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>That reason largely disappears for electric vehicles It already mostly disappeared, or entered the realm of “completely reasonable trade-off”, with the rise o

>That reason largely disappears for electric vehicles It already mostly disappeared, or entered the realm of “completely reasonable trade-off”, with the rise of unibody low-displacement SUVs. The original SUVs were body-on-frame V8s that got 13 mpg. Gas price and uncomfortable ride were a huge factor. Now you can get a RAV4 hybrid that drives like a car and gets 40 mpg. And you get a tailgate. Why would anyone bother with a sedan and the limitations the trunk gives you? For 5-7 more mpg it’s not worth it.

vuln 3y ago
> RAV4 hybrid that drives like a car and gets 40 mpg. I had a 2018 rav4 hybrid that never got close to 40MPG. Maybe 30-32 in the city, but once you hit the interstate where the speed limit is 65-70 the MPG significantly drops to 25-7 due to the underpowered 4 cylinder engine and the massive 3,900 lbs curb weight. The rav4 only had 5k miles on it when we got rid of it. I guess it’s good if you live in a big city or never drive the actual speed limit on the interstates.
- sokoloff 3y ago
  The difference in fuel consumed from 40 down to 30 mpg was a little over 40 gallons over your ownership (so under $200). That hardly seems worth changing cars over once you’ve bought it.
  - TylerE 3y ago
    We really need to start using gallons per distance instead of distance per gallon. The former doesn’t distort the proportion. Going from 10mpg to 20 is massive, literally double the efficiency. 20 to 30 is still a pretty big deal. 30 to 40 is noticeable, but not really a huge deal. 40 to 50 is barely above the noise floor
    - analog31 3y ago
      There are all kinds of interesting "reciprocal" units that lead to confusion. Another one is price-to-earnings ratio, which goes through an anomaly at zero, even though earnings-to-price ratio is a nice smooth function.
  - vuln 3y ago
    Okay extrapolate that over 100k miles. If the battery even lasts that long. It wasn’t good for our use case and we incurred zero loss if anything we made money selling it back. They were in very high demand.

vuln 3y ago

> RAV4 hybrid that drives like a car and gets 40 mpg. I had a 2018 rav4 hybrid that never got close to 40MPG. Maybe 30-32 in the city, but once you hit the interstate where the speed limit is 65-70 the MPG significantly drops to 25-7 due to the underpowered 4 cylinder engine and the massive 3,900 lbs curb weight. The rav4 only had 5k miles on it when we got rid of it. I guess it’s good if you live in a big city or never drive the actual speed limit on the interstates.

sokoloff 3y ago
The difference in fuel consumed from 40 down to 30 mpg was a little over 40 gallons over your ownership (so under $200). That hardly seems worth changing cars over once you’ve bought it.
- TylerE 3y ago
  We really need to start using gallons per distance instead of distance per gallon. The former doesn’t distort the proportion. Going from 10mpg to 20 is massive, literally double the efficiency. 20 to 30 is still a pretty big deal. 30 to 40 is noticeable, but not really a huge deal. 40 to 50 is barely above the noise floor
  - analog31 3y ago
    There are all kinds of interesting "reciprocal" units that lead to confusion. Another one is price-to-earnings ratio, which goes through an anomaly at zero, even though earnings-to-price ratio is a nice smooth function.
- vuln 3y ago
  Okay extrapolate that over 100k miles. If the battery even lasts that long. It wasn’t good for our use case and we incurred zero loss if anything we made money selling it back. They were in very high demand.