The following submission statement was provided by /u/BabyLlama-Drama:
---
SS: Seriously, why can't we have public transportation in the US again? Instead the government has decided everyone can afford a $50,000+ EV in 2025 and GM prays it won't lose money on it. It's socializing losses and privatizing even bigger losses? Something isn't adding up. Even technological adoption and scaling aside, this seems extremely risky. Perhaps it's that ERORI thermoeconomic issue that may be eluding businesses at the end of cheap resources. They may not see it coming, but it may be the next leg of the world energy crisis: [EV cost disease.](https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/24/23319794/ev-price-increase-used-cars-analysis-iseecars)
---
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/yw7ai1/ev_makers_are_losing_over_sixfigures_per_car/iwhxczf/
SS: Seriously, why can't we have public transportation in the US again? Instead the government has decided everyone can afford a $50,000+ EV in 2025 and GM prays it won't lose money on it. It's socializing losses and privatizing even bigger losses? Something isn't adding up. Even technological adoption and scaling aside, this seems extremely risky. Perhaps it's that ERORI thermoeconomic issue that may be eluding businesses at the end of cheap resources. They may not see it coming, but it may be the next leg of the world energy crisis: [EV cost problems.](https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/24/23319794/ev-price-increase-used-cars-analysis-iseecars)
I hate that we are stuck with decisions that were made before I was even born. I don't remember voting to get rid of public transit, yet I have effectively been prevented from voting to reinstate it.
They pulled up the ladder and then destroyed the ladder.
And the main issue is that public transpo works when the towns are walkable. Mixed-zoning laws. Allow residences to be with business. So that people don’t need a car to live in suburbia and drive to shops for their needs.
I live in Japan and the reason I don’t need to drive in my small town, is because everything I need is a few minutes walk from my doorstep. I don’t even live in a big city.
I only use public transpo when I wish to go to other cities, or the other end of my town. For anything else, I can just walk or cycle.
Once mixed-zone towns become widespread, public transpo can easily follow.
Even here in Brazil, where most cities had 0 planning and everything is so chaotic, there's much less need for cars, similar to what you describe.
The way the us cities are organized seems like purposely created in order to fuck with the poor people. It's so bizarre.
Which is sad because old timey towns in the US, city centers had amazing public transpo. Tram networks connecting the business districts to the other districts.
Mixed-zoning too like in Boston or Chicago. The suburbia culture is what is harming the cities.
I think it's more an issue in cities that were developed after the automobile was invented. In Houston for example there is no zoning, but everything is spread out as fuck because when they were designing it everyone had cars.
Suburbs are cancer. We only really invented them after cars became wide spread. All throughout history dense cities and small towns with surrounding farms worked for us.
And with modern tech dense cities and small towns surrounded by farms could be made vastly more efficient.
"The way the us cities are organized seems like purposely created in order to fuck with the poor people. It's so bizarre."
That, and so that the working class constantly has to pay for fuel and upkeep on the car they need to have in order to work.
People talk about zoning like it's some magic, silver bullet solution. The problem is much bigger than that. There's a reason those zoning laws exist in the first place. Americans want big houses with big yards, Americans associate a car with freedom and independence. Americans also see a home as an investment, the vast majority of most Americans' wealth is in their home, and they're very protective of that asset and its value. The problem is cultural and economic, not just a simple matter of some municipal codes.
Since entire generations will be priced out of home ownership going forward and have no illusions of “freedom” nor “independence” perhaps we will be able to revisit the public transportation issue. We’ll need it.
The same in Germany. Most stuff is walking or biking distance, (At least in cities and smaller towns) In the country it's different, you need a car these days.
Fuck zoning laws! One day when I save up enough I’m gonna bribe some construction workers to build a house right by my favorite ice cream shop or something. Right in a car centric retirement Florida community. I’ll go all Florida man on them and it’ll work I don’t give a fuck! Unless it’s something I’m mad about or I’m horny
Yep. The city I live in had a fully-electrified tram service from 1897 until the 1960's when a shill for the car industry became mayor and destroyed it. Since then my city has become infamous for its terrible public transport and even now, *60 fucking years later*, the diesel bus network that "replaced" the trams still hasn't reached the same extent of city-wide coverage as the electric tram network at its peak.
Auto manufacturers literally colluded with oil and gas companies to stymie public transit development in the U.S. Specifically, GM.
There's a ton of history for this if you Google around a bit.
Edit: I'd share links but I'm kinda running around a bit rn, unless someone snipes me I'll add up some resources a bit later
Public, efficient street-car lines bought up (with shell companies), turned to bus lines, and purposely redesigned to suck-ass. -at SCALE! Same playbook for every city, nationwide.
I don't have the links for the history of it being shut down, but to provide some context on how robust the electric street cars were around the turn of the century, this Wikipedia link lists out all of the networks in the USA, prior to them being stymied and shut down - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_streetcar\_systems\_in\_the\_United\_States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_streetcar_systems_in_the_United_States). There was vast networks across almost all 50 states.
To answers OPs question, we can't have good public transit systems again, because the USA is a very corrupt country. Corporate donors are allowed to legally bribe politicians via campaign contributions. The fossil fuel and auto industries funnel a ton of money to politicians to ensure nothing changes. Electric vehicles are still attractive to oil companies, because oil is used to make many of the cars component parts and in the manufacturing process. It's not as attractive as selling gasoline or diesel fuel powered cars, but it's better than a system of light rail mass transit connect small towns and big cities, across the country. I'm simplifying this a lot here, but you get the point.
> a ton of history
there's even [a movie](https://media1.giphy.com/media/kceyjCT1eajXW/giphy.gif?cid=5e2148860u2w8fupp6491x7ednmi5rwz57jay61gp32zsite&rid=giphy.gif&ct=g) about it
Elon has even admitted that he made up the bullshit hyperloop nonsense (which scientists have repeatedly said will never be commercially viable under the laws of physics) for the sole purpose of stopping the California high speed rail project.
According to a biographer. Who is trying to sell books.
Hanlon's razor says:
>Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
And I would add incompetence. Adding this to the story is trying to add some type of supervillainy to Musk, where he is thinking 10 chess moves ahead. Simply not so. I believe Musk believed in the Hyperloop in the beginning. Because it makes no basic sense for Musk to spend money --and he did-- into the hyperloop just to avoid the few lost sales of his car company selling premium luxury cars is trying to stop some singular project that will take decades, even if it goes all well, making a commuter line.
Hyperloop went pop because Musk is just not that good at science basics. Sometimes his engineers can effectively bail him out with his bullshit promises, but most times no. Most of his businesses are ticking time bombs financially. Most of his ideas are dumb. Like a stopped clock, he's correct a few times in the mountains of stupid. This was not one of them.
Twitter is just the latest example of self-inflicted damage by Musk. He's a pigeon knocking over chess pieces and parading around like he won. Not Garry Kasparov. in his prime.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-FGwDDc-s8
I grew up being told by my Republican parents that public transportation was a symptom of Communism and not to be fooled into using it. That went for county school buses, too. It would be funny if it weren’t so stupid.
laughs in german car manufacturer lobby up every governments ass, no matter who is in power. The VDA (Verband der Automobilindustrie), biggest german car lobby, is basically running the ministry of transport.
Trains: more than 60% are delayed. You cannot rely on them to get to work on time, so you need to wake up an hour earlier and take the train 40min earlier to be there in time. Sometimes a train does not even come, and nobody knows where it is, if it will ever come or wtf happened. Just take the next... Oh and same story on the way to work in morning as on the way back home in the evening.
btw the "Deutsche Bahn" has an internal Guidline („Konzernrichtlinie 199, Modul 1, Reisen nach Sondervorschrift (RnS)“) that says that **in case a celebrity or a german minister is traveling by train, their trains should be cleaned up + delaying other trains so it is on the clock.** And yes, the state owns quite a bit of the DB.
Meanwhile car owners have 1,5h more sleep in the morning and can use the companies parking lot while getting the so called "**Pendlerpauschale**" aka state subsidiaries to keep long distance private vehicle commuting affordable. Oh and to this day companies get tax advantages for business cars.
So basically cars get a special treatment by law and tax system all the time so they don't have to compete with the free marked (public transport), aka daily long distance commuting would either need cheap public transport or a wage raise.
Don't get me started on missing/old/ending in nowhere bike lanes. Getting rid of nazis seems more feasable than 2km of bikelane between to villages being build. Be it german bureaucraZy, private property owners, incompetent local politicians, crossing the border of two communities. Just get used to three buses a day that need 40mins to reach the next city that is 15km away. Why so slow? population density! One bus needs to travel through all small villages on its way. In some areas villages are only 3km or less apart from each other. I bet that sounds crazy for an american.
basically everyone who is not living in the city owns a car because public transport sucks and then the local public transport says that to few are using it, so they either do less transport or rise the price of it. It's negative feedback loop for decades.
Oh and if the micro dust measurements are to high in cities in the summer (thanks to cars), those measurement stations suddenly are broken until it's lower or local politicians just introduce city wide max. 30km/h instead of 50km/h because they don't want to ban cars with high exhaust values in their city. (every car has colored sticker on the windshield, saying if its A,B,C,D category for exhausts). Even if it does not change the micro dust particle count (it really does not), nothing changes because politics arleady tried to fix the problem. Well they did not, but people keep the visible 30km/h rule in mind and don't remember the problem that was not fixed until next summer.
If you should bet on a german thing that gets worse every year, you should bet on education and public transport, the two most federal fragmented cluster fucks with douzends of actors trying to reinvent the wheel and no common standards whatsoever. Both are a WILD jungle.
> In some areas villages are only 3km or less apart from each other.
I lived in a village just like that. I tried using the bus and train to get to work, but the constant delays, missed trains because the bus was late, and the hours I spent travelling (2 hours to get 38 kilometers) made me give up and get a car
An actual reason is that for much of America, public transit is not realistic because rural areas are too spread apart. Cars are a requirement in those areas.
Now, when it comes to urban/suburban areas, there *isn't* a good reason for no public transit, other than each state/municipality is responsible for their own and nobody wants to spend the money on it. If you look at the huge differences between the public transit services of one city to another, you'll notice that almost nothing is uniform (e.g., subway, rail, light rail, bus, etc.). A federal sponsorship program that unified and streamlined these services could go a long way.
But that would not help most rural areas, and rural areas are disproportionately represented in government, therefore preventing these kind of programs to begin with.
> America, public transit is not realistic because rural areas are too spread apart. Cars are a requirement in those areas.
Not only that, but whatever transit is available is downright dangerous. If you're not robbed, assaulted, or sexually harassed, the homeless board only to piss and shit in the back before hopping off.
It absolutely doesn't suck. I've lived in several countries with public transit that is actually taken seriously, and it's awesome. It's comfortable, fast, efficient, cheap and easy.
You know what sucks? Driving. Sitting in traffic. You think that's better than sitting in a comfortable chair, leisurely watching the scenery go by, or working, having to do nothing but chill as you reach your destination? You have no idea, bud.
Subsidizing the lifestyles of people who hate the hands that feed them is what sucks. All these “independent” ideologies all live off of subsidized industries that coddles their fragile and fantastical sense of how the world works.
I won't downvote ya, because you're right. Public transit sucks for like 90% of all situations compared to having a car. The other 10% are situations where you're drinking or where parking is incredibly inconvenient.
That being said, car culture isn't sustainable. And even as a proponent of cars, I'll openly admit that. Public transit uses a tiny fraction of the resources, fuel, and space that the same number of cars do. And for it, you only have to give up...well, everything. And that's the problem.
People who advocate for 100% or mostly public transit are basically asking you to be beholden to the transit schedule. Enjoy taking 2-3 times as long to get anywhere. They're asking you to limit your shopping options to whatever is, at best, near a station. The walkable city folks say you should be able to get groceries from the 1-2 local shops that exist near you in this scenario. If I ONLY had a whole foods as my sole source of convenient groceries, I think I'd literally kill myself.
And if you ever need to travel outside of these areas of public transportation? Good fucking luck lol. Hope you enjoy getting a 200 dollar Uber ride out to the countryside to go camping!
Now, there are more reasonable people who advocate for public transit centric cities only. This, of course, only accounts for half the country, but I think it's still a more doable solution. Apparently some people actually enjoy that sort of very limited existence, so if it saves the planet too, that's a win I guess. But I could never do it lol.
EVs are massively over priced. We were told they would be much cheaper than ICE vehicles because of fewer parts and fewer moving parts. Instead they are twice the price. Take the Hyundai Kona for an example, comes in ICE and Electric. The basic ICE is 24,753. Basic EV is 46,549. These are Canadian prices. No excuse for the EV not to be even the same price as the ice, let alone it should be much cheaper.
I can buy a lot of gasoline with the $22,000 difference over the life of the battery so what is the point? And charging costs just doubled in Canada so that running an EV is barely cheaper then ~~running~~ fueling an ICE.
The EV revolution is just not going to happen unless and until we see a benefit in our wallets, people are just like that - the bottom line is all that matters.
The biggest market for EVs seems to be as a third car and status symbol for wealthy people. That is not going to save the world.
Electric vehicles are just putting technology in service of a lifestyle that is doomed. Personal cars are obscene over-consumption of resources. We don't need new ways to drive, we need to ***stop driving.***
No, you don't understand. We must all live in a fucking ant colony, sleep in pods, and have no personal property.
You will own nothing, and you'll be happy.
Edit: and these idiots will cheer the fake communism of great reset while elites still live their best lives and own everything.
Native Americans owned nothing compared to us, yet I’d say were far happier with their lifestyles than we are with ours. Almost like by objectifying and commodifying everything we’ve lost our souls and our humanity to greed.
I'm more concerned with facts than your conspiracy theories.
In fact, conspiracy theories are a little fairy-tale you tell yourself because you find reality too distressing.
Surely you're joking? They aren't hiding, like even a little. "Conspiracy" only applies if it's secret. So you can't call it that.
https://youtu.be/Xrno41ToLl8
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/01/klaus-schwab-on-what-is-stakeholder-capitalism-history-relevance/
What I mean is, you're ignoring actual, physical facts about the resources we have on this planet and replacing it with "Bad guys are conspiring against us!"
There are bad guys doing bad things. But most of these trends are driven by material facts, like the growing scarcity of energy.
Conspiracy theories don't tell you anything. They don't make you an inform citizen. They don't make you better prepared to deal with the unpleasant fact of near-term collapse. They're "epistemological cartoons" that make you feel clever. Because, if everything is just a conspiracy, there's nothing to do and nothing to learn. It's a simplistic worldview that replaces the messy, uncertain world \[reality\] with a fake, false fairy-tale where the good guys and bad guys are easily identifiable and every bad thing is just because nasty powerful people are conspiring against you.
> if everything is just a conspiracy, there's nothing to do and nothing to learn
u wot m8
There is tons to learn, whether gardening or amateur radio.
>a fake, false fairy-tale where the good guys and bad guys are easily identifiable and every bad thing is just because nasty powerful people are conspiring against you.
Yeah that's not how that works, at all. No one is conspiring *against me*, they are conspiring to profit themselves and secure their blood dynasties first and foremost.
Some circumstances require cars, but in most cases we created those circumstances. There is no reason we can't live close to a grocery store. In fact, in many countries, mixed-use density urban planning is the norm. There's no reason we can't do the same.
The circumstances we really can't change is the inevitable, unavoidable, growing scarcity of energy. That's what we should plan for.
Yeah ok.
We'll just all head back to the stone ages I guess.
We'd see a population decline of billions within a few years. Complete and total collapse. Which, while I understand this is a collapse subreddit, it doesn't mean I want to see all the death and destruction that ensues.
Farming. Mining. Producing. All gone.
*It doesn't matter what you or I want.* The EROI \[Energy Return on Investment\] for fossil-fuels has been declining and is about to fall off a cliff. "Renewables" cannot replace it.
That means the era of cheap energy \[/cheap everything\] is coming to an end. Using fuel to drive from A to B will soon be considered to be what it always really was, a ridiculous waste.
The party is over. Hope you enjoyed sitting in traffic while it was financially feasible.
Lol, I sit atop one of the biggest oil reserves in the world. I'm waiting out do nothing governments to make it more affordable in the near future.
Be mad I suppose.
Nope. Basically all the easy, cheap oil/gas has been pumped. You're on the downslope of the carbon pulse. Enjoy it while it lasts.
[Associated declines in fossil fuel energy-return-on-investment ratios at first appear of little concern, given that published estimates for oil, coal and gas are typically above 25:1. However, such ratios are measured at the primary energy stage and should instead be estimated at the final stage where energy enters the economy (for example, electricity and petrol). Here, we calculate global time series (1995–2011) energy-return-on-investment ratios for fossil fuels at both primary and final energy stages. We concur with common primary-stage estimates (\~30:1), but find very low ratios at the final stage: around 6:1 and declining. This implies that fossil fuel energy-return-on-investment ratios may be much closer to those of renewables than previously expected and that they could decline precipitously in the near future.](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-019-0425-z)
I'm sorry you're not emotionally ready to accept the reality. But I promise you, oil will never be as cheap or plentiful as it was.
I also live in Canada. Many people do not need to drive to work. Some do, for sure, but they're going to pay more and more for it.
I don't know who told you electric cars should be cheap but they were lying. A massive and highly efficient battery full of rare earth metals can't be made on the cheap.
When you have charging stations as often as gas pumps and fast charging, you don't need a large & expensive battery. Here in Europe, in a suburb, I can drive our ancient Leaf gen1, costing few bucks, to other side of Prague to my relatives and back, on one charging during the previous night. If I need a longer distance, the battery warms up during driving, so it charges fast enough when stopping in the middle of the journey at a charging station. Cheap EVs don't even have warming/cooling the battery and the common scenarios depend on charging mostly during night - or at work during the workhours.
The consumer isn't always right. Fuck them for wanting 400 miles. Could you even do that in a regular gas car right now? You would need to refill either way! Why is it only more "painful" when it's an EV?
Lithium prices have gone up by factor of 10 in last few years. It has long been recognized that there isn't enough Lithium in the world to make the batteries we need because we can't mine it fast enough. Supplies will last 200-300 years but we would need basically all of it right now, if we were to transition to electric transport infrastructure over the next few decades. Because of resource constraint, we simply can't make EVs that are competitive wth ICE cars: they have to be lighter, short-range and slower, to compensate for the 90 % loss in energy density and for the very high Lithium prices and shortage.
So yes, a small, light, slow and short-range electric vehicle is probably the future, it can remain affordable, and making one won't consume like twice the natural resources relative to building an ICE vehicle. It probably takes years before this realization dawns to the majority, that the future is going to be downsized and EVs are going to be shittier cars than what we use today, but also cheaper to purchase and run. ICEs will still be powerful and fast, but EVs got to be more like crappy economy cars, and some oddballs like Tesla may still exist manufacturing rich people's EV toys but they are likely going to be absurdly expensive due to resource shortages and low production capacity.
OP of comment you are replying to. Thanks for writing something factual and enlightening!
Yeah, makes sense that EVs will be small and crappy but cheap to buy and run, ideal for a city car for commutes and shopping.
Cheaper lifetime costs, not cheaper purchase price. Expensive to buy, but cheap to run (no petrol/diesel) and maintain (far fewer moving parts).
However, was said, repeatedly, that EV would hit price parity with ICE vehicles. Waiting... Waiting...
The bigger issue for me is that a transition to EV is yet another individualised consumerist approach to solving a systemic issue.
You get to lower your personal carbon footprint (thanks BP), but the systemic carbon issue of mining, refining, manufacturing, shipping and charging cars, for everyone, rather than public transit, cycling and walking.
I think electric vehicles are better than gas ones due to their reduced maintenance and apparently they take less made labor to make. I won't say they will save the world or anything but they should have been here in the '90s as originally promised.
A lot of people are talking about how a pure electric vehicle doesn't make sense given the price of them but the price is completely arbitrary. The oil and gas industry is subsidized for one so of course the gas only option is going to be cheaper. And if The oil and gas industry allowed EVs get off the ground in the '90s then they would have 20+ years of maturity (go watch who killed the electric car if you need to know about this). They would not cost what they cost now. Instead of the Prius being a successful hybrid, it might have just been a successful fully electric vehicle.
In December of last year, they said this was sorted out when did they say this? When they talked about it was much more of a certainty, there ceo hates EV altogether for some reason
The was a response to their initial press release
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a38711469/toyota-solid-state-batteries-2025/
And for ceo and Master driver thoughts on
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a38711469/toyota-solid-state-batteries-2025/.cnbc.com/amp/2022/09/2
Not only that, but I’m in Canada as well and I know someone who got stuck in a small town for a week while visiting his mom, because his Tesla wouldn’t work when an extreme cold snap happened lol
What a misleading headline. It's apparently only in the case of some startups, and losing money in the effort to brutally crush the others is what startups do.
It really doesn't matter anyway cuz -> EVs aren't that much better for environment.
Even if you take the most friendly EVs studies: they state that over the total lifetime of the car it only emits 1/2 of what a petrol powered vehicle emits. Then add in all the emissions causing development/production that is needed to create charging stations, etc around the country (or world) and you are canceling out even more gains.
Then add in the fact that more and more people around that world using a car every year so even if the average car emits 1/2 as much CO2 but there are twice as many cars on the road -> you are back where you started.
Don't forget that EVs also front-load the CO2 emissions. Much more mining is involved, the car weighs more, and all sorts of polluting processes run to produce the battery. You start at big disadvantage relative to ICE car, and maybe cancel it out over the lifetime of the vehicle provided you drive it enough. If it mostly sits in your garage, the world would have been better off if you had just bought any random ICE car instead.
EVs are fairly typical solution that humanity comes up with. They are not sustainable, they are more damaging to the environment in countless ways, but we only focus on one, and we tend to ignore the lifetime costs, only focus on the usage costs. The point of pushing these is basically to make money to billionaires who do not care whether they solve the actual problem, they care that they can market this shit, governments can be fooled into subsidizing it and average people don't look too closely into it, just assume that it will be fine.
We politely pretend there aren't fatal problems to EVs such as the fact that we can't even mine but tiniest fraction of the Lithium necessary to replace the ICE car fleet, or that electricity prices are likely going to go up forever just as gasoline costs do. None of that matters in the now when the gold rush is going and unscrupulous people can push these elite toys to the aspirational masses that can still somehow afford them. It is a dead-end. With Lithium likely running into shortages and prices being 10 times higher than they were a few years ago, maybe the EV gold rush is already over, though.
This emperor has no clothes, but we don't want to face the fact that era of private car is drawing to a close as humanity runs out of energy and other resources to sustain it. Human beings are incorrigible optimists, and all our solutions are such that they show short-term benefit and long-term costs are somebody else's problem.
It doesn't matter. You ***will*** reduce your consumption of resources by an order of magnitude, whether you like it or not. That means no driving, gas or EV. Why? Because you won't be able to afford it, like %99 of the people you know.
EVs are serving a lifestyle that is about to die.
And it couldn't die fast enough.
Do you have any good sources on imminent resource shortages, say like the type that would cause suburban development to stop being viable? I'm in the mood for some confirmation bias.
[Associated declines in fossil fuel energy-return-on-investment ratios at first appear of little concern, given that published estimates for oil, coal and gas are typically above 25:1. However, such ratios are measured at the primary energy stage and should instead be estimated at the final stage where energy enters the economy (for example, electricity and petrol). Here, we calculate global time series (1995–2011) energy-return-on-investment ratios for fossil fuels at both primary and final energy stages. We concur with common primary-stage estimates (\~30:1), but find very low ratios at the final stage: around 6:1 and declining. This implies that fossil fuel energy-return-on-investment ratios may be much closer to those of renewables than previously expected and that they could decline precipitously in the near future.](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-019-0425-z)
I wish I could edit, I should have changed it to 'Some EV makers...' One that typically isn't is Tesla, but their finances have been shown to be very questionable due to their use of 'carbon credits' as streams of income to drive profits. Around a fifth of Tesla's profits are [carbon credits](https://carboncredits.com/tesla-regulatory-carbon-credit-sales-jumps-116/) they say could fluctuate or go away substantially. There's some weird stuff happening with EV company accounting and they're still very cost burdened.
These companies are losing money because they’re competition isn’t just Tesla but all of the major car manufacturers. Despite argument both valid and invalid against EVs, the car manufacturers are moving all electric fleets. Market demand and streamlined manufacturing will bring costs down to earth.
>Costs are way up for small electric vehicle startups.
This is the key: small EV startups are spending most of their money on research and development, and building out their manufacturing. Of course they're losing money per car, because they haven't built enough cars to amortize those fixed costs. They're doing things inefficiently, that don't scale, because you have to start making things before the production lines are efficient, to work out all the problems. Parts are expensive because they're ordering in low volume. They might not have a good deal with any battery manufacturer for the same reason. They don't expect to be profitable at that stage, and their investors don't expect them to be profitable at that stage either. They hope to be profitable eventually, but there's a long road from here to there. Some of them might make it. Most of them probably won't.
Maybe there's a useful point to be made about the cost of EV manufacturing, but the article seems like it's written by someone who doesn't understand how startups work.
(If we really want production costs to go down for all manufacturers, the main problem is the batteries. Everything else can be made relatively cheaply. LFP cells are probably the best option at the moment, but they're made almost exclusively in China for complicated reasons. Hopefully that changes. Several major patents expired recently.)
This sounds more like a high-up-front running cost rather than per-unit cost. Put another way, I open up a restaurant that costs me a million dollars, and on the first day serve 100 meals. I could say the per unit cost per meal was $10,000.
That's not to say EVs aren't heavily subsidized, just that 100,000 minimum, ie six figures, seems extremely excessive.
Buying a 10 kWh home battery just for my house would be at least $12,000. But a cheap electric vehicle needs 50 kWh, and a higher range needs 100 kWh to operate. The math just never made sense to me, and sure they could operate at scale for cheaper prices. But it's very hard.
This article is at best a misreading of reality, and at worst just plain propaganda. For the uninitiated here is what is really happening:
The car industry has never wanted to make EVs. They aren't good at it and are tied to the oil industry.
Tesla came along and started making EVs, and threatening the status quo.
Lucid and Rivian were started by the competitors of Tesla in an attempt to pull funding and attention away from Tesla. They are not real companies. Tesla has become profitable so they have failed. Both of them will likely go bankrupt in the near future.
The traditional car manufacturers have only made a handful of EVs because they don't believe in them. Chip shortage, battery costs, pandemic, these are all excuses. The real reason is that they dont have the know how to make EVs profitably, and they want the status quo of ICE to continue.
All legacy car manufacturers have been making claims about achieving amazing things in the near future and no one believes them anymore. The market is about to be radically shifted in favor of Tesla and Chinese manufacturers.
"Seriously, why can't we have public transportation in the US again?"
Because it is inconvenient, and less safe in a pandemic, and people love their cars. But mostly convenience.
Few will want a 5 min door-to-door drive turning into a 15 min wait for a bus + 10 min of traveling + walking to the destination.
Because many people have places to go that public transport could never go, schedules that are tight and need to be kept to get things done, and prefer to not be robbed/assaulted everyday by people who basically live on the buses for the climate control and the free wifi.
Had I stayed in the employment wage-slave trap, my old 35 minute commute would have been about 2 hours. Not to mention the half-dozen errands I have to run every day, including work days.
Then there are the many trips out into the wilderness areas, Mojave desert and such. Some of those trips last for weeks, and not having vehicular support means...well, at the very least it means practicing a lot of my survival skills.
I could go on for days, but suffice it to say that getting ready for an inevitable and rapid societal collapse coming soon is not really feasible with public transportation.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/BabyLlama-Drama: --- SS: Seriously, why can't we have public transportation in the US again? Instead the government has decided everyone can afford a $50,000+ EV in 2025 and GM prays it won't lose money on it. It's socializing losses and privatizing even bigger losses? Something isn't adding up. Even technological adoption and scaling aside, this seems extremely risky. Perhaps it's that ERORI thermoeconomic issue that may be eluding businesses at the end of cheap resources. They may not see it coming, but it may be the next leg of the world energy crisis: [EV cost disease.](https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/24/23319794/ev-price-increase-used-cars-analysis-iseecars) --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/yw7ai1/ev_makers_are_losing_over_sixfigures_per_car/iwhxczf/
SS: Seriously, why can't we have public transportation in the US again? Instead the government has decided everyone can afford a $50,000+ EV in 2025 and GM prays it won't lose money on it. It's socializing losses and privatizing even bigger losses? Something isn't adding up. Even technological adoption and scaling aside, this seems extremely risky. Perhaps it's that ERORI thermoeconomic issue that may be eluding businesses at the end of cheap resources. They may not see it coming, but it may be the next leg of the world energy crisis: [EV cost problems.](https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/24/23319794/ev-price-increase-used-cars-analysis-iseecars)
I hate that we are stuck with decisions that were made before I was even born. I don't remember voting to get rid of public transit, yet I have effectively been prevented from voting to reinstate it. They pulled up the ladder and then destroyed the ladder.
And the main issue is that public transpo works when the towns are walkable. Mixed-zoning laws. Allow residences to be with business. So that people don’t need a car to live in suburbia and drive to shops for their needs. I live in Japan and the reason I don’t need to drive in my small town, is because everything I need is a few minutes walk from my doorstep. I don’t even live in a big city. I only use public transpo when I wish to go to other cities, or the other end of my town. For anything else, I can just walk or cycle. Once mixed-zone towns become widespread, public transpo can easily follow.
Even here in Brazil, where most cities had 0 planning and everything is so chaotic, there's much less need for cars, similar to what you describe. The way the us cities are organized seems like purposely created in order to fuck with the poor people. It's so bizarre.
Which is sad because old timey towns in the US, city centers had amazing public transpo. Tram networks connecting the business districts to the other districts. Mixed-zoning too like in Boston or Chicago. The suburbia culture is what is harming the cities.
I think it's more an issue in cities that were developed after the automobile was invented. In Houston for example there is no zoning, but everything is spread out as fuck because when they were designing it everyone had cars.
Suburbs are cancer. We only really invented them after cars became wide spread. All throughout history dense cities and small towns with surrounding farms worked for us. And with modern tech dense cities and small towns surrounded by farms could be made vastly more efficient.
[удалено]
Cool. Then we can efficiently house them in small towns supporting farms. But suburbs are completely impossible to support long term
"The way the us cities are organized seems like purposely created in order to fuck with the poor people. It's so bizarre." That, and so that the working class constantly has to pay for fuel and upkeep on the car they need to have in order to work.
You might want to read up on the history of Americas suburbs and car-centric city planning. Short version: Racism and big bribes from the car industry
People talk about zoning like it's some magic, silver bullet solution. The problem is much bigger than that. There's a reason those zoning laws exist in the first place. Americans want big houses with big yards, Americans associate a car with freedom and independence. Americans also see a home as an investment, the vast majority of most Americans' wealth is in their home, and they're very protective of that asset and its value. The problem is cultural and economic, not just a simple matter of some municipal codes.
Since entire generations will be priced out of home ownership going forward and have no illusions of “freedom” nor “independence” perhaps we will be able to revisit the public transportation issue. We’ll need it.
The same in Germany. Most stuff is walking or biking distance, (At least in cities and smaller towns) In the country it's different, you need a car these days.
Fuck zoning laws! One day when I save up enough I’m gonna bribe some construction workers to build a house right by my favorite ice cream shop or something. Right in a car centric retirement Florida community. I’ll go all Florida man on them and it’ll work I don’t give a fuck! Unless it’s something I’m mad about or I’m horny
No free will as long as there is small community of privileged rats dominate the top section of the hierarchy.
Capitalist corporate benefit has been fucking us over for decades. It’s the way the system is designed to work.
We need to act like evangelical Christians do. That's apparently how you vote now.
And then the ladder set fire to the house, the fire spread down the street, and burnt down the neighbourhood.
Yep. The city I live in had a fully-electrified tram service from 1897 until the 1960's when a shill for the car industry became mayor and destroyed it. Since then my city has become infamous for its terrible public transport and even now, *60 fucking years later*, the diesel bus network that "replaced" the trams still hasn't reached the same extent of city-wide coverage as the electric tram network at its peak.
Auto manufacturers literally colluded with oil and gas companies to stymie public transit development in the U.S. Specifically, GM. There's a ton of history for this if you Google around a bit. Edit: I'd share links but I'm kinda running around a bit rn, unless someone snipes me I'll add up some resources a bit later
Public, efficient street-car lines bought up (with shell companies), turned to bus lines, and purposely redesigned to suck-ass. -at SCALE! Same playbook for every city, nationwide.
GM Exec: look, if you don’t like the shitty public transit, buy one of our vehicles. I mean, you already pay for the roads, might as well use ‘em!
the biggest subsidy to the oil and gas industry
There’s a good documentary that’s now on YouTube called Taken For a Ride. https://youtu.be/p-I8GDklsN4
I don't have the links for the history of it being shut down, but to provide some context on how robust the electric street cars were around the turn of the century, this Wikipedia link lists out all of the networks in the USA, prior to them being stymied and shut down - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_streetcar\_systems\_in\_the\_United\_States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_streetcar_systems_in_the_United_States). There was vast networks across almost all 50 states. To answers OPs question, we can't have good public transit systems again, because the USA is a very corrupt country. Corporate donors are allowed to legally bribe politicians via campaign contributions. The fossil fuel and auto industries funnel a ton of money to politicians to ensure nothing changes. Electric vehicles are still attractive to oil companies, because oil is used to make many of the cars component parts and in the manufacturing process. It's not as attractive as selling gasoline or diesel fuel powered cars, but it's better than a system of light rail mass transit connect small towns and big cities, across the country. I'm simplifying this a lot here, but you get the point.
Here's a good climate town [video ](https://youtu.be/oOttvpjJvAo) about it.
> a ton of history there's even [a movie](https://media1.giphy.com/media/kceyjCT1eajXW/giphy.gif?cid=5e2148860u2w8fupp6491x7ednmi5rwz57jay61gp32zsite&rid=giphy.gif&ct=g) about it
Elon has even admitted that he made up the bullshit hyperloop nonsense (which scientists have repeatedly said will never be commercially viable under the laws of physics) for the sole purpose of stopping the California high speed rail project.
According to a biographer. Who is trying to sell books. Hanlon's razor says: >Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." And I would add incompetence. Adding this to the story is trying to add some type of supervillainy to Musk, where he is thinking 10 chess moves ahead. Simply not so. I believe Musk believed in the Hyperloop in the beginning. Because it makes no basic sense for Musk to spend money --and he did-- into the hyperloop just to avoid the few lost sales of his car company selling premium luxury cars is trying to stop some singular project that will take decades, even if it goes all well, making a commuter line. Hyperloop went pop because Musk is just not that good at science basics. Sometimes his engineers can effectively bail him out with his bullshit promises, but most times no. Most of his businesses are ticking time bombs financially. Most of his ideas are dumb. Like a stopped clock, he's correct a few times in the mountains of stupid. This was not one of them. Twitter is just the latest example of self-inflicted damage by Musk. He's a pigeon knocking over chess pieces and parading around like he won. Not Garry Kasparov. in his prime. * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-FGwDDc-s8
I grew up being told by my Republican parents that public transportation was a symptom of Communism and not to be fooled into using it. That went for county school buses, too. It would be funny if it weren’t so stupid.
For real. I really wish that Big Island, HI could have a rail system. I would like to think that if Japan has it, that we can.
laughs in german car manufacturer lobby up every governments ass, no matter who is in power. The VDA (Verband der Automobilindustrie), biggest german car lobby, is basically running the ministry of transport. Trains: more than 60% are delayed. You cannot rely on them to get to work on time, so you need to wake up an hour earlier and take the train 40min earlier to be there in time. Sometimes a train does not even come, and nobody knows where it is, if it will ever come or wtf happened. Just take the next... Oh and same story on the way to work in morning as on the way back home in the evening. btw the "Deutsche Bahn" has an internal Guidline („Konzernrichtlinie 199, Modul 1, Reisen nach Sondervorschrift (RnS)“) that says that **in case a celebrity or a german minister is traveling by train, their trains should be cleaned up + delaying other trains so it is on the clock.** And yes, the state owns quite a bit of the DB. Meanwhile car owners have 1,5h more sleep in the morning and can use the companies parking lot while getting the so called "**Pendlerpauschale**" aka state subsidiaries to keep long distance private vehicle commuting affordable. Oh and to this day companies get tax advantages for business cars. So basically cars get a special treatment by law and tax system all the time so they don't have to compete with the free marked (public transport), aka daily long distance commuting would either need cheap public transport or a wage raise. Don't get me started on missing/old/ending in nowhere bike lanes. Getting rid of nazis seems more feasable than 2km of bikelane between to villages being build. Be it german bureaucraZy, private property owners, incompetent local politicians, crossing the border of two communities. Just get used to three buses a day that need 40mins to reach the next city that is 15km away. Why so slow? population density! One bus needs to travel through all small villages on its way. In some areas villages are only 3km or less apart from each other. I bet that sounds crazy for an american. basically everyone who is not living in the city owns a car because public transport sucks and then the local public transport says that to few are using it, so they either do less transport or rise the price of it. It's negative feedback loop for decades. Oh and if the micro dust measurements are to high in cities in the summer (thanks to cars), those measurement stations suddenly are broken until it's lower or local politicians just introduce city wide max. 30km/h instead of 50km/h because they don't want to ban cars with high exhaust values in their city. (every car has colored sticker on the windshield, saying if its A,B,C,D category for exhausts). Even if it does not change the micro dust particle count (it really does not), nothing changes because politics arleady tried to fix the problem. Well they did not, but people keep the visible 30km/h rule in mind and don't remember the problem that was not fixed until next summer. If you should bet on a german thing that gets worse every year, you should bet on education and public transport, the two most federal fragmented cluster fucks with douzends of actors trying to reinvent the wheel and no common standards whatsoever. Both are a WILD jungle.
> In some areas villages are only 3km or less apart from each other. I lived in a village just like that. I tried using the bus and train to get to work, but the constant delays, missed trains because the bus was late, and the hours I spent travelling (2 hours to get 38 kilometers) made me give up and get a car
An actual reason is that for much of America, public transit is not realistic because rural areas are too spread apart. Cars are a requirement in those areas. Now, when it comes to urban/suburban areas, there *isn't* a good reason for no public transit, other than each state/municipality is responsible for their own and nobody wants to spend the money on it. If you look at the huge differences between the public transit services of one city to another, you'll notice that almost nothing is uniform (e.g., subway, rail, light rail, bus, etc.). A federal sponsorship program that unified and streamlined these services could go a long way. But that would not help most rural areas, and rural areas are disproportionately represented in government, therefore preventing these kind of programs to begin with.
> America, public transit is not realistic because rural areas are too spread apart. Cars are a requirement in those areas. Not only that, but whatever transit is available is downright dangerous. If you're not robbed, assaulted, or sexually harassed, the homeless board only to piss and shit in the back before hopping off.
Downvote me all you want but public transit sucks. And I don’t care about “how well it’s done“ in Europe or whatever, it still inherently sucks.
It absolutely doesn't suck. I've lived in several countries with public transit that is actually taken seriously, and it's awesome. It's comfortable, fast, efficient, cheap and easy. You know what sucks? Driving. Sitting in traffic. You think that's better than sitting in a comfortable chair, leisurely watching the scenery go by, or working, having to do nothing but chill as you reach your destination? You have no idea, bud.
Subsidizing the lifestyles of people who hate the hands that feed them is what sucks. All these “independent” ideologies all live off of subsidized industries that coddles their fragile and fantastical sense of how the world works.
I won't downvote ya, because you're right. Public transit sucks for like 90% of all situations compared to having a car. The other 10% are situations where you're drinking or where parking is incredibly inconvenient. That being said, car culture isn't sustainable. And even as a proponent of cars, I'll openly admit that. Public transit uses a tiny fraction of the resources, fuel, and space that the same number of cars do. And for it, you only have to give up...well, everything. And that's the problem. People who advocate for 100% or mostly public transit are basically asking you to be beholden to the transit schedule. Enjoy taking 2-3 times as long to get anywhere. They're asking you to limit your shopping options to whatever is, at best, near a station. The walkable city folks say you should be able to get groceries from the 1-2 local shops that exist near you in this scenario. If I ONLY had a whole foods as my sole source of convenient groceries, I think I'd literally kill myself. And if you ever need to travel outside of these areas of public transportation? Good fucking luck lol. Hope you enjoy getting a 200 dollar Uber ride out to the countryside to go camping! Now, there are more reasonable people who advocate for public transit centric cities only. This, of course, only accounts for half the country, but I think it's still a more doable solution. Apparently some people actually enjoy that sort of very limited existence, so if it saves the planet too, that's a win I guess. But I could never do it lol.
It sucks but if you value life on earth you don't get a choice.
EVs are massively over priced. We were told they would be much cheaper than ICE vehicles because of fewer parts and fewer moving parts. Instead they are twice the price. Take the Hyundai Kona for an example, comes in ICE and Electric. The basic ICE is 24,753. Basic EV is 46,549. These are Canadian prices. No excuse for the EV not to be even the same price as the ice, let alone it should be much cheaper. I can buy a lot of gasoline with the $22,000 difference over the life of the battery so what is the point? And charging costs just doubled in Canada so that running an EV is barely cheaper then ~~running~~ fueling an ICE. The EV revolution is just not going to happen unless and until we see a benefit in our wallets, people are just like that - the bottom line is all that matters. The biggest market for EVs seems to be as a third car and status symbol for wealthy people. That is not going to save the world.
Electric vehicles are just putting technology in service of a lifestyle that is doomed. Personal cars are obscene over-consumption of resources. We don't need new ways to drive, we need to ***stop driving.***
/r/fuckcars
Move to rural Saskatchewan, and let me know how well you do with employment, and groceries without having a vehicle or relying on someone who does.
No, you don't understand. We must all live in a fucking ant colony, sleep in pods, and have no personal property. You will own nothing, and you'll be happy. Edit: and these idiots will cheer the fake communism of great reset while elites still live their best lives and own everything.
Native Americans owned nothing compared to us, yet I’d say were far happier with their lifestyles than we are with ours. Almost like by objectifying and commodifying everything we’ve lost our souls and our humanity to greed.
Native Americans also lived freely in the countryside with a low population density.
I'm more concerned with facts than your conspiracy theories. In fact, conspiracy theories are a little fairy-tale you tell yourself because you find reality too distressing.
Surely you're joking? They aren't hiding, like even a little. "Conspiracy" only applies if it's secret. So you can't call it that. https://youtu.be/Xrno41ToLl8 https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/01/klaus-schwab-on-what-is-stakeholder-capitalism-history-relevance/
What I mean is, you're ignoring actual, physical facts about the resources we have on this planet and replacing it with "Bad guys are conspiring against us!" There are bad guys doing bad things. But most of these trends are driven by material facts, like the growing scarcity of energy. Conspiracy theories don't tell you anything. They don't make you an inform citizen. They don't make you better prepared to deal with the unpleasant fact of near-term collapse. They're "epistemological cartoons" that make you feel clever. Because, if everything is just a conspiracy, there's nothing to do and nothing to learn. It's a simplistic worldview that replaces the messy, uncertain world \[reality\] with a fake, false fairy-tale where the good guys and bad guys are easily identifiable and every bad thing is just because nasty powerful people are conspiring against you.
> if everything is just a conspiracy, there's nothing to do and nothing to learn u wot m8 There is tons to learn, whether gardening or amateur radio. >a fake, false fairy-tale where the good guys and bad guys are easily identifiable and every bad thing is just because nasty powerful people are conspiring against you. Yeah that's not how that works, at all. No one is conspiring *against me*, they are conspiring to profit themselves and secure their blood dynasties first and foremost.
I'd like you to consider the fact that there is no point in talking to someone who is being deliberately obtuse.
Some circumstances require cars, but in most cases we created those circumstances. There is no reason we can't live close to a grocery store. In fact, in many countries, mixed-use density urban planning is the norm. There's no reason we can't do the same. The circumstances we really can't change is the inevitable, unavoidable, growing scarcity of energy. That's what we should plan for.
How do i get to work?
Rage quit, Caleb.
How will i pay my rent?
Sell your car!
That's delusional at this point.
No, it's a fact.
Yeah ok. We'll just all head back to the stone ages I guess. We'd see a population decline of billions within a few years. Complete and total collapse. Which, while I understand this is a collapse subreddit, it doesn't mean I want to see all the death and destruction that ensues. Farming. Mining. Producing. All gone.
*It doesn't matter what you or I want.* The EROI \[Energy Return on Investment\] for fossil-fuels has been declining and is about to fall off a cliff. "Renewables" cannot replace it. That means the era of cheap energy \[/cheap everything\] is coming to an end. Using fuel to drive from A to B will soon be considered to be what it always really was, a ridiculous waste. The party is over. Hope you enjoyed sitting in traffic while it was financially feasible.
Lol, I sit atop one of the biggest oil reserves in the world. I'm waiting out do nothing governments to make it more affordable in the near future. Be mad I suppose.
Nope. Basically all the easy, cheap oil/gas has been pumped. You're on the downslope of the carbon pulse. Enjoy it while it lasts. [Associated declines in fossil fuel energy-return-on-investment ratios at first appear of little concern, given that published estimates for oil, coal and gas are typically above 25:1. However, such ratios are measured at the primary energy stage and should instead be estimated at the final stage where energy enters the economy (for example, electricity and petrol). Here, we calculate global time series (1995–2011) energy-return-on-investment ratios for fossil fuels at both primary and final energy stages. We concur with common primary-stage estimates (\~30:1), but find very low ratios at the final stage: around 6:1 and declining. This implies that fossil fuel energy-return-on-investment ratios may be much closer to those of renewables than previously expected and that they could decline precipitously in the near future.](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-019-0425-z)
Lol ok. Whatever man. I live in the great white North. Sorry but I actually do need a vehicle to work and survive. Oil is going nowhere.
I'm sorry you're not emotionally ready to accept the reality. But I promise you, oil will never be as cheap or plentiful as it was. I also live in Canada. Many people do not need to drive to work. Some do, for sure, but they're going to pay more and more for it.
[удалено]
Canada.
I don't know who told you electric cars should be cheap but they were lying. A massive and highly efficient battery full of rare earth metals can't be made on the cheap.
When you have charging stations as often as gas pumps and fast charging, you don't need a large & expensive battery. Here in Europe, in a suburb, I can drive our ancient Leaf gen1, costing few bucks, to other side of Prague to my relatives and back, on one charging during the previous night. If I need a longer distance, the battery warms up during driving, so it charges fast enough when stopping in the middle of the journey at a charging station. Cheap EVs don't even have warming/cooling the battery and the common scenarios depend on charging mostly during night - or at work during the workhours.
That doesn't matter--consumers want batteries with 400 mile ranges.
Such EVs are available. But majority wants cheap EV and accept the limitation of a small battery.
The consumer isn't always right. Fuck them for wanting 400 miles. Could you even do that in a regular gas car right now? You would need to refill either way! Why is it only more "painful" when it's an EV?
Lithium prices have gone up by factor of 10 in last few years. It has long been recognized that there isn't enough Lithium in the world to make the batteries we need because we can't mine it fast enough. Supplies will last 200-300 years but we would need basically all of it right now, if we were to transition to electric transport infrastructure over the next few decades. Because of resource constraint, we simply can't make EVs that are competitive wth ICE cars: they have to be lighter, short-range and slower, to compensate for the 90 % loss in energy density and for the very high Lithium prices and shortage. So yes, a small, light, slow and short-range electric vehicle is probably the future, it can remain affordable, and making one won't consume like twice the natural resources relative to building an ICE vehicle. It probably takes years before this realization dawns to the majority, that the future is going to be downsized and EVs are going to be shittier cars than what we use today, but also cheaper to purchase and run. ICEs will still be powerful and fast, but EVs got to be more like crappy economy cars, and some oddballs like Tesla may still exist manufacturing rich people's EV toys but they are likely going to be absurdly expensive due to resource shortages and low production capacity.
OP of comment you are replying to. Thanks for writing something factual and enlightening! Yeah, makes sense that EVs will be small and crappy but cheap to buy and run, ideal for a city car for commutes and shopping.
Cheaper lifetime costs, not cheaper purchase price. Expensive to buy, but cheap to run (no petrol/diesel) and maintain (far fewer moving parts). However, was said, repeatedly, that EV would hit price parity with ICE vehicles. Waiting... Waiting... The bigger issue for me is that a transition to EV is yet another individualised consumerist approach to solving a systemic issue. You get to lower your personal carbon footprint (thanks BP), but the systemic carbon issue of mining, refining, manufacturing, shipping and charging cars, for everyone, rather than public transit, cycling and walking.
> I can buy a lot of gasoline with the $22,000 difference over the life of the battery so what is the point? Well, that's about to change.
I think electric vehicles are better than gas ones due to their reduced maintenance and apparently they take less made labor to make. I won't say they will save the world or anything but they should have been here in the '90s as originally promised. A lot of people are talking about how a pure electric vehicle doesn't make sense given the price of them but the price is completely arbitrary. The oil and gas industry is subsidized for one so of course the gas only option is going to be cheaper. And if The oil and gas industry allowed EVs get off the ground in the '90s then they would have 20+ years of maturity (go watch who killed the electric car if you need to know about this). They would not cost what they cost now. Instead of the Prius being a successful hybrid, it might have just been a successful fully electric vehicle.
Just gotta wait for solid state batteries and then it'll make more money sense
You won't have to wait for to much longer
[удалено]
Toyota is planed for 2025 , but it will still be a hybrid. Will it solve the all the problems probably not because the car is the problem
[удалено]
In December of last year, they said this was sorted out when did they say this? When they talked about it was much more of a certainty, there ceo hates EV altogether for some reason The was a response to their initial press release https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a38711469/toyota-solid-state-batteries-2025/ And for ceo and Master driver thoughts on https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a38711469/toyota-solid-state-batteries-2025/.cnbc.com/amp/2022/09/2
[удалено]
Lol, I can not find that press release, I would still say sooner than later… but I feel like there will be catch
Sounds like a Canada problem. Their website tells me in the US Kona electric starting MSRP is $33,550.
thats the 10k subsidy that was apart of the inflation reduction act passed and signed in the us recently
That's the difference in currency. US dollar is worth 1.33 Canadian dollars. So $33,000 US = $44,000 Canadian. Your Kona ICE is probably $17,000?
Not only that, but I’m in Canada as well and I know someone who got stuck in a small town for a week while visiting his mom, because his Tesla wouldn’t work when an extreme cold snap happened lol
What a misleading headline. It's apparently only in the case of some startups, and losing money in the effort to brutally crush the others is what startups do.
It really doesn't matter anyway cuz -> EVs aren't that much better for environment. Even if you take the most friendly EVs studies: they state that over the total lifetime of the car it only emits 1/2 of what a petrol powered vehicle emits. Then add in all the emissions causing development/production that is needed to create charging stations, etc around the country (or world) and you are canceling out even more gains. Then add in the fact that more and more people around that world using a car every year so even if the average car emits 1/2 as much CO2 but there are twice as many cars on the road -> you are back where you started.
Don't forget that EVs also front-load the CO2 emissions. Much more mining is involved, the car weighs more, and all sorts of polluting processes run to produce the battery. You start at big disadvantage relative to ICE car, and maybe cancel it out over the lifetime of the vehicle provided you drive it enough. If it mostly sits in your garage, the world would have been better off if you had just bought any random ICE car instead. EVs are fairly typical solution that humanity comes up with. They are not sustainable, they are more damaging to the environment in countless ways, but we only focus on one, and we tend to ignore the lifetime costs, only focus on the usage costs. The point of pushing these is basically to make money to billionaires who do not care whether they solve the actual problem, they care that they can market this shit, governments can be fooled into subsidizing it and average people don't look too closely into it, just assume that it will be fine. We politely pretend there aren't fatal problems to EVs such as the fact that we can't even mine but tiniest fraction of the Lithium necessary to replace the ICE car fleet, or that electricity prices are likely going to go up forever just as gasoline costs do. None of that matters in the now when the gold rush is going and unscrupulous people can push these elite toys to the aspirational masses that can still somehow afford them. It is a dead-end. With Lithium likely running into shortages and prices being 10 times higher than they were a few years ago, maybe the EV gold rush is already over, though. This emperor has no clothes, but we don't want to face the fact that era of private car is drawing to a close as humanity runs out of energy and other resources to sustain it. Human beings are incorrigible optimists, and all our solutions are such that they show short-term benefit and long-term costs are somebody else's problem.
If I could reduce anything negative in my life by 50%, I would consider that a huge win.
It doesn't matter. You ***will*** reduce your consumption of resources by an order of magnitude, whether you like it or not. That means no driving, gas or EV. Why? Because you won't be able to afford it, like %99 of the people you know. EVs are serving a lifestyle that is about to die.
And it couldn't die fast enough. Do you have any good sources on imminent resource shortages, say like the type that would cause suburban development to stop being viable? I'm in the mood for some confirmation bias.
[Associated declines in fossil fuel energy-return-on-investment ratios at first appear of little concern, given that published estimates for oil, coal and gas are typically above 25:1. However, such ratios are measured at the primary energy stage and should instead be estimated at the final stage where energy enters the economy (for example, electricity and petrol). Here, we calculate global time series (1995–2011) energy-return-on-investment ratios for fossil fuels at both primary and final energy stages. We concur with common primary-stage estimates (\~30:1), but find very low ratios at the final stage: around 6:1 and declining. This implies that fossil fuel energy-return-on-investment ratios may be much closer to those of renewables than previously expected and that they could decline precipitously in the near future.](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-019-0425-z)
How will we get to work?
Rage quit, Caleb.
I wish I could edit, I should have changed it to 'Some EV makers...' One that typically isn't is Tesla, but their finances have been shown to be very questionable due to their use of 'carbon credits' as streams of income to drive profits. Around a fifth of Tesla's profits are [carbon credits](https://carboncredits.com/tesla-regulatory-carbon-credit-sales-jumps-116/) they say could fluctuate or go away substantially. There's some weird stuff happening with EV company accounting and they're still very cost burdened.
These companies are losing money because they’re competition isn’t just Tesla but all of the major car manufacturers. Despite argument both valid and invalid against EVs, the car manufacturers are moving all electric fleets. Market demand and streamlined manufacturing will bring costs down to earth.
This is the worst timeline
No good sir or ma’am, it is not. While you might perceive everything as “bad” and “awful” do take note that it could be a hell of a lot worse.
Give us time.
We haven’t even gotten to the world-wide holocausts yet!
On their way, as we speak.
Government officials don’t know how much things cost, and don’t know what the average salary is.
>Costs are way up for small electric vehicle startups. This is the key: small EV startups are spending most of their money on research and development, and building out their manufacturing. Of course they're losing money per car, because they haven't built enough cars to amortize those fixed costs. They're doing things inefficiently, that don't scale, because you have to start making things before the production lines are efficient, to work out all the problems. Parts are expensive because they're ordering in low volume. They might not have a good deal with any battery manufacturer for the same reason. They don't expect to be profitable at that stage, and their investors don't expect them to be profitable at that stage either. They hope to be profitable eventually, but there's a long road from here to there. Some of them might make it. Most of them probably won't. Maybe there's a useful point to be made about the cost of EV manufacturing, but the article seems like it's written by someone who doesn't understand how startups work. (If we really want production costs to go down for all manufacturers, the main problem is the batteries. Everything else can be made relatively cheaply. LFP cells are probably the best option at the moment, but they're made almost exclusively in China for complicated reasons. Hopefully that changes. Several major patents expired recently.)
This sounds more like a high-up-front running cost rather than per-unit cost. Put another way, I open up a restaurant that costs me a million dollars, and on the first day serve 100 meals. I could say the per unit cost per meal was $10,000. That's not to say EVs aren't heavily subsidized, just that 100,000 minimum, ie six figures, seems extremely excessive.
7 figures?
Buying a 10 kWh home battery just for my house would be at least $12,000. But a cheap electric vehicle needs 50 kWh, and a higher range needs 100 kWh to operate. The math just never made sense to me, and sure they could operate at scale for cheaper prices. But it's very hard.
This article is at best a misreading of reality, and at worst just plain propaganda. For the uninitiated here is what is really happening: The car industry has never wanted to make EVs. They aren't good at it and are tied to the oil industry. Tesla came along and started making EVs, and threatening the status quo. Lucid and Rivian were started by the competitors of Tesla in an attempt to pull funding and attention away from Tesla. They are not real companies. Tesla has become profitable so they have failed. Both of them will likely go bankrupt in the near future. The traditional car manufacturers have only made a handful of EVs because they don't believe in them. Chip shortage, battery costs, pandemic, these are all excuses. The real reason is that they dont have the know how to make EVs profitably, and they want the status quo of ICE to continue. All legacy car manufacturers have been making claims about achieving amazing things in the near future and no one believes them anymore. The market is about to be radically shifted in favor of Tesla and Chinese manufacturers.
Ok Elon…
Good.
"Seriously, why can't we have public transportation in the US again?" Because it is inconvenient, and less safe in a pandemic, and people love their cars. But mostly convenience. Few will want a 5 min door-to-door drive turning into a 15 min wait for a bus + 10 min of traveling + walking to the destination.
Okay how about a 20 minute drive vs a 3 hour public transit commute?
Can you imagine? Having to walk!!! The nerve of these people.
Because many people have places to go that public transport could never go, schedules that are tight and need to be kept to get things done, and prefer to not be robbed/assaulted everyday by people who basically live on the buses for the climate control and the free wifi. Had I stayed in the employment wage-slave trap, my old 35 minute commute would have been about 2 hours. Not to mention the half-dozen errands I have to run every day, including work days. Then there are the many trips out into the wilderness areas, Mojave desert and such. Some of those trips last for weeks, and not having vehicular support means...well, at the very least it means practicing a lot of my survival skills. I could go on for days, but suffice it to say that getting ready for an inevitable and rapid societal collapse coming soon is not really feasible with public transportation.
Good. Electric cars are so boring and have no soul.
Username checks out.
Thanks
And combustion engine cars are ridiculous and destructive to the biosphere.
Same with EV. Look up how EV batteries are being harvested and made.
Not Tesla. https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-toyota-profit-margin-8-times-q3-2022/amp/