EV (electric vehicle) News and Discussion

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#2691559 12-Apr-2021 16:45

Obraik:
wellygary:

Small electric runabouts comparable to the cost point of an ICE are still a long way down the road (Unless you live in China)

A BMW i3 would hit pretty many of your requirements, but you are looking at 80K....

The i3 is absolutely not good value for money brand new. However, they can be had second hand from $25-30k and at that price they're a decent EV - watercooled too!

It's worth noting that they only have four seats - I didn't realise this until we test drove one. While that may not be an issue for a retired couple, it was certainly no good for the two adults and three children we needed it to carry.

PolicyGuy

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#2691622 12-Apr-2021 17:04

wellygary:

Geektastic: Maybe they could have a lower GST rate on ev’s? 5%.

Or on Food, or Medicine, or XXXx....

reducing GST on ABC turns up whenever someone wants to incentivise things,

The last time was NZ First with GST off "basic" Food, and they had government by the short and curlies -- and it still didn't happen.

It ain't gonna happen so move on now... :)

One of the most important features of NZ's GST system is that it is so simple and so straightforward.
One rate, hardly any exemptions - one of the things that Roger Douglas got absolutely right.

Multi-rate VAT/GST schemes are a nightmare of bureaucratic complexity and tax inspection visits, and engender endless tax avoidance and continuous loophole plugging.
If you want to see a very funny illustration of this, see the late great Leonard Rossiter in Episode 6 "Vatman and Robbin" of Tripper's Day

mattwnz

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#2691805 13-Apr-2021 00:51

wellygary:

Jaxson:

Same could be said for local home direct online solar initiatives, something to get the ball rolling. Anything really.

The problem is that EV subsidies get captured heavily by those in a position to buy a new car.... which is NZ is not many people, -

We have created a very internationally unique market where most people buy second hand imported cars...

I was listening to the turns auction CEO recently and recall him saying that 80% of car buyers spend less than $20,000 for a car. So it is likely these subsidies will be going to more wealthy people who can afford to pay extra anyway. I see EVs a bit like LED lights in the early days. They used to advertised the light fittings based on the savings in fuel. Nowadays LED lights are standard, and are as cheap, if not cheaper than older light technologies. So eventually EVs will likely be the same. Especially in the small car space.

jonathan18

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#2691888 13-Apr-2021 08:19

mattwnz:

So it is likely these subsidies will be going to more wealthy people who can afford to pay extra anyway.

I think that's a bit of a blanket statement - my feeling is that for many (non-super-wealthy) households it's likely to provide the necessary nudge to purchase an e-powered car of some type. That's why I kinda liked the proposed feebate scheme, in that it had an increasing subsidy depending on how 'green' the car was. So at the (relatively) lower end it would hopefully push people to choose a hybrid over a conventional ICE, for example. Similarly, I would love my next car to be a full EV, but no chance can I afford this if I have to pay full retail - add in a subsidy and it may be something I can stretch to, whereas without I'll be limited to not even a PHEV but a bog-standard hybrid.

I also think you're missing the point I and others have made earlier: to copy from my earlier post - "a decent proportion of those cars purchased new with a subsidy will, after a few years, be resold on the sh market, thereby expanding the number of sh EVs available further down the chain and hopefully help keep prices down... We surely can’t expect the sh import market to provide enough vehicles to make a sizeable difference in EV uptake?"

frankv

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#2691912 13-Apr-2021 10:10

mattwnz:

I was listening to the turns auction CEO recently and recall him saying that 80% of car buyers spend less than $20,000 for a car. So it is likely these subsidies will be going to more wealthy people who can afford to pay extra anyway. I see EVs a bit like LED lights in the early days. They used to advertised the light fittings based on the savings in fuel. Nowadays LED lights are standard, and are as cheap, if not cheaper than older light technologies. So eventually EVs will likely be the same. Especially in the small car space.

Wealthy people still choose how they spend their money. Just because they can afford to pay extra doesn't mean they *will* choose to do that. However I do take your point that these subsidies would only go to the 5%? each year who actually buy a new car. When subsidies are removed, the price of secondhand EVs will jump by that amount. So, if the subsidies are removed within 5-10 years, they won't trickle down to the bottom end of the second hand market at all.

The difference between ICEVs and LED lights is that the old incandescent lights lasted only a few years at most. Yes, EVs will replace ICEVs just because they are as good and cheaper. But it will take much longer.

I'm not sure that EVs will have more advantage in small cars than large? I suspect that large cars will make it easier to install large batteries to give more range. But EVs will have an advantage for commuters who can do a whole day's commute on a single charge, and for that usage a small car is fine.

Hammerer

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#2691951 13-Apr-2021 11:32

frankv:

The difference between ICEVs and LED lights is that the old incandescent lights lasted only a few years at most. Yes, EVs will replace ICEVs just because they are as good and cheaper. But it will take much longer.

I'd argue that incandescents last a lot longer but high-use brake and indicator lights do often die that quickly.

Anyway, I'm very certain that EVs will replace ICEVs as quickly as LED lights replaced incandescent lights. Such changeovers typically take one generation, i.e. by 40 years. Typically, a technical breakthrough kick-starts new uses for previously invented technology. The first spiral compact flourescent was in 1976 - by the 2000s governments were mandating replacement of incandescents. The first high brightness LED was in 1994 and provided better options for phasing out incandescents. The first highway-capable EV was in 2004 and EV developments and production seems to be following a similar trend.

Early adoption is generally slow until about 20 years and then the technology rapidly becomes more widespread once production pipelines are fully established and the technology is now considered mainstream with high mass-market acceptance. It took about two decades to go from replacing some automotive lights to replacing all lights with LEDs. 1986 was the first LED use in a production vehicle. A major breakthrough was replacing headlights in 2006, initially as an option, which then led to the first all LED cars appearing. Now the large majority of vehicles use all/nearly-all LEDs.

The first highway-capable EV was in 2004 so, even without any knowledge of the current situation, I'd expect that widespread availability of EVs is still to come in the next few years. When this happens, the impact of subsidies will be diminished by high availability and the problem we're discussing should be increasingly solved.

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frankv

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#2691973 13-Apr-2021 12:23

Hammerer:

Anyway, I'm very certain that EVs will replace ICEVs as quickly as LED lights replaced incandescent lights. Such changeovers typically take one generation, i.e. by 40 years. [snip]

Early adoption is generally slow until about 20 years and then the technology rapidly becomes more widespread once production pipelines are fully established and the technology is now considered mainstream with high mass-market acceptance. It took about two decades to go from replacing some automotive lights to replacing all lights with LEDs. 1986 was the first LED use in a production vehicle. A major breakthrough was replacing headlights in 2006, initially as an option, which then led to the first all LED cars appearing. Now the large majority of vehicles use all/nearly-all LEDs.

I don't think there's any particular timebase, and often a lot less than a generation e.g. the Internet. Remember that EVs have been around for longer than ICEVs.

Technology S-curve: The trick is to identify when the curve crosses the profit/loss line. Elon Musk seems to have done this spectacularly well with Tesla. And probably SpaceX. Conversely, ICEVs are very much in the maturity phase at the top of their curve, where a lot of time & investment gives very little gain. As EVs improve, ICEVs will go into descent.

You can also graph technology level vs investment which gives a Sigmoid curve - initially you don't get much improvement for a lot of investment (R&D phase), then you get lots of improvement for little investment (ascent), then you're back to not much improvement for a lot of investment (maturity). If a product depends on several technologies, then the quality of the car will change depending on the underlying technologies. So, for a car, it might be metallurgy, machining, production lines, oil refining, rubber, plastics, electronics, computers, and now batteries.

PolicyGuy

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#2692001 13-Apr-2021 12:57

If you are an ICEV manufacturer with hundreds of millions - or even billions - of dollars of capital committed to ICEV production, then you are highly incentivised to go as slow as you dare on converting to BEV production. One of the strategies you will follow is to produce low-volume, high-priced BEVs. This allows you to say you're "doing EVs" without risking your major cash flow ICEV products, and you may even learn a few things about making BEVs efficiently.

There are a couple of flies in this ointment:

A cashed-up manufacturer with no ICEV investment may enter the market - think Tesla. Fortunately for the Big Guys, Tesla has aimed so far at the mid- to upper-market, so the floods of ICEVs haven't been displaced SO FAR
Governments change the rules. Fortunately for Big Automobiles, they currently hold more political sway than proponents of BEVs, however this is changing

wellygary

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#2692028 13-Apr-2021 14:01

PolicyGuy:

There are a couple of flies in this ointment:

A cashed-up manufacturer with no ICEV investment may enter the market - think Tesla. Fortunately for the Big Guys, Tesla has aimed so far at the mid- to upper-market, so the floods of ICEVs haven't been displaced SO FAR

Although it takes time to ramp large scale production, even for a new entrant like Tesla, they still only made ~500K cars last year, 180K last quarter, I think they might get close to north of 800K in 2021.

And in the meantime the US ICEV manufacturers don't actually care that much about losing car markets share to EVS because pretty much the entire market has moved to light trucks/SUVs and Crossovers.....Ford alone sold 780K F series trucks (utes) in the US , many are atually stopping "car" production because there is more demand and profit in making "light" truck

"Light trucks accounted for a record 75.9% share of U.S. auto sales in 2020, up from 71.7% in 2019. In 2012, just eight years ago, trucks were 53% of the total. "

https://www.forbes.com/wheels/news/2020-truck-suv-car-sales-winners-and-losers/#:~:text=U.S.%20new%2Dvehicle%20sales%20in,overall%20to%20just%2014.6%20million.&text=Light%20trucks%20accounted%20for%20a,were%2053%25%20of%20the%20total.

HarmLessSolutions

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#2692048 13-Apr-2021 14:23

frankv:

I don't think there's any particular timebase, and often a lot less than a generation e.g. the Internet. Remember that EVs have been around for longer than ICEVs.

Technology S-curve: The trick is to identify when the curve crosses the profit/loss line. Elon Musk seems to have done this spectacularly well with Tesla. And probably SpaceX. Conversely, ICEVs are very much in the maturity phase at the top of their curve, where a lot of time & investment gives very little gain. As EVs improve, ICEVs will go into descent.

You can also graph technology level vs investment which gives a Sigmoid curve - initially you don't get much improvement for a lot of investment (R&D phase), then you get lots of improvement for little investment (ascent), then you're back to not much improvement for a lot of investment (maturity). If a product depends on several technologies, then the quality of the car will change depending on the underlying technologies. So, for a car, it might be metallurgy, machining, production lines, oil refining, rubber, plastics, electronics, computers, and now batteries.

This presentation by Tony Seba gives a great explanation of S-curve adoption of technologies, starting at about the 8 minute mark. He's still giving essentially the same presentations now except his earlier predictions are now being quoted as facts that have now arrived and he proves to be pretty much on the button if not slightly conservative in his predictions.

On a similar note this data on technology adoption is interesting. Note particularly the demise of the landline as the cellphone has risen. Also the increasingly steep adoption rates now compared to earlier technologies.

https://www.harmlesssolutions.co.nz/

frankv

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#2692082 13-Apr-2021 15:14

PolicyGuy:

If you are an ICEV manufacturer with hundreds of millions - or even billions - of dollars of capital committed to ICEV production, then you are highly incentivised to go as slow as you dare on converting to BEV production.

However.... If BEV production is going to actually supersede ICEV, you want to be one of the first to switch to it, and you certainly don't want to be the one of the last. Or you might figure that gen1 or even gen2 BEVs are going to be marginal to negative profit-wise, so you aim to skip gen1, tiding yourself over with ICEV sales while you develop a gen2 (or gen3) BEV, learning from everyone else's mistakes.

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GV27

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#2692092 13-Apr-2021 15:45

Geektastic:
GV27:

For safety reasons alone, yes.

Yes it would be a bad thing? Why?

Because our average vehicle age is already 14 years old and used vehicles are the best chance that some people have in getting a drastically safer vehicle.

New vehicles safety improvements tend to be a case of diminishing returns. Stinging used car imports to underwrite flash new EVs for people who can afford a new car, subsidy be damned, will have a flow on effect of people keeping older, less safe cars on the road.

I don't know why we don't just cap a new car incentives based on a value (e.g. $70K) and zero-rate second-hand EV imports for GST and have the best of both worlds.

tripper1000

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#2692106 13-Apr-2021 16:17

mattwnz: ...So it is likely these subsidies will be going to more wealthy people who can afford to pay extra anyway....

This will happen with almost any kind of environmental incentive because Environmentalism is a luxury that mainly only the rich can afford. This is why poor countries tend to have the worst pollution and why left leaning greens struggle balancing contradictory policy.

You need to look at the long game: the rich are buying cars and eating the depreciation to "create" affordable cars for the poor. If you encourage the rich to buy environmental cars, they are still eating a lot of depreciation to create affordable cars for the poor, but the poor now have environmental choices. Yes, it may take 5 or 10 years, for the trickle down to be seen, but it will happen and looking after people and the planet is a long game.

wellygary

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#2692156 13-Apr-2021 16:34

GV27:

I don't know why we don't just cap a new car incentives based on a value (e.g. $70K) and zero-rate second-hand EV imports for GST and have the best of both worlds.

The problem with the cap is that it has to include the new EVs that NZers are actually buying, and they are very concentrated

There are roughly 6000 new EVs ( cars) in NZ, 40% are Teslas, another 25% are Hyundai (ioniqs and Konas) -the fleet numbers are just that small

Heck almost 8% of the new pure EV fleet are NZ post buggies..

mattwnz

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#2692168 13-Apr-2021 17:11

frankv:

The difference between ICEVs and LED lights is that the old incandescent lights lasted only a few years at most. Yes, EVs will replace ICEVs just because they are as good and cheaper. But it will take much longer.

Many of the cheaper LEDs don't' seem to last as long , or last about the same time as incandescent, as they are cheaply made and cook and overdrive the components. I have purchased many cheaper ones in the past, and many have failed within few months. Complained to the manufacturer and they didn't seem to care. They sent me a box of replacement ones and they also failed, they just blamed my power supply, although the store had told me they had had a lot of returns. But never had a problem with good branded ones.

Have a watch of Big Clives Youtube channel where he opens up many of these cheaper LEDs and compares them. Whether these cheaper brands are designing to to fail prematurely, I don't know, but if built well, they should last a long time. Also putting them on a dimmer and under driving them is supposed to help prolong their life. But many of the regular E27 or B22 bulbs are not dimmable. But they could also make incandescent bulbs last decades, think there has been one that has been going for over a hundred years, but it would be bad for business to do that.

But the problem with EVs is that 40% of the price is in the batteries /power store, and they degrade, and creates waste and needs material mining for them. We need to work out a good way to recycle them, and NZ needs to prepare for this now, otherwise we are going to end up with a lot of waste from them.

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