Technology

Yeah, a surprising number of people don't want these hyper complex cars with thousands of microchips and millions of lines of code operating them. Give me an electric 2012 Honda fit/Toyota matrix equivalent that just fucking works and costs $20k or less new.

I currently lease a 2 years old Renault Zoe (very compact car) for 200€ a month (0€ upfront). It was a special deal in Germany for a few months. I charge at home with solar panels and rarely drive more than the 300-350km range.

It honestly feels like the holy grail of electro mobility.

There’s no margins there. Just like in real estate, the best margins are at the high end. They won’t make affordable cars while they can make more money on expensive ones.

Seriously, the electric f150 had a 100% markup at some dealerships. The build quality was absolute crap on those too.

This is a huge point. The other considerations are: EVs are balls expensive compared to ICE counterparts and often require $500-2k worth of electrical work at your house (assuming you even own it) to put in a charger. If you live in an apartment, good luck.

And oh, btw, the chargers aren't standard. Each charging site has different plugs, apps you have to download, etc. Then there is the lack of charging stations that highlights the range anxiety people have with EVs.

Adoption would be so much faster if EVs cost $15-25k and there were adequate standardized charging options available.

Carmakers: (High) increase of the selling prices of all cars, gas/EV.

Consummers: 20k for the simplest car, without options? No thanks, we can't afford that

In the usa the poor don't really have anywhere to charge these cars even if they were cheap enough to afford.

It is impossible to compete with a less than five minute fill up for 300+ miles range.

Not to mention that reports place charging on public charges to be more costly than gas.

It's already hard to convince people to use EVs, convincing them to use public transportation is even harder. It's completely understandable why they don't want to use public transportation tho: it kinda sucks in most countries. Here in germany it's simply unreliable. If you use it to get to work, you can expect to get there late quite frequently and the same goes for the way home. Fixing the issues public transportation has and making cities less car dependent takes time and we don't really have that much anymore. EVs aren't perfect but it's a compromise.

If you want to talk about real solutions to climate change I wouldn't aim as consumer facing things like cars or household recycling. That's all BS to make people focus on what their role in it is to distract from the fact that the vast majority of emissions come from things like:

Industrial and manufacturing processes Electricity and heat generation Transportation (with vast majority being bunker fueled chips, and agriculture.

Me getting 25mpg versus 30 ain't moving the needle on the emissions numbers the same way moving to renewables for electricity generation and eliminating shipping emissions would. Or mitigating agricultural emissions which produces tons of the worst kinds of greenhouse gasses (methan and nitrous oxide).

And then we have fugative emissions from unintentional leaks or more accurately irresponsible processes and maintenance from things like fracking, oil/gas extraction and transport. Quite literally just drilling into gas and releasing it into the air.

But yea, my Honda is the problem.

I'm not saying everyone has a part to play, but don't let the arguments and focus be on anything other than the big culprits of greenhouse gas emissions. We could pass meaningful regulations and provide meaningful incentives and actually move the needle on green house gasses.

And taxing companies that produce a significant amount of carbon emissions?

... But Tesla is far from the only manufacturer, that produces totally overpriced and shitty EVs

Very much this. Lithium batteries are the best battery we’ve got (at manufacturing scale) so far in terms of energy storage density, but the best we’ve got isn’t very good.

Gasoline has an energy storage density of around 13 MJ/kg. That’s a ton of energy, so much so that a vehicle can waste most of it generating so much heat that we have to bolt on a cooling system (with the associated weight) and still have enough to go highway speeds for hundreds of miles on a quantity of fuel weighing less than one of the passengers.

Toyota loves hydrogen because it’s got a storage density slightly higher than gasoline. Hydrogen has some serious volume and storage issues, but the density is there.

Contrast that with lithium ion batteries at ~0.7 MJ/kg (for the really good ones, which usually aren’t used in cars). Less waste heat, to be sure, but the bulk of the vehicles weight, the main factor in speed and travel distance, is the insane amount of material necessary to store the “fuel”.

Electric motors are far more efficient than ICE, but we need orders-of-magnitude improvements in battery storage density before EV can really take advantage of the greater efficiency. Until then manufacturers don’t have a choice, EV will be heavy and thus expensive.