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Fewer people are buying electric cars in the US

businessinsider.com

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Re: Fewer people are buying electric cars in the US

#131

Post by jandrewrogers »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #110
jandrewrogers wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is even worse for people like me, despite having a charger in my home. I almost never drive short distances, I walk everywhere locally. When I do drive, it is very long distances, and in those cases range and refill time counts for a lot. On their best days EVs have inferior range and in many conditions they have markedly inferior range. Add on top of that the lengthy recharge time (topping off a gas tank is idea…

> We will know EVs have arrived when Americans in the mountain west start trading their Subarus for Teslas. No need to get the laggards onboard, you simply need to get to the inflection point where the petroleum supply chain is no longer sustainable (due to demand falling through minimum economic viable throughput). Still at least 10-15 years out, as the US accounts for ~35% global oil consumption. US EV uptake is st…

That point is so far in the future that I don’t need to consider it. The US is not going to abandon their massive agricultural infrastructure because EVs. As long as significant parts of the US are not readily navigable by EVs 12 months out of the year, and that looks to remain the case for quite some time, there will be plenty of petrol.

I am sure that in 2050 the EVs will be far superior to what we have today. But then again, so will AI etc and most of these discussions may be moot.

I don’t understand what people expect to gain by antagonizing people that cannot drive an EV. It trains them to ignore or oppose the same people on useful climate mitigations that have nothing to do with EVs.

Re: Fewer people are buying electric cars in the US

#132

Post by freddie_mercury »

rdtsc wrote: post #66

> But an analysis from CarGurus found that EV prices were still 28% higher than gas-vehicle prices on average. To me that is bonkers. When EVs were becoming popular, I was expecting to see super cheap, under $10k vehicles. That was the promise: forget about all the IC complicated gears, alternators, transmission, fuel pumps and imagine getting a motor and batteries, what could be simpler!". But no, we ended up with m…

This is entirely because manufacturers thought they saw a way to pad margins and then US politicians added tariffs to Chinese EVs to protect them from lower-cost competition.

As the other reply mentions, this isn't an issue in China.

And now that the bet on expensive EV growth allowing manufacturers to have fat margins forever isn't panning out, they're all freaking out about cheap Chinese models and pivoting to design cheap EVs.

You see this more in Europe than the US because Europe doesnt have the same protectionist tariffs the US does.

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/fear-c...

Re: Fewer people are buying electric cars in the US

#133

Post by JamisonM »

iknowstuff wrote: post #45

Dumbass "journalists" with the usual clickbait. Explicitly MORE people are buying EVs: > Sure, sales of EVs keep going up — a record 300,000 cars sold in the US in the third quarter of 2023 were electric The only thing they're seeing is "but the pace of adoption has markedly slowed" -- no shit, have you seen the interest rates and price diffs? And which manufacturer grew the most? Oh that's right the only all-EV one.…

Running the headline "Fewer people are buying electric cars" and then conceding that EV sales are rising at the start of the 3rd paragraph is embarrassing for the author Paris Marx and I hope he feels ashamed.

Re: Fewer people are buying electric cars in the US

#134

Post by ellisv »

protocolture wrote: post #83
rappatic wrote: post #60

The article talks about range concerns as if they're simply incorrect or ill-founded: > Niedermeyer said that while an electric car can meet most people's driving needs, it struggles with edge cases like road trips because of the need to recharge. Since Americans have been promised a one-to-one substitute for their gas cars, this seems like a failure; an EV should be able to do everything a gas car can. This idea per…

Yep. I have a Diesel. My average trip length will be roughly 60km. However, 4 - 8 times a year I need to go much further. Last year a single round trip for work was roughly 2200 km. And that was through extreme rural environments. The vast majority of places I stopped to refill the vehicle did not have electric service. Average trips being serviceable doesnt help me. I dont buy a vehicle assuming it will work on aver…

> The vast majority of places I stopped to refill the vehicle did not have electric service.

They didn’t have electricity?! What country are you in?! How did they power their pumps?!

Ok, I’m being too hyperbolic.

I assume you mean they didn’t have DC fast charging, perhaps making a trip less practical, but I’d find it hard to believe there was no electric service whatsoever. One of the great benefits for EVs is that you can plug in anywhere.

> I buy a vehicle knowing in will serve every one of my use cases.

Vehicles are for already specific use cases; I don’t try to drive my car into the lake. I think a vehicle that can do everything probably can’t do many things well.

Re: Fewer people are buying electric cars in the US

#135

Post by bombcar »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #8
stalfosknight wrote: post #7

I 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…

Depending on locality and exactly where the local trips are, those “hopped up golf carts” may be a quite competitive option.

Re: Fewer people are buying electric cars in the US

#139

Post by 7speter »

iteria wrote: post #94
lukas099 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People focus too much on edge cases when making life decisions, imo. > We need a dining room for when we have parties (has a party once every 2 years; room sits empty 99% of the time) > We need a guest bedroom (guests could stay at the hotel down the street) > I need a pickup truck (driver is an accountant who maybe picks up a couple bags of mulch from Lowes twice a year) I'm glad I live in a prosperous society where…

It's about how often the edge case comes up. 4 to 12 times a year, I need to drive 300 miles to visit my family. 10 to 30 times a year, I'll drive 50 to 60 miles to visit friends/family or see specialist doctors or take trip to some interesting event. But on the vast majority of days I drive less than 10 miles a day. My edge cases come up fairly frequently and I don't really have a good fall back for them i could spe…

There have been a good number of articles recently about the increase of sales of hybrids. Some of them have probably been at the top of HN

Re: Fewer people are buying electric cars in the US

#140

Post by kridsdale1 »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #110
jandrewrogers wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is even worse for people like me, despite having a charger in my home. I almost never drive short distances, I walk everywhere locally. When I do drive, it is very long distances, and in those cases range and refill time counts for a lot. On their best days EVs have inferior range and in many conditions they have markedly inferior range. Add on top of that the lengthy recharge time (topping off a gas tank is idea…

> We will know EVs have arrived when Americans in the mountain west start trading their Subarus for Teslas. No need to get the laggards onboard, you simply need to get to the inflection point where the petroleum supply chain is no longer sustainable (due to demand falling through minimum economic viable throughput). Still at least 10-15 years out, as the US accounts for ~35% global oil consumption. US EV uptake is st…

Japan has trains.
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