this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2023
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shrug and?
I know most people want "New cars" and fine, go chase that over priced luxury, but I'd rather a car that's 1-2 years old that's dropped more than half the price, and being passed over because new shiny thing came out.
People shouldn't have to drive beaters, but buying a car for 10k isn't a bad decision unless you're extremely well off our only care about status symbols.
Like there's a reason I was able to buy a house, and a good job helped, but also my wife and I lived with in our means, which is something I feel that isn't talked about in the consumerism age. (You can buy something new, but for most things you don't need a yearly iphone/car/or anything. A good 50 inch tv works well for a tenth of the price of the newest one. ) And yet I see people complain about not having a lot of money yet they're always talking about the newest graphics cards, newest tvs, and newest tech.... I wonder why.
Arguable the case for purchasing a brand new vehicle starts to make more sense as BEV become the majority as the batteries are a consumable that degrades with use and time. So long as the increased price is offset by the longer utilization of that battery.
Yeah, of course... But they're also replaceable. You can even check the individual cells, swap out the worst ones with cells from other used packs, and end up getting back up to decent capacity. There's a whole statistics, mean time to failure aspect to batteries - it's not going to take them back to new, but swapping out the worst cells can get you a lot better performance
Or you could just replace the batteries with newer, likely better, battery banks. The first option needs a certain scale, but would be cheap, the second would be a straight range upgrade over even the factory range.
There's also the fact that electric cars are much more mechanically simple - this is unlikely to catch on under our current economic system, but it's way easier to swap electric motors than an engine...
My points being, I think we need to make way less cars, and electric cars are actually easier to repair (at least from a physics and resource perspective, hostile design and economic pressures could easily eat up that difference)
we need right to repair laws for cars so this is possible