You can, but it's usually a larger difference. A car that might be negotiated down to $5k or $6k on the private market, will probably be at $9k-$10k on the dealer lot. Plus they'll tack on document fees, and so on. In the end, you might be looking at paying double what you would otherwise for cars in similar shape and mileage.
That does also basically erase any connection to the last owner - so you can't try to infer if they took care of the car or not. On top of that, afaik many second-hand dealers buy cars at auction and then often only do basic (bandaid-type?) fixes to get the car ready for sale.
Are there any utilities that have progressive rates electricity rates? Where the first X kWh are $0.12/kWh, the next Y kWh are $0.15/kWh, and then anything over Z kWh are $0.18/kWh, etc?
Though it seems that nowadays, much of that cost goes to taxes and fees, rather than electricity rate itself.
Texas has all sorts of options. Most power usage here is structured where individuals can select which Retail Electric Provider (REP) to use. They essentially wholesale energy from the grid. I had the (dis)pleasure of searching for a new contract after ours expired so have a refreshed memory of options:
- flat rates
- discounted for more or less spend
- credits issued at X usage (which is only good at X specifically because its generally an expensive rate but it’s a marketing ploy for filter based searches).
- free or discounted night time or weekends
- etc.
If you can imagine they charge a certain way, there is likely someone trying it.
Motorcycles only seem cheap. Factor in a proper set of gear, like helmet, jacket, pants, and gloves, and you're up another $1k. Also note that maintenance intervals are more frequent. Consumables, such as tires, will be more expensive in the long run.
Why choose that over a used car for $5k? It's not cheaper, nor is it more practical. But I'll agree, on the nice days, it's definitely more enjoyable.
Are you comparing a brand new motorcycle with a 5k used car? You can get a used motorcycle and second hand gear. No matter how you slice and dice it, motorcycle is cheaper.
I can find several middleweight tourers / adv bikes between £12k-£25k new. And that's middle/top shelf. I can even get something new under £8k if I don't need the most modern electronics and 650cc is enough.
Comparing that to the car? LOL, 5 year used car like, say, Hyundai Ioniq is £15k+
And every other bit of the maintenance is more expensive in the car. Literally every single one. Also taxes and insurance.
Gear? Yeah, boots once every 10-15 years, gloves/jacket/trousers/helmet every 5 years,
They may not have the best prices at every point in time, but they consistently have good deals. There are several price trackers out there; Keepa and CamelCamelCamel are the big ones. Use them to your advantage and figure out whether the item you're after is a good deal or not.
For what it's worth, been buying from Amazon for the past 15 years or so, and not once received a counterfeit product. Granted, I still don't like they they mix up their inventory, but I think it's a smaller problem than people make it to be. Most people are buying household supplies off of Amazon; that's not really a category that gets affected by counterfeits.
B&H is a hidden gem. I came across them because I needed a camera, but they sell lots of other stuff and their sales team consists of actual humans who have physically used the products they sell, and a supply chain they actually control. In the past, I’ve talked to a real human there who:
* verified the un-advertised compatibility between an accessory and the device I was buying it for (hours of googling had not been able to confirm this for me)
* explained their personal experience with both the Sony and Canon cameras I was considering
* nearly price-matched another vendor’s sale on a large purchase of Dell monitors
They have their own warehouses with real physical stock ordered directly from suppliers, (no drop shipping and no third party sellers.) One order I received even came with a hand written note signed by the salesman who’d help me select it. A nice touch, but impossible for an operation at Amazon scale.
These days B&H is my preferred vendor for PCs+components, AV gear, SMB network equipment.
"Despite the slightly higher levels of tire wear from EVs, brake dust was found to be more unhealthy, as brake dust is much more likely to become airborne (>40%) than tire wear is (1-5%). So EVs create a lot less of the worse thing, and a little more of the less-bad thing."
I recently bought an EV and love it. I barely ever touch the brakes and the wheels stay clean, unlike my old BMW where the front wheels turned gray from brake dust very quickly.
Some comments here are looking for a 100% perfect solution, which doesn't exist. Transportation is polluting. Sorry but even public transportation is polluting, even if it is more efficient when its above a certain utilization. Where I live, some buses are EV and it is a joy to ride them compared to diesel ones.
With an EV there is less local pollution, less noise pollution, more dynamic response when needed and no need for wasteful oil "changes" where the old, dirty, useless oil doesn't just magically disappear.
There is an additive called 6PPD added to tires to prevent them from degrading in the atmosphere, and it has been found that when this thing reacts with ozone in the air it forms another compound 6PPD-quinone which is highly toxic to some fishes. Weirdly enough it's highly toxic to some species of salmon but not to other salmon species.
Presumably there's work ongoing to find an less damaging replacement, but I haven't heard of any.
Not really. There are plenty of possible replacements, the industry wants to make sure that _this_ time it won't hurt some Australian finches if tires are exposed to moonlight or something.
It's not you, it's definitely me. I cannot tell if there is irony or a 'straight-faced' comment that you wrote.
Either way, like always, time will tell. We (humans) almost never 'get it right the first time'. And perhaps EVs have been around for quite a while now, it's still 'a while'. So I wouldn't be surprised if the lobby for "7PPD" (or whatever replacement) convinces us that "7PDD" is the best and even makes fish taste better, only to find out that it causes terminal cancer (see smoking, sugar, etc.)
So putting this aside, the elephant in the room is still the weight of the EVs, tire wear is one thing but the roads are also being worn at a much faster rate due to the weight of the cars. When EVs do have to brake and regenerative is not enough it needs to stop more inertia due to this high weight.
Yeah but they should get lighter ideally and not heavier because the BMW 3 ICE has also gotten unreasonably heavy.
I'm a huge proponent of biking and electric bikes but there is too bad infrastructure, storage, safety concerns etc that are not being addressed properly. For instance I wish I could buy a Cargo bike and use that for grocery shopping and most other transportation of my kids but I don't have room in our bike storage (where I've had two bikes stolen) and I don't have room in our storage room and live in an apartment. The cars parking take up more square meters than the squaremeters of the building or close to it while the bike storage is a fraction of that.
I'm not a bot but I regret posting that as my first comment and to be honest I didn't read the article before it was just my thoughts from prior knowledge. I've been on Hacker News for many years but decided a week ago to make an account.
Still you have a good point, one should be skeptical of what is written by bots.
Right. So as the other poster mentioned the elephant in the room regarding road damage are trucks. And as a fellow biker I'm completely with you on infrastructure, but still see EVs as a massive improvement on ICEs.
What's even worse is we're seeing some relatively-new accounts basically commenting LLM summaries of the article; it definitely looks like a way to "fake age" accounts.
Same thing happens with renewables. Every single article either positive or negative about solar or wind you'll inevitably see the "But the sun doesn't always shine! Nuclear is the only possible solution!" style comments.
This nearly always means "mentioned" rather than any kind of coercion. The ICE phaseout is still something like a decade away at the most optimistic in Europe and much, much further away in the US.
Depends on the gripe. My state has the largest housing crisis in the nation, but also requires all new homes to have rooftop solar - forcing implementation of the least economic scale and the the least economic installation type. I certainly empathize with people we feel compelled to point out that solar energy policy isn't all sunshine and roses.
Yeah, no. Most homes are in the range of 1.500.000 to 2.500.000 kroner. There are some homes closer to 1.000.000 kroner that need repairs or remodeling. You are not buying anything livable for 500.000 kroner, sorry. Those days are in the past. And mind you, these numbers are for medium-sized cities. Not any of the desirable cities, like Copenhagen, Odense, or Aarhus.
