I can't believe that the average price of a car in the U.S. is almost $50k. For rapidly depreciating assets.
Here I am working out TCO costs for a range of mid-sized cars for my next purchase, and trying to decide if the extra $2k for a Prius Prime over a Prius will beat the differential in fuel costs for my driving situation. I feel like a chump, but I know it's the smarter thing to do with my money.
I coworker of mine just spent $100k on a regular old pickup truck that is planned to spend less than 5% of the time doing anything other than commuting him back and forth to work. It doesn't fit in any of the parking garages around here, or in his garage -- he has to park it at the other side of a surface lot because it doesn't fit in the normal spots. It gets like 11 mpg and uses the 92 octane fuel.
Americans won't buy cheap cars, they won't buy upmarket small cars, but they'll burn their children's college fund into the ground for a 2 second gain on 0-60 and bad ergonomics.
I can afford the fancy car, but I'd rather turn $100k into $200k in my index funds and buy an entire apartment in Spain overlooking the Mediterranean with the gains.
We can have nice things, but this is why we can't have affordable things.
Some Americans. The average car in the US is 12 years old. I just checked my local craigslist, most cars of that age are under 10k, and almost none are more than 20k. Since that is average we can assume cars of that age will run (with maintenance) for another decade and so shouldn't be very expensive. Of course at that age almost nothing is electric.
I do think part of it is how darned long cars last now.
I have an 18 year old car that I purchased used long ago and currently has no mechanical issues. I've had a few repairs but nothing terribly expensive. I have no interest in replacing it.
When you think about it, people who are frugal will buy practical and cost effective cars and drive them for a decade or more (that is, if they buy a car at all!). That means they either never buy new at all, or when they do they do so only seldom.
People who are chasing the new shiny will continue to churn through new shiny. And of course they want to pay a lot to get only the shiniest.
So I can see why the average new car cost would creep up, because buying a new car at all is a luxury in most cases.
Develop film takes time, same as why somebody wait for hours and hours just to get an EV charged? The “last generation” can “recharge” to 450miles in 3 minutes at a gas station then move on.
I live in a single family residence like the majority of households in the US.
My point still stands. Despite driving more miles on my EV my ICE wastes my time on pumping gas especially before all the time I waste with routine maintenance. I am far from alone.
Why would anyone waste their time going to gas stations all the time and wait for oil changes and have to deal with all that maintenance of things like timing belts and what not?
Sounds like you have a residence where you can charge overnight. That's a nicety right there. For everyone who can't, is it faster to get 400 miles by finding a place to charge and waiting on the charging or by filling a tank?
Sure it's a nicety, but it's also pretty common. Most households in the US would be able to do it.
You'll spend considerably more of your life standing next to a gas pump than they spend waiting for their cars to charge. And you'll spend more money per mile in the end for the energy cost. And yet somehow you'll continue to feel superior about it. Congrats on spending so much of your life pumping gas my dude. I'm glad I don't have to spend nearly as much time anymore.
Home ownership is a distant dream for most Americans, and the sort of rentals that have parking AND EV charging tend to be extremely pricy luxury new-builds.
Gas is unfortunately going to be around for a long, long time for normal working-class Americans.
It is one of those 'was it really that long ago? I am getting old' moments to actually look this up, but the last major safety features which moved the needle on keeping you alive in a car were the mandates for side-impact protection and anti-lock braking systems. Both are more than ten years old.
I think you would be hard-pressed to name a single innovation from the past five years which has increased your lifespan in a car as either a driver or a passenger. Given the fact that things like adaptive braking, lane-following assist, and blind-spot sensors are old enough to be showing up in low-end cars these days I cannot name a single new or shiny safety feature which would not be available in a mid-tier car from 2014. Can you?
Anti-lock brakes, if I remember correctly, had essentially no safety effect in the real world. Stability control, on the other hand, dropped single car accidents by something like a third. Perhaps you were thinking of that?
Regardless of that, the threat environment has changed pretty dramatically in the last two decades. I gave up my 2006 VW sedan for a new SUV this year because the IIHS numbers had started to look bad for lighter vehicles.
Back in 2006 the previous gen VW Passat was basically as safe as anything you could buy (according to their dataset). Now you need something a lot bigger to be upper tier.
The new vehicle is a plug-in so in the first 4 months of driving I've more than doubled my fuel efficiency. So there's that, anyway.
Adaptive cruise was still higher end at that time. Certainly not ubiquitous at the mid tier. Heck, it's barely ubiquitous now. Both adaptive cruise and automatic emergency braking are game changer features for safety on the highway.
Adaptive driving is a nuisance for me whenever I rent a new car (it seems most of the rentals have this feature). Those visual and audio cues going off when I am in the middle of changing lanes is very disconcerting - and makes me lose focus for a fraction of a second. I wish I could turn it off - but after one look at that hot mess on that center touch-screen I back off in repulsion.
(I also do not like the lights on the side mirrors that indicate a vehicle coming by. I constantly think - what about false positives - and then I double check my blind spot)
While it’s certainly true that old cars are death traps I’d live to see a source showing that car safety is increasing at notable levels every five years. Federal safety standards haven’t.
Is there evidence for the rationale for five years or less for the age of a car?
I hate all the entertainment systems and believe anything beyond Bluetooth and no complex entertainment system to be a lethal distraction that makes cars just as unsafe as older or weaker safety controls.
I do think CarPlay is very helpful for navigation, I mean, I can read map because I’m old but my kids and my wife when they’re driving need a onscreen display if they’re going somewhere new. And the CarPlay or similar provides a good navigation option that I think is safer than mounting a phone.
Everyone says this but the number of accidents (of which injurious, let alone fatal ones are a small minority) the typical person gets into in a lifetime are low enough to make the tradeoff worthwhile.
> If only those 4 people that burned to death in a Tesla last week [1] would have a chance to revisit their vehicle choice...
>
Kind of a weird story for People magazine to be covering, but I guess any story with Tesla gets clicks. Doesn't say if the fire or the high speed impact killed those passengers.
Anyhoo, I'd bet those 140+ people killed by GMs ignition switch wish they had a chance to revisit their car buying choice.
An older "nice" car is also a lot nicer than a new economy car and in most cases even a newer luxury model car. There may be more bells and whistles which are nice on new cars but it's fairly evident they have skimped on elements of the suspension and body that reduce roughness and road noise. There's a very marked difference in quality of vehicles made before and after the "realignment" prompted by the great recession, even as those cars are approaching 14-16 years old.
From what I have gathered, I assume average age of registered vehicles. I would also assume that collector cars would "pollute" the statistics, unless they are filtered out -- the details of the research are not stated.
The highest lifetime EV sales in the US is the Leaf, Model 3/Y, and Bolt. They aren't at the top of the list because they're the best cars on the market, but because they are the cheapest.
It was 30k new, but you could lease it for nearly nothing (a friend got $120/month) or buy it off-lease for about 10k. I bought one for 10k in 2016, drove it as a daily commuter until 2022 and sold it for 6k.
What do consider affordable? There are cheaper cars out there, a Kia Forte will run you $21k, but a new entry-level Honda Civic is $25k, with options it'll get above $30k.
Not from a new car dealership, no. They'll buy cheap cars, but the mere act of driving a new car off the lot is a huge deprecation event in the life of the car. Why would price sensitive buyers go to the dealership?
In fact, most don't. 3/4 of car sales in the US are used cars. The vast majority of Americans are driving used cars. Only relatively well-to-do people buy new cars. It might seem counterintuitive, but the stock of cars on the road is rotated around a lot, and new cars are only a small fraction of them.
A $100k pickup isn't a regular pickup, anymore than an $80k sedan is a regular sedan. It's gotta be more expensive than 95% of the pickups on the road. If it gets 11 mpg it must have a really beefy engine and be geared for towing. If it uses premium fuel, it's one of the badged models likely.
One thing that's odd about the pickup market is it isn't segmented into low tier/mid tier/luxury tier the way other vehicles are. The luxury version of a Toyota is a Lexus. The luxury version of an F-150 is still an F-150, just a different badge level. Your friend's is a luxury pickup.
If what you do 5% of the time absolutely requires a truck, you don't have many options. You can't rent a truck to tow easily and affordably. There are commercial truck rental places that do have vehicles you can tow with but if you're doing that even 2 days a month you might as well just buy the damn pickup.
And I'd focus on median prices a lot more than mean, though I'm sure there's an increase in that too.
Also, we drive a lot more miles than almost anyone, our gasoline is cheaper, our incomes are higher, and our cars last very long times and are safer than ever now. The average car is over a decade old now. When I was a kid, you got lucky if your odometer hit six figures, in fact some didn't even have that many digits! And I'm not that old.
The American car market is perhaps the best example of an efficient, highly competitive, well-regulated marketplace. Whatever the average price is, it's what it should be.
Well regulated marketplace huh? You mean the marketplace that forces customers to purchase through a dealership because of dealership lobbies? You mean the marketplace which has those same dealers charge outrageous markups just because the law says they must exist? Ok.
Your index fund grows on the activity of people who spend 100k on a consumable item. Good for them, they can work their whole life if they like. You can relax and let compounding do the rest.
You said it yourself — their dwelling is the entire city. Those 400sqft are where they sleep and relax but most of their living probably happens outside. Different strokes and all that.
Same with a hotel. The hotel is where I spend most of my time unconscious. Other than a few select destinations, why would I spend a fortune at a place where I’ll mostly be asleep?
My experience with trying really low-ball hotels is not great. I rarely stay in really luxe places but I do usually go for some midrange business hotel in a city.
Yeah, my point was mostly against luxe hotels as opposed to somewhere I know will be clean and comfortable to get a good night’s sleep, and close to the places I want to visit.
Honestly I tried cheaper hotels and motels and often times I simply didn't sleep well there - usually due to some noise as some college or high school kids were running up and down the hallway outside or were partying in the room next door.
If you are going to count where they live to be the whole city, you should increase the rent they pay to cover the cost of the third spaces they use in the cities as well.
I don’t think that’s a good comparison. If you’re buying a car primarily for commuting a $10k car is going to achieve that purpose just as well as a $50k car. But $2500 on a small apartment in a city gives a very different lifestyle than one in a big house in the suburbs. I’m not going to make a value judgement either way there but there is a clear difference in functional result.
It's not though. Going from a bare bones $10k car to a more expensive car that drives itself on the freeway is a huge difference. It's less effort to get from A to B in a car that has L2.5 self-driving like Ford's blue cruise. How tired you are after three hours of driving a shitty car with a bad wheel alignment so you have to jerk the wheel every once in a while to keep it on track, vs a new luxury car that keeps itself in the lane so you don't have to steer, makes a huge difference if you want to be useful when you get there.
Yo, an alignment is like $150. You shouldn't have any car on the road that is so bad you're jerking the wheel to keep it going straight. That's straight up dangerous. And if you're that bad at maintaining your car, your robot car isn't going to be any safer.
If you're an American wondering why you're forced to buy shitty overpriced Teslas instead of those $15k BYD Dolphins, here's Janet Yellen screeching about how unfair it is that China uses its labor force to manufacture consumer goods instead of creating millions of bullshit make-work financialization jobs like good liberal democracies https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/yellen-intends-warn-...
There are none. The Model Y is the closest with 70% of it made in either the US or Canada (the law does not require them to break it down to US only...) Every other car available for sale in the US has more than 30% manufactured outside of the US or Canada. And the big 3 are some of the worst offenders for offshoring their manufacturing out of the US.
Ah, I used a third party source which was missing the Model 3 Long Range specifically, which is 75%. Maybe it was not listed because it is limited to that one trim. Then there's the Model Y and the Model 3 Performance at 70%. All other American brand vehicles are < 70% and most are 20-40%
The top vehicle from the big 3 is the Ford F150 at a whopping 45% US/Canada.
My point is that if you buy any car in the US, you are buying a vehicle with significant foreign manufactured content.
I'd totally buy a phone that was mostly US produced if it was the same (or better) quality within ~30% of the same price.
I do tend to apply this same idea to a lot of things I buy. If there's an American version available with at least similar quality and some % of similar price, I'll pick the US one nearly every time. Goes even further when its something I know is made in my state, even further when it comes to the city I live in. The vast majority of the beer I drink is made in the city I live in, for example.
I'm still confused on how/why cars are different for you? here you're making a cost/benefit calculation but your original comment said you would "never" buy a chinese car. Why are cars so special?
I am not the same person who said they would never buy a Chinese car. I might, but they'd have to be significantly cheaper while being pretty much the same quality. Quality also meaning parts availability and places willing to work on it and what not for the continued support of keeping that vehicle working for a long time.
And in the end that "$10k" Chinese car doesn't fit my needs in the same way a $14k US or Japanese car doesn't fit my needs. When I actually look at a vehicle that does do what I'm looking for, they're not too differently priced.
Note that the "$10k" car in China costs ~$22k in Mexico. So chances are, even without tariffs that car coming to the US would probably be $20k+, not $10k. Probably more, because BYD knows Americans would probably pay more in the end. That's without any tariffs applied.
Chances are though, a similar car to what I'd buy would be more along the lines of the BYD Seal, but even then that's a little smaller than what I'd like. Honestly the Mach E is pretty much the perfect sized vehicle for my family for the majority of our drives, so something like a large hatchback/small crossover is what I'm looking for but a full-sized sedan would do. That went on sale in Mexico without tariffs for 888,800 Mexican Pesos, or about $44k USD. A The 2025 Mach E pricing starts around $37k.
Both parties are in the wrong on this. Americans (and others) would be wealthier and the world would decarbonize faster if the tariffs on China were lifted but it is what the people want
So you are blaming your good liberal democratic goverment for not protecting your market enough which forces you to make a living on some bs job while at the same time you complain that the market is overly protected so you cant get a cheap dolphin.
High compression engines require high octane to avoid knock. It's not about performance. An engine with a turbo or super charger will always need higher octane fuel.
Not all forced induction engines always need higher octane fuel. A lot of the newer turbo engines in cheaper vehicles such as Subarus are specifically rated for 87 octane gasoline. They don't knock.
If your engine does not require the higher octane, then no efficiency will be noticed and you're just burning money. If your engine is specified to take the higher octane, then you can notice an efficiency bump over running a lower octane fuel in most modern engines. The engine computer will adjust the valve timing to prevent predetonation with the lower octane fuel at the cost of efficiency.
Adding octane to fuel isn't adding a booster. It's adding stability to the fuel so it can be run in a higher compression engine. If your engine doesn't reach that pressure then you'll notice no effect except your wallet getting lighter.
That being said, unless you are constantly flooring the accelerator and / or doing a lot of track driving, it seems challenging to make a modern (and properly functioning) engine knock on a persistent basis (irrespective of octane).
This is a weird hill to die on man. Modern ECUs are smart enough to tune the timings in to prevent knock when the wrong fuel is used, at the cost of both efficiency and fuel economy. "Runs" is not the same thing as "runs well"
Are you familiar with Boyle's Law? You compress a gas and it heats? Higher compression of air/fuel lowers the detonation point. If your air/fuel mixture detonates at the wrong time in an engine, you will get damage. Higher octane fuels take higher temperatures to detonate.
That's why higher compression engines REQUIRE higher octane fuel, as the manufacturer will specify. Run without it, damage your engine and try to make a warranty claim. Good luck with that!
> coworker of mine just spent $100k on a regular old pickup truck
> It gets like 11 mpg and uses the 92 octane fuel.
I understand hating on pickup trucks is an easy way to farm upvotes on HN, but there is no 'regular pickup truck' in existence that gets 11 mpg. The closest that comes to that is the F-150 Raptor with turbocharged V8 which is a preposterous performance vehicle with a racing engine. It is a luxury item. Yet for some reason we don't criticize people with the same disdain who buy and drive sports cars which get as bad or even worse mpg. I guess the Lambo drivers never need to haul lumber.
The F-150 is also offered in hybrid (which gets > double that mpg) and all electric drivetrains.
I will make the equally presumptuous assumption that since you've narrowed your choices to "Prius or Prius" you harbor some grudges against pickup owners.
> but there is no 'regular pickup truck' in existence
I grew up in deep country. I've owned my share of pickups. When you need them, they're invaluable. When you don't, they're basically the most inconvenient daily drivers you can have short of a box truck, an RV, or a main battle tank. Outside of a fairly narrow range of medium-sized hauling activities, they aren't really even terribly good at carrying things.
I hate talking about things as "it's more than anybody could need" because you end up with needs-based conceptualization of lifestyles with people eating diets of only sweet potatoes, commuting on onewheels, and living in Hong-Kong style coffin apartments. But these things are not only obnoxious main character syndrome demonstrators, they're actively dangerous to everybody in and around them even when they're following the rules of the road.
If I was king for a day, I'd make driving one require a special class of license and tax them extra if they aren't being used for active work purposes like they're intended. They should be in the same class of vehicle as commercial box trucks, because that's what they're supposed to be for.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if some type of vehicle fad takes over the U.S. at some point where people just start driving converted box trucks or RVs around as daily drivers, then complain that all the parking garages and train overpasses are too low for their 13 and a half foot tall lifestyle decisions.
> there is no 'regular pickup truck' in existence that gets 11 mpg
Point but e.g. the 2024 Silverado gets 12mpg in city driving. Go to any office parking lot here and you’ll see a lot of that size truck which have clearly never been used harder than going to Costco - and even the better ones are barely approaching ⅔ of the mpg of the pickup my grandparents bought in the 1980s.
I do agree that from a pollution standpoint we should treat all inefficient vehicles as the problem but large trucks and SUVs have significant immediate downsides for everyone around them. They’re far more lethal when they hit pedestrians or smaller vehicles, they produce higher tire and brake particulates which are known to cause health issues, they take more space to park, and at least where I live there are streets which could previously handle bidirectional traffic but now require someone to pull over to let oncoming traffic pass because there isn’t enough room for two large vehicles. In contrast, sports car drivers pose less risk because they’re low to the ground and the drivers are far more likely to see you and avoid an accident.
>approaching ⅔ of the mpg of the pickup my grandparents bought in the 1980s.
It's for your own good, peasant. That 1989 S10 (or whatever else got mid 20s around that time) had basically no crash protection let alone ABS and ESC and.... and... and.......
I’m aware but that article is overstating the problem: the issue is weight so the problem comes back to the form factor. Every office worker LARPing as a rancher is making the world worse buying an unnecessary truck regardless of the power train. EV trucks and SUVs are bad, but so are the ICE versions.
I didn't realize ICE vehicles don't have tires. News to me.
There is a slight increase in tire particulates, sure. A small increase. There's also a lot less brake particulates. And get this: there's no tailpipe emissions either.
The Model Y has +89% more volume. Its considerably bigger car with more torque. It's not a good comparison. And even though its 32% heavier and has a ton more torque, its tire wear was 26% greater. You're arguing it goes up by the fourth power, but it wasn't even a 1 for 1 increase on a car with considerably more torque. And besides, their testing shows the tire wear particulates for their comparison gas car as even higher than the Y.
Let me reiterate it again. The Kia is a much smaller car with way less torque. It is a poor comparison from the get-go. Go find a similar sized vehicle with a similar amount of torque. But this study is pretty heavily biased, so they chose their cars accordingly.
But let's continue on and see what it is you're trying to point out.
> Kia has 50% as many emissions
You're now talking about the VOCs table at the bottom. This is a pretty bullshit test overall.
> Large samples from one tyre on each vehicle were also taken and placed in a ‘microchamber’ heated to 20 degrees Celsius, around the temperature of a vehicle certification test, and held at that level for the same duration of the on-road EQUA test – around three-and-a-half hours. The off-gassed VOCs were analysed and quantified, and then scaled up by the relative surface area of the sample to that of all four tyres on the vehicle. The results are shown in the table below.
So, this isn't actually testing the tires under load on the car at all, they're just baking a small piece in the oven and scaling the resulting VOCs to the size of the tires. This test isn't testing the car, its testing the tire. There are no controls over this test. It's just a tire of an unknown age from one car with a part cut out and a tire of an unknown age from another car with a part cut out. The brands and models are pretty different, which could lead to pretty radical results.
If I put brand new tires on that Kia and used some pretty old ones on the Tesla those numbers would look radically different. Even two different models of tires from the same manufacturer could yield vastly different numbers. If you used the exact same model from the exact same manufacturer made at the same time the car with bigger tires would have the worst emissions, which says absolutely nothing about whether that's a tire going on an EV or a sedan with a hybrid engine or a truck with a DEF delete getting 6 MPG. See how that's then a pretty poor test?
Seriously friendo, read the studies you're wanting to use to talk about these things. There's so many absolutely bullshit studies trying to get you to think one way or another. Don't just go "table says 57%, ev bad!"
Now I think I know where you're pulling that fourth power from. You're probably thinking of road wear which does scale like that. But that's road wear, not tire wear, and doesn't result in the same airborne particulate issue here.
And even then, it's small potatoes compared to actual big trucks and busses rolling on the roads.
I was thinking about road wear. I had thought the same equation applied to both tires and the road. Why wouldn't the increases in wear on both increase in the same way? (You seem to know why, so honest question, not snark)
I don't fully know but it is probably something to do with the fact tires are designed to be more malleable and flexible than roads. The tire is also flexing and pushing on an air cushion while the road itself is being pressed against and having to flex with the ground.
Also, almost all the particulate emissions are due to the abrasive nature of the road-tire interface tearing apart the tire. Tires are a cheaper and simpler wear items than roads, something is going to give, so we've decided we'll replace our tires more often than tearing up our roads. Just like if you ever got road rash, the road is going to tear you up far more than you're going to tear the road up. So, while the road forms cracks and what not from its repeated stresses it's not coming apart like dust nearly as much. Don't get me wrong, some small, tiny amount of it does but not nearly as much as the tire.
The external effects of large pickup trucks are drastically more than that of a small sports car, in ways that are more immediate than climate change.
Large pickup trucks take up a lot more space on the road and parking lots, are harder to see around, and when they get into accidents they cause a lot more damage and injuries to people both in and out of cars. There is a very different visceral response to a large pickup truck tailgating you with its driver perched above you, than a Lambo or 911 doing the same.
I think it's a strange argument: that buying a truck is "worse" than buying a sports car. I think the term "apples and oranges" is applicable here. The former are both vehicles and the latter are both fruit, but otherwise have fairly different cost/benefit.
The default in America is to make everything out to be individualistic, but the rest of us have to bear the very real costs of the externality of pickups, not just limited to pollution but also safety, land use, etc.
You mean like the police in America? Or elementary and high school? Or fire brigades, interstate highways, border security or the thousands of other things you rely on every single day that are 100% socialism.
Agreed. It's really amazing what they've done in recent years.
I ended up in a fullsize primarily because I got it cheaper than the midsizes I was looking at. The midsize market is priced really oddly.
Anywho, I was blown away that it's getting me 23MPG. That's what my previous midsize was giving me.
That's nearly double what fullsizes got in the 90s.
My guess would be the difference in perception comes from the fact sport cars tend to be smaller and sit lower, which makes pedestrians and motorist feel safer and less intimidated around them. In addition their general rarity means most people still view them as novelties rather than something to actually take a side on. That being said though it is 100% true performance engines are the absolute worst in terms of economy/emissions/noise; most truck engines are really just oversized economy engines and have the efficiency to match.
Also I tend to think that they are often rather expensive and not as robust. So people who drive them do not want to damage. As repairs tend to be expensive too. So in general they avoid accidents, unless they are going to speed off the road...
Lamborghini drivers obeying the traffic rules aren't creating a hazard.
Aftermarket headlights blazing directly into the eyes of oncoming drivers are creating a hazard. As is the fact that it takes up a lot of road space and has poor visibility for small objects in front of the hood.
I don't think it's malicious in most cases. As a counterpoint, most family members I know with absurdly large cars, either dimensionally or in terms of seat height aren't very confident drivers and the large vehicle makes them feel "safer" especially if they have kids in the car. I recognize it's not always the case but they didn't buy a large car to lord over other people on the road they did it for emotional piece of mind. I'm willing to bet a lot of people however wouldn't be willing to admit that that's why they prefer a large car out of some perceived weakness or the like.
I wish it would have adjusted for inflation. One quote: "The average transaction price for a new vehicle sold in the U.S. last month was $48,623, according to Kelley Blue Book, roughly $10,000 higher than in 2019, before the pandemic." However, about 9200 euros of that is due to inflation according to this calculator: https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
That's a nitpick though. All in all, an interesting article, which can be summarized as: the EV car market is lacking demand, and car makers definitely don't want to make cheap EVs since it's already so hard.
Yep. Midrange-to-expensive EVs have been around for long enough that pretty much everybody in those market segments who are currently interested have already bought one. Additionally, the segment has been flooded with midsize SUVs, with the odd midsize sedan — variety is sorely lacking.
Between these two, quite a considerable market is being left unaddressed. The first to fill these niches with affordable models that don’t have weird quirks or make strange tradeoffs will likely do well.
I'm hoping for manufacturers to pull back on the "all controls are via touchscreen" and "you can't have carplay because we want to charge you our own monthly fees" trends.
Taking Chevy for example, they have physical HVAC controls, but they're counting on the average consumer being too clueless to realize they only have Google Maps in their car because it came with a free OnStar trial. Eventually people are going to notice that they spent $1000+ to buy the larger screen upgrade, and now Chevy wants them to shell out $300/year forever to be able to use it for maps.
The other big unknown is lifespan of car software platforms, if these end up being like phones where they get laggier and laggier with continued software updates, until eventually it's unusable, people aren't going to be happy about it. But we won't know for 15 years exactly how bad that problem is.
The trend to exclude CarPlay and/or Android Auto really is awful.
Not only is there a high risk of notoriously underpowered head units becoming increasingly laggy over time with updates, there’s also the risk of the automaker deciding that shipping new updates for your only slightly old EV is too much of a cost to bear and dropping support, making the head unit slowly become more and more useless over time as apps stop running.
CarPlay/Android Auto is an excellent hedge against both of those scenarios, even if one prefers the onboard experience. It never hurts to have an escape hatch.
"Escape hatch" is exactly how I describe it. I don't care how good a car's screens are today, I know they get software updates and I don't trust them to not screw it up down the road.
Yeah, we could go back to suction cup phone mounts on the windshield if we had to, but that feels pretty stupid when the car has a 12" screen in the dashboard.
> The first to fill these niches with affordable models...
And is not tariffed to the point they are not competitive.
I'm on the fence as to whether tariffs are good or bad, but I do wonder if an external player might not be able to come in and shake up the US auto industry.
I feel like the working class in the U.S. are paying way too much for what amounts to a necessity for their livelihood: the automobile. We'd all benefit (the planet that is) if the options included inexpensive electrics rather than merely gas and diesel.
What would really help the working class is building out actual forms of transportation beyond private automobiles. That way we're not subject to a single point of failure in our ability to move around. Maybe warm up to the idea of ebikes for getting around town, and bring back some trams for city to city connections. Then you can free up the roads for actual useful transit.
The US is one crisis away from our expensive to maintain road infrastructure being unsustainable. The American people are one crisis away from their $60k SUV being worth nothing and still owing a four figure note against it. They're also one fuel crisis away from being unable to pay to use it. And we don't really have any alternatives at a scale to handle those sorts of things.
We're really going to have egg on our face at some point. And the only option will be to import affordable EVs the rest of the world has been building and developing.
Economics is not my field, but I’d reason that tariffs can be useful if they’re used as a scalpel instead of as a sledgehammer.
So for example, if the goal is to stimulate domestic automakers to be more competitive without unnecessarily risking killing them off entirely, a moderate tariff that pushes the price of ultra cheap foreign cars up to a level that’s reasonably achievable by the domestic automakers but still well below the average price could be a good thing.
Where tariffs are just plain bad is when they’re so high that domestic manufacturers don’t even have to think about trying to compete and can continue to drive up prices unabated.
My aunt and uncle have a couple of Teslas (at different homes, I think). We have one as well. They're looking at replacing one with another EV, so she was probing me for options, and then also said "I can't help but notice your recent vehicle purchases have not been EVs. Hmm.."
I don't get it. We already have an EV. Why would I buy more EVs? The one that gets commuted in every day is already in our driveway. It already does the work. It doesn't need replacing, or adding to.
I'm a car person. There are so many cars I want to own in my life, so much to experience. I will admit I briefly considered buying a 10 year old BMW i3 BEV because it seemed like a fun runabout for not much money, but most of the _other_ EVs on the market serve the "practical" market, or are too expensive. I bought a Fiat 500 Abarth because it's an absolute insane hoot to drive. I bought a roadster. These are not exactly markets served by EVs. At the very least, we need another decade or two of sales to build up the inventory of interesting/unique/quirky models that get introduced by manufacturers over time.
But mostly, I want something fun to drive with character- a nice gearshift, an exhilarating powerband, ... not another competent appliance. We have a competent appliance at home.
The EV market isn't saturated, but just because an EV owner doesn't serially buy EVs doesn't mean the shine has come off. It just means the 100,000 mile, 6 year old Model 3 does exactly what it did the day we bought it, and there's no reason to replace it.
I hear you on the lack of diversification in models available.
I’d really love to see an EV that’s in line with the virtues of the Honda Fit, Honda Element, and Toyota Matrix — not sexy or fancy, but cheap, insanely practical little “everything cars” that can take on anything you throw at them with tons of cargo space, fold flat seating, stock roof rack, etc — cars that are made for doing things instead of impressing the neighbor or acting as a status symbol.
There’s absolutely nothing like this in the EV space right now. The closest thing that’s upcoming is Rivian’s R3, which isn’t likely to be as cheap as the Fit/Element/Matrix were.
I do think that the i3 is the one that fits best here. But being an all carbon fiber structure, being 2-10 years old, being a BMW, I understand there are a lot of strikes against it here when people think "cheap small economical car with a lot of space inside".
It's such a shame Honda won't sell the e here. I'm not going to say "I'd buy one in a second" because I'm not paying new car prices for one, but I wouldn't have bought a Fit new either. And yet, people bought the Fit new. And I'd happily buy a used Fit, it was actually on my runabout shopping list as well. (Fit with a manual trans).
I considered a used i3 when I last shopped but got spooked by how some models used plastic parts that can break easily and have cooling systems which can fail spectacularly, both of which are costly to fix. If it weren’t for that there’d probably be one in my garage now.
A big part of that market is being addressed by used EVs, which are getting much cheaper right now as they age out of new-car-buyers' households. https://www.kbb.com/cars-for-sale/used/tesla
I don't understand where this thinking comes from. It's not based in fact. These Tesla batteries degrade very slowly. And so if in 5 years you've lost 15% of the range, it still gets you anywhere you need to go including road trips with all of the Superchargers!? "totals the vehicle" is just nonsense and I wish more people understood the reality.
> I don't understand where this thinking comes from.
My observations, which certainly don't reflect the current state of the tech (although if I'm buying a used EV, I'm not buying the current tech). But that's my bias nonetheless. I do think I overemphasized this, though, because while this is what makes me shy away from the idea of used EVs, it's not the reason why I avoid buying cars that are too new (which includes pretty much all EVs).
Since Tesla funds Dahn's research, they get the IP. This is just in the lab but those advancements are trickling, over time, to Tesla's battery making (and not just Tesla: every battery maker does research to make batteries cheaper and last longer).
Supposedly, first-gen Leafs were known to have pretty nasty degradation due to lack of sufficient cooling. Combined with an already short-range battery, and the belief that you'd need to replace the battery frequently was justified.
Key word: WAS
Of course, modern EVs, and basically all Teslas, have bigger batteries with better cooling, so it's no longer an issue. But the belief won't die, just like how people still make memes about Java being slow as if it's still 1998.
One could say the same about a combustion engine, really. Battery packs last way, way longer than most people think because they analogise it to phone batteries which are quite different. The resale value of a degraded pack is also going to be higher than most people assume, I think. Unfortunately we have not had plentiful EVs with good battery packs for long enough to show this to the average consumer.
I guess the question comes down to how does one know if the battery pack is good? When I buy a regular used gas car, I can get all sorts of diagnostics about it out of the OBD2 port, pull a spark plug and stick a scope into the combustion chamber to see if there's any issues (e.g. on the walls).
With an electric car, how can one tell if the pack has been charged all the way up to 100% all the time (vs. the much better 40-70% range)?
This is the "term premium" of batteries it seems, and I honestly don't know if there's a reliable answer.
At least on our PHEV, when you read out the battery module state with an OBDII reader, you get to know not only the current estimated capacity but also how much time it's spent at various states of charge, how much time it's spent being charged and discharged at different currents, how much time it's spent at different temperatures, and a completely absurd amount of other diagnostics.
I'd feel a lot better about the state of the battery if I bought one used, rather than the state of the ICE. It's possible to borescope it, but you have no way of telling how long the previous owner went between oil changes, if they flogged it out to redline regularly, etc.
With my electric car, I can plug into the ODB port and get highly detailed information on the health of the battery. Far deeper insights than what I get plugging into an ODB port on an ICE.
Getting into the technician menus on Teslas is well documented, they also report a ton of data and can do a lot of diagnostics on the battery.
you just need to know the SoH (state of health). If that's 90% then you've lost 10% of the range at new. The lower the SoH for the same vehicle make, model, year and driven kms, then the worse the car has been treated. Simple as that.
I'm reminded of various videos on Youtube where they dissect grenaded engines. "Oh look, the Cummins in your pickup dropped a valve seat. That's going to cost you $50K."
The average car today lasts 12 years, or 200,000 miles, with 300,000 miles possible with luck and good maintenance. Modern EV batteries are designed to last longer than that. Moreover, EV battery capacity loss is nonlinear: most (I've read 80%) of the eventual loss happens in the first couple years.
So if you're looking for a car with the least amount of battery degradation between purchase and EOL, buying a used EV rather than new is actually the better decision.
Would you never buy a used ICE car because replacing the engine would effectively total the vehicle?
Batteries last a LONG time assuming the vehicle manufacturer has put proper heat and SoC management into the battery controller (ie, not a Nissan Leaf).
I thought my 7 year old Ford Focus EV would be half the range of its 110mi battery by now but it still posts near-perfect range (it's lost about 5%).
A recent analysis of 10,000 EV vehicles shows that they only lose about 1.8% capacity per year[0], so they are perfectly useable up to 150-200k, which is the same general useful lifespan of ICE vehicles. [1] EVs and Plug-in Hybrids cost less to maintain than ICE vehicles. [2] Over 200k miles, ICE vehicles are about double the maintenance cost of EVs or Plug-in hybrids, and EVs are slightly more than Plug-in hybrids.
EVs use about 30kWh to go 100 miles [3] and at the US national average for electricity [4], that would be about $ 9,978 to drive 200k miles. ICE vehicles vary, but 35 mpg combined is pretty average for compact cars. At the US national average for gasoline [5], that is $ 17,548 to drive 200k miles. Plug-in hybrids use about 29kWh to go 100 miles and about 48 mpg. Just assuming 50/50 driving on gas or electric, that’s about $11,220 to drive 200k miles.
So maintenance and fuel cost over 200k miles would be roughly:
I can't make great use of a full EV but would love more AWD PHEV options, of which there are currently few and they're mostly very expensive. A PHEV can be my everything-car that runs entirely on electricity for 90% of trips. I assume there's some reason they're not a more widely-supported option, but damn, I wish they were more common.
They aren't more widely supported because they are more expensive and more complicated to manufacture with a higher potential for more stuff to go wrong.
Until the engine that powers a PHEV is nearly drop-in ready for a replacement (for example, going to your local auto parts store and buying a replacement like a battery) then companies need to have service technicians and production lines to support these "engines" (they're fancy generators at this point).
However, that would also require automakers to standardize to some degree or potentially cannibalize their own business.
We've already seen this with batteries/panels in the consumer space in regards to solar. I can buy whatever packs of cells I want, and as long as the voltages match up, I can mix and match to my hearts content. If I can only get service for my Jeep PHEV from Jeep because the drivetrain is a bespoke black box and parts are impossible to get, then we'll keep seeing customers continuing to opt for traditional gas vehicles or full EVs. PHEV is just too complicated to support long term (imo).
If 90% of your trips can be covered by a normal EV, then I would make the argument that you should buy one of those (secondhand even!) and then rent a vehicle for the instances where you need AWD. The fuel and tax savings should likely make up for it in the long run. For that one year that you don't go skiing in the mountains, then you're coming out on top financially!
> PHEV is just too complicated to support long term (imo).
PHEV isn't that much more complex than an ICE. The transaxle is typically mechanically simpler, and you have two electric motor/generators instead of an electric motor (starter) and an electric generator (alternator). There's a big battery you need to find room for, and the power wiring. And the engine control is significantly different, but if it doesn't work, swap the ECU works as well for an ICE and PHEV.
>> PHEV is just too complicated to support long term (imo).
> PHEV isn't that much more complex than an ICE.
I've been an owner/operator of two Gen3 Prii for 14 years and agree in practice even though in theory I would agree with the complexity argument. The one maintenance hit for both was for the vacuum pump needed for brakes/etc because the car cannot assume the engine is always running.
Toyota has moved to hybrid only for the Camry and Sienna. This is an indicator to me that technology maturity and US manufacturing is where it needs to be for broad adoption.
Vacuum not being reliable has been a thing for decades - diesel engines don't produce vacuum and so vacuum pumps are available off the shelf. If anything those vacuum pumps are oversized for cars since they are mostly used on large trucks.
People make the rental argument a lot. But having been in a ski house quite a few years back with a lot of New Yorkers who didn't own cars, I saw first-hand what a relative main in the neck it was to rent a car for the weekend (e.g. often having to go out to an airport and planning ahead). That's maybe fine if the economics are compelling but that probably assumes things like you even have a commute by car. And that you're willing to give up convenience to save even a few thousand dollars a year.
I have an ICE but I only fill the tank once or maybe twice most months.
If you drive an ICE that much you could be saving money vs renting a car when you need one. I've done the math, rental cars are expensive. Between the per day and per mile charges it doesn't take long to make up the cost of a cheap car. (if you insist on a new car of course that is much more expensive than a 10 year old car) I keep wanting to get rid of my truck that I only fill about 4x/year, but it turns out it is hard to rent a truck, as opposed to a truck shaped car. (I have found ways to do this, but those trucks are even more expensive than a car and they are out of the way)
The BYD Shark is ~$60k, but it’s being only available in Brazil and Australia. Ford is making a Ranger Sport PHEV, but only for Australia and Europe. CATL launched its Freevoy hybrid battery, competing with BYD. It’s certainly being worked on, but not in the US quite yet.
Pure EVs also waste tons of energy, because they lug around a huge battery that you barely use for most trips.
The battery pack in a Model Y weighs 1700 lbs and provides 330 miles of range. A RAV4 Prime (PHEV) has a 14.5 gallon gas tank, which provides 500 miles of range from 90 lbs of gas - in addition to the smaller 300 lb battery pack providing 42 miles range. The additional weight of the drivetrain components offsets the savings from not lugging around a huge battery. Overall, the vehicles end up with similar weight, but the RAV4 has much longer range. By default, the RAV4 prime runs on EV mode until the battery runs down. With both vehicles, you’re taking an efficiency hit on the average drive for having the option of taking longer trips.
Of course, both vehicles are a big environmental win over old ICE cars, because they will move you more miles per carbon emitted. Which one works better for you depends on your use-case. If you want to lower the environmental impact if you commute even more, ride a bicycle or something.
Or, getting at what is actually desired, a car that can be a wall-charged EV for in-town trips and daily commuting but can use the existing gasoline distribution network for long trips or in emergencies. We’re in a transition state, this isn’t an unreasonable ask.
Nobody wants this, but in an imperfect world, one has to make suboptimal compromises.
You can get an EV, and then have to deal with half a dozen barely competent charging networks each with their own donkey, slow and insecure app, their own quirks and pricing schemes, etc. For some, the tradeoff is worth it, for others it isn't.
You can also get a PHEV, which could allow you to use one car for commuting purely on electric power - even if you are lugging around an entire ICE power train - and then also take the family out to the countryside over the weekend. Without the having to deal with a bunch of annoyed passangers when you are stuck midway through your journey and the charging station you are trying to use is giving you the massively helpeful error message of "Charging failed, please try again later".
I'm waiting for an EREV midsize SUV. EREV sounds like the ideal layout as opposed to HEV and PHEV which sound mechanically over complicated with too many components that can go wrong. The new Dodge Ramcharger sounds amazing but I don't want a pickup and it's way outside of my price point.
I mean, that's exactly what I'm saying. It's a compromise. A pure EV would be much better if the charging infrastructure was great. If it isn't, then you need a compromise...
No, even if charging infrastructure was perfect EVs still require a significant amount of time to charge compared to refueling an ICE vehicle. There are other esoteric benefits of ICE but that's the one the vast majority of people are hung up on and that will likely not be fixed anytime soon.
> Even if charging infrastructure was perfect EVs still require a significant amount of time to charge compared to refueling an ICE vehicle.
That's just down to charging infrastructure no? Sure, there are physical limits to how much electricity one can move in a given time, but we are nowhere at those physical limits.
So it's just down to infrastructure in the end. If there was infrastructure to quickly and reliably charge EVs, ICE would only have niche advantages.
Your average, rather small, gasoline pump 'charges' an ICE at an average speed around 4000 KW, effectively 1200 KW after accounting for moderate efficiency -- hybrids will get better. Good EV charging today is a peak around 300 KW with a much lower average.
Honestly, _averaging_ 300 KW is probably within a factor of 2 of the highest we'll do for light vehicles given economic (how much electric distribution infrastructure can an 8-32 stall charging station have?) and practical (how heavy and stiff can the charging cable be?) limits.
It's unlikely EV charging speed will ever match existing ICEs. Relatively long recharge times are an intrinsic trade-off of BEV technology which needs to be engineered around, mostly by having enormous and heavy batteries.
Or you could have drop in batteries? You pull up to a charging station, they take your battery and replace it with one charged to 100%.
Does this require further work? Yes of course. We are definitely not there yet, and we may never get there. But let's not pretend that this is an insurmountable problem.
Battery swapping has so many serious pragmatic problems I don't think we'll ever see it offered at scale for public use. It could be a fit for large private fleets however.
On the engineering side:
- Swapping requires standardization of batteries across models and manufacturers. To accommodate different vehicles the batteries will need to be rather small so most vehicles will need multiple swapped every time
- Requires more space and weight because the battery cannot be structural. This will reduce the overall range of EVs
- Connectors for high voltage, signalling, cooling fluid, and high strength mechanical rated for thousands of cycles in the face of road grime and poorly maintained swap robots will not be small. Cooling system contamination will be a serious concern.
On the financial side:
- Batteries are expensive, how do you track and reclaim them across the entire continent? What about theft? Destruction insurance?
- With swappable batteries the incentive is to store them at 100% then run them 100% to 0%, which is especially bad for battery longevity
- How do you deal with batteries swapped at different 'swap' networks?
On the user side:
- What if the swap station is out of batteries when you need them? Are you always gambling on holiday weekends that you won't need to sit for hours charging (if that is even possible!)?
- Since some batteries will be more worn than others, how do you deal with constant variability of range because maybe last week you got a new set of batteries and next week you'll get an older set with only 80% capacity left.
- Are you allowed to charge at home? How is the wear from that charged?
- Did I buy a battery with my car, or are cars no longer batteries included? If my car came with a battery, how do I know I get it back? Do I get paid for the wear other users put on it? Do I need to retrieve my battery from the same station on the way home after a road trip?
That's just off the top of my head. I'm sure there are others. Most of these issues are solvable with unlikely levels of corporate cooperation or immense levels of excess capital expenditure. However, they all cost money and will reduce the economic viability of battery-swap EVs versus every other vehicle type.
Most ICE car engines are massively oversized for highway cruising (so they have power for acceleration) and aren't running efficiently during said cruising. Huge amounts of engineering goes into trying to reduce this effect but it's always there to some extent.
Hybrids use a smaller engine that is running in a more efficient operating range during cruising (i.e. not pulling a huge vacuum and moving lots of parts the whole time). The battery/motor comes in for acceleration.
Unlike combustion engines, electric stuff isn't really inefficient at low load.
Prius uses an Atkinson cycle engine, doesn't it? Inherently more efficient than a conventional engine, albeit at the cost of lower power. You can get that effect with variable valve timing in some power ranges, at the cost of more complexity.
Pretty much all mainstream hybrids run Atkinson cycle (technically not the original Atkinson design, but an otto-cycle engine that keeps the intake valve open longer, to produce the same effect)
An ICE is typically most fuel efficient at about 2000 RPM and 90% throttle (this is different for every engine of course, but those numbers are close enough for discussion). A typical car can be at 45% fuel efficiency if you can pull that off, but 90% throttle when cruising will bring your RPMs and thus ground speed up. A hybrid can use a smaller engine that can just barely keep your car moving at 90% throttle and use the electric to get acceleration up to those speeds.
I'd guess it has something to do with its unusual drivetrain. It can operate: 1) fully electric, 2) fully electric but with gas used in generator-mode to supply power to the electric drive train, 3) gas engine mechanically powering the wheels (like a normal ICE car).
I'd expect it operates in mode 2 a lot when at highway speeds, but not accelerating.
Prius "eCVT" is a special planetary gearset that all gears are powered. ICE is connected to the planets, input and output has the alternator and traction motors. Difference in resistance between two motors is imparted to the ICE, achieving power mix and generation control.
It's a really simple and clever solution. So much so that brain hurts to think about
The ICE engine in a Prius is a special branch of tech that is more efficient at the cost of basically kneecapped performance. Americans cannot stand needing a full ten seconds to get onto the highway, because we all drive like a bunch of roided up chimps who refuse to move over to give the merging onramp any room.
For two decades there has been a roughly free 5% or so in fuel economy available to any ICE car if only we could manage to be slightly more patient drivers, but American car buyers would literally rather spend twice the cost on a V8, gasoline truck, that gets worse fuel economy than it's $8k more expensive diesel variant, worse performance, and often a less reliable engine.
Americans will swear that a ten cent increase in gas prices will drive them to financial ruin, and then choose to buy the SUV made out of a terrible truck chassis that gets 20mpg. They did this despite having to learn the hard way back in 2008 what it actually meant for gas to be expensive.
> Americans will swear that a ten cent increase in gas prices will drive them to financial ruin
Look, come on. There's no need to turn every comment into a chance to bash a whole country. I bet there aren't many countries you think so poorly of that you'd make sweeping statements about their populations. Gas prices affect all prices due to direct logistics costs and the increases every employee needs all along every supply chain. That's the problem with them.
ICE weigh much much less than an EV with equivalent range. It matters what you're optimizing for. Most people seem to optimize cost, many for range and some for GHG emissions. Based on which camp you're in, your judgment of of something being wasteful will be different.
Not really. PHEVs are usually one-and-a-half drivetrains at most. They're almost never as complicated as a separate BEV and ICE drivetrains would be individually.
They don't typically have a full transmission or CVT either. Taking the new hybrid Civic for example: it just has a basic planetary gearbox that handles forward, reverse and highway cruising.
Any time you're not at highway cruising speed, it's just in the normal position where the electric motor drives it (the engine only functions as a generator). It's effectively an electric car with a small, far under provisioned in Civic terms, engine that comes on to top the battery up sometimes if regen braking isn't enough.
At highway speeds, the gearbox has the engine drive. And since it's a less powerful engine, it will have better fuel economy than one that has to ever handle acceleration from a standstill.
And the whole thing weighs about 3200-3400lb, far less than any electric vehicle. So you're "lugging" around less.
BMW makes an PHEV X5 50e with about 30ish miles range and the B58 straight six. Most other options get a dinky little engine. The 5 series also has one that is just making its way to the US, 550e.
Typed this before I saw that you said expensive. I’ll leave my comment anyway.
I haven’t seen one that is cost competitive with its model’s regular hybrid version. The EV adds thousands of dollars, but only saves you about $3 per day in gas.
For example, The Kia niro is $9k more for phev and saves you 0.6 gallons of gas per day so it would take over 10 years for the cost to balance out. The funny thing is, the more efficient the gas engine is, the less gas the phev can save you.
From what I've read most PHEVs tend to have really bad batteries that are unreliable, complicated and expensive to replace. It makes sense that they cut corners when there's a whole other powertrain to mask it.
Is there somewhere I can find more info on this? Car enthusiast here who is genuinely interested in learning.
My impressions had been that it largely mirrors the EV market: A few early PHEV models (such as the BMW i3) had poor battery management leading to unreliable battery packs. This was fixed in subsequent generations and is not a problem unless you are scraping the bottom of the used market. That's much the same as how EV batteries are generally reliable unless you buy early versions of certain problematic models (particularly the Nissan Leaf).
> My impressions had been that it largely mirrors the EV market: A few early PHEV models (such as the BMW i3) had poor battery management leading to unreliable battery packs.
It's Toyota cheaping out as always. They put a 1.5kWh NiMH pack in the trunk, and charge $5k for replacement. That's almost a big power bank capacity, and using that small of a battery strains it too. Cost for enclosures and control circuits don't scale with capacity so dollar/kWh figure is atrocious.
It works. People hates it. The issues with it are mostly theoretical or matters of preferences. That's hallmark Toyota, isn't it...
Yes, I've owned one for 4 years now and I genuienly believe this is what all cars should be, it's just such an obvious idea in hindsight it's crazy that this isn't what everyone is pivoting to. I do all of my daily driving on EV power using zero fuel and the car costs me close to nothing to drive(charging nightly on a cheap tariff), and when I need to drive across the continent to visit family I just put in fuel and go, no bother with charging on the way. And on slightly longer drives the entire system improves efficiency a lot - just did a 100 mile drive this weekend to a holiday cottage, averaged 45mpg both ways, and that's in a 2.2 tonne SUV with 400bhp. That's the kind of number you'd see out of a diesel normally.
I own a PHEV, for almost a year now, as my daily drive. It's not as good a BEV as a true BEV (range is ~20% of one) and it's not as good a HEV as a true HEV (gas mileage on hybrid mode is worse than my in-laws Prius'). But it perfectly fits our current life. We can do all of our normal daily routine (commute/school drop offs) on one charge, and when we head out of town I don't have to worry about it (I live in a Western US state with long drives between population centers- I can get range anxiety just on gasoline as I did not grow up like this). So we've driven it for 18,000 km, and 14,000 of those have been fully electric, just a couple of weekend getaways and one week-long trip around the country have been on gas.
Getting all of that capability in one car is very convenient. We replaced an 11 year old gas vehicle, and I don't expect that this PHEV one will last us as long. But it was the right car for us in our current situation.
> Do you really want a plugin car that loses its charge in 30 minutes?
Yes? Probably half of all my drives are 30 minutes or less, round trip. Some get closer to 40ish minutes of driving on battery, which would cover more like 90% of my drives.
AFAIK it's not (usually?) two drive trains, it's one electric drive train and a generator that's way smaller than a normal gasoline engine.
I own one and would prefer if my next car purchase was another one. Unfortunately, while the model I've picked for my next car has a PHEV option, they don't make very many, and don't take orders, so if you really want it, you probably need to put your name down at all the dealerships, and the wait for regular hybrid is already long and the vehicle to be replaced was sold in summer. PHEV would be nicer, and we've made due longer than I thought we would, but when our regular hybrid comes in, that will be good enough.
PHEVs are lovely to drive, and availability of gas stations means almost no planning is needed. Fuel low, stop in for 5 minutes and good to go for hundreds of miles (current one does 500-600/tank depending on conditions)
> Do you really want a plugin car that loses its charge in 30 minutes?
30' are enough to go to work, where I can recharge during the day for the return leg. 30' are enough for any daily errand, too, so that would not be a problem.
Finally, for long trips, I'd use it as a "real" car with its internal combustion engine.
I think you exaggerate about BEVs. I have a friend of mine who has a Boston condo and commutes with his Tesla to his house in Northern Vermont most weekends. I think he charges once along the way and then at home on both ends. That said I'm going to Maine next week and I would certainly have to track down convenient and reliable chargers. And there would probably be some trips--even in the Northeast--where they wouldn't be practical.
(I on the other hand drive into a city about 60+ minutes away so I don't know what the percentage is but I do a fair number of trips an hour+ away.)
That works, but EV chargers are rare enough that you can't just see the charge meter getting to low and get off at the next exit for a fill up like you can with a gas charge. If you don't pay attention you can end up with not enough charge make it to any charging station. People run out of gas too, but most cars the gas light comes at with 40 miles of range left - 40 miles of range won't always get you to any EV charger (and with different charging standards you cannot be sure your car can charge at them all though this is getting better and will likely be solved in a few years as we move to NACS).
"30 minutes" is pretty misleading, because it's not like the batteries are discharging at a constant rate.
It might be thirty minutes on the highway, as new PHEV cars have ranges in the 30-40 miles range. But if you're driving in the city, 30 miles is enough to get you basically anywhere you want to go and back, even if traffic makes it a 2 hour trip.
Is it two drive trains? I thought ideally PHEV would be like diesel-electric with electric motors supplying traction and a gas power plant supplying power.
Gears are more efficient (assuming you are not stupid in design) than an electric generator and motor. We cannot make gears that will do the job for a train - they wouldn't fit between the wheels while also doing the needed 90 degree turn to the engine. Once in a while someone makes such a car, but it is generally better to use a transmission.
> Among this group, those leaving between 6:00 a.m. and 6:29 a.m. reported the longest average travel time to work at 32.8 minutes.
So, if "30 minutes" was actually how you measured range (and not in miles), the average worker in the longest group would burn fuel for 3 minutes, instead of 33 minutes. This is 90% less fuel than a traditional hybrid car would use in the same time.
Travel time != travel distance. When you're stuck in traffic, an electric or hybrid car will not consume any energy except for fans/heating/AC. An ICE-only car will have to keep its engine running.
Because demand isn't the issue. The issue is a new car that isn't a budget brand is increasingly a luxury option in the United States, because, and say it with me...
Wages have been stagnant in the United States for nearly 50 years.
Every economic stat right now points to this as the core issue. Consumers are squeezed more on every last good and service, tons of services are now only available via subscriptions which inherently cost more, and despite the economy supposedly (and, actually) booming in a lot of ways, that doesn't hardly at all make it's way down to the workers either via higher wages, or via cheaper products.
This is a complicated situation that doesn't lend itself well to comments but a number of the bigger datapoints include an employment market that favored employers for the majority of the time since the 70's, the ongoing slandering not to mention outright interference on the part of employers against labor organizing, "inflation" that when you scratch the surface is just companies charging more because they can, the ongoing consolidation of enterprise resulting in monolithic companies that own dozens of brands of the same product, none of which truly compete on price, on and on and on.
There are a ton of good reasons for Americans to be broke, and a number of prominent economists have been ringing alarm bells for decades now that all of these things coming together is going to stall the economy cold and send us into the... by my count, fourth once-in-a-lifetime economic crisis I've experienced.
Your nominal charts are extremely misleading. Real wages have gone up about 10% since the GFC. Is it up? Yeah, but that is quite a tiny amount annually, not even an additional pack of gum.
I mean I think the distinction between "goods that are not wanted" and "goods that are wanted but are not affordable" is a significant one, but if you want to stick strictly to the terms of art in economics, then yes I suppose you're correct. And I didn't mean to argue his point, but rather to reinforce it. If goods, when they become cheaper, suddenly start moving again, then the goods themselves aren't really the issue.
And I mean, this is exactly 100% my experience currently. Our sedan could use replacement, it's about to hit the 200k miles mark, and given it's primarily used by my wife for inter-town transit, I would happily buy her an electric car, but a new electric car is hopelessly out of our reach financially. And I make six figures!
A car is an inelastic good that is priced beyond what the market can actually bear. This is why the used market is so insane: people make do with a secondary market because they need the good but can't afford it on the actual market. And now there's a supply crunch on that secondary market, because the primary one has risen so much.
No it is exactly the same. If people can't afford to live in mansions, then it makes no sense to build them. Nobody will buy it. It is a demand problem.
It's actually growing at around 20% year on year, this year. World wide. The EU is the exception. Mostly because Germany is struggling. Everywhere else, EVs are growing pretty nicely.
I guess I don’t understand the advantage of EVs really. Isn’t a plug in hybrid the best option? You can do everyday short trips on battery but also have the gas engine for longer trips. Sure it is more complicated but Toyota has shown that you can make this super reliable.
Not only does this (and the things you pointed out) reduce the cost of maintenance, it saves on trips to get them done, and the headaches of the pressure most put on you to get things done you don’t need, just so they can make even more money off of you.
Also, EVs on the highway (when hybrids are using the ICE) are much quieter, and have more torque.
The only downsides I have noticed are:
- Higher up front cost (though I don’t think hybrids are much cheaper)
- Heavier = more frequent tire changes (again, not sure hybrids are much better)
- Range for long road trips, resulting in having to pause for long charges, and having to plan your route in advance (definitely not a problem for hybrids)
> And brakes. My brake pads rarely touch my rotors.
I still have the original brake pads on my 2008 Prius with 150k miles. (And yes, I have them measured periodically to see if they're still good.) This is typical.
What usually kills that age of Toyota brakes is not use, but rust. I've had all 4 corners rust to death on my 2004 vintage Toyota. They use terrible metal that just cannot resist rust at all.
They do. PHEVs and even HEVs are very easy on their brake pads. Usually to a lesser degree than BEVs, but it is not uncommon for even traditional hybrid owners to never need brake pad replacement for their entire ownership of a vehicle.
Yes, all PHEVs have regenerative braking. I sold my Chevy Volt a few months back with 50K miles and the brakes were like brand new. It’s very possible that they’ll outlive the rest of the car.
With torque blending, regen braking is blended with friction braking at low speeds (when regen braking is ineffective). Friction braking is always needed to make a full stop.
> Friction braking is always needed to make a full stop.
In my EV6, I have a paddle on the left of my steering wheel that I use (almost) exclusively for braking. It 100% only uses regenerative braking, and I can definitely tell the difference, as its stops are much more subtle than when using the brake pedal for stopping (even when coming to a stop super gently).
More evidence that it doesn't use friction brakes: when I use the left paddle to brake, the car will sometimes edge forward (just an inch or two). With friction braking, this obviously never happens.
Friction braking is rarely needed to make a full stop. My EV only applies blended braking in specific conditions (cold temps, steep hills, and full battery) and I essentially never touch the brake pedal.
Are you sure it's not actually applying friction brakes?
I have a Model 3, and even when the driving mode is set to "Stop" (enabling one-pedal driving), I know that it's applying the friction brakes at low speeds, even when the battery is warm and not full.
Regen isn't enough to slow the car to a stop, even in ideal conditions, and it certainly can't hold the car in place.
You may not touch the brake pedal but the brake pads are still being used to make a complete stop (this is how regen braking systems work, at low speeds regen is not effective so brake pads are used for the last few feet).
You’ll use wear out your brake pads way less, but they are still used very frequently (every time you make a complete stop in fact).
My mistake, I misunderstood what you were saying. I thought you meant that regen braking on its own wasn't strong enough to slow the vehicle down. You're right that friction brakes are applied for the last little bit to come to a complete stop and hold.
The 'transmission' on a hybrid is often no more complicated than the 'transmission' on an EV, many (but not all... looking at you, Hyundai) are much more simple than ICE vehicles.
Also, for the duration that most new car buyers own any car, any difference of maintenance liability of even a traditional ICE vehicle is close to negligible. Most new car buyers pay for a couple of years of fluid changes, tires, and brakes... then they trade in the car. They're going to pay similar costs no matter the architecture.
It can, but the degree to which it does in practice varies. A used Maserati with $1000+ oil changes definitely will. Failure costs of components at end-of-life usually don't, until a vehicle is approaching end-of-life. But the regular maintenance for a typical (P)HEV is mid-life is similar to other vehicles.
25 year old sedan with a Northstar engine, a couple belt and chain replacements, no significant transmission issues, no significant engine work. Regular dealer maintenance No major battery pack replacements. May not be the greenest, but I know I’m in the green. Plug-in hybrids do sound cool…
Combustion engine is a perfected tech, which can easily last 100K+ miles. EVs do have a cooling system for the battery.
EVs also have a battery which can be $20k, and electric motors which are $10k. This really makes them awful on the used market when the warranty runs out. If a used Model 3 needs a battery it is basically scrap.
Seriously, a YouTube video is supposed to be proof that batteries last ages? What is ages? If you provide something I can read you might have been able to change my mind.
Truth is not many want to risk buying a used electric car and the depreciation reflects that.
Generally, 10-20 years and 100K-200K miles. The US requires a warranty of 8 years and 100K miles.
For newer cars it's hard to tell for sure since the tech has improved significantly in recent years. But even the earlier cars have done better than people expected.
A quick google turns up lots of sources you can read. Here are a few:
Battery costs keep coming down. We are now sub $100/kWh, and Chinese batteries are approaching $50/kWh. So a 75 kWh battery will cost less than $4000 in the not too distant future. And costs should be way more interesting when you have to replace your battery in 2040.
Most people don’t own multiple cars and wouldn’t rent a car for those rare use-cases when they already own a perfectly fine car. It may be overall cheaper to do that, but people don’t think that way.
One or two annual holiday roadtrips to go see the family and oops that EV starts looking like an annoying option. Every friend I have who doesn’t own a house and bought an EV ended up returning it because of how annoying the charging was to deal with.
It’s not that charging was _hard_, it’s that they had to think about it.
edit: this may be an urbanite take. Even folks with cars don’t really use them to commute regularly. Semi-rare trips only.
I enjoy road trips far more since getting an EV. It's nice paying half as much or less in fuel costs.
Tesla's charging network is excellent, and I'm glad it's opening to all EVs on the market. I used a third party charger once and the horrible user experience made sure I never will again.
It's only 57%, so a good chunk who don't, but according to [0], the median US household does own two cars. I assume that a fairly large majority of married people have multiple cars (between the two of them), and only a very small minority of unmarried people do.
People who are spending new car money are not going to settle for a product that requires planning and effort to be used outside of one's daily routine.
This is also why 3-row SUVs and half ton crew cab trucks have proliferated as much as they have.
> People who are spending new car money are not going to settle for a product that requires planning and effort to be used outside of one's daily routine.
Maybe YOU won't, but others will.
I paid $60K for my Model 3 Performance. Yes, I chose to plan out my charging stops when I take my annual 1300 mile road trip from Portland to Santa Clara, or my recent 2,400 mile road trip from Portland to San Diego.
But I CHOSE to plan them. You don't HAVE to. The car's built-in nav will easy plan charging stops for you. I just choose to plan them out ahead of time (Using ABetterRoutePlanner.com) to min-max my charging time. IE, I can tell ABRP "This will be a stop where I expect to spend at least 30 minutes", and it will adjust the rest of the charging plan accordingly. Or I can tell it to stop at specific chargers that might have a specific place I want to eat, or whatever, but my usual workflow is to set all my destinations (actual destinations, not including chargers), hit Plan Drive, and then make some minor adjustments to the charging plan.
I suppose in some way, I'm sort of proving your point. But it's not nearly the chore you make it out to be. In fact, I actually enjoy the planning. Of course, one person's joy is another's drudgery.
I have found that people who are considering buying a new car and immediately rule out EV's mostly do so out of confusion and misunderstanding.
My father for instance wouldn't get one because he will drive to the beach a couple times each summer, and does not want to have to deal with waiting while charging. However, he is also the type who stops for rests while driving. But he, being old and stubborn, didn't want to hear it.
You're never going to a hybrid under $25,000. Pretty much everywhere but the US has the option of getting an electric car for under $25,000 from BYD or Renault.
I've done over 20,000 km in road trips in an EV. You charge while you're eating or toileting or sleeping, it doesn't affect my trips.
> Pretty much everywhere but the US has the option of getting an electric car for under $25,000 from BYD or Renault.
The US is afraid of competition in the automotive industry and the current import tariffs and taxes on cars are a bit of an elephant in the room here, too.
BYD just has to do the same thing Toyota did, build a plant in Mexico and use NAFTA to sell well made cars for dirt cheap.
I'm not yet convinced that BYD cars ARE well made yet though. When Hyundai had a similar amount of mistrust from American consumers, they improved their standing by offering a very compelling warranty, 100k miles or 10 years. The problem is I don't know if I can trust BYD the COMPANY that much.
We have three choices: 1) compete by enslaving our workers and treating them horribly like they do in China, 2) refuse to compete by simply outsourcing the slavery to China, or 3) compete by treat our workers well, use tariffs and tacitly admit that Trump has a good idea. Option 2 seems like the only option that is afraid of competition.
Labor is at most 10% of the overall cost of a car.
Now explain the remaining 15k of price difference!
Sure another 5 or 6k is subsidies from the Chinese government to the manufacturers, but there is still another $10k more that American cars cost VS Chinese cars.
I agree, the range has rarely been a problem for me. The battery runs out of juice about the time my butt needs a break, my bladder needs emptying, and my stomach needs filling. By the time I'm done with lunch, I'm good for another 250-300 miles, and I'm going to stop for the night at that point anyway. People doing >500 miles per day on a roadtrip are the outliers. Way, way outliers.
I drive home from Virginia to Florida in a single day, typically with one stop at the Florence, SC Buc-ee's. That's nearly 600 miles (in a gas RAV4). I do this a couple times a year and it takes about 9 hours, less if there's no cops.
Out of curiosity, how long are those trips though?
In the US and probably Canada, there's an expectation that spending 8 hours in one day going somewhere is easily doable. (as in 800 km in 8 hours with a few 10-30 minute breaks for gasoline or food). It doesn't seem like that's a particularly normal thing for a European to do.
Longer trips are actually easier in an EV because you have no expectation of being able to power through without stopping for breaks. And it adds the option of charging overnight at a hotel.
It's the medium distance trips that are harder in an EV. A 500-800km trip is something people without kids expect to be able to do without any breaks.
They are rare, but easy to filter for in the standard hotel apps.
For most of my trips I was also able to use block heater plugs, which are ubiquitous in Western Canada. 120V isn't enough to get a full charge overnight, but 8-10 hours of charging at 120V is still adds a nice boost.
Generally, no, a plug in hybrid is not the best option.
Where > 95% of trips are 2x30 mile trips (daily commuting); the vehicle is accelerating and decelerating the extra weight for no benefit. You have the increased battery wear, where you exceed the optimal charging range 15-80% on LiPo. Then the additional ICE factors such as brake wear, oil changes, fuel rot (if you always charge and buy gas once a quarter), coolant changes, an an exhaust system increase maintenance necessities significantly (where a brushless motor has no need for oil or open coolant).
Hybrids can also promote "green washing" ~ it's never charged and driven on short commute trips, the system is always charging the electric, using more gas than if it were only gas, with lower performance, a shorter battery life, and more components to fail.
The best option, is somewhere between renting an hybridICE for less than once a quarter > 200 mile one way, road trips; and, if your household driving is out of norms, ie > 200 miles road trips every week, having a car in the household fleet that is hybrid/ice.
Dodge has the 2025 ramcharger which has amazing specs! 690 mile range, 14,000lb towing capacity, 663 hp, etc. etc.
I've got reservations about dodge, and reservations about the first year of the model from any manufactuerer. Otherwise, I'd gladly shell out 70k+ and my left nut to get one.
I really wish more manufacturers would go this direction. I've got no interest in 100% EV, because I do things with my truck that simply are not feasible with any EV model, mostly due to range. The problem is, I do just enough truck stuff with really tough requirements that I don't want a non-truck without serious range. Yet, I still go to work in an office a few days a week and would love to use plug-in charge to do so.
not a PHEV, but I've been incredibly happy with the 2023 F-150 Powerboost. It's a Mild hybrid system, with great towing capacity, power & torque. Does not sound quite as "stout" as the Dodge, but like you I have my reservations about the brand.
I've been Using it as a honest work truck in the civil engineering / construction world, and have been able to get 600 miles from a tank without trying too hard. I've seen plenty of short (~20 mile) trips nearing 30mpg, which is above stated estimates. 23-25mpg for mixed use driving off road, on road, idling, etc. I'm on jobsites a lot, and just even having working AC / full host of accessories with the ICE engine powered down, acting as a generator when needed, is a big quality of life upgrade.
I’m not a PE (or EIT). I run my firm’s construction services department. I have a Bachelor of Music degree, so without an ABET degree, not much hope for me ;) I’m engineering adjacent, and really enjoy the field based problem solving and bringing a different perspective to projects. Just no sealing plans for me.
Just wanted to set the record straight! Good to see others in the civil field represented here.
Those are amazing specs. I want one that isn't luxury. Give me cloth bench seats, no infotainment... I'm happy with my basic 1999 F350 but it is showing rust (I expect to lose the box in a couple years) and so I need to be thinking about what next.
A real EV has much better performance than a plugin hybrid, which is more like the worst of both worlds when it comes to driving experience. If you think only about economy, a PHEV can make sense, but it is an overly complicated solution which is bound to have extra maintenance problems.
HEVs and PHEVs are usually no more complicated or burdensome to maintain than an ICE car, as their architecture often eliminates or mitigates some problematic ICE parts. Furthermore, very few new car buyers continue to own a car towards the tail-end slope of the product-failure bathtub curve. The advantage to (P)HEVs over BEVs is not driving performance, but versatility.
But yeah, don't buy a Prius Prime for the track. But it'll work great for going to the grocery store for a very wide variety of lifestyles and living situations.
A lot of people buying BEVs aren’t doing it for economy or environment, but for the driving experience. It’s a splurge for sure, but it makes driving more fun.
That's the problem in the OP -- EVs in the US sell only when they are premium vehicles. Cheap EVs don't quite drive like a Model 3. People don't buy a Leaf over a Prius Prime because of a better driving experience... and something cheaper than a Leaf is going to be similarly utilitarian.
Then we are pretty much aligned? I don't think, at least in the USA, that cheap EVs make much sense. The value proposition definitely changes in other countries with higher gas prices.
Yeah, gas prices are having less and less influence in what cars people buy. The overlap between [people squeezed by gas prices] and [people who demand cars from automakers] is dwindling. Fun fact, only about 26% of cars sales are new cars. The vast majority of drivers have no say in what is made.
It is possible to make cheaper cars, but they aren't competitive against nicer used cars. Back when cars didn't last very long it was viable to sell a car with basic amenities, like keyed locks, roll up windows, a single exterior mirror, no stereo, no AC, etc. But now, few are going to pay the prices that would demand when a used car for around the same price has all of those features. This pressure extends to cars of any drivetrain type.
Yes, and EREVs are obviously superior as a hybrid architecture yet most of the ink gets spilled pushing PHEVs, so it's pretty clear that people with PHEVs to sell are pushing the narrative.
I see PHEVs as the worst of both worlds. Electric but short range, hybrid but lower efficiency. All of the complexities and costs of both drivetrains added together.
And the high maintenance costs. Just took a hybrid SUV in for maintenance after my maintenance plan expired, got a depressingly high price quote for extended maintenance. Adds literally thousands of dollars to the price.
I don't know what a "quote for extended maintenance" is. Like a subscription/insurance sort of thing? I've always just taken cars in around the time they're supposed to have things looked at based on maintenance tables, or when something goes wrong.
They're sometimes overpriced (due to dealer upsell) and sometimes a good way to estimate what the manufacturer estimates that routine maintenance will cost, at least using their in-house service center. They can run $1000 to several thousand dollars for luxury cars.
The biggest downside of a plugin hybrid is the complexity and therefore higher service costs, likely shorter lifetime etc. You have all the maintenance requirements of a regular ICE vehicle and an electric motor + battery on top of that. Also the full electric range is likely much lower than an electric only vehicle so running costs would be higher.
Some EVs have full charge range that's not much less than a full tank of gas on an ICE at this point - the range is really a non issue for a lot of people.
I drive an EV with a comparably low range (~130 miles) and I can still count on one hand the number of times I've needed to drive further than that in one trip - on those occasions other than my lunch/dinner stop being limited to places with a charging station nothing really changed compared to when I drove an ICE. The rest of the time I get to plug it in in my garage overnight instead of having to stop at petrol stations, which is a nice albeit minor convenience increase.
IIRC the US has some ass-backwards fuel economy laws that mean it's essentially illegal to produce small cars.
Also there's enough demand for high-margin cars to max out available production capacity, and would you want to be making major investments in ICE car production right now?
It's never been illegal to produce small cars in the US. It's a tragedy of the commons that the more over-sized cars on the road the more intimidated the average driver and the more compensation in the sizes of other cars to "keep up". Over-sized SUVs and trucks aren't penalized enough for their domination and essentially destruction of the commons space.
That's also what fuels some of the demand for high-margin cars, because of the perverse incentive that over-sized delivers higher margins. People will be too easily convinced to pay extra (generally at linear relationship) for size and there's not a linear relationship in size versus margins.
Even without the bogus classifications, the EPA emissions regulations are inversely proportional to the footprint of the car. That rewards manufacturers for not offering small cars.
The "light truck" designation is made on the basis of features like cargo capacity and ground clearance. The Subaru Outback was properly classified as a car until the smaller PT Cruiser got its truck designation and they justifiably complained.
... yet the Outback is still around and the PT Cruiser is not. Why? Well, the Outback has a thousand tiny details that add up to make it a very useful vehicle, while the PT Cruiser was all about exploiting nostalgia and finding regulatory loopholes to create/increase profit margin.
It's almost like there is a lesson to be learned. Make a "cheap" electric car worth buying, and people will buy it.
The biggest reason that works is that most states dropped per-axle weight taxes for trucks (which would much more directly pay for road wear-and-tear than gas taxes, and which is why such taxes existed in the first place) and the ones that didn't carved out too many "personal vehicle" loopholes for trucks. It's a curious lack of disincentives (and enforcement of such) for larger vehicles more than "small cars are illegal". Things like CAFE standards could have been met in smarter ways if they were properly incentivized. (Plus CAFE standards were in part set with an expectation of not "double dipping" versus vehicle weight taxes. That the vehicle weight taxes disappeared is the smoking gun, in some ways.) Small cars aren't incentivized enough, larger vehicles aren't disincentivized enough. Especially with today's wear and tear on roads, the states complaining that EVs are dropping gas taxes too fast, it's a wild shame that we aren't seeing a faster return to per-axle vehicle taxes.
I don’t think companies are penalized for producing small cars so much as larger vehicles like trucks and SUVs are incentivized to become larger to sit outside the rules as commercial vehicles even though everyone knows that only a small percentage are used for commercial purposes.
Exactly. The large gas guzzling, glorified grocery getters are just an easy out for manufacturers to subvert the requirements made for smaller vehicles (which was completely short-sited, or it was planned by lobbyists). It was simply easier for these companies to continue doing what they were doing with what they had. Give a company and alternative that costs them nothing, then they will do nothing. We need a new fuel standard. A truck or SUV purchased after <some date> then you pay an extra $<some dollar amount> per gallon. Yeah, I know the implementation is a problem, but I am simply throwing out an idea. Perhaps they yearly registration is now an extra $2000/year. They already screw EV owners in many states. I pay an extra $220 a year for my car, and that is ridiculous. I have owned my car for 5 1/2 years, and I have 24k miles on it. This tax is completely unfair and has no basis in reality for "road tax".
Unless I'm mistaken, a big reason we don't have smaller cars in the US (other than consumer demand) is related to safety regulations rather than fuel economy laws.
> would you want to be making major investments in ICE car production right now?
I would if I were a car manufacturer, at least in addition to other projects that I may have investing in alternative fuels. I haven't dug deeply into all the issues VW is dealing with today, but it does seem at least in part due to an over investment in electric vehicles.
If I were really in that situation, though, I'd personally be investing heavily in designs more similar to the Chevy Volt with an electric drivetrain and onboard gas generator. Range anxiety goes away without having to pack a massive battery pack in the car, and the gas engine is much less stressed meaning easier maintenance and a longer life.
Unless I'm mistaken, a big reason we don't have smaller cars in the US (other than consumer demand) is related to safety regulations rather than fuel economy laws.
It's a combination of everything. Trucks keep getting bigger because it's how they game the fuel efficiency requirements. Small cars get bigger because of safety standards. Consumers in the US don't really want small cars, partly because we've gotten bigger a partly because it's terrifying to be on the road with the aforementioned trucks.
Similarly, cars seem really boring these days because most people want something big enough (i.e. CUV like the RAV4), and because safety standards for things like pedestrian impact have constrained the designers. So, we end up with a bunch of CUVs that I can't tell apart.
I drive a 2023 Kida Rio 5 which is small, simple and fuel efficient (combined 40 MPG). Kia is killing it though, because not enough Americans bought them. They (Americans) instead buy the larger Forte. I specifically told them I wanted the Rio 5, and after a few calls they found one (1!) and proceeded to mark it up $2k - still worth it.
Not only do Americans tend to buy larger vehicles, but CAFE regulations encourage automakers to increase the footprint (area between the wheels) of the cars they offer. This is another reason the Rio is (and other small cars are) discontinued.
CAFE regulations (in a nutshell) require automakers' vehicles to meet a particular fuel economy per size of footprint, averaged across the vehicles they sell. So, they can meet the standards either by increasing the footprint of the vehicle, or by increasing the fuel economy of their vehicles, or both.
That's true, but US fuel economy standards don't actually require vehicles to be more fuel efficient in a direct way. They require vehicles to be a certain fuel efficiency for their footprint.
Unintuitively, while making a car larger doesn't make it more fuel efficient, it might make it better meet US fuel economy standards.
There's no way to sell a good, cheap car without also cannibalizing your high margin sales and the dealers wouldn't want to sell it anyway. The vast majority of vehicle cost goes to:
1) amortizing the assembly line and upfront platform design costs
2) the raw materials of the basic car components, e.g. power train, chassis, and body
3) getting the car into consumer hands (distribution fees, taxes, advertising, dealership margin, etc).
Everything else like labor and upgraded trims works out to a relatively small percentage of the overall price, often under 20%.
Since you can't make enough impact by cutting amenities, you have to cut one of the listed things. You mostly can't build things more efficiently than major manufacturers do (though Tesla is quite good here), so that's out. You can't shave 50% off the basic materials costs because you run into basic FMVSS issues. Kia's strategy is to get as close to this line as they can though. That means you need to cut from the third category. No company wants don't want to cut their own margin, so that's out. Manufacturers can't work around the dealers by law, so they need to keep some dealer margin. Manufacturers can't stop advertising because the advertising department has significant political power and can get anyone proposing that fired. Manufacturers can't avoid taxes for consumers either.
The only real paths to cheaper cars involve opening the market to competitors that aren't limited like this, for instance foreign companies that don't need dealers and are okay accepting lower margins and not advertising.
Looking at what's available in Ireland at the moment, in the 20-30k range there's a Nissan, a VW (though it's the ancient e-Up, due to be replaced by the i2 any day now), a BYD, a Fiat, an MG, and an Ora (tragically no longer under the names "Good Cat", or "Funky Cat", presumably because Ora got around to hiring someone who had heard of marketing).
There are a bunch more in this price range due to launch next year.
Cheap-ish electric cars exist, they're just not, generally, suited to US consumer preferences.
If the cost is low enough, compromise on range becomes acceptable. I might buy a small, cheap EV that has range enough to handle my typical daily driving. But if I'm paying Tesla prices, it will need range to handle virtually all of my driving.
That'd be perfect for me to be honest. We have a Tesla Model Y which we can road trip in. I'm just looking for a slick, efficient commuter. I normally only charge my Model 3 to ~60%, which is ~150 miles of range anyways.
Man this thing is awesome. One of my dream cars was always a 90s hilux - I got so disappointed when they started taking design cues from giant American trucks and making them bigger. Single cab with maximized tray space is the most practical option if you actually need to use it as a ute.
My understanding is that because cars are generally purchased rarely, they make more money with the status quo instead allowing customers a budget option.
Budget options are out there but consumer demand for them is weak. Americans love their cars and seem to be willing to pay for a lot more car than they need.
Which would you buy - a brand new car with no options, or for the same price a three year car with all the options. Or you can go cheaper yet with a 10 year old car with all the options of 10 years ago. Anything other than the most luxurious car doesn't make sense for anyone to build in general because people who want to pay less are willing to settle for a used car.
If cars only lasted 3 years instead of the 20+ they do today (average car is 12 years old), there would be demand for cars that don't even have a heater by people who want to save money.
Low price normally requires lower margins, so for the same risk, you're making less money than with a higher end model. Make it up in volume, you say? Well, that increases the risk that you don't sell enough and end up with a loss.
Ultimately, you CAN "win" by doing really well with a low-end model, but the chance of losing big is there, too.
The Nissan Versa currently starts around $17k, and I see a lot of those on the road. The Mitsubishi Mirage is similarly priced but I don't think I've ever seen one in the wild. I rented a Kia Soul a few years ago and thought it was perfectly fine.
But with so few options, like the parent, I'm planning to keep my current car (a 2008 Prius) indefinitely, just paying for repairs as needed until parts are unavailable or nobody is willing to do the work.
My worry is that US automakers have all but abandoned the compact and midsize economy car segments, and I don't know what tariffs will mean for the Japanese and Korean automakers that do cover these segments. But see my other comment about the pendulum swinging back and forth.
I rented a Versa about 5-6 years ago and I was surprised how completely "fine" it was.
It was a totally functional vehicle. The radio sounded good enough. The seats were comfy enough. It was a bit of a slug, but it had enough power so that you weren't scared for your life when merging onto a highway.
If those sound like low standards... well, this was not always the case for bargain basement cars...
Right. I've been saying for a while that if you need four seats or fewer, there's no good reason to buy anything more expensive than an entry-level Versa, Soul, Corolla, Civic, etc. (If you need five or more seats, especially with kids' car seats, you're obviously looking at more expensive three-row minivans.)
One way of looking at it, validating the point that others have already made in their comments, it is that there are no bargain basement cars anymore; everything now comes with an automatic transmission, air conditioning, power locks and windows, cameras and sensors, etc. As recently as 2008 when I was buying my Prius, these things were optional on many models. Today's compact cars are, I think, the size of midsize cars from 20 years ago too.
It's kind of like housing in America where the cost per square foot didn't actually rise much in some places, but the average home is now twice the size, so the average home price doubled.
Japanese and Korean automakers make a lot of their US-bound cars in USA, so I don’t think it will be that bad. A Honda civic is likely to be more American than a Chevy compact, for example.
Closer to $20k than $10k seems insane for a budget-tier car, to me. I guess that's my age showing, but it wasn't that long ago (ten years ago? Twelve?) my in-laws got basically two identical Chevys of their shittiest possible model for under $10,000 combined. Granted I think it was the previous model year, but they weren't used cars or anything.
40 years ago, the Yugo was sold in the U. S. for $4500. I’m not questioning the truth of your story, but I think it a poor basis for arguing that cars should be $10K today. The dealer obviously was willing to take a loss to get those Chevys off the lot.
MSRP in 2010 (first I could easily find from around the same period—this was a couple years later) for the worst Chevy Aveo was under $5,000, and MSRP was rather more aspirational (bullshitty) then than it seems to be now, as far as what cars actually sell for. This wasn't even that big a mark-down from MSRP.
Your source is wrong. No one was selling new cars in 2010 for $5000. (Source: me, and my memory isn't that bad yet.) That's the reason I brought up the Yugo: in order to sell a new car for $5000 in 1985, 25 years prior to your Aveo example, a company had to buy the leftover tooling of the Fiat 128 (one of the biggest pieces of shit I've ever owned) and cut even more corners.
So 25 years on, without even looking anything up, it's pretty reasonable to assume no one was selling a car for that same price and adding airbags and ABS for the U. S. market. But if one insists on a source, Motortrend said they sold for around $12K in 2010: https://www.motortrend.com/cars/chevrolet/aveo/2010/
I don't think so... I vividly remember Nissan running commercials for the Versa in late 2008 during the darkest depths of the recession because it was one of the last models selling in the US for under $10k (like $9,990 if you got the manual transmission, etc.). There was also the Smart Fortwo, but it was a two-seater.
However, KBB's page for the 2008 Versa also says that it "had a starting MSRP of $14,025 when new" so maybe you're right? Maybe they're adjusting for inflation? It was a crazy time, obviously, with deflation so maybe there were huge discounts.
Oh weird, maybe my source was fucked then. I did find it generally hard to find any reliable-seeming info about historical car MSRPs, which seems... odd? It's strange the ways the Web fails to provide certain information (or rather, in this case, I expect it's the way modern search engines fail to surface the information we're looking for).
I bought my only-ever (and probably last-ever, as I can't stomach the prices now) new car as a 2012 Nissan Sentra, and I think it was around $14k and was definitely a way, way better car than the infamous Chevy Aveo (and a big step up from the Versa in size, power, et c., for that matter).
Vehicles at that price are usually crap, esp. the Versa with the CVT engine. And, at least last year, there was a shortage so that you'd be paying a few grand above that price just to get it. I'd bet it's still the same where you're paying closer to 20k for this car.
Now, if you could get a Versa with the simpler engine (I think it was a manual shift), it's apparently a decent car. But finding that model is like a full-time job for a week, then either flying out to whatever dealership has it or getting it shipped which is another grand.
The destination fee isn't really a "junk" fee. it's variable based on how far away from the plant that manufactured your car or, or the distance from nearest port of entry. Delivering a car isn't cheap. There's certainly some level of arbitrage going on, but the delivery driver is usually independent of the dealership.
The dealership knows ahead of time how far they are from the plant and how much it costs to ship the car. GP was asking that the fee be included in the advertised price. That's fair.
The dealer should do that. However the manufacture cannot do that - they are advertising to people all over the country - some of live next to the factory and some who live across the continent.
And yet the destination fee is the same no matter where you are. If you buy a Chrysler Pacifica in Detroit, 15 miles from the assembly plant, you get to pay the same $1595 destination fee as someone 2000 miles away in Los Angeles.
Since the fee doesn’t actually reflect anything related to cost of delivery, it’s hard to see it as anything other than hiding part of the MSRP so that they can lie about cheaper prices in advertisements.
So instead of easily comparing prices online, now you have to call dealers individually and ask them to compute the out the door price? Which they already know and could post online themselves?
This is exactly the kind of problem regulations are meant to solve. Preventing false advertising and bringing information to all market participants make the market more efficient.
They'll have to know your address in order to accurately tell you the OTD price. Are you willing to give that information to every dealer you're querying about price?
There are also choices you can make during the registration process that will change the costs a bit. Quoting a fixed price for that would require yet more small print disclosing that certain choices were made.
I just don't see how it works out. Registration costs money. Not just when you buy the car, but over and over and over throughout the time you own it. You should know this as a driver. Further, the registration cost does not vary by dealer, so you don't need to know it in order to negotiate the best price.
> Are you willing to give that information to every dealer you're querying about price?
Dealerships generally get your name and phone number if you call them to ask about the price including fees and taxes. If you make them post defaults online, they get nothing from you. Clearly better.
> There are also choices you can make during the registration process that will change the costs a bit.
I'm curious about this. Do you have some examples?
Besides GP is also talking about things like the shipping fee, which are decidedly not variable or unknown. The dealership knows how much it costs them to ship the car from the factory and how much they want to charge you. They just choose not to disclose it.
> Dealerships generally get your name and phone number if you call them to ask about the price including fees and taxes. If you make them post defaults online, they get nothing from you. Clearly better.
I email, not call, and I lie. About my name, phone number, all of it. Best they will ever get is zip code. They could post defaults, but then I still don't know the actual OTD price -- it's already a hassle today because I have to be aware that dealers will advertise discounts that are only available in-state, and only mention that detail in the small print. I live in a metro that spans two states so this is common.
> I'm curious about this. Do you have some examples?
My state has a plethora of plate designs, and how much you pay depends on which you pick (it's really just a scheme for getting more revenue, of course). I can also choose (dependent on the vehicle, not all qualify) to pay for an extended registration period.
> They just choose not to disclose it.
I agree that they should disclose it. And they are required to by law. It's on the Monroney sticker, and it is included under "Total MSRP".
Such regulations are pro-market, too (not pro-business, in the sense of being something business owners will be thrilled about—confusing the two is a common error). Increasing price transparency is supposed to be a way to improve market efficiency.
The destination fee is baked into the price in my experience. I recently priced used vs new cars, and every new car had the destination fee embedded in the advertised price. Customizing a car on the Kia website included the destination fee. No dealership in my metro tacked on an additional destination fee. The destination fee was line-itemed for total MSRP on the window sticker.
You'd say someone would build an API to retrieve that information by city. But I would not be surprised that the product seller can't be bothered inserting that information into their sales flow.
Sure, add that to the list of disclaimers in the small print so that the customer from the next town over will have something to reference when the dealer cannot sell them the car for the advertised price.
The problem is that cars are not treated like most other commodities. E.g. You don't have to buy a license to use a microwave or register it with the government. The closest analog is if you live somewhere with sales tax.
> add that to the list of disclaimers in the small print
Correct. Instead of a vague "registration fees may apply" disclaimer now there's a "registration fees assuming <city>, <state>" disclaimer. It's definitely not worse for anyone, and is arguably better for the customers who will register in <city>, <state>. That's a green light for a utilitarian.
I posted in another comment above, but I bought a 2023 Kia RIo 5 - excellent car. Small, simple, efficient and IMHO good looking. The Forte and Soul are larger (I also own a Soul)
with the American consumer buying 15M cars a year at those average $50K there isn't an opportunity for the low end. And if such market really appears - i.e. if the American consumer would hit hard economic patch and would really need cheap car - it will be at any moment filled by cheap Chinese EVs.
I would imagine the most price sensitive buyers wouldn't be looking at the new market at all - there might not be enough demand for "cheap, but still nowhere near as cheap as a second hand car" to make the price point worth targeting as a manufacturer.
They used to, that’s the thing. It used to be possible to get barebones A-to-B transportation with zero frills. Power windows/locks, air conditioning, ABS, power steering, automatic transmission—all manner of things that aren’t strictly required to get a person to/from where they need to go—could be optioned away if the buyer was very price sensitive.
In 1998 a Chevrolet Metro could be optioned without a radio or rear defogger, even. New purchase price was about $9k (equivalent to $14.5k today). Somebody was buying those, enough for it to be worth the manufacturer’s effort to produce it.
I suspect a whole segment of people would be willing to consider a no-frills EV at a comparable price point. Hell, if somebody made something new like a base model 90s Civic into a $15k EV without extra luxury nonsense I don’t actually need, I’d be in the dealership tomorrow.
You can get a low miles used Chevy Bolt for that much, and it's significantly nicer than most 90's Civics (has AC, Android Auto and CarPlay, cruise control, satellite radio, power doors and locks, keyless remote, etc.).
> I suspect a whole segment of people would be willing to consider a no-frills EV at a comparable price point.
GM made that play with the Bolt. It was routinely available for just over $20K. Still sat on lots, not getting a lot of love. People shopping for new cars want nicer toys, people who cannot afford new shop used and enjoy getting those nice toys at a discount. I bet the subset of buyers looking for a bare bones no frills brand-new car is quite small.
It is worth recognizing the role that ZIRP played in all of this. Artificially low interest rates allowed payments on more expensive premium vehicles to be much more manageable for a much larger portion of the population.
I think this is something people just don't want to admit. It's easy to overlook prices being ridiculous when your monthly payment is all principal. That period of time of ZIRP constantly had me wondering how financing was making money.
That actual reason for this is that cars are just hyper-reliable. The reason people wanted to buy a new bare bones car over a used nice car is the assumption that the used car would cost you in repairs.
That assumption has been dead since cash for clunkers. Even American made cars will hit 200k miles. There's ZERO value to a "new" car. You would be outright stupid to pay $10k for some probably not possible "bare bones" car when you could just buy the decade old Corolla down the street with 100k miles that's only $5k. It will even have fairly modern safety. This is true even in the modern post-COVID hyper contracted used car market.
> I bet the subset of buyers looking for a bare bones no frills brand-new car is quite small.
I think you're correct; we're probably talking about a portion of the weirdly minimalist and frugal crowd pursuing FIRE. Also, most folks in that small subset wouldn't even consider buying a GM product; it's going to be either a Toyota or Honda for them.
Source: I'm one of them, still driving my base-level trim 2008 Prius.
As an aside, I'm reading that the new Bolt sold nearly as well as the Tesla Model S in 2017. Before that, I think the similarly basic Nissan Leaf was the best selling EV. Since then, however, my sense is that EV purchases became more about "fun" (which Tesla has emphasized and provided) than anything else.
Sure, but compared with other cars of a similar size, it's not especially ugly, either. And in that segment the utilitarian view definitely dominates, people looking for something more than A->B are going for more prestigious badges.
Hell, if somebody made something new like a base
model 90s Civic into a $15k EV without extra
luxury nonsense I don’t actually need
They could strip all that stuff out, but it wouldn't really reduce the cost of the car by as much as we want it to.
The cost of much of the "luxury nonsense" like power windows and heated seats is heavily amortized since the tooling etc. is shared with the more expensive vehicles, and the actual material costs are low.
Think about it; heated seats are just some simple heating coils. You can get something functionally equivalent that plugs into your cigarette lighter adapter for like $10 from Amazon. It ain't adding that much to the cost of your car.
I sometimes think about power locks. I usually drive alone, and only lock/unlock the driver door. I had no problems flipping the little lock switch, and using the key outside was no problem because it’s right next to the door handle I’m going to use anyway.
Electrifying the locks led to the idea of RF transmitters as a secondary switch. Now there’s hardware for that, and a radio receiver. Gotta make it flash the lights, so that’s another relay and a wiring harness to the lighting system. Gotta beep the horn too, more wires. Maybe make it so you can hold the button to crack the power windows on a hot day; it’s just wire.
Fast forward 30 years, now everything talks to everything and I’d argue they don’t want to have to maintain a bunch of different firmware configurations to support fine-grained dealership options.
Not only that, but there's a cost to variable manufacturing. It's easy to build thousands of the same thing. It's harder (read: more expensive) to build a thousand of one thing, and another thousand of a slight variation of that thing and yet another thousand of another variation...
Specific to GM, those low cost barebones cars were a regulatory hack for CAFE. Selling 3 Metros made up for high dollar, low efficiency Camaros or Cadillacs.
With the move to trucks and ethanol credits, those hacks are no longer cost-effective.
Because there's no incentive to. The invisible hand of the free market only encourages a race to the bottom when the incentives are aligned. With the ridiculously high capex required to become an automaker these days, why would someone come in, just to make $3,000 per car, in a saturated market, chock full of regulations, to make money on the bottom end of a market where existing manufacturers can easily just undercut you the second you get any traction in the market.
Manufacturers make more money off selling luxury cars. The poors can just buy used luxury cars for all they care. We see the same problem with housing and luxury vs spartan options. The spartan option exists, but only begrudgingly so.
Privacy is in my top two concerns for EVs (and any vehicle purchase I make). I am increasingly avoiding every privacy destroying option out there, be it cars or services in general. It is, unfortunately, becoming nearly impossible to be privacy aware but the more resistance people put up the better chance we have of maintaining some privacy.
Any bit of telemetry in a modern EV is also in a modern ICE. There's no reason to hate on EV's for telemetry, you have to hate on the entire modern auto industry.
I don't think EVs are any worse than any other car. My F150 Lightning has precisely as much telemetry as the ICE version. Which is to say, more than I'd like. But I realize most buyers don't care.
Not good privacy by default, but as a hack you can also just buy a Bolt EV for like ~14k or so, then disconnect the location tracking antennae which takes like 30 mins of fiddling and $12 of parts.
I always buy used so I have some time left, but not much. When I bought my last vehicle the person had one of those insurance GPS devices in it. I can't even begin to understand why anyone would do that. It is so obviously going to be used against the driver and it is also obvious that it will eventually become 'required' and that just depresses me.
If you drive the speed limit and otherwise follow all those things they teach you in drivers ed but almost nobody does once they pass their drivers test those will save you money. The average driver is really bad.
Not at all - telematics schemes also penalise subjective measures such as "over-revving" and "cornering with too much lateral g".
Royal Mail drivers in the UK found themselves being disciplined for exceeding telematics thresholds when the company transitioned back to petrol-engined vans, from diesel, because they are driven in a very different manner.
Those are things I was taught not to do in drivers ed. I don't know how the UK compared. For that matter, I took drivers ed 30+ years ago, and I don't know what all has changed.
The point about the insurance GPS is that they will eventually use it against the person. 'You were going 5mph over the speed limit before the crash...' that kind of thing. Giving them more information will just lead to the consumer being hurt. Oh, and they will clearly sell that info to anyone they can get to buy it of course. That part isn't great either.
Lack of demand is the conventional explanation. But I think it is a bit of lazy and misleading one. I think there's plenty of demand for cheap EVs. But there's a problem with US manufacturing not being able to deliver those. Supply chains aren't there. Manufacturing capability and capacity isn't there. Etc.
And of course the EV market is still actually growing in the US. It's just that companies like Tesla, Kia/Hyundai, and other foreign companies with factories in the US are picking up the slack left by the likes of GM, Ford, Stellantis, etc.
Protectionism in the form of tariffs and incentives is making things worse. It's temporarily succeeding at keeping competition out of the door but it's failing at making local industry more competitive. Especially in the international market where US companies enjoy neither the benefits of import tariffs nor incentives. They have to compete on merit with the likes of BYD there. And that's obviously going to cause some issues.
Dropping incentives and tariffs would obviously be short term disruptive but I don't think it changes the outcome long term. Which is that GM either catches up or falls over (wouldn't be the first time). Either way, them delaying investments in EVs is not a sign of them adapting. Same for Ford, which has the same problem and is doing the same. Same for Stellantis. They are favoring short term profits over a long term plan. That's because protectionism is temporarily excusing them from having to compete.
That's not something they can dodge long term. Somebody will step up if it is not them.
> I think there's plenty of demand for cheap EVs. But there's a problem with US manufacturing not being able to deliver those.
How much of that has to do with the USA's extreme needs for range and size?
There are places I'd be happy to drive a subcompact with a 300km range (eg. the Byd Dolphin), but most of the USA that kind of vehicle wouldn't be safe or practical. That's an awful lot of expensive battery-mass the Byd Dolphin doesn't have to pay for.
> How much of that has to do with the USA's extreme needs for range and size?
Very little as far as I can see; this is a simple lack of competition. Most of the really long range vehicles are super premium products that are sold in relatively low numbers to people who can afford them rather than to people that need that kind of range (or rather thing that they do, it is a bit irrational in many cases).
Most US manufacturers simply compensate their lack of efficiency with more battery and cost. It allows them to keep up with e.g. Tesla and Kia in terms of range. So, they'll put in 85kwh instead of 65kwh. Or even more.
Same range but at a higher cost. But of course the flip-side is that Tesla can just effortlessly undercut their pricing whenever they are having surpluses. They sell the same cars for much less abroad.
It's also telling that Tesla has sold more Cybertrucks last quarter than all other EV trucks combined. It's not a very practical truck. But it looks cool. They've barely even started to ramp up production and they are already running circles around their competitors. No sign of a lack of demand there. Lots of signs of an outclassed competition that is simply not able to keep up.
One of the best understandings of inflation is to use the mathematical concept of "equality" on those. They're two ways of phrasing the same thing.
A lot of people do a lot of bad thinking when they say "oh, well, inflation is umptybumpkins percent, so the fact that cars are that much more expensive is 'just' inflation, and thus isn't anything".
But inflation is prices going up. When the various sources release "how large inflation is", they are telling you "this is how much prices went up". Ignoring prices going up because "oh, the prices went up because of inflation" is basically using the thing's own existence to argue that it doesn't exist, which, while abstractly sort of impressive, is not strong thinking.
There are some arguments about what causes prices to go up, but that's a separate question.
> One of the best understandings of inflation is to use the mathematical concept of "equality" on those. They're two ways of phrasing the same thing.
They're not quite the same thing. All other things equal, if a price increase is "just" inflation then it takes the same number of hours of work to buy the car (or equivalently, the car is worth the same number of loaves of bread).
The alternative is that car prices have increased relative to other goods. This could happen through higher-quality/more featureful/bigger cars (which would be removed from the inflation calculation), or it could come because of some idiosyncratic feature of the industry like the car-chip shortage during covid.
Second, if you wrap inflation into your salary like that you are obscuring some important aspects of inflation, most especially the various lag effects that result in your salary being the last thing to update.
While understanding "purchasing power" (the term for what you are trying to describe) is important, it doesn't mean inflation is non-existent. It still has effects on savings, effects on assets, effects due to the aforementioned delays as it flows through the economy, and is in general not something you should view as any sort of "cancelling" like that, or, if you do, only as a final result, not an excuse to just wave it away like it's all just an artifact.
New cars actually match the total average inflation the closest of any categories (22.3% for new cars vs 22.1% all items). Also interesting to note that food is up 30.7%, transport is up 39.5 % and shelter is up 27.6% in the past 5 years!
Is it actually $10K more expensive? The F150 Lightning I just bought was cheaper than the hybrid version I was looking at buying. The Tesla Model 3 & Y seem to be priced pretty competitively, as well.
Inflation is a shit metric because it's easily manipulated.
The cost of a GB of hard drive is failing spectacularly. The price of health care went up much more than the price of eggs. So what is the "real" inflation?
Government gets to pick what they use to define inflation so they can manipulate "inflation" numbers. And manipulate they do.
What you should look at is money printing: how much money did the government print. This is about 8% yearly for US.
This money debasement is eventually reflected in prices.
Some things get cheaper, because we can produce them more efficiently (like hard drives). Some things get even more expensive than 8% because we produce them less efficiently (health care insurance or college diplomas).
So to answer your question: cars costs more mostly because the government prints money, which devalues your dollars and car makers are not getting more efficient at making cars to counter currency debasement.
I honestly don't get it - the median income in the US is like $35k - assuming people don't want to drive vehicles older than a decade, do people really spend a sixth of their total income on cars?
In Europe the numbers are even worse. I'm fairly convinced only rich people and businesses buy new cars
> do people really spend a sixth of their total income on cars
Yes. It's a huge expense for a lot of Americans. Either the primary expense, or just behind housing.
> assuming people don't want to drive vehicles older than a decade
That's not a great assumption, especially if you're looking at people with less money. The normal lifespan of a car is 15-25yrs, and _somebody_ is driving those cars.
As you suspect though, the flow of new vehicles largely goes into wealthier people (average incomes in the $100k range), and after 6-10yrs the used cars trickle down to everyone else and live ~20yrs in total. There exist a number of exceptions (e.g., people getting a new car for reliability and not realizing that you could replace the engine and transmission three times over for the extra premium they're paying -- trying to do the right thing and make a fiscally responsible decision but accidentally doing something more expensive), but those aren't the norm.
Median incomes of single earners get pretty skewed from people willingly working part-time or low-income jobs as secondary income instead of primary income. I usually prefer analyzing things on household income for this reason. Think a grandpa working a part-time gig as a greeter at Walmart while going back to a multi-generational household or a stay-at-home parent working a part-time remote call center job while the kids are in school or a teenager working a part-time job. All of these positions would pull pretty small amounts of overall yearly income but chances are they're not the sole source of wealth/income they have access to.
The median household income is ~$75k. There's ~131M households in the US. This means there are 65M households making more than $75k/yr.
But yes, generally speaking wealthier people are the ones buying new cars with a lot of people buying used models.
A lot of people buy used cars rather than new cars. The wealthiest buy the new cars, eat the cost of most of the depreciation, then sell them.
If we had a functioning housing market, you'd see something pretty similar there too. The wealthiest would be the ones paying for nearly all the new construction, instead of driving up the cost of housing for everyone else.
I took advantage of the IRA solar power and $7500 EV credit, now I have an off grid home all electric appliances and excess power for hot tubs and EV's. The Ford Lightning acts as a generator.
This was the greatest most life changing and impactful legistlation ever: I've had $0 (ZERO!) in gasoline, LP, and electric utility bills since installation last year.
It's too bad that the only people benefiting from all green power subsidies are the people that least need them.
We should be investing solar in lower income communities, as those people could really use cheaper utilities, and any saving they get would immediately go back into their communities.
Those who are most able to pay for it are those who are paying for the highest initial costs, lowering the costs for everyone else by improvements in the technology, and making it easier for others to adopt later. Early adopters take lots of risk on things not working out well, and learning what things can go wrong and how to fix them (at additional expense, too.)
This is much better than those who are least able to pay being made to shoulder the cost and risks of being early adopters.
That money is spent to fund the capital expenditures and the on-the-production-line R&D that drives down costs.
That money that subsidizes purchases of more expensive products also incentivizes all those factories, the things that make them cheaper in the future.
> That money should have been spent to fund R&D/capital expenditures to make cheaper electric vehicles and solar cells for everyone, TBH
If you can convert this vague statement into a policy with real impacts, there would be tons of people that would love to hear it. Otherwise, it's just wishing the world were different, without a path to completion.
Should we all have free energy? Of course! But how do we do it. I'm all ears and hope that you have come up with a defensible policy. (Though ideally you should have shared it 4 years ago, because it's going to be a long time before we have another shot at setting policy, and everybody was begging for ideas like yours back then.)
> That money should have been spent to fund R&D/capital expenditures to make cheaper electric vehicles and solar cells for everyone, TBH.
It kinda was, it's just that it was spend in China and the US government got the money back by putting tariffs on the imports.
The tariffs are paid by the importer, whose customers also gets a government subsidy paid for by the tariffs that the electorate is told are paid by the exporter, so they get to feel like they're getting a good deal and the voters get to feel patriotic, and why isn't my MSCI China investment doing better…
Which would be great and all, but they already exist. But rather than take advantage of the cheaper existing solar panels and electric cars we'd rather impose massive tariffs on them because of the country making them.
Isn't TFA about how the technology is not resulting in lowered costs for end users? What are you suggesting would change the dynamic described in the article?
There's two very very different things under discussion here,
1) TFA, with manufacturers using their limited production capacity to target the highest margin customers, the ones that overpay the most.
2) green energy subsidies, in the comment I'm replying to.
In the first case, the price insensitive customers are the ones paying for a build out of capacity, and taking on greater risk while doing it.
But in the comment that I'm replying to, the poster was commenting on "benefits" which is presumably the lower cost of electricity, and those with the least also have the greatest need for lower costs. Presumably this is about residential solar/storage, or at least I interpreted it to be. Lower costs in solar are not having much of an impact at the moment due to the high cost of the regulatory structure that we use in the US; Australia has a far far far lower solar installation cost, <5x per Watt. If there's disparity in the availability of our overpriced residential solar, it's due to those with less generally being renters rather than owners. So their landlord makes the decision about residential solar versus grid electricity.
And for green energy subsidies on utility solar/storage, the question gets even more complicated because falling electricity generation costs are not something that the utility wants to pass on, since most in the US are regulated monopolies and have no incentive to ever lower prices.
In any case, the existence of the subsidy is not the core problem, it's the mismatch between decision makers and beneficiaries.
Paying wealthy people to leave the power grid isn't making it cheaper for those left behind. It is making it more expensive for those who couldn't afford to leave the grid. Now more of the share of the cost to maintain all the infrastructure is pushed on to those who couldn't afford to leave it.
Those who are most able to pay for it likely have larger energy footprints too, so it's possible prioritizing this demographic gives you more bang for your buck in emissions reductions.
We need both. There's plenty of wealthy people that can afford to go solar and could arguably have a bigger environmental impact if they did since they often also have large homes, big cars etc. If they don't feel strongly about doing it for altruistic reasons then subsidies are a useful tool to get them to take the plunge. Without subsidies there's really no economic argument for them to do it since the break even times are long and they probably aren't too worried about utility costs.
Taking one single family home solar does not provide a measurable environmental impact in aggregate.
OP doesn't have to pay the electric bill anymore, but the average residential solar install exceeds $30k before credits. Someone has to pay off that loan...
Not to mention the Chinese factory that manufactured the solar panels is probably dumping toxic waste chemicals into the local drinking water unabated. We're all too busy patting ourselves on the back for saving the world to consider the impact of the whole lifecycle.
> Taking one single family home solar does not provide a measurable environmental impact in aggregate.
In order for large numbers of homes to go solar, individual homes need to go solar. Are you saying we just shouldn't bother with solar and EVs because not everyone is going to do it? May aswell just stop donating to charity too right?
> Someone has to pay off that loan...
I think the OP is probably paying for the loan themselves. The subsidies are just a small part of the total cost.
> probably dumping toxic waste chemicals...
Again, I think everyone would agree that it'd be better if the solar panel production process was totally clean, but the fact it isn't yet doesn't stop solar being a net win.
>In order for large numbers of homes to go solar, individual homes need to go solar.
Assuming that SFH remain the standard. Even with ADUs, that changes. (Idea: subsidize only based on the presence of multifamily on a lot?)
>I think the OP is probably paying for the loan themselves.
Hm. Knock-on effect. That homeowner now has to command the income to pay for the loan. That changes his job choice, consumption habits. Maybe his boss feels that he has to pay him more to keep him happy (and not another worker). If he has to sell, price has to be higher in order to break even/get a return. Solar is probably a good thing for municipal expenses, re: less strain on the power grid, but you also get a better turn in that regard converting multi-family or non-residential buildings.
CA is doing both but PG&E (and SDGE and SCE, etc) are screwing everyone over as they wasted decades without maintaining their lines properly and now charge through the roof on power distribution which they have a monopoly on.
> In order for large numbers of homes to go solar, individual homes need to go solar.
The percentage of energy going to my house which was generated by solar continues to go up every year. And yet I haven't installed a single solar panel. Strange huh?
Wealthy people pay much more in taxes than poor people. One use of taxes I am in favor of is "nudges" to achieve desirable outcomes for all. This is an example of that.
True, but not universally. In cities, lower income people living in older buildings are a significantly larger source of tax revenue than corporate parks or the wealthy communities they subsidize. I spend less in sales tax shopping at Costco than someone who eats every meal from a corner store and overpays for singles of everything.
I don't even know what a soda or single roll of toilet tissue costs, but I'd probably be horrified by it because I can afford not to spend money.
The government gets my money on occasion, but they have a chunk of the nation on a subscription plan.
>We should be investing solar in lower income communities, as those people could really use cheaper utilities, and any saving they get would immediately go back into their communities.
Good news, these are called "community solar gardens" and they exist all around the USA, here's a large one based in Minneapolis: https://www.cooperativeenergyfutures.com/
Community net monitoring isn’t allowed in California.
Instead, PG&E let the grid fall apart, so now they’re charging crippling amounts of money to people that can’t afford solar.
On the one hand, with the help of subsidies, our house is off-grid capable, and our power bill is $0-50.
On the other hand, there’s a red-tagged neighborhood near by (they built homes despite not having power grid access), and they usually end up having a generator fire take out a few houses every couple of years.
Anyway, I really wish California had a second political party (not the GOP).
How is it crippling? My 1900 sq. ft. loft in SF cost like $100/mo most months. That’s 5 hours of minimum wage work here. Even the $200 it hit at peak is 10 hours of minimum wage work. That was with 4 people living in it.
On the other hand, living in a purple state doesn't necessarily help with corruption either. I live in PA and we had billions "go missing" from our Department of Transportation over the course of over a little over a decade. Things have improved in the last like 6 years or so, but we had to get to the point where our bridges were crumbling and just having permanent detours setup around them first before people really got on a crusade about properly fixing our roads.
Josh Shapiro's done a bang-up job actually properly allocating the funds we managed to get from the big infrastructure bill, but that's been a major change from how things have been for the last 30 years I've lived here.
> CEF has financed and developed 6.9MW (~$16M) of low-income-accessible community solar arrays that ... offsets the utility bills of over 700 Minnesota households for the next 25 years
$16M for 700 homes = $22,857.14/home
That's not an investment, it's just charity by other means.
And even at that price, it's overlapping in price range with the non-solar equivalents.
The funny thing is, I grew up (in the UK) with news stories about how the latest computers were so expensive in the UK that it was cheaper to fly to NYC, buy one, and fly back with it, than to buy local — and now the US is having the same problem in reverse with PV (you might well be able to fit some of the much smaller flexible PV systems I've seen around here in Berlin into oversized luggage).
(Sure, I get that big projects aren't exactly the same as small ones… but usually that makes big things cheaper, not more expensive, even for home PV vs. park PV).
That's just the panels. So, I buy a bunch of panels, they get dropped off by a truck, and then...? I'm going to use slave labor to assemble it all and wire it all up?
The price for installed solar in the US isn't high because of the panels. Its high because of the labor costs.
> I'm going to use slave labor to assemble it all and wire it all up?
Well, the USA is one of the few places left that still uses that, so you could…
But even without that, the linked product is the kind of thing two untrained people can do 95% of the installation in an afternoon, with the rest being a trained professional checking the wires and doing the final connection to the grid.
If this was done in a place that already has nearby grid access:
8 h * {$25/h unskilled labour} + 0.5 h * {$50/h electrician} = $225 per one of those, assuming you're doing enough of them to hire at full time rates not contractor rates.
And that's a car port, it isn't designed for optimal installation time.
If they need to also add their own connection to a more remote grid, well I've seen quotes of €10k for stuff like that around here, which is still cheap enough that you could do each of those on an entirely separate new not yet connected plot of clear land at domestic rates and still be cheaper than the quoted example in the USA.
Electricians in my area charge a good bit more than $50/hr. More like $100/hr. And its not going to be for a half an hour, it'll be a few hours.
And that's a car port kit, its a lot simpler to install than installing on a roof of a potentially multi-story house with a steep incline.
It is also completely excluding an inverter and all the additional wiring materials needed to connect it to your house or the labor of modifying your home's wiring. Its literally just the panels and a frame. So add another ~$2k to your prices here, at least. So really more like $8k for materials.
> If they need to also add their own connection to a more remote grid, well I've seen quotes of €10k for stuff like that around here
Yes, they'll need to tie into the grid, so you're really comparing $18k to $22k and continuing to ignore a lot of labor costs.
Similar prices can be found for just buying panels here in the US as your example link. As someone who has actually looked at solar proposals for an installation on my home, it's not the cost of the panels that's keeping me away from it. It's how much people are wanting to charge to put the panels on my roof, and the fact I don't want to be doing that labor myself at the moment.
> Electricians in my area charge a good bit more than $50/hr. More like $100/hr. And its not going to be for a half an hour, it'll be a few hours.
At contractor rates.
Hence me saying "assuming you're doing enough of them to hire at full time rates not contractor rates".
That said, I seem to have wildly over-estimated how much electricians get paid, at full-time rates the average in the USA is only $27.79 per hour: https://www.talent.com/salary?job=electrician
> And that's a car port kit, its a lot simpler to install than installing on a roof of a potentially multi-story house with a steep incline.
So do that then.
> So really more like $8k for materials.
You're being ripped off.
You all are.
> Yes, they'll need to tie into the grid, so you're really comparing $18k to $22k and continuing to ignore a lot of labor costs.
No, that's the price if you're putting each pair of these onto its own, new, grid connection.
If you've already got a house, you already have a grid connection.
If you're building a solar park, you share the same grid connection for all of them, you don't put a completely separate connection on each 10 kW because that is a pointless waste of money… but if you did, it would still be cheaper.
Oh, you're talking about the prices the company actually installing it pays. If that's the case, solar installers get panels even cheaper than what you're quoting from that German website. It's possible here in the US to get panels retail for just a little bit more from big box stores, they're paying even less with volume wholesale prices.
And if I'm talking about prices being paid by the company installing them, I'm still needing to do a lot more labor than 8 hours of unskilled labor and half an hour of an electrician and a pile of solar panels. I'm not going to make many deals if I don't have any salespeople, people aren't going to know to hire me if I don't have any advertising/referral business going on, I'm not going to have much continued business if nobody is answering the phone, people are probably going to sue me if I don't have people running support operations, I'll need a good bit of insurance & bonding for all of this, different sites have different needs so someone will have to actually design out the system, people need to handle all the permitting requirements and deal with those processes, I'll probably need to have accountants to help manage these cash flows, my costs for their labor is a good bit more than what they see on their paychecks, etc.
I swear it's like you've never actually looked at the costs of running a business.
Once again, the price of the panels isn't why it cost an average of $22k per home in that example.
> You're being ripped off
Please show me your $0 10kW inverter plus $0 for several hundred feet of decent gauge wire, enough for handling this 10kW plus plenty of safety margin.
There'll often be a broad restriction of adornment of any kind outside of a strict list, and/or at the discretion of the HOA/property manager. Many don't allow window AC units. There's a general air of paranoia about anything that could potentially bring down perceived property values, or that might otherwise project a sense that the neighborhood is anything other than a Flanderization of affluence. (There's also a element of social control.) Think historical preservation codes, but for a pile of sticks built in the 80s or 90s.
Unpopular opinion: Things here get twisted by our sordid history with race/class. We actually do value our civil liberties and economic freedom, as a general rule... but that can and does get short-circuited by attitudes and assumptions that were steeped during segregation and industrialization (and the associated widening of economic inequality).
Our government had the bright idea to bake those issues - particularly the strict rich/poor, white/black, good/bad dichotomy - into our housing policy, so now, any divergence from the local (affluent) norm isn't just a funny quirk; it conjures up anxieties associated with the Civil War, white flight, immigrant ghettos, eminent domain, urban decay, Superfund sites, etc.
People here are desperate not to be on the wrong side of the tracks, as it were, and so they'll submit themselves to no small amount of what looks like insanity to the rest of the world, in order to not live somewhere thought of as "sketch". Not entirely irrational, mind you, since these kinds of perceptions are often what determines whether or not a neighborhood receiving amenities like "parks" and "school funding" and "a place to buy food."
Circling back: window AC and PV signal to some people that folks in the neighborhood are too poor to afford central AC or roof panels (or to not "need" solar, budget-wise). These people (and the people who want to sell their homes to the first group) will fight you to prevent that perception from taking root. It wouldn't be as much of a problem if so much wealth wasn't tied up in real estate (the buildings, not just the land), but that's where we are.
Well, the US is a strong federal state, so it depends on the level of government. At the national level, the US government is relatively hands-off compared to other places. At the local level, it depends on your local politics. In urban areas, you might have an HOA telling you whether or not you can have an AC unit. In rural areas there's almost certainly no HOA, and potentially not even a local municipal government at all, and could quite often be legal to put up a gun range in your back yard.
Look at what it's solving for. Low income households are not the largest consumers of energy. They may own less efficient appliances, but there are other programs for that, like free home sealing and heat pump installation.
One group has insufficiencies that need to be solved, the other, excesses. Lessening dependence on the grid for the ones for whom cost is not a barrier lowers costs for everyone.
Now, having some sort of solar community energy bank would eventually be novel, akin to the replaceable battery charge stations for electric scooters in the Pacific Islands. Take your high density 12VDC canisters up, slot them into the locking wells, and get a text when they're full. Dock them onto your appliance circuit when you're home, and enjoy grid-free power for your home or vehicle.
This seems like an argument for utility-scale solar and batteries, which can be used by everyone. The do-it-yourself approach makes more sense for people who own their own home and can invest in improving it. That’s going to skew towards wealthier people who live in suburban and rural areas.
Agreed with the caveat, I'm from a lower income area where solar has been on the up. Panels would get stolen often enough to warrant thoughful consideration.
Probably found out about the tax credit while wine tasting, diving a Tesla and trading crypto while on the way to buy a new house with RSU's right after was given a bonus for new internal tool development.
The thing is, we paid $50,000 to drive a brand new, mid trim line kia 99kwh ev9 off the lot. It supposedly will also support V2H with an upcoming update.
They’re moving production of that model to Georgia, for what it’s worth.
Anyway, the lightning looks great. It’s definitely a tempting replacement for our ICE truck.
I’m conflicted about buying Kia again. I’ve got a recent model Sorento and the dealer where I have to take it is dogshit. I say I have to, because the next dealer is a $50 bridge toll and 2-hour drive away.
I’ve been charged for things that should be under warranty. They refused to do a permanent fix for a recall after they did a temporary fix. Dealing with corporate is an exercise in being gaslit and living in a Kafkaesque nightmare.
Kia and possibly Hyundai are in purgatory right now: they’re innovating and making cars that no one else is. Their dealer network, however, can have some sleazy used car sales personalities and make for a terrible experience that can ruin your week.
There was a recent article about Kia reconsidering the EV9 factory line in GA since the incoming Trump admin is likely to squash the IRA/BBB stuff Biden set up - specifically the $7500 tax credit for EVs.
As an EV6 owner I strongly considered the EV9 - which apparently fixes some of the annoyances of the EV6 and other eGMP vehicles.
Does your state pay you retail for your production? And have you gotten your first annual true up bill yet?
That setup is a dream for a lot of people, but it's not always easy to make happen depending on state regulations (and how powerful the utilities there are)...
I disconnected from the grid entirely so there is no bill.
Since the local power company here is only paying 10 cents per kw for solar power (which they resell at greater profit), I decided to run a small crypo miner and I still have excess power on a 22kw system.
I don't know of anywhere where its not legal to be solar powered but there were several thousand in costs associated with engineer plans and permits.
> Since the local power company here is only paying 10 cents per kw for solar power (which they resell at greater profit)
I think this is a common reason for disappointment in solar incentives. At least half of your power bill pays for transmission, and the half that pays for generation needs to be constructed such that the overall supply must meet the demand at all times, rather than simply supplying a number of kWh per day regardless of instantaneous demand. You can’t consider the “price” per kWh that you pay commercially to be the value of supplying a kWh to the grid, it’s much more likely that the utility is making a (subsidized) loss paying you 10c per solar kWh.
Electricity on the local distribution node has a value equal to the cost of generation plus the distribution. That's the value of it, what we pay. So by supplying the kWh locally to neighbors, the grid costs have been avoided. But the value is still the same.
Now, the T&D infrastructure has already been built, and the utility wants to get paid no matter what, but if they were a private company and not a monopoly, they wouldn't have a right to get compensated for their investment no matter what, because every company buys capital at risk. And that's for the good of the economy.
There needs to be some sort of forcing function to incentivize this cheaper form of power delivery, that avoids a lot of transmission and distribution costs. And that forcing function is the price that we pay those who generate the electricity.
The utility of course loses on every kWh they don't generate, because they want to sell more electricity. However, since they have a monopoly, we need other regulation to ensure that innovation that results in lower overall costs actually results in lower prices for consumers.
So far, the utilities have snowed the public and the PUCs such that they get away with murder on this transition. We need a grid, but we do not need the utility. And if the utility can not come up with a business model that works as a regulated monopoly when we have local generation, then we need to change the regulatory model, most likely eliminating the monopoly.
There's a lot to learn from Texas here for the rest of the country.
Your excess solar power is not worth the retail power cost because it is not as reliable or plentiful as utility power. If you think your neighbor would pay you the same rate for your unreliable excess power as they pay the utility, you should start a power company!
The infrastructure has not “already been built” - it is constantly under expansion and maintenance, and the bonds used to fund construction also need to be repaid.
I think your mind frame is that the reason the grid is not smart enough to pay you what you think your excess unreliable power is worth (which you stated to be the entire retail cost of power, including transmission and distribution) is because of incompetence and corruption of the utility monopolies. I think that is a pretty uncharitable take. It’s a hard problem and people generally want reliable and cheap. You can’t make microgrids reliable and plentiful without a ton of diverse generation (which already exists on the macro-grid) OR a ton of storage, both of which are very expensive. It is a problem worth solving but it needs to be considered with a realistic view on what people are actually paying for when they pay their power bill.
My frame of mind is that residential solar has the potential to dramatically reduce transmission and grid costs, but there is no way to force the utilities to shift to that model, because they will make less money. And regulators are asleep at the wheel and beholden to the utilities they regulate.
Grids are sized for peak, and without solar that peak is midday in most places, meaning that distributed behind-the-meter solar makes the grid cheaper.
Utilities, when they argue that solar is worth less, are not arguing on the merits of the issue but only selectively advancing arguments that benefit them. They will never present the totality of the issue.
It is up to others to push back against utilities' narrow views with a more complete view of the picture and what's possible.
I think you've still got too much of an "us vs them" mentality about the utilities, its not so much that they are refusing to shift to that model per se, these shifts are ongoing and happening today (which is why you're getting paid 10c per kwh for unreliable solar, IMO definitely more than it's worth), but I think a lot of people have unrealistic expectations with how far things can be shifted without addressing the implicit assumptions, such as the reliability of the power. Like, if we downsize the transformer between your subdivision and the grid by too much, that subdivision will have brownouts on cloudy days. In order to avoid that, we could deploy industrial scale battery packs, which also costs a ton of money and requires ongoing maintenance; at that point, it's probably cheaper to just use a bigger transformer to connect to the greater grid, where we have nuclear, hydro, wind, commercial solar, and hydrocarbon generation, which can all be used in different situations to match the grid demand with supply on a larger economy of scale.
In conclusion, the retail price of your electricity includes the engineering and infrastructure required to make your power delivery reliable most of the time, which is much more valuable than the raw kilowatts coming off of your solar panels.
I think you are giving the utilities far too much credit. They were bemoaning solar being even 5% of the grid, complaining that it would bring down everything. Seriously!
And if you didn't know that, and think that I'm too "us vs. them," then you should go look at the arguments made in regulatory proceedings and IRPs etc.
The utilities invoke preposterous technical arguments all the time. Yes, the grid should be reliable, but making it more decentralized and adding storage all over will make it far more reliable.
Industrial scale battery packs are quite often cheaper than new transmission lines. And we're going to need a lot more transmission or transmission alternatives in the future as more of our energy needs are electrified.
I don't dispute that some distribution might need to be upgraded to fully take advantage of the cost savings that distributed solar and storage present.
But you'll never find the utilities making the case for engineering a more reliable cheaper system, if that system is cheaper, because they will make less money. It would be financially irresponsible for them to make that case, and in fact they must try their hardest to increase the amount of money that is spent on fixed grid assets, that they can directly rate base.
This is not being overly "us vs. them" this is simple economics and incentives of regulated monopolies. Utilities are great at responding to the financial incentives put before them. Sometimes those financial incentives are making the grid reliable. But I don't know of a single regulated monopoly that has been financially incentivized to lower grid costs.
Peak is not usually midday; peak is in in the evening when people get home from work. So in places like California and Hawaii, you get the opposite problem where the solar drops off right before peak demand and you have to ramp up other generators to make up for it. It's called the duck curve problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve
The United States electric grid data is freely available and pretty neat: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electr... Choose a grid or a state to get regional time and you can see that region's peak will usually be 4-7pm. You can even see that weekend peaks are a bit lower, and that there's a second peak at ~10am when people get to work.
My sentence was "and without solar that peak is midday in most places." Remove the solar and California has a huge midday peak. Watch it shift over the years into the evening as more residential solar was added to the California grid:
(Note also in your visualisation that all times are Eastern and should be adjusted for different localities. And if you go to a summer week rather than a winter week, you'll find the true peak, which is much higher, and which has a pretty standard curve with a peak that overlaps sunlight hours.)
They have this summer's data too, though no way to link directly, and it still peaks at ~7pm: https://i.imgur.com/16mssuH.png . Using the 16th as an example, a peak demand of 44,008 megawatthours @ 20H PDT. Comparing that to their generation graphs, which you can separate into sources, like solar. On the 16th, peak solar generation is at 11 @ 13,201 megawatthours. By 6PM, it's down to 853 megawatthours. By peak time, it's nothing. My own residential solar matches that curve on that date.
Peak load without solar is not midday. Here's an NYT article from 1975 about introduction of Time of Use billing describing peak rates being in the morning and evening:
> Mrs. Wells changed her housework habits because for part of the year it costs her more than six times as much to use electricity from 8 A.M. to 11 A.M. and 5 P.M. to 9 P.M. as it costs during the rest of the day.
Current CAISO data shows that overall demand still peaks in the late afternoon to early evening. I picked a day in mid-august, and demand at 7pm is 40% higher (39GW) than at solar noon of 1pm (29GW).
You're making a blanket statement about peak time which is incorrect.
Historically in Califorinia, peak load has been in the afternoon, which I count as midday. At least, it's when solar panels are still pumping out a ton of power:
You're posting a random day in winter in California, where overall consumption is low even at its highest, because there's very little demand for cooling. True peak for the California grid is ~50GW, not 25GW like today. You're also omitting all the residential solar that never gets on the grid that drives down midday demand in that graph.
Texas also has midday peaks, here's today and you'll see that even though its winter and very little AC is needed, peak is midday:
My statement was qualified with "most places." There will undoubtedly be some places with other peaks for which solar will not shave the peak. But in most places distributed solar will shave the peak.
> You're posting a random day in winter in California, where overall consumption is low even at its highest, because there's very little demand for cooling.
You're just seeing the data for today. You can select any day you want.
Let's look at a really generous day for you, the peak annual usage from 2020: 47,121 MW on August 18 @ 15:57. On this day, the peak was indeed at 15:57. However, the demand remains high for hours past that. Demand is above 99% of peak until 5:30pm and above 90% of peak until almost 9pm. Solar production is down to under 1000MW by 6:45pm. Thus we have over 2 hours of near-peak demand when solar is not helping at all. No amount of additional solar (without batteries) will ever cover that 6:45-9pm period of high (if not peak, but it's close) demand.
> peak load has been in the afternoon, which I count as midday
Mid day is the middle of the day, as in noon. You might as well be arguing that you define three as five.
5PM is not "mid day". So you're cherry-picking time frames, making up definitions for things, and still not showing a mid day peak energy use, you're showing a late afternoon energy use.
Eliminating the delivery of kWs doesn't change the grid costs one whit. Grid costs are driven mostly by the number of customers, the max demand that the grid has to support at one time, maintenance, and the distance the lines have to travel to reach you. Just like a water main or sewage pipe, reductions in demand only change the cost of distribution when they are large enough and prolonged enough to allow for smaller equipment and fewer lines.
Having a residential power connection from the grid allows you to demand up to 200Amps of power, at any time of day or night, 365 days a year, with zero notice. The power company has to build the lines to support that potential demand, whether you use it or not. Over all of California, distributed solar probably has reduced the expenditures we would have need to have made on new transmission and generation facilities compared to a world without distributed solar, but that doesn't affect the baseline cost of a ubiquitous grid that serves from Crescent City to the border with Arizona at Yuma, and all points between.
> So by supplying the kWh locally to neighbors, the grid costs have been avoided.
No they haven't. The grid cost is to build and maintain the wires and equipment. Your solar output isn't reliable enough for them to downsize the grid, so even though selling to a neighbor bypasses the grid it doesn't reduce the cost of having a grid.
What you could do is split out the grid cost, make it be a fixed fee per location instead of per-kWh. That would drop the price of buying a kWh until it's much closer to the price of selling.
But if you do that, someone with a lot of solar panels would end up with even less money in their pocket, since their reduced kWh purchases used to let them skimp on grid fees, and now that no longer happens.
If you keep reading to the next few sentences I point out that the utility has sunk costs, so I understand you point quite well already.
Transmission savings are the big thing with distributed solar and storage. And transmission is the bottleneck for most projects looking to connect to the grid right now. Not only is it expensive, it's slow to build.
> If you keep reading to the next few sentences I point out that the utility has sunk costs, so I understand you point quite well already.
It's not that they have sunk costs, it's that they have ongoing costs. The grid cost does not drop when you send excess solar to a neighbor. To actually avoid grid costs you need to reduce your max watts in a way that the power company can rely on.
> Transmission savings are the big thing with distributed solar and storage. And transmission is the bottleneck for most projects looking to connect to the grid right now. Not only is it expensive, it's slow to build.
Storage can save on transmissions but it has to be set up the right way. Solar and storage working together can do even better, but also have to be set up the right way. Solar by itself doesn't make a big difference in peak transmissions.
Cheap storage actually makes grid defection a possibility for a ton of people these days. Especially when you start considering the cost of upgrading 100 amp service to 200 amp or similar. Once you've added a bit of battery, might as well go a bit more, and use your vehicle for additional backup when necessary.
People having 70kWh or more of mobile battery in the garage is going to change the calculation for a lot of people. Many people who would never install solar unless it saves them money will also spend a tooooooon of money on a big truck for aesthetic reasons, and then find that it makes solar a cheaper propositon.
this is a good example of how individuals are fine to do things for the public good when they are consequential or at least compatible with the things in their best interest. We're willing to self sacrifice only so (and not very) far, so need to apply that goodwill very strategically. Another example: I commute by bike everyday, not because it's cheaper, healthy good for the environment (even though these are all true), but because I love it and it's so enjoyable - even it winter. Screw with the roads, or traffic patterns, or waste my property taxes, or neglect the bikes paths and snow removal enough and I'll either stop or move.
It's great now but when it starts to degrade and needs maintenance and replacement that's now entirely your problem, there is no utility with a huge staff of electricians and linesmen ready to deal with that on a sub-zero winter day or in the middle of a rainy night.
With this kind of setup you can stay connected to the grid. In the event that your solar and storage fail unexpectedly you can still pay for grid electricity.
You still pay service fees to maintain a grid connection. Not to mention that many people with these setups contribute excess generation back to the grid or allow their batteries to discharged by the grid during demand spikes.
A lot of those service fees were designed to scale with the amount of electricity used. If you've got a net metered bill chances are you haven't really been paying much for service fees.
I don't know anyone who bothers discharging their home batteries to the grid. The rates they get wouldn't cover the cost of the wear and tear to their batteries.
I am part of a plan that discharges my batteries to the grid. I don't initiate this happening, it is based on a pull from the grid upto 60 times per year when demand is high. Full disclosure that I received a rebate on my batteries for allowing this.
Also, I just checked my bills and my service fees are a flat amount independent of how much electricity I pull from the grid.
What do you use for energy storage and how much can you store?
When we were considering solar panel solution for our small apartment complex that was the major cost and the reason we decided against a few years ago.
It's getting cheaper all the time, look at tesla powerwalls and many other companies are using them. But the really cheap thing to do it get an older EV like a leaf, they are much much less per kwh than standalone cars.
You should be downvoted for your last comment too! Or at least someone could explain the world we live in. Is it confiscatory to have public schools, funded by your taxes, fsck guy (you do have a great handle...)? How about publicly funded (by our taxes too) police and fire protection? Uh, govt funding to help pay for hospitals? Food inspection, are you crazy you might say, the perfectly working markets of our paradise make this not a necessity. People will self report when the water has contaminants - maybe?
Now let's add significantly reducing your own greenhouse gas impact for 20 or 30 years after you buy the demon solar panels (made from dead babies, some right thinking american might say), then putting your own excess electricity on the grid, further reducing fossil fuel generation. So in all thoses cases, that dastardly helpful socialism is for the public good.
you need to read up on the economics of "public goods", other people have thought this through before you. In a nutshell, police and fire protection benefit everyone, because if your neighbor has low crime or low chance of fire spreading, that also benefits you, so it makes sense to include everyone in the plan. But while the $7500 was paid for by everybody else, the only person with the $0 electric bill is GP, which does not have any fairness property.
The socialist mantra "from those with the ability" includes GP who has the ability to pay for this so that other people's needs can be met.
The subsidy was to incentivize adoption of technology to fight climate change. As a result, he took actions that reduced CO2 emissions, which everyone benefits from.
"we" overpaid for the climate benefit you want, can't you see that? We could have got the climate benefit cheaper, which would give us a bigger budget for more climate benefits.
Instead of him saying "for net zero cost, I've reduced my carbon footprint, which is great!" he's crowing about "I don't pay anything any more!" That is a private benefit that he loves, that we paid for, and we do not benefit from.
Its not up to a single individual to fix monetary policy. Maybe you should work on your social skills before calling someone greedy for merely making money.
we are all greedy, it's human nature, and greed is good, it makes us strive and human striving is what brings us all benefits.
So when I use greed, it's not meant as an insult. Only people who use it as an insult (frequently socialists), as if they themselves are not greedy, need to hear it hurled at them, simply as a proof of "hey, you're a human too, stop thinking you're better than other people".
and we're talking about fiscal policy here, not monetary.
For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils. It is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs.
Calling greed a virtue is certainly a thing a person has said.
The police force in the next city doesn't really benefit me, so F them, right? Reducing greenhouse gases and the price of electricity (such as from super cheap customer provided solar power on the grid during the day) actually does benefit me and every other electricity consumer.
Some conservatives are really stuck on the $7500 rebate, they are so excited to maintain our existing industrial base. They are in extreme denial about the public subsidies of the oil industry industrial complex, when we offer something visible for an EV they lose all reason. All those other public goods were paid by everyone who pays taxes but many people don't benefit from them. Say an elderly retired person doesn't benefit from educating kids, because they are kicking the bucket in the next few years, burn it all down behind them, they might say, reduce my taxes now.
you're just angry, and anger makes people incoherent. You do benefit from the police in the next town, and turns out, you don't pay for it, so I have no idea what you are talking about.
liberals should be stuck on the $7500 rebate, read my separate response about achieving even more climate benefit.
If you had even the slightest clue about what you're pretending to know about, you would realize this $7500 is about the farthest thing possible from the only time the government pays for a benefit that doesn't benefit everyone.
It's just straight up amusing how much you lose your mind over like absolute economic trivialities, because evil renewable energy is a symbol of the liberals.
>amusing how much you lose your mind over like absolute economic trivialities... If you had even the slightest clue about what you're pretending to know about
i didn't lose my mind, all of you have. i just "pointed out"
in terms of "the slightest clue about what you're pretending to know about", i was raised from the crib as a good liberal and socialist, i understand the perspective intimately, then I studied economics at MIT and realized I didn't need to change my morals/sensibilities at all, the free market achieves what socialism is trying to achieve, and then I studied more economics in grad school at MIT... please, tell me your background, and like you suggest, no "pretending to know about"...
I would love a 10-15K BYD. I was told recently desiring a BYD is un-American when I can spend 3 times the price on a Tesla. No thanks! I’ll hold out for something truly cheap. Cars in America are insanely priced.
I will never buy an American car. I remember my parents' multiple Dodges and Fords catastrophically failing before they switched to Toyota.
US car companies have created the lasting idea that cars are dead at 100K miles, because those companies' cars absolutely were. Meanwhile, I bought my Honda at 148K and it's over 210K now and doing fine.
Tesla seems to live up to the legendary Ford quality, with hilarious workmanship issues, Ford Pinto level "it'll trap you in a fire" design and frequent failures. Probably because they threw out the hard-learned lessons of a century of auto-making for novelty electronic gimmicks.
I believe it's worth pointing out that with your Toyota, you're still buying an American car. The vast majority of Toyota vehicles sold in America are made in US plants.
Which is a good thing! It shows that those other quality issues are not related to US labor force, or some intrinsic American inability to make high quality goods.
US cars have not been dead at 100k miles in decades, but people still accuse them of that. I have my Chrysler at 230k miles and still running fine.
Note that many of the "American" cars with the bad reputation are Toyota's with just a different logo. Even though it is easy to check who made the car, the American logo makes for the reputation that it will die in 100k miles.
I don’t know what you’re doing but I have had 3 American sedans (1 mustang, 1 fusion, 1 Malibu) over the past 20 years and they all (2) made it over 200k miles when I sold them with my current one approaching that, nothing but regular maintenance and one time I had to replace shocks/struts on the ford fusion. 200k is when I generally pack it up and get a new car.
> US car companies have created the lasting idea that cars are dead at 100K miles
OT but, there were clear exceptions to this even back in the bad ol' days. It was common knowledge in the 70s that for certain engines (such as Chevy small blocks), if you cared for the engine (mainly: regular oil changes) you could get 200K+ out of it. The rest of the car was too low-tech to decay, except of course for road salt vs body work.
We have 2 Chevrolet EVs, a Bolt EUV made in the US and an Equinox EV made in Mexico.
They're great. I have rotated the tires twice on the Bolt and I'm getting some different wipers for the windshield because my wife doesn't like the noise the factory ones make. Oh, and I got floor mats for both cars.
I have Car Play in the Bolt and GM's own system in the Equinox (Android for Autos or something like that, not the standard Android Auto) and they're both fine.
I use SuperCruise whenever I can. That's only on freeways with the Bolt and a lot more other places with the Equinox. I was backseat in an Uber Saturday and it was neat watching the Tesla Model 3's AutoPilot system. Very cool. On the other hand, GM was reporting no accidents with their cars, which include ICE vehicles, too. https://gmauthority.com/blog/2024/02/gm-super-cruise-users-t...
Protecting local manufacturers from cheap offshore labor is rational, especially if the offshore products are being subsidized specifically to undermine incumbents and put them out of business. I get that individual consumers want the cheapest trinket they can find, but the gov't has to be more strategic. And every country does this, including the one that would be the source of these trinkets.
I exclusively buy Toyotas because they are cheaper to maintain than American cars. Is your argument that I shouldn't have access to Japanese cars either?
I understand the desire to have a strategic reserve of manufacturing capacity. However, the US also subsidizes the US auto industry heavily by e.g. bailing out GM and Chrysler. It frustrates me that US car manufacturers continue to make exclusively heavy, low-efficiency vehicles. Give me something inexpensive, safe, efficient, reliable, and I'll buy it.
Most (maybe all?) Toyota in the US are actually made in America. If you look at the various "Made In America" indexes that take into account factories, supply chain, etc, the Camry does better than anything from Detroit
There's some interesting history here. Toyota started manufacturing in North America in the 70s-80s largely due to pressure from the US government in the form of tariffs and import restrictions. For example, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Motor_North_America:
"Toyota’s first manufacturing investment in the United States came in 1972 when the company struck a deal with Atlas Fabricators, to produce truck beds in Long Beach, in an effort to avoid the 25% "chicken tax" on imported light trucks."
...
"After the successes of the 1970s, and the threats of import restrictions, Toyota started making additional investments in the North American market in the 1980s. In 1981, Japan agreed to voluntary export restraints, which limited the number of vehicles the nation would send to the United States each year, leading Toyota to establish assembly plants in North America."
The book "The Machine That Changed the World", while a bit dated, gives a great overview of the history of Toyota from US automaker perspective.
There have been people who wanted much more protectionism from Japanese autos since the 1970s, esp. since they demonstrated they make great cars for less money and detroit wasn't really interested in trying too hard.
History looked like it was going to repeat with EVs from the US except for Tesla. Now GM has some decent cars across a variety of models, Ford has 2. But neither company has put out any really low priced cars yet (you know, like under 30). Tesla (lead by darth vader) is the only hope for the near future of low priced cars. I think ford and gm will get there eventually. But it could be too late if imports can just come in.
While not an EV, but a hybrid - I'm the lucky owner of an affordable Ford Maverick little truck. From what I can tell, Ford makes a lot of sweet $$$ selling the F series trucks and does not really care about low margins.
> I exclusively buy Toyotas because they are cheaper to maintain than American cars.
I think Teslas are actually cheapest, by brand.
> It frustrates me that US car manufacturers continue to make exclusively heavy, low-efficiency vehicles.
The market has decided that they want cars from Toyota and trucks from Detroit. I can't really blame the automakers from focusing on what makes them the best profit.
I'd dispute the low efficiency claim. My Ford pickup is way more efficient than anything Toyota makes. And even strictly comparing like-for-like, Toyota is on the lower efficiency end of that market.
Subsidy cannot work beyond a certain scale. Sure they may have benefitted initially, but in the long run I presume they need some kind of profits to sustain.
May be the lead in Chinese EV and battery industries is not purely technological, it is also the supply chain and scale developed over the years.
All this talk assumes that USA or Western countries have always had a level playing field whereas companies like Boeing or Airbus are prime counter examples
> All this talk assumes that USA or Western countries have always had a level playing field whereas companies like Boeing or Airbus are prime counter examples
As I said, every country does it. It is rational to protect your own manufacturing industry. China does it. We do it. European countries do it. Just because we protect our own industry does not mean we have to protect China's interests too. That's their problem.
The problem is that the US is complaining a lot about that when it is the other countries doing that. Even here, average commentator will call it a foul (whataboittism) if you point out that.
You can't eat the cake and have it. Either you follow the fair trade requirements or don't complain about others not doing the same. If you say standards, then follow by lead and respect them.
Also I do not think every country does that. There are too much pressure by the US, China and EU on these countries to prevent many from doing that.
The us of course subsidizes our manufacturing (whatever is left of it), just like many other countries. I don't know if our $7500 tax rebates on locally made EVs with non-chinese batteries compare to Chinese govt subsidies. But it's clear that EVs are going to be much much cheaper to make, maintain, and recycle over time. This is a threat to all kinds of incumbents. We face the destruction of a lot of our manufacturing industrial base if we don't convert some more of it to EVs, and this will also be destabilizing to our politics. Add on the enmity of the gas and oil industry (helped a tiiiny bit by Trump's victory).
The US is subsiding a lot of industries. Aviation, agriculture (specially agricultural exports), transportation and energy. They just introduced CHIPSA act to promote US companies chipa production and a lot more. When china does this (which is does) then this is far cry and outright harmful for international trade. Lets get out of comparison between US and China. Smaller countries will be hit hard (even with sanctions) if they try to do something from that.
The point here is that the US, China shouldn't try to prevent other countries from doing what they are doing and forcing them to harm their local economy and open markets under the disguise of free trade.
It leads to market separation. No one outside the US will buy US made when they have cheaper Chinese cars as an option. And the US can’t force external competitiveness to emerge with those subsidies in place. Not to mention internally having to buy more expensive transport has knock on effects to the entire economy.
In a way, that doesn’t matter for the US. Consider that the US has an enormous trade deficit. If the US brought to even, then all those exporting countries with large surpluses would be in bad shape.
This is a complex problem, and when the US is the importer from the world, the mere decision to stop importing would send shockwaves through trade everywhere.
If you are running $2 trillion deficits, then of course you will have trade deficits. You are an importer of goods and an exporter of USD. The problem will arise when your debt becomes unsustainable and alternatives to the USD emerge for settling international trade. This would lead to a decline in demand for USD, a drop in demand for U.S. debt, and reduced capital inflow into the U.S. stock market (end of recycling), essentially leading to a collapse of the current U.S. economic model.
The problem is -the us exports one thing en mass- security. And its starting to use that for shakedowns- which is the moment everybody becomes his own sheriff.
The current average monthly salary in China is $3000-$4000 US dollars. This is not about cheap labour anymore but simple economies of scale.
The whole talk about subsidies is pure smoke screen. US automakers have received a lot more subsidies than their Chinese counterparts. The top chinese firm receiving government subsidies, CATL, got ~$500M USD last year. BYD is said to have received $3.5 billion in total in its lifetime. In the meantime, the US government offered $12B just last year for automakers to start making more EVs, and Ford is reported to have received a total of $33B in loans, bailouts and tax rebates.
In any case, if you could put down $3.5B and get a BYD out, everyone would be doing it, reality is a bit more complex than that.
??? The average BYD line autoworker earns $640 to $840 USD a month, but that require overtime; 1.5x pay on weekdays and 2x pay on weekends.
BYD Wuxi workers went on strike in 2021 because BYD was trying to restructure to eliminate overtime, which would effectively drop the workers wage to under $400 USD a month.
That report says averages are $1381/month (120k RMB/year) for "non-private" employees, $800 for private (?), $3000/month in IT, $1500/month in mining. You happened to pick the lowest number.
There seem to be wildly different numbers reported online, but from a more thorough search it looks like the national median is indeed around ~$1400, while the 3k-4k range I mentioned is specifically for the Shangai area.
The only thing locally made is the bare minimum to make it "Made in USA", but everything is heavily outsourced already. There is no point to your argument, as that battle was lost a long time ago.
The assembly line process itself is a big strategic value. And just because we don't manage to source every individual part exclusively from USA labor doesn't mean we should just throw in the towel and completely give up on our ability to make machinery.
Absolutely! The biggest problem is the average American allows themselves to be duped and challenged by advertising. New tech in cars is great, but spending $40K and up is stupid. I've said it before: my $27K base model Ram truck will go from point A to point B just as well as a $70K(!) model. Is it just as shiny? No, but the money I didn't spend on all that shine won't be wasted on depreciation.
My credit union recently sent me an email telling me I can be approved for up to $70K for an auto loan, this is insane! When we allow competitiveness or temptation to decide how much money we spend, we lose every time. The only way to get Tesla to offer that $25K car is to stop buying the more expensive ones.
I was nodding along with your post until you brought out your numbers (I agree fully with the broader point). For me, any car above 15k or so is very expensive - I've always bought used and drove them into the ground. I'd love an electric car but it's not in the cards for my family until the total cost of ownership gets down to 2-3k a year or so.
This is something I've always found fascinating about materialism (I can only speak to the US). The messaging and feelings are incredibly similar whether your budget is 10k or 100k. Very easy to slide up the scale slowly and feel like you're still living small with a bulging budget, or to choose options that are beyond your means and so stunt financial growth.
Your points are well taken. I only bought the Ram because I had to for personal reasons. It's the first new car/truck I've ever owned and I will drive it till it's worn out. I've always bought used/low mileage vehicles to avoid depreciation and the headache of the warranty period.
Car makers make a lot of money based on our egos to one up-our neighbors. Car salesmen are trained to create a competitive atmosphere at the dealership by exposing our vanity and it works!
Is there a $27k base model ram truck? Seems like the base model on the ram website is $38k and when I tried to price a regular cab one from stellantis fleet those were like $46k, but I could have made a mistake on that site.
Sorry, no mistake on your part. I bought the Ram new in 2021. I live in the Tulsa, OK area, where prices are a little more reachable because of so many different dealerships.
And American prices are already insanely low. If I want to buy a RAM in Austria for $30k I get a used car with 150.000km. If I want a new one it's (much) over $100k.
Funny thing is that Musk himself said the “Shanghai built Tesla's are the best quality Tesla's” and he’s fully leaning into Chinese manufacturing.
I suspect what will happen is that cheap Chinese imports will come into the USA but only for select manufacturers who benefit the current administration. So no cheap byd’s but possibly cheap Tesla’s.
What it means that if you count what percentage of car parts are made in America, Tesla has higher percentage that other brands, even those you might consider "more" American, like GM or Ford. All Teslas sold in America are assembled in America (California or Texas). Ford Mustang, for example, is assembled in Mexico.
As far as I know Tesla never sold Chinese built cars in US. They used Chinese manufacturing (CATL) and Korean batteries in some model, but also manufactured batteries in US (Nevada, with Panasonic) and are expanding battery production in US with 4680 (used in Cybertruck).
Cheaper Teslas are coming to US but they'll be manufactured in US (Texas). Tesla told us that they'll start making a cheaper model sometime in 2025.
> Tesla told us that they'll start making a cheaper model sometime in 2025.
Next, you'll tell me that RoboTaxi is coming within 6 months.
Roadster is now 4 years late and has no release date planned. FSD is how many years late, now?
Tesla is the king of missed timelines and broken promises. I'd be surprised if they even actually had a desire to make a cheaper car. Their claims are just lies to boost the stock price. Margins on a base Model 3 are already incredibly slim.
I’m saying that Chinese made teslas might be allowed in the USA in the near future.
Musk himself has stated bluntly that USA made teslas are lower quality and more expensive so you can see the desire to shut down the US plants and bring in Chinese made Teslas and he clearly has some political sway now.
Yeah,if you look at the tariffs not as a fixed thing that applies to everyone, but a way to favor select companies and hurt others, I think they make more sense.
Half of America doesn't want to support the incoming administration either, and Musk has decided to closely and personally align himself with it. I wonder if that will affect Tesla sales.
I recently saw a bumper sticker on a Tesla that said "We bought it before we knew how awful he was." Because of Musk, my wife and I will never buy a Tesla even if they do release a basic, low-cost model here in the US to compete with Japanese and Korean economy cars.
On the other hand, as the other comment said about him "tricking Republicans," I think he's also gained a new segment of buyers with his political play, so this might be a wash.
I don't know what will publicly get the blame, but I, and I don't think I'm unique in this regard, am not buying a Tesla because of the documented issues the cars keep having: getting bricked, catching fire, being needlessly difficult to escape in an emergency, tons of unfulfilled promises about new features, etc. On top of this, everyone who I knew who had a Tesla never bought a 2nd.
I'd like to see some real numbers. All to often something gets in the news and so you think there is a real issue while in reality it is no worse than anything else. Statistics are important, otherwise we get lost in our own biases.
It is very common for people to change brands every time they get a new car.
He wants the tax credit snuffed out to eliminate US competition and tarrifs against imports to eliminate foreign competition.
No tax credit, no Rivian. I can see why he wants that. Their build quality and manufacturing ability trounce the Tesla when they were at that stage. Rivian has full EV vans in production and on the road daily. Impressive as hell.
That isn't quite true. They are aware of EV trucks - they won't buy one of course, but they are aware. They spread stories about those trucks not having any useful range (which is true - when pulling a trailer or driving well over the speed limit the EVs lose range) Those diesel trucks they drive get 600 miles unloaded.
The incoming administration has shown contempt for programs created by the "other side". They're strongly against renewable energy in general, and their patrons are oil and gas people.
I think there are a lot of little reasons all combined, and that is definitely one of them.
- Heavy criticism over the past 6 years from traditional news sources (even tech sources like Ars Technica)... basically ever since the Tham Luang cave rescue*
- Thick hate from people in the comments sections
- Government agencies interfering with SpaceX and Tesla
- Biden administration ignoring his carbon tax suggestion
- Biden administration snubbing Tesla at the EV Summit
- His family transgender drama
- COVID mandates shutting down his manufacturing for a period of time
- Conservatives not buying EVs
If you look at all his points of friction in recent years it's not much of a surprise to see the transformation.
*The cave rescue was a sad turning point for Musk. He endured excessive ridicule for pushing for a technological solution, then really stepped in it with his bitter accusations against that rescue diver.
> As evidence look at all of the quickly disproven posts on a wide range of topics that Elon has posted. He did no research at all before posting those things (despite a large following, and thus large responsibility). He "felt" that the post was good/right, so he went with it.
Or, more likely, he knows exactly what he is doing.
There's also the closing of his factory by the lady that didn't like him during covid, the Biden administration's decision to never mention Tesla, instead proclaiming that manufacturers like GM were making America Electric (Tesla sold way more electric cars, and they are much more American).
> the Biden administration's decision to never mention Tesla, instead proclaiming that manufacturers like GM were making America Electric (Tesla sold way more electric cars, and they are much more American).
This always bugged me.
Look, I'm no fan of Elon Musk, but Tesla has been the most influential car manufacturer in the EV space. To blatantly ignore them when talking about the electrification of cars in America is simply madness.
He also had kind of a meltdown during the initial period of COVID isolation when his factories were closed too.
I think it was that double-whammy: both his trans daughter and the threat of COVID shutdowns destroying Tesla happened pretty close to each other. Those combined drove him not just to traditional fiscal conservatism but to the modern populist identity-driven Trump politics.
That and he's visibly obsessed with validation and popularity and going hard-right has given him that in spades. He wants to be cheered-for at rallies the way Trump is... remember the time that Dave Chappelle brought him out on stage in SF and he was greeted with a wave of boos?
I get the point, but also he's a much more competent salesman (and, I'm assured, rocket scientist) than he is at basically all the other things he's inadvisably gotten involved with.
So, while I'd bet against Twitter (if I such a thing were possible), I wouldn't bet against Tesla being a good fit for the US market.
European sales may well collapse, and he may be very confused about this, but I'd still expect his approach to do well in the USA.
I don't remember the 90s being this polarizing. Sure, people made fun of blowjobs in the White House, but it didn't feel like we were always on the precipice of civil war and societal collapse. Even Bush and Obama weren't so divisive. Yeah, people always had their political preferences, but there used to be such a thing as a shared American identity to some degree, especially in the post-9/11 years. Not these days.
As an independent, it's especially discouraging. I don't see many level-headed voters or politicians anymore, and a lot of the basic governmental services and protections seem to be collapsing while we focus on culture wars. We can't even work together as a country to discuss something as boring yet important as energy policy. Who knew battery-powered cars could be so divisive. Everything is weaponized now.
Un-American or not, those 10k BYDs reflect Chinese supply chains, labor prices, and market subsidies and cars built to different regulations - turns out if they play the game like other manufacturers do, BYDs aren't actually that much cheaper to make.
The only difference between the vast majority of cars "Made in the USA" is the scant margin that allows manufacturers to use that mark. Most cars are made outside the USA. So, as far as I'm concerned, they are all basically un-American.
That's beside from the point that Tesla is being run by a Nazi.
I don't remember the source so, someone please correct me if I'm wrong but, I read that no EV battery can be made for less than $50K. So, either BYD is cutting some serious corners (possibly) or they are being heavily subsidized (probably). If either are true, I can see how that would be damaging to us.
> I don't remember the source so, someone please correct me if I'm wrong but, I read that no EV battery can be made for less than $50K.
Absolute hogwash.
The only way for this to be true is if you amortize the cost of R&D and factory building over a small number of batteries and include it in the manufacturing cost, and I think it's incredibly misleading to include the cost of R&D into the cost of a battery, simply for the fact that you can make wild claims by just including it.
So...for an incumbent manufacturer that's putting very little effort into actually selling EVs, it might be true that it's costing them $50K per battery if you include the cost of setting up the manufacturing. But for someone like Tesla, who has literally sold millions of cars, even if you include that cost, it's closer to $10K.
I’ve heard replacing an EV sadan’s battery is typically ~$10K (capacity matters of course).
Also, fwiw, our home batteries (sold at profit, with lots of expensive other stuff and
install labor) were about $20K, and the same capacity as our small car.
“As automakers were profit maximizing during the supply chain crisis era, you are going to prioritize the bigger vehicles, the more expensive vehicles with their higher margins,” Tyson Jominy, vice president of data and analytics at J.D. Power, told me. “Now we just don’t have” these cheaper models.
You also leave out the emissions exceptions for vehicles above a certain size, which also incentivizes manufacturers to build and sell larger vehicles.
Look at fords lineup now. No sedan. Its straight up embarrasing if you are the first lemming to start burning furniture to save on heat. But if the entire industry has been doing just this since 2008 then you are the fool for not playing the game your investors expect from you. Never mind how you might fare 10 years from now. Quarterly thinking dominates.
They started long ago. Ford himself was doing that. However what makes for maximum profit has changed over time. As cars last longer more and more people are not buying new cars so they have to make cars for the people left. If you want me to buy a new car it needs to be cheap - my 25 year old truck is paid off and still runs fine.
They’ve done it for ages but there were market constraints. The pandemic broke that in two key ways: the first was the chip shortage they accidentally created by breaking their supply contracts early on but the second was because so many people stopped using transit. That created a demand spike at the same time supply was limited, which they capitalized on by prioritizing the most expensive models for production since they knew many buyers would feel they had no ability to negotiate.
Higher interest rates and other inflation caused by profit-taking in other industries drove this to a head since consumers couldn’t just soak it up, but none of the manufacturers wants to be the first to lower their margins.
This. Yep, automakers have deliberately gone after higher profit margins per vehicle. Huge-volume, lower-cost cars are slowly going away. Get one while you can, if that's your thing.
If that were true, you wouldn't be able to buy multiple vehicles for under $18,000, which would have been a $10,000 vehicle at the turn of the century. How many $10,000 cars do you remember from 2000? I was in the market for my 3rd car by then and I can tell you the answer was zero. Cars are actually cheaper today than they've ever been DESPITE the increased safety and emissions features and you are exactly wrong in your claim.
The fact that most cars are priced at $60K doesn't mean cars cost that much to make, it means that the US car makers have decided to stop caring about poor people, leaving them to the used market while they go luxury, chasing ever higher margins from a smaller and smaller but ever-wealthier consumer.
Again, if safety or emissions requirements drove up prices, how is it legal for Nissan, Mitsubishi, Kia/Hundai and others to sell cars that cost under $10K in 2000 dollars when you couldn't buy new in 2000 for anywhere close to that? Just because Ford and GM WONT compete there doesn't mean competing there is cost prohibitive.
It's the biggest purchase most people make in their lives (and on a regular basis to boot), aside from real estate. Not the worst thing to be passionate about.
It's weird the Chevy Bolt wasn't mentioned. After the $7500 tax credit, you could get a brand new Chevy Bolt for under $20k. If you haven't driven a Bolt, I can't recommend it more. It's about as perfect as car as I could reasonably dream up. It's a hatchback, minimally gimmicky (compared to, e.g, a Tesla, where so many things are "different" for the sake of being different), unnecessarily fast—truly, it's shocking how quick it is, very respectable range of ~270 miles, has Apple CarPlay (or Android's equivalent if you're into that sort of thing), and it's cheap.
I picked up a used 2023 for $14k last month. Hertz is unloading their fleet of EV's, so they're ridiculously cheap if you don't mind driving a former rental car.
Picked up a used Bolt as well. Certified used with 7 years left on the battery warranty for about $15k.
Anyone who actually wants a cheap EV can buy a cheap EV.
There's just too many people that think they need a 3 row EV SUV with 500 miles of range, and that it should be under $35k.
Also the goal posts keep getting moved. Used to be people would say EVs will never take off until they hit $35k. Now that there are new EVs that can be had for that price, the new problem is that EVs will never take off unless they're $25k.
Meanwhile just about every EV sales graph shows an upward trajectory regardless of these "requirements".
Yes, an in fact IMO that makes the used models even more of a steal. Get a several year old model with a pretty much new battery. The battery is pretty much the main wear item in the whole drivetrain, so its like buying a used ICE with a brand new drive train.
Yeah they are fixed. A Bolt is a nice vehicle to buy if you don't mind its slow charging; and judging by the number of Bolts on the road plenty of people don't mind.
Unfortunately, while BYD would be the most readily-available option for cheap cars, it would need: homologation, distributors, parts suppliers, repeal of the protectionist tariffs protecting Tesla, and the removal of Musk from an unfair position of power, influence, and regulatory capture, and whatever the heck DOGE will be.
The larger issue is that, in order to afford housing, a car, and a life, regular American workers need to be paid livable wages to keep up with the inflation "pay cut" and reverse decades of sliding standards of living through lower and suppressed real wages.
American Dream? At this point I'd settle for some reasonable chance that I'd be able to still rent an apt and put food on the table next year, nevermind actually owning anything or ever retiring, lol.
I'll be squarely in the have-not camp, eager to serve our rich robot-assisted overlords.
Americans already thought the Bolt was far too small and had far too little range. BYD's cheap EVs like the Seagull are even smaller and have less range.
After reading some of the comments, the next questions, why are automakers not building plants in Africa? Cheap labor force, cheap land, probably needs education and training. China is courting Africa, is the US?
Firstly, Africa is a continent, not a sovereign nation or a monolithic politico-economic bloc. Cars aren't manufactured in every country in Asia, but primarily East and Southeast Asia. Asia proper extends from Anatolia to the Bering Strait, where many countries in between have no automobile industry whether domestic or foreign.
Secondly, there are plenty of reasons to avoid doing business in the many African countries, not the least of which are political instability, low literacy rates of the native populations, unfavorable and inconsistent economic policies (tariffs, board membership requirements, etc.), as well as inefficient and corrupt bureaucracies. That last one can create legal issues for you if you run a business incorporated in the US.
Of all the places in the world to build factories, you choose Africa? Not India, Vietnam, Philippines, Indonesia? Nothing personal against Africa but there are just a lot of options that aren't china with better industrial policy and want to build stuff to export.
US automarket is not a free market is why. Protective tariffs and other taxes or else we’d already be driving something hammered out of bangladesh as of decades ago.
Recent Japanese and Chinese automotive plants have gone up in the more stable countries on the continent such as Ghana, Egypt, and Kenya, but I assume this production will all be for local consumption.
France has dibs on Africa. Plus, the American manufacturing industry was our gift to and remains our primary bargaining chip with CCP. We wouldn't dare give it to anyone else.
This is partially a case of not moving the goalposts - if you run an inflation calculator [0] on 25k from 2017-now, it comes in right around 32.5k, and you can definitely order a Tesla for less than that today.
> 1993 Geo Metro pricing starts at $1,410 for the Metro XFi Hatchback 2D, which had a starting MSRP of $7,296 when new. The range-topping 1993 Metro LSi Convertible 2D starts at $1,481 today, originally priced from $10,749.
The British made the same mistake back in the day with motorcycles. "Who cares about the market for 125 cc machines?" they said.
The Japanese did, and now they have the market, the British used to have, for luxury and high powered motor cycles. As well as most of the 125cc market
Not if our governments start putting tariffs on everything.
I am Canadian, but it also applies to other governments (including the US). The politicians know that it's not going to be easy to do the actual right thing and build up a competitive industry. Instead, it's much easier to just slap some tariffs and make lagging productivity the next generation's problem.
That would only apply to markets with tariffs, and not the rest of the world. China can sell their EVs to Central Asia, Russia, Africa, south east Asia, Australia, and still dominate the world wide market. America, Canada, Japan, Western Europe, and Korea can protect their markets, but they can’t really protect their market share.
Let's face it, the Canadian reaction is purely out of US friendship. There is no end-to-end EV car manufacturing in Canada. There is an EV battery setup in Ontario (and perhaps Quebec?) but that's about it. We are a decade or more away from having an end-to-end manufacturing pipeline. So... we implement tariffs that hurt the majority of the population? For the govt's lack of investment across decades. If you want to, put a tariff on EV batteries or any other part that is manufactured in Canada - not the whole car. There is no good reason for us to take this tariff.
At the same time, politicians will talk about the dangers of climate change and how we should all try hard to mitigate it. I guess some solutions just don't have the right story to it.
I do agree that the situation we are in now is due to lack of investment in EV/associated tech starting 1.5-2 decades ago. China has invested over 200 billion in EV+Solar and are reaping the rewards.
Yes, the lack of discussion of tariffs in the article and even in these threads is a bit odd to me. The US has tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles in part specifically to keep cheap Chinese EVs off the market.
The complexities of this are outside my wheelhouse, but it's easy to see how keeping cheaper EVs out of the market would carve out a major source of cheaper vehicles period, leaving other manufacturers able to push higher priced cars. My guess is the tariffs are directly contributing to the process described in the article. Even if manufacturers were to "leave that market to China", eventually it would come to bite them as a certain proportion of people would start buying those cars instead.
Monopolies, monopsonies, and tariffs are playing a huge role throughout the US economy and it gets such little attention. Or at least it seems that way to me.
Honestly that analogy feels like a stretch. I like my Nortons, BSAs and Triumphs, but the Japanese honestly just built better bikes at the end of the day (que joke about Lucas electrics and all of the other shit that seems to go wrong on British vehicles of that era). The British built really beautiful bikes and sports cars, but their reliability and general aggravation of ownership was kind of abhorrent. A good Yamaha, Suzuki, Honda, etc. even from that era, I've come to expect will be cheaper to maintain, not come with half a dozen headaches out of the box, and will "Just Run" when you turn the key.
I've yet to see good evidence that the Chinese cars are actually built in a way that they're more reliable or a better value than counterparts from other countries, they're just cheaper.
The benefit of EVs comparatively is that the drivetrain is much simpler than an ICE vehicle. If a motor dies, unbolt it and swap in a new one. Same thing for the battery pack. Sure, it's inconvenient, but if these Chinese companies are willing to offer the same warranties as American manufacturers, then what's the problem?
The only EV I'm even interested in is an Aptera. They're building a new class of vehicle that takes advantage of the affordances of full electric. I want a small efficient car that can go long distances and nobody else is building anything like that. Even US capital markets don't understand the appeal of this class of vehicle, but luckily they were able to fill their funding in global capital markets. I'm pretty pessimistic about US EVs, but Aptera gives me a little hope.
Aptera is coming up on their 20th anniversary of being vaporware. It's a vehicle with a potential market of potentially hundreds of nerds. Unfortunately, an idea that appeals to so few will never be a viable mass-production automaker.
I was happy to see them get funded, but its fair to be wary. They are a new company after all, but I think there are a lot of emerging markets where this type of vehicle makes more sense than a wagon. I'm pretty pessimistic about US manufacturing in general tho so I'm willing to admit that there's a good chance that you're right about Aptera.
demonstrably false. Unless you think they're lying, they have something like ~47k preorders registered. If even 75% of those preorders flake, that's something like 2 years of manufacturing pipeline and sales, if they manage to get the first stage factory they want.
'Hundreds' was a bit of hyperbole, but it ain't far off.
47k in 100 countries, they say. These are $100 fully refundable 'preorders', so they're more like placeholders in line than anything else. They will absolutely have a high attrition rate because most of them are speculatory. And of small number that are serious -- how many of those are in a regulatory region where they will be launching? ...and in a way that they are normally registrable? I think even they'll be shocked to ship 10% of those preorders.
For a bit of a reality check here -- the cybertruck preorder originally had the exact same terms (before it got more expensive), and had 2 million preorders. They've sold almost 30k of them, and it has already been reported that all waitlist reservations have been fulfilled. So at best, a 98% attrition rate. If the Aptera ever ships, and they are able to convert sales as good as Tesla did with the Cybertruck -- then yeah, the number will be measured in hundreds, not thousands.
The cybertruck also went up in price by 50k? IIRC from promised. I bet a lot of the flakes couldn't justify the extra cost. Sure the aptera has gone up from 28k? to 37k? but
1. That's likely a high water mark estimate
2. An extra 10k is easier to come up with, not to mention generally cars in that price range going up by about 5k anyways
I love Aptera! I just don't think it's ever going to take off. There's just not enough investment and demand. It looks ridiculous but it's an awesome concept of aerodynamics.
People hated the prius too, when it first came out. But then Leonardo DiCaprio bought a Gen2 and pretty soon everyone wanted one. This is particularly funny because Honda built the insight first which looked crazy and nobody bought it, then Toyota built the Gen1 which looked like a normal car, then pivoted. Then Honda's Insight2 copied the New Prius vibe and this car ALSO failed, poor honda.
Looking unlike anything on the road catches eyes. Yesterday I was walking through an outdoor mall and I saw a bunch of kids crossing the road that jumped up and down and shouted "cybertruck!" when a cybertruck passed by.
Anyways, I happen to know the person who worked on the aptera's marketing campaign the first time around in 2009. Best Buy desperately wanted to get in on the EV market, and so they piloted showing Apteras at a few best buys, and they were laughed out of the room by all of the soccer moms walking in to store. It's pretty clear the market wasn't there in 2009... It's clear there is a huge vibe shift now, and the market is ready enough to at least launch the vehicle. Whether or not it will stick is a real question, but i think it would be silly to assume that the company can't get to say 100k cars on the road for lack of a market. Execution failure is, of course, still a possibility.
Something you have to understand is that the Aptera is bound to fail because it has two doors, two seats.
That's why the Honda Insight failed. The car didn't look crazy, it looked like a Civic. It didn't sell because was a tiny two-seater.
Look at the top 25 selling vehicles in America. Not one is lacking four door, 4+ passengers.
The ceiling for two door vehicles is the Ford Mustang. Ford sells about 50,000 of them, it's the top selling two door vehicle.
If Aptera could sell 10% of that in a year it would be essentially a miracle.
I also think the kind of demographic that is so eco-concious and anti-automotive status quo that they would consider something like an Aptera are already switching to cycling. I see that buyer as someone like City Nerd on YouTube, who at this point isn't looking for a better and more efficient car, they're looking to live car-free in a lively walkable/bikable urban neighborhood. The kind of person who wants to buy an Aptera is probably already halfway done packing to move to Copenhagen.
So, I've met a lot of aptera investors and reservation holders and, (modulo selection bias, ofc), your characterization of them is incorrect. By far most of them are considering keeping a utility car and using aptera as a daily driver for work. It's not so expensive that that is crazy thing to do or want.
Obviously, I don't expect them to try and become the next Tesla or Toyota and make a car for every person, but there are just not a lot of car companies that can survive selling 10 or 20 thousands units per year, especially at an affordable price rather than selling a small amount of high volume luxury vehicles.
You look at the situation Jaguar is in where they are desperately pausing all production for an entire year to retool and try to come back and solely make six figure luxury vehicle to support their small volumes and that makes me wonder how Aptera can swing it with such a niche vehicle.
I totally believe you that there are people who want to use the Aptera this way. The problem with that is that for $30k there are a lot of options to fill that need that are very similarly eco-friendly and low cost of fuel.
$30k will buy you a Tesla Model 3 or Toyota Prius and both of those cars have extra utility by having double the seating capacity.
I just think that if this efficient commuter vehicle concept was more popular we would see more two-door cars around, vehicles like the original Honda Insight. You even see cars like the Mini Cooper and Mazda Miata that can fill this personal car role for many people facing declining sales numbers: people really demand 4 doors.
The thing is, someone who is buying a second car for $30k is far up the affluence ladder. Most people when they buy a car need it to do everything: commuting, transporting friends and family, making Home Depot runs. Having a second brand new $30k car just to commute is a huge luxury.
And that type of affluent person probably has a home with a garage, which kind of negates the solar charging concept immediately.
So, in my opinion, you really need to buy this car not for economic reasons, not for reasons of enjoyment/fun driving experience (like a sports car), but for ideological reasons. And that can be a tough sell.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but unless there is another solar option, the 100 kWh pack will take around 40 days to charge by solar at 700W from 20% to 80%. Otherwise, it seems like the solar part is greenwashing with a bit of '70's-style geodesic dome and Balans chair styling. I'm all for cheap(er) EVs that don't involve Tesla like Scout or BYD.
The solar adds 40 miles roughly every 8 hours of sunlight. Of course it's not a way to get 100% charged regularly, but how often do you need the battery at 100%? 40 "free" miles a business day is still a game changer in fuel usage.
it's probably greenwashing if you live in seattle or london, but lots of americans live in sunnier places and drive less (especially so now that people are WFH). I drive on the order of ~25 miles a day and supposedly the aptera will let me get that range on a day's charge, even though I live in a slightly less sunny place than say Texas, Arizona, or SoCal.
It's neat, but it would require segregated roadways to be safe, and we're not going to get that.
I'd love to live in that world though. Smaller, lighter, lower-speed vehicles. Bicycles. Walkable neighborhoods. It'd be great.
But we can't have those nice things, because most Americans have atrocious taste -- and the ones who do have good taste, you can't afford to live next to.
Why would it? It has a carbon fiber monocoq hull with a steel roll cage. The shape is pretty much egg shaped, which seems like it would be fairly structurally resilient (IANA MechE)
Not really, its registered as a motorcycle. From what I understand they're going above and beyond on safety to meet standards normally set for cars, but there are other light vehicles that people drive all the time that don't get special lanes.
Something has to disconnect here. Everyone complains that everything costs so much, but the average Americans' paycheck is not rising the same way, so they can try all they want to sell $95k electric vehicles because of thin margins for cheaper products, but if purchasing power doesn't rise with inflation, then that market that "sucks" is going to be the only real market one day...
I think the disconnect is maybe just in the title: Lucid is obviously just trying to be the next Mercedes. Duh, of course they don't make a cheap car (how much did Lucid pay for this ad in the WSJ?); but their competitors kind of do. Tesla literally told their shareholders during the most recent earnings call that "more affordable models are coming in the first half of 2025". Jim Farley has spoken on how one of the reasons Ford's EVs are still rather expensive is because they clean-roomed much of the assembly for them to better compete with Tesla, so while ICE cars have a century of process optimization behind them, their EVs aren't at that same level... yet.
Its just clickbait paid by Lucid to make their $90,000 cars seem reasonable because, well geeze, no one is making cheap EVs anyone. Wrong: Everyone is trying to, and its very obvious that this is direction the market needs to go in (just look at the depreciation on modern Teslas, new cars cannot compete with what is happening in the used market).
I'm pretty sure they do, though. Lucid owns Atieva, the company supplying the batteries for Formula E. What they've learned through the many seasons directly goes back into the vehicle's battery.
I am a bit skeptical of Lucid's ability to grow into profitability, but they do have excellent engineering. Their EVs have some of the best efficiency and range on the market.
The problem IMHO is a variety of US policies have artificially taken out that cheap market in all kinds of domains through protectionist policies like rent seeking, monopolies, and tariffs. So, for example, tariffs hurt the emergence of a cheap EV market.
The solutions for this in general don't line up nicely with any of the major party platforms, at least in the US — major deregulation of certain areas in certain ways, aggressive antitrust enforcement, and dismantling of tariffs, possibly combined with government incentivizing of competition in certain areas, at least for awhile. It feels like candidates and parties demonize one or more of these things and overemphasize other things, or implement some of these things in the wrong ways, like they're all mutually exclusive.
Yeah, I think the pendulum swings back and forth. My recollection of the 2007-2009 recession, with $4 gas and the failure of GM, was that it spurred a lot of interest and innovation in smaller, more efficient, economy cars after many years of the automakers pushing (and people buying) larger and less efficient trucks and SUVs. I think we're at an extreme point in the cycle again now with American automakers all but abandoning the compact and midsize economy car segments. At some point, things will dry up and they'll need to compete with the Toyota Corolla and Honda Civic again.
I think you're right about pendulums here, but we might be about to see a US auto maker vs China auto maker inflection point like I read about in the 1980s with US vs Japan.
I watching this video which lays out some fundamental diffs between US companies, like GM and Chinese companies, like BYD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXvcwM977D0
* Short term vs long term focus
* .gov subsidies stronger in key markets in CN
* CN companies extremely rapid in development (as low as 1.5 yr vs 6 yr in the US)
* Lower wages and input costs
Things will probably have to get worse before they get worse. Corporate people know the machine (public traded US auto makers) keeps lumbering forward without change until it can't, and all handouts, bailouts, and other tricks have been played.
There's only one reason why US cars are more expensive than CN cars: People will pay it. All that other stuff is window dressing. The US is way, way better at financial engineering than China; we can sell an $80,000 Tahoe to a single mom between jobs on zero down and 10% APR, somehow she'll take that deal, and somehow the system doesn't explode into a fiery deathball; so you get $80,000 Tahoes. That's it.
Short-term vs long-term focus means nothing. Government subsidies run out. Rapid development is easy when its a first generation product with no customers. Lower wages means fewer of your own people can afford it (though it does help with export pricing to richer first world countries... what's that word I'm looking for... it starts with a T, I heard an orange man say it recently. eh probably nothing)
The 2008-2023 US economy was basically the strongest national economy in the history of humanity; but, obviously, that's changing. And no, I'm not doomering about a mother-of-all-crashes. The world is just getting more realistic, as it should.
Manufacturing, generally? Solar? Batteries? Semiconductors? Cyber espionage/warfare? I think those are more than nothing that China has had a demonstrable long term strategy in which benefits them at our expense.
Also, great point about financialization in the US. Do you think if that dam breaks, US auto makers come back to planet Earth instead of chasing what seems to be exclusively high-margin cars only affordable by credit?
Maybe their strategy will pan out, but generally any economy which critically depends on a restless and despondent class of basically slave labor (and, in some cases, actual slave labor) isn't going to sustain itself. As they said in Silicon Valley (the HBO show) like 8 years ago: "There's no New Bangladesh; there's just Bangladesh."; China's population wants upward social mobility in a way that's basically just westernization. On the flip side, they have a government that wants the economic benefits of a cheap labor pool, they want to be a cheap western manufacturing destination, and they have the surveillance and police state to push the issue further than western democracies would; a scary combo.
The other unrelated point I try to impress on people: You can assert that China's lead in manufacturing solar panels, batteries, etc is indicative that they're "ahead" of us, or whatever. You sure? I don't know what job you have right now, but the US was a destination for high tech manufacturing many decades ago. We largely moved past that. We make poorer countries do that for us now. How is it desirable that America become better at, I don't know, mining lithium? Are those jobs that we want our population to have? Versus what are clearly higher-margin email jobs? China manufacturing solar panels to sell us is our benefit, their expense; their economy is built on attaching a 2% margin on physical goods, ours is attaching a 200% margin on services, software, and financialization we build on top of those physical goods. Every economist on the planet would agree, you want to live in the second one. Lithium mines suck. Assembly lines suck.
But even looking beyond that: The US has an unemployment rate of like 3% right now. You can open the world's biggest solar factory out in Iowa; good luck finding workers to staff it. The US is not "behind" on manufacturing; we LEFT it behind, for good reason.
> Do you think if that dam breaks, US auto makers come back to planet Earth instead of chasing what seems to be exclusively high-margin cars only affordable by credit?
It doesn't seem to me like the problems that the automotive world are going to face over the next five years will be isolated to US manufacturers; its going to be global. Its going to get harder to financially-engineer your way to higher margins and revenue. That means prices need to come down. But, prices are higher because consumers want these nicer cars, nicer materials, there's a lot of cost in mandated safety features and safety engineering as well, not to mention all the export controls and tariffs Trump is threatening. So, how do they get cost down? That's the challenge.
With the size of American vehicles these days and the reduced visibility inherent, I'm all for mandatory backup cameras. Some trucks even have forward cameras now because their front-ends are so tall that they have a large front blind-spot.
There are inexpensive EVs in the US. A local dealer has new Nissan Leafs available for $24.5k (after rebates) all day, every day.
There are also inexpensive cars. A local dealer has new Mitsubishi Mirage Hatchbacks available for $17k all day, every day.
People don't want them.
They're not being tricked, cajoled, strong-armed, forced, pressured, misguided, or hoodwinked.
American consumers WANT and CAN AFFORD gigantic $65k SUVs with heated and cooled seats and wifi and huge screens that take up the entire dashboard.
"Oh but they're prioritizing higher-marg..." yeah no shit Sherlock literally all a consumer has to do is not buy one of those.
But Toyota can slap a limited edition retro paint job on an SUV, mark it up $5k and the dealer can mark it up $10k and people will walk past the cheap cars to sign up for a waiting list to get a chance to earn an opportunity to put down a non-refundable deposit to maybe, potentially, pay $75k for an middling SUV with a limited edition retro paint job.
Here's the thing: in a market where almost all the new car buyers are affluent and can afford "wealthy country luxury," it's no wonder that small, economic penalty boxes like the Chevy Spark and Ford Fiesta get discontinued left and right when you think about how depreciation and the used market works.
I think you'd have to be batshit insane to buy a brand new Mitsubishi Mirage for $17k when the used market is flooded with much better cars that are barely used for the same price.
You can get a 2021 Hyundai Sonata with under 30,000 miles for that kind of money. Basically, a brand new car, one that's far larger, more refined, faster, more features, etc.
Those economy boxes make a lot of sense in countries where buying something higher end is less attainable. But in a world where someone leases a $40,000 car for 3 years, dumps it back to the dealership, a $20,000 new car can't compete with an originally-$40,000 3-year-old car with 30,000 miles.
All true, and there is still a viable used car market. Even cars that may require a bit more maintenance are a win by a large margin. Some things are just expensive. Ever price out a replacement 8" entertainment console in a vehicle? Probably ~$2,500 and up. Replacement LED headlights? Over $1,000. (Third party is your friend there). Regular maintenance like water pumps, brakes, serpentine belts are economical by comparison.
These are cheap "city" EVs with small batteries and slow charging. They have all the compromises and annoyances that people don't like about EVs.
The desirable EVs have 2x-3x more range and charge 3x-4x faster. That completely changes the equation, because that makes them good enough to be the primary/only car. Even for people who don't have a charger at home, even for people who need to drive long distances.
> We also now have sub-$30k used Tesla's out in the market too.
I purchased a 2023 Model 3 from Hertz over the summer for $23k, which I've been very happy with. I'm not eligible for either tax rebate (used or new), so 1 year ago I would have paid north of $40k for it.
Chinese EV imports could threaten national security through technology dependence and harm American auto manufacturing jobs. Safety and environmental standards may also be lower. I think that view is rather narrow.
>threaten national security through technology dependence and harm American auto manufacturing jobs. Safety and environmental standards may also be lower.
Protectionism based tax and economic policy causes the exact same outcomes but far enough in the future and far enough away that the people who implemented it will be retired and/or dead and the people who voted for those people to do it will have had time to spin some counter narrative about it being an honest mistake, everyone thinking it was a good idea at the time, etc, etc.
No. They will flood the market with government-subsidized EVs built in zero-workers-rights environments that will absolutely destroy the American auto industry. It will benefit American people in the short term but absolutely harm our country long-term.
It's not. Heaps on heaps on heaps of small businesses have been destroyed by cheap international goods that Walmart and Amazon push, and customers have crappier products that don't last as long as a result.
This is incorrect. The products we buy today from the Chinese through big box stores like Walmart (or Amazon) actually last much longer and work far better than the same American-made goods from 25 years ago in those same big box stores before China was so dominant.
Quality is actually going up as prices come down VIA CHINA. You may get comfort pretending otherwise, but Chinese manufacturing is generally far better than US manufacturing at large scale. Sure, you can find some bespoke businesses that make great stuff here, but if you want the best possible smartphone or bluejeans or air conditioner, or automobille, you'd go with China over the US most days of the week.
Americans vote against their own self interests constantly. How is this any different? Or do you think the US govt couldn't backstop it's own car companies until they became cost competitive? Seems like a win/win if we want to speed up EV adoption and reduce global emissions. If a new $20k EV with 300 miles of range was released tomorrow, we'd see massive adoption similar to the original Model 3. Americans I believe are largely ready for EV adoption but the only thing stopping the majority is price.
America's grid isn't ready for massive EV adoption, nor are its fire departments or insurance underwriters, indoor parking garages, etc.
Price is not the thing holding back EV adoption. The people who are in the $20k car market don't own their own homes and don't have anywhere to plug their theoretical EV into consistently.
EVs as they are now are only as successful as they are because of a set of diehard futurists with cash to burn and excessive government subsidy.
I would love to see some analysis on the average car production cost invoice cost. The current numbers being shown focus too much on MSRP or final sale cost, which include vehicle options or markup. It would be very useful to look at these trends.
All they do is slightly improve fuel efficiency; but they cost more to buy, and cost more to maintain. I had to dump my first hybrid because I couldn't find anyone to fix it.
The way to think of it is that a hybrid (both traditional and PHEV,) has more parts than an ICE car, which has more parts than an EV. It's more things that can fail as the car gets old, and more things to pay for when the car is new.
Edit: I should add that hybrids were good for automakers to dip their toe in the water for electrification: IE, get the supply chain working and get institutional knowledge. But, that ship sailed 10 years ago.
Hybrids cost more to repair, but much less to maintain. Hybrid brakes can last decades, and their tires and suspension wear is very near an internal combustion engine. However, the added complexity of a hybrid powertrain almost always makes engine repairs more difficult and therefore cost more money.
Hybrid sales have actually skyrocketed in the past year for light duty vehicles and represent a greater percentage than BEVs now [1]. Most western manufacturers completely leapfrogged HEVs and went from ICEs to BEVs, so Japan seems to rule the market, and will reap the rewards. There seems to a zeal surrounding reducing carbon emissions that is counterproductive. The contempt of hybrids is incredibly reminiscent of the disdain of nuclear energy in favor of pure renewables.
Plain hybrids currently do sell better than PHEVs or EVs.
I'm not sure in which "best of both worlds" a standard hybrid is better than a PHEV - a PHEV allows for cheaper fuel (grid electricity) when it's available. That being said, the extra cost is associated with larger batteries than standard hybrids. As batteries come down in price / size, I'm not sure why people would want a standard hybrid over a PHEV.
Japan went all-in on hybrids, not exactly sure why though. Skip forward a few decades and it'd make a lot more sense to unify behind a fully electric charging solution than maintaining two fueling methods.
> Aren't they a best of both worlds approach? What am I missing.
They have the mechanical complexity of both, in a package of roughly the same size. And usually far smaller batteries and thus far less battery-only range than a pure EV. There are plenty of downsides.
Um because people really want to be done burning petroleum in their cars. Hybrid is just an old gas car that’s gets improved gas mileage. It’s not a real fix.
And you still don't escape having to go to a gas station every few weeks, and maintenance twice a year. Those 10 or so hours per year don't seem like a lot but after having enjoyed EVs for 6 years now, that's the one of the main reasons I'll never go back.
I expected more from this article. Sure they are boring but in the new market Kona EV, ID.4, Leaf, and as mentioned Bolt EV/EUV are all very good deals, and the only compromise is infrequent road-tripping, and this is totally ignoring Tesla.
Teslas are one of the few vehicles where you can actually get the model at the lowest price they advertise because they are all delivery. Almost every other make and model will show you a price in their advertisements that you can’t find anywhere and make you wait forever to order one. I’ve often thought it was deceptive advertising because the price they show in their TV ad is one almost nobody actually gets or likely could. I’m pretty sure Lexus has a version of the RX with cloth seats and no touchscreenthat they only make one of just so they can use the price in their ads.
I don’t know how many people actually opt for the lowest end version of Teslas but I believe you can get them with essentially no more difficulty than any other version.
The cheapest Teslas are also best selling Teslas. With Teslas the base model is really good and more expensive models offer either longer range or performance of a Porsche for half the price.
1) a SV/Texas "tech" company, which, by its very identity, must yield insane returns to shareholders
2) Legacy auto companies who must yield insane returns to both shareholders and, to a lesser extent, retired employees. In their defense, the second group actually did work
Compare this to Chinese EV makers who are dumpi - I mean, willing to take less return on their sale in order to establish market dominance globally.
So your issue is that US public companies need return on investment, but that Chinese ones don't? There's nothing "insane" about the ROI at GM or Ford...
The Chinese are selling either at a loss or far below the return expectations of their competitions' investors. They're not going to stop, because they want to drive everyone else out of the market. The solution is to drop things like dividends and executive bonuses down to sane (or, really, non-existent) levels and pass along the savings to the customer.
Otherwise there might not be a company to collect ROI on in a decade or two. Not that most shareholders care; they hire a guy specifically to engineer the holdings so that they can drop any one of them and not lose lots of value.
Currently in Europe right now the smart purchase is on second hand EVs. Depreciation is extremely high (mainly fueled by fear of second hand batteries), so you can get an EV equivalent to an ICE counterpart for around 30-40% less money (Golf vs ID3; BMW iX vs X5; Model 3 vs BMW 330i/340i).
If I was in the market for a second hand car I would go electric for sure.
Obviously it might be pointless for a company like Tesla, as it might not favour their financial numbers.
It is actually a phenomenon going on specially with European brands. They have abandoned low margin cars, it is, cheapest segments, to improve their financial performance numbers (ROIC...)
* That was mentioned during Tesla's earnings call in October this year, in the context of the shift of strategy towards FSD and the Robotaxi.
While he did say that, its worth pointing out that Tesla also said that more affordable options will be available in 2025H1 [1]. Given Musk's statement, what I think Tesla means by this is more affordable trims of existing models.
I don't think its reasonable to read Musk's statement as "the Model 2 isn't happening". Its more accurate to read it as "it might cost more than $25,000".
Absolutely; but it is at least indicative of the direction Tesla is taking. It might be the end of 2025, 2026, whenever; but they've said they're working on lower cost models. That's all I'm asserting.
It's still the company that trots out humans in spandex to simulate robots and a self-driving taxi that was actually remotely operated by a guy on his phone.
Elon did not say that. Tesla The Company said that.
Ask yourself this: I bet you a thousand dollars that Tesla will release either a lower cost model or a lower cost trim of an existing model before the end of 2026. Would you take the other side of that bet?
That's directionality. Deadlines might get missed. I'm talking about directionality.
As somebody who wants less cars and more public transportation, I think your messaging is way off.
This is an all-hands-on-deck situation where we need to pursue all options simultaneously. And there are huge swathes of our country that we will not be able to transition out of suburban sprawl into transit-friendly planning in the necessary amount of time.
So in 2050, there will still be cars, and we can not build enough public transportation in time to solve climate change (and in fact we won't transition to EVs fast enough to solve climate change, if we rely on EVs alone either...)
Co-signed. One really concept is the locked-in demand: every single internal combustion vehicle sold now means someone is buying gas for at least two decades, but even if you use entirely coal power an EV will generate fewer carbon emissions now and that will drop rapidly every time cleaner power is added to the grid.
No, wrong. Completely wrong. The US auto industry doesn't believe EVs will save them--they're certain it's going to kill them or almost, but the EV transition is being forced by CARB + ROW (Europe, China and Korea) which don't really give a shit whether the US auto companies like it or not. They will chase China and Korea or die. It's really that simple and has nothing to do with what they want and entirely what they're forced into by global competition and regulation.
What exactly does Aptera 'do right'? and what is it 'manufacturing'? They've been pitching the same tiny, unsafe, and impractical car for ~20 years now...
You can't really call them a "manufacturer" when they haven't manufactured a single car, can you? I think they have exactly one test vehicle that they've made by hand.
Anyone interested in this should look into BorgWarner, the company that produces most of the EV power trains in the US. They charge a several x markup and hold a virtual monopoly.
I can't believe that the average price of a car in the U.S. is almost $50k. For rapidly depreciating assets.
Here I am working out TCO costs for a range of mid-sized cars for my next purchase, and trying to decide if the extra $2k for a Prius Prime over a Prius will beat the differential in fuel costs for my driving situation. I feel like a chump, but I know it's the smarter thing to do with my money.
I coworker of mine just spent $100k on a regular old pickup truck that is planned to spend less than 5% of the time doing anything other than commuting him back and forth to work. It doesn't fit in any of the parking garages around here, or in his garage -- he has to park it at the other side of a surface lot because it doesn't fit in the normal spots. It gets like 11 mpg and uses the 92 octane fuel.
Americans won't buy cheap cars, they won't buy upmarket small cars, but they'll burn their children's college fund into the ground for a 2 second gain on 0-60 and bad ergonomics.
I can afford the fancy car, but I'd rather turn $100k into $200k in my index funds and buy an entire apartment in Spain overlooking the Mediterranean with the gains.
We can have nice things, but this is why we can't have affordable things.
Some Americans. The average car in the US is 12 years old. I just checked my local craigslist, most cars of that age are under 10k, and almost none are more than 20k. Since that is average we can assume cars of that age will run (with maintenance) for another decade and so shouldn't be very expensive. Of course at that age almost nothing is electric.
I do think part of it is how darned long cars last now.
I have an 18 year old car that I purchased used long ago and currently has no mechanical issues. I've had a few repairs but nothing terribly expensive. I have no interest in replacing it.
When you think about it, people who are frugal will buy practical and cost effective cars and drive them for a decade or more (that is, if they buy a car at all!). That means they either never buy new at all, or when they do they do so only seldom.
People who are chasing the new shiny will continue to churn through new shiny. And of course they want to pay a lot to get only the shiniest.
So I can see why the average new car cost would creep up, because buying a new car at all is a luxury in most cases.
I think of the last generation of pro-level film cameras.
They were expensive, but well designed and durable, yet ... who wants to pay in time and money to develop film every 36 pictures?
I think some really good gas cars only make sense if you use them infrequently to haul heavy things or lots of passengers.
Otherwise it is getting cheaper to run an EV - you might even charge it with electricity you capture yourself.
Develop film takes time, same as why somebody wait for hours and hours just to get an EV charged? The “last generation” can “recharge” to 450miles in 3 minutes at a gas station then move on.
> same as why somebody wait for hours and hours just to get an EV charged?
I spend hours a year more waiting for gas pumps for my ICE than I spend waiting on my EV to charge. And I put way more miles on my EV than my ICE.
Are you lucky enough to own your own house, do you put up with a corporate landlord/big condo, or are you in street parking?
I live in a single family residence like the majority of households in the US.
My point still stands. Despite driving more miles on my EV my ICE wastes my time on pumping gas especially before all the time I waste with routine maintenance. I am far from alone.
Why would anyone waste their time going to gas stations all the time and wait for oil changes and have to deal with all that maintenance of things like timing belts and what not?
Sounds like you have a residence where you can charge overnight. That's a nicety right there. For everyone who can't, is it faster to get 400 miles by finding a place to charge and waiting on the charging or by filling a tank?
Sure it's a nicety, but it's also pretty common. Most households in the US would be able to do it.
You'll spend considerably more of your life standing next to a gas pump than they spend waiting for their cars to charge. And you'll spend more money per mile in the end for the energy cost. And yet somehow you'll continue to feel superior about it. Congrats on spending so much of your life pumping gas my dude. I'm glad I don't have to spend nearly as much time anymore.
The EV charges while you sleep. You always start your journey with a full tank.
If you can't do that then, yes, an EV is less convenient than a gas car that is true.
Home ownership is a distant dream for most Americans, and the sort of rentals that have parking AND EV charging tend to be extremely pricy luxury new-builds.
Gas is unfortunately going to be around for a long, long time for normal working-class Americans.
Homeownership Rate in the United States
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N
Home ownership rate today is pretty similar to what it's been for decades.
It’s been bad for decades. Nobody can afford housing anymore. Get out of the tech bubble
^ This is patently false.
Which part.
With PG&E it really feels like the cost to run an EV keeps increasing.
The difference is that new cars are safe cars. Old cars are death traps.
If you value your life you will be buying the new shiny every 5 years or less.
It is one of those 'was it really that long ago? I am getting old' moments to actually look this up, but the last major safety features which moved the needle on keeping you alive in a car were the mandates for side-impact protection and anti-lock braking systems. Both are more than ten years old.
I think you would be hard-pressed to name a single innovation from the past five years which has increased your lifespan in a car as either a driver or a passenger. Given the fact that things like adaptive braking, lane-following assist, and blind-spot sensors are old enough to be showing up in low-end cars these days I cannot name a single new or shiny safety feature which would not be available in a mid-tier car from 2014. Can you?
Anti-lock brakes, if I remember correctly, had essentially no safety effect in the real world. Stability control, on the other hand, dropped single car accidents by something like a third. Perhaps you were thinking of that?
Regardless of that, the threat environment has changed pretty dramatically in the last two decades. I gave up my 2006 VW sedan for a new SUV this year because the IIHS numbers had started to look bad for lighter vehicles.
https://www.iihs.org/ratings/driver-death-rates-by-make-and-...
Back in 2006 the previous gen VW Passat was basically as safe as anything you could buy (according to their dataset). Now you need something a lot bigger to be upper tier.
The new vehicle is a plug-in so in the first 4 months of driving I've more than doubled my fuel efficiency. So there's that, anyway.
You are correct, I was thinking of stability control. Both were mandated by NHTSA at the same time I think.
Adaptive cruise was still higher end at that time. Certainly not ubiquitous at the mid tier. Heck, it's barely ubiquitous now. Both adaptive cruise and automatic emergency braking are game changer features for safety on the highway.
Adaptive driving is a nuisance for me whenever I rent a new car (it seems most of the rentals have this feature). Those visual and audio cues going off when I am in the middle of changing lanes is very disconcerting - and makes me lose focus for a fraction of a second. I wish I could turn it off - but after one look at that hot mess on that center touch-screen I back off in repulsion.
(I also do not like the lights on the side mirrors that indicate a vehicle coming by. I constantly think - what about false positives - and then I double check my blind spot)
Usually they don’t beep on lane changes when you use the indicators before switching.
The lights in the side mirrors are also not removing the obligation to check your blind spot.
Both help, but don’t take away your responsibility as driver.
Nah, it's the same game.
AEB is pretty recent, though I'm not sure of the exact timeline, and it has already saved lives.
While it’s certainly true that old cars are death traps I’d live to see a source showing that car safety is increasing at notable levels every five years. Federal safety standards haven’t.
Is there evidence for the rationale for five years or less for the age of a car?
I hate all the entertainment systems and believe anything beyond Bluetooth and no complex entertainment system to be a lethal distraction that makes cars just as unsafe as older or weaker safety controls.
I do think CarPlay is very helpful for navigation, I mean, I can read map because I’m old but my kids and my wife when they’re driving need a onscreen display if they’re going somewhere new. And the CarPlay or similar provides a good navigation option that I think is safer than mounting a phone.
Everyone says this but the number of accidents (of which injurious, let alone fatal ones are a small minority) the typical person gets into in a lifetime are low enough to make the tradeoff worthwhile.
If only those 4 people that burned to death in a Tesla last week [1] would have a chance to revisit their vehicle choice...
[1] https://people.com/4-killed-after-tesla-crash-sparks-fire-in...
> If only those 4 people that burned to death in a Tesla last week [1] would have a chance to revisit their vehicle choice... >
Kind of a weird story for People magazine to be covering, but I guess any story with Tesla gets clicks. Doesn't say if the fire or the high speed impact killed those passengers.
Anyhoo, I'd bet those 140+ people killed by GMs ignition switch wish they had a chance to revisit their car buying choice.
Seems like the kind of advice that was true up until about 10 years ago
That's incredibly wrong. 10-year old cars are quite safe.
An older "nice" car is also a lot nicer than a new economy car and in most cases even a newer luxury model car. There may be more bells and whistles which are nice on new cars but it's fairly evident they have skimped on elements of the suspension and body that reduce roughness and road noise. There's a very marked difference in quality of vehicles made before and after the "realignment" prompted by the great recession, even as those cars are approaching 14-16 years old.
The average car in the US? Or the average daily driver car?
Cars just don't disappear, so all vehicles would "polute" the statistics right?
From what I have gathered, I assume average age of registered vehicles. I would also assume that collector cars would "pollute" the statistics, unless they are filtered out -- the details of the research are not stated.
https://www.spglobal.com/mobility/en/research-analysis/avera...
> Americans won't buy cheap cars
Sure they will, they'll even buy cheap EVs.
The highest lifetime EV sales in the US is the Leaf, Model 3/Y, and Bolt. They aren't at the top of the list because they're the best cars on the market, but because they are the cheapest.
>The highest lifetime EV sales in the US is the Leaf, Model 3/Y, and Bolt.
The cheapest Model 3 is $42,500. The cheapest Model Y is $45,000.
Is that cheap?
The Leaf ($30,000) and Bolt ($27,500) are cheap_er_ (by a lot), but they are still not what I (and presumably parent) would consider cheap.
The Leaf was famously available for $10-$12k at one point.
Used versions are cheap. (right now there are 5 under $3k)
https://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/cta?auto_make_model=niss...
It was 30k new, but you could lease it for nearly nothing (a friend got $120/month) or buy it off-lease for about 10k. I bought one for 10k in 2016, drove it as a daily commuter until 2022 and sold it for 6k.
What do consider affordable? There are cheaper cars out there, a Kia Forte will run you $21k, but a new entry-level Honda Civic is $25k, with options it'll get above $30k.
> Americans won't buy cheap cars
Not from a new car dealership, no. They'll buy cheap cars, but the mere act of driving a new car off the lot is a huge deprecation event in the life of the car. Why would price sensitive buyers go to the dealership?
In fact, most don't. 3/4 of car sales in the US are used cars. The vast majority of Americans are driving used cars. Only relatively well-to-do people buy new cars. It might seem counterintuitive, but the stock of cars on the road is rotated around a lot, and new cars are only a small fraction of them.
A $100k pickup isn't a regular pickup, anymore than an $80k sedan is a regular sedan. It's gotta be more expensive than 95% of the pickups on the road. If it gets 11 mpg it must have a really beefy engine and be geared for towing. If it uses premium fuel, it's one of the badged models likely.
One thing that's odd about the pickup market is it isn't segmented into low tier/mid tier/luxury tier the way other vehicles are. The luxury version of a Toyota is a Lexus. The luxury version of an F-150 is still an F-150, just a different badge level. Your friend's is a luxury pickup.
If what you do 5% of the time absolutely requires a truck, you don't have many options. You can't rent a truck to tow easily and affordably. There are commercial truck rental places that do have vehicles you can tow with but if you're doing that even 2 days a month you might as well just buy the damn pickup.
And I'd focus on median prices a lot more than mean, though I'm sure there's an increase in that too.
Also, we drive a lot more miles than almost anyone, our gasoline is cheaper, our incomes are higher, and our cars last very long times and are safer than ever now. The average car is over a decade old now. When I was a kid, you got lucky if your odometer hit six figures, in fact some didn't even have that many digits! And I'm not that old.
The American car market is perhaps the best example of an efficient, highly competitive, well-regulated marketplace. Whatever the average price is, it's what it should be.
how is it efficient when there's regulation that prevents manufacturers from directly selling, and have to go through dealers?
Tesla sells directly but the market is not perfect. An imperfect market can still be efficient. It’s a spectrum not a binary.
Well regulated marketplace huh? You mean the marketplace that forces customers to purchase through a dealership because of dealership lobbies? You mean the marketplace which has those same dealers charge outrageous markups just because the law says they must exist? Ok.
Your index fund grows on the activity of people who spend 100k on a consumable item. Good for them, they can work their whole life if they like. You can relax and let compounding do the rest.
City dwellers will spend $2500 a month for 400 sq feet of rented living space and laugh at people paying $50k for a car.
You said it yourself — their dwelling is the entire city. Those 400sqft are where they sleep and relax but most of their living probably happens outside. Different strokes and all that.
Same with a hotel. The hotel is where I spend most of my time unconscious. Other than a few select destinations, why would I spend a fortune at a place where I’ll mostly be asleep?
My experience with trying really low-ball hotels is not great. I rarely stay in really luxe places but I do usually go for some midrange business hotel in a city.
Yeah, my point was mostly against luxe hotels as opposed to somewhere I know will be clean and comfortable to get a good night’s sleep, and close to the places I want to visit.
Honestly I tried cheaper hotels and motels and often times I simply didn't sleep well there - usually due to some noise as some college or high school kids were running up and down the hallway outside or were partying in the room next door.
YMMV.
If you are going to count where they live to be the whole city, you should increase the rent they pay to cover the cost of the third spaces they use in the cities as well.
I don’t think that’s a good comparison. If you’re buying a car primarily for commuting a $10k car is going to achieve that purpose just as well as a $50k car. But $2500 on a small apartment in a city gives a very different lifestyle than one in a big house in the suburbs. I’m not going to make a value judgement either way there but there is a clear difference in functional result.
It's not though. Going from a bare bones $10k car to a more expensive car that drives itself on the freeway is a huge difference. It's less effort to get from A to B in a car that has L2.5 self-driving like Ford's blue cruise. How tired you are after three hours of driving a shitty car with a bad wheel alignment so you have to jerk the wheel every once in a while to keep it on track, vs a new luxury car that keeps itself in the lane so you don't have to steer, makes a huge difference if you want to be useful when you get there.
Yo, an alignment is like $150. You shouldn't have any car on the road that is so bad you're jerking the wheel to keep it going straight. That's straight up dangerous. And if you're that bad at maintaining your car, your robot car isn't going to be any safer.
If you're an American wondering why you're forced to buy shitty overpriced Teslas instead of those $15k BYD Dolphins, here's Janet Yellen screeching about how unfair it is that China uses its labor force to manufacture consumer goods instead of creating millions of bullshit make-work financialization jobs like good liberal democracies https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/yellen-intends-warn-...
I would never, EVER, buy any BYD or any car manufactured in China. Support local brands who manufacture locally.
> Support local brands who manufacture locally.
There are none. The Model Y is the closest with 70% of it made in either the US or Canada (the law does not require them to break it down to US only...) Every other car available for sale in the US has more than 30% manufactured outside of the US or Canada. And the big 3 are some of the worst offenders for offshoring their manufacturing out of the US.
There are several vehicle models such as the Tesla Model 3 which have >70% North American parts content.
https://www.nhtsa.gov/part-583-american-automobile-labeling-...
Ah, I used a third party source which was missing the Model 3 Long Range specifically, which is 75%. Maybe it was not listed because it is limited to that one trim. Then there's the Model Y and the Model 3 Performance at 70%. All other American brand vehicles are < 70% and most are 20-40%
The top vehicle from the big 3 is the Ford F150 at a whopping 45% US/Canada.
My point is that if you buy any car in the US, you are buying a vehicle with significant foreign manufactured content.
Why?
edit: presumably you don't (or can't) hold this position for electronics or a myriad of other devices you already own. Why are cars different?
I'd totally buy a phone that was mostly US produced if it was the same (or better) quality within ~30% of the same price.
I do tend to apply this same idea to a lot of things I buy. If there's an American version available with at least similar quality and some % of similar price, I'll pick the US one nearly every time. Goes even further when its something I know is made in my state, even further when it comes to the city I live in. The vast majority of the beer I drink is made in the city I live in, for example.
I'm still confused on how/why cars are different for you? here you're making a cost/benefit calculation but your original comment said you would "never" buy a chinese car. Why are cars so special?
I am not the same person who said they would never buy a Chinese car. I might, but they'd have to be significantly cheaper while being pretty much the same quality. Quality also meaning parts availability and places willing to work on it and what not for the continued support of keeping that vehicle working for a long time.
And in the end that "$10k" Chinese car doesn't fit my needs in the same way a $14k US or Japanese car doesn't fit my needs. When I actually look at a vehicle that does do what I'm looking for, they're not too differently priced.
Note that the "$10k" car in China costs ~$22k in Mexico. So chances are, even without tariffs that car coming to the US would probably be $20k+, not $10k. Probably more, because BYD knows Americans would probably pay more in the end. That's without any tariffs applied.
Chances are though, a similar car to what I'd buy would be more along the lines of the BYD Seal, but even then that's a little smaller than what I'd like. Honestly the Mach E is pretty much the perfect sized vehicle for my family for the majority of our drives, so something like a large hatchback/small crossover is what I'm looking for but a full-sized sedan would do. That went on sale in Mexico without tariffs for 888,800 Mexican Pesos, or about $44k USD. A The 2025 Mach E pricing starts around $37k.
I have a feeling that if BYD was a Taiwanese company it’d be fine, could there be a concern with the Xi government’s bellicosity?
Both parties are in the wrong on this. Americans (and others) would be wealthier and the world would decarbonize faster if the tariffs on China were lifted but it is what the people want
So you are blaming your good liberal democratic goverment for not protecting your market enough which forces you to make a living on some bs job while at the same time you complain that the market is overly protected so you cant get a cheap dolphin.
Madness. And people poke fun at annual phone upgraders. The big fancy car habit is far worse.
> uses the 92 octane fuel
There's no evidence that higher octane fuel is required or leads to performance gains in excess of the cost bump.
High compression engines require high octane to avoid knock. It's not about performance. An engine with a turbo or super charger will always need higher octane fuel.
Not all forced induction engines always need higher octane fuel. A lot of the newer turbo engines in cheaper vehicles such as Subarus are specifically rated for 87 octane gasoline. They don't knock.
I have yet to see a study showing efficiency gains, or losses, are greater than the price difference in fuel types.
If your engine does not require the higher octane, then no efficiency will be noticed and you're just burning money. If your engine is specified to take the higher octane, then you can notice an efficiency bump over running a lower octane fuel in most modern engines. The engine computer will adjust the valve timing to prevent predetonation with the lower octane fuel at the cost of efficiency.
Adding octane to fuel isn't adding a booster. It's adding stability to the fuel so it can be run in a higher compression engine. If your engine doesn't reach that pressure then you'll notice no effect except your wallet getting lighter.
As I said. It's not about efficiency.
Knock (pre-ignition) will destroy an engine. I have a naturally aspirated infinity, but with compression ratio around 13:1 it calls for premium.
Believe me I wouldn't pay for it if it wasn't necessary. It's still cheaper than a new engine.
Knocking and engine efficiency are inter-related.
That being said, unless you are constantly flooring the accelerator and / or doing a lot of track driving, it seems challenging to make a modern (and properly functioning) engine knock on a persistent basis (irrespective of octane).
This is a weird hill to die on man. Modern ECUs are smart enough to tune the timings in to prevent knock when the wrong fuel is used, at the cost of both efficiency and fuel economy. "Runs" is not the same thing as "runs well"
Are you familiar with Boyle's Law? You compress a gas and it heats? Higher compression of air/fuel lowers the detonation point. If your air/fuel mixture detonates at the wrong time in an engine, you will get damage. Higher octane fuels take higher temperatures to detonate.
That's why higher compression engines REQUIRE higher octane fuel, as the manufacturer will specify. Run without it, damage your engine and try to make a warranty claim. Good luck with that!
> coworker of mine just spent $100k on a regular old pickup truck
> It gets like 11 mpg and uses the 92 octane fuel.
I understand hating on pickup trucks is an easy way to farm upvotes on HN, but there is no 'regular pickup truck' in existence that gets 11 mpg. The closest that comes to that is the F-150 Raptor with turbocharged V8 which is a preposterous performance vehicle with a racing engine. It is a luxury item. Yet for some reason we don't criticize people with the same disdain who buy and drive sports cars which get as bad or even worse mpg. I guess the Lambo drivers never need to haul lumber.
The F-150 is also offered in hybrid (which gets > double that mpg) and all electric drivetrains.
I will make the equally presumptuous assumption that since you've narrowed your choices to "Prius or Prius" you harbor some grudges against pickup owners.
> but there is no 'regular pickup truck' in existence
I grew up in deep country. I've owned my share of pickups. When you need them, they're invaluable. When you don't, they're basically the most inconvenient daily drivers you can have short of a box truck, an RV, or a main battle tank. Outside of a fairly narrow range of medium-sized hauling activities, they aren't really even terribly good at carrying things.
I hate talking about things as "it's more than anybody could need" because you end up with needs-based conceptualization of lifestyles with people eating diets of only sweet potatoes, commuting on onewheels, and living in Hong-Kong style coffin apartments. But these things are not only obnoxious main character syndrome demonstrators, they're actively dangerous to everybody in and around them even when they're following the rules of the road.
If I was king for a day, I'd make driving one require a special class of license and tax them extra if they aren't being used for active work purposes like they're intended. They should be in the same class of vehicle as commercial box trucks, because that's what they're supposed to be for.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if some type of vehicle fad takes over the U.S. at some point where people just start driving converted box trucks or RVs around as daily drivers, then complain that all the parking garages and train overpasses are too low for their 13 and a half foot tall lifestyle decisions.
> there is no 'regular pickup truck' in existence that gets 11 mpg
Point but e.g. the 2024 Silverado gets 12mpg in city driving. Go to any office parking lot here and you’ll see a lot of that size truck which have clearly never been used harder than going to Costco - and even the better ones are barely approaching ⅔ of the mpg of the pickup my grandparents bought in the 1980s.
I do agree that from a pollution standpoint we should treat all inefficient vehicles as the problem but large trucks and SUVs have significant immediate downsides for everyone around them. They’re far more lethal when they hit pedestrians or smaller vehicles, they produce higher tire and brake particulates which are known to cause health issues, they take more space to park, and at least where I live there are streets which could previously handle bidirectional traffic but now require someone to pull over to let oncoming traffic pass because there isn’t enough room for two large vehicles. In contrast, sports car drivers pose less risk because they’re low to the ground and the drivers are far more likely to see you and avoid an accident.
I'd bet the Tundras get similar in practice. They're rated higher but the turbo is practically always-on in stop and go traffic.
>approaching ⅔ of the mpg of the pickup my grandparents bought in the 1980s.
It's for your own good, peasant. That 1989 S10 (or whatever else got mid 20s around that time) had basically no crash protection let alone ABS and ESC and.... and... and.......
> they produce higher tire and brake particulates which are known to cause health issues
Interesting you mention tire particulates, because there is nothing worse for this than - brace yourself - electric vehicles.
https://grist.org/transportation/electric-vehicles-are-a-cli...
I’m aware but that article is overstating the problem: the issue is weight so the problem comes back to the form factor. Every office worker LARPing as a rancher is making the world worse buying an unnecessary truck regardless of the power train. EV trucks and SUVs are bad, but so are the ICE versions.
That's been debunked. Tire particulates are mainly linked to weight, and electric cars tend to be heavier than comparable capacity gas cars. But:
- gas cars emit more brake pad particulates - EV have lower rolling resistance tires so at equal weight, they emit less tire particulates
So if comparing a pickup vs an EV, the pickup is heavier and will pollute more in terms of both tailpipe and tire particulates.
I didn't realize ICE vehicles don't have tires. News to me.
There is a slight increase in tire particulates, sure. A small increase. There's also a lot less brake particulates. And get this: there's no tailpipe emissions either.
A slight increase? Particulates increase with the 4th power of weight, and EVs way a significant amount more.
Go digging into the details of the comparison in the article above. They're comparing a Model Y to a Kia Niro FHEV.
https://www.emissionsanalytics.com/news/do-no-harm
The Model Y has +89% more volume. Its considerably bigger car with more torque. It's not a good comparison. And even though its 32% heavier and has a ton more torque, its tire wear was 26% greater. You're arguing it goes up by the fourth power, but it wasn't even a 1 for 1 increase on a car with considerably more torque. And besides, their testing shows the tire wear particulates for their comparison gas car as even higher than the Y.
It says the Kia has 50% as many emissions even once you add the tailpipe emissions. Because the larger Model Y tires offgas more.
Let me reiterate it again. The Kia is a much smaller car with way less torque. It is a poor comparison from the get-go. Go find a similar sized vehicle with a similar amount of torque. But this study is pretty heavily biased, so they chose their cars accordingly.
But let's continue on and see what it is you're trying to point out.
> Kia has 50% as many emissions
You're now talking about the VOCs table at the bottom. This is a pretty bullshit test overall.
> Large samples from one tyre on each vehicle were also taken and placed in a ‘microchamber’ heated to 20 degrees Celsius, around the temperature of a vehicle certification test, and held at that level for the same duration of the on-road EQUA test – around three-and-a-half hours. The off-gassed VOCs were analysed and quantified, and then scaled up by the relative surface area of the sample to that of all four tyres on the vehicle. The results are shown in the table below.
So, this isn't actually testing the tires under load on the car at all, they're just baking a small piece in the oven and scaling the resulting VOCs to the size of the tires. This test isn't testing the car, its testing the tire. There are no controls over this test. It's just a tire of an unknown age from one car with a part cut out and a tire of an unknown age from another car with a part cut out. The brands and models are pretty different, which could lead to pretty radical results.
If I put brand new tires on that Kia and used some pretty old ones on the Tesla those numbers would look radically different. Even two different models of tires from the same manufacturer could yield vastly different numbers. If you used the exact same model from the exact same manufacturer made at the same time the car with bigger tires would have the worst emissions, which says absolutely nothing about whether that's a tire going on an EV or a sedan with a hybrid engine or a truck with a DEF delete getting 6 MPG. See how that's then a pretty poor test?
Seriously friendo, read the studies you're wanting to use to talk about these things. There's so many absolutely bullshit studies trying to get you to think one way or another. Don't just go "table says 57%, ev bad!"
Now I think I know where you're pulling that fourth power from. You're probably thinking of road wear which does scale like that. But that's road wear, not tire wear, and doesn't result in the same airborne particulate issue here.
And even then, it's small potatoes compared to actual big trucks and busses rolling on the roads.
I was thinking about road wear. I had thought the same equation applied to both tires and the road. Why wouldn't the increases in wear on both increase in the same way? (You seem to know why, so honest question, not snark)
I don't fully know but it is probably something to do with the fact tires are designed to be more malleable and flexible than roads. The tire is also flexing and pushing on an air cushion while the road itself is being pressed against and having to flex with the ground.
Also, almost all the particulate emissions are due to the abrasive nature of the road-tire interface tearing apart the tire. Tires are a cheaper and simpler wear items than roads, something is going to give, so we've decided we'll replace our tires more often than tearing up our roads. Just like if you ever got road rash, the road is going to tear you up far more than you're going to tear the road up. So, while the road forms cracks and what not from its repeated stresses it's not coming apart like dust nearly as much. Don't get me wrong, some small, tiny amount of it does but not nearly as much as the tire.
That’s comparing cars to cars. Trucks are worse.
We're getting the worst of both worlds with these atrocious EV trucks - Big, heavy, and relying on electric torque to be bigger and heavier.
The external effects of large pickup trucks are drastically more than that of a small sports car, in ways that are more immediate than climate change.
Large pickup trucks take up a lot more space on the road and parking lots, are harder to see around, and when they get into accidents they cause a lot more damage and injuries to people both in and out of cars. There is a very different visceral response to a large pickup truck tailgating you with its driver perched above you, than a Lambo or 911 doing the same.
I think it's a strange argument: that buying a truck is "worse" than buying a sports car. I think the term "apples and oranges" is applicable here. The former are both vehicles and the latter are both fruit, but otherwise have fairly different cost/benefit.
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The grudges are valid.
The default in America is to make everything out to be individualistic, but the rest of us have to bear the very real costs of the externality of pickups, not just limited to pollution but also safety, land use, etc.
I think you just made the case for some flavor or another of socialism.
Or maybe we could just not make literally everything a tragedy of the commons or a race to the bottom?
You mean like the police in America? Or elementary and high school? Or fire brigades, interstate highways, border security or the thousands of other things you rely on every single day that are 100% socialism.
Yes but some people need regularly-scheduled reminding.
Socialism is good, actually.
Agreed. It's really amazing what they've done in recent years.
I ended up in a fullsize primarily because I got it cheaper than the midsizes I was looking at. The midsize market is priced really oddly.
Anywho, I was blown away that it's getting me 23MPG. That's what my previous midsize was giving me. That's nearly double what fullsizes got in the 90s.
My guess would be the difference in perception comes from the fact sport cars tend to be smaller and sit lower, which makes pedestrians and motorist feel safer and less intimidated around them. In addition their general rarity means most people still view them as novelties rather than something to actually take a side on. That being said though it is 100% true performance engines are the absolute worst in terms of economy/emissions/noise; most truck engines are really just oversized economy engines and have the efficiency to match.
Also I tend to think that they are often rather expensive and not as robust. So people who drive them do not want to damage. As repairs tend to be expensive too. So in general they avoid accidents, unless they are going to speed off the road...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecnS1Ygf0o0 I've been waiting for the chance to use this
Lamborghini drivers obeying the traffic rules aren't creating a hazard.
Aftermarket headlights blazing directly into the eyes of oncoming drivers are creating a hazard. As is the fact that it takes up a lot of road space and has poor visibility for small objects in front of the hood.
It isn't just aftermarket headlights anymore, some are blinding from the factory.
It is also the smugness that gets me. Huge trucks are a signal saying "Fuck you, got mine". Their first strike, I'm merely retaliating
I don't think it's malicious in most cases. As a counterpoint, most family members I know with absurdly large cars, either dimensionally or in terms of seat height aren't very confident drivers and the large vehicle makes them feel "safer" especially if they have kids in the car. I recognize it's not always the case but they didn't buy a large car to lord over other people on the road they did it for emotional piece of mind. I'm willing to bet a lot of people however wouldn't be willing to admit that that's why they prefer a large car out of some perceived weakness or the like.
https://archive.ph/9oIT4
I wish it would have adjusted for inflation. One quote: "The average transaction price for a new vehicle sold in the U.S. last month was $48,623, according to Kelley Blue Book, roughly $10,000 higher than in 2019, before the pandemic." However, about 9200 euros of that is due to inflation according to this calculator: https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
That's a nitpick though. All in all, an interesting article, which can be summarized as: the EV car market is lacking demand, and car makers definitely don't want to make cheap EVs since it's already so hard.
> the EV car market is lacking demand
There is scant evidence for this. Every time prices improve, sales surge. Sounds like the demand is there, but price matters. As it always has.
Yep. Midrange-to-expensive EVs have been around for long enough that pretty much everybody in those market segments who are currently interested have already bought one. Additionally, the segment has been flooded with midsize SUVs, with the odd midsize sedan — variety is sorely lacking.
Between these two, quite a considerable market is being left unaddressed. The first to fill these niches with affordable models that don’t have weird quirks or make strange tradeoffs will likely do well.
I'm hoping for manufacturers to pull back on the "all controls are via touchscreen" and "you can't have carplay because we want to charge you our own monthly fees" trends.
Taking Chevy for example, they have physical HVAC controls, but they're counting on the average consumer being too clueless to realize they only have Google Maps in their car because it came with a free OnStar trial. Eventually people are going to notice that they spent $1000+ to buy the larger screen upgrade, and now Chevy wants them to shell out $300/year forever to be able to use it for maps.
The other big unknown is lifespan of car software platforms, if these end up being like phones where they get laggier and laggier with continued software updates, until eventually it's unusable, people aren't going to be happy about it. But we won't know for 15 years exactly how bad that problem is.
The trend to exclude CarPlay and/or Android Auto really is awful.
Not only is there a high risk of notoriously underpowered head units becoming increasingly laggy over time with updates, there’s also the risk of the automaker deciding that shipping new updates for your only slightly old EV is too much of a cost to bear and dropping support, making the head unit slowly become more and more useless over time as apps stop running.
CarPlay/Android Auto is an excellent hedge against both of those scenarios, even if one prefers the onboard experience. It never hurts to have an escape hatch.
Indeed. I won't buy a car that doesn't support CarPlay.
"Escape hatch" is exactly how I describe it. I don't care how good a car's screens are today, I know they get software updates and I don't trust them to not screw it up down the road.
Yeah, we could go back to suction cup phone mounts on the windshield if we had to, but that feels pretty stupid when the car has a 12" screen in the dashboard.
> The first to fill these niches with affordable models...
And is not tariffed to the point they are not competitive.
I'm on the fence as to whether tariffs are good or bad, but I do wonder if an external player might not be able to come in and shake up the US auto industry.
I feel like the working class in the U.S. are paying way too much for what amounts to a necessity for their livelihood: the automobile. We'd all benefit (the planet that is) if the options included inexpensive electrics rather than merely gas and diesel.
What would really help the working class is building out actual forms of transportation beyond private automobiles. That way we're not subject to a single point of failure in our ability to move around. Maybe warm up to the idea of ebikes for getting around town, and bring back some trams for city to city connections. Then you can free up the roads for actual useful transit.
The US is one crisis away from our expensive to maintain road infrastructure being unsustainable. The American people are one crisis away from their $60k SUV being worth nothing and still owing a four figure note against it. They're also one fuel crisis away from being unable to pay to use it. And we don't really have any alternatives at a scale to handle those sorts of things.
We're really going to have egg on our face at some point. And the only option will be to import affordable EVs the rest of the world has been building and developing.
Economics is not my field, but I’d reason that tariffs can be useful if they’re used as a scalpel instead of as a sledgehammer.
So for example, if the goal is to stimulate domestic automakers to be more competitive without unnecessarily risking killing them off entirely, a moderate tariff that pushes the price of ultra cheap foreign cars up to a level that’s reasonably achievable by the domestic automakers but still well below the average price could be a good thing.
Where tariffs are just plain bad is when they’re so high that domestic manufacturers don’t even have to think about trying to compete and can continue to drive up prices unabated.
Then perhaps we lift tariffs on sub-$20K cars. Let the Big-3 sell luxury cars to the wealthy.
My aunt and uncle have a couple of Teslas (at different homes, I think). We have one as well. They're looking at replacing one with another EV, so she was probing me for options, and then also said "I can't help but notice your recent vehicle purchases have not been EVs. Hmm.."
I don't get it. We already have an EV. Why would I buy more EVs? The one that gets commuted in every day is already in our driveway. It already does the work. It doesn't need replacing, or adding to.
I'm a car person. There are so many cars I want to own in my life, so much to experience. I will admit I briefly considered buying a 10 year old BMW i3 BEV because it seemed like a fun runabout for not much money, but most of the _other_ EVs on the market serve the "practical" market, or are too expensive. I bought a Fiat 500 Abarth because it's an absolute insane hoot to drive. I bought a roadster. These are not exactly markets served by EVs. At the very least, we need another decade or two of sales to build up the inventory of interesting/unique/quirky models that get introduced by manufacturers over time.
But mostly, I want something fun to drive with character- a nice gearshift, an exhilarating powerband, ... not another competent appliance. We have a competent appliance at home.
The EV market isn't saturated, but just because an EV owner doesn't serially buy EVs doesn't mean the shine has come off. It just means the 100,000 mile, 6 year old Model 3 does exactly what it did the day we bought it, and there's no reason to replace it.
I hear you on the lack of diversification in models available.
I’d really love to see an EV that’s in line with the virtues of the Honda Fit, Honda Element, and Toyota Matrix — not sexy or fancy, but cheap, insanely practical little “everything cars” that can take on anything you throw at them with tons of cargo space, fold flat seating, stock roof rack, etc — cars that are made for doing things instead of impressing the neighbor or acting as a status symbol.
There’s absolutely nothing like this in the EV space right now. The closest thing that’s upcoming is Rivian’s R3, which isn’t likely to be as cheap as the Fit/Element/Matrix were.
I do think that the i3 is the one that fits best here. But being an all carbon fiber structure, being 2-10 years old, being a BMW, I understand there are a lot of strikes against it here when people think "cheap small economical car with a lot of space inside".
It's such a shame Honda won't sell the e here. I'm not going to say "I'd buy one in a second" because I'm not paying new car prices for one, but I wouldn't have bought a Fit new either. And yet, people bought the Fit new. And I'd happily buy a used Fit, it was actually on my runabout shopping list as well. (Fit with a manual trans).
I considered a used i3 when I last shopped but got spooked by how some models used plastic parts that can break easily and have cooling systems which can fail spectacularly, both of which are costly to fix. If it weren’t for that there’d probably be one in my garage now.
A big part of that market is being addressed by used EVs, which are getting much cheaper right now as they age out of new-car-buyers' households. https://www.kbb.com/cars-for-sale/used/tesla
I wouldn't buy a used EV because the battery pack is that much closer to needing to be replaced, which effectively totals the vehicle.
I don't understand where this thinking comes from. It's not based in fact. These Tesla batteries degrade very slowly. And so if in 5 years you've lost 15% of the range, it still gets you anywhere you need to go including road trips with all of the Superchargers!? "totals the vehicle" is just nonsense and I wish more people understood the reality.
> I don't understand where this thinking comes from.
My observations, which certainly don't reflect the current state of the tech (although if I'm buying a used EV, I'm not buying the current tech). But that's my bias nonetheless. I do think I overemphasized this, though, because while this is what makes me shy away from the idea of used EVs, it's not the reason why I avoid buying cars that are too new (which includes pretty much all EVs).
It's not an observation because it's not something that you've observed.
Here's the truth based on an observation: Tesla's battery capacity degrades 12% after 200k miles. Source: https://insideevs.com/news/664106/tesla-battery-capacity-deg...
200k miles is effectively the lifetime of a car. Average US person drives 10k miles so that's 20 years of driving.
Tesla's warranty "guarantee at least 70 percent retention of battery capacity over 8 years and 100,000 miles or more". Source: https://www.motortrend.com/features/tesla-battery-warranty/
And latest chemistries are even better. In 2020 Jeff Dahn (who leads battery research group in Canada funded by Tesla) published a paper about million mile battery. Source: https://www.electrochem.org/dahn-unveils-million-mile-batter...
Since Tesla funds Dahn's research, they get the IP. This is just in the lab but those advancements are trickling, over time, to Tesla's battery making (and not just Tesla: every battery maker does research to make batteries cheaper and last longer).
Supposedly, first-gen Leafs were known to have pretty nasty degradation due to lack of sufficient cooling. Combined with an already short-range battery, and the belief that you'd need to replace the battery frequently was justified.
Key word: WAS
Of course, modern EVs, and basically all Teslas, have bigger batteries with better cooling, so it's no longer an issue. But the belief won't die, just like how people still make memes about Java being slow as if it's still 1998.
One could say the same about a combustion engine, really. Battery packs last way, way longer than most people think because they analogise it to phone batteries which are quite different. The resale value of a degraded pack is also going to be higher than most people assume, I think. Unfortunately we have not had plentiful EVs with good battery packs for long enough to show this to the average consumer.
I guess the question comes down to how does one know if the battery pack is good? When I buy a regular used gas car, I can get all sorts of diagnostics about it out of the OBD2 port, pull a spark plug and stick a scope into the combustion chamber to see if there's any issues (e.g. on the walls).
With an electric car, how can one tell if the pack has been charged all the way up to 100% all the time (vs. the much better 40-70% range)?
This is the "term premium" of batteries it seems, and I honestly don't know if there's a reliable answer.
At least on our PHEV, when you read out the battery module state with an OBDII reader, you get to know not only the current estimated capacity but also how much time it's spent at various states of charge, how much time it's spent being charged and discharged at different currents, how much time it's spent at different temperatures, and a completely absurd amount of other diagnostics.
I'd feel a lot better about the state of the battery if I bought one used, rather than the state of the ICE. It's possible to borescope it, but you have no way of telling how long the previous owner went between oil changes, if they flogged it out to redline regularly, etc.
With my electric car, I can plug into the ODB port and get highly detailed information on the health of the battery. Far deeper insights than what I get plugging into an ODB port on an ICE.
Getting into the technician menus on Teslas is well documented, they also report a ton of data and can do a lot of diagnostics on the battery.
you just need to know the SoH (state of health). If that's 90% then you've lost 10% of the range at new. The lower the SoH for the same vehicle make, model, year and driven kms, then the worse the car has been treated. Simple as that.
I'm reminded of various videos on Youtube where they dissect grenaded engines. "Oh look, the Cummins in your pickup dropped a valve seat. That's going to cost you $50K."
The average car today lasts 12 years, or 200,000 miles, with 300,000 miles possible with luck and good maintenance. Modern EV batteries are designed to last longer than that. Moreover, EV battery capacity loss is nonlinear: most (I've read 80%) of the eventual loss happens in the first couple years.
So if you're looking for a car with the least amount of battery degradation between purchase and EOL, buying a used EV rather than new is actually the better decision.
Would you never buy a used ICE car because replacing the engine would effectively total the vehicle?
Batteries last a LONG time assuming the vehicle manufacturer has put proper heat and SoC management into the battery controller (ie, not a Nissan Leaf).
I thought my 7 year old Ford Focus EV would be half the range of its 110mi battery by now but it still posts near-perfect range (it's lost about 5%).
A recent analysis of 10,000 EV vehicles shows that they only lose about 1.8% capacity per year[0], so they are perfectly useable up to 150-200k, which is the same general useful lifespan of ICE vehicles. [1] EVs and Plug-in Hybrids cost less to maintain than ICE vehicles. [2] Over 200k miles, ICE vehicles are about double the maintenance cost of EVs or Plug-in hybrids, and EVs are slightly more than Plug-in hybrids.
-At 50k miles; EVs $600, Plug-in $1,050, ICE $1,400.
-100k miles; EVs $2,000, Plug-ins $2,600, ICE $4,400.
-200k miles; EVs $6,300, Plug-ins $5,900, ICE $12,300.
EVs use about 30kWh to go 100 miles [3] and at the US national average for electricity [4], that would be about $ 9,978 to drive 200k miles. ICE vehicles vary, but 35 mpg combined is pretty average for compact cars. At the US national average for gasoline [5], that is $ 17,548 to drive 200k miles. Plug-in hybrids use about 29kWh to go 100 miles and about 48 mpg. Just assuming 50/50 driving on gas or electric, that’s about $11,220 to drive 200k miles.
So maintenance and fuel cost over 200k miles would be roughly:
-EVs $18,852
-Plug-in Hybrids $17,120
-ICE $29,848
[0] https://thedriven.io/2024/09/19/new-study-finds-vast-majorit...
[1] https://www.caranddriver.com/research/a32758625/how-many-mil...
[2] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/10/owning-an-electric-car-...
[3] https://www.perchenergy.com/energy-calculators/electric-car-...
[4] https://www.energybot.com/electricity-rates/
[5] https://gasprices.aaa.com/
>with the odd midsize sedan — variety is sorely lacking
Sedans are nothing. Just barely, finally, after all those years, we have electric kombis - VW ID.7 Tourer and Audi A6 Avant e-tron.
I can't make great use of a full EV but would love more AWD PHEV options, of which there are currently few and they're mostly very expensive. A PHEV can be my everything-car that runs entirely on electricity for 90% of trips. I assume there's some reason they're not a more widely-supported option, but damn, I wish they were more common.
They aren't more widely supported because they are more expensive and more complicated to manufacture with a higher potential for more stuff to go wrong.
Until the engine that powers a PHEV is nearly drop-in ready for a replacement (for example, going to your local auto parts store and buying a replacement like a battery) then companies need to have service technicians and production lines to support these "engines" (they're fancy generators at this point).
However, that would also require automakers to standardize to some degree or potentially cannibalize their own business.
We've already seen this with batteries/panels in the consumer space in regards to solar. I can buy whatever packs of cells I want, and as long as the voltages match up, I can mix and match to my hearts content. If I can only get service for my Jeep PHEV from Jeep because the drivetrain is a bespoke black box and parts are impossible to get, then we'll keep seeing customers continuing to opt for traditional gas vehicles or full EVs. PHEV is just too complicated to support long term (imo).
If 90% of your trips can be covered by a normal EV, then I would make the argument that you should buy one of those (secondhand even!) and then rent a vehicle for the instances where you need AWD. The fuel and tax savings should likely make up for it in the long run. For that one year that you don't go skiing in the mountains, then you're coming out on top financially!
> PHEV is just too complicated to support long term (imo).
PHEV isn't that much more complex than an ICE. The transaxle is typically mechanically simpler, and you have two electric motor/generators instead of an electric motor (starter) and an electric generator (alternator). There's a big battery you need to find room for, and the power wiring. And the engine control is significantly different, but if it doesn't work, swap the ECU works as well for an ICE and PHEV.
>> PHEV is just too complicated to support long term (imo).
> PHEV isn't that much more complex than an ICE.
I've been an owner/operator of two Gen3 Prii for 14 years and agree in practice even though in theory I would agree with the complexity argument. The one maintenance hit for both was for the vacuum pump needed for brakes/etc because the car cannot assume the engine is always running.
Toyota has moved to hybrid only for the Camry and Sienna. This is an indicator to me that technology maturity and US manufacturing is where it needs to be for broad adoption.
Vacuum not being reliable has been a thing for decades - diesel engines don't produce vacuum and so vacuum pumps are available off the shelf. If anything those vacuum pumps are oversized for cars since they are mostly used on large trucks.
People make the rental argument a lot. But having been in a ski house quite a few years back with a lot of New Yorkers who didn't own cars, I saw first-hand what a relative main in the neck it was to rent a car for the weekend (e.g. often having to go out to an airport and planning ahead). That's maybe fine if the economics are compelling but that probably assumes things like you even have a commute by car. And that you're willing to give up convenience to save even a few thousand dollars a year.
I have an ICE but I only fill the tank once or maybe twice most months.
If you drive an ICE that much you could be saving money vs renting a car when you need one. I've done the math, rental cars are expensive. Between the per day and per mile charges it doesn't take long to make up the cost of a cheap car. (if you insist on a new car of course that is much more expensive than a 10 year old car) I keep wanting to get rid of my truck that I only fill about 4x/year, but it turns out it is hard to rent a truck, as opposed to a truck shaped car. (I have found ways to do this, but those trucks are even more expensive than a car and they are out of the way)
The BYD Shark is ~$60k, but it’s being only available in Brazil and Australia. Ford is making a Ranger Sport PHEV, but only for Australia and Europe. CATL launched its Freevoy hybrid battery, competing with BYD. It’s certainly being worked on, but not in the US quite yet.
Maybe because PHEV are a really dumb idea? You're lugging around two complete powertrains the whole time, a massive waste of energy!
Pure EVs also waste tons of energy, because they lug around a huge battery that you barely use for most trips.
The battery pack in a Model Y weighs 1700 lbs and provides 330 miles of range. A RAV4 Prime (PHEV) has a 14.5 gallon gas tank, which provides 500 miles of range from 90 lbs of gas - in addition to the smaller 300 lb battery pack providing 42 miles range. The additional weight of the drivetrain components offsets the savings from not lugging around a huge battery. Overall, the vehicles end up with similar weight, but the RAV4 has much longer range. By default, the RAV4 prime runs on EV mode until the battery runs down. With both vehicles, you’re taking an efficiency hit on the average drive for having the option of taking longer trips.
Of course, both vehicles are a big environmental win over old ICE cars, because they will move you more miles per carbon emitted. Which one works better for you depends on your use-case. If you want to lower the environmental impact if you commute even more, ride a bicycle or something.
Or, getting at what is actually desired, a car that can be a wall-charged EV for in-town trips and daily commuting but can use the existing gasoline distribution network for long trips or in emergencies. We’re in a transition state, this isn’t an unreasonable ask.
Nobody wants this, but in an imperfect world, one has to make suboptimal compromises.
You can get an EV, and then have to deal with half a dozen barely competent charging networks each with their own donkey, slow and insecure app, their own quirks and pricing schemes, etc. For some, the tradeoff is worth it, for others it isn't.
You can also get a PHEV, which could allow you to use one car for commuting purely on electric power - even if you are lugging around an entire ICE power train - and then also take the family out to the countryside over the weekend. Without the having to deal with a bunch of annoyed passangers when you are stuck midway through your journey and the charging station you are trying to use is giving you the massively helpeful error message of "Charging failed, please try again later".
I think you'll find most normal people find PHEVs extremely attractive propositions that are a perfect compromise between ICE and EVs.
I'm waiting for an EREV midsize SUV. EREV sounds like the ideal layout as opposed to HEV and PHEV which sound mechanically over complicated with too many components that can go wrong. The new Dodge Ramcharger sounds amazing but I don't want a pickup and it's way outside of my price point.
An SUV version of ramcharger is very appealing
I mean, that's exactly what I'm saying. It's a compromise. A pure EV would be much better if the charging infrastructure was great. If it isn't, then you need a compromise...
No, even if charging infrastructure was perfect EVs still require a significant amount of time to charge compared to refueling an ICE vehicle. There are other esoteric benefits of ICE but that's the one the vast majority of people are hung up on and that will likely not be fixed anytime soon.
> Even if charging infrastructure was perfect EVs still require a significant amount of time to charge compared to refueling an ICE vehicle.
That's just down to charging infrastructure no? Sure, there are physical limits to how much electricity one can move in a given time, but we are nowhere at those physical limits.
So it's just down to infrastructure in the end. If there was infrastructure to quickly and reliably charge EVs, ICE would only have niche advantages.
Your average, rather small, gasoline pump 'charges' an ICE at an average speed around 4000 KW, effectively 1200 KW after accounting for moderate efficiency -- hybrids will get better. Good EV charging today is a peak around 300 KW with a much lower average.
Honestly, _averaging_ 300 KW is probably within a factor of 2 of the highest we'll do for light vehicles given economic (how much electric distribution infrastructure can an 8-32 stall charging station have?) and practical (how heavy and stiff can the charging cable be?) limits.
It's unlikely EV charging speed will ever match existing ICEs. Relatively long recharge times are an intrinsic trade-off of BEV technology which needs to be engineered around, mostly by having enormous and heavy batteries.
Or you could have drop in batteries? You pull up to a charging station, they take your battery and replace it with one charged to 100%.
Does this require further work? Yes of course. We are definitely not there yet, and we may never get there. But let's not pretend that this is an insurmountable problem.
Battery swapping has so many serious pragmatic problems I don't think we'll ever see it offered at scale for public use. It could be a fit for large private fleets however.
On the engineering side:
- Swapping requires standardization of batteries across models and manufacturers. To accommodate different vehicles the batteries will need to be rather small so most vehicles will need multiple swapped every time
- Requires more space and weight because the battery cannot be structural. This will reduce the overall range of EVs
- Connectors for high voltage, signalling, cooling fluid, and high strength mechanical rated for thousands of cycles in the face of road grime and poorly maintained swap robots will not be small. Cooling system contamination will be a serious concern.
On the financial side:
- Batteries are expensive, how do you track and reclaim them across the entire continent? What about theft? Destruction insurance?
- With swappable batteries the incentive is to store them at 100% then run them 100% to 0%, which is especially bad for battery longevity
- How do you deal with batteries swapped at different 'swap' networks?
On the user side:
- What if the swap station is out of batteries when you need them? Are you always gambling on holiday weekends that you won't need to sit for hours charging (if that is even possible!)?
- Since some batteries will be more worn than others, how do you deal with constant variability of range because maybe last week you got a new set of batteries and next week you'll get an older set with only 80% capacity left.
- Are you allowed to charge at home? How is the wear from that charged?
- Did I buy a battery with my car, or are cars no longer batteries included? If my car came with a battery, how do I know I get it back? Do I get paid for the wear other users put on it? Do I need to retrieve my battery from the same station on the way home after a road trip?
That's just off the top of my head. I'm sure there are others. Most of these issues are solvable with unlikely levels of corporate cooperation or immense levels of excess capital expenditure. However, they all cost money and will reduce the economic viability of battery-swap EVs versus every other vehicle type.
PHEVs generally weigh much less than a full EV with equivalent range. Doesn’t seem very wasteful to me.
And you get a big energy win with regenerative braking.
GP's argument can be countered with basically every hybrid getting better mileage than its ICE sibling in city traffic.
The Prius gets up to 50 mpg on the highway too, much better than ICE cousins.
How is that possible? What's it doing that ICE cars can't do on a highway?
Most ICE car engines are massively oversized for highway cruising (so they have power for acceleration) and aren't running efficiently during said cruising. Huge amounts of engineering goes into trying to reduce this effect but it's always there to some extent.
Hybrids use a smaller engine that is running in a more efficient operating range during cruising (i.e. not pulling a huge vacuum and moving lots of parts the whole time). The battery/motor comes in for acceleration.
Unlike combustion engines, electric stuff isn't really inefficient at low load.
Prius uses an Atkinson cycle engine, doesn't it? Inherently more efficient than a conventional engine, albeit at the cost of lower power. You can get that effect with variable valve timing in some power ranges, at the cost of more complexity.
Pretty much all mainstream hybrids run Atkinson cycle (technically not the original Atkinson design, but an otto-cycle engine that keeps the intake valve open longer, to produce the same effect)
An ICE is typically most fuel efficient at about 2000 RPM and 90% throttle (this is different for every engine of course, but those numbers are close enough for discussion). A typical car can be at 45% fuel efficiency if you can pull that off, but 90% throttle when cruising will bring your RPMs and thus ground speed up. A hybrid can use a smaller engine that can just barely keep your car moving at 90% throttle and use the electric to get acceleration up to those speeds.
I'd guess it has something to do with its unusual drivetrain. It can operate: 1) fully electric, 2) fully electric but with gas used in generator-mode to supply power to the electric drive train, 3) gas engine mechanically powering the wheels (like a normal ICE car).
I'd expect it operates in mode 2 a lot when at highway speeds, but not accelerating.
I believe the Prius is either in mode 1 or 3. Never heard that it has a generator capability, unless newer models have changed?
Prius "eCVT" is a special planetary gearset that all gears are powered. ICE is connected to the planets, input and output has the alternator and traction motors. Difference in resistance between two motors is imparted to the ICE, achieving power mix and generation control.
It's a really simple and clever solution. So much so that brain hurts to think about
The ICE engine in a Prius is a special branch of tech that is more efficient at the cost of basically kneecapped performance. Americans cannot stand needing a full ten seconds to get onto the highway, because we all drive like a bunch of roided up chimps who refuse to move over to give the merging onramp any room.
For two decades there has been a roughly free 5% or so in fuel economy available to any ICE car if only we could manage to be slightly more patient drivers, but American car buyers would literally rather spend twice the cost on a V8, gasoline truck, that gets worse fuel economy than it's $8k more expensive diesel variant, worse performance, and often a less reliable engine.
Americans will swear that a ten cent increase in gas prices will drive them to financial ruin, and then choose to buy the SUV made out of a terrible truck chassis that gets 20mpg. They did this despite having to learn the hard way back in 2008 what it actually meant for gas to be expensive.
The latest Prius Prime can do 0-60 in 6.7 seconds. It’s no muscle car but that’s hardly “kneecapped performance.”
> Americans will swear that a ten cent increase in gas prices will drive them to financial ruin
Look, come on. There's no need to turn every comment into a chance to bash a whole country. I bet there aren't many countries you think so poorly of that you'd make sweeping statements about their populations. Gas prices affect all prices due to direct logistics costs and the increases every employee needs all along every supply chain. That's the problem with them.
ICE weigh much much less than an EV with equivalent range. It matters what you're optimizing for. Most people seem to optimize cost, many for range and some for GHG emissions. Based on which camp you're in, your judgment of of something being wasteful will be different.
Not really. PHEVs are usually one-and-a-half drivetrains at most. They're almost never as complicated as a separate BEV and ICE drivetrains would be individually.
They don't typically have a full transmission or CVT either. Taking the new hybrid Civic for example: it just has a basic planetary gearbox that handles forward, reverse and highway cruising.
Any time you're not at highway cruising speed, it's just in the normal position where the electric motor drives it (the engine only functions as a generator). It's effectively an electric car with a small, far under provisioned in Civic terms, engine that comes on to top the battery up sometimes if regen braking isn't enough.
At highway speeds, the gearbox has the engine drive. And since it's a less powerful engine, it will have better fuel economy than one that has to ever handle acceleration from a standstill.
And the whole thing weighs about 3200-3400lb, far less than any electric vehicle. So you're "lugging" around less.
The "S" trim of the current Nissan Leaf (with the 40 kwh battery) weighs 3509 lbs.
https://www.autopadre.com/vehicle-weight/nissan-leaf
BMW makes an PHEV X5 50e with about 30ish miles range and the B58 straight six. Most other options get a dinky little engine. The 5 series also has one that is just making its way to the US, 550e.
Typed this before I saw that you said expensive. I’ll leave my comment anyway.
I haven’t seen one that is cost competitive with its model’s regular hybrid version. The EV adds thousands of dollars, but only saves you about $3 per day in gas. For example, The Kia niro is $9k more for phev and saves you 0.6 gallons of gas per day so it would take over 10 years for the cost to balance out. The funny thing is, the more efficient the gas engine is, the less gas the phev can save you.
From what I've read most PHEVs tend to have really bad batteries that are unreliable, complicated and expensive to replace. It makes sense that they cut corners when there's a whole other powertrain to mask it.
Is there somewhere I can find more info on this? Car enthusiast here who is genuinely interested in learning.
My impressions had been that it largely mirrors the EV market: A few early PHEV models (such as the BMW i3) had poor battery management leading to unreliable battery packs. This was fixed in subsequent generations and is not a problem unless you are scraping the bottom of the used market. That's much the same as how EV batteries are generally reliable unless you buy early versions of certain problematic models (particularly the Nissan Leaf).
> My impressions had been that it largely mirrors the EV market: A few early PHEV models (such as the BMW i3) had poor battery management leading to unreliable battery packs.
BMW i3 owner here. The i3 never had such issues and has been praised for its overall great engineering (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjPIuLz5VFI and https://evclinic.eu/2024/11/03/which-used-ev-to-buy-a-beginn...). It is also not a PHEV but an EV that had an option for a range extender.
These guys do a lot of work on ICE, EVs and Hybrids, scroll to the end where they discuss Hybrids https://evclinic.eu/2024/11/03/which-used-ev-to-buy-a-beginn...
It's Toyota cheaping out as always. They put a 1.5kWh NiMH pack in the trunk, and charge $5k for replacement. That's almost a big power bank capacity, and using that small of a battery strains it too. Cost for enclosures and control circuits don't scale with capacity so dollar/kWh figure is atrocious.
It works. People hates it. The issues with it are mostly theoretical or matters of preferences. That's hallmark Toyota, isn't it...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_encumbrance_of_large_au...
PHEV means two drive trains, more parts and in turn more weight.
Do you really want a plugin car that loses its charge in 30 minutes?
Yes, I've owned one for 4 years now and I genuienly believe this is what all cars should be, it's just such an obvious idea in hindsight it's crazy that this isn't what everyone is pivoting to. I do all of my daily driving on EV power using zero fuel and the car costs me close to nothing to drive(charging nightly on a cheap tariff), and when I need to drive across the continent to visit family I just put in fuel and go, no bother with charging on the way. And on slightly longer drives the entire system improves efficiency a lot - just did a 100 mile drive this weekend to a holiday cottage, averaged 45mpg both ways, and that's in a 2.2 tonne SUV with 400bhp. That's the kind of number you'd see out of a diesel normally.
I own a PHEV, for almost a year now, as my daily drive. It's not as good a BEV as a true BEV (range is ~20% of one) and it's not as good a HEV as a true HEV (gas mileage on hybrid mode is worse than my in-laws Prius'). But it perfectly fits our current life. We can do all of our normal daily routine (commute/school drop offs) on one charge, and when we head out of town I don't have to worry about it (I live in a Western US state with long drives between population centers- I can get range anxiety just on gasoline as I did not grow up like this). So we've driven it for 18,000 km, and 14,000 of those have been fully electric, just a couple of weekend getaways and one week-long trip around the country have been on gas.
Getting all of that capability in one car is very convenient. We replaced an 11 year old gas vehicle, and I don't expect that this PHEV one will last us as long. But it was the right car for us in our current situation.
> Do you really want a plugin car that loses its charge in 30 minutes?
Yes? Probably half of all my drives are 30 minutes or less, round trip. Some get closer to 40ish minutes of driving on battery, which would cover more like 90% of my drives.
AFAIK it's not (usually?) two drive trains, it's one electric drive train and a generator that's way smaller than a normal gasoline engine.
I own one and would prefer if my next car purchase was another one. Unfortunately, while the model I've picked for my next car has a PHEV option, they don't make very many, and don't take orders, so if you really want it, you probably need to put your name down at all the dealerships, and the wait for regular hybrid is already long and the vehicle to be replaced was sold in summer. PHEV would be nicer, and we've made due longer than I thought we would, but when our regular hybrid comes in, that will be good enough.
PHEVs are lovely to drive, and availability of gas stations means almost no planning is needed. Fuel low, stop in for 5 minutes and good to go for hundreds of miles (current one does 500-600/tank depending on conditions)
> Do you really want a plugin car that loses its charge in 30 minutes?
30' are enough to go to work, where I can recharge during the day for the return leg. 30' are enough for any daily errand, too, so that would not be a problem.
Finally, for long trips, I'd use it as a "real" car with its internal combustion engine.
Since 90% of my car trips are under 30 minutes, yes that would be worthwhile.
The other 10% are beyond any practical battery range, so a BEV isn't an option.
I think you exaggerate about BEVs. I have a friend of mine who has a Boston condo and commutes with his Tesla to his house in Northern Vermont most weekends. I think he charges once along the way and then at home on both ends. That said I'm going to Maine next week and I would certainly have to track down convenient and reliable chargers. And there would probably be some trips--even in the Northeast--where they wouldn't be practical.
(I on the other hand drive into a city about 60+ minutes away so I don't know what the percentage is but I do a fair number of trips an hour+ away.)
That works, but EV chargers are rare enough that you can't just see the charge meter getting to low and get off at the next exit for a fill up like you can with a gas charge. If you don't pay attention you can end up with not enough charge make it to any charging station. People run out of gas too, but most cars the gas light comes at with 40 miles of range left - 40 miles of range won't always get you to any EV charger (and with different charging standards you cannot be sure your car can charge at them all though this is getting better and will likely be solved in a few years as we move to NACS).
"30 minutes" is pretty misleading, because it's not like the batteries are discharging at a constant rate.
It might be thirty minutes on the highway, as new PHEV cars have ranges in the 30-40 miles range. But if you're driving in the city, 30 miles is enough to get you basically anywhere you want to go and back, even if traffic makes it a 2 hour trip.
Is it two drive trains? I thought ideally PHEV would be like diesel-electric with electric motors supplying traction and a gas power plant supplying power.
Gears are more efficient (assuming you are not stupid in design) than an electric generator and motor. We cannot make gears that will do the job for a train - they wouldn't fit between the wheels while also doing the needed 90 degree turn to the engine. Once in a while someone makes such a car, but it is generally better to use a transmission.
That's more than enough to cover the average worker's commute, especially as most of the time is spent stuck in traffic.
That's not true, it's barely enough to get the average worker to their job https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/one-way-...
> Among this group, those leaving between 6:00 a.m. and 6:29 a.m. reported the longest average travel time to work at 32.8 minutes.
So, if "30 minutes" was actually how you measured range (and not in miles), the average worker in the longest group would burn fuel for 3 minutes, instead of 33 minutes. This is 90% less fuel than a traditional hybrid car would use in the same time.
Travel time != travel distance. When you're stuck in traffic, an electric or hybrid car will not consume any energy except for fans/heating/AC. An ICE-only car will have to keep its engine running.
Because demand isn't the issue. The issue is a new car that isn't a budget brand is increasingly a luxury option in the United States, because, and say it with me...
Wages have been stagnant in the United States for nearly 50 years.
Every economic stat right now points to this as the core issue. Consumers are squeezed more on every last good and service, tons of services are now only available via subscriptions which inherently cost more, and despite the economy supposedly (and, actually) booming in a lot of ways, that doesn't hardly at all make it's way down to the workers either via higher wages, or via cheaper products.
This is a complicated situation that doesn't lend itself well to comments but a number of the bigger datapoints include an employment market that favored employers for the majority of the time since the 70's, the ongoing slandering not to mention outright interference on the part of employers against labor organizing, "inflation" that when you scratch the surface is just companies charging more because they can, the ongoing consolidation of enterprise resulting in monolithic companies that own dozens of brands of the same product, none of which truly compete on price, on and on and on.
There are a ton of good reasons for Americans to be broke, and a number of prominent economists have been ringing alarm bells for decades now that all of these things coming together is going to stall the economy cold and send us into the... by my count, fourth once-in-a-lifetime economic crisis I've experienced.
>Wages have been stagnant in the United States for nearly 50 years.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES0500000003
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LEU0252881500A
There simply isn't data to back this up.
What you are referring to is capital gains (CEO pay) compared to hourly pay (employee pay), which is a misleading apples to oranges comparison.
> There simply isn't data to back this up.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
Your nominal charts are extremely misleading. Real wages have gone up about 10% since the GFC. Is it up? Yeah, but that is quite a tiny amount annually, not even an additional pack of gum.
> What you are referring to is capital gains (CEO pay) compared to hourly pay (employee pay), which is a misleading apples to oranges comparison.
I assumed it was the infamous wage vs productivity chart.
https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
This certainly aligns a lot better with what they're saying than talking about executive pay (though I'm sure that's also part of the problem).
No, I'm talking about the stagnant wages: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-...
Though, I don't think it's possible to talk about this without also talking about the ludicrous salaries now drawn by the executives either.
So if people would have money, there would be a demand. His point still stands.
I mean I think the distinction between "goods that are not wanted" and "goods that are wanted but are not affordable" is a significant one, but if you want to stick strictly to the terms of art in economics, then yes I suppose you're correct. And I didn't mean to argue his point, but rather to reinforce it. If goods, when they become cheaper, suddenly start moving again, then the goods themselves aren't really the issue.
And I mean, this is exactly 100% my experience currently. Our sedan could use replacement, it's about to hit the 200k miles mark, and given it's primarily used by my wife for inter-town transit, I would happily buy her an electric car, but a new electric car is hopelessly out of our reach financially. And I make six figures!
A car is an inelastic good that is priced beyond what the market can actually bear. This is why the used market is so insane: people make do with a secondary market because they need the good but can't afford it on the actual market. And now there's a supply crunch on that secondary market, because the primary one has risen so much.
No it is exactly the same. If people can't afford to live in mansions, then it makes no sense to build them. Nobody will buy it. It is a demand problem.
It's actually growing at around 20% year on year, this year. World wide. The EU is the exception. Mostly because Germany is struggling. Everywhere else, EVs are growing pretty nicely.
German manufacturers also seem to struggle the most with the whole "the cheaper your products are, the more customers can afford them" concept.
I guess I don’t understand the advantage of EVs really. Isn’t a plug in hybrid the best option? You can do everyday short trips on battery but also have the gas engine for longer trips. Sure it is more complicated but Toyota has shown that you can make this super reliable.
An advantage of a pure EV over a hybrid is that you don’t have the maintenance liability of the combustion engine, cooling system, and transmission.
And brakes. My brake pads rarely touch my rotors.
Not only does this (and the things you pointed out) reduce the cost of maintenance, it saves on trips to get them done, and the headaches of the pressure most put on you to get things done you don’t need, just so they can make even more money off of you.
Also, EVs on the highway (when hybrids are using the ICE) are much quieter, and have more torque.
The only downsides I have noticed are:
- Higher up front cost (though I don’t think hybrids are much cheaper)
- Heavier = more frequent tire changes (again, not sure hybrids are much better)
- Range for long road trips, resulting in having to pause for long charges, and having to plan your route in advance (definitely not a problem for hybrids)
> And brakes. My brake pads rarely touch my rotors.
I still have the original brake pads on my 2008 Prius with 150k miles. (And yes, I have them measured periodically to see if they're still good.) This is typical.
What usually kills that age of Toyota brakes is not use, but rust. I've had all 4 corners rust to death on my 2004 vintage Toyota. They use terrible metal that just cannot resist rust at all.
I'd assumed PHEVs would include regenerative braking. Do they not?
They do. PHEVs and even HEVs are very easy on their brake pads. Usually to a lesser degree than BEVs, but it is not uncommon for even traditional hybrid owners to never need brake pad replacement for their entire ownership of a vehicle.
Yes, all PHEVs have regenerative braking. I sold my Chevy Volt a few months back with 50K miles and the brakes were like brand new. It’s very possible that they’ll outlive the rest of the car.
Is that right?
With torque blending, regen braking is blended with friction braking at low speeds (when regen braking is ineffective). Friction braking is always needed to make a full stop.
Kinetic energy is a function of velocity squared, low speed breaking damages the pads way less.
Sure but the pads are still being used frequently even with regen braking.
> Friction braking is always needed to make a full stop.
In my EV6, I have a paddle on the left of my steering wheel that I use (almost) exclusively for braking. It 100% only uses regenerative braking, and I can definitely tell the difference, as its stops are much more subtle than when using the brake pedal for stopping (even when coming to a stop super gently).
More evidence that it doesn't use friction brakes: when I use the left paddle to brake, the car will sometimes edge forward (just an inch or two). With friction braking, this obviously never happens.
Friction braking is rarely needed to make a full stop. My EV only applies blended braking in specific conditions (cold temps, steep hills, and full battery) and I essentially never touch the brake pedal.
Are you sure it's not actually applying friction brakes?
I have a Model 3, and even when the driving mode is set to "Stop" (enabling one-pedal driving), I know that it's applying the friction brakes at low speeds, even when the battery is warm and not full.
Regen isn't enough to slow the car to a stop, even in ideal conditions, and it certainly can't hold the car in place.
You may not touch the brake pedal but the brake pads are still being used to make a complete stop (this is how regen braking systems work, at low speeds regen is not effective so brake pads are used for the last few feet).
You’ll use wear out your brake pads way less, but they are still used very frequently (every time you make a complete stop in fact).
My mistake, I misunderstood what you were saying. I thought you meant that regen braking on its own wasn't strong enough to slow the vehicle down. You're right that friction brakes are applied for the last little bit to come to a complete stop and hold.
The 'transmission' on a hybrid is often no more complicated than the 'transmission' on an EV, many (but not all... looking at you, Hyundai) are much more simple than ICE vehicles.
Also, for the duration that most new car buyers own any car, any difference of maintenance liability of even a traditional ICE vehicle is close to negligible. Most new car buyers pay for a couple of years of fluid changes, tires, and brakes... then they trade in the car. They're going to pay similar costs no matter the architecture.
but if there are higher maintenance costs a little later in the vehicle's life, won't that impact the trade-in value?
It can, but the degree to which it does in practice varies. A used Maserati with $1000+ oil changes definitely will. Failure costs of components at end-of-life usually don't, until a vehicle is approaching end-of-life. But the regular maintenance for a typical (P)HEV is mid-life is similar to other vehicles.
25 year old sedan with a Northstar engine, a couple belt and chain replacements, no significant transmission issues, no significant engine work. Regular dealer maintenance No major battery pack replacements. May not be the greenest, but I know I’m in the green. Plug-in hybrids do sound cool…
Combustion engine is a perfected tech, which can easily last 100K+ miles. EVs do have a cooling system for the battery.
EVs also have a battery which can be $20k, and electric motors which are $10k. This really makes them awful on the used market when the warranty runs out. If a used Model 3 needs a battery it is basically scrap.
but a used Model 3 doesn't! and that's the fake news here. These batteries last ages. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doAcNVuTnXU
Seriously, a YouTube video is supposed to be proof that batteries last ages? What is ages? If you provide something I can read you might have been able to change my mind.
Truth is not many want to risk buying a used electric car and the depreciation reflects that.
Generally, 10-20 years and 100K-200K miles. The US requires a warranty of 8 years and 100K miles.
For newer cars it's hard to tell for sure since the tech has improved significantly in recent years. But even the earlier cars have done better than people expected.
A quick google turns up lots of sources you can read. Here are a few:
https://unitil.com/blog/electric-car-battery-life-fact-vs-fi...
https://blog.evbox.com/ev-battery-longevity
https://unitil.com/blog/electric-car-battery-life-fact-vs-fi...
Battery costs keep coming down. We are now sub $100/kWh, and Chinese batteries are approaching $50/kWh. So a 75 kWh battery will cost less than $4000 in the not too distant future. And costs should be way more interesting when you have to replace your battery in 2040.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-lithium-ion-batteri...
For most people, their daily trips are well within the range of what an EV can do.
And most people don't do long trips every week. Personally, I try to optimize my life to avoid spending a considerable part of it in a car.
With charging at home EVs are just easy. For long trips charging every 2-3 hours isn't too bad (most humans benefit from a break anyways).
> And most people don't do long trips every week
Most people don’t own multiple cars and wouldn’t rent a car for those rare use-cases when they already own a perfectly fine car. It may be overall cheaper to do that, but people don’t think that way.
One or two annual holiday roadtrips to go see the family and oops that EV starts looking like an annoying option. Every friend I have who doesn’t own a house and bought an EV ended up returning it because of how annoying the charging was to deal with.
It’s not that charging was _hard_, it’s that they had to think about it.
edit: this may be an urbanite take. Even folks with cars don’t really use them to commute regularly. Semi-rare trips only.
I enjoy road trips far more since getting an EV. It's nice paying half as much or less in fuel costs.
Tesla's charging network is excellent, and I'm glad it's opening to all EVs on the market. I used a third party charger once and the horrible user experience made sure I never will again.
It's only 57%, so a good chunk who don't, but according to [0], the median US household does own two cars. I assume that a fairly large majority of married people have multiple cars (between the two of them), and only a very small minority of unmarried people do.
[0] https://www.autoinsurance.com/research/car-ownership-statist...
People who are spending new car money are not going to settle for a product that requires planning and effort to be used outside of one's daily routine.
This is also why 3-row SUVs and half ton crew cab trucks have proliferated as much as they have.
> People who are spending new car money are not going to settle for a product that requires planning and effort to be used outside of one's daily routine.
Maybe YOU won't, but others will.
I paid $60K for my Model 3 Performance. Yes, I chose to plan out my charging stops when I take my annual 1300 mile road trip from Portland to Santa Clara, or my recent 2,400 mile road trip from Portland to San Diego.
But I CHOSE to plan them. You don't HAVE to. The car's built-in nav will easy plan charging stops for you. I just choose to plan them out ahead of time (Using ABetterRoutePlanner.com) to min-max my charging time. IE, I can tell ABRP "This will be a stop where I expect to spend at least 30 minutes", and it will adjust the rest of the charging plan accordingly. Or I can tell it to stop at specific chargers that might have a specific place I want to eat, or whatever, but my usual workflow is to set all my destinations (actual destinations, not including chargers), hit Plan Drive, and then make some minor adjustments to the charging plan.
I suppose in some way, I'm sort of proving your point. But it's not nearly the chore you make it out to be. In fact, I actually enjoy the planning. Of course, one person's joy is another's drudgery.
I have found that people who are considering buying a new car and immediately rule out EV's mostly do so out of confusion and misunderstanding.
My father for instance wouldn't get one because he will drive to the beach a couple times each summer, and does not want to have to deal with waiting while charging. However, he is also the type who stops for rests while driving. But he, being old and stubborn, didn't want to hear it.
You're never going to a hybrid under $25,000. Pretty much everywhere but the US has the option of getting an electric car for under $25,000 from BYD or Renault.
I've done over 20,000 km in road trips in an EV. You charge while you're eating or toileting or sleeping, it doesn't affect my trips.
> Pretty much everywhere but the US has the option of getting an electric car for under $25,000 from BYD or Renault.
The US is afraid of competition in the automotive industry and the current import tariffs and taxes on cars are a bit of an elephant in the room here, too.
BYD just has to do the same thing Toyota did, build a plant in Mexico and use NAFTA to sell well made cars for dirt cheap.
I'm not yet convinced that BYD cars ARE well made yet though. When Hyundai had a similar amount of mistrust from American consumers, they improved their standing by offering a very compelling warranty, 100k miles or 10 years. The problem is I don't know if I can trust BYD the COMPANY that much.
We have three choices: 1) compete by enslaving our workers and treating them horribly like they do in China, 2) refuse to compete by simply outsourcing the slavery to China, or 3) compete by treat our workers well, use tariffs and tacitly admit that Trump has a good idea. Option 2 seems like the only option that is afraid of competition.
Labor is at most 10% of the overall cost of a car.
Now explain the remaining 15k of price difference!
Sure another 5 or 6k is subsidies from the Chinese government to the manufacturers, but there is still another $10k more that American cars cost VS Chinese cars.
I agree, the range has rarely been a problem for me. The battery runs out of juice about the time my butt needs a break, my bladder needs emptying, and my stomach needs filling. By the time I'm done with lunch, I'm good for another 250-300 miles, and I'm going to stop for the night at that point anyway. People doing >500 miles per day on a roadtrip are the outliers. Way, way outliers.
I drive home from Virginia to Florida in a single day, typically with one stop at the Florence, SC Buc-ee's. That's nearly 600 miles (in a gas RAV4). I do this a couple times a year and it takes about 9 hours, less if there's no cops.
Out of curiosity, how long are those trips though?
In the US and probably Canada, there's an expectation that spending 8 hours in one day going somewhere is easily doable. (as in 800 km in 8 hours with a few 10-30 minute breaks for gasoline or food). It doesn't seem like that's a particularly normal thing for a European to do.
4 of the trips were 3000km each.
Longer trips are actually easier in an EV because you have no expectation of being able to power through without stopping for breaks. And it adds the option of charging overnight at a hotel.
It's the medium distance trips that are harder in an EV. A 500-800km trip is something people without kids expect to be able to do without any breaks.
Now you have to find a hotel with (working) overnight charging. These are rare in the USA epecially outside of major cities.
They are rare, but easy to filter for in the standard hotel apps.
For most of my trips I was also able to use block heater plugs, which are ubiquitous in Western Canada. 120V isn't enough to get a full charge overnight, but 8-10 hours of charging at 120V is still adds a nice boost.
Generally, no, a plug in hybrid is not the best option.
Where > 95% of trips are 2x30 mile trips (daily commuting); the vehicle is accelerating and decelerating the extra weight for no benefit. You have the increased battery wear, where you exceed the optimal charging range 15-80% on LiPo. Then the additional ICE factors such as brake wear, oil changes, fuel rot (if you always charge and buy gas once a quarter), coolant changes, an an exhaust system increase maintenance necessities significantly (where a brushless motor has no need for oil or open coolant).
Hybrids can also promote "green washing" ~ it's never charged and driven on short commute trips, the system is always charging the electric, using more gas than if it were only gas, with lower performance, a shorter battery life, and more components to fail.
The best option, is somewhere between renting an hybridICE for less than once a quarter > 200 mile one way, road trips; and, if your household driving is out of norms, ie > 200 miles road trips every week, having a car in the household fleet that is hybrid/ice.
I'm 100% with you.
Dodge has the 2025 ramcharger which has amazing specs! 690 mile range, 14,000lb towing capacity, 663 hp, etc. etc.
I've got reservations about dodge, and reservations about the first year of the model from any manufactuerer. Otherwise, I'd gladly shell out 70k+ and my left nut to get one.
I really wish more manufacturers would go this direction. I've got no interest in 100% EV, because I do things with my truck that simply are not feasible with any EV model, mostly due to range. The problem is, I do just enough truck stuff with really tough requirements that I don't want a non-truck without serious range. Yet, I still go to work in an office a few days a week and would love to use plug-in charge to do so.
not a PHEV, but I've been incredibly happy with the 2023 F-150 Powerboost. It's a Mild hybrid system, with great towing capacity, power & torque. Does not sound quite as "stout" as the Dodge, but like you I have my reservations about the brand.
I've been Using it as a honest work truck in the civil engineering / construction world, and have been able to get 600 miles from a tank without trying too hard. I've seen plenty of short (~20 mile) trips nearing 30mpg, which is above stated estimates. 23-25mpg for mixed use driving off road, on road, idling, etc. I'm on jobsites a lot, and just even having working AC / full host of accessories with the ICE engine powered down, acting as a generator when needed, is a big quality of life upgrade.
Hey! It's a fellow Civil Engineer on HN!
I’m not a PE (or EIT). I run my firm’s construction services department. I have a Bachelor of Music degree, so without an ABET degree, not much hope for me ;) I’m engineering adjacent, and really enjoy the field based problem solving and bringing a different perspective to projects. Just no sealing plans for me.
Just wanted to set the record straight! Good to see others in the civil field represented here.
Those are amazing specs. I want one that isn't luxury. Give me cloth bench seats, no infotainment... I'm happy with my basic 1999 F350 but it is showing rust (I expect to lose the box in a couple years) and so I need to be thinking about what next.
A real EV has much better performance than a plugin hybrid, which is more like the worst of both worlds when it comes to driving experience. If you think only about economy, a PHEV can make sense, but it is an overly complicated solution which is bound to have extra maintenance problems.
HEVs and PHEVs are usually no more complicated or burdensome to maintain than an ICE car, as their architecture often eliminates or mitigates some problematic ICE parts. Furthermore, very few new car buyers continue to own a car towards the tail-end slope of the product-failure bathtub curve. The advantage to (P)HEVs over BEVs is not driving performance, but versatility.
But yeah, don't buy a Prius Prime for the track. But it'll work great for going to the grocery store for a very wide variety of lifestyles and living situations.
A lot of people buying BEVs aren’t doing it for economy or environment, but for the driving experience. It’s a splurge for sure, but it makes driving more fun.
That's the problem in the OP -- EVs in the US sell only when they are premium vehicles. Cheap EVs don't quite drive like a Model 3. People don't buy a Leaf over a Prius Prime because of a better driving experience... and something cheaper than a Leaf is going to be similarly utilitarian.
Then we are pretty much aligned? I don't think, at least in the USA, that cheap EVs make much sense. The value proposition definitely changes in other countries with higher gas prices.
Yeah, gas prices are having less and less influence in what cars people buy. The overlap between [people squeezed by gas prices] and [people who demand cars from automakers] is dwindling. Fun fact, only about 26% of cars sales are new cars. The vast majority of drivers have no say in what is made.
It is possible to make cheaper cars, but they aren't competitive against nicer used cars. Back when cars didn't last very long it was viable to sell a car with basic amenities, like keyed locks, roll up windows, a single exterior mirror, no stereo, no AC, etc. But now, few are going to pay the prices that would demand when a used car for around the same price has all of those features. This pressure extends to cars of any drivetrain type.
Yes, and EREVs are obviously superior as a hybrid architecture yet most of the ink gets spilled pushing PHEVs, so it's pretty clear that people with PHEVs to sell are pushing the narrative.
I’m suspicious that regulators have made the EREV category worse than it could otherwise be:
See the CARB Regulation section here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range_extender
Why not instead set a carbon price and otherwise let the market and owners decide what mix of gasoline and grid electricity to use?
I see PHEVs as the worst of both worlds. Electric but short range, hybrid but lower efficiency. All of the complexities and costs of both drivetrains added together.
And the high maintenance costs. Just took a hybrid SUV in for maintenance after my maintenance plan expired, got a depressingly high price quote for extended maintenance. Adds literally thousands of dollars to the price.
I don't know what a "quote for extended maintenance" is. Like a subscription/insurance sort of thing? I've always just taken cars in around the time they're supposed to have things looked at based on maintenance tables, or when something goes wrong.
Extended maintenance plans cover oil changes and normal scheduled service. They're separate from warranties and only cover some wear parts. Most manufacturers sell one. See: https://www.edmunds.com/car-buying/prepaid-maintenance-plans...
They're sometimes overpriced (due to dealer upsell) and sometimes a good way to estimate what the manufacturer estimates that routine maintenance will cost, at least using their in-house service center. They can run $1000 to several thousand dollars for luxury cars.
The biggest downside of a plugin hybrid is the complexity and therefore higher service costs, likely shorter lifetime etc. You have all the maintenance requirements of a regular ICE vehicle and an electric motor + battery on top of that. Also the full electric range is likely much lower than an electric only vehicle so running costs would be higher.
Some EVs have full charge range that's not much less than a full tank of gas on an ICE at this point - the range is really a non issue for a lot of people.
I drive an EV with a comparably low range (~130 miles) and I can still count on one hand the number of times I've needed to drive further than that in one trip - on those occasions other than my lunch/dinner stop being limited to places with a charging station nothing really changed compared to when I drove an ICE. The rest of the time I get to plug it in in my garage overnight instead of having to stop at petrol stations, which is a nice albeit minor convenience increase.
In theory, yes - however, after all this time, 00s Priuses are typically lowest maintanence (or, overall TCO) cars.
If even ICE cars are now super expensive, why isn’t this a screaming opportunity for some auto manufacturer to target the low end of the market?
I’ve never spent more than 20k for a car. With prices like this, I’m just going to keep my old one as long as I can.
IIRC the US has some ass-backwards fuel economy laws that mean it's essentially illegal to produce small cars.
Also there's enough demand for high-margin cars to max out available production capacity, and would you want to be making major investments in ICE car production right now?
It's never been illegal to produce small cars in the US. It's a tragedy of the commons that the more over-sized cars on the road the more intimidated the average driver and the more compensation in the sizes of other cars to "keep up". Over-sized SUVs and trucks aren't penalized enough for their domination and essentially destruction of the commons space.
That's also what fuels some of the demand for high-margin cars, because of the perverse incentive that over-sized delivers higher margins. People will be too easily convinced to pay extra (generally at linear relationship) for size and there's not a linear relationship in size versus margins.
> It's never been illegal to produce small cars in the US
I think they're referring to the practice of making cars larger to pass as trucks so they are faced with more lax fuel-efficiency standards.
Even without the bogus classifications, the EPA emissions regulations are inversely proportional to the footprint of the car. That rewards manufacturers for not offering small cars.
The "light truck" designation is made on the basis of features like cargo capacity and ground clearance. The Subaru Outback was properly classified as a car until the smaller PT Cruiser got its truck designation and they justifiably complained.
... yet the Outback is still around and the PT Cruiser is not. Why? Well, the Outback has a thousand tiny details that add up to make it a very useful vehicle, while the PT Cruiser was all about exploiting nostalgia and finding regulatory loopholes to create/increase profit margin.
It's almost like there is a lesson to be learned. Make a "cheap" electric car worth buying, and people will buy it.
The biggest reason that works is that most states dropped per-axle weight taxes for trucks (which would much more directly pay for road wear-and-tear than gas taxes, and which is why such taxes existed in the first place) and the ones that didn't carved out too many "personal vehicle" loopholes for trucks. It's a curious lack of disincentives (and enforcement of such) for larger vehicles more than "small cars are illegal". Things like CAFE standards could have been met in smarter ways if they were properly incentivized. (Plus CAFE standards were in part set with an expectation of not "double dipping" versus vehicle weight taxes. That the vehicle weight taxes disappeared is the smoking gun, in some ways.) Small cars aren't incentivized enough, larger vehicles aren't disincentivized enough. Especially with today's wear and tear on roads, the states complaining that EVs are dropping gas taxes too fast, it's a wild shame that we aren't seeing a faster return to per-axle vehicle taxes.
I don’t think companies are penalized for producing small cars so much as larger vehicles like trucks and SUVs are incentivized to become larger to sit outside the rules as commercial vehicles even though everyone knows that only a small percentage are used for commercial purposes.
> I don’t think companies are penalized for producing small cars
They are. CAFE target formulas have the footprint of the vehicle(s) in the denominator. Larger footprint = easier fuel economy targets
https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/cafe-ghg_my_2012...
Exactly. The large gas guzzling, glorified grocery getters are just an easy out for manufacturers to subvert the requirements made for smaller vehicles (which was completely short-sited, or it was planned by lobbyists). It was simply easier for these companies to continue doing what they were doing with what they had. Give a company and alternative that costs them nothing, then they will do nothing. We need a new fuel standard. A truck or SUV purchased after <some date> then you pay an extra $<some dollar amount> per gallon. Yeah, I know the implementation is a problem, but I am simply throwing out an idea. Perhaps they yearly registration is now an extra $2000/year. They already screw EV owners in many states. I pay an extra $220 a year for my car, and that is ridiculous. I have owned my car for 5 1/2 years, and I have 24k miles on it. This tax is completely unfair and has no basis in reality for "road tax".
Unless I'm mistaken, a big reason we don't have smaller cars in the US (other than consumer demand) is related to safety regulations rather than fuel economy laws.
> would you want to be making major investments in ICE car production right now?
I would if I were a car manufacturer, at least in addition to other projects that I may have investing in alternative fuels. I haven't dug deeply into all the issues VW is dealing with today, but it does seem at least in part due to an over investment in electric vehicles.
If I were really in that situation, though, I'd personally be investing heavily in designs more similar to the Chevy Volt with an electric drivetrain and onboard gas generator. Range anxiety goes away without having to pack a massive battery pack in the car, and the gas engine is much less stressed meaning easier maintenance and a longer life.
Unless I'm mistaken, a big reason we don't have smaller cars in the US (other than consumer demand) is related to safety regulations rather than fuel economy laws.
It's a combination of everything. Trucks keep getting bigger because it's how they game the fuel efficiency requirements. Small cars get bigger because of safety standards. Consumers in the US don't really want small cars, partly because we've gotten bigger a partly because it's terrifying to be on the road with the aforementioned trucks.
Similarly, cars seem really boring these days because most people want something big enough (i.e. CUV like the RAV4), and because safety standards for things like pedestrian impact have constrained the designers. So, we end up with a bunch of CUVs that I can't tell apart.
I drive a 2023 Kida Rio 5 which is small, simple and fuel efficient (combined 40 MPG). Kia is killing it though, because not enough Americans bought them. They (Americans) instead buy the larger Forte. I specifically told them I wanted the Rio 5, and after a few calls they found one (1!) and proceeded to mark it up $2k - still worth it.
Not only do Americans tend to buy larger vehicles, but CAFE regulations encourage automakers to increase the footprint (area between the wheels) of the cars they offer. This is another reason the Rio is (and other small cars are) discontinued.
CAFE regulations (in a nutshell) require automakers' vehicles to meet a particular fuel economy per size of footprint, averaged across the vehicles they sell. So, they can meet the standards either by increasing the footprint of the vehicle, or by increasing the fuel economy of their vehicles, or both.
Its not fuel economy laws, its the highway safety laws. Light cars are usually more efficient.
Maybe you're thinking of the strict emission laws regarding NOx and SOx that prevent diesel cars.
> Light cars are usually more efficient.
That's true, but US fuel economy standards don't actually require vehicles to be more fuel efficient in a direct way. They require vehicles to be a certain fuel efficiency for their footprint.
Unintuitively, while making a car larger doesn't make it more fuel efficient, it might make it better meet US fuel economy standards.
Nope, manufacturers get penalized by CAFE regulations if they have too many cars of certain types. It's batshit insane.
There's no way to sell a good, cheap car without also cannibalizing your high margin sales and the dealers wouldn't want to sell it anyway. The vast majority of vehicle cost goes to:
1) amortizing the assembly line and upfront platform design costs
2) the raw materials of the basic car components, e.g. power train, chassis, and body
3) getting the car into consumer hands (distribution fees, taxes, advertising, dealership margin, etc).
Everything else like labor and upgraded trims works out to a relatively small percentage of the overall price, often under 20%.
Since you can't make enough impact by cutting amenities, you have to cut one of the listed things. You mostly can't build things more efficiently than major manufacturers do (though Tesla is quite good here), so that's out. You can't shave 50% off the basic materials costs because you run into basic FMVSS issues. Kia's strategy is to get as close to this line as they can though. That means you need to cut from the third category. No company wants don't want to cut their own margin, so that's out. Manufacturers can't work around the dealers by law, so they need to keep some dealer margin. Manufacturers can't stop advertising because the advertising department has significant political power and can get anyone proposing that fired. Manufacturers can't avoid taxes for consumers either.
The only real paths to cheaper cars involve opening the market to competitors that aren't limited like this, for instance foreign companies that don't need dealers and are okay accepting lower margins and not advertising.
The real reason is that it's basically impossible to produce a cheap new car that is a better deal than a Toyota with 80k miles on it.
Looking at what's available in Ireland at the moment, in the 20-30k range there's a Nissan, a VW (though it's the ancient e-Up, due to be replaced by the i2 any day now), a BYD, a Fiat, an MG, and an Ora (tragically no longer under the names "Good Cat", or "Funky Cat", presumably because Ora got around to hiring someone who had heard of marketing).
There are a bunch more in this price range due to launch next year.
Cheap-ish electric cars exist, they're just not, generally, suited to US consumer preferences.
> Cheap-ish electric cars exist, they're just not, generally, suited to US consumer preferences.
Some of the brands you listed aren't even really available in the US, or if they are that are 100% marked up with tariffs.
Big cars are definitely a thing in the US, but I'd kill for a ~$20k smaller EV hatch commuter to swap out my Model 3.
The small hatch EVs have generally had ~200 mile ranges, which is a little tough
If the cost is low enough, compromise on range becomes acceptable. I might buy a small, cheap EV that has range enough to handle my typical daily driving. But if I'm paying Tesla prices, it will need range to handle virtually all of my driving.
I mean, this is the Nissan Leaf- lightly used ones are really cheap.
That'd be perfect for me to be honest. We have a Tesla Model Y which we can road trip in. I'm just looking for a slick, efficient commuter. I normally only charge my Model 3 to ~60%, which is ~150 miles of range anyways.
Have you considered a Leaf? They've been around forever, with around 200 miles of range.
A 2025 Toyota Corolla hybrid is ~ $25k
I bring you https://www.carexpert.com.au/car-news/toyota-hilux-champ-lau...
You can't have it because of existing tarrifs.
Man this thing is awesome. One of my dream cars was always a 90s hilux - I got so disappointed when they started taking design cues from giant American trucks and making them bigger. Single cab with maximized tray space is the most practical option if you actually need to use it as a ute.
My understanding is that because cars are generally purchased rarely, they make more money with the status quo instead allowing customers a budget option.
Budget options are out there but consumer demand for them is weak. Americans love their cars and seem to be willing to pay for a lot more car than they need.
Which would you buy - a brand new car with no options, or for the same price a three year car with all the options. Or you can go cheaper yet with a 10 year old car with all the options of 10 years ago. Anything other than the most luxurious car doesn't make sense for anyone to build in general because people who want to pay less are willing to settle for a used car.
If cars only lasted 3 years instead of the 20+ they do today (average car is 12 years old), there would be demand for cars that don't even have a heater by people who want to save money.
Low price normally requires lower margins, so for the same risk, you're making less money than with a higher end model. Make it up in volume, you say? Well, that increases the risk that you don't sell enough and end up with a loss.
Ultimately, you CAN "win" by doing really well with a low-end model, but the chance of losing big is there, too.
Kia sells quite a few cars that start at $20k, like the Soul and Forte
The Nissan Versa currently starts around $17k, and I see a lot of those on the road. The Mitsubishi Mirage is similarly priced but I don't think I've ever seen one in the wild. I rented a Kia Soul a few years ago and thought it was perfectly fine.
But with so few options, like the parent, I'm planning to keep my current car (a 2008 Prius) indefinitely, just paying for repairs as needed until parts are unavailable or nobody is willing to do the work.
My worry is that US automakers have all but abandoned the compact and midsize economy car segments, and I don't know what tariffs will mean for the Japanese and Korean automakers that do cover these segments. But see my other comment about the pendulum swinging back and forth.
I rented a Versa about 5-6 years ago and I was surprised how completely "fine" it was.
It was a totally functional vehicle. The radio sounded good enough. The seats were comfy enough. It was a bit of a slug, but it had enough power so that you weren't scared for your life when merging onto a highway.
If those sound like low standards... well, this was not always the case for bargain basement cars...
Right. I've been saying for a while that if you need four seats or fewer, there's no good reason to buy anything more expensive than an entry-level Versa, Soul, Corolla, Civic, etc. (If you need five or more seats, especially with kids' car seats, you're obviously looking at more expensive three-row minivans.)
One way of looking at it, validating the point that others have already made in their comments, it is that there are no bargain basement cars anymore; everything now comes with an automatic transmission, air conditioning, power locks and windows, cameras and sensors, etc. As recently as 2008 when I was buying my Prius, these things were optional on many models. Today's compact cars are, I think, the size of midsize cars from 20 years ago too.
It's kind of like housing in America where the cost per square foot didn't actually rise much in some places, but the average home is now twice the size, so the average home price doubled.
Japanese and Korean automakers make a lot of their US-bound cars in USA, so I don’t think it will be that bad. A Honda civic is likely to be more American than a Chevy compact, for example.
Closer to $20k than $10k seems insane for a budget-tier car, to me. I guess that's my age showing, but it wasn't that long ago (ten years ago? Twelve?) my in-laws got basically two identical Chevys of their shittiest possible model for under $10,000 combined. Granted I think it was the previous model year, but they weren't used cars or anything.
40 years ago, the Yugo was sold in the U. S. for $4500. I’m not questioning the truth of your story, but I think it a poor basis for arguing that cars should be $10K today. The dealer obviously was willing to take a loss to get those Chevys off the lot.
MSRP in 2010 (first I could easily find from around the same period—this was a couple years later) for the worst Chevy Aveo was under $5,000, and MSRP was rather more aspirational (bullshitty) then than it seems to be now, as far as what cars actually sell for. This wasn't even that big a mark-down from MSRP.
Your source is wrong. No one was selling new cars in 2010 for $5000. (Source: me, and my memory isn't that bad yet.) That's the reason I brought up the Yugo: in order to sell a new car for $5000 in 1985, 25 years prior to your Aveo example, a company had to buy the leftover tooling of the Fiat 128 (one of the biggest pieces of shit I've ever owned) and cut even more corners.
So 25 years on, without even looking anything up, it's pretty reasonable to assume no one was selling a car for that same price and adding airbags and ABS for the U. S. market. But if one insists on a source, Motortrend said they sold for around $12K in 2010: https://www.motortrend.com/cars/chevrolet/aveo/2010/
I don't think so... I vividly remember Nissan running commercials for the Versa in late 2008 during the darkest depths of the recession because it was one of the last models selling in the US for under $10k (like $9,990 if you got the manual transmission, etc.). There was also the Smart Fortwo, but it was a two-seater.
This page from KBB says that the 2008 Chevy Aveo "had a starting MSRP of $10,610 when new." https://www.kbb.com/chevrolet/aveo/2008/
However, KBB's page for the 2008 Versa also says that it "had a starting MSRP of $14,025 when new" so maybe you're right? Maybe they're adjusting for inflation? It was a crazy time, obviously, with deflation so maybe there were huge discounts.
Oh weird, maybe my source was fucked then. I did find it generally hard to find any reliable-seeming info about historical car MSRPs, which seems... odd? It's strange the ways the Web fails to provide certain information (or rather, in this case, I expect it's the way modern search engines fail to surface the information we're looking for).
I bought my only-ever (and probably last-ever, as I can't stomach the prices now) new car as a 2012 Nissan Sentra, and I think it was around $14k and was definitely a way, way better car than the infamous Chevy Aveo (and a big step up from the Versa in size, power, et c., for that matter).
Agreed. The Web seems to have a shorter memory than many of us like to think, and ironically seems to be getting shorter.
> The Nissan Versa currently starts around $17k
Vehicles at that price are usually crap, esp. the Versa with the CVT engine. And, at least last year, there was a shortage so that you'd be paying a few grand above that price just to get it. I'd bet it's still the same where you're paying closer to 20k for this car.
Now, if you could get a Versa with the simpler engine (I think it was a manual shift), it's apparently a decent car. But finding that model is like a full-time job for a week, then either flying out to whatever dealership has it or getting it shipped which is another grand.
Quite a few $20k ish, though only the Forte actually making it under that. Forte LX starting at $19,900.
Of course that's without without the $1,155 "destination" fee, so even the Forte really starts at $21,145.
But considering inflation, $21k isn't a bad price.
We need laws that ban these junk fees. Any advertised price should be one I can get when I walk in.
I cannot get the car without registration. I cannot get the car without 'destination' fee.
Bake it into the price.
The destination fee isn't really a "junk" fee. it's variable based on how far away from the plant that manufactured your car or, or the distance from nearest port of entry. Delivering a car isn't cheap. There's certainly some level of arbitrage going on, but the delivery driver is usually independent of the dealership.
The dealership knows ahead of time how far they are from the plant and how much it costs to ship the car. GP was asking that the fee be included in the advertised price. That's fair.
The dealer should do that. However the manufacture cannot do that - they are advertising to people all over the country - some of live next to the factory and some who live across the continent.
And yet the destination fee is the same no matter where you are. If you buy a Chrysler Pacifica in Detroit, 15 miles from the assembly plant, you get to pay the same $1595 destination fee as someone 2000 miles away in Los Angeles.
Since the fee doesn’t actually reflect anything related to cost of delivery, it’s hard to see it as anything other than hiding part of the MSRP so that they can lie about cheaper prices in advertisements.
Just ask the dealer to compute the out the door price. It really isn't that difficult and certainly doesn't require yet another stupid regulation!
So instead of easily comparing prices online, now you have to call dealers individually and ask them to compute the out the door price? Which they already know and could post online themselves?
This is exactly the kind of problem regulations are meant to solve. Preventing false advertising and bringing information to all market participants make the market more efficient.
They'll have to know your address in order to accurately tell you the OTD price. Are you willing to give that information to every dealer you're querying about price?
There are also choices you can make during the registration process that will change the costs a bit. Quoting a fixed price for that would require yet more small print disclosing that certain choices were made.
I just don't see how it works out. Registration costs money. Not just when you buy the car, but over and over and over throughout the time you own it. You should know this as a driver. Further, the registration cost does not vary by dealer, so you don't need to know it in order to negotiate the best price.
> Are you willing to give that information to every dealer you're querying about price?
Dealerships generally get your name and phone number if you call them to ask about the price including fees and taxes. If you make them post defaults online, they get nothing from you. Clearly better.
> There are also choices you can make during the registration process that will change the costs a bit.
I'm curious about this. Do you have some examples?
Besides GP is also talking about things like the shipping fee, which are decidedly not variable or unknown. The dealership knows how much it costs them to ship the car from the factory and how much they want to charge you. They just choose not to disclose it.
> Dealerships generally get your name and phone number if you call them to ask about the price including fees and taxes. If you make them post defaults online, they get nothing from you. Clearly better.
I email, not call, and I lie. About my name, phone number, all of it. Best they will ever get is zip code. They could post defaults, but then I still don't know the actual OTD price -- it's already a hassle today because I have to be aware that dealers will advertise discounts that are only available in-state, and only mention that detail in the small print. I live in a metro that spans two states so this is common.
> I'm curious about this. Do you have some examples?
My state has a plethora of plate designs, and how much you pay depends on which you pick (it's really just a scheme for getting more revenue, of course). I can also choose (dependent on the vehicle, not all qualify) to pay for an extended registration period.
> They just choose not to disclose it.
I agree that they should disclose it. And they are required to by law. It's on the Monroney sticker, and it is included under "Total MSRP".
Such regulations are pro-market, too (not pro-business, in the sense of being something business owners will be thrilled about—confusing the two is a common error). Increasing price transparency is supposed to be a way to improve market efficiency.
I didn't say pro-business. I'm sure dealerships won't like it.
The destination fee is baked into the price in my experience. I recently priced used vs new cars, and every new car had the destination fee embedded in the advertised price. Customizing a car on the Kia website included the destination fee. No dealership in my metro tacked on an additional destination fee. The destination fee was line-itemed for total MSRP on the window sticker.
Registration cost is too variable. Varies by state, and even by city.
You'd say someone would build an API to retrieve that information by city. But I would not be surprised that the product seller can't be bothered inserting that information into their sales flow.
Okay, so build the API, and now customers will need to enter their locality before they can see the advertised price. It won't be a popular decision.
So compute and post some defaults? At least the state and city that the dealership is located in?
Sure, add that to the list of disclaimers in the small print so that the customer from the next town over will have something to reference when the dealer cannot sell them the car for the advertised price.
The problem is that cars are not treated like most other commodities. E.g. You don't have to buy a license to use a microwave or register it with the government. The closest analog is if you live somewhere with sales tax.
> add that to the list of disclaimers in the small print
Correct. Instead of a vague "registration fees may apply" disclaimer now there's a "registration fees assuming <city>, <state>" disclaimer. It's definitely not worse for anyone, and is arguably better for the customers who will register in <city>, <state>. That's a green light for a utilitarian.
I posted in another comment above, but I bought a 2023 Kia RIo 5 - excellent car. Small, simple, efficient and IMHO good looking. The Forte and Soul are larger (I also own a Soul)
>why isn’t this a screaming opportunity
with the American consumer buying 15M cars a year at those average $50K there isn't an opportunity for the low end. And if such market really appears - i.e. if the American consumer would hit hard economic patch and would really need cheap car - it will be at any moment filled by cheap Chinese EVs.
I would imagine the most price sensitive buyers wouldn't be looking at the new market at all - there might not be enough demand for "cheap, but still nowhere near as cheap as a second hand car" to make the price point worth targeting as a manufacturer.
They used to, that’s the thing. It used to be possible to get barebones A-to-B transportation with zero frills. Power windows/locks, air conditioning, ABS, power steering, automatic transmission—all manner of things that aren’t strictly required to get a person to/from where they need to go—could be optioned away if the buyer was very price sensitive.
In 1998 a Chevrolet Metro could be optioned without a radio or rear defogger, even. New purchase price was about $9k (equivalent to $14.5k today). Somebody was buying those, enough for it to be worth the manufacturer’s effort to produce it.
I suspect a whole segment of people would be willing to consider a no-frills EV at a comparable price point. Hell, if somebody made something new like a base model 90s Civic into a $15k EV without extra luxury nonsense I don’t actually need, I’d be in the dealership tomorrow.
You can get a low miles used Chevy Bolt for that much, and it's significantly nicer than most 90's Civics (has AC, Android Auto and CarPlay, cruise control, satellite radio, power doors and locks, keyless remote, etc.).
Not new, but does that matter so much?
> I suspect a whole segment of people would be willing to consider a no-frills EV at a comparable price point.
GM made that play with the Bolt. It was routinely available for just over $20K. Still sat on lots, not getting a lot of love. People shopping for new cars want nicer toys, people who cannot afford new shop used and enjoy getting those nice toys at a discount. I bet the subset of buyers looking for a bare bones no frills brand-new car is quite small.
> People shopping for new cars want nicer toys
It is worth recognizing the role that ZIRP played in all of this. Artificially low interest rates allowed payments on more expensive premium vehicles to be much more manageable for a much larger portion of the population.
I think this is something people just don't want to admit. It's easy to overlook prices being ridiculous when your monthly payment is all principal. That period of time of ZIRP constantly had me wondering how financing was making money.
That actual reason for this is that cars are just hyper-reliable. The reason people wanted to buy a new bare bones car over a used nice car is the assumption that the used car would cost you in repairs.
That assumption has been dead since cash for clunkers. Even American made cars will hit 200k miles. There's ZERO value to a "new" car. You would be outright stupid to pay $10k for some probably not possible "bare bones" car when you could just buy the decade old Corolla down the street with 100k miles that's only $5k. It will even have fairly modern safety. This is true even in the modern post-COVID hyper contracted used car market.
> I bet the subset of buyers looking for a bare bones no frills brand-new car is quite small.
I think you're correct; we're probably talking about a portion of the weirdly minimalist and frugal crowd pursuing FIRE. Also, most folks in that small subset wouldn't even consider buying a GM product; it's going to be either a Toyota or Honda for them.
Source: I'm one of them, still driving my base-level trim 2008 Prius.
As an aside, I'm reading that the new Bolt sold nearly as well as the Tesla Model S in 2017. Before that, I think the similarly basic Nissan Leaf was the best selling EV. Since then, however, my sense is that EV purchases became more about "fun" (which Tesla has emphasized and provided) than anything else.
It's a shame that the Bolt got discontinued. It was a great EV. I would have bought one if I didn't have exposure to Tesla first.
The Bolt isn't exactly a good looking car though.
It might sound silly, but not everyone looks at things through a utilitarian view.
Sure, but compared with other cars of a similar size, it's not especially ugly, either. And in that segment the utilitarian view definitely dominates, people looking for something more than A->B are going for more prestigious badges.
I want that too, but:
They could strip all that stuff out, but it wouldn't really reduce the cost of the car by as much as we want it to.The cost of much of the "luxury nonsense" like power windows and heated seats is heavily amortized since the tooling etc. is shared with the more expensive vehicles, and the actual material costs are low.
Think about it; heated seats are just some simple heating coils. You can get something functionally equivalent that plugs into your cigarette lighter adapter for like $10 from Amazon. It ain't adding that much to the cost of your car.
I sometimes think about power locks. I usually drive alone, and only lock/unlock the driver door. I had no problems flipping the little lock switch, and using the key outside was no problem because it’s right next to the door handle I’m going to use anyway.
Electrifying the locks led to the idea of RF transmitters as a secondary switch. Now there’s hardware for that, and a radio receiver. Gotta make it flash the lights, so that’s another relay and a wiring harness to the lighting system. Gotta beep the horn too, more wires. Maybe make it so you can hold the button to crack the power windows on a hot day; it’s just wire.
Fast forward 30 years, now everything talks to everything and I’d argue they don’t want to have to maintain a bunch of different firmware configurations to support fine-grained dealership options.
That’s my hunch anyway.
Not only that, but there's a cost to variable manufacturing. It's easy to build thousands of the same thing. It's harder (read: more expensive) to build a thousand of one thing, and another thousand of a slight variation of that thing and yet another thousand of another variation...
Specific to GM, those low cost barebones cars were a regulatory hack for CAFE. Selling 3 Metros made up for high dollar, low efficiency Camaros or Cadillacs.
With the move to trucks and ethanol credits, those hacks are no longer cost-effective.
There are small, ~20k cars in the US, but this isn't where most of the sales volume is. Trax starts at ~20k and isn't even that small.
Because there's no incentive to. The invisible hand of the free market only encourages a race to the bottom when the incentives are aligned. With the ridiculously high capex required to become an automaker these days, why would someone come in, just to make $3,000 per car, in a saturated market, chock full of regulations, to make money on the bottom end of a market where existing manufacturers can easily just undercut you the second you get any traction in the market.
Manufacturers make more money off selling luxury cars. The poors can just buy used luxury cars for all they care. We see the same problem with housing and luxury vs spartan options. The spartan option exists, but only begrudgingly so.
Privacy is in my top two concerns for EVs (and any vehicle purchase I make). I am increasingly avoiding every privacy destroying option out there, be it cars or services in general. It is, unfortunately, becoming nearly impossible to be privacy aware but the more resistance people put up the better chance we have of maintaining some privacy.
> Privacy is in my top two concerns for EVs
Any bit of telemetry in a modern EV is also in a modern ICE. There's no reason to hate on EV's for telemetry, you have to hate on the entire modern auto industry.
I don't think EVs are any worse than any other car. My F150 Lightning has precisely as much telemetry as the ICE version. Which is to say, more than I'd like. But I realize most buyers don't care.
Not good privacy by default, but as a hack you can also just buy a Bolt EV for like ~14k or so, then disconnect the location tracking antennae which takes like 30 mins of fiddling and $12 of parts.
> Privacy is in my top two concerns for EVs
Yes.
But it does rue out every single modern car on the market.
Very frustrating
I always buy used so I have some time left, but not much. When I bought my last vehicle the person had one of those insurance GPS devices in it. I can't even begin to understand why anyone would do that. It is so obviously going to be used against the driver and it is also obvious that it will eventually become 'required' and that just depresses me.
If you drive the speed limit and otherwise follow all those things they teach you in drivers ed but almost nobody does once they pass their drivers test those will save you money. The average driver is really bad.
Not at all - telematics schemes also penalise subjective measures such as "over-revving" and "cornering with too much lateral g".
Royal Mail drivers in the UK found themselves being disciplined for exceeding telematics thresholds when the company transitioned back to petrol-engined vans, from diesel, because they are driven in a very different manner.
Those are things I was taught not to do in drivers ed. I don't know how the UK compared. For that matter, I took drivers ed 30+ years ago, and I don't know what all has changed.
Money. The insurance company gives a discount. And honestly, for someone who doesn't share my same strong values for privacy, I don't blame them!
The point about the insurance GPS is that they will eventually use it against the person. 'You were going 5mph over the speed limit before the crash...' that kind of thing. Giving them more information will just lead to the consumer being hurt. Oh, and they will clearly sell that info to anyone they can get to buy it of course. That part isn't great either.
> eventually
No one thinks about "eventually." That's a long time and may never happen to them. "Now" is more important.
Lack of demand is the conventional explanation. But I think it is a bit of lazy and misleading one. I think there's plenty of demand for cheap EVs. But there's a problem with US manufacturing not being able to deliver those. Supply chains aren't there. Manufacturing capability and capacity isn't there. Etc.
And of course the EV market is still actually growing in the US. It's just that companies like Tesla, Kia/Hyundai, and other foreign companies with factories in the US are picking up the slack left by the likes of GM, Ford, Stellantis, etc.
Protectionism in the form of tariffs and incentives is making things worse. It's temporarily succeeding at keeping competition out of the door but it's failing at making local industry more competitive. Especially in the international market where US companies enjoy neither the benefits of import tariffs nor incentives. They have to compete on merit with the likes of BYD there. And that's obviously going to cause some issues.
Dropping incentives and tariffs would obviously be short term disruptive but I don't think it changes the outcome long term. Which is that GM either catches up or falls over (wouldn't be the first time). Either way, them delaying investments in EVs is not a sign of them adapting. Same for Ford, which has the same problem and is doing the same. Same for Stellantis. They are favoring short term profits over a long term plan. That's because protectionism is temporarily excusing them from having to compete.
That's not something they can dodge long term. Somebody will step up if it is not them.
> I think there's plenty of demand for cheap EVs. But there's a problem with US manufacturing not being able to deliver those.
How much of that has to do with the USA's extreme needs for range and size?
There are places I'd be happy to drive a subcompact with a 300km range (eg. the Byd Dolphin), but most of the USA that kind of vehicle wouldn't be safe or practical. That's an awful lot of expensive battery-mass the Byd Dolphin doesn't have to pay for.
> How much of that has to do with the USA's extreme needs for range and size?
Very little as far as I can see; this is a simple lack of competition. Most of the really long range vehicles are super premium products that are sold in relatively low numbers to people who can afford them rather than to people that need that kind of range (or rather thing that they do, it is a bit irrational in many cases).
Most US manufacturers simply compensate their lack of efficiency with more battery and cost. It allows them to keep up with e.g. Tesla and Kia in terms of range. So, they'll put in 85kwh instead of 65kwh. Or even more.
Same range but at a higher cost. But of course the flip-side is that Tesla can just effortlessly undercut their pricing whenever they are having surpluses. They sell the same cars for much less abroad.
It's also telling that Tesla has sold more Cybertrucks last quarter than all other EV trucks combined. It's not a very practical truck. But it looks cool. They've barely even started to ramp up production and they are already running circles around their competitors. No sign of a lack of demand there. Lots of signs of an outclassed competition that is simply not able to keep up.
Is the car 10k more expensive because of inflation or is the inflation so high because the car costs 10k more?
One of the best understandings of inflation is to use the mathematical concept of "equality" on those. They're two ways of phrasing the same thing.
A lot of people do a lot of bad thinking when they say "oh, well, inflation is umptybumpkins percent, so the fact that cars are that much more expensive is 'just' inflation, and thus isn't anything".
But inflation is prices going up. When the various sources release "how large inflation is", they are telling you "this is how much prices went up". Ignoring prices going up because "oh, the prices went up because of inflation" is basically using the thing's own existence to argue that it doesn't exist, which, while abstractly sort of impressive, is not strong thinking.
There are some arguments about what causes prices to go up, but that's a separate question.
> One of the best understandings of inflation is to use the mathematical concept of "equality" on those. They're two ways of phrasing the same thing.
They're not quite the same thing. All other things equal, if a price increase is "just" inflation then it takes the same number of hours of work to buy the car (or equivalently, the car is worth the same number of loaves of bread).
The alternative is that car prices have increased relative to other goods. This could happen through higher-quality/more featureful/bigger cars (which would be removed from the inflation calculation), or it could come because of some idiosyncratic feature of the industry like the car-chip shortage during covid.
First, there's a reason I said "One of the best".
Second, if you wrap inflation into your salary like that you are obscuring some important aspects of inflation, most especially the various lag effects that result in your salary being the last thing to update.
While understanding "purchasing power" (the term for what you are trying to describe) is important, it doesn't mean inflation is non-existent. It still has effects on savings, effects on assets, effects due to the aforementioned delays as it flows through the economy, and is in general not something you should view as any sort of "cancelling" like that, or, if you do, only as a final result, not an excuse to just wave it away like it's all just an artifact.
I had the same thought. You can actually look up the inflation data by category:
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/find-me-the-cpi-inflation-d...
New cars actually match the total average inflation the closest of any categories (22.3% for new cars vs 22.1% all items). Also interesting to note that food is up 30.7%, transport is up 39.5 % and shelter is up 27.6% in the past 5 years!
Is it actually $10K more expensive? The F150 Lightning I just bought was cheaper than the hybrid version I was looking at buying. The Tesla Model 3 & Y seem to be priced pretty competitively, as well.
Inflation is a shit metric because it's easily manipulated.
The cost of a GB of hard drive is failing spectacularly. The price of health care went up much more than the price of eggs. So what is the "real" inflation?
Government gets to pick what they use to define inflation so they can manipulate "inflation" numbers. And manipulate they do.
What you should look at is money printing: how much money did the government print. This is about 8% yearly for US.
This money debasement is eventually reflected in prices.
Some things get cheaper, because we can produce them more efficiently (like hard drives). Some things get even more expensive than 8% because we produce them less efficiently (health care insurance or college diplomas).
So to answer your question: cars costs more mostly because the government prints money, which devalues your dollars and car makers are not getting more efficient at making cars to counter currency debasement.
yes
I honestly don't get it - the median income in the US is like $35k - assuming people don't want to drive vehicles older than a decade, do people really spend a sixth of their total income on cars?
In Europe the numbers are even worse. I'm fairly convinced only rich people and businesses buy new cars
> do people really spend a sixth of their total income on cars
Yes. It's a huge expense for a lot of Americans. Either the primary expense, or just behind housing.
> assuming people don't want to drive vehicles older than a decade
That's not a great assumption, especially if you're looking at people with less money. The normal lifespan of a car is 15-25yrs, and _somebody_ is driving those cars.
As you suspect though, the flow of new vehicles largely goes into wealthier people (average incomes in the $100k range), and after 6-10yrs the used cars trickle down to everyone else and live ~20yrs in total. There exist a number of exceptions (e.g., people getting a new car for reliability and not realizing that you could replace the engine and transmission three times over for the extra premium they're paying -- trying to do the right thing and make a fiscally responsible decision but accidentally doing something more expensive), but those aren't the norm.
Median incomes of single earners get pretty skewed from people willingly working part-time or low-income jobs as secondary income instead of primary income. I usually prefer analyzing things on household income for this reason. Think a grandpa working a part-time gig as a greeter at Walmart while going back to a multi-generational household or a stay-at-home parent working a part-time remote call center job while the kids are in school or a teenager working a part-time job. All of these positions would pull pretty small amounts of overall yearly income but chances are they're not the sole source of wealth/income they have access to.
The median household income is ~$75k. There's ~131M households in the US. This means there are 65M households making more than $75k/yr.
But yes, generally speaking wealthier people are the ones buying new cars with a lot of people buying used models.
A lot of people buy used cars rather than new cars. The wealthiest buy the new cars, eat the cost of most of the depreciation, then sell them.
If we had a functioning housing market, you'd see something pretty similar there too. The wealthiest would be the ones paying for nearly all the new construction, instead of driving up the cost of housing for everyone else.
I took advantage of the IRA solar power and $7500 EV credit, now I have an off grid home all electric appliances and excess power for hot tubs and EV's. The Ford Lightning acts as a generator. This was the greatest most life changing and impactful legistlation ever: I've had $0 (ZERO!) in gasoline, LP, and electric utility bills since installation last year.
It's too bad that the only people benefiting from all green power subsidies are the people that least need them.
We should be investing solar in lower income communities, as those people could really use cheaper utilities, and any saving they get would immediately go back into their communities.
That's an odd way of looking at it.
Those who are most able to pay for it are those who are paying for the highest initial costs, lowering the costs for everyone else by improvements in the technology, and making it easier for others to adopt later. Early adopters take lots of risk on things not working out well, and learning what things can go wrong and how to fix them (at additional expense, too.)
This is much better than those who are least able to pay being made to shoulder the cost and risks of being early adopters.
It’s literally a government handout for people wealthy enough to buy more expensive cars and solar.
That money should have been spent to fund R&D/capital expenditures to make cheaper electric vehicles and solar cells for everyone, TBH.
That money is spent to fund the capital expenditures and the on-the-production-line R&D that drives down costs.
That money that subsidizes purchases of more expensive products also incentivizes all those factories, the things that make them cheaper in the future.
> That money should have been spent to fund R&D/capital expenditures to make cheaper electric vehicles and solar cells for everyone, TBH
If you can convert this vague statement into a policy with real impacts, there would be tons of people that would love to hear it. Otherwise, it's just wishing the world were different, without a path to completion.
Should we all have free energy? Of course! But how do we do it. I'm all ears and hope that you have come up with a defensible policy. (Though ideally you should have shared it 4 years ago, because it's going to be a long time before we have another shot at setting policy, and everybody was begging for ideas like yours back then.)
> That money should have been spent to fund R&D/capital expenditures to make cheaper electric vehicles and solar cells for everyone, TBH.
It kinda was, it's just that it was spend in China and the US government got the money back by putting tariffs on the imports.
The tariffs are paid by the importer, whose customers also gets a government subsidy paid for by the tariffs that the electorate is told are paid by the exporter, so they get to feel like they're getting a good deal and the voters get to feel patriotic, and why isn't my MSCI China investment doing better…
Which would be great and all, but they already exist. But rather than take advantage of the cheaper existing solar panels and electric cars we'd rather impose massive tariffs on them because of the country making them.
Isn't TFA about how the technology is not resulting in lowered costs for end users? What are you suggesting would change the dynamic described in the article?
There's two very very different things under discussion here,
1) TFA, with manufacturers using their limited production capacity to target the highest margin customers, the ones that overpay the most.
2) green energy subsidies, in the comment I'm replying to.
In the first case, the price insensitive customers are the ones paying for a build out of capacity, and taking on greater risk while doing it.
But in the comment that I'm replying to, the poster was commenting on "benefits" which is presumably the lower cost of electricity, and those with the least also have the greatest need for lower costs. Presumably this is about residential solar/storage, or at least I interpreted it to be. Lower costs in solar are not having much of an impact at the moment due to the high cost of the regulatory structure that we use in the US; Australia has a far far far lower solar installation cost, <5x per Watt. If there's disparity in the availability of our overpriced residential solar, it's due to those with less generally being renters rather than owners. So their landlord makes the decision about residential solar versus grid electricity.
And for green energy subsidies on utility solar/storage, the question gets even more complicated because falling electricity generation costs are not something that the utility wants to pass on, since most in the US are regulated monopolies and have no incentive to ever lower prices.
In any case, the existence of the subsidy is not the core problem, it's the mismatch between decision makers and beneficiaries.
Paying wealthy people to leave the power grid isn't making it cheaper for those left behind. It is making it more expensive for those who couldn't afford to leave the grid. Now more of the share of the cost to maintain all the infrastructure is pushed on to those who couldn't afford to leave it.
Those who are most able to pay for it likely have larger energy footprints too, so it's possible prioritizing this demographic gives you more bang for your buck in emissions reductions.
We need both. There's plenty of wealthy people that can afford to go solar and could arguably have a bigger environmental impact if they did since they often also have large homes, big cars etc. If they don't feel strongly about doing it for altruistic reasons then subsidies are a useful tool to get them to take the plunge. Without subsidies there's really no economic argument for them to do it since the break even times are long and they probably aren't too worried about utility costs.
Taking one single family home solar does not provide a measurable environmental impact in aggregate.
OP doesn't have to pay the electric bill anymore, but the average residential solar install exceeds $30k before credits. Someone has to pay off that loan...
Not to mention the Chinese factory that manufactured the solar panels is probably dumping toxic waste chemicals into the local drinking water unabated. We're all too busy patting ourselves on the back for saving the world to consider the impact of the whole lifecycle.
> Taking one single family home solar does not provide a measurable environmental impact in aggregate.
In order for large numbers of homes to go solar, individual homes need to go solar. Are you saying we just shouldn't bother with solar and EVs because not everyone is going to do it? May aswell just stop donating to charity too right?
> Someone has to pay off that loan...
I think the OP is probably paying for the loan themselves. The subsidies are just a small part of the total cost.
> probably dumping toxic waste chemicals...
Again, I think everyone would agree that it'd be better if the solar panel production process was totally clean, but the fact it isn't yet doesn't stop solar being a net win.
>In order for large numbers of homes to go solar, individual homes need to go solar.
Assuming that SFH remain the standard. Even with ADUs, that changes. (Idea: subsidize only based on the presence of multifamily on a lot?)
>I think the OP is probably paying for the loan themselves.
Hm. Knock-on effect. That homeowner now has to command the income to pay for the loan. That changes his job choice, consumption habits. Maybe his boss feels that he has to pay him more to keep him happy (and not another worker). If he has to sell, price has to be higher in order to break even/get a return. Solar is probably a good thing for municipal expenses, re: less strain on the power grid, but you also get a better turn in that regard converting multi-family or non-residential buildings.
> In order for large numbers of homes to go solar, individual homes need to go solar
Or we could put that solar on the grid so everyone could benefit from it
CA is doing both but PG&E (and SDGE and SCE, etc) are screwing everyone over as they wasted decades without maintaining their lines properly and now charge through the roof on power distribution which they have a monopoly on.
> In order for large numbers of homes to go solar, individual homes need to go solar.
The percentage of energy going to my house which was generated by solar continues to go up every year. And yet I haven't installed a single solar panel. Strange huh?
The average solar install only costs 30k in large part to tens of thousands of people pay that cost to bring it out.
That being said, the costs panels themselves make up ~12% of that cost: https://www.nrel.gov/solar/market-research-analysis/solar-in...
Also worth pointing out, in 13 years the cost of panels dropped by almost 90%.
> There's plenty of wealthy people that can afford to go solar ... subsidies are a useful tool to get them to take the plunge.
So you are in favour of taking taxes from the poor to give to the rich. Good to know.
Wealthy people's impact disproportionately comes from plane travel. That is highly polluting but nothing is being done about that.
Wealthy people pay much more in taxes than poor people. One use of taxes I am in favor of is "nudges" to achieve desirable outcomes for all. This is an example of that.
Bringing up plane travel is "whataboutism".
True, but not universally. In cities, lower income people living in older buildings are a significantly larger source of tax revenue than corporate parks or the wealthy communities they subsidize. I spend less in sales tax shopping at Costco than someone who eats every meal from a corner store and overpays for singles of everything.
I don't even know what a soda or single roll of toilet tissue costs, but I'd probably be horrified by it because I can afford not to spend money.
The government gets my money on occasion, but they have a chunk of the nation on a subscription plan.
>We should be investing solar in lower income communities, as those people could really use cheaper utilities, and any saving they get would immediately go back into their communities.
Good news, these are called "community solar gardens" and they exist all around the USA, here's a large one based in Minneapolis: https://www.cooperativeenergyfutures.com/
Community net monitoring isn’t allowed in California.
Instead, PG&E let the grid fall apart, so now they’re charging crippling amounts of money to people that can’t afford solar.
On the one hand, with the help of subsidies, our house is off-grid capable, and our power bill is $0-50.
On the other hand, there’s a red-tagged neighborhood near by (they built homes despite not having power grid access), and they usually end up having a generator fire take out a few houses every couple of years.
Anyway, I really wish California had a second political party (not the GOP).
How is it crippling? My 1900 sq. ft. loft in SF cost like $100/mo most months. That’s 5 hours of minimum wage work here. Even the $200 it hit at peak is 10 hours of minimum wage work. That was with 4 people living in it.
PG&E is a factor in net emigration out of CA. Agreed single-party-controlled states are full of inefficiency (aka corruption).
On the other hand, living in a purple state doesn't necessarily help with corruption either. I live in PA and we had billions "go missing" from our Department of Transportation over the course of over a little over a decade. Things have improved in the last like 6 years or so, but we had to get to the point where our bridges were crumbling and just having permanent detours setup around them first before people really got on a crusade about properly fixing our roads.
Josh Shapiro's done a bang-up job actually properly allocating the funds we managed to get from the big infrastructure bill, but that's been a major change from how things have been for the last 30 years I've lived here.
Net metering?
> CEF has financed and developed 6.9MW (~$16M) of low-income-accessible community solar arrays that ... offsets the utility bills of over 700 Minnesota households for the next 25 years
$16M for 700 homes = $22,857.14/home
That's not an investment, it's just charity by other means.
That number is in the ballpark of what it costs to install solar on a rooftop here in Minnesota.
The other part is these solar gardens don't stop paying for your electric bill if you move, so it's especially equitable for renters.
6.9MW / 700 homes is 9.85 kW/home.
Two of these would do more than that (10.5 kW), for (at current exchange rates) $5934, or just over a quarter that price:
https://www.kaufland.de/product/512021383/?search_value=sola...
And even at that price, it's overlapping in price range with the non-solar equivalents.
The funny thing is, I grew up (in the UK) with news stories about how the latest computers were so expensive in the UK that it was cheaper to fly to NYC, buy one, and fly back with it, than to buy local — and now the US is having the same problem in reverse with PV (you might well be able to fit some of the much smaller flexible PV systems I've seen around here in Berlin into oversized luggage).
(Sure, I get that big projects aren't exactly the same as small ones… but usually that makes big things cheaper, not more expensive, even for home PV vs. park PV).
That's just the panels. So, I buy a bunch of panels, they get dropped off by a truck, and then...? I'm going to use slave labor to assemble it all and wire it all up?
The price for installed solar in the US isn't high because of the panels. Its high because of the labor costs.
> I'm going to use slave labor to assemble it all and wire it all up?
Well, the USA is one of the few places left that still uses that, so you could…
But even without that, the linked product is the kind of thing two untrained people can do 95% of the installation in an afternoon, with the rest being a trained professional checking the wires and doing the final connection to the grid.
If this was done in a place that already has nearby grid access:
8 h * {$25/h unskilled labour} + 0.5 h * {$50/h electrician} = $225 per one of those, assuming you're doing enough of them to hire at full time rates not contractor rates.
And that's a car port, it isn't designed for optimal installation time.
If they need to also add their own connection to a more remote grid, well I've seen quotes of €10k for stuff like that around here, which is still cheap enough that you could do each of those on an entirely separate new not yet connected plot of clear land at domestic rates and still be cheaper than the quoted example in the USA.
Electricians in my area charge a good bit more than $50/hr. More like $100/hr. And its not going to be for a half an hour, it'll be a few hours.
And that's a car port kit, its a lot simpler to install than installing on a roof of a potentially multi-story house with a steep incline.
It is also completely excluding an inverter and all the additional wiring materials needed to connect it to your house or the labor of modifying your home's wiring. Its literally just the panels and a frame. So add another ~$2k to your prices here, at least. So really more like $8k for materials.
> If they need to also add their own connection to a more remote grid, well I've seen quotes of €10k for stuff like that around here
Yes, they'll need to tie into the grid, so you're really comparing $18k to $22k and continuing to ignore a lot of labor costs.
Similar prices can be found for just buying panels here in the US as your example link. As someone who has actually looked at solar proposals for an installation on my home, it's not the cost of the panels that's keeping me away from it. It's how much people are wanting to charge to put the panels on my roof, and the fact I don't want to be doing that labor myself at the moment.
> Electricians in my area charge a good bit more than $50/hr. More like $100/hr. And its not going to be for a half an hour, it'll be a few hours.
At contractor rates.
Hence me saying "assuming you're doing enough of them to hire at full time rates not contractor rates".
That said, I seem to have wildly over-estimated how much electricians get paid, at full-time rates the average in the USA is only $27.79 per hour: https://www.talent.com/salary?job=electrician
> And that's a car port kit, its a lot simpler to install than installing on a roof of a potentially multi-story house with a steep incline.
So do that then.
> So really more like $8k for materials.
You're being ripped off.
You all are.
> Yes, they'll need to tie into the grid, so you're really comparing $18k to $22k and continuing to ignore a lot of labor costs.
No, that's the price if you're putting each pair of these onto its own, new, grid connection.
If you've already got a house, you already have a grid connection.
If you're building a solar park, you share the same grid connection for all of them, you don't put a completely separate connection on each 10 kW because that is a pointless waste of money… but if you did, it would still be cheaper.
Oh, you're talking about the prices the company actually installing it pays. If that's the case, solar installers get panels even cheaper than what you're quoting from that German website. It's possible here in the US to get panels retail for just a little bit more from big box stores, they're paying even less with volume wholesale prices.
And if I'm talking about prices being paid by the company installing them, I'm still needing to do a lot more labor than 8 hours of unskilled labor and half an hour of an electrician and a pile of solar panels. I'm not going to make many deals if I don't have any salespeople, people aren't going to know to hire me if I don't have any advertising/referral business going on, I'm not going to have much continued business if nobody is answering the phone, people are probably going to sue me if I don't have people running support operations, I'll need a good bit of insurance & bonding for all of this, different sites have different needs so someone will have to actually design out the system, people need to handle all the permitting requirements and deal with those processes, I'll probably need to have accountants to help manage these cash flows, my costs for their labor is a good bit more than what they see on their paychecks, etc.
I swear it's like you've never actually looked at the costs of running a business.
Once again, the price of the panels isn't why it cost an average of $22k per home in that example.
> You're being ripped off
Please show me your $0 10kW inverter plus $0 for several hundred feet of decent gauge wire, enough for handling this 10kW plus plenty of safety margin.
can one even get that german made solar kit in the usa?
We do. Through community solar programs low/medium income households can get anywhere from 10%-50% off their electricity supply costs.
Oh, the low income people only have to pay 50-90% of the costs eh?
Yes..? What are you trying to get at?
*Waves from Germany* We have self-install balcony PV systems starting at a few hundred euros: https://www.obi.de/p/8073827/absaar-flexibles-balkonkraftwer...
I've been to the US a few times, seen AC hanging out of the windows all over the place.
If you can do that, and Germany can do this, why can't you also do this?
Now sure, it won't cover 100% of demand, but it will help many of the poorest.
HOA and lease restrictions. Also depends on what exposures you have. One place I lived was exclusively western, the other eastern.
Rhetorically: Do HOA/lease rules that forbid PV not also prohibit AC dangling out the window?
If they allow one and prohibit the other, can they not be changed to allow something else that also dangles from the window?
There'll often be a broad restriction of adornment of any kind outside of a strict list, and/or at the discretion of the HOA/property manager. Many don't allow window AC units. There's a general air of paranoia about anything that could potentially bring down perceived property values, or that might otherwise project a sense that the neighborhood is anything other than a Flanderization of affluence. (There's also a element of social control.) Think historical preservation codes, but for a pile of sticks built in the 80s or 90s.
Ah, I see.
For the whole "land of the free" and "free market" thing, the US seems very not that?
Unpopular opinion: Things here get twisted by our sordid history with race/class. We actually do value our civil liberties and economic freedom, as a general rule... but that can and does get short-circuited by attitudes and assumptions that were steeped during segregation and industrialization (and the associated widening of economic inequality).
Our government had the bright idea to bake those issues - particularly the strict rich/poor, white/black, good/bad dichotomy - into our housing policy, so now, any divergence from the local (affluent) norm isn't just a funny quirk; it conjures up anxieties associated with the Civil War, white flight, immigrant ghettos, eminent domain, urban decay, Superfund sites, etc.
People here are desperate not to be on the wrong side of the tracks, as it were, and so they'll submit themselves to no small amount of what looks like insanity to the rest of the world, in order to not live somewhere thought of as "sketch". Not entirely irrational, mind you, since these kinds of perceptions are often what determines whether or not a neighborhood receiving amenities like "parks" and "school funding" and "a place to buy food."
Circling back: window AC and PV signal to some people that folks in the neighborhood are too poor to afford central AC or roof panels (or to not "need" solar, budget-wise). These people (and the people who want to sell their homes to the first group) will fight you to prevent that perception from taking root. It wouldn't be as much of a problem if so much wealth wasn't tied up in real estate (the buildings, not just the land), but that's where we are.
Well, the US is a strong federal state, so it depends on the level of government. At the national level, the US government is relatively hands-off compared to other places. At the local level, it depends on your local politics. In urban areas, you might have an HOA telling you whether or not you can have an AC unit. In rural areas there's almost certainly no HOA, and potentially not even a local municipal government at all, and could quite often be legal to put up a gun range in your back yard.
Look at what it's solving for. Low income households are not the largest consumers of energy. They may own less efficient appliances, but there are other programs for that, like free home sealing and heat pump installation.
One group has insufficiencies that need to be solved, the other, excesses. Lessening dependence on the grid for the ones for whom cost is not a barrier lowers costs for everyone.
Now, having some sort of solar community energy bank would eventually be novel, akin to the replaceable battery charge stations for electric scooters in the Pacific Islands. Take your high density 12VDC canisters up, slot them into the locking wells, and get a text when they're full. Dock them onto your appliance circuit when you're home, and enjoy grid-free power for your home or vehicle.
This seems like an argument for utility-scale solar and batteries, which can be used by everyone. The do-it-yourself approach makes more sense for people who own their own home and can invest in improving it. That’s going to skew towards wealthier people who live in suburban and rural areas.
Agreed with the caveat, I'm from a lower income area where solar has been on the up. Panels would get stolen often enough to warrant thoughful consideration.
Probably found out about the tax credit while wine tasting, diving a Tesla and trading crypto while on the way to buy a new house with RSU's right after was given a bonus for new internal tool development.
In canada the lower your income the higher the grant for solar and things like insulation and window upgrades, heat pumps, etc.
The domestic manufacturing component is helpful to many of the people in the "Battery belt" and in auto manufacturing!
Most of the IRA has actually been spent in red states and rural areas
The thing is, we paid $50,000 to drive a brand new, mid trim line kia 99kwh ev9 off the lot. It supposedly will also support V2H with an upcoming update.
They’re moving production of that model to Georgia, for what it’s worth.
Anyway, the lightning looks great. It’s definitely a tempting replacement for our ICE truck.
I’m conflicted about buying Kia again. I’ve got a recent model Sorento and the dealer where I have to take it is dogshit. I say I have to, because the next dealer is a $50 bridge toll and 2-hour drive away.
I’ve been charged for things that should be under warranty. They refused to do a permanent fix for a recall after they did a temporary fix. Dealing with corporate is an exercise in being gaslit and living in a Kafkaesque nightmare.
Kia and possibly Hyundai are in purgatory right now: they’re innovating and making cars that no one else is. Their dealer network, however, can have some sleazy used car sales personalities and make for a terrible experience that can ruin your week.
Pick your poison.
It’s an amazing truck and you’ll never go back to ICE!
There was a recent article about Kia reconsidering the EV9 factory line in GA since the incoming Trump admin is likely to squash the IRA/BBB stuff Biden set up - specifically the $7500 tax credit for EVs.
As an EV6 owner I strongly considered the EV9 - which apparently fixes some of the annoyances of the EV6 and other eGMP vehicles.
Does your state pay you retail for your production? And have you gotten your first annual true up bill yet?
That setup is a dream for a lot of people, but it's not always easy to make happen depending on state regulations (and how powerful the utilities there are)...
I disconnected from the grid entirely so there is no bill.
Since the local power company here is only paying 10 cents per kw for solar power (which they resell at greater profit), I decided to run a small crypo miner and I still have excess power on a 22kw system.
I don't know of anywhere where its not legal to be solar powered but there were several thousand in costs associated with engineer plans and permits.
> Since the local power company here is only paying 10 cents per kw for solar power (which they resell at greater profit)
I think this is a common reason for disappointment in solar incentives. At least half of your power bill pays for transmission, and the half that pays for generation needs to be constructed such that the overall supply must meet the demand at all times, rather than simply supplying a number of kWh per day regardless of instantaneous demand. You can’t consider the “price” per kWh that you pay commercially to be the value of supplying a kWh to the grid, it’s much more likely that the utility is making a (subsidized) loss paying you 10c per solar kWh.
I'm not fully sold on this reasoning.
Electricity on the local distribution node has a value equal to the cost of generation plus the distribution. That's the value of it, what we pay. So by supplying the kWh locally to neighbors, the grid costs have been avoided. But the value is still the same.
Now, the T&D infrastructure has already been built, and the utility wants to get paid no matter what, but if they were a private company and not a monopoly, they wouldn't have a right to get compensated for their investment no matter what, because every company buys capital at risk. And that's for the good of the economy.
There needs to be some sort of forcing function to incentivize this cheaper form of power delivery, that avoids a lot of transmission and distribution costs. And that forcing function is the price that we pay those who generate the electricity.
The utility of course loses on every kWh they don't generate, because they want to sell more electricity. However, since they have a monopoly, we need other regulation to ensure that innovation that results in lower overall costs actually results in lower prices for consumers.
So far, the utilities have snowed the public and the PUCs such that they get away with murder on this transition. We need a grid, but we do not need the utility. And if the utility can not come up with a business model that works as a regulated monopoly when we have local generation, then we need to change the regulatory model, most likely eliminating the monopoly.
There's a lot to learn from Texas here for the rest of the country.
Your excess solar power is not worth the retail power cost because it is not as reliable or plentiful as utility power. If you think your neighbor would pay you the same rate for your unreliable excess power as they pay the utility, you should start a power company!
The infrastructure has not “already been built” - it is constantly under expansion and maintenance, and the bonds used to fund construction also need to be repaid.
I think your mind frame is that the reason the grid is not smart enough to pay you what you think your excess unreliable power is worth (which you stated to be the entire retail cost of power, including transmission and distribution) is because of incompetence and corruption of the utility monopolies. I think that is a pretty uncharitable take. It’s a hard problem and people generally want reliable and cheap. You can’t make microgrids reliable and plentiful without a ton of diverse generation (which already exists on the macro-grid) OR a ton of storage, both of which are very expensive. It is a problem worth solving but it needs to be considered with a realistic view on what people are actually paying for when they pay their power bill.
My frame of mind is that residential solar has the potential to dramatically reduce transmission and grid costs, but there is no way to force the utilities to shift to that model, because they will make less money. And regulators are asleep at the wheel and beholden to the utilities they regulate.
Grids are sized for peak, and without solar that peak is midday in most places, meaning that distributed behind-the-meter solar makes the grid cheaper.
Utilities, when they argue that solar is worth less, are not arguing on the merits of the issue but only selectively advancing arguments that benefit them. They will never present the totality of the issue.
It is up to others to push back against utilities' narrow views with a more complete view of the picture and what's possible.
I think you've still got too much of an "us vs them" mentality about the utilities, its not so much that they are refusing to shift to that model per se, these shifts are ongoing and happening today (which is why you're getting paid 10c per kwh for unreliable solar, IMO definitely more than it's worth), but I think a lot of people have unrealistic expectations with how far things can be shifted without addressing the implicit assumptions, such as the reliability of the power. Like, if we downsize the transformer between your subdivision and the grid by too much, that subdivision will have brownouts on cloudy days. In order to avoid that, we could deploy industrial scale battery packs, which also costs a ton of money and requires ongoing maintenance; at that point, it's probably cheaper to just use a bigger transformer to connect to the greater grid, where we have nuclear, hydro, wind, commercial solar, and hydrocarbon generation, which can all be used in different situations to match the grid demand with supply on a larger economy of scale.
In conclusion, the retail price of your electricity includes the engineering and infrastructure required to make your power delivery reliable most of the time, which is much more valuable than the raw kilowatts coming off of your solar panels.
I think you are giving the utilities far too much credit. They were bemoaning solar being even 5% of the grid, complaining that it would bring down everything. Seriously!
And if you didn't know that, and think that I'm too "us vs. them," then you should go look at the arguments made in regulatory proceedings and IRPs etc.
The utilities invoke preposterous technical arguments all the time. Yes, the grid should be reliable, but making it more decentralized and adding storage all over will make it far more reliable.
Industrial scale battery packs are quite often cheaper than new transmission lines. And we're going to need a lot more transmission or transmission alternatives in the future as more of our energy needs are electrified.
I don't dispute that some distribution might need to be upgraded to fully take advantage of the cost savings that distributed solar and storage present.
But you'll never find the utilities making the case for engineering a more reliable cheaper system, if that system is cheaper, because they will make less money. It would be financially irresponsible for them to make that case, and in fact they must try their hardest to increase the amount of money that is spent on fixed grid assets, that they can directly rate base.
This is not being overly "us vs. them" this is simple economics and incentives of regulated monopolies. Utilities are great at responding to the financial incentives put before them. Sometimes those financial incentives are making the grid reliable. But I don't know of a single regulated monopoly that has been financially incentivized to lower grid costs.
Peak is not usually midday; peak is in in the evening when people get home from work. So in places like California and Hawaii, you get the opposite problem where the solar drops off right before peak demand and you have to ramp up other generators to make up for it. It's called the duck curve problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve
The United States electric grid data is freely available and pretty neat: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electr... Choose a grid or a state to get regional time and you can see that region's peak will usually be 4-7pm. You can even see that weekend peaks are a bit lower, and that there's a second peak at ~10am when people get to work.
My sentence was "and without solar that peak is midday in most places." Remove the solar and California has a huge midday peak. Watch it shift over the years into the evening as more residential solar was added to the California grid:
https://www.caiso.com/Documents/CaliforniaISOPeakLoadHistory...
(Note also in your visualisation that all times are Eastern and should be adjusted for different localities. And if you go to a summer week rather than a winter week, you'll find the true peak, which is much higher, and which has a pretty standard curve with a peak that overlaps sunlight hours.)
That's why I said choose a region to get regional time. California's chart shows the time in Pacific time: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electr...
They have this summer's data too, though no way to link directly, and it still peaks at ~7pm: https://i.imgur.com/16mssuH.png . Using the 16th as an example, a peak demand of 44,008 megawatthours @ 20H PDT. Comparing that to their generation graphs, which you can separate into sources, like solar. On the 16th, peak solar generation is at 11 @ 13,201 megawatthours. By 6PM, it's down to 853 megawatthours. By peak time, it's nothing. My own residential solar matches that curve on that date.
Peak load without solar is not midday. Here's an NYT article from 1975 about introduction of Time of Use billing describing peak rates being in the morning and evening:
> Mrs. Wells changed her housework habits because for part of the year it costs her more than six times as much to use electricity from 8 A.M. to 11 A.M. and 5 P.M. to 9 P.M. as it costs during the rest of the day.
https://www.nytimes.com/1975/06/29/archives/experimenting-wi...
Current CAISO data shows that overall demand still peaks in the late afternoon to early evening. I picked a day in mid-august, and demand at 7pm is 40% higher (39GW) than at solar noon of 1pm (29GW).
https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook
You're making a blanket statement about peak time which is incorrect.
Historically in Califorinia, peak load has been in the afternoon, which I count as midday. At least, it's when solar panels are still pumping out a ton of power:
https://www.caiso.com/Documents/CaliforniaISOPeakLoadHistory...
You're posting a random day in winter in California, where overall consumption is low even at its highest, because there's very little demand for cooling. True peak for the California grid is ~50GW, not 25GW like today. You're also omitting all the residential solar that never gets on the grid that drives down midday demand in that graph.
Texas also has midday peaks, here's today and you'll see that even though its winter and very little AC is needed, peak is midday:
https://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/loadForecastVsActualC...
My statement was qualified with "most places." There will undoubtedly be some places with other peaks for which solar will not shave the peak. But in most places distributed solar will shave the peak.
> You're posting a random day in winter in California, where overall consumption is low even at its highest, because there's very little demand for cooling.
You're just seeing the data for today. You can select any day you want.
Let's look at a really generous day for you, the peak annual usage from 2020: 47,121 MW on August 18 @ 15:57. On this day, the peak was indeed at 15:57. However, the demand remains high for hours past that. Demand is above 99% of peak until 5:30pm and above 90% of peak until almost 9pm. Solar production is down to under 1000MW by 6:45pm. Thus we have over 2 hours of near-peak demand when solar is not helping at all. No amount of additional solar (without batteries) will ever cover that 6:45-9pm period of high (if not peak, but it's close) demand.
https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook
> peak load has been in the afternoon, which I count as midday
Mid day is the middle of the day, as in noon. You might as well be arguing that you define three as five.
5PM is not "mid day". So you're cherry-picking time frames, making up definitions for things, and still not showing a mid day peak energy use, you're showing a late afternoon energy use.
Eliminating the delivery of kWs doesn't change the grid costs one whit. Grid costs are driven mostly by the number of customers, the max demand that the grid has to support at one time, maintenance, and the distance the lines have to travel to reach you. Just like a water main or sewage pipe, reductions in demand only change the cost of distribution when they are large enough and prolonged enough to allow for smaller equipment and fewer lines.
Having a residential power connection from the grid allows you to demand up to 200Amps of power, at any time of day or night, 365 days a year, with zero notice. The power company has to build the lines to support that potential demand, whether you use it or not. Over all of California, distributed solar probably has reduced the expenditures we would have need to have made on new transmission and generation facilities compared to a world without distributed solar, but that doesn't affect the baseline cost of a ubiquitous grid that serves from Crescent City to the border with Arizona at Yuma, and all points between.
> So by supplying the kWh locally to neighbors, the grid costs have been avoided.
No they haven't. The grid cost is to build and maintain the wires and equipment. Your solar output isn't reliable enough for them to downsize the grid, so even though selling to a neighbor bypasses the grid it doesn't reduce the cost of having a grid.
What you could do is split out the grid cost, make it be a fixed fee per location instead of per-kWh. That would drop the price of buying a kWh until it's much closer to the price of selling.
But if you do that, someone with a lot of solar panels would end up with even less money in their pocket, since their reduced kWh purchases used to let them skimp on grid fees, and now that no longer happens.
If you keep reading to the next few sentences I point out that the utility has sunk costs, so I understand you point quite well already.
Transmission savings are the big thing with distributed solar and storage. And transmission is the bottleneck for most projects looking to connect to the grid right now. Not only is it expensive, it's slow to build.
> If you keep reading to the next few sentences I point out that the utility has sunk costs, so I understand you point quite well already.
It's not that they have sunk costs, it's that they have ongoing costs. The grid cost does not drop when you send excess solar to a neighbor. To actually avoid grid costs you need to reduce your max watts in a way that the power company can rely on.
> Transmission savings are the big thing with distributed solar and storage. And transmission is the bottleneck for most projects looking to connect to the grid right now. Not only is it expensive, it's slow to build.
Storage can save on transmissions but it has to be set up the right way. Solar and storage working together can do even better, but also have to be set up the right way. Solar by itself doesn't make a big difference in peak transmissions.
> I have an off grid home
Seems like the utilities aren't involved at all?
Cheap storage actually makes grid defection a possibility for a ton of people these days. Especially when you start considering the cost of upgrading 100 amp service to 200 amp or similar. Once you've added a bit of battery, might as well go a bit more, and use your vehicle for additional backup when necessary.
People having 70kWh or more of mobile battery in the garage is going to change the calculation for a lot of people. Many people who would never install solar unless it saves them money will also spend a tooooooon of money on a big truck for aesthetic reasons, and then find that it makes solar a cheaper propositon.
Haha sorry! I totally missed that important sentence. Thanks for pointing it out.
Plus you reduced your GHG emissions considerably too probably!
this is a good example of how individuals are fine to do things for the public good when they are consequential or at least compatible with the things in their best interest. We're willing to self sacrifice only so (and not very) far, so need to apply that goodwill very strategically. Another example: I commute by bike everyday, not because it's cheaper, healthy good for the environment (even though these are all true), but because I love it and it's so enjoyable - even it winter. Screw with the roads, or traffic patterns, or waste my property taxes, or neglect the bikes paths and snow removal enough and I'll either stop or move.
It's great now but when it starts to degrade and needs maintenance and replacement that's now entirely your problem, there is no utility with a huge staff of electricians and linesmen ready to deal with that on a sub-zero winter day or in the middle of a rainy night.
With this kind of setup you can stay connected to the grid. In the event that your solar and storage fail unexpectedly you can still pay for grid electricity.
The grid you've been refusing to pay to support for years, that grid is going to be your backup?
You still pay service fees to maintain a grid connection. Not to mention that many people with these setups contribute excess generation back to the grid or allow their batteries to discharged by the grid during demand spikes.
A lot of those service fees were designed to scale with the amount of electricity used. If you've got a net metered bill chances are you haven't really been paying much for service fees.
I don't know anyone who bothers discharging their home batteries to the grid. The rates they get wouldn't cover the cost of the wear and tear to their batteries.
I am part of a plan that discharges my batteries to the grid. I don't initiate this happening, it is based on a pull from the grid upto 60 times per year when demand is high. Full disclosure that I received a rebate on my batteries for allowing this.
Also, I just checked my bills and my service fees are a flat amount independent of how much electricity I pull from the grid.
May I ask what state are you in?
What do you use for energy storage and how much can you store? When we were considering solar panel solution for our small apartment complex that was the major cost and the reason we decided against a few years ago.
It's getting cheaper all the time, look at tesla powerwalls and many other companies are using them. But the really cheap thing to do it get an older EV like a leaf, they are much much less per kwh than standalone cars.
Unfortunately due to recent events this will likely be nearly fully repealed for anybody that might be interested in doing this in the future.
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You should be downvoted for your last comment too! Or at least someone could explain the world we live in. Is it confiscatory to have public schools, funded by your taxes, fsck guy (you do have a great handle...)? How about publicly funded (by our taxes too) police and fire protection? Uh, govt funding to help pay for hospitals? Food inspection, are you crazy you might say, the perfectly working markets of our paradise make this not a necessity. People will self report when the water has contaminants - maybe?
Now let's add significantly reducing your own greenhouse gas impact for 20 or 30 years after you buy the demon solar panels (made from dead babies, some right thinking american might say), then putting your own excess electricity on the grid, further reducing fossil fuel generation. So in all thoses cases, that dastardly helpful socialism is for the public good.
you need to read up on the economics of "public goods", other people have thought this through before you. In a nutshell, police and fire protection benefit everyone, because if your neighbor has low crime or low chance of fire spreading, that also benefits you, so it makes sense to include everyone in the plan. But while the $7500 was paid for by everybody else, the only person with the $0 electric bill is GP, which does not have any fairness property.
The socialist mantra "from those with the ability" includes GP who has the ability to pay for this so that other people's needs can be met.
The subsidy was to incentivize adoption of technology to fight climate change. As a result, he took actions that reduced CO2 emissions, which everyone benefits from.
"we" overpaid for the climate benefit you want, can't you see that? We could have got the climate benefit cheaper, which would give us a bigger budget for more climate benefits.
Instead of him saying "for net zero cost, I've reduced my carbon footprint, which is great!" he's crowing about "I don't pay anything any more!" That is a private benefit that he loves, that we paid for, and we do not benefit from.
Its not up to a single individual to fix monetary policy. Maybe you should work on your social skills before calling someone greedy for merely making money.
we are all greedy, it's human nature, and greed is good, it makes us strive and human striving is what brings us all benefits.
So when I use greed, it's not meant as an insult. Only people who use it as an insult (frequently socialists), as if they themselves are not greedy, need to hear it hurled at them, simply as a proof of "hey, you're a human too, stop thinking you're better than other people".
and we're talking about fiscal policy here, not monetary.
For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils. It is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs.
Calling greed a virtue is certainly a thing a person has said.
> greed is good
My dude, Gordon Gekko was not the protagonist.
The police force in the next city doesn't really benefit me, so F them, right? Reducing greenhouse gases and the price of electricity (such as from super cheap customer provided solar power on the grid during the day) actually does benefit me and every other electricity consumer.
Some conservatives are really stuck on the $7500 rebate, they are so excited to maintain our existing industrial base. They are in extreme denial about the public subsidies of the oil industry industrial complex, when we offer something visible for an EV they lose all reason. All those other public goods were paid by everyone who pays taxes but many people don't benefit from them. Say an elderly retired person doesn't benefit from educating kids, because they are kicking the bucket in the next few years, burn it all down behind them, they might say, reduce my taxes now.
you're just angry, and anger makes people incoherent. You do benefit from the police in the next town, and turns out, you don't pay for it, so I have no idea what you are talking about.
liberals should be stuck on the $7500 rebate, read my separate response about achieving even more climate benefit.
I've never. Like elon musk, i already got my 7500 rebates. Pull the ladder up behind me, just like him and you too i guess
If you had even the slightest clue about what you're pretending to know about, you would realize this $7500 is about the farthest thing possible from the only time the government pays for a benefit that doesn't benefit everyone.
It's just straight up amusing how much you lose your mind over like absolute economic trivialities, because evil renewable energy is a symbol of the liberals.
>amusing how much you lose your mind over like absolute economic trivialities... If you had even the slightest clue about what you're pretending to know about
i didn't lose my mind, all of you have. i just "pointed out"
in terms of "the slightest clue about what you're pretending to know about", i was raised from the crib as a good liberal and socialist, i understand the perspective intimately, then I studied economics at MIT and realized I didn't need to change my morals/sensibilities at all, the free market achieves what socialism is trying to achieve, and then I studied more economics in grad school at MIT... please, tell me your background, and like you suggest, no "pretending to know about"...
I would love a 10-15K BYD. I was told recently desiring a BYD is un-American when I can spend 3 times the price on a Tesla. No thanks! I’ll hold out for something truly cheap. Cars in America are insanely priced.
I will never buy an American car. I remember my parents' multiple Dodges and Fords catastrophically failing before they switched to Toyota.
US car companies have created the lasting idea that cars are dead at 100K miles, because those companies' cars absolutely were. Meanwhile, I bought my Honda at 148K and it's over 210K now and doing fine.
Tesla seems to live up to the legendary Ford quality, with hilarious workmanship issues, Ford Pinto level "it'll trap you in a fire" design and frequent failures. Probably because they threw out the hard-learned lessons of a century of auto-making for novelty electronic gimmicks.
I believe it's worth pointing out that with your Toyota, you're still buying an American car. The vast majority of Toyota vehicles sold in America are made in US plants.
Which is a good thing! It shows that those other quality issues are not related to US labor force, or some intrinsic American inability to make high quality goods.
Designs, manufactures and sells all in the US. For all intensive purpose, the Japanese exert a rather small influence on the day to day operations
intents* and purposes
Well, the big seller is Canadian. RAV4 comes out of Woodstock, Ontario.
US cars have not been dead at 100k miles in decades, but people still accuse them of that. I have my Chrysler at 230k miles and still running fine.
Note that many of the "American" cars with the bad reputation are Toyota's with just a different logo. Even though it is easy to check who made the car, the American logo makes for the reputation that it will die in 100k miles.
I don’t know what you’re doing but I have had 3 American sedans (1 mustang, 1 fusion, 1 Malibu) over the past 20 years and they all (2) made it over 200k miles when I sold them with my current one approaching that, nothing but regular maintenance and one time I had to replace shocks/struts on the ford fusion. 200k is when I generally pack it up and get a new car.
> US car companies have created the lasting idea that cars are dead at 100K miles
OT but, there were clear exceptions to this even back in the bad ol' days. It was common knowledge in the 70s that for certain engines (such as Chevy small blocks), if you cared for the engine (mainly: regular oil changes) you could get 200K+ out of it. The rest of the car was too low-tech to decay, except of course for road salt vs body work.
We have 2 Chevrolet EVs, a Bolt EUV made in the US and an Equinox EV made in Mexico.
They're great. I have rotated the tires twice on the Bolt and I'm getting some different wipers for the windshield because my wife doesn't like the noise the factory ones make. Oh, and I got floor mats for both cars.
I have Car Play in the Bolt and GM's own system in the Equinox (Android for Autos or something like that, not the standard Android Auto) and they're both fine.
I use SuperCruise whenever I can. That's only on freeways with the Bolt and a lot more other places with the Equinox. I was backseat in an Uber Saturday and it was neat watching the Tesla Model 3's AutoPilot system. Very cool. On the other hand, GM was reporting no accidents with their cars, which include ICE vehicles, too. https://gmauthority.com/blog/2024/02/gm-super-cruise-users-t...
Protecting local manufacturers from cheap offshore labor is rational, especially if the offshore products are being subsidized specifically to undermine incumbents and put them out of business. I get that individual consumers want the cheapest trinket they can find, but the gov't has to be more strategic. And every country does this, including the one that would be the source of these trinkets.
I exclusively buy Toyotas because they are cheaper to maintain than American cars. Is your argument that I shouldn't have access to Japanese cars either?
I understand the desire to have a strategic reserve of manufacturing capacity. However, the US also subsidizes the US auto industry heavily by e.g. bailing out GM and Chrysler. It frustrates me that US car manufacturers continue to make exclusively heavy, low-efficiency vehicles. Give me something inexpensive, safe, efficient, reliable, and I'll buy it.
Most (maybe all?) Toyota in the US are actually made in America. If you look at the various "Made In America" indexes that take into account factories, supply chain, etc, the Camry does better than anything from Detroit
There's some interesting history here. Toyota started manufacturing in North America in the 70s-80s largely due to pressure from the US government in the form of tariffs and import restrictions. For example, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Motor_North_America:
"Toyota’s first manufacturing investment in the United States came in 1972 when the company struck a deal with Atlas Fabricators, to produce truck beds in Long Beach, in an effort to avoid the 25% "chicken tax" on imported light trucks." ... "After the successes of the 1970s, and the threats of import restrictions, Toyota started making additional investments in the North American market in the 1980s. In 1981, Japan agreed to voluntary export restraints, which limited the number of vehicles the nation would send to the United States each year, leading Toyota to establish assembly plants in North America."
The book "The Machine That Changed the World", while a bit dated, gives a great overview of the history of Toyota from US automaker perspective.
There have been people who wanted much more protectionism from Japanese autos since the 1970s, esp. since they demonstrated they make great cars for less money and detroit wasn't really interested in trying too hard.
History looked like it was going to repeat with EVs from the US except for Tesla. Now GM has some decent cars across a variety of models, Ford has 2. But neither company has put out any really low priced cars yet (you know, like under 30). Tesla (lead by darth vader) is the only hope for the near future of low priced cars. I think ford and gm will get there eventually. But it could be too late if imports can just come in.
While not an EV, but a hybrid - I'm the lucky owner of an affordable Ford Maverick little truck. From what I can tell, Ford makes a lot of sweet $$$ selling the F series trucks and does not really care about low margins.
The protectionism there deformed the product and thus, the limited offerings are a result of the inability to compete in these segments.
The product deformed due to lack of ingenuity related to the CAFE standards.
> I exclusively buy Toyotas because they are cheaper to maintain than American cars.
I think Teslas are actually cheapest, by brand.
> It frustrates me that US car manufacturers continue to make exclusively heavy, low-efficiency vehicles.
The market has decided that they want cars from Toyota and trucks from Detroit. I can't really blame the automakers from focusing on what makes them the best profit.
I'd dispute the low efficiency claim. My Ford pickup is way more efficient than anything Toyota makes. And even strictly comparing like-for-like, Toyota is on the lower efficiency end of that market.
Most of the Toyotas sold in America and made in America
Subsidy cannot work beyond a certain scale. Sure they may have benefitted initially, but in the long run I presume they need some kind of profits to sustain.
May be the lead in Chinese EV and battery industries is not purely technological, it is also the supply chain and scale developed over the years.
All this talk assumes that USA or Western countries have always had a level playing field whereas companies like Boeing or Airbus are prime counter examples
> All this talk assumes that USA or Western countries have always had a level playing field whereas companies like Boeing or Airbus are prime counter examples
As I said, every country does it. It is rational to protect your own manufacturing industry. China does it. We do it. European countries do it. Just because we protect our own industry does not mean we have to protect China's interests too. That's their problem.
The problem is that the US is complaining a lot about that when it is the other countries doing that. Even here, average commentator will call it a foul (whataboittism) if you point out that.
You can't eat the cake and have it. Either you follow the fair trade requirements or don't complain about others not doing the same. If you say standards, then follow by lead and respect them.
Also I do not think every country does that. There are too much pressure by the US, China and EU on these countries to prevent many from doing that.
The us of course subsidizes our manufacturing (whatever is left of it), just like many other countries. I don't know if our $7500 tax rebates on locally made EVs with non-chinese batteries compare to Chinese govt subsidies. But it's clear that EVs are going to be much much cheaper to make, maintain, and recycle over time. This is a threat to all kinds of incumbents. We face the destruction of a lot of our manufacturing industrial base if we don't convert some more of it to EVs, and this will also be destabilizing to our politics. Add on the enmity of the gas and oil industry (helped a tiiiny bit by Trump's victory).
The US is subsiding a lot of industries. Aviation, agriculture (specially agricultural exports), transportation and energy. They just introduced CHIPSA act to promote US companies chipa production and a lot more. When china does this (which is does) then this is far cry and outright harmful for international trade. Lets get out of comparison between US and China. Smaller countries will be hit hard (even with sanctions) if they try to do something from that.
The point here is that the US, China shouldn't try to prevent other countries from doing what they are doing and forcing them to harm their local economy and open markets under the disguise of free trade.
No, they do not need long term profits to sustain, at least in certain regimes.
It leads to market separation. No one outside the US will buy US made when they have cheaper Chinese cars as an option. And the US can’t force external competitiveness to emerge with those subsidies in place. Not to mention internally having to buy more expensive transport has knock on effects to the entire economy.
In a way, that doesn’t matter for the US. Consider that the US has an enormous trade deficit. If the US brought to even, then all those exporting countries with large surpluses would be in bad shape.
This is a complex problem, and when the US is the importer from the world, the mere decision to stop importing would send shockwaves through trade everywhere.
If you are running $2 trillion deficits, then of course you will have trade deficits. You are an importer of goods and an exporter of USD. The problem will arise when your debt becomes unsustainable and alternatives to the USD emerge for settling international trade. This would lead to a decline in demand for USD, a drop in demand for U.S. debt, and reduced capital inflow into the U.S. stock market (end of recycling), essentially leading to a collapse of the current U.S. economic model.
The problem is -the us exports one thing en mass- security. And its starting to use that for shakedowns- which is the moment everybody becomes his own sheriff.
And at this point that would also benefit the US. That mass security is not cheap.
Do you think this argument applies to microprocessor manufacture?
To the extent that those microprocessors are necessary for war, sure.
The current average monthly salary in China is $3000-$4000 US dollars. This is not about cheap labour anymore but simple economies of scale.
The whole talk about subsidies is pure smoke screen. US automakers have received a lot more subsidies than their Chinese counterparts. The top chinese firm receiving government subsidies, CATL, got ~$500M USD last year. BYD is said to have received $3.5 billion in total in its lifetime. In the meantime, the US government offered $12B just last year for automakers to start making more EVs, and Ford is reported to have received a total of $33B in loans, bailouts and tax rebates.
In any case, if you could put down $3.5B and get a BYD out, everyone would be doing it, reality is a bit more complex than that.
??? The average BYD line autoworker earns $640 to $840 USD a month, but that require overtime; 1.5x pay on weekdays and 2x pay on weekends.
BYD Wuxi workers went on strike in 2021 because BYD was trying to restructure to eliminate overtime, which would effectively drop the workers wage to under $400 USD a month.
Which is about the same a factory worker in Mexico, building the Ford Mach-E, makes. I imagine the purchasing power in China will be a lot higher.
China currently has multiple times higher costs than countries like Vietnam. Cheap labour is not a major factor anymore.
> The current average monthly salary in China is $3000-$4000 US dollars.
Source, please. I do not believe this.
Yeah doesn’t look true, median is more like $800 for those in private companies.
https://finance.sina.cn/2024-05-19/detail-inavuhsp2237661.d....
That report says averages are $1381/month (120k RMB/year) for "non-private" employees, $800 for private (?), $3000/month in IT, $1500/month in mining. You happened to pick the lowest number.
There seem to be wildly different numbers reported online, but from a more thorough search it looks like the national median is indeed around ~$1400, while the 3k-4k range I mentioned is specifically for the Shangai area.
The only thing locally made is the bare minimum to make it "Made in USA", but everything is heavily outsourced already. There is no point to your argument, as that battle was lost a long time ago.
The assembly line process itself is a big strategic value. And just because we don't manage to source every individual part exclusively from USA labor doesn't mean we should just throw in the towel and completely give up on our ability to make machinery.
What is a "local manufacturer" some other multinational corporation? At least think about your bullshit propaganda before you repeat it.
Absolutely! The biggest problem is the average American allows themselves to be duped and challenged by advertising. New tech in cars is great, but spending $40K and up is stupid. I've said it before: my $27K base model Ram truck will go from point A to point B just as well as a $70K(!) model. Is it just as shiny? No, but the money I didn't spend on all that shine won't be wasted on depreciation.
My credit union recently sent me an email telling me I can be approved for up to $70K for an auto loan, this is insane! When we allow competitiveness or temptation to decide how much money we spend, we lose every time. The only way to get Tesla to offer that $25K car is to stop buying the more expensive ones.
I was nodding along with your post until you brought out your numbers (I agree fully with the broader point). For me, any car above 15k or so is very expensive - I've always bought used and drove them into the ground. I'd love an electric car but it's not in the cards for my family until the total cost of ownership gets down to 2-3k a year or so.
This is something I've always found fascinating about materialism (I can only speak to the US). The messaging and feelings are incredibly similar whether your budget is 10k or 100k. Very easy to slide up the scale slowly and feel like you're still living small with a bulging budget, or to choose options that are beyond your means and so stunt financial growth.
Your points are well taken. I only bought the Ram because I had to for personal reasons. It's the first new car/truck I've ever owned and I will drive it till it's worn out. I've always bought used/low mileage vehicles to avoid depreciation and the headache of the warranty period.
Car makers make a lot of money based on our egos to one up-our neighbors. Car salesmen are trained to create a competitive atmosphere at the dealership by exposing our vanity and it works!
All those options and appearance packages just become liabilities as the trucks age. None of it ages well.
Is there a $27k base model ram truck? Seems like the base model on the ram website is $38k and when I tried to price a regular cab one from stellantis fleet those were like $46k, but I could have made a mistake on that site.
Sorry, no mistake on your part. I bought the Ram new in 2021. I live in the Tulsa, OK area, where prices are a little more reachable because of so many different dealerships.
And American prices are already insanely low. If I want to buy a RAM in Austria for $30k I get a used car with 150.000km. If I want a new one it's (much) over $100k.
Wow, is that because of tariffs or shipping costs from the US?
Funny thing is that Musk himself said the “Shanghai built Tesla's are the best quality Tesla's” and he’s fully leaning into Chinese manufacturing.
I suspect what will happen is that cheap Chinese imports will come into the USA but only for select manufacturers who benefit the current administration. So no cheap byd’s but possibly cheap Tesla’s.
Tesla cars sold in US are the most American build cars. See https://www.carpro.com/blog/most-american-made-vehicle-the-t...
What it means that if you count what percentage of car parts are made in America, Tesla has higher percentage that other brands, even those you might consider "more" American, like GM or Ford. All Teslas sold in America are assembled in America (California or Texas). Ford Mustang, for example, is assembled in Mexico.
As far as I know Tesla never sold Chinese built cars in US. They used Chinese manufacturing (CATL) and Korean batteries in some model, but also manufactured batteries in US (Nevada, with Panasonic) and are expanding battery production in US with 4680 (used in Cybertruck).
Cheaper Teslas are coming to US but they'll be manufactured in US (Texas). Tesla told us that they'll start making a cheaper model sometime in 2025.
> Tesla told us that they'll start making a cheaper model sometime in 2025.
Next, you'll tell me that RoboTaxi is coming within 6 months.
Roadster is now 4 years late and has no release date planned. FSD is how many years late, now?
Tesla is the king of missed timelines and broken promises. I'd be surprised if they even actually had a desire to make a cheaper car. Their claims are just lies to boost the stock price. Margins on a base Model 3 are already incredibly slim.
I’m saying that Chinese made teslas might be allowed in the USA in the near future.
Musk himself has stated bluntly that USA made teslas are lower quality and more expensive so you can see the desire to shut down the US plants and bring in Chinese made Teslas and he clearly has some political sway now.
Yeah,if you look at the tariffs not as a fixed thing that applies to everyone, but a way to favor select companies and hurt others, I think they make more sense.
I’d be surprised if that happened in a Trump-run trade environment.
I know Elon has his ear, but still…
> Tesla told us that they'll start making a cheaper model sometime in 2025.
Buddy, do I have a bridge to sell you...
You puff up the local market when you're giving a speech in that market.
Half of America doesn't want to support the incoming administration either, and Musk has decided to closely and personally align himself with it. I wonder if that will affect Tesla sales.
I recently saw a bumper sticker on a Tesla that said "We bought it before we knew how awful he was." Because of Musk, my wife and I will never buy a Tesla even if they do release a basic, low-cost model here in the US to compete with Japanese and Korean economy cars.
On the other hand, as the other comment said about him "tricking Republicans," I think he's also gained a new segment of buyers with his political play, so this might be a wash.
I don't know what will publicly get the blame, but I, and I don't think I'm unique in this regard, am not buying a Tesla because of the documented issues the cars keep having: getting bricked, catching fire, being needlessly difficult to escape in an emergency, tons of unfulfilled promises about new features, etc. On top of this, everyone who I knew who had a Tesla never bought a 2nd.
I'd like to see some real numbers. All to often something gets in the news and so you think there is a real issue while in reality it is no worse than anything else. Statistics are important, otherwise we get lost in our own biases.
It is very common for people to change brands every time they get a new car.
I kinda think the whole thing is just Elon tricking republicans into buying electric cars.
Masterful move right there. Maybe he can trick them all into going to Mars next? They don't call it the Red Planet for nuthin.
that's the first thing about politics that made me smile in months i think.
He wants the tax credit snuffed out to eliminate US competition and tarrifs against imports to eliminate foreign competition.
No tax credit, no Rivian. I can see why he wants that. Their build quality and manufacturing ability trounce the Tesla when they were at that stage. Rivian has full EV vans in production and on the road daily. Impressive as hell.
Which is good, we don't want electric cars to become a culture war issue
Have you ever gotten behind a diesel truck with emissions deleted? I have...a lot. The roll coal crowd doesn't have EV on their radar whatsoever.
That isn't quite true. They are aware of EV trucks - they won't buy one of course, but they are aware. They spread stories about those trucks not having any useful range (which is true - when pulling a trailer or driving well over the speed limit the EVs lose range) Those diesel trucks they drive get 600 miles unloaded.
I think the Cybertruck has a lot of crossover appeal.
Aside from being useless? That truck is a toy, nothing more. You better have a backup vehicle.
Which is fine. Deleted trucks are already illegal, and soon enough you won’t be able to buy a new ICE vehicle. They will be gone in my lifetime.
America just overwhelmingly voted to go back in time.
> we don't want electric cars to become a culture war issue
Too late. I'm happy to be proven wrong at some point.
Is that why the EV subsidy is getting repealed?
The incoming administration has shown contempt for programs created by the "other side". They're strongly against renewable energy in general, and their patrons are oil and gas people.
I think there are a lot of little reasons all combined, and that is definitely one of them.
- Heavy criticism over the past 6 years from traditional news sources (even tech sources like Ars Technica)... basically ever since the Tham Luang cave rescue*
- Thick hate from people in the comments sections
- Government agencies interfering with SpaceX and Tesla
- Biden administration ignoring his carbon tax suggestion
- Biden administration snubbing Tesla at the EV Summit
- His family transgender drama
- COVID mandates shutting down his manufacturing for a period of time
- Conservatives not buying EVs
If you look at all his points of friction in recent years it's not much of a surprise to see the transformation.
*The cave rescue was a sad turning point for Musk. He endured excessive ridicule for pushing for a technological solution, then really stepped in it with his bitter accusations against that rescue diver.
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> As evidence look at all of the quickly disproven posts on a wide range of topics that Elon has posted. He did no research at all before posting those things (despite a large following, and thus large responsibility). He "felt" that the post was good/right, so he went with it.
Or, more likely, he knows exactly what he is doing.
Nah...
There's also the closing of his factory by the lady that didn't like him during covid, the Biden administration's decision to never mention Tesla, instead proclaiming that manufacturers like GM were making America Electric (Tesla sold way more electric cars, and they are much more American).
> the Biden administration's decision to never mention Tesla, instead proclaiming that manufacturers like GM were making America Electric (Tesla sold way more electric cars, and they are much more American).
This always bugged me.
Look, I'm no fan of Elon Musk, but Tesla has been the most influential car manufacturer in the EV space. To blatantly ignore them when talking about the electrification of cars in America is simply madness.
He also had kind of a meltdown during the initial period of COVID isolation when his factories were closed too.
I think it was that double-whammy: both his trans daughter and the threat of COVID shutdowns destroying Tesla happened pretty close to each other. Those combined drove him not just to traditional fiscal conservatism but to the modern populist identity-driven Trump politics.
That and he's visibly obsessed with validation and popularity and going hard-right has given him that in spades. He wants to be cheered-for at rallies the way Trump is... remember the time that Dave Chappelle brought him out on stage in SF and he was greeted with a wave of boos?
I get the point, but also he's a much more competent salesman (and, I'm assured, rocket scientist) than he is at basically all the other things he's inadvisably gotten involved with.
So, while I'd bet against Twitter (if I such a thing were possible), I wouldn't bet against Tesla being a good fit for the US market.
European sales may well collapse, and he may be very confused about this, but I'd still expect his approach to do well in the USA.
> Half of America doesn't want to support the incoming administration
Hasn't that been true for every US presidential election?
I don't remember the 90s being this polarizing. Sure, people made fun of blowjobs in the White House, but it didn't feel like we were always on the precipice of civil war and societal collapse. Even Bush and Obama weren't so divisive. Yeah, people always had their political preferences, but there used to be such a thing as a shared American identity to some degree, especially in the post-9/11 years. Not these days.
As an independent, it's especially discouraging. I don't see many level-headed voters or politicians anymore, and a lot of the basic governmental services and protections seem to be collapsing while we focus on culture wars. We can't even work together as a country to discuss something as boring yet important as energy policy. Who knew battery-powered cars could be so divisive. Everything is weaponized now.
Un-American or not, those 10k BYDs reflect Chinese supply chains, labor prices, and market subsidies and cars built to different regulations - turns out if they play the game like other manufacturers do, BYDs aren't actually that much cheaper to make.
Labor prices and subsidies might be "cheating" but why would we count supply chain against them?
If you want something truly cheap, buying a new car doesn’t make a lot of sense. Used cars are a better deal.
Not always, the lower end Toyotas it’s a better deal per mile to buy new, if you are willing to shop around a little and get last year’s model.
Used cars are not that much of a bargain. I’ve been looking and asking 20k for a car with 100k plus miles is insanity.
The only difference between the vast majority of cars "Made in the USA" is the scant margin that allows manufacturers to use that mark. Most cars are made outside the USA. So, as far as I'm concerned, they are all basically un-American. That's beside from the point that Tesla is being run by a Nazi.
Blame the pesky labor and safety laws.
I don't remember the source so, someone please correct me if I'm wrong but, I read that no EV battery can be made for less than $50K. So, either BYD is cutting some serious corners (possibly) or they are being heavily subsidized (probably). If either are true, I can see how that would be damaging to us.
> I don't remember the source so, someone please correct me if I'm wrong but, I read that no EV battery can be made for less than $50K.
Absolute hogwash.
The only way for this to be true is if you amortize the cost of R&D and factory building over a small number of batteries and include it in the manufacturing cost, and I think it's incredibly misleading to include the cost of R&D into the cost of a battery, simply for the fact that you can make wild claims by just including it.
So...for an incumbent manufacturer that's putting very little effort into actually selling EVs, it might be true that it's costing them $50K per battery if you include the cost of setting up the manufacturing. But for someone like Tesla, who has literally sold millions of cars, even if you include that cost, it's closer to $10K.
I’ve heard replacing an EV sadan’s battery is typically ~$10K (capacity matters of course).
Also, fwiw, our home batteries (sold at profit, with lots of expensive other stuff and install labor) were about $20K, and the same capacity as our small car.
Money quote:
“As automakers were profit maximizing during the supply chain crisis era, you are going to prioritize the bigger vehicles, the more expensive vehicles with their higher margins,” Tyson Jominy, vice president of data and analytics at J.D. Power, told me. “Now we just don’t have” these cheaper models.
Ding ding ding.
We have a winner.
There's a bunch of free riders in the form of shareholders artificially driving up the price of goods.
>There's a bunch of free riders in the form of shareholders artificially driving up the price of goods.
Isn't this a natural consequence of capitalism in entrenched industries?
Why yes. Yes it is.
Which is why you don't put shareholders first in line for revenues.
Yeah, I think that's the point they were trying to make.
You also leave out the emissions exceptions for vehicles above a certain size, which also incentivizes manufacturers to build and sell larger vehicles.
Why did they just start "maximizing profit" recently?
Did all the bad bad no good CEO's just read The Prince or something?
Look at fords lineup now. No sedan. Its straight up embarrasing if you are the first lemming to start burning furniture to save on heat. But if the entire industry has been doing just this since 2008 then you are the fool for not playing the game your investors expect from you. Never mind how you might fare 10 years from now. Quarterly thinking dominates.
They started long ago. Ford himself was doing that. However what makes for maximum profit has changed over time. As cars last longer more and more people are not buying new cars so they have to make cars for the people left. If you want me to buy a new car it needs to be cheap - my 25 year old truck is paid off and still runs fine.
They’ve done it for ages but there were market constraints. The pandemic broke that in two key ways: the first was the chip shortage they accidentally created by breaking their supply contracts early on but the second was because so many people stopped using transit. That created a demand spike at the same time supply was limited, which they capitalized on by prioritizing the most expensive models for production since they knew many buyers would feel they had no ability to negotiate.
Higher interest rates and other inflation caused by profit-taking in other industries drove this to a head since consumers couldn’t just soak it up, but none of the manufacturers wants to be the first to lower their margins.
This. Yep, automakers have deliberately gone after higher profit margins per vehicle. Huge-volume, lower-cost cars are slowly going away. Get one while you can, if that's your thing.
US Congress has mandated a growing list of advanced features, leading to complex vehicles, complex supply chains, and higher sticker prices.
If that were true, you wouldn't be able to buy multiple vehicles for under $18,000, which would have been a $10,000 vehicle at the turn of the century. How many $10,000 cars do you remember from 2000? I was in the market for my 3rd car by then and I can tell you the answer was zero. Cars are actually cheaper today than they've ever been DESPITE the increased safety and emissions features and you are exactly wrong in your claim.
The fact that most cars are priced at $60K doesn't mean cars cost that much to make, it means that the US car makers have decided to stop caring about poor people, leaving them to the used market while they go luxury, chasing ever higher margins from a smaller and smaller but ever-wealthier consumer.
Again, if safety or emissions requirements drove up prices, how is it legal for Nissan, Mitsubishi, Kia/Hundai and others to sell cars that cost under $10K in 2000 dollars when you couldn't buy new in 2000 for anywhere close to that? Just because Ford and GM WONT compete there doesn't mean competing there is cost prohibitive.
You are very passionate about retail car prices.
It's the biggest purchase most people make in their lives (and on a regular basis to boot), aside from real estate. Not the worst thing to be passionate about.
Nissan has figured out how to comply and sell a Versa for just $17k like its 15 years ago still.
That's not the problem there.
OK
It's weird the Chevy Bolt wasn't mentioned. After the $7500 tax credit, you could get a brand new Chevy Bolt for under $20k. If you haven't driven a Bolt, I can't recommend it more. It's about as perfect as car as I could reasonably dream up. It's a hatchback, minimally gimmicky (compared to, e.g, a Tesla, where so many things are "different" for the sake of being different), unnecessarily fast—truly, it's shocking how quick it is, very respectable range of ~270 miles, has Apple CarPlay (or Android's equivalent if you're into that sort of thing), and it's cheap.
I picked up a used 2023 for $14k last month. Hertz is unloading their fleet of EV's, so they're ridiculously cheap if you don't mind driving a former rental car.
Picked up a used Bolt as well. Certified used with 7 years left on the battery warranty for about $15k.
Anyone who actually wants a cheap EV can buy a cheap EV.
There's just too many people that think they need a 3 row EV SUV with 500 miles of range, and that it should be under $35k.
Also the goal posts keep getting moved. Used to be people would say EVs will never take off until they hit $35k. Now that there are new EVs that can be had for that price, the new problem is that EVs will never take off unless they're $25k.
Meanwhile just about every EV sales graph shows an upward trajectory regardless of these "requirements".
> After the $7500 tax credit, you could get a brand new Chevy Bolt for under $20k.
searched online for about 10 minutes and couldn't find this.
Absolutely! I just picked up a 2023 for $17k. It's basically the perfect commuter car.
Didn't they recall all of them for a few years due to some safety issues? Are they fixed yet?
Yes, an in fact IMO that makes the used models even more of a steal. Get a several year old model with a pretty much new battery. The battery is pretty much the main wear item in the whole drivetrain, so its like buying a used ICE with a brand new drive train.
Yeah they are fixed. A Bolt is a nice vehicle to buy if you don't mind its slow charging; and judging by the number of Bolts on the road plenty of people don't mind.
Yeah, it was just a software patch. Real quick fix.
No, the Bolt had a manufacturing defect which could result in an internal short and cause a battery fire.
All Bolts were available for a recall maintenance where the entire battery was replaced under warranty.
I doubt a cheap american electric car is the real withering dream with people not being able to put a roof over their head
The American dream would have both.
Unfortunately, while BYD would be the most readily-available option for cheap cars, it would need: homologation, distributors, parts suppliers, repeal of the protectionist tariffs protecting Tesla, and the removal of Musk from an unfair position of power, influence, and regulatory capture, and whatever the heck DOGE will be.
The larger issue is that, in order to afford housing, a car, and a life, regular American workers need to be paid livable wages to keep up with the inflation "pay cut" and reverse decades of sliding standards of living through lower and suppressed real wages.
American Dream? At this point I'd settle for some reasonable chance that I'd be able to still rent an apt and put food on the table next year, nevermind actually owning anything or ever retiring, lol.
I'll be squarely in the have-not camp, eager to serve our rich robot-assisted overlords.
Americans already thought the Bolt was far too small and had far too little range. BYD's cheap EVs like the Seagull are even smaller and have less range.
After reading some of the comments, the next questions, why are automakers not building plants in Africa? Cheap labor force, cheap land, probably needs education and training. China is courting Africa, is the US?
Firstly, Africa is a continent, not a sovereign nation or a monolithic politico-economic bloc. Cars aren't manufactured in every country in Asia, but primarily East and Southeast Asia. Asia proper extends from Anatolia to the Bering Strait, where many countries in between have no automobile industry whether domestic or foreign.
Secondly, there are plenty of reasons to avoid doing business in the many African countries, not the least of which are political instability, low literacy rates of the native populations, unfavorable and inconsistent economic policies (tariffs, board membership requirements, etc.), as well as inefficient and corrupt bureaucracies. That last one can create legal issues for you if you run a business incorporated in the US.
Of all the places in the world to build factories, you choose Africa? Not India, Vietnam, Philippines, Indonesia? Nothing personal against Africa but there are just a lot of options that aren't china with better industrial policy and want to build stuff to export.
US automarket is not a free market is why. Protective tariffs and other taxes or else we’d already be driving something hammered out of bangladesh as of decades ago.
Government stability? Supply chain? Cost of delivery? Just the first few guesses off the top of my head.
> probably needs education and training
That's not helping!
Recent Japanese and Chinese automotive plants have gone up in the more stable countries on the continent such as Ghana, Egypt, and Kenya, but I assume this production will all be for local consumption.
In South Africa as far as I know we are already building cars for export markets.
This being
- VW - Mercedes Benz - Ford - BMW
(I think there may be a couple more).
Point being is that there are already some plants in "Africa".
France has dibs on Africa. Plus, the American manufacturing industry was our gift to and remains our primary bargaining chip with CCP. We wouldn't dare give it to anyone else.
Tell Mali and Niger that
This is partially a case of not moving the goalposts - if you run an inflation calculator [0] on 25k from 2017-now, it comes in right around 32.5k, and you can definitely order a Tesla for less than that today.
[0]https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=25000&year1=20...
> 1993 Geo Metro pricing starts at $1,410 for the Metro XFi Hatchback 2D, which had a starting MSRP of $7,296 when new. The range-topping 1993 Metro LSi Convertible 2D starts at $1,481 today, originally priced from $10,749.
https://www.kbb.com/geo/metro/1993/
> $10,749 -> $23,288
https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=10749&year1=19...
WSJ is entitled to their opinions, however they conveniently forgot about the plethora of Herz used EVs onsale right now.
https://www.hertzcarsales.com/used-electric-vehicles.htm
The Chinese are going to clean this market up.
The British made the same mistake back in the day with motorcycles. "Who cares about the market for 125 cc machines?" they said.
The Japanese did, and now they have the market, the British used to have, for luxury and high powered motor cycles. As well as most of the 125cc market
> The Chinese are going to clean this market up.
Not if our governments start putting tariffs on everything.
I am Canadian, but it also applies to other governments (including the US). The politicians know that it's not going to be easy to do the actual right thing and build up a competitive industry. Instead, it's much easier to just slap some tariffs and make lagging productivity the next generation's problem.
That would only apply to markets with tariffs, and not the rest of the world. China can sell their EVs to Central Asia, Russia, Africa, south east Asia, Australia, and still dominate the world wide market. America, Canada, Japan, Western Europe, and Korea can protect their markets, but they can’t really protect their market share.
Let's face it, the Canadian reaction is purely out of US friendship. There is no end-to-end EV car manufacturing in Canada. There is an EV battery setup in Ontario (and perhaps Quebec?) but that's about it. We are a decade or more away from having an end-to-end manufacturing pipeline. So... we implement tariffs that hurt the majority of the population? For the govt's lack of investment across decades. If you want to, put a tariff on EV batteries or any other part that is manufactured in Canada - not the whole car. There is no good reason for us to take this tariff.
At the same time, politicians will talk about the dangers of climate change and how we should all try hard to mitigate it. I guess some solutions just don't have the right story to it.
I do agree that the situation we are in now is due to lack of investment in EV/associated tech starting 1.5-2 decades ago. China has invested over 200 billion in EV+Solar and are reaping the rewards.
Yes, the lack of discussion of tariffs in the article and even in these threads is a bit odd to me. The US has tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles in part specifically to keep cheap Chinese EVs off the market.
The complexities of this are outside my wheelhouse, but it's easy to see how keeping cheaper EVs out of the market would carve out a major source of cheaper vehicles period, leaving other manufacturers able to push higher priced cars. My guess is the tariffs are directly contributing to the process described in the article. Even if manufacturers were to "leave that market to China", eventually it would come to bite them as a certain proportion of people would start buying those cars instead.
Monopolies, monopsonies, and tariffs are playing a huge role throughout the US economy and it gets such little attention. Or at least it seems that way to me.
North Americans can have their Auto Galapagos. Even Aussies and the UK aren't listening to the White House's histrionics (for now).
Honestly that analogy feels like a stretch. I like my Nortons, BSAs and Triumphs, but the Japanese honestly just built better bikes at the end of the day (que joke about Lucas electrics and all of the other shit that seems to go wrong on British vehicles of that era). The British built really beautiful bikes and sports cars, but their reliability and general aggravation of ownership was kind of abhorrent. A good Yamaha, Suzuki, Honda, etc. even from that era, I've come to expect will be cheaper to maintain, not come with half a dozen headaches out of the box, and will "Just Run" when you turn the key.
I've yet to see good evidence that the Chinese cars are actually built in a way that they're more reliable or a better value than counterparts from other countries, they're just cheaper.
The benefit of EVs comparatively is that the drivetrain is much simpler than an ICE vehicle. If a motor dies, unbolt it and swap in a new one. Same thing for the battery pack. Sure, it's inconvenient, but if these Chinese companies are willing to offer the same warranties as American manufacturers, then what's the problem?
if your cheap Chinese EV starts on fire and burns down your house, it might not have been such a good deal
if your expensive Tesla starts on fire and burns down your house, it might not have been such a good idea
Once they have the volume of the global market they definitely will, if not sooner.
There are some externalities that may prevent that, such as large tariffs. Countries are wary of the effects on employment.
The only EV I'm even interested in is an Aptera. They're building a new class of vehicle that takes advantage of the affordances of full electric. I want a small efficient car that can go long distances and nobody else is building anything like that. Even US capital markets don't understand the appeal of this class of vehicle, but luckily they were able to fill their funding in global capital markets. I'm pretty pessimistic about US EVs, but Aptera gives me a little hope.
Aptera is coming up on their 20th anniversary of being vaporware. It's a vehicle with a potential market of potentially hundreds of nerds. Unfortunately, an idea that appeals to so few will never be a viable mass-production automaker.
I was happy to see them get funded, but its fair to be wary. They are a new company after all, but I think there are a lot of emerging markets where this type of vehicle makes more sense than a wagon. I'm pretty pessimistic about US manufacturing in general tho so I'm willing to admit that there's a good chance that you're right about Aptera.
demonstrably false. Unless you think they're lying, they have something like ~47k preorders registered. If even 75% of those preorders flake, that's something like 2 years of manufacturing pipeline and sales, if they manage to get the first stage factory they want.
'Hundreds' was a bit of hyperbole, but it ain't far off.
47k in 100 countries, they say. These are $100 fully refundable 'preorders', so they're more like placeholders in line than anything else. They will absolutely have a high attrition rate because most of them are speculatory. And of small number that are serious -- how many of those are in a regulatory region where they will be launching? ...and in a way that they are normally registrable? I think even they'll be shocked to ship 10% of those preorders.
For a bit of a reality check here -- the cybertruck preorder originally had the exact same terms (before it got more expensive), and had 2 million preorders. They've sold almost 30k of them, and it has already been reported that all waitlist reservations have been fulfilled. So at best, a 98% attrition rate. If the Aptera ever ships, and they are able to convert sales as good as Tesla did with the Cybertruck -- then yeah, the number will be measured in hundreds, not thousands.
The cybertruck also went up in price by 50k? IIRC from promised. I bet a lot of the flakes couldn't justify the extra cost. Sure the aptera has gone up from 28k? to 37k? but
1. That's likely a high water mark estimate
2. An extra 10k is easier to come up with, not to mention generally cars in that price range going up by about 5k anyways
I love Aptera! I just don't think it's ever going to take off. There's just not enough investment and demand. It looks ridiculous but it's an awesome concept of aerodynamics.
People hated the prius too, when it first came out. But then Leonardo DiCaprio bought a Gen2 and pretty soon everyone wanted one. This is particularly funny because Honda built the insight first which looked crazy and nobody bought it, then Toyota built the Gen1 which looked like a normal car, then pivoted. Then Honda's Insight2 copied the New Prius vibe and this car ALSO failed, poor honda.
Looking unlike anything on the road catches eyes. Yesterday I was walking through an outdoor mall and I saw a bunch of kids crossing the road that jumped up and down and shouted "cybertruck!" when a cybertruck passed by.
Anyways, I happen to know the person who worked on the aptera's marketing campaign the first time around in 2009. Best Buy desperately wanted to get in on the EV market, and so they piloted showing Apteras at a few best buys, and they were laughed out of the room by all of the soccer moms walking in to store. It's pretty clear the market wasn't there in 2009... It's clear there is a huge vibe shift now, and the market is ready enough to at least launch the vehicle. Whether or not it will stick is a real question, but i think it would be silly to assume that the company can't get to say 100k cars on the road for lack of a market. Execution failure is, of course, still a possibility.
Something you have to understand is that the Aptera is bound to fail because it has two doors, two seats.
That's why the Honda Insight failed. The car didn't look crazy, it looked like a Civic. It didn't sell because was a tiny two-seater.
Look at the top 25 selling vehicles in America. Not one is lacking four door, 4+ passengers.
The ceiling for two door vehicles is the Ford Mustang. Ford sells about 50,000 of them, it's the top selling two door vehicle.
If Aptera could sell 10% of that in a year it would be essentially a miracle.
I also think the kind of demographic that is so eco-concious and anti-automotive status quo that they would consider something like an Aptera are already switching to cycling. I see that buyer as someone like City Nerd on YouTube, who at this point isn't looking for a better and more efficient car, they're looking to live car-free in a lively walkable/bikable urban neighborhood. The kind of person who wants to buy an Aptera is probably already halfway done packing to move to Copenhagen.
So, I've met a lot of aptera investors and reservation holders and, (modulo selection bias, ofc), your characterization of them is incorrect. By far most of them are considering keeping a utility car and using aptera as a daily driver for work. It's not so expensive that that is crazy thing to do or want.
Anyways, time will tell which of us is correct.
Obviously, I don't expect them to try and become the next Tesla or Toyota and make a car for every person, but there are just not a lot of car companies that can survive selling 10 or 20 thousands units per year, especially at an affordable price rather than selling a small amount of high volume luxury vehicles.
You look at the situation Jaguar is in where they are desperately pausing all production for an entire year to retool and try to come back and solely make six figure luxury vehicle to support their small volumes and that makes me wonder how Aptera can swing it with such a niche vehicle.
I totally believe you that there are people who want to use the Aptera this way. The problem with that is that for $30k there are a lot of options to fill that need that are very similarly eco-friendly and low cost of fuel.
$30k will buy you a Tesla Model 3 or Toyota Prius and both of those cars have extra utility by having double the seating capacity.
I just think that if this efficient commuter vehicle concept was more popular we would see more two-door cars around, vehicles like the original Honda Insight. You even see cars like the Mini Cooper and Mazda Miata that can fill this personal car role for many people facing declining sales numbers: people really demand 4 doors.
The thing is, someone who is buying a second car for $30k is far up the affluence ladder. Most people when they buy a car need it to do everything: commuting, transporting friends and family, making Home Depot runs. Having a second brand new $30k car just to commute is a huge luxury.
And that type of affluent person probably has a home with a garage, which kind of negates the solar charging concept immediately.
So, in my opinion, you really need to buy this car not for economic reasons, not for reasons of enjoyment/fun driving experience (like a sports car), but for ideological reasons. And that can be a tough sell.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but unless there is another solar option, the 100 kWh pack will take around 40 days to charge by solar at 700W from 20% to 80%. Otherwise, it seems like the solar part is greenwashing with a bit of '70's-style geodesic dome and Balans chair styling. I'm all for cheap(er) EVs that don't involve Tesla like Scout or BYD.
The solar adds 40 miles roughly every 8 hours of sunlight. Of course it's not a way to get 100% charged regularly, but how often do you need the battery at 100%? 40 "free" miles a business day is still a game changer in fuel usage.
it's probably greenwashing if you live in seattle or london, but lots of americans live in sunnier places and drive less (especially so now that people are WFH). I drive on the order of ~25 miles a day and supposedly the aptera will let me get that range on a day's charge, even though I live in a slightly less sunny place than say Texas, Arizona, or SoCal.
It's neat, but it would require segregated roadways to be safe, and we're not going to get that.
I'd love to live in that world though. Smaller, lighter, lower-speed vehicles. Bicycles. Walkable neighborhoods. It'd be great.
But we can't have those nice things, because most Americans have atrocious taste -- and the ones who do have good taste, you can't afford to live next to.
> it would require segregated roadways to be safe
Why would it? It has a carbon fiber monocoq hull with a steel roll cage. The shape is pretty much egg shaped, which seems like it would be fairly structurally resilient (IANA MechE)
Not really, its registered as a motorcycle. From what I understand they're going above and beyond on safety to meet standards normally set for cars, but there are other light vehicles that people drive all the time that don't get special lanes.
I dream of public transport and not having to drive.
Something has to disconnect here. Everyone complains that everything costs so much, but the average Americans' paycheck is not rising the same way, so they can try all they want to sell $95k electric vehicles because of thin margins for cheaper products, but if purchasing power doesn't rise with inflation, then that market that "sucks" is going to be the only real market one day...
I think the disconnect is maybe just in the title: Lucid is obviously just trying to be the next Mercedes. Duh, of course they don't make a cheap car (how much did Lucid pay for this ad in the WSJ?); but their competitors kind of do. Tesla literally told their shareholders during the most recent earnings call that "more affordable models are coming in the first half of 2025". Jim Farley has spoken on how one of the reasons Ford's EVs are still rather expensive is because they clean-roomed much of the assembly for them to better compete with Tesla, so while ICE cars have a century of process optimization behind them, their EVs aren't at that same level... yet.
Its just clickbait paid by Lucid to make their $90,000 cars seem reasonable because, well geeze, no one is making cheap EVs anyone. Wrong: Everyone is trying to, and its very obvious that this is direction the market needs to go in (just look at the depreciation on modern Teslas, new cars cannot compete with what is happening in the used market).
Tesla has kind of been lying about "more affordable models are coming" for about as long as they've been in business, though.
I wouldn't pay for anyone to write this, if I were Lucid...
Mercedes sold their cars by having better engineering (perceived by customers). Does Lucid have better batteries? Almost certainly not.
I'm pretty sure they do, though. Lucid owns Atieva, the company supplying the batteries for Formula E. What they've learned through the many seasons directly goes back into the vehicle's battery.
https://lucidmotors.com/media-room/atieva-powers-season-6-fo...
I am a bit skeptical of Lucid's ability to grow into profitability, but they do have excellent engineering. Their EVs have some of the best efficiency and range on the market.
The problem IMHO is a variety of US policies have artificially taken out that cheap market in all kinds of domains through protectionist policies like rent seeking, monopolies, and tariffs. So, for example, tariffs hurt the emergence of a cheap EV market.
The solutions for this in general don't line up nicely with any of the major party platforms, at least in the US — major deregulation of certain areas in certain ways, aggressive antitrust enforcement, and dismantling of tariffs, possibly combined with government incentivizing of competition in certain areas, at least for awhile. It feels like candidates and parties demonize one or more of these things and overemphasize other things, or implement some of these things in the wrong ways, like they're all mutually exclusive.
Increasingly expensive products are afforded through innovations in financing.
Yeah, I think the pendulum swings back and forth. My recollection of the 2007-2009 recession, with $4 gas and the failure of GM, was that it spurred a lot of interest and innovation in smaller, more efficient, economy cars after many years of the automakers pushing (and people buying) larger and less efficient trucks and SUVs. I think we're at an extreme point in the cycle again now with American automakers all but abandoning the compact and midsize economy car segments. At some point, things will dry up and they'll need to compete with the Toyota Corolla and Honda Civic again.
I think you're right about pendulums here, but we might be about to see a US auto maker vs China auto maker inflection point like I read about in the 1980s with US vs Japan.
I watching this video which lays out some fundamental diffs between US companies, like GM and Chinese companies, like BYD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXvcwM977D0 * Short term vs long term focus * .gov subsidies stronger in key markets in CN * CN companies extremely rapid in development (as low as 1.5 yr vs 6 yr in the US) * Lower wages and input costs
Things will probably have to get worse before they get worse. Corporate people know the machine (public traded US auto makers) keeps lumbering forward without change until it can't, and all handouts, bailouts, and other tricks have been played.
There's only one reason why US cars are more expensive than CN cars: People will pay it. All that other stuff is window dressing. The US is way, way better at financial engineering than China; we can sell an $80,000 Tahoe to a single mom between jobs on zero down and 10% APR, somehow she'll take that deal, and somehow the system doesn't explode into a fiery deathball; so you get $80,000 Tahoes. That's it.
Short-term vs long-term focus means nothing. Government subsidies run out. Rapid development is easy when its a first generation product with no customers. Lower wages means fewer of your own people can afford it (though it does help with export pricing to richer first world countries... what's that word I'm looking for... it starts with a T, I heard an orange man say it recently. eh probably nothing)
The 2008-2023 US economy was basically the strongest national economy in the history of humanity; but, obviously, that's changing. And no, I'm not doomering about a mother-of-all-crashes. The world is just getting more realistic, as it should.
> Short-term vs long-term focus means nothing.
Manufacturing, generally? Solar? Batteries? Semiconductors? Cyber espionage/warfare? I think those are more than nothing that China has had a demonstrable long term strategy in which benefits them at our expense.
Also, great point about financialization in the US. Do you think if that dam breaks, US auto makers come back to planet Earth instead of chasing what seems to be exclusively high-margin cars only affordable by credit?
Maybe their strategy will pan out, but generally any economy which critically depends on a restless and despondent class of basically slave labor (and, in some cases, actual slave labor) isn't going to sustain itself. As they said in Silicon Valley (the HBO show) like 8 years ago: "There's no New Bangladesh; there's just Bangladesh."; China's population wants upward social mobility in a way that's basically just westernization. On the flip side, they have a government that wants the economic benefits of a cheap labor pool, they want to be a cheap western manufacturing destination, and they have the surveillance and police state to push the issue further than western democracies would; a scary combo.
The other unrelated point I try to impress on people: You can assert that China's lead in manufacturing solar panels, batteries, etc is indicative that they're "ahead" of us, or whatever. You sure? I don't know what job you have right now, but the US was a destination for high tech manufacturing many decades ago. We largely moved past that. We make poorer countries do that for us now. How is it desirable that America become better at, I don't know, mining lithium? Are those jobs that we want our population to have? Versus what are clearly higher-margin email jobs? China manufacturing solar panels to sell us is our benefit, their expense; their economy is built on attaching a 2% margin on physical goods, ours is attaching a 200% margin on services, software, and financialization we build on top of those physical goods. Every economist on the planet would agree, you want to live in the second one. Lithium mines suck. Assembly lines suck.
But even looking beyond that: The US has an unemployment rate of like 3% right now. You can open the world's biggest solar factory out in Iowa; good luck finding workers to staff it. The US is not "behind" on manufacturing; we LEFT it behind, for good reason.
> Do you think if that dam breaks, US auto makers come back to planet Earth instead of chasing what seems to be exclusively high-margin cars only affordable by credit?
It doesn't seem to me like the problems that the automotive world are going to face over the next five years will be isolated to US manufacturers; its going to be global. Its going to get harder to financially-engineer your way to higher margins and revenue. That means prices need to come down. But, prices are higher because consumers want these nicer cars, nicer materials, there's a lot of cost in mandated safety features and safety engineering as well, not to mention all the export controls and tariffs Trump is threatening. So, how do they get cost down? That's the challenge.
In general, I’m not an anti-regulation person. But American regulations on cars add cost compared to other countries.
One specific example: mandatory back up cameras (and a monitor to watch them on).
With the size of American vehicles these days and the reduced visibility inherent, I'm all for mandatory backup cameras. Some trucks even have forward cameras now because their front-ends are so tall that they have a large front blind-spot.
There are inexpensive EVs in the US. A local dealer has new Nissan Leafs available for $24.5k (after rebates) all day, every day.
There are also inexpensive cars. A local dealer has new Mitsubishi Mirage Hatchbacks available for $17k all day, every day.
People don't want them.
They're not being tricked, cajoled, strong-armed, forced, pressured, misguided, or hoodwinked.
American consumers WANT and CAN AFFORD gigantic $65k SUVs with heated and cooled seats and wifi and huge screens that take up the entire dashboard.
"Oh but they're prioritizing higher-marg..." yeah no shit Sherlock literally all a consumer has to do is not buy one of those.
But Toyota can slap a limited edition retro paint job on an SUV, mark it up $5k and the dealer can mark it up $10k and people will walk past the cheap cars to sign up for a waiting list to get a chance to earn an opportunity to put down a non-refundable deposit to maybe, potentially, pay $75k for an middling SUV with a limited edition retro paint job.
Here's the thing: in a market where almost all the new car buyers are affluent and can afford "wealthy country luxury," it's no wonder that small, economic penalty boxes like the Chevy Spark and Ford Fiesta get discontinued left and right when you think about how depreciation and the used market works.
I think you'd have to be batshit insane to buy a brand new Mitsubishi Mirage for $17k when the used market is flooded with much better cars that are barely used for the same price.
You can get a 2021 Hyundai Sonata with under 30,000 miles for that kind of money. Basically, a brand new car, one that's far larger, more refined, faster, more features, etc.
Those economy boxes make a lot of sense in countries where buying something higher end is less attainable. But in a world where someone leases a $40,000 car for 3 years, dumps it back to the dealership, a $20,000 new car can't compete with an originally-$40,000 3-year-old car with 30,000 miles.
All true, and there is still a viable used car market. Even cars that may require a bit more maintenance are a win by a large margin. Some things are just expensive. Ever price out a replacement 8" entertainment console in a vehicle? Probably ~$2,500 and up. Replacement LED headlights? Over $1,000. (Third party is your friend there). Regular maintenance like water pumps, brakes, serpentine belts are economical by comparison.
These are cheap "city" EVs with small batteries and slow charging. They have all the compromises and annoyances that people don't like about EVs.
The desirable EVs have 2x-3x more range and charge 3x-4x faster. That completely changes the equation, because that makes them good enough to be the primary/only car. Even for people who don't have a charger at home, even for people who need to drive long distances.
People don't want Leafs because they come with too many compromises.
Small battery, slow, weird and phased-out charging port; list goes on. It's a first-gen EV through and through.
However, Nissan's second EV, the Ariya, is selling much better! Crossover CUV (which America wants), bigger battery, fast, stylish, starts at $39.5k.
We also now have sub-$30k used Tesla's out in the market too.
> We also now have sub-$30k used Tesla's out in the market too.
I purchased a 2023 Model 3 from Hertz over the summer for $23k, which I've been very happy with. I'm not eligible for either tax rebate (used or new), so 1 year ago I would have paid north of $40k for it.
There are definitely some good deals out there.
People not wanting a Leaf is how I got mine for dirt cheap. I also happen to live in a state with an extraordinary EV tax credit.
The annoyances of the Leaf are overstated, and the benefits are way better than people give credit for.
If people do what’s popular, they have to accept a popularity tax for the “keeping up with the Joneses” lifestyle
If we wanted a cheap American electric car, the way to do it would be to allow Chinese EV manufacturers to sell to the American public!
Of course, that is not allowed, because it would benefit the American people and hurt the American car cartel.
Well, there's also the 4.3 million US autoworkers who'd ultimately be the ones to get shafted.
I don't think we can keep killing off entire industries and expect it to work out in the long run. At some point, what's left? WalMart?
Congrats! You discovered the Broken Window Fallacy.
There are 300 million Americans. Why should ~1% get to hold the remaining 99% hostage?
It’s strategically important to have essential industries at home.
My brother in christ, that is not the Broken Window Fallacy
Who is facing stiff competition from Amazon (heaps of Chinese goods) and Wish (Chinese company)
Chinese EV imports could threaten national security through technology dependence and harm American auto manufacturing jobs. Safety and environmental standards may also be lower. I think that view is rather narrow.
>threaten national security through technology dependence and harm American auto manufacturing jobs. Safety and environmental standards may also be lower.
Protectionism based tax and economic policy causes the exact same outcomes but far enough in the future and far enough away that the people who implemented it will be retired and/or dead and the people who voted for those people to do it will have had time to spin some counter narrative about it being an honest mistake, everyone thinking it was a good idea at the time, etc, etc.
Weird to me that off-shoring is back in vogue.
You think Japanese auto imports was good for American auto manufacturing jobs?
Don't you remember American auto workers beating a Japanese man to death? You probably don't, because they beat a Chinese man to death by mistake. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Vincent_Chin
I’d say let’s ask the free market and put BYD’s for sale to see what the American people think.
No. They will flood the market with government-subsidized EVs built in zero-workers-rights environments that will absolutely destroy the American auto industry. It will benefit American people in the short term but absolutely harm our country long-term.
Perhaps true, but how is this any different to other Chinese products sold at Walmart ?
It's not. Heaps on heaps on heaps of small businesses have been destroyed by cheap international goods that Walmart and Amazon push, and customers have crappier products that don't last as long as a result.
This is incorrect. The products we buy today from the Chinese through big box stores like Walmart (or Amazon) actually last much longer and work far better than the same American-made goods from 25 years ago in those same big box stores before China was so dominant.
Quality is actually going up as prices come down VIA CHINA. You may get comfort pretending otherwise, but Chinese manufacturing is generally far better than US manufacturing at large scale. Sure, you can find some bespoke businesses that make great stuff here, but if you want the best possible smartphone or bluejeans or air conditioner, or automobille, you'd go with China over the US most days of the week.
And two million less jobs for Americans. Huge benefit!
Americans vote against their own self interests constantly. How is this any different? Or do you think the US govt couldn't backstop it's own car companies until they became cost competitive? Seems like a win/win if we want to speed up EV adoption and reduce global emissions. If a new $20k EV with 300 miles of range was released tomorrow, we'd see massive adoption similar to the original Model 3. Americans I believe are largely ready for EV adoption but the only thing stopping the majority is price.
America's grid isn't ready for massive EV adoption, nor are its fire departments or insurance underwriters, indoor parking garages, etc.
Price is not the thing holding back EV adoption. The people who are in the $20k car market don't own their own homes and don't have anywhere to plug their theoretical EV into consistently.
EVs as they are now are only as successful as they are because of a set of diehard futurists with cash to burn and excessive government subsidy.
I would love to see some analysis on the average car production cost invoice cost. The current numbers being shown focus too much on MSRP or final sale cost, which include vehicle options or markup. It would be very useful to look at these trends.
Why isn't there more focus on plain old Hybrids? Not PHEV's... Aren't they a best of both worlds approach? What am I missing.
Hybrids don't really solve much.
All they do is slightly improve fuel efficiency; but they cost more to buy, and cost more to maintain. I had to dump my first hybrid because I couldn't find anyone to fix it.
The way to think of it is that a hybrid (both traditional and PHEV,) has more parts than an ICE car, which has more parts than an EV. It's more things that can fail as the car gets old, and more things to pay for when the car is new.
Edit: I should add that hybrids were good for automakers to dip their toe in the water for electrification: IE, get the supply chain working and get institutional knowledge. But, that ship sailed 10 years ago.
Hybrids cost more to repair, but much less to maintain. Hybrid brakes can last decades, and their tires and suspension wear is very near an internal combustion engine. However, the added complexity of a hybrid powertrain almost always makes engine repairs more difficult and therefore cost more money.
Hybrid sales have actually skyrocketed in the past year for light duty vehicles and represent a greater percentage than BEVs now [1]. Most western manufacturers completely leapfrogged HEVs and went from ICEs to BEVs, so Japan seems to rule the market, and will reap the rewards. There seems to a zeal surrounding reducing carbon emissions that is counterproductive. The contempt of hybrids is incredibly reminiscent of the disdain of nuclear energy in favor of pure renewables.
1. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=62924
Plain hybrids currently do sell better than PHEVs or EVs.
I'm not sure in which "best of both worlds" a standard hybrid is better than a PHEV - a PHEV allows for cheaper fuel (grid electricity) when it's available. That being said, the extra cost is associated with larger batteries than standard hybrids. As batteries come down in price / size, I'm not sure why people would want a standard hybrid over a PHEV.
Right? I drive an accord hybrid (2023) and get ~53 mpg city and ~48 mpg interstate.
I have a hard time imagining switching to a full EV or going back to traditional ICE.
I think they can work well if you do a lot of city driving (where you brake a lot). So in a sense, it's the best of both worlds.
They are cheaper than pure EV's and do not require the home charging infrastructure.
Japan went all-in on hybrids, not exactly sure why though. Skip forward a few decades and it'd make a lot more sense to unify behind a fully electric charging solution than maintaining two fueling methods.
They are crutches and will be the worst of both worlds when EV fast charging infrastructure becomes as ubiquitous as gas refueling is today.
> Aren't they a best of both worlds approach? What am I missing.
They have the mechanical complexity of both, in a package of roughly the same size. And usually far smaller batteries and thus far less battery-only range than a pure EV. There are plenty of downsides.
Um because people really want to be done burning petroleum in their cars. Hybrid is just an old gas car that’s gets improved gas mileage. It’s not a real fix.
i have heard that a hybrid car is in fact the worst of both worlds, having to carry both 50kg gasoline _and_ over 50kg battery
And you still don't escape having to go to a gas station every few weeks, and maintenance twice a year. Those 10 or so hours per year don't seem like a lot but after having enjoyed EVs for 6 years now, that's the one of the main reasons I'll never go back.
I expected more from this article. Sure they are boring but in the new market Kona EV, ID.4, Leaf, and as mentioned Bolt EV/EUV are all very good deals, and the only compromise is infrequent road-tripping, and this is totally ignoring Tesla.
> The cheapest car Tesla currently sells in the U.S. starts at around $43,000—or $35,500 with a federal tax credit of $7,500.
Curious if anyone knows — do people actually drive off the lot with a Tesla for $35,500?
Teslas are one of the few vehicles where you can actually get the model at the lowest price they advertise because they are all delivery. Almost every other make and model will show you a price in their advertisements that you can’t find anywhere and make you wait forever to order one. I’ve often thought it was deceptive advertising because the price they show in their TV ad is one almost nobody actually gets or likely could. I’m pretty sure Lexus has a version of the RX with cloth seats and no touchscreenthat they only make one of just so they can use the price in their ads.
I don’t know how many people actually opt for the lowest end version of Teslas but I believe you can get them with essentially no more difficulty than any other version.
true. I wasted over a year waiting to get a base model Toyota Sienna, and eventually realized they might as well not exist.
The cheapest Teslas are also best selling Teslas. With Teslas the base model is really good and more expensive models offer either longer range or performance of a Porsche for half the price.
There is no lot. You click order online and it shows up. Honestly one of the best things Tesla has done for the car industry.
I see a Model 3 Long Range rear wheel drive listed for $42,490 in their new vehicle configurator: https://www.tesla.com/model3/design#overview
The soon-to-be-dismantled federal tax credit of $7500.
"There’s not a lot of movies made about the heroes who got 20% of the cost out of a car, but let me tell you, there should be.”
Of course. You start by designing a car to be cheap, not slimming down an expensive one.
Consider who builds American EVs:
1) a SV/Texas "tech" company, which, by its very identity, must yield insane returns to shareholders 2) Legacy auto companies who must yield insane returns to both shareholders and, to a lesser extent, retired employees. In their defense, the second group actually did work
Compare this to Chinese EV makers who are dumpi - I mean, willing to take less return on their sale in order to establish market dominance globally.
Yeah, no wonder American EVs are expensive.
So your issue is that US public companies need return on investment, but that Chinese ones don't? There's nothing "insane" about the ROI at GM or Ford...
That's the issue, yes.
The Chinese are selling either at a loss or far below the return expectations of their competitions' investors. They're not going to stop, because they want to drive everyone else out of the market. The solution is to drop things like dividends and executive bonuses down to sane (or, really, non-existent) levels and pass along the savings to the customer.
Otherwise there might not be a company to collect ROI on in a decade or two. Not that most shareholders care; they hire a guy specifically to engineer the holdings so that they can drop any one of them and not lose lots of value.
People who can afford to buy brand new, does it matter if there is a 25k EV?
People that buy used, can get a cheap electric car like a 2023 Tesla M3 with approx. 50k miles going for 20-24k on Hertz Rental Car sales site.
If you want a better price, just wait until 2026, when the 250k leases come due. There will be a flood of used electric cars on the market.
Currently in Europe right now the smart purchase is on second hand EVs. Depreciation is extremely high (mainly fueled by fear of second hand batteries), so you can get an EV equivalent to an ICE counterpart for around 30-40% less money (Golf vs ID3; BMW iX vs X5; Model 3 vs BMW 330i/340i).
If I was in the market for a second hand car I would go electric for sure.
> “I think having a regular $25,000 model is pointless,” Musk said a few weeks ago. “It would be silly.”
ROTFLMAO!
Says the richest person in existence. What an entitled nasty person.
That lacks context*
Obviously it might be pointless for a company like Tesla, as it might not favour their financial numbers.
It is actually a phenomenon going on specially with European brands. They have abandoned low margin cars, it is, cheapest segments, to improve their financial performance numbers (ROIC...)
* That was mentioned during Tesla's earnings call in October this year, in the context of the shift of strategy towards FSD and the Robotaxi.
While he did say that, its worth pointing out that Tesla also said that more affordable options will be available in 2025H1 [1]. Given Musk's statement, what I think Tesla means by this is more affordable trims of existing models.
I don't think its reasonable to read Musk's statement as "the Model 2 isn't happening". Its more accurate to read it as "it might cost more than $25,000".
[1] https://fortune.com/2024/10/24/tesla-model-2-affordable-car-...
> its worth pointing out that Tesla also said that more affordable options will be available in 2025H1
Sure, but they've been saying full self driving is "next year" for a decade in a row. I take that with a large grain of salt. https://jalopnik.com/elon-musk-promises-full-self-driving-ne...
Absolutely; but it is at least indicative of the direction Tesla is taking. It might be the end of 2025, 2026, whenever; but they've said they're working on lower cost models. That's all I'm asserting.
It's still the company that trots out humans in spandex to simulate robots and a self-driving taxi that was actually remotely operated by a guy on his phone.
I'll believe in the cheap Tesla when it arrives.
Why anyone would take Elon at his word is beyond me.
Elon did not say that. Tesla The Company said that.
Ask yourself this: I bet you a thousand dollars that Tesla will release either a lower cost model or a lower cost trim of an existing model before the end of 2026. Would you take the other side of that bet?
That's directionality. Deadlines might get missed. I'm talking about directionality.
You are now changing your claim; you originally said or quoted lower cost models.
Yes, I'd take that bet.
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They certainly enjoy the fact that I don't make unsubstantiated and unwarranted ad hominem attacks!
It's the Wall Street Journal.
Electric cars will not "save the environment".
Their purpose is to "save the US automotive industry".
The idea that billionaires and car manufacturers would be motivated by anything else is laughable.
Support public transportation.
As somebody who wants less cars and more public transportation, I think your messaging is way off.
This is an all-hands-on-deck situation where we need to pursue all options simultaneously. And there are huge swathes of our country that we will not be able to transition out of suburban sprawl into transit-friendly planning in the necessary amount of time.
So in 2050, there will still be cars, and we can not build enough public transportation in time to solve climate change (and in fact we won't transition to EVs fast enough to solve climate change, if we rely on EVs alone either...)
Co-signed. One really concept is the locked-in demand: every single internal combustion vehicle sold now means someone is buying gas for at least two decades, but even if you use entirely coal power an EV will generate fewer carbon emissions now and that will drop rapidly every time cleaner power is added to the grid.
No, wrong. Completely wrong. The US auto industry doesn't believe EVs will save them--they're certain it's going to kill them or almost, but the EV transition is being forced by CARB + ROW (Europe, China and Korea) which don't really give a shit whether the US auto companies like it or not. They will chase China and Korea or die. It's really that simple and has nothing to do with what they want and entirely what they're forced into by global competition and regulation.
Maybe if domestic automakers fall to Chinese competition, the US will start properly investing in public transportation like it did a century ago.
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the only manufacturer that does this right is Aptera, the rest is a bunch of gimmicks / subsidy fraud that doesn't solve any actual problem with cars
Never even heard of them, so I doubt they're the only ones "doing it right" vs other car companies that actually sell EVs.
What exactly does Aptera 'do right'? and what is it 'manufacturing'? They've been pitching the same tiny, unsafe, and impractical car for ~20 years now...
they understand that weight and efficiency is the only way forward
not like Tesla selling 3-ton vehicles that pretend to be green
You can't really call them a "manufacturer" when they haven't manufactured a single car, can you? I think they have exactly one test vehicle that they've made by hand.
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Anyone interested in this should look into BorgWarner, the company that produces most of the EV power trains in the US. They charge a several x markup and hold a virtual monopoly.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.10440