You may remember when Ford announced the debut of the Lightning – the electric version of its best-selling half-ton pick-up truck. Ford said it would sell it for just over $40,000 – which would have meant it cost about the same as a non-electric F-150 similarly configured (crew cab, short bed, etc.)
Emphasis on said – and would have.
Within less than a year’s time of its debut as a new-for-2022 model, Ford increased the Lightning’s price to around $60,000 to start (emphasis on to start to reflect the fact that this price was what you paid to get the Lightning with the battery that only took you maybe 240 or so miles – if it wasn’t too cold outside. If you wanted the one that might take you 300 miles, you had to pay several thousand dollars more to get it).
Well, here we go again – before we even got started, this time.
GM had promised to offer a battery-powered version of its Blazer SUV for around $44,000 to start.
Emphasis on had promised.
That promise has just been reneged upon. GM will not be selling the battery powered Blazer for around $44,000 when it becomes available in early 2024. Instead, the new base price will be $60,215.
For this sum, you get a battery-powered Blazer that might go 279 miles before the proverbial screen goes dark – and you walk. Assuming it’s not too cold (or hot) out. 
But wait – good news! – Chevy also plans to offer an EV Blazer with an upgraded battery that might go 320 miles – if it’s not too cold or hot out – for just shy of $62,000.
Meanwhile, you can (for now) buy a Blazer with an engine for $35,100 that will take you 426 miles – in city driving – and 562 miles on the highway. Emphasis on engine – and will – because vehicles that aren’t powered by batteries are not meaningfully affected by the weather in terms of how far they go. Also – as this column has made mention of previously – a battery powered device’s range isn’t really its range for another reason:
If you run low, you’ve run out of time.
The $35k Blazer can be driven to the fullest extent of its range, to the point it is running on fumes – and in no time to speak of, you can be fully fueled and back on the road again. For that reason, it is neither a hassler nor a risk to run it down to almost empty. But if you are driving a battery powered device and it’s running low – and you haven’t got time – you are going to be screwed.
That’s why it’s necessary – in the real world, where things come up you didn’t anticipate – to always leave enough range (charge) in reserve, for just-in-case. Those who say otherwise are not being serious.
Or they are being disingenuous.
So, a battery powered device such as the 279 mile Blazer EV has a real-world-usable range of maybe 250 miles, the approximately miles of range 30 putatively left to go being the range you don’t want to burn through, so as to avoid being screwed for time when you haven’t got it to spend.
How many people are going to want to spend $15,000 more for such a battery-powered device? Probably about as many as the number who’ve ponied up to buy Ford’s battery-powered devices, such as the Lightning. Which isn’t even a blip on the radar relative to the hundreds of thousands who buy non-electric F-150s each year.
Meanwhile, the battery-powered devices are doing what they excel at doing – which is not moving. There is a two-months’-plus backlog of inventory awaiting buyers, who may never come. The idled fleets of these things cannot be swept under the rug. Even the lugenpresse has been reporting it.
It isn’t hard to understand what the issue is.
Aside from the True Believers – most of whom can afford a second car to mitigate the problem of having to wait and plan around the wait – most people prefer not to spend more to get less, so long as that option is still available to them.
But what will happen when it no longer is?
As this column has wondered aloud about previously, that may well explain this battery-powered Kamikaze operation. The car companies that have “committed” to this “transition” to battery powered devices have been given assurances. They will be able to make money on EVs when people are forced to buy EVs by forcing people to stop driving anything that isn’t an EV.
It’s either that or they’re literally suicidal.
But are people stupid?
Apparently, a good many aren’t. They are becoming wise to what’s up. It’s why unsold EVs are stacking up like the bodies that never did during the (cough) “pandemic.”
At this point, who but the deluded few still believes the lie that EVs are going to get cheaper?
Is it not of-a-piece with “safe and effective”? And perhaps people begin to see there’s another commonality shared between EVs that few can afford and many do not want and the “vaccines” that did something other than immunize the recipient.
. . .
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https://s3mag.com/ford-walking-back-ev-promises/
I did a real quick scan of the last few articles posted by our host. The new annoying poster just started on 8/5/23, one Martin Brock, one who seemingly knows all and has it at his fingertips all through the day and never makes a typographical error, though did complain about inability to edit has only posted on this article. “Here we Go Again” most legitimate posters lurk for awhile, get comfortable with the several interesting persons on this site then start talking a bit, maybe a bit more by some such as Richard. MB has jumped in feet first. Spends way more time on it than someone with other responsibilities and spouts many talking points. Most being “red herrings”. In the recent past we have had Cashy, Urthluvr, Chewy and now MB. Who knows more than all of us together and has it at his (it’s bites, think chat gpt) fingertips. Instantly posts seemingly logical posts, but when looked at closely by readers of this column are bullshit writ large. As I indicated earlier, Eric we are under attack. Once happenstance, two coincidence, three enemy action. It is now more than 3.
PS. MB appears to post during the day. First post on August 7, then lots on August 8 none in the last few hours. Got lots of pushback fom other denizens of Eric’s site. Responded to everything. Something is definitely going on. I think more than just a troll.
I’ve been getting a weird vibe about MB.
And reality is all about your vibes … ’cause you’re such a rational, objective libertarian.
Martin,
Do you have something to offer other than personal attacks and your opinion?
Morning, Ugg!
I would not be surprised. I regard it as inevitable that this sort of thing – ChatGTP/bot/whatever-it-is – assaults on sites like this that have drawn together contrarians and other such Wrongthinkers. Well, that’s ok! It tells me, if so, that we are on the right track!
Yeah. I didn’t comment at all yesterday.
But I know a lot about the subject and carefully edit myself, so I must be an EPA bot.
I’ve had this debate many times over many years in other fora because the subject interests me. I’m here now because I heard Eric on the Tom Woods Show recently.
GM will be offering an Escalade EV known as the Escalade IQ. Get it? Subtle, huh?
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/08/gm-electric-cadillac-escalade-ev-strategy.html
I found this quote interesting:
Ivan Drury, senior manager of insights at Edmunds, believes the Escalade IQ could continue such trends for a new generation of Cadillac buyers, without the gas-guzzling stigma.
“The vehicle exudes excess. It’s meant to say, ‘I don’t care about the following things including being eco-conscious or -friendly,’” Drury said. “But the thing about IQ is you could potentially get all of those new eyeballs … It’s something that really does bring new blood to the brand.”
—
Escalade (ICE) 2023 avg. transaction price: $115,494
Reading the back and forth between Eric and Martin reminds me of Eric’s recent article about Celebrating Diminishment. I often wonder how many “fanboys” of EVs would be so quick to extol the virtues of these vehicles if they weren’t being forced by government edicts. In other words, how many of these individuals would be begging the car makers to build vehicles that offered reduced range, a multitude of inconveniences, along with a higher cost? I mean, who in their right mind would advocate for such a deal?
I don’t expect many people to pay $60k for this Blazer when they can buy a Tesla Model Y Long Range for $50k, and that’s the problem for legacy automobile companies and startups trying to compete with Tesla at this point. They’re like Android phone makers competing with Apple. I use an Android phone, but Apple still has over half the market for smartphones in the U.S. because iPhone is practically synonymous with “smartphone”. Why buy the generic cola when Coke is cheaper? Tesla sells more EVs in the U.S. than all of its competitors combined, and it has economies of scale that no competitor outside of China can match.
So the proliferation of EV models has left many cars on lots, but Tesla sales in the first half of 2023 are up 30% over 2023, and Tesla doesn’t have lots, so maybe you’re being disingenuous by suggesting that demand for EVs is drying up. I would be shocked if this cutthroat competition were not happening. It happened with conventional cars in the twentieth century when the number of automakers fell from thousands to single digits over a few decades, and electric cars were initially more popular. Of course, it’ll happen with EVs too whether or not they ultimately displace ICEVs.
The F150 Lightning always looked like a bad idea to me, and the Blazer looks no better. Large pickup trucks and SUVs are not the best use case for EVs or even a very good one. U.S. automakers expect to sell more of them because they sell more ICEVs in this category, but the Bolt was very successful. There’s a reason why Tesla took so long to produce the Cybertruck. Trucks make far less sense as EVs than small, passenger vehicles especially when the truck is hauling a lot of cargo or pulling a trailer. I’ve never owned one because I’ve never needed one.
Yes, the cost of an EV is all about the battery, and battery prices have fallen nearly 90% since 2008, not surprisingly since they benefit from economies of scale and massive R&D improving the technology. They’ll continue to improve, but they’re good enough now for the uses to which people now put them. If progress suddenly stalls, maybe EVs will never crack ten percent of the market in the U.S., and that’s fine with me, but the stall seems very unlikely.
I’ve always driven small cars and driven them into the ground. I’m still very happy with my 2010 Mazda 3 with 140k miles, but I expect to replace it with an EV, hopefully an Aptera, in a year or two because an EV has many advantages over an ICEV in the appropriate use case. I’ll charge at home, so I’ll start every day with 400 miles of range in an Aptera, maybe 300 if I buy something else like the next-generation Bolt. 300 miles looks like the sweet spot to me especially for a small car. I’ll also leave with 300 miles of range on long trips.
Sure, I’ll rarely if ever let the range fall below 50 miles, but so what? At 60 mph, that’s four hours before I must stop for half an hour to charge. That’s more than half the distance to my dad’s house, so it’s only one stop, and the break won’t kill me. It’s arguably healthy, and I’ll rarely visit a charging station at all except on these trips, so I may spend less time overall at fueling stations.
Sure, I could stop for ten minutes and eat a burger behind the wheel of my car, and that is my habit, but it’s really a bad habit. For millennia, humanity counted the time to travel 500 miles in days, not hours. Stopping for an hour every few hundred miles can hardly be catastrophic. If I drove hundreds of miles a day routinely, I wouldn’t drive an EV.
And I’ll have the advantages of an EV, less engine noise, no smelly exhaust, instant torque, better acceleration, lower fuel cost, lower maintenance cost, the convenience of fueling at home, and so on. By most accounts, they’re more fun to drive.
And I expect fully self-driving cars by the end of this decade. They’ll be far more transformative than EVs, and they’ll eliminate many shortcomings of EVs since they’ll enable car sharing. By the time I’m 70, I may not own a car at all. I’ll use an app like Uber but at a much lower cost because the driver is most of the cost of an Uber. In this scenario, I don’t wait for an EV to charge. I get out of one car and into another in less time than it takes to fill a car with gas.
The future looks bright to me, and EVs look like a part of it, but the future looks bright regardless.
Richard Brock. I have no problem with what you say you want. The problem I have is me having to subsidize your choice of a ev.
If it makes sense to you go for it. But no subsidy, no tax credits, pay you own way. Tannstafl.
You could live to 170 and you won’t see self driving cars. AI has been a massive failure and has not advanced in years. There will never be a machine that can make the kind of decisions a human brain has to make. The experts in AI are admitting it.
As for the wonderfulness of EV’s you forgot to mention decreasing range depending on weather and age, collapse of a currently non-existent grid due to the increased load, and your eventual new battery cost, over half the cost of the vehicle. And you might not want to park it in your garage.
We’ll know soon enough, but I see progress reported every day. You see no progress because you aren’t looking for it.
Never is a very long time. Your knowledge of forever is dubious at best, so your certitude is not persuasive.
I didn’t forget to mention anything. I’m commenting on an article that focuses obsessively on every disadvantage of an EV, and I’m not here to #metoo.
I’ll park it in my garage and not worry about just as I don’t worry about setting my house on fire every time I fry something on my stove.
Hi Martin,
I have personally test driven pretty much every EV currently on the market other than the very highest end ones (e.g., Lucid) and found them all to be hugely compromised. Many are extremely quick. But that gets old when you’re constantly worrying about how far you can’t go – and how long you’ll be waiting (again).
My 22-year-old truck is vastly superior as a conveyance to any EV on the road. It goes 300 miles on a tank and I can run it down to fumes if need be and be fully refueled in a few minutes. If I forget to top off it off and find the next morning it’s almost empty, it’s no problem to just pour a few gallons into the tank from a jug in my shed. On the road in less than 5 minutes, with 100-plus miles of range. Its range is unaffected by the cold or the heat. I can leave it sitting for a month and it will ready to go anytime I need it. And it hasn’t yet needed a new engine or transmission. If it were an EV, by now it would almost certainly have needed a new battery – and the cost of replacing it would not have been worth it because the truck is worth less than an EV battery pack!
I don’t worry about how far I can go because I rarely go very far, and I haven’t run my car to fumes since I was naive twenty-something. So what if I can? I don’t.
You can fuel an ICEV from a jug in your garage, and I can charge an EV from my dryer outlet while I’m sleeping, and I can leave it plugged in for months, and it will be ready to go anytime I need it. I literally never leave my car for months without driving it anyway, so this hypothetical is irrelevant.
But you have this range-anxiety-inducing FUD. It’s a legitimate argument in favor of ICEVs over EVs, and I’ve never denied it. I just don’t consider it decisive given my needs.
I’ve never owned a truck because I’ve never needed to own one. I don’t really need the Honda CRV either. It was my wife’s idea. I typically drive less than 10k miles per year, so I don’t worry much about a battery lasting only 200k miles, which is realistic if the battery is rarely completely discharged or fast-charged. It’s about the miles, not the years.
When my 2010 Mazda 3 reaches 200k miles, it won’t be worth two grand according to Edmunds. If it were an EV, I probably wouldn’t replace the battery, but so what? I probably wouldn’t replace the clutch either, much less the transmission. At some point, I’m buying another car.
Your posts sure sound like pro-EV talking points to me. They’re all very well polished with all the right terminology, almost as if they came from a PR firm. You even cleverly concede an argument or two, but with one in a sort of belittling way, almost going so far as to say the word “hesitancy”: “But you have this range-anxiety-inducing FUD. It’s a legitimate argument in favor of ICEVs over EVs, and I’ve never denied it.” You sure have given all of this an awful lot of thought and writing, even though you don’t own an EV and drive a 13-year-old ICE economy car.
What did you say your line of work is again, Martin Brock?
I’m a libertarian and very much opposed to subsidies and mandates as a general proposition, including EV subsidies, but I’ve been interested in EVs, self-driving cars, and radically efficient cars (like the Elio and the Aptera) since before Tesla existed.
I have no fundamental problem with EVs, only with the subsidies, and I don’t believe that EVs are growing in popularity only because of the subsidies and mandates. Battery technology crossed a threshold a decade or two ago that made a pure BEV practical in some applications. If it were only about the climate change narrative, Tesla wouldn’t be selling over a million vehicles per year at this point, and legacy automakers wouldn’t be scrambling to catch up after making compliance cars for a decade.
I’ve also been a climate change skeptic for decades. I can show you the social media posts from a decade ago if you doubt it.
I don’t cleverly concede arguments. When I agree with an argument, I say so. I’m not a deep-state operative here to bamboozle you. I’m expressing my sincere opinions just as you are.
I’ve given it a lot of thought because I’ve been having this argument for years, and I’ve done a lot of homework.
I’m a software developer. I develop software for power distribution management systems, the software that controls switching equipment, transformers, capacitors, and other equipment on the electric grid. Your electric utility uses the software for load balancing and to manage power outages during storms and the like. Previously, I worked on other outage management software for another company, and before that, I worked for NASA on astrophysical research.
What’s your life story?
Hi Martin,
You may already know about this, but:
VW was working on an ultra-efficient diesel-electric hybrid that was expected to average at least 80 MPG and possibly more than 100 MPG. You may think I’m crazy, but I do not regard it as a coincidence that VW was “discovered” to have been “cheating” federal emissions certification tests (by complying with them, incidentally) right around the time this model was in development. VW’s production diesels – models like the TDI-powered Jetta, for instance – represented a huge threat to the then-nascent (this was circa 2016) EV push. No one interested in efficiency or practicality would buy a $50,000 EV that goes maybe 270-ish miles that take hours to recharge fully over a $24k diesel that got 50 MPG and could travel 600-plus miles on a tank. Imagine the impact of a diesel hybrid that could double that mileage and range…
I don’t know the details of the VW “cheating” business. If you want to lead me down the rabbit hole, I’ll follow for a while, but if VW never really cheated and it was all a plot to keep better ICEVs off the road, I need to see some unusually persuasive evidence. Many conspiracy theories are true, but they’re also a dime a dozen, so the theorist has the burden of proof. I don’t believe the “who killed the electric car” conspiracy theory either.
Aptera is an EV, but it promises the equivalent of over 300 mpg and a 1000-mile range in its high-range variant. It’s a three-wheeled, two-seater, but I drive alone in my car 90+% of the time, and I have one or fewer passengers 99+% of the time.
Elio Motors credibly promised an 80 mpg ICEV too, also in a three-wheeled two-seater, and I was ready to buy one before they ran out of their investors’ money, but I doubt anything nefarious. I followed their progress closely the whole time, so I have a decent idea of what happened, at least what they and their investors said was happening in public.
How did the EV fanatics get the reigns of the state away from VW and GM? When did the largest corporations on Earth succumb to Greta Thunberg, and how did it happen?
But people would buy $50k EVs that go maybe 270 miles and take hours to fully charge. I know they would because millions have in fact, and no one held a gun to their head.
Ahhh, the phrase “conspiracy theories.” Nice!
Demanding special pleading with an “unusually” high standard of evidence: “I need to see some unusually persuasive evidence.” In other words, my mind is closed shut and I’ll be the judge as to whether your “evidence” is unusually persuasive or not.
If you don’t want to see “conspiracy theory”, don’t describe conspiracy theories. Eric himself says, “You may think I’m crazy, but I do not regard it as a coincidence …” He knows what a conspiracy theory is, and he knows he’s describing one. Conspiracy theories can obviously be true, but they’re nonetheless conspiracy theories. Governments particularly engage in conspiracies. Entire government agencies, like the CIA, specialize in conspiring secretly to deceive and manipulate.
I haven’t demanded an unusually high level of evidence, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the person making the claim has the burden of proving it. If VW never violated emissions standards and tried to conceal it, as charged, but paid billions in fines anyway for some reason, that seems an extraordinary claim to me. I’ve heard of the charges and the fines, but I’ve never heard that it was all a hoax. Maybe it was a hoax. I’m asking for evidence, and I’m willing to consider it.
No. What I say is the opposite of “my mind is closed shut”, but you’re always free to ignore what I say and pretend that I’ve said the opposite.
I don’t think you’re crazy. Here’s what wikipedia says about the VW emissions scandal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal
I haven’t read it all yet, but we can start there. What if anything does this article get wrong?
Wikipedia has been has been corrupted by the propagandists. The founder, Jimmy Wales, has gone on record to this point. This Wiki outline is pure garbage propaganda.
Hi Martin,
Here’s the synopsis as regards the VW “cheating” scandal:
VW was selling large numbers of TDI diesel-powered vehicles. This was because VW was the only car manufacturer that offered a line of affordable diesel-powered vehicles. Most of the rest were expensive, luxury brand models such as those offered by Mercedes, BMW and Audi. These posed no threat to the EV Push because they were just as expensive as EVs.
The TDI-powered VWs such as the Jetta and Golf and New Beetle, on the other hand, made EV look silly. A person could buy a TDI Golf or Jetta or Beetle for half as much as it costs to buy a small EV such as a Tesla 3 – that goes not even half as far before it forces its owner to wait for it to recharge. Those diesel-powered VWs also threatened the EV Push in another way. Being diesels, they could be expected to go 250,000-plus miles before needing any major work. Battery-powered cars will need a new battery long before then.
At any rate, the VW diesels were just too damned good. So they had to be done away with. And so an excuse was found. VW was caught “cheating” on federal emissions certification tests. Oh, the humanity! The “clean” diesels were actually “dirty” – which was an absurdity. The “cheating” involved fractional, meaningless (in terms of harms caused) differences in the “emission” of oxides of nitrogen under certain driving conditions (e.g., wide open throttle). VW had programmed its cars to pass the tests – and they did.
This was taken as an affront to the Authority of the regulatory apparat – and a crucifixion followed. Which was followed by a mea culpa tour for VW, which then had to pay millions to promote EVs.
The point of it all is that we’re no longer allowed to buy affordable – and very clean – diesel-powered cars. So that it’s easier to force us into electric cars.
That Wiki articles literally claims deadly results from the “cheating VW cars” (in a most oily and intellectually dishonest way, of course):
“Deaths
A peer-reviewed study published in Environmental Research Letters estimated that approximately 59 premature deaths will be caused by the excess pollution produced between 2008 and 2015 by vehicles equipped with the defeat device in the United States, the majority due to particulate pollution (87 percent) with the remainder due to ozone (13 percent). The study also found that making these vehicles emissions compliant by the end of 2016 would avert an additional 130 early deaths.[205][204]
Earlier non peer-reviewed studies published in media sources, quoted estimates ranging from 10 to 350 excess deaths in the United States related to the defeat devices based on varying assumptions.[206]
A 2022 study by economists found that each cheating Volkswagen car per 1,000 cars caused a low birth weight rate increase of 1.9 percent and infant mortality rate increase by 1.7 percent.[207]”
This Widipedia article verifies what I’ve said all along. VW passed the test. Their crime was being smarter than the EPA and programming their cars to pass the test. They embarrassed the EPA, and that cannot be allowed.
“I’m not a deep-state operative here to bamboozle you.”
That’s just what a deep state operative would say! Proves it!
Touche.
Sounds like that deep state operative job pays pretty well. They don’t give you a car with it? They probably make you drive electric to further the agenda!
Agreed. Definitely some kind of NLP going on here.
I like this one… “I don’t believe that EVs are growing in popularity only because of the subsidies and mandates.”
—-
Something beyond subsidies and mandates is responsible for “popularity”? How is that possible? How truly “popular” is something that needs subsidies and mandates?
It interesting. A single poster (that I have never seen post here before) who says he’s employed seems to all the sudden join in on multiple articles and be able to pump out these huge, well written responses (with a multitude of pro EV talking points), while a bunch of us can barely keep up with replies.
It’s also interesting that he would specifically deny being a “deep-state operative.” Did anybody accuse him of being one?
I don’t say that anyone accused me of being a deep state operative. I only wanted to reassure you that I’m not one since you can’t understand how anyone could be employed and also here writing well-written responses. Maybe I’ve been arguing this same point for years. Maybe you could see these arguments in Tom Woods’ supporting listeners group on MeWe. Maybe Eric Peters has already seen them there. That’s just food for thought.
RE: “…while a bunch of us can barely keep up with replies.”
Man, you can say That again!
I, definitely, cannot.
Me, I’m often beat from sweating my ass off most of the day outside when I get here, or just waking up & got a few minutes in the morning.
I suppose, if someone were well off financially & spent the day in CAC while sitting in a plush leather swivel chair,… it could be done.
Idk.
The interstate highway system isn’t only subsidized. It’s wholly owned by the Federal government, and it’s popular, and you use it, so you already know the answer to your question, but you’re being deliberately obtuse.
Yeah, no. Gov’t as monopoly provider in the context of the interstate highway system isn’t the same as “popular” in a marketplace of choices kind of way. Are you going to argue the US Postal service is “popular” next?
You don’t talk like “regular people.” Nor, per your persona, which seems fake but whatever, do you put your money where your mouth is and drive one of these electric appliances. Conveniently, ironically, and hysterically, the ones you claim mention you like are bankrupt or nearly so. Yet you push the narrative like nobody’s business.
Martin,
The Tesla Model Y is still a $50,00 vehicle. To start. For this sum you get a compact electric crossover with a pathetic 279 miles of range – the equivalent of about half a tank of gas. The “long range” (330 miles) version stickers for almost $53k.
For $20k-plus less, you could buy a same-sized Honda CR-V that has a standard range of almost 400 miles in city driving and nearly 500 on the highway.
It is absurd – as well as tone-deaf elitist – to believe that $50k cars can ever be mass-market viable. Even $40,000 is beyond the means of the average person. How did we get to the point that people are expected to spend $50k – or $40k or even $30k – on a car?
Most people do not make six figure incomes and many of those that do still can’t really afford this. The can finance this – but that is not the same thing. It is a debt-saddled existence that people are being habituated to.
As far as the rest: It takes 8-11 hours to fully recharge an EV at home on Level II 240 volts. If you haven’t got the time to do that, you’ll regularly be driving with less than a full charge. This is a hassle in an EV because they generally do not have that much range to begin with. Keep in mind that the advertised range is often (in the real world) much less than advertised. I don’t offer this as mere opinion. I have personally test driven lots of EVs, all makes and models and this is fact.
Finally, in re:
” I’ll have the advantages of an EV, less engine noise, no smelly exhaust, instant torque, better acceleration, lower fuel cost.”
Less noise? Unless you are driving a muscle car, most new non-electric new cars hardly make any. Once rolling, you will still hear the noise of the road and tires, which in EVs are often more noticeable for the obvious reason. “Smelly exhaust”? Really? This isn’t 1970. I test drive new cars every week and assure you none have “smelly” exhaust – unless there’s something badly wrong with them. “Lower fuel costs”? Not really. It costs about the same to “fast” charge an EV as it does to fuel a non-EV and whatever you “save” on fueling you lost on the car – which cost you many thousands more than a comparable non-EV. “Lower maintenance” – except for replacing thew battery. Except for tires that wear out 30 percent faster (due to the weight of the EV and the higher torque output).
“More fun to drive”? If you find it fun to drive an appliance.
Some people are in the market for $50k vehicles. I’m not one of them.
The Model Y standard range starts at $47k, $40k after the credit. I don’t defend the credit, but I take it into consideration when making my own buying decisions because I might as well take what the Feds are handing since they’ll grab it right back regardless.
I have a Honda CRV. I don’t need another one.
I don’t say that $50k cars are mass-market viable. Products are rarely mass-market out of the gate. My first personal computer, that I bought in 1982 when I was a computer science major in college, cost more than my first car. It was laughably impotent compared with my phone now, it weighed at least a hundred times more. After forty years of inflation, the phone still costs much less than that first computer cost me. Progress is like that. Celebrate it.
You definitely shouldn’t be compelled to buy an EV just as you shouldn’t be compelled to buy a Ferrari, but you aren’t being compelled to buy one. This compulsion is only hypothetical. It’s FUD at this point. If it becomes a reality at some point, I’ll be on your side opposing the compulsion as I am now.
Fun?
Hi Martin,
In re: “Some people are in the market for $50k vehicles. I’m not one of them.”
Certainly. These are luxury-car buyers; the EV thing is incidental. They can afford to indulge is the point. But most people are not affluent enough to indulge a $50k-plus car, irrespective of what kind of car it is.
The 2023 Model Y’s base price is $49,900. And even if it were “47K,” that’s quibbling. It’s still almost $50k. And the tax credit is only something you can get if you already paid a certain amount in taxes. Even so, $40k for a small crossover that is functionally inferior to a $28k CR-V except as regards how quick it is only highlights my point. These are not practical cars. They are expensive cars. And that’s fine, if you want to spend the extra – but it’s obnoxious to contend that it has anything to do with practicality.
Yes. EVs have been and continue to be luxury cars. So? Most people can’t afford a new BMW either, and I wouldn’t buy one even though I can afford it.
Then 49,000 is also quibbling, and I’ve been using $50k as a typical EV price all along. A Bolt starts under $30k, which is less than I paid for a Honda CRV over five years ago, and I considered buying a Bolt for a while because I’m losing hope that an Aptera will ever be produced, but I ultimately decided that I don’t need a new car yet. It is hard to find a Bolt for less than $30k, but they’re available for not much more, and I could buy a used Bolt with a practically new battery for less than $30k.
I paid a bit more than $20k for my Mazda 3 in 2010, and the Bolt is more like the Mazda than the Honda in scale, but I’ve always been an early adopter of new technology and paid a bit more for it as a consequence. You do you.
I’d get the tax credit. I don’t believe in one-size-fits-all solutions, and I certainly don’t want common people compelled buy any $50k car, EV or otherwise.
“I’d get the tax credit.”
Congrats! A retired married couple needs an income over $100,000 to qualify for the entire credit. Working people would need to earn almost $100,000 and that assumes they don’t have any significant deductions to reduce their tax bill. Basically, it takes a relatively high income to take advantage of the tax credit. Which, makes for a rather interesting irony.
The state has always been of, by, and for the better off. When you realize that the “common man’s party” is even worse in this regard than the “businessman’s party”, it’s a rude awakening, but I woke up to this reality decades ago. The utility of EVs is a separate issue.
“Martin Brock August 8, 2023 At 4:21 pm
The state has always been of, by, and for the better off. When you realize that the “common man’s party” is even worse in this regard than the “businessman’s party”, it’s a rude awakening, but I woke up to this reality decades ago.”
This is the kind of insouciance that allows it to perpetuate.
While you’re mightily defeating the status quo on a daily basis … in your tortured imagination.
How do you know what I do, sir? One thing we can be sure of: I haven’t expressed insouciance, like you have.
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” -Edmund Burke
According to Tesla, the Model Y starts at $40,240 after the tax credit, so that’s $47,740 before the credit. Just saying …
https://www.tesla.com/modely
Tesla recently cut its prices across the board, and since it has 60% of the EV market in the U.S., it’s hard to see how EV prices are not falling.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-reports-sequentially-lower-quarterly-gross-margin-2023-07-19/
Martin,
Tesla is a company built on legal racketeering (via the “carbon credit” scam) that depends on hyped stock valuation based upon government EV mandates (via regs that effectively mandate EVs). But there’s no question Musk has grifted himself a fortune – which he can use to subsidize the “sale” of his EVs. Those sales were faltering before he cut prices.
Tesla and every other large corporation … The myriad of state interventions in the economy is much too dense to untangle, so I largely ignore it.
Tesla is not Elon Musk, and Musk is no genius, but he is a high-stakes gambler and has parlayed an early investment in Tesla into an incredible fortune in Tesla stock. I’ve never owned the stock because its price is highly speculative, and I’m not a high-stakes gambler myself, but people who do own it are betting on much greater EV adoption and that Tesla will keep 50+% of the EV market while EVs become 50+% of the entire car market, making it thrice the size of GM in a decade or two without any of the baggage of legacy automakers. That’s a huge gamble, but so far, they’ve been right. We’ll see. Some undoubtedly are betting on climate hysteria and mandates too, but I can’t help that.
On the other hand, hyperloops, Mars colonies, humanoid robots, and the Twitter debacle are incredibly stupid. SpaceX is more crony capitalism, and Starlink doesn’t look promising at this point either. Musk may be the greatest crony capitalist of our time, but this fact is not relevant to the utility of EVs.
Sales were hardly faltering. Tesla sold 367,500 vehicles in 2019, 499,550 in 2020, 936,950 in 2021, and 1,313,581 in 2022. A reasonable projection for this year is 1.8 million. Even Tesla investors have been surprised by this success, thus the big swings in the share price. Tesla is cutting prices now to hold market share as the competition gets serious.
And Tesla is pursuing a speculative approach to self-driving cars (with mostly optical sensors and neural networks) that may not pan out well enough to justify its investment, but high-stakes gambles do pay off sometimes, and that’s why we have very wealthy people. Plenty of crony capitalism exists, but it’s not only about crony capitalism.
If a Tesla can drive itself safely enough on 99% of routes, then a robotaxi service will soon follow, and it will be as transformative and profitable as Musk imagines. We’ll see about that too. It’s true that legacy automakers aren’t competing much in this arena, but why would they? If self-driving cars become a real thing, many people, even most people, won’t own a car at all anymore, and the number of cars sold each year will plummet. If you aren’t selling many cars now but you are selling self-driving cars, that’s not a problem for you. If you’re GM, it’s a huge problem.
You can call that pie in the sky if you like. I don’t think it is. I’d say it’s inevitable eventually. How far in the future is debatable, but it’s the kind of bet capitalists make all the time.
Hi Martin,
There has been a concerted, deliberate effort to make car ownership more and more expensive and driving less and less enjoyable. If the government weren’t essentially dictating car design, there would be much more interest in cars and driving and far less in being transported like a meatsack in an automated car. Imagine the panoply of choice we might have had; indeed, that we once had. Now what do we have? Mostly, it’s look-alike crossovers and battery-powered appliances that have all the individuality of a can of sardines.
Ich scheisse uber alles!
Most EV owners say that the driving experience is a big improvement, but I like the idea of being transported like a meatsack in an automated car. Think of all the time I’ll have to comment on your posts on long trips. A chicken in every pot, and a chauffeur in every car. I should run for office.
I didn’t intend to post that last reply because I hadn’t finished it, and I hate that we can’t edit here.
Charging an EV with a level 2 charger at home is completely practical because I sleep eight hours a day anyway. I don’t drive anywhere near 200 miles per day, so other than long trips, that I take rarely, I’ll never come close to running out of charge, and I’ll very rarely use a fast charger.
Smelly is subjective, but I agree that typical ICEVs don’t smell much. EVs don’t smell at all. Quiet is also subjective, but an EV is much quieter at low speeds and much quieter to start. These aren’t big advantages.
I’ll hardly ever use a fast charger, so the cost of fast charging is irrelevant. Charging at home will be much less expensive per mile for me. My power bill doesn’t lie.
The battery is the weakest link for any EV, and I have never denied it, but battery costs have fallen precipitously in recent decades as energy density has improved; otherwise, EVs wouldn’t be as popular as they are. If they fall no further, EV adoption could stall, but I don’t expect that to happen, and they’re already over the viability threshold for me. I work from home, and I did have a six-figure income until I semi-retired, but I’m not suggesting that anyone should be compelled to buy an EV.
Improving battery tech has many advantages beyond EVs, so I hope for a lot more of it. My first computer didn’t have a battery at all, and it wasn’t portable at all. Smartphones and laptops last much longer on a charge than they did a decade ago. Doubling battery energy density will make flying cars a reality, and I can’t wait. My DJI drone has a lithium-ion battery, and I suppose it could burst into flame, along with this laptop, but it’s in a drawer in my house right now, and I don’t lose a moment’s sleep over it. I often sleep with the laptop, as you can see from the timestamps on my posts on social media. If I burn to death, you can gloat.
In the video linked below, the Tesla owner concedes the point about tires, so he’s quite honest about the downsides of driving an EV despite being a fanboy. Ferraris eat tires too. If you want a Ferrari anyway, that’s fine with me.
Fun to drive?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCNR0-f6wJc
That’s an honest appraisal from someone who’s not an EV fanboy. I follow this youtube channel because the guy lives near me, so he drives his FSD Tesla on many of the same roads I use, and FSD interests me even more than EVs. He’s annoyingly fanboyish toward Elon Musk, but that’s OK. I understand his bias and can account for it, just as I can account for yours.
Martin writes:
“Charging an EV with a level 2 charger at home is completely practical because I sleep eight hours a day anyway. I don’t drive anywhere near 200 miles per day, so other than long trips, that I take rarely, I’ll never come close to running out of charge, and I’ll very rarely use a fast charger.”
You forgot the modifier – for you. It isn’t for me. Nor is it for people who do not live in the city or close to one.
And I do not understand this endless defense of hassle that didn’t exist before.
You write:
“The battery is the weakest link for any EV, and I have never denied it, but battery costs have fallen precipitously in recent decades as energy density has improved…”
First off, they have not fallen. I have been covering EVs (and cars) since the ’90s, when the modern EV push began. The GM EV1/Impact of the ’90s was beset by the same problems as today. It only went about 100 miles, granted. But it was also a tiny, subcompact car that did not tout “ludicrous” speed.
“Battery density”? The typical 800-1,000 pound EV battery can hold the energy equivalent of about 7 gallons of gas – that weighs about 60 pounds.
As far as fun to drive – yes, that’s subjective. But here’s objective: All EVs are essentially the same homogenous appliances. A battery is a battery; a motor is a motor. Some are stronger/quicker. They all have the same devoid-of-individual personality quality, like a mannequin.
I am me. That goes without saying. I live in the suburbs and nowhere near a big city unless Athens, Georgia counts. My nearest (Tesla) fast charger is twenty miles away at Best Buy, but I don’t expect to use it anyway. I could use it on rare occasions if I forget to plug in at home before a long trip, but I don’t expect it, and it’ll be once in a blue moon at most.
I’m not seeing the hassle. You talk incessantly about driving a car to fumes and running out of gas, but I don’t worry about it because it practically never happens. Again, I’ll plug in my car when I arrive home, in less time than it takes to unlock my front door, rather than driving to a gas station weekly except on long trips. That sounds like less hassle to me.
Battery prices have fallen precipitously. The stats are in the article I linked. EV prices haven’t fallen as much because there’s more to an EV than the battery, and reaching the economies of scale we take for granted with ICEVs takes time. Only Tesla has done it outside of China. Legacy automakers still lose money on every EV they sell, but that’s true of the first PCs and smartphones sold too. It’s true of the first everything mass produced. Tesla has cut prices recently in fact.
Battery density is what it is. No need for the scare quotes. I’m not scared. EVs have no transmission, no cylinders or spark plugs, fewer moving parts in general, but you know that already.
Fun to drive is subjective, but it’s a big reason why most EV owners say they’ll stick with an EV. Instant torque and acceleration is very attractive to some people.
I think that you as the first wave of EV user is not going to be typical. From what I know of human nature (myself included) I try to squeeze every last mile out of a tank of gas before bothering to fill up.
I think people are going to run their EV’s out of juice on a regular basis and the streets will be filled with cars with completely dead batteries. The reason that doesn’t happen with gas cars (as much) is that there is a gas station on every corner and it takes 5 min. to fill up. But when you are looking at having to get home (all the charging stations will be filled up so the half hour wait becomes two hours) people will push it too far. Mobile charging vehicles (probably gas powered) will be everywhere.
I doubt that you routinely drive your car on fumes before filling up. If you did, you’d often run out of gas, and running out of gas sucks, so most people who do it once or twice learn the lesson. Filling up with fifty miles left is easy enough and practically eliminates the risk. That’s why I haven’t run out of gas in decades.
Again, I’ll practically never use a public charging station because I’ll charge at home overnight 90+% of the time.
My nearest Tesla charging station is twenty miles away. I’ve never seen it close to fully booked, but I wouldn’t worry about it anyway because I expect never to use it. I’d occasionally use one halfway to my dad’s house in NC (260 miles away); otherwise, I’ll never run out of charge because I’ll start each day with a full charge. Your mileage may vary, and I’m not trying to sell you an EV here. Eric is trying to sell me an ICEV, but I’m not trying to sell you an EV.
Mobile charging vehicles are possible, but there’s no reason to expect them to be gas-powered, quite the opposite since they’ll carry a big battery anyway.
The reason you don’t see EVs bricked on every street corner in San Francisco, where half of all new vehicle registrations are EVs, is that your theory is wrong.
My point, your situation is particular to you. Also the future will be different. Your empty charging station will be full and crowded if EV’s continue to be forced onto people. Same with the situation in SF. The EV drivers there are all self selected at this point. Obviously using SF as an example of anywhere else is not a good idea. But rest assured the people in other places will behave differently.
Of course, my situation is particular to me. I’ve said over and over again that EVs aren’t for everyone, but they’ll work for me.
SF as an example has the advantage that SF actually exists, unlike your imaginary future city with EVs bricked on every street corner.
Martin writes:
“Of course, my situation is particular to me. I’ve said over and over again that EVs aren’t for everyone, but they’ll work for me.”
And that’s fine. But the point remains: EVs are being pushed on everyone rather than offered as an alternative people are free to choose, if they wish. The fact that this is so says much about the desirability of EVs.
Hi Martin,
A few weeks back, I had a new Challenger to test drive. I parked it one night and didn’t think about it until the next morning, when I headed out to drive it downtown – which for me is 30 miles distant. Well, I’d left it with almost no gas in it. But – no problem – I just poured a few gallons into it from a jug in the shed. You cannot do that with an EV. Just another example of the inconveniences these battery powered appliances impose on people.
You keep saying that EVs impose inconveniences on people, but most EV owners themselves say something else. They don’t forget to plug in for the very reason you say that they’ll regret it if they do.
And being delivered a car with no fuel for a test drive is not a use case that i ever expect to encounter. You do you.
Since we’re discussing anecdotes, here’s a woman who drives a 2023 Bolt.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXtdKl0E-gc
She initially had a problem charging the battery on a level two charger at home, and her Chevrolet dealer took a month to fix it. She wasn’t happy about it, but once the problem was resolved, she’s very happy overall with the Bolt and won’t go back to an ICEV because she prefers the EV driving experience.
So is she lying? Only lying about the post-battery-fix situation? She seems completely honest to me.
Martin,
I don’t “say” they impose inconvenience. They do.
Having to wait for literally five times as long – or longer – to do what can be readily done in five minutes or less is by definition inconvenient. Not being able to drive hundreds of miles, on the spur of the moment – perhaps because something came up you didn’t plan for is by definition inconvenient. Having a vehicle with hugely variable range – according to the weather – is inconvenient.
That some people don’t mind these inconveniences is a non sequitur.
Thanks for the link, Martin. Wow, if Dr. Know-it-all thinks that video will make me want an electric car, then he and I must live on separate planets. If you enjoy fighting with your phone for a day and a half to get it to stop doing something that you don’t want it to do, then this is the car for you. Settings, settings, settings. What a pain in the ass!
I love my phone, and I love this Chromebook even more.
The settings are for Full Self-Driving Beta. I expect it to have many settings, but it looks very well-designed and easy to use. Of course, it has shortcomings. Everything does especially bleeding-edge technology. Early ICEVs were full of shortcomings and killed a whole lot of people.
Hi Martin,
“Early ICEVs were full of shortcomings and killed a whole lot of people.”
A couple of points:
One, the early cars with engines (“ICEV” is a dreadful construction) were never pushed onto the market to replace the electric cars that co-existed with them and which many people did prefer, chiefly because they were – at first – easier to use, especially for women and men not physically able to or interested in dealing with hand cranking and so on.
Two, the early cars with engines soon supplanted the early electric cars because self-starters and so on rendered them as easy to use and they had the additional advantages of being able to go much farther, far more easily – without endless waiting.
What’s happening now is a forced reversal of that natural progression.
I still maintain self driving cars are not going to happen in any large number and many of the ones that are being used are going to be cancelled. Here is an article by an expert in the field that explains why.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/self-driving-cars-2662494269
The article does not say that self-driving cars are not going to happen or that existing robotaxi services will be canceled. I’m not remotely surprised that the first services of this kind have many problems. I would be shocked if they didn’t. Research the early automobile industry a little.
Martin,
The point here is that the government isn’t evincing “concern” for the “safety” of the public… as regards these automated cars. That is the proper term, by the way. An autonomous car is one not controlled by someone other than you.
I’d rather die sooner than live as safely as possible, and I like the idea of automated cars, so if the United State is really throwing pedestrians at automated cars like Ukrainian boys at the Donbas, I guess we have a coincidence of wants.
Non-automated cars kill 40k people per year in the U.S, and that’s down from 50k in 1980. The things are death traps, but people love them anyway.
Hi Martin,
Actually, it’s not the cars that killed those 40k people. It was the drivers. I’d rather be responsible for my own death!
Martin,
You mentioned Musk’s Starlink in another comment. Could you elaborate? I tried it last year. At the time, part of our property was in the service area (the house was barely outside it), so I dragged our location to that spot on the Starlink map, and it let me order the hardware. But it didn’t work. It was like going back to dialup, even though their app had told me that both our deck and our roof were excellent locations for the dish. I sent it back for a refund. Now the coverage map says “coming in 2023” for our area. I have read that they have started throttling users during prime time, which makes me think I don’t want it if and when the map shows widespread coverage here.
I said, “Starlink doesn’t look promising at this point either.” What else do you want me to say? You know more about it than I do.
Off-topic comments are quite common here, and nobody seems to mind. You know a lot about new stuff, so I thought you might be able to tell me what’s going on with SL and whether it actually works. Your comment suggested that it doesn’t.
I was about to defend you for providing interesting nuance about EVs (some of Eric’s regular readers can be downright sycophantic sometimes). But now I think I’ll get started cutting the grass instead. Sorry I bothered you.
“Eric’s regular readers can be downright sycophantic sometimes.” -Roland
Come on now. I have a very similar point of view. The common thread is the non-aggression principle (sometimes known as the golden rule). I have a hard time seeing a valid argument that aggression can be justified against others (except in actual and immediate self defense). What say you about the NAP?
Hi Mister, what have I ever written here that shows that I’m anything but all-in on the NAP? What I don’t like is when commenters pile on a newcomer who attempts to add nuance to the discussion. Eric has said himself that EVs might be fine for people who make short trips and can charge them at home, and that if consumers demonstrate a legitimate preference for them, so be it. But when Martin says the same thing, and tries to broaden the discussion with evidence that contradicts certain assumptions we’ve made about EVs, all hell breaks loose. Within half an hour everybody agrees that the new guy is a troll who wants to force EVs and masks on everybody. He states, over and over, that he is opposed to that. But the mob says, “You just don’t get it: these things are being forced on us!” Sheesh. Sometimes you guys can’t take yes for an answer.
Well, you raise a different point than sycophancy.
There are certain indicia of some new posters that get my suspicion up, which makes me believe they are not commenting in good faith. Martin Brock is a great example of this. He has these long posts that touch on all of the pro-EV talking points. He pumps these out with great immediacy which makes me wonder whether they are genuinely coming from an individual that wants discuss these things in good faith. He appeared all of the sudden and then also went entirely dark for 2 days, only to come back with about 5-10 posts just today. Multiple commuters can barely keep up with his.
Something is fishy here.
Did it ever occur to you that I’ve discussed this issue for years in other fora?
I went dark yesterday because I needed to get some work done to make up for all the time I wasted here the day before. I would have gone dark today, but my housebuilding project was canceled due to the weather. I’m semi-retired and work from home. Even when I’m working, my personal laptop sits beside my work laptop.
All clear now, or are you still fishing?
Don’t pay attention to Mister Liberty he is the site crank that thinks every new poster who is not 100% in agreement with the consensus is a commie spy for the CIA. There are a couple of others also that act like junkyard dogs barking at anyone they don’t like the “smell” of.
I’ve missed you, buddy.
Hi Cashew,
I’m hoping we’ll be able to keep it intelligent. All I mean by that is responding to points made rather than evading them. I don’t want much less expect anyone to just “amen” the views expressed here. I would like it if people who disagree with them to explain why – and then respond directly to rebuttals made, etc.
You’re right, ML, I did wander from what I said about sycophants. This is what I see too much of here (not word-for-word, of course):
“You’re right, Boss!”
“Haha, that new guy’s an idiot, Boss!”
“You really told him, Boss!”
“He just doesn’t get it, Boss!”
I don’t see anything fishy. Martin said he came here after hearing Eric on the Tom Woods Show. Isn’t that evidence of a generally anti-state mindset? I want to see more nuanced, well-written comments from fellow libertarians.
People disappear all the time. Sometimes for days, sometimes for weeks. I believe he said he’s retired.
Roland: When anybody is forced to fabricate quotes to support an argument (like you did), it’s probably not a very solid argument.
Being a proponent of the NAP is evidenced by what somebody says and does. He may have listened to Tom Woods (who is a big NAP guy), but the things he says and claimis to do are not consistent with the NAP. I would bet there have been many statists and propagandists that have listened to Tom Woods to find out what the libertarian arguments are. Him telling us he has listened to Tom woods means nothing.
What part of “not word-for-word” don’t you understand? My point is that the sycophancy here is palpable sometimes.
Not every newcomer is an earthlubricator, or whatever the guy calls himself. What exactly has Martin said or done that indicates he wants the state to force people into EVs or masks? Yet he is bombarded over and over and over with “But the problem is force!” He agrees with you, for crying out loud.
Putting things in quotes but then disclaiming in a parenthetical that they are not actual quotes is intellectually dishonest.
I think he’s a shill for the EV lobby. You’re convinced he’s not and you’ve decided to call others sycophants. That, of course, is your prerogative on this site and that’s the nature of debate.
I don’t think Martin has advocated for the state to force EVs, but hat is not the same as advocating for or even acknowledging the NAP. He also vociferously defends EVs believing that Eric and other commenters are advocating the abolition of EVs. I am clarifying that abolishing EVs is not my position. It is the mandating of them that I and many here are against. Nonetheless, this keeps falling of deaf ears and he keeps extoling what he claim are their virtues without addressing the point being made, which is the involuntariness. This is the kind of thing I would certainly do if I were and EV shill. Mandates are not virtues that one would want to promote. Instead just avoid the debate on it.
To wit: krustyklown’s comment at 10:40 a.m. today.
I thought you were asking me for a defense of Starlink. I didn’t mean to brush you off.
I don’t know a lot about Starlink, but I’ve read that it’s a dubious proposition because of the number of satellites required and how often they must be replaced. Global coverage requires so many satellites that they’ll become a space junk hazard and interfere with ground-based telescopes among other things. Also, the current system requires each satellite to communicate with a ground station as opposed to communicating with other satellites in the network. The system Musk imagines would have satellites communicating with one another to reduce the number of ground stations and increase coverage, but all of that is much easier for Musk to imagine than to realize, and the idea that he can ultimately finance SpaceX with Starlink revenue, even enough to colonize Mars, doesn’t add up at all even if he could replace everyone’s internet access with Starlink, which wouldn’t provide nearly the bandwidth of what most people in developed countries have now.
Tesla Hit With Another Class Action Lawsuit, This Time Over Driving Range
80% of EV owners say they wouldn’t buy another one….no wonder…lol
https://www.investopedia.com/tesla-hit-with-another-class-action-lawsuit-this-time-over-driving-range-7569325
Where do you read that 80% of EV owners say they wouldn’t buy another one? It’s not in the article you linked.
https://insideevs.com/news/330392/survey-92-of-tesla-owners-will-buy-tesla-again-55-to-purchase-a-model-3/
On the self-defeating nature of EeeVee mandates:
‘Oil is a mixture of different hydrocarbon lengths. Substitution of electricity for one part of the hydrocarbon mix, namely for the Light Distillates [e.g., gasoline], is not very helpful. Oil companies need to be able to sell ALL parts of the mix in order to make their extraction efforts worthwhile.
‘As a practical matter, the vast majority of the world will pay no attention to mandates that all private passenger automobiles be EVs. Instead, EV mandates in some countries [cough … USA … cough] may somewhat reduce the selling price of gasoline worldwide because these [Americlown] drivers are no longer using gasoline. With lower gasoline prices, non-EV’s are likely to become cheaper to operate in countries where they are permitted, boosting their sales. This is an effect similar to Jevons Paradox.’
https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/our-oil-predicament-explained-heavy-oil-and-diesel-fuel-it-provides-are-key
China thanks us for our sacrifice. India too!
The only EV mandate in the U.S. that I know of is in California, and it only mandates EVs in new vehicle sales in 2035. You can still drive an ICEV sold before 2035. Since Cubans still drive cars built in the fifties, this mandate will leave ICEVs on the road for many decades, and that’s more than enough time for the political winds to shift if EVs turn out to be as disastrous as Eric imagines.
Hi Martin,
“The only EV mandate in the U.S. that I know of is in California, and it only mandates EVs in new vehicle sales in 2035.”
It’s more subtle than this. Federal regs are now at the point of effectively mandating EVs (or at least, hybrids). The compliance cost of these regs makes it so. This is not my opinion. It is undeniable fact. One openly acknowledged by the CEOs of major automakers. It is not possible to meet the latest round of CAFE regs without resorting to hybrid or EV vehicles because the latter are the only vehicles that can comply with a federal mandate that new cars must average 58 MPG – or even 40 MPG.
Also: Numerous other states have already adopted California’s regulatory regime. And keep in mind that 2035 is much closer than 12 years from now. Car makers invest in the designs they’ll be allowed to sell. They are not investing in designs they won’t be allowed to sell for very much longer.
I don’t defend any Federal regulation of anything, but Trump and Biden went back and forth on these standards, so the current standards are hardly set in stone. I prefer self-regulating communities smaller than U.S. states, but we have the Federal system we have, and if Californians want to spend $50k on an EV or live like Cubans, that’s up to them. I don’t live there, and if I did, I could move. I also expect EV battery prices to continue to fall, and the rest of an EV is less costly to produce than an ICEV because EVs are much simpler mechanically. If the decline in battery prices doesn’t continue along with increasing economies of scale for EV producers, EV adoption should stall, but governments subsidize and mandate all sorts of things and aren’t about to stop doing it. The best I can do is ignore them.
Hi Martin,
CAFE “standards” – read, MPG minimums decreed by the federal government – have been reliably going up since the mid-1970s, when they first went into force. The car industry assumes they will continue to do so because they never go down.
Battery prices falling? They have been rising. It is why EV prices continue to rise. EVs are not less costly to build… because of the cost of batteries!
The recent uptick in battery prices reflects the demand for minerals growing faster than supply can grow. Buying an EV is much easier than building a lithium mine.
https://about.bnef.com/blog/increase-in-battery-prices-could-affect-ev-progress/
This article discusses your “rising battery cost”. It’s over a year or two after decades of steep decline.
EV prices are falling regardless.
https://insideevs.com/news/672100/ev-prices-reduce-14-percent-tax-incentives/
The supply of lithium and other minerals can and will grow, and sodium is already replacing lithium in some EVs, and Li-Ion batteries are still much less expensive now than they were a decade ago. Progress rarely occurs in a straight line, and I don’t expect it to, but I do expect progress because I’ve lived long enough to see a whole lot of it. I remember when a PC cost more than a car, and a PC remotely comparable to my phone cost more than a thousand cars.
My first PC had 128 kilobytes of RAM, not the paltry 64kb in an IBM PC, and it had two, count ’em two, 320-kilobyte floppy disk drives. It had no hard drive and no non-volatile RAM. It weighed hundreds of pounds. It had a text-only, 80-character by 24 lines, monochrome, CRT monitor. The monitor alone weighed vastly more than my phone. I was hot shit ’cause it was top of the line.
Hi Martin,
The (supposed) analogy between electronic devices and electrically powered cars isn’t valid – for several reasons – among them that electronic devices do not need to move under their own power. A car on the other hand…
You keep asserting that battery costs have come down; they have not. Certainly, part of the reason for the increase in cost has to do with forced demand (via mandates that result in the building of EVs, irrespective of cost, in the hope they can be sold; viz Ford’s unfolding fiasco). But it is very expensive to leach/refine lithium. Also other necessary materials.
And – again – for what? Why?
We already have better alternatives, as I’ve been pointing out. Gas is very energy dense; it is easily portable and storable. Fifteen gallons will take a typical car 400 miles. For thousands – tens of thousands – less.
Yet we are being pushed to replace what works really well with something that works much less well that costs a lot more. Why?
To stave off a fictitious “crisis.”
There are countless differences between an EV and other electronic devices. So what? I remember when I couldn’t take a laptop on plane for fear of the battery exploding. If Li-Ion batteries are so spontaneously combustible, why do you have one in your lap right now and likely another one in your pocket?
I linked the source for the battery cost decline claim. Your argument is with them. Here’s another one.
https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1272-january-9-2023-electric-vehicle-battery-pack-costs-2022-are-nearly
Now, link your source.
Electric cars were initially more popular than internal combustion engine cars in the early 20th century, for all the same reasons they’re growing in popularity now. Climate hysteria and EV subsidies had nothing to do with it. Batteries were always the limiting factor. Improving battery tech was always going to push EVs back into popularity again. Tesla bet big on it and won while other automakers only produced compliance cars and so never reached profitable economies of scale. The proximity of this change to climate hysteria is largely a coincidence.
No one is pushing me. The “climate crisis” has nothing to do with my car-buying decisions. I was also interested in an Elio before that company failed, and it was an ICEV.
I expect an Aptera to cost me considerably less than any new ICEV over the life of the car if it’s ever produced at the advertised price. I also expect a Bolt to cost less, and I can discuss the figures in detail. Maybe I’ll be wrong about that. Maybe the thing will fail catastrophically on my first drive. I’ll find out. Every new technology has early adopters, and they often buy lemons, but that’s the price of progress.
Martin,
I wrote an article a few weeks back about EVs 100 years ago. Initially, they were easier to use and more versatile; that changed – and EVs went the way of the Betamax. They are only back now because of government. Inarguable.
Everything is arguable.
Hi Martin,
“Everything is arguable.”
No, it isn’t. Example: The sun is hot.
Hot compared to what?
GM introduced the EV1 in 1996. Tesla built its first prototypes in 2006. Obama introduced the EV tax credit in 2009.
Martin,
The EV tax rebate is only one piece of this grift. Another is the use of regulations to advantage EVs and – effectively – force the car companies to make them. I have already explained how this works so I will not do so again.
The point, which we circle back to again, is that it is not the EV that is the issue. It is the forcing of these things on to the market while at the same time forcing off the market alternatives to them.
I missed a bid on Barnfinds.com for a ’79 Plymouth Volare, clean, with the two-barrel “Super Six”, with only 77K on the clock (at least claimed). Went for $4,800. More in terms of raw dollars than when it was new, but a pittance in terms of actual purchasing power with the Fed’s “Monopoly Money”.
Trouble is, manufacturers are going to wind down production of ICEVs very soon if they believe they won’t be allowed to sell them in California’s huge market a few years from now. Then if the EV craze doesn’t pan out (say, because there is not enough generating capacity to keep the power on), they will not be able to retool overnight to put ICE cars in the showrooms again. And as always happens when the market is artificially manipulated, there will be a massive amount of resources wasted, making the population in general much poorer.
I argue the opposite point here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixlzvOIXNxo
Rapid EV adoption is a bad idea. Forcing rapid adoption will be very costly for car buyers and overwhelm the electric grid. Even if EVs displace most ICEVs over the next couple of decades, a small automaker like Mazda can benefit by staying away from the EV market until it matures further.
Rapid adoption can’t happen so it won’t happen. Efforts to push EVs too hard will be counterproductive. ICEVs will be sold for decades to come. We won’t have one or the other. We’ll have both, just as we have both economy cars and luxury sedans, sports cars and fuel-efficient cars, SUVs and compact hatchbacks. I own one SUV and one compact hatchback now. Central planners are always trying to impose uniformity, but they often fail.
None of that means that EVs are all bad or that they’re only a product of central planning or that they can’t compete with ICEVs in particular applications. The world is not black and white.
My argument is in the comments section. The Electric Viking is the most zealous EV and “green energy” proponent imaginable, and I follow him to get that perspective. To his followers, I’m the opposite of what people here perceive because people with extreme views reflexively impose extreme views on other people.
Hi Martin,
The “extreme” thing at issue is not the EV. It is the forcing of the EV on people. Take that away and I would have no problem with EVs in that it is none of my business whether you or anyone else chooses to buy one.
Eric: It’s funny how you and other commenters here have to keep stressing the point over and over that it’s the involuntariness of things that is opposed, not necessarily the thing itself. Many new to your site just can’t seem to understand this concept. Perhaps its just to nuanced?
Hi Mister,
Yeah – I wonder about that, too. I think it may be a mindset thing in that many people have been reflexively conditioned to just assume that force is ok and why even bother talking about that? It thus becomes an argument about whose opinions are the more persuasive.
Why not? They were indoctrinated as “yutes” that those racist Confederates, how DARE they leave the United States! I guess that to them the Constitution was an instrument of SURRENDER.
You don’t need to keep stressing it, not to me anyway, because I make the same point myself in my first post here, and I have repeated it many times since.
And my defense of EVs here never had anything to do with mandates, subsidies or climate change, yet I get enormous pushback regardless. The pushback has nothing to do with mandates. EVs are supposed to be bad in every conceivable way. They’re too expensive, too slow to charge, have too little range, will burn your house down, and on and on. None of that has anything to do with mandates or subsidies.
The mandates are part and parcel of EVs though. That like saying I’m not in favor of the involuntariness of rape, but come on guys, can’t we just agree that the sex part of it might be enjoyable?
I’ve said repeatedly here, from the outset, that I oppose EV mandates and subsidies, and I say it often to the Electric Viking.
But even with the subsidies, EV owners do choose to buy them. Everyone who buys an EV is choosing an EV over an ICEV, and early buyers paying $100k for a Roadster were hardly influenced by a $7.5k tax credit. The first buyers didn’t even get the credit because it didn’t exist yet.
The subsidies and mandates distort the automobile market to favor EVs and to the disadvantage of ICE vehicles.
Martin,
Observe that there are no – zero – full-sized sedans with V8s available anymore, other than very high-dollar (six figure) luxury cars. Observe there are very few cars left at all (the market is now overwhelmingly crossover). Not one small, low-cost pickup. This reduction of choice did not come about naturally. It came about because of busybodies – government – interfering with the market, forcing their control-freak “plans” on people.
I’ve never owned a V8 or a full-sized sedan, so I haven’t noticed. My first SUV was a V4, in 2003, and so is my Honda CRV. Why would I want a V8 sedan? Maybe V8 sedans went the way of the dinosaurs because they made no sense.
But sure, emission and mileage regulations have affected the car market, and regulations affect the drug market and the food market and practically every other market outside of black markets. I’m not defending any of it. Markets alone very often demand greater efficiency. For most people, efficiency is a plus. Most people don’t want a muscle car, but if you want one, I don’t have a problem with it.
Sure you don’t have a problem with it. But the government does and that’s the point. Government regulations often move the market in a direction but forcing people to electric cars is a complete warping of the market.
Prohibition was a government regulation that was similar. It was a disaster for the country. It was based on the “morals” of a group of people and completely ignored the desires of others. The EV regulations are the same.
And note that there were plenty of supporters of Prohibition that like yourself see it as a move in the proper direction. You should change your screen name to Carrie Nation.
Hi Martin,
What’s a V4?
If V8 sedans went away, how come they are still available – for the rich, who are the only ones who can still afford them? How come so many Americans drive the equivalent – the V8-powered crew cab truck or SUV? It was CAFE that killed off large, V8-powered sedans and wagons. SUVs and trucks took their place – because for awhile, they were held to a lesser standard than “passenger cars.”
How is efficiency a plus when it entails mass waste of resources and energy (as regards EVs?)
Must have been a v4 swap from a Saab Sonnet.
Or maybe a Honda Magna?
This whole electric pickup truck fiasco, and high mpg requirements which could eliminate the gasoline engine truck is being driven by one thing: that CO2 emissions are an existential threat. They are not, in fact CO2 does nothing in changing earth’s thermodynamics, but increased CO2 is making plants grow faster and is greening the planet. All those facts are easily demonstratable, the last two are not being challenged by anyone.
So what exactly is CO2 doing? Not a damn thing at current levels of 420ppm. The reason why that is, is shown in this chart, the CO2 effect of absorbing sunlight is most in the first 20ppm, and then exponentially declines to nil:
https://www.therightinsight.org/media/uploads/images/climate242-1%20Heating%20Effect%20of%20CO2.jpg
No scientist in China, or Russia is worried about Global Warming, that is why neither of those nations has any policies to stop carbon emissions. It is only the western nations, under the umbrella of Rothschild central banks, who are caught in this draconian climate spell.
A profound amount of information is in the above CO2 chart. First of all, at current levels, CO2 could double, triple and Ice Age progression would continue normally. Here is a chart of ice age temperature cycles for the last 400,000 years:
https://andymaypetrophysicist.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/080417_0233_paleoclimat1.jpg?w=1110
As you can see, we are in the ice age right now, just in an interglacial, which last 10-20k years then back to cold and ice sheets. So the real threat is global cooling, not warming, and global cooling would be a threat to world agriculture.
Here is a chart of the last 10,000 years of earth’s temp:
https://steemitimages.com/p/2gsjgna1uruvUuS7ndh9YqVwYGPLVszbFLwwpAYXZ67eeoASUStYuJ2mXy8uzZZz2B8axUcYTfaxFEEnqncdgVMEAbx9qqeaydMx5sp3FZhhJXNtii?format=match&mode=fit&width=1280
The current warming blip is far below the peak of the interglacial warmest temps. In fact we are a good 8,000 past the Holocene optimum, and in an ACCELERATING cooling phase.
So keep you ICE truck because ice is coming back.
“in fact CO2 does nothing in changing earth’s thermodynamics”
That false statement contradicts over 99.9% of scientists living on our planet. They include almost every “skeptic” scientist on our side, trying to refute false claims of a coming climate catastrophe.
The CO2 does nothing cult has a lot in common with the CO2 does everything cult — both are spouting climate science disinformation.
Catastrophic Climate Change and “it’s all a hoax” is a ridiculous false choice. In the studies I’ve seen, scientists agree that rising CO2 has some effect on climate, but I’ve yet to see a study in which 99% of scientists agree that the change will be catastrophic even if the temperature increase exceeds two degrees in this century. Where is this study?
Hi Martin,
My take on this “climate change” thing is that it is not fundamentally different than the “pandemic” thing in that both contain a small kernel of truth grossly exaggerated and hystericized. As regards the “pandemic,” a sickness that for most healthy people was a minor annoyance (the usual flu-season feeling like crap for a week or so if you caught the bug) was inflated into a Black Death that threatened to kill us all – or at least, lots of us (as opposed to being the hair that broke the camel’s back of old age and chronic sickness). As regards the “climate changing,” well of course it does; but is it “changing” in a “catastrophic” way? Is it because a 0.04 percent trace gas is increasing by a fraction of that fraction of a percent? Absurd. There is no evidence at all of “catastrophic” climate change; there are merely projections based on assumptions. All of these projections have so far – over the course of 50 years – proved false. It’s insane to continue to take at face value assertions of an alarmist nature. Facts must be adduced rather than beliefs mindlessly deferred to.
A trace gas can have a significant greenhouse effect, and scientists generally agree that CO2 has one, and CO2 concentration has nearly doubled since the pre-industrial era, and fossil fuels seem to be the reason, but I agree that the effect is vastly overhyped. Climate change worries even less than my laptop battery burning me to death in my sleep.
Martin,
It is one thing to say C02 concentrations have gone up; it is another to say this has caused or will cause a “catastrophic” effect. It is of a piece with the hysteria fomented over “COVID.”
Scientists “generally agreed” that wearing a Face Diaper “worked” – and that “vaccines” were “safe and effective.” These people are compromised and nothing they say ought to be taken at face value.
I’m not saying it. Many scientists aren’t saying that masks worked. Let’s not confuse Pfizer propaganda with science or throw science out with the bathwater. “Scientific” regulatory agencies are certainly captured, but science is still the best tool we have to understand the world including the artifacts we create.
Hi Martin,
“Many scientists are saying that masks worked.” And they were (and are) full of shit.
Mind: I say this as a guy who grew up in a family of medical doctors. My dad and grandfather. Neither ever wore a “mask” – outside of a surgical suite. Nor did doctors generally – until just three years ago. Are we really to believe that the entire medical apparat was unaware that “masks” served to prevent the transmission of respiratory viruses but threw caution to the wind and put their patients “at risk” anyhow?
I didn’t write, “Many scientists are saying that masks worked.”
I never wore a mask either though I did wear a (laughably thin) neck gaiter with skulls on it around my neck in case I needed to pull it over my nose in a store. I looked more like a bandit than a covid hysteric, but no one ever challenged me.
I bought some turtle neck shirts for the same reason. Easy masking if you had to. (like visiting an older relative in a rest home).
Martin Brock: I see you are not a man of conviction. You succumbed to the pressure of the tyranny and got on your knees by “pulling the gaiter over your nose.” You knew it was nonsense, but you went along with it anyway.
I say this not to anger you, but to encourage you to stand up for yourself in the future.
Mister Liberty: You know nothing about my convictions or my risk aversion. If I’m such a wimp, how am I hanging from the wing of a biplane flying upside in the photo beside this post?
I also wear an asshole mask everywhere I go even though I doubt that exposing my asshole poses any risk to anyone. Where are your asshole mask convictions, tough guy.
Waiting to be moderated …
Hi Martin,
“Asshole mask” is pretty funny!
Martin Brock: I see you got angry anyway, even though I told you my intent was not to cause that emotion.
Humans tend not to communicate with each other via assholes (unlike dogs), but facial expressions and breathing are very important aspect of human behavior. A mask interferes with both. Wearing a gaiter under the circumstances was also a manifestation to those around you that you were in great fear of the air around you and that you were a true believer of the narrative. Instead of expressing to the world what you actually believed, you succumbed to displaying the message that the tyrants wanted you to display. In other words, you did what you were told. That was my only point.
I’m not sure how covering one’s asshole is relevant in any way here.
I’m no angrier than you are. If you want a friendly conversation, don’t start it with a sweeping and insulting generalization like “you have no convictions”.
Covering one’s asshole is a social convention I observe because everyone else is doing it, not because I think it’s necessary otherwise. I also see signs like “no shirt, no shoes, no entry”, so I wear shirts and shoes in those places. Don’t you?
For a while, for dubious but widely accept reasons, many businesses required masks during the covid19 pandemic, so to avoid the hassle of being told to wear one or leave, I wore a black neck gaiter emblazoned with amusing skulls that I found in the hunting department at Walmart.
And to you, that makes me a man without convictions. Get over yourself. You aren’t half as holy as you imagine.
Martin,
The point – as regards “masks” – is that they were a tool. Used to foment and perpetuate mass hysteria. To equate “masks” with being expected to wear a shirt to enter a store is silly – and naive.
And – yes – it took some guts to be the only one (or one of the only ones) who would not play along with Sickness Kabuki. I did. And I am proud I did.
I don’t think you read my post, but your response proves my point.
Instead of expressing to the world what you actually believed, you succumbed to displaying the message that the tyrants wanted you to display. This’s clear evidence of your lack of conviction. I get it though. Facing reality can be a tough pill to swallow.
Actually, if my laptop battery spontaneously combusts, I hope it burns me to death ’cause I’d rather not survive the fire.
Hopefully it clears your browser history when it burns up!
Only my wife would care, and she wouldn’t care much ’cause my will isn’t in my browser history.
Of course, I could also leave my oven on and burn myself to death that way. Cooking is the leading cause of house fires, but I’m not losing sleep over it.
Indeed, Martin –
But if you leave your oven off, it won’t spontaneously combust.
But my laptop might, and I sleep with that.
Richard the whole Co2 thing was invented by a science fiction writer. It is total bullshit. Believe what you want to believe. But if you think a .04 percent of gas in the atmosphere is going to affect the “climate” in an appreciable way when there is that big hot thing in the sky then you are not very good at thinking.
No. It wasn’t.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Arrhenius#Greenhouse_effect
Rely on a real source. Wiki is not a source. It is propaganda Ask the founder. Probably run by your bosses. I do give you that Arrhenius did talk about CO2 being a possible mechanism. However that was as far as he got.
Not a source? What does that even mean?
You know why people say that you’re a conspiracy theory nut? ‘Cause it’s true.
But at least you concede the point. The whole CO2 thing was not invented by a science fiction writer.
Martin,
The “whole C02 thing” wasn’t invented. But it has been exaggerated – and hystericized. There is no “crisis” – as regards the “climate.” Buyt there is a psychological crisis, as there was during the “pandemic.”
Well, I’m responding to a comment that saying it was invented by a science fiction writer.
I agree that there is no climate crisis, and I’ve argued this point for decades. I was a covid crisis denier. I suppose there was a pandemic, but it never looked like a crisis to me. Most of the people it killed were close to the grave anyway, and life expectancy during the pandemic never fell below the level in 2000. I suppose we live too long now, and my 94-year-old father agrees.
Martin Brock engages in an ad hominem attack using a CIA term created to disparage those who do not accept the regime’s official narrative: “conspiracy theory nut.”
Nice work Martin.
I’m glad we agree on those points, Martin!
A pandemic was once defined by deaths – not “cases.” Many people caught cold; other than (mostly) the very elderly and the very frail and the already-chronically sick, that’s all that happened to most people. The hyping of that into a sort of ersatz Black Death was so over-the-top and so obviously concerted/organized at the highest levels of government and corporations (they are now essentially adjuncts of one another) that it was obvious to any person looking into it even a little bit that it was done with malice and for reasons having nothing to do with “health.”
The “climate crisis” is of a piece.
PS: I’ll have a piece about the Aptera published shortly…
Well, I’ve come around, time to acquire an EV – if it’s free. Wasn’t going to take one even free – might burn down the house – but I have an outside receptacle and I’ll use it for the 30 hour 120V recharge.
The price increase will be waved off as another failure of free markets over a centrally planned economy. Greedy capitalists profiting from the global warming crisis and whatnot. Why, if they cared, really cared, they’d take one for team Gaia. In fact if some grandstanding politician (hello Pocahontas!) wanted to I’ll bet they could hold hearings about price gouging during the disaster that is climate change.
But of course not the workers building them, or the kids mining the colbalt and certainly not the Chinese companies making the LiPO cells. They’re already underpaid and under appreciated by the greedy capitalist swine.
OT: The knee feels pretty good this morning, even without aspirin. I guess I didn’t tear anything. Still going to wear the Ace bandage but going to try a walk this afternoon (I need to catch up on my podcasts and I saw that Eric is on Tom Woods). Odd thing is that I was supposed to hear back from a “virtual primary care physician” to set up an MRI but never got anything. I did get 4 reminders to be sure to fill out the NPS survey telling us how we did -but we’ll just blame the helpful nurse for anything less than an 8- because we really value your opinion.
“Hence, this is a classic confirmation of my observation that no matter how much the government controls the economic system, any problem will be blamed on whatever small zone of freedom remains.” Sheldon Richman
Wow! The contrast between the EV Blazer and ICE Blazer is so stark that it’s hard to believe GM would want to have a single model that can be directly compared. I wonder if there’s a bit of internal subterfuge/sabotage going on within the ranks of GM in order to expose the EV scam doe what it is. I would bet the GM rank and file have no interest in EV production.
It’s possible. GM executives feel shareholder pressure to sell EVs at a price with a remote possibility of profit. That’s a big problem for legacy automakers selling a few thousand or tens of thousands of EVs competing with Tesla while Tesla sells two million cars a year. Any new model, including a new ICEV, is unprofitable until it recovers its development costs, and many models (including ICEVs) never do.
GM could do what Mazda has done and back out of the BEV market altogether, but I don’t think it will. It’s also aware of Tesla’s growing sales. Ironically, it has one of the best-selling EVs on the market, the Bolt, and it canceled the model before promising to reintroduce it. Legacy carmakers often try simply to electrify their popular ICEV models, so they make big, electric pickups and SUVs, but pickups and SUVs make little sense as EVs at this point. GM should have pushed ahead with the Bolt and similar, compact EVs.
If the market for EVs is relatively small and the legacy automakers continue to lose money making them (Ford recently admitted to 4.5 billion in losses), why do they continue to make EVs?
They’re building compliance cars because of regulations and because they didn’t anticipate Tesla’s success. Legacy automakers are starting to get serious about EVs now because Tesla has been very successful in fact, but now they’re competing with a company with millions of EV sales and profitable models in a market that’s still small enough that many people are only interested in the leading models.
Even if environmentalists want to force automakers to build EVs, no one is forced to buy them. It was never a forgone conclusion that Tesla would reach nearly two million sales this year including over 600k in the U.S. That’s equivalent to the sales of SUVs in 1990.
Martin,
Tesla’s “sales” greatly depend upon the government helping paying people pay for them. It would be fascinating to see how well they sold without such “help.” How many more Camrys would Toyota sell if the people who bought them got paid $7,500 to buy one?
Also, Tesla built its business via extortion – the “carbon credits” grift, which was used to bleed what is styled the “legacy” automakers white while making Tesla’s cheeks rosy red. Also, much of Tesla’s stock valuation is premised on the belief (correct) that the “market” for EVs will increase. Which it will – because of government force.
In any event, there are only so many people with the means to spend the $50k it takes to buy one of these things. It’s a self-limiting “market.”
Marin Brock: You have correctly identified that the legacy auto makers are being compelled by the government’s guns and badges (you term it “compliance”). Because they are forced to build these, that distorts the market and provides less choice and higher prices for buyers.
They don’t “want to force automakers to build EVs,” they ARE forcing them to build EVs. Does this fact not bother you?
Martin,
The point is GM cannot “back out” of the EV market. Not as a practical matter – due to compliance considerations. The bulk of GM’s profits are derived from the sale of trucks and SUVs, all of which are a problem for GM – in terms of CAFE compliance. With compensatory “credit” for EeeeeeeeeeeeeeVeeeeeeees, GM would have to absorb CAFE fines that would then be reflected in the sticker prices of its trucks and EVs, to the extent that they would be so expensive that fewer and fewer could afford them.
Mazda did. It still sells plugin hybrids, but it no longer sells a BEV. I don’t know all the regulations. Maybe that’s enough.
Martin,
Mazda is a relatively small player in the U.S. and it primarily sells small and medium-sized crossovers (and the Miata). It does not have the same compliance cost problems that GM – which bases its profits on trucks and SUVs – has.
Martin Brock: You speak with such certitude in your post, yet you concede you “don’t know all the regulations.” Why such certainly then?
The vehicle in the pic is a Blazer? Gee, I remember when those where more like medium sized trucks. They were a favored vehicle when I was growing up for people to “jack up” and put big tires on for off-roading. Hard to imagine anyone would want to off-road (or would be able to) in this new iteration. Of course, off-roading in an EV is asking for trouble. For the same reason that electric golf carts are made for running on smooth surfaces, while ATVs are gas powered for running over all sorts of uneven terrain. But at least if you damage a golf cart battery, it won’t explode…
That said, it is plainly obvious why most people would choose a gas powered version of the same vehicle over an EV. And price is just one of many factors…
Also guess automakers have forgotten about the infamous “New Coke”. But at least Coca-Cola didn’t have to do much to stop making that and go back to making regular Coke!
This is classic bait and switch; go to the stealership for a car advertised at a specific price only to be told “sorry sir, that vehicle is not available but let me show you this one over here.” Another cost of these EV’s not mentioned id the sales tax and the personal property tax that gets added on, about $5k or so. The “property tax” is the grift that keeps on stealing for as long as you own the car; I imagine the insurance mafia also charges a huge premium for such an expensive vehicle.
I plan to keep my 22 year old Corolla running for as long as I’m able to drive it.
So ok our local Whole Foods has had a bank of EVgo chargers for the last 3 years or so. About 6 total. If EVs are so popular now how come there is and always has only ever been 1 maybe 2 vehicles using these chargers any time I visit this store? Which is often because its right near my office. Weren’t they going to need fast chargers everywhere? I see more Teslas and ecars on the road. Are all the ev owners using home installed level 2 chargers? Ditto with other charging banks. You would think by now they would all be in use.
Parachute has a new Love’s truck stop, just opened up a few weeks ago. While it was under construction I noticed what I thought were EV charging pedestals. There’s already an empty Tesla charging station across the street and another empty one at the rest area across the highway, but that’s capitalism I guess. However it turns out they are 30A hookups for travel trailers and RVs. And they’re full nearly all weekend long. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anyone at the Tesla station and only the occasional Leaf (might be a local) at the rest stop. I wonder which will pay back sooner, the Tesla station or the RV hookups?
None of this makes sense in the WEF world. They have already said you will own nothing and be happy. They have recently admitted they will outlaw the automobile by 2035 for the non person….. that be us.
We have caved on pretty much everything they have thus far banned. Most believed their covid plandemic bs. Most now believe the CC bs they’re selling.
So exactly what is the issue we’re debating since we seem to go along with everything they do, say or ban?
The masses still believe that they will cruise to work at Ludicrous speed in their $40k Cybertruck.
To do 30 hours work for 40 hours pay.
30? That’s being generous. I did about 2 hours of actual work per day, and maybe an hour of productive communication. The rest of the time was spent waiting for other people to do their jobs so I could do mine. And screwing around…
EVs are politicians if they were cars.
No matter how much hype how, many promises, how much you’re told they’ll be great, the up front price never matches the end result, the end result never matches the promised performance. Ohhh what we really meant by $44,000.00 was $66,633.33! Well, I mean 240 miles downhill with a tailwind is VERY doable!
No joke I notice the difference between winter mpg 19 and summer mpg 21 enough that it bugs me a little I can’t imagine going from 240 mpes to oh 150 mpes? Just because it’s cold or hot. I do believe it would be that bad just given the lackluster performance of cordless tool once it’s been 20⁰ F and/or their total inability to take or hold a charge unless it’s 77⁰F 40% humidity
‘The idled fleets of these things cannot be swept under the rug. Even the lugenpresse has been reporting it.’ — eric
At first glance, I misread the second word — five letters starting with ‘i’ — as ‘the idiot fleets of these things cannot be swept under the rug.’
Not to worry, though: Arizona’s ample aircraft boneyards can accommodate EeeVee Mary’s idiot fleets.
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of those colossal Wrecks, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
— Percy Bysshe Shelley, Bidenmandias
“There is a two-months’-plus backlog of inventory awaiting buyers, who may never come.”
Days sales in inventory under 60 days is considered normal. Two months is 60 days. That’s not yet a problem.
The slowing sales of various EVs are a problem, and some models do have excessive inventories.
Decades ago, Toyota introduced the first Lexus at $40,000 and no one in the industry could believe the low price. Ford bought one and tore it down. After estimating the part costs, it was estimated that Lexus could not possibly make a profit at $40,000. It ought to sell for $50,000. That “low” price of $40,000 (compared with a Mercedes) changed a lot of minds of American people who were very suspicious of a luxury car made in Japan at that time.
If you want to get people to buy EVs, the price has to be lower than ICEs. There is no way the cost of the batteries and the electric motor could exceed the cost of an ICE engine and transaxle by enough to justify the high EV prices today.
Richard,
Engines (and drivelines) are much less expensive than EV drivelines. One can buy a brand-new (not remanufactured) GM crate V8 engine for less than $5,000, ready to install. A new transmission costs maybe $4k or so at the upper end for most vehicles. Combined, these cost thousands less than just the EV battery costs. Keep in mind the massiveness of these batteries – and the quantity of expensive raw materials needed for them.
There is no question that EV sales are slowing. Excepting Teslas – and even Tesla is just a drop in the proverbial bucket in terms of the 15 million new vehicles (appx.) sold annually in this country. And Tesla has had to resort to discounting prices to resuscitate sales.
The bottom line is that there is no way $50,000 vehicles (the average price paid for an EV) can ever become mass market vehicles. At least, not without the income of the average family increasing by about 30-40 percent to make it economically viable.
Discounting prices below cost.
I know you are wrong, and I will prove it some day when data become available. In 2022, i was unable to get the variable cost for Ford for a battery pack for the 2026 EV my electrical engineering friend was working on. It seemed like some top secret variable cost. So a possible explanation of why the price of EVs was going to be so much higher than similar ICEs could not be determined with accuracy
The cost penalty for EVs has nothing to do with the retail prices of engines and batteries. But is related to the variable (piece) cost the manufacturer pays for the parts.
We do not have a definitive answer now, but we are confident the variable cost of batteries, electric motor and extra structure to hold the weight and different brakes can not exceed the variable cost of an engine and transmission by more than $5000.
Therefore, we can’t explain the prices of EVs exceeding the prices of similar ICE vehicles by more than $5,000.
Just because a Ford dealer might charge you $20,000 to replace EV batteries does NOT mean Ford pays anywhere close to $20,000 to buy the batteries for their EV assembly plants.
Really, Richard?
Then you must account for the fact that it’s not just Ford. EV cost is a universal problem. Even on the “low end.” Models like the Nissan Leaf and the Chevy Bolt priced in the entry-luxury range. What possible other reason could account for this, other than the cost of the batteries? The rest of the car is mostly plastic and stamped steel, neither more expensive in an EV than a regular car. The electric motors ought not to be particularly expensive, either – and then there’s the cost savings of the not-having-to-install a transmission.
Yes really
The batteries and motor could cost $10,000, while an ICE powertrain costs $5000. That’s a $5000 difference in favor of ICE.
It does not explain why a Tesla Model 3 sells for $40,000 and a bigger Toyota Camry ICE sells for $26,000.
The selling prices do help explain why Tesla has a 15% net profit margin while Toyota has a 7.7% net profit margin.
Could they be adding the cost of research and startup expenses to the vehicle price? It has to be an enormous amount. New facilities, new engineers, new factories. That all has to be paid somehow.
There are no new assembly plants for Ford
There are fewer engineers at Ford
The outsourced research and engineering for batteries and electric motors is already in their piece cost.
The fixed costs are lower for EVs when they put your powertrain engineers and assembly people out of work
You do realize that in your comments you just confessed you have no argument against Eric’s article or his comments other than your opinion, don’t you?
A thing you did NOT mention, and I don’t think Eric did either, is the gigantic subsidies EVs get, in tax breaks, charging infrastructure, battery manufacture, and the destruction of their competition through regulation, among others I don’t recall at the moment.
Also confusing your opinion with what you “know”.
Kable, you are a troublemaker and should be sedated.
And here’s another. The added cost of liability for keeping a known fire hazard on the lot. It’s not so much that they catch fire as that they are near impossible to put out, and burn VERY hot and VERY toxic.
Glad to be of service.
In Richard’s world, being observant and articulate = a troublemaker in need of sedation.
Whenever I visit this site and read the comments from Dick Greene, my mind immediately wonders if someone actually lives with this “piece of work”. I mean, can you imagine putting up with that every day?
Your mother would be so proud of your “brilliant” comment that she would have it printed, framed and hung on the wall of her kitchen.
Thanks for proving my point. Was that your intention?
Yes keyboard warrior. In person when you say ‘your mother’ you would be on the ground before you finished your sentence.
Amen, Mark –
One of the things I dislike about the “online” world is that it undermines good manners. The outlawing of dueling did the same. I think it was extremely conducive to civilization when a man who sullied the reputation of or insulted another man could be called out by his target and then had to choose either an apology or facing the other man, like a man, on the field of honor.
I usually am, as I drink some liquor to relieve my Rheumatoid Arthritis pain. Nevertheless, that sedation does not preventing me seeing through your self-righteousness. A day or two ago you proclaimed you have been an atheist for 60 years. There is no higher form of arrogance, that you presume to KNOW there is no God, even though what we know is a pond in the ocean of what we don’t.
Hi John,
In re the arthritis: My “crunchy” girlfriend got me into Turmeric. The spice. It has anti-inflammatory properties and is utterly harmless to take. You may recall my shoulder issue. Well, I took her advice – it seemed silly, but I figured why not try it – and began taking about a spoonful of the stuff every morning mixed with a glass of water. It greatly improved my shoulder issue such that I’m almost back to normal again. I recommend trying this as there’s no downside to trying this. It costs very little and the stuff has no bad side effects.
I take a turmeric capsule every day. I’m going to double or triple my dose. Your ability to swallow a teaspoon of turmeric impresses me more than your claim of bench pressing a bazillion pounds
Thanks, I will.
You bet, John –
I hope it helps. I was hugely skeptical but it helped me self-rehab my shoulder. I am pretty sure I dislocated it somehow because one day, it just “popped” (I literally felt my entire left arm move forward from the socket) and since then, the pain is nearly gone and my range of motion is much, much better.
> A day or two ago you proclaimed you have been an atheist for 60 years.
Q: How do you identify an atheist?
A: You don’t have to…they make sure you know.
(Substitute “vegan,” “Crossfitter,” and probably several other annoyances for “atheist” as needed.)
> i was unable to get the variable cost for Ford for a battery pack for the 2026 EV my electrical engineering friend was working on.
Please do keep your ear to he ground, Richard. If you can prove your assertion (about which I have no clue) you will be the Sy Hersh of EV battery scammery. If the manufacturers are in fact charging $20,000 for something which costs ~$5000, that would be astounding, to put it mildly.
But, if they could reduce the selling price by $10,000 and still make a tidy profit, why would they not do so, particularly in the face of rising inventory? Makes no sense, to me.
Do keep us posted, eh?
“the manufacturers are in fact charging $20,000 for something which costs ~$5000, that would be astounding, to put it mildly.”
The manufacturer’s piece cost for a battery part is barely related to what a dealer charges to remove an old battery pack and install a new one. A $1 part when it arrives at an assembly plant could easily cost you $4 for a dealer to replace it.
Richard,
As I’ve already pointed out, all EVs – all makes and models – are much more expensive than their analogs that aren’t battery-powered. The clear common denominator is the battery. The reason for this is equally obvious: These batteries are enormous, even in small EVs. In an EV truck such as the Lightning, the battery weighs nearly 2,000 lbs or more than a ’70s-era Volkswagen Beetle. This accounts for why the Lightning’s battery costs more than a ’70s Beetle, itself, did.
And so on.
A 1970 VW cost about $2000, but that fact has nothing to do with EV batteries.
I’m ignoring what may be the worst case EV battery cost, in the Lightning, because that is not the subject of this article.
If all I knew about batteries was an auto dealer charges $20,000 to install a new battery case, a good guess would be that the auto manufacturer paid less than $5000 to get that battery case delivered to their assembly plant.
There is no logical explanation of why an EV’s variable cost of parts (and assembly hours) should exceed a similar ICE vehicle by more than $5,000, unless the desired profit margin is higher for the EV.
If there is ever an accurate, detailed explanation of why EVs are priced so high versus ICE, I’m confident it will not mention the price of a 1970 VW.
Your regular
heckler
Richard –
Sometimes, you are titanically obtuse. It is not the replacement cost of EV batteries that we are discussing – although those are also titanically high. We are discussing the fact that EV prices are high. Your absurd assertion is that the one thing about EVs that is known to be specifically expensive – the batteries – doesn’t explain their high cost. You seem to think that EV manufacturers are just pricing them at a higher level, as luxury car brands price luxury cars at a higher level, so as to increase profits per vehicle. But this is palpably absurd – as regards EVs – because ALL of them are priced as if they were luxury cars, or at least entry-luxury. A little electric shitbox such as the Nissan Leaf costs almost as much with its “long range” battery as an entry-level BMW. The cited EV Blazer sells for almost twice as much as the same goddamned vehicle without a battery.
Richard –
Cuing my best Ren & Stimpy voice – you idiot. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpp2J5ZwMmg
You write: “A 1970 VW cost about $2000, but that fact has nothing to do with EV batteries.”
I pointed out that an EV battery as in the Lightning weighs more than a 1970s Beetle. And costs more, too. These facts strike me as having a lot “to do with EV batteries.”
What is it you don’t understand?
EV batteries are obviously the single most expensive (and wasteful of raw materials) components of an EV. They are why EVs are expensive. It isn’t the steel or the plastic – which cost the same for an EV as for any other car. It isn’t the electronics – the cheapest parts of the car. So what else could it be, hmmmmm?
If an EV could draw electricity from the air – like a real Tesla – then it would weigh much less than an equivalent gas-engined car and it would cost much less, too.
$48k is the average new car price for all vehicles.
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a43611570/average-new-car-price-down-still-high/
Martin,
Yes – because of EVs!
In 2021, the average transaction price was about $35. What changed? A mass influx of very expensive EVs.
PS: There are still many new vehicles available for $25k or so, including practical family cars. There are no such EVs available. “Low cost” models like the Bolt and Leaf are subcompacts and thus commuter cars and for people without families.
@Eric – I went to the county tax office yesterday to get a title transfer on a vehicle I bought from a family member out of state. I noticed multiple window clerks had masks, but, fortunately, the one who took care of my paperwork seemed sane.
Hi Roscoe,
Interesting… I have to deal with the geeks soon myself, as my CC permission slip is up for renewal. I may wear my Keeeeeeeeeeeev shirt to do that.
The family member who sold us the car is in the military, and interacting with him to complete the deal in person made me aware of the extent to which the average soldier is being quietly paid off in terms of cash and benefits to look the other way on what the Biden thing is up to overseas as of late.
If you believe the rank and file will eventually wake up, don’t count on it happening soon enough. Too many perks (perqs?) are at stake.
A true believer is not going to buy a *Blazer*. That will be much harder for Mary Barra to fetishize than Farley putting the Mustang name on an electric skate and managing to sell a few to the Ford faithful dreaming of GNX-level resale in 20 years.
If you want a good look at a T-bone …
Who buys IC Blazers now beyond someone who can’t score a deal on an Explorer?
This is not the “great disturbance in the Force” moment you are waiting to happen. That will be the announcement of the delivery of the first Cybertruck with the final street price.
Now *that* is a sex toy.
Hey, a sexy stainless steel body worked for John Z DeLorean … errr, until he went outta business. 🙁
>Now *that* is a sex toy.
Maybe so, but in that case it is not a working pickup.
I do need a working pickup. I do not need a “sex toy.”
This will not stand. There is no way the government will allow the people/market decide how they want to live their lives. The government is through will curly fries/lottery tickets/tax incentives. You people will not comply? Then it will be MANDATED.
Gas stations will be outlawed by 2030 and all gas cars will be refused registration by 2025. Maybe even sooner than those dates.
I agree. That follows their standard mo. Ive always thought if the gas stations close down then you WILL buy an EV. Period. Because no one will want to be without a vehicle. And only people who live in densely populated cities will be able to exist without one. Ubers will not fill that gap.
You WON’T buy and EV if you can’t afford one, regardless how badly you need or want one.
But you can always move into the 15 minute city. And that’s the goal of the Psychopaths In Charge.
Well, I won’t be able to do much about it if there’s no gas, but if they refuse to register my IC truck? That’s when I join the “undocumented” folks and start driving an unregistered uninsured vehicle.
Well, I won’t be able to do much about it if there’s no gas
https://www.amazon.com/still/s?k=still
My option is to keep accumulating and restoring real diesels. A real mechanical diesel can run on nearly anything. It’s not that hard to come up with a fuel for them and it need not have a refinery.
Hi Ernie,
I wish I could afford to snap up the mid-’90s Toyota Hi-Lux that’s for sale in my area. If I’d taken that job at the Wall Street Journal back in the ’90s, I could afford one. But then, it would have cost me my soul!