Oh yeah, the deus ex machina everyone thinks is going to make these tesla cars practical. Ain't gonna happen. If you disagree, enjoy your Hydrogen car. Regardless, people won't buy something that they can't use for everything they need. If you get laid off from your job in Winnnipeg but find a job in the next city, you're stuck hiring a tow truck. Nobody will accept that.
Since I've only been making one argument -- this car is expensive and impractical, basically just a status symbol -- it seems like you're wasting your time by arguing against my point if you agree with all the supporting points. You agree that it's expensive. You agree that it's impractical. You agree that it's essentially just a status symbol, but you don't agree with me that it's an impractical expensive status symbol.
The difference between an electric bicycle and a tesla s is twofold: First, the bicycle can be bought by someone making minimum wage with a single paycheque. 500 bucks and you've got powered transportation. If you're trying to sell this as a commuter vehicle, it's best for the vehicle to be practical. Second, the bicycle doesn't need to be the primary source of transportation. It is far better suited to limited range and limited service than a full-size car. I, and many people in cities, live in an apartment and don't have room for two cars, so if I'm going to get a luxury brand car, it'll be a BMW or a porsche -- something I can make it to the next city with (even ignoring that the $50,000 car doesn't have a range of 300 miles, but half of that).
That's why I don't believe in electric cars. I like electric vehicles, but the car is a bulky and expensive form factor to push a limited range vehicle into. I think we should be looking at a much much smaller 1 or 2 person vehicle that'd cost maybe 2000 dollars.
When did a hand wave ignoring the range entirely become logical?
When did a hand wave ignoring the lack of recharging stations become logical?
None of your arguments are logical. They remind me of the arguments I made to justify staying with a girlfriend once. "I love her, so I'll work around the problems!" -- not very logical. I ended up leaving her.
It's pretty hard to take the European style of design seriously when Europe doesn't have any natural resources left. From an environmental standpoint, urban sprawl limits population density.
There are three types of people in the world: Gatherers, who mine or cut down, or plow; Builders, who make the mined or cut down or plowed resources into something useful; And Consumers, who take what the gatherers and builders produce and consume it, contributing nothing.
The human race requires builders and gatherers to survive, but consumers simply increase the resources the other two groups require to keep the standard of living for everyone at an acceptable level.
Cities are basically filled with consumers. There are no factories. There are no mines. there are no farms. You've got stores, and banks, and exchanges, and advertising agencies.
The solution to our environmental troubles, therefore, isn't building cities closer together, quite the opposite. The solution is genocide for consumers.
So before you get too smug, you should ask yourself: What exactly do you contribute to the human race? How is your existence justified? Why aren't you just a drain on the planet's resources?
Canada has half the population of the UK and the land mass of Europe, so you're just being ignorant -- Congratulations, not the entire world is the UK.
Travelling to the next town for me means spending 4 hours looking at trees passing by. The next city is another 2 hours.
Sure, you want everyone to live in cozy little cities, but guess what? My city is situated next to natural resources. Either we burn megatonnes of fossil fuels transporting every load of trees across a thousand kilometers of praerie so the paper mill can be in a city, or we put the town way up north where the trees are.
The other issue being, this is a car that exists now. These hypothetical charging stations don't exist.
Right now, you can travel about 200 miles before hopefully finding a receptical so you can charge for 8 hours. With that kind of distance on a trip, you might as well just hop on your bicycle.
Logic never comes into it, because this vehicle isn't logical to own.
This car is twice the price of most fully-loaded sedans, and the price difference is equal to the total lifetime fuel cost for a conventional vehicle.
Even ignoring that, the range is substantially less than a conventional vehicle.
Even ignoring that, there are no dedicated charging stations anywhere so it'll take a substantial amount of time(hours) to charge assuming you find an outlet you can use, which is unlikely at the moment.
Even ignoring that, a dedicated charging station takes ten times the time a petroleum car takes to fuel.
What does this car have going for it? Well, logically the reduced emissions by replacing your car won't affect the global climate appreciably, so you're buying it because of the warm fuzzy feeling you get by buying the latest "green" fad, and the warm fuzzy feeling that you might be helping to pay for the next technological deus ex machina.
This car, and this company, aren't logical. The only reasons to buy this horribly expensive car are wholly emotional.
After taxes and interest, you'll have a monthly payment of over $1,000 for 5 years to own this car. It's not arrogant to think that paying such a ridiculous amount every month, transportation should be covered. It's simple practicality.
What's arrogant is your shotgun engineering. "These are the specs of your car. If these specs don't work, go fuck yourself."
At the end of the day, the market will prove me right. These cars will be bought by movie stars and other people who want an overpriced status object but don't need to worry about practicality, and regular people will continue to buy regular cars, because even if gas goes to 8 dollars a gallon, it'll still be more economical over 200,000km to buy a nice petroleum car(or even a hybrid) than an EV that for $50,000 will still force you to take the bus.
Better, folks will still pretend they're financing some deus ex machina to save the world trather than buying a status object.
Ironically, electric bikes will continue to expand their market, since they're a more sane application of range-limited zero emission transportation.
You don't own a Tesla, and you won't own one. You won't spend 50k on a vehicle that'll force you to take the bus. No sane person would. It's ridiculous to do so.
Why not sell your e-meters somewhere that people don't actually deal with reality for a living?
I can buy an electric bike at the local Canadian Tire. I can't buy any of the things you've linked to. Therefore, they effectively don't exist and I don't give a crap.
Why didn't the EEE PC concept of a less powerful small laptop at a very low cost catch on until Asus released one? How did the netbook become the fastest growth segment of the PC industry?
Because the consumer didn't have any chance to buy one until Asus created it. The table I'm sitting at right now has two, the household I'm in has four, and the market segment didn't exist a few years ago.
Give me a 2000 dollar weatherproof vehicle I can actually buy, and I'll buy it. I can't buy it because it doesn't exist. Insurance differences alone would pay for such a vehicle if I could use it from march to october or november, forget about gas.
I can't buy it, and my hypothetical vehicle needs to be something I can buy.
Our dealerships don't even bother selling hybrids.
That said, for the months where it's not -50 before windchill, the trike would be a lot more useful than having to have the malibu barbie wardrobe for the massive variety of weather conditions -- frost in the morning, over 100F in the afternoon! Yaaay!
No, protection from the elements is a must. I've done the bike thing for months at a time, and the elements alone were reason enough for me to take my car every day and not have to deal with any of it, and reason enough for me to continue to do so despite the availability of inexpensive electric bikes.
If it's sunny and I'm taking my car, I put on my hat and leather jacket and drive away. If it's raining and I'm taking my car, I put on my hat and leather jacket and drive away. If it's windy and I'm taking my car I put on my hat and leather jacket and drive away. If it rained last night but it's clearing up, I put on my hat and leather jacket and drive away.
If I'm riding my bike, by contrast, I need to have a deep understanding of present and future conditions and I need to plan accordingly. I need sixteen different outfits and I need to plan ahead very much.
For a small-scale EV to be practical, it needs the same degree of seperation from the elements. After 12 hours of work, I don't want to worry about what the weather's like, I want to hop in my vehicle, turn the key, and drive home for some well-deserved rest.
Practicality is why you'd want to make it possible to travel as many places bikes can as possible. It's not supposed to be a car, it's supposed to be a useful little vehicle that can get you, a passenger, and a few groceries from point A to point B with as little fuss as possible.
The problem is energy density. A certain weight of capacitors would hold only a small fraction of the energy the same weight of batteries could hold.
Gelcaps/ultracaps/goldcaps or whatever trade name you use are better, but nowhere near what a battery can do.
Some independent projects have used ultracaps as a buffer between the charger and drive and the battery pack, but never as a main supply because the capacity is so low and the cost so high. Ignoring weight, replacing batteries in a project with ultracaps would turn the car into a million dollar investment.
But we're back to square 1. Why am I spending $50,000 on a car with the range characteristics of my 1985 Bronco with the half-dead ignition system? For half the price I bought a fairly luxurious fuel-efficient petroleum-fuelled car that got me where I wanted to be without having to stop at all.
Maybe you want to stop in some of the deliverance-like towns the range compromise requires, but the less I have to do with such overpriced filthy disgusting holes the happier I am. With a vehicle of a certain range, I can pass all those towns over and stop only at the well-lit, clean, modern gas stations of the larger towns.
You never know when the town you intended to gas up at was shut down, or the gas station isn't open anymore, or there's a detour due to construction that adds to your trip, or some other issue happens. I've driven about 7500km during the past few weeks on vacation, and I never let the range remaining in my fuel tank fall below 200km. This saved me countless times.
And let me get this straight: You want to spend $50,000 on a car that forces you to go back to 1909 standards of travel? "At least we didn't catch polio on our journey! You have to be thankful for that!"
Know what? I'll spend half as much on a fully loaded petroleum-fueled vehicle and arrive hours earlier. Why fly when you can drive?
The idea of compromising with a $50,000 car is ridiculous to me. The idea of maintaining and insuring a second vehicle because your $50,000 car can't pull off what a car needs to do is insane.
I just bought a fully loaded car for about half of that price. It's an excellent vehicle, and it works for any distance I need -- I drove 21 hours half way across the country to pick up my brother a couple weeks ago. With this car, you're paying twice as much for much less car. That's insane from where I'm standing.
Bang on. Why would anyone buy a $50,000 car then take the bus?
I could see a city vehicle being created that'd cost a couple grand and would have more in common with a bicycle than a car. If I could drive around the city virtually for free I'd consider taking the bus. If I'm paying as much for a car as a small house, it'd better do what I need it to do.
It's an 8 hour straight drive to the next city from where I live. I'd need to stop 3 times with this vehicle.
Turning my 8 hour trip into an 11 hour trip is a big deal. Turning my 12 hour trip to visit my parents in the next province into a couple days is a very big deal, costing me hundreds of dollars to deal with.
It's all fine and good to sit in your little design booth and say "They'll just have to deal with the inconvenience", but we don't have to deal with the inconvenience. Unless convenient petroleum-based vehicles are legislated away, electric cars are going to have to deal with the existing standards of convenience.
Frankly, that's why I think we need to look at electric vehicles in a different light: Create something closer to an all weather electric tricycle that you can buy for a couple grand or less, and suddenly people can justify the purchase by offsetting a year's gasoline purchases. It stops being a car altogether, which means it can play by it's own rules.
I used an electric bike a couple years ago that wasn't high tech in any sense of the word. The batteries were basically UPS batteries in expensive casings. Besides that, the electric parts were basically grafted onto a conventional bike chassis. It reached residental street speeds and did so for distances far longer than I could pedal. The bike cost about $500 CDN.
I think we're trying to solve the wrong problem. We're trying to reinvent the car as a car, when we need to re-invent our concept of a vehicle altogether.
I imagine a good electric vehicle being had for less than 2000 dollars, and being a 3-wheel, 2 seater with a lightweight basket capable of carrying a couple bags of groceries. It would have to be weather-proof, but that could (and should) be accomplished using something cheap and effective like tarp and plexi-glass and aluminium. It'd have a small enough footprint to use bike paths and to store like a bicycle, a long enough distance to use as a commuter(at least 100km on a charge), high enough speeds to use residental streets, and low enough cost that people like me don't need to point out it's uneconomical to own. Such a vehicle would require a fraction of the energy to move, it would require a fraction of the materials to build, and overall could actually be a practical solution that doesn't need a technological deus ex machina to happen.
The tesla motors paradigm is still too inside the box. They're trying to make an electric car in a world where electric cars aren't useful. We need to think outside the box, to what we actually want, so we can escape the limitations of the automobile.
The greenest car on the market appears to be the Geo Metro. Very little energy to make, gets fuel economy comparable to a prius.
Nobody wants to drive a Geo Metro because it's not a cool car.
Therefore, the prediction created by your theory, that fuel efficient but uncool cars would be less popular than fuel efficient yet cool cars that are much more expensive, appears correct.
Just FYI, diesel and gasoline price cycles are much different. There have been a number of times in the past few years where diesel was much higher than gasoline, because gasoline prices tend to peak during summer and come down to rational levels while diesel prices tend to move more slowly and peak closer to christmas when lots of freight is being moved around.
More importantly, remember to keep the price of gasoline in perspective. Over 100,000km, you'll pay about 5500 dollars in gasoline or diesel at $1/l(about 3.80/galllon), or 11000 dollars at $2/l(about 7.60/gallon). Considering just how far 100,000km is, that's a pittiance. Gas is something that people notice due to volatility, not due to magnitude. People notice when they spend 40 bucks a month instead of 20, but neither number is terribly large, and shouldn't affect a well-designed budget.
Of course, there are the people who travel a few hours to get to and from work each day, and those people's problem isn't the price of gasoline, but their decision to live hundreds of kilometers from where they work.
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Oh yeah, the deus ex machina everyone thinks is going to make these tesla cars practical. Ain't gonna happen. If you disagree, enjoy your Hydrogen car. Regardless, people won't buy something that they can't use for everything they need. If you get laid off from your job in Winnnipeg but find a job in the next city, you're stuck hiring a tow truck. Nobody will accept that.
Since I've only been making one argument -- this car is expensive and impractical, basically just a status symbol -- it seems like you're wasting your time by arguing against my point if you agree with all the supporting points. You agree that it's expensive. You agree that it's impractical. You agree that it's essentially just a status symbol, but you don't agree with me that it's an impractical expensive status symbol.
The difference between an electric bicycle and a tesla s is twofold: First, the bicycle can be bought by someone making minimum wage with a single paycheque. 500 bucks and you've got powered transportation. If you're trying to sell this as a commuter vehicle, it's best for the vehicle to be practical. Second, the bicycle doesn't need to be the primary source of transportation. It is far better suited to limited range and limited service than a full-size car. I, and many people in cities, live in an apartment and don't have room for two cars, so if I'm going to get a luxury brand car, it'll be a BMW or a porsche -- something I can make it to the next city with (even ignoring that the $50,000 car doesn't have a range of 300 miles, but half of that).
That's why I don't believe in electric cars. I like electric vehicles, but the car is a bulky and expensive form factor to push a limited range vehicle into. I think we should be looking at a much much smaller 1 or 2 person vehicle that'd cost maybe 2000 dollars.
So, when did "kickass" become a logical argument?
When did a hand wave ignoring the range entirely become logical?
When did a hand wave ignoring the lack of recharging stations become logical?
None of your arguments are logical. They remind me of the arguments I made to justify staying with a girlfriend once. "I love her, so I'll work around the problems!" -- not very logical. I ended up leaving her.
It's pretty hard to take the European style of design seriously when Europe doesn't have any natural resources left. From an environmental standpoint, urban sprawl limits population density.
There are three types of people in the world: Gatherers, who mine or cut down, or plow; Builders, who make the mined or cut down or plowed resources into something useful; And Consumers, who take what the gatherers and builders produce and consume it, contributing nothing.
The human race requires builders and gatherers to survive, but consumers simply increase the resources the other two groups require to keep the standard of living for everyone at an acceptable level.
Cities are basically filled with consumers. There are no factories. There are no mines. there are no farms. You've got stores, and banks, and exchanges, and advertising agencies.
The solution to our environmental troubles, therefore, isn't building cities closer together, quite the opposite. The solution is genocide for consumers.
So before you get too smug, you should ask yourself: What exactly do you contribute to the human race? How is your existence justified? Why aren't you just a drain on the planet's resources?
Canada has half the population of the UK and the land mass of Europe, so you're just being ignorant -- Congratulations, not the entire world is the UK.
Travelling to the next town for me means spending 4 hours looking at trees passing by. The next city is another 2 hours.
Sure, you want everyone to live in cozy little cities, but guess what? My city is situated next to natural resources. Either we burn megatonnes of fossil fuels transporting every load of trees across a thousand kilometers of praerie so the paper mill can be in a city, or we put the town way up north where the trees are.
The other issue being, this is a car that exists now. These hypothetical charging stations don't exist.
Right now, you can travel about 200 miles before hopefully finding a receptical so you can charge for 8 hours. With that kind of distance on a trip, you might as well just hop on your bicycle.
Logic never comes into it, because this vehicle isn't logical to own.
This car is twice the price of most fully-loaded sedans, and the price difference is equal to the total lifetime fuel cost for a conventional vehicle.
Even ignoring that, the range is substantially less than a conventional vehicle.
Even ignoring that, there are no dedicated charging stations anywhere so it'll take a substantial amount of time(hours) to charge assuming you find an outlet you can use, which is unlikely at the moment.
Even ignoring that, a dedicated charging station takes ten times the time a petroleum car takes to fuel.
What does this car have going for it? Well, logically the reduced emissions by replacing your car won't affect the global climate appreciably, so you're buying it because of the warm fuzzy feeling you get by buying the latest "green" fad, and the warm fuzzy feeling that you might be helping to pay for the next technological deus ex machina.
This car, and this company, aren't logical. The only reasons to buy this horribly expensive car are wholly emotional.
Really? Arrogance?
After taxes and interest, you'll have a monthly payment of over $1,000 for 5 years to own this car. It's not arrogant to think that paying such a ridiculous amount every month, transportation should be covered. It's simple practicality.
What's arrogant is your shotgun engineering. "These are the specs of your car. If these specs don't work, go fuck yourself."
At the end of the day, the market will prove me right. These cars will be bought by movie stars and other people who want an overpriced status object but don't need to worry about practicality, and regular people will continue to buy regular cars, because even if gas goes to 8 dollars a gallon, it'll still be more economical over 200,000km to buy a nice petroleum car(or even a hybrid) than an EV that for $50,000 will still force you to take the bus.
Better, folks will still pretend they're financing some deus ex machina to save the world trather than buying a status object.
Ironically, electric bikes will continue to expand their market, since they're a more sane application of range-limited zero emission transportation.
Maybe if you drive a 25 year old SUV it's not common, but most new cars will easily get 500 highway miles on a tank of gas.
Really, you're looking at maybe 40 litres of gasoline for an efficient vehicle, which is less than the capacity of most cars.
You don't get supplies if people like me move to cities. I actually work to produce something useful.
It's not perfect, you're living in a dream world.
You don't own a Tesla, and you won't own one. You won't spend 50k on a vehicle that'll force you to take the bus. No sane person would. It's ridiculous to do so.
Why not sell your e-meters somewhere that people don't actually deal with reality for a living?
I can buy an electric bike at the local Canadian Tire. I can't buy any of the things you've linked to. Therefore, they effectively don't exist and I don't give a crap.
A $50,000 vehicle that forces you to take the bus at any point isn't a practical vehicle. Period.
Why didn't the EEE PC concept of a less powerful small laptop at a very low cost catch on until Asus released one? How did the netbook become the fastest growth segment of the PC industry?
Because the consumer didn't have any chance to buy one until Asus created it. The table I'm sitting at right now has two, the household I'm in has four, and the market segment didn't exist a few years ago.
Give me a 2000 dollar weatherproof vehicle I can actually buy, and I'll buy it. I can't buy it because it doesn't exist. Insurance differences alone would pay for such a vehicle if I could use it from march to october or november, forget about gas.
I can't buy it, and my hypothetical vehicle needs to be something I can buy.
I live 2 thousand miles north of you.
Our dealerships don't even bother selling hybrids.
That said, for the months where it's not -50 before windchill, the trike would be a lot more useful than having to have the malibu barbie wardrobe for the massive variety of weather conditions -- frost in the morning, over 100F in the afternoon! Yaaay!
sod-all except for the second car you need to own because this one won't get you to the next town, right?
No, protection from the elements is a must. I've done the bike thing for months at a time, and the elements alone were reason enough for me to take my car every day and not have to deal with any of it, and reason enough for me to continue to do so despite the availability of inexpensive electric bikes.
If it's sunny and I'm taking my car, I put on my hat and leather jacket and drive away. If it's raining and I'm taking my car, I put on my hat and leather jacket and drive away. If it's windy and I'm taking my car I put on my hat and leather jacket and drive away. If it rained last night but it's clearing up, I put on my hat and leather jacket and drive away.
If I'm riding my bike, by contrast, I need to have a deep understanding of present and future conditions and I need to plan accordingly. I need sixteen different outfits and I need to plan ahead very much.
For a small-scale EV to be practical, it needs the same degree of seperation from the elements. After 12 hours of work, I don't want to worry about what the weather's like, I want to hop in my vehicle, turn the key, and drive home for some well-deserved rest.
Practicality is why you'd want to make it possible to travel as many places bikes can as possible. It's not supposed to be a car, it's supposed to be a useful little vehicle that can get you, a passenger, and a few groceries from point A to point B with as little fuss as possible.
Capacitors wouldn't work.
The problem is energy density. A certain weight of capacitors would hold only a small fraction of the energy the same weight of batteries could hold.
Gelcaps/ultracaps/goldcaps or whatever trade name you use are better, but nowhere near what a battery can do.
Some independent projects have used ultracaps as a buffer between the charger and drive and the battery pack, but never as a main supply because the capacity is so low and the cost so high. Ignoring weight, replacing batteries in a project with ultracaps would turn the car into a million dollar investment.
But we're back to square 1. Why am I spending $50,000 on a car with the range characteristics of my 1985 Bronco with the half-dead ignition system? For half the price I bought a fairly luxurious fuel-efficient petroleum-fuelled car that got me where I wanted to be without having to stop at all.
Maybe you want to stop in some of the deliverance-like towns the range compromise requires, but the less I have to do with such overpriced filthy disgusting holes the happier I am. With a vehicle of a certain range, I can pass all those towns over and stop only at the well-lit, clean, modern gas stations of the larger towns.
You never know when the town you intended to gas up at was shut down, or the gas station isn't open anymore, or there's a detour due to construction that adds to your trip, or some other issue happens. I've driven about 7500km during the past few weeks on vacation, and I never let the range remaining in my fuel tank fall below 200km. This saved me countless times.
And let me get this straight: You want to spend $50,000 on a car that forces you to go back to 1909 standards of travel? "At least we didn't catch polio on our journey! You have to be thankful for that!"
Know what? I'll spend half as much on a fully loaded petroleum-fueled vehicle and arrive hours earlier. Why fly when you can drive?
The idea of compromising with a $50,000 car is ridiculous to me. The idea of maintaining and insuring a second vehicle because your $50,000 car can't pull off what a car needs to do is insane.
I just bought a fully loaded car for about half of that price. It's an excellent vehicle, and it works for any distance I need -- I drove 21 hours half way across the country to pick up my brother a couple weeks ago. With this car, you're paying twice as much for much less car. That's insane from where I'm standing.
Bang on. Why would anyone buy a $50,000 car then take the bus?
I could see a city vehicle being created that'd cost a couple grand and would have more in common with a bicycle than a car. If I could drive around the city virtually for free I'd consider taking the bus. If I'm paying as much for a car as a small house, it'd better do what I need it to do.
It's an 8 hour straight drive to the next city from where I live. I'd need to stop 3 times with this vehicle.
Turning my 8 hour trip into an 11 hour trip is a big deal. Turning my 12 hour trip to visit my parents in the next province into a couple days is a very big deal, costing me hundreds of dollars to deal with.
It's all fine and good to sit in your little design booth and say "They'll just have to deal with the inconvenience", but we don't have to deal with the inconvenience. Unless convenient petroleum-based vehicles are legislated away, electric cars are going to have to deal with the existing standards of convenience.
Frankly, that's why I think we need to look at electric vehicles in a different light: Create something closer to an all weather electric tricycle that you can buy for a couple grand or less, and suddenly people can justify the purchase by offsetting a year's gasoline purchases. It stops being a car altogether, which means it can play by it's own rules.
I used an electric bike a couple years ago that wasn't high tech in any sense of the word. The batteries were basically UPS batteries in expensive casings. Besides that, the electric parts were basically grafted onto a conventional bike chassis. It reached residental street speeds and did so for distances far longer than I could pedal. The bike cost about $500 CDN.
I think we're trying to solve the wrong problem. We're trying to reinvent the car as a car, when we need to re-invent our concept of a vehicle altogether.
I imagine a good electric vehicle being had for less than 2000 dollars, and being a 3-wheel, 2 seater with a lightweight basket capable of carrying a couple bags of groceries. It would have to be weather-proof, but that could (and should) be accomplished using something cheap and effective like tarp and plexi-glass and aluminium. It'd have a small enough footprint to use bike paths and to store like a bicycle, a long enough distance to use as a commuter(at least 100km on a charge), high enough speeds to use residental streets, and low enough cost that people like me don't need to point out it's uneconomical to own. Such a vehicle would require a fraction of the energy to move, it would require a fraction of the materials to build, and overall could actually be a practical solution that doesn't need a technological deus ex machina to happen.
The tesla motors paradigm is still too inside the box. They're trying to make an electric car in a world where electric cars aren't useful. We need to think outside the box, to what we actually want, so we can escape the limitations of the automobile.
The greenest car on the market appears to be the Geo Metro. Very little energy to make, gets fuel economy comparable to a prius.
Nobody wants to drive a Geo Metro because it's not a cool car.
Therefore, the prediction created by your theory, that fuel efficient but uncool cars would be less popular than fuel efficient yet cool cars that are much more expensive, appears correct.
Just FYI, diesel and gasoline price cycles are much different. There have been a number of times in the past few years where diesel was much higher than gasoline, because gasoline prices tend to peak during summer and come down to rational levels while diesel prices tend to move more slowly and peak closer to christmas when lots of freight is being moved around.
More importantly, remember to keep the price of gasoline in perspective. Over 100,000km, you'll pay about 5500 dollars in gasoline or diesel at $1/l(about 3.80/galllon), or 11000 dollars at $2/l(about 7.60/gallon). Considering just how far 100,000km is, that's a pittiance. Gas is something that people notice due to volatility, not due to magnitude. People notice when they spend 40 bucks a month instead of 20, but neither number is terribly large, and shouldn't affect a well-designed budget.
Of course, there are the people who travel a few hours to get to and from work each day, and those people's problem isn't the price of gasoline, but their decision to live hundreds of kilometers from where they work.