Average price of a new vehicle in the US is $50,000. This is priced appropriately considering total cost of ownership delta against a combustion vehicle. Rivian needs more volume for prices to decline from manufacturing efficiency at scale.
A cursory search of the web shows that TCO for EVs in the US is higher than ICE for all but high mileage commuters. Wish it wasn't the case, but insurance alone is a 30% premium.
NYT recently did a fantastic calculator. It isn't simple flat one or the other is cheaper. It takes into account buy vs lease, milage, local energy cost, length of ownership etc
How are insurers making any money insuring these things nowadays? 30% higher premiums are being mentioned elsewhere in the comments; that doesn't sound like enough!
People keep repeating this uncritically. There is a car-debt crisis, and wages haven't kept up with house/car costs.
We have one person saying "well in Californian wages..." and another saying essentially that 50K isn't a lot of money when the average SALARY is $66K/year.
I also believe this $50,000 stat is the mean car price which is likely to be pushed up by luxury car sales that cost 2-4x what a typical car costs, whereas a median price would give a better indication of what most people are actually spending. I did a quick Google search and wasn't able to find any data on median price, though.
To what degree is this caused by car prices versus Americans' compulsion to keep buying new cars? Anecdotally, the folks I know struggling with car payments are almost exclusively in the latter bucket. But I'm open to having my mind changed with data.
Not entirely true; there are at least the lease, rental, and commercial fleet markets supplying predictable inventory of used cars to the public market.
I have 2014 Tesla S which which I recently had drive unit and battery replaced ($20k total). my friends all think I am nuts, but they all have $1k+ payments (some for 72m) while I haven’t had a car payment since 2017 and won’t have another one till 2036 :)
Electricity prices have gone up due to datacenters as well as neglected grid infrastructure needing investment. Natural gas prices are going up because of LNG export infrastructure causing US consumers to compete against global LNG consumers for fuel to heat, as well as domestic electrical generation demand. Pick your poison.
Electricity prices might come down over time (renewables push down generation costs), natural gas prices won’t due to global demand for it.
The price of electricity where I am in California is pretty cheap for the energy itself -- I pay about $20/mo for generation -- but the cost for electricity delivery is absolutely fucking insane. It costs me $90 for "delivery" of that $20 worth of electricity.
I haven’t paid attention to the change in my utility prices but my natural gas furnace is much cheaper for heating than my electric heat pump (I have both and my thermostat can pick). I believe our local electricity is almost fully from renewables already.
Installation costs dominate the price. I check every few years, and while the hardware is down to about $5k for me, cost for installation remained $45k-$50k. Which is where it’s been for years. Makes diy very attractive though.
This is bananas. Ten years ago I paid £5.5k for a whole 3.9kW installation, which has now more than paid for itself. I can see why everyone in the US is saying "get a trade job", you can rip off householders to a massive extent.
Solar installer costs are broadly comparable as Australians are better qualified and even if they weren't comparable the fraction of the cost isn't enough to explain the total difference.
There's various studies comparing the two countries, Tesla did one and found various technical approach changes and permitting reforms. It suggests labor is 7% of the cost in the US. Soft costs around acquisition, sales and marketing can be 18%.
What kind of power we're talking about here? I was quoted €10600 (around half of which will be government-subsidized) for 8 kWp worth of panels + 10.24 kWh battery storage, including project documentation (for subsidies), labor, and materials.
50k?
I could fly there, stay somewhere nice, buy a decent truck, put the solar PV on your roof, and make it home with 20k in my pocket to upgrade my solar power with and a truck.
The installation is straightforward, but the problem comes when you want to connect to the grid, because you have to get it approved by the utility. I'm sure getting a DYI installation approved by the utility is _possible_, but I wouldn't count on it. And, you may not know that you got disapproved until you've made the investment and are sort of screwed.
What I did was install solar with batteries and inverters that have the ability to never export power to the utility. That way I didn't have to tell them or seek their approval.
I picked a random spot in New York state. It looks like the solar generation in January is about 68% of July. As solar keeps getting cheaper, one option is to just install more solar.
Don't get me wrong, there are still issues here, like snow or back-to-back-to-back cloudy days. But the rate of a price change for solar has been pretty dramatic.
I installed a modest solar system (5kwh) in 2024 and was incredibly happy with the results. On any given 24 hour period it'd offset 40% of my electricity consumption (EV, hot tub being the big loads).
Last year I installed a cold climate heat pump. I'm incredibly happy with the switch from gas as my primary heat source. The solar now only covers ~15-20% of my consumption in winter.
So my solution this year will be to add more solar.
In the two years since I installed mine prices have halved. I'm fortunate enough to be able to do a DIY install, properly permitted and inspected, for about $350/400w panel once you factor in inverters, mounts, etc.
More than 60 million Americans own a home with a garage (where a charger can be installed) and most are within 100 miles of a fast DC charger. Edge cases continue to shrink and be solved for, electricity is ubiquitous and batteries keep improving rapidly.
I think proportion is more useful that quantity. 66% of housing units (that's all forms of housing, not just single-family homes) have a garage or carport. Also, given that there are ~145 million housing units, 60 million would be a bad situation.
> most are within 100 miles of a fast DC charger
That's not good enough. No one can spend 3-4 hours to drive 200 miles round trip, or even 100 miles, to charge quickly.
There needs to be a good solution for the 33% of households that don't have access to EV charging as part of their home. Until it becomes really plentiful, part of the solution may involve fast charging that only the 33% can use or that favors the 33%; people who can charge overnight at home should charge overnight at home.
Fast chargers colocated at grocery stores people shop at at least weekly are a solution, Tesla did this (Meijer partnership), as did Electrify America. Walmart is rolling out charging at most of their US stores. Home charging is a solution, but so is workplace level 2 charging.
Can you charge at home? Do so. Can you charge at work? Do so. Can you charge at a grocery store or other location your task will take longer than the charging? Do so. This works for most Americans, while charging infrastructure continues to be rapidly deployed. The gaps will be filled, how fast is a function of will and investment.
Chargers at grocery stores and other places of public accommodation that have lots of parking and customers who stay a while are good options. I don't know how many are enough; even fast chargers take orders of magnitude longer to use than a gas pump.
At least in the midwest very few grocery stores have fast charging. Usually the fast chargers are along highways on the outskirts of cities, and even then they’re almost always at gas stations.
Agreed. However, the number of people who live 100+ miles from a fast charger rounds to zero. Something like 85-90% of the US population lives within a metro area, and even in the least "EV friendly" states probably has a fast charger within 10-20 miles at most.
Yes, things are rapidly improving. My claim was that cold weather is a pain today. Also “living within 100 miles of a fast charger” is small comfort to those who don’t have a convenient way to charge at home.
For the record, I’ve been an EV owner for 5 years in the northern US. I still like my EV and things get better all the time, but I don’t understand the people in this thread saying that cold weather battery performance is fine.
My argument is more charging infrastructure and sodium ion chemistries should solve this relatively soon, and both are on arguably steep trajectories. My 2018 Model S 100kw has decent cold weather performance even cold soaked after 8 years of ownership with resistive heat for both the cabin and battery pack (glycol heater), I expect state of the art to keep getting better.
I used to keep a 100ft 120V heavy duty extension cord in the frunk to charge due to how few charging options there were in 2018, and no longer have to (having driven across most of the continental US).
If an EV is not feasible today due to limited charging options, certainly, procure a hybrid until battery chemistry and charging infrastructure improves in your area. I admit cold weather performance might be hard for some, but Norway has achieved 99% BEV monthly sales, so it can be done. It’s just a matter of where you are on the global adoption curve.
I think a fun thought experiment is, "If this is indeed a cover up and he's still alive, how would you find where is currently is?" If he's still dead, I think finding the truth might still be valuable for historical and closure purposes, but not as valuable as the "still alive" scenario.
I think "he was murdered by agents of the state before he could reveal anything damaging to the ruling class" is more likely than "he faked his own death and lives on an island somewhere".
It seems hard to square that with the fact of the files being released, or indeed of the FBI being able to obtain files in the first place. You'd have to suppose that "the ruling class" expected/expects to be able to tank vast hordes of deeply obsessed Internet randoms poring through all that data, but not be able to tank Epstein himself speaking publicly.
On the other hand, as far as I can recall, nothing significant happened after the Panama Papers, so.
25% of global annual auto sales are EVs as of 2025. 50% in China, the largest auto market in the world. This will only accelerate. Norway is already effectively at 100%, the rest will follow in time.
US legacy auto is just squeezing profits from what’s left until they turn out the lights. EVs didn’t fail, the US automotive industry did.
https://www.axios.com/2024/12/19/cars-prices-inflation-suvs
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