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Comment by selectodude | Hacker News Reader

The majority of the cost of any EV is in the batteries. They make them faux-luxury to justify the price that they cost. A stripper EV is going to cost only a couple thousand less than anything out right now.

Maybe relax on the 300mi range and get a Nissan Leaf.

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It reminds me of housing which is in a very similar situation. Developers will often throw in something nice like a granite countertop and use that as justification for jacking up the price way beyond the cost of those additions because a majority of the cost lies elsewhere.

These luxury features aren't why these products are so expensive. They are thrown in to segment the market and make people feel better about spending this huge amount of money. There is no incentive for the people producing these products to remove these luxuries.

Soon the only option for people who can't afford or simply don't want to buy the new luxury product is to buy an old and rundown version of what was once a luxury product. New affordable alternatives just aren't as profitable so they aren't produced anymore in the quantities that we actually need.

Given that the govt already has a gazillion auto subsidies, perhaps they should do something to encourage an affordable no-frills EV with good range. I for one would pay more for a vehicle like that.

I would too. The problem is, like the mini phones, there aren't enough of us, and the profit margin small enough (manufactures make more money on luxury vehicles), that automakers don't see a point. Add in a great number of safety regulations (eg mandatory backup cameras in the US since 2013, automated emergency braking (AEB) in the EU since 2022) which all bring up the price of cars, means that we're relegated to the pre-2017 used car market.

"Majority" is an exaggeration. Tesla battery replacements cost around $13-20k while the cars themselves go for well over double that.

https://www.jdpower.com/cars/shopping-guides/how-often-do-te...

The battery still drives costs to some extent, but the bigger issue is manufacturing capacity; you can only make so many EVs on the existing production lines (including battery factory capacity), and there's plenty of high-end demand to consume the supply, so you're not going to leave money on the table selling a cheap car.

People who want a cheap EV just have to do what every cost-conscious consumer does when a new technology comes along: wait. At some point there will be plenty of EVs for the PMC and it will make sense to build one for the rest of us.

It is really hard to recommend getting a Leaf in 2023, at least in the US, unless you _only_ plan to charge at home. The Leaf still uses the Chademo plug, (I believe it's the last car sold in the US that does so) where as CCS is becoming the standard here. The Chevy Bolt is otherwise a similar car for a similar price.

My rav4 prime has a combined range well north of 500 miles and I need every bit of it-because I live in the sticks and we’re not to the point of being able to charge comparably. Something’s got to give.

> Something’s got to give.

Living in the sticks?

ICEs enabled housing sparsity, reversing that is part of the solution.

I’m guessing you don’t realize how offensive that statement is.

I’d like to know what percentage of GDP is done “in the sticks”. It’s one of the more viable ways to address NIMBYISM and locality problems.

20 percent of the population, 10 percent of GDP. So the entirety of rural USA has a GDP 3 points higher than the NYC metro area.

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/redefining-rural-am...

A couple things:

That census definition of urban/rural is different from the colloquial definition. The census link allows an "urban" classification as low as 2,500 people.

Colloquially-defined rural areas have been decimated by globalization in the last 40 years. The "rural" area I grew up in had thousands of manufacturing jobs; now it may have 200. The drop in GDP goes far beyond urban sprawl enabled by ICE vehicles.

2000 is far far too low to declare things urban. That line should be drawn at least above 10k-20k, I think.

Also critical infrastructure is out “in the sticks” like dams, power infrastructure (lines/plants/storage), and the support of the container trucks. Then there’s agriculture. It all needs to be electrified and reachable by electrics.

I generally hate that rural areas are so over-represented in US politics but jesus, some of the comments in this thread are making me question that. There is some serious big city myopia going on here. Not everyone can and wants to live their entire lives in a dense city and that's perfectly fine.

It should be very possible in a decade or so to extend charging capacity to the boondocks. Just look at where we were ten years ago, versus today. In the meantime, if you can install even a slow 220V/12A charger in your garage, a PHEV should be quite effective.

Quite, it’s about a 90/10 split right now. 80/20 would really be something.

Edit Just to expand on this, the current 90/10 split (500 miles gas/40ish electric) has cut my long distance drive gas usage down by something like 50-75%. If it were more like 500 miles gas/100 miles electric that’d probably cut it down to 2-4 gallons of gas per month or less. Around my house is already fully electric with the 10%.

The numbers I have not done are would simply going inline series with the gas be better than having the traditional power train and electric. In line meaning a generator to fire up the amps needed when the batter gets low-how modern trains work. I’m guessing it’s not so obvious since BMW cancelled their range extender.

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