I consistently hear 2 main arguments against electric vehicles in the US. Range, and cost.
BYD & China is solving both. Range is important because we lack charging infrastructure still, and anyone who rents at an apartment complex, you are screwed and have to rely on public charging stations. Big batteries are important for these folks. People also still have range anxiety, so when a fuel efficient gas car will get ~400+ miles per full tank, only having more expensive cars with a ~250 mile range is a non starter for a lot of people in the US.
Cost is self explanatory. One of the better electric cars sold in the US, the Ioniq 6 STARTS at $38k, which is already more than a significant chunk of the population can afford - you're looking at close to an $800/month payment at current rates for entry level. BYD could sell in the US at around $20,000.
https://www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/2024/05/23/electric-ve...
Key takeaways from the above:
> The number of EV charging stations has more than doubled since 2020. In December 2020, the Department of Energy reported that there were nearly 29,000 public charging stations nationwide. By February 2024, that number had increased to more than 61,000 stations. Over 95% of the American public now lives in a county that has at least one public EV charging station.
> EV charging stations are most accessible to residents of urban areas: 60% of urban residents live less than a mile from the nearest public EV charger, compared with 41% of those in the suburbs and just 17% of rural Americans.
Maps: https://supercharge.info/map | https://www.plugshare.com/ | https://afdc.energy.gov/stations#/find/nearest?country=US&fu...
https://www.coxautoinc.com/market-insights/q4-2024-ev-sales/
https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2025/trends-in...
No but it only takes 3 minutes to dump 45 litres of fuel into my car and that lasts about 3 weeks of driving.
The demand isn't there. The group of people who buy EVs and don't have a home to charge at is too small. And that won't change until the economics of purchasing an EV fundamentally change.
The point I’m primarily trying to make, repeatedly: distance to a charger is not some universal rule that prevents uptake. The least likely thing to be true is that the market stays the same. If it remains the same in the US for a few years, China will crush this market.
Either a human needs to be employed overnight plugging in and unplugging these cars ($$) or else every single charger that supports this needs to have new fancy robotic arms and some agreed-upon protocol that cars can use to request a charge.
Considering that so far the story of EV chargers in America has looked like "download my app!" people struggling and failing to get credit card readers reliably working, I have no faith that this would happen in a few years.
The benefit is that you can power the cars when there is least demand on the grid, on the roads, on the need for the vehicles themselves, on the time of people who currently wait at chargers for their cars to charge. Fix one thing (and build upon the main innovation of cars driving themselves) and you unlock all this other waste. The charging location can even manage this by setting availability to align with staff, eg 5am to 11pm, or 24/7 if they want to hire up. You can even have roaming staff, eg wander between three locations and just switch the cars out.
The current state of affairs in the US is that having a L2 charger at home and paying $E for 100kwh of electricity is massively less expensive than paying $E*5 for the car to go charge itself via some third party. This will not be a cheap service. The places where people tend to buy electric vehicles, generally coincide with high electricity prices and high labor costs. Maybe the high electricity costs can be somewhat offset by using off-peak power, but that's also off-peak generation due to solar panels, so who knows.
This also relies on the innovation of "cars that can drive themselves to the charger", which has been 18 months away in Teslas for what, a decade now? And Teslas are now a tiny proportion of the EVs sold in the US. Something less expensive and better price-per-range like the Ioniq 5/6 or the Equinox EV don't even have the hardware to take advantage of a system like this if you could snap your fingers and make these overnight charging facilities exist.
I don't think the economics work in the 2020s. Someday, sure.
These arguments are kind of like horse and cart owners stating that gasoline powered vehicles will.need to be able to get fuel and that's impractical. Its infrastructure and innovation that is still being built out, the that build out is now 10-12 years along for most first world nations.
If this includes AC chargers, leaving your car for 8 hours 2 miles away is an absolute pain.
If it doesn't, the question becomes are the chargers occupied? Are they operational?
Waiting at a gas station takes a minute, waiting at a charger takes 30.
I've been driving an EV for more than 5 years and pretending that charging isn't a significant hindrance to EV ownership is disingenuous. It's actually gotten worse because more EVs are on the road and the chargers haven't kept pace with the rising demand.
It is curious that this is the case. If chargers were profitable a couple of years ago, you would expect more chargers and more profit today.
I haven’t noticed much growth in chargers where I live but I have noticed more EVs on the road.
You have to think a lot of the low hanging fruit locations are taken by now and, even if it's profitable, it doesn't make any profit while you're building it and I've seen a "coming soon" sign on top of what looked like a finished installation for more than a year at a mall near me.
I’m currently on a road trip and was leaving the car at a nearby charger which was walking distance from where I’m staying - I can’t imagine owning one where either this wasn’t available or there wasn’t a fast charger I could spend 10 minutes at.
The actual long distance drives were super easy thanks to Superchargers - 5-10 minute stops keep you driving for hours! It doesn’t feel disadvantaged compared to gas so long as the infrastructure is there.
My car gets ~500 miles/800 km per tank. My wife's car, which has a more efficient engine and transmission and is also smaller, but with the same huge tank, gets ~600 miles/960 km per tank. I will have to stop for a bathroom somewhere along a route that long, but only once or twice. I used to have to stop three times for a ~900 mile/1500 km trip that I did a few times.
This is a problem with EV proponents who try to argue that "you'll stop every couple of hours for half an hour or so anyway, so charging isn't an issue". No, I won't. I'll drive 1000 miles with less than 45 minutes of downtime on the whole trip. I don't stop every two hours. Maybe 15 minutes every 4 hours, of which 10 is fueling and going to the bathroom and 5 is getting off and back on the highway.
That's not a slam against EV's, but let's acknowledge their weak points honestly.
I'm American, so grew up in car culture, but I've never driven more than 200 - 300 miles in a day.
I guess if you’re trying to follow an ICE car on a road trip then yeah it might be a weak point. If you’re already stopping every 200 miles then it’s no matter. For us, we enjoy travel days more with the built in stretch/bathroom breaks.
Those are five long charging opportunities, which is two more than you need for a 1000 mile trip.
I get the concept, and I am not an EV hater. But let us not pretend that long-distance driving is an imaginary thing. I don’t stop - ever - for more than fifteen minutes, unless it’s to sleep.
I've also done the same trip in 3 days, and in 5 days. The longer trips were far more pleasant, and were not slowed down at all by charging.
My car (Mazda3 hatch) gets 24 mpg, which is actually typical for US mid-sized cars.
I have a 3-5 minute gas station fill up every 260 miles or so, basically once a week. The Chinese MG4 does 435 miles on a charge, 95% of which I could charge at home, the remaining 5% of my miles are my twice a year road trips @ ~400 mi (to LA) and ~800 mi (to Seattle).
The MG4 makes LA without a stop and Seattle with 1 stop.
That's a once a year stop for ~30 minute in the EV compared to 3-4 hours a year sitting at smelly gas stations for my Mazda ICE.
I would certainly trade never having to ever take my car into a gas station, ever again, for one brief stop once a year on my leisurely road trip if I had the cash to buy a great EV.
But to be fair, not every product has to perfectly fit every context. To be successful a product can fill a small niche, or it can appeal to a large market- it doesn't have to satisfy every use case.
So you're right - driving 1000 miles with no downtime is not an EV strength. But the percentage of the market doing that is tiny. Conversely the proportion of people who live in a house (home charging) and drive < 100 miles a day, is huge.
Even for those doing a "once a year road trip" - well, hire cars exist.
So I completely agree that an EV is not useful to you. I would suggest though that a product can be massively successful, while at the same time appealing to a subset of the market. And appealing to a subset does not limit validity or indeed profitability.
Lipstick seems to be a successful product, despite only appealing to something less than 50% of the market.
Yes, EVs do slow down long road trips a bit. But it’s really not much of a difference. I just did 3000 miles in 10 days in one.
I recently moved to an EV for my road-tripper vehicle. Yes, I need to stop and recharge every 4-5 hours for 20-40mn.
I find that I like it. A stretch, a coffee, snacks and replenishment. My favorite chargers are at a supermarket and a cafe' nearby.
I agree the pro-EV types try to whitewash this a lot, and I agree it is dishonest.
...but I find that I am okay with the cross-country EV reality anyway.
$0.02
Even among Americans, American cars aren't considered that good. There's a massive reliability premium you pay for Honda and Toyota. Even cars with 100k miles on them (frustratingly as a buyer) keep their value. And they're manufactured in the US, inasmuch as any car can be said to be manufactured in a single location.
I've been searching around and I can't even find data about other countries importing our cars which to me would be the biggest signal of strength.
I've only been in BYDs in Mexican Ubers and I would not buy one, it felt cheap and plasticky and creaked.
Oh I would for sure buy a BYD today if I were able. The ones I've ridden in have been really nice. I mean they are literally plastic but so is every car in the "economy" price range. I don't think their interiors were noticeably different than any other non-luxury car. I've been told that their higher end models don't have this problem.
They do have significant advantages on the software side of things. I’m not sure how that compares to Chinese companies however.
We've owned Hondas (Odyssey) and Toyotas (Camry, Prius, Corolla). They've been great. We also changed the oil whenever the car's display said to and did whatever other servicing our independent mechanic advised. I suspect that a lot of cars would also be reliable if they were maintained.
Toyota is recalling 100,000 Tundra trucks because debris was left in the engine. https://www.haleytoyota.com/blog/the-2022-2023-toyota-tundra... There's no perfect vehicle although I'd say EVs get a lot closer when you can refill at home and do basically no maintenance except tire rotations and cabin air filters.
However, the much higher prices these companies are selling their cars outside of China are still much lower than the prices American cars are available at.
Are they even doing that? A few billion dollars a year is meaningful but it's not dumping for an industry this big.
At least 40% of Americans do not give a crap about addressing climate change. Many Americans see EVs as a waste of time and a direct attack on the US.
*all beliefs are the same*
Point your gun where it belongs which is the oil industry and its lobbyists.
They are indeed the enemy. They've managed to convince a large swath of the population to hate everything that is not fossil-fueled.
Example: God made the sun and the sky. That's where heaven is. Fossil fuels come from under the earth. Something else really bad is down there too. I don't want to spell it out, but it's the opposite of heaven.
Or for the "independent, lion-not-sheep" types: I don't depend on big companies. My energy comes from up above. You can't take the sky from me. etc.
Freedom to power your home without paying "the man" should be compelling to all who could use it. Texas is ironically a prime state for renewable energy and the dollars generated from it have convinced some, but many still reject it as "wokeness".
It boggles the mind.
When I'm in public conversation, say in a coffee shop, restaurant, or crowded park, and I know I'm in a place with a lot of "christians" around me, I'll say things very much like you describe:
"Don't you know? Oil comes up from hell! It's made by the devil!"
"Sunlight is falling down from heaven, it's a gift directly from god."
"But for some reason, so many christians are against solar power, and want to burn more oil."
Then I'll wrap up with a little apocalypse evangelism:
"The bible says that in the end times, most christians will start to follow false prophets, and they're all going to go to hell!"
I doubt it has much lasting effect, but I do see a few heads turn, with questioning, worried looks on their faces.
You're the first other person I've seen mention this as a means of "converting the sinners".
Because the unfair advantage distorts the market leading to a potentially otherwise noncompetitive product destroying the competition at which point they can (and will) jack up prices, so not only do you get more expensive vehicles, but you've also destroyed an entire industry and several adjacent industries at the same time.
It's not like you can't just snap your fingers and re-establish a vehicle manufacturing supply chain once it disappears.
I get people just want cheap vehicles, but the short-term benefit simply isn't worth it.
Purchase discounts for EVs in the US, for instance, didn't discriminate based on manufacturer. You could buy a foreign made EV and you still get the discount.
Discriminatory subsidies, like for instance, funneling billions of dollars per year into Chinese-owned manufacturers of EVs, parts and even even shippers, is not ok.
The US has, of course, been accused of discriminatory subsidies as well and countries have retaliated, correctly, with increased tariffs to offset the unfair advantage.
Given our recent election results, it seems to me that we don't want to.
How we made it: will China be the first electrostate? - https://www.ft.com/content/e1a232c7-52a0-44dd-a13b-c4af54e74... | https://archive.today/OSFYo
Stellantis sells a good number of EVs in Europe, but almost entirely in form factors that won't sell in North America. Perhaps this expertise and experience will be useful.
I hope domestic manufacturers survive the "protection" Trump is giving them, but the protection may prove fatal.
heheh
The climate thing itself is a giant oligarchy influenced manipulative game play. This nation is built on capital. Capital by its nature looks to dominate humanity and freewill.
The treacherous twists to turn a noble pursuit into a way for developed nations to continue dominate developing nations is beyond the space of this comment, but you can see that clearly over the history: Caesar Hitler Mao Trump Xi etc.
We people have truly never been able to wield the power ourselves.
Anyone who mentions China's subsides without mentioning the US's $2.5B+ in EV subsidies is mostly likely ignorant and bluffing, or intentionally misleading you.
And don't even get me started on how it took $80B in AIFP subsidies to keep our auto industry from just dying completely ~16 years ago.
This "China subsidizes EVs" BS needs to end. Everyone subsidizes. The only meaningful questions are how much and to what end.
If anything you are proving the US doesn't understand research or science behind producing electric vehicles and simply funding EVs directly instead of associated organizations.
Given the current climate theres no way to explain it without sounding like a crazy person.
This fits well with the corporate donor driven political system where the government puts no pressure on the corporations on their production side allowing them to outsource their production to the rest of the world and instead focuses on growing the American market and consumer demand for them.
One of the largest recipients of Chinese EV subsidies is ... (drumroll) ... Tesla, an American company.
It's not just that China has reached some kind of quality parity with North America. There are now significant market segments that the US functionally cannot manufacture because we completely ceded the institutional knowledge and infrastructure in favor of financialization and outsourcing of the US economy.
My specific area of expertise is robotic / computer controlled manufacturing equipment and a lot of the components (high precision servos, sensors and other motion components) are functionally impossible to source domestically. There are still some boutique manufacturers making things in low efficiency / low volume in the USA but touring the manufacturing campuses of Chinese suppliers has been shocking in the last five years. The sheer scale of efficient, automated assembly they are capable of operating at makes a big-three automotive assembly line look like a dirt-floored shack with men knocking things together with rocks.
They are laser focused on lights-out manufacturing at extreme volume in ways I have never seen in the US. Entire production lines of high complexity electronics that are completely vertically integrated (everything from the injection molding for the plastic enclosure to the PCB manufactured on one campus) with human hands touching them for the first time as they leave the automated quality control line to be boxed up.
I don't think American people fully comprehend the brain and skill drain that has already taken place.
He also was a guest on the Search Engine podcast to discuss the same topic earlier this year [1]. I enjoyed this more than the video.
I think there’s some nuance and slight nationalism to take with a grain of salt, but the point is extremely well demonstrated.
[0] https://youtu.be/3ZTGwcHQfLY?si=2jaYQZEinXsJBk2L
[1] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/search-engine/id161425...
Assume a generation to be about 21 years (birth to high school + trade training).
Our business leaders since the 1980s failed to quantify the cost of a possible revamp, and I wonder what the true cost will end up being.
I’ve seen some of the Great Lake cities and towns that are in sad shape; but I was too young (and being immigrants, also too poor) to tour those areas in any depth in the Reagan/Carter days so I can only imagine what they were like back then.
Because your own industrial base atrophies is one reason:
> Democratic countries’ economies are mainly set up as free market economies with redistribution, because this is what maximizes living standards in peacetime. In a free market economy, if a foreign country wants to sell you cheap cars, you let them do it, and you allocate your own productive resources to something more profitable instead. If China is willing to sell you brand-new electric vehicles for $10,000, why should you turn them down? Just make B2B SaaS and advertising platforms and chat apps, sell them for a high profit margin, and drive a Chinese car.
> Except then a war comes, and suddenly you find that B2B SaaS and advertising platforms and chat apps aren’t very useful for defending your freedoms. Oops! The right time to worry about manufacturing would have been years before the war, except you weren’t able to anticipate and prepare for the future. Manufacturing doesn’t just support war — in a very real way, it’s a war in and of itself.
* https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/manufacturing-is-a-war-now
That's (partly) what did-in Japan and Germany in during WW2: they couldn't produce enough to actually run a war. Even the just the UK was out-producing Germany in many measures (e.g., aircraft).
The Big 3 completely retooled for war in very short order. If things go hot again you want factory capacity available for retooling to be possible.
A society just has to be willing to pay for that capacity instead of deciding that they want the cheapest widget made somewhere else.
Given the use of drones in Russia-Ukraine, what is the drone-making capacity of the US versus some other countries?
If we're really so concerned about 'supply chain' issues we could build up a strategic reserve of batteries and solar panels. If china wants to continue subsidizing their industry below costs of manufacture I see no reason why we shouldn't exploit their generosity to meet our climate goals as quickly as possible.
One of the 'good news' stories re: the recent datacenter buildout is that grid storage is now being more widely deployed, and that compliments the roll out of renewable energy.