Honda’s 2030 Vision

charleswrivers

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It's an interesting topic I've been watching for awhile.

CAFE is going to push it hard by raising fleet average requirements to 54.5 MPGs. Every MPG less than that, there's a $55 penalty per MPG… per car. Based on the current projection of total Civic sales... the ~2 million 10th gen Civics will cost Honda about a billion dollars if their 2016 car was being sold in 2025 and continued through it's life cycle... and would require them to pass down $1000 in fines to the consumer. ICE has made some good strides, but there's a long way to go. Batteries may have very poor energy density compared to gasoline per volume and weight... but electric cars are substantially more energy efficient. If batteries could hold the same amount of energy as gasoline, then electric cars range would be over a thousand miles... not a few hundred.

As to the idea of extremely durable cars... I get you. Still, if Honda made a car that'd really last a lifetime, coupled with being extremely modular so that new technologies could be seamlessly integrated again and again to keep all the bells and whistles current and relevant, they'd probably shoot themselves in the foot.

As a fella that gave up on cartridge shaving a few years ago... it reminds me of hearing about Tungsten blades. See... Gillette gave up on double edge razors because there was too much competition. Too little money in selling each blade. So they did cartridges. They did Excels in several versions... Mach 3s... Fusions. Blades that used to be pennies cost a couple dollars, though their actual manufacturing costs stayed low. Why don't they still market Excels and Mach 3s? Their patents are up and 3rd parties can make replacement blades. They're *the* name in stores around the country through skillful marketing of a product while keeping control of it.

Back tot he DE blades... Personna came out w/a Tungsten blade in the 70s to beat Gillette that was harder, sharper, are wore over a very long time... such that some could use them for months on end w/o changing them, and they were still relatively cheap.

https://www.bruceonshaving.com/2010/07/30/personna-74-the-ultimate-razor-blade/

The effect? They sold very few blades to some very happy customers and lost their butts and Gillette moved on to market different blades as "better blades" at a much higher price that no one else could make replacements for due to patents and have played that game for decades. The fusion will be replaced someday prior to patents expiring to try and keep it going.

Car companies certainly want to be competitive in their market but I don't think there's any financial incentive to sell a "forever car". The #1 name of the game is money and if they can make a product just good enough to have you pick it over the competition, then that's good enough. I'm not a conspiracy theorist... but just don't see the industry going from a sell-a-new-car-every-few-years type of institution to maintain-just-a-car-over-two-over-a-person's-life type of business. Once you go electric, and I do think it's inevitable, the maintenance needs of them are so small and decreasing rapidly as economies of scale on batteries are coming along, that I don't think it would be sustainable. We are probably going to see many car companies fail out right or get acquired over the rest of our lifetimes during the transition through the rest of this half of the century.

As a guy who's had several cars that were older than him... and has a 25 year old car now... it *is* possible to keep a car going for a long time. The problem inevitably becomes parts availability. OEMs only have to provide parts for cars for 10 years after they cease production. Once new-old-stock (NOS) parts dry up... you're relying on 3rd party parts or the shrinking supply of used parts. Once those are gone... you're getting custom made parts or substitutes. I spent a good deal of money on a few new parts to be made for my Z... along with scouring for some NOS parts. Honestly... it doesn't make much financial sense to keep the car, other than nostalgia. Without readily available parts, it's turned into a now-and-then car and doesn't see DD duty at all. Nissan *could* make parts still... but they'd rather you dumped your old 300zx for a 350z 16 years ago.
 

jred721

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This would never work anyway. Technology grows rapidly and people would simply not want to keep their cars that long. Not to mention that at the end of the day combustion engines still let out emissions while ev's don't.
 

JT Si

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This would never work anyway. Technology grows rapidly and people would simply not want to keep their cars that long. Not to mention that at the end of the day combustion engines still let out emissions while ev's don't.
Pretending that driving an EV doesn't create emissions is a fantasy. Just because it doesn't come out of the tailpipe doesn't mean the energy you're using is emission free.
 

jred721

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Pretending that driving an EV doesn't create emissions is a fantasy. Just because it doesn't come out of the tailpipe doesn't mean the energy you're using is emission free.
I know that, i've even made that point on this forum a couple times. It's currently still impossible to create a vehicle that truly emission free. However according to studies, even though the production of an EV's battery and other components are actually more harmful than gasoline cars, the emission free driving starts to offset this difference and eventually negate it and become more environmentally friendly. Bottom line, its not completely innocent at all but it is still enough to be more "green" than a traditional combustion engine. This is coming from a guy who would still much rather own a fast gasoline car rather than a fast and soulless EV.
 

charleswrivers

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Pretending that driving an EV doesn't create emissions is a fantasy. Just because it doesn't come out of the tailpipe doesn't mean the energy you're using is emission free.
True, but it's more than that. They are still more efficient, so you're getting much more range per energy usage. There's also the consideration of the ability to make all the energy we need domestically with an established electrical infrastructure vice having to inport oil to push a car down the road. OPEC had us by the balls in the 70s and helped force a recession. How much of our resources go to maintain stability around the world to keep a constant flow of oil? For any country? I'd personally rather burn domestic coal than foreign oil to push a car... environment be damned (though it shouldn't come to that in the end). Nuclear is stagnant. Fossil is trying to hold it's ground with an existing infrastructure of plants. Green is on the rise. GA power just partnered with the KB naval base to build a giant solar farm on their property and brought 30MW on the grid in about a year that'll last year after year. It's a drop in the bucket, but a drop nonetheless. Get enough drops and you've got a full bucket.

Oil burning cars themselves are actually a smaller piece of the emissions pie compared to power generation in general. Moving off gasoline/diesel is a good move to use the existing electrical infrastructure for cars themselves and alternative sources of energy, whether they be fossil or otherwise. I figured H2 fuel cells would never work because of the lack of infrastructure... unless you're planning on having a home electrolysis generator to break your water up... then to recombine it. Why not use it directly? The only reason I can see they ever existed was energy density and cost for the fuel cells vs batteries a the time.

I've seen the cost of photovoltaics drop substantially since the last decade. At the time, $4-5 dollars per watt was normal... with $1 per watt being the point that it became pretty cost effective (and yes, I know there have been government substitutes that meant we were paying for individuals pet projects. I'm not interested in a dude making a few KWs off his roof... I want MWs from a legit farm). We're about at the $1 point now... and it can be seen as power companies are making long-term investments in large farms that, once built, will continue producing energy for decades with very little additional cost to maintain. And that's just photovoltaic solar. We've built an infrastructure and method of producing power for over a century that isn't going to change overnight. It'll get there though slowly. Oil is a great thing that changed the world... and there are better uses for it than burning it in a car to push it down the road IMO. I doubt my grandkids will be driving a ICE-powered car... certainly not a pure ICE when they get here.

The 2nd 1/2 of my left will likely be in the power-generation industry and whether it's from "green" sources or trying to see if we can pull nuclear out of a nosedive due to using obsolete designs that aren't fast fission but are just making piles of bred plutonium that everyone freaks out about (fun fact... the UK has a stockpile of spent fuel on hand that could power their entire country for 500 years. We just haven't been making modern fast reactor designs to utilize it. I've never seen a figure to what we have in the US... but I expect it's centuries worth, given what I know).

Change is good. It isn't just about saving the dolphins. It's about long-term sustainability and security and using the resources we have as efficiently as possible. Cars are just small piece of a much larger game... if we get off of coal and natural gas... then stop burning oil in cars, we killed 2 birds with 1 stone and took out a good chunk. Between renewables and generations worth of spent fuel rods waiting to get used in a fast reactor, we've got ourselves set for a millennia and can make the transition in a single human lifetime. We got ourselves here in well less than a couple centuries... there's no reason to thing we can't change things drastically over this century.
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