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Comment by overstay8930 | Hacker News Reader

People overestimate because underestimating means you just wasted 50k+ on something that doesn’t meet your needs. That’s why normal people don’t buy EVs, cars are usually the most expensive thing someone owns outside of real estate and you’re going to have a hard time convincing someone to buy something that is a worse value.

It’s why so many people own pickup trucks and large SUVs. People don’t buy vehicles for what they need 95% of the time, they buy vehicles that will do whatever they want it to do 100% of the time.

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You will never, ever be able to spend any amount of money on any vehicle that will perpetually guarantee a 100.000% success rate for all situations you will end up in.

Suddenly inherit a boat? Perhaps your towing capacity is inadequate.

A ravine appears due to an unexpected earthquake? Four tires probably won’t traverse it.

You’re out at a dinner party. Your friend’s car breaks down and you now need to carry 9 people? Anything but a small bus will be inadequate.

How to solve this? Look at your last X years of driving and solve for that. For everything else, vehicle rental exists for the exactly-once occasion.

I’m impressed by how many 9’s people try to solve for. It’s completely unreasonable. I solved for my 99.9% of days driving and am extremely happy.

Plus, how many of us would be currently unemployed if our respective industries demanded a 100.0% solution before adoption?

> You will never, ever be able to spend any amount of money on any vehicle that will perpetually guarantee a 100.000% success rate for all situations you will end up in.

True, except all they said was that consumers "overestimating" their needs, which is pretty reasonable, not that they contracted pathological monomania leading to psychiatric and financial disaster.

> I solved for my 99.9% of days driving and am extremely happy.

That’s mostly what people are trying to do. In that 1000 days of driving, they are going to have ~three of every annual event. Thanksgiving travel to family three times. Christmas travel three times. Three years of summer vacations or ski trips, etc.

We have an EV and love it. We also have a hybrid for road trips.

Why not just have the hybrid? You already blew your carbon budget by having two cars so this is definitely not about saving the environment.

We have two adults and two kids and frequently need to be in two different places at the same time, each in a car, between the combination of two working adults and various activities.

I never said it was about saving the environment. (It’s about not being outright ridiculous in either direction.)

> That’s why normal people don’t buy EVs

Are you sure that the reason isn't the cost of them? I mean, sure charging is one aspect, but is there actually a study that compares the two? There's plenty of "normal" people buying cheap BYDs.

> It’s why so many people own pickup trucks and large SUVs.

That's a very region/culture-specific thing.

This is a thread about US charging infrastructure, BYD does not sell vehicles here and large trucks and SUVs are extremely popular here.

The thread is about incentives and future possibilities in the US. The current state of the charging network is not set in stone. Neither is regulation, EV availability, etc.

Even then, the question "what are the actual preferences when adjusted for price" is valid even in today's US.

I'm definitely not an expert but I think BYDs are popular in China and EU because of governmental policies (in China) and geographical reasons (both China and EU are more urban than North America, owning a detached house in China that is closer to good schools, hospitals and infras are unthinkable for most Chinese).

I live in Canada and I really can't see myself driving an EV right now. It doesn't guarantee my not-so-rare but crucial requests:

- Going to some random places for vacationing without worrying about whether there are enough charging stations;

- Going through early spring without adding anxiety about a power outage that sweeps for 2-7 days;

The infra is just not ready. And TBH, I don't think it's going to be ready forever. Infra construction is so corrupted and so expensive in NA that I absolutely have zero faith in it.

Actually, the push to more EVs in China is already a bit problematic due to lack of Infras. Just imagine you are in the middle of Spring festival traffic jam...it's already bad for gasoline cars but it's a nightmare for EVs.

>I live in Canada and I really can't see myself driving an EV right now.

We live in a semi-rural part of Canada, and have a bit of a (pleasant, country) commute. I want the most efficient vehicle. I ran the numbers and an EV just did not make sense. If you're driving mostly highway, the overall cost/km isn't that much better than the best ICEs, and the ICE is much cheaper.

Oh I wish I could live in such a place too.

Financial-wise, I actually haven't compared the cost/km because of two things:

- I'm not sure how expensive a switch of battery going to be (do we have data on that?)

- Yeah they are outright more expensive than ICEs, and with the current financing climate, not very attractive

This what I don’t get about EV

If you live in suburban and commuting to downtown for work, large part of the driving would be high way. Having hybrid makes way more sense in this scenario.

If you live in downtown, you probably don’t need a car or you are parking in a underground parking lot that does not guarantee you a charging plspot

I'm not sure the urban part is that relevant as a country-scale statistic. Australia is uninhabitable in lots of areas and 90% of people live in cities. I'm still planning an EV in a small town, because I'm never driving more than a single tank anyway and that one time I want to do a cross-country trip, I'll just rent a car for that time.

A more interesting statistic would be something like daily commute https://www.thinkinsure.ca/insurance-help-centre/commuting-t... which recently was ~30min each way on average - very much in range.

On the other hand the power issues could actually improve with enough V2L deployed.

Which is an interesting parallel to Taleb's "The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority." Essentially one's own fringe preferences dictate the design requirements of something that doesn't utilize that preference a significant amount of time.

https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...

Which makes sense, imagine only have shoes that worked on 95% of the floors you walk on. Imagine a fridge that only cools 95% of your food, and it’s a fun surprise when it doesn’t.

This is entirely rational, and reminds me of people who can’t understand why everyone doesn’t bike everywhere. It just reeks of solipsism.

I own a Tesla, and I have to tell you it’s a massive pain to own an EV and live in an apartment complex. It’s honestly frustrating to the point that I regret getting it. The performance is great, but the interior, significant price drop in the year I’ve owned it, and the constant anxiety about the battery has not made for a pleasant experience.

If I could go back I’d get a Mercedes S class that’s 5-7 years old.

Gotta admit, after moving to the Netherlands, it’s kinda legit insane how much stuff people will carry on a bike. A new 55” tv is not uncommon! Today I saw a lady with two toddlers and a grocery bag swinging from the handlebars.

I take your point though. There are still plenty of delivery trucks and personal autos, even in this biking paradise.

Imagine you have a portable laptop that works for 95% of all your use cases except those days when you need a cluster of GPUs training a ML model or doing some large-scale scientific calculation.

Imagine having a fridge that isn't cold enough for storing ice cream and frozen veggies.

And yes, none of my shoes are even remotely close to covering 95% of floors. Some are good for hiking, some are good for running, some are warm in the winter.

The issue is not the lack of 100% coverage. The issue is that there is no sufficiently appealing option for a large number of people to get access to the 5% of cases when you do need it. Apparently rentals and other sharing options aren't quite up to snuff, so everybody overprovisions like crazy.

It's not exactly irrational though. Swinging back to car rental companies, they will overbook their vehicle fleets in order to maximize the amount of time that they're out generating revenue. Even if you prepay a reservation, it's no guarantee you will get a car.

It gets awful stressful awful quick when you have to deal with availability uncertainty and other things depend on it.

Those items are all vastly cheaper than a car. When shoes were expensive relative to what the average family could afford, families bought for quality and longevity, because they would need to last for years at a time, and most people only had a single pair.

A car is just a fundamentally different product to a set of shoes. If cars ever get to the point where the cost of one is trivial for the average person, we'll probably see the kind of specialization you see in other cheaper products. Also note, we can see pressure in the opposite direction for phones. Phones have become more expensive as they become more general purpose.

I've read all of Taleb's major works, twice. "The Most Intolerant Wins" is not in any way an explanation of the market failure of EVs.

His canonical example was "kosher food is acceptable to nearly everyone, and required by a small minority." Thus kosher takes over.

"EVs vs. ICEs" is nothing like that. EVs have been rejected by vast numbers of consumers because they find them impractical. That's all.

> His canonical example was "kosher food is acceptable to nearly everyone, and required by a small minority." Thus kosher takes over.

Which is a great example of how Taleb's "examples" are BS. Really, when Taleb goes into a grocery store, is all of the food kosher? Or even a majority? Kosher has not "taken over". It's a niche product.

so why did you quote him in the first place?

Secondly, his examples were from the Middle East, where kosher food is indeed ubiquitous even for non-Jewish consumers. Because almost no one really objects to it.

Whereas US consumers really do object to EVs.

> why did you quote him in the first place?

I didn't bring Taleb into the thread, adolph did.

> his examples were from the Middle East

Not the one in the article adolph referenced:

"The Kosher population represents less than three tenth of a percent of the residents of the United States. Yet, it appears that almost all drinks are Kosher."

> "The Kosher population represents less than three tenth of a percent of the residents of the United States. Yet, it appears that almost all drinks are Kosher."

This implies that some sort of considered effort has been made to produce these drinks as kosher. This is just paying some money to get the private certification and the license to put it on the can. In the context of a drink, the drink ingredients is almost certainly already kosher, so the certification is just saying: "there was no cross-contamination in the making of this product". Which isn't a special consideration made for kosherness.

If I told you that you could increase your TAM by a million people, and open new wholesale marketing opportunities for a onetime payment of ~$1000, you take the deal.

I don’t think the EV market has failed in any way. What makes you think it has failed?

My analogy for the most intolerant wins is treating a decision-maker’s personal values as a population, one of which is “the most intolerant” and thus drives the decision because the others are indifferent to that quality.

There are a variety of aesthetic or prosaic values that might drive a decision for EV or ICE. A minority of those values will likely drive the decision since the majority will be satisfied by any number of options.

> I don’t think the EV market has failed in any way. What makes you think it has failed?

I guess you don't read the Wall Street Journal, or otherwise follow automotive news. I don't feel a need to provide links for you.

> the others are indifferent to that quality

No auto buyer is indifferent to the choice of EV vs ICE.

If you got nothing to back up your assertion there is no need to type it out. Let your thumbs relax in a fact free zone.

it's not up to me to prove to you what everyone knows. Except you, apparently.

Growth is slower this year vs last year but the growth is still happening...

How is that a failure? Slow sales are occurring across the entire auto industry probably because people are broke/unemployed and dont want to spend the cash right now.

> I guess you don't read the Wall Street Journal, or otherwise follow automotive news. I don't feel a need to provide links for you.

I don't read the WSJ, but I do understand numbers. This site seems to indicate that 4% of global new car sales were electric in 2020, and 18% are electric at the end of 2023. https://ourworldindata.org/electric-car-sales

What are you reading that would indicate that an industry segment that is up 450% in four years has "failed"?

You have made an extraordinary claim, and refuse to back it up in the face of compelling evidence.

The rate of growth is falling, but the overall sales trend is still up. Perhaps you are confused with the math, and the difference between rate of growth and growth?

My strategy is never buy new cars, period. Spending $50k+ on a car seems absolutely insane to me. In the past 26 years I've been driving, I've spent a total of $19k on cars, $11k of which is on my most recent as I got a great deal from a family member. So previous to last year, I was averaging a $26/mo "car payment". No major repairs outside of alternators, starters, batteries, and tires. I probably won't own an EV for another 20 years.

Is t one of the main problems with used EVs the battery cap? Unless battery tech gets better can it be assumed that most EVs on the used market would also require a battery replacement so they have the original range?

Liquid cooled batteries (so, not the LEAF) have pretty modest degradation. Yes, it would require a new battery if you needed 100.0% of original range, but if you need 92% of range, you just buy a much cheaper used EV.

You would just deal with the reduced range. With a hybrid it's not really an issue.

The battery replacement meme seems like mostly propaganda. Lots* of 10 year old EVs have 20% or less degradation. That's very usable.

Excluding cars without active thermal management, which mostly means the Nissan Leaf.

Yes sounds like propaganda but I worry about the long term repair costs of the rest of a car like Tesla. They weren't built well in the first place and age can only make that worse. This is where right to repair would have really helped Tesla but no they have to act like every other crap SV company.

At this point, most car brands with dealerships also have a selection of EVs. You can get things like extended bumper-to-bumper warranties also.

Tesla batteries are close to 90% after 200,000 miles. There is some degradation but it plateaus quickly.

It’s a good strategy for someone who doesn’t care about vehicles and mostly sees them as a point A to B thing.

That’s not how many Americans view vehicles though. They view them as a reflection of themselves and as a status item.

$50k to you seems insane but I was eyeing a car that was about $280k in Redwood City last week. It’s been sold. Some of us enjoy cars.

That's what blows my mind. A married couple in the midwest might make $130k combined and have 2 $60k cars in the garage.

If so, they probably didn't buy them outright. They probably leased them.

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