When I bought my Fiat 6 months ago this week, I had no intention to buy a new or used electric car, even a Fiat 500e, the electric version of my gas guzzler.
I have a lot of problems with buying an electric vehicle. Batteries don’t last long between charges—fine in the city where commutes are usually very short, and recharging stations are slowly increasing; but no stations exist in the countryside, and commutes to and from towns to shop can be quite long. There’s no universal way to dispose of batteries.
We have no idea how long these companies will support the software—I learned this the hard way, with my 2014 Ford Fiesta SE, that Ford wouldn’t upgrade us with older versions of their FordSync hardware, to anything that would include CarPlay and Android Auto.
And now people who are trying to prepurchase for new models on the horizon may have to pony up even more at some point, because of ”rising prices”:
We failed to appreciate how you viewed your configuration as price locked, and we wrongly assumed the announced Dual-Motor and Standard battery pack would provide configurations that would deliver price points similar to your original configuration. While this was the logic, it was wrong and we broke your trust in Rivian.
For anyone with a Rivian preorder as of the March 1 pricing announcement, your original configured price will be honored. If you canceled your preorder on or after March 1 and would like to reinstate it, we will restore your original configuration, pricing and delivery timing. Our team will be sending an email in the next few days with more details.
—A Letter from Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe on Pricing Updates, via The Verge
While Rivian has backed down for now, it shows companies won’t honor prior commitments. How do we know companies won’t try this again in the future?
Here are the two biggest lies about electric vehicles: these are new vehicles being made, meaning we have to use more of the earth’s resources to produce them, which doesn’t make them exactly ”green”. And the source of the electricity for most will still come from oil and coal, again, not exactly ”green” as they’re trying to tell us. It’s all “greenwashing”, meaning it’s all just marketing bullshit.
If you definitely want to live more ”eco-friendly”, it helps living close to where you work—which isn’t exactly affordable for many, but all that money you would waste on car payments, insurance, gas, etc could be used instead on your rent. Public transportation if it’s available (sadly, it isn’t an option for most of us in this country), even if it means giving up your ”freedom” to travel whenever you wanted to. Or do what I did—buy a (gasp! 😱) used car, one with damn good gas mileage. Sure, it may not have all the ”latest” infotainment features like Bluetooth or even that dashboard to play your Spotify playlists, but you save on car costs, a used car gets a second lease on life, no mining is done to get you that ”new” ride, you spend less on gas. (Plus, there’s plenty of ”dashboard” add-ons that you can just hook up to your car’s audio system, without spending hundreds on replacing the car radio, to access CarPlay and Android Auto, map and navigation apps, and other apps [tho I would recommend not using them while driving].)
Until we have infrastructure in place like do for gas cars, and they are actually affordable so even working-class people can afford them, I will continue to buy and use gas-powered cars. Maybe not as ”green”, but they are usually more reliable, affordable, and I know I can get somewhere without my dying.
