SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
I decided a few years ago that I was sick of standing in the snow at a gas station waiting for the person inside the building to finish selling that lottery ticket and turn the pump on so I can stand there some more babysitting it while it fills up and I freeze. The answer, of course, was to buy a car that didn't need gasoline, one I could plug into the house and go inside where it's warm.
I'm not a rich man, I'm a pensioner who is still paying a mortgage, so I looked for an affordable EV. Used ones are almost nonexistent, and I found out why when I finally bought one: it has a ten year warranty. They haven't been making them much longer than that.
I swore off new cars decades ago when my month old VW stranded me ninety miles from home with a bad alternator, but if you want an EV, new is your only choice. I kept seeing the Chevy Bolt advertised, but could never find one for sale at all. Then I found that they had stopped making them two years earlier.
Why? Well, battery problems, they claimed. Why just the not so expensive one, $30,000? GM is still selling electric Cadillacs and Corvettes, why no cheap cars?
I discovered after buying an EV that the only two advantages of a piston car to an electric one are the lack of infrastructure for long trips, and the high purchase price of the vehicle. Why high? Because only their flagship autos have electric motors, the ones that formerly had V8s.
My car cost $40,000. It's absolutely the nicest, roomiest (except for the minivans) car I ever owned. My Dad had a Checker when I was about ten, they no longer make them. They were designed for taxicabs and I've never seen more back seat leg room than in one. My new Hyundai has more leg room except Dad's Checker than any other car I've ever seen, and although the '74 LeMans was a much bigger car, my new EV is much roomier. It's a lot roomier than the '02 Concorde that was the same size as my new car on the outside. Why aren't the auto companies advertising how roomy EVs are? I never realized how much space engines, transmissions, and gas tanks take up.
I started trying to buy one when I realized that you don't have to babysit them when you're charging. I didn't want to stand there in the snow filling a gas tank, but judging from most Facebook comments I've seen, I must be the only one who realized that. People seem to think you have to stand there when they charge. Why aren't they advertising this benefit?
Why aren't they telling you that your car can now heat your garage, unlike a piston car? Why aren't they advertising the fact that rather than the heat coming on when you get to where you're going, you have heat before you're out of the driveway?
Why aren't they telling you how well EVs handle, thanks to its crazy low center of gravity? Or how much faster they can stop, thanks to having two sets of brakes?
Why aren't they advertising the fact that electricity is five times cheaper than gasoline and diesel? The only way I found out was by buying one.
Why aren't they advertising all the advantages of EVs?
Why are only the top of the line autos like the Mustang or Cadillac EVs? That's an easy question to answer. The automakers are under laws from our and other governments that their fuel mileage average of all the vehicles they sell has to be under a certain number. The easiest way to do that is to make the expensive cars, the ones with big V-8s, electric. When your fastest car doesn't use traditional fuel...
But this, of course, begs a second question: why only the expensive ones? Because they don't want to make electric cars at all. The obvious reason is that they hate EVs. But why do they hate them and love the incredibly inefficient (my car will go 20 miles on the electricity it takes to refine a gallon of gasoline), obsolete Rube Goldberg device with thousands of moving parts to wear and break?
EVs threaten their business model. The businesses are set up so that GM makes almost as much profit from aftermarket parts, like spark plugs, belts, hoses, pumps, and so forth as they do on the cars themselves.
Gasoline and diesel vehicles all need periodic maintenance. They're needy things, expensive to maintain, and the car company gets a cut of every repair of every car they sell. The drive train is a Rube Goldberg mess with thousands of moving, interlocking parts, any one of which fails can cripple the vehicle. A bad fuel pump stranded me in the bad part of town last year, and the repair was nearly $900 not counting the towing charge. The repair shop got half, Pontiac and other companies got the rest.
My new car doesn't have a fuel pump. Or spark plugs, or belts, or fuel injectors, or any of the other moving parts all the other cars I've owned since 1968 had and needed replacing. The motor's shaft IS its drive train! When was the last time your ceiling fan needed servicing?
More than likely that new 1976 Vega that cost $3,000 garnered more than that for GM in aftermarket parts. There may still be some on the road still earning money for GM. An EV has few aftermarket parts; tires, brake pads, windshield wiper blades are all I can think of. Hyundai won't make any more money from my new EV like they would if it had a big six cylinder piston engine.
Which is a shame, because electric motors are all far, far superior to piston engines and transmissions in every way. But the nearly zero cost of maintenance is why the thieving billionaire car companies don't want to sell affordable EVs. In fact, they want to sell as few EVs as possible. If it wasn't for fuel mileage restrictions, Tesla and the Chinese would likely be the only electric cars you could buy.
But isn't this just a conspiracy theory? No, there was never a conspiracy, nothing needed to be said. Those people aren't moral, but they're not stupid, either. Ford and Chevy aren't making cars for a hobby, nor are they charitable organizations. All they care about is profit, and EVs threaten their gravy train.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by pTamok on Thursday December 07 2023, @10:28AM (2 children)
Nope.
Far fewer components to assemble makes EVs cheaper to make. The cost of some of those components (batteries, motors, high-voltage electrical system) gives some of the answer, but the actual assembly is far, far cheaper than an ICE car.
It might be that ICE cars are cheaper per car right now, down to economies of scale, because you can spread out the costs of production over more cars, but EVs are considerably simpler than ICE cars in component count. If they were built in comparable numbers, the costs of assembling EVs would be considerably lower than ICE cars (clue: they already are).
Then why is the headline in this article true?:
Inside EVs: EVs Are Still 45% More Expensive To Make Than Combustion-Engined Cars [insideevs.com]
It turns out that the cost of the battery is the main decider.
Cost of ICE to build: 13,900
Cost of EV to build (without battery): 12,200
Cost of EV battery: 8,000
And to support mcgrew, here's some interesting data on a comparison of the energy cost to travel 100 km in an EV and an ICE: To EV or not to EV? A clear cost analysis between electric vehicles and ICE cars [thedriven.io]
I doubt that 8,000 spondulick batteries will drop in price to 1,700 spondulicks to make the total manufacturing cost equal, but the running costs of EVs appear to be lower than ICEs (until governments start taxing them more to make up for lost revenue on fossil fuel taxes), so until government EV usage taxes rise, it looks like that in the longer term, EVs are the cheaper option.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 07 2023, @01:12PM
> Far fewer components to assemble makes EVs cheaper to make.
Perhaps some day, but maybe not now?
Thousands of cells are assembled into battery modules, and multiple modules make up the overall pack in a long range BEV (the number of cells may be reduced in recent Teslas, due to larger cell size). Each cell (or each module) has individual temp and voltage sensors, with suitable wiring harness to get that data back to the battery control computer. Most high power packs are water cooled so there are seals to keep the water from leaking along with pump(s)/radiator/plumbing/sensors.
Ah, but then you qualify and say "moving parts" and I counter that Li-ion batteries expand when charged and shrink when discharged--they are moving, slowly, all the time they are in use. This leads to cracks or other internal damage and the life of each cell depends on how quickly the damage accumulates to reduce the cell capacity. Looking at it this way, a BEV may have *more* "moving parts" than an ICE powered car.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday December 07 2023, @02:22PM
>Far fewer components to assemble makes EVs cheaper to make.
Agreed, but, it's not just economies of scale, it's also sunk costs into the existing capacity - not just manufacturing but also service, support and even recycling. We've got massive complex systems already built and paid for which manufacture the complex beasts of I4, V6 and V8 power. Component manufacturing, distribution, training of service technicians and even customer service people - all that is a much bigger consideration than the cost or efficiency of the individual cars. (Yes, some people can be easily retrained, some.) As you point out, economies of scale have been ramped up over a century for ICE vehicles, thousands of times as much investment in getting to where we are today than has been put into EVs so far. We won't have to duplicate that massive investment before EVs become more economical overall, but we will have to do more than we have so far - and that kind of investment is bad for the quarterly bonuses of the people who make the decisions of whether to do it or not.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]