For at least a few decades the DIY crowd has been purchasing parts to build their own electric vehicles. The reason we build our own EVs are the demand for EVs and lack of supply from manufacturers. This is changing now as more electric cars are being manufactured and the vehicles produced are being met with great consumer acceptance.
The availability of EVs that are ready -to drive-after signing your life away to a loan - is leading to a reduction in sales for the mom and pop type shops that have sold to the hobbyists for much long time. Though it may not cause all of these businesses to fail, some surely will.
Some EV component suppliers have lost around 50% of their recent peak sales and are hanging on by a thread . How will their weakened state affect this industry? Well, as the I read on a forum post from a Chief engineer of Soliton motor controllers {I'm paraphrasing} -the way to make a small fortune (in this EV market) is to spend a large fortune developing a controller that will be copied and sold (at far lower prices) by China and we will lose significant portions of our business to them. Fortunately, this is not the case for motors and the reputation for Chinese-made motor controllers is not that great. Buy American made whenever possible and you'll get a much better product.
There has been a great emergence of new competition to the existing suppliers of electric vehicle parts, such as : Emotorwerks who is known for creating an amazing open source electric vehicle battery charger for a small portion of the price of their competitors. Since they are making a profit off of this, it makes me wonder why the other companies charge so much; Jack Rickard's EVTV site and store- he's known for product testing and his show that delivers a wide range of info on DIY EV conversions through articles and videos; there are others out there, but maybe they're not worth mentioning. The older ma & pa EV parts sellers aren't very competitive due to their lack of providing the other half of what people need in order to build an EV, which is know-how, as well as not creating/finding innovative products that either didn't exist before (open source charger/controller) or were hard to find elsewhere (JLD404 Ah meter).
Electric vehicles are definitely here to stay, but the shops of yesterday can no longer rely on their reputation from years past. Staying competitive means developing and finding new products that solve problems for customers and providing written and recorded media that demonstrate how to build and modify EVs and even talks about the general EV industry itself, which includes talking about manufactured EVs.
The availability of EVs that are ready -to drive-after signing your life away to a loan - is leading to a reduction in sales for the mom and pop type shops that have sold to the hobbyists for much long time. Though it may not cause all of these businesses to fail, some surely will.
Some EV component suppliers have lost around 50% of their recent peak sales and are hanging on by a thread . How will their weakened state affect this industry? Well, as the I read on a forum post from a Chief engineer of Soliton motor controllers {I'm paraphrasing} -the way to make a small fortune (in this EV market) is to spend a large fortune developing a controller that will be copied and sold (at far lower prices) by China and we will lose significant portions of our business to them. Fortunately, this is not the case for motors and the reputation for Chinese-made motor controllers is not that great. Buy American made whenever possible and you'll get a much better product.
There has been a great emergence of new competition to the existing suppliers of electric vehicle parts, such as : Emotorwerks who is known for creating an amazing open source electric vehicle battery charger for a small portion of the price of their competitors. Since they are making a profit off of this, it makes me wonder why the other companies charge so much; Jack Rickard's EVTV site and store- he's known for product testing and his show that delivers a wide range of info on DIY EV conversions through articles and videos; there are others out there, but maybe they're not worth mentioning. The older ma & pa EV parts sellers aren't very competitive due to their lack of providing the other half of what people need in order to build an EV, which is know-how, as well as not creating/finding innovative products that either didn't exist before (open source charger/controller) or were hard to find elsewhere (JLD404 Ah meter).
Electric vehicles are definitely here to stay, but the shops of yesterday can no longer rely on their reputation from years past. Staying competitive means developing and finding new products that solve problems for customers and providing written and recorded media that demonstrate how to build and modify EVs and even talks about the general EV industry itself, which includes talking about manufactured EVs.
