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Comment by version_five | Hacker News Reader

The real impetus behind electric cars is vendor lock in and monitoring. It brings a clean slate to the currently robust repair market.

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That's a minor reason. The major reason is profit margins. It costs a lot less to make an electric vehicle than an internal combustion vehicle because the drivetrain and control systems are so much simpler. Since Tesla made electric vehicles seem more "premium" that also set up the expectation to the buying public that electric cars should cost more. So an electric vehicle costs $9,000 to make compared to an internal combustion engine vehicle costing $14,000, but the EV sells for $60,000 while the ICE one sells for $46,000. That's also the reason why sedans, stationwagons, hatchbacks, coupes, and minivans are being phased out in favour of trucks, CUVs, and SUVs. Despite costing as much or less to manufacture, public perception allows the manufacturer to charge more.

That said, considering that most repairs are done to transmissions, fuel systems, and body panels (interior and exterior), cutting out everything but the body panels also cuts into the profits of dealership service centers. That's beginning to drive up the costs even more because the dealerships are padding the lot sales price with their markups to cover the loss that happens in the service department with EVs. People are starting to want a direct sales model like Tesla does, but that causes even more problems because direct sales cannot account for local market conditions or quick economic downturns the way dealerships can. Plus you get the problem of "When the hell am I getting my car back?" when it needs repairs or service because you have to ship your car off somewhere far away where they'll get to it as the backlog allows. A la Rivian and Tesla. Neither the customers or the manufacturers want a Rivian/Tesla repair center situation.

> So an electric vehicle costs $9,000 to make compared to an internal combustion engine vehicle costing $14,000, but the EV sells for $60,000 while the ICE one sells for $46,000

Automotive gross margins don't seem to reflect those numbers. Tesla's are around 25%.

I don't know how you ignored battery costs

Hilariously batteries, even being as expensive as they are, cost less per produced vehicle than an ICE drivetrain thanks to emissions and crash regulations. In the U.S. very single engine and transmission combination for a given vehicle has to be tested individually for both fields. That drives the cost of any new generation of a given car up considerably. Chrysler/FCA/Stellantis kept ancient LX cars alive with just facelifts because paying the penalties was cheaper than testing new vehicles. We don't get a lot of cheaper world brands like SEAT or Japanese kei cars because of that, too. We lost the Focus and Fiesta in North America because Ford foolishly spent that money on the cost-amortized EcoSport instead. The companies believe it's too expensive to "federalize" these cars, and so they just don't bother with them. Meanwhile Volkswagen rushed the id.Buzz right over the Atlantic the moment they finished it because they only had to test one configuration. Same with the Fiat 500E and the Toyota bZ4X. No EPA emissions testing and only a single NHTSA test round make those EVs so much cheaper than testing the twenty six of the Toyota RAV4 or the twelve of the Volkswagen Transporter.

But vendor lock in and monitoring is happening even on non-electric cars, and there's nothing inherent to electric vehicles that requires the lock in and remote monitoring compared to any modern ICE.

It truly sucks that they require a pound of flesh here, you can't have this nice thing without selling your soul. There is nothing that prevents them from respecting the user and allowing repair.

Greed? It's a pretty textbook case for regulation.

Greed is fine but ideally we would also have competition where one can vote with their wallet for a less connected old-school car.

Ideally I agree. The issue seems to be that barriers to entry are too high. There is so much regulatory capture in the automotive industry, everything is arrayed in favor of incumbents.

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