel mixture, and more.
The Honda CVCC engine had 2 combustion chambers separated by a metal plate with holes: a small chamber that a rich fuel mixture enter and ignited which sent fire through the perforated plate to ignite the lean fuel mixture. No catalytic converter needed.
The AP Lab had built about 100 prototype engines. Some were bench tested, others were installed in Nissan Sunnys, as Honda didn’t have a car large enough to accommodate the CVCC engine yet.
The EPA was eager to see if Honda lived up to his word. As a result, the landmark test that would catapult Honda to global carmaking giant was conducted not with a Honda car, but with a Honda engine installed in a Nissan. On December 14, 1972 the Frankenstein’ed Honda/Nissan emerged victorious after a week of testing (the EPA required 50,000 miles of driving) and became the first car to pass the US’s 1975 emissions requirements.
Once word got out, Honda received a visit from a Toyota representative looking to license CVCC. And when it became known that even the mighty Toyota had struck a deal to use Honda’s technology, other companies came knocking. Honda ultimately signed agreements with Ford, Chrysler, and Isuzu as well.
Notably, General Motors did not see much value in CVCC and was skeptical that it would work on a big American V8. GM’s then CEO said, “Well, I have looked at this design, and while it might work on some little toy motorcycle engine… I see no potential for it on one of our GM car engines.”
When Mr. Honda heard this, he bought a 1973 V8 Impala, air-freighted it to Japan, designed and cast a set of CVCC heads for the Chevy engine, tested it in our own emission labs, then flew the car back to the EPA’s facility in Ann Arbor, and had it tested by them…where it passed the stringent 1975 emissions requirements. You didn’t mess with the old man…
The testing revealed another beneficial side-effect. The CVCC engine was not only clean-burning, it got great mileage, and was ranked the most fuel efficient car in the U.S. for four consecutive years, 1975-78.
