Are electric cars too expensive to tempt motorists away from petrol vehicles? • Hacker News Board

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

#241

Post by badpun » Tue, Dec 19, 2023, 10:43 AM UTC

okaram wrote: post #133

badpun wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t have to buy a banger, just buy a new car and drive it for 20 years. You will save vast amounts of momey.

Same difference, after 7-10 years, it becomes a banger, or at least it has enough problems that you worry.

I bought a new (made in Japan) Mitsubishi in 2013, still have it, and it didn't have any failure yet whatsoever. If you buy German, American or (shudder) French cars, then yeah, they will become problematic after 7-10 years, or even earlier. Just buy Japanese (so, not Nissan, and sadly also no longer Mitsubishi, since, after a merger, it's now a Japanese-European company), preferably made in Japan.

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

#242

Post by marcusverus » Thu, Dec 21, 2023, 3:42 PM UTC

Nextgrid wrote: post #199

marcusverus wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maintenance costs are easily managed by avoiding brands which generally require frequent or expensive maintenance. Regardless, they don’t hold a candle to the long term savings. If one lacks the rainy-day savings to afford a hypothetical thousand-dollar repair bill, one certainly cannot afford to throw away thousands of dollars every year “to not have to worry” about one’s precarious finances.

> one certainly cannot afford to throw away thousands of dollars every year “to not have to worry” about one’s precarious finances. There are plenty of people who live near paycheck-to-paycheck who also need a car to get to work, where a stroke of bad luck like engine + transmission damage would not only be a significant financial hit but the downtime of the car being unavailable might compound the problem as they ca…

> While it's not a great financial situation and ideally nobody should be in it, in reality these people don't have a choice and budgeting away a fixed percentage of their salary on a vehicle that guarantees them to be able to get to work (to pocket the remaining percentage of salary) is a better option than not paying a monthly fee but gambling on the fact that a significant breakdown might completely wipe them out financially and jeopardize the transportation they use to get to work.

This makes sense so long as it isn't used as an argument for leasing a new car on an ongoing basis. If one actually finds themselves in this situation, the responsible approach would be to find the cheapest possible lease and to save aggressively until they can take the more economical approach.

Leasing is like credit card debt. It makes sense in some rare cases, but in most cases it is wasteful and the average consumer should avoid it.

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

#243

Post by wazoox » Fri, Dec 22, 2023, 5:26 PM UTC

badpun wrote: post #109

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.

Don’t you need to extract hundreds of millions of tons of lithium ore to get a couple of millions of tons of pure lithium? Not to mention the extensive chemical processing the ore must go through.

Yes but it's still absolutely dwarfed by the staggering amounts of fossil fuels we're extracting (and the absolute environmental catastrophe that goes with them):

https://edconway.substack.com/p/the-hump