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Give me a small 4dr sedan with crank windows, manual mirrors, pleather seats, tape player, shitty heat/ac, room for just 4 ppl (barely) and electric for $12-15k. They will fly off the shelves.
Instead let's build 7 passenger SUVs with a massive ass IPad, that drives itself into other cars, and fetch key fobs.
That's due to battery prices. You can't pay $25,000 for a battery, put it in a shitbox and sell it for $30,000 because nobody's going to buy a $30,000 car with the features and quality of a $5,000 car. Batteries can only be maybe a third of the cost of a car, so everyone's been targeting the top of the market with expensive EVs.
The good news is, battery prices are continuing to plummet each year. When you have $2,000 batteries, $12,000 cars are doable.
Bullshit. You can easily get a battery for less than $25,000. The Tesla model 3 is a 50KWh pack and is $14000 to replace and likely costs way less to make.
If you were really skilled you could buy 50KWh worth of cells for less than $10000.
The reason the batteries are more is because you have SUVs and Trucks that need twice the amount of cells for about the same range because they're not aerodynamic
The math still stands even with those numbers
Give me a small 4dr sedan with crank windows, manual mirrors, pleather seats, tape player, shitty heat/ac, room for just 4 ppl (barely) and electric for $12-15k. They will fly off the shelves.
I don't think they will though. At least in the US. I currently drive the gas version of this vehicle, a 5 speed Ford Fiesta, and the majority of other drivers on the road seem offended that I'm there with them. I set my cruise control ~7mph over the speed limit everywhere I go (almost all highway driving) and I'll have people speed up when I switch lanes to go around them because they had been driving slower than me for miles previously. I'm used to seeing nothing but bro-dozer oversized grills out of my rear hatch window. Police could just use me as a mobile speed trap for all the people who feel the need to zoom around me despite always going just below the 'probably won't get pulled over' speed. When I'm turning left at a light and I need to end up in the right-most lane I have to switch quickly to keep the person behind me from flooring it and trying to go around me in the slow lane.
Meanwhile I have low cost to replace tires, low insurance rates and get 40mpg regardless of how or where I drive it.
I definitely understand. In North Carolina we have Carolina lifted trucks. It's were the back of the truck is lower than the front. Illegal? Yes. Enforced? No. A real child plowing machine (never thought I would have to write that statement before).
There is a sect of the population that needs to grow the fuck up and stop worrying about their dick size or how tall they are. We need to have a more realistic view when buying things. Do I need a $100k truck with mud tires and a 12" lift just to pick up the kids from daycare and get groceries? No
It's amazing how much a difference there was in road manners when I was driving a mustang vs. a rav4. It was quite literally stress free, suddenly there were no jackasses on the road.
Oh, same. We have multiple vehicles and I only experience this when driving the Fiesta. It's almost like people are mad that you have chosen a vehicle based on logic and reasoning over id.
Also, in my town at least, this phenomenon seems to have gotten perceptibly worse over the past 6-8 years. People are just angrier all the time in general I think.
Try driving an old crown Vic police cruiser. The last one was made in 2011 and were never ever used in my area. I still get people getting over and slowing down when they were going to pass me.
You could probably buy an old junker with no engine, an EV crate engine kit, and pay someone to install it, and still come out under the cost of a new EV, or even recent used one.
Depends. Quick scan puts it at about $AU20 grand just for electrification, which is already a good ways towards the cost of a new one.
With that kind of money, you could reasonably buy a secondhand EV, like a Leaf ($AU16 grand), and swap out the battery on top ($AU10 grand), and come out around the same kind of price. Might even come out on top, just by virtue of the EV having systems and gauges that were designed around it being an EV that could be reused.
Yes, but then it wouldn't be an electric Karmann Ghia, which is the prettiest thing on the planet.
I understand all those requirements except the tape player. I don't why anyone would need that? In fact they'd probably just add additional cost as I imagine getting brand new tape decks would be hard to source now.
I often hear people saying "But where does the electricity for the EV come from? Driving an EV is not better than driving a diesel."
They have to realize that the thiny ICE in your car is optimised for weight, and has an efficiency of 30-35%. So about ⅔ of the fossil fuel is turned into heat and blown out of the exhaust. Compare that to the turbine in a coal or gas plant, which can archive up to 90% efficiency.
And don't forget that an EV is an investment, which will likely still be on the road in 20 years time. The electricity mix at the moment is still rather fossil fuel heavy, but this will change completely within the next 10 years.
Edit: not 90% but 40% efficiency. See comments below
Compare that to the turbine in a coal or gas plant, which can archive up to 90% efficiency.
Nope, you might have seen 90+% efficiency when talking about steam power plants, but that's the efficiency of the generator(converting the mechanical energy of the the rotating turbogenerator to electricity). You have to multiply with the efficiency of the turbine(converting the energy of the heated gases into the mechanical energy) and there the efficiency is much lower, ~40% for a coal fired and maybe <60% for a gas combined cycle.
Yeah. Power plants are nowhere near 90% efficient.
It's worth emphasizing, though, that they're still way, way more efficient than car engines are.
Also, regenerative breaking saves a lot of energy. Basically, instead of using the motor to increase the cars speed, you use it as a generator to recharge the battery.
Huh, that makes a lot of sense actually. Thanks for correcting!
If nothing else, electricity is fungible by source. Your EV doesn't care if the electrons in your battery came from solar, coal, fusion, whatever. An ICE? It can burn certain hydrocarbons. That's it.
Not to mention that a grid doesn't have to be a coal or gas plant. Lots of houses have solar charging now, for example.
Last time I looked (a few years ago), a 100% coal powered EV had similar emissions to a 60mpg car.
I doubt anywhere will still be coal powered in a decade, with how fast plants are closing. But that EV will still be there on its 3rd owner.
Different countries and states obviously have different electricity source mixes.
Here in the UK, coal accounts for around 1% of electricity. Natural gas is about 35%, biomass about 5%, and the rest is various clean renewables (wind, solar, hydro) or nuclear.
So although charging an EV is by no means fossil-fuel-free, it's considerably less fossil-fuel than an ICE car.
We’ve contributed to that. We got a PHEV (not a pure electric) that we probably put gas in once a month whereas before it was probably every 2 weeks to 10 days in a normal car.
EVs are awesome.
Got myself a fully electric car, and yeah... Never looking back. I keep it charged for maybe five bucks a month most of the time, with the only exceptions being when I'm taking it on a longer trip. It gets 250 miles per charge on average, which is plenty as far as I'm concerned. Charging on the go is more expensive of course, but still a lot cheaper than filling a gas tank.
I’ve had mine for 4 years. A few months back I started traveling with it. I average about 230-250 miles per charge for around 15-18$. That’s a charge every 3.5 hours or so. Sometimes, you can find hotels that let you charge for free overnight, too.
That's the best. I went to a sporting event last year and parked a couple blocks from the arena. The cost to charge and park was less than parking at the closest parking garage.
Doesn't less demand mean cheaper gas? That sure hasn't happened here.
Maybe it didn't go up as fast because of it
Less supply does the opposite
For many people they actually represent a better experience. If you mostly use the car below the range of the battery in your local area and can charge at home then you mostly eliminate the need to travel to fill up stations. Its kind of nice to not have to put petrol into the vehicle every week and have to deal with it being near empty and being forced to refill. It just gets charged cheaply overnight on greener power.
The modern EVs get a lot of range in a 15-30 minute charge too. The reality is a 250 mile EV requires one stop to drive for 8-10 hours. Most people aren't going to do that without a break in the middle. Even if you were going to go non-stop compared to an ICE its only another 30 minutes of journey time extra and it will cost you less to do it. So long as there are enough charge points, and these days their typically are in a lot of countries, then its not really a massive problem.
In many ways they are more convenient on most peoples average usage and the range anxiety goes away when you realise what we are really talking about in terms of long journeys and how long charging in practice will add.
Dude you've got the numbers completely wrong. I drive a "modern ev with a 250mile range" and in reality I will stop after 2-3 hours when doing long trips in the winter.
Manufacturer stated EV range is a joke. 5-6 hours of driving at best with one stop, not 8-10 lol.
Yes, those official (bullshit) ranges are not for highway speeds nor winter weather.
I live in Germany, but drive 1000+ kms to my hometown in Eastern Europe around Christmas (and often Easter and summer), going 160-180 kmph where allowed. I would have to stop to charge around every 2 hrs, spend time waiting for (fast) charging, and have a tortured battery after a few trips. As we have a dog, flying is not possible, so we do have to drive.
So even if an EV fits 90% of my driving days, due to this 10% I need an ICE car. I’m not happy about it, as I like driving EVs, and could charge at my work for free. I could of course also get 2 cars, one small EV for city driving during the year, and an ICE for the long trips, but that’s just too much money.
I also checked PHEV, but that version of my car would have a 20 liter smaller tank, 100+ liter smaller trunk, and more weight - so not really an option for the long trips.
One interesting option for EVs is are the battery swap stations for NIO, now all over Germany - you lease your battery, and can swap it instead of charging at stations, takes 5 minutes.
How many EVs will it take for fuel prices to start decreasing? Or do prices only react to increased demand 🙃
They'll lower production to introduce artificial scarcity.
Which is amazing news for the planet, they're greedy though so they'll probably try and keep it cheap enough to keep people using and maximize profit.
It's going to be interesting when a large enough portion of cars on the road are electric that gas stations start to lose enough business to thin out.
They'll lower production to introduce artificial scarcity.
Just like they have done many times in the past.
That's why we need to hit peak oil fast. It will be a definitive fuck you to oil.
The increase in energy consumption globally is still bigger than the increase of energy production from renewables. When this happens, hopefully soon, we will start seing reductions in fossil fuel, and especially oil, cosumption. The adoption of EVs will increase further as soon as bettery cosy falls further, wich is expected in the next few years due to increased supply of lithium and thecnologiasl breakthroughs in EV energy mangement
Lets cross our fingers
