Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

The infrastructure is harder than the vehicles. New power plants take longer to get built than new vehicles.

Electric vehicles offer opportunity for innovation, but they don't have to be innovative. The zooming Teslas and Mach-E Mustangs get the attention. But that's not where the volume is. The electric Ford Transit is just a Ford Transit with electric drive. It's boring, but useful. Commercial vehicles which make many stops, from Amazon to the U.S. Postal Service, are rapidly going electric.

The real question is, when do electric vehicles become cheaper than IC vehicles. Last year, the same vehicle in electric seems to cost about US $10,000 more. This year, the Ford E-transit is about $5000 more than the IC version. It's harder to tell for passenger vehicles, because manufacturers are treating "electric" as a premium option and dumping in all the high-markup stuff such as leather seats. At some point somebody will come out with something comparable to the Toyota Corolla at a comparable price. BYD already has, but they don't sell in the US. Then electric sales will take over.

EVs are "already" cheaper on TCO. You drive it for 10 years and you save money compared to ICE due to savings on gas and maintenance. They'll possibly never going to be cheaper on sticker price.

This is going to shock people, but the days of buying a new car every 3-5 years is over. It's not going to make financial sense. Used cars will be mostly worthless due to the batteries being shit. Financing is going to be different for low income people. Potentially just fewer car owners period. (which is great actually)

Why won’t a drop-in replacement battery be a better deal than a new car after 10 or more years?

> This is going to shock people, but the days of buying a new car every 3-5 years is over.

The average age of a car on the road in the US is about 11 years. As that is the average age of a car on the road, it suggests the lifespan of a typical car is much longer.

I've look at the TCO of electric vehicles every year or two. The math always pencils out that it's far cheaper to keep my 4 door Japanese sedan another year, as I drive it less than 5,000 miles/yr and maintenance is minimal with that little use. I think most people trying to minimize their transportation costs would do better with a corolla, unless their drive more than average.

Of course, no one looking at minimizing their TCO buys a new car every 3-5 years.

As long as maintenance isn't yet eating you alive, there's no new car at any price that is going to have a better TCO. But if you were getting a new car to last a long time, it's tough to beat a compliance EV. Chevy Bolt, 260 miles of range, small but not tiny, great utility, and 26K before rebates. $11K after rebates if you're an Oregonian. Fuel is much cheaper, TCO is basically impossible to beat.

As long as it doesn't burst into flames: https://www.chevrolet.com/electric/bolt-recall

Tesla famously started building their packs out of laptop 18650 cells. To keep the voltage out of the kilovolt range while still being able to draw useful amounts of power you have to connect huge numbers of them in parallel-- the old model S had 74 in parallel. DIY battery pack HOWTOs will flat out tell you that you can't connect cells in parallel at all, while Tesla is connecting dozens of them together.

Presumably they have to go to great and awful lengths to characterize/bin the cells, maintain QC during manufacture, keep pack temperature constant to avoid hot spots from aging single cells, lots and lots of balance wires to carefully charge sub-sections, etc etc etc.

GM saw all this early adopter crap, and all the extra weight from the redundant steel casings on each cell, and say screw that, let's use really big lipo cells. Well, you still have all that variability and inconsistency... just hidden inside a big polymer pouch where you can't see it. Recipe for unexpectedly going fwoosh in the middle of the night while charging.

GM's new Ultium platform still uses LG lipo cells. Let's hope they worked out the kinks!

> it's far cheaper to keep my 4 door Japanese sedan another year

This is like saying it's cheaper to wait a year before contributing to retirement because you'll have more money in checking if you don't contribute to retirement.

Average lifespan of an ICE car is around 14.8 years. For an EV it's 22.2. They last longer, and break down less often, and fuel is cheaper.

Over a period of 20 years, it does not matter how expensive the EV was when you paid for it. After 20 years, there is more money in your bank account, with the EV. So buying or keeping a used corolla is pretty much guaranteed to leave you with less money after those 20 years. No matter how cheap the corolla is now, keeping ICE cars will add up to a higher cost. The longer you wait the more you lose in the end.

>Average lifespan of an ICE car is around 14.8 years. For an EV it's 22.2

I am going to need to see some figures on that. How many electric cars were even made 22 years ago?

The average expected lifespan of an ICE vehicle is 200k miles, and the average expected lifespan of an EV is 300k miles. The average ICE vehicle in the USA is driven between 12k and 15k miles per year. So for an ICE vehicle that averages out to 14.8 years to reach 200k, and an EV, 22.2 years to reach 300k. On average.

> Average lifespan of an ICE car is around 14.8 years. For an EV it's 22.2.

Citation definitely needed for those figures. There are no mass market EVs that are 22+ years old, let alone old enough to make their average lifespan be 22.2 (which obviously implies some EVs lasted a lot longer than that).

> So buying or keeping a used corolla is pretty much guaranteed to leave you with less money after those 20 years.

That's clearly not true in the absolute. Might be in some cases. For instance my parent has a 1998 Corolla which works perfectly well and requires minimal maintanance. There is no conceivable scenario where it'd be cheaper to buy a new EV vs. just keep driving the old car.

I meant to say on average. Add up the fuel and maintenance for that corolla over a 20 year period, plus its initial sales cost. The EV is cheaper over 20 years.

If they barely drive it and nothing ever goes wrong, they should still be spending several thousand a year on fuel and regular maintenance tasks, on average, over time. If they aren't then either they aren't doing the suggested maintenance or aren't driving it much at all, or both.

The EV uses cheaper fuel and its maintenance cost is significantly lower.

Again: the initial cost of the EV is greater. It's the cost over time that is lower, because ICE vehicles cost more over time. Even taking a used car into account, its average cost over time is greater.

> It's the cost over time that is lower, because ICE vehicles cost more over time. Even taking a used car into account, its average cost over time is greater.

A person looking to buy a new car today, you're mostly right in that their total lifetime cost will be less if they buy a new EV today.

Mostly though, not everyone, since there are ICE cars cheaper than EVs and for someone who drives very little it'll take a long time to recover the initial price difference.

But for people who already own a car it's a very different equation. The old car is already owned, so buying an EV is a huge expense unlikely to ever be recovered by reduced operating costs. Such as the example above of my parent. Were they to buy a 40K EV, it'll take easily 40 years to break even compared to simply keep driving the old Corolla. Nowhere near worth it.

the days of buying a new car every 3-5 years is already over. The average vehicle on the road is approaching what pennsylvania identifies as open to "Classic" registration. I gotta wonder who the first person that registered a ford windstar classic will be.

Vehicles are so damn reliable compared to the 70's that - we'd actually be closer to going full EV if cars were less reliable....

>Used cars will be mostly worthless due to the batteries being shit.

Modern battery chemistry can last for 2000 cycles. Assuming you get 200 miles on a charge, that's 400000 miles. A typical ICE car doesn't last that long.

Battery performance is highly variant both per manufacturer and based on temperature and elevation. Some perform half as well as others. And battery lifespan varies depending on charge type, use profile, climate, vendor, etc.

I shouldn't have said worthless. But on average their degradation varies between 5% and 10%, and individual units have had quite variant actual performance lifespans.

I'm less inimical to the idea of an electric car than I am all of the Orwellian control mechanisms that will come with it.

Contra all of the Really Smart People who seem to view the rest of humanity as livestock, a huge swath of people don't care to be bossed around and treated like livestock by those who are (a) too full of themselves and (b) demonstrably incorrect on pretty much every issue.

Get stuffed, global elite, and leave my diesel vehicle alone.

One really has to stretch to equate the change of prime movers in an automobile to a global conspiracy to destroy free will.

What could the conspirators do with an electric vehicle that they couldn't do with a Hummer?

As it stands, I think every EV in the US market currently has some kind of built-in data connections to allow integrating with the manufacturer's mobile app. So not about the prime mover, but it just so happens that the current generation of EVs are more connected to the hivemind, if you will. Of course, a number of ICE cars are also that way.

I, for one, cannot wait for the day that somebody brings the Toyota Corolla of EVs to the market; something under $25k MSRP with nothing fancy. I don't need OTA updates or the ability to turn the AC on from my phone.

I think the manufacturing costs for things bluetooth connectors or touch screen are usually minimal compared to the thousands of pounds of raw materials, or extensive quality assurance needed to build a car. So often these are added to luxury cars where drivers are charged a premium for them, and then later added to lower tier cars as manufacturing costs have scaled down and R&D costs have been recovered.

All of this means if you want a new basic car your shit out of luck.

Since margin is notoriously low on vehicles, OEMs strive to shave pennies in cost. While I'm also skeptical that we'll have a no-frills EV in the future, too, I suspect it's because monetizing transportation data will outweigh the benefits of reduced cost.

The motors and batteries are commodities...you can make a pretty good electric S-10 or Ranger with an '80s-'00s model for maybe $20-30k over the cost of the donor. Stick the batteries under the bed.

Try it, and tell us it isn't the most fun you can have on four wheels.

For us shifter+clutch snobs all the praises of electric vehicles in this thread are falling on deaf ears.

No reason you couldn't have a manual transmission on an EV, it could even help with energy efficiency but it might not be worth the weight. Biggest challenge would be the extreme torque.

Both of my diesels are manual transmission, but this thread has gotten downmodded far harder than most of my unpopular inputs.

On blasphemes Gaia at peril.

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