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points by toomuchtodo 1 day ago | 0 comments

California is the world’s fourth largest economy, so this tracks. Whether or not flyover country gets EVs is immaterial to the overall US situation. They can pay forward curve petrol prices if they so choose (“freedom!”), or find a suitable EV if that is a more suitable choice for their needs, unless federal policy returns to assist with purchasing. I am hopeful, concerning recent regime change, that federal EV incentives come back to enable folks to buy affordable EVs (because we should be optimizing for affordable zero emission mobility for all, imho), but only time will tell.

Wyoming‘s population of 600k people is less than one percent of total US population, for example. Californians buy about half that number of EVs per year (~300k-400k).

[–] wat10000 1 day ago

Flyover country has several times the population of California. It’s vital to the success of American manufacturers that their products sell well there too.

[–] toomuchtodo 1 day ago

Nah. You go where the purchasing power is, and that is not poor rural America that is evaporating [1]. K Shaped economy. That’s related, but distinct from the fact that American auto makers are already dead. They collectively wrote off $50B in EV investment to turn away from EVs, and GM just created a $20B multi year stock buyback plan while not investing more in electrification. That is an active choice to allocate that capital to profits instead of investment to build EVs.

The future is affordable, well built Chinese EVs. They already have the capacity to build 50M EVs per year, more than half of global total light vehicle demand. They are currently exporting ~12M/year, and constrained only by there not being enough marine car carriers available to ship more. They are building more car carriers to ramp exports to the world. How long would it take the US to learn how to build 10-20M EVs per year? A decade, probably more, on current trajectories, during which Chinese automakers will continue to ramp. “Build the machine that builds the machine.”

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48586250

(the US sold out its future in this context for globalization and shareholder returns, unfortunately)

[–] wat10000 1 day ago

There are plenty of well-off people in poor rural areas, and there are plenty of wealthy urban areas in flyover country. California is an important market but it's not so important that the rest can be ignored.

[–] toomuchtodo 1 day ago

Please provide geographic economic citations of where.

Here’s mine:

Interactive: Visualizing Median Income For All 3,000+ U.S. Counties - https://www.visualcapitalist.com/interactive-median-income-u... (blue is better, red is worse)

(assume 45k-$50k new vehicle price in the US, back out to the income needed to support a payment at current interest rates on a 5-7 year term, which is roughly $500-$1000/month, which is why auto loans are currently defaulting at record highs)

/r/dataisbeautiful: USA auto loan delinquency rate from 2000 to 2025 - https://old.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1ueked2/oc...

[–] wat10000 1 day ago

It makes no sense to respond to this with a chart of median income. That tells you nothing about how many well-off people there are beyond limiting it to less than 50%, presuming the median is below whatever threshold you consider.

Here's a table of states with median, top 20%, and top 5% figures: https://beforeview.com/income-percentile/state

Mississippi, the lowest one on the list, has a top 5% at over $200,000/year. That's ~150,000 people in households who can comfortably afford a nice new EV, in just one small, poor state.

The states defined by the Census Bureau as being in "the midwest" (a subset of "flyover states") contain about 70 million people. The top 5% would be 3.5 million people who can afford a nice new EV. And this is conservative: someone in the top 6% can probably afford one too, but I'm not counting them, and there's plenty of "flyover state" territory beyond the midwest.

California is big enough and rich enough to have a huge amount of market power. But it's not so big and rich that it makes 100+ million Americans in the middle of the country completely irrelevant and ignorable.

[–] michaelt 1 day ago

Los Alamos, in New Mexico :)

Seriously though, everywhere I've lived there have been at least some doctors, dentists, college professors, business owners and suchlike; even Mississippi has hospitals, or so I'm told.

[–] toomuchtodo 1 day ago

Sure, I know and admit these people exist. I did extensive market research on the US EV TAM before being a late private early public investor in Tesla (~<$20/share), riding in the first Roadster to evaluate the product, etc, and even with updated models to account for socioeconomic strata that continues to bifurcate, I believe my thesis holds around who and who cannot to afford to buy new vehicles at current price levels (it’s definitely gotten worse than 15 years ago, for gestures broadly at everything reasons). I’m saying, broadly speaking, all of the purchasing power is mostly in urban areas, although there are some exceptions in the middle of nowhere as you commented. This does not mean we should leave Rural America out in the cold.

Fundamentally, if we expect Rural America to buy affordable EVs (which, imho, they will need to do, and we should crank on policy to achieve), someone will have to force them to be affordable. Allow cheap, high quality Chinese imports, or nationalize an automaker as they approach failure. But right now, Rural America is captive to a parasite US auto industry profitmaxxing by minimizing production and maxing their profits, protected by tariffs. You cannot compel them to make affordable cars currently, but if you don’t, Rural America is fucked.

“You can just do things.”

(no current TSLA exposure, out long ago around “420 funding secured,” but still own a handful of Teslas out of sentimental reasons)

[–] _heimdall 19 hours ago

We absolutely should not go down the road of nationalizing companies and means of production. The government already has too much influence and control over our lives, we don't need them taking even more by using their power to gobble up failing companies.

We should watch how poorly its going trying to have NYC own something as simple as a few grocery stores. If the government is stepping in to make things cheaper they're destroying competition in the entire industry. They either inadvertently end up owning the entire industry by driving out all privately owned companies, or they subsidize those private companies so they can compete with the state owned ones.

[–] stonogo 1 hour ago

It's not just affordability. Range anxiety is real and the consequences for miscalculating how far you can get on a charge are far more dire in rural areas than they are in urban centers. Affordable or not, EVs won't catch on out here until they're at least as convenient to fuel as gassers. Right now high-speed chargers are hard to find and expensive to use, and slow, which is not going to be tolerated when you're trying to tow a horse trailer.

[–] 59percentmore 18 hours ago

>because we should be optimizing for affordable zero emission mobility for all, imho

Cool, build rail and solar.

[–] MisterMower 1 day ago

That’s just what we need: more subsidies to Elon Musk via federal EV tax credits.

[–] toomuchtodo 1 day ago

Limit subsidies to vehicles that are no more expensive than $25k after subsidies. Make them build cars like BYD, with sub 4% margins. No subsidies for Tesla, they had their chance. He can find a new grift. It’s time to focus on people who actually build, not those who use theatrics to inflate silly capital market numbers for power and status.

[–] tstenner 1 day ago

To be fair an absolute amount already does that. $6k less is nice for a Mercedes CLA (~$55k), but there's a reason you can't buy a Hyundai Inster ($20k) and get it within a year.