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Meh, most of the BEV's available are big inefficient wallowing SUV's with hefty price tags regardless of the clean car discount.
I'm hoping some of the Chinese manufacturers will bring affordable sedan or station wagon BEV's to the market. Lighter, better aerodynamics, more range for the same battery size.
Not interested in hybrids, the worst of both worlds
I just cannot bring myself to trust my life to a Chinese car.
I have done business there. I know what it's like. It does not fill me with confidence.
Also it's one thing to be spied on by ad companies (which is bad enough) but quite another to be spied on by an adversarial dictatorship.
Exactly. Same reason I won't use Chinese brand phones.
Nio seems to be the one making waves that no one in NZ has heard of as they don't operate here. They are doing the Tesla promise of swapable batteries for real life, with a network of swap stations. Imagine buying a car and knowing you can in future swap the battery for a longer range one, one with better health, not to mention long range batteries from empty to fully charged in minutes.
The only reason I've heard of Nio was because I bought shares in them a couple of years ago. I sold when I doubled my money, which looks like it was a good move considering how low it is now!
Tom Scott made a video where he tested an automatic swap station:
He also mentions the company is hemorrhaging money at the moment.
Yeah, that is normal for a VC funded company
This is a stupid idea, and there's a very good reason why nobody but them is doing it.
Both swappable batteries and hydrogen are dead end technologies, at least as far as road vehicles are concerned. The economics of hydrogen will never compare to an EV, the range is only similar, and the charge rates of modern EVs have made the refuel time less significant.
With battery swaps, the logistics and capital required to build a charging station, which any EV can charge at, compared to a battery swap station which only one model of vehicle can use, mean this will never be widespread.
Meanwhile, most EVs will go from 10-80% capacity in about fifteen minutes.
Hydrogen is already being used in diesel / hydrogen hybrid trucks, but in terms of cars I don't think the technology is going anywhere fast.
In terms of battery swap, would the simple answer not be to have an open standard that different manufacturers can all use?
Meanwhile, most EVs will go from 10-80% capacity in about fifteen minutes.
I normally see this quoted as 30 mins?
Try and find out the cost per KG for hydrogen, it's almost impossible. If you lease a hydrogen car, the fuel is included in the lease, and I've found it very hard to find a retail price for the stuff, but every price I have seen indicates it's phenomenally expensive, meaning a hydrogen vehicle is more expensive to run than a petrol vehicle.
Here's some actual numbers, $200 usd to fill a Mirai, which will give you about 600km of range.
As to the battery swap thing, it took decades, and an EU ultimatum, for everyone to agree on a charging standard, what do you think your chances are of everyone agreeing on a battery design?
The truck companies I've seen doing hydrogen are generating the hydrogen themselves with water and electricity. I'm not sure whether it's financially viable or not, they seem to be doing it for the reduced carbon emmisions.
And yeah, you're right, a common battery standard will probably only exist if say GM or some group of Japanese car companies uses a standard across all their brands and allows this to be used by others. In other words, chances are probably pretty slim.
PHEVs are the best of both worlds for me living in an apartment with limited charging capacity.
We have two shared charges for PHEVs, they can be used for four hours maximum per day, this means that I can drive in EV mode to and from the shops as well as to my parents house, if I need to go further, I turn on Hybrid mode and it gives me great milage for a long time.
I can't imagine why increasing the price of something by $7000 would suppress demand for it
Nobody in this government understands economics apparently.
Oh I'm pretty sure they do. The intended outcome was achieved
I would imagine that people in the market for an EV would have bought it already last december, before the funding was cancelled.
My thoughts too. From memory sales of double cab utes also surged immediately before and plummeted immediately after the prices went up as expected due to their high emissions.
I had a BEV on the budget for late this year (move banks to get a low-interest loan + some savings once the mortgage comes off fixed), isn't practical with the price increase, so will back burner that plan for a couple of years and hope prices drop a bit
We had planned a new vehicle late this year, changing the price by $7k makes a huge difference to the calculations.