I'm not sure being an EV is the biggest hurdle for manufacturing that abomination. Tesla had troubles putting plastic panels together, so steel ones might be an issue. If they actually end up trying to manufacturing it at scale they'll end up having redesign it which will lead to significant delays.

You just revealed yourself as someone uninformed about what's actually happening with Cybertruck.

If they actually end up trying to manufacturing it at scale they'll end up having redesign it

You're about a year or so late with this "prediction."

Of course other much better informed people have said it before. Show what? What happens if they try manufacturing it at scale and every third car needs to be sent back due to defects?

Then again considering how tasteless a person needs to be to buy that thing might they won't mind a rough edge or two.

My prediction, over the next 2 years: There are going to be some rough patches to iron out, just like Model X. Then things are going to improve going forward. Eventually, production will be in excess of 100k/year. Every Cybertruck built will be sold.

We'll see who gets it right.

Is an actually relatively well designed and practical car.

Tesla is best seller outside China, but they're hitting a ceiling of demand as well, and they can drop prices only so much before they're underwater.

And in China, guess what? Most EVs sold are small urban vehicles. Which I covered in my embarrassing huge argument on faulty grounds. Watch what happens next. Or if you catch up slowly, the final outcomes will be in 2024.

[0] https://twitter.com/JesseJenkins/status/1724395067224236182

It's true but not because of the boat, it's because interest rates are up and the auto sector is notoriously interest rate sensitive. Not to mention it has a subprime crisis courtesy of the supply chain woes of 2021-2022.

https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/taxes/ev-tax-credit-elect...

I'm hoping we'll see improvements to the designs here, e.g. modular replaceable batteries, so that if the battery is damaged in a collision there's a $1000 cost to replace one of 4 battery modules, rather than a $40000 cost to replace the entire vehicle.

Because batteries are HEAVY. A modular design means the batteries can't be structural, so you need more structure to support the car around the battery, and a solid structure holding the replaceable battery itself. Boxes in boxes in boxes in boxes. This makes the car heavier. Weight means less range. To increase the range you need more batteries. Which adds more weight. Which means less range.

Do you see what I mean? It's just physics. We can't fix this. Only some amazing battery breakthrough would fix this, but so far we have only sensationalist articles about something working in a lab supposedly and nothing out there in production.

Because Elon spouts a lot of bullshit that you shouldn't take seriously? Why do people still feign surprise.

That's not an indictment of EVs as a whole, and in fact none of your arguments are.

Cybertrucks being a failure? Well yeah, but not because it's an EV.

Expensive to buy? When M3s are going for $30K on sale after federal credits?

Expensive to own? I haven't needed a single maintenance other than windshield wipers after 50K miles.

We have them. Nissan is one of the ones I know that can replace individual battery modules if any of them have faulty cells. That's completely different than a battery swap for charging purposes.

Batteries are heavy but they aren't ridiculously so in the grand scheme of things. Normal, not oversized trucks, with decent range are possible without structural batteries, and that describes a lot of (non Tesla) EVs.

China has them; automated EV battery swap stations by NIO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kZgG58zz8U

California had a subsidy for cars that had swappable batteries. Tesla opened a single station that was open by invite-only in order to qualify for that subsidy. Once it ended, so did the project.

Some of this will come as mechanics decide they need to learn how to service EVs. However some of it depends on a good design for repair.

I recently had cause to rent a people-mover, and did so from two separate, off-airport local companies (not chains).

The 3 rentals all went off either a hitch, service was smooth, no wait, returns was trivial, cost was very reasonable.

It definitely showed me that if i need a specific vehicle for an edge case this is a very viable approach.

I don't see how you can have middlemen like rental companies take on the burden of peak fleet capacity for the whole economy, anymore than everyone can afford to own their own long-range ICE alongside a more limited BEV. It makes sense for some people, sure, but it seems like across the whole fleet we really need BEV to catch up and be suitable to cover these demands.

Otherwise, we need to address how those demands can be replaced with something else, like airplanes or trains, with more limited BEV rental at destinations. It seems disingenuous to me to suggest everyone can rent an ICE to cover the gap.

are you saying your tesla's total cost of ownership is higher than gasoline cars you've had? Or that your car is somehow unusually cheap, given that you bought an expensive one and we are before 2025?

As far as the cybertruck ... this is just the stupidity elon musk has been affected by lately. The cybertruck body is supposed to be made by a fancy new method which Tesla has a lot of problems bringing to mass manufacturing. Rivian is making ev trucks and suvs that are quite popular.

But the price, coupled with the mass spying in every new vehicle... Looking like it will be used ICE cars for me pretty much indefinitely.

My family is sticking with our old Toyota pickup for the same reasons you mention. It would be nice to completely stop burning fuel, but in practice we've already electrified our everyday travel by switching to bikes and scooters.

haha well Luton Airport fire was not caused by an EV !! https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-67077...

The risks are going in the opposite direction with lifepo4 batteries this reduces by a large margin (( far better than petrol and diesel )), then the next step is semi-solid state batteries and then solid state.

Just no contest...

"can't be fixed" well insureance companies will need to be forced to make sure they are fixed !!! it's poor regulations that are causing this not the tech!! standard and modular replaceable batteries problem solved and this also reduces prices.

Yes, there’s a risk with EVs, but there is plenty of risk with ICE cars too!

The West can only hold back value Chinese EVs for so long.

Vastly inferior?

I have one of the cheapest EVs that you can buy in the US. The quick charging standard is obsolete. And yet I'd rather drive it than most gas cars. Instant torque (even with a wimpy motor that's the size of a baseball), silent operation, zero time spent at gas stations. Free charging at work means I don't pay for fuel to commute (and it's more than 50 miles each way). But even if I did pay, it would be far cheaper than gas.

> These cars are expensive to buy, but way more expensive to own.

It's the cheapest car I've ever owned. I leased, then purchased after the lease. It cost about the same as an entry level Honda Civic. 4th year, $0 maintenance, other than a cabin air filter.

No oil changes, no emissions testing.

> the bigger you get, the worse it gets.

That's true for all vehicles, although you do have a point with power density requirements. SUVs and 'trucks' are only viable because US gasoline is still cheap even in CA peak prices and parking is usually plentiful. Notice how they are rare worldwide.

> Insurance is shooting up to the sky as they have to write off entire cars over minor damage because they dented the battery and this sh*t can't be fixed.

Insurance is fine for me. Again, non Tesla. Not all cars have the same design or have batteries that are structural - or batteries that aren't too different from laptop ones.

> EVs will also be increasingly a liability when parked tightly below residential buildings, malls, ferries and so on.

Statistics are hard to come by, but you'll find some manufacturers that have a higher incidence of fires. In particular, LFP chemistries are very, very tame. Heck, Toyota still uses NIMH for their hybrids.

By the way, you contradict yourself when you say the future is hybrid, but then go on to talk about battery fires. Even small hybrid batteries store a lot of energy, enough for a pretty serious fire if they do catch on fire. So which is it?

Many of your criticisms seem to be about Tesla. Tesla does a lot of things that are questionable. Repairs tend to be very expensive, for one. The Cybertruck makes no sense and the Semi is probably not viable. That's not about "EVs" though, that's a Tesla specific thing.

I don't know how anyone with any knowledge of EVs whatsoever can make this argument in 2023. Maybe this was forgivable 10 years ago, but now? This feels like bad faith.

> The future is hybrid

The future of personal transport vehicles is battery-electric, full stop. Why? Because you no longer need any of the trappings of an internal combustion engine. People forget why cars were awesome in the first place -- because you didn't need a horse anymore. In the same way, the big gain in the BEV is NOT adding the battery and the electric motor, it's getting rid of the ICE.

Getting rid of the ICE is only an indirect benefit. It makes the car lighter and cheaper. If you don't need gas for anything, then getting rid of it is worth it. However if you need the gas for something (long trips?) then you need it.

Seems likely that it won't be long until 90% of people won't need gas for anything. Just a single doubling of range from current levels, and a reasonably build out of charging infrastructure would do the trick. I'd be surprised if we don't see both of those in the next 20-30 years.

And of course for many people the tipping point will come earlier.

People didn't care about getting rid of the horse at first, either.

My grandpa remembered the horses and didn't miss them at all. They had an ugly temper and you had to feed them daily even if you didn't leave the farm. They were purely a cost sink worse than a car or tractor.

I guess I'd get pissy too if I had to pull a plow all day long :-(

It may be true that when 30% of vehicles are EVs, oil change locations will be hard to find, but I doubt it. Even if dedicated oil change chains cease to exist, people will still need tires, alignment, etc, and those shops will presumably provide oil change services.

Regardless, it's going to be a while before 30% of vehicles on the road are EVs — isn't it like 1-2% of new cars sold? If vehicles stay on the road for 20 years, then EVs won't be 30% of the total fleet for a long time.

The EU has a lot of variance (Sweden 32%) and I assume the USA does too.

https://www.wri.org/insights/countries-adopting-electric-veh...

Average car age in the EU is 12 years.

My modern car recommends synthetic changes at 7,500 miles by the book. Sending off samples to the labs, it looked good at that point but started to get some bad degradation at about 11,000mi. It would be sludge a little after 15,000mi and would have probably destroyed the engine before 25,000mi

Oil analysis is about the cost of an oil change for most people and sometimes says change the oil so most people just change the oil. For some it makes sense to do oil analysis.

Otherwise you're talking about extremely rare one-off cases where someone's car happened to be in just the right environment and built just perfectly the whole time. I'm not talking about "that one time one guy in a forum five years ago said his car lasted 120,000mi without an oil change", I'm talking about normal advice for normal car drivers.

No OEM car manual says this is recommended.

> Normal Service – Up to 25,000 miles (40,200 km), 700 hours of operation or one year, whichever comes first, in personal vehicles not operating under severe service.

That said, this still goes against the person who I was originally commenting about. They suggested going 2+ years between oil changes, and while the mileage does fit here for the average car the timeframe doesn't.

You're also technically 1,000mi short from my ask but I'll grant if it actually is OK at 20,000mi it's probably still OK at 26,000mi.

For most people oil analysis and their filters is more expensive than just changing the oil.

It's not just that it's a bit less, it's like a few standard deviations less.

The average US car goes a hair over 13,000mi/yr.

Even just putting the car on the lift and jacking it up is already more work, requires more training, and has more risk than having someone in the pit at a fast oil change place.

No oil changes. No finding a gas station just to refuel. No worrying about whether the engine is warm enough for setting off in the morning. No smell before the cats light off. Instant heat. Instant torque. Dead silent. The list goes on and on.

After you get used to it, the idea of going back to ICE again is unfathomable. Why would I want to give up the convenience I have now? For road trips? Ha! I have both ICEV and EV at the moment and it is the EV that is the preferred road trip car, not the ICEV.

I've almost never spent longer than 15 minutes charging on long car trips, unless we're also going to a restaurant. And even then, we usually don't have to, and could have made it a 15 minute stop if we wanted to. Most of the time, the car is done charging enough faster than we could stop for coffee, and I have to extend the charge using my app.

That said, there was one occasion in a trip through Big Sur, when the Ventana supercharger went offline, when I did a 45 minute charge session, and I drove 30 minutes out of the way to catch a supercharger on another occasion. So 2 occasions like that in nearly 3 years.

The situation is pretty good now. In another few years, it will be even better!

This. The haters think that Level 3 charging takes 60+ minutes. There are times I wish it did. Instead, if I leave my car on the Supercharger next to Denny's and get seated right away, I will finish charging and have to move the car before my food comes. Every time.

Maybe someday we will actually have large numbers of free Level 2 chargers at shops and restaurants, so we can eat a leisurely lunch in peace while our cars charge.

This is one of the big issues. EVs are for the class of people who own houses with garages, in the suburbs of large metros.

EV sales are still at only around 20% of the market, which is a lot! But given that the majority of lithium batteries are already going into EVs now total battery production needs to go up by something like a factor of 5 by 2030 just to meet EV sales. That's a huge amount of growth for any industry, let alone high tech manufacturing.

I would not be surprised to see the relative growth of EV sales stall soon as manufacturers have trouble sourcing enough batteries, and in response we may see some Hybrids or EREVs coming onto the market to meet the shortfall. After all, a battery that gets you 50km is good for 90% of trips for a significant number of people, but you couldn't buy it without a range extender because of that last 10%.

If fossil hydrogen ever gets off the ground I still have hope for fuel-cell/battery hybrids. Since they generate water vapor as a side product they'd also be beneficial to a small extent for arid climates.

The battery is the single most fragile, heavy, dangerous, expensive, stressful ("range anxiety") and annoying component of an EV, and one which degrades at an alarming rate, just by using it normally.

Guess what, a fuel tank doesn't shrink every time you fill it.

And it doesn't shrink even FASTER when you fill it to the top.

Or let it go empty.

Or run in cold weather.

Or hot weather.

Or you drive fast.

Or too slow.

Or when you fill the tank too fast. Where "too fast" is dripping it in for 30 to 60 minutes a pop.

Or when you don't drive the car for too long.

On top of that, the starting range of the top BEV is half an ICE car. That's on a new car, before all the magical "shrinking" happens.

Batteries are WORSE than anything the automobile industry has from the past 50+ years. And people are slowly realizing that.

Second, when a gas car catches fire, it's almost always after a car incident. Firefighters arrive, and put the fire out easily.

Do you know what firefighters do when an EV catches fire? Nothing can stop this fire. Literally nothing. So firefighters have to evacuate everyone at least half a mile in radius. Then let it burn down. Which may take a full day. Or more. Read the protocols.

What an absolute joker.

https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/car-recalls-defects/hyu...

https://apnews.com/article/chevy-silverado-recall-truck-fire...

https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/jeep-cherokee-recall-fi...

https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/recall-chrysler-pacific...

https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/car-recalls-defects/vol...

https://www.upi.com/Archives/1987/11/25/GM-agrees-to-recall-...

I could go on and on and on and on and on and on and on...

I've owned multiple cars which have had multiple recalls for catching fire while parked. I've had multiple neighbors have house fires from parked ICE vehicles. You're massively wrong for thinking ICE vehicles don't catch fire while parked.