Tesla was all the rage for a couple of years, especially due to their exceptional (and free) charging infrastructure and weak competition. The government has done a lot to facilitate the expansion of the public charging infrastructure and this makes it more attractive to buy electric cars from other brands. Teslas are so common here know that it has lost much of its novelty. There are so many cars to choose from now.
Sounds like Tesla did what they were attempting to: dragging everyone to EVs faster.
Edit: Would governments be starting to implement new combustion vehicle sales bans without robust charging infra and large quantities of EV deliveries quarter after quarter? Unlikely.
The Norwegian government has been in support of EVs going as far back as the 90s but Tesla demonstrated that EVs could supplant ICE entirely for a large percentage of the population. Prior to Tesla the market options were lacking and couldn't meet the majority of consumer demands.
Now that Tesla has broken through, the incumbent ICE manufacturers are following suit.
As awful as Tesla is, all the other car manufacturing companies are far far worse. Even with massive government incentives, even with their massive war chests, even with their massive production capacity, even with their access to capital markets for big investments, even then, they didn't make the smart move and had to be shown the path by an annoying megalomaniac who gets way too much attention.
So yes, I regret giving money to Tesla, but it is the least bad option out there as far as giving money to these car companies. The only winning move is to not play the game, but unfortunately that same government that is paying for the EV transition is the system that, by law, is denying my ability to live a car-free daily life.
There are no heroes here, nobody is doing exactly the right thing, but Tesla and the government are doing things partially right.
I think you've hit on something that a lot of the detractors of Tesla have seemed to have forgotten. The alternatives are Ford, Chevy, Honda and Toyota. While I fully understand that Tesla is no titan of the little man and Musk is a very flawed man, compared to the titans of industry and the sins of the past that these companies are responsible for, it's a little odd that so much vitriol gets thrown toward Tesla and not these companies who are, ever so slowly, switching from diesel and gas powered automobiles.
I haven't even mentioned how Tesla is the only company that doesn't sponsor at least one (I think they all sponsor multiple) traditionally powered racing teams, whose development goes into premium powered, traditional gas powered automobiles. Plus the advertisement of said vehicles.
> I haven't even mentioned how Tesla is the only company that doesn't sponsor at least one (I think they all sponsor multiple) traditionally powered racing teams, whose development goes into premium powered, traditional gas powered automobiles.
Not exclusively. Formula 1 and Le Mans use hybrid engines. Formula E and Extreme E are battery electric racing series.
Because motorsport is a giant unprofitable waste of money. The only value they get out of it is advertising their brand, and Tesla doesn't advertise.
Why would Tesla spend the minimum tens of millions of dollars to get into what is at best a side diversion from their main business? They certainly have better uses for that capital and talent.
Of course they do. They advertised at you and it worked. It's worked so well that you're even parroting their marketing messages for them, including the myth that they don't advertise.
> Why would Tesla spend the minimum tens of millions of dollars to get into what is at best a side diversion from their main business?
Formula E doesn't cost tens of millions of dollars. Team budgets in Formula E are $10 million. And Tesla doesn't need to own a team. They can be a powertrain supplier just like other car companies are suppliers and not team owners.
All four also have off road racing teams (those were the only ones I was familiar with, sadly). I don't follow Formula 1 or Le Mans, I'm afraid.
As for Formula E, that's a great question. It seems like it should be right up their alley, but I'm almost positive AI is verboten and that would be a non starter for Tesla.
Because they are known for having fast EVs. Having a team and losing would be a hit on their reputation, but having a team and winning wouldn't change much. So they have a lot to lose and little to gain.
The automakers' behavior makes much more sense once you assume they did their homework, and came out with the same conclusion as everyone else: that the future of personal transport is in battery electric vehicles, and that future implies lower service revenue, slower upgrade cycle, fewer possibilities for brand differentiation, obsolescence of their patent portfolio and large layoffs.
Based on that conclusion, they decided the best overall strategy is to delay that future as long as possible, by any means necessary.
That strategy was only the best if you assumed someone like a Tesla wouldn't come along. However, a Tesla did come along, and as a result, Tesla now controls an ungodly fraction of the total worldwide automaker value.
Basically, it was a bad strategy, as it was practically inevitable that at some point someone would "defect" and do BEVs. Not only did the automakers use a bad strategy, but they failed to pivot from that strategy once it was already blown to hell. Any one of them could be worth a lot more money now if they had simply taken EVs as seriously as Tesla did a decade ago. But none did.
Same problem with Kodak. The new technology is inevitable, and while you may delay it, you're killing your future by doing so. It's short term thinking.
To put it charitably, it is not a widely held viewpoint that pressurized hydrogen tanks and fuel cells are a superior automotive technology to batteries.
Which is why the disruptive risk is so high here. There’s already enough fuel cell cars out there that we know pressurized hydrogen tanks work safely. That so many people ignore or dismiss this fact is potentially leading many companies in the wrong direction.
There is plenty of material about why hydrogen isn't really better just a google away. Plenty of smart people have evaluated it and realized it's not worth it. Toyota is the only company left that still pretends that it's relevant... while slowly electrifying their fleet.
Most of that stuff is written by people with a financial motivation and are likely biased. You can’t take them too seriously.
Toyota, Hyundai, Honda are all investing and expanding investment. That’s for passenger cars specifically. Once you go into industrial and heavy transportation it’s a vast group of companies.
People who are paying attention knows that there’s a major revolution afoot. The people with tunnel vision are the people who don’t realize this or are ignorant of these events.
I would insist that the future is really fuel cell cars. Battery electric will be a short-term transitional class of vehicle. Most car companies need to plan for the real future pretty soon now.
I can't imagine any future where that seems remoter plausible. Hydrogen requires 2x as much energy according to anything we know right now. Unless the hydrogen capital expenses have a way of getting cheaper than lithium ion capital expense, then there's little chance of this ever happening.
So when you say "pretty soon now," you must mean 2040 at the earliest. There's certainly a chance, when you look at the progress of PV solar over the past 40 years, for example, but it is hugely speculative and a long term bet, not a short term one.
That’s the thing: Hydrogen is getting much cheaper as we speak. Cheap enough to become a real threat to companies not on board. It’s following the curve of PV solar right now and not some decades in the future.
Besides, what do companies have to gain by waiting for the technology to be ready before investing? It’s weird how people here lament the lack of foresight in the car industry, and yet on this subject immediately reject any kind of forward planning.
Finally, most of the negative stuff you heard is probably marketing or propaganda from businesses that don’t want to see fuel cell succeed. “2x more energy” is a misleading claim, as fuel cells are technically batteries and should close the gap eventually. Plus, you save energy by avoiding heavy batteries, do better in cold weather, and need less raw materials during production.
Electrolyzers are expensive and capital intensive enough that we don't anticipate that green hydrogen will compete with natural-gas derived hydrogen on cost before 2030.
By 2030 batteries will haven fallen dramatically in cost. It's not enough to show that electrolyzers are falling in cost, it also needs to be shown that they are falling faster than batteries, and will be able to catch up.
That's the missing logical link, and I haven't seen even the most optimistic hydrogen boosters produce numbers that show it to be possible. Definitely not before 2030.
There is a massive hydrogen PR push right now from natural gas companies with the hope that they can eek a few more years out before transitioning to the modern renewable economy. But even those folks don't say that fuel cell is going to be cheaper than typical passenger vehicle sized batteries.
Every single hydrogen powered vehicle is already going to have a battery in it, to manage variable output. The question is, if hydrogen machinery gets cheaper than battery, at what range capacity does it make sense to include both battery and hydrogen. If it's at 1000 miles, 500 miles, or 300 miles, or 100 miles, and that all depends on the cost ratio of the two, and hydrogen being significantly cheaper than battery.
Except that electrolyzers have plunged in cost in way that's catching many people off guard. And 2030 is just 9 years from now. Even if what you say is true, disruption is still within a decade's time. If you wait until that event has already happened before you start investing, then it will be too late. So basically everyone has to start investing in fuel cells right away or risk being disrupted.
I don't think people fully grasp that hydrogen is made from water, and has a theoretical lowest possible cost of almost $0. A tank of hydrogen is just a dumb tank too, not a series of sophisticated battery cells. It's batteries that will have trouble keeping up on cost, not hydrogen. In fact, on a cost per range basis, the latest Mirai is already cheaper than competing battery electric cars. This suggests that the crossover point is nearly reached.
So we should stop thinking about batteries as if they have any kind of permanent lead here. The real missing logical link is ignoring the speed of hydrogen and fuel cell advancement, not the other way around.
What about the PR from big battery and electric car companies? These companies might too be dead within a decade or so. And yes, the hydrogen boosters very much say that fuel cell cars will be cheaper than battery powered cars. Toyota thinks fuel cell cars will be as cheap as the Corolla is today.
Some fuel cell cars use a capacitor instead. You only need 1-2 kWh for a passenger car for that purpose anyways. Probably anything past 100 miles will make more sense using fuel cells than batteries.
The laws of physics and chemistry demand that producing hydrogen and oxygen from water requires at least as much energy as is released when they are combined in a fuel cell.
The laws of physics demand that compressing hydrogen so that a usable amount can be stored in a vehicle requires energy.
So by saying "almost $0" you're saying that electricity is "even less than almost $0". Which might be correct, industrial scale solar PV energy is cheap and will get a lot cheaper over the next decade.
But of course electric cars benefit from cheap electricity even more than hydrogen cars do.
> In fact, on a cost per range basis, the latest Mirai is already cheaper than competing battery electric cars.
Sure, if you use grey hydrogen created from natural gas rather than green hydrogen created from water and electricity. Grey hydrogen is far from carbon-free.
> It's batteries that will have trouble keeping up on cost
That's a strong claim, given that battery prices have historically dropped 80% per decade and show no signs of slowing down.
> These companies might too be dead within a decade or so.
The lack of hydrogen filling stations is the biggest roadblock for this among many big roadblocks.
The same is true of batteries. You don't get more energy than you put into it. Fuel cells are just another form of batteries, but with a far higher energy density and much lower material costs. At best, you can claim there is one more step in fuel cells than with batteries, but even this is not necessary. Metal hydride hydrogen storage currently exists and can eliminant the compression step.
The notion that batteries are superior than fuel cells at utilizing low cost electricity is fundamentally in error. People have traditionally made the argument batteries are more efficient, but the gap is continuously shrinking and likely will become a non-factor. Meanwhile, you benefit from lower weight, less material cost, faster refueling, cold weather performance, and various other advantages. So it could easily be more cost effective to power a car using hydrogen than with cheap electricity than with batteries in the majority of cases.
> Sure, if you use grey hydrogen created from natural gas rather than green hydrogen created from water and electricity. Grey hydrogen is far from carbon-free.
You're conflating two different things: fuel cells and green hydrogen production. Fuel cell cars are in a lot of ways already competitive with battery electric on their own merits. Hydrogen production is going to be dependent on electrolysis. Even so, as electrolysis costs come down this too will be become cheaper than fossil fuel sources of hydrogen
It's also a lazy argument, as fuel cells have the possibility of being zero emissions the same way batteries have. In fact, this was repeated against battery electric cars historically, since electricity production is heavily based on fossil fuels. So repeating it against fuel cell cars is just playing the role of luddite again.
> That's a strong claim, given that battery prices have historically dropped 80% per decade and show no signs of slowing down.
That's from a very high base and is misleading. Regardless, fuel cell costs are also dropping extremely fast, but unlike batteries don't have the floor of material costs. It's likely that fuel cells will be much cheaper than batteries in the long run. Toyota for instance believes that a fuel cell car can cost the same as a Corolla. Electrolysis costs are also dropping in a similar way and you can expect green hydrogen production to be minimally capital intensive.
> The lack of hydrogen filling stations is the biggest roadblock for this among many big roadblocks.
It's starting to look like the hydrogen refueling infrastructure will be cheaper than the equivalent battery charging infrastructure. Some recent studies are suggesting this.
In nearly all of the US, it is only legal to build a city in ways that require a car for daily life. For example, it is illegal for a small grocery store to exist within a mile of my house. It is also illegal to build housing close to where jobs have been located. The design of cities has been centrally planned to manufacture car dependence, and exclude the possibility of biking or walking. It also eliminates the possibility of shared transit from private companies from being profitable. A century ago, light rail companies built entire little suburbs that allowed people to get to jobs without cars. That's not possible anymore because of legal structures that ban planning that is compatible with that lifestyle.
There is huge unmet demand for this, which is why cities are so much more expensive than far-based lifestyles these days.
Sour grapes. No one was racing to buy Leafs and Bolts, nor EVs with no DC fast charging network. People wanted a great car that happened to be electric, not anemic golf carts.
Leafs and Bolts were sold out (or leased out) almost everywhere they were available before the Model 3 was released.
The problem was that they never made enough of them because their respective manufacturers didn't believe the market was very large, largely because battery technology when they were first released simply wasn't as good as it is now.
These awful manufacturers have also actively sandbagged their designs, making them less desirable and less normal, in an attempt to limit their appeal.
Car manufacturers are masters of marketing. Their choices in how they market these cars are very intentional.
I'm not even sure that it was an attempt to limit their appeal. There's a whole generation of old car executives who still think that anyone who would want an electric car is some sort of hippie-moonbat and you need to make the car look like a plastic sex-toy space capsule to appeal to that moonbat market.
And then Tesla comes along with great engineering and a more conservative body design and eats their lunches.
> Leafs and Bolts were sold out (or leased out) almost everywhere they were available before the Model 3 was released.
That's not true, people were leasing Leafs for tax credits the dumping them as soon as the lease expired. There was a glut of off lease Leafs on the market as early as 2017. I picked up a 2015 Leaf with 15k miles on it for ~$14k off lease in 2017 before the Model 3 went into production.
Nissan started manufacturing Leafs in 2010 and it wasn't until fall 2020 that they managed to build their 500,000th. By comparison, the Model 3 went into production in 2017 and they built the 500,000th in March of 2020.
Tesla managed to build and sell more EVs in under than 3 years than Nissan did in 10. Either Nissan was stifling production or there was no demand for the product.
There was intense demand for the Leaf in California. The waiting list was a year long through 2016, and in LA at least there was still a waiting list well into 2017. However, Nissan only ever made a few thousand Leafs a year and only made them available in select markets.
By comparison, the Model 3 went into production in 2017 and they built the 500,000th in March of 2020.
BMW, VW, Toyota, and Ford have all launched new models in significantly greater numbers over shorter timeframes and with fewer employees than Tesla. The Passat, for example, went from 50,000 cars made/year (at the Chattanooga factory) to 250,000 cars made/year in just over a year, with 1/5 the employees of the Tesla line, minimal rework required...and here's the real kicker: while making an actual profit per car under standard accounting practices (not Tesla's imaginary profit per car that leaves out costs the other automakers include in unit economics).
> There was intense demand for the Leaf in California. The waiting list was a year long through 2016, and in LA at least there was still a waiting list well into 2017.
No there wasn't. Leaf sales dropped 43% from 2014 to 2015 and were even worse in 2016 for a number of reasons. The first was the Bolt was announced in early 2016 and the Model 3 in mid 2016 [1]. The second reason was the 2016 cost $5000 more than the 2015 because of a larger battery that only gave it 27% greater range (107 miles total)[1]. The third reason was that cosmetically it was unchanged from prior years [1]. The final reason was that there was an influx of cheap Leafs on the market[2].
The only waiting list in 2016 was for receiving your EV Rebate from the state[3].
The waiting list for the original Leaf was only 20,000 compared to the Model 3 which exceeded 300,000.
> BMW, VW, Toyota, and Ford have all launched new models in significantly greater numbers over shorter timeframes and with fewer employees than Tesla.
Ok? Incumbent car manufacturers who have been building cars for 50+ years can ramp up manufacturing of a new model ICE faster than a company that's just over a decade old that had to build an entirely new factory from the ground up. That should surprise no one.
So what about EVs? VW only managed to product around 30k of the ID.3 in 2020, it wants to build 300k in 2021. Ford's new Mach-E is limited to 50k units in 2021. Why? Both are due in large part to production constraints with the battery. The battery problem isn't going to go away and everyone, including Tesla is being throttled by it.
Your citation leaves out the part that Nissan cut production of the Leaf in anticipation of the Bolt's arrival. They couldn't have sold more Leafs because they didn't have any more to sell...
If you had bothered to read your sources, you would have seen that the reason the used Leafs were so cheap was due to battery issues with the early generation Leafs, which is why demand was so high for new Leafs.
> Your citation leaves out the part that Nissan cut production of the Leaf in anticipation of the Bolt's arrival.
Maybe because it's not true?
> If you had bothered to read your sources, you would have seen that the reason the used Leafs were so cheap was due to battery issues with the early generation Leafs...
If that were true then the 2014 and 2015 Leaf would have been fine since they used the new lizard chemistry. It was only the 2013 or older Leafs that had issues and only in hot dry climates like Texas and Arizona.
Leafs were cheap primarily because there was a glut of off lease vehicles. They were leased for federal and state tax rebates, in Georgia you got enough back in rebates to pay for the entirety of a 2 year lease, 2 years of insurance, and still have some left over. Lots of people leased them, and then when the lease was up they didn't want to renew the lease or buy them.
When I bought my off lease Leaf, I was talking with the salesman and he said he bought one off lease with less than 1000 miles on it because it had just been parked the whole time.
US sales of Nissan Leaf in 2016 was 14k. In 2019 it was 12k.
If Nissan Leaf was sold out in U.S. it's only because Nissan decided not to make enough of them. Or they made exactly the very small amount that people were willing to buy.
Bolt was even worse. They did 23k in 2017 and dropped to 16k in 2019. GM dealers were so desperate to get rid of them that at some point they offered up to $10k cash rebate. At that despite the fact that GM admitted they are loosing money on Bolt even when sold at full price.
20k a year in U.S. market of ~10 million cars is a rounding error. Whatever the reason, no one except Tesla was selling EV cars in US at non-laughable numbers.
In contrast, Tesla sales went from 50k in 2017 to 195k in 2019.
Like I said... The problem was that they never made enough of them because they didn't believe the market existed.
Note that Tesla is also losing money on the Model 3 (and indeed, all models of Teslas) when using the same accounting practices as other automakers. Tesla only has high margins when using non-standard accounting.
Even if they made a million of the Leaf, there was never demand. Now that everyone is point that out to you, you're trying to pivot to saying that Tesla is losing money on their EVs.
Even if they are, so what? Tesla's stated goal was to shepherd in the mass adoption of EVs as quickly as possible. They only need to remain in business long enough for every major auto manufacturer to start selling EVs in mass quantities. Once that happens they can just vanish and they'll have won.
The BS about "shepharding" mass adoption was just marketing speak. It's what Toyota said with the Prius, GM with the Cruise, and Nissan with the Leaf. They all grew their respective markets; the difference is that Tesla was the only one to go all in on EVs and make it their only market (and Tesla owes Toyota, GM, and Nissan, for demonstrating the market for green cars and making them trendy with the wealthy segments of the auto-buying population).
Moreover, CA and the EU have far more to do with EV adoption that Tesla, by creating the market incentives for consumers to buy EVs and other green vehicles, and the clean car credits that have singlehandedly kept Tesla afloat the past 5 years while they lose money making cars.
You have all sorts of excuses to dismiss Tesla's success in the market. Nissan and GM under produced, Nissan adopted Toyota's Prius ugly car strategy, now that EVs are cool the incumbents will out produce Tesla, Tesla is only successful because of everyone else, Tesla only exists because of government handouts, blah blah blah...
You are trying to come up with every angle you can to excuse away the the fact that Tesla has been successful making a product people actually wanted and not a compliance vehicle purposefully made unattractive to ensure only a limited audience would purchase it.
Range, battery longevity (older versions), lack of fast charge network and charge experience, no OTA software updates, no lane keeping (“autopilot”) on older versions.
One can appreciate Tesla and not like Musk. Even as a Tesla investor, not a huge fan. I see him as a necessary evil. The cars sells, and that’s all that’s important.
As a software dev, "OTA software updates" on a vehicle I own sounds like a security nightmare / active anti-feature.
I don't need my critical transportation bricked by a failed update, or removing functionality so they can charge me extra to re-enable it, or any of the other nonsense routinely seen from device makers.
We're talking about whether or not price is a signal of desirability. You suggested a good point about the Leaf is the ability to buy a used one for $7k. I believe the way pricing works suggests that the Leaf has low desirability, because you can get one for so cheap. What you're implying appears to violate the law of demand, and I'm hoping you can explain what I'm missing.
What you're missing is that the leaf is designed to be cheaper than a tesla. That's not hard to work out. A Bugatti veyron goes for a lot more than a specced out mercedes S-class because they're designed to be sold to different markets.
The leaf's entertainment system, for example, does the job it's intended to do fine, the tesla one is designed to innovate.
They are empirically desirable because they've sold half a million of them.
Who is more likely to be right? You and your cheap used car use case or sophisticated capital markets and the valuation they’ve assigned to Tesla based on future expectations? Tesla can’t build 3s and Ys fast enough to keep up with demand, and they’re $40k-$50k (roughly) vehicles.
Have I touched a nerve? All I was saying is that Tesla's are very good but they're also expensive for a European market which is why the Leaf is a perfectly good EV for driving to the shops.
>>That's your job and its called driving. If you cant handle that simple task then you should not be driving.
Ah, the "just suck it up and man up" argument. Lovely. I hope you drive a manual car with no power steering no power brakes and no abs. Heaven forbid the car helped you with the sacred art of driving, right?
People have always resisted change in the automotive market, whether it be with ABS, power steering, starter motors, electronic stability control, seat belts, air bags, traction control, cruise control, automatic shifting, etc.
You aren't making a unique argument about lane keeping that wasn't made about all these other improved technologies in decades past.
In the near future people might not even be driving their cars at all. What excuse are you gonna have then as for why people actually shouldn't demand that manufacturers provide that feature?
I've driven from NYC to FL and back a few times (Once in a Uhaul truck) in addition to NYC <-> Chicago. Never did I have trouble keeping lanes. If I did, it meant that I was tired or fatigued. As a responsible driver that means I pull off the road at a rest stop and rest.
If you have trouble keeping lanes and are not fatigued then I suggest you put your fucking phone down or see a doctor. This new trend of passing responsibility to technology has got to stop. It's fueld by greed, built on human laziness and fostered by stupidity. People need to grow up and accept responsibility.
The point is that you're not as fatigued with it. I've driven many many times between Amsterdam - Krakow(12 hour drive) and the last few times I've done it in a car that has active lane keeping. On those times I've arrived probably 50% as fatigued as in a car without it, without sacrificing any safety of the journey.
>>As a responsible driver that means I pull off the road at a rest stop and rest.
No one is saying otherwise. This technology doesn't allow you to drive further while tired. It stops you from becoming tired in the first place.
>>People need to grow up and accept responsibility.
And people need to grow up and see that some inventions are not as bad as they think they are ;-)
>>suggest you put your fucking phone down or see a doctor
I've flagged your comment because it isn't how conversations on HN should go like.
Up until 2015 the leaf's max range was 84 miles. Teslas were never nearly that low: 220 (3 v1), 244 (roadster v1). 249 (S v1). The leaf now has 107 with it's biggest battery.
Tesla's big bet on the supercharger network was the game changer. Before that, EVs we're only a 'second car' for commuting. With the SC network, an EV was parity with ICs, not a set of green/cost tradeoffs.
By all accounts the Leaf and Bolt are great cars (to say nothing of the Toyota Prius & friends), they just don't have the cachet as a status symbol that Tesla does.
I think it's similar to how the iPhone is the sexy mobile, but there's actually far more cheapo Android devices and feature-phones out there in use.
To be honest most of the "credit" comes from Wall Street. Yes, Tesla wouldn't have been profitable if you subtracted the credits but it is absolutely not worth as much as the market says with the credits or even with 3x the credits it got.
And the $TSLA price it's not just some random number mostly irrelevant to daily operations of the company, they sold/issued many shares at such valuations.
I've never looked, but I had always assumed that Tesla's valuation comes from lots of rabid-fans from the retail market. Are there many large investors or Wall Street players that are driving the share price?
As far as I know there's not much incentive to buy electric in Sweden, where in Norway they're heavily subsidised.
Also, small internet, Hello from Caroli, Malmo!
[EDIT: Cars otherwise being heavily taxed and EV's being Tax free, both at purchase time and with annual car taxes (with additional perks such as no parking tolls and driving in bus lanes) is the definition of subsidised]
It's not so much that they are heavily subsidized per se. but rather that IC cars are heavily taxed. A Tesla in Norway costs slightly more than in the US, while an 'equivalent' BMW or Audi can cost ~3 times as much as in the US.
> Subsidies come in various forms including: direct (cash grants, interest-free loans) and indirect (tax breaks, insurance, low-interest loans, accelerated depreciation, rent rebates).
Looks like the market share for electric hit 50% in December for Sweden if you count Plug-in Hybrids[1]. So a bit more optimistic! Clean Technica does great reporting for these numbers.
It seems like Volkswagen is making some real inroads in the EV market based on that data. Is this correct? What has fueled it—is there a particular model?
The first two models are the ID.3 hatchback (which has launched in Europe) and the ID.4 SUV (which has been advertised and is available for pre-orders in the US).
Volkswagen has made massive investments in EVs after their diesel emissions cheating scandal. Part of their settlement with the US was that they would spend $2 billion on emissions-free auto infrastructure to offset their diesel emissions. That's where Electrify America (one of the big EV charger networks) came from.
I'm not sure that VW would have jumped into the EV market quite so enthusiastically if the diesel emissions scandal hadn't forced their hand. But now, I guess they figure they're spending billions on all of this EV infrastructure, they might as well try to become one of the leaders in EV sales.
It's not just that, but also some pressure from the EU Commission:
Regulation 2019/631 sets new EU fleet-wide CO2 emission targets are set for the years 2025 and 2030, both for newly registered passenger cars and for newly registered vans.
But: The specific CO2 emission target of a manufacturer will be relaxed if its share of low-emission vehicles registered in a given year exceeds 15% in 2025 and 30-35% in 2030.
At least in Norway, what fuelled it was simply that Volkswagen is a very popular brand in Norway. Many people preferred to buy an e-Golf or e-Up rather than a Leaf or Zoe even though the range was poorer simply because it came from VW, a brand that they had bought before and found reliable. And of course many people could not afford to buy a Tesla until the Model 3 came along and even now it is one of the more expensive electric cars.
VW has created a huge EV platform. You won't see it as much in the US but in Europe they'll probably unleash 40 models covering every category in the next 2-3 years.
I've tried 5+ times to put a deposit on an ID.4 but their site won't take my deposit (I work in fintech and e-commerce, I tried many times, on different machines, using different cards -- their workflow for AWD models seems to have a reversion).
I know they're tempering their US launch ambitions a bit, but I wonder if they're seeing lower numbers because something's not working with their reservation system.
Volkswagen has majorly invested in EVs. One important model Volkswagen has made is the ID.3 . Similar in size to the golf / rabbit. This is an attainable car I'm interested in buying.
I have a Škoda Kamiq which has a very similar dash design and I'd agree that I preferred the older style approach of having buttons for everything (e.g. heated windscreen).
However, my Kamiq has Apple CarPlay and a 'virtual cockpit' - the latter I thought would be a bit gimmicky but I really like it.
Edit: Did have to take the car back to the dealer because of a software problem when it was ~2 weeks old - which was a first for me... :-|
Still a huge markup on their petrol equivalents, roughly £14k more expensive. Yes you get a few extra bells and whistles and a small grant to help but that difference still has a ways to go
Battery prices are falling 10-15% a year. Add economies of sale for other parts of an electric car and competition as new electric cars keep coming out in 2 years the difference will be less than 8k when the op plans to buy. My prediction is in less than 5 years electric car sticker prices will be cheaper than petrol cars with the bans on new ice cars coming in the few years after that new model ice cars might actually stop coming out as car manufacturers would not want to spend money on what they wont be allowed to sell.
According to Consumer Reports, electric cars are now cheaper on a Total Cost of Ownership basis than gas cars.
Your mileage may vary depending on what you select as a comparable and some of your assumptions, but you save a lot of money on fuel and maintenance and need to factor that in. The resale value of your vehicle is also a huge factor.
For those that are at the bottom end of the market and rely on second hand cars this won’t be the case for a long time.
I lease my car and when looking recently it’s not the case for me either, even when factoring in associated costs. It’s an extra 150 quid a month on sticker price for a roughly equivalent car. Take fuel, tax, servicing reductions out and you are still no where near parity
Surely the fuel cost savings would wipe out the price difference within a couple of years?
Not sure what the average price of petrol is where you are though.
Surely the fuel cost savings would wipe out the price difference within a couple of years?
Only if you drive a lot. Based on my driving patterns I calculated it would take me a good 10-12 years to make up the difference. Which is a shame because in every other way an electric car would fit my usage pattern perfectly.
I worked out that based on energy prices and my 12,000 miles per year, I would save about £500-700 per year in fuel in an average EV. Important to remember the 14k difference is based on entry level range and there’s still the issues that charging presents
I definitely would not want to have my phone as a key. I can keep my car key safely attached inside by backpack but I use my phone all the time when walking (taking pictures, OS maps, audiobooks) so its much more likely that I would damage/lose my phone than lose my car key.
I hope you have phones worth of $14k in your pocket in case you break one. I always keep my Tesla's "CC key" with me as a backup for the phone. Also, the phone is horrible key when you have stuff in the hands or using gloves in the winter.
ID.3 is already seen around every street corner here, and the ID.4 has just been released and I already saw 4...
Tesla (in the Netherlands) doesnt have the tax incentives anymore because its too expensive, the ID.3 still has that cause its cheaper... So lease car owners choose ID.3 because money.
I'm surprise that the new ID3 even has the volume to compete with Tesla at this point. Does this data include other VW electric vehicles like the Golf E or another model we're not too familiar with?
Edit... just to clarify, nothing against the ID3, just pretty surprised VW could have scaled up production so fast even if they're the largest or second largest car company in the world.
Interesting site. Here in Germany, most of the electric cars I see are delivery vehicles by Deutsche Post or Renault Zoes (I don't own one, but regularly drive a Zoe (carsharing), I have no complaints). The market share for Germany seems to reflect that. I have never seen a Tesla on the road here.
Tesla is cyclic because they're delivered on boats that have to transit the Panama canal. And because Tesla runs on the stock market quarterly cycle. The cars manufactured in the first month of the quarter are mostly delivered to Europe for delivery in the last month of the quarter. The cars manufactured in the second month get delivered to Eastern North America and the third month cars get delivered to California and close states. That way most cars are delivered in the same quarter they are manufactured in. So over 4000 cars were delivered in Norway in December, but only 200 in october.
The COVID-19 shutdown disrupted that cycle, so December was really the only month this year that Tesla delivered a significant number of cars to Norway.
I mean people buy new models. When a new model or refreshed model comes out they're motivated to consider upgrading. When a model is a couple of years beyond the last refresh people aren't motivated because it's behind models which have been refreshed and they know a new one is coming so they wait.
Yeah, sacrificing QC for scaling is biting them in the ass in a big way.
There are plenty of people who have heard horror stories about Tesla and are now won't consider buying one. All of the small buy annoying defects were acceptable to the first-mover crowd, but they're an extremely small segment of the market. Once you go mass market, people care a great deal about the quality of something they're spending $30k+ on and which may be their only vehicle.
I would not lump Teslas with the rest of "American cars". Quite a few people that wouldn't touch a Ford/Chrysler/GM vehicle seem eager to give Tesla a chance.
What's more likely to happen first: Tesla catches up on a century's knowledge and experience of car manufacturing, or the combined resources of the entire car industry catches up on a decade or so of technological advantage in batteries?
The former. Manufacturing cars is not arcane knowledge, Tesla is hiring former Daimler employees in Germany as we speak.
Also, Tesla's quality problems are wildly exaggerated to distract from their lead in battery and software technology. Look at VW's ineptitude at fixing ID.3 software...
This is almost completely a result of artificial government imposed constraints that make ICE vehicles exceedingly more expensive there. It really has nothing to do with free market choice. A new Tesla Model 3 costs less than a Subaru Outback or Mini Cooper [0]. A VW eGolf also costs less than a base model ICE Golf.
Can we not pretend that electric cars don't pollute the planet?
To be clear, I am a big fan of electric cars. But this seems to have become another one of those things that has become so polarised you're not even allowed to express healthy skepticism.
ICE vehicles have very little headroom for "environmental growth" whereas electric seems to have very high levels of headroom. Batteries from more common elements, better recycling, more renewable energy to charge them. As much as I love big trucks, there is no "zero carbon diesel".
So it isn't pretending, they really are a lot better for the planet in the mid-term and forward.
Also, the fact that EVs produce almost zero local pollution makes them incredibly compelling. So much so that I'd still be in favour of them even if they produced the same amount of CO2 overall. Just to make it clear which "team" I am on.
I'm just pointing out that the EV debate seems to have become one of those things where people pick a side and then stop accepting any nuance.
The comment I originally replied to was making the typical glib lazy assertion that ICE cars are some terrible medieval technology and EVs are all sunshine and rainbows. It's more complicated than that.
there is also the environmental cost of replacing the worldwide fleet of vehicles with EVs, and replacing fuel based infrastructure with electric infrastructure. I would love to see a study done on the environmental impact of car ownership in a place like Cuba, where they fix and reuse 70 year old cars to this day due to sanctions. They've certainly avoided all the shipping pollution that the auto industry would have imposed at least.
I think our disposible lifestyle needs to be fixed. Replacing your perfectly good thing with shiny new x% better thing is not necessarily green when you consider the costs of manufacturing that thing, shipping it to you, and disposing with your old thing.
And it's insanely expensive and thus not ever going to be remotely economically feasible. The only reason it might falsely appear to be so now is because it is heavily subsidized (way more heavily subsidized than EVs are).
Economic feasibility is a different question, but we can say the same thing about EVs in Norway - they're not currently economically feasible there without significant incentives. That doesn't mean technology can't catch up.
Is anyone pretending that electric cars don't pollute? It seems like the pollution of EVs has been widely discussed in all kinds of media. Even extremely pro EV site like Electrek or CleanTechnica writes about it all the time.
The pitch has always been that they pollute less globally (and that how much depends on the electric energy mix, but will generally decrease over time) and way less locally. EVs is also the only solution to have a viable path to net zero lifetime CO2 impact. It'll take a zero-emission grid and zero-emission mining, but we need those anyway, and EV tech will help make mining zero-emission.
With Norway's ultra-clean gird four people commuting in a 40kWh EV have, after 130k km, a smaller carbon footprint than four cyclists doing the same.
EV pollute the planet, but so does everything else - including making the food that's turned into energy spent on cycling. It's not all that clear cut.
>Should we allow a free market to continue producing vehicles that contribute to the degradation of the planet?
That's not my argument. It would be a good thing if all governments outlawed ICE consumer vehicles. However, headlines like this are portraying Norway as some kind of progressive utopia where everyone just wants to drive EVs.
Obviously you can make people do whatever you want with aggressive enough tax policies. But the goal should be to get EVs to a fair market price point where they truly compete, not reliant on subsidies.
>Kia niro comes out the same price, electric sells the most.
That's my whole point. Of course more people will choose an EV when they are at price parity. The problem is that they are not. The Niro EV sells for a ~40% premium in the US over the ICE version, because the government subsidies are far less.
Yes, that is correct. But the argument is, «electric cheaper -> sells more». My argument is that the people of Norway wants electric, when priced the same. Electric is the new shiny that most people in Norway want.
They are priced the same, I’ve bought this car to this price. The MSRP includes no sale tax (mva) and no horse power tax. Are you thinking of some other incentives?
The retail price is the same, sure, but the effective price is much different because the incentives come from different tax and rebate schemes that aren't factored into the retail price. EVs have no VAT in Norway, no road tax, no toll or ferry fees [0] -- that's a major difference in the effective price!
Sorry, thought you meant “initial” total purchasing price, if that makes sense. Road tax is back, this year. No ferry fee is only on Europe roads. No toll fee still. Also service cost is probably cheaper, as electric has less failing motor parts, not sure about the battery though.
Many of these are regular business expense deductions like depletion and foreign tax credits. They’re not specific to carbon energy industries and aren’t subsidies per se.
Exactly right. A consequence of the US tax code being so complicated is that regular people (even very highly educated regular people) do not understand even elementary tax concepts.
That article was written by Drilling Info and reads like a lobbying piece. Here's some info on that company:
Drilling Info has more than 2,700 accounts globally with more than 20,000 users. Drilling Info members produce more than 90 percent of domestic oil and gas in the United States.
They're in the oil and gas business -- of course they want to "debunk" any info about the subsidies given to that industry.
I'll take one point from that article as an example of BS:
"Intangible Drilling Costs ($3.5 billion “subsidy” – low estimate is $780 million) - Intangible Drilling Costs are essentially the cost of drilling a new well that have no salvageable value. Currently, most exploration companies are allowed to deduct 100% of the costs in the year they are incurred with the majors able to deduct 70% of the costs immediately with the remaining 30% amortized over 5 years. In what world would money spent that may or may not be recovered be capitalized as an asset?"
Plenty of companies spend plenty of money on R&D every year that goes nowhere. For some reason, the oil & gas industry gets a refund on their exploration but other companies don't. I work in R&D in tech -- should the government fund my complete salary for projects that turn out to not be viable? Sounds great if you're an entrepreneur -- start all the companies you want and get refunded by the government for all of your misses.
LOL - They don't get a refund. They get to deduct those as business costs exactly like R&D expenditures. The argument from the *those are subsidies" camp is that they should have to capitalize them as a purchased asset (and depreciate them on the usual schedule) and not be able to deduct them in the year of expenditure, which would be like treating R&D the same as purchasing a building. As the article says, that doesn't make any sense at all. And allowing a deduction of intangible drilling costs much like all other business deductions is in no way a "subsidy."
The headline doesn't seem misleading. I would also argue that the government giving out incentives for electric cars makes Norway "some kind of progressive utopia" as it is a republic and I assume it is in someway what the people want.
Are you comparing a large car, Subaru Outback, to a small car, Model 3? Model X would be a fairer comparison, where model X is 300k NOK more in base model.
Norway is subsidizing electric vehicles (with cash) and disincentivizing ICE vehicles (with higher fuel costs and other levers). However, vehicles of all kinds are subsidized by society by other means [0]. If we all paid the true costs of driving, our built environment and society would be structured radically different.
Even just building roads shaped countries and cities in a certain way.
Killing trains, increasing car usage, encouraging shipping things from far away locations.
Hopefully with the next generation of city planning we won't be so stupid and create environments which are more liveable where people waste less time commuting and buy things as close to home as possible (even if the last point may have more to do with taxation / regulations / working conditions differences in various countries more than roads).
Norway has been leading the pack in this regard for quite some time. A few Government incentives, both financial and for instance the ability to use dedicated bus lanes (now discontinued in Oslo I think?) majorly helped.
One of the large issues around uptake is simply infrastructure. Here in Ireland, it is still patchy at best. We had an EV (Nissan) from around 2016 but gave it up in 2020 as there was simply too much anxiety around out of service public chargers and lack of backup. Range anxiety is definitely possible to overcome, but it requires the state to back it up with resources: Norway has most definitively done this.
Final thought: no surprise that ID.3 is making inroads in a huge way on sales. It's a sweet spot of a good car at an attainable price that looks, for want of a better word, 'normal'. Some EVs seem to be designed 'differently' almost for the sake of it - and while some will love that, it ends up adding another hurdle for a certain segment of the market I believe.
I drive occasionally and the first time I drove an electric last year, I barely made it to a charging station an hour outside Oslo and not close to another city. I had to wait a couple of hours before hopping to a fast charger. I treated it like a gas car, but after that, I changed both my attitude and a number of driving habits to get the most of them. I am happy the wide breadth of support across the country is available to maintain charging stations. Just on cost alone, I would prefer electric for rentals.
Many thanks. Was there a change in perhaps the hours they could be used, or was it floated perhaps at one stage? I’m nearly certain I read it more than once maybe 3-4 years ago.
This is mostly because aerodynamics become very important in an EV, and weight becomes (relatively) less important.
That changes substantially many design decisions, affecting a lot of things you might not expect - dramatic changes to the visual appearance, focus on AC rather than a sunroof, internal airflow changes to prevent fogging, etc.
Yes the amsterdam city center is bike centric. But around it its all cars... Diesel cars are banned in the ring now, and there are TESLA's everywhere (lease car owners). The tax incentives where crazy, you could ride a Tesla for as cheap as 150 euro per month...
But that now has stopped above 40k euro, and its the Volkswagen group that builds electrified cars in the sweet spot.
Surely the OP meant that electric cars are still cars, and thus encourage car-centric cities with wide streets and lots of space devoted to parking, as opposed to denser, more walkable and bikable cities.
How are all those people who walk around the city going to get there? Norwegians live in quite scattered communities and even though we have better public transport that some other countries it really isn't convenient to time your visit to the nearest town and shopping centre to coincide with the bus timetable. For me a trip to the centre of the nearest town (Drammen, Norway) means a forty minute bus ride and the buses run once per hour, not too bad if all I want to do is go to a café or buy a small bag of shopping. If I need to visit one of the shopping centres nearer the edge of town it will take and hour and twenty minutes and two buses. Now imagine doing that with children as well while it is raining during the twenty minutes that you have to wait for the second bus.
I'm not arguing against pedestrian friendly towns, in fact Drammen is very pedestrian friendly, just that it is really not enough to make a town pedestrian friendly, not here anyway, you also need a massive expansion in public transport. You need more routes, more frequent buses, you need overlapping routes so that people do not have to change buses too often.
Sadly, the problem of designing convenient, efficient, cost-effective public transportation is beyond the capabilities of this HNer. I was merely trying to translate the OP's comment as a lot of people seemed to be missing its intent.
As a side note I've only visited Norway once (and would love to return), but I've heard the phrase "Det finnes ikke dårlig vær, bare dårlig klær/There's no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes" countless times, almost as if it were the official motto of Norway. And here you are, fretting about rain at the bus stop, dashing my stereotype of Norwegians as tough, hardy folks, undeterred by even the foulest weather! :)
I've spent thousands of hours waiting for buses in the rain and yes that rhyme could well be the national motto. But still it's not much fun with bags of shopping and small children.
But I can undash your stereotype: I'm English. Mind you my boss did once say to me "Du har blitt en ekte Viking."; the previous day I had walked out of the office to go home dressed only in a light jumper and shorts while it was tipping it down. It was summer so not too cold and anyway where I come from the rain comes sideways from the Atlantic.
Glad to hear you liked it here, perhaps you'll get a chance to come back once COVID-19 is sorted out.
> the problem of designing convenient, efficient, cost-effective public transportation is beyond the capabilities of this HNer.
You are not alone. I certainly can't do it and it seems to be beyond the local authorities here. Actually I wonder if it might actually be provably impossible.
I personally hate taking the bus in Innlandet... Too many rude kids and to get to a friends house you need to arrange car for the last mile anyway. Car centric city is preferable if I get to drive
Sell oil, buy electric cars. Is this the definition of hypocrisy? At least it is better than the alternative, sell oil and buy fossile fuel cars.
Edit: I would like to rephrase the last sentence as "At least it is better than _an_ alternative, which is to sell oil and buy fossile fuel cars." which is a fairer categorisation of the problem space and less consumerist.
As a Norwegian, I've been thinking the same for a while. The argument that "our" oil would just get replaced by some other oil if we stopped pumping feels hollow.
That being said, given how much of our workforce is directly or indirectly tied to pumping up oil and gas, I also get that simply stopping the pumps tomorrow will pretty much make the country collapse.
As such I think that spending our black money to help foster greener technologies like EVs is at least better than nothing.
We're also using our oil fund a bit more actively[1] when it comes to climate and investments.
All developed countries "emit" a lot of CO2 by importing goods manufactured overseas in countries that are heavily reliant on fossil fuels including coal. There's just no going around the fact that this is a global problem.
To me it is obvious that the solution to the global climate change crisis isn't rich countries buying new luxorious cars, that happen to be electric. That's a very western-centric view.
There's no one silver bullet solution. There are dozens of different things that need to happen that, in total, sufficiently reduce the emitted CO2. Surface level transport makes up for a significant amount of worldwide emissions, and as such phasing out petroleum-powered cars for electric-powered cars is absolutely part of the overall solution for climate change.
> To me it is obvious that the solution to the global climate change crisis isn't rich countries buying new luxorious cars, that happen to be electric.
THE solution? Who has ever said the problem is solved with just one thing?
It's certainly a very important part of the solution. Solving climate change is absolutely impossible without electric vehicles and better batteries. This is not just about driving your SUV to your cabin, it's about transportation of goods, farming, mining etc. We're also seeing that there's overlap in development of EV batteries and grid batteries (at least for short term frequency regulation).. so there's some synergies there that will be important for increasing the share of renewables.
It just happens that personal cars is the easiest vehicle to implement as BEV first. If rich western countries didn't buy them, and China didn't have the foresight to push BEVs hard, the development could easily have taken 10-20 years longer.
> That's a very western-centric view.
Cars are used in non-western countries too. Now that batteries for vehicles are getting cheaper, you're starting to see BEVs become viable at the very bottom of the market as well. Cheap BEVs and cheap renewable energy will be huge for developing countries. You're already starting to see renewable micro-grids giving a much lower barrier to get access to electricity. Importing oil is expensive for a developing country. Importing refined gasoline is even more expensive.
This is a bit facetious but, my point is that driving to the airport in a tesla isn't solving climate change. The guy in India who lives in a house with dirt for floor is solving climate change, no matter if he likes it or not.
No, the solution is leaving the oil in the ground, anything less than that and what you're making is excuses and not progress. We can't keep moving the goalposts.
There is nothing good for the climate about 13 norwegians (to reference another comment on this article) buying luxurious cars that happen to be electric.
I doubt renewable micro-grids are going to power EVs in the third world anytime soon, but that would be nice I guess.
As stated on that page, motor gasoline was 45% of US petroleum consumption, so 23% of that 68% wouldn't be touched by electric cars. There's also a relatively small amount that ends up in small engines[1], but I'm willing to write that off as a rounding error.
[1] Side note: I'm impressed by the explosion of high-quality electric replacements for small gasoline engines over the past few years. All my power yard tools are electric; the only gasoline engines we own our the car and the generator.
No, individual Norwegians are getting poorer because we now have to pay closer to European market prices for electricity. Mind you the weather this summer was so wet that the prices went negative on a couple of occasions.
> Sell oil, buy electric cars. Is this the definition of hypocrisy?
In what way? It's not like Norway is responsible for the worlds dependence on oil, or that they've ever claimed that they're saving the world. They haven't said that others should stop using oil/gasoline right now either. They're just trying their best to help develop alternatives.
If you have oil, what's the third alternative? Should Norway just not have extracted any of its oil ever? Is that realistic to expect? Would it even have helped in any way, or would it just be offset by increased production in the middle east?
It's a huge discussion around this in Norway btw. The green party wants to cut all oil production by 2035. Obviously it's not very popular, although the green party has been growing quite well recently. The main argument against it is that cutting oil/gas production will easily be offset by other nations, most of which have worse CO2/methane pollution from their oil/gas production, and cutting gas to Germany could increase coal usage. It has been a big focus on that in Norway, to the point that Equinor is building a wind power plant to supply oil rigs with cleaner electricity rather than burning gas in inefficient power plants on the oil rigs. Of course, a lot of people are saying that this is green washing. Personally I'm ambivalent. Cutting production early would send a very strong signal, and could perhaps push other countries to cut oil/gas use, but at least building those off-shore wind power plants will help reduce cost of off-shore wind.
Norway is not the "good guy" here, but then nobody is. Everyone that has cheap/easy access to oil reserves has developed them. Expecting anybody to do otherwise is naive. Everyone in the world is hopelessly dependent on oil. We're all product of the circumstances of the 20th century, and all we can do is to try to do the best we can going forward.
> hy·poc·ri·sy (hĭ-pŏk′rĭ-sē)
> 1. The practice of professing beliefs, feelings, or virtues that one does not hold or possess; falseness.
> 2. An act or instance of such falseness.
It's clearly _not_ hypocrisy by any normal definition of the word.
I mean, first of all EVs isn't just about cutting CO2-emissions. Norway is very concerned about local pollution, and EVs is pretty superior there.
And Norway does not believe that they're the good guys when it comes to CO2 emissions, at all. There's a continuous debate about what to do about the oil/gas production though, and there's some pretty strong arguments that cutting oil/gas would do nothing or even be damaging to global CO2 emissions. Cutting production will easily be offset by other countries with worse emissions in their production chain. Cutting off gas to Germany will either push them back to coal or to Russian gas. And most of those other countries are not investing as much of their oil profits in renewables and EV tech. I'm not sure I agree with this line of though, but it's valid because it depends on knowledge of alternative futures that we just don't know.
I mean if you think it's hypocrisy you're free to do so, but it's not very productive. What action should Norway take to reduce the worlds CO2 emissions more than they are? The Norwegian green party wants to cut all oil/gas production by 2035. Is that enough, or should they have cut everything already?
> It's clearly _not_ hypocrisy by any normal definition of the word.
Okay sure if you define their goals for EVs simply as decreasing _local_ pollution, then you're right it's not hypocritical. Though in that case I would instead refer to it as extremely selfish, since they are using the proceeds from their exportation of pollution to decrease their own local pollution. Honestly I'm not really sure which perspective I find worse.
> There's a continuous debate...
Given you clearly don't strongly agree with what you wrote, I won't attack you on it. I'll simply point out that those arguments are really no different than all the other self-serving arguments people use to post facto rationalize their actions. If them ridiculous. They remind me of the arguments I sometimes hear from fellow Swedes saying that Sweden's large profits from arms exports aren't bad since they'd be sold by someone else anyway. Convenient how easily such reasoning can be used to ignore one's culpability.
> I mean if you think it's hypocrisy you're free to do so, but it's not very productive. What action should Norway take to reduce the worlds CO2 emissions more than they are? The Norwegian green party wants to cut all oil/gas production by 2035. Is that enough, or should they have cut everything already?
If this is a serious question, then I'll answer it. They should stop being hypocrites. That is they should either stop their exports immediately or they should come to terms with the fact that they are making the world a worse place. You might want to get rid of Solberg as a first step:
"Norge är ett av världens rikaste länder, mycket tack vare sin olja. Men man tar inget klimatansvar för den olja som exporteras.
Det säger Norges statsminister Erna Solberg i Ekots lördagsintervju idag. Enligt henne är det den som köper oljan som har ansvaret för utsläppen. Och då menar hon bland annat Sverige."
Total bullshit. I mean I agree that Swedes need to take responsibility for their actions (Sweden is probably just as full of hypocrites as Norway), but Norway is selling their oil knowing very well the result. Of course they are responsible. They are selling it because they want money. There's nothing noble about it.
They're not phasing out the #1 incentive to buy electric cars: Insanely high gasoline prices (nor should they). So I'm not seeing a regression in the making here.
Are there any suggestions for how to replace lost revenue that would support infrastructure like roads?
In the US roads are mostly maintained by taxes on gas. I would think taxing tires might be a decent replacement, but I haven't seen much conversation on the issue.
>In the US roads are mostly maintained by taxes on gas. I would think taxing tires might be a decent replacement, but I haven't seen much conversation on the issue.
Most of the conversation seems to be around taxing mileage or putting up toll roads which IMO are both crap solutions.
Taxing mileage is, is highly regressive because less wealthy people drive tons more (they live farther out from the economic centers and more frequently justify driving farther to access goods more cheaply). However, less wealthy people do not shape public policy in the kinds of states that tend to be willing to try these things out so we'll likely wind up with mileage taxes that result in people in the expensive cities and inner ring suburbs paying the least and they will be able to justify it by pointing out that the less wealthy who live in city apartments and use public transit (which is generally how the more wealthy want the less wealthy to live) pay even less.
Taxing tires is a great idea because it's a naturally progressive tax though still loosely tied to overall use. The poors on their rock hard economy all seasons will pay less than the wealthy on their super sticky and soft summers and winters. Also tire cost scales well with weight of vehicle and the heaviest vehicles do the most damage to roads. That said, I can see a lot of bad 2nd order effects (that fuel tax is mostly immune to) if we start taxing tires so I am highly apprehensive. It would be a great time to own an alignment shop though.
IMO the best solution is to just accept that good transit infrastructure is in everyone's interest and fund roads directly with general tax revenue the same way we fund subways, municipal water/sewer, parks and almost every other piece of infrastructure. The net good of the marginal cost of use being so low that pretty much anyone can use as much as they want with no cost other than opportunity cost has immense benefits to society.
I think that makes sense. I wonder if enough people see it that way and what sources of that general tax revenue would increase to offset the lost revenue from gas tax.
> In the US roads are mostly maintained by taxes on gas.
This is a common misconception. Most road funding comes from the Fed and state/local income and property taxes. Gasoline taxes exist but do not comprise the majority of funding. It's important to emphasize this because I pay a LOT in taxes but don't even so much as own a car, so I'm paying way more than my fair share for road upkeep.
The solution would be simple -- tax based on odometer reading (and do it federally, so you can't get around it by moving cars between states). Every year as part of your taxes you'd look at your odometer and then pay an amount per mile driven since last year, and periodic vehicle registration renewals would keep people honest (there'd be the same kind of penalty fee there as for paying taxes late). So long as all the states require vehicle registration and send that data to the feds, it'll work. The states could also have their own tax on top.
I never said it was a sole source, but it is a large source (I thought the largest source). Do you have the breakdown of funding sources?
Most of your property tax (depending on state) is going to schools, not roads. For example, my school tax is about $3700 per year, while county tax is about $500 and local income tax is maybe $500. The county and local taxes support courts, parks, police, fire, public transport, etc. Yes, some does go to road maintenance, especially projects like bike lane and crosswalk programs, but that is relatively little. I pay about $400 per year in gas taxes, $90 in registration, and $90-120 in tolls each year (pre covid). Federal road money comes from a federal gas tax (not sure if there are other sources added since that was a big issue a decade ago).
Enforcement of the odometer reading might be tricky, especially at the state level for states without periodic inspections. It could work though. The reason I mentioned tires is because they are a consumable part and have treadwear ratings for how long they should last. It would be self-enforcing, to a degree, at the consumer level. Enforcement would be at the manufacturer or distributor level to collect the tax.
The exemptions that electric cars currently enjoy will eventually be phased out so quite a lot of the shortfall will disappear in the future. The only remaining shortfall will be the petrol taxes and I suspect that this will eventually be recouped by some variety of road pricing or mileage tax which will be unfortunate because it is a regressive tax as has been pointed out by another comment here. It is likely to happen because Norwegian authorities are very willing to impose tolls; road pricing or mileage taxes are but a small step from there.
Per mile charging. Your car reports where it goes using a black box rather like what some insurance companies install then you get taxed based on how many miles you travelled.
Many states in the US do this too through registration. The cost varies by state. In my state, total gas taxes would be about $200 per year for an average driver, with the registration fee being about $50 ($90 for pickup trucks).
I'm jealous. Tennessee (in the US) has no incentives for electric cars and actually charges a high "EV fee" for annual vehicle registration since they aren't getting the gasoline tax.
The VAT discount as discussed in the links apply when a company acquires an electric bike for company use. It does not as far as I know apply to private citizens which pay the normal VAT rate.
There have been some municipal subsidy schemes for private citizen where you upon sending a receipt of an electric bike purchase will get some money back. They are however often temporary as they only budget a given amount for the scheme.
For European standards, Norway's petro; and diesel prices aren't that crazy. When touring through the fjords on a couple of vacations, I've found them comparable to what you have in Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands.
Especially considering that Norway's average income is leagues ahead of those countries.
Artificially reducing supply by whatever means is going to have a similar effect on the consumer as a tax, prices and the cost to the consumer will rise
Reducing the supply has the effect of not taxing your own citizens more than the rest of the world. Also, a tax at the gas pump hits the everyday Joe (or in Norway, Mittias) disproportionately. Lots of fuel is consumed without ever going to a gas station.
Right,I think GP post is just saying buyers were "pulled forward" (in parlance we use to discuss iphone buyers)
If you were going to buy an electric car in the next couple of years, you should do it before you lose the discounts
Of course, budget electric cars are continuing to improve year over year, so that along with gas prices and the charging station network effect (which is perhaps fairly saturated in Norway? I don't know) should help draw in new buyers post incentives
I agree that I don't really imagine much backsliding unless the current generation of first-time buyers hate their electric cars (I suspect many will love them though)
A bit off-topic but I've been wondering how well self driving technologies will work in Nordic countries where the roads look pretty different in summer and in winter. At least for me, the one of the biggest interest for Tesla comes from its (current but especially future) self driving capabilities.
This includes hybrids. It's really questionable to incentivize hybrid vehicles and selling it as a electrified success.
Discussions about the efficiency/environmental impact/... of combustion v.s. electric aside, it's obvious that driving a huge battery around will burn more fuel.
I think this can only be seen as a success for electrified motors if it's proven that they're actually being used.
If the article is to be believed this does not include hybrids. The first sentence reads in part "... where the sale of electric cars has overtaken those powered by petrol, diesel and hybrid engines ... " (my emphasis)
Plug-in hybrids used for routine urban driving (commutes, errands, etc...) are effectively EVs. I don't have usage data for Norway specifically, but the numbers that have been thrown around elsewhere are something like 20-30% of the driving is done using the gasoline engine.
Almost everyone celebrating "electric cars" in that headline is really cheering for carbon reduction, and this for sure qualifies.
> Discussions about the efficiency/environmental impact/... of combustion v.s. electric aside, it's obvious that driving a huge battery around will burn more fuel.
I am not sure if I am misunderstanding something here, but did you ever compare fuel statistics of ICE/HEV/PHEV?
Literally everything you said is wrong. The figure does not include hybrids, driving around a battery does not consume more energy, and yes they are being used.
Battery manufacturing emits a lot of CO2, to the point that out of the factory, an EV is less green than an ICEV, and it takes about 2 to 3 years of commuting just to catch up. Now with a plug-in hybrid assuming it has half of the battery capacity, it could very well be that the PHEV is actually greener than an BEV.
A smaller battery that is enough 90% of the time + an ICE to make up for that 10% could very well be greener than a BEV with twice the battery capacity.
> driving a huge battery around will burn more fuel
and driving around two engines. also, equally important, having to produce two engines gives hybrids an extra co2 footprint even before their first km. this way, the total co2 footprint over the entire life cycle of a hybrid car can be just the same as that of the same car with a combustion engine.
They use money from all of the carbon they sell to provide massive tax discounts for electric cars, so the incentives are skewed to electric, so we shouldn't read too much into this in terms of market preference.
I mean, the government is spending something like 2.5 billion US Dollars per year to subsidize electric cars, yet people still claim how electric cars are competitive.
From having lived in Norway for a year, I also remember that even buying used cars with a combustion engine is ridiculously expensive due to the high taxes that electric cars are exempt from.
I mean, of course, Norwegians are buying more electric cars. Who wouldn't given these circumstances?
> the government is spending something like 2.5 billion US Dollars per year to subsidize electric cars
The government currently does not charge import taxes on electric cars, but charges very high import taxes on ICE cars.
I wouldn't say that the government is "spending" that money. For sure it's a subsidy, but the Norwegian government is not actually sending checks to people or manufacturers if they buy electric. There is a cost to road maintenance that needs to get funded from somewhere, and that cost is not currently being borne by electric car owners. But using the phrase "spending" makes it sound a whole lot like a check is getting cut in some amount and sent somewhere.
(There's an ongoing debate about when to ramp up taxes for electric cars, and to what amounts, so don't expect the situation to remain as-is for too much longer.)
Consider buying VOLKSWAGEN group stock instead of TESLA stock... There are electric volkswagens everywhere, and their lineup of electric cars is amazing.
It looks way better in real life than on the site.
With Tesla... These tesla model 3s are everywhere in the Netherlands, and they are a bit minimal in design and expensive.. A bit boring to be honest. But thats good, electrify the world!
Just don't buy an ID until VW sort out the climate control and entertainment system. Currently quite a few Norwegian ID.3 owners are reluctant to drive them for fear of suddenly losing visibility when the climate control misbehaves: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=no&tl=en&u=https:/...
No it isn't. The ID.3 problems are real, VW are working on software updates to fix the problems and have emailed the owners to provide instructions for work arounds.
You do know that multiple people have actually died from Teslas driving themselves into trucks and center dividers?
The worst part with the most recent center-divider crash is that it was an regression following an OTA update, demonstrating that OTA can cause just as much harm as good.
As far as I know all of the instances where Teslas drove into trucks and centre dividers were found to be at least partially due to driver behaviour (speeding, not paying attention). And also be aware that ordinary cars of all kinds do all of those things too.
> most recent center-divider crash is that it was an regression following an OTA update,
DO you have reference for that? I would be interested to read up on that, I have an interest as I have a Model S.
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