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

971–980 of 1001 posts

Re: Fewer people are buying electric cars in the US

#971

Post by genocidicbunny »

thatfrenchguy wrote: post #678
genocidicbunny wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Many frequently cite the lower cost of charging the car vs paying for gas, but don't acknowledge the extra time spent. Let's say I spend $500/mo on gas for an ICE car. That's roughly 6 fill-ups per month at the gas prices where I live for a full tank that gets me 350 miles of range. How long does charging up an EV take for the same kind of range? How long does it take for 6 full recharges per month? Filling…

People with EVa charge 99% of their miles at home, so you’re gaining time.

Let me quote myself from the comment you replied to:

> And no, I can't charge at home because there's no way that's happening where I live, nor do I frequent any shops/malls that have charging stations that I can rely on, nor does my workplace offer such a service.

I am far from unique in this situation.

Re: Fewer people are buying electric cars in the US

#972

Post by jansan »

lagadu wrote: post #751
jansan wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You sound like a version of me with deeper pockets. We have a Volkswagen eUp! as an EV, which is a lot of fun to drive and does all the inner city commute. Then I have a station wagon that I bought for 15000€ in almost new condition, which is used for all longer trips or cases when stuff needs to be transported. Sometimes I drive it on short trips only to not let it sit around for longer than two weeks. I would go fo…

Going completely off-topic here but I have to ask: why spend that much for a Carrera T in a world the Cayman GTS 4.0 exists and is superior in virtually everything that matters for a sports car for significantly less?

Manual transmission and purism. I am not in the financial position to buy a Porsche, but if I was I would not go for the best power to price ratio, but for the car that gives me most joy.

Re: Fewer people are buying electric cars in the US

#973

Post by jakewins »

_ea1k wrote: post #965
jakewins wrote: post #493

Data: EV sales up 50% YoY. Business Insider headline: “Fewer people are buying electric cars”. A useful discussion for HN might be: Why are they choosing this framing? Some discussion in Electrek about why the record growth is framed as if the numbers show absolute-figure declines: https://electrek.co/2023/11/09/which-is-it-already-is-us-ev-...

I wonder if there is brigading occuring here? It is odd that your comment is downvoted, when so many negative comments are getting upvotes. Hmm...

Nah, I think I just posted late, so this ended up below the fold and got almost no eyes on it. HN has a huge early-mover bias in the comment field

Re: Fewer people are buying electric cars in the US

#975

Post by mlrtime »

christiangenco wrote: post #778
atestu wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in that first group and I don't see how it makes the most sense. They are not more convenient. I can "charge" my gas car in 2 minutes basically anywhere in the country. I'm going on vacation next week, driving with 2 young children. It'll be about a 11 hour drive which is not crazy for a US vacation. I don't want to plan where I stop and stop for 45 minutes to fuel up with 2 toddlers in the car. And they're all m…

My wife and I own a single family home, a gas-powered car (Toyota Rav4), and an electric car (a standard range Tesla model 3). The electric car is much more convenient for us for city driving and the gas-powered car is much more convenient for road trips. Refuelling the Rav4 is an errand that takes time, planning, and mental energy. For my wife it's also a low-level danger: women find gas stations spooky, apparently.…

Also using a comma3x with a rav4. Checkout frogpilot, it is much better than openpilot.

https://github.com/FrogAi/FrogPilot

Re: Fewer people are buying electric cars in the US

#978

Post by _ea1k »

jakewins wrote: post #973
_ea1k wrote: post #965

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if there is brigading occuring here? It is odd that your comment is downvoted, when so many negative comments are getting upvotes. Hmm...

Nah, I think I just posted late, so this ended up below the fold and got almost no eyes on it. HN has a huge early-mover bias in the comment field

True, but there's something weird about this one in general. I've never seen an EV article get this much activity here.

And a lot of it is highly charged (no pun intended).

Re: Fewer people are buying electric cars in the US

#979

Post by dcsommer »

martindbp wrote: post #421
dcsommer wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of the article is that rising EV sales, even at 87% in Norway (which yields only 20% EVs on the road), is not enough to fix the environmental problems of car driving. TFA talks about the need to end the car-size arms-race and the need for viable alternatives to car transportation as necessary for actually addressing the issues EV tax incentives are meant to tackle. Agreed the title is useless, but I found t…

That observation is completely pointless. Yes, even at 100% adoption it will take a long time to replace the whole fleet of cars, does that mean we shouldn't be doing it? Just the fact they bring this up shows they have an agenda. Tesla is also recognizing this fact and it's one reason they're pushing for robotaxis, because robotaxis can increase utilization by 5x, the same as selling 5x as many cars.

It is not a useless observation. Of course there is an "agenda" (strange word choice for "thesis" or "point"). Like I said, the point in the article is that there needs to be alternatives to car ownership and car-centric development to achieve environmental goals, and subsidizing purchases of EVs is not going to do that.

Taxis might help a bit, but I would want to see data or modeling on impacts for that.

It's strange you start out with "this observation is pointless" and then follow up with an example of a company making big investments and strategic changes based on "this fact". Perhaps it's not pointless after all?

Re: Fewer people are buying electric cars in the US

#980

Post by insane_dreamer »

s0rce wrote: post #881
insane_dreamer wrote: post #877

Article is spot on about the problems, but as much as I'm a huge fan of European style mass transit, we really need to let go of the idea of "push more public transportation" as some sort of solution in the U.S. IT'S NOT GOING TO HAPPEN. The US as a country has for the past 100 years been built around cars, both in cities and rural areas, and it would probably take another 100 years to change that if there was even t…

Didn't major European cities manage to pivot away from some pretty major car centric design effectively...

European cities were always high-density as they've been around much longer than US ones many of which developed for the most part after the arrival of the car.

But the problem in the US is the geographical distances are enormous compared to European countries, and the lack of a dense train network.

Post reply on HN