Electric Vehicles

If you want a really long range EV, you might look for a used Lucid
https://insideevs.com/news/732294/used-lucid-air-low-price/

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ICE vehicles make up less than 5% of new vehicle sales in Norway -

Yes, well gasoline in Norway costs well over $8.00 a gallon and the federal government heavily subsidizes EVs and requires local governments to do so as well.

The economics just make owning an EV cheaper than an ICE.

Yes, it appears they over-incentivized which is creating new environmental problems. Car ownership has gone up in Norway and public transportation usage has stayed low.

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I feel holding on to our 15 year old Honda Civic (which we hardly use anyway) a while longer is environmentally better than buying an EV given the environmental cost of producing any new car.

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For my family (5 drivers/5 vehicles) the number one reason we haven’t gone all electric is $, but there is also the varying use cases for our vehicles. Minivan is only thing that will fit all 7 of us, small pickup truck handles the various furniture and home improvement loads. Those vehicles are old, and have 205k/195k miles on them. So the first and only ev to date is a small commuter car. It gets first use/longest use priority, followed by the gas cars with best gas mileage (these have 130k/155k miles), then minivan/pickup when needed.

As more evs are produced, the resale market will improve, giving people a less environmentally costly alternative when they must replace a vehicle. But you are correct in saying sometimes the best alternative is to continue with what you have.

Our 15 year anniversary Honda has well under 100k miles on it so that is low mileage for one of them.

I think there should be a few more affordable EVs worth waiting for coming out in the next couple of years. Actually the new Honda EV, which is more affordable than most is selling quite well -

https://electrek.co/2024/09/04/honda-prologue-ev-record-sales-us-rollout-heats-up/

I think the EVs will only get better and cheaper. May well get a plug-in hybrid when we abandon our old Honda.

I think PHEV is a poor option, if you tend to keep a car for 15 years. Much higher fire risk, a lot more moving parts that can go wrong and a soon-to-be redundant technology.

Eh, buying a used EV, say three years old, is a good option. The prices on those are way lower than new ones. Posters can theorize why…

I haven’t taken delivery yet, but I am trading in my Honda Civic for a Tesla model Y.
In blue, of course.
Thanks to Mathman for a referral link saving me a grand and encouraging it.
And thanks to the government for $7,500 wouldn’t have done it without you.

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Mine is blue, it’s a beautiful color - especially in sunlight. I got the black interior, I don’t trust myself with white, lol.

I decided at the test drive that a model Y would probably be best.
Then I found out he had a model Y. I knew he had a Tesla, didn’t know which one.
They are both blue with black interior.
Great minds … and all that
Although I didn’t get the performance version so …

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Here’s an innovation to hybridize existing diesel trucking fleets. The trailer has an electric battery and motor which effectively reduces the weight that the diesel motor has to pull. The mpg goes up by about 50%.

https://electrek.co/2024/09/18/range-energys-electric-trailer-helps-egg-farm-improve-mpg-by-up-to-70/

That’s pretty cool. On “the trucks feeling lighter”…I hope the company is thinking through what that means in terms of training drivers to understand they actually aren’t.

The cybertruck and it’s symbiotic relationship with flat bed trucks.

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I am sure this varies by state, but a good portion of road maintenance is funded by a tax on gasoline. Surely, electric cars & trucks are at least doing a proportional amounts of wear and tear on roads, if not more (allegedly, EV’s go through tires at at least double the rate of ICE vehicles so perhaps they also wear out roads faster?). EV’s do not contribute to the cash flow to maintain the roads that they use.

Sure, but that’s not what I was asking.

Hip Tiger claimed that EVs cause more road damage than ICEs and I was asking why.

Obviously they are not paying gas tax, but that has nothing to do with the quantity of damage they are causing to roads.

(Yes, it is quite reasonable to extract some charge from EVs for road maintenance… again… not what I was asking.)

Road damage, as I understand it, is proportional to weight to the fourth power. ‘Weight’ is really pressure, so think ‘per axle,’ more or less. EVs are generally heavier than ICE cars, so they will wear out the roads more. A civil engineering friend once told me when they do calculations on road life they often begin by only counting large trucks because they weigh so much more and do the bulk of damage despite being a pretty small share of traffic.

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