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Politics : Politics of Energy -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (897)	7/23/2008 7:34:33 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 86355

OK, just much lower. Is that bad? Its not bad, but it means the calculations are thrown off, and the actual net total cost consideration isn't as good as what was in the post. Most of the people who bought SUVs and other inefficient vehicles bought them when gas prices were much lower, and awareness was much lower. Its not like there isn't a market for SUVs even at today's prices. The market shrunk, and the producers now have severe overcapacity (and also large unsold inventories), but we still sell a lot more trucks and SUVs than hybrids, and massively more than electric cars. "Look at hybrids. It took awhile before you started to see hybrid SUVs, performance cars etc., and they are still a much smaller part of the total market." Are you living in a cave? Gasoline prices have spiked in the last 6 months, and you are using data from a few years ago. Look at sales of SUVs, look at sales of gasoline efficient cars. If you are at all perceptive you have to recoginze a change in behaviour. Gasoline prices have spiked in the last 6 months, but that's only modestly relevant to the point. Even with today's higher prices, people would generally get a better overall finacial deal from a conventionally powered car than from an electric car. Also even with the higher prices, hybrids will continue for a time to be focused on small to medium sized cars, with low to middling performance. Electric cars even more so. Even in that segment electric cars are not primed for a real breakout. Look at sales of SUVs. Yes look at them. Electric car sales are insignificant compared to them. And almost certainly will continue to be for a long time. You can dismiss an unreleased product as a failure if you want. I never said it was a failure. I suspect it might fail, but it clearly hasn't yet. My only points are the benefit from the car will even at best not be as large as claimed, and the car won't take over a large segment of the market. Even being generous and not just talking about this one car (although my statements have been about it, not electric cars in general), but rather expanding the conversation to all electric cars, they won't be an important segment of the market for quite some time, and they won't be important in terms of the installed base for even longer.