Since nobody has answered, here is my take on the Volkswagen-Samsung deal.
- Samsung got a better offer from somebody else du to high demand
- Or: The prices of raw material have increased due to high demand and Samsung needs to raise prices to be profitable.
- Volkswagen is unable or unwilling to match that higher price.
- To save face, Samsung is still delivering some of the capacity to the originally agreed-on price.
In other words, prices for batteries are rising and they are making it hard to produce EVs at the competitive prices that Volkswagen had in mind.
Let’s hope that this is a temporary situation and that supply is elastic enough to make prices fall again in the mid term.
I predict that electric vehicles will be so expensive up-front and so efficient that nobody will personally own them. They’ll exclusively be structured as pools of rentals, with or without a driver.
There are industries using Lithium-ion batteries with insane margins (tools for example). Perhaps battery manufacturers are fighting commodification and subsequent price drop.
On the other hand I wouldnt be surprised if Panasonic was in talks with Honda/Toyota about the future, and preparing to exit Tesla deal. Same for Samsung and Hyundai/Kia.
An interesting side-aspect is the different battery supplier for the chinese market. I wonder if Samsung, LG, etc. will see their battery IP "unwillingly transferred" to Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. when these deals come to fruition.
I would sort of disagree that EV Bite is just a spammy blog site. I get a lot of great EV news from them among others like CleanTechnica, Electrek, etc.
By the way, I know you have discretion as a moderator to change things dang, but I would hope that you try to place at least some good faith in posters. All the submissions I make are from my personal RSS newsfeed, which I've tried to prune throughout the years to build what I believe is an extremely comprehensive information portal, if perhaps somewhat biased towards the technology industry and technical engineering.
Blogspam doesn't mean spammy blogsite, it means copying the content of a source article without adding anything.
There are good reasons to do that, e.g. to be a one stop destination for news on a topic, but from aggregators like this it's preferable to link to the original source because errors are less likely to have been introduced by broken telephone, and to give credit where credit is due.
Fair enough, I can see how even with a citation, aggregators might dilute the credit received to the original poster because most people prefer the more convenient option of just staying with the aggregator.
Though I would still argue that by definition, sites like Hacker News are also aggregators in the same way, so I think it's slightly disingenuous to pick on one and not the other.
I think that there’s a bug difference between a site that’s clearly an aggregator (HN) and something with original content and thin wrappers around another site’s content.
Linking to hn thread instead of the original article wouldn't quite be blogspam (hn doesn't copy the content) but it would be bad form for the same reasons (assuming you weren't linking to the hn thread for added content, such as linking to someone's great comment).
Blogspam isn't a judgement that says you shouldn't read the article if you're on the blog (or read hn), it's a judgement that you shouldn't link to it on a news aggregator, or generally use it as a source.
We have lots of good faith in posters, including you! It's just standard moderation that when one submission is based primarily on content from another, we change the URL to the latter. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
