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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, 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
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.
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 would be nice if the cars from China could be purchased in the US
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.
Is there any advantage for a hybrid car using the alternative fuel license plate?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, 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
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.