Quote:
Originally Posted by allinon72
I like how the entire industry is shoveling huge investments toward EVs not because the customer is demanding it
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Except the customer is demanding it.
Tesla's a brand with only 3 models yet they still outsell BMW, Mercedes, Audi, Lexus, Cadillac, etc.
What the manufactures are doing is gaming the system. They see what sells, like pickup trucks, and charge up the wazoo. High end pickup? $70k. High end electric car, you're lucky if you can find for under $70k.
You can NOT get an inexpensive electric car - they have no incentive to since its considered a premium and if they sold for regular prices it would kill their profitable premium market (why there's no $17k F-150 - it certainly doesn't cost any more to build than a corolla but they can't price that cheap because it would hurt sales of the profitable ones)
I mean, you can get a cheap one - see Bolt/Leaf, but those are the only two on the market, and when 'typically equipped' cost more than the average car sold in the US (average car is $34k, average bolt/leaf is $40k) so cheap, but not inexpensive. You may see other electric cars, i3, or ipace, but those are niche vehicles and also sell for over $50k which is beyond the means of the majority of buyers.
'If' you could get a well equipped electric car, that looks like a normal car, that costs the average price of a normal car, they wouldn't be able to keep them on the lot (and of course would mark them up to slow down sales). But, at the moment, they can't, because it costs like $10k to assemble a car, but the batteries cost 3-4 times as much as a gas setup, so there's no business case for it. Marketing then pushes electrics into high end car so they can command high prices which allows them to hold their profit margin which makes wall street happy.
Right now all the manufacturers are not investing in "EV"s, they already know how to build an electric car and have for decades. They are investing in figuring out how to manufacture a 300 mile drive train for the same price as a gas model.
The cosmic joke in all this, is according to the EPA (on their website, you can verify), new car sales each year, despite growth in units, make up a smaller and smaller percentage of this nations emissions. So much so that all the combined emissions of cars sold this year constitute a rounding error. It's been like that for many years. Transportation related emissions are mostly shipping, trucking, heavy duty machines. Not personal vehicles. And even then, the transportation sector continues to be part of a declining % of emissions.
After all, a single school bus pollutes way way more than a dieselgate jetta, but no one minds putting 50 kids inside, and yet the jettas were all recalled. (I understand, they broke the rules, and this was just being pedantic to set an example because we are a country of laws, and the laws are not applied evenly).
The real emitters are industry and power generation. So it's wonderful that new cars hardly emit at all, and we are all better off for it, but as we accelerate using electric cars, which is also a good thing, we need to accelerate the removal of power stations because they have been and continue to be the true source of harmful emissions.
For places like Europe which are Nuclear/wind, it's great, for places in the US which have some solar, some wind, some nuclear, and natural gas, it's also ok, but for places like China which is coal, it's going to get worse before it gets better.
Seth