Someone more educated, please explain to me, why it’s impossible to just take the existing industry, take all the know how and engineering and direct efforts into electrifying (converting) existing cars instead of building new ones.
If the world was perfect and there was no nuance, no bad actors, no human factor involved - would it be a viable solution to cut back on the emissions without getting rid of the comfort that a car affords?
When you mass-manufacture things, they’re made in a very specific way using a very specific amount of material in a very specific size and shape in a very specific spot in order to accommodate the exact stuff that goes into the final product.
The industry did that during the “compliance” era where they had to hit emissions targets in places like California. The cars were much heavier and didn’t go as far as current EVs. A lot of vestigial metal designed to hold parts that weren’t present in the EV version. A lot less space for batteries since the car was designed for a different layout (gas tanks, engine parts, transmissions).
There are cheap EVs in other markets like Europe. The VW ID3 is a good example. They aren’t shipped here because the industry believes that Americans only want SUVs and giant trucks. This is a problem that plagues combustion cars as well. Ford completely stopped shipping sedans in the US, and companies like Mazda no longer ship smaller trucks in the states.
To which cars are you comparing the vw id3? In Germany, the cheapest settings will result in a price of 40.000€ which is expensive for my taste. But I don’t have a clue about the us ev market.
Someone more educated, please explain to me, why it’s impossible to just take the existing industry, take all the know how and engineering and direct efforts into electrifying (converting) existing cars instead of building new ones.
If the world was perfect and there was no nuance, no bad actors, no human factor involved - would it be a viable solution to cut back on the emissions without getting rid of the comfort that a car affords?
You’d need to gut the car completely and rebuild it, it would be more work than starting from scratch.
When you mass-manufacture things, they’re made in a very specific way using a very specific amount of material in a very specific size and shape in a very specific spot in order to accommodate the exact stuff that goes into the final product.
The industry did that during the “compliance” era where they had to hit emissions targets in places like California. The cars were much heavier and didn’t go as far as current EVs. A lot of vestigial metal designed to hold parts that weren’t present in the EV version. A lot less space for batteries since the car was designed for a different layout (gas tanks, engine parts, transmissions).
There are cheap EVs in other markets like Europe. The VW ID3 is a good example. They aren’t shipped here because the industry believes that Americans only want SUVs and giant trucks. This is a problem that plagues combustion cars as well. Ford completely stopped shipping sedans in the US, and companies like Mazda no longer ship smaller trucks in the states.
To which cars are you comparing the vw id3? In Germany, the cheapest settings will result in a price of 40.000€ which is expensive for my taste. But I don’t have a clue about the us ev market.
I am “the other market” haha. But even in Europe it’s mostly Tesla’s that you see. At least in the parts that I’ve lived in.
The American truck culture is weird to me.