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this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2024
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Technology
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So much talk about Tesla. It's like people don't realize Tesla is not even relevant anymore. They were first with good electric cars, but their cars all have reliability problems and tech problems.
In the mean time, other manufacturers like Kia is eating their lunch without much publicity. :)
Unfortunately Tesla is still relevant in that you can actually buy a Tesla sedan or suv with very little hassle.
Meanwhile I’ve been on a waitlist for years for a GM EV that has been “launched” but with not a peep about my order.
One of my friends got so dicked around by dealers and waiting he bought a Tesla, and it wasn’t even on his list because of lack of CarPlay.
I've seen bolts and bolt EUVs in stock pretty readily, but Not sure which GM EV you are referencing. If you are still looking for a small SUV, I really like the Nissan Aryia and VW ID.4, and those should be easy to get. Kia dealers are shit almost across the board, and I have doubts about longevity.
Bolt is too small, the ID4 can’t fit 3 car seats comfortably either, and the Aryia is too small and is a sad excuse for an ev, especially given the legacy of the Leaf.
The Buzz comes close but isn’t widely available, the EV9 would fit the bill were it not for its excessive size. That size also rules out the R1T.
What I want is essentially a lifted full-sized wagon, which in ICE terms is like an Outback or Sorento.
Enter GM with the Lyriq/Blazer/Prologue. Perfect dimensions, reasonable range.
Except they haven’t shipped them, and they announced they are stripping CarPlay starting this year.
Lucid has an SUV that might do if I was rich.
Or I can walk into a Tesla store today and buy a model Y with more range, less weight, a great charging network with a future proof connector, and a more proven platform than the unproven and rather piggish Ultium platform. I could buy the Y, put my fucking child car seats in and be done.
Now I’m not buying a Tesla because fuck Elon and fuck not having CarPlay, but you can see why they are so relevant.
There are simply too many unfilled niches in the EV market.
I have 4 kids and I don't want to pay over 100k for a car. Believe it or not, there is currently no EV option on the market. It's looking like the EV9 will be the first...
Yeah I feel ya. Funny thing is as soon as the EV9 starts selling Tesla is gonna drop model X price. They’ll also undercut the Escalade IQ with that same stroke.
The honest truth is only VW has what it takes, but they have to commit.
I had not considered that many kids. Yeah, not really much on the market. Subaru needs to get their shit together
Subaru’s EV future is tied to Toyota, and Toyota is fucking around.
They don’t have the capital to pursue an EV on their own unless it’s a rebadge or repackage, maybe in 5 years when EV components get more commoditized.
Yes they do. It's just they're choosing to spend all of it on hydrogen, which the Japanese companies still think is better than batteries.
Supposedly hydrogen cars are a solved problem now, all the investment is going into infrastructure. The ability to fill your tank in a few minutes is useless if there's nowhere to fill up.
I was referring to Subaru not having enough capital.
But in terms of Hydrogen, it is either a product of fossil fuel extraction via natural gas, or a product of electrolysis at a huge cost of electricity which is better spent charging an EV.
It’s never gonna be widely adopted(which is why Toyota is pivoting after their ceo stepped down).
Have you looked at a Volvo XC40/XC60 or even EX30, if available where you live? They're not perfect, but spacious, very pleasant to drive, generally very reliable, safe, with decent range and CarPlay (though not Android Auto).
Hmm. In Europe nobody talks about GM for electric cars, it's all Kia now.... Do you have Kia around?
The local Hyundai/KIA dealer dicked me around when I went to test drive a car. They also add absurd markups to the EV6. There are already headlines about KIA asking dealers not to do similar markups on the EV9.
Also the reliability track record for Kia is mixed for ICE cars, they made defective oil-consuming engines and tried to cover it up.
Their EVs show a similar pattern.
https://m.carcomplaints.com/Kia/EV6/2022/ https://m.carcomplaints.com/Tesla/Model_3/2022/
Tesla being mediocre doesn’t mean Kia isn’t shit-tier.
Yeah I know, Kia is absolutely not perfect. But feels like better then Tesla to me. They have been knocking it out of the park lately with great designed cars that look like from the future. But yes there are some reliability issues still with them too.
Yeah I went to the Kia dealer due to those designs.
The real missing player here is Japan. But as the saying goes, Japan has been stuck in the year 2000 since 1980.
It frustrates me to no end that the automakers who are known for their boring but practical cars and who’s customer base is the most likely to want an EV are instead still messing around with hydrogen becuse the Japanese government sunk a lot of money into a nuclear hydrogen plant and can’t stand the idea of just using it for industrial applications.
Like even if it works, produces masses of cheap hydrogen and makes it cost competitive, you would still need to license and build dozens of new plants in each market you wanted to export to, which means maybe the cars become viable for export by 2030, by which time your not competing with gas vehicles but electric ones.
Once people get used to the convenience filling up for cheap at home, I suspect it will be really hard to get them to go back to going out and spending five to fifteen minutes every single week driving to the gas station.
Europe is large and diverse, what country are you talking about?
KIA sold 15,000 EV's in 2023. Tesla sold 1.8 million. That's about 0.8% of their lunch. I think the publicity is appropriately sized.
Didn't know it was such a huge difference, thank you :)
That's total sales of all cars for KIA America.
So they weren't, in fact, the first with good electric cars?
It's all relative. When their first cars came, nobody else even had cars that could go that speed and that range. That was considered very good back then.
Now in 2024, a good electric car needs to be reliable and safe. Tesla is struggling with that and have focused their attention on their self driving capabilities, which also has had many issues and accidents.
Uh, a car always needs to be reliable and safe, not just now in the faraway future of 2024. Tesla was first because they rushed the development and refuse to acknowledge or fix the problems
They were first because no one else tried. It's that simple. Companies have been dicking around for decades with the hybrids, electric assist, alternate fuels, etc., and no one went whole hog before Tesla. Then* every auto maker on the planet started rushing to catch up.
Even if you discount Tesla's early lead and fast forward to 2017 when the Model 3 went on sale and GM was offering what appeared to be real competition in the Bolt, by 2021 Tesla has sold over a million 3's to GM's 100,000. And then GM had to recall all the bolts it had ever sold because they kept catching fire.
2019 is the same story with the Ford Mustang EV. Pretty decent, no real problems (other than their glass roof flying off sometimes...) but the model Y out sells it by hundreds of thousands, even beating Toyota one year for most sold globally. It's the second best selling EV SUV behind the model Y. Ford sold something like 10K of them in Q3 2023. Tesla sold over 400,000 Model Y's and 3's that same quarter.
The other car companies in the US at least just aren't putting in the effort to match those numbers. They don't want to put their money on the line.
I think the problem with a number of their reliability issues is that they essentially have (bad) agile in the automotive industry.