this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2024
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Electric Vehicles

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Why No One Wants To Sell You A $25,000 EV (insideevs.com)
submitted 2 months ago by MyOpinion@lemm.ee to c/evs@lemmy.world
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There is a fundamental truth you have to understand about car companies:They do not exist to make cars. They exist to make money. That distinction, analyst Kevin Tynan tells me, is why they’re not really interested in making affordable electric vehicles.

Perhaps that’s an oversimplification. Tynan is the director of research at an auto-dealer-focused investment bank, the Presidio Group, with decades of experience as an analyst at firms like Bloomberg Intelligence. What he means isn’t that automakers have no interest in affordable products. It’s that their interest begins and ends with winning customers who will eventually buy more expensive, higher-margin products.

One of the auto industry’s dirtiest secrets is that at scale, it doesn’t cost that much more to make a bigger, more expensive than a smaller and cheaper one. But they can charge you a lot more for the former, which makes this a game of profit margins and not just profits. In recent years especially, that’s a big part of why your new car choices have skewed so heavily toward bigger crossovers, SUVs and trucks.

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[–] WalrusDragonOnABike@lemmy.today 5 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Even if you don't make them giant and obscenely inefficient, a 100kwh pack is gonna weigh over 300kg. Doesn't matter if that gives it 1000 miles of range or 400 miles.

[–] superkret@feddit.org 7 points 2 months ago (2 children)

And how much does an internal combustion engine, a transmission, a fuel tank, a driveshaft, a starter motor, and an oil sump weigh?

[–] WalrusDragonOnABike@lemmy.today 2 points 2 months ago

Probably about the same as such a battery, maybe a little less? The electric motor is still gonna push the EV weights above the equivalent ICE by a little. Either way, neither is gonna be comparable to the much larger vehicles on roads. Which includes buses (which I don't think we should be trying to disincentivize although it should be considered in the planning stages of deciding between BRT and alternatives like rail). But due to the 4th power law, if we scaled taxes based on damaged done to roads, the only consumer vehicles (excluding things like trailers) that would even notice the tax would be a the few at the highest end.