Suddenly inherit a boat? Perhaps your towing capacity is inadequate.
A ravine appears due to an unexpected earthquake? Four tires probably won’t traverse it.
You’re out at a dinner party. Your friend’s car breaks down and you now need to carry 9 people? Anything but a small bus will be inadequate.
How to solve this? Look at your last X years of driving and solve for that. For everything else, vehicle rental exists for the exactly-once occasion.
I’m impressed by how many 9’s people try to solve for. It’s completely unreasonable. I solved for my 99.9% of days driving and am extremely happy.
Plus, how many of us would be currently unemployed if our respective industries demanded a 100.0% solution before adoption?
That’s mostly what people are trying to do. In that 1000 days of driving, they are going to have ~three of every annual event. Thanksgiving travel to family three times. Christmas travel three times. Three years of summer vacations or ski trips, etc.
We have an EV and love it. We also have a hybrid for road trips.
I never said it was about saving the environment. (It’s about not being outright ridiculous in either direction.)
Well, yeah, but they said consumers "overestimate" their needs, not "contract pathological monomania leading to psychiatric and financial disaster."
Are you sure that the reason isn't the cost of them? I mean, sure charging is one aspect, but is there actually a study that compares the two? There's plenty of "normal" people buying cheap BYDs.
> It’s why so many people own pickup trucks and large SUVs.
That's a very region/culture-specific thing.
I live in Canada and I really can't see myself driving an EV right now. It doesn't guarantee my not-so-rare but crucial requests:
- Going to some random places for vacationing without worrying about whether there are enough charging stations;
- Going through early spring without adding anxiety about a power outage that sweeps for 2-7 days;
The infra is just not ready. And TBH, I don't think it's going to be ready forever. Infra construction is so corrupted and so expensive in NA that I absolutely have zero faith in it.
Actually, the push to more EVs in China is already a bit problematic due to lack of Infras. Just imagine you are in the middle of Spring festival traffic jam...it's already bad for gasoline cars but it's a nightmare for EVs.
We live in a semi-rural part of Canada, and have a bit of a (pleasant, country) commute. I want the most efficient vehicle. I ran the numbers and an EV just did not make sense. If you're driving mostly highway, the overall cost/km isn't that much better than the best ICEs, and the ICE is much cheaper.
Financial-wise, I actually haven't compared the cost/km because of two things:
- I'm not sure how expensive a switch of battery going to be (do we have data on that?)
- Yeah they are outright more expensive than ICEs, and with the current financing climate, not very attractive
If you live in suburban and commuting to downtown for work, large part of the driving would be high way. Having hybrid makes way more sense in this scenario.
If you live in downtown, you probably don’t need a car or you are parking in a underground parking lot that does not guarantee you a charging plspot
A more interesting statistic would be something like daily commute https://www.thinkinsure.ca/insurance-help-centre/commuting-t... which recently was ~30min each way on average - very much in range.
On the other hand the power issues could actually improve with enough V2L deployed.
Even then, the question "what are the actual preferences when adjusted for price" is valid even in today's US.
Excluding cars without active thermal management, which mostly means the Nissan Leaf.
That’s not how many Americans view vehicles though. They view them as a reflection of themselves and as a status item.
$50k to you seems insane but I was eyeing a car that was about $280k in Redwood City last week. It’s been sold. Some of us enjoy cars.
https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
This is entirely rational, and reminds me of people who can’t understand why everyone doesn’t bike everywhere. It just reeks of solipsism.
I own a Tesla, and I have to tell you it’s a massive pain to own an EV and live in an apartment complex. It’s honestly frustrating to the point that I regret getting it. The performance is great, but the interior, significant price drop in the year I’ve owned it, and the constant anxiety about the battery has not made for a pleasant experience.
If I could go back I’d get a Mercedes S class that’s 5-7 years old.
Imagine having a fridge that isn't cold enough for storing ice cream and frozen veggies.
And yes, none of my shoes are even remotely close to covering 95% of floors. Some are good for hiking, some are good for running, some are warm in the winter.
The issue is not the lack of 100% coverage. The issue is that there is no sufficiently appealing option for a large number of people to get access to the 5% of cases when you do need it. Apparently rentals and other sharing options aren't quite up to snuff, so everybody overprovisions like crazy.
It gets awful stressful awful quick when you have to deal with availability uncertainty and other things depend on it.
A car is just a fundamentally different product to a set of shoes. If cars ever get to the point where the cost of one is trivial for the average person, we'll probably see the kind of specialization you see in other cheaper products. Also note, we can see pressure in the opposite direction for phones. Phones have become more expensive as they become more general purpose.
I take your point though. There are still plenty of delivery trucks and personal autos, even in this biking paradise.
His canonical example was "kosher food is acceptable to nearly everyone, and required by a small minority." Thus kosher takes over.
"EVs vs. ICEs" is nothing like that. EVs have been rejected by vast numbers of consumers because they find them impractical. That's all.
Which is a great example of how Taleb's "examples" are BS. Really, when Taleb goes into a grocery store, is all of the food kosher? Or even a majority? Kosher has not "taken over". It's a niche product.
Secondly, his examples were from the Middle East, where kosher food is indeed ubiquitous even for non-Jewish consumers. Because almost no one really objects to it.
Whereas US consumers really do object to EVs.
I didn't bring Taleb into the thread, adolph did.
> his examples were from the Middle East
Not the one in the article adolph referenced:
"The Kosher population represents less than three tenth of a percent of the residents of the United States. Yet, it appears that almost all drinks are Kosher."
This implies that some sort of considered effort has been made to produce these drinks as kosher. This is just paying some money to get the private certification and the license to put it on the can. In the context of a drink, the drink ingredients is almost certainly already kosher, so the certification is just saying: "there was no cross-contamination in the making of this product". Which isn't a special consideration made for kosherness.
If I told you that you could increase your TAM by a million people, and open new wholesale marketing opportunities for a onetime payment of ~$1000, you take the deal.
My analogy for the most intolerant wins is treating a decision-maker’s personal values as a population, one of which is “the most intolerant” and thus drives the decision because the others are indifferent to that quality.
There are a variety of aesthetic or prosaic values that might drive a decision for EV or ICE. A minority of those values will likely drive the decision since the majority will be satisfied by any number of options.
I guess you don't read the Wall Street Journal, or otherwise follow automotive news. I don't feel a need to provide links for you.
> the others are indifferent to that quality
No auto buyer is indifferent to the choice of EV vs ICE.
How is that a failure? Slow sales are occurring across the entire auto industry probably because people are broke/unemployed and dont want to spend the cash right now.
I don't read the WSJ, but I do understand numbers. This site seems to indicate that 4% of global new car sales were electric in 2020, and 18% are electric at the end of 2023. https://ourworldindata.org/electric-car-sales
What are you reading that would indicate that an industry segment that is up 450% in four years has "failed"?
You have made an extraordinary claim, and refuse to back it up in the face of compelling evidence.
The rate of growth is falling, but the overall sales trend is still up. Perhaps you are confused with the math, and the difference between rate of growth and growth?
It’s why so many people own pickup trucks and large SUVs. People don’t buy vehicles for what they need 95% of the time, they buy vehicles that will do whatever they want it to do 100% of the time.