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Comment by missionlocal1 | Hacker News Reader

$20k is still too expensive of a car for a lot of people in the US, and for most outside the developed world. Toyota is just keeping that population in perspective.

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Toyota doesn't even sell a car in the US that you can buy for $20k. The cheapest Corolla is $20,425 but you can't actually buy it at that price in practice. EV's actually have a huge advantage in that you can make a car at nearly any price point you want by trading off range. For example in China the top selling EV is a $5000 EV made by Wuling[1] with a 75 mile range, they offer slightly higher trims for more range. For the majority of people who live in cities a 75-150 mile range small vehicle is good enough and for something like that you can build it for $5-10k easily.

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/review-wuling-hongguang-mini-ev/

I wonder how much the US market is limited by safety requirements here. What happens when a giant SUV runs into one of those things on the highway in LA?

Short range EV is great but if people want A/C and heater, much costs added for equipment and more battery capacity.

A heat pump isn't that expensive and does both.

The cheapest Toyota available in the US is a bare bones Corolla for a bit over $20,000.

It somewhat remains to be seen if a used electric with a new battery can be cheaper than a used hybrid.

That's what the used market is for. You're not getting a new economy sedan for under $20k MSRP in normal times, let alone the weird market right now.

But 2nd hand ICE cars don’t have to worry about a degraded and very expensive lithium battery and certain models are proven to last a long time.

These things may work, but I don’t want to spend the money to be the one that finds out.

Do you not worry about the transmission, water pump, radiator, or even the engine itself failing? Does that mean you don't buy 2nd hand ICE cars at all?

I've had a water pump die on me within 6 months of buying a 2nd hand car. In nearly 20 years of driving 2nd hand cars I've had more issues with ICE cars I've bought than I have with the two used EVs I've bought.

No I don’t because I inspect and research the cars I buy to avoid dumpster fires. After 20 years of car ownership I’ve never once had a breakdown or an expensive repair. Furthermore I haven’t had any issue that a $150 toolset, a jack, and a youtube video couldn’t fix in an afternoon.

And you don't believe you can do the same with an EV? When I test drove the first EV (a Nissan Leaf) I bought, I took an OBD2 dongle with me and evaluated the data after the fact. I was able to confirm the battery health and capacity, the charging rates seen, etc.

With that in hand, I was confident in the health of the EV and made my purchase.

In the future it may very well be possible to do the same home repairs on your EV. We're barely past the first decade of publicly available EVs. A number of early EVs have plenty of guides out there on how to replace and rebuild battery packs on your own, and aftermarket mfgs are starting to produce speed controllers and ECUs for custom EVs.

It's just a new wave of tech, and that too will become normal over time just like ICE cars themselves.

Things happen with ICE vehicles too. But you can easily find a model that has a really good track record for reliability and is easy and cheap to repair.

Batteries on the other hand will eventually break down. Sure, eventually it will become cheaper to repair and replace. But the oldest EVs on the road are probably Teslas. The Model S is something like 10 years old now? And a full battery replacement is still hugely expensive. A decade on and EVs are still luxury items.

The cost of the vehicle and maintenance over 10 years would have to be dramatically less in the average case for regular people to start buying them. In that sense I think Toyota has plenty of run way.

Good for you

Used ICE cars have all sorts of failure modes that EVs don’t. More parts get physical wear, and once a car gets old enough something is always breaking, and all that adds up in cost. It’s pretty clear EVs need less maintenance over time, though I don’t know where the break-even point is. I suspect batteries will continue to get cheaper over time as well.

no, instead 2nd hand ice cars have to work about a degraded and very expensive engine. an EV battery is likely to last somewhere around 200000 miles (https://www.consumerreports.org/hybrids-evs/evs-offer-big-sa...), and over that period require essentially no engine maintenance compared to gas cars which between oil changes, break pad replacement (which EVs avoid due to regenerative), and all the other things that can go wrong with an ICE have an extra roughly 500-700 per year of additional maintenance cost.

My car should easily last 200K - 250K miles. At least data shows that my model should easily hit those numbers.

My yearly maintenance is 250-325USD per year. Occasionally you need to replace the brake pads. And a few other things come up sure. But over 10 years I’m only looking at 5KUSD unless something horrible goes wrong. And I could probably get it cheaper. At my level of fuel consumption I’m looking at another 4K over 10 years.

I can’t find an up to date quote, but in Australia, the Tesla 3 years service plan for a rear wheel drive Model 3 was 1.75 times the cost compared to the standard service for my car in 2018.

Non Tesla EVs do better. And some are half the price or less than what I pay for annual servicing. But I still have to cough up 3-4 times more money 2nd hand. So potentially a 2nd hand EV based on current prices will start to be cheaper in 8ish years. Not including the loan I’d have to take out to pay for the thing.

> These things may work, but I don’t want to spend the money to be the one that finds out.

Then don't? There will be millions of people testing it for you.

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