The US Refuses to Fall in Love with Electric Cars

When we know something could be done, but currently isn't practical, instead of saying "Nope, we are building this charging network and we will have better batteries within 5 years", we say "Maybe someday, but right now we need gas".

We judge technology based on whether it works and is economical right now, even when there's a clear road map to making it work.

People still talk about whether the electric grid can handle the electric cars, and how windmills and solar are forcing coal offline, like as if we don't know how to upgrade things and build natural gas plants.

For a given individual, waiting a few generations makes sense, but it would be cool if big companies were just a little less obsessed with slow iterative development and rollout of tech that we pretty much already know how to do.

Everyone says batteries aren't sustainable and Lithium mining is bad, but the point isn't to make a billion lithium cars, everything now is just a prototype.

Building these missing technologies like energy storage should be as big of a deal as the moon landing was. The kind of "Make it work even if it costs 100 billion because our future depends on it" thing we just don't see anymore.

Trying to do that trip in an electric vehicle, in order to account for charging stations, would add 4 stops and around 2 hours for charging. Tesla's trips webpage also estimates that I'd save...$13 in fuel compared to gas.

The cars are more expensive, the number of required stopping locations is increased while severely restricted, and overall I don't save much money charging compared to buying gasoline. Overall it doesn't add up, and I think a lot of Americans see it this way as well.

In the US the automobile has historically been marketed and used as a tool of freedom, independence, mobility, etc. It's hard to market something as a provider of mobility when in my mind I see an orange extension cord tethering it to the cities and metro areas.

Many cities already have electrically wired parking meters today and adding a plug on the side of that isn't a major technical hurdle, it's much more a sociopolitical hurdle.

Most gas stations are owned by large chains, I assume they're doing it too. Some stores I visit literally pull up my email for e-receipt from my credit card alone.

There's also tracking systems (often used in malls) that use our phone's Bluetooth and Wifi signature to track us as we go store to store. Some use facial recognition as well.

There was a lawsuit here in Canada because police cars are equipped with license plate scanners which run 24/7, and retain all the data. Wouldn't even be a lawsuit if it was a private entity.

Our cell phone carriers also sell this data. Anonymized sure, but there's enough data points to figure out who is who, especially if paired with another data source.

There's also companies that sell a constant feed of satellite imaging. Hedge funds buy it so they can track cars in an out of oil refiners, to better estimate production figures, or setbacks if they see a bunch of emergency response vehicles.

I also have an appreciation for my older non-connected vehicles, but let's be real, the ship has sailed on being tracked everywhere we go. I may not like it, but I accept I'm always being tracked a dozen different ways no matter what I do.

I'm just glad I'm not anyone important or a political dissident, this would not be a good era for that.

https://aptera.us/

(of course it's much less of a car for the money)

But I got my used, low-mileage Fit for under $10k cash. While I understand even that sort of thing is harder to find these days, it'll still be a while before I can find a solid, cheap EV with roughly similar capabilities.

On top of that, people like me (live in an urban area, drive short distances) have it tough because we park on the street, not in a garage. Makes it a lot harder to justify If I can't just plug in every night. It's really a shame, because I'd be on board for just about every other aspect of an EV.

Hopefully down the line I'll see a decent used market emerge and/or we'll sort out some sort of way for city folks to charge easily. But I can't currently consider an EV as a mostly-drop-in replacement for a used, economy ICE car.

EVs seem to be causing a permanent shift of "Time Under First Owner". Fewer required maintenance milestones early in ownership seem to create incentives to own the car for longer. Some of the people regularly buying/leasing new cars create a lot of their turnover simply to avoid maintenance costs and with less overall maintenance, especially early in the life of vehicle, there's less incentive for turnover.

The other thing that influences prices in the used market is that turnover point and if it's maintenance-forced the first owners are more willing to sell for less if they pass on the maintenance burden to the next owner (or more likely the middleman in between the two; the used car market equivalent of a "house flipper", buy the car cheap because it needs a bunch of maintenance that you can do at reasonable cost and flip it back into the used market for a much higher price). That "opportunity cost" also seems to be disappearing with EVs. EVs don't as often have thousands of dollars of (deferred) maintenances costs at the 5 year/10 year horizon and there's much less to "flip". A lot of EVs go directly from the first owner to the second without even needing to show up on the used markets, and certainly without needing to go through major maintenance. That, naturally, drives up prices.

So far trends seem to imply that the used market isn't seeing many EVs not because new car buyers aren't buying them ("hot" or not), but that first owners are holding them longer and when they do sell them it often isn't through the "traditional" used market and when it is its usually still at a premium because there just isn't (deferred) maintenance generally driving costs down as in the traditional new ICE to used ICE market pipeline.

I don't know what your budget is specifically, but the economics shifts here indicate that it may be time to start budgeting for a new car if you truly want an EV any time soon. The math is very different from the old math of buying/leasing an ICE vehicle, because of the different realities of maintenance costs alone, and it can be worth reevaluating that math in your personal case, because those assumptions changed.

Which isn't to say that EV costs can't be driven down. Both EU and Asia are at a point where economies of scale are starting to kick in and average new EV costs have met or fallen below new ICE vehicle costs (in the EU mostly just for "diesel" vehicles still, but other categories may not be far behind; in the Chinese market it seems like EVs are winning in price in almost every car segment now). It will likely be a while before the US hits anything remotely similar in economies of scale precisely because of this chicken-and-egg that American consumers aren't buying enough EVs yet and many won't until prices drop. [1] It certainly doesn't help that the US is still fixated on heavier, more resource needy, segments like Trucks and SUVs, which drive prices back up in their own ways even with economies of scale behind them.

[1] This chicken-and-egg is also why eyes need to be on the imports horizon if you are looking for cheaper prices. It's exactly the sort of situation that made Japanese imports the cars to beat in the US in the 1980s and with Chinese manufacturers in seemingly a cat-bird seat now in terms of economies of scale for EVs there's a lot of interesting questions if Chinese manufacturers are about close enough to do cross over to the US EV market today similar to the market conditions that gave Japanese manufacturers such 1980s market power. So far Tesla is the US company incumbent to beat in EV sales, and the other US companies are greatly lagging behind. Imports may be hugely disruptive here in the US.

FWIW, their vehicles' feature set looks extremely cool for people who do in fact go offroad, but I'm sure many will never leave the pavement.

Though that is using the Mercator projection, you can at least tell that the contiguous USA is damn similar to China in scale. Perhaps China is even more biased towards the one coastline, with sparse settlements to the West, but the USA essentially has a massive deserve/mountain range in the middle, too.

It's less a product of the petroleum lobby than the desire to keep tax revenues high.