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Comment by cjs_ac | Hacker News Reader

Cars are just more expensive in Europe than in Australia. In Europe, cars are still a bit of a luxury, whereas in Australia, they’re an absolute necessity.

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There also higher tariffs and transport cost. Shipping cars from China to the EU can cost up to a few thousand per car. Local production seems less competitive. But the bottom line is that there are now a lot of relatively affordable EVs in the market. The cheapest cars in most markets now include EVs.

For example the Dacia Spring that is selling for around 17K Euros in Germany. And then there are tax rebates, discounts, etc. that are causing some of these cars to be available for a lot less occasionally in some markets.

Markets where EVs have been available in larger numbers for a while now have a sizable EV market. Australia is relatively early with its adoption, so the second hand market is a lot smaller there. The EU as a relatively early adopter has a lot of EVs from 2020 or earlier that are still under warranty and being traded in quite large numbers now. In the last few months these been a very hot commodity as lots of people are feeling the pain of high fuel prices.

All these new small cars will become a large part of the second hand car market in a few years. There will many be millions of them on the roads in a few years. And they last quite long.

Isn't it just different levels of import duty and/or proximity to China?

(normally something being essential drives the price up)

Jeez, cars are absolute necessity in US, and yet still ave cost new runs $50,000 US or about 44,000 euros.

I can assure you that a $50k car in the US is nowhere near 44k€ in Europe. You're lucky if it's below 54k€.

You can always buy a Corolla for 25k. People who buy new car have extra money and want an expensive one.

Interesting in which part of Europe are you living to make such a statement for the bit of luxury. The only country I could think of is the Netherlands and probably Belgium.

about to say the same.

Because i don't live in a big city (and i would dread to) the 10km commute to work is either

1) 15-25 min by car

2) 25-30 min by bike

3) 40-60 min by public transport, with at least one change

And i'm lucky as we recently moved the office to be a good 4km nearer from my home. That was further out requiring 25min by car, and aobut 1h30min by public transport with at least two changes.

Also if i want to do anything beside going in my backyard on my free time, car is a necessity.

But you can walk to your neighbor 200m down the road. That feels (and actually may be) illegal on other continents.

yeah, the world is crazy

European cities are wastly more accessible as a pedestrian than australian or north american cities. And I count northern, southern, central, western and easterneuropenan cities in that.Thre other continents have some examples where the inner cities are also okayish from a pedestrian or cyclist POV, but a lot and especially suburbia is so much worse in pretty much all regions. A mining town in northern Sweden is better than suburbia on Long Island!

Yes - car is a bit of a luxury in Europe if you don't do any of those things - live in the rural parts of the country, leave the urban core, have kids, visit parents, friends and grandparents, go to your rural property, go the mountains, the beach, buy bulky things, buy things in bulk, go to any other city just for exploration and fun, go outside the city to watch the milky way, do anything spontaneous, have job in the trades or have girlfriend.

You may not need car daily, but you definitely need it at least weekly.

I do ¾ of those things, including two children and a wife, without a car.

I have transported 2x4s with a bike, I have moved houses with a bike, I have send a bike across countries to a place I had never been before via standard mail. I have transported 40kg of gear with a bike trailer. I cycle in -15°C to go ice-skating. All with the same one bike while I have never owned an electric bike.

I am not working in trades, don't live rural and I dont have kids. In that case I would get an electric bike. The rest I do. Heck, I have transported my SUP and a week of resources over 4km of rural road to get around rapids in a Swedish National Park. In one go in an hour because it was getting close to sun set and I had fallen in at the rapid before. My partner would like me less if I had a car.

Outside France people don't live in big clusters. Take a look at the night satellite view. All those small/continuous towns do not have (functional) public transport. In my 12k-people town we don't have buses other than school buses and long-distance ones. And unfortunately people don't really walk other than for leisure.

As far as I know the closest city with public transport counts 100k residents, but there are 60 smaller towns in my province alone.

And what do people outside of Europe do when they want to walk for leisure? They drive to the park, because they are often not allowed to walk there!

People forget that European history before cars has lead to so many small accessible paths that simply do not exist in many American or Australian places. I know what rural Europe looks like. But you seem to have no idea what rural on other continents looks like.

Yeah. I was recently without a car for three weeks (bangernomics finally stopped winning) and decided that I'd learned the wrong lesson about car dependency: despite living in a city with a decent bus service, I really did benefit a lot from having a car and needed to buy a secondhand one as soon as possible, even though I am waiting for my leased EV to arrive in a few months.

You have to be quite central in quite a big city to not need a car. But that does cover quite a lot of people - I would say much of the population of London and the most central bits of Manchester and Birmingham, which is easily 10-20m people.

It varies greatly by region. I grew up in a German village - most people got a car when they turned 18, usually a cheap used one. Now I live in Berlin, where I didn't have a car for years, and now I have one (a cheap used one) that I use about once a month.

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