Show the math.. only about 12% of buyers buy new cars. Economical, efficient EVs can be had for $20k. Renting a big truck occasionally can be as little as $20, but even at $5000 for a truck rental... most people are buying trucks that cost $10, $20, $30K more than an enconomy car.
You could alternatively just rent a car or truck when you need one, and not one a car at all?
if you arent affluent, all the costs that come with car ownership are a bit excessive.
even still you might want to go for the cheap EV, and just not do things that require a pickup, rather than paying the costs of the pickup all the time
> no one is willing to admit the EV tech isn't just there yet
The easy explanation is that it's because it is there. The article is about the rapid decline of companies that believe otherwise. They aren't doing to great.
A wealthy nation with a small population that has plenty of money to update their infrastructure is not comparable to upgrading the grid and converting the fleet of 250M cars in the US, which is a mess of 50 states who spend varying amounts of money on their infrastructure.
The US grid is already stressed by all these new data centers, where is the power to send 10kW of power minimum to tens to hundreds of millions of vehicles every day going to come from?
100M vehicles times 10kW divided by one million is One Million Megawatts.
One Thousand Gigawatts. That’s five hundred 2GW power plants. Four thousand solar panels make 1MW, four million solar panels make 1GW, four billion solar panels make 1000 GW.
And that’s 40% of the fleet converted to EVs, and does not account for diesel semi-tractors being converted to EV.
> A wealthy nation with a small population that has plenty of money to update their infrastructure is not comparable to upgrading the grid and converting the fleet of 250M cars in the US, which is a mess of 50 states who spend varying amounts of money on their infrastructure.
The US is plenty wealthy per capita, around the same or more than Norway. It has plenty of money to upgrade it's infrastructure, it just chooses to spend it on other goals such as bombing Iran.
This is not a particularly useful statistic when talking about the number of cars being bought.
Almost invariably, "per capita wealth" uses mean wealth. This is dramatically different from the median wealth.
When you've got a few individual people worth upwards of $200 billion, that means that each one of them adds roughly $1000 to the "per capita wealth" number, while only ever accounting for something like a dozen cars at the outside.
> which is a mess of 50 states who spend varying amounts of money on their infrastructure.
That is not a tech problem, which is the claim I was replying to.
I saw your deleted comment about four charging stations costing $200,000 or so. Four petrol stations also cost that much. Nobody is saying infrastructure is free, but phasing out infrastructure is simply a matter of time and political will, not a fundamental tech problem.
I agree that we’ll eventually fully convert to EVs, it’s just going to take way longer than a lot of people expect. It’s going to be tens or hundreds of billions of dollars to upgrade electrical transmission, distribution, and premises distribution.
Edit: You nailed it, it’s a political problem in the US.
> It’s going to be tens or hundreds of billions of dollars to upgrade electrical transmission, distribution, and premises distribution.
Would certainly happen a lot faster if, for example, America spent the $200 billion the Pentagon just asked for the Iran war on infrastructure instead. It would even benefit Americans, imagine that! America is the wealthiest country in the world by far, it has the capital to facilitate the process, but taxpayers would rather blow it on bombing schools across the world.
I agree, I’m just saying it’s easier for a country with a sovereign wealth fund and ridiculous oil royalties to handle upgrading their infra to handle EVs for 6M is much easier than doing it in the US which has extremely low average population density, 250M+ vehicles and 400M people, and a mess of separate but inter-tied grids and varying levels of infrastructure investment depending on which state you are in.
Do you feel that externalities should not be taxed? That individuals should be able to do things that collectively cost everyone else in society money, without any expectation that they pay money into a societal fund to address the problems created by their own actions?
That's a strange statement considering that 20% of new vehicles sold globally are EVs. And that's not just China propping up the numbers: 20% of new vehicles sold in the EU are EVs as well.
Obviously that's not "fully replace" territory, but that is most definitely a critical mass beyond being a niche vehicle category.
The EV market globally is growing much faster than the ICE market. At the rate of technology and pricing improvement, EVs taking over the majority of sales is almost inevitable.
It's just not growing as quickly in certain markets like the USA, and many predictions were too aggressive.
Who is really going to prefer ICE vehicles when we start seeing median MSRP vehicles start to reach customers with 400-500mile+ range numbers? This isn't some crazy idea (e.g., see the 2026 BMW i3, estimated range of 440 miles in an entry level premium sedan - in 5-10 years that's the kind of spec you'll be seeing in a cheap Kia).
There just isn't that much more progress in battery technology and pricing left to achieve to make ICE fully obsolete, and that is exacerbated by oil prices that are now set to rise for years to come.
In 2024[1]:
- 37.2% in Sweeden
- 51.6% in Denmark
- 30.4% in Finland
of newly registered cars were BEV. Only Norway reaches 89% you are talking about. The total average of newly registered BEV cars in European Union was 13.6%.
The EV tech is here,but the grid in most EU countries is certainly not. The proliferation of heat pumps in the local area caused 3 blackouts caused by a failure of a local transformer - something that hasn't happened before or at least not as frequently. And in most countries you are looking at doubling the electricity consumption if all road transport was to switch to electricity.
In 2025[1]: 64.3% in Sweden - 69.3% in Denmark - 55.2% in Finland. Across the EU 2.6 million BEVs were sold out of ~13 million cars in total, i.e. 20% in 2025. That's on top of 1.3 million PHEVs which is an even faster growing segment.
So it's not quite 80% yet, but it's getting there fast.
They just have to replace most use cases. There will come a point, not too far away, where battery progress makes them cheaper to purchase than petrol cars (for many use cases the point may already have come where TCO is lower, and Trump’s oil crisis will only speed the arrival of that point for more use cases.)
It's impossible to go on a long off-road travel with the EV equivalent of 50L of gas in a jerrycan.
But some are twisting the narrative to say that because of that reason EV will fail.
Millions of people could use an EV in their daily life, just like I can go without a pickup in my daily life and rent one whenever I need one.