I expected more from this article. Sure they are boring but in the new market Kona EV, ID.4, Leaf, and as mentioned Bolt EV/EUV are all very good deals, and the only compromise is infrequent road-tripping, and this is totally ignoring Tesla.
The withering dream of a cheap American electric car
721–730 of 780 posts
Re: The withering dream of a cheap American electric car
#722Earlier quoted context omitted.
> there is no 'regular pickup truck' in existence that gets 11 mpg Point but e.g. the 2024 Silverado gets 12mpg in city driving. Go to any office parking lot here and you’ll see a lot of that size truck which have clearly never been used harder than going to Costco - and even the better ones are barely approaching ⅔ of the mpg of the pickup my grandparents bought in the 1980s. I do agree that from a pollution standpo…
> they produce higher tire and brake particulates which are known to cause health issues Interesting you mention tire particulates, because there is nothing worse for this than - brace yourself - electric vehicles. https://grist.org/transportation/electric-vehicles-are-a-cli...
That's been debunked. Tire particulates are mainly linked to weight, and electric cars tend to be heavier than comparable capacity gas cars. But:
- gas cars emit more brake pad particulates - EV have lower rolling resistance tires so at equal weight, they emit less tire particulates
So if comparing a pickup vs an EV, the pickup is heavier and will pollute more in terms of both tailpipe and tire particulates.
Re: The withering dream of a cheap American electric car
#723Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't realize ICE vehicles don't have tires. News to me. There is a slight increase in tire particulates, sure. A small increase. There's also a lot less brake particulates. And get this: there's no tailpipe emissions either.
A slight increase? Particulates increase with the 4th power of weight, and EVs way a significant amount more.
Go digging into the details of the comparison in the article above. They're comparing a Model Y to a Kia Niro FHEV.
https://www.emissionsanalytics.com/news/do-no-harm
The Model Y has +89% more volume. Its considerably bigger car with more torque. It's not a good comparison. And even though its 32% heavier and has a ton more torque, its tire wear was 26% greater. You're arguing it goes up by the fourth power, but it wasn't even a 1 for 1 increase on a car with considerably more torque. And besides, their testing shows the tire wear particulates for their comparison gas car as even higher than the Y.
Re: The withering dream of a cheap American electric car
#724Earlier quoted context omitted.
The grid you've been refusing to pay to support for years, that grid is going to be your backup?
You still pay service fees to maintain a grid connection. Not to mention that many people with these setups contribute excess generation back to the grid or allow their batteries to discharged by the grid during demand spikes.
A lot of those service fees were designed to scale with the amount of electricity used. If you've got a net metered bill chances are you haven't really been paying much for service fees.
I don't know anyone who bothers discharging their home batteries to the grid. The rates they get wouldn't cover the cost of the wear and tear to their batteries.
Re: The withering dream of a cheap American electric car
#725Earlier quoted context omitted.
You still pay service fees to maintain a grid connection. Not to mention that many people with these setups contribute excess generation back to the grid or allow their batteries to discharged by the grid during demand spikes.
A lot of those service fees were designed to scale with the amount of electricity used. If you've got a net metered bill chances are you haven't really been paying much for service fees. I don't know anyone who bothers discharging their home batteries to the grid. The rates they get wouldn't cover the cost of the wear and tear to their batteries.
I am part of a plan that discharges my batteries to the grid. I don't initiate this happening, it is based on a pull from the grid upto 60 times per year when demand is high. Full disclosure that I received a rebate on my batteries for allowing this.
Also, I just checked my bills and my service fees are a flat amount independent of how much electricity I pull from the grid.
Re: The withering dream of a cheap American electric car
#726Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm going to use slave labor to assemble it all and wire it all up? Well, the USA is one of the few places left that still uses that, so you could … But even without that, the linked product is the kind of thing two untrained people can do 95% of the installation in an afternoon, with the rest being a trained professional checking the wires and doing the final connection to the grid. If this was done in a place tha…
Electricians in my area charge a good bit more than $50/hr. More like $100/hr. And its not going to be for a half an hour, it'll be a few hours. And that's a car port kit, its a lot simpler to install than installing on a roof of a potentially multi-story house with a steep incline. It is also completely excluding an inverter and all the additional wiring materials needed to connect it to your house or the labor of m…
> Electricians in my area charge a good bit more than $50/hr. More like $100/hr. And its not going to be for a half an hour, it'll be a few hours.
At contractor rates.
Hence me saying "assuming you're doing enough of them to hire at full time rates not contractor rates".
That said, I seem to have wildly over-estimated how much electricians get paid, at full-time rates the average in the USA is only $27.79 per hour: https://www.talent.com/salary?job=electrician
> And that's a car port kit, its a lot simpler to install than installing on a roof of a potentially multi-story house with a steep incline.
So do that then.
> So really more like $8k for materials.
You're being ripped off.
You all are.
> Yes, they'll need to tie into the grid, so you're really comparing $18k to $22k and continuing to ignore a lot of labor costs.
No, that's the price if you're putting each pair of these onto its own, new, grid connection.
If you've already got a house, you already have a grid connection.
If you're building a solar park, you share the same grid connection for all of them, you don't put a completely separate connection on each 10 kW because that is a pointless waste of money… but if you did, it would still be cheaper.
Re: The withering dream of a cheap American electric car
#727Earlier quoted context omitted.
Develop film takes time, same as why somebody wait for hours and hours just to get an EV charged? The “last generation” can “recharge” to 450miles in 3 minutes at a gas station then move on.
The EV charges while you sleep. You always start your journey with a full tank. If you can't do that then, yes, an EV is less convenient than a gas car that is true.
Home ownership is a distant dream for most Americans, and the sort of rentals that have parking AND EV charging tend to be extremely pricy luxury new-builds.
Gas is unfortunately going to be around for a long, long time for normal working-class Americans.
Re: The withering dream of a cheap American electric car
#728I took advantage of the IRA solar power and $7500 EV credit, now I have an off grid home all electric appliances and excess power for hot tubs and EV's. The Ford Lightning acts as a generator. This was the greatest most life changing and impactful legistlation ever: I've had $0 (ZERO!) in gasoline, LP, and electric utility bills since installation last year.
It's too bad that the only people benefiting from all green power subsidies are the people that least need them. We should be investing solar in lower income communities, as those people could really use cheaper utilities, and any saving they get would immediately go back into their communities.
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Re: The withering dream of a cheap American electric car
#729Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lamborghini drivers obeying the traffic rules aren't creating a hazard. Aftermarket headlights blazing directly into the eyes of oncoming drivers are creating a hazard. As is the fact that it takes up a lot of road space and has poor visibility for small objects in front of the hood.
It is also the smugness that gets me. Huge trucks are a signal saying "Fuck you, got mine". Their first strike, I'm merely retaliating
I don't think it's malicious in most cases. As a counterpoint, most family members I know with absurdly large cars, either dimensionally or in terms of seat height aren't very confident drivers and the large vehicle makes them feel "safer" especially if they have kids in the car. I recognize it's not always the case but they didn't buy a large car to lord over other people on the road they did it for emotional piece of mind. I'm willing to bet a lot of people however wouldn't be willing to admit that that's why they prefer a large car out of some perceived weakness or the like.
Re: The withering dream of a cheap American electric car
#730Earlier quoted context omitted.
Electricians in my area charge a good bit more than $50/hr. More like $100/hr. And its not going to be for a half an hour, it'll be a few hours. And that's a car port kit, its a lot simpler to install than installing on a roof of a potentially multi-story house with a steep incline. It is also completely excluding an inverter and all the additional wiring materials needed to connect it to your house or the labor of m…
> Electricians in my area charge a good bit more than $50/hr. More like $100/hr. And its not going to be for a half an hour, it'll be a few hours. At contractor rates. Hence me saying "assuming you're doing enough of them to hire at full time rates not contractor rates". That said, I seem to have wildly over-estimated how much electricians get paid, at full-time rates the average in the USA is only $27.79 per hour: h…
Oh, you're talking about the prices the company actually installing it pays. If that's the case, solar installers get panels even cheaper than what you're quoting from that German website. It's possible here in the US to get panels retail for just a little bit more from big box stores, they're paying even less with volume wholesale prices.
And if I'm talking about prices being paid by the company installing them, I'm still needing to do a lot more labor than 8 hours of unskilled labor and half an hour of an electrician and a pile of solar panels. I'm not going to make many deals if I don't have any salespeople, people aren't going to know to hire me if I don't have any advertising/referral business going on, I'm not going to have much continued business if nobody is answering the phone, people are probably going to sue me if I don't have people running support operations, I'll need a good bit of insurance & bonding for all of this, different sites have different needs so someone will have to actually design out the system, people need to handle all the permitting requirements and deal with those processes, I'll probably need to have accountants to help manage these cash flows, my costs for their labor is a good bit more than what they see on their paychecks, etc.
I swear it's like you've never actually looked at the costs of running a business.
Once again, the price of the panels isn't why it cost an average of $22k per home in that example.
> You're being ripped off
Please show me your $0 10kW inverter plus $0 for several hundred feet of decent gauge wire, enough for handling this 10kW plus plenty of safety margin.