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Comment by decimalenough

13 hours ago

Legacy car manufacturers have done just that (forcing an EV into an ICE chassis). The results generally suck and the pure EV manufacturers like Tesla and BYD have kicked their ass in the market.

You can use a similar design to your existing fleet without a literal retrofit of an existing chassis to shoehorn a battery and electric drive train in there.

The retrofits usually are less preferable not only because of pointless inconveniences like transmission tunnels, but because they'll be the manufacturer's first toe dipped into the EV waters. The retrofit chassis speaks to either a rush to market, or a cautious approach not wanting to commit too many resources. The former says it'll have issues, the latter says they might bail on it and leave you stranded for service and repairs. Or both at once.

That was kinda different thing. It was legacy manufacturers scrambling to push out any EV they could get together so they are not left behind too much. But in meantime they started working on genuinely new designs (like Hyundai Ioniq, Mercedes EQS, BMW Neueu Klasse) or they adjusted their platforms to better accommodate electric drive trains (like Audi e-tron).