251–260 of 919 posts
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Most of the profits come from rich countries. And even then especially the more expensive cars. (Personally I am fine driving a 10 year old shit box because for me it is just a means of going from A to B and rather spend my money on other things)
My daily driver is approaching the ripe old age of 30, my main reason is a lack of software.
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My daily driver is approaching the ripe old age of 30, my main reason is a lack of software.
Are you doing the maintenance yourself? I guess at some point the yearly maintenance costs exceed the value of the car itself.
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Netherlands. And fuel injection has been a thing since the 1930s for Diesel and the 1950's for vehicles. Yes, it has an ECU and ooh, gollies there is software in that. But it's completely invisible from an interaction point of view, there are no screens, all the buttons just do what they are told, there are no 'upgrades', no bugs, interfaces, restarts and attempts to kill me through 'assistance'.
I understand the appeal. Do you use paper maps too or you have a smartphone on the dashboard ? That would be a bit cheating.
It’s entirely possible to get around without smartphones or paper maps. There are road signs, written directions, verbal directions. The main time I used to use a paper map was driving long distance trips in a foreign country.
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> No one is going to pay extra for fewer features. Right, what people want is to pay less for fewer features. If EVs with all their limitations are going to replace ICE cars for daily use, they need to be cheap. We need the Ford Focus or Toyota Tercel of EVs, with the same set of features (i.e. very few) that those cars had when they were introduced. Otherwise I'll just go buy a used ICE Tercel or Focus. When Tesla s…
You can get a new Model 3 base model for $36k. A Hyundai Ioniq 5 MSRP is $35k. A Chevy Bolt is $30k. A non-EV Toyota Camry is $30k (hybrid and ICE). We are almost there. For buyers on a budget, the used car market is liquid for EVs as of now.
I personally buy used, and pay about a quarter of that or less when I buy a car.
I hate those narratives that if you don't jump on EVs, your future is doomed. The last 5 years just don't show it. The EV market is still small and infrastructure missing in most of the world. Toyota played it safe and made bank when everybody was saying they were doomed. German automakers went hard on EVs. VW group sold 1 million fully electric vehicles in 2025, they will probably overtake Tesla in a couple of years…
EV sales keep on growing world wide by juicy double digit percentages. Some markets less than others of course but the net effect is that all that legacy business keeps on shrinking because all that EV growth is at the cost of that legacy business.
The main issue with Honda and other Japanese manufacturers is that they are hopelessly dependent on Chinese suppliers to ship any EVs at this point. They've dragged their heels on doing their own tech and at this point while they might have some promising things in their labs, they lack supply chains and factories to mass produce any of it by themselves. That's going to take many years to turn around. Without guarantees that they'll be able to match the Chinese on cost. And the EU, Koreans, Chinese, and even US companies like GM are picking up the slack and growing EV sales at their cost.
Toyota seems to finally be producing a lot of EVs now to counter that. They've been catching up fast in the last year or so. But most of these EVs come with a lot of Chinese tech inside. Their alternative was to cede that market to competitors. Which seems to be what Honda is doing. I don't think that will end well for them.
Damn, the Honda E looked great.
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Japan is the only other country besides China and Korea that produces magnets of high quality (higher in fact than the Chinese), they just don't do the volume. But there is absolutely no doubt that they could scale up if they wanted to. They're just more expensive, but not even that much.
They manufacture the magnets, but they don't produce the rare earths themselves. They're still getting something like 60-70% of their supply from China.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/08/business/japan-rare-earth...
I'm convinced that the Japanese government is terrified of EVs because all the small and medium-sized businesses which support the Japanese auto industry will be absolutely gutted when vehicles contain drastically fewer parts. That, and Japan is deeply screwed if they go all-in on EVs and then China decides they shouldn't be allowed access to any more rare earths.
https://www.economist.com/asia/2025/12/04/lessons-from-japan...
This is so unfortunate. I was never a van guy, but my wife insisted we get a van, so I got the Honda. And honestly? I kinda love it. It drives like a car but holds eight people (or four people and a whole bunch of luggage). The way we use the van, 90% of our drives are under 20 miles round trip. The rest are longer road trips. I've been waiting eight years for Honda to make an electric or even a plug-in hybrid where…
They have quite decent hybrids now. I’m surprised that they haven’t released a plug-in one, since their architecture seems perfect for it. Maybe battery supply constraints. They are also developing a v6 hybrid, which should replace the j series in the Odyssey.
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Norway is a very special case in that it has massive hydro energy resources and nobody lives there.
There must be more to it than this, or we'd have fantastic EV uptake here in New Zealand (we don't - EVs currently only have a 6% market share).