Tech special needs motor and doen not run was one car, and many/most of the rest are from the scam “buy here pay here” places. I assume you know how they work?
Not to mention KBB is known for its unreliability and being a tool of dealers- they send out two KBBs- one with prices the dealer shows you to BUY your car, another for the dealer to show you to sell you a car.
Take CarMax- you cant even search for any cars under $10000.
Autonation, search for cars under $3000-
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Which is an order of magnitude more than I paid for my car. Now, my car was used and 17 years old, so you might say that the fair comparison is to a used EV over a decade old. Except that there really aren’t any of those.
Also granted, I counted myself very lucky to get a reliable car for $3000 two years ago. I was expecting more like $10,000. Though that’s still far lower than any EV will be for a while (how long? Hard to say, because EVs will probably last longer than gas cars).
That hews to another issue; the people who sell their gasoline or diesel vehicle to purchase a battery electric vehicle (BEV) or some other ‘green’ tech car aren’t just putting their old car out to pasture or sending it to be recycled; at best, it might be going to a junkyard if it is really in rough shape, but more than likely it gets sold on a secondary market or shipped oversees to a developing country where it will likely have the emissions control removed and be driven into the ground. The whole notion that you are “saving the planet” or “fighting climate change” by buying a BEV is just obtuse to the reality that you are actually just creating a demand for an extremely resource-intensive product without functionally offsetting anything in the near term.
There are, of course, other reasons to want a BEV; lower maintenance and operating costs, reliability (well, sort of), performance, and a virtual elimination in operating emissions which is great for air quality (except for tire wear, which still produces synthetic rubber microparticles). But the people patting themselves on the back for “doing their part to fight climate change” are living in a fantasy land disconnected from the reality that they are only making a marginal decrease in their personal carbon footprint and that their previous vehicle will almost certainly be in service for many years to come, and then likely become mostly landfill waste in a developing country.
That’s ridiculous. There is one and only one way of making all ground transportation carbon free, and that’s for every new car to be a BEV (or ZEV). Every new BEV sold accelerates this process.
Yes, there is an enormous amount of hysteresis in the market, such that it will take a long time for ICE cars to be totally displaced, but like everything else, the best time to start is yesterday, and the second-best time is today.
If capturing the last segment of drivers requires $3k EV beaters, and the beaters won’t exist until 20 years after the first practical EVs, then we need to be selling as many non-beater EVs as we can today.
Some of what you say about KBB is valid criticism. They, like much of the used car industry, is scum. Edmunds is the same outfit under the hood.
Of course there are several prices for any given used car: At the lowest price, it’s what you as owner could get on convenient easy trade-in to a dealer, what you might sell it for private party (PP) to a sharp/aware/savvy buyer, sell PP to a gullible goof, and (highest of all) what the next schmuck would pay for the same car from that same dealer the next day. Dealers gotta make margins too. That’s not (inherently) evil.
Carmax only sells newish used cars. They don’t deal in beaters, period. Neither really does Autonation or the other national chains. They won’t take beaters in trade, they don’t buy them at auction. They’re the clean-hands Soccer Mom used car operators.
If someone sells their ICE to get a BEV prematurely versus their normal car turnover cycle, then yes I agree.
But for the people who buy a new car every 3 years like clockwork, there is a whole downstream pipeline. Each car they have ever bought new goes through a series of owners, both domestically and perhaps overseas, before it finally is crushed, abandoned, crashed beyond repair, or whatever. And each stage of that pipeline depends on a continuous fresh supply of vehicles of that class / condition / price. It’s a food chain.
The day somebody trades in their 3yo ICE for a new BEV, they load that ICE into the downstream pipeline. If we ignore for a moment the growth in total motor vehicles in use worldwide, that suggests that as that pig works through the python/pipeline, somebody somewhere can replace their car that just died. One rattrap ICE leaves the worldwide fleet and one BEV joins it. All the rest are just links in a fairly inelastic chain. The change in tailpipe emissions takes effect pretty quickly, a month or two at most.
For sure, as the poor world becomes increasingly car-owning, the worldwide count of active vehicles only goes up. Along with the count of mouths to feed, electricity to supply, fuel for cooking to consume, water, cropland, etc.
But in and of itself, beginning to load the new-to-used-to-used-up vehicle pipeline with long-lived BEVs is part of delivering eventual improvement. Not immediate improvement, but eventual. If you assume, as I do, that the alternative is to add a new ICE to the same pipeline, it’s probably better to add BEVs now. Ceteris parabus, and there’s a lot that won’t be.
Big picture, humanity is screwing the pooch and this is mostly moving the deck chairs on the Titanic to higher-up decks. But that’s probably preferable to moving them to lower-down decks.
Yep. Sure, some electric power used for EVs is generated by natural gas, etc. But everyone I know that owns either an EV or a Plug in has home solar- which means most of the charging is solar.
Sure.
I concur- altho Edmunds seems a little better with honest car reviews.
Unfortunately, I live in a condo and can’t get home solar. But simply living in California means my electricity is greener than average, and this will continue to get better as more solar plants are installed.
Every new fossil fuel plant that’s closed makes every EV car on the road that much more carbon-friendly. EVs would be beneficial even if they weren’t a net win right now (though they are), because every one automatically gets more carbon-efficient as the grid improves.
That’s the problem, though. Doing anything of real effect in terms of abating climate change to a level that isn’t going to severely compromise or extinguish industrial society to the point of not being able to manufacture electric vehicles (or any other complex products with vast manufacturing and material logistic chains) has to be effective now, not decades into the future when dramatic climate change has already occurred and created irreversible feedbacks. The “Just Stop Oil” protestors are correct that the notion of gradually tailing off oil and gas production is not a viable plan (although their methods and the people they are targeting with their protests are ineffectual and even counter-productive lashing out); getting to even an RCP 2.6 scenario were average global temperature rise is limited to a ~2 °C requires a virtual immediate phase-out of all greenhouse gas emitting industrial and transportation processes, including those involved in the supply chain to build electric vehicles.
We won’t do that, of course, and frankly we really can’t not only because of the economic impact and corporate subversion any effective emission reduction plans but because it will also be subjecting hundreds of millions of people to famine and death in the near term (instead of waiting a few years more when they’re going to die anyway) and no political leader is going to openly advocate for policies that will directly lead to mass death (unless it involves nuclear deterrence or they have some immediate gain for it). We’ll continue extracting petroleum from oil shale until it runs dry, and pumping and burning natural gas indefinitely because the near-term consequences are too grave to consider, and of course there is a profit to be made.
I’m not opposed to or bearish on battery electric vehicles (other than the economic costs and environmental impact of extracting lithium and rare earth materials needed for their manufacture), and they offer an advantage of fungibility in not being tied to a fossil hydrocarbon energy infrastructure, but they aren’t going to save the planet or have a measurable impact on emissions in a term short enough to be of consequence.
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Well, sorta:
California is on the right path toward sustainable, renewable energy systems (although fumbling badly on getting offshore wind afloat) but the realities are that we still have a large population that is thirsty for cheap electricity using an infrastructure that is still highly dependent upon fossil fuels.
So in attempting to paraphrase what I think your position is (and it’s one I largely agree with, so I’m not trying to pull a hatchet job here) …
We have 3 choices here in 2023 with the AGW we’ve already baked into the next centuries:
We can voluntarily shut down the modern industrialized economy right now, and suffer mass famine and death, or
We can ignore the problem and watch Mother Nature do the same shutdown to us involuntarily over the next 50-100 years, or
We can start a large variety of very expensive and politically painful technology transitions, and necessarily fail to get them far enough along to matter enough before Mother Nature swats us comprehensively just like option 2, but maybe 10 or 25 years later instead.
Is that a fair summary?
Said another way, the time to stop an adverse exponential growth process is before you get near the knee in the curve; not while you’re already halfway around the corner. And the time to start stopping an adverse exponential growth process is long, long before you get near the knee in the curve.
Even if all of your power is coming from coal, the end-to-end efficiency of a coal power plant fueling an EV is still far higher than the end-to-end efficiency of a gasoline internal combustion engine. So it’s still a net improvement, just not as much of one.
And like @Dr.Strangelove said, the best time to do all this was yesterday (actually, decades ago), but the second best time was now. Doing this now will not stop climate change from being a horrible catastrophe that costs many dollars and lives, because climate change is already a horrible catastrophe that has cost many dollars and lives. But our choice right now is do this right now, or don’t do this right now. And the sooner we do things like this, the more future dollars and lives we can save.
Yes and yes, with the caveat is that there probably some bastardization of 1 and 3 involving an intentional reduction in consumption and dependence upon complex industrial manufacturing chains in favor of more locally sustainable technology primarily utilized in ways to adapt to climate change which is the theoretical best path. That’s not going to help people in developing nations which have become overpopulated to the point that they are completely unsustainable using local resources (and are most impacted by the effects of climate change such as drought, sea level rise, and extreme weather events), and would require a radical change in lifestyles and expectations even for the most developed of nations, but at least it is looking for paths to viability in a hotter, more chaotic climate with fewer accessible mineral and energy resources.
Of course, almost nobody is doing this. Norway, Sweden, and Denmark all have some pretty aggressive plans and are well placed to avoid the worst of changes (although Norway is still funding this through the sale of North Sea oil and gas; Denmark has pledged to end new gas and oil exploration, but are still extracting current leases). What they are doing isn’t really enough to insulate them from the effects of climate change and deglobalization but they at least have a path toward a maybe sustainable adaptation provided that we don’t end up in a 4 °C or greater world.
Most other nations, the United States included, are taking no material actions besides resource guarding and what could generously be described as a cursory investment in renewable energy that may or may not be adaptable to a future world while continuing to extract as much fossil resources as possible. And frankly, they can’t. Any government that even tries to impose the kind of austerity and radical social and economic changes required would be voted out or overthrown, and replaced with more reactionary leadership promising more of the same, only better for as long as it holds out.
If we (the developed world led by the United States, and providing support and technology to developing nations to get them to industrialize more greenly) had started doing this three decades ago at the end of the Cold War and using the fiscal resources and technological capabilities to develop and built out a sustainable infrastructure, that might have been a viable plan to limiting heating to something less than a very tolerable 1 °C. Instead, we put all of those resources into extracting, guarding, and fighting over hydrocarbon energy sources even knowing then of their finite nature and the hazard of uncontrolled greenhouse gas emissions. And here we are, as you say, “halfway around the corner” (or more). In fact, of all the industrial release of anthropogenic carbon dioxide, about half of it has actually occurred in the last thirty years and continues at a record pace (with a slight slowdown in 2020-21 due to pandemic reductions in transportation and shipping) despite the fact that oil is getting more difficult to extract.
I don’t disagree that EVs are substantially more efficient and produce far less emissions per mile. I think EVs are a good technology for many transportation uses (and even better if we can develop a better battery chemistry that doesn’t rely on lithium), and what’s more, they are fungible with regard to the source energy as long as it is converted into electricity, so they work equally well on coal, natural gas, wind, solar, nuclear fission, et cetera. But buying a BEV today isn’t offsetting any greenhouse gas emissions (unless you literally junk your old car) and is extremely resource intensive, and offsetting some hypothetical future carbon emissions is essentially saying that you’ll put on your parachute once you are outside of the plane. And if we are talking about offsetting emissions two or three decades from now it is a literal hypothetical because extracting petroleum at that point is going to be so costly that almost nobody will be able to use it, so that is purely an exercise in fantasy bookkeeping.
I wish I had a more sanguine view of the effects of developing and deploying renewable energy technology, because it would be great to say, “We’ve got this genius plan that just requires a concerted national effort to come together and do this thing that is going to end up enriching the country and making us independent of foreign oil and gas, and oh by the way, actually save us from an apocalyptic future of acidic oceans, melting polar ice sheets, perpetual drought and desertification, radically powerful hurricanes, and maybe the end of all complex life on land and upper ocean.” But we don’t have that, and are best hope at this point is running dry of hydrocarbon resources that are financially viable to extract before pushing past a climate turning point that leaves us on the far side of 4 °C, because we aren’t stopping or even slowing down right now. And your Volt or Tesla, however good it makes you feel, isn’t doing anything to prevent that.
About 20-30 of our electric power (not counting home solar) is imported, but only 20% of the power in the rest of the USA is coal, so maybe 5% of CA comes from coal.
Stranger, how is it that our switch to EVs hasn’t reduced our household greenhouse gas emissions? Before, we drove 20-30k miles/year in ICE vehicles. Now we drive the same miles using electricity, most of which is generated on our roof. Not only that, but the buyers for our previous vehicles were replacing their ICE vehicles with our more efficient ones.
It may soon be the case that the best low priced used cars are EVs. Used EV prices are going down faster than used ICE prices, and EVs don’t hold their value as well as ICE cars. The article points to the data, and gives a few reasons, and I’m adding some of my own the article doesn’t call out:
Battery degradation, particularly on the first generation Leaf, decreases the car’s value more than simple miles and age would suggest
Most EVs are luxury cars, and luxury cars (including ICE), depreciate faster than non-luxury cars
EV technology is advancing faster than ICE technology, so a 5 year old EV may be disproportionately out of date compared to a 5 year old ICE car
For some cars tax credits are only available on a lease, so manufacturers are making attractive lease plans, which means lots of EVs will be coming off lease in a few years
Tesla has been lowering the price on new cars, pushing down all other EV prices
New Teslas are available for delivery quickly, unlike two years ago when the only way to get a Tesla quickly was to buy used
So for those reasons, and probably others, I would not at all be surprised if in a few years lots of people’s budget used car will be a $15,000 Model 3, or an off lease Ioniq.
We don’t yet know how modern EVs will hold their value. ICE cars go through several different life cycles - purchased new or leased, purchased as a 2=4 year old vehicle still in warranty, then purchased much cheaper later on as maybe a 7-10 year old vehicle by poorer people or people looking for a beater. Then they get driven for many more years. There are lots of 20 year old vehicles on the road, many of which perform just about as well as they did new.
We simply don’t know that yet about EVs. We don’t know how battery life will affect the used market for very old EVs. We don’t know how long various models of EV will remain roadworthy and useful. We don’t know whether the cumulative effects of corrosion, age, fender benders or other issues will cause premature death of batteries. We don’t know how to gauge the risk of used EVs. For that matter, we underestimated how much service they would require now. We don’t know what insurance on older EVs will look like.
I’m a fan of EVs. They will get better over time, more reliable, etc. But it serves no one to paper over the very large hurdles we are still facing to get to mass adoption. The truth is that EVs are not profitable for anyone but Tesla at the moment, most auto manufacturers are now pushing back against mandates because they don’t know how to meet them, investment in EV tech is being scaled back, and the future definitely has some clouds.
Right now, I’m not ready in fact for a BEV. At least inasmuch as it would be more expensive and take more time. Whereas there would be an inadequate number of chargers in my apartment complex to charge overnight, and chargers around town are nowhere to be seen.
If chargers around town started to spring up at random businesses, but before we got individual charging spots, then a PHEV would be even more convenient than either a BEV or HEV since I could charge up while shopping. Plus, since my charging spots are near the laundry, I could charge up while doing laundry without having to specifically go back to remove my car from the charger.
In addition to the issues with distance and road trips, which we’ve already hashed out in other threads unproductively.
However, I do not know if PHEV are that much better than the new generation of HEV, which are very efficient. For every gas guzzling SUV driver you convert to a new Prius, it saves more gas than if a new gen Prius buyer decides to get a BEV instead.
In addition, not only is the Californian ask a little too much, it’s also not enough since we need to reduce now. So my personal solution would be to start raising fleet efficiency at a medium pace, but inexorably and right away, without reference to the source of the power, except perhaps giving a bonus for plugging into green energy. Then, we can raise the efficiency standards even quicker if there is enough charging infrastructure built up in response to people buying a lot of BEV rather than HEV.
Great cite. I especially like any blog with the 'nads to call themselves The Morning Dump.
All good points, both theirs and yours.
ISTM the early EVs with marginal battery tech (at least compared to current battery tech) will not only quickly depreciate to nothing, and much faster than same-year ICEs, they’ll also pretty quickly fall out of the overall used vehicle fleet. Which paradoxically will increase the average resale values of the surviving used EV fleet. My large point being that the early vehicles will be a brief headwind on resale values, then disappear, and/or be diluted to insignificance by the far larger volumes each year of newer and more advanced vehicles coming into the used fleet.
A bit like a car brand that’s suddenly no longer imported (e.g. Suzuki or Peugeot a couple decades ago), IMO the difficulty of maintaining the residual fleet of early marginal EVs will grow enough that the first time any one car has a crash or severe system problem it’ll get junked not fixed.