Honda is setting itself up for failure on the second disruption sweeping the automotive industry: the software-defined vehicle (SDV), which has core capabilities that can be upgraded and improved over time.
No thank you. Not sure why the author frames this as a good thing. They've been bamboozled by the automakers and have got it backwards - you're buying a vehicle that already has the capabilities, but are disabled, then paying rent (or a fee) to turn them on. I'm much more likely to buy from a manufacturer that doesn't play these games.
Most people including the author think more software = premium/better. But as software engineers, we know better. That's not the case at all. More software = more control by everyone else except you. Manufacturers. Governments.
For this reason, I always avoid cars with big flashy LCD screens that are central to controlling the cars accessories like sunroof, AC and other electricals.
The other issue is support. So many models stop getting updates after 5 years. So, if there is a bug in that big screen, you have to live with it for the rest of the car's life.
Finally, there's the issue of privacy. Most manufacturers contract with analytics vendors to send your data back to them. You can't even turn it off. For example, MG (now chinese owned) has Adobe analytics embedded into their big screens. The only reason chinese love using Adobe over other vendors is because they aren't blocked in China. So that's usually a dead giveaway that your data is being sent back there.
What kind of data? You will be surprised.
1. How many people are inside the car at a given point (measuring laden weight)
2. What are your favorite spots (your home, office, restaurants, etc)
3. How many people live in your family (average laden weight over time)
4. Your favorite routes, highways
5. If you are married/have kids
6. If you're having an affair
7. Your annual income, monthly spend, estimated net worth
And a lot more data points that I can list here. Remember, they have access to additional data brokers to stitch a complete user profile about you too.
There is also the issue of longevity. Most people don't expect 20 year old laptops to keep working, but they expect 20 year old cars to keep working. The software defined vehicle is a disposable vehicle, and that means it better be cheap or someone is taking a depreciation bath.
It's not only bug fixing. It's what happens to phones too: updates for a fixed number of years.
I don't see the point to pay a premium for a new car (it's not a tool for my work) so I always buy second hand. My Citroën C3 from 2016 never upgraded to the new backward incompatible Android auto from the late 2010s. I bought it in 2020 and I wasn't able to connect to it with my phone from 2019 which came with the new Android auto. BTW iPhones could connect. Last time I checked was 2024.
This particular problem is not important because I put my phone in a holder close to my wheel and I get a better navigator than my car could ever be with its 3 colors LCD panel, but cars can last much more than phones and stopping support at any time during their lifetime could be a problem. I understand that supporting a 2016 car in 2036 could be a problem too, so just give us the mechanical part with the firmware of engine, brakes etc and the usual knobs and buttons. Each passenger has a personal infotainment system in their hands and spend their time liking at it with earpieces in their ears. No need to duplicate that in the car.
I'm past 130k km now so I'll be looking for another second hand car a few years from now. I'm afraid that it will be from the middle of the worst period of the car dashboards. Maybe I'll be partially saved by looking at a low price point.
> Finally, there's the issue of privacy. Most manufacturers contract with analytics vendors to send your data back to them. You can't even turn it off.
You absolutely can. Pull the fuse of the cellular modem aka "telematics unit" or even completely remove it. Some vehicles don't have a separate fuse, in which case you will need to physically unplug the modem. Do your research and don't buy any car where this can't be done more or less painlessly.
I was told by a car dealer service guy that if the touch screen went on the blink, the car would be totaled. (Since replacing it cost more than the car was worth.)
I've often thought the touch screen should be replaced by a socket that accepts an iPad, and put the auto custom software on that. Why reinvent the hardware?
It doesn't have to be that way though. There's a bigger scam in the tech industry in general that says the path we're on is the only path we can be on.
More software doesn't have to mean less value for the customer. More software doesn't have to mean your tools and devices are spyware machines. That's just the lie we've been told.
As users we should also know better. All too often software is used to remove functionality from your things, or add unwanted ones. Even just adding ads. It's used as bait and switch and can make the thing you bought unfit for the job.
Car software comes with so many locks and it's intentionally made to not be serviceable by the user in any way. You can't tweak it, replace it, take one from another car. It's your car, the hardware part that does the same job is yours, but the software that replaces it isn't.
And at the end of the day almost no buyer buys a car for future promised software features. They buy it for existing features and new good ones are just welcome. If anything, the software is just used as an excuse to deliver a half baked product and have it bake over the years in the owner's hands, so at the end of the ownership maybe it's what was promised in the first place.
Telling that to normies would usually give me blanks stares and "nothing to hide" or "don't care" arguments.
My "but your situation my change" and "gov can turn bad" arguments never hit. People are terrible at projecting themselves. That's why climate change is so hard to fight. It's too far and abstract.
Humans need to feel concrete and awful pain to realize their mistake and learn.
But I'm hoping the Trump situation is going to cause that. Now that the US is at the brink of dictatorship (some might argue it's already there), maybe American citizens will realize that putting their entire life on a centralized platform, having non encrypted communications and spying devices everywhere is a terrible idea.
I'm not very optimistic though.
And even if they do, in 3 generations, they will have forgotten. I have no idea how to fix this.
That's why I have a dumb car, but added a tablet with maps and can bus connection (OBD-II) via bluetooth. All in my control. The OBD-II adapter is not visible. Did cost my about 50€.
Maybe that's because software that we use every day (websites, saas, etc) generally get better over time and it's still relatively cheap. Meanwhile cars still rely on things like an archaic check engine light rather than just tell you what's wrong with the car and an infotainment system that's worse than a circa 2012 iPad.
People feel that cars haven't really improved much in practical terms over the last 20 years. At least to the layman, they don't feel smoother, safer, more comfortable to drive. They just got more expensive, more cameras and crap like auto-start that no one asked for.
So at least the hope is to take some of the best parts of modern software manufacturing and apply it to the car. Tesla did this and is why it was the first successful car company that's been started in the past 50 years or so.
I thought more software meant I could write a little Lua and get the seat in the second preset position when I pressed the key fob in a particular way...
> More software = more control by everyone else except you. Manufacturers. Governments.
Also more unreliability, because software engineers often aren't real engineers.
> The other issue is support. So many models stop getting updates after 5 years. So, if there is a bug in that big screen, you have to live with it for the rest of the car's life.
The problem here is (probably) the internet, which gives management an excuse to slack on QA. If there was no chance to ever update the software, they'd probably do a better job. But now with the internet, they can say they'll just fix it in a patch later, but then never actually get around to doing that.
There ought to be a law that says car software may only be shipped on console-style non-flash ROM carts.
>you're buying a vehicle that already has the capabilities, but are disabled, then paying rent (or a fee) to turn them on.
This is very much not what "software-defined vehicle" means which itself is very much not the same thing as EVs. It's possible to criticize the explotative business practices you mentioned (or bad UI practices like moving everything to a touchscreen instead of physical buttons) without linking them to other issues that have no real relation beyond falling under the general category of "technology".
At a societal level, EVs are generally better than ICE cars. At a societal level, cars that can automatically fix a "recall" with an over-the-air update are generally better than recalls that will wait to get fixed until an owner schedules an appointment to have the car serviced. These two things can be true without endorsing automakers who charge and extra fee to activate the seat warmers that already exist in the vehicle.
That's all motherhood and apple pie, but I'm sorry: the reality that we live in and incentives at play are such that if a capability can be exploited, then it will be exploited to the detriment of the consumer. Full stop.
cars that can automatically fix a "recall" with an over-the-air update are generally better than recalls that will wait to get fixed until an owner schedules an appointment
Haed disagree. You've been bamboozled, too.
Recalls of any kind are a signal to me the vehicle shipped half-baked. I'd rather have the car with slightly older features that took a little longer to release, but got it right before leaving the factory floor. Or at least the one with sufficient isolation between safety-critical and convenience features that recalls like those you describe are low priority enough to not be urgent.
> At a societal level, cars that can automatically fix a "recall" with an over-the-air update are generally better than recalls that will wait to get fixed until an owner schedules an appointment to have the car serviced.
Experience with boxed versus updatable software, particularly video games, says otherwise. When it costs a lot for the manufacturer to fix defects, they put more emphasis on not having them in the first place. Otherwise we just just a parade of defects all the time. Even if it's minor things and never fixed, the user can adapt; that's not possible in the face of continuous updates.
> At a societal level, EVs are generally better than ICE cars.
Cite your sources, please
> cars that can automatically fix a "recall" with an over-the-air update are generally better than recalls that will wait to get fixed until an owner schedules an appointment to have the car serviced.
If a "recall" can be fixed via software, doesn't that mean just shitty software to begin with? And that usually happens only when a car is infested with tons of software - proving the exact opposite of why we need less software inside cars?
>a societal level, cars that can automatically fix a "recall" with an over-the-air update are generally better than recalls that will wait to get fixed until an owner schedules an appointment to have the car serviced
Maybe? At least in my experience, once the cost of patching buggy software goes down, it typically means that the people become more willing to ship software with more bugs with a fix it later attitude.
> At a societal level, cars that can automatically fix a "recall" with an over-the-air update are generally better than recalls that will wait to get fixed until an owner schedules an appointment to have the car serviced.
This doesn't have anything to do with EV vs ICE, but whether it has a over the air updates and whether the problem can be fixed with a software update or not. I expect car recalls are pretty well into the noise in terms of "societal level" problems too aren't they? Even if they were not I expect whole "software defined car" thing, whatever that really means, has not resulted in mechanical defects plummeting, but rather just more software defects. Although it is quite possible EVs have less defects in general than ICE cars I suppose.
I’ve never had a software-based danger on my hardware-based vehicles. As such, there is a whole class of recalls that I never needed: all the ones you tell me I’m missing out on.
As far as I can tell, a software defined vehicle is one that has fewer computers in it for cost cutting reasons.
There’s an argument to be made that this allows better integration between subsystems, and therefore a better user experience.
We have a vehicle built this way. It is a death trap. Most of its safety issues can’t really be blamed on it using a new computer network technology. For instance, if it is dawn or dusk (so, commute hours) the vision systems get flaky and it likes to override steering and brakes to force itself into oncoming or merging traffic.
However, one issue is firmly due to it being a software defined vehicle.
If you are changing lanes with the turn signal on, and hit a bump while the passenger adjusts the stereo volume, they’ll accidentally turn the hazard lights on. Af that point the steering override will kick in and try to force abort the lane change.
A normal car wouldn’t be able to wire the hazards into the power steering subsystem, and also probably wouldn’t have the button be part of the radio control panel.
I appreciate your sentiment, and I agree with you in the hypothetical universe I think you’re imagining. But in this universe, that ship has long since sailed. Cars are software. They have been so for a long time. The only difference between a Tesla and an economy car from Stellantis is whether the software is well written or not.
My wife has a 2015 Jeep Cherokee. For its purpose It’s actually quite a nice vehicle, sending aside concerns of mechanical reliability. But it also has many annoyances, and EVERY single one of them (with no exceptions) are software-defined bugs or behaviours, and all could all be improved with software updates. But legacy order has never cared about improving software after you bought the car.
For all of Tesla’s many faults, they one of the first automakers where it feels like the software is not abandonware. It’s a positive trend and it’s nice to see a few other manufacturers following suit.
I'm afraid it's exactly the opposite -- Tesla has awful software, and no self discipline about adding more bloat. There is a lot of rigorously designed software in cars where you can't see it. Jeep is no one's idea of quality in any respect though.
Legacy brands do significantly improve software as the model evolves, and provide firmware updates to earlier models. The best car is probably the last one before a new platform step change.
Tesla has also pioneered putting large amounts of software in mission critical compute like instrument displays and touch screens, disregarding decades of careful evolution in HMI and TCB design. There is so much wrong with their cars without even touching their autonomy system, a proven killer.
I literally worked on building the next generation of handheld OBD devices (m68000 based) that techs used to reflash Toyota ECUs in 1997. Automakers can and do update software after the car has been sold. Before that, techs would need to swap EEPROMS.
You can do all the research in the world about a car, learn everything there is to know, and decide "this is worth my money". (Bait)
And then your car's manufacturer chooses to use the update mechanism to modify the center console screen to serve ads[1] while you're driving. (… and switch.)
Cars have software. But I don't think cars are software. Can I apply a software update to make my Honda Accord into Tesla or Dodge Ram?
> The only difference between a Tesla and an economy car from Stellantis is whether the software is well written or not.
Is that actually true? I mean, assume I have access to all software in the world and all IP lawyers got kidnapped by aliens - could I just write a software for Stellantis Economy to turn it into Tesla (or vice versa)? I don't think so.
> But in this universe, that ship has long since sailed.
No, you're combining "there can be updates" and "there will be subscriptions, always-online and enshittification" as if it wasn't splittable.
It is. It can. It will be.
As long as there are people making purchasing decisions, no ship will ever sail.
This is just passive HN fatalism as we know and resent it; probably a survival tactic to not go insane in the SV (or any large corp).
It's techcrunch. The angle of software-everything has to be there.
Why honda is killing EVs is directly related to just how damn cheap Chinese EVs have become and how stupid Americans are when it comes to EV efficiency. Who the hell wants large vehicles for EV when the best solutions are small efficient vehicles with long drive times.
Americans distort the market and margins, and Honda was never in the large SUV game.
I'm not sure what exactly pisses me off so much in this idea - after all, I am not upset by the existence of $Brand Basic, $Brand Premium, $Brand Luxury and $Brand Now-Everybody-Knows-You-Have-Money, each of which has different features and bells and whistles. But put it in one single box and charge me monthly rent to go from Basic to Premium - and it does feel wrong. Even if TCO of Premium comes out as lower over time. I don't know why exactly it feels that way but it looks like it feels that way to a lot of people. Maybe it's daily reminder that all the luxuries are right here, right under your fingers, if only you weren't so miserably poor? Or the constant necessity of begging somebody else for permission to use your own car (yes, car loans, but they feel different)? Not sure. But it feels like it's real, even if it's only in my head.
I think you've captured it perfectly with "Maybe it's daily reminder that all the luxuries are right here, right under your fingers, if only you weren't so miserably poor?"
I think its a rational move for Honda. They cant compete with tesla et al on EVs or self driving. People buy honda for reliability and low TCO. The world is heading towards lower disposable income for maybe a decade. Honda is playing by strengths, market positioning appealing to a particular target audience and keeping its margins. It adds.
And bugs, and DRM, and mass surveillance, and giving the power to the state to abuse even more of the tech, and giving police super powers, and giving bad actors (terrorists, assassins) the abilities to kill you with a virus, and the general concentration of power that this implies.
This is a terrible idea, and that's why I have mixed feelings about the robo taxi. On one hand, it's a great resource-sharing tech. On the other hand, all of the above.
I don't know the author insinuated that. It sounded more like, we release the car now, and as engineers come up with new capabilities, they get rolled out over a software update. Case in point was my car received an update that pulled in weather data. That didn't exist in the UI originally, and they added it with time.
Also because SDVs actually come with half baked firmwares that make the ECU crash, throw down the CAN network, make lights and screens act up...
Who cares, because they are now connected to the internet and can be updated with links at effective speeds higher than 10kbps, and without having to go to the dealer.
Honda is going to be the "opt-out" on that future car. And if one defect - the mafia has to pay you to raise your prices to prevent mass-defection by the customers from what is essentially a defect by default car.
Honda is going to get kickbacks by the EV industry to be more expensive.
Not really. Competitors shifting focus out of the space, combined with their being incredibly competitive in the space (they're known for making some of the most reliable engines), says to me they've found their product-market fit. They've got plenty of time to quietly reboot and have another crack at the EV game down the road.
This is one of those times I'll trust the judgement of the grey haired execs who actually have all the numbers, over the plucky young journalist who's just spouting an editorial opinion. (Nothing against the latter, I just think in this specific case they're naive and dead wrong).
Maybe, but customers DO want it, without realizing. I'm a decent DIYer, but I realize my wishes is not the same as a typical customer. Sadly, but customers vote with their wallets.
Exactly. I dont want the software and I dont want something that I paid $100k to be gated tomorrow by a software update or broken by it. Or the constant reporting on me to god knows who. Until this dumbass touch screen design idea gets removed from a car, I am not buying such a car. Even it means paying more in gas. Touch and SDV is the dumbest thing in a car. My motion is not to be tracked and for sale.
I hate to break it to you, but unless you own a mainframe that allows you unlock more RAM (that is already physically installed), unlocking more HP via software is actually how tunning works; and it is mot a scam from the 90s where you buy TurboRAM or whatever snake oil was sold back then.
> you're buying a vehicle that already has the capabilities, but are disabled, then paying rent (or a fee) to turn them on. I'm much more likely to buy from a manufacturer that doesn't play these games.
Ongoing subscriptions for access to physical hardware features like seat warmers* seems obnoxious at first glance, but a fee is more reasonable and you might find that there aren’t many auto makers that don’t do this or aren’t planning on it. BTW there’s very little in software or electronics that doesn’t do this, and many other consumer products do too. What might be less visible is how often the hardware is included and made trivial for a dealer to upgrade but doesn’t have a remote software unlock. It’s the same thing and it’s been happening for decades, but gets less outrage.
You would have paid a fee for the feature if it wasn’t included. Focusing on features being there already and locked being somehow “bamboozles” isn’t necessarily the right way to frame this, even from a pro-consumer perspective. This practice of building the high end model and locking some features behind a paywall makes the design and manufacturing cheaper for everyone by having only one design. The paywall model suggests that the design costs are more important than the manufacturing or materials costs of these features. That’s absolutely true for software apps, and it’s accepted by and large and we don’t feel like that’s a skeezy game. It doesn’t surprise me at all that with manufacturing at a global scale, it makes more sense to build one model and lock some features with software.
Do think of the potential benefits we get from this model - overall lower prices (in theory) from simplified design and manufacturing; the ability to upgrade later after you buy (or even downgrade if you don’t like it and it’s a subscription).
* AFAIK the BMW seat warmers subscription was a rumor at one point, got a bunch of online uproar, but didn’t actually happen? I’m not sure if anyone has actually done this.
Manufacturing one hardware setup and charging separately for features is not the problem. The problem is charging ongoing rent for a feature that isn't an ongoing service. A seat heater doesn't use a server, need content updates, or create meaningful recurring costs for the manufacturer after the car is sold. It shifts the relationship from ownership to permission. It also creates bad incentives: features can be removed later, tied to accounts, complicated for second owners, or turned into endless monetization opportunities.
In Shenzhen for a tech meeting. The streetscape is quieter, despite high traffic levels and I hear not only MORE birdsong, but the birds do more complex songlines.
The air is clean. For sure some of this is because it's a coastal city and has fresh sea breezes, but I've been in other Chinese coastal cities in times past and the air was significantly less clean.
There are social upsides for an almost-all-EV city.
This is an 18m person city. It's not exclusively wealthy people, its just a city with a very high local EV population and it shows.
Counterpoint - I returned to China (Beijing) last summer after 9 years and was honestly surprised how LITTLE it has changed over those 9 years, I was expecting big changes reading this tales about Shenzhen, but the reality is maybe only 1/4-1/3 of the cars on the road were EVs, there were pretty much none escooters, people still smoke in restaurants and yes, the air was for the most part perfectly fine, though this was really case in summer even before.
The most noticable change which puzzled me where those big boxes with slots in all restaurants and grocery shops, which are rental powerbanks.
Other than these hardly anything changed, policemen in police station smoked right under no smoking sign and in that half an hour in their office I inhaled more secondary smoke than in years in Europe combined. To their credit they were as laid back as policemen in my small home town. Beijing province border checks are more strict, but they still let us go without registered accommodation on weekend.
Oh yeah, out of dozens restaurants we frequented ONE fancy hot pot restaurant had robot bringing over plates.
Plus Taobao/Tmall seems replaced now with Pinduoduo with super cheap purchases (think double the Alibaba/factory price) including free shipping.
Mutianyu great wall is now fully mainstream, everyone (99%) now use cable car instead of hiking uphill, before it felt at least 50:50, people got lazy.
Ah yeah, everywhere you go you need to present passport and sometimes also book ticket in advance, so from tourist standpoint it's worse, before you could just show up same visit major sights in Beijing even without passport.
1/4-1/3 EVs is an underestimate for somewhere like Shenzhen (probably for Beijing too). It's going to be well over 50% there. And virtually all scooters will be electric.
You're right about the smoking, though. It's a massive problem.
AFAIK, beyond a certain speed (~25km/h?), EVs make just as much noise as ICEs, since the noise is then mainly generated by the tyres hitting the road. So I'm somewhat sceptical about this claim.
Dutch city centres can be really crowded and yet actually quiet, because there are practically no cars. It's probably not Shenzen-level crowded, but I'd bet that the number of people that are being transported at busy locations isn't too far behind.
(As popular slogan is "cities aren't noisy, cars are noisy".)
There is no reason to be skeptical of this claim. ICEs are very noisy during acceleration. City traffic is very start-stop by its nature. Even in Dutch cities, even if you replace every single traffic light with a roundabout. EV engines are incredibly quiet when you put them next to each other.
In many cases, we're just very used to it especially because it's a "low rumbling" kind of noise. But it still affects us.
While true (beyond 30-50km/h), that assumes that cars are driving at a steady state. Obviously, cities with much more stop-and-go require more revving of engines.
Acoustic tyres are also gradually becoming the norm, primarily with EVs. This cuts noise by several decibels.
It's not just a "rich city" effect. That's kind of the key point in the whole EV debate... once it's mainstream and infrastructure is there, it stops being a luxury signal and just becomes… normal urban life, with some pretty noticeable side benefits
I'm sure it's coming. I'm in Mexico this week and was surprised to drive by not one but two chinese car dealerships. Looks like almost 10% of cars sold last year were EVs
It also has a relatively low vehicle density, roughly 1/3 of somewhere like Houston. Mexico City is a good comparison by size and vehciles, but is also a way older, sprawling city. Shenzhen was largely built around modern road planning and extensive transit, and the power of aggressive policies limiting gas cars.
Birds adapt their song to ambient noise conditions. This paper [1] studies the Pearl River Delta (where Shenzhen is) as a natural experiment. It shows spectral changes in the target species correlating to background noise levels. I haven't looked hard enough to make sure there isn't a study that does find complexity changes but it's certainly clear that noise can affect bird song behavior generally.
I want to say this with the caveat that I am generally a person who always contends with the contradictions of living in a capitalist-imperialist country and my own distaste for it. So this doesn't come from a place of American exceptionalism writ large, but I am a firm believer the we did get this part right:
Public lands and culture of the ability to access wild places, whether for hunting, fishing, hiking, camping, and just generally an affordance of access to wilderness that is codified into the laws of the country. In Europe they have the concept of "Right to Roam" which is a powerful concept that I appreciate (and in ways is superior to our systems for just walking in the woods) but it is also fundamentally different than the almost legalistic systems we have in this country towards public lands.
My surface understanding of China is that there is no such broad remit given to the people of China and there aren't designated places where the people of China can just go and exist in wilderness. Such places might exist by convention but they don't have the sort of legal framework that we have in America to recreate in these places.
They don't come close to the variety and quality of cosmopolitan dining you can get in major American cities. A lot of FOBish Chinese people I've met won't even venture too far outside of Chinese cuisine when going out to dinner.
Shenzhen is not nearly "almost-all EV" city. There is a lot of wealthy people and almost none of them drives EV. You can see all expensive cars are ICE (blue plates).
Modern ICE cars emit almost no sound or emissions. Its not 70s with black smoke coming from exhaust pipes.
You can take any densely populated city with almost none EV vehicles (say Tokyo) and you can hear birds and air would be very clean.
I live in Tokyo, and the air is not that clean close to highways: large diesel trucks pollute a lot, and also small motorbikes/scooters pollute horribly because they don't seem to require any emissions controls at all.
The main thing keeping the air clean here is the proximity to the bay, along with the fact that there just aren't that many private cars in the first place, since most people take public transit and don't drive because there's nowhere to park.
What about the increased pollution from road dust? In Norway this has led to higher pollution levels that are directly dangerous to people and animals than back when we were all combustion vehicles.
The heavier EV's are causing genuinely harmful particles simply by driving on the roads themselves.
Woah hold on there. Where is the evidence for both increased dust and increased pollution levels?
EVs generate next to no brake dust due to regenerative braking, most EVs have mechanisms to forcefully use the friction brakes at some points to stop surface rust for this reason.
It's true they're generally heavier than the equivalent ICE vehicle, but this is usually around 200-300KG heavier - it causes a small increase in tyre wear and associated particulates but these are heavy large particles - the majority larger than pm10. That's a problem for water courses and micro plastics but nothing that'll get in your lungs or bloodstream. Anecdotally, my EV tyres (a particularly heavy model too) have lasted fine - my last set did 53k miles.
ICE cars produce plenty of pm10s, pm2.5s and smaller particles as well as nitrogen oxide, carbon dioxide and plenty of other harmful pollutants that EVs inherently don't. Even the power generated for them is usually produced away from the majority of the population.
This claim keeps circulating around and around and is not "EVs are producing more pollution", it's "if EVs are going at motorway speed, and if we only look at the pollution generated by the tires, then indeed they produce a little more".
But that's completely ignoring tailpipe emission, and the fact that in an urban setting it's still vastly more advantageous to drive an EV.
Where did you get the idea that EVs have caused it? As far as I know the amount of road dust from EVs is within the same ballpark so the claim that it has led to overall higher pollution levels sounds inconceivable. I can't even find sources that indicate high pollution levels in Oslo besides a Bloomberg article that says the situation has actually improved in recent years. [1] On the contrary Oslo seems to be doing comparatively well according to the air quality data from iqair. [2]
Most other countries are not Norway, it is a very wealthy, tiny market (150 K vehicles/year) with lots of hydro and not representative of the typical vehicle market in Western Europe and definitely not representative of the situation in the rest of the world.
EVs are the future, there is no doubt about that. But that future will not arrive everywhere at the same point in time and Norway is very far ahead of the rest of the world due to a fairly unique set of circumstances: exporting your own oil and gas to be able to have a 'clean' (and up to recently heavily subsidized) transportation network is in a way just a gigantic bookkeeping trick.
"exporting your own oil and gas to be able to have a 'clean' (and up to recently heavily subsidized) transportation network is in a way just a gigantic bookkeeping trick"
How so?
If every oil exporter used some of their oil revenue to switch to EVs, that would, all things equal, hasten the transition to EVs. The U.S. is not doing that.
Speaking of bookkeeping tricks: Kneecapping renewable energy (wind), cancelling the EV future in the US, and then starting a war in the strait of hormuz will someday be acknowledged as the finest moment of the oil industry, maximizing profit in the face of all reason.
Sure, but there is also China where over half of new vehicle sales are EVs. Denmark is at 70%, Sweden, Iceland, Finland and the Netherlands are all above 50%, a bunch of other countries in the EU are at one third EVs. In India, 5% of sales are EVs but that is double of the year before and all the big car manufacturers in India are now offering EVs. Even Australia is at 14% after stalling on EVs for years. So change is unfolding quite quickly compared to previous years. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ev-share-new-car-sales-by-c...
per-capita or by total volume? i ask because a sibling or child comment says that the number of cars sold in norway is pretty small (in part because the population is small). a quick google says 180k cars sold in norway in 2025 (we can round up to 100% EV) and 34M sold in China. It also says China has 50% EV sales. So by total volume Norway isn't close to the top.
No, it is a real invewtment in the right direction. The oil states in the middle east could have made such investments, too. Lots of EV powered by solar panels paid for with oil dollar. But they did not (in a significant way).
>But that future will not arrive everywhere at the same point in time and Norway is very far ahead of the rest of the world due to a fairly unique set of circumstances: exporting your own oil and gas to be able to have a 'clean' (and up to recently heavily subsidized) transportation network is in a way just a gigantic bookkeeping trick.
Not really. Even in a hypothetical future where all road vehicles are electric, we'll still need fossil fuels for a while. For one thing, it's probably going to be a while before airplanes can go electric. And production of plastics will probably need petroleum for a long time.
EVs are fine and dandy, but it is a luxury class of cars for now and it shows really. Most other countries are far far away from mass deployment of EVs or restricting ICE cars. EVs can win if either a) the car is cheaper than the same class ICE, or b) operational expenses of using EV car would be cheaper. Neither of which is happening yet. And the car do need to have some advantage, since EVs already come with inherent disadvantage of long and inconvenient charging, small batteries, limited locations for charging with buggy and broken stations, not working apps or cards etc.
What's silly is that the reality you describe is a choice that's been made, not something fundamental to EVs. Cars like the Nissan Leaf and the Chevy Bolt are supremely inexpensive. China's BYD cars are extremely cheap for what they are.
American/European car makers realized there is a large class of people who are wealthy and will buy a high end EV for status reasons, and started chasing that market instead.
Yeah, visiting my ex-Gf family in Norway, I realized how much richer Norwegians are that it's not even funny. It's not really a market representative of the average buyer. Same how neither Switzerland, Luxembourg or Monaco are.
I am living in a working class neighborhood of apartment buildings in West-central Europe with average to below average earners, and there's zero EVs parked here on the streets, basically 90% of people have old diesel cars. Only when you go towards the suburbs with rich(inherited wealth) people living in single family homes you see everyone has an EV.
The distinction is quite clear, do you live in a house or have your own parking space and possibility to install your own charger? Then EV 100% no brainer. Otherwise people stick to ICE.
To give you some perspective, the most popular EV in China costs $6000 (Wuling Mini). New. The second most popular costs $10000 (Geely Xingyuan). I tried both, and they are far less crappy than they have the right to be. They are cheap cars for sure, but they're perfectly adequate for regular use.
And Geely Xingyuan has a 40kWh battery in the basic configuration! This is utterly ridiculous for a car that is _that_ cheap.
So China basically murdered the global ICE market. It's gone. There's no going back. Once China figures out the logistics and sales, ICE vehicles will be dead in all of the less affluent countries. Especially because EVs combine almost too perfectly with solar generation.
Just cross the border to Sweden or Finland, and the share of EV's of all new cars drop from around 90 to something like 30-35%. The EV transition is going to take a while longer in most EU countries.
Of course something to note is the absolute number of cars sold, which has dropped dramatically at least here in Finland. Most people who are priced out of new EV market simply don't buy any new car at all, and the average age of cars is climbing fast. Either way, few people are looking for new ICE vehicles. No point buying outdated tech new, when the used car market has perfectly good ICE vehicles that perform just the same.
A country where you're looked down upon for driving a Focus RS or other "fun" car seems like a boring, austere place to be.
Perhaps that's why we never hear about Norwegian car culture (as opposed to Germany and the US). Ferdinand Porsche would have resigned to building apple carts.
US car culture has been dead for a long time, at least internationally. People like big American cars made in 50s - 70s for their looks, but since then all I can think of are oversized pickups, Nascar and Tesla which is getting eaten alive by Chinese competitors.
What fun about an ICE vehicle. Loud, slow acceleration, pollution, poisoned garages, transmissions, maintenance, gas is 10x as expensive vs charging at home. It’s shit. My EV smokes Porsches when I need to overtake them.
The only thing gas does better is higher range and quicker fill ups.
And massive oil resources. As a result of this, one of the wealthiest sovereign wealth funds on the planet, which they manage well and for the good of the country.
Their hydro energy company is an aluminum company company, they have so much slack power they export it refining bauxite.
It is worth repeating solar panels covering an area about the size of NH generate enough power to supply all current entire US energy needs.
That is irrelevant unless Norway has unused capacity.
If a country adds electric cars using more electric power, then what really matters is how that extra power is generated.
It gets weird in Europe because adding extra load in Norway could easily mean that Poland does more generation using coal.
I'm in New Zealand where the government owned generators are preventing solar installations. One example was via an unobvious regulation that the installation had to handle massively overengineered earthquake rules. Meanwhile we use coal or imported gas when the isn't enough rain for our hydro. And we waste about 10% of our total capacity exporting (via one aluminium plant).
What is a hydro energy resource, a river? Don't lots of countries have rivers?
(If we're talking about hydroelectric power plants they've chosen to build, that's not exactly a resource -- and other countries could choose to build those too, right?)
I have a tangential question. Do you find that snow banks near roads are appreciably less black and disgusting now that there are fewer ICE vehicles on the road?
Growing up in America I have memories of our roadside snowbanks becoming black and saturated by vehicle exhaust and it always felt so gross to me. The back half of winter was characterized by blackened, salt-saturated puddles and banks. I wonder if the prevalence of EVs has made things less dirty in the winter.
> The back half of winter was characterized by blackened, salt-saturated puddles and banks. I wonder if the prevalence of EVs has made things less dirty in the winter.
The dominant cause of that is probably brake and tire particulate matter, not car exhaust. And EVs make tire pollution go up (because they're heavier) and brake pollution... I'm not sure if the weight effect there is counteracted by the decreased amount of friction brake use (as opposed to resistance braking).
As others have said most of that was probably not pollution related to being an ICE vehicle, but if even part of it was the environmental performance of ICEs is magnitudes better over the last 25 years when it comes to unburned hydrocarbons and particulates, which WOULD reduce visible pollution way more than modest EV adoption. CO2 reduction? not so much with bigger vehicles offsetting gains here...
We're struggling with the pollution levels from road dust now though. It's worse in most cities than it ever was with combustion engines. Yes there's lower Co2, but the dust and tire particles are actually more dangerous.
EU is introducing regulations for this kind of emissions which will likely create a market for a few new techs that reduce it (reformulated tyres, modern drum brakes that capture dust, etc)
My hot take for Japan is that hybrids make the most sense until one the major markets (US or all of EU) has significant traction with respect to ubiquitous EV charger infrastructure.
Tesla can fund the project of making EV chargers ubiquitous in the US and make it make sense within the context of a profitable business plan.
Chinese manufacturers can similarly make it make sense financially.
Japanese auto makers who are heavily subsidized by the Japanese government can't easily fund the infrastructure project of making EV chargers ubiquitous in a foreign country like the US or EU and their home market is much smaller.
California has 1.6 charge stalls per gas nozzle. Does that count?
I places like Japan (small, population dense, with small cars) you can use a 120V outlet to charge an EV. Most places have 240V household outlets, and can charge at least twice as fast.
So, if you have a garage with electricity, infrastructure isn’t really an issue. Sooner or later it will be common to mandate a charger per residential parking spot. The chargers themselves are $200. The main costs are permitting and retrofitting, but that matters a lot less for new development.
If one circuit per parking spot seems like a lot of infrastructure, consider the fact that most apartments have at least a half dozen circuits already.
Interesting but North America has different needs for vehicles. Long time before our electrical systems to be able to compensate for that kind of whole sale change. Will be at least 20 years if it ever happens.
I would also say that any ICE vehicle that has 0 subscription models, upgradable firmware, tracking software will probably have a value premium to it in the not distant future.
FWIW downvoters - I have a PHEV - but I live in the real world and a likely future!
> Long time before our electrical systems to be able to compensate for that kind of whole sale change. Will be at least 20 years if it ever happens.
I don't know about the whole national electric grid, but at my house, I didn't really have to upgrade anything and didn't even notice an increase in electric bill when I started plugging in my EV. I don't think my car is even 20% of my household electricity usage. I'd hope we can increase our national grid's capability by at least 20% in the next 20 years. (Also, aren't datacenters causing that massive demand right now, whether or not the upgrades are even there yet? As I understand this is causing massive price increases?)
> I would also say that any ICE vehicle that has 0 subscription models, upgradable firmware, tracking software will probably have a value premium to it in the not distant future.
As you kind of hint at, whether or not the vehicle is EV or ICE has nothing to do with whether it has subscription models, tracking, etc. and car manufacturers are racing towards both of those things in a way that makes the drivetrain irrelevant.
And if 100% of EV's sold this year were electric, it would take ~24 years for basically all of the vehicles on the road were electric. (The average age of registered cars in the US is 12 years old).
Estimates are that a 100% EV fleet would increase electricity demand by 20%. So that's < 1 % a year.
Approximately how much demand increases due to increasing A/C usage in the US.
And a lot less than AI/crypto is increasing demand.
And that's not to mention that EV charging is a relatively easy demand to meet -- most EV owners charge when it's cheapest, so you can shape demand via price signals.
>Long time before our electrical systems to be able to compensate for that kind of whole sale change. Will be at least 20 years if it ever happens.
There's little to no reason that the electrical grid itself needs to change for the sake of EV's.
The biggest problem is that while slow charging (L2) in your own garage would be perfect for 99%+ of people in the US, and isn't even very expensive, that's a barrier to entry most people do not want to screw with. So, everyone wants DC fast that mimics a gas station experience, even if it's completely unnecessary for almost everyone's use cases.
Land is limited, new builds like that are expensive, slower to earn returns, and make little sense with so few EVs in the US - which leads to a viscous cycle. It's a bit of TotC.
>I would also say that any ICE vehicle that has 0 subscription models, upgradable firmware, tracking software will probably have a value premium to it in the not distant future.
Consumers do not care about this. If they did, such cars would not sell. No one is going to pay extra for fewer features.
Oh yeah, because Norway is very representative of the world...
A country that is bigger than half Spain with 10 times less population with one of the lowest electrify prices of the entire world(5-8 dollars MWh) because of huge hydro resources.
A country with huge capital reserves precisely because of oil resources.
"Here, Honda is setting itself up for failure on the second disruption sweeping the automotive industry: the software-defined vehicle (SDV), which has core capabilities that can be upgraded and improved over time."
I'll pay triple for a non software defined vehicle that doesn't track me and can't be touched by the dealer once I purchase it. My one SDV (Tesla) is still on FSD from 2023 because the newer versions are terrible judging from the comments on the Tesla forums.
This. And same for phones, tvs, operating systems.
I bought a perfectly fine macbook pro m1 in 2020. It has been made far, far worse, slower, bloated and less responsive by apple. I see nothing improved, everything significantly degraded. It used to be that I could airplay to our tv with a single mouse click, now it seems to work once every 5 attempts, and takes about a minute. It used to be near instantaneous.
I bought a top of the line philips oled tv in 2020. I think I paid 4k for it. It has been made slower, bloated, less responsive by google and philips (or whatever company makes those tvs branded by philips).
I buy a top of the line iphone every 2-3 years, and it gets worse.
I bought a SONOS soundbar a few years ago. It used to work fine and produce nice sound. Now if I start my tv, and don't play anything for a few minutes it goes to sleep, and I need to restart my tv to get the sound to play.
Blocking updates on anything newly purchased seems like the best option. Not buying anything from those absolute crap companies seems like the second best option, but its hard to find alternatives.
> I'll pay triple for a non software defined vehicle that doesn't track me and can't be touched by the dealer once I purchase it.
But you didn't? So... you wouldn't really?
I don't mean to be too cute but I think it's worth taking the sting out of your words a bit. Maybe you would prefer a different choice for your next car, but that's a far less dramatic way of putting it.
2023 is better than 2020. 2026 is not necessarily better than 2023.
Shifting speeds abruptly in the modern FSD notwithstanding, what happened especially for people with HW 2.5/3 (circa 2018/19) is the change in behavior of adaptive cruise control and FSD -- you can go look it up. Essentially they "removed" a useful feature that let the car seemlesly move between the two -- I think because they didn't want to support the drivers "stalk" on the steering wheel anymore - new Teslas don't have it. So basically for me, SDV is not all that it's cracked up to be -- yeah and all that privacy stuff too...
FSD is great for me, although I mostly use it on the highways. But 90% of my driving is FSD now. It can be more conservative for my tastes with street driving
I think self-driving cars are inevitable: I agree with that statement. And once they are here and cheap and safer than humans, they'll become universal. I don't know when that is, but it's less than 100 years from now.
However I don't think Tesla's SFD is inevitable, or any other carmakers; for all I know, they're so bad they shouldn't be sold. It's early days. This or that brand might go out of business. But within 100 years, self-driving will conquer the world.
Unfortunately the only valid response is "Don't be so sure." There have been too many exposés about the poor data privacy practices of virtually every automaker including Honda. [1]
I'm convinced that the Japanese government is terrified of EVs because all the small and medium-sized businesses which support the Japanese auto industry will be absolutely gutted when vehicles contain drastically fewer parts.
That, and Japan is deeply screwed if they go all-in on EVs and then China decides they shouldn't be allowed access to any more rare earths.
> China decides they shouldn't be allowed access to any more rare earths
This is a common misunderstanding. There are plenty of alternative locations to mine rare earth minerals, particularly Australia. China cornered the market because it's a high pollution low margin business. If geopolitical concerns cut off access to Chinese sources, alternatives will be developed.
Mining isn't the only bottleneck with rare earths. There also the processing, which is an industry China has monopolized through sustained investments over decades. They have also improved processing efficiency through investments in technology. It's going to take a while for anyone else to catch up.
Japan is also particularly well positioned because China had used rare earths against them first in 2014. Since then they've created basically a strategic rare earths reserve and done research on how to build some components without them. It's not an absolute solution but between this and future development in friendlier nations, I don't think the rare earth risk is as acute for Japanese automakers.
I do think the original point about lower complexity vehicles being a threat to the suppliers has some merits though. Germany faces a very similar dilemma and made similar decisions.
There are also non rare earth magnets being explored. Niron - Iron nitride - magnets and ultrasonic compaction and other tech that wasn't feasible a while back are now becoming very practical. Japan could probably get to a dominant place with a solid research program, it'd give them a huge advantage for EVs and other motors.
Ford: It recorded a loss of $1.2 billion in EBIT in the third quarter on its EVs, bringing its losses on the segment for the first three quarters of 2024 to $3.7 billion
Honda: Honda to Write Off $15.7 Billion as EV Winter Arrives.
> I'm convinced that the Japanese government is terrified of EVs because all the small and medium-sized businesses which support the Japanese auto industry will be absolutely gutted when vehicles contain drastically fewer parts.
For what it's worth, this theory is blown up by hydrogen based vehicles, which Japan has gone heavily in on. Yes, slightly more parts than an EV, but not a ton. And the drivetrain is electric.
It really shows the bias in Honda’s management here. They’ve also spent years trying to develop and promote their hydrogen fuel cell cars and it’s just as much of a failure as their EV division yet they aren’t axing that golden child.
Is there a place somewhere in the world where Hydrogen powered passenger vehicles are a success? I know that the one Hydrogen filling station here in Australia's Capital City has shut down after opening with great fanfare a few years ago. And the approximately 20 or so Hydrogen cars it supplied are no longer being used.
They have not gone heavely in on hydrogen based vehicles. They have talked about it a lot, and given some subsidies, but nothing so major as to make any impact at all.
Also, they invested in in hydrogen internal combustion engines just as much.
Japan is the only other country besides China and Korea that produces magnets of high quality (higher in fact than the Chinese), they just don't do the volume. But there is absolutely no doubt that they could scale up if they wanted to.
They're just more expensive, but not even that much.
India is looking to produce 6000 tonnes of NdFeB magnets per year with the first batch coming out in mid 2026. This is great news because India has large rare earth reserves and are producing using the full supply chain of ore to oxide to magnets. 6000 tonnes is like 3% of the global supply but that’s not bad for year one.
They manufacture the magnets, but they don't produce the rare earths themselves. They're still getting something like 60-70% of their supply from China.
Toyota just had three large EV announcements and they are putting large incentives on some of them. Feels like they're serious about it and with so many others exiting the EV market lately they may have timed it well.
> all the small and medium-sized businesses which support the Japanese auto industry will be absolutely gutted when vehicles contain drastically fewer parts.
EVs have lots of the same parts as an ICEV - the differences are engine and power systems, fuel tank, transmission... Most of the car is still there. There is a lot of churn - lead-acid is out, fuel injection, sensors are different and sense different things, and so on, but it's still a car.
I've read that the Japanese electrical grid would be hard to upgrade to charge lots of electric vehicles, and that somewhat explains their enthusiasm for hydrogen.
I live in Japan and IMHO the problem is that it is an extremely conservative and risk averse country, "if it ain't broke don't fix it" taken to the extreme. They had a period of innovation after WW2 out of necessity, but after the bubble crash of 1990 they reverted back to their old selves.
Japan is just being the usual USA vassal. Since now China absolutely dominates EV and batteries, they rather align themselves with the oil-thirsty war monger.
Calling the Prologue "Honda's EV" feels like a huge stretch. The Prologue was a rebadged GM vehicle that served strictly as a compliance car for meeting CAFE standards. Now that the CAFE standards have been rendered toothless, there's no longer a need for that deal.
It was "Honda's EV" in the sense that it was the only EV with a Honda badge you could actually buy. The three canned models mentioned in the article never even made it into the market.
Europeans and the Japanese were able to buy the Honda e for a few years - this article wrongly states another unreleased model as Honda's first ground up EV.
There's a few other EVs Honda produced in 90s as well, but e probably in running for first ground up new EV platform that made it to market as mass produced Honda product.
> Calling the Prologue "Honda's EV" feels like a huge stretch. The Prologue was a rebadged GM vehicle …
I don't see the OP article call the Prologue "Honda's EV"? Instead, the OP article explicitly says the Prologue was both "designed and entirely built by GM."
That's separate from where the OP article first states that Honda killed three other specific models "that were the company’s first ground-up EVs".
OBBB removed any fines for violating CAFE standards. They still exist technically, but it'd be like getting a speeding ticket but the fine is always $0...
CAFE killed small trucks in part, tariffs in another part, but US manufacturers are the real reason small trucks are dead.
US manufacturers want margins, and they're not getting margins on little, efficient cars. They get enormous margins on gigantic trucks that start at $55,000. Have you noticed that all the sub $20k cars went away from all the manufacturers around COVID?
Ford makes the Maverick, which is a small truck. They were priced very reasonably at release, at $19,000 or so. However, Ford didn't make very many of them, and the ones they did make got up to $15,000 over MSRP from the dealers, who scalped them. Why would Ford want to cannibalize their pricy gigantic trucks when they know that they can get their $50k asking price because there's nowhere else for people to go?
OTOH, it really looks like Toyota is Goldilocks. Most companies invested too much too early and had to write off a substantial amount, but Toyota is rolling into 2027 with a small but nice selection of EV's.
Over 25% of vehicles sold world-wide were electric in 2025, and that percentage is steadily increasing. So VW & Ford were "too hot", Honda is looking like "too cold" and Toyota might be the "just right" of the three bears.
Observers and technologists have also consistently failed to appreciate the continuing value proposition of hybrids, and Toyota makes some of the best, top selling models.
My biggest peeve with hybrids is that it gives consumers the mistaken impression that they're going to have to replace the batteries in their EV.
Most hybrids aren't liquid-cooled (although that is changing), and the smaller size means that a hybrid puts a lot more cycles per mile on the battery than an EV does.
Which in practice means that a hybrid battery lasts about 100,000 miles whereas an EV lasts about 250,000 miles.
A Prius is an amazing car; a 300,000 mile Prius is often still in good shape and worth the expense to replace the battery in. Which means you might put 3 batteries in a Prius and then look at how expensive it would be to replace the battery in an EV 3 times and choke. But very few people are going to spend the significant dollars it costs to replace the battery in a 250,000 mile Tesla so in practice that's an expense you'll never have.
Hybrids are just amazing and SHOULD have mostly replaced ICE-only a long time ago. I'm going to cry the day the midwestern winter road salt takes my Prius away from me.
Hybrids are kinda the worst of both worlds though - you have all of the disadvantages of a internal combustion engine (maintenance costs, carbon footprint, fuel dependence), and all the disadvantages of a battery (car is more expensive, battery can die) and the only advantage is range.
Isn't Toyota betting big on the Hybrid EV? To me, at least in the US, this seems like the best medium-term bet. The EV infrastructure just isn't there yet, despite there being a lot of Tesla chargers. Even with that, the charge time, etc are too long to get going again. Hybrid EV seems to resolve this, and eases the customer into an EV future. Current EVs are great for being around town, but a lot of people in the US live 45min to an hour each way just to work, have to get their kids to school or practice in the meantime. It's just added stress thinking about finding a charging station or having time constraints.
The biggest issue I think every auto maker needs to solve is cost. The average car payment is insane, with dealership markups it's even worst than it would be otherwise. I'm not sure how we got here on that, to me car interiors are no nicer than they were from 2005ish on. I don't even know what the cost is going into.
Doesn't that describe most Toyotas, EV or not? You buy a Toyota because you expect it to last forever (or because it has low running costs because it has great resale value because it lasts forever).
You want a Supra to drive much better than fine. But if you're in the market for a Corolla, "fine" might be better than some of the cars you're comparing against.
But it's not really increasing anymore, and the increase has been almost entirely tied to subsidies. When Germany and America pulled back on EV subsidies, sales dropped significantly.
The adoption curve hasn't been nearly as steep as predicted, and the political landscape is unstable. Other manufacturers are also pulling back on their EV investments.
I'm not saying Honda isn't overdoing it, but a retreat from EVs isn't surprising.
Smart doorbells and thermostats that upgraded in the night often became a nuisance or an expensive brick. But a faulty software upgrade on a car can kill you and others.
Car company execs need to take a chill pill followed by a reality serum. Monetizing subscription based basic features and delivering in-car advertising is the absolutely worst way to go.
As consumers we need to stop buying into the bells, whistles and trinkets and demand essential and safe transportation.
Consumers have very little power in this space. Have you tried buying a non-premium car with physical buttons instead of touchscreens in recent years? There used to be hardly any option because carmakers all somehow decided this was the way forward, even though science clearly said it was making cars less safe. So if you needed a car and didn't have a ton of money, you could merely accept it. Only now that safety ratings started to include usability of key vehicle controls car makers decided to turn around again.
Or manufacturers should learn from Tesla.
Did you know - if your Tesla shuts down (screen goes blank) you can still drive it! If done right, it works like magic.
I have had 3 software updates in 12 years of ownership of Tesla that bricked my car and require mobile service (twice) and tow (once) to resolve. tesla is probably better than most but far from perfect when it comes to this
I mean there are multiple, multiple boundaries in place for this reason. I’d start by saying most “in the middle of the night” updates target non-safety critical systems in the car like the IHU. The update I received last night has a build date of 2024 reflecting extensive validation before general availability in 2026. It was field tested in limited markets after factory validation and had staged rollouts through dealers before going to general OTA availability.
Independently, I had to take my car into the dealer to get a safety critical recall installed via Ethernet that affected a braking system in certain edge cases and this was not installable OTA “in the night”.
While, yes, I am annoyed that the dealer price for my “infotainment” unit is $2k and reflects the technical specs of a 2016 mid tier android tablet running Intel cores; I do feel that vehicle is far safer with its airbags, 360 camera, lane keeping, and AEB on net than my 1970’s classic.
We've had software upgrades on cars for years now.
The used car market has, in many ways, usurped what used to be the role of the basic car used to be.
As a result, you see fewer and fewer new cars sold, and automakers have to more intensively monetize the cars they have. They must create ever-increasing returns to shareholders.
My cars last 8+ years. My tablets last 3+ years. I’ll pass on a software defined car unless they swap out the whole logic and display unit before the warranty runs out. Otherwise I’ve got dead hardware in the cabin. They did this to the Leaf.
Or assume you have to provide a current model iPad or android tablet to run their software. That would keep the hardware functional if they kept the software working.
And I don’t trust the vendors to try to drive resale by eol’ing the logic/software. They’ll drive everybody to leases to avoid this and battery life concerns.
Not a single manufacturer out there makes a "good" ev.
All have proprietary bullshit parts, proprietary fancy software with features that nobody gives a fuck about, and are all expensive. Im not paying fucking 30k for a Nissan leaf. EVs are supposed to be simple. Where is my 12k OTD Corolla with a battery and a motor instead of an engine?
Meanwhile BYD has an app that auto parallel parks. And China has cars like Greely M9 that are not only packed full of features, but also has a gas engine that acts like a generator.
To compete in EV, one has to compete also in battery manufacturing. Increasingly Japan is unable to keep up with China and even Korean manufacturers. Panasonic is still in the race due to their decades lead, but its market is largely shrinking. Once China took over batteries, it would have been unlikely for Japan to take the EV market, just like Sony. Same with most American EV manufacturers who are unable to compete, even with closed off large American auto market, that Japan has no access to. As rapidly shrinking Tesla marketshare world wide suggests, competing with Chinese makers is hard.
It may not necessarily be the catastrophic move it seems to be, on reflection. 2030s Japan will not be 1970s Japan. Their labor force is different, the culture is different, the world is different. It might be better to not waste time and money chasing the, "We USED to make amazing cars," phantom, and instead push forward into whatever comes next.
> Consumers, mostly those who buy EVs from the likes of Tesla, Rivian, and BYD, have grown accustomed to the frequent updates, slick infotainment software, and advanced driver-assistance systems.
Guess which three items out of that list I do not want.
You don’t like active safety features ? Even if you think you are great and better than most, don’t you think it would be neat that the other drivers you share the roads with have active safety features ?
So they don’t crash into you or run over your kids?
I don’t think the title is hyperbole. Toyota isn’t giving up on
their long term EV R&D plans.
Just look at Nissan, which is broke as a joke, but they still put a new Leaf model on the market.
Lately there’s been a vibe that the EV experiment has died off, but that really isn’t true looking at industry reporting.
There is stalling that seems related to subsidy expiration and/or scale back, but we could argue that subsidies expiring is happening because the subsidies aren’t needed to sell vehicles anymore.
20% of new vehicles sold globally are EVs. Critical mass has been achieved, and not just in China (20% of vehicles sold in Europe are EVs).
This is also an admission that Honda is just giving up on Acura completely. That $50k two row luxury SUV buyer that is such an industry staple buyer for the US auto industry is going to be buying Rivian R2s instead of an EV Acura MDX.
EVs are going to be an extinction-level event for carmakers.
As the buggy-makers failed to transition to making cars, and thus ceased to be, so too will automakers fail to transition to EVs, and thus end their viability as vehicle manufacturers.
Right? Have any of the execs making these decisions ever ridden in an EV? They are so much better that the experience I've seen is no one will ever go back to preferring ICE after spending time with an EV. My family currently has 2 ICE vehicles (one is a PHEV). I really doubt we'll buy another.
The week I spent renting an EV (an Ioniq 5, so not even a high-end one) convinced me. Enjoyable to drive. Having to figure out where/how to charge it was sufficient to chase away the fears around that.
> EVs are going to be an extinction-level event for carmakers.
Agreed. It is exceptionally rare for a consumer to purchase one EV and then buy ICE as their next vehicle. I have owned EVs for more than 10 years. There is no going back.
Guys, cars are specifically designed to work for their entire life in areas where there is no coverage. Thus, there are plenty of EVs, probably all of them, where you can just open the telematics box and pull the SIM card. Then the software will never update, and the car will just stay in whatever state it’s currently in.
The moment you do this things will stop working: for example phone app, but your car will be more or less unshittified.
And yes, there should probably be a law that makes this easier for the consumer to do for example mandating a plastic hatch or something.
But connected cars are not the end of the world and if we normalise disconnecting cars (make an online list or something of cars that are confirmed to work fine afterwards) then we’ve basically solved the issue. Remember, EVs are not the problem, and this kind of stuff will be mainstream/common knowledge once adoption rates are higher.
Yes the Tesla BLE seems to be one of the better ones and works in the middle of nowhere even without cell reception, so it probably would still work with the SIM pulled on the car side.
Everyone is saying EVs are the future but most EVs cannot compete with many of Honda’s offerings.
Eg. I need to move 6 people and significant gear (skiing, camping, biking etc) long remote distances.
There is no EV that can do that really. And the ones that come close are easily $20-30k higher than an Odyssey. Plus the durability of large EVs is far from proven while the 300k mile club of Odyssey owners is large.
I need Suburban/Minivan functionality out of a proven OEM at a competitive price point. (I also need to see my friends with Rivians etc not having to schedule their vacation around charger availability. Have seen this waste hours and hours of time)
I live in an old, pre-automobile neighborhood. Like other such old, walkable, sidewalk-and-park-and-corner-store neighborhoods in the US, it's one of the most attractive parts of my city.
However, almost nobody here could feasibly own a fully electric car. Most houses don't have driveways or garages. People park ad-hoc on the street. Most families own one car, and that car needs to be able to go long distances because it's both the local vehicle and the road tripper.
My wife and I would buy an EV if we could. We know the exact one. But it's not feasible for us, or for our neighbors. Far from being "1%" this situation is quite common. So we have a Honda hybrid instead.
If you are visiting nature in any vehicle you are messing it up.
Gas prices are pretty much trivial unless you:
- drive a lot (which in that case you’re really messing up nature regardless of ICE vs EV)
- own a fleet
- are really tight on finances (not buying a new car anyway)
All the legacy automakers that haven't fully moved to EV's PROFITABLY will go defacto bankrupt within a few years, there will be some mergers to stay alive but it's game over. Tesla and China companies will own auto, with Tesla capturing most the profit, similar to Apple vs Android phones. Autonomy will further accelerate this.
Spot on, except for the part about Tesla. Tesla shut down production of Model S & X. Coming up next: 3 and Y. Also, Tesla has YOY decreasing revenue and sales. Pretty soon, they will go pre-revenue and embrace what they are: A NFT traded on the stock market for bragging rights.
I'll just leave his here, "Tesla achieved a record-breaking third quarter in 2025 (Q3 2025), delivering 497,099 vehicles". It's expected that to be exceeded most quarters going forward
> SDVs don’t have to be EVs, but they tend to go hand in hand. The large battery in an EV makes it easier to feed powerful computers, and it allows things like over-the-air updates to happen when the car is parked and “off.” Could Honda make a fossil fuel SDV? Sure, but it’s unlikely to for the same reason it’s backing away from EVs: The old way of doing things is easier and more profitable, for now.
So can a $300 dollar iPad. Large EV scale batteries are needed to feed powerful computers? What are they on about?
This is so unfortunate. I was never a van guy, but my wife insisted we get a van, so I got the Honda. And honestly? I kinda love it. It drives like a car but holds eight people (or four people and a whole bunch of luggage).
The way we use the van, 90% of our drives are under 20 miles round trip. The rest are longer road trips. I've been waiting eight years for Honda to make an electric or even a plug-in hybrid where the gas motor just charge the battery.
It would be perfect for my family. I guess that's not happening now.
They have quite decent hybrids now. I’m surprised that they haven’t released a plug-in one, since their architecture seems perfect for it. Maybe battery supply constraints. They are also developing a v6 hybrid, which should replace the j series in the Odyssey.
I have a Honda Hybrid CR-V and love the drivetrain. We're waiting until Honda moves that drivetrain into the Odyssey (which is the van we want... probably what you have, hah)
I almost pulled the trigger on a Prologue; so glad I had second thoughts. Even though it was essentially a GM product, I've only ever owned Hondas, so I thought "Well, at least I can get service at my Honda dealer".
Charging in the US (other than at home) is still the biggest issue for me. I do lots of traveling, and waiting 30-45 minutes to charge even at a Level 3 charger is a PITA. If I had a J std charger, then it's even longer. This makes my monthly 8 hour trips one-way another 2 hours - this sucks. Sorry - I'll keep my 2005 Honda Element with 445K miles. Another engine would be cheaper than less than a year of car payments. And it's pretty much indestructible.
It does depend on what car you get. A RWD Ioniq5 can do about 3 hours on the highway with 20 minute stops (though the stops are a lot longer at the more-available Tesla chargers).
There’s other good roadtrip friendly options out there too, but ya with monthly drives like that you’re really limiting your options and ICE cars still make a lot of sense
To be honest, I have every faith in Honda. It took them a long time to arrive at hybrid, but they were never about first to market, but they were always adamant about controlling the entire technology stack.. made their own transmission and everything. And engineering doesn't faze them, Honda just nonchalantly displayed a reusable rocket like it was too easy... EV is a little bit like AI nowadays, not much moat and possibly not challenging enough for Honda R&D so why not. I'll always be on the look out for Honda's next take on EV.
It increasingly looks like legacy auto should have pursued (and still can, there is a LOT of runway for it) PHEV architectures for a 10 year cycle. Well to be honest government should have put a hard deadline of 10 years for PHEVs over 20 years ago (10 years after the Prius/Insight was released) for all consumer platforms or pay a $5000 new car tax.
PHEVs with 50 miles of range would effectively make almost all day-to-day driving electrified, at least in "consumer" transportation, wouldn't require special recharging equipment beyond a 110V outlet, removes range anxiety, would alleviate urban air pollution.
Of course nothing will be done in this administration. But to the point of the article, oil and transportation dependence, even with extensive shale oil production, remains a national security risk that PHEVs and alt energy can mitigate.
> I can imagine Honda executives thinking that they can wait out the awkward transition period and, when motors and batteries are fully sorted, simply swap out the fossil fuel bits.
I don't know, this actually sounds like a really good strategy. Jaguar, Ford, Porsche and others have spent a lot of money (and arguably brand capital) trying to get in early and developing EVs with too many trade-offs and limitations. Why not wait until you can develop a _really good_ 500-mile-plus, reliable, daily driver EV, if you feel you can get away with waiting?
And most users surely don't care about the whole software-defined-vehicle thing.
Could it be that the EVs they were planning were just out of touch with what the market wants? Their zero vehicles look butt-ugly in my opinion. They look like concept cars that are great for show, but no serious buyer would consider them for a daily driver.
I don't have charging capability at my apartment or work. On occasion, I do 300 mile trips (adirondacks/nyc). Skeptical of winter performance. I have no interest in "frequent updates, slick infotainment software, and advanced driver-assistance systems". Frankly, no spare tire is a no starter for me also.
Or instead of paying money for a car that still fills up slower than a gas one, has all the extra issues that come with EVs, and hope that there is charging infrastructure in my area, I could just buy any ice car made in the last 35+ years.
Similar boat here. No charging at home without expensive install, work is a commercial charger, and frequent trips into WV, which seems to be a dead zone for chargers. Plus occasional towing. I’d love an EV, but they aren’t there yet.
I think what people want out of an EV is the Honda Civic and CRV. Nice practical, reliable low cost EVs that don’t feel cheap or weird. The Tesla model 3 and Y are so close. But there is weirdness to it that a lot of consumers aren’t really interested in an that is before you factor in the polarizing nature of Elon himself.
Maybe we aren’t there yet. The Model 3 and Y are probably still too expensive without incentives.
As much as I love tech in my cars, I’ve found that the more you add, the more will eventually fail. If you really must integrate more software, make it free and guarantee X years of support. If that means a more expensive car, so be it let the market decide if it’s worthwhile. Subscriptions hide the cost and inflate the popularity of vehicles that otherwise may not have been purchased.
Ironically, Trump attacking Iran and closing the Strait is a boon to China and EV makers. Once the car is produced, aside from lubricants, it’s completely independent of oil. Heck you can put panels on your rooftop and slow charge it during the day.
It may be a boon to EV makers everywhere including in China, but I don't think it's a boon to China generally as they buy a lot of their oil from the Gulf states. Thus they're more directly affected by the Hormuz shutdown than the US (which is a net oil exporter and is mostly only affected indirectly by price increases).
Like the Ukraine war, maybe one good thing thing we can say about this terrible situation is that it may encourage a lot of countries to move to renewables (or nuclear) sooner than they otherwise would and cut back on fossil fuels.
The energy crises of the 1970s caused people to start caring a lot more about fuel economy. Now we have the technology for people not to need to buy gas to propel their vehicle at all, and many of them once they switch they're never switching back.
Sure, but increasingly less so as electrification takes off. And using less gas means you can redirect that to the other derivative products such as plastic.
Quick google math says you get 6 tires from a barrel of oil vs roughly 20 gallons of gas. Unless EVs mean you change tires every 300 miles or so I think we're good.
My ICE vehicles go through many more pounds of gasoline than they do tires. A set of tires is ~100lbs of material. 50,000mi of gas on a 30mpg vehicle is 10,000lbs of gas.
With where the Trumpists want to take us, tires made out of carved stone will suffice. Non-EVs will be retrofitted with a hole in the floor for your feet.
A friend of mine has a dozen panels in central France and pretty much provides all the energy for his Kia eNiro. He reckons the payback time is under five years.
The software defined car practically boils down to this: "It's not quite done yet, but we'll ship it anyway because we can fix it in post". And then two years later, "oh we've already sold them, why spend money updating it to fix the bugs." And five years later, "oh the warranty periods gone, not our problem anymore."
> It makes really good engines, and that's starting to matter less and less.
Maybe. But here's the thing... most cars today feel completely lifeless.
Honda knows how to build an engine and wrap it in a car that actually makes you feel something. That still matters.
Anyone here driven an S2000?
It's still the best car I've ever owned. Light, raw, grippy, and genuinely fun -- every drive felt like an event, not just transportation. (And it was still an affordable car!)
They killed it around 2010. I've never found anything that captures that same feeling since, at any price point.
So yeah -- Honda will always have a place in my heart. When they want to, they build something truly special.
Here's one of their marketing films they can use to find inspiration again.
Honda is the world's largest engine maker: yachts, airplanes, ships, lawnmowers, cars, motorcycles, heavy equipment. They will be fine.
Also, please ignore these announcements. CEOs are trend-following children and their declarations of future behavior should be heavily discounted. Honda will follow the market, as will all the other automakers. This is all sturm and drang. When an automaker says "We will transition to all EV by 2030" then ignore them. When an automaker says "We will not sell any EVs" then ignore them. It's like a child saying "I will grow up to be an astronaut". Just pat them on the head and go about your day.
Focus on what they are bringing to market at any point in time, everything else is foolish talk.
I can imagine Honda executives thinking that they can wait out the awkward transition period and, when motors and batteries are fully sorted, simply swap out the fossil fuel bits. How hard could it be?
The article loses its credibility once it imagines a multi-billion, multi-country company executives thinking this way :).
Is this a global direction or just the US market? If it's only US, this might make sense - they might just want to cut their losses and wait for a scenario where they could better compete in the US.
If this is a global direction, it sounds suicidal.
Honda did not invent ICE cars. They do not need to invent EVs. I reckon they will wait until the dust settles and then leapfrog all the rest. As they have done so in the past.
Of course, I drive a Honda that I will be buried in. So I may be biased.
Honda is launching the WN7 this year. It seems like a typical Honda motorcycle: not for those obsessed with specs, but definitely a solid and well-designed bike. If I were currently looking for a mid-sized electric motorcycle, this would be my top choice for the same reasons people choose Honda for gasoline-powered motorcycles.
Well, they just launched the Honda WN-7. It seems to be a commuter and fun bike. It has a limited range, so it's not a touring motorcycle but it does have fast-charging.
I watched the reviews on YouTube, and they're all quite favorable.
I'm yet to see a EV bike that can be classified as a "fun bike". Not fun and impracticle compared to pure "inner city mobility vehicle" such as Renault Twizy.
They had a ubuquitious 100cc/9hp scooter called Activa in India. Honda, Yamaha and Suzuki are a drop in the bucket in EV scooter sales and Honda's offerings are the most hilarious.
Yeah, e-bikes with thumb throttles are so good that the only reason they haven't already supplanted motorcycles is that there are ten bajillion old unkillable motorcycle engines in use.
It's a shame that US law doesn't have a nice in-between that would slot these bikes between proper e-bikes and motorcycles.
I hate those narratives that if you don't jump on EVs, your future is doomed.
The last 5 years just don't show it. The EV market is still small and infrastructure missing in most of the world.
Toyota played it safe and made bank when everybody was saying they were doomed.
German automakers went hard on EVs. VW group sold 1 million fully electric vehicles in 2025, they will probably overtake Tesla in a couple of years for the biggest non-Chinese EV automaker by sales, but is it paying off financially?
At the same time german premium brands have a very hard time differentiating when Chinese cars offer similar quality at half the price even after tariffs.
If you look here in Germany at the car companies, they are suffering quite a bit. Most of that has to do with EVs eating the market share of their legacy car business. VW, Mercedes, and BMW each make pretty decent EVs at this point of course. And there are a lot of even better ones coming to market soon from them. And they sell pretty well even. But because their legacy business is imploding, profits are down by very large double digit percentages. Despite this, the Germans are adjusting well. VW seems to be having some success in the Chinese market now (lots of China specific VW models coming out there). And BMW is gearing up to what looks like a massive range luxury EV (500 miles) that should be doing well.
EV sales keep on growing world wide by juicy double digit percentages. Some markets less than others of course but the net effect is that all that legacy business keeps on shrinking because all that EV growth is at the cost of that legacy business.
The main issue with Honda and other Japanese manufacturers is that they are hopelessly dependent on Chinese suppliers to ship any EVs at this point. They've dragged their heels on doing their own tech and at this point while they might have some promising things in their labs, they lack supply chains and factories to mass produce any of it by themselves. That's going to take many years to turn around. Without guarantees that they'll be able to match the Chinese on cost. And the EU, Koreans, Chinese, and even US companies like GM are picking up the slack and growing EV sales at their cost.
Toyota seems to finally be producing a lot of EVs now to counter that. They've been catching up fast in the last year or so. But most of these EVs come with a lot of Chinese tech inside. Their alternative was to cede that market to competitors. Which seems to be what Honda is doing. I don't think that will end well for them.
Is your point that the western car companies are doomed no matter how aggressively they jump into EVs now, and that Chinese EV producers have too much of a lead for them to recover, or that they have time to catch up later and can take it slow for now?
China is already selling EVs to countries that haven’t even had many cars before, like Nepal. Is 75% of the world car market just going to be there’s because western auto manufacturers overfixated on their own very mature car markets?
I think they can catch up later, spin off some electric project to build know-how without going all-in releasing so many models.
Mercedes-Benz sells 9 different fully electric models and that ignores their trucks and vans.
BMW sells 9 different fully electric models across their BMW/Mini/Rolls Royce brands.
Volkswagen sells more than *30*.
I don't think western automakers can compete in any case unless they can either differentiate their offering or significantly lower the cost of core components like batteries.
The EU regulations are in many ways built to prevent this kind of free riding, for the sensible reasons that if everyone free rides, aiming for excess profits on the short term, the transition doesn't happen and the Chinese eat your whole market.
If you want to sell cars in the EU you have no future without EVs. The fleet emmision fines are quite high already, will be much higher from 2030 and will kick in from 0g CO2/km from 2035, basically killing any ICE passenger vehicle. That's in 8,5 years.
German automakers are suffering because their sales in the Chinese market has tanked. Not going hard on EVs would have left them in an even worse situation.
Take VW: in 2020 they were by far the biggest automaker in China with ~16% market share. In 2023 they had fallen to number two at ~10% behind BYD. But now that they are starting to have competetive BEVs in their lineup they are tied for first place in the market at ~13% market share.
Do people really want "software defined vehicles"? People keep repeating how Tesla keeps upgrading their software, but I don't really want my car to change every time I step into it.
The person I know who loves FSD has soured on updates since the last one changed how the car handles simple things like intersections, and it's added a lot more stress.
Cars should be appliances, boring and reliable, not something to amaze and delight you. Especially since the latter usually changes into "sell ads and your personal information".
Sadly, this view is considered antiquated and anti-technology by a younger generation of people who think what we see in sci-fi shows should be reality (good or bad). And if you don't get that vision then you're some dumb luddite who should be banished from society.
What's kind of remarkable is the onslaught of vehicles, many EV, which have critical functionality issues that are being ignored, but they have WiFi + hotspot on board! And if you want to do basic things with your own vehicle, like get the climate control ready before you leave on a trip you now need an app, a smartphone, and Internet connection and a subscription...to do things that could easily be done via some local BLE or WiFi connection.
I see a lot of car companies rush to make "immersive" driving experiences while neglecting the basics. The Ioniq 5 / EV6 have ICCU issues that are not addressed which can leave the car stranded and the replacement parts have the same mysterious failure modes, the Jaguar I-Pace had numerous failures including a UI that would lag for basic things like changing air conditioning settings, the last generation Leaf (just prior to the current re-design) has battery issues that have forced people to do lemon-law buy backs, the Ford Mach E has a Tesla-style iPad center display that can't be turned off at night so it's a distraction (among other issues with the poor concept), but it has OTA so awesome!
> Do people really want "software defined vehicles"?
Absolutely, the sooner the better. The truth is, auto companies can track you, show you ads, and otherwise jerk you around without going all the way to having a "software defined vehicle." You just get a worse user experience.
If it doesn't have a screen or a network connection it can't do either of those things. I'm very eagerly awaiting the Slate truck for exactly this reason. A cheap barebones EV meant for hauling stuff and people locally.
The thing can't even do OTA updates without you connecting your phone to the car's bluetooth.
> People keep repeating how Tesla keeps upgrading their software, but I don't really want my car to change every time I step into it.
My driving experience/controls has not changed since I bought it 18 months ago. They added an option for Grok which I don’t use, and the FSD is much better now. And enabled adaptive headlights.
>The person I know who loves FSD has soured on updates since the last one changed how the car handles simple things like intersections, and it's added a lot more stress.
The most recent FSD update made me recommend a model 3 or Y to my parents.
All the updates (so far…) have added features that I actually like. Things like Apple Music integration and even safety things like cross-traffic alerts when reversing.
Even today my wife left her phone on the charge pad and the car beeped as we walked away to alert us - a feature that didn’t exist when we first got it.
Enshittification may come, but maybe there will be an Apple-like benevolent dictator that keeps it mostly clean.
Edit: I should say that I will never trust any “self-driving” at all based on cameras alone. It can’t even do Autopilot without me intervening on most trips.
But my guess is maybe Honda will wait for Tesla or another US based auto company with EVs to fail and buy that company. Seems that is how large companies do "innovation" these days.
> When developed as an original product, EVs offer automakers a chance to rethink the automobile, and in the process, make it cheaper.
That does not bode well for German car makers either I'm afraid. Take BMW for instance: they started off with two "pure" EV models, the i3 (a compact car) and the i8 (a sports car). Both of them promising, but neither a particular bestseller. So they switched to offering electric drive as an alternative to IC engines in several (most?) "regular" models. But I agree with TechCrunch that this is more of a cop-out than a winning strategy...
> Consumers, mostly those who buy EVs from the likes of Tesla, Rivian, and BYD, have grown accustomed to the frequent updates, slick infotainment software, and advanced driver-assistance systems. Honda has yet to make significant progress in any of those domains.
Here's an idea: what about making an EV free from this enshittification? One where you can decide yourself when to install an update, like in the "olden days" a few years ago? One that doesn't pretend to have an "autopilot" which isn't really one? I think there would be a market for such an EV.
The software designed car and continued price growth of automobiles is going to push them out of price range for consumers. Maybe Honda just wants to go out of a dying industry on good terms.
My Honda family car has a CVT and electric parking brakes. "Driver's Car" mattered more when the low-price option was a stickshift and cars weren't so heavy.
“Many automakers have found that dropping batteries into a car originally designed for an internal combustion engine”. Reminds me of idiotic hybrid variants of Subaru and Honda vehicles that don’t have spare tires because the battery was slapped into the existing vehicle platform as an afterthought. Eg. Subaru forester hybrid. Car bought by educated, practical folks.
> The large battery in an EV makes it easier to feed powerful computers, and it allows things like over-the-air updates to happen when the car is parked and “off.”
I don't want anything of the sort as a consumer, so auto makers who don't "get" it either are fine by me. Nay, heroes.
Also, lol, "the large battery in an EV makes it easier to feed powerful computers". Do they not think an internal combustion engine can power a few ARM chips? What could the total power consumption of all the computer equipment in a car be, like 30-50 watts? 200 horsepower is 147 kW.
Even the point about running computers when the car is off seems wildly uninformed: a 12 V starter battery in an ICE car is about 70 Ah. That’s 840 Wh. So you can run a 5 W computer (that does nothing but periodically wake up to look for and download updates and such) for 168 hours. (Of course, any competent implementation will not let electronics run the battery flat, but it still seems like way more than enough)
Consumers, mostly those who buy EVs from the likes of Tesla, Rivian, and BYD, have grown accustomed to the frequent updates, slick infotainment software, and advanced driver-assistance systems. Honda has yet to make significant progress in any of those domains.
"Grown accustomed to" is a funny way of saying "begrudgingly put up with because the alternative is buying a new car, but really they would rather not have to deal with that crap at all."
Gas cars are great until you realize you have to replace the gas. Then you'll realize the cost of owning a gas car.
Once people realize they're literally burning the expensive gas they put in their vehicle, the game is over.
Also, gas is a limited resource which after you burn never ever comes back, so it is expected to get more expensive, while all the rare earth metals in batteries can be recycled into new batteries because when you use the battery, you aren't actually burning it away into nothing. You can even recharge it.
I love the Honda E and it's not mentioned in the article for some reason. However it must certainly have been a costly flop; they are so rare on the roads in the UK,
The wind is just blowing back towards internal combustion for the moment. A couple years and they will shift again. Killing the whole research project would be dumb. Killing current models makes some sense.
Only in the US. The rest of the world, especially the undeveloped and developing world, is currently undergoing a car ownership boom due to cheap Chinese EVs.
Remember when cars were just a simple, no computers, maybe a transistor or two. why do cars have to cost the same price as a new house?
give me a simple 1960's vw bug please.
I once put together a comparison of Chinese and Japanese industries on a forum while answering a question. What’s happening with Honda is probably just the beginning — the bigger signs of decline aren’t limited to the auto industry. Japan’s space program, for example, has had several launch failures in a row, it has been mostly absent in the current AI wave, and there was even recent news about a so-called Japanese AI model that turned out to be built directly on top of DeepSeek.
Japanese society has long been romanticized in the West, but once you start noticing certain details, a different side becomes visible. A simple example: about a century ago, the average height of Japanese men and women was actually higher than that of Chinese and Koreans, but later the growth basically stalled, and in some periods even declined. It’s not that Japan is poor. It feels more like there are strong, invisible social expectations — women are not supposed to grow too tall, men don’t seem comfortable standing out physically, and people live within a very tight set of unwritten rules about what you should and shouldn’t do.
This is the same kind of thing people notice when they joke that Japan still uses Yahoo or fax machines. That discipline creates stability, and from the outside it can look orderly and even admirable. But when you look more closely, it can also feel restrictive, even a bit unsettling. It’s hard to believe that this kind of social atmosphere wouldn’t affect corporate culture as well. In that sense, it may help explain why Japan, which once dominated the global auto industry, hesitated for so long on electric vehicles and ended up being overtaken by China in the new wave of technology.
Another thing is that Japan can be very unrealistic. You can see this in their movies, anime, and literature — there’s this strong belief in the power of belief itself, like if you just believe hard enough, things will work out. That mindset shows up in real issues too, like rare earth supply, military readiness, and national strategy. Japan might actually be one of the countries with the strongest information bubbles in the world. From top to bottom, people tend to believe what they want to believe, even when reality says otherwise. And when reality does show up, the reaction is often to pull back quickly and say the problem isn’t real.
You could already see this mentality during World War II, especially with the attack on Pearl Harbor. After that, Japan’s postwar industrial success made the illusion even stronger. If a company messes up, they apologize, and everyone forgives them. Toyota is number one in the world and will always be number one — no need to worry. That kind of thinking is exactly why Japanese industry has been declining for a long time without people really feeling a sense of crisis.
You can even see Germans openly complaining about their country’s problems, but you don’t see that very often in Japan. As long as they still have Excel, Word, and loppy disk ,or some japan made code editor, everything feels fine, so there’s no need to feel anxious.
And if there were ever a war over China and Taiwan, most people in Japan might even think: as long as we take action, China will definitely lose.It’s just like the recent Iran war. many japanese people believe that China will collapse first, because China is too dependent on Middle Eastern oil, even though the real data shows that Japan is actually more dependent.
> Here, Honda is setting itself up for failure on the second disruption sweeping the automotive industry: the software-defined vehicle (SDV), which has core capabilities that can be upgraded and improved over time.
Hells yeah, Honda went to the top of my list all of the sudden. SDVs coded by vibe coding bros are just not for me.
Honda is an engine company at its heart. It makes very reliable, long lived engines.
They refine technology not really invent it (maybe invented VTEC). The transition to EV will be very gradual, I don’t even think we have enough rare earth metals and electrical grid capacity to go even twice as fast in adoption?
Honda is waiting for the standards and technology to settle out and become commodity technology, then they implement and iterate to a refined and reliable product.
It doesn’t seem like a winner take all market for EV? What would be the most? Perhaps I am ignorant on that part of market dynamics.
Once EVs are economically attractive the transition can be very fast. I live in Denmark so I have seen it, it took 7 years to go from ~5% to 90+% of new cars sold. Both EU and US are now relying on trade barriers to keep Chinese EVs away from consumers.
well China debate aside, where are they? i've been dabbling in electrics for over a decade now, on the lower range they are still 30% more expensive than gas cars. Surely someone, anyone outside of China could have done one cheaper by now? Leaf came out 16 years ago and they still can't get it under $30k?
How is safety and quality for Chinese EVs? There was the 2008 melamine baby formula scandal, where a toxic substance was deliberately introduced into baby formula for domestic market. Chinese food imports were curtailed across many countries.
Capitalism over there is at another level, and cars are so complicated with tiny changes can have huge problems. Look at the immobilizer chips that Kia dropped to save $5, which resulted in thousands of car thefts and the whole Kia Boyz phenomenon.
> I don’t even think we have enough rare earth metals and electrical grid capacity to go even twice as fast in adoption
I also have some concerns about our grid, but not from EVs. AI is already consuming more 5% of the grid, more than twice that of EVs (~2%), and is growing far faster. I've seen estimates as high as 17% of the grid by 2030. Most EVs are also charged in off-peak hours when there's plenty of capacity.
That's worst-case +600TWh by 2030. The US electrical grid also expanded by +600TWh between 1983 and 1990. Did you panic at that time and, if not, why not?
> I don’t even think we have enough rare earth metals and electrical grid capacity to go even twice as fast in adoption?
This is not an issue, it’s the one the things that the anti-EV/baby boomer crowd throws out that is completely unsubstantiated. We have plenty of rare earths, America just lit their rare earth refining capacity on fire when China said they would do it for us at a much cheaper price. China doesn’t have a shortage of rare earth refining capacity, and they are producing most of the Eavs in the world as a result. EVs mostly charge at night when the grid is underutilized anyways.
China won the EV war a few years ago while the Japanese spent too much wasted time on hydrogen. Honda just doesn’t have anything to offer that BYD already does much better. That the Chinese auto manufacturers will slow down EV advancements and refinements long enough for Honda to make a significant improvement is a bit ridiculous.
That article reads like a 5 years old wrote it. In particular the part that says "software-defined vehicles is sweeping the automobile industry" and going further by saying "this is what consumers want and expect".
Yeah, if you're 5 and you want to keep paying subscriptions for a car you already bought! Not to mention software failures, over the air updates, hacking, etc
These tech writers (or bros) need to be replaced by AI or something, total disconnection with reality and what a car is for most people (e.g. it's not a computer and it should be mostly about reliability than anything else).
The biggest EV car is Tesla and they aren't good and tesla isn't a car company, its a finance comapny. Like Intel lost its edge because it became finance first engineering almost never. And no one wants a >$20k car. Disposable energy oil or not, manufacturers went nuts in 2020, and just kept pushing prices up and can't figure out why cars aren't selling.
BYD Auto is the worlds biggest, and their cars are affordable and their battery tech is evolving rapidly -- just recently announced batteries that can effectively recharge in the same time it takes to fill up one's gas tank.
They are an unstoppable force and we ignore them at our own peril.
Japanese auto companies are so incredibly corrupt it's hilarious. Toyota has clear ties with terrorist organizations plus intentionally going out of their way to kill EVs with the whole hydrogen scam. And Honda right here trying to "kill" EVs as well.
The moment a battery without lithium comes out, legacy car engines are dead for good.
I think this is a smart move, the EV boom is soon coming to and end. There is just not possible to make enough batteries or to deliver enough power, for all of us to drive electric.
Is it possible to deliver and store electricity in a more efficient way perhaps? Rumor has it that it does, but not in a way you can put a meter on :)
Yeah, it's impossible. Also, China is making them too cheap to compete with, and in such quantity that they're basically dumping them and flooding the market. We have to enact laws and trade barriers to keep them out, or else we'll be drowning in them. Plus don't forget it's impossible to make that many EVs in the first place.
You are right. We don't need more EVs. Lets get rid of cars completely and built cheap electrified public transport. Make ICE cars illiegal. Going all EV won't help the environment. Going all public transport would.
I have a 2016 Tacoma I bought in 2015. It has ~114k miles, so ~11k miles/year. Gas is 16-18gal/mi. It's paid off. There is no math, outside of major repairs (it's maintained regularly) where any Hybrid or EV makes sense for the next 10+ years. Maintenance ~ 250 a year; Tires ~12-1300 every 3 years (more due to age than wear). So - 11k/year w/ fuel at $5/gal and 16mi/gal - $3.4k in fuel, 600/year in maintenance and tires. So $4k/year in rough cost (excluding insurance). Still high, but I've lived in rural areas the last 10 years.
A new vehicle makes no sense. Unless I went a budget used Prius (with a good hybrid battery system). No plan to make changes.
Take care - the Hybrid battery can be expensive to replace and they do eventually fail. Note that Toyota changed from NiMH to LiIon 2017/18. I recently had to wreck an old Toyota Hybrid because replacing the dead battery was going to cost 2/3 of the value of the vehicle. Context: New Zealand.
> Take care - the Hybrid battery can be expensive to replace and they do eventually fail.
That is true, but median mileage at replacement for the old NiMH batteries is 150k miles (240k km), and the lithium cells have a median mileage at replacement of over 200k miles (320k km) - even though those cars are now 10 years old, not enough of them have reached that mileages, so exact data is still not available.
And don't get me wrong, those cars are bullet proof. Median total mileage of the car could be a bit higher than 150k miles, especially after the car was sold to a third world country. But for most intents and purposes, those batteries (especially the lithium cells) have about the same median lifetime than the car itself.
Anything you need to plug into a power source is doomed to fail. EVs are simply not designed properly which is why hybrids are the best of both world. A Camry hybrid has some genius technology as the EV part is used at low speed and ICE at higher speed. That is the perfect balance and you see why it's a success for them. Toyota make the best hybrid vehicles. Honda makes hybrids too so they're not throwing all their EV technology into the e-waste bin.
Hybrids makes no sense, but to the smallest of customer segments.
They need to carry two engines, batteries and a gas tank, that makes them pretty bad at being both an EV and a ICE vehicle. They are to heavy, have to little battery capacity to be a good EV. The batteries and electric engines make them to heavy to get good fuel mileage as a gas powered car.
I've meet exactly one person for who they made sense. He could get to an from work on battery alone, but not much more and he needed the combustion engine to haul a trailer every now and then. If he could have waited a few years, he could just have gotten an EV that did the same.
There might be locations where hybrids makes more sense, but now that the range of EVs have gotten much better I think that list is slowly shrinking.
The thing that's weird to me is the focus on getting rid of diesel, because EVs and diesel cars are not at all competing. EVs can replace gas powered cars, in most cases (depending on your location), but they can't replace diesel. Need to drive 500km a day? Diesel is probably your best bet and EVs are completely out.
Whether or not your analysis is correct (I'd say not), the root problem is Chinese manufacturing dominance and unfair competitive advantage when it comes to EVs. It saddens me to say it, but the legacy car companies are unable to pivot and are likely doomed.
> Anything you need to plug into a power source is doomed to fail.
Totally disagree. One of the reasons I drive an EV is so I _can_ plug it in and never go to a gas station again. What a useless exercise and waste of my time, especially for a penny-pincher like me who would wait in like for 20 minutes at Costco for gas.
Plugging it in is why it is so awful. It takes ages to charge it and you don't get very much range for a full charge. Battery technology is so incredibly poor right now and EV manufacturers are just plain dumb until they make the body of the car harness the sun's rays.
Honda is setting itself up for failure on the second disruption sweeping the automotive industry: the software-defined vehicle (SDV), which has core capabilities that can be upgraded and improved over time.
No thank you. Not sure why the author frames this as a good thing. They've been bamboozled by the automakers and have got it backwards - you're buying a vehicle that already has the capabilities, but are disabled, then paying rent (or a fee) to turn them on. I'm much more likely to buy from a manufacturer that doesn't play these games.
Most people including the author think more software = premium/better. But as software engineers, we know better. That's not the case at all. More software = more control by everyone else except you. Manufacturers. Governments.
For this reason, I always avoid cars with big flashy LCD screens that are central to controlling the cars accessories like sunroof, AC and other electricals.
The other issue is support. So many models stop getting updates after 5 years. So, if there is a bug in that big screen, you have to live with it for the rest of the car's life.
Finally, there's the issue of privacy. Most manufacturers contract with analytics vendors to send your data back to them. You can't even turn it off. For example, MG (now chinese owned) has Adobe analytics embedded into their big screens. The only reason chinese love using Adobe over other vendors is because they aren't blocked in China. So that's usually a dead giveaway that your data is being sent back there.
What kind of data? You will be surprised.
1. How many people are inside the car at a given point (measuring laden weight)
2. What are your favorite spots (your home, office, restaurants, etc)
3. How many people live in your family (average laden weight over time)
4. Your favorite routes, highways
5. If you are married/have kids
6. If you're having an affair
7. Your annual income, monthly spend, estimated net worth
And a lot more data points that I can list here. Remember, they have access to additional data brokers to stitch a complete user profile about you too.
There is also the issue of longevity. Most people don't expect 20 year old laptops to keep working, but they expect 20 year old cars to keep working. The software defined vehicle is a disposable vehicle, and that means it better be cheap or someone is taking a depreciation bath.
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It's not only bug fixing. It's what happens to phones too: updates for a fixed number of years.
I don't see the point to pay a premium for a new car (it's not a tool for my work) so I always buy second hand. My Citroën C3 from 2016 never upgraded to the new backward incompatible Android auto from the late 2010s. I bought it in 2020 and I wasn't able to connect to it with my phone from 2019 which came with the new Android auto. BTW iPhones could connect. Last time I checked was 2024.
This particular problem is not important because I put my phone in a holder close to my wheel and I get a better navigator than my car could ever be with its 3 colors LCD panel, but cars can last much more than phones and stopping support at any time during their lifetime could be a problem. I understand that supporting a 2016 car in 2036 could be a problem too, so just give us the mechanical part with the firmware of engine, brakes etc and the usual knobs and buttons. Each passenger has a personal infotainment system in their hands and spend their time liking at it with earpieces in their ears. No need to duplicate that in the car.
I'm past 130k km now so I'll be looking for another second hand car a few years from now. I'm afraid that it will be from the middle of the worst period of the car dashboards. Maybe I'll be partially saved by looking at a low price point.
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> Finally, there's the issue of privacy. Most manufacturers contract with analytics vendors to send your data back to them. You can't even turn it off.
You absolutely can. Pull the fuse of the cellular modem aka "telematics unit" or even completely remove it. Some vehicles don't have a separate fuse, in which case you will need to physically unplug the modem. Do your research and don't buy any car where this can't be done more or less painlessly.
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I was told by a car dealer service guy that if the touch screen went on the blink, the car would be totaled. (Since replacing it cost more than the car was worth.)
I've often thought the touch screen should be replaced by a socket that accepts an iPad, and put the auto custom software on that. Why reinvent the hardware?
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It doesn't have to be that way though. There's a bigger scam in the tech industry in general that says the path we're on is the only path we can be on.
More software doesn't have to mean less value for the customer. More software doesn't have to mean your tools and devices are spyware machines. That's just the lie we've been told.
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> But as software engineers, we know better.
As users we should also know better. All too often software is used to remove functionality from your things, or add unwanted ones. Even just adding ads. It's used as bait and switch and can make the thing you bought unfit for the job.
Car software comes with so many locks and it's intentionally made to not be serviceable by the user in any way. You can't tweak it, replace it, take one from another car. It's your car, the hardware part that does the same job is yours, but the software that replaces it isn't.
And at the end of the day almost no buyer buys a car for future promised software features. They buy it for existing features and new good ones are just welcome. If anything, the software is just used as an excuse to deliver a half baked product and have it bake over the years in the owner's hands, so at the end of the ownership maybe it's what was promised in the first place.
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Telling that to normies would usually give me blanks stares and "nothing to hide" or "don't care" arguments.
My "but your situation my change" and "gov can turn bad" arguments never hit. People are terrible at projecting themselves. That's why climate change is so hard to fight. It's too far and abstract.
Humans need to feel concrete and awful pain to realize their mistake and learn.
But I'm hoping the Trump situation is going to cause that. Now that the US is at the brink of dictatorship (some might argue it's already there), maybe American citizens will realize that putting their entire life on a centralized platform, having non encrypted communications and spying devices everywhere is a terrible idea.
I'm not very optimistic though.
And even if they do, in 3 generations, they will have forgotten. I have no idea how to fix this.
That's why I have a dumb car, but added a tablet with maps and can bus connection (OBD-II) via bluetooth. All in my control. The OBD-II adapter is not visible. Did cost my about 50€.
Maybe that's because software that we use every day (websites, saas, etc) generally get better over time and it's still relatively cheap. Meanwhile cars still rely on things like an archaic check engine light rather than just tell you what's wrong with the car and an infotainment system that's worse than a circa 2012 iPad.
People feel that cars haven't really improved much in practical terms over the last 20 years. At least to the layman, they don't feel smoother, safer, more comfortable to drive. They just got more expensive, more cameras and crap like auto-start that no one asked for.
So at least the hope is to take some of the best parts of modern software manufacturing and apply it to the car. Tesla did this and is why it was the first successful car company that's been started in the past 50 years or so.
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I thought more software meant I could write a little Lua and get the seat in the second preset position when I pressed the key fob in a particular way...
> More software = more control by everyone else except you. Manufacturers. Governments.
Also more unreliability, because software engineers often aren't real engineers.
> The other issue is support. So many models stop getting updates after 5 years. So, if there is a bug in that big screen, you have to live with it for the rest of the car's life.
The problem here is (probably) the internet, which gives management an excuse to slack on QA. If there was no chance to ever update the software, they'd probably do a better job. But now with the internet, they can say they'll just fix it in a patch later, but then never actually get around to doing that.
There ought to be a law that says car software may only be shipped on console-style non-flash ROM carts.
>you're buying a vehicle that already has the capabilities, but are disabled, then paying rent (or a fee) to turn them on.
This is very much not what "software-defined vehicle" means which itself is very much not the same thing as EVs. It's possible to criticize the explotative business practices you mentioned (or bad UI practices like moving everything to a touchscreen instead of physical buttons) without linking them to other issues that have no real relation beyond falling under the general category of "technology".
At a societal level, EVs are generally better than ICE cars. At a societal level, cars that can automatically fix a "recall" with an over-the-air update are generally better than recalls that will wait to get fixed until an owner schedules an appointment to have the car serviced. These two things can be true without endorsing automakers who charge and extra fee to activate the seat warmers that already exist in the vehicle.
That's all motherhood and apple pie, but I'm sorry: the reality that we live in and incentives at play are such that if a capability can be exploited, then it will be exploited to the detriment of the consumer. Full stop.
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cars that can automatically fix a "recall" with an over-the-air update are generally better than recalls that will wait to get fixed until an owner schedules an appointment
Haed disagree. You've been bamboozled, too.
Recalls of any kind are a signal to me the vehicle shipped half-baked. I'd rather have the car with slightly older features that took a little longer to release, but got it right before leaving the factory floor. Or at least the one with sufficient isolation between safety-critical and convenience features that recalls like those you describe are low priority enough to not be urgent.
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> "At a societal level, cars that can automatically fix a "recall" with an over-the-air update..."
If an over-the-air patch can have that kind of impact, then what happens if security is compromised and that power is used for ill?
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> At a societal level, cars that can automatically fix a "recall" with an over-the-air update are generally better than recalls that will wait to get fixed until an owner schedules an appointment to have the car serviced.
Experience with boxed versus updatable software, particularly video games, says otherwise. When it costs a lot for the manufacturer to fix defects, they put more emphasis on not having them in the first place. Otherwise we just just a parade of defects all the time. Even if it's minor things and never fixed, the user can adapt; that's not possible in the face of continuous updates.
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> At a societal level, EVs are generally better than ICE cars.
Cite your sources, please
> cars that can automatically fix a "recall" with an over-the-air update are generally better than recalls that will wait to get fixed until an owner schedules an appointment to have the car serviced.
If a "recall" can be fixed via software, doesn't that mean just shitty software to begin with? And that usually happens only when a car is infested with tons of software - proving the exact opposite of why we need less software inside cars?
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>a societal level, cars that can automatically fix a "recall" with an over-the-air update are generally better than recalls that will wait to get fixed until an owner schedules an appointment to have the car serviced
Maybe? At least in my experience, once the cost of patching buggy software goes down, it typically means that the people become more willing to ship software with more bugs with a fix it later attitude.
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> At a societal level, cars that can automatically fix a "recall" with an over-the-air update are generally better than recalls that will wait to get fixed until an owner schedules an appointment to have the car serviced.
This doesn't have anything to do with EV vs ICE, but whether it has a over the air updates and whether the problem can be fixed with a software update or not. I expect car recalls are pretty well into the noise in terms of "societal level" problems too aren't they? Even if they were not I expect whole "software defined car" thing, whatever that really means, has not resulted in mechanical defects plummeting, but rather just more software defects. Although it is quite possible EVs have less defects in general than ICE cars I suppose.
How many software recalls did something other than fix a bug or derate something?
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I’ve never had a software-based danger on my hardware-based vehicles. As such, there is a whole class of recalls that I never needed: all the ones you tell me I’m missing out on.
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As far as I can tell, a software defined vehicle is one that has fewer computers in it for cost cutting reasons.
There’s an argument to be made that this allows better integration between subsystems, and therefore a better user experience.
We have a vehicle built this way. It is a death trap. Most of its safety issues can’t really be blamed on it using a new computer network technology. For instance, if it is dawn or dusk (so, commute hours) the vision systems get flaky and it likes to override steering and brakes to force itself into oncoming or merging traffic.
However, one issue is firmly due to it being a software defined vehicle.
If you are changing lanes with the turn signal on, and hit a bump while the passenger adjusts the stereo volume, they’ll accidentally turn the hazard lights on. Af that point the steering override will kick in and try to force abort the lane change.
A normal car wouldn’t be able to wire the hazards into the power steering subsystem, and also probably wouldn’t have the button be part of the radio control panel.
can you share what vehicle that is? i don't know why you wouldn't just name it in the post...
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Jesus christ. This should be just forbidden. What car is this? I guess you wouldn't buy it again?
I appreciate your sentiment, and I agree with you in the hypothetical universe I think you’re imagining. But in this universe, that ship has long since sailed. Cars are software. They have been so for a long time. The only difference between a Tesla and an economy car from Stellantis is whether the software is well written or not.
My wife has a 2015 Jeep Cherokee. For its purpose It’s actually quite a nice vehicle, sending aside concerns of mechanical reliability. But it also has many annoyances, and EVERY single one of them (with no exceptions) are software-defined bugs or behaviours, and all could all be improved with software updates. But legacy order has never cared about improving software after you bought the car.
For all of Tesla’s many faults, they one of the first automakers where it feels like the software is not abandonware. It’s a positive trend and it’s nice to see a few other manufacturers following suit.
I'm afraid it's exactly the opposite -- Tesla has awful software, and no self discipline about adding more bloat. There is a lot of rigorously designed software in cars where you can't see it. Jeep is no one's idea of quality in any respect though.
Legacy brands do significantly improve software as the model evolves, and provide firmware updates to earlier models. The best car is probably the last one before a new platform step change.
Tesla has also pioneered putting large amounts of software in mission critical compute like instrument displays and touch screens, disregarding decades of careful evolution in HMI and TCB design. There is so much wrong with their cars without even touching their autonomy system, a proven killer.
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I literally worked on building the next generation of handheld OBD devices (m68000 based) that techs used to reflash Toyota ECUs in 1997. Automakers can and do update software after the car has been sold. Before that, techs would need to swap EEPROMS.
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You can do all the research in the world about a car, learn everything there is to know, and decide "this is worth my money". (Bait)
And then your car's manufacturer chooses to use the update mechanism to modify the center console screen to serve ads[1] while you're driving. (… and switch.)
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/subaru/comments/1p57ohp/these_ads_s...
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Cars have software. But I don't think cars are software. Can I apply a software update to make my Honda Accord into Tesla or Dodge Ram?
> The only difference between a Tesla and an economy car from Stellantis is whether the software is well written or not.
Is that actually true? I mean, assume I have access to all software in the world and all IP lawyers got kidnapped by aliens - could I just write a software for Stellantis Economy to turn it into Tesla (or vice versa)? I don't think so.
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> But in this universe, that ship has long since sailed.
No, you're combining "there can be updates" and "there will be subscriptions, always-online and enshittification" as if it wasn't splittable.
It is. It can. It will be.
As long as there are people making purchasing decisions, no ship will ever sail. This is just passive HN fatalism as we know and resent it; probably a survival tactic to not go insane in the SV (or any large corp).
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It's techcrunch. The angle of software-everything has to be there.
Why honda is killing EVs is directly related to just how damn cheap Chinese EVs have become and how stupid Americans are when it comes to EV efficiency. Who the hell wants large vehicles for EV when the best solutions are small efficient vehicles with long drive times.
Americans distort the market and margins, and Honda was never in the large SUV game.
Americans in most of their country are besieged by massive SUVs and pickups.
Driving a tiny little Japanese/Chinese import in, say, Oklahoma is asking to get literally run over.
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> Honda was never in the large SUV game.
(The Honda Pilot and Honda Passport stare at you, with deep resentment)
I'm not sure what exactly pisses me off so much in this idea - after all, I am not upset by the existence of $Brand Basic, $Brand Premium, $Brand Luxury and $Brand Now-Everybody-Knows-You-Have-Money, each of which has different features and bells and whistles. But put it in one single box and charge me monthly rent to go from Basic to Premium - and it does feel wrong. Even if TCO of Premium comes out as lower over time. I don't know why exactly it feels that way but it looks like it feels that way to a lot of people. Maybe it's daily reminder that all the luxuries are right here, right under your fingers, if only you weren't so miserably poor? Or the constant necessity of begging somebody else for permission to use your own car (yes, car loans, but they feel different)? Not sure. But it feels like it's real, even if it's only in my head.
I think you've captured it perfectly with "Maybe it's daily reminder that all the luxuries are right here, right under your fingers, if only you weren't so miserably poor?"
The enshitification of the car.
I don't think the author is saying "subscriptions are good", more like "if Honda isn't even building the capability, they're not even in the game"
I think its a rational move for Honda. They cant compete with tesla et al on EVs or self driving. People buy honda for reliability and low TCO. The world is heading towards lower disposable income for maybe a decade. Honda is playing by strengths, market positioning appealing to a particular target audience and keeping its margins. It adds.
And bugs, and DRM, and mass surveillance, and giving the power to the state to abuse even more of the tech, and giving police super powers, and giving bad actors (terrorists, assassins) the abilities to kill you with a virus, and the general concentration of power that this implies.
This is a terrible idea, and that's why I have mixed feelings about the robo taxi. On one hand, it's a great resource-sharing tech. On the other hand, all of the above.
I don't know the author insinuated that. It sounded more like, we release the car now, and as engineers come up with new capabilities, they get rolled out over a software update. Case in point was my car received an update that pulled in weather data. That didn't exist in the UI originally, and they added it with time.
Also because SDVs actually come with half baked firmwares that make the ECU crash, throw down the CAN network, make lights and screens act up...
Who cares, because they are now connected to the internet and can be updated with links at effective speeds higher than 10kbps, and without having to go to the dealer.
Honda is going to be the "opt-out" on that future car. And if one defect - the mafia has to pay you to raise your prices to prevent mass-defection by the customers from what is essentially a defect by default car.
Honda is going to get kickbacks by the EV industry to be more expensive.
It doesn't have to be ethical. Honda is missing out on something profitable.
Ironically Honda announced its move, precisely to bandage the gaping $16 billion wound from EV reorganization and retooling.
Not really. Competitors shifting focus out of the space, combined with their being incredibly competitive in the space (they're known for making some of the most reliable engines), says to me they've found their product-market fit. They've got plenty of time to quietly reboot and have another crack at the EV game down the road.
This is one of those times I'll trust the judgement of the grey haired execs who actually have all the numbers, over the plucky young journalist who's just spouting an editorial opinion. (Nothing against the latter, I just think in this specific case they're naive and dead wrong).
Maybe, but customers DO want it, without realizing. I'm a decent DIYer, but I realize my wishes is not the same as a typical customer. Sadly, but customers vote with their wallets.
What core capabilities of a car need to be improved anyway ?
Exactly. I dont want the software and I dont want something that I paid $100k to be gated tomorrow by a software update or broken by it. Or the constant reporting on me to god knows who. Until this dumbass touch screen design idea gets removed from a car, I am not buying such a car. Even it means paying more in gas. Touch and SDV is the dumbest thing in a car. My motion is not to be tracked and for sale.
I love the new BMWs. Their software is shit tho.
"Download more HP" is the new "download more RAM".
I hate to break it to you, but unless you own a mainframe that allows you unlock more RAM (that is already physically installed), unlocking more HP via software is actually how tunning works; and it is mot a scam from the 90s where you buy TurboRAM or whatever snake oil was sold back then.
> you're buying a vehicle that already has the capabilities, but are disabled, then paying rent (or a fee) to turn them on. I'm much more likely to buy from a manufacturer that doesn't play these games.
Ongoing subscriptions for access to physical hardware features like seat warmers* seems obnoxious at first glance, but a fee is more reasonable and you might find that there aren’t many auto makers that don’t do this or aren’t planning on it. BTW there’s very little in software or electronics that doesn’t do this, and many other consumer products do too. What might be less visible is how often the hardware is included and made trivial for a dealer to upgrade but doesn’t have a remote software unlock. It’s the same thing and it’s been happening for decades, but gets less outrage.
You would have paid a fee for the feature if it wasn’t included. Focusing on features being there already and locked being somehow “bamboozles” isn’t necessarily the right way to frame this, even from a pro-consumer perspective. This practice of building the high end model and locking some features behind a paywall makes the design and manufacturing cheaper for everyone by having only one design. The paywall model suggests that the design costs are more important than the manufacturing or materials costs of these features. That’s absolutely true for software apps, and it’s accepted by and large and we don’t feel like that’s a skeezy game. It doesn’t surprise me at all that with manufacturing at a global scale, it makes more sense to build one model and lock some features with software.
Do think of the potential benefits we get from this model - overall lower prices (in theory) from simplified design and manufacturing; the ability to upgrade later after you buy (or even downgrade if you don’t like it and it’s a subscription).
* AFAIK the BMW seat warmers subscription was a rumor at one point, got a bunch of online uproar, but didn’t actually happen? I’m not sure if anyone has actually done this.
It's legal to cut the seat heater relay out of the circuit and wire it to your own, right?
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I don't disagree in theory, but:
<START AI SLOP>
Manufacturing one hardware setup and charging separately for features is not the problem. The problem is charging ongoing rent for a feature that isn't an ongoing service. A seat heater doesn't use a server, need content updates, or create meaningful recurring costs for the manufacturer after the car is sold. It shifts the relationship from ownership to permission. It also creates bad incentives: features can be removed later, tied to accounts, complicated for second owners, or turned into endless monetization opportunities.
<END AI SLOP>
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In Shenzhen for a tech meeting. The streetscape is quieter, despite high traffic levels and I hear not only MORE birdsong, but the birds do more complex songlines.
The air is clean. For sure some of this is because it's a coastal city and has fresh sea breezes, but I've been in other Chinese coastal cities in times past and the air was significantly less clean.
There are social upsides for an almost-all-EV city.
This is an 18m person city. It's not exclusively wealthy people, its just a city with a very high local EV population and it shows.
Counterpoint - I returned to China (Beijing) last summer after 9 years and was honestly surprised how LITTLE it has changed over those 9 years, I was expecting big changes reading this tales about Shenzhen, but the reality is maybe only 1/4-1/3 of the cars on the road were EVs, there were pretty much none escooters, people still smoke in restaurants and yes, the air was for the most part perfectly fine, though this was really case in summer even before.
The most noticable change which puzzled me where those big boxes with slots in all restaurants and grocery shops, which are rental powerbanks.
Other than these hardly anything changed, policemen in police station smoked right under no smoking sign and in that half an hour in their office I inhaled more secondary smoke than in years in Europe combined. To their credit they were as laid back as policemen in my small home town. Beijing province border checks are more strict, but they still let us go without registered accommodation on weekend.
Oh yeah, out of dozens restaurants we frequented ONE fancy hot pot restaurant had robot bringing over plates.
Plus Taobao/Tmall seems replaced now with Pinduoduo with super cheap purchases (think double the Alibaba/factory price) including free shipping.
Mutianyu great wall is now fully mainstream, everyone (99%) now use cable car instead of hiking uphill, before it felt at least 50:50, people got lazy.
Ah yeah, everywhere you go you need to present passport and sometimes also book ticket in advance, so from tourist standpoint it's worse, before you could just show up same visit major sights in Beijing even without passport.
1/4-1/3 EVs is an underestimate for somewhere like Shenzhen (probably for Beijing too). It's going to be well over 50% there. And virtually all scooters will be electric.
You're right about the smoking, though. It's a massive problem.
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AFAIK, beyond a certain speed (~25km/h?), EVs make just as much noise as ICEs, since the noise is then mainly generated by the tyres hitting the road. So I'm somewhat sceptical about this claim.
Dutch city centres can be really crowded and yet actually quiet, because there are practically no cars. It's probably not Shenzen-level crowded, but I'd bet that the number of people that are being transported at busy locations isn't too far behind.
(As popular slogan is "cities aren't noisy, cars are noisy".)
There is no reason to be skeptical of this claim. ICEs are very noisy during acceleration. City traffic is very start-stop by its nature. Even in Dutch cities, even if you replace every single traffic light with a roundabout. EV engines are incredibly quiet when you put them next to each other.
In many cases, we're just very used to it especially because it's a "low rumbling" kind of noise. But it still affects us.
While true (beyond 30-50km/h), that assumes that cars are driving at a steady state. Obviously, cities with much more stop-and-go require more revving of engines.
Acoustic tyres are also gradually becoming the norm, primarily with EVs. This cuts noise by several decibels.
So it's not an unreasonable claim per se.
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Source? That sounds dubious. Here in USA you hear blazing engines constantly, I’m skeptical a rubber tire is louder than that
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It's not just a "rich city" effect. That's kind of the key point in the whole EV debate... once it's mainstream and infrastructure is there, it stops being a luxury signal and just becomes… normal urban life, with some pretty noticeable side benefits
Mexico City needs this badly. It would be beautiful if it wasn't for the smog and noise of traffic.
I'm sure it's coming. I'm in Mexico this week and was surprised to drive by not one but two chinese car dealerships. Looks like almost 10% of cars sold last year were EVs
Inversion layer there will still trap ev particulate unfortunately
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We must not be visiting the same city.
It also has a relatively low vehicle density, roughly 1/3 of somewhere like Houston. Mexico City is a good comparison by size and vehciles, but is also a way older, sprawling city. Shenzhen was largely built around modern road planning and extensive transit, and the power of aggressive policies limiting gas cars.
Considering how polluted was HK, hearing that Shenzhen is less polluted and quieter makes me happy.
True enough, the last time I have been in HK I was surprised to see less smog and overall less pollution.
> I hear not only MORE birdsong, but the birds do more complex songlines.
Do the local mockingbirds sing the song of the car alarm? That one is pretty complex.
Surely you don’t think birds have evolved to sing more complex songs in the time since mass EV adoption?
Birds adapt their song to ambient noise conditions. This paper [1] studies the Pearl River Delta (where Shenzhen is) as a natural experiment. It shows spectral changes in the target species correlating to background noise levels. I haven't looked hard enough to make sure there isn't a study that does find complexity changes but it's certainly clear that noise can affect bird song behavior generally.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235198942...
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I want to say this with the caveat that I am generally a person who always contends with the contradictions of living in a capitalist-imperialist country and my own distaste for it. So this doesn't come from a place of American exceptionalism writ large, but I am a firm believer the we did get this part right:
Public lands and culture of the ability to access wild places, whether for hunting, fishing, hiking, camping, and just generally an affordance of access to wilderness that is codified into the laws of the country. In Europe they have the concept of "Right to Roam" which is a powerful concept that I appreciate (and in ways is superior to our systems for just walking in the woods) but it is also fundamentally different than the almost legalistic systems we have in this country towards public lands.
My surface understanding of China is that there is no such broad remit given to the people of China and there aren't designated places where the people of China can just go and exist in wilderness. Such places might exist by convention but they don't have the sort of legal framework that we have in America to recreate in these places.
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They don't come close to the variety and quality of cosmopolitan dining you can get in major American cities. A lot of FOBish Chinese people I've met won't even venture too far outside of Chinese cuisine when going out to dinner.
Software. Music.
Universities
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Liberal arts, Hollywood and the associated soft power, increasingly prevalent onlyf___ etc.
Private aviation.
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many things:
indoor smoking ban actually working
you don't need passport and prior booking to visit every single tourist sight
car registration process, good luck in Chinese major cities, even EV won't help you anymore
those come first to my mind
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>almost-all-EV city.
Shenzhen is not nearly "almost-all EV" city. There is a lot of wealthy people and almost none of them drives EV. You can see all expensive cars are ICE (blue plates).
Modern ICE cars emit almost no sound or emissions. Its not 70s with black smoke coming from exhaust pipes.
You can take any densely populated city with almost none EV vehicles (say Tokyo) and you can hear birds and air would be very clean.
I live in Tokyo, and the air is not that clean close to highways: large diesel trucks pollute a lot, and also small motorbikes/scooters pollute horribly because they don't seem to require any emissions controls at all.
The main thing keeping the air clean here is the proximity to the bay, along with the fact that there just aren't that many private cars in the first place, since most people take public transit and don't drive because there's nowhere to park.
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What about the increased pollution from road dust? In Norway this has led to higher pollution levels that are directly dangerous to people and animals than back when we were all combustion vehicles.
The heavier EV's are causing genuinely harmful particles simply by driving on the roads themselves.
Woah hold on there. Where is the evidence for both increased dust and increased pollution levels?
EVs generate next to no brake dust due to regenerative braking, most EVs have mechanisms to forcefully use the friction brakes at some points to stop surface rust for this reason.
It's true they're generally heavier than the equivalent ICE vehicle, but this is usually around 200-300KG heavier - it causes a small increase in tyre wear and associated particulates but these are heavy large particles - the majority larger than pm10. That's a problem for water courses and micro plastics but nothing that'll get in your lungs or bloodstream. Anecdotally, my EV tyres (a particularly heavy model too) have lasted fine - my last set did 53k miles.
ICE cars produce plenty of pm10s, pm2.5s and smaller particles as well as nitrogen oxide, carbon dioxide and plenty of other harmful pollutants that EVs inherently don't. Even the power generated for them is usually produced away from the majority of the population.
This claim keeps circulating around and around and is not "EVs are producing more pollution", it's "if EVs are going at motorway speed, and if we only look at the pollution generated by the tires, then indeed they produce a little more".
But that's completely ignoring tailpipe emission, and the fact that in an urban setting it's still vastly more advantageous to drive an EV.
See https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trd.2025.104622
Where did you get the idea that EVs have caused it? As far as I know the amount of road dust from EVs is within the same ballpark so the claim that it has led to overall higher pollution levels sounds inconceivable. I can't even find sources that indicate high pollution levels in Oslo besides a Bloomberg article that says the situation has actually improved in recent years. [1] On the contrary Oslo seems to be doing comparatively well according to the air quality data from iqair. [2]
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-11/why-oslo-...
[2] https://www.iqair.com/us/norway/oslo/oslo
On the other hand the EVs produce no exhausts and less harmful particles from using their brakes.
This sounds like a nice problem to have. Most of the world lives cities blighted by ICE pollution.
Thats' why you need light EVs. Norway has electric tanks. China has light EVs.
I live in a top EV market, Norway.
ICE cars have been planned out for years now, and something like 96% of all new cars in Norway were EV last year.
Basically, if you plan on keeping selling ICE cars, you're removing yourself from the market here. There's no future for new personal ICE cars here.
I figure most other countries will be the same.
> I live in a top EV market, Norway.
It is the top EV market.
> I figure most other countries will be the same.
Most other countries are not Norway, it is a very wealthy, tiny market (150 K vehicles/year) with lots of hydro and not representative of the typical vehicle market in Western Europe and definitely not representative of the situation in the rest of the world.
EVs are the future, there is no doubt about that. But that future will not arrive everywhere at the same point in time and Norway is very far ahead of the rest of the world due to a fairly unique set of circumstances: exporting your own oil and gas to be able to have a 'clean' (and up to recently heavily subsidized) transportation network is in a way just a gigantic bookkeeping trick.
"exporting your own oil and gas to be able to have a 'clean' (and up to recently heavily subsidized) transportation network is in a way just a gigantic bookkeeping trick"
How so?
If every oil exporter used some of their oil revenue to switch to EVs, that would, all things equal, hasten the transition to EVs. The U.S. is not doing that.
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Top market? I'm pretty sure that's China.
Speaking of bookkeeping tricks: Kneecapping renewable energy (wind), cancelling the EV future in the US, and then starting a war in the strait of hormuz will someday be acknowledged as the finest moment of the oil industry, maximizing profit in the face of all reason.
Sure, but there is also China where over half of new vehicle sales are EVs. Denmark is at 70%, Sweden, Iceland, Finland and the Netherlands are all above 50%, a bunch of other countries in the EU are at one third EVs. In India, 5% of sales are EVs but that is double of the year before and all the big car manufacturers in India are now offering EVs. Even Australia is at 14% after stalling on EVs for years. So change is unfolding quite quickly compared to previous years. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ev-share-new-car-sales-by-c...
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> It is the top EV market.
per-capita or by total volume? i ask because a sibling or child comment says that the number of cars sold in norway is pretty small (in part because the population is small). a quick google says 180k cars sold in norway in 2025 (we can round up to 100% EV) and 34M sold in China. It also says China has 50% EV sales. So by total volume Norway isn't close to the top.
No, it is a real invewtment in the right direction. The oil states in the middle east could have made such investments, too. Lots of EV powered by solar panels paid for with oil dollar. But they did not (in a significant way).
They seem to be solving the “Resource Curse” quite well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
>But that future will not arrive everywhere at the same point in time and Norway is very far ahead of the rest of the world due to a fairly unique set of circumstances: exporting your own oil and gas to be able to have a 'clean' (and up to recently heavily subsidized) transportation network is in a way just a gigantic bookkeeping trick.
Not really. Even in a hypothetical future where all road vehicles are electric, we'll still need fossil fuels for a while. For one thing, it's probably going to be a while before airplanes can go electric. And production of plastics will probably need petroleum for a long time.
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I mean - how are you defining most?
Most countries are quite poor and/or have small populations and aren't buying many vehicles period.
About ~45% of countries have smaller populations than Norway, and Norway is in the top ~25% of countries by size of the auto market...
Most countries are not the China and India, yet they make up almost 45% of the global population.
The US and China make up about 45% of the auto market...
There's a lot of European, Asian, and Latin American countries that have more in common with Norway than they do with the US or China or India.
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Most of the profits come from rich countries. And even then especially the more expensive cars.
(Personally I am fine driving a 10 year old shit box because for me it is just a means of going from A to B and rather spend my money on other things)
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There is still one country that uses leaded gasoline for personal cars.
For automobiles, the future comes very slowly.
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At least it doesn’t smell ICE fumes downtown. That’s neat.
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EVs are fine and dandy, but it is a luxury class of cars for now and it shows really. Most other countries are far far away from mass deployment of EVs or restricting ICE cars. EVs can win if either a) the car is cheaper than the same class ICE, or b) operational expenses of using EV car would be cheaper. Neither of which is happening yet. And the car do need to have some advantage, since EVs already come with inherent disadvantage of long and inconvenient charging, small batteries, limited locations for charging with buggy and broken stations, not working apps or cards etc.
What's silly is that the reality you describe is a choice that's been made, not something fundamental to EVs. Cars like the Nissan Leaf and the Chevy Bolt are supremely inexpensive. China's BYD cars are extremely cheap for what they are.
American/European car makers realized there is a large class of people who are wealthy and will buy a high end EV for status reasons, and started chasing that market instead.
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Yeah, visiting my ex-Gf family in Norway, I realized how much richer Norwegians are that it's not even funny. It's not really a market representative of the average buyer. Same how neither Switzerland, Luxembourg or Monaco are.
I am living in a working class neighborhood of apartment buildings in West-central Europe with average to below average earners, and there's zero EVs parked here on the streets, basically 90% of people have old diesel cars. Only when you go towards the suburbs with rich(inherited wealth) people living in single family homes you see everyone has an EV.
The distinction is quite clear, do you live in a house or have your own parking space and possibility to install your own charger? Then EV 100% no brainer. Otherwise people stick to ICE.
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> the car is cheaper than the same class ICE,
To give you some perspective, the most popular EV in China costs $6000 (Wuling Mini). New. The second most popular costs $10000 (Geely Xingyuan). I tried both, and they are far less crappy than they have the right to be. They are cheap cars for sure, but they're perfectly adequate for regular use.
And Geely Xingyuan has a 40kWh battery in the basic configuration! This is utterly ridiculous for a car that is _that_ cheap.
So China basically murdered the global ICE market. It's gone. There's no going back. Once China figures out the logistics and sales, ICE vehicles will be dead in all of the less affluent countries. Especially because EVs combine almost too perfectly with solar generation.
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In NZ cheapest EV right now (I think it is clearance) is 15.8K USD.
Just cross the border to Sweden or Finland, and the share of EV's of all new cars drop from around 90 to something like 30-35%. The EV transition is going to take a while longer in most EU countries.
Of course something to note is the absolute number of cars sold, which has dropped dramatically at least here in Finland. Most people who are priced out of new EV market simply don't buy any new car at all, and the average age of cars is climbing fast. Either way, few people are looking for new ICE vehicles. No point buying outdated tech new, when the used car market has perfectly good ICE vehicles that perform just the same.
A country where you're looked down upon for driving a Focus RS or other "fun" car seems like a boring, austere place to be.
Perhaps that's why we never hear about Norwegian car culture (as opposed to Germany and the US). Ferdinand Porsche would have resigned to building apple carts.
US car culture has been dead for a long time, at least internationally. People like big American cars made in 50s - 70s for their looks, but since then all I can think of are oversized pickups, Nascar and Tesla which is getting eaten alive by Chinese competitors.
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What fun about an ICE vehicle. Loud, slow acceleration, pollution, poisoned garages, transmissions, maintenance, gas is 10x as expensive vs charging at home. It’s shit. My EV smokes Porsches when I need to overtake them.
The only thing gas does better is higher range and quicker fill ups.
Norway is a very special case in that it has massive hydro energy resources and nobody lives there.
Norway has roughly the population of the average US state. So I guess no-one really lives in the USA.
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And massive oil resources. As a result of this, one of the wealthiest sovereign wealth funds on the planet, which they manage well and for the good of the country.
Their hydro energy company is an aluminum company company, they have so much slack power they export it refining bauxite.
It is worth repeating solar panels covering an area about the size of NH generate enough power to supply all current entire US energy needs.
There must be more to it than this, or we'd have fantastic EV uptake here in New Zealand (we don't - EVs currently only have a 6% market share).
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> massive hydro energy resources
That is irrelevant unless Norway has unused capacity.
If a country adds electric cars using more electric power, then what really matters is how that extra power is generated.
It gets weird in Europe because adding extra load in Norway could easily mean that Poland does more generation using coal.
I'm in New Zealand where the government owned generators are preventing solar installations. One example was via an unobvious regulation that the installation had to handle massively overengineered earthquake rules. Meanwhile we use coal or imported gas when the isn't enough rain for our hydro. And we waste about 10% of our total capacity exporting (via one aluminium plant).
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Solar and wind is cheap too, no need to attack the Middle East.
> hydro energy resources
What is a hydro energy resource, a river? Don't lots of countries have rivers?
(If we're talking about hydroelectric power plants they've chosen to build, that's not exactly a resource -- and other countries could choose to build those too, right?)
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More importantly it's one of the richest countries in the world, and has high taxes but big tax breaks for EVs.
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And lots of bad conscious from all the oil.
I have a tangential question. Do you find that snow banks near roads are appreciably less black and disgusting now that there are fewer ICE vehicles on the road?
Growing up in America I have memories of our roadside snowbanks becoming black and saturated by vehicle exhaust and it always felt so gross to me. The back half of winter was characterized by blackened, salt-saturated puddles and banks. I wonder if the prevalence of EVs has made things less dirty in the winter.
> The back half of winter was characterized by blackened, salt-saturated puddles and banks. I wonder if the prevalence of EVs has made things less dirty in the winter.
The dominant cause of that is probably brake and tire particulate matter, not car exhaust. And EVs make tire pollution go up (because they're heavier) and brake pollution... I'm not sure if the weight effect there is counteracted by the decreased amount of friction brake use (as opposed to resistance braking).
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As others have said most of that was probably not pollution related to being an ICE vehicle, but if even part of it was the environmental performance of ICEs is magnitudes better over the last 25 years when it comes to unburned hydrocarbons and particulates, which WOULD reduce visible pollution way more than modest EV adoption. CO2 reduction? not so much with bigger vehicles offsetting gains here...
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isn't that at least partially caused by the rubber tire particles?
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That's the plan. The reality seems different:
https://www.electrive.com/2025/01/09/norway-the-number-of-ne...
We're struggling with the pollution levels from road dust now though. It's worse in most cities than it ever was with combustion engines. Yes there's lower Co2, but the dust and tire particles are actually more dangerous.
So EVs that reduce both are a double win!
EU is introducing regulations for this kind of emissions which will likely create a market for a few new techs that reduce it (reformulated tyres, modern drum brakes that capture dust, etc)
My hot take for Japan is that hybrids make the most sense until one the major markets (US or all of EU) has significant traction with respect to ubiquitous EV charger infrastructure.
Tesla can fund the project of making EV chargers ubiquitous in the US and make it make sense within the context of a profitable business plan.
Chinese manufacturers can similarly make it make sense financially.
Japanese auto makers who are heavily subsidized by the Japanese government can't easily fund the infrastructure project of making EV chargers ubiquitous in a foreign country like the US or EU and their home market is much smaller.
California has 1.6 charge stalls per gas nozzle. Does that count?
I places like Japan (small, population dense, with small cars) you can use a 120V outlet to charge an EV. Most places have 240V household outlets, and can charge at least twice as fast.
So, if you have a garage with electricity, infrastructure isn’t really an issue. Sooner or later it will be common to mandate a charger per residential parking spot. The chargers themselves are $200. The main costs are permitting and retrofitting, but that matters a lot less for new development.
If one circuit per parking spot seems like a lot of infrastructure, consider the fact that most apartments have at least a half dozen circuits already.
What would be the market like if there is no government intervention with subsidies - the free market?
I doubt EV would take any significant share if that would be the case.
You live in the HackerNews of the real world. Not at all representative for the rest of the world. ;-)
> 96% of all new cars in Norway were EV last year.
Thats of course because people wanna go green and certainly has nothing to do with the 25% VAT exemption that ICE cars are subject to.
Yup, everyone else should be taking notes.
Not Germany.
Interesting but North America has different needs for vehicles. Long time before our electrical systems to be able to compensate for that kind of whole sale change. Will be at least 20 years if it ever happens.
I would also say that any ICE vehicle that has 0 subscription models, upgradable firmware, tracking software will probably have a value premium to it in the not distant future.
FWIW downvoters - I have a PHEV - but I live in the real world and a likely future!
> Long time before our electrical systems to be able to compensate for that kind of whole sale change. Will be at least 20 years if it ever happens.
I don't know about the whole national electric grid, but at my house, I didn't really have to upgrade anything and didn't even notice an increase in electric bill when I started plugging in my EV. I don't think my car is even 20% of my household electricity usage. I'd hope we can increase our national grid's capability by at least 20% in the next 20 years. (Also, aren't datacenters causing that massive demand right now, whether or not the upgrades are even there yet? As I understand this is causing massive price increases?)
> I would also say that any ICE vehicle that has 0 subscription models, upgradable firmware, tracking software will probably have a value premium to it in the not distant future.
As you kind of hint at, whether or not the vehicle is EV or ICE has nothing to do with whether it has subscription models, tracking, etc. and car manufacturers are racing towards both of those things in a way that makes the drivetrain irrelevant.
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> Will be at least 20 years if it ever happens.
And if 100% of EV's sold this year were electric, it would take ~24 years for basically all of the vehicles on the road were electric. (The average age of registered cars in the US is 12 years old).
Estimates are that a 100% EV fleet would increase electricity demand by 20%. So that's < 1 % a year.
Approximately how much demand increases due to increasing A/C usage in the US.
And a lot less than AI/crypto is increasing demand.
And that's not to mention that EV charging is a relatively easy demand to meet -- most EV owners charge when it's cheapest, so you can shape demand via price signals.
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>Long time before our electrical systems to be able to compensate for that kind of whole sale change. Will be at least 20 years if it ever happens.
There's little to no reason that the electrical grid itself needs to change for the sake of EV's.
The biggest problem is that while slow charging (L2) in your own garage would be perfect for 99%+ of people in the US, and isn't even very expensive, that's a barrier to entry most people do not want to screw with. So, everyone wants DC fast that mimics a gas station experience, even if it's completely unnecessary for almost everyone's use cases.
Land is limited, new builds like that are expensive, slower to earn returns, and make little sense with so few EVs in the US - which leads to a viscous cycle. It's a bit of TotC.
>I would also say that any ICE vehicle that has 0 subscription models, upgradable firmware, tracking software will probably have a value premium to it in the not distant future.
Consumers do not care about this. If they did, such cars would not sell. No one is going to pay extra for fewer features.
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You're Norway, you don't count.
> I figure most other countries will be the same.
I figure you're wrong on that one.
Oh yeah, because Norway is very representative of the world...
A country that is bigger than half Spain with 10 times less population with one of the lowest electrify prices of the entire world(5-8 dollars MWh) because of huge hydro resources.
A country with huge capital reserves precisely because of oil resources.
His first sentence is literally disclaiming that he is in an outlier market.
"Here, Honda is setting itself up for failure on the second disruption sweeping the automotive industry: the software-defined vehicle (SDV), which has core capabilities that can be upgraded and improved over time."
I'll pay triple for a non software defined vehicle that doesn't track me and can't be touched by the dealer once I purchase it. My one SDV (Tesla) is still on FSD from 2023 because the newer versions are terrible judging from the comments on the Tesla forums.
This. And same for phones, tvs, operating systems.
I bought a perfectly fine macbook pro m1 in 2020. It has been made far, far worse, slower, bloated and less responsive by apple. I see nothing improved, everything significantly degraded. It used to be that I could airplay to our tv with a single mouse click, now it seems to work once every 5 attempts, and takes about a minute. It used to be near instantaneous.
I bought a top of the line philips oled tv in 2020. I think I paid 4k for it. It has been made slower, bloated, less responsive by google and philips (or whatever company makes those tvs branded by philips).
I buy a top of the line iphone every 2-3 years, and it gets worse.
I bought a SONOS soundbar a few years ago. It used to work fine and produce nice sound. Now if I start my tv, and don't play anything for a few minutes it goes to sleep, and I need to restart my tv to get the sound to play.
Blocking updates on anything newly purchased seems like the best option. Not buying anything from those absolute crap companies seems like the second best option, but its hard to find alternatives.
I think a lot of people are starting to feel this
> I'll pay triple for a non software defined vehicle that doesn't track me and can't be touched by the dealer once I purchase it.
But you didn't? So... you wouldn't really?
I don't mean to be too cute but I think it's worth taking the sting out of your words a bit. Maybe you would prefer a different choice for your next car, but that's a far less dramatic way of putting it.
Those options don’t really exist though. The cars that cost 3x as much (new ones at least) are also doing the same thing.
> My Tesla is still on FSD from 2023 because the newer versions are terrible judging from the comments on the Tesla forums.
I've had FSD since 2020; the latest version is noticeably better than 2020. I wouldn't put too much stock in forums which tend to skew negative.
2023 is better than 2020. 2026 is not necessarily better than 2023. Shifting speeds abruptly in the modern FSD notwithstanding, what happened especially for people with HW 2.5/3 (circa 2018/19) is the change in behavior of adaptive cruise control and FSD -- you can go look it up. Essentially they "removed" a useful feature that let the car seemlesly move between the two -- I think because they didn't want to support the drivers "stalk" on the steering wheel anymore - new Teslas don't have it. So basically for me, SDV is not all that it's cracked up to be -- yeah and all that privacy stuff too...
You’re aware this is effectively a forum?
FSD is great for me, although I mostly use it on the highways. But 90% of my driving is FSD now. It can be more conservative for my tastes with street driving
The newer versions of FSD are soooooo much better. Don't listen to the "comments on the Tesla forums".
I think self-driving cars are inevitable: I agree with that statement. And once they are here and cheap and safer than humans, they'll become universal. I don't know when that is, but it's less than 100 years from now.
However I don't think Tesla's SFD is inevitable, or any other carmakers; for all I know, they're so bad they shouldn't be sold. It's early days. This or that brand might go out of business. But within 100 years, self-driving will conquer the world.
I just got a Honda Hybrid. It doesn’t phone home or do updates automatically, as far as I can tell, and I love this.
Unfortunately the only valid response is "Don't be so sure." There have been too many exposés about the poor data privacy practices of virtually every automaker including Honda. [1]
[1] Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37401563 )
Actually it does do that. They sell your driving data to your insurance company & government.
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Feels like the real missing piece is user control: let people opt into updates, choose what gets enabled, and turn off data collection
Why do you need a EV to be a software defined variable? Maybe just a large enough lithium battery?
> software-defined vehicle (SDV)
I hate that expression. It's software-limited, not defined.
> the newer versions are terrible
300k subscribers that pay $100 per month must be..? Imaginary? Wrong?
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I'm convinced that the Japanese government is terrified of EVs because all the small and medium-sized businesses which support the Japanese auto industry will be absolutely gutted when vehicles contain drastically fewer parts.
That, and Japan is deeply screwed if they go all-in on EVs and then China decides they shouldn't be allowed access to any more rare earths.
> China decides they shouldn't be allowed access to any more rare earths
This is a common misunderstanding. There are plenty of alternative locations to mine rare earth minerals, particularly Australia. China cornered the market because it's a high pollution low margin business. If geopolitical concerns cut off access to Chinese sources, alternatives will be developed.
Mining isn't the only bottleneck with rare earths. There also the processing, which is an industry China has monopolized through sustained investments over decades. They have also improved processing efficiency through investments in technology. It's going to take a while for anyone else to catch up.
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Japan is also particularly well positioned because China had used rare earths against them first in 2014. Since then they've created basically a strategic rare earths reserve and done research on how to build some components without them. It's not an absolute solution but between this and future development in friendlier nations, I don't think the rare earth risk is as acute for Japanese automakers.
I do think the original point about lower complexity vehicles being a threat to the suppliers has some merits though. Germany faces a very similar dilemma and made similar decisions.
There are also non rare earth magnets being explored. Niron - Iron nitride - magnets and ultrasonic compaction and other tech that wasn't feasible a while back are now becoming very practical. Japan could probably get to a dominant place with a solid research program, it'd give them a huge advantage for EVs and other motors.
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Or they're unprofitable and highly competitive.
Ford: It recorded a loss of $1.2 billion in EBIT in the third quarter on its EVs, bringing its losses on the segment for the first three quarters of 2024 to $3.7 billion
Honda: Honda to Write Off $15.7 Billion as EV Winter Arrives.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/ford-r...
https://www.barrons.com/articles/gm-stock-general-motors-inv...
https://www.barrons.com/articles/honda-to-write-off-15-7-bil...
That projection won't last in a world where Brent Oil @ $100. That was only true while the petrodollars kept flowing.
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> I'm convinced that the Japanese government is terrified of EVs because all the small and medium-sized businesses which support the Japanese auto industry will be absolutely gutted when vehicles contain drastically fewer parts.
For what it's worth, this theory is blown up by hydrogen based vehicles, which Japan has gone heavily in on. Yes, slightly more parts than an EV, but not a ton. And the drivetrain is electric.
It really shows the bias in Honda’s management here. They’ve also spent years trying to develop and promote their hydrogen fuel cell cars and it’s just as much of a failure as their EV division yet they aren’t axing that golden child.
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Is there a place somewhere in the world where Hydrogen powered passenger vehicles are a success? I know that the one Hydrogen filling station here in Australia's Capital City has shut down after opening with great fanfare a few years ago. And the approximately 20 or so Hydrogen cars it supplied are no longer being used.
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They have not gone heavely in on hydrogen based vehicles. They have talked about it a lot, and given some subsidies, but nothing so major as to make any impact at all.
Also, they invested in in hydrogen internal combustion engines just as much.
But isn't Japan deeply screwed if they can't drastically cut their dependence on oil imports?
Also going to suffer a demographic crunch, having fewer jobs in more advanced technology would suit well with a shrunk labour force.
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Japan is the only other country besides China and Korea that produces magnets of high quality (higher in fact than the Chinese), they just don't do the volume. But there is absolutely no doubt that they could scale up if they wanted to.
They're just more expensive, but not even that much.
India is looking to produce 6000 tonnes of NdFeB magnets per year with the first batch coming out in mid 2026. This is great news because India has large rare earth reserves and are producing using the full supply chain of ore to oxide to magnets. 6000 tonnes is like 3% of the global supply but that’s not bad for year one.
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They manufacture the magnets, but they don't produce the rare earths themselves. They're still getting something like 60-70% of their supply from China.
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Toyota just had three large EV announcements and they are putting large incentives on some of them. Feels like they're serious about it and with so many others exiting the EV market lately they may have timed it well.
> all the small and medium-sized businesses which support the Japanese auto industry will be absolutely gutted when vehicles contain drastically fewer parts.
EVs have lots of the same parts as an ICEV - the differences are engine and power systems, fuel tank, transmission... Most of the car is still there. There is a lot of churn - lead-acid is out, fuel injection, sensors are different and sense different things, and so on, but it's still a car.
China already did, in 2010, against Japan. Japan has been preparing alternatives for a decade and a half now.
https://www.economist.com/asia/2025/12/04/lessons-from-japan...
I've read that the Japanese electrical grid would be hard to upgrade to charge lots of electric vehicles, and that somewhat explains their enthusiasm for hydrogen.
I live in Japan and IMHO the problem is that it is an extremely conservative and risk averse country, "if it ain't broke don't fix it" taken to the extreme. They had a period of innovation after WW2 out of necessity, but after the bubble crash of 1990 they reverted back to their old selves.
Japan is just being the usual USA vassal. Since now China absolutely dominates EV and batteries, they rather align themselves with the oil-thirsty war monger.
Calling the Prologue "Honda's EV" feels like a huge stretch. The Prologue was a rebadged GM vehicle that served strictly as a compliance car for meeting CAFE standards. Now that the CAFE standards have been rendered toothless, there's no longer a need for that deal.
It was "Honda's EV" in the sense that it was the only EV with a Honda badge you could actually buy. The three canned models mentioned in the article never even made it into the market.
Europeans and the Japanese were able to buy the Honda e for a few years - this article wrongly states another unreleased model as Honda's first ground up EV.
There's a few other EVs Honda produced in 90s as well, but e probably in running for first ground up new EV platform that made it to market as mass produced Honda product.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_e
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> Calling the Prologue "Honda's EV" feels like a huge stretch. The Prologue was a rebadged GM vehicle …
I don't see the OP article call the Prologue "Honda's EV"? Instead, the OP article explicitly says the Prologue was both "designed and entirely built by GM."
That's separate from where the OP article first states that Honda killed three other specific models "that were the company’s first ground-up EVs".
There'll be a need to maintain sales if gas prices stay high.
>Now that the CAFE standards have been rendered toothless
Can you elaborate on this? I'd love to have a cheap small truck like they used to make, but CAFE largely killed those.
OBBB removed any fines for violating CAFE standards. They still exist technically, but it'd be like getting a speeding ticket but the fine is always $0...
CAFE killed small trucks in part, tariffs in another part, but US manufacturers are the real reason small trucks are dead.
US manufacturers want margins, and they're not getting margins on little, efficient cars. They get enormous margins on gigantic trucks that start at $55,000. Have you noticed that all the sub $20k cars went away from all the manufacturers around COVID?
Ford makes the Maverick, which is a small truck. They were priced very reasonably at release, at $19,000 or so. However, Ford didn't make very many of them, and the ones they did make got up to $15,000 over MSRP from the dealers, who scalped them. Why would Ford want to cannibalize their pricy gigantic trucks when they know that they can get their $50k asking price because there's nowhere else for people to go?
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Cheap small trucks were killed by the chicken tax, not CAFE.
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OTOH, it really looks like Toyota is Goldilocks. Most companies invested too much too early and had to write off a substantial amount, but Toyota is rolling into 2027 with a small but nice selection of EV's.
Over 25% of vehicles sold world-wide were electric in 2025, and that percentage is steadily increasing. So VW & Ford were "too hot", Honda is looking like "too cold" and Toyota might be the "just right" of the three bears.
Observers and technologists have also consistently failed to appreciate the continuing value proposition of hybrids, and Toyota makes some of the best, top selling models.
My biggest peeve with hybrids is that it gives consumers the mistaken impression that they're going to have to replace the batteries in their EV.
Most hybrids aren't liquid-cooled (although that is changing), and the smaller size means that a hybrid puts a lot more cycles per mile on the battery than an EV does.
Which in practice means that a hybrid battery lasts about 100,000 miles whereas an EV lasts about 250,000 miles.
A Prius is an amazing car; a 300,000 mile Prius is often still in good shape and worth the expense to replace the battery in. Which means you might put 3 batteries in a Prius and then look at how expensive it would be to replace the battery in an EV 3 times and choke. But very few people are going to spend the significant dollars it costs to replace the battery in a 250,000 mile Tesla so in practice that's an expense you'll never have.
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Hybrids are just amazing and SHOULD have mostly replaced ICE-only a long time ago. I'm going to cry the day the midwestern winter road salt takes my Prius away from me.
Hybrids are kinda the worst of both worlds though - you have all of the disadvantages of a internal combustion engine (maintenance costs, carbon footprint, fuel dependence), and all the disadvantages of a battery (car is more expensive, battery can die) and the only advantage is range.
Isn't Toyota betting big on the Hybrid EV? To me, at least in the US, this seems like the best medium-term bet. The EV infrastructure just isn't there yet, despite there being a lot of Tesla chargers. Even with that, the charge time, etc are too long to get going again. Hybrid EV seems to resolve this, and eases the customer into an EV future. Current EVs are great for being around town, but a lot of people in the US live 45min to an hour each way just to work, have to get their kids to school or practice in the meantime. It's just added stress thinking about finding a charging station or having time constraints.
The biggest issue I think every auto maker needs to solve is cost. The average car payment is insane, with dealership markups it's even worst than it would be otherwise. I'm not sure how we got here on that, to me car interiors are no nicer than they were from 2005ish on. I don't even know what the cost is going into.
I recently drove a brand new Toyota EV. It was ... fine. But I wouldn't buy it. Kia/Hyundai make the best EV's for the US right now.
Doesn't that describe most Toyotas, EV or not? You buy a Toyota because you expect it to last forever (or because it has low running costs because it has great resale value because it lasts forever).
You want a Supra to drive much better than fine. But if you're in the market for a Corolla, "fine" might be better than some of the cars you're comparing against.
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> Kia/Hyundai make the best EV's for the US right now.
They are suffering with just incredibly terrible reliability. Every model was a failure on top of terrible support.
It's Rivian and Tesla, and it's not even close for the rest.
But it's not really increasing anymore, and the increase has been almost entirely tied to subsidies. When Germany and America pulled back on EV subsidies, sales dropped significantly.
The adoption curve hasn't been nearly as steep as predicted, and the political landscape is unstable. Other manufacturers are also pulling back on their EV investments.
I'm not saying Honda isn't overdoing it, but a retreat from EVs isn't surprising.
> But it's not really increasing anymore
EV's are a half trillion dollar market (20 million cars annually, average selling price $25K) that increased by 20% in 2025.
That's a massive increase in a massive market.
It's not the 50% per annum we were seeing earlier, but 20% of a big number is often more impressive than 50% of a big market.
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Where does that leave GM?
Quietly making some of the highest rated EVs right now.
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Smart doorbells and thermostats that upgraded in the night often became a nuisance or an expensive brick. But a faulty software upgrade on a car can kill you and others.
Car company execs need to take a chill pill followed by a reality serum. Monetizing subscription based basic features and delivering in-car advertising is the absolutely worst way to go.
As consumers we need to stop buying into the bells, whistles and trinkets and demand essential and safe transportation.
Consumers have very little power in this space. Have you tried buying a non-premium car with physical buttons instead of touchscreens in recent years? There used to be hardly any option because carmakers all somehow decided this was the way forward, even though science clearly said it was making cars less safe. So if you needed a car and didn't have a ton of money, you could merely accept it. Only now that safety ratings started to include usability of key vehicle controls car makers decided to turn around again.
Toyota Yaris, a small budget car has physical buttons for everything.
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> Have you tried buying a non-premium car with physical buttons instead of touchscreens in recent years? T
This is a USP for the Slate Truck. A lot of early commentary lauded the simplicity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slate_Truck
A screen is cheaper to design and easier to modify. That’s the motivation for auto companies.
> Have you tried buying a non-premium car with physical buttons instead of touchscreens in recent years?
They are coming back! Next VW ID generation will have them again :)
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Yeah, the only updates I want are map data for a GPS. And even then, go ahead and leave out the GPS and give me a dumb screen to attach my phone to.
Or manufacturers should learn from Tesla. Did you know - if your Tesla shuts down (screen goes blank) you can still drive it! If done right, it works like magic.
I have had 3 software updates in 12 years of ownership of Tesla that bricked my car and require mobile service (twice) and tow (once) to resolve. tesla is probably better than most but far from perfect when it comes to this
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I mean there are multiple, multiple boundaries in place for this reason. I’d start by saying most “in the middle of the night” updates target non-safety critical systems in the car like the IHU. The update I received last night has a build date of 2024 reflecting extensive validation before general availability in 2026. It was field tested in limited markets after factory validation and had staged rollouts through dealers before going to general OTA availability.
Independently, I had to take my car into the dealer to get a safety critical recall installed via Ethernet that affected a braking system in certain edge cases and this was not installable OTA “in the night”.
While, yes, I am annoyed that the dealer price for my “infotainment” unit is $2k and reflects the technical specs of a 2016 mid tier android tablet running Intel cores; I do feel that vehicle is far safer with its airbags, 360 camera, lane keeping, and AEB on net than my 1970’s classic.
What does any of this have to do with EVs?
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We've had software upgrades on cars for years now.
The used car market has, in many ways, usurped what used to be the role of the basic car used to be.
As a result, you see fewer and fewer new cars sold, and automakers have to more intensively monetize the cars they have. They must create ever-increasing returns to shareholders.
Those of us who cared enough and did not want them -- have not had them. it is very easy to replace an antenna with a 50 ohm resistor
My cars last 8+ years. My tablets last 3+ years. I’ll pass on a software defined car unless they swap out the whole logic and display unit before the warranty runs out. Otherwise I’ve got dead hardware in the cabin. They did this to the Leaf.
Or assume you have to provide a current model iPad or android tablet to run their software. That would keep the hardware functional if they kept the software working.
And I don’t trust the vendors to try to drive resale by eol’ing the logic/software. They’ll drive everybody to leases to avoid this and battery life concerns.
I think Japanese automakers by sticking to ICE vehicles have admitted defeat - that they no longer have the engineering prowess to compete.
they dominated in the era of small engines.
with EVs - the Chinese have run away with the stick & sadly no one is catching up.
I wish the Japanese made good EVs - Germans are the only ones besides the Chinese making decent EVs
Korea makes pretty good EVs as well
Not a single manufacturer out there makes a "good" ev.
All have proprietary bullshit parts, proprietary fancy software with features that nobody gives a fuck about, and are all expensive. Im not paying fucking 30k for a Nissan leaf. EVs are supposed to be simple. Where is my 12k OTD Corolla with a battery and a motor instead of an engine?
Meanwhile BYD has an app that auto parallel parks. And China has cars like Greely M9 that are not only packed full of features, but also has a gas engine that acts like a generator.
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> they no longer have the engineering prowess to compete
That's not nearly the case. They have made one of best EVs back in years, but decided to focus on hybrids. And that makes total sense.
To compete in EV, one has to compete also in battery manufacturing. Increasingly Japan is unable to keep up with China and even Korean manufacturers. Panasonic is still in the race due to their decades lead, but its market is largely shrinking. Once China took over batteries, it would have been unlikely for Japan to take the EV market, just like Sony. Same with most American EV manufacturers who are unable to compete, even with closed off large American auto market, that Japan has no access to. As rapidly shrinking Tesla marketshare world wide suggests, competing with Chinese makers is hard.
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It may not necessarily be the catastrophic move it seems to be, on reflection. 2030s Japan will not be 1970s Japan. Their labor force is different, the culture is different, the world is different. It might be better to not waste time and money chasing the, "We USED to make amazing cars," phantom, and instead push forward into whatever comes next.
Interesting they are actually launching EVs in India: https://bwautoworld.com/article/honda-starts-pan-india-test-...
> Consumers, mostly those who buy EVs from the likes of Tesla, Rivian, and BYD, have grown accustomed to the frequent updates, slick infotainment software, and advanced driver-assistance systems.
Guess which three items out of that list I do not want.
And what on that list is exclusive to EVs anyway? This whole article reads like a hit piece. It's amateurish.
trick question. all three
You don’t like active safety features ? Even if you think you are great and better than most, don’t you think it would be neat that the other drivers you share the roads with have active safety features ?
So they don’t crash into you or run over your kids?
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I don’t think the title is hyperbole. Toyota isn’t giving up on their long term EV R&D plans.
Just look at Nissan, which is broke as a joke, but they still put a new Leaf model on the market.
Lately there’s been a vibe that the EV experiment has died off, but that really isn’t true looking at industry reporting.
There is stalling that seems related to subsidy expiration and/or scale back, but we could argue that subsidies expiring is happening because the subsidies aren’t needed to sell vehicles anymore.
20% of new vehicles sold globally are EVs. Critical mass has been achieved, and not just in China (20% of vehicles sold in Europe are EVs).
This is also an admission that Honda is just giving up on Acura completely. That $50k two row luxury SUV buyer that is such an industry staple buyer for the US auto industry is going to be buying Rivian R2s instead of an EV Acura MDX.
> Lately there’s been a vibe that the EV experiment has died off, but that really isn’t true looking at industry reporting.
The oil industry spends a lot of money on astroturf.
EVs are going to be an extinction-level event for carmakers.
As the buggy-makers failed to transition to making cars, and thus ceased to be, so too will automakers fail to transition to EVs, and thus end their viability as vehicle manufacturers.
Right? Have any of the execs making these decisions ever ridden in an EV? They are so much better that the experience I've seen is no one will ever go back to preferring ICE after spending time with an EV. My family currently has 2 ICE vehicles (one is a PHEV). I really doubt we'll buy another.
The week I spent renting an EV (an Ioniq 5, so not even a high-end one) convinced me. Enjoyable to drive. Having to figure out where/how to charge it was sufficient to chase away the fears around that.
I had an EV for 6 months about 2 years ago and went back to an ICE car happily, it will be a long time before I try again
> EVs are going to be an extinction-level event for carmakers.
Agreed. It is exceptionally rare for a consumer to purchase one EV and then buy ICE as their next vehicle. I have owned EVs for more than 10 years. There is no going back.
It's not though: https://www.wardsauto.com/news/consumers-turn-back-to-ice-EY...
Guys, cars are specifically designed to work for their entire life in areas where there is no coverage. Thus, there are plenty of EVs, probably all of them, where you can just open the telematics box and pull the SIM card. Then the software will never update, and the car will just stay in whatever state it’s currently in.
The moment you do this things will stop working: for example phone app, but your car will be more or less unshittified.
And yes, there should probably be a law that makes this easier for the consumer to do for example mandating a plastic hatch or something.
But connected cars are not the end of the world and if we normalise disconnecting cars (make an online list or something of cars that are confirmed to work fine afterwards) then we’ve basically solved the issue. Remember, EVs are not the problem, and this kind of stuff will be mainstream/common knowledge once adoption rates are higher.
> The moment you do this things will stop working: for example phone app
Probably untrue with Tesla. I have mine integrated via BLE to home assistant for solar charging. App works via BLE using same protocol.
Your biggest struggle would be avoiding to update the native app, but I guess nothing is stopping you from developing your own implementation.
Yes the Tesla BLE seems to be one of the better ones and works in the middle of nowhere even without cell reception, so it probably would still work with the SIM pulled on the car side.
Don't many of them have soldered SIMs or pure-SW eSIMs now?
Everyone is saying EVs are the future but most EVs cannot compete with many of Honda’s offerings.
Eg. I need to move 6 people and significant gear (skiing, camping, biking etc) long remote distances.
There is no EV that can do that really. And the ones that come close are easily $20-30k higher than an Odyssey. Plus the durability of large EVs is far from proven while the 300k mile club of Odyssey owners is large.
I need Suburban/Minivan functionality out of a proven OEM at a competitive price point. (I also need to see my friends with Rivians etc not having to schedule their vacation around charger availability. Have seen this waste hours and hours of time)
So an EV is not for you! You just might be one of the unlucky 1% for whom that is true.
Congratulate yourself on visiting nature while simultaneously messing it up. And enjoy the fuel prices.
> So an EV is not for you! You just might be one of the unlucky 1% for whom that is true.
Given the data on the trend of EV sales (https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/global...) this is a pretty big claim to make.
I live in an old, pre-automobile neighborhood. Like other such old, walkable, sidewalk-and-park-and-corner-store neighborhoods in the US, it's one of the most attractive parts of my city.
However, almost nobody here could feasibly own a fully electric car. Most houses don't have driveways or garages. People park ad-hoc on the street. Most families own one car, and that car needs to be able to go long distances because it's both the local vehicle and the road tripper.
My wife and I would buy an EV if we could. We know the exact one. But it's not feasible for us, or for our neighbors. Far from being "1%" this situation is quite common. So we have a Honda hybrid instead.
The Toyota strategy from 2022 has aged brilliantly: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/29/toyota-ceo-stands-by-electri...
However, the EV maximalist strategy from the same era has aged like milk.
If you are visiting nature in any vehicle you are messing it up.
Gas prices are pretty much trivial unless you: - drive a lot (which in that case you’re really messing up nature regardless of ICE vs EV) - own a fleet - are really tight on finances (not buying a new car anyway)
In a lot of places, most of your electricity is generated by burning coal and gas.
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All the legacy automakers that haven't fully moved to EV's PROFITABLY will go defacto bankrupt within a few years, there will be some mergers to stay alive but it's game over. Tesla and China companies will own auto, with Tesla capturing most the profit, similar to Apple vs Android phones. Autonomy will further accelerate this.
tesla is not competitive vs chinese. they can remain afloat wherever the chinese are not allowed to sell, that's about it
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Spot on, except for the part about Tesla. Tesla shut down production of Model S & X. Coming up next: 3 and Y. Also, Tesla has YOY decreasing revenue and sales. Pretty soon, they will go pre-revenue and embrace what they are: A NFT traded on the stock market for bragging rights.
I'll just leave his here, "Tesla achieved a record-breaking third quarter in 2025 (Q3 2025), delivering 497,099 vehicles". It's expected that to be exceeded most quarters going forward
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Where did you get “ Coming up next: 3 and Y” from?
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> SDVs don’t have to be EVs, but they tend to go hand in hand. The large battery in an EV makes it easier to feed powerful computers, and it allows things like over-the-air updates to happen when the car is parked and “off.” Could Honda make a fossil fuel SDV? Sure, but it’s unlikely to for the same reason it’s backing away from EVs: The old way of doing things is easier and more profitable, for now.
So can a $300 dollar iPad. Large EV scale batteries are needed to feed powerful computers? What are they on about?
This is so unfortunate. I was never a van guy, but my wife insisted we get a van, so I got the Honda. And honestly? I kinda love it. It drives like a car but holds eight people (or four people and a whole bunch of luggage).
The way we use the van, 90% of our drives are under 20 miles round trip. The rest are longer road trips. I've been waiting eight years for Honda to make an electric or even a plug-in hybrid where the gas motor just charge the battery.
It would be perfect for my family. I guess that's not happening now.
They have quite decent hybrids now. I’m surprised that they haven’t released a plug-in one, since their architecture seems perfect for it. Maybe battery supply constraints. They are also developing a v6 hybrid, which should replace the j series in the Odyssey.
They do, but for some reason haven't brought them to the van yet. Here's hoping!
> I guess that's not happening now.
They're still going with their hybrids of course.
I have a Honda Hybrid CR-V and love the drivetrain. We're waiting until Honda moves that drivetrain into the Odyssey (which is the van we want... probably what you have, hah)
the new sienna's are all hybrid and get 36mpg. best you are gonna do.
> By shelving EVs, Honda will fall farther behind in two of the biggest shifts sweeping the automotive industry: electric drivetrains [...]
Ugh that sucks
> [...] and software-defined vehicles.
Take my money! I'll suffer with gas for that.
I almost pulled the trigger on a Prologue; so glad I had second thoughts. Even though it was essentially a GM product, I've only ever owned Hondas, so I thought "Well, at least I can get service at my Honda dealer".
Charging in the US (other than at home) is still the biggest issue for me. I do lots of traveling, and waiting 30-45 minutes to charge even at a Level 3 charger is a PITA. If I had a J std charger, then it's even longer. This makes my monthly 8 hour trips one-way another 2 hours - this sucks. Sorry - I'll keep my 2005 Honda Element with 445K miles. Another engine would be cheaper than less than a year of car payments. And it's pretty much indestructible.
It does depend on what car you get. A RWD Ioniq5 can do about 3 hours on the highway with 20 minute stops (though the stops are a lot longer at the more-available Tesla chargers).
There’s other good roadtrip friendly options out there too, but ya with monthly drives like that you’re really limiting your options and ICE cars still make a lot of sense
To be honest, I have every faith in Honda. It took them a long time to arrive at hybrid, but they were never about first to market, but they were always adamant about controlling the entire technology stack.. made their own transmission and everything. And engineering doesn't faze them, Honda just nonchalantly displayed a reusable rocket like it was too easy... EV is a little bit like AI nowadays, not much moat and possibly not challenging enough for Honda R&D so why not. I'll always be on the look out for Honda's next take on EV.
> It took them a long time to arrive at hybrid
The Honda Insight went on sale in 1999. They were 2 years behind Toyota's Prius but at least 5 years ahead of everybody else.
It's okay when legacy companies die. That can be a good thing. Having the same few companies around for 100yrs isn't always a benefit for the world.
It increasingly looks like legacy auto should have pursued (and still can, there is a LOT of runway for it) PHEV architectures for a 10 year cycle. Well to be honest government should have put a hard deadline of 10 years for PHEVs over 20 years ago (10 years after the Prius/Insight was released) for all consumer platforms or pay a $5000 new car tax.
PHEVs with 50 miles of range would effectively make almost all day-to-day driving electrified, at least in "consumer" transportation, wouldn't require special recharging equipment beyond a 110V outlet, removes range anxiety, would alleviate urban air pollution.
Of course nothing will be done in this administration. But to the point of the article, oil and transportation dependence, even with extensive shale oil production, remains a national security risk that PHEVs and alt energy can mitigate.
> I can imagine Honda executives thinking that they can wait out the awkward transition period and, when motors and batteries are fully sorted, simply swap out the fossil fuel bits.
I don't know, this actually sounds like a really good strategy. Jaguar, Ford, Porsche and others have spent a lot of money (and arguably brand capital) trying to get in early and developing EVs with too many trade-offs and limitations. Why not wait until you can develop a _really good_ 500-mile-plus, reliable, daily driver EV, if you feel you can get away with waiting?
And most users surely don't care about the whole software-defined-vehicle thing.
Could it be that the EVs they were planning were just out of touch with what the market wants? Their zero vehicles look butt-ugly in my opinion. They look like concept cars that are great for show, but no serious buyer would consider them for a daily driver.
I'm not anti-EV...
I don't have charging capability at my apartment or work. On occasion, I do 300 mile trips (adirondacks/nyc). Skeptical of winter performance. I have no interest in "frequent updates, slick infotainment software, and advanced driver-assistance systems". Frankly, no spare tire is a no starter for me also.
BYD just released a car that charges 250mi of range in 5min for exactly this reason.
Or instead of paying money for a car that still fills up slower than a gas one, has all the extra issues that come with EVs, and hope that there is charging infrastructure in my area, I could just buy any ice car made in the last 35+ years.
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Similar boat here. No charging at home without expensive install, work is a commercial charger, and frequent trips into WV, which seems to be a dead zone for chargers. Plus occasional towing. I’d love an EV, but they aren’t there yet.
I think what people want out of an EV is the Honda Civic and CRV. Nice practical, reliable low cost EVs that don’t feel cheap or weird. The Tesla model 3 and Y are so close. But there is weirdness to it that a lot of consumers aren’t really interested in an that is before you factor in the polarizing nature of Elon himself.
Maybe we aren’t there yet. The Model 3 and Y are probably still too expensive without incentives.
The new Renault 5 EV is basically this
As much as I love tech in my cars, I’ve found that the more you add, the more will eventually fail. If you really must integrate more software, make it free and guarantee X years of support. If that means a more expensive car, so be it let the market decide if it’s worthwhile. Subscriptions hide the cost and inflate the popularity of vehicles that otherwise may not have been purchased.
Ironically, Trump attacking Iran and closing the Strait is a boon to China and EV makers. Once the car is produced, aside from lubricants, it’s completely independent of oil. Heck you can put panels on your rooftop and slow charge it during the day.
It may be a boon to EV makers everywhere including in China, but I don't think it's a boon to China generally as they buy a lot of their oil from the Gulf states. Thus they're more directly affected by the Hormuz shutdown than the US (which is a net oil exporter and is mostly only affected indirectly by price increases).
Like the Ukraine war, maybe one good thing thing we can say about this terrible situation is that it may encourage a lot of countries to move to renewables (or nuclear) sooner than they otherwise would and cut back on fossil fuels.
The energy crises of the 1970s caused people to start caring a lot more about fuel economy. Now we have the technology for people not to need to buy gas to propel their vehicle at all, and many of them once they switch they're never switching back.
> you can put panels on your rooftop and slow charge it during the day
The real Mad Max will be roaming the apocalyptic wasteland in a Kia EV5.
Until the ICCU fails, at which point you're toast.
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The suuply chain for repair parts is still supported by oil (freight, packaging, any plastics).
Better hope your vehicle is never damaged.
Sure, but increasingly less so as electrification takes off. And using less gas means you can redirect that to the other derivative products such as plastic.
> freight
I know the US primarily uses diesel for its trains, but have you ever been outside of the US before?
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i don't mind panels in the rooftop strictly for AC blowing while car's parked...
Car tires are made with synthetic rubber, which is made from oil.
Quick google math says you get 6 tires from a barrel of oil vs roughly 20 gallons of gas. Unless EVs mean you change tires every 300 miles or so I think we're good.
My ICE vehicles go through many more pounds of gasoline than they do tires. A set of tires is ~100lbs of material. 50,000mi of gas on a 30mpg vehicle is 10,000lbs of gas.
The big concern is burning oil products into the atmosphere: that means fuels. Using oil to produce rubbers and plastics is less of a concern.
With where the Trumpists want to take us, tires made out of carved stone will suffice. Non-EVs will be retrofitted with a hole in the floor for your feet.
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>Heck you can put panels on your rooftop and slow charge it during the day.
The breakeven for this is so bad that it's only worth it for the gullible "wow" factor from the general public asking about it.
A friend of mine has a dozen panels in central France and pretty much provides all the energy for his Kia eNiro. He reckons the payback time is under five years.
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The software defined car practically boils down to this: "It's not quite done yet, but we'll ship it anyway because we can fix it in post". And then two years later, "oh we've already sold them, why spend money updating it to fix the bugs." And five years later, "oh the warranty periods gone, not our problem anymore."
> It makes really good engines, and that's starting to matter less and less.
Maybe. But here's the thing... most cars today feel completely lifeless.
Honda knows how to build an engine and wrap it in a car that actually makes you feel something. That still matters.
Anyone here driven an S2000?
It's still the best car I've ever owned. Light, raw, grippy, and genuinely fun -- every drive felt like an event, not just transportation. (And it was still an affordable car!)
They killed it around 2010. I've never found anything that captures that same feeling since, at any price point.
So yeah -- Honda will always have a place in my heart. When they want to, they build something truly special.
Here's one of their marketing films they can use to find inspiration again.
* Failure: The Secret to Success - A Honda Documentary - YouTube // https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOVig5H7UbM
I just hope Honda sticks to making awesome motorcycles.
Honda is the world's largest engine maker: yachts, airplanes, ships, lawnmowers, cars, motorcycles, heavy equipment. They will be fine.
Also, please ignore these announcements. CEOs are trend-following children and their declarations of future behavior should be heavily discounted. Honda will follow the market, as will all the other automakers. This is all sturm and drang. When an automaker says "We will transition to all EV by 2030" then ignore them. When an automaker says "We will not sell any EVs" then ignore them. It's like a child saying "I will grow up to be an astronaut". Just pat them on the head and go about your day.
Focus on what they are bringing to market at any point in time, everything else is foolish talk.
I can imagine Honda executives thinking that they can wait out the awkward transition period and, when motors and batteries are fully sorted, simply swap out the fossil fuel bits. How hard could it be?
The article loses its credibility once it imagines a multi-billion, multi-country company executives thinking this way :).
They timed it perfectly when oil is $100+/barrel. Sane countries are thinking about their reliance on oil.
Is this a global direction or just the US market? If it's only US, this might make sense - they might just want to cut their losses and wait for a scenario where they could better compete in the US.
If this is a global direction, it sounds suicidal.
Honda did not invent ICE cars. They do not need to invent EVs. I reckon they will wait until the dust settles and then leapfrog all the rest. As they have done so in the past.
Of course, I drive a Honda that I will be buried in. So I may be biased.
This doesn't mention motorcycles
> For the fiscal year ended March 31, 2025 (FY2025), motorcycles accounted for about 17% of total revenue, while cars made up around 65%.
I wonder what the plan is for motorcycles, where in much of Asia cars aren't really viable and there are no real competitors to Honda engine bikes.
Honda is launching the WN7 this year. It seems like a typical Honda motorcycle: not for those obsessed with specs, but definitely a solid and well-designed bike. If I were currently looking for a mid-sized electric motorcycle, this would be my top choice for the same reasons people choose Honda for gasoline-powered motorcycles.
It's $15,000 about 15x the price of a standard gas powered Honda motorcycle. Also completely impractical for daily life in Asia.
No wonder I've not seen one yet
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Well, they just launched the Honda WN-7. It seems to be a commuter and fun bike. It has a limited range, so it's not a touring motorcycle but it does have fast-charging.
I watched the reviews on YouTube, and they're all quite favorable.
I'm yet to see a EV bike that can be classified as a "fun bike". Not fun and impracticle compared to pure "inner city mobility vehicle" such as Renault Twizy.
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They had a ubuquitious 100cc/9hp scooter called Activa in India. Honda, Yamaha and Suzuki are a drop in the bucket in EV scooter sales and Honda's offerings are the most hilarious.
What do you mean by "hilarious"?
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>and there are no real competitors to Honda engine bikes.
e-bikes/mopeds?
Yeah, e-bikes with thumb throttles are so good that the only reason they haven't already supplanted motorcycles is that there are ten bajillion old unkillable motorcycle engines in use.
It's a shame that US law doesn't have a nice in-between that would slot these bikes between proper e-bikes and motorcycles.
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I hate those narratives that if you don't jump on EVs, your future is doomed.
The last 5 years just don't show it. The EV market is still small and infrastructure missing in most of the world.
Toyota played it safe and made bank when everybody was saying they were doomed.
German automakers went hard on EVs. VW group sold 1 million fully electric vehicles in 2025, they will probably overtake Tesla in a couple of years for the biggest non-Chinese EV automaker by sales, but is it paying off financially?
At the same time german premium brands have a very hard time differentiating when Chinese cars offer similar quality at half the price even after tariffs.
If you look here in Germany at the car companies, they are suffering quite a bit. Most of that has to do with EVs eating the market share of their legacy car business. VW, Mercedes, and BMW each make pretty decent EVs at this point of course. And there are a lot of even better ones coming to market soon from them. And they sell pretty well even. But because their legacy business is imploding, profits are down by very large double digit percentages. Despite this, the Germans are adjusting well. VW seems to be having some success in the Chinese market now (lots of China specific VW models coming out there). And BMW is gearing up to what looks like a massive range luxury EV (500 miles) that should be doing well.
EV sales keep on growing world wide by juicy double digit percentages. Some markets less than others of course but the net effect is that all that legacy business keeps on shrinking because all that EV growth is at the cost of that legacy business.
The main issue with Honda and other Japanese manufacturers is that they are hopelessly dependent on Chinese suppliers to ship any EVs at this point. They've dragged their heels on doing their own tech and at this point while they might have some promising things in their labs, they lack supply chains and factories to mass produce any of it by themselves. That's going to take many years to turn around. Without guarantees that they'll be able to match the Chinese on cost. And the EU, Koreans, Chinese, and even US companies like GM are picking up the slack and growing EV sales at their cost.
Toyota seems to finally be producing a lot of EVs now to counter that. They've been catching up fast in the last year or so. But most of these EVs come with a lot of Chinese tech inside. Their alternative was to cede that market to competitors. Which seems to be what Honda is doing. I don't think that will end well for them.
Is your point that the western car companies are doomed no matter how aggressively they jump into EVs now, and that Chinese EV producers have too much of a lead for them to recover, or that they have time to catch up later and can take it slow for now?
China is already selling EVs to countries that haven’t even had many cars before, like Nepal. Is 75% of the world car market just going to be there’s because western auto manufacturers overfixated on their own very mature car markets?
I think they can catch up later, spin off some electric project to build know-how without going all-in releasing so many models.
Mercedes-Benz sells 9 different fully electric models and that ignores their trucks and vans.
BMW sells 9 different fully electric models across their BMW/Mini/Rolls Royce brands.
Volkswagen sells more than *30*.
I don't think western automakers can compete in any case unless they can either differentiate their offering or significantly lower the cost of core components like batteries.
The EU regulations are in many ways built to prevent this kind of free riding, for the sensible reasons that if everyone free rides, aiming for excess profits on the short term, the transition doesn't happen and the Chinese eat your whole market.
If you want to sell cars in the EU you have no future without EVs. The fleet emmision fines are quite high already, will be much higher from 2030 and will kick in from 0g CO2/km from 2035, basically killing any ICE passenger vehicle. That's in 8,5 years.
German automakers are suffering because their sales in the Chinese market has tanked. Not going hard on EVs would have left them in an even worse situation.
Take VW: in 2020 they were by far the biggest automaker in China with ~16% market share. In 2023 they had fallen to number two at ~10% behind BYD. But now that they are starting to have competetive BEVs in their lineup they are tied for first place in the market at ~13% market share.
Damn, the Honda E looked great.
Agree! But there are almost none on the roads in Europe so must have been costly for Honda. Price was too high.
Not surprised. It's almost as expensive as a Tesla Model 3 in the Netherlands.
Big Vintage Energy
Do people really want "software defined vehicles"? People keep repeating how Tesla keeps upgrading their software, but I don't really want my car to change every time I step into it.
The person I know who loves FSD has soured on updates since the last one changed how the car handles simple things like intersections, and it's added a lot more stress.
Cars should be appliances, boring and reliable, not something to amaze and delight you. Especially since the latter usually changes into "sell ads and your personal information".
1000% agree.
Sadly, this view is considered antiquated and anti-technology by a younger generation of people who think what we see in sci-fi shows should be reality (good or bad). And if you don't get that vision then you're some dumb luddite who should be banished from society.
What's kind of remarkable is the onslaught of vehicles, many EV, which have critical functionality issues that are being ignored, but they have WiFi + hotspot on board! And if you want to do basic things with your own vehicle, like get the climate control ready before you leave on a trip you now need an app, a smartphone, and Internet connection and a subscription...to do things that could easily be done via some local BLE or WiFi connection.
I see a lot of car companies rush to make "immersive" driving experiences while neglecting the basics. The Ioniq 5 / EV6 have ICCU issues that are not addressed which can leave the car stranded and the replacement parts have the same mysterious failure modes, the Jaguar I-Pace had numerous failures including a UI that would lag for basic things like changing air conditioning settings, the last generation Leaf (just prior to the current re-design) has battery issues that have forced people to do lemon-law buy backs, the Ford Mach E has a Tesla-style iPad center display that can't be turned off at night so it's a distraction (among other issues with the poor concept), but it has OTA so awesome!
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> Do people really want "software defined vehicles"?
Absolutely, the sooner the better. The truth is, auto companies can track you, show you ads, and otherwise jerk you around without going all the way to having a "software defined vehicle." You just get a worse user experience.
If it doesn't have a screen or a network connection it can't do either of those things. I'm very eagerly awaiting the Slate truck for exactly this reason. A cheap barebones EV meant for hauling stuff and people locally.
The thing can't even do OTA updates without you connecting your phone to the car's bluetooth.
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We do want software defined vehicles, we just don’t want automatic updates or cars that require an Internet connection to work.
> Cars should be appliances, boring and reliable
Agree, but then how do you get people to change them?
> People keep repeating how Tesla keeps upgrading their software, but I don't really want my car to change every time I step into it.
My driving experience/controls has not changed since I bought it 18 months ago. They added an option for Grok which I don’t use, and the FSD is much better now. And enabled adaptive headlights.
>The person I know who loves FSD has soured on updates since the last one changed how the car handles simple things like intersections, and it's added a lot more stress.
The most recent FSD update made me recommend a model 3 or Y to my parents.
All the updates (so far…) have added features that I actually like. Things like Apple Music integration and even safety things like cross-traffic alerts when reversing.
Even today my wife left her phone on the charge pad and the car beeped as we walked away to alert us - a feature that didn’t exist when we first got it.
Enshittification may come, but maybe there will be an Apple-like benevolent dictator that keeps it mostly clean.
Edit: I should say that I will never trust any “self-driving” at all based on cameras alone. It can’t even do Autopilot without me intervening on most trips.
Worldwide ? Seems so from the article.
But my guess is maybe Honda will wait for Tesla or another US based auto company with EVs to fail and buy that company. Seems that is how large companies do "innovation" these days.
Haha, this you "Blockbuster is waiting till Netflix fails and buy that. Nokia is waiting for Apple to fail and just buy that."
As realistic as Toshiba purchasing Apple.
> When developed as an original product, EVs offer automakers a chance to rethink the automobile, and in the process, make it cheaper.
That does not bode well for German car makers either I'm afraid. Take BMW for instance: they started off with two "pure" EV models, the i3 (a compact car) and the i8 (a sports car). Both of them promising, but neither a particular bestseller. So they switched to offering electric drive as an alternative to IC engines in several (most?) "regular" models. But I agree with TechCrunch that this is more of a cop-out than a winning strategy...
> Consumers, mostly those who buy EVs from the likes of Tesla, Rivian, and BYD, have grown accustomed to the frequent updates, slick infotainment software, and advanced driver-assistance systems. Honda has yet to make significant progress in any of those domains.
Here's an idea: what about making an EV free from this enshittification? One where you can decide yourself when to install an update, like in the "olden days" a few years ago? One that doesn't pretend to have an "autopilot" which isn't really one? I think there would be a market for such an EV.
The software designed car and continued price growth of automobiles is going to push them out of price range for consumers. Maybe Honda just wants to go out of a dying industry on good terms.
You can buy affordable simple EVs in many markets. Not all EVs target the premium segment.
My Honda family car has a CVT and electric parking brakes. "Driver's Car" mattered more when the low-price option was a stickshift and cars weren't so heavy.
“Many automakers have found that dropping batteries into a car originally designed for an internal combustion engine”. Reminds me of idiotic hybrid variants of Subaru and Honda vehicles that don’t have spare tires because the battery was slapped into the existing vehicle platform as an afterthought. Eg. Subaru forester hybrid. Car bought by educated, practical folks.
New Honda Accord hybrids do not include a spare tire. The manufacturers copied the idiocy.
For Toyota a spare tyre became on optional extra in Europe even on ICE models. They charge 200-300 Euro for having it.
Weird, they do here in Brazil (Hybrid Civics as well). Must be a cost or regulatory thing more than anything else.
Are they killing their EVs because of vibrations?
Honda seems to love pulling out of things just when they are about to succeed. Both in F1 and apparently now also in EV's.
lol. Their new F1 engine seems to be a mess (I'm assuming you're referring to that).
Yes, precisely. /r/formula1 was not leaking here yet ;-)
> The large battery in an EV makes it easier to feed powerful computers, and it allows things like over-the-air updates to happen when the car is parked and “off.”
I don't want anything of the sort as a consumer, so auto makers who don't "get" it either are fine by me. Nay, heroes.
Also, lol, "the large battery in an EV makes it easier to feed powerful computers". Do they not think an internal combustion engine can power a few ARM chips? What could the total power consumption of all the computer equipment in a car be, like 30-50 watts? 200 horsepower is 147 kW.
Even the point about running computers when the car is off seems wildly uninformed: a 12 V starter battery in an ICE car is about 70 Ah. That’s 840 Wh. So you can run a 5 W computer (that does nothing but periodically wake up to look for and download updates and such) for 168 hours. (Of course, any competent implementation will not let electronics run the battery flat, but it still seems like way more than enough)
Consumers, mostly those who buy EVs from the likes of Tesla, Rivian, and BYD, have grown accustomed to the frequent updates, slick infotainment software, and advanced driver-assistance systems. Honda has yet to make significant progress in any of those domains.
"Grown accustomed to" is a funny way of saying "begrudgingly put up with because the alternative is buying a new car, but really they would rather not have to deal with that crap at all."
What is wrong with the japanese automotive industry shifting to 100% EV!? Seems like some kind of seppuku...
> What is wrong with the japanese automotive industry shifting to 100% EV!? Seems like some kind of seppuku
The writing is on the wall. ICE vehicles sales are declining worldwide. The direction is very clear to anybody paying attention.
I just leased a Prologue
Eva are great until you have the replace the battery. Then you’ll finally realize the real cost of owning an EV.
Once people realize that, then the game is over. Honda is just forecasting the future more accurately than other automakers.
What time horizon are you basing this on? It seems like most EVs will retain 70-85% capacity after a decade.
There likely isn’t data for anything beyond 12-15 years but I’m not sure that’ll matter given most people own cars ~7-8 years.
https://evelectriccars.com/electric-car-battery-lifespan/
How often do batteries get replaced in EVs? 10 year old cars have ~85% SOH typically. Sometimes more.
Gas cars are great until you realize you have to replace the gas. Then you'll realize the cost of owning a gas car.
Once people realize they're literally burning the expensive gas they put in their vehicle, the game is over.
Also, gas is a limited resource which after you burn never ever comes back, so it is expected to get more expensive, while all the rare earth metals in batteries can be recycled into new batteries because when you use the battery, you aren't actually burning it away into nothing. You can even recharge it.
Honestly this feels less like Honda "killing EVs" and more like Honda admitting it never really committed in the first place
I expected better from the company that entered the EV market with an impressive aquarium simulator in its Honda E.
Time will tell, but I think it’s a long term mistake.
I love the Honda E and it's not mentioned in the article for some reason. However it must certainly have been a costly flop; they are so rare on the roads in the UK,
They are rare in Norway too. Too expensive, worse than a BMW i3, never updated with a better battery.
I don’t know why they didn’t try to do better.
I want repairable, affordable, light-weight vehicles with as little software as possible.
The wind is just blowing back towards internal combustion for the moment. A couple years and they will shift again. Killing the whole research project would be dumb. Killing current models makes some sense.
Maybe in the US, but not elsewhere. EVs are still very much in the ascendant in the rest of the world.
Only in the US. The rest of the world, especially the undeveloped and developing world, is currently undergoing a car ownership boom due to cheap Chinese EVs.
How are those Chinese EV makers doing financially, anyway?
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/2025/11/china-elec...
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The wind is actually blowing towards EVs.
China: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/electric-vehicle-sales-i... Europe: https://eleport.com/ev-sales-in-europe/ USA: https://www.statista.com/outlook/mmo/electric-vehicles/unite...
Oh I mixed up Honda and Hyundai in my head and panicked for a second. Were they even ever trying?
This isn't reporting, it's propaganda.
Remember when cars were just a simple, no computers, maybe a transistor or two. why do cars have to cost the same price as a new house? give me a simple 1960's vw bug please.
I once put together a comparison of Chinese and Japanese industries on a forum while answering a question. What’s happening with Honda is probably just the beginning — the bigger signs of decline aren’t limited to the auto industry. Japan’s space program, for example, has had several launch failures in a row, it has been mostly absent in the current AI wave, and there was even recent news about a so-called Japanese AI model that turned out to be built directly on top of DeepSeek.
Japanese society has long been romanticized in the West, but once you start noticing certain details, a different side becomes visible. A simple example: about a century ago, the average height of Japanese men and women was actually higher than that of Chinese and Koreans, but later the growth basically stalled, and in some periods even declined. It’s not that Japan is poor. It feels more like there are strong, invisible social expectations — women are not supposed to grow too tall, men don’t seem comfortable standing out physically, and people live within a very tight set of unwritten rules about what you should and shouldn’t do.
This is the same kind of thing people notice when they joke that Japan still uses Yahoo or fax machines. That discipline creates stability, and from the outside it can look orderly and even admirable. But when you look more closely, it can also feel restrictive, even a bit unsettling. It’s hard to believe that this kind of social atmosphere wouldn’t affect corporate culture as well. In that sense, it may help explain why Japan, which once dominated the global auto industry, hesitated for so long on electric vehicles and ended up being overtaken by China in the new wave of technology.
Another thing is that Japan can be very unrealistic. You can see this in their movies, anime, and literature — there’s this strong belief in the power of belief itself, like if you just believe hard enough, things will work out. That mindset shows up in real issues too, like rare earth supply, military readiness, and national strategy. Japan might actually be one of the countries with the strongest information bubbles in the world. From top to bottom, people tend to believe what they want to believe, even when reality says otherwise. And when reality does show up, the reaction is often to pull back quickly and say the problem isn’t real.
You could already see this mentality during World War II, especially with the attack on Pearl Harbor. After that, Japan’s postwar industrial success made the illusion even stronger. If a company messes up, they apologize, and everyone forgives them. Toyota is number one in the world and will always be number one — no need to worry. That kind of thinking is exactly why Japanese industry has been declining for a long time without people really feeling a sense of crisis.
You can even see Germans openly complaining about their country’s problems, but you don’t see that very often in Japan. As long as they still have Excel, Word, and loppy disk ,or some japan made code editor, everything feels fine, so there’s no need to feel anxious.
And if there were ever a war over China and Taiwan, most people in Japan might even think: as long as we take action, China will definitely lose.It’s just like the recent Iran war. many japanese people believe that China will collapse first, because China is too dependent on Middle Eastern oil, even though the real data shows that Japan is actually more dependent.
(write by me and translated by GPT)
> Here, Honda is setting itself up for failure on the second disruption sweeping the automotive industry: the software-defined vehicle (SDV), which has core capabilities that can be upgraded and improved over time.
Hells yeah, Honda went to the top of my list all of the sudden. SDVs coded by vibe coding bros are just not for me.
Honda is an engine company at its heart. It makes very reliable, long lived engines.
They refine technology not really invent it (maybe invented VTEC). The transition to EV will be very gradual, I don’t even think we have enough rare earth metals and electrical grid capacity to go even twice as fast in adoption?
Honda is waiting for the standards and technology to settle out and become commodity technology, then they implement and iterate to a refined and reliable product.
It doesn’t seem like a winner take all market for EV? What would be the most? Perhaps I am ignorant on that part of market dynamics.
*edit for typos
Once EVs are economically attractive the transition can be very fast. I live in Denmark so I have seen it, it took 7 years to go from ~5% to 90+% of new cars sold. Both EU and US are now relying on trade barriers to keep Chinese EVs away from consumers.
well China debate aside, where are they? i've been dabbling in electrics for over a decade now, on the lower range they are still 30% more expensive than gas cars. Surely someone, anyone outside of China could have done one cheaper by now? Leaf came out 16 years ago and they still can't get it under $30k?
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Denmark has 6M people. The US has 289M vehicles.
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How is safety and quality for Chinese EVs? There was the 2008 melamine baby formula scandal, where a toxic substance was deliberately introduced into baby formula for domestic market. Chinese food imports were curtailed across many countries.
Capitalism over there is at another level, and cars are so complicated with tiny changes can have huge problems. Look at the immobilizer chips that Kia dropped to save $5, which resulted in thousands of car thefts and the whole Kia Boyz phenomenon.
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> I don’t even think we have enough rare earth metals and electrical grid capacity to go even twice as fast in adoption
I also have some concerns about our grid, but not from EVs. AI is already consuming more 5% of the grid, more than twice that of EVs (~2%), and is growing far faster. I've seen estimates as high as 17% of the grid by 2030. Most EVs are also charged in off-peak hours when there's plenty of capacity.
That's worst-case +600TWh by 2030. The US electrical grid also expanded by +600TWh between 1983 and 1990. Did you panic at that time and, if not, why not?
> I don’t even think we have enough rare earth metals and electrical grid capacity to go even twice as fast in adoption?
This is not an issue, it’s the one the things that the anti-EV/baby boomer crowd throws out that is completely unsubstantiated. We have plenty of rare earths, America just lit their rare earth refining capacity on fire when China said they would do it for us at a much cheaper price. China doesn’t have a shortage of rare earth refining capacity, and they are producing most of the Eavs in the world as a result. EVs mostly charge at night when the grid is underutilized anyways.
China won the EV war a few years ago while the Japanese spent too much wasted time on hydrogen. Honda just doesn’t have anything to offer that BYD already does much better. That the Chinese auto manufacturers will slow down EV advancements and refinements long enough for Honda to make a significant improvement is a bit ridiculous.
That article reads like a 5 years old wrote it. In particular the part that says "software-defined vehicles is sweeping the automobile industry" and going further by saying "this is what consumers want and expect".
Yeah, if you're 5 and you want to keep paying subscriptions for a car you already bought! Not to mention software failures, over the air updates, hacking, etc
These tech writers (or bros) need to be replaced by AI or something, total disconnection with reality and what a car is for most people (e.g. it's not a computer and it should be mostly about reliability than anything else).
Big Fucking Mistake. They should come together with BYD.
Here’s hoping they make another s2000
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You mean drones?
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yes, everyone knows that a human head cannot hold both information about CO2 and information about cars
Arvix coming right up
ICE cars are still the majority of new cars being sold and it'll still take a while for EVs to become more popular.
That will change.
And it must, environmental concerns aside nobody wants to be beholden to oil prices ;)
The biggest EV car is Tesla and they aren't good and tesla isn't a car company, its a finance comapny. Like Intel lost its edge because it became finance first engineering almost never. And no one wants a >$20k car. Disposable energy oil or not, manufacturers went nuts in 2020, and just kept pushing prices up and can't figure out why cars aren't selling.
BYD Auto is the worlds biggest, and their cars are affordable and their battery tech is evolving rapidly -- just recently announced batteries that can effectively recharge in the same time it takes to fill up one's gas tank.
They are an unstoppable force and we ignore them at our own peril.
Japanese auto companies are so incredibly corrupt it's hilarious. Toyota has clear ties with terrorist organizations plus intentionally going out of their way to kill EVs with the whole hydrogen scam. And Honda right here trying to "kill" EVs as well.
The moment a battery without lithium comes out, legacy car engines are dead for good.
I think this is a smart move, the EV boom is soon coming to and end. There is just not possible to make enough batteries or to deliver enough power, for all of us to drive electric.
Is it possible to deliver and store electricity in a more efficient way perhaps? Rumor has it that it does, but not in a way you can put a meter on :)
Yeah, it's impossible. Also, China is making them too cheap to compete with, and in such quantity that they're basically dumping them and flooding the market. We have to enact laws and trade barriers to keep them out, or else we'll be drowning in them. Plus don't forget it's impossible to make that many EVs in the first place.
You are right. We don't need more EVs. Lets get rid of cars completely and built cheap electrified public transport. Make ICE cars illiegal. Going all EV won't help the environment. Going all public transport would.
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I have a 2016 Tacoma I bought in 2015. It has ~114k miles, so ~11k miles/year. Gas is 16-18gal/mi. It's paid off. There is no math, outside of major repairs (it's maintained regularly) where any Hybrid or EV makes sense for the next 10+ years. Maintenance ~ 250 a year; Tires ~12-1300 every 3 years (more due to age than wear). So - 11k/year w/ fuel at $5/gal and 16mi/gal - $3.4k in fuel, 600/year in maintenance and tires. So $4k/year in rough cost (excluding insurance). Still high, but I've lived in rural areas the last 10 years.
A new vehicle makes no sense. Unless I went a budget used Prius (with a good hybrid battery system). No plan to make changes.
> Unless I went a budget used Prius
Take care - the Hybrid battery can be expensive to replace and they do eventually fail. Note that Toyota changed from NiMH to LiIon 2017/18. I recently had to wreck an old Toyota Hybrid because replacing the dead battery was going to cost 2/3 of the value of the vehicle. Context: New Zealand.
> Take care - the Hybrid battery can be expensive to replace and they do eventually fail.
That is true, but median mileage at replacement for the old NiMH batteries is 150k miles (240k km), and the lithium cells have a median mileage at replacement of over 200k miles (320k km) - even though those cars are now 10 years old, not enough of them have reached that mileages, so exact data is still not available.
And don't get me wrong, those cars are bullet proof. Median total mileage of the car could be a bit higher than 150k miles, especially after the car was sold to a third world country. But for most intents and purposes, those batteries (especially the lithium cells) have about the same median lifetime than the car itself.
okay? others are in the market for a car
Weird, why didn’t they buy a car in 2016?
Anything you need to plug into a power source is doomed to fail. EVs are simply not designed properly which is why hybrids are the best of both world. A Camry hybrid has some genius technology as the EV part is used at low speed and ICE at higher speed. That is the perfect balance and you see why it's a success for them. Toyota make the best hybrid vehicles. Honda makes hybrids too so they're not throwing all their EV technology into the e-waste bin.
Hybrids makes no sense, but to the smallest of customer segments.
They need to carry two engines, batteries and a gas tank, that makes them pretty bad at being both an EV and a ICE vehicle. They are to heavy, have to little battery capacity to be a good EV. The batteries and electric engines make them to heavy to get good fuel mileage as a gas powered car.
I've meet exactly one person for who they made sense. He could get to an from work on battery alone, but not much more and he needed the combustion engine to haul a trailer every now and then. If he could have waited a few years, he could just have gotten an EV that did the same.
There might be locations where hybrids makes more sense, but now that the range of EVs have gotten much better I think that list is slowly shrinking.
The thing that's weird to me is the focus on getting rid of diesel, because EVs and diesel cars are not at all competing. EVs can replace gas powered cars, in most cases (depending on your location), but they can't replace diesel. Need to drive 500km a day? Diesel is probably your best bet and EVs are completely out.
Whether or not your analysis is correct (I'd say not), the root problem is Chinese manufacturing dominance and unfair competitive advantage when it comes to EVs. It saddens me to say it, but the legacy car companies are unable to pivot and are likely doomed.
> Anything you need to plug into a power source is doomed to fail.
Totally disagree. One of the reasons I drive an EV is so I _can_ plug it in and never go to a gas station again. What a useless exercise and waste of my time, especially for a penny-pincher like me who would wait in like for 20 minutes at Costco for gas.
Plugging it in is why it is so awful. It takes ages to charge it and you don't get very much range for a full charge. Battery technology is so incredibly poor right now and EV manufacturers are just plain dumb until they make the body of the car harness the sun's rays.
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