Hear, Hear. We are seriously missing out over here in the US and continuing to be protectionist over the big 3 automakers is not going to improve our climate situation.
I consistently hear 2 main arguments against electric vehicles in the US. Range, and cost.
BYD & China is solving both. Range is important because we lack charging infrastructure still, and anyone who rents at an apartment complex, you are screwed and have to rely on public charging stations. Big batteries are important for these folks. People also still have range anxiety, so when a fuel efficient gas car will get ~400+ miles per full tank, only having more expensive cars with a ~250 mile range is a non starter for a lot of people in the US.
Cost is self explanatory. One of the better electric cars sold in the US, the Ioniq 6 STARTS at $38k, which is already more than a significant chunk of the population can afford - you're looking at close to an $800/month payment at current rates for entry level. BYD could sell in the US at around $20,000.
Not to say EV charging has been solved, it is still very much in progress, but 64% of Americans live within 2 miles of a public charging station. We should continue to use policy to encourage "EV ready" infra in residential and apartment settings, places of business, commercial/retail, government, etc, but lots of folks can be served today. The vast majority US housing stock is single family homes (attached and detached combined), and those can, in most cases, be upgraded to support a dedicated circuit for charging. And, to your point, you'll also want to mandate new apartment building build outs are EV charging ready for their tenants.
> The number of EV charging stations has more than doubled since 2020. In December 2020, the Department of Energy reported that there were nearly 29,000 public charging stations nationwide. By February 2024, that number had increased to more than 61,000 stations. Over 95% of the American public now lives in a county that has at least one public EV charging station.
> EV charging stations are most accessible to residents of urban areas: 60% of urban residents live less than a mile from the nearest public EV charger, compared with 41% of those in the suburbs and just 17% of rural Americans.
2 miles is an awfully long way, and 36% of Americans are even further away. That’s 4 miles round trip. Presumably many of those charging stations aren’t that big and disallow you leaving your car overnight. The rest of the numbers are similarly bad.
Some of the new 1000v infrastructure has 10-80% charging occuring in 5 minutes.
These arguments are kind of like horse and cart owners stating that gasoline powered vehicles will.need to be able to get fuel and that's impractical. Its infrastructure and innovation that is still being built out, the that build out is now 10-12 years along for most first world nations.
It’s not insane to hope many cars will be able to go and charge themselves at 2am, when roads are quiet and chargers are free, a few years from now. Optimise over the entire system, schedule it, car ready for the morning.
This is going to be a long time coming. Owners of EVs overwhelmingly live in houses not apartments. No one is going to send their car off to pay many times their home rate per kWh when they could get a home L2 charger and charge it themselves. It would pay for itself in under a year.
My comment is not solving for people who would be better served by charging at home, because they don’t care about the distance to a charger. Waymo’s can already find their own way to a charger, so it’s not a huge stretch to imagine people innovating around this problem for owned cars.
Waymo might build a waymo specific solution, but the general case for the general population won't exist for a long time.
The demand isn't there. The group of people who buy EVs and don't have a home to charge at is too small. And that won't change until the economics of purchasing an EV fundamentally change.
I’m making very loose claims. Hope, it’s not an huge stretch, etc. My error bars are very wide, intentionally, because it’s hard to predict the next 5 years. Your position is a lot more brittle. If self driving works, cars can go fill themselves up. That can change demand, so the demand argument falls away. If taxi’s work and scale up, costs drop, so the economic issue falls away. For you to be right, no innovation must happen.
The point I’m primarily trying to make, repeatedly: distance to a charger is not some universal rule that prevents uptake. The least likely thing to be true is that the market stays the same. If it remains the same in the US for a few years, China will crush this market.
I disagree, you're missing a really important part. If self driving exists, then cars can drive themselves to the spot where the chargers are, which is necessary but not sufficient.
Either a human needs to be employed overnight plugging in and unplugging these cars ($$) or else every single charger that supports this needs to have new fancy robotic arms and some agreed-upon protocol that cars can use to request a charge.
Considering that so far the story of EV chargers in America has looked like "download my app!" people struggling and failing to get credit card readers reliably working, I have no faith that this would happen in a few years.
I’d considered it but assumed a person in one place is cheaper than many people wandering around to fill their own cars. Just bake it into the price. This is not an insurmountable problem compared to “require all buildings must be upgraded to power EV charging”. If I paid you a million dollars to figure it out I think you could make a plan in under a day.
The benefit is that you can power the cars when there is least demand on the grid, on the roads, on the need for the vehicles themselves, on the time of people who currently wait at chargers for their cars to charge. Fix one thing (and build upon the main innovation of cars driving themselves) and you unlock all this other waste. The charging location can even manage this by setting availability to align with staff, eg 5am to 11pm, or 24/7 if they want to hire up. You can even have roaming staff, eg wander between three locations and just switch the cars out.
It's certainly not an insurmountable problem, I just think we're in a local minimum that will prevent it from being a thing in, say, the next 5 years. I would agree with your other statement that China may well figure it out.
The current state of affairs in the US is that having a L2 charger at home and paying $E for 100kwh of electricity is massively less expensive than paying $E*5 for the car to go charge itself via some third party. This will not be a cheap service. The places where people tend to buy electric vehicles, generally coincide with high electricity prices and high labor costs. Maybe the high electricity costs can be somewhat offset by using off-peak power, but that's also off-peak generation due to solar panels, so who knows.
This also relies on the innovation of "cars that can drive themselves to the charger", which has been 18 months away in Teslas for what, a decade now? And Teslas are now a tiny proportion of the EVs sold in the US. Something less expensive and better price-per-range like the Ioniq 5/6 or the Equinox EV don't even have the hardware to take advantage of a system like this if you could snap your fingers and make these overnight charging facilities exist.
I don't think the economics work in the 2020s. Someday, sure.
> 64% of Americans live within 2 miles of a public charging station.
If this includes AC chargers, leaving your car for 8 hours 2 miles away is an absolute pain.
If it doesn't, the question becomes are the chargers occupied? Are they operational?
Waiting at a gas station takes a minute, waiting at a charger takes 30.
I've been driving an EV for more than 5 years and pretending that charging isn't a significant hindrance to EV ownership is disingenuous. It's actually gotten worse because more EVs are on the road and the chargers haven't kept pace with the rising demand.
I’m currently on a road trip and was leaving the car at a nearby charger which was walking distance from where I’m staying - I can’t imagine owning one where either this wasn’t available or there wasn’t a fast charger I could spend 10 minutes at.
The actual long distance drives were super easy thanks to Superchargers - 5-10 minute stops keep you driving for hours! It doesn’t feel disadvantaged compared to gas so long as the infrastructure is there.
I think the difficulty is the installation process. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that the challenge of getting that much run to convenient places isn't always that easy and, combined with the regulatory burdens likely involved in something providing that much power is scaring away potential installations.
You have to think a lot of the low hanging fruit locations are taken by now and, even if it's profitable, it doesn't make any profit while you're building it and I've seen a "coming soon" sign on top of what looked like a finished installation for more than a year at a mall near me.
Byd recently came out saying the hyper competitive landscape and low prices needs to end soon. The Chinese government is propping up a lot of their auto industry right now. So some protectionism is needed if you don’t want one of the last bits of manufacturing strength to disappear in the US.
Genuine question, we have manufacturing strength in the US auto industry?
Even among Americans, American cars aren't considered that good. There's a massive reliability premium you pay for Honda and Toyota. Even cars with 100k miles on them (frustratingly as a buyer) keep their value. And they're manufactured in the US, inasmuch as any car can be said to be manufactured in a single location.
I've been searching around and I can't even find data about other countries importing our cars which to me would be the biggest signal of strength.
I own a Chevy Bolt EUV, made in the US. After 18 months driving it, I was happy enough with it that we leased a Chevy Equinox EV to replace my wife's gas car. The Equinox is made in Mexico, not the US but we've also been happy with it for 9 months so far.
We've owned Hondas (Odyssey) and Toyotas (Camry, Prius, Corolla). They've been great. We also changed the oil whenever the car's display said to and did whatever other servicing our independent mechanic advised. I suspect that a lot of cars would also be reliable if they were maintained.
Toyota is recalling 100,000 Tundra trucks because debris was left in the engine. https://www.haleytoyota.com/blog/the-2022-2023-toyota-tundra... There's no perfect vehicle although I'd say EVs get a lot closer when you can refill at home and do basically no maintenance except tire rotations and cabin air filters.
I have a 2018 Model 3 and your description of BYD is exactly how I would describe my Tesla. It feels cheap and plasticky and it creaks. I also briefly had a Model 3 rental car that was newer than mine (but I don't know what year it was) and it also felt the same.
I had thought about throwing an exception for Tesla because they did manage to create cars that people outside the US want. So I guess that does count but I doubt they're what anyone thinks of when they think of American car makes.
Oh I would for sure buy a BYD today if I were able. The ones I've ridden in have been really nice. I mean they are literally plastic but so is every car in the "economy" price range. I don't think their interiors were noticeably different than any other non-luxury car. I've been told that their higher end models don't have this problem.
The hyper competitive landscape only exists within China.
However, the much higher prices these companies are selling their cars outside of China are still much lower than the prices American cars are available at.
Hopefully this will allow cheaper cars to get ~400mi of range but I doubt we'll ever see much more in mainstream cars. Batteries are simply too expensive and too heavy. Fuel tanks are cheap to build, but we still see no gasoline passenger cars with large tanks. The manufacturers sort of standardize around a "normal" capacity, and just want the one option to design, manufacture, crash test, etc.
Not only the climate situation, the economic situation. If the US protects the old tech for another decade it’ll never catch up. The US needs to move along the experience curve as fast as possible, build skills and volume and charging stations and suitable power grids and sources. I would much, much rather be China than the US in this fight right now.
My car gets ~500 miles/800 km per tank. My wife's car, which has a more efficient engine and transmission and is also smaller, but with the same huge tank, gets ~600 miles/960 km per tank. I will have to stop for a bathroom somewhere along a route that long, but only once or twice. I used to have to stop three times for a ~900 mile/1500 km trip that I did a few times.
This is a problem with EV proponents who try to argue that "you'll stop every couple of hours for half an hour or so anyway, so charging isn't an issue". No, I won't. I'll drive 1000 miles with less than 45 minutes of downtime on the whole trip. I don't stop every two hours. Maybe 15 minutes every 4 hours, of which 10 is fueling and going to the bathroom and 5 is getting off and back on the highway.
That's not a slam against EV's, but let's acknowledge their weak points honestly.
I think the argument is not whether EVs will take an extra 65-80 min to go 1000 miles, it’s whether that matters to the average driver. Realistically for my family it doesn’t. I’m sure for some (predominately) solo drivers it does. But then there’s the question of how often you’re driving 1000 mile trips that an extra 1.5hrs max actually impacts anything real in your life…
I guess if you’re trying to follow an ICE car on a road trip then yeah it might be a weak point. If you’re already stopping every 200 miles then it’s no matter. For us, we enjoy travel days more with the built in stretch/bathroom breaks.
You can do 1000 miles in one day, but it is a really unpleasant trip. Doing it in two is so much nicer. Take a hotel one night. Have a really nice meal at a slow restaurant a couple of times. Visit a couple of roadside attractions.
Those are five long charging opportunities, which is two more than you need for a 1000 mile trip.
Ah, yes, that’s the ticket. Spend far more money and time than you would with an ICE to do your trip.
I get the concept, and I am not an EV hater. But let us not pretend that long-distance driving is an imaginary thing. I don’t stop - ever - for more than fifteen minutes, unless it’s to sleep.
I've done 1800 mile trips in 36 hours. Stopping for 20 minutes every three hours to charge, bathroom, and grab food would not have added significant time to the trip.
I've also done the same trip in 3 days, and in 5 days. The longer trips were far more pleasant, and were not slowed down at all by charging.
Overnight charging at hotels is awesome. 5 years ago if a hotel had EV chargers it was very likely one was available. Unfortunately, it's more common that they're all busy now.
Your 500 and 600 miles per fill-up is the kind of outlier that isn't much worth discussing. That kind of range can't be more than about 5-7% of US autos.
My car (Mazda3 hatch) gets 24 mpg, which is actually typical for US mid-sized cars.
I have a 3-5 minute gas station fill up every 260 miles or so, basically once a week. The Chinese MG4 does 435 miles on a charge, 95% of which I could charge at home, the remaining 5% of my miles are my twice a year road trips @ ~400 mi (to LA) and ~800 mi (to Seattle).
The MG4 makes LA without a stop and Seattle with 1 stop.
That's a once a year stop for ~30 minute in the EV compared to 3-4 hours a year sitting at smelly gas stations for my Mazda ICE.
I would certainly trade never having to ever take my car into a gas station, ever again, for one brief stop once a year on my leisurely road trip if I had the cash to buy a great EV.
I hear you, and your concern is real for your context.
But to be fair, not every product has to perfectly fit every context. To be successful a product can fill a small niche, or it can appeal to a large market- it doesn't have to satisfy every use case.
So you're right - driving 1000 miles with no downtime is not an EV strength. But the percentage of the market doing that is tiny. Conversely the proportion of people who live in a house (home charging) and drive < 100 miles a day, is huge.
Even for those doing a "once a year road trip" - well, hire cars exist.
So I completely agree that an EV is not useful to you. I would suggest though that a product can be massively successful, while at the same time appealing to a subset of the market. And appealing to a subset does not limit validity or indeed profitability.
Lipstick seems to be a successful product, despite only appealing to something less than 50% of the market.
Why not? -200 miles each way is in the realm of day trips unless you’re driving very congested corridors. I drove 400+ miles each way last Christmas with two overnights in between. I did the same distance a month or two ago and again last week, though I did stay for about a week each time.
That sounds like you have a more efficient car than many of us. When I switched to an EV I actually got a range upgrade due to having a really inefficient ICE vehicle. Regardless, most of us aren't spending our days doing multi hundred mile drives. We shouldn't be optimizing for that scenario.
You’re an outlier. Most people don’t do long road trips often, and when they do they don’t care to drive 1000 miles with minimal stops, and their gas cars don’t have that much range in a tank of fuel.
Yes, EVs do slow down long road trips a bit. But it’s really not much of a difference. I just did 3000 miles in 10 days in one.
Agreed but this car would solve that for just $25,000 if we didn’t have 100% tariffs on Chinese vehicles. 1,200 mile range, can charge 800 miles in 12 minutes.
I consistently hear 2 main arguments against electric vehicles in the US. Range, and cost.
BYD & China is solving both. Range is important because we lack charging infrastructure still, and anyone who rents at an apartment complex, you are screwed and have to rely on public charging stations. Big batteries are important for these folks. People also still have range anxiety, so when a fuel efficient gas car will get ~400+ miles per full tank, only having more expensive cars with a ~250 mile range is a non starter for a lot of people in the US.
Cost is self explanatory. One of the better electric cars sold in the US, the Ioniq 6 STARTS at $38k, which is already more than a significant chunk of the population can afford - you're looking at close to an $800/month payment at current rates for entry level. BYD could sell in the US at around $20,000.