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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35348 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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To me this looks like they failed to make electric vehicles attractive to consumers compared to gas ones, so they're giving up on that and instead are going to effectively make gas vehicles illegal to manufacture. It's absolutely insane to me that the EPA can just destroy a major industry like this, and have a massive effect on the lives of every American, and they don't have ask anyone. Congress doesn't vote on it, the president doesn't sign it, it just happens because they said so.

Good, shows consumers are still relatively smart.

I want to like electric vehicles. But they're expensive, and their batteries predestine them for become e-waste in about 10 years. I know, I know, the claims are that most EV batteries last "10-20" years. Even so, I wouldn't want to roll the dice on needing a $20,000+, planned obsolescence repair within what I consider the usable lifespan of the vehicle. I drive my cars into the ground. I drove my 2007 Honda Civic until a tornado/down burst (meteorologist couldn't make up their mind) dropped a tree on, totaling it. I got a solid 15 years of use out of it, with only standard maintenance. I never had to spend more than $1000 in a single year on it.

Then you have cases where manufacturers decide, fuck it, we don't want to support the batteries for that vehicle anymore. I saw that happened to one particular model a while ago, although now I can't seem to find a reference.

To add insult to injury, batteries are one of the hottest battlegrounds for right to repair right now. A lot of them are aggressively locked down with DRM, so they cannot have dead cells swapped out, or be worked on at all. You must buy the $20,000+ OEM replacement.

Add in all the nonsense a lot of EVs are doing, turning even cars you ostensibly own into a subscription service, and it's a convergence of lots of terrible things I hate, utterly ruining a technology I would want to be enthusiastic about.

Agreed. I've noticed there's a lot of politically-motivated fudging of costs when it comes to gas-powered vehicles.

Gas-powered vehicles are incredibly cheap to own and operate if that is what you want. People can and do drive old, reliable vehicles and it costs very little to do so. My first car cost $6000 (in 2001) and I drove it for 10 years with essentially no maintenance getting nearly 40 miles to the gallon. I'm currently on year eight of my current car, and have put almost no money into it other than the cost to purchase.

"But the average car costs $XXX per year. Look at the data." says the chorus.

That's because cars serve multiple purposes, mainly transportation and status symbol. A person who buys a $120,000 G-Wagon is not purchasing transportation. Yes the cost of expensive new vehicles is counted as "transportation cost" and used to argue that gas-powered cars are expensive. They are not.

Agreed on all points.

If we had sci-fi battery technology, then electric vehicles would be ideal. Electric motors are in every way vastly superior to gas motors. A tiny motor that is ultra-low-maintenance, ultra-high-torque-starting-at-0-RPM, etc.

But the batteries are in every way horrible. Very heavy, expensive, wear out with use, require rare minerals to make, take a long time to charge, etc.

Even if we had the magic battery, we'd need the upgraded electric grid. Which the same environmentalists who want to ban gas cars want to prevent from happening.

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