Comment by antisthenes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by antisthenes | Hacker News Reader

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> Electric cars are not intrinsically more expensive. Because EVs are simpler mechanically they will be cheaper to make than ICE cars once the battery packs get cheap enough.

This is nonsense, because the battery packs are already cheap enough. The value of savings from cheap battery packs is simply not being passed on to the end consumer, because the car companies and dealerships can get away with not doing so.

It doesn't matter if Ford or Tesla builds battery packs for $90/KWh and the engine is 2x cheaper than the ICE car, if later on it is marked up appropriately to be sold as a luxury good.

NONE of the battery packs in current EVs cost more than $10000 to make, for ANY manufacturer. Which means they are pricing the econoboxes that contain the batteries at $30,000, which is ridiculous.

There's another angle there too.

The dealers are often up-charging MORE for fuel efficient hybrids or EVs. It might be 2-5k more for a gas burner, but you get nailed 10k over MSRP for the hybrid or EV option.

They're effectively making you pay the difference in the cost of gasoline up front so there's no economic incentive to the consumer to get the better MPG or emission-free option.

I haven't done the math but intuitively it seems like you end up pre-paying the difference you'd save by using less to no gasoline.

I think part of it is also that dealers / manufacturers are creatively trying to capture tax incentives as well. Instead of the consumer getting a cheaper EV via tax breaks, the dealer or manufacture charges that much more and it ends up in their pocket.

It's messed up. Just about every large business in America is on the government teat in various creative ways. They're not innovating or competing anymore.

> They're effectively making you pay the difference in the cost of gasoline up front so there's no economic incentive to the consumer to get the better MPG or emission-free option.

A different way to look at it: the dealers are trying to make you pay for the difference in oil changes and maintenance costs. EVs don't need regular oil changes and service checkups. For many dealers those services are their actual bread-and-butter where they make the most profit.

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