JackFlorey said:
I don't think the argument "if people had more money they'd buy smaller cars/trucks" has much to back it up.
The target demographic for the low-end of the car market is completely priced out of this market segment. Someone with less than $500 in the bank living paycheck to paycheck will not in their wildest dreams be able to afford a $15k Mitsubishi Mirage or Chevrolet Spark. In fact, this demographic is becoming increasingly priced out of automobile ownership altogether.
Low-end cars used to be the majority of U.S. car sales, back when those of modest means could actually afford to buy a new car. These days, the upper 20% income earners are almost exclusively driving the new car market including the paltry sales of lower-end vehicles, and this is the segment with money to waste on status symbols.
If the Chinese manufacturers can figure out a way to keep their cars cheap while getting through U.S. regulations(which keep getting more stringent in part to keep these vehicles off the market here), the U.S., Japanese, Korean, and European manufacturers are going to be in trouble. A $5k car, brand new, with a warrantee and parts readily available, is going to mean a lot to the portion of the U.S. population that can't afford any of the current new cars available in the U.S. or the typical used car now costing $28k.
ZeroEm said:
If your from the USA then Bigger is more status. Always wanted power, if brainwashing was not over come then I would want a 6.2L Dodge Hemi crate motor 1000hp. It's been this way as long as I can remember. Did not think of better gas mileage always thought of bigger gas tanks.
I want a 6.2L Dodge Hemi crate motor 1000hp. I just want it in a vehicle with 1/4 the aero drag and half the weight of a Dodge Demon. Were this to be done, Prius-like MPG on the highway would be possible, except you'd have a monstrous V8 pushing a light, low-drag thing around, instead of a heavy brick. The performance benefits of having such an engine in a light and slippery vehicle would be obvious, which is the entire point of having such an engine in the first place. Instead, we get overweight retrograde muscle cars and SUVs/trucks, wasting the potential that this engine offers.
JackFlorey said:
The EV industry had some big hurdles to get over. The big one was getting over the barriers to entry into the market - good enough batteries, availability of batteries, experience with inverters, experience with thermal management.
The batteries, control systems, motors, thermal management, were all "good enough" by the 1990s. The barriers of entry into the market were mostly political by that time. If it weren't for Tesla, we probably wouldn't have anyone building mass market EVs to this day, but Tesla got the genie out of the bottle 15 years later than the Big 3 could have, and everyone is now scrambling to keep up.
Those have been overcome. Now we are seeing problems with raw materials supply, logistics issues in getting enough parts (mainly batteries and semiconductors) and recycling of used parts. In other words, all the problems mature industries face.
This becomes a lot less of an issue if we use more efficient vehicles that require smaller battery packs and less materials for the same performance and range. The problem is that the auto industry no longer wants to build cheap cars. The wealth gap has become so obscene in the U.S. that most working people will never be able to afford even the cheapest new cars available, and the auto industry has mostly forsaken the entry level market as a result of poor sales, especially with the supply line issues and component shortages we are experiencing. In turn, many auto manufacturers make more money financing cars than selling cars, which is another major incentive for moving everything up-market. The upper-middle class with more money than brains will gladly go into debt to show off their "status".
I think we will soon be seeing a glut of used cars on the market as more and more people can't make the payments and get their vehicles repossessed. The average new car costs north of $40k and the average used car now costs $28k. Wages have not gone up in a manner commensurate with these price increases. MOST of the demographic of people that need a car and don't currently have one are desperately seeking something that is reliable and inexpensive enough that they can pay cash, but unable to find it, are driven into debt for a much pricier option just to get to work and back. What used to be a $500 beater has become the $5,000 beater, but Federal minimum wage is still stuck at $7.25/hour, the same as it was when a beater could be easily found for $500.
We are now in a situation where greater gas demand will drive new EV sales directly, and those EV sales will in turn reduce fuel demand and thus fuel prices. We're no longer solely dependent on petroleum to fuel vehicles.
You mention 17 years as the average vehicle turnover. And that's the way it is now. But if gas becomes so expensive that people can't afford gas cars, that will be considerably faster.
How does someone with less than $500 in the bank and ruined credit get an EV that they can be certain will get them back and forth to work without requiring a repair that costs more than the vehicle is worth before they can even finish paying it off? For that matter, how does one keep a cheap used EV charged while living in a cheap apartment or even government housing? In my hood, cheap 49cc mopeds are a greatly more common solution to reduce vehicle expenses than used Nissan Leafs and Chevy Sparks, even if all of those vehicles are around. There's a reason for that. Given a choice unrestricted by available funds and circumstances, I'm sure most of the moped riders would gladly take the Leaf or Spark, especially in the winter. A $5,000 used Leaf is not a wise purchase for them, even if in the medium to long term the budget math will work out in their favor in most cases, simply because unexpected events that are financially significant always can happen, and that is if they are able to get a loan for such a thing at all in order to take that gamble, assuming one could afford a place to live that allows them to even charge such a vehicle, and only under the condition that no unanticipated life-altering event impacts their finances in a way that they can no longer make payments for the duration thereof.
If gas becomes so expensive that people can't afford to use gas cars, as is happening to the poor in America already, they don't switch to used EVs. They go without cars altogether. The rungs of the socioeconomic ladder that are priced out of automobile ownership outright will continue to move upward, in correlation with rising gasoline prices as well as rising used car prices. It is the middle class and wealthier that will be switching to EVs, which many of them are already doing now that the choice is available.
I think soon an opportunity for a low-cost 3-wheeled electric micro-vehicle priced similarly to a moped, that offers weather protection and rudimentary crash protection, that is capable of sustaining highway speeds, will present itself. It would be greatly preferable to taking the bus, or walking, be much more comfortable than a motorcycle, and making it accelerate and/or corner like a car that costs 100x as much would be very inexpensive to do, adding a lot of value to the proposition. Who cares if it doesn't have heated/cooled seats, bluetooth connectivity, leather upholstery, infotainment centers, and all this other crap. It gets you from work to back and around town for pennies, if something breaks it can be repaired by Bubba mechanic down the street with some hand tools in a few hours over a six pack of beer, and you won't need to go into debt for nearly a decade to "afford" it.
