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Comment by xattt | Hacker News Reader

> I mean, what buying a gas car is like in 2022. It’s like holding onto your flip phone in 2012. It’s like trying to find your hotel in a strange city after a red-eye with a paper map. It’s like putting your retirement savings into coal-mining investments.

This piece comes from a place of privilege. I bought a gas car out of the necessity of a growing family within the last year. Within my market, there are no options to buy a new electric without waiting for a very, very, very long time. Also, travelling out of province to buy is not an option given the pandemic and a small baby at home.

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Things are a bit messed up in the car market in general, with a lot of long long time waits for ICE vehicles too.

We bought the first generation plug-in hybrid Chrysler Pacifica minivan five years ago and we've been very happy with it. In Chicago it's effectively an EV 9 months of the year (it likes to run on gas in the winter, likely to feed the heaters). I do think that when we downsize to a non-minivan in a few years that we're likely looking at an EV (perhaps renting an ICE car for vacations where we'll be doing a lot of driving and have inconsistent access to charging).

There is definitely some infrastructure that needs to change still. A lot of rental properties (perhaps almost all) don't have the ability to manage EVs which is going to be a challenge going forth, but I think that we're definitely on the precipice of EVs becoming dominant. I'd say it's not quite flip phone in 2012, but it is flip phone in 2008.

> flip phone in 2008

That's a great analogy. In 2008 iPhones were fabulously expensive ($700 doesn't seem so bad, but remember that $700 was the contract-locked subsidized price, and that phone didn't have an app store), and it still wasn't certain whether iPhone would beat Blackberry. The rich bought an iPhone or Blackberry, but average Joe's were best off limping along with their old flip phone an extra year, and if they couldn't, buying the cheapest thing they could to hold them over.

And this applies even more in early 2022. All cars, new or used, EV or ICE are stupidly expensive right now. In 12 months time, the used car market should have settled, Teslas should no longer be supply constrained and may have more reasonable prices, and some really nice vehicles like the Hyundia/Kia Ioniq5/EV6 should be widely available. So this is the year to repair your beater rather than replacing it, IMO.

And remember that it's still somewhat environmentally responsible buying a used ICE car. reuse/reduce/recycle is the mantra, and that first R still has meaning.

I still remember the first smartphones were crazy expensive, and as an average person, I couldn't afford one. I still agreed that the smartphone was the future.

Same arguments, buying an ICE is staying in the past technology, and so what.

While having two babies in a North-American city, I needed a car, so I bought the cheapest safe car (97' E Class for $2K) and a cargo bike. I know my car is an ICE, but I agree with the author.

To add on to this: his whole argument about range not mattering assumes that there is an easy place to plug the car into every night, something that is not true for most people that live in an apartment (and could be true for many people that rent their homes and don't have a pre-existing place to plug the car in).

Nontrivial amounts of cars don't overnight anywhere near an outlet, and that particular use case is not handled very well by existing electric cars at all.

You are correct that it's very hard to find an apartment with access to an outlet, but it's less of an issue than you would think.

Having owned a Tesla in San Francisco and street-parking it for 2 years without access to a charger, I treated it much like one would with a gas-powered car: I went to the charging station about once every week or so and "filled up". The only inconvenience is that it took longer to recharge the car than to fill up an ICE vehicle. Everything else was the same basically. I never found myself in a position where I couldn't charge the car.

After I moved to a place where I had access to an everyday power outlet (120v, like you'd plug a desk lamp into), it pretty much eliminated my trips to the charging station.

The ONLY time it was every a question was when I took a trip to visit family in a rural part of the country where the closest supercharger at the time was 2+ hours away. My family doesn't do a lot of driving, so it was easy for us to just plug my car in and I had no problem leaving.

I ended up putting about 40k miles on the Tesla before I sold it, and I have no qualms about getting another electric vehicle.

If the 2022 price is any indication, moreover, the author has something like $40k to drop on an electric car, and deems himself price sensitive when comparing to… $60k cars.

Either way, this is crazy money. $40k is about a year’s salary for the average American, and more than a year for the rest of the world. Yes, you’ll save a bit on gas, but still!

https://www.edmunds.com/most-popular-cars/ suggests that the Ford F-series is the most popular car in much of the US, and a quick search for its price suggests that the prices of some typical configurations are somewhere around $40k.

The top few results mention $29k, $35k and $53k, and the highest price I found in a 30 seconds of glancing was >$90k. Of course, one may still regard that as crazy money, no matter how typical. ;)

It’s a “luxury belief”[1] and it shows that some people either forgot or never really knew how the other half lives.

1: https://quillette.com/2019/11/16/thorstein-veblens-theory-of...

Yeah, it is a bit "why don't you just buy a brand new luxury car every year?"

Well, if he's so environmentally conscious I sure hope he doesn't buy a new electric car every year, and (to be fair) it doesn't sound like that from the article (the "What I'd buy" section starts with "Suppose a meteorite hits [his current car]"). But yeah, the fact that many people still can't afford an EV seems to have slipped his mind...

If a meteorite hit his current car, he could buy a luxury EV (or two) with the proceeds he got from selling his meteorite and collector car. I've only ever heard of one over such car, and it fetched a very high price for its 17-year-old owner.

I agree it comes from a place of privilege, but ain't it true, though?

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