> can be had for less than the price of the average new car.
Emphasis mine and obviously they are factoring in the $7,500 tax credit which I guess is fine.
I dislike this "price of the average new car" line and it gets repeated a lot. Car manufacturers must love it since it tries to normalize that price as "average" when its not very representative. Grand total "average new car" price that the media is using everywhere is $33,666, but that's only because of the average price of luxury cars and trucks driving the number way, way up. There's a breakdown by sector in KBB's numbers:
Scroll down to the second table for more realistic numbers. At any rate the median new car price, if we could get it, would be much more telling. Sadly I can't find it anywhere.
After the tax credit the base model is the average cost of a Mid-size Pickup Truck ($30,045) or average cost of a sports car ($30,712)
But well above the average cost of a mid size car ($25,095) or crossover ($27,056) or subcompact ($17,218)
What is amazing to me considering these numbers is that there are enough people buying new cars every year to keep all these car manufacturers around. I'm a pretty decently employed individual, doing better than most my family and I've only bought one new car ten years ago for $15K a Mazda 3. Who are all these people buying new cars all the time?
I'm going to do some cocktail napkin math and see if it makes any sense.
The total amount of new vehicles sold in the U.S. in 2015 was 17.5 million [1]. Since the average is $33666, we can assume half are above, and half are below that price. In reality, there are far fewer than half above that price, since an outsized sale price pushes that average up.
Half of 17.5 million is 8.75 million. The U.S. Census estimates the 2015 population was 323,995,528 [2], with 116,211,092 households [3]. With every household replacing their car every five years or so (total guess), that leaves us 23.2 million households that should have been buying a car in 2015. That means that about 37.7% of the eligible U.S. households bought a car worth over $33666.
That is bizarre enough that it leads me to believe there is a serious fault in my methodology or it just so happened that car sales were abnormally high in 2015 due to an enormous rise in consumer confidence. Either way, I'm more confused now than when I started scribbling on my metaphorical cocktail napkin.
>> Who are all these people buying new cars all the time?
I'm not sure where you're from, but this is Hacker News, so I'll just ask - Who are all these people who can afford to live in California? ;-)
It's all relative. Remember, the annual new car market is the number of cars on the road divided by the life of a car. This accounts for the sale of used cars as well.
Purely anecdotal, but my wild-assed guess is that most middle class Americans spend $20-30k on one every 4-5 years. Some people are enthusiasts and will spend more than that on the same timetable, and some people are extra frugal and will spend less, less often.
People with families will probably spend a little more for a minivan or SUV, which will skew it higher. Students (or people in their 20s in the early phases of their careers) will spend less, balancing out the minivan purchasers. Totally guessing though.
I used to think the same. We bought a new car 3 years ago with a financing which we still need to pay for 3 more years. However, we had to spend nearly $1000 on a new set of tires and alignment recently, and now I'm thinking it is better to get another brand new car as soon as we get a deal from the manufacturer or the dealer.
The average consumer is awash in debt. The guy next to me just bought some truck for around $40k with a 72mo loan. His wife leases some BMW 3 series, and can't drive on the weekend.
They eyeroll at my 2002 Honda, and I eyeroll at their $1000/mo payments.
You might have just happened to pick an amazingly well-aging car. My friend has a 2006 Mazda3 as well and it runs incredibly well, and it still looks like new cars. It's one of those cars you never feel like you need to upgrade from.
I know a few people who buy new cars, but they're very well-off and can afford it. I bought a new car once in my life (when I was young and dumb and my first paycheck made me think I was some kind of millionaire), but realized my mistake and ended up selling it pretty much right away. Now it's purely used from here on out.
Availability of cheap credit combined with dealer incentives (an offer like 0% for 72 months is not that rare nowadays) moves the conversation from "can you afford a $40,000 car?" to "can you afford a $556 monthly payment?"
To top it off, when you're financing, used car loans are rarely as attractive as manufacturer/dealer incentives - BankRate says they average about 3% annually nowadays, so an 18% mark-up to the value of the used vehicle over the 6-year ownership period.
I think it's a lot of money to spend on a vehicle, but if you look at leasing, lots of vehicles are less than $5000 a year, which is an easier number to wrap your mind around if you figure many of the people paying it aren't super focused on saving.
Out of 330M people even if 5% of population is buying a new car in the given year that is whooping 15M cars per year. USA sells around 17M cars year +-2M. One simple proxy to arrive at the 5% figure is the number of people in 16-19 age group where they might get parent's old car and the parent might buy a new one. That population is around 20M in USA.
Of course I have not accounted for taxi fleets, car rental fleets, corporate purchases etc. In fact go to think of it 17M cars per year does look like a very low number.
Not just households buy cars...companies, fleet vehicles, rental car companies. People lease cars and need to get a new car every 3-5 years.
Also, I'd like to think your average developer is more financially literate/savvy than your average American. Otherwise, the housing crash wouldn't have happened. You know, people with no money buying expensive houses. People carrying credit card balance and rolling them over.
Here's one case: I just bought a new Tundra a couple months ago (cash because I don't like debt). I could have saved $5K (15%) and gotten one 3 years old with 40K miles on it.
That's the problem with some models. The resale value is SO good that the value proposition for buying used is almost nil.
Since my trade-in Tundra was 10 years old with 178K miles, let's assume that's the life of the new vehicle too. I don't think saving 15% to buy a vehicle that's 20% through its life span is a good deal.
Think of it this way. It sounds like you're surprised by the number of new cars being purchased, but presumably you're not surprised that people are constantly buying used cars. And yet, roughly every used car that's purchased corresponds to a new car being purchased, unless you're expecting total car ownership to decline.
I buy a car every ~2 years because I like technology. Driving a Tesla Model S now, and looking forward to the company releasing self-driving software before I upgrade to the new version.
> At any rate the median new car price, if we could get it, would be much more telling. Sadly I can't find it anywhere.
The best I can find is $24000 [1], which sounds believable. But that's not referenced. There's a lot of articles stating that most people actually can't afford new cars [2]. Those articles, and studies they're talking about, are comparing median income and average car price, though.
I did an analysis on this a while ago since no one publishes median figures [1]. Average base price of the top 20 best selling cars in the US is a good proxy, and that amounts to a bit over $23k. Bolt is obviously way higher than that. Of course, then people go and add several grand worth of upgrades so that base price doesn't reflect the true transaction price very well. Average transaction price in the mass market segment is around $31.5k
> *Kelley Blue Book Average Transaction Prices do not include applied consumer incentives
Trucks make up the top 3 best selling vehicles in the US by a large margin -- accounting for 42% of the top 10 best selling vehicles in the US. They are also the most heavily discounted because their margins are so high. And KBB intentionally leaves that information out of their figures.
So all those $8-12k discounts on Ford/GM/Dodge pickup-trucks are not even taken into account for that average. Meaning KBB's numbers are complete trash.
I wonder if such statements are taking total cost of ownership into account? After subsidies it's more expensive to purchase than similar models and trim lines of gasoline powered cars, but electricity is much cheaper than fuel and you have much less maintenance to do as well.
I drive about 800km per month and I'd pay $10/mo in electricity to do that in a Bolt, versus $150/mo in gasoline for my current car.
What ? Even in Germany with it's high fuel prices i will get 800km with 50-70 EUR of fuel. Charging that 60kWh battery would be around 16 EUR worth of electricity here but only results in half the range. So still cheaper, but nowhere near your numbers.
> I drive about 800km per month and I'd pay $10/mo in electricity to do that in a Bolt, versus $150/mo in gasoline for my current car.
I don't get those figures at all... 800km (500 miles) is approx two-three recharges on the Bolt or about one tank of gas (depending on vehicle). Ignoring how incredibly cheap you are claiming electricity is ($5/full charge), there's nowhere on earth where a full tank of gas costs $150 (or even two full tanks).
Something went badly wrong when you came up with these figures.
There are a ton of systemic subsidies for gasoline powered cars. It isn't irrational or unfair to subsidize a new technology until it has proliferated enough to challenge such an ingrained technology as hydrocarbon fuels. Costs will come down as volume goes up, and early state R&D gets paid down.
I tried to specifically point out that the tax credit accounting of "cost" is fine by me and that I am including its benefit in my numbers for comparison. My post is not about that.
> A 10.2-inch touchscreen is standard equipment, but a navigation system isn’t offered. Instead, you’ll have to rely on a connected phone to pull up Android Auto or Apple CarPlay.
Hallelujah! I really hope the rest of the manufacturers and their car lines come around to this model. I know they make more $$ on their $2000 nav packages, but people are rejecting them in droves because they are horrible and need to be updated through clunky, often expensive processes.
The phone navigation apps are made by software companies who actually have to compete with each other to make the best system. Compare to car nav systems where you only have one option, and the comparison of navigation systems between different cars is going to be a very very small factor in which car you end up buying. You buy the car you want and take whatever you get for navigation.
Car manufacturers (to generalize a bit) are not particularly good at software, and do not have much incentive to get better at it.
I much prefer inbuilt nav systems when they're done well (integrated, simple dash view is a must) like in VW Golf and Merc A Class. Phone can't compete to having just the right information, right when you need it in the console. Particularly when travelling and hiring cars.
The navigation assistance in my car is significantly better than the one Google Maps offers. For one thing it doesn't lose its mind every time I go under an overpass. For another, the UI is vastly superior: it shows me the distance to the next waypoint prominently in the center of the display, between the speedometer and the tachometer. When approaching a turn, the same area of the display is used to show the configuration of the intersection, even complicated ones like double forks or t- or y- shaped intersections, or even acute turnbacks. My car never barks orders like Google Maps does. If it needs to say something, it is awfully polite, saying things such as "If possible, make a legal U-turn." And finally my car's navigation responds to a voice command to stop navigating, which Google Maps doesn't seem to know.
In my experience the only thing Google Maps navigation has going for it is superior data. I really wish I could have my car's UI with Google's data.
You'll love using your phone for navigation, until you go to Canada, where you don't have data. (Or affordable data.)
I have a 2010 Prius, and I'm quite happy with its built-in navigation. Its UI is worse at first-time address entry, but is substantially better for... Just about everything else.
My old Highlander had a DVD that provided the map data and stayed loaded all the time for that reason.
Each year was a new one for a couple hundred bucks. I bought mine, but given that it's a DVD, out of curiosity I checked if it was possible to pirate them and I only found one possibility in some Russian guy's home directory Apache index. Toyota Highlander dealer navigation DVDs weren't that hot of a commodity when I looked, rather surprisingly.
I'm very much ready to jump on the hype train for Android Auto, but sadly there's still a long list of countries they don't serve[1]
> The Android Auto app is currently available in the following countries: Argentina Australia Austria Bolivia Brazil Canada Chile Colombia Costa Rica Dominican Republic Ecuador France Germany Guatemala India Ireland Italy Japan Mexico New Zealand Panama Paraguay Peru Puerto Rico Russia Spain Switzerland United Kingdom United States Uruguay Venezuela
I wish there were a way to make a more interoperable system though. Android Auto isn't available in all countries. It also locks you into the two main phone OS's. What if you have a Windows Phone? Or Sailfish OS? Now you can't connect to your car.
Reminds me of Superbook kickstarter project to attach your phone to a laptop-shell, and use your phone like a desktop. The future looks more and more like Bring Your Own Device.
I came here to post this exactly comment. I even have the same quotation sitting in my clipboard right now. Apple CarPlay or Android Auto is the best of both worlds; I can't imagine a dedicated nav system being better. (Best cause, a really good one might be the same, except tied to one car and lacking any other search history. And much more expensive.)
Au contraire, I much prefer my 2016 car's built-in navigation system with consistent performance and features to the ADHD ever-changing, signal-dependent, random notifiers asking stupid questions, craptastic voice input, arbitrarily failing navigation apps of the two major mobile providers.
I don't WANT to update my navigation system. That's exactly what I HATE about Google Maps etc. In fact, I have gone so far as to opt out of updating my car's system to enable Android Auto after I tried it out in a rental and found it to be an epic bowl of buggy fail that nearly got me in an accident.
And of course, that didn't stop the Android team from breaking basic Bluetooth support in Android 7.0.1 on my Nexus 5x because they're go-getters in that department.
My car is a useful device that I need to count on daily, not a @#$%ing mobile app like Candy Crush.
But will you three years from now? I get what you are saying, but you are comparing a 2016 nav system to a phone. If you've got a nav system that's a few years old it's a headache (and possibly costly) to update, might be missing features in newer nav systems or might simply be broken and outrageous to fix (a problem that could also apply to an Android Auto head unit, to be fair, but at least you have a backup then).
Sounds like your complaint is half against Android Auto (and Android in general).
I wonder if it would be cost effective for you to simply have another dedicated device and data line if you get a Bolt? Reusing an older device ($0) + $10/mo data sounds better for even 5 years of service (10125) = $600 vs. $2000 for nav system.
I wish the nav was simply easier to update. In fact, I wish the entertainment system was an Android offshoot with GPS and wifi built in. Shouldn't be so proprietary.
The Bolt may work in terms of range and charging but it remains impractical for most of the general public.
A Bolt costs roughly $32K (depending on incentives, maybe more). A Toyota Camry Hybrid starts at $26,790. And, I know what you're going to say, "electricity is free!" That's just untrue. Recharging electric cars is far from free.
The Bolt costs roughly $10 to recharge its 238 mile battery. A Camry Hybrid can drive approx 680 miles on a full tank and costs $37 to completely refill. So you're saving about $8 per every 680 miles you drive.
So the breakeven for the cost difference of the two vehicles (@$5,210) is 442,850 miles. Neither car is going to make it to 400K miles, so therefore you won't make your money back from a Bolt.
PS - Yes, my post uses tons of assumptions: Incentives for the Bolt, cost of electricity, cost of gas, average miles figures, and so on. You cannot make a post about this topic without doing so. Feel free to pick particular figures/assumptions apart, but pointing out "this is all based on estimates!" isn't very constructive within itself.
So, in Northern California where I live, gasoline is $2.50/gallon, so to fill the Camry's 17 gallon tank it's $42.50, and for 680 miles that's $0.0625/mile. If I can get the baseline rate in my area, I pay $0.12025/kwh. Assuming there's a 10% loss on charging (no idea what the actual loss is, so just choosing 10%) the 60kw battery, that's $7.9365, and for 238 miles that's $0.0333/mile. That's a savings of $0.0292/mile.
If you drive 1000 miles a month (average), that's $29.20 in savings a month, or $350.40 a year in fuel costs (assuming base gas/electricity prices inline with what I have here). If you think gas prices will average $3.00/gallon for the lifetime of the car, the fuel savings are $41.80/mo per 1000 miles, $500.40 a year in fuel costs for 12,000 miles, and evens out at just under 125k miles. For $2.00/gallon the 1000 mile savings are $16.70, $200 for a 12,000 mile year. That said, I think I average about 20,000 miles a year on the family car that we use to ferry kids to/from school and most daily errands.
The very important thing to consider though is whether or not you have access to free public charging. If you can find a free public charger and work it into your schedule in some way (maybe run some errands by foot in the area), you might be able to eliminate almost all of your home charging. If I was able to do really good at this, and only home charge for 10% of my usage on average (probably a tall order), and assuming that availability of free chargers doesn't change drastically for the worse, at current gas prices that would put my average (12,000 miles) yearly savings at $710.04. I consider $3.00/gallon a more likely average over that time, and that puts the yearly savings at $860.04, and it evens out at just under 73k miles. .
That's not super compelling when compared to a Camry Hybrid, but it may be cheaper overall, depending on how the future unfolds. That said, if what others are saying and Hybrids have increased maintenance costs, it may be enough to make electric the clear winner in this comparison, but I don't know.
Hybrids seem likely to have more maintenance costs than pure EVs, but I think it's clear that EVs are still too expensive to be truly cost-efficient. If what you care about is lowest TCO, you can get a car of comparable size to the Bolt for like more than $15k cheaper, and of course you won't make that back up in fuel.
I expect that the Bolt will also have crappy resale value, if, as I think we all expect, EVs continue to get substantially better over the next few years.
The reason to get a Bolt right now is because you are ideologically committed to EVs or because the whole deal of mostly not having to deal with fueling up your car/liking the acceleration profile of an EV/etc., not because it's genuinely the lowest TCO.
True. This is a voting with your dollars situation. If you favor the way in which electricity is generated in your area over using an IC engine then the Bolt is your car regardless of how the finances work out.
I expect that the Bolt will also have crappy resale value...
The battery pack replacement is a major maintenance cost, even if everything else is running fine. That's something a used EV buyer should take into account.
Toyota's hybrids have low maintenance costs; the transmission varies the gear ratio by electronic means and is overall far simpler than either a manual or automatic.
As an EV owner, the bigger benefit is the vastly simplified maintenance schedule. I don't know how the TCO works out, but in general, the EV is much less of a pain compared to my wife's ICE.
I think his numbers are too high as well. I pay $0.2 per kilowatt hour, and live in one of the most expensive electricity areas in the country. To completely charge the 60 kw/hour battery it will cost me only $12.
In many parts of the country, power is much, much cheaper than mine. My friend pays less than $0.10 per kw/h in Georgia, which also has a $5,000 state subsidy (on top of the $7,500 federal subsidy).
Do the math with $6 full charge cost and a $12,500 subsidy and it quickly turns in the EVs favor...
I assumed he used california prices. I live in canada and electricity is half the price as it is in cali based on that website (but the weather could affect millage as well).
Let's also add the saved time/trip distance in not going to the gas station.
But separately, depreciation on EVs is a bit unknown. The powertrain should be good for a very long time - but the battery pack may cancel out any benefit relative to IC cars.
Local electricity cost multiplied by the capacity of the battery listed on the Bolt's site (ignoring any inefficiency).
Cutting e.g. $3/charge off the cost doesn't really swing the figures towards paying off the Bolt's extra $5.2K starting price over the life of the vehicle.
So 60 kw-h is $7.20. Brings the breakeven miles down a fair bit, and I guess it should be possible to have quite lot cheaper electricity for charging (and lots of people will have to do the calculation with higher prices).
I don't know anything about car ownership, but if it's more expensive to buy, but cheaper to operate, how does that conclude to being impractical for the general public? shouldn't things like interior space, handling, durability and craftsmanship determine its practicality?
I'd say the biggest simplification in your analysis is only factoring cost, but not the cars themselves. Again, what do I know, right?
I'm not sure why cars eventually get scrapped, but I have a 13 year old car with 130k. Other things started breaking which make driving bothersome. Cloth started drooping from the headliner, the glovebox got loose and stopped closing, leather seats crack. I'm happy that cars last longer and longer, but I'm not sure how practical 400k is for any car unless a lot of care is put into it.
There are many reasons, besides lower cost, why people buy particular cars. Also, are you sure you aren't being confusing with how you're using "impractical"?
Unaffordable is impractical. Most families cannot afford an extra $5K unless there is a reasonable amount of benefit to them, they don't have that kind of disposable income.
So unless they can quantify why a Bolt is superior to a Hybrid (and cost definitely isn't a winning argument) you'll struggle to convince the average American household to own one.
Avg Chicago gas price in the past few years has been $3.50. That's $60 to fill that tank, not $37 for Chicagoans and others in urban areas with high gas prices.
Avg 3-5 cents kwh for overnight charging here via ComEd's hourly pricing system. Assuming a decent level of inefficiency here via the charging process and ComEd's variable rates after 8pm I'm closer to $3 to charge than $10.
So the Camry gets 3x the range, but at 20x the cost. The Bolt is 6-7x more economical per mile for me in Chicago, which is fairly impressive.
Not sure how that plays out from a real dollar perspective, but I imagine after incentives the Bolt might be the cheaper option. I also imagine an EV car is a simpler machine than a ICE car, so you may have maintenance and reliability benefits. Personally, the complexity of a hybrid is a pretty big turn off. I'd rather just get a lower HP ICE car that naturally gets good milaeage and deal with worse performance than go the hybrid route.
The nice thing with electric is you get all these cost savings and you get some decent performance as well. The Bolt does 0-60 under 7 seconds. The Camry Hybrid is almost 10 seconds.
In the UK, I'd get rather different numbers: the Camry hybrid fuel tank is 70L, petrol is currently ~£1.20/l, pound at 1.22 to the dollar (thanks Brexit), so a full tank would be $102.48.
That gives a saving of $74/680m or breakeven around the 50k miles point, if my maths is correct.
> "EVs often require a warm-up period before they can deliver maximum regen braking. Tesla gives the driver a warning when full regenerative braking is unavailable. Chevrolet doesn’t do so. This can be alarming to the driver who lifts off the right pedal expecting significant deceleration and gets virtually none"
Whoa, inconsistent brake feel? That's kind of terrifying. You'd think Chevy would calibrate the brake feel across states.
it's not brake feel... it's the feel off the accelerator. when you let of the accelerator in a Tesla, it doesn't coast, it's like letting of the trigger of an electric drill.. it quickly grinds to a halt. it's strange to get used to at first but you get the feel by the end of a test drive. it is strange to still be pressing the accelerator as you pull up behind a car at a red light.
this weird feel is one of the problems that halted tesla's collaboration with toyota on electric rav4 drivetrains.
What there is is that, if the battery is completely full, the energy has nowhere to go. So the car does not use full regen. This could be mistaken for a "warmup".
As another poster commented, this changes the accelerator feel, not the brakes.
I disagree completely. Sure, the change in feel is related to the accelerator, but it's the slowing down of the car that changes. In a gasoline car that would be referred to as "engine braking". Imagine if in your gas car, when the tank was full, it didn't engine brake. I can imagine people getting caught off guard when the car didn't slow down like they expect.
Muscle memory is very important, and having the car behave unexpectedly is bad.
Surely they'd fit a braking resistor to cover this case? Most VSDs support them so I'd be amazed if it was too much trouble to use one with a car controller.
I admit being lazy here, but I wonder what kind of resistor (and what kind of cooling) it would be needed to dump the regen braking electrical energy there instead of battery? Probably impractical...
It's more of an engine-brake feel as you experience in a vehicle with a manual transmission.
I doubt it's that alarming. When you let off the accelerator in a manual transmission vehicle, it's more of a "test the water" type of thing, and then you can change gear from there.
It's not like people are going to rely on engine braking to come to an immediate stop.
Does Toyota have a patent on this? I know my 2005 Prius even in pure EV mode has a consistent brake response... I believe it simply bleeds off the excess regen if batteries are already fully charged (ie, going downhill on a long slope).
My 2004 Prius (which should have the same behavior as your 2005) definitely doesn't have consistent brake response: the first inch or so of travel is completely electronic and when the battery is completely full (having gone down a long hill) it doesn't do any regeneration at all and neither letting off the accelerator nor using that first inch of brake travel does absolutely nothing.
If you're in B mode, it will use compression braking (and if you're stopped, it'll bleed off energy by spinning the engine without any gas), but that doesn't change when you actually press on the brake pedal.
I rented a 2009 Prius once, and was surprised by the brake pedal being completely electronic. When the battery was completely full, I noticed the brake pump noise occurring immediately upon touching the brake, instead of partway down the travel like it usually does when regeneration is working.
My mom's Leaf also has a fully electronic pedal, but I've never driven it down a very long hill with a fully-charged battery, and there's no telltale brake pump noise, so I don't know if it changes its behavior with the battery filled to capacity.
The Prius can dump the energy into turning the engine over, just as a regular ICE would.
You can hear this by starting at the top of a hill with a full battery and in `D` mode. Then, as you roll down it, you can hear a noise from the engine as it is being turned over as it uses the regen energy.
Side note: I wonder if they fixed the terribly noticeable transition between regen braking and mechanical braking that I experienced in a few rental Volts.
One of the first things EV manufacturers will have to take care of is standardization of their fast charging networks so that the network of one manufacturer can be used by cars from another. If they don't get that worked out it will be a huge stumbling block to EV adoption.
It's being worked on (there were some talks between Tesla and a French manufacturer) but it isn't there yet.
Yup, we will have a world with many adapters. I don't think it'll be a big of a problem though.
Also, Tesla has already done so much for any car manufacturer:
- They have made all patents free to use by anyone.
- Elon has stated that he would welcome other car makers to join in on the Tesla Supercharger network if they are willing to contribute in an equal manner.
Seeing as Tesla has more Evs on the road than anyone else by a large magnitude, and they have proven their charging network far more than anybody else, it's odd nobody else wants to join in. But that's Wall Street for you. Nothing will be given away "free", and we can't be seen working with the competition. Despite many of the 'shareholders' are institutions who likely would own shares of both companies regardless. And at the end of the day, Wall Street is a secondary market that should mean jack.
Hell, the only reason other companies are now pushing for EVs so much is because Tesla lit a fire under everyone else and despite Wall Street betting against them (high volume of shorts), Tesla is now the top selling luxury sedan in the U.S. Now everyone else is scrambling. We will see one or two major automotive companies that have been prominent in the last century fall. They will either A. not keep up with the EV world (maybe they receive too much money from the fossil fuel industry) or B. Their tech will not keep up and/or fail and they will lose all their competitiveness.
Shareholders have many different avenues to diversify their assets. Companies do not need to, and should not, attempt to diversify themselves for the sake of diversity.
the good news is that the actual cost of the charger itself is probably a small part of the cost of the charger station construction and installation. They can easily tear out obsolete charging units and use the existing electrical conductors to deliver the same amount of power with a compatible connector.
Even if they have to pull new cables to deliver more power the conduits will already be there.
Standardization has happened, the market has spoken, Tesla has won.
Seriously, Ford, Nissan and whoever spent many many years in committees designing one charging standard after the other. Meanwhile, Tesla built an actual high amps charging network. The other manufacturers need to realize they have wasted 5+ years with dick in hand doing nothing.
People in informal language constantly use "exponential" to mean "more than linear." Which drives me completely insane, but I think it's time to just accept it.
Hell I'd be happy if it were used to describe sequences with more than just two values. I hear it constantly used in comparisons of just two quantities where the intended meaning is just "a lot more".
What frustrates me is people saying "exponentially more" when comparing two things, like the Bolt has exponentially more range than the Leaf. I mean, you could fit an exponential curve to those data points, but also logarithmic, so why bother?
There's no hope of curing this in the popular press, but I think technical people should still be careful with the term. I think it's great that someone's called it out on HN.
Yes. To be precise, power, which is energy per unit time, is cubic in velocity: it takes 8 times as much power to go twice as fast (because of air resistance). But for a given distance, the energy required to traverse it is quadratic in velocity: it takes only 4 times as much energy to cover the distance at twice the speed, because it takes you half as long to get there.
ETA: There are other sources of drag, of course -- tire drag, and mechanical friction in the drivetrain -- but AFAIK the power required to overcome those is linear in speed, and so the energy is constant for a given distance. Anyway, at highway speeds, air resistance dominates.
For many people this won't have the mythos or upstart appeal of the upcoming Tesla Model 3-- and that's a shame, cause they did a real good job on it.
Yet I do believe the 200+ mile range and price will get enough people in one and really start to shift the EV from being an early adopter accessory to a viable everyday car.
EV are only viable for those who own their own homes. Many electric vehicles have been adequate for my needs, but I continue to drive a car with an internal combustion engine because I can always buy gas.
My apartment building has two EV charging stations (always taken) and my work has 9 (always taken).
I don't think vehicle technology or execution has been the limiting factor for a while.
Roughly 60% of the US housing inventory is composed of single-family detached houses[0]. Even if we assume an EV isn't practical for half of the households living in those units for some reason (need more range, can't have a charger installed for some reason, etc.), there's still a huge amount of room for EV marketshare growth without addressing that problem.
I agree generally, but think this is changing. My building has probably 10 ports, and you can get a reserved space with a charger, so you always have your spot open and a charger available.
This will change when people can make some money off charging. If you can fill up 200 miles of range for $10 in 30 minutes, then you might consider an EV even without a home charger.
Yea this is at odds with rising percentage of people who rent instead of buy. I park on the street, maybe public streets would be equipped with electric chargers with meters.
Autonomous driving will solve this. You won't need to own your EV, you'll just be able to pay $0.50 for a cab ride, and it can go charge itself whenever.
Autonomy will also eventually allow for in-fight recharging. A vehicle will just pull up behind you and plug in.
It's great that it doesn't have upstart appeal. Nobody cares about the latest Subaru at this price point either. EV's need to be boring to succeed. It can't all be Porche-level cars with a price point to match.
That's fine with GM. If you go to a Chevrolet dealership, they'll usually have a Corvette Stingray on the showroom floor. Most buyers will admire it, then buy the sedan or mini-van.
Agreed. This looks pretty nice. They did a good job.
> $30,000. The liquid-cooled lithium-ion battery pack stores 60.0 kilowatt-hours of energy (equivalent to about 1.8 gallons of gasoline), enough to earn a 238-mile range
The biggest drawback for me would be the inability to charge quickly.
With a Tesla you can take it on a road trip, as long you plan it around hitting supercharging stations. In the bolt, you can go 200 miles, but have to stop for the night to grab a full charge.
But if you aren't the type of person to drive more than 4 hours a day, or have an alternative vehicle for longer trips, this could be a great choice.
40km per hour of charge time, 9 hours for a full charge.[1] It doesn't look like it has the ability to use superchargers, or charge quickly in any way.
My water pump went out on my (gasoline engine powered) car today. All 6 of my fuel injectors did earlier in the year, so I'm a little sensitive about vehicle repairs today.
Out of curiosity, I wondered if the upcoming Tesla Model 3 has any water pumps. It has no need to cool an engine, right? So, maybe I'd avoid replacing fuel and coolant parts. Less parts, means lower cost of ownership, right? ...Maybe?
Teslas have 3 water pumps, to pump ~26 quarts of coolant to keep the battery cool. Sigh.
Maybe I'd have no fuel injectors to replace in a Tesla, but the physics of getting me from 0-60 in a reasonable amount of time must necessitate a minimum complexity.
I wish I could fast forward ten years to see total cost of ownership of EVs versus gas/petrol powered vehicles.
The motor and drivetrain is significantly less complex than an engine. A Tesla has a dozen moving parts in the drivetrain. Your gas car has thousands. Not only does a Tesla not have fuel injectors, it doesn't have a fuel pump, or spark plugs, or valves, or piston rings or pistons or connecting rods or rod bearings or a cam shaft... The electric powertrain is magnitudes simpler.
Not only that, but while it is orders of magnitude more difficult to fix than a classic gas engine, those don't really exist anymore either. Pretty much any engine electric or otherwise is out of range for typical home repair. (And I say this as someone that still has a manual with the thought that I could replace the clutch on my own, if I want to.)
I hasten to add that I do not know the expected cost of repairs between the two types of engines. Would be a good fact to know.
Warranties on electric cars are insane right now, I suspect specifically to counter some of that new owner anxiety. Chevy are putting a 100,000 mile/8 year warranty on the battery systems in the Bolt; Ford are putting a similar warranty on EV components in their electric/hybrid range. Tesla do 8 year unlimited mileage on battery and drive units. You shouldn't have to pay for a repair on the battery cooling system in a new EV.
A buyer should check the warranty offered on replacement batteries. A coworker had the hybrid battery replaced on her car, and the car maker only offered their usual 12 month parts warranty on it, not the remaining time on the initial battery warranty.
The water pump on an EV can be engineered to be significantly easier to maintain/replace - the one in your car is driven by the engine and usually bolted directly in to your engine. This necessitates some crazy levels of work to get to in some cases.
There's also no possibility for a backup on an IC engine, if you water pump dies, you're not running. It would be pretty easy for an electric car to have their simple water pumps cover for each other to provide a limp-home or reduced power-mode.
Readit News
> can be had for less than the price of the average new car.
Emphasis mine and obviously they are factoring in the $7,500 tax credit which I guess is fine.
I dislike this "price of the average new car" line and it gets repeated a lot. Car manufacturers must love it since it tries to normalize that price as "average" when its not very representative. Grand total "average new car" price that the media is using everywhere is $33,666, but that's only because of the average price of luxury cars and trucks driving the number way, way up. There's a breakdown by sector in KBB's numbers:
http://mediaroom.kbb.com/new-car-transaction-prices-up-2-per...
Scroll down to the second table for more realistic numbers. At any rate the median new car price, if we could get it, would be much more telling. Sadly I can't find it anywhere.
After the tax credit the base model is the average cost of a Mid-size Pickup Truck ($30,045) or average cost of a sports car ($30,712)
But well above the average cost of a mid size car ($25,095) or crossover ($27,056) or subcompact ($17,218)
The total amount of new vehicles sold in the U.S. in 2015 was 17.5 million [1]. Since the average is $33666, we can assume half are above, and half are below that price. In reality, there are far fewer than half above that price, since an outsized sale price pushes that average up.
Half of 17.5 million is 8.75 million. The U.S. Census estimates the 2015 population was 323,995,528 [2], with 116,211,092 households [3]. With every household replacing their car every five years or so (total guess), that leaves us 23.2 million households that should have been buying a car in 2015. That means that about 37.7% of the eligible U.S. households bought a car worth over $33666.
That is bizarre enough that it leads me to believe there is a serious fault in my methodology or it just so happened that car sales were abnormally high in 2015 due to an enormous rise in consumer confidence. Either way, I'm more confused now than when I started scribbling on my metaphorical cocktail napkin.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awsj.com+U.S.+Car+Sale...
[2] https://www.census.gov/popclock/
[3] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/
I'm not sure where you're from, but this is Hacker News, so I'll just ask - Who are all these people who can afford to live in California? ;-)
It's all relative. Remember, the annual new car market is the number of cars on the road divided by the life of a car. This accounts for the sale of used cars as well.
People with families will probably spend a little more for a minivan or SUV, which will skew it higher. Students (or people in their 20s in the early phases of their careers) will spend less, balancing out the minivan purchasers. Totally guessing though.
They eyeroll at my 2002 Honda, and I eyeroll at their $1000/mo payments.
To top it off, when you're financing, used car loans are rarely as attractive as manufacturer/dealer incentives - BankRate says they average about 3% annually nowadays, so an 18% mark-up to the value of the used vehicle over the 6-year ownership period.
Out of 330M people even if 5% of population is buying a new car in the given year that is whooping 15M cars per year. USA sells around 17M cars year +-2M. One simple proxy to arrive at the 5% figure is the number of people in 16-19 age group where they might get parent's old car and the parent might buy a new one. That population is around 20M in USA.
Of course I have not accounted for taxi fleets, car rental fleets, corporate purchases etc. In fact go to think of it 17M cars per year does look like a very low number.
Also, I'd like to think your average developer is more financially literate/savvy than your average American. Otherwise, the housing crash wouldn't have happened. You know, people with no money buying expensive houses. People carrying credit card balance and rolling them over.
Those people exist, and they are many.
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How much do you drive?
What kind of vehicle do you want?
How long do you plan on keeping the car?
Etc...
Here's one case: I just bought a new Tundra a couple months ago (cash because I don't like debt). I could have saved $5K (15%) and gotten one 3 years old with 40K miles on it.
That's the problem with some models. The resale value is SO good that the value proposition for buying used is almost nil.
Since my trade-in Tundra was 10 years old with 178K miles, let's assume that's the life of the new vehicle too. I don't think saving 15% to buy a vehicle that's 20% through its life span is a good deal.
The best I can find is $24000 [1], which sounds believable. But that's not referenced. There's a lot of articles stating that most people actually can't afford new cars [2]. Those articles, and studies they're talking about, are comparing median income and average car price, though.
[1] http://www.financialsamurai.com/the-110th-rule-for-car-buyin... [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/02/your-money/new-cars-are-to...
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-much-does-typical-america...
> *Kelley Blue Book Average Transaction Prices do not include applied consumer incentives
Trucks make up the top 3 best selling vehicles in the US by a large margin -- accounting for 42% of the top 10 best selling vehicles in the US. They are also the most heavily discounted because their margins are so high. And KBB intentionally leaves that information out of their figures.
So all those $8-12k discounts on Ford/GM/Dodge pickup-trucks are not even taken into account for that average. Meaning KBB's numbers are complete trash.
I drive about 800km per month and I'd pay $10/mo in electricity to do that in a Bolt, versus $150/mo in gasoline for my current car.
I don't get those figures at all... 800km (500 miles) is approx two-three recharges on the Bolt or about one tank of gas (depending on vehicle). Ignoring how incredibly cheap you are claiming electricity is ($5/full charge), there's nowhere on earth where a full tank of gas costs $150 (or even two full tanks).
Something went badly wrong when you came up with these figures.
Hallelujah! I really hope the rest of the manufacturers and their car lines come around to this model. I know they make more $$ on their $2000 nav packages, but people are rejecting them in droves because they are horrible and need to be updated through clunky, often expensive processes.
http://money.cnn.com/2016/10/10/autos/car-navigation-frustra...
The phone navigation apps are made by software companies who actually have to compete with each other to make the best system. Compare to car nav systems where you only have one option, and the comparison of navigation systems between different cars is going to be a very very small factor in which car you end up buying. You buy the car you want and take whatever you get for navigation.
Car manufacturers (to generalize a bit) are not particularly good at software, and do not have much incentive to get better at it.
In my experience the only thing Google Maps navigation has going for it is superior data. I really wish I could have my car's UI with Google's data.
I have a 2010 Prius, and I'm quite happy with its built-in navigation. Its UI is worse at first-time address entry, but is substantially better for... Just about everything else.
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Nav seems nice so far but the real test is always several years after the latest update...
Each year was a new one for a couple hundred bucks. I bought mine, but given that it's a DVD, out of curiosity I checked if it was possible to pirate them and I only found one possibility in some Russian guy's home directory Apache index. Toyota Highlander dealer navigation DVDs weren't that hot of a commodity when I looked, rather surprisingly.
> The Android Auto app is currently available in the following countries: Argentina Australia Austria Bolivia Brazil Canada Chile Colombia Costa Rica Dominican Republic Ecuador France Germany Guatemala India Ireland Italy Japan Mexico New Zealand Panama Paraguay Peru Puerto Rico Russia Spain Switzerland United Kingdom United States Uruguay Venezuela
[1]: https://www.android.com/auto/
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andromium/the-superbook...
I don't WANT to update my navigation system. That's exactly what I HATE about Google Maps etc. In fact, I have gone so far as to opt out of updating my car's system to enable Android Auto after I tried it out in a rental and found it to be an epic bowl of buggy fail that nearly got me in an accident.
And of course, that didn't stop the Android team from breaking basic Bluetooth support in Android 7.0.1 on my Nexus 5x because they're go-getters in that department.
My car is a useful device that I need to count on daily, not a @#$%ing mobile app like Candy Crush.
I wonder if it would be cost effective for you to simply have another dedicated device and data line if you get a Bolt? Reusing an older device ($0) + $10/mo data sounds better for even 5 years of service (10125) = $600 vs. $2000 for nav system.
Dead Comment
A Bolt costs roughly $32K (depending on incentives, maybe more). A Toyota Camry Hybrid starts at $26,790. And, I know what you're going to say, "electricity is free!" That's just untrue. Recharging electric cars is far from free.
The Bolt costs roughly $10 to recharge its 238 mile battery. A Camry Hybrid can drive approx 680 miles on a full tank and costs $37 to completely refill. So you're saving about $8 per every 680 miles you drive.
So the breakeven for the cost difference of the two vehicles (@$5,210) is 442,850 miles. Neither car is going to make it to 400K miles, so therefore you won't make your money back from a Bolt.
PS - Yes, my post uses tons of assumptions: Incentives for the Bolt, cost of electricity, cost of gas, average miles figures, and so on. You cannot make a post about this topic without doing so. Feel free to pick particular figures/assumptions apart, but pointing out "this is all based on estimates!" isn't very constructive within itself.
If you drive 1000 miles a month (average), that's $29.20 in savings a month, or $350.40 a year in fuel costs (assuming base gas/electricity prices inline with what I have here). If you think gas prices will average $3.00/gallon for the lifetime of the car, the fuel savings are $41.80/mo per 1000 miles, $500.40 a year in fuel costs for 12,000 miles, and evens out at just under 125k miles. For $2.00/gallon the 1000 mile savings are $16.70, $200 for a 12,000 mile year. That said, I think I average about 20,000 miles a year on the family car that we use to ferry kids to/from school and most daily errands.
The very important thing to consider though is whether or not you have access to free public charging. If you can find a free public charger and work it into your schedule in some way (maybe run some errands by foot in the area), you might be able to eliminate almost all of your home charging. If I was able to do really good at this, and only home charge for 10% of my usage on average (probably a tall order), and assuming that availability of free chargers doesn't change drastically for the worse, at current gas prices that would put my average (12,000 miles) yearly savings at $710.04. I consider $3.00/gallon a more likely average over that time, and that puts the yearly savings at $860.04, and it evens out at just under 73k miles. .
That's not super compelling when compared to a Camry Hybrid, but it may be cheaper overall, depending on how the future unfolds. That said, if what others are saying and Hybrids have increased maintenance costs, it may be enough to make electric the clear winner in this comparison, but I don't know.
I expect that the Bolt will also have crappy resale value, if, as I think we all expect, EVs continue to get substantially better over the next few years.
The reason to get a Bolt right now is because you are ideologically committed to EVs or because the whole deal of mostly not having to deal with fueling up your car/liking the acceleration profile of an EV/etc., not because it's genuinely the lowest TCO.
True. This is a voting with your dollars situation. If you favor the way in which electricity is generated in your area over using an IC engine then the Bolt is your car regardless of how the finances work out.
The battery pack replacement is a major maintenance cost, even if everything else is running fine. That's something a used EV buyer should take into account.
That seems way high.
For your post to matter, you should really cite figures or at least detail your math a bit.
In many parts of the country, power is much, much cheaper than mine. My friend pays less than $0.10 per kw/h in Georgia, which also has a $5,000 state subsidy (on top of the $7,500 federal subsidy).
Do the math with $6 full charge cost and a $12,500 subsidy and it quickly turns in the EVs favor...
I assumed he used california prices. I live in canada and electricity is half the price as it is in cali based on that website (but the weather could affect millage as well).
But separately, depreciation on EVs is a bit unknown. The powertrain should be good for a very long time - but the battery pack may cancel out any benefit relative to IC cars.
Cutting e.g. $3/charge off the cost doesn't really swing the figures towards paying off the Bolt's extra $5.2K starting price over the life of the vehicle.
So 60 kw-h is $7.20. Brings the breakeven miles down a fair bit, and I guess it should be possible to have quite lot cheaper electricity for charging (and lots of people will have to do the calculation with higher prices).
I'd say the biggest simplification in your analysis is only factoring cost, but not the cars themselves. Again, what do I know, right?
So unless they can quantify why a Bolt is superior to a Hybrid (and cost definitely isn't a winning argument) you'll struggle to convince the average American household to own one.
To me that is impractical.
Avg 3-5 cents kwh for overnight charging here via ComEd's hourly pricing system. Assuming a decent level of inefficiency here via the charging process and ComEd's variable rates after 8pm I'm closer to $3 to charge than $10.
So the Camry gets 3x the range, but at 20x the cost. The Bolt is 6-7x more economical per mile for me in Chicago, which is fairly impressive.
Not sure how that plays out from a real dollar perspective, but I imagine after incentives the Bolt might be the cheaper option. I also imagine an EV car is a simpler machine than a ICE car, so you may have maintenance and reliability benefits. Personally, the complexity of a hybrid is a pretty big turn off. I'd rather just get a lower HP ICE car that naturally gets good milaeage and deal with worse performance than go the hybrid route.
The nice thing with electric is you get all these cost savings and you get some decent performance as well. The Bolt does 0-60 under 7 seconds. The Camry Hybrid is almost 10 seconds.
That gives a saving of $74/680m or breakeven around the 50k miles point, if my maths is correct.
Deleted Comment
Whoa, inconsistent brake feel? That's kind of terrifying. You'd think Chevy would calibrate the brake feel across states.
this weird feel is one of the problems that halted tesla's collaboration with toyota on electric rav4 drivetrains.
What there is is that, if the battery is completely full, the energy has nowhere to go. So the car does not use full regen. This could be mistaken for a "warmup".
As another poster commented, this changes the accelerator feel, not the brakes.
Muscle memory is very important, and having the car behave unexpectedly is bad.
I doubt it's that alarming. When you let off the accelerator in a manual transmission vehicle, it's more of a "test the water" type of thing, and then you can change gear from there.
It's not like people are going to rely on engine braking to come to an immediate stop.
It's still a bad surprise, but you can tap the brakes if you want to slow down.
If you're in B mode, it will use compression braking (and if you're stopped, it'll bleed off energy by spinning the engine without any gas), but that doesn't change when you actually press on the brake pedal.
I rented a 2009 Prius once, and was surprised by the brake pedal being completely electronic. When the battery was completely full, I noticed the brake pump noise occurring immediately upon touching the brake, instead of partway down the travel like it usually does when regeneration is working.
My mom's Leaf also has a fully electronic pedal, but I've never driven it down a very long hill with a fully-charged battery, and there's no telltale brake pump noise, so I don't know if it changes its behavior with the battery filled to capacity.
You can hear this by starting at the top of a hill with a full battery and in `D` mode. Then, as you roll down it, you can hear a noise from the engine as it is being turned over as it uses the regen energy.
It's being worked on (there were some talks between Tesla and a French manufacturer) but it isn't there yet.
> As of September 1, 2016, there were 1061 CCS fast-charging connectors in the United States, versus 2010 Tesla Supercharger hookups
Let's not do this.
Also, Tesla has already done so much for any car manufacturer:
- They have made all patents free to use by anyone. - Elon has stated that he would welcome other car makers to join in on the Tesla Supercharger network if they are willing to contribute in an equal manner.
Seeing as Tesla has more Evs on the road than anyone else by a large magnitude, and they have proven their charging network far more than anybody else, it's odd nobody else wants to join in. But that's Wall Street for you. Nothing will be given away "free", and we can't be seen working with the competition. Despite many of the 'shareholders' are institutions who likely would own shares of both companies regardless. And at the end of the day, Wall Street is a secondary market that should mean jack.
Hell, the only reason other companies are now pushing for EVs so much is because Tesla lit a fire under everyone else and despite Wall Street betting against them (high volume of shorts), Tesla is now the top selling luxury sedan in the U.S. Now everyone else is scrambling. We will see one or two major automotive companies that have been prominent in the last century fall. They will either A. not keep up with the EV world (maybe they receive too much money from the fossil fuel industry) or B. Their tech will not keep up and/or fail and they will lose all their competitiveness.
I thought this was the case too, but was recently told that the Nissan Leaf has sold pretty well too.
I'd say I see about equal numbers of Teslas and Leafs driving around my area. And Chevy Volts are nearly as common, though that's not a true EV.
The Chevy Volt is the most common plug-in electric car. Tesla is 3rd behind Nissan in cumulative sales.
Even if they have to pull new cables to deliver more power the conduits will already be there.
Seriously, Ford, Nissan and whoever spent many many years in committees designing one charging standard after the other. Meanwhile, Tesla built an actual high amps charging network. The other manufacturers need to realize they have wasted 5+ years with dick in hand doing nothing.
Deleted Comment
quadratic? otherwise we're in trouble
Well, I'll continue to downvote comments here that do it. Mathematical concepts are an important part of our culture and of the public conversation.
ETA: There are other sources of drag, of course -- tire drag, and mechanical friction in the drivetrain -- but AFAIK the power required to overcome those is linear in speed, and so the energy is constant for a given distance. Anyway, at highway speeds, air resistance dominates.
Yet I do believe the 200+ mile range and price will get enough people in one and really start to shift the EV from being an early adopter accessory to a viable everyday car.
Good on ya, GM.
My apartment building has two EV charging stations (always taken) and my work has 9 (always taken).
I don't think vehicle technology or execution has been the limiting factor for a while.
200mi+ is the threshold that will make a lot of people feel completely comfortable using an EV day-in and day-out.
Charging stations will go up when EV sales go up--this will help.
[0] https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/census/historic/unit...
Autonomy will also eventually allow for in-fight recharging. A vehicle will just pull up behind you and plug in.
The Bolt is there to be bought, not admired.
> $30,000. The liquid-cooled lithium-ion battery pack stores 60.0 kilowatt-hours of energy (equivalent to about 1.8 gallons of gasoline), enough to earn a 238-mile range
Good price too
With a Tesla you can take it on a road trip, as long you plan it around hitting supercharging stations. In the bolt, you can go 200 miles, but have to stop for the night to grab a full charge.
But if you aren't the type of person to drive more than 4 hours a day, or have an alternative vehicle for longer trips, this could be a great choice.
Anyway, how quick does it charge, either to full or 50 or 80%?
[1] http://www.chevrolet.ca/bolt-ev-electric-vehicle.html
edit: I am wrong, the article mentions quick charging, but the official website doesn't.
Out of curiosity, I wondered if the upcoming Tesla Model 3 has any water pumps. It has no need to cool an engine, right? So, maybe I'd avoid replacing fuel and coolant parts. Less parts, means lower cost of ownership, right? ...Maybe?
Teslas have 3 water pumps, to pump ~26 quarts of coolant to keep the battery cool. Sigh.
Maybe I'd have no fuel injectors to replace in a Tesla, but the physics of getting me from 0-60 in a reasonable amount of time must necessitate a minimum complexity.
I wish I could fast forward ten years to see total cost of ownership of EVs versus gas/petrol powered vehicles.
I hasten to add that I do not know the expected cost of repairs between the two types of engines. Would be a good fact to know.
There's also no possibility for a backup on an IC engine, if you water pump dies, you're not running. It would be pretty easy for an electric car to have their simple water pumps cover for each other to provide a limp-home or reduced power-mode.