[throwaway15858]

There are a lot of reasons, many of them bureaucratic.

If you own your own home in an urban locale with a garage and drive more than 12k miles a year an EV is probably perfect for you. If you live in a condo good luck dealing with the condo board to install a charger. If you park on the street tough luck charging. If you don't drive enough gas is cheaper. If you drive too much you will spend too much time charging.

The problem is that the number of people that fit in this category isn't that big. The market may be saturating.

The other issue is modern cars generally. The average age of a car on the road is going up because modern cars are too complicated and too expensive.

A large reason for this is IP laws. I can still buy parts for my 90's car because the aftermarket still supports it. Modern car parts are full of computers and the aftermarket will never support them because they can't ship copyrighted code. After 10 years they will be scrapped because there will be no parts available. We will end up with a bimodal car market. 90's cars and cars <10 years old with nothing in between.

Everything in a car used to be covered by patents but they mostly expired in the 70's. Now it's copyright which will outlive us all.

https://finance.yahoo.com/average-age-vehicles-u-roads-13030...

[dilyevsky]

I’m on a condo board. In fact I am the condo board atm. I would love to install infra to have ev charging available in our garage. Unfortunately ev load balancing hardware is prohibitively expensive and installers are borderline incompetent. I was quoted like 20k per spot and they couldn’t say if it would work or i would need to pull new service line in and how to do it. So we dont have ev charging.

Someone ought to disrupt this…

[Scoundreller]

> Modern car parts are full of computers and the aftermarket will never support them because they can't ship copyrighted code.

Once a car gets older, there's usually no shortage of the electrical components on the secondary market as they're getting scrapped. And they're easy to ship. Or someone figures out "Capacitor 96 goes bad on Part 420" and solders a new one in.

We'll run into problems once they "marry" all the electric parts together and you can't swap in a headlight from another vehicle because the VIN doesn't match the computer's. Fuck you Apple.

[throwaway15858]

>Once a car gets older, there's usually no shortage of the electrical components on the secondary market as they're getting scrapped

Usually the lifespan limiting component is the same on all vehicles of a type so there's a shortage of exactly the part you need which makes it economically nonviable.

>figures out "Capacitor 96 goes bad on Part 420" and solders a new one in.

Car PCB's are often conformally coated or require destructive disassembly.

>We'll run into problems once they "marry" all the electric parts

Already happened.

[Scoundreller]

> Usually the lifespan limiting component is the same on all vehicles of a type so there's a shortage of exactly the part you need which makes it economically nonviable.

Varies across a country/continent. I'm in the salt belt so it's the body/suspension that gives first while it's whatever heat-deaths first in the US south.

And we have bad drivers in north america which helps the market for non-front/rear body components.