China’s $4k electric cars tap huge market Tesla can’t reach
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11ExTYIEJm0
tldr: great alternative to a scooter.
That said, I personally don't own a car for ethical reasons, and I'd love this small one for shopping or just small trips on the weekends.
Or if we lived closer to where we worked but that's seems like a more complex problem.
Unfortunately, highways require a certain minimum vehicle size. The best you could possibly do is have a short coupe with 2 seats. It wouldn't significantly influence the size of the vehicle but waste more resources for the few times where you need a 3-4 person vehicle. The savings to be had are way too slim. However, driving a pick up truck for your commute is absolutely a waste of resources because there are smaller and more aerodynamic cars that are commute worthy.
>Or if we lived closer to where we worked but that's seems like a more complex problem.
It's the only solution. Building a von Neuman architecture style city is absolutely stupid for society since the world is inherently parallel. There is no logical reason to have massive central work place districts. Each office building is a cpu core and each residential building is a memory chip in its own right. We don't need to put all the cpu cores next to each other and put the memory somewhere else. A distributed development pattern is significantly more efficient since data and computation are next to each other.
When I was in US I drove to nearest big box store, loaded my pickup and drove to my place. Easy, unfortunately no other country I've found such convenience and this makes me wanna go back to US.
For the rare occasions when that wouldn't be feasible, they'll deliver for a moderate charge. It would make no sense to pay all the costs of keeping an extra vehicle (or a much larger one than I generally need) just to avoid a couple of deliveries per year.
People who need it barely once or twice a year for home take an estate car, rent one for a taxi, borrow a trailer off a friend, or get the store to deliver - because owning your own van or pickup just for that reason would be considered completely insane.
In the UK we have the Ford Transit van and people that can do things for you. You get stuff delivered or collected. The guy with the Transit van gets a high level of utilisation out of it. People can therefore have normal cars and SUVs. Or a bicycle.
We don't have those man size trucks with dual tyres in the UK and certainly not at US prices. You can buy Ranger and Hilux size trucks and those are a bit too large for UK roads. In the US these would be toys, not man size at all.
In the UK you can play a game watching cars and counting how many have more than one person in them. In the US you can count how many trucks are hauling stuff. They ain't.
OTOH, in 41 years I had exactly 0 times needed large MDF boards or wood planks or steel pipes...
You do this like once every 10 years? I wouldn't choose a car on this.
A couple of years ago I did maintenance to my garden. I ordered planks and bags of cement from Amazon for next day delivery because I couldn't even be bothered to order from a specialist store.
But if I wanted to, there's a store with bulk construction supplies literally at the bottom of my road, and a more retail oriented one 20 minutes away.
But I don't even have a drivers license. Never felt worth the time.
[looks at personally-owned half-acre of forest] [looks at car]
I own a car so I CAN own & preserve substantial undeveloped natural land. You get more city space by me not being there at all.
A million people are killed directly every year by cars. Many more are seriously injured and disabled. Another million indirectly due to air pollution. They are also the number one cause of micro plastics around waterways. Billions are spent on hospitals, doctors, nurses, ambulances, police to support all this death.
Much more is spent covering our countryside on roads, that kill millions of animals every year.
And encouraging urban sprawl means cities take up more space, destroying wild life habitat.
This is just some of the awful things cars have bought to our world, not mentioned are wars, major spills, toppled governments, bribery, etc...
What's the point in saying: "But you do some unrelated thing???"
Is the argument that there's no point in making a small difference, it's only worth it if you're 100% ideologically pure?
Because I don't see where road deaths and microplastics in local rivers come into owning a computer.
The reality is almost all of modern technology, materials, tools, and life have huge externalities. Us being alive consuming resources and emitting green house gases further pushes us towards terrible climate changes, while taking away space from nature before us.
It just feels very arbitrary to stop at personal car ownership but maintain the benefits of all other externalities. Perhaps the OP also has many other resists to modern life under ethical guise. The computer is the one known exception here.
Making a choice not to buy a car makes a measurable impact.
It's not a gotcha to say that they partake in society.
By your logic, it'd be arbitrary to safely dispose of motor oil instead of conveniently dumping it into the local park's pond.
Yes, it's incredibly arbitrary because cars don't suffer from low density development patterns. They don't cause pollution. They also don't cost a significant amount of money and this also doesn't force less well off people to get expensive leases because everyone buys low end cars. The tax burden of suburbia is absolutely insignificant. The fact that you have more roads per resident decreases the tax burden significantly. Their only fatal flaw is that new developments aren't funded by the federal government and private developers. Thanks to cars and suburbia municipalities are swimming in cash and never have to worry about their finances.
We should ban bicycles and pedestrian paths. Everyone should drive, even children. This is the future.
It stops feeling like that once you replace assumptions with numbers.
— Mister Gotcha (https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/)
That was not what he said. He was quite clear in making a personal decision. There was no force on anyone to make that same decision. That you are reading that into it might say more about the way you think :)
"Producing a medium-sized new car costing £24,000 may generate more than 17 tonnes of CO2e – almost as much as three years' worth of gas and electricity in the typical UK home."[0]
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/green-living-blog/20...
This was discussed recently here on HN, I'll try to find the conversation.
Edit: here's the conversation, with link to source:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24716921
It's about 50,000 to 112,00km depending on the source of electricity used to charge the electric car.
https://www.motorbiscuit.com/are-electric-cars-worse-for-the...
> ... compared to most gasoline-powered cars, an electric car should become carbon neutral in less than 3 years of driving.
Rejecting the car for ethical reasons should be accompanied by rejecting most of the modern society & infrastructure as well.
"Outsourcing" would be if his decision not to drive a car required him to pay people to drive cars on his behalf. That's the definition of the word "outsourcing". But you're talking about transportation that occurs whether he drives a car or not. The groceries you get at the store are driven there also. Him choosing not to drive a car literally has 0 impact on the transportation infrastructure of the supply chain. That is not outsourcing.
But just because that part of the logistic chain involves ICE vehicles does not mean that every part has to involve ICE vehicles nor does it mean that people not using a car to do their shopping are "outsourcing" anything: The large-scale logistics happen regardless of how people get to the grocer, people getting there by foot/bicycle/public transport have literally zero influence on that end of the logistics.
Another advantage is that they don't need to get inspected every other year by the authorities (TÜV) and due to the standard 50ccm two-stroke scooter motor they are really cheap to maintain.
how odd, in Italy small ICE vehicles in this category (which I believe is called "Light quadricycles" or L6e) seem to be marketed mostly to kids from affluent families. .
Look at ads for fashion that actually targets older people. It will also feature people in their early thirties, at most. Everybody still knows exactly what the intention is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_CB50 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_Super_Cub
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_cc_Grand_Prix_motorcycle_ra...
Europe just places a relatively high bar for driving skills. You do see the outcome in road safety and much more orderly driving behaviour (with the usual caveat that Europe is diverse and this applies more to some regions than some others yadda yadda).
I've driven in many countries and Italy had more than an equal share of near death experiences.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
The general trend for pedestrian and cycling deaths is up in the US, because increasingly popular SUVs and crossovers strike a person higher on the body, and also are more likely to push a person under the car towards the wheels or forward where they’ll be run over again, rather than over the hood.
https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/new-study-suggests-todays-s...
What does that actually cover? Just the administrative things you do at the DMV or driving school / exams / etc?
Germany is probably like France, which means that the 1500 covers driving school + exam + actual licence.
You need to have a certain number of driving school hours (22 I think?) to be able to sit the practical exam.
It varies widely by state, of course; I started driving in Alabama when I was 15. I just recently had to pay WA to transfer my license from Colorado, I guess that was just administrative fees.
I think the difference might be in the difficulty of the test. Here in the UK driving lessons aren't required, but most people wouldn't pass the test without them (and most drivers wouldn't pass the test now if they had to sit it again).
Additionally, i would love to compare car accidents stats for countries with strict rules/very liberal rules and no rules at all(like most third world countries with high level of corruption)
In the end you have to pass a 45 minute driving test where the instructor tells you where to drive to (mostly through the city), asks you questions about car maintenance and safety, makes you parallel park, and do emergency break tests.
As somebody who missed out on that, I ended up paying around $400 as an adult for 6 hours of private lessons (yes, that was it), plus a $60 fee for the driver's license and a $9 fee for the driving test.
Never happened for me either. A few years ago I payed a similar amount for a handful of very short courses that didn’t leave me confident enough to take the test. The consequences are big degradation of QoL. Now looking at probably 1 or 2 grand for significantly longer courses which I’m not even sure will be enough, along with the fact that these sort of places are not compatible with a working adults schedule.
When I lived there I was able to swap my home country drivers license for a German one and bypass the whole system. I will say that German’s drive very well, and the training and gatekeeping go a long way to explaining how the Autobahn’s unlimited speed limits function so well.
Ouch, these vehicles must be wrecking hell on local air quality.
There are some cheaper and some electric alternatives starting to arrive on the market. Right now, the electric alternatives don't have much range.
It's a good alternative to a smart car, it has uses cases much beyond that of a scooter by nature of having, say, a roof.
What people notice about EV’s is really an artifact of being cars having extremely overpowered engines but ineffective transmissions to maximize the use of that power.
It's as much power as a Honda Rebel 250, a CBF250, an MT125, a Yamaha Vixion, an ST250, etc..., and those are gas engines that will generally only provide like 50-70% of their power.
Electric golf carts generally use 3-5hp engines. That's because for small engines, the electric advantage of always delivering the same amount of power is a huge deal.
18hp was enough for many cars. It is fine for city driving. It goes up to 100km/h, it's fine.
Also, the peak power of the motor is actually 20kW, 13kW is the sustained power, which again is more than enough for city driving.
I believe from the factory the Rebel has like 15 or 16 hp, mine that was 12 years old at the time must have had one or two less, and it was exciting to ride around town.
I'll grant that 17 hp in a car would not be "exciting", but I bet from 0-30mph which is where this car would live would feel plenty zippy.
IMO, anything that can’t maintain highway speed up a hill is anemic by modern standards. I get that HP has become a largely meaningless metric for daily driving, but that seems like a useful baseline.
Either way I still do it. And turn my wheels towards/away from the kerb on a hill as appropriate. Probably useless but if you have a fail-safe, may as well apply it.
And with the advent of Hyundai Ioniq 5 and other cars coming on stream in the premium space, Tesla can suck a fat one.
Imagine a massive growing middle class buying gas-powered foreign produced cars instead. What would that do the Chinese economy and security with all oil imported?
The strategy of welcoming of firms such as Tesla builds up a huge ecosystem of suppliers creating possibilities for China's own car companies. Whether they target a highend international market such as with the Volvo Polestar or the small electric car market.
The small car market basically doesn't exist in the west. We don't find these cars safe or desireble enough. But safety and desirability of this category of cars will improve rapidly over time and ultimately they will become attractive enough to be sold in the west.
There are a lot of small cars in European big cities as it is difficult to find parking space for an "american sized" car.
The sedans which Americans thinks of as "small car", we think of "too big car for the city".
Chevy makes the Aveo.
You can still buy a Smart car here.
The mini is quite popular.
There is absolutely a segment for compact cars in the US, it's just nowhere near as large because most people spend time on the highway and don't feel as safe being surrounded by larger cars and OTR trucks.
The US has a strange obsession with massive cars.
However it was not the european style small cars I ment when I referred to small cars but rather the 4000 USD electric cars, the article is refering to. Those you do not see in Europe at present.
In fact, the only Chinese EVs I have seen are the MG ZS EV and Volvo Polestar - both big cars.
The small electrics are things like the VW Up electric and the Fiat 500 electric, both European.
It's not strange... it's survival (plus federal regulations about crash safety, bumper height) require the size vehicles I'm used to here. (The SUV thing is just crazy, though)
It is not unusual in the USA on a road trip (vacation) to drive 1000 km/day (or more) at 120+ kph.
How is something smaller than a 1999 Honda Civic (1100kg) going to safely share the road with 40000 kg Tractor-Trailer rigs?
Here's the smallest car I ever owned... it was silver, with a hatchback... I loved that car, and miss it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_Civic_(sixth_generation)
It is true that generally people don't tend to drive as long distances in Europe as they do in the US, but it's not unheard of to drive 1000km on holiday. It's not as if everyone in Europe spends their lives pootling around cobble-stoned towns in Fiat 500s with a crusty baguette sticking out the window. There are large highways and plenty of heavy traffic.
I think the difference is that people in Europe tend not use their oversized vehicles as daily drivers. Many people don't even own a large car at all, preferring to rent or borrow one for specifically when they do go on holiday. Driving a large car seems like less of a status symbol in Europe. I don't buy that it's a safety thing for Americans, when most Americans are just driving their SUVs to the shops or to work every day.
In my mind, that conjures up a 1972 Buick Electra Station Wagon. They are 2320 Kg, more than 2 of the 1999 Honda Civic.
https://www.automobile-catalog.com/make/buick/full-size_buic...
SUVs in the US are out of hand, I totally agree with that. I thought you were saying that our Sedans are huge.
It would be interesting to see if the move toward larger cars in general has been offset by the increase of "sub-car" vehicles like electric tuk-tuks, e-bikes and so on.
[0] https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/features/investigation-wh...
To Europeans used to small, cramped spaces - the great open roads and huge comfy cars of America are much appreciated.
I actively avoid driving in the UK. I adore driving in the US.
edit: Downvoting an outside perspective, how very Reddit!
If the car you ended up getting was large, as implied, I'd be interested in looking at how sh!te the small car must have been.
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/167786-2014-chevrolet-cr...
Here you go. I can persoanlly attest that the diesel Chevy cruze easily gets 45-50 mpg. I also paid less for it than a smart car.
Like I said, I was not opposed to it, but I'm not spending more for a smaller car that is more fuel inefficient.
But I don't accept the smart fortwo as a typical small car.
If those are its numbers, then its a horrible car, both in terms of mpg and everyday practical use. It looks good as a quick city run around and that's it.
In Europe, a typical small car might be a Toyotal Yaris or Peugeot 208, both hitting 70-90mpg
https://www.carbuyer.co.uk/reviews/toyota/yaris/hybrid/14351...
Yeah that was why I had that disappointment, I was expecting gas milages closer to what you said. If I could get a car like that in the States, that would be awesome. I would love to get a car that gets 70-90 mpg.
The only local roads are littered with stop signs or red lights at every goddamn intersection and then some speed bumps. It's either the highway or the obstacle course.
I do have a electric scooter (max 40 km/h, so can only stick to local roads) which I use for <5km trips and and I can definitely say those stop signs cut my battery range by a factor of 2 or 3.
So in a world where there are SUVs driving around, buying an SUV for yourself instead of a car is a safer move.
Just think about getting t-boned in an intersection. Would you rather be in a light, low vehicle or in a heavy, tall vehicle? I'd pick the latter, especially if the vehicle t-boning me is tall and its bumper at the height of my head if I were in a small car.
[0]: https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2013/05/suvs-are-sa...
That sounds like the same kind of circular reasoning that's often cited to oppose any gun regulation: "When everybody has a gun, you also need a gun to stay safe!".
No one having a big car is an unstable equilibrium.
If you lived somewhere where all the cars were small, both vehicles would be better off, because there would be much less energy in the collision.
SUV's aren't safer, they're more dangerous to other people. and that shouldn't be OK.
Small cars became very popular in the late 70’s and early 80’s in the US due to gas shortages. They gradually died out as gas prices came back down.
Go look at car sizes in the 1950’s and 1960’s in the US. Compare that to car sizes in Europe as it recovered from WW2. Think Cadillac boat like cars vs the Mini.
Also, cars are essential transportation in parts of the US and raising gas prices would/have result(ed) in a lot of protesting. In fact, high gas prices would be seen as regressive.
Volkswagen and the Japanese auto companies filled this role in the 60s, 70s and 80s. In the 90s foreign vehicles started on the same obesity trajectory, 2nd born generation regresses to the mean.
For example, a subcompact Ford in the US might get 35mpg, vs 33mpg for the next size class up. The two cars cost about the same.
In Europe, Ford will sell the same subcompact body style with a smaller engine, and maybe a diesel, and it’ll get 50+ mpg.
No one buys the tiny gas guzzler, in the US and then Ford execs claim there’s no market for fuel efficient cars in the US.
It was this way 5-10 years ago; maybe it changed since then.
Europeans don't seem anymore excited about taking what I'd call "city cars" on the highway than Americans are. That being said: I think far more Europeans can spend almost all their time in their local city and don't NEED to get on a highway with large trucks and vehicles. In the US that's basically unheard of unless you're in a large city. I'm sure during holiday the roads look quite different than a regular workday.
I'm guessing if you compared New York to most of Europe you'd see similar numbers, public transit and city layout in the rest of the US basically makes that impossible.
I've wondered what it would be like if there were cities with tight, maybe even exclusionary urban areas. "you must be less than this big to enter downtown"
There are some cities in Florida where retired people can drive golf carts, and it has become very popular.
Once we arrived in Chicago I kind of started to sweat because I'm used to European city parking spots. How many times will have to retry to park this huge car, but to my surprise the parking spaces are also huge.
They would be the easiest to automate fully (lower risk of damaging pedestrians or others on the road) and do not pollute inside densely populated areas.
Your average speed in a city center is pretty low anyway, so if it could be automated to avoid slow starts when lights turn green (I have to imagine that automated cars could simultaneously start, rather than having to make sure the car in front of you had committed to driving before you do) would actually improve the experience and average speed immensely.
And a few months before that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24601479
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VHstY5pKhw&ab_channel=YOUCA...
definitely a completely different market though. This car doesn't even have air bags
This seemed like a better alternative to cheap electric cars. I don’t know how to convert Lahks to dollars, but the original article said around $5000 usd.
Different cars for different markets and budget. $4k car is great for driving a few miles or once a week. Or within city limits. Generally, you get what you pay for so a $4k can't offer what a $80K car does. Common sense.
If all cars were like that it would be fine.
But I have 0 doubt that being priced so aggressively, US and Europe would slap such a huge tariff to protect local markets, they would be very uncompetitive.
Current road death trends in the US indicate that people inside cars are dying less, but people outside of them are dying more, notably cyclists and pedestrians.
There are plenty of new cars from leading global auto manufacturers that aren’t legal for sale in the US.
But when it comes to expensive systems like crash structures, active and passive safety systems, the US requires a lot.
I remember one of the points of the failed trans-atlantic trade treaty was about handling where the stop lights should be on cars, because "safety" regulations differ.
Standards (or lack thereof) in much of Asia/Africa/S.America are on a whole different planet.
I guess my point is, not being approved for sale in the US doesn’t mean the car is shockingly different than many other cars in the rest of the world. You can find unsafe cars that would be illegal to sell in the US that say “Nissan” or “VW” on them just over the border in Mexico.
Every manufacturer builds cars to meet the specific requirements and needs for a market. In many countries, the requirements are low and the #1 priority is cheap.
* Motorcycles aren't very dangerous to bystanders.
* Approximately zero infants or toddlers are routinely transported via motorcycle.
* Motorcycles don't make up a large percentage of traffic in the U.S.
* Motorcycle deaths are more likely to leave donable organs intact, so it's a bit like the lottery, but for organs. Some people opt in to entertainment, and the rest of society benefits.
Why do you think Tesla won’t have self driving cars in the next 5 years?
Every expert worth his salt says we aren't anywhere near self driving cars. Only Tesla and non-experts says otherwise. Self driving requires AI or some kind of rails. We are years from any kind of intelligence.
It's a “coal car” that's much easier to upgrade, en masse with millions like it, to end-to-end cleaner technology than a cat with an onboard fossil fuel engine.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China
58% of china's energy comes from coal alone (which I suspect is where you get your fossil fuel figure)
20% comes from oil and related fluids
8% natural gas
so 86% fossil fuels. Of the remaining 14%, 2% is nuclear and 11% is renewable.
> and that's dropping fast (65% in 2019)
The percentage is dropping slowly because newer forms of generation such as solar are coming online. China is using all the energy it can get from every sector, they are rapidly adding coal capacity along with everything else. China has no qualms about opening hundreds of coal plants per year, except they are also manufacturing millions of solar panels as well.