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Fewer people are buying electric cars in the US

businessinsider.com

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Re: Fewer people are buying electric cars in the US

#621
post #376
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…

The problem is that if they made a sub $10k vehicle now, "everyone" would buy it. That sounds great, but there's simply not enough battery factories to make the batteries for that many vehicles. The demand for expensive vehicles is still high enough that most of the EV battery factory output of the world can go to those expensive high margin vehicles, so of course the car makers haven't focused on low cost. There are…

I for one can't wait for the cheap 18650 cells flooding the market. They are so useful!

Re: Fewer people are buying electric cars in the US

#622

Until they can produce an EV that doesn’t feel like a massive downgrade in connvience, performance, cost, basically all the ways normal people measure the decision of buying a car, I’m not sold. I like the fact it takes a few minutes to refuel my car, and it’s the same process regardless if I’m traveling 5 miles or 500. I don’t need to deal with charging stations, and if I run out of gas I can take a gas can to the c…

You need to choose better sources. Your post seems like a list of common anti EV fake tropes.

Except battery range, charging time during long trip and initial cost (of a new car) EV are already better than ICE.

You don't change battery every 100-150 miles due to 50% capacity loss. You lose maybe ~10% by then.

Unless you are driving in Arctica you don't lose much range in winter (and in ICE you lose range too).

Your ICE car is more likely to spontaneously combust than EV car.

Re: Fewer people are buying electric cars in the US

#623

I think EVs give me LESS range anxiety overall. In my gas car days, atleast once a month I was late for work or an event AND low on gas. Having to remember and think about getting gas was constantly on my mind because I have a pretty long commute. With an electric car, I start every day, always, with a full tank. No matter how late I'm running, I know there won't be a surprise that I need gas in addition to being lat…

Yesterday close to where I live there was a big queue that still isn't resolved in a winter storm (over 1000 cars got stuck). With a gas car, you can physically go and get gas and fill it up manually but an EV would run out of battery, die and would need to be towed.

Maybe you live in a place where winter storms are not a reality but where I live the range isn't the problem it's the weather combined with the range. EVs range go down during winter and it's already worse, the risk of getting stuck in a snowstorm is thus higher.

But yes, during summer and perfect road conditions an EV would be great. That is not the reality of my life though and that is just speaking about the range issues. I live on the country side as well and I need a car that can handle roads that are not in perfect condition. EVs are also generally sedans and wouldn't even fit my family while being a lot more expensive, adding the risk of freezing to death in the car is just making it a no-go for now.

Re: Fewer people are buying electric cars in the US

#624
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…

Because it wouldn't save a meaningful amount of money over the life of the car, but it would make developing and manufacturing them significantly more expensive.

Re: Fewer people are buying electric cars in the US

#626

A missing part of the "flawed" plan: it was relying on expectation that battery ranges would improve exponentially thanks to all the "breakthroughs" that were published on a regular basis to get views on tech news site. Except, no, it still does not work as a drop-in replacement, so you have to change the whole society instead, which sucks because we're kinda on a deadline here, aren't we ? To put it mildly "the engi…

As an EV owner, range doesn’t matter to me beyond ~200 miles real world or so. It’s the 10-70% charge speed that matters the most. And advances are being made there- see KIA/Hyundai.

Re: Fewer people are buying electric cars in the US

#627
EV’s currently make the most sense for people who own a single family home or otherwise live in a community with readily available near-home chargers, where EV’s are on average more convenient than gas cars. People who rely on street parking and apartment dwellers would likely find EV’s more inconvenient than a gas car.

We may be close to saturating the market for the former group.

Another factor that could be at play is that all the non-Tesla EV makers have recently announced they will switch their chargers to NACS, but this will take a couple of years to roll out, so it’s not a great time to buy a non-Tesla since it already has legacy charging hardware.

Re: Fewer people are buying electric cars in the US

#628

> 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…

I don't think we (Norway) should be a poster child for EVs. Or, we've done great in increasing their share, but at what cost? Changing cars from ICE to EVs doesn't really solve most of the problems cars pose to our society. The money poured into this each year could've built so many new railways, metros, supported public transport for decades etc.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23939076/norway-electric-...

Re: Fewer people are buying electric cars in the US

#629

Dumbass "journalists" with the usual clickbait. Explicitly MORE people are buying EVs: > Sure, sales of EVs keep going up — a record 300,000 cars sold in the US in the third quarter of 2023 were electric The only thing they're seeing is "but the pace of adoption has markedly slowed" -- no shit, have you seen the interest rates and price diffs? And which manufacturer grew the most? Oh that's right the only all-EV one.…

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