I would love a world, where I while waiting at the traffic stop can breathe clean air. It’s sad to see that in the US the ev incentives are gone.
EVs are a lot cheaper there than in Europe(same modes), plus way more charging infra, plus much cheaper energy than in Europe.
The first was built one hundred years ago with the modern tech of those times.
To quote the philosopher Bob Dylan "those who are first will later be last".
You'll also have the car's movements tracked in detail, etc.
If China's the 21st century, they can keep it.
With today's AI models, it'd be feasible to analyze massive amounts of video/audio data gathered by the microphones and cameras all around us - as long as you have enough GPU data centers.
In fact if you believe democracy is the superior system of government, it's arguably even more embarrassing that an authoritarian single party state run by billionaire communists is somehow doing a better job as a technologically advanced civilization that a lot of democracies.
Ultimately it doesn't really matter though. The future will at least temporarily belong to those who get there first, regardless of their system of government or other issues. If other countries don't want China to own the 21st century, they should act like it.
After the incentives were cancelled, many of the EV manufacturers simply cut the prices of their cars by a large amount, some as high as the incentive, in the following months and model years. EV sales still fell but are recovering now. It's hard to know how many people shifted their purchase early to 2025 instead of waiting for 2026, where they may have gotten the same price.
It's not like driving an EV has any actual downsides Vs a gasoline car any more? Yes yes I am sure people will reply saying how they need to drive 900 miles every day without stopping once while towing a trailer at 100mph etc. Most people don't need to do that, but hey enjoy spending your life doing that if that's your thing.
The real "problem" is that price-conscious buyers will be buying used, and then you need EVs to be a larger percentage of new cars for a few years before they're a larger percentage of used cars.
There are also other electric cars for under $30k.
...what? For most the world by area (so at least 20-30% of the population, even in Europe) arbitrary point to point mechanical transportation is a requirement for work/life at least a significant chunk of the year. Most will also either flat out need, or find quite valuable: 1) Having that capability on demand. 2) Being able to permanently customize it to suit their needs (be it accessibility, having tools and organizational systems onboard, or most basically having what can be transported along with them match their common/rare needs).
The most economical way to manage that in general is owning your own vehicle. But it's a large capital expenditure upfront. Getting a loan to spread that out over time is one of the most basic purposes of debt. The ROI is in the actual utility, not in some sort of asset appreciation. Which is how most economics is right? I didn't replace all my incandescent bulbs with LED bulbs because I expected to be able to resell them later for more money, I bought them because they deliver far more useful visible wavelength photons per watt, and with more precise tuning and far less toxicity and other concerns then fluorescent. If I needed to replace 10k bulbs and wanted to get a loan for it the economics would be pretty straightforward to pencil out even with the expectation the entire value of the bulbs would go to zero wouldn't it? Taking out a loan for an EV car isn't any different.
It might not be the most economical way to manage that. Often owning a car is seen as a status symbol, and economically it would be more rational not owning one. But I doubt many people do a really thorough honest calculation - they don't have to, they can afford a car. In that way, a car loan is helping them to do the, strictly economically speaking, wrong thing.
> But it's a large capital expenditure upfront.
Yes, which is why in many countries the private owners are not the biggets market for new cars; instead, companies are, because they have the incentives to buy new. And private owners mostly buy on the secondary market.
I just came from my short Euro vacation and majority of EVs I saw at the tourist spots had license plates from countries with above average wealthy people: CH, NL, DK, etc. Germans, Italians, eastern Europeans, etc mostly had ICEs.
You can't mandated all switch to EVs unless you can somehow mandate they all have the same wealth too, which isn't the case.
German car manufacturers make up a big part of the German economy, and they decided a long time ago they'd rather lobby to keep ICEs on the market than invest enough to develop good EVs. So for decades, our "news" media (especially Bild and co.) worked to instill a deep-seated fear in the population against EVs, renewables and co. This is changing slowly since solar got ever more profitable, and fossil fuels got so expensive. But still our current government is actively removing lots of incentives for renewables while throwing money towards the O&G industries.
This is simply not as big of a factor in a country like France, which is not as dependent on fossil fuels.
It's the main factor. Without charging at your house, EV ownership is a PITA.
Driving, no. Buying, yes. I bought a used car for €2600 8 years ago and it’s still going strong. That won’t buy me an EV. I drive maybe 1000 kilometers a year, the difference in fuel costs doesn’t make a dent in the difference in the initial purchase.
for now, but maybe in a few years it will
Suire, EVs might get cheaper in the future, but I also might lose my auto sector job (again), so that's hardly a silver lining.
No need to worry about cam belts or oil changes or spark plugs or mice eating your air filter or petrol going stale in the tank or replacing fuel filters or 12v batteries going flat if you don't drive them for at least 20 mins once every 10 days etc.
Most good electric bicycles I saw cost more than 2,8K. You're not getting a suable EV for that where I live.
Same for me. Also, I live in rental apartment, I don't live in a house with residential charging, which would make me dependent on public chagrin spots which suck and have massive energy prices compared to residential ones, so I'm in no way better off/cheaper with an EV than my gasoline car.
EVs where I live massively benefit the wealthy who own their homes and have charging at home, making EV ownership a slam dunk. Even cheaper for them if they have solar panels. But not for the poor, where TC ICE ownership is so much cheaper overall.
The government can fix this by putting cheap subsidized charging spots across all existing street parking to lead the way, but they aren't, so then we're at the mercy of the "free market" who will just gouge us, and so nothing will change.
I agree to everything except waking up every day to a full "tank". That's only if you have your own house. If not, you'll depend on public chargers, so you'll buy "fuel" at premium prices, possibly higher than petrol, and you'll have to move your car at the end of the recharge in the middle of the night to avoid the parking fee.
Why do the sellers need handouts? See sibling comment about manufacturers cutting prices when the handout ended...
I'm an EV fan but this is apples to oranges comparison. EV vehicles are substantially heavier than their ICE counterparts. Their instant torque also wears tread quicker. That's just facts and there's nothing wrong with that. The world is not black and white.
Tesla model 3 curb weight: "3,552 lbs to 4,072 lbs"
BMW 3 series curb weight: "3,536 lbs to 4,180 lbs"
> Their instant torque also wears tread quicker.
This works the opposite of how you imagine it does. Because electric motors have a flat torque curve, electric cars typically use a single-speed transmission, e.g. Model 3 has a fixed gear ratio of ~9:1.
Modern ICE cars typically have around 6 gears and the lowest one will have a higher total gear ratio than that, more like 15:1, causing wheel torque to be around two thirds higher in that gear proportional to engine torque than it would be at 9:1, and the engine's torque peak is commonly ~2400 RPM, which translates to as little as 10-15 MPH in first gear.
Electric cars like the Model 3 Performance accelerate quickly because they have >500 horsepower. So do ICE cars with equivalent power. Meanwhile something like a Nissan Leaf has similar power and correspondingly a similar 0-60 time to a Honda Civic.
To put it another way, there are very few modern cars where you can't hit the traction limit of the tires by putting your foot down in low gear, so the limit was never the powertrain to begin with.
Electric cars typically have a faster 60-100 time than similar ICE cars, because then the ICE car has to use a higher gear, but now we're back to the thing where this is hardly relevant unless you're accelerating the vehicle flat out to 100 MPH.
Fossil fueled vehicles are still significantly worse for the environment and health (before you even start considering the wars and bloodshed for the fossil fuels that we're currently witnessing in Ukraine and Iran). Don't accept the propaganda.
I'm not even going to address tire dust. That's just people looking for an EV-related pearl to clutch.
Pickup trucks are heavier than EVs so their tires should wear into dust even faster. No one says jack about that.
People that kvetch about how windmills kill birds and whales don't give a shit about birds or whales. It's a bad faith argument. EV tire dust is in the same category.