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Cheap Gas Fuels Switch From Electric Cars To SUVs
schwit1 points out news that's sure to clash with Earth Day narratives: drivers who bought hybrid and electric cars are switching back to SUVs at a higher rate than ever. Quoting:
According to Edmunds.com, about 22 percent of people who have traded in their hybrids and EVs in 2015 bought a new SUV. The number represents a sharp increase from 18.8 percent last year, and it is nearly double the rate of 11.9 percent just three years ago. Overall, only 45 percent of this year's hybrid and EV trade-ins have gone toward the purchase of another alternative fuel vehicle, down from just over 60 percent in 2012. Never before have loyalty rates for alt-fuel vehicles fallen below 50 percent. ... Edmunds calculates that at the peak average national gas price of $4.67/gallon in October 2012, it would take five years to break even on the $3,770 price difference between a Toyota Camry LE Hybrid ($28,230) and a Toyota Camry LE ($24,460). At today's national average gas price of $2.27/gallon, it would take twice as much time (10.5 years) to close the same gap.
Tax gas and spend the proceeds on "green" R&D.
Table-ized A.I.
We've read this a 1000 times. Stupid people think prices will be low forever. A year later said people cry they are paying $250 a week for gas. Can't fix stupid.
For most people, especially ones with NEW cars, the cost of fuel is such a small portion of TCO that gas mileage is almost inconsequential within reason. People get psychotic when gas swings one way or another because people are idiots, who cannot ignore the 20-80 dollars they spent today in favor of focusing on the 500 dollars they pay every month.
I didn't see them breaking it down by make/model...
An owner of a Lexus hybrid-SUV trading it in on a non-hybrid SUV is one thing.
But I very much doubt that there's a line of Leaf or Tesla owners trading their EVs for SUVs.
TFA is beyond dumb. It's not people switching back, it's people buying a second car for their household. Many people have one EV and one ICE car.
EV sales are rising fast. Few people switch back after getting one and realizing how great they are, mostly because they did their homework and made sure it suited them before spending tens of thousands of dollars.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
My Camry Hybrid is quieter, smoother, and has over 30 extra HP compared to the 4 cyl Camry. You don't ONLY get improved mileage from most hybrids. They should be comparing the cost of the hybrid vs. the V6 model when calculating years to make up cost (not a perfect comparison, but much closer). They are just skewing statistics...
TFA is beyond dumb. It's not people switching back, it's people buying a second car for their household. Many people have one EV and one ICE car.
This.
Also, I have yet to see an EV or Hybrid which is suitable for a soccer mom.
People should also realize that the yellow carpool stickers are no longer available for hybrids... to get the new white stickers, you have to be either a plug-in, hydrogen, or LNG fueled.
car is being repaired. Ridiculous! 20 MPG and every time I step on the brakes or the gas it rocks back and forth like a rocking chair. It seats about as many people as a sedan and can carry only slightly more junk than a sedan. Why do people want to drive these things? They aren't attractive, they don't stop/go fast, they can't carry much stuff. I don't get it.
I don't understand why so many people want to drive pickups either. In a pickup you can only haul stuff you care about in decent weather. I get it if you're a farmer or ranch hand and need to haul messy stuff year round, but why would anyone else want to drive a truck? And why is it that the bigger the pickup, the greater the odds that they will back into parking spaces?
Love,
The Oil Industry
P.S. We secretly own Whole Foods. You dumb fucks have been giving your money to us all along.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Where I live (Vancouver, Canada) the purchase of an electric car is never about savings over gas prices. Even here, where gas costs ~$1.25 CAD per liter and hydroelectric residential power costs $0.0797 CAD per kWh for first 1,350 kWh ($0.1195 CAD per kWh over the 1,350), with a car like the Nissan Leaf you'll never save enough over the life of the car in fuel costs to offset the higher price for the car.
For the people I know with Leafs and Volts it's about doing their bit to reduce pollution and CO2 output, not saving money.
Let me know when Toyota starts shipping hybrid vehicles with batteries that actually retain their ability to recharge to a usable capacity for 10+ years.
They've been shipping those batteries... since 2001. See this 10 year checkup from Consumer Reports:
http://www.consumerreports.org...
Moreover, Toyota made it so that you can replace individual battery cells, instead of only being able to replace everything at once. My GF's Prius needed a few cells replaced, and the price was quite reasonable. ($250? I forget the exact number.)
I don't care how cheep gas gets, Plenty of EV charging stations are 100% free. Last I checked, no one in my area was giving away free gas?
Further, people are obviously uninformed or misled on how EV's are, in the most important ways, superior automobiles for the daily use:
1) ZERO MAINTENANCE (except for breaks & tires, wipers/fluid)
2) Vastly fewer points of failure - NO: fuel pumps, alternators, starters, automatic transmission(unless you count a 1 speed transmission), main seals, mufflers, fuel injectors, heater cores, etc., etc...
3) Electricity is far cheaper than any gas any where every day.
4) Used EV's are SUPER CHEAP right now - http://goo.gl/ZAJV81
5) EV's are super quiet, peaceful, meditative.
1) Combine two things that are sort of similar but not really - e.g. EVs and hybrids or tablets and e-ink e-readers
2) Make a statistical claim about the combined group - 'People are leaving EVs and hybrids", "Tablets and E-readers bad for sleep/eyes"
3) Forget to mention one of the two in the headline - 'People dump EVs', 'E-readers bad for sleep/eyes"
By combining the two, this report doesn't really tell us anything useful. I'd love to know the different rates of people abandoning EV or hybrids, as I think they are two very different propositions.
Hybrids, at the end of the day, are simply a different way of building efficient petrol/diesel powered cars. From what I've heard that efficiency has been a lot less in real life, with milage claims for things like the Prius not really living up to the hype. With ever more efficient petrol engines on the market, and gas prices so low, the efficiency improvements have to be pretty significant to make a big difference and to offset the higher cost of buying many hybrids.
EVs on the other hand are a totally different beast, and the reasons people might give up on them are different. Are people buying EVs and then finding range is more of a problem than they thought? Did they have problems finding charing points? Was overnight, at-home charging not good enough for them? Etc, etc.
In addition, this report talks about the number of people who are trading in their EVs/Hybrids for something else. But that doesn't really tell us anything about how much people like EVs and Hybrids as it only includes people who are switching. It doesn't provide any analysis of how many people are keeping their EVs for longer.
What's most annoying is that there are genuinely interesting questions to be asking about the EV and hybrid market, but this data isn't really answering any of them well.
Paul Leader
is that Americans will always drive big cars and trucks. We like big roads and wide open spaces. We like the space and utility that a truck offers. We like the feeling of security that driving a big hulking SUV offers.
Hybrids and electrics are a nice idea but for many people they are wholly impractical. Too small, too expensive compared to a gas powered equivalent, limited hauling capability. The high mileage ratings are for city driving. Once you get out on the freeway the advantage is lessened. For a lot of Americans, their daily commute is on the freeway.
Frankly, if I was looking for a vehicle that got great gas mileage I would buy a diesel. Better highway mileage, less complex than an hybrid, proven long term reliability.
That translates out to:
"Given the option, people will buy the vehicle they actually want, rather than settling for for electric/alt-fuel vehicles."
Speak for yourself. Eighty percent of my region's power is generated by carbon free sources - mostly hydro, with a bit of wind and nuclear. The rest of you either need to get more solar where it's sunny and bright most of the year, or for those with a less than ideal climate, kick the hippies in the nuts and start building some nuclear plants. Nuclear waste is a problem, but a manageable one... the lesser of two evils, so to speak.
Of course, you're correct in that if your electricity still comes from coal, you might as well stick with an efficient gas-powered car for now.
My next car is almost certainly going to be electric, although I'm not going to trade in my completely-paid-for gas powered car until it actually needs replacing.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
There's another reason. There are a lot more hybrid, diesel, and efficient trucks and SUVs becoming available. Most Americans' sense of the fuel efficiency of vehicles is distorted because it's measured in MPG. MPG is actually the inverse of fuel economy. Consequently the amount of fuel saved by vehicles like the Prius is exaggerated.
Here are the EPA figures for a 2004 3L 4WD Toyota Highlander, a 2015 3L 4WD Toyota Highlander Hybrid, and a 2015 Prius. Say you'd previously owned the 2004 Highlander and were looking to replace it. If you looked only at MPG, you'd think the Prius saves you a lot more gas than the Highlander Hybrid. The Prius gets 31 more MPG while the Highlander Hybrid only gets 9 more MPG.
But MPG is the inverse of fuel economy. Scroll down to "Annual Fuel Cost". The 2004 Highlander is estimated to cost $1900/yr in fuel. The Highlander Hybrid $1300/yr. The Prius $700/yr. In other words, switching to the Highlander Hybrid saves you $600/yr. Switching to the Prius saves you $1200/yr. The Highlander Hybrid gives you 50% the fuel savings of a Prius despite "only" getting a 9 MPG improvement vs 31 MPG improvement. How can this be? Because MPG is the inverse of fuel economy. Every time you double MPG, you save half the fuel you did in the previous doubling.
A lot of people laughed when hybrid trucks and SUVs first came out. If you want to save gas with a hybrid, why are you buying a big truck instead of an econobox like the Prius? But they were being deceived by MPG being the inverse of fuel consumption. If we as a country want to reduce fuel consumption, it's actually the low MPG vehicles like trucks and SUVs whose fuel economy you want to improve first by hybrid-izing them. They're the ones burning a disproportionately large amount of fuel, so improving their mileage first will save more fuel. Economy cars already burn so little fuel that making them a hybrid gets you little improvement. e.g. Dropping a hybrid in a 35 MPG economy car to get 50 MPG only saves you $350/yr by EPA estimates. While dropping the hybrid in a 19 MPG SUV to get 28 MPG saves you $600/yr. In other words, each SUV-buyer you can convince to buy a hybrid SUV instead saves nearly twice as much fuel as each environmentalist you convince to switch from their already-efficient car to a Prius.
If we really want to save gas, we should be concentrating on ways to improve the mileage of pickup trucks, SUVs, minivans, and tractor trailers (actually most of their cargo should be shifted to trains, but that's another argument). The rest of the world uses liters/100 km to avoid this misconception about fuel economy.
Tax gas and spend the proceeds on "green" R&D.
Seems pretty rational to me. You could even just spend the proceeds on our deficit or even just lower taxes because of the revenue.
The government doesn't even need to subsidize R&D spending if gasoline taxes made the price of gas reflect its true cost to society. $8/gallon gas would make our cars more efficient real quick. Obviously we wouldn't want to go to that level overnight because of its impact on the shipping industry, but over a decade or so our economy could shift to use more locally raised food, no more 2 day shipping of a toothbrush on Amazon Prime, etc.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
My point was really that electric cars are only one part of the solution. If you don't look at the whole system, you may be just exchanging one kind of pollution for another. If you can get clean energy to power your electric car, then you're doing it right. But if you're exchanging gasoline for coal to power your car, you're not helping as much as you think you are.
It's like all of those people claiming ethanol is such a great fuel because it's clean burning and renewable. What they don't understand is that many of the new ethanol plants in the heartland burn tons of coal to produce that ethanol. So the ethanol they produce isn't what I would call as much of a "net positive" as other alternatives.
My immediate thought is that perhaps the 1st gen users are just cycling to their next car? Why do we assume that people will always buy the exact same type of car again? THat actually seems unreasonable to me... Hybrids and EVs tend to be smaller vehicles, and there is some natural tendency to get something "different" when you get a new car. How many people who last owned a compact car bought the same class of vehicle again? How many went on to buy SUVs/trucks? That is important info if we want to make a proper comparison.
Anecdotal example: I drive a pickup truck, and I have owned it for 11 years. It is on its way out soon, and I can't wait to get a small car as I am tired of having something that costs so much to fill up, has bad traction on snow/ice, and is hard to navigate in tight parking lots. But then maybe after xx years in a compact, I'll buy another truck...
The actual article is titled "Hybrid and Electric Vehicles Struggle to Maintain Owner Loyalty". Shame on Slashdot for not getting even the title correct, since it has little bearing on electric vehicles.
The example in the article claims a 10-year payback at current fuel prices for a Toyota Camry hybrid. It doesn't say how many miles/year that is based on but I've tried to recreate the calculation, and I think it must have been 13,000 miles/year driving, which is far fewer than some people drive. And this is based on 41 MPG combined for the hybrid model compared to 28 MPG for the standard Camry, a difference of just 13. (This gap widens to 18 if you do mostly city driving.)
And worse, no comparable example is quoted for electric vehicles, which can have an effective MPG in triple digits. Given that some EV's are not much more than similar hybrids in cost these days, EV's offer a far better value proposition. Pure hybrids aren't that attractive for either environmental or cost reasons, given that the mileage improvements are modest over their standard counterparts. I wouldn't be surprised if some hybrid owners were trading in for SUV's, but I'd also expect to see hybrid owners trading for pure EV's. Hybrids without charging ability or significant battery storage are going to get squeezed out of the market.
(Disclaimer: I drive a Chevy Volt, and I love my car.)