I think you know very well I would never engage with this possibility as a means of self preservation. Good day sir!

Just because he compared it to a suburban doesn’t mean that the Mitsubishi mirage and used Corollas aren’t a thing.

And sure the Chevy Bolt is 26k, but that’s still 5k more expensive than a new Corolla and has like half the range, and you can fuel the Corolla way faster.

I love the front end of the Rivian.

Whenever I see these razor thin LED headlights on vehicles, my first thought is are those COB chips getting cooled properly?

It just comes across as very sus, a bit like form over function at the expense of headlight longevity

I’m not even sure what my headlights look like. I never really see them.

And the fucking dangerous high front which is completely unnecessary on an electric car, why is it there. Not even the TESLA FUCKING CYBERTRUCK pulls that shit, say what you will about Tesla, but they understand how the differences between gas and electric cars can be taken advantage of.

It’s not, of course it’s not.

But we know that legacy Reddit users never even bothered to read the articles anyway. Hurray! I missed-- not.

That context is great, but I haven’t seen any articles about the Chevy CEO saying such astoundingly tone deaf shit. 🤔 maybe the price isn’t what’s inflammatory.

This is true, but fuel taxes are very low. Most states that are charging an EV “road maintenance fee” (with whatever phrasing they select) are charging way more than an ICE vehicle would contribute in fuel taxes. And while it is true that BEVs are heavier than ICE vehicles, all else held equal, and that road wear and tear is strongly dependent on weight… as I recall reading, the overwhelming majority of road wear and tear is the result of freight trucks and similar vehicles.

I’m all for going electric, but an 8500lb truck is not helping the environment.

The issue here isn’t that it’s an EV in this case. It’s that it’s a truck. I’d wager than >95% of people buying trucks in the US would be perfectly served by a four door sedan or comparable sized vehicle. Trucks have largely become expensive vanity items to act as an external signal of a person’s cultural identity. Contractors and similar that actually use a truck for truck purposes still exist, but they’re comically outnumbered by people buying trucks for no good reason.

Removed by mod

If your road trips are only once in a while, you easily make up for it in saved time not doing weekly fill-ups.

What, you don’t like spending a quarter of your road trip waiting for “fuel”?

Right but don’t make vulgar statements about how fabulous you are, and how stupid everyone else is but not buying your fabulous expensive car that’s fabulous and expensive, but that’s fine because you’re a startup.

I have outdoor parking :/

I don’t have any electrical plugs in my garage. The best I can do is commandeering a 60 watt bulb socket with one of those adapters that turns it into a socket. Also, I don’t think the apartment complex is rigged up to charge tenants for the cost of running that bulb and garage door opening either. So they probably would be pissed if I started charging a full EV in there.

Even in that instance the Lightning is a better deal.

IIRC, Norway also offered substantial tax incentives to people that bought electric cars. IIRC, the fed. gov’t did the same in the US, and car companies responded by raising prices by the amount of the incentive.

That’s true but you have to consider how much of the car market is made up of used cars. When I was last shopping for cars (4 years ago) there were hardly any EVs in my budget and the ones that were, were 10 year old Priuses. Most people frankly don’t have the income to buy anything more than a gas car. (Market for EVs may have changed since my experience). The way I see it is the CEO is making a good point while also shitting on poor people.

The only new car still sold in the US for under $20k is the Mitsubishi Mirage, and even that model will likely be phased out in the next few years. I also wouldn’t recommend buying one, as, speaking from experience, it tends to roll over in a slight breeze.

I own a gasoline car. I was being too flippant. I would point out that our car centric culture is inefficient no matter how you swing it. I agree it’s a part of solving climate change, but cars of any type are still a problem, we need to massively overhaul our urban transit and get away from cars in urban areas.

In the end all transit only accounts for 15% of the overall problem. Our spread out infrastructure caused by car convenience has many other negative externalities though, like the increased need to maintain more roads, electric loss over longer distribution, heating and cooling in large single family homes made possible by cars bringing you to your job while living way out in the suburbs (arguably way more serious than the cars themselves), etc. The suburban experiment was an environmental disaster, and I say this as someone that lives in a large house in the suburbs currently pumping out AC, so I’m not judging.

But plugging in your personal tank isn’t really solving the problem. It’s just ignoring it. Cars are the problem no matter the fuel source, because of the impact they have had on how we spread out and grow our consumption… We need multi use zoning, dozens of train lines in every city, bike infrastructure, work at home, massive reduction in fossil fuel based power plants… A reordering of society around alternatives to spreading out, a massive worldwide effort of urban densification. As well as a massive effort to hold corporations accountable for their energy use as well. That and we need to stop having so many fucking kids, the world can’t support this level of consumption forever.

Not disingenuous. True. Grid power is still dirty so electric cars are still dirty. Probably about a 50% improvement in carbon emissions based on the most common fuel mix in the US for an e car.

Clean transportation by car is a luxury that we do not yet have.

A small house for 74,000? Lol, you’d need at least double that in the Northeast part of America.

Completely agree, people are not zooming out enough to understand the real problems. Our spread out car centric infrastructure has externalities past just the fuel issues on the cars themselves. Our car centric culture is largely responsible for a huge boom in energy consumption outside of just driving. There is a huge cost to spreading out beyond cars. I think the biggest is our trend in occupying larger and larger single family homes and larger and larger office spaces which require heating and cooling (Which is a little more than double the environment cost of cars iirc). One of the benefits of densification is that you often share a wall with someone else that is also heating and cooling and there is far less energy loss. Those energy costs far exceed our transit issues, but are directly related, in that cars allow density to reduce and therefor people to consume more energy at home and their place of work. And if people are still unwilling to densify then we need to greatly increase the energy efficiency of single family homes and businesses by 4 fold. Better insultation, better windows, better appliances, across the board.

The thing that bothers me about the communication around electric cars is not that they are an improvement, because they most certainly are a good stop gap to one of our many issues, but people like to singularly focus on car fuel type like it is the focal point of climate change when it really is urban and suburban car centricity that is a much larger issue. Electric cars wont stop climate change, they only slow it down a little. Countries like Denmark, the Netherlands, Switzerland, etc are far closer to becoming carbon neutral partly because car centricity is not a focus in these places, people live closer together and use all types of transit that supplement each other. And yet no one would claim any of those places are unpleasant to live, far from it they are some of the most desired places to live in the world. We need to start modeling the rest of the world off of the design improvements those countries made over the last 60 years.

I have absolutely no idea how it would be possible in a rural area or a car centric city. I guess it wouldn’t be, and the people in charge are not willing to change.

I live in a car-centric city, and am relatively civically engaged. Speaking from personal experience, for most of the people in charge, it’s not that they’re unwilling to change; it’s that they’re so indoctrinated from having grown up in American car-centricity that they don’t understand the problem or the alternatives enough to realize that there’s anything to change to. They’re like the people in this thread, who think “infrastructure” means things like adding EV chargers to suburban-sprawl parking lots or trying to get public transit to serve neighborhoods of single-family houses. They have no comprehension of the scope of the problem, which is that the Suburban Experiment is a failure and that the geometry of low-density, car-centric development makes it unsustainable, unaffordable, and unhealthy, regardless of how you power the cars.

Even when they support things like transit-oriented development or abolishing minimum parking requirements, they tend to think it’s the exception to be implemented in certain areas instead of realizing that it needs to be the default way we do things now.

A single delivery truck carries 100-200 packages, if everyone drives to the store instead, you’d have 100+ cars on the road. There is a huge difference.

Real sustainability comes from changing the zoning code to cease outlawing walkability.

Reply:

For quite a lot of America, not owning a car is simply not feasible

WHY IS IT NOT FEASIBLE WHOFEARSTHENIGHT? IS IT BECAUSE OF ZONING? ITS BECAUSE OF ZONING ISNT IT