this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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At the rate of industrial investment into this tech coupled with some places punishing gas cars, a cheap car that spans the gap from now until affoedable and better EVs is the perfect prescription, not to mention we havent stopepd having some form or financial crises since covid.
I think it's debatable. Is it really good if all the energy that went into making the vehicle goes to waste because it only lasts 50k miles? At that point you're basically building disposable vehicles.
I think the sweet spot for this period is in hybrids that allow people to run on electricity around town but also have the ICE as a fallback for long/extended trips. The main hesitancy with EVs is range anxiety (ignoring high prices) and hybrids solve that issue while still retaining a lot of the benefits of an EV.
The problem with that is that phevs are surprising expensive/heavy/complicated. It's why Chevy discontinued the volt over the bolt. And why chevy had to cut a lot of costs on the volt to get it down to a semi-acceptable price (the volt didn't even have power seats except on the Premier, and only on the drivers side).
Honestly, I prefer not to have power seats. It's faster to adjust manual seats in my experience and there's both fewer things to break and less weight.
Agreed. Although having seat settings linked to individual fobs is nice. If you share a vehicle you don't have to mess around with all the settings every time. Moot point though.
I've found I can never get a manual seat just right myself, they're either slightly too far forward, or slightly too far back.
Electric let's you get it just right
Does that midpoint between 2 steps really make such a difference? 🧐
Yes, yes it does.
A large port of cars are recycled, so I'm not sure the energy costs are a big deal.
A huge amount of the overall CO2 output of EVs is from the manufacturing process though. It doesn't matter if you can recycle the aluminum, for example, bc you still need to heat it to be recast and we're not exactly using nuclear or solar to power our forges.
Mining is responsible for more CO2 than the rest of manufacturing. We also do use renewables for aluminum - there is enough energy required that energy cost is a big deal and so production is done in areas where energy is cheap - generally meaning geothermo.
If I was in the market for a new car, I’d strongly consider them because of the cost even knowing the quality may be low. It’s still an EV and would hold its value for now. It’s a good alternative to the slim-pickings we have here in the states
The solid state batteries that seem to be clearly on the verge of mass production within the next few years are going to make everything they're making now horribly obsolete. I've been considering a EV for my next vehicle and will definitely be waiting now.
People have been saying that for years. They could well still be 10 years out since we've only recently gotten them working on test benches. I'm not going to keep burning gas in the meantime.
While researching Chinese EVs I came across articles about abandoned EVs, the article claimed it was because they were made obsolete (they have roughly 100 mile range or less) so they were abandoned for the newer cheaper models with 3-5x that range, that problem is probably gong to be a bigger one to tackle than Chinese EV longevity, which supposedly aims for roughly 200,000km lifecycle which is 125k miles (average ice car has a lifespan of 130k miles). It also showed me how close to production those batteries you are talking about are, there's a bold claim that the battery could be good for 2 million kilometers, if it's even on the same order of magnitude of that, it would make so many EVs 'obsolete'.
I've seen so much EV vapourware come and go over the years, I'm extremely sceptical about any new technology like this.
I do sincerely hope it comes through though, range and charging speed are very much the limiting factors for EV tech right now.