Burned

Interesting read1 in The Economist about the “the death of the internal combustion engine“.

The technology for combustion engines is a remarkable engineering feat. It took more than a century of constant iteration to get to the currently existing state-of-the-art in power-train technology. I wonder how long it will take until, once it became obsolete by the wide-spread adoption of electric cars, the knowledge2 to build a combustion engine on the current technological level gets lost forever.

Compared with existing vehicles, electric cars are much simpler and have fewer parts; they are more like computers on wheels. That means they need fewer people to assemble them and fewer subsidiary systems from specialist suppliers

This is the key observation and herein lies one of the main challenges in the transformation to electric power-trains on a broad basis. The article paints a dark picture for the industry in general:

While today’s carmakers grapple with their costly legacy of old factories and swollen workforces, new entrants will be unencumbered. Premium brands may be able to stand out through styling and handling, but low-margin, mass-market carmakers will have to compete chiefly on cost.

You could argue that premium brands are already distinguishing themselves in terms of styling and handling and that low-margin OEMs already chiefly compete on cost. But still:

On the most extreme estimates, that could shrink the industry by as much as 90%.

This sparks a comparison to other industrial disruptions on a similar level, for example the closing of coal mines in the Ruhr Area that started several decades ago: the painful implications still haven’t been overcome to this day.

On the other hand, parts will still have to be made on an industrial scale and especially the software branch may find plenty of opportunities. For example, the creation and maintenance of a reliable charging infrastructure with high availability will take a lot of resources and this should mean business for existing companies that are willing and able to take the challenge.

Therefore, I sincerely hope that the consequences for workers and engineers will not become as terrible as painted by the article.

I don’t know whether central power stations – as the article suggests – will really play a central (sorry) role in that future as they do today. My hope is that decentralized power generation from renewable sources will eventually become the dominant supplier of the power grid.

Electric cars will come and Otto- and Diesel-cars will shrink in market share over the next decades. This development will be driven by two factors, the fact that fossil oil deposit is limited in quantity and the fact that the technological improvements (once starting to gain pace) will make electric cars more compelling and eventually even more economically appealing than traditional fuel burners.

Driverless electric cars in the 21st century are likely to improve the world in profound and unexpected ways, just as vehicles powered by internal combustion engines did in the 20th. But it will be a bumpy road.

Indeed.


  1. Via Instapaper
  2. And the industrial processes, these are admittedly equally crucial. 

Two Years ago

This is the dock of my iPad home screen from August 2015:

This is the dock in my current iPad home screen:

Completely incidentally and without intending to nearly restore my dock of 2015, I switched back from Pocket to Instapaper and from Fiery Feeds to Unread just last week to see what it was like these days.

And no, I have no plans to replace Things 3 by Todoist again. No way.

Oh No, Another on Goes Subscription Only …

This time it is Ulysses, my favorite app for writing.

Whether it makes sense or not, subscriptions feel more expensive than one-time payments. You could pay for an app and only occasionally use it over the course of several years. You could ignore paid updates released on the meantime, and still enjoy the app that you bought back in 2015, at no additional charge.

The most prominent example of this category of apps, off the top of my head, is Acorn. I don’t need the app on a regular basis, but when I do I’m happy to have a powerful tool at the ready.

Sure, it would be possible to sign up for short-period subscriptions, but that sounds like at least a mild pain in the hind quarters.

With more and more apps going subscription only, I feel less and less comfortable buying yet another subscription on top of the pile of existing ones1.

Last year, paying for a subscription of Bear was a no-brainer. The app is such a joy to work with. Despite the obvious overlap in functionality I would have no problem using Ulysses and Bear side by side going forward. But this will have to change.

The thing is: I can use Ulysses for what I use Bear for2, but I simply can’t use Bear to replace Ulysses functionally, not even close. And if I have to chose between the two to keep the costs low it is obvious that I’ll be terminating my subscription to Bear.


  1. To give an example, TextExpander did not make the cut. 
  2. Which is mostly note-taking and being a bucket for text shared from other apps. 
Mastodon