Hacker News Reader

Comment by nottorp | Hacker News Reader

I wonder. Isn't that because poor people can't buy even new cheap cars these days?

So the share of electrics is there because only the rich early adopters have bought a new car lately.

>I wonder. Isn't that because poor people can't buy even new cheap cars these days?

Kinda yes. Poor/average people now in France/EU will just keep using their 10 year old cars, for the next 10 years as well.

France has cheap electricity so the class of people who can afford brand new cars will definetly go for electric to save money. I bet most new car sales now are company cars anyway rather than individuals.

>Isn't that because poor people can't buy even new cheap cars these days?

What is your definition of cheap?

The best-selling EV in France is the Dacia Spring and it is around €16k after government subsidy. The cheapest ICE vehicle is probably the Dacia Sandero, and it is around €10k.

I don't know if fuel prices would eat up the savings of an ICE car but I do know that electricity is very affordable in France.

Poor people were never buying new cars anyway.

But but but! “If you buy electric cars you never have to worry about gas prices ever again!”

you joke now (because oil is dirt dirt cheap right now) but just wait a few decades. I've listened to some of the most knowledgable people in the oil industry (Art Berman and others on Nate Hagens podcast) discuss Oil. And it looks like Hubbard's curve at least on a worldwide basis is true and oil supply is only going to go down in the long term. The peak is much much closer than most people expect. The world is so much more dependent on oil than it realizes and the impacts will be far more profound than most economists currently realize.

In "a few decades" 99% of the new Teslas being sold today will be in a scrap heap :)

The decision now is for 5-10-15 years.

Why do you think 99% of the new Tesla's today will be in a scrap heap in 20 years?

By the very nature of lithium batteries EVs are basically throwaway cars after 10 years.

The cost of replacing an old battery pack quickly exceeds the value of the car. You might be able to get a few extra years refurbishing it but that’ll be expensive and require niche battery work that’ll be hard to find.

The oldest Teslas sold are now about 10 years old, and this epidemic of no-longer-holding-charge cars heading to battery replacement or scrapyards you speak of hasn't happened yet. From most accounts I've seen, the cars have 80-90% of their original capacity at 150-200k miles.

Because the kind of person that buys an expensive electric car now won't keep it 20 years.

The average age of a car on the road in the EU is 12 years, varying from 8 in Austria to 17 in Lithuania.

This may well increase with electric cars being more reliable, but other failures (rust, collision) won't change much.

So 99% is too high. VEH1107 shows that 22.5% of cars in the UK were 13 years or older.

[VEH1107] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/vehicle-...

It's probably worth noting why cars are finally scrapped. It's usually not because of problems with the engine, but other issues that EVs also have. Rust (in Northern Europe this is a big thing), crash damage, generate state of disrepair. Of course EVs will remove some issues meaning the lifetime of cars may extend a little, but it's not going to increase it significantly.

It’ll be a peak demand, not peak supply problem.

One of the big takeways from Art berman, Nate Hagens and other experts on this subject is that the growth of GDP is very heavily dependent on Oil and it's impossible to decouple that within the next several decades. That may sound unlikely but the evidence they've shown is overwhelmingly convincing. One of the things I've learned is that reknewables aren't actually reknewable: they are mostly all tied to oil in some way, almost everything is because everything is either made of oil or uses oil in it's production, hence it's "the hemoglobin of the economy".

So there will always be more demand. It's the mainstream media that has it backwards: they're the ones always saying peak demand and that's misleading.

That's correct assuming you have to choose between buying two equally priced cars, one electric and one combustion.

But the choice here may be between buying a new electric and a used combustion that costs 1/4 of the price.

Or between buying a new electric and keeping the existing car longer.

Pretty sure that over the next 10 years at least, the latter two are the cheaper options.

> the choice here may be between buying a new electric and a used combustion that costs 1/4 of the price

This is why targeting new car sales, instead of fleet composition, is the best strategy. Despite the latter being the closer input to emissions.

ICE vehicles at and above EVs, in price and capability, should not have a market. Those EVs should then have the opportunity to decrease in price through both economies of scale and learning curves, on one hand, and the emergence of used vehicles, on the other hand.

Too bad they're ignoring the opportunity. And laying off people because sales have gone down :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com