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The withering dream of a cheap American electric car

(www.wsj.com)
152 points voisin | 1 comments | 17 Nov 24 23:52 UTC | HN request time: 0.203s | 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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torginus ◴[18 Nov 24 16:32 UTC] No.42174015[source]▶
I honestly don't get it - the median income in the US is like $35k - assuming people don't want to drive vehicles older than a decade, do people really spend a sixth of their total income on cars?

In Europe the numbers are even worse. I'm fairly convinced only rich people and businesses buy new cars

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1. vel0city ◴[18 Nov 24 16:39 UTC] No.42174088[source]▶
Median incomes of single earners get pretty skewed from people willingly working part-time or low-income jobs as secondary income instead of primary income. I usually prefer analyzing things on household income for this reason. Think a grandpa working a part-time gig as a greeter at Walmart while going back to a multi-generational household or a stay-at-home parent working a part-time remote call center job while the kids are in school or a teenager working a part-time job. All of these positions would pull pretty small amounts of overall yearly income but chances are they're not the sole source of wealth/income they have access to.

The median household income is ~$75k. There's ~131M households in the US. This means there are 65M households making more than $75k/yr.

But yes, generally speaking wealthier people are the ones buying new cars with a lot of people buying used models.