EV to ICE Transition

Chevy Bolt won some "Best of" award for 2021 which naturally infuriated the Musk fan club.

Tesla is the best EV to get if you're spending $40,000+ on a new car cash or finance, or want to lease a base trim Model 3 at $6000 down, $359 a month. That is to say all their products are out of the price range of 90% of car shoppers.

Forgot to add that Tesla owners seem to prefer it this way, it's a luxury brand.

Why doesn't it make some noise?

1. A young lady was walking slowly in the middle of the road. I had to drive as slowly as she walk.

1. An old lady was standing in front of my parked car, looking forward. I had to move slowly back and forth couple of time to catch her attention. Even my backing sound did not catch her attention.

I was told to resist using the horn, which is not too polite for pedestrian.

I need an ICE engine noise simulator.

First gen Chevy Volt had a "polite horn" on the end of the turn signal lever that just went "Beep beep boop" instead of the typically aggressive Chevy horn.

It was removed for the second gen IDK why, nobody hears the "air conditioner" generated noise very well.

In the final model year they again changed it to some kind of New Age music:

I'd still like the beep-booper back though. Move on, move on, move on:

But as engineers we can install something like that ourselves:

Sorry this link should be:

I read that about 20% of electric car owners buy a ic-engine replacement.

I wonder if the Tesla is an enthusiasts car, like the PT Cruiser. Once everyone who wanted a Cruiser had one, sales stopped. Other cars, like Smarts and Miatas, had similar popularity/fad dynamics. And those halfway pickup truck things.

There's an electric Harley, which is silent. Don't people buy hogs to make noise?

Sounds like nonsense. Does it pull data from the CANBUS on "throttle" position, motor load, velocity and torque etc. and run a virtual engine blending sound files to generate the audio?

Not an unsolvable problem and It's likely some automaker has a patent on an implementation but doesn't sound cheap as an aftermarket product.

Like probably not the _only_ reason...

Why can't the "horn" make an apologetic cough? I'm sure I've had engines do something similar...

Or just adjustable volume. At close range, horn is very annoying for pedestrian. I am aware of an assault with a deadly weapon case from pedestrian started with the driver horning.

"These guys are losing money selling cars."

Tesla makes money reselling regulatory credits and gambling on bitcoins.

You can stay in business a long time losing money on selling luxury cars, though. Lamborghini lost money selling high-end cars for years or decades, maybe, before VW Gruppe finally bought them out.

A real Marxist would be uninterested in what car any particular person drives; whether they drive a zero-emissions luxury Tesla that makes them feel good about saving the Earth or an F-450 that gets 4 mpg, or whether they use paper or plastic at the store because the glossy sign tells them it's better to use paper. It's of no interest to them. "Fuck the machines, we want the machines that are making them" is an expression.

But since I would be unlikely to be a very good Marxist by any measure I will continue to drive my "budget"-priced not-electric, not-gas sedan like the snob I am. or whatever.

Exactly. It is just a matter of time before gas stations no longer sell gas, truck stops will not sell diesel, the air will clear and the silence of life will settle over the land. Well, except for the yahoos raising hell a few doors down with their loud music the entire cove has to listen to.

But it won't be Harleys. In ten years or so you'll have to drive so far to buy gas that a Harley can't make it from one station to another. Motorcycles usually don't have much range. I guess one could tow a gas trailer behind.

For plenty of them it is. Absolutely.

Whenever people talk about driving a Tesla because they want to "virtue signal" or whatever, I realize they have never driven a Tesla, not in a meaningful way. I'm looking at relocation to Puerto Rico and I was thinking I'd leave the car here, but transporting the car is not that much money. It's a nice car in so many ways. By the time the Harleys can't find a gas station within range EVs will be under $20,000 and the fuel savings will be enough that no one can afford to drive an ICE.

What makes you think anyone will ever make an EV under 20k for domestic sale? The low end of the market particularly cars is a thankless job and margins are thin.

Aside from some brands like Mitsubishi and Daewoo and some of the Chinese and Indian producers for purchase in those countries that's a market segment everyone else want to get out of, not get into. New car prices for cutting-edge cars go _up_, they don't go _down_.

An alternative take that's not any more or less plausible than that Elon Musk fever-dream: The age of the personal automobile is ending. Personal automobiles will become the playthings of the very wealthy like horses are today.

They'll be replaced for most people with transport-as-a-service, self-driving taxis, mass transit, bicycles, or walking, depending. For the majority of the world's population this will probably be an improvement as they've never owned a personal automobile anyway and chances are they never will.

That is such a silly thing to say. If it's so terrible, why would anyone make low end cars at all? Simple, that's where the volume is. Very few car companies make only high end cars. For every $50,000 car sold there are a lot more $20,000 cars sold. Right now people are buying $35-$40,000 cars because there are none in the US at $20,000.

Again, rather silly thing to say. It's very easy to get out of a car market, just stop making those cars!

You totally miss the point. In even just 5 years, EVs won't be "cutting edge" anymore and it will be about price points. In 10 years batteries will have advanced enough that an EV will be cheaper than an ICE for anything other than the lowest priced cars and the cost of operating an EV will more than make up for that easily.

That is the point where there are so few ICE left on the roads that half the gas stations will have turned into ice cream parlors or 7-11s. I would really like to be in the room when the big chain gas stations are planning their futures.

What I'm really wondering about is if this transition will be like the impact of quartz digital devices on the watch market. It didn't take long at all for the Swiss to lose dominance in the watch market. Something similar could happen with EVs where some automakers simply can't make the transition and fade away.

BTW, it is just plain silly to think the low end EV cost is going to rise in the next 40 years unless there is some major disaster affecting a vital resource. EVs will continue to drop in price for the foreseeable future.

That is entirely realistic. There are no small number of people in cities who don't have cars and use one of the car services to share cars for shopping or whatever. Once cars are self driving this will be greatly enhanced by the cars not needing to sit around waiting for someone in the local area to come to them like rental vehicles. Instead the cars will operate like taxis coming to the user.

Not saying this will be any time soon. I think Elon said it would be the end of 2020 which was BS clearly. But maybe in 5 or 10 years. It's not an easy problem to solve.

Maybe. But if you can't afford to own a car, you likely can't afford to use/share a car very often either. Mass transit is about the low cost end of transportation and that's still not inexpensive. But in comparison to owning a car it is cheaper.