Mexico, facing US pressure, will halt incentives to Chinese EV makers
reuters.com
reuters.com
We dragged our feet and said “no EVs, infrastructure isn’t ready, too expensive,…”
Now we need protectionism to save our auto industry because in the end, we’ll take the cheaper solution
Do we know if this is even a legitimate issue facing a lot of people?
Meaning, is this an accessibility issue or a privacy issue? Because from my understanding, smartphone access is nearly ubiquitous nowadays across all income groups. But I could be wrong.
>Meaning, is this an accessibility issue or a privacy issue? Because from my understanding, smartphone access is nearly ubiquitous nowadays across all income groups. But I could be wrong.
Access is not the biggest problem, fragmentation and giant shittyness of the apps is. And the fragmentation is an unsolvable problems.
However, I'm pretty sure the app-based charging stations are all internet connected anyway, so I'm not sure if this is a big deal in practice.
The reason you need apps to pay at charging stations is because just like a lot of tech companies nowadays, they're not after money (or at least, not just money), they're after "engagement" and personal data.
The thing about ICE cars is that they are really good. Many EV advocates seem to overlook this. The EVs replacing them have to be better in all metrics. We just aren't there. As an anecdote, I've been renting EVs for a day to try out a handful of ones I can afford.
1. Mache: buggy software, painful seating for tall people(center console hard plastics poke your leg and its painful), mediocre sound, somewhat ugly
2. Bolt EUV: cramped back window, slow charging, poor headroom for tall passengers, poor luggage space, ugly
3. ID4: terrible software, poor value for the price, strange reliability issues.
4. Tesla: high insurance costs, high repair costs, cheap interior, poor seats.
My comparison car is a 2006 Mazda 3. A car I really love. At the end of each day I ask myself, is there something i'd miss that my old car had? So far the answer has been yes.
According to the department of transportation, only 7% of drivers drive more than 30 miles a day: https://nhts.ornl.gov/vehicle-trips
The base model 3 has an epa range of 270 miles. Say you cut that in half, that's 135 miles a day. If you personally drive more than 135 miles in one day and don't want to stop to charge, and have serious range anxiety, then EVs aren't ready for you. But your experience and requirements are far outside the norm.
> There are also barely any charging stations along this route, if at all.
I have not driven that route, but there seem to be plenty of level3 chargers all along that route: https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/electricity-locations#/find/ro...
It's probably more like - on 7% of days people drive more than 30 miles, that is to say, basically everyone does it, just not every day.
People sometimes drive a 400 mile trip for Thanksgiving or Christmas. Fact.
EV being a bad choice because the 2 trips a year that someone makes are longer than it's range: opinion and not fact.
First, that's trading the convenience and cost saving associated with the thing you do 98% of the time, with a minor inconvenience for the 2% case.
Second, a 400 mile trip will easily take 6 hours of straight driving. At some point you're going to make a pit stop, even if it's to refill on gas since 400 miles is pushing it for a gas car. So the real question is how much longer is that one stop you make (and I highly doubt it will be just one)?
Model 3s will charge to full in 25-30 minutes at a supercharger. So the inconvenience is 30 minutes minus however long your break would have anyway. Infrastructure on highways exists, here's just tesla's superchargers [0], and here's all the level 3 chargers [1].
So no, the range anxiety is not based on facts.
[0]: https://www.tesla.com/findus [1]: https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/electricity-locations
I'm sure they do. We disagree about whether the long tail should be handled by 1) buying a car which can handle it at the cost of the other 99% of the time, or 2) plane, train, renting a car, or extending your existing driving breaks to recahrge.
> the Teslas trapped in the road with no batteries this winter
As the stories themselves pointed out back then, many of the new owners did not know that preconditioning was something they had to do before being able to charge. That alone greatly exacerbated the problem.
My oven/hob is large enough to cook a roast dinner because I do it enough times that it's useful to me.
Most days I use one or two pots to cook basic meals.
It's not "anxiety" that drives me to have a full size oven, it's a superior product for me that allows me to cook meals that I want to cook.
No analogy though, how often have you in the past five years driven more than 240 miles in one go without the posibility to stop and recharge? If you do it often, then yeah electric cars are not for you yet. But again that's not most people's usage of their car.
Yeah there's people who go out in the wilderness with their SUV or jeep and a bunch of jerry cans, but they're a rounding error compared to the people who drive 20 miles for their daily commute.
Overall the acceleration was great but charging was just a huge faff compared to a car or van that I can "charge to full" basically anywhere in sub 5 mins.
The range of an EV is not the same as the range of an ICE because of that difference, you actually need a longer range for a comparable experience.
Source: Mazda 3 2012 owner.
So what I am doing is renting various EVs I can afford for a day each with the intention of striking them off on my list. While driving 100+ miles in the day, I come up with reasons why I definitely don't want this car or that car.
The final car to be rented will be a modern Mazda 3 and having tried out all the EVs I will have to think deeply about whether I can really give up Mazda.
This is an expensive and time consuming experiment but it has already helped me dodge a bullet. Test driving a Mach-E would have been a decent experience but it was only after several hours of driving the car did I realize the hard plastics of the center console would be pressing hard into my leg causing pain. Also the "premium B&O" system is good but not that much better than my 17 year old crusty system in my Mazda. Especially not for the price. You only really internalize this when listening to a variety of soundtracks over many hours.
I've joked with friends that maybe I should just buy a plane ticket to Hiroshima, get on my knees and beg Mazda to make an EV. :P
CX50 is also one that I had my eyes on.
Maybe Mazda will finish hybridizing the rest of their lineup by then. Their plan seems to be to lower the fleet average emissions by first dropping the pickup truck (done), sticking to few fairly efficient engines across the lineup, then convert each model to hybrid (and PHEV) and then finally move to electric once the Toyota alliance bears fruit.
Now we can debate whether the bailout was good or not, but, to rephrase your post: "The U.S. financially supports U.S. companies. You aren't competing in a free market when that happens."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_the_2008%E2%80%9320...
More seriously this isn't a problem I encounter with my current ICE car (nor other EVs like the Mustang Mach-e). Seems like a specific Bolt design flaw.
This is subjective. I have a car that does all my journeys, is preheated and fully charged every morning - and I don’t have to visit fuel stations to fill up so it’s actually better.
We are either there and there are compelling products that people want or we are not and they are struggling to sell/values are going down...oh wait we are currently experiencing the latter.
Why do I need to do that? That’s what the whole “subjective” thing is. It meets my needs. It might not meet someone else’s.
> We are either there and there are compelling products that people want or we are not and they are struggling to sell/values are going down...oh wait we are currently experiencing the latter.
Be very careful about consuming headlines here. In a lot of places sales are still going up but this has still been headlined as “sales slowing” when they just aren’t growing as quickly, but still growing. Sure, we’re on an s-curve and certain manufacturers are changing strategies but reading the headlines would have you believe that sales are plummeting.
As per the WTO, they do this already. And then both the US government and Boeing have the absolute gall to complain that Airbus also gets subsidies from European governments, or that Quebec invested into Bombardier and gave them loans.
Either we can compete, or we can't. China can't subsidize for eternity without eventually failing, so why not take the short-term loss and pivot and win in the long-term? Also, Mexico would like to grow their economy as a sovereign nation too.