Comment by ragingregard

1 month ago

It's sad to see how much of an echo chamber hackernews has become, used to see a a decent number of users engage in critical discussion and exchange perspective, now threads like this are just a gong show of self-reinforcement.

To give some weight to the above, this thread leans way too heavy into EVs being awesome and the main issue is "the people or industry" (misconceptions, misunderstanding, oil industry bad, etc) while backing that with "rest of the world is winning the race" (FOMO).

Here's some counter points to a bunch of claims made in this thread:

1) EVs are not as practical as this thread proposes:

- Battery degradation is still mostly an unsolved issue. 10% within 3 years is common on the latest models as reported by drivers, 15% within 5-7 years is also quite common. LFPs do better but provide considerably less ideal range. 20% degradation is the cliff, where degradation accelerates and lithium ion batteries are considered EOL. For cars that under ideal conditions do 500km - 550km that's not okay over the lifespan of the car where you want good performance in the 8 to 16 year range. In addition, average car on the road in the USA / Europe is at 12 years (many cars far above 12 years old). These batteries will be lucky to make it to 12 years so the average age of EV fleet will end up much lower than ICE (not great)(more disposable) unless you replace the battery. Battery replacements are $10k-$20k and poor warranties (4 years or less). Costs are not coming down for various reasons.

- Actual cold performance (under -10C) is not good, there's no way to resolve this without increasing ideal range

- Range is considerably lower at highway speeds than city driving due to energy dynamics, exactly the opposite of what users need. ICE cars have an advantage here because their power curve is non-linear and power output improves with RPM, RPM goes up with higher speeds in the final gear so efficiency improves for a portion of the curve.

- Charging when living in apartment complexes or in multi-home units is not competitive at all with filling up at a gas tank, time wise or cost (unless subsidized).

- Most people drive few miles daily but long road trips yearly, often to remote places without reasonable charging infra. Versatility of use cases is a core requirement for most car users and EVs are not competitive here.

2) Growth is not as significant and growth rate has significantly slowed down

- EV sales are not at 30%+ of all car sales world wide as someone proposed in this thread claiming China is at 50%. China is at 50% NEV, which stands for new energy vehicle and makes up hybrids, BEV and EREV. EREV + hybrids are 40% of sales in China. That means BEVs are only at 30% of total which is what the rest of the world considers EV. World can't be at 30% EV sales itself as the rest of the world is far behind this sales % compared to China.

- China is pushing higher EVs not due to tech superiority but for energy security for obvious reasons, i.e. a lack of traditional energy independence and rising geopolitical risk

- Subsides have played a huge role in the growth and removal of subsidies will depress sales growth more

3) "rest of the world is winning the race" (FOMO)

- No one has won this race because the tech is not technically sufficiently superior to the currently available. This will change when solid state batteries become common place, but the problems with the tech are hard with a long tail of issues so that's still many years away from being widely rolled out.