Everytime I consider buying an EV I do some research and they always seem to have all of the bells and whistles. Then I get to price and it’s like $60,000+ and I can’t help but wonder how much cheaper it could be without all of the added features.
Edit: I’m not going to reply to everyone and I really should have mentioned since it’s not immediately obvious but I’m Australian. No Chevy volt and and all vehicles are imported increasing prices on top of the usual AUD imbalance.
Sorry, best we can do is massive, expensive pseudo-luxury SUVs
The large profit margin SUVs are necessary for a company to achieve scale to then be able to produce the smaller cheaper stuff. Fixed costs like the factory, tooling, training, designing, that all takes a lot of money up front before even selling a single vehicle, and the smaller and cheaper the vehicle coming out of that production pipeline is, the longer the payback period will be. And when we’re talking about billions of dollars in cost, it’s hard to remain solvent when interest payments on the debt grow exponentially over time.
It’s why before tesla there had not been an American auto company startup for like 70 years, Tesla almost went bankrupt, and Rivian is just starting to head in the right direction. Lucid is probably fucked and they’re mostly Saudi owned these days anyways, and the rest of the US EV startup space ranges from a joke to a scam.
What legacy automakers already have in staff and part of the production line established is actually kind of useless when they have to wait to establish their electric motor, battery, and chassis production, which probably just means a new factory anyways. Give it a few years and the cheaper smaller stuff will come, because right now AFAIK only tesla actually has the free cash flow to fund an EV economy car at scale. Everyone else is still sinking billions establishing any EV production at all, and interest rates aren’t helping the speed of their progress either.
There’s more than one way to skin a cat. The Chinese EV companies that have come up in the last few years use a diversity of business strategies, not all involving high margin SUVs. BYD’s cars, for example, are spinoffs of its battery manufacturing business.
BYD was selling ICE vehicles up until March of 2022, and their current split is somewhere around 50/50 BEV/hybrid so they’re still not a full EV company. Their lineup is still being supported by their existing infrastructure, subsidized by the already established supply chains for ICE that they can incrementally cannibalize while building up the EV part of the company. It’s a good blueprint for legacy auto, but not for an EV startup. That is even before mentioning the very generous subsidies and incentives for electrification provided by the national, provincial, and city governments to producers and consumers. Not to say there is anything wrong with that, because I believe the US also needs that level of investment into electrification, but my point is that it’s not the same business model.
BYD also put lots of resources into electric buses. Anyway the point is that there’s multiple game plans EV makers can follow, not only Tesla’s.
Best thing for consumers and environmental would be conversion. We already have the cars. I like my 2003 Golf. I won’t be getting rid of it until I need to.
Why replace 8 billion cars when we can convert them. Yeah they won’t be nearly as efficient but it’s a stop gap between scrapping that many cars. Also I can’t afford a new ev. I need a small run around with 259 miles.
I have had a handful of that generation golf over the years that I have modified. It would be absurdly simple to drop an electric motor into that thing if the right kit existed.
alternatively we could get rid of car dependency
If we started now, we’d be ready in a couple decades in all but the most compact metro areas. And that’s after we build the requisite political will. The US fucked itself hard leaning into cars as transport.
But that’s reality for most of us living in the burbs where the schools are better and the neighborhoods are better for kid stuff.
neighborhoods are better for kid stuff
Maybe it’s just me growing up in the city, but I would not want to raise my kid in an American-style suburb. Imagine being a tween but never being able to go anywhere without your parents, because everything is too far away to walk or bike and public transport is not available. Yikes.
My local huge park, pool, and sports complex is .7 miles. I have multiple stores and restaurants .5 miles away. Our library is also about .7 miles away. My burb is relatively walkable and perfectly bike-able.
Our grid has its own problems and is completely unsafe for cyclists a lot of the time. I know; I work there. My city has removed lanes from streets to create space for bikes and people still get killed by idiots in cars. Still inadequate public transit. Only more walkable than my own burb in certain, hyper expensive neighborhoods. Cheaper areas have homeless problems (warmer climate) resulting in tons of property crimes (mostly stolen bikes and break-ins). Many encounters with bonk-shit crazy guys yelling at stop signs (and people). Some of them have large, aggressive dogs. Oh, and then there’s the fires they start by attempting to cook or warm themselves and then getting high or drunk.
Frankly I would be stoked to live in a townhouse or condo or something on the grid. All my favorite restaurants are down there, lots to do, etc. But it’s shit for kids and the schools are rough as fuck.
Maybe, but I feel like that ship has sailed in the US. Both for practical/economical reasons and because will resist. If half the people fought against wearing masks to protect vulnerable people from covid, good luck getting them to give up their "single family home with a yard + 2 cars” lifestyle. For those fortunate enough to have a single family home, that is.
I’m not saying it SHOULD be this way, and I’m not arguing against reducing cars with public transit and walkable/bikeable towns. However, from my perspective inside suburbia that borders rural areas, electrification of vehicles and supplying the grid with renewables is 1000x more likely as the path to fix this stuff environmentally.
And to get rid of cars for non-environmental reasons, I think that will be even more difficult. I mean, I visited Sweden earlier this year and for all the progressive stuff they’re way ahead of us on, there are still cars everywhere. They are smaller, more sensible cars with a much larger proportion being electric, but cars just the same.
This is exactly what I want, I don’t need 300 miles of range, I don’t need luxury entertainment systems. I need a simple vehicle with decently comfortable seats and a shitty Walmart $80 bluetooth head unit. In Europe and various parts of China / Japan you can get a small electric vehicle for like 8,000 US dollars and that’s what I want here God damn it
Honestly that would be great - make the head unit similar to a car from '07/'08 and then if we want to upgrade it wity something aftermarket, we can. Then we can choose what bells and whistles we want.
No autopilot, not internet connected BS. Heck I’d even go without adaptive cruise control and lane assist.
07/08 really was one of the best eras for car interior, because the head units weren’t usually integrated into the dash, meaning you didn’t have to replace trim pieces with your unit in order to upgrade the damned stereo.
I think a large part of the move towards integrated head units had to do with the mandated rear backup camera that necessitates a decent sized screen in the dash in order to use it. The death of CD’s and CD changers also allowed for the screens to grow in size. Lastly, the touchscreens themselves are ever cheaper to manufacture. I love the giant screen in my Chevy Bolt - especially given the Google integration means I don’t have to use the nonsense baked in apps from Chevy.
They need to just build hybrids until batteries advance further. Either ones that will last 25 years with 80+% capacity remaining, or lighter more power dense batteries that can more easily and cheaply be replaced.
A 1500Lb battery that costs $10,000 and requires half disassembling the vehicle in order to replace That goes bad after 15 years is a pretty shit thing.
I have an 08 prius with 240,000 miles on it. The 75 Lb Battery went bad last year. I bought a new one from toyota for $1,900 and installed it myself in an afternoon. If the gas motor goes out on me (they will typically go 400,000 miles if cared for correctly) a rebuilt one with a 5 year warranty is around $1400. That’s not in most people’s “diy” zone but it’s a 7 to 9 labor hour job, so just call it $3,000.
All things much cheaper and easier than replacing an all electric battery, and no range issues.
Let’s just do some checking here to counter your argument
All evs sold in America have 8year/100,000mi warranty on battery, also these are ev top of the line batteries, not the junk that goes into most toys that burn out in a few years, these are good for 300,000mi+ before the 80% capacity, which is not at all a cause for replacement
But for your cost of ownership argument, if you drove a Prius for 400,000mi as claimed, at a likely/optimistic mpg of 50mpg, that’s 8,000 gallons of fuel, which over the last decade has probably averaged at least close to 3$/g, depending of course. That’s 24,000$. Just in fuel. Now you have say 40$ oil changes every 6,000 miles, that’s another 2,600$, you did a nicad battery replacement because Toyota was totally fine putting that junk in there, another 1,500$
Totalled up to 28,100$. But that potential , not guarantee, 10,000$ battery replacement is too expensive. Literally could have bought an ev for the price of the running costs for an ice
4 qt oil in a prius. I change my own oil every 8,000 miles, so it’s around $25 for me, but most people don’t, I suppose.
Electricity costs money. You skipped that, and for the millions and millions of people living in places like apartments, you can’t charge from home. Charge stations cost almost as much as gasoline, so that gets danged pricey and inconvenient. Poor option all the way around for those people.
Most vehicles have a 100,000 power train warranty, so that’s pretty irrelevant.
I already stated the failure of the batteries is closer to 15 years. That is the good batteries used today. I’m well aware of the lifespan of the lithium ion batteries used in today’s EV’s. They’re generally Lithium Cobalt Oxide or Lithium Nickle Cobalt Oxide and they can go 300,000 in theory. The “in theory” is that they won’t last that long if it’s spread over the course of 15 years and you keep them always close to fully charged or close to discharged. To go 300,000 miles you’ll have to not use any of the extra fast chargers and keep the capacity between 30 and 80 percent all the time. The batteries used have a lifespan of about 1400 charge cycles, if age is not a factor. You can go beyond that by keeping them at 30 to 80 percent, and it will be less than that if you use a level 3 charge station.
Also, look at tesla. There’s an entire industry that’s developed to keep their batteries up and going. They use barrel style batteries. There’s around 3,000 battery cells in each of their teslas. Some of those individual cells start going out quite quickly. The manufacturing of them isn’t flawless to the extent that 3,000 can all last over even 5 years. Tesla designed their system to be able to operate as the cells go bad, but it’s a nice slow deminishment of capacity and power. It’s turned into an entire business of tearing into those tesla batteries, finding and replacing out the bad battery cells, and then re-selling the packs as refurbished to people, which is a terrible idea, really. Replacing a hundred of the worse cells and calling good, when the other 2800 cells have a decade on them and will also fail soon is a short lived stop gap that takes advantage of people ignorance about what a remanufactured battery actually is.
Lastly; to your comment about toyota being “totally fine putting that junk in there”: LOL. You obviously don’t know much about batteries. NMH batteries have a longer duty cycle rate than any lithium batteries that have been developed. It’s why a little 75 pound battery in a non plug in lasts 14 years as it did before wearing out. Also, the “junk” batteries are Panasonics. Go check into it. They’re regarded as making the best mass produced batteries in the world.
Also, fyi: teslas 8 year battery warranty only kicks in if the battery has degraded below 70% capacity. So they think it’s OK that the car you bought to go 300 miles on a charge may only go like 225 miles after 8 years.
Then, finally, look what happens to a plug in when it’s winter and below freezing. An electrics range is tested and claimed when it’s around 70 degrees outside. That’s when your 300 mile electric can go 300 miles. If it’s 15 degrees out real world expectations put your range down to 60%. So your 300 miles goes to less than 200. That’s not just from capacity and discharge rates being effected. A large reason is running the all electric heater.
True I did not count cost of electricity, because it’s extremely hard to guess. Some places are .04$/kwh, some are .45/kwh, some are free. What if you had free charging at work? Or apartment, or had solar, it could be completely free. But let’s say you did pay for electricity, average of .12$/kwh, 4mi/kwh, around 12,000$ so half. You spend twice as much for a far slower, much smaller car that needs maintenance 2-4 times a year, and need to waste 15 minutes every week at a gas station (13 hours per year!).
And before I get a “it only takes 3 minutes to fill” bullshit, your not considering the detour time, pull in time, parking time, credit card time, Skip their ads/loyalty shit time, wait for receipt, time to make your turn out of the lot. Go ahead and time it, I’m sure you’ll be surprised how much of your life is being wasted while breathing those fumes from gas/exhaust.
Of course there’s going to be a market for ev battery repair, and they’ll work on Teslas the most/exclusively not because they’re bad, but because they’re the only significant ev so far. They’ve sold millions, when the next highest has 200k. Shit can break on anything at any time from any manufacturer.
All Toyotas for years have had 3yr/36,000mi, 5yr/60,000mi powertrain warranty.
Nimh is junk, it is guaranteed to die due to age. It cycles really well but the chemistry inside literally dries out and stops working, 8-10 years. That’s probably where a lot of the FUD about lithium batteries come from, lithium batteries degrade slowly. You can check this old blog that gives stats for 10 year higher mileage Teslas, looking at 18% to the high end but usually 8-12%. And those are the early batteries where Tesla was probably cutting as much cost as possible, today’s batteries are a bit better.
And Toyota absolutely does put junk into their cars, they put weak engines, weak hybrid motors, bottom tier infotainment, minimum legal warranty. They’ve been riding their 1980-2000 reliability reputation hard. Not saying they’re unreliable, but that reputation is the only thing that sells their cars.
Range does decrease in winter for evs, but it does for gasoline cars too, they don’t show the mpg difference on the window sticker either. Tesla has really good thermal management so it generally Loses about 15%, not your 40% claim
Dude. You’re living in your very own special zip code.
