L4sBotTesla owners are typically white men earning six figures
const_voidThe same demographic as MAGA supporters.
MAGA supporters drive EVs?
This is totally anecdotal, but of the two tesla owners i know, both are left leaning and software devs (not white though). I have also have few maga relatves that shit on electric anything, like they gave me crap for having an electric mower.
It’s part of the US right wing identity to be against anything that might reduce the risk of climate catastrophe. That is hilarious about your electric mower! Same experience with right wingers shitting on EVs, though they softened a bit since Elon blew up Twitter.
Can we avoid turning Lemmy.world into a political car fight and stick to the particulars of the issues instead of name calling. Whether right or wrong saying “that’s the same demographic as trump supporters” doesn’t add to the conversation, it’s just inflammatory
This is what happens when you let redditors in
ArcturusAll the right-leaning people I know don't like EV's and don't own them. Most, can't afford them. Most of the Tesla owners I've noticed in my country are Chinese. You've got plenty of Tesla ownership in Europe and China where sales dominate. Far from MAGA battlegrounds.
This is true for me, I have an S.
I’ll also never buy another tesla again but I’ll drive this until the wheels fall off. It’s 5 years old now.
How is the battery holding up? All Tesla owners I know sold theirs before the 2 year mark worrying that they might need to replace the battery for the price of a new car, always sounded like a misconception to me.
TechnoguyficationThe thing gets me about the "$XX,000" battery replacement figure is that people are talking about the dealer quote for a battery replacement, not a third party shops. If your vehicle is in warranty (and Tesla has an 8 year battery warranty), then the dealer replaces the battery for free. If it's not under warranty anymore, there's no reason to get your battery replaced at the dealer. Third party shops will do it for a fraction of the cost.
Holding up fine. I’m about 7% degradation, 2018 over 80k miles on it. 100D.
I’ve been very happy with it as far as anything goes. Never serviced, just a few things like lights that I needed replaced.
Sounds about right
HypxYep. It basically proves that Teslas are a toy for the rich. It will eventually be realized that BEVs are a fad.
This is why BEVs are fundamentally just a fad. It is a toy for rich white men and little else. It is fundamentally too expensive for normal people. There not even the most important car in the household, and is usually just the second car.
Catch42In the 90's you could've written an equally true headline replacing "Tesla owners" with "PC owners". It's not an indication that BEV's are a fad, it's an indication that wealth inequality and sexism continues to this day.
There is no Moore's law of batteries. BEVs are always going to be fairly expensive compared to other types of cars.
Not to mention BEVs are old technology. They literally pre-date internal combustion cars.
@Hypx There's no Moore's Law for batteries because they're a different technology. Transistors today are still fundamentally the same as the first transistor, made in 1947. Batteries, on the other hand, are constantly evolving. The first LiPo battery wasn't invented until 1997, and there are multiple new battery technologies currently being studied, like solid state batteries.
Are you seriously joking? A transistor today is much smaller and faster than what existed in 1947. That is what is driving Moore's law.
Batteries evolve only very slowly, and run into hard physical limits at every step. As a result, BEVs are very expensive and have major downsides like weight, long recharge times, etc.
@Hypx Yes transistors are smaller and faster, that's the literal definition of Moore's Law. But a transistor today is a smaller, faster version of the exact same technology as the first transistor, applying a small signal to pass current between doped semiconductor junctions, the only major difference being changing the semiconductor from germanium to silicon.
Batteries, however, are fundamentally different from when they were first invented. Yes, it's still storing electrical energy as chemical energy, but the chemistry has changed so much since the first batteries. The word "polymer" wouldn't even exist for another 20 odd years. And new technology is constantly being discovered, such as solid state batteries or supercapacitors.
And if you want to talk about physical limits, Moore's Law is essentially dead. We're nearing a point where you'd have to split atoms to make a smaller transistor. Batteries are limited by their chemical makeup, transistors are limited by the laws of physics.
That’s ridiculous. You basically admitted that we switched from germanium to silicon, but that this apparently doesn’t count as a difference.
Not to mention that this is massively off-topic. The point is that batteries do not improve as fast as transistors did in the 1990s. Hence why an analogy is wrong.
And if you are aware that Moore’s law is (more or less) dead today, then you should understand the problem that batteries are facing. They too are hitting hard physical limits. You talk of solid state batteries but they are nowhere to be found right now. Clearly, this is a hard problem and future batteries will not magically be far superior.
But ultimately, there are other green ideas not called the BEV. Including other types of EVs. This is why I try to make it clear that I am talking about BEVs specific. Not EVs in general. Once other people become aware of this fact, it will become much clearer that the BEV is a fad. It is an expensive and very limited idea. It is arguably an idea stuck in the mid-2000s, and its advocates have simply failed to move on.
HobovisionI think the point that is counter to yours is that we are nowhere near the fundamental limits of energy density for batteries. It's probable we are near a fundamental limit for LiPo, but the point is that battery tech improves by changing technologies/chemistries. BEVs couldn't exist at all when the best rechargeable battery tech was lead-acid, but were enabled by LiPo. Theres most likely a type of battery you can't even imagine that has yet to be invented that could store >10x or more energy than current LiPo per unit cost or mass.
I would say that's pretty unlikely there will be a 10x improvement in battery chemistry. At some point, we will have to deal with the fundamental limitations of the technology. That will likely imply a different kind of EV. Other conversations in this thread have brought up the FCEV, which is honestly the mostly likely guess for what comes after the BEV. In other words, the solution is to move beyond batteries, not pretend we can just improve batteries ad absurdum.
Also, this is basically the point of the book The Innovator's Dilemma. Technology does not improve linearly exclusively. At some point, major shifts in the market will have to happen. If you think about this problem honestly, you probably have to conclude that the limitations of the BEV must be solved by a big leap forward, not incremental improvements in batteries. And if you can reach that conclusion, then you must realize that the BEV has to be a transitional technology. Perhaps, even a fad.
If we're talking approaching fundamental limits, Hydrogen fuel cell is not a great comparison. A high pressure tank can only get so light, even with linerless ultra high strength carbon fiber pressure vessels, the mass of the vessel is maybe 6-10x the mass of the hydrogen it carries. To increase specific energy there you need to go to cryogenics which is a whole technology leap and has its own set of challenges.
Battery tech has been improving more than you have seen, clearly. Since '08, lithium batteries have increased energy density by 8x (https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1234-april-18-2022-volumetric-energy-density-lithium-ion-batteries). The best LiPo batteries are around 0.9MJ/kg right now, but there's no fundamental reason a battery couldn't achieve 9MJ/kg. Lithium-air batteries could theoretically achieve way higher energy density than that even (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium%E2%80%93air_battery), and have already been demonstrated in a lab to achieve more than 5x what current commercial automotive batteries are doing.
Except those fundamentally limits are far higher. The fact is that hydrogen stores energy at 120 MJ/kg. Even at 5% weight efficiency, that's 6 MJ/kg. Or 1,666 Wh/kg. Far beyond any battery.
Your link is seriously lying. 8x is the gap between lead-acid and li-ion batteries. The claims are simply impossible. The author must be unknowingly comparing lead-acid battery powered cars to li-ion battery powered cars. I cannot see any other way his claim is true.
A lithium-air battery is literally a fuel cell. In fact, what did you think hydrogen fuel cells were this entire time?
Driving with something that power dense is incredibly dangerous. You're literally driving a bomb, dynamite is 4.6 MJ/kg
Gasoline is 46 MJ/kg
Calling them BEVs is misleading and damaging to EVs as a whole, because you're right, batteries do have their limitations, at least today's batteries. The proper industry term is FEV, fully electric vehicle. Choosing to limit EVs to only batteries is an arbitrary decision made for argument's sake, but instead of looking at how they can be improved, you're just focusing on why it'll fail. A "battery" is anything that stores energy, not just the traditional battery, and once EVs are the norm, they probably won't be using LiPos, they'll be using something that hasn't been invented yet.
Are you talking about FCEVs? You can also include directly electrified vehicles, but that is mostly mass transit.
And yes, electrification as a whole will succeed. But BEVs probably are not. I call them fads because they are just toys for the rich and they are unlikely to be affordable for most people.
There's plenty of BEVs that are competitively priced to any other new car: https://www.caranddriver.com/features/g32463239/new-ev-models-us/
They might not be the car you choose to take on a road trip, but most days, I only need to drive less than 20 miles anyway.
You're joking? The first one on that list is literally the Hummer EV. Completely unaffordable for most people. This is just more evidence that BEVs are a fad, not the other way around.
And there are 5 other cars below $40k. Just because 1 car is expensive doesn't mean others are.
The list is dominated by SUVs and pick-up trucks. The "below $40k" market is all subcompacts or compacts and are the equivalent of $20k ICE cars. It is not a competitive technology. If anything, it just proves how underwhelming BEVs actually are.
https://www.caranddriver.com/chevrolet/bolt-euv
So you just have a hydrogen full cell manufacturer's name as your username and post extensively in https://kbin.social/m/Hydrogen for fun or do you think you maybe have a conflict of interest here and are being disingenuous?
Because I want to tell the truth, not swallow marketing propaganda from Tesla. In reality, BEVs are a fad and no amount of wishful thinking will change that.
The name is a coincidence. I've used this name for a long time (from elsewhere to be clear).
Yeah that’s not even a little surprising
Hence why it is a fad. Just a toy for rich people who work in the tech industry.
Overall, not surprised.
Couple of points I noticed were missing:
These are their most affordable models, so I’m reading this article in terms of the Model X & Model S, and not every owner. The data did say that the Model 3 was predominantly male-owned, and I expected nothing less from a car marketed as a sports car.
A state that was once identified as “Camry California”, the Model Y exceeding Camry sales in the state is a big enough deal to include that data to qualify an article that describes all Tesla owners.
It's consistent with the idea that mostly tech workers buy Teslas. It does not really sell to people outside this demographic.
Around me, I see lots of soccer moms driving them, and I wouldn't say I live in a particularly affluent area. I do, however, live near a nuclear plant (11th largest in the world, in fact) and have relatively cheap electricity.
Those are often pretty wealthy people.
Til the middle class is considered "wealthy"
You sound like a right-wing troll at this point.
a1studmuffinTesla’s are Thermomix for tech bros.
I mean Model 3 is also now literally the #1 bestselling car in the entire world
Also quite popular in China. Really it's the most affordable non-Chinese option, outside the US market. Unless you count the Tata Nexo, in which case, the Chinese options would be better...
Teslas are now the more expensive finance bro Patagonia vests, but on the road I’m seeing more polestars and other Ev’s.
Yeah I only got mine because it had the best range at the time and went "zoom" real good. I'd get an Aptera (if it ever comes out) for my next one though.
“Six figures.”
Can we retire this phrase? A lot of these people are earning multi-hundred-thousand dollar salaries. And many of them live in expensive areas where $100k is not some magic number that means you’re rich.
It’s just such a cringey phrase. Not specific enough to be useful, and loaded with economic misconceptions.
Agreed. Between my wife and I we gross close to 200k. With a house in a Boston Suburb and 2 kids, it’s solidly middle class. Certainly a far cry from rich.
The use of “six figures” as a measure of affluence goes back to at least the 60’s… if we use 1970 as a baseline, a salary of $100,000 then is $800,000 today, accounting for inflation.
Inflation isn’t the whole picture , but helps to demonstrate how dated the phrase is.
This is interesting, thank you for this. Makes me feel less bad
dylanTheDeveloperI thought Tesla’s were for poor kids who live in trailer parks
They're toys for rich people. The whole concept is a just big fad.
IMHO Tesla is too unreliable. There are enough EVs available that are more reliable (and cheaper).
I just want an EV that is:
-Reasonably priced.
-User repairable/modifiable.
-No stupid luxury gimmicks (fake “self driving” or “self parking”, 360° cameras for outside view, electronic locks that will most likely fail in a couple years, etc…)
-NO FUCKING SUBSCRIPTION SERVICES like those stupid heated seats!!
-User repairable/modifiable.
It’ll have to run on a couple of AAA-batteries then.
vis4valentineIf I were rich I would like an EV based on the fact that I hate gasoline.
But I dont trust my road safety on a billionaire crybaby who gets triggered by the word “cisgender”
When our current car dies, I’d like to replace it with an EV - but 0% chance it’ll be a Tesla.
Lots of better options out now. And in 5 years, Tesla may be the worst of them, given how bad their quality control is.
I just wish it wasn’t their charging network that manufacturers were moving to, but I have to admit that it is better than the alternatives. And we do need a single standard like gas.
I wouldn't say there are lots of better options out there. There's definitely a lot of options. But there aren't many that I have seen that are better. Those that are, are more expensive. Those that are cheaper and better are Chinese and aren't available in the US market. I know this because we do receive Chinese vehicles here. From memory, top three selling EV brands here are Tesla, and two other Chinese brands. There are some equivalent alternative options, but it might not be for all people either.