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The last paragraph of this article is right on. Don’t just tell people to buy EVs and then call it a day. Improve the infrastructure. Make buying an EV feel like less of an unsupported risk.
Citroen e-c3 is trying.
looks interesting, it certainly is very cheap and the range / charging is good enough for many people in practice, even when many will think its not
Europe has so many super cool options!
I think a lot of people will avoid it just because of what’s going on in the Congo unless that company can prove that they aren’t getting their cobalt from the Congo.
Most people have no idea
This is the truth
They need to just build hybrids until batteries advance further. Either ones that will last 25 years with 80+% capacity remaining, or lighter more power dense batteries that can more easily and cheaply be replaced.
A 1500Lb battery that costs $10,000 and requires half disassembling the vehicle in order to replace That goes bad after 15 years is a pretty shit thing.
I have an 08 prius with 240,000 miles on it. The 75 Lb Battery went bad last year. I bought a new one from toyota for $1,900 and installed it myself in an afternoon. If the gas motor goes out on me (they will typically go 400,000 miles if cared for correctly) a rebuilt one with a 5 year warranty is around $1400. That’s not in most people’s “diy” zone but it’s a 7 to 9 labor hour job, so just call it $3,000.
All things much cheaper and easier than replacing an all electric battery, and no range issues.
Let’s just do some checking here to counter your argument
All evs sold in America have 8year/100,000mi warranty on battery, also these are ev top of the line batteries, not the junk that goes into most toys that burn out in a few years, these are good for 300,000mi+ before the 80% capacity, which is not at all a cause for replacement
But for your cost of ownership argument, if you drove a Prius for 400,000mi as claimed, at a likely/optimistic mpg of 50mpg, that’s 8,000 gallons of fuel, which over the last decade has probably averaged at least close to 3$/g, depending of course. That’s 24,000$. Just in fuel. Now you have say 40$ oil changes every 6,000 miles, that’s another 2,600$, you did a nicad battery replacement because Toyota was totally fine putting that junk in there, another 1,500$
Totalled up to 28,100$. But that potential , not guarantee, 10,000$ battery replacement is too expensive. Literally could have bought an ev for the price of the running costs for an ice
I mean, you’re not counting the fact that the electricity isn’t free either - and KWH costs are just going up. It’s debatable how you ought to cost out the electrical work to put in a charger, and the charger itself. I really have no idea about the lifespan of the chargers, so it might not last a full 15 years out in the elements, it might last 50+ years.
The charger is just a few solenoids very simple device, and they don’t get switched with current flowing. So probably last forever, for wall mounted hard wired ones at least.
True I did not count cost of electricity, because it’s extremely hard to guess. Some places are .04$/kwh, some are .45/kwh, some are free.
What if you had free charging at work? Or apartment, or had solar, it could be completely free
4 qt oil in a prius. I change my own oil every 8,000 miles, so it’s around $25 for me, but most people don’t, I suppose.
Electricity costs money. You skipped that, and for the millions and millions of people living in places like apartments, you can’t charge from home. Charge stations cost almost as much as gasoline, so that gets danged pricey and inconvenient. Poor option all the way around for those people.
Most vehicles have a 100,000 power train warranty, so that’s pretty irrelevant.
I already stated the failure of the batteries is closer to 15 years. That is the good batteries used today. I’m well aware of the lifespan of the lithium ion batteries used in today’s EV’s. They’re generally Lithium Cobalt Oxide or Lithium Nickle Cobalt Oxide and they can go 300,000 in theory. The “in theory” is that they won’t last that long if it’s spread over the course of 15 years and you keep them always close to fully charged or close to discharged. To go 300,000 miles you’ll have to not use any of the extra fast chargers and keep the capacity between 30 and 80 percent all the time. The batteries used have a lifespan of about 1400 charge cycles, if age is not a factor. You can go beyond that by keeping them at 30 to 80 percent, and it will be less than that if you use a level 3 charge station.
Also, look at tesla. There’s an entire industry that’s developed to keep their batteries up and going. They use barrel style batteries. There’s around 3,000 battery cells in each of their teslas. Some of those individual cells start going out quite quickly. The manufacturing of them isn’t flawless to the extent that 3,000 can all last over even 5 years. Tesla designed their system to be able to operate as the cells go bad, but it’s a nice slow deminishment of capacity and power. It’s turned into an entire business of tearing into those tesla batteries, finding and replacing out the bad battery cells, and then re-selling the packs as refurbished to people, which is a terrible idea, really. Replacing a hundred of the worse cells and calling good, when the other 2800 cells have a decade on them and will also fail soon is a short lived stop gap that takes advantage of people ignorance about what a remanufactured battery actually is.
Lastly; to your comment about toyota being “totally fine putting that junk in there”: LOL. You obviously don’t know much about batteries. NMH batteries have a longer duty cycle rate than any lithium batteries that have been developed. It’s why a little 75 pound battery in a non plug in lasts 14 years as it did before wearing out. Also, the “junk” batteries are Panasonics. Go check into it. They’re regarded as making the best mass produced batteries in the world.
Also, fyi: teslas 8 year battery warranty only kicks in if the battery has degraded below 70% capacity. So they think it’s OK that the car you bought to go 300 miles on a charge may only go like 225 miles after 8 years.
Then, finally, look what happens to a plug in when it’s winter and below freezing. An electrics range is tested and claimed when it’s around 70 degrees outside. That’s when your 300 mile electric can go 300 miles. If it’s 15 degrees out real world expectations put your range down to 60%. So your 300 miles goes to less than 200. That’s not just from capacity and discharge rates being effected. A large reason is running the all electric heater.
True I did not count cost of electricity, because it’s extremely hard to guess. Some places are .04$/kwh, some are .45/kwh, some are free. What if you had free charging at work? Or apartment, or had solar, it could be completely free. But let’s say you did pay for electricity, average of .12$/kwh, 4mi/kwh, around 12,000$ so half. You spend twice as much for a far slower, much smaller car that needs maintenance 2-4 times a year, and need to waste 15 minutes every week at a gas station (13 hours per year!).
And before I get a “it only takes 3 minutes to fill” bullshit, your not considering the detour time, pull in time, parking time, credit card time, Skip their ads/loyalty shit time, wait for receipt, time to make your turn out of the lot. Go ahead and time it, I’m sure you’ll be surprised how much of your life is being wasted while breathing those fumes from gas/exhaust.
Of course there’s going to be a market for ev battery repair, and they’ll work on Teslas the most/exclusively not because they’re bad, but because they’re the only significant ev so far. They’ve sold millions, when the next highest has 200k. Shit can break on anything at any time from any manufacturer.
All Toyotas for years have had 3yr/36,000mi, 5yr/60,000mi powertrain warranty.
Nimh is junk, it is guaranteed to die due to age. It cycles really well but the chemistry inside literally dries out and stops working, 8-10 years. That’s probably where a lot of the FUD about lithium batteries come from, lithium batteries degrade slowly. You can check this old blog that gives stats for 10 year higher mileage Teslas, looking at 18% to the high end but usually 8-12%. And those are the early batteries where Tesla was probably cutting as much cost as possible, today’s batteries are a bit better.
And Toyota absolutely does put junk into their cars, they put weak engines, weak hybrid motors, bottom tier infotainment, minimum legal warranty. They’ve been riding their 1980-2000 reliability reputation hard. Not saying they’re unreliable, but that reputation is the only thing that sells their cars.
Range does decrease in winter for evs, but it does for gasoline cars too, they don’t show the mpg difference on the window sticker either. Tesla has really good thermal management so it generally Loses about 15%, not your 40% claim
Dude. You’re living in your very own special zip code.
75 lb battery doesnt sound much bigger than a regular car battery
Yeah. Car batteries are lead acid and weigh a lot more than the nickel metal hydride batteries in the hybrid battery.
Essentially, the hybrid battery is kind of like 168 rechargeable batteries all wired together in 28 sets of 6.
There’s some after market batteries a website called “Project Lithium” has been selling that use lithium cobalt batteries instead of NMH batteries (lithium batts each have 3.7v as opposed to 1.2v in nmh and lithium batts have a higher storage capacity) that weighs even less at around 45Lbs, but they’ve only been selling them a few years, so how long those last before failure isn’t really a known thing. I knew the OEM toyota battery would last over a decade, so I went that route. Newer prus and other toyota hybrids do use lithium now, but I don’t think they made the switch until around 2015.
Everytime I consider buying an EV I do some research and they always seem to have all of the bells and whistles. Then I get to price and it’s like $60,000+ and I can’t help but wonder how much cheaper it could be without all of the added features.
Edit: I’m not going to reply to everyone and I really should have mentioned since it’s not immediately obvious but I’m Australian. No Chevy volt and and all vehicles are imported increasing prices on top of the usual AUD imbalance.
I just bought a used 2022 Polestar 2 under 20k miles for $35k.
This. For most of my trips I could use a glorified golf cart.
Last year I bought new Citroen e-berlingo for 25.000€. It would be €32.000 without subsidies but still not 60.000.
Chevy bolt at least has half of the features but still quite a few, I would say a very set of features to include, but I do imagine it would only shave less than 5k if the bolt had the most basic of features. That means it would be 1-2k cheaper as a used vehicle. I do think it’s the more reasonable priced vehicle, and we need more competitors to this vehicle. On the other hand, most of the cost is the battery and it just something researchers must be paid to bring innovations for and its just not reasonable to pay them cheap as they are doing a great thing for humanity. However, this forces companies to charge higher prices and should instead be subsidized without trademark/IP protections restricting its adoption.
And they almost killed the Bolt.
The only reason they didn’t is because China is getting ready to ship stupid cheap cars to the US.
Is that true? Last I heard they couldn’t pass safety regulations.
I would be for it, we need more companies to show Hyundai how to child proof cars… By child proof I mean making sure the car isn’t so easy to steal, a child could do it.
China can’t but their corporations are welcome to submit cars to American testing to sell here. Look up Greely Automotive.
Greely Automotive.
I have never heard of them. I’m not knowledgeable on cars but their newest generation looks very interesting. If they can break the US market, I hope they can lower prices. Thank you for bringing them to my attention.
This. Just this, so much. How much would a battery, an electric engine and safety shit cost?
I’ve seen conversion kits for old trucks under $10k. So there’s your answer.
Unfortunately said kits are often lacking in range unless you’re willing to fill your truck box with batteries, because you can’t really retrofit a “skateboard” style battery.
I literally want that skateboard with seats and a steering wheel. Hell, give me a diesel burning heater and a washer fluid bulb I have to stomp on like I have in my old truck, I’m not picky
That’s actually what they did before the Tesla, and the result was the cars were so useless nobody wanted to buy them.
Most carmakers make small subcompact EVs, and they are way more useful now, but even Dacia Spring which is probably the cheapest European made EV, isn’t competitive against similar sized or prized ICE cars. And frankly it’s a very unattractive car in many ways IMO.
ICE cars have a century of iterations and optimizations on cost effective production and efficiency, it will take a while longer to get the EVs to the same level.
Batteries are getting both cheaper and better and safer, so there is no doubt EVs will ultimately surpass ICE in probably every segment.There was an awful lot of “most trips are under x miles, so we will plan for x miles of range”.
Yes probably, but I don’t see why I would buy a car that can only manage “most trips” unless it’s as a second car.
Attractiveness is an interesting point; it would be interesting to see a “boring” normal looking car that doesn’t lean into the somewhat polarizing EV aesthetic.
OK, I didn’t mean attractive as in how it looks, I mean more that it has a tiny battery, and it doesn’t have a fast charger either, the cheap model you can’t even get as an extra!. It’s not a “real” car IMO, but more something that can be used as a 2nd car, maybe for shopping. It’s simply so underwhelming in every way for its price IMO.
It’s almost like the people who buy EVs are doing it to save money.
The money saving is the bait on the hook, but once you change there is no return. It’s just so much better in every way
How about cold weather?
Range goes down by about 1/3rd. Bad, but most people drive 40 miles/day in the US, so going from 300 miles to 200 miles doesnt really matter.
Nothing a blow torch won’t solve. Will heat that batter up right quick.
How do you know that?
I don’t.
It’s just a guess, but it’s also the main reason I’m looking for a plug-in hybrid.
Can confirm. Was shopping around for cars, and settled on either a 2023 WRX Limited, or a fully loaded 2022 Polestar 2. Both around $37k in the US. Chose the Polestar, and now I don’t have to pay for gas, let alone premium gas
Hey Polestar buddy! I just got one too.
Nice! I’m loving mine! Such a cool car
Also I heard that EVs are alot cheaper to maintain, due to rare malfunctions, because so few moving parts in the car.
It was even a big topic at my local mechanic because they didn’t earn any money on EVs.
Sounds amazing for consumers.
Can your local mechanic even service EVs? The parts that are different, I mean. Obviously they can all do tires and the like.
My local mechanic can service 2 different car brands, so he can’t service them all. And he services those two brands both on ICE and EV.
But he says that 95% of the things he fixes on traditional cars, is not even present in EVs. EVs just require fewer parts to work, therefore almost no parts that can break.
Donald Trumps tariffs have been a disaster
There are great EVs out there but trump blocked them. We have all lost out
I saw in Asia there is a Chinese EV, I think the brand is Wuling, for about ~13-15k with about 180 miles of range. Small car but perfect for local driving.
Wuling and BYD absolutely dominates cheap EV segment in Asia. Their small EVs basically cost almost a quarter of Hyundai Ioniq 5.
Thought that image was of a rad Winamp equalizer at first. Was disappointed.
That doesn’t whip the llama’s ass
They are giving americans what they want. The real problem is continuing to feed the deep rooted car addiction brought on by lobbying and corporate greed. There has not been a better time to instead invest heavily on public transportation, build extension inter-state, inter-city train systems, subway or rail systems for cities. Overtime phasing out freeways and replacing them walkable districts. I understand this won’t happen over night and cities like Houston and LA are sprawling cities of 100s of miles but it needs to start somewhere and it starts with heavy investment from the federal government. Time to finally invest the tax money back to the taxpayers not defense, wars (direct, proxy or funded) and foreign affairs in the name of “national security”. How about domestic security from corporate greed, price gouging, poor education, horrible Healthcare are system, costly drug prices to say the least. I understand for all these there’s need to be a massive social change booth in the country and in the world’s largest retirement home, US Congress.
I always see the argument for making areas more walkable. But I like a good chunk of Americans live in a subdivision and unless they tear down my neighbors homes to build stores I need to walk like 20 minutes to get anywhere I can purchase something. That said I used to live in Chicago and everything was walkable, however the population density made it possible. I don’t think you can simply make a place more walkable unless the population density supports it.
I feel a way to combat suburban hellholes is to at least make it more cycle-friendly in those areas. Big stroads kill any chance of people being able to cycle to stores, I feel a lot of people don’t want to have to drive to get to a Walmart, especially in hot months and would probably prefer to bike it instead. There’s obviously also the health benefits of people cycling too. For those more lazy individuals, e-bikes and e-scooters are a good idea that can help them rely less on their car too, and are far cheaper to run than a full car.
Eliminating huge sprawling suburbs is a monumental task, but we can at least apply patch fixes for some things at the moment.
Why tear anything down? With zoning changes we could re-allow neighbors to build Front yard businesses like small grocers and cafes again
They aren’t. They are making larger vehicles to keep up with the demands for fuel efficiency (in gasoline vehicles) and max range in electric vehicles because of NHTSA regulations.
There absolutely have been better times to invest in public transit and expansion of transit systems. You require skilled man power for those things. Not just to build them but to upkeep them. And we’re at a time where there are a lot of things that will need to be fixed first or we won’t be able to have nice things. The mental health crisis for one, and homelessness/ rising housing costs for another. Adding infrastructure skyrockets the cost of living making affordable housing farther out of reach, and that adds fuel to the fire where the mental health crisis is concerned. You touch on corporate greed but you don’t outright say we need more regulation. We do. But to get it we have to have people to enforce it. We don’t have that either.
Suburbia costs more in terms of infrastructure, density costs more because of demand. It is absolutely not the way to combat homelessness to build more sprawl.
Public transit for the masses would absolutely create more sprawl. We already have people living there. Are we just going to ignore those people?
brought on by lobbying and corporate greed
That they’ve brought on, mind you.
We, the consumers, have also been saying that. Like, for a while.
Yes - but a quick glance at the insane profit margins on large SUVs/trucks will tell you why this sadly hasn’t happened.
Something’s gotta give though…
Og VW Beetle, but aluminum and EV please.
Same for the VW Golf
I’m so confused why they don’t sell the id4 as a sporty hatchback and call it the GEI or something. It’s the same platform, just tweak the suspension and add some more beefy motors, kinda like the whole idea behind the GTI
They did make the e-golf. Not gti, but still a golf.
And the id3 which is pretty much the same size
Because then people will stop buying the combustion cars, with which they make more money.
Chevy Bolt just got canceled this year so… ?
I do miss smaller cars and if they were electric too? Count me in! The 80’s economy cars were the best.
