Fewer people are buying electric cars in the US

I want an EV to be more reliable and save me more money in the long run. EVs start out ~10k more than the Corolla most people should buying. They then compromise the long term reliability and maintenance cost with high tech gee whiz features. I’d sooner have manual roll up windows than touch screen controlled air vents. When you integrate sensors and software controls into every little thing, we know those things will start failing and your intricate and overly proprietary systems will be expensive to repair. Their marketing says the electric motor will run longer, but a Toyota is already dead reliable for 300k miles and the bits in the cabin will last without repairs too. ICE cars are so reliable I don’t think anyone in my extended family has spent over $1k fixing them in any single year, with most years just the cost of an oil change.

EV’s currently make the most sense for people who own a single family home or otherwise live in a community with readily available near-home chargers, where EV’s are on average more convenient than gas cars. People who rely on street parking and apartment dwellers would likely find EV’s more inconvenient than a gas car.<p>We may be close to saturating the market for the former group.<p>Another factor that could be at play is that all the non-Tesla EV makers have recently announced they will switch their chargers to NACS, but this will take a couple of years to roll out, so it’s not a great time to buy a non-Tesla since it already has legacy charging hardware.

Title is incorrect.<p>&gt; Sure, sales of EVs keep going up — a record 300,000 cars sold in the US in the third quarter of 2023 were electric — but the pace of adoption has markedly slowed<p>So, from that we&#x27;re to conclude that electric cars are doomed?<p>In fact, fewer <i>more</i> people are buying cars:<p>&gt; Electric car registrations accounted for more than 16% of the market in the first seven months of 2023, up from 14% this time last year. The rise saw the number of electric cars sold rise to 175,978 from 127,492 by the end of July (a rise of 38%), according to the latest official figures from the SMMT.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.electrifying.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;article&#x2F;electric-car-sales-growth-strong-but-not-on-target-for-2024-goal" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.electrifying.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;article&#x2F;electric-car-sales...</a> (and their first citation)

Sorry, but in what world do sales of electric cars going up and market share of electric vehicles increasing lead to the thesis that &quot;fewer people are buying electric cars?&quot;<p>Oh - I get it. It&#x27;s the world where this publication wants clicks for ad revenue.<p>&quot;Sure, electric vehicles are becoming more and more widely adopted, but wouldn&#x27;t it be better for this article if they weren&#x27;t?&quot;

I think EVs give me LESS range anxiety overall. In my gas car days, atleast once a month I was late for work or an event AND low on gas. Having to remember and think about getting gas was constantly on my mind because I have a pretty long commute.<p>With an electric car, I start every day, always, with a full tank. No matter how late I&#x27;m running, I know there won&#x27;t be a surprise that I need gas in addition to being late.

&gt; But an analysis from CarGurus found that EV prices were still 28% higher than gas-vehicle prices on average.<p>To me that is bonkers. When EVs were becoming popular, I was expecting to see super cheap, under $10k vehicles. That was the promise: forget about all the IC complicated gears, alternators, transmission, fuel pumps and imagine getting a motor and batteries, what could be simpler!&quot;. But no, we ended up with more expensive vehicles, which take longer to &quot;fuel up&quot;, and more expensive to insure, and they have a shorter range. Then everyone wonders how come not as many people want to buy them.<p>Sure, for some, it&#x27;s a moral choice. We are saving the planet so it makes sense to pay more and wait 30 minutes to charge or whatever instead of 3 minutes. That idea is valid but it will run out of steam. In the end, it it has to make sense economically. Even a Joe Schmoe who could care less about saving the planet should be able to price compare and say &quot;Hey, look, $8k for new car with more torque and cheaper to maintain! I&#x27;ll take it over a $18k Honda Civic&quot;. It has to be that simple to make sense financially.

I&#x27;ve lived with an EV for 3 years now, and take some legit road trips from SF: Utah, Vegas, LA, San Diego, Tahoe. I have also been all over the world and done many, many trips (far to many to count). I submit the optimum mix for most Americans right now is roughly 1 EV and 1 hybrid, solar roofing and a battery storage system. The average American has a spouse. Even if we ignore kids, we can roughly assume, unless those suburbs are <i>way</i> more empty than they appear, that both people have a car. Let one have an EV, and one take a hybrid. That way, they can cover the occasional very long drive in relatively remote areas.<p>Keep in mind, it may very well eventually switch, where gas stations are less common than high power EV chargers in the remote areas. Sort of a Dutch disease issue: once the EV chargers are the dominant market, the gas station market is likely to quickly fade until it&#x27;s just diesel and finally all electric.<p>The Mad Max theorists worry that they won&#x27;t have power for their electric vehicles in the event of an apocalypse. Friends, how long do you think refineries, pipelines, and oil freighters are going to stay going in the event of an apocalypse? Better to get good at rigging some salvaged solar panels, an inverter, and re-learn the old pass times, like dominos, dice, and cards.

1. Range. But this speaks to the failure of the industry to provide charging infrastructure. This was one big thing that Tesla got right.<p>2. Price. An EV is inherently simpler to build and should cost less. Indeed, early EV offerings were almost affordable, if not for the high cost of the batteries. Now that batteries are less expensive, the automakers are pushing large, expensive cars (because they think they can sell them?). The Nissan Leaf is going away. The Chevy bolt stumbled badly out of the gate on technical issues.<p>3. Somebody figured that if extravagant pickup trucks are the most popular cars in American, then what America wanted was an electric pickup. The &quot;I want a pickup&quot; idea does not tickle the same brain cells as the &quot;I want an EV&quot; idea.<p>Make affordable, entry-level EVs and sufficient infrastructure to make them usable by people with HOA restrictions or apartments, and they will sell like hotcakes.

<i>&quot;But an analysis from CarGurus found that EV prices were still 28% higher than gas-vehicle prices on average.&quot;</i><p>That&#x27;s the problem. The product costs too much. Way too much.<p>Auto companies have tried to position electric cars as a premium product. The electric version usually comes with the highest trim level. In the truck sector, it&#x27;s ridiculous. Ford just raised the price of their base electric F-150 by $5000. &quot;The new starting prices for the Ford F-150 Lightning will range from $54,995 for an entry-level Pro model to $92,995 for a Platinum Black trim.&quot; The base price for the 2024 gas version is $36,570.<p>Tesla&#x27;s Cybertruck is only sold in the high-end models. Base model will be on sale in 2025, maybe. Rivian is in the &quot;Super luxury all-wheel-drive electric truck&quot; category, according to Edmunds.<p>This despite steady decreases in battery prices.<p>If the US auto industry doesn&#x27;t get its act together, BYD and Toyota will take over the low-end market.

&gt; sales of EVs keep going up — a record 300,000 cars sold in the US in the third quarter of 2023 were electric — but the pace of adoption has markedly slowed<p>This does not fit with the tone of the headline

It’s the same problem it’s always been from my point of view.<p>There’s nowhere to charge. No charger at my apartment, none at my office and according to internet charger maps it’s a 45 minute round trip to go get a charge and then I have to both save some of the range to get there and waste some getting back.<p>Doesn’t appear that anything will change on the next few years to gain a charger at my apartment or work either.<p>Also EVs all appear way more expensive than the used ICE cars that I would buy.<p>I don’t have the faintest desire for a luxurious car. I just want a super simple basic cheap car to get from point a to b.

&quot;EV should be able to do everything a gas car can&quot;<p>I disagree with this article. I have a 2023 Polestar that I&#x27;ve had for about 10 months. I will be trading it when my new gasoline Audi arrives in the next week or so. I&#x27;ll never have another electric vehicle. They tell you things that are not true. The cost of ownership of electric vehicles is much higher than gasoline, especially if you travel. It takes twice as long for a trip. A trip that used to take me normally 7 hours turned into 15 hours for charging and waiting.<p>You&#x27;re going to be shocked by the electric bill. We&#x27;re having to pay 0.22 cents&#x2F;kW here. Many of the charging stations charge more than it costs to fill up a gas powered car. If you leave your car on their charger, they charge you for parking, and it is expensive. Don&#x27;t charge your car, then go to dinner, and the movie.<p>They burn through tires. I have almost 30,000 miles on mine and I already need a new set of tires. I don&#x27;t accelerate hard. I would be curious about others experiences. My friend still swears up and down about his Tesla, but he never goes anywhere. He has a 2018 Tesla w&#x2F; 40k miles. Maybe they&#x27;re perfect for people that live in the city. If you have to drive, be warned.

Why don&#x27;t electric cars use replaceable battery modules with a standard form factor? Advantages would include:<p>1) It allows the battery to be easily replaced as the car gets older.<p>2) With a suitable generic form factor, it would allow batteries to be upgraded as technology changes.<p>3) It would allow people to only populate enough battery slots for their daily needs. Communing to work: you only need to insert a few battery modules. Going on a road trip: you can buy&#x2F;rent extra battery modules and populate every battery slot.<p>4) Matching battery capacity to the task at hand is also safer, as there is less energy in the system in case of an accident.<p>The manufacturers may be using batteries as built in obsolescence or differentiation, but surely there is enough competition for someone to break ranks and build a car with some modularity. It could stimulate sales by giving people confidence in the battery, the weakest part of an electric car. Maybe Framework should start building cars as well as laptops?

A lot of the car model launches have been “paper” launches. They advertise a $30-40k car&#x2F;truck and then anything other than the $70k premium model is “coming 2024”.<p>I would expect all car sales to be lower now that interest rates are considerable. I got mine at 1% interest and many got 0% not too long ago

<i>&gt; Niedermeyer said that while an electric car can meet most people&#x27;s driving needs, it struggles with edge cases like road trips because of the need to recharge. Since Americans have been promised a one-to-one substitute for their gas cars, this seems like a failure; an EV should be able to do everything a gas car can. This idea persists even though in 2023 the average US driver traveled only about 40 miles a day, and in 2022 about 93% of US trips were less than 30 miles. Still, in a survey conducted by Ipsos last fall, 73% of respondents indicated they had concerns about EV range.</i><p>It&#x27;s entirely true that an EV will work perfectly fine for 90%+ of the drives a typical person in the US makes. <i>Logically,</i> the right solution is to buy an EV for commutes and errands, and rent a gas engine car for road trips.<p>But the result of that logic is asking people to make one of the most expensive purchases of their life where:<p>1. They will only use it do things they don&#x27;t enjoy: driving to work and running errands.<p>2. They won&#x27;t get to use it for the things they do enjoy about that product category: road trips, camping, vacations, etc.<p>Logical or not, it&#x27;s a psychologically shitty deal. Especially when you compare it to gas vehicles where you can use the same vehicle for <i>both</i> the fun and unfun stuff (at some loss of efficiency and environmental value). So at least when you&#x27;re stuck in traffic on your horrific work commute, you&#x27;re in a vehicle that pleasantly reminds you of your awesome camping trip last week.

&gt; Sure, sales of EVs keep going up — a record 300,000 cars sold in the US in the third quarter of 2023 were electric — but the pace of adoption has markedly slowed, and analysts have suggested the country is no longer on track to hit the government&#x27;s sales targets.<p>The link they give to &quot;no longer on track&quot; is to a British site talking about British government targets, and nowhere does it suggest that they previously were on target but now aren&#x27;t. That&#x27;s almost an LLM hallucination level of bullshit.

&gt; Plus, heavier electric vehicles are harder on roads.<p>It’s true but the author should check the fourth power law. Most of the road wear comes from the heavyweight vehicles, the trucks. The little weight increase on personal vehicles isn’t that bad for the roads.<p>Making lightweight electric cars is also possible, the old bmw i3 was light, but it’s more expensive.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Fourth_power_law" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Fourth_power_law</a>

This article makes me even more dismayed at the fact that the Chevy Volt never really took off. I really believe it would be the perfect car for most people:<p>1. As the article points out, most people drive less than 40 miles a day, and the Volt provided 40-50 miles of electric range.<p>2. Since the battery is relatively small for an EV, no expensive home charging system is needed - just plug it into a normal 120V outlet and it fully charged overnight.<p>3. Since it automatically switches to gas power when the battery discharges, there are basically none of the downsides of EVs. No range&#x2F;charger anxiety, for occasional long trips I just use gas, and it&#x27;s actually able to utilize a lot more of the battery because it doesn&#x27;t need a &quot;buffer&quot; (i.e. for a fully electric car most folks are very wary to bring it below 20 miles of range or so). With my Volt a tank of gas would last me about 6 months unless I went on a road trip.<p>I wonder if, as pure EV sales slow down, that people and car manufacturers will start to see the benefits of plugin hybrids. I think if a plugin hybrid had better styling (as opposed to the Prius-derivative styling of most of them) that they would do a lot better.

I&#x27;m surprised nobody is pointing out the chasm.<p>EVs have so far captured the market for early adopters. The range limitations, early teething problems, and just lack of comfort of understanding how they work (is it on, is it not on, how far can I go, etc etc) only appeals to the early adopters.<p>My proof point in this is when I was renting an EV at Hertz a few weeks ago. The couple next to me were trying out an EV for the first time, and trying to select one. They couldn&#x27;t figure out how to get the trunk open, there was no obvious button or handle (this EV only had a button on the key, which they hadn&#x27;t taken from the car yet).<p>They were asking me a few questions as I just walked up to my car and started getting my stuff in it. They wanted to know which one they should take, how do they know if it&#x27;s locked, etc. Many things which are not significantly, or any different from a regular car, but they understand that EVs are new, and they obviously weren&#x27;t comfortable with the new.<p>So a &quot;slowdown in growth&quot;, is somewhat to be expected as EVs make the transition across the chasm.<p>I&#x27;m embarrassed that i don&#x27;t know this, I&#x27;ve read the book, but how is this properly addressed?

Im grateful that the Norwegian gouverment sponsored me a top specced Porsche Taycan Turbo for half the price. Now I drive more than ever, because now driving is really fun.<p>I will repay the Norwegian gouverment by announcing my move to Sweden. I cannot let my kids grow up in a country that spend tax money like a drunk sailor.

“AUSTIN, Texas, January 2, 2024 – In the fourth quarter, we produced approximately 495,000 vehicles and delivered over 484,000 vehicles. In 2023, vehicle deliveries grew 38% YoY to 1.81 million while production grew 35% YoY to 1.85 million.”<p>— Tesla Vehicle Production &amp; Deliveries and Date for Financial Results &amp; Webcast for Fourth Quarter 2023<p>Few people are buying non-Tesla EVs but more EVs sold last quarter than ever.

EVs are expensive and not that much better than a hybrid at the same price point. going full electric on cars isn&#x27;t even that good of a plan. where&#x27;s all of that lithium supposed to come from? it would be dramatically more cost effective to invest heavily into grid-tied public transit in urban areas, including suburbs which need to be re-zoned to mix-use so local transit can be more useful, and heavily subsidize switching to hybrid flex fuel vehicles in rural areas.<p>the black and white thinking in this domain is really frustrating.

Hmm...dealerships who make most of their money on service don&#x27;t like to sell EVs, maybe? Surprise? Have had a Mach E for going on 3Y with 20K miles on it and it&#x27;s literally needed cabin air filters and windshield washer fluid in that time. No there aren&#x27;t any buyers being steered away from EVs by dealerships, noticing this...<p>Oh, and the oil companies selling gasoline have nothing at all to do with the &quot;OMG such DOOM IF EVERYONE PLUGS IN THEIR EV&quot; articles, eh? Let me translate that for you: &quot;OMG such DOOM IF EVERYONE SWITCHES TO AN ENERGY SOURCE FOR DRIVING THAT&#x27;S REGULATED&quot;. When I charge at home in one of the most expensive states for electricity in the US, I&#x27;m still paying <i>half</i> the per-mile electric cost as the Subaru we also have. Oops. Thermodynamics are real, eh?<p>And let&#x27;s not mention that it costs a <i>lot</i> of money to buy an ICE car that has anything like the acceleration and torque of a typical EV. I&#x27;ve had relatives (usually of the Fox News watching variety) grump about my car. You know what, it has just enough &quot;mid-life-crisis&quot; fun factor for me -- and that&#x27;s why I got the damn thing. Because EVs are FUN TO DRIVE, PEOPLE.<p>So nya nya nya to all you trying to seem reasonable in the HN comments...

I&#x27;ve owned several EVs over the past 10 years, and I&#x27;ve settled on a so-called &quot;hybrid garage.&quot; That is, one EV and one PHEV. I&#x27;ve owned two luxury EV brands priced over $80k, and yet my favorite EV is still my first one, a 2013 LEAF now worth less than $5k.<p>The cheap and tiny EV is a no-fuss&#x2F;no-worry car that zips me around town for my daily driving. It&#x27;s small and nimble, and I don&#x27;t really care about what happens to it. I park in spaces a lot of other people would pass up because they&#x27;re too cramped and they&#x27;re worried about door dings or whatever. By now it has about 50 miles of range, but I never get close to that on any given day. In fact I tend to go several days in a row between plugging it in.<p>The other car is a PHEV that only has about 20 miles of range. It dips into the gas tank here and there, but that&#x27;s so infrequent that stops at the gas station happen only maybe once every month and a half. And when it&#x27;s time to do a family vacation or other out-of-town trip, it&#x27;s only using gas, which is super-easy to come by and only requires 5 minutes to replenish. Best of all I don&#x27;t have to deal with any rapid charger drama.<p>My next car is going to be a midlife crisis purchase, and I&#x27;m taking a pretty hard look at a manual transmission ICE. The idea of buying something like a Taycan and then having to roll the dice with the substandard rapid charging infrastructure doesn&#x27;t sound appealing to me at all.<p>I know Tesla superchargers are a thing and that they will be available more broadly in the years to come, but I&#x27;m also looking to reduce the tech in my car, in particular anything that reports my location all the time to some mother ship.

We bought a new primary car last April, it was a toss up between an electric and a petrol&#x2F;diesel, and we opted for a diesel car in the end.<p>Reasons: range anxiety, and war anxiety.<p>I want a Tesla, but the problem is that an electric car becomes a giant paperweight in an emergency.<p>We have a secondary, small electric car and we use it for short local trips. There’s been more than a few instances where a lapse resulted in not being able to use it because it wasn’t charged fully. And don’t get me started on the state of public charges, it’s a mess.<p>Don’t get me wrong, I like electric, but edge cases are real and important and so they must be planned for.

In 2023, Australian full battery electric vehicles made up 7.2 per cent of all new vehicles sold, compared with 3.1 per cent in 2022. That is despite a decade of EV denial by one particular side of Australia government, meaning EV re-charging infrastructure in Australia is still decades behind the rest of the developed world.

The electric offerings from most companies just don’t seem “there” yet. I don’t want a Tesla because AirPlay and adjustable aircon grates are non-negotiable for me, but the alternatives just don’t seem like a good bet yet. Hyundai is compelling, but most brands are offering electrified versions of non-EV platforms. An EV platform with low drag is much better, but outside of Tesla and Hyundai no one seems to be shipping an EV platform car in the $40k price range.<p>Then when it comes to plug in hybrids, Toyota RAV4 Prime looks great, but options from other makes look kinda like a joke with 20-30mi range and the ICE engine kicks in whenever you accelerate, or are similarly super expensive to the BEVs.<p>My plan is to just buy an ICE car now, and then sell it in a couple years once brands start fielding their second generation electric platforms with better economics, NACS (Tesla) plugs, and the infra catches up a bit.

Unsurprisingly, more cars, even if electric, are not a solution. Yet again, the answer is better public transport.

I think this is a US only problem. People in the US probably take longer road trips than the rest of the world. When I take a Roadtrip, I need a 20 minute break every two hours anyway, and as far as I have seen that is enough for a charge for the next two hours. It&#x27;s not perfect but I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s as bad as the people in this thread are making it out be. I&#x27;m in Europe btw.

Why is this blatantly incorrect title allowed here? The correct title is, &quot;more people than ever are buying EVs but the pace of the growth has significantly slowed&quot;.<p>The article itself confirms this as the truth and the original title as a flat out falsehood.

The biggest hurdle for many is the price of a new car + premium for electric.<p>--<p>Imagine a fairly priced &quot;off the shelf kit&quot; to convert existing cars:<p>1) Wide spread adoption of renewable energy, reducing fears of range anxiety, more demand for charging&#x2F;fuel stations.<p>2) Dealers can option existing inventory as renewable, possibly increasing sales&#x2F;profits<p>3) Would increase jobs&#x2F;expertise in the mechanic and after market industries.<p>4) Keeps existing cars out of the scrap yards&#x2F;land fills. Cut on manufacturing pollution of new cars.<p>5) Hobbyists and collector car owners could convert their cars as well.<p>Negatives that kill the idea:<p>1) Would cut into automaker profits, so I doubt lobbyist support&#x2F;government incentives<p>2) Would hurt adoption of new safety features. Insurance companies go womp womp.

Article does not support the title, and I assume the source title has been changed since it no longer matches the HN title.<p>&gt; Sure, sales of EVs keep going up — a record 300,000 cars sold in the US in the third quarter of 2023 were electric — but the pace of adoption has markedly slowed, and analysts have suggested the country is no longer on track to hit the government&#x27;s sales targets.

I would like an EV but not if it means I&#x27;m forced into an SUV, crossover, or some other huge land whale.

Article is spot on about the problems, but as much as I&#x27;m a huge fan of European style mass transit, we really need to let go of the idea of &quot;push more public transportation&quot; as some sort of solution in the U.S. IT&#x27;S NOT GOING TO HAPPEN. The US as a country has for the past 100 years been built around cars, both in cities and rural areas, and it would probably take another 100 years to change that if there was even the willpower to do so (which there is not). So whatever solutions we implement need to just accept that fact; it&#x27;s fanciful and counter-productive otherwise.

I know it&#x27;s a motorcycle and a non-plug-in hybrid, but I think Kawasaki&#x27;s offering of a 450cc ICE with a &quot;strong&quot; EV hybrid hits the sweet spot for me. You get 1000cc performance with the EV assist off the line, and 250cc gas mileage when just cruising.[1]<p>The longer wheelbase is going to make it less of a bike for the twisties than the dragstrip, but you can&#x27;t have it all!<p><pre><code> [1] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cycleworld.com&#x2F;motorcycle-reviews&#x2F;kawasaki-ninja-7-hybrid-motorcycle-first-ride-review&#x2F;</code></pre>

One thing I have not heard discussed is the all-too-common family visit. If I drive 200 miles to visit some family and stay at their house what’s the etiquette for using their power to charge my car? I wouldn’t feel comfortable asking and saying “I’ve got to leave for two hours to find a charging station” also feels awkward. I want to maximize our time together and not burden folks with needing to pay to charge my car.

My biggest beef with EV buyers is their obsession with range, and their complete and utter disregard for efficiency. Why do we obsess over fuel economy for our ICE cars but have zero awareness of what the equivalent figures are for the various EVs.<p>Imagine 2 seemingly environmentally conscious buyers debating between a Corolla and a Hummer:<p>&quot;How far can the Corolla go on a tank? 325mi. OK, well how far can the Hummer go? Well it&#x27;s got the extended safari tank, so it can go 500mi. Got it, so obviously I&#x27;m going to get the Hummer.&quot;<p>No ICE buyers who have any concern for the environment would ever compare two ICE cars using only the total range figure, and completely disregard the MPG. In fact it&#x27;s the complete opposite. Most would consider the Hummer absurd solely due to its atrocious fuel economy.<p>Similarly, these same people will say things like:<p>&quot;Be sure to turn off the lights when you leave a room&quot;<p>&quot;I changed out my LEDs because they&#x27;re so much more efficient than those old incandescents&quot;<p>So why are they so obsessed with saving electricity in that context, but never even begin to think about the equivalent value for, say, a Tesla Y vs. a Rivian? In fact a Rivian has the same &quot;green cred&quot; to most buyers as does a Model 3. Yet the same person would chastise someone for running incandescent bulbs or for leaving the lights on when you leave the house.<p>I&#x27;m certain that the difference in electrical energy usage between a month of driving a Rivian vs say a Model 3 overshadows a year of using LEDs bulbs in your house vs incandescents. Yet no one even thinks about it.<p>People are incredibly illogical when it comes to EVs.

The article nails it really. The core problem here is that a small minded swap from ICE to EV is only a mild implementation improvement on top of an already fragile transportation system that is riddled with problems.<p>The government could really get the ball rolling by incentivizing a switch further by by adding more stick along with the current carrots, adding a carbon tax to make ICE vehicles less appealing, but that is likely to be unbelievably contentious as it is in Canada.<p>The bigger gains have always been a more fundamental transformation of the transportation system from car oriented to a multi-modal system of moving people around via walking&#x2F;cycling&#x2F;bus&#x2F;train.<p>The article suggests that this is expensive but I don&#x27;t really think it is. Cycling infrastructure is unbelievably cheap compared to everything else, and walking is made more viable at the stroke of a pen simply by changing the zoning and building code to actually allow people to build walkable neighbourhoods with retail amenities, which unbelievably remain outright banned in so many places.

The problem comes when you take the incentives that are supposed to make the cars less expensive and you use them instead to sell people more expensive cars. Turns out that pushing people to the limit of their ability to borrow is not a solid long-term business strategy. Gee who would have thought?<p>Guess who still knows how to build inexpensive cars?

The car manufacturers have been going after the top end of the market for obvious reasons - it&#x27;s the first thing to do when your battery supply and manufacturing capacity and electronic components are or have been limited.<p>There&#x27;s got to be a point where that stops working. Perhaps it has arrived more suddenly than expected because of inflation due to ...... natural gas and petrol prices.<p>As for range, it&#x27;s obvious that people who drive a lot will get a Return on Investment from an EV sooner than the rest of us and thus they can justify the purchase to themselves. So their demand for range is what is being satisfied. My need is for a car with modest range that I can easily afford - no need for fancy infotainment or acceleration or status. I&#x27;m not a good target for car companies till they have satisfied higher profit segments of the market.

All car sales have stalled significantly. Now are there issues to EV sales, maybe? but a larger swath of people more than any other time in recent history can&#x27;t afford new cars.

&gt; Drivers saw the vehicles around them getting bigger, so they wanted bigger cars to make themselves feel safer. Automakers argued that this was proof that people wanted only big cars, so they cut small models and made existing vehicles bigger, which made people with smaller cars feel less safe — you get the picture.<p>This statement (that drivers buy bigger cars to protect themselves from big cars they see on the road) is unsourced, and seems ridiculous to me. I found some surveys where people cite safety as a factor in purchases of SUVs, but that says nothing about whether an &quot;XXL&quot; SUV is (or is even assumed to be) safer than an &quot;XL&quot; SUV. It especially does not attribute causation: whether or not people are buying larger and larger vehicles reactively, and in an endless feedback loop. That last part sounds like somebody&#x27;s personal theory.

My in-law’s hybrid Jeep just started on fire while charging in their driveway, confirming what I was starting to consider an irrational fear of EVs. I’d rather move around on exploding gas than go anywhere near these gigantic bricks of highly flammable, inextinguishable chemicals.

Electric technology (vs. gas) allow for small vehicles.<p>It allows easy access to single person transports (electric scooters, electric scooters with seat, electric scooters with canopy, etc.) on the cheap.<p>And that is where it will thrive, and is already thriving in Asia.<p>Using electric for heavy vehicles doesn&#x27;t make a lot of sense.

A missing part of the &quot;flawed&quot; plan: it was relying on expectation that battery ranges would improve exponentially thanks to all the &quot;breakthroughs&quot; that were published on a regular basis to get views on tech news site.<p>Except, no, it still does not work as a drop-in replacement, so you have to change the whole society instead, which sucks because we&#x27;re kinda on a deadline here, aren&#x27;t we ?<p>To put it mildly &quot;the engineers got their estimates wrong, the salespersons oversold, and now we have to do a massive redesign of the product to give you only 60% of what you used to have&quot;.<p>Or, to put it less mildly, &quot;everyone lied, and now we&#x27;re in trouble&quot;.

Title is misleading. It is saying growth of market has slowed. EV sales are doing really well, considering interest rates.

Such a garbage article.<p>What happened to EVs is what happened to all new car sales.<p>Reminds me of the time a couple decades back when a bunch of power plants went offline in Florida, and the only news article about it was about how a nuclear power plant stopped.

I live in a city that&#x27;s built for pedestrians and public transport. I have a twenty year old car because there is no value in selling it, but otherwise a car is pretty useless; I mostly use my bike instead.

Charging needs to be more convenient like gas refueling is. Max 5 minutes in any town or remote station. It is only achievable with battery swap&#x2F;rental system - such already function in Asia for scooters.

At this point the whole greenwash thing, do I really want drop one environmental disaster tech for another? With old car it is at least the devil we know, and it is superior tech from user point of view.

&gt; Sure, sales of EVs keep going up — a record 300,000 cars sold in the US in the third quarter of 2023 were electric — but the pace of adoption has markedly slowed<p>I feel that the headline subverts the lede somewhat. This is in line with most articles like this, where the big headline is a surprising&#x2F;edgy “EVs are FAILING due to this ONE WEIRD THING” and the body of the article is “EV sales climb for the 15th consecutive quarter, but the quarter-on-quarter increase is slightly down on last quarter.”

At least in the Bay Area, charging at home has gotten a lot more expensive thanks to PG&amp;E.

I think the central problem for me boils down to some fairly essential math.<p>When you are fueling up a gasoline vehicle, you are drawing something like 10-20 megawatts of effective power for the duration. And remember, this is pretty much <i>any</i> gas station. Now, what kind of power output can I expect at the <i>highest end</i> supercharging station under the best possible circumstances?<p>The solution seems to be hybrid where you have options. Certainly, using electrical charging allows you to manage the prime mover&#x27;s carbon emissions better, but you&#x27;d be able to dramatically improve adoption if you had a backup plan for less enthusiastic or diligent customers. I suspect <i>most</i> consumers don&#x27;t have &quot;minimize carbon emissions&quot; set as their #1 priority when purchasing or operating an automobile.<p>If we really wanted to, how dense could we make a gasoline generator? I know we can make the actual generator incredibly tiny. What about the engine? What if we are hedging for the &quot;just in case&quot; and aren&#x27;t managing full-time emissions? Remember - most consumers just need a psychological safety blanket. You are probably never going to run this thing.

&gt; If the government and automakers are serious about making transportation more sustainable, they should be incentivizing smaller vehicles, hybrid cars, and public transportation like trains and buses.<p>You can&#x27;t really expect automakers to like trains and buses. This leaves us with government.<p>Smaller cars, hybrid are OK. Trains and buses work well hub to hub and inside large cities. They are not OK in the countryside where population is sparse. People know that and it results in people of large cities doing without cars and people in small cities owning at least one per family.<p>I didn&#x27;t own a car 2012 to 2020 when I was living in a large city. I did 400 euro of gas per year for two years in a row and ditched my car when I had to pay a larger sum for a repair. Plenty of taxis fit in a 400 euro and we started to have fleets of rental cars that you can pick at the side of the road without reservation and notice. That doesn&#x27;t work with low population densities.<p>I don&#x27;t live in a large city anymore. Actually I live in a very small town and life here is unthinkable and unfeasible without a car.<p>So, ditching driving could work for most of the urban population but not for everybody in general.

For myself, someone who actually wants an electric car, a big part of the hesitation is that I&#x27;ll have to basically give up my garage to our cars.<p>As is, it&#x27;s basically a detached workspace - so my family having to park two cars in there makes an electric car a massive loss of usable square footage.<p>It would also likely mean having to rewire my garage which had an actual Fusebox from the 70s - a cost I&#x27;d love to avoid.

This headline is just wrong. Sales growth is down, but sales are growing.<p>That said, what bugs me about these articles is the parroting of stats about how the average driver drives 40 miles a day. But for most drivers, the &quot;average&quot; day is not actually a typical day, and doesn&#x27;t tell you anything about the capabilities they actually require from their vehicle.<p>I average 25 miles of driving a day, but most days I do no driving. And then there are the handful of days a year when I do 600 miles in a single day. There are long stretches of the drives I make that have few if any charging stations. I assume the more populated stretches have more, but I don&#x27;t see them when I&#x27;m stopping for gas or restroom breaks. And while I could probably prepare for a 600 mile EV trip on a route I take regularly, if I were driving to different places all the time, I would be far too anxious to rely on my ability to find working, high-quality chargers at the right intervals.

The range anxiety issue is the same sort of issue we’ve seen preventing heat pumps from becoming more widespread than far less efficient heating sources until more recently.<p>Consumers seem to focus on the circumstances under which the new technology performs its worst and judge it against the performance of the old technology in this specific scenario, with little regard to how common or likely this scenario may be.<p>It begs the question if this is a marketing problem, a generational problem, or a simple matter of dollars and cents — that is to say: Does this kind of problem only go away when the new technology is just so much cheaper that it’s impossible to rationalize choosing the old?<p>Obviously it’s some combination of these things and more, but personally I think there’s an outsized effect of marketing. Here’s why: Take a look at the top selling vehicles in the US and you’ll find a large number of heavy duty pick up trucks, for example. However you’ll also find that something like 10% of consumer heavy duty vehicles actually haul anything substantial on any regular basis.<p>Now, take a look at the ads for these vehicles (or really any vehicles — not to pick on trucks) and you’ll find they are selling a lifestyle fantasy: Off-roading to a private beach with a surf board and your dog, hauling lumber from a forest to your family’s cabin, heroically helping a close friend move into their new home, a family road trip to Yellowstone…<p>It’s January 2024 and Americans everywhere are resolving to spend more time with their friends and families, to do more things outdoors, etc. They can finally get to it this year once they’ve got the (literal) vehicle to achieve this fantasy, so only then nothing stands in their way, surely…<p>It’s this kind of FOMO that is driving most range anxiety, because people see their vehicle in the fantastical terms they were sold, not the reality of how they’re actually used.

&gt; While bigger batteries allow drivers to travel farther between charges, they also make the cars heavier, more dangerous, more expensive, and worse for the planet.<p>Bigger vehicles in general are safer than smaller vehicles. If you are in a 2,000lb car with a 5 star safety rating, you will still probably be killed in an accident with a 6,000lb truck that has a 3 star safety rating. Despite all your advanced driver aids and BS. You will die, and the 1995 Ford F-250 owner will walk away. Mass is the most significant safety feature you can buy. Don&#x27;t let some journalist in a suit tell you any different. He only wants you to drive the Corolla because he&#x27;s driving a Suburban.<p>Personally, I buy cars based on my enjoyment of them. To buy a car for any other reason is silly. None of your friends or family will remember that time you got 55mpg on vacation, but nobody will forget the adventures you can have with a 4x4 on 35&#x27;s.

&gt; Over the past few decades the American auto industry has become obsessed with huge vehicles. &gt;...Drivers saw the vehicles around them getting bigger, so they wanted bigger cars to make themselves feel safer. &gt;...made existing vehicles bigger, which made people with smaller cars feel less safe — you get the picture. Meanwhile, road deaths and injuries soared<p>Instant eye roll. The author is literally making up their own version of history when the facts aren&#x27;t even on their side[0]. The author generalizes the entire US government into some strange type of groupthink where apparently everyone thought replacing ICE vehicles with EVs was a &quot;slam dunk&quot;. It&#x27;s not only factually incorrect but it&#x27;s just piss poor writing.<p>[0]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;injuryfacts.nsc.org&#x2F;motor-vehicle&#x2F;historical-fatality-trends&#x2F;deaths-and-rates&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;injuryfacts.nsc.org&#x2F;motor-vehicle&#x2F;historical-fatalit...</a>

Here&#x27;s a slightly different take: When I first tried electric cars, I absolutely loved them and really wanted one. However a few things to consider:<p>1. My country&#x27;s infrastructure when it comes to electric cars is appalling. I&#x27;d be fine in the city but outside the city, I&#x27;m pretty screwed.<p>2. Winters: though climate change has softened winters down considerably but still, the fact that a full charge in summer gets you 250km and the same charge gets you less than 50 in winter is something I won&#x27;t be able to work with.<p>3. The skewed stats about how eco-friendly electric cars are. I mean my 3 liter diesel is arguably more eco-friendly if I employ similar tactics of presenting the data: I drive it once a week for single digit kilometers.<p>4. Musk: let&#x27;s just say that he made sure I hate electric cars and anything he&#x27;s involved with. I can&#x27;t stand his ego, lies and hypocrisy. Let&#x27;s just say that if he goes missing tomorrow, I won&#x27;t miss him a single bit.

I just got my &quot;configure your Cybertruck&quot; email. Unfortunately, I have an outdoor parking spot in a rented apartment and running power to charge there would be difficult&#x2F;impossible. Yet, I would like a cybertruck.<p>I am going to try to buy a house in 2024-2026 so I can have a charging spot&#x2F;garage so I can buy the EV, although not in a huge rush given the local real estate market (Puerto Rico), hassle of moving, etc (and relatively few miles&#x2F;yr on my present car, although it&#x27;s a 2006 and gets about 10-12mpg).<p>I wonder how many people are in similar situations. A PHEV would actually be the optimal new vehicle for me -- no need to charge, exempt from 40% import duty, and highly efficient in stop and go traffic -- but I want the Tesla. (I&#x27;ve also never owned a new vehicle, and kind of enjoy owning an old&#x2F;cheap enough truck that if anything happened to it I&#x27;d be relatively unconcerned.)

I guess I am in the minority looking at all the comments here, but I only use my car 1-2 times per week, and that means 350km+ usually on a trip (there and back, and no not even NL has charging stations everywhere).<p>A car with constant 400km+ range, in colder weather at 100km&#x2F;h highway speed is still no way cheap enough to be worth it.

It&#x27;s relative to personal preference, economic status, and general logistics. If your living conditions and&#x2F;or lifestyle support EVs, do the thing if you want. Stick with ICE otherwise.<p>Although, I do have to say that I think EV benefits can materialize without national adoption.<p>If the majority of people were to prefer EVs in a densely populated city, for instance, then conditions would likely improve for everyone who lives within the boundaries of said city due reduced emissions. Not to mention minimized road noise! It seems like every other car in Atlanta is a Hellcat and 02:30 is their doughnut hour (kill me plz).<p>In an ideal world, we could use EVs for daily life and high speed rail for long distance travel. But that&#x27;d involve tax dollars and that&#x27;d take away from the military industrial complex&#x27;s bottom line, and we can&#x27;t have that!

Strangely, the first paragraph &quot;the EV myth&quot; has nothing to do with EV&#x27;s, but is spot-on:<p><pre><code> a doom loop of consumer preference: Drivers saw the vehicles around them getting bigger, so they wanted bigger cars to make themselves feel safer. Automakers argued that this was proof that people wanted only big cars, so they cut small models and made existing vehicles bigger, </code></pre> But it was just profit driven by the pricing power to get bigger margins from lack of competition at the low end.<p>That happened for lack of political will: when gas first went to $4-5&#x2F;gallon in the U.S., politicians should have promised to keep prices there or higher with taxes, to pay incentives for people to buy cars that are smaller, fuel-efficient, or carbon-free.<p>Now we&#x27;re stuck with 10+ years of SUV-sized vehicles.

Sub-Headline: &quot;The sudden slowdown in electric car sales&quot;<p>Third paragraph: &quot;Sure, sales of EVs keep going up&quot;<p>This story is fake

It is all about cost. Who can afford the cost of a new EV? Not the average household around me. Next I can guarantee the moment widespread adoption has taken place the new road taxes will be added into the equation wiping out the savings EV drivers currently experience.

Is a tow-behind gas or diesel generator a thing for longer trips? Charge the battery as the car drives?

Plug-in Hybrids are the best of all worlds, but currently ridiculously expensive. I wanted a plug in hybrid minivan, but I couldn&#x27;t justify it even after the tax incentive. It should be the default engine configuration, not some &quot;premium feature&quot;

The range anxiety myth really annoys me. I drove my family of seven across (NY-SF) and up and down the country (NH-FL) three times in a Model Y and charging was super easy. The computer did all the planning for us and there were plentiful crazy fast V3 stations in pretty remote areas. Charge times were spaced out and short enough that we were <i>always</i> waiting on the humans to finish using the bathroom, not the car.<p>Maybe range anxiety is a thing for non-Tesla cars, but that will change soon with the universal adoption of NACS.<p>The apartment charging issue also hasn’t been an issue for us as most garages have chargers.<p>I encourage anyone skeptical about this to just check out their favorite route in abetterrouteplanner.com

Tennessee&#x27;s state parks are (almost always) FREE TO ENTER, and all of the EV-chargers within (Rivian-badged, will charge anything) are FREE TO USE — and yet I rarely seen them used, even at those within city urban areas (i.e. very easy to access).<p>I think until electric vehicles can reliably and safely work (in leiu of e.g. a Tesla Powerwall &amp;c) in both directions with the grid plug-ins<p>...and until legislatively we can STOP PENALIZING EV ADOPTION WITH ANNUAL FEE INCREASES UPON EVs, only. E.g. in Tennessee, EVs (&amp; Plug-in-hybrids?, IIRC) the annual registration fee is about 4x a gas-only vehicle [so $120, instead of $30, depending on county].<p>Only then can we fully justify lugging around 2000 pounds of LiFePhos...

&gt; Though the new-vehicle sales figure is high, data from Statistics Norway indicates the total share of EVs on Norwegian roads in 2022 was only about 20%<p>I followed the link buy couldn&#x27;t find the source for this claim. The linked page talks about Registered vehicles (many of which will be car#2 etc), while <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ssb.no&#x2F;en&#x2F;transport-og-reiseliv&#x2F;landtransport&#x2F;statistikk&#x2F;kjorelengder" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ssb.no&#x2F;en&#x2F;transport-og-reiseliv&#x2F;landtransport&#x2F;st...</a> about miles driven isn&#x27;t split into EV&#x2F;fossil. Anyone see where the 20% comes from?

At this point in time, you’re buying into the EV charging network when you buy the vehicle. In the U.S., that means Tesla. I just bought a Model Y. We really liked the Mustang and the F-150 Lightening, but the Tesla has the charging network. We drove from Detroit to Chicago last weekend and had no problem because there were ample Supercharger stations along the way. If we go to Northern Michigan it becomes a bit trickier but I think we can make it in warmer weather. It’s just where the infrastructure is at this point. We have an ICE vehicle for when we don’t think the EV would make it, but the EV is our daily driver.

We haven’t updated our electric grid in 50 years. There are barely any charging stations available. If I want to make a long distance trip I have to plan my trip according to charging station availability. I prefer hybrid for now.

About two years ago, I tested my friend’s Tesla and was so thrilled (I love fast cars, and it absolutely blew away any muscle&#x2F;sports I had owned). But after some time, I got turned off by the absurd pricing, lack of chargers in my area, and all the other inconveniences&#x2F;problems&#x2F;bugs of an EV. The friend who has the Tesla is now disenchanted with the while EV experience and wants out. EV ownership is unnecessarily complicated and until we vastly improve our infrastructure, work out the bugs, and standardize everything, they won’t get widespread adoption.

For those folks who think they&#x27;re saving the planet by driving an electric car, they need to realize most of the power for their EV is generated by fossil fuels and natural gas -- not wind, solar, or hydro.

- I buy my cars used for less than 10k€ - I just have one car - I sometimes have to drive 500+km - I have no way to charge it at home or at the people I visit<p>so I&#x27;m in the people that are not going to buy an electric car soon

One thing that have not been mentioned why i still do not have an EV. Recovery form loss of the power grid. My cost to store diesel for extended period compared to electricity is an insignificant fraction. For diesel I only need a tank, stabilizer, and a hand crank pump.<p>Can keep it for years. If I make the vehicle propane, I can do it for decades. No additional cost over time. This is not so for electric.<p>EV is excellent for short, in town trips for now. And, this is not a USA thing as noone likes to be stuck on the side of the road, no matter of the country.

Reading this thread gives me the creeps. So much entitlement. As if owning multiple cars or being able to drive 1000s of kilometres for holidays is a human right.<p>Having kids and reading this thread is fucking depressing.

Until they can produce an EV that doesn’t feel like a massive downgrade in connvience, performance, cost, basically all the ways normal people measure the decision of buying a car, I’m not sold.<p>I like the fact it takes a few minutes to refuel my car, and it’s the same process regardless if I’m traveling 5 miles or 500. I don’t need to deal with charging stations, and if I run out of gas I can take a gas can to the car and problem solved. I can also store as much excess gasoline as I want just by having an extra container and if I take it with me, I can basically define whatever range I want.<p>I also don’t mind stopping at gas stations and it’s part of my routine where I like to talk to the people there. Sitting alone for an hour in a parking lot where I have somewhere to be isn’t my cup of tea.<p>I don’t want a vehicle that gradually looses half of its range over time, then has to have over $10k invested (sometimes quite a bit more) in a new battery every 100-150k miles. It’s like buying a gasoline car where the engine not only wears out and performance greatly degrades, but is virtually guaranteed it will always need a complete engine replacement.<p>I don’t want to worry about greatly reduced range in the winter. I don’t want to worry about a battery fire. When’s the last time you have seen a gasoline car spontaneously combust just sitting in a garage? Despite having a lot of flammable liquid it just doesn’t happen.<p>I also expect the resale value of the car to be reasonable, at least consistent with a good quality gasoline car.<p>Then there’s Elon Musk. His toxicity is reason alone for me to delay any EV purchase (not just Tesla) for as long as possible.<p>Outside of the tech echo chamber, I think I represent the majority of people who aren’t interested in EV’s and likely never will be. I wouldn’t care if they had a full self driving car, or make the car out of glass, or put a giant screen in it, I’m not buying it.

Data: EV sales up 50% YoY. Business Insider headline: “Fewer people are buying electric cars”.<p>A useful discussion for HN might be: Why are they choosing this framing?<p>Some discussion in Electrek about why the record growth is framed as if the numbers show absolute-figure declines: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;electrek.co&#x2F;2023&#x2F;11&#x2F;09&#x2F;which-is-it-already-is-us-ev-demand-slowing-or-growing&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;electrek.co&#x2F;2023&#x2F;11&#x2F;09&#x2F;which-is-it-already-is-us-ev-...</a>

In my family - we have two cars - all Alfa Romeos.<p>Alfa Romeo Stelvio 2018 &#x2F; 2.0 petrol &#x2F; 280 bhp Alfa Romeo Stelvio Quadrifoglio 2021 &#x2F; 2.9 V6 &#x2F; 510 bhp<p>We have ZERO incentives to change these cars with electrics; why would I change my convenience to put gas in the established gas network with the dubious charging station availability (Eastern Europe)?<p>I drove a Hyundai Kona electric last year; well, when you drive it at 150-180 km&#x2F;h - the battery dies quite fast :)<p>I am not convinced AT ALL in electric cars. Maybe in 20-30 years ...

You know what is fascinating about hydrogen fuel cell technology that uses the same electric motors that EV uses?<p>A hydrogen leak is somewhat a non issue as it dissipates with no fire whatsoever due to the pressure hydrogen has to be under to stay at the low temps required.<p>And its the same issue in the diesel usage case where its actually being burned instead of generating electricity for the output to drive the vehicle.<p>The only downside will be the same expensive replacement of the fuel-cell itself compared to EV batteries.

I have an aging 2011 Nissan Leaf with a realistic 55 mile range. I charge it at home with a 15a extension cord. I drive it every day. Occasionally I give it a boost charge at charging station.<p>I am in Seattle. I can get to Issaquah, Bainbridge, Everett, Tacoma and back no problem. If I had a _modern_ electric car with a 150 mile range, I could drive to Vancouver BC or Portland instead of taking the train. I don&#x27;t think electric cars should have a range over 200 miles.<p>Gas cars should be taxed out of existence.

The headline is not true. EV sales are still increasinf YoY. The rate of increase has slowed, but it went from +75% YoY to +42% YoY. So it&#x27;s still increasing quite rapidly.

For those with EVs or considering EVs, do EV buyers buy with the intent of keeping the car and running it into the ground?<p>I have no problem buying a VW or Toyota and keeping it running until it gets so old that it is no longer feasible. I don&#x27;t buy an EV for this because I don&#x27;t think it would make it nearly as long. I might be wrong, but that is my mindset.<p>Going with this, I feel this limits EV buyers to those who intend to get a new car every few years.

I want to buy one as well, but there are few things which i want to know,<p>1. can I buy a used one? what about the battery life? I live in EU, my primary mode of transport is bike and public transport, buying a car is not a necessity but I would buy mostly for getting around. So I rather buy something bit cheaper. 2. How durable are batteries, been reading that getting a new one cost fortune.<p>anyone having experience with buying a used one

I’d love to get an electric car, but I’ve just spent too much time and effort clawing back a scrap of privacy for me to be comfortable driving around in a mobile telemetry collection machine. It’s not just electric cars, obviously, but I can’t buy an old electric car from the pre-surveillance age.<p>Maybe things will change between now and when my current car dies.

EVs have to be a superior product (read: including the infrastructure) before the majority of people will switch to them, plain and simple.

I won&#x27;t buy any car, electric or ICE, that comes with a data connection to someone else&#x27;s server. That appears to include all EVs.

There are no incentives for regular people to buy EVs anymore:<p>- Cost of the vehicle itself<p>- Charging costs are almost the same as fuel costs<p>- Tax credits and HOV benefits are disappearing<p>- Public chargers are slow, hard to find, and crowded<p>- Charger network is nowhere near gas station network<p>- Uncertainty about battery degradation, failure, and safety<p>The only reason to buy an EV is environmental, and taste&#x2F;performance, and these are reserved to the privileged class.

I bought an EV on December 18. On December 19 I took my family on a 2400 mile road trip up the US east coast and Canada, with multiple days of all day driving.<p>It worked out fine! Driving the car was also much more enjoyable than driving our loud gas car. Yes, we stopped to recharge every few hours, but I also needed to give my mental focus a break from driving, too.

&gt; buyers in Norway &quot;tend to be in higher income brackets, often using their EV as a second car.&quot;<p>They&#x27;ve got it backwards: buyers in Norway are using the EV as the first car and their older ICE vehicle as the second car, for when they want to do longer trips. If they share driving time between cars, they&#x27;re still going to drive less in the ICE car.

This HN headline is misleading.<p>The article makes it clear that sales of EVs in the US are still increasing but the rate of increase has slowed.<p>It says “…sales of EVs keep going up — a record 300,000 cars sold in the US in the third quarter of 2023 were electric — but the pace of adoption has markedly slowed”.<p>@dang - This headline should be changed to the article headline “What happened to EVs?”

Sorry but NO. I have choose an BEV for a simple set of reasons:<p>- WFH in a zone with p.v. is a reasonable choice, I live in a home and I have p.v. so at least partially I can recharge from my own energy when the Sun shine, beside that I can still recharge at home from the grid, meaning no needs to go somewhere just to give juice to my car;<p>- state incentives that coupled with less energy expenses to travel almost put the TCO of my car on par with a equivalent new ICE;<p>- some &quot;small bonuses&quot; like here and there free parking in paying areas of various cities, access to &quot;emission free&quot; or &quot;limited circulation&quot; zones of some cities, a pleasure to drive, option to activate A&#x2F;C from remote without polluting other parked cars nearby, similarly keeping the A&#x2F;C on in case of a long traffic jam and so on.<p>The point though is that for what I get a BEV is absurdly high priced. It&#x27;s reasonable price should be LESS than an ICE counterpart, because there is far less inside, less fine machining to build the parts, less to assembly them, less for me in range terms, less in MTBF and so on. I&#x27;ve choose and entry level Chinese EV (MG ZS long range 2022) because of that. The crappy crapware on board is not much more crappy than the crapware on board of any new vehicle, and all of new connected crapware on wheel are a national security and a personal security threat, I chose to accept that simply because ALL car&#x27;s now are such a nightmare. The rest is just an economy will by some to remove the ability to own a personal transportation mean to the masses, and still retaining the ability to remotely lock those who can still afford one.<p>Most people are not Citizens and attentive enough to IMPOSE by public will in furor to end such practice, but still smart enough to understand the crappyness and their side implications so they simply choose to stick with old vehicles as much as they can. That&#x27;s is. Is not a rate toward glorified golf cart, that&#x27;s the OEM will, it&#x27;s not about range anxiety (instead about knowing that the large battery you have the less charging cycle you do in a timeframe, so the long it last) witch is STILL just sufficient for most use cases, not more than enough since sometimes it&#x27;s cold, we are in hurry and on steep roads where a 450km WLTP range became a ~200km real range. That&#x27;s just PR bullshit to sell chairs with wheel to be sold in dense cities just to move few km per day, ignoring the fact that such model is economically untenable.

The editorialized headline is not correct. From the article:<p>&quot;Sure, sales of EVs keep going up — a record 300,000 cars sold in the US in the third quarter of 2023 were electric — but the pace of adoption has markedly slowed, and analysts have suggested the country is no longer on track to hit the government&#x27;s sales targets.&quot;

There is a best of both worlds option, in theory, which is a car with a much smaller battery than can still be fully electric for a commute.<p>We&#x27;re wasting our battery capacity on cars anyway. Grid storage is much more important, and cars have the worst possible power demands for use with batteries.

Rather than doom and gloom based on personal EV demand, I&#x27;d love to see the numbers on corporate EV adoption too (corporate fleets and electric semi trucks). The push for renewables in states like California show an entirely different story than what this article suggests.

This headline is false, and it&#x27;s not the original.<p>The original sub-head contains the text &quot;sudden slowdown in electric car sales&quot;, but the article itself correctly reports that sales are still rising.<p>The rate of growth has declined, as it often does when things are growing quickly from a small number.

The &quot;road trip problem&quot; wouldn&#x27;t be a problem if folks could casually get on a train to the next town over etc.<p>It really speaks to the broader issues of North America where Canada and the United States declined to build improved rail service for decades on decades. Whoops.

Some friends of mine bought an electric car, thinking they could go on a road trip about 80 miles away with us (it was fully charged before they left).<p>They weren&#x27;t calculating the weight of other things they brought in the car for the trip and would have ran out of charge in 30 minutes.<p>Full electric is skipping an important step. It&#x27;s hybrid. Hybrid makes perfect sense. Boost gas powered cars and increase their milage. It allow us to build up the infrastructure to then convert to full electric.<p>Now, it&#x27;s a shit-show where major car companies won&#x27;t ever be interested in electric again because they are losing too much money.

It is not trivial to get electricity service upgrades that many homes need to charge electric cars. It is expensive and many utilities are backed up with service upgrade requests. PG&amp;E in the SF Bay Area is currently quoting 12-18 months for service upgrades.

I think hybrids are the ideal car that addresses the current reality and infrastructure as it is at this moment in time. Most trips can be driven electric only, while also having the ICE to address those edge cases and long trips while at the same time removing range anxiety.

This supports my take, which is that the perfect EV is a plug-in hybrid with about 100m EV range, in addition to an ICE.<p>My RAV4 gets 50 depending on temps, so on average I use the ICE for about 10 miles of my long commute.<p>But I load up and drive 500 miles using gas when I need to, once in a while.

I don&#x27;t know about the USA, I live in India, and people just want electric bikes and cars.

&gt; When automakers pivoted to EVs, they focused on the kinds of cars that were already popular — which meant a flood of big electrified SUVs and trucks.<p>This point is flat out wrong. The only true EV- SUV that was available till the end of 2022 is the model-X.

I want a minivan that holds 8 and can drive itself (mostly).<p>Electric or Not, I literally don&#x27;t care.

Seems kind of strange when this just happened:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;insideevs.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;702783&#x2F;byd-plugin-car-sales-december2023&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;insideevs.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;702783&#x2F;byd-plugin-car-sales-decem...</a>

I&#x27;m a fan of EV technology, I&#x27;m as green as they come and love nature, our lungs, and believe in climate change and the need to pull the planet back from that.<p>And I have absolutely no intention of buying an EV.<p>My balance is to run older cars, much less. I commute to work by train, I walk to the supermarkets and back, I cycle sometimes.<p>For longer distances, I might bust out our 2005 5 door Toyota ... for fun, I&#x27;ll roll out a 69 Bug at the weekend ... I have some other classics in mind.<p>I got excited about EV&#x27;s, Tesla, etc about 10 years ago ... and the passion has absolutely fizzled out.<p>I&#x27;ve spent time with a few and they&#x27;re boring computers (and I love computers). I firmly believe that maintaing older cars and using them less is much better for the enviroment overall. AND, importantly, I still enjoy the hell out of my cars.<p>The only EV I got mildly excited about, recently, for looks was the ioniq 5 ... that looks pretty badasss ... but even that has faded. All the rest look like something I&#x27;d ride to the airport. They almost all have the design language of a taxi-cab.<p>I&#x27;m not sure what EV companies can do to reach me. But add me to the list of fewer people buying electric cars.

&gt; Since Americans have been promised a one-to-one substitute for their gas cars, this seems like a failure; an EV should be able to do everything a gas car can. This idea persists even though in 2023 the average US driver traveled only about 40 miles a day, and in 2022 about 93% of US trips were less than 30 miles. Still, in a survey conducted by Ipsos last fall, 73% of respondents indicated they had concerns about EV range.<p>This right here is the problem. For &gt;99% of your yearly trips you do not need the range. EV&#x27;s aren&#x27;t 100% replacements of ICE. They are a replacement for urban, interurban and trips under 500 km range. For my country, for example, there&#x27;s no two way trip that is longer than 200 km, and the ones that are are so rare and usually overnight so you have charging figured out.

European perspective, Opel&#x27;s lowest range model Corsa (ICE) starts at 17k EUR while Opel e-Corsa (EV) starts at 33k EUR. EVs are a status symbol, not a wise financial decision, for most people. &#x2F;thread

We need a ton of infrastructure build-out for EV chargers.<p>There was funding for EV chargers in one of the recent infrastructure bills, but while the money is there the execution appears lacking. They&#x27;ve barely built anything.

Sure it was approached not in the way it had to be. It requires a long-term commitment - longer than duration of one administration. And it requires actual mandates, like we do in EU. Simply put, there are norms of how many electric cars should be sold and on the road in every country every year, and countries face steep fines if they don&#x27;t. There is no way to object apart from leaving the EU which means instant economic and social death. So things move along quite well here. It might look like socialism, but hell yeah, if it works, why not?<p>U.S. needs to have state by state mandates which are actually mandatory and provide irrevocable mechanisms to maintain them regardless of administration in power, it needs high tax on gas (make it more expensive than in EU - maybe $10&#x2F;gallon? because people make more), and ban or extreme high taxes on large cars, especially large gas cars. That progressively increase as share of EVs increase.<p>Median age of a new car buyer is 53. These people are not going to voluntarily change. They need to be forced to.

Can someone advise me when you have a family of 4 kids? Thinking of buying a Ford Explorer. About 30k for a 3 years old one. I believe there are no equivalent EVs. An old model X is just not practical.

At least India, 2 out of 10 car <i>I</i> see in my small town is electric

They are still too expensive and the infrastructure isn&#x27;t in place.

I&#x27;m going to wait until battery technology updates, everyday I see in the news about solid-stage batteries, sodium batteries ..etc<p>Like 60% of the price of electric car are the batteries, I guess.

Seems like a hit piece. The same old BS FUD as always. The EV sales are slower than expected and can be explained by only one simple fact: cost. However, battery prices (the dominant cost) has been falling steadily and will keep falling. We&#x27;ll get there eventually, albeit not as fast as we wanted.<p>PS: I&#x27;ve been driving exclusively electric since 2012 and haven&#x27;t owned an ICE since 2016.

Feels like electric cars are the Wayland of transportation.

The submission title is inaccurate, as per article<p>&gt; sales of EVs keep going up — a record 300,000 cars sold in the US in the third quarter of 2023 were electric

The headline is incorrect. The article clearly says that sales are up, but the pace has slowed. Acceleration and velocity are different.

I want to buy one, I just can&#x27;t afford one.

This article really confuses the problems that legacy car manufacturers have with switching to EVs, with EVs in general. EVs work, just look at countries farther ahead in the transition, or ask the 1.8 million people who bought a Tesla last year. The transition is in full swing.<p>Tesla&#x27;s excellent supercharger network is already more than sufficient for roadtripping in the USA and Europe, and now is open to non-Tesla EVs. This piece of writing is just a poorly researched bit of trash.

Electric cars have less range, cost more to purchase and take a very long time to refuel, compared to hydrocarbon-based cars.

Why would you buy an overpriced electric car?

I&#x27;m sure a couple of generations with no job prospects and double digit credit scores has nothing to do with it

In the UK we now have two holdups to futher adoption:<p>- road tax is going to start ramping up (already!) for electric cars<p>- ditto BIK tax

Gas is cheap. $3.19 near us vs. $5.00+ a few years ago. Guess what happened when gas prices went up?

* Fewer people in the United States.<p>The World Economic Forum reports that EV sales are still strong in Europe[0]<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.weforum.org&#x2F;agenda&#x2F;2023&#x2F;11&#x2F;electric-car-sales-europe-barriers-ev-adoption&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.weforum.org&#x2F;agenda&#x2F;2023&#x2F;11&#x2F;electric-car-sales-eu...</a>

Two problems: Infrastructure. Price. Solve this and nobody will think using ICE cars.

It’s because they’re worse cars.

One big problem is that the ceo man-child has made Tesla toxic. This has cost the brand and the market a significant amount of credibility. Their abysmal build quality and parts monopoly don’t help matters either. Now he picked a fight with the labor unions of Scandinavia.<p>I wouldn’t be surprised if he tanks the whole industry.

I&#x27;m not buying an electric car because they are twice as expensive, still.

I want to drive as much as I want the IC&#x2F;EV car that I want with the range that I decide, whenever and wherever I want. I dont care If the common HN guy decides to buy the next Apple Car because the fancy screens or the expensive Tesla paid with the startup Options, I want a car I feel proud to own for many many years to dedicate time to work in the engine and to be able to fix it by myself. Somehow it&#x27;s a matter of freedom that, I&#x27;m observing more and more this days, has been lost in the past of this forum.

There is a big media push to say EV market is in trouble. If you look at the price change dynamics for batteries, it&#x27;s a constant decline. In fact, the first Tesla battery pack battery and the current one have a price diff of 30x.<p>Right now, the cost goes below 100 kWh. That is an industry agreed threshold of EV becomes cheaper to produce compared to ICE cars. So this and next year, market will introduce several EVs that are cheaper compared to ICE. Add to this government funding incentives. Plus, the side effects of expensive batteries pushed companies like Tesla to adopt stamping techniques, higher levels of automation, etc.<p>So, the typical buyer persona will switch from upper mid-class early adopters to people who need a cheap car for their day-to-day use.<p>That&#x27;s going to be another EV rush, where they will be selling everything they can produce.<p>Fun fact: China surpassed Japan as the biggest car exporter. And battery revolution held mostly by Chinese companies will strengthen that lead x2 since they are the most capable of producing cheap EV&#x27;s.<p>Why would you buy a gas Toyota Corolla if you will be able to buy an EV that is $5-10k cheaper? And btw, Chinese manufacturers are buying factories in Mexico to be ready to export EVs to the US.<p>Scary conspiracy theory: The Western world is very scared of this wave of cheap EVs, and that&#x27;s why we see these ridiculously misleading articles.<p>post-WW2 world: The West produces cars and sells them to the rest of the world; no one else is capable of producing good enough ICE cars.<p>post-2025 world: west is not able to compete with the price and efficiency of Chinese-produced batteries and hence EVs market overall.

&gt;in the US<p>Oh, so we&#x27;re ignoring the massive increase in China.

this is one of those &quot;nobody wants a smartphone, the sound quality is shit&quot; kind of articles

Part of what a car sells you is an identity - you may not actually venture off into the wilderness but it&#x27;s nice to believe you <i>could</i>.

I never thought I would be a simp for electric cars, but after owning one, when I hear someone driving an internal combustion engine, I just feel bad for them - such an inefficient, dirty system.

A lot of common talking points from the anti-EV FUD going around - EVs are heavier, sales are going down (even though they&#x27;re not, according to the data presented in the article), EVs don&#x27;t have enough range. Ask an EV owner and they don&#x27;t care. It&#x27;s almost like there might be vested corporate interests (say, Big Oil?) pushing a narrative here?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;submarine.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;submarine.html</a>

It&#x27;s called the chasm

Hmm maybe hybrids are currently a better value proposition for most consumers.

HN title is wrong. From the article: &quot;Sure, sales of EVs keep going up — a record 300,000 cars sold in the US in the third quarter of 2023 were electric...&quot;<p>Discussion is about a more slowly growing market - not one in decline. YoY sales are up like 40%. This is FUD.

I can&#x27;t afford 30K for a new battery every few years.

TL;DR:<p>&quot;While it may be a sexy and industry-friendly approach to the climate crisis, an EV-first plan isn&#x27;t the most effective way to tackle the enormous challenge we face.&quot;

(in the usa)

Maybe it is time to push for hydrogen cars?

the first line of the article &quot;a record 300,000 electric cars sold in the US in the third quarter of 2023&quot;; the spreading of FUD around EVs continues, nothing new here; this time it is from the opposite end of the spectrum from the crowd saying &quot;Getting Americans to ditch driving altogether would be the most effective way to reduce emissions, but it would require a massive rethink of our transport system.&quot;<p>classic case of the great being the enemy of the good;

Dumbass &quot;journalists&quot; with the usual clickbait.<p>Explicitly MORE people are buying EVs:<p>&gt; Sure, sales of EVs keep going up — a record 300,000 cars sold in the US in the third quarter of 2023 were electric<p>The only thing they&#x27;re seeing is &quot;but the pace of adoption has markedly slowed&quot; -- no shit, have you seen the interest rates and price diffs?<p>And which manufacturer grew the most? Oh that&#x27;s right the only all-EV one. Just so happens Tesla dropped prices to keep monthly payments roughly the same.

<i>&gt; Getting Americans to ditch driving altogether would be the most effective way to reduce emissions</i><p>And build more sidewalks, please. It&#x27;s ridiculous how bad it is in some places.

The article talks about range concerns as if they&#x27;re simply incorrect or ill-founded:<p>&gt; Niedermeyer said that while an electric car can meet most people&#x27;s driving needs, it struggles with edge cases like road trips because of the need to recharge. Since Americans have been promised a one-to-one substitute for their gas cars, this seems like a failure; an EV should be able to do everything a gas car can. This idea persists even though in 2023 the average US driver traveled only about 40 miles a day, and in 2022 about 93% of US trips were less than 30 miles. Still, in a survey conducted by Ipsos last fall, 73% of respondents indicated they had concerns about EV range.<p>93% of trips are less than 30 miles, but the <i>vast majority</i> of drivers take <i>occasional</i> trips that are beyond the range of an electric car. It&#x27;s no wonder that 73% of drivers have range concerns-- no one is concerned with the EV getting through their commute, they&#x27;re concerned with the EV getting them to their distant family &#x2F; weekend trip &#x2F; vacation home &#x2F; etc. The argument is a clear strawman; it&#x27;s playing down what people have genuine concerns with and focusing on the range aspect that&#x27;s obviously unimportant.

&gt; If there&#x27;s any direct inspiration for the United States&#x27; EV policy, it&#x27;s Norway. As the story goes, Norway introduced some compelling subsidies for EVs<p>Ah yup... Norway, sitting on gigantic oil reserves. Reserves so huge they could decide to just give the finger to the EU and not join. So huge there&#x27;s a fund benefiting, AFAIK, all Norway citizens.<p>I&#x27;m not <i>criticizing</i> Norway. But citing Norway as some kind of EV posterchild is quite hilarious when it&#x27;s their oil business subsidizing EVs.<p>Besides that the &quot;heavier = bad for the road&quot; (which TFA hints at) is pure non-sense: a regular car or a car twice the weight of the regular car will do exactly jack shit to damage the road. The damages are proportional to the root of the weight and it&#x27;s the real heavy vehicles, like loaded semis at 80 000 pounds, that do damage highways and roads. It&#x27;s not even clear if non-loaded semis even make a dent.<p>In Europe, on three-lane highways, the left lane (the fast one, where semis never drive) are <i>never</i> damaged. It&#x27;s always the right lane and the middle lane (when trucks overtake) that are damaged.<p>An EV can be 1.5x the weight of a similarly sized ICE car: won&#x27;t damage the road more. Doesn&#x27;t even register.<p>It&#x27;s a lie told by those who want, like the EU, to impose a tax on weight (because with EVs they see their gigantic taxes on gasoline&#x2F;diesel go down the drain and they need to bleed people another way: so they&#x27;re selling this made-up narrative that EVs do damage the road).<p>TFA has many flaws. Those ones plus the ones highlighted by other comments. A poor article.<p>P.S: FWIW I drive an ICE car but I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s OK to beat on EVs like that...

I use public transportation. Americans should do the same for the sake of their health

Flagged for misleading clickbait. The article says that the growth rate has slowed, yet the title says sales are declining.<p>&gt; Sure, sales of EVs keep going up — a record 300,000 cars sold in the US in the third quarter of 2023 were electric — but the pace of adoption has markedly slowed

The most disingenuous part of this article is labeling a slowing growth rate (which is still a very healthy double digit percentage growth rate) to “fewer people buying” electric cars.<p>That’s not how growth works.<p>It also needs to be pointed out that the auto industry as a whole is slowing down.<p>The other thing that needs to discussed is interest and financing. This is a terrible time to buy any car. I’m not personally going to get into a 7% auto loan if I don’t have to. I think a lot of people are waiting.<p>If borrowed $50,000 for a car in 2021 your payment was $834 a month (0% interest).<p>That same payment with a typical 5% new car loan will knock $6,000 off the sticker price of what you can afford.<p>Essentially, cars are 15% more expensive than they were two years ago just when talking financing.

The HN title is wrong and contradicted by the article.<p>More people are buying electric cars than ever before, but adoption rates aren&#x27;t quite as high as what the government had hoped for.

Cars used to weigh half as much and make their own electricity. Repair costs are exponential on EVs compared to normal cars.<p>I can fix a car with a carburetor with analog parts, that I can machine myself.<p>It does not require an electric drive-train and battery to have back up cameras, tablets, even self-driving.<p>EVs are priming us for micro-transactions in our vehicles that we do not actually own.<p>So maybe the ecological impact makes sense, but the financial does not.

I’m surprised none of the top comments mention that California will be banning gas cars starting in 2035, with a handful of other states following<p>So whatever problems are being mentioned here…will have to be figured out in the next 10 years.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnet.com&#x2F;roadshow&#x2F;news&#x2F;states-banning-new-gas-powered-cars&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnet.com&#x2F;roadshow&#x2F;news&#x2F;states-banning-new-gas-po...</a>

Good.<p>I&#x27;ve been reading &quot;Cobalt Red&quot; How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives and it is deplorable how the Congolese people are treated.<p>Maybe they&#x27;ll discover or manufacture a material that can replace Cobalt that has the same thermal stability but by then it will be too late.