I wonder if PHEVs are still going to be available in a decade or so. They may not be necessary if changing stations are more widespread. In part they are meant to address range anxiety.
My general prediction for these sorts of hard limits is that if they are too optimistic they’ll just be pushed out until they aren’t: the government isn’t going to have the political will to be the reason people have to do something like buy an EV. If 2035 is too optimistic it implies the market just isn’t ready, and forcing people to buy an EV that will likely be difficult to find or expensive would be too enraging. So the hard limit date will just keep moving out until it has a negligible effect: it’s just cleaning up the last remaining stragglers while the mainstream market has already moved on to EVs.
It’s hard to say if 2035 is too optimistic. My expectation is that there will be some sort of tipping point, where EV sales are commonplace enough that they seem like the new normal and an investment in ICE transportation seems like a bad idea. I’m already at that point, but I think the switch to that being a majority opinion will happen quickly when it does. Any hard date before that time will look optimistic if you’re linearly projecting current trends.
It’s completely plausible to me that 2035 rolls around and most people are buying EVs anyway and the law only has effects at the margins. It is 12 years away, so if production can ramp up and cheaper options can come onto the market I wouldn’t be shocked if that sudden switch happens in that timeframe.
Maybe, but my parents are basically climate change denialists, and hostile to the idea of doing anything to benefit the environment, and yet own a PHEV and plug in every day. In fact they pretty much make a game of how far they can go on the 40-ish mile battery and how long they can go between fillups.
So while they don’t care about the environmental stuff, they do care about the cost of gas and the inconvenience of visiting gas stations. They also like that it’s quiet and smooth when running on pure electric.
While coal roller types undoubtedly exist, most people do respond to direct incentives. Plugging in a PHEV has minimal cost compared to the savings for most people, but I can see where it might be otherwise in some situations. I wouldn’t put any stock into your UK example without knowing the details.
That’s for damn sure. It’s one of the worst aspects of the political process. When it goes right it’s usually by sheer luck.
I assume this is the study:
The main thing they found was that the mileage was lower than rated. They don’t seem to have much data on the plugging-in aspect aside from anecdote:
“There are some examples where employees aren’t even charging these vehicles up,” said Paul Hollick, The Miles Consultancy’s managing director.
The mileage thing is possibly largely explained by the nature of the driving: highway vs. local.
Some of it may come down to the way the fuel is paid for. It could be that there’s a company card to pay for gas, while there’s no easy way to reimburse employees for electricity costs. Hence they use gas only.
At any rate, the article is from 2018, and the incentive program from 2011, so probably some things have changed since then. And PHEVs are intermediate tech, anyway.
They’ll probably disappear of their own accord. Here are the current sales figures within CA:
So they’re already <15% of the total. And we should expect that to drop further in the future as BEVs and the charging situation continues to improve. And that appears to be the case if we guess that Santa Clara county is ahead of the curve:
<8% PHEV here.
Ran across this article just now:
Electric cars are smashing all kinds of records in the U.S. (detroitnews.com)
Their share of new cars exceeded 7% for the first half of the year, speeding past a critical tipping point for mass adoption. In the past few months, all-time sales topped 3 million.
I saw my first electric Jeep Wrangler the other day. Or at least the first I noticed. The logo-ing is 4Xe with a blue e which is a bit subtle. It’s a PHEV.
Color me a bit surprised. They also make a 4Xe version of the Grand Cherokee.
While the know-nothings are loudly raging about how it’ll never happen it’s quietly simply being done all around them. For sure the tide will take a long time to get to deepest darkest ruralia. But that’s a small minority anyhow, despite their outsized political power. Economically, they’re more than a rounding error, but not a lot more.
I do feel this is a very likely scenario. We could argue about the whole timeline, and I suspect there will be a degree of regionality as well ( I could see arguments that more extreme climatic areas and the concurrent loss of range with current battery chemistries may carve out a more long-lasting niche) - but PHEV will likely be a “gateway drug” for EVs. You’ll get one because you’re not ready (in your mind) for a BEV, and after 3-5 years of driving it and only going to the gas station once a month or so, you’ll feel comfy with the BEV.
Otherwise, I think they’ll persist longer in the same way SUVs persist for one or two person households, because you think you might need the AWD / Off Road / Carrying capacity, you’ll want that extra possibility just in case, even if it means less efficiency 95% of the time than having a full BEV. But I could be completely wrong.
Of course, if new battery techs DO prove out in the not-too distant future - say 350-400ish becomes standard, most of those worries and expectations will fade away. The same way I would have had concerns in the past with a 50-150 mile range, but at the 250 range on modern models that I’ve researched have all but shelved them.
This article may be of interest:
Stranger
For a significant number of people, the price of an EV is an order of magnitude more than they pay for their vehicle. I still think the main thing that would help the most would be if costs could be driven down. Perhaps a focus on affordability would be good.
Also, due to pricing, it’s just inevitable that owning an EV will be a class based thing. It already is in many cases. There’s a reason my landlord owns a Tesla.
And as long as there are class implications, there’s going to be resentment. There will be those who look down on those of a lower class and the ones who feel those insisting on EVs are elitist. I very much suspect a lot of the fights are more about that, rather than actually about hatred for the technology. Those with resentment will be more aware of flaws.
I think that, as costs go down, objections will diminish significantly.
Electric vehicles are not 10 times the cost of gas cars.
And of course there is the $7500 tax criti to consider, and the long term costs-
For U.S. car buyers looking to save money, knowing whether an electric vehicle will be worth it isn’t always obvious.
On one hand, EVs are usually more expensive compared with similar internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles. On the other hand, EVs have cheaper annual fuel and maintenance costs that can make up for the higher sticker price over time.
Plus, EV owners might qualify for a $7,500 federal tax credit, which can negate the price difference between EVs and similar ICE vehicles (your state might have credits, too). However, without tax credits, EV owners might have to wait years before the annual cost savings make EV ownership a comparative bargain.
Tesla Model Y v. Audi Q5 Premium
The electric Tesla Model Y and and gas-powered Audi Q5 Premium, both with the lowest level of trim, are similar compact luxury SUVs, with 2023 base pricing at $51,380 and $45,795, respectively, according to car review website Edmunds.
Model Ys are eligible for a federal EV tax credit worth $7,500, at least until Dec. 31, 2023. But that’s undercut by the cost and installation of a Level 2 charger, which can cost thousands of dollars. Expect to pay around $2,000 as a “reasonable ballpark figure,” according to Kelley Blue Book.
After credits and other costs, the upfront price of Tesla’s Model Y is only about $100 more than the Audi Q5.
So, electric cars are just a little more expensive up front in this example-
But here, at the bottom end-
Nissan Leaf v. Nissan Sentra
Both the EV Leaf and ICE Sentra are affordable, compact sedans made by the same company. At $29,135, the 2023 Leaf has a higher sticker price than the 2023 Sentra, which goes for $21,295, according to Edmunds.
Unfortunately, the Leaf no longer qualifies for the $7,500 federal tax credit due to recently updated manufacturing standards. Throw in a Level 2 charger and the Leaf is nearly $10,000 more than its ICE counterpart.
The article goes on to show the leaf is cheaper on the long run, but it will take 12 years to make up the difference.
So it depends a lot on what cars you are comparing.
Not with cars like the Leaf.
Teslas are luxury cars, sure, but not all EVs are.
Agree with all that you wrote / cited, but …
I think what @BigT was getting at is that lots of people buy $1,000 - $2,000 10+ yo beaters as their transportation. And many buy $5,000 well-used not-yet beaters.
Until those vehicles exist in EV form, only the upper parts of the income distribution will have them. And we all understand how many more poor folks there are than upper-middle class folks who can afford any new car, much less a nicer-than-average new car.
EV’s right now have limited market penetration mostly because they’re not yet available in vast numbers as (well-) used cars.
You are literally citing an example. Your Leaf car is around $30,000. But it’s far more normal for people to buy $3000 cars. That’s how much our last two cars cost, and the first died not because of wearing out but due to a wreck.
I would someone who buys a new car to be in a different class than the people I know or interact with. Same for those who buy used cars at dealers for such high prices.
A lot of what I notice on the Dope is that most of you have more money than the average person I’ve met, and that your financial ideas are very different. Someone moved into an apartment that they said was too great a deal, while being sad they would have to trim down. But they described something that costs like 4 times more than the rent at my old, fullsized house.
It’s just a different world for a lot of y’all compared to what I consider normal.
Depends on what you define as “normal.” Googling, “the average price of a used car hovers around $27,000” while the “average cost of new cars is now well over $48,000.”
Yeah.
One of the things I’ve always found especially interesting about the Dope is the chance to interact on an ongoing basis with folks from different educational or wealth / income levels or from very different occupations, or parts of the country, or very different ethnic backgrounds. Plus of course our international contingent who get to learn far more about 'Murricah than most probably ever wanted to know. 
IRL most of us hang with folks pretty similar to ourselves. Not so here. But that also means it’s easy for folks here to unthinkingly project their little slice of reality onto everyone in the audience. Sometimes that’s just an oops, and sometimes it’s offensively tin-eared.
I pulled one of those myself a few days ago. It wasn’t malicious, it wasn’t received as tin-eared, but it was totally a matter of me projecting my narrow local experience onto the whole country. Oops.
I alternate between being optimistic and being pessimistic. On the optimistic side, EVs are clearly a better engineering architecture, battery issues aside. The new Cybertruck is an engineering marvel.
On the pessimistic side, forcing a major transition in one of the most complex industries with a global supply chain was never going to be easy, and central industrial planning is a bad idea that almost always fails. We are seeing that now, with Ford and others being forced to transition to EVs without really knowing how to do it cost-effectively with high quality.
The truth is, if you take China out of the mix (HALF of electric car sales are in China) and take Tesla out of the mix (the Model Y is now the most popular car in the world), the rest of the EV industry looks pretty sick. Rivian and Lucid are barely hanging on. GM, Stallantis and Ford are losing money on every EV they sell.
EVs should have far fewer problems than ICE cars, should have much lower parts counts, but they don’t. The current crop of EVs (again, not including Tesla) are having far more problems than ICE cars, probably because they are being forced to market before the car companies are really comfortable with the technology. Legacy automkers with legcy workforces and legcy fqctories can’t easily make the transition, and wind up,using too many old ideas and practices.
The new UAW contracts may be the death knell for the big automakers, adding around $1,000 in costs to every venicle they sell by 2028. Vehicles that are already losing money.
The charging infrastructure is also nowhere near ready for a huge increase in EVs. And power grids are not ready for a huge influx of chargers. And cities are not prepared to do what it takes to upgrade neighborhoods to handle grid upgrade so people can charge at home.
And Evs have become too expensive for most peole. They are selling mostly to privileged upper class and upper middle liberals right now mostly. The average EV price in 2023 is about $12,000 more than the average price across the industry, But more importantly, there are NO EVs in the under-$25,000 category The cheapest is the Chevy Bolt at around $28,000. That’s going to freeze out the lower middle classes and lower classes from car ownership.
Depending on the metric, even sales figures can be misleding because they may count cars shipped to dealers, but not actually sold to the the public.
This with a $7500 rebate that is not sustainable in a mass market,
The future of EVs is still very much up in the air. At the very least, I think the Biden administration or whoever is in the next one is going to have to ease up,on the mandate for light trucks. The Ford Lightning, after initial hype and excitement, has seen demand crater as word gets out that they are very compromised trucks. Ford has already cut one Lightning production line and repurposed it for gas trucks. Rivian is a niche vehicle, as is the Cybertruck.
So far, common work trucks that might be driven by a construction worker, farmer, etc. are not under any threat from electric alternatives, and may never be. They’ll get some market penetration, but are nowhere near the ability to replace a significant traction of light trucks.
That’s no more normal than $80k luxury cars. One’s on the high end and the other the low end, but they’re both outliers.
I went to cars.com to search for used cars in Cheyenne, WY (just to pick a random city that’s not in a high CoL area), and the pickings are very slim at $3k. A 2004 Mercedes with 203k miles, which is kinda funny. A 2002 Buick Century with 149k miles. If I bump the limit to $4k, a few more are shown: a 2007 Jeep Commander, a 2003 Mitsubishi Montero, and some others.
These are not what most people are buying. Average used car prices are more like $35k these days.
Of course, plenty of people still need beaters. But what the examples above have in common is that they’re all older than the first practical EV, let alone any of the first ones that could be a daily driver for most people. That came roughly in 2018. And you aren’t going to find $3k 2018 cars unless they’ve been trashed. Hell, you probably won’t find any that have been trashed.
It’s just going to take time. It takes 15-20 years for a car to become a beater. And EVs haven’t been around long enough.
I looked hard for any such vehicle, and the very cheapest i could find was $10K. Now, this was in SoCal, but still.
Can you find a nice reliable vehicle for $3K now? Those days are long gone.
Yeah, the days of a nice used car for $1000 or even $3000 are gone.
But yeah, if you are gonna compare apples and oranges, comparing 10 year old beater eco-cars with brand new luxury cars, then the debate in meaningless.
And the OP here is talking about CA requiring the sale of NEW Vehicles.
No, it’s not. EVs will be the car of the future. maybe not as early as some want, but the gas car is going out as sure as the horse drawn buggy is.
When there are no more gas stations, they will be gone also.
Due to a issue. Sure, that happens with gas vehicles also. But there are a good dozen EV trucks out there.
I just tried KBB.com (Kelley Blue Book). Nationwide they showed 3100 cars priced at/below $3K. And for comic relief, 100 cars nationwide priced at/below $1K.
A quick Google suggests 38 million used cars were bought/sold in 2022. Now the KBB 3100 cars is a supply at the moment and the Google number is a demand over 365 days, so not directly comparable. But if every one of those 3100 cars for sale today sold today and was replaced by an equal number tomorrow, and the same again every day for a full year, that would move 3100 * 365 ~=1.2M cars. Or about 3% of total used car sales.
Now clearly, turning over the entire stock of cheap-ass cars daily is unrealistically quick turnover = unrealistically high volume. So as a matter of math that 3% number is an extremely loose upper bound for the percentage of used car sales that are sub-$3K. If we assume the average beater takes 10 days to sell, the 3% loose upper bound turns into 0.3% as a closer but probably still loose upper bound.
BUT …
My KBB cite (or your cars cite) are only covering the kinds of cars that people put on the internet. IMO the real beaters are bought and sold between folks who mostly don’t hang out on the interwebz. Immigrants, the very, very po folks, rural shadetree informal car fix-n-flippers, etc.
It’s not easy for us keyboard jockeys to get a good grip on how much of that goes on where at what price.
But overall I think the data supports that @BigT’s experience may be commonplace where he is both geographically and economically, but it actually isn’t all that common nationally. Despite the income inequality we all know dominates our national demographics.
Then again, the poor folks tend to own cars until they die. Which might be 10+ years. Fancier folks, even those who buy used, get a new (to them) one every 2 or 3 years. So as in so much else, the low-income folks may be numerous, but they don’t contribute much to the overall velocity / volume of money (or cars) changing hands.