Electric Crossovers and Trucks are Coming to the US, But Smaller, Bestselling EV's Aren't Being Brought Here

If you keep up with the news about EV's, you will perceive a lot of of excitement in the US right now about electric SUV's, crossovers, trucks and big sedans. The Mustang Mach-E, which despite its name is not a Mustang, but a crossover, has been selling very well. The Hyundai Ioniq 5, another crossover, is coming soon, as are big fast sedans from Lucid, Polestar and Audi, and trucks from Rivian and Tesla and Bollinger, as well as newer versions of great big huge EV's which have already been on sale in the US for a while. And a report from some alleged geniuses says that VW "could" eventually compete with Tesla in the EV market. The VW id.4, a crossover, will go on sale in the US very soon, if it hasn't already.

In Europe, the best-selling EV right now is the VW id.3, a hatchback a bit smaller then the id.4, which hit the market last year. 2nd place: the Renault Zoe, which has been around for years and sold a huge number of units, over 250,000 and counting fast, 4th all-time among EV's after the Tesla Model 3, the Nissan Leaf and the Tesla Model S.. 

Neither the id.3 nor the Zoe is on sale in the US. 

And European reviewers are very excited about many other smallish EV's, such as the Honda E, which also are not for sale in in the US. The best-selling EV in China is the Wuling HongGuang Mini EV -- not on sale in the US.

"They" say that we Americans love SUV's, crossovers and trucks. But it's sort of hard for us to make the case that we would often prefer smaller cars when it's literally impossible for us to buy them.

 

Jeepers, why were almost 4 times as many EV's sold in Europe last year as in the US? It's a complete and stupefying mystery! The number sold in China was almost identical to Europe. Europe just barely won.

 

I'm old enough to remember the 1960's and 70's, when the US market was full of muscle cars, station wagons and huge sluggish sedans. Not very exciting machines, but the manufacturers made huge profits per vehicle. What's going on right now in the US EV market feels very familiar, unfortunately. Except that in this case it's doubly stupid, of course, because EV's are supposedly about efficiency.

The Cute EV of the Month Award goes to the Citroen Ami. This time it wasn't even close.

 

This French 2-seater is technically not even  a car, at least not according to French laws. 14-year-olds can legally drive it. The exterior is entirely made of plastic. The Ami doesn't have any of the sound insulation found in conventional automobiles, so you hear the very small electrical motor whizzing away as you drive. It doesn't seem to be able to top 30mph, except maybe downhill. Don't quote me on the downhill over-30mph, I'm not entirely sure about it. So far it's only available in France. Despite the total lack of anything even remotely resembling frills, British reviewers are going, please please please, Citroen, bring it to the UK, and Citroen is saying, Okay, maybe, we'll see, which makes the British reviewers hop around with glee.

What about in the US? Haha. Ahhhh, haaaa-hahahaaaa, haahaa, haha!  

No, as far as I know, there are no immediate plans to bring the Citroen Ami to the US.

I've got a great idea for a commercial for the Citroen Ami. "Ami" is French for "friend." In the commercial, someone is walking along the sidewalk, while an Ami rolls along silently in the street just behind him. There's no-one behind the steering wheel. He turns around and the Ami stops. He starts walking again and the Ami starts rolling along behind him again. He turns around again and looks at the Ami for a longer period of time. Then the Ami says, in a voice like ET: "Friend."

Alternative-Energy Developments in Ann Arbor

Christopher Taylor, Mayor of Ann Arbor, has announced -- well, I don't know whether he's announced a "resolve," or actual concrete plans, to put solar panels on the rooftops of all the public buildings in town. Either way, part of that project was completed four days ago, when volunteers from the University of Michigan and the Ann Arbor community helped to install rooftop solar panels on the roof of one of the stations of the Ann Arbor Fire Department.

US Representative Debbie Dingell was there, and posted about it on Facebook, and, of course, one of the right-wing trolls who are all over Michigan Democrats on Facebook immediately complained about this "waste of taxpayer money," and why didn't Dingell yada yada instead. I read a few of the replies to this troll, which of course pointed out that these solar panels will save taxpayer money by generating electricity which the taxpayers have been buying from a utility. I stopped reading the replies to the troll before I noticed any mention that Dingell had linked a story about people volunteering to install the panels, which of course saved the taxpayers even more money. And if you've read the news story I linked above, you already know that in addition to working for free, students and local residents also raised several thousand dollars toward the cost of the installation.

In the past several months I have suddenly ratcheted my interest in electric vehicles, known to us aficionados as EV's, way up. I've been paying a lot more attention to the vehicles within a mile or so of where I live, which I suppose is one of the more left-wing 2-miles circles in the US, but which is also very close to downtown Detroit, and has always had a very deeply-entrenched internal-combustion culture. I've seen quite a few Tesla Model 3's since June. How many is "quite a few"? I don't know. I'm sorry. I've seen at least one Tesla Model X. I've seen several Toyota Leaf's, several Chevrolet Bolts and several Chevrolet Volts, and some BMW i3's, and a few other EV's.

Those are all vehicles running strictly on electricity, Although the Volt also has a small gasoline engine which isn't really necessary, except, presumably, to reassure buyers who don't really know how EV's work. (They work just fine without any gasoline at all, believe it or not.)

Then there are the hybrids in Ann Arbor. The city buses are biodiesel hybrids. I have noticed a few hybrids from Ford and Honda, and one BMW i8 which looks like it wandered onto the street off of a seriously-fast racetrack. I talked to the driver, who said, yes, it was very very fast and fun to drive, but who seemed tired of talking about it, as if strangers were constantly asking him about his car, so I tried to give him a break, said thanks and broke off the conversation early. [ PS, 24 October 2019: I forgot to mention that I've seen a couple of Toyota Camry hybrids and one Hyundai Ioniq hybrid.]

And then there are the Priuses. Toyota has manufactured millions of units of the Prius since 1997 -- how many million? I don't know, and I don't know why I'm having such difficulty finding a reliable figure. And I certainly don't know why so many statistics on Wikipedia having to do with things like solar and wind energy and EV's and hybrids stop at around 2016 or 2017. That's ridiculous. It's like having statistics about computers up until 1983.

Be all of that as it may: there are about 3 million Priuses within a one mile radius of my home. I'm kidding, but there are a lot. A lot.

A few days ago I spoke to a nice lady who drives a Toyota Prius+ and does not seem at all tired of talking about it. I asked her what sort of mileage she got. She said 30 or 40 miles. At first I thought she meant 30 or 40 miles per gallon of gasoline, but no, what she meant was that she charges the car overnight in her garage, and then it goes 30 or 40 miles before the gasoline engine starts. The + in the car's name means you can plug it in. (Does her house run on solar, I wondered but didn't ask.) And, she added, the gasoline engine doesn't start very often. She rarely drives that far in a day. She said she got a full tank of gas four months ago, and still has 3/4 of a tank.

If this nice lady has driven 3000 miles in the past four months, an average of 24 miles a day for 125 days, and if her Prius has used 5 gallons of gasoline over those 3000 miles -- that's 600 miles per gallon.

A lot of the EV enthusiasts I've been hanging out with lately are obsessed with getting longer range per charge from EV's, and the range of EV's is increasing very rapidly. 5 years ago, 100 per charge was pretty good. For a brand-new EV today, in a lot people's opinions, 200 miles is pathetic. This would make sense if they were all driving across Alaska, the Yukon and British Columbia all the time, or across Mongolia, but they're not. I'm one of a vocal minority, but definitely still a minority, who think that the obsession with range is sort of getting out of hand. For longe-range vacations and business trips, charging stations are beginning to sprout everywhere like gas stations, and they're not stopping. The EV revolution is underway.

For these EV enthusiasts, among whom it is usual to want more, more, MORE RANGE!!!!! it is also usual to be very frustrated at the continued success of the Prius, when there are completely gasoline-free EV's are available. I wonder how many Prius+ owners get 600 miles to the gallon, and I wonder how much the EV enthusiasts know about real-world Prius gas consumption.

Also on the topic of opinions and awareness: it seems that the general public don't realize how fast EV's are. A new Tesla is faster from 0-60 than any internal-combustion car which costs less than a million dollars or so. But also very sedate-looking EV's like the Chevy Bolt

accelerate more quickly than just about any ICEV's (as we call internal-combustion-engine vehicles) which can be had for less than six figures. Priuses are slow, as people tend to know by now because there are 35 million of them (I'm exaggerating, but I don't know by how much), but EV's are an entirely different thing. They tend to be ridiculously quick, which is among the reasons to stop obsessively loading them with such large battery packs, which give them the lusted-after long range per change, and make them ridiculously quick, and also very heavy, and also more expensive than they really need to be.

Still, ridiculously fast, overweight and all, a new EV doesn't necessarily have to be very expensive any more. Especially not after a big fat Federal rebate, and possibly state and local rebates as well. It's like with solar energy: people need to resort to more and more ridiculous arguments in order to put EV's down.

The More I Learn About Tesla, The More Appalled I Become

It's hard to talk sense to fanatics -- maybe impossible. If you criticize anything said by any New Atheist, you are immediately denounced as a fundamentalist believer, whether you actually believe that God or gods exist, or not.

If you criticize anything about Tesla or Elon Musk, the Elon fanboys immediately accuse you of being in league with Big Oil, CNBC and the German automaking industry. Tesla doesn't publicize the fact that many of the parts of their cars have been made in Germany, by Bosch or Daimler or other companies whom they publicly diss. If you try to bring this up with the fanboys, chances aren't they won't hear you, because they'll immediately begin drowning you out (and perhaps also drowning out their own attempts at rational thought?) by calling you a liar and repeating the company's talking points.

So I don't know whether I'm going to change any of the fanboys' minds. This is addressed more to the general public about the fanboys, than to the fanboys. But if I do change some of their minds too, well wouldn't that blow my mind.

Tesla is worse than most car companies, because they're more dishonest, and more ruthlessly dedicated to squeezing every last penny they can out of their adoring fans, and giving billions of that revenue, yearly, to Musk. Who is always referred to as Elon, as if he were everybody's pal. He's not your pal.

Tesla is so dishonest, they can't even tell you how much their cars cost, and the fanboys are so hypnotized that they'll insist all day long that Tesla was never misleading about their prices. The Tesla Model 3 is known as the $35,000 Tesla. The only problem is that it actually costs $44,000, except that it actually costs $49,000, except that it actually costs $50,200, except that it actually costs more than that. Realistically, $60,000 or more. But the hypnotized fans who've actually payed this much for Model 3's will tell you that they haven't. There may actually be some $35,000 Model 3's -- a dozen or so. In Canada. Since early in 2019. Or maybe that was just another lie.

Back in 2017, when Tesla began to establish the lie of the $35,000 Model 3 in the public consciousness, they got the figure of $35,000 by taking the retail price, subtracting the Federal and state rebates in California, and then also figuring in the fuel cost savings. (Fuel cost savings compared to what? I'm sure the fanboys don't care.) Tesla says they're not an average car company. By God, they're not. A normal car company will actually state the retail prices of their vehicles.

Tesla is supposedly a liberal, Leftist, humans-before-cash company. But they're completely union-free, and the low-paid employees routinely work 80 to 100 hours a week. Less humane than the big carmakers, while claiming to be really good guys. Press cameras aren't allowed inside the Fremont, California factory, but they can get close enough (briefly) to the perimeter fence to see the campers of employees in the parking lot. From the factory to the camper and back again -- or is the camper home?

The people most likely to shout down any and all objections to Tesla's practices -- the employees, the shareholders, the owners of the vehicles, and very often two or all of the above in one person -- are the very ones I and other critics are trying to help, by pointing out how they're being used.

EV's (That's Short for "Electric Vehicles")

Lately, all of a sudden, I've been paying a lot more attention to the cars around me. Specifically, I've been looking for EV's, electrical vehicles. For years, I'd already been spotting Toyota Priuses, which are gasoline, electric hybrids, because of their distinctive body shape. But besides the Priuses, there are more hybrids and pure EV's around me than I had thought.

This afternoon I saw a Tesla Model 3 in a parking lot nearby. I've been looking at so many Teslas online lately that this one looked familiar from a long way away, and I came up for a close look, and sure enough. It surprised me that I was right, because none of the Teslas -- to my way of thinking -- is nearly as distinctive-looking as, say, a Prius. Many Tesla fans would denounce me for this opinion, because to them, Teslas are distinctive-looking and very uniquely beautiful. And who am I to try to minimize their joy in beauty. Lately, I've seen either several Tesla Model S's, or the same Model S several times. The Model S is a rather expensive model which Tesla first started selling in 2012. The Model 3

is a less expensive model which went on sale in 2017, and which will surely soon surpass all of the other Tesla models, going back to 2008, in number of units sold, if it hasn't already. (As of the end of 2018, combined sales of all other Tesla models added up to almost 400,000 units.) One of the Model S's zoomed past me very quickly on the right, accomplishing being ahead of me instead on behind me when the road narrowed down to single-lane single-file. I was startled, and yelled out the window, "Was that really necessary?!" Yes, I still sometimes yell at other drivers. But I'm trying to stop once and for all. I don't road rage as much as I used to.

Since I've been looking at the rear fender of every single car I walk past lately, I've been seeing the green badge on the back of many Fords which says "EcoBoost." I've been having a hard time finding concrete information about EcoBoost, information such as: is there actually anything ecological about EcoBoost, or is the name just a cynical ploy on Ford's part to make buyers think they're being green?

I saw a BMW i8, a very high-end, very sporty hybrid, and spoke to its owner, but soon got the impression that many strangers talked to him about his car and he was tired of it, so I left him alone.

A Tesla driver might be more green, in his personal transportation carbon footprint, than an ICE (internal-combustion engine) driver. If the Tesla driver gets his electricity from solar or wind, then there's no maybe about it. A Nissan Leaf driver might have a smaller carbon footprint than the Tesla driver. Someone who has no car and takes the bus might be greener still, especially if the local buses are green. There are other factors besides whether you drive a car and what kind of car you drive, such as how many miles per year you drive. And airline travel is very dirty, ship travel too, although some ships are much cleaner than others. Many ships are hybrids now. So are many trains. And of course, many trains have been all-electric for a very, very long time. And transportation is only a fraction of the current total hydrocarbon usage. So, I'm just saying: if you drive a Prius or a Tesla: Thank you. But don't forget that there are also many other things you can do, or not do, to help us all survive our own activity.

Nuanced Discussion of Electric Vehicles

A few years ago, I dabbled in discussions about atheism versus religion, and about whether or not Jesus ever existed. Some of my participation in these discussions can be seen on this blog. I quickly became frustrated by the general nature of these discussions: on one side were New Atheists whose attitude is nicely summed up by the sub-title of one of Christopher Hitchens' books, Religion poisons Everything, and on the other side were believers out to denigrate any and all expressions of religious doubt and/or doubt about the existence of the historical Jesus. They mostly weren't actually discussions so much as flame wars. I soon had enough.

Recently, dipping my toe into the waters on public discussion of Tesla, Inc and its allegedly charismatic CEO Elon Musk, I've been very much reminded of those earlier flame wars. In this case, on one side are people who think everything Elon does (they often call him Elon as if he were their personal friend, and often act as Elon has personally, single-handedly accomplished every good thing ever done at Tesla, Inc) is pure genius, and pure blessing for all life on Earth; and on the other side are climate-change deniers and enthusiasts of internal combustion engines, without much in between. And I have absolutely no appetite for more flame wars. I'd rather see nuanced discussion.

I'm not 100% anti-Tesla. Far from it. I'm very excited to see that sales of electric vehicles are exploding worldwide. And outside of China, where they are building electric cars for domestic consumption at a rate which dwarfs the electric vehicle (EV for short) production in the rest of the world -- outside of Chine, far and away the best-selling EV in the world is the Tesla Model 3. The Model 3 is taking EV sales to an entirely new level, and I love that. I love that that huge battery which Tesla sold to Australia is actually working, contrary to the predictions of many. I love that Teslas are made with a high percentage of green electricity, and that many of their owners also operate them with mostly or all green electricity. There is a huge upside to Tesla, from my point of view.

But that doesn't mean that I love everything Elon Musk does and says, or that I don't wonder whether he actually deserves billions of dollars a year in compensation, or that I don't worry that many Tesla owners and Tesla shareholders (are there actually any Tesla shareholders who don't own and drive at least one Tesla?) are giving way too much in return for what Musk gives them.

In between the Tesla cult members on the one side, who are not nearly concerned enough that Musk might be screwing them over financially, and the Tesla critics who have a whole bunch of facts completely wrong, asserting, for example, that electric vehicles are not better for the environment than those with internal-combustion engines (ICE for short), and that Teslas are made and operated with dirty electricity from the grid, and that demand for Teslas is about to dry up, among many other claims which are completely wrong -- in between is at least one other person besides me: Rich Benoit, Tesla owner and star of the successful YouTube channel Rich Rebuilds, on which you can see him repairing and rebuilding Teslas. Both his own Teslas, and those owned by other people who also have become frustrated by Tesla's normal way of servicing the cars they make.



Which is something which Tesla, Inc absolutely does not encourage people outside of Tesla, Inc to do. Rich says that he loves the Tesla company, but thinks that it can do much better in some areas -- like being much more like a normal car company which lets customers fix their own cars or take them to non-factory garages for repairs if they want to, the way people have been doing with every model of car for as long as there have been cars.

In other words: Rich has a lot of praise and also a lot of criticism for Tesla and is very open about both. A nuanced approach. How about that.

What is more completely Murrkin than workin' on yr car, or takin' it to yr local Mom-n-Pop gas station to get it fixed? Precious little! Hopefully Musk will relent on this subject soon. And if he doesn't, I predict that it will only help the sales of non-Tesla EV's. Lead, follow or get out of the way -- Elon.