this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2024
115 points (88.6% liked)

Electric Vehicles

3217 readers
96 users here now

A community for the sharing of links, news, and discussion related to Electric Vehicles.

Rules

  1. No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia.
  2. Be respectful, especially when disagreeing. Everyone should feel welcome here.
  3. No self-promotion
  4. No irrelevant content. All posts must be relevant and related to plug-in electric vehicles — BEVs or PHEVs.
  5. No trolling
  6. Policy, not politics. Submissions and comments about effective policymaking are allowed and encouraged in the community, however conversations and submissions about parties, politicians, and those devolving into general tribalism will be removed.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
115
Why No One Wants To Sell You A $25,000 EV (insideevs.com)
submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
76 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

There is a fundamental truth you have to understand about car companies:They do not exist to make cars. They exist to make money. That distinction, analyst Kevin Tynan tells me, is why they’re not really interested in making affordable electric vehicles.

Perhaps that’s an oversimplification. Tynan is the director of research at an auto-dealer-focused investment bank, the Presidio Group, with decades of experience as an analyst at firms like Bloomberg Intelligence. What he means isn’t that automakers have no interest in affordable products. It’s that their interest begins and ends with winning customers who will eventually buy more expensive, higher-margin products.

One of the auto industry’s dirtiest secrets is that at scale, it doesn’t cost that much more to make a bigger, more expensive than a smaller and cheaper one. But they can charge you a lot more for the former, which makes this a game of profit margins and not just profits. In recent years especially, that’s a big part of why your new car choices have skewed so heavily toward bigger crossovers, SUVs and trucks.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The problem is there are no easy safe bike paths directly there; he would have to either ride out of his way to one or travel part of the way on narrow fast roads that have a lot of box-truck and semi-truck traffic. Or get on the freeway for a stretch, which is also bad in different ways.

The bike paths that there are, are pretty nice, but they’re more geared towards ‘enjoy a ride along the river’ and less towards ‘get from the inner city out and back again quickly’.

But yes, when he is willing to take those risks, it’s about a half-hour or so to get to work.

I’ve noticed this a lot in industrial areas; no-one seems to think you’d want to ride a bike there, so they don’t bother with infrastructure. Unless it’s in the inner city, but in that case it’s more a thing of happenstance since there are bike paths already surrounding the area so it’s less work to add a few connecting paths.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Yeah, hopefully that is shifting a bit more. When a bike system works, it is really nice. But many cities are just now realizing that they can be more than toys. It took our city to a breaking point before they realized that there was no physical room to keep adding lanes to the highways and roads around the city now that things have been built up. We still have traffic so bad that it can take upwards of an hour to move two blocks, though. That's starting to change now, finally.