Quote:
Originally Posted by dcb
Concrete, I'm only looking at consumer fuel costs in this post here, not maintenance or taxes for defence budgets or any other funny business. And you do not acknowledge the role of inertia in the market place. It takes gas going over $4 because that is what it takes to get enough attention to get a noticable number of consumers to change, because they arent sitting around the dinner table with their calculators and doing energy source analysis fretting about the cost per mile all the time waiting to react by dumping their old cars. In some ways it is a good thing, imagine the race to the bottom every product would suffer if consumers were paying that much attention to everything  |
dcb,
I don't think we are that far apart on this issue - but our perspective are very different
The market does drive us to the bottom and consumers do cost analysis
and they include all the cost - not just fuel
and some of it is "funny business" and fuzzy logic
and not all of them analyze everything all of the time
- but we are consumers and we are analyzing cost in this thread
and any company that is viable analyzes and re-analyzes cost
Others will follow once a few have pointed out the numbers
Ernie's point is valid - and he has some good math to prove it
EVs get over hyped all the time - this is just one piece
As for Market inertia - it is there
But the US market has made quick corrections when the time was right
look at the housing market
I still maintain that there is a bell curve in market penetration
when the time is right (and $4 a gallon made it right) EVs will sneak into places and beat Gassers
market inertia or no
and there are lots of people trying to be the first successful EV maker
but my city sold there their handful of GEMs and replaced them with gassers
I'm just guessing - but I bet it had to do with cost/price/value/economic performance
what ever you want to call it
I'm not one for market manipulation
but a gas price floor would allow EVs to keep their foot in the door
but as it is the price of gas drops and amputates them every time
and it happens at a cost much higher than your calculations
example Aptera blossomed somewhere between $3.00 and $4.50 a gallon
and will become the next Citicar below $2 a gallon
that is what the market says
(you can do this postmortem on any of the Ex-EV makers to find a "market" value)
now we need to find the calculations and drivers (like Ernie) that make that so
and it is not the boogie man - it is just millions and millions of consumers doing cost analysis