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Ford hits the brakes on $12B in EV spending

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Re: Ford hits the brakes on $12B in EV spending

#41

Evs are great fun toys that I would absolutely recommend to anyone that can afford them and lives in a 2 car household. They are not currently an acceptable replacement for an ICE car in the United States due to infrastructure problems. I would bet we need 10-15 years to get that to an acceptable state

After seeing the damage from a few EV fires, I don't think we're anywhere near proper insurance underwriting of EVs...both for the vehicles themselves and also surrounding property damage.

Tbh, I wouldn't want an EV parked anywhere within 500 feet of my house. And seeing $41k dent repair bills for the Rivian or a non-covered Tesla battery replacement for driving in heavy rain...Well, I really don't think the masses are ready.

The fact that regulators are pushing so hard for EVs is steering us into a crisis in the near future, I think.

Re: Ford hits the brakes on $12B in EV spending

#42

Evs are great fun toys that I would absolutely recommend to anyone that can afford them and lives in a 2 car household. They are not currently an acceptable replacement for an ICE car in the United States due to infrastructure problems. I would bet we need 10-15 years to get that to an acceptable state

I live in a one car household and it's been perfectly fine, including our yearly roadtrip driving up and around places like Banff in Canada and down the coast to San Francisco. And that's not a Tesla either, it's just with a cheap Chevy Bolt I got for 25k.

Re: Ford hits the brakes on $12B in EV spending

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, it is not driven nearly that much. It has But it did spend its first 6 or 7 years in Western NY, with snowy, salty roads a good chunk of the year. There definitely is some rusty spots and corrosion. I think people who do stuff like fix their own cars (and lots of other things) very much underestimate the time it takes to acquire the knowledge, and how much intuition they've unknowingly built up while they did it…

You've also got to have a place to do it and a modest collection of tools. If you live in dense urban housing you probably aren't up for swapping a transmission for your very first time on the curb of a busy street or doing much multi-day work in your narrow numbered parking spot unless you can borrow a friend's garage to have a place to spread out a little bit. You aren't rolling a toolbox down from your 4th floor a…

Nowadays you can pay a mobile mechanic to come work on your car for a very reasonable rate in most urban areas. I find doing this is usually at least 75% cheaper than the dealerships and much more convenient.

I still do minor repairs and things like battery swaps myself and keep an OBD reader in the car for preliminary investigation and research before I call the mechanic. But otherwise I probably average less than $1k USD per year on vehicle maintenance and repairs, tires oil included.

Obviously this excludes things like transmission swaps but those are ideally once in a decade occurrences with proper care and maintenance otherwise

Re: Ford hits the brakes on $12B in EV spending

#44

The originally announced F150 lightening price was under $40k, and there were also some incentives IIRC. The cheapest ones are about $60k now. A lot of people were interested in the truck for the lower $30k's, but much more than that is a non-starter. The marketing for these vehicles is also laughable. Instead of advertising real-world range for a 10k towing load, they talk about how it can power your blender. The mu…

Yeah but Ford just cancelled F150 lightning orders in the US & Canada again. How many production shutdowns are they going to deal with for quality issues per year?

Also it's weird to be pushing EVs in areas where they aren't wanted (trucks, motorcycles). Harley Davidson just reported that their electric bike model sold 69 units globally in the last quarter of 2022...That's basically nothing. Their yearly goals are like 500 units.

Re: Ford hits the brakes on $12B in EV spending

#45

Can the price pressure reduce the amount of cars overall after IC cars are outlawed?

ICE cars won't be outlawed if there isn't an acceptable alternative. It would be political suicide.

> ICE cars won't be outlawed if there isn't an acceptable alternative

Not explicitly.

But new gas stations will stop being built [1]. For-hire cars mandated to go electric [2]. Parking spaces reserved for electric cars only. Perhaps HOAs that ban the running of combustion engines on their streets. Nudges here and there that make it more annoying and expensive to own a gas car.

[1] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-07-11/californ...

[2] https://www.nyc.gov/assets/tlc/downloads/pdf/green_rides_ini...

Re: Ford hits the brakes on $12B in EV spending

#46
post #5

The headline basically says it all. My 15 year old car is starting to get some issues so I was browsing some EVs. They are literally twice as expensive as a comparable ICE car, even after tax incentives. With interest rates where they are, 22k vs 44k is a huge difference. They are just unaffordable for a lot of people. (Also, was looking for a sedan. They don’t seem to make a lot of EV sedans, and I find the hatchbac…

You should really be comparing TCO rather than sticker price. Probably won't totally flip the calculation in your specifically cited case but will still make a serious difference.

Re: Ford hits the brakes on $12B in EV spending

#47
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really hate this quote. 9 women can’t make a baby in 1 month. But 9 women can produce babies 9x faster than 1 woman. Which is the effect you would hope to achieve by scaling production facilities. Increasing the rate of unit production per facility is something you might also want to achieve, but is not analogous to adding more women.

Hating the quote does not make it less true. 9 women may be able to make babies 9x faster than 1 woman, but they still cannot manage to make one in a single month. The quote is meant to point out that scaling is often limited by factors in addition to production capacity. Sometimes throwing money at the problem can solve it. Sometimes not. Sometimes there is only one person in the world, who is the rate limiting fact…

But it’s NOT the same problem! Producing an item in 1/9 the time is very different from producing them at 9x the rate.

scaling production is generally not expected to do the former, only the latter.

This analogy is only suitable for one off goods and projects. Not economic production capacity.

Re: Ford hits the brakes on $12B in EV spending

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This demonstrably false. This is a paranoid take that disregards the actual facts. The same was said of cars when horses were popular. Economies of scale will make EVs cheaper. The more produced the cheaper they get. The hidden costs of ICE vehicles means that they are only priced as low as they are because of significant discounting of their real effects on air quality, climate, and diminishing oil supply. If those…

>We want our children to grow up in a world where humans can thrive instead of hiding underground to keep cool from deadly heat and starving from the lack of stable food production. Sure, but most of global harming pollution doesn't come from ICE cars and it won't be solved by people switching to EVs. EV evangelists should know that EV manufacturing is 70% more environmentally damaging than building ICE cars. Also, m…

> Sure, but most of global harming pollution doesn't come from ICE cars and it won't be solved by people switching to EVs.

It's a necessary but not sufficient part of the solution. Solving all greenhouse gas sources in our world except the ones involved in switching from ICE to EV is nowhere near enough.

> EV evangelists should know that EV manufacturing is 70% more environmentally damaging than building ICE cars.

Manufacturing in general also needs to be made greener. Concrete, steel, etc. are, even by themselves, each such heavy emitters as to be environmentally unsustainable unless the tech is improved. Fortunately, other people are in fact working on those, they don't have to be on the same schedule as EVs.

Also, the main damage from cars isn't the manufacturing — over the vehicle lifetimes, the emissions from literally burning fuel far out-mass the manufacturing emissions.

> Also, mining enough materials to replace all ICE cars on the road today with EVs would literally obliterate the planet.

Not even close, and I don't know why your beliefs are so badly calibrated.

> So no, the reality is we literally can't all have EVs, or cars of any kind for that matter, if we really wish to save the planet, instead of pretending that we are just to sell EVs.

If we even attempt to solve greenhouse gas emissions just by reducing overall economic consumption, then whoever ignores that edict can trivially take over the world, because the "just be less rich" method requires returning to a pre-industrial-era society with a maximum sustainable global population of about 790 million, 90%-98% of whom are then at or under the UN extreme poverty threshold of 2.47 USD/day inflation-adjusted 2022 dollars.

No, the only sustainable solution is one that's sustainable by every measure: political and economic, not just environmental.

Re: Ford hits the brakes on $12B in EV spending

#49
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We want our children to grow up in a world where humans can thrive instead of hiding underground to keep cool from deadly heat and starving from the lack of stable food production. Sure, but most of global harming pollution doesn't come from ICE cars and it won't be solved by people switching to EVs. EV evangelists should know that EV manufacturing is 70% more environmentally damaging than building ICE cars. Also, m…

> Sure, but most of global harming pollution doesn't come from ICE cars and it won't be solved by people switching to EVs. It's a necessary but not sufficient part of the solution. Solving all greenhouse gas sources in our world except the ones involved in switching from ICE to EV is nowhere near enough. > EV evangelists should know that EV manufacturing is 70% more environmentally damaging than building ICE cars. Ma…

>Also, the main damage from cars isn't the manufacturing — over the vehicle lifetimes, the emissions from literally burning fuel far out-mass the manufacturing emissions.

Again, personal vehicle ICE fuel burning is only a relatively small part of global emissions (about 9%). People are just fixate on it because it happens in their back yard so that's all they see everyday as the main polluter instead of the giant mines in Australia and Africa or the giant factory towns in China, or the oil wells, air travel, shipping industry, etc.

But there are lower hanging fruit which are a lot more environmentally damaging than those 9% of ICEs, except nobody's talking about them berceuse those are all big industry related and it's much cheaper to push the blame on the 9% powerless peasants driving ICEs so you can sell them EVs, instead of dealing and hurting the profits of the giant polluting industries out there that account for the other 90% and onto which the lifestyle of the world is tied to.

Rich western countries moving to EVs in 10 years will not alleviate this if countries like China, India and from Africa mine and burn even more fossil fuels as they industrialized further and lift even more people out of poverty.

>Not even close, and I don't know why your beliefs are so badly calibrated.

It's not my belief, it's been scientifically proven that the planet's climate cannot sustain the emissions from the mining and manufacturing efforts of transitioning all ICE cars on the road today to EVs.

>If we even attempt to solve greenhouse gas emissions just by reducing overall economic consumption, then whoever ignores that edict can trivially take over the world

That's the reason the climate issue will never be solved and why we're heading towards the iceberg of environmental destruction full speed ahead. Because everyone wants to have their cake and eat it too. Nobody wants to tone down on consumerism, wealth building and lifestyle enabled by fossil fuels, oil, gas, petroleum and manufacturing.

Something has to give. You either want to be rich enough to feed and house every mouth on the planet, or you want to have a habitable planet with less well off mouths on it. You can't have both with our current lifestyle and trajectory.

That's why we're doomed to destroy ourselves. Because no country or individual wants to compromise on their wealth and lifestyle. On this path we can expect extreme climate phenomenons to increase in strength and frequency, along with more famine, political and economic instability, wars and refugees. EVs alone won't save us from this.

Re: Ford hits the brakes on $12B in EV spending

#50
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany is pushing for ev too and Germany main industry is cars. We have bmw, VW, Mercedes etc here. A lot of people I personally know work for bmw. Your conspiracy doesn't make sense. No German politican would ever ty to hurt the German automotive sector. And we don't have that many it people we have a ton of German engineers

> Your conspiracy doesn't make sense. No German politican would ever ty to hurt the German automotive sector. The same German politicians that shutdown nuclear reactors making Germany more dependent on fossil fuels like coal?

Neither coal nor nuclear is part of the German automotive sector.
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