I'm not sure if you're making this point, but the reason why leasing e-trons was so popular was because leasing an EV provided a loophole between 2022 and 2025 where the dealer would get a $7500 credit regardless of the lessee's income or the place where the EV or its battery was manufactured (buyers had income limits and required certain manufacturing thresholds). So expensive/luxury imported EVs tended to be a better deal when leased rather than purchased.

And a lot of those leased vehicles will likely be hitting the used market over the next few years.

Also, because of the tax credits, the actual price paid tends to be lower than the MSRP, so that the apparent depreciation looks faster than the actual difference in amount paid for new/used.

If you're buying a $120,000 sports car I think you're doing it for reasons other than maximizing your financial return.

The oldest (2022 model year) e-tron GTs are showing up in the used market in a few places, for about $35k-$45k. Still not cheap, but if you're already an Audi driver you probably have a bit more of a car budget than a lot of Americans.

A lot of these legacy automakers have to deal with a supplier network, too. EVs will also need those relationships, but it will likely be with different companies, and cause some friction in broken relationships. The company manufacturing fuel pumps might not have the same future as the company manufacturing wiring harnesses.

At the same time, the sentiment common in this thread way overstates things. Toyota is continuing to make profits at this very moment, and has the cash on hand (and future profits) to be able to afford to pivot slowly.

If the future is all battery based EVs, there's no reason to believe that this particular company won't survive the transition. They have the supply chain already in place for batteries and electric motors, and have been public about batteries being supply constrained so that they believe that building hybrids with smaller capacity batteries is a better use of that existing supply. It's a self-serving position that one should be somewhat skeptical about, but they're such a huge company they have to think about scale in a way that smaller manufacturers don't have to worry about.

They've been talking a big game about not wanting to make the switch until battery tech and volume gets up to its standards, but they can actually afford to wait. They talk a big game about waiting for solid state battery tech, and while other companies can't afford to wait another 3-5 years for mass production to catch up, Toyota actually can.

And, even before then, Toyota is slowly pivoting to EVs anyway. Their plug in hybrid lineup targets some of their most popular models (Prius, Rav4). On the all-electric front, the bz is available today, and the EV Highlander and the EV Lexus ES are going to be competing side by side with the hybrid counterparts (with the ES selling at a lower MSRP than its hybrid counterparts and the Highlander expected to do similar). They can afford to actually test the market to see whether sales volume data informs how they allocate production resources to EVs versus hybrids.

I expect they'll survive. They probably won't find their way back to #1, but there's plenty of reason to believe they'll still be selling lots of cars profitably in 10 years.

I do wonder how much it would cost to build a code-compliant, UL-certified/listed system for home battery backup at 50 kwh, with a system that knows to balance things between cells over many charge/discharge cycles.

I gotta imagine a lot of the value add of the established names is that they actually operate in the U.S. (even though all 3 companies I named are Chinese owned). That's not just about marketing (even if it is true that having U.S. operations helps significantly with marketing), but the cost of certifying for different third party safety standards, and having assets/operations that bring them within reach of U.S. courts and regulators.

Yup. A huge part of the cost is the batteries, the electric motors, the sensors and controllers that manage charging and discharging.

Looking around at home battery backup solutions, for example, simply having the same storage capacity as an EV (50-75 kwh) can cost almost as much as an EV itself.

Jackery has add on batteries for about $1000 for 5 kwh, Ecoflow and Anker Solix cost $2000 for 6 kwh.

At those prices, a 60kwh battery pack in an EV basically represents $12,000 to $20,000 in battery cost alone, plus a whole system around charging it and using it for an electric motor, and then a whole car around that.

It's not a perfect comparison, but it does show that the actual material cost of what goes into an EV is primarily the electric drivetrain and battery.

Being prepared for emergencies is a good thing. But not everything we do has to actively prepare for an emergency.

This article is about people installing equipment that alleviates their energy costs and reduces the amount of energy they draw from the grid, especially during high demand times. That is worth doing, entirely separately from being prepared for emergencies.

So the fact that this equipment does not prepare for emergencies is relevant to know, but doesn't change whether it's a good idea to install the equipment.

It's possible, but needs to be engineered for safety, and that design/testing/certification will increase the cost and complexity.

You can have solar panels and a battery totally off grid, where the big battery just acts as a generator, with its own inverter creating AC power for anything you plug in. That's really simple and cheap, but isn't safe for connecting to and powering a grid-connected house circuit. So anything you want to power with one of these systems needs to be plugged into outlets that only get their power from these batteries.

You can add a grid-following inverter that safely matches the grid frequency AC, so that you can use the solar power you collect in your own normal home circuit, to power your own household appliances. But the simplest design here is a grid following inverter that doesn't work when the grid isn't connected. It can only add to something that already exists and can't do things on its own.

If you want to do both, where it can work without grid power and it follows the grid when the grid power is on, you'll have to design a system that can switch between the two modes without delivering power where it's not expected or generating power that conflicts with the grid's AC waveform. Making it automated, like an UPS system, is even more complicated.

It's not impossible, or even that difficult, it just does add complexity and the engineering tradeoff is always the question of "what problem does this solve, and is solving that problem important enough to devote these resources to it?" For anyone on a reliable electric grid where power outages are rare, the answer is usually no.

It's mainly an adjustment to how you handle pit stops. I've learned to embrace the leisurely pit stop where you pull up to the charger and plug in, and then walk and wander around a shopping area or restaurants and maybe even sit down to eat slowly.

I also have a long road trip planned next month, where I'll be leaving in the afternoon/evening so I might have to sleep overnight on the way there. If that happens, I'm going to prefer a hotel with overnight charging options, rather than have to try to find a separate charger from where I'll be sleeping. But I haven't fully planned that out, and it'll be my first EV road trip over 600 miles/1000 km.

It might be cheaper in some settings.

For certain food styles, I buy bulk spices sometimes because I don't like to pay for an entire jar I won't use, knowing that most of it will go stale by the time I'm through the jar. Being able to buy tiny quantities is sometimes way cheaper.

I'm also mismatched in my conditioner and shampoo remaining where I can buy the matching set and let the difference persist, or I can try to buy a single catch-up bottle of whatever I have excess of, to hope that they even out by the time I get to the bottom of a bottle.

Basically, I can imagine where it might be preferable (for both cost and convenience) to buy an arbitrary amount of something rather than buy a fixed factory container of that thing. I know I already do it for certain things.

It's like a dumpster filling up, where you have to pay a waste management company to come haul that stuff away, at least if people can't find a way to take it off your hands for free.