China has EVs that aren't luxury and I'm pretty sure Europe does as well if I am reading your comment correct you are trying to insinuate that EVs are luxury. If not your comment needs some clarity.
ICE are to EV as HDs are to SSDs. My intuition is that because there’s a floor to the cost of HDs (I think at some point it was around $35) and no practical floor to SSDs, there might be a similar story with cars. I know it’s really a bad analogy.
Cars still need brakes (for now) and tires and lots of other stuff, but there’s a huge amount of infrastructure built in a car to help it blow up million year old leaves. EVs are simpler so should be able to be made cheaper (eventually).
Maybe that means that what we expect from a car changes. If it costs you $10,000 to do all the stuff for a gasoline engine then a $1,000 AC isn’t a huge addition and there are maybe a bunch of other thousand dollar decisions that get added to make the cars cost what they cost.
Makes me think of stuff that used to be luxury items that came in expensive packaging and came with expensive accessories and now the actual item is so cheap the old packaging costs more than the actual item.
Sorta, but. It's not really analogous. The "floor" on EV cost is the battery. It's the hugest bottleneck and although prices / kWh have come down drastically it's still extremely high because supply is just not there.
Meanwhile the floor on an ICE is more the complexity of manufacturing and labour. Some of which exists also for EVs.
What is the least expensive EV one could buy in the middle of nowhere North America?
I'm open to anyones knowledge in this area I dont have but our primary mode of transportation when we were struggling was a $2,000 USD 30 year old Toyota.
If you don't think EVs are a luxury than we both need some clarity.
On cars.com right now it looks like the electric price floor is roughly $5k, which gets you a 10 year old Nissan Leaf, though it looks like they mostly have lower mileage than comparable-age ICE cars.
Used car prices have ballooned in recent years, so I’m not sure how much lower you can go without buying a complete heap. As a comparison I looked at the cheapest Nissan Sentras and Versas on the market, which are about $4k, a bit older, and have 200k miles.
Does it? A cursory search seems to put an (used) EV at around 10k$ at best. Poor people definitely do not drive 10k$ cars here. Hell, even my tech-adjacent friends in their twenties rarely own anything more expensive than 3k$-ish.
They may not drive a $10k used ICE, but if you add up the cost in fuel & oil changes, it's likely equivalent.
The real problem is that right now a $10k used EV is almost certainly an old Leaf or Kia Soul EV etc with extremely low range and degraded battery (because they lacked proper thermal mgmt, mainly). So they're not really directly usable by most people. This will eventually change though; in 10 years there'll be boatloads of Model 3s or Ioniqs or Bolts etc on the used market. And yes, they'll be more expensive than a used ICE but they'll also be cheaper to maintain.
