This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
It’s not EV’s I’m skeptical of hey.
It’s the cars they are making. The evs are all quite expensive and then all new cars seem to be taking the opportunity to tack on all these extra subscriptions and such.
I’m never buying a car where heated seats are bound to my car app account on a subscription like seriously…
Many EV are just wasting too much energy for useless stuff. I love the dacia spring, it so reduced, that it only wights about 1000kg and still has about 200km (33kw motor and 29kw/h battery(my version))
"Gas is a little more convenient, so lets destroy our sole, shared, communal ecosystem we all rely on from one breath to the next so I don't have to wait for my car to charge."
Oh humans, don't ever change. For Earth's long-term sake, we need to make sure we commit to our species' mass suicide for short term profit and convenience. No half measures.
I mean its the same reason that EVs were considered before public transit.
Convenience over an actual solution, every time.
Most of US mass transit isn't an option as the Gov. didn't plan for it and have no intention of ever funding any but a token to assure workers have to pack lick sardines.
They won't fund it because we aren't a society, just a bunch of rugged individuals at each other's throats over green paper scraps.
This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
I would argue that moving to evs puts the cost burdens on companies and consumers where a functioning public transit system would cost a shit ton and only be able to occur by taxing people which people won't vote for.
Also when I went on a walk today while visiting my mother, I knocked on a neighbors door to let them know their hazard lights were on in the driveway. I didn't want their battery to die so I went to door. They wouldn't even open the door while clearly being able to see my mother standing behind me who lives a few doors down. I had to speak through the door to tell her. That older lady will never take public transit with all the fear we have engrained into the public.
I think combining both makes sense: Usually I use the bike or public transit to get around. But today I rented an EV from a local rideshare company (Skoda Enyaq iV80 4x4) because we had to move an entire rack of equipment between two cities for work.
Transportation is a tiny fraction of carbon emissions. And EVs are a small improvement within that. Regulations and investment into things that matter are the only way out of this problem.
Wrong. We want affordable EVs, ideally not not sold by an openly fascist billionaire eternally-divorced childmanboy.
The only thing worse for adoption than only selling high priced EVs, is attempting to sell high priced EVs when interest rates are high.
Plus, no one ever talks about the switchover to NACS plugs in the US. Except for Tesla, most companies have announced they will switch plugs on a year or two. I hear “in a year or two these old ones will be difficult to charge and lose all its resale value”, so why would I buy?
I plan on waiting for NACS myself, but they do have adapters coming to use Tesla chargers on current non-NACS EVs. Some will provide them for free to recent owners.
Actually it's just pessimism of the likes of Mercedes-Benz. I'm not going to buy an expensive electrical car in the same way I'm not going to buy an expensive ICE car.
Make cheap electrical cars and we can talk.
Very true. VW had a really cheap one, and it sold out immediately. Still removed it for no reason.
MONEY
Volvo is bringing a 36k one to market this summer. While that's still very expensive it's less expensive than the average of 50k (45k with rebates) you see from domestic manufacturers.
If they manage to dodge the inevitable court case for selling at a loss and make it stick we should see more stuff like the Chevy Bolt.
How about you make one that doesn’t cost 30k more than a normal car… gees.
You make an excellent point!
I expect electric will soon be much cheaper than gas cars. Battery prices are still falling, despite the demand outpacing supply. Lithium refineries and mines are in the works and should be online in 5 years.
More importantly, electric cars are much simpler than gas cars. Anyone saying otherwise has no appreciation for the genius behind modern motors, transmissions, traction control and exhaust systems. There are an order of magnitude the number of moving parts in a combustion engine than an electric motor.
The price is higher because of the still-young supply chain for batteries and the infantile production lines for EVs.
Toyota say they can make 90 hybrids using the same raw materials as one BEV or six PHEVs, leading to a 37-fold reduction in lifetime carbon emissions .
There's the rub. 'The market' is demanding EVs with massive range-per-charge, leading to huuuge batteries (of which only 10% capacity is used, most of the time) and high prices. It's all a bit crazy.
I'm very skeptical of anything Toyota says about EVs.
Toyota Rav4 PHEV 18.1kWh Toyota Rav4 Hybrid ~1.6kWh Model Y LR 81kWh
81 / 18.1 = 4.48 PHEV 81 / 1.6 = 50.6 Hybrids
90 hybrids using the same raw materials as one BEV or six PHEVs
** for one material, compared to one battery chemistry, for hypothetical vehicles
Did you catch the news a week or so ago about mining and ore processors shutting down because they got ahead of EV demand
Edit: fix auto-correct
Yes, I'm sure Toyota is massaging that statistic heavily. They are all about hybrids.
The market wants more Chevy Bolts. They didn't have a 200 mile range. The market wants them so badly that GM unkilled the production line.
Of course they're on the same EV platform as all of the other GM BEVs that's a lemon lottery.
Volvo is going to beat the pants off this market with their 36k EV. Assuming of course our government doesn't swoop in to protect GM and Ford.
This is really sad. Their ambition should be to be leading innovators and build the best possible EVs and not just give up.
They never wanted to innovate. They have entire warehouses full of IC engines and related parts. It's far cheaper to just slap those together.
My doubt about electric vehicles is based on my doubt that the automotive industry will produce a quality product at a reasonable price. They're no different than any other short-term profit based business.
I agree. They seem to put everything in the cars and sell them as luxury EVs. Give me a basic car for $15k.
I'm really optimistic about electric vehicles, I don't know what you're talking about. LOL.
Meanwhile BYD is absolutely exploding in popularity. The problem isn’t “EV pessimism” it’s that some governments are fighting it so hard that it’s difficult out for citizens (USA) to make it work. Didn’t Biden promise a network of EV chargers across the nation?
And instead he made it illegal to import affordable Chinese cars. I’m sick of seeing articles phrased like this
Did Biden forget which about the magic wands, which you obviously know all about, that cause charge stations to spontaneously appear?
I mean, the first of the ones funded went into operation in December of 2023, which was the earliest it could as that is when funding was available and enough time had passed to get it permitted and installed, but wave the damned wand!!!!! demands internet padme. /s
In case anyone wants to know what is really going on with the EV charge stations;
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/first-ev-charging-station-funded-by-bidens-infrastructure-law-goes-online-2023-12-11/
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/biden-pours-623-million-into-ev-charging-void/
Wish they would take the hybrid model and flip it. I love my gas/EV hybrid but the EV side of things is only good for 50miles or so. Its much more a gas vehicle really than an EV. Why not a primarily EV vehicle with large battery and a small gas generator for those Oh crap, I need another 50-100 miles right now with no time to charge moments?
Because you waste a lot energy transporting a heavy mostly useless gas tank and motor. In the other hand, if gas is main motor, you can use the battery / EV motor to get brake energy back and accelerate faster.
there's a lot of abbreviations in the article that I don't understand or know lol. what's a BEV? HPEV? etc.
Good article tho. From my limited view prices definitely are a huge limiting factor for electric vehicles, though they brought up a good point about the charge times. I guess if people treated it like their phones (charge every night) then it wouldn't be a problem?
Honestly not surprised that demand has dropped for them though. Anyone who was interested in it has either decided it's not worth it or already has one. Price puts them out of most people's budget, and with rising costs and stagnant wages, people can't really afford to take on monthly payments anymore. The environmental friendliness of them is heavily marketed, but won't bring into effect the large scale, immediate change we need to slow climate change. Plus there's the whole Tesla thing with delayed shipping and paywalling features built into software (admittedly not up to brush with Tesla tho).
For a while they were a new, impressive technology, and while I still think they're cool, until they become very, very cheap and accessible, I won't be getting one. The fad is starting to die out.
BEV?
BatteryElectricVehicle
HPEV
HybridPluginElectricVehicle
More market share for Volkswagen I guess. I just wish I knew which VW stocks to purchase, there are so many...
Someone more educated, please explain to me, why it’s impossible to just take the existing industry, take all the know how and engineering and direct efforts into electrifying (converting) existing cars instead of building new ones.
If the world was perfect and there was no nuance, no bad actors, no human factor involved - would it be a viable solution to cut back on the emissions without getting rid of the comfort that a car affords?
You'd need to gut the car completely and rebuild it, it would be more work than starting from scratch.
When you mass-manufacture things, they’re made in a very specific way using a very specific amount of material in a very specific size and shape in a very specific spot in order to accommodate the exact stuff that goes into the final product.
My biggest EV doubt is that everyone living in a condo/apartment doesn't have the option to install charging ports in their own parking space, so plug-in EVs are a terrible option ATM. I'll get on board when I see the change happen but knowing landlords I'm doubtful.
