What the electric car transition really means for autoworkers
What the electric car transition really means for autoworkers
A big sticking point in contract talks between Detroit automakers and the United Auto Workers union is the popular assertion that it takes fewer workers to manufacture electric vehicles (EVs) than conventional cars.
The union should be pushing hard for education and skill training beyond just car assembly. Unions need to look out for labor behind the traditional boundaries. Labor is critical and lots of things need to be updated to support EVs.
100%. One of the reasons I didn't join a union as a skilled worker is that I don't want to be locked into doing the same exact thing for the rest of my career.
They should have learned that with the near collapse of the American auto industry during the '07-08 financial crisis. Automated manufacturing has been part of the auto industry for nearly 40 years and it's just going to continue to whittle away at jobs on the assembly line.
There's a huge amount of shit between the lines here...
For one, that labor isn't going to be the purview of the union friendly grease monkeys. It's going to be the purview of nerdy science club motherfuckers that likely won't be the union type.
Much of the tooling is useless. Much of the skillset is useless. The writing is on the wall for those unions, an electric car is nothing like an ice car.
I early adopted on a zero motorcycle, and ended up with enough prototype/first year glitches that I only got 8k miles out of the bike before the company bought back all the 2012 bikes, but that was long enough to understand how entirely unlike a traditional vehicle the thing was. I'd get routine emails from the dealer offering oil changes on a bike with no oil, I'd look around the bike to figure out if there actually was any sort of routine maintenance (and came up with zero, to strike a pun). And when I did need help with registering a new sensor to the motor, that I'd replaced myself because I couldn't find any sort of shop that would do it, the dealer spent two hours trying to sort out how to get the bike online, failed, and declared that they were no longer a zero dealer and wouldn't support the bike they'd sold me.
The current gas vehicle infrastructure is completely unprepared, unsuited, unwilling, and incapable of supporting an EV. You'd probably have better luck with the dude at the little kiosk that offers cell phone repair, literally...
The article describes a gaggle of dinosaurs looking up to the sky at a meteor that's about to wreck their shit completely. They're going extinct and all this nonsense is bullshit about how they'll be fine.
There might be an alligator or a horseshoe crab out there that'll make the transition, but I bet it ain't gonna be anyone referenced here :)
This is partly true, but the comparison to motorcycles is a little off.
What will be effected is jobs on the drivetrain. A motorcycle is almost entirely drivetrain, so you would have seen the most extreme version of this change. Cars have a lot more in them: climate, seats, soundproofing, doors.
Those jobs wouldn't be impacted by electrification. Its the automation part that is at play there.
I'm of the opinion that the computer/electronics nerd community is probably more suited to adding seats, doors, and climate control than the car building community is to adding battery arrays, BMS, and all the other gizmos and gadgets....
I understand what you mean, but I'm speaking more to the infrastructure. The infrastructure of the phone repair kiosk guy is closer to EVs than Detroit is. It's mindset, ya know? It's sending an email every 3 months offering oil changes vs knowing that the "gas station" of the future should include tables, chairs, snacks, and overpriced coffee ;)
The livewire is a great example of what I mean... its like it was built to support the service department more than the rider. It's got a transmission full of fluid that needs serviced that only has one gear. It's got a service required coolant system that other electrics don't have. It has requirements to visit the shop baked into the design, and it's silly. As soon as they parted from HD, the bike radically changed, because gearheads aren't calling the shots anymore. The bike has 10% of the service requirements at half the cost, because nerds (and I mean that endearingly... Im a nerd that turned gearhead, ironically) are designing them now :)
Just as a note, if you have moving metal parts, you will need lubrication. It might be sealed for life or it is more likely a transmission oil change, but there is still generally oil spaces in EVs.
Engine oil needs to be changed often - though most dealers understand just how much a profit center that is and so encourage people do change far more often than the engine needs. All cars can go more than 7000 miles on an oil change, and 25,000 is possible on the best oils, but dealers still push the 3 months or 3000 mile nonsense and say it is treating the engine.
Chassis lubrication is needed much less often and often is lifetime as something else will fail that isn't worth replacing before damage from not doing it is noticed. If you really keep the car/bike for 30 years do it, but most people buy "the last car I'll ever buy" and 3 years later upgrade "that old thing", and in reality the car/bike won't be on the road at all in 20 years.
GM got in trouble inn the 1960s for telling the unions that every strike and pay raise makes automation that much cheaper. However that is truth and as automation advances more and more things that used to be done manually will be done by hand. The union people need to adapt, that means many need to get retrained to do something more productive than repetitive assembly.
That's not really true though. In my experience automation is either way way cheaper than manual labor, so much so that there's no competition, or it's completely impractical to implement.
Usually it's not 5% cheaper or something like that.
As for the last point, with AI we are trying to automate intelligence, which is a completely different thing than classic automation
Automation typically costs millions to implement the first time, but then replaces labor that is paid every year. So you lose money the first 5 years, and after that it is a lot cheaper.
Don't forget that technology marches on. When GM started automation in the 1960s it was doing a lot of design work on it in house, so it was several million $ to replace a few people making $10k/year. Now you can buy CNC machines to make many of the parts off the shelf, and those machines directly hook up to the CAD your engineers are designing parts in, so automation is cheaper in just days (and the machine probably holds tighter tolerances for more quality). Even today though there are a lot of things that are we could automate, but it isn't practical as the custom machines needed would be more cost than doing the work manually - but there are less and less such things all the time.
Thanks for sharing!