It’s so wild to me to make a multiyear purchasing decision based upon recent events. My next car will be an EV not suggesting it’s a bad decision however I’m still blown away by statistics like this.
> It’s so wild to me to make a multiyear purchasing decision based upon recent events.
Recent events? Russia going rogue and the US going haywire both happened a decade ago at least. Those are two major suppliers of fossil fuel for Europe.
The current trend was bound to happen, it only required time for the industry to pivot.
We're commenting on the fact that demand has surged in the last few months. Russian and American behavior from a decade ago didn't (directly) cause that.
There was definitely a build up. Trump was held back from being Trump in the first term. Even with that, there was no recourse for any of the actions that he took. There were also the court decisions that happened in between terms. So this term, he naturally feels no need to hold back. It is unlikely this Trump term would happen had his first not happened.
The thing is a lot of people might be right at the tipping point of buying an EV and then some news like this comes out and it pushes them over the line.
I feel EVs at this moment are right at the level of “I’m gonna buy a new car, but maybe I’ll wait for the one after before I jump into an EV”. Better batteries (solid state), better charging speeds and more fast charger availability seem to have a large group of people waiting.
It’s not a bad idea. I bought in 2022 and the range of newer EVs is already a lot more than mine. But I really enjoy my car and don’t have much pressure to take so many roadtrips.
What I can’t see doing is buying a new ICE now. If you just want something to hold you over a few years, buy used or lease.
That makes no sense to me. I've had an EV for five years and right now the infrastructure is fantastic in comparison. There are chargers everywhere, they're fast enough, and the prices are reasonable. The batteries are also quite large. I see absolutely no reason to buy an IC car any more. Many people have solar panels installed, making the commute practically free.
I think at the upper range, and for Teslas, this is true. But for the rest, not quite yet.
Suppose you buy an entry-level Renault 5, the WLTP range is 310km. In mild conditions you typically get 85-90% of that, enough for the majority of people. But in winter you get 65% of that, so 195km, on a new battery. And after 5 years that may be 165km in winter, and that's just not great. With home-charging that still is enough for most requirements, but you are more restricted for longer trips and have to charge diligently.
I live in an apartment so I wouldn't be home-charging daily, there'd be plenty of times I'd want to park my car at the first available spot in my area at 55% charge and use it the next day, which is even more restrictive.
For the entry-level Tesla the WLTP range is 530km or 70% more. There the problem is much less. And for home-chargers, it's also a no-brainer usually, especially with home solar. But for an apartment-dweller who just needs an entry-level car, it's still a toss-up between a new EV like a renault 5 for 30k, or just a Toyota Corolla Hybrid that gets great mileage, low maintenance and can be had new for 30k or a few years old for 20k.
Unfortunately, I refuse to buy a Tesla due to Musk's politics.
Renault seems to have made a sensibly priced range with some classic styles too. Familiar cars but with EV, rather than early adopter cars like the Nissan Leaf or weird tech bro cars.
It moves up people's purchasing plans. If you were expecting to replace your vehicle in the next two years because of performance degradation, and now your fuel costs are substantially higher, then a purchase today might make more sense than your original plan.
Of even if people are just considering and EV as compared to an ICE car they may think "you know what, who knows when fuel prices will come down? maybe I just switch now!"
"make a multiyear purchasing decision based upon recent events" You have this all backwards. The fact is that for many decades petroleum is an unreliable energy source due to geopolitical factors, but people have been pretending that was not the case. What has happened in the last two months is people have finally realized the long-term truth.
Yeah buying an EV instead of a gas car is a hedge that doesn't cost much. There is an asymmetry in the upside and downside risk. The downside risk is all on gas with no upside. No downside for the EV.
EVs have been better for ~90% of the driving most people do for a decade, but a lot of people held back because they fixated on things like epic road trips or needing to haul many sheets of plywood.
What a price shock does is force people to acknowledge how much money they’ve been spending on edge-cases, making many of them reconsider how much it’s really worth to, for example, go on an all-day drive without every stopping for more than a few minutes or whether the SUV/pickup truck aesthetic is worth paying 50% more every day.
It's more like the recent events trigger people's awareness and learning about multi-year trends that are happening regardless of recent events.
EVs are a good deal in much of the world. They're more quiet, lower maintenance costs, lower fuel costs, therefore lower cost of ownership and operation. And they have less volatile costs as electricity prices swing less than gas prices.
Long-term trends show electricity and gas prices decouple.
It's just that every time gas prices spike, people look into solutions and find out these truths.
Climate change has been in the zeitgeist for decades now. Pretty sure many people are cognizant of this and want to move away from fossil fuels. This is just a boost to do so.
Interesting point, I wonder why governments haven't planted the idea in buyers that ICE cars will be getting more expensive to own (e.g. through taxes) in the coming 5-10 years. Then the thought of buying an ICE car now will also be less attractive because people know they won't be worth much in the 2nd hand market in 5-10 years.
But I suppose I see the answer, it's because of the car manufacturers employing many EU voters (in particular in Germany which is the 400kg gorilla in the EU), no government wants to piss off their voters.
It's not as direct as a future tax, but ICE cars have been gradually made less useful in many EU countries including Germany and France. You can't drive one into the centre of Paris, and older ICE cars are banned from the centre of larger German cities.
Even people who never go to these cities know it reduces the second hand value.
Oil usage being subject to supply shocks is nothing new, it’s completely inevitable. Moving to renewables is an obvious upgrade, this recent crisis is just bringing that into the light for folk.
I think the comments that the tech industry was always a bit terrifying and this piece can both be accurate. It is the case that the public perception has changed significantly due to lighting trust on fire and that the trust might not have been that deserved in the first place.
The asset liquidation analogy is perfect. For about the past ten year, I think the Cambridge Analytica hearings are a good turning point, tech has realized that their warm and fuzzy persona is no longer valuable cultivating and so there’s been a very rapid burn down of that persona into the hyper capitalist power hungry one we have today. It has always been the case that money and power were motivating factors but until that was laid fully bare there was value in pretending like it wasn’t the only factor.
These companies have pivoted from being cash generation machines to being data center building companies. It’s a huge bet that might pay off but the market is starting to notice that where there used to be revenue generation there is now infrastructure spend.
That representation is also old, incredibly well documented, and used to describe how to reason about chess. There are of course text guides to other games in training data but they rely upon depictions of what’s happening that aren’t purely text so the game harness is always going to have to make novel decisions about represent the game as text.
Yea it’s wild watching so many smart people convince themselves that LLMs are general purpose AIs. Don’t get me wrong they are incredibly powerful tools. However being surprised that text models cannot play video games particularly well is like being surprised weather models cannot.
Why aren’t those all spiritual questions? They seem like it to me. Maybe not religious questions but at the very least they are questions which, if approached honestly, force you to grapple with what it means to be you.
Describing the issue as “violent” is wild. Reading through a bit, it’s massive, it’s clear no one involved has the moral high ground here. The polite response is to close the issue if you believe it’s genuinely off topic.
Still not quite sure what you mean by obvious because to me “Stop. You know nothing. You have shipped 0 features by hand. No one has ever depended on your code.” Is much more violent than “please do not vibe fuckup this software”.
But more likely it’s just that those who still listen to Hard Fork agree with the conclusions before listening to the podcast.
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