In today’s news dump we’ve got flying cars, crashing sales, falling costs for Chinese automakers, and a Mercedes recall almost as old as Thomas.
Welcome to The Morning Dump, bite-sized stories corralled into a single article for your morning perusal. If your morning coffee’s working a little too well, pull up a throne and have a gander at the best of the rest of yesterday.
Pick Your Poison: Randomly Stalling Engine Or Detaching Sunroof?
Recalls happen almost every day and we don’t cover all of them because the volume is fairly high and the issues are often quite minor (we could have a whole blog just for Ford). It’s rare, though, to see an automaker issue recalls for vehicles over 20 years old and it’s not often there’s a recall for a problem that can cause new engines to just randomly stall. That Mercedes managed to pull off one of each in the same week is the bad kind of impressive.
Let’s start with the older one, first. You can read about it here. This is the one where the sunroof might just fly off the car without warning:
Mercedes-Benz USA, LLC (MBUSA) is recalling certain 2001-2011 C-Class, CLK, E-Class, and CLS vehicles. Please refer to MBUSA’s recall report for specific vehicle model details. The glass sunroof panel may not be properly secured and may detach
If this sounds familiar, it’s because Mercedes already tried one recall with this supplier and then decided it wasn’t enough. There’s a whole chronology of what happened that you can read here, but the short version is Mercedes claims the supplier initially didn’t let the sunroofs bond long enough at first and then changed their process at some point in production. Mercedes recalled those vehicles but noticed the problem was still occurring and decided other factors (humidity/temperature in the production facility, for instance) were to blame and thus decided to institute a second recall.
Given that these cars are on most likely on their second or third owners, it’ll be fun tracking them down. The good news is it sounds like an extremely rare occurrence.
And behind door number two there’s this recall of crossovers/suvs for engines that can stall while driving.
Mercedes-Benz USA, LLC. (MBUSA) is recalling certain 2012-2014 ML550, 2012-2015 ML350, AMG ML63, 2015 ML250, ML400, 2016 GLE450, GLE300, 2016-2018 GLE350, GLE550, 2016-2019 GLE400, 2017-2019 AMG GLE43, and 2016-2020 AMG GLE63 vehicles. Water might accumulate in the spare tire wheel well and damage the fuel pump control unit, which could cause an engine stall while driving.
Auto Supplier: Chinese Automakers Can Undercut Europeans By $10,600 Per Small EV
There are numerous reasons why Chinese automakers have focused on reaching European customers first, but the biggest is probably the relative lack of duties compared to the United States. Without the high import barrier, the Chinese can use their price advantage to gain market share. How big is their advantage?
Franco-German auto supplier Forvia’s CEO Patrick Koller told Reuters at CES that it’s about 10,000 EUR or $10,600 USD.
While the average price of electric cars has risen in Europe since 2015 from 48,942 euros to 55,821 euros and 53,038-to-63,864 in the United States, it has dropped in China to 31,829 from 66,819 euros, taking it below the price of gasoline cars, according to a study by JATO Dynamics, which provides analysis on industry trends.
Koller said Chinese EV makers can produce vehicles for less because they have lower research and development costs, lower levels of capital spending and lower labour costs than rivals in Europe.
The halving of costs for Chinese EVs is a huge deal. The Chinese might not be here tomorrow, but that’s an enormous amount of price pressure to put on the competition. Can it last forever? That’s less clear. Cheap labor usually doesn’t last forever as a middle class often forms, though it’s always a conflict (as seen in South Korea, most recently).
Stellantis USA Did Worse Than The Market In 2022, GM Did Way Better
FCA US LLC, aka Stellantis, aka Chrysler, aka aka Winnie the Bish, lagged the rest of the market in 2022. While the overall car market in the US looks to be down about 8-10% from 2022, Stellantis dropped nearly 12.9%. It could be worse! Honda/Acura combined for a 32.9% loss year-over-year. Other big losers include Toyota at -9.6% and Nissan/Mitsubishi at -24.5%.
I mentioned yesterday that Hyundai did quite well (almost matching 2021), but the biggest winner seems to be Polestar, which had an increase of 189.7% compared to 2021. That’s got a lot to do with the small numbers (it sold 2,100 cars in 2022) and the rollout of products, but it’s still a fun number. General Motors also performed admirably, with a 41.8% increase in sales in the fourth quarter, which put the company ahead for the year by 2.5%.
Looking at the Stellantis sales results, it is interesting to see that Jeep’s plug-in hybrid game is so strong. The Jeep Wrangler 4xe is America’s best-selling plug-in hybrid and 11% of all Grand Cherokee sales in the fourth quarter were also the 4xe. It’s not just Jeep, as Pacifica Hybrids were up 123% in the fourth quarter of 2022 as well.
Oh, Hey, Look! Stellantis Is Doing The Flying Car Thing
The eVTOL (electric vertical take-off and landing) market is exploding. Specifically, the investment side is exploding. None of these things are actually flying in anything other than in extremely limited tests. The renders, though, are great. Look how cool that person appears to be. They’re not even looking at the flying car! They just keep walking like it’s an explosion in an action movie.
Hyundai’s got Supernal, and now Stellantis has announced an increased investment in California-based Archer. From their press release:
Stellantis will work with Archer to stand up Archer’s recently announced manufacturing facility in Covington, Georgia at which the companies plan to begin manufacturing the Midnight aircraft in 2024. Midnight is designed to be safe, sustainable, quiet and, with its expected payload of over 1,000 pounds, can carry four passengers plus a pilot. With a range of 100 miles, Midnight is optimized for back-to-back short distance trips of around 20 miles, with a charging time of approximately 10 minutes in-between.
Additionally, Stellantis set aside $150 million in equity capital that Archer can use to enlarge itself. Phrasing!
The Flush
Flying cars, huh? Not to go all Popular Mechanics here, but how long do you think before these are regularly in service?
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The Auto Industry Thinks The Future Of Cars Is Everything But Driving
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Chinese Car Companies Had A Huge Year In Europe And They’re Just Getting Started
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McLaren’s V6 Artura Already Recalled For Fire-Causing Loose Nuts
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Here’s What You Need To Know About Tom Zhu, Tesla’s New ‘Number 2’
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Photos: Stellantis, BYD, Mercedes BYD
Given the idiocy we see with cars on the ground, putting traffic way up into the air probably wouldn’t end well
Cars have wheels and tires, and are made to drive on a road. That is what separates them from boats, or trains, or helicopters… ALL of these new “flying cars” are not cars. They are helicopters. Stop trying to make “Fetch” happen…
Here’s an alternate Flush question that encompasses a few we’ve had lately. Which will happen first?
A. Flying cars
B. Level 5 autonomy
C. ICE cars no longer being manufactured
D. The Cybertruck will enter full scale manufacturing
E. None of the above
Cars are becoming electronic gadgets, and one attribute of electronic gadgets is that they get cheaper over time.
Is it really all that surprising that hybrid versions of wildly popular Stellantis vehicles are selling well during a period of high gas prices? In other news, water is found to be wet and bears defecate in arboreal areas. 😉
I find it weirdly encouraging that the Stellantis products that are selling best are PHEVs. It’s almost like their “shove a dinosauric V8 in all the things” approach wasn’t sustainable…and that maybe their customer base isn’t as YOU CAN TAKE MY ICE OUT OF MY COLD DEAD HANDS as you might think.
To be fair to the person not looking at the flying car, most people don’t turn back to their cars to give long lingering glances as they walk away from them.
I mean, I do. But I’m not quite as weird as Torch.
As for when we’ll get flying cars, I kinda believe we’ll have initiated nuclear destruction and will be buying radroach steaks with bottlecaps before we get those.
“Given that these cars are on most likely on their second or third owners, it’ll be fun tracking them down.”
Oh they’ll find them. 2 of my 3 Saab 9-2x needed the airbag recall done, and they were mailing me about it even though I was second owner of one, and at least 3rd or 4th owner of the other. I’m *still* getting notifications for one of them, even though it was scrapped and I updated its status online.
As for flying cars, people already can’t drive things that go left, right, forward, and backward. If you add *two more directions*, especially ones affected by gravity, it’s never going to happen unless they’re almost 100% autonomous or you need a pilot’s license to fly them.
Flying cars are 20 years after Level 4 self driving. You need to figure this out on ground before you place more than 1 foot of air between us and the ground.
At this point, I think commercial scale fusion power is going to happen before flying cars
“Water might accumulate in the spare tire wheel well and damage the fuel pump control unit, which could cause an engine stall while driving……….. The fix is the installation of a drain plug and, potentially, the replacement of the fuel pump itself.”
Here is a radical thought, fix the cause of water accumulation. But I guess drilling a hole is easier.
There have been a lot of recalls lately where the solution was “drill a drain hole” instead of “fix whatever is leaking”. I’d be rather displeased if any of my vehicles had a recall like that.
Let’s handwave away the issues of autopiloting, noise, cost, landing space and parking, airspace restrictions for (the time being) experimental aircraft, there’s still range problems for EV aircraft. Range issues are solved in EV automobiles and trucks by adding batteries. Adding batteries to EV aircraft is problematic. Even if every other issue is solved for urban VTOLs, I don’t see EV VTOLs for human transport at any large scale in the foreseeable future until battery energy density takes a big forward leap.
As with any project, it is important to define parameters and success criteria prior to getting started. There are so many different definitions of “flying cars” that it’s easy to get confused and to miscommunicate.
For many, a “flying car” is something that you can park in your driveway, take off from your street, fly to the office, land in the parking lot, and then do the trip in reverse. By this definition, we will never see flying cars.
A more charitable definition would be something that can park in your driveway, drive to a general aviation airport, take off from the runway there, fly around and enjoy the sights, and maybe land at a not-too-far-away airport to enjoy a “$500 cheeseburger”.
The latter is not too different from the Light Sport Aircraft category of aircraft, just without the need to tow the craft to the airport or to lease hangar space to park it. I don’t know enough about either of those inconveniences to have an opinion on whether they are significant enough for recreational pilots to accept the other inherent compromises associated with a “flying car” (or more accurately, a “roadable aircraft”), but if they are, then that will drive development in the field to meet the demand.
The former would not only require technological advances but, possibly more significantly would require extensive infrastructure and regulatory updates. Even assuming that those can be overcome, the price of the resulting vehicle (and its associated maintenance) would be at least an order of magnitude higher than a traditional road car for negligible benefits (while it would be marginally faster to travel the same distance in the sky rather than on the road, it wouldn’t be a significant improvement, and aside from the novelty of cosplaying George Jetson, there are few other advantages over ground transportation). So even if the technical and bureaucratic hurdles could be cleared, the market for such a vehicle would be incredibly small.
I think it’s doable technically. It’s just going to be fantastically expensive. The vehicle would need to at once satisfy FAA Part 23 regulations and NHTSA light-duty road vehicle regulations simultaneously. Unless there was some new category created, or one could get clever and classify said vehicle as some sort of exempt “multi-purpose” vehicle. Terrafugia was very, very close to accomplishing this but was still about a decade behind schedule. The costs to do this are fantastic.
I have another post in the thread mentioning the Terrafugia, but I completely forgot about Aeromobil, who are also now very close to a viable, road- and airworthy product. But it’s telling that the estimated retail cost of the vehicle is in excess of $1 million. So to your point, is playing George Jetson *or* the convenience of storing the vehicle at home, worth the exponential increased cost over simply having a good car and a good airplane? Both of which can be had for far less than $1 million.
Exactly.
For a million bucks, I can buy a nice luxury car and hire someone to drive me around in it for a long time. I’d much rather have that than a flying car that I have to operate myself for the same money. I feel like most people would feel similarly.
I don’t know much about GA aircraft ownership, but I wouldn’t expect to see any advantages of keeping the aircraft at home and driving it back-and-forth to the airport. I’d rather just rent hangar space… or even get something like the Icon A5 that can be towed if hangar space is a premium.
While it’s fun to listen to companies describe their future offerings, I’d be interested in hearing from some prospective “flying car” customers. What do they want out of such a vehicle? How would they use it? What features and specs are most important to them? And possibly most important: What would they be willing to pay for it? That conversation would be most enlightening to understand what an eventual flying car might look like.
Flying cars will be here on the 30th of February. Controlling airborne stuff is hard! I try not to crash R/C airplanes and drones. Even experienced pilots get it wrong sometimes. We’re worried about range with electric cars. Triply so for the giant multi-copters being proposed! Oh, the weather changed from calm to stormy and your copter needs a charger to complete the trip? Good luck finding one without auto rotating.
“Koller said Chinese EV makers can produce vehicles for less because they have lower research and development costs,”
And how do they achieve this?
That’s right – intellectual property theft. R&D costs are pretty much nil when you’re just stealing things from your government-mandated “partner.” Especially when your partner knows it’s pointless to sue, since China doesn’t have a legitimate legal system, or any sort of copyright laws.
This will come home to roost sooner or later.
“Flying cars, huh? Not to go all Popular Mechanics here, but how long do you think before these are regularly in service?”
… those are called HELICOPTERS, Matt. They’ve been here a while.
I’m sure there is plenty of IP theft amongst Chinese automakers. But it’s not the cause of lower costs there.
I know that Tesla owners get really upset when people say this, but most of the tech in an EV is off-the-shelf stuff that has been out of patent for 70+ years. There’s some fancy battery stuff that is new and novel and patented, but it’s not _necessary_ to make a credible EV.
R&D costs are higher here because we decide to make them that way. We want to make it hard to compete with our automakers. We want to make it hard to compete with our car salespeople (dealers). We want to make it hard to buy a car because then when your life is hard maybe you’ll fix the environment. We want to make it hard to buy a car because then maybe you’ll support the train I want you to pay for so that I can take the train from my house to my job. Etc.
So we make regulations that increase the cost. Then we point to the costs as the problem.
This is a common strategy with EVERYTHING that somebody has an axe to grind about. We can’t build power plants (nuclear, solar, gas, coal, whatever….) because it’s too expensive to do all the studies and buy all the insurance and comply with the regulations. We can’t fix a bridge that has lasted 100 years because you have to make it accessible and pedestrian friendly and cyclist friendly and wildlife friendly and do an erosion control study and send registered letters to the 1000 closest residents notifying them and giving them an opportunity to object. Etc.
So yeah. It’s cheaper in China where somebody can say “you’ve paid your bribes, just build the damned thing.”
I don’t know which way is worse, but that’s the great thing about life. Just because somebody is wrong doesn’t mean everybody else can’t _also_ be wrong!
As per a lot of the commenters here so far, that thing is not a “flying car”. It’s a VTOL aircraft.
The closest anyone has ever gotten to an actual flying car was the two Terrafugia Transition prototypes, the second of which I actually watched fly and drive at Oshkosh in 2012. It fit into a two car garage with wings folded and ran on automotive gasoline. The company was founded and was being led by some MIT grads. They had a bunch of NHTSA exemptions to make it happen and I think they might had actually pulled it off eventually, but they sold to Geely for an infusion of cash and shortly after that all the MIT people left. I don’t know why Geely wanted it if they were just going to kill the whole thing, because that’s what it seems like has happened. Whatever Terrafugia is pushing now is definitely not a flying car.
In any case, the Transition would have required one to be a licensed private pilot as well, so these fears of the common idiot flying cars around are kind of unfounded. The only way the general public is ever going to get into private aircraft is if said aircraft are fully autonomous, and I think we can all agree we’re decades away from that.
I’ll edit to add that I completely forgot about Aeromobil, who are apparently very close to a viable road- and airworthy product (let’s just wait and see, shall we?). So it can technically can be done, and theoretically can be done within regulations as well. It’s just very expensive and very complex. But it will still require a pilot’s license and an airport to use. So it’s still not the flying car dream (or fear) that many have.
+1 for peak “New Girl” reference.
I don’t think we can get everybody to agree on what makes something a “car.” At least I don’t think *I* am up to the task.
However it should be trivially easy to get us all to agree on lots of things that make something “not a car”.
If something is “not a car” then it is certainly not a “flying car”.
Here’s a brief list of things that I think make something “not a car”:
* It doesn’t fit in a two car garage
* You’re not allowed to come and go from your home or work; you have to use a “port” of some sort that is designed specifically for arrivals and departures
* It’s sufficiently complicated to operate that you need to hire somebody else to use it for you
I wish I could edit.
I think another key entry on that list is “you need to be in contact with some external traffic controller to get around. You can’t use ad-hoc visual collaboration with static signals other vehicle operators”
Fair enough. I’d even go as far as to add
* It’s not designed and optimized primarily for ground mobility
Because like somebody else already mentioned, most of these “flying cars” are in the end really just helicopters that are above-average at taxiing.
By this definition, both of my velomobiles could be considered not “not cars”, the motorized custom build and unmotorized Milan SL.
The custom build is more of a microcar than a bicycle in terms of how it moves. Before I disassembled it, using the motor, it topped 50 mph and did 0-30 mph acceleration in about 6 seconds on all of 4 horsepower, weighing in at 91 lbs. It’s being upgraded to 13 horsepower to top out at 100+ mph and for 0-60 mph under 8 seconds, but will still be perfectly pedalable with the motor shut off as you would expect from a bicycle, and due to aerodynamic slipperiness it will be faster than a normal bicycle and even most ebikes when operated strictly on human power in spite of what will be a 100 lb weight. As a car using the electric motor with pedaling supplementing it, it will get the efficiency equivalent of thousands of miles per gallon at freeway speeds.
I would agree. Those are definitely “not cars”
Both of your velomobiles are “not cars.” Being fast does not make something a car.
Also, none of those requirements make them not a car.
I built the six-person pedal-powered Shamancycle using a VW bug front-end and Tacoma rear end that has held about 20 people at one time. I either put it on a trailer for long hauls, or if within 45 minutes I flat tow it. I researched California trailer and bicycle laws to find . . . nothing applicable other than it is a bicycle. So I tow a 1600 pound “bicycle” on the freeway at about 50 MPH behind my truck. It is not a trailer, it is a bicycle. How I have not ever been pulled over by the CHP amazes me.
Flying car:
1: it can fly, and take off without breaking the speed limit on the road.
2: You need to be able to drive it on the road legally, and meets all crashing standards.
The crazy thing is that a lot of these vehicles are getting classed as ultralights. That way, you can fly it yourself without formal flight training, without communications with air traffic control, and without knowledge of how airspace works. And these “future of transportation” pods boast about how you’ll be flying to work and back.
But, they legally can’t live up to the promise. Ultralights aren’t allowed in densely populated areas, can’t fly at night, can’t fly in a lot of America’s airspace, and are legally limited in capability. So, you’re spending $100,000+ on something that could really only be used in a rural area.
Supposedly, the companies building these things are trying to change the laws or get exemptions, but I don’t see it. No major city is going to want untrained people trying to navigate their glass and steel jungles.
So now you’re left with the bigger ones, the ones that could fly into a city but require a pilot license and undoubtedly cost multiples of what the already expensive ultralights cost. And, I fail to see how they’re much better than an electric helicopter with 8 rotors.
This is a long way to say that yeah, none of these things are “cars.”
By the very legal definition of “ultralight” there is no way these can be ultralights:
In the U.S., flying an ultralight doesn’t require a license or a medical certificate of any kind, providing the aircraft meets the Federal Aviation Regulation called Part 103. Part 103 defines an ultralight as an aircraft that meets the following criteria:
Seats = 1
Max. Empty Weight (Powered Aircraft) = 254 lbs
Max. Empty Weight (Unpowered Aircraft) = 155 lbs
Max. Fuel Capacity = 5 Gallons
Max. Speed @ Full Power = 55 knots
Max. Stall Speed (Power Off) = 24 knots
If the aircraft has more than 1-seat or exceeds any of the above criteria, it’s not an ultralight, and thus not eligible for operation under Part 103.
https://www.eaa.org/eaa/aviation-interests/~/link.aspx?_id=F19457F9B41B41D391AA484BA86EF880&_z=z
Of course! I apologize, I was talking about the broader category of eVTOLs that have been in the news for the past year or two. Many of them do meet ultralight criteria. The ones from this article are definitely in a larger class.
The really scary thing is that there are already people who buy traditional ultralights without significant understanding of the restrictions on them, and these are pushing VERY hard for a broader, less informed audience. Given that and the number of people I have known to defeat drone flight ceilings, these will be a nightmare if they ever get them out to a broad enough market.
I don’t know about US ultralight rules, but in France the rules are defined by a philosophy of “whenever the engine cut during flight, I can land safely”. I have difficulties to imagine a safe powerless landing in most of these machines. I would feel safer in a standard helicopter (I had a PPL-H some time ago…).
These are good points. Another parallel is use and regulation of drones over a certain size/weight. Here in Canada they are severely restricted (special permit only I believe) in urban areas and have to stay a significant distance away from airports, including places like helipads at hospitals. Basically you can only really fly them out in the open countryside. Also, except for special purposes like rescue, surveying or law enforcement, they have to be in the operator’s sight at all times.
I’m glad we don’t live in a dystopia of drones buzzing around everywhere. It would be even more horrifying if you scaled them up to passenger carrying size.
Dude. It’s a coupe.
If you’ve been driving your Mercedes for 22 years without the sunroof flying off, is it really that big of a problem?
Definitely not. But I’d take advantage of the opportunity to have the dealer service my 20 yr old sunroof for free.
I’m sure they’ll also include a *free* 50 point inspection while you’re there.
When it comes to auto dealers, you can’t afford free…
And promptly total the car, because 20 year old Mercedes + dealer rates
“[…]Expected payload of over 1,000 pounds, can carry four passengers plus a pilot” looking at the people I see on the street that payload better be quite a bit over a thousand pounds or two of those five people will actually have to be hamsters.
I dunno man, I’ve seen some pretty hefty hamsters driving Kias on TV.
Imagine the average person.
Now imagine the 160 million Americans dumber than that person.
Now imagine all those people in control of flying machines over populated areas.
Little more needs said I think.
As with amphibious cars, it will be neither a good airplane nor a good car. Not to mention the fact that you can’t let people actually fly these by themselves. They will have to be autonomous to prevent carnage ( or flyingcarnage), if you like.
The only actual “flying cars” I’ve ever seen — or read about — were built long ago. Today’s all appear to be flying vehicles that might have an extended taxiing range. Molt Taylor seems to have had a better grasp of the concept than today’s dreamers.
My suspicion is that the Chinese will maintain the lower labor costs for a good long time to come. Slave labor, and all that. The people who buy their products because cheap apparently don’t care, and if the slave workers care, no one listens to them.
Personal flying transportation brings a whole host of issues, from dropping out of the sky to clearly delineating aerial lanes of travel. Air traffic control is already a massive undertaking for planes, I don’t see “flying cars” as being easier to control than current air traffic.
Agreed – people (in general) do not do a great job of controlling their existing vehicles in X and Y even when they have lines and signage to guide them; adding Z to the mix (without lines, etc.) seems like a bad idea.
that’s when they go in the Z dimension sometimes
Literally nobody wants flying cars anyway.
They want to have the only flying car with no other flying cars in their way.
Which is why these will likely always be prohibitively expensive–only the very wealthy get to fly/come crashing down on the rest of us plebes. A lot more space for them.
About the only way it works is if you mandate vehicle-to-vehicle transponders from the get-go, only allow them to fly specific routes, and do not allow manual control for normal flights. Which means you should really just set up public transit on those routes.
Yeah, this. Most people are too stupid to handle one plane of movement on the ground. You really wanna add a Y-axis to that mess?
Not gonna lie, I read the title and thought “Ooh, Mercedes is writing a long one.” Got my hopes up for the wrong Mercedes.
“Mercedes Streeter fondly recalls hundreds of thousands of vehicles. Mostly buses and Smarts.” I’d read that article. The “some over 20 years old” is a given, though.
Don’t worry, I’d slide in a locomotive, some motorcycles, and a few planes here and there. Oh, and maybe some of the boats that fascinate me!
Ooh, I definitely want to see which boats fascinate you!
Four wheels good, two wheels great.
>4 or <2 wheels… case-by-case basis. 🙂
Flying car? That shit is a helicopter, and those already exist.
The most generous interpretation is that they are really big drones. Are drones cars? No. No, they are not.
They show a picture of what is obviously an EV VTOL airplane and call it a flying car. Are the editors asleep at the wheel or does everybody not give a shit about what words mean.
We’ve had helicopters over 90 years, I can’t see what a “flying car” is going to add to that.
Even with pilot training and fastidious maintenance helicopters are a bit crashy. Flying cars just seem unworkable beyond toys for the extremely wealthy.