Especially since the US is a rich country.

There’s basically no correlation between a country’s wealth and its EV uptake. High EV adoption countries include rich countries like Norway and poor countries like Nepal. Low adoption countries include rich countries like Japan and poor countries like Albania.

For context, this sounds like they’re pausing production for the “body on battery” BT1 platform for their largest electric trucks (the Hummer and Silverado).

Their much more popular “skateboard” BEV3 platform is still selling at pretty good numbers with the Chevy Blazer and Equinox EVs, the Cadillac Lyriq/Optiq/Vistiq EVs, and the Honda Prologue EV and the last of the now-discontinued Acura ZDX badged with those brands (but ultimately running the same GM platform underneath). Plus the BEVII platform should be selling well again with the relaunch of the Chevy Bolt this year (after a 2 year hiatus).

Customer rejection of the largest electric pickup trucks shouldn’t be seen as a long term failure of EVs in the American market, and shouldn’t even be understood as a failure of GM’s ability to compete in the EV market. They’re selling over 150,000 EVs per year, and have a continued pipeline of new EVs coming, which is a lot more than most manufacturers can say (even including the traditional manufacturers that embraced EVs early, like VW and Hyundai and Nissan).

I think they’re allowed to, but just can’t hook it up to the grid. The Alabama Power fee looks to me like it applies only to generation capacity that is actually connected to the grid, under an interconnection agreement with the utility.

I can imagine a completely separate circuit, not at all connected to the rest of the electrical system, that only powers things that don’t need grid backup: EV chargers, HVAC equipment, other heating or cooling equipment, etc. You’d probably want a decent amount of battery backup, though, to make the best use of that equipment.

I’m not sure if you’re making this point, but the reason why leasing e-trons was so popular was because leasing an EV provided a loophole between 2022 and 2025 where the dealer would get a $7500 credit regardless of the lessee’s income or the place where the EV or its battery was manufactured (buyers had income limits and required certain manufacturing thresholds). So expensive/luxury imported EVs tended to be a better deal when leased rather than purchased.

And a lot of those leased vehicles will likely be hitting the used market over the next few years.

Also, because of the tax credits, the actual price paid tends to be lower than the MSRP, so that the apparent depreciation looks faster than the actual difference in amount paid for new/used.

If you’re buying a $120,000 sports car I think you’re doing it for reasons other than maximizing your financial return.

The oldest (2022 model year) e-tron GTs are showing up in the used market in a few places, for about $35k-$45k. Still not cheap, but if you’re already an Audi driver you probably have a bit more of a car budget than a lot of Americans.

A lot of these legacy automakers have to deal with a supplier network, too. EVs will also need those relationships, but it will likely be with different companies, and cause some friction in broken relationships. The company manufacturing fuel pumps might not have the same future as the company manufacturing wiring harnesses.

At the same time, the sentiment common in this thread way overstates things. Toyota is continuing to make profits at this very moment, and has the cash on hand (and future profits) to be able to afford to pivot slowly.

If the future is all battery based EVs, there’s no reason to believe that this particular company won’t survive the transition. They have the supply chain already in place for batteries and electric motors, and have been public about batteries being supply constrained so that they believe that building hybrids with smaller capacity batteries is a better use of that existing supply. It’s a self-serving position that one should be somewhat skeptical about, but they’re such a huge company they have to think about scale in a way that smaller manufacturers don’t have to worry about.

They’ve been talking a big game about not wanting to make the switch until battery tech and volume gets up to its standards, but they can actually afford to wait. They talk a big game about waiting for solid state battery tech, and while other companies can’t afford to wait another 3-5 years for mass production to catch up, Toyota actually can.

And, even before then, Toyota is slowly pivoting to EVs anyway. Their plug in hybrid lineup targets some of their most popular models (Prius, Rav4). On the all-electric front, the bz is available today, and the EV Highlander and the EV Lexus ES are going to be competing side by side with the hybrid counterparts (with the ES selling at a lower MSRP than its hybrid counterparts and the Highlander expected to do similar). They can afford to actually test the market to see whether sales volume data informs how they allocate production resources to EVs versus hybrids.

I expect they’ll survive. They probably won’t find their way back to #1, but there’s plenty of reason to believe they’ll still be selling lots of cars profitably in 10 years.

I do wonder how much it would cost to build a code-compliant, UL-certified/listed system for home battery backup at 50 kwh, with a system that knows to balance things between cells over many charge/discharge cycles.

I gotta imagine a lot of the value add of the established names is that they actually operate in the U.S. (even though all 3 companies I named are Chinese owned). That’s not just about marketing (even if it is true that having U.S. operations helps significantly with marketing), but the cost of certifying for different third party safety standards, and having assets/operations that bring them within reach of U.S. courts and regulators.

Yup. A huge part of the cost is the batteries, the electric motors, the sensors and controllers that manage charging and discharging.

Looking around at home battery backup solutions, for example, simply having the same storage capacity as an EV (50-75 kwh) can cost almost as much as an EV itself.

Jackery has add on batteries for about $1000 for 5 kwh, Ecoflow and Anker Solix cost $2000 for 6 kwh.

At those prices, a 60kwh battery pack in an EV basically represents $12,000 to $20,000 in battery cost alone, plus a whole system around charging it and using it for an electric motor, and then a whole car around that.

It’s not a perfect comparison, but it does show that the actual material cost of what goes into an EV is primarily the electric drivetrain and battery.

It’s possible, but needs to be engineered for safety, and that design/testing/certification will increase the cost and complexity.

You can have solar panels and a battery totally off grid, where the big battery just acts as a generator, with its own inverter creating AC power for anything you plug in. That’s really simple and cheap, but isn’t safe for connecting to and powering a grid-connected house circuit. So anything you want to power with one of these systems needs to be plugged into outlets that only get their power from these batteries.

You can add a grid-following inverter that safely matches the grid frequency AC, so that you can use the solar power you collect in your own normal home circuit, to power your own household appliances. But the simplest design here is a grid following inverter that doesn’t work when the grid isn’t connected. It can only add to something that already exists and can’t do things on its own.

If you want to do both, where it can work without grid power and it follows the grid when the grid power is on, you’ll have to design a system that can switch between the two modes without delivering power where it’s not expected or generating power that conflicts with the grid’s AC waveform. Making it automated, like an UPS system, is even more complicated.

It’s not impossible, or even that difficult, it just does add complexity and the engineering tradeoff is always the question of “what problem does this solve, and is solving that problem important enough to devote these resources to it?” For anyone on a reliable electric grid where power outages are rare, the answer is usually no.

It’s mainly an adjustment to how you handle pit stops. I’ve learned to embrace the leisurely pit stop where you pull up to the charger and plug in, and then walk and wander around a shopping area or restaurants and maybe even sit down to eat slowly.

I also have a long road trip planned next month, where I’ll be leaving in the afternoon/evening so I might have to sleep overnight on the way there. If that happens, I’m going to prefer a hotel with overnight charging options, rather than have to try to find a separate charger from where I’ll be sleeping. But I haven’t fully planned that out, and it’ll be my first EV road trip over 600 miles/1000 km.

I read the article’s main point as being that waste heat is all around us, and in places that get cold (like the Great Lakes region), that heat can be moved to where it is useful.

I’m thinking of the brain meme where each level represents something better:

1. Electric power is used to generate heat in places that need to be heated, using resistive heat.
2. Electric powered heat pumps move heat from air where it’s not needed to places that do need heat, using heat pumps that draw heat from ambient air.
3. Heat is transferred from places that actively need cooling to places that need heat.

The main point in the article is that if we’re using electricity to cool a place while also using electricity to heat a place, can we just use less electricity to move the heat from the place where it’s not wanted to the place where it is wanted?

So seen in that light, it’s not so much about how much thermal efficiency a power plant achieves, but rather a question about whether there is something better that can be done with that heat that doesn’t become electricity.

It might be cheaper in some settings.

For certain food styles, I buy bulk spices sometimes because I don’t like to pay for an entire jar I won’t use, knowing that most of it will go stale by the time I’m through the jar. Being able to buy tiny quantities is sometimes way cheaper.

I’m also mismatched in my conditioner and shampoo remaining where I can buy the matching set and let the difference persist, or I can try to buy a single catch-up bottle of whatever I have excess of, to hope that they even out by the time I get to the bottom of a bottle.

Basically, I can imagine where it might be preferable (for both cost and convenience) to buy an arbitrary amount of something rather than buy a fixed factory container of that thing. I know I already do it for certain things.

Doesn’t look like anything to me.

The non-Honda traditional automakers are getting dragged, kicking and screaming, into actually providing EV options.

Kia and Hyundai’s E-GMP platform has a few hundred thousand vehicles on US roads. They have had reliability issues on the charging unit, though, so I’m not sure if the newest ones have fixed the problems there. Still, they’re moving a decent volume, and electric represents a big chunk of their overall sales now.

GM saw a huge increase in EV sales in the past few years with a lot of newer models on their main BEV3 platform (including the Honda and Acura EVs). I’m a bit biased against GM generally, but I have no reason to assume that their EVs are somehow worse than their ICE vehicles.

Volkswagen, Volvo, Mercedes, BMW, and some other European manufacturers have been trying to make inroads with EV consumers, with mixed success.

Ford recently acknowledged that its Mustang Mach-E and F-150 Lightning were designed sub-optimally as EVs, with too many unique parts and designs for each model, through their traditional way of doing business through existing supply chains and vendors. Left unsaid in that interview, though, is how much they were held back by dealers trying to jack up prices on EVs or discourage their sale (knowing that they get better service revenue on ICE vehicles).

And even though Toyota has tried a whole bunch of other stuff seemingly to avoid building pure battery EVs, they’re launching all electric models of the Lexus ES and the Highlander and finally getting on board.

I think we’re at a critical point, and current U.S. government policy might be discouraging EVs, but EVs have plenty going for them, even with government hostility. I’m hopeful we can see gasoline consumption drop in the U.S. over the next few years.

But because of the unsubstantiated hatred of anything Chinese

That might apply for the Chinese manufacturers you’ve listed, but the others are available in the US, even the ones with significant Chinese ownership (Volvo/Polestar mostly owned by Geely, Mercedes Benz owned significantly by Chinese investors). Many of these companies simply choose not to go through the trouble of importing or manufacturing some of their EVs for the US market, despite continuing to manufacture/import other EVs for the US market. See, for example the Kia EV6 GT (no longer offered in the US, despite other trim levels continuing to be sold), the VW ID.7 (canceled plans to bring into US and Canada), Polestar 2 (no longer available in the US), Ford F-150 Lighting (the recently discontinued electric version of literally the top selling vehicle in the United States), etc.

A big part of the problem with the US isn’t that there aren’t choices, it’s that many of the choices are bad. Lots of EVs are expensive, and competing for the expensive luxury market. Even then, some of those brands are struggling. I don’t know what the future holds for Rivian or Lucid in the U.S., but those companies aren’t exactly making money.

Without sales volume, they won’t hit the economies of scale necessary to actually profitably sell those cars. Lucid is absurdly expensive while the company loses money on each sale. Rivian has similar problems, although they might actually turn the corner to profitability soon. Polestar is probably in the same boat for the US market, but is propped up by its owners and partners for now.

So no, I don’t think that US EV new car buyers are suffering from a quantity of options. It’s just kinda a quality problem, where the consumer has a lot of mediocre choices, and only a few good choices.

Honda is a company built around manufacturing internal combustion engines. Anything that uses an internal combustion engine is fair game: lawnmowers, motorcycles, ATVs, generators, and regular old cars.

So it’s been hard for them to shift their culture to where they don’t actually use the thing they’re best at, the foundation for their company’s whole history.

See also BYD that eventually got into making cars simply because they were so good at making batteries.