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I live in Vietnam and we have EVs for "normal people" here. EV doesn't mean "cars". The V is for vehicles. We've had electric scooters on the roads for many ye

I live in Vietnam and we have EVs for "normal people" here. EV doesn't mean "cars". The V is for vehicles. We've had electric scooters on the roads for many years. In some cities, especially in the north they are nearly the majority of vehicles on the road. But even if you limit yourself to cars, a friend just bought a Volvo S90 Recharge electric car to drive in Ho Chi Minh City. And the first electric bus route launched earlier this year. Toyota will never be very popular in Vietnam. If anything the Kia Smile is probably the most popular car and will be for a long time.

onpensionsterm 4y ago
Vietnam's transport stats are skewed by insane import and luxury taxes.
potatolicious 4y ago
If there's one thing I've learned is that one shouldn't underestimate the sheer speed at which a maturing technology cheapens itself in a drive downmarket. Cars themselves went from being a rich person's curiosity to mostly-affordable to ubiquitous in the space of 50 years. Airline travel went from a luxury for the rich to broadly affordable in about ~30 years. For more recent examples see smartphones - in less than 10 years it's gone from exclusively high-end device to near-universal adoption across the world. It's often hard to figure out what technologies will stick and what will never resolve fundamental flaws - but once it sticks in the high-end market there is a good bet it will rapidly drive its way down the price scale, at a far faster speed than you might expect.
- ballenf 4y ago
  LED bulbs is the one that still surprises me. The quality jump and price cliff from the flickery, blindness-inducing early bulbs was very fast.
  - rhino369 4y ago
    Semiconductors have HUGE upfront R&D cost, but marginal costs aren't that bad.
    - Scoundreller 4y ago
      Same with PVs
  - joe-collins 4y ago
    I remember buying just a pair of bulbs for my first apartment in 2010 at $20 each, and now they're a dollar or two apiece.
    - shapefrog 4y ago
      I remember buying bulbs in 2010 at $20 each - I havent had to buy any since.
  - prometheon1 4y ago
    One of the main reasons for this is research funding and regulation by the European Union. Something similar is probably going to happen with hydrogen production over the next years. (Not as fuel for cars but for industry)
    - mrpopo 4y ago
      Mandatory reminder that hydrogen as fuel for cars is an incredible waste of primary energy and will be for a long time. A petrol car engine is inefficient due to constraints (small + no cooling source other than air). An electric engine + battery is extremely efficient (the "downside" is you can't use the wasted energy to heat up the car in winter like an ICE). An electric engine + hydrogen fuel tank brings back inefficiency, and you can't even reuse that wasted energy because most of this waste is electrolysis.
      - samtho 4y ago
        On the other hand, you can refill a pressurized hydrogen tank in seconds. Electricity itself is merely a mode of energy transmission. Energy storage has and will continue to be a huge innovation area as the current means of battery charging are either slow or low capacity. We’re getting really good at getting energy from the sun, and excess energy not consumed is wasted, so why not make hydrogen? Heck, why not have fuel stations in the middle of nowhere have a well (for water extraction) and an array of solar panels so the station can produce its own product to sell? I can see a future where you can opt for a hydrogen fuel cell EV rather than a battery powered one. Efficiently using the hydrogen will be a non-issue if we are able to trivially produce a vast abundance of it. It’s hard to say that an EV is just as good (for the consumer) as an ICE engine if I am taking a road trip and one of many fill-ups makes me wait for hours. There are these uncommon cars that opponents usually cite and are sometimes unfairly dismissed. I say this because we can and will make EV technology better and cheaper and I’m willing to bet money that hydrogen fuel cell in lieu of batteries will become a thing.
        tedk-42 4y ago
        You think you have two good points (refill time + H2 generation from water) but really you have nothing. Hydrogen might fill a gap to replace large vehicles like buses or trucks but not passenger vehicles.
  - hoseja 4y ago
    What surprises me is how they managed to make them artificially degrade anyway through terrible cooling. We could have truly eternal LEDs for only minor increase in material cost but no, they have to overheat and burn out to secure profits for Philips.
- _spduchamp 4y ago
  What we don't see here in North America are small cheap EVs for doing small tasks in the city. All EVs here are big and expensive. There is a huge proliferation of electric scooters in the city, in particular in low income areas, and while you may see the occasional 3 wheeler, you never ever see small 4 wheel EVs.
- UltraViolence 4y ago
  I do agree that EV's will eventually be much cheaper than ICE vehicles, since they're mechanically much simpler (they're basically a battery with an electric motors and 4 wheels). The devil is basically in the battery chemistry, which is extremely difficult to improve on. Ignore all the "revolutionary" new batteries you hear about almost every week. None of them are heading for production for the same reasons: their capacity or durability are much lower than current Li-Ion batteries.
lamnk 4y ago
> In some cities, especially in the north they are nearly the majority of vehicles on the road. lol, do you really live in Vietnam? How many electric scooters do you see on the street in compare to the gasoline counterparts? Honda alone deliver about 2.7 million bikes per year in Vietnam. All of the Honda bikes are ICE. The number of new electric scooters is not even six figures. > Toyota will never be very popular in Vietnam. Recently Toyota is not as popular as some years ago. But they still ship the most passenger cars among other manufacturers last year.
- refurb 4y ago
  Have to agree 100%. During my time there this year I saw maybe 1 or 2 electric scooters? I did see some Vinfast electric charging stations though. Vietnam is still a relatively poor country (~$600USD/month average wage). It's going to take a long time before the current vehicles on the road are replaced with new ones. It's still pretty common to see people riding around motorbikes from the 80's and 90's.
- EdwardDiego 4y ago
  You have different opinions, bit rude to suggest the commenter is lying about where they live.
  - ThunderSizzle 4y ago
    It's the internet. The entire state of the internet is to basically assume most comments and data are lies or at least partially true at best.
    - FullyFunctional 4y ago
      This is Hacker News. We hold discourse to a higher standard.
    - EdwardDiego 4y ago
      But implications of lying just divert the discourse from useful to emotive. HN is pretty good at trying to avoid that, long may it live.
JKCalhoun 4y ago
Yes, but there's no profit in electric scooters for Toyota — anyone can make them.
csomar 4y ago
> But even if you limit yourself to cars, a friend just bought a Volvo S90 Recharge electric car to drive in Ho Chi Minh City. The heck does this mean? Suddenly, vietnam is going to follow the trend and buy electric cars? This car costs something like $60k in Vietnam. The country gdp per capita is $2700. Most people who can buy cars will probably buy an old gas car.
- moviewatcher333 4y ago
  The most common car I saw in Vietnam was some colossal Ford truck. Straight up American-sized and bigger than anything I’ve seen anywhere else in Asia. Everything was either a tiny scooter, or a massive truck well oversized for the narrow and crowded roads. In countries where wealth divides are big, people go all out on large and expensive items. I could see 60k electric cars taking off among the top 2%, which still amounts to millions of people.
- _ph_ 4y ago
  Isn't that the point? That people in poor countries mostly buy old cars from other countries? Which currently of course means they are gas powered. But what about the day when old cars start to be mostly electric? Wouldn't electric cars become equally, if not more attractive to poor countries?
  - saiya-jin 4y ago
    Electric cars don't age in same way as mechanic/based ones which we had 100 years to perfect. People buy those used cars from other countries because any skilled mechanic in dirt poor country can repair most of it, dismantle engine to last screw. And nobody is importing a Maserati for example. I don't see this happening in EVs, at least not current generations. On super-proprietary cars like Tesla probably never.
    - _ph_ 4y ago
      I think this is a myth in several ways. First of all, modern ICE cars are anything but easily repairable with their complex exhaust treatment and turbo chargers. They are very delicate machinery and won't be on the roads for 40 years like cars from the 80ies might be. And then, electric cars seem to be pretty easily repairable. Just look at all the home-built electric conversions. Or the guy who builds new Teslas out of totalled ones. I think it is even the other way around. There was a startup in Germany which designed a small electric truck with Africa in mind. Basic, cheap, not only repairable but designed to be assembled by the customers. This is way cheaper to do with electric technology then with combustion engines.
flakeoil 4y ago
Adding to that, vehicles with built in solar panels will also add some attractiveness to this for development countries. No need to pay for fuel/electricity. Sure it might take up to a full day to get 50-100 miles in the battery, but with smaller vehicles (three wheelers, motor bikes etc) it will definitely work out. Certainly considering many development countries are mostly sunny places like south east Asia, Africa, and south America.
yrgulation 4y ago
EV sales are going up everywhere, never mind op, its just the age old chauvinist speak.
Gravityloss 4y ago
Buses and taxis make the sense to switch to EV:s first, since they drive the most and the total lifetime cost is dominated by energy cost and maintenance, not the investment. If you think about the limited battery supply chain, with the minerals, components, modules etc, it doesn't make so much sense to put them to huge battery SUV:s that mostly just sit on the driveway or office parking lot. This too will eventually happen, but it's better for the economy and the climate to put them where they are actually displacing the most fossil fuels.
ladyattis 4y ago
I think that's part of the problem I see with the discussion regarding EVs in that everything is framed with the concept of a car and that some how all cities across the world will have the same kind of infrastructure standards (aka US styled stroads, Euclidean zoning, and so forth). If anything, EVs like you stated are likely to be slimmer, slower, and more useful to get around on than just replacing the SUV's ICE components with batteries and electric motors.

onpensionsterm 4y ago

Vietnam's transport stats are skewed by insane import and luxury taxes.

potatolicious 4y ago

If there's one thing I've learned is that one shouldn't underestimate the sheer speed at which a maturing technology cheapens itself in a drive downmarket. Cars themselves went from being a rich person's curiosity to mostly-affordable to ubiquitous in the space of 50 years. Airline travel went from a luxury for the rich to broadly affordable in about ~30 years. For more recent examples see smartphones - in less than 10 years it's gone from exclusively high-end device to near-universal adoption across the world. It's often hard to figure out what technologies will stick and what will never resolve fundamental flaws - but once it sticks in the high-end market there is a good bet it will rapidly drive its way down the price scale, at a far faster speed than you might expect.

ballenf 4y ago
LED bulbs is the one that still surprises me. The quality jump and price cliff from the flickery, blindness-inducing early bulbs was very fast.
- rhino369 4y ago
  Semiconductors have HUGE upfront R&D cost, but marginal costs aren't that bad.
  - Scoundreller 4y ago
    Same with PVs
- joe-collins 4y ago
  I remember buying just a pair of bulbs for my first apartment in 2010 at $20 each, and now they're a dollar or two apiece.
  - shapefrog 4y ago
    I remember buying bulbs in 2010 at $20 each - I havent had to buy any since.
- prometheon1 4y ago
  One of the main reasons for this is research funding and regulation by the European Union. Something similar is probably going to happen with hydrogen production over the next years. (Not as fuel for cars but for industry)
  - mrpopo 4y ago
    Mandatory reminder that hydrogen as fuel for cars is an incredible waste of primary energy and will be for a long time. A petrol car engine is inefficient due to constraints (small + no cooling source other than air). An electric engine + battery is extremely efficient (the "downside" is you can't use the wasted energy to heat up the car in winter like an ICE). An electric engine + hydrogen fuel tank brings back inefficiency, and you can't even reuse that wasted energy because most of this waste is electrolysis.
    - samtho 4y ago
      On the other hand, you can refill a pressurized hydrogen tank in seconds. Electricity itself is merely a mode of energy transmission. Energy storage has and will continue to be a huge innovation area as the current means of battery charging are either slow or low capacity. We’re getting really good at getting energy from the sun, and excess energy not consumed is wasted, so why not make hydrogen? Heck, why not have fuel stations in the middle of nowhere have a well (for water extraction) and an array of solar panels so the station can produce its own product to sell? I can see a future where you can opt for a hydrogen fuel cell EV rather than a battery powered one. Efficiently using the hydrogen will be a non-issue if we are able to trivially produce a vast abundance of it. It’s hard to say that an EV is just as good (for the consumer) as an ICE engine if I am taking a road trip and one of many fill-ups makes me wait for hours. There are these uncommon cars that opponents usually cite and are sometimes unfairly dismissed. I say this because we can and will make EV technology better and cheaper and I’m willing to bet money that hydrogen fuel cell in lieu of batteries will become a thing.
      - tedk-42 4y ago
        You think you have two good points (refill time + H2 generation from water) but really you have nothing. Hydrogen might fill a gap to replace large vehicles like buses or trucks but not passenger vehicles.
- hoseja 4y ago
  What surprises me is how they managed to make them artificially degrade anyway through terrible cooling. We could have truly eternal LEDs for only minor increase in material cost but no, they have to overheat and burn out to secure profits for Philips.
_spduchamp 4y ago
What we don't see here in North America are small cheap EVs for doing small tasks in the city. All EVs here are big and expensive. There is a huge proliferation of electric scooters in the city, in particular in low income areas, and while you may see the occasional 3 wheeler, you never ever see small 4 wheel EVs.
UltraViolence 4y ago
I do agree that EV's will eventually be much cheaper than ICE vehicles, since they're mechanically much simpler (they're basically a battery with an electric motors and 4 wheels). The devil is basically in the battery chemistry, which is extremely difficult to improve on. Ignore all the "revolutionary" new batteries you hear about almost every week. None of them are heading for production for the same reasons: their capacity or durability are much lower than current Li-Ion batteries.

lamnk 4y ago

> In some cities, especially in the north they are nearly the majority of vehicles on the road. lol, do you really live in Vietnam? How many electric scooters do you see on the street in compare to the gasoline counterparts? Honda alone deliver about 2.7 million bikes per year in Vietnam. All of the Honda bikes are ICE. The number of new electric scooters is not even six figures. > Toyota will never be very popular in Vietnam. Recently Toyota is not as popular as some years ago. But they still ship the most passenger cars among other manufacturers last year.

refurb 4y ago
Have to agree 100%. During my time there this year I saw maybe 1 or 2 electric scooters? I did see some Vinfast electric charging stations though. Vietnam is still a relatively poor country (~$600USD/month average wage). It's going to take a long time before the current vehicles on the road are replaced with new ones. It's still pretty common to see people riding around motorbikes from the 80's and 90's.
EdwardDiego 4y ago
You have different opinions, bit rude to suggest the commenter is lying about where they live.
- ThunderSizzle 4y ago
  It's the internet. The entire state of the internet is to basically assume most comments and data are lies or at least partially true at best.
  - FullyFunctional 4y ago
    This is Hacker News. We hold discourse to a higher standard.
  - EdwardDiego 4y ago
    But implications of lying just divert the discourse from useful to emotive. HN is pretty good at trying to avoid that, long may it live.

JKCalhoun 4y ago

Yes, but there's no profit in electric scooters for Toyota — anyone can make them.

csomar 4y ago

> But even if you limit yourself to cars, a friend just bought a Volvo S90 Recharge electric car to drive in Ho Chi Minh City. The heck does this mean? Suddenly, vietnam is going to follow the trend and buy electric cars? This car costs something like $60k in Vietnam. The country gdp per capita is $2700. Most people who can buy cars will probably buy an old gas car.

moviewatcher333 4y ago
The most common car I saw in Vietnam was some colossal Ford truck. Straight up American-sized and bigger than anything I’ve seen anywhere else in Asia. Everything was either a tiny scooter, or a massive truck well oversized for the narrow and crowded roads. In countries where wealth divides are big, people go all out on large and expensive items. I could see 60k electric cars taking off among the top 2%, which still amounts to millions of people.
_ph_ 4y ago
Isn't that the point? That people in poor countries mostly buy old cars from other countries? Which currently of course means they are gas powered. But what about the day when old cars start to be mostly electric? Wouldn't electric cars become equally, if not more attractive to poor countries?
- saiya-jin 4y ago
  Electric cars don't age in same way as mechanic/based ones which we had 100 years to perfect. People buy those used cars from other countries because any skilled mechanic in dirt poor country can repair most of it, dismantle engine to last screw. And nobody is importing a Maserati for example. I don't see this happening in EVs, at least not current generations. On super-proprietary cars like Tesla probably never.
  - _ph_ 4y ago
    I think this is a myth in several ways. First of all, modern ICE cars are anything but easily repairable with their complex exhaust treatment and turbo chargers. They are very delicate machinery and won't be on the roads for 40 years like cars from the 80ies might be. And then, electric cars seem to be pretty easily repairable. Just look at all the home-built electric conversions. Or the guy who builds new Teslas out of totalled ones. I think it is even the other way around. There was a startup in Germany which designed a small electric truck with Africa in mind. Basic, cheap, not only repairable but designed to be assembled by the customers. This is way cheaper to do with electric technology then with combustion engines.

flakeoil 4y ago

Adding to that, vehicles with built in solar panels will also add some attractiveness to this for development countries. No need to pay for fuel/electricity. Sure it might take up to a full day to get 50-100 miles in the battery, but with smaller vehicles (three wheelers, motor bikes etc) it will definitely work out. Certainly considering many development countries are mostly sunny places like south east Asia, Africa, and south America.

yrgulation 4y ago

EV sales are going up everywhere, never mind op, its just the age old chauvinist speak.

Gravityloss 4y ago

Buses and taxis make the sense to switch to EV:s first, since they drive the most and the total lifetime cost is dominated by energy cost and maintenance, not the investment. If you think about the limited battery supply chain, with the minerals, components, modules etc, it doesn't make so much sense to put them to huge battery SUV:s that mostly just sit on the driveway or office parking lot. This too will eventually happen, but it's better for the economy and the climate to put them where they are actually displacing the most fossil fuels.

ladyattis 4y ago

I think that's part of the problem I see with the discussion regarding EVs in that everything is framed with the concept of a car and that some how all cities across the world will have the same kind of infrastructure standards (aka US styled stroads, Euclidean zoning, and so forth). If anything, EVs like you stated are likely to be slimmer, slower, and more useful to get around on than just replacing the SUV's ICE components with batteries and electric motors.