Comment by nullc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nullc | Hacker News Reader

> proposed phasing out internal combustion engines by 2035.

Has there been any discussion about the impact of EVs on less wealthy people on the basis of their lifecycle cashflow due to battery replacement?

My partner got a very inexpensive used Nissan leaf a couple years back, with us full in the understanding that we would need to replace the battery in a couple years, we priced the battery out at the time and were happy with it.

Come time to replace it earlier this year we found that Nissan had substantially increased the replacement battery cost, so much so that for the price of the replacement we could get a much newer used leaf for less. Worse, the replacement was still just the original battery with limited range (about 80mi).

Fortunately, we found that with some hacks it was possible to replace the battery with a newer model year one and managed to get double the range for about the amount we originally expected to spend on the battery, so that ultimately worked out.

But I think back to the first car I bought-- which was $800 (back in the 90s, so maybe $1400 in today-dollars), and then I just had to spend incrementally on gas and maintenance. The car served me fine for many years.

Back then having to make a periodic outlay of thousands of dollars at a time would have been ruinous for me. (Whatever maintenance costs I might get surprised with wouldn't be worse than whatever it cost to just replace the whole car with another similar one.)

So even though an EV could deliver better $/mile the greater portion of the operating costs showing up as big battery replacement costs seems like it will create serious cash-flow problems for people who aren't wealthy. This might also increase their dependency on usurious-rate financing, and harm their economic mobility.

I haven't really seen any discussion of EV cash-flow lifecycle, anyone have any pointers?

This is an excellent question. The math is pretty easy to do and very few politicians want to seriously confront this reality. I did a calculation for a Toyota Camry Hybrid vs a Tesla Model 3 in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27096215), and even in the state of WA which has extremely favorable electricity vs gas tradeoff price wise, the Camry Hybrid is an easy $/mile winner. There were some rebuttals, but they do not change the fundamental conclusion.

Maybe things are a bit different on the lower end, but I haven't looked into it - the range on a Nissan Leaf is extremely low as you point out, and likely rules it out for many in the US regardless of $/mile calculations.

Because you don't pay the carbon cost of the gasoline.

Dunno about the WA figures, but California cap-and-trade results in carbon costs increasing fuel prices.

A quick internet search suggests that the cost of carbon credits to offset emissions for gas come out to $0.1 per gallon.

I'm guessing adding this in wouldn't change the result being discussed.

The fact that CA is charging $0.1 per gallon does not mean you're actually paying the true carbon cost of the gasoline. You're paying a tax based on an arbitrary cap that was set by politicians, and one that may change dramatically in the future.

$0.1 is the price of for carbon offsets. 1 Gallon gas = 20lbs CO2, and going rate for carbon offsets are $10/ton.

Due to how CA cap/trade works I can't directly figure out the marginal cost difference there, though it looks greater than the market offset rate (as you note these rates depend on caps).

Obviously I don't think that offset capture the total externality, but if a comparison is to be made some figure is needed. Even our 'green energy' figures don't capture their own substantial carbon footprint entirely.

The leaf is a special case with poor thermal maintenance. Even basic thermal maintenance results in much longer lifetimes for batteries, well into the 250k territory where the car is definitively old.

There's probably a good case for some simple regulation around the availability and pricing of replacement batteries.

>Has there been any discussion about the impact of EVs on less wealthy people on the basis of their lifecycle cashflow due to battery replacement?

Has there been any discussion about the impact of global warming on less wealth people?

Yes, a considerable amount: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_and_poverty

You seem to be upset because it became cheaper to double the range of your decade-old car for cheaper than buying a new battery of the original style.

When was the last time you were able to double the mileage of a decade-old gas car for less than its value?

In most of the world poor people can't afford cars. We should be increasing the supply of places people can live without cars, not subsidizing more cars.

No, the complaint was that Nissan wanted $12500 to replace the battery, instead of the $7500 we were quoted when we got the car.

I probably shouldn't have mentioned the range except it was gulling that they wanted so much and it didn't even increase the range as a side effect. (and also that we did manage to fix it, and increased the range and spent what we originally expected).

Even at the original/expected price the big lump sum cost would create cashflow problems for people who aren't wealthy. And I think this is a new consideration for EVs that doesn't exist for IC cars and should probably be a factor in our public policy.

> When was the last time you were able to double the mileage of a decade-old gas car

Range is not mileage. A standard IC car has a range many times what we're talking about here. We got the EV because we were prepared to make lifestyle affordances for the limited range.

Range is also not dependent of battery life. These batteries have substantially better life if you charge them to only 80% most of the time, which was something we found we couldn't do on the shorter range battery, but have no problem with on the longer range battery.

> In most of the world poor people can't afford cars. We should be increasing the supply of places people can live without cars

In the US today people can afford cars and we've designed our cities and economies in ways where people need them. That's the cards currently in our hand. I agree that it is good to reduce the need for cars, but that is orthogonal to the impact that we'll have on the public when we push hard into EVs.

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