Even the higher trims are going to have extremely thin margins, if they're making money at all. Seeing as it's an $8K jump in price from the base model to the second level trim, I imagine dealers are going to make it very difficult to buy a base model.
Tesla can almost make money selling a model 3 at $39k before any tax discounts, the RWD version with 272 miles. With the theoretical battery price of $100/kwh, each kwh is almost 4 miles of range, need 28+19/4 = need about 11 kwh of battery or $1,100 of cost addition. They don't want to increase the range on their lowest end car because people might buy it instead of the more expensive higher end prices.
Car prices need to drop another 10%, and then some for them to actually become affordable.
That said, the Bolt does have a low kWh charging rate of 55 kW, and in early models, DC fast charging was an option.
* it is available, new, at my local dealer, for <=$40k
* it will enable me to travel to a destination 1.5 hr away, and return, without stopping to charge
* it has a reliable fast-charging network
* doesn't stream video of me to someone else's computer
I don't really think I'm asking for much.
Wow. No way they're going to beat the #1 best selling EV in the world. GM is clearly still learning how to both make and sell EVs.
Leaving everyone to go figure out efficiency obfuscates what should be a defining characteristics of these offerings!
Here's another claim from them in 2018 about upcoming cars requiring a technological breakthrough:
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/01/12/577688125....
I think the ground clearance might be tricking you, the proportions make it look like a compact hatchback, just lifted.
To save you some time, here are some real prices (from the article):
2LT FWD starting at $43,295 (or $35,795 with tax credits)
2RS FWD starting at $44,795
3LT FWD starting at $45,295
3RS FWD starting at $46,795
On top of that, add $1,395 destination charge. Also, add your state taxes.
Rough realistic price is going to be $47,000. Priced exactly so you don't get to extract any value out of fuel savings during the lifetime of the vehicle ;).
https://gmauthority.com/blog/2024/02/2024-chevy-equinox-ev-t...
We need cheaper, smaller EVs in the US yesterday. Looking at the options China and Europe have and comparing to what we have you can really get the sense that car companies here only care about making SUVs/trucks/and _some_ crossovers electric but don’t actually care about making small cars electric because of one thing.. profit. They know they’ll make more money on the massive cars but that’s horrible for us because it further expands the need for larger parking spots, wider roads, and I won’t even get into the fatality statistics when comparing cars of different sizes.
The only thing that will force car companies to get smaller cars into the U.S. market is regulation. Then and only then will we see true EV offerings around the 20k mark
Until it exists, it doesn’t exist.
But a far better deal is buy a used tesla model 3 with more range, used, and 4 years of battery warranty (to 120k miles) and 4 more years of drive train warranty, for well under 30.
This is why tesla model y was the best selling sedan in the entire world last year, taking it away from Toyota, an amazing thing really.
If I were buying today, I'd get a Prius Prime. It is available locally starting at $34,100, has enough range for me to be in EV for anything but a road-trip, and has a good network for parts and service.
Edit: He stealth-edited "doesn't stream video of me to someone else's computer" into the list, so I think the point of the comment is just, "I want an EV that's as good as a Tesla but isn't a Tesla."
Edit: Never mind I see that’s something you’re already considering!
Or you could get a car delivered to your driveway for you like the rest of us urchins. But maybe that's just a bridge too far.
Ours (mid-range 240 mile model 3) has lost less than 20 miles of range after 5 years/36k miles.
How many miles do they have on it? Mileage that short after only 6 years should be covered by warranty. That's not degradation, that's a battery failure.
Though I doubt your friend’s situation would be much different with an ICE. The only way a new battery isn’t covered by the warranty is if he’s already driven 150k miles before 30% degradation hit, at which point ICE cars also see a dramatic drop in resale value.
As to ~10k to replace a battery, high mileage ICE engines end up needing a lot of work over their lifetime. Many 300k mile car see several sets of spark plugs, various belts, plus some big ticket items like transmission, catalytic converter, or cracked head gasket etc. Batteries just condense all that into one big ticket item which slowly degrades and people can budget for.
Yeah, I really don't think you do. That would be an outrageously wild outlier. As others are pointing out, the simple warranty terms promise a 4-5x lower degradation. I won't say it's impossible to break a battery that badly in six years, but if it happened your friend is doing some crazy stuff to their car.
More likely you're misunderstanding or they're spinning. Maybe you heard them talk about wanting to plan road trips with 120 mile legs or something (which is a pretty routine thing -- trips can actually be faster if you charge often at low capacities).
That's my bet. Cold winter, some pack degradation, US highway speeds, and only considering 60% of the capacity (20%-80% for road tripping), 120 miles between supercharging stops is plausible.
https://www.tesla.com/support/vehicle-warranty
> 8 years or 150,000 miles, whichever comes first, with minimum 70% retention of Battery capacity over the warranty period.
So I'm guessing either your friend doesn't read their warranty or they've gone over 150K?
Battery failures happen, but no 6 year old Tesla is at 60% battery degradation without a system failure.
Also, lithium ion batteries are almost entirely recyclable. Once we've mined enough and have a good recycling process in place, this will become more affordable for your average person.
Also, and I'd love if someone could dig up some data on this, the X and S used an older battery type that has since been replaced by a new chemistry and assembly which degrades quite a lot less than the older nickel based batteries.
TLDR: I think battery degradation varies a lot by make/model/year.
With an older gasoline car, at some point you're going to have a transmission repair that will cost ~$2000. The engine will throw an emissions code and you're out $1000. The fuel pump goes bad, you have to replace the timing belt, the lead acid battery dies, actually the battery was fine but your alternator is shot. And when the head gasket fails you decide it's time for another car because even though it's "only" $4000, that's the today price and you know it's only going to be a few months until the muffler rusts through or you have to do the starter motor.
EVs don't have any of that stuff. Replacing the battery is expensive, but replacing the battery could be worth it, because EVs don't have any of that stuff. Once you replace the battery it's much less likely you're going to be facing another large repair bill for a while. Give the car an aluminum frame that can't rust and we could start commonly seeing 40 year old cars on the road.
It's also not impossible that there will be replacement batteries that don't match the original spec. When new the car had a 350 mile range, now the battery is shot and the car is 20 years old and a new battery is $15,000, but a cheaper battery with a different chemistry or fewer cells is only $4000 and it has a 90 mile range. Which is more than the range on some new EVs, and maybe you've only got a 20 mile commute -- or somebody else does who would buy the car.
I would have figured that rolling resistance and air resistance account for the huge majority of the energy usage without much room for improvement over eg a Model 3, unless you make it look like an F1 car or give it solid tires or something.
But it's something I feel like should be at forefront of mind. Competitors should be trying to get to top of pack, but very few are >120 MPGe.
Also it should be more obvious that big E-SUVs, even if they have big range, are actually joule hogs. Seeing a 70 MPGe should be a turn off.
And if we do change architectures? The Aptera has been talking about a 337 MPGe system for a while. It's an incredibly impressive idea, but only if people have the context to understand relative efficiency versus other EVs. We need to be building the base knowledge to evaluate, to appreciate wins, and to keep car makers from regressing.
When I think of "MPGe", my incorrect intuition is that it's factoring in the cost of gas and the cost of electricity to create a cost per mile that results in an "MPGe" relative to gas prices. ie, a 60 MPGe car would cost half as much per mile as a 30 MPGe car.
But as mentioned, this is incorrect. "MPGe" is based purely on some idea of how much energy a gallon of gas has in kWh, and miles/kWh is used to calculate that.
The result is that a 60 MPGe car could cost just as much, if not more, to drive than a 30 MPG ICE if gas prices are low while electricity costs are high.
Miles per dollar would be extremely region specific. And temporally specific; it'd change as prices wax and wane. I don't see how such a MP$e would in practice work.
My understanding is much of the world does kWh/100KM, which by virtue of the constant gives a reasonable straight number. Tesla for example has a page called European Union Energy Label, where we get figures like: Model 3 Rear-Wheel Drive, 13,2 kWh/100 km. It's perceived as more human friendly I guess than .132kWh/KM.
It definitely does seem like having the two units - either 1 gallon or 33.7kWh EPA - makes it really hard for consumers to understand the relative merits of their vehicles.
This is even less of a concern with electric vehicles, both because any electric vehicle is already more environmentally friendly (you can feasibly charge with 100% renewable energy regardless of MPGe), and because the energy cost will always be lower than it was for gasoline vehicles, which leaves even less monetary value on the table for possible gains from efficiency improvements.
So almost nobody is going to care about that unless we end up in a world where electricity prices are dramatically higher than they are now.
Fuel or electricity should cost what it costs. Vehicles need to be taxed according to their externalities. Heavier vehicles have more externalities. Road maintenance, pollution, traffic injuries and fatalities to name a few. I think if we did these things we'd trend back towards reasonable vehicles over time, and that would be a big net win.
At which point sacrificing interior space doesn't yield much in terms of efficiency and makes for a poor trade off. What we're probably going to see is "family cars" with a 300+ mile range and the shape of an SUV and then "commuter cars" which are small and correspondingly have a <100 mile range, because it doesn't make a ton of sense to make something which is tiny but still heavy.
The small Chinese EVs are universally poor performers in terms of crash safety. You can make a lot of concessions on price when you don't particularly care about the people inside the car. Are those the regulations you're talking about?
I like those regulations.
I've owned a Bolt. It was $24K out the door (however, no tax credit at the time). And I really have a hard time understanding why you'd call it large?
They certainly make very short trips 10x easier and more fun though.
Now, is the market efficient / globally optimal? No. Welcome to complex reality.
If there was a big enough market for that EV at 20k to make production practical, car companies would make them in an effort to maximize profit.
But Americans have a lot of money and a lot of space and want big vehicles; EVs are more expensive to produce, so it’s the rich people that want EVs. And those people aren’t going to buy a little toy box.
That might make sense if the only two options were "make nothing" and "make EVs to sell for 20k". In the presence of other options, however, the manufacturer might decide that that's not the optimal strategy. Or existing regulations, tariffs, or subsidies might be distorting the market. Automobiles are probably one of the least-free markets this side of pacemakers.
So a 20k EV probably just involves too many compromises to make it a winning proposition for both the buyer and the seller.
> U.S. fossil fuel subsidies stretch across the U.S. tax code, which makes detailing their costs complex. The IMF estimates they stood at $760 billion in 2022, a figure topped only by China.
https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modely/en_us/GUID-EDAD116...
>By default, images and video from the camera do not leave the vehicle itself and are not transmitted to anyone, including Tesla, unless you enable data sharing.
Also the outside of the thing is covered in cameras and I'm not spending $40k to drive around a car with tape all over it.
Tesla confused everyone when they massively cut prices, causing prices to go down across the entire EV world.
There is no technical reason someone can't make an EV with mechanical HVAC controls and a navigation/audio system which is generic, independent of any other function of the car and feasibly replaced by a third party system if you don't care for it.
Phrasing it this way also just begets that tax deductions are subsidies: “It's like these other highly subsidized industries.” Its rephrasing your conclusion rather than making some new point.