I remember when EVs where a pointless toy for rich people to flaunt their wealth, now they're causing problems by letting poor people drive more. That's some remarkble progress they've made while still somehow remaining vaguely problematic.
Poor people also were against EVs before they went mainstream, so does that count for anything? I would evangelize Tesla and EVs in general in 2010 and the overwhelming majority of people who thought that EVs were “dumb” were poor and lower class. A poor person has the exact same opportunity as a rich person to say the words “that makes sense, let’s try it.”
My guess there is quite a lot of this low-hanging fruit improvements. Electric cars its a young technology than can go through tons of incremental changes that will add up.
E.g. compare gas cars over decades. There were tons of improvements that allow much better fuel efficiency.
Improving public transportation is a far superior solution than forcing people to buy EV cars by outlawing gas engines. For the median income in the US, or person working minimum wage - all of this is pie-in-the-sky elite talk. EVs are essentially for rick folks to feel better about themselves.
I know why they did it, but it meant that to start with, rich people got electric cars. Progress is often made by lifting the top of what's possible before raising the floor of what's acceptable. It must happen that way almost by definition.
Electrical (battery based) car's are more a marketing thing that a real tech change. They simply can't for now substitute fossil-fuel car's.
Battery life is still a problem, most of the people have yet do discover due to the young age of ALL electric car's in actual market, inability to offer enough electricity to recharge them at scale is another problem most people still have to discover simply because we actually have very small percentage of EV around. And that's only to cite most important problems.
Of course I expect may downvote, without comment so I expect this comment fade quickly but since today's prize of EVs people that can actually buy them is supposed to been able to compute enough to choose and REAL EV sell confirm that. Despite all the marketing.
EVs have been around for decades, and that's the issue here. They weren't ever cool and it was never particularly cheap to buy one. California used to (still does?) give rebates and an okay to use the carpool lane, and that didn't even cause a significant bump.
All Tesla did is prove you can sell an EV at a high price point to tech people who love all sorts of trendy things that don't sell outside that sphere. This in no way says EV is a mass-market vehicle yet.
Tesla did bring many infrastructure issues to the forefront, and that's no small feat.
Hello r/fuckcars folks, berating people for making reasonable choices within their environment isn't a winning strategy. EVs are a legitimate incremental improvement. Sorry we don't all live a bikable wonderland with good public transit.
There was some old regulations on the books that allowed EVs to drive toll free and use buss lanes during rush hour.
Hardly anyone cared when it was introduced, because the major EV available were Think compacts.
But when Tesla introduced their sports car, suddenly everyone monied individual in the cities took interest. Because it was still a EV according to regulations, so now they could drive something that looked and performed just like the gas guzzler the neighbor had, get around tolls and rush hour traffic, and pretend to care about the environment.
Yeah, EVs are the minimum possible change that at first glance looks like it might work, of course without disturbing the global capitalist system or our cultural values.
Wow, people are going to be pissed off in thirty years. "Why didn't that fix it all? We have to do more?"
I have a hypothesis that the auto industry didn't believe EVs would catch on until relatively recently, so they half-assed things like the charging infrastructure thinking they were just checking a box to make the government and a few Tesla fanboy weirdos happy.
The internal combustion engine isn't just the thing that powers cars. In that industry it's practically a religious object. If it doesn't go vroom vroom it's not a car and your penis will fall off... or at least I think there's a whole generation of people in that field who feel that way.
The fact that EVs have tipped and the transition is not going away is just now starting to sink in.
So the argument for EVs here is not that they're better, but that the experience of owning a gas car will eventually get worse, bringing the convenience bar down to meet EVs? That's hardly compelling. It also reminds me of some people's efforts to "improve" public transport which seem to consist only of intentionally inconveniencing car drivers, but doing barely anything to actually improve the alternatives
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