There is a fundamental truth you have to understand about car companies:They do not exist to make cars. They exist to make money. That distinction, analyst Kevin Tynan tells me, is why they’re not really interested in making affordable electric vehicles.
Perhaps that’s an oversimplification. Tynan is the director of research at an auto-dealer-focused investment bank, the Presidio Group, with decades of experience as an analyst at firms like Bloomberg Intelligence. What he means isn’t that automakers have no interest in affordable products. It’s that their interest begins and ends with winning customers who will eventually buy more expensive, higher-margin products.
One of the auto industry’s dirtiest secrets is that at scale, it doesn’t cost that much more to make a bigger, more expensive than a smaller and cheaper one. But they can charge you a lot more for the former, which makes this a game of profit margins and not just profits. In recent years especially, that’s a big part of why your new car choices have skewed so heavily toward bigger crossovers, SUVs and trucks.
What people need and what people irrationally want can be two different things
For the purposes of this conversation, only 1 of those matter. The point is EVs are not inherently heavier than ICE vehicles. They’re only heavier if you insist on unnecessarily large vehicles with unnecessarily long range. That’s why a Chevy Bolt weighs 3600 lb and a Hummer EV weighs a patently insane 9k lbs.
Lack of a need for that won’t stop people from getting them if that’s an option…
Economics of lugging all that extra battery weight around on daily commutes is why smart people wont go for the extra large pack.
What people choose to buy does not make “EVs are heavier than ICE vehicles” true.
If you want an equivalent vehicle, you need that kind of capacity. If you want to match the range of a vehicle with a 24gallon tank (ie: if you want to convert a typical ICE truck into an EV), you probably need a 200kwh pack. If you want to match a ~12 gallon tank (ie: if you want to convert a typical ICE sedan into an EV), you probably need a 100kwh pack. If you had a car efficient enough to get 1000 miles on 100kwh, you’d be comparing it to a 3 gallon tank for an ICE equivalent. To match an 8 gallon tank (ie: a 2-seater car), you need about 60 kwh battery. Even if you want to compare a 80mile range fortwo EQ to a 300 mile range ICE fortwo, its already 300lbs heavier without even being close on the range and being quite limiting for even just normal commuting around here (assuming you don’t have a guaranteed charger at work).
