511–520 of 919 posts
Eva are great until you have the replace the battery. Then you’ll finally realize the real cost of owning an EV. Once people realize that, then the game is over. Honda is just forecasting the future more accurately than other automakers.
In Shenzhen for a tech meeting. The streetscape is quieter, despite high traffic levels and I hear not only MORE birdsong, but the birds do more complex songlines. The air is clean. For sure some of this is because it's a coastal city and has fresh sea breezes, but I've been in other Chinese coastal cities in times past and the air was significantly less clean. There are social upsides for an almost-all-EV city. This…
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Public lands and culture of the ability to access wild places, whether for hunting, fishing, hiking, camping, and just generally an affordance of access to wilderness that is codified into the laws of the country. In Europe they have the concept of "Right to Roam" which is a powerful concept that I appreciate (and in ways is superior to our systems for just walking in the woods) but it is also fundamentally different than the almost legalistic systems we have in this country towards public lands.
My surface understanding of China is that there is no such broad remit given to the people of China and there aren't designated places where the people of China can just go and exist in wilderness. Such places might exist by convention but they don't have the sort of legal framework that we have in America to recreate in these places.
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If you include PHEVs along with pure EVs the total is around 12% total sales for 2025, and 4% total on the road. I'm not sure when PHEVs became available overseas but they haven't been an option here for that long. Heaps of hybrids are being sold but for now still mostly of the traditional non-plug-in type. As alliao says, this is partly because of the way road user charges (RUC) currently work, though that is slated…
Hybrids and PHEVs are more complicated given that they are both ICEs and EVs. A pure EV is much cheaper, and many places in the developing world don't have easy access to oil anyways.
They’re mostly big, and compete with 20mpg models. At $4/gallon, you’ll spend $40K on gasoline to drive a new ICE car 200K miles. The EV premium is typically $10-20K. These are all luxury cars, so a trimline upgrade is often $10K.
EVs have particularly poor resale value (the technology improves rapidly), so if you’re price sensitive you can get a much better deal by buying something a few years old.
In places where competition is allowed, EVs are much cheaper than ICE. That’ll eventually be true in most places. If NZ lets the Chinese models in, I’d expect them to take over immediately.
I think Japanese automakers by sticking to ICE vehicles have admitted defeat - that they no longer have the engineering prowess to compete. they dominated in the era of small engines. with EVs - the Chinese have run away with the stick & sadly no one is catching up. I wish the Japanese made good EVs - Germans are the only ones besides the Chinese making decent EVs
> they no longer have the engineering prowess to compete That's not nearly the case. They have made one of best EVs back in years, but decided to focus on hybrids. And that makes total sense.
Everyone is saying EVs are the future but most EVs cannot compete with many of Honda’s offerings. Eg. I need to move 6 people and significant gear (skiing, camping, biking etc) long remote distances. There is no EV that can do that really. And the ones that come close are easily $20-30k higher than an Odyssey. Plus the durability of large EVs is far from proven while the 300k mile club of Odyssey owners is large. I n…
So an EV is not for you! You just might be one of the unlucky 1% for whom that is true. Congratulate yourself on visiting nature while simultaneously messing it up. And enjoy the fuel prices.
Given the data on the trend of EV sales (https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/global...) this is a pretty big claim to make.
I live in an old, pre-automobile neighborhood. Like other such old, walkable, sidewalk-and-park-and-corner-store neighborhoods in the US, it's one of the most attractive parts of my city.
However, almost nobody here could feasibly own a fully electric car. Most houses don't have driveways or garages. People park ad-hoc on the street. Most families own one car, and that car needs to be able to go long distances because it's both the local vehicle and the road tripper.
My wife and I would buy an EV if we could. We know the exact one. But it's not feasible for us, or for our neighbors. Far from being "1%" this situation is quite common. So we have a Honda hybrid instead.
The Toyota strategy from 2022 has aged brilliantly: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/29/toyota-ceo-stands-by-electri...
However, the EV maximalist strategy from the same era has aged like milk.
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I have a tangential question. Do you find that snow banks near roads are appreciably less black and disgusting now that there are fewer ICE vehicles on the road? Growing up in America I have memories of our roadside snowbanks becoming black and saturated by vehicle exhaust and it always felt so gross to me. The back half of winter was characterized by blackened, salt-saturated puddles and banks. I wonder if the preva…
As others have said most of that was probably not pollution related to being an ICE vehicle, but if even part of it was the environmental performance of ICEs is magnitudes better over the last 25 years when it comes to unburned hydrocarbons and particulates, which WOULD reduce visible pollution way more than modest EV adoption. CO2 reduction? not so much with bigger vehicles offsetting gains here...
Recent studies have shown significant reductions in mortality starting at 5-10% EV market share.
Honda is setting itself up for failure on the second disruption sweeping the automotive industry: the software-defined vehicle (SDV), which has core capabilities that can be upgraded and improved over time. No thank you. Not sure why the author frames this as a good thing. They've been bamboozled by the automakers and have got it backwards - you're buying a vehicle that already has the capabilities, but are disabled,…
> you're buying a vehicle that already has the capabilities, but are disabled, then paying rent (or a fee) to turn them on. I'm much more likely to buy from a manufacturer that doesn't play these games. Ongoing subscriptions for access to physical hardware features like seat warmers* seems obnoxious at first glance, but a fee is more reasonable and you might find that there aren’t many auto makers that don’t do this…
Manufacturing one hardware setup and charging separately for features is not the problem. The problem is charging ongoing rent for a feature that isn't an ongoing service. A seat heater doesn't use a server, need content updates, or create meaningful recurring costs for the manufacturer after the car is sold. It shifts the relationship from ownership to permission. It also creates bad incentives: features can be removed later, tied to accounts, complicated for second owners, or turned into endless monetization opportunities.
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Yeah I wonder how they get around on a bike...
Really? Sounds like you are a possible customer... can I interest you in a handlebar mount for your phone? https://www.quadlockcase.com.au/products/bike-mount
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It's interesting how many complaints I see on HN that are framed as if they're complaints about a specific piece of technology when they are really complaints about capitalism. I'm all ears if you want to criticize our entire economic system, but I think it's silly to have that conversation specifically in the context of car software rather than at a societal level.
Because we don't care about capitalism, we don't want over the air updates to our cars.
To be honest, I have every faith in Honda. It took them a long time to arrive at hybrid, but they were never about first to market, but they were always adamant about controlling the entire technology stack.. made their own transmission and everything. And engineering doesn't faze them, Honda just nonchalantly displayed a reusable rocket like it was too easy... EV is a little bit like AI nowadays, not much moat and p…
The Honda Insight went on sale in 1999. They were 2 years behind Toyota's Prius but at least 5 years ahead of everybody else.