| HN Mirror

This feels irrelevant - it's not an idea about which lots of lies are being told in favor? (quite a lot of .. misapprehensions against, though)

Yes. It's a good idea, therefore should not need lots of lies, indeed lots of lies aren't told, and so the idea should just catch on of its own strength? But it doesn't seem to and I'm identifying that as due to inertia. You may disagree

The contrapositive of "Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance" is not "good ideas will succeed without any messaging at all".

I looked into buying an EV but it turns out it would be a little over four times as expensive as running an old Landrover with a massive V8 engine.

So I still run an old Landrover with a massive V8 engine.

Would you be willing to share your math?

Okay, it immediately costs more to buy an EV than it does to run my existing car. The monthly payment to buy an EV is more than I spend on fuel.

Then I'd be paying roughly ten times as much for insurance, because it's a new and valuable car, and being "keyless" it cannot be secured in any meaningful way without locking it in a garage, which I don't have.

Because I don't have a garage or a driveway I can't park right at my house, so I would not be able to charge at home. So I'd have to park an EV up at the nearest charging point several miles away, cycle home, and then cycle back to the car to retrieve it. This would then be costing roughly the same per mile to charge it up as it costs per mile for propane (my car is dual-fuel).

That's before you add in the exorbitant cost of servicing an EV, which can only be done at a dealer.

All told, I'd be spending a grand a month to replace a vehicle that costs a couple of hundred a month, that - crucially - wouldn't allow me to actually do the things I need it to do.

Sohcahtoa82 77 days ago

> Because I don't have a garage or a driveway I can't park right at my house, so I would not be able to charge at home.

IMO, this matters more than anything else.

If you can't charge at home, then an EV becomes rather nonviable unless you drive very little and your usual grocery store has a fast charger. But then public chargers are typically at least double the price per kilowatt hour compared to charging at home.

My insurance went down not up when I switched.

EV servicing is cheaper and I do it less often.

I bought used. The monthly depreciation is less than my previous fuel bill.

YMMV.

> EV servicing is cheaper and I do it less often.

Most EVs need serviced every year and it's about £300 to do so. This is a ridiculous amount.

klooney 77 days ago

What do you need to get serviced every year? Do the tires wear out that fast?

Tade0 77 days ago

First time I hear that all EVs are keyless and have expensive insurance.

What model were you considering and why only this one?

Pretty much everything is keyless these days, which makes them expensive to insure since you can steal them with a very small and inexpensive device. The problem is not just limited to EVs though.

Those are arguments, not math. Will you share your actual math?

Okay, for even a very basic EV I'd be paying £400 per month.

This is more than the £200-300 or so it costs to run my existing car.

Straight off, it's costing me more just to even own one - that's before it turns a wheel.

Tax on an EV is free just now, and about £300ish a year for the vehicle I have now, so that's got the difference down a little.

Insurance on even a fairly basic EV would be a couple of hundred quid a month, as opposed to a couple of hundred quid a year. This immediately makes running an EV uneconomic.

At the end of the five year lease (you can't buy them outright, without getting entirely ripped off) I'd have spent 24 grand to still not actually own a car. This is roughly 100 times as much as I spent to actually own a car. This too makes things uneconomic.

Thank you, this makes sense out of the gate, and I appreciate you sharing!

I'm not seeing you calculate any repair costs for your vehicle. Or depreciation overall, especially not replacement. What year do you expect to replace your vehicle? What would you replace it with? How much would you get for trading in your vehicle if you buy a new car now?

I think you're missing pretty large parts of the math - what happens if you take your likely depreciation/replacement costs into account over time?

throwaway27448 77 days ago

What would the math look like to make an EV cheaper than using an ICE car you already own? It looks an awful lot like you're just dodging the numbers yourself.

I would be happy to share the exact numbers I used to figure out replacing a 2017 Ford Fusion with a 2023 Tesla Model 3 would save me money. And it has.

When most people make these comparisons, they don't consider depreciation, trade-in value, or maintenance costs.

I don't understand what I was dodging though. Can you be really specific? Help me out.

zigman1 77 days ago

> among people who like me can charge at home

OP said this, you clearly don't fall into this category. And if servicing an electric car costs more than servicing an old Landrover I will not eat for a week

At the dealer it costs about £300 to get a Kia Niro EV serviced, which needs done every year.

It just cost me £75 to service my car, of which nearly £15 was just the cabin air filters which have got bizarrely expensive since last year.

That sounds like a charge the dealer has made up to try to get you to spend money, not an actual need.

imtringued 77 days ago

EVs got really good in the last two years. If you bought anything that wasn't a Tesla ten years ago you were faced with some pretty bad compromises if you insisted on driving an EV.

The original Leaf looks like a Nokia 3210 compared to a current-gen iPhone. The tech has been moving at high speed and continues to do so.

I don't think it's a tech issue. I have a Tesla, it's a few years old now, and it's still better than most of what legacy car makers produce. The tech has been mature for several years.

I think legacy car makers have been slow rolling. They might have to in order to allow their organizations and customers to adapt.

thinkingemote 77 days ago

What are the arguments being used to sell electric cars?

I would say that investing oneself and one's money in an idea changes how one feels about the choices that was taken. I would say that those not invested might think that some of the arguments might have untruths more than those who have invested.

(For me inertia does play a role too! "Why fix what's not broken")

> it slightly confuses me take-up hasn't been quicker among people who like me can charge at home

No big mystery: a) most people keep cars for 20 years or more, b) most people don't buy new cars - they're too expensive.

The average car in the UK is ten years old: https://www.racfoundation.org/media-centre/average-car-in-th... ; while I have an 18 year old car, I'm an outlier on my street.

It's true that most people don't buy new, but there's still 20% of purchases new, and a steady flow of EVs into the used market.

https://www.scrap-car-dealers.co.uk/latest-news/post/average...

> As of 2025, the average age of a scrapped car in the UK is between 16 and 20 years old!

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/123niq7/ag...

Tade0 77 days ago

There are very few 20yo+ cars on the road, mostly because the probability of a totalling over the course of this many years is pretty high.

I know for a fact that the figure for Poland is exaggerated, because plenty of cars which are currently shaving people's beards and have been performing this duty for years now remained in the registry and were purged from it only in 2024. That was 7 million out of 41 million originally there and most likely there's many more, as the criteria were set to avoid false positives.

Tepix 77 days ago

What‘s the source for the 20 years? Seems unlikely to me.

b) You can also buy used EVs. I bought one last year, 2 years old, for 56% of the original price.

Yes mine was used. Battery is fine. Of course I made sure to buy one with a suitable range for my needs. There's lots of options.

How is the battery?

Well the car has done 50,000km before I bought it and tbh in the winter it lost quite a bit of range (I've had a different EV previously and its range didn't decrease as much during the winter). The car has a warranty on the battery valid for 8 years or 160,000km (whatever occurs first), the manufacturer promises it will have 70% or more capacity at that point.

ADAC did a test with a vehicle that reached 160,000km and its battery was at 91%.

Sohcahtoa82 77 days ago

I roll my eyes at this question because it's often framed as good faith curiosity, but it's often asked in bad faith by people that think it's a "gotcha" question, because they have this incorrect notion that EV batteries need to be replaced frequently. They see the warranty is 100K miles/8 years or whatever and think that means they have to replace the battery after 100K miles/8 years, yet fail to recognize that they don't apply that same logic to combustion engines with 30K mile/3 year warranties.

antonkochubey 72 days ago

In my country it is 8y/160k km for batteries and 5-10y/150-200k km for ICE cars.

That being said, when a battery fails, it’s a €20,000+ whole unit replacement (e.g. for Audi e-tron 55 it is €26,500 in my country), while ICE failures very rarely need a whole unit replacement, usually it’s a €1700 turbocharger or a €400 injector or something of that caliber. Personal anecdote: my 12 year old 262k km BMW did not need any engine repairs until now, except for free manufacturer recall on the EGR cooling system. And it still has 1000 km highway range in the winter.

zigman1 70 days ago

Unfortunately, I don't know how else to ask something I am genuinely curious about.

https://www.scrap-car-dealers.co.uk/latest-news/post/average...

My source is just personal observation, but I'm clearly not far off:

> As of 2025, the average age of a scrapped car in the UK is between 16 and 20 years old!

...

> You can also buy used EVs.

True, but you're quite limited there since good EVs have only been around for a very small number of years. Maybe you can get an old Tesla for not too much but that's pretty undesirable for obvious reasons.

> True, but you're quite limited there since good EVs have only been around for a very small number of years

You'd think that, but (I am shopping at the moment) it is routine to see last year's EVs on Autotrader, at 30-50% off list price. That does make me a little suspicious (is this being got rid of because it's a lemon?), but they're there.

I think we can narrow the statement to "if you are buying a new or nearly-new car, or leasing, and you can charge at home or work, you should seriously consider an EV". Fleet and business use should definitely be thinking very hard about it.

Tepix 75 days ago

There is a huge difference between these two statements:

> most people keep cars for 20 years or more

and

> the average age of a scrapped car in the UK is between 16 and 20 years old

Because the second fact doesn't tell you whether or not the 1st fact is true. After all, there is a second hand market where you can find cars of every age.

jstanley 77 days ago

If most people kept cars for 20 years, and the secondhand market exists, then by the time an average car is scrapped it must be substantially over 20 years old.

n4r9 77 days ago

Is there not a big image factor? Like, people don't want to be seen as the type of person who'd drive an electric.

throwaway27448 77 days ago

I'm sure this impacts certain cultures in the US, but I've got to imagine that's a pretty tiny impact compared to pragmatic concerns like "where can I charge this" and "how often do I need to charge this".

Mine is a model available with different power trains, so nobody knows. Or cares, I'm sure!

n4r9 77 days ago

I don't know about you, but as soon as a car starts I'm pretty sure I know whether it's an EV or combustion engine.

Oh I see. So yes, for pedestrians standing nearby when you start up. That probably represents 0.01% of the people I encounter on my drives. The other 99.99% don't notice.

Maybe in the US. The rest of the world doesn't hate the environment quite so much.

randusername 77 days ago

EV marketing in the US is super dumb.

We get these ads emphasizing the luxuriousness, the status, the high-tech, the exclusivity of EVs. Meanwhile... BYD.

Surely it can't be entirely conspiracy to bludgeon the public with messaging that EVs are premium goods and ICEVs are for the mass market.

Could it be that the maxim should really be something like "bullshit too often and too greedily and you forget how to sell something that sells itself"...?

SpicyLemonZest 77 days ago

Perhaps you're just not used to US car advertising? Even the cheapest cars are always advertised as though they're cool luxurious status symbols. The Bolt and Leaf match the price point of the RAV4 they're competing with. (Genuinely budget-conscious buyers don't buy new cars at all in the US.)

throwaway27448 77 days ago

That's not just marketing; that's a reality of the market. A corolla is cheaper than any EV on the market, so why would I even consider them? They might as well be luxury cars.

eleveriven 77 days ago

Sometimes good ideas just have to fight habit