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Ford Mustang Mach-E Sales Soar After Discounts, Proving Cheap EVs Are the Way Forward
(www.thedrive.com)
this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2024
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[Dormant] Electric Vehicles
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Chevy has had a perfectly serviceable and low cost EV on the market for years. It's possible to buy them new for $30,000 or less (before rebates) and used ones can be had for under $14,000.
It isn't just about price or being an EV or the Leaf would be the best selling car in the world. People also want a car that isn't a piece of junk with low resale value, is cramped, or has bad styling. These are big purchases and a lot more thought goes into buying them than two simple checkboxes.
You can't have inexpensive and all the features you're asking for though. It's just not realistic.
I don't want all the features I just want an EV with 300 miles of range, liquid cooling, and 20 minute charging.. Automakers can shove their fancy computerized BS
The cheapest lease in America of any car, not just EVs, is a Hyundai Ioniq 6, with 300+ miles of range. And 20 min dc charging. I have one and it sure doesn't feel like a cheaply made car.
Hyundai has the electric kona that fits that description for the most part.
Only $38k with outdated batteries that require charge limiting I'm looking for under $25k
Good luck! I think you're asking too much TBH.
Were getting ass reamed by legacy auto.. China has cars that meet this requirement but we have regressive tariffs on them. Free market my ass.
I feel the same way about feature bloat on pickup trucks. I don't need a tailgate that opens and closes itself, but it's a mandatory add-on if you want to buy the extended battery for any F-150 lightning. Trucks are meant for work, not loading them up with luxury bullshit.
Trucks are meant for work
When I see the size of them and the pristine condition they are in, I seriously doubt it's the case for most pick up owners.
Tell me about it. It's ruined the truck market for those of us that need/want one for work/light duty.
Same.
Plus these guys are kinda all assholes that seem to compensate for something? Man, if I had a nickel for every time one of those tailgates me...
I have an opel and a merc and I prefer the opel. It has all the same features for less than half the price. It isnt impossible.
That's awesome. So there are in fact low cost options then.
This is mostly true but I think a lot of the added cost is manufacturers pushing out vehicles with the maximum amount of markup possible in order to recoup their costs in developing EVs as fast as possible (along with COVID era proce gouging). I'm sure in a decade or two they'll be dirt cheap comparatively, not that helps anyone now.
But isn't this true with any "new" technology? The beginning of the timeline has high cost and as the product becomes "normal" costs come down?
Pretty much. I distinctly remember when plasma TVs first came out and seeing an advertisement in a magazine for them, 55" for $15,000. Now you can buy one (LCD) for a few hundred bucks.
Right. I doubt we see the exact same behavior with cars, especially in today's world where all cars are more expensive than they were just 4 or so years ago. That said, I do expect EV prices to come down. I can hate on auto makers for being slow to the game all I want, but the reality is they won't do it if they don't think they can turn a profit. It seems like it's coming just a lot slower than some would like.
Yeah, how else will they afford a third yacht?
Automakers don't care about the used market in the same way video game makers or authors don't. They only get money from the initial sale. Everyone is trying to move to a subscription model to capture some of that revenue. No such thing as a 'used' League of Legends copy.
There are tons of affordable used EVs under 30k. Most of them just don't happen to be made anymore or have any parts availability without a fabrication shop.
The Bolt is nice, but it's crazy that it doesn't have much competition in the US.
Automakers do care about the used car market. Otherwise reliability would go out the window. There's a reason Toyota is the #1 manufacturer in the world.
There’s more than 1 reason.
It's early days for EVs and one thing that really pinched was that COVID happened literally right as manufacturers had just or were about to roll out their EVs. You can't build cars when your workforce is sheltering in place and when they did show up to the factories they couldn't get the parts thanks to supply chain problems. Those woes were then followed by super inflation and labor disputes with the UAW which delayed rollouts even further.
Right now sales are flat / declining because the early release EVs are too expensive for the current economic environment and the 2nd Gen Mainstream EVs are right around the corner. I wanted to buy an EV two years ago but in 2022 they were in very short supply and the dealer markups were insane so I didn't. Prices have returned to something like normal but now we're just months away from the release of the next generation so I'm holding off until they get here.
With the caveat that for those years it's been basically unobtainium. I looked into buying one at the start of last year and five dealers all had none in stock + a 6 month wait. (Their websites listed several in stock but we'll ignore that other thorn)
They killed production of it to focus on building luxury SUVs (Cadillac Lyriq) and the Blazer EV (starts $42k), so the stock that exists today is all there is. Used ones exist but the problem is they never actually made them in sufficient quantities to meet demand, and instead of ramping up production decided it'd be better to sell $40k-60k vehicles instead.
Bearing in mind they had them in the early 90s. Then killed them. Twice. Now they’re all “ooohhhh somebody’s doing it better” well of course they are, you quit doing it at all until five minutes ago!
The late 90s EVs, like the EV1, were absolute dogshit. They had the styling of a Beluga Whale, a maximum speed of 80MPH, maximum range of as little as 50 miles and a recharge time of 8 hours!
The EV1 was an Alpha release prototype, there was barely 1,000 of them ever made. It was never a serious car, nor could it have been. The technology wasn't available.
Any "early 90s" EVs were one off custom built toys and would have been even worse than the EV1.
And yet people loved those EV-1’s, even if it’s just nostalgia, and they were capable of handling most peoples commutes.
I never learned what was so “unavailable” about them. Weren’t the batteries lead acid or no and or something in common use? While they suck compared to today and could never have been a primary car, they would have sold in modest numbers as a commuter car, and GM could have evolved it.
Look at the history of Prius: the originals were horrible, expensive and lost tons of money, but Toyota stuck with them and evolved them into a huge, reliable, affordable moneymaker. Todays Prius is a huge leap over the crude original. That could have been EV-1 history
No. The first run of EV1s had a literal maximum range of 50 miles so absolute best case your commute could be 25 miles each way and that's assuming a fully charged battery, no traffic congestion, no use of the heater, and no cold weather. That would also see you barely rolling your car into the driveway as you got home where it would then spend a full 8 hours charging up again.
Again no. People won't buy an EV that will go 200+ miles because of range anxiety. There's absolutely no way a car with only 50 would have been bought by anyone, ESPECIALLY when the damn things cost nearly $100,000. And that was in 1996/1999 money! Any discussion of the EV1 in a thread about "affordable EVs" is just silly.
GM never stopped working on EV, they just stopped selling it to the public while the technology evolved. If everyone would just stop shitting out about the EV1 and take five minutes to look into it's clear.
In 2002, one year after the EV1 went away, GM started working on the Hybrid Tahoe and it was eventually released in 2008. It was expensive as all hell, again pushing up against $100,000 but it was in fact a parallel drivetrain SUV with a pile of Lithium Ion batteries under the passenger bench. It could only go a few miles on pure Electric Power but it's existence showed that GM was continuing to evolve the tech. They were also a great full sized SUV and I loved the one we had.
In 2010 came the Chevy Volt, a hybrid sedan. The first generation of the Volt used the same parallel EV drive that the Tahoe had. It would go about 35ish miles on electric. The 2nd Generation of it was a serial drive EV where the gas engine did nothing but provide electricity. It was made up until 2016.
Then in 2017, literally right as the Volt was discontinued, came the Chevy Bolt which is an actual pure EV with 220ish miles of range.
The Bolt is out of production for 2024 while GM swaps its drivetrain for the new Ultium stuff with a better battery, management system, and more range. It will be back, in upgraded form, in 2025.
So where in that timeline did GM abandon EV tech? They've literally been working on it non-stop since they started designing the EV1 around 1992!
The Volt was a direct competitor to the 3rd Gen Prius and they were released within a year of each other. The Toyota got popular while the Chevy didn't, but that doesn't mean Chevy didn't have a car that competed with it.
BTW, where's Toyota's affordable EV? You know, the one to compete with the Bolt? Oh...right...
Basically everyone pretends that GM crushed all those EV1s back in '01 and then stuck it's head in the sand for the next twenty years but it's just not true at all and in fact GM is the only Domestic US Auto Manufacturer that sells an inexpensive EV.
Go pick on Ford or Dodge, your criticisms might be valid for them but not GM.
Subjective but yea, I don't like the look of them either. Leaf either, for a more modern example
Who cares?
Real problem
I charge my 2022 EV on level 1 so I take up ~3mi/hr and it's not a problem. Given how much larger my modern EV battery is, it would take far longer to fully charge at home than the EV1 but it doesn't really matter as my day-to-day driving isn't that far, which describes the case for most people.
The Bolt had battery problems that led GM to pause production until they could get it sorted out. Production restarted in April of 2022. On top of THAT they had the same COVID induced supply chain issues that every other vehicle manufacturer did, which also limited their production efforts.
Temporarily. They sold down their MY2023 / MY2024 stock but the Bolt will be back in 2025 with their new Ultrium drive train.
Battery problems + COVID meant that they couldn't make as many of them as they wanted too and they will be ramping up production of them in 2025...using the same powertrain that the more expensive vehicles now have.
At the end of all this my point remains. Used Bolts are out there and while there is a wait for new ones there's a good reason for it. GM invested a shit ton of money into the Bolt and they do care about it. They didn't ignore EVs while waiting around for their business to collapse so they could get a Government handout.
And GM tried to cancel it! Idiots.
Did cancel it - a promise to later release a more expensive car with the same name is not the same as revisiting their decision
The US has a problem making shit ugly as fuck if it's cheaper. We're still in the mindset that something needs to be expensive to be good, but then complain when it's expensive. The Bolt and Leaf are cheap because no one wants to buy that shit.