I love that the world is loving kei trucks and kei cars right now.

I see them pretty often in Australia which also has an anti yank-tank movement (tongue in cheek name for a big american "truck")

That said our most popular cars are still all three tonne utes or SUVs so it's a small movement.

You are right to note the economic situation being a big part of vehicle decisions. Fuel prices has been a driving force, and image plays a big part too.

The chicken tax pretty much makes this impossible. The only domestic manufacturer interested in cheap light-duty trucks is Slate, which is still in the development phase and faces a lot of risks, notably high cost for the segment.

I think big vehicles are ugly and stupid so I like the form as well as the function.

Until HN can have an honest discussion on how far behind West is in so many aspects - without blaming Trump for it glibly - each day that passes is a day it falls further behind.

The moment you face the truth is the moment you can start doing something about it.

This is a US or local problem primarily. At least where I live there is a law in place requiring public ev chargers to be available with credit card payments and are forbidden from needing users to subscribe.

I just finished a road trip from Colorado to SoCal by EV and this was the first trip where I didn’t once need an app to start charging. It was a nice change from my last one. Rivian’s network has been amazing now that non Rivian EVs can use it, and Ionna has appeared with delightfully retro futuristic looking equipment that doesn’t even have a backing app - just payment and go.

Could you give some examples of the Western propaganda machine producing xenophobia and racism?

It's good you also mentioned "(and Japanese)" regarding the propaganda machine. I don't think it will crash any time soon, but considering how much the economy is driven by the automotive industry, it's scary to see how much the incumbent companies are doing all they can to stifle electric vehicle advances. They aren't just ignoring them, they're doing all they can to spread FUD. To think there was a good start with hybrids too. There's also the ongoing hydrogen fuel attempt which starts to look like a sunk cost fallacy. If nothing changes, the decline is going to be a gradual irreversible ugly one layered on top of the demographic problem.

You could also flip that and talk about the risks of when your gasoline supply get shut down due to some event. With an EV stack you can generate your power locally and add resilience that way.

That's why Vehicle to the Grid / Home is so exciting. Your multi-kWh car battery can power your home for several days.

https://carnewschina.com/2024/12/05/byd-struck-deal-with-jap...

my area lost power for about 3 days last week and I ran all of my house's critical systems from my EV. it was great - silent, unlike the old generator, and not counting the sunk cost of the car, extremely cheap. Cost maybe $5 in electricity to keep the furnace, refrigerator/freezer, and internet on for 3 days, contrasted with probably $50 in gasoline for a similar amount of time.

If the outage had been longer, I could have made a half-hour trip to an area that had working EV fast chargers and come back with another 5-6 days of power for the house.

That sounds like the extreme version of "but I need a fuel car because I want to drive it to France once a year for holiday". Driving something around all year for a once-a-year event is silly, but this is just insane. In a good life, you don't need this fallback from grid power even once in your lifetime!

At least, not beyond the inconvenience that is having to stay at home like 1 unplanned day per several decades. That's still three and three quarters of a nine of uptime even if you'd get the recent Iberian peninsula event every 10 years, and assumes you emptied the battery coincidentally the day before the outage. If you're not an EMT or power plant technician, you're doing more harm than good by being the person who can drive to work during a power outage and find that you're the only one there and nothing works anyway

We’ve already had some experiences with this in Florida after a hurricane. EVs do quite well, turns out, better in many cases than gas cars. The grid is a very high priority for fixing, more so even than gas supplies.

The common advice among "preppers" and more anxious individuals is to never let your gas gauge go below half or 1/4 tank. I think people are much more anxious than they realize about running out of gas in a black swan event.

When a hurricane impacted my area last year, I kept seeing Facebook posts for a week or two afterward from people asking where to find gas. Meanwhile, the power never went out, so my EV was able to charge without issue.

I worry about that, too, but with my gas car. :)

More batteries.

I cannot believe this is a serious question.

A small battery pack can easily run most essential domestic services.

Rooftop solar is getting cheaper, easier, more efficient, and more reliable every year.

If you live in an area that is poor enough that this is not an option, it loses power frequently due to weather, and no one in power cares enough to fix it, that genuinely sucks, and I feel for you. But, as sibling comments said, some other poor areas don't get gasoline shipments in a timely manner—being poor and neglected is just always going to suck in various ways, and the solution is not to avoid any technological advancements that remove the crutch that your particular poor and neglected area is using to get through it a little easier, but to find ways to reduce the poverty and neglect.

And, frankly, solar power and electric vehicles are both great tools to help with that, especially when used together.

Plug-in hybrids also have tax advantages in some jurisdictions.

E.g. in Georgia (US), EV owners have to pay a $234 annual alternative fuel vehicle fee.

Plug in hybrid owners may choose to have a alternative fuel license plate or standard license plate. If you opt for the standard plate, you don't have to pay the alternative fuel vehicle fee.

I've already been roadtripping across Europe multiple times in an EV that needs 20 minutes to recharge per ~3 hours of driving (e-GMP). To me this is great, and wouldn't be faster in an ICE, since I need the breaks anyway. EV charging is unattended, so it takes less of my time than refuelling. The chargers are already everywhere, even in rural areas and in the freakin' Alps.

I know some people want a pee-in-a-bottle cannonball run, but that doesn't make sense to me. At distances where charging time starts to add up, flying is already much quicker.

Battery swap. Great for industry growth, but the manufacturers selling into US and Europe decided not to go there and disputable claims "it can't work" and false applications of Gresham's law are used to explain why.

The Gresham's law thing: money is just a transfer token. Batteries have a use value. The agents who could profit from hoarding good batteries, don't get to achieve the income of renting them.

It's working fine for scooters, and in China for cars and trucks.

Everyone is now betting on solid state getting both range and rapid charge.

You are not allowed to decide how everyone else should live. But just for the sake of argument, take a trip to Montana and get back to me on how well universal EVs would work in much of the US. They're fine for urban and suburban areas. They aren't so great for agricultural work, and certainly not great for people who live in places you probably haven't visited. I don't even think EVs are a solution for people in Nebraska, let alone places where the weather gets really extreme.

Our family has EVs and rents a gas car for the occasional road trip. We did the math and it’s cheaper than buying and owning and doing the maintenance on a gas car.

If we did long road trips a lot we’d probably get rid of one EV and get an older gas car for that. It wouldn’t be the daily driver.

Massive depreciation means cheap used EVs. I don't see the issue.

Luxury ICE vehicles also depreciate rapidly, and yet they're quite popular. Plus EVs are likely to have longer usable lifetimes -- though with different issues -- than gas cars.

one step further - the overall market for vehicle transport will go down as cities smarten up and build in ways they can afford, rather than scaling on bigger roads that go further away and require tons of infrastructure to service.

the bigger replacement will still be walking and scooter-like EVs that are cheaper for everyone

> A fleet of high utilization autonomous vehicles will increase utilization rates of each automobile that is still on the road substantially, serving more people with fewer raw materials. Not to mention that as of right now, all of the leading contenders for commercially viable robotaxi fleets are on EV platforms anyway.

I think people overestimate the difference due to the amount of dead-heading needed.

It will shrink even further when everyone has their own cheap personal teleportation device

It would be the end of the US auto industry. Of course they kind of deserve it. The Japanese also beat them to a pulp for much the same reason: refusal to offer practical affordable efficient vehicles to the silent majority who just want a fucking car.