How the US got left behind in the global electric car race
How the US got left behind in the global electric car race
www.bbc.com
How the US got left behind in the global electric car race
11 comments
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This quote from Ford's CEO:
"It's going to be a vibrant industry, but it's going to be smaller, way smaller than we thought," Ford chief executive Jim Farley said at an event on Tuesday.
Combined with the following quote he recently said:
Speaking on the Everything Electric Show podcast, Farley praised the [Xiaomi] electric sedan. "I don't like talking about the competition so much, but I drive a Xiaomi," he said. "We flew one from Shanghai to Chicago, and I've been driving it for six months now, and I don't want to give it up."
Really feels like Kodak in the 90's kinda-sorta investing in digital but not willing to fully transform a majority of business.
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I agree, he probably can't tell the future he'd like and the one that will be. And when the CEO drives a competitor's car you know there's something wrong.
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Electric cars, high speed rail, efficient cities, cheap energy, it's almost like all of these have been actively pushed against by some large industry
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Seems to me the US has lost every single race it has competed in.
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Well we've recently entered the race to the bottom category, we'll see how that one goes
More seriously, the US did lead the way in various ways for a while for the time. Just gotta ignore the racism and colonialism. Unfortunately many innovations turned out to be the limit of American imagination and any attempt to continue to improve and grow is now met with hostility.
It's probably at least somewhat a product of years of corporate and conservative interests marketing a return to an imagined golden age for economic and political gain. No room for new things in the fantasy of the '50s, just easy money, grass suburbs, giant cars, and unconcerned white people as far as the eye can see.
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I think a big part of it is the nature of the US car market over the past 10 years, where the growth has come from sales of “premium” vehicles. The standard and budget market segments have underperformed and thus most US car companies haven’t invested in them much. Consumer spending is increasingly driven by the wealthiest 10% of the population. Everyone else is struggling and cutting back where ever they can, that means buying used cars and holding on to their current cars as long as they can, if they’re even in a position to own a car. The middle and low end consumer is doing so poorly that they’re not just moving down market, they’re not buying at all.
EVs just aren’t super competitive in the premium market. One of the biggest real selling points of Electric vehicles is their low operating cost. Electricity is cheaper than gas, way less maintenance is needed, and the most expensive and failure prone parts are absent, reducing repair costs. To a wealthy person, none of that is particularly compelling. What can an EV sell on in a premium segment? Acceleration and the “saving the environment” vibes, and that’s just not compelling enough to take significant market share.
So why isn’t what remains of the budget market dominated by EVs? Because there are no Budget EVs on the US market. The cheapest EV on the US market is the Chevy bolt and that’s got an MSRP of around 30,000 dollars. None of the companies are willing to invest the money needed to make a budget EV production line and the required supply chains. They’d rather take their capital and put it in to high margin premium vehicles, and service the anemic budget market with legacy production lines.
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Disappointed that the article didn't touch on supply chains, raw materials, and batteries.
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Lately, I've been in a bunch of electric cars, including the Tesla (which was a Bolt or an Uber). I must say, I was impressed. Beyond the main purpose of saving the environment, there are plenty of other perks that they have:
- You can barely feel and hear it. On an ICE car, you always hear the engine running and feeling the vibration of it. Even if it's largely unnoticeable, it's basically still there. And whenever you rev the engine, it's getting even more noticeable. On an electric car, there's no such thing as engine noise. It's basically either working or not working. And when it's working, there are fewer moving parts making this noise and shaking the car around.
- They always come with an automatic transmission, so they're easier to drive. I know that might not be an advantage out there in the US, since you also have ICE cars with automatic transmission, but here in the rest of the world it does make a difference, since almost all cars are manual.
- A way better acceleration. I know some of the cars I've been in were basically sport cars, but I never felt like being stuck to the seat in a car before.
I honestly don't even know why would anyone oppose the switch, tbh. Okay, I know it takes more to fill it up than just sticking the pump in and pressing the handle, but the capacities that modern batteries have, make it feasible to just time your trips in a way that you can even charge them at home overnight or something.
11 comments
“Left behind” insinuates inaction, the USA has been very active at driving away from electrification.
They tried to destroy it over and over again.
I don't like Elon Musk but I am glad the attention that Tesla got forced a lot of companies to create electric vehicles.
A hearty demise