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Are electric cars too expensive to tempt motorists away from petrol vehicles?

theguardian.com

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Re: Are electric cars too expensive to tempt motorists away from petrol vehicles?

#61

Post by baq »

wazoox wrote: post #56
MilaM wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rare earths are not a major component in car batteries. They are mostly used in the electric motors for the magnets and it's acutally quite easy to replace them. Mining of lithium, copper, nickel, will have to expand in the future. But it's nothing in comparison to the damage that is done with the extraction of oil and gas.

Yes, people afraid of rare earth and lithium mining should get some numbers right first: We extract 4 BILLION TONS of oil from the ground every year. In comparison, we extract a few million tons of lithium (and it's reusable / recyclable), and a few tens of thousand tons of rare earths. The FUD about mining is pure big oil propaganda, frankly.

Oil (let’s forget about Canada oil sands for a minute here) is pumped out of the ground. Lithium and copper is strip mined and lithium salts are dried in toxic pools. I’m all for the electric transition because oil will run out but this needs figuring out environmentally.

Re: Are electric cars too expensive to tempt motorists away from petrol vehicles?

#62

Post by Dalewyn »

j4yav wrote: post #36
br3d wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP meant "can't afford them" in the sense of "couldn't afford the full price of". There are lots of people here in the UK on medium incomes driving around in £80,000 cars using this finance

How do the economics work out for the seller? Depreciation is highest at the beginning, when these people are paying the per month price. If they can't afford a loan for the price of the car, how are they making a lease payment that covers the depreciation for the leasor? I'm sure there's a reason but I can't think of it.

I don't think you understand how car loans work?

Let's say a car costs $50,000 and Joe wants to finance it (because he either doesn't have $50,000 or just doesn't want to spend $50,000 right now), so he gets a $50,000 loan to buy it. Let's also say the loan will mature in 10 years, also obviously the loan has interest but we don't need a specific number for this conversation.

The minimum payment per month will be set such that Joe will pay off the loan in 10 years, and Joe presumably can afford the loan's minimum monthly payments since he accepted it to buy that new car.

If Joe wants to pay off the loan sooner and he can afford it, he can just pay more than the minimum due during a given month.

So Joe gets a loan from a bank (oftentimes middleman'd by the dealership), the bank pays the dealer in full, Joe gets his car, the bank becomes the lienholder on the car until the loan is paid off.

Re: Are electric cars too expensive to tempt motorists away from petrol vehicles?

#63

Post by ndsipa_pomu »

speedgoose wrote: post #12
techterrier wrote: post #4

Just get rid of the damn cars.

In city centres for sure. In the country side, the population density makes public transports more challenging. People could walk or bike or ski but that would reduce their life quality. It’s difficult to reduce your life quality unless you are forced. I don’t see country side people giving up their cars.

I would dispute that driving leads to a higher quality of life than walking/biking/skiing due to the health problems from lack of exercise. Driving certainly helps with long commutes, but are long commute times increasing the quality of life?

Re: Are electric cars too expensive to tempt motorists away from petrol vehicles?

#65

Post by mg »

rcxdude wrote: post #58
mg wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thinking about energy usage always puzzles me. I'm not even sure if driving a car from one city to another really uses energy. For example, let's look at it this way: The energy from the sun is heating earth. When we use some of it to drive a solar-powered electric car from one city to another, does that lower the temperature of planet earth? I would think it does not. So why did we get the energy to drive the car fo…

Energy is, in fact, conserved, as you point out. When we colloqually talk about 'using energy', we are generally referring to converting low-entropy energy (like electricity, sunlight, chemical energy from fuel) into high-entropy energy (ultimately dissipated as heat in the air), hopefully doing useful work along the way. High-entropy energy cannot generally be harnessed to do useful work anywhere nearly as easily as…

Let me try to wrap my head around this:

Say there is a completely static, black planet. All sunlight that hits it is turned into heat which is dissipated into the universe. Nothing moves on that planet.

The static black inhabitants of the planet are very thankful for the sun that it makes their planet nicely warm and cozy.

Now one day, one of them is allowed to travel to planet earth and read Hacker News. He reads this very thread.

Are you telling him that they are wasting half of the benefits they could get from the sun? They could have a nice warm planet AND drive around in electric cars all day? For free? Everything else would stay the same?

If so, doesn't that make driving a car "free" in that it not even increased the amount of entropy? Since the sunlight would have turned into high entropy heat anyhow?

Re: Are electric cars too expensive to tempt motorists away from petrol vehicles?

#66

Post by mg »

ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #52
mg wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thinking about energy usage always puzzles me. I'm not even sure if driving a car from one city to another really uses energy. For example, let's look at it this way: The energy from the sun is heating earth. When we use some of it to drive a solar-powered electric car from one city to another, does that lower the temperature of planet earth? I would think it does not. So why did we get the energy to drive the car fo…

It can be more instructive to consider entropy rather than energy usage. The energy coming from the sun has low entropy and that makes it easy to capture and convert into electricity/plants etc. When you use some of that energy to move a car, you're converting the useful low entropy of the electricity/fuel into high entropy "waste" heat that can no longer be easily captured and used.

Isn't that "waste" heat still warming the planet? Isn't turning a cold planet into a warm planet a good thing and therefore the "waste" heat is still "used" for something useful?

Re: Are electric cars too expensive to tempt motorists away from petrol vehicles?

#67

Post by 2Gkashmiri »

edent wrote: post #48
padjo wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder do any of them realise they’re paying the maximum depreciation every single time too. Losing 20k+ in depreciation every year feels like a great way to stay poor

On the flip side, using PCP means that you get a brand new car and it has a warrantee. You could buy a banger for £500 - but then you're always going to be wondering if today is the day it'll cost you £££ to repair. And if you can't get in to work, that'll cost you dearly as well. £300 per month to basically not have to worry about any unexpected bills seems reasonable to me. Plus you get the social value of having a…

in my city at least, this PCP concept hasnt really taken off because companies arent offering it.

what the people have done informally is something similar.

1. person "buys" a car and Hypothecates the same to a bank for paying the car dealer. usually 80-90-100% of the car value can be paid by bank meaning 0-10-20% of the car value can be given as deposit.

2. now that the new "owner" has taken the car, they start making monthly EMI payments to bank.

3. 1 year or 2 years from purchase, the owner wants to "sell" the car so what they do is, find a buyer willing to accept the outstanding loan amount.

4. the first "owner" has paid 2 things. 1 deposit and say 12 months of EMI.

5. first "owner" tells the buyer that "here, take hold of these future EMI entries and give me a portion of the amount i have paid till now as in #4"

6. the first "owner" takes cheques each dated monthly in future with the amount from the buyer which the first "owner" will deposit every month and if there is any failure, claim default in payment of cheque.

7. car remains in title of the first owner and Hypothecated by bank until last EMI is paid at which point the first owner "transfers" the car to new owner

Re: Are electric cars too expensive to tempt motorists away from petrol vehicles?

#68

Post by ghusto »

When we can buy second hand electric cars _with reliable batteries that aren’t near end of life_ for 2k, we can have a discussion. Arguments of affordability before that point will rely on cherry picking, and I call bullshit on every one of them.

I know many people pay way more for cars, even buying ones they can’t afford with loans, but most of the people I know aren’t in that group.

Re: Are electric cars too expensive to tempt motorists away from petrol vehicles?

#69

Post by ghusto »

ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #63
speedgoose wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In city centres for sure. In the country side, the population density makes public transports more challenging. People could walk or bike or ski but that would reduce their life quality. It’s difficult to reduce your life quality unless you are forced. I don’t see country side people giving up their cars.

I would dispute that driving leads to a higher quality of life than walking/biking/skiing due to the health problems from lack of exercise. Driving certainly helps with long commutes, but are long commute times increasing the quality of life?

I agree that many of the drives out in the countryside should be bike rides, but not all.

I’ve seen people driving their car to the supermarket <1km away for a handful of shopping, which is obviously bonkers. Then again, you sometimes need to drive somewhere or be cut off, which leads to poor mental health and quality of life.

Re: Are electric cars too expensive to tempt motorists away from petrol vehicles?

#70

Post by ndsipa_pomu »

mg wrote: post #66
ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can be more instructive to consider entropy rather than energy usage. The energy coming from the sun has low entropy and that makes it easy to capture and convert into electricity/plants etc. When you use some of that energy to move a car, you're converting the useful low entropy of the electricity/fuel into high entropy "waste" heat that can no longer be easily captured and used.

Isn't that "waste" heat still warming the planet? Isn't turning a cold planet into a warm planet a good thing and therefore the "waste" heat is still "used" for something useful?

No not really. There's a known problem with the atmosphere starting to retain too much heat (as opposed to radiating it out into space) due to the amount of CO2 (and other gasses) that people are dumping into the atmosphere. Far from being useful, it's likely to collapse our current civilisation.
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