Meanwhile .... Honda and GM cancelled their joint ev platform because affordable cars are too hard
this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
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Think of how incompetent Musk has come off in the last couple of years. These execs are even more pathetic.
I agree there is definitely a cost and availability component to all of this. The MSRP of new ICE and EV vehicles are very high, then the dealers have them marked up by thousands because they (mostly EVs) are on back order. Personally I don’t know too many people that have 6+ months to wait on a new car. They need one soon because their current vehicle is dead or dying. The risk of not having a functional vehicle while you wait for your new one to be delivered undoubtedly pushes people to go with ICE cars that they know they can get immediately. The transmission in my wife’s car was on life support early this year, we really wanted a Bolt, it seemed like a decent option for the price, but couldn’t get one nearby for months, went with a Buick instead.
Yeah, people don't talk about it, but it's sooo hard for average Americans to justify a full EV.
If you want to travel long distances, 30 minutes for 70% range every few hours is rough. If you don't own a home, figuring out how to charge at your apartment is tough, if you do own a home, having to drop thousands on an electrician on top of thousands in car down payment is tough. Also, the average EV is like $5k more than the average car, and the average car is already like $48k, which is insane.
My girlfriend and I are thinking of getting a Chevy bolt to share, but we still have to save for the electrician costs.
Travelling long distance isn't as often as an occurrence as people think it is, the vast majority of people will use it for commuting 95% of the time or more. Having to stop once or twice per 10 hour road trip is something almost everyone already does, it's not that big of a change tbh
Cars with ranges far longer than the average commute have been around for years
You don't need to drop any money on an electrician, if you have a dryer plug you can charge right off of that. If you don't you can use a 110v plug, though that's sinfully slow tbf
The major issues facing EV adoption are people not owning / renting homes capable of easy charging, higher buy-in cost, and misinformation on range and charging
It doesn’t need to be a common occurrence. It is the second most expensive item you are likely to own. It shouldn’t have huge limitations.
Could you imagine something like a hurricane evacuation if everyone owned only electric cars?
Hopefully we will see a lot of households owning at least one as their round town daily driver, but I doubt we’ll ever get past 50% take up with current tech.
A Chevy Bolt has very slow DC charging about 70% range around a hour. The Hyundai ionic 5/6 on a EA 350kW DC can go from 18 to 80% in 18 minutes a Tesla can do that in about 20 minutes, so I really don't think that amount of time is a big deal.
Obviously. EVs don’t solve anything - just move the consumption from one type of energy to another.
We need walkable cities and high quality public transport.
We will need socialism first to make that happen tho so the CEOs are gonna keep blaming the consumers for them not making the profits they oh so desperately hoard.
Load of horseshit. More and more of our electricity is renewables. It grows every year. And EVs DO solve emissions problems. In the US we are NOT getting walkable cities. That ship sailed about 150 years ago.
Maybe if we properly embraced modern nuclear power. I don’t see that happening anytime soon though
I gotta call bs chief. My city, notoriously car dependent in the 70s, just removed a lane of traffic on a major local road (leads from business/commercial to a residential area and high school) and put a grade-separated pedestrian only path.
You cannot give up on walkable cities. We can build them; EVs are for the car industry - Yes they do reduce emissions but still reinforce car dependency causing a lovely cocktail of knock effects that encourage decimating our environment, preventing investment from staying local to the community [pop up shops don't stick around in karen fortresses], and actively builds a hostile environment.
Like, yeah we gotta have cars, but don't kid yourself in that scenario preventing walkable cities. Cars are new. Walkable cities are not. If we as a nation invested in 45% of what we do on the highways Amtrak would probably run through every capital once, maybe even twice a day.
But we don't. Because for some reason we as a society simply cannot invest in transit that isn't a half-baked asphalt slap. It just isn't possible. Nope. We'll fuckin die if we do anything other than subsidize car companies that can more than afford investing in themselves because if the stock market does that go up and make a few people more rich the world is falling apart /s
Yes! This is the attitude we need. It’s so sad to read the comments of those who have given up. We CANNOT give up on walkable cities!!
A lot of places just aren't "cities". I live inside the perimeter loop highway of a major US city but I'm in a suburb. There are no sidewalks. No bike lanes. No shoulder on the road, just a ditch and dangerous high speed curves with lots of earth-hauler landscaping trucks. The nearest bus stop is 3 miles away and it runs at most twice a day in the wrong direction for me.
I'm not even talking about rural life. Cars are part of the US for a long time to come. Let's make them as good as we can.
Well, yes. We should make them as good as we can. I just don't feel cars are the only mode we should make as good as we can. Right now, it feels like we're only starting to consider cars may not always need to be the "default".
Going all in on cars is what leads to these kinds of "nothing-towns". It's like they're made for people to drive through, but not necessarily for people to exist in.
Seems like a sidewalk, a bike lane, and cis stops might be a great first step for your area to be less car dependent
Plus, iirc, I believe a coal plant powering an EV is still better for the environment than a similar gas car.
Either way though, so much of US power is moving towards renewables. This dude's take is wild.