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Comment by fsckboy | Hacker News Reader

I've been seeing a lot of headlines the last month about demand for EVs falling. Of course, it could just be a PR campaign by Big Fossil, I'm not in a position to judge that.

I had another idea about it and I'm wondering what other people think: by buying Twitter/X, Musk has waded deeply into the culture war, and we see on HN plenty of people who just can't stand to see his name. It seems a sizable community, could the supposed downward trend in the industry simply be a lot of refusal to buy Teslas? It would not necessarily reflect directly in Tesla sales because reduced demand for Teslas could be made up on margin by other undecided EV brand buyers seeing more availablity of Teslas and switching because they feel Tesla is an upgrade. In a like manner, some of the former Tesla buyers might not be willing to downgrade from a Tesla, so they hang on to their car longer, get a hybrid, etc.

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There are a lot of reasons, many of them bureaucratic.

If you own your own home in an urban locale with a garage and drive more than 12k miles a year an EV is probably perfect for you. If you live in a condo good luck dealing with the condo board to install a charger. If you park on the street tough luck charging. If you don't drive enough gas is cheaper. If you drive too much you will spend too much time charging.

The problem is that the number of people that fit in this category isn't that big. The market may be saturating.

The other issue is modern cars generally. The average age of a car on the road is going up because modern cars are too complicated and too expensive.

A large reason for this is IP laws. I can still buy parts for my 90's car because the aftermarket still supports it. Modern car parts are full of computers and the aftermarket will never support them because they can't ship copyrighted code. After 10 years they will be scrapped because there will be no parts available. We will end up with a bimodal car market. 90's cars and cars <10 years old with nothing in between.

Everything in a car used to be covered by patents but they mostly expired in the 70's. Now it's copyright which will outlive us all.

https://finance.yahoo.com/average-age-vehicles-u-roads-13030...

> Modern car parts are full of computers and the aftermarket will never support them because they can't ship copyrighted code.

Once a car gets older, there's usually no shortage of the electrical components on the secondary market as they're getting scrapped. And they're easy to ship. Or someone figures out "Capacitor 96 goes bad on Part 420" and solders a new one in.

We'll run into problems once they "marry" all the electric parts together and you can't swap in a headlight from another vehicle because the VIN doesn't match the computer's. Fuck you Apple.

>Once a car gets older, there's usually no shortage of the electrical components on the secondary market as they're getting scrapped

Usually the lifespan limiting component is the same on all vehicles of a type so there's a shortage of exactly the part you need which makes it economically nonviable.

>figures out "Capacitor 96 goes bad on Part 420" and solders a new one in.

Car PCB's are often conformally coated or require destructive disassembly.

>We'll run into problems once they "marry" all the electric parts

Already happened.

> Usually the lifespan limiting component is the same on all vehicles of a type so there's a shortage of exactly the part you need which makes it economically nonviable.

Varies across a country/continent. I'm in the salt belt so it's the body/suspension that gives first while it's whatever heat-deaths first in the US south.

And we have bad drivers in north america which helps the market for non-front/rear body components.

I’m on a condo board. In fact I am the condo board atm. I would love to install infra to have ev charging available in our garage. Unfortunately ev load balancing hardware is prohibitively expensive and installers are borderline incompetent. I was quoted like 20k per spot and they couldn’t say if it would work or i would need to pull new service line in and how to do it. So we dont have ev charging.

Someone ought to disrupt this…

I used to have a '18 Model 3 Performance (P3D as they were called then) and I sold it after a little less than 3 years.

1. The interior quality was shit. By 10k miles everything was rattling and the quiet nature of the car meant even with bass thumping everything was just annoying af.

2. The car software felt like it got worse. I had bought FSD for $2k back in 2018. I thought it worked fine for that price. As it became more expensive, and pretty much 5x in price, I thought it was a ripoff. Around 2021 it felt like FSD had gotten way worse. More phantom braking, more getting tripped up and literally pulling into another lane for no reason, etc.

3. Going somewhere farther away became a huge PITA. It was fine waiting at a supercharger 20-30 minutes the first like two months. After that it became a hassle and eventually something I would dread. What a collossal waste of time.

I ended up going back to ICE and I probably won't ever get an EV again unless there are substantial improvements or even hot swap battery stations.

Yeah EVs are "cool", but at least for me if I'm being completely honest and not lying to make myself feel better, the allure wore off pretty quick.

I holding onto my hybrid until the industry comes to its senses and realizes that PHEVs are the solution to electrifying daily commutes with sensibly sized batteries while simultaneously sidestepping range anxiety for long trips.

I've been lightly car shopping in the past few weeks, and from chatting to salespeople, that does seem like the trend that's coming.

This is the true wisdom. However, the industry needed to realize this fact about 5 years after the Prius/Insight hit the market in 1997ish.

Now? You have a choice as a carmaker: invest 50 billion dollars into PHEVs which will be mere stepping stones to then having to invest ANOTHER 50 billion dollars into EVs, or you just bite the bullet now and do the 50 billion ICE-EV upgrade. Figures obviously arbitrary.

If our government was smart, it would have taken one look at the Prius/Insight, realized that every single commodity consumer vehicle should use that architecture (for the regen braking alone) and mandated it to be in all cars/trucks by 2010.

Oh well. It's too late now.

You might have bought into musk's used car salesman pitch and were not one who used their car for just commuting. Few years ago things he said most ppl followed then he bought twitter and things went a bit south for him (putting himself in the sh!t show that is politics) and now EVs.

For me the thought of plugging in my car at home and cutting gas station visits by half or more sounds great! Yet I road trip frequently and if I'm paying tons of money for a car the experience better match that of an ICE car(no problems working in cold weather like Fairbanks AK, EV chargers need to be in every nook n cranny of this and other countries like gas stations are & most importantly don't inconvenience me making me wait 15 to 60 or more minutes to charge my car on one of my road trips when I paid thru the nose for an EV/Telsa).

Other possible reasons

- We're in a recession (at least if you aren't upper middle class or above)

- Dealers are still acting like there's a supply shortage, so prices are still up but lots are full

- Everyone (pretty much) but tesla has commited to migrating to NACS, so if you buy a car now you'll need an adapter, and depending on where you are tesla's chargers are have half the speed if you're using the adapter (like if you're on a 800v based car)

- Gas prices seem less volatile at the moment (we'll see how much that stays as the election gets closer)

have the speed - half*? the speed maybe?

Tesla's changers are *half(?) the speed...?

I hadn't heard this.

most existing tesla chargers are 400v (I believe the cybertruck is their first to use 800v), so for other fast charging cars (like kia/hyundai GMP based ev6/ioniq 5) you only get half the speed, so as they update this will start to fall away as an issue.

The existing chargers for these cars are much slower than the slower Tesla chargers, so it's not like these cars will face an overall worse experience.

No, these cars charge at maximum 240kW when the voltage is sufficient. But on a Tesla charger without sufficient voltage they charge at 100kW. Therefore the experience is significantly worse.

This is only true for somewhat old and obsolete Tesla superchargers, like V1 and V2. Since the introduction of Supercharger V3 they're all 400-1000V, so any car, with any internal voltage can charge at their rated speeds.

I believe you've mixed up the versions. That's only true for Supercharger V4, not V3. V3 did not support high voltages. V1 and V2 did not speak the CCS protocol so they were even more obsolete.

In Europe the V3 superchargers are 1000VDC, it's a big label of them that says so. Could it be that they're different in other regions?

It's very likely Europe version numbers are 1 below US in that case as yeah in the US it's the V4 for 1000v.

Not exactly half the speed, but that the vehicle needs to boost the voltage coming from the charger in order to charge the battery. For some cars this is limited to around 100kW, way less than charging the battery from a sufficiently high voltage directly.

For high end cars like Porsche Taycan you can configure the rated wattage of this DC-DC converter.

Tesla's consistently score low on reliability and are expensive to repair. I would love an EV but place a high weight factor on reliability.

I thought Tesla's were low reliability across ALL vehicles (ICE included) but were the most reliable of all EV's?

I guess it comes down to what "reliable" means. In my opinion if it has a failure but runs, drives, is safe and comfortable it's "reliable". For example I read lots of complaints about squeaks or rattles when music is played. I don't call that "unreliable"

> I thought Tesla's were low reliability across ALL vehicles (ICE included) but were the most reliable of all EV's?

My impression is very much the other way around: EVs are more reliable across the board for all vehicles (especially over ICE; most of the categories of unreliability that ICE invented don't exist at all for most EVs; catalytic convertors, belts, transmissions, spark plugs, ...) and somehow Tesla has managed to be the least reliable EV manufacturer despite their head start and despite some manufacturers intentionally sabotaging their EV car efforts to try to sell more hydrogen (Toyota) or dumber reasons.

I agree they SHOULD be. But from what I can find online it's not the case.

ICE is more complicated - more moving parts - but manufacturers have had 100 years of experience building them.

It's reported that Tesla vehicles have an average of 171 mechanical issues per 100 vehicles. For reference, the average number for most automakers hovers around 120 problems per 100 vehicles.

Yes EVs should be more reliable on paper, but Tesla's aren't.

It is about the number of mechanical issues per hundred vehicles and on that metric Tesla scores appallingly.

https://www.topspeed.com/tesla-reliability-and-repair-costs-....

I thought NACS _is_ Tesla's charger? i.e. they're been migrated from the start?

Correct, on rereading what I wrote I see its confusingly written

> I thought NACS _is_ Tesla's charger?

No, NACS is CCS with Tesla's plug on the end. All that's happened is that the plug has been standardized as CCS type 3 (aka J3400).

Some older Tesla's don't support CCS and need a CCS retrofit before they'll work with CCS chargers (including ones with Tesla's plug).

People who aren't upper middle class can't afford a tesla

We’re not in a recession. GDP is growing and for the last several quarters, wage growth has outpaced inflation.

> - We're in a recession (at least if you aren't upper middle class or above)

I'm sorry, what recession?

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/workers-paychecks-a...

> In the year ending in November, real wages grew by about 0.8 percent for all workers and 1.1 percent for the 80% of workers who are production and non-supervisory workers. Further, wage inequality fell. The ratio of wages at the 90th percentile compared to the 10th percentile fell by nearly 6 percent over the year.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/cea/written-materials/2023/12/19/...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1351276/wage-growth-vs-i...

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/strong-wage-growth-gave-ameri...

We're on the upswing (hopefully it sticks around)

My use of recession there may be a bit glib and poorly chosen, but people are feeling like job security is way down, and finding a new job is a way slower prospect than it has been. Every non-upper middle class and up person I regularly talk to has locked down their finances, upper middle and up seems to be less effected but still less likely to buy big purchases with interest higher than it has been in 15ish years.

I do thank you for your links though, those recovery stats are better than I thought they were, I probably should have put that reason on the bottom of my list with a disclaimer, I try to be much less doom and gloom than some of my family but it came across stronger here than I meant it too.

We just bought an EV (VW ID4) and it's fine, but the charging situation in the US is kinda fucked for road trips. Besides usually taking way longer than filling up gas, making sure there are charging stations on the way is a pain, they might fill up and then you're kinda just screwed (have to wait a long time for people to move), and the UX for these things is atrocious.

Gas filling is dead simple and fast even though I have no 'account', but filling up our EV at an Electrify America station takes considerably longer to start even with an account already present. The UI on the charging station is really clunky and slow, with some extra steps there for apparently no reason.

I've also heard plenty of stories of persistently broken chargers on various networks, only Tesla seems to have their shit together for EV charging.

More range, more charging stations, faster charging, easier charging, more reliable charging, these are all necessary imo.

I don't think it's PR. The transition to EV is comparably piss poor to anyone who is using their cars for more than short commutes. We go skiing every year and we drive approx 1200 km to the same spot. This year on the brand new EV with 500km range. Well not so much 500 in -20°C. More like 200. We had to stop every 2.5 hours and charge. And in some places wait in line for maybe 30 minutes in supercharging stations. The trip is usually about 12 hours with regular stops. This year was close to 20. And it was the same during the stay at the cabin, closest supercharger was 35km away and there were only 2.

The EV is a company car and policy bans non EV, not even hybrid are allowed. For a 4 hour trip to a customer in winter cold, if I am lucky, I charge twice. A minimum of 20 minutes per charge. And no wait times on a good day. Waiting 30 minutes to charge for 20 minutes. Well you do the math.

In my old car Id just drive the car on full tank the 4 hours front and back. Maybe 1 short rest stop on the way back. Now with the charge max to 80% hysteria and battery range being non existent in cold weather and endless lines in the charging stations I am starting to hate the EV. I do have a home charger but we do not drive only 20 minutes per day. We live outside the main city and works as consultants.

I am seriously considering changing employer because of this.

It's Geoffrey Moore's chasm, right on time with respect to market adoption. It's all pragmatist arguments as predicted as well.

You can see a similar dip at approximately the same point in other EV adoption curves, such as Norway: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/01/norway-electric-vehic... ... That green line, we're in the dip right now.

Since the US is such a big market you can't look at it holistically. You have to look at it regionally (the US has 60x more people than Norway):

https://insideevs.com/news/688779/california-tops-us-ev-adop...

We're talking about the markets with high pickup rate which have recently seen a downtick.

It's only unexpected if you don't study literature of market adoption behaviors of emerging technologies. This lull absolutely was coming. It always does in behavior-based products, especially those with infrastructure requirements. Here it was in broadband for instance at about the same point in 2004: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2006/05/28/part-1-broad...

I was just talking to a friend who was going to buy a Tesla, got turned off by Musk, and bought an ICE SUV instead.

> It could just be a PR campaign by <vested interest>, I'm not in a position to judge that.

The really wild part about the world today is that is true of literally everything you ever hear. There is a very good chance there are billions (trillions?) of dollars on the other side promoting whatever narrative they want to further their own goals.

"Fake news" was just the first thing out of Pandora's Box that I doubt we'll ever close.

From my experience, many Tesla fans don’t agree with Elon and that is okay with them.

I don't care for Elon Musk but Teslas are by far the best all around EV experience when considering road tripping.

That was true when we got our 2018 Model 3, and when we got our 2022 Model Y, and likely will be until full NACS adoption.

Will I consider another EV brand? Sure, but I also enjoy the Tesla infotainment and driving experience.

I think it definitely has to do with Tesla, but perhaps not much to do with Musk. Tesla's price cuts have made other EVs look expensive by comparison, which is why they're piling up on lots while Teslas are still selling well. When you read past the headline, invariably what they really mean is that "the growth rate for non-Tesla EVs is slowing." In no case, however, do they mean demand is falling -- sales are still increasing.

Definitely Teslas became less attractive to a lot of people with Musks behavior in the last year. But also interest rates are up, and EV enthusiast market may be saturated, so now you have to win over just regular people.

I don't like Musk, but I am also under no illusion that CEOs of other major car companies are any better. They may just hide their opinions a little better than Musk.

The reality is that Tesla aren't very good cars from both reliability, price and range perspective. Musk has done a brilliant job hyping the car, but reality starts setting in. For example, FSD will likely remain in beta for years.

Agreed. Second most popular EV here in Australia is an MG. Which is a state owned CCP company. Is Musk worse than the CCP/Xi Jinping? Really?

> They may just hide their opinions a little better than Musk.

Isn't that better? Even if it's not /good/, it seems /better/.

It is a complex issue that would require an essay to answer.

However, in this specific case, avoiding buying a car because you don't like the CEO, it doesn't make a difference. Most CEOs are psychopaths.

All EV enthusiasts were formerly normal people. A lot of EV buyers become enthused. I never used to really care about cars.

The market expanded just fine. It's just some EV manufacturers that are under performing. The growth dropped slightly from a stellar 60% in 2022 to a still very impressive 30% last year.

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