There is a fundamental truth you have to understand about car companies:They do not exist to make cars. They exist to make money. That distinction, analyst Kevin Tynan tells me, is why they’re not really interested in making affordable electric vehicles.

Perhaps that’s an oversimplification. Tynan is the director of research at an auto-dealer-focused investment bank, the Presidio Group, with decades of experience as an analyst at firms like Bloomberg Intelligence. What he means isn’t that automakers have no interest in affordable products. It’s that their interest begins and ends with winning customers who will eventually buy more expensive, higher-margin products.

One of the auto industry’s dirtiest secrets is that at scale, it doesn’t cost that much more to make a bigger, more expensive than a smaller and cheaper one. But they can charge you a lot more for the former, which makes this a game of profit margins and not just profits. In recent years especially, that’s a big part of why your new car choices have skewed so heavily toward bigger crossovers, SUVs and trucks.

  • Rivalarrival
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    4 months ago

    400 miles of range is 5 hours of driving (plus enough reserve to comfortably skip a busy, broken, blocked, or skeevy recharging point), recharge over lunch, and another 5 hours of driving. 400 mile range is where road trips become feasible.

    400 miles of range, in the mountains, is 150 miles of range.

      • tyler@programming.dev
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        4 months ago

        I mean it’s not, we have two ICE vehicles with 400 miles of range, and one EV with 265 miles of range.

      • Rivalarrival
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        4 months ago

        ICEs can refuel during a bathroom break. EVs need a long lunch. Turning every bathroom break into a long lunch makes a 3-day trip into a 5-day trip.

      • Rivalarrival
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        4 months ago

        And I can put in a leather gimp suit and have my partner spank me with a ping pong paddle. You don’t shame me for my masochistic kinks, and I won’t shame you for yours. Deal?

        The overwhelming majority of us don’t have a fetish for recharging stations, and don’t want to spend 2 hours a day on our vacations to make short-range EVs seem feasible.