Fewer people are buying electric cars in the US
businessinsider.com
Fewer people are buying electric cars in the US
1–10 of 1001 posts
Re: Fewer people are buying electric cars in the US
#2Such a garbage article.
What happened to EVs is what happened to all new car sales.
Reminds me of the time a couple decades back when a bunch of power plants went offline in Florida, and the only news article about it was about how a nuclear power plant stopped.
Re: Fewer people are buying electric cars in the US
#3A lot of the car model launches have been “paper” launches. They advertise a $30-40k car/truck and then anything other than the $70k premium model is “coming 2024”.
I would expect all car sales to be lower now that interest rates are considerable. I got mine at 1% interest and many got 0% not too long ago
Re: Fewer people are buying electric cars in the US
#4A lot of common talking points from the anti-EV FUD going around - EVs are heavier, sales are going down (even though they're not, according to the data presented in the article), EVs don't have enough range. Ask an EV owner and they don't care. It's almost like there might be vested corporate interests (say, Big Oil?) pushing a narrative here?
Re: Fewer people are buying electric cars in the US
#5All car sales have stalled significantly. Now are there issues to EV sales, maybe? but a larger swath of people more than any other time in recent history can't afford new cars.
Re: Fewer people are buying electric cars in the US
#6> sales of EVs keep going up — a record 300,000 cars sold in the US in the third quarter of 2023 were electric — but the pace of adoption has markedly slowed
This does not fit with the tone of the headline
Re: Fewer people are buying electric cars in the US
#7I would like an EV but not if it means I'm forced into an SUV, crossover, or some other huge land whale.
Re: Fewer people are buying electric cars in the US
#8I would like an EV but not if it means I'm forced into an SUV, crossover, or some other huge land whale.
The Nissan Leaf is a nice size for an around town EV. I currently have a twenty year old truck that I need for a side hustle, along with normal household and yard work, but I really hate using it for all those short trips to the grocery store, the library, and anything else nearby that doesn't involve moving around a large, heavy, or messy objects.
The economics of having a Leaf as a second vehicle just doesn't work very well, especially since my primary job is a remote work from home one which requires no daily commute. Used Leafs, even with batteries in terrible shape that will need an expensive replacement, are priced too high and the days of being able to add additional vehicles to an insurance policy for little cost appear to be gone. From an environmental point of view, using the truck for short trips probably is net better than having an entirely different vehicle, even if it's an EV, but it always feels wrong.
Re: Fewer people are buying electric cars in the US
#9I would like an EV but not if it means I'm forced into an SUV, crossover, or some other huge land whale.
Weight (and the battery capacity to deal with it) is a major factor in EVs; we should be seeing things like Ford Focus wagon EV, Honda Fit EV, Toyota Corolla EV.
But everything we have now was planned assuming zero interest rates forever and that consumers will always demand more technology regardless of what it does.
Have y'all seen the photos of the new version of Apple Car Play in a Porsche? It's like nobody ever stopped and said "wait, is this a car that people are going to drive? Or a really uncomfortable workstation?"
Re: Fewer people are buying electric cars in the US
#10> 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 posterchild is quite hilarious when it's their oil business subsidizing EVs.
Besides that the "heavier = bad for the road" (which TFA hints at) is pure non-sense: a regular car or a car twice the weight of the regular car will do exactly jack shit to damage the road. The damages are proportional to the root of the weight and it's the real heavy vehicles, like loaded semis at 80 000 pounds, that do damage highways and roads. It's not even clear if non-loaded semis even make a dent.
In Europe, on three-lane highways, the left lane (the fast one, where semis never drive) are never damaged. It's always the right lane and the middle lane (when trucks overtake) that are damaged.
An EV can be 1.5x the weight of a similarly sized ICE car: won't damage the road more. Doesn't even register.
It's a lie told by those who want, like the EU, to impose a tax on weight (because with EVs they see their gigantic taxes on gasoline/diesel go down the drain and they need to bleed people another way: so they're selling this made-up narrative that EVs do damage the road).
TFA has many flaws. Those ones plus the ones highlighted by other comments. A poor article.
P.S: FWIW I drive an ICE car but I don't think it's OK to beat on EVs like that...