Honestly, i don’t get why more folks aren’t enthusiastic about EVs. I got a used Bolt, and i love it. Much easier and cheaper maintenance, fewer moving parts to wear out, no gas prices drama… never buying an ICE vehicle again.
It’s also a downside. Now we have bought a Leaf I never want to buy an ICE again. But here in NZ there aren’t many second hand options for a reasonable price. Luckily prices are dropping.
While I agree with most of the articles points, even if they and the title are nearly all phrased in very hyperbolic language and the extent of the “slowdown” has been rather overstated given that sales are still increasing, I take issue with it citing Norway’s 89% EV sales as insufficient becuse only 20% of vehicles on the road are EVs yet.
Namely, the average lifespan of a ICE car is 12 years. While it’s definitely better for the environment to replace a functional ICE with an EV after two to four years, buying a new car when you don’t need to is a big financial cost and so it shouldn’t be surprising that many people are waiting until their cars get old to replace them.
While I also agree that simply replacing every ICE with an EV isn’t enough on its own and that trollybuses and other electric mass transit need to be part of the solution, it’s not a question of one or the other. If we are to have any hope of staying below 2C, we need to be doing both and a whole lot more beside, especially when it comes to cleaning up industry.
We simply don’t have the time left anymore for any one solution to be expanded to the point it can solve the problem on its own, if that was ever possible to begin with. We need solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear to generate clean power in the first place. We need heat pumps and geothermal to turn that into the heating and cooling necessary to keep people safe in a world with increasing dangerous temperatures.
We need trollybuses, metros, and high speed intercity rail to electrify the transport of people. We need denser housing in our cities and EVs in our rural areas and service and delivery vehicles. We need overhead cantanarys to electrify our railroads. We need green hydrogen to decarbonize farming, steel marking and a thousand other processes. We need net zero bio and synthetic fuels for ships and aircraft. We even need carbon capture and sequestration to deal with the industrial processes that can’t otherwise be decarbonated.
Any framing that expects a single one of these to solve the problem on its own ignores the things it can’t cover. Our current actions are insufficient to tackle the scale of the problem, that is not a sign we should roll back one in favor of another, it is a sign that we need to be pushing increasing the scale of all of the above.
While I agree with most of the articles points, even if they and the title are nearly all phrased in very hyperbolic language and the extent of the “slowdown” has been rather overstated given that sales are still increasing
I’d argue it’s an outright falsehood. “Slowdown” implies that sales are going down. They’re actually going up, but the pace of acceleration has gone down. The subtitle in the article here:
Fewer people are buying electric cars — the slowdown hints at a problem at the heart of America’s EV push.
This is literally false. More people than ever are buying electric cars.
What has actually happened is that the EV market went from supply-constrained (where manufacturers were building them as fast as they could and selling each one they built to waitlisted customers) to some models becoming demand-constrained (where manufacturers are building them faster than they can sell them).
This is due to a number of things, only some of which apply to the industry as a whole. First, there are some models that just aren’t really that heavily desired by the public, at the price points they’re being sold at. The Ford F-150 is a pretty good example, where Ford misinterpreted the demand from people who signed up on the waitlist, and then chose to prioritize the highest priced trim levels (rather than the entry level F-150 Lightning). So even if people are interested in the entry-level $50,000 F-150 Lightning still have to wait (and oh, by the way, Ford is raising the price to $55,000) while the $90,000 models pile up in dealer lots.
Second, dealers are actively sabotaging EV sales. Everyone I know who has tried to buy an EV from a traditional dealer has been steered towards a hybrid or a traditional ICE vehicle, and sales staff seem to be intentionally ignorant about the EV models sold by their dealership. The EV maintenance model is a threat to dealer business models, where service/maintenance is a very important part of their revenue, so the incentives of the dealer aren’t lined up with the incentives of the manufacturer.
Third, the traditional automakers released their EVs into some headwinds, because interest rates have increased, and Tesla had the profit margins to simply be able to drop prices in a way to make the newest non-Tesla EVs seem like a bad deal in comparison. The average Tesla transaction dropped from $65k in October 2022 to $50k in October 2023, with big price cuts on almost all of its models.
So electric vehicle sales are up. The difficulties that some manufacturers have even in this climate of sales going up is, in many cases, specific to those makes and those models.
Exactly. Normally when I see this story their careful to say things like the EV market falls short of projections or EV adoption slows, which are arguably true, if wildly misleading.
Cars pilling up in dealers lots isn’t unusual, and indeed is the default for nearly all ICEs. It also means that now manufacturers might just actually have to try and make what customers want, instead of just being able to assume everything they make selling out immediately.
Namely, the average lifespan of a ICE car is 12 years. While it’s definitely better for the environment to replace a functional ICE with an EV after two to four years, buying a new car when you don’t need to is a big financial cost and so it shouldn’t be surprising that many people are waiting until their cars get old to replace them.
Precisely! And while the ongoing environmental cost of burning gasoline is a concern, there’s also the environmental impact of the chassis, the internal electronics. That’s a sunk cost right now. And that’s not counting making sure you have access to charging infrastructure. When I was renting, I simply didn’t have street access to a regular home plug. And my workplace also didn’t have any electrical infrastructure in its parking lots (despite years of begging from employees.) There are still a lot of reasons an EV might not make sense for individuals.
All that said, my next vehicle will definitely be an EV since I can charge at home now. But only when our car gives up the ghost from a cost to repair perspective.
I’m trying hard to hold out buying a new vehicle until I can move into somewhere I can charge an EV. Sold my last ICE when I moved overseas, and current apartment has no charging places.
We simply don’t have the time left anymore for any one solution to be expanded to the point it can solve the problem on its own, if that was ever possible to begin with.
This is such an important point. We are too late in the game to have the luxury of choosing a single sector or a single solution to pursue before the others. We need to hit all sectors with a diverse barrage of solutions, and we need to do it yesterday.
To quote UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, “In short, our world needs climate action on all fronts – everything, everywhere, all at once.”
Well, I can only speak for myself: EVs cost 5-10k more and I can’t charge it in one minute like a regular car.
The cost is certainly a factor, but the thing about fueling up quick is a mindset shift. Imagine instead of fueling up once or twice a week, you start everyday at Full. The places the charge time becomes relevant is road trips, and there are currently cars that can go from 25-80% in 15 minutes. While that is not all, most of them do it in 20-30 minutes. On any road trip that is enough time to use the restroom or grab a bite. Having done road trips in an EV, the longer stops and potentially adding a couple extra stops does not significantly effect arrival time, and I feel way less fatigued when arriving.
Imagine instead of fueling up once or twice a week, you start everyday at Full.
Sure. I can also imagine Taylor Swift sitting on my lap, but that won’t change the reality. If you live in a regular tenement block, charging your car becomes a problem, and you’ll be the one paying for the infrastructure if it’s not there yet (and it isn’t where I live). Add these extra costs to the difference between a regular and EV car. Even if you’re ready to pay, it’s not guaranteed that other residents will approve that.
Apartments are for sure a problem area. In my last place we were able to trade parking spots to the one below our deck. We were able to run an extension to the spot below our balcony, but not everyone is that lucky
For a slightly different take: I want a car that runs on free software, that doesn’t spy on me.
Until then, I can bike, or continue driving my now fifteen year old sedan that I bought with 5% of my annual salary, used.
For sure drive your car until the wheels fall off, but all cars have some kind of proprietary software on them. It is a big sticking point in the fight for right to repair. As far as free goes, Tesla and BMW are really the only ones being shitty about subscriptions and shit like that in their software. I have a VW ID.4 and never have to pay anything to use the software.
Similar reason for me. Although, as long as I could get a car without internet connectivity, I would even be fine with non-free software but even that is too much to ask nowadays. This also applies to gas or diesel powered cars though, so I will stick with my sedan from 2015 too, might even have the engine redone completely in a few years if there are no proper options by then.
They completely whiffed on the most important and obvious part. That whole article could be replaced by the words “THEY’RE TOO DAMN EXPENSIVE”.
The article doesn’t whiff on this, it lays out why it’s too expensive.
- The strategy was to replace gas cars with EV 1-to-1 to solve the climate crisis and save the car industry.
- Gas cars have gotten bigger over the years because of marketing, bravado, “safety”, and regulation-skirting.
- EV-makers have largely bought into that and made all these huge EVs.
- Huge EVs require bigger batteries which are more expensive in raw materials and manufacturing.
- Huge batteries are heavy and dangerous.
- Range anxiety has encouraged even more oversized batteries on already oversized cars.
- Huge batteries are the main source of cost, meaning EVs end up being a luxury.
So, yes–they are too damn expensive, however a vehicle that meets our actual needs wouldn’t be, if it existed in North America.
Large batteries are a must-have to get anywhere near a comfortable range.
I wonder if larger battery packs fit in small cars. And it would also push the price beyond the level that people expect to pay for smaller cars.
Range anxiety is what pushed me to buy a Bolt over other EVs, but I do find that practically I don’t need as many kms as it offers, especially in the summer.
Opinion: 400km is overkill for city driving in warm climates. Half the battery/range would be fine for virtually all daily use. I know everyone will anecdotally state their use case on why 200km is insufficient, but that’s basically what the article is saying is part of the problem.
People also forget that rental cars exist.
For the handful of actual long-range drives a typical person needs to take in a given year, it’d almost certainly be cheaper to rent a different car rather than spend extra to get a huge-range EV. But relatively short-range EVs are basically not a thing because of how universal these range anxieties are. Not to even mention that the available rentals aren’t a great situation either, given how universal it is for people to own these long-range vehicles.
Our society is a damn prisoner’s dilemma.
A lot of that range anxiety will start to evaporate as charging (both slow and fast) becomes more ubiquitous. If I can charge to 80% in 15 minutes I don’t need a lot more than 2-3 hours of drive time on a single charge, so long as there’s a charging station at that interval.
This article neglects the state of charging and grid infrastructure. We can’t immediately convert all cars to EV, we don’t have the grid capacity or enough charging stations, yet. Each level 3 (fast charging station) is a custom layout and they take time to design and implement.
Source: I design EV charging stations across the US.
we don’t have the grid capacity
For those not in the industry, “grid capacity” here doesn’t refer to power generation, but power distribution. With renewables, generation is comparatively easy (storage notwithstanding). But getting the power where it needs to go is not. Right now, thanks to a grain-oriented steel squeeze, the lead time on transformers is longer than the commissioning time for an entire solar farm. Switchgear is also hard to get your hands on, especially with SF6 being phased out.
The good news is that these long lead times are caused by demand. Right now, utilities are racing to expand and reinforce the grid in preparation for the next 30 year’s worth of EV demand, renewable storage/transmission, and distributed generation. Utilities are risk-averse by nature, and do not move without conviction, so it’s rare and noteworthy to see this kind of industrial momentum.
Source: I design MV distribution equipment in the US.
they’re too fucking expensive. i won’t pay more than $20k for a car.
