Fuel or electricity should cost what it costs. Vehicles need to be taxed according to their externalities. Heavier vehicles have more externalities. Road maintenance, pollution, traffic injuries and fatalities to name a few. I think if we did these things we'd trend back towards reasonable vehicles over time, and that would be a big net win.
> U.S. fossil fuel subsidies stretch across the U.S. tax code, which makes detailing their costs complex. The IMF estimates they stood at $760 billion in 2022, a figure topped only by China.
Phrasing it this way also just begets that tax deductions are subsidies: “It's like these other highly subsidized industries.” Its rephrasing your conclusion rather than making some new point.
They certainly make very short trips 10x easier and more fun though.
If there was a big enough market for that EV at 20k to make production practical, car companies would make them in an effort to maximize profit.
But Americans have a lot of money and a lot of space and want big vehicles; EVs are more expensive to produce, so it’s the rich people that want EVs. And those people aren’t going to buy a little toy box.
That might make sense if the only two options were "make nothing" and "make EVs to sell for 20k". In the presence of other options, however, the manufacturer might decide that that's not the optimal strategy. Or existing regulations, tariffs, or subsidies might be distorting the market. Automobiles are probably one of the least-free markets this side of pacemakers.
So a 20k EV probably just involves too many compromises to make it a winning proposition for both the buyer and the seller.
Now, is the market efficient / globally optimal? No. Welcome to complex reality.
I've owned a Bolt. It was $24K out the door (however, no tax credit at the time). And I really have a hard time understanding why you'd call it large?
The small Chinese EVs are universally poor performers in terms of crash safety. You can make a lot of concessions on price when you don't particularly care about the people inside the car. Are those the regulations you're talking about?
I like those regulations.
At which point sacrificing interior space doesn't yield much in terms of efficiency and makes for a poor trade off. What we're probably going to see is "family cars" with a 300+ mile range and the shape of an SUV and then "commuter cars" which are small and correspondingly have a <100 mile range, because it doesn't make a ton of sense to make something which is tiny but still heavy.
We need cheaper, smaller EVs in the US yesterday. Looking at the options China and Europe have and comparing to what we have you can really get the sense that car companies here only care about making SUVs/trucks/and _some_ crossovers electric but don’t actually care about making small cars electric because of one thing.. profit. They know they’ll make more money on the massive cars but that’s horrible for us because it further expands the need for larger parking spots, wider roads, and I won’t even get into the fatality statistics when comparing cars of different sizes.
The only thing that will force car companies to get smaller cars into the U.S. market is regulation. Then and only then will we see true EV offerings around the 20k mark