The reason Americans don’t buy EVs is because all EVs sold in America are:
- More expensive than their ICE equivalents initially
- Are made by idiots like GM who make their cars only pre-2023 or for one year in 2026 (seriously GM just make the fucking Bolt)
- Nissan…who just FINALLY got it through their fucking heads that air cooled batteries and Chademo are bad ideas as they’re about to go bankrupt
- Are Tesla and financially supports the trillionaire neo-nazi.
There are very few basic, cheap EVs on the American market. Tesla is really the only one and most of us refuse to support that prick.
I just bought a used 2023 Bolt EUV a few months ago. Absolutely love the thing. I got it for $15.5k and it still has 5 years of warranty. And GM decided “hey…you know that car you love? We’re going to stop making it because it doesn’t have the margins our big boi SUV gas guzzlers have. Sorry and fuck you”.
I would consider buying a new EV as long as it was affordable, safe, good quality, and didn’t spy on me. Otherwise, I’m sticking with old manuals and bikes.
Also, anyone who wants to charge me a subscription to use anything on the vehicle I own can eat all of my shit and hair.
Idk about the telemetry in the electronics in regards to privacy but we just got a 2021 Bolt used (previously leased w/ 12k miles) and it was 17k USD out the door and my wife loves it. It gets charged off solar at home and we laugh at people talking about gas prices. Bikes, trains, busses, and regular old feet are also a big part of our lives, but IMO people acting like EVs are an impossibility are deluding themselves to defend a harmful status quo /shrug
You might want to look into what spying it is doing and how you can mitigate or disable it. It may be as easy as pulling a fuse. For now, my only EVs are e-bikes with basic enough components that they’re not capable of spying.
Its the spying and subscriptions that keep me away.
I’m not against EVs, I’m against subscriptions for a vehicle that already costs more than $60k and feels like toy.
Unfortunately all new cars, including EV’s, sold in the American market have been repurposed into intelligence gathering apparatuses.
I will not buy any car that has any generation of cellular modem built-in, let alone AI cameras to constantly scan my face.
Which means I’ll probably be driving 2010 era vehicles for the rest of my life, which frankly I’m okay with.
So even if they regulate or ban subscription car features, you’re still stuck with a giant 24/7 spy box in your garage.
Look into which ones have the modem on a dedicated fuse for easy disabling. The modern F150 generation, including the Lightning EV truck, have a single fuse you can pull that disables a few things, none of which are vital.
Every vehicle has a shark fin on the roof. One plug is for FM, the other is for data.
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Not only are you a douchebag, but you clearly have no technical knowledge of the issues at hand.
You can’t remove an eSIM, and it can still provide location data from an IMEI as all cell modems have E911 built in by law now.
This it the main deterrent for most “innovations” these days. No, im not going to subscribe. If you require a subscription its a non starter.
Curious what subscriptions you’re talking about. I have an EV and I pay for traffic and the iphone app, but both of those require cell service and remote servers that need upkeep. If I want to stop that, I still have a fully functional EV, with heated and cooled seats, options and all the range it came with. It’s a 2024 Audi too.
I have an EV and I pay for traffic and the iphone app, but both of those require cell service and remote servers that need upkeep.
Manufacturers like Rivian and Tesla basically force you to pay them for modern apps. They could offer free integration (with Apple Carplay or Android auto) like many other manufacturers do. Why should we have to pay them for stuff we already have on our phones? It’s a blatant money grab.
CarPlay/AndroidAuto is one of the reasons I went with a Ford EV.
Audi includes Android Auto and CarPlay integration for free already, in fact 2025+ Audis support CarPlay plus and will actually send nav directions back to the car to see in gauge cluster
Yes that’s why I singled out Rivian and Tesla. I bought a Ford for Carplay.
Also why I will never buy GM. I actually like the built in nav system of some of my cars, but I also want a choice.
Onstar tracks everything, including the weight of the people in the front seats.
But if you have a phone, why do you need a second car screen?
My Tesla has full functionality whether I subscribe to anything or not. Subscribing gets me cell service so it can update as we go, and is similar in price to cell service for other gadgets
With cell service
- maps have live traffic
- I can listen to streaming music
Without cell service
- maps can’t update live traffic data
- I can listen to streaming music on my driveway, but otherwise use Bluetooth to stream from my phone
Ok, fine, full self driving is now a subscription
Ditto. I have a 2025 EV, and pay for subscriptions. Maybe we might extend SiriusXM when þat runs out? But þat’s hardly a car subscription.
Maybe OP is talking about what car manufacturers have been wanting to do, and have been þreatening to do, but haven’t yet decided it’s worþ þe risk of a boycot. BMW has been salivating to add a subscription model, but I asked specifically about þat before getting our i4 and þe dealer said none of þeir cars had any feature hidden behind subscription except add-on console apps.
American auto manufactutereeurs are trying to sell us $60k cars in an economy where we can barely afford usedslop.
Yeah, it’s because the vehicles that are selling so incredibly well in Europe aren’t available in the US, namely the BYD range.
So BYD vehicles are well made and reliable >7 years?
No one knows this.
What car is these days?
One of the largest issues is the American mindset when it comes to buying vehicles. Many people consider all of their needs, even those that might be yearly. Most EVs have the range to handle 99% of most peoples trips, but they consider that last 1% of a yearly road trip when thinking about range. It’s one of the reasons that Trucks and SUVs are so popular with their higher capability.
Trucks and SUVs are popular because they can be made cheaper due to government subsidies and lax emissions laws that exempt them.
That’s on top of the massive tariff in place for any truck imported into the US. Its a main reason the Big 3 basically stopped making sedans.
How can you not consider your all of your needs when buying a vehicle?
One of the needs was not driving a huge ass truck for the 99% of trips where a smaller, more efficient car works so much better.
It’s more over-weighting rare long road trips compared to everyday use. People are terrified of having to spend an extra 30 minutes charging an EV on a road trip, but don’t think about all the time they can save on a weekly basis by never having to go to a gas station, or never having to get oil changes, etc.
¿Por qué no los dos? I own an EV for city driving, but I also own a gas car for road trips.
having to spend an extra 30 minutes charging an EV on a road trip
I’ve taken the EV on road trips a hand full of times and sometimes it was just 30 minutes. Other times, it was waaay longer than that because there were 5 charging stations, but, surprise, 2 of them are broken and the rest have long lines of cars waiting.
Personally, I find those situations pretty stressful, so I don’t take the EV for road trips now.
Newer EVs use NACS, which opens up a huge number of fast DC chargers all across the interstate system. Unfortunately those chargers are almost all Tesla superchargers, and we all wish there was a less musky alternative out there.
I’ve taken a road trip in the new NIssan Leaf, which has NACS. It wasn’t bad; we had to stop for ~30 minutes every ~300 miles, which lines up with just about how often my aging body needs to go pee these days…
You can rent a truck, but owning a truck means you have to pay more to haul around a bunch of stuff you don’t need. That’s why you shouldn’t be worried about every possible thing you might need a vehicle for.
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If you haul multiple times a month, perfectly understandable. If you haul things once or twice a year, the $20 rental from your local hardware store is probably more than sufficient for the task. And significantly cheaper, too.
This is a good point. I’ve watched a lot of idiots ruining their vehicles hauling stuff from Home Depot when a truck is only $20.
Home Depot is pro-Trump. I wouldn’t spend a dime there.
What $20 rental?
Those do not exist anymore.
Truck rentals start at $50 now, when all fees are in.
How the hell are truck rentals so cheap in the US? Vans start at 70 euros here and I have to go the other side of the country because that’s where the airport is.
I get most of my needs done with the much more easily available rental trailers instead. My wagon has a tow hitch for that.
I am, however, considering an SUV and buying a bigger trailer of my own so I could put more than ~500 kilos on it as that’s the limit or the brake less rental trailers. I expect to do a bunch of hauling next few years, major home repairs are in order and I ain’t paying other people to do all of it for me. I’ll bring my own materials home from the shop and DHL my own work.
Its largely because of volume. They can keep every truck for moving pretty much on the road, all the time.
Especially around the 1st of the month. You need to reserve at least a month out for a 1st of the month rental.
Also, we accumulate loads of crap here. I surmise that’s less common in your area.
Home Depot charges 29.99+ a charge per mile. Otherwise I was going to agree with you.
they do not charge per mile, only time. 75 minutes is $20 or $30 depending on the type of vehicle. A whole day is like $150.
eg: https://www.homedepot.com/p/rental/load-n-go-truck-rental/316822131
It’s actually a bargain.
Damn, it’s been a minute since I looked into it but that’s a lot more than it used to be and even furthers the point.
Home Depot fucking sucks, then. Menard’s has a $0.50 per mile charge, $19 for 75 minutes, $6 for each additional 15 min
The difference in price between a sedan and a truck is like $400-500 annually
I can’t say I have heard of Menards but they sound the same as Home Depot, or worse maybe since Home Depot charges for the whole day last I checked.
OMG, this is ludicrous! $60+ for a couple of hauls a year!!! How dare they!!!
If you live right next-door to the Home Depot then sure, if you live in a town like the one I grew up in and it has no Lowe’s or Home Depot or other car rental place even though it has 16,000 people and a college in it then no not at all.
You don’t need more than 200 miles of range if you are using roads in the United States.
So, 260 advertised.
You just don’t.
From my experience reading the various articles everywhere and driving an EV exclusively since 2018… it is 100% misinformation, largely based on media coverage. And the media’s lack of updates as technology has advanced quickly. Not all of it is intentional misinformation, some is just obviously ignorance by whoever is covering the topic.
There is the disinformation campaigns from the fossil fuel lobby, but that is separate from just poor journalism and people not updating their beliefs from previous reports they heard years prior.
Most US manufacturers have only produced the minimum EVs required for things tax breaks. And several of the big foreign manufacturers selling in the US have done the same, or cancelled plans to expand. Or they’re focused on Hydrogen still for some reason despite 2+ decades proving that’s a failed technology for consumer use.
So you really just have new startups on the scene, like Rivian, and Lucid, and a couple companies making mid EVs that clearly still use ICE thinking and just have an EV powertrain dropped in them, not taking advantage of the things they can do without an ICE engine.
A big indicator of this is if they still have an Engine Start/Stop button. There is no reason for that to exist in most EVs, especially if it has a mobile app and can have settings changed and starting things remotely. The vehicle is never “off” so there’s nothing to start, just have it turn “on” when the key is inside. Tesla has done this basically since the beginning just fine. Getting in an EV and having to press a useless button just because that’s what the ICE version needed is pointless and shows a lack of real development for the vehicle.
The start button (or app, or whatever) absolutely does something, and to say otherwise leads me to think you need to dive in deeper to how they work.
The button closes the contactors, activating the high voltage battery pack. To do otherwise is a massive safety risk. It also verifies the key (to prevent theft, and required by law) and on some models launches the parts of software needed for driving.
I’m not familiar with Tesla’s design, but it should be easy enough to set the code to run this process whenever the door closes. Whether that’s what people want is a different question entirely.
Yeah Chevy got rid of the start button on the 2027 and it turns on* when you close the door. Its one of the common complaints I read about on the subreddit. It would annoy me as sometimes I dont need the car on and automatic things annoy me
Technological devices making assumptions always seems to be grating, and can even be disastrous. I’m not against automation at all, but it is important automate things only when the automated tasks are certain to be appropriate, rather than guessing, as in this example of the car automatically starting when you get in, when sometimes you dont want that.
I WANT a start/stop button or key. I do not want smartphone control. It is a car, whose sole purpose is to haul me around from place to place. Why does it need all of that extra crap?
You get a key with a Tesla/Rivian and don’t HAVE to setup the app.
I have had a tesla and a ford EV (with a start button). I prefer having a start button. I did not like how the tesla always fired on all of its accessories and HVAC every time I approached the car, even if i wasn’t going anywhere.
in case anyone asks, no i don’t still have the tesla.
A lot of what I like about my bolt is how much its like a gas car. Everything has buttons for the most part, it has a start and stop button etc. A lot of my coworkers have teslas so I ride around in them often and its what put me off from even considering them
The R1S doesn’t have a start/stop button. Or at least the 2025 version doesn’t.
2026 doesn’t either and it’s glorious not having one.
No sarcasm; there’s no need for the button - it can all be done with sensing and software.
I demand a physical power button for my EV, and a physical key fob. I am not okay with how Rivian only gives new owners a single key fob, the second key being relegated to an RFID card and an expectation that any other driver must use a smartphone app to replace physical key fob functions.
Taycan fits my needs very well in those regards, thankfully.
focused on Hydrogen still for some reason despite 2+ decades proving that’s a failed technology for consumer use
Debate about þe technology aside, it has a compelling use case for vehicles: refill times. Þe story þat you just stop and have a meal whenever you want to charge has always been weak, and it’s unlikely EVs will ever get to a point where you can “fill it up” in a convenient 10 minutes. Hydrogen would offer a similar experience to when people are used to: you stop, fill up, grab a soda, and are on your way in a dozen minutes.
Now, I believe people are solving þe wrong problem here. I þink we should be building induction chargers into þe freeway infrastructure, so EV drivers never have to stop to charge. Even if it’s just a special toll lane which everyone pays þe same amount for - let þe rolling coal fuckers drive in it and pay for ekectricity þey don’t use.
Apparently your “th” is still broken.
The main problem with hydrogen is that it’s not actually clean energy. The vast majority of hydrogen is byproduct of fossil fuel production. Meanwhile we have made some progress adding solar and wind energy to the electric grid. You can even add solar panels to your roof and power your car for decades.
Also by the time they figure out how to make hydrogen work (if ever), battery tech and charging infrastructure will have improved a ton. and people will be more used to the idea of taking a short break after driving a few hours.
Yeah,
Debate about þe technology aside
So much to unpack about hydrogen. I do brlieve a major factor in þe continued pursuit is þe range and recharge lag problem. I don’t þink it’s any more mysterious þan þat.
and people will be more used to the idea of taking a short break after driving a few hours.
How “short” of a break? After how many miles, is the question.
For example, I’ve done a Texas to NY run in 23 hours clock time. Can I do that, with short breaks after driving a few hours to charge? Or a NY to Illinois trip in under 11 hours?
No. But, sometimes, you really do need to get from point A to point B as rapidly as you can.
We would need to get range up to about 900 miles on a charge, to make is more feasible, as 900 miles is about the max one can drive in a 24 hour period.
You may think these are just pipe dreams of impossible to meet requirements, and it’s true, they are on the outside of what a typical person would need. However, it is a lost capability that needs to be filled.
For example, designing cars so you don’t sit for an hour to charge. You pull up, 2 people (Or yourself, hopefull) swap the battery rack for a new rack, of pre-charged batteries. As long as we can eek out 300 miles on a single charge, that could work. But we need infra for that, and industry standards.
Says the CEO of a luxury EV brand that only makes SUVs and pick-ups that sell for >60k. Can’t imagine why no one is interested…
You clearly didn’t read the article. Did you even read the headline?
They literally just released a (more) reasonably priced SUV. The R2.
They always planned on starting with the high end market, then slowly release more economically priced versions as their technology matures.
Will it work? Who knows.
The R2 still starts at 50K
*$45K. Either way, there are a lot of people in the US who are paying >$60K for vehicles with internal combustion engines, so I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make
Hate to be the bearer of bad news but $50k is the current average price for a new car in the US.
The R2 starts at $45k, which isn’t a bad price for a luxury SUV.
They’re also planning a more affordable R3.
Its not that luxury, the $45k trim. But its a good price for a medium size modern SUV EV
“luxury” is a few hundred dollars in farkles suckers pay thousands for.
I think you replied to the wrong person.
Average price is a meaningless number. Median price is far lower.
You need to look at what people spend, not average Corollas and Rolls Royces.
Median price includes used. We’re not talking about a used R2.
R2 45-50k trims don’t actually arrive until next year
50K is comparable to a similarly sized ICE truck.
I’m certainly anti-Rivian with their all-SUV lineup.
Meanwhile, I just want a 15 to 20 year old EV or PHV coupe for under $4k that I can buy for cash and doesn’t look like someone’s idea of a cross between a roller skate and a bullfrog.
I just want a 15 to 20 year old EV or PHV coupe for under $4k
Probably need to wait about 10 more years then, for the new cars to be used cars :)
Except there aren’t even that many ICE coupes, much less EV coupes.
4 doors is 2 doors too many!
Unless you have kids. Then 2 doors are 2 doors too few.
My car is for fun. Her car is for the rest of us.
