why don’t you drive an EV?

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.

think a lot of EVs recommend 40-50 PSI, like the lucid recommends 49 PSI and teslas are at like 40-45 PSI xp to lagz

ed, i look forward to reading this

Probably needs some work.

Also the tyre thing is a complete fucking furphy. There might be an argument if cars were small and light and we were adding batteries to them, but cars got big and heavy before we made them into EVs. Weight does matter but no one was complaining about increased particulate pollution from tyre wear and brakes as everyone got conned into buying monster trucks.

(See also the BS about having to reengineer parking structures to accommodate the extra weight of EVs, EV fire risk and a whole bunch of other unscientific crap)

think a lot of EVs recommend 40-50 PSI, like the lucid recommends 49 PSI and teslas are at like 40-45 PSI xp to lagz

― 龜, Wednesday, February 28, 2024 2:25 PM (fifty-four seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

juicin the stats

thanks, Ed!

ed whats yr car job just out of curiosity if you dont mind sharing cool to get the inside info

booming post, ed

I build electric car fast charging stations, or at least cause them to be built. My actual role is sort of amorphous, trying to work out how the industry is going to grow and develop, what drivers want etc. so we end up building the right things in the right places, put the right products and services around them etc.

way xpost but seriously that is the thing, if BYD models ever arrive on US shores as the literal cheapest things on the entire market, it may cease to matter whether people WANT 'em or not! I assume it'd also point toward more people seeing EVs in general as cheap and mockable, or whatever, but that was the case for little Hondas in the 70s, too. If they work and other automakers can't hustle up a better proposition...

Nice to see a delurked Ed!

thing is people arent rushing out to buy the cheapest cars available currently, americans seem to want big nice cars, tho there is another aspect where automakers put less effort into the cheap cars cause theyre less profitable so theyre worse than they prob need be and in fact many companies have stopped producing lil shitboxes altogether, but still the rav4 way outsells the civic

cool thank you ed xp so are the industry dysfunctions you described making it hard for you to forecast what to build or are you just disgusted by them on principle

way xpost but seriously that is the thing, if BYD models ever arrive on US shores as the literal cheapest things on the entire market, it may cease to matter whether people WANT 'em or not! I assume it'd also point toward more people seeing EVs in general as cheap and mockable, or whatever, but that was the case for little Hondas in the 70s, too. If they work and other automakers can't hustle up a better proposition...

Nice to see a delurked Ed!

― ን (nabisco), Wednesday, February 28, 2024 3:11 PM (one hour ago)

hmm the BYD cars i saw were pretty freakin advanced (i visited a showroom and sat in a few via rideshare), if they came to the US they'd def want to compete with tesla and lucid at those price points they'd probably go for the premium strategy

there are companies that make the rinky dinky EVs with only 80 miles of range, i think there's gonna be a fiat 500e that's aimed at city folks that's gonna be like, that would be the model to undercut the current EV market but unfortunately it would trigger massive range anxiety among murricans

The petrol engine today is an absolute marvel in terms of of raw energy extracted from fuel

mazda has a really neat engine called the skyactiv-x that achieved some sort of holy grail of engine design and can get 44 mpg from a 2 liter 4-banger which is crazy, unfortunately they said it's "not powerful" enough for the american market because of all the big heavy tanks murricans want so to be seen whether we get to enjoy any of the magic of that design

https://www.motor1.com/features/708538/mazda-skyactiv-engine-what-happened/

anyway i totally agree with your post ed, i would love to see what a modern day kei car / geo metro could do fuel efficiency wise esp with some of this advanced tech like mazda's skyactiv-x but unfortunately we're stuck with tanks b/c of the obama era light truck exception

booming post, ed

― polyamerie "it's more than this 1 thing" (m bison), Wednesday, February 28, 2024 12:49 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

hey Ed!

i bought a new car ed ;_;

wow what a weirdo

i had a beloved high school social studies teacher who everyone considered very wise/philosophical, and a bunch of us sought him out on the last day of our senior year to get some sage advice. that advice? "never have a car payment." i was a little disappointed at the time but i've lived by it ever since

https://hongkongfp.com/2024/02/24/how-cheap-mini-electric-vehicles-took-off-in-chinas-smaller-poorer-cities/

https://media.gettyimages.com/id/2023791366/photo/china-economy-automobile-ev.jpg?s=2048x2048&w=gi&k=20&c=Bbh2KauLi-pp9DNh00RGYqwXReeMPLouwVupTafFpWE=

this is the world i want. except i'd be scared of getting squished by a monster rivian truck

siick (headlights still dumb)

https://i.imgur.com/i1eQCUd.png

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a60128707/2027-rivian-r3-r3x-entry-level-ev-suvs-revealed/

that really isn’t a terrible looking car

vintage hot hatch aesthetics

I kind of like that even if it looks like someone pumped up an 80s Honda Civic hatchback on roids.

I like that. I dislike the Rivian trucks, although they are cool looking, because there is something fundamentally un-truck about them, like it doesn't look like a truck for someone who needs a truck (although neither do today's RAM-on-steroids type pickups, really).

I like the Hyundai Ioniq and Ioniq5 a lot too, and even the Kia Niro EV is cool. All more aesthetically pleasing than Teslas imo, which somehow already look dated.

We are still planning to run the 12-year-old Honda into the ground, but it kind of looks beat to shit and I've been occasionally tempted to take on a ridiculous car payment to replace it with an EV.

sort of like a cross between a classic hatchback and one of those two door defenders

https://i.imgur.com/7z1IQkG.png

https://i.imgur.com/n8cvuOs.png

the headlights are dumb but otherwise yeah that's sick

i'll probably replace my car with an e-bike for day to day stuff and keep my 30yo jeep for stuff where cars can't go

i hate that they make these very good unique cars and then their trademark is the dumbest possible headlights

Monster post thanks Ed! Had no concept of the car hire firms being a sponge to mop the spills of poor design/planning/marketing.
Holy shit I am tired of the big, dumb personal fatbergs people drive these days. Always some absolute leviathan housing one tiny person, peering over the wheel trying to park at the corner grocery. I've always driven Alfas because I'm stupid - and even the newer models of theirs are obese blobs - but I would jump at a compact EV that actually fucking handles.

That Rivian should have a Mini badge on it and they'd walk out the door.

i need a new ev lease this november, i guess another 3-year would cover me until that rivian exists

the lad hit two big shots down the stretch and got a sick block at the buzzer to assassinate the pacers

wrong thread

ant edwards is an ev, its ok

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fiat_panda_policia_olbia.jpg

R3 is giving this

The major reason why I want one is because I'm sick and tired of dealing with oil and spark plugs and thermostats and all of the other things that gas engines have. I don't know where I'd plug it in, though--I don't think the overloaded park grid my RV is in can handle the electrical requirements (it can barely handle a microwave), and the closest commerical charger I know of (other than the five or so that are hidden behind the Outback in Crystal River) are 40 miles away.

yep that's the issue. here's a really good link that I just realized could add to the general conversation here:

(oh wait it's a post on linkedin, let me C&P)

I see major changes coming in the mobile off-grid power market.

Traditional RV hook-ups with good power will be harder to find.
-Land use trends and regulations are changing, making RV park development less popular.
-Aging electrical infrastructure coupled with higher demand is making the power supply in many parks unreliable.
-More RVers means more competition for hook-up spots.
-Increased demand for limited spots will result in increased prices.

There will be more restrictions on running gas generators.
-Look at California’s laws on generator usage.

Mobile off-grid power systems will have to work with or be designed around electric vehicles.
-If someone’s tow vehicle has hundreds of kWh stored, they are going to want to share it with their trailer.
-Topping off your RV at a supercharger might be as common as emptying your black tank.

RVers are going to demand more robust power system capabilities.

long story short, investing in some sort of expandable lithium-based off-grid solar system (no matter how small you start) is looking like a good idea. that's the key thing about lithium vs lead-acid, with lithium you can add new ones to old ones as long as they are the same brand and (mostly) model/size (there are some where you can mix sizes). you can't do that with traditional lead-acid batteries b/c of a chemistry thing called the Peukert Effect.

The major reason why I want one is because I'm sick and tired of dealing with oil and spark plugs and thermostats and all of the other things that gas engines have. I don't know where I'd plug it in, though--I don't think the overloaded park grid my RV is in can handle the electrical requirements (it can barely handle a microwave), and the closest commerical charger I know of (other than the five or so that are hidden behind the Outback in Crystal River) are 40 miles away.

One thing I do need to mention is that this is a full-time residential park--I've lived here for nine years, some people have been here for 20.

wonder how EVs would shake out if we were to be hit by The Big One solar flare coronal mass ejaculation whatever from the nyer article

a lot of ppl would go nyer nyer nyer

https://www.media.volvocars.com/global/en-gb/media/pressreleases/325193/volvo-cars-partners-with-and-invests-in-breathe-for-next-generation-fast-charging

a rare vote of confidence in the UK tech sector

There's a youtube guy I sometimes check in on who focuses entirely on the Hyundai Ioniq. I caught up with one of his most recent videos, and while he still likes his car after 2 years his videos really emphasize all sorts of bullshit big and small that I can't believe remain issues. For example, lack of a rear wiper (which is finally being remedied, but still, wtf?) or the fact that the car's map to charging stations is only updated every six months or so (by his estimate missing the addition of 22k+ new charger locations over those same six months), or the fact that the brake light goes on whenever you take your foot off the accelerator, which is by design, but which must be maddening to those around you. This stuff might be unique to this car, but, like, why are any of these seemingly easy to fix issues still even, well, issues? The downside of making cars but particularly EVs more like driving computers is that features seems to be pushed out before it's ready for prime time, with constantly promised fixes and patches always on the way, just like computers. But my computer doesn't cost $30k+.

the brake light going on sounds like that's by design - i assume he has regen braking turned on?

I think so, but I think it's related to an overcorrection to the old software, where people were basically able to coast to a complete stop without the brake lights ever coming on. The youtube guy thinks the light should be related to actual deceleration rather than the regen amount, but he understands why it is the way it is. Does regen foot-off-the-pedal braking light up the brake lights in all cars that use it?

US flailing around:

China's EV industry is causing US automakers to sweat. Why? Because it is cranking out high-quality, reasonably sized, affordable EVs. US automakers' bad decisions *once again* require the US gov't to shelter them from competition.https://t.co/vLdbj5YL7g

— David Roberts (@drvolts) March 18, 2024

Vs Australia thinking outside the box:

The Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) says that EV drivers in Australia could earn $12,000 a year by allowing the grid to draw from their batteries. Five years of that & you've basically paid off the car! https://t.co/2m08Wfac3r

— David Roberts (@drvolts) March 17, 2024

the fact that the brake light goes on whenever you take your foot off the accelerator, which is by design, but which must be maddening to those around you.

This is absolutely related to the regen. First off in a petrol car you can absolutely have brake lights go on without the brakes enshrining because there’s always a bit of free play in the brake pedal before the pads hit the rotors. Similarly you want the lights to go on before the regen brakes engage because it’s the safest way - much better than the lights going on after you start braking, you always want to do right side fail in cars.

Much more maddening in the Ioniq is that they clearly have to run out a big supply of flappy paddle steering wheels (for racing style manual gear changes - another stupid feature no drivers actually use). The flappy paddles are used to set the regen, and the regen needs to be reset every time you get in the car; there’s no memory of the last setting. I can’t think of a circumstance in an EV where you wouldn’t want maximum regen, because that’s energy going back into the battery extending your range.

I realize 1 pedal driving in an EV drive is not what most people are used to, but it takes about 5 minutes to get used to it (OK, maybe not the BMW i3 which drove like a dogem and took a lot of getting used to).

Now to the ARENA thing. Anyway that tweet is a bad reading on an even worse press release.

ARENA - Australian renewables energy agency - was founded to fund research into renewables and grid integration of renewables. It used to be staffed by some really knowledgeable and competent people but the last two liberal prime ministers eviscerated it by suggesting it should start funding gas exploration and other nonsense. It’s now staffed by children who are not ‘there for a long time, only for a good time’ basically just for the CV points on whatever political greasy pole they are climbing (there’s a very funny episode of utopia on this). There’s no institutional memory there - to the extent that I’ve been in meetings where they’ve prosposed ideas to fund and I’ve had to ask ‘how is this different from the thing you funded three years ago? Let me show you the report on your website’.

Anyway this person who made or could make $12k from V2G - I believe they were part of a trial funded by ARENA whose knowledge sharing wrapped up a few months ago. The press office is ignoring the conclusions of the report - which certainly don’t say that every driver can make 12k a year. The authors (I know one of them, Laura Jones at ANU) have all sat through at least the first half hour of Econ 101 and learnt about supply and demand.

Yes one person has extrapolated a few good wins putting their car on Amber (the infuriating Australian Griddy, remember them) and having the car play in the wholesale electricity market.

The problem here is that the commodity being traded is flexibility and lots of people are pulling supply into the market, GWh of new batteries going in all providing the same thing that car is - so maybe a few people get 2 or 3 years of good earning from v2g but then the market gets stabilized by the big batteries and the supernormal returns evaporate.

But to get that return you need to buy $5k worth of V2G charger in the garage for maybe another $3k in install costs. (The chargers in the trial were more like 10k but prices are coming down and should probably normalize around the 3k or so battery inverters cost). But remember also that V2G tech in the car adds cost there as well.

Then of course is the main problem with this. If you want to Hoover up all these money making opportunities your car has to be plugged in, at home.

Having run some of this style of ARENA pilot with home batteries; I can say that the median participant is a cashed-up retired engineer who probably makes it to the hardware store or the golf club a couple of times a week. Basically someone who has an expensive car but doesn’t drive a lot.

For most people, even though their car sits idle 97% of the time, it is not always at home - it’s a work or the shops or wherever. So you are likely to miss a substantial number of these money making opportunities by just getting on with your life.

Tesla are actually vehermently anti v2g - it adds costs as above and they think cars should be utilized more and I agree on that point. Now where we disagree is what they ought to be doing, Tesla say mowing down pedestrians being robot taxis, but let’s get real, put your car or Turo or similar and let someone else use it.