RE: Netshark993 I find it very difficult even in my location which is on the border of dense suburb/city and farm country to justify buying into it.  I may only have a 100 mile range needed, or 120 miles round trip if the Chicago, Rockford, Milwaukee, Madison is the destination.  

My biggest beef with the entire EV affair is the lack of transparency related to product lifetime costs as it relates to parts availability and aftermarket(if it exists) and subsequent service costs.  

1.  With ICE engines we have 100 years of R&D which involve dealers and private party service centers helping inform and be a part of the process of keeping cars on the road.  As an example of that, Any one of us can go buy a part for any one of our 20+ year old wrecks and likely get it, and often affordably.  You might say well keeping these old cars on the road kills us all in the long run, but does consumption necessarily drive reductions in waste?  I argue it’s hard in this day and age to differentiate what product purchase will support a coming revolution in waste/consumption and which will contribute more to it.  To make strong moral claims here is probably a fool’s errand.  Both the progressive and conservative approach should be to use skilled labor to update existing chassis into safe modern vehicles vs giving 90k to recent upstarts claiming the next environmental miracle. You say, but Josh I don’t want to contract local skilled labor to make my old clunker efficient and safe and modern. That sounds like a sunk cost problem before even beginning.  Yah well let me know how ROI works on the EV in 20 years and we can talk.  Ohh you traded it in 5 years and have never worked on a 20 year old one, and avoided that all because you are now in a place in your life where you no longer have to work on shit to get to work?  Right must be nice but its no argument suggesting EV’s can filter down into all markets.   Until EV manufacturers wisen up to the aftermarket, i.e. Software and Electrical Engineers have to be less butt hurt and bend over like engine manufacturers did when we saw massive advancements during OBD2 standardization, we won’t see what we need to see EV adoption, which is a healthy means of keeping cars on the road past their warranty and past prime loan territory. 

2.  The OEM’s themselves are obfuscating the wear characteristics of a primary component which has the ability if it fails, to total the vehicle in insurance terms.  They sell a battery at a given rating, that actually has a higher rating, so that way as its state of charge is reduced they can still claim its rated capacity is within spec for non warranty claim.  They then also obfuscate the report the user has the ability to check by tuning it as time goes to better represent the product vs the actual value of the used thing being bought.  

3.  The products themselves lead to more centralization of primary humanity supporting energy feed stocks, production methods, and distribution methods.  I prefer engines compete with batteries to make better supply chains and redundancy for both methods as they both offer unique specific utility.  I can have a generator on a farm burning diesel to power both farm and EV, and if its a sunny warm area, maybe solar, etc..   I can’t do that if we ban diesel, now I MUST plug in and get power generated at a specific efficiency via a grid.  Ok well power plants of these sizes require higher order expenses done by monopolistic enterprises.  Gas companies have to compete to refine the fuel, store, deliver me the fuel, if we don’t replicate(at worst what we have now, it should be MORE competition than we have now) similar competition in distribution and production of electricity, we are boned and corporate interests will with government pwn energy costs by first making them the only provider.  It will turn into a single payer single buyer.  .gov hegemonically buys, US faux enterprise competes to convert to grid power, we all suck on tit.  This is def ok for some and good for many(coastal metropolitans), but will lead to disconnect between supply and demand and turn into FED reserve esque energy inflation vs markets.  We will still buy and burn fossil fuels, and the only innovation will be at the power plant level.  You won’t pay for innovation in each vehicle you buy outside if the materials are ‘ethically sourced’ and what automated features come next.  The electric motor will reach peak efficiencies in a decade and they will plateau for another 20 as patents clog up real innovation as Electrical/Software engineering is a much more troll happy space. 

The EV industry needs to move towards affordable retrofits asap and OEM’s need to make their product easily serviceable and software and electrical hardware needs to be no harder or more difficult than swapping and mating and figuring out the pc building landscape. 

 Keep in mind nothing I am saying is necessarily bad, I want to pop in a pod and automate a short trip to work, but not if I can’t also choose to hoon.  I also want an EV to hoon, and a 1.2liter turbo gas high rpm engine, and a 16L diesel to power my Commune etc..