“EVs are twice as hard to sell today” says industry that has done everything except make cars with prices at $15000 or less
If ford built an electric version of the 2005-2010 Ranger I would buy it today. It’s not even a new idea, they made electric Rangers around 2000 but they had lead acid batteries so the range was only 150km.
I want a PRACTICAL pickup, not a god damned $61K, 5 seat, electric minivan with 4 foot trunk.
Cargo vans are more practical than pick up trucks for 95% of uses. Modern trucks are more like status symbols than work horses.
In shocking news, sales of luxury cars have slowed as wealthy people have finally saturated their demand. Poor people are still stuck without a viable replacement to ICE models.
Bicycles
If you want to get murdered by an SUV or pickup. There are very few places in Canada where you can safely commute by bike.
And fixing that is likely to do a lot more for the environment and people’s health than just converting from ICE to EVs and investing in more highways.
And, if anything, EV’s are more dangerous to cyclists. They’re significantly heavier and quieter.
And the trend of massive sized SUVs and high bumper heights will likely continue into EVs.
additionally, there are very few months it isn’t goddamn miserable cold to commute by bike
Why Canadians can’t bike in the winter (but Finnish people can)
Look I definitely agree with you, never had a car and never plan on having one, and I try to promote cycling as a means of transportation as much as possible.
That being said, just replying “bicycles” is likely to rub people the wrong way. Bikes are not a 1:1 replacement for motor vehicles. There has to be investment into public transit, especially for intercity travel, as well as investments into safer cycling infrastructure.
“Where’s my goddamn affordable electric car, Bruce?”
Can confirm, I haven’t even thought about buying an EV since I bought an EV.
Truly “poor people” (to use your words) typically don’t buy a lot of new cars in the first place. People on the lower end of the income scale are the main drivers of the used vehicle market.
Incentivizing EV purchases and infrastructure ultimately helps everyone. It will bring efficiencies to the supply chain, and will drive investment into resources that should help drive prices down. At the same time, within the next 5 years or so you should see growth in the used EV market, which as more stock becomes available and used EVs become more normalized should make them more economical to purchase (as they’re already more economical to run and maintain).
More new EVs now means more used EVs down the road, which will allow people to get into a better car for less money.
Isn’t there a big issue regarding the permanent wearing down of batteries though? Not sure anyone would want to buy a 10 y/o EV with a worn-to-hell battery that has a greatly diminished max range. And last I heard, new batteries are thousands of dollars, but maybe that’s changed?
Modern batteries last a lot better, and there’s a huge difference between an 80 mile EV that’s lost a third of its range and a 300 mile EV that’s lost a third of its range anyway.
Also, PHEV vehicles will retain most of the benefit of all-electric, while alleviating range anxiety stemming from deteriorated batteries
PHEVs have their own disadvantages, though.
They’re a lot more complicated with higher maintenance costs, and also often don’t have an EV drivetrain that’s fully independent. They’ll kick on the engine when accelerating, going uphill, for cabin heating, etc. Most of them don’t just use the engine as a range extender.
PHEVs only make sense so long as batteries continue to be expensive. The complexity of manufacturing the dual drivetrain and plummeting battery prices is going to see PHEVs become more expensive than gas cars or long range battery EVs in another year or two.
Those are all serious concerns, and I expect PHEV vehicle design to change over the next few years (my only concern is how many “few” is).
The more sensible design if you’re are going for ‘ICE as backup’, not ‘electric as efficiency improvement on top of ICE’ is a typical electric ‘drivetrain’ and battery, with a generator, more similar to diesel-electric trains. A switch to diesel in general wouldn’t be a bad idea either, but the north american market would be resistant.
Depending on how gas prices and the EV market go, I wouldn’t be surprised if drop-in engine replacements for converting ICE vehicles to hybrid become easily available in the next 5-10 years either, especially on larger vehicles.
It’ll still be a typical ICE transmission, which will still be less efficient, but you can run the engine at the ideal RPM all the time which helps make up for that. Where to put enough battery to be worthwhile is problematic, but the vehicles that would benefit most tend to have vestigial truck beds, so there is that
The batteries on modern EVs doesn’t wear anywhere near the rate that people think they do. A properly cared for battery (which doesn’t require much care other than keeping it charged properly) will easily last 15+ years — and likely beyond the lifetime of the car they were installed into. Manufacturers already offer 8+ year battery warranties on new EVs, because they know they can easily beat that (barring a manufacturing defect of some kind).
(In Japan, Nissan has been taking cells out of old Leafs that have at least 80% remaining capacity and are making them into home power packs. The Nissan Leaf was one of the first EVs and used an older battery chemistry — and even there, the batteries are typically outliving the cars they were originally installed into).
It’s a little difficult to say with certainty what the lifetime of an EV battery is going to be like right now, as EVs with modern chemistries aren’t yet 15 years old (they’re more like 5 to 7 years old at most). Anecdotally, those I know with EVs in that age range typically have less than 1% capacity loss (and ODB-II reader can typically check this for you, so it’s not difficult to determine).
Now of course it’s possible that someone has abused the hell out of their vehicle in ways that reduce the battery life (like routinely driving it to completely pull-over-to-the-side-of-the-road empty before recharging) — but as mentioned above an ODB-II reader will quickly show what the battery capacity is like. Hopefully used car sellers would check this themselves and provide it to buyers — but if not, ODB-II readers on Amazon aren’t terribly expensive to buy to check for oneself.
Battery wear concerns are going to be more for “classic” EV collectors in 30+ years time, and won’t be for your typical EV driver.
Where has this battery technology come from? It’s still lithium ION I well be surprised if it lasts 15 years unless they seriously over provisioned.
It’s mostly improved chemistries and manufacturing processes. What we call “lithium ion batteries” aren’t the same today as they were even just in the 2010s. We have newer chemistries (lithium cobalt oxide, lithium manganese oxide, lithium iron phosphate, lithium manganese cobalt, lithium nickel cobalt aluminium oxide, etc.), newer solid state battery technologies, better cell packaging, and overall better manufacturing processes.
Will these cells still have 100% capacity after 15 years? Likely not — but even if they’re only at 80 - 90% of their original capacity that’s still quite a lot of driving capacity for most EVs.
Here is one non-peer reviewed study on Tesla battery deterioration, which shows that at the ~10 year mark, battery capacity loss is at around 17%. However, it’s worth noting that cars that hit the 8 through 10 year marks were more likely using older battery chemistry and construction techniques; newer cars at the 7 year mark only showed a roughly 7% battery capacity loss.
Time will tell, but the situation is significantly less bleak than naysayers (and the oil industry) want you to believe.
