Both cars are also available with AWD.
And I think the ionic5 has this at a premium price. I don’t need AWD. But I have been driving exclusively front wheel drive cars for years.
Just discovered that the new Prius Ltd doesn’t have rear seat vents for heat/AC. That’s disappointing.
After much consideration we couldn’t justify getting anything other than a Hyundai for our high schooler due to its incredible cost benefit and are so happy with that decision. We will definitely be looking at the Ioniq when we upgrade DHs car (soon).
Not shopping for cars for our kids!
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I didn’t think you were. I was just commenting that we have found the Hyundai to be a great value. I don’t know that we would have considered the brand for ourselves before the research we did when our kids reached driving age and a third card became a necessity.
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Tesla announced price cuts across their entire line of cars.
Is Tesla trying to bury the negative news by making a big buzz about price cuts?
So how much is a blue model 3 now?
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Why China is crimping the EV tax credit……
https://www.axios.com/2023/04/12/why-us-cant-build-evs-without-china
The Biden administration’s effort to spur domestic battery manufacturing is running into a problem: Some critical raw materials are only found abroad, and China controls much of the supply.
Why it matters: The provenance of raw materials used in electric vehicle (EV) production — including lithium, nickel, cobalt and graphite — is about to have a huge impact on tax credits designed to put such cars within reach of average Americans.
Details: Consumers can earn up to $7,500 in federal tax credits on EV purchases — but only when buying cars that meet certain sourcing requirements.
- New rules issued under last year’s Inflation Reduction Act exclude EVs with components from “foreign entities of concern” — a category that remains hazy but will likely include China, given that federal officials recently tagged it as such in the semiconductor world.
- The idea is to reduce U.S. reliance on China, a lofty goal given that country’s control of vital battery resources and technology.
Reality check: Many of the minerals essential to EV battery chemistries are primarily mined and processed in China, or by companies within China’s sphere of influence.
- China is poised to control a third of the world’s lithium supply by 2025, for example.
- It’s also home to one of the world’s largest natural battery graphite resources, and is the only country currently mining such material in large quantities.
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It appears that geopolitics will come into play for the potential replacement for lithium batteries too, according to The New York Times:
There’s definitely demand for electric cars, but my worry is why we’re allowing China to become our mainstream supplier. It seems like a conflict of interest, since they’re working with OPEC to replace the dollar with their own currency. Right now, I don’t trust Chinese made batteries.
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I do not think that battery technology is very well understood by the general public, or perhaps even by me. I have been reading about it but there seems to be a lot to learn.
Lithium is apparently quite common in many places around the world. China certainly does not have a monopoly on the presence of lithium. One issue is that it tends to be sparse in the sense that there is a bit of it all over the place, rather than a lot in one place. Another issue is that extracting lithium is very polluting. Mining lithium in the US runs into trouble with pollution controls. I have seen many articles about this, here is one:
It is normal in engineering for their to be tradeoffs all over the place. This is one obvious example where the environmental advantages of electric cars comes at an environmental cost.
Also, lithium is not even remotely close to being the only ingredient in lithium ion batteries. Here is one article that explains that while there is a range, the battery in an EV might typically weigh about 1,000 pounds, and might contain about 8kg (17 or 18 pounds) of lithium. Most of the weight is other stuff, and there is a lot of other stuff.
Nickel is one of the other ingredients in batteries. One of my early memories was a trip to Sudbury Ontario, which at the time was billed as the Nickel capital of the world. I remember a huge nickel (basically a 5 cent coin, but 30 feet high). I also remember, even at a very young age, being surprised that no plants would grow within a few miles of the town. I wondered if plants could not survive, what was this doing to humans. Apparently Sudbury has been cleaned up. It has plants now. Nickel mining is still a problem. This article is about nickel, but in Indonesia (not China and not the US and not Canada).
So I think that there are tough tradeoffs here and I do not think that we have fully figured out the least damaging approach. At the very least a lot of very smart people are thinking about it.
To me the big win with a plug in hybrid comes from the fact that so much of my driving is local. The big win with an electric car comes from the fact that they are expected to last so long, and where I live electric generation is relatively clean. I still think that there are tradeoffs all over the place and I do not fully understand the tradeoffs.
For right now I just keep driving the car that I have, and hoping that all of this will become clearer before I need to replace it with a new car.
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Gotta love the 2 interviewed Tesla employees whose attitude was “that people long ago had given up any reasonable expectation of keeping personal data private.” So, basically, we are entitled to do whatever we want with your data because everyone should expect nothing to be private.
Just saw a piece that described huge lithium reserves in Maine. We’ll have to see if @MaineLonghorn is ready to allow a huge hole to be dug in the middle of that beautiful state.
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Some EV batteries do not use nickel (or cobalt, which is the most expensive and problematic of the minerals commonly used in EV batteries). Lithium iron phosphate batteries are less expensive, less likely to catch fire, and more durable, though they store less energy per battery weight and volume (but still usable in EVs).
Depends what part of the state! Interesting. This state could use another source of income.
So Tesla employees verified the Snowden info. Cool.
Some lithium is not mined in the sense of being dug out of the ground. THere’s a lot of excitement right now about lithium in the Salton Sea in California. Don’t know if any of y’all have ever been to the Salton Sea, but it is a creepy decrepit place.
There are also large reserves in South America in Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia.