Hacker News Reader

Comment by grizzles | Hacker News Reader

It will be all electric because electric cars will be the most affordable. You can buy decent $3000 electric cars from alibaba.com today. [1] Check out this article about it. [2]

[1] https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Cheapest-Chinese-Elec... [2] https://electrek.co/2022/04/02/awesomely-weird-alibaba-elect...

View on HN

They're great assuming you'll never be on the road with any other 1 ton vehicle that might impact you at 30mph+. Then they're fiery death traps that you'd hope to never experience again, if you survive.

EDIT: 100Ah 12V battery? So an electric golf cart, supposedly rated to go up to 50mph, with a "bed" and four seats and a lot of extra weight and drag. You're barely going to go 10 miles at 30mph in this even without four people and cargo in the bed of this "truck".

Most of the world only needs a car that will do 45mph with a range of about 50 miles. Both the model T and model A would have struggled to do 50mph. Those cars effectively built the suburbs. About 50% of them are still on the road today, even though the last Model A rolled off the assembly line in the early 1930s, and the model T before that. LiFePO4 batteries are rapidly dropping in price, 100 miles of range is plenty for most families. Especially globally.

> Those cars effectively built the suburbs

Streetcars built the suburbs, then cars of the 40s and 50s expanded that. Model T and A proved the performance of cars, but they were still largely toys for the wealthy or workhorses. Not necessarily white collar workers commuting to the office.

Plus, suburbs didn't come into full force until after WWII in the US. Show me the massive amount of suburbs which were founded in the 1920s or earlier which were only accessible by car.

Most of the world only needs a car that will do 45mph with a range of about 50 miles.

What people need most of the time is basically irrelevent though. If you need a car to drive 20 miles a day for 364 days of the year, and 300 miles 1 day a year, then you need a range of 300 miles. It's the outliers that determine the requirements, not the typical use cases.

Nope, no they don't. You can rent a vehicle or use public transport for the 1 day special trip.

I did this calculation when I switched from ICE to a cheap EV. With just the money I save a gas+maintenance yearly our family can _fly_ to our yearly vacation spot (~1200km away) and rent the biggest fanciest Mercedes for the week. And we'll still have money left over.

Or we could load our EV on a night train, wake up at the destination and drive around all week.

Or we could rent an ICE car for the week.

There was zero point in spending ~20k€ more for the car just to match that once a year event.

With just the money I save a gas+maintenance yearly our family can _fly_ to our yearly vacation spot (~1200km away) and rent the biggest fanciest Mercedes for the week. And we'll still have money left over.

And if you need to do a second trip that year? Or a third? Or 10 extra trips? The marginal utility of a cheaper EV starts looking really expensive. This is how people think. Owning a car that can cope with the outliers is a hedge against a period where you have to make lots of unexpected long trips.

People enjoy the freedom of ICE cars and their ability to go on essentially unplanned long journeys. Giving that up to use a cheaper EV will be a very hard sell.

Unless employers suddenly start handing out extra months worth vacations, an extra family trip sounds unlikely, let alone 10.

I'm in the UK. 28 days of paid vacation time is the legal minimum (22 vacation days, plus 6 bank holidays). I get quite a lot more. Some places around the world have higher legal minimums. People in Brazil all get at least 30 days.

And people's plans are already made for whatever days they get, so unless there's a sudden influx of vacations, more trips just won't happen. That is of course expecting people can also afford extra trips, the locations themselves often being quite expensive.

And people's plans are already made for whatever days they get...

Maybe I'm unusual but I rarely have any plans further than a couple of months ahead. Whether I'll be going on any long trips in the next 12 months isn't something I have any idea about yet. It depends on loads of factors (money, weather, work, whether I can pick up a bargain, etc.)

Going anywhere where EV couldn't reach would most often require some sort of reservations; hotels, skiing resorts, museums, sight seeing etc all require some sort of planning if you don't want to absolutely burn money buying things ad-hoc, which would go counter the point of saving money with an ICE anyway.

A month or two in advance is just fine, most people can do as much. They do know how many days of vacation they get though, and it's unlikely to change, so any plan you have you keep.

I think you're vastly overestimating the resources the average person (read: income under 40k) has to do things like drive 300 miles in one direction, multiple times a year

The VW ID.Buzz is the only vehicle at the moment that could handle all the outliers of my life. (And maybe a Model X Tesla, but I'm not made of money).

I could go camping with it, I could use it to haul stuff. It can fit seven adults and two dogs at the same time.

But for daily driving it'd be a huge pain. I don't need a car that big 90% of the time, a smaller, nimbler car is much more practical.

I like to think about needing to daily drive a box truck because, hey, sometimes I move and need to take all my belongings from one place to another!

No, I don't. I'll rent a u-haul every now and then, and own the 95th+ percentile transportation machine.

Only if you assume that there are no alternatives to your personal car that can take care of that usecase. For example, I don't own a car despite needing to move heavy objects once or twice a year. I simply rent something, or ask a friend. That's much cheaper than owning something that I only need rarely.

Is it? My car doesn't go fly or go 600 mph, so it's basically useless to me on that yearly outlier trip that takes me cross-country to visit relatives. Somehow I manage though.

That's assuming you have the money to overfit to your 1% use case. Otherwise you're paying $xx,000 to drag around batteries that you don't need most of the time.

In a perfect world 90% of those massive vehicles would be replaced by golf carts, in cities with temperate climates at least.

Entirely depends on your point of view of a "perfect world" and the realism of that. I'd love to just have transporters entirely powered by 100% renewable energy capable to send me anywhere at light speed, but that's not the world we live in.

Does a "perfect world" imply me missing birthdays? Does it imply me missing lunch with close friends? Does it imply me not taking a job outside the local bus line? Does it imply me not visiting a dying relative? If I'm limited to either entirely public transit or a vehicle which can barely do 10 miles at 30mph then yes, I'll miss many of these things.

Covering only 95% cases means you save a lot of money, part of which can be used for those rare events. Does taking a taxi to see a dying relative a couple hundred miles away cost a lot? Sure, but owning a ton of unused capacity for years costs a lot more.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com