Hacker News Reader

Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

EVs and luxury cars tend to have more fancy features that enable these issues than ice or hybrid cars. That’s changing as more advanced tech filters down.

View on HN

This is the part that's seriously sucks. We need greener alternatives (current state of things especially highlighting that) and car dependency has crushed us, so instead of just giving us the basic EV most of us want, they've taken the capitalistic approach of giving us massive luxury cars with premium features often cloud-tied, that happen to also be EVs.

You can count the exceptions to this on one hand.

I wonder if Tesla was a grift from day 1. They seemed to be the halo EV company that everyone accepted, until the charismatic leader moved on.

You need government support to make EVs a preferred option. Poor folk buy cheap cars, and they mostly rent. The whole scenario around EV charging is a shitshow, and the tax incentives were insufficient to fix it. I had a Model Y for awhile and really liked it, and now have a fancy Japanese hybrid SUV. It's much less of a pain in the ass then the EV was.

In retrospect, most of Musk's ventures would indeed appear to be grifts from the very start. Many of them were plainly transparent grifts with only a perfunctory attempt to hide the fact (hyperloop)

It can be true. I've owned two Teslas, which meet that description. I've also owned a Bolt, which was just a basic car. I still own a Lightning, which is also pretty basic (it can get occasional ... very occasional ... OTA updates, but the ICE F150 got OTA update ability before the Lightning existed).

I think a bunch of people have decided that EV means Tesla or Rivian, and maybe Hyundai/Kia, and possibly VW if they think about it. But there are a bunch of EVs driving on the roads that people don't even realize exist, they look like every other car. They tend not to have fancy features.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com