Hacker News Reader

Comment by PeterisP | Hacker News Reader

> because nobody won't be able to afford new cars.

Wait, what? The price differential is not that significant, there are also cheap new EVs, and driving a 30 year old car with EU fuel prices and mandatory technical maintenance costs won't be a much more affordable option, and there are pollution laws like Paris which ensure that older, more polluting cars can't enter city centers. If new cars become more expensive, it's likely to cause some limited decline in usage, but saying "nobody won't be able to afford new cars" is useless hyperbole.

View on HN

It's too late. Budget cars are already gone. We dont need EVs to destroy affordability. It's already happening. Used car prices have already doubled or tripled in the last few years. Do you have $4000 for a used car? That will get you a beater with around 200,000 miles on it. Average new car price is $45,000. That's around $600-800/mo for a car payment. That's not affordable. The manufacturers have all figured out that there's significantly more profit for them though. Why make 20 budget cars when you only need to sell 5 luxury models to make the same profit?

If you want a car for under $4k with under 60k miles on it, you can get that too[0].

[0] https://www.autotrader.com/cars-for-sale/all-cars/cars-under...

>EU fuel prices and mandatory technical maintenance costs

Both of which are predicated on continued political will.

I can see the out of touch upper middle class driving things far enough off a cliff that populists get elected and change these things.

This is exactly what I am expecting as well. People here earning 100k USD a year can't comprehend that people who earn 20k EUR a year or less does not have means to buy even a used BEV. But they have means to buy 15 years old beater.

If they're not buying new cars, then nothing changes for them in 2035; and if they buy 15-year old beaters, then there's time until 2050 for the used EV market to normalize - because right now it is (of course) distorted as the early adopter EV cars were more of the expensive end and not represent the median family car.

What‘s your proposal to get transportation emissions to zero?

Mine is an appropriate CO2 price (pricing in the currently not priced in externalities) and then distributing most of the money from that equally back to everyone (meaning those who earn less and also pollute less will on average get more money back than the increase in CO2 costs for them while still preserving a strong incentive to reduce emissions).

It seems pretty clear to me that in that world BEVs are the only viable way forward for personal transportation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com