I want to see if Kei-trucks can break into the market. The last time a new product form broke into the US market, it was during a big recession (japanese auto-makers got compact cars in). People will value functionality over form if we get into a prolonged recession.
I love that the world is loving kei trucks and kei cars right now.
I see them pretty often in Australia which also has an anti yank-tank movement (tongue in cheek name for a big american "truck")
That said our most popular cars are still all three tonne utes or SUVs so it's a small movement.
You are right to note the economic situation being a big part of vehicle decisions. Fuel prices has been a driving force, and image plays a big part too.
The chicken tax pretty much makes this impossible. The only domestic manufacturer interested in cheap light-duty trucks is Slate, which is still in the development phase and faces a lot of risks, notably high cost for the segment.
It's too late anyway- China and the other Eastern players have already won. Western Autos are basically walking dead, artificially kept alive by export controls and tariffs.
Until HN can have an honest discussion on how far behind West is in so many aspects - without blaming Trump for it glibly - each day that passes is a day it falls further behind.
The moment you face the truth is the moment you can start doing something about it.
Facing the truth also requires acknowledging the roadblocks. Largely due to Trump but Al Republican and conservative culture, and structural, and some permitting etc.
Saying that Trump is not allowed to be blamed is symptomatic of just how damaged the public discourse is. Too many snowflakes who are terrified of facing basic accountability for the consequences of their beliefs and actions.
Not long ago, Tesla dealerships were being firebombed and random Teslas vandalized. The perps were lefties, intent upon trying to harm Elon Musk. There were a great many appreciative onlookers in left leaning subreddits and similar places.
Politically, it seems the people slowing EV adaption can be on both sides of the aisle.
Unsurprising. GM/Ford will fail once again, along with the BMW/MB/VW and then the government will bail them out again... for the 4th time in 30 years. There is no incentive to be better.
Making sub-$100k EV's and then crying that consumer demand is low doesn't make any sense. Meanwhile, the Chinese and Korean EVs are absolutely eating this market by making sub 35k and 50k EV's respectively. In California, 1/4 new vehicles registered was an EV in 2024. By the end of 2025, it was 1/3.
The rest of the world will continue to embrace EV's, and the western (and Japanese) propaganda machine will do what it always does when the rest of the world does better: xenophobia, racism followed by screaming that EVs are a failure.
It's good you also mentioned "(and Japanese)" regarding the propaganda machine. I don't think it will crash any time soon, but considering how much the economy is driven by the automotive industry, it's scary to see how much the incumbent companies are doing all they can to stifle electric vehicle advances. They aren't just ignoring them, they're doing all they can to spread FUD. To think there was a good start with hybrids too. There's also the ongoing hydrogen fuel attempt which starts to look like a sunk cost fallacy. If nothing changes, the decline is going to be a gradual irreversible ugly one layered on top of the demographic problem.
One of the big risks for manufacturers seem to be that EVs are fundamentally more compatible with automated production and allows simplifications to the car stack. It would seem that the costs and risks of the keeping the ICE stack alive will keep increasing over time as it loses relevance to EVs.
Every time I think about EVs, I become filled with dread thinking about what will happen if an area loses power for an extended period of time. I used to live in an area that had transformers blow from rain showers.
At least you could hook up a generator to pump gas at a gas station.
:/ Life's about trade offs.
Edit: Whoops.. Im not against EVs to be clear. But from a safety POV, having two different energy sources is safer than having one. Im not sure if you'll understand this if you haven't lived in a very snowy state.
You could also flip that and talk about the risks of when your gasoline supply get shut down due to some event. With an EV stack you can generate your power locally and add resilience that way.
my area lost power for about 3 days last week and I ran all of my house's critical systems from my EV. it was great - silent, unlike the old generator, and not counting the sunk cost of the car, extremely cheap. Cost maybe $5 in electricity to keep the furnace, refrigerator/freezer, and internet on for 3 days, contrasted with probably $50 in gasoline for a similar amount of time.
If the outage had been longer, I could have made a half-hour trip to an area that had working EV fast chargers and come back with another 5-6 days of power for the house.
How expensive is the setup to tie in your vehicle into a house grid? Or can it be something as crude as running extension cables to plug into a powerstrip attached to the car?
I did it cheap - I just ran extension cables from my car (previously from a generator). I have a manual transfer switch at my furnace to safely switch between utility power and extension cable power, and just replugged appliances. I think everything drew on average about 800 watts, up to maybe 1500. I split it between 2 1.8 kW 110v outlets in the car.
That sounds like the extreme version of "but I need a fuel car because I want to drive it to France once a year for holiday". Driving something around all year for a once-a-year event is silly, but this is just insane. In a good life, you don't need this fallback from grid power even once in your lifetime!
At least, not beyond the inconvenience that is having to stay at home like 1 unplanned day per several decades. That's still three and three quarters of a nine of uptime even if you'd get the recent Iberian peninsula event every 10 years, and assumes you emptied the battery coincidentally the day before the outage. If you're not an EMT or power plant technician, you're doing more harm than good by being the person who can drive to work during a power outage and find that you're the only one there and nothing works anyway
Considering how expensive cars are, I do find the trip-to-grandma reasoning useful. Most people want a single vehicle that can do everything. Dismissing that with, "Well just drive differently" or "You can do the hassle that is renting a car" is not a compelling sell. What if I want to do my vacation trips during the holidays where rentals are already booked?
I think full EVs are great if the lifestyle allows it, but plug-in hybrids seem a better fit for most people without requiring undue compromise.
What trip to grandma can't you do anymore with an EV?
> What if I want to do my vacation trips during the holidays where rentals are already booked?
The same as you do when any other part is booked out: go elsewhere or do something else. I don't buy a backup train in case the one I want is booked out one of the next ten summers
Consider also the lifestyle change that's "growing older more healthily" by not having a population sit in exhaust fumes for 2x the daily average commute length
We’ve already had some experiences with this in Florida after a hurricane. EVs do quite well, turns out, better in many cases than gas cars. The grid is a very high priority for fixing, more so even than gas supplies.
When a hurricane impacted my area last year, I kept seeing Facebook posts for a week or two afterward from people asking where to find gas. Meanwhile, the power never went out, so my EV was able to charge without issue.
The common advice among "preppers" and more anxious individuals is to never let your gas gauge go below half or 1/4 tank. I think people are much more anxious than they realize about running out of gas in a black swan event.
Rooftop solar is getting cheaper, easier, more efficient, and more reliable every year.
If you live in an area that is poor enough that this is not an option, it loses power frequently due to weather, and no one in power cares enough to fix it, that genuinely sucks, and I feel for you. But, as sibling comments said, some other poor areas don't get gasoline shipments in a timely manner—being poor and neglected is just always going to suck in various ways, and the solution is not to avoid any technological advancements that remove the crutch that your particular poor and neglected area is using to get through it a little easier, but to find ways to reduce the poverty and neglect.
And, frankly, solar power and electric vehicles are both great tools to help with that, especially when used together.
I bought an EV. it's fun to drive and it's affordable to recharge. However, I wouldn't buy another anytime soon. The depreciation is horrible. They are basically destined for a landfill once they no longer work. I can go to a junk yard and pull an engine for my Toyota tomorrow if I need to.
Massive depreciation means cheap used EVs. I don't see the issue.
Luxury ICE vehicles also depreciate rapidly, and yet they're quite popular. Plus EVs are likely to have longer usable lifetimes -- though with different issues -- than gas cars.
Luxury vehicles I've never understood, especially the non Lexus variety. so don't expect me to explain that.
Due to all the people in my fmaily I have 4 cars so I wouldn't go from 1 EV to 2. If the current EV gets destroyed I do think that used EVs are the right way to go and would buy a used one for sure.
They do still feel like throwaway cars. I'm not sure how you can argue they will have a longer lifetime. If the battery dies surely no one is replacing that at cost? It's more than the car is worth. At least with an ICE each part can be replaced in your driveway with a few hundred in tools and the part probably exists locally used or new.
Rather disappointing as an environmentalist. But the established freedoms of the car culture and price sensitivity in NA (probably parts of Europe, idk) hard to overcome — “what if I want to road trip though!”
That being said, I think Ford’s shift to a range extended EV makes sense for the truck space. I’m sure someone has crunched the numbers on emissions but getting more market share on hybrid/plugin/range extended EVs are definitely better then ICE only. Plenty of manufacturers are offering hybrids- however, the government has historically been too heavily lobbied to push for hybrids by default and reduce ICE only uptake with some kind of sin tax.
Plug-in hybrids also have tax advantages in some jurisdictions.
E.g. in Georgia (US), EV owners have to pay a $234 annual alternative fuel vehicle fee.
Plug in hybrid owners may choose to have a alternative fuel license plate or standard license plate. If you opt for the standard plate, you don't have to pay the alternative fuel vehicle fee.
Wait, you pay extra for driving a cleaner vehicle when you live in that region? I'm not sure if I understand it correctly or if that's the full picture. Do EVs pay less for road taxes, emission fees, or get some different rebate that this fee is meant to balance?
It’s an attempt to get revenue that would otherwise be collected as gas tax. In practice it’s usually about twice as much as a gas car would generate in tax proceeds. Even in EV friendly states like the PNW.
In some cities with HOV lanes on expressways having an EV (with plates) lets you use those lanes with only one person in the car. How important that is to any given buyer obviously depends on where and when they're driving.
I've already been roadtripping across Europe multiple times in an EV that needs 20 minutes to recharge per ~3 hours of driving (e-GMP). To me this is great, and wouldn't be faster in an ICE, since I need the breaks anyway. EV charging is unattended, so it takes less of my time than refuelling. The chargers are already everywhere, even in rural areas and in the freakin' Alps.
I know some people want a pee-in-a-bottle cannonball run, but that doesn't make sense to me. At distances where charging time starts to add up, flying is already much quicker.
Battery swap. Great for industry growth, but the manufacturers selling into US and Europe decided not to go there and disputable claims "it can't work" and false applications of Gresham's law are used to explain why.
The Gresham's law thing: money is just a transfer token. Batteries have a use value. The agents who could profit from hoarding good batteries, don't get to achieve the income of renting them.
It's working fine for scooters, and in China for cars and trucks.
Everyone is now betting on solid state getting both range and rapid charge.
An EV with a degraded battery and miles per charge is still very useful for retired people who are tired of traveling long distance and can plug in at home. There should be a good market for them.
I tend to keep my cars over 200,000 miles. Today's cars last a long time. Still, looking back over the past three year's expenses between 150,000 and 200,000 miles, almost all of them relate to engine peripherals - like a new exhaust system, work on emission controls, and a new gas tank, which an EV doesn't have - or brakes, which on an EV last much longer.
The incentives for such a swapping system are completely busted.
Think of existing swap infrastructure out there, like propane tank swaps. People already use these systems to rinse defective or expired tanks all the time, and that overhead simply gets built into the price.
Now imagine if you could refill a propane tank at home by just plugging it in to your wall. The only reasons to use such a service are now exceptional cases like travel, or to move defective items.
For every new tank introduced to the supply, on average, how many good-for-good swaps will occur before the supplier gets a defective one? Take the cost of a new one and divide it by that average and that is the minimum overhead for a swap.
For batteries, that number is likely in the hundreds of dollars.
Battery swap would just about eliminate planned obsolescence in cars- EVs should last just about forever if the batteries aren’t impossible to replace. The only real wear items in an EV drivetrain are a few cheap bearings that already will probably last a million miles. This would devastate the auto industry.
What about the interior? There’s no one thing you can point to in a car interior and say “that’s no good after X years” but we’ve all seen the interior of old cars.
The batteries in modern EVs will last the lifetime of the vehicle [0] but what factor(s) determine that lifetime are unknown I think.
I'm not sure that tracks with my experience, plenty of 20-30 year old cars still running around. The people upgrading every few years do it for financial or image reasons rather than because the car stopped working.
Warranty anxiety is probably a big factor too, which could be legislated. Imagine how reliable cars would be if a 30 year warranty on drivetrain components was mandatory.
I don’t think it’s planned (car companies have been competing heavily on lifespan for decades with results) but battery lifetimes seem to already be such that it can last basically forever.
But most people replace their ICE looong before the battery dies. I’d assume the same would happen for EVs too.
That sounds great. We can focus on planning the obsolescence of the auto industry rather than having the industry continue to extract rents on society. Of course this will be a political nightmare, but it does seem like truly the sooner the better.
Most EVs can have the battery swapped in less time than it takes to drop in a new engine. The real issue IMO is reliable availability of refurb batteries at a reasonable price, and reliability at least on par with an engine.
Our family has EVs and rents a gas car for the occasional road trip. We did the math and it’s cheaper than buying and owning and doing the maintenance on a gas car.
If we did long road trips a lot we’d probably get rid of one EV and get an older gas car for that. It wouldn’t be the daily driver.
You are not allowed to decide how everyone else should live. But just for the sake of argument, take a trip to Montana and get back to me on how well universal EVs would work in much of the US. They're fine for urban and suburban areas. They aren't so great for agricultural work, and certainly not great for people who live in places you probably haven't visited. I don't even think EVs are a solution for people in Nebraska, let alone places where the weather gets really extreme.
Unpopular idea: the personal automobile segment will shrink so rapidly when autonomous, ubiquitous, low-cost EV robotaxis reach widespread proliferation, that many of the existing automotive manufacturers today will become increasingly commercially non-viable and wind down operations anyway, only further accelerating a trend that has already begun due to the rampant, multifaceted rise in total vehicle ownership costs far above CPI inflation.
Environmentalists should be happy about this either way. A fleet of high utilization autonomous vehicles will increase utilization rates of each automobile that is still on the road substantially, serving more people with fewer raw materials. Not to mention that as of right now, all of the leading contenders for commercially viable robotaxi fleets are on EV platforms anyway.
It's not that, by and large, over a longer time horizon, new gasoline cars are going to replace these EVs disappearing from the consumer-owned automobile segment so much as EV robotaxis will be gradually replacing almost all consumer-owned vehicles. Enthusiasts will still have their track toys, but as an economic mode of transportation, the personally owned automobile is going the way of the horse and buggy.
one step further - the overall market for vehicle transport will go down as cities smarten up and build in ways they can afford, rather than scaling on bigger roads that go further away and require tons of infrastructure to service.
the bigger replacement will still be walking and scooter-like EVs that are cheaper for everyone
It would be the end of the US auto industry. Of course they kind of deserve it. The Japanese also beat them to a pulp for much the same reason: refusal to offer practical affordable efficient vehicles to the silent majority who just want a fucking car.
I want to see if Kei-trucks can break into the market. The last time a new product form broke into the US market, it was during a big recession (japanese auto-makers got compact cars in). People will value functionality over form if we get into a prolonged recession.
I love that the world is loving kei trucks and kei cars right now.
I see them pretty often in Australia which also has an anti yank-tank movement (tongue in cheek name for a big american "truck")
That said our most popular cars are still all three tonne utes or SUVs so it's a small movement.
You are right to note the economic situation being a big part of vehicle decisions. Fuel prices has been a driving force, and image plays a big part too.
The chicken tax pretty much makes this impossible. The only domestic manufacturer interested in cheap light-duty trucks is Slate, which is still in the development phase and faces a lot of risks, notably high cost for the segment.
I think big vehicles are ugly and stupid so I like the form as well as the function.
It's too late anyway- China and the other Eastern players have already won. Western Autos are basically walking dead, artificially kept alive by export controls and tariffs.
Until HN can have an honest discussion on how far behind West is in so many aspects - without blaming Trump for it glibly - each day that passes is a day it falls further behind.
The moment you face the truth is the moment you can start doing something about it.
Facing the truth also requires acknowledging the roadblocks. Largely due to Trump but Al Republican and conservative culture, and structural, and some permitting etc.
Saying that Trump is not allowed to be blamed is symptomatic of just how damaged the public discourse is. Too many snowflakes who are terrified of facing basic accountability for the consequences of their beliefs and actions.
Not long ago, Tesla dealerships were being firebombed and random Teslas vandalized. The perps were lefties, intent upon trying to harm Elon Musk. There were a great many appreciative onlookers in left leaning subreddits and similar places.
Politically, it seems the people slowing EV adaption can be on both sides of the aisle.
Unsurprising. GM/Ford will fail once again, along with the BMW/MB/VW and then the government will bail them out again... for the 4th time in 30 years. There is no incentive to be better.
Making sub-$100k EV's and then crying that consumer demand is low doesn't make any sense. Meanwhile, the Chinese and Korean EVs are absolutely eating this market by making sub 35k and 50k EV's respectively. In California, 1/4 new vehicles registered was an EV in 2024. By the end of 2025, it was 1/3.
The rest of the world will continue to embrace EV's, and the western (and Japanese) propaganda machine will do what it always does when the rest of the world does better: xenophobia, racism followed by screaming that EVs are a failure.
Could you give some examples of the Western propaganda machine producing xenophobia and racism?
It's good you also mentioned "(and Japanese)" regarding the propaganda machine. I don't think it will crash any time soon, but considering how much the economy is driven by the automotive industry, it's scary to see how much the incumbent companies are doing all they can to stifle electric vehicle advances. They aren't just ignoring them, they're doing all they can to spread FUD. To think there was a good start with hybrids too. There's also the ongoing hydrogen fuel attempt which starts to look like a sunk cost fallacy. If nothing changes, the decline is going to be a gradual irreversible ugly one layered on top of the demographic problem.
One of the big risks for manufacturers seem to be that EVs are fundamentally more compatible with automated production and allows simplifications to the car stack. It would seem that the costs and risks of the keeping the ICE stack alive will keep increasing over time as it loses relevance to EVs.
Every time I think about EVs, I become filled with dread thinking about what will happen if an area loses power for an extended period of time. I used to live in an area that had transformers blow from rain showers.
At least you could hook up a generator to pump gas at a gas station.
:/ Life's about trade offs.
Edit: Whoops.. Im not against EVs to be clear. But from a safety POV, having two different energy sources is safer than having one. Im not sure if you'll understand this if you haven't lived in a very snowy state.
You could also flip that and talk about the risks of when your gasoline supply get shut down due to some event. With an EV stack you can generate your power locally and add resilience that way.
my area lost power for about 3 days last week and I ran all of my house's critical systems from my EV. it was great - silent, unlike the old generator, and not counting the sunk cost of the car, extremely cheap. Cost maybe $5 in electricity to keep the furnace, refrigerator/freezer, and internet on for 3 days, contrasted with probably $50 in gasoline for a similar amount of time.
If the outage had been longer, I could have made a half-hour trip to an area that had working EV fast chargers and come back with another 5-6 days of power for the house.
How expensive is the setup to tie in your vehicle into a house grid? Or can it be something as crude as running extension cables to plug into a powerstrip attached to the car?
I did it cheap - I just ran extension cables from my car (previously from a generator). I have a manual transfer switch at my furnace to safely switch between utility power and extension cable power, and just replugged appliances. I think everything drew on average about 800 watts, up to maybe 1500. I split it between 2 1.8 kW 110v outlets in the car.
That's why Vehicle to the Grid / Home is so exciting. Your multi-kWh car battery can power your home for several days.
https://carnewschina.com/2024/12/05/byd-struck-deal-with-jap...
That sounds like the extreme version of "but I need a fuel car because I want to drive it to France once a year for holiday". Driving something around all year for a once-a-year event is silly, but this is just insane. In a good life, you don't need this fallback from grid power even once in your lifetime!
At least, not beyond the inconvenience that is having to stay at home like 1 unplanned day per several decades. That's still three and three quarters of a nine of uptime even if you'd get the recent Iberian peninsula event every 10 years, and assumes you emptied the battery coincidentally the day before the outage. If you're not an EMT or power plant technician, you're doing more harm than good by being the person who can drive to work during a power outage and find that you're the only one there and nothing works anyway
Considering how expensive cars are, I do find the trip-to-grandma reasoning useful. Most people want a single vehicle that can do everything. Dismissing that with, "Well just drive differently" or "You can do the hassle that is renting a car" is not a compelling sell. What if I want to do my vacation trips during the holidays where rentals are already booked?
I think full EVs are great if the lifestyle allows it, but plug-in hybrids seem a better fit for most people without requiring undue compromise.
What trip to grandma can't you do anymore with an EV?
> What if I want to do my vacation trips during the holidays where rentals are already booked?
The same as you do when any other part is booked out: go elsewhere or do something else. I don't buy a backup train in case the one I want is booked out one of the next ten summers
Consider also the lifestyle change that's "growing older more healthily" by not having a population sit in exhaust fumes for 2x the daily average commute length
We’ve already had some experiences with this in Florida after a hurricane. EVs do quite well, turns out, better in many cases than gas cars. The grid is a very high priority for fixing, more so even than gas supplies.
When a hurricane impacted my area last year, I kept seeing Facebook posts for a week or two afterward from people asking where to find gas. Meanwhile, the power never went out, so my EV was able to charge without issue.
The common advice among "preppers" and more anxious individuals is to never let your gas gauge go below half or 1/4 tank. I think people are much more anxious than they realize about running out of gas in a black swan event.
I worry about that, too, but with my gas car. :)
More batteries.
I cannot believe this is a serious question.
A small battery pack can easily run most essential domestic services.
Rooftop solar is getting cheaper, easier, more efficient, and more reliable every year.
If you live in an area that is poor enough that this is not an option, it loses power frequently due to weather, and no one in power cares enough to fix it, that genuinely sucks, and I feel for you. But, as sibling comments said, some other poor areas don't get gasoline shipments in a timely manner—being poor and neglected is just always going to suck in various ways, and the solution is not to avoid any technological advancements that remove the crutch that your particular poor and neglected area is using to get through it a little easier, but to find ways to reduce the poverty and neglect.
And, frankly, solar power and electric vehicles are both great tools to help with that, especially when used together.
I bought an EV. it's fun to drive and it's affordable to recharge. However, I wouldn't buy another anytime soon. The depreciation is horrible. They are basically destined for a landfill once they no longer work. I can go to a junk yard and pull an engine for my Toyota tomorrow if I need to.
Massive depreciation means cheap used EVs. I don't see the issue.
Luxury ICE vehicles also depreciate rapidly, and yet they're quite popular. Plus EVs are likely to have longer usable lifetimes -- though with different issues -- than gas cars.
Luxury vehicles I've never understood, especially the non Lexus variety. so don't expect me to explain that.
Due to all the people in my fmaily I have 4 cars so I wouldn't go from 1 EV to 2. If the current EV gets destroyed I do think that used EVs are the right way to go and would buy a used one for sure.
They do still feel like throwaway cars. I'm not sure how you can argue they will have a longer lifetime. If the battery dies surely no one is replacing that at cost? It's more than the car is worth. At least with an ICE each part can be replaced in your driveway with a few hundred in tools and the part probably exists locally used or new.
Rather disappointing as an environmentalist. But the established freedoms of the car culture and price sensitivity in NA (probably parts of Europe, idk) hard to overcome — “what if I want to road trip though!”
That being said, I think Ford’s shift to a range extended EV makes sense for the truck space. I’m sure someone has crunched the numbers on emissions but getting more market share on hybrid/plugin/range extended EVs are definitely better then ICE only. Plenty of manufacturers are offering hybrids- however, the government has historically been too heavily lobbied to push for hybrids by default and reduce ICE only uptake with some kind of sin tax.
Plug-in hybrids also have tax advantages in some jurisdictions.
E.g. in Georgia (US), EV owners have to pay a $234 annual alternative fuel vehicle fee.
Plug in hybrid owners may choose to have a alternative fuel license plate or standard license plate. If you opt for the standard plate, you don't have to pay the alternative fuel vehicle fee.
Wait, you pay extra for driving a cleaner vehicle when you live in that region? I'm not sure if I understand it correctly or if that's the full picture. Do EVs pay less for road taxes, emission fees, or get some different rebate that this fee is meant to balance?
It’s an attempt to get revenue that would otherwise be collected as gas tax. In practice it’s usually about twice as much as a gas car would generate in tax proceeds. Even in EV friendly states like the PNW.
Is there any advantage for a hybrid car using the alternative fuel license plate?
In some cities with HOV lanes on expressways having an EV (with plates) lets you use those lanes with only one person in the car. How important that is to any given buyer obviously depends on where and when they're driving.
I've already been roadtripping across Europe multiple times in an EV that needs 20 minutes to recharge per ~3 hours of driving (e-GMP). To me this is great, and wouldn't be faster in an ICE, since I need the breaks anyway. EV charging is unattended, so it takes less of my time than refuelling. The chargers are already everywhere, even in rural areas and in the freakin' Alps.
I know some people want a pee-in-a-bottle cannonball run, but that doesn't make sense to me. At distances where charging time starts to add up, flying is already much quicker.
Battery swap. Great for industry growth, but the manufacturers selling into US and Europe decided not to go there and disputable claims "it can't work" and false applications of Gresham's law are used to explain why.
The Gresham's law thing: money is just a transfer token. Batteries have a use value. The agents who could profit from hoarding good batteries, don't get to achieve the income of renting them.
It's working fine for scooters, and in China for cars and trucks.
Everyone is now betting on solid state getting both range and rapid charge.
An EV with a degraded battery and miles per charge is still very useful for retired people who are tired of traveling long distance and can plug in at home. There should be a good market for them.
I tend to keep my cars over 200,000 miles. Today's cars last a long time. Still, looking back over the past three year's expenses between 150,000 and 200,000 miles, almost all of them relate to engine peripherals - like a new exhaust system, work on emission controls, and a new gas tank, which an EV doesn't have - or brakes, which on an EV last much longer.
The incentives for such a swapping system are completely busted.
Think of existing swap infrastructure out there, like propane tank swaps. People already use these systems to rinse defective or expired tanks all the time, and that overhead simply gets built into the price.
Now imagine if you could refill a propane tank at home by just plugging it in to your wall. The only reasons to use such a service are now exceptional cases like travel, or to move defective items.
For every new tank introduced to the supply, on average, how many good-for-good swaps will occur before the supplier gets a defective one? Take the cost of a new one and divide it by that average and that is the minimum overhead for a swap.
For batteries, that number is likely in the hundreds of dollars.
Battery swap would just about eliminate planned obsolescence in cars- EVs should last just about forever if the batteries aren’t impossible to replace. The only real wear items in an EV drivetrain are a few cheap bearings that already will probably last a million miles. This would devastate the auto industry.
What about the interior? There’s no one thing you can point to in a car interior and say “that’s no good after X years” but we’ve all seen the interior of old cars. The batteries in modern EVs will last the lifetime of the vehicle [0] but what factor(s) determine that lifetime are unknown I think.
0. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/07/heres-one-way-we-know-t...
I'm not sure that tracks with my experience, plenty of 20-30 year old cars still running around. The people upgrading every few years do it for financial or image reasons rather than because the car stopped working.
Warranty anxiety is probably a big factor too, which could be legislated. Imagine how reliable cars would be if a 30 year warranty on drivetrain components was mandatory.
I don’t think it’s planned (car companies have been competing heavily on lifespan for decades with results) but battery lifetimes seem to already be such that it can last basically forever.
But most people replace their ICE looong before the battery dies. I’d assume the same would happen for EVs too.
That sounds great. We can focus on planning the obsolescence of the auto industry rather than having the industry continue to extract rents on society. Of course this will be a political nightmare, but it does seem like truly the sooner the better.
My two biggest concerns buying a used EV: - privacy (my #1 concern for any vehicle right now) - how long the used battery will last
I can only hope we solve batteries making EVs throw-away vehicles either with quick battery swaps or with batteries that truly last a lifetime.
Most EVs can have the battery swapped in less time than it takes to drop in a new engine. The real issue IMO is reliable availability of refurb batteries at a reasonable price, and reliability at least on par with an engine.
Battery life isn't a concern with current EVs.
Our family has EVs and rents a gas car for the occasional road trip. We did the math and it’s cheaper than buying and owning and doing the maintenance on a gas car.
If we did long road trips a lot we’d probably get rid of one EV and get an older gas car for that. It wouldn’t be the daily driver.
You are not allowed to decide how everyone else should live. But just for the sake of argument, take a trip to Montana and get back to me on how well universal EVs would work in much of the US. They're fine for urban and suburban areas. They aren't so great for agricultural work, and certainly not great for people who live in places you probably haven't visited. I don't even think EVs are a solution for people in Nebraska, let alone places where the weather gets really extreme.
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Unpopular idea: the personal automobile segment will shrink so rapidly when autonomous, ubiquitous, low-cost EV robotaxis reach widespread proliferation, that many of the existing automotive manufacturers today will become increasingly commercially non-viable and wind down operations anyway, only further accelerating a trend that has already begun due to the rampant, multifaceted rise in total vehicle ownership costs far above CPI inflation.
Environmentalists should be happy about this either way. A fleet of high utilization autonomous vehicles will increase utilization rates of each automobile that is still on the road substantially, serving more people with fewer raw materials. Not to mention that as of right now, all of the leading contenders for commercially viable robotaxi fleets are on EV platforms anyway.
It's not that, by and large, over a longer time horizon, new gasoline cars are going to replace these EVs disappearing from the consumer-owned automobile segment so much as EV robotaxis will be gradually replacing almost all consumer-owned vehicles. Enthusiasts will still have their track toys, but as an economic mode of transportation, the personally owned automobile is going the way of the horse and buggy.
one step further - the overall market for vehicle transport will go down as cities smarten up and build in ways they can afford, rather than scaling on bigger roads that go further away and require tons of infrastructure to service.
the bigger replacement will still be walking and scooter-like EVs that are cheaper for everyone
It will shrink even further when everyone has their own cheap personal teleportation device
It would be nice if the cars from China could be purchased in the US
It would be the end of the US auto industry. Of course they kind of deserve it. The Japanese also beat them to a pulp for much the same reason: refusal to offer practical affordable efficient vehicles to the silent majority who just want a fucking car.
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