this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
552 points (92.9% liked)
Technology
59190 readers
2930 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
They do it to disguise the cost. When the first leaf came out the battery was the majority of the cost of the car.. everything that was added on to make it a 'car' was cheap by comparison. So they added frills to get people to pay that much.. and it worked.
Even now, when batteries are considerably cleaner, they're a decent part of the cost - everyone wants a car that can do 300 miles.. that dictates a certain size and weight (given current energy densities) and the companies have to build a car around that.
Effectively if you made a kirkland car with few features it'd cost almost as much as the current EV crop and nobody would buy one to the lack of features. About cheapest so far is the MG ZS, and that's a £30k car. The £15-20k runabout that everyone wants just isn't feasable without compromising range beyond what most would accept.