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Californians Have Now Purchased Half a Million EVs (arstechnica.com)
According Veloz -- an electric car industry group -- electric vehicle sales in California hit a cumulative 512,717 since 2010. "Months of strong U.S. sales in 2018, preceded by a strong 2017, are starting to show a trend: electric vehicles are selling well, especially in places where there are strong monetary and non-monetary incentives to buy them," reports Ars Technica. From the report: "Overall, this year has seen exponential growth in electric car sales," Veloz wrote. "Electric cars accounted for 7.1 percent of California car sales in the first three quarters of the year, with fully electric, zero-emission car sales outpacing plug-in hybrid sales 4.1 percent to 3 percent respectively." Veloz's data tallies not just fully battery-electric vehicles but also plug-in hybrids as well as the much rarer fuel cell vehicles. The group gets its data (PDF) from the blogs InsideEVs and HybridCars.com as well as a market-research firm called Baum & Associates and estimates from the California Air Resources Board (CARB).
According to data from InsideEVs, the Tesla Model 3 was the top-selling electric vehicle model in the U.S. in November. In November alone, 18,650 of those vehicles were sold in the U.S. To its credit, Veloz's press release isn't too self-congratulatory. The group writes, "Veloz recognizes that, while electric car sales are increasing at a rapid clip, it is not happening fast enough to achieve the deep cuts in emissions that the state needs to achieve to protect people's health and curb negative impacts on the environment."
According to data from InsideEVs, the Tesla Model 3 was the top-selling electric vehicle model in the U.S. in November. In November alone, 18,650 of those vehicles were sold in the U.S. To its credit, Veloz's press release isn't too self-congratulatory. The group writes, "Veloz recognizes that, while electric car sales are increasing at a rapid clip, it is not happening fast enough to achieve the deep cuts in emissions that the state needs to achieve to protect people's health and curb negative impacts on the environment."
If the electricity to charge electric vehicles comes from dirty sources, how are they cutting emissions?
You must be a socialist. Why punish success?
Socialists want to protect people from the harm of being born to the wrong parents, not to punish people for being born to the right ones.
We one percenters are the ones paying 60% of the taxes collected by the government.
And deriving 90% of the benefit. Any asshole can see that this is unfairly biased towards the 1% if they are not willfully determined to miss it.
Stop envying us, get off your butt and work your ass off. You might make a tenth of what my grandpa left in the trust fund.
The most reliable predictor of wealth is the social status of one's parents. You didn't build that, and you don't deserve it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The problem in America is, people still don't see EVs as cost-effective, practical alternatives to internal combustion engine vehicles in most cases!
That's something you can't fix by waving a one time tax credit at people, and really shouldn't attempt to do by mandating purchasing behaviors.
It's just the fact that EV technology still has to mature, like ALL technologies do. Your early adopters pay the premium prices that help fund mass-market viability.
(I can remember back in the early 1990's, paying over $1,200 for an internal CD burner drive. It was an HP 4020i, and only burned media at a 2x maximum speed. Now, you can buy these things off the shelf for about $25 and they record single or dual layer DVD as well as CD media at speeds of up to 52x! But back then, I had a real need for it and could justify that price. Most people couldn't.)
Electric cars still present some big challenges, like practically none of them existing yet that in a pickup truck or van format. If you need to make longer road trips, you barely have any viable options EXCEPT for Tesla, because they're the only one with a fast supercharging network that's built out well enough. (The GPS in the car automatically takes you to the nearest one when you won't make it to a destination otherwise, etc.) And we still barely even have any of America's gas stations on-board with adding EV charging at their locations! If American adopted EVs in any serious way, all of a sudden? There would be huge lines and people stuck waiting hours to recharge their vehicles, and cars with dead batteries stranded all over our roads.
Go on, do the math. And by that I mean the full chain, for both. Getting the fuel, transporting it, storing it, and so on, and so forth. It does happen that if you do that, the "green" suddenly isn't so green any longer.
[citation needed]
This is all hard to follow, but I take it that AC is trying to say that the transport and storage of fuels to be used for EV somehow make them less green than the transport and storage of fuels, then burning them in vehicles designed to burn those fuels?
Well, if that is the case, we always have to remember that the electrics tend to get pretty good MPGe. the Nissan Leaf gets an equivalent 112 mpg https://www.autobytel.com/top-...
In addition, we can charge the EV via a home solar system, negating the transport and storage issue altogether. https://news.energysage.com/so...
But the way I like to look at it is let us assume instead of the present situation, Electric cars are dominant.
So someone comes along with this idea that we should all convert to internal combustion engines with all of their complexity, and install a nationwide system of trains and trucks to deliver fuel to neighborhood refueling stations - to create an infrastructure of an immense amount of transport of flammable materials.
All this to replace plugging our vehicles into an electric outlet. All to replace a multiplicity of energy sources. Solar/wind/nuc/coal/hydro can produce the energy for EVs; with a very specific energy source of petrofuel - with a very minor ethanol component.
Whoever came up with that idea would be laughed out of town.
Yet we have people defending that very system as somehow superior.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Not every EV is a Tesla that costs $80,000. You can by a Hyundai Ionic EV for under $30,000 before incentives and well under $25,000 after incentives. For a new car that's pretty affordable, but I guess it depends on what you mean when you describe someone as rich.
I bought a used EV for $12,000 that would likely have cost a lot more if the incentives weren't in place for the new models. The incentives also lower the cost of used EVs because why would would someone pay $24,000 for a used Nissan Leaf when you can get a new one for that after incentives?
I do think the way the incentives are currently structured should be changed, but I also think that they are helping to accomplish what they were intended to, - bring EVs into the main stream.
A lot of the "subsidies" fossil fuel companies receive are tax based, ie they get significant discounts on their tax liability. While this may be comparable to other businesses, fossil fuel companies hold a somewhat unique position among corporations that do damage to the environment and pollute the air and water. This pollution harms the health of anyone and everyone living near it. So they should be taxed more harshly than other corporations that do not pollute the environment to either pay for the environmental cleanup or subsidize the treatment of the health issues that their pollution causes.
I would argue the same treatment be applied to any and every corporation that pollutes in a similar manner/scale.