Auto industry executives admit electric vehicle plans are in jeopardy
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I'm not interested in owning a science experiment. I want something that has real buttons so I can use my muscle memory to push them without taking my eyes off the road. I don't want something that beeps at me all the damned time (looking at you, Toyota/Lexus/Subaru). I want something with decent range (300 miles/500km) - I don't mind stopping at the 4-5 hour mark to recharge - I need to recharge too at that point. I don't want an all-glass roof - I live in the South and it gets hot here. I want comfortable seats. After trade-in and cash-down, I don't want a payment much over $600. I don't mind spending $1200 to install a charger at home - it's a one-time purchase that I will be able to use over several vehicles and adds value to the house.
I'm sure I sound like a cranky old man (because I am). But there's a reason why car design has converged over the last century to the control layout we have today. It's because it works.
https://www.hagerty.com/media/car-profiles/driving-a-model-t...
That was by far the scariest car situation I have been in for a while. If I had been alone in the car I never would have found the menu item while driving and could have easily crashed before pulling over.
Even after we found two ways to adjust the wipers it was still the worst interface I have ever seen for a safety critical car system.
I usually spend a couple of minutes when I drive someone else's car to get familiar with the controls, as the rear window windscreen wiper, light controls (especially fog light) can be tricky on old cars as well.
I love my model 3 but the wipers are by far the worst feature. The auto sensing is awful in light mist, there are not enough different intermittent settings, and changing the speed is a nightmare.
I think the offset touch screen controls are categorically worse than traditional cars in many ways, but hiding the freaking windshield wipers is the worst of them.
Beyond being annoying, it’s dangerous. I feel like there should some core functionality that should be illegal to not have a physical button.
Aside from the usual complaints about safety, distraction, generally poor UI design and the rest, touchscreens are a huge fuck-you to people with peripheral nerve damage.
Also, it's 2023, nearly 2024, how are tablet displays still laggy by default?
The voice controls are terrible, inaccurate and anyway you need to look at the console to see confirmation!
(look at new model s/x)
My only concern is the quality of the offerings so far have mostly driven people away from EVs. The two biggest problems IMHO are charging and software. Hopefully charging issues will be a thing of the past soon as more and more cars adopt NACS. The software problem is a harder nut to crack. I think legacy auto makers are having a much more difficult time getting this right than some of the newer companies. I'm hopeful that Hyundai / Kia will get it right.
I am of the opposite opinion -- I don't trust new tech-bro tier companies to get it right, esp. for something related to operational technology. simple car relay and control systems are now well known, and battery + traction control systems aren't rocket science, even with EVs. I don't want a fully networked cyber-car, I want a car with just enough to make it work well.
An M3 in which the only the difference is propulsion will instantly turn my head.
Saw a tag on the window for the Lighting describing how Ford owns all the data, you can’t do anything about it, and it’s on all their new vehicles.
Yeah, nah
I live in an apartment complex without charging infrastructure. Don’t want to drive to nearby charging station and wait/coordinate rides to and from. My place of work doesn’t have enough charging infrastructure to support demand.
It’s… fine? Not perfect but also liveable for now.
We used to live in a condo and there were plenty of 110v outlets in the shared garage space we probably could have used.
The car drives much better than any gas car i’ve ever owned and we never go to the gas station. I wouldn’t go back to an ICE if I could avoid it.
Edit: And, the ability to do minor fixes by myself (air filters, lights if they stop working, etc. nothing major) as well as ability to take it to any body shop if needed with quick turnaround. I shouldn’t have to take it to the dealer for every thing.
Not sure if the situation has improved but a while ago there were reports that Tesla were sitting in body shops for 6 months - 1 year due to lack of availability of parts.
Even the Lucid sales guy admitted the car is not designed right yet.
Reflections of the dash in the window -always.
Glass roof? Always sun in your eyes.
Never once yet in four years and 90,000 miles.
But I’m in another car with a glass roof, not a Lucid. Can’t speak to those, just can say that not all glass roofs are bad.
As to why everyone is installing them? They do look cool. And Tesla did it...
Really? I don't care how much you crank the heat, on a -25F night that has to suck.
Teslas are great in many ways, but the lack of physical controls are a gimmick to save money on production and materials. Same with those 'vegan' leather seats and fragile interiors.
Prior to this car I would never opt for the "vegan" option - I assume the quality varies dramatically from brand to brand, though
On the Mach-E, I like the small LCD they use as a speedometer panel. I also like the door handles. The handles on the Model 3 & Y are also good. I like the instant torque of electric motors - it lets you take any holes in traffic. I like the Tesla charge connector - it's a much better design than CHAdeMO (well, almost anything is..) and the CCS/J1772 connector (so huge). And I like the styling of the IONIC 5 - I don't think it'll age well, but at least it isn't a jelly-bean CUV. I also like the idea of much fewer service visits that come with EV ownership.
These will sometimes come with your car, or can be easily bought.
An expensive one will run about US $200 but again you might already have one included with the car.
It should be used with an adapter for whatever outlet you have; there are a few kinds with different connector shapes.
Long story short, there’s no need to install anything, just plug in.
Also if you don't have 220, then 110, which is not as fast, will also work if you don’t have much of a commute.
It isn't a total solution but it is an excelent option for <$10k from a dealer for something with <50k miles and ~70 miles range under realistic conditions. You can fully charge it overnight from a standard 120 wall socket. A 6.6 kW 220V charger can be had for ~$200. Being in the southern US and away from extremely low temperatures is also a plus.
An electric drivetrain is a way better driving experience than the miserable turbocharged 4-cylinder engines that everyone has been forced to use for fuel economy reasons today, even premium brands like Mercedes and BMW. These are nasty, underpowered, vibrating pieces of shit with no torque and no power unless you run them at thousands of RPM, where they're loud and buzzy. Just complete fucking garbage.
It's a shame EVs are not catching on, because they're really just better cars. I'd definitely pay a premium for an EV (and I have). I suppose the problem is that, if you're not a car enthusiast, a $30k Toyota hybrid is still a better deal, even if it drives like shit.
Downside is much increased tire wear for already much more expensive tires.
Why would the tyres be more expensive? Something like ID.3 or MG4 use normal tyres no different than ones you'd put on your normal Fiesta, they aren't any more expensive. The increased tyre wear is a problem but only in that it's directly linked with how heavy your foot is, and EVs make it much easier to have a heavy foot as you don't get any typical downsides of heavy acceleration you'd get in a petrol/diesel car.
Like for like compared to the same model with an ICE drivetrain? Sure. But that doesn't mean that all EVs are heavy. Our Volkswagen e-Up is only 1200kg.
Volskwagen ID.3 is 1740kg which I suppose is heavy, but a Diesel Golf 8 is nearly 1500kg, so the weight difference isn't that massive. And something like a Nissan Qashqai is 1700kg in a diesel, so if you swapped that for a new ID.3 you haven't bought a heavier car at all.
Compared to 997kg in en ICE version.
I do imagine that the thin tires they put on BMW i3s would last less. But for most people getting an EV now I can’t see how increased tire wear would be a practical problem.
And I do drive dynamically, let’s say. It’s just too fun not too.
Most of my miles are done on long journeys. I live in a terraced house and can’t charge at home. UK charging infrastructure seems pretty underdeveloped so far. My 2018 petrol car does 600 miles on a tank.
The upshot of all that is that an EV would give me half the range at twice the cost, and a headache every time I needed to charge it.
I really want EVs to get better, and I’m sure they will. But for now, they’re hugely inferior for me.
I'm still waiting to hear how the government plans to solve this or incentivize private investment for this setup to work. Because yeah, if you live in UK and don't have a private drive then I have no idea how you're using an electric car, unless you literally have a Tesla and live right next to a supercharger(I know one person with that setup and it works fine for them, it's literally one 20 minute stop a week and they get enough charge to last them a week).
>>Most of my miles are done on long journeys.
Funnily enough, for that use case you should be ok-ish, as most motorway stops in the UK are now equipped with rapid chargers, so if you're just driving up and down the country you should be able to just charge when you stop for a break, and with modern EVs easily doing 200+ miles per charge this really shouldn't be an issue.
The other thing is - you are an outlier if most of your driving is done on long journeys. Most people use their car to do a school run and commute to work, usually no more than 30-50 miles a day. If that's your setup(and you can charge at home), then EVs(and PHEVs to a large extent) are just a no brainer.
I assume that to be true in most places, however, one has to consider that even those people occasionally make long distance travels.
What happens if for whatever emergency I have drive 500 mi across the state, keep an ICE just in case? Hit the hay to wait for my car to recharge?
Uhm, you either rent a car locally if that's an option, or in any modern EV realistically you'd drive for 250 miles, then do a 45 minute stop to recharge and then do the other 250 miles. It would end up being marginally slower than in a normal car.
Also depends on the emergency, right - at 500 miles that's at least 10 hours of driving, it can't be that urgent. If someone is literally dying you'd get there faster in a normal car, I suppose - but somehow I don't pick my cars based on some incredibly rare situation. If you regularly have to address "emergencies" 500 miles away then I guess yes, don't buy an EV.
>I don't pick my cars based on some incredibly rare situation. If you regularly have to address "emergencies" 500 miles away then I guess yes, don't buy an EV.
Mr. Joe may also want to take his family for a summer trip, or attend some business at the capital city, it's not as unreasonable or rare as you think for the average person to account for the 1-2 times per year he might want or need to make a long distance trip when making their purchase.
>in any modern EV realistically you'd drive for 250 miles, then do a 45 minute stop to recharge
I'm not getting this kind of number, Google claims charging time is 31h–39h (220V) for an ID.3 and 21h–32h (220V) for a Nissan Leaf.
> Mr. Joe may also want to take his family for a summer trip, or attend some business at the capital city, it's not as unreasonable or rare as you think for the average person to account for the 1-2 times per year he might want or need to make a long distance trip when making their purchase.
No, it is not unreasonable or rare to do two long-distance trips a year. But what holds true for an emergency that requires you to drive 800km holds also true for a leisure or business trip where you can plan a little more beforehand.
> I'm not getting this kind of number, Google claims charging time is 31h–39h (220V) for an ID.3 and 21h–32h (220V) for a Nissan Leaf.
Of course not. You are looking at charging times for plugging in an extension cord from a household outlet (which in Europe is 220V AC at 16A, therefore ~3500W). It's like saying that refueling your 30t truck with a garden hose is taking really long. Well, duh!
The fast chargers you find on highways are usually DC chargers with varying specifications. IIRC, the smallest DC chargers you can find (at least in mainland Europe) are 500V at 125A, so ~62000W. These load your average car battery in less than an hour, IFF your car can do it (not all new ones can, so watch out). Really high-performance EV like Porsche Taycan or Tesla S can charge much faster, if the DC charger allows it. There are modells that go up to 240kW, which would charge a recent Tesla S with 100kWh battery in less than 30 minutes from empty to 100%.
This is goal post shifting, you said "emergencies". Vacation trips aren't emergencies. Tens of millions of us rent cars anyway for such trips since they involve flying.
>I'm not getting this kind of number, Google claims charging time is 31h–39h (220V) for an ID.3 and 21h–32h (220V) for a Nissan Leaf.
Did you seriously just use 2.3kW emergency home wall plug as your number for a stop vs 77-400 kW DC chargers (which are what are actually found at stops)? Or even a proper 7-22kW home charger? The very first hits I saw on Google for charging an iD.3 [0, 1] both showed the correct range of options, and other cars (including Teslas) are capable of handling more power. I'm curious how you arrived at the idea that owners were all accepting 1-2 days for each charge of an EV.
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0: https://pod-point.com/guides/vehicles/volkswagen/2020/id-3
1: https://evbox.com/en/electric-cars/volkswagen/volkswagen-id3
https://www.nissanusa.com/experience-nissan/news-and-events/...
I didn't look at what editions of the Leaf support DC charging, but it's safe to expect that new electric cars will almost all support it, and that it will get easier (in the sense of finding and paying for it).
Personally I can't imagine an emergency where I need to travel 500 miles as fast as possible but I suppose I'd either fly, take a train, or rent an ICE car. I personally wouldn't invest in a dedicated emergency car because that would cost far more than the other three options.
One scenario I could imagine is an evacuation for wildfires or hurricanes, but often there is plenty of warning with those events. Having one gas car topped off during hurricane season is probably good safety if you live on the Gulf coast.
In the short term very thin flat cables are being tested. But this assumes you can park opposite your house.
Councils are happy to lease pavements to providers but it's not a lucrative proposition right now for 95% of UK streets, it's also victim to a negative feedback mechanism where home owners won't buy EVs because charging is hard which creates low demand
Councils can't solve it without investment, most likely it will solve itself when the majority of high income charging locations have been constructed. Most charging companies are operating on long-term investments leveraging debt. It's going to take years to solve, and that's without worrying about the grid infrastructure
I can go 290 miles at £0.016/mile when charging at home. At the (expensive) motorway services it's then £0.15/mile to rapid-charge. The unleaded at that services is £1.60/l so at 42 mpg (guess) it's about £0.17/mile. The EV version of my car is more expensive than petrol but it's not 2x. A petrol car is more expensive to run and fuel (in the UK, at least).
Is that from solar? Or some tariff granting 6p/kWH delivered?
As far as I know, the distribution has for a very, very long time been managed by a private, regulated monopoly utility.
> fixed charge
I pay the same fixed (daily) standing charge regardless of how much electricity I use. This is normal here. To include it in the calculations makes no sense.
I asked, because if I chose Octopus supply, my energy supply price per kWh would vary according to the supplier but the price per kWh for distribution would not. (And Octopus would naturally only quote the price that they are charging for the part of the total picture that they're involved with.)
Being the total (excellent!) rate, I'm a little surprised that Octopus customers aren't running LiFePO4 battery banks to power their daytime usage from the nighttime tariff.
It will take some time to be more widespread, but I think this and small 7kW stations here and there (like the ones from Source London) charging will be the technical solution.
As for how this will be incentives, I don't expect to see much until ICE are banned. 65% to 75% of households in the UK have off-street parking, that's more than enough for charging providers to get established and have different types of cost effective chargers. Once ICE are banned, then there will probably be incentives to cover dead zones. Unfortunately, that's usually how it goes and people living there are usually getting things last, like for broadband, 5G.
Not always a thing. Plenty of "dense" neighbourhoods have less-than-ideal transport systems. Few of even the most dense run 24/7 bus/train service. Not everyone works a 9-5 job near a bus station. Im in a dense area, in an apparment building beside the largest hospital. Bus service doesn't start until 6am, meaning it isnt an option for my work. Nearest passenger train is hundreds of miles away.
Pick a random terraced road in Bristol [1] or Birmingham [2] or London [3] or Norwich [4] and you'll find terraced house residents are not yet living without cars.
If our nation's goals require such people to live without cars, I would say we're a long way off - and we're not particularly moving in that direction either. Hell, the current government's plan for the next election is essentially the opposite.
[1] https://maps.app.goo.gl/JUVD3xy4qRuP78VP8 [2] https://maps.app.goo.gl/CGfDGEibG3zQij8MA [3] https://maps.app.goo.gl/TXZYFuuQC3aQiam56 [4] https://maps.app.goo.gl/srs27pyGuzobhp1V9
A modern minivan can get myself, 3 passengers and all their luggage from the bay area to LA without even stopping for gas. In the event that we start without a full tank, the gas stop in middle adds 150 seconds to the trip.
This simply isn't possible yet with an EV. I expect it will maybe happen someday, but not yet.
As for putting the most miles on long trips: Say I drive 10 miles a day to work and back, and I drive to LA only once a month. Hey presto, most of my driving miles are on the rare but long journey.
To me, an EV is a no-brainer, in fact I was test driving the Mercedes EV just yesterday. The only thing stopping me from getting one is that my ten-year-old car is still fine. Definitely not getting a new ICE, though.
I don't know where you got this number from - a new 7.2kW charger is £400, and I'm sure you can get it cheaper if you buy several hundred of them. They are hardly expensive devices now. Yes there's the cost of installation too - but 10k is an extremely unreasonable number.
Furthermore, if I did want to include such stops, why would I want to confine myself to the dingy dirty corner of some backwater Walmart parking lot?
With my high range ice car I can stop anywhere along the scenic way for as long or as short as I want.
You know that this is only a temporary condition, right?
>>why would I want to confine myself to the dingy dirty corner of some backwater Walmart parking lot?
I don't know, why would you? Are those the only charging options you have?
>>With my high range ice car I can stop anywhere along the scenic way for as long or as short as I want.
You can do that in an electric car too.
Most busy corridors like sf-LA have the well known charge stations full and backed up making the delay multiple times longer.
The point about stopping wherever is that my stops won't have to be near any out of the way chargers. Of course an EV can stop wherever, but it also requires a pilgramage to somewhere I never wanted to go.
Don't do it and health problems could quickly appear. Like back pain, herniated discs, at the very least. Not to mention the risk of drowsiness induced car accidents.
I don'l like to refuel in a busy gas station either, but stopping and stretching is recommended.
That's less than 15 minutes a month at a gas station. Still beats the pants off the 20 minutes each way for the ev on the long trip.
And let's say we do make bathroom stops (kids or whatever); why should the needs of the car dictate when and for how long we stop?
When I was a kid my dad would threaten to leave us behind if we took over 10 minutes dragging out a bathroom stop. I don't see any reason to tolerate a car that takes twice that long to recharge.
On a recent trip I did pull over for a bathroom stop at a gas station. The prices were too high (understandable, only option for many miles) so I didn't buy any gas. In and out, no time lost.
At no time do I want to park in the back of an economically depressed store to sit in my car for 20 minutes watching a crack head defecate in the next parking stall over. If I have time to stop, I want to stop at scenic overlooks and the like.
Look, all I'm saying is when EV charging (or battery swap, or whatever) gets to the turn around time of a gas station I'll be all over it.
Unless I'm dehydrated, no, I generally have to piss more often than every 6 hours, and it's unreasonable to ask a passenger to hold it that long unless they specifically say that can.
Perhaps mandated 50% charging places in every supermarket carpark?
I have a friend in this situation. He charges it at other places, although the council are apparently going to dig a small trench in the pavement (free of charge) to allow him to run a charging cable from his house to the car without disrupting foot traffic.
But that's still contingent on being able to park right outside his house, which is a rare luxury.
Supercharging in itself is easy enough too.
My EV has a big battery (given) but im charging publicly for nearly 2 years but my company already plans charging stations next year and other locations of my company already have them.
BP just order $100m of Tesla chargers.
QuickTrip (gas stations) around me have 2+ chargers.
Gas stations will need to have chargers to stay in business (and electrification will impact their business); With 5% electrification, gas stations have already lost ~5% of their business, if they can recoup 2% from people without high speed charging at home or for road trips, they can make up in margins (especially as a 20 min charge up is more likely to get a user in store than a 5 minute fill up)
Grocery chains, working locations, state parks, county parks have been incentivized to put chargers. So have local shopping centers.
That means - total energy independence. I can get a solar roof and no longer need "the government" ie, a bunch of criminals, to "help" me.
Strangely this is never on the news. Ever. Go figure.
Possible but it would be highly inconvenient and people wouldn't like the consequences. At the very least we need referendums on all the big contentious issues.
The petroleum industry did just fine without government funding the building of gas stations. It took over 10 years from the introduction of the model T until gasoline outsold kerosene in this country. Not the best metric to compare against, just saying that these things take time.
The mainstreaming of EVs is coming. It's just taking more time than early adopters would like. Part of the problem is that many early adopters assumed that their EVs we're shiny and perfect like their Apple products, etc. So there's frustration that things aren't as glossy and simple as they'd like.
The market is working correctly. Demand for EVs isn't there. Give it time. Maybe a decade or two. And most cars will be EVs.
Is this because you actively want cars to be less efficient/more expensive/more cumborsome to use and maintain?
Which is a valid viewpoint, but your comment could be read as suggesting that this is somehow greener or cheaper tor simpler than BEVs, which it isn't.
For example, I'm assuming that the "better public transport" you envision is electric, and battery electric wherever that makes sense (which is in quite a lot of places, even trams with overhead lines in busy cities can benefit from batteries).
But the majority of use cases at this point is - EVs are way better. City driving, less than 100 miles per day, which is what most people do in most countries, charge at home, etc.
I suspect people overestimate the frequency in which they drive 250 miles a day.
No.
The nice thing about fuel cars is you almost never need to think about range beyond the refueling visit to a gas station once every week or two. If you're going on an extended road trip, you know you could skip a dozen gas stations and still be fine.
I drove an EV before alongside a fuel car, and I constantly considered whether the bloody thing had enough range for the day or journey. The constant mental load, light as it was, is something I don't have to deal with driving fuel cars. Having ease of mind is priceless.
Maybe it has more to do with how much you need to drive each day?
If you’re putting in triple digits of miles every day, then you have a very different set of constraints compared to someone commuting up to 40 miles a day, which is the United States average.
OTOH, if the EV is at home, it's plugged in and is always sitting at 80% full. No load.
If that's your frequency of gas fillups, and you have a garage charger, the same is true for an EV. (If you lived in an apartment where you couldn't plug in regularly, perhaps not.)
So there I was, constantly considering whether the bloody thing had enough range for the day. It's a worry I can do without, and so batteries will need to see exponential improvements before I'll consider one over a good old fuel tank and an engine.
They might be saying "In an ideal world I'd drive a gas car, but the electric car is good enough where I'd rather not pay double." I don't think the person I was responding to was saying they "sucked", just that they had drawbacks.
California: 423970 km²
If anyone knows about it, I'd be interested to explore this further.
My understanding is that in some parts of Canada it's common to plug your currently petrol/diesel car into an electricity socket overnight to provide a low-level of heating (otherwise the car would be impossible to start in the morning) - is this level of heating insufficient for an EV?
Alternatively how much electricity would be wasted spending some power to keep batteries at a warm enough temperature to prevent performance degradation when charging? Are we talking a few percent or a double/tripling of power costs?
The problem is that driving EVs in the cold costs a lot more energy. I've got a Ford Mustang Mach E for about 2.5 years now. In the winter the range that Ford claims drops by about 30 to 35%. That is a lot of range that goes missing just because the temp drops below 5 degrees Celsius.
Luckily I'm the perfect EV candidate: my daily commute is less than 50% of the total range so I can drive 2 days to the office if needed. And I can charge both at home and at the office.
The main problem that I see is that people cannot charge at home. If you are dependent on fast chargers by the side of the road you are going to have a hard time. The downtime for fast-chargers is enormous: my personal guess would be that they do not reach the 90% uptime. Which is bizar problem to have because a fast-charger and remote monitoring of the charger condition should be a solved problem by now.
> The problem is that driving EVs in the cold costs a lot more energy. I've got a Ford Mustang Mach E
The Mach E delivers heat in the most inefficient way possible: resistive heat[0]. Modern EVs from other manufacturers use heat pumps, which are much more efficient. There's still some drop in winter range (like gas cars), but it's nowhere near 35% anymore.[1]
Ford's system is also Rube Goldberg[2]: they use a water-based PTC heater to warm a small isolated coolant loop (complete with its own separate reservoir!), and then run a pump to send it through a liquid-to-air heater core. Obviously done for commonality with an ICE heater core, but the unnecessary weight and complexity shows the compromises to shoehorn an electric drivetrain into a ICE (or even "flex") platform.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00ejq7z4H6g&t=449
[1] https://www.autoevolution.com/news/here-s-how-much-range-a-t...
If we look at the total energy consumption for driving in cold conditions, then moving the vehicle along the road needs in the ballpark a similar amount of energy as what is required to heat up the interior of the car to a reasonable temperature and keep it there - cars aren't (and probably can't be) as insulated as houses, so they need quite a lot of energy to stay so much warmer than the outside.
In an ICE, most that heating is done from waste heat of the engine. In an EV, that comes directly out of your range.
I don't think there is a car in production where the heating is coming not from the engine.
Of course there are some cars which do have a resistive heating, but which are those?
> heat pumping through AC
Uhm, the compressor runs from the engine so while the heat is not from it, it's still directly relies on availability of running engine.
Also don't forget that seat heaters are also resistive and most cars in cold climates have them.
I know it (or more like my bum) too damn well, though I didn't think about them in this case.
> small diesels like VW Polo
Makes sense, though as I understood, it's strictly auxiliary till the engine is heated aaaand maybe some additional heating at the parking lot with the engine turned off, though I would wary of this usage, it would drain even the extended battery fast.
Overall it's not quite what I had in my mind (think of space heaters), though yes, there are some parts which can operate independently from the engine, though it's not a primary function for them.
Thanks for the hint.
Kind of. Block heaters help warm the engine coolant which warms engine and the oil, making it less viscous and help it flow properly so that the battery doesn't need to work as hard to crank the engine. They're typically only 400w to 600w draw.
Modern full synthetic oil and a well maintained AGM battery makes it less necessary, it's just a little less wear on the engine overall over the long term. Most folks though don't spring for either since they're a bit more expensive then mineral oil and flooded lead acid batteries.
Skimming the Tesla forums, some said to estimate a drop in range of almost 1/3 in this extreme heat?
A lot of city infra just isn't set up for at-home charging in older cities, and it's a non-trivial retrofit.
Kia, Hyundai (same company I think) are well situated. As are BMW, Mercedes, and obviously Tesla.
But... Toyota? Nowhere to be seen, has some also-ran EVs in production. The old American carmakers - absent. VW - been talking about EVs for years but ... nothing.
The biggest carmakers in the world have a vested interest in keeping EVs off the market for as long as possible.
Ford F-150 electric Lightning truck has production issues, but it exists. Same with the Cadillac LYRIQ. VW's ID.4 is also all-electric.
Tesla and the gigafactory has a head start on the critical component - batteries - but the rest of the industry has started to wake up.
Well I think they're the third EV manufacturer in the world for 2023. BYD is first (I guess mostly in China), Tesla second and Stellantis (Peugeot, Fiat and some American brands I think) fourth.
Hyundai, BMW, Mercedes (didn't even know they made EVs but apparently they do) Toyota and the other brands I'm reading about in these comments are all much further down the charts, so I'm not sure what to think.
Maybe the American market is so different that most commenters here have a warped view of the actual EV market in the rest of the world
Total deliveries in 2022 (incomplete obviously, there are many other manufacturers): Toyota (10,483,024, including Daihatsu), Volkswagen Group (8,262,776), Stellantis (4,488,269), Hyundai (3,944,579), BMW (2,399,630), Mercedes (2,043,900), Tesla (1,313,851).
What do you mean?? There are loads of ID.3 and .4 about here.
https://www.volkswagen.co.uk/en/electric-and-hybrid/electric...
At €45k you're far from "basic" imho. Not so long ago you were into the premium car category at that price in Europe. In 2010 you could buy a new bmw 335i for that price... or in 2012 two new basic (for real this time) peugeot 308
Not sure about Europe but after the US tax credit on EVs our Niro cost about the same as say an Accord.
I don't know why people are saying this though - they are catching on massively.
Marketshare growth is excellent.
Car manufacturers and government regulators bet the farm on mass EV adoption.
Current EVs and EV infrastructure haven't solved the range anxiety/charging issue yet. Suburban US, where most people own a garage, is an outlier.
Waiting 10-15 years for prolific street-level infrastructure to be built out doesn't solve the fact that there are unsold EVs on dealer lots today.
Of course, there are plenty of use cases where range anxiety simply isn't relevant. Ditto why marketshare is still growing and will likely continue to grow.
The problem with resistance of the existing auto industry is that if everyone buys EVs the big American carmakers go out of business. GM, Ford, etc have nothing, no technology to compete, their EVs are still crap, they are unable to catch up. So are many Japanese carmakers also BTW.
I was recently in Hong Kong - a good 50% of cars there are EVs thanks to tax breaks - no taxes on EVs while other cars are heavily taxed, so that makes even high end EVs cheaper than mid range gas cars. I think I tried every single model EV using Uber, Mercedes, BMW, and Tesla primarily, they're all really great EVs, great cars, great range, great comfort, obviously insane acceleration. Just better cars.
There's also a range of Chinese EVs coming up - didn't test I guess they are too rare to show up on Uber.
American carmakers then spread all sorts of FUD about EVs such that my facebook feed is full of people who really believe EVs are worse for the environment than their exploding mineral oil machines. They hold back all development through propaganda, lawmaking, political influence, anything and everything they can do - because they can easily act like a mafia. They can't easily compete with the good EVs of the world. Or at all.
Situation report complete.
I'd buy a used $5k piece of shit over that any day. I'm as interested in cars as I am in hammers, as long as it gets me from a to b I absolutely don't give a shit.
$30k is like 5+ years of saving for a lot of people, even in the west. That's a lot of money for a liability.
For the price of a modern EV you can buy a flat in many region of the developed world too...
Even the shittiest EV you can get from Dacia is above most people budget, it does o-60mph in like 20 seconds and can't go faster than ~75mph
But alas, now people get into debt for TVs and smartphones, so what do I know, I must be a boomer!
Aside from low rates though I agree that there's not much point in getting a loan if you're able to comfortabely buy the car with cash, although many/most car buyers don't have that kind of financial flexibility.
There's literally nowhere I can legally drive at 75mph. I'm glad EVs are being more sensible about top speeds. My 40 minute daily commute has a top speed of 70mph and an average of just under 20! That's the reality of urban speed limits and heavy traffic where something like the Dacia might fit well. But I agree, it is under-powered and won't be a fun drive carrying even one person, let alone carrying five. The next generation should be more interesting.
I would buy an EV, I love those things. But between fitting a charger in the garage and getting a reasonably priced 2nd hand EV I would have to expend like $20+k. Which is much MUCH more than what I would save up in fuel through its lifespan. Not really happening unless I get some help from the government to purchase an EV and my town hall puts up some chargers near.
You solution is ideal and I don’t think you should change a thing. I’d love to see more personal car sharing, both electric and gas. Electric cars with a range over 200 is a big waste of battery that should go towards something else, like a bicycle.
Even my old car is the equivalent of 50 electric bicycles.
> ...and you never have to worry about stopping at a gas station - the car is ready to go every morning and you don't even have to think about it!
If you have a home charging station. This immediately excludes a - very - large number of people in the EU and metropolitan US who live in multifamily housing or older towns and cities.
> an electric drivetrain is a way better driving experience than the miserable turbocharged 4-cylinder engines that everyone has been forced to use for fuel economy reasons today, even premium brands like Mercedes and BMW. These are nasty, underpowered, vibrating pieces of shit with no torque and no power unless you run them at thousands of RPM, where they're loud and buzzy. Just complete fucking garbage.
What are we comparing? A Tesla Model 3 against most non-premium cars? Of course. An MG5 EV/Roewe EI5 against a BMW B48 or a Honda K20C1? Questionable.
Let's not forget that there are plenty of fuel efficient 6 cylinder mild hybrid platforms that, quite frankly, compete very well with premium EVs. Range anxiety aside, are they necessarily better? Again, questionable, but the overall package that comes with an M340d or an A6 55TFSI is better than the equivalent Model 3/S (or even, imo, any of BMW or Audi's EVs).
It's not a species-ending threat (at least, to humans). That said, the realistic outlook for global warming is bad enough.
EV is a technology in transition. It will get there. It's getting there. It's not "there" yet for every use case.
Why? A large part isn't because of the technology, it's about population density. The countries that pollute the most also happen to have sub-par public transportation networks. Range anxiety isn't an issue when the default option for most people is light rail.
The solution is likely going to come down to: 1. Urban planning. Car friendly zoning, building codes, minimum parking requirements, and other regulations are starting be reversed in the US. It's already happened across most of the EU.
2. Switch to low emissions electricity generation. Power plants are still the leading emitter, full stop.
3. EV adoption. My point above wasn't an argument against EVs as a technology, but a statement of fact that - as a technology in transition - it's not superior for all major use cases. This should change over the next couple of decades.
> Power plants are still the leading emitter, full stop.
is not true, at least not regionally. In Massachusetts, for example, power is 20% of emissions while transportation is 37%.
https://www.mass.gov/info-details/massachusetts-clean-energy...
What this implies is that there needs a greater density of charging stations - which Tesla is anyway working on this. So in a Tesla super charger, if I can charge to 80% in 5 mins and get 150-160 mile range am good. Even if I don’t have a garage at home, this should work with appropriate alerting, routing etc.
An electric car for the non-enthusiasts, for those who just need a car to get stuff done.
The core issue is that it's not the case for most people. If you can afford an EV, have a house with a garage where you can plug in the car - you're basically a corner case.
The reality for most people in Europe: car should cost 5 - 10k EUR (used), 10 - 20k new, it'll be parked on the street and need to be practical both for driving in a city as well as for longer trips.
We're still pretty far away from any of these goals. I imagine something like Skoda Enyaq, with 800 km - 1000 km of range, for 25 - 30'000 EUR max, with tax included (an equivalent to VW Golf Variant).
it'll be parked on the street
Just open google maps, satellite view, and look into any major European city. Given the known ~70% urbanisation of the EU, it seems feasible. From my own, anecdotal experience, I would say way more than most cars are parked outside. Most of the times a block away. Some annoying times, much farther.
45-55% in most countries (France seems like an outlier), but even that is above 20%.
I'd guesstimate that the cars parked "american style" (in a private garage or on the driveway of the house) in Europe is < 10%. You really need to live in a small town or a village to find these setups.
I can see a lot of articles / comments on various portals where the authors are explaining how easy is to use EVs - you charge it in your own garage over night and then drive to office or to do groceries. I can't overstate how unusual use-case it is.
Most people where I live (Switzerland) would never consider using a car to get to work. We walk / cycle / take a bus, tram or train. Same with groceries. The cars are on the street, you use it maybe once every week or two, to go skiing, move something large or go for a longer trip. Average yearly distance per car is ~13'000 km (~8'000 miles). Using an EV is really a huge huge hassle.
Most car buyers have a different mindset. Your rationale doesn't resonate with them.
A good amount of them actually enjoy what you described as "garbage". They don't hear "loud" noises, they hear a pleasant sound.
But these people clinging to ICE because... so many bad reasons. Basically manufacturing consent.
Meanwhile traditional auto makes can't seem to create compelling BEVs. The initial offerings from Toyota & Mazda have been terrible. I am surprised that the Ford Lightning hasn't done better. It's a great truck, that can't seem to compete with itself (cheaper gasoline versions). I'll be curious to see how the electric Escalade does. That thing looks incredible and I think is the right brand / market for a premium SUV.
You mean traditional American automakers? I can see a few compelling electric cars from European manufacturers.
And they have to be a second car for many north American folks (due to distances and ranges involved),which unfortunately makes it even more of a luxury :-(
I'd be curious to hear more about handling part though. Outside of Tesla (which I've never driven ; it's a personal thing but as soon as I see the "controls", I jump out) , the EVs I've tried (volt,ioniq, leaf) had great acceleration, but not great handling (turning etc). Tires, suspension and in particular extra weight all seemed to work against me in the corner.
They were all very comfortable, and powerful, but I would not have called any of them well handling.
That's... A lot of money for a car.
We just bought a nice 5 door hatchback for 19kcad (25k cad all in) . It's not a comparable car on any granular metric, but it's a car! It takes me places! At literally one Third the price.
If I want to go for fun, I can get a wrx for 35k or gti for 40. If I want a practical car I can get a minivan for 40k or any number of (ugh) SUVs.
Tesla 3 on the other hand is a luxury, not a practical choice. It'll never ever ever pay off on cost/economy basis. And that's ok! Luxury cars exist and are great,for those who want and can afford them. It may be fun and enjoyable and status symbol, but it's the Apple of cars. Some people are into it while many of us balk at the value proposition (or perceived lack thereof).
So yes - it's just. So. Expensive! For me at least, when I look at other options and alternatives :).
edit/addition: Same is the case for most other EVs. Nissan Leaf starts at 42k CAD, Mazda 3 starts at 24k CAD. Ioniq 5 starts at 51K CAD, VW Taos starts at 30k.
Basically, EVs are $12k - $25k more than ICE cars, where I'm at. And $12K is a lot of money! That's how much whole cars used to cost as recently as 3 years ago (and you can still get a brand new car for $15k though you probably shouldn't:). Again, it's a bit of HN bubble, or possibly California special circumstances, where Tesla can even begin to be discussed as an affordable :-/
https://www.kia.ca/en/vehicles/2023/rio/specs?trimCode=RO853...
Background, FWIW :)
* We have a Honda Odyssey as the primary family vehicle for ourselves and our kids. It's a very nice, very practical, very large car. As a family car travelling with kids, we love it! You do feel a little ridiculous if you're driving somewhere as a lone driver though. Did I mention it's big?? :-)
* I work from home and my wife had a hybrid job so we got away with Minivan as the primary car, occasionally supported by my 20yo Subaru WRX
* However, our occasional second car is increasingly a rustbucket, as as my wife needs to go to work physically more, the 20yo WRX (manual gear etc) is less and less a viable option for us
* We bought a used car this summer, safetied, from people we are kinda-sorta connected through our network, and ended up being completely fleeced. After several mechanics review ended up writing off the entire car. Between that and other people's experiences and long searches, we are completely soured on used car market right now, at least here in Ontario, in terms of prices and reliability. It's insane.
* We need a cheap basic car for work commute and situations when we need to do two things at once. We are still paying monthly financing on the Oddyssey so our budget is limited. We don't necessarily need it to last forever but we need it to be basic and largely reliable and comfortable for next 5-8 years.
* We looked at Mitsubishi Mirage, which is currently the cheapest new car in Canada, but it had too many tradeoffs
* Kia Rio LX+ is the second cheapest car in Canada but is a significant step up. It drives fine, looks fine, comfortable, visibility is good (shockingly a rarity these days), roomy enough (I'm 189cm / 6'2"), has A/C and Carplay/Android Auto etc. Honestly not missing ANYthing I need for a basic, practical car.
* Massive bonus: great, great control scheme. I love the control scheme of Hyundai & Kia last few years. Reasonable buttons in reasonable places, reasonably well found without looking for them. SO MANY modern cars sacrifice usability for some perceived fashion/looks, and it's a massive turn off. Kia's controls are like a Nikon DSLR - sure they're somewhat "old fashioned", but they're based on all the usability lessons learned we have at our disposal. It works and works well. Thus endeth the sermon :->
* FWIW, In Canada at least, the availability of cars I personally like is dwindling. Manufacturers are doubling down on the large SUVs (ugh!), and subcompact hatchbacks (Mazda 2, Ford Fiesta etc) are completely disappearing. I understand it's even the last year for the Kia Rio, and I can't seem to find regular Golf/Rabbit (only GTI/R) either.
Depending on if your Hyundai 5-door is the Accent or Elantra GT, you might find the current Rio a very natural replacement :)
The other car we looked at is the Subaru Impreza or RS; that's the car we would've liked to get, especially given my old WRX, but given our usage patterns, paying $10k more was not a good value for us at this time.
Hope that helps!
After that’s rebates and “est. gas savings of $3,000 over 3 years”. So that’s $31,490. About 25% more than 25k.
Misleading on price does a disservice to potential buyers.
I included sales tax. Without that it's still $30,630, but I don't think it's fair to include government subsidies but exclude government taxes when determining the effective cost of the car.
Here's the breakdown:
Vehicle Price $38,990
Destination Fee 1,390
Order Fee 250
Sales Tax 3,555
Federal Tax Credit (7,500)
Calif Tax Credit (2,000)
Utility Rebate (500)
—————————
$34,185https://www.tesla.com/en_CA/inventory/new/m3?arrangeby=relev...
Prices range $53k - $65k CAD (prior to any fees / taxes etc), which would make the cheapest one 38k, in line with price you indicated.
Our incentive though is "up to $5k CAD" which is up to ~3,600USD rebate.
(basically, nowhere near 25k USD however it is sliced :( )
The model 3 is a great handling car - closest compare is a 2012ish BMW 335xi. It’s heavier and you can feel it in turns, but you can feel the low center of gravity, and the grip/acceleration curve compensates it out. For street use the tires grip and the car overall overpowers its weight. The suspension is good, really reminding me of the BMW. Note suspension is tuned like a BMW with surprisingly similar dampening but overall is not as mature as the 335xi was - on super bumpy roads the tires will stay in contact with the ground but you will feel the difference. The model 3 not going to be close to a Miata, but in its size class it’s a great time. I would totally buy one, and almost did; it always puts a smile on my face.
The model Y is not nearly as maneuverable, but the low center of gravity really helps in turns. It’s better than I expected from a CUV/SUV. Not in the same league as the model 3.
Tesla is really good about test drives - I’d highly recommend it. Even if you never buy one, it’s a solid experience.
Model 3, NIO, BYD, and to some extent VW and even the i3 or Zoe have much nicer handling. Their low center of gravity and perfect 50/50 weight distribution should actually give you more grip and stability than the equivalent gas burner.
The original post did not specify the EV they spoke about, and I disagreed with generic comment that "ICE drives like shit, EV drives awesome!".
This is not to claim EVs don't exist that handle well! "Sporty EVs exist" can be taken as a given I think. But so do ICE! :)
It has not been my personal experience that moderately priced EV (not "cheap EVs", as such a thing doesn't exist here in Canada), are particularly well handling for their class, for all the other pros and cons that they may have.
FFS if it got 100 miles to the charge it would be the perfect EV for most daily driver scenarios.
Also, the number of people who can’t charge in their own yard or driveway or garage is significant. I would never, ever drive am EV without my own plug at home.
> I suppose the problem is that, if you're not a car enthusiast, a $30k Toyota hybrid is still a better deal, even if it drives like shit.
The car definitely drives differently in the two modes. It's no Tesla, but electric acceleration is much more responsive and faster than a traditional sedan, like a Corolla or a Civic. Driving in gas mode feels like driving a Prius.
If it fits your needs, I recommend looking into plug-in hybrids. But I'm no car enthusiast. My car is functional, not a status symbol.
We are in the era where the super cars I grew up with are handily lapped by a honda accord. Driving has never been better than right now.
Modern Hybrids (not Priuses) drive like normal cars.
>than the miserable turbocharged 4-cylinder engines that everyone has been forced to use for fuel economy reasons today
I have a 181HP Honda Civic with said turbo 4cyl, it's not noisy and is quieter than my original v6 Accord. A little less power (30HP less) but the fuel economy is insane, I average 40 MPG sitting in NYC traffic for 2 hours. 35 MPG on my normal commutes.
These small engines are fine, the problem is what automakers do with them.
On top of that, I can (and have) jump into my car with a close to empty fuel tank, and go on a 1000 km journey without worrying about how and when I'll fill up. EVs don't have that, because even if your route has a lot of public chargers, it will still take you way longer to charge up.
Edit: I'm not saying EVs are unreliable, just that I'm not gonna pay cash to be part of that experiment. I'll get in once the technology has proven itself.
I want an adorable, tiny EV Mitsubishi Delica for $13,000 new. https://www.mitsubishi-motors.com/en/newsrelease/2023/detail...
Or this adorable, tiny EV SUV for about the same price: https://www.thedrive.com/news/gms-tiny-electric-pickup-is-an...
Elon stated that Cybertruck will weigh about 7000 lbs. That's 3.5 tons.
That's the same mass as an F-350 DRW (dual rear wheel) loaded with options.
Seriously heavy. I'm not anti heavy vehicles or anything; I have a 3/4 ton truck myself (~5200 lbs.) I just think it's eye opening just how heavy these EVs are.
Of course, the same could be said about unnecessarily enormous ICE vehicles people drive nowadays too.
Vehicle weight really ought to be taxed.
https://www.cdc.gov/transportationsafety/pedestrian_safety/i...
Weight is directly called out as a factor:
> SUVs can cause more harm to a person on foot when a crash occurs because of their greater body weight and larger profile
I just want a small, cheap second car for running errands around the neighborhood. TBH, if I ever break down on this, I’ll probably just buy a 12 year old Leaf that gets 70 miles of range for $6,000, or whatever. I just really want an electric version of the adorable, tiny Japanese trucks I see in my Seattle neighborhood.
Preemptive edit: yes I’ve thought many times about buying an e-bike. Love the idea, but I value my health too much to entrust it to Seattle drivers. Every person I know who regularly bikes in Seattle has some horror story about being hit by a car.
Until our municipal government values biking as a first class alternative to driving, I will not put myself in danger.
I think I had a Kia for a day when the Bolt was in for the battery recall and it wasn't bad. I still think the Bolt nailed the one-pedal driving though and I preferred it over the Kia. Thanks for reminding me, I almost forgot I'd driven that car. It was a lot more comfortable and finished than the Bolt, although not as nimble from what I remember.
Or maybe, just maybe, realize your consumer preferences are not universal and are in fact the minority view
I'd like to try one out for my next car but I can't afford a luxury car.
The US market is so weird. Mostly dominated by very expensive, very large vehicles. Yet, it seems like the kind of consumer who might want a EV is also the kind of consumer who would want a smaller vehicle, which would be far more practical. I guess the Bolt (in limbo, with a new design maybe coming?) and Nissan Leaf are pretty much it right now.
I think automakers just assume "US consumers want big, expensive cars" and copy/pasted that over to their EV offerings, while the big untapped EV market is probably for more practical people who would gladly drive a smaller, more efficient, cheaper vehicle.
(1) legacy car manufacturers don't know how to make cars. They forgot how to make cars decades ago. All components are manufactured by someone else, they slap their label on it. If you don't know how to make cars, it is nearly impossible to make new kind of cars.
(2) If you don't know how to do something, you can spend some money and learn. Legacy car manufacturers had $250 billion profits, but didn't spend any money on building this capability. Meanwhile, Tesla made electric cars, built supercharger network, built gigafactories, expanded these capabilities globally.
(3) Dealers hate EVs. Even if legacy manufacturers make EVs, dealers won't sell them. I've been going to dealerships every year for more than five years, dealers treat you like shit if you wanna buy an EV. Which is understandable, ICE cars have 2000+ moving parts and tons of repairs, EVs have 20 moving parts and zero repairs. They aren't going to make much money replacing windshield wipers.
(4) Meanwhile, China has figured out how to do EVs at scale, iterating and improving batteries and EVs. Eventually, legacy car manufacturers will go bust (after taking tens of billions in bailouts). We'll import cars from China either directly or indirectly. If there are too many tariffs, China is going to build assembly plants in Mexico or Canada, sell them very competitively in US. VW sells ID.3 for 16K in China, the competition is intense![2]
[1]https://www.epi.org/blog/uaw-automakers-negotiations/
[2] https://insideevs.com/news/675842/volkswagen-slashes-id3-pri...
A hybrid can have a 2 year/20k factory oil change interval, and really doesn't need much of any other service. An ICE comes in once a year for an oil change and not much else. Maybe spark plugs and timing belt around 100k... if that even goes to the dealer service and not an independent.
Sure, more brake work on an ICE. More tire work on an EV (heavier, probably fancy low rolling resistance tires). Maybe some transmission work on an ICE or Hybrid, but they're all 'sealed' units these days that are not supposed to need anything done to them. Other than that, what does an ICE have that an EV doesn't that needs regular maintenance?
We're not going from a 1970s carburated car that needs regular tuneups to an EV.
The short answer is: more stuff that can break.
What you outlined is true in the best case scenario. Anecdotally, if I had to guess, 20% of my friends and family with cars older than 5 years have had them in the shop for something other than routine maintenance just this year. (And I realize that this is cherry-picked, but many (most?) ICE cars, frankly, are just not that reliable.)
Do EVs fare any better in practice? Just looking at reliability by manufacturer, Tesla's reliability is below the industry average^[1], which you would not expect if electric cars were fundamentally more reliable by virtue of having less "stuff that can break". The related notion that EVs are cheaper to maintain also seems up for debate^[2], and GGP's assertion that EVs have "zero repairs" is risible on its face.
I'm willing to entertain the possibility that Tesla is simply a subpar car manufacturer despite being the West's premier EV manufacturer, but either way we are evidently not yet living in a world where EVs offer car buyers freedom from maintenance and breakage.
---
^[1] random google search results: https://www.kbb.com/car-news/consumer-reports-toyota-lexus-m..., https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2023-us-vehi...
^[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/26/hertz-pulls-back-on-ev-plans...
Also, with Hertz having problems keeping Teslas repaired, its also not necessarily pointing to drivetrain reliability. Its not immediately obvious from the reporting if the issues they're having are mostly drivetrain or other parts like bodywork and suspension and what not. If a Tesla bumper replacement is more expensive than a Nissan Altima bumper replacement, is that EV drivetrains being more expensive?
BEV evangelists commonly steer reliability comparisons toward the drivetrain, since it in theory ought to be more reliable (at the very least it will have fewer moving parts), but I don't think my earlier comment was in an explicitly drivetrain-specific context. As you say, there are many other facets of vehicle reliability that matter.
It's also worth mentioning that modern ICEs seem to be exceptionally reliable even with the bare minimum maintenance, which makes sense given the maturity of the technologies involved. Transmissions maybe not so much, but the obvious answer to that IMO is hybrid drive systems—series hybrids, simple planetary gear systems, etc. Everything on the road today ought to be a hybrid, since they're arguably the most impactful way to distribute our limited battery production capacity. A standard hybrid battery is something like 1/100 the capacity of a BEV battery.
Is a Volkswagen EV generally more expensive to repair than a Volkswagen ICE? Do your links answer that kind of question?
And you're talking to a person literally commenting from the auto shop after shelling out a couple hundred bucks in maintenance on a 2017 ICE, maintenance that I literally won't have to do on my EV. So kind of funny having someone suggest the EV is more expensive when it's going against my lived experience, right now.
But—since you asked—just Googling around, recentish CR data^[1] (late '22) do seem to show that Tesla isn't a low outlier in terms of reliability, being joined in the lower echelons of EV reliability by such manufacturers as "Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen, Jeep, GMC and Chevrolet." All well-established manufacturers that seem to be having just as much trouble building reliable EVs as Tesla.
All these data, though obviously incomplete, point strongly in a certain direction: that an EV powertrain is not a magic bullet for reliability or repair costs. Do you have any material reason to suspect that the obvious conclusion isn't the correct one?
> And you're talking to a person literally commenting from the auto shop after shelling out a couple hundred bucks in maintenance on a 2017 ICE, maintenance that I literally won't have to do on my EV. So kind of funny having someone suggest the EV is more expensive when it's going against my lived experience, right now.
Anecdotes like this are are just as irrelevant as the EV sob stories that constantly make the news, which is why I haven't posted any of the latter. But if we're doing that, did you catch that crazy story^[2] about the Tesla owner who was told their battery suffered "water ingress" after driving in the rain and that they'd have to shell out $20k for a new one just like that? What a bummer!
---
^[1] https://insideevs.com/news/622136/tesla-consumer-reports-rel...
^[2] https://www.autoblog.com/2023/10/16/tesla-owners-heart-misse...
> “Remember, in the likes of GM and other OEMs, there’s decades of establishment of a broad national parts supply network. There’s an aftermarket of parts that that is there that is less mature obviously in the context of Tesla,” Scherr said, adding that margins and other EV issues would improve as Hertz looks to “diversify” that part of its fleet.
It sounds like they aren't saying anything about rates of issue, but rather cost. A Malibu could have 10 issues for every 1 of the same issue on a Tesla (e.g bumper replacement), but if the Tesla costs $2,000 to fix and the Malibu is $150 to fix, the Malibu is going to win. But one would expect that as the Teslas continue to become popular, cheaper parts will arrive.
Sure, I bought a first model year FCA car, so I understand. It's ICE only, and has been in the shop a lot (I should have pursued lemon law remedies, but it wasn't really that bad...). But it's never been powertrain issues. Bad crimping of connectors in wiring harness led to assistance features disabling, paint issues, multiple issues with infotainment, door beeper went out, problems with sliding doors, whatever recalls, 12v battery failed early, and the replacement failed a month after. All of that kind of stuff happens to EVs too.
Some day, I'm sure I'll add a spectacular transmission failure on this particular vehicle, and that wouldn't have been an issue with an EV, or at least not in the same way (EVs do often have some sort of gearing, and could be sensitive to manufacturing or assembly errors in the gears and bearings, but it's usually mechanically simpler than a 9 speed automatic)
Mechanically, my CR-V hybrid's "transmission" is two electric motors and two lockup clutches geared for different cruise speeds. Given the reliability of modern ICEs, it seems like the best of both worlds from a complexity standpoint (not that reliability necessarily correlates in a straightforward way).
I haven’t had major engine issues, but I’ve spent a lot of money on these systems
Exhaust / emissions, yes. Emissions systems are notoriously flakey.
To claim that an EV has a starter motor and an alternator is misunderstanding at best, wrong at worst. An EV doesn't have a have a starter motor than cranks a huge mechanical engine. An ICE's alternator converts AC to DC, it has a DC/DC converter.
Here's an start for a RAV4 Prime, a plugin hybrid vehicle: https://parts.lakelandtoyota.com/p/TOYOTA_2023_RAV4-PRIME/St...
And here's an alternator for the same vehicle: https://parts.lakelandtoyota.com/p/toyota_2021_RAV4-PRIME/Al...
Electric vehicles certainly have their own issues (which may or may not be worse, depending on your point of view), but one of their advantages is fewer moving mechanical parts.
So of course they were handed this project by the feds to expand their EV offerings and completely shit the bed. They’ve been spending decades competing on making the most fuel unfriendly vehicles on the planet.
I don’t want an EV, but if I did, American (including Tesla) would be the last place I looked.
(Genuine) Q: Why is it that the rest of the world manages just fine without needing full size diesel pickups? Over here even tradespeople drive panel vans, not pickups.
Yea, you could do that with a 90's Toyota Hilux too and it was 75% smaller =)
Also you can fit that exact same sheet in a van and it's covered from the elements, along with your tools.
It's all about image.
Americans think van = "free candy child molester" or "FBI stakeout" and minivan = "soccer mom", which is bad for some reason.
Thus, everybody drives HUGE TRUCKS or SUVs, because they've been marketed as cool for 20+ years. Even though a proper mini van would do the exact same thing in a smaller, more efficient package.
(also huge trucks are exempt from environmental standards because of a legal fuckup they refuse to fix and thus better profits for the manufacturer)
You actually can’t fit full sheet goods (4’x8’) into 99% of pickups, there are very few pickups on the road with full-size (8’) beds that can fit sheet goods, most of them have ridiculously short beds, like 5’ long.
Take a look at this Chevy truck poster that shows the silhouette by generation, there’s almost no bed on new pickup trucks: https://customcarposters.com/products/chevy-pickup-truck-pos...
There are well over a million miles of unpaved roads and highways in the US. These usually have insufficient traffic to justify the cost of putting in a proper road bed. Equally, if you do get stuck out there because of poor road conditions, you may be stranded for a long time. American trucks, for good or ill, are designed to drive on these kinds of roads all day without falling apart.
I have a high-clearance AWD today and have a lot of experience driving on these types of roads. There are still occasional times when I "nope"-out of a road and turn around due to road conditions that really recommend a proper 4WD truck. It has happened in more parts of the US than I think people expect.
EDIT: Another common use case in some parts of the US is towing heavy things like boats, in places where every other person seems to own boats or other types of large vehicle trailers. Never my use case though.
There are plenty of legit use cases for a high clearance 4x4, but I think the vast majority of people claiming that they need one are being disingenuous, and really just want to feel like their commuter car is cool.
I own a smaller truck myself (Ford Maverick) and tow a ~3000lb trailer with it regularly in the summer. My fuel economy goes from 30 mpg -> 11 mpg while towing. If I had a diesel, it would have virtually zero impact on mpg.
Now, most people aren’t doing that every day, every year or ever, but a person thinks “what if I ever need to tow my airstream through the Rockies like they show on those commercials?” And they buy the vehicle with the most utility.
Other places that have mountainous regions, like South America, do have a lot more diesel trucks and 4x4s, so geographic region does play a part.
Tesla, from my expertise as a car builder, is just very sloppy. Poor panel fitment, door alignment, chintzy cheap materials for the price, and ultimately the smoke and mirror show that is FSD. Even if you manage to find one without all these issues, you still have a power source that essentially expires after 10 years and costs as much as a car to replace.
That's because of protectionist laws, aka the chicken tax: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax Asian/European manufacturers were squeezed out of the light truck market. US manufacturers then had this lucrative niche they marketed the hell out of.
This is wildly exaggerated, as in completely made-up.
The only significant difference is combustion engine internals vs. electric motor, which has a large difference in moving parts. But not two orders of magnitude.
The thing is, the ICE has had well over a century of perfecting, so while it is a lot more complex, it is so mature that stuff does not break. In over 35 years of owning many many cars, the number of times I've had an ICE internal component go bad is.. zero. Statistical noise aside, that's not a thing anymore and has not been since the 60s/70s.
The car that I've had which has spent by far (far) the most time at the dealer for repairs, was an EV. Nothing to do with the powertrain, just the usual stuff that breaks on cars like window regulators, electrical switches and hatch actuators. All things that are exactly the same regardless of ICE or EV powertrain.
If we don't count the ball bearings, an EV has 1 moving part.
A combustion engine easily has an "order of magnitude" more components. And I'm not even counting the gearbox here, which - in a modern automatic car - is clockwork levels of crazy gearing and technology.
A combustion engine has camshafts and pistons and valve lifters and timing chains (or belts) and dozens more. Every single of those moving parts is a potential failure mode. Add to that all the electronics and sensors we need to run a modern combustion engine, the complexity goes up exponentially.
Granted, we have been perfecting the metallurgy and construction of combustion engines for 100 years so they're amazingly reliable considering they work by inducing thousands of explosions a minute while every part moves at insane speeds.
- Diesel Particulate filter - Turbo - Clutch - Dual-mass Flywheel - Radiator
Each was 1000-2000€ except for the radiator. The DPF would've been a 2k€ operation, but I found a sketchy mechanic who just drilled it out and chipped the car to think the DPF was just fine. I paid in cash, didn't get a receipt =)
Then a tiny hex shaft broke in the bottom of the engine. It was the only thing running the oil pump to the engine and the only official repair was to replace the whole bottom part of the engine as a whole. Estimate: 2000€++.
It was fixed with liquid metal or something by a different sketchy car mechanic and I sold it immediately.
Meanwhile the maintenance schedule for my EV drive train is a fluid change every 150,000mi.
The first "real" maintenance is at 150k km where they do something to the battery cooling system. After that the next one is at 300k. I have no intention of keeping the car that long.
(of course there's the regular tire changes and brake repair, but it's not enforced by the manufacturer)
Agreed! If neither electric nor IC engines existed and we started developing both from scratch today, clearly the electric motors would be reliable within a year (I'm guessing, but probably) and the IC engines would take decades of development and manufacturing maturity to match the reliability.
But, that's not the world where we are. The ICE does have more than a century of development already so Honda/Mazda/Toyota/etc can manufacture an IC engine that'll go 200K+ miles with zero problems, so for a consumer buying a car today, the powerplant is not the source of trouble (whether EV or ICE). It's the rest of the car that needs repairs.
(An ICE engine should not have any explosions occurring, that's pinging and will damage the engine. It needs to be a controlled burn. But I'm nitpicking on the word.)
In my opinion the future will be an EV drivetrain. The only question is how do we store the energy to run the electric engines.
Batteries are a decent solution, but I'd love to see more range extenders like the Chevy Volt / Opel Ampera. Put in a 10-20kW battery, a 20-40 litre gas/diesel tank and a highly optimised generator that only charges the batteries.
Ta-dah, best of both worlds. You've got a reliable engine (steady RPM, steady output, no need to turbo it for power etc.) and a drivetrain that produces instant torque and is highly reliable.
They have four wheels (with, if you’re nitpicking, have many parts: the wheel itself, the tire, disc brake, brake pads, electronics for ABS, screws to put them together), and suspension (probably a more heavy one than ICE cars), don’t they?
(and doors and a trunk that can be opened, and handles to open the doors and trunk, and a steering wheel that has to be turned, and sun visors, and fans for cooling and heating, and, for modern cars, AC, likely with moving parts, and probably a few more moving parts)
The actual electric MOTOR has one moving part. An internal combustion engine has hundreds or thousands, depending on the model.
Because of that, I think saying the engine has only one moving part isn’t a good argument in a discussion of “Electric cars require much less maintenance than ICE cars”
Can you tell me which ICE has thousands of moving parts?
I've rebuilt several engines and can't think of anything that comes close.
In fact I have a fully disassembled (top and bottom) 4 cylinder engine sitting in the garage as a long term project and I'm pretty sure it's less than a hundred parts, although I haven't really counted. Certainly not multiple hundreds.
Another point of view of course is that each piece is one more way to break.
Just a reminder that EV has had well over a century of perfecting too.
A combination of battery and electric motor is an obvious solution for powering a vehicle. This is nothing new, revolutionary or disruptive. It has been tried many times before and has always failed for certain reasons. It will win, but not overnight.
Actually, it's so mature that it breaks exactly when the manufacturers want it to - after warranty.
Just like you can optimise a 3D-printed shelf to have a shape that's almost fully load-bearing and thus uses less material, you can produce a part that can be stressed a certain number of times before it breaks.
This practice crossed some kind of threshold in the latter half of the last decade, because every manufacturer is now in on it.
So cars are indeed "getting worse", because the margins of reliability are now much thinner than e.g. 20 years ago.
Not sure, all of my cars are way out of warranty (in nearly every case I've bought them way out of warranty already) and they keep going strong.
But you say the latter half of the last decade, so perhaps. My newest car is a 2013 (oldest is 1988).
If ICE cars never fail, I wonder what all the auto mechanics are doing? 282,637 automotive repair companies are currently in business, with 614,433 employees. How are they surviving is nobody is getting their ICE cars repaired?
I've had interactions with a few hundred people (at least) over 2 decades and every single person had their ICE car in the shop for repairs, small and large.
ICE cars also have major scheduled maintenance, somewhere around 90 - 120K, you have to replace timing belt and a bunch of things.
Car dealers don't make any money on selling new cars. Nobody buys a new car unless its priced a few thousand below MSRP (the past 2 years are an aberration). Dealerships make money on service. This is the same model as inkjet printers.
ICE cars are so horribly unreliable and bad, even new ones, there exist special laws just for them: lemon laws.
Cars in general are complex and expensive, Tesla EVs run afoul of lemon laws all the time: https://insideevs.com/news/433383/tesla-warranty-repairs-goo...
> 282,637 automotive repair companies are currently in business, with 614,433 employees. How are they surviving is nobody is getting their ICE cars repaired?
Collisions. The most expensive repair I've had is bodywork after a small fender bender. Way more expensive than maintenance or even pretty substantial repairs like an alternator replacement.
That's not to say that ICE cars don't ever need repairs for mechanical failures, but for such a complex machine they're extremely reliable.
Well I never said that. I said that components of the IC engine itself fail exceedingly rarely (in my personal experience, never).
"The car" is a far greater system than just the engine or motor. The powerplant (IC or electric) is a tiny percentage of the car as a whole.
It's all the other stuff that fails and keeps cars in the repair shop.
My second EV spent multiple weeks at the dealer to fix a window regulator that kept failing. Other things that often fail are electronics, actuator motors, wiring glitches, shocks, etc. All parts which are common to all cars, regardless of how it happens to produce horsepower.
> ICE cars are so horribly unreliable and bad, even new ones, there exist special laws just for them: lemon laws.
Ok you're clearly biased, since the above is not true. Lemon laws are not specific to ICE cars. They apply to EVs and plenty of EVs get repurchased due to lemon law criteria. I personally know someone who lemon law'd a Tesla. Lemons laws trigger if a new car spends an inordinate time at the dealer being repaired for whatever reason. Our EV (with the window regulator problem) came within a week of meeting lemon law criteria.
Consider the engine + transmission + exhaust + fuel, many moving parts all that can cause a fail closed of your car. Fuel system alone has a pump, filter, injectors, injector booster (looking at you bmw!). All that goes in the trash.
I will grant that EVs have new exciting things like coolant loop and pump for batteries so we don't get off that easy. Zero belts however, not a timing anything in sight, and the old coolant vs oil battle for heat movement is over.
Transmissions too can be a huge source of pain, modern ones are great, but if you end up with something <2012 or a CVT, who knows what could go wrong? Ton of solenoids, some fluid that can burn, for CVTs a lame belt...
It's a lot, EVs totally simplify that. In my mind my biggest worry is that all that stuff is software controlled now, which could be better but might be worse if we look at the average quality of code...
I just opened a lease car comparison site. Under €650 a month I get 11 German(-ish) cars to choose from. 10 of which are VAG, 1 is BMW. In total, however, I have 180+ cars to choose from, many of which are much cheaper than the German ones and are way better equipped.
In the UK they sell for £37K ($45K USD). I don't expect it is the exact same spec but even so it is annoying.
Total net to date: -12.4B (https://projects.propublica.org/bailout/list/category/Auto%2...), losses from ICE manufacturers.
Tesla's loan: $465 million, January 2010, Loan fully repaid in May 2013 (~3.5 years) https://www.energy.gov/lpo/tesla
Traditional car companies have access to tens of billions in bailouts, which EVs never have and never will. (1) Chrysler Bailout of 1979, $1.5 billion (2) In 2008, $17.4 billion bailout to General Motors and Chrysler (3) In 2009, $3 billion, cash for clunkers
In fact I don't have a car at all. But if I got one it wouldn't be an EV until nearly every parking space has a charger so I can combine a trip with a charge.
But really I'm so happy I don't have a car anymore. There's so many drawbacks.
- Huge cost and high depreciation
- Maintenance costs and time sink
- Tyre swap in winter
- insurance and worry about losing no claim bonus
- Road tax and chance of fines if you miss a speed sign
- Finding parking and paying for that
- Worry about break-in, damage and theft
- Not being able to do anything productive while driving (on the train I can do so just fine)
- Always having to return to where you parked it (a much overlooked convenience of public transport)
I don't really see how all these drawbacks compensate for slightly more easily getting from A to B. Public transport here is amazing and costs 20€ unlimited per month. If I'm in a hurry a taxi will cost a tenner or so. And as I work mostly from home most of trips involve going out and drinking so I wouldn't be able to drive anyway :P
And I see more and more of my friends going car free too. I think that's more of a reason for dropping car sales now.
-no public transport inside of an hour's walk
-sky-high petrol/diesel prices, but I can charge from solar
-cheap road tax for EVs
-I leave the farm once every 1-2 weeks and generally only go about 15km away on those journeys, so trickle-charging and moderate range would not be an impediment to my mobility
Unfortunately a farming income does not translate to a new Tesla, or even a used Kia EV. Guess I should have got one before I burned out and quit tech.
But you are spot on. The dollars and cents just don't make sense.
> Huge cost and high depreciation
Fair cost and zero depreciation
> Maintenance costs and time sink
Oil change once a year.
> Tyre swap in winter
Fair point, local laws and climate realities may require this.
> insurance and worry about losing no claim bonus
Low insurance; no worry if you get a few more scratches on top of existing scratches.
> Road tax and chance of fines if you miss a speed sign
There are apps for that
> Finding parking and paying for that
There are apps for that
> Worry about break-in, damage and theft
Comes pre-damaged.
> Not being able to do anything productive while driving (on the train I can do so just fine)
Sure, but not much you can do on the train either, standing squeezed like a sardine in a can, with network connectivity only above ground or at stations.
> Always having to return to where you parked it (a much overlooked convenience of public transport)
I think there have been only 2 times in the past few years when I felt this was an inconvenience.
>There are apps for that
>> Finding parking and paying for that
>There are apps for that
Ahh the "you're holding it wrong" everyone with a ticket or parking fees is a sucker!
>> Not being able to do anything productive while driving (on the train I can do so just fine)
>Sure, but not much you can do on the train either, standing squeezed like a sardine in a can, with network connectivity only above ground or at stations.
I don't even have words, so everyone else that can't manage to avoid local laws deftly is a sucker who didn't use the right app but you can't find offline video, ebooks , wikipédia , etc...at some point you just gotta be content you're making a choice for your preference so let people have theirs. I definitely drove your beat up Toyota/Saturn/Honda/Mazda for 16 years and you couldn't pay me enough to go back to that lifestyle willingly.
I mean, to each their own, but I can't remember the last time I got a speeding fine, and I listen to ebooks in the car every trip.
Well yes that's what I do if I have the choice. My most expensive car ever cost me 2200 euro (which was a pretty nice full-option 10-year-old Volvo - big cars are super unpopular here because of the high road tax).
But the problem with those these days is that you're banned from city centers then.
But still I feel much freeer not having the worry and cost of it. And I like walking a lot and I hate making any plans so I often go off on a trip to whatever and take the train back from wherever I end up. But yes YMMV!
I like this one. But for the apps... they are plaster, not solution.
A surprising number of underground systems have phone signal these days. I was recently surprised, visiting London, to notice that my phone was mostly working on the tube; the tube is, of course, the oldest and clunkiest of all underground systems, so if they can do it...
If you have no parking at home, you can't have a car. Bringing EV into your situation is irrelevant.
In China, it technically isn’t allowed (like Japan you have to have proof of parking spot before you can buy a car), but the rule is easily gamed and lots of people park on the street (or in many cases, the right lane of a two lane one way road without street parking, they only get ticketed once a year so it’s ok - see “wild parking”). It’s a bit crazy, maybe other cities aren’t as bad as Beijing.
There's public car parks around but they are prohibitively expensive as it's an old city center.
I could also rent a spot somewhere. But this becomes a special issue with EVs, because I regularly would have to go and drive it somewhere to charge it. Also those rented spaces are crazy expensive.
- No need to plan around transportation times.
- Staying at the party after the last subway: the crowd changes a lot.
- Intimate conversation with friends/partner, while listening to music of your choice.
- Dressing up without worrying about others staring. It applies to your passengers too! You will see your friends really thankful for your ride, wearing suits/dresses/high heels!
- Hability to change destination on the go.
- Having a strong excuse not to drink, then partying till 6am, waking up without a hangover and going straight to the gym.
- Going to wherever after work on a Friday night.
I never regretted it.
Though strangely enough a friend of mine was told off by security for taking off her heels while sitting down (they hurt a bit) but at the same time ignoring the boobs girl altogether lol.
Berlin is even (way) crazier by the way. Though I'm not sure how they would deal with this in public there, Germans can be a bit more formal in that sense :)
Interesting, I didn't know about that movement.
I'm currently running an errand and I took an Uber here because it's absolutely pouring at the moment and I don't need this sort of excitement in my life.
My friend used to drive a car that we dubbed "the car of truth". Many honest conversations have been had in there.
Except for the rush hour. When I did ~25km commute one way I had to think when I should leave with the car. With bicycle, time was constant, so I was free to choose when I could leave.
> - Staying at the party after the last subway: the crowd changes a lot. > - Having a strong excuse not to drink
Car is good excuse not to drink - I have used that excuse myself. But there are other ways - you do not need car for this. It does not work both ways: if you want to drink, with car you can not.
My point is: car is convenience not freedom.
Car is freedom to stay late. Public transit is freedom to drink.
These two really depend on the system and frequency; non-issue for high-frequency underground systems, say. There'll be another one along in 3 minutes.
> Staying at the party after the last subway: the crowd changes a lot.
This depends a lot on the system as well. In Dublin, traditionally, we only had night buses on weekends, they were infrequent, and they used weird Frankenstein routes (they'd take like five normal routes, and make a route that passed _all the stops of all five_) so they took hours. In the last few years, a bunch of normal routes have started going 24 hours; makes things a lot easier. I was recently out inconveniently far from home, at 4 in the morning, resigning myself to an hour walk home, or else trying to somehow get a taxi, when I noticed that there was a bus coming in ten minutes at the stop outside the bar, which would bring me to five minutes walk from home.
If you're situated more than 5km from the nearest town, car ownership is practically mandatory.
I do eventually plan to get some dinky EV at some point for scooting around town. The way I solved the problem you mentioned about charge locations is to install a 240V.
imo, electric vehicles are still a luxury even at lower price points unless you live a very specific lifestyle.
Oh yes, when you are used to that freedom, always having to return to the car feels like a ball and chain. People who are not used to it clearly don't feel that way at all. An impressive example of how perspective changes perception.
Legacy auto EVs are garbage. They ignored Tesla for almost 15 years, and then once Tesla was Goliath, surprise pikachu. The time to build battery factories was when Tesla was building battery factories circa 2014-2015. The fact that Tesla predicted selling 500k EVs a year by 2020 was laughed at, and now they are approaching 2.3M/year total capacity of EVs alone (while still building 40GWh/year of stationary storage).
Good luck.
https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/blog_attachments/g...
(yes, yes, I agree Elon is a monster, but he has also been effective)
I went to a showroom I looked at Teslas. I could not find a single car with even panels gaps. The wipers don't work. The car doesn't have USS anymore and Tesla vision sucks. I could go on and on and on. I seriously considered one but just too many shortcomings.
For the price of Model Y, I can buy a Lexus ES300h(car is QC and build perfection) and drive that car for the next 15 years with oil changes once a year.
I keep hearing this from people, especially my friends who work for other manufacturers. I personally couldn't care less.
Hell, if they sold it pre-scratched and pre-dented It'd be even better, would same me the paranoia of something happening to it.
Why would anyone pay new car prices for a damaged car? It has lower resale value.
> Why would anyone pay new car prices for a damaged car? A) I didn't say it had to be the same price. Sell the car with a bumper blemish and give people a discount to account for the fact that you didn't have to reject parts.
B) People might buy it for the same reason that others gent bent out of shape about panel gaps; personal differences in what they value.
It feels like the quip everyone uses without any meaningful value.
Do panel gaps really matter? Probably not, but if I'm paying Tesla prices, maybe?
There's absolutely nothing sudden about people caring about panel gaps on new vehicles.
Cockeyed panel gaps are a tell-tale of a used/bodged vehicle, this has been the case my entire life. It's the last thing you want to see on what's supposedly a new vehicle, and it sticks out like a sore thumb.
It didn't help that the experience of renting from Hertz was terrible, but renting the Y seemed to confirm every terrible Tesla rumor and then some. It didn't drive well, the range was surprisingly bad(abused battery maybe?), the controls were confusing and distracting, and hell, even the acoustics of the interior were terrible(glass roof is dumb).
And yet it takes the #4 spot for most vehicle sales in 2023 in the US, and likely the #1 spot globally.
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/g43553191/bestselling-cars...
Tesla does not owe current customers firm resale value.
How is the man that has actually made a huge difference in battery-powered cars and actually made them seem like a viable alternative to gas a 'monster'. And yet the dozens of environmentalist activists who have done nothing but make a fuss and complain seen as the good guys. This sort of praise of mediocrity and ineffectiveness is the root cause of so many issues today.
Musk has been extremely effective. Maybe that means there is something about his thinking and methods of action that we should seek to replicate instead of criticize.
As far as the cars go, I think most Americans can see that spending an extra $10k on an EV Chevy isn’t gonna keep the Saudis from draining Ghawar Field. I wonder how cheap BYD and VinFast can get their imports.
https://www.google.com/search?q=elon+abussive
https://www.google.com/search?q=elon+petty
https://fortune.com/2023/09/12/elon-musk-walter-isaacson-boo... ("One of Elon Musk’s favorite video games taught him the ‘life lesson’ that ‘empathy is not an asset.’")
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/15/tesla-asked-cooley-to-fire-l... ("Tesla asked law firm to fire attorney who worked on Elon Musk probe at SEC, report says")
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/10/04/making-sense-of-grime... ("Grimes sues Elon Musk after she said he wouldn’t let her see their son")
> Indeed, reports and Grimes’ since-deleted social media posts indicate that the situation has become rather ugly, with allegations that Musk is being a controlling bully. In posts last month on Musk’s X platform, Grimes alleged that he wasn’t allowing her to see one of their children and threatened to take him to court unless he let her see her son or responded to her lawyer. She said the situation was “utterly ripping my family apart.”
I’ll ask one of the folks tracking Elon facts publicly to aggregate all of the citations on the topic, so the next time I say “monster” a simple URL citation will do. As a high empathy human, I fully stand behind my characterization based on all available public evidence. Hurt people hurt people I suppose.
Good EVs sell.
However, the other experience I've seen is the near lack of required paid maintenance. That could easily come out to another $10k over 8-10yr, which would shorten the payoff. Of course that would hurt the dealers for the major Autos, and drive up their pricing.
Also, my wife hated the EV. Sure, it was a Bolt so it wasn't that comfy, but she hated having to think about charging. She's fine dealing with gas. That right there kills it for us.
As for the fueling up, there's a huge gulf between those who own a home and those who don't in terms of EV experience - when you have a charger in your garage, you wake up every day with a "full tank".
Sounds like a recipe for us to lose our auto industry to China. The instant some upstart puts a $20k simple super reliable EV on the market it’s over, and we will deserve it.
Of course some subset will keep buying the biggest F-9000 Super Chungus they can find while complaining about the price of gas, so maybe that will keep legacy auto alive.
You saw the same thing with microcars or anything especially affordable the past couple years. They only want to sell giant gas guzzling insanely expensive XXL crap and are doing their best to keep affordable shit off the market meanwhile it all sells just fine everywhere else. It's obvious how rigged the whole thing is same with real estate and "automatic price adjustments" that coincidentally biases things in favor of landlords, same for other software that biases things in favor of other colluding fucks like the auto industry so they merely "coincidentally" conspire. It's all total bullshit.
What pisses me off is the fact people somehow think an industry agreeing to use algorithms that only go in their favor and most of all if they all use those algorithms together doesn't count as collusion.
AI generated Chevy Goliath Ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MI7Tq6sRxE4
Chances are if you own a pickup truck you're not using it to drive to the grocer's mart to pick up granny snacks for the senior's home.
You work for a living.
Cars are getting massively cheaper. I don't see why you'd pay $50k for one.
A Bolt or Nissan Leaf with NACS fast charge and a bit better looks will sell pretty well. The Tesla model 3 sells.
I'd love to see one of the typical 4-door 4-cylinder "economy" cars like the Sentra, Corolla, or Civic with an EV transmission.
Why should they sell a Bolt if they don't have it? When you sell the car before it's made, you have to do a lot of customer handholding and the customer holds the dealer responsible when the car doesn't arrive on time. Much better to sell them something that's already on the lot, or at least on a truck on the way.
This is probably more specifically a US thing but the preference for large cars = luxury doesn't appear to be doing any favours to the market.
If we care about reducing carbon, we'll probably get more milage out of more walkable cities, expanded public transit, and e-bikes/scooters for local trips.
Mild hybrid is winning out.
> If we care about reducing carbon, we'll probably get more milage out of more walkable cities, expanded public transit, and e-bikes/scooters for local trips.
Completely agree. The best way to solve this issue is to fund or otherwise incentivize alternatives that get cars off of the road entirely.
The answer isn't an EV car, although these will help. It's reliable EV light rail/passenger trains.
- I need a truck with large towing capacity and no EV but a Semi currently comes close.
Reasons why I don't want to buy an EV:
- I live in an apartment with street parking. The nearest public chargers are 15 minutes away. Charging would be a time consuming hassle.
- Any EV truck is at least 5x more expensive than the average used truck.
- I don't want to have to plan out every single trip around where the next charger is. I'd like to go hiking in the Catskills and not have to create an Excel spreadsheet to figure out where I'll need to stop for power and how long.
- Unless you can use a Tesla charger, public chargers suck. They often are broken, do not provide nearly enough power, have difficult payment systems, etc. Many EV drivers just don't get how shitty non-Tesla chargers are.
- I like driving standard transmission. I could technically hire someone to retrofit an EV with a manual trans. I can't imagine how expensive that would be.
Reasons why I wish I could buy an EV:
- Larger trucks are insanely fuel inefficient. I want to pay less for fuel and have longer range.
- ICE maintenance is a huge pain. I don't want to deal with all the broken stuff and constantly going in for minor to major repairs and maintenance.
- I'd like to help people with asthma and the environment.
This one is getting better as fast-charging becomes more prevalent. You don't (I assume) live next to a gas station either, but you're accustomed to stopping for gas every few weeks. Of course, filling up a gas tank takes five minutes instead of twenty, but we're getting close to parity.
Most EVs don't have a transmission, or, really, just have a single speed transmission, so a "manual trans" on an EV would just be cosplaying ;)
>I live in an apartment with street parking.
You are an extreme edge-case. EV trucks have massive towing capacities. Their only drawback is towing without fast charging infrastructure (long distances).
I say this as an EV nerd: there's no EVs that are there yet. Well, that's not true, the best EVs are! Ebikes!
Ironically this is because I bike everywhere I'm not driving.
> automakers have neglected the market.
The US ICE corporations have not neglected their market.
They have steered the EV market toward the wall. Now the executives claim in bad faith that "something isn't working".
They understand the economics of their industry very well.
The only exception to the market that the US ICE corporations have created is Tesla, an undeniable success story.
The EV market in the US is estimated to be less than 10% in 2023.[1] If a larger percentage of N.A. consumers want an affordable EV for commuting, they won't find one. Yet.
They will however find many truck-like SUVs and asphalt warships such as the Ford F150, the GM Silverado, and the Stellantis Dodge RAM.
Perhaps the US ICE corporations simply accepted that China and Telsa will dominate the mid-to-low cost segment of the EV market. We will see how N.A. buyers who want an affordable zero-emission EV for commuting will react to the Fiat 500e with a 42 kWh battery (coming to the US in 2024). [2]
Cue the influencers who will say that you will be doomed when (not if) you collide with an asphalt warship.
[1] _ https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2023/executive...
[2] _ https://www.autoblog.com/2023/03/09/2023-fiat-500e-first-dri...
They need to build smaller, less fancy cars with prices for normal people.
They don’t want to say things like “Chinese automakers are eating our lunch” or “we’ll never catch up to Tesla.”
The most bullish EV automakers should have seen Tesla’s charging network strategy 10 years ago and executed on something similar. Where are the Ford and GM-branded charging stations?
Their time is limited, and they will bring down the house with them. As you say, BYD, GW, and MG will eat them for lunch. I’ve been in their cars and they are pretty good, and have a lot of transferred tech from Tesla embedded at near zero R&D costs. With Tesla open sourcing their adapter design and getting federal subsidies to expand charger networks the Chinese makers just need to use the Tesla adapter and their infrastructure challenges are done.
- Must seat 6 (I have 4 kids, I'm not going to start doing 2 trips)
- Must be below 100k CAD (y'know, budget. I'm still way stretching at this price point.)
I could not find a single EV that fit these 2 criteria. Tesla had a 7-seater option on the Y, which I did actually order, but then they canceled my order as they stopped selling the 7-seater in Canada.
In the end, I had to fall back to the closest thing, a PHEV. Even there, the choices are pretty much only the Mitshubishi Outlander or the Chrysler Pacifica, and I'm not a SUV guy so I got the Pacifica.
Manufacturers need to stop competing on the same exact car (boring 5-seater mini-SUVs) and start offering some variety, maybe they'll see more sales.
Okay but you have to admit that having 4 kids is pretty atypical. Why would it make more sense for car companies to target more niche segments for electric vehicles? Are electric drivetrains somehow more suited for 7 seater cars?
This thread is about failed EV plans, so I guess with hindsight we should be saying that targeting the mainstream segments didn't make much sense.
But I guess if you want some reasons - niche segments are poorly served. A "pretty good" EV should stand out; in a highly competitive market a "pretty good" EV is one of the worst choices available. Niche segments are not high volume. You don't need a battery gigafactory to meet demand. You won't have multi-year waitlists and huge dealer markups that turn definite buyers into angry non-customers.
3-child families might fit in a sedan or crossover, but they'll be much more comfortable in a minivan or similar, and most of them actually do shop for bigger, 3-row vehicles.
I think it would make much more sense for a manufacturer to try and get a good percentage of that niche rather than compete and get a sliver of the mainstream. That's the advice we generally tell new freelancers (find a niche) and it also applies here.
I don't think there's any particular considerations around electric drivetrains and 7-seaters that would change suitability, except 2 things:
- bigger vehicles do consume more energy, but you have a lot more room for batteries.
- Minivan buyers aren't particularly concerned about performance; you don't have to make the fastest thing out there and it'll still sell. (up to a point, though: I rejected the Sienna after a test drive because it was just so sluggish and noisy.)
[1]: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=981001...
5 seater mini-SUV's are the main profit driver in the market so it's not surprising they started there. It was more surprising 5 years ago when basically all you could get for EV's were small cars.
There's always something "just over the corner", but my previous vehicle buy was in 2021 and the options were the exact same... I will seriously consider a EV9 (and the VW ID.Buzz) once I can test-drive one. I haven't seen any prices for any of these yet, though. If they're 150k CAD I just can't afford it, so they'll join the Tesla X, the Volvo whatever90 and the Rivians of this world.
Also, why don't they make minivans? It's people I need to move; 3-row SUVs are awful for that. Kia should've electrified their new Carnival when they refreshed it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/2023/08/08/ch...
Non-Chinese automakers better prepare themselves, because whoever comes out on top from that struggle will take over the market just like it happened with solar panels.
I suppose EV-as-luxury-vehicle is maybe how an industry kicks off before the market begins to mature and prices come down. I look forward to the phase of the market when EVs become affordable for everyone.
In principle it's all simple, but what exactly happens inside is not as well studied as combustion engines.
Case in point: this year researchers found out that a type of tape used in li-ion batteries is actually not chemically stable in this environment and replacing it with a different material increased lifespan by 10% and decreased self-discharge by 70%:
https://techxplore.com/news/2023-09-tape-lithium-ion-batteri...
Plenty of other stories of this type - one of them brought LFP batteries into the limelight, because researchers figured out how to close to double their capacity.
Stellantis (Fiat, Citroen, Opel, etc.) is launching lots of interesting new models in the EU lately. The new Citroen e-c3 is supposed to be priced around 23000 euro. That's a small family car, not a crazy amount of range but usable. The citroen ami, is only about 7000 euro and more of a glorified golf cart than a car. But for 7-8K it is pretty awesome and pretty handy for getting around town. Opel (also Stellantis) has a similar car called the Rocks-e that I saw in Berlin on the streets a few weeks ago. I think it sells for a similar price. It looks like more or less the same product with some minor differences.
The whole notion that an electric car is just a battery with some wheels and not much more means that there are going to be a lot of companies racing to the bottom in terms of cost and form factors. The main constraint here is price and availability of batteries and other components. That market is growing and there's not shortage of demand for any of that.
I was hopeful for this:
But they seem to have went dark - I saw one comment on YouTube asking (in Dutch) why aren't they responding to emails.
Note: This sweet spot seems to have disappeared from the market as I don't believe any plug-in hybrids available in the US today match the EV range of the Clarity.
These companies are walking dead. And like IBM, they probably can be walking dead for a good while.
It's interesting that there is no mention in the article about most auto makers adopting the Tesla charging standard and ceding profit on charging to Tesla. That pattern will continue as Tesla's all-out technology and investment sprint continues to widen the gap.
In my view, by the time the legacy auto makers get a profitable, competitively priced BEV into the showrooms, Tesla (and the Chinese companies) will have their low-cost factory running in Mexico, lowering the bar on them again. And then Full Self Driving will go wide as the final nail in the coffin.
I'm not a short-seller because people like short sellers about the same as undertakers, but if I were, I'd be betting that the legacy autos are declaring bankruptcy again in less than 5 years.
I can replace a transmission or engine on my ford focus for $500, the car is at 140k miles with basic maintenance.
There is no way around battery replacement out of warranty and Tesla has recently raised their battery prices. I happen to keep my cars for 10+ years because its a depreciating asset.
The issue with EVs is charging infrastructure. However that will continue to improve over the next 10 years. As will the economics - there’s no reason for an EV to cost so much. They’re just premium priced because everyone wants a Tesla margin, and they’re used to demanding high prices for their complex mechanical gear and belts beasts because that complexity of machine really costs that much. BYD is proving tho you can deliver a quality $10k EV at much lower costs than we see coming from the major car makers.
I’d note your $500 replacement is if you do it yourself with a scrap engine. You can’t take it to the dealer or a shop and get a major change to the car done. So while that may be your economics, it’s not a very widely shared option.
Nevermind "gasoline" - from the US carmaker lobby view, clearly diesel is the dinosaur juice because the European makers promoted it and lied about it (while in Germany petrol is the dinosaur juice as diesel is cheaper with more mileage). Definitely a dinosaur fight if you ask me.
The lack of a charger network is lamentable but let's not forget that Benz' first motor car had to be refilled at pharmacies; the fuel station network didn't come to exist overnight either.
Transitions that happen with ourselves "feeling overridden" always leave us annoyed and perky. That's no different whether authorities put that shiney new motorway right through your neighbourhood or your local fuel station closes - or your new company car is electric because that's what fleet management went for to tick the green box. We're already in the middle of a big shift here. whether one of us individually embraces our resists it won't stop it from happening. The choice of the dinosaur fate is everyone's own by and large.
https://www.gizmochina.com/2022/12/29/new-2023-byd-dolphin-l...
But it would be good to hear from someone with actual insight.
do they use some kind of special battery tech? because that's not the common experience with battery operated devices, every phone I have ever owned had half battery life after one year. Same for laptops. Even the super efficient macbook air m1 I have now lasts half what it did two years ago.
I have never seen a battery last ten years, let alone do it at 80% capacity.
• Car batteries are thermally managed much better than your laptop or especially your phone, which helps longevity
• Much larger capacity means a similar amount of battery cycles lasts a long time. 1000 cycles is common for lithium ion, which in a 300 mile range car means 300,000 miles
That's impressive. I just put a new clutch in my 2004 Toyota Matrix. The clutch, flyweel and pressure plate were $450 just in parts from Rockauto, the cheapest of the cheap.
This will hasten adoption. We'll see gas stations taking out their pumps and tanks to put in chargers and transformers.
500KW chargers already exist.[1]
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/19/23922649/gravity-dc-fast...
I thought this was a war crime?
The issue is that the end users are also the electorate. Forcing everyone to EVs is going to cost more money than cars do now (at least for a time), and the same constituents that vote for legislators are going to feel it.
It worked for making dishwashers and washing machines shittier and more power efficient, maybe it will work for cars too. I just don’t think most people in the US are willing to commit to switching, however.
With the way PG&E keeps raising electricity prices in California, it may be cheaper to go back to gas. Just heard they are pushing yet another huge increase next year. As we approach $1/kWh, charging an EV gets painful.
Let me be specific. They killed 84 people with their negligence in Paradise alone, but they keep raising rates while never seeming to have the money to fix their problems. Did you know that in just 2021 the PG&E CEO Patricia Poppe was paid $51.2 million — the year that fire killed 84 Californians she made 51.2 million bucks for doing such a good job.
They can take their electric future and shove it right where the sun doesn’t shine. They want to make that company the center of California’s future.
And they want to raise rates again this year a huge amount on every single customer. After rolling back solar incentives for rooftop.
I’m sorry, I hate PG&E. Especially when you have models like SMUD and Roseville power just chugging along delivering power inside the same system at less than half the price. There is no excuse left for PG&E to continue as it has. They need to be broken up and someone like SMUD should take over.
They're terrible, so stop being a customer.
I so wish I had enough real estate square footage to put up solar to get rid of PG&E abuse.
Unfortunately the space I have can only fit a few panels which won't make a dent. I still want to do it as a fun project, but it won't help much.
And Palo Alto too. Every time I want to get depressed and cry a little I go look at the Palo Alto electric rates. I don't live that far from PA but being in the PG&E abuse zone, have to pay far more.
https://www.cityofpaloalto.org/files/assets/public/v/4/utili...
That's what a public utility can do instead of a for-profit monopoly like PG&E which is just maximizing revenue from a captive audience.
It feels that aiming for an all or nothing 0% -> 100% electrification of the planet's automobile infrastructure needlessly raises the bar (both on what cars should be able to deliver and what the grid / infrastructure should be able to sustain).
The sustainability transition is really a long-term marathon, not a fireworks display. It must carry society along at a steady clip, be affordable and usable etc.
It's probably more telling that the anti-EV propaganda needs to give a false impression of what's going on in order to make it seems unreasonable in order to win their argument. That's generally a bad sign.
To give just one of many examples, of policies that do exactly as you ask, the CARB ZEV mandates:
a) include credits for hybrids
b) ramp up over time
c) was introduced in 1990
d) the most recent update in 2020 set a target for 100% zero emission sales in 2035 for small vehicles and 2045 for "medium and heavy-duty trucks and buses"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Air_Resources_Board...
They should have taken a stab at seeing what kind of a car you could build for a retail price of $15,000-$20,000. I believe Citroen did something like this as everyone has been complaining here, my question to folks is what car features are essential for you and which are disposable? For me, heating, air conditioning, hundred and 50 mile range with aggressive driving, good all-around visibility, plenty of room for 6 foot tall person but can adjust for a 5 foot person. Antilock brakes. Would be nice is anticollision front radar, blind spot detection, radar adaptive cruise control. Heated steering wheel and heated seats. Dashboard display and entertainment center could be two off-the-shelf tablets.
That's my wish list. What would be the right thing for you?
This is basically a tesla, except with 250 mile range, and 2x as expensive. And they replaced everything that requires radar/uss with unreliable cameras.
fwiw Tesla had a helluva time sourcing the screens for their cars back in like 2019. Something off the shelf isn't liable to cut it, though the market may have changed by now.
https://www.thedrive.com/tech/27989/teslas-screen-saga-shows...
In 2018, I went to several car dealerships in North Carolina with the intent to buy an electric car. Not one carried them. The salespeople claimed, "there's no demand," but there was one person right in front of them demanding an electric car. If I were the executives at the car companies, I wouldn't trust what the dealers were telling me.
/my $0.00002
I feel a bit vindicated.
Toyota cars are currently rather cheap to buy in Europe and USA. But Toyota still primarily offers ICE and hybrids, they are late to the BEV game.
Where I live, a Tesla Model 3 (€43k, with incentives) is still about 10k more expensive as a comparable Toyota Corolla hybrid (€33k).
That all said, in my country Teslas are still very popular, the model 3 has outsold every other car (ICE or EV) for the past few years, only to be overtaken by the model Y.
My worry is buying an EV with a used battery - as the battery feels like the inevitable failure point
Pretty much the same as ICE cars, at least where I live.
> My worry is buying an EV with a used battery - as the battery feels like the inevitable failure point
They are, but so are combustion engines (not to mention gearboxes!). A new engine for example would cost more than most second-hand cars are worth.
The solution to a broken battery would be the same as with a broken engine: either repair it, or replace it with a second hand one. Battery packs can be repaired, though it does require special tools and (safety) skills, just like with combustion engines.
Well the tax credit is available already. That makes the slump harder to understand.
https://www.irs.gov/credits-deductions/credits-for-new-clean...
One problem has been that there is not enough power coming via the regular infrastructure but believe that has been mostly solved now.
Then there are a lot of people who do not have permanent parking space. Most commercial parking houses offer some spots with charging but the need may outstrip the availability.
If you are left to find a parking spot outside somewhere you are out of luck, unless there is a charging station close to work, (and you drive to work)
GM, Toyota, and Ford talk a lot about EVs but they struggle to build a lot of them. Upstarts like Rivian are actually threatening to displace these companies in terms of volume production of EVs. That's how bad it is. And of course Tesla and a range of Korean, Vietnamese, and Chinese manufacturers are already running circles around the legacy manufacturers with about an order of magnitude difference in volume production. And profits.
It's just the legacy manufacturers that are struggling to keep up. Some are further than others. But they all are burdened by supply chains that are mismatched with their EV strategy, legacy business units and product lines that are facing a steep cliff in terms of competitiveness and profitability, and just the reality of having to basically transition away from that on an accelerated timeline. And they are trying to figure out how to manufacture competitive EVs at scale and aren't as far as they'd like to be relative to their competition.
The strategy of building transitional vehicles that can be delivered in ICE, hybrid, or bev versions is flopping hard. They are compromise vehicles and just not as good as pure battery electric vehicles. More expensive to make, less efficient with space, weight, etc. Less desirable to own. Less competitive in what is a pretty competitive market. And priced unrealistically high to "protect" the "cheaper" hybrid and ICE range.
That was all fine until the macroeconomic circumstances changed. Some countries are already in a recession and others are pondering the semantics of whether they are or aren't in a recession. Interest rates have gone up and the cheap capital needed to bootstrap new EV manufacturing capacity is evaporating rapidly. And on top of that the new entrants in this market have started a price war in China. And of course sales are down in a recession. EVs are affected. Ice vehicles are affected more. And that's what legacy manufacturers depend on for revenue. Despite this, the EV market is still growing. But weaker companies might not make it. And the likes of the companies mentioned in the article are looking weak. It wouldn't be the first time for GM to go bankrupt. And they might need to do that again to cut loose from their legacy business.
The next few years are going to be brutal for these companies. The US is lagging other countries a bit but basically, like elsewhere, EVs are going from single digit (most of the US) to double digit percentage (much of northern Europe) market share to eventually a majority market share (Norway). Price points are coming down too. Sub 20k$ vehicles are already on the market. Just not in the US because of import regulations. But the world market is where the money is. It's going to be a massacre there for ICE vehicle manufacturers. All that EV growth is going to come out of their revenue. Unless they figure out how to take a cut of that, they are going to be going out of business.
In the US it mostly is a decent decision to buy electric (and I love my Tesla and Volt I use here) but there are some caveats.
1. The insurance tends to be a bit more expensive.
2. You need to have a place with charging infrastructure (like your own home or an apartment etc. that has free charging).
3. Paid chargers often have similar costs to buying gas for ICE vehicles.
4. Battery degradation is a thing. As someone who lives in the SouthEast and likes to keep cars for 10-15+ years that becomes an issue with cars like the Volt where the only option that makes economic sense when the battery dies is to try to find a refurb from another vehicle if the car is out of warranty. As these refurbed batteries age, or people buy batteries from salvaged volts for home solar batteries that will become an issue (and already is for many 1st gen volts). The Tesla is not as likely to have that issue because a lot more were produced, but if other offerings have after sales support similar to the volt because of lower than expected sales volumes that becomes a perception issue down the road unless you want to just purchase a car, take a big depreciation hit and then trade it in a few years.
5. depreciation see #4.
6. Sales are currently slowing down with inventory piling up even with federal subsidies right now. Imagine how much lower it would be without them.
7. To add more range to a car like the Tesla you need to add more batteries which adds a lot of weight to the car (they have already gone after most the low hanging fruit with motor efficiency and vehicle wind drag). Because of the weight it goes through tires a lot quicker. (30K miles vs 60K average for tires)
Other countries, outside of Europe, China and other developed nations are a mixed bag.
For example in Costa Rica, where I have a property, even with the government tax discounts it doesn't make any sense because electric is really expensive there and it is difficult to get parts is something goes wrong. Also, if you want a car that you are not going to drive a lot of miles in every year there is also the issue of time degrading your battery which is going to be a lot more expensive and difficult to replace there.
South Africa has so many current problems with their electric grid that they heavily tax BEV's and plug in hybrid cars instead of offering tax breaks like other countries. Ironically, having solar panels and batteries for a house makes more sense there.
....and guess which car brand is has one of the higher theft rates because of parts and resale around the world....Toyota, who has been very slow to go BEV. The formula for Toyota is to wait until technologies are perfected and to then build reliable products that will last for years which the majority of buyers seem to prefer worldwide.
Because of the slow market adoption it will not surprise me if the legislation around the world to ban ICE sales ends up being relaxed before it takes effect and the transition happens much more slowly.
I don't have charging at home, but the L2 charging around me is reasonably priced. Equivalent to buying gas for $2/gallon (and I live in a place with pricy gas, around $5-6/gallon). L3 chargers can be closer to gas prices, but they're only necessary on very long road trips which I rarely do
Also, detachable batteries are a huge safety risk. (One bad contact and you could literally die.)
For this reason they don't even put detachable batteries into electric scooters and bikes anymore.
This was janky and amusing but I feel like this concept is a great one for solving the range problem. Just rent a generator trailer for long trips, or you could buy one if you used it semi-often.
- the battery won't be able to be a stressed member of the chassis, increasing weight and decreasing range for the same size of pack
- designing high voltage contactors and mechanical fasteners to cycle safely however many hundreds of times is difficult
- Electric cars are privacy nightmare
- Electric cars can be hacked (Hyunday and Kia could be stolen using USB cable). It is more vulnerable
- There is still a ton of energy required to create a electric vehicle, and uses slave labour
- EV is not plan to last a decade. Electronic parts do not last that long. You can easily find a decade old Mercedes
- No real plan for battery disposal
- Does not work well in winter
- You cannot park it everywhere, as malls and garages will not allow it
There are many downsides of having EV
The grid isn't ready for anything we're doing the next 20 years. That goes without saying: the grid was built for the needs of the present, not for the needs several decades ahead. The grid will be upgraded to handle it, just like the grid has been upgraded many times in the past to deal with increased demand.
The region around Oslo has hundreds of thousands of EVs without any upgrades to the grid. The Norwegian government has studied the issue and found that no grid upgrades are even needed if most cars charge at night. There's lots of spare capacity at night. I have my car charging set up to be controlled by the electric company based on price right now. It's super easy to set up.
> Electric cars are privacy nightmare
False. The drive train has absolutely nothing to do with privacy. SOME modern cars are a privacy nightmare. There are plenty of "smart" ICE vehicles too.
> Electric cars can be hacked (Hyunday and Kia could be stolen using USB cable). It is more vulnerable
False. There's no difference between EV and modern ICE here. Both are started electronically these days, and that can make them less vulnerable than older cars since you can have cryptographic verification of your key.
> There is still a ton of energy required to create a electric vehicle
True, but over the whole lifetime the energy required is less. When the battery is recycled and a second EV created from the materials, the energy needed is FAR less.
> and uses slave labour
I'd say false. Anything we manufacture has a risk that the materials were unethically mined. Since EV car makers care about their image, they tend to audit their supply chain to reduce the chance of unethical mining.
Do you think the company refining your gasoline care if the cobalt used in refining gasoline comes from slave labor? What about the cobalt going into your metal alloys? Nobody cares, because nobody is trying to use "cobalt slave labour" to attack those industries. But fossil fuel lobbies are constantly pushing this as an argument against EVs.
> EV is not plan to last a decade. Electronic parts do not last that long. You can easily find a decade old Mercedes
False. We have plenty of decade old EVs here in Norway. The Nissan Leaf came out in 2011 and there's plenty of them here. Yes, quite few of them have degraded too much, and needs a new battery. But that's because they started out with a tiny battery (gets cycled more often), had an old battery chemistry and bad BMS with no cooling.
Even if the battery must be replaced, the rest of the car is totally fine. An old EV with a new battery is MUCH more reliable than an old ICE car. Since newer batteries are better, you can also end up with a car that's better - with longer range - than when it was new.
My old Kia Soul EV is 7 years old and has zero issues, and not much degradation. My neighbors decade old ICE car just broke down, and they're borrowing our old EV right now. (We have a second newer one as well)
Solid state electronic parts can last multiple decades. Electric motors can essentially last forever (there are EVs from the early 1900s still working with no motor refurbishment). Mechanical parts generally do not last long without having to be refurbished/replaced. It's an inherent problem when you have moving parts rubbing against each other.
> No real plan for battery disposal
Completely false. EU has battery recycling regulations, and EV battery recycling is already up and running at an industrial scale.
> Does not work well in winter
False. I drive my EV to my moms cabin in deep snow every winter. Modern EVs are MUCH better than ICE cars in winter. Yes, the range is shorter. But try driving a modern AWD EV in snow. The traction is insanely good. That's what being able to adjust the torque precisely 100s of times a second gets you.
Yes, the range of my older 7yo old EV is rather short in winter. But nobody makes EVs with such a small battery anymore. And it's still much better than an ICE for short trips around town and commutes to work.
> You cannot park it everywhere, as malls and garages will not allow it
Hilarious. EVs catch fire far less often than ICE cars. The statistics are crystal clear on this.
An airport car garage burned down in Norway. Started by a spontaneous fire in an ICE car. It was also full of EVs, and despite being surrounded by a firey hellscape, NOT A SINGLE EV BATTERY PACK CAUGHT FIRE. Can you imagine if every car was EV? If there's no gasoline to fuel the fire, it might not have spread as fast, and it might be easier to extinguish the fire before the whole building burned down.
> There are many downsides of having EV
There are a few. But there are way more downsides with ICE.
Most of all: you are literally poisoning yourself and your neighbors by driving one.
The air quality around Oslo has noticeably improved the last few years.
Oslo will not save the world.
Yesterday I have read article from Pakistan observer that there are 62 factories that were burning plastic waste and tires. What you do does not matter.
Source: https://pakobserver.net/62-factories-cause-smog-by-burning-p...
2) About cars being hacked. There is a major difference between my old combustion car and modern EV. I know that modern cars could have gone through enshittification.
So you're wrong here again.
Source: https://www.bolnews.com/technology/2022/08/hyundai-and-kia-c...
Source2: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-67005620 - EV are prone to software problems
3) About slave labor:
You are just wrong.
Source: https://www.dailywire.com/news/joe-rogans-podcast-shows-horr...
For each and every point I could find a source, but I am not sure if it is worth it. Some folks are so brain washed that any article they will deem not worthy, treat as misinformation. It is just they do not agree with the view point, therefore there will be no scientific data enough for them, no explanation good enough.
Yet for these folks vague plans of upgrades for 20 years, illusions of fixing the world, 0 net pledges after x years, greenwashing makes perfect sense for them. It is more like people are hearing both sides of argument, but not hearing because they do not want to hear.
EVs aren't going to kill it. Mass A/C adoption in response to global warming is a different issue entirely.
Most grids are using less electricity today than they did 20 years ago due to more efficient devices that require electricity.
The hacking and runaway vehicle have nothing to do with the drivetrain at all. Nothing.
LFP batteries contain no cobalt. You will still get cobalt used in other places of course, but if you’re worried about slave cobalt then an EV with an LFP battery is the best option since refining petroleum uses cobalt.
Here’s the grid (or mine anyway) saying it will be fine: https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/journey-to-net-zero/ele...
The privacy and hacking are not limited to EVs.
There is a ton of energy needed to make any vehicle. My EV has used almost 100% renewable energy since day 1 on off-peak rates on a special tariff. Here’s my normal grid for when I have to charge during the day: https://electricityproduction.uk/in/scotland/
Slave labour? You mean for cobalt? LFP batteries don’t use cobalt. It will still be needed for some common parts in EVs and ICE cars. And of course for refining petroleum.
Electronic parts don’t last long? Not even sure what that means. Mechanical parts don’t last forever either.
Battery reuse is a thing. Battery recycling is a thing. LFP batteries get even more cycles than NMC.
Reduced range in winter? I’ll use 13% per day instead of 10%? My car will be preheated every morning with full range.
I have never seen a place I can’t park in the UK. We recently had a multi story car park burn down and everyone said it was an EV until a video came out of a burning diesel car that started it. There was also the ship that went on fire that everyone blamed on an EV until they recovered all of the EVs from a lower floor unharmed. I’m not surprised that some might believe the misinformation though.
Basically, China is doing a better job than us, therefore the job isn't worth doing anyway and frankly who even cares about competing? I'm going home, and I'm taking the ball, and you can forget about my birthday party too.
But the only worthwhile analysis is basically "too bad, disruption is happening". Total car/truck sales went into a steep dive in 2020, made a marginal recovery the next year, and then declined again in 2022. The back-to-office coercion only had partial success - commercial real estate is still sinking in many markets. Meanwhile, e-bike sales got red-hot and everyone suddenly discovered Youtube urbanism. California governor Gavin Newsom made a trip to visit BYD recently, and their buses are being trialed in a few cities. You can even pin a lot of the global instability on energy changes - Russia was a big oil/gas exporter, and they seem to have driven everyone away from them at this point.
western conspiracy?
The important part is that while the subsidies introduced significant graft and the creation of some vehicles which were below market standard to the point that consumers wouldn't buy them, those subsidies also worked to build the factories, train the people, and demonstrate the demand which have then ensured that ever since China axed those subsidies four years ago, EV sales have still been growing extremely fast, every single year. Those subsidies were good policy, and so was gutting them to reduce corruption once EVs had enough momentum to not be significantly helped by them anymore. We should learn from that good policy and try to compete, rather than just giving up and going home.
Need a better value proposition.
This sounds more like a defeated competitor than a leader.