For people living in apartments, with the building providing no way to charge your vehicle, especially when parked outside, the value proposition is a lot less tempting.
Takes 5 minutes to get gas, gas stations are everywhere, but having to find a charging station for your EV and having to sit there for an hour or longer is just not appealing if the tradeoff is the good feelings of one's microscopic contribution to saving the planet. You want me to pay more for extra inconvenience.
I'm sure that will change eventually, but at this point it works best for home owners with garages, which isn't everybody.
That's definitely true, but that still leaves a pretty large potential market for home owners with garages (i.e. people for whom an EV is a decent value proposition) that is far from saturated. My guess is that by the time the garage owner market for EVs is getting tapped out, the charging problem for everyone else will have been solved as well.
I also think the market forces work the other way around. I currently own my home, but it's a condo with a shared parking lot and no way to charge an EV. I've been looking to upgrade at some point, and one of my non-negotiable requirements is that whatever I buy next needs to have a way to charge an EV at home (private garage with power, shared parking with the ability to install charges, etc). As EV market share increased, I expect this to create more and more pressure on the housing market to meet home charging needs.
Here in Geneva, Switzerland there is exactly one place with superchargers, metro area easily over 1.5 million and some of the wealthiest and most powerful folks live here or often move through here. I think they have 24 chargers altogether in that spot.
Next nearest in Switzerland is some 120km away. That's basically a non-existent network. Colleague who has model S told me he can charge at his house cca 9km/hour. With commuting he ends up almost empty at the end of the work week, and has this additional worry constantly. Service outside warranty is supposedly sky high. Not that great a proposition.
And you can go grab a Starbucks without sucking down a bunch of carcinogenic fumes during that time.
I have a home charger but never use it. I have never once wished I could go to a gas station, and whenever I drive a dinosaur fume contraption and end up at a gas station I’m reminded of what a filthy end to end system the age of fire was. I’m glad to see the age of Maxwell begin.
I will never buy and EV as long as I’m beholden to the tyranny of PG&E’s constant gamification of my power.
They keep raising and raising prices and there’s nothing attractive about putting all my eggs in the electric basket in California as long as the rates are controlled by cartels.
PG&E will exploit any electric car progress for themselves and rip off their customers as hard as they can as soon as they thought they had a critical mass worth really rate exploiting and could get away with it.
I know lots of people disagree with me, but low institutional trust is the main reason we don’t have one.
That and we tend to buy and keep our vehicles for decades and I’m quite sure I don’t believe the rhetoric around durability and reliability.
When it’s truly a superior product from a quality and reliability standpoint and not a car body stapled to a battery with a smartphone quality warranty, and I have choice in how to fuel it beyond predatory power companies controlled by corrupt institutions, I’m in.
Nobody ever talks about the profound lack of diversity in the power suppliers, but it’s more than a minor existential risk to electric car viability in many parts of the country.
Long term, my plan is to buy a cheap EV like a Bolt as well as a powerwall or other home battery in a part of the world with good sunlight and build a nice little solar farm to power the house and car.
Solar panels just keep getting cheaper and this plan seems increasingly like a way to nearly do away with power bills all together while still staying on grid.
But until then I tend to agree, EVs aren't as appealing when you can't predict what energy prices will be over 10 years
Yea, we’ve been discussing this as an option, especially now that there are such high quality integrated controllers and batteries. It’s become viable to do this, but it’s really rough as it kind of abandons everyone else to the meat grinder.
Having enough personal solar for your car charging solves this problem for now but who know what kind of fuckery there will be around home solar rules in California in the future.
Indeed. That was the story. The reality is after all these rate hikes PG&E, which so desperately complained about their future being in jeopardy, forcing worker concessions, and undergoing a 58 billion dollar wildfire fueled restructuring, paid their CEO more than 40 million dollars and cleared more than 25 percent pure profit last quarter.
Oh, and this most recent rate hike was justified to bury cables. All while becoming the most expensive provider in California.
And did I mention that, after announcing a massive across the board rate hike, they decided to start the very expensive program of giving dividends to stock holders.
But wait! THEN they announced that instead of paying for what you use, you’re going to pay for how much money you earn and that you would now need to report income to them like they are the Government. A private corporation? Every rate payer pays on household incomes?!? What?
A lot of folks (like me) just use high speed charger infrastructure, which would intermediate you from PG&E
I would note that drilling, refineries, distribution, and point of sale for oil have all been and still are an assortment of disgusting cartels, monopolies, and nefarious governments hell bent on screwing you and the planet. But they’re definitely at more arms reach as a consumer than PG&E.
I just can’t agree with you anymore. I think companies that are government supported monopolies are a lot more difficult to change than those subject to competition. There’s just so little incentive to change and it’s baked into regulatory capture on so many levels that changing a company that appears to be available but actually isn’t is probably harder than making change when market forces can create incentives for that change.
I used to believe what you wrote, but my opinion has changed.
EVs are still too compromising or expensive. All I want is an electric no-frills version of my Civic at a comparable price. Honda themselves, or any other manufacturer, have been unable to offer that.
I have no interest in buying another ICE vehicle, so I'll continue to maintain my current car, but I'm ready to buy once they offer something I'm looking for.
> All I want is an electric no-frills version of my Civic at a comparable price.
The US car industry seems really determined not to allow anything affordable on the market. It's not just EVs. They also push overpriced bloated gas guzzlers.
Eventually someone will get a cheap reliable decent-range EV like you want into the market and steamroll the entire industry.
Overpriced according to whom? There's no big conspiracy here. Manufacturers earn larger profits on more expensive vehicles. If consumers are willing to buy expensive cars then why bother making cheap ones?
Some of the legacy mainstream brands used to offer an affordable entry-level model as essentially a loss leader to build brand loyalty with younger consumers. The theory was that those consumers would return in a few years and trade that cheap car in for a more profitable model. But now the brands have largely abandoned that strategy.
As for fuel economy, it costs more to build an efficient vehicle. If consumers are willing to pay a premium for efficiency then manufacturers will be happy to build it.
The answer for me is just that I'll buy one when it's better.
Particularly for larger vehicles such as vans it just doesn't make sense. It's more expensive both to buy and to run, the payload is reduced due to the additional weight, and the range is lower.
I imagine in 5-10 years that won't be the case, but for now, there's no point in me being an early adopter.
To get a decent daily cross the city charger installed in my garage, I have to spend some $3,000 just on electrical work because I have to upgrade service. Currently unsubsidized because my government doesn’t believe climate change is real. This is before the average $700 to install the charger.
Vehicle prices have skyrocketed, and while my family makes well in to 6 figures, cars are just not a thing we want to spent lots of money on. Dropping 80k on a vehicle is WAY past what we’d ever consider.
Critical infrastructure is non-existent for highway trips (again, government doesn’t believe in climate change).
For me it’s simply not practical. There’s too many annoying barriers.
Just curious, why did you use "80k" as a figure for car prices? That's very deep into luxury car prices. You can easily get a fully electric 2023+ model car used with less than 10k miles for $25k, and new ones in the 30s.
Not sure which government but the US has a pretty complete super charger network for Tesla owners and opening up to other brands. I actually have a charger at home but never use it. I just drop by the super chargers around town or along all the highways and grab a 15 minute charge while I grab a Starbucks or lunch once a week.
Why would you need such a lot of work done? A normal domestic 230 V 10 A supply is enough to add 10 km of range per hour so if you plug it in at 20:00 and unplug at 06:00 you have added 100 km. That's far more than the average daily distance for the vast majority of users.
> Dropping 80k on a vehicle is WAY past
You can get perfectly useable EVs for under half that in Europe. Are they not available in the US?
It’s Canada, where we have a price premium for “shipping” even for products that are built here. Gouging is the Canadian way.
But that said, I see that we do have the very low trim options for ranges I would entertain starting at 50k rather than my initial 80k. That’s still more than we’ve ever spent on a vehicle. I will have to wait for better used options, but at the moment, there is no “practical” difference between used or new, at least not in Canada. There is literally no “not abused by someone else” value at all. Value now is basically just choosing kilometers, and even that floors somewhere around 20k (seeing 10 year old vehicles with 300,000 kilometers for 20k was regular when we were shopping a couple years back).
If government truly believed in climate change they would ban passenger cars. Both for taxis and private use. Or gave out very limited purchase licenses.
EV utility is less than ICE cars, but far worse than commuter rail. Most of the pollution in the bay area is from car tires. So if they really want to clean that up, they need to switch to light rail and inter city express rail
The Bay Area's pollution is very low compared to most other cities in the world. People from those cities wish that their pollution primarily came from car tires.
Not light rail, you want and automated metro. the difference is small - sometimes even the same trains are used on both. However the automated metro is cheaper to run (in the US operating costs are a big deal), and so you run it high frequency all day long. Metro systems also tend to run faster than light rail and people care about their time. This in turn means people will choose to take the train as they know it will be there when they want to go. Light rail makes people dream of having a car (possibly self driving) because the car is ready to go when they want to and is fast.
Of course in the US building the above is often not affordable. We need to fix that problem, the more we can afford to build the more we will build and the faster we get away from the car only mindset.
Most of the pollution in the Bay Area is actually from wood smoke. In the summer it's wildfires; in the winter it's wood stoves. A significant portion of Bay Area housing is still on wood heat, which is terrible for outdoor air pollution.
> wood heat, which is terrible for outdoor air pollution
FYI, newer wood stoves have a catalytic combustor and burn the gasses as they leave the wood box 2 or even three times. They are much, much more efficient and drastically less polluting (because all the particulates are burned instead of going out in the air)
They're law for all new installs in many, many places.
I'm aware that car tires create a lot (most?) of the microplastic pollution in the Bay Area, but are you sure it's most of all pollution? Do you possibly have a citation?
The more people who switch to mass transit the more the experience of using mass transit becomes (better used systems tend to have money to build/run more transit). And eventually you reach a point where mass transit is strictly better than the car as well, though in the short term you make the car better.
Honest question, tires, or brakes? I was under the impression brake dust was the worst polluter. I'm sure tires aren't great either, but they should be equivalent between EV's and ICE cars. Brakes last significantly longer on EV's and therefore would help with pollution.
That's wild, didn't know that. Is anything doable about car tires short of not driving a car? Are people perhaps looking into better materials for this problem?
For at least one of the most toxic additives in tires, Washington State's Department of Ecology and some West Coast tribes are leading the push to prohibit, with the caveat that researchers are still looking for a suitable replacement:
Isn’t the automotive space filled with lobbyists wanting to maintain the status quo? I’ve witness many families go electric and none have gone back. Self selected bias?
I’ve had an EV for over seven years now. We are on our second Tesla and looking at a Rivian. I could not go back to an ICE vehicle and this is coming from a long time automotive enthusiast who has competed in rallys and track events. For my family’s lifestyle it is just so simple to own an EV with low to no maintenance, home charging, solar panels cost savings, pet modes, simple to operate, and almost appliance like. We have one vehicle and a motorcycle. When I ride I can focus on manual operations like changing gears or using two brakes. But if I am honest it is rare I want such a taxing ride. I still commute at least twice per week on a two wheels. Eventually, I will get an electric motorcycle.
I had range anxiety in my first month of EV ownership but you quickly realize that most trips rarely require a charging stop. Admittedly, I am in California but even traveling through the desert only one time did I need to use my mobile charger.
If you own a house, an EV is a no brainer. I drive an ICE vehicle and my wife drives an EV. My car feels like antiquated technology after driving the EV. It is hard to describe how simple, cheap and fun they are to operate. To date we haven't had to use a charging station because charging at home or at the office (for free) has been sufficient. We had range anxiety maybe the first few weeks but that is long gone. It just works.
If you have a house odds are you live in a family situations. Maybe you can justify one non-EV truck for towing or trips, but an EV will do everything you need from the other cars.
"a disaster" is very vague and could still be true if EV sales were growing faster than expected as it would still be better if they were higher.
The articles discussed often specifically claimed the sales were dropping (at least in the headline, usually admitting that's not true in the text) which would give a much less wishy-washy headline.
Readit News
Takes 5 minutes to get gas, gas stations are everywhere, but having to find a charging station for your EV and having to sit there for an hour or longer is just not appealing if the tradeoff is the good feelings of one's microscopic contribution to saving the planet. You want me to pay more for extra inconvenience.
I'm sure that will change eventually, but at this point it works best for home owners with garages, which isn't everybody.
“per 100,000 cars sold in each category, electric vehicles had the lowest number of fires.”
Source: https://www.popsci.com/technology/electric-vehicle-fire-rate...
Deleted Comment
I also think the market forces work the other way around. I currently own my home, but it's a condo with a shared parking lot and no way to charge an EV. I've been looking to upgrade at some point, and one of my non-negotiable requirements is that whatever I buy next needs to have a way to charge an EV at home (private garage with power, shared parking with the ability to install charges, etc). As EV market share increased, I expect this to create more and more pressure on the housing market to meet home charging needs.
A Tesla can supercharge 200 miles in 15 minutes
Next nearest in Switzerland is some 120km away. That's basically a non-existent network. Colleague who has model S told me he can charge at his house cca 9km/hour. With commuting he ends up almost empty at the end of the work week, and has this additional worry constantly. Service outside warranty is supposedly sky high. Not that great a proposition.
Where I live (LA) there’s long queues more often than not.
I have a home charger but never use it. I have never once wished I could go to a gas station, and whenever I drive a dinosaur fume contraption and end up at a gas station I’m reminded of what a filthy end to end system the age of fire was. I’m glad to see the age of Maxwell begin.
They keep raising and raising prices and there’s nothing attractive about putting all my eggs in the electric basket in California as long as the rates are controlled by cartels.
PG&E will exploit any electric car progress for themselves and rip off their customers as hard as they can as soon as they thought they had a critical mass worth really rate exploiting and could get away with it.
I know lots of people disagree with me, but low institutional trust is the main reason we don’t have one.
That and we tend to buy and keep our vehicles for decades and I’m quite sure I don’t believe the rhetoric around durability and reliability.
When it’s truly a superior product from a quality and reliability standpoint and not a car body stapled to a battery with a smartphone quality warranty, and I have choice in how to fuel it beyond predatory power companies controlled by corrupt institutions, I’m in.
Nobody ever talks about the profound lack of diversity in the power suppliers, but it’s more than a minor existential risk to electric car viability in many parts of the country.
Solar panels just keep getting cheaper and this plan seems increasingly like a way to nearly do away with power bills all together while still staying on grid.
But until then I tend to agree, EVs aren't as appealing when you can't predict what energy prices will be over 10 years
PG&E is a 100% monopoly for it's customer with no choice whatsoever.
Oh, and this most recent rate hike was justified to bury cables. All while becoming the most expensive provider in California.
And did I mention that, after announcing a massive across the board rate hike, they decided to start the very expensive program of giving dividends to stock holders.
But wait! THEN they announced that instead of paying for what you use, you’re going to pay for how much money you earn and that you would now need to report income to them like they are the Government. A private corporation? Every rate payer pays on household incomes?!? What?
https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news-release/2022/10/ratep....
https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...
https://www.nbclosangeles.com/investigations/national-invest...
We’re rewarding failure and the utility is killing people.
I would note that drilling, refineries, distribution, and point of sale for oil have all been and still are an assortment of disgusting cartels, monopolies, and nefarious governments hell bent on screwing you and the planet. But they’re definitely at more arms reach as a consumer than PG&E.
I used to believe what you wrote, but my opinion has changed.
I have no interest in buying another ICE vehicle, so I'll continue to maintain my current car, but I'm ready to buy once they offer something I'm looking for.
The US car industry seems really determined not to allow anything affordable on the market. It's not just EVs. They also push overpriced bloated gas guzzlers.
Eventually someone will get a cheap reliable decent-range EV like you want into the market and steamroll the entire industry.
This time around the Japanese have been assimilated; it looks like it'll have to be the Chinese to make useful cars.
Some of the legacy mainstream brands used to offer an affordable entry-level model as essentially a loss leader to build brand loyalty with younger consumers. The theory was that those consumers would return in a few years and trade that cheap car in for a more profitable model. But now the brands have largely abandoned that strategy.
As for fuel economy, it costs more to build an efficient vehicle. If consumers are willing to pay a premium for efficiency then manufacturers will be happy to build it.
Particularly for larger vehicles such as vans it just doesn't make sense. It's more expensive both to buy and to run, the payload is reduced due to the additional weight, and the range is lower.
I imagine in 5-10 years that won't be the case, but for now, there's no point in me being an early adopter.
Vehicle prices have skyrocketed, and while my family makes well in to 6 figures, cars are just not a thing we want to spent lots of money on. Dropping 80k on a vehicle is WAY past what we’d ever consider.
Critical infrastructure is non-existent for highway trips (again, government doesn’t believe in climate change).
For me it’s simply not practical. There’s too many annoying barriers.
> Dropping 80k on a vehicle is WAY past
You can get perfectly useable EVs for under half that in Europe. Are they not available in the US?
See https://ev-database.org/uk/cheatsheet/price-electric-car. It lists 19 models under 40 kUSD.
But that said, I see that we do have the very low trim options for ranges I would entertain starting at 50k rather than my initial 80k. That’s still more than we’ve ever spent on a vehicle. I will have to wait for better used options, but at the moment, there is no “practical” difference between used or new, at least not in Canada. There is literally no “not abused by someone else” value at all. Value now is basically just choosing kilometers, and even that floors somewhere around 20k (seeing 10 year old vehicles with 300,000 kilometers for 20k was regular when we were shopping a couple years back).
Federally some subsidies exist, but provincially, Canada has some real “winners”.
Dead Comment
Of course in the US building the above is often not affordable. We need to fix that problem, the more we can afford to build the more we will build and the faster we get away from the car only mindset.
FYI, newer wood stoves have a catalytic combustor and burn the gasses as they leave the wood box 2 or even three times. They are much, much more efficient and drastically less polluting (because all the particulates are burned instead of going out in the air)
They're law for all new installs in many, many places.
EVs tend to be heavier, so are harder on tyres.
https://ecology.wa.gov/blog/january-2023/saving-washington-s...
https://apnews.com/article/epa-tires-toxic-chemical-salmon-t...
I’ve had an EV for over seven years now. We are on our second Tesla and looking at a Rivian. I could not go back to an ICE vehicle and this is coming from a long time automotive enthusiast who has competed in rallys and track events. For my family’s lifestyle it is just so simple to own an EV with low to no maintenance, home charging, solar panels cost savings, pet modes, simple to operate, and almost appliance like. We have one vehicle and a motorcycle. When I ride I can focus on manual operations like changing gears or using two brakes. But if I am honest it is rare I want such a taxing ride. I still commute at least twice per week on a two wheels. Eventually, I will get an electric motorcycle.
I had range anxiety in my first month of EV ownership but you quickly realize that most trips rarely require a charging stop. Admittedly, I am in California but even traveling through the desert only one time did I need to use my mobile charger.
The articles discussed often specifically claimed the sales were dropping (at least in the headline, usually admitting that's not true in the text) which would give a much less wishy-washy headline.