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Business idea: Very cheap electric city car with low range, but standardised commodity batteries you can rent for long journeys.
Home charging is easily better for city car. Only two use cases for changeable batteries are commercial two wheelers and trailer trucks. And for trucks you’ll need to change out the driver too. There are ones being trialed which use a forklift to change it out.
Making batteries exchangeable adds a lot of costs and overhead. The battery changing infrastructure is even a greater nightmare. Nio tried it and failed. With batteries getting better and better, this concept also is getting less and less feasible. It is really easier and cheaper to expand infrastructure of long range EV renting. That said, in Europe taking the train and renting an EV at the destination (range is not much of an issue then either) is probably the more relaxed option anyway, if a car is needed at all.
Most cheap EVs have a battery you need to rent, and they are “standard” to the company (proprietary)
I’ve wrote this before and I’ll write it again. Conversion kits need to become mainstream. It’s like my old Jeep can have pretty much any engine. Someone converted theirs with using parts from a junk yard Tesla.
There is a whole chunk of people wanting the diesel electric conversion kits Deboss Garage is developing with Edison Motors.
https://debossgarage.com/builds/diesel-electric-edison-pickup
(yes it will be possible to have a big battery instead of an engine + smaller battery)
Pretty cool if it’s legit. The west side Germany 300 got me a giggle. Bookmarked it. Okay, I just finished. I can’t believe this tech is out. I have read about how well it does with frying oil.
as battery tech improves and electric motors become more powerful and ubiquitous it’ll happen. there’s a small market of people converting classic cars to ev. one day I’d like to convert my old honda element. I don’t need 300 miles range, give me 80 and it’ll be fine for grabbing lumber or taking junk to the dump.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53ZV1GMrf50
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqcHIQmWgIs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d53aNHMMai0
and a host of companies trying to cater to the market -
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/T4WWHvZODz4
dig around and there’s a lot more. there’s a lot of rolling stock that can be swapped eventually, it would be stupid to condemn all that metal to scrap.
Totally agree. It sounds like you live in Vermont or the like. I think of how the star trek movie had a electric corvette.
Its an iron!
Go get a used Chevy Bolt or Nissan Leaf. Tesla ain’t the only EV in the US.
Isn’t there Renault 4/5 or Kia EV 2 in USA? They seem perfect
No renaults at all, and no kia ev2 here. Affordable cars are pretty much completely gone from our market.
Oh damn, and with Chinese brands not allowed, its pretty much waiting for Japanese brands for you all
The US is basically walling up its market against affordable compact cars. That can’t be the whole reason however. After all, Renault could sell the R5 or Twingo in the US if it wanted I assume. Are the regulations there so incredibly hostile towards compact cars, or do European companies resent producing compact cars as well and just do it in Europe because they absolutely have to, in order to survive?
Americans don’t like cars any smaller than a house because they make you gay
What do gay Americans drive?
Outbacks or Foresters
My EV only cost 1.5K
No, we need more rail. Enough with cars.
We can’t afford that either, look at California.
“hyperloop” lol
Yeah Americans are shit at doing hsr
And dedicated bike lanes.
I’d take more Heavy rail, light rail, bike lanes, better city layouts, AND cheap electric cars.
I don’t honestly think the US has the technical ability anymore. The US doesn’t really make much and hasn’t since the seventies. That’s a long time. How much of a Ford is actually made in the US? Shoot, how much is designed in the US?
Best they could do would be buy the parts, maybe make the frame, paint it and assemble. Don’t make batteries, don’t make screens, or chips, or leds or much of nothing.
I’m probably gonna get an Ioniq 6 or 5 in a year or two, those are very affordable and have actual buttons and switches.
There won’t be flying cars until Autonomous Vehicles have a perfect self driving score.
Joe Average Potata-brain can’t drive as it is. Now they want to add the extra chaos of multiple tons of debris falling from the sky after minor crash bends one of the stabilizer ports out of alignment?
I walked past a Tesla showroom recently and they had one car on the floor that they still sell, one that they haven’t sold in decades, a frame to a car that’s out of production, and a robot they still don’t produce. They used to have more cars out then they stopped producing them. The stock is still high somehow.
The original roadster is still so cool to me. I wish a small relatively light ev sports car was sold in the US. I don’t want a barge with 800 HP I’d much rather have something nimble with a quarter of the power.
There was very little original with the roadtser. The chassis is just a Lotus Elise that they stuffed an EV drivetrain into.
And there are some small ones. The Kia EV3 is 201hp and under 30k.
Yeah I know and that’s exactly why it was good, because the elise already had an incredible sports car chassis.
The EV3 seems like a fine commuter but is certainly not a sports car in weight, shape, chassis, or suspension. It’s just another compact crossover, seemingly a good one, but not really what I’m talking about. In the US the closest thing is probably the Mini Cooper SE, but it’s still heavier and less powerful than the original roadster.
Imagine if Mazda made an mx-5 EV or Toyota made an 86 EV.
Imagine if Mazda made an mx-5 EV or Toyota made an 86 EV.
I’m pro-EV in general (pro-trains notwithstanding), but don’t see the point in that. I’d rather they just got the people who designed the MX-5 and GT86 to design EV sports cars on their own terms. An MX-5 EV would just be there to remind you how much more fun the ICE version was to drive.
Well yeah I don’t mean literally make the same car but an EV. Of course there are special considerations that need to be made when designing a different type of car. The main reason most EVs aren’t very fun is because most of them haven’t been designed to be.
No shit. I feel like this company has enough money they could produce a $10k Electric car that is basically sold at cost.
Tesla refuses to even develop a compact 20k car they could sell at a profit. Instead the new developments focus on wankpanzers and sports cars with party tricks.
I think it’s because they know they can’t compete with quality or specs at the low end. They’d much rather get customers with gimmicks and “controversial” aesthetics. Chinese cars would eat anything they could build for that price for breakfast but even legacy brands like Hyundai and VW have been able to make good EVs far cheaper than Tesla.
Well, if Hyundai, Kia, VW, Renault and others can compete on reasonably priced compact cars, Tesla should be able to do so too. They do not only produce in the US after all. If they can’t that would be just an admission that their future is that of a niche highend producer. But for that, they are a bit too cheap on the inside.
Why would any company sell anything at cost? The point of a company is to make money
Then sell it for 20k it would still be one of the cheapest on the market. That seems like a pretty braindead leap in logic. The “at cost” comparison is just to show how cheap the baseline should be.
The point of society is to live on.
And I said “basically at.” As in, make SOME money, just not excess money.
If we’re talking about “society” then the way forward is to get rid of cars almost entirely and have extremely robust public transport. Not make new cars.
Yes but let’s say, in the interim, we make cars that are more efficient and better for the environment, and make them affordable enough that everyone can use one.
public transit will never work for 100% of people
Public transit is never going to work until people stop being allowed to make it not work.
Maybe, but you cannot expect an entire societal mindset to change overnight, and for many, it’s never going to change. Society in many places can’t even agree that women are equal to men, which is like, step one for any other equality mindset going down the line, for example. Because it’s been engrained into culture.
Even places with better mass transit than the US like Europe or Japan still have cars. Mas transit works great in some areas and terrible in others. Which is also why its going to be impossible to make it work 100% of the time for 100% of situations.
Even before cars, we had “individual transport” with things like carts and horses etc. mass Transit isn’t even an old concept.
