• 4 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • That’s a very special case where EV is not suitable. The 2200 km in 26 hours you mention is very far from legal driving in most countries. Here you need resting periods, and AFAIK you can’t legally drive more than 11 hours per day as a professional, so that trip would take 2 days here anyway, unless it’s something you do for fun?
    So here (EU) that trip would in fact be possible with an EV with little loss of time, because of the mandatory resting periods, but maybe in Australia there wouldn’t be the necessary infrastructure to charge on such long trips.





  • I’ll take charging the 400-500 km of that distance from home for free from my solar panels any day.

    The longest distance we drive semi regularly is about 500 km.
    In an ICE car that’s about 67 liter of gasoline for the round trip, which is now almost €2 per liter here. That’s €134 in gasoline per trip.
    In the EV it’s 18kWh/100km making it 180 kWh total for the round trip, of which we start precharged with 77 kWh each way, only needing to charge 26 kWh.
    Even with a very healthy safety margin charging 50 kWh, (10 minutes each way) We only spend about €20 on charging.

    The time it takes to charge matches the time it takes to step aside to pee, and is less time than getting a cup of coffee or a snack for the trip.

    I can spend €100 on snacks on the trip, and still come out ahead economically. 😋
    And the charging has not extended the time it takes significantly if at all.






  • The story about new cars being sold as used at reduced prices is old, and the Chinese government tried to intervene on that already half a year ago.
    That said the situation in the Chinese car industry is indeed crazy. With every possible financial trick they can think of being used.
    Including 6 month delayed payments to suppliers, that instead get vouchers they can sell to be able to continue.
    As the article writes, some of them should have been bankrupted by now, but “somehow” they all keep going.
    The “somehow” possibly being things like regional politicians supporting the factories to keep the jobs. ( Which is common in mostly all countries to do. )

    It’s very interesting to follow the current problems of car makers across the globe, with for instance even the mighty VW group also having problems. Difference is that last I heard, they have margin enough on sales to still remain profitable, although it’s only with 5%, which is a very narrow profitability for a market with heavy R&D cost.

    Anyways, I’m personally betting this cutthroat competition which is currently also spreading in EU will last through next year too, so I’m still waiting a bit before going electric. Expecting ever better offers to come next year too.

    We sure live in interesting times. 😱


  • I bet Lee Iacocca is turning in his grave over that!
    Lee Iacocca created one of the most iconic cars in American history, and now Ford is using the name for a car that has absolutely nothing to do with the original concept of the Mustang.

    IMO the Mustang E is a very nice civilized sporty sedan, but that’s not what a Mustang is supposed to be. That is not what gave Mustang its reputation.





  • I never claimed they are going back to ICE, but Toyota claimed that they had an ICE engine that would make EV obsolete a couple of years ago when Toyota didn’t have any Electric cars only hybrid.
    And no they did not start with EV before hydrogen, all Japanese car makers bet a lot on Hydrogen because it was supported by their government. This is the reason all Japanese car makers except Nissan are late to the EV market.

    Toyota has made false claims about having amazing batteries before too, seemingly in an attempt to make people wait to buy a new car until Toyota was more competitive. These kinds of vaporware announcements are borderline fraud IMO.


  • IDK I thought CATL was the leader of solid state, and AFAIK already has a working battery that just needs to go into production.
    Usually CATL make their new batteries plugin compatible with previous generation batteries, so EV makers that use CATL can shift to the new batteries without much design change of anything else.
    My guess is that CATL will be before Toyota. And Toyota is full of shit like they’ve been around electric cars for years.
    Don’t get me wrong, current Toyota are decent, but they claimed multiple times in the past to upend the entire market by now. Including claiming they’d make ICE engines to make EV obsolete!
    Don’t trust anything Toyota claims about their future tech, they are as full of shit as Elon Musk.


  • Weird chart where plus as in increasing sales is marked in red, and declining sales are marked in blue?
    Also very obviously car sales have dropped dramatically last year in Russia, but is marked as positive. But the increase is exclusively because of military vehicles, not normal passenger cars.

    But as I’ve been saying since Trump was elected, USA is steadily making itself irrelevant.
    Looks more and more like that factory investment is going to be $4 billion down the drain for Hyundai/LG.
    A $4B and 8500 job factory stopped, because ICE detained 300 South Koreans starting it up on a working Visa!!
    But more than that Hyundai has investments in USA for $28Billion!! Mostly facilities to increase production within USA exactly like Trump wants, yet they detain the Koreans that are there to start it up!

    America first is truly America alone, as some people observed already early on in his first presidency.

    Anyone considering investing in entering the US market, here’s a piece of advice to you:
    Stay the fuck away, it’s not worth it.