Car Science: ICE cream meltdown
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Gosh it's been such a long five days since the last edition, I am keeping up with scheduling just fine.
This week's news-ier edition is about emissions testing and OEMs pulling a shocked Pikachu face when rules they've been told are coming in seven years prior happen to them. Also: an ice cream-related scandal at Shanghai Auto Show and why the car industry has China all wrong.
There's two really annoying terms that crop up a lot in my Twitter mentions. Well, no, there's a lot more than two but I'm talking about these two: fiatpilled and legacy autos. The first is referring to people who use conventional money instead of made up environmental disaster coins and the second is 'any car company that isn't Tesla.' Apparently both are on the brink of extinction and unable to negotiate the modern world, which is sort of true but doesn't mean the alternative is any more competent.
Legacy auto is especially supposed to be floundering in China. This is probably true because everyone would very much like to sell millions of cars there but the reality is Chinese brands do a lot better; BYD, FAW, Geely, Changan, SAIC, Great Wall, Dongfeng, etc all absolutely kick the arse of foreign brands in terms of sales and although everyone gets a big huffy that anyone would be buying Chinese-made cars not their good old imports it's not like Tesla's doing any better. Volkswagen and Toyota have managed the best Chinese tie-ups but honestly everyone might as well pack up and go home and leave the brands selling cars people want to buy to it.
That's not the sort of thing that plays well with The Board when you're trying to convince them you've got a way to sell millions of cars somewhere, though. Which might be how a very silly situation has happened that got reported last month.
OEMs don't actually know, even in times when car inventories are at all-time record lows, where their vehicles are when they're not in a factory or a dealership. That might sound like I'm talking rubbish but I've been to multiple conferences where people from genuinely large car companies stand on a stage and say finished vehicle logistics is one of their biggest problems so when the car company says they don't know where the $37,000 truck you ordered six months ago is, they aren't actually shitting you. Except in the sense that this completely strange attitude to high-value items has somehow developed over decades.
Anyway, all of that weirdness aside, at the minute everyone knows where their finished vehicles are, for the most part. It's a lot easier when you don't have any. Despite a quarterly prediction by a trade body that supply chain issues and particularly semiconductors are easing, they haven't and it's still a painfully slow process to get vehicles out the factory doors.
So it might surprise you (and certainly surprised me) to find out that legacy automakers are supposed to have thousands of soon-to-be-unsellable vehicles stockpiled in China. This isn't going to be a debunk of that because whether it's true or not isn't particularly the interesting thing about it - it could well be and there's some sort of semi-nefarious reason for it, like the OEMs have been holding that stock in China to transfer it elsewhere once it can't be sold. Or it could be total rubbish and inventories are as low there as anywhere.
What's surprising in the story is that the automakers' problem is supposed to be 6b emission standards that are coming in in China this summer. "Oh, that must be new," you might think but it's definitely not.
Volkswagen and Toyota have been trying to shift petrol and diesel cars in China in roughly the same lazy way they do in all Other Places and New Markets which is to just throw whatever might not be palatable for Europe or the US at it. Maybe. That would explain how they've ended up with a stockpile of unsellable cars, perhaps. Except that it doesn't because China already had emissions standards that were about as strict as Euro 6 and current EPA measures.
China is the leading polluter as a country but it doesn't come from the tailpipes of its cars - aside from anything else, car ownership remains relatively low in China and tends towards small vehicles. For car emissions it's the US, followed by its quieter cousin Canada, leading by car emissions per capita. By a long way.
At 4468kg of CO2 emissions from road transport per capita for the US and 4120kg for Canada, North America's truck lovers dwarf China's 537kg per year per person. Those statistics will have shifted a little since 2018 but probably not in a way that flatters the US and Canada given China's overwhelming appetite for EVs.
And car companies, for all their flaws, presumably know this. They're currently grumbling in the EU about Euro 7 and in the US about new, tighter EPA regulations proposed for 2027. As discussed previously, OEMs managed to whine so loudly they get to keep combustion engines as a weird project to market energy-disastrous synthetic fuels. Which, more on that next week when I've finished getting my head around how mindbogglingly nonsensical the state of Texas is.
There are still prosecutions happening over Dieselgate. The scandal, which started around 2015, is still going and will keep going probably until combustion cars aren't. By which time we'll be on to tyre particulates or whatever the next most pressingly deadly issue is. And in the meantime, all the cars that have been rendered non-compliant for the US and EU and China will be going elsewhere and seemingly every time a company actually gets told 'no' it's going to look like IndyCat when I tell her it's not dinnertime. How can you turn down our polluting cars?
Oh and the ice cream? Well, here's this week's silliest-sounding story that's actually got a darker and more important theme to it. Automotive News reported that BMW had to issue an apology after a racially charged "ice cream melée" at the Shanghai Auto Show.
"Uhm," you might say, "what the fuck?" Well turns out BMW was handing out ice cream at its Mini stand at the Shanghai Auto Show, however, multiple Chinese attendees have accused the stand workers of only handing it out to foreign workers.
BMW's stand was apparently locally staffed and while I am by no means the person to talk about this, there are plenty of anecdotal accounts that Chinese firms at a trade show like this would bias selling towards foreigners. BMW says it was all just a coincidence and they simply happened to have run out of ice cream at the time Chinese visitors appeared.
Draw your own conclusions, on all fronts. But the fact is that somewhere between seven-year-old emissions standards being treated like breaking news and the ability to cause a scandal worse than just how utterly hideous the Mini Aceman concept is, one thing that's true about automakers, legacy or otherwise, is they just don't get China. Chinese automakers, on the other hand, seem to have a pretty good grasp of what might sell in Europe, with BYD launching its Seagull EV that comes with all the space of a Ford Fiesta and a £8000 price tag.
That seems like a pretty sound way to get ahead of regulations. People might not be keen on dropping Tesla or E-Tron money but there's plenty of people in London's ULEZ who might be willing to consider jacking in their Qashqai (please) if the alternative cost less than ten grand. One of the ways that price is allegedly being met is by jacking in expensive lithium ion in favour of cheap sodium ion batteries; a less energy-dense and slower charging but significantly cost-reduced alternative.
To gratuitously crowbar in some of the eponymous science here (which I seem to have, uh, not up until this point) I read a great paper about sodium batteries a couple of weeks ago that's made me very optimistic about how quickly sodium-ion research is going now.
For context: about fifteen years ago lithium-ion was frankly, not in a better state than sodium-ion is now. In fact, it might have been worse; it's not like there were a lot of EVs trundling round in 2008. But then we realised we needed it for everything and suddenly both plucking ideas from research and research itself sped the hell up. So although sodium isn't quite on the level with lithium yet it's honestly not very far off, when you consider the difference between an early Nissan Leaf's battery and the EQXX's air-cooled nonsense.
So it's cool to read the snappily-titled Fluorinated ethylene carbonate as additive to glyme electrolytes for robust sodium solid electrolyte interface.
Not because I'm some sort of super genius that understood all those words the first time but because this is a paper looking at the limitations sodium batteries currently have, one of which is that it takes a long time for it to form the ... like, call it a science-crust, let's say, over electrodes. When the crust is there, charging and discharging is faster and the battery is working in peak condition - until a dendrite goes and spoils it all by stabbing through something. But we'll worry about dendrites later.
Like an episode of the Great British Bake Off, forming crust (or solid electrolyte interface) is not a straightforward business and using glyme (a spicy solvent regularly used in electrolyte) alone is not enough. But if you add fluorinated ethylene carbonate (or, to be pronounced like the world endurance championship acronym, FEC) then scientists were able to measurably observe crusty happenings.
That's excellent news for the future of sodium-ion, which god knows sounds like a great idea going forwards. Getting batteries out of the sea, which is undergoing a process of salinisation as ice melts, would be the sort of deus ex machina we are probably in the order of needing.
Anyway, that was a ramble. Let's all hope I remember what day it is and actually send Friday's out this week, eh? Stranger things have happened.
Hazel
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