> 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 more expensive vehicles, which take longer to "fuel up", and more expensive to insure, and they have a shorter range. Then everyone wonders how come not as many people want to buy them.
Sure, for some, it's a moral choice. We are saving the planet so it makes sense to pay more and wait 30 minutes to charge or whatever instead of 3 minutes. That idea is valid but it will run out of steam. In the end, it it has to make sense economically. Even a Joe Schmoe who could care less about saving the planet should be able to price compare and say "Hey, look, $8k for new car with more torque and cheaper to maintain! I'll take it over a $18k Honda Civic". It has to be that simple to make sense financially.
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.
The Chinese EVs are very unsafe. Many many fires are happening with them, but you don't see it reported due to the journalistic repression there.
The sales numbers of Chinese EVs also look good because they'll buy hundreds of cars from their own stock and then park them in a field to rot, just to make the numbers look good.
IMO there shouldn't be a tariff on Chinese EVs but an outright ban.
> The Chinese EVs are very unsafe. Many many fires are happening with them, but you don't see it reported due to the journalistic repression there.
Wonder if it's just carelessness, or it's there is an inherent cost to make them safe. As in, did they just not bother because of laziness, or that extra safety to prevent fires takes up the 2x-3x price markup and there is simply no way around it.
The problem is that if they made a sub $10k vehicle now, "everyone" would buy it. That sounds great, but there's simply not enough battery factories to make the batteries for that many vehicles. The demand for expensive vehicles is still high enough that most of the EV battery factory output of the world can go to those expensive high margin vehicles, so of course the car makers haven't focused on low cost.
There are several dozen giga-scale battery factories coming online in the next few years. That should be a huge enabler to make cheap cars. Once they start to flood the market, the car makers will have to make budget vehicles to stay relevant.
There are also still a whole bunch of expensive R&D work still going on to optimize EV cars. Look at the cyber truck with its 48V and ethernet architecture. It made sense to launch that with an expensive vehicle so they can get a return on their R&D investment sooner. But now that they have it, they can apply it to a budget car and that should help lower cost by reducing the amount of copper wires needed.
Feels like everything is coming together for an explosion in EV growth. We're at the bottom of the ramp of the technology S-curve (logistics curve). We're in what feels a bit like a "false start" phase, but this phase is important for ironing out the kinks for the true mass-scale rollout.
I keep on seeing this problem reduced to the market or a business decision, but is it simply physically possible?
These vehicles require much more energy to produce. And without a reduction in consumption, almost the entire economy accounts for the availability of the same materials in the near future to meet carbon emissions targets. It's not just cars in vacuum.
It feels like we simply don't accept yet that the time of cheap energy is over...
I don't think ever before we had significant periods of time where we actually get paid to use energy from the grid due to overprovisioning with renewables. Plenty of times during the past several years I've had negative electricity cost.
Energy seems to be more and more available as we expand the infrastructure.
> I don't think ever before we had significant periods of time where we actually get paid to use energy from the grid due to overprovisioning with renewables
Yes, because storage isn't factored in and production is intermittent... A world relying fully on solar panels is also relying fully on batteries, whether it's lithium, hydro or something else, we need to account for that in the price.
> It's literally free after building the infrastructure.
That's a gross oversimplification of the problem at hand. The entire supply chain from mining to manufacturing to shipping relies on fossil fuel... The investments to renew all that will have to come from somewhere.
It is not "literally" free, it is free only if you ignore the global industrial complex required to build and service them.
Do you have a source? I think you may be referring to the peak production price without storage. Oil comes with storage: put it in a jug, and use it whenever.
That's about to change. Prices are coming down rapidly. The US is lagging the rest of the world mainly because its car industry is a bit uncompetitive (except for Tesla) and because manufacturers there are spoiled with a market that just has an insatiable demand for pointlessly large and expensive vehicles. That's still a growth market and very lucrative. Which means that US manufacturers are dedicating their very limited EV production capacity (except for Tesla) at that market exclusively. Because that's where the profits are.
BYD, Stellantis, and others are already producing cheap EVs by the millions. There are tiny EVs on the road in Europe that cost as little as 7000 Euros. Not a lot yet but I've seen a few in the wild. Think lots of plastic and not a whole lot of range and speed. Perfect for a city car. Stellantis is launching a proper EV for 24K euros this year; the Citroen e-c3. Modest range and good enough speed for short journeys on the highway. VW is following soon with the ID2. And of course the Chinese market has very different pricing than the rest of the world because it's a much more competitive market. BYD already has vehicles in the price classes you mention in China. You can buy EVs there for less than 10K$.
Producing cheap EVs is a solved problem from a technical point of view. It's being done. They exist. Just not in the US. Not yet at least. But as volume production kicks in that's just a matter of time.
Eh... as the Ford Maverick showed, people in the USA do want smaller and more efficient vehicles. Likewise, the Civic and Corolla have remained in the top vehicles for quite some time. People keep buying F150s because Mavericks became unobtainium really quickly, and the car space (as opposed to truck) has renewed competition from KIA and Hyundai which has dropped the overall sales figures for Japanese and American sedans.
Also, vehicles under a certain size and weight are illegal in many US states so anything similar to a kei car is outlawed. It is therefore unknown whether or not Americans would like even smaller and more efficient vehicles, but demand for some small-ish models seems to indicate that they would.
The last time I bought a personal vehicle (2022) I did some math. I drive X miles a year, I pay Y for gas, I pay Z for electricity. I then compared some vehicles in the segment that fits my needs and found the ICE options to have a significantly lower cost of ownership for the 8-10 years I expect to operate the vehicle. So I left the extra 15 grand in stock, which will see a much higher rate of return than an EV would have.
It's not even Joe Schmoe that's looking at the up front costs. I don't think EVs pencil out as profitable for people that aren't doing more than average amounts of driving. For someone borrowing for the car I cannot image ever getting ahead compared to traditional vehicles if you get $10k-20k more into debt at 6%apr for 60 months. That's an additional $3500-7000 in interest which buys you a lot of oil changes and gasoline. I guess I'll do the math again in 2031 when it's time to start looking at a more modern car and see if they are a good deal or not.
I bought an EV because it needs way less regular maintenance. I don't need to do oil changes or replace parts at an interval defined by the manufacturer. I don't even need to go to a gas station.
And every time I leave home, I've got a full tank, charged with cheap electricity.
And as a bonus it's really comfortable to drive, including having the ability to keep itself cool/warm even when the engine is not running.
IF I went purely by numbers the best choice would've been to buy a 2000€ car drive it until it breaks down. Then just call a taxi for the rest of the trip and buy a new similar one online for the next day. I could've bought 20 shitty cars for the price of my EV. But that's stress I don't want in my life.
Maintenance, planned and breakage, is a huge differentiator in favor of EVs- there are simply less moving parts and the EV ones are usually simpler and more reliable.
There is no question that the electric motor is the future.
The only question is that how do we transport the power for it, currently it's batteries but in the future it might be something else.
I'm personally wondering why more companies don't do range extender trucks for long hauls. Electric drivetrain with insane torque and long maintenance intervals. Add a small to medium sized battery. Plug in a diesel generator that can always work at 100% optimal RPM to produce maximum output to charge the battery.
(Edison Motors[0] is doing some amazing work in this space, but they're a small player)
Same, going on 5 years now, still only had to get my tires replaced. It’s been night and day compared to my last vehicle that always had something breaking for >$1,000 and I definitely don’t miss gas stations
I think we should be pricing in the time wasted on going to mechanics for routine and other maintenance. My last ICE would spend a couple of days a year in the shop (besides routine maintenance, there were some recall events, which then lead to engine malfunction which I learned were a known problem on this model, etc. etc.). And then each time you need a rental to substitute, which is a huge chore, and not to mention taking vacation days to handle it. Just got an EV last month and look forward to none of this.
The motivation behind choosing an EV is not because it's cheaper. People like the features, low pollution, low noise, the imagine, etc. Buying a car is very often not about making the best financial decision. E.g. in Europe, SUVs are now the most popular car model, even though they are more expensive, use more fuel, are more dangerous, noisy, polluting, etc.
Which I find crazy tbh (that they are so popular). Especially in Western Europe where vehicle taxes are crazy (imo). Here in the Netherlands, you could be paying €100/mo for a "midsize" SUV just in taxes. That's nothing to say about the cost of fuel, insurance, and maintenance.
I understand why they are priced that way, and perhaps it is my expat bubble in NL specifically, but with the cost of public transportation the way that it is, I'm not sure how they expect to keep raising vehicle taxes without also making public transportation more affordable.
You’re valuing your own time at $0/hr that is spent at gas stations, doing oil changes and other ICE maintenance, unless you have a personal assistant to do that stuff for you.
My calculation was 15 minutes/week for gas, 1 hour every 3 months for oil changes, and 1 hour a month on average dealing with other ICE problems (for instance I had a water pump failure cause my engine to overheat on a busy highway, had to wait 2 hours for a tow truck waiting in a dangerous location, then took another 2 hours to finally get home).
So that’s ~30 hours of my time per year. I value my own free time at $300/hr so even at a much higher initial cost an EV still made sense to me.
Where in the world does it take 15 minutes to fill up a tank of gas? You change your oil every 3 months? Are you driving 20,000+ miles per year? 1 hour per month on ICE problems? What are you driving, a 1985 Pontiac Skylark? My parents' 2003 Camry has never had a single mechanical problem.
Sometimes you just want something and that's OK...but your calculations are not based in reality.
The 2014 Ford Escape I had before my current EV was actually worse than his calculations. I'm glad your parents' Camry was reliable but my experience was not good.
1 hour per month is amortized. My last car ended up in the shop for several days. It's not several days of my time but dealing with renting a replacement and coordinating the drop-off took me half a day, and this happened more than once. I ended up burning a vacation day on it which was pretty frustrating.
If you read the article you posted, you’d see it say that the EV problems referenced have to do with paint, trim, climate, as opposed to engine, transmission, etc. In other words, not major issues.
“Tesla Motors, the market leader in EV sales, continues to have issues with body hardware, paint and trim, and climate system on its models, but are not as problematic for motor, charging, and battery. At number 14, Tesla is the second-highest ranked domestic automaker in CR’s brand rankings. The Model 3 and Model Y have average reliability while all the other Tesla models–the S, and X–are all below average.“
This has been my experience too. In 5 years I have not had any major issue with my electric car preventing me from driving it other than a flat tire. There have been a couple minor other issues, such as a window not automatically closing all the way and a software issue with the display but they were minor and tesla came to my house to fix it for free while the car was in my driveway. I don’t think there’s enough room in this comment box to type out all the major problems I had with my previous ICE vehicle in the 5 years before that.
I also have experienced much lower maintenance numbers with ICEs than what are being quoted. I think it's a combination of the models I pick (only those manufactured in Japan) and the fact that I buy new and drive for 8-10 years so I'm the single owner.
My 2019 Santa Fe has needed oil changes and 0 other maintenance in 5 years/50k miles.
I do the oil changes myself in about 30 minutes and they cost me about $30 using synthetic oil(costco) and OEM filter. So, I have spent $300 in 5 years on maintenance. Still original tires.
The people claiming expensive maintenance on ICE cars DID NOT follow what manufacturer recommends but the dealer, who have an incentive to offer extra services.
It's hard to decide based on any kind of published data because so much chance is involved. And it's hard to decide based on first-hand experience because you can't compare a new and 10-year old car. In my case I figured the unexpected maintenance is unlikely to be worse, and I know the expected maintenance will be better.
Well, either we believe the data, or we believe stories (true or not) that people tell us (EVs are more reliable). EVs compared to ICEs are still in the early adopter phase in terms of ironing the kinks out. We've been doing ICE vehicles for what, 100 years?
I don’t doubt the data, but the question is how to use it. When it comes to long tail events like breakdowns there is a big difference between an individual purchasing one car and a large fleet owner purchasing in bulk where the law of large numbers helps remove the variance.
In my anecdotal case, I traded a potentially larger but still small probability of a major breakdown for a guaranteed better maintenance schedule (no oil changes, less brake/rotor work) and no gas station visits. We’ll see how it goes!
It’s a few min out of my way each direction to get to a gas station, then another few min to fill it up, sometimes longer if I have to wait. For some reason you assume that the typical fill up is what happens every time, for an accurate average you have to consider worst case scenarios too. I’ve had too many experiences traveling late at night looking for a gas station in a rural area only to be driving 30+ min out of my way to find stations that were either out of gas or closed. I’ve also had plenty of instances where there was a long line at the station for whatever reason. So overall it roughly rounds to 15.
Yes I was told to change oil every 3 months, I drive a lot. I had a ton of mechanical problems with my Lexus RX.
It's always been true that people who drive a lot every day are the low hanging fruit for EVs. EVs are more efficient when in motion, but most cars spend a lot of their time parked.
But in most places prices have continually dropped so the people who will save has expanded.
(Not checked to see if recent battery sourcing changes are included but either way it's still illustrative if the big picture.)
I like to look at these types of calculators to make sure I am considering all the important parameters but I never use them to do the actual calculations. I have found too many that either don't consider all the parameters I want, aren't configurable enough, and some that are simply incorrectly implemented.
One example of this specific calculator is that it compares all vehicles in the same graph, and all vehicles use the same parameters. However, not every vehicle actually has the same parameters. For example, the resell value of different brands varies significantly. The maintenance cost of different brands varies significantly. I don't want to be too harsh on this because it does provide some value and seems to be implemented by a well meaning student. I just would never suggest someone use it to actual compare the cost of ownership of different vehicles.
EDIT: Another thing that's hard to model is road trips. During which time gas prices fluctuate and electricity prices shot up.
Because if you’re putting modest mileage on a vehicle you probably don’t need to worry much about maintenance beyond a once a year maybe scheduled visit to the dealer for a long time. That’s worth a lot to
Me.
the supply of used cars isn't what it used to be post-covid. Some people end up leasing a new car simply because their used car search was extremely slim pickings.
When in a conversation about keeping car expenses low, mentioning leasing seems like a bizarre thing to do.
My understanding is that a lease price is essentially the purchase price minus the expected value at the end of the lease (Plus a few dollars for profits). ie, A $50,000 car that's expected to be worth $30,000 after 3 years might have you pay $25,000 over the course of the 3 years, which would be about $695/mo.
But frequently, in reality, I would see such a car being leased for $750/month with $3,000 due at signing or some shit.
Every time I see lease offers, I do the math and they seem like an incredibly bad deal. Even if the lease expenses are a business tax deduction, I don't see how in the long term it ends up a better deal than buying new over the course of 10 years.
Didn't lease, but did buy new due to this factor. I was looking for a rather modest, cheap, reliable, used sedan. Prices were all well over $14/$15k (for a 2015-2017, and nearly the cost of new after that). At that point, it made sense to look at a new Kia/Hyundai in the lower price range and gain a decade's worth of warranty.
Yeah. In America it's pretty clear that they're using the high battery cost to say "all EVs are expensive so they start at 50k and only go up" so they can crank their profit margins.
Batteries are unavoidably expensive, but the only market they've been targeting are the wealthy, so they're largely burning through the enthusiasts and people on the border. Of course that market slows down, you've gotta open up the rest of the market to keep it accelerating. Maybe make something other than F-150-alikes.
The F150 is the best selling vehicle in the US. That’s not an anomaly, the top 3 are all trucks, and 5 of the top 10 are trucks. Making a great EV truck is an enormous market opportunity.
No one wants to chase the low end market in the US. Even if the tech pans out it just means more work faster resource depletion given the infra isn't there yet, and less profits. And then you think well a hybrid would fill the void better anyways if you have to sacrifice range for cheaper EVs.
> No one wants to chase the low end market in the US.
Geely, BYD and other Chinese manufacturers are chasing the affordable end of the global market, regardless of if US and EU manufacturers also do so or not.
Obviously they would prefer not; as it leaves the market wide open to them. Either they will also sell these affordable cars in the USA; or the USA will lose out.
But I expect Tesla and Hyundai/Kia will be there as well before too long.
Add a lifetime carbon tax to car purchases and EVs would make a lot more sense.
Even without that they will make sense soon. Expecting new tech to start out at the same place on the mass-production supply chain curve as the internal combustion engine is idealistic. It takes time to reach economies of scale but it will happen.
As the article says, the best approach to addressing climate change is not to replace cars with EVs 1:1, but to rethink invest in public infrastructure in high-population areas so that people don't feel like they have to buy a car.
This is a more thoughtful approach to addressing the problem than simply levying a tax on people who can't afford what still appears to be a rich man's toy.
The best way to address climate change would be to annihilate the human population. Since we're not going to do that (presumably), we have to come up with a practical, viable and acceptable solution.
Altering American culture to love public transportation is significantly less practical than offering them EVs. The only time I can think of that a campaign like that might have worked is with smoking and how many decades did that take (and how many people still smoke anyway)?
I think it’s more that the EV battery adds $10k to the cost of the car. So they add lots of cheap bells and whistles (ie touchscreens) to justify that additional price.
Part of that is making electricity cheaper, which means finding better alternatives to renewables, for the time being. Realistically only nuclear can get there until more breakthroughs happen in solar. Instead we're seeing electricity go up and this is only going to make people double down on gas cars, moving to a different state if needed.
Making a working tech cheaper is easier than trying to discover new tech that we don't even know will have enough output. Also, if they were that expensive then I would think they wouldn't get built at all, but there are a lot of nuclear plants, not to mention we can always continue investing in renewables and eventually phase them out.
The solution for 80% of the world is solar, wind, batteries; and batteries are the only thing that matters price-wise. We have acceptable battery technologies today, the thing that is missing is manufacturing at the scale needed. Closer to the poles nuclear and geothermal make sense to add, since solar isn't as reliable and doesn't produce as much. But cheap batteries make nuclear cheaper too. It is better to keep your multi-billion dollar facility outputting near 100% of its capacity all of the time, batteries let you smooth out the peaks and valleys of demand. So all paths with less natural gas and coal lead to more batteries, they are they thing that matter.
Right, and I would include battery tech as part of renewables in practice. I really hope the next generation of batteries (i.e. solid state, and/or no rare earth metals needed, and more density) is enough of a jump for the wider change to happen.
I mean year in magical utopia world we would have build them already and it would be great, but we’d also have had serious electric cars from American auto mfgs 30 years ago in that world.
instead in our real world the auto and oil companies literally sabotaged the tech and repossessed the early vehicles that owners loved.
America gave away it's manufacturing base to Japan in the 70s and Japan gave it to Korea and China, and China gave it to Vietnam.
There are more Chinese iPhones in American hands than in any other country. Some of them run a particularly nefarious Israeli Spyware that could get you killed if deployed on behalf of a particular kind of customer.
There's plenty of Black Mirror style dystopia right within US corporate policy that doesn't involve CCP panopticon fear mongering.
A US woman discovers that her Mercedes allows her abusive ex-husband to track the car movements and follow her. Eve though she got a court order giving her sole control of the car and was making the loan payments herself, the company refused to rescind access to her abusive ex because his name was still on the title.
As you say, part of the problem is also that the loan was in the husband's name.
> the loan and title were in his name, a decision the couple had made because he had a better credit score than hers.
Curious, what outcome would you expect instead? As in: no tracking functionality, or tracking that can be disabled by the driver, or customer support processing the request, or saner credit score processes, or something else?
I would expect Mercedes to abide by a court order. This wouldn't be an issue if it wasn't a "smart car" and just has a plain old set of keys, the company wouldnt need to be involved at all. But they have an additional responsibility here because they can override the legal system in this case with no recourse.
Frankly they're lucky the ex husband killed himself. Could have been a very expensive lawsuit if he ended up hurting someone.
Batteries are too expensive for cheap cars. There won't be $1k beater EVs for a _long_ time. Just the raw metals in any decently sized battery is worth 2-3 times that. Even more if the battery cells are still in working condition, it can be repurposed for multiple uses.
Also expensive cars have bigger profit margins - which is the real reason =)
Raw material cost of a car is under 50 percent. An ICE drivetrain isn't really a huge part of that. Interiors, paint, suspension, electronics, HVAC are all still costs in an EV. So even if motors, batteries, motor controllers, cooling were all free, EV costs won't decimate ICE costs.
> When EVs were becoming popular, I was expecting to see super cheap, under $10k vehicles.
And you will see super cheap evs as soon as the market for those thinking they are saving the planet is exhausted. As with any product, it’s easier to exploit emotional buyers. And once tesla and others will want to tap into the practical buyer market prices will drop.
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 more expensive vehicles, which take longer to "fuel up", and more expensive to insure, and they have a shorter range. Then everyone wonders how come not as many people want to buy them.
Sure, for some, it's a moral choice. We are saving the planet so it makes sense to pay more and wait 30 minutes to charge or whatever instead of 3 minutes. That idea is valid but it will run out of steam. In the end, it it has to make sense economically. Even a Joe Schmoe who could care less about saving the planet should be able to price compare and say "Hey, look, $8k for new car with more torque and cheaper to maintain! I'll take it over a $18k Honda Civic". It has to be that simple to make sense financially.