Electric Vehicles

Bought a Tesla last week and I love it. Quality is flawless (unlike what the media likes to write about) and it's saving me a ton of cash by not buying fuel. Charging at home is so damned simple and convenient. I can't imagine every driving an ICE vehicle.

I paid a visit to Ford's Henry Ford Museum and did the factory tour. It's an absolutely great museum full of industrial progress throughout the ages, however it does mostly center on the American side of things. Highly recommend a visit, it will take you all day to see everything. Anyway, the factory tour is definitely Ford Propaganda, especially for the F150, and they do discuss the EV market which is massively smaller than the ICE truck market, however every single EV truck is sold before it leaves the factory. There's no inventory sitting around. I imagine that's partly due to production line issues like materials availability, but nonetheless the demand is there for EV, even trucks.

They definitely are way down, in Germany.

One of the key reasons traditional manufacturers were reluctant to build EVs is because of the batteries needed and their lack of ability to make these themselves. A battery on a brand new EV can be half or more of the total cost to build the car, who wants to pay somebody else, who is going to expect to make a profit on the batteries they sell, half the cost of the build to a competitor or third party for any true mass market car? You cannot start to compete on price or volume till you make your own batteries and cut out that profit of the third party.

When it became clear that the Traditional Manufacturers could no longer avoid ramping up EV production as Tesla and latter China/Korea were stealing their future market they have shit the bed, begging for subsidies to build their own battery factories and recruiting staff with experience. Its going to take a few years before these factories come on line, but till then you will see them pushing things like PHEVs and halo EVs like the F150 that they do not plan in selling in large volumes in favor of ICE that they make the engine.

There is also an element of the speed of development of EVs, they were clearly caught out how fast the market moved with efficiency and thus range. As an example, the early VW group EVs were awful, at least a generation behind the best from Korea or Tesla. The latest ID7 and A6 etrons show that VW have acknowledged their mistake, the saloons made on that platform (the SUVs on the same platform just cannot compete due to worse drag and weight) seem to be aiming around 4 miles per kwh, which is extremely impressive for such large saloons.

Improving efficiency is the key to reducing battery sizes, which reduces weight, which further improves efficiency, but most importantly reduces the cost of EVs. We need to move away from 100kwh+ batteries, they are a crutch for inefficient, bricks of SUVs that are far too large and heavy. Manufacturers just up the battery size to counter their poor design decisions, which leads to disappointment when you realize you struggling to get 2 miles per kwh from your 2.5 ton EV9 and its only doing low 200s out of a 100kwh battery.

Got a PHEV for our family recently, wanted to go full EV but our region just doesn't have enough charging stations available yet.

While going over the paperwork for the financing, the paperwork guy was talking about how the car company keeps pushing them to order EVs for their lot but they keep refusing. They don't want to sell EVs because they think people don't want them, because they think it just "won't ever work" - so now I think that there may be other car dealers like that who are holding back what options consumers may have in there area. I had to drive 100 miles to buy the PHEV I wanted, none nearby.

Thank you this royally pisses me off whenever I hear it from Ford or Chevy. They could be selling like hotcakes but they much rather go back to their cash cows and the oil industry to milk.