Honda is setting itself up for failure on the second disruption sweeping the automotive industry: the software-defined vehicle (SDV), which has core capabilities that can be upgraded and improved over time.
No thank you. Not sure why the author frames this as a good thing. They've been bamboozled by the automakers and have got it backwards - you're buying a vehicle that already has the capabilities, but are disabled, then paying rent (or a fee) to turn them on. I'm much more likely to buy from a manufacturer that doesn't play these games.
Most people including the author think more software = premium/better. But as software engineers, we know better. That's not the case at all. More software = more control by everyone else except you. Manufacturers. Governments.
For this reason, I always avoid cars with big flashy LCD screens that are central to controlling the cars accessories like sunroof, AC and other electricals.
The other issue is support. So many models stop getting updates after 5 years. So, if there is a bug in that big screen, you have to live with it for the rest of the car's life.
Finally, there's the issue of privacy. Most manufacturers contract with analytics vendors to send your data back to them. You can't even turn it off. For example, MG (now chinese owned) has Adobe analytics embedded into their big screens. The only reason chinese love using Adobe over other vendors is because they aren't blocked in China. So that's usually a dead giveaway that your data is being sent back there.
What kind of data? You will be surprised.
1. How many people are inside the car at a given point (measuring laden weight)
2. What are your favorite spots (your home, office, restaurants, etc)
3. How many people live in your family (average laden weight over time)
4. Your favorite routes, highways
5. If you are married/have kids
6. If you're having an affair
7. Your annual income, monthly spend, estimated net worth
And a lot more data points that I can list here. Remember, they have access to additional data brokers to stitch a complete user profile about you too.
There is also the issue of longevity. Most people don't expect 20 year old laptops to keep working, but they expect 20 year old cars to keep working. The software defined vehicle is a disposable vehicle, and that means it better be cheap or someone is taking a depreciation bath.
The older modules were more durable, but even those start to fail after that much use. In the past, you could go to a junkyard and pull a new module, but now everything is vin-locked to the car, so you need to buy a new module from the manufacturer, but oops, they are no longer selling them. Now what do you do? It's a real problem.
Some shops try to reverse engineer the modules and create clones, and that works a little bit, but it's a real problem. But that was for modules made in the early 2000s.
Now fast forward to today where the electronics is completely different and much less durable. You have basically PC motherboards being inserted into cars. I think people have not yet understood the implications of this in terms of their car's durability.
I've been talking to a guy with a 2007 Volvo and the upper electronics module failed -- it's in the rear-view mirror. Now, you can still drive that car, but he pulled one from a junkyard and tried to replace his -- now the CEM wont recognize the module. OK, with Volvo, you can crack the CEM pin and get it to accept the new module since the reverse engineering community has managed to figure that out.
But with modern cars? With the "software defined vehicle"? You are S.O.L.
When a mechanical part fails, you can fabricate a new part, and aftermarket vendors come and make replacement parts. But with software? The vendor isn't releasing the code. You can't make a replacement.
Cars with (double) DIN units are ok. When the built in GPS is missing half the roads in your area or Carplay/android auto stops working you can just buy a new headunit for a few hundred dollars. But cars with everything "integrated" aren't ageing as gracefully and it's not easy to upgrade the built in systems. 20 years old is fine, 10 years maybe not.
Yeah but those were primitive (as in simple, more reliable) and hardened electronics, and you had tons of knobs to set most important things directly even if the screen would die completely.
Now its just a tablet glued to some annoying location and no physical controls. Do you expect a tablet to last 20 years battery notwithstanding, the touch to be perfectly sensitive for so long? Most people don't, for good reasons.
> Finally, there's the issue of privacy. Most manufacturers contract with analytics vendors to send your data back to them. You can't even turn it off.
You absolutely can. Pull the fuse of the cellular modem aka "telematics unit" or even completely remove it. Some vehicles don't have a separate fuse, in which case you will need to physically unplug the modem. Do your research and don't buy any car where this can't be done more or less painlessly.
Well thats a nice theory but do you yourself give guarantee to all models that they will keep working after such potentially destructive 'hack' ? I don't think so. Its trivial for manufacturer to make it stop working because of ie some security blah and just having a big warning on the screen to go to the repair shop.
So a typical internet advice - don't listen to it uncritically, or not at all.
It's not only bug fixing. It's what happens to phones too: updates for a fixed number of years.
I don't see the point to pay a premium for a new car (it's not a tool for my work) so I always buy second hand. My Citroën C3 from 2016 never upgraded to the new backward incompatible Android auto from the late 2010s. I bought it in 2020 and I wasn't able to connect to it with my phone from 2019 which came with the new Android auto. BTW iPhones could connect. Last time I checked was 2024.
This particular problem is not important because I put my phone in a holder close to my wheel and I get a better navigator than my car could ever be with its 3 colors LCD panel, but cars can last much more than phones and stopping support at any time during their lifetime could be a problem. I understand that supporting a 2016 car in 2036 could be a problem too, so just give us the mechanical part with the firmware of engine, brakes etc and the usual knobs and buttons. Each passenger has a personal infotainment system in their hands and spend their time liking at it with earpieces in their ears. No need to duplicate that in the car.
I'm past 130k km now so I'll be looking for another second hand car a few years from now. I'm afraid that it will be from the middle of the worst period of the car dashboards. Maybe I'll be partially saved by looking at a low price point.
I was told by a car dealer service guy that if the touch screen went on the blink, the car would be totaled. (Since replacing it cost more than the car was worth.)
I've often thought the touch screen should be replaced by a socket that accepts an iPad, and put the auto custom software on that. Why reinvent the hardware?
Funny that you say that because of all the big tech companies, Apple has the best track record at fighting for consumer privacy. And you certainly cannot say that for any of the car makers that currently have an EV lineup.
Apple has a terrible reputation if you don't cherrypick news. Most of their 'security' stuff is PR work. Its just that rest of competition is even worse.
The power of a tablet is far more than is required for an infotainment system. Make a standard, like we used to have for radios and regulate everything to expose all the controls via a standard connection. Standard parts for replacing and sizes for fitting.
The only way we can have nice things is by regulating. I don't want proprietary tyres either.
As users we should also know better. All too often software is used to remove functionality from your things, or add unwanted ones. Even just adding ads. It's used as bait and switch and can make the thing you bought unfit for the job.
Car software comes with so many locks and it's intentionally made to not be serviceable by the user in any way. You can't tweak it, replace it, take one from another car. It's your car, the hardware part that does the same job is yours, but the software that replaces it isn't.
And at the end of the day almost no buyer buys a car for future promised software features. They buy it for existing features and new good ones are just welcome. If anything, the software is just used as an excuse to deliver a half baked product and have it bake over the years in the owner's hands, so at the end of the ownership maybe it's what was promised in the first place.
> More software = more control by everyone else except you. Manufacturers. Governments.
Also more unreliability, because software engineers often aren't real engineers.
> The other issue is support. So many models stop getting updates after 5 years. So, if there is a bug in that big screen, you have to live with it for the rest of the car's life.
The problem here is (probably) the internet, which gives management an excuse to slack on QA. If there was no chance to ever update the software, they'd probably do a better job. But now with the internet, they can say they'll just fix it in a patch later, but then never actually get around to doing that.
There ought to be a law that says car software may only be shipped on console-style non-flash ROM carts.
Maybe that's because software that we use every day (websites, saas, etc) generally get better over time and it's still relatively cheap. Meanwhile cars still rely on things like an archaic check engine light rather than just tell you what's wrong with the car and an infotainment system that's worse than a circa 2012 iPad.
People feel that cars haven't really improved much in practical terms over the last 20 years. At least to the layman, they don't feel smoother, safer, more comfortable to drive. They just got more expensive, more cameras and crap like auto-start that no one asked for.
So at least the hope is to take some of the best parts of modern software manufacturing and apply it to the car. Tesla did this and is why it was the first successful car company that's been started in the past 50 years or so.
I appreciate your sentiment, and I agree with you in the hypothetical universe I think you’re imagining. But in this universe, that ship has long since sailed. Cars are software. They have been so for a long time. The only difference between a Tesla and an economy car from Stellantis is whether the software is well written or not.
My wife has a 2015 Jeep Cherokee. For its purpose It’s actually quite a nice vehicle, sending aside concerns of mechanical reliability. But it also has many annoyances, and EVERY single one of them (with no exceptions) are software-defined bugs or behaviours, and all could all be improved with software updates. But legacy order has never cared about improving software after you bought the car.
For all of Tesla’s many faults, they one of the first automakers where it feels like the software is not abandonware. It’s a positive trend and it’s nice to see a few other manufacturers following suit.
I'm afraid it's exactly the opposite -- Tesla has awful software, and no self discipline about adding more bloat. There is a lot of rigorously designed software in cars where you can't see it. Jeep is no one's idea of quality in any respect though.
Legacy brands do significantly improve software as the model evolves, and provide firmware updates to earlier models. The best car is probably the last one before a new platform step change.
Tesla has also pioneered putting large amounts of software in mission critical compute like instrument displays and touch screens, disregarding decades of careful evolution in HMI and TCB design. There is so much wrong with their cars without even touching their autonomy system, a proven killer.
I know enough about the software in BMW (NBT/OS7) and Audi (MIB2/MIB3) instrument cluster stacks to know there's at least as much complexity — if not substantially more — in many of the legacy brands. Not to mention the exponential complexity which comes from their highly modularised approach, where systems from a variety of external suppliers have to co-ordinate with each other.
By contrast, the Tesla software stack is (or appears to be based on a few minutes of research) shockingly straightforward considering its apparent complexity. Rather than being a hodge-podge of vendor software, it appears to be Qt-based software running within a Linux environment on Nvidia and/or Intel chipsets. If there's a bloat issue, it'd be interesting to hear some specifics.
As for your quip about "decades of careful evolution in HMI and TCB design" you might have been right 20–30 years ago.
I literally worked on building the next generation of handheld OBD devices (m68000 based) that techs used to reflash Toyota ECUs in 1997. Automakers can and do update software after the car has been sold. Before that, techs would need to swap EEPROMS.
It’s getting better, but even now many traditional automakers strictly limit software updates to bug fixes only. And they'll probably only fix the bug if there's a legal or sales incentive to do so.
My own car is a 2013 BMW 125i. Its software stack received a handful of very simple quality-of-life improvements in 2014. The clearest example is the on-screen volume overlay. As delivered, my car’s volume knob provided absolutely no visual feedback.
If you ask nicely, BMW dealership can update it. But that's not enough. The way BMW "codes" your vehicle after a software update means that any features introduced after its date of manufacture are disabled. So even after I had the dealer install newer software (to fix a crashing bug with navigation) the volume overlay didn’t appear. What I ended up having to do was "recode" the ECU with a new delivery date. Literally all I did was change the delivery date in a pirated copy of BMW E-Sys, push the change to the car, and the overlay appeared like magic.
Cars have software. But I don't think cars are software. Can I apply a software update to make my Honda Accord into Tesla or Dodge Ram?
> The only difference between a Tesla and an economy car from Stellantis is whether the software is well written or not.
Is that actually true? I mean, assume I have access to all software in the world and all IP lawyers got kidnapped by aliens - could I just write a software for Stellantis Economy to turn it into Tesla (or vice versa)? I don't think so.
> Cars have software. But I don't think cars are software. Can I apply a software update to make my Honda Accord into Tesla or Dodge Ram?
That's a disingenuously literal misinterpretation of what I said. I wasn't saying that a Tesla and some economy car are identical, only that they have in common the characteristic of being defined at their core by software. It should go without saying that software alone can't turn a Cherokee into a Model Y for the same reason that software alone can't turn a HomePod into an Apple Watch.
But there's an obvious difference between a good software experience and a poor one. Like in my wife's Cherokee, how the radio always turns on every time you start the car, no matter what you do. Like how the digital speedometer is completely concealed by any warning text that appears. Like how all window controls stop working as soon as any passenger opens their door after stopping the engine. This is all software, and I write this in response to rkagerer saying "no thank you" to cars getting meaningful software updates.
You can do all the research in the world about a car, learn everything there is to know, and decide "this is worth my money". (Bait)
And then your car's manufacturer chooses to use the update mechanism to modify the center console screen to serve ads[1] while you're driving. (… and switch.)
> But in this universe, that ship has long since sailed.
No, you're combining "there can be updates" and "there will be subscriptions, always-online and enshittification" as if it wasn't splittable.
It is. It can. It will be.
As long as there are people making purchasing decisions, no ship will ever sail.
This is just passive HN fatalism as we know and resent it; probably a survival tactic to not go insane in the SV (or any large corp).
Even for me (a software developer who reads these articles) it's really hard to actually know whether the software is any good. Are there unlockable features? Are there subscriptions with reasonable costs? What happens if I don't have a subscription? How often are updates shipped? What's the general consensus around the quality of the system as a whole?
It took decades for people to land on - in fairness some times very handwavy -generalizations like "Japanese cars are reliable", "German cars are well built", "French cars are...french".
All this is now on its head. The landscape changes very quickly and you don't even recognize the brands. A Chinese maker of vacuum cleaners might have sold more cars than VW in 2025 and yet you never heard of them. A reputable car manufacturer like Honda could be a complete novice when it comes to EVs and so on.
Even though software is extremely important for how cars work, we still don't have easy comparisons. It's mentioned in reviews/tests of cars, but it's mostly "Yeah it feels snappy and modern, 7/10" and no real meat in the comparison. I wish there was an WLTP comparison scheme for car software which made it easy to compare.
Looking at most modern cars, I'm of the view that most of them are so fully whacked with the enshittification stick, that it's pretty hard for them to get even more enshittified without risking sales to actual normies. A very normie person in my extended family decided against an MG because she could tell how bad the software was — an impressive feat of enshittedness.
Right now I don't need a new car, but if I did, it would be a Tesla for literally no reason other than their track record of delivering substantial software updates to existing customers for free, with no subscription requirement and none of the usual dealership nonsense or corporate shenanigans.
>you're buying a vehicle that already has the capabilities, but are disabled, then paying rent (or a fee) to turn them on.
This is very much not what "software-defined vehicle" means which itself is very much not the same thing as EVs. It's possible to criticize the explotative business practices you mentioned (or bad UI practices like moving everything to a touchscreen instead of physical buttons) without linking them to other issues that have no real relation beyond falling under the general category of "technology".
At a societal level, EVs are generally better than ICE cars. At a societal level, cars that can automatically fix a "recall" with an over-the-air update are generally better than recalls that will wait to get fixed until an owner schedules an appointment to have the car serviced. These two things can be true without endorsing automakers who charge and extra fee to activate the seat warmers that already exist in the vehicle.
That's all motherhood and apple pie, but I'm sorry: the reality that we live in and incentives at play are such that if a capability can be exploited, then it will be exploited to the detriment of the consumer. Full stop.
It's interesting how many complaints I see on HN that are framed as if they're complaints about a specific piece of technology when they are really complaints about capitalism. I'm all ears if you want to criticize our entire economic system, but I think it's silly to have that conversation specifically in the context of car software rather than at a societal level.
> when they are really complaints about capitalism
it's not a complaint about capitalism. It's a complaint about asymmetric bargaining power in the seller/buyer relationship.
That's not inherent in capitalism. It's inherent in an anti-competitive market. The failure is in gov't making sure there's sufficient regulation to prevent monopolistic practises.
> The failure is in gov't making sure there's sufficient regulation to prevent monopolistic practises.
This may not be a problem inherent to capitalism, but it certainly is a problem caused by the capitalism we currently have (by which I'm specifically referring to the US, but it may apply more broadly elsewhere).
And the government's failure to adequately regulate the market is due to the right. The party that claims government doesn't work has repeatedly - for generations - run on this as their platform, and when in power, they ensure it doesn't work by continued regulatory capture and gutting of consumer protections.
Criticising our entire economic system tends to have very little effect. Criticising specific poor business practices and/or technologies that enable them has a much better chance of improving people's lives.
> Criticising our entire economic system tends to have very little effect.
I think its actively counterproductive. Criticising the entire economic system doesn't do anything. Complaining in broad strokes about stuff you can't change reduces your sense of agency over the world.
Also, if people believe that businesses must be sociopathic, they will make sociopathic choices in business. The belief reinforces the problem.
When you're fighting the same enemy on a dozen battlefields, you won't stand a chance of winning until you understand that fact and go after the root cause.
This feels to me like a false dichotomy. The only alternative to the current way of doing things isn't a planned command economy, no matter what "libertarians" or tankies might argue.
As another poster already said, the complaints are not about capitalism, even if sometimes they are worded in such a way, but they are about monopolistic capitalism.
For "capitalism" without other qualifications, there are no alternatives. The so-called socialist or communist economies have always lied by pretending that they are not capitalist. In fact all such economies were the extreme form of monopolistic capitalism.
Towards the end of the nineties of the previous century, a huge wave of acquisitions and mergers has started and it has never stopped since then.
Because of this, to my dismay, because I have grown in a country occupied by communists so I know first hand how such an economy works, the economies of USA and of all the other western countries have begun to resemble more and more every year with the socialist/communist economies that were criticized and ridiculed here in the past.
While the lack of competition and its consequences are very similar, in some respect the current US and western economies are even worse than the former socialist/communist economies. At least those had long-term plans. While those plans were frequently not as successful as claimed, they at least realized from time to time useful big infrastructure projects.
The main role of the laws and of the state must be the protection of the weak from the powerful, for various definitions of weakness and power, to prevent the alternative of attempting to solve such inequalities by violent means, when everybody loses.
Therefore there must be a balance between the economic freedom of the private companies and the regulation of their activities.
It is obvious that in USA such a balance has stopped existing long ago and the power of the big companies is unchecked, to the detriment of individuals and small/medium companies.
The US legislators spend most of their time fighting for the
introduction of more and more ridiculous laws, which are harmful for the majority of the citizens, while nobody makes the slightest attempt to conceive laws that would really protect the consumers against the abusive practices that have now spread to all big companies.
Do personal computers even really emerge under communism? it is yet to be seen. But this specific technology seems to only evolve under capitalism to suit the needs of a certain type of buisness against the consumer.
If it emerged under communism, it probably would be equally as bad. I imagine if it emerged under communism or socialism it would be designed to solve a similar problems: securing the needs of the state against the citizen.
The economies of all countries that claimed to be socialist or communist were the extreme form of monopolistic capitalism.
Because nowadays the economy of USA resembles more and more every year to that of the socialist countries from the past, a non-negligible risk has appeared for the personal computer to become an endangered species.
The prices of personal computers and of their components have been increasing steadily during the last decade, long before the current wave of extreme price increases.
There is a steadily increasing pressure from big companies and from the governments controlled by them to eliminate true ownership of computers and of many other electronic devices, by introducing more and more restrictions for what owners can do with their PC/smartphone and by introducing more and more opportunities for others to control those devices remotely.
Many kinds of computing devices have eliminated their low-price models and they are offered now only in models so expensive as to be affordable only for big businesses, not for individuals or SMEs.
Ten years ago, I could still buy various kinds of professional GPUs with high FP64 throughput and any model of Intel Xeon server CPUs.
Nowadays I can choose to buy only high-end desktop CPUs for my servers, because the state-of-the-art server CPUs and datacenter GPUs now have 5-digit prices. NVIDIA, Intel and AMD see only big businesses as customers for such products, and they no longer offer any smaller SKUs in these categories (Intel nominally offers a few cheap Xeons, but those are so crippled that they are not worth for anything else but for enabling the testing of some server systems).
So in the kind of unregulated capitalism that exists today in USA, PCs would not have appeared and there is a risk for them to disappear, because they have become a relict of the past.
Those against capitalism are going to speak out against what capitalism will lead to be exploited. I don't consider it "silly" to be against something that will lead to disaster, even if the disaster is systemic. Like, so what? Honestly. You can be against giving bad actors new tools without the tools having to be bad themselves. That's the premise of gun control for example.
cars that can automatically fix a "recall" with an over-the-air update are generally better than recalls that will wait to get fixed until an owner schedules an appointment
Haed disagree. You've been bamboozled, too.
Recalls of any kind are a signal to me the vehicle shipped half-baked. I'd rather have the car with slightly older features that took a little longer to release, but got it right before leaving the factory floor. Or at least the one with sufficient isolation between safety-critical and convenience features that recalls like those you describe are low priority enough to not be urgent.
Imagine having a car that pulls packages from npm or Docker hub whenever it gets a network connection. If there were cosmic justice that's what many HN users would get.
>a societal level, cars that can automatically fix a "recall" with an over-the-air update are generally better than recalls that will wait to get fixed until an owner schedules an appointment to have the car serviced
Maybe? At least in my experience, once the cost of patching buggy software goes down, it typically means that the people become more willing to ship software with more bugs with a fix it later attitude.
When was the last time you worried about someone cutting your brakes? A lot of times these hypothetical fears are disconnected from reality. Security is important, but people generally don't engage in destruction for destruction's sake so improving default safety levels has been a clear net positive for society so far. Maybe I'm being shortshighted and a future security exploit will change that, but it's not something I currently fear as someone whose car gets occasional OTA updates.
Cutting someones breaks requires physical access to the hardware.
Changing:
if (brakeDepressed()){
engageBrake();
}
To:
if (brakeDepressed() && currentTime < '5/6/26 4pm EST'){
engageBrake();
}
Can be deployed to thousands of vehicles, and would stop brakes from working during peak commute time on the East Coast.
Someone who can write out that code with that specificity should know there are countless technical and procedural ways to help prevent that sort of thing from actually making its way into consumer vehicles (or that OTA updates would be the only avenue to accomplish that). In a properly designed system, the only real fear here is a state-level attack. And I just don't think getting every Honda to crash at 4pm is a vulnerable enough attack vector to make this hypothetical worthy of much thought.
Not only state actors. Vulnerability can be exploited by non-state actors. A terrorist getting hold of this capability to crash every Honda at 4pm introduces new challenges. The impact of 9/11 was not about how many people were killed. But it terrorized the population with that act. People stopped getting into flights. Imagine similar stuff with our daily routine cars.
> the only real fear here is a state-level attack.
This is blatantly false. In the real world there was a major recall after security researchers (not state actors) demonstrated that they could remotely interfere with safety critical systems. OTA updates without user involvement are a massive security vulnerability. So are internet connected safety critical systems. Neither should be legally permissible IMO.
> I just don't think getting every Honda to crash at 4pm is a vulnerable enough attack vector to make this hypothetical worthy of much thought.
Setting aside assassinations do you just have no imagination? There have been all sorts of crazy disgruntled worker sabotage stories over the years. Mass shooters exist. Political and religious terrorists exist.
For a specific mass scale state level hypothetical imagine that the US enters a hot war with a peer adversary for whatever reason. The next day during the morning commute the entire interstate system grids to a halt, the hospitals are completely overwhelmed, and the entire supply chain collapses for a week or so while we pick up the pieces. With a bit of (un)luck it might happen to catch an oil tanker in the crossfire while it was in a tunnel thereby scoring infrastructure damage that would take years to fix.
State level actors have plenty of money to find any exploit around those protections and some need little incentive. They can hire a spy to cut my break line but their gain is much lower vs the cost. They don't care about me at all anyway except if I'm in a group of 100k people they can get at once.
> should know there are countless technical and procedural ways to help prevent that sort of thing
Sometimes when I look at code it feels like I was led into a weird surprise party celebrating structure and correctness, only for everyone to jump out as soon as I get past the door to shout, “Just kidding - it’s the same old bullshit!” All that to say, we’re about as good or worse as anyone else, at our respective jobs.
How do you know that a car is the result of a properly designed system before you get behind the wheel (or step in front of it?).
>the only real fear here is a state-level attack
Why isn't this a valid concern? We should just be fine with russia or china having the ability to remotely hack all of our cars and kill/spy on individuals, even critical members of our leadership? What about our own government? What about some terrorist launching formerly state-level malware from his basement with the help of AI?
> A lot of times these hypothetical fears are disconnected from reality.
Conversely, a lot of times people don't fear real dangers of reality until it bites them. "Hackers wouldn't care about me, and the single password I use on every website is super good and complicated."
> but people generally don't engage in destruction for destruction's sake
Generally true, but they do engage in destruction when there's profit to be made or when it becomes in their geopolitical interests, and sometimes that destruction is quite notable: Remember when it was safe to assume that passengers could passively wait out airplane hijackings?
Your average script-kiddie might not seriously consider cutting everyone's brakes simultaneously, Al Queda would have been giddy.
Software has an atrocious track record for security. Doubly so for hardware manufacturers. It only takes one smart cow to disable millions of vehicles vs a local knave cutting brake lines.
I yearn for the days of wrapped software where developers had to make a gold pressed release. Not, “we can patch it later”.
If you want to talk about society, then this is about systematic security not individual security. If someone somewhere can push a button and flash your car with OTA firmware to drive you off a bridge, political assasinations become a lot easier.
In fact, with all this data they are collecting, you wouldn't even need to be the next edward snowden to get this treatment. You could set the firmware to target, say, every left-wing voter in america.
You don't even need the own the car with such behavior. Everyone becomes a pedestrian eventually.
> At a societal level, EVs are generally better than ICE cars.
Cite your sources, please
> cars that can automatically fix a "recall" with an over-the-air update are generally better than recalls that will wait to get fixed until an owner schedules an appointment to have the car serviced.
If a "recall" can be fixed via software, doesn't that mean just shitty software to begin with? And that usually happens only when a car is infested with tons of software - proving the exact opposite of why we need less software inside cars?
Cite your own sources that they're not. And maybe try to avoid the ten year old nonsense that's frequently floated as "evidence".
On recalls -- like the one that said that individual icons have to be slightly bigger? Yeah, shitty software.
Or the one that made Tesla annoy drivers with a smaller timeout? That was actually a safety issue --- people would turn off FSD to adjust something and then turn it back on again. Much, much less safe.
You made an assumption about something I never said and used that as the base of your argument to make a point.
I didn't say anything, I simply asked them to cite a source for that kind of a grandiose claim. If you make a claim like that without citation(s), the onus to prove it lies on the person making the said claim, not on me to disprove it.
we need sources for the fact an electric motor, all other things being equal, is better than a combustion engine? If you agree that people in general value the health of their lungs that alone is sufficient reason.
It's also becoming quickly a question of geopolitical resilience, running your transport system on dinosaur juice coming from regions where people blow each other up is bad in particular if you happen to be Japanese automaker Honda
> an electric motor, all other things being equal, is better than a combustion engine?
This is not the core argument. Motors maybe superior - we can agree on that. The power source (batteries) and the environmental impact they have - that has always been the core argument. [1]
Does the article you cited cost money to read? I found a description on google scholar:
> Ten years left to redesign lithium-ion batteries
> Reserves of cobalt and nickel used in electric-vehicle cells will not meet future demand. Refocus research to find new electrodes based on common elements such as iron and silicon, urge Kostiantyn Turcheniuk and colleagues.
I notice that the article was published in 2018. So I guess we only have to wait two more years to decide if it's right or not. Will we be out of cobalt and nickel by then? I'd be happy to take a bet with you, assuming you stand by the article you cited.
My background is global geophysical exploration, primarily for mineral resources with some dabbling in the energy domain.
For a single example, this passage:
High demand and prices are already encouraging some producers to cut corners and violate environmental and safety regulations.
For example, in China, dust released from graphite mines has damaged crops and polluted villages and drinking water. In Africa, some mine owners exploit child workers and skimp on protective equipment such as respirators. Small artisanal mines, where ores are extracted by hand, often flout laws.
is entirely emotive, intended to tug on feelings (which it does) but otherwise it has no bearing on the bulk of major mining that contributes to bulk of mineral processing.
The tonnes of nickel and cobalt we see largely comes from big mines, big trucks, formal Occ Health and Safety regulations, etc.
It also commits the usual mistake of confusing "just in time" exploration results that firm up suspected deposits with sizes and density estimates for the commodities of interest with absolute limits on what is available over the cycle of time.
As demand increases further areas that are "known" (but not measured) get further technical inspection (magnetics, drill sampling, etc) and become new fresh reserves.
> At a societal level, cars that can automatically fix a "recall" with an over-the-air update are generally better than recalls that will wait to get fixed until an owner schedules an appointment to have the car serviced.
Experience with boxed versus updatable software, particularly video games, says otherwise. When it costs a lot for the manufacturer to fix defects, they put more emphasis on not having them in the first place. Otherwise we just just a parade of defects all the time. Even if it's minor things and never fixed, the user can adapt; that's not possible in the face of continuous updates.
I’ve never had a software-based danger on my hardware-based vehicles. As such, there is a whole class of recalls that I never needed: all the ones you tell me I’m missing out on.
I'm impressed that you're daily driving what must be a 30+ year old vehicle. What model? Most enthusiasts have another vehicle to keep the miles down and use when the antique needs maintenance.
1990 AU Ford Falcon family here - still in near showroom condition (well, looks good but has a scratch and a minor ding) with ~ 600,000 km on the clock.
> when the antique needs maintenance.
You're talking about all the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, et al cars, tracks and tractors that litter our district? Yeah - there are a lot of them in this part of the world.
All the farmers love the bleeding edge gear and are getting into AgBot boom sprayers, etc - but they still can't shake a love of keeping the really old stuff going - pimped up rat-trucks abound and we rebuilt an old Alice Chambers tractor ourselves two years back.
"Antique" is a term for any vehicle that meets the local criteria for antique vehicle registration [0], usually older than 25-30 years. Your falcon is in the same club as those older vehicles now.
> Your falcon is in the same club as those older vehicles now.
No, it isn't - you missed:
In Australia, the rules for antique vehicle registration vary between states.
I am well aware that the vehicle I own and drive is normally registered as a normal vehicle and is not treated as an antique.
What we do have, here in W.Australia, is a limited usage "Classics" rego for vehicles 30 years or older.
Reduced rates for enforced (but how??) reduced usage:
The owners must also be a financial member of a Department of Transport (DoT) approved motoring club.
a 1991 Holden Commodore would drop from $867.55 to $171.30 per year
Vehicles in the scheme are only able to be driven on public roads for a maximum of 90 days per annum.
Classics (not antiques!) are beloved cars kept road ready but only occassionally used on public roads.
> At a societal level, cars that can automatically fix a "recall" with an over-the-air update are generally better than recalls that will wait to get fixed until an owner schedules an appointment to have the car serviced.
This doesn't have anything to do with EV vs ICE, but whether it has a over the air updates and whether the problem can be fixed with a software update or not. I expect car recalls are pretty well into the noise in terms of "societal level" problems too aren't they? Even if they were not I expect whole "software defined car" thing, whatever that really means, has not resulted in mechanical defects plummeting, but rather just more software defects. Although it is quite possible EVs have less defects in general than ICE cars I suppose.
As far as I can tell, a software defined vehicle is one that has fewer computers in it for cost cutting reasons.
There’s an argument to be made that this allows better integration between subsystems, and therefore a better user experience.
We have a vehicle built this way. It is a death trap. Most of its safety issues can’t really be blamed on it using a new computer network technology. For instance, if it is dawn or dusk (so, commute hours) the vision systems get flaky and it likes to override steering and brakes to force itself into oncoming or merging traffic.
However, one issue is firmly due to it being a software defined vehicle.
If you are changing lanes with the turn signal on, and hit a bump while the passenger adjusts the stereo volume, they’ll accidentally turn the hazard lights on. Af that point the steering override will kick in and try to force abort the lane change.
A normal car wouldn’t be able to wire the hazards into the power steering subsystem, and also probably wouldn’t have the button be part of the radio control panel.
I chalk it up to poorly designed software from a company where software isn't the core competency, rather than blaming the basic concept of putting software in a vehicle.
"Bad software is bad" doesn't have the same ring though...
I'm not sure what exactly pisses me off so much in this idea - after all, I am not upset by the existence of $Brand Basic, $Brand Premium, $Brand Luxury and $Brand Now-Everybody-Knows-You-Have-Money, each of which has different features and bells and whistles. But put it in one single box and charge me monthly rent to go from Basic to Premium - and it does feel wrong. Even if TCO of Premium comes out as lower over time. I don't know why exactly it feels that way but it looks like it feels that way to a lot of people. Maybe it's daily reminder that all the luxuries are right here, right under your fingers, if only you weren't so miserably poor? Or the constant necessity of begging somebody else for permission to use your own car (yes, car loans, but they feel different)? Not sure. But it feels like it's real, even if it's only in my head.
I think you've captured it perfectly with "Maybe it's daily reminder that all the luxuries are right here, right under your fingers, if only you weren't so miserably poor?"
Also because SDVs actually come with half baked firmwares that make the ECU crash, throw down the CAN network, make lights and screens act up...
Who cares, because they are now connected to the internet and can be updated with links at effective speeds higher than 10kbps, and without having to go to the dealer.
Maybe, but customers DO want it, without realizing. I'm a decent DIYer, but I realize my wishes is not the same as a typical customer. Sadly, but customers vote with their wallets.
Not really. Competitors shifting focus out of the space, combined with their being incredibly competitive in the space (they're known for making some of the most reliable engines), says to me they've found their product-market fit. They've got plenty of time to quietly reboot and have another crack at the EV game down the road.
This is one of those times I'll trust the judgement of the grey haired execs who actually have all the numbers, over the plucky young journalist who's just spouting an editorial opinion. (Nothing against the latter, I just think in this specific case they're naive and dead wrong).
It's techcrunch. The angle of software-everything has to be there.
Why honda is killing EVs is directly related to just how damn cheap Chinese EVs have become and how stupid Americans are when it comes to EV efficiency. Who the hell wants large vehicles for EV when the best solutions are small efficient vehicles with long drive times.
Americans distort the market and margins, and Honda was never in the large SUV game.
I get the trucks and SUV's where you need them. I live in a rural area and without ground clearance and 4x4, I literally wouldn't be able to visit my parents. But my daily driver is a Honda Civic. Because 75% of my driving is done on paved roads that are well maintained (except in the winter).
What kills me are the MASSIVE vehicles in the suburbs though. Why do you need a 3 ton suburban to drive around 2 kids on very clear, very well maintained streets? Why would you buy a 4x4 truck when the most off road you'll do is driving over wet leaves on your cul-de-sac in the fall?
2. You're on a site with a bunch of programmers who regularly use weird words for stuff that already has a name. Reading through HN is wading through a swamp of made up names and tech neologisms, you're just used to it already. I once told a software guy that our team's SWEs had migrated away from React and Node to Stork.JS and Blackadder. He nodded like that meant anything.
I don't disagree with your first statement but there is a huge range of cars in the Japanese market. They make the Toyota Land Cruiser and Nissan Patrol after all, smaller by American standards but the biggest cars most other countries will see.
> you're buying a vehicle that already has the capabilities, but are disabled, then paying rent (or a fee) to turn them on. I'm much more likely to buy from a manufacturer that doesn't play these games.
Ongoing subscriptions for access to physical hardware features like seat warmers* seems obnoxious at first glance, but a fee is more reasonable and you might find that there aren’t many auto makers that don’t do this or aren’t planning on it. BTW there’s very little in software or electronics that doesn’t do this, and many other consumer products do too. What might be less visible is how often the hardware is included and made trivial for a dealer to upgrade but doesn’t have a remote software unlock. It’s the same thing and it’s been happening for decades, but gets less outrage.
You would have paid a fee for the feature if it wasn’t included. Focusing on features being there already and locked being somehow “bamboozles” isn’t necessarily the right way to frame this, even from a pro-consumer perspective. This practice of building the high end model and locking some features behind a paywall makes the design and manufacturing cheaper for everyone by having only one design. The paywall model suggests that the design costs are more important than the manufacturing or materials costs of these features. That’s absolutely true for software apps, and it’s accepted by and large and we don’t feel like that’s a skeezy game. It doesn’t surprise me at all that with manufacturing at a global scale, it makes more sense to build one model and lock some features with software.
Do think of the potential benefits we get from this model - overall lower prices (in theory) from simplified design and manufacturing; the ability to upgrade later after you buy (or even downgrade if you don’t like it and it’s a subscription).
* AFAIK the BMW seat warmers subscription was a rumor at one point, got a bunch of online uproar, but didn’t actually happen? I’m not sure if anyone has actually done this.
Manufacturing one hardware setup and charging separately for features is not the problem. The problem is charging ongoing rent for a feature that isn't an ongoing service. A seat heater doesn't use a server, need content updates, or create meaningful recurring costs for the manufacturer after the car is sold. It shifts the relationship from ownership to permission. It also creates bad incentives: features can be removed later, tied to accounts, complicated for second owners, or turned into endless monetization opportunities.
I agree with that. I don’t know what your prompt was, but I wasn’t arguing in favor of subscription access to hardware, I said flat upfront fee based upgrades make more sense, and I was only pointing out that market segmentation over a single physical product via software feature locks is a pretty common thing and it’s not necessarily a bad thing for consumers, there are some side benefits, some tradeoffs.
I’m not personally into paying subscription upgrades, I tend to avoid them. But the one case where I could see potential for consumer benefit is when there’s a choice between a high upfront fee or a low subscription price. I would assume a subscription price over time will cost more than the upfront fee. However, there’s an argument to be made for lower cost access, for smaller barrier to entry for the upgrade, especially if it can be discontinued if the customer doesn’t find enough value.
There was a motorcycle airbag jacket that offered this choice and was discussed on HN maybe a year or two ago. People were, of course, freaking out about a safety feature being tied to a subscription, and I can totally understand the fear, but the rhetoric around it didn’t match what the actual product offered, and the company was offering the choice between flat fee and monthly fee, not demanding a rent-seeking only option. Personally I think most of the ick feeling of a subscription idea goes away for me if it’s not the only option.
In Shenzhen for a tech meeting. The streetscape is quieter, despite high traffic levels and I hear not only MORE birdsong, but the birds do more complex songlines.
The air is clean. For sure some of this is because it's a coastal city and has fresh sea breezes, but I've been in other Chinese coastal cities in times past and the air was significantly less clean.
There are social upsides for an almost-all-EV city.
This is an 18m person city. It's not exclusively wealthy people, its just a city with a very high local EV population and it shows.
It's not just a "rich city" effect. That's kind of the key point in the whole EV debate... once it's mainstream and infrastructure is there, it stops being a luxury signal and just becomes… normal urban life, with some pretty noticeable side benefits
I'm sure it's coming. I'm in Mexico this week and was surprised to drive by not one but two chinese car dealerships. Looks like almost 10% of cars sold last year were EVs
yes. it's an argument that since EVs are heavier than fossil-fuel vehicles due to their batteries, that they generate more particulate emissions (brakes/tire dust) than fossil-fuel vehicles.
it's a wrong argument, but it's still circulated in groups of factually-challenged people
Nobody said they generate more but simply that they generate some. Modern petrol engines output very little particulates so almost all the particulates are from tyres and brakes. Why would EVs produce any less?
While EVs are heavier—increasing tire wear—their regenerative braking significantly reduces brake dust, and they eliminate tailpipe exhaust entirely. Overall, EVs offer a net reduction in particulates.
The WSJ and Daily Mail both ran stories with headlines explicitly stating that they generate more particulates. I can't find any credible source stating the same, so I'm assuming the stories were the usual agenda fiction, but they do exist.
It also has a relatively low vehicle density, roughly 1/3 of somewhere like Houston. Mexico City is a good comparison by size and vehciles, but is also a way older, sprawling city. Shenzhen was largely built around modern road planning and extensive transit, and the power of aggressive policies limiting gas cars.
Counterpoint - I returned to China (Beijing) last summer after 9 years and was honestly surprised how LITTLE it has changed over those 9 years, I was expecting big changes reading this tales about Shenzhen, but the reality is maybe only 1/4-1/3 of the cars on the road were EVs, there were pretty much none escooters, people still smoke in restaurants and yes, the air was for the most part perfectly fine, though this was really case in summer even before.
The most noticable change which puzzled me where those big boxes with slots in all restaurants and grocery shops, which are rental powerbanks.
Other than these hardly anything changed, policemen in police station smoked right under no smoking sign and in that half an hour in their office I inhaled more secondary smoke than in years in Europe combined. To their credit they were as laid back as policemen in my small home town. Beijing province border checks are more strict, but they still let us go without registered accommodation on weekend.
Oh yeah, out of dozens restaurants we frequented ONE fancy hot pot restaurant had robot bringing over plates.
Plus Taobao/Tmall seems replaced now with Pinduoduo with super cheap purchases (think double the Alibaba/factory price) including free shipping.
Mutianyu great wall is now fully mainstream, everyone (99%) now use cable car instead of hiking uphill, before it felt at least 50:50, people got lazy.
Ah yeah, everywhere you go you need to present passport and sometimes also book ticket in advance, so from tourist standpoint it's worse, before you could just show up same visit major sights in Beijing even without passport.
1/4-1/3 EVs is an underestimate for somewhere like Shenzhen (probably for Beijing too). It's going to be well over 50% there. And virtually all scooters will be electric.
You're right about the smoking, though. It's a massive problem.
it's definitely not underestimate for Beijing where I stayed for 3 weeks this summer, maybe you count PHEV as EVs, many of those cars which look like EVs are actually hybrids, only in late 2025 China reached 50% newly registered BEV+PHEV cars plus there are lots of previously registered cars and if we count only BEVs the percentage will be much smaller, actually I think 1/3 of BEV on the road is quite an overestimate from my side
are NEV common? sure. do BEV make majority of cars on the road? for sure not
there are basically none scooters, they use either (e)bikes or electric motorbikes/mopeds (these are not new, they used them en masse already 10 years ago)
What about the increased pollution from road dust? In Norway this has led to higher pollution levels that are directly dangerous to people and animals than back when we were all combustion vehicles.
The heavier EV's are causing genuinely harmful particles simply by driving on the roads themselves.
Where did you get the idea that EVs have caused it? As far as I know the amount of road dust from EVs is within the same ballpark so the claim that it has led to overall higher pollution levels sounds inconceivable. I can't even find sources that indicate high pollution levels in Oslo besides a Bloomberg article that says the situation has actually improved in recent years. [1] On the contrary Oslo seems to be doing comparatively well according to the air quality data from iqair. [2]
Birds adapt their song to ambient noise conditions. This paper [1] studies the Pearl River Delta (where Shenzhen is) as a natural experiment. It shows spectral changes in the target species correlating to background noise levels. I haven't looked hard enough to make sure there isn't a study that does find complexity changes but it's certainly clear that noise can affect bird song behavior generally.
Shenzhen is not nearly "almost-all EV" city. There is a lot of wealthy people and almost none of them drives EV. You can see all expensive cars are ICE (blue plates).
Modern ICE cars emit almost no sound or emissions. Its not 70s with black smoke coming from exhaust pipes.
You can take any densely populated city with almost none EV vehicles (say Tokyo) and you can hear birds and air would be very clean.
I live in Tokyo, and the air is not that clean close to highways: large diesel trucks pollute a lot, and also small motorbikes/scooters pollute horribly because they don't seem to require any emissions controls at all.
The main thing keeping the air clean here is the proximity to the bay, along with the fact that there just aren't that many private cars in the first place, since most people take public transit and don't drive because there's nowhere to park.
Large trucks do not pollute a lot (there are strict standards to that matter). While they do pollute obviously, there is no viable substitute to it. EV truck is a dream at this point in history.
Amount of private cars in Tokyo is huge. Pollution near expressways in rural japan far from bays is next to nothing, so having it close to ocean does help a little.
Small motorbike/scooters are not allowed on expressways.
Most other countries are not Norway, it is a very wealthy, tiny market (150 K vehicles/year) with lots of hydro and not representative of the typical vehicle market in Western Europe and definitely not representative of the situation in the rest of the world.
EVs are the future, there is no doubt about that. But that future will not arrive everywhere at the same point in time and Norway is very far ahead of the rest of the world due to a fairly unique set of circumstances: exporting your own oil and gas to be able to have a 'clean' (and up to recently heavily subsidized) transportation network is in a way just a gigantic bookkeeping trick.
"exporting your own oil and gas to be able to have a 'clean' (and up to recently heavily subsidized) transportation network is in a way just a gigantic bookkeeping trick"
How so?
If every oil exporter used some of their oil revenue to switch to EVs, that would, all things equal, hasten the transition to EVs. The U.S. is not doing that.
> the drug dealer that knows you don't consumer your own supply unless you must
So true. There's nothing incompatible at all with:
a) realizing that earth has gifted you with a valuable but limited & polluting energy source
b) realizing that you'd be foolish to get you own country hooked on it, but it's not a bad business if you can get other countries hooked on it.
Instead we get oil rich areas seemingly determined to show off how much of their oil they can waste.
Wow, so now the US oil barons who lobbied Trump to kill renewables and EVs are even worse than Mohammed "Bonesaw*" bin Salman Al Saud? That's really something, if you look at it that way...
Either you're too smart for me or I just can't follow you, but could you please expand a bit on your comment? I find it hard to link it to the parent, but I realize that may be on me.
Sorry, it was referring more to the grandparent comment, that referred to Saudi Arabia behaving more responsibly than the US, and Mohammed bin Salman is of course the crown prince and prime minister of Saudi Arabia.
They're comparing Saudi Arabia to a drug dealer; I don't think they're ascribing any moral virtue to the Saudi regime. They just believe the Saudis are acting more intelligently.
The funny thing is the US doesn’t really consume much Saudi Oil. The US is a net exporter of oil, though they do import some specific types of oils and export more of others.
The US’s interest in the Middle East oil is a lot about stabilizing oil prices. At least it used to be when there was a rational policy and competent executors.
Transitioning to renewables makes economic sense for the Saudis because they make more money selling a barrel of oil for transportation fuel and generating power with wind and solar.
The US has vast reserves of coal and natural gas. We generally don't use oil to generate power either -- oil is something like 0.4% of the total power generated, because we have vast amounts of natural gas and coal to use instead.
The situation isn't the result of some crafty master plan on the part of the Saudis. It's jusut what makes sense.
The oil market is global and the US is a big part of that but it’s not the only one. You can always make changes to energy sources later and as new technologies are unlocked perhaps we can even skip some headaches now. Obviously there’s the geostrategic angle now which you see play out in Iran and Venezuela.
As other countries move to reliance on Chinese rare earth processing for renewable technology, it drives their oil and gas consumption down which means more oil and gas for those who are still using it.
If you really want to look at this analogy about drug dealers then really what you see is that America is the big boss here and an energy and military super power, and Saudi Arabia is just another dealer under American protection and if they don’t do what we tell them to do they’ll get the boot.
Like the drug dealers where I grew up they are making the neighborhood a really terrible place to live. They might have a nice house right now, but the homes around them are burning.
The US is moving the grid renewable. The guys at top might not think so and yell loudly not to, but they can't stop things, only put the brakes on a little.
They've pumped the brakes pretty hard by cutting EPA standards,
subsidizing coal,
suing to stop wind and solar projects,
cutting green energy grants by $8B,
yoinking solar tax credits,
trying to rewrite the Clean Air Act to block states from regulating emissions,
shield Big Oil from litigation for climate deception,
and repeating Big Oil's lies and disinformation.
"If every oil exporter used some of their oil revenue to switch to EVs, that would, all things equal, hasten the transition to EVs."
The premise is all things aren't equal. The oil Norway would have used just gets used somewhere else so what difference does it make what Norway does instead. I don't know if that's the reality of the situation but if it is just an offset, it does sound like a bookkeeping trick doesn't it?
Norway switching from ICEs to EVs objectively reduces global oil consumption+burning by exactly that much.
Norway exporting oil increases oil supply, but doesn't increase consumption. The world's oil consumers are not supply-constrained; the producers are not running at 100% capacity, and they'll happily pick up the slack if Norway just stopped exporting oil for no reason. And there's a large amount of consumption that can't be offset by electrification in the first place (petrochemicals, long distance flight, etc) so there's not even a theoretical future end-state where they require a non-EV-using counterparty to buy their oil to fund their EV usage.
Calling it a "bookkeeping trick" is just verbal sleigh-of-hand.
This would be true but you're not accounting for OPEC and other groups (e.g. historically the Texas Railroad Commission in the United States, not sure how relevant they still are) to balance production and price per barrel to what they think is agreeable.
Oil hasn't been supply constrained since the 50's, it's price is largely based on what producing countries agree on, as well as geopolitics.
Additionally, governments levy a decent amount of taxes on certain end products such as gasoline. They might very well, as they have in the past, decide to simply up their tax revenue as prices of crude and derivatives go down.
Only if Norway's lack of internal consumption must be met with equal and similarly destructive consumption elsewhere.
Consider if others followed their lead. Then oil would be used less for transportation, one of its most destructive and singular uses, and more for manufacturing or medical or less wasteful uses.
Speaking of bookkeeping tricks: Kneecapping renewable energy (wind), cancelling the EV future in the US, and then starting a war in the strait of hormuz will someday be acknowledged as the finest moment of the oil industry, maximizing profit in the face of all reason.
Sure, but there is also China where over half of new vehicle sales are EVs. Denmark is at 70%, Sweden, Iceland, Finland and the Netherlands are all above 50%, a bunch of other countries in the EU are at one third EVs. In India, 5% of sales are EVs but that is double of the year before and all the big car manufacturers in India are now offering EVs. Even Australia is at 14% after stalling on EVs for years. So change is unfolding quite quickly compared to previous years. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ev-share-new-car-sales-by-c...
Those numbers include PHEV cars. As a BEV owner, I consider PHEV to be more ICE than BEV. BEV numbers are not as impressive, but we're getting there, slowly but surely. A bit slower than I would've hoped.
The Danish numbers normally exclude PHEVs. Not that it matters, since PHEVs are almost dead as a segment here. Over the past two years 310k BEVs were sold here, but only 6k PHEVs. The situation in Norway is very similar.
And across Europe BEVs are also about twice as popular as PHEVs. In 2025 2.6 million BEVs were sold in Europe compared to 1.3 million PHEVs. It seems the biggest deciding factor is how good the public charging network is.
My Phev is about 80% ev. It uses a tank of gas a month, replacing a nearly identical vehicle (similar body and same engine - though other things have changed) that needed one or two tanks a week.
sadly thats not the norm. Various recent studies from the EU based on real world vehicle data show that actual savings from the PHEV category are about ~20% less emissions than a pure gas version. Aka, they are just gas cars. Despite manufacturers claiming ~70-80% for emissions credits. The category is today kind of a scam, in aggregate.
It doesnt have to be - bigger battery strictly-series EREVs would likely show better numbers than the weak-ev phevs sold today.
PHEV feels good on paper, but in ICE mode they’re terrible. On a recent long road trip they do about 14km/L with a fully charged EV range of 50km. Quite inefficient to lug a petrol engine and a semi large battery all the time.
No, it is a real invewtment in the right direction. The oil states in the middle east could have made such investments, too. Lots of EV powered by solar panels paid for with oil dollar. But they did not (in a significant way).
It's actually not clear to me in what sense "banned" is used here. The UK never formally "banned" leaded petrol. They banned sales of new cars which need it, and then later told places which sell petrol that they can only have a small portion of their fuel as leaded, and then (as anticipated) market forces did the rest.
AFAICT it would still be legal for the place on the bypass near me to sell leaded fuel but they don't because (a) the market is too small, not worth it and (b) as a result wholesalers don't offer the product, so if they wanted to sell it they can't get it anyway.
You might have very good smog checks. Here in NZ I've recently replaced my Tesla's HEPA air filters which includes carbon filter which. I've got them slightly cheaper from somewhat ok supplier. Turns out there's ton of fake filters out there (i.e. vacuum filters).
I was suffering every day I was driving it. Smog is insane everywhere.
In the US, near a major roadway on a cold morning, the fumes are strong. Not every car or truck is maintained properly and running in cold weather really magnifies that effect.
per-capita or by total volume? i ask because a sibling or child comment says that the number of cars sold in norway is pretty small (in part because the population is small). a quick google says 180k cars sold in norway in 2025 (we can round up to 100% EV) and 34M sold in China. It also says China has 50% EV sales. So by total volume Norway isn't close to the top.
>But that future will not arrive everywhere at the same point in time and Norway is very far ahead of the rest of the world due to a fairly unique set of circumstances: exporting your own oil and gas to be able to have a 'clean' (and up to recently heavily subsidized) transportation network is in a way just a gigantic bookkeeping trick.
Not really. Even in a hypothetical future where all road vehicles are electric, we'll still need fossil fuels for a while. For one thing, it's probably going to be a while before airplanes can go electric. And production of plastics will probably need petroleum for a long time.
Not the OP but have a 20-year-old car. The relevant calculation is not cost of annual repair v value of car, but rather annual cost vs annual cost of a new car. Even if you amortize the upfront cost of a new car over 20 years, the increased insurance cost and (depending on where you live) property taxes plus some annual maintenance, at least for me, is substantially more expensive than annual maintenance on my current car.
I did a from-the-ground-up rebuild (including the engine) just after buying it. That cost an arm and a leg but all in (including the original car) it still came to ~half of what a new one would cost. Anything that had been 'improved' on it was brought back to stock. It's been super reliable, I've had it since jan 2020, put a considerable number of kms on it and it hasn't let me down (so far :) ).
As for doing the maintenance myself, I don't have experience with this kind of car at all, I've worked a lot on classic Mini's, Citroens (2CV and DS) and Austin Maxi. But never anything like this so I'm more than happy to let someone else earn a buck on it. But it's been pretty cheap to run so far, fuel, oil, regular service and once a control arm that got bent out of shape.
Compared to a new vehicle I'm considerably better off.
That would not be the case amortized I expect. You can sell virtually any car for $5k as a floor price I’d say. Most yearly maintenance amounts to changing oil. Maybe tires every four years. Every 5-10 years maybe a bigger couple hundred dollar job. That has been about my experience owning used cars. But still well below $5k/yr.
Netherlands. And fuel injection has been a thing since the 1930s for Diesel and the 1950's for vehicles.
Yes, it has an ECU and ooh, gollies there is software in that. But it's completely invisible from an interaction point of view, there are no screens, all the buttons just do what they are told, there are no 'upgrades', no bugs, interfaces, restarts and attempts to kill me through 'assistance'.
It’s interesting to see how people who grew up with smartphones think.
It’s entirely possible to get around without smartphones or paper maps. There are road signs, written directions, verbal directions. The main time I used to use a paper map was driving long distance trips in a foreign country.
I have one, but I haven't used it since I got a smart watch (I mostly used it to track my speed). I actually really dislike navigation apps, since they tend to take you on strange routes that maybe are slightly shorter? To be fair, I haven't owned a car in 15 years, so I rarely drive.
Just cross the border to Sweden or Finland, and the share of EV's of all new cars drop from around 90 to something like 30-35%. The EV transition is going to take a while longer in most EU countries.
Of course something to note is the absolute number of cars sold, which has dropped dramatically at least here in Finland. Most people who are priced out of new EV market simply don't buy any new car at all, and the average age of cars is climbing fast. Either way, few people are looking for new ICE vehicles. No point buying outdated tech new, when the used car market has perfectly good ICE vehicles that perform just the same.
EVs are fine and dandy, but it is a luxury class of cars for now and it shows really. Most other countries are far far away from mass deployment of EVs or restricting ICE cars. EVs can win if either a) the car is cheaper than the same class ICE, or b) operational expenses of using EV car would be cheaper. Neither of which is happening yet. And the car do need to have some advantage, since EVs already come with inherent disadvantage of long and inconvenient charging, small batteries, limited locations for charging with buggy and broken stations, not working apps or cards etc.
What's silly is that the reality you describe is a choice that's been made, not something fundamental to EVs. Cars like the Nissan Leaf and the Chevy Bolt are supremely inexpensive. China's BYD cars are extremely cheap for what they are.
American/European car makers realized there is a large class of people who are wealthy and will buy a high end EV for status reasons, and started chasing that market instead.
Which Leaf? Leaf 1st gen with 150km range in summer and 100km in winter and which are already decade old? Those yeah, cheap, but also useless. Leaf 2 are nothing like that. Even base model with small-ish 40kWh battery is 30k euro, and 60kWh model is starting close to 40k euro. And for that price it's a small c-class hatchback, competing with way better cars, like large and packed d-class sedans or SUVs.
And charging EV on a commercial station is currently more expensive than filling up a tank of a similar ICE with 95 petrol, per km of range. The only way to charge EV on a cheap, which is possible, is to own a house and charge it on a home line at domestic rates. And owning a house in EU is an expensive luxury.
Unfortunately, infrastructure need to improve a lot before the switch may happen.
Even the Ford Lightning (by far the best work truck on the market) was modestly priced compared to other Fords.
Ford claims there’s no market for “expensive” $60-70K trucks in the US, but go to any Ford dealership in the bay area, and they’ll have used ICE Ford trucks that cost that much.
(And I don’t mean the giant specialty super duty trucks — these are tricked out suburban kid transporters that look like they’ve never seen a camp ground, let alone a Home Depot).
Anyway, the Lightning was a fantastic model line. I hope someone else builds quarter ton EV trucks moving forward. I’m rooting for Rivian and Slate.
Yeah, visiting my ex-Gf family in Norway, I realized how much richer Norwegians are that it's not even funny. It's not really a market representative of the average buyer. Same how neither Switzerland, Luxembourg or Monaco are.
I am living in a working class neighborhood of apartment buildings in West-central Europe with average to below average earners, and there's zero EVs parked here on the streets, basically 90% of people have old diesel cars. Only when you go towards the suburbs with rich(inherited wealth) people living in single family homes you see everyone has an EV.
The distinction is quite clear, do you live in a house or have your own parking space and possibility to install your own charger? Then EV 100% no brainer. Otherwise people stick to ICE.
I do live in a house, could easily afford an EV and have plenty of solar to keep it charged. And I still don't have one because all of these EVs feel like the worst of the computer world applied to automotive. The last thing I need is a computer on wheels and I'm old enough that I know my current car is likely my last. For my kids it is different, and I'm sure that they'll go electric at some point but I hope that they'll be able to do so without buying a mobile privacy violation instrument.
The Dacia Spring proves that it doesn't have to be the case. The base version doesn't even have a touchscreen, let alone internet connectivity. It is a cheap car, in every sense of the word, but is shows that not every EV has to be like Tesla.
That’s genuinely nice that it doesn’t have the multimedia crap. They do also have an “extreme” model with touchscreen and connected services.
At ~220km range it probably has about 100km in winter though. :-/
Ironically society would benefit tremendously from “computer on wheels” because when you inevitably have a heart attack on the road your car won’t swerve onto oncoming traffic or crash into people.
There is a slight difference between my mobile phone/carrier and the manufacturer of my vehicle, especially when the latter includes cameras, all kinds of telemetry and of course the near certainty over the longer term of compromise of all the data they hoover up.
To give you some perspective, the most popular EV in China costs $6000 (Wuling Mini). New. The second most popular costs $10000 (Geely Xingyuan). I tried both, and they are far less crappy than they have the right to be. They are cheap cars for sure, but they're perfectly adequate for regular use.
And Geely Xingyuan has a 40kWh battery in the basic configuration! This is utterly ridiculous for a car that is _that_ cheap.
So China basically murdered the global ICE market. It's gone. There's no going back. Once China figures out the logistics and sales, ICE vehicles will be dead in all of the less affluent countries. Especially because EVs combine almost too perfectly with solar generation.
Out of curiosity, do they support one pedal driving correctly (i.e., let you set it and forget it, and never unexpectedly accelerate from a stop unless you turn it off explicitly).
BMW used to, but broke it on the i4, and presumably all the newer ones. Kia’s implementation is completely broken.
I ask, because that’s the number one thing I’ll check for with future EV purchases, and it’s purely software.
I have not driven the Wuling myself, only traveled as a passenger. On Xingguan it's "normal", just like on Tesla or anywhere else.
The Geely did not come to a complete stop on regen braking, I had to use the brake pedal for the final ~5 km/h. Perhaps there was a setting to override this, but I did not check.
Tesla seems OK. I’m really spoiled by the “complete stop” feature.
The worst (which is what most brands are moving to in the US) is when it’s completely unpredictable. Basically, half the time, the car unexpectedly accelerates from a stop, or fails to engage regen.
On some cars, they even tie regen to a camera, so regen works well unless you are on a curve or cresting a hill. In those situations, the car accelerates or fails to slow down.
yes, there a lot of outdated perspectives in these threads. The world has changed, EVs are the cheaper option now, its just going to take awhile for some places to catch up.
A country where you're looked down upon for driving a Focus RS or other "fun" car seems like a boring, austere place to be.
Perhaps that's why we never hear about Norwegian car culture (as opposed to Germany and the US). Ferdinand Porsche would have resigned to building apple carts.
US car culture has been dead for a long time, at least internationally. People like big American cars made in 50s - 70s for their looks, but since then all I can think of are oversized pickups, Nascar and Tesla which is getting eaten alive by Chinese competitors.
The C8 is great, The Hellcat, Demon, etc are kinda US specific (won't be great on the curvier roads in Europe) but still cool. Modification/Tuning is very alive and well due to lack of regulation in comparison to Europe or pretty much anywhere else..
Car culture is getting killed everywhere because safety and comfort by far outweigh fun in gov priorities but I'm literally considering the US because I'll be able to drive whatever I want. Good luck finding someone running nitrous on the street in Europe nowadays, stretched bikes, engine swaps, etc. It all comes with administrative fees, a lot is forbidden and even if your documents are in order you'll get in trouble because police officers are not qualified or incentivized to deal with severely modified vehicles.
That is unfortunately not the case - see all the ridiculous ginormous American pickup trucks invading Europe as a "look at me, I'm rich" or "look at me I'm (local equivalent to) MAGA" signifiers.
What fun about an ICE vehicle. Loud, slow acceleration, pollution, poisoned garages, transmissions, maintenance, gas is 10x as expensive vs charging at home. It’s shit. My EV smokes Porsches when I need to overtake them.
The only thing gas does better is higher range and quicker fill ups.
I understand that you're being intentionally difficult, and probably think it's quite clever, but clear to the rest of us that the original point was that Norway is an extreme outlier with their immense (oil) wealth, hydroelectricity generation and tiny population density.
That is irrelevant unless Norway has unused capacity.
If a country adds electric cars using more electric power, then what really matters is how that extra power is generated.
It gets weird in Europe because adding extra load in Norway could easily mean that Poland does more generation using coal.
I'm in New Zealand where the government owned generators are preventing solar installations. One example was via an unobvious regulation that the installation had to handle massively overengineered earthquake rules. Meanwhile we use coal or imported gas when the isn't enough rain for our hydro. And we waste about 10% of our total capacity exporting (via one aluminium plant).
Going all electric with cars would add ~10-15% of electric demand. That's a bit, but not really a deal breaker, and something Norway would easily be able to offset by adding more wind turbines.
If you include PHEVs along with pure EVs the total is around 12% total sales for 2025, and 4% total on the road. I'm not sure when PHEVs became available overseas but they haven't been an option here for that long. Heaps of hybrids are being sold but for now still mostly of the traditional non-plug-in type.
As alliao says, this is partly because of the way road user charges (RUC) currently work, though that is slated to change in the future.
Hybrids and PHEVs are more complicated given that they are both ICEs and EVs. A pure EV is much cheaper, and many places in the developing world don't have easy access to oil anyways.
Even in the US, our overpriced EVs are cheaper than comparable ICE.
They’re mostly big, and compete with 20mpg models. At $4/gallon, you’ll spend $40K on gasoline to drive a new ICE car 200K miles. The EV premium is typically $10-20K. These are all luxury cars, so a trimline upgrade is often $10K.
EVs have particularly poor resale value (the technology improves rapidly), so if you’re price sensitive you can get a much better deal by buying something a few years old.
In places where competition is allowed, EVs are much cheaper than ICE. That’ll eventually be true in most places. If NZ lets the Chinese models in, I’d expect them to take over immediately.
Model 3s are Honda Accord class, so compacts, not sub-compacts. I haven't seen many sub-compact EVs in the states beyond the Leaf and the Bolt. I’m kind of excited about the new BmW i3, which will be a more normal 3 series size and shape vs the old i3. I won’t buy it of course, I’ve decided I’m not replacing my i4 before a real self driving car is available.
I can't imagine why NZ doesn't allow Chinese EVs in already like Australia has. I would guess it isn’t really about restriction but rather the smaller size of the market.
nz politicians figured out where the tap is to control uptake.. in the name of RUC right now it's tuned so non-plugin hybrid is cheapest, this separates out the price sensitive crowd...
What is a hydro energy resource, a river? Don't lots of countries have rivers?
(If we're talking about hydroelectric power plants they've chosen to build, that's not exactly a resource -- and other countries could choose to build those too, right?)
You need both the right geography and a lack of either people or democracy in the place you want to build it. That rules out new large hydro projects in most of Europe.
And massive oil resources. As a result of this, one of the wealthiest sovereign wealth funds on the planet, which they manage well and for the good of the country.
Their hydro energy company is an aluminum company company, they have so much slack power they export it refining bauxite.
It is worth repeating solar panels covering an area about the size of NH generate enough power to supply all current entire US energy needs.
I have a tangential question. Do you find that snow banks near roads are appreciably less black and disgusting now that there are fewer ICE vehicles on the road?
Growing up in America I have memories of our roadside snowbanks becoming black and saturated by vehicle exhaust and it always felt so gross to me. The back half of winter was characterized by blackened, salt-saturated puddles and banks. I wonder if the prevalence of EVs has made things less dirty in the winter.
As others have said most of that was probably not pollution related to being an ICE vehicle, but if even part of it was the environmental performance of ICEs is magnitudes better over the last 25 years when it comes to unburned hydrocarbons and particulates, which WOULD reduce visible pollution way more than modest EV adoption. CO2 reduction? not so much with bigger vehicles offsetting gains here...
> The back half of winter was characterized by blackened, salt-saturated puddles and banks. I wonder if the prevalence of EVs has made things less dirty in the winter.
The dominant cause of that is probably brake and tire particulate matter, not car exhaust. And EVs make tire pollution go up (because they're heavier) and brake pollution... I'm not sure if the weight effect there is counteracted by the decreased amount of friction brake use (as opposed to resistance braking).
On my Polestar 2, I was surprised how in actual use, friction braking was basically zero - to the point where when you start a trip the brakes are used for a few seconds to make sure they're still working (and scrub them a bit.) In actual driving - without trying particularly on my part - it's just always regen.
Could be! I don't know enough to say what the ratio of exhaust to tire particulate is on the average road.
In either case it's a good physical representation of how much particulate we are exposed to every day. Maybe having it trapped in dirty snowbanks is better than having it getting kicked up into the air during a dryer season.
If it's particulates from tires then heavier EVs are probably making that worse not better (partially offset by regenerative braking, but only partially).
EVs produce more tire dust, but much less brake dust and exhaust (even when powered by coal plants).
The net effect is a massive reduction in dust and particulates.
Some modern tire additives are incredibly toxic to fish. They’ve been banned in the EU, but for the very special corner case of driving in sensitive watersheds in the US, it’s possible EVs are worse on that one dimension.
Of course, we could just ban the recently approved additive, and completely solve that corner case problem.
My hot take for Japan is that hybrids make the most sense until one the major markets (US or all of EU) has significant traction with respect to ubiquitous EV charger infrastructure.
Tesla can fund the project of making EV chargers ubiquitous in the US and make it make sense within the context of a profitable business plan.
Chinese manufacturers can similarly make it make sense financially.
Japanese auto makers who are heavily subsidized by the Japanese government can't easily fund the infrastructure project of making EV chargers ubiquitous in a foreign country like the US or EU and their home market is much smaller.
California has 1.6 charge stalls per gas nozzle. Does that count?
I places like Japan (small, population dense, with small cars) you can use a 120V outlet to charge an EV. Most places have 240V household outlets, and can charge at least twice as fast.
So, if you have a garage with electricity, infrastructure isn’t really an issue. Sooner or later it will be common to mandate a charger per residential parking spot. The chargers themselves are $200. The main costs are permitting and retrofitting, but that matters a lot less for new development.
If one circuit per parking spot seems like a lot of infrastructure, consider the fact that most apartments have at least a half dozen circuits already.
We're struggling with the pollution levels from road dust now though. It's worse in most cities than it ever was with combustion engines. Yes there's lower Co2, but the dust and tire particles are actually more dangerous.
EU is introducing regulations for this kind of emissions which will likely create a market for a few new techs that reduce it (reformulated tyres, modern drum brakes that capture dust, etc)
Interesting but North America has different needs for vehicles. Long time before our electrical systems to be able to compensate for that kind of whole sale change. Will be at least 20 years if it ever happens.
I would also say that any ICE vehicle that has 0 subscription models, upgradable firmware, tracking software will probably have a value premium to it in the not distant future.
FWIW downvoters - I have a PHEV - but I live in the real world and a likely future!
> Long time before our electrical systems to be able to compensate for that kind of whole sale change. Will be at least 20 years if it ever happens.
I don't know about the whole national electric grid, but at my house, I didn't really have to upgrade anything and didn't even notice an increase in electric bill when I started plugging in my EV. I don't think my car is even 20% of my household electricity usage. I'd hope we can increase our national grid's capability by at least 20% in the next 20 years. (Also, aren't datacenters causing that massive demand right now, whether or not the upgrades are even there yet? As I understand this is causing massive price increases?)
> I would also say that any ICE vehicle that has 0 subscription models, upgradable firmware, tracking software will probably have a value premium to it in the not distant future.
As you kind of hint at, whether or not the vehicle is EV or ICE has nothing to do with whether it has subscription models, tracking, etc. and car manufacturers are racing towards both of those things in a way that makes the drivetrain irrelevant.
1. Infra will need to upgrade in order to handle heavy charging in neighborhoods with wholesale change in the fleet. It would change our electrical use model considerably in terms of times of use -- and we would be adding all the energy used from gas powered cars to the electrical grid - which is somewhat significant.
2. While you are correct technically -- I think what I am implying is older cars (ICE) will be the ones without all the tracking and software - whereas all EVs will have that embedded as they are all relatively new. There is no world where they remove that from new car production.
It's a myth that EV charging requires an upgrade to a 100 amp connection. Scheduling charging to times when you're not using appliances will still result in a charged vehicle by morning.
The Youtube channel Technology Connections has an interesting video where it describes a successful transition to a fully-electric house while remaining on a 50 amp electrical connection. (it requires a smart circuit breaker)
We have a F-150 lightning, and charge it on a 12A, 120V charger. It’s fine for 6-10 trips a week. If I commuted in it to an office without a charger it wouldn’t be fine, but a smaller commuter car would be. (The truck gets 2.5 miles/kWh, commuter cars are at 4-5).
I’m sure we are outliers, but still.
Put another way: growing up with incandescent bulbs, I remember light switches that would turn on 6-8 lamp track lights. That’s half the current our EV charger draws. We had a space heater that drew more than our EV charger currently does.
Houses and neighborhoods are still built with electrical systems provisioned for pre-LED, pre-induction/heatpump workloads. They certainly have enough slack for everyone to plug in a level one or two charger simultaneously.
I wonder if the household share of grid power has gone down faster than total power has gone up, and that's why people are worried about EVs taking out the power grid even when everyone's individual house seems to handle it easily enough.
That's true enough at the level of individual households. If the whole neighborhood switches to EVs, the power grid in general might not be built to handle it.
(Personally I don't expect this will be that big a deal, since switching to EVs is something that happens one household at a time over many years. So, it shouldn't come as a sudden shock, and its something the utilities can make long term plans about. It just means power utilities need to be on the ball about not putting off infrastructure upgrades, and it means somewhat higher electricity prices for residential customers.)
If you've been assuming you need to replace all the oil with the same amount of electrical power then you're seriously wrong.
Electric motors are extremely efficient over a wide speed range, whereas combustion engines aren't very efficient even in their relatively narrow optimal range and the arrangement needed to translate that power into motion further reduces overall efficiency.
While replacing the energy 1:1 would entail roughly doubling US electrical generation you actually want to replace the function and that's maybe 20-25% increase. It's not a trifle but it's very do-able. Especially if you time-shift car charging so that it's happening when humans are asleep and there's slack in the network.
You charge your phone while you sleep right? If you're used to filling up a car at a gas station it can feel weird but you can charge a car while you sleep too.
Its not a 1:1 replacement but its also quite a significant amount of energy and infrastructure that is needed. You still have losses in electrical production from Gas/Solar/Wind/Nuclear to your charging round trip efficiency.
Its a massive change in how things operate in the US - significant amount of money reinvested into the grid and not solvable only through behavioral change. Thats one of a quiver of things that need to be done.
It's poor HN practice to badly strawman others comments.
Dragging up sequestered carbon in the billions upon billions of tonnes and changing the insulation factor of the atmosphere _is_ bad and will lead to no good if not unchecked and somewhat reversed - that's just physics.
Ergo - that should _stop_ and other things should be made that sidestep the issue.
I’m really at a loss with these “we should stop using the abundant natural resource bubbling out of the ground and completely overhaul our entire infrastructure” arguments. We also produce more wind power than anyone else. Change will come incrementally.
You and I are in agreement then - and that change will ideally be away from harmful sequestered carbon.
> I have no idea
> I’m really at a loss
Seriously, starte with IEA reports, the IPCC reports, etc. they really do go into excruciating detail about these things you have no idea about and are at a loss to understand.
And if 100% of EV's sold this year were electric, it would take ~24 years for basically all of the vehicles on the road were electric. (The average age of registered cars in the US is 12 years old).
Estimates are that a 100% EV fleet would increase electricity demand by 20%. So that's < 1 % a year.
Approximately how much demand increases due to increasing A/C usage in the US.
And a lot less than AI/crypto is increasing demand.
And that's not to mention that EV charging is a relatively easy demand to meet -- most EV owners charge when it's cheapest, so you can shape demand via price signals.
So, EVs would reduce electricity usage in the long term (by eliminating the growth in demand from air conditioning).
On top of that, things like balcony and rooftop solar are much more economically attractive if you have a lot of load at your house, so people that buy EVs are likely to also self-generate a lot of electricity.
You can somewhat change the profile by price signals -- however if all vehicles are EVs there is a good portion of that demand that is inelastic. You will also need to be able to handle larger volumes of demand for faster charging stations and that entire effort of infra.
Its all doable but it is not as a simple as every plugs in at home. Its a large co-ordinated infrastructure effort.
You also brought up some other valid issues -- right now we are looking at the being undersupplied for electricity across NA without a wholesale swap to EVs. Maybe the upside of the oversupply of AI is that we have a lot of stranded assets for electrical charging infra/generation afterwards..
So if EV's cause electricity demand to go up by less than 1% per year, it'll cause inelastic demand to go up a small fraction of 1%. If operators can't expand at that low a rate, we have bigger problems.
Full fleet of EVs would be 20-30 % of our annual electricity. Ain't no way we can acomodate for that on any near term timeline especially if you add in all the additional demand on electricity from AI/compute.
Now if had money as a country and had a recent history of building actual physical things for a reasonable cost. Yes may we could get there -- but current state of affairs - broke and limited manufacturing ability.
>Long time before our electrical systems to be able to compensate for that kind of whole sale change. Will be at least 20 years if it ever happens.
There's little to no reason that the electrical grid itself needs to change for the sake of EV's.
The biggest problem is that while slow charging (L2) in your own garage would be perfect for 99%+ of people in the US, and isn't even very expensive, that's a barrier to entry most people do not want to screw with. So, everyone wants DC fast that mimics a gas station experience, even if it's completely unnecessary for almost everyone's use cases.
Land is limited, new builds like that are expensive, slower to earn returns, and make little sense with so few EVs in the US - which leads to a viscous cycle. It's a bit of TotC.
>I would also say that any ICE vehicle that has 0 subscription models, upgradable firmware, tracking software will probably have a value premium to it in the not distant future.
Consumers do not care about this. If they did, such cars would not sell. No one is going to pay extra for fewer features.
> The biggest problem is that while slow charging (L2) in your own garage would be perfect for 99%+ of people in the US, and isn't even very expensive, that's a barrier to entry most people do not want to screw with.
I feel like this is only an opinion that people who have never actually used an EV have. Plugging in my car overnight at home every few days is infinitely more convenient than needing to drive somewhere to plug it in somewhere else. The actual charge time is irrelevant as long as it's not more than ~12 hrs.
I leval 1 charge my car and that is always enough. Salesmen who sold it to me says he does the same. It depends on your commute, (i typically ride my bike if the weather isn't too bad) and the other trips you make (why I bought it - there is a once a week trip I make outside of bike range)
> No one is going to pay extra for fewer features.
Right, what people want is to pay less for fewer features.
If EVs with all their limitations are going to replace ICE cars for daily use, they need to be cheap. We need the Ford Focus or Toyota Tercel of EVs, with the same set of features (i.e. very few) that those cars had when they were introduced.
Otherwise I'll just go buy a used ICE Tercel or Focus.
When Tesla showed the world that an EV didn't have to look like a middle school science project and drive like a golf cart, it made sense that they went upmarket. They had to recover development costs. That won't work to get mass conversion.
If you can hoof it all the way to Fairfield (2.5 hours from Y Combinator HQ in SF; Muni->BART->Amtrak->taxi), you can get a 7 year old Model 3 for $14k tomorrow.
Oh yeah, because Norway is very representative of the world...
A country that is bigger than half Spain with 10 times less population with one of the lowest electrify prices of the entire world(5-8 dollars MWh) because of huge hydro resources.
A country with huge capital reserves precisely because of oil resources.
> SDVs don’t have to be EVs, but they tend to go hand in hand. The large battery in an EV makes it easier to feed powerful computers, and it allows things like over-the-air updates to happen when the car is parked and “off.” Could Honda make a fossil fuel SDV? Sure, but it’s unlikely to for the same reason it’s backing away from EVs: The old way of doing things is easier and more profitable, for now.
So can a $300 dollar iPad. Large EV scale batteries are needed to feed powerful computers? What are they on about?
"Here, Honda is setting itself up for failure on the second disruption sweeping the automotive industry: the software-defined vehicle (SDV), which has core capabilities that can be upgraded and improved over time."
I'll pay triple for a non software defined vehicle that doesn't track me and can't be touched by the dealer once I purchase it. My one SDV (Tesla) is still on FSD from 2023 because the newer versions are terrible judging from the comments on the Tesla forums.
This. And same for phones, tvs, operating systems.
I bought a perfectly fine macbook pro m1 in 2020. It has been made far, far worse, slower, bloated and less responsive by apple. I see nothing improved, everything significantly degraded. It used to be that I could airplay to our tv with a single mouse click, now it seems to work once every 5 attempts, and takes about a minute. It used to be near instantaneous.
I bought a top of the line philips oled tv in 2020. I think I paid 4k for it. It has been made slower, bloated, less responsive by google and philips (or whatever company makes those tvs branded by philips).
I buy a top of the line iphone every 2-3 years, and it gets worse.
I bought a SONOS soundbar a few years ago. It used to work fine and produce nice sound. Now if I start my tv, and don't play anything for a few minutes it goes to sleep, and I need to restart my tv to get the sound to play.
Blocking updates on anything newly purchased seems like the best option. Not buying anything from those absolute crap companies seems like the second best option, but its hard to find alternatives.
> I'll pay triple for a non software defined vehicle that doesn't track me and can't be touched by the dealer once I purchase it.
But you didn't? So... you wouldn't really?
I don't mean to be too cute but I think it's worth taking the sting out of your words a bit. Maybe you would prefer a different choice for your next car, but that's a far less dramatic way of putting it.
2023 is better than 2020. 2026 is not necessarily better than 2023.
Shifting speeds abruptly in the modern FSD notwithstanding, what happened especially for people with HW 2.5/3 (circa 2018/19) is the change in behavior of adaptive cruise control and FSD -- you can go look it up. Essentially they "removed" a useful feature that let the car seemlesly move between the two -- I think because they didn't want to support the drivers "stalk" on the steering wheel anymore - new Teslas don't have it. So basically for me, SDV is not all that it's cracked up to be -- yeah and all that privacy stuff too...
I think self-driving cars are inevitable: I agree with that statement. And once they are here and cheap and safer than humans, they'll become universal. I don't know when that is, but it's less than 100 years from now.
However I don't think Tesla's SFD is inevitable, or any other carmakers; for all I know, they're so bad they shouldn't be sold. It's early days. This or that brand might go out of business. But within 100 years, self-driving will conquer the world.
FSD is great for me, although I mostly use it on the highways. But 90% of my driving is FSD now. It can be more conservative for my tastes with street driving
Unfortunately the only valid response is "Don't be so sure." There have been too many exposés about the poor data privacy practices of virtually every automaker including Honda. [1]
I also recently bought a Honda hybrid. I turned off as many of the data sharing features as I could from the first day I drove it. They don't make it easy, of course.
I'm convinced that the Japanese government is terrified of EVs because all the small and medium-sized businesses which support the Japanese auto industry will be absolutely gutted when vehicles contain drastically fewer parts.
That, and Japan is deeply screwed if they go all-in on EVs and then China decides they shouldn't be allowed access to any more rare earths.
> China decides they shouldn't be allowed access to any more rare earths
This is a common misunderstanding. There are plenty of alternative locations to mine rare earth minerals, particularly Australia. China cornered the market because it's a high pollution low margin business. If geopolitical concerns cut off access to Chinese sources, alternatives will be developed.
Mining isn't the only bottleneck with rare earths. There also the processing, which is an industry China has monopolized through sustained investments over decades. They have also improved processing efficiency through investments in technology. It's going to take a while for anyone else to catch up.
> There also the processing, which is an industry China has monopolized through sustained investments over decades.
I don't think this is the right way to characterize it. China invested when other countries didn't, but they didn't monopolize the market, they have no moat beyond expertise and some tech advancement that could be replicated easily enough. The only moat they have is related perseverance and other countries simply not wanting to put the work in.
I think they do have a moat because they dominate the supply chain not just in the raw material and processing but also in some of the actual technical experience, i.e. the experience of running such processing facilities, and also a monopoly on making the equipment that you need to build such a facility. They put export controls on those equipment and restricted their citizens who work in the rare earths industry from traveling aboard.
Basically, if we want to replicate what they did, we will have to do it mostly from scratch -- Japan and Australia has done some of the work already so it's not totally from scratch. It's obviously not impossible but it could take almost a decade for us to do that.
That said, I don't think this should be enough for Japan to stop investing in EVs. If Japanese car makers are really worried about this then they can build their plants in the US and leverage any deal the US has with China on real earths. They've already starting importing Japanese cars made in India and the US back to Japan so that's an established practice. Then once they've secured their own supplies they can make the EVs in Japan too. I think OP's point about the suppliers have more merit as a reason why Japan might not want to develop EVs.
I have worked with the Chinese REE industry, and we've often bumped heads and shared ideas together with them and I can confidently tell you, the Chinese don't use anything novel that has not been established in Western science already. What they do have is executing rarely-used techniques confidently at scale, but all of that is already often published in the West. The only reason the West hasn't done it is because these techniques are less profitable, and, surprise, the CCP actually forces processors to minimize ecological damage, which further bumps up the costs to the point only large-scale players can exist making such lower profits. You'll often find them using some obscure process alteration that was published minutely in the West.
As an addendum, companies in the REE Sinosphere are often encouraged by the CCP to exchange ideas with each other quite often, while Western companies often lock them behind proprietary patents and competition. While both systems have their pros and cons, the former allows for faster process proliferation (and a lower profit incentive for the innovator).
> the Chinese don't use anything novel that has not been established in Western science already
Like they say: in theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice, they aren't.
It's all well and good to have knowledge of the techniques, or to even have published or created them. But applying them successfully, working out all the kinks, and streamlining everything to become profitable doesn't happen overnight.
I have no doubt alternate sources can exist, but not without significant time and effort.
> my experience with theory is that it includes time and effort considerations
I would never disagree with you here. But the point is that the time and effort you spend on theory doesn't translate to time and effort spent on practice.
What I mean is that since the peak of American REE in the 1970s and 1980s(?) a lot of the engineers who have working knowledge are retired. There's nothing theoretical we can't dig up but I think there will need to be a number of years for the US to catch up in terms of craft knowledge or "metis" (as Dan Wang likes to call it) and processing equipment and plants.
Maybe I'm wrong. I gained my knowledge second-hand/third-hand from books and podcasts so I would defer to you to your actual experience and observations about Chinese REE. What is your estimate on how long it would take the West to catch to at least supply some of the rare earth components and what the real barriers might be? Would love to hear your take on this.
Thanks for sharing your observations. I had no idea about the minutiae of that industry, i.e. the ecological control and its effects on the industry.
No, you're right. China, and even India and Russia, also do not have the same talent problem of the West, in that there is an undersupply of engineers, especially in the geological, processing and chemical sectors. In the US, the average age of the chemical process engineer was touching 50 a few years back. The average age of a process safety engineer is well past 50. While Russia and India lose their technical talent to brain drain, the Chinese govt has done quite a lot in trying to reverse that.
The real barriers are talent and the regulation vs profit motive balance. What I mentioned in my previous comment was effectively an effect of the intersection of the two - you can't find novel ways of processing harmful substances without having the technical talent to find these out in the first place, nor without giving them a free reign after deprioritizing profit.
Let's take arsenic for instance, a substance that's a harmful byproduct arising out of most mining operations. We already have the technology in the West to lock away arsenic into glass, but a.) apart from the big ones, most companies are unaware of them, and b.) even if they were aware of it, the tech is a significant line item that shies investors and companies away from investing into it.
> What is your estimate on how long it would take the West to catch to at least supply some of the rare earth components and what the real barriers might be?
Never. Yes, there are a few companies still engaged in trying to secure REE supply (Glencore being the most notable), but due to Western regulatory and policy limbo, the answer is never. For this to change, you need regulators open to experimentations and a concerted effort by the government in trying to reestablish REE independence, both in extraction and in processing, but I have yet to see either happening. It's telling when frankly the US is the country in the West most likely to catch up still, but the gap is deeper than the Darien Gap .
> they have no moat beyond expertise and some tech advancement that could be replicated easily enough
Incorrect, de facto, the only firms invested heavily in the rare earth refineries technology are Chinese for the last 20-30 years. Their moats are as deep as TSMC moats so to say.
>they have no moat beyond expertise and some tech advancement that could be replicated easily enough
Moat is decades of process / tactic knowledge built by disproportionate amount of talent on geologic formations others didn't invest in. Right now they generate 15x mining graduates, university of mining tech alone enrolls more than all US mining programs combined. Then you throw all that into a mining city like Batou with 3 million people running vertically integrated operation. That's ecosystem scale with compounded advantages beyond "wanting" to put work in, it maybe scale on PRC has demonstrated ability to produce.
Between shallow kiddy pool and Mariana Trencth in terms of ease of replication, I wouldn't lean towards kiddy pool. I don't think "right way to characterize" their lead is "no moat" beyond... all the things that are actually, in fact very deep moats, as if any country can persevere their way to replicate decades of work and execute industrial policy of a 3 million large city dedicated to mining/rees.
I surmise, PRC will build out EUV (technical problem) and produce them at scale before west+co meaningfully tackles HREEs supply chain (technical and regulatory and industrial problem).
Processing is the thing china does, you don't really mine rare earths, they are in many areas. Sure there are substrates it's easier to extract from, but the massive pollution of the processing that china was willing to accept when others were not that allowed them to corner the market. It can be done more cleanly, the US has some processing for strategic reasons (not enough though), but doing it clean is _very_ expensive.
Lets hope the people modifying plants to concentrate elements make work.
As I understand it, some of these processes also require a sufficiently large industrial base to be even remotely economical due to a reliance on industrial 'byproduct' (for want of a better word). Because of this, some of these processes are not something that can be quickly stood up in isolation over a few years. It would take concerted large scale planning over a long time period - something the Chinese system of government is almost uniquely capable of.
Japan is also particularly well positioned because China had used rare earths against them first in 2014. Since then they've created basically a strategic rare earths reserve and done research on how to build some components without them. It's not an absolute solution but between this and future development in friendlier nations, I don't think the rare earth risk is as acute for Japanese automakers.
I do think the original point about lower complexity vehicles being a threat to the suppliers has some merits though. Germany faces a very similar dilemma and made similar decisions.
There are also non rare earth magnets being explored. Niron - Iron nitride - magnets and ultrasonic compaction and other tech that wasn't feasible a while back are now becoming very practical. Japan could probably get to a dominant place with a solid research program, it'd give them a huge advantage for EVs and other motors.
Ford: It recorded a loss of $1.2 billion in EBIT in the third quarter on its EVs, bringing its losses on the segment for the first three quarters of 2024 to $3.7 billion
Honda: Honda to Write Off $15.7 Billion as EV Winter Arrives.
> I'm convinced that the Japanese government is terrified of EVs because all the small and medium-sized businesses which support the Japanese auto industry will be absolutely gutted when vehicles contain drastically fewer parts.
For what it's worth, this theory is blown up by hydrogen based vehicles, which Japan has gone heavily in on. Yes, slightly more parts than an EV, but not a ton. And the drivetrain is electric.
It really shows the bias in Honda’s management here. They’ve also spent years trying to develop and promote their hydrogen fuel cell cars and it’s just as much of a failure as their EV division yet they aren’t axing that golden child.
That's a fundamental misunderstanding of why they're going in on hydrogen so hard - it's something they can generate domestically and without geopolitical implications.
If there is a war with china or in the middle east, hydrogen vehicles are somewhat immune to oil or rare earth spikes.
They will likely never roll out hydrogen power in any large capacity but the capability will be there if they need it
If we get into an actual shooting war with China, I don't think there's enough hydrogen generating facilities to make much of a difference. If maybe 20% of vehicles on the road were using hydrogen, maybe?
Considering how much money and effort both Toyota and Honda have poured into trying to kick start a hydrogen economy over the past decade and a half, and how much EV technology was evolved over the same time span, would it not make more sense to switch to the technology that actually is proven and actually has consumer demand for?
It's not like they're switching all that military hardware to hydrogen too.
Japan can't solve all of its energy woes, but it can ease it a lot by restarting all the nuclear reactors they shut down after Fukushima, and to be fair, they've been trying [0], but stuff breaks after not having been used in over a decade.
Is there a place somewhere in the world where Hydrogen powered passenger vehicles are a success? I know that the one Hydrogen filling station here in Australia's Capital City has shut down after opening with great fanfare a few years ago. And the approximately 20 or so Hydrogen cars it supplied are no longer being used.
I just looked it up for Germany[0] and there were a whopping 3 (0.0%) new hydrogen fuel cell cars registered in Februrary 2026. Even LPG cars were more with 397 registered.
For comparison 21.9% were BEVs, 11.5% Plugin hybrids, ~51% pure petrol or non plug-in hybrid, and 14.8% Diesel.
Toyota just had three large EV announcements and they are putting large incentives on some of them. Feels like they're serious about it and with so many others exiting the EV market lately they may have timed it well.
Japan is the only other country besides China and Korea that produces magnets of high quality (higher in fact than the Chinese), they just don't do the volume. But there is absolutely no doubt that they could scale up if they wanted to.
They're just more expensive, but not even that much.
They manufacture the magnets, but they don't produce the rare earths themselves. They're still getting something like 60-70% of their supply from China.
India is looking to produce 6000 tonnes of NdFeB magnets per year with the first batch coming out in mid 2026. This is great news because India has large rare earth reserves and are producing using the full supply chain of ore to oxide to magnets. 6000 tonnes is like 3% of the global supply but that’s not bad for year one.
I live in Japan and IMHO the problem is that it is an extremely conservative and risk averse country, "if it ain't broke don't fix it" taken to the extreme. They had a period of innovation after WW2 out of necessity, but after the bubble crash of 1990 they reverted back to their old selves.
Japan is just being the usual USA vassal. Since now China absolutely dominates EV and batteries, they rather align themselves with the oil-thirsty war monger.
Calling the Prologue "Honda's EV" feels like a huge stretch. The Prologue was a rebadged GM vehicle that served strictly as a compliance car for meeting CAFE standards. Now that the CAFE standards have been rendered toothless, there's no longer a need for that deal.
It was "Honda's EV" in the sense that it was the only EV with a Honda badge you could actually buy. The three canned models mentioned in the article never even made it into the market.
Europeans and the Japanese were able to buy the Honda e for a few years - this article wrongly states another unreleased model as Honda's first ground up EV.
There's a few other EVs Honda produced in 90s as well, but e probably in running for first ground up new EV platform that made it to market as mass produced Honda product.
The Honda e was a massively compromised vehicle due to the tiny ~29 kWh net battery and high energy consumption. It was released in 2020 but in terms of utility it's really much more like an early 2010s EV.
> Calling the Prologue "Honda's EV" feels like a huge stretch. The Prologue was a rebadged GM vehicle …
I don't see the OP article call the Prologue "Honda's EV"? Instead, the OP article explicitly says the Prologue was both "designed and entirely built by GM."
That's separate from where the OP article first states that Honda killed three other specific models "that were the company’s first ground-up EVs".
OBBB removed any fines for violating CAFE standards. They still exist technically, but it'd be like getting a speeding ticket but the fine is always $0...
CAFE killed small trucks in part, tariffs in another part, but US manufacturers are the real reason small trucks are dead.
US manufacturers want margins, and they're not getting margins on little, efficient cars. They get enormous margins on gigantic trucks that start at $55,000. Have you noticed that all the sub $20k cars went away from all the manufacturers around COVID?
Ford makes the Maverick, which is a small truck. They were priced very reasonably at release, at $19,000 or so. However, Ford didn't make very many of them, and the ones they did make got up to $15,000 over MSRP from the dealers, who scalped them. Why would Ford want to cannibalize their pricy gigantic trucks when they know that they can get their $50k asking price because there's nowhere else for people to go?
>Why would Ford want to cannibalize their pricy gigantic trucks when they know that they can get their $50k asking price because there's nowhere else for people to go?
Why isn't Ford worried that Chevrolet, Toyota, Ram, or Nissan will bring back a small and cheap U.S. built pickup? Is that because all manufacturers are afraid of cannibalizing their more expensive offerings? Are they all colluding? Or do not many people want small pickups? I guess if the Slate becomes a breakout hit, we'll know that people really want the smaller pickups.
Neither GM, Chrysler, or Ford wants to hurt their expensive offerings. Toyota and Nissan have less expensive offerings, but can't bring them here because the tariffs make them much less margin, and the CAFE standards kill the rest off.
That’s not really sufficient explanation due to vehicles manufactured in the USA, CA or MX being exempt, and yet there are no small vehicles being made and sold in the USA in any large volume (despite clear demand).
My understanding is that this is due to fuel regulations being enacted by size and weight where it’s simply easier to make bigger vehicles.
The Chicken tax didn't kill the domestically manufactured Ranger and turn the Colorado into the huge thing it is today.
CAFE killed them too. You can't have a small vehicle that gets fuck all MPG because it's built like a tank to do work. You gotta have a bigger one that gets slightly worse MPG but has a way huger footprint in order to make the math math.
This didn't just kill compact pickups for 20yr. It also killed the Chevy Astro (the most "fullsize work van" of the minivans) and why you'll never see a car with a giant overhanging cargo area again.
The software defined car practically boils down to this: "It's not quite done yet, but we'll ship it anyway because we can fix it in post". And then two years later, "oh we've already sold them, why spend money updating it to fix the bugs." And five years later, "oh the warranty periods gone, not our problem anymore."
Guys, cars are specifically designed to work for their entire life in areas where there is no coverage. Thus, there are plenty of EVs, probably all of them, where you can just open the telematics box and pull the SIM card. Then the software will never update, and the car will just stay in whatever state it’s currently in.
The moment you do this things will stop working: for example phone app, but your car will be more or less unshittified.
And yes, there should probably be a law that makes this easier for the consumer to do for example mandating a plastic hatch or something.
But connected cars are not the end of the world and if we normalise disconnecting cars (make an online list or something of cars that are confirmed to work fine afterwards) then we’ve basically solved the issue. Remember, EVs are not the problem, and this kind of stuff will be mainstream/common knowledge once adoption rates are higher.
Yes the Tesla BLE seems to be one of the better ones and works in the middle of nowhere even without cell reception, so it probably would still work with the SIM pulled on the car side.
OTOH, it really looks like Toyota is Goldilocks. Most companies invested too much too early and had to write off a substantial amount, but Toyota is rolling into 2027 with a small but nice selection of EV's.
Over 25% of vehicles sold world-wide were electric in 2025, and that percentage is steadily increasing. So VW & Ford were "too hot", Honda is looking like "too cold" and Toyota might be the "just right" of the three bears.
Observers and technologists have also consistently failed to appreciate the continuing value proposition of hybrids, and Toyota makes some of the best, top selling models.
My biggest peeve with hybrids is that it gives consumers the mistaken impression that they're going to have to replace the batteries in their EV.
Most hybrids aren't liquid-cooled (although that is changing), and the smaller size means that a hybrid puts a lot more cycles per mile on the battery than an EV does.
Which in practice means that a hybrid battery lasts about 100,000 miles whereas an EV lasts about 250,000 miles.
A Prius is an amazing car; a 300,000 mile Prius is often still in good shape and worth the expense to replace the battery in. Which means you might put 3 batteries in a Prius and then look at how expensive it would be to replace the battery in an EV 3 times and choke. But very few people are going to spend the significant dollars it costs to replace the battery in a 250,000 mile Tesla so in practice that's an expense you'll never have.
We clarified that the standard mileage for the Toyota Prius Prime is up to 500,000 miles, but we would place the high mileage point for the car at around 300,000 miles. Once the vehicle passes this point in its lifespan, it’s far more likely to experience issues that cost ample money to keep in excellent condition.
Hybrids are just amazing and SHOULD have mostly replaced ICE-only a long time ago. I'm going to cry the day the midwestern winter road salt takes my Prius away from me.
Doesn't that describe most Toyotas, EV or not? You buy a Toyota because you expect it to last forever (or because it has low running costs because it has great resale value because it lasts forever).
You want a Supra to drive much better than fine. But if you're in the market for a Corolla, "fine" might be better than some of the cars you're comparing against.
Isn't Toyota betting big on the Hybrid EV? To me, at least in the US, this seems like the best medium-term bet. The EV infrastructure just isn't there yet, despite there being a lot of Tesla chargers. Even with that, the charge time, etc are too long to get going again. Hybrid EV seems to resolve this, and eases the customer into an EV future. Current EVs are great for being around town, but a lot of people in the US live 45min to an hour each way just to work, have to get their kids to school or practice in the meantime. It's just added stress thinking about finding a charging station or having time constraints.
The biggest issue I think every auto maker needs to solve is cost. The average car payment is insane, with dealership markups it's even worst than it would be otherwise. I'm not sure how we got here on that, to me car interiors are no nicer than they were from 2005ish on. I don't even know what the cost is going into.
After writing off $7B. So they were early. But likely better early than late. VW is an even better example. They wrote off many billions, but they're now the biggest seller of EV's in Europe.
But it's not really increasing anymore, and the increase has been almost entirely tied to subsidies. When Germany and America pulled back on EV subsidies, sales dropped significantly.
The adoption curve hasn't been nearly as steep as predicted, and the political landscape is unstable. Other manufacturers are also pulling back on their EV investments.
I'm not saying Honda isn't overdoing it, but a retreat from EVs isn't surprising.
It's not that simple, some markets are slowing down and others are accelerating.
Two of Honda's biggest markets are Japan and the US. The US is cooling on EVs with incentives and regulation changes making adoption less urgent. Japan already has an extremely low adoption rate. So the incentives for Honda to invest heavily just aren't there right now.
Other manufacturers are also pulling back. Ford is cutting way back on the Lightning for example.
It's too soon to tell on America. In Germany sales pulled back temporarily after the loss of subsidies -- most people who were looking at buying an EV pulled their purchase forward to before the subsidy went away but then after a while growth resumed. 2025 EV sales in Germany without subsidies were higher than 2023 EV sales with subsidies after being down in 2024. I expect the same thing to happen for 2027 US EV sales.
In Japan, it's more a matter of not having good domestic options. Japanese people don't buy non-Japanese cars. When the Leaf was selling well world-wide, it sold well in Japan. But it's been a few years since the Leaf sold well anywhere. Now with good Toyota options and spiking gas prices I expect EV's to pick up in Japan. Nowhere is more dependent than Japan on the straight of Hormuz.
My cars last 8+ years. My tablets last 3+ years. I’ll pass on a software defined car unless they swap out the whole logic and display unit before the warranty runs out. Otherwise I’ve got dead hardware in the cabin. They did this to the Leaf.
Or assume you have to provide a current model iPad or android tablet to run their software. That would keep the hardware functional if they kept the software working.
And I don’t trust the vendors to try to drive resale by eol’ing the logic/software. They’ll drive everybody to leases to avoid this and battery life concerns.
Not a single manufacturer out there makes a "good" ev.
All have proprietary bullshit parts, proprietary fancy software with features that nobody gives a fuck about, and are all expensive. Im not paying fucking 30k for a Nissan leaf. EVs are supposed to be simple. Where is my 12k OTD Corolla with a battery and a motor instead of an engine?
Meanwhile BYD has an app that auto parallel parks. And China has cars like Greely M9 that are not only packed full of features, but also has a gas engine that acts like a generator.
And BYD doesn't have propietary software? Also this leaves out Kia and Hyundai, the latter which I would argue has some of the best EVs and in Europe with the Inster also one of the most affordable ones without it being stripped down completely.
To compete in EV, one has to compete also in battery manufacturing. Increasingly Japan is unable to keep up with China and even Korean manufacturers. Panasonic is still in the race due to their decades lead, but its market is largely shrinking. Once China took over batteries, it would have been unlikely for Japan to take the EV market, just like Sony. Same with most American EV manufacturers who are unable to compete, even with closed off large American auto market, that Japan has no access to. As rapidly shrinking Tesla marketshare world wide suggests, competing with Chinese makers is hard.
They can purchase the battery technology, just as many manufacturers already do.
I hate to be a luddite, but they also don't need to be pioneers to succeed here. They need cars that meet their customers needs, just like not every ICE car needs to have an F1 racing engine in it.
It may not necessarily be the catastrophic move it seems to be, on reflection. 2030s Japan will not be 1970s Japan. Their labor force is different, the culture is different, the world is different. It might be better to not waste time and money chasing the, "We USED to make amazing cars," phantom, and instead push forward into whatever comes next.
Smart doorbells and thermostats that upgraded in the night often became a nuisance or an expensive brick. But a faulty software upgrade on a car can kill you and others.
Car company execs need to take a chill pill followed by a reality serum. Monetizing subscription based basic features and delivering in-car advertising is the absolutely worst way to go.
As consumers we need to stop buying into the bells, whistles and trinkets and demand essential and safe transportation.
Consumers have very little power in this space. Have you tried buying a non-premium car with physical buttons instead of touchscreens in recent years? There used to be hardly any option because carmakers all somehow decided this was the way forward, even though science clearly said it was making cars less safe. So if you needed a car and didn't have a ton of money, you could merely accept it. Only now that safety ratings started to include usability of key vehicle controls car makers decided to turn around again.
Precisely. But not because of consumers. Which is the whole point. Legislation and oversight make cars better and safer for consumers, not consumer buying choices.
Or manufacturers should learn from Tesla.
Did you know - if your Tesla shuts down (screen goes blank) you can still drive it! If done right, it works like magic.
I have had 3 software updates in 12 years of ownership of Tesla that bricked my car and require mobile service (twice) and tow (once) to resolve. tesla is probably better than most but far from perfect when it comes to this
I mean there are multiple, multiple boundaries in place for this reason. I’d start by saying most “in the middle of the night” updates target non-safety critical systems in the car like the IHU. The update I received last night has a build date of 2024 reflecting extensive validation before general availability in 2026. It was field tested in limited markets after factory validation and had staged rollouts through dealers before going to general OTA availability.
Independently, I had to take my car into the dealer to get a safety critical recall installed via Ethernet that affected a braking system in certain edge cases and this was not installable OTA “in the night”.
While, yes, I am annoyed that the dealer price for my “infotainment” unit is $2k and reflects the technical specs of a 2016 mid tier android tablet running Intel cores; I do feel that vehicle is far safer with its airbags, 360 camera, lane keeping, and AEB on net than my 1970’s classic.
We've had software upgrades on cars for years now.
The used car market has, in many ways, usurped what used to be the role of the basic car used to be.
As a result, you see fewer and fewer new cars sold, and automakers have to more intensively monetize the cars they have. They must create ever-increasing returns to shareholders.
EVs are going to be an extinction-level event for carmakers.
As the buggy-makers failed to transition to making cars, and thus ceased to be, so too will automakers fail to transition to EVs, and thus end their viability as vehicle manufacturers.
Right? Have any of the execs making these decisions ever ridden in an EV? They are so much better that the experience I've seen is no one will ever go back to preferring ICE after spending time with an EV. My family currently has 2 ICE vehicles (one is a PHEV). I really doubt we'll buy another.
The week I spent renting an EV (an Ioniq 5, so not even a high-end one) convinced me. Enjoyable to drive. Having to figure out where/how to charge it was sufficient to chase away the fears around that.
> EVs are going to be an extinction-level event for carmakers.
Agreed. It is exceptionally rare for a consumer to purchase one EV and then buy ICE as their next vehicle. I have owned EVs for more than 10 years. There is no going back.
> Consumers, mostly those who buy EVs from the likes of Tesla, Rivian, and BYD, have grown accustomed to the frequent updates, slick infotainment software, and advanced driver-assistance systems.
Guess which three items out of that list I do not want.
You don’t like active safety features ? Even if you think you are great and better than most, don’t you think it would be neat that the other drivers you share the roads with have active safety features ?
So they don’t crash into you or run over your kids?
I am convinced that some safety features (such as lane assist, for example), actually make roads less safe on net, because they allow or encourage drivers to be less engaged in the act of driving. But then, if it were up to me we'd all be driving manual transmissions.
Even if they do make people safer "on average" these systems are not tested by a lot of the auto-safety organizations. In fact, some of these organizations simply bump up the "safety rating" automatically depending on how many "safety" features are included, without actually testing the effectiveness of the feature.
This is important, because forward collusion detection is not a binary thing. Each auto maker has their own set of parameters, sensors and implementations to achieve a similar goal, but each act independently.
I would also prefer if people were more engaged with driving too. I don't think we should encourage people to "rely" on these systems to keep them out of trouble as these systems can and do act unpredictably and may harm other road users as a result of a programming decision since the car in front acted unexpectedly.
I think the whole automation of everything in a car is a bit silly. Transmissions are whatever for me, although the full lane assist, cruise control, adaptive cruise control, even automatic wipers and headlights makes people feel so much more disconnected from the car, which I think leads to unsafe habits or worse, unable to handle the car in situations where the automatic systems fail or become unreliable (e.g poor visibility, wet roads, unmapped roads, off-road, obstructions on the road, road works, etc).
> I am convinced that some safety features (such as lane assist, for example), actually make roads less safe on net, because they allow or encourage drivers to be less engaged in the act of driving.
"Birth control leads to riskier behavior and more pregnancies."
One time I gently left my lane to slightly move into the (empty) opposing lane as I passed a cyclist who was on a narrow shoulder. The lane assist thankfully corrected my clearly idiotic move by taking the wheel and swerving the car towards the cyclist, who the car probably thought was a terrorist or something. Luckily I fought the "correction" and managed to save myself the inconvenience of cleaning cyclist guts off my windshield at the next gas station.
I don’t think the title is hyperbole. Toyota isn’t giving up on
their long term EV R&D plans.
Just look at Nissan, which is broke as a joke, but they still put a new Leaf model on the market.
Lately there’s been a vibe that the EV experiment has died off, but that really isn’t true looking at industry reporting.
There is stalling that seems related to subsidy expiration and/or scale back, but we could argue that subsidies expiring is happening because the subsidies aren’t needed to sell vehicles anymore.
20% of new vehicles sold globally are EVs. Critical mass has been achieved, and not just in China (20% of vehicles sold in Europe are EVs).
This is also an admission that Honda is just giving up on Acura completely. That $50k two row luxury SUV buyer that is such an industry staple buyer for the US auto industry is going to be buying Rivian R2s instead of an EV Acura MDX.
All the legacy automakers that haven't fully moved to EV's PROFITABLY will go defacto bankrupt within a few years, there will be some mergers to stay alive but it's game over. Tesla and China companies will own auto, with Tesla capturing most the profit, similar to Apple vs Android phones. Autonomy will further accelerate this.
Spot on, except for the part about Tesla. Tesla shut down production of Model S & X. Coming up next: 3 and Y. Also, Tesla has YOY decreasing revenue and sales. Pretty soon, they will go pre-revenue and embrace what they are: A NFT traded on the stock market for bragging rights.
I'll just leave his here, "Tesla achieved a record-breaking third quarter in 2025 (Q3 2025), delivering 497,099 vehicles". It's expected that to be exceeded most quarters going forward
This is so unfortunate. I was never a van guy, but my wife insisted we get a van, so I got the Honda. And honestly? I kinda love it. It drives like a car but holds eight people (or four people and a whole bunch of luggage).
The way we use the van, 90% of our drives are under 20 miles round trip. The rest are longer road trips. I've been waiting eight years for Honda to make an electric or even a plug-in hybrid where the gas motor just charge the battery.
It would be perfect for my family. I guess that's not happening now.
They have quite decent hybrids now. I’m surprised that they haven’t released a plug-in one, since their architecture seems perfect for it. Maybe battery supply constraints. They are also developing a v6 hybrid, which should replace the j series in the Odyssey.
I have a Honda Hybrid CR-V and love the drivetrain. We're waiting until Honda moves that drivetrain into the Odyssey (which is the van we want... probably what you have, hah)
Everyone is saying EVs are the future but most EVs cannot compete with many of Honda’s offerings.
Eg. I need to move 6 people and significant gear (skiing, camping, biking etc) long remote distances.
There is no EV that can do that really. And the ones that come close are easily $20-30k higher than an Odyssey. Plus the durability of large EVs is far from proven while the 300k mile club of Odyssey owners is large.
I need Suburban/Minivan functionality out of a proven OEM at a competitive price point. (I also need to see my friends with Rivians etc not having to schedule their vacation around charger availability. Have seen this waste hours and hours of time)
I live in an old, pre-automobile neighborhood. Like other such old, walkable, sidewalk-and-park-and-corner-store neighborhoods in the US, it's one of the most attractive parts of my city.
However, almost nobody here could feasibly own a fully electric car. Most houses don't have driveways or garages. People park ad-hoc on the street. Most families own one car, and that car needs to be able to go long distances because it's both the local vehicle and the road tripper.
My wife and I would buy an EV if we could. We know the exact one. But it's not feasible for us, or for our neighbors. Far from being "1%" this situation is quite common. So we have a Honda hybrid instead.
Is burning the coal, delivering the electricity, and storing it in a battery that's then converted to mechanical motion more efficient than an ICE? What are the losses in delivery and storage?
there are yes, but it is still more efficient than an ICE engine. Not going to enumerate that here because that was a discussion to be had in 2010 and I am bloody tired of it.
If you are visiting nature in any vehicle you are messing it up.
Gas prices are pretty much trivial unless you:
- drive a lot (which in that case you’re really messing up nature regardless of ICE vs EV)
- own a fleet
- are really tight on finances (not buying a new car anyway)
I almost pulled the trigger on a Prologue; so glad I had second thoughts. Even though it was essentially a GM product, I've only ever owned Hondas, so I thought "Well, at least I can get service at my Honda dealer".
Charging in the US (other than at home) is still the biggest issue for me. I do lots of traveling, and waiting 30-45 minutes to charge even at a Level 3 charger is a PITA. If I had a J std charger, then it's even longer. This makes my monthly 8 hour trips one-way another 2 hours - this sucks. Sorry - I'll keep my 2005 Honda Element with 445K miles. Another engine would be cheaper than less than a year of car payments. And it's pretty much indestructible.
It does depend on what car you get. A RWD Ioniq5 can do about 3 hours on the highway with 20 minute stops (though the stops are a lot longer at the more-available Tesla chargers).
There’s other good roadtrip friendly options out there too, but ya with monthly drives like that you’re really limiting your options and ICE cars still make a lot of sense
Honda did not invent ICE cars. They do not need to invent EVs. I reckon they will wait until the dust settles and then leapfrog all the rest. As they have done so in the past.
Of course, I drive a Honda that I will be buried in. So I may be biased.
To be honest, I have every faith in Honda. It took them a long time to arrive at hybrid, but they were never about first to market, but they were always adamant about controlling the entire technology stack.. made their own transmission and everything. And engineering doesn't faze them, Honda just nonchalantly displayed a reusable rocket like it was too easy... EV is a little bit like AI nowadays, not much moat and possibly not challenging enough for Honda R&D so why not. I'll always be on the look out for Honda's next take on EV.
I can imagine Honda executives thinking that they can wait out the awkward transition period and, when motors and batteries are fully sorted, simply swap out the fossil fuel bits. How hard could it be?
The article loses its credibility once it imagines a multi-billion, multi-country company executives thinking this way :).
I don't have charging capability at my apartment or work. On occasion, I do 300 mile trips (adirondacks/nyc). Skeptical of winter performance. I have no interest in "frequent updates, slick infotainment software, and advanced driver-assistance systems". Frankly, no spare tire is a no starter for me also.
Or instead of paying money for a car that still fills up slower than a gas one, has all the extra issues that come with EVs, and hope that there is charging infrastructure in my area, I could just buy any ice car made in the last 35+ years.
Extra issues? Or "different" issues? The jury is still out on whether ICEVs or EVs are better overall, but despite being a less mature technology my EV is the best car I've owned so far. Seems to me that EVs win pretty easily in the long run.
Similar boat here. No charging at home without expensive install, work is a commercial charger, and frequent trips into WV, which seems to be a dead zone for chargers. Plus occasional towing. I’d love an EV, but they aren’t there yet.
Could it be that the EVs they were planning were just out of touch with what the market wants? Their zero vehicles look butt-ugly in my opinion. They look like concept cars that are great for show, but no serious buyer would consider them for a daily driver.
Honda is the world's largest engine maker: yachts, airplanes, ships, lawnmowers, cars, motorcycles, heavy equipment. They will be fine.
Also, please ignore these announcements. CEOs are trend-following children and their declarations of future behavior should be heavily discounted. Honda will follow the market, as will all the other automakers. This is all sturm and drang. When an automaker says "We will transition to all EV by 2030" then ignore them. When an automaker says "We will not sell any EVs" then ignore them. It's like a child saying "I will grow up to be an astronaut". Just pat them on the head and go about your day.
Focus on what they are bringing to market at any point in time, everything else is foolish talk.
> When developed as an original product, EVs offer automakers a chance to rethink the automobile, and in the process, make it cheaper.
That does not bode well for German car makers either I'm afraid. Take BMW for instance: they started off with two "pure" EV models, the i3 (a compact car) and the i8 (a sports car). Both of them promising, but neither a particular bestseller. So they switched to offering electric drive as an alternative to IC engines in several (most?) "regular" models. But I agree with TechCrunch that this is more of a cop-out than a winning strategy...
> Consumers, mostly those who buy EVs from the likes of Tesla, Rivian, and BYD, have grown accustomed to the frequent updates, slick infotainment software, and advanced driver-assistance systems. Honda has yet to make significant progress in any of those domains.
Here's an idea: what about making an EV free from this enshittification? One where you can decide yourself when to install an update, like in the "olden days" a few years ago? One that doesn't pretend to have an "autopilot" which isn't really one? I think there would be a market for such an EV.
The software designed car and continued price growth of automobiles is going to push them out of price range for consumers. Maybe Honda just wants to go out of a dying industry on good terms.
My Honda family car has a CVT and electric parking brakes. "Driver's Car" mattered more when the low-price option was a stickshift and cars weren't so heavy.
Gas cars are great until you realize you have to replace the gas. Then you'll realize the cost of owning a gas car.
Once people realize they're literally burning the expensive gas they put in their vehicle, the game is over.
Also, gas is a limited resource which after you burn never ever comes back, so it is expected to get more expensive, while all the rare earth metals in batteries can be recycled into new batteries because when you use the battery, you aren't actually burning it away into nothing. You can even recharge it.
> The large battery in an EV makes it easier to feed powerful computers, and it allows things like over-the-air updates to happen when the car is parked and “off.”
I don't want anything of the sort as a consumer, so auto makers who don't "get" it either are fine by me. Nay, heroes.
Also, lol, "the large battery in an EV makes it easier to feed powerful computers". Do they not think an internal combustion engine can power a few ARM chips? What could the total power consumption of all the computer equipment in a car be, like 30-50 watts? 200 horsepower is 147 kW.
Even the point about running computers when the car is off seems wildly uninformed: a 12 V starter battery in an ICE car is about 70 Ah. That’s 840 Wh. So you can run a 5 W computer (that does nothing but periodically wake up to look for and download updates and such) for 168 hours. (Of course, any competent implementation will not let electronics run the battery flat, but it still seems like way more than enough)
Ironically, Trump attacking Iran and closing the Strait is a boon to China and EV makers. Once the car is produced, aside from lubricants, it’s completely independent of oil. Heck you can put panels on your rooftop and slow charge it during the day.
It may be a boon to EV makers everywhere including in China, but I don't think it's a boon to China generally as they buy a lot of their oil from the Gulf states. Thus they're more directly affected by the Hormuz shutdown than the US (which is a net oil exporter and is mostly only affected indirectly by price increases).
Like the Ukraine war, maybe one good thing thing we can say about this terrible situation is that it may encourage a lot of countries to move to renewables (or nuclear) sooner than they otherwise would and cut back on fossil fuels.
The energy crises of the 1970s caused people to start caring a lot more about fuel economy. Now we have the technology for people not to need to buy gas to propel their vehicle at all, and many of them once they switch they're never switching back.
Sure, but increasingly less so as electrification takes off. And using less gas means you can redirect that to the other derivative products such as plastic.
Quick google math says you get 6 tires from a barrel of oil vs roughly 20 gallons of gas. Unless EVs mean you change tires every 300 miles or so I think we're good.
My ICE vehicles go through many more pounds of gasoline than they do tires. A set of tires is ~100lbs of material. 50,000mi of gas on a 30mpg vehicle is 10,000lbs of gas.
With where the Trumpists want to take us, tires made out of carved stone will suffice. Non-EVs will be retrofitted with a hole in the floor for your feet.
A friend of mine has a dozen panels in central France and pretty much provides all the energy for his Kia eNiro. He reckons the payback time is under five years.
When did I say on the rooftop of a car? There’s level 1 that could plug into an house outlet and level 2 from 220v. House charges the car and solar provides power to the house.
I hate those narratives that if you don't jump on EVs, your future is doomed.
The last 5 years just don't show it. The EV market is still small and infrastructure missing in most of the world.
Toyota played it safe and made bank when everybody was saying they were doomed.
German automakers went hard on EVs. VW group sold 1 million fully electric vehicles in 2025, they will probably overtake Tesla in a couple of years for the biggest non-Chinese EV automaker by sales, but is it paying off financially?
At the same time german premium brands have a very hard time differentiating when Chinese cars offer similar quality at half the price even after tariffs.
If you look here in Germany at the car companies, they are suffering quite a bit. Most of that has to do with EVs eating the market share of their legacy car business. VW, Mercedes, and BMW each make pretty decent EVs at this point of course. And there are a lot of even better ones coming to market soon from them. And they sell pretty well even. But because their legacy business is imploding, profits are down by very large double digit percentages. Despite this, the Germans are adjusting well. VW seems to be having some success in the Chinese market now (lots of China specific VW models coming out there). And BMW is gearing up to what looks like a massive range luxury EV (500 miles) that should be doing well.
EV sales keep on growing world wide by juicy double digit percentages. Some markets less than others of course but the net effect is that all that legacy business keeps on shrinking because all that EV growth is at the cost of that legacy business.
The main issue with Honda and other Japanese manufacturers is that they are hopelessly dependent on Chinese suppliers to ship any EVs at this point. They've dragged their heels on doing their own tech and at this point while they might have some promising things in their labs, they lack supply chains and factories to mass produce any of it by themselves. That's going to take many years to turn around. Without guarantees that they'll be able to match the Chinese on cost. And the EU, Koreans, Chinese, and even US companies like GM are picking up the slack and growing EV sales at their cost.
Toyota seems to finally be producing a lot of EVs now to counter that. They've been catching up fast in the last year or so. But most of these EVs come with a lot of Chinese tech inside. Their alternative was to cede that market to competitors. Which seems to be what Honda is doing. I don't think that will end well for them.
Is your point that the western car companies are doomed no matter how aggressively they jump into EVs now, and that Chinese EV producers have too much of a lead for them to recover, or that they have time to catch up later and can take it slow for now?
China is already selling EVs to countries that haven’t even had many cars before, like Nepal. Is 75% of the world car market just going to be there’s because western auto manufacturers overfixated on their own very mature car markets?
I think they can catch up later, spin off some electric project to build know-how without going all-in releasing so many models.
Mercedes-Benz sells 9 different fully electric models and that ignores their trucks and vans.
BMW sells 9 different fully electric models across their BMW/Mini/Rolls Royce brands.
Volkswagen sells more than *30*.
I don't think western automakers can compete in any case unless they can either differentiate their offering or significantly lower the cost of core components like batteries.
The EU regulations are in many ways built to prevent this kind of free riding, for the sensible reasons that if everyone free rides, aiming for excess profits on the short term, the transition doesn't happen and the Chinese eat your whole market.
If you want to sell cars in the EU you have no future without EVs. The fleet emmision fines are quite high already, will be much higher from 2030 and will kick in from 0g CO2/km from 2035, basically killing any ICE passenger vehicle. That's in 8,5 years.
Honda is launching the WN7 this year. It seems like a typical Honda motorcycle: not for those obsessed with specs, but definitely a solid and well-designed bike. If I were currently looking for a mid-sized electric motorcycle, this would be my top choice for the same reasons people choose Honda for gasoline-powered motorcycles.
Yes, you’re absolutely right. The WN7 is intended more for the European market. For the Global South, something like the Zeno Emara is more suitable. Although I’d buy one right away if it were available here in Germany at a similarly affordable price. Since the beginning of the year, my perspective on e-motorcycles has shifted a bit. I ride an e-scooter to the office and have really gotten into it. Ride, charge, ride, charge, ride, charge, ride, and practically no maintenance: I find that very appealing! That’s why I took notice of the WN7.
Well, they just launched the Honda WN-7. It seems to be a commuter and fun bike. It has a limited range, so it's not a touring motorcycle but it does have fast-charging.
I watched the reviews on YouTube, and they're all quite favorable.
I'm yet to see a EV bike that can be classified as a "fun bike". Not fun and impracticle compared to pure "inner city mobility vehicle" such as Renault Twizy.
They had a ubuquitious 100cc/9hp scooter called Activa in India. Honda, Yamaha and Suzuki are a drop in the bucket in EV scooter sales and Honda's offerings are the most hilarious.
Yeah, e-bikes with thumb throttles are so good that the only reason they haven't already supplanted motorcycles is that there are ten bajillion old unkillable motorcycle engines in use.
It's a shame that US law doesn't have a nice in-between that would slot these bikes between proper e-bikes and motorcycles.
Because owning a motorcycle is a huge pain in the ass on account of motorcycles costing a decent amount of money, weighing 300lbs, going on the highway. If a $1000 ebike can only hit 40mph and weighs less than 100lbs, why not let people just buy them and ride them with a normal drivers' license?
Because e-bikes have effectively done regulatory arbitrage and the sky didn't fall. You want more people using small electric vehicles where before they would have used a car, you lower the burden to get one on the road.
Ebikes definitely aren't a viable alternative in Asia yet. Most Asian countries either have no charge stations or very few. Range doesn't compare with gas motorcycles.
Hundreds of millions of motorcycles are still in active use with no real incentive to change
Genuine question, could many of them not charge at home? I own an EV and the number of charging stations near me is irrelevant to it because the 120V outlet in my garage is more than sufficient. My naive thinking is that an ebike is an order of magnitude smaller, so surely the same outlet would be even less of a limitation, right? (not to mention that many other countries have ~240V standard outlets)
Maybe the answer is truly "no, that wouldn't actually be practical for how people in those places live" for some reason, but I'm genuinely curious.
> Ebikes definitely aren't a viable alternative in Asia yet. Most Asian countries either have no charge stations or very few. Range doesn't compare with gas motorcycles.
I was in China last year and one apartment complex I stayed at had a garage full of e scooters and bikes all plugged in to charge.
The streets in China are remarkably quiet now with so many electric vehicles.
Do people really want "software defined vehicles"? People keep repeating how Tesla keeps upgrading their software, but I don't really want my car to change every time I step into it.
The person I know who loves FSD has soured on updates since the last one changed how the car handles simple things like intersections, and it's added a lot more stress.
Cars should be appliances, boring and reliable, not something to amaze and delight you. Especially since the latter usually changes into "sell ads and your personal information".
Sadly, this view is considered antiquated and anti-technology by a younger generation of people who think what we see in sci-fi shows should be reality (good or bad). And if you don't get that vision then you're some dumb luddite who should be banished from society.
What's kind of remarkable is the onslaught of vehicles, many EV, which have critical functionality issues that are being ignored, but they have WiFi + hotspot on board! And if you want to do basic things with your own vehicle, like get the climate control ready before you leave on a trip you now need an app, a smartphone, and Internet connection and a subscription...to do things that could easily be done via some local BLE or WiFi connection.
I see a lot of car companies rush to make "immersive" driving experiences while neglecting the basics. The Ioniq 5 / EV6 have ICCU issues that are not addressed which can leave the car stranded and the replacement parts have the same mysterious failure modes, the Jaguar I-Pace had numerous failures including a UI that would lag for basic things like changing air conditioning settings, the last generation Leaf (just prior to the current re-design) has battery issues that have forced people to do lemon-law buy backs, the Ford Mach E has a Tesla-style iPad center display that can't be turned off at night so it's a distraction (among other issues with the poor concept), but it has OTA so awesome!
> Do people really want "software defined vehicles"?
Absolutely, the sooner the better. The truth is, auto companies can track you, show you ads, and otherwise jerk you around without going all the way to having a "software defined vehicle." You just get a worse user experience.
If it doesn't have a screen or a network connection it can't do either of those things. I'm very eagerly awaiting the Slate truck for exactly this reason. A cheap barebones EV meant for hauling stuff and people locally.
The thing can't even do OTA updates without you connecting your phone to the car's bluetooth.
All the updates (so far…) have added features that I actually like. Things like Apple Music integration and even safety things like cross-traffic alerts when reversing.
Even today my wife left her phone on the charge pad and the car beeped as we walked away to alert us - a feature that didn’t exist when we first got it.
Enshittification may come, but maybe there will be an Apple-like benevolent dictator that keeps it mostly clean.
Edit: I should say that I will never trust any “self-driving” at all based on cameras alone. It can’t even do Autopilot without me intervening on most trips.
> People keep repeating how Tesla keeps upgrading their software, but I don't really want my car to change every time I step into it.
My driving experience/controls has not changed since I bought it 18 months ago. They added an option for Grok which I don’t use, and the FSD is much better now. And enabled adaptive headlights.
>The person I know who loves FSD has soured on updates since the last one changed how the car handles simple things like intersections, and it's added a lot more stress.
The most recent FSD update made me recommend a model 3 or Y to my parents.
“Many automakers have found that dropping batteries into a car originally designed for an internal combustion engine”. Reminds me of idiotic hybrid variants of Subaru and Honda vehicles that don’t have spare tires because the battery was slapped into the existing vehicle platform as an afterthought. Eg. Subaru forester hybrid. Car bought by educated, practical folks.
I love the Honda E and it's not mentioned in the article for some reason. However it must certainly have been a costly flop; they are so rare on the roads in the UK,
> Here, Honda is setting itself up for failure on the second disruption sweeping the automotive industry: the software-defined vehicle (SDV), which has core capabilities that can be upgraded and improved over time.
Hells yeah, Honda went to the top of my list all of the sudden. SDVs coded by vibe coding bros are just not for me.
Remember when cars were just a simple, no computers, maybe a transistor or two. why do cars have to cost the same price as a new house?
give me a simple 1960's vw bug please.
Consumers, mostly those who buy EVs from the likes of Tesla, Rivian, and BYD, have grown accustomed to the frequent updates, slick infotainment software, and advanced driver-assistance systems. Honda has yet to make significant progress in any of those domains.
"Grown accustomed to" is a funny way of saying "begrudgingly put up with because the alternative is buying a new car, but really they would rather not have to deal with that crap at all."
The wind is just blowing back towards internal combustion for the moment. A couple years and they will shift again. Killing the whole research project would be dumb. Killing current models makes some sense.
Only in the US. The rest of the world, especially the undeveloped and developing world, is currently undergoing a car ownership boom due to cheap Chinese EVs.
But my guess is maybe Honda will wait for Tesla or another US based auto company with EVs to fail and buy that company. Seems that is how large companies do "innovation" these days.
I once put together a comparison of Chinese and Japanese industries on a forum while answering a question. What’s happening with Honda is probably just the beginning — the bigger signs of decline aren’t limited to the auto industry. Japan’s space program, for example, has had several launch failures in a row, it has been mostly absent in the current AI wave, and there was even recent news about a so-called Japanese AI model that turned out to be built directly on top of DeepSeek.
Japanese society has long been romanticized in the West, but once you start noticing certain details, a different side becomes visible. A simple example: about a century ago, the average height of Japanese men and women was actually higher than that of Chinese and Koreans, but later the growth basically stalled, and in some periods even declined. It’s not that Japan is poor. It feels more like there are strong, invisible social expectations — women are not supposed to grow too tall, men don’t seem comfortable standing out physically, and people live within a very tight set of unwritten rules about what you should and shouldn’t do.
This is the same kind of thing people notice when they joke that Japan still uses Yahoo or fax machines. That discipline creates stability, and from the outside it can look orderly and even admirable. But when you look more closely, it can also feel restrictive, even a bit unsettling. It’s hard to believe that this kind of social atmosphere wouldn’t affect corporate culture as well. In that sense, it may help explain why Japan, which once dominated the global auto industry, hesitated for so long on electric vehicles and ended up being overtaken by China in the new wave of technology.
Another thing is that Japan can be very unrealistic. You can see this in their movies, anime, and literature — there’s this strong belief in the power of belief itself, like if you just believe hard enough, things will work out. That mindset shows up in real issues too, like rare earth supply, military readiness, and national strategy. Japan might actually be one of the countries with the strongest information bubbles in the world. From top to bottom, people tend to believe what they want to believe, even when reality says otherwise. And when reality does show up, the reaction is often to pull back quickly and say the problem isn’t real.
You could already see this mentality during World War II, especially with the attack on Pearl Harbor. After that, Japan’s postwar industrial success made the illusion even stronger. If a company messes up, they apologize, and everyone forgives them. Toyota is number one in the world and will always be number one — no need to worry. That kind of thinking is exactly why Japanese industry has been declining for a long time without people really feeling a sense of crisis.
You can even see Germans openly complaining about their country’s problems, but you don’t see that very often in Japan. As long as they still have Excel, Word, and loppy disk ,or some japan made code editor, everything feels fine, so there’s no need to feel anxious.
And if there were ever a war over China and Taiwan, most people in Japan might even think: as long as we take action, China will definitely lose.It’s just like the recent Iran war. many japanese people believe that China will collapse first, because China is too dependent on Middle Eastern oil, even though the real data shows that Japan is actually more dependent.
Honda is an engine company at its heart. It makes very reliable, long lived engines.
They refine technology not really invent it (maybe invented VTEC). The transition to EV will be very gradual, I don’t even think we have enough rare earth metals and electrical grid capacity to go even twice as fast in adoption?
Honda is waiting for the standards and technology to settle out and become commodity technology, then they implement and iterate to a refined and reliable product.
It doesn’t seem like a winner take all market for EV? What would be the most? Perhaps I am ignorant on that part of market dynamics.
Once EVs are economically attractive the transition can be very fast. I live in Denmark so I have seen it, it took 7 years to go from ~5% to 90+% of new cars sold. Both EU and US are now relying on trade barriers to keep Chinese EVs away from consumers.
well China debate aside, where are they? i've been dabbling in electrics for over a decade now, on the lower range they are still 30% more expensive than gas cars. Surely someone, anyone outside of China could have done one cheaper by now? Leaf came out 16 years ago and they still can't get it under $30k?
I assume you are coming from a US perspective, because smaller economical EVs are available in europe and dominate in asia. America car companies have managed to make a 50k+ truck the average new car purchase. They aren’t going to kill that golden calf voluntarily. Instead they have managed to lock out the competition. Why Musk elected to build another truck instead of the promised model 2 is beyond me. Besides, with EVs you really have to consider total cost, they are still slightly more expensive to buy in the EU as well, but you quickly make it back on fuel.
Don't forget maintenance costs in the TCO calculation too. Transmissions, fuel pumps, timing belts, radiators (mostly), fuel injectors, emissions systems, etc are all out of the picture in an EV. Servicing those things may be infrequent but is often extremely expensive.
I think this is the biggest thing that non-EV owners do not understand. Or perhaps they do but not the full scope because money is spent little by little over the years. the oil changes, brakes, belts, starters, alternators, whatevers… I have 2014 Tesla S and I literally spent practically nothing for 11 years. I had to put in a new modem, replaced 12V battery twice and that’s about it. Still on original brakes (102k miles) because with regenerative breaking I hardly ever use the brakes, I mean there is just nothing to spend your money on (I even called Tesla in the beginning of my ownership and was like “do I need to being the car in for something” to be met with “is something wrong with the car? no? why are you calling us then??!” :) ). I will never own a non-EV car again and neither will my kid or anyone in my family
I hear a lot of Teslas banging around corners in my town and it leads me to believe that EV drivers freed from annual dealer maintenance actually believe that tie rod ends don't need to be inspected and replaced.
I recently had to do some service (12 years to the day of the purchase) and mechanic, who worked for tesla for a decade and now has a local shop, told me exactly the same thing - you got shit that moves, you gotta lube it once in a while! but I own another EV and 47.5k miles later the car hasn’t seen a dealership since I drove off it.
> Don't forget maintenance costs in the TCO calculation too.
OK? Then don’t forget to add a replacement battery, replacement battery heating and cooling system, factor in a few extra sets of tires over a lifetime of the vehicle, you can also assume the suspension will wear out earlier, so at least ball joints if not also struts.
I’m an automotive EE, there is no free lunch.
I have a car we just got rid of in our research shop, in order to replace the battery the entire rear suspension and half of the interior had to come out. To an insurance agency, the car was literally totaled between the cost of the battery and the labor to replace it.
I think EVs today are intended to last shorter than the battery. There has been examples of model 3s reaching 250k+ miles on the original battery, a number most cars (ICE or EV) do not come close to before being salvaged. There are also startups re-purposing battery packs for stationary use ex. from old Nissan leafs. So I don't think you should consider battery pack replacement costs as part of owning a EV.
How is safety and quality for Chinese EVs? There was the 2008 melamine baby formula scandal, where a toxic substance was deliberately introduced into baby formula for domestic market. Chinese food imports were curtailed across many countries.
Capitalism over there is at another level, and cars are so complicated with tiny changes can have huge problems. Look at the immobilizer chips that Kia dropped to save $5, which resulted in thousands of car thefts and the whole Kia Boyz phenomenon.
I think the fear of low-quality and dangerous corner cutting is a big reason Chinese evs have not been even more popular in the EU. However as some brands start to establish themselves for longer they gain trust. Also we have Euro N-cap tests which are pretty extensive and lots of Chinese cars have earned excellent scores.
Electric cars are way way simpler than ICE cars. It's just market segmentation gone wrong when EU car manufacturers wanted to sell these cheaper cars as premium/luxury ones (i.e. greed) and therefore couldn't learn the lessons from producing them at scale on cheaper models. China had poor ICE cars and bet everything on EVs, scaled their production up, reiterated a few times, and now Nio/Xiaomi/BYD/Zeekr are better than anything built in the EU.
> I don’t even think we have enough rare earth metals and electrical grid capacity to go even twice as fast in adoption
I also have some concerns about our grid, but not from EVs. AI is already consuming more 5% of the grid, more than twice that of EVs (~2%), and is growing far faster. I've seen estimates as high as 17% of the grid by 2030. Most EVs are also charged in off-peak hours when there's plenty of capacity.
That's worst-case +600TWh by 2030. The US electrical grid also expanded by +600TWh between 1983 and 1990. Did you panic at that time and, if not, why not?
> I don’t even think we have enough rare earth metals and electrical grid capacity to go even twice as fast in adoption?
This is not an issue, it’s the one the things that the anti-EV/baby boomer crowd throws out that is completely unsubstantiated. We have plenty of rare earths, America just lit their rare earth refining capacity on fire when China said they would do it for us at a much cheaper price. China doesn’t have a shortage of rare earth refining capacity, and they are producing most of the Eavs in the world as a result. EVs mostly charge at night when the grid is underutilized anyways.
China won the EV war a few years ago while the Japanese spent too much wasted time on hydrogen. Honda just doesn’t have anything to offer that BYD already does much better. That the Chinese auto manufacturers will slow down EV advancements and refinements long enough for Honda to make a significant improvement is a bit ridiculous.
> It makes really good engines, and that's starting to matter less and less.
Maybe. But here's the thing... most cars today feel completely lifeless.
Honda knows how to build an engine and wrap it in a car that actually makes you feel something. That still matters.
Anyone here driven an S2000?
It's still the best car I've ever owned. Light, raw, grippy, and genuinely fun -- every drive felt like an event, not just transportation. (And it was still an affordable car!)
They killed it around 2010. I've never found anything that captures that same feeling since, at any price point.
So yeah -- Honda will always have a place in my heart. When they want to, they build something truly special.
Here's one of their marketing films they can use to find inspiration again.
Japanese auto companies are so incredibly corrupt it's hilarious. Toyota has clear ties with terrorist organizations plus intentionally going out of their way to kill EVs with the whole hydrogen scam. And Honda right here trying to "kill" EVs as well.
The moment a battery without lithium comes out, legacy car engines are dead for good.
The biggest EV car is Tesla and they aren't good and tesla isn't a car company, its a finance comapny. Like Intel lost its edge because it became finance first engineering almost never. And no one wants a >$20k car. Disposable energy oil or not, manufacturers went nuts in 2020, and just kept pushing prices up and can't figure out why cars aren't selling.
BYD Auto is the worlds biggest, and their cars are affordable and their battery tech is evolving rapidly -- just recently announced batteries that can effectively recharge in the same time it takes to fill up one's gas tank.
They are an unstoppable force and we ignore them at our own peril.
I think this is a smart move, the EV boom is soon coming to and end. There is just not possible to make enough batteries or to deliver enough power, for all of us to drive electric.
Is it possible to deliver and store electricity in a more efficient way perhaps? Rumor has it that it does, but not in a way you can put a meter on :)
Yeah, it's impossible. Also, China is making them too cheap to compete with, and in such quantity that they're basically dumping them and flooding the market. We have to enact laws and trade barriers to keep them out, or else we'll be drowning in them. Plus don't forget it's impossible to make that many EVs in the first place.
You are right. We don't need more EVs. Lets get rid of cars completely and built cheap electrified public transport. Make ICE cars illiegal. Going all EV won't help the environment. Going all public transport would.
Even in places where public transportation is very good, no bus goes everywhere or all the time, and trains are still limited to very specific routes. Need to go to the supermarket to buy food for your whole family? Not very practical on a bus. Live in rough area and come home from work late at night? Perhaps a car is safer. And so on. And this is in a city, it's even worse in rural areas.
Even as someone that loves electric vehicles and uses public transportation a lot, it's hard to get behind these extreme "let's ban X and go all on Y" views. It ignores how things work in the real world.
Anything you need to plug into a power source is doomed to fail. EVs are simply not designed properly which is why hybrids are the best of both world. A Camry hybrid has some genius technology as the EV part is used at low speed and ICE at higher speed. That is the perfect balance and you see why it's a success for them. Toyota make the best hybrid vehicles. Honda makes hybrids too so they're not throwing all their EV technology into the e-waste bin.
Hybrids makes no sense, but to the smallest of customer segments.
They need to carry two engines, batteries and a gas tank, that makes them pretty bad at being both an EV and a ICE vehicle. They are to heavy, have to little battery capacity to be a good EV. The batteries and electric engines make them to heavy to get good fuel mileage as a gas powered car.
I've meet exactly one person for who they made sense. He could get to an from work on battery alone, but not much more and he needed the combustion engine to haul a trailer every now and then. If he could have waited a few years, he could just have gotten an EV that did the same.
There might be locations where hybrids makes more sense, but now that the range of EVs have gotten much better I think that list is slowly shrinking.
The thing that's weird to me is the focus on getting rid of diesel, because EVs and diesel cars are not at all competing. EVs can replace gas powered cars, in most cases (depending on your location), but they can't replace diesel. Need to drive 500km a day? Diesel is probably your best bet and EVs are completely out.
Whether or not your analysis is correct (I'd say not), the root problem is Chinese manufacturing dominance and unfair competitive advantage when it comes to EVs. It saddens me to say it, but the legacy car companies are unable to pivot and are likely doomed.
> Anything you need to plug into a power source is doomed to fail.
Totally disagree. One of the reasons I drive an EV is so I _can_ plug it in and never go to a gas station again. What a useless exercise and waste of my time, especially for a penny-pincher like me who would wait in like for 20 minutes at Costco for gas.
Plugging it in is why it is so awful. It takes ages to charge it and you don't get very much range for a full charge. Battery technology is so incredibly poor right now and EV manufacturers are just plain dumb until they make the body of the car harness the sun's rays.
For me it likely won't matter 98% of the time. I charge at home and already cap out my existing circuit and it's plenty fast for me (around 10% of range per hour).
For those not with an overnihht charging parking spot I can see the appeal though.
> until they make the body of the car harness the sun's rays.
The surface area of a car usable for solar panels is about 3 square meters. At the absolute best, when the stars align just right, you're going to get about 1 kW of power out of these panels.
In other words, barely enough to offset the auxiliary systems in the car (cooling pumps, lights, computers, etc.)
I have a 2016 Tacoma I bought in 2015. It has ~114k miles, so ~11k miles/year. Gas is 16-18gal/mi. It's paid off. There is no math, outside of major repairs (it's maintained regularly) where any Hybrid or EV makes sense for the next 10+ years. Maintenance ~ 250 a year; Tires ~12-1300 every 3 years (more due to age than wear). So - 11k/year w/ fuel at $5/gal and 16mi/gal - $3.4k in fuel, 600/year in maintenance and tires. So $4k/year in rough cost (excluding insurance). Still high, but I've lived in rural areas the last 10 years.
A new vehicle makes no sense. Unless I went a budget used Prius (with a good hybrid battery system). No plan to make changes.
Take care - the Hybrid battery can be expensive to replace and they do eventually fail. Note that Toyota changed from NiMH to LiIon 2017/18. I recently had to wreck an old Toyota Hybrid because replacing the dead battery was going to cost 2/3 of the value of the vehicle. Context: New Zealand.
> Take care - the Hybrid battery can be expensive to replace and they do eventually fail.
That is true, but median mileage at replacement for the old NiMH batteries is 150k miles (240k km), and the lithium cells have a median mileage at replacement of over 200k miles (320k km) - even though those cars are now 10 years old, not enough of them have reached that mileages, so exact data is still not available.
And don't get me wrong, those cars are bullet proof. Median total mileage of the car could be a bit higher than 150k miles, especially after the car was sold to a third world country. But for most intents and purposes, those batteries (especially the lithium cells) have about the same median lifetime than the car itself.
No thank you. Not sure why the author frames this as a good thing. They've been bamboozled by the automakers and have got it backwards - you're buying a vehicle that already has the capabilities, but are disabled, then paying rent (or a fee) to turn them on. I'm much more likely to buy from a manufacturer that doesn't play these games.
For this reason, I always avoid cars with big flashy LCD screens that are central to controlling the cars accessories like sunroof, AC and other electricals.
The other issue is support. So many models stop getting updates after 5 years. So, if there is a bug in that big screen, you have to live with it for the rest of the car's life.
Finally, there's the issue of privacy. Most manufacturers contract with analytics vendors to send your data back to them. You can't even turn it off. For example, MG (now chinese owned) has Adobe analytics embedded into their big screens. The only reason chinese love using Adobe over other vendors is because they aren't blocked in China. So that's usually a dead giveaway that your data is being sent back there.
What kind of data? You will be surprised.
1. How many people are inside the car at a given point (measuring laden weight)
2. What are your favorite spots (your home, office, restaurants, etc)
3. How many people live in your family (average laden weight over time)
4. Your favorite routes, highways
5. If you are married/have kids
6. If you're having an affair
7. Your annual income, monthly spend, estimated net worth
And a lot more data points that I can list here. Remember, they have access to additional data brokers to stitch a complete user profile about you too.
Some shops try to reverse engineer the modules and create clones, and that works a little bit, but it's a real problem. But that was for modules made in the early 2000s.
Now fast forward to today where the electronics is completely different and much less durable. You have basically PC motherboards being inserted into cars. I think people have not yet understood the implications of this in terms of their car's durability.
I've been talking to a guy with a 2007 Volvo and the upper electronics module failed -- it's in the rear-view mirror. Now, you can still drive that car, but he pulled one from a junkyard and tried to replace his -- now the CEM wont recognize the module. OK, with Volvo, you can crack the CEM pin and get it to accept the new module since the reverse engineering community has managed to figure that out.
But with modern cars? With the "software defined vehicle"? You are S.O.L.
When a mechanical part fails, you can fabricate a new part, and aftermarket vendors come and make replacement parts. But with software? The vendor isn't releasing the code. You can't make a replacement.
Now its just a tablet glued to some annoying location and no physical controls. Do you expect a tablet to last 20 years battery notwithstanding, the touch to be perfectly sensitive for so long? Most people don't, for good reasons.
You absolutely can. Pull the fuse of the cellular modem aka "telematics unit" or even completely remove it. Some vehicles don't have a separate fuse, in which case you will need to physically unplug the modem. Do your research and don't buy any car where this can't be done more or less painlessly.
So a typical internet advice - don't listen to it uncritically, or not at all.
I don't see the point to pay a premium for a new car (it's not a tool for my work) so I always buy second hand. My Citroën C3 from 2016 never upgraded to the new backward incompatible Android auto from the late 2010s. I bought it in 2020 and I wasn't able to connect to it with my phone from 2019 which came with the new Android auto. BTW iPhones could connect. Last time I checked was 2024.
This particular problem is not important because I put my phone in a holder close to my wheel and I get a better navigator than my car could ever be with its 3 colors LCD panel, but cars can last much more than phones and stopping support at any time during their lifetime could be a problem. I understand that supporting a 2016 car in 2036 could be a problem too, so just give us the mechanical part with the firmware of engine, brakes etc and the usual knobs and buttons. Each passenger has a personal infotainment system in their hands and spend their time liking at it with earpieces in their ears. No need to duplicate that in the car.
I'm past 130k km now so I'll be looking for another second hand car a few years from now. I'm afraid that it will be from the middle of the worst period of the car dashboards. Maybe I'll be partially saved by looking at a low price point.
I've often thought the touch screen should be replaced by a socket that accepts an iPad, and put the auto custom software on that. Why reinvent the hardware?
The last thing I need is Apple spying on me when I am driving.
I'm being a bit sarcastic but also not. I understand the sentiment of people here but also the 2 standards applied.
The power of a tablet is far more than is required for an infotainment system. Make a standard, like we used to have for radios and regulate everything to expose all the controls via a standard connection. Standard parts for replacing and sizes for fitting.
The only way we can have nice things is by regulating. I don't want proprietary tyres either.
Cheap? No. But not overly expensive all things considered.
As users we should also know better. All too often software is used to remove functionality from your things, or add unwanted ones. Even just adding ads. It's used as bait and switch and can make the thing you bought unfit for the job.
Car software comes with so many locks and it's intentionally made to not be serviceable by the user in any way. You can't tweak it, replace it, take one from another car. It's your car, the hardware part that does the same job is yours, but the software that replaces it isn't.
And at the end of the day almost no buyer buys a car for future promised software features. They buy it for existing features and new good ones are just welcome. If anything, the software is just used as an excuse to deliver a half baked product and have it bake over the years in the owner's hands, so at the end of the ownership maybe it's what was promised in the first place.
Also more unreliability, because software engineers often aren't real engineers.
> The other issue is support. So many models stop getting updates after 5 years. So, if there is a bug in that big screen, you have to live with it for the rest of the car's life.
The problem here is (probably) the internet, which gives management an excuse to slack on QA. If there was no chance to ever update the software, they'd probably do a better job. But now with the internet, they can say they'll just fix it in a patch later, but then never actually get around to doing that.
There ought to be a law that says car software may only be shipped on console-style non-flash ROM carts.
People feel that cars haven't really improved much in practical terms over the last 20 years. At least to the layman, they don't feel smoother, safer, more comfortable to drive. They just got more expensive, more cameras and crap like auto-start that no one asked for.
So at least the hope is to take some of the best parts of modern software manufacturing and apply it to the car. Tesla did this and is why it was the first successful car company that's been started in the past 50 years or so.
My wife has a 2015 Jeep Cherokee. For its purpose It’s actually quite a nice vehicle, sending aside concerns of mechanical reliability. But it also has many annoyances, and EVERY single one of them (with no exceptions) are software-defined bugs or behaviours, and all could all be improved with software updates. But legacy order has never cared about improving software after you bought the car.
For all of Tesla’s many faults, they one of the first automakers where it feels like the software is not abandonware. It’s a positive trend and it’s nice to see a few other manufacturers following suit.
Legacy brands do significantly improve software as the model evolves, and provide firmware updates to earlier models. The best car is probably the last one before a new platform step change.
Tesla has also pioneered putting large amounts of software in mission critical compute like instrument displays and touch screens, disregarding decades of careful evolution in HMI and TCB design. There is so much wrong with their cars without even touching their autonomy system, a proven killer.
By contrast, the Tesla software stack is (or appears to be based on a few minutes of research) shockingly straightforward considering its apparent complexity. Rather than being a hodge-podge of vendor software, it appears to be Qt-based software running within a Linux environment on Nvidia and/or Intel chipsets. If there's a bloat issue, it'd be interesting to hear some specifics.
As for your quip about "decades of careful evolution in HMI and TCB design" you might have been right 20–30 years ago.
My own car is a 2013 BMW 125i. Its software stack received a handful of very simple quality-of-life improvements in 2014. The clearest example is the on-screen volume overlay. As delivered, my car’s volume knob provided absolutely no visual feedback.
If you ask nicely, BMW dealership can update it. But that's not enough. The way BMW "codes" your vehicle after a software update means that any features introduced after its date of manufacture are disabled. So even after I had the dealer install newer software (to fix a crashing bug with navigation) the volume overlay didn’t appear. What I ended up having to do was "recode" the ECU with a new delivery date. Literally all I did was change the delivery date in a pirated copy of BMW E-Sys, push the change to the car, and the overlay appeared like magic.
> The only difference between a Tesla and an economy car from Stellantis is whether the software is well written or not.
Is that actually true? I mean, assume I have access to all software in the world and all IP lawyers got kidnapped by aliens - could I just write a software for Stellantis Economy to turn it into Tesla (or vice versa)? I don't think so.
That's a disingenuously literal misinterpretation of what I said. I wasn't saying that a Tesla and some economy car are identical, only that they have in common the characteristic of being defined at their core by software. It should go without saying that software alone can't turn a Cherokee into a Model Y for the same reason that software alone can't turn a HomePod into an Apple Watch.
But there's an obvious difference between a good software experience and a poor one. Like in my wife's Cherokee, how the radio always turns on every time you start the car, no matter what you do. Like how the digital speedometer is completely concealed by any warning text that appears. Like how all window controls stop working as soon as any passenger opens their door after stopping the engine. This is all software, and I write this in response to rkagerer saying "no thank you" to cars getting meaningful software updates.
And then your car's manufacturer chooses to use the update mechanism to modify the center console screen to serve ads[1] while you're driving. (… and switch.)
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/subaru/comments/1p57ohp/these_ads_s...
Advertisers need to be regulated.
No, you're combining "there can be updates" and "there will be subscriptions, always-online and enshittification" as if it wasn't splittable.
It is. It can. It will be.
As long as there are people making purchasing decisions, no ship will ever sail. This is just passive HN fatalism as we know and resent it; probably a survival tactic to not go insane in the SV (or any large corp).
It took decades for people to land on - in fairness some times very handwavy -generalizations like "Japanese cars are reliable", "German cars are well built", "French cars are...french".
All this is now on its head. The landscape changes very quickly and you don't even recognize the brands. A Chinese maker of vacuum cleaners might have sold more cars than VW in 2025 and yet you never heard of them. A reputable car manufacturer like Honda could be a complete novice when it comes to EVs and so on.
Even though software is extremely important for how cars work, we still don't have easy comparisons. It's mentioned in reviews/tests of cars, but it's mostly "Yeah it feels snappy and modern, 7/10" and no real meat in the comparison. I wish there was an WLTP comparison scheme for car software which made it easy to compare.
Right now I don't need a new car, but if I did, it would be a Tesla for literally no reason other than their track record of delivering substantial software updates to existing customers for free, with no subscription requirement and none of the usual dealership nonsense or corporate shenanigans.
This is very much not what "software-defined vehicle" means which itself is very much not the same thing as EVs. It's possible to criticize the explotative business practices you mentioned (or bad UI practices like moving everything to a touchscreen instead of physical buttons) without linking them to other issues that have no real relation beyond falling under the general category of "technology".
At a societal level, EVs are generally better than ICE cars. At a societal level, cars that can automatically fix a "recall" with an over-the-air update are generally better than recalls that will wait to get fixed until an owner schedules an appointment to have the car serviced. These two things can be true without endorsing automakers who charge and extra fee to activate the seat warmers that already exist in the vehicle.
it's not a complaint about capitalism. It's a complaint about asymmetric bargaining power in the seller/buyer relationship.
That's not inherent in capitalism. It's inherent in an anti-competitive market. The failure is in gov't making sure there's sufficient regulation to prevent monopolistic practises.
This may not be a problem inherent to capitalism, but it certainly is a problem caused by the capitalism we currently have (by which I'm specifically referring to the US, but it may apply more broadly elsewhere).
And the government's failure to adequately regulate the market is due to the right. The party that claims government doesn't work has repeatedly - for generations - run on this as their platform, and when in power, they ensure it doesn't work by continued regulatory capture and gutting of consumer protections.
Criticising our entire economic system tends to have very little effect. Criticising specific poor business practices and/or technologies that enable them has a much better chance of improving people's lives.
I think its actively counterproductive. Criticising the entire economic system doesn't do anything. Complaining in broad strokes about stuff you can't change reduces your sense of agency over the world.
Also, if people believe that businesses must be sociopathic, they will make sociopathic choices in business. The belief reinforces the problem.
This kind of attitude is like saying "I don't want software that updates on my PC" when you are actually complaining about SaaS products.
For "capitalism" without other qualifications, there are no alternatives. The so-called socialist or communist economies have always lied by pretending that they are not capitalist. In fact all such economies were the extreme form of monopolistic capitalism.
Towards the end of the nineties of the previous century, a huge wave of acquisitions and mergers has started and it has never stopped since then.
Because of this, to my dismay, because I have grown in a country occupied by communists so I know first hand how such an economy works, the economies of USA and of all the other western countries have begun to resemble more and more every year with the socialist/communist economies that were criticized and ridiculed here in the past.
While the lack of competition and its consequences are very similar, in some respect the current US and western economies are even worse than the former socialist/communist economies. At least those had long-term plans. While those plans were frequently not as successful as claimed, they at least realized from time to time useful big infrastructure projects.
The main role of the laws and of the state must be the protection of the weak from the powerful, for various definitions of weakness and power, to prevent the alternative of attempting to solve such inequalities by violent means, when everybody loses.
Therefore there must be a balance between the economic freedom of the private companies and the regulation of their activities.
It is obvious that in USA such a balance has stopped existing long ago and the power of the big companies is unchecked, to the detriment of individuals and small/medium companies.
The US legislators spend most of their time fighting for the introduction of more and more ridiculous laws, which are harmful for the majority of the citizens, while nobody makes the slightest attempt to conceive laws that would really protect the consumers against the abusive practices that have now spread to all big companies.
If it emerged under communism, it probably would be equally as bad. I imagine if it emerged under communism or socialism it would be designed to solve a similar problems: securing the needs of the state against the citizen.
The economies of all countries that claimed to be socialist or communist were the extreme form of monopolistic capitalism.
Because nowadays the economy of USA resembles more and more every year to that of the socialist countries from the past, a non-negligible risk has appeared for the personal computer to become an endangered species.
The prices of personal computers and of their components have been increasing steadily during the last decade, long before the current wave of extreme price increases.
There is a steadily increasing pressure from big companies and from the governments controlled by them to eliminate true ownership of computers and of many other electronic devices, by introducing more and more restrictions for what owners can do with their PC/smartphone and by introducing more and more opportunities for others to control those devices remotely.
Many kinds of computing devices have eliminated their low-price models and they are offered now only in models so expensive as to be affordable only for big businesses, not for individuals or SMEs.
Ten years ago, I could still buy various kinds of professional GPUs with high FP64 throughput and any model of Intel Xeon server CPUs.
Nowadays I can choose to buy only high-end desktop CPUs for my servers, because the state-of-the-art server CPUs and datacenter GPUs now have 5-digit prices. NVIDIA, Intel and AMD see only big businesses as customers for such products, and they no longer offer any smaller SKUs in these categories (Intel nominally offers a few cheap Xeons, but those are so crippled that they are not worth for anything else but for enabling the testing of some server systems).
So in the kind of unregulated capitalism that exists today in USA, PCs would not have appeared and there is a risk for them to disappear, because they have become a relict of the past.
I'd love to buy an ad-free, subscription-free, tracking-free, touchscreen-free car.
People demand connectivity, big screens and lots of software.
Haed disagree. You've been bamboozled, too.
Recalls of any kind are a signal to me the vehicle shipped half-baked. I'd rather have the car with slightly older features that took a little longer to release, but got it right before leaving the factory floor. Or at least the one with sufficient isolation between safety-critical and convenience features that recalls like those you describe are low priority enough to not be urgent.
Man. HN. This goddamn platform
Maybe? At least in my experience, once the cost of patching buggy software goes down, it typically means that the people become more willing to ship software with more bugs with a fix it later attitude.
If an over-the-air patch can have that kind of impact, then what happens if security is compromised and that power is used for ill?
Changing: if (brakeDepressed()){ engageBrake(); } To: if (brakeDepressed() && currentTime < '5/6/26 4pm EST'){ engageBrake(); } Can be deployed to thousands of vehicles, and would stop brakes from working during peak commute time on the East Coast.
This is blatantly false. In the real world there was a major recall after security researchers (not state actors) demonstrated that they could remotely interfere with safety critical systems. OTA updates without user involvement are a massive security vulnerability. So are internet connected safety critical systems. Neither should be legally permissible IMO.
> I just don't think getting every Honda to crash at 4pm is a vulnerable enough attack vector to make this hypothetical worthy of much thought.
Setting aside assassinations do you just have no imagination? There have been all sorts of crazy disgruntled worker sabotage stories over the years. Mass shooters exist. Political and religious terrorists exist.
For a specific mass scale state level hypothetical imagine that the US enters a hot war with a peer adversary for whatever reason. The next day during the morning commute the entire interstate system grids to a halt, the hospitals are completely overwhelmed, and the entire supply chain collapses for a week or so while we pick up the pieces. With a bit of (un)luck it might happen to catch an oil tanker in the crossfire while it was in a tunnel thereby scoring infrastructure damage that would take years to fix.
Sometimes when I look at code it feels like I was led into a weird surprise party celebrating structure and correctness, only for everyone to jump out as soon as I get past the door to shout, “Just kidding - it’s the same old bullshit!” All that to say, we’re about as good or worse as anyone else, at our respective jobs.
>the only real fear here is a state-level attack
Why isn't this a valid concern? We should just be fine with russia or china having the ability to remotely hack all of our cars and kill/spy on individuals, even critical members of our leadership? What about our own government? What about some terrorist launching formerly state-level malware from his basement with the help of AI?
Conversely, a lot of times people don't fear real dangers of reality until it bites them. "Hackers wouldn't care about me, and the single password I use on every website is super good and complicated."
> but people generally don't engage in destruction for destruction's sake
Generally true, but they do engage in destruction when there's profit to be made or when it becomes in their geopolitical interests, and sometimes that destruction is quite notable: Remember when it was safe to assume that passengers could passively wait out airplane hijackings?
Your average script-kiddie might not seriously consider cutting everyone's brakes simultaneously, Al Queda would have been giddy.
I yearn for the days of wrapped software where developers had to make a gold pressed release. Not, “we can patch it later”.
In fact, with all this data they are collecting, you wouldn't even need to be the next edward snowden to get this treatment. You could set the firmware to target, say, every left-wing voter in america.
You don't even need the own the car with such behavior. Everyone becomes a pedestrian eventually.
Cite your sources, please
> cars that can automatically fix a "recall" with an over-the-air update are generally better than recalls that will wait to get fixed until an owner schedules an appointment to have the car serviced.
If a "recall" can be fixed via software, doesn't that mean just shitty software to begin with? And that usually happens only when a car is infested with tons of software - proving the exact opposite of why we need less software inside cars?
On recalls -- like the one that said that individual icons have to be slightly bigger? Yeah, shitty software.
Or the one that made Tesla annoy drivers with a smaller timeout? That was actually a safety issue --- people would turn off FSD to adjust something and then turn it back on again. Much, much less safe.
Cite my sources for what exactly?
> that they're not.
You made an assumption about something I never said and used that as the base of your argument to make a point.
I didn't say anything, I simply asked them to cite a source for that kind of a grandiose claim. If you make a claim like that without citation(s), the onus to prove it lies on the person making the said claim, not on me to disprove it.
we need sources for the fact an electric motor, all other things being equal, is better than a combustion engine? If you agree that people in general value the health of their lungs that alone is sufficient reason.
It's also becoming quickly a question of geopolitical resilience, running your transport system on dinosaur juice coming from regions where people blow each other up is bad in particular if you happen to be Japanese automaker Honda
This is not the core argument. Motors maybe superior - we can agree on that. The power source (batteries) and the environmental impact they have - that has always been the core argument. [1]
Again, without sources, these are just opinions.
Sources:
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30046087/
> Ten years left to redesign lithium-ion batteries
> Reserves of cobalt and nickel used in electric-vehicle cells will not meet future demand. Refocus research to find new electrodes based on common elements such as iron and silicon, urge Kostiantyn Turcheniuk and colleagues.
I notice that the article was published in 2018. So I guess we only have to wait two more years to decide if it's right or not. Will we be out of cobalt and nickel by then? I'd be happy to take a bet with you, assuming you stand by the article you cited.
Full article, for others: https://sci-hub.ru/10.1038/d41586-018-05752-3
My background is global geophysical exploration, primarily for mineral resources with some dabbling in the energy domain.
For a single example, this passage:
is entirely emotive, intended to tug on feelings (which it does) but otherwise it has no bearing on the bulk of major mining that contributes to bulk of mineral processing.The tonnes of nickel and cobalt we see largely comes from big mines, big trucks, formal Occ Health and Safety regulations, etc.
It also commits the usual mistake of confusing "just in time" exploration results that firm up suspected deposits with sizes and density estimates for the commodities of interest with absolute limits on what is available over the cycle of time.
As demand increases further areas that are "known" (but not measured) get further technical inspection (magnetics, drill sampling, etc) and become new fresh reserves.
Experience with boxed versus updatable software, particularly video games, says otherwise. When it costs a lot for the manufacturer to fix defects, they put more emphasis on not having them in the first place. Otherwise we just just a parade of defects all the time. Even if it's minor things and never fixed, the user can adapt; that's not possible in the face of continuous updates.
> when the antique needs maintenance.
You're talking about all the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, et al cars, tracks and tractors that litter our district? Yeah - there are a lot of them in this part of the world.
All the farmers love the bleeding edge gear and are getting into AgBot boom sprayers, etc - but they still can't shake a love of keeping the really old stuff going - pimped up rat-trucks abound and we rebuilt an old Alice Chambers tractor ourselves two years back.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antique_vehicle_registration
No, it isn't - you missed:
I am well aware that the vehicle I own and drive is normally registered as a normal vehicle and is not treated as an antique.What we do have, here in W.Australia, is a limited usage "Classics" rego for vehicles 30 years or older.
Reduced rates for enforced (but how??) reduced usage:
Classics (not antiques!) are beloved cars kept road ready but only occassionally used on public roads.* https://www.wa.gov.au/government/media-statements/Cook-Labor...
* https://www.transport.wa.gov.au/licensing/concessions/classi...
This doesn't have anything to do with EV vs ICE, but whether it has a over the air updates and whether the problem can be fixed with a software update or not. I expect car recalls are pretty well into the noise in terms of "societal level" problems too aren't they? Even if they were not I expect whole "software defined car" thing, whatever that really means, has not resulted in mechanical defects plummeting, but rather just more software defects. Although it is quite possible EVs have less defects in general than ICE cars I suppose.
There’s an argument to be made that this allows better integration between subsystems, and therefore a better user experience.
We have a vehicle built this way. It is a death trap. Most of its safety issues can’t really be blamed on it using a new computer network technology. For instance, if it is dawn or dusk (so, commute hours) the vision systems get flaky and it likes to override steering and brakes to force itself into oncoming or merging traffic.
However, one issue is firmly due to it being a software defined vehicle.
If you are changing lanes with the turn signal on, and hit a bump while the passenger adjusts the stereo volume, they’ll accidentally turn the hazard lights on. Af that point the steering override will kick in and try to force abort the lane change.
A normal car wouldn’t be able to wire the hazards into the power steering subsystem, and also probably wouldn’t have the button be part of the radio control panel.
I chalk it up to poorly designed software from a company where software isn't the core competency, rather than blaming the basic concept of putting software in a vehicle.
"Bad software is bad" doesn't have the same ring though...
The enshitification of the car.
Who cares, because they are now connected to the internet and can be updated with links at effective speeds higher than 10kbps, and without having to go to the dealer.
This is one of those times I'll trust the judgement of the grey haired execs who actually have all the numbers, over the plucky young journalist who's just spouting an editorial opinion. (Nothing against the latter, I just think in this specific case they're naive and dead wrong).
Why honda is killing EVs is directly related to just how damn cheap Chinese EVs have become and how stupid Americans are when it comes to EV efficiency. Who the hell wants large vehicles for EV when the best solutions are small efficient vehicles with long drive times.
Americans distort the market and margins, and Honda was never in the large SUV game.
(The Honda Pilot and Honda Passport stare at you, with deep resentment)
Driving a tiny little Japanese/Chinese import in, say, Oklahoma is asking to get literally run over.
What kills me are the MASSIVE vehicles in the suburbs though. Why do you need a 3 ton suburban to drive around 2 kids on very clear, very well maintained streets? Why would you buy a 4x4 truck when the most off road you'll do is driving over wet leaves on your cul-de-sac in the fall?
2. You're on a site with a bunch of programmers who regularly use weird words for stuff that already has a name. Reading through HN is wading through a swamp of made up names and tech neologisms, you're just used to it already. I once told a software guy that our team's SWEs had migrated away from React and Node to Stork.JS and Blackadder. He nodded like that meant anything.
3. I like it and you can't stop me.
Ongoing subscriptions for access to physical hardware features like seat warmers* seems obnoxious at first glance, but a fee is more reasonable and you might find that there aren’t many auto makers that don’t do this or aren’t planning on it. BTW there’s very little in software or electronics that doesn’t do this, and many other consumer products do too. What might be less visible is how often the hardware is included and made trivial for a dealer to upgrade but doesn’t have a remote software unlock. It’s the same thing and it’s been happening for decades, but gets less outrage.
You would have paid a fee for the feature if it wasn’t included. Focusing on features being there already and locked being somehow “bamboozles” isn’t necessarily the right way to frame this, even from a pro-consumer perspective. This practice of building the high end model and locking some features behind a paywall makes the design and manufacturing cheaper for everyone by having only one design. The paywall model suggests that the design costs are more important than the manufacturing or materials costs of these features. That’s absolutely true for software apps, and it’s accepted by and large and we don’t feel like that’s a skeezy game. It doesn’t surprise me at all that with manufacturing at a global scale, it makes more sense to build one model and lock some features with software.
Do think of the potential benefits we get from this model - overall lower prices (in theory) from simplified design and manufacturing; the ability to upgrade later after you buy (or even downgrade if you don’t like it and it’s a subscription).
* AFAIK the BMW seat warmers subscription was a rumor at one point, got a bunch of online uproar, but didn’t actually happen? I’m not sure if anyone has actually done this.
<START AI SLOP>
Manufacturing one hardware setup and charging separately for features is not the problem. The problem is charging ongoing rent for a feature that isn't an ongoing service. A seat heater doesn't use a server, need content updates, or create meaningful recurring costs for the manufacturer after the car is sold. It shifts the relationship from ownership to permission. It also creates bad incentives: features can be removed later, tied to accounts, complicated for second owners, or turned into endless monetization opportunities.
<END AI SLOP>
I’m not personally into paying subscription upgrades, I tend to avoid them. But the one case where I could see potential for consumer benefit is when there’s a choice between a high upfront fee or a low subscription price. I would assume a subscription price over time will cost more than the upfront fee. However, there’s an argument to be made for lower cost access, for smaller barrier to entry for the upgrade, especially if it can be discontinued if the customer doesn’t find enough value.
There was a motorcycle airbag jacket that offered this choice and was discussed on HN maybe a year or two ago. People were, of course, freaking out about a safety feature being tied to a subscription, and I can totally understand the fear, but the rhetoric around it didn’t match what the actual product offered, and the company was offering the choice between flat fee and monthly fee, not demanding a rent-seeking only option. Personally I think most of the ick feeling of a subscription idea goes away for me if it’s not the only option.
The air is clean. For sure some of this is because it's a coastal city and has fresh sea breezes, but I've been in other Chinese coastal cities in times past and the air was significantly less clean.
There are social upsides for an almost-all-EV city.
This is an 18m person city. It's not exclusively wealthy people, its just a city with a very high local EV population and it shows.
same tires (actually a little harder due to being LRR tires) same brakes (that get used significantly less thanks to regenerative braking)
it's a wrong argument, but it's still circulated in groups of factually-challenged people
True enough, the last time I have been in HK I was surprised to see less smog and overall less pollution.
The most noticable change which puzzled me where those big boxes with slots in all restaurants and grocery shops, which are rental powerbanks.
Other than these hardly anything changed, policemen in police station smoked right under no smoking sign and in that half an hour in their office I inhaled more secondary smoke than in years in Europe combined. To their credit they were as laid back as policemen in my small home town. Beijing province border checks are more strict, but they still let us go without registered accommodation on weekend.
Oh yeah, out of dozens restaurants we frequented ONE fancy hot pot restaurant had robot bringing over plates.
Plus Taobao/Tmall seems replaced now with Pinduoduo with super cheap purchases (think double the Alibaba/factory price) including free shipping.
Mutianyu great wall is now fully mainstream, everyone (99%) now use cable car instead of hiking uphill, before it felt at least 50:50, people got lazy.
Ah yeah, everywhere you go you need to present passport and sometimes also book ticket in advance, so from tourist standpoint it's worse, before you could just show up same visit major sights in Beijing even without passport.
You're right about the smoking, though. It's a massive problem.
are NEV common? sure. do BEV make majority of cars on the road? for sure not
there are basically none scooters, they use either (e)bikes or electric motorbikes/mopeds (these are not new, they used them en masse already 10 years ago)
Do the local mockingbirds sing the song of the car alarm? That one is pretty complex.
The heavier EV's are causing genuinely harmful particles simply by driving on the roads themselves.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-11/why-oslo-...
[2] https://www.iqair.com/us/norway/oslo/oslo
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235198942...
Shenzhen is not nearly "almost-all EV" city. There is a lot of wealthy people and almost none of them drives EV. You can see all expensive cars are ICE (blue plates).
Modern ICE cars emit almost no sound or emissions. Its not 70s with black smoke coming from exhaust pipes.
You can take any densely populated city with almost none EV vehicles (say Tokyo) and you can hear birds and air would be very clean.
The main thing keeping the air clean here is the proximity to the bay, along with the fact that there just aren't that many private cars in the first place, since most people take public transit and don't drive because there's nowhere to park.
Amount of private cars in Tokyo is huge. Pollution near expressways in rural japan far from bays is next to nothing, so having it close to ocean does help a little.
Small motorbike/scooters are not allowed on expressways.
you should tell china.
https://www.electrive.com/2026/01/23/year-end-surge-electric...
ICE cars have been planned out for years now, and something like 96% of all new cars in Norway were EV last year.
Basically, if you plan on keeping selling ICE cars, you're removing yourself from the market here. There's no future for new personal ICE cars here.
I figure most other countries will be the same.
It is the top EV market.
> I figure most other countries will be the same.
Most other countries are not Norway, it is a very wealthy, tiny market (150 K vehicles/year) with lots of hydro and not representative of the typical vehicle market in Western Europe and definitely not representative of the situation in the rest of the world.
EVs are the future, there is no doubt about that. But that future will not arrive everywhere at the same point in time and Norway is very far ahead of the rest of the world due to a fairly unique set of circumstances: exporting your own oil and gas to be able to have a 'clean' (and up to recently heavily subsidized) transportation network is in a way just a gigantic bookkeeping trick.
How so?
If every oil exporter used some of their oil revenue to switch to EVs, that would, all things equal, hasten the transition to EVs. The U.S. is not doing that.
Saudi Arabia started moving the electrical system to renewables where USA is doubling down on fossil fuels.
Saudi Arabia is the drug dealer that knows you don't consumer your own supply unless you must were the USA consumes the crack they sell.
My next vehicle will 100% be pure EV, not Tesla.
So true. There's nothing incompatible at all with: a) realizing that earth has gifted you with a valuable but limited & polluting energy source b) realizing that you'd be foolish to get you own country hooked on it, but it's not a bad business if you can get other countries hooked on it.
Instead we get oil rich areas seemingly determined to show off how much of their oil they can waste.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Jamal_Khashog...
The US’s interest in the Middle East oil is a lot about stabilizing oil prices. At least it used to be when there was a rational policy and competent executors.
The US has vast reserves of coal and natural gas. We generally don't use oil to generate power either -- oil is something like 0.4% of the total power generated, because we have vast amounts of natural gas and coal to use instead.
The situation isn't the result of some crafty master plan on the part of the Saudis. It's jusut what makes sense.
Instead they seem to be in a cycle of buying massive inefficient vehicles and then getting annoyed at gas prices.
Oil is 2/5ths of US energy use.
As other countries move to reliance on Chinese rare earth processing for renewable technology, it drives their oil and gas consumption down which means more oil and gas for those who are still using it.
If you really want to look at this analogy about drug dealers then really what you see is that America is the big boss here and an energy and military super power, and Saudi Arabia is just another dealer under American protection and if they don’t do what we tell them to do they’ll get the boot.
The premise is all things aren't equal. The oil Norway would have used just gets used somewhere else so what difference does it make what Norway does instead. I don't know if that's the reality of the situation but if it is just an offset, it does sound like a bookkeeping trick doesn't it?
Norway exporting oil increases oil supply, but doesn't increase consumption. The world's oil consumers are not supply-constrained; the producers are not running at 100% capacity, and they'll happily pick up the slack if Norway just stopped exporting oil for no reason. And there's a large amount of consumption that can't be offset by electrification in the first place (petrochemicals, long distance flight, etc) so there's not even a theoretical future end-state where they require a non-EV-using counterparty to buy their oil to fund their EV usage.
Calling it a "bookkeeping trick" is just verbal sleigh-of-hand.
Oil hasn't been supply constrained since the 50's, it's price is largely based on what producing countries agree on, as well as geopolitics.
Additionally, governments levy a decent amount of taxes on certain end products such as gasoline. They might very well, as they have in the past, decide to simply up their tax revenue as prices of crude and derivatives go down.
Consider if others followed their lead. Then oil would be used less for transportation, one of its most destructive and singular uses, and more for manufacturing or medical or less wasteful uses.
Speaking of bookkeeping tricks: Kneecapping renewable energy (wind), cancelling the EV future in the US, and then starting a war in the strait of hormuz will someday be acknowledged as the finest moment of the oil industry, maximizing profit in the face of all reason.
And across Europe BEVs are also about twice as popular as PHEVs. In 2025 2.6 million BEVs were sold in Europe compared to 1.3 million PHEVs. It seems the biggest deciding factor is how good the public charging network is.
Sources:
https://bilmagasinet.dk/bil-nyheder/hvor-mange-elbiler-er-de... (Danish)
https://bilmagasinet.dk/bil-nyheder/saa-meget-steg-salget-af... (Danish)
https://www.tradingpedia.com/forex-brokers/global-demand-for...
It doesnt have to be - bigger battery strictly-series EREVs would likely show better numbers than the weak-ev phevs sold today.
PHEVs in a world that includes externalities in the cost of fuel will be used in EV mode more. Same vehicle different outcome.
Currently it's a mishmash with some countries penalizing electricity use while subsidizing fuel sales in lots of different little ways.
In general it's trending in the right direction though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
Most countries are quite poor and/or have small populations and aren't buying many vehicles period.
About ~45% of countries have smaller populations than Norway, and Norway is in the top ~25% of countries by size of the auto market...
Most countries are not the China and India, yet they make up almost 45% of the global population.
The US and China make up about 45% of the auto market...
There's a lot of European, Asian, and Latin American countries that have more in common with Norway than they do with the US or China or India.
For automobiles, the future comes very slowly.
That was true five years ago, but no longer-Algeria, the last country to allow it, banned leaded petrol in 2021 - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-58388810
AFAICT it would still be legal for the place on the bypass near me to sell leaded fuel but they don't because (a) the market is too small, not worth it and (b) as a result wholesalers don't offer the product, so if they wanted to sell it they can't get it anyway.
This EU directive banned the sale of leaded petrol in the UK on 1 January 2000.
I was suffering every day I was driving it. Smog is insane everywhere.
per-capita or by total volume? i ask because a sibling or child comment says that the number of cars sold in norway is pretty small (in part because the population is small). a quick google says 180k cars sold in norway in 2025 (we can round up to 100% EV) and 34M sold in China. It also says China has 50% EV sales. So by total volume Norway isn't close to the top.
Not really. Even in a hypothetical future where all road vehicles are electric, we'll still need fossil fuels for a while. For one thing, it's probably going to be a while before airplanes can go electric. And production of plastics will probably need petroleum for a long time.
(Personally I am fine driving a 10 year old shit box because for me it is just a means of going from A to B and rather spend my money on other things)
As for doing the maintenance myself, I don't have experience with this kind of car at all, I've worked a lot on classic Mini's, Citroens (2CV and DS) and Austin Maxi. But never anything like this so I'm more than happy to let someone else earn a buck on it. But it's been pretty cheap to run so far, fuel, oil, regular service and once a control arm that got bent out of shape.
Compared to a new vehicle I'm considerably better off.
This is often mentioned but is not relevant.
In terms of cost, what matters is whether an equally good (for whatever metrics a car is "good" to you) replacement car will cost less or more.
Yes, it has an ECU and ooh, gollies there is software in that. But it's completely invisible from an interaction point of view, there are no screens, all the buttons just do what they are told, there are no 'upgrades', no bugs, interfaces, restarts and attempts to kill me through 'assistance'.
It’s entirely possible to get around without smartphones or paper maps. There are road signs, written directions, verbal directions. The main time I used to use a paper map was driving long distance trips in a foreign country.
https://www.quadlockcase.com.au/products/bike-mount
Of course something to note is the absolute number of cars sold, which has dropped dramatically at least here in Finland. Most people who are priced out of new EV market simply don't buy any new car at all, and the average age of cars is climbing fast. Either way, few people are looking for new ICE vehicles. No point buying outdated tech new, when the used car market has perfectly good ICE vehicles that perform just the same.
American/European car makers realized there is a large class of people who are wealthy and will buy a high end EV for status reasons, and started chasing that market instead.
Unfortunately, infrastructure need to improve a lot before the switch may happen.
Ford claims there’s no market for “expensive” $60-70K trucks in the US, but go to any Ford dealership in the bay area, and they’ll have used ICE Ford trucks that cost that much.
(And I don’t mean the giant specialty super duty trucks — these are tricked out suburban kid transporters that look like they’ve never seen a camp ground, let alone a Home Depot).
Anyway, the Lightning was a fantastic model line. I hope someone else builds quarter ton EV trucks moving forward. I’m rooting for Rivian and Slate.
I am living in a working class neighborhood of apartment buildings in West-central Europe with average to below average earners, and there's zero EVs parked here on the streets, basically 90% of people have old diesel cars. Only when you go towards the suburbs with rich(inherited wealth) people living in single family homes you see everyone has an EV.
The distinction is quite clear, do you live in a house or have your own parking space and possibility to install your own charger? Then EV 100% no brainer. Otherwise people stick to ICE.
Tell me you don't bring any mobile device when you ride/drive a car.
To give you some perspective, the most popular EV in China costs $6000 (Wuling Mini). New. The second most popular costs $10000 (Geely Xingyuan). I tried both, and they are far less crappy than they have the right to be. They are cheap cars for sure, but they're perfectly adequate for regular use.
And Geely Xingyuan has a 40kWh battery in the basic configuration! This is utterly ridiculous for a car that is _that_ cheap.
So China basically murdered the global ICE market. It's gone. There's no going back. Once China figures out the logistics and sales, ICE vehicles will be dead in all of the less affluent countries. Especially because EVs combine almost too perfectly with solar generation.
BMW used to, but broke it on the i4, and presumably all the newer ones. Kia’s implementation is completely broken.
I ask, because that’s the number one thing I’ll check for with future EV purchases, and it’s purely software.
The Geely did not come to a complete stop on regen braking, I had to use the brake pedal for the final ~5 km/h. Perhaps there was a setting to override this, but I did not check.
The worst (which is what most brands are moving to in the US) is when it’s completely unpredictable. Basically, half the time, the car unexpectedly accelerates from a stop, or fails to engage regen.
On some cars, they even tie regen to a camera, so regen works well unless you are on a curve or cresting a hill. In those situations, the car accelerates or fails to slow down.
Perhaps that's why we never hear about Norwegian car culture (as opposed to Germany and the US). Ferdinand Porsche would have resigned to building apple carts.
Car culture is getting killed everywhere because safety and comfort by far outweigh fun in gov priorities but I'm literally considering the US because I'll be able to drive whatever I want. Good luck finding someone running nitrous on the street in Europe nowadays, stretched bikes, engine swaps, etc. It all comes with administrative fees, a lot is forbidden and even if your documents are in order you'll get in trouble because police officers are not qualified or incentivized to deal with severely modified vehicles.
The only thing gas does better is higher range and quicker fill ups.
That is irrelevant unless Norway has unused capacity.
If a country adds electric cars using more electric power, then what really matters is how that extra power is generated.
It gets weird in Europe because adding extra load in Norway could easily mean that Poland does more generation using coal.
I'm in New Zealand where the government owned generators are preventing solar installations. One example was via an unobvious regulation that the installation had to handle massively overengineered earthquake rules. Meanwhile we use coal or imported gas when the isn't enough rain for our hydro. And we waste about 10% of our total capacity exporting (via one aluminium plant).
Out of interest, do you mean 6% of cars on the road of 6% of new cars sold last year?
I think for much of the population a brand new EV is simply too expensive.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/16/plug-in-...
https://electrek.co/2026/02/19/biggest-study-yet-shows-plug-...
As alliao says, this is partly because of the way road user charges (RUC) currently work, though that is slated to change in the future.
They’re mostly big, and compete with 20mpg models. At $4/gallon, you’ll spend $40K on gasoline to drive a new ICE car 200K miles. The EV premium is typically $10-20K. These are all luxury cars, so a trimline upgrade is often $10K.
EVs have particularly poor resale value (the technology improves rapidly), so if you’re price sensitive you can get a much better deal by buying something a few years old.
In places where competition is allowed, EVs are much cheaper than ICE. That’ll eventually be true in most places. If NZ lets the Chinese models in, I’d expect them to take over immediately.
I can't imagine why NZ doesn't allow Chinese EVs in already like Australia has. I would guess it isn’t really about restriction but rather the smaller size of the market.
Although curiously, Nissan has stopped selling us the Leaf.
What is a hydro energy resource, a river? Don't lots of countries have rivers?
(If we're talking about hydroelectric power plants they've chosen to build, that's not exactly a resource -- and other countries could choose to build those too, right?)
A river winding along a flat plain is not a hydro energy resource. A river in the same valley as your capital city is not a hydro energy resource.
Some big slow moving river in a flat land on the other hand is not helping you here.
Their hydro energy company is an aluminum company company, they have so much slack power they export it refining bauxite.
It is worth repeating solar panels covering an area about the size of NH generate enough power to supply all current entire US energy needs.
Growing up in America I have memories of our roadside snowbanks becoming black and saturated by vehicle exhaust and it always felt so gross to me. The back half of winter was characterized by blackened, salt-saturated puddles and banks. I wonder if the prevalence of EVs has made things less dirty in the winter.
Recent studies have shown significant reductions in mortality starting at 5-10% EV market share.
The dominant cause of that is probably brake and tire particulate matter, not car exhaust. And EVs make tire pollution go up (because they're heavier) and brake pollution... I'm not sure if the weight effect there is counteracted by the decreased amount of friction brake use (as opposed to resistance braking).
In either case it's a good physical representation of how much particulate we are exposed to every day. Maybe having it trapped in dirty snowbanks is better than having it getting kicked up into the air during a dryer season.
https://www.eiturbanmobility.eu/press-corner/nees-are-the-ma...
The net effect is a massive reduction in dust and particulates.
Some modern tire additives are incredibly toxic to fish. They’ve been banned in the EU, but for the very special corner case of driving in sensitive watersheds in the US, it’s possible EVs are worse on that one dimension.
Of course, we could just ban the recently approved additive, and completely solve that corner case problem.
Tesla can fund the project of making EV chargers ubiquitous in the US and make it make sense within the context of a profitable business plan.
Chinese manufacturers can similarly make it make sense financially.
Japanese auto makers who are heavily subsidized by the Japanese government can't easily fund the infrastructure project of making EV chargers ubiquitous in a foreign country like the US or EU and their home market is much smaller.
I places like Japan (small, population dense, with small cars) you can use a 120V outlet to charge an EV. Most places have 240V household outlets, and can charge at least twice as fast.
So, if you have a garage with electricity, infrastructure isn’t really an issue. Sooner or later it will be common to mandate a charger per residential parking spot. The chargers themselves are $200. The main costs are permitting and retrofitting, but that matters a lot less for new development.
If one circuit per parking spot seems like a lot of infrastructure, consider the fact that most apartments have at least a half dozen circuits already.
EU is introducing regulations for this kind of emissions which will likely create a market for a few new techs that reduce it (reformulated tyres, modern drum brakes that capture dust, etc)
Thats of course because people wanna go green and certainly has nothing to do with the 25% VAT exemption that ICE cars are subject to.
I doubt EV would take any significant share if that would be the case.
https://www.electrive.com/2025/01/09/norway-the-number-of-ne...
> I figure most other countries will be the same.
I figure you're wrong on that one.
I would also say that any ICE vehicle that has 0 subscription models, upgradable firmware, tracking software will probably have a value premium to it in the not distant future.
FWIW downvoters - I have a PHEV - but I live in the real world and a likely future!
I don't know about the whole national electric grid, but at my house, I didn't really have to upgrade anything and didn't even notice an increase in electric bill when I started plugging in my EV. I don't think my car is even 20% of my household electricity usage. I'd hope we can increase our national grid's capability by at least 20% in the next 20 years. (Also, aren't datacenters causing that massive demand right now, whether or not the upgrades are even there yet? As I understand this is causing massive price increases?)
> I would also say that any ICE vehicle that has 0 subscription models, upgradable firmware, tracking software will probably have a value premium to it in the not distant future.
As you kind of hint at, whether or not the vehicle is EV or ICE has nothing to do with whether it has subscription models, tracking, etc. and car manufacturers are racing towards both of those things in a way that makes the drivetrain irrelevant.
1. Infra will need to upgrade in order to handle heavy charging in neighborhoods with wholesale change in the fleet. It would change our electrical use model considerably in terms of times of use -- and we would be adding all the energy used from gas powered cars to the electrical grid - which is somewhat significant.
2. While you are correct technically -- I think what I am implying is older cars (ICE) will be the ones without all the tracking and software - whereas all EVs will have that embedded as they are all relatively new. There is no world where they remove that from new car production.
The Youtube channel Technology Connections has an interesting video where it describes a successful transition to a fully-electric house while remaining on a 50 amp electrical connection. (it requires a smart circuit breaker)
I’m sure we are outliers, but still.
Put another way: growing up with incandescent bulbs, I remember light switches that would turn on 6-8 lamp track lights. That’s half the current our EV charger draws. We had a space heater that drew more than our EV charger currently does.
Houses and neighborhoods are still built with electrical systems provisioned for pre-LED, pre-induction/heatpump workloads. They certainly have enough slack for everyone to plug in a level one or two charger simultaneously.
(Personally I don't expect this will be that big a deal, since switching to EVs is something that happens one household at a time over many years. So, it shouldn't come as a sudden shock, and its something the utilities can make long term plans about. It just means power utilities need to be on the ball about not putting off infrastructure upgrades, and it means somewhat higher electricity prices for residential customers.)
Electric motors are extremely efficient over a wide speed range, whereas combustion engines aren't very efficient even in their relatively narrow optimal range and the arrangement needed to translate that power into motion further reduces overall efficiency.
While replacing the energy 1:1 would entail roughly doubling US electrical generation you actually want to replace the function and that's maybe 20-25% increase. It's not a trifle but it's very do-able. Especially if you time-shift car charging so that it's happening when humans are asleep and there's slack in the network.
You charge your phone while you sleep right? If you're used to filling up a car at a gas station it can feel weird but you can charge a car while you sleep too.
Its a massive change in how things operate in the US - significant amount of money reinvested into the grid and not solvable only through behavioral change. Thats one of a quiver of things that need to be done.
That's a problem and behaviour with poor long term consequences.
Bit like Columbia being a net cocaine exporter.
> I have no idea
There are annual IEA reports on global energy demand and supply by means and country.
Those looking ahead to sustainable energy are improving technology and infrastructure to better utilize the great fusion reactor in the sky.
Certainly the US could use a plan for charging infrastructure and grid improvements- it's currently lagging both the EU and China there.
eg: Electric vehicle charging - https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2025/electric-...
( Just the current trends in public charging stations, not trends in supply )
>Stop wanting to actually make things and have a well rounded economy!!!
Dragging up sequestered carbon in the billions upon billions of tonnes and changing the insulation factor of the atmosphere _is_ bad and will lead to no good if not unchecked and somewhat reversed - that's just physics.
Ergo - that should _stop_ and other things should be made that sidestep the issue.
You and I are in agreement then - and that change will ideally be away from harmful sequestered carbon.
> I have no idea
> I’m really at a loss
Seriously, starte with IEA reports, the IPCC reports, etc. they really do go into excruciating detail about these things you have no idea about and are at a loss to understand.
And if 100% of EV's sold this year were electric, it would take ~24 years for basically all of the vehicles on the road were electric. (The average age of registered cars in the US is 12 years old).
Estimates are that a 100% EV fleet would increase electricity demand by 20%. So that's < 1 % a year.
Approximately how much demand increases due to increasing A/C usage in the US.
And a lot less than AI/crypto is increasing demand.
And that's not to mention that EV charging is a relatively easy demand to meet -- most EV owners charge when it's cheapest, so you can shape demand via price signals.
On top of that, things like balcony and rooftop solar are much more economically attractive if you have a lot of load at your house, so people that buy EVs are likely to also self-generate a lot of electricity.
Its all doable but it is not as a simple as every plugs in at home. Its a large co-ordinated infrastructure effort.
You also brought up some other valid issues -- right now we are looking at the being undersupplied for electricity across NA without a wholesale swap to EVs. Maybe the upside of the oversupply of AI is that we have a lot of stranded assets for electrical charging infra/generation afterwards..
Now if had money as a country and had a recent history of building actual physical things for a reasonable cost. Yes may we could get there -- but current state of affairs - broke and limited manufacturing ability.
There's little to no reason that the electrical grid itself needs to change for the sake of EV's.
The biggest problem is that while slow charging (L2) in your own garage would be perfect for 99%+ of people in the US, and isn't even very expensive, that's a barrier to entry most people do not want to screw with. So, everyone wants DC fast that mimics a gas station experience, even if it's completely unnecessary for almost everyone's use cases.
Land is limited, new builds like that are expensive, slower to earn returns, and make little sense with so few EVs in the US - which leads to a viscous cycle. It's a bit of TotC.
>I would also say that any ICE vehicle that has 0 subscription models, upgradable firmware, tracking software will probably have a value premium to it in the not distant future.
Consumers do not care about this. If they did, such cars would not sell. No one is going to pay extra for fewer features.
I feel like this is only an opinion that people who have never actually used an EV have. Plugging in my car overnight at home every few days is infinitely more convenient than needing to drive somewhere to plug it in somewhere else. The actual charge time is irrelevant as long as it's not more than ~12 hrs.
Right, what people want is to pay less for fewer features.
If EVs with all their limitations are going to replace ICE cars for daily use, they need to be cheap. We need the Ford Focus or Toyota Tercel of EVs, with the same set of features (i.e. very few) that those cars had when they were introduced.
Otherwise I'll just go buy a used ICE Tercel or Focus.
When Tesla showed the world that an EV didn't have to look like a middle school science project and drive like a golf cart, it made sense that they went upmarket. They had to recover development costs. That won't work to get mass conversion.
A non-EV Toyota Camry is $30k (hybrid and ICE).
We are almost there. For buyers on a budget, the used car market is liquid for EVs as of now.
I personally buy used, and pay about a quarter of that or less when I buy a car.
If you can hoof it all the way to Fairfield (2.5 hours from Y Combinator HQ in SF; Muni->BART->Amtrak->taxi), you can get a 7 year old Model 3 for $14k tomorrow.
https://www.autotrader.com/cars-for-sale/vehicle/770441711?a...
You're saying?
A country that is bigger than half Spain with 10 times less population with one of the lowest electrify prices of the entire world(5-8 dollars MWh) because of huge hydro resources.
A country with huge capital reserves precisely because of oil resources.
So can a $300 dollar iPad. Large EV scale batteries are needed to feed powerful computers? What are they on about?
I'll pay triple for a non software defined vehicle that doesn't track me and can't be touched by the dealer once I purchase it. My one SDV (Tesla) is still on FSD from 2023 because the newer versions are terrible judging from the comments on the Tesla forums.
I bought a perfectly fine macbook pro m1 in 2020. It has been made far, far worse, slower, bloated and less responsive by apple. I see nothing improved, everything significantly degraded. It used to be that I could airplay to our tv with a single mouse click, now it seems to work once every 5 attempts, and takes about a minute. It used to be near instantaneous.
I bought a top of the line philips oled tv in 2020. I think I paid 4k for it. It has been made slower, bloated, less responsive by google and philips (or whatever company makes those tvs branded by philips).
I buy a top of the line iphone every 2-3 years, and it gets worse.
I bought a SONOS soundbar a few years ago. It used to work fine and produce nice sound. Now if I start my tv, and don't play anything for a few minutes it goes to sleep, and I need to restart my tv to get the sound to play.
Blocking updates on anything newly purchased seems like the best option. Not buying anything from those absolute crap companies seems like the second best option, but its hard to find alternatives.
But you didn't? So... you wouldn't really?
I don't mean to be too cute but I think it's worth taking the sting out of your words a bit. Maybe you would prefer a different choice for your next car, but that's a far less dramatic way of putting it.
I've had FSD since 2020; the latest version is noticeably better than 2020. I wouldn't put too much stock in forums which tend to skew negative.
However I don't think Tesla's SFD is inevitable, or any other carmakers; for all I know, they're so bad they shouldn't be sold. It's early days. This or that brand might go out of business. But within 100 years, self-driving will conquer the world.
[1] Example: https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/arti... (prev. HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37401563 )
I hate that expression. It's software-limited, not defined.
300k subscribers that pay $100 per month must be..? Imaginary? Wrong?
That, and Japan is deeply screwed if they go all-in on EVs and then China decides they shouldn't be allowed access to any more rare earths.
This is a common misunderstanding. There are plenty of alternative locations to mine rare earth minerals, particularly Australia. China cornered the market because it's a high pollution low margin business. If geopolitical concerns cut off access to Chinese sources, alternatives will be developed.
I don't think this is the right way to characterize it. China invested when other countries didn't, but they didn't monopolize the market, they have no moat beyond expertise and some tech advancement that could be replicated easily enough. The only moat they have is related perseverance and other countries simply not wanting to put the work in.
Basically, if we want to replicate what they did, we will have to do it mostly from scratch -- Japan and Australia has done some of the work already so it's not totally from scratch. It's obviously not impossible but it could take almost a decade for us to do that.
That said, I don't think this should be enough for Japan to stop investing in EVs. If Japanese car makers are really worried about this then they can build their plants in the US and leverage any deal the US has with China on real earths. They've already starting importing Japanese cars made in India and the US back to Japan so that's an established practice. Then once they've secured their own supplies they can make the EVs in Japan too. I think OP's point about the suppliers have more merit as a reason why Japan might not want to develop EVs.
As an addendum, companies in the REE Sinosphere are often encouraged by the CCP to exchange ideas with each other quite often, while Western companies often lock them behind proprietary patents and competition. While both systems have their pros and cons, the former allows for faster process proliferation (and a lower profit incentive for the innovator).
Like they say: in theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice, they aren't.
It's all well and good to have knowledge of the techniques, or to even have published or created them. But applying them successfully, working out all the kinks, and streamlining everything to become profitable doesn't happen overnight.
I have no doubt alternate sources can exist, but not without significant time and effort.
I would never disagree with you here. But the point is that the time and effort you spend on theory doesn't translate to time and effort spent on practice.
Maybe I'm wrong. I gained my knowledge second-hand/third-hand from books and podcasts so I would defer to you to your actual experience and observations about Chinese REE. What is your estimate on how long it would take the West to catch to at least supply some of the rare earth components and what the real barriers might be? Would love to hear your take on this.
Thanks for sharing your observations. I had no idea about the minutiae of that industry, i.e. the ecological control and its effects on the industry.
The real barriers are talent and the regulation vs profit motive balance. What I mentioned in my previous comment was effectively an effect of the intersection of the two - you can't find novel ways of processing harmful substances without having the technical talent to find these out in the first place, nor without giving them a free reign after deprioritizing profit.
Let's take arsenic for instance, a substance that's a harmful byproduct arising out of most mining operations. We already have the technology in the West to lock away arsenic into glass, but a.) apart from the big ones, most companies are unaware of them, and b.) even if they were aware of it, the tech is a significant line item that shies investors and companies away from investing into it.
> What is your estimate on how long it would take the West to catch to at least supply some of the rare earth components and what the real barriers might be?
Never. Yes, there are a few companies still engaged in trying to secure REE supply (Glencore being the most notable), but due to Western regulatory and policy limbo, the answer is never. For this to change, you need regulators open to experimentations and a concerted effort by the government in trying to reestablish REE independence, both in extraction and in processing, but I have yet to see either happening. It's telling when frankly the US is the country in the West most likely to catch up still, but the gap is deeper than the Darien Gap .
Incorrect, de facto, the only firms invested heavily in the rare earth refineries technology are Chinese for the last 20-30 years. Their moats are as deep as TSMC moats so to say.
Moat is decades of process / tactic knowledge built by disproportionate amount of talent on geologic formations others didn't invest in. Right now they generate 15x mining graduates, university of mining tech alone enrolls more than all US mining programs combined. Then you throw all that into a mining city like Batou with 3 million people running vertically integrated operation. That's ecosystem scale with compounded advantages beyond "wanting" to put work in, it maybe scale on PRC has demonstrated ability to produce.
Between shallow kiddy pool and Mariana Trencth in terms of ease of replication, I wouldn't lean towards kiddy pool. I don't think "right way to characterize" their lead is "no moat" beyond... all the things that are actually, in fact very deep moats, as if any country can persevere their way to replicate decades of work and execute industrial policy of a 3 million large city dedicated to mining/rees.
I surmise, PRC will build out EUV (technical problem) and produce them at scale before west+co meaningfully tackles HREEs supply chain (technical and regulatory and industrial problem).
See my sibling comment. Their moat is the scale and structure of their industry. Some parts of rare earth processing are dependent on that.
I do think the original point about lower complexity vehicles being a threat to the suppliers has some merits though. Germany faces a very similar dilemma and made similar decisions.
Incredible what can be done. If Japan ever wants actual mecha warriors for their military, they're going to need motors like that.
Ford: It recorded a loss of $1.2 billion in EBIT in the third quarter on its EVs, bringing its losses on the segment for the first three quarters of 2024 to $3.7 billion
Honda: Honda to Write Off $15.7 Billion as EV Winter Arrives.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/ford-r...
https://www.barrons.com/articles/gm-stock-general-motors-inv...
https://www.barrons.com/articles/honda-to-write-off-15-7-bil...
For what it's worth, this theory is blown up by hydrogen based vehicles, which Japan has gone heavily in on. Yes, slightly more parts than an EV, but not a ton. And the drivetrain is electric.
If there is a war with china or in the middle east, hydrogen vehicles are somewhat immune to oil or rare earth spikes.
They will likely never roll out hydrogen power in any large capacity but the capability will be there if they need it
Considering how much money and effort both Toyota and Honda have poured into trying to kick start a hydrogen economy over the past decade and a half, and how much EV technology was evolved over the same time span, would it not make more sense to switch to the technology that actually is proven and actually has consumer demand for?
It's not like they're switching all that military hardware to hydrogen too.
Japan can't solve all of its energy woes, but it can ease it a lot by restarting all the nuclear reactors they shut down after Fukushima, and to be fair, they've been trying [0], but stuff breaks after not having been used in over a decade.
[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq6v0v32rg1o
For comparison 21.9% were BEVs, 11.5% Plugin hybrids, ~51% pure petrol or non plug-in hybrid, and 14.8% Diesel.
[0] https://www.kba.de/DE/Presse/Pressemitteilungen/Fahrzeugzula...
They're just more expensive, but not even that much.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/08/business/japan-rare-earth...
Trafalgar will be the first large scale NdFeB magnet plant looking to start production in 2027
https://www.fastmarkets.com/insights/trafalgar-sets-sights-o...
https://www.economist.com/asia/2025/12/04/lessons-from-japan...
There's a few other EVs Honda produced in 90s as well, but e probably in running for first ground up new EV platform that made it to market as mass produced Honda product.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_e
I don't see the OP article call the Prologue "Honda's EV"? Instead, the OP article explicitly says the Prologue was both "designed and entirely built by GM."
That's separate from where the OP article first states that Honda killed three other specific models "that were the company’s first ground-up EVs".
Can you elaborate on this? I'd love to have a cheap small truck like they used to make, but CAFE largely killed those.
US manufacturers want margins, and they're not getting margins on little, efficient cars. They get enormous margins on gigantic trucks that start at $55,000. Have you noticed that all the sub $20k cars went away from all the manufacturers around COVID?
Ford makes the Maverick, which is a small truck. They were priced very reasonably at release, at $19,000 or so. However, Ford didn't make very many of them, and the ones they did make got up to $15,000 over MSRP from the dealers, who scalped them. Why would Ford want to cannibalize their pricy gigantic trucks when they know that they can get their $50k asking price because there's nowhere else for people to go?
Why isn't Ford worried that Chevrolet, Toyota, Ram, or Nissan will bring back a small and cheap U.S. built pickup? Is that because all manufacturers are afraid of cannibalizing their more expensive offerings? Are they all colluding? Or do not many people want small pickups? I guess if the Slate becomes a breakout hit, we'll know that people really want the smaller pickups.
My understanding is that this is due to fuel regulations being enacted by size and weight where it’s simply easier to make bigger vehicles.
CAFE killed them too. You can't have a small vehicle that gets fuck all MPG because it's built like a tank to do work. You gotta have a bigger one that gets slightly worse MPG but has a way huger footprint in order to make the math math.
This didn't just kill compact pickups for 20yr. It also killed the Chevy Astro (the most "fullsize work van" of the minivans) and why you'll never see a car with a giant overhanging cargo area again.
The moment you do this things will stop working: for example phone app, but your car will be more or less unshittified.
And yes, there should probably be a law that makes this easier for the consumer to do for example mandating a plastic hatch or something.
But connected cars are not the end of the world and if we normalise disconnecting cars (make an online list or something of cars that are confirmed to work fine afterwards) then we’ve basically solved the issue. Remember, EVs are not the problem, and this kind of stuff will be mainstream/common knowledge once adoption rates are higher.
Probably untrue with Tesla. I have mine integrated via BLE to home assistant for solar charging. App works via BLE using same protocol.
Your biggest struggle would be avoiding to update the native app, but I guess nothing is stopping you from developing your own implementation.
Over 25% of vehicles sold world-wide were electric in 2025, and that percentage is steadily increasing. So VW & Ford were "too hot", Honda is looking like "too cold" and Toyota might be the "just right" of the three bears.
Most hybrids aren't liquid-cooled (although that is changing), and the smaller size means that a hybrid puts a lot more cycles per mile on the battery than an EV does.
Which in practice means that a hybrid battery lasts about 100,000 miles whereas an EV lasts about 250,000 miles.
A Prius is an amazing car; a 300,000 mile Prius is often still in good shape and worth the expense to replace the battery in. Which means you might put 3 batteries in a Prius and then look at how expensive it would be to replace the battery in an EV 3 times and choke. But very few people are going to spend the significant dollars it costs to replace the battery in a 250,000 mile Tesla so in practice that's an expense you'll never have.
eg, from one:
How Long Do Toyota Prius Primes Last? The Scoop on Vehicle Lifespan (2024) https://www.copilotsearch.com/posts/how-long-do-toyota-prius...https://www.electricbike.com/the-curious-case-of-the-600000-...
You want a Supra to drive much better than fine. But if you're in the market for a Corolla, "fine" might be better than some of the cars you're comparing against.
The biggest issue I think every auto maker needs to solve is cost. The average car payment is insane, with dealership markups it's even worst than it would be otherwise. I'm not sure how we got here on that, to me car interiors are no nicer than they were from 2005ish on. I don't even know what the cost is going into.
The adoption curve hasn't been nearly as steep as predicted, and the political landscape is unstable. Other manufacturers are also pulling back on their EV investments.
I'm not saying Honda isn't overdoing it, but a retreat from EVs isn't surprising.
EV's are a half trillion dollar market (20 million cars annually, average selling price $25K) that increased by 20% in 2025.
That's a massive increase in a massive market.
It's not the 50% per annum we were seeing earlier, but 20% of a big number is often more impressive than 50% of a big market.
Two of Honda's biggest markets are Japan and the US. The US is cooling on EVs with incentives and regulation changes making adoption less urgent. Japan already has an extremely low adoption rate. So the incentives for Honda to invest heavily just aren't there right now.
Other manufacturers are also pulling back. Ford is cutting way back on the Lightning for example.
In Japan, it's more a matter of not having good domestic options. Japanese people don't buy non-Japanese cars. When the Leaf was selling well world-wide, it sold well in Japan. But it's been a few years since the Leaf sold well anywhere. Now with good Toyota options and spiking gas prices I expect EV's to pick up in Japan. Nowhere is more dependent than Japan on the straight of Hormuz.
Or assume you have to provide a current model iPad or android tablet to run their software. That would keep the hardware functional if they kept the software working.
And I don’t trust the vendors to try to drive resale by eol’ing the logic/software. They’ll drive everybody to leases to avoid this and battery life concerns.
they dominated in the era of small engines.
with EVs - the Chinese have run away with the stick & sadly no one is catching up.
I wish the Japanese made good EVs - Germans are the only ones besides the Chinese making decent EVs
All have proprietary bullshit parts, proprietary fancy software with features that nobody gives a fuck about, and are all expensive. Im not paying fucking 30k for a Nissan leaf. EVs are supposed to be simple. Where is my 12k OTD Corolla with a battery and a motor instead of an engine?
Meanwhile BYD has an app that auto parallel parks. And China has cars like Greely M9 that are not only packed full of features, but also has a gas engine that acts like a generator.
That's not nearly the case. They have made one of best EVs back in years, but decided to focus on hybrids. And that makes total sense.
I hate to be a luddite, but they also don't need to be pioneers to succeed here. They need cars that meet their customers needs, just like not every ICE car needs to have an F1 racing engine in it.
Car company execs need to take a chill pill followed by a reality serum. Monetizing subscription based basic features and delivering in-car advertising is the absolutely worst way to go.
As consumers we need to stop buying into the bells, whistles and trinkets and demand essential and safe transportation.
They are coming back! Next VW ID generation will have them again :)
This is a USP for the Slate Truck. A lot of early commentary lauded the simplicity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slate_Truck
Independently, I had to take my car into the dealer to get a safety critical recall installed via Ethernet that affected a braking system in certain edge cases and this was not installable OTA “in the night”.
While, yes, I am annoyed that the dealer price for my “infotainment” unit is $2k and reflects the technical specs of a 2016 mid tier android tablet running Intel cores; I do feel that vehicle is far safer with its airbags, 360 camera, lane keeping, and AEB on net than my 1970’s classic.
The used car market has, in many ways, usurped what used to be the role of the basic car used to be.
As a result, you see fewer and fewer new cars sold, and automakers have to more intensively monetize the cars they have. They must create ever-increasing returns to shareholders.
As the buggy-makers failed to transition to making cars, and thus ceased to be, so too will automakers fail to transition to EVs, and thus end their viability as vehicle manufacturers.
The week I spent renting an EV (an Ioniq 5, so not even a high-end one) convinced me. Enjoyable to drive. Having to figure out where/how to charge it was sufficient to chase away the fears around that.
Agreed. It is exceptionally rare for a consumer to purchase one EV and then buy ICE as their next vehicle. I have owned EVs for more than 10 years. There is no going back.
Guess which three items out of that list I do not want.
So they don’t crash into you or run over your kids?
This is important, because forward collusion detection is not a binary thing. Each auto maker has their own set of parameters, sensors and implementations to achieve a similar goal, but each act independently.
I would also prefer if people were more engaged with driving too. I don't think we should encourage people to "rely" on these systems to keep them out of trouble as these systems can and do act unpredictably and may harm other road users as a result of a programming decision since the car in front acted unexpectedly.
I think the whole automation of everything in a car is a bit silly. Transmissions are whatever for me, although the full lane assist, cruise control, adaptive cruise control, even automatic wipers and headlights makes people feel so much more disconnected from the car, which I think leads to unsafe habits or worse, unable to handle the car in situations where the automatic systems fail or become unreliable (e.g poor visibility, wet roads, unmapped roads, off-road, obstructions on the road, road works, etc).
Also why manual transmissions for everyone ? It’s kinda slow and cumbersome. It’s fun to pretend play being a good pilot, but that’s obsolete.
"Birth control leads to riskier behavior and more pregnancies."
Just look at Nissan, which is broke as a joke, but they still put a new Leaf model on the market.
Lately there’s been a vibe that the EV experiment has died off, but that really isn’t true looking at industry reporting.
There is stalling that seems related to subsidy expiration and/or scale back, but we could argue that subsidies expiring is happening because the subsidies aren’t needed to sell vehicles anymore.
20% of new vehicles sold globally are EVs. Critical mass has been achieved, and not just in China (20% of vehicles sold in Europe are EVs).
This is also an admission that Honda is just giving up on Acura completely. That $50k two row luxury SUV buyer that is such an industry staple buyer for the US auto industry is going to be buying Rivian R2s instead of an EV Acura MDX.
The oil industry spends a lot of money on astroturf.
2024 total deliveries: 1,789,226
2025 total deliveries: 1,636,129
That 8% decline YOY
Sources:
https://ir.tesla.com/press-release/tesla-fourth-quarter-2024...
https://ir.tesla.com/press-release/tesla-fourth-quarter-2025...
The way we use the van, 90% of our drives are under 20 miles round trip. The rest are longer road trips. I've been waiting eight years for Honda to make an electric or even a plug-in hybrid where the gas motor just charge the battery.
It would be perfect for my family. I guess that's not happening now.
They're still going with their hybrids of course.
I have a Honda Hybrid CR-V and love the drivetrain. We're waiting until Honda moves that drivetrain into the Odyssey (which is the van we want... probably what you have, hah)
Ugh that sucks
> [...] and software-defined vehicles.
Take my money! I'll suffer with gas for that.
Eg. I need to move 6 people and significant gear (skiing, camping, biking etc) long remote distances.
There is no EV that can do that really. And the ones that come close are easily $20-30k higher than an Odyssey. Plus the durability of large EVs is far from proven while the 300k mile club of Odyssey owners is large.
I need Suburban/Minivan functionality out of a proven OEM at a competitive price point. (I also need to see my friends with Rivians etc not having to schedule their vacation around charger availability. Have seen this waste hours and hours of time)
Congratulate yourself on visiting nature while simultaneously messing it up. And enjoy the fuel prices.
Given the data on the trend of EV sales (https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/global...) this is a pretty big claim to make.
I live in an old, pre-automobile neighborhood. Like other such old, walkable, sidewalk-and-park-and-corner-store neighborhoods in the US, it's one of the most attractive parts of my city.
However, almost nobody here could feasibly own a fully electric car. Most houses don't have driveways or garages. People park ad-hoc on the street. Most families own one car, and that car needs to be able to go long distances because it's both the local vehicle and the road tripper.
My wife and I would buy an EV if we could. We know the exact one. But it's not feasible for us, or for our neighbors. Far from being "1%" this situation is quite common. So we have a Honda hybrid instead.
The Toyota strategy from 2022 has aged brilliantly: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/29/toyota-ceo-stands-by-electri...
However, the EV maximalist strategy from the same era has aged like milk.
Gas prices are pretty much trivial unless you: - drive a lot (which in that case you’re really messing up nature regardless of ICE vs EV) - own a fleet - are really tight on finances (not buying a new car anyway)
Charging in the US (other than at home) is still the biggest issue for me. I do lots of traveling, and waiting 30-45 minutes to charge even at a Level 3 charger is a PITA. If I had a J std charger, then it's even longer. This makes my monthly 8 hour trips one-way another 2 hours - this sucks. Sorry - I'll keep my 2005 Honda Element with 445K miles. Another engine would be cheaper than less than a year of car payments. And it's pretty much indestructible.
There’s other good roadtrip friendly options out there too, but ya with monthly drives like that you’re really limiting your options and ICE cars still make a lot of sense
Of course, I drive a Honda that I will be buried in. So I may be biased.
The Honda Insight went on sale in 1999. They were 2 years behind Toyota's Prius but at least 5 years ahead of everybody else.
The article loses its credibility once it imagines a multi-billion, multi-country company executives thinking this way :).
I don't have charging capability at my apartment or work. On occasion, I do 300 mile trips (adirondacks/nyc). Skeptical of winter performance. I have no interest in "frequent updates, slick infotainment software, and advanced driver-assistance systems". Frankly, no spare tire is a no starter for me also.
Also, please ignore these announcements. CEOs are trend-following children and their declarations of future behavior should be heavily discounted. Honda will follow the market, as will all the other automakers. This is all sturm and drang. When an automaker says "We will transition to all EV by 2030" then ignore them. When an automaker says "We will not sell any EVs" then ignore them. It's like a child saying "I will grow up to be an astronaut". Just pat them on the head and go about your day.
Focus on what they are bringing to market at any point in time, everything else is foolish talk.
That does not bode well for German car makers either I'm afraid. Take BMW for instance: they started off with two "pure" EV models, the i3 (a compact car) and the i8 (a sports car). Both of them promising, but neither a particular bestseller. So they switched to offering electric drive as an alternative to IC engines in several (most?) "regular" models. But I agree with TechCrunch that this is more of a cop-out than a winning strategy...
> Consumers, mostly those who buy EVs from the likes of Tesla, Rivian, and BYD, have grown accustomed to the frequent updates, slick infotainment software, and advanced driver-assistance systems. Honda has yet to make significant progress in any of those domains.
Here's an idea: what about making an EV free from this enshittification? One where you can decide yourself when to install an update, like in the "olden days" a few years ago? One that doesn't pretend to have an "autopilot" which isn't really one? I think there would be a market for such an EV.
The writing is on the wall. ICE vehicles sales are declining worldwide. The direction is very clear to anybody paying attention.
Once people realize that, then the game is over. Honda is just forecasting the future more accurately than other automakers.
There likely isn’t data for anything beyond 12-15 years but I’m not sure that’ll matter given most people own cars ~7-8 years.
https://evelectriccars.com/electric-car-battery-lifespan/
Once people realize they're literally burning the expensive gas they put in their vehicle, the game is over.
Also, gas is a limited resource which after you burn never ever comes back, so it is expected to get more expensive, while all the rare earth metals in batteries can be recycled into new batteries because when you use the battery, you aren't actually burning it away into nothing. You can even recharge it.
I don't want anything of the sort as a consumer, so auto makers who don't "get" it either are fine by me. Nay, heroes.
Even the point about running computers when the car is off seems wildly uninformed: a 12 V starter battery in an ICE car is about 70 Ah. That’s 840 Wh. So you can run a 5 W computer (that does nothing but periodically wake up to look for and download updates and such) for 168 hours. (Of course, any competent implementation will not let electronics run the battery flat, but it still seems like way more than enough)
Like the Ukraine war, maybe one good thing thing we can say about this terrible situation is that it may encourage a lot of countries to move to renewables (or nuclear) sooner than they otherwise would and cut back on fossil fuels.
The energy crises of the 1970s caused people to start caring a lot more about fuel economy. Now we have the technology for people not to need to buy gas to propel their vehicle at all, and many of them once they switch they're never switching back.
Better hope your vehicle is never damaged.
I know the US primarily uses diesel for its trains, but have you ever been outside of the US before?
- $0.005 to $0.01 per ton-mile (for ocean ships)
- $0.05 to $0.08 per ton-mile (for diesel trucks)
- $0.015 – $0.025 per ton-mile (for electric trucks)
- $0.007 per ton-mile (for diesel trains)
- $0.002 per ton-mile (for electric trains)
- $0.002 – $0.004 per ton-mile (electric ships, not widely deployed yet due to battery weight)
The real Mad Max will be roaming the apocalyptic wasteland in a Kia EV5.
The breakeven for this is so bad that it's only worth it for the gullible "wow" factor from the general public asking about it.
The last 5 years just don't show it. The EV market is still small and infrastructure missing in most of the world.
Toyota played it safe and made bank when everybody was saying they were doomed.
German automakers went hard on EVs. VW group sold 1 million fully electric vehicles in 2025, they will probably overtake Tesla in a couple of years for the biggest non-Chinese EV automaker by sales, but is it paying off financially?
At the same time german premium brands have a very hard time differentiating when Chinese cars offer similar quality at half the price even after tariffs.
EV sales keep on growing world wide by juicy double digit percentages. Some markets less than others of course but the net effect is that all that legacy business keeps on shrinking because all that EV growth is at the cost of that legacy business.
The main issue with Honda and other Japanese manufacturers is that they are hopelessly dependent on Chinese suppliers to ship any EVs at this point. They've dragged their heels on doing their own tech and at this point while they might have some promising things in their labs, they lack supply chains and factories to mass produce any of it by themselves. That's going to take many years to turn around. Without guarantees that they'll be able to match the Chinese on cost. And the EU, Koreans, Chinese, and even US companies like GM are picking up the slack and growing EV sales at their cost.
Toyota seems to finally be producing a lot of EVs now to counter that. They've been catching up fast in the last year or so. But most of these EVs come with a lot of Chinese tech inside. Their alternative was to cede that market to competitors. Which seems to be what Honda is doing. I don't think that will end well for them.
China is already selling EVs to countries that haven’t even had many cars before, like Nepal. Is 75% of the world car market just going to be there’s because western auto manufacturers overfixated on their own very mature car markets?
Mercedes-Benz sells 9 different fully electric models and that ignores their trucks and vans.
BMW sells 9 different fully electric models across their BMW/Mini/Rolls Royce brands.
Volkswagen sells more than *30*.
I don't think western automakers can compete in any case unless they can either differentiate their offering or significantly lower the cost of core components like batteries.
> For the fiscal year ended March 31, 2025 (FY2025), motorcycles accounted for about 17% of total revenue, while cars made up around 65%.
I wonder what the plan is for motorcycles, where in much of Asia cars aren't really viable and there are no real competitors to Honda engine bikes.
No wonder I've not seen one yet
I watched the reviews on YouTube, and they're all quite favorable.
e-bikes/mopeds?
It's a shame that US law doesn't have a nice in-between that would slot these bikes between proper e-bikes and motorcycles.
Hundreds of millions of motorcycles are still in active use with no real incentive to change
Maybe the answer is truly "no, that wouldn't actually be practical for how people in those places live" for some reason, but I'm genuinely curious.
I was in China last year and one apartment complex I stayed at had a garage full of e scooters and bikes all plugged in to charge.
The streets in China are remarkably quiet now with so many electric vehicles.
https://www.motorcyclesdata.com/2026/03/11/electric-motorcyc...
I think Vinfast would like to have a word with you…
The person I know who loves FSD has soured on updates since the last one changed how the car handles simple things like intersections, and it's added a lot more stress.
Cars should be appliances, boring and reliable, not something to amaze and delight you. Especially since the latter usually changes into "sell ads and your personal information".
Sadly, this view is considered antiquated and anti-technology by a younger generation of people who think what we see in sci-fi shows should be reality (good or bad). And if you don't get that vision then you're some dumb luddite who should be banished from society.
What's kind of remarkable is the onslaught of vehicles, many EV, which have critical functionality issues that are being ignored, but they have WiFi + hotspot on board! And if you want to do basic things with your own vehicle, like get the climate control ready before you leave on a trip you now need an app, a smartphone, and Internet connection and a subscription...to do things that could easily be done via some local BLE or WiFi connection.
I see a lot of car companies rush to make "immersive" driving experiences while neglecting the basics. The Ioniq 5 / EV6 have ICCU issues that are not addressed which can leave the car stranded and the replacement parts have the same mysterious failure modes, the Jaguar I-Pace had numerous failures including a UI that would lag for basic things like changing air conditioning settings, the last generation Leaf (just prior to the current re-design) has battery issues that have forced people to do lemon-law buy backs, the Ford Mach E has a Tesla-style iPad center display that can't be turned off at night so it's a distraction (among other issues with the poor concept), but it has OTA so awesome!
Absolutely, the sooner the better. The truth is, auto companies can track you, show you ads, and otherwise jerk you around without going all the way to having a "software defined vehicle." You just get a worse user experience.
The thing can't even do OTA updates without you connecting your phone to the car's bluetooth.
Agree, but then how do you get people to change them?
Even today my wife left her phone on the charge pad and the car beeped as we walked away to alert us - a feature that didn’t exist when we first got it.
Enshittification may come, but maybe there will be an Apple-like benevolent dictator that keeps it mostly clean.
Edit: I should say that I will never trust any “self-driving” at all based on cameras alone. It can’t even do Autopilot without me intervening on most trips.
My driving experience/controls has not changed since I bought it 18 months ago. They added an option for Grok which I don’t use, and the FSD is much better now. And enabled adaptive headlights.
>The person I know who loves FSD has soured on updates since the last one changed how the car handles simple things like intersections, and it's added a lot more stress.
The most recent FSD update made me recommend a model 3 or Y to my parents.
Time will tell, but I think it’s a long term mistake.
I don’t know why they didn’t try to do better.
Hells yeah, Honda went to the top of my list all of the sudden. SDVs coded by vibe coding bros are just not for me.
"Grown accustomed to" is a funny way of saying "begrudgingly put up with because the alternative is buying a new car, but really they would rather not have to deal with that crap at all."
China: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/electric-vehicle-sales-i... Europe: https://eleport.com/ev-sales-in-europe/ USA: https://www.statista.com/outlook/mmo/electric-vehicles/unite...
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/2025/11/china-elec...
But my guess is maybe Honda will wait for Tesla or another US based auto company with EVs to fail and buy that company. Seems that is how large companies do "innovation" these days.
Japanese society has long been romanticized in the West, but once you start noticing certain details, a different side becomes visible. A simple example: about a century ago, the average height of Japanese men and women was actually higher than that of Chinese and Koreans, but later the growth basically stalled, and in some periods even declined. It’s not that Japan is poor. It feels more like there are strong, invisible social expectations — women are not supposed to grow too tall, men don’t seem comfortable standing out physically, and people live within a very tight set of unwritten rules about what you should and shouldn’t do.
This is the same kind of thing people notice when they joke that Japan still uses Yahoo or fax machines. That discipline creates stability, and from the outside it can look orderly and even admirable. But when you look more closely, it can also feel restrictive, even a bit unsettling. It’s hard to believe that this kind of social atmosphere wouldn’t affect corporate culture as well. In that sense, it may help explain why Japan, which once dominated the global auto industry, hesitated for so long on electric vehicles and ended up being overtaken by China in the new wave of technology.
Another thing is that Japan can be very unrealistic. You can see this in their movies, anime, and literature — there’s this strong belief in the power of belief itself, like if you just believe hard enough, things will work out. That mindset shows up in real issues too, like rare earth supply, military readiness, and national strategy. Japan might actually be one of the countries with the strongest information bubbles in the world. From top to bottom, people tend to believe what they want to believe, even when reality says otherwise. And when reality does show up, the reaction is often to pull back quickly and say the problem isn’t real.
You could already see this mentality during World War II, especially with the attack on Pearl Harbor. After that, Japan’s postwar industrial success made the illusion even stronger. If a company messes up, they apologize, and everyone forgives them. Toyota is number one in the world and will always be number one — no need to worry. That kind of thinking is exactly why Japanese industry has been declining for a long time without people really feeling a sense of crisis.
You can even see Germans openly complaining about their country’s problems, but you don’t see that very often in Japan. As long as they still have Excel, Word, and loppy disk ,or some japan made code editor, everything feels fine, so there’s no need to feel anxious.
And if there were ever a war over China and Taiwan, most people in Japan might even think: as long as we take action, China will definitely lose.It’s just like the recent Iran war. many japanese people believe that China will collapse first, because China is too dependent on Middle Eastern oil, even though the real data shows that Japan is actually more dependent.
(write by me and translated by GPT)
They refine technology not really invent it (maybe invented VTEC). The transition to EV will be very gradual, I don’t even think we have enough rare earth metals and electrical grid capacity to go even twice as fast in adoption?
Honda is waiting for the standards and technology to settle out and become commodity technology, then they implement and iterate to a refined and reliable product.
It doesn’t seem like a winner take all market for EV? What would be the most? Perhaps I am ignorant on that part of market dynamics.
*edit for typos
OK? Then don’t forget to add a replacement battery, replacement battery heating and cooling system, factor in a few extra sets of tires over a lifetime of the vehicle, you can also assume the suspension will wear out earlier, so at least ball joints if not also struts.
I’m an automotive EE, there is no free lunch.
I have a car we just got rid of in our research shop, in order to replace the battery the entire rear suspension and half of the interior had to come out. To an insurance agency, the car was literally totaled between the cost of the battery and the labor to replace it.
Inflation calculator site says 45% inflation since 2011, USD.
Capitalism over there is at another level, and cars are so complicated with tiny changes can have huge problems. Look at the immobilizer chips that Kia dropped to save $5, which resulted in thousands of car thefts and the whole Kia Boyz phenomenon.
That was in 2008, which was 18 years ago. Comparing China in 2026 to China in 2008 is like comparing Japan in 1978 to Japan in 1960.
I also have some concerns about our grid, but not from EVs. AI is already consuming more 5% of the grid, more than twice that of EVs (~2%), and is growing far faster. I've seen estimates as high as 17% of the grid by 2030. Most EVs are also charged in off-peak hours when there's plenty of capacity.
This is not an issue, it’s the one the things that the anti-EV/baby boomer crowd throws out that is completely unsubstantiated. We have plenty of rare earths, America just lit their rare earth refining capacity on fire when China said they would do it for us at a much cheaper price. China doesn’t have a shortage of rare earth refining capacity, and they are producing most of the Eavs in the world as a result. EVs mostly charge at night when the grid is underutilized anyways.
China won the EV war a few years ago while the Japanese spent too much wasted time on hydrogen. Honda just doesn’t have anything to offer that BYD already does much better. That the Chinese auto manufacturers will slow down EV advancements and refinements long enough for Honda to make a significant improvement is a bit ridiculous.
Maybe. But here's the thing... most cars today feel completely lifeless.
Honda knows how to build an engine and wrap it in a car that actually makes you feel something. That still matters.
Anyone here driven an S2000?
It's still the best car I've ever owned. Light, raw, grippy, and genuinely fun -- every drive felt like an event, not just transportation. (And it was still an affordable car!)
They killed it around 2010. I've never found anything that captures that same feeling since, at any price point.
So yeah -- Honda will always have a place in my heart. When they want to, they build something truly special.
Here's one of their marketing films they can use to find inspiration again.
* Failure: The Secret to Success - A Honda Documentary - YouTube // https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOVig5H7UbM
The moment a battery without lithium comes out, legacy car engines are dead for good.
And it must, environmental concerns aside nobody wants to be beholden to oil prices ;)
They are an unstoppable force and we ignore them at our own peril.
Is it possible to deliver and store electricity in a more efficient way perhaps? Rumor has it that it does, but not in a way you can put a meter on :)
Even as someone that loves electric vehicles and uses public transportation a lot, it's hard to get behind these extreme "let's ban X and go all on Y" views. It ignores how things work in the real world.
They need to carry two engines, batteries and a gas tank, that makes them pretty bad at being both an EV and a ICE vehicle. They are to heavy, have to little battery capacity to be a good EV. The batteries and electric engines make them to heavy to get good fuel mileage as a gas powered car.
I've meet exactly one person for who they made sense. He could get to an from work on battery alone, but not much more and he needed the combustion engine to haul a trailer every now and then. If he could have waited a few years, he could just have gotten an EV that did the same.
There might be locations where hybrids makes more sense, but now that the range of EVs have gotten much better I think that list is slowly shrinking.
The thing that's weird to me is the focus on getting rid of diesel, because EVs and diesel cars are not at all competing. EVs can replace gas powered cars, in most cases (depending on your location), but they can't replace diesel. Need to drive 500km a day? Diesel is probably your best bet and EVs are completely out.
Totally disagree. One of the reasons I drive an EV is so I _can_ plug it in and never go to a gas station again. What a useless exercise and waste of my time, especially for a penny-pincher like me who would wait in like for 20 minutes at Costco for gas.
For those not with an overnihht charging parking spot I can see the appeal though.
The surface area of a car usable for solar panels is about 3 square meters. At the absolute best, when the stars align just right, you're going to get about 1 kW of power out of these panels.
In other words, barely enough to offset the auxiliary systems in the car (cooling pumps, lights, computers, etc.)
A new vehicle makes no sense. Unless I went a budget used Prius (with a good hybrid battery system). No plan to make changes.
Take care - the Hybrid battery can be expensive to replace and they do eventually fail. Note that Toyota changed from NiMH to LiIon 2017/18. I recently had to wreck an old Toyota Hybrid because replacing the dead battery was going to cost 2/3 of the value of the vehicle. Context: New Zealand.
That is true, but median mileage at replacement for the old NiMH batteries is 150k miles (240k km), and the lithium cells have a median mileage at replacement of over 200k miles (320k km) - even though those cars are now 10 years old, not enough of them have reached that mileages, so exact data is still not available.
And don't get me wrong, those cars are bullet proof. Median total mileage of the car could be a bit higher than 150k miles, especially after the car was sold to a third world country. But for most intents and purposes, those batteries (especially the lithium cells) have about the same median lifetime than the car itself.