> Toyota claims it will be ready for sale in 2027 or 2028
Should be the first, last, and, honestly, single line of the discussion. We need those battery breakthrough yesterday, and we're still stuck with press releases and misleading car ranges.
I'll give all the credit due as soon as I can aford a car that let me drive the 500km of highway separating my house from my mom's with less than 2 charges. For all those who're readying to chant the gospel of Elon and tout the range of they model W, noticed how I used the word "afford".
And I'm a f-ing software engineer with the purchasing power of at least two people with a real job - and those two people would not mind getting an EV to get to their real jobs, too.
The clock is ticking, people are working hard, in the end the laws will force the car manufacturers to do what the market could not - but damn, in the meantime, am I tired of press releases...
Toyota has been researching this solid state batteries for years. I saw a post here (or many on the EV subreddit?) with a timeline showing how in 2018 Toyota was claiming they'd be selling cars with 700 miles of range by 2023.
But in the non-fantasy version of 2023, they're selling EVs with weird tradeoffs, like how the bz4x AWD version has a worse charging experience than the RWD
Which is about twice as much as I ever paid for a car.
I absolutely know you can recoup a part of that in the long run, especially given the price of gas, etc... But at the moment I'm already indebted to do insulation work in my house - there's a limit to how much an individual can invest at any given point, even if the investment is sure to pay off.
And again, remember that you have to be _rich_ to afford such a car. Real people are already having a hard time buying second hand cars at around 5000€/10000€.
I realize I don't have any real data point, so let's digg in.
At current exchange rate, $20000 is 18000€. I checked the 3 most sold cars for last year in France [1], and the listed price range from 12k€ to 16k€.
So, it's not obvious that a 18k€ car is "cheap" - but it's just a napkin computation.
I'm surprised to learn that each model accounts for a pretty small percentage of the total sales, around 5% each. I would have expected more for at least the top salers.
If we wanted to get a real sense of what "cheap" means, what would make more sense in your opinion ?
- A simple "average" of the prices ?
- A weighted average of the prices, taking the percentage of sales into account ?
Also, in the distribution, do you define "cheap" as "the lower half" ? "the last decile" ?
Should be the first, last, and, honestly, single line of the discussion. We need those battery breakthrough yesterday, and we're still stuck with press releases and misleading car ranges.
I'll give all the credit due as soon as I can aford a car that let me drive the 500km of highway separating my house from my mom's with less than 2 charges. For all those who're readying to chant the gospel of Elon and tout the range of they model W, noticed how I used the word "afford".
And I'm a f-ing software engineer with the purchasing power of at least two people with a real job - and those two people would not mind getting an EV to get to their real jobs, too.
The clock is ticking, people are working hard, in the end the laws will force the car manufacturers to do what the market could not - but damn, in the meantime, am I tired of press releases...