Car affordability in 2022 and beyond

From my own experience, NYC and Washington D.C. are not that bad, but both are still well behind what most other "big cities" in the world are offering.

And I have my own experience in Boston. The T itself isn't completely awful, but once you add purple-line problems it's all over. Part of that is just a bit of geographic honesty: Real Boston suburbs are places like Somerville, Brookline and maaaybe Quincy. You go out as far as the "Ws" (Weymouth, Weston, Wakefield, Winchester) and you're just buying into some real estate agent's dream. People only started referring to those outer towns as "Boston suburbs" in response to a ton of road building and car ownership, both of which are barely a century old.

I can easily see that transportation for the physically disabled adds enormous pressure to have a private transportation solution. Lots of cities worldwide are hard on the less-able-bodied.

 

Ford hikes electric F-150 prices


tl;dr: the base spec version has gone up from $40k to $60k between product announcement and today.

 

Here we go again.

Another ridiculous, tone-deaf piece on electrek.

 

I agree with the idea that mobility electrification is fundamentally important and should be done urgently for environmental reasons. I want to make that clear first off.

It is not apparent to me that the author ever considered the idea that automakers invested in ICE production might have some responsibilities to their shareholders.

So it looks to me like a mis-directed complaint- trying to shame automakers for doing exactly what they are obligated to do. I think it would be a lot more constructive if the effort were spent in trying to change those obligations.

Going after management & operations down at the manufacturing level seems wrong. They are all deeply incentivized to sell all they can out of old, paid-for manufacturing facilities. If they don't, they get fired. Even if they don't get fired, their competitors are constantly clamoring to take their place and allowing that will get them fired for sure.

With different incentives, this could all work differently- but that's going to have to come from further up. Maybe way further up.

Calling out manufacturer management for the failings of shareholders, banks & government regulators just looks wrong to me.

 

-Not specifically related to the electrek article tangent above-
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What would rapid adoption of EVs look like? What would it take? Here's a few questions and ideas focused on affordable EV adoption.

1. Make charging-at-work a default wherever possible. Does the employer have parking for employees? Okay, every last employee space should be electrified.

Lots of apartment dwellers don't have access and also don't have the leverage to get chargers installed at home, and that's assuming they even have dedicated parking. Requiring employers to provide charging for employees would go a long way to cracking this one. It also gets a lot of charging done during daytime hours, which seems to be emerging as an important detail to prevent lopsided grid loading.

2. This one is an open-ended question about volume. I'm not a stats guy, but I know some of you are. I did some searches to get an idea of how many cars are sold, used vs. new. From what I found on the public internet, it looks like there are about 1.2 million new car sales per month in the USA. And about 3 million used car sales per month.

A significant swath of the buying public cannot afford new cars at all. We're never going to meet our environmental goals (demands? necessities?) by only serving the peak of the market. So how do we get to 3 million used EV sales per month?

2a. Would there be a useful benefit to requiring all EV makers to lease all of their output as a means to boost that secondary market? The root idea is to use rapid depreciation to convert less-affordable EVs into more-affordable EVs.

3. I'd like to read more specifics about reducing and eliminating petro subsidies, or possibly mirroring their benefits for electrification efforts. Any suggestions?

 

Some don't, and many don't provide a 1:1 employee-to-parking-space ratio. So a more sophisticated rule would be needed, no doubt.

But that's the sort of thing I'm trying to call attention to. I'll throw in an example from my suburban neighborhood, an ordinary grocery store which has about 20 people on full time duty.

Most of the employees who work there need to drive there. As is common, there is no separate employee lot. The employees are directed to park in spaces far away from the door to leave more desirable spaces open for the customers. Many of the people who work there live in rentals with little or no opportunity to charge at home.

So in a charge-at-work regime, they'd need electrify about 20 of their least-desirable parking spaces. And that would probably have to happen after they electrified some of the more desirable slots for customer use, just to prevent the customers from taking over chargers that the employees are counting on.

Anyone else see a bunch of complications in this?

 

I agree, it's plenty of time to have done something. We should all be upset that nobody lifted a finger.

My point is that competitive businesses are absolutely locked into behaving a certain way, and they'll be brutally punished by one part of the market or another (customers or shareholders) if they don't behave that way- and that way makes no allowance for environmentally-rooted rationale.

Most businesses are conditioned to expect that regulatory deadlines are negotiable. That 7 years could have turned into 15 years or never. The CEO could get canned for spending money to prepare something that is never needed, especially if their competition didn't spend anything on prep. (I used the term manufacturing management- I loosely meant CEOs, upper management and boards)

The corporate response to regulations and deadlines is utterly predictable. They'll fight it until it comes to pass and at that point they'll go to the shareholders and say "Sorry, we tried to do it your way. Please be assured that we didn't miss anything that our competitors also didn't."

And that answer keeps working.

So why attack a CEO for pleasing their shareholders?

I don't see this changing until the CEO's marching orders are changed away from "Extract all possible value from the market and reward your investors with all haste."

 

I agree with that one whole-heartedly. On the other hand, I've found that most Priuschatters are relatively hostile to public transportation so I tend not to bring it up that often.