Who is "we"?
On 4/16/2018 4:08 PM, Bill Woodcock via EV wrote:
On Apr 16, 2018, at 10:24 AM, EVDL Administrator via EV <ev@lists.evdl.org> wrote: What's the problem with Siemens?The small problem is that their motors have lousy thermal efficiency, and even lousier thermal dissipation. Nonetheless, they’re inductive, and there weren’t a lot of other non-PM options at the time I was first shopping. And they’re not so bad that you wouldn’t use them, just bad enough that you wouldn’t choose them now that there are better options. The big problem is that they try to “pick favorites” among their customers, and choose one among several that are competing with each other, and try to bankrupt the rest. That’s been particularly obvious in the aviation space, after they decided that Airbus was their customer-of-choice, and all of their other longstanding customers would suddenly have deals revoked or not honored. With us, they were very buddy-buddy and sending biz-dev folks around to try to pile on additional deals, while ignoring Azure Dynamics, and refusing to sell them hardware they were happily shipping to us. Azure Dynamics went bankrupt. We bought most of the remains. Then Siemens decided they didn’t like us, and refused to send software that was already contracted _and paid for in full_, and said “sue us… in Germany.” The problem with that being that they’re essentially immune from lawsuit in Germany, and German law puts the full cost of the defense of an unsuccessful lawsuit onto the plaintiff. So Siemens just throws their own staff counsel at it, running up the bill as quickly as they can, until the plaintiff bails out because they can’t afford to pay for both sides of the case. So we’re out less than a half-million in the actual cost of garbage inverters and such that couldn’t be used without the software they never shipped, but lost several million more, and probably three years of time in the friction of trying to deal with them. We’d have been far, far better off if we’d never heard of them, and just started our process three years later, after there were more component suppliers in the market. And that story is pretty typical of people in the EV space who’ve tried to deal with them. The only success I can think of off-hand is the original Ford Ranger; Ford’s big enough and canny enough not to get taken. But you didn’t see them wanting to deal with Siemens directly again, either. To my observation, German business culture is just really, really corrupt. Siemens is constantly getting investigated for different kinds of fraud, and the whole dieselgate thing seemed very typical to me. We’re sticking with suppliers in the US and Japan and the Netherlands and so forth, going forward. -Bill
_______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org Please discuss EV drag racing at NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
