In actuality, they buried the lede: "EV sales continue to grow."
Buying EVs from most legacy carmakers is overwhelmingly a crappy experience.
The price per kWh per kg of batteries keeps declining. Lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries are basically here. Solid state batteries will work at scale at reasonable cost sooner or later.
Every week, new fast (150kW+) charging stations open. One just opened a five-minute walk from my apartment.
Buying a brand new ICE car today makes no sense, because their resale value will fall precipitously long before the end of their hypothetically useful life.
I don’t see anytime in the near future where a Ford F250 Diesel will be supplanted by an electric vehicle. For a dual car household, a Tesla Model Y and an F250 Diesel seems to be the optimal choice.
The amount of people that need an F250 is vanishingly small. For a two car household, they’d be much better suited with a Model Y and a smaller car, perhaps an older Nissan Leaf or something gas. If you actually, truly, need a truck, you probably do not need an F250. A maverick or equivalent is more than sufficient for 99%+ of people.
Just because it will take longer for an EV equivalent of an F250 to exist (and frankly, I think such a vehicle is a lot closer than you think) doesn’t mean it makes any sense whatsoever for a dual vehicle household. Again, a relatively small amount of people need a truck, let alone an F250. Electric trucks today already do most of what people need them to do for consumers, they just fail in more industrial/commercial settings. By and large most people would be better off with a larger SUV (EV or not) and a smaller sedan for two vehicles.
In my area it seems that very old EVs hold their value quite well. If you get a good measure of the state-of-health on the battery, and it’s OK, an old EV can be a very reliable car, with very little need for service, compared to an ICE car the same age.
Like, the value of an ICE goes down to the scrap value. The value of an EV seems to hit a floor.
I suspect this could be improved even further if we got really good and affordable battery replacements. Range could be better than new, and motor+inverter is likely to be problem free. It feels like doing big repairs on old ICE cars is futile because something else expensive will fail soon after. At least that was the case with my dad’s cars. With EVs it’s just the battery that’s the main worry.
Problem with old EVs now is there wasn’t that many of them, so no economies of scale on the battery replacement. You can get a good upgrade for original Nissan Lead , but it’s expensive.
Anyway, for 3-5 yo EVs there’s been some new models and price drops that have been quite brutal, is my impression at least.
We can look at the Toyota Prius since it's mass-produced and has both technologies within. The big-ticket item that usually needs fixing as the mileage goes up is the (nicad) battery pack. Upgrades (lifepo4) are available and cost in the range of $2000. For a battery that's <2kwh. Now scale that up to be able to power an EV and you can see why it's Nissan Leafs that are scrap value once the (admittedly sub-optimally cooled) batteries go.
This tracks what I've noticed as well. Consumer confidence in EVs is not as strong as certain people would like it to be. And it makes sense why that's the case. Until the people with a case for EV can come up with a better reason for consumers to purchase them over traditional and hybrid cars, we will have lukewarm public adoption that won't match "the estimates"
Buying EVs from most legacy carmakers is overwhelmingly a crappy experience.
The price per kWh per kg of batteries keeps declining. Lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries are basically here. Solid state batteries will work at scale at reasonable cost sooner or later.
Every week, new fast (150kW+) charging stations open. One just opened a five-minute walk from my apartment.
Buying a brand new ICE car today makes no sense, because their resale value will fall precipitously long before the end of their hypothetically useful life.