Sprinkle in the various reliability issues that have come up recently (regardless of whether they are better or worse than what happens to ICE vehicles)...
Oh, Also, Kinda wondering what's happened to Kia/Hyundai's EV sales due to public perception, I still see probably as many of their EV's as I do GM[0]
[0] It's around this order, not counting plug-in hybrids and M-Plates[1]: Tesla, Ford, Hyundai/GM, Rivian, Polestar, BMW/VW
[1] M-Plate is a "Manufacturer's" License plate. Not all states have them, but mine does and due to where I run into a lot of them. Since they range between prototypes and 'company car' they don't count in the ranking.
The ID4 we got is very comfortable to drive around in, but doing a road trip in Winter feels out of the question. Not that it'd be completely impossible, mind, but I'm pretty confident it'd be a pain in the ass. We'd need to stop more frequently than in our CRV, for a longer period of time each time, and the whole situation with electric car chargers are that sometimes they're broken or working worse than expected, or they're all taken (and it takes way long for a spot to be freed up than at a gas station), or there's problems with the software running the charger, etc.
It'd also be nice if it charged faster and had more range too; it's not terrible on those metrics, but I wouldn't say it's great. Certainly not comparable at all to gas cars.
But yes, I'm aware that Tesla has the charger situation handled much better.
If it showed me the road behind me, for example, that would be super useful for lane changing. But it doesn’t.
I have never once been able to work out what it does, and would love to see the map take up the whole screen, or maybe a list of route instructions could go there.
I also noticed that the “full self driving preview” option seems to have disappeared (it never worked anyway, guessing it’s because we drive on the left)
There is probably a "it looks cool" factor that doesn't hurt.
As far as UX options. Providing customization is old-school thinking these days :/
Pretty much though what the other commentor said - to give a visualization into the self driving for the user.
When traffic cones and street signs were added to Autopilot - you can bet that visualization was updated to show it off.
Same when they added stop light detection.
It makes sense to me. For some, that visualization literally _is_ the AI, for all they know.
I have the screen dimmed right down. You can also choose dark mode.
I think Tesla needs better salespeople, there's a lot of things that I found out after purchase that makes me like it more.
It might sound minor, but that visualization is on the part of the screen close to the steering wheel 100% of the time you're driving. If it's distracting to you, it'll be distracting any time you're driving, and you can't turn it off.
It's like a running shoe that comes with a pebble permanently stuck inside.
Different from the EU Superchargers, which I believe do offer standard CCS?
1) Tesla needs to open up superchargers to other cars. They're doing this at scale now, but generally only the less popular ones, or if they're required to do so by government grants. So many key sites are still off limits to others.
2) In the US only, other car manufacturers need to adopt Tesla's NACS charging standard, so they can physically connect to superchargers. (In the rest of world, everybody including Tesla is already standardized on CCS2.)
The anxious feeling about “will the charger work/will there be a space” is real, but the more EVs are out there, the less this is going to be a problem.
My petrol car could have done the trip without refuelling, but it would also have cost, literally, 5x the cost of charging in fuel.
If you drive a tesla, a supercharger stall is usually available. No other kind of chargers I found either work, or are compatible with my tesla.
But it would be nice to be able to road trip more easily, and 100% this is an important factor in a lot of people's decisions, even if road tripping is something they do only infrequently.
It’s very common for Americans to drive long distances to visit family for holidays.
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/12/24/upshot/24up-f...
[1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/05/18/more-than...
Winter does NOT like EVs...
now that i have an EV and no place at home to charge it (like tens of millions of other Americans) and have to use public infrastructure...
its crap. its just utter crap. yes 90% of trips are not road trips but people do not want to buy a car that can do 90% of what they want any more than they would buy shoes or clothes that only work 90 percent of the time. (and imagine if you could only buy one pair of shoes or one shirt).
There isn't really any data backing up this claim.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/e...
Planes are much popular and this data seems to include commuters so the proportion of people travelling medium to long distances by train is much lower (and most medium/intercity travel is obviously usually done by car and not trains..)
Amongst other significant issues (e.g. cross border travel) high-speed trains tend to be quite expensive, so unless you're travelling alone a car is usually cheaper.
https://www.ryanair.com/gb/en/lp/promotion/getaways
That page shows me flights to Bulgaria, France and Italy for around €25.
It is more like €50 if you aren't flexible, and more again if you need business-friendly times.
Ryanair fly to the primary airport in eastern and southern Europe. I'll take a direct Copenhagen to Sofia flight rather than enjoy changing with Lufthansa.
I feel like the premise of a train is that it costs less than a plane and uses less fuel per passenger, so it should be slower but have the countervailing advantage of being less expensive. That is not what I'm observing.
History shows that no company ever was as superior to its competition as it may seem at their height. Shit's hard yo.
The media has never been a "source of truth" at the best they act as watchdogs, at the worst they are propaganda. You can still find answers for yourself but good information has a time cost.
Tesla's have deep discounts, suggesting a decline in demand. The end. Inventory is harder because they lack dealerships, but it doesn't seem difficult to find a Model3/ModelY right now at all.
-------
For other EVs like Ford Mustang MachE, days of inventory are rising and prices are declining as well as incentives.
It's not just Tesla, it's a wide group of EVs that were overproduced.
https://caredge.com/guides/fastest-and-slowest-selling-cars-...
Go browse some stats yourself.
You've got it backwards. Recessions cause rate-drops.
> Try to sell an expensive car on a loan with eye watering APR of, say 10-12%. This did actually happen in the past, and could very well happen again.
Rate-hikes cause us to lose demand. Yes. But we can see that Toyota demand remains strong with less than 30-days-of-inventory on the average.
So the rate-hikes from the current Fed plan are causing expensive cars (like EVs) to lose demand, while cheaper, more-reliable ICE / Hybrid cars from Toyota are selling like hotcakes.
Yes, I'm watching interest rates and am trying to understand how our economy shifts because of them. But at this base level, EVs are doing worse (and the stats prove it), while cheaper cars (namely ICE/Hybrids) are doing far better right now than anyone expected.
I said: recessions cause rate-drops. Which has always been true. Rate-drops don't always cure recessions, but its one of the first moves a central bank will make to try to fix a recession.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS
That's 2020, 2007, 2000, 1990, 1981, 1979 where a recession immediately caused a rate-drop.
We have to go all the way back to 1974 before we had inflation so high that the central bank kept rates high even during a recession. (Dropping rates causes inflation, so its a balancing act). Even then, interest rates dropped to bring us out of the recession of 1974.
After that, we have 1969, 1959, and 1957 recessions, all three of which caused interest rates to drop.
So 9/10 times, a recession caused an immediate drop in interest rates. And the last 1 time (1974), the recession _eventually_ caused the bankers to drop rates.
> Consider as well the cost of “printing money” if the rate reaches double digits, and the cost of refinancing the existing debt load.
You've got it backwards. Increases rates destroy money. Lower-rates print money.
That's why the central bank lowers rates during recessions, its an indirect way to print money (or perhaps more accurately, expand M2).
Raising rates, like what we're doing today, destroys money (or more accurately, contracts M2). We're destroying money today with 5%+ interest rates because we've seemingly made too much in the 2020 recession / COVID19.
> Price: The 2022 Tesla Model Y starts at $64,990. A Model Y Performance model starts at $67,990. Fully loaded, a Performance model can exceed $80,000.
Is there any other car, EV or otherwise, that is seeing a 33%+ decline in price over the last two years?
Other EVs are seeing deep shadow-discounts. I'm seeing 0% or 1.9% APY financing, which comes out to a few $x,000 savings over the term of the loans. Its an interesting trick to reduce prices without changing the MSRP, but I'm perfectly aware of these games.
Still, no one is doing the depth of discounts like Tesla is doing right now. Granted, all EV makers (Ford F150 Lightning, Subaru Solterra, etc. etc.) have discounts of some kind, or at least financing-1.9% or other "shadow discounts". But nothing on the level of wtf 30%+ declines like Tesla.
The Model 3 price is down ~25% year over year:
https://www.kbb.com/tesla/model-3/2023/ (Long Range MSRP $45,990)
https://www.kbb.com/tesla/model-3/2022/ (Long Range MSRP $57,190)
But that's still higher than its release price in 2017:
https://www.kbb.com/tesla/model-3/2017/ (Long Range MSRP $45,200)
And the "target price" for this thing was supposed to be $30,000.
It's hard to do the same comparison for the Model Y because it was originally released in the middle of the COVID supply chain problems, but notice that the year you're using was the high water mark. The Model Y Performance was $69,190 in 2022 but $61,190 in 2021:
https://www.kbb.com/tesla/model-y/2021/
2022 - 2023 was -32% but 2021 - 2023 was only -16.5%, which itself presumably had some of the supply chain issues priced into it.
Many things can be measured. And unemployment is measuring something but not what it's titled suggests. It's measuring some group of people who qualify as looking for work within a specific timeframe. Someone looking for work for a few years is deemed to employed by this calculation some might question it.
Changing the definition of a recession is political.
That doesn't mean measurements are incorrect and prediction is impossible.
Sorry, I'm not spending 100k on a vehicle.
So I ended up getting a Palisade for around 32k, and my wife and I share that, at least until until better (and cheaper) EV options appear.
Luckily I can use my ebike for most of my around town travel, and that is way less of a carbon footprint than adding an extra vehicle to the roads.
It's more likely EV sales are driven by cost. They have always been more expensive than ICE cars, so they only eaten into the luxury market up until now so the rises you see are increasingly bigger bites out of the luxury market. But the primary cost is batteries, and a blip during COVID aside the cost of batteries has dropped every year. EV are approaching the cost of ICE cars now, if you include a bit of hand waving about maintenance costs.
Once they cross cost threshold and drop below the cost of ICE cars, that quadratic curve will go exponential for a while. Chargers will spring up like weeds, because you can make money out of them and they cost far, far less to build and run than a gas station.
The car I am benchmarking against is the Mazda CX-5. The natural equivalent is the Model Y.
The CX-5 is a fully mature platform and is an excellent example of a solid ICE vehicle.
Mazda CX-5 Cost: $29,300 (possible out the door price ~35K)
Model Y cost: Demo vehicle out the door price is ~41K
My upper bound price is 35K and im seriously exploring used given Mazdas reliability so I can save myself ~10K for a recent model year.
I cant do the same on the Model Y because of Tesla's poor quality reputation. Either I am stuck taking a massive risk on a used Model Y or I am priced out of the market. Repair costs on the Model Y are insane.
This is not including the fact that the Insurance cost on a Model Y is almost double that of a CX-5 for me. (970$/yr vs 1700$/year)
Now I have also considered other EVs but none provide an equivalent to what the CX-5 offers.
Theres the used Mach-E market but I have concerns about reliability and given the whole issue with the contactors and how Ford handled it, I don't think this car will last long term. OK, lets ignore that issue, you still get a bad looking car that gives poor value for the price you have to pay (I can only buy used and it is still on the upper bound of what my budget is)
There is the Chevy Bolt EUV. Good insurance, easily within my price range but I am giving up everything else. Terrible charging speeds (made worse because I dont have supercharger access), not really a crossover, terrible looks, not as comfortable as CX-5.
This is just my anecdote but there has got to be many others who have made the same conclusion as me about EVs. You have to compromise in at least one of the following areas with every EV: Price, looks, comfort, value
When you are risking so much money on the line, it becomes difficult to ignore all these signals.
While I could afford the monthly payment on a $41k car, I would never do that when I would be starting my comparison with a $16k Nissan Versa.
Then on top of that, there are many who would be starting with a Nissan Versa because they simply can't afford an EV even if they wanted to.
EV discussion always ends up being what the best espresso maker is when a huge % of the population is just going to buy the cheapest coffee maker they can because they are too broke to buy much else.
[1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2wHh6sduVw
The last car I owned (Mazda3) lasted me 10 years and cost me 6k (I bought it at 60K miles)
The CX-5 is what I consider a stretch purchase. I can easily afford it but after working 15 years I feel like I wanted to get something I consider upscale.
Really wish more EVs were in this price range but if you include the nonsense that Tesla does with repair costs, the fact that even in 2024 it is still up in the air whether or not they can consistently build a reliable car, and all the other OEMs just messing around with bad designs, the state of EVs is pretty poor. :/
Like I mentioned in my previous post: This isn't a situation where ICE cars are so horridly bad that most people's day to day lives are made worse. You could maybe say that for some EVs though. People are quite happy with their ICE cars, and EV makers need to not only overcome all the issues that they have, they also need to overcome this friction to switching.
If we had used subsidies to undercut gas powered cars we would be much further along than subsidizing expensive status symbols for people who have to always have the latest iphone.
Of course, demand was going to slow from that market from saturation.
The same reason I use an android and so do a 130 million other Americans. I am cost conscious and I will never pay more for an EV if I can pay less for a gas powered car.
The main problem IMO is the groups making these decisions all have the latest iphone at the margin. "No one wants an android" besides for nearly half the population that shop based on price.