Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Fewer people are buying electric cars in the US

businessinsider.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 1001 posts

Re: Fewer people are buying electric cars in the US

#141

Post by ac29 »

iknowstuff wrote: post #50
TexanFeller wrote: post #15

I want an EV to be more reliable and save me more money in the long run. EVs start out ~10k more than the Corolla most people should buying. They then compromise the long term reliability and maintenance cost with high tech gee whiz features. I’d sooner have manual roll up windows than touch screen controlled air vents. When you integrate sensors and software controls into every little thing, we know those things wil…

Total Cost of Ownership is already significantly lower than a Corolla's so idk what's stopping you buddy. https://cleantechnica.com/2019/06/22/toyota-corolla-vs-tesla...

Their most expensive electricity scenario is 20c/kWh. Maybe that was realistic when the article was written 5 years ago, but electricity is definitely more expensive than that in California now, even with a special EV rate plan.

Re: Fewer people are buying electric cars in the US

#142

Post by AlexandrB »

rappatic wrote: post #60

The article talks about range concerns as if they're simply incorrect or ill-founded: > Niedermeyer said that while an electric car can meet most people's driving needs, it struggles with edge cases like road trips because of the need to recharge. Since Americans have been promised a one-to-one substitute for their gas cars, this seems like a failure; an EV should be able to do everything a gas car can. This idea per…

This is the one good idea the Cybertruck has, in my opinion - the expandable battery[1]. If EV powertrains were standardized to the point where you could rent a battery pack to extend your range for these kinds of longer trips I think there would be a lot less anxiety about EV range.

[1] https://electrek.co/2023/12/04/cybertruck-range-extender-opt...

Re: Fewer people are buying electric cars in the US

#143

Post by data-ottawa »

jitl wrote: post #89

The electric offerings from most companies just don’t seem “there” yet. I don’t want a Tesla because AirPlay and adjustable aircon grates are non-negotiable for me, but the alternatives just don’t seem like a good bet yet. Hyundai is compelling, but most brands are offering electrified versions of non-EV platforms. An EV platform with low drag is much better, but outside of Tesla and Hyundai no one seems to be shippi…

This is where I am.

It's great that we're getting more competition, but since it's more expensive R&D it's all geared for top of market. I had looked at a plugin hybrid but the actual range of the electric engine was underwhelming.

I'm also curious how the EV situation will play out in Canada, it gets damn cold here. How much does that reduce the advertised range on top of running a heater?

Re: Fewer people are buying electric cars in the US

#144

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #37
TacticalCoder wrote: post #10

> If there's any direct inspiration for the United States' EV policy, it's Norway. As the story goes, Norway introduced some compelling subsidies for EVs Ah yup... Norway, sitting on gigantic oil reserves. Reserves so huge they could decide to just give the finger to the EU and not join. So huge there's a fund benefiting, AFAIK, all Norway citizens. I'm not criticizing Norway. But citing Norway as some kind of EV pos…

> The damages are proportional to the root of the weight No, road damage is proportional to the 4th power of axle weight. So a car that's 50% heavier will do 5x the damage to the road. (Assuming the same number of axles.)

But 5x a very small number is still small.

Loaded semis weigh 20-40x a car. That's 160,000x the damage.

And as the author points out - it's not going to change much whether the semi is gas or electric.

It's the load of the truck that matters.

Re: Fewer people are buying electric cars in the US

#146

Post by Groxx »

rdtsc wrote: post #66

> But an analysis from CarGurus found that EV prices were still 28% higher than gas-vehicle prices on average. To me that is bonkers. When EVs were becoming popular, I was expecting to see super cheap, under $10k vehicles. That was the promise: forget about all the IC complicated gears, alternators, transmission, fuel pumps and imagine getting a motor and batteries, what could be simpler!". But no, we ended up with m…

Yeah. In America it's pretty clear that they're using the high battery cost to say "all EVs are expensive so they start at 50k and only go up" so they can crank their profit margins.

Batteries are unavoidably expensive, but the only market they've been targeting are the wealthy, so they're largely burning through the enthusiasts and people on the border. Of course that market slows down, you've gotta open up the rest of the market to keep it accelerating. Maybe make something other than F-150-alikes.

Re: Fewer people are buying electric cars in the US

#147

Post by ac29 »

SushiHippie wrote: post #69
femto wrote: post #47

Why don't electric cars use replaceable battery modules with a standard form factor? Advantages would include: 1) It allows the battery to be easily replaced as the car gets older. 2) With a suitable generic form factor, it would allow batteries to be upgraded as technology changes. 3) It would allow people to only populate enough battery slots for their daily needs. Communing to work: you only need to insert a few b…

Related Tom Scott video: "A robot just swapped my electric car's battery" - https://youtu.be/hNZy603as5w

As mentioned in the video, building these stations is expensive and the company building them (Nio) is losing massive amounts of money.

Re: Fewer people are buying electric cars in the US

#148

Post by fny »

rappatic wrote: post #60

The article talks about range concerns as if they're simply incorrect or ill-founded: > Niedermeyer said that while an electric car can meet most people's driving needs, it struggles with edge cases like road trips because of the need to recharge. Since Americans have been promised a one-to-one substitute for their gas cars, this seems like a failure; an EV should be able to do everything a gas car can. This idea per…

Forget range, you can’t even reliably charge non-Tesla EVs without having to drive 20 min to find a working charging station. This is a problem I’ve had in a densely populated NY suburb when I was given an electric Genesis as a loaner car.

The car was incredible to drive, and I was sold on the idea that my next vehicle would be an EV until I had 3 miles of charge left after leaving my fourth broken charging station.

Re: Fewer people are buying electric cars in the US

#149

Post by linsomniac »

pxeboot wrote: post #72
rappatic wrote: post #60

The article talks about range concerns as if they're simply incorrect or ill-founded: > Niedermeyer said that while an electric car can meet most people's driving needs, it struggles with edge cases like road trips because of the need to recharge. Since Americans have been promised a one-to-one substitute for their gas cars, this seems like a failure; an EV should be able to do everything a gas car can. This idea per…

My next car will be an EV. I have no concern about the advertised range. The real worry is what the range will look like in 5-10 years when it is cold out.

As someone who is 6 years in: It's not that bad. Really the only issue is when it's REALLY cold, like single digits F (negative double digits C) where the car is charging, and the battery is cold, it basically will not charge at home (Supercharger can do it, but takes a very long time). If the charging starts before the battery freezes, it's good.

Re: Fewer people are buying electric cars in the US

#150

Post by akira2501 »

lukas099 wrote: post #78
rappatic wrote: post #60

The article talks about range concerns as if they're simply incorrect or ill-founded: > Niedermeyer said that while an electric car can meet most people's driving needs, it struggles with edge cases like road trips because of the need to recharge. Since Americans have been promised a one-to-one substitute for their gas cars, this seems like a failure; an EV should be able to do everything a gas car can. This idea per…

People focus too much on edge cases when making life decisions, imo. > We need a dining room for when we have parties (has a party once every 2 years; room sits empty 99% of the time) > We need a guest bedroom (guests could stay at the hotel down the street) > I need a pickup truck (driver is an accountant who maybe picks up a couple bags of mulch from Lowes twice a year) I'm glad I live in a prosperous society where…

> but it's kind of annoying.

Why? Do the life choices of other individuals really cause you that much harm? I could see being annoyed that they're _marketed_ into over sized solutions that aren't actually correct for their use case, but to just be annoyed that other people appear to enjoy prosperity as an edge case is unusual to my way of thinking.

> People focus too much on edge cases when making life decisions, imo.

Similarly, and sorry to do this in reverse, but why do you think that is? Marketing, experience, habitual, unfairly priced?

> need

Anyways, personally, I'm more annoyed that corporations get to do this kind of edge case thinking. Shifting the growing of food, the use of labor, and the capital markets they sell to around in pernicious ways simply to add a few points to a publicly traded stock. Then using these profit streams to purchase selfish legislation and reduced taxes all to grease the wheels of this odd machine. Then we're all expected to accept a reduced quality experience just to paper over their decades of environmental abuse? That is madness.

Post reply on HN