papatonyinsd
Member
- Joined
- Dec 15, 2010
- Messages
- 18
Here's an article that I wrote for my technology newsletter. It started out as a "Lease versus Buy" topic, and then veered off into more philosophical areas:
Dennis and I are supposed to finally get our all-electric Nissan Leaf car on Friday. In June, I will have pursuing this car for two years!
We were debating whether to buy or lease, but I now know that the choice is clear. We will be leasing. The finances look quite good, and the paradigms have swiveled around in a radical new way.
Here's why:
We can't keep thinking of the upcoming wave of electric cars as being like any other kind of car. We have to think of our next big purchase as if it were an iPhone or iPad.
There haven't been many BIG changes in petroleum-driven tech, since the technology and infrastructure have been around for well over a century. Cars have gotten faster, quieter, cleaner, easier to own and drive, safer and so forth, but you can still drive a 1911 car into your local gas-station and get the oil, gas and radiator fluids handled just fine. You can't with an all-electric car, so the field is wide-open to innovation on a massive scale.
Battery, charging and electric motor technology are progressing rapidly, with a LOT of money being thrown at them. Electric-car tech is going to replace fully-amortized oil tech, so everybody wants to get in on the ground floor. Patents are going to be auctioned off for big bucks, and year-by-year competition is going to put a lot of pressure on every manufacturer.
I mean, really - The Ford Focus electric is already being promoted as "Charging in half the time of the Nissan Leaf!" Just think how much more pressure will be on Nissan in just one year, when everybody else (BMW, Toyota, Ford and many more) come shoving their way into the market with sharp elbows. Nissan is in a very good position due to Carlos Ghosn's vision, but the road forward is all uphill.
Imagine being forced to hang onto an iPhone 1.0 in 2011 (with improved software but the same hardware), while everybody else is using vastly improved competitors, and Apple itself is pumping out the iPhone 5 in a few months.
I'm pretty certain that there will be big hardware changes nearly every year. Not just software. They'll HAVE to do it that way. The market is already demanding a new charger to replace the weak one behind the Nissan Leaf's back seat. A new one would allow full charging from zero in four hours at home, not eight.
Imagine Nissan someday being able to say "Now, with newer batteries that allow you 200 miles of range!" That day is already coming, but nobody can say when.
There is still plenty of room for improvement, just as Apple did with the MacBook Air, iPad and iPhone's battery structure and form. They were willing to do away with a hard-shell casing for their batteries and use the surrounding structure as the actual casing, which makes their batteries fill more space and last much longer than the competition's, without changing the chemical structure in the least.
Nanotech batteries are starting to come online, allowing even more densely-packed energy storage. I'd sure hate to miss out on that.
All-electric traction tech isn't just a supplement to old dinosaur-juice tech like the hybrid was, it's the whole Megillah… New infrastructure, new consumer demands that never had to be dealt with before in such quantities, new biases that have to be overcome. New, enforced habits are coming for consumers that they will NOT adore, so the industry will have to adapt. Consumers sure won't be willing to.
All of these problems will provide new possibilities for innovators to move to the front of the pack, and for more consumers to get comfortable with making the switch to all-electric transportation.
Being the first on the market with a mass-produced electric car, Nissan has a good chance to be the 900-pound gorilla of the entire worldwide market. They want to fight for this, and the only way that they can is to constantly innovate and upgrade, just like Apple does with the iPhone and iPad each year.
At the rate that things are changing, we'd be fools to buy (versus lease) and expect to use the same car for a decade or so, with only software upgrades.
Dennis and I are supposed to finally get our all-electric Nissan Leaf car on Friday. In June, I will have pursuing this car for two years!
We were debating whether to buy or lease, but I now know that the choice is clear. We will be leasing. The finances look quite good, and the paradigms have swiveled around in a radical new way.
Here's why:
We can't keep thinking of the upcoming wave of electric cars as being like any other kind of car. We have to think of our next big purchase as if it were an iPhone or iPad.
There haven't been many BIG changes in petroleum-driven tech, since the technology and infrastructure have been around for well over a century. Cars have gotten faster, quieter, cleaner, easier to own and drive, safer and so forth, but you can still drive a 1911 car into your local gas-station and get the oil, gas and radiator fluids handled just fine. You can't with an all-electric car, so the field is wide-open to innovation on a massive scale.
Battery, charging and electric motor technology are progressing rapidly, with a LOT of money being thrown at them. Electric-car tech is going to replace fully-amortized oil tech, so everybody wants to get in on the ground floor. Patents are going to be auctioned off for big bucks, and year-by-year competition is going to put a lot of pressure on every manufacturer.
I mean, really - The Ford Focus electric is already being promoted as "Charging in half the time of the Nissan Leaf!" Just think how much more pressure will be on Nissan in just one year, when everybody else (BMW, Toyota, Ford and many more) come shoving their way into the market with sharp elbows. Nissan is in a very good position due to Carlos Ghosn's vision, but the road forward is all uphill.
Imagine being forced to hang onto an iPhone 1.0 in 2011 (with improved software but the same hardware), while everybody else is using vastly improved competitors, and Apple itself is pumping out the iPhone 5 in a few months.
I'm pretty certain that there will be big hardware changes nearly every year. Not just software. They'll HAVE to do it that way. The market is already demanding a new charger to replace the weak one behind the Nissan Leaf's back seat. A new one would allow full charging from zero in four hours at home, not eight.
Imagine Nissan someday being able to say "Now, with newer batteries that allow you 200 miles of range!" That day is already coming, but nobody can say when.
There is still plenty of room for improvement, just as Apple did with the MacBook Air, iPad and iPhone's battery structure and form. They were willing to do away with a hard-shell casing for their batteries and use the surrounding structure as the actual casing, which makes their batteries fill more space and last much longer than the competition's, without changing the chemical structure in the least.
Nanotech batteries are starting to come online, allowing even more densely-packed energy storage. I'd sure hate to miss out on that.
All-electric traction tech isn't just a supplement to old dinosaur-juice tech like the hybrid was, it's the whole Megillah… New infrastructure, new consumer demands that never had to be dealt with before in such quantities, new biases that have to be overcome. New, enforced habits are coming for consumers that they will NOT adore, so the industry will have to adapt. Consumers sure won't be willing to.
All of these problems will provide new possibilities for innovators to move to the front of the pack, and for more consumers to get comfortable with making the switch to all-electric transportation.
Being the first on the market with a mass-produced electric car, Nissan has a good chance to be the 900-pound gorilla of the entire worldwide market. They want to fight for this, and the only way that they can is to constantly innovate and upgrade, just like Apple does with the iPhone and iPad each year.
At the rate that things are changing, we'd be fools to buy (versus lease) and expect to use the same car for a decade or so, with only software upgrades.