I'm a fan of Edmunds reviews especially when they do a head-to-head comparison: The Edmunds ranking somewhat agrees with what Munro found: Mach-E - Edmunds likes best Model Y - Munro likes best VW ID.4 - both Munro and Edmunds are not fans There are some technical errors but I was happy to see compare and contrast of SuperCharger, seamless, and Electrify America, 3d party issues. Bob Wilson
IMO, Part of the problem with this review is that, while it makes sense to compare Tesla and Ford because they are targeting the same audience and basically have the same design philosophy, the VW isn’t and doesn’t, so it’s always going to finish 3rd. Ding the infotainment, it is still a work in progress, but it’s built better than the Tesla and for the price has better range and ergos than the equivalent Ford. And I like the Interfaces better on the VW than the Ford. I have no hands-on with a Tesla but will stipulate their software is top shelf, and are years ahead of both Ford and VW.
You may want to look at the Munro teardown videos for all three EVs. The parts I'm interested in, the drivetrain, are clearly smaller and higher performance than the other two. Bob Wilson
I don't see Munro as being objective at all - he comes across like a Tesla fanboy. His first-take of the ID4 was an embarrassment, and didn't really involve any engineering at all - it was just his first take. It was clear he didn't like VW in general (even before the ID.4), but it wasn't at all clear why. Subsequent videos were sort of interesting in the sense that we get to see how the things were built, but he goes off on tangents about things like fasteners and stuff he did at Ford 30 years ago.
A common fault of real engineers. Real engineers look at the parts count and labor. Designed for manufacturing, a better car has fewer and more consistent parts. Bob Wilson
Real engineers optimize for whatever the bean counters tell them to optimize for. In his case, lower production cost and lower weight. But the lessons he learned 30 years ago were before robots took over large parts of the car assembly process. How many of the lessons learned are still relevant or correct? There are always trade-offs. Cost, weight, longevity, repairability, reusability, and finally recyclability. The term "planned obsolescence" comes to mind - the bean counters want cheaper and cheaper parts, and engineers like Munro help to provide them, resulting in things that break sooner (the joke is they break the day after the warranty runs out). I might also argue that engineers like Munro helped to give Detroit the black eye that it deserved, and are the reasons that a lot of people stopped buying from Detroit, and went to other manufacturers like Toyota. His dislike of threaded fasteners means that reparability goes out the window - he just throws out statements like "nobody will ever try and service that". So that means that if it breaks, the whole assembly is more likely to go into the landfill, and repair costs for the customer go up. For a small and inexpensive assembly, maybe that's not an issue. It may well be that when battery packs come out of service, that they can have a 2nd life in powerwall applications. But one might need to open the thing up and make repairs (possibly either swap out or bypass a bad cell). If the whole thing is sealed up and riveted shut, that is more difficult. Similar for recyclability - for something to be truly recyclable, the value of the materials recovered need to be high enough to make it worth the trouble. Metals are oftentimes the 1st thing that come to mind - copper from the motor might be highly desirable, but if you make it too hard to get to, it might not be done at large scale. Metals in the battery packs (Lithium, Nickel, Cobalt, etc) Injection molded plastic can't be recycled at all - that goes straight to the landfill. He did a whole video of an ID.4 battery teardown and they talked about an replacing the battery box with an injection molded plastic frame, that would be bonded shut. I suspect that to open such a thing, you would need to saw it open, which basically means the whole thing can't be repaired. The most expensive part in the whole car, and he proposes making it a throwaway. I just shake my head.
Elon Musk tried to use too many robots in the initial Model 3 assembly line: https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/technology/pages/can-robots-replace-humans-just-ask-elon-musk.aspx Robots can do everything people can do, Musk reasoned, but many, many times faster—so why not take the people, who are a drag on production speed, out of the equation? His stated goal: to achieve a 20-fold increase in production speed for Tesla's Model 3 electric vehicle and be cranking out 20,000 cars per month by the end of 2017. But a funny thing happened on the way to future: the robots weren't quite up to the task. While Musk had promised production of 20,000 Model 3s per month by December, a mere 2,425 rolled off the line for all of the last three months of 2017, leading up to a record loss in Q1 2018 of $785 million. Ultimately, Musk had to reverse course, pulling his new robots off the lines and hiring hundreds of employees a week to rescue the Model 3 targets. As Tesla continues to burn through its cash, the missed production targets have resulted in order cancelations, a falling share price and downgrades on both stock and debt. In July, Tesla claimed it had hit the 5,000-per-week production target, but a nervous Street seems not at all confident that the rate is sustainable. Musk offered his mea culpa in a tweet: "Excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake. To be precise, my mistake. Humans are underrated." Robots have a role as a human augment, not a replacement. Reliability is a function of the number of parts and processes needed to assemble them. Munro points out fewer is better than more. One of the biggest EV advantages is the more than two orders of magnitude fewer moving parts. So we don't have oil changes, air filter changes, PVC changes, transmission fluid changes, ... If you don't have a part, it can't break or wear out. A former Prius owner, I still have some first generation, NiMH modules around. There were systemic design problems. So a small cottage industry sprang up that rebuilt traction battery packs using salvaged modules. But there were a lot of badly done rebuilds and since then, Toyota went with LiON packs. What you do is build a tunnel. At one end a piston pushes the bad packs in. At the other end, miners recover the materials at a fraction of the cost of raw material mining and refining. You'll really hate the Tesla structural 4680 pack that becomes a primary, load bearing part and battery: More technical details: Bob Wilson
I’m new here and a new EV owner. While I liked the video I believe they missed some real life issues. For me the Mustang is out because that huge panoramic sunroof doesn’t have a sun shade. Being in AZ, that makes the car a greenhouse 24/7. The VW comes with a shade and I am sure Ford will make them as well down the road. I also don’t like the huge vertical infotainment panel on the Ford. I would have preferred a landscape vs portrait layout. Additionally, since I wanted a SUV I found it pretty stupid that the Mach E has a lower ground clearance then the standard Mustang! I like the model Y, but its just a bit out of range for my budget. Also no Apple Car Play is a deal killer for me. I am also not that much of a fan of the overly minimalistic design but I believe I could get used to it. As for the VW, yes there are some quirks but in reality I can count on one hand how many times I needed to lower or raise my rear windows. So while it was a stupid idea of VW to do this, it really isn’t an issue for me. Also I found no problems working the infotainment screen and have no lag time. Even the sliders work well once you get used to them, which took all of two minutes. I enjoy driving so things like FSD and one pedal driving are not a big issue for me. What is the big deal of stepping on a break pedal? I do drive mostly in B mode. With that said, I would love to see a law passed that if you are technically DUI but riding in a self driving car that you would not be charged with a DUI. Overall I am happy with my purchase of the ID.4. I do wish it had a bit more ground clearance though. I am also really looking forward to seeing the Toyota BZ4X!
