The thought came up while reading this ancient blog post about the development of the GM EV1, the pioneering electric car that GM leased but never sold. The post is a response to the rather bitter
Who Killed The Electric Car? documentary, but draws most of its information from the earlier history
The Car That Could, published in 1996. It explains how GM would have lost money on every EV1 it sold, if it sold them for what people were happy to pay:
In 2011 a video entitled
Who Killed the Electric Car? was published. It is a very effective bit of propaganda but quite misleading. The key issue left out was the cost of producing the EV1 electric car. About 1100 EV1 s were produced by General Motors (GM) and leased to selected drivers at a monthly cost of $250 to $500. The drivers thought that this was somewhere near what would be required to cover the cost of producing them. It wasn’t. When the development cost was averaged among those cars their cost was about $340,000 each. Tha
Photo: Getty Images (Getty Images)
The gas tax should be raised, along with other taxes intended to curb global warming, ideas which never get much traction in America because America but Europe is a bit more receptive. Even automakers are on board.
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Now, part of the reason raising the gas tax is unpopular in America is that outside of a handful of cities D.C., New York, Boston, and San Francisco, pretty much it’s virtually impossible to get by without a car, and nearly all of the cars on the road are powered by gas. Further, electric cars remain prohibitively expensive for most people, and thus a higher gas tax would be a blow to the working class, most of whom don’t have many other options than to drive.
Image: Volvo
Just a few years ago, car subscriptions seemed as if they were going to be the next big thing in vehicle purchasing. Every automaker from Porsche to Ford and even car rental agencies were getting in on the game. Now though, most of them have all but quietly vanished.
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Subscriptions came about because of bad assumptions made by automakers. Mid-decade, the assumption was that by now (or at least going into the 2020s) we’d all be transitioning in a driverless car utopia and single-person car ownership would be a thing of the past. People would simply order up an autonomous vehicle from a free-roaming fleet to get to their destinations. Since no one would actually buy cars, people would subscribe to use them, essentially ending car ownership as we currently know it.
Audi
Audi unveiled two new electric crossovers on Wednesday: the 2022 Q4 E-Tron and Q4 E-Tron Sportback.
The base model will cost under $45,000 and have a range of around 250 miles, Audi said.
The twin EVs will hit US dealerships toward the end of 2021.
Audi on Wednesday unveiled a pair of new electric crossovers: the 2022 Q4 E-Tron and Q4 E-Tron Sportback. Their addition to Audi s lineup slashes the entry price for an Audi electric vehicle by more than $20,000.
The two EVs will hit US dealer lots toward the end of 2021 with a starting MSRP of less than $45,000, Audi says. And that s before the federal tax incentive that could effectively knock the price down another $7,500.