As far as the first part being heavily subsidized, the American public doesn’t care as they didn’t care about anything coming from China as long as the price was right. Right now in Canada Canadians overwhelmingly support removing the tariffs from Chinese cars.
Trump has really pissed off our neighbors. It will be very interesting to see if China can sell into the Canadian auto market. Most North Americans have no exposure to Chinese EVs. If they get into Canada, there's a good chance they'll make substantial inroads into yet another market prized by domestic manufacturers.
The analogy to horse drawn buggies makes no sense whatsoever.
Sure it does. It's antiquated technology that still exists. Much like ICE will be in the near future. I'm nearing 50. Assuming I have another 30 years I think new ICE vehicles will be rare well before I expire.
Gasoline vehicles do everything and more than electric vehicle can so how can that compare to a horse drawn buggy?
That may be true, but in the very near future, EVs will do everything ICE does with much lower maintenance and at lower cost. You can debate that, but look at the trajectory. Even on this forum, you'll find many people that believe ICE is going backwards for various reasons, mostly related to maintenance. In contrast, EV improvement is accelerating. GM is
investing over $2,000,000 in batteries for one plant. It has like three plants, all multi-billion dollar investments. And that doesn't account for its investment in
battery materials. In contrast,
it's putting $900,000,000 in its staple V8 powertrain.
One could actually look at it the other way around and say that about electric vehicles. Much of the population lives in multifamily housing, including apartment buildings and the ones that live in individual homes most have multiple cars for multiple family members.
You're correct that multifamily housing residents will take longer to convert. But arguably, that demographic buys fewer new vehicles anyway. There substantial inroads still to be made with the population that resides in single-family housing. Even so, the multi-family demographic would benefit from cheaper vehicles with reduced maintenance requirements. Even if charging is the same cost as gas, the vehicle being cheaper to acquire and operate will make the choice easy once charging infrastructure has been addressed. Charging infrastructure is
expanding rapidly and will continue to do so.
Electric vehicles will never overtake gasoline vehicles on the road with their current technology.
Until the day comes, that an electric vehicle can recharge as fast as one can fill up gas in a gasoline tank and have the same amount of charge points available as gasoline pumps and have a price point for the vehicle that is the same as gasoline and at a cost no higher than the reasonable cost of gasoline per gallon vs kW which at the current time kW struggles to be equivalent in price at some super chargers and we haven’t even begun to get all the agencies to tax that electricity like they tax gasoline yet.
CATL has already announced
five-minute charging. The only time charging speed really matters is for road trips, which for many drivers is a comparatively small part of their overall mileage. For those use cases, most people take a break every three to four hours of driving. I can barely get my family into the store, use the bathroom, and get everyone back in the car in under 30 minutes.
The EGMP vehicles (Ioniq, EV6, GV60, EV9) have 800V charging that can add over 200 miles of range
in less than 25 minutes.
Porsche and Lucid can add 300 miles in 20 minutes. And this isn't even the state-of-the-art. The newer chargers being deployed in China are even faster. How long do you think it will realistically take for this technology to spread? Alpitronic is already deploying 400 kW chargers in the U.S., including the Walmart sites I referenced above.
I’m not sure if you know this, but I have nothing against electric vehicles at all except accurate posts and reality.
I don't doubt it. My only goal is a realistic appraisal of the market and a recognition of
how quickly the technology is advancing.
As far as the Bolt goes I never met a consumer who would want to pay more for a vehicle so the company can make a profit on a specific product.
In the meantime, as an automobile company, General Motors has blown away Tesla for the last 10 years regarding profit.
GM has steadily brought the price of its EVs down by rapidly scaling. It went from the 95K Silverado RST to the 35K Equinox in under two years. Now it has a new Bolt coming to market below the Equinox. It makes sense that GM would beat Tesla on profit since its unit sales are much larger. I think Tesla is in for a hard few years because Elon has alienated many people (myself included) while allowing the company's products to stagnate (Cybertruck???).
GM, in contrast, is doing everything it needs to do to scale up production and drive costs down, all while innovating on the product front. On occasion I browse the GM truck forums and the people buying the Silverado and Sierra rave about those trucks. The Blazer EV I have wasn't even on my radar, but after searching for a higher trim Equinox EV and driving the RWD Blazer, I was very impressed with the packaging and interior quality. It's not as good as my wife's Jaguar was, but for a vehicle starting in the 45K range it was competitive with other vehicles in the class. Never thought I would buy another GM vehicle (I acquired a used Cobalt from a family member before). It was the first new vehicle I've purchased in 25 years.
Agree, 100% on cordial conversation and debate.
