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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?

#71

Post by drivingmenuts »

ghusto wrote: post #68

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.

I agree. Until there’s a cheap electric option, the bulk of drivers won’t switch. Their car is paid for, or mostly so, it works and. With some payout, can be kept running indefinitely. It’s easy to convince rich people to buy into EVs, but try getting the people who can’t afford to blow a huge chunk of money on something that has less range, less perceived power and can’t be fixed by a cousin under a tree.

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

#72

Post by wazoox »

baq wrote: post #61
wazoox wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oil is burnt into CO2 that will remain for centuries in the atmosphere, heating it up (and I'm not mentioning countless toxic oil spills, methane leaking, etc). It's less immediately visible and acutely dangerous than toxic pools, but it's really bad.

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

#73

Post by j4yav »

Dalewyn wrote: post #62
j4yav wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks! Indeed I've always paid cash for any new cars I've bought. But I still don't see how companies that provide leases are able to purchase a car, lease it out for cheaper than the cost of a loan to people who couldn't afford the loan, and still make money despite the depreciation?

Imagine a car that costs 50,000 - a 10 year loan will be 500 or so per month according to https://www.calculator.net/auto-loan-calculator.html.

If I want to buy a car and lease it out to make money, but charge half that much so people who can't afford it can still get it, then let's say I charge 250/month. It would take 17 years of leasing it at the rate that it was worth when it was new in order to just break even and get my outlay on the car back.

So it's possible that I'm missing something else key about how car loans work but the numbers don't seem to add up for the leasor that your market is people who can't afford a car loan. Even https://www.bankrate.com/loans/auto-loans/lease-vs-buy-calcu... seems to indicate that you pay a little less for the loan than leasing, so I'm still not getting how leasing is the budget option that helps people get a car they can't otherwise afford a loan for.

EDIT: the answer is here: https://www.thecarexpert.co.uk/car-finance-pcp-explained/. Apparently in the UK, leases work with a small monthly payment, but at the end of the lease term there's a gigantic balloon payment where you pay back the difference between your cheap payments until then and what you actually would have owed if you had a normal lease or loan the whole time - thus making the leasor whole. The system is designed such that the leasor will always have received the cost of depreciation (plus more) at any point in the term.

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

#74

Post by nunez »

edent wrote: post #14

In the UK, most people don't pay the "sticker" cost for a car. They take out a PCP or similar plan. Pay £X00 per month for Y months. At the end of the period, either buy the vehicle outright or hand it back. Or, as many people do, switch to a new vehicle. That's why you see so many expensive cars driven by people who can't afford them. No one is paying the up-front cost. They splurge their disposable income on a moto…

Didn't know leasing was popular outside the US. That's how a great majority of luxury cars are acquired here. To be fair, given how their asset price depreciates and repair demands increase over time, leasing makes a lot of sense.

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

#75

Post by rimunroe »

mg wrote: post #65
rcxdude wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

I'm not sure if you're asking actual or rhetorical questions. Assuming they're genuine:

> 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?

Strictly speaking, yeah, they're not using all the energy they could. "Wasting" seems like a weird way to say it though, because it feels like that implies they want to be doing something with it.

> 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?

On a long enough timescale nothing matters from the point of view of entropy. Net entropy will always increase. This is a pretty useless observation if you're trying to make a value judgement on the much smaller timescale of a civilization or the much smaller physical system of a planet, where having easily harnessable energy is important.

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

#76

Post by rimunroe »

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?

Venus would be a pretty unpleasant place to live for many reasons, one of which is how balmy it is due to its atmosphere being quite effective at trapping heat from the sun.

We actually spend quite a bit of energy doing the work of moving heat from colder to hotter areas because humans don't like to be too hot.

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

#77

Post by cpursley »

wazoox wrote: post #51
cpursley wrote: post #30

My concern is safety (car wreaks), distaste for touch interfaces (also safety related) and the environmental (ironic, I know) and social impact of rare earths mining.

Petrol fire is undoubtedly easier to come by and more dangerous in case of a crash. Touch interfaces aren't specifically tied to electric vehicles; it's a common disease on all modern vehicles, fortunately on the decline. Environmentally, in countries with reasonably balanced (i.e. not China and Poland) power generation, EVs are *way better* than ICEs, without the slightest room for debate.

Petrol fire is much easier to extinguish than a battery fire.

Yeah, touch interfaces is a disease on most modern vehicles (but especially electric).

The infrastructure is the weakest link after the raw material chain required to build them. Oh, and recycling/disposal.

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

#78

Post by cpursley »

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.

Is it just pure FUD? There's some very negative and well documented externalities with lithium mining in particular like child slavery and major environmental pollution. It's not something "big oil" is just making up.

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

#79

Post by rcxdude »

mg wrote: post #65
rcxdude wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Yes, if you are replacing a process which basically just converts low entropy energy into high entropy heat directly with something that does more interesting along the way, the end result is basically the same from an entropy point of view. Generally we as a species are not limited by the entropy available at the moment, but by our ability to harness it and the consequences of doing so in terms of the balances of the systems that it flows through.

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

#80

Post by helij »

padjo wrote: post #34
highwaylights wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn’t realise until recently just how engrained this practice is in people’s behaviour. I was discussing cars with someone not long ago and they were really matter-of-fact about switching to a new car just because the dealership offered it to them. It came across very much as that’s just how it works and everyone does that.

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

Our car was £40k new. We've been paying £400/month for 2.5 years now. It's a 4 year lease. We still owe £22k. They gave us £7k for our old car - that was the difference between how much we owed and how much previous car was worth. Now the latest one we can buy for around £18k once the lease is up I think. Currently I'm being offered £31k for it. So, rough calculation is that the car cost us £120/month in the last 2.5 years if we sell it today. Pretty good deal I think.

Of course we realise we're paying for depreciation but I consider a car to be a fixed expense and honestly if you take a look at the numbers above it's not that bad and we drive a new, safe, no issues (free servicing) car every 3-4 years.

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