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All Volvo car models launched after 2019 will be electric or hybrids, the Chinese-owned company said on Wednesday, making it the first major traditional automaker to set a date for phasing out vehicles powered solely by the internal combustion engine.
The Sweden-based company will continue to produce pure combustion-engine Volvos from models launched before that date, but its move signals the eventual end of nearly a century of Volvos powered solely that way.
While electric and hybrid vehicles are still only a small fraction of new cars sales, they are gaining ground at the premium end of the market, where Volvo operates and where Elon Musk's Tesla Motors has been a pure-play battery carmaker from day one. As technology improves and prices fall, many in the industry expect mass-market adoption to follow.
"This announcement marks the end of the solely combustion engine-powered car," Volvo Cars CEO Hakan Samuelsson said.
The company, owned by Zhejiang Geely Holding Group, said five new models set to be launched in 2019 through 2021 - three of them Volvos and two Polestar-branded - would all be fully electric.
"These five cars will be supplemented by a range of petrol and diesel plug in hybrid and mild hybrid 48-volt options on all models," Volvo said. "This means that there will in future be no Volvo cars without an electric motor."
Source: Reuters
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Saturday July 08 2017, @09:44PM (7 children)
Alas, yes. To get insurance, the car must be taxed (we have yearly road tax here). To get the tax, the car has to pass yearly examination to make sure it is in working order and meets requirements for being road legal (called the MOT).
A non working car would not get that, so would either have to be fixed, or would have to be scrapped. You can't just keep it on the road for insurance purposes.
Well, not particularly hard, just they don't end up very good. Many cars have been converted to electric, from VWs to Porsche's. However they all end up far worse than the IC engines originally in them, and worse than "store bought" electric cars. Primarily because the motors, battery packs and motor controllers used by production electric cars are generally not available to the end user (you generally have to buy them in bulk, assuming they are available on the market at all. Some have exclusivity contracts, others like Tesla are made solely for their cars). As such DIYers either make do with COTS motors and controllers (usually heavy industrial or from golf carts), much fewer high capacity batteries, or they go with lead acid batteries. The result is underwhelming, to say the least. Saying that, a friend asked me to help him convert a classic car to electric, so he has something to pootle about the city in, so might have a go and see what I can build for him.
It used to be possible to do that, up until the mid-late 2000s. The 2004 Alfa has a separate ECU, so in theory I could do that. However modern cars have multiple ECUs all spidered around the car, and interconnected, if you remove one then it just won't work (they seem to use some sort of challenge/response to make sure they have not been tampered with). gone are the days of a single "Engine ECU", a "Alarm ECU", etc... now it is all one system. Indeed they have integrated it so tightly, that they developed security holes. For example they integrated the ICE into the ECU bus, so when a pentester hacked into the ICE via bluetooth, they could remotely control the brakes, of all things.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday July 09 2017, @12:33AM (6 children)
The yearly examination is just to make sure it's safe? not that it has motor power? or just suck as a car? it could be ugly and have shitty seats etc. Everything just to get the price down. And if it stays in the garage the rust will be minimal even if there's damage.
Motors are hard, but can be ordered with custom winding. Batteries can be had in various ways. I have read about builds 10x lower price than Tesla with about the same acceleration and endurance. But of course not the same paint job but that depends on priorities. The controller is certainly doable to build oneself. The catch may be to do the pulse drive math.
Here's one guys EV conversion [youtube.com] (WV minibus?)
I know, I have contact with a designer of such things. But my point is that if you remove all of the controllers there's nothing to limit your own stuff. After all motor mechanics is not that different and is controlled via analogue means at some level. Someone may argue that is not safe. But considering the current shit status it's 50/50 thing.
Btw, car security shouldn't be possible to compromise via Bluetooth. Someone did Monday coding..
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Sunday July 09 2017, @12:51PM (5 children)
To make sure it is safe (i.e. no spots of rust, holes, weakness of integrity), make sure the bushings, transmission components, brakes are balanced and in order, make sure it meets emissions requirements (so the engine, catalytic converters, etc... have to be in order) and so on. Also the car must arrive under its own power. If you tow it to the testing station it is a fail.
But yes, you could get something cheap shitty etc... and I considered it tbh, but then I asked myself why I am paying tax, insurance and expensive parking charges on a car I would never drive? I already have a sporty classic number for the nice summer weekends, so I bought a (slightly more) practical hatchback with rear seats that can fit adults and you can drop for more space. Already had something German, so decided to check out what the Italians offered.
And I dream of having a garage. Been trying to get one for the last 10 years. Problem is the areas where I can afford a garage, there is no work for me (out in the sticks with poor transport to the city) while in the urban area where I live, I can't afford them ( a single car garage near where I live recently sold for $154,676. Just the garage, no plumbing but with electric lights).
Oh bloody hell, he disassembled laptop batteries, and then re-assmebled the hundreds of cells himself? Wow, dedication. And if one of the brazed points he soldered fail, that could be a pain to debug. Still, quite a nice project. I admit the last time I looked at EVs it was before the Tesla came out, so things have probably changed quite a bit. Thanks for that, will send to my friend. His idea atm is to convert an old 70s drop top SAAB to electric, but the camper van is kinda cool too.
As for the speed control, most DIYers before made use of ex-industrial variable speed controllers, tied to 3-phase electric motors. These usually ran at a minimum 115V per phase (and you wanted as high a voltage as possible, for increased power and reducing the amount of copper you needed to lug around) and come in variable frequency and in PWM systems (generally variable frequency is better, as they give really good starting torque, more efficient and they whine less).
well, it is getting harder to do. For example. when I was looking to build a kit car, all the other builders were limited to using the BMW M73 engine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_M73) as the newest possible powerplant for their cars, despite the fact there are 2 new generations of that engine in existence (N73, N74) primarily because they are struggling to build a standalone ECU that can manage the direct injection, dual VANOS, etc.... and still meet the original emissions standards. I follow the megasquirt people specifically for support, being a semi open source type project.
Here when you build a custom car, the car must not produce more emissions than the engine of the doner, so you can't take a new BMW V12, stick some carbs and straight pipes on it, and call it a day. You have to meet the same strict standards as the original BMW engineers did, but without the massive budget and talent they had to do so. This wasn't a problem before with separate ECUs, because you just took the engine ECU and wiring loom from the doner as well, but now it being integrated into the suspension, transmission, alarm, etc... ECUs , that is pretty much impossible.
Agreed, but it happens quite a bit: http://money.cnn.com/2014/08/01/technology/security/most-hackable-cars/index.html [cnn.com]
I mean, look at the state of software. It is generally a mess, and with most companies following an approach of "not our problem if the software breaks and does something bad" in EULAs. I don't have much faith that things will improve with electric cars. Aviation has been fly-by-wire/autopilot for decades now, and they have strict engineering standards for their software. Still, they make loads of mistakes and bugs appear in the computers. So much so that Airbus (for example) will have three different companies, with three different teams, coding in three different languages, running on three different types of hardware/architecture build the flight control computers. That way when flying the computers quorum amongst each other. The chances that two out of three machines will trigger the exact same error condition is very small, but still can happen (e.g. the airplane lost due to erronous sensor output - Air France AF447 )
And aviation has strict standards set by people like the FAA, and companies get it really in the neck if sloppy coding causes deaths. This makes airplanes very expensive, but because they tend to last 30+ years, and shunt millions and millions of people over their lifetime, the per-person cost is not too bad.
Cars don't have any of the above, while driving on the roads is a hell of a lot harder than flying. Indeed as it seems that software companies are branching out into car manufacturing (Hello Apple) I suspect that the build it "quick/cheap/barelyworking and ship it" software development methodology currently prevalent will move into cars. Not my idea of a good direction.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday July 11 2017, @05:20PM (4 children)
Just thinking of garage option. Do you live in your own house? albeit small?
If you start digging like some prisoners do where they stand. No one would know and it could accommodate some garage + tools ;)
Replacing the ECUs, could it be possible to modify them them so that they can be quickly replaced using quick-plug-connections?
The integrated into the suspension, transmission, alarm, etc can possible be mitigated by building another computer that simulates a car for these ECU units? Perhaps even better is to have such computer hardware MITM that can let the original ECUs through sometimes. And then triggered by switch just take over.. after the annual check is done.
Code security will likely be dismal. The temporary fix has to be to block all phone-home abilities with unplugging and foils. And spectrum analyzers.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Wednesday July 12 2017, @10:54AM (3 children)
I wish :-) Even the smallest of houses here are more than $800,000, and you can't really dig down without hitting a sewer pipe, or electric/fibre cable. You would need permission from the local government, get the surveyors and lawyers involved, your neighbours would have to sign off on it, etc... and that all drives the price up to the point where it would be cheaper to buy a place with a garage already. Unless you are in the rich parts of town, where a house can cost $10,000,000+, then it might be worth it.
I live in an apartment block, on the upper floors. Quite frankly even having the right to pay high charges for parking is something. Quite a few places round here don't have that right at all (no matter how much they want to pay), they are newly designated "car free zones".
The local government then proudly state that "less than 50% of our constituents have cars", not because they don't want them, but because the government prevents them from having them at all. I guess that is one way to achieve "green" credentials. Of course, now that car owners are a minority here, they get stamped on a lot, making it one of the most car unfriendly places I know.
ECUs already have plug connectors, they are not all soldered together. This is so if a ECU goes faulty it can be replaced.
Your other ideas are a huge amount of work, emulating all the other systems of the car, just so you can use the engine ECU. Plus just simulating the other ECUs to make them look like they are attached is not enough, they need to interact.
For example. modern cars tend to have 8 or 9 gear automatic transmissions, to keep the engine in its most efficient power band, with the gearbox ECU communicating precisely with the engine ECU about when to shift for optimum emissions reduction.
If you take that engine, and mate it to a 6 speed manual with a clutch, you would need to design and build an ECU for your gearbox, interface it to the gearbox, and then have some sort of simulated auto box with a mapping of the 6 gears and clutch operation to the 9 gear automatic that the engine ECU thinks is connected.
It is complicated, it is bug prone, and at the end of it you will most likely end up with a car that is much more expensive to get working, much more error/bug prone, and essentially a kludge. If you are going to put in thousands of hours of your life and a lot of money to build your dream car, you don't want it to not work properly.
Personally, what would solve this problem is if engine ECU designers just included a "standalone/debug" easter egg in the engine ECU. Make it so we have to open up the ECU and solder some resistors or something, so it would void the warranty if you did it to the OEM car, and that way nobody can claim it is a defeat device.
That way when we want to recycle/reuse the parts in our own cars, we can make the necessary changes to let the ECU just work on the engine. It isn't like we expect to have a warranty, and if you are building your own car, a bit of soldering is trivial compared to the rest of the work to do.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday July 12 2017, @06:40PM (2 children)
What prevents you from finding a new city, workplace and housing combination? Are you dependent on the social opportunities of a city?
Could it be possible to approach it by inserting some hardware MITM to control specific aspects of the car?
And the emission issue could possible be solved with an all electric car?
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Wednesday July 12 2017, @10:01PM (1 child)
> What prevents you from finding a new city, workplace and housing combination? Are you dependent on the social opportunities of a city?
In a nutshell, yes. The UK (where I live) is such that only London has any decent opportunities left. London keeps the rest of the country afloat more or less, primarily the financial sector. I have been looking abroad in the EU, but the issue there is one of language. I am not fluent enough in the three main languages (French/Spanish/German) to take a job there. Other English speaking countries are an option, but they are too far from family for me to consider relocation atm.
Although I am trying to improve the language thing, it will be a while (couple of years I suspect) before I can consider a job abroad.
So I am working on it :-)
> Could it be possible to approach it by inserting some hardware MITM to control specific aspects of the car?
I thought I explained that with the gearbox example? Mapping one type of gearbox to another is quite a bit of work, and I suspect it will never work that well. Likewise trying to emulate different suspension setups, etc... It really makes it hard to reuse components.
> And the emission issue could possible be solved with an all electric car?
True, but I have absolutely no interest in electric cars myself. Especially if I want to build my own car. The visceral experience from petrol engines is what does it for me really.
Those who do DIY electric cars do have it easier, as they can pretty much take off the shelf industrial 3 phase motors/controllers, and just really need to build up the DC power supply and charging circuits themselves. AFAIK there are no restrictions on electric DIY cars, so they are not strangled in any way (emissions wise). They still need to meet all the other criteria, of which there is an entire rulebook though.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday July 13 2017, @12:12AM
Job) Most larger companies seems to do the English language thing regardless of the local variety. Maybe the family can relocate too? Another approach is to find another job or explore opportunities outside of the job market.
And if you are really good at something companies want. They will most likely be satisfied that you know English which is the international to go language + desired skill.
ECU-MITM) The idea was to let the normal ECU through. BUT whenever your own box deems the ordinary ECU doing something wrong or bad it will intervene like a thunder on a clear day. I think especially the drive-by-wire + cellular phone-home is a bad combination that may need some extra monitoring and safety checks.
DIY car) Do these off the shelf industrial 3-phase (AC) motors and controllers really perform well, ie with torque and without excessive heat at the edge cases of really low speed or high? I have some memory of VFD sucking in those circumstances.
Maybe you can make use of other fuels like Methanol or wood gas? it may even be really economical. Wood gas should be like 5x cheaper than ordinary car fuel.