Auto execs are coming clean: EVs aren't working | Hacker News Reader

Auto execs are coming clean: EVs aren't working

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18 pointsTheAlchemist28 comments

Well, maybe a two row EV shouldn't weigh 9000lb?

EVs are subject to their own form of the tyranny of the rocket equation, because the weight is dominated by fuel (the battery). The more battery you have, the more battery you need to haul that battery around, and so on.

So they are the perfect platform for minimalist cars and plug-in hybrid setups... but instead everyone has decided they need to make giant, heavy, hilariously expensive luxury pure EVs.

Just to clarify: this is true of ICE too, it's just less of a factor.

Are there any 9000 pound EVs other than the Hummer? That one is notable for its excess, most EVs are much lighter (just like most ICE cars are smaller and more efficient than humvees!)

It is an extreme example, but every pure EV I have seen is heavier than the ICE equivalent.

The Model 3 3500-4000 lb, and its a small car and lighter than most other EVs.

The Model 3 is a compact car @ 3,862 to 4,048 lbs, so it would comparable to an Accord rather than a Civic. A Honda accord is 3,239 to 3,280 lbs, so the Model 3 is obviously a few hundred pounds heavier (from 600 - 800 lbs).

And I would assert that ~3250lb is rather porky for a compact ICE car, even though thats "normal" these days.

Ya, I’m much more interested in a luxury civic class EV, but those don’t really exist yet. We just have the leaf, bolt, and mini in the states.

There's a lot of path dependence, ossified thinking, and perverse incentives driving this irrational outcome. SUVs and pickup trucks are 80% of the US market because bigger is better in America so customers buy the biggest cars and houses they can afford. On the manufacturer side MSRP is proportional to size and curb weight. GM quit the economy sedan market. Government fuel economy mandates are more forgiving of larger vehicles and provide a "light duty truck" exemption. Gasoline is cheap and always available so all the lessons we learned in 1973 have long been forgotten.

Charging networks except for Tesla's suck. Weak charging infrastructure means customers have range anxiety and like many other things in America feel like they are going it alone and cannot rely on sharing or renting on demand, so they demand a huge battery. This huge battery is very expensive so the price of a EV is very high. People expect an expensive car to be luxurious, powerful, or huge. No one wants to pay a green premium.

Individuals are rationally responding to government subsidized road and parking infrastructure, lack of any carbon tax, and cheap fuel by consuming bigger cars without bound.

Manufacturers are rationally maximizing short term profit by following demand. They're applying the ICE business model of externalizing the cost of roads, "fuel," parking, pollution, insurance. If it wasn't for trillions of dollars spent on car infrastructure like wide roads, highways, mandated parking, gas stations, etc. adoption of ICE cars would also be low.

America has extreme car dependency. Just legalizing apartments, mixed use zoning, and building safe e-Bike lanes and mass transit could relieve some car demand and housing shortage in big cities where most people live. The IRA law literally subsidizes big EVs more than sedans! Even owning a car creates crash safety anxiety in which people feel like driving a sedan is not safe enough because everyone else is driving an oversized SUV.

Some of this is negated if manufacturers just sell plug in hybrids with tiny range-extending generators.

But mostly they are not, and that is particularly perplexing to me. Is there some kind of stigma against anything but a pure EV?

Plug-in hybrids only seem to be sold in certain states like California. GM cancelled the Chevy Volt. In states that don't subsidize or mandate them, or are ahem politically opposed to lower tailpipe emission vehicles, inventory is very thin. I wonder if these cars are just compliance models to bring up the CAFE fleet average.

A 10 kWh battery adds several thousand dollars to the cost of the car. If manufacturers are not eager to make these widely available in all states it suggests they don't find it profitable. I'm not sure if it's EVs being higher priced and allowing for more margin, or sedans fading away from the market and therefore any PHEV sedans. Toyota does sell a PHEV SUV RAV4 but inventory is very scarce. Stellantis sells a Chrysler Pacifica PHEV (minivan).

> A 10 kWh battery adds several thousand dollars to the cost of the car. If manufacturers are not eager to make these widely available in all states it suggests they don't find it profitable.

A plug in hybrid is basically an EV with a much smaller battery though, and what must be a cheap generator. It seems at least as economical as a pure EV to me, unless the generator "taints" them and they cannot be sold with higher margins.

PHEVs are like the worst of both worlds. You have a heavy battery, and a combustion engine on the side. Just go one way or the other already.

Toyota already makes a lot on selling hybrids, and I believe at least one Prius model is a PHEV.

They fit in a niche. People who can charge it every day and have a commute that fits within the battery only range can go months without buying gasoline. There used to be a $10,000 spread between a PHEV and 200 mi BEV.

Ya. Its weird that hybrids, let alone PHEVs, were never popular in China. They moved straight from ICE to EV. I expect the USA is sort of in the middle (we had more adoption of PHEVs, but that is rapidly being replaced by BEVs).

PHEV's are like the best of both worlds. You have a light battery, 20% of the size of an EV battery but big enough to cover most peoples day to day driving. Then you have a traditional internal combustion engine for the occasional longer trip.

You are confusing traditional hybrids with true plug-in electric hybrids.

The entire drivetrain is electric, but there is the ICE generator only has to be a few horsepower, at a single static rpm, hence it can be tiny, dirt cheap, and more fuel efficient than any normal automotive engine. This more than offsets the massive battery size reduction, which is a huge cost for EVs.

PHEVs aren’t a new thing. The Prius PHEV is exactly as you say.

This should come as no surprise. ICE vehicles (in the US) has an extremely large, stable infrastructure, economies of scale for parts/aftermarket/service, little to no supply chain issues, and a sense of reliability (most cars just _work_). The economics of EVs just don't play out as well as ICE. While the charging network is expanding there are still not fast chargers on nearly every exit ramp on every interstate like there are gas stations. Then there's the cost of the vehicle which is super expensive compared to the most popular vehicles (pickups and wagons) factoring in all the other EV issues.

My 2 cents: we (the western economies) should have focused on hybrids first before jumping to EV. The fast push to EV was rather bold given hybrid tech works so well and uses the existing infrastructure. The push should have been much slower.

The price of the actual vehicle needs to be heavily subsidized before mass adoption

The article is surprisingly scant on detail why this is.

Are fewer cars sold in total?

Are they not, and people continue to buy gasoline cars?

Are fewer people driving? Is the situation the same worldwide?

In China, a lot of EVs are being sold, something like 50% of all cars. The vast majority of them are very small, similar to the Japanese kei cars.

They are used in "3rd tier" cities, not the cities you might have heard of such as Beijing and Wuhan.

Crucially, these cars are affordable. Well under USD 10k. Not street legal in Western countries, of course.

Back in the West, it appears that the pool of wealthy people who wish to virtue-signal by buying a car for $70K or more is finite.

I haven't yet seen any stories about the experiences of rental car companies with electric cars, and why they are not snapping them up. Those stories would be very interesting. So would the stories of companies that operate their own fleets.

Well, you're just in time for the rental car companies. Hertz was releasing their quarterly results yesterday, and they sounded pretty negative on Tesla (they signed up for 100k Teslas last year - was a pretty huge deal):

"The rental car company cited Tesla’s price cuts negatively impacting the resale value of its EVs, and higher than expected repair costs for EVs as a reason to slow its pace of electrification."

"Hertz now has 35,000 Tesla vehicles and around 50,000 electric vehicles in its fleet -- far shy of the 100,000 Teslas that Hertz originally said it was ordering and expected by the end of 2022."

There is this phrase in TFA:

> the next wave of buyers focus on cost, infrastructure challenges, and lifestyle barriers to adopting.

We can assume that new buyers are looking at the value proposition carefully:

* There are few small-battery EVs available in most of North America (Fiat 500e is a California compliance car);

* Large-battery EVs are expensive and require a significant charge rate beyond Level 2;

* L2 charging at home is the minimally-viable requirement for saving money versus petrol;

* There is no low-cost charging option for people who have no residential charging solution. If the cost of a rapid charge at a service station approaches the cost of fueling a PHEV or ICE, then PHEV or ICE may be cheaper to buy and more convenient (equally inconvenient) for refueling.

Also bear in mind that the next cohort of buyers is facing a lodging crisis, sustained high cost of living, and then end of climate stability.

“Why aren’t customers buying the EVs we are not selling?”.

Enough already, let the Chinese car manufacturers in.

I thought the headline was referring to the autoexec.bat file.

...using current business models.

There is a LOT of misinformation going around about EVs too.

Every single Facebook ad I see even mildly related to EVs or chargers has people claiming that EVs are a big fire risk, despite the stats showing they are less likely to catch fire.

There is also the “hydrogen is just around the corner, keep using oil until it is” brigade.

A lot of these are from fake profiles too. I see some with e.g. Clint Eastwood profile pictures, or names with “Liberty” in the name. These are obviously targeted at key demographics.

Then there are the crazy ones that have feeds full of 5G and covid.

I've also seen a huge increase in anti EV & renewable energy propaganda.

A look at the posts from a right-wing Facebook user I know are recently all about it:

  * Anti windmill posts
  * Human induced global warming not being real
  * EV charging stations powered by diesel-powered generators
  * EV bus catching fire
  * 'meme post' about an EV simply displacing the greenhouse gases to the power generator that's far away and using a battery that's poisoning children who make them
  * Cost of driving EVs are equal to $17.33 per gallon of gasoline

Seems there is a real concentrated effort going on.

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