why don’t you drive an EV?

best of both worlds baby

Caveat etc., but a car dealer acquaintance just posted this rant/update/come to jesus screed:

In case you haven’t been paying attention for the last 3 days or so. The EV market is crashing on every front not called Tesla. Demand for EV has fallen off the proverbial cliff. This actually happened months ago, but trailing data has finally confirmed what we already knew. What is currently occurring is nothing short of earthquake level. Below will bring up to speed.

The EPA and Federal Government plan to considerably roll back their EV and emissions time table. That plan will be announced some time this spring. This means manufacturers will NOT face the fines and penalties they had feared which had forced many to advance their EV production far ahead of market demand.

Ford just lost their federal $7500 credit on the Mach E. Prices as such were dropped by Ford, 3100-8100 dollars, and an incentive was added on leased vehicles of you guessed it, $7500. This basically means Ford is losing an ADDITIONAL 10-15k per Mach E sold. This on the heels of already losing 4+B last year in their EV operations. If you own a Mach-E, your car just depreciated an additional 10-15k overnight. Speaking directly to Ford dealers, nobody wants a Mach-E

Mercedes effectively waived the white flag on trying to push their EV vehicles ahead of ICE, ‘for many years to come’.

Rivian lost 20% of its market capital last night only able to ‘hopefully’ produce 56k units next year. While currently losing an eye popping 43k/per vehicle sold.

In the ICE world, it you are a Chrysler/Dodge/Jeep dealer your world is all kinds of phuct. In a recent meeting of dealer principals across the nation, it was discussed that they have not accepted a single car from the factory in the past 90 days. Turning every car down. Chevy, same. Dealer floor plans have exploded to 6 month supplies costing them upwards of $250,000 each month just to keep the cars in their lots. I expect 0% 72 month loans to be announced shortly on those, my guess March 1.

Toyota supply somehow has reverted back, and dealers are once again starving for cars. Honda, thankfully for me, seems to be in pretty good spot.

On the used car front, after nearly 7 months of weekly decline in used car values the market stabilized and actually gained nominally about .1 percent. The free fall of your used car value has hopefully stabilized and it does appear that actual traditional seasonality may be returning. We still have a MASSIVE shortage of late model used cars from the past 3 years. BUT, we may have found a soft bottom for the moment.

Rivian lost 20% of its market capital last night only able to ‘hopefully’ produce 56k units next year. While currently losing an eye popping 43k/per vehicle sold.

I believe everything in that, but this para seems like a separate issue. RIVN sells 100% of the vehicles they make, and has a waiting list. The problem is they can't make them fast enough and they're losing money on each sale until they get the hang of volume and selling at scale (which may not happen fast enough).

they need to learn some scams from musk

Yeah have they considered space and tunnels and social media?

Mercedes effectively waived the white flag on trying to push their EV vehicles ahead of ICE, ‘for many years to come’.

i think the ev situation is legit in a tough spot in america, but not necessarily in the entire world

there are just not enough affordable and good evs on the market imo, and not enough infrastructure to support them

yep

RIVN sells 100% of the vehicles they make, and has a waiting list. The problem is they can't make them fast enough and they're losing money on each sale until they get the hang of volume and selling at scale (which may not happen fast enough).

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Thursday, February 22, 2024 11:51 AM (two hours ago)

yeah there's an inflection point they need to reach that depends on hypergrowth, but they're not going to reach that inflection point if they're forecasting producing the same # of vehicles in 2024 as they did in 2023

hopefully they're just managing expectations by setting a low bar to clear idk

starting a new car company is insanely hard, telsa getting to scale (via scams) is very impressive tbf

the Mach-E was only eligible for a $3750 tax credit which makes me, you guessed it, a bit skeptical of that screed.

theres a whole weird industry of dealers saying the market of whatever cars is crashing, ive been getting these youtube videos for years now about how no one is buying used cars at wholesale auctions signaling that the bottom is about to fall out of the used car market, idk what the deal is maybe people will just watch your video if you say that

Screed = dealers of every other manufacturer other than the one I, personally, deal are screwed (ha ha, absolutely no coincidence).

RIVN is "unveiling" their compact SUV next month. if they can't make enough before they run out of cash it seems academic.

whoops, sorry for posting the stock ticker. brain worms. time to log off.

If you own a Mach-E, your car just depreciated an additional 10-15k overnight.

As someone who owns a Mach-E, why would I care about this? I just bought it, it's not like I'm selling it!

The free fall of your used car value has hopefully stabilized

Relatedly: are there a lot of people other than used car dealers who "hope" that used car prices stay really high? I guess there's a transit advocacy / environmentalist case for not wanting cheap cars to be available because of their externalities?

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/biden-administration-relax-ev-rule-tailpipe-emissions-ny-times-2024-02-18/

Speak of the devil, I just heard on the news that Rivian is cutting 10% of its salaried employees.

For depreciation, if you took out a loan for, say, a $45000 car, but the car itself is now only worth $30k, isn't that a bit like having an underwater mortgage? You're locked into a loan based on a purchase price not in line with its actual value.

This dude, by the way, is a member of a local dads group. Iirc he's complained about EVs sitting on the lot. Whereas I think he says hybrids and plug-in Hybrids are still in pretty high demand. Can't attest to the validity of his claims, or gauge his self-interest.

I don't know if I posted about this before, but we were surprised to see EVs offered as a rental option on an upcoming trip for a comparable price to an ICE car. I don't know how accurate it is, but I heard that a lot of EVs that have otherwise been sitting around are being sold cheap to rental car agencies.

if you already own the car and have no plans to sell it then it doesn't matter. but otherwise depreciation is bad for current owners who borrowed to buy (they no longer have the option of getting rid of the car without a large bill). it's also bad for current owners who plan to sell (they lose money). that's bad for the manufacturer because people selling their car buy new cars. it also gives the brand a reputation for depreciation, which drives further depreciation. and it drives up interest rates on car loans, which is bad for buyers and sales.

So my observation is basically what Josh described upthread -- that a lot of people are interested in EVs but feel a need to have some kind of recourse to our vast, reliable gas-based infrastructure if it comes to it. What's unfortunate is that plug-in hybrids, which could bridge that gap, seem kind of like a worst-of-both-worlds engineering and cost challenge? I feel like a lot of buyers weigh those and then end up rolling back downhill to regular mild hybrids, which are an easy best-of-both-worlds sell.

(I would bet good money that, for similar reasons, a lot of the people who'd enjoy an EV rental while traveling are ... not traveling with children.)

iirc one of the big car rental companies just got rid of all their teslas, makes sense to me that they wouldnt be popular, you dont want to have to figure out the charging situation while youre traveling

it's an election year so biden made gas cheap. not a good look for EVs

we just convinced a friend who was gonna rent an EV around palm springs / joshua tree to go with a gas car instead. then i did some redditing and it seems like an EV around there would have been fine. too late! they already went with a gas car

I rented a car for a CA road trip in December and was getting pushed to rent a Tesla pretty strongly. I didn't take it for several reasons. I would not have a problem with owning an EV, but I don't want to have to figure it for a one-week rental (i.e. away from home, unfamiliar area, vacation, etc.).

PHEV is worst of both worlds if you regularly need to drive beyond the battery range but otherwise not an awful prospect

Anyway, I have to say that having the Mach-E has been great, all my concerns about charging upthread from before I bought the car were unwarranted, it just works

I’m thinking of PHEV as worst-of-both in terms of engineering/sales more than usage … you need to work in a relatively big battery and robust EV tech and charging, but you still don’t get to dump the combustion engine, so … you’re packing a lot of stuff in one vehicle, driving up cost and complexity and points of failure, driving down options, all in those little ways that become weird dealbreakers when you’re spending tons of money on a new car

def not wrong ito certain things

plugin hybrids have like 30 miles of battery range its not much, tho obvs the hybrid system does the normal hybrid stuff too

the best vehicle is obvs electric app scooter that you bought a five dollar part to make it your own

plugin hybrids have like 30 miles of battery range its not much

Isn't around 30 miles what the average person drives each day, anyway? That seems to be the promise of the PHEV, that you essentially have an EV for daily/local usage, but when you need to go further than your daily commitment you're not limited by electric range. And even when you do go beyond the electric range, the car reverts to being a standard hybrid, right? The way I look at it, it's a hybrid car that can also go some distance on a charge, which seems to be better than just an ICE, and probably works for a lot of people.

There was just a WaPo article about some of this stuff (https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/02/24/ev-market-cools-us/) that says that PHEVs were "the fastest-growing light vehicle sold in the United States last year."

They 100% address that issue of "I'd love an EV but I need some kind of gas backstop just in case!" I'd have thought there's a sizable market for that, but the available offerings in the U.S. don't seem all that robust, which is the part I suspect might have to do with their being marginally trickier to engineer/price. (Like the price gap between a Prius and a Prius Prime is ... not minor!) Some Volvos and BMWs, a couple Kia/Hyundai models, and then a lot of lines with maybe one model, at a high premium to the alternatives, and of course new enough that people will wonder how reliable they turn out.

(I mean, just to be clear, I would LOVE to have one and am particularly tickled by the Prius Prime with the solar panel on top trying to give you a little top-off, they just seem like maybe a market challenge)

fwiw the prius/prius prime gap used to be addressed by the ev tax credit when it was still eligible for one (i got one in 2021 and it ended up being cheaper than a new prius by a few thousand, wild times), but no longer since it’s just for ‘merican cars

Isn't around 30 miles what the average person drives each day, anyway? That seems to be the promise of the PHEV, that you essentially have an EV for daily/local usage, but when you need to go further than your daily commitment you're not limited by electric range.

― Josh in Chicago, Monday, February 26, 2024 4:29 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

if thats the average then many people drive further right

my main concern with EVs is how heavy they are. i looked up the weight of the rav4 prime. 4300 pounds or something. not horrible!

yeah it’s crazy. the canonical response to this is that, yo, they really hug the road tho

the combination of instant torque and very heavy vehicles is not great

mine is more like 45 miles battery but is fuckin heavy alright

They're physically bad for the road, too, right? Thanks to the weight? I think I saw people talking about that when Tesla debuted/touted/lied about its EV 18-wheelers, where they were being predictably cagey about the weight, not just because of the range or restriction of range and load, but because of the impact to roads.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/27/opinion/gm-ford-electric-vehicles.html

Guest essayist in the Times thinks cheap Chinese EVs will upend the market, barring some kind of protectionist policy move. If they can seriously end up selling EVs here for less than the cost of a Kia Soul, I'm almost more interested in how that would upend perceptions -- presumably the image of EVs would flip rapidly away from "high-tech status object" and toward "poky budget buy," the equivalent of little imports during the energy crisis. Given where the cost of cars has gone relative to the wages of a lot of the jobs people need cars to get to ... being the cheapest thing on the market would definitely be a hell of an inflection point in mass adoption.

i was in beijing over the winter and felt like 1/3 to half of the cars on the road were EVs (in china, EVs have a green license plate vs the standard blue). beyond the big brands of BYD, xpeng and NIO there were also a ton of other brands on the road.

not an engineer but given how much simpler EVs are than ICE cars (just a battery and a motor) feels like the barrier-to-entry is lower in china where the soup factories and the nut factories and the everything in between factories are right there.

def into the idea of cheap utility chinese evs, yeah xp would be a good contrast to the current baroque car era

idk if americans really want them but its worth a shot

thinking about small electric pick up now

i would happily replace my car with a cheap electric kei truck

not that small lol

https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0457/6008/6166/files/Honda-N-Van-EV-Yamato_480x480.jpg?v=1684468355

actually this is the dream right here