If your EVs aren't selling maybe that's because you're making giant fucking trucks and SUVs and hyper-expensive luxury sedans and the kind of people who want EVs mostly just want a compact car for getting to work and running errands.
Also, like, a lot of people who want EVs live in cities and denser environments where it's expensive to live and a pain in the ass to park and maybe your $100K electric monster truck doesn't fit with their lifestyle.
Stop trying to make EVs that appeal to the kind of people who would rather be rolling coal in a modified F450.
@tess The affordable, efficient, small #EV most people want is an #eBike and/or #cargoBikes which use 1/100th the amount of #lithium and other #carbon-intensive resources, costs less to own two #eBikes than one year of car expenses, don't have to give up your old gas car yet, no worries for #parking or grid-scale crisis about charging infrastructure. All we need are #transportation Engineers who don't fruitlessly waste every inch of city streets on cars, and some transit priority lanes instead.
@enobacon@tess Going to push back on this. Outside of an urban environment with decent bike safety, most people would prefer a compact #EV car to replace comparable gas/hybrid vehicle. I like the idea of a bike & I live in a relatively bike-friendly urban area, but it doesn't cover my use cases. I currently use ELEV car, public transit or I walk. Don't really need the bike.
@Stybba3019@schizanon@tess Pushing back on the idea that roads shouldn't be maintained exclusively for cars is #ClimateDenial. Sure you can drive a car, but why does that obviate others from riding an e-bike when the majority of trips are under three miles and half of that distance is #Parking. The funding that it would take to enable transit and e-bikes for everyone is being used to subsidize luxury SUVs for a few, but obviously you need a car, fine, pay for it.
@enobacon@schizanon@tess No. You're not listening to valid reasons why bikes are not a replacement for larger vehicles outside of a dense urban core. Honestly, even IN those cores, walking + bus is a more appealing than wrestling with a bike. I don't want or need to deal with one for a grocery trip, esp. in bad weather. Bikes work for some use cases, anti-bike sentiment sucks, and there is a role for compact, ultra-efficient #EV cars in most of the US.
@Stybba3019@schizanon@tess "wrestling with a bike" 🙄 Bikes don't need to replace car trips across the countryside for a cars-only system to be a bad idea. You can't have transit if you don't allow space for bikes, that's the geometric reality of US cities today, it's too spread out for a bus to be the only non-car option (walking is recreational-only in all but the densest areas.)
@Stybba3019@enobacon@schizanon@tess
To be fair, you didn't list any reasons, or any use cases. You just said you had some. Lots of people tell me they have reasons they can't use a bike, and when asked for details, list things that I do every single day. Many people have a very blinkered idea of what a bicycle is, or what you can do on a bike, if you buy a decent bike, and ride it often enough to know how to use it.
@Stybba3019@enobacon@schizanon@tess
Things I do every day: bike 6 miles to work, with my work stuff, stopping for groceries and errands on the way to/from whenever I need them.
Things I do when I need to: bike in the cold, I am accustomed to the winter minimum were I live (near Boston). People here get snow tires for their cars, I get snow tires for my bike.
Things that are easier on a bike than a truck (that I don't have): trailer-towing a snow blower or someone else's broken bike.
@dr2chase@Stybba3019@schizanon@tess all that effort just to save $30/day is just not "practical" for a small fraction of people, so we better force everyone to drive instead.
@Stybba3019@tess people who choose to live outside an urban environment for their pleasure should pay for the infrastructure and fuel/EVs themselves. The ones who are doing it for productive reasons, i.e. farming, can be subsidized for that instead of just requiring everyone to own and drive a vehicle. The idea that we'll turn the whole fleet electric is folly, but that's basically the plan, and in a DIY-safety environment, that becomes an arms race to the biggest, most armored vehicle.
@enobacon "no yeah lemme just quick bike 1.5 hours to the store, park my bike at the store (there are no bike racks), and carry 150 lbs of groceries on the 1.5 hour bike ride back"
all of the American population
Don't pretend EV cars don't have a use case. It doesn't make you look smart when you say the only vehicle anyone in the world needs is a bike
@erikriffle reading miscomprehension award, most people already have cars, that they could just ... use less if they had other options 🙄 choosing to live 18 miles from the nearest grocery store and expecting society to shape itself around the comfort of your butt, I'm sure mars will be fine by the time you get there.
@enobacon I don't disagree with you that public transportation is absolutely necessary and we should be ramping that up as much as humanly possible. I'm on your side on that issue. I just think it would be disingenuous to expect, as you say, most people to be covered by public transportation or bicycles, or the combination of the two. The unfortunate reality is that most people will need, not want but need, a personal four-wheel vehicle, and it will be powered by either batteries or gasoline
@erikriffle most people have a working car, which embodies some amount of sunk cost for themselves and the environment, and keeping that car to use a few times a week or a handful of times per year is going to be a better deal for them and the environment if they can displace trips of three miles or less with an e-bike. Why are people arguing that bikes can't replace cars but for the species to survive all gas cars become EVs? Buy an e-bike & save up for an EV in a few years 🤷 without subsidy.
@enobacon [2/2] Drive the car you have, whatever it is, until it dies. I just think "replace your car with a bike" applies to a small subset of a small subset of people, and a lot of people who can ride bikes probably are. Likely the only way to make bikes and busses the overwhelmingly primary mode of transportation is by converting every city, town, and village into a condensed urban environment, which I don't think is practical. I again want to emphasize that on the whole, I agree with you.
@erikriffle It does not sound like you understand eBikes or urbanism, and you have overestimated the number of people who don't live in cities and are able to drive cars. Also if you don't think we urgently need to stop burning gas at this rate (transportation is now half of greenhouse gas emissions and we're entering / already in WWIII) then you are just not paying attention. Cars are useful for what they are, but we fail to make such good use of them as most car apologists imagine.
@erikriffle more practical to allow people to ride bikes instead of reserving that roadway for speeding cars, or terraform another planet for human habitation?
@enobacon [2/2] I assume, move to an urban center to get rid of their car, that would be at best disingenuous. I say again, I agree with you that we needed to be done burning greenhouse gasses decades ago. The unfortunate reality is that "bikes and busses only for everyone everywhere" is not an airtight solution. There will be millions of cars on the road for the foreseeable future. Hopefully they stop running on fossil fuels.
@erikriffle some people would definitely relocate if fossil carbon was taxed appropriately, but the politics of doing that while so many are coerced into cars by bad traffic Engineering, is problematic. I'm not saying bikes and buses only for everyone, but it's all we should invest public money in at this point where we've far far overspent on car supremacist planning. Five lanes for idling cars & no sidewalks or bike lanes & the bus stuck in car traffic is not even a good plan for driving.
@tess
The best way to truly transition into broad consumer acceptance and sensible volume production of EV, thereby having the most positive ecological impact and biggest potential revenues, is obviously to make unaffordable garish bullshit exclusively available to posh assholes. Econ 101ish shit.
@tess well, GM does make a sensible sized Bolt that is not a bad car, after a long drawn out battery problem that saw most bolts with new batteries installed under warranty!
@tess yes and there are other underlying factors as well. Take Texas where a new EV registration now runs you 400 bucks. Then it's 200 a year after that.
A typical registration here is under 100 dollars per year.
@RVLara23 that's not uncommon; because roads are typically maintained out of gas taxes and EVs do just as much damage to infrastructure as gas-powered vehicles.
(I mean, Texas is probably doing it to be shitty, but WA does the same thing.)
I think the rich and “aspirational” (barf) is a fine starting point as they’ve got money to burn, but we are absolutely past the point where they should be focusing on mainstream affordable options.
@tess actually we want a ‘dad’s taxi’ - an estate car with a big boot for our EV. We currently have a hybrid. There’s still a place for large family cars that aren’t trucks or SUVs.
@tess
There is a market in the U.S. for "just a compact EV for commuting and errands." That was the Nissan Leaf, starting in 2009: small, limited range, low cost BEV (MSRP ~US$25,000). You can buy a 2024 Leaf starting at US$28,140!
Sales tell the tale. Nissan gave up on the Leaf, discontinuing it for 2026 in favor of the Ariya introduced in 2022. Ariya 2024 MSRP is US$43,000 to $60,000.
Better low-cost commuter EVs will come as batteries and charging infrastructure get better.
@richardknott@tess
At a glance, Fiat 500e as a smaller 2-door has the range of the Leaf but with better charging speed at 15% higher price in US$. Let's see how it does here ... :ablobthinking: #EV
@hairylarry@richardknott@tess what charging port do they ship in the states? The leaf still has chademo afaik. If the fiat comes with ccs or nacs it could be a major consideration.
@martijn@hairylarry@richardknott@tess good question, don’t know. The European ones all have CCS (as do Tesla shipped to Europe), but I think they have signed up to use Nacs in the US.
@tess there are no ev trucks. There are cars that loov like trucks if you are an alien visitor. Real trucks tan put a full sheet of plywood in the back with the tailgate up.
@tess BEVs are a fad. They don't make sense in nearly any cases. This is just the next lazy attempt at a shortcut to green transportation, paralleling ethanol and diesel cars.
@tess It would be easy to incentivize smaller EVs by putting a size restriction on the $7,500 federal tax credit. There already are a buttload of restrictions
There’s a MSRP limit of $55K for cars, but it goes up to $80K for SUVs and minivans :NekoSad:
Absolutely impossible to get a small anything, let alone a plugin-in hybrid that's good for getting around town off the plug but can still take you out of town without hour long pitstops at charging stations.
"Let's hawk electric monster trucks to coal rollers" was apparently the plan? It's not like the administration is unaware that the NHTSA could bring the size of the fleet down by extending safety to include pedestrians, since they're taking a half-assed swing at it.
@buermann
> "Let's hawk electric monster trucks to coal rollers"
True, a ute is not a practical vehicle for urban commuters. But it is for many tradies, people who live rurally, etc. If we want them to move away from fossil fuels, there need to be EVs that can do what utes do. Yes, we need small town EVs, but it's not an either/ or.
I have to wonder if offering an EV ute would be getting the same blowback if literally anyone else had done it.
One way to think of the Tron truck is as the iThing of utility EVs. The first to market, but unlikely to be the last or the best. In both cases they were made by companies obsessed with flashy design and PR, headed by contemptible CEOs. But they pushed out an experimental product that most companies would be too risk averse to even attempt.
I don't think there would be as many car companies making EVs today if Tesla hadn't proved their viability. Maybe they can do it for utes?
@tess I am absolutely chomping at the bit for the new Chinese mini-EVs. No idea if those would clear American safety regulations even if Trump/Biden weren't going hyper-protectionist.
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