Edit: Although a bit of a bummer further down: "Toyota claims it will be ready for sale in 2027 or 2028."
The e-up from VW is the cheapest one they sell. It's 30k, more than double than the combustion version. I simply cannot believe that the same car but with battery an e engine costs 16k more.
Best-selling EV in China after Model Y is BYD Yuan Plus, which costs ~20k USD. That's the niche VW has to compete for.
VW is just behind on EV tech, they don’t have much to offer their Chinese JV partners beyond a brand.
I just believe the profit margins on those 2 versions are wildly different.
Electric cars are more expensive to produce, for now at least, but that that price difference doesn't excuse a 2x price difference to the end customer.
ICE cars have had decades to bring down the cost of manufacturing, through shared components and improved manufacturing processes.
EVs are newer, with a lot of cost going into R&D that must be recouped and parts that aren’t shareable across their entire lineup of vehicles yet.
The simplicity of EVs results in reduced ownership cost though with little maintenance required
If you only have batteries for X amount of cars, selling X amount of expensive cars makes much more sense.
Also despite being conceptually simpler, the cost of the battery is still high.
I think is a fairly common situation in Europe, you might live in a city but relatives are away. You visit but don’t see the point of making a complex planning factoring cold weather, vehicle load, potentially broken chargers no your planned stop,….
And train is not an option if you are carrying a family of 5 or plan on moving around once you arrive.
Why adopt a solution that is worse than the status quo?
Of course that's also worse than the status quo (well, probably cheaper than the status quo, but less convenient), so I don't expect people to flock to that solution
If it lets you get rid of your cars, maybe.
If you also need a daily car (or even two), rental is not necessarily cheap, and beyond convenience it has flexibility issues.
For instance the rental closest to me is a half hour bus ride away, and not open on the weekends, and the prices can vary a lot depending on time to trip or period, and obviously the type of car can triple the rental price.
It’s worth it to me, because I can otherwise get by fine without owning a car. But if I need a daily anyway, it makes more sense to upscale it a bit and get the extra freedom. Especially if relatives start getting up in age and you never know when you need to pack up quick.
It’s the same issue with timeshare vehicles, if people have kids they’ll all need it at the same time (because school schedules), and you’ll always remember when it was not available for an emergency.
I just looked up a trip in A Better Route Planner in a Hyundai Ioniq 6 going on a trip around Texas, 495km trip. 4h44min total trip time, 8 minutes of charging.
Do you really not take a 10 minute break in nearly 5 hours of driving?
People who are willing to look into the situation on the ground tend to react positively
Now I'm married with kids. Even road trips in my ICE, I tend to stop more often and for a little longer than I would have otherwise. And you know what? Overall, my road trips are more enjoyable. I'm far less drained when I arrive. I'm less stressed on my drive. I'm more alert in the car for more of the trip. Its a much better experience in the end taking a few more breaks on a long road trip, and I look back at my previous min-maxing attempts in regret of stressing myself out so much unnecessarily.
The road trips I've done in my EV have been absolutely pleasant, and my EV isn't even that great for road trips.
Depends. If you believe climate change is a hoax pushed by evil liberals or whatever, the status quo is fine.
If you understand that it is real, then you know that keeping the status quo of burning oil means working towards destroying human civilization. Then it's easy to decide that mild inconvenience of charging an EV is worth keeping humanity around.
How many miles do you need to drive an EV until you break even on the emissions required to balance out manufacturing of the car, recycling of the battery and car once it has reached its max lifetime use, and how the electricity to charge your EV was generated?
If your concern is climate change, lobbying for EV use probably isn’t the biggest bang for the buck.
I’m not 100% convinced an EV is better for the environment when you consider all of the indirect emission sources.
(I’m bracing for the downvotes, but would much prefer to be proved wrong with citations and research studies)
Absolutely is not. Passenger road transport accounts for only about 10% of CO2 emissions[1], and reducing that is one of the more difficult approaches because you're asking millions of people to each change their personal habits which individually have essentially no impact.
State regulatory changes applying to large industrial emitters will have the biggest impact and while the costs will ultimately be borne by customers, it is more likely to actually happen. This includes both encouraging "green" energy production such as nuclear and renewables, as well as demanding capture and/or reduction of emissions.
My EV is already a bit over 26,000mi, so it's most likely past it's break even and I plan on probably putting another 100,000+ miles on it before I sell it.
BEVs last a week or more between charges. If you have a charger at work, supermarket, gym, or such, you just plug it in when you have a chance.
Tesla hatte VW im zweiten Halbjahr 2022 die deutsche Elektroautokrone abgejagt. Nun verteidigte das Unternehmen von Elon Musk den Spitzenplatz. Der Vorsprung schrumpfte allerdings von 7400 auf 2000 Autos. Die Marktanteile der Marken lagen dabei bei 16,5 und 15,6 Prozent der insgesamt in Deutschland neu zugelassenen Elektroautos.
See also in English: https://www.best-selling-cars.com/electric/2022-full-year-ge...
That way they can sell cheap shitty cars without damaging their reputation for high end vehicles.
The many brands are mostly historical by consolidation in the industry.
So yes, Tesla sold more cars in Germany than the Volkswagen brand, but fewer than the Volkswagen group.
No not really. When they say 1200km that's under ideal conditions. Put a roof rack, a kayak or two bikes, load it up with 4 passengers and a trunk full of luggage, and drive up into the mountains on a hot summer day with the air conditioner on full blast, and you're probably looking at a range of 400km. And your destination probably doesn't have a place to charge overnight.
This whole "in one day" mentality is the problem. If you're going to the backcountry of death valley where there is absolutely no civilization, you want your vehicle to hold enough energy for your entire trip, not just for one day.
At any rate, most people never do all those things, nor do they go into some death valley. Because most of us don't like death.
As for the charging places, yes that is an issue. I never had trouble filling my horse with that gasoline stuff, either.
Yes but when most people talk about 400 miles of range in an ICE car they are usually referring to at least typical (==harsh, if you are in the western part of the US) conditions with AC on full blast and lots of mountains.
When EV companies boast 400 miles of range they're testing it on an ideal track. Very different.
I have a model 3 long range, advertised 358 miles, I get nowhere near that, more like 200 miles in realistic California conditions, which are (a) searing heat in the central valley in summer (b) mountains everywhere else (c) biting cold in the winter anywhere in the far north or far east part of the state (d) stop sign hell in the bay area which forces you to stop and go every block.
It's not necessarily about the range, there's also charging frequency. I personally don't have anywhere to charge my car where I live (apartment complex) so I have to go to my office building or my city hall/library, etc.. and of course pay for it, while I coordinate whatever errands I have to match the charging time. I would like to do that as seldom as possible.
That's 560 kilos more than what Bill Gates said.