The other way that EVs enter the market is that someone takes a gas-powered car and converts it to electric. It's not a particularly common thing to do, for multiple reasons. It's time consuming, expensive, and requires tools and space, and a certain amount of expertise or willingness to learn.

The may be a lot of people who have the time, inclination, space, and access to tools to do a conversion but are blocked by the cost barrier. That probably includes at least some poor people. Mostly I'm thinking of young college-age people who might not necessarily be experiencing poverty but also don't have any significant wealth either. Maybe they live with their parents and are having trouble finding work.

I'd like to see EV conversions have the same level of subsidy as OEM cars; that could make it a worthwhile and cost-effective endeavor for a lot of people. It could also provide jobs for local mechanics, for customers who don't want to do the work of converting the vehicle themselves. There are a lot of gas-powered cars on the road. They aren't all worth converting, but some of them are. It seems a waste to replace them all rather than convert the ones worth converting.

There's also a bit of an annoyance w/ EV conversions, at least here in the US: automatic transmissions being pretty much ubiquitous. They're basically dead weight for an EV (which doesn't need to switch gears), and they further tend to have a lot of mechanical and electrical complexity.

I suspect that if I ever convert my Highlander to an EV (which is something I'd like to investigate should its current drivetrain eventually give up the ghost), it'll likely entail needing to remove the transmission entirely (and maybe replace it with a fixed gearbox of some sort?). And given that it's AWD, that complicates things further, since there are very few AWD/4WD EV conversions.

That said, if there are solutions to this problem, and said solutions prove viable, then this makes EV conversion a lucrative business, and opens it up to most cars on American roads.

Transmissions aren't entirely dead weight; being able to switch gears means you can get away with using a smaller motor than you otherwise would. You also don't need to worry quite so much about getting a motor rated for super high RPM.

Converting something with a manual is probably easier than an automatic (especially if there's some software controlling when to shift the automatic based on some engine sensors which aren't there anymore), but there's no fundamental reason why you couldn't just keep the transmission even in an automatic. Especially if bolting a motor on where the engine was is far simpler than re-engineering half the drive train. (You might be able to get rid of or disable the torque converter, though.)

At this point I think the biggest roadblocks to EV conversion are cost and availability of parts so you don't have to design and build everything from scratch. And I think subsidizing conversions would help with both of these. If there's a big enough market, you might even get reasonably priced kits (possibly from the original vehicle manufacturer) that has everything you need including battery boxes and can be installed by someone who's done it before in less than a week.

(Battery boxes are usually the most difficult and time consuming part of a conversion, since they're usually constructed in an ad-hoc way to fit whatever battery you're using into wherever they would fit. Having something that's actually engineered and possibly even crash tested would be great.)

> And I think cheap BEVs will be a HUGE benefit to poor people in the future, since it saves on gas and maintenance costs in the long term.

I’ve been wondering whether the opposite is true. We might find the cost of replacing the battery puts a floor on the price of old EV’s. I wouldn’t be surprised if we are coming to the end of bangernomics.

We already have million-KM batteries, and we're headed toward million-mile batteries.

Even if the battery does die, I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot of secondhand batteries with half a million Ks of mileage put up relatively cheap. You don't need to go straight to brand-new.

> And I think cheap BEVs will be a HUGE benefit to poor people in the future, since it saves on gas and maintenance costs in the long term.

I believe the same, if you race for the lowest cost possible, eventually an EV will be cheaper than the cheapest IC powered car for those exact reasons.

... But as I said above. Wuling MiniEV costs like $5500, which is cheaper than low-end Chinese petrol, or diesel engined sedans priced at $7000-$8000, but is still massively, massively outsold by IC cars in its price bracket despite China's massive subsidies for EVs, and quite draconian curbs on IC powered cars.

In part because the MiniEV has really low range (think first generation Leaf) whereas any IC car is gonna be like a Model 3 at least.

200 miles (on the EPA cycle) really is the minimum for a pure electric car IMHO. 250 miles, really. Otherwise it looks like less of a value than an IC car.

It seems like there should be a removable gasoline or diesel generator purely for range extension. For day-to-day commutes and errands near home, leave the generator at home and save on weight. For long-distance trips, bring the generator with you.

Depends who you ask. For most people in the world, even 60km-80km will be more than enough.