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Comment by jwr | Hacker News Reader

When I looked at the title, I immediately thought that even if this makes sense from an engineering standpoint, psychology is going to be the bigger problem. For some reason many people are hell-bent on burning fossil fuels, almost in a sect-like belief kind of way. I do not understand it, but the backlash against anything electric for example is real.

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Burning fossil fuels is relatively simple and well understood by general public. Modern business strategies to squeeze every cent out of a customer that involves subscriptions, planned obsolescence, adding bizarre complexity for marginal gains are not helping. Buying a very expensive black box with questionable reliability, possible dependency on a manufacturer provided internet services (APIs for updating etc), questionable availability of parts and probably not really fixable by yourself or your local shop with rednecks with wrenches is not very appealing when you are living paycheck to paycheck.

This is the real answer.

A friend of my family is a carpenter who came from a very bad family situation, and is just climbing out of poverty. He has an old Chevy K1500 that gets him to and from work, with all his tools.

His transmission went, but he was able to find one at a local junkyard and swap it in over the course of a day and be back on the road for a few hundred dollars.

If you proposed this guy get a F-150 Lightning (or god forbid, a Cybertruck) to reduce his carbon emissions, he'd keel over laughing.

People make noise about a lot of subjects, but money is what really talks. Whatever is cheaper will end up gaining market share until it wins.

Top Gear, one of the most popular car shows of all time, was responsible for a lot of this. They spent years spreading myths about electric cars being worse for the environment and doing things like filming fake segments where they were pushing an EV claiming the battery had died.

They did come around in later years, changing their tune to be more pro-EV. A lot of the damage was done, though.

Or maybe you are just blind to the realities of normal people. Most people are not hell-bent on burning fossil fuels. There are numerous valid reasons for people to continue to choose ICE. I want an EV. I want to dump every piece of outdoor equipment with an ICE for something with an electric motor. I very much prefer the pieces I have switched to electric. I've been wanting to make the switch for years. It just does not make sense for me at this time.

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