The prices did not immediately triple.

It doesn't follow a linear demand curve, because we only have two data points (any two points can define a line, so we'd need at least one more to estimate the second derivative).

Furthermore, linear demand curve doesn't mean that the price elasticity of demand is 1 - and in fact, unit elasticity would be quite surprising, and it would generally not be desirable for Tesla[0].

But finally, Economics 101 classes don't teach linear demand curves. Every introductory economics textbook I've seen draws them this way because it's easier and it doesn't change the math at the introductory level, but every single one also introduces the concept with an indicator that it's drawn this way for convenience, not because they are teaching linear models.

[0] You can come up with somewhat exogenous reasons for wanting to operate in the unit-elastic or inelastic portions of the demand curve, based on the venture model of optimizing for brand penetration, but it's not the place that they'd financially be able to or want to operate in the long run.

So if you were ever in this situation, you would probably expect price to rise until the slope of the demand curve changes.

Seems like with compression, x/y offsets, and rotation you could fit just about curve.

This least to an easy way to demonstrate the evils of over-fitting :)

It actually turned out that the change caused the EV sales all but stop completely (quite to the surprise of the tax authorities). So they're looking at re-exempting a few thousand cars every month.

Fun fact: The danish nickname for the tax authorities is "Skattefar", "Taxdaddy" - and it's the name of their twitter account: https://twitter.com/Skattefar

To illustrate, I recently spec'd out a honda civic, with the base model costing $19k USD, and looking at even hybrids like the chevy volt and prius, I'm basically paying a premium of $4k to $15k for what amounts to a nominal gain in mileage. It just doesn't make sense when the civic is cheaper and more fun to drive (huge consideration when you spend more than 10 minutes commuting every day.) Drop the honda to a fit, and the straight IC is even more of a hands-down winner.

Mileage standards are probably the most effective tool at reducing automobile emissions, and I wish more people costed that out and understood the economic impact, especially on poor people, before coming to any debate on the subject.

Edit: I realize this is more of an american perspective on an article about a european problem. I wish I could bike safely where I live, but the infrastructure costs would probably be tremendous given how spread out everything is here.

If you get all the subsidies, you're looking at less than $2,500 per year. I think that most people will save $500+ on gas and oil changes and PG&E rates, so for the three years, let's say that you pay $6,000 all in.

Essentially any new car will lose $6,000 in value over three years. You could lower your TCO by buying used, for sure, but if you care about worn finishes, little QOL things like bluetooth audio and reasonably good climate control, and lower risk of inconvenient maintenance, then I think the Leaf is pretty amazingly good.

IF you can deal with a 90 mile range. That's the big killer. But as a second car or for some people, it's kind of amazing.

I think that's only true from 11pm-7AM, which obviously is good if you're charging an EV, but it compensates by raising your daytime rates, which isn't a good deal for most people with more traditional domestic electric workloads.

So I wouldn't exactly interpret this as a straightforward "lower your rates". Or am I missing something?

A few years back SCE had a EV-TOU plan that was peak hours only from 10am-6pm, and it was very easy to save money on that plan.

Right now with our relatively limited driving, it appears E6 is better for me, but I’m sure if you drive enough, the 50% discount at night is worth it.

The leaf is for sale in Belgium at €32-38K.

Which is why the relevant comparison point is how much a car you actually buy would drop in price.

But what about my life in wide open spaces...

I agree with this. Electric cars are still affordable only to the affluent. Even a Nissan Leaf costs over $30k.

> I drive 5-10 thousands miles a year, and at $2/gallon gas, I'm looking at a total expense of 4-500 dollars per year.

This, however, seems really optimistic. 10k miles for $500 in gas assumes $2/gallon and 40 mpg, which is the EPA rating for highway miles in a Civic. Most people are driving >10k miles/year. Most people don't spend 100% of their miles on open highway at optimal speed, nor do most people drive a new car with max efficiency. And most people don't have $2/gallon gas even in the US (the average is closer to $2.50 currently).

Driving 12-15k/year, getting 25mpg, paying $2.50/gallon, you'd be looking at $1200-$1500/year for gas. That's still not enough to offset the difference in an electric car unless you assume long ownership and no major costs to, say, replace the battery pack at 5 years.

I just now ran a Carfax report and found no fewer than 7 electric Ford Focus cars within 50 miles of my zipcode for less than $15k used. Two of them are less than $10k. Not sure what "affluent" means to you.

I can buy a 2013 electric Focus for $13k. I can buy a 2012 BMW 328i for $14k. Are BMWs also affordable now?

A 5 year old base 3-series has always been affordable, unless you include maintenance and the price/availability of parts.

Not sure about that Focus, but electric cars have vastly fewer moving parts which should help quite a bit.

I know people that spent that much just replacing a BMW's transmission. Yea, not free but everything else should be cheap so maintenance costs are likely to be far less over the next 5 - 10 years.

Edit: I do wonder how many of these "cheap" electric cars will ever have a replacement battery pack. When your car value drops below $5000, are you really going to spend $3000 (guesstimate including labor) to replace the battery?

Anyway, this might change if they are more common, but for now used electrics seem to have a significant price premium suggesting people think replacing older battery packs is probably a good long term deal.

Maybe. Depends on how you interpret the numbers. The electric Focus seems to command a premium of ~20% over the SE for a comparable used car near me, but the MSRP is >50% over the SE new. So you could see that as used buyers believing that the electric is worth 20% more than the comparable used IC, or you could see that as buyers believing that the a value of an electric drops much more rapidly than the value of an IC. Maybe after a couple more years these lines cross and the IC commands a premium. I honestly don't know.

If a new x kwh battery pack cost 10k then but a new xkwh battery pack is only 4k new today then predicted deprecation calculations should arguably be based on the 4k price not the 10k initial price unless you expect such dramatic price drops to continue.

In any case, I think the current used prices would be vastly lower if people expected the kind of range and lifetime limitations you get from not replacing the batteries.

It has a 70k warranty on all major systems and 2 years of road side assistance. Which reminds me I can remove that from my insurance coverage and save about $15 a month.

I was spending over $1000 a year maintaining my old car so for the same or less expense I now have what I consider a much nicer car and modern features. It's also a lot more fun to drive.

Nissan didn't (and still might not) have active cooling in their batteries and was seeing high failure rates in states like Arizona. Because of this, Nissan ended up extending battery warranties to 8 years / 100,000 miles. Basically if there is anything wrong with the battery or it's capacity drops below 9 bars (starts at 12), then Nissan will replace it.

Combined state and federal deductions on EVs were up to 50% of the purchase or lease price of a Leaf and could be deducted over several years. This combined with annual fuel savings when gas was $4 a gallon meant people could drive a new car for little more than the cost of insurance since Nissan was including free charging at qualified stations for 2 years. So a lot of Leafs were bought or leased and being dumped on the market now that all the incentives are drying up.

Gas has been ~$2 where I live for a very long time, and you're right, I'm closer to 5 than 10k miles, and much of it is city.

I don't travel much though. :-)

I assure you that even at nearly $8/gallon over here, an electric vehicle still didn't make much sense when we were buying a new car last year. Even the cheapest Leaf was so much more expensive than a well specced VW Polo that it made no sense to go electric, we did the calculation and the difference in price would not be returned in the savings over the time we are likely to keep the car for.

A Prius is 46 combined, the Civic is only 32 combined (as per fuelly). The base Civic uses 50% more fuel than a Prius, I'd hardly consider that "nominal", that's the difference between a 6.2L V8 powered Corvette (22 combined on fuelly) and a Civic.

Another way to look at it is, $2/gallon gas in a Prius is $3/gallon in a Civic.

Not everyone's concern is solely cost, of course. Some of us are happy to pay a little more for a car that eliminates our families largest contribution to global warming. Yes, new Tesla's and other EVs are not cheaper than ICE vehicles today. The Model S has only been available for 5 years. You can't expect EVs to beat ICE vehicles with over 100 years of engineering from minute 1. Give it some time.

Even elderly drivers that I know in rural areas in the US have a difficult time staying in 5K-10K miles per year.

Someone living in a rural or suburban area in the US has a 30 mile round trip for just about anything. Even 3 trips a week would put you above 5K miles. And you won't be getting 40mpg on those roads.

So, either you really don't do much (possible) at which point delivery probably suffices as you have minimal needs.

Or, you don't have to drive very far, which would tend to place you in a dense suburb or urban setting.

Or, you could, of course, simply be one of the lucky people who live in a rural/sparse suburban setting that just happens to have everything you need within a walk or very short drive. Those places do exist--the number of people who have the opportunity to live in them is very small, however.

Unlike the Prius it only has an electric drive train with a gas generator.

And it's a hatchback with the seats folded you might just be able to sleep.

The volt is a sedan, but only 2 seats in the back split by a center console. I don't think that'd be very comfortable without an air mattress.

Here's an image of the new 2016/2017 volt with its seats folded down: http://www.tampabay.com/resources/images/dti/rendered/2016/0...

My guess is the OP is a climber or similar and has pretty specific van needs.

With own car one pays insurance once, while renting the insurance gets payed every single time it gets rented.

Not going full coverage is an open game as they will charge for any little new scratch the car might get, no matter how tiny.

Meanwhile, I have been in countries where the only thing that matters is that the car is returned in one piece still.

EDIT: The car hire companies make a massive profit on the 'super cover' optional insurance.

If you are worried about the provenance of a financial services company, there are usually national regulators who maintain registers of companies that have to abide by certain standards. You should check that an insurer is on this register before taking out a policy, as well as checking to see if there are a lot of complaints about them on the internet.

If you don't mind doing the work yourself, and don't mind a range lower than 500km a day, you can get something like this for less than 30k Euros. For example:

http://hackaday.com/2017/05/17/solar-powered-camper-is-a-mag...

A single-digit sales tax or registration fee does not cover these costs to society caused by car owners. Therefore, these costs must be covered by the general fund: from income, payroll, and business taxes. These all apply equally whether or not you own a car, so if you don't buy a car, you're still paying for the environmental cost of having one but not getting the benefits.

Denmark has done a smart thing by placing high taxes on cars. Reasonable taxation policy helps make this decision more rational. The flat tax usually makes sense because cheap cars are likely to be low-powered sub-compacts, which have a smaller impact, while expensive luxury cars are more likely to be high-powered, heavy, large vehicles.

But EVs (and hybrids, to a lesser extent) break this model. They are expensive, but environmentally friendly. It makes sense to encourage their adoption through tax breaks. That is not a shift of wealth from the poor to the rich, it's an intelligent exception in a model intended to shift costs away from all of society to the source of those costs.

Not quite. EVs reduce direct pollution, but there are still a lot of negative externalities. There are obvious ones relating to the manufacture and also to then still requiring energy.

But car culture itself has all sorts of issues, no matter the drive train: it encourages bad urbanism and sprawl (with large environmental impact), encourages inefficient land use via extensive parking, it taxes the infrastructure, it encourages bad health, and also some direct accidents.

Actually: The logic here is: “Tesla batteries use graphite; the world’s biggest source of graphite is in China; China has terrible pollution; therefore, Tesla is partially responsible for China’s pollution.” Except when I did some digging, I learned that Tesla uses synthetic graphite made mostly in Japan and Poland, and that the average Model S uses 100kg of it. That 100kg lasts for ten years, so the amount of graphite used to make a Model S is similar to the amount you’d use if you had a few barbecues a year.

But the big issue is still car culture and related energy waste, urban development and health issues.

(The steel/aluminum/plastics of a car's exterior/interior/chassis are shared by cars regardless of drive train and still the overall impact of those materials dwarfs the environmental impact of battery technologies.)

I wrote:

> EVs reduce direct pollution, but there are still a lot of negative externalities.

Trickle down environmentalism is just like regular trickle down economics.

ETA: For what it's worth, I think the downvotes on this comment are fair too. It doesn't need to be reiterated that tired, off-topic comments are tired and off-topic every time somebody makes one. I answered because I feel bad when I see somebody confused, but this is another example of a comment that probably deserves to be downvoted even though it's correct.

True. but luckily most people don't commute by car here in Denmark, bike infrastructure is close to perfect. And most energy is renewable, so it's not as bad as it could have been.

That's a nice rationalizing lie we like to tell ourselves; they are not nice to live in, but we vastly prefer them to be that way and get very, very angry if something is not car-accessible.

Speaking more generally, I'd say few cities in Europe fit your description. Within the city limits I think people pretty much expect cars to be the least practical mode of transport. Very few shops have parking lots, and getting around is very slow. It's probably true in the US though.

Thankfully the one thing that this place gets right is the range and organisation of Public Transport.

A more effective policy at encouraging the growth of the EV sector would be a road pricing system where non-EV cars pay higher fees.

This sort of policy would have the added bonus of incentivizing people into public transit and active transportation, which is ultimately better for the environment than buying an EV car.

Not quite ...

If you taxed poor people to subsidize luxury cars (a regressive tax) then you would indeed shift wealth from the "poor" to the "rich".

However, if you tax rebate the "rich" to subsidize luxury cars you are instead shifting less wealth from rich to poor than you used to.

Maybe you should or should not do these things - I'm not going to debate that here - but I think that distinction is important and interesting ...

Giving away money worth 2 years of welfare to people who don't need money and just want to dump a car that still perfectly works sounds just crazy to me.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14536854

But as I understand, it's not really an import fee but a registration fee, which probably means you also have to pay it for domestically manufactured cars.

Indeed, it is payed even if you live in Denmark, go buy a car in Germany, drive it back to Denmark yourself, and want to use it there.

Anyway, I guess the point I was trying to make was that there are electrical cars in a lot of different price ranges these days. The old car manufacturers are trying to board the train as well, with varying commercial success. It's not all Tesla.

It's likely to be about 62,000$ here in Australia before any options or upgrades, so that's with no autopilot and the smallest battery. Still a luxury car, in fact, with some options expensive enough to trigger the Luxury Car Tax, which kicks in at $75,525.

When you can get a brand new Suzuki Swift for 15,000 you really have to ask yourself how much you care about electric.

Plus the liability of having a 240V outside plug may be against the building code. The weather here can really destroy anything outside.

As much as I like them the "care and feeding" and overall maintenance of an EV is way beyond my means or anyone else in my minimum wage blue collar town.

Why would you rewire the house to run a 240V plug for your car? That's nuts. You'd add a dedicated 240 circuit. You're probably still looking at a a minimum of $1k and likely in the $3-5K range, especially if your panel needs to be updated/expanded, but there's no reason you'd need to rewire your whole house for this. As for the outdoor outlet, there are exterior rated outlets (and presumably exterior rated chargers). Code isn't the concern.

My reasoning is I may as well change the panel and house wiring while the electrician is there. It's a small house so really it would be more efficient to get it all done at once.

My other concern is the growing number of things using power. When the house was built TV, fridge, stove, washer, dryer, lights, furnace and water heater. Now there's Xbox consoles, big TVs, computers, cellphones charging, A/C units.

This is small town Canada too probably more expensive than the US unless I can get a good buddy electrician after hours deal.

I haven't gotten bids yet to know for myself, but assuming you feel confident enough to do the wiring after the new box install, it shouldn't be outlandish price-wise, even in CA.

I'm only doing that because I don't want to mess with the live feed from the street, though I did watch some electricians replace my mains breaker. Their solution was being very careful with rubber gloves and rubber-handled-pliers, but I just don't think that's for me :).

When I mentioned "At best" EVs suffer disproportionately from the effects of cold weather, the colder the worse it gets and elevation changes aren't your friend either.

I am really curious what the average pricing will be on IIIs. I do remember Tesla talking about how you could get into a S for a little over 60 yet it always seemed people just talk about the 90k and up versions.

So, basically, your complaints are all things that most Tesla owners don't complain about. Almost every discussion about electric cars features a subthread with the same back and forth about these same topics. No sign of any learning.

Ah well.

Tesla and other EV car companies successfully sell cars in Canada, so apparently it's not all Canadians: http://www.fleetcarma.com/ev-sales-canada-2016-final/ In fact the market share of EVs in Canada is similar to the US.

I'd be surprised if Canada was that different than the US: some apartment complexes will install chargers because it will eventually be an important amenity (that's why I have chargers at my apartment complex), some communities will start requiring them for new construction (Palo Alto does this already), you'll find chargers installed for on-street parking (already happening various places), and eventually the government will probably mandate installing chargers in all larger parking lots (probably when EVs are a lot more popular than today.)

Another place you might charge is at work. Facebook has ~ 170 chargers at their headquarters, last I looked. They're ahead of the curve, but you'll find that more and more over time.

I know that EVs aren't for me, that's actually what I'm trying to show. Some people have the feeling that charging is just a little inconvenience and everyone should buy one. For someone like me, charging doubles the trip.

There are range extended EV options (the Volt/Ampera, for instance) to at least use battery for part of the trip.

It certainly doesn't have to be all or nothing right now. You are enough of an outlier you might never be satisfied, but that shouldn't stop you from trying for a middle ground.

Me personally, I have an EV Smart that I use in my home city. I love electric vehicles, but there are use cases when they just can't be used.

https://www.tesla.com/model3

Still, doesn't this also apply to the cheaper cars? You're getting a Pugeot 208 for not $20k but $56k. While the difference between sticker price and post-tax price is smaller in proportion with the cost of the cars - $63k vs $36k - that's still $56k... for a Pugeot.

So yeah, just because the Model S is a luxury car, don't make the mistake of assuming all other EVs are too.

Here in the US if you can find a used Nissan Leaf you can get a really good deal.

Wikipedia says $42K is the mean after-tax annual income in Denmark. Median will be a bit lower. So maybe not as many Danes are in that market as you think.

https://electrek.co/2017/06/09/gm-chevy-bolt-orders-nationwi...

Ca. 35 000 EUR in Germany (which means less in the rest of the world, for whatever reason).

In Sweden the eGolf is about SEK 400k ($45k) compared to about SEK 220k ($25k) for the Zoe.

[0] https://www.thelocal.dk/20151120/whats-the-deal-with-denmark...

Oh and it's been withdrawn from sale entirely in Australia.

Ugly is relative, so I'll concede the point.

Tiny? I've transported a chest freezer on mine. If anything, it has more cargo space than a Nissan Rogue, which is supposed to be an SUV.

Your right that autopilot doesn't exist. You know what else doesn't exist? The Model 3.

In contrast, as of today, the Model 3 doesn't even exist.

Personally speaking, I don't buy the first model of any car anyway. If I were seriously considering the Model 3, I wouldn't plan on buying it till 2019 at the earliest. That would give Tesla enough time to work out the issues that the first batch of cars will inevitably have.

No car company has ever launched a new model line without issues. The issues may be major, or minor (like doors or windows not closing properly... rattles and that sort of thing). Inevitably, the first year or two are basically a public beta-test. For what basically amounts to a dozens-of-thousands of dollars investment, I want to make sure the car manufacturing company gets it right.

https://www.carsales.com.au/car/nissan/leaf/

Using words like "garbage" when it simply doesn't appeal to you - that's not exactly adding to the S/N ratio here.