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The withering dream of a cheap American electric car

(www.wsj.com)
152 points voisin | 3 comments | 17 Nov 24 23:52 UTC | HN request time: 0.478s | source
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bartvk ◴[18 Nov 24 00:05 UTC] No.42168473[source]▶
https://archive.ph/9oIT4

I wish it would have adjusted for inflation. One quote: "The average transaction price for a new vehicle sold in the U.S. last month was $48,623, according to Kelley Blue Book, roughly $10,000 higher than in 2019, before the pandemic." However, about 9200 euros of that is due to inflation according to this calculator: https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/

That's a nitpick though. All in all, an interesting article, which can be summarized as: the EV car market is lacking demand, and car makers definitely don't want to make cheap EVs since it's already so hard.

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AgentOrange1234 ◴[18 Nov 24 00:21 UTC] No.42168570[source]▶
If even ICE cars are now super expensive, why isn’t this a screaming opportunity for some auto manufacturer to target the low end of the market?

I’ve never spent more than 20k for a car. With prices like this, I’m just going to keep my old one as long as I can.

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lmm ◴[18 Nov 24 00:58 UTC] No.42168743[source]▶
IIRC the US has some ass-backwards fuel economy laws that mean it's essentially illegal to produce small cars.

Also there's enough demand for high-margin cars to max out available production capacity, and would you want to be making major investments in ICE car production right now?

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1. weberer ◴[18 Nov 24 14:50 UTC] No.42172776[source]▶
Its not fuel economy laws, its the highway safety laws. Light cars are usually more efficient.

Maybe you're thinking of the strict emission laws regarding NOx and SOx that prevent diesel cars.

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2. kube-system ◴[18 Nov 24 14:54 UTC] No.42172826[source]▶
> Light cars are usually more efficient.

That's true, but US fuel economy standards don't actually require vehicles to be more fuel efficient in a direct way. They require vehicles to be a certain fuel efficiency for their footprint.

Unintuitively, while making a car larger doesn't make it more fuel efficient, it might make it better meet US fuel economy standards.

3. EricE ◴[18 Nov 24 14:59 UTC] No.42172874[source]▶
Nope, manufacturers get penalized by CAFE regulations if they have too many cars of certain types. It's batshit insane.