401–410 of 915 posts
$20b capital write down means that consumers paid that much more for all vehicles to subsidize redundant and insolvent EV product lines . Tesla is the only company making money off of these products . People keep complaining about the AI bubble but we sustained an EV bubble for 15 years without it popping .
No one in top comments is mentioning a key point. It was cheap looking. How the truck looks is important. Outside the bottom end of market, it's a status symbol. I got a tundra TRD earlier this year and I've gotten multiple compliments on it because it's a good looking truck. The F150 lightning looked cheap. The grill is this crappy plastic. And there was no upgrade feature to make it cooler. If they had the option t…
But you're right! An electric pickup truck is a status symbol, but an F-150 isn't a status symbol. The F-150 brand, and the blue oval itself, is associated with being an appliance. The branding is at odds with the starry-eyed futurism that drives EV sales.
Don't get me wrong, plenty of folks buy F-150s and Rams and Silverados who don't need them. But, those people are cosplaying their imaginary blue-collar grandfathers. An electric car goes against that retrospective way of thinking.
As for folks who actually need a pickup for practical reasons, they don't want a Lightning. Ford doesn't sell it with an 8 foot bed. Every time you get plywood or drywall or whatever, it's gonna hang out the back. Can't wait to see the look on your face when a ladder falls over onto the hood of your $75,000 truck.
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What anti-market tactics? My understanding is they poured money over the whole market in a way that helped it grow faster, but didn't pick winners and doesn't subsidize the current pricing.
Don't like posting a long comment, but re-posting a high-level chronological view of the problems past 15 years: 1) forced technology transfer/IP theft -- all foreign automakers/EV battery producers forced to give up IP to access China's market (and subsidies). This was litigated before the WTO by the EU in 2018 (see WT/DS549): Hybrid in a Trade Squeeze, Keith Bradsher, Sept 5, 2011, NYT ... The Chinese government is…
2,3) Okay, yes, half-separating China from the rest of the world is anti-market. But then they did a lot inside the country that was pro-market. With a population of over a billion, I don't consider that picking winners.
4) That's obnoxious of them but doesn't really affect what I was saying.
subsidies) I was unaware of extensions, and I thought the supply chain subsidies were already gone? But okay, let's assume this is accurate, 17% duty on BYD. Man. As I've said before when Trump was talking about 25% on everything, I wish the US was putting 25% tariffs on Chinese EVs instead of whatever dumb number it is.
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Less than 20% of Americans live in most of the (very large) country. The rest live in cities and suburbs.
Those census definitions are not good. I’m sure the place I went to high school is considered “city” by that definition, but the average HN poster would not recognize it as one, and there were lots of farm working trucks around.
We don't want your electric car ... we want your car, but electric . We want an electric F150 or an electric Suburban or v90 wagon or whatever. But instead we get e-initiative i-mobiles. We get TRON-cars. We get iModels. There is a reason for this: The incumbent auto makers understand fully that the ICE version of whatever model they electrify will suffer enormously. They believe that they can somehow retain all of t…
Chevrolet makes these. The Blazer and the Blazer EV look roughly the same. The Equinox and Equinox EV look more different but not completely different. The Silverado and the Silverado EV look completely different, but given those other models, I don't think it's for lack of trying. Similarly, Volvo's EX cars look almost exactly like their XC counterparts.
Interesting you should mention ...
Here is the interior of the 2025 XC90:
... and here is the 2025 EX90:
That's not a mistake and they know exactly what they are doing: they think they can sell the EX90 in addition to the XC90 and the dramatically different UI/UX/styling is an effort to keep the XC money flowing.
If the electric one was just the XC90 ... but electric ... they know they'd barely sell another ICE one again.
The F-150 is in one of the markets I think ev's will take over first (small commercial vehicles) but it just was not the right vehicle to start with. To expensive, even when the tax incentives were still a thing, and Ford suffers from having corrupt dealers taking a large cut on top of that. So you are selling to either the top 5% or bigger businesses. If you are a top 5% buying this you want it to tow your expensive…
> "tow your expensive toy somewhere which ev's suck at currently" Do EVs suck at towing because of battery life? I thought electric engines were often superior to comparable internal combustion engines regarding torque.
EVs are 90% efficient at converting their chemical energy to useful work. This is a good thing in general, but it also means that drag and extra losses hurt its range much more. If 90% of the energy goes into useful power, than anything that requires 50% more power is going to almost halve the range. Whereas with an ICE engine, the high fixed losses mean that demanding 50% more power doesn’t increase fuel consumption by 50%. Pair that with the higher energy density of gasoline and you’ve got a bad comparison for EVs.
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Home electricity in California is about 45¢/kWh. If your F150 mileage is typical, you're getting about 2 miles per kWh. 600 miles would cost about $135 here in California. Meanwhile, a 20 mpg gas car would cost about $110/month at $3.65/gallon. You must be paying about 4.7 cents per kWh, or about 90% less than you'd pay here.
That's only certain parts of California, right? I mean, a big part, but definitely not all of it. PG&E is a tire fire, I feel bad for you guys.
The F-150 is in one of the markets I think ev's will take over first (small commercial vehicles) but it just was not the right vehicle to start with. To expensive, even when the tax incentives were still a thing, and Ford suffers from having corrupt dealers taking a large cut on top of that. So you are selling to either the top 5% or bigger businesses. If you are a top 5% buying this you want it to tow your expensive…
They should be cheaper than the F150 but Ford can’t figure out how to make batteries cheaply. Evs are a lot less complex, no gas engine, no transmission, no exhaust systems with hundreds of dollars of precious metal in them. It should be cheaper than a gas equivalent.
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Cheaper? Not sure how. While an ICE engine does have cooling systems and fuelling systems, water pumps and fuel pumps are relatively cheap and simple devices. An EV generally has a battery cooling system along with regenerative braking. EVs have roughly the same mechanical things as an ICE vehicle too, HVAC, suspension, brakes, in car entertainment, heated seats. Lighting. An entire 12v subsystem to power all that st…
China EVs are cheaper than ICE cars. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/why-evs-are-now-cheaper-tha...
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90% of F-150s are daily driver grocery-getters. That was the target for the Lightning, not truck stuff.
My hunch is that the people who buy an F-150 for groceries are not the people interested in buying EVs. The advantage of an EV truck is solely on cost and maintenance, so the natural market is businesses looking for practical vehicles, not people who buy impractical vehicles that are costly to operate for status reasons. Then again as I’m typing this I realize that I have a phone with a better processor than most com…