there’s a lot of abbreviations in the article that I don’t understand or know lol. what’s a BEV? HPEV? etc.
Good article tho. From my limited view prices definitely are a huge limiting factor for electric vehicles, though they brought up a good point about the charge times. I guess if people treated it like their phones (charge every night) then it wouldn’t be a problem?
Honestly not surprised that demand has dropped for them though. Anyone who was interested in it has either decided it’s not worth it or already has one. Price puts them out of most people’s budget, and with rising costs and stagnant wages, people can’t really afford to take on monthly payments anymore. The environmental friendliness of them is heavily marketed, but won’t bring into effect the large scale, immediate change we need to slow climate change. Plus there’s the whole Tesla thing with delayed shipping and paywalling features built into software (admittedly not up to brush with Tesla tho).
For a while they were a new, impressive technology, and while I still think they’re cool, until they become very, very cheap and accessible, I won’t be getting one. The fad is starting to die out.
Yes completely agree. Especially the price, most people don’t want to pay or can’t afford a 45-50k usd car after subsidies. (This is the minimum pricepoint to get something comparable to an average gas car, both trim wise and to get an at least acceptable range)
And let’s be honest about the subsidies, they just allow the car companies to charge a higher price in the first place… I expect the price to be about the same after they are gone.
Got a Chevy Bolt EUV for 31K
Ok thats a good deal. Exception to the rule 😅 Sadly it is discontinued since the end of 2023.
yup. But it proves the whole cost issue is corporate BS greed. Much like GM’s new “no android auto or carplay” infotainment to force onstar subscription plan.
BEV?
BatteryElectricVehicle
HPEV
HybridPluginElectricVehicle
PHEV , plug in hybrid electric vehicle.
Should I’ve written [sic] next to it?
I’ve never understood what [sic] actually means… I am ignorant
it means the one citing did not fix any errors in grammar or spelling. it is cited just as it was written or said.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sic
The Latin adverb sic (pronounced [sɪk]; “thus”, “just as”; in full: sic erat scriptum, “thus was it written”)[1]
Got it. Thank you!
Meanwhile BYD is absolutely exploding in popularity. The problem isn’t “EV pessimism” it’s that some governments are fighting it so hard that it’s difficult out for citizens (USA) to make it work. Didn’t Biden promise a network of EV chargers across the nation?
And instead he made it illegal to import affordable Chinese cars. I’m sick of seeing articles phrased like this
Did Biden forget which about the magic wands, which you obviously know all about, that cause charge stations to spontaneously appear?
I mean, the first of the ones funded went into operation in December of 2023, which was the earliest it could as that is when funding was available and enough time had passed to get it permitted and installed, but wave the damned wand!!! demands internet padme. /sIn case anyone wants to know what is really going on with the EV charge stations;
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/first-ev-charging-station-funded-by-bidens-infrastructure-law-goes-online-2023-12-11/
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/biden-pours-623-million-into-ev-charging-void/Okay. He still handcuffed the EV market itself. To which the American companies have suddenly decided they can spend a few more years dumping their last ICE engines here.
Nope, not even close. Reality is that doing things with oversight takes time. Writing grant guidelines and requirements takes time. Reviewing bids, or whatever mechanism is chosen to allocate the very finite pool of money takes time. Adherence to financial regulations, as any Gov. program must, takes time. Permitting takes time. Construction contracting takes time. Construction takes time. And, oh look a year later and the charge stations are appearing.
Meeting the “instant gratification” crowd’s expectations is how you lose most of the funding to waste and fraud.It’s not about the charging stations. That’s what the other commenter was talking about. He made foreign EVs prohibitively expensive and domestic companies are shitting the bed. So your choice is a domestic EV that has quality control problems and is still the cost of a high trim ICE car, or pay luxury car price just to get a competent EV.
Or you can buy a very reliable ICE car for half the price.
Thus he handcuffed the EV market by artificially subjecting it to monopoly forces. Now everyone is suddenly wondering what went wrong like we’re all blind.
Not a whiff of truth to any of that.
Go read the IRA. Look up what’s eligible for the rebates now versus before.
Go read the the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and catch up to reality.
My doubt about electric vehicles is based on my doubt that the automotive industry will produce a quality product at a reasonable price. They’re no different than any other short-term profit based business.
My doubt is based on the fact that public transportation and bicycle infrastructure is the obvious better and more environmentally economical solution for the majority of the population that lives in cities.
I say this as a gear head, do we really want people on the roads that don’t want to be driving? It should be a choice, not a requirement. Plus, driving in cities sucks.
Cycling, an activity for those that wish to be killed by a monster truck.
That’s why I said cycling infrastructure
I agree. They seem to put everything in the cars and sell them as luxury EVs. Give me a basic car for $15k.
Toyota say they can make 90 hybrids using the same raw materials as one BEV or six PHEVs, leading to a 37-fold reduction in lifetime carbon emissions .
There’s the rub. ‘The market’ is demanding EVs with massive range-per-charge, leading to huuuge batteries (of which only 10% capacity is used, most of the time) and high prices. It’s all a bit crazy.
The market wants more Chevy Bolts. They didn’t have a 200 mile range. The market wants them so badly that GM unkilled the production line.
Of course they’re on the same EV platform as all of the other GM BEVs that’s a lemon lottery.
Volvo is going to beat the pants off this market with their 36k EV. Assuming of course our government doesn’t swoop in to protect GM and Ford.
Because protecting American car makers has worked so well the last time they tried…
Well somebody has to be the dumping ground for the oldest, least efficient, engines still in inventory. But yeah we don’t even have a robust domestic market to protect anymore. It’s effectively a triad.
90 hybrids using the same raw materials as one BEV or six PHEVs
** for one material, compared to one battery chemistry, for hypothetical vehicles
Did you catch the news a week or so ago about mining and ore processors shutting down because they got ahead of EV demand
Edit: fix auto-correct
Yes, I’m sure Toyota is massaging that statistic heavily. They are all about hybrids.
They are all about hybrids.
Truthfully, Toyota is all about ICE. They’re okay with hybrids because hybrids still contain an ICE. For Toyota there’s a good reason for this. They make a damn good ICE engine! They’ve spent decades and billions of dollars on refining efficiency of gasoline into motion, and into very long run times of those ICE engines for reliability. However, that also means cars without and ICE, like EVs are a threat to the ICE empire Toyota has spent its life building.
They have a history of actively working against EVs and even using their influence and money to affect public policy in government:
“Toyota has been lobbying governments to water-down emissions standards or oppose fossil-fuel vehicle phaseouts, according to a New York Times report. In the last four years, Toyota’s political contributions to US politicians and PACs have more than doubled. Those contributions have gotten the company into hot water, too. By donating to congresspeople who oppose tighter emissions limits, the company funded lawmakers who objected to certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election. Though Toyota had promised to stop doing so in January, it was caught making donations to the controversial legislators as recently as last month.” source
So Toyota is no friend of EVs.
That’s because nobody could have foreseen that early adopters are willing to pay a premium price and it’s not an unlimited market
Please tell me you’re being sarcastic?
I’m very skeptical of anything Toyota says about EVs.
Toyota Rav4 PHEV 18.1kWh Toyota Rav4 Hybrid ~1.6kWh Model Y LR 81kWh
81 / 18.1 = 4.48 PHEV 81 / 1.6 = 50.6 Hybrids
“Gas is a little more convenient, so lets destroy our sole, shared, communal ecosystem we all rely on from one breath to the next so I don’t have to wait for my car to charge.”
Oh humans, don’t ever change. For Earth’s long-term sake, we need to make sure we commit to our species’ mass suicide for short term profit and convenience. No half measures.
I mean its the same reason that EVs were considered before public transit.
Convenience over an actual solution, every time.
I would argue that moving to evs puts the cost burdens on companies and consumers where a functioning public transit system would cost a shit ton and only be able to occur by taxing people which people won’t vote for.
Also when I went on a walk today while visiting my mother, I knocked on a neighbors door to let them know their hazard lights were on in the driveway. I didn’t want their battery to die so I went to door. They wouldn’t even open the door while clearly being able to see my mother standing behind me who lives a few doors down. I had to speak through the door to tell her. That older lady will never take public transit with all the fear we have engrained into the public.
I can decide to buy an EV, and it will work with what I have available to give me essentially the same functionality as a gasoline car, but easier on the environment and more convenient to charge at home.
Transit requires a majority of the population and political leaders to decide, huge amounts of money and many years. I have very little say in it happening and it won’t happen for years
I think combining both makes sense: Usually I use the bike or public transit to get around. But today I rented an EV from a local rideshare company (Skoda Enyaq iV80 4x4) because we had to move an entire rack of equipment between two cities for work.
Most of US mass transit isn’t an option as the Gov. didn’t plan for it and have no intention of ever funding any but a token to assure workers have to pack lick sardines.
They won’t fund it because we aren’t a society, just a bunch of rugged individuals at each other’s throats over green paper scraps.
This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias as it fell was ‘Oh no, not again’. Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the Universe than we do now.
Transportation is a tiny fraction of carbon emissions. And EVs are a small improvement within that. Regulations and investment into things that matter are the only way out of this problem.
Transportation is 28% of GHG emissions. EVs are a huge improvement even before we add more clean energy on the grid.
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions
.
This is really sad. Their ambition should be to be leading innovators and build the best possible EVs and not just give up.
They never wanted to innovate. They have entire warehouses full of IC engines and related parts. It’s far cheaper to just slap those together.
I don’t think that is true. Big companies consist of many people. There are Mercedes people who want to be on the leading edge but they need support from management.
Well yeah. But they aren’t in charge are they?
IIRC, Mercedes also keeps making parts for all of their vehicles. Even all the classics.
Finally someone sees common sense. EV’s simply do not make sense. Petrol is the way to go. Just make the engines cleaner and leaner.
For the majority of the planet, petrol is far more accessible and affordable than electricity.
I’m sticking with petrol no matter what they say
deleted by creator
https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1142087_toyota-exec-says-evs-won-t-top-30-wants-new-engines
Er…you might want to rethink that statement.
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Because I have enough common sense to know this tech is not ready. Neither are the energy grids. If we reach a point one day when the tech is ready and the grids can handle it, then I’ll be open to it
Nah, he’s right.
Internal combustion has had over a century of research and engineering going into making the engines “cleaner and leaner”. It’s like squeezing blood out of a stone, that’s why you end up with features like auto-stop (where it cuts the engine if you idle for a bit) which barely save on petrol, but it’s a saving so they throw it in. Petrol is inherently dirty.
I’m sure there is more that can be done. I’ve heard that Porsche have developed a cleaner fuel that can power petrol cars. I’m waiting so that what that is.
Unfortunately the car manufacturers typically have supported the petrol suppliers, which are big powerful entities, but if they stop doing that and really focus on clean fuel, I’m sure it can be achieved.
EV’s at the moment are NOT good for the environment and create WAY more pollution than petrol cars in their manufacturing process. Making batteries produces WAY more pollution than what petrol cars with catalytic converters will ever make in a lifetime. This is a fact.
Do you have an article or something talking about this cleaner fuel? Toyota’s approach for a cleaner fuel is hydrogen, but that’s its own disaster due to all the issues with logistics and storage, among other things.
Thanks. This relies heavily on how well carbon capture technology works out. From what I’ve been reading, it’s pretty inefficient and expensive, at least currently. Whether it can scale is an open question. Additionally, burning this fuel will release whatever carbon was captured. This may help to slow down emissions, but better battery tech looks like it’ll go much further.
Batteries and their construction if at the moment a worse alternative. And involves slave labour.
At least C02 is already naturally occurring. Btw, humans and plants need C02 to live. Without it we die …
Batteries and their construction come out ahead over the life of the vehicle. There is nothing about battery manufacturing that requires slave labour. You could make the slave labour claim about anything being manufactured. As for your CO2 points, those are repeats of oil industry propaganda. Based on your point, why even bother trying to capture carbon when CO2 is so great, right? It’s a matter of amount. We need water to live, but drinking too much water will kill you.
Actually it’s just pessimism of the likes of Mercedes-Benz. I’m not going to buy an expensive electrical car in the same way I’m not going to buy an expensive ICE car.
Make cheap electrical cars and we can talk.
Very true. VW had a really cheap one, and it sold out immediately. Still removed it for no reason.
MONEY
Volvo is bringing a 36k one to market this summer. While that’s still very expensive it’s less expensive than the average of 50k (45k with rebates) you see from domestic manufacturers.
If they manage to dodge the inevitable court case for selling at a loss and make it stick we should see more stuff like the Chevy Bolt.
There’s a cheat code out there right now: Toyota bz4x. At full price, they’re not a very good option. There’s plenty with better range and charge time. They also fucked up some of the features, like one pedal driving.
However, first year depreciation is hitting them hard, and then they look much better. So much off that the downsides can be overlooked.
Haha, those things are like 15k off. I wonder what the hell happened there?
Bad range, bad charge time, a bunch of little things that aren’t up to snuff. Toyota didn’t half-ass it as much as the Mazda CX-30 (which should go on the Wikipedia page for “Minimal Effort”), but it’s not great.
Once depreciation hits, though, it’s suddenly looking good.
That’s just hilarious. Enshittification really is coming for cars.
TBF there was a VW Electric Car recall, clearly their models had some liabilities. Hopefully they continue to keep their word and improve to become the top EV brand in the next few years.
They seem like it, saw a video where it beat BMW and Mercedes in efficiency and fast charging.
But to be fair I hate cars like hell. It would be completely fine to have 5% of the cars on our roads, and still be fossile
Yeah, and road expansion needs to stop as well. It’s already ridiculous in the USA, it makes communities less walkable.
How’s BYD going? They seem unstoppable
Non-existent in the US thanks to whack-ass tariffs unfortunately. We love hindering our adoption of climate change reducing technology for political points.
Wish they would take the hybrid model and flip it. I love my gas/EV hybrid but the EV side of things is only good for 50miles or so. Its much more a gas vehicle really than an EV. Why not a primarily EV vehicle with large battery and a small gas generator for those Oh crap, I need another 50-100 miles right now with no time to charge moments?
Because you waste a lot energy transporting a heavy mostly useless gas tank and motor. In the other hand, if gas is main motor, you can use the battery / EV motor to get brake energy back and accelerate faster.
Yeah, seems like there could be a point where the gas engine sufficient to generate an emergency charge could be small enough that the impact while non negligible would be worth the elimination of battery fear. The tank could be empty most of the time and just available for a quick gas station fill if on a long trip and battery prediction is insufficient to reach the destination. Alternatively fast capacitor charges or a small swappable emergency battery that gas stations could carry for evs seem like systemic changes that could help with this issue.
Because 90% of the time 50 miles is enough for you (maybe not you, but most people) to get through the day and charge it, while you will only need gas on those long occasional trips.
Yes
People keep saying this, but when I’m buying a 40k car I want to be able to go shopping and cross country with my family. The fact that I’ll only use it for the occasional family trip is irrelevant. The point is my current ICE car does both things without any worry. If EVs want to win they need to be better than the ICE counterparts.
I want to reduce emissions but you’ll never get adoption of something that’s objectively worse. If I have to worry if it will start in the winter or reach the next town on my trip, it’s a non-starter. And that’s even before we get to the insane prices of new cars.
The only thing worse for adoption than only selling high priced EVs, is attempting to sell high priced EVs when interest rates are high.
Plus, no one ever talks about the switchover to NACS plugs in the US. Except for Tesla, most companies have announced they will switch plugs on a year or two. I hear “in a year or two these old ones will be difficult to charge and lose all its resale value”, so why would I buy?
I plan on waiting for NACS myself, but they do have adapters coming to use Tesla chargers on current non-NACS EVs. Some will provide them for free to recent owners.
It’s more parts that you must bring with you. Also adapters always break and give you compatibility headaches… They should retrofit the port on the car for a nominal fee (say 5 hours of labour).
In Ireland the Tesla chargers have both plugs. The NACS is already attached to a CCS plug in the charger. Depending on the car it releases the combo plug or just the NACS plus. Cool mechanism.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Today, Mercedes published its annual results for 2023, and it’s clear that the company has little confidence that any region will be ready for EVs-only sales by that date.
Here in the US, established automakers like Ford and General Motors have already told investors that their EV plans were overambitious or focused on the wrong market segments, like full-size pickups, and this week saw startups Rivian and Lucid both forecast much-reduced production in 2024.
It’s tempting to try to find a single reason for this growth in EV pessimism—unsympathetic actors like car dealers flush with record profits complaining about having to learn to sell something new make for easy villains in this story.
In part, BEVs remain a little too unfamiliar for a large swath of the general public to make them feel comfortable spending tens of thousands of dollars or euros.
Those gas station visits have also made drivers expect to be able to refuel in a few minutes, something that just isn’t possible with even the fastest fast-charging BEVs.
Hybrid powertrains in particular provide a cost-effective, efficient alternative to just burning liquid hydrocarbons, and in terms of reducing fleet carbon emissions, OEMs like Toyota say they can make 90 HEVs using the same raw materials as one BEV or six PHEVs, leading to a 37-fold reduction in lifetime carbon emissions.
The original article contains 605 words, the summary contains 222 words. Saved 63%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
More market share for Volkswagen I guess. I just wish I knew which VW stocks to purchase, there are so many…
Wrong. We want affordable EVs, ideally not not sold by an openly fascist billionaire eternally-divorced childmanboy.
My first complaint with Tesla is the shit tablet for everything. I don’t want to have to look at a screen while trying to drive. Elon is a shit but every publicly traded company is going to be owned in some regard by a billionaire fascist.
How about you make one that doesn’t cost 30k more than a normal car… gees.
You make an excellent point!
I expect electric will soon be much cheaper than gas cars. Battery prices are still falling, despite the demand outpacing supply. Lithium refineries and mines are in the works and should be online in 5 years.
More importantly, electric cars are much simpler than gas cars. Anyone saying otherwise has no appreciation for the genius behind modern motors, transmissions, traction control and exhaust systems. There are an order of magnitude the number of moving parts in a combustion engine than an electric motor.
The price is higher because of the still-young supply chain for batteries and the infantile production lines for EVs.
It will become a subscription business with EULA.
It should really replace this petrol powered junk but this is what ultimately happens with such suits in charge. Do you think people will choose better? How many Fairphones or Linux desktops have you seen in real life? They choose slavery.
Speaking of slavery, China does make better cars with great price. I just wonder how many gigabyte per month these cars send to China? So it’s either future Mercedes car with Apple carOS coming with subscription or Chinese spycar. Make your choice.
Or choose community/cycle transport, something better fit to 2024.
That is definitely where the corporations are trying to push everyone, but that has nothing to do with electric powertrain cars and everything to do with capitalism powered enshittification.
I do know one person that uses their fairphone to access their self-hosted services on their raspberry pi and uses their Linux daily driver to make money and browse the web.
They also encourage people to reject surveillence capitalism, to do what they can for our ecosystem and to join the fediverse to help stop the slide into the new feudalism.
“It’s all nothing until it’s everything. Starting where I am, doing what I can.” -Knower
Probably because they are far more complicated than a regular car and have expensive batteries with precious metals? Oh and we haven’t been mass producing them for 100 years either.
Bro it’s just a battery, some motors, a computer, an IO system, and some brakes. An amateur with money and free time could rip the guts out of a traditional car and make it fully electric by following an online tutorial.
An EV is on all fronts more simple. It’s the reason so many new car companies are being started.
It absolutely has an upfront cost to design and ramp up production though.
No. No, they are not more complicated.
You can learn to build your own brushless motor on YouTube that’s close to as good as anything the major manufacturers are using. You’d need a whole machine shop to build an ICE, and it’s not going to be nearly as good as a crate engine from a company that dumped billions of dollars into R&D.
Battery chemistry is complicated, but you can buy the modules and build a pack yourself. There’s quite a bit of safety knowledge that goes into this so you don’t burn your house down, but it’s all out there.
Even if you bought all the major components and dropped them into a rolling chassis, an EV would be significantly easier to build than an ICE. It’s not even close.
Their EV is about $8k more than a similar MB ICE SUV. Seems to be they just want to keep making easy money off innovating pay walls for remote start.
Have you not seen what geely are doing?
I haven’t. Whatre they doing?
I haven’t. Whatre they doing?
My biggest EV doubt is that everyone living in a condo/apartment doesn’t have the option to install charging ports in their own parking space, so plug-in EVs are a terrible option ATM. I’ll get on board when I see the change happen but knowing landlords I’m doubtful.
I think we need street lighting with charging points.
Where I live, this is changing already. I suspect it comes down to your lawmakers and how you vote more than landlords. Landlords will never do something unless it makes them easy money. Though, ev chargers can be profitable, so maybe they are just dumb.
Not to mention the infrastructure upgrades it would take to mass-install enough plugs in every condo
You don’t need one for every condo. Though that would be awesome. It’s not like you need to charge every day.
A big part of why the tesla plug was chosen as the north american standard plug is the lack of infrastructure upgrades needed. Apparently it uses exactly 1 phase of a commercial electric line so it needs far less infrastructure to add charging if there is commercial electric already. For example they’d be able to install just an outlet on every streetlight.
