Electric Vehicles

It’s interesting that you’d mention “trim packages“ here, because that’s one of the things that’s turned me off of one manufacturer.

I was seriously looking into an Ioniq 6 at one point. It’s got a look only a weirdo like me can love. However, it starts at a decent price—even if it goes up quickly from there—gets some good positive reviews, and has some decent performance. But, I like the things that I have in my current car, like a sunroof, heated seats, and a heated steering wheel. Well, in order to get those, I have to step up to 20-inch wheels, which eats into the range by almost 50 miles—or some 15%.

Can I get the premium trim line without the monster truck wheels? No. Can I get the heated seats and steering wheel (I’ll forego the sunroof) on the lower trim line with smaller wheels and more range? No. And, they’re not the only ones. For some reason, all these EV manufacturers think they have to put bigger wheels on the premium lines, and thereby kill range.

And I just don’t get it…

Case in point, I would have been drooling at an actual Mustang EV. The Mach-E is a joke.

Dealerships are the bottleneck here. They've lobbied the states to make it illegal/very difficult for manufacturers to sell straight to consumer and have jacked up EV prices as a result. MSRP on most electrics are a joke right now.

Funny enough, perhaps the most innovative thing Tesla ever did was breaking this mold and look how successful they've become because of it.* Ford's been trying for years now to get their dealers under control to middling results, just to show how pervasive it is.

• please don't read into this as any kind of pro-Elon praise. There's plenty to criticize Tesla/Elon Musk for, but the only point I'm making here is that selling directly to consumers isn't one of them.

The thing is that on the one side this is becoming a national security issue where China is basically building a capability where they can cripple the US economy, on the other side Tesla is already getting subsidized to high heaven already, so it's more about whether the US government deigns to actually attach strings to the carrots it hands out quite regularly.

On the first topic though, it wouldn't be a big problem if the US would start to depend on Chinese imports more, as long as all that is symmetrical and China develops dependencies on US imports. We got the French and the Germans to stop trying to kill each other that way. The question is whether China expects this to be a good faith let's tie ourselves together deal, or a one-sided let's get ahead by getting leverage thing.

I live in a place where cycling is the norm for short trips, trains are for longer trips. I still understand that the US is currently fucked up with their infrastructure to the point that people will need to buy cars either way.

Cities and metropolitan areas should be free of car dependency, but rural places will need something. And that something would better be an EV rather than another F150.

Idk what's up with the downvotes here. Just speaking anecdotally, Tesla was the face of EV up until like four years ago, and Elon was the face of Tesla. Him coming out against the demographic that was among the earliest supporters of EVs (read: Tesla (read: Elon Musk)) definitely did a blow to support for them from what I've seen. I once watched a Tesla driver get booed out of an Electric Car show in Madison, WI, because of how much the community hates Elon lol

I still see way more Teslas in Denver, but also finally some Kias, Rivians and others.