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Comment by johanvts | Hacker News Reader

Once EVs are economically attractive the transition can be very fast. I live in Denmark so I have seen it, it took 7 years to go from ~5% to 90+% of new cars sold. Both EU and US are now relying on trade barriers to keep Chinese EVs away from consumers.

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well China debate aside, where are they? i've been dabbling in electrics for over a decade now, on the lower range they are still 30% more expensive than gas cars. Surely someone, anyone outside of China could have done one cheaper by now? Leaf came out 16 years ago and they still can't get it under $30k?

I assume you are coming from a US perspective, because smaller economical EVs are available in europe and dominate in asia. America car companies have managed to make a 50k+ truck the average new car purchase. They aren’t going to kill that golden calf voluntarily. Instead they have managed to lock out the competition. Why Musk elected to build another truck instead of the promised model 2 is beyond me. Besides, with EVs you really have to consider total cost, they are still slightly more expensive to buy in the EU as well, but you quickly make it back on fuel.

Don't forget maintenance costs in the TCO calculation too. Transmissions, fuel pumps, timing belts, radiators (mostly), fuel injectors, emissions systems, etc are all out of the picture in an EV. Servicing those things may be infrequent but is often extremely expensive.

I think this is the biggest thing that non-EV owners do not understand. Or perhaps they do but not the full scope because money is spent little by little over the years. the oil changes, brakes, belts, starters, alternators, whatevers… I have 2014 Tesla S and I literally spent practically nothing for 11 years. I had to put in a new modem, replaced 12V battery twice and that’s about it. Still on original brakes (102k miles) because with regenerative breaking I hardly ever use the brakes, I mean there is just nothing to spend your money on (I even called Tesla in the beginning of my ownership and was like “do I need to being the car in for something” to be met with “is something wrong with the car? no? why are you calling us then??!” :) ). I will never own a non-EV car again and neither will my kid or anyone in my family

I hear a lot of Teslas banging around corners in my town and it leads me to believe that EV drivers freed from annual dealer maintenance actually believe that tie rod ends don't need to be inspected and replaced.

I recently had to do some service (12 years to the day of the purchase) and mechanic, who worked for tesla for a decade and now has a local shop, told me exactly the same thing - you got shit that moves, you gotta lube it once in a while! but I own another EV and 47.5k miles later the car hasn’t seen a dealership since I drove off it.

> Don't forget maintenance costs in the TCO calculation too.

OK? Then don’t forget to add a replacement battery, replacement battery heating and cooling system, factor in a few extra sets of tires over a lifetime of the vehicle, you can also assume the suspension will wear out earlier, so at least ball joints if not also struts.

I’m an automotive EE, there is no free lunch.

I have a car we just got rid of in our research shop, in order to replace the battery the entire rear suspension and half of the interior had to come out. To an insurance agency, the car was literally totaled between the cost of the battery and the labor to replace it.

I think EVs today are intended to last shorter than the battery. There has been examples of model 3s reaching 250k+ miles on the original battery, a number most cars (ICE or EV) do not come close to before being salvaged. There are also startups re-purposing battery packs for stationary use ex. from old Nissan leafs. So I don't think you should consider battery pack replacement costs as part of owning a EV.

We have blocked Chinese EVs precisely because they are 1) super cheap and 2) would wipe out our automakers.

Looked this up yesterday:

Inflation calculator site says 45% inflation since 2011, USD.

Denmark has 6M people. The US has 289M vehicles.

And how many new EVs did China make in the last 5 years?

Actually I have egg on my face; I looked it up and it's closer to "3 Denmarks" than "1 USA".

How is safety and quality for Chinese EVs? There was the 2008 melamine baby formula scandal, where a toxic substance was deliberately introduced into baby formula for domestic market. Chinese food imports were curtailed across many countries.

Capitalism over there is at another level, and cars are so complicated with tiny changes can have huge problems. Look at the immobilizer chips that Kia dropped to save $5, which resulted in thousands of car thefts and the whole Kia Boyz phenomenon.

I think the fear of low-quality and dangerous corner cutting is a big reason Chinese evs have not been even more popular in the EU. However as some brands start to establish themselves for longer they gain trust. Also we have Euro N-cap tests which are pretty extensive and lots of Chinese cars have earned excellent scores.

China also picked up (from A123) and ran with LFP batteries which are inherently safer.

Electric cars are way way simpler than ICE cars. It's just market segmentation gone wrong when EU car manufacturers wanted to sell these cheaper cars as premium/luxury ones (i.e. greed) and therefore couldn't learn the lessons from producing them at scale on cheaper models. China had poor ICE cars and bet everything on EVs, scaled their production up, reiterated a few times, and now Nio/Xiaomi/BYD/Zeekr are better than anything built in the EU.

> There was the 2008 melamine baby formula scandal

That was in 2008, which was 18 years ago. Comparing China in 2026 to China in 2008 is like comparing Japan in 1978 to Japan in 1960.

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