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Honda says making cheap electric vehicles is too hard, ends deal with GM
(arstechnica.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
So let’s build an unaffordable EV?
They’re saying they don’t care about the cheaper segments and are just going to sell expensive vehicles. I don’t know what those of us who can’t afford 60k vehicles are expected to do for transit though… I suspect this is a ploy to get the American government to subsidize an affordable car range.
Buy a used car. At some point people started thinking new cars was something for people without money.
But if the base price is 60k and a replacement battery costs something like 30 even used cars are going to be too expensive. You're thinking like they're ICE cars where you might be able to buy an old shitbox for 5k and maybe rebuild the engine for the same amount.
I hardly see that happening with these smartphone cars. Lithium battery s would need to get really cheap and a lot of consumer protection laws would have to be passed to keep manufacturers from charging whatever they want for replacing them like they do now.
Don't buy a 60k vehicle. Batteries are more like 15k installed. Those reports of 30k batteries are edge cases.
Also EV batteries have a life expectancy of 200k miles. Most people consider 100k to be a cars retirement age, so I think the battery problem isn't as big of an issue as we think. Your car is statistically likely to be worn down or wrecked by that amount of mileage.