This is why I refuse to buy anything after a certain date when it comes to cars. Luckily I have the ability and resources to maintain and fix my own vehicle.
The unfortunate thing is that sticking to older cars forfeits a lot of safety improvements that've been implemented in the past decade or so, which is more of an issue every day with giant SUVs and trucks having come to dominate the roads.
It's something I've been grappling with lately, with a potential car purchase coming up. I really don't need much more than a mid-late 00s sub-compact Toyota or Honda of some kind but not going with something made in the past ~5 years feels a bit like a gamble.
A friend works in environmental science and his advice when it comes to cars and climate is to keep your car for as long as possible, regardless of gas vs. electric. Obviously YMMV but generally speaking the emissions "cost" of manufacturing and delivering the car in the first place is huge, and the way the numbers work out, it's better to amortize that over as long a time as you can than it is to frequently buy a replacement, even if it's electric.
Your friend may understand environmental science, but clearly not economics.
If you don't keep your car you'll sell it. You won't be moving the needle on how long it'll take to amortize that initial manufacturing cost, it'll just happen with someone else driving it.
Likewise if you don't buy a new car someone else will, you're not going to move the needle on the overall supply.
I don't recommend buying new cars, but if you consider the above it's pretty much pollution-neutral.
All you're really doing is paying a premium in order to be the first in a long line of owners to drive that vehicle.
You appear to be making an unfounded assumption that regardless of how many owners it has, any given vehicle will remain on the road the exact same number of years.
If an owner decides to keep and maintain their car longer than they would have in the past, that car will stay out of the junkyard longer and therefore reduce the need to produce new cars. They will use some of the money they would have spent on a new car to keep the old one going longer, and still pocket the rest of it as savings.
Most households keep a fairly fixed number of vehicles. Selling more moderately used vehicles into the used car market will result in more old vehicles being retired sooner.
I like the idea that plug-in hybrids are the best choice. Battery supply is the limiting factor, so 100 plug-in hybrids that can do 50 miles of electric driving are overall better than 10 electrics that can do 500 miles.
Especially since basically 99% of drives are under 50 miles.
Plug in hybrids would be the best choice if anyone actually plugged them in. Most PHEVs here in Norway are leased and exist only because they are cheaper than the petrol version. The leasing companies say that only a small fraction of them are ever charged.
That assumes that the used car market isn't a thing. Richer people (those who can afford new cars) keeping their cars as long as possible would definitely reduce overall demand for cars by killing the used car market, which I guess is also a good thing if you care about the environment (but in a harsh unintended consequence kind of way). Or perhaps new economy cars would become a thing again, kind of like the ones they drive around in China (or Japan). They aren't designed to last more than 4-6 years anyways.
That's a minor reason. The major reason is profit margins. It costs a lot less to make an electric vehicle than an internal combustion vehicle because the drivetrain and control systems are so much simpler. Since Tesla made electric vehicles seem more "premium" that also set up the expectation to the buying public that electric cars should cost more. So an electric vehicle costs $9,000 to make compared to an internal combustion engine vehicle costing $14,000, but the EV sells for $60,000 while the ICE one sells for $46,000. That's also the reason why sedans, stationwagons, hatchbacks, coupes, and minivans are being phased out in favour of trucks, CUVs, and SUVs. Despite costing as much or less to manufacture, public perception allows the manufacturer to charge more.
That said, considering that most repairs are done to transmissions, fuel systems, and body panels (interior and exterior), cutting out everything but the body panels also cuts into the profits of dealership service centers. That's beginning to drive up the costs even more because the dealerships are padding the lot sales price with their markups to cover the loss that happens in the service department with EVs. People are starting to want a direct sales model like Tesla does, but that causes even more problems because direct sales cannot account for local market conditions or quick economic downturns the way dealerships can. Plus you get the problem of "When the hell am I getting my car back?" when it needs repairs or service because you have to ship your car off somewhere far away where they'll get to it as the backlog allows. A la Rivian and Tesla. Neither the customers or the manufacturers want a Rivian/Tesla repair center situation.
> So an electric vehicle costs $9,000 to make compared to an internal combustion engine vehicle costing $14,000, but the EV sells for $60,000 while the ICE one sells for $46,000
Automotive gross margins don't seem to reflect those numbers. Tesla's are around 25%.
Hilariously batteries, even being as expensive as they are, cost less per produced vehicle than an ICE drivetrain thanks to emissions and crash regulations. In the U.S. very single engine and transmission combination for a given vehicle has to be tested individually for both fields. That drives the cost of any new generation of a given car up considerably. Chrysler/FCA/Stellantis kept ancient LX cars alive with just facelifts because paying the penalties was cheaper than testing new vehicles. We don't get a lot of cheaper world brands like SEAT or Japanese kei cars because of that, too. We lost the Focus and Fiesta in North America because Ford foolishly spent that money on the cost-amortized EcoSport instead. The companies believe it's too expensive to "federalize" these cars, and so they just don't bother with them. Meanwhile Volkswagen rushed the id.Buzz right over the Atlantic the moment they finished it because they only had to test one configuration. Same with the Fiat 500E and the Toyota bZ4X. No EPA emissions testing and only a single NHTSA test round make those EVs so much cheaper than testing the twenty six of the Toyota RAV4 or the twelve of the Volkswagen Transporter.
But vendor lock in and monitoring is happening even on non-electric cars, and there's nothing inherent to electric vehicles that requires the lock in and remote monitoring compared to any modern ICE.
It truly sucks that they require a pound of flesh here, you can't have this nice thing without selling your soul. There is nothing that prevents them from respecting the user and allowing repair.
Ideally I agree. The issue seems to be that barriers to entry are too high. There is so much regulatory capture in the automotive industry, everything is arrayed in favor of incumbents.
That sounds like the opposite of nuts. What would be nuts is to do a whole bunch of work to upgrade something that's already working for literally no reason at all.
The problem is, once you ossify, you can't upgrade for whatever reason or extend functionality because the build tools will get lost or won't run on modern stacks any more.
Or, say, some industrial machine - you might wish to allow network connectivity so that the vendor/service teams can get notified once a sensor detects signs of upcoming failure such as vibrations. But you can't connect it to your network, or have to take it off your network once the vendor's security support has passed, because otherwise you're just asking hackers to establish persistence on the system.
How about spare parts? Sure, IDE disk drives (aka the thing that fails the most often) can be replaced by CF cards, but if your software hasn't been touched in 20 years, good luck getting it to run on a "modern" embedded board. You'd have an easier time if you had invested into keeping the embedded OS, the build environment and the boards reasonably up-to-date.
There are two industries the are leading in obsolescense managememt: Aerospace and railways. But yes, this is a seriousbissue if service love of your product is measured in multiple decades.
At least in Europe, railways got the hint (or rather, the EU forced their hand)... they are switching over to ETCS and digital signalling control based on standardised interfaces. Will take a few decades to fully roll out, though.
Hence obsolescence management to litterally keep the trains running, sometimes even on time. And no, regardless of what smart phones do, you do not update a running, and certified, piece of equipment with a real technical need to do so. One of the reasons rail, and air, travel are as safe as they are.
And it is not just signaling, it is rail car and engine systeks as well, down to the last mechanical and electronic component.
