I see them pretty often in Australia which also has an anti yank-tank movement (tongue in cheek name for a big american "truck")
That said our most popular cars are still all three tonne utes or SUVs so it's a small movement.
You are right to note the economic situation being a big part of vehicle decisions. Fuel prices has been a driving force, and image plays a big part too.
The moment you face the truth is the moment you can start doing something about it.
Saying that Trump is not allowed to be blamed is symptomatic of just how damaged the public discourse is. Too many snowflakes who are terrified of facing basic accountability for the consequences of their beliefs and actions.
Politically, it seems the people slowing EV adaption can be on both sides of the aisle.
Yes, we can truly both sides everything. But we can't just claim things are the same when they're obviously not.
It's clear, and indisputable, that most EV adoption is coming from green policy, particularly around the economy. And who is most responsible for that? The explicitly pro-oil republicans, or not-them?
He didn't say that.
The trouble is that ALL anyone does is blame Trump, when both parties have undermined US industry for the past 50 years or so. I think there is no clear solution to keeping industry here. Protectionism often undermines competition and raises costs. But with the current monetary system, and our collective labor/wage standards, we cannot compete in the long run. We will ultimately have to resort to some protectionism for critical industries.
>Too many snowflakes who are terrified of facing basic accountability for the consequences of their beliefs and actions.
I think both of our political parties are unwilling to admit fault. Unfortunately, people like you only want to shit on Trump and Republicans.
No doubt this will get several downvotes because HN is in fact overwhelmingly populated by liberals with Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Luxury ICE vehicles also depreciate rapidly, and yet they're quite popular. Plus EVs are likely to have longer usable lifetimes -- though with different issues -- than gas cars.
Due to all the people in my fmaily I have 4 cars so I wouldn't go from 1 EV to 2. If the current EV gets destroyed I do think that used EVs are the right way to go and would buy a used one for sure.
They do still feel like throwaway cars. I'm not sure how you can argue they will have a longer lifetime. If the battery dies surely no one is replacing that at cost? It's more than the car is worth. At least with an ICE each part can be replaced in your driveway with a few hundred in tools and the part probably exists locally used or new.
Making sub-$100k EV's and then crying that consumer demand is low doesn't make any sense. Meanwhile, the Chinese and Korean EVs are absolutely eating this market by making sub 35k and 50k EV's respectively. In California, 1/4 new vehicles registered was an EV in 2024. By the end of 2025, it was 1/3.
The rest of the world will continue to embrace EV's, and the western (and Japanese) propaganda machine will do what it always does when the rest of the world does better: xenophobia, racism followed by screaming that EVs are a failure.
At least you could hook up a generator to pump gas at a gas station.
:/ Life's about trade offs.
Edit: Whoops.. Im not against EVs to be clear. But from a safety POV, having two different energy sources is safer than having one. Im not sure if you'll understand this if you haven't lived in a very snowy state.
If the outage had been longer, I could have made a half-hour trip to an area that had working EV fast chargers and come back with another 5-6 days of power for the house.
https://carnewschina.com/2024/12/05/byd-struck-deal-with-jap...
At least, not beyond the inconvenience that is having to stay at home like 1 unplanned day per several decades. That's still three and three quarters of a nine of uptime even if you'd get the recent Iberian peninsula event every 10 years, and assumes you emptied the battery coincidentally the day before the outage. If you're not an EMT or power plant technician, you're doing more harm than good by being the person who can drive to work during a power outage and find that you're the only one there and nothing works anyway
I think full EVs are great if the lifestyle allows it, but plug-in hybrids seem a better fit for most people without requiring undue compromise.
> What if I want to do my vacation trips during the holidays where rentals are already booked?
The same as you do when any other part is booked out: go elsewhere or do something else. I don't buy a backup train in case the one I want is booked out one of the next ten summers
Consider also the lifestyle change that's "growing older more healthily" by not having a population sit in exhaust fumes for 2x the daily average commute length
I cannot believe this is a serious question.
A small battery pack can easily run most essential domestic services.
If you live in an area that is poor enough that this is not an option, it loses power frequently due to weather, and no one in power cares enough to fix it, that genuinely sucks, and I feel for you. But, as sibling comments said, some other poor areas don't get gasoline shipments in a timely manner—being poor and neglected is just always going to suck in various ways, and the solution is not to avoid any technological advancements that remove the crutch that your particular poor and neglected area is using to get through it a little easier, but to find ways to reduce the poverty and neglect.
And, frankly, solar power and electric vehicles are both great tools to help with that, especially when used together.
That being said, I think Ford’s shift to a range extended EV makes sense for the truck space. I’m sure someone has crunched the numbers on emissions but getting more market share on hybrid/plugin/range extended EVs are definitely better then ICE only. Plenty of manufacturers are offering hybrids- however, the government has historically been too heavily lobbied to push for hybrids by default and reduce ICE only uptake with some kind of sin tax.
E.g. in Georgia (US), EV owners have to pay a $234 annual alternative fuel vehicle fee.
Plug in hybrid owners may choose to have a alternative fuel license plate or standard license plate. If you opt for the standard plate, you don't have to pay the alternative fuel vehicle fee.
The Gresham's law thing: money is just a transfer token. Batteries have a use value. The agents who could profit from hoarding good batteries, don't get to achieve the income of renting them.
It's working fine for scooters, and in China for cars and trucks.
Everyone is now betting on solid state getting both range and rapid charge.
Think of existing swap infrastructure out there, like propane tank swaps. People already use these systems to rinse defective or expired tanks all the time, and that overhead simply gets built into the price.
Now imagine if you could refill a propane tank at home by just plugging it in to your wall. The only reasons to use such a service are now exceptional cases like travel, or to move defective items.
For every new tank introduced to the supply, on average, how many good-for-good swaps will occur before the supplier gets a defective one? Take the cost of a new one and divide it by that average and that is the minimum overhead for a swap.
For batteries, that number is likely in the hundreds of dollars.
I tend to keep my cars over 200,000 miles. Today's cars last a long time. Still, looking back over the past three year's expenses between 150,000 and 200,000 miles, almost all of them relate to engine peripherals - like a new exhaust system, work on emission controls, and a new gas tank, which an EV doesn't have - or brakes, which on an EV last much longer.
I can only hope we solve batteries making EVs throw-away vehicles either with quick battery swaps or with batteries that truly last a lifetime.
0. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/07/heres-one-way-we-know-t...
Warranty anxiety is probably a big factor too, which could be legislated. Imagine how reliable cars would be if a 30 year warranty on drivetrain components was mandatory.
But most people replace their ICE looong before the battery dies. I’d assume the same would happen for EVs too.
I know some people want a pee-in-a-bottle cannonball run, but that doesn't make sense to me. At distances where charging time starts to add up, flying is already much quicker.
If we did long road trips a lot we’d probably get rid of one EV and get an older gas car for that. It wouldn’t be the daily driver.
Environmentalists should be happy about this either way. A fleet of high utilization autonomous vehicles will increase utilization rates of each automobile that is still on the road substantially, serving more people with fewer raw materials. Not to mention that as of right now, all of the leading contenders for commercially viable robotaxi fleets are on EV platforms anyway.
It's not that, by and large, over a longer time horizon, new gasoline cars are going to replace these EVs disappearing from the consumer-owned automobile segment so much as EV robotaxis will be gradually replacing almost all consumer-owned vehicles. Enthusiasts will still have their track toys, but as an economic mode of transportation, the personally owned automobile is going the way of the horse and buggy.
the bigger replacement will still be walking and scooter-like EVs that are cheaper for everyone