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Comment by etempleton | Hacker News Reader

I believe EV adoption will be slow and then sudden. Yes, there will hurdles and EVs aren’t going to make sense for everyone, but there will be a tipping point. Right now you have EVs that check all the boxes and but are over $45,000.

Even with premium pricing, demand already outstrips supply for electric vehicles.

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This is also how it went with smartphones. First it’s a status symbol and a luxury item, then a few years later there seems to be a cliff and suddenly it’s highly unusual not to have one.

You can get a brand new perfectly functional smartphone for under $200. If electric cars drop to even $30k they're still way out of reach for most people, and we'll be waiting a long time from them to hit the used car market.

https://www.recurrentauto.com/research/used-electric-vehicle... says 1/4th of EV sales in Q2 2022 were used vehicles. with an average price of 40k although this is all complicated by a shortage in EV production.

40k... That is triple what I paid for my slightly used ICE car. With long warranty in country with extreme taxation... That is just bonkers level of pricing.

Yeah, the market is in a very weird place largely caused by the fact that there was a roughly 5 year period where the Model S was the only real electric car, so used EVs are much more likely to be extremely high end cars than new EVs (also the current car market in general is very wacky right now). It will probably be another 5 years or so before there are enough cheap EVs that have been on the road long enough to enter the used market in high volume.

We have now several examples of markets (California, Norway, Iceland, Sweden, Netherlands) that electric vehicle sales follow an S curve like you're predicting.

In a couple of years, I think China & India should make it clear if this will be the global play out as well.

China certainly seems interested in getting off gasoline as fast as possible.

That's because China looks like and practically is City 17 right now

Really because I came to the exact opposite conclusion that the tipping point will be they getting more expensive because of the input costs, namely the raw materials.

How do you figure natural resource extraction will be revolutionised to make EV's dramatically cheaper after enough people buy EVs?

After enough people buy EVs, you don't need to extract new resources, as they can be recycled. Redwood Materials recycled 60 tons of EV batteries a day last year, with an over 90% recovery rate of the materials.

Wow fascinating company I haven't heard of before. That definitely helps a ton if the recovery rate is good enough.

The issue isn't supply/demand it's the availability of resources e.g. lithium.

And those won't just just magically jump from none to plentiful. It will be more gradual.

Lithium is plentiful. Refineries and mines might be scarce, but that (and dozens of other supply chain issues) will be fixed, and all of a sudden EV supply will skyrocket.

> but are over 45K

The Kia EV6 is $41K and has > 300 mile range.

Leafs start at $28K ($20K after subsidy), but that is a lower range model.

I agree with the point you are making, but I think we are in the middle of the tipping point. Plenty of models exist at many price points. 100% are back ordered. All the manufacturers have to do at this point is scale their production lines.

Nissan and Kia are probably going to eat a few lunches in the mass market segment.

Yes, Kia with their models are the closest. They are right there in terms of pricing. The Nissan Leaf is well priced, but it is a bit basic and not what most people are looking for these days in terms of features.

And I agree, a tipping point feels close. If Tesla ever caught up with demand and stopped raising their prices on the Model 3 I think it would be a Model T like hit.

> Even with premium pricing, demand already outstrips supply for electric vehicles.

Thanks to pandemic stimulus, this is true for almost all vehicle types.

How do you people buy these $40,000 cars with your one-time $1400 check?

The Fed printed $4.5 trillion during the pandemic.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttren...

The article points out there's just not enough raw lithium and nickel to go around to convert every gas car to an EV.

If everyone would suddenly want an EV, that would drive raw material prices even higher and would lead to a drastic expansion of lithium mining, without the necessary environmental precautions, which would counteract the environmental benefits of EV adoption.

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