We're most probably at the combustion -> "only upper-middle-class people and richer will be able to afford private transportation" tipping point.
EVs will continue to get cheaper, faster, as global auto manufacturers scale up their production. If you can take a bus, a train, or an ebike, definitely do that. But consumers will not stop buying cars (global light vehicle market is ~83M units/annually), so sell them EVs, making them as inexpensive and quickly as possible. China EV sales are already at 9M units/year, more than half total US light vehicle sales in 2022 (~14M units).
TLDR Volume is misleading, pay attention to velocity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects
https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline
https://about.bnef.com/blog/lithium-ion-battery-pack-prices-...
https://www.reuters.com/technology/ev-energy-storage-battery...
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/used-ev-prices-are-collapsing...
The problem is not solved and may not be which is what I think the original poster is considering. The bottom rung of society is going to lose their transport.
Edit: I know everyone is blinded by EV hype at the moment but the entire financial model is drastically different and that will impact people heavily. Even the infrastructure and housing here doesn't necessarily mean it's viable.
And in many cases, they're also going to lose their jobs. Politicians are incapable of thinking beyond the M25, so are probably expecting everyone to just hop on the Tube or frequent London bus services instead.
People can't move closer to workplaces (or better public transport links), as the #1 goal of every UK government seems to be pumping up property prices to ever more ridiculous levels. (You can't allow the supply of housing to increase when rich people are getting richer from the rising prices!)
We're incapable of building transport infrastructure in the UK. Look at the state of HS2. Something like £500 million per mile of railway (largely down to those property prices), and it might not even reach London at the current rate, let alone be extended north of Birmingham.
Even for those that can afford an EV, huge numbers of people are unable to charge them at home (living in flats, relying on on-street parking, etc). There's hardly any visible growth of public charging infrastructure, and you just know that public chargers will be a huge bait+switch, eventually charging extortionate amounts compared to home charging (if only to minimize the queues...)
So why are governments committing to these non-sensical goals?
The UK is the perfect place for High Speed rail, and part of the problem with it is the idiotic bending over backwords for NIMBYs and the generally terrible rail planning practices. Not having built this in like the 80s is insanely dumb.
If we are talking about poor people then bus reduction in bus service is actually by far the biggest deal.
Where is the most expensive property in the world? For the most part, next to ports, next to railways, next to subways, next to anything that makes makes it cheap to move people and things.
Demand for housing and transport is rising beyond the means of the infrastructure to actually sustain this. Most of the whinging I see against governments surrounds their unwillingness to restrict investment and immigration, which they won’t do because their books are balanced around the notion that they will “grow out of debt”. Likely we will arrive at a point where we have a bunch of infrastructure we built that’s infeasible to maintain that will turn into ruins when the population gets around to contracting.
The idea that rail infrastructure isn't sustainable is kind of nonsense, even with smaller population. Road infrastructure maintenance is far more expensive and in a bad economic situation you can run 30 year old trains. Its simply a matter of what your society puts priority on.
Main part of Britain specifically is so densely populated that even with massive collapse in population most of the rail network would still be vital.
Yet we are still building up such infrastructure, even if emphasis is gradually shifting to more sustainable infrastructure. I still am sceptical that much of what is being built now can survive a century. It seems most plausible that transport costs are going to climb up every year over the next few decades and I don't see how that doesn't break the back of many many communities.
https://www.cars.com/articles/2023-cars-com-affordability-re...
> The median new-car price among Cars.com dealers was approximately $42,500 in December — a 10% increase from December 2021 and 18% higher than December 2020.
"The segment median for cars ($25,745) is $8,450 less than small SUVs, $17,325 less than small pickups and $33,925 less than EVs."
What does $23K get? I drive the car like a normal person with no attempt to eek out extra mileage. I'm averaging 48 mpg over the past seven months since I got the car. Even though it is a low end model, it is amazing what technology it comes with. It shows me the speed limit and indicates when I'm over -- not by having a map of the speed limit, but by reading the signs as I drive. It has lane keeping and adaptive cruise control, and warns me when my closing speed is too great.
My ego isn't attached to my car so I don't care it is not flashy. I can't imagine paying twice as much unless I had some specialty need (eg, had to buy a heavy duty truck).
But my comment was about third party options with lower range. $6-10k depending on the range selected, IIRC. For a car with high mileage already, that'd be a good way to turn it into a commuter.
In practice, I'm not seeing a significant difference between the way the 3 is being treated and the way similarly sized vehicles are treated.
It's a bit like the fact that there is a ton of Iphone8's available, pop a new battery in them and you're still good to go: https://www.gumtree.com.au/s-iphone/iphone+8/k0c18597r10?cat...
And even if it is $10k, plus another $10k for a new battery, and from at least a drive train perspective that's practically a new Tesla for $20k that'll last another 100,000+mi.
I certainly would think twice about an old car with over 100k on the clock for $20k. There are plenty of other components besides the drivetrain that can go south on you and are expensive to fix relative to the value of the car. Some ICE cars are notorious for the drivetrain going 350k+ miles while the rest of it might rot apart. Honestly modern cars are terrible to drive when they are old. My old 20 year old honda had a leaky sunroof, leaky tail light seals, slow window motors that cut out in the cold winter, every hydraulic line corroded and leaked at one point or another sometimes multiple times, frame rust, shot rubber in the suspension components, shot brake system, rubber and plastic body trim that was just cracking and sloughing off from 20 years of UV bombardment, blown speakers, and a motorized radio antenna that never once worked. The drivetrain on the other hand was flawless being a honda, just needed an oil change with synthetic once a year ($35 or so and 15 minutes of my time mostly passive waiting for it to drain) and it was still on the original clutch.
With a tesla you still have suspension components with rubber. You still have rubber gaskets and seals around windows and doors. You still have hydraulic brake lines. You still have steel components that will rust. You still have electric motors controlling things like windows (and presumably the sexy door handle release) that probably have plastic gearboxes. You aren't out of the woods, far from it.
But that's why I don't understand why you seem to assume a Tesla needing a new battery and a worn out interior/exterior/suspension is going to be $10k. Where's the data? Do you actually have listings of Teslas with dead batteries for $10k?
The financial reasonable thing for the wealthy has always been to buy off lease, at a steep depreciation discount, excellent service records, a dealer warranty, and 2 years and 20k miles.
I'm cheap, I last bought a 7 year old car for ¼ of its sticker price and 100k miles with detailed service records. I still drive it 13 years later at 20 years old, though, I only put 5-10k miles on a year. My most common trip is 150 miles in a neighboring state. That and track and autocross. I get 32mpg on mid grade gasoline.
I did consider a Tesla recently, a 2016 model s is about ⅓ of it's original sticker price, though Tesla is one of the few companies that the new car is cheaper than it was 6 years ago. With a 20% price drop.
There's obviously lots of reason why "most people" want a new. An unblemished interior, the newest self driving features, the longest range. But you'll find the 2-6 year olds still have 80% of the range, the same safety features, and some form of self driving that your old car (that as rates increase you should keep 7 years instead of 4) didn't have.
And the cost of (often obligatory, in places like the USA) private transportation is almost like a crony capitalist regressive tax. It disproportionately harms the purchasing power of working-class individuals. Before I broke into the middle class, it was absolutely infuriating how much of my hard-earned money I had to spend on owning, maintaining, and operating my car. But there was no way around it, because the city I lived in was structured such that not owning a car was tantamount to not even having a chance at improving my economic opportunity. The sooner governments are forced to stop making infrastructure decisions that further siphon money out of the pockets of individuals and into the pockets of big automakers and oil companies, the better.
I'm afraid it's not going to be anytime soon. What you are doing is government acting in service harder for the benefit of big corporations.
Its simple really. There are 2 problems, both need to be solved. We can't wait on 1 to be solved until we start addressing the other.
And EV now are way cleaner then ICE cars even in West Virgina. If you are in France, Switzerland or a country lie that, they are incredibly low carbon.
> spend on owning, maintaining, and operating my car.
Yes, society would do much better to invest in walking, biking and trains (of various kinds) then EV and to discourage car usage, EV or not.
This is pretty clear to anybody who has studied the issue. Housing and transportation cost combined are a huge part of avg peoples lives, well over 50% in many cases. Better land use and zoning policies, combined with proper transport policy can make this much, much better.
The US ironically has so many access road lanes that establishing a bike network is actually easy. In Switzerland most cities roads are very narrow so its much harder to add an extra mode in.
If government in the 80/90s were as smart with their nuclear policy as Canada now we would live in a much better world.
(And maybe, just maybe, we should create viable alternatives before pricing vast swathes of populations off the roads and out of work...)
I'd say this is an example of putting the cart before the horse. Why would you expect people to shift to other forms of transit before the road network supports these other forms of transit?
More restrictions on road and car use shouldn't surprise anyone at this point, it's been coming down the pipe for years. At some point you have to make the status quo painful, because no-one's willing to change anything if they're not feeling the pain yet.
Meanwhile, the people in charge of solving the problem of climate change are still flying around the world on private jets.
The poorest already don't own or use cars. Getting cars off the road will make buses faster and more reliable, and the poorest will benefit the most from that.
We need fewer cars on the road, so any way you slice it some people have to be pushed out of driving, and any way you slice it the rich will find a way to pay to continue to drive. Either we let them pay directly, and spend that money in public-directed ways that improve transit and help the poor, or we adopt some other system and they'll find more wasteful ways to use money to "solve the problem" that just mean everyone loses out. (e.g. some cities have a rule that each car is only allowed into the city a few days a week depending on its numberplate - so the result is that rich people buy two cars).
> Meanwhile, the people in charge of solving the problem of climate change are still flying around the world on private jets.
And they'll continue to do that until we adopt a carbon tax system so dumb that there's no way around it. But if you try to just "ban private jets" then they'll buy private prop planes, or private trains, or fly around in private full-size airliners...
https://youtu.be/uxoRrdE9efk?t=355
Plus, China's middle class has been gobbling up the BYD Qin and Song EVs.