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Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

My brother has one, it is an amazing vehicle with better range performance than Tesla. It's dramatically better in the snow. Towing of large loads is a valid downside, but reality is that most people don't tow, and people who do are probably fine with 80% of the use cases (construction trailers, lawn trailers, etc).

The business problem Tesla solved at Ford cannot is the dealer network. He pre-ordered his, and the dealer he was stuck with tried to rip him off like 4 different ways.

The other issue is that car guys are afraid of electric, as the entire supporting industry is essentially obsolete. It's hard to get excited about something that will take away your ability to pay your mortgage. Every car dealer employee and mechanic knows that.

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Electric cars still need maintenance. They don't get regular oil changes, but they wear out tires sooner. They have more recalls in general than ICE (this will likely change, but manufactures are still learning how to make EVs reliable). The parts of a car that are not common with EVs don't break for the first 100k miles, and almost nobody is using the dealer for cars that old. There is plenty of other work that is common that dealers will still need to do.

Your argument hinges on any level of maintenance being enough to maintain our current level of investment. The truth is always more complicated.

Take for example DVD rental. The market completely evaporated, while there is still a small lingering community that could be serviced by rentals. My local library is proof that there is a market. But there are, bar some weird exceptions, no remaining DVD rental stores.

If an EV needs 50% of the maintenance, then it stands to reason that you need 50% of the staff. That's the easy part. But what about all the other staff? Can you afford as many staff in front of house when your main profit centre shrank massively? Can you keep the same amount of cars in the lot if you don't have the cash to pay the manufacturer fees?

I'm sure that some mechanics will need to go. However a lot of them will still remain because there are a lot of cars and a lot that can go wrong that is common. There are also potential new failure modes, though only time will tell.

> they wear out tires sooner.

This is dependent on how you drive them. EVs are fun, so you get a disproportionate number of people driving them aggressively. That's hard on tires. If you drive normal, you get normal tire life.

They wear out tires because they weigh a shit ton, not because their drivers like to go below the limit trying to draft off a rig.

They weigh slightly more than a similar ICE vehicle. And why would drafting a big rig increase tire wear? The problem I mentioned was that EV drivers frequently drive more aggressively because it's intoxicating to be able to silently dust basically every other car on the road that isn't another EV. Those people do have tire wear issues :). And they're not drafting a big rig...

EVs are typically heavier than ICE cars so will cause more tyre wear.

Yes, but typically by a small margin. Close enough that tire wear is dominated by driving style. The problem is that instant torque is simultaneously addictive and also maximally damaging to tire tread.

The F-150 lightning weighs about 25-35% more than the ICE version. That's a significant margin.

It displaces well paid mechanic jobs with greasemonkey stuff.

It's not bad for consumers, but a significant amount of the economy is maintaining cars. It's the same thing that happened when emissions standards made cars more reliable. The corner repair shop was displaced by convenience stores, and repair consolidated.

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