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Comment by danmg | Hacker News Reader

Saying that "none of this is anyone’s fault" and blaming this on new technology is entirely disingenuous.

This is 100% GM's fault because they learned nothing after the government bailed them out in 2009. They continued to scrimp on labor and build quality, and that resulted in horrible cars that no one wants. And their response? Scrimp even more on labor.

EVs make up a very small slice of the new car market and virtually none of the truck market. What we're witnessing is a form of kabuki theater, where it looks like GM's hands are tied and the only path forward is to build cars entirely in China. Mind you, this is at the same time that most foreign owned companies build and assemble their cars in domestic US facilities.

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EV is a small part of the market today. But it's growing fast. As someone who owns an electric car, my next car will definitely be one and I wouldn't buy anything else.

These union deals last 4 years. So the manufacturers have to think about labor and planning long term.

Being optimistic, EVs will never have more than a 30% market share because they're incompatible with a large portion of people's lifestyles. They will find an audience with people exclusively commute and have the facilities to charge at home. At the moment, there's some cachet to having a Tesla but the reality of owning one is represented in the deprecation rate.

The energy density of battery technology will never reach that of petroleum. Just bolting on bigger and bigger batteries to try to overcome that has its own engineering, safety and environmental problems.

> The energy density of battery technology will never reach that of petroleum.

Not anytime soon at least. But that's besides the point. They don't have to do that, they just have to be good enough.

For people who can use an EV, and for people who are willing to accept that a single vehicle can't do everything.

Most people don't want to keep multiple vehicles to cover all their bases. Just look at the number of pickup trucks sold in the US. How many of those people are hauling stuff or using it for work? While there are landscapers, tradesmen and laborers who do that, the vast majority of them are essentially commuter cars. People often get them, among other reasons, because they might come in handy if they need to move stuff. These are the same people who will never accept an EV because it doesn't have the overall utility of their other vehicle.

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