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Off topic, those prices omg, how the hell are we going to get to zero without 95% of the population just being too poor to own a car? No matter how great the te

Off topic, those prices omg, how the hell are we going to get to zero without 95% of the population just being too poor to own a car? No matter how great the tech is, this is one of those rare occasions where the price of advanced new tech goes up with time. I've been able to buy a new 150 euro laptop for decades now at about 10% the price of a decent one. Why isn't this happening with electric vehicles?

lynx23 2y ago
If I had to guess... Because EVs are still a luxury item. All the green-deal-EVs-are-the-future talk is basically hot air. At least in my circles, all the EV owners have medium-to-high income. Its a luxury. And therefore, prices are high, because, you know, customers can and should be squeezed to the max.
- user_7832 2y ago
  The annoying thing is that there's nothing inherent about EVs that make them expensive/luxury. A budget EV is just as possible as a budget car, sure, the range may suffer (unless it's a hybrid) but it's technically possible. It's companies and maybe consumer preferences driving this. I'd guess luxury EVs just have a fatter margin.
  - infecto 2y ago
    It is a mixture that plays off each other. Consumers don't want small cars in the US and mid-size cars provide far better margin.
throw383y8 2y ago
You can buy EV for a few hundreds dollars (bike), cheapest Chinese cars are around $2k, European minis start at 10k EUR. EVs are actually very cheap as basic city car, but you have to leave out extra features like long range, bidicharging, heating... Zero emissions means much smaller car, not some monstrosity like 3 tons SUV ls for personal transport.
- uf00lme 2y ago
  A lot of safety features are mandatory in Eu/Aus/US/NA etc, making imported Chinese cars much more expensive than first thought. Bidirectional charging does not add much cost if planned ahead, since most of the effort is in implementing ISO 15118-20 rather than hardware. I feel like the main issue with bidirectional adoption currently is the number of groups trying to maximise their profit, everyone wants a cut of the pie: the car companies, energy companies, ev charging companies, ev charging networks, solar/inverter manufactures and government standard groups. The needle won't move until California or other countries with influence force it. In Japan, from a technology perspective CHAdeMO has allowed for EVs to do bidirectional charging for years now. Side note - I'm all for any extra safety features but I do find that a lot of the software driven features are poorly designed and implemented. I've had bad experiences with automatic braking and lane keeping when freeways driving where I was lucky to avoid having an accidents, so not being able to disable them permanently is a major annoyance to me. It seems like these features have very little real world testing.
  - throw383y8 2y ago
    Charging adds TONS of cost. For start most small city cars are simply charged from wall socket. 2KW are absolutely fine to charge such small cars. You are comparing cost of power cable, with building dedicated circuits and charging station! Second is the deprecation cost on car battery! Cycles add up quickly!
pards 2y ago
The prices are in Australian dollars 1 USD = 1.5 AUD 1 AUD = 0.67 USD Converting the price of Nissan Leaf to USD would be about $34,163 which is close to the prices listed on the Nissan website [0] [0]: https://www.nissanusa.com/shopping-tools/build-price?models=nissan-leaf&modelYear=current-year https://www.nissanusa.com/shopping-tools/build-price?models=...
pjc50 2y ago
Check out the BYD Dolphin. (the underlying politics seems to be that the existing Western manufacturers are lagging deliberately, while the Chinese manufacturers are concentrating on delivering working products cheaply to consumers)
- infecto 2y ago
  Thats not entirely true. In the US at least I believe it has more to do with consumer demand. Small cars are not popular. On the EV front we had the Ford Bolt and the Nissan Leaf, neither of which sell very well. There have also been large supply issues, most of the battery refinement is happening in China.
  - londons_explore 2y ago
    > Small cars are not popular. small cars are not popular, and large cars have much more aerodynamic drag and therefore require bigger batteries. Bigger batteries dramatically increase the cost of the car.
    - infecto 2y ago
      And? The fact remains, in the US market small cars are not popular. Its not a conspiracy of US manufacturers "lagging deliberately". There of course is more margin to be made on bigger vehicles but its a mixture of both consumer demand and margin incentives.
  - pjc50 2y ago
    Parent comment was "how the hell are we going to get to zero without 95% of the population just being too poor to own a car?" If people would rather walk than suffer the shame of a small cheap car that's .. fine by me? Just make sure that the small cars "nobody wants" aren't carefully kept out of the market by tariffs and non tariff barriers to avoid people discovering that they do want them.
    - infecto 2y ago
edent 2y ago
Your cheap laptop doesn't have to go through multiple rounds of destructive safety testing. It isn't recalled every time a hardware issue is found. It doesn't have to certify much of anything other than some basic electric and RF safety. But, nevertheless, the price of EVs is coming down. You can buy a Renault AMI for 10% of the cost of a luxury EV. The other issue is that most people buy cars on finance. £300/month gets you a decent car. Same as most people pay £50/mo for their iPhone.
- BurnGpuBurn 2y ago
  Sorry, but a Renault AMI is not a car, it's more like a toy. Wouldn't want to go on the high way with that...
  - edent 2y ago
    Sorry, but a cheap ChromeBook is not a laptop, it's more like a toy. Wouldn't want to compile Linux with that... Do you get the analogy now?
    - BurnGpuBurn 2y ago
      Well, a cheap laptop lets me check my mail and write a document. Which I can also do on an expensive laptop. A cheap car gets me from a to b. An expensive car too. But seriously, that's not a car. I own a Toyota IQ. Very small, but still a car. That's not a car, that's a toy. Not comparable to the cheap laptop, more comparable to a Nintendo DS or something similar. It works, but it won't let you email. Just like that "car" won't let you drive for a couple of hours on the highway without feeling you might die every moment.

lynx23 2y ago

If I had to guess... Because EVs are still a luxury item. All the green-deal-EVs-are-the-future talk is basically hot air. At least in my circles, all the EV owners have medium-to-high income. Its a luxury. And therefore, prices are high, because, you know, customers can and should be squeezed to the max.

user_7832 2y ago
The annoying thing is that there's nothing inherent about EVs that make them expensive/luxury. A budget EV is just as possible as a budget car, sure, the range may suffer (unless it's a hybrid) but it's technically possible. It's companies and maybe consumer preferences driving this. I'd guess luxury EVs just have a fatter margin.
- infecto 2y ago
  It is a mixture that plays off each other. Consumers don't want small cars in the US and mid-size cars provide far better margin.

throw383y8 2y ago

You can buy EV for a few hundreds dollars (bike), cheapest Chinese cars are around $2k, European minis start at 10k EUR. EVs are actually very cheap as basic city car, but you have to leave out extra features like long range, bidicharging, heating... Zero emissions means much smaller car, not some monstrosity like 3 tons SUV ls for personal transport.

uf00lme 2y ago
A lot of safety features are mandatory in Eu/Aus/US/NA etc, making imported Chinese cars much more expensive than first thought. Bidirectional charging does not add much cost if planned ahead, since most of the effort is in implementing ISO 15118-20 rather than hardware. I feel like the main issue with bidirectional adoption currently is the number of groups trying to maximise their profit, everyone wants a cut of the pie: the car companies, energy companies, ev charging companies, ev charging networks, solar/inverter manufactures and government standard groups. The needle won't move until California or other countries with influence force it. In Japan, from a technology perspective CHAdeMO has allowed for EVs to do bidirectional charging for years now. Side note - I'm all for any extra safety features but I do find that a lot of the software driven features are poorly designed and implemented. I've had bad experiences with automatic braking and lane keeping when freeways driving where I was lucky to avoid having an accidents, so not being able to disable them permanently is a major annoyance to me. It seems like these features have very little real world testing.
- throw383y8 2y ago
  Charging adds TONS of cost. For start most small city cars are simply charged from wall socket. 2KW are absolutely fine to charge such small cars. You are comparing cost of power cable, with building dedicated circuits and charging station! Second is the deprecation cost on car battery! Cycles add up quickly!

pards 2y ago

The prices are in Australian dollars 1 USD = 1.5 AUD 1 AUD = 0.67 USD Converting the price of Nissan Leaf to USD would be about $34,163 which is close to the prices listed on the Nissan website [0] [0]: https://www.nissanusa.com/shopping-tools/build-price?models=nissan-leaf&modelYear=current-year https://www.nissanusa.com/shopping-tools/build-price?models=...

pjc50 2y ago

Check out the BYD Dolphin. (the underlying politics seems to be that the existing Western manufacturers are lagging deliberately, while the Chinese manufacturers are concentrating on delivering working products cheaply to consumers)

infecto 2y ago
Thats not entirely true. In the US at least I believe it has more to do with consumer demand. Small cars are not popular. On the EV front we had the Ford Bolt and the Nissan Leaf, neither of which sell very well. There have also been large supply issues, most of the battery refinement is happening in China.
- londons_explore 2y ago
  > Small cars are not popular. small cars are not popular, and large cars have much more aerodynamic drag and therefore require bigger batteries. Bigger batteries dramatically increase the cost of the car.
  - infecto 2y ago
    And? The fact remains, in the US market small cars are not popular. Its not a conspiracy of US manufacturers "lagging deliberately". There of course is more margin to be made on bigger vehicles but its a mixture of both consumer demand and margin incentives.
- pjc50 2y ago
  Parent comment was "how the hell are we going to get to zero without 95% of the population just being too poor to own a car?" If people would rather walk than suffer the shame of a small cheap car that's .. fine by me? Just make sure that the small cars "nobody wants" aren't carefully kept out of the market by tariffs and non tariff barriers to avoid people discovering that they do want them.
  - infecto 2y ago

edent 2y ago

Your cheap laptop doesn't have to go through multiple rounds of destructive safety testing. It isn't recalled every time a hardware issue is found. It doesn't have to certify much of anything other than some basic electric and RF safety. But, nevertheless, the price of EVs is coming down. You can buy a Renault AMI for 10% of the cost of a luxury EV. The other issue is that most people buy cars on finance. £300/month gets you a decent car. Same as most people pay £50/mo for their iPhone.

BurnGpuBurn 2y ago
Sorry, but a Renault AMI is not a car, it's more like a toy. Wouldn't want to go on the high way with that...
- edent 2y ago
  Sorry, but a cheap ChromeBook is not a laptop, it's more like a toy. Wouldn't want to compile Linux with that... Do you get the analogy now?
  - BurnGpuBurn 2y ago
    Well, a cheap laptop lets me check my mail and write a document. Which I can also do on an expensive laptop. A cheap car gets me from a to b. An expensive car too. But seriously, that's not a car. I own a Toyota IQ. Very small, but still a car. That's not a car, that's a toy. Not comparable to the cheap laptop, more comparable to a Nintendo DS or something similar. It works, but it won't let you email. Just like that "car" won't let you drive for a couple of hours on the highway without feeling you might die every moment.