TheAsterisk!
Elio Aficionado
While I don't spot a whole lot of outright nonsense on their frontpage, quite a bit of their pitch is predicated upon certain non-universal assumptions, and they are sloppy as heck with their verbiage- which being a some-time pedant I cannot tolerate.
For instance, from their website:
For example, nothing mandates or legally compels me to point out this flaw in the Myers Motors pitch, but I felt it warranted doing besides.
Also, the same argument for safety absent any quantified or qualified risk assessment works for avoiding driving and public roads altogether, but I bet they aren't aiming for that conclusion.
2) As legally mandated.
3) "<$18K after tax credits" means "<$25.5K out-of-pocket", and if you pay little income tax and no property tax- like myself- the rebate is all but meaningless. The rebate courts those who might buy an additional vehicle, not those who need transportation beyond a bike and a bus. Tax credits don't help, either, if you just can't afford to drop that much all at once, and if financing is an issue for whatever reason. Again, the Elio is the only modern vehicle I've yet seen that might potentially fit such scenarios new. (Time will tell.)
2) The cost of the average ICE car is too darned high, too. They're right, though; even the true upfront $25.5K cost is lower than current averages for a new car, but that's less a merit of theirs and more an indictment of the state of automotive production, sales and marketing much more generally.
3) The next biggest factor is the difficulty of owning and charging an electric car for renters. Ty seemed to get that up above in an earlier comment:
Alternatively, I can totally see other tennants pulling the plug out of others' cars for their own use, then just leaving their neighbors' as they are later, with a partial charge. Locking the charger to the car with some sort of mechanism could fix that, but then you'd also have to deal with someone like me, his EV sitting on it all day long while he sleeps for third shift.
Given the choice, I'd keep the cheaper unit and forgo the complex with (a) charger(s).
Either way, you wouldn't be able to rely upon access to a charger, unless you own a charger (good luck getting property management to OK that somehow) or you lease one solely for yourself, which- again- is likely to more than wash out any fuel savings over an ICE alternative, with the charger lease and the likely higher apartment/unit lease. It's not a solution I'd put much stock in beyond actual homeowners, unless/until I can see my apprehensions assuaged by practice.
For instance, from their website:
Yes, but only applicable as described if you make your single rear wheel the drive wheel. Failing to mention that does nothing to help those who can't grok the driving and/or the physics behind the scenario they depict here. Like I said, not outright nonsense, but potentially misleading, dependent upon the context.Three-wheeled vehicles perform very poorly in bad weather conditions.
If the single wheel is in the rear (as it was on our 3-wheeled EV), the rear wheel slips all over the place in snowy weather. It’s hard to generate forward momentum. It’s also hard to stop the car from fishtailing.
So: Three-wheeled cars are harder to control in bad weather (even rain) and more likely to get into an accident.
Well, no. "Don't have to" !== "doesn't". Again, not outright fabrication, but conflation of mandate with possibility. A lack of legal mandate to conform to functionally similar standards of safety does not mean that none do so, just that any such engineered safety features are put in as a concern of market and customer demand rather than as a concern of legal compliance. Different carrot/stick proposition, but not necessarily a different consequential output.More to the point, 3-wheeled cars are considered “motorcycles.” They don’t have to comply with government safety regulations and are therefore not as safe as their 4-wheeled counterparts.
For example, nothing mandates or legally compels me to point out this flaw in the Myers Motors pitch, but I felt it warranted doing besides.
And they continue to further chase the thread they've found, predicated upon (or at least presented with) flawed logic. I'm willing to bet this has a little something to do with the other single-RWD EV for one that they pictured up above, with a caption loosely insinuating that three-wheelers are all symptomatic of a big business conspiracy to maim our children and kill our families in the greedy pursuit of profit. Or somesuch.If a 3-wheeled EV is more likely to get into accident in bad weather conditions… and does not have the same safety features as a 4-wheeled vehicle… what does that mean?
It means your risk of getting into an accident is higher. If you do get into an accident, your risk of injury is higher also.
Also, the same argument for safety absent any quantified or qualified risk assessment works for avoiding driving and public roads altogether, but I bet they aren't aiming for that conclusion.
That a vehicle has n wheels (where n is greater than two) means nothing by itself to safety absent further information. As critics of our local favorite rightly say, testing will have to speak to that.Safety is the #1 reason why we abandoned our 3-wheeled EV. For EVs to reach the mass market, they need to be as safe as regular cars. That’s why we are now bringing our 4-wheeled EV to market.
1) It's about the ugliest render of a car concept I've seen recently. Not just the car concept itself, which is homely in a B-movie scifi cityscape sort of a way, but whoever did their actual rendering for them, and the composite into the photograph, did a terrible job of it. From the unrefined curves (looks like a video game real-time render from at least several years ago) that show their line and polygonal approximations of curves in the composite, to the weird choice of color, to the lighting on the vehicle, it's awful. Here's hoping they just went a quick-n-dirty route, and used an exported CAD render as their conceptual render for the illustration, and they didn't pay graphics or marketing professionals to make that render.
- We’re bringing a stylish 4-wheeled EV to market.
- This EV will comply with all U.S. car safety regulations.
- And it will sell for < $18,000 after tax credits that, even under President Trump, will be available for the first 200,000 electric cars we produce (by the 200,000th car we don’t expect to need the tax credits for profitability due to higher volumes, lower costs and, especially, lower battery costs).
2) As legally mandated.
3) "<$18K after tax credits" means "<$25.5K out-of-pocket", and if you pay little income tax and no property tax- like myself- the rebate is all but meaningless. The rebate courts those who might buy an additional vehicle, not those who need transportation beyond a bike and a bus. Tax credits don't help, either, if you just can't afford to drop that much all at once, and if financing is an issue for whatever reason. Again, the Elio is the only modern vehicle I've yet seen that might potentially fit such scenarios new. (Time will tell.)
1) The cost/benefit proposition is keeping me from getting all enthused about it, not just cost. Cost means I can't be an owner, but the cost/benefit proposition means I find myself not even a fan. I know, nitpick-y, but it's an important distinction in terms, I think. For a hyperbolic example, a $2K EV that had a 1/2 mile range would also be a no-go, no matter how amazingly cheap that might be.People want to love and own electric vehicles, but cost is the biggest factor keeping them from it. Our personal electric vehicle will finally bring the cost of owning and operating an EV well below the cost of the average gas car.
2) The cost of the average ICE car is too darned high, too. They're right, though; even the true upfront $25.5K cost is lower than current averages for a new car, but that's less a merit of theirs and more an indictment of the state of automotive production, sales and marketing much more generally.
3) The next biggest factor is the difficulty of owning and charging an electric car for renters. Ty seemed to get that up above in an earlier comment:
Exactly. As to a follow-up comment also from Ty:Typically, your most poor won't be living in a house and apartments have never been a place where you can just plug in a vehicle to charge it.
Not to pick on you or your post, Ty, since the first comment was spot on, but newer complexes that stand to have such amenities are very often more expensive to rent, too. I worked for several months to rent a unit at the remarkably low sub-$300/mo. that I have here, but $650-plus/mo. is much more typical for comparable space and amenities in the area. I was very stubborn and very lucky. I guarantee that any such chargers would be (a) token, maybe one or two per building, much like they do so with washing machines so that they can advertise that there is "laundry" in the building (which you'll never use, because the three families of five each in the building always have some sibling or another holding a place in line for it like geeks at a midnight video game release), and/or (b) would be used as a justification to up monthly rates on leases. Glad to be proven wrong, but I'd wager that the corresponding increase would more than wash out fuel savings relative to comparable but cheaper 'no-chargers-here' units, since even just the hookups for your own washer and dryer usually raise monthly rents by $200 or more.I'd be willing to bet that newer apartment complexes/parking garages in cities will have electrical for charging.
Alternatively, I can totally see other tennants pulling the plug out of others' cars for their own use, then just leaving their neighbors' as they are later, with a partial charge. Locking the charger to the car with some sort of mechanism could fix that, but then you'd also have to deal with someone like me, his EV sitting on it all day long while he sleeps for third shift.
Given the choice, I'd keep the cheaper unit and forgo the complex with (a) charger(s).
Either way, you wouldn't be able to rely upon access to a charger, unless you own a charger (good luck getting property management to OK that somehow) or you lease one solely for yourself, which- again- is likely to more than wash out any fuel savings over an ICE alternative, with the charger lease and the likely higher apartment/unit lease. It's not a solution I'd put much stock in beyond actual homeowners, unless/until I can see my apprehensions assuaged by practice.
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