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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 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.