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Sales of electric cars up by 43% in 2020

theguardian.com

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Re: Sales of electric cars up by 43% in 2020

#181

Post by BillyTheKing »

missedthecue wrote: post #110
theshrike79 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China is a country lead by engineers with unlimited power to do whatever they want. If they want all cars to be electric, that will happen. If they want a 5 million person city just there because it's logistically advantageous, then that will happen. The good thing is that they can make decisions like this. The bad thing is that they can make decisions like this.

Autocracies seem to be the most efficient form of governance. It's a shame that this also means that they can do evil things very efficiently, given no one can stop them.

Efficiency is the opposite of robustness. Autocracies always appear stable until suddenly they don't anymore and break apart or fail in some other way. While democracies seem inefficient and at times quite volatile, they are significantly more robust and can adapt better to changes down the road.

Modern China, so far, has only really experienced a fairly homogeneous historical phase, which is one primarily driven by economic growth. They haven't been forced to deal with major societal issues, in my opinion it's simply too early to judge just how robust that government and state is going to be in the long-run.

Re: Sales of electric cars up by 43% in 2020

#182

Post by Reason077 »

dagurp wrote: post #175
Reason077 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Toyota now sells the full-electric Lexus UX 300e in Europe, so it’s no longer true that they “don’t offer a single BEV”.

The specs of that car suggest that they want it to fail. It's not competitive to the EVs out there and is too expensive.

You may well be right. But they do offer a single EV!

Re: Sales of electric cars up by 43% in 2020

#183

Post by limaoscarjuliet »

The next step is to work on cleaner electricity. While most EU got the message long time ago, eastern bloc countries are much behind. Currently in Poland it is better for the environment to drive a diesel VW Golf than Tesla, as the electricity is produced from brown coal.

Re: Sales of electric cars up by 43% in 2020

#184

Post by _ph_ »

konschubert wrote: post #149
_ph_ wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the emission standards have forced the car manufacturers to offer electric cars. But how does it explain that customers are buying them? Even so much that there are long waiting times when you order an electric car. The answer is: there are enough customers interested in buying an electric cars but both the available product range and production count limited their ability to do so. With the offerings of electri…

The car makers are taking a loss/low margin on BEVs sales . Pricing is tuned such that they can sell enough BEVs to meet the regulated fleet efficiency, but no more than that.

Which only means that the customer is of course taking the price into account when buying new cars. As the production costs of electric cars are coming down considerably (manufacturing scaling, battery costs), the prices are coming down and very soon there will be the same margin as with petrol cars. Never mention Tesla, who don't have the problem of compensating their ICE car emissions.

Re: Sales of electric cars up by 43% in 2020

#185

Post by nickik »

godmode2019 wrote: post #81

'Global sales' I hope everyone understands in China it is very hard to get a licence plate, the government allows you to get a licence plate if you buy a heavily subsidised electric car. The aim is to stimulate demand to develop an industry. Large cities also banned motorbikes and scooters, with the same aim. This is no way market driven demand, BYD is a very interesting company to look into. It is my understanding t…

This is no longer really the case. Last year many of the subsidies have been removed.

If anything growth in China has slowed down because of that.

Europe is actually the place that has put the most pressure on companies, because their new regulation required a fleet efficiency that.

China does legitimately want to not have cities be a hellhole to live in and supporting EV made sense. Also because China hopes to be able to export EV, getting into the ICE car game would have been harder.

Re: Sales of electric cars up by 43% in 2020

#186

Post by clouddrover »

Reason077 wrote: post #182
dagurp wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The specs of that car suggest that they want it to fail. It's not competitive to the EVs out there and is too expensive.

You may well be right. But they do offer a single EV!

And more to follow:

https://electrek.co/2020/12/07/toyota-electric-suv-battery-e...

Re: Sales of electric cars up by 43% in 2020

#187

Post by adrianN »

BillyTheKing wrote: post #181
missedthecue wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Autocracies seem to be the most efficient form of governance. It's a shame that this also means that they can do evil things very efficiently, given no one can stop them.

Efficiency is the opposite of robustness. Autocracies always appear stable until suddenly they don't anymore and break apart or fail in some other way. While democracies seem inefficient and at times quite volatile, they are significantly more robust and can adapt better to changes down the road. Modern China, so far, has only really experienced a fairly homogeneous historical phase, which is one primarily driven by…

I'm not sure that modern democracies exist for sufficiently long to make strong claims about their stability, and premodern democracies weren't particularly stable (as far as I know, I'm not too good at history).

Re: Sales of electric cars up by 43% in 2020

#188

Post by _ph_ »

konschubert wrote: post #147
_ph_ wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electric car sales are up in Germany by similar amounts. Completely without any force applied. The same in many European countries.

To be fair there are heavy subsidies for electric cars in Germany.

Yes, there are. About 6k per car. But this just preempts the price development in a growing market. And it helps the market to grow to a point where the cars do get cheaper because of scaling. On the other side: fossil fuels and especially car combustion engines are not taxed along the negative impact they have by toxic and carbon emissions.

Re: Sales of electric cars up by 43% in 2020

#189

Post by oblio »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #151
oblio wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're being downvoted because HN loves electric car, but for the layman, that's their thought process: 1. Does the EV cost as much as a regular car? Most of them are very expensive, comparatively, especially for cheap family cars. 2. Is the range comparable to regular cars? It's not, at similar prices it's 60%. 3. Is it trivial to recharge it, especially quickly? Not true for most of the world. 4. Can the car be bou…

It's not hard to see the trajectory however. I heard the same types of arguments against digital cameras. Ten years later film cameras barely exist.

True, but timing is everything. 2021 still seems to early for mass EV adoption, 2022 might see a proper ramp up and we will have to wait until 2025 or so, for better battery tech and cheaper batteries, to have EVs truly on an equal footing to internal combustion engine cars.

After that things will probably pick up and we'll get the hockey stick that leads to what you're saying.

Re: Sales of electric cars up by 43% in 2020

#190

Post by tonyedgecombe »

magicalhippo wrote: post #24
CameronNemo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the replacement battery will have better tech!

AFAIK the main problem with the Leaf battery is that it doesn't have active thermal management[1]. I guess it's possible one could make a replacement battery pack which has an internal cooling loop, but it would be quite limited in how much heat it could get rid of through the battery case body without external radiators. Of course better batteries might heat up less when used or charged, due to lower internal resist…

It's somewhat strange that they didn't add active thermal management. The Nissan electric vans do have it.
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