why don’t you drive an EV?

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

Is that cat eating a charging plug?

is that a cat delivery truck

Renault 5 for £25-30k

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68419695

all cars have such huge wheels now

https://i.imgur.com/JPDBeu4.png

idk why they say it's "retro".. i guess because there are a few boxy edges on it? looks like crap, the OG looks absolutely iconic. it's crazy how bad cars have looked, and for how long

larger wheels = less rolling resistance and so better fuel economy xp

battery prices coming down seems like a huge deal in ev adoption, im sure till happen maybe sooner than people think idk, moving on to some new tech rather than the expensive and environmentally damaging to mine and process lithium would be good, seems like theres things in the pipeline but of course you never know if rosy reports are going to translate to actual production at scale

that is the famous yamato shipping cat https://www.yamatoamerica.com/

talk about iconic

larger wheels = less rolling resistance and so better fuel economy

― 龜, Wednesday, February 28, 2024 1:13 PM (nineteen seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

its the size of the tires that matter, what were seeing now is huge wheels and thin tires which is just an aesthetic thing and makes for a worse ride and iirc a lil worse fuel economy than if you had more tire and less wheel

every car now

https://i.imgur.com/BBfXuoQ.png

tho obvs the tires on that new renault are bigger than the old one, but still its gone too far, looks dumb imho

its the size of the tires that matter, what were seeing now is huge wheels and thin tires which is just an aesthetic thing and makes for a worse ride and iirc a lil worse fuel economy than if you had more tire and less wheel

― lag∞n, Wednesday, February 28, 2024 1:17 PM (forty-six minutes ago)

stiffness improves rolling resistance, larger wheels + rubber band tires at a higher inflation PSI = overall stiffer wheel and better rolling resistance

https://www.tirereview.com/science-behind-rolling-resistance-passenger-tires/

Rim Width
Typically, an increase of rim width can improve rolling resistance by creating a stiffer tire leading to less deflation. For every 1-in. increase on rim diameter, 2% of rolling resistance improvement can be achieved. However, rim width is a function of tire size which cannot easily be changed.

car tires usually have a 30 psi spec but not uncommon to see 40 or even 50 psi recommendations for really skinny tires

it's also easy to observe on your own car, increasing the psi of your tires past recommended spec will improve your gas mileage due to the lower rolling resistance but will also lead to more uneven wear patterns on your tires

you ever try to push a flat hoop with a stick, does not compare to pushing a stiff hoop with a stick

no normal car is suggesting you do 500psi because its uncomfortable, but they do have big silly wheels on there because people like how it looks

Delurking on ILX for the first time in forever. Basically because I’ve been workshopping this speech on how fucked the car industry is - my product team has had an earful of it and the audience at Kryten’s electrification boondoggle got a version of it is well. So here’s a version of it.

And hey, tonight I called the head of marketing for the Victorian equivalent of AAA a weirdo so let’s get this off my chest.

I’ve been working in the car industry for 5 years now and it is nuts that any of these companies are still in business.

Normal people don’t buy new cars and the car industry has backed itself into a corner because of this and made electrification really hard. What do I mean by this - down here in Australia 51% of new cars are bought by enterprise customers with more than 20 vehicles, another 20-30% are small businesses, sole readers and novated leaves (company cars) - only the remaining 20% or so are bought by individual and they and fucking weirdos. Normal people buy second hand cars. US and UK are a bit different because of the way US leases and UK PCPs work - using rubes to buy cars they can’t and shouldn’t afford in a shell game based on low interest rates and high residual values - still the weirdos

Basically car design and car choice is based on what you can market and sell to the the weirdos who treat car ownership as a game of top trumps. It works like this - It takes 5 years to bring a car product to market - you design it for the weirdos, market it to the weirdos. What’s great is failure is covered because what you don’t sell you can flog at a discount to fleet operators. Hertz and Avis were, if not created by, bought and grown by GM and ford to buy the crap they couldn’t sell so as not to publicly disclose falling prices and bad sale. They still perform this function today.

20 years of low interest rate means that the weirdos have been convinced to buy ever more expensive and stupid vehicles. Marketing created the SUV, the myths about better safety, the arms race in size. When I was a child BMW sold 3 cars, the 3,5 &7 a few different engines and maybe an estate version. I have no idea how many different models they do now, all satisfying some niche that the industry has created.

All the while they have squandered the efficiency gains of the the lean burn revolution. The petrol engine today is an absolute marvel in terms of of raw energy extracted from fuel, but you’d never know it because cars have got bigger, heavier and stupider. But also along the way, most western OEMs abandoned the idea of selling cheap basic mobility to normal people. The weirdos are buying cars at higher and higher average selling prices every year.

The car industry is even really bad at catering to the weirdos. It takes 5 years to develop a car product and car people barely even read the weirdest of the weirdos who make car media let alone the weirdos that buy the car. Connected vehicles have been a revelation to car makers. ford came along a couple of weeks ago and basically said ’ we’ve wasted billions on developing features we can now see that people don’t use’ (I saw the CEO of Peugeot Citroen basically say the same thing at a conference last year). Ford will also tell you they can’t hire good devs, ‘they all want to go and work for Apple, Google and Tesla’. And yet this company that ‘can’t hire good devs’ is trying to build autonomous vehicles.

(Incidentally the feature ford named that they were canning because no-one uses is ‘auto park’)

You’d think the model would break at some point - and yet it doesn’t, ‘good’ car companies get bailed out as strategic assets, ‘bad’ car companies fall into the black hole of doom that is Stellantis, and yet still do not die.

So then electrification comes along. Nissan gets a flying start with the first mass market electric car, nice simple family hatchback, but in a market where they and everyone else are destroying the demand for family hatchback. Tesla does its thing (more on that later) and everyone else freaks because they have nothing electric. So what do they do - they look at the market and go what do the weirdos want and how do we make the most out of EVs - well we start at the top with the most expensive cars and work down. And it works, for a short while, not only are there a few weirdos who will bring their top trumps logic to EVs but there’s also the early adopter crowd - I have met so many people who have told me ‘I have never spent so much on a car but I did it to get an EV’ or ‘I’ve never bought a new car before but I did it to get an EV’.

Thing is though, as anyone who has read Geoff Moore will know, that early adopter pool is limited. They are great though because they are problem solvers, they will accept a certain degree of inconvenience some discomfort. There is an intersect between the weirdos and the early adopters but it’s not total. There are weirdos that have top trumps categories that EVs can’t do (and are often ludicrous) - like not being able to do 1000km on a single charge - who needs this, people are either driving with a bucket between their feet, have a bladder the size of a baseball, driving ludicrously unsafe stages between stops or are playing top trumps. A lot of EVs on sale today can charge up a couple more hours of driving in the time it takes you to take a leak and buy a coffee.

So what’s the problem - the car industry is running out of early adopters and can’t satisfy all the weirdos to sell cars. It also hasn’t done anything to satisfy cheap basic mobility needs that would encourage normal people to buy new cars, rather than wait for cars they don’t really want to trickle down to the used market.

Tesla are fucking remarkable because they persuaded early adopters to buy up to EVs, they persuaded American weirdos to buy sedan cars which the big 3 US manufactures had abandoned as something that weirdos would not buy. Even they screwed it up, whilst the rest of the product pushes high tech and sparta comfort to people buying cars at ‘luxury’ prices.

Tesla is one phenomenon, the Chinese manufacturers are another. Down here in Australia, with no auto manufacturing to protect, the top 7-8 EV models (including Tesla) are made in China. The first EV I ever drove (a JAC in Hefei back in 2016) was already a high quality product. BYD beat Tesla in global BEV sales Q4 last year. The Chinese automakers know how to build a quality car down to a price. Of course the zombie first world automakers are calling for protectionism.

We need to transition transportation to zero carbon modes, but its is hard, there is a fundamental disconnect from the utility in terms of mobility, that most people need, and what gets sold. It’s not just the car industry, because there is a symbiotic relationship with shit urban planning, edge cities, living beyond the human scale.

However, densifying sprawl is hard, even if that’s what people, especially gen z increasingly want. Electrification doesn’t solve congestion, autonomy could take us further down the occupancy curve, in the 70s cars, on average, carried more than 2 passengers, now it is close to one and autonomy takes it below one. More people asking for more mobility, bigger and stupider cars and poor substitutes - need more infrastructure - the misallocation of resources is egregious. Greater Sydney is 13,000 square km, greater Tokyo is 13,500 sq km - Tokyo packs in 38 million into slightly more space than Sydney accommodates 5.5million. This is why we can’t have nice things.

Electrification needs to be a moment where we reevaluate how we access and allocate mobility. The utilitarian answer is not personal car ownership. Personal Cars sit idle 95% of the time - it’s a stupid waste - even worse with EVs, which are more expensive to buy but cheaper to run. The solutions are transit, active transport (walking and bike), micro mobility, shared mobility (carshare and rideshare).

Tax the hell out of parking and anything bigger than a Nissan Sakura.