Up to now, EVs have been very very expensive. We are only now starting to see EVs approaching the €20k mark. Al lthe rich folks who are interested in getting an EV got one already. The rest of us still can't afford them. I'm in the market now, but I'll be looking at the 2nd hand market because new is just too rich for my blood.
Here in Ireland the grants are also drying up reducing the incentives further.
I think this will change pretty soon. As more cheaper new EVs come online, the bottom of the 2nd hand market will drop out. It's a pity that the majority of ev manufacturers are focusing on ultra loaded luxury land-space-ships. Give me a cheap urban transport capsule with 100km range that charges quickly, and I'll be dead happy and probably buy 2.
The only fear I'd have buying a 2nd hand on what I consider these 1st/2nd generation EVs is battery repairability/replacement. Buying a 10 years old used ICE car is a pretty common and affordable option for many people, a 10 years old EV might need its whole battery pack replaced, and as far as I know that is a pretty massive cost.
This is true, and EVs have not been in the market long enough to really know how they behave over long periods of time and high miles. There is also not a strong enough secondary market of mechanics, parts dealers, second-hand parts, generic batteries/drive units etc.
BUT, having said that, the common sentiment that I'm picking up in my online "research" is that it's not as a big issue as made out to be.
The Nissan Leaf specifically has issues with its battery design that makes high mileage batteries that were mostly fast-charged very suspect, but in general for other cars with proper thermal management, degradation is not really an issue. 80% after 5-10 years is not so bad, especially if the car is much cheaper than comparable new models.
But yes, the cost of replacing that battery after 10-20 years is massive, considering that an ICE car will happily last that long if it's looked after, and if not, usually an engine overhaul is all that's needed.
Once again, it comes back to cost. Everything is too expensive, and EVs are still seen as a luxury item, compared to an affordable means of transport.
And with 10 year old cars you have enough spread to know the common issues and costs to repair those. Some of them are pretty minor. But battery packs still can be very substantial comparatively.
And I would really worry about some second/third hand battery from fly-by night operator that might actually not properly guarantee anything.
For me personally (I spoke to others and they mostly agree) the biggest downside is that for "public" charging I pay a 100% premium. My costs at home (I live in a rented apartment with no possibility of charging an EV) for 1kw/h are 0.30€. The average price for charging publicly here are 0.59€. Plus the hassle of having a quadrillion providers for which I would have to check first what the cheapest one at a given charger would be. I have enough inconveniences in my life, won't add another one (especially one that could be easily resolved).
Perhaps it would make sense if electricity contracts came with a "roaming" option for a certain region. As in, get the same electricity price as at home when using a charging station on the go. After all, I think it shouldn't make much difference to the electricity company whether I use electricity at home or elsewhere, as long as I stay within the region where the company offers the contract.
This would also help people with dynamically priced contracts (the ones that vary hour by hour based on the day-ahead electricity market) to make optimal use of cheap or even negatively priced power, e.g. during the daily solar peak, even when at work. That would also help with grid balancing and reduce carbon intensity.
There would still have to be a roaming surcharge to pay the operator of the charging station of course. But perhaps it wouldn't have to be as expensive as a 100% premium, at least for AC chargers on parking lots. (For DC fast chargers the premium would probably still be substantial, because you're paying for the ROI on the high power infrastructure.)
I think that double cost is about the right price if you want market operators to offer AC charging. I don’t know exactly what we paid to install 8 Chargepoints at our office (and we offered market-rate electricity, no markup, but I’m also pretty sure we got grants to install the chargers), but it had to be $10K per 2 charging spots (and likely more, as the GW1 itself is $7200).
Making about a break-even return on that upfront expense means making $40 in markup per spot in a typical month. Thats $2 per workday per spot, meaning around a 100% markup on 10kWh of electricity or ~40 miles of range every day every spot.
That seems doable, but doing 80 miles of range every day every spot (to cut the markup in half) does not.
I don't own an EV so I don't understand... when I go to a gas station, I just tap my debit card and fill up. The price and running total is shown on a display on the pump. Why don't EV charging stations work that way?
In the UK at least, they mostly do. You park up, plug the car in, tap your contactless card and that starts the charge. Once the charge completes (or you unplug the car), the charger works out how much electricity you used and your card gets charged accordingly. In my experience there aren't too many charging points that don't accept contactless payments in this way.
Sometimes having memberships, RFID cards or apps for the different charging networks unlocks cheaper rates though, so contactless payments don't always end up being the most economical in the long run and that can make it harder to compare charging providers, hence why things like Zap-Map and Electroverse were born.
Because we live in a post-internet, post-social media, post-smartphone world. Seems like everything new requires me to sign up and pay for a subscription now.
I have no reason to believe gas stations that wouldn’t require an app if they were invented today.
Same feeling here. Given enough cars, thus given enough pressure, I'm convinced we will see some regulation coming into place. I just hope it won't become like the actual regional energy monopoly...
I used to have a bmw i3 then a model y while I lived in an apartment building. In my experience although public charging is more expensive the amount you pay overall is cheaper than an equivalent gas vehicle such that it’s probably not worth trying to find the cheapest station more than once.
For example to go “500km” in the model y charging at home with the cheapest electricity it’s about $6. At a super charger I pay about $30. 5x more expensive but for my f150 I pay $120-150 for the same distance. Between the two options charging at the super charger every time is still 4x cheaper than gas even though I could save even more charging at home
Over 10,000 miles, my EV saves me roughly £1300/year compared to my previous petrol car on the basis of being able to charge the EV overnight at home for £0.09/kW and the petrol costing around £1.40/L before. If I were relying on public charging in the UK, that story would be quite different.
A typical public 7kW AC charger here would start at around £0.45/kWh, at which point the savings would only be £300/year and that is assuming there is somewhere close by that I could leave the car charging for hours at that speed.
If I had to rely on a typical 50kW+ DC charger here in order to get charged up more quickly, that would start at a much higher £0.79/kWh, at which point driving the EV would be £700/year more expensive than the petrol car.
Quite a bit (can't find a reliable number, but looks like 300-1000kg and yes, I realize that's a wide range)
The fuel economy is actually quite reasonable unloaded - I'm getting 11L/100km vs 13 on my 370z.
The point I'm trying to make though is that it's probably not worth it to look at saving cents/kw when you're likely to come out ahead either way.
And yes, maybe more to the point of the original article - yes, if you have no car and you're only concerned with the cheapest to operate vehicle I'm confident something like a Prius driven gingerly and only filled up while gas is historically low (over a week window or whatever) you could beat an EV. On the other hand, that doesn't describe most people with cars already so for most people even living in an apartment they'd likely save money.
Norway had a little downward bump in sales around the 10-20% market share mark too if I remember correctly. But after going through that speed bump the sales have shot up to 90%+
I wonder if it’s kind of necessary to sit on that ~10% level for a while to drive infrastructure investments. And then when infrastructure gets up to a decent level further growth is unlocked. I remember it was a very short timespan where it went from feeling like we had some fast chargers here and there, to it feeling like chargers was absolutely everywhere. I think that does a lot to give people confidence in buying EVs
If you look at curves of other technology transitions it doesn’t seem like these kind of bumps or pauses in growth are unusual.
The industry should have started out with smaller cars and motorcycles with swappable battery cells. It would have solved so many problems in even deploying charge centers, but unfortunately, it means reduced profit. Tech Companies focus on monthly subscriptions and planned obsolescence to guarantee revenue streams so much now that it's making intentionally disposable products that will do far more environmental damage than fuel burning vehicles. We're making bike and bus lanes and speed cameras that bottleneck traffic, while wondering why no one wants to work. The lead EV manufacturing company is led by someone with astronomical wealth that is impulsive and erratic, despite having a faulty and way over-stylized product that many are buying, but most fail within the first 5-6 years, and sit dormant due to very high repair costs. Even the quality and long-term reliability of gas powered vehicles has declined for unknown reasons as they become primarily software-based, which some believe are the result of trying to encourage EV sales.
The reason why EV markets are faltering now are simple... They're just not very viable and reliable in their current form in comparison to traditional vehicles.
We all need to reject the "new mobile phone + plan every year" model of car ownership. Not only is it not sustainable, it's not environmentally safe.
Without tax incentives EVs are far more expensive for people who only drive say 5-10k miles a year.
My fuel costs are about 15p/mile in my old rustbucket (45mpg is about 10 miles per litre, £1.50 a litre)
An EV will do say 4 miles per kWh, so in theory at 30p/kWh that's 7.5p per mile, half the price.
5000 miles a year that's £375 saving with electric. Add in another £160 VED saving (again my old bucket) and that's £500 a year.
A bottom of the line Micra is about £13k new. A bottom of the line Leaf is £27k new. A new micra will get better milage and lower VED than my 20 year old one too.
> Without tax incentives EVs are far more expensive for people who only drive say 5-10k miles a year.
If you're only driving 5-10k miles a year, car ownership seems like a massive unnecessary burden, electric or ICE. But given you're measuring in miles, I guess there's a good chance you're not from somewhere with adequate public transit and bicycle infrastructure.
In my opinion, we really need to focus less on personal electric cars and more on making high quality, convenient, electric public transportation.
k is kilo. As in 1000. 5000-10000 miles. UK average is about that.
But you go chuntering on about your high density living and fantasies that there will be public transport at 2130 tonight from the nearby village 8 miles away where the scout hut is back to my house.
Whenever I try to get a taxi to the station (a mere 9 miles away) it's massively unreliable, had to get a hotel in the past because they just don't exist in the real world at 3AM. We don't all live in the middle of London or Paris or NYC.
Yes, I accidentally dropped the k, I know you meant 5-10k.
> UK average is about that.
Yes, and the average UK person is driving more than they would if there was better public transportation availability.
Sure, not every household is going to be well served by public transportation, especially in very rural settings, but way more rural areas can be well served by public transport than they currently are.
If you think you need to live in London, Paris, or NYC to have good public transit, you're simply wrong. There's lots of rather rural places that actually do have quite good trains and bus options.
There'll still be lots of people for whom a car makes the most sense, but we can still strive to reduce that by giving more options and building better infrastructure.
The average car in the netherlands is driven about 8000 miles a year.
Doesn't matter how good the public transport is, it can not sustain a journey from my small village to a larger village at 10pm at night on a friday night. Nor will it meet me at 2350 from the railhead in a city a 30 minute drive away. On the way back from that station at that time of night I pass maybe 2 or 3 cars, none of which came from or go to anywhere near my house.
Even if there was some form of ondemand public transport, the carbon impact would be far more than my own car.
The reason I don't travel 40,000 miles a year by car is because I use other forms of public transport when I can. However even with 90% of my domestic (by mile) being public transport, I still need a car for the last 10%. The tax system in the UK punishes that behaviour (I pay far more in tax per litre of petrol used than my neighbour who drives everywhere), it's either all-or-nothing.
> The average car in the netherlands is driven about 8000 miles a year.
Could be (I don't know) because all the people living next to bike lanes and with good public transport have given up their cars, so the only car users left are the ones who really need to drive a lot, raising the average.
It's the opposite actually. Car ownership in the netherlands is actually rather high because it's a relatively rich country where people can easily afford to own a car for the occasional convenience.
The fact that there's great public transport there makes it so that those cars don't get driven as much for day-to-day errands as cars do in other places, so they have overall less driving. 8000 miles a year is relatively low.
Yes, you may very well be in a situation where car ownership makes perfect sense for you. I guess my perspective (being originally from rural Canada) is that 5-10k miles a year is very low, and I equate that with city drivers, not rural drivers. Where I grew up, most people often do 400km day trips to the nearest city multiple times a month, in addition to regular day-to-day driving.
Rural England is a pretty different beast from rural Canada though, and also pretty different dynamics from urban Germany where I currently live.
People in your situation unfortunately probably won't benefit from electric cars for some time, because the tax incentives are generally being decreased, not increased, so we're going to have to count on competition lowering prices instead, which seems to be happening, but relatively slowly.
There is always opportunity cost... I like having car available even if I drive very little or short distances. It is there when I need it.
And electric cars don't have same range as my cheap gasoline car. Not at least on same price point. So at times I need that range getting 160-200km to somewhere and then back without charging...
And taxis here are expensive. It would not be that many trips in a month with all the things that I consider car is nicer...
Sure, it's definitely nice to always have a car on hand to use whenever you like, but how much are you really willing to pay for that? Your milage may vary, but I've found that so-called carshare services (i.e. app based car rentals) give me a good way of having an on-demand car parked within walking distance of my home that I can use when I need, but I don't actually have to deal with the expenses and hassle of car ownership, and ends up much cheaper overall since I'm normally very well served by public transit.
Obviously this isn't available everywhere, e.g. the person I was responding to lives somewhat rurally, so probably doesn't have such services available to them.
It is not that expensive even counting depreciation. 30-40€ one way taxi rides get expensive pretty quickly and 40-60€ day rents for car is not that many uses...
Plus it really means no walking and waiting for public transport. Ofc, if you love moving stuff inside public transport and ten walking from stops to home the alternatives are great.
It really is that expensive. Car owners routinely underestimate the amount of money their cars cost to own and operate. They are very unreliable narrators when reporting how much their cars cost them. So many costs are hidden, that it feels cheap.
Once you account for
* the opportunity cost of the up-front money you paid for your car (or the cost of the loan to buy it) compared to investing that money or simply putting it in a high-interest savings account
* the cost of car insurance
* the cost of car maintenance
* the cost of depreciation
* the cost of fuel
it adds up very very quickly to gigantic quantities of money.
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> 30-40€ one way taxi rides get expensive pretty quickly and 40-60€ day rents for car is not that many uses...
Nobody is advocating you rely on taxi rides to get around. 40-60€ day rentals, or 1€/km metered rentals absolute can save you money relative to car ownership so long as you don't use them super often.
I have a "car subscription" in Germany, which is kinda like a rental car but for longer periods (mine is 1 year). The subscription covers the cost of registration/taxes/maintenance/insurance and I cover fuel and parking. 580€ a month for a mid-range SUV, or 20€ a day.
Only if those are available. €1/km is way more than I pay for car ownership including all those costs, but even if it wasn't it would be economically unsustainable to provide such a service which would always be available
Owning a car isnt a per kilometer cost. Only some of the costs are per kilometer, a lot of other costs are fixed costs.
For the amount I drive, the per kilometre cost for me would be more like 100€/km because I only drive when I actually need to, like renting a car to move furniture, or make a road trip somewhere that I cant easily access by train.
> BYD also saw a slowdown between January and March.
Did they, though?
> BYD sold 300,114 EVs globally in the first three months of the year, up 13.4% YOY. In April, BYD sold another 134,465 EVs, up 17% over April 2023. Through the first four months of 2024, BYD sold 434,579 electric cars.
> Tesla and BYD sales fall as concerns mount over electric shift
From the body:
> …from BYD as the world’s biggest seller of electric vehicles, after the Chinese company posted a 42 per cent fall in quarterly EV shipments to 300,114.
But they are talking about a drop from a record Q4 (normally the highest quarter) to a record Q1 (normally the lowest). Not apples to apples. Q1 this year is better than last year - sales are up. The graph even shows it.
The number of electric cars sold globally in the first three months of this year is roughly equivalent to the number sold in all of 2020. In 2024, electric cars sales in China are projected to leap to about 10 million, accounting for about 45% of all car sales in the country: https://www.iea.org/news/the-worlds-electric-car-fleet-conti...
I won't drive an electric car as long as possible.
Not because they are electric or I have any love at all for cumbustion cars, but because I work in the industry.
I see what's inside those things, I see what the plans for the next generation are, and they are a cost-cutters wet dream.
They are getting even more over-engineered, fully stuffed of useless, cheap, consumer-standard-manufactured gadgets, with software so unbelievabley shit that wouldn't be allowed to run on anything else, design and engineering teams lead by testosteroned morons - and everything targeted on rent-seeking and commodifying for the quick buck.
Seeing the current generation of EVs of many large companies, they will never be environmentally sensible - just because they are all around designed in a way to be basically impossible to be used for more than a couple of years.
> They are getting even more over-engineered, fully stuffed of useless, cheap, consumer-standard-manufactured gadgets, with software so unbelievabley shit that wouldn't be allowed to run on anything else, design and engineering teams lead by testosteroned morons - and everything targeted on rent-seeking and commodifying for the quick buck.
Same for new ICE cars, maybe even worse than electric cars.
If you want a reasonable "just-works" minimalist design, you have to buy a used car prior 2010. Anything newer will suffer from those issues.
> If you want a reasonable "just-works" minimalist design, you have to buy a used car prior 2010. Anything newer will suffer from those issues.
Afaik both China & India have some EV models that fit this description. (Relatively) simple, and cheap.
But those are either not street-legal in EU or US because 'reasons', or there's import tarifs high enough to undo any cost advantage.
Just replace ICE with electric drivetrain, do the minimum necessary to meet legal & safety requirements, but cut out (most) modern conveniences / luxuries, telemetry, self-driving etc. Then you'd have a winner.
I can understand his feelings somewhat since it seems electric cars spearheaded this malicious idiocy but rest assured it is already here for ICEs and getting worse. Rejecting electric vehicles might feel like the only way to signal distaste for this behavior if he needs a newer car.
I won't argue with the general feeling, but keeping it realistic, a consumer-standard article like a car is just expected to have consumer-standard gadgets in it. And car software is already garbage to begin with, almost makes you wonder how programmers/managers/qa working in the industry manage to sell their CV outside it - but garbage quality is pretty much our standard nowadays, so there's that..
EVs are growing everywhere, see Q1 2024 vs Q1 2023[1], slower in EU, compared to other regions. There's a reason for it.
Schmidt said German sales were suffering due to subsidy cuts, and because manufacturers are deliberately holding back sales until 2025, when tougher rules on average CO2 emissions come in: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/23/electric...
I think it's like 5G. Yeah, it's running out of steam, the marginal benefit is virtually nonexistent.
I personally don't want a ton of tracking and screens in my car. People want to be able to "fill up" in 10 minutes, go wherever they want, and spend less than a thousand dollars on CSR repairs to get them going again. Until that's possible, even with cheaper cars, electric cars will always be an upper middle class social signalling decision.
Up to now, EVs have been very very expensive. We are only now starting to see EVs approaching the €20k mark. Al lthe rich folks who are interested in getting an EV got one already. The rest of us still can't afford them. I'm in the market now, but I'll be looking at the 2nd hand market because new is just too rich for my blood.
Here in Ireland the grants are also drying up reducing the incentives further.
I think this will change pretty soon. As more cheaper new EVs come online, the bottom of the 2nd hand market will drop out. It's a pity that the majority of ev manufacturers are focusing on ultra loaded luxury land-space-ships. Give me a cheap urban transport capsule with 100km range that charges quickly, and I'll be dead happy and probably buy 2.