why don’t you drive an EV?

imo the vast majority of people who don't do a daily commute should get a used battery hybrid as their next car. range anxiety goes away, better net for the environment than a new EV, etc.

i wonder how many of those 20% who want to go back to gas cars got a tesla with panels that don't line up and let the rain in. do they still make those or have they gotten better?

more car than i need right now but they are cool.

Do you just mean the Mach-E is expensive, or is there a specific sense that you'd be paying for "more car" stuff you don't need? I don't think of myself as somebody who needs a lot of car. But the Mach-E looks like a kind of sweet spot of "good range, well-built car, doesn't have the computer-glitchiness of a Tesla" for me -- I dunno maybe I should be looking harder at e-Niro

its a performance car

What does that mean, it drives fast? I thought the whole point was that it was called a Mustang but it was actually a family hatchback.

speed, handling, general appealing to car guy features, my impression is that its basically a tesla ripoff

yeah i would be paying for like acceleration and range that i don't need as a guy who mostly drives around town dropping my baby off places and buying groceries. honestly i would have just grabbed a bolt if there were any to grab.

forgot about this craziness where they only give you one key when you buy it because they think youre going to use your phone as a key but what happens when your phone runs out of battery?? this is insane to me, wonder if theyre still doing that the review is like a year old

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4n5iPqxpaw

honestly hate all this dumb innovation happening around evs like no door handle instead theres a button you press then theres a weird door handle to pull on, door handles work good thats why cars have them what does this stupid two step process have to do with the car being electric

no driver instrument panel in a tesla, a fucking square steering wheel, all of this shit sucks, also the need to make the car look electric who cares just make a nice car

What I want is safety, reliability, and "I don't have to think about this car very much" (e.g. I don't want huge hassles around charging, I don't want it to be a huge hassle to get it serviced, etc.)

the retractable door handle was an elon-aping-steve jobs fit of pique iirc xp

yeah i was just reading about a tesla app issue the other day where everyone was getting 500 errors and couldn't unlock their cars as a result. feel like i've also read a lot of ev reviews from car guys who ding models that don't feel futuristic enough or something which is what leads to all these dumb ideas. one nice thing about the niro was just about everything was recognizable and i had control sticks and physical climate buttons and stuff....like i don't want to have to *think* about how to turn up the heat in the car.

Okay I am just a hybrid-liking normie but really how often do you make your purchase decisions based on the edge case, as opposed to normal everyday usage?

Like, do you say "Normally I toast one or two slices of bread. Maybe four. But I need a toaster that can toast 12 slices at a time, because sometimes I have company"?

No. You do not.

Ditto towing capacity or hauling capacity. How often are you running to the grocery store for some milk vs., say, moving a couch? How often are you going to the post office vs., say, towing a boat?

Buy a vehicle for the stuff you do most often. Rent one for the longest trips you do, or heaviest loads you haul. Unless your life mainly consists of trips from e.g. Boulder to Birmingham or Glasgow to Zurich while towing your pet antelope.

people don't want to rent a car

yeah renting a car has a big cost of both time and money

Ok. Me, I lived happily for 10 years without owning a car, but I rented one when I wanted to get to mountains or oceans that I couldn't walk to or take public transportation to.

i think the advice (buy the car that works for you 360 days of the year, and rent when it doesn't, and you will save money and own a better car for you) is logically good advice, and i have given it myself. i have not followed it myself though.

1000+ mile trips are rare but multi hundred mile trips are common enough for a lot of people, like going from ny to vermont, that it makes sense to want a car that can do that easily, that you dont have to worry about planning out your charging scheme perfectly, although some people probably like that sort of thing

people in the US pretty much buy only on edge cases, which is why every car in the US is either a crossover or truck and why the sedan has disappeared. it's particularly insidious for truck buyers because it's well documented that truck owners pretty much almost never use their trucks to actually haul stuff, they buy them to get 'em lifted and to roll coal on EV owners.

Not to be a dick but heck, let's unpack this for a sec. I don't own a plane but sometimes I want to get to Europe. Do you know what I do? I buy a plane ticket.

I don't own a flat in London or condo in New York City, but I like to visit those places from time to time. Do you know what I do? I get a hotel room.

I don't have a beach house but sometimes I want to go to the beach. Again, what I do is... I rent space there.

yeah but those aren't consumer goods and have real unattainable cost associated with them.

youre looking at it from the pov of not owning a car, which is nice if you live in a place where that works, but if you were to need a car generally youd prob pick one that met all your car needs

By this logic everyone should own a moving truck because they will eventually want to move all their stuff to a new place and GAH

people in the US pretty much buy only on edge cases, which is why every car in the US is either a crossover or truck and why the sedan has disappeared. it's particularly insidious for truck buyers because it's well documented that truck owners pretty much almost never use their trucks to actually haul stuff, they buy them to get 'em lifted and to roll coal on EV owners.

― 龜, Monday, November 29, 2021 3:39 PM (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

people just like the big boys the space sitting high and feeling safe is how i break it down, its all pretty stupid and has lead to the near death of the best car type, the famous station wagon

By this logic everyone should own a moving truck because they will eventually want to move all their stuff to a new place and GAH

― popcornoscenti (Ye Mad Puffin), Monday, November 29, 2021 3:45 PM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

i mean some people do do that ie get a pickup truck, but imo wanting a car that can drive far is not an unreasonable ask, and the good news is evs can pretty much drive far and that situation will continue to improve

winter tesla road trip

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UskzfQJt2Bc

I don't own a plane but sometimes I want to get to Europe. Do you know what I do? I buy a plane ticket.

the people you're struggling to understand already own planes capable of flying to europe. they are reluctant to sell them and fly scheduled.

i mean i get your point: if you only fly to europe once a year, maybe owning a private jet isn't worth it. but i think your international travel metaphor is a good one because the only thing worse than a public airport is a busy car rental place in a lot of people's minds.

people just like the big boys the space sitting high and feeling safe is how i break it down, its all pretty stupid and has lead to the near death of the best car type, the famous station wagon

― lag∞n, Monday, November 29, 2021 3:47 PM (three minutes ago)

another factor is that the people who actually buy /new/ cars these days are usually boomers and maybe gen x'ers, who have aging hips and knees and don't like cars that require them to bend and tear their creaky cartilage to get in and out of, hence the death of station wagons and sedans and coupes

yeah true recall a friend of mine with bad knees talking about never getting in an out of a normal low car again

not just old people. a lot of people with kids under five switch to SUVs pretty quickly. loading a 3 year old from a 10" sidewalk to the rear passenger side of a civic is not fun.

hard to deny the big cars are better in a lot of ways

definitely bigger

and the quasi-edge case of like, needing to move a largeish piece of furniture is pretty valid.

Obviously this varies from city to city but I haven’t owned a car in 15 years. Carshare means whenever I want a car I can get one, maybe it’s on my street, maybe it’s on the next street. There’s 3 providers in my neighborhood (1 peer to peer) plus more in the wider city. Not many EVs yet but I’m working on that, and one of the new entrants is a peer to peer EV car share. For longer trips I have traditional car rental and they are all getting EVs.

I know it doesn’t work for everyone, but owning a rapidly depreciating lump of steel and have it clutter up the garage for less than 5% utilisation is pure insanity.

I get the car I need when I need it, and I get an extra room in the house to hang laundry, brew sake and put the bike trainer.

if you have two dogs you need somewhere for them to ride, i dont have any dogs but its good to know if i found some i could just throw them in the back of my near crossover station wagon

also a safety positive feedback loop arms race where in order to feel 'safe' on roads where 18-wheelers, hummers and f-350s driven by 16 year olds with permits regularly traverse at 80-90 miles per hour, people want cars that are equally as big and heavy... just a very american freudian death drive

I know this will fall on deaf ears but small crossover SUVs are great and extremely useful, like all the time not "edge cases" especially if you have kids. this idea that I find my very reasonable gas mileage Honda CR-V for "big boy" macho reasons is beyond ridiculous, no one thinks this or Rav 4s or whatever are imposing

they really just are the new station wagons except easier to load

this guy is the prototypical tesla s driver in my mind

https://www.tampabay.com/news/crime/2021/11/26/tampa-surgeon-in-tesla-struck-bicycling-banker-at-about-80-mph-records-say/

xp i have a forester and agree with you that they are easier to load, and if by "not imposing" you mean don't look like a suburban then sure, but they are absolutely more dangerous than a wagon for other road users.

i have an outback and i passed a bmw 3 series wagon a while ago and was like wow my car is so much bigger

on the other hand there are some compact suvs that are actually small, which ends up being a pretty hilarious shape for a car, like a perfect cube

crossovers like the cr-v are only considered 'small' in america, and imo have been increasing in size with each generation - my family has owned two foresters, a second gen and fourth gen, and the fourth gen is definitely just... bigger, bloatier, more like a land boat than the one we previously had

"small crossover SUVs" are small relative to bigger cars. but if they seem small to you in an absolute sense then that's living in the US.

haha xp

europe and asia have much more support for hatchbacks like the toyota yaris, for example, which have a similar form factor but are just... smaller

https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7qnz3/us-automakers-phasing-out-affordable-subcompact-cars

its true that there are almost no cars here that are small like you see other places, the mitsubishi mirage, the cheapest car sold in usa, is prob the closest we get

yeah they are getting bigger, mine is 10 years old so not as much, I will never own a new car

a 10 year old CRV is 3" shorter than a new one. it's pretty big!

in cities you see a lot of smart cars and cars like the fiat abarth, scion iQ, cars that make a lot of sense if you live in a city but feel absolutely terrifying to take on the highway