The withering dream of a cheap American electric car

They used to, that’s the thing. It used to be possible to get barebones A-to-B transportation with zero frills. Power windows/locks, air conditioning, ABS, power steering, automatic transmission—all manner of things that aren’t strictly required to get a person to/from where they need to go—could be optioned away if the buyer was very price sensitive.

In 1998 a Chevrolet Metro could be optioned without a radio or rear defogger, even. New purchase price was about $9k (equivalent to $14.5k today). Somebody was buying those, enough for it to be worth the manufacturer’s effort to produce it.

I suspect a whole segment of people would be willing to consider a no-frills EV at a comparable price point. Hell, if somebody made something new like a base model 90s Civic into a $15k EV without extra luxury nonsense I don’t actually need, I’d be in the dealership tomorrow.

> I suspect a whole segment of people would be willing to consider a no-frills EV at a comparable price point.

GM made that play with the Bolt. It was routinely available for just over $20K. Still sat on lots, not getting a lot of love. People shopping for new cars want nicer toys, people who cannot afford new shop used and enjoy getting those nice toys at a discount. I bet the subset of buyers looking for a bare bones no frills brand-new car is quite small.

> I bet the subset of buyers looking for a bare bones no frills brand-new car is quite small.

I think you're correct; we're probably talking about a portion of the weirdly minimalist and frugal crowd pursuing FIRE. Also, most folks in that small subset wouldn't even consider buying a GM product; it's going to be either a Toyota or Honda for them.

Source: I'm one of them, still driving my base-level trim 2008 Prius.

As an aside, I'm reading that the new Bolt sold nearly as well as the Tesla Model S in 2017. Before that, I think the similarly basic Nissan Leaf was the best selling EV. Since then, however, my sense is that EV purchases became more about "fun" (which Tesla has emphasized and provided) than anything else.

> People shopping for new cars want nicer toys

It is worth recognizing the role that ZIRP played in all of this. Artificially low interest rates allowed payments on more expensive premium vehicles to be much more manageable for a much larger portion of the population.

You can get a low miles used Chevy Bolt for that much, and it's significantly nicer than most 90's Civics (has AC, Android Auto and CarPlay, cruise control, satellite radio, power doors and locks, keyless remote, etc.).

Not new, but does that matter so much?

I think this is something people just don't want to admit. It's easy to overlook prices being ridiculous when your monthly payment is all principal. That period of time of ZIRP constantly had me wondering how financing was making money.

I want that too, but:

    Hell, if somebody made something new like a base 
    model 90s Civic into a $15k EV without extra 
    luxury nonsense I don’t actually need

They could strip all that stuff out, but it wouldn't really reduce the cost of the car by as much as we want it to.

The cost of much of the "luxury nonsense" like power windows and heated seats is heavily amortized since the tooling etc. is shared with the more expensive vehicles, and the actual material costs are low.

Think about it; heated seats are just some simple heating coils. You can get something functionally equivalent that plugs into your cigarette lighter adapter for like $10 from Amazon. It ain't adding that much to the cost of your car.

The Bolt isn't exactly a good looking car though.

It might sound silly, but not everyone looks at things through a utilitarian view.

Sure, but compared with other cars of a similar size, it's not especially ugly, either. And in that segment the utilitarian view definitely dominates, people looking for something more than A->B are going for more prestigious badges.

Specific to GM, those low cost barebones cars were a regulatory hack for CAFE. Selling 3 Metros made up for high dollar, low efficiency Camaros or Cadillacs.

With the move to trucks and ethanol credits, those hacks are no longer cost-effective.

That actual reason for this is that cars are just hyper-reliable. The reason people wanted to buy a new bare bones car over a used nice car is the assumption that the used car would cost you in repairs.

That assumption has been dead since cash for clunkers. Even American made cars will hit 200k miles. There's ZERO value to a "new" car. You would be outright stupid to pay $10k for some probably not possible "bare bones" car when you could just buy the decade old Corolla down the street with 100k miles that's only $5k. It will even have fairly modern safety. This is true even in the modern post-COVID hyper contracted used car market.

It's a shame that the Bolt got discontinued. It was a great EV. I would have bought one if I didn't have exposure to Tesla first.

I sometimes think about power locks. I usually drive alone, and only lock/unlock the driver door. I had no problems flipping the little lock switch, and using the key outside was no problem because it’s right next to the door handle I’m going to use anyway.

Electrifying the locks led to the idea of RF transmitters as a secondary switch. Now there’s hardware for that, and a radio receiver. Gotta make it flash the lights, so that’s another relay and a wiring harness to the lighting system. Gotta beep the horn too, more wires. Maybe make it so you can hold the button to crack the power windows on a hot day; it’s just wire.

Fast forward 30 years, now everything talks to everything and I’d argue they don’t want to have to maintain a bunch of different firmware configurations to support fine-grained dealership options.

That’s my hunch anyway.

Not only that, but there's a cost to variable manufacturing. It's easy to build thousands of the same thing. It's harder (read: more expensive) to build a thousand of one thing, and another thousand of a slight variation of that thing and yet another thousand of another variation...