The reason why Europe can pull off progressive reforms has nothing to do with population or geography, Europe is bigger than the US on both fronts. It has to do with political will.

I only meant to say that many of the things that might put people off buying electric cars, like range concerns etc. can be alleviated.

Even with subsidies and incentives it was slow going in the beginning, before people gained trust in the infrastructure and realized electric could be a real and practical alternative.

I didn’t mean to be an asshole, sorry.

How does a smaller population make it easier to pay those incentives? Less people also means less tax income and vice versa

Incentives like that are a lot easier your entire national population is smaller than some cities.

Maybe you should split your country up into smaller, independent regions that can govern more effectively.

You could call them “States”

Incentives like that are a lot easier …

I don’t buy this logic at all. A larger population also means a much larger taxpayer base, so it evens out. US can offer incentives like this but chooses not to. Half the population seems to feel threatened by any incentives. Then going down to state levels: some states do offer additional incentives and some don’t. The population size isn’t an economical difference, it’s a political difference

How they got rich doesn’t change their sales figures. Other countries that got rich in different ways could apply the same techniques.

It goes hand in hand with the prices. If you’re going to spend that much more on a BEV, you want it to be different. And making it look different doesn’t cost significantly more.

Also, car shape and style has so much to do with ICE vehicle design necessity.

I got a Peugeot 208. It’s small, and ok in all aspects except the software. Typical bad car UI. It works with cabled Android Auto, so for long drives that’s more than fine. But touch screen is still old, and the app/site hasn’t let me log in for a few weeks now… So I can’t remote start heating.

But it’s a great car that I bought used, for driving to and from work. Looks good, yellow color, parking sensors and rear camera for my blind ass. But is also probably not available in America for all I know, I live in Europe.

The Hyundai Ioniq was like that, sadly they discontinued it

There are a few companies that do this. Tesla, Kia, and Nissan come to mind. I’m not sure what’s available in your location though.

Oh yeah, forgot that one. Way too small for me, but a really nice car. If the Polestar 3 wasn’t so stupid expensive, I’d love to get that.

Picked up a used 2022 Polestar 2 about 6 months ago for nearly half off. No regrets, because it’s an awesome car, and I strongly recommend it

I got a lyric and I love ot

Yes, availability in the US is much better. You can find a base ioniq 5 here easily now, but nobody wants those. Everyone wants the long range AWD.

Is the charging network that bad in the US that you need to get that far without charging?

The charging network actually is about to get much bigger, as Ford will be able to use tesla superchargers starting sometime within next few months. (and is providing a free adapter to owners). I’ve had my Mach e for 6 months and couldn’t be happier with it.

I test drove the mach-e and really liked it. And it has a surprisingly large amount of storage due to the well designed frunk. The California edition has more than enough range for me. However, the abysmal charging speed has me worried about battery condition. If it’s that slow to charge it means the battery isn’t good under load.

Rivian and Lucid are exclusively luxury brands. Not shocked that they’re having a hard time pushing cars over 100k CAD. I don’t think they’re atracting the same media attention either.

Personally, I’m keen to see if the proverbial doors get blown off the first few gens of electric cars, and the FOSS community makes headway.
I would happily buy an old Leaf if I knew we could handle all the software ourselves, and just do battery swaps when the range wasn’t enough any more.

I have a terrible EV. Claims it has 80 miles of range but is really around 50 miles. A drive to work brings it down to 20%. The fast charge port is CHAdeMO, which at least around here is barely used, and even the electrify America places usually only have 1.

I still don’t want to switch back, I just want a better one with a more common port. I work from home except for the occasional mandatory in office stuff (one coming this Thurs and probably another next month). Most of the stuff I want to drive to is within a battery’s distance to go to and from. About the only thing that really sucks is vacations to visit family.

I was able to get a charger installed …… it was so easy to get used to treating it like phone charging: plugin at night and it is always ready to go. I am done with gas stations, and hope I never need to go “crawling back” to them

I just bought my first EV. I’m never going back to ICE. Effortless acceleration, a super quiet drive, being able to plug in at home and always leave the house with 100% capacity… People try to argue that they’re bad because of something they remember seeing once a couple of decades ago or whatever. It’s nice correcting them based on personal experience. Also if they go for a test drive they change their minds REALLY quickly. That EV power off the line is a pretty compelling argument all on its own.

Reminds me a lot of the battery versus petrol RC car debate back in the day. Anyone who remembered NiCad batteries and brush motors had a justifiable hate for electric RC cars and opted for the petrol option… But if they refused to try LiPo and brushless they ended up stuck with noisy, finicky, and ultimately slower cars.

You gotta be willing to accept that as technology improves the balance can (and rapidly does) swing in favour of something that you remember sucking.

There is no way in hell I’m paying 30k for a Prius.

They arguably do in Australia, since the charging infrastructure is poor to non-existent in some places.

Melbourne, one of the major cities, has about seven charging stations for the entire metropolis. Until the charging network is built up more effectively, if you live there, it would make more sense to buy a PHEV to tide you over until it became practical to run electric all the time.

PHEV is not the same as a common hybrid. It’s literally in the name.

Why would they pay more for a PHEV if they aren’t going to use it? Even with credits the cost is still higher.

That would not surprise me at all.
In the UK, they have a huge tax incentive as company cars. People are definitely getting them for the tax benefig, and not giving a shit about the electrics.

Though honestly, if it means almost all company cars are at least regenerative braking, and the tech is there is someone does want to use it, it’s not the worst thing.
I might end up with a PHEV in a few years, as most of my driving is very short distance, and I can’t justify the cost of a 200mi+ BEV for the 1 trip a month that needs it. And putting second hand PHEVs on the market helps that.

No. It all depends on how you drive it. If you just drive a PHEV around town and do the occasional road trip (which is how most people drive) then the ICE engine sees very little wear and requires very little service.

If you’re doing constant road trips and burning up the road, a PHEV is not for you. And neither is an EV, honestly.

IMO its a great idea right now because IIRC 90% of round trips are 50 miles or less. So if you have a 200 mile battery, 75% of it is dead weight most the time. PHEVs remove the range anxiety present in most parts of the US with poor charger networks. Plus if battery manufacturing becomes a bottleneck in the near future it will be good to reduce the amount needed per car.

Maybe in the future good charger networks and much cheaper batteries will solve the problem but for the next 20 years I think PHEVs will fill an important role.

At the same time, a PHEV is a good stopgap if you live in a place with poor charging infrastructure. You might be able to charge enough to drive locally, but not when going some place farther afield. For example, I may be able to charge enough to drive around the neighbourhood from my socket, but literally half the city does not have any kind of EV charging capability, making a BEV unsuitable.

A PHEV would do better there, since I could switch to petrol if needed, and run in EV mode otherwise, and when charging infrastructure becomes good enough that I can live without the petrol part, then it might be worth switching to BEV.

PHEV in my opinion is a really dumb idea. It got popular, because it was an easy way for car manufacturers to continue making large SUVs and adhere to even stricter fuel efficiency restrictions, while also benefitting from generous state subsidies. Now that those subsidies are either scaled down or completely removed the PHEV sector is shrinking fast.

I’d argue that to be less of a issue with PHEV, since they weren’t all that common to start with, and more of an issue with things like Mild Hybrids where the motor is just there to give the ICE a little boost, and precious little else.

With PHEV, the maintenance cost is higher than ICE, because at the end you need to service and maintain two engines.

I would be curious if they are. ECVT systems don’t seem that much more complex than an equivalent automatic transmission, since the motor doubles as the starter and internal brake bands.

Maybe for the diesel-electric locomotive-type drivetrain that Opel’s Ampera-E uses, since it’s basically an EV with an onboard generator, but even then, maintenance costs could easily be offset by the ICE not running as often or as hard.

The catalytic converters of hybrid cars are often sought after because they are cleaner and don’t see as much wear as their ICE counterparts. It would not be much of a stretch for that logic to extend to hybrid engines.

It’s still more viable in regions where people don’t have personal garages, and their apartment parking lot doesn’t support retrofitting charging stands.