Great Wall Motor unveils $9k electric urban car with nearly 200-mile range | Hacker News Reader

Great Wall Motor unveils $9k electric urban car with nearly 200-mile range

electrek.co

109 pointslxm204 comments

35kWh on a boxy vehicle? As mentioned in the article, more like 150mi range on the standard the US uses to calculate range, and a smaller battery than some Zero motorcycles.

Not tiny, but it's not exactly a slippery vehicle; low mass could help it do better than a tesla-type car at lower speeds, but worse at higher speeds, I imagine.

Charge to 90% and you're at 135mi range, leave a safety margin and now you're looking at 100mi real world. Not bad for most day-to-day, but when you look at real world usage and the safety margins most drivers like to use, it starts getting dicey.

Been in a Great Wall or two. Fine cars. I wouldn't want to crash in one, but they're engineered to a price point.

This is supposed to be an urban car. Almost all trips in cities are less than 20km (Berlin is about 30km across, Beijing maybe twice that). Even a 160km range is plenty if there are chargers where you park your car. I suppose China is building charging stations to match their accelerated introduction of EVs in their cities.

I'm sorry but I can't afford to own two+ vehicles, one for urban, one for long range.

For the purposes of the article, 'long range' equals one tank of gas (~250 miles in my 90s SUV) for an ICE. I am behind the concept of EVs in general, but IMHO they aren't quite practical for suburban (which is in EV terms in long range territory) usage. (yet!)

You don't need a vehicle for long range travel: when you want to do that, you either fly or take a train. What, your country doesn't have good trains for intercity transport? Maybe you should work on that.

...have you seen our country? It's nice that Europe is dense enough to use trains, but let's not pretend that your solutions scale.

The northeast US is more dense than Europe.

That is a bad excuse, USA is denser than Sweden yet Sweden still has enough trains that you don't have to take cars between basically all cities with more than 10k inhabitants, even those in the mostly depopulated Swedish north.

USA also holds a dubious record of building the most expensive rail in the world https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...

What, your country doesn't have 20% of its population living in idyllic rural areas that cover 97% of your nearly 4 million square miles of land?

Let's not pretend that what works for some people will work for everyone. It would be beyond unfeasible to take a plane or train everywhere I typically go in a given month, and 100mi range would be pretty dicey, especially when it gets brutally cold in winter and I need extra power to get heat and get through snow on the roads.

> What, your country doesn't have 20% of its population living in idyllic rural areas that cover 97% of your nearly 4 million square miles of land?

Still, getting around on the east coast is absurd, though somehow the Europeans and Japanese manage it under similar conditions. In an environment where high speed rail would be superior to air travel there are 0 lines[+].

In the west I agree the "travel density" is minor except in the SF-LA region which is both being developed and tying the Central Valley into the wealthier areas.

The real reason is that the US has the most highly developed rail freight transport system in the world. Passenger trains lease access to those lines and must work around freight (including having passengers stop and wait).

[+] yes I have used the amusingly-named "Acela".

Wouldn't work in america. It's no dense enough. Which is why people poor money into automated cars. It makes way more sense for america.

How often do you actually drive these long distances? At some point it's much less expensive to just rent a car when you need to travel that far.

Well personally, the overwhelming majority of my driving km are longer distances. I work from home, and mostly use my car to carpool to ski hills in the winter, and crags and trailheads in the summer.

One problem with that approach is that those long distance trips tend to coincide with everybody else in America taking those long distance trips (Thanksgiving, Fourth of July, end of school year) with surge prices for rentals as a result.

If you drive more than 100 miles per day more often than once a month, then an EV is probably not for you. Otherwise you can just rent a car for the days where you need the range. Just like you rent a transporter when you buy new furniture instead of driving one every day to the office.

it depends what you count as Beijing, i used to ride bicycle sometimes from eastern Beijing to western part and it's easily 40-50 minutes in heavy traffic with numerous traffic lights, i don't think it would be even 30km across

actually using car in Beijing it's pretty stupid, why would you do it? it's flat as pancake, ideal for biking same as Bangkok, you don't even need car for grocery since you can have it delivered for free right to your door, even if you don't have elevator, more convenient and cheaper than shopping with car, subway station it's always pretty much less than 1km walk unless you live in Beijing suburbs

shame there is not done elevated LRT, since buses are useless and there are no trams/trains either so only solution to avoid traffic jams it's subway, elevated LRT could have more frequent stops in places subway can't reach or where it's not possible to upgrade capacity anymore

I don't imagine too many people doing a round trip commute that would make a 100mi real world range dicey even after a safety margin.

Well, actually my round-trip commute is about 300 kilometers/200 miles (Antwerp, Belgium to Lille, France - it's fine because it's only once a week, I would never do that more frequently) and when I was looking for a new car just a few weeks ago, I realised that it made using an electric car just not practical at all, especially if I'm not guaranteed to be able to park in front of my house to charge it, or to have free EV parking spots at work.

Obviously most people have shorter commutes, but here in Belgium it's actually not that uncommon to have long commutes. I see more Teslas in the city of Antwerp than on the highway.

But you have excellent trains in that area! Ok Antwerp-Lille has a change in Bruxelles, but you still can do the trip in under 90 minutes.

They're actually really not that good. Antwerp-Lille by train is more like 2 hours and 30€, one-way.

So even if we don't take into account the extra time it's still about twice as expensive as by car (about 12€ one-way on diesel) and then the train does not depart from my home, and I still have a metro to take in Lille to get to the office.

If the various transport networks were better integrated though, it could be at least as fast and as convenient as by car. A first step would be not needing between six and four different tickets for a round-trip: De Lijn for the tram in Antwerp (and/or Velo passes for the shared bikes) SNCB for the train departing from Antwerp, Transpole for the metro in Lille (and/or V'Lille for the shared bikes) and SNCF for the train departing from France.

Let’s not forget the fact that the trains run unpredictability late very often!

Let's not forget that road contents and flow are at the best times unpredictable.

That's Germany not Belgium ;)

Comparisons like these are moot because if you regularly plan to use the train you can commonly (not sure about Belgium specifically) get a subscription allowing you to save costs. Especially if you don't work from 9 to 5 but odd times.

Actually, it's not possible to get a plan for a once-a-week commute, at least with SNCB/NMBS, even putting aside the fact that my commute crosses a border (which makes most of the available plans unavailable to me anyway).

I've tried very hard to look for something that would make taking the train even remotely competitive with using my car, but unfortunately there is absolutely no convenient option in my particular case (and even in the more common cases, train is just as cheap or as fast as car in the best case, rarely better).

But had is not your only cost. Insurance, repairs, ...

And It's not all about cost. Just to add two factors that you might want to consider as relevant::

How can you use the time. Eg in a train you can read a book, do an online course, ... even work if you feel the need. I'd choose a 2h train ride any time over a 90 minute drive. Twice a week 60 minutes spent on a good course book or online course will in the long term give you much more value than the price of the train ticket compared to the price of gas.

And of course environment-wise the choice is obvious.

Nowadays you can listen to audio books in your car. I haven't done this, I'm curious how safe that is.

You can try to resonate real cost per km eg thru this tool by the German car driver association.

https://www.adac.de/infotestrat/autodatenbank/autokosten/aut...

"Not that uncommon" still means that >>50% of all commuters could switch to an EV if cities built charging infrastructure. That would be awesome for the air quality in cities.

My daily driver is a Honda Jazz, cos it's tiny and fairly reliable. Weekender is the VW T5 Transporter.

This Great Wall Motors ORA R1 would be ideal for me as a daily river. I'd only need to charge it once a week!

> I wouldn't want to crash in one, but they're engineered to a price point.

Great Wall Motors sell vehicles in Australia, so presumably they've passed all the relevant crash tests? Not sure about the ORA R1 though, obviously.

Edit to add: ObsoleteNerd's comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18775462 supports your claim that you probably don't want to be in a Great Wall accident.

> I wouldn't want to crash in one

I feel like this is a regulatory issue; my wild-ass guess would be that in the EU, at least, they'll have to be engineered to be a minimum level of crash-safe.

If so, it'll weigh a lot more. It's easy to make a light vehicle that isn't reinforced.

About 50 HP. That's pretty OK for a small city car like that, especially with electric engine which has nice torque from the start. Boxyness doesn't matter much at 30-50 km/h.

It has similar shape and size to Fiat 126p - the car that motorized several communist countries in 70s-80s (and is still used in Cuba). They made millions of them. It had about 600 kg empty mass, and 24 HP. I assume this weighs more because of batteries, but surely not twice as much?

It wasn't comfortable (back seats were designed for people about 160 cm tall :) ), and certainly wasn't safe (famously - the structural integrity during a crash depended on a spare tire being in it's intended place in the front trunk, and even then any serious crash was deadly).

But there were almost no heavy cars on the roads then, and you weren't supposed to drive it over 80km/h anyway - it felt like you're in a formula one when you exceeded 90 km/h, and it took over 40 seconds to achieve 100km/h speed :)

I would be OK with driving this in city traffic, especially if it was allowed on bus lanes and if access to the city center was paid for ICE cars.

50Hp is a bit low for a car - a Vespa Scooter has 22Hp Btw

My Fiat Punto has 54 HP at 860 kg and it's perfectly fine for urban driving.

That's the biggest engine ever put in a Vespa. For a long time (until the 1990s) they were legally limited to 1.5 Hp in Italy.

That Vespa also costs nearly as much as this car.

this is the 300 they have done 500cc

Which Vespa scooter? A 150cc scooter is pretty big and you need a proper motorcycle license for it, and that has 12-13 bhp. Smaller scooters have even less.

300 GTS ie the one you need a full licence for

GTS 300, and probably the GTS Super

https://www.vespa.com/us_EN/news-promo/vespa-GTS-300-new-HPE...

Vespa 150cc scooters were commonly sold in India and were a very popular commuter vehicle for many years, earlier. Later Bajaj Auto manufactured the Chetak model which was similar, probably under license or know-how transfer.

I rode a Vespa for some time. Never thought of it as big. But you could be right. Depends what you compare it with, I guess.

You did need a license for it. IIRC, only mopeds like 50cc or below did not need a license.

I can see many people buying one of these in european cities once they start heavily benefiting electric cars vs ICE ones.

The main problem is charging, but that could also be fixed by installing chargers in the financial districts where only electric cars can park...

The article says 35kW motor, not 35kWh battery.

my apologies, lack of sleep and too much exposure to american units. I even read what it said, and thought it was erroneously written as 'motor size' rather than 'battery size'.

I would not be surprised that they were measuring the range on a perfectly flat road in vacuum.

My knowledge of engineering suggests me that Great Wall guys are lying.

200 miles / 33kWh is about 6 miles per kWh. A Tesla Model S does about 3 miles per kWh. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me that a much smaller car with a 35kW engine instead of a 580kW engine could be twice as efficient, but maybe my knowledge of engineering is not as good as yours. Care to elaborate why they're lying?

As another comparison point, my volt does about 3.5 miles per kWh at 60-65mph on a highway and close to double that at 20-30mph in cities. And it’s not that light.

To double the specific impulse of a vehicle, their losses at cruising speed have to be 3-4 times smaller in real life.

They claim the weight at around 1t. Half that of Model S, but still I don't see them realising such efficiencies.

> I wouldn't want to crash in one

This is what is keeping my wife and I from getting her a Nissan Leaf. She drove a Nissan Versa (basically the same platform but traditional gas engine) until she was hit by another car. The accident was caused by a person in the oncoming lane not seeing her and turning left, striking her driver's side door. The other person was in a mid sized SUV (first gen Jeep Liberty) and was only going about 15MPH when she struck my wife's car, but the force pushed my wife's driver side door all the way into her seat and against her hip. The Versa was severely frame damaged and not driveable; the only damage the Jeep sustained was losing the bumper cover.

Thankfully my wife was not hurt apart from some bruising and soreness on her hip, but if the other car had been going faster (say, at an intersection) she could have been seriously hurt or killed. She is now driving our Crown Victoria, a full frame vehicle with five star crash ratings all around and reinforced doors due to being a former detective's car. Her fuel economy sucks, and she was just moved to a more remote office at her job which makes the Vic a very expensive commuter car now, but we're leery of getting her a subcompact (gas, hybrid, or electric). It's probably an irrational fear; such an accident is probably a once in a lifetime thing, but traffic is insane where we live and work so we both feel much safer with her in "The Tank".

In general, a side impact is a very bad scenario for the party being hit. There's not much room for crumple zones at all, and cars are often not rigid enough, leading to an intrusion by the other vehicle. But this is true for larger vehicles as well, e.g. older Ford F150s were famous for basically folding in half from the slightest side hit (say, a telephone pole at low speeds after losing control). In this situation, a rigid battery pack might actually make the car a lot safer. But yes, I wouldn't want to be in a tiny car getting hit from the side by a larger one.

God. That story rankles me, the new Jeep, a lifestyle product and environmentally terrible choice, being driven very poorly and causing massive damage and potential serious injury at only 15 mph. These large cars need to be taxed, they are not good for our planet or other drivers

I agree. Driving is essentially an arms race with how people drive large vehicles.

They are effectively taxed through taxes on gas though, aren't they?

Apparently not enough. They're the most popular type of car right now.

We should tax things more because they are popular?

We should tax things to appropriately account for the external costs. Big cars not only consume more fuel, the external costs of which are not reflected by current fuel taxes, they also consume a lot more space on the road. They're also more dangerous to other people, especially pedestrians and cyclists.

I agree, and I would love to trade her Vic for a comparably safe hybrid or full electric. The former simply doesn't exist, and the latter is only available right now as a Tesla S, which is far outside our price range. Maybe when the Tesla or Rivian pickups debut they will be somewhat affordable, but until then we unfortunately are stuck with gas guzzlers in our household.

I would argue that a Nissan Leaf would be overall safer than a Crown Victoria.

First of all, the 2nd generation (2018/2019) Nissan Leaf seems to have a comparable weight as the Crown Victoria. From the data I've been looking at online, it's around 25% less weight than the CV, but definitely more than a Versa. Also, this weight is likely better distributed throughout the car instead of being concentrated in one place.

Another factor to consider is that the CV is an older vehicle (did they stop making them in 2012?), and in general newer cars are safer due to strong materials and safety features/design.

Also, the likelihood of a fire during an accident is greatly reduced (although still non-zero, as demonstrated by Tesla).

Yet he said the crown vic has "reinforced doors due to being a former detective's car." Also, are fires really that much of a worry when you get in an accident? I have seen very little of that happening... More likely probably that your alternator causes a fire.

According to https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24073770 (fire-related auto deaths in Sweden), this is a problem. Around 5% of auto-related deaths in Sweden involved burning cars, and around 1/3 of these deaths fire was the cause of death. Definitely not the main cause of death, it is a factor that has to be considered when looking at overall safety.

What are the crash ratings all around on the Versa? I feel you are not being very scientific on this. She wasn’t injured in her wreck, you are extrapolating that she would have been, but you don’t know that. Bigger is not always better with crash safety, I see this idea espoused a lot. The old huge rigid cars from back in the day are actually death traps because they don’t have crumple zones and the frames are too rigid, transferring all the force to the occupant in a crash. That’s why demolition derby contestants always get those old full frame cars from the past, they don’t crumple and they transfer force to the other vehicles, but also to the driver.

If the modern crown vic is 5 star rated this may not be a problem, but the rating probably came before they added the door supports for the police, so the car may actually be more unsafe now.

Yes! I had the exact same reaction to this story. The way I interpreted the story is that the design of the Versa may actually have contributed to his wife's safety. It's possible the car was designed to crumple in such a way to distribute the weight of the collision. Ironically getting a Crown Victoria may decrease the overall safety.

There's not much zone to crumple in a side impact. On the sides, all effort is invested in keeping the rigid zone rigid and cushioning the resulting acceleration with airbags, as good as space inside the rigid zone is permitting.

I also think the problem space is being solved incorrectly. Sure, 9k might not make a comparably safe 2-4 seater (which is debatable). But I bet they’d make a much safer 1 seater. That’s precisely what most day commuters need.

The crown vic police interceptor (which is likely what the op is talking about) is a fairly "modern" vehicle; it was the go-to vehicle for police departments across the country. Detective versions typically were white or black only (not "cruiser" decorated), and usually lacked the interior cage and hose-out rear seat. Other than that, they usually had the full interceptor package (unless the dept cheaped out for the detectives, I suppose, and just bought standard crown vics).

I'm not sure when they stopped making them, but it had to be sometime in the early-2000s, maybe a bit later. I know that a lot of PDs went to an SUV platform, or other vehicles.

The one potential issue with a crown vic that would make it more dangerous that other cars is that it had a saddle fuel tank. Ford did not learn the lesson of their Pinto. Rear-end accidents with a crown vic had the potential to turn in to fiery death-traps. It wasn't until a police detective here in Phoenix got horribly injured (but survived) did they make modifications to police fleet vehicles (I think they put in a racing fuel bladder or something like that in the tanks). I don't believe such modifications were implemented for standard civilian crown vics...

Regardless, the crown vic isn't the same as much older vehicles. While it likely isn't up to modern crash standards, it is still a fairly new vehicle that does have crumple zones and such, and won't spear someone thru the heart with the steering column in a front-end collision.

> The crown vic police interceptor (which is likely what the op is talking about) is a fairly "modern" vehicle

Yes, it is.

> I'm not sure when they stopped making them, but it had to be sometime in the early-2000s, maybe a bit later.

The CVPI (Crown Victoria Police Interceptor) and the Crown Victoria itself were retired in 2011. Their immediate replacement from Ford was a Taurus based Interceptor sedan and SUV. Most officers I know derided the new Interceptor platform for having less acceleration and smaller interior space than the old CV platform. Where I live, the Dodge Charger police vehicle became much more popular after the CVPI was retired.

> The one potential issue with a crown vic that would make it more dangerous that other cars is that it had a saddle fuel tank. Ford did not learn the lesson of their Pinto. Rear-end accidents with a crown vic had the potential to turn in to fiery death-traps. It wasn't until a police detective here in Phoenix got horribly injured (but survived) did they make modifications to police fleet vehicles (I think they put in a racing fuel bladder or something like that in the tanks). I don't believe such modifications were implemented for standard civilian crown vics...

This is correct. The last revision of the CVPI (2004 to 2011) had a ton of safety improvements, including to the gas tank.

> Regardless, the crown vic isn't the same as much older vehicles. While it likely isn't up to modern crash standards, it is still a fairly new vehicle that does have crumple zones and such, and won't spear someone thru the heart with the steering column in a front-end collision.

It's still one of the safer (for the driver) cars on the road today, though its weight and bulk make it more likely to cause the most damage to other vehicles in any accident it's involved in. And you're exactly right about the steering column, it's a breakaway design. I know this because I've had to replace a dash component that required unbolting the steering wheel and column.

> What are the crash ratings all around on the Versa? I feel you are not being very scientific on this.

Front on the Versa is 3 stars, side impact is 2 stars, rollover is 4 stars. The Crown Vic is 5, 5, 5. The door additions were designed to improve officer survival in a crash, not reduce it (I used to work in law enforcement and that is direct knowledge). I'm not sure why you think I'd look at the Vic's safety ratings and just make an assumption about the Versa, that's extremely presumptive of you.

> She wasn’t injured in her wreck

She was injured, she had bruising and a sore hip for a few weeks, as I stated. This was from a 15MPH crash, one which rendered her car totaled with severe frame damage. If it had been at highway speeds I doubt she would have survived.

Also, the Crown Vic is a 2009, not a 80s or 90s car. It has crumple zones, breakaways, and other modern safety features that all contribute to its exceptional crash rating.

Sources for crash ratings:

Versa: https://www.nhtsa.gov/vehicle/2011/NISSAN/VERSA/5%252520HB/F...

Crown Victoria: https://www.nhtsa.gov/vehicle/2009/FORD/CROWN%252520VICTORIA...

Your feeling of safety is not justified. The Ford Crown Victoria had a "Marginal" rating for side impact crashes. And the type of modifications made to police vehicles don't actually do anything to improve crash safety.

https://www.iihs.org/iihs/ratings/vehicle/v/ford/crown-victo...

Check out the side impact crash test pictures. The body actually buckled and rode up over the frame! This is not a safe design.

https://www.nhtsa.gov/vehicle/2009/FORD/CROWN%252520VICTORIA...

As I said above, the modifications made to the police version were done to increase officer safety in a crash, not decrease it.

The NHTSA side impact ratings are considered outdated and inadequate, which is why I linked to the newer IIHS ratings above. The Crown Victoria is not a safe vehicle in a side crash compared to more modern designs.

Ford installed ballistic panels in some of those vehicles, but those won't give you any significant extra protection in a crash.

One little-known fact is that (at least for Euro NCAP crash test scores), the scores are only comparable within "vehicle class", and even then by vehicle mass.

> Euro NCAP’s frontal impact test simulates a car crashing into another of similar mass and structure [...] cars which are within 150kg of one another are considered comparable.

This means that at least for Euro NCAP scores, you can only meaningfully compare crash test results within a type class of vehicle, for vehicles of similar weights. Heavier, higher vehicles will usually be better-off, so a compact roadster with a 5* score is not going to come off well from a collision with a 5* SUV.

Ref: https://web.archive.org/web/20090222214930/http://www.euronc...

What you're saying is true, but there is also this

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emtLLvXrrFs

modern safety features make a big difference, even against heavier cars.

Honda is making hybrid versions of their full and mid-sized SUVs.

35kWh on a boxy vehicle?

24kWh has been pushing Nissan Leafs around for eight years.

and a smaller battery than some Zero motorcycles.

Well, you made me look, at least. Because if they can fit a 35kWh battery on a bike, I’m buying one tomorrow. They don’t, of course. The biggest thing Zero makes is a tenth that size.

They don't, but their bikes top out at 18 kWh, not 3.5 kWh as you're implying. The power tank add-on is 3.6 kWh which could be the source of the confusion.

Thanks for the correction. 18 kWh ought to do the job, then. Not quite in “buy it tomorrow” territory, but close enough I should give them another look.

Something that keeps me from getting an hybrid or electric vehicle is that I can no longer fix them. My '01 Subaru is a simple machine. When something goes wrong there are only a few potential issues and usually it is either something I can do myself or something my mechanic can do for less than $500.

My mechanic won't even look at electric or hybrid cars because he isn't certified. My brother in laws hybrid Nissan had an issue over Christmas. I took a look at it and a mechanic took a look at it (friend of the family doing him a favor). Turned out to be an electronic issue, dealer ended up having to replace a controller that cost north of $1200.

When they diagnosed it I did some research and discovered that I could replace it, but much like the market for HVAC parts, I wasn't allowed to purchase the part...

I will probably ve sticking with my Subaru and get my wife (who is looking for a new car after hers died) an early 00s vehicle that I can still repair for less than ridiculous prices.

My understanding is that the failure rates are so low on electric motors, you won’t need to fix lots of problems like on an ICE-powered vehicle. As someone that has owned a lot of shitty gas cars and had to repair them myself, I’d relish the chance for an electric.

While this is true with regards to the motor, battery, etc. the rest of the car is the same as standard vehicles and will fail in the same way as today's cars do. So if the AC fails, some computer board fries, suspension gets messed up, etc. you're still back at the shop.

Yes, but those components (mostly) haven't changed. They're also (mostly) not part of the "standard" maintenance which dominates ICE vehicles post sale profitability. Another reason dealers don't want to sell EVs.

Agreed. They’re also likely to be components a nondealer may fix.

The motors yes, but the power electronics components in motor controllers, MOSFETs and IGBTs, have a notoriously short life, especially if heavy power cycling with short t_on and t_off occurs.

Those things are pretty easy to replace with a hot-air soldering station.

Unless they're conformally coated.

Why would they do such a thing? Conformal coating is good for harsh environments if the electronics are actually exposed to the environment (like liquids), but in a car that's not the case, it's protected in a box and usually put inside the cabin too.

Also, conformal coatings are very, very bad for heat transfer. Power MOSFETs usually need to be heatsinked; conformally coating them would work against that.

Tesla drivetrains had a high failure rate possibly due to arcing through their ball bearing causing pitting. The Tesla problem is likely resolved, but I’m not confident these (non-Tesla) electric motors won’t have high failure rates too. Other simple things like battery pack power relays fail more often than you’d expect, costing thousands to replace a ?$50? part.

I’m a few years into my first electric and would feel more comfortable with a solid supply of reasonably priced parts and service manuals.

Give it time. As long as right to repair isn't killed off by lobbying (John Deere can piss off), the secondary parts market will slowly catch up.

There is an inherent risk to working on these vehicles w/out proper training--just like working on your home's electric has risks if you don't know what you're doing.

They said the LED light bulbs would last 20 years. Last week I had to replace 5 of them that failed all at the exact same time, 6 month old bulbs. Clearly there was some kind of power surge or disturbance that the power electronics didn't like; but yet here we are.

The LEDs themselves likely will last 20 years (though losing some of the brightness). The power electronics that feeds them off 110V (or 220V) is tiny because it has to fit into the lamp's base, cannot be too expensive for pricing reasons, but is still much more complex than the LED crystals. It has a much higher failure rate than the light-emitting parts.

I'm sure that electric car manufacturers will have the same things to say when people point to previous claims of extreme longevity.

Does that matter if we get off of oil in the interim? It seems the argument should be for continuous improvement in the manufacturing process and a closed loop recycling system for failed components and batteries.

`let lifetime = max(...components_lifetime)` is like `let size = to_greeklish(base10(hard_drive_capacity))`. Some people don't care, but the people who do care are not going to thank you when they optimize on the basis of the appearance of a promise with an actual performance that is opposed to its appearance.

An electric motor is not a cheap newly made LED light bulb? We know how long electric motors last since we have been using them since 1832. They seem to last a very long time.

I haven't had your bad experiences with LED bulbs either though, mine seem to be lasting great so far.

LEDs last almost forever if they work within their parameters (mostly the temperature is important). They degrade quickly if they overheat. And above let's say 5W they will overheat if they are made out of plastic.

So - these plastic ones are designed to fail, so why put a proper electronics there? So they skimp on power regulator as well (and that's probably what killed your LEDs).

Buy LEDs with metal radiators - they are more expansive, but they aren't designed to fail in a few months and should really last decades.

This may be pessimistic, and relating back to the higher level comments on the auto side. Watching how current automotive manufacturers have gone due to the bean counters demanding higher margins - I don’t know that we can expect them to default to the better quality hardware. If they do, I’d expect it to be during the formative/adoption years and again decline toward higher margins.

I've analyzed some failed LED bulbs, and what fails is the power supply. The LEDs themselves were likely still good, but especially the cheaper bulbs have inadequate cooling and very cheap & crappy power supplies.

I agree with your sentiment, but I think you should look at the bigger picture. Subarus have a reputation for being easy to repair, a testament to thoughtful engineering. But most other brands are not that accessible, whether they're electric or ICE. So you might as well say you'll only buy Subaru rather than you wouldn't buy electric or hybrid.

Next, long range electric cars are a new technology and the tools and parts needed to repair them are still exotic. This is likely to change as electric cars become more common. Ideally, I'd recommend selecting electric cars that use standard components so they can be easily swapped or repaired. I don't know that these standards will ever arise, and that's not really how it worked out for ICE cars. But if the ability to repair and maintain your vehicle is a priority, that's a quality you should be looking for.

"Subarus have a reputation for being easy to repair"

Replacing a single headlight bulb in recent Subarus is an hour long job. You get to remove the wheel and wheel well cover. Nice $250 job to replace both at the dealer. Daytime running lights that burn out extra quick just adds to this insanity.

How often do you have to replace headlight bulbs? And if it only takes an hour, why on earth would you spend $250 at the dealer to do it? I don't know about you, but I certainly don't get paid $250/hour at my day job (don't forget that car dealer mechanics don't work at your home or workplace, you have to bring the car to them and sit there while they do the job).

DRLs don't burn out quickly if you don't cheap out on them. Get the car model that has LED DRLs and you won't have this problem. Only crappy models with halogen bulbs still do this. If you're driving a car with halogen bulbs, you're driving an unsafe car according to the IIHS, which won't award a good safety rating to any such vehicle: only cars with HID or LED lighting qualify. Night visibility with halogen is atrocious.

Because the damn lights keep breaking every year and are not user serviceable unless you happen to have access to a garage and know how to remove the bumper to access the headlights and swap them.

I can just bring my car to the dealer and avoid dealing with all of this crap.

What kind of crappy car do you have that requires removing the bumper?

Mine isn't the easiest in the world to change bulbs on, but it's not that hard, as you just have to pull out the fender liners a little to get to the bulbs. But with HIDs, I've never needed to do that, and likely won't for years to come. I guess paying extra for HIDs ends up paying for itself...

Replace both at the dealer. So $100/hr labor for each and $50 for parts and tax. In the Bay Area the labor cost for every skilled/semi-skilled job costs at least $100/hr. Plumber, electrician, tree trimming, etc.

I would assume its newer? My headlights are cake to replace. But my Subaru is from nearly two decades ago.

The original comment probably should've included "older". In general most older cars are easier to repair. Just replaced my headlights a couple days ago in 01 forester. Took about 3 minutes. Changing a fog light in my 11' 328i is insane. Had to take off the wheel and go in from the wheel well instead of just having screws on the front. Seems intentional sometimes.

Honestly, her car will probably be a Subaru for this reason. Thinking a Forester since they are a bit larger and she needs the space for kids/horse tack/dogs/etc.

I highly value the ability to fix my own problems if I want to. Same reason I prioritize FOSS. I can fix issues myself.

Eventually I will probably be forced to move on, but my cars downfall will be rust and I estimate it has another decade at least before that happens.

Side note: my brother and I were raised in compact sedans. I don’t recall any issues. I get that with more kids, a third row would have been important, but the crossovers most people are buying (including the Forester) don’t have that. Can someone explain this “need space for kids” thing?

For us its width. My Legacy isn't wide enough for three car seats. A Forester is. A third row would be amazing, but Subaru doesn't make such a vehicle and Subaru is basically a requirement for me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subaru_Ascent is being built and has 3 rows of seats. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subaru_Tribeca was the previous version, which they stopped selling in 2014 because of poor sales. I've seen them on the street and they were not attractive.

Yeah, the Tribeca did not look nice at all. Wasn't aware it was a 3 row though.

This new one looks pretty nice, and it confirms what I thought I had heard on the radio the other day about a 3 row Subie. See what the wife thinks...

> "I will probably ve sticking with my Subaru and get my wife (who is looking for a new car after hers died) an early 00s vehicle that I can still repair for less than ridiculous prices."

A simple counter-argument is that an early 00s vehicle will break a lot more than a newer car. So even if you can fix it yourself or repairs are cheaper (which is questionable), a new car would break down a lot less often.

A counter argument to your counter argument, in point of example would be any Land Rover / Range Rover vehicle. If you've owned one, then you know - at a certain point they start falling apart. It doesn't matter what model year they are. On the whole, it's a certainty (with some rare outliers that run forever). The newer model years have considerably worse repairability. I'm lucky in that my 2012 is still relatively easy to work on.

Repairing older model years _tends_ to be cheaper as there are more surplus parts as more vehicles are retired. I've never lived in a county that didn't have several junkyards.

Reliability, repairability, and durability varies greatly by year, make, and model. Newer model years do not mean that all three factors always improve, and frequently mean that some or all of those factors regress. JD Power, Consumer Reports et al run yearly technical reports on nearly every vehicle out there if you're curious.

Land Rover has a long reputation for being unreliable, so that's not a very good argument. If you want reliable, buy a Japanese brand, not a British one.

Land Rover is Indian, not British - bought by Tata in 2008.

Where is the car engineered and manufactured? I'm pretty sure it's not India, just like Volvos are not engineered or manufactured in China.

I can imagine the car industry is big in lobbying against "right to repair it yourself" laws.

Automobiles nowadays are more like electronics with more sophisticated ECUs and drive-by-wire technologies on throttle, breaks etc. With self-driving on the horizon, they are going to be more compute intensive and be more powerful in computing than your smartphones and your average personal computers. Btw, electric vehicles are more suitable for self-driving due to the electricity requirements of AI computing.

Are you ever going to be able to fix them yourself if they are broken? Probably not (unless you have a electronic shop with all the equipments and are savvy in electronics like iFixIt guys do, but even then you can't fix a IC chip if it's fried.)

Just like an iPhone, as it's more integrated and smarter and more powers, the repairability is going down. So get used to it.

PS: on the flip side, more IC chips in designs generally provide a more solid and reliable product (probably with exception) and cheaper the cost due to economy of scale in manufacturing and reduced in labor, which is why you can have an EV with 200miles of range with less than $10k price tag.

My grandfather was a mechanic. In the 80s ECUs became the normative and he was unable to keep up with the electronic side of mechanical work and had to retire. I was talking to my mechanic last week about this and he said he would probably be out of a job in another decade because the next generation of mechanics are going to be electricians.

>When they diagnosed it I did some research and discovered that I could replace it, but much like the market for HVAC parts, I wasn't allowed to purchase the part...

What are you talking about? You can buy all the automotive HVAC parts you need on Ebay or elsewhere. I did this for my ex-wife's car a couple years ago; with the help of a friend and his hose/gauge set, we replaced the compressor and recharged the system. It wasn't too hard.

Did you try looking on Ebay for the controller you needed?

For my '15 Mazda (non-hybrid), I can easily buy any part I need online from various OEM parts stores.

I meant HVAC for a house. Needed a part for my furnace and I had to get someone to buy the part for me because there were no 3rd party parts and Trane only sells to licensed HVAC. Felt like I was 18 and trying to buy alcohol.

Had to do this myself about 10 years ago.

A delay relay in my AC burned out and wouldn't allow the unit to shut the fan down. Shut the breaker off, went up, pulled the main fuse pack, pulled the cover, found the relay. Pretty much a burnt husk of plastic.

Looked at the wiring diagram inside and in my manual for the unit (it was built in the early 1970s, when full documentation for everything was pretty standard), just to double check everything along the way was still ok. It all looked ok, so I went online to find the part - and ran into the same issue. For a simple relay.

I wasn't going to pay several hundred dollars to someone to change out a relay. That's dumb.

So I got in contact with my local Burning Man community, and someone on there was an AC repairman. I let him know what I had found, and he set me up with an invoice to purchase the part at a local HVAC parts place. Got the part, installed it, and it hasn't been a problem since.

I can understand the reasoning of needing licensed professionals for certain things, but basic electro-mechanical repair of appliances shouldn't be one of them. It wasn't always this way, either; I'm not sure when it changed (probably sometime in the 1960s), but before then it was almost expected that a homeowner would do his or her own repairs and maintenance on their home.

That said - likely the change came about in part due to shoddy electrical work that you can almost always find on homes that haven't been renovated that were built before such rules and regulations went into effect...

Isn't this a matter of having mechanics and electricians certified in maintaining electric cars? Presumably as these cars become more popular electricians will flock to this line of work because that's where the demand is going.

I'm more electrically minded, so in some ways I find the opposite to be true.

Electric cars are not fundamentally less fixable. Mechanics just don't know them yet.

it's a transitional period, a bit like smartphones, you can't put your fingers on the part, you have to have hot air gun, lenses etc etc. Repair shop will transition but so far the status was : electronics are not for repair..

When EV will be a major % people will fix because it will be regular market/customers. Also as other people said, EVs are 10x, if not more, simpler than ICE so we may (depending on QA) need less repairs.

Also I believe that swappable parts will become the norm, quick swap batteries ala Tesla, etc etc

I have a second car just for doing school runs. Never does more than 5km in a day, never goes over 40km/h. Still it requires expensive maintenance. I have long said I should replace it with something more like a golf-cart or electric bike with kids in a trailer or something. This kind of car could be that. I’m happy with a 20km range but it has to be cheap. The current car I use is worth less than the cost of its overdue timing belt change.

A bike trailer is less than $200. But if the trips are shorter than 5km, why not let the kids do them by themselves? How old are they?

Cargo bike is most excellent for these kind of trips. I take my 0 and 2 year old in an Urban Arrow to school / daycare.

Unfortunately they cost more than a used car. The Urban Arrow family is like 5000€.

This always ignores running costs however. Parking and insurance alone is 200 USD/mo where I live. Electric bikes can be expensive to acquire but then they run on next to nothing.

Of course. But imho the advantage of a cargo bike over a normal bike with a trailer isn't worth the extra cost. Not to mention that for poorer people it's often easier to pay higher running costs than coming up with a big chunk of cash up front (see Sam Vines' theory of economic inequality).

But the bicycle maintenance cost is trivial, the fuel is cheap and there are no licensing costs.

Isn't it true that bicycle fuel (human food) is actually more expensive than gasoline or electricity? It has a much larger carbon footprint per mile anyway.

And I spend way more of my time on bicycle maintenance than on car maintenance. So if my time is part of it, then that's got to be 10X the cost. But only because I earn more than a car mechanic per hour.

Thought of that way, having to use a bicycle is part of what keeps folks poor - soaking up their time and the larger operating cost...

Cycling is cheaper than driving.

Calories are cheap: Cycling for one hour you burn maybe 500 calories. That's four table spoons of butter.

Bicycle maintenance is cheap: I pay about 20 Euros a month because I ride a lot and don't do any repairs myself. You can easily save half of that if you're willing to get your hands dirty.

Cycling is not much slower than driving: Average driving speed in Berlin is 25km/h. During rush hour it's 9km/h. It's not hard to average 15km/h on a bike, even during rush hour. 20km/h is doable if you're fit.

Surely it is, considering the purchase cost of a car.

But the daily cost is not insignificant. And if you can't afford a car, you pay the daily cost forever.

Cycling for an hour you burn maybe 2000 calories. That's a whole day's food. It can be your 2nd largest expense if you're poor. And the time spent on bicycle maintenance (tires, chain, wheels, adjustment etc) is 'easy to do yourself' for well-paid middle-class folks. After 12 hours in the factory or on your feet in a big box store, the time may not seem so cheap.

Then add in job risk when you get a flat on the way to work. Not insignificant if you're on a clock at a minimum-wage job. Could lose that job.

Its easy to enjoy bikes when well-employed and your time is your own. But for many they are part of being poor, part of the reason they stay poor.

Your numbers are way off. Even elite pro cyclists are unable to burn 2000kcal/hr when racing. The estimate of 500kcal/hr is more realistic for regular people.

Getting a flat is insignificant. You can change a tube in less than 5 minutes. New tubes and patch kits are very cheap. And cars also get flat tires.

Ok that estimate is better, 500 calories per hour. But how many calories per mile? That's the proper comparison.

And again, 'very cheap' is relative. In a minimum-wage job it can be your entire discretionary income for you shift. And when I commuted by bicycle I got several flats over a year. I've driven a car for decades without a single flat that interrupted my trip (slow leaks).

And actually not many folks can change a bicycle tire, certainly not in 5 minutes, not at the side of a busy street.

All this glib dismissal of the cost of bicycling seems to stem from a fairly comfortable viewpoint.

A typical cyclist burns about 48kcal/mi. In terms of cost of calories that's about $0.06 worth of Russet potatoes at Walmart. Call it $0.10 total if you include cooking costs. Very cheap. And remember that people burn a few calories just sitting in a car as well.

https://caloriesburnedhq.com/calories-burned-biking/

Every cyclist I know can change a tube. Most people learned how to do this as children. For those who never learned, ParkTool has a great series of videos showing how to do basic maintenance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqR6nlZNeU8

The real reasons that people don't commute by bike include safety, comfort, time, security, and cargo capacity. It's not a cost issue. (I totally understand that bike commuting isn't practical for most people.)

The 20€/month that I pay while not doing any maintenance myself is still cheaper than the insurance for a car.

Cars can break down as well, frequently if you drive a pile of junk because you can't afford a good car. Flat tires are of course annoying, but they don't happen very frequently if you have for example Schwalbe Marathon tires and changing an inner tube is not terribly hard. Certainly easier than fixing a car, and at least an order of magnitude cheaper than a trip to a car mechanic.

A more realistic problem with bikes for poor people is that you can't do terribly long commutes on a bike, so it limits the number of job offers you can accept without moving.

Regarding flat tires on a bike - I have to endorse Amerityre's products here (as a satisfied customer - at least when I last rode a bike):

https://amerityre.com/our-flat-free-products/flat-free-bicyc...

They aren't cheap, but they also aren't your standard airless, flat-free tire, either. They don't feel like "mush" when you ride on them, making you have to pedal harder - they feel identical to a regular air-filled bicycle tire. You can drill a hole through them, and they still feel and work perfectly fine.

If you ride a bike and tend to get a lot of flats, take a look into their products - you won't be disappointed.

5+7 so the smaller isn’t allowed to go alone yet, but within 2 years they will.

I've long had the notion that we shouldn't drive anything heavier than a golf cart in cities. It would be a lot safer for everyone and even teenagers could drive them.

Something like this town? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcVGqtmd2wM

Stayed on Ambergris Caye in Belize a few months ago, where almost all of the vehicles in town are golf carts. The air pollution was terrible in town because most of them were gas powered. It would've been amazing if they were all electric though!

Let me know how well that works out for you here in Phoenix during the middle of July.

For some areas of the US (notably the southwest), the summer months are brutal. Air conditioning is virtually a requirement, not a luxury. Unless we mandate that all businesses install showers for employees (and we change as a society and not mind people being sweaty and smelly otherwise).

The majority of power used in a car during the summer months - beyond moving itself and passengers - comes from the AC system. These systems can sometimes exceed the BTU output of a house AC unit, mainly because they are fighting the heat input from the outside constantly, due to the lack of insulation in an automobile passenger cabin. So they have to be more powerful to offset that. Which means they need a power system to keep up, and historically that has been an IC engine. I'm not sure how an electric vehicle's AC system fares during a hot summer day, or how it effects the battery charge, but I'd expect it to be fairly heavy on that front.

Could we do as you suggest? Certainly we could; we did something similar (more or less) for hundreds of years before automotive AC was a standard item (in fact, the automobile was around a long time before AC became a readily available option). At the same time, though, certain social standards were different, plus there's the argument that cities weren't as built up or as dense (heat island effect), making them (marginally) cooler than today.

Here in Phoenix, though - it starts to become a furnace around the end of May, and continues until about the end of October. There are nights where it never falls below 100F at times; most of the time it never falls below 90F at night. There isn't an easy solution for comfortable personal transportation in such conditions, except for the automobile as we currently know it.

Maybe my car's AC is underpowered, but I get much sweatier from a 15 minute drive in my car with the AC cranked if my car's been sitting in the sun (with black paint, black leather, moonroof) than I do from a 15 minute walk in the same sun.

Maybe you can move here? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcVGqtmd2wM

A school run that is less than 5 km round trip? Can't it be done on foot?

It will be once they do it on their own. Right now it takes too much time. My workday is already down to 6-7h even with car drop off. Another 30min for school walk commute doesn’t make sense at the moment.

It’s a shame this isn’t possible at the moment, I suppose the safety requirements of cars that need to be able to run on highways means a substantial minimum cost.

I almost wonder whether we shouldn’t have two overlapping road systems, one for residential streets and one for transport routes.

You could have a class of cars that only run on the residential streets which would be half way between a moped and a car, with 1-4 seats, a range of 30-50 miles, and a cost of $5-8k.

> I almost wonder whether we shouldn’t have two overlapping road systems, one for residential streets and one for transport routes.

It's not unrealistic at all, some cities already limit access to city center for some vehicles.

IMHO it shouldn't be an outright ban, just a big financial disincentive, so that people with big cars happen in the city center rarely enough not to matter, but they can still afford to drive there a few times a year when they really need to. Maybe on the order of 1 USD per minute?

You could maybe just do it with speed limits, maybe limiting the speed to 20mph or 25mph would be enough to de-escalate the threat and make it safe for smaller cars. Pretty much all of central London apart from Westminster has a 20mph limit now. Or use the existing congestion charge infrastructure, introduce a new low weight class for cars which are exempt. An additional new standard for a smaller parking size would also help.

The main point is that standards have to be adopted by multiple cities otherwise the market won’t be large enough for manufacturers.

We sort of do have that class of cars: Neighborhood Electric Vehicles. They are restricted to 25mph.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neighborhood_Electric_Vehicle

Not sure what your definition of cheap is. You can get a used Nissan Leaf for under $5k. Expect 40 - 50 miles of range on a worn battery.

https://www.autotrader.com/cars-for-sale/vehicledetails.xhtm...

One of my friends used an electric tricycle (the kind in China used for light hauling) to take his kids to school during his sabbatical in Beijing. Might not be legal in Europe though.

> The current car I use is worth less than the cost of its overdue timing belt change.

If your car has an interference engine, that timing belt change could get even more expensive really quick, should it fail...

Not sure I understand. By “worth less than the cost of the cam belt change” I mean I’m expecting it to fail at which point I’ll scrap the car, because it’s not worth doing the cam belt change for 2x what the car is worth. I can just get another car with 3-4 years left until the cam belt change for that kind of money.

Ignoring whether this is a great engineering accomplishment or not:

> In addition, the big data cloud that is created as the result of the information collected from the ORA app, the ORA shopping site and the Tmall e-shop opens the way to the development of multiple scenarios for offline sales

I don't see that much discussion about this trend, but I consider it a threat to security as well as just plain bad UX. All these UX gimmicks and "features" I already loathe in web apps, I really don't want them in my car. Pay to unlock, tracking, remote control, AI. Sure, it's comfort, but what is the price? At this point I prefer a 90's car where you just turn the key and it works or don't.

Is this just "get-off-my-lawn" thinking?

I think one trend we've seen emerging in markets everywhere is that despite competition in the market there isn't significant differentiation. So you'd think great, we've got this tech and I'll go with the company where I pay a little more and don't have to give up all my privacy. But instead what we end up with is 90% of companies bundling in all the privacy invasion stuff (because they like the new revenue stream or the share holders demand they follow the trend or they simply can't make the margin on the product) and then 10% of companies go right to the top end, and whilst you get your privacy you're also paying for massively premium products.

I see this in the smart home devices - you can trust NONE of them, with the exception of a tiny minority like Apple who also then charge a fortune extra because they're trying to sell a premium product for other reasons. So in the end you're not overwhelmed by choice, you're railroaded.

Nah I don’t think this is get off my lawn. “Features” have become the modern version of the next big thing, and humans are drawn to them like moths to a flame. In the rush we’ve given up a lot of personal rights to corporations without second thought. This isn’t like the invention of cars where people irrationally wanted to cling to a simpler way of life. This has been a tremendous paradigm shift for the autonomy and liberty of our citizens.

And as we see China implementing a dystopian social credit system, we really ought to be considering what traps were setting for our future selves.

Oh you didn’t pay off your Facebook credit card on time? Guess we’ll deactivate your car and drive it back to the factory until you sort that out. Hm looks like you like to go to some sketchy businesses that we don’t really think you should be going to? Ok we’re going to block off areas of the city where you’re permitted to drive to - trust us, it’s for your own good.

If we had that mythical “benevolent government” then sure this shouldn’t be an issue. But in this country you can literally be chilling in your apartment playing video games (or just chilling...) and get raided/murdered by police who are following a random SWAT call.

I don’t trust my primary mode of escape to be locked down by the government. And no one should.

Does anyone know the $$ hidden in the phrase "with incentives". If there are 20k of incentives, this press release is much less impressive than if there are $2k of incentives.

Personally, I am very bullish on electric cars, and am hoping this is the start of a lot of other automakers releasing affordable (to little ol me) electric cars.

This article explains it well but it's complicated. Around $9k or $7k

https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/comparing-u.s.-and-chines...

"The subsidy program was renewed again in 2016 - up to RMB 55,000 ($8,736) for each BEV and up to RMB 30,000 ($4,765) for each PHEV. It will decrease by 20 percent in 2017 and 2018 based on 2016’s standard"

Is "Great Wall Motor" a name that's supposed to appeal to English-speaking audiences? It's not my first language, but even to me "Motor" sounds just wrong, it should be "Motors". No matter how often I read it, it still seems wrong.

Sorry for bikeshedding, but I don't drive a car :P

Keep in mind this is with significant subsidies. A 33kWh battery pack alone costs more than that retail. You can make anything cheap to the consumer when you funnel tax money into it.

Like "cheap" energy from carbon emissions from coal, oil, and gas? If you mention subsidies for EVs, must mention the MUCH larger and historically MASSIVE subsidies all polluters have been given by dumping their garbage into our atmosphere for free.

Another way to look at it is to see the subsidy as an investment by the govt. and then calculate the ROI on that investment. As long as it's above 0, it should be ok.

With subsidized electric vehicles, there are huge savings in terms of cost of imported oil, new jobs created in a new industry segment as a whole, new areas of economy opened up for growth, geo-political implications in terms of more negotiating power for purchasing energy, etc.

Not all subsidies are bad, not all capitalist systems are good.

Between the Chinese price competitiveness and the vulnerability the car faces vis-a-vis 3 ton roadtrains ("Fords" and "RAMs")...

... we can be sure the US will do lots to ban importing these.

Indeed. The free market is a concept only applied to other countries, never to the US.

As an American, I've been thoroughly and continuously shocked to see how roughly 50% of voters seem very devoted to supporting mercantilism and cronyism, as if this somehow makes their lives better.

But then again this is also the same demographic that lines up to pay $50,000 for a truck that delivers marginal value compared to a $6,000 used Nissan or Mitsubishi.

Especially when the majority of truck owners don't haul anything heavy (concrete, tile, metal).

> seem very devoted to supporting mercantilism and cronyism

America was arguably made great via the free markets and market forces. People know this instinctively. However, these same firms now push this idea to become rent-seekers, and I don't feel like we've seen an adjustment from the left of politics to counter this, or point out economic market failures.

cf: safety regulations. Seen as hurting business. Yes, they stop individual companies making super-normal profits. But that's because they're stopping these same companies from selling the common good for profit.

Wildly off on a tangent, I wonder if we're not going to see someone running on an anti-corruption platform at some point soon, where corruption is explicitly inclusive of: lobbying, rent-seeking, gerrymandering, and so on.

I hope someone does run but I'm not optimistic they would deliver.

I am biased. I hate regulation because it isn't applied fairly.

My gf's parents had their dry cleaner business shut down by NY state, who fined them $50,000 for allegedly failing to dispose of chemicals. They never paid, NY state never sued.

However, Lawrence Aviation Co DID dump chemicals in NY state that permanently destroyed the water supply in Port Jefferson NY.

The owner was fined $100,000, a small percentage of his networth compared to my gf's parents who are paycheck to paycheck.

He served 1 year in prison despite potentially poisoning the 100,000 people who were on the local water supply.

American-style democracy aka managed democracy aka inverted totalitarianism

Also arguably, America was made great by an abundance of exploitable resources, a government that was only occasionally interested in health and safety regulations, and a steady stream of low cost easily exploitable immigrants.

Another important factor was blatant disregard for other country’s intellectual property - something the US now criticizes China for. A well researched book that covers how the UK and later the US “borrowed” technology from other countries to fuel their economic development is “Kicking away the ladder”.

well let us be honest here. that 50% crosses both political sides and isn't just limited to what they spend on vehicle purchases. A more common example than your slightly extreme car choice would be in cell phones. people line up to buy thousand dollar cell phones all the time when phones that are half if not a quarter of that work just fine.

This is what makes any free country work. Respect for private property which includes money earned from one's labor to make the purchases wanted without recrimination by the government we live under.

As for trucks, most actually are used to haul something but just like passenger cars many will have time where they are not fully employed to the extent their ability permits. just driving into work the majority of cars carry only a fourth of the people they could carry and many of them can be fifty, sixty, or even more tens of thousands of dollars. Don't worry about it, focus on yourself and be better

I haven't seen actual figures, and it would be difficult to measure, but I have a distinct impression that most trucks in the suburban area I live are used to commute to work, not haul anything. Around here, they're status symbols, not work vehicles.

Also, in case of accident, the amount of steel in those trucks protects their drivers by increasing the lethality to other vehicles. So, I don't entirely not worry about large trucks driving around me.

And then there's fuel efficiency. Other people's bills at the fuel pump is not my business, sure. But then, there's a pretty solid scientific consensus that man made climate change is on course to have a drastic effect on living conditions on this planet. But I concede that you're free not to believe in the scientific method if you don't want to.

So focus on yourself, but do pay attention to others.

This comment feels like flame bait, but FYI the US runs the largest trade deficits of any country in the world.

Our current account deficit is half an order a magnitude larger than the #2.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_current...

Chinese cars haven’t made it in the anerican market yet. Safety standards are their biggest hurdle (and yes, the bar is higher because cars are on average heavier). GreatWall has had some success in Australia, but with a very mixed record on safety.

$9k? That’s less than a Tesla battery pack.

checks specs

62mph top speed, 33kwh battery, 150mi real world range, looks like the size of a smart car. Yep. No surprises here.

I bet the fit and finish is worse than a Ford Ranger

In other words: a vending machine calling itself a car.

Interesting vehicle, but the design is such a rip-off. Honda Urban EV in the front and Smart forfour in the back.

It would be interesting to know what the unsubsidized price is and if it ever comes to the west.

The e.Go Life has a similar concept but does not seem to be able to compete on price or battery capacity.

This actually has almost the same range as my petrol car - it's a terrible Kia automatic with a microscopic gas tank that gets 225 miles on a full tank. I suppose these won't be sold in Europe because they don't pass safety standards?

How do these do in a crash test?

No one knows

They'll crash just fine.

It's not the fall, it's the hard stop at the ending that gets ya.

The top speed is only 100kmh or so, so it's probably subject to some special rules

100kmh is plenty fast enough to have a major accident.

There are lot of fatal crashes in cities as well, because going 30 while getting hit frontally by a speedster at 60 is still releasing 90dv of energy and that scales quadratically with speed

Euro NCAP will be mostly “nope”. It’s not that the Chinese can’t build decent cars (Qoros 3 got 5 stars) but definitely not at that price point.

Also no dealer, service or parts supply here in Europe so no thanks. Stick with my Citroen.

We get a fair few of them (edit: Great Walls, not this new model) in Australia, and they're pretty universally considered utter crap. From reliability to crash tests, they consistently just don't live up to the marketing and hype. Sure they're cheap, but this seems to very much be a "you get what you pay for" cheap, not a "great bang for buck" cheap.

Personally I've only been in 1, one of the newer utes, and it felt like a 15 yr old base-model rental, despite being brand new and spec'd out.

Few examples of previous models bombing their testing:

> The budget Great Wall Steed ute has scored a shocking two stars in the latest round of ANCAP crash testing, against the 2016 ratings criteria.

https://www.caradvice.com.au/545184/great-wall-steed-flunks-...

> Chinese Haval H9 SUV slammed in world first independent crash test, conducted in Australia

> [...]sales of Chinese vehicles have almost come to standstill in Australia after safety recalls of Great Wall Motors utes due to asbestos components and poor crash test ratings of earlier models in recent years.

https://www.news.com.au/technology/innovation/motoring/chine...

> they're pretty universally considered utter crap. From reliability to crash tests, they consistently just don't live up to the marketing and hype

If I remember my history correctly, this used to be true of Japanese exports too (and Taiwanese, and Korean, et al). Hopefully the Chinese will improve with time, and start to be known for high-quality exports!

I've ridden a Chinese electric taxi in Guangzhou. it was fine. If you want to walk away from a high speed crash I'd chose something else. If you stick under 60km/h which is what an awful lot of urban driving is, in traffic, I think you'd survive.

A 1960s mini minor, or a fiat 500 or even a fiat panda or a Citroen 2cv would be as dangerous. And yet, entirely street legal.

Tbf, Fiat Panda has recently been downgraded to 1 out of 5 stars in European safety tests, due to the fact that the most advanced safety feature it has is a beeper if you don't put your seatbelt on. So while still legal, hopefully the dire safety rating should put at least some buyers off.

Static seatbelts. God.. what a pain they were. I liked the first panda, it felt a lot like a 2cv or a mini. I suspect it would be hard to get real insurance now, for the obvious reasons. Mind you.. the Dutch canta.. now there's a deathtrap and more than a few of them on th streets of Amsterdam

Wikipedia says that the Panda gets 4/5 for the 2012 version - -the latest apparently.

As always, Wikipedia is outdated. And I was wrong too - Fiat Panda was awarded no stars recently, the worst possible score: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.fleetnews.co.uk/amp/news/ma...

You have to be careful when interpreting 'safety feature'. It does of course have airbags and SIPS but NCAP is now considering driver-assistance equipment as part of the assessment. So they moved the goalposts and retested the same Panda.

And as a result year's NCAP 'stars' signify something different to previous model years, so a zero rating in 2018 might still be better than four stars in 2014. That is important when comparing against second-hand models.

Personally I think that NCAP should just rate on actual impact protection measures and provide additional, supplemtary ratings for other features.

there is one more reasons why electric cars are popular in Beijing or shanghai, good luck getting license plate for gasoline engine and license plate itself will cost almost as much as this car

if you would have to pay free thousands euros just for license plate and even to get it you would have to win lottery, most if the people would think twice about buying gasoline engine cars

If your definition of eletric car is just car with a battery and engine then...

https://twitter.com/GeorgStieler/status/1075195222953349120

Wish we could get cheap cars in the U.S. Our prices are crazy.

I recall hearing the smart car could be sold cheaply in its original country, but after importing it and meeting all U.S. requirements, the price quadrupled.

I've always wondered how much would the price of a car/truck decrease, if advertising for vehicles would be banned? 10%? 20%? 30%?

And if they authorized cars to be sold outside of showrooms, how much would they drop further?

It seems to me that a huge portion of the price winds up paying for advertising + the showroom building + the salesperson and their administrative staff.

I hope one day we can go from factory -> consumer without all this extra cost baked in.

> Wish we could get cheap cars in the U.S. Our prices are crazy.

They are actually lower than in Europe, mind you.

The Scion iM a.k.a. Toyota Auris starts at ~$17k. in Europe to give an example.

Is there some rule somewhere that electric cars have to be fugly? (with some notable exceptions obviously)

Without AMP (actually works in with noscript): https://electrek.co/2018/12/27/great-wall-motor-ora-r1-all-e...

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