Honda is setting itself up for failure on the second disruption sweeping the automotive industry: the software-defined vehicle (SDV), which has core capabilities that can be upgraded and improved over time.
No thank you. Not sure why the author frames this as a good thing. They've been bamboozled by the automakers and have got it backwards - you're buying a vehicle that already has the capabilities, but are disabled, then paying rent (or a fee) to turn them on. I'm much more likely to buy from a manufacturer that doesn't play these games.
>you're buying a vehicle that already has the capabilities, but are disabled, then paying rent (or a fee) to turn them on.
This is very much not what "software-defined vehicle" means which itself is very much not the same thing as EVs. It's possible to criticize the explotative business practices you mentioned (or bad UI practices like moving everything to a touchscreen instead of physical buttons) without linking them to other issues that have no real relation beyond falling under the general category of "technology".
At a societal level, EVs are generally better than ICE cars. At a societal level, cars that can automatically fix a "recall" with an over-the-air update are generally better than recalls that will wait to get fixed until an owner schedules an appointment to have the car serviced. These two things can be true without endorsing automakers who charge and extra fee to activate the seat warmers that already exist in the vehicle.
That's all motherhood and apple pie, but I'm sorry: the reality that we live in and incentives at play are such that if a capability can be exploited, then it will be exploited to the detriment of the consumer. Full stop.
It's interesting how many complaints I see on HN that are framed as if they're complaints about a specific piece of technology when they are really complaints about capitalism. I'm all ears if you want to criticize our entire economic system, but I think it's silly to have that conversation specifically in the context of car software rather than at a societal level.
When was the last time you worried about someone cutting your brakes? A lot of times these hypothetical fears are disconnected from reality. Security is important, but people generally don't engage in destruction for destruction's sake so improving default safety levels has been a clear net positive for society so far. Maybe I'm being shortshighted and a future security exploit will change that, but it's not something I currently fear as someone whose car gets occasional OTA updates.
Cutting someones breaks requires physical access to the hardware.
Changing:
if (brakeDepressed()){
engageBrake();
}
To:
if (brakeDepressed() && currentTime < '5/6/26 4pm EST'){
engageBrake();
}
Can be deployed to thousands of vehicles, and would stop brakes from working during peak commute time on the East Coast.
> At a societal level, cars that can automatically fix a "recall" with an over-the-air update are generally better than recalls that will wait to get fixed until an owner schedules an appointment to have the car serviced.
This doesn't have anything to do with EV vs ICE, but whether it has a over the air updates and whether the problem can be fixed with a software update or not. I expect car recalls are pretty well into the noise in terms of "societal level" problems too aren't they? Even if they were not I expect whole "software defined car" thing, whatever that really means, has not resulted in mechanical defects plummeting, but rather just more software defects. Although it is quite possible EVs have less defects in general than ICE cars I suppose.
I’ve never had a software-based danger on my hardware-based vehicles. As such, there is a whole class of recalls that I never needed: all the ones you tell me I’m missing out on.
> you're buying a vehicle that already has the capabilities, but are disabled, then paying rent (or a fee) to turn them on. I'm much more likely to buy from a manufacturer that doesn't play these games.
Ongoing subscriptions for access to physical hardware features like seat warmers* seems obnoxious at first glance, but a fee is more reasonable and you might find that there aren’t many auto makers that don’t do this or aren’t planning on it. BTW there’s very little in software or electronics that doesn’t do this, and many other consumer products do too. What might be less visible is how often the hardware is included and made trivial for a dealer to upgrade but doesn’t have a remote software unlock. It’s the same thing and it’s been happening for decades, but gets less outrage.
You would have paid a fee for the feature if it wasn’t included. Focusing on features being there already and locked being somehow “bamboozles” isn’t necessarily the right way to frame this, even from a pro-consumer perspective. This practice of building the high end model and locking some features behind a paywall makes the design and manufacturing cheaper for everyone by having only one design. The paywall model suggests that the design costs are more important than the manufacturing or materials costs of these features. That’s absolutely true for software apps, and it’s accepted by and large and we don’t feel like that’s a skeezy game. It doesn’t surprise me at all that with manufacturing at a global scale, it makes more sense to build one model and lock some features with software.
Do think of the potential benefits we get from this model - overall lower prices (in theory) from simplified design and manufacturing; the ability to upgrade later after you buy (or even downgrade if you don’t like it and it’s a subscription).
* AFAIK the BMW seat warmers subscription was a rumor at one point, got a bunch of online uproar, but didn’t actually happen? I’m not sure if anyone has actually done this.
It's techcrunch. The angle of software-everything has to be there.
Why honda is killing EVs is directly related to just how damn cheap Chinese EVs have become and how stupid Americans are when it comes to EV efficiency. Who the hell wants large vehicles for EV when the best solutions are small efficient vehicles with long drive times.
Americans distort the market and margins, and Honda was never in the large SUV game.
I get the trucks and SUV's where you need them. I live in a rural area and without ground clearance and 4x4, I literally wouldn't be able to visit my parents. But my daily driver is a Honda Civic. Because 75% of my driving is done on paved roads that are well maintained (except in the winter).
What kills me are the MASSIVE vehicles in the suburbs though. Why do you need a 3 ton suburban to drive around 2 kids on very clear, very well maintained streets? Why would you buy a 4x4 truck when the most off road you'll do is driving over wet leaves on your cul-de-sac in the fall?
I don't disagree with your first statement but there is a huge range of cars in the Japanese market. They make the Toyota Land Cruiser and Nissan Patrol after all, smaller by American standards but the biggest cars most other countries will see.
In Shenzhen for a tech meeting. The streetscape is quieter, despite high traffic levels and I hear not only MORE birdsong, but the birds do more complex songlines.
The air is clean. For sure some of this is because it's a coastal city and has fresh sea breezes, but I've been in other Chinese coastal cities in times past and the air was significantly less clean.
There are social upsides for an almost-all-EV city.
This is an 18m person city. It's not exclusively wealthy people, its just a city with a very high local EV population and it shows.
I'm sure it's coming. I'm in Mexico this week and was surprised to drive by not one but two chinese car dealerships. Looks like almost 10% of cars sold last year were EVs
Shenzhen is not nearly "almost-all EV" city. There is a lot of wealthy people and almost none of them drives EV. You can see all expensive cars are ICE (blue plates).
Modern ICE cars emit almost no sound or emissions. Its not 70s with black smoke coming from exhaust pipes.
You can take any densely populated city with almost none EV vehicles (say Tokyo) and you can hear birds and air would be very clean.
Birds adapt their song to ambient noise conditions. This paper [1] studies the Pearl River Delta (where Shenzhen is) as a natural experiment. It shows spectral changes in the target species correlating to background noise levels. I haven't looked hard enough to make sure there isn't a study that does find complexity changes but it's certainly clear that noise can affect bird song behavior generally.
Most other countries are not Norway, it is a very wealthy, tiny market (150 K vehicles/year) with lots of hydro and not representative of the typical vehicle market in Western Europe and definitely not representative of the situation in the rest of the world.
EVs are the future, there is no doubt about that. But that future will not arrive everywhere at the same point in time and Norway is very far ahead of the rest of the world due to a fairly unique set of circumstances: exporting your own oil and gas to be able to have a 'clean' (and up to recently heavily subsidized) transportation network is in a way just a gigantic bookkeeping trick.
"exporting your own oil and gas to be able to have a 'clean' (and up to recently heavily subsidized) transportation network is in a way just a gigantic bookkeeping trick"
How so?
If every oil exporter used some of their oil revenue to switch to EVs, that would, all things equal, hasten the transition to EVs. The U.S. is not doing that.
The funny thing is the US doesn’t really consume much Saudi Oil. The US is a net exporter of oil, though they do import some specific types of oils and export more of others.
The US’s interest in the Middle East oil is a lot about stabilizing oil prices. At least it used to be when there was a rational policy and competent executors.
> the drug dealer that knows you don't consumer your own supply unless you must
So true. There's nothing incompatible at all with:
a) realizing that earth has gifted you with a valuable but limited & polluting energy source
b) realizing that you'd be foolish to get you own country hooked on it, but it's not a bad business if you can get other countries hooked on it.
Instead we get oil rich areas seemingly determined to show off how much of their oil they can waste.
Wow, so now the US oil barons who lobbied Trump to kill renewables and EVs are even worse than Mohammed "Bonesaw*" bin Salman Al Saud? That's really something, if you look at it that way...
Either you're too smart for me or I just can't follow you, but could you please expand a bit on your comment? I find it hard to link it to the parent, but I realize that may be on me.
Sorry, it was referring more to the grandparent comment, that referred to Saudi Arabia behaving more responsibly than the US, and Mohammed bin Salman is of course the crown prince and prime minister of Saudi Arabia.
They're comparing Saudi Arabia to a drug dealer; I don't think they're ascribing any moral virtue to the Saudi regime. They just believe the Saudis are acting more intelligently.
Transitioning to renewables makes economic sense for the Saudis because they make more money selling a barrel of oil for transportation fuel and generating power with wind and solar.
The US has vast reserves of coal and natural gas. We generally don't use oil to generate power either -- oil is something like 0.4% of the total power generated, because we have vast amounts of natural gas and coal to use instead.
The situation isn't the result of some crafty master plan on the part of the Saudis. It's jusut what makes sense.
The oil market is global and the US is a big part of that but it’s not the only one. You can always make changes to energy sources later and as new technologies are unlocked perhaps we can even skip some headaches now. Obviously there’s the geostrategic angle now which you see play out in Iran and Venezuela.
As other countries move to reliance on Chinese rare earth processing for renewable technology, it drives their oil and gas consumption down which means more oil and gas for those who are still using it.
If you really want to look at this analogy about drug dealers then really what you see is that America is the big boss here and an energy and military super power, and Saudi Arabia is just another dealer under American protection and if they don’t do what we tell them to do they’ll get the boot.
Like the drug dealers where I grew up they are making the neighborhood a really terrible place to live. They might have a nice house right now, but the homes around them are burning.
The US is moving the grid renewable. The guys at top might not think so and yell loudly not to, but they can't stop things, only put the brakes on a little.
They've pumped the brakes pretty hard by cutting EPA standards,
subsidizing coal,
suing to stop wind and solar projects,
cutting green energy grants by $8B,
yoinking solar tax credits,
trying to rewrite the Clean Air Act to block states from regulating emissions,
shield Big Oil from litigation for climate deception,
and repeating Big Oil's lies and disinformation.
"If every oil exporter used some of their oil revenue to switch to EVs, that would, all things equal, hasten the transition to EVs."
The premise is all things aren't equal. The oil Norway would have used just gets used somewhere else so what difference does it make what Norway does instead. I don't know if that's the reality of the situation but if it is just an offset, it does sound like a bookkeeping trick doesn't it?
Norway switching from ICEs to EVs objectively reduces global oil consumption+burning by exactly that much.
Norway exporting oil increases oil supply, but doesn't increase consumption. The world's oil consumers are not supply-constrained; the producers are not running at 100% capacity, and they'll happily pick up the slack if Norway just stopped exporting oil for no reason. And there's a large amount of consumption that can't be offset by electrification in the first place (petrochemicals, long distance flight, etc) so there's not even a theoretical future end-state where they require a non-EV-using counterparty to buy their oil to fund their EV usage.
Calling it a "bookkeeping trick" is just verbal sleigh-of-hand.
Only if Norway's lack of internal consumption must be met with equal and similarly destructive consumption elsewhere.
Consider if others followed their lead. Then oil would be used less for transportation, one of its most destructive and singular uses, and more for manufacturing or medical or less wasteful uses.
Sure, but there is also China where over half of new vehicle sales are EVs. Denmark is at 70%, Sweden, Iceland, Finland and the Netherlands are all above 50%, a bunch of other countries in the EU are at one third EVs. In India, 5% of sales are EVs but that is double of the year before and all the big car manufacturers in India are now offering EVs. Even Australia is at 14% after stalling on EVs for years. So change is unfolding quite quickly compared to previous years. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ev-share-new-car-sales-by-c...
Those numbers include PHEV cars. As a BEV owner, I consider PHEV to be more ICE than BEV. BEV numbers are not as impressive, but we're getting there, slowly but surely. A bit slower than I would've hoped.
No, it is a real invewtment in the right direction. The oil states in the middle east could have made such investments, too. Lots of EV powered by solar panels paid for with oil dollar. But they did not (in a significant way).
>But that future will not arrive everywhere at the same point in time and Norway is very far ahead of the rest of the world due to a fairly unique set of circumstances: exporting your own oil and gas to be able to have a 'clean' (and up to recently heavily subsidized) transportation network is in a way just a gigantic bookkeeping trick.
Not really. Even in a hypothetical future where all road vehicles are electric, we'll still need fossil fuels for a while. For one thing, it's probably going to be a while before airplanes can go electric. And production of plastics will probably need petroleum for a long time.
In the US, near a major roadway on a cold morning, the fumes are strong. Not every car or truck is maintained properly and running in cold weather really magnifies that effect.
per-capita or by total volume? i ask because a sibling or child comment says that the number of cars sold in norway is pretty small (in part because the population is small). a quick google says 180k cars sold in norway in 2025 (we can round up to 100% EV) and 34M sold in China. It also says China has 50% EV sales. So by total volume Norway isn't close to the top.
Not the OP but have a 20-year-old car. The relevant calculation is not cost of annual repair v value of car, but rather annual cost vs annual cost of a new car. Even if you amortize the upfront cost of a new car over 20 years, the increased insurance cost and (depending on where you live) property taxes plus some annual maintenance, at least for me, is substantially more expensive than annual maintenance on my current car.
I did a from-the-ground-up rebuild (including the engine) just after buying it. That cost an arm and a leg but all in (including the original car) it still came to ~half of what a new one would cost. Anything that had been 'improved' on it was brought back to stock. It's been super reliable, I've had it since jan 2020, put a considerable number of kms on it and it hasn't let me down (so far :) ).
As for doing the maintenance myself, I don't have experience with this kind of car at all, I've worked a lot on classic Mini's, Citroens (2CV and DS) and Austin Maxi. But never anything like this so I'm more than happy to let someone else earn a buck on it. But it's been pretty cheap to run so far, fuel, oil, regular service and once a control arm that got bent out of shape.
Compared to a new vehicle I'm considerably better off.
Netherlands. And fuel injection has been a thing since the 1930s for Diesel and the 1950's for vehicles.
Yes, it has an ECU and ooh, gollies there is software in that. But it's completely invisible from an interaction point of view, there are no screens, all the buttons just do what they are told, there are no 'upgrades', no bugs, interfaces, restarts and attempts to kill me through 'assistance'.
It’s interesting to see how people who grew up with smartphones think.
It’s entirely possible to get around without smartphones or paper maps. There are road signs, written directions, verbal directions. The main time I used to use a paper map was driving long distance trips in a foreign country.
A country where you're looked down upon for driving a Focus RS or other "fun" car seems like a boring, austere place to be.
Perhaps that's why we never hear about Norwegian car culture (as opposed to Germany and the US). Ferdinand Porsche would have resigned to building apple carts.
EVs are fine and dandy, but it is a luxury class of cars for now and it shows really. Most other countries are far far away from mass deployment of EVs or restricting ICE cars. EVs can win if either a) the car is cheaper than the same class ICE, or b) operational expenses of using EV car would be cheaper. Neither of which is happening yet. And the car do need to have some advantage, since EVs already come with inherent disadvantage of long and inconvenient charging, small batteries, limited locations for charging with buggy and broken stations, not working apps or cards etc.
What's silly is that the reality you describe is a choice that's been made, not something fundamental to EVs. Cars like the Nissan Leaf and the Chevy Bolt are supremely inexpensive. China's BYD cars are extremely cheap for what they are.
American/European car makers realized there is a large class of people who are wealthy and will buy a high end EV for status reasons, and started chasing that market instead.
Yeah, visiting my ex-Gf family in Norway, I realized how much richer Norwegians are that it's not even funny. It's not really a market representative of the average buyer. Same how neither Switzerland, Luxembourg or Monaco are.
I am living in a working class neighborhood of apartment buildings in West-central Europe with average to below average earners, and there's zero EVs parked here on the streets, basically 90% of people have old diesel cars. Only when you go towards the suburbs with rich(inherited wealth) people living in single family homes you see everyone has an EV.
The distinction is quite clear, do you live in a house or have your own parking space and possibility to install your own charger? Then EV 100% no brainer. Otherwise people stick to ICE.
I do live in a house, could easily afford an EV and have plenty of solar to keep it charged. And I still don't have one because all of these EVs feel like the worst of the computer world applied to automotive. The last thing I need is a computer on wheels and I'm old enough that I know my current car is likely my last. For my kids it is different, and I'm sure that they'll go electric at some point but I hope that they'll be able to do so without buying a mobile privacy violation instrument.
The Dacia Spring proves that it doesn't have to be the case. The base version doesn't even have a touchscreen, let alone internet connectivity. It is a cheap car, in every sense of the word, but is shows that not every EV has to be like Tesla.
To give you some perspective, the most popular EV in China costs $6000 (Wuling Mini). New. The second most popular costs $10000 (Geely Xingyuan). I tried both, and they are far less crappy than they have the right to be. They are cheap cars for sure, but they're perfectly adequate for regular use.
And Geely Xingyuan has a 40kWh battery in the basic configuration! This is utterly ridiculous for a car that is _that_ cheap.
So China basically murdered the global ICE market. It's gone. There's no going back. Once China figures out the logistics and sales, ICE vehicles will be dead in all of the less affluent countries. Especially because EVs combine almost too perfectly with solar generation.
That is irrelevant unless Norway has unused capacity.
If you use more electric power, then what matters is how that extra power is generated.
It gets weird in Europe because adding extra load in Norway could easily mean that Poland uses more coal generation.
I'm in New Zealand where the government owned generators are preventing solar installations. One example was via an unobvious regulation that the installation had to handle rediculously overengineered earthquake rules. Meanwhile we use coal or imported gas when the isn't enough rain for our hydro. And we waste about 10% of our total capacity exporting (via one aluminium plant).
What is a hydro energy resource, a river? Don't lots of countries have rivers?
(If we're talking about hydroelectric power plants they've chosen to build, that's not exactly a resource -- and other countries could choose to build those too, right?)
You need both the right geography and a lack of either people or democracy in the place you want to build it. That rules out new large hydro projects in most of Europe.
If you include PHEVs along with pure EVs the total is around 12% total sales for 2025, and 4% total on the road. I'm not sure when PHEVs became available overseas but they haven't been an option here for that long. Heaps of hybrids are being sold but for now still mostly of the traditional non-plug-in type.
As alliao says, this is partly because of the way road user charges (RUC) currently work, though that is slated to change in the future.
Hybrids and PHEVs are more complicated given that they are both ICEs and EVs. A pure EV is much cheaper, and many places in the developing world don't have easy access to oil anyways.
nz politicians figured out where the tap is to control uptake.. in the name of RUC right now it's tuned so non-plugin hybrid is cheapest, this separates out the price sensitive crowd...
And massive oil resources. As a result of this, one of the wealthiest sovereign wealth funds on the planet, which they manage well and for the good of the country.
Their hydro energy company is an aluminum company company, they have so much slack power they export it refining bauxite.
It is worth repeating solar panels covering an area about the size of NH generate enough power to supply all current entire US energy needs.
My hot take for Japan is that hybrids make the most sense until one the major markets (US or all of EU) has significant traction with respect to ubiquitous EV charger infrastructure.
Tesla can fund the project of making EV chargers ubiquitous in the US and make it make sense within the context of a profitable business plan.
Chinese manufacturers can similarly make it make sense financially.
Japanese auto makers who are heavily subsidized by the Japanese government can't easily fund the infrastructure project of making EV chargers ubiquitous in a foreign country like the US or EU and their home market is much smaller.
I have a tangential question. Do you find that snow banks near roads are appreciably less black and disgusting now that there are fewer ICE vehicles on the road?
Growing up in America I have memories of our roadside snowbanks becoming black and saturated by vehicle exhaust and it always felt so gross to me. The back half of winter was characterized by blackened, salt-saturated puddles and banks. I wonder if the prevalence of EVs has made things less dirty in the winter.
> The back half of winter was characterized by blackened, salt-saturated puddles and banks. I wonder if the prevalence of EVs has made things less dirty in the winter.
The dominant cause of that is probably brake and tire particulate matter, not car exhaust. And EVs make tire pollution go up (because they're heavier) and brake pollution... I'm not sure if the weight effect there is counteracted by the decreased amount of friction brake use (as opposed to resistance braking).
Could be! I don't know enough to say what the ratio of exhaust to tire particulate is on the average road.
In either case it's a good physical representation of how much particulate we are exposed to every day. Maybe having it trapped in dirty snowbanks is better than having it getting kicked up into the air during a dryer season.
Interesting but North America has different needs for vehicles. Long time before our electrical systems to be able to compensate for that kind of whole sale change. Will be at least 20 years if it ever happens.
I would also say that any ICE vehicle that has 0 subscription models, upgradable firmware, tracking software will probably have a value premium to it in the not distant future.
FWIW downvoters - I have a PHEV - but I live in the real world and a likely future!
> Long time before our electrical systems to be able to compensate for that kind of whole sale change. Will be at least 20 years if it ever happens.
I don't know about the whole national electric grid, but at my house, I didn't really have to upgrade anything and didn't even notice an increase in electric bill when I started plugging in my EV. I don't think my car is even 20% of my household electricity usage. I'd hope we can increase our national grid's capability by at least 20% in the next 20 years. (Also, aren't datacenters causing that massive demand right now, whether or not the upgrades are even there yet? As I understand this is causing massive price increases?)
> I would also say that any ICE vehicle that has 0 subscription models, upgradable firmware, tracking software will probably have a value premium to it in the not distant future.
As you kind of hint at, whether or not the vehicle is EV or ICE has nothing to do with whether it has subscription models, tracking, etc. and car manufacturers are racing towards both of those things in a way that makes the drivetrain irrelevant.
1. Infra will need to upgrade in order to handle heavy charging in neighborhoods with wholesale change in the fleet. It would change our electrical use model considerably in terms of times of use -- and we would be adding all the energy used from gas powered cars to the electrical grid - which is somewhat significant.
2. While you are correct technically -- I think what I am implying is older cars (ICE) will be the ones without all the tracking and software - whereas all EVs will have that embedded as they are all relatively new. There is no world where they remove that from new car production.
It's a myth that EV charging requires an upgrade to a 100 amp connection. Scheduling charging to times when you're not using appliances will still result in a charged vehicle by morning.
The Youtube channel Technology Connections has an interesting video where it describes a successful transition to a fully-electric house while remaining on a 50 amp electrical connection. (it requires a smart circuit breaker)
If you've been assuming you need to replace all the oil with the same amount of electrical power then you're seriously wrong.
Electric motors are extremely efficient over a wide speed range, whereas combustion engines aren't very efficient even in their relatively narrow optimal range and the arrangement needed to translate that power into motion further reduces overall efficiency.
While replacing the energy 1:1 would entail roughly doubling US electrical generation you actually want to replace the function and that's maybe 20-25% increase. It's not a trifle but it's very do-able. Especially if you time-shift car charging so that it's happening when humans are asleep and there's slack in the network.
You charge your phone while you sleep right? If you're used to filling up a car at a gas station it can feel weird but you can charge a car while you sleep too.
It's poor HN practice to badly strawman others comments.
Dragging up sequestered carbon in the billions upon billions of tonnes and changing the insulation factor of the atmosphere _is_ bad and well lead to no good if not unchecked and somewhat reversed - that's just physics.
Ergo - that should _stop_ and other things should be made that sidestep the issue.
And if 100% of EV's sold this year were electric, it would take ~24 years for basically all of the vehicles on the road were electric. (The average age of registered cars in the US is 12 years old).
Estimates are that a 100% EV fleet would increase electricity demand by 20%. So that's < 1 % a year.
Approximately how much demand increases due to increasing A/C usage in the US.
And a lot less than AI/crypto is increasing demand.
And that's not to mention that EV charging is a relatively easy demand to meet -- most EV owners charge when it's cheapest, so you can shape demand via price signals.
You can somewhat change the profile by price signals -- however if all vehicles are EVs there is a good portion of that demand that is inelastic. You will also need to be able to handle larger volumes of demand for faster charging stations and that entire effort of infra.
Its all doable but it is not as a simple as every plugs in at home. Its a large co-ordinated infrastructure effort.
You also brought up some other valid issues -- right now we are looking at the being undersupplied for electricity across NA without a wholesale swap to EVs. Maybe the upside of the oversupply of AI is that we have a lot of stranded assets for electrical charging infra/generation afterwards..
So if EV's cause electricity demand to go up by less than 1% per year, it'll cause inelastic demand to go up a small fraction of 1%. If operators can't expand at that low a rate, we have bigger problems.
>Long time before our electrical systems to be able to compensate for that kind of whole sale change. Will be at least 20 years if it ever happens.
There's little to no reason that the electrical grid itself needs to change for the sake of EV's.
The biggest problem is that while slow charging (L2) in your own garage would be perfect for 99%+ of people in the US, and isn't even very expensive, that's a barrier to entry most people do not want to screw with. So, everyone wants DC fast that mimics a gas station experience, even if it's completely unnecessary for almost everyone's use cases.
Land is limited, new builds like that are expensive, slower to earn returns, and make little sense with so few EVs in the US - which leads to a viscous cycle. It's a bit of TotC.
>I would also say that any ICE vehicle that has 0 subscription models, upgradable firmware, tracking software will probably have a value premium to it in the not distant future.
Consumers do not care about this. If they did, such cars would not sell. No one is going to pay extra for fewer features.
> The biggest problem is that while slow charging (L2) in your own garage would be perfect for 99%+ of people in the US, and isn't even very expensive, that's a barrier to entry most people do not want to screw with.
I feel like this is only an opinion that people who have never actually used an EV have. Plugging in my car overnight at home every few days is infinitely more convenient than needing to drive somewhere to plug it in somewhere else. The actual charge time is irrelevant as long as it's not more than ~12 hrs.
> No one is going to pay extra for fewer features.
Right, what people want is to pay less for fewer features.
If EVs with all their limitations are going to replace ICE cars for daily use, they need to be cheap. We need the Ford Focus or Toyota Tercel of EVs, with the same set of features (i.e. very few) that those cars had when they were introduced.
Otherwise I'll just go buy a used ICE Tercel or Focus.
When Tesla showed the world that an EV didn't have to look like a middle school science project and drive like a golf cart, it made sense that they went upmarket. They had to recover development costs. That won't work to get mass conversion.
If you can hoof it all the way to Fairfield (2.5 hours from Y Combinator HQ in SF; Muni->BART->Amtrak->taxi), you can get a 7 year old Model 3 for $14k tomorrow.
Oh yeah, because Norway is very representative of the world...
A country that is bigger than half Spain with 10 times less population with one of the lowest electrify prices of the entire world(5-8 dollars MWh) because of huge hydro resources.
A country with huge capital reserves precisely because of oil resources.
"Here, Honda is setting itself up for failure on the second disruption sweeping the automotive industry: the software-defined vehicle (SDV), which has core capabilities that can be upgraded and improved over time."
I'll pay triple for a non software defined vehicle that doesn't track me and can't be touched by the dealer once I purchase it. My one SDV (Tesla) is still on FSD from 2023 because the newer versions are terrible judging from the comments on the Tesla forums.
This. And same for phones, tvs, operating systems.
I bought a perfectly fine macbook pro m1 in 2020. It has been made far, far worse, slower, bloated and less responsive by apple. I see nothing improved, everything significantly degraded. It used to be that I could airplay to our tv with a single mouse click, now it seems to work once every 5 attempts, and takes about a minute. It used to be near instantaneous.
I bought a top of the line philips oled tv in 2020. I think I paid 4k for it. It has been made slower, bloated, less responsive by google and philips (or whatever company makes those tvs branded by philips).
I buy a top of the line iphone every 2-3 years, and it gets worse.
I bought a SONOS soundbar a few years ago. It used to work fine and produce nice sound. Now if I start my tv, and don't play anything for a few minutes it goes to sleep, and I need to restart my tv to get the sound to play.
Blocking updates on anything newly purchased seems like the best option. Not buying anything from those absolute crap companies seems like the second best option, but its hard to find alternatives.
2023 is better than 2020. 2026 is not necessarily better than 2023.
Shifting speeds abruptly in the modern FSD notwithstanding, what happened especially for people with HW 2.5/3 (circa 2018/19) is the change in behavior of adaptive cruise control and FSD -- you can go look it up. Essentially they "removed" a useful feature that let the car seemlesly move between the two -- I think because they didn't want to support the drivers "stalk" on the steering wheel anymore - new Teslas don't have it. So basically for me, SDV is not all that it's cracked up to be -- yeah and all that privacy stuff too...
FSD is great for me, although I mostly use it on the highways. But 90% of my driving is FSD now. It can be more conservative for my tastes with street driving
Unfortunately the only valid response is "Don't be so sure." There have been too many exposés about the poor data privacy practices of virtually every automaker including Honda. [1]
I also recently bought a Honda hybrid. I turned off as many of the data sharing features as I could from the first day I drove it. They don't make it easy, of course.
I'm convinced that the Japanese government is terrified of EVs because all the small and medium-sized businesses which support the Japanese auto industry will be absolutely gutted when vehicles contain drastically fewer parts.
That, and Japan is deeply screwed if they go all-in on EVs and then China decides they shouldn't be allowed access to any more rare earths.
> China decides they shouldn't be allowed access to any more rare earths
This is a common misunderstanding. There are plenty of alternative locations to mine rare earth minerals, particularly Australia. China cornered the market because it's a high pollution low margin business. If geopolitical concerns cut off access to Chinese sources, alternatives will be developed.
Mining isn't the only bottleneck with rare earths. There also the processing, which is an industry China has monopolized through sustained investments over decades. They have also improved processing efficiency through investments in technology. It's going to take a while for anyone else to catch up.
> There also the processing, which is an industry China has monopolized through sustained investments over decades.
I don't think this is the right way to characterize it. China invested when other countries didn't, but they didn't monopolize the market, they have no moat beyond expertise and some tech advancement that could be replicated easily enough. The only moat they have is related perseverance and other countries simply not wanting to put the work in.
I think they do have a moat because they dominate the supply chain not just in the raw material and processing but also in some of the actual technical experience, i.e. the experience of running such processing facilities, and also a monopoly on making the equipment that you need to build such a facility. They put export controls on those equipment and restricted their citizens who work in the rare earths industry from traveling aboard.
Basically, if we want to replicate what they did, we will have to do it mostly from scratch -- Japan and Australia has done some of the work already so it's not totally from scratch. It's obviously not impossible but it could take almost a decade for us to do that.
That said, I don't think this should be enough for Japan to stop investing in EVs. If Japanese car makers are really worried about this then they can build their plants in the US and leverage any deal the US has with China on real earths. They've already starting importing Japanese cars made in India and the US back to Japan so that's an established practice. Then once they've secured their own supplies they can make the EVs in Japan too. I think OP's point about the suppliers have more merit as a reason why Japan might not want to develop EVs.
I have worked with the Chinese REE industry, and we've often bumped heads and shared ideas together with them and I can confidently tell you, the Chinese don't use anything novel that has not been established in Western science already. What they do have is executing rarely-used techniques confidently at scale, but all of that is already often published in the West. The only reason the West hasn't done it is because these techniques are less profitable, and, surprise, the CCP actually forces processors to minimize ecological damage, which further bumps up the costs to the point only large-scale players can exist making such lower profits. You'll often find them using some obscure process alteration that was published minutely in the West.
As an addendum, companies in the REE Sinosphere are often encouraged by the CCP to exchange ideas with each other quite often, while Western companies often lock them behind proprietary patents and competition. While both systems have their pros and cons, the former allows for faster process proliferation (and a lower profit incentive for the innovator).
> the Chinese don't use anything novel that has not been established in Western science already
Like they say: in theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice, they aren't.
It's all well and good to have knowledge of the techniques, or to even have published or created them. But applying them successfully, working out all the kinks, and streamlining everything to become profitable doesn't happen overnight.
I have no doubt alternate sources can exist, but not without significant time and effort.
What I mean is that since the peak of American REE in the 1970s and 1980s(?) a lot of the engineers who have working knowledge are retired. There's nothing theoretical we can't dig up but I think there will need to be a number of years for the US to catch up in terms of craft knowledge or "metis" (as Dan Wang likes to call it) and processing equipment and plants.
Maybe I'm wrong. I gained my knowledge second-hand/third-hand from books and podcasts so I would defer to you to your actual experience and observations about Chinese REE. What is your estimate on how long it would take the West to catch to at least supply some of the rare earth components and what the real barriers might be? Would love to hear your take on this.
Thanks for sharing your observations. I had no idea about the minutiae of that industry, i.e. the ecological control and its effects on the industry.
No, you're right. China, and even India and Russia, also do not have the same talent problem of the West, in that there is an undersupply of engineers, especially in the geological, processing and chemical sectors. In the US, the average age of the chemical process engineer was touching 50 a few years back. The average age of a process safety engineer is well past 50. While Russia and India lose their technical talent to brain drain, the Chinese govt has done quite a lot in trying to reverse that.
The real barriers are talent and the regulation vs profit motive balance. What I mentioned in my previous comment was effectively an effect of the intersection of the two - you can't find novel ways of processing harmful substances without having the technical talent to find these out in the first place, nor without giving them a free reign after deprioritizing profit.
Let's take arsenic for instance, a substance that's a harmful byproduct arising out of most mining operations. We already have the technology in the West to lock away arsenic into glass, but a.) apart from the big ones, most companies are unaware of them, and b.) even if they were aware of it, the tech is a significant line item that shies investors and companies away from investing into it.
> What is your estimate on how long it would take the West to catch to at least supply some of the rare earth components and what the real barriers might be?
Never. Yes, there are a few companies still engaged in trying to secure REE supply (Glencore being the most notable), but due to Western regulatory and policy limbo, the answer is never. For this to change, you need regulators open to experimentations and a concerted effort by the government in trying to reestablish REE independence, both in extraction and in processing, but I have yet to see either happening. It's telling when frankly the US is the country in the West most likely to catch up still, but the gap is deeper than the Darien Gap .
As I understand it, some of these processes also require a sufficiently large industrial base to be even remotely economical due to a reliance on industrial 'byproduct' (for want of a better word). Because of this, some of these processes are not something that can be quickly stood up in isolation over a few years. It would take concerted large scale planning over a long time period - something the Chinese system of government is almost uniquely capable of.
Japan is also particularly well positioned because China had used rare earths against them first in 2014. Since then they've created basically a strategic rare earths reserve and done research on how to build some components without them. It's not an absolute solution but between this and future development in friendlier nations, I don't think the rare earth risk is as acute for Japanese automakers.
I do think the original point about lower complexity vehicles being a threat to the suppliers has some merits though. Germany faces a very similar dilemma and made similar decisions.
There are also non rare earth magnets being explored. Niron - Iron nitride - magnets and ultrasonic compaction and other tech that wasn't feasible a while back are now becoming very practical. Japan could probably get to a dominant place with a solid research program, it'd give them a huge advantage for EVs and other motors.
Ford: It recorded a loss of $1.2 billion in EBIT in the third quarter on its EVs, bringing its losses on the segment for the first three quarters of 2024 to $3.7 billion
Honda: Honda to Write Off $15.7 Billion as EV Winter Arrives.
> I'm convinced that the Japanese government is terrified of EVs because all the small and medium-sized businesses which support the Japanese auto industry will be absolutely gutted when vehicles contain drastically fewer parts.
For what it's worth, this theory is blown up by hydrogen based vehicles, which Japan has gone heavily in on. Yes, slightly more parts than an EV, but not a ton. And the drivetrain is electric.
It really shows the bias in Honda’s management here. They’ve also spent years trying to develop and promote their hydrogen fuel cell cars and it’s just as much of a failure as their EV division yet they aren’t axing that golden child.
Is there a place somewhere in the world where Hydrogen powered passenger vehicles are a success? I know that the one Hydrogen filling station here in Australia's Capital City has shut down after opening with great fanfare a few years ago. And the approximately 20 or so Hydrogen cars it supplied are no longer being used.
Japan is the only other country besides China and Korea that produces magnets of high quality (higher in fact than the Chinese), they just don't do the volume. But there is absolutely no doubt that they could scale up if they wanted to.
They're just more expensive, but not even that much.
They manufacture the magnets, but they don't produce the rare earths themselves. They're still getting something like 60-70% of their supply from China.
India is looking to produce 6000 tonnes of NdFeB magnets per year with the first batch coming out in mid 2026. This is great news because India has large rare earth reserves and are producing using the full supply chain of ore to oxide to magnets. 6000 tonnes is like 3% of the global supply but that’s not bad for year one.
Toyota just had three large EV announcements and they are putting large incentives on some of them. Feels like they're serious about it and with so many others exiting the EV market lately they may have timed it well.
Japan is just being the usual USA vassal. Since now China absolutely dominates EV and batteries, they rather align themselves with the oil-thirsty war monger.
I live in Japan and IMHO the problem is that it is an extremely conservative and risk averse country, "if it ain't broke don't fix it" taken to the extreme. They had a period of innovation after WW2 out of necessity, but after the bubble crash of 1990 they reverted back to their old selves.
My cars last 8+ years. My tablets last 3+ years. I’ll pass on a software defined car unless they swap out the whole logic and display unit before the warranty runs out. Otherwise I’ve got dead hardware in the cabin. They did this to the Leaf.
Or assume you have to provide a current model iPad or android tablet to run their software. That would keep the hardware functional if they kept the software working.
And I don’t trust the vendors to try to drive resale by eol’ing the logic/software. They’ll drive everybody to leases to avoid this and battery life concerns.
Calling the Prologue "Honda's EV" feels like a huge stretch. The Prologue was a rebadged GM vehicle that served strictly as a compliance car for meeting CAFE standards. Now that the CAFE standards have been rendered toothless, there's no longer a need for that deal.
It was "Honda's EV" in the sense that it was the only EV with a Honda badge you could actually buy. The three canned models mentioned in the article never even made it into the market.
Europeans and the Japanese were able to buy the Honda e for a few years - this article wrongly states another unreleased model as Honda's first ground up EV.
There's a few other EVs Honda produced in 90s as well, but e probably in running for first ground up new EV platform that made it to market as mass produced Honda product.
The Honda e was a massively compromised vehicle due to the tiny ~29 kWh net battery and high energy consumption. It was released in 2020 but in terms of utility it's really much more like an early 2010s EV.
OBBB removed any fines for violating CAFE standards. They still exist technically, but it'd be like getting a speeding ticket but the fine is always $0...
That’s not really sufficient explanation due to vehicles manufactured in the USA, CA or MX being exempt, and yet there are no small vehicles being made and sold in the USA in any large volume (despite clear demand).
My understanding is that this is due to fuel regulations being enacted by size and weight where it’s simply easier to make bigger vehicles.
The Chicken tax didn't kill the domestically manufactured Ranger and turn the Colorado into the huge thing it is today.
CAFE killed them too. You can't have a small vehicle that gets fuck all MPG because it's built like a tank to do work. You gotta have a bigger one that gets slightly worse MPG but has a way huger footprint in order to make the math math.
This didn't just kill compact pickups for 20yr. It also killed the Chevy Astro (the most "fullsize work van" of the minivans) and why you'll never see a car with a giant overhanging cargo area again.
CAFE killed small trucks in part, tariffs in another part, but US manufacturers are the real reason small trucks are dead.
US manufacturers want margins, and they're not getting margins on little, efficient cars. They get enormous margins on gigantic trucks that start at $55,000. Have you noticed that all the sub $20k cars went away from all the manufacturers around COVID?
Ford makes the Maverick, which is a small truck. They were priced very reasonably at release, at $19,000 or so. However, Ford didn't make very many of them, and the ones they did make got up to $15,000 over MSRP from the dealers, who scalped them. Why would Ford want to cannibalize their pricy gigantic trucks when they know that they can get their $50k asking price because there's nowhere else for people to go?
>Why would Ford want to cannibalize their pricy gigantic trucks when they know that they can get their $50k asking price because there's nowhere else for people to go?
Why isn't Ford worried that Chevrolet, Toyota, Ram, or Nissan will bring back a small and cheap U.S. built pickup? Is that because all manufacturers are afraid of cannibalizing their more expensive offerings? Are they all colluding? Or do not many people want small pickups? I guess if the Slate becomes a breakout hit, we'll know that people really want the smaller pickups.
It may not necessarily be the catastrophic move it seems to be, on reflection. 2030s Japan will not be 1970s Japan. Their labor force is different, the culture is different, the world is different. It might be better to not waste time and money chasing the, "We USED to make amazing cars," phantom, and instead push forward into whatever comes next.
OTOH, it really looks like Toyota is Goldilocks. Most companies invested too much too early and had to write off a substantial amount, but Toyota is rolling into 2027 with a small but nice selection of EV's.
Over 25% of vehicles sold world-wide were electric in 2025, and that percentage is steadily increasing. So VW & Ford were "too hot", Honda is looking like "too cold" and Toyota might be the "just right" of the three bears.
Observers and technologists have also consistently failed to appreciate the continuing value proposition of hybrids, and Toyota makes some of the best, top selling models.
My biggest peeve with hybrids is that it gives consumers the mistaken impression that they're going to have to replace the batteries in their EV.
Most hybrids aren't liquid-cooled (although that is changing), and the smaller size means that a hybrid puts a lot more cycles per mile on the battery than an EV does.
Which in practice means that a hybrid battery lasts about 100,000 miles whereas an EV lasts about 250,000 miles.
A Prius is an amazing car; a 300,000 mile Prius is often still in good shape and worth the expense to replace the battery in. Which means you might put 3 batteries in a Prius and then look at how expensive it would be to replace the battery in an EV 3 times and choke. But very few people are going to spend the significant dollars it costs to replace the battery in a 250,000 mile Tesla so in practice that's an expense you'll never have.
Hybrids are just amazing and SHOULD have mostly replaced ICE-only a long time ago. I'm going to cry the day the midwestern winter road salt takes my Prius away from me.
Doesn't that describe most Toyotas, EV or not? You buy a Toyota because you expect it to last forever (or because it has low running costs because it has great resale value because it lasts forever).
You want a Supra to drive much better than fine. But if you're in the market for a Corolla, "fine" might be better than some of the cars you're comparing against.
Isn't Toyota betting big on the Hybrid EV? To me, at least in the US, this seems like the best medium-term bet. The EV infrastructure just isn't there yet, despite there being a lot of Tesla chargers. Even with that, the charge time, etc are too long to get going again. Hybrid EV seems to resolve this, and eases the customer into an EV future. Current EVs are great for being around town, but a lot of people in the US live 45min to an hour each way just to work, have to get their kids to school or practice in the meantime. It's just added stress thinking about finding a charging station or having time constraints.
The biggest issue I think every auto maker needs to solve is cost. The average car payment is insane, with dealership markups it's even worst than it would be otherwise. I'm not sure how we got here on that, to me car interiors are no nicer than they were from 2005ish on. I don't even know what the cost is going into.
But it's not really increasing anymore, and the increase has been almost entirely tied to subsidies. When Germany and America pulled back on EV subsidies, sales dropped significantly.
The adoption curve hasn't been nearly as steep as predicted, and the political landscape is unstable. Other manufacturers are also pulling back on their EV investments.
I'm not saying Honda isn't overdoing it, but a retreat from EVs isn't surprising.
It's not that simple, some markets are slowing down and others are accelerating.
Two of Honda's biggest markets are Japan and the US. The US is cooling on EVs with incentives and regulation changes making adoption less urgent. Japan already has an extremely low adoption rate. So the incentives for Honda to invest heavily just aren't there right now.
Other manufacturers are also pulling back. Ford is cutting way back on the Lightning for example.
It's too soon to tell on America. In Germany sales pulled back temporarily after the loss of subsidies -- most people who were looking at buying an EV pulled their purchase forward to before the subsidy went away but then after a while growth resumed. 2025 EV sales in Germany without subsidies were higher than 2023 EV sales with subsidies after being down in 2024. I expect the same thing to happen for 2027 US EV sales.
In Japan, it's more a matter of not having good domestic options. Japanese people don't buy non-Japanese cars. When the Leaf was selling well world-wide, it sold well in Japan. But it's been a few years since the Leaf sold well anywhere. Now with good Toyota options and spiking gas prices I expect EV's to pick up in Japan. Nowhere is more dependent than Japan on the straight of Hormuz.
Smart doorbells and thermostats that upgraded in the night often became a nuisance or an expensive brick. But a faulty software upgrade on a car can kill you and others.
Car company execs need to take a chill pill followed by a reality serum. Monetizing subscription based basic features and delivering in-car advertising is the absolutely worst way to go.
As consumers we need to stop buying into the bells, whistles and trinkets and demand essential and safe transportation.
Consumers have very little power in this space. Have you tried buying a non-premium car with physical buttons instead of touchscreens in recent years? There used to be hardly any option because carmakers all somehow decided this was the way forward, even though science clearly said it was making cars less safe. So if you needed a car and didn't have a ton of money, you could merely accept it. Only now that safety ratings started to include usability of key vehicle controls car makers decided to turn around again.
Or manufacturers should learn from Tesla.
Did you know - if your Tesla shuts down (screen goes blank) you can still drive it! If done right, it works like magic.
I have had 3 software updates in 12 years of ownership of Tesla that bricked my car and require mobile service (twice) and tow (once) to resolve. tesla is probably better than most but far from perfect when it comes to this
I mean there are multiple, multiple boundaries in place for this reason. I’d start by saying most “in the middle of the night” updates target non-safety critical systems in the car like the IHU. The update I received last night has a build date of 2024 reflecting extensive validation before general availability in 2026. It was field tested in limited markets after factory validation and had staged rollouts through dealers before going to general OTA availability.
Independently, I had to take my car into the dealer to get a safety critical recall installed via Ethernet that affected a braking system in certain edge cases and this was not installable OTA “in the night”.
While, yes, I am annoyed that the dealer price for my “infotainment” unit is $2k and reflects the technical specs of a 2016 mid tier android tablet running Intel cores; I do feel that vehicle is far safer with its airbags, 360 camera, lane keeping, and AEB on net than my 1970’s classic.
We've had software upgrades on cars for years now.
The used car market has, in many ways, usurped what used to be the role of the basic car used to be.
As a result, you see fewer and fewer new cars sold, and automakers have to more intensively monetize the cars they have. They must create ever-increasing returns to shareholders.
EVs are going to be an extinction-level event for carmakers.
As the buggy-makers failed to transition to making cars, and thus ceased to be, so too will automakers fail to transition to EVs, and thus end their viability as vehicle manufacturers.
Right? Have any of the execs making these decisions ever ridden in an EV? They are so much better that the experience I've seen is no one will ever go back to preferring ICE after spending time with an EV. My family currently has 2 ICE vehicles (one is a PHEV). I really doubt we'll buy another.
The week I spent renting an EV (an Ioniq 5, so not even a high-end one) convinced me. Enjoyable to drive. Having to figure out where/how to charge it was sufficient to chase away the fears around that.
All the legacy automakers that haven't fully moved to EV's PROFITABLY will go defacto bankrupt within a few years, there will be some mergers to stay alive but it's game over. Tesla and China companies will own auto, with Tesla capturing most the profit, similar to Apple vs Android phones. Autonomy will further accelerate this.
Spot on, except for the part about Tesla. Tesla shut down production of Model S & X. Coming up next: 3 and Y. Also, Tesla has YOY decreasing revenue and sales. Pretty soon, they will go pre-revenue and embrace what they are: A NFT traded on the stock market for bragging rights.
I'll just leave his here, "Tesla achieved a record-breaking third quarter in 2025 (Q3 2025), delivering 497,099 vehicles". It's expected that to be exceeded most quarters going forward
Model Y is the best selling car (not just EV but any car) in the world (with a month long shutdown for new version), so I can confidently say they got it from their EDS infected mind.
I almost pulled the trigger on a Prologue; so glad I had second thoughts. Even though it was essentially a GM product, I've only ever owned Hondas, so I thought "Well, at least I can get service at my Honda dealer".
Charging in the US (other than at home) is still the biggest issue for me. I do lots of traveling, and waiting 30-45 minutes to charge even at a Level 3 charger is a PITA. If I had a J std charger, then it's even longer. This makes my monthly 8 hour trips one-way another 2 hours - this sucks. Sorry - I'll keep my 2005 Honda Element with 445K miles. Another engine would be cheaper than less than a year of car payments. And it's pretty much indestructible.
It does depend on what car you get. A RWD Ioniq5 can do about 3 hours on the highway with 20 minute stops (though the stops are a lot longer at the more-available Tesla chargers).
There’s other good roadtrip friendly options out there too, but ya with monthly drives like that you’re really limiting your options and ICE cars still make a lot of sense
> Consumers, mostly those who buy EVs from the likes of Tesla, Rivian, and BYD, have grown accustomed to the frequent updates, slick infotainment software, and advanced driver-assistance systems.
Guess which three items out of that list I do not want.
You don’t like active safety features ? Even if you think you are great and better than most, don’t you think it would be neat that the other drivers you share the roads with have active safety features ?
So they don’t crash into you or run over your kids?
I am convinced that some safety features (such as lane assist, for example), actually make roads less safe on net, because they allow or encourage drivers to be less engaged in the act of driving. But then, if it were up to me we'd all be driving manual transmissions.
Even if they do make people safer "on average" these systems are not tested by a lot of the auto-safety organizations. In fact, some of these organizations simply bump up the "safety rating" automatically depending on how many "safety" features are included, without actually testing the effectiveness of the feature.
This is important, because forward collusion detection is not a binary thing. Each auto maker has their own set of parameters, sensors and implementations to achieve a similar goal, but each act independently.
I would also prefer if people were more engaged with driving too. I don't think we should encourage people to "rely" on these systems to keep them out of trouble as these systems can and do act unpredictably and may harm other road users as a result of a programming decision since the car in front acted unexpectedly.
I think the whole automation of everything in a car is a bit silly. Transmissions are whatever for me, although the full lane assist, cruise control, adaptive cruise control, even automatic wipers and headlights makes people feel so much more disconnected from the car, which I think leads to unsafe habits or worse, unable to handle the car in situations where the automatic systems fail or become unreliable (e.g poor visibility, wet roads, unmapped roads, off-road, obstructions on the road, road works, etc).
> I am convinced that some safety features (such as lane assist, for example), actually make roads less safe on net, because they allow or encourage drivers to be less engaged in the act of driving.
"Birth control leads to riskier behavior and more pregnancies."
This is so unfortunate. I was never a van guy, but my wife insisted we get a van, so I got the Honda. And honestly? I kinda love it. It drives like a car but holds eight people (or four people and a whole bunch of luggage).
The way we use the van, 90% of our drives are under 20 miles round trip. The rest are longer road trips. I've been waiting eight years for Honda to make an electric or even a plug-in hybrid where the gas motor just charge the battery.
It would be perfect for my family. I guess that's not happening now.
They have quite decent hybrids now. I’m surprised that they haven’t released a plug-in one, since their architecture seems perfect for it. Maybe battery supply constraints. They are also developing a v6 hybrid, which should replace the j series in the Odyssey.
I have a 2016 Tacoma I bought in 2015. It has ~114k miles, so ~11k miles/year. Gas is 16-18gal/mi. It's paid off. There is no math, outside of major repairs (it's maintained regularly) where any Hybrid or EV makes sense for the next 10+ years. Maintenance ~ 250 a year; Tires ~12-1300 every 3 years (more due to age than wear). So - 11k/year w/ fuel at $5/gal and 16mi/gal - $3.4k in fuel, 600/year in maintenance and tires. So $4k/year in rough cost (excluding insurance). Still high, but I've lived in rural areas the last 10 years.
A new vehicle makes no sense. Unless I went a budget used Prius (with a good hybrid battery system). No plan to make changes.
Take care - the Hybrid battery can be expensive to replace and they do eventually fail. Note that Toyota changed from NiMH to LiIon 2017/18. I recently had to wreck an old Toyota Hybrid because replacing the dead battery was going to cost 2/3 of the value of the vehicle. Context: New Zealand.
To be honest, I have every faith in Honda. It took them a long time to arrive at hybrid, but they were never about first to market, but they were always adamant about controlling the entire technology stack.. made their own transmission and everything. And engineering doesn't faze them, Honda just nonchalantly displayed a reusable rocket like it was too easy... EV is a little bit like AI nowadays, not much moat and possibly not challenging enough for Honda R&D so why not. I'll always be on the look out for Honda's next take on EV.
I don't have charging capability at my apartment or work. On occasion, I do 300 mile trips (adirondacks/nyc). Skeptical of winter performance. I have no interest in "frequent updates, slick infotainment software, and advanced driver-assistance systems". Frankly, no spare tire is a no starter for me also.
Or instead of paying money for a car that still fills up slower than a gas one, has all the extra issues that come with EVs, and hope that there is charging infrastructure in my area, I could just buy any ice car made in the last 35+ years.
Similar boat here. No charging at home without expensive install, work is a commercial charger, and frequent trips into WV, which seems to be a dead zone for chargers. Plus occasional towing. I’d love an EV, but they aren’t there yet.
> When developed as an original product, EVs offer automakers a chance to rethink the automobile, and in the process, make it cheaper.
That does not bode well for German car makers either I'm afraid. Take BMW for instance: they started off with two "pure" EV models, the i3 (a compact car) and the i8 (a sports car). Both of them promising, but neither a particular bestseller. So they switched to offering electric drive as an alternative to IC engines in several (most?) "regular" models. But I agree with TechCrunch that this is more of a cop-out than a winning strategy...
> Consumers, mostly those who buy EVs from the likes of Tesla, Rivian, and BYD, have grown accustomed to the frequent updates, slick infotainment software, and advanced driver-assistance systems. Honda has yet to make significant progress in any of those domains.
Here's an idea: what about making an EV free from this enshittification? One where you can decide yourself when to install an update, like in the "olden days" a few years ago? One that doesn't pretend to have an "autopilot" which isn't really one? I think there would be a market for such an EV.
Could it be that the EVs they were planning were just out of touch with what the market wants? Their zero vehicles look butt-ugly in my opinion. They look like concept cars that are great for show, but no serious buyer would consider them for a daily driver.
The software designed car and continued price growth of automobiles is going to push them out of price range for consumers. Maybe Honda just wants to go out of a dying industry on good terms.
I love the Honda E and it's not mentioned in the article for some reason. However it must certainly have been a costly flop; they are so rare on the roads in the UK,
My Honda family car has a CVT and electric parking brakes. "Driver's Car" mattered more when the low-price option was a stickshift and cars weren't so heavy.
I don’t think the title is hyperbole. Toyota isn’t giving up on
their long term EV R&D plans.
Just look at Nissan, which is broke as a joke, but they still put a new Leaf model on the market.
Lately there’s been a vibe that the EV experiment has died off, but that really isn’t true looking at industry reporting.
There is stalling that seems related to subsidy expiration and/or scale back, but we could argue that subsidies expiring is happening because the subsidies aren’t needed to sell vehicles anymore.
20% of new vehicles sold globally are EVs. Critical mass has been achieved, and not just in China (20% of vehicles sold in Europe are EVs).
This is also an admission that Honda is just giving up on Acura completely. That $50k two row luxury SUV buyer that is such an industry staple buyer for the US auto industry is going to be buying Rivian R2s instead of an EV Acura MDX.
Consumers, mostly those who buy EVs from the likes of Tesla, Rivian, and BYD, have grown accustomed to the frequent updates, slick infotainment software, and advanced driver-assistance systems. Honda has yet to make significant progress in any of those domains.
"Grown accustomed to" is a funny way of saying "begrudgingly put up with because the alternative is buying a new car, but really they would rather not have to deal with that crap at all."
> The large battery in an EV makes it easier to feed powerful computers, and it allows things like over-the-air updates to happen when the car is parked and “off.”
I don't want anything of the sort as a consumer, so auto makers who don't "get" it either are fine by me. Nay, heroes.
I hate those narratives that if you don't jump on EVs, your future is doomed.
The last 5 years just don't show it. The EV market is still small and infrastructure missing in most of the world.
Toyota played it safe and made bank when everybody was saying they were doomed.
German automakers went hard on EVs. VW group sold 1 million fully electric vehicles in 2025, they will probably overtake Tesla in a couple of years for the biggest non-Chinese EV automaker by sales, but is it paying off financially?
At the same time german premium brands have a very hard time differentiating when Chinese cars offer similar quality at half the price even after tariffs.
If you look here in Germany at the car companies, they are suffering quite a bit. Most of that has to do with EVs eating the market share of their legacy car business. VW, Mercedes, and BMW each make pretty decent EVs at this point of course. And there are a lot of even better ones coming to market soon from them. And they sell pretty well even. But because their legacy business is imploding, profits are down by very large double digit percentages. Despite this, the Germans are adjusting well. VW seems to be having some success in the Chinese market now (lots of China specific VW models coming out there). And BMW is gearing up to what looks like a massive range luxury EV (500 miles) that should be doing well.
EV sales keep on growing world wide by juicy double digit percentages. Some markets less than others of course but the net effect is that all that legacy business keeps on shrinking because all that EV growth is at the cost of that legacy business.
The main issue with Honda and other Japanese manufacturers is that they are hopelessly dependent on Chinese suppliers to ship any EVs at this point. They've dragged their heels on doing their own tech and at this point while they might have some promising things in their labs, they lack supply chains and factories to mass produce any of it by themselves. That's going to take many years to turn around. Without guarantees that they'll be able to match the Chinese on cost. And the EU, Koreans, Chinese, and even US companies like GM are picking up the slack and growing EV sales at their cost.
Toyota seems to finally be producing a lot of EVs now to counter that. They've been catching up fast in the last year or so. But most of these EVs come with a lot of Chinese tech inside. Their alternative was to cede that market to competitors. Which seems to be what Honda is doing. I don't think that will end well for them.
The EU regulations are in many ways built to prevent this kind of free riding, for the sensible reasons that if everyone free rides, aiming for excess profits on the short term, the transition doesn't happen and the Chinese eat your whole market.
Is your point that the western car companies are doomed no matter how aggressively they jump into EVs now, and that Chinese EV producers have too much of a lead for them to recover, or that they have time to catch up later and can take it slow for now?
China is already selling EVs to countries that haven’t even had many cars before, like Nepal. Is 75% of the world car market just going to be there’s because western auto manufacturers overfixated on their own very mature car markets?
I think they can catch up later, spin off some electric project to build know-how without going all-in releasing so many models.
Mercedes-Benz sells 9 different fully electric models and that ignores their trucks and vans.
BMW sells 9 different fully electric models across their BMW/Mini/Rolls Royce brands.
Volkswagen sells more than *30*.
I don't think western automakers can compete in any case unless they can either differentiate their offering or significantly lower the cost of core components like batteries.
If you want to sell cars in the EU you have no future without EVs. The fleet emmision fines are quite high already, will be much higher from 2030 and will kick in from 0g CO2/km from 2035, basically killing any ICE passenger vehicle. That's in 8,5 years.
“Many automakers have found that dropping batteries into a car originally designed for an internal combustion engine”. Reminds me of idiotic hybrid variants of Subaru and Honda vehicles that don’t have spare tires because the battery was slapped into the existing vehicle platform as an afterthought. Eg. Subaru forester hybrid. Car bought by educated, practical folks.
Honda is launching the WN7 this year. It seems like a typical Honda motorcycle: not for those obsessed with specs, but definitely a solid and well-designed bike. If I were currently looking for a mid-sized electric motorcycle, this would be my top choice for the same reasons people choose Honda for gasoline-powered motorcycles.
Well, they just launched the Honda WN-7. It seems to be a commuter and fun bike. It has a limited range, so it's not a touring motorcycle but it does have fast-charging.
I watched the reviews on YouTube, and they're all quite favorable.
I'm yet to see a EV bike that can be classified as a "fun bike". Not fun and impracticle compared to pure "inner city mobility vehicle" such as Renault Twizy.
They had a ubuquitious 100cc/9hp scooter called Activa in India. Honda, Yamaha and Suzuki are a drop in the bucket in EV scooter sales and Honda's offerings are the most hilarious.
Yeah, e-bikes with thumb throttles are so good that the only reason they haven't already supplanted motorcycles is that there are ten bajillion old unkillable motorcycle engines in use.
It's a shame that US law doesn't have a nice in-between that would slot these bikes between proper e-bikes and motorcycles.
Because owning a motorcycle is a huge pain in the ass on account of motorcycles costing a decent amount of money, weighing 300lbs, going on the highway. If a $1000 ebike can only hit 40mph and weighs less than 100lbs, why not let people just buy them and ride them with a normal drivers' license?
Because e-bikes have effectively done regulatory arbitrage and the sky didn't fall. You want more people using small electric vehicles where before they would have used a car, you lower the burden to get one on the road.
Ebikes definitely aren't a viable alternative in Asia yet. Most Asian countries either have no charge stations or very few. Range doesn't compare with gas motorcycles.
Hundreds of millions of motorcycles are still in active use with no real incentive to change
Genuine question, could many of them not charge at home? I own an EV and the number of charging stations near me is irrelevant to it because the 120V outlet in my garage is more than sufficient. My naive thinking is that an ebike is an order of magnitude smaller, so surely the same outlet would be even less of a limitation, right? (not to mention that many other countries have ~240V standard outlets)
Maybe the answer is truly "no, that wouldn't actually be practical for how people in those places live" for some reason, but I'm genuinely curious.
> Ebikes definitely aren't a viable alternative in Asia yet. Most Asian countries either have no charge stations or very few. Range doesn't compare with gas motorcycles.
I was in China last year and one apartment complex I stayed at had a garage full of e scooters and bikes all plugged in to charge.
The streets in China are remarkably quiet now with so many electric vehicles.
Ironically, Trump attacking Iran and closing the Strait is a boon to China and EV makers. Once the car is produced, aside from lubricants, it’s completely independent of oil. Heck you can put panels on your rooftop and slow charge it during the day.
Sure, but increasingly less so as electrification takes off. And using less gas means you can redirect that to the other derivative products such as plastic.
A friend of mine has a dozen panels in central France and pretty much provides all the energy for his Kia eNiro. He reckons the payback time is under five years.
When did I say on the rooftop of a car? There’s level 1 that could plug into an house outlet and level 2 from 220v. House charges the car and solar provides power to the house.
Quick google math says you get 6 tires from a barrel of oil vs roughly 20 gallons of gas. Unless EVs mean you change tires every 300 miles or so I think we're good.
My ICE vehicles go through many more pounds of gasoline than they do tires. A set of tires is ~100lbs of material. 50,000mi of gas on a 30mpg vehicle is 10,000lbs of gas.
With where the Trumpists want to take us, tires made out of carved stone will suffice. Non-EVs will be retrofitted with a hole in the floor for your feet.
Do people really want "software defined vehicles"? People keep repeating how Tesla keeps upgrading their software, but I don't really want my car to change every time I step into it.
The person I know who loves FSD has soured on updates since the last one changed how the car handles simple things like intersections, and it's added a lot more stress.
Cars should be appliances, boring and reliable, not something to amaze and delight you. Especially since the latter usually changes into "sell ads and your personal information".
Sadly, this view is considered antiquated and anti-technology by a younger generation of people who think what we see in sci-fi shows should be reality (good or bad). And if you don't get that vision then you're some dumb luddite who should be banished from society.
What's kind of remarkable is the onslaught of vehicles, many EV, which have critical functionality issues that are being ignored, but they have WiFi + hotspot on board! And if you want to do basic things with your own vehicle, like get the climate control ready before you leave on a trip you now need an app, a smartphone, and Internet connection and a subscription...to do things that could easily be done via some local BLE or WiFi connection.
I see a lot of car companies rush to make "immersive" driving experiences while neglecting the basics. The Ioniq 5 / EV6 have ICCU issues that are not addressed which can leave the car stranded and the replacement parts have the same mysterious failure modes, the Jaguar I-Pace had numerous failures including a UI that would lag for basic things like changing air conditioning settings, the last generation Leaf (just prior to the current re-design) has battery issues that have forced people to do lemon-law buy backs, the Ford Mach E has a Tesla-style iPad center display that can't be turned off at night so it's a distraction (among other issues with the poor concept), but it has OTA so awesome!
> Do people really want "software defined vehicles"?
Absolutely, the sooner the better. The truth is, auto companies can track you, show you ads, and otherwise jerk you around without going all the way to having a "software defined vehicle." You just get a worse user experience.
If it doesn't have a screen or a network connection it can't do either of those things. I'm very eagerly awaiting the Slate truck for exactly this reason. A cheap barebones EV meant for hauling stuff and people locally.
The thing can't even do OTA updates without you connecting your phone to the car's bluetooth.
All the updates (so far…) have added features that I actually like. Things like Apple Music integration and even safety things like cross-traffic alerts when reversing.
Even today my wife left her phone on the charge pad and the car beeped as we walked away to alert us - a feature that didn’t exist when we first got it.
Enshittification may come, but maybe there will be an Apple-like benevolent dictator that keeps it mostly clean.
Edit: I should say that I will never trust any “self-driving” at all based on cameras alone. It can’t even do Autopilot without me intervening on most trips.
> People keep repeating how Tesla keeps upgrading their software, but I don't really want my car to change every time I step into it.
My driving experience/controls has not changed since I bought it 18 months ago. They added an option for Grok which I don’t use, and the FSD is much better now. And enabled adaptive headlights.
>The person I know who loves FSD has soured on updates since the last one changed how the car handles simple things like intersections, and it's added a lot more stress.
The most recent FSD update made me recommend a model 3 or Y to my parents.
Japanese auto companies are so incredibly corrupt it's hilarious. Toyota has clear ties with terrorist organizations plus intentionally going out of their way to kill EVs with the whole hydrogen scam. And Honda right here trying to "kill" EVs as well.
The moment a battery without lithium comes out, legacy car engines are dead for good.
But my guess is maybe Honda will wait for Tesla or another US based auto company with EVs to fail and buy that company. Seems that is how large companies do "innovation" these days.
> It makes really good engines, and that's starting to matter less and less.
Maybe. But here's the thing... most cars today feel completely lifeless.
Honda knows how to build an engine and wrap it in a car that actually makes you feel something. That still matters.
Anyone here driven an S2000?
It's still the best car I've ever owned. Light, raw, grippy, and genuinely fun -- every drive felt like an event, not just transportation. (And it was still an affordable car!)
They killed it around 2010. I've never found anything that captures that same feeling since, at any price point.
So yeah -- Honda will always have a place in my heart. When they want to, they build something truly special.
Here's one of their marketing films they can use to find inspiration again.
The wind is just blowing back towards internal combustion for the moment. A couple years and they will shift again. Killing the whole research project would be dumb. Killing current models makes some sense.
Only in the US. The rest of the world, especially the undeveloped and developing world, is currently undergoing a car ownership boom due to cheap Chinese EVs.
Honda is an engine company at its heart. It makes very reliable, long lived engines.
They refine technology not really invent it (maybe invented VTEC). The transition to EV will be very gradual, I don’t even think we have enough rare earth metals and electrical grid capacity to go even twice as fast in adoption?
Honda is waiting for the standards and technology to settle out and become commodity technology, then they implement and iterate to a refined and reliable product.
It doesn’t seem like a winner take all market for EV? What would be the most? Perhaps I am ignorant on that part of market dynamics.
Once EVs are economically attractive the transition can be very fast. I live in Denmark so I have seen it, it took 7 years to go from ~5% to 90+% of new cars sold. Both EU and US are now relying on trade barriers to keep Chinese EVs away from consumers.
well China debate aside, where are they? i've been dabbling in electrics for over a decade now, on the lower range they are still 30% more expensive than gas cars. Surely someone, anyone outside of China could have done one cheaper by now? Leaf came out 16 years ago and they still can't get it under $30k?
I assume you are coming from a US perspective, because smaller economical EVs are available in europe and dominate in asia. America car companies have managed to make a 50k+ truck the average new car purchase. They aren’t going to kill that golden calf voluntarily. Instead they have managed to lock out the competition. Why Musk elected to build another truck instead of the promised model 2 is beyond me. Besides, with EVs you really have to consider total cost, they are still slightly more expensive to buy in the EU as well, but you quickly make it back on fuel.
Don't forget maintenance costs in the TCO calculation too. Transmissions, fuel pumps, timing belts, radiators (mostly), fuel injectors, emissions systems, etc are all out of the picture in an EV. Servicing those things may be infrequent but is often extremely expensive.
I think this is the biggest thing that non-EV owners do not understand. Or perhaps they do but not the full scope because money is spent little by little over the years. the oil changes, brakes, belts, starters, alternators, whatevers… I have 2014 Tesla S and I literally spent practically nothing for 11 years. I had to put in a new modem, replaced 12V battery twice and that’s about it. Still on original brakes (102k miles) because with regenerative breaking I hardly ever use the brakes, I mean there is just nothing to spend your money on (I even called Tesla in the beginning of my ownership and was like “do I need to being the car in for something” to be met with “is something wrong with the car? no? why are you calling us then??!” :) ). I will never own a non-EV car again and neither will my kid or anyone in my family
I hear a lot of Teslas banging around corners in my town and it leads me to believe that EV drivers freed from annual dealer maintenance actually believe that tie rod ends don't need to be inspected and replaced.
I recently had to do some service (12 years to the day of the purchase) and mechanic, who worked for tesla for a decade and now has a local shop, told me exactly the same thing - you got shit that moves, you gotta lube it once in a while! but I own another EV and 47.5k miles later the car hasn’t seen a dealership since I drove off it.
> Don't forget maintenance costs in the TCO calculation too.
OK? Then don’t forget to add a replacement battery, replacement battery heating and cooling system, factor in a few extra sets of tires over a lifetime of the vehicle, you can also assume the suspension will wear out earlier, so at least ball joints if not also struts.
I’m an automotive EE, there is no free lunch.
I have a car we just got rid of in our research shop, in order to replace the battery the entire rear suspension and half of the interior had to come out. To an insurance agency, the car was literally totaled between the cost of the battery and the labor to replace it.
How is safety and quality for Chinese EVs? There was the 2008 melamine baby formula scandal, where a toxic substance was deliberately introduced into baby formula for domestic market. Chinese food imports were curtailed across many countries.
Capitalism over there is at another level, and cars are so complicated with tiny changes can have huge problems. Look at the immobilizer chips that Kia dropped to save $5, which resulted in thousands of car thefts and the whole Kia Boyz phenomenon.
Electric cars are way way simpler than ICE cars. It's just market segmentation gone wrong when EU car manufacturers wanted to sell these cheaper cars as premium/luxury ones (i.e. greed) and therefore couldn't learn the lessons from producing them at scale on cheaper models. China had poor ICE cars and bet everything on EVs, scaled their production up, reiterated a few times, and now Nio/Xiaomi/BYD/Zeekr are better than anything built in the EU.
I think the fear of low-quality and dangerous corner cutting is a big reason Chinese evs have not been even more popular in the EU. However as some brands start to establish themselves for longer they gain trust. Also we have Euro N-cap tests which are pretty extensive and lots of Chinese cars have earned excellent scores.
> I don’t even think we have enough rare earth metals and electrical grid capacity to go even twice as fast in adoption
I also have some concerns about our grid, but not from EVs. AI is already consuming more 5% of the grid, more than twice that of EVs (~2%), and is growing far faster. I've seen estimates as high as 17% of the grid by 2030. Most EVs are also charged in off-peak hours when there's plenty of capacity.
That's worst-case +600TWh by 2030. The US electrical grid also expanded by +600TWh between 1983 and 1990. Did you panic at that time and, if not, why not?
> I don’t even think we have enough rare earth metals and electrical grid capacity to go even twice as fast in adoption?
This is not an issue, it’s the one the things that the anti-EV/baby boomer crowd throws out that is completely unsubstantiated. We have plenty of rare earths, America just lit their rare earth refining capacity on fire when China said they would do it for us at a much cheaper price. China doesn’t have a shortage of rare earth refining capacity, and they are producing most of the Eavs in the world as a result. EVs mostly charge at night when the grid is underutilized anyways.
China won the EV war a few years ago while the Japanese spent too much wasted time on hydrogen. Honda just doesn’t have anything to offer that BYD already does much better. That the Chinese auto manufacturers will slow down EV advancements and refinements long enough for Honda to make a significant improvement is a bit ridiculous.
The biggest EV car is Tesla and they aren't good and tesla isn't a car company, its a finance comapny. Like Intel lost its edge because it became finance first engineering almost never. And no one wants a >$20k car. Disposable energy oil or not, manufacturers went nuts in 2020, and just kept pushing prices up and can't figure out why cars aren't selling.
BYD Auto is the worlds biggest, and their cars are affordable and their battery tech is evolving rapidly -- just recently announced batteries that can effectively recharge in the same time it takes to fill up one's gas tank.
They are an unstoppable force and we ignore them at our own peril.
I think this is a smart move, the EV boom is soon coming to and end. There is just not possible to make enough batteries or to deliver enough power, for all of us to drive electric.
Is it possible to deliver and store electricity in a more efficient way perhaps? Rumor has it that it does, but not in a way you can put a meter on :)
Yeah, it's impossible. Also, China is making them too cheap to compete with, and in such quantity that they're basically dumping them and flooding the market. We have to enact laws and trade barriers to keep them out, or else we'll be drowning in them. Plus don't forget it's impossible to make that many EVs in the first place.
You are right. We don't need more EVs. Lets get rid of cars completely and built cheap electrified public transport. Make ICE cars illiegal. Going all EV won't help the environment. Going all public transport would.
Even in places where public transportation is very good, no bus goes everywhere or all the time, and trains are still limited to very specific routes. Need to go to the supermarket to buy food for your whole family? Not very practical on a bus. Live in rough area and come home from work late at night? Perhaps a car is safer. And so on. And this is in a city, it's even worse in rural areas.
Even as someone that loves electric vehicles and uses public transportation a lot, it's hard to get behind these extreme "let's ban X and go all on Y" views. It ignores how things work in the real world.
Anything you need to plug into a power source is doomed to fail. EVs are simply not designed properly which is why hybrids are the best of both world. A Camry hybrid has some genius technology as the EV part is used at low speed and ICE at higher speed. That is the perfect balance and you see why it's a success for them. Toyota make the best hybrid vehicles. Honda makes hybrids too so they're not throwing all their EV technology into the e-waste bin.
Whether or not your analysis is correct (I'd say not), the root problem is Chinese manufacturing dominance and unfair competitive advantage when it comes to EVs. It saddens me to say it, but the legacy car companies are unable to pivot and are likely doomed.
> Anything you need to plug into a power source is doomed to fail.
Totally disagree. One of the reasons I drive an EV is so I _can_ plug it in and never go to a gas station again. What a useless exercise and waste of my time, especially for a penny-pincher like me who would wait in like for 20 minutes at Costco for gas.
Plugging it in is why it is so awful. It takes ages to charge it and you don't get very much range for a full charge. Battery technology is so incredibly poor right now and EV manufacturers are just plain dumb until they make the body of the car harness the sun's rays.
No thank you. Not sure why the author frames this as a good thing. They've been bamboozled by the automakers and have got it backwards - you're buying a vehicle that already has the capabilities, but are disabled, then paying rent (or a fee) to turn them on. I'm much more likely to buy from a manufacturer that doesn't play these games.
This is very much not what "software-defined vehicle" means which itself is very much not the same thing as EVs. It's possible to criticize the explotative business practices you mentioned (or bad UI practices like moving everything to a touchscreen instead of physical buttons) without linking them to other issues that have no real relation beyond falling under the general category of "technology".
At a societal level, EVs are generally better than ICE cars. At a societal level, cars that can automatically fix a "recall" with an over-the-air update are generally better than recalls that will wait to get fixed until an owner schedules an appointment to have the car serviced. These two things can be true without endorsing automakers who charge and extra fee to activate the seat warmers that already exist in the vehicle.
If an over-the-air patch can have that kind of impact, then what happens if security is compromised and that power is used for ill?
Changing: if (brakeDepressed()){ engageBrake(); } To: if (brakeDepressed() && currentTime < '5/6/26 4pm EST'){ engageBrake(); } Can be deployed to thousands of vehicles, and would stop brakes from working during peak commute time on the East Coast.
This doesn't have anything to do with EV vs ICE, but whether it has a over the air updates and whether the problem can be fixed with a software update or not. I expect car recalls are pretty well into the noise in terms of "societal level" problems too aren't they? Even if they were not I expect whole "software defined car" thing, whatever that really means, has not resulted in mechanical defects plummeting, but rather just more software defects. Although it is quite possible EVs have less defects in general than ICE cars I suppose.
Ongoing subscriptions for access to physical hardware features like seat warmers* seems obnoxious at first glance, but a fee is more reasonable and you might find that there aren’t many auto makers that don’t do this or aren’t planning on it. BTW there’s very little in software or electronics that doesn’t do this, and many other consumer products do too. What might be less visible is how often the hardware is included and made trivial for a dealer to upgrade but doesn’t have a remote software unlock. It’s the same thing and it’s been happening for decades, but gets less outrage.
You would have paid a fee for the feature if it wasn’t included. Focusing on features being there already and locked being somehow “bamboozles” isn’t necessarily the right way to frame this, even from a pro-consumer perspective. This practice of building the high end model and locking some features behind a paywall makes the design and manufacturing cheaper for everyone by having only one design. The paywall model suggests that the design costs are more important than the manufacturing or materials costs of these features. That’s absolutely true for software apps, and it’s accepted by and large and we don’t feel like that’s a skeezy game. It doesn’t surprise me at all that with manufacturing at a global scale, it makes more sense to build one model and lock some features with software.
Do think of the potential benefits we get from this model - overall lower prices (in theory) from simplified design and manufacturing; the ability to upgrade later after you buy (or even downgrade if you don’t like it and it’s a subscription).
* AFAIK the BMW seat warmers subscription was a rumor at one point, got a bunch of online uproar, but didn’t actually happen? I’m not sure if anyone has actually done this.
Why honda is killing EVs is directly related to just how damn cheap Chinese EVs have become and how stupid Americans are when it comes to EV efficiency. Who the hell wants large vehicles for EV when the best solutions are small efficient vehicles with long drive times.
Americans distort the market and margins, and Honda was never in the large SUV game.
(The Honda Pilot and Honda Passport stare at you, with deep resentment)
Driving a tiny little Japanese/Chinese import in, say, Oklahoma is asking to get literally run over.
What kills me are the MASSIVE vehicles in the suburbs though. Why do you need a 3 ton suburban to drive around 2 kids on very clear, very well maintained streets? Why would you buy a 4x4 truck when the most off road you'll do is driving over wet leaves on your cul-de-sac in the fall?
The air is clean. For sure some of this is because it's a coastal city and has fresh sea breezes, but I've been in other Chinese coastal cities in times past and the air was significantly less clean.
There are social upsides for an almost-all-EV city.
This is an 18m person city. It's not exclusively wealthy people, its just a city with a very high local EV population and it shows.
Do the local mockingbirds sing the song of the car alarm? That one is pretty complex.
Shenzhen is not nearly "almost-all EV" city. There is a lot of wealthy people and almost none of them drives EV. You can see all expensive cars are ICE (blue plates).
Modern ICE cars emit almost no sound or emissions. Its not 70s with black smoke coming from exhaust pipes.
You can take any densely populated city with almost none EV vehicles (say Tokyo) and you can hear birds and air would be very clean.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235198942...
ICE cars have been planned out for years now, and something like 96% of all new cars in Norway were EV last year.
Basically, if you plan on keeping selling ICE cars, you're removing yourself from the market here. There's no future for new personal ICE cars here.
I figure most other countries will be the same.
It is the top EV market.
> I figure most other countries will be the same.
Most other countries are not Norway, it is a very wealthy, tiny market (150 K vehicles/year) with lots of hydro and not representative of the typical vehicle market in Western Europe and definitely not representative of the situation in the rest of the world.
EVs are the future, there is no doubt about that. But that future will not arrive everywhere at the same point in time and Norway is very far ahead of the rest of the world due to a fairly unique set of circumstances: exporting your own oil and gas to be able to have a 'clean' (and up to recently heavily subsidized) transportation network is in a way just a gigantic bookkeeping trick.
How so?
If every oil exporter used some of their oil revenue to switch to EVs, that would, all things equal, hasten the transition to EVs. The U.S. is not doing that.
Saudi Arabia started moving the electrical system to renewables where USA is doubling down on fossil fuels.
Saudi Arabia is the drug dealer that knows you don't consumer your own supply unless you must were the USA consumes the crack they sell.
My next vehicle will 100% be pure EV, not Tesla.
The US’s interest in the Middle East oil is a lot about stabilizing oil prices. At least it used to be when there was a rational policy and competent executors.
So true. There's nothing incompatible at all with: a) realizing that earth has gifted you with a valuable but limited & polluting energy source b) realizing that you'd be foolish to get you own country hooked on it, but it's not a bad business if you can get other countries hooked on it.
Instead we get oil rich areas seemingly determined to show off how much of their oil they can waste.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Jamal_Khashog...
The US has vast reserves of coal and natural gas. We generally don't use oil to generate power either -- oil is something like 0.4% of the total power generated, because we have vast amounts of natural gas and coal to use instead.
The situation isn't the result of some crafty master plan on the part of the Saudis. It's jusut what makes sense.
As other countries move to reliance on Chinese rare earth processing for renewable technology, it drives their oil and gas consumption down which means more oil and gas for those who are still using it.
If you really want to look at this analogy about drug dealers then really what you see is that America is the big boss here and an energy and military super power, and Saudi Arabia is just another dealer under American protection and if they don’t do what we tell them to do they’ll get the boot.
The premise is all things aren't equal. The oil Norway would have used just gets used somewhere else so what difference does it make what Norway does instead. I don't know if that's the reality of the situation but if it is just an offset, it does sound like a bookkeeping trick doesn't it?
Norway exporting oil increases oil supply, but doesn't increase consumption. The world's oil consumers are not supply-constrained; the producers are not running at 100% capacity, and they'll happily pick up the slack if Norway just stopped exporting oil for no reason. And there's a large amount of consumption that can't be offset by electrification in the first place (petrochemicals, long distance flight, etc) so there's not even a theoretical future end-state where they require a non-EV-using counterparty to buy their oil to fund their EV usage.
Calling it a "bookkeeping trick" is just verbal sleigh-of-hand.
Consider if others followed their lead. Then oil would be used less for transportation, one of its most destructive and singular uses, and more for manufacturing or medical or less wasteful uses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
For automobiles, the future comes very slowly.
That was true five years ago, but no longer-Algeria, the last country to allow it, banned leaded petrol in 2021 - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-58388810
Not really. Even in a hypothetical future where all road vehicles are electric, we'll still need fossil fuels for a while. For one thing, it's probably going to be a while before airplanes can go electric. And production of plastics will probably need petroleum for a long time.
Most countries are quite poor and/or have small populations and aren't buying many vehicles period.
About ~45% of countries have smaller populations than Norway, and Norway is in the top ~25% of countries by size of the auto market...
Most countries are not the China and India, yet they make up almost 45% of the global population.
The US and China make up about 45% of the auto market...
There's a lot of European, Asian, and Latin American countries that have more in common with Norway than they do with the US or China or India.
per-capita or by total volume? i ask because a sibling or child comment says that the number of cars sold in norway is pretty small (in part because the population is small). a quick google says 180k cars sold in norway in 2025 (we can round up to 100% EV) and 34M sold in China. It also says China has 50% EV sales. So by total volume Norway isn't close to the top.
(Personally I am fine driving a 10 year old shit box because for me it is just a means of going from A to B and rather spend my money on other things)
This is often mentioned but is not relevant.
In terms of cost, what matters is whether an equally good (for whatever metrics a car is "good" to you) replacement car will cost less or more.
As for doing the maintenance myself, I don't have experience with this kind of car at all, I've worked a lot on classic Mini's, Citroens (2CV and DS) and Austin Maxi. But never anything like this so I'm more than happy to let someone else earn a buck on it. But it's been pretty cheap to run so far, fuel, oil, regular service and once a control arm that got bent out of shape.
Compared to a new vehicle I'm considerably better off.
Yes, it has an ECU and ooh, gollies there is software in that. But it's completely invisible from an interaction point of view, there are no screens, all the buttons just do what they are told, there are no 'upgrades', no bugs, interfaces, restarts and attempts to kill me through 'assistance'.
It’s entirely possible to get around without smartphones or paper maps. There are road signs, written directions, verbal directions. The main time I used to use a paper map was driving long distance trips in a foreign country.
Perhaps that's why we never hear about Norwegian car culture (as opposed to Germany and the US). Ferdinand Porsche would have resigned to building apple carts.
American/European car makers realized there is a large class of people who are wealthy and will buy a high end EV for status reasons, and started chasing that market instead.
I am living in a working class neighborhood of apartment buildings in West-central Europe with average to below average earners, and there's zero EVs parked here on the streets, basically 90% of people have old diesel cars. Only when you go towards the suburbs with rich(inherited wealth) people living in single family homes you see everyone has an EV.
The distinction is quite clear, do you live in a house or have your own parking space and possibility to install your own charger? Then EV 100% no brainer. Otherwise people stick to ICE.
To give you some perspective, the most popular EV in China costs $6000 (Wuling Mini). New. The second most popular costs $10000 (Geely Xingyuan). I tried both, and they are far less crappy than they have the right to be. They are cheap cars for sure, but they're perfectly adequate for regular use.
And Geely Xingyuan has a 40kWh battery in the basic configuration! This is utterly ridiculous for a car that is _that_ cheap.
So China basically murdered the global ICE market. It's gone. There's no going back. Once China figures out the logistics and sales, ICE vehicles will be dead in all of the less affluent countries. Especially because EVs combine almost too perfectly with solar generation.
That is irrelevant unless Norway has unused capacity.
If you use more electric power, then what matters is how that extra power is generated.
It gets weird in Europe because adding extra load in Norway could easily mean that Poland uses more coal generation.
I'm in New Zealand where the government owned generators are preventing solar installations. One example was via an unobvious regulation that the installation had to handle rediculously overengineered earthquake rules. Meanwhile we use coal or imported gas when the isn't enough rain for our hydro. And we waste about 10% of our total capacity exporting (via one aluminium plant).
What is a hydro energy resource, a river? Don't lots of countries have rivers?
(If we're talking about hydroelectric power plants they've chosen to build, that's not exactly a resource -- and other countries could choose to build those too, right?)
A river winding along a flat plain is not a hydro energy resource. A river in the same valley as your capital city is not a hydro energy resource.
Some big slow moving river in a flat land on the other hand is not helping you here.
Out of interest, do you mean 6% of cars on the road of 6% of new cars sold last year?
I think for much of the population a brand new EV is simply too expensive.
As alliao says, this is partly because of the way road user charges (RUC) currently work, though that is slated to change in the future.
Their hydro energy company is an aluminum company company, they have so much slack power they export it refining bauxite.
It is worth repeating solar panels covering an area about the size of NH generate enough power to supply all current entire US energy needs.
Tesla can fund the project of making EV chargers ubiquitous in the US and make it make sense within the context of a profitable business plan.
Chinese manufacturers can similarly make it make sense financially.
Japanese auto makers who are heavily subsidized by the Japanese government can't easily fund the infrastructure project of making EV chargers ubiquitous in a foreign country like the US or EU and their home market is much smaller.
Thats of course because people wanna go green and certainly has nothing to do with the 25% VAT exemption that ICE cars are subject to.
Growing up in America I have memories of our roadside snowbanks becoming black and saturated by vehicle exhaust and it always felt so gross to me. The back half of winter was characterized by blackened, salt-saturated puddles and banks. I wonder if the prevalence of EVs has made things less dirty in the winter.
The dominant cause of that is probably brake and tire particulate matter, not car exhaust. And EVs make tire pollution go up (because they're heavier) and brake pollution... I'm not sure if the weight effect there is counteracted by the decreased amount of friction brake use (as opposed to resistance braking).
In either case it's a good physical representation of how much particulate we are exposed to every day. Maybe having it trapped in dirty snowbanks is better than having it getting kicked up into the air during a dryer season.
https://www.eiturbanmobility.eu/press-corner/nees-are-the-ma...
Dominated to the point of insignificance?
Anyway, did you understand it?
I doubt EV would take any significant share if that would be the case.
https://www.electrive.com/2025/01/09/norway-the-number-of-ne...
I would also say that any ICE vehicle that has 0 subscription models, upgradable firmware, tracking software will probably have a value premium to it in the not distant future.
FWIW downvoters - I have a PHEV - but I live in the real world and a likely future!
I don't know about the whole national electric grid, but at my house, I didn't really have to upgrade anything and didn't even notice an increase in electric bill when I started plugging in my EV. I don't think my car is even 20% of my household electricity usage. I'd hope we can increase our national grid's capability by at least 20% in the next 20 years. (Also, aren't datacenters causing that massive demand right now, whether or not the upgrades are even there yet? As I understand this is causing massive price increases?)
> I would also say that any ICE vehicle that has 0 subscription models, upgradable firmware, tracking software will probably have a value premium to it in the not distant future.
As you kind of hint at, whether or not the vehicle is EV or ICE has nothing to do with whether it has subscription models, tracking, etc. and car manufacturers are racing towards both of those things in a way that makes the drivetrain irrelevant.
1. Infra will need to upgrade in order to handle heavy charging in neighborhoods with wholesale change in the fleet. It would change our electrical use model considerably in terms of times of use -- and we would be adding all the energy used from gas powered cars to the electrical grid - which is somewhat significant.
2. While you are correct technically -- I think what I am implying is older cars (ICE) will be the ones without all the tracking and software - whereas all EVs will have that embedded as they are all relatively new. There is no world where they remove that from new car production.
The Youtube channel Technology Connections has an interesting video where it describes a successful transition to a fully-electric house while remaining on a 50 amp electrical connection. (it requires a smart circuit breaker)
Electric motors are extremely efficient over a wide speed range, whereas combustion engines aren't very efficient even in their relatively narrow optimal range and the arrangement needed to translate that power into motion further reduces overall efficiency.
While replacing the energy 1:1 would entail roughly doubling US electrical generation you actually want to replace the function and that's maybe 20-25% increase. It's not a trifle but it's very do-able. Especially if you time-shift car charging so that it's happening when humans are asleep and there's slack in the network.
You charge your phone while you sleep right? If you're used to filling up a car at a gas station it can feel weird but you can charge a car while you sleep too.
That's a problem and behaviour with poor long term consequences.
Bit like Columbia being a net cocaine exporter.
> I have no idea
There are annual IEA reports on global energy demand and supply by means and country.
Those looking ahead to sustainable energy are improving technology and infrastructure to better utilize the great fusion reactor in the sky.
Certainly the US could use a plan for charging infrastructure and grid improvements- it's currently lagging both the EU and China there.
eg: Electric vehicle charging - https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2025/electric-...
( Just the current trends in public charging stations, not trends in supply )
>Stop wanting to actually make things and have a well rounded economy!!!
Dragging up sequestered carbon in the billions upon billions of tonnes and changing the insulation factor of the atmosphere _is_ bad and well lead to no good if not unchecked and somewhat reversed - that's just physics.
Ergo - that should _stop_ and other things should be made that sidestep the issue.
And if 100% of EV's sold this year were electric, it would take ~24 years for basically all of the vehicles on the road were electric. (The average age of registered cars in the US is 12 years old).
Estimates are that a 100% EV fleet would increase electricity demand by 20%. So that's < 1 % a year.
Approximately how much demand increases due to increasing A/C usage in the US.
And a lot less than AI/crypto is increasing demand.
And that's not to mention that EV charging is a relatively easy demand to meet -- most EV owners charge when it's cheapest, so you can shape demand via price signals.
Its all doable but it is not as a simple as every plugs in at home. Its a large co-ordinated infrastructure effort.
You also brought up some other valid issues -- right now we are looking at the being undersupplied for electricity across NA without a wholesale swap to EVs. Maybe the upside of the oversupply of AI is that we have a lot of stranded assets for electrical charging infra/generation afterwards..
There's little to no reason that the electrical grid itself needs to change for the sake of EV's.
The biggest problem is that while slow charging (L2) in your own garage would be perfect for 99%+ of people in the US, and isn't even very expensive, that's a barrier to entry most people do not want to screw with. So, everyone wants DC fast that mimics a gas station experience, even if it's completely unnecessary for almost everyone's use cases.
Land is limited, new builds like that are expensive, slower to earn returns, and make little sense with so few EVs in the US - which leads to a viscous cycle. It's a bit of TotC.
>I would also say that any ICE vehicle that has 0 subscription models, upgradable firmware, tracking software will probably have a value premium to it in the not distant future.
Consumers do not care about this. If they did, such cars would not sell. No one is going to pay extra for fewer features.
I feel like this is only an opinion that people who have never actually used an EV have. Plugging in my car overnight at home every few days is infinitely more convenient than needing to drive somewhere to plug it in somewhere else. The actual charge time is irrelevant as long as it's not more than ~12 hrs.
Right, what people want is to pay less for fewer features.
If EVs with all their limitations are going to replace ICE cars for daily use, they need to be cheap. We need the Ford Focus or Toyota Tercel of EVs, with the same set of features (i.e. very few) that those cars had when they were introduced.
Otherwise I'll just go buy a used ICE Tercel or Focus.
When Tesla showed the world that an EV didn't have to look like a middle school science project and drive like a golf cart, it made sense that they went upmarket. They had to recover development costs. That won't work to get mass conversion.
A non-EV Toyota Camry is $30k (hybrid and ICE).
We are almost there. For buyers on a budget, the used car market is liquid for EVs as of now.
I personally buy used, and pay about a quarter of that or less when I buy a car.
If you can hoof it all the way to Fairfield (2.5 hours from Y Combinator HQ in SF; Muni->BART->Amtrak->taxi), you can get a 7 year old Model 3 for $14k tomorrow.
https://www.autotrader.com/cars-for-sale/vehicle/770441711?a...
You're saying?
> I figure most other countries will be the same.
I figure you're wrong on that one.
A country that is bigger than half Spain with 10 times less population with one of the lowest electrify prices of the entire world(5-8 dollars MWh) because of huge hydro resources.
A country with huge capital reserves precisely because of oil resources.
I'll pay triple for a non software defined vehicle that doesn't track me and can't be touched by the dealer once I purchase it. My one SDV (Tesla) is still on FSD from 2023 because the newer versions are terrible judging from the comments on the Tesla forums.
I bought a perfectly fine macbook pro m1 in 2020. It has been made far, far worse, slower, bloated and less responsive by apple. I see nothing improved, everything significantly degraded. It used to be that I could airplay to our tv with a single mouse click, now it seems to work once every 5 attempts, and takes about a minute. It used to be near instantaneous.
I bought a top of the line philips oled tv in 2020. I think I paid 4k for it. It has been made slower, bloated, less responsive by google and philips (or whatever company makes those tvs branded by philips).
I buy a top of the line iphone every 2-3 years, and it gets worse.
I bought a SONOS soundbar a few years ago. It used to work fine and produce nice sound. Now if I start my tv, and don't play anything for a few minutes it goes to sleep, and I need to restart my tv to get the sound to play.
Blocking updates on anything newly purchased seems like the best option. Not buying anything from those absolute crap companies seems like the second best option, but its hard to find alternatives.
I've had FSD since 2020; the latest version is noticeably better than 2020. I wouldn't put too much stock in forums which tend to skew negative.
[1] Example: https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/arti... (prev. HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37401563 )
I hate that expression. It's software-limited, not defined.
That, and Japan is deeply screwed if they go all-in on EVs and then China decides they shouldn't be allowed access to any more rare earths.
This is a common misunderstanding. There are plenty of alternative locations to mine rare earth minerals, particularly Australia. China cornered the market because it's a high pollution low margin business. If geopolitical concerns cut off access to Chinese sources, alternatives will be developed.
I don't think this is the right way to characterize it. China invested when other countries didn't, but they didn't monopolize the market, they have no moat beyond expertise and some tech advancement that could be replicated easily enough. The only moat they have is related perseverance and other countries simply not wanting to put the work in.
Basically, if we want to replicate what they did, we will have to do it mostly from scratch -- Japan and Australia has done some of the work already so it's not totally from scratch. It's obviously not impossible but it could take almost a decade for us to do that.
That said, I don't think this should be enough for Japan to stop investing in EVs. If Japanese car makers are really worried about this then they can build their plants in the US and leverage any deal the US has with China on real earths. They've already starting importing Japanese cars made in India and the US back to Japan so that's an established practice. Then once they've secured their own supplies they can make the EVs in Japan too. I think OP's point about the suppliers have more merit as a reason why Japan might not want to develop EVs.
As an addendum, companies in the REE Sinosphere are often encouraged by the CCP to exchange ideas with each other quite often, while Western companies often lock them behind proprietary patents and competition. While both systems have their pros and cons, the former allows for faster process proliferation (and a lower profit incentive for the innovator).
Like they say: in theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice, they aren't.
It's all well and good to have knowledge of the techniques, or to even have published or created them. But applying them successfully, working out all the kinks, and streamlining everything to become profitable doesn't happen overnight.
I have no doubt alternate sources can exist, but not without significant time and effort.
Maybe I'm wrong. I gained my knowledge second-hand/third-hand from books and podcasts so I would defer to you to your actual experience and observations about Chinese REE. What is your estimate on how long it would take the West to catch to at least supply some of the rare earth components and what the real barriers might be? Would love to hear your take on this.
Thanks for sharing your observations. I had no idea about the minutiae of that industry, i.e. the ecological control and its effects on the industry.
The real barriers are talent and the regulation vs profit motive balance. What I mentioned in my previous comment was effectively an effect of the intersection of the two - you can't find novel ways of processing harmful substances without having the technical talent to find these out in the first place, nor without giving them a free reign after deprioritizing profit.
Let's take arsenic for instance, a substance that's a harmful byproduct arising out of most mining operations. We already have the technology in the West to lock away arsenic into glass, but a.) apart from the big ones, most companies are unaware of them, and b.) even if they were aware of it, the tech is a significant line item that shies investors and companies away from investing into it.
> What is your estimate on how long it would take the West to catch to at least supply some of the rare earth components and what the real barriers might be?
Never. Yes, there are a few companies still engaged in trying to secure REE supply (Glencore being the most notable), but due to Western regulatory and policy limbo, the answer is never. For this to change, you need regulators open to experimentations and a concerted effort by the government in trying to reestablish REE independence, both in extraction and in processing, but I have yet to see either happening. It's telling when frankly the US is the country in the West most likely to catch up still, but the gap is deeper than the Darien Gap .
See my sibling comment. Their moat is the scale and structure of their industry. Some parts of rare earth processing are dependent on that.
I do think the original point about lower complexity vehicles being a threat to the suppliers has some merits though. Germany faces a very similar dilemma and made similar decisions.
Incredible what can be done. If Japan ever wants actual mecha warriors for their military, they're going to need motors like that.
Ford: It recorded a loss of $1.2 billion in EBIT in the third quarter on its EVs, bringing its losses on the segment for the first three quarters of 2024 to $3.7 billion
Honda: Honda to Write Off $15.7 Billion as EV Winter Arrives.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/ford-r...
https://www.barrons.com/articles/gm-stock-general-motors-inv...
https://www.barrons.com/articles/honda-to-write-off-15-7-bil...
For what it's worth, this theory is blown up by hydrogen based vehicles, which Japan has gone heavily in on. Yes, slightly more parts than an EV, but not a ton. And the drivetrain is electric.
They're just more expensive, but not even that much.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/08/business/japan-rare-earth...
Trafalgar will be the first large scale NdFeB magnet plant looking to start production in 2027
https://www.fastmarkets.com/insights/trafalgar-sets-sights-o...
https://www.economist.com/asia/2025/12/04/lessons-from-japan...
Or assume you have to provide a current model iPad or android tablet to run their software. That would keep the hardware functional if they kept the software working.
And I don’t trust the vendors to try to drive resale by eol’ing the logic/software. They’ll drive everybody to leases to avoid this and battery life concerns.
There's a few other EVs Honda produced in 90s as well, but e probably in running for first ground up new EV platform that made it to market as mass produced Honda product.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_e
Can you elaborate on this? I'd love to have a cheap small truck like they used to make, but CAFE largely killed those.
My understanding is that this is due to fuel regulations being enacted by size and weight where it’s simply easier to make bigger vehicles.
CAFE killed them too. You can't have a small vehicle that gets fuck all MPG because it's built like a tank to do work. You gotta have a bigger one that gets slightly worse MPG but has a way huger footprint in order to make the math math.
This didn't just kill compact pickups for 20yr. It also killed the Chevy Astro (the most "fullsize work van" of the minivans) and why you'll never see a car with a giant overhanging cargo area again.
US manufacturers want margins, and they're not getting margins on little, efficient cars. They get enormous margins on gigantic trucks that start at $55,000. Have you noticed that all the sub $20k cars went away from all the manufacturers around COVID?
Ford makes the Maverick, which is a small truck. They were priced very reasonably at release, at $19,000 or so. However, Ford didn't make very many of them, and the ones they did make got up to $15,000 over MSRP from the dealers, who scalped them. Why would Ford want to cannibalize their pricy gigantic trucks when they know that they can get their $50k asking price because there's nowhere else for people to go?
Why isn't Ford worried that Chevrolet, Toyota, Ram, or Nissan will bring back a small and cheap U.S. built pickup? Is that because all manufacturers are afraid of cannibalizing their more expensive offerings? Are they all colluding? Or do not many people want small pickups? I guess if the Slate becomes a breakout hit, we'll know that people really want the smaller pickups.
they dominated in the era of small engines.
with EVs - the Chinese have run away with the stick & sadly no one is catching up.
I wish the Japanese made good EVs - Germans are the only ones besides the Chinese making decent EVs
That's not nearly the case. They have made one of best EVs back in years, but decided to focus on hybrids. And that makes total sense.
Over 25% of vehicles sold world-wide were electric in 2025, and that percentage is steadily increasing. So VW & Ford were "too hot", Honda is looking like "too cold" and Toyota might be the "just right" of the three bears.
Most hybrids aren't liquid-cooled (although that is changing), and the smaller size means that a hybrid puts a lot more cycles per mile on the battery than an EV does.
Which in practice means that a hybrid battery lasts about 100,000 miles whereas an EV lasts about 250,000 miles.
A Prius is an amazing car; a 300,000 mile Prius is often still in good shape and worth the expense to replace the battery in. Which means you might put 3 batteries in a Prius and then look at how expensive it would be to replace the battery in an EV 3 times and choke. But very few people are going to spend the significant dollars it costs to replace the battery in a 250,000 mile Tesla so in practice that's an expense you'll never have.
You want a Supra to drive much better than fine. But if you're in the market for a Corolla, "fine" might be better than some of the cars you're comparing against.
The biggest issue I think every auto maker needs to solve is cost. The average car payment is insane, with dealership markups it's even worst than it would be otherwise. I'm not sure how we got here on that, to me car interiors are no nicer than they were from 2005ish on. I don't even know what the cost is going into.
The adoption curve hasn't been nearly as steep as predicted, and the political landscape is unstable. Other manufacturers are also pulling back on their EV investments.
I'm not saying Honda isn't overdoing it, but a retreat from EVs isn't surprising.
EV's are a half trillion dollar market (20 million cars annually, average selling price $25K) that increased by 20% in 2025.
That's a massive increase in a massive market.
It's not the 50% per annum we were seeing earlier, but 20% of a big number is often more impressive than 50% of a big market.
Two of Honda's biggest markets are Japan and the US. The US is cooling on EVs with incentives and regulation changes making adoption less urgent. Japan already has an extremely low adoption rate. So the incentives for Honda to invest heavily just aren't there right now.
Other manufacturers are also pulling back. Ford is cutting way back on the Lightning for example.
In Japan, it's more a matter of not having good domestic options. Japanese people don't buy non-Japanese cars. When the Leaf was selling well world-wide, it sold well in Japan. But it's been a few years since the Leaf sold well anywhere. Now with good Toyota options and spiking gas prices I expect EV's to pick up in Japan. Nowhere is more dependent than Japan on the straight of Hormuz.
Car company execs need to take a chill pill followed by a reality serum. Monetizing subscription based basic features and delivering in-car advertising is the absolutely worst way to go.
As consumers we need to stop buying into the bells, whistles and trinkets and demand essential and safe transportation.
This is a USP for the Slate Truck. A lot of early commentary lauded the simplicity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slate_Truck
Independently, I had to take my car into the dealer to get a safety critical recall installed via Ethernet that affected a braking system in certain edge cases and this was not installable OTA “in the night”.
While, yes, I am annoyed that the dealer price for my “infotainment” unit is $2k and reflects the technical specs of a 2016 mid tier android tablet running Intel cores; I do feel that vehicle is far safer with its airbags, 360 camera, lane keeping, and AEB on net than my 1970’s classic.
The used car market has, in many ways, usurped what used to be the role of the basic car used to be.
As a result, you see fewer and fewer new cars sold, and automakers have to more intensively monetize the cars they have. They must create ever-increasing returns to shareholders.
As the buggy-makers failed to transition to making cars, and thus ceased to be, so too will automakers fail to transition to EVs, and thus end their viability as vehicle manufacturers.
The week I spent renting an EV (an Ioniq 5, so not even a high-end one) convinced me. Enjoyable to drive. Having to figure out where/how to charge it was sufficient to chase away the fears around that.
* https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2025/trends-in...
* https://source.benchmarkminerals.com/article/global-ev-sales...
China no longer subsidizes their EV production to the level they did at its industry's inception.
Can you expand on your comment and reference data that supports your reasoning?
> when you suffer from EDS
Edit out the cheap swipes please.
See: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
2024 total deliveries: 1,789,226
2025 total deliveries: 1,636,129
That 8% decline YOY
Sources:
https://ir.tesla.com/press-release/tesla-fourth-quarter-2024...
https://ir.tesla.com/press-release/tesla-fourth-quarter-2025...
Edit out the cheap swipes please.
See: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Charging in the US (other than at home) is still the biggest issue for me. I do lots of traveling, and waiting 30-45 minutes to charge even at a Level 3 charger is a PITA. If I had a J std charger, then it's even longer. This makes my monthly 8 hour trips one-way another 2 hours - this sucks. Sorry - I'll keep my 2005 Honda Element with 445K miles. Another engine would be cheaper than less than a year of car payments. And it's pretty much indestructible.
There’s other good roadtrip friendly options out there too, but ya with monthly drives like that you’re really limiting your options and ICE cars still make a lot of sense
Ugh that sucks
> [...] and software-defined vehicles.
Take my money! I'll suffer with gas for that.
Guess which three items out of that list I do not want.
So they don’t crash into you or run over your kids?
This is important, because forward collusion detection is not a binary thing. Each auto maker has their own set of parameters, sensors and implementations to achieve a similar goal, but each act independently.
I would also prefer if people were more engaged with driving too. I don't think we should encourage people to "rely" on these systems to keep them out of trouble as these systems can and do act unpredictably and may harm other road users as a result of a programming decision since the car in front acted unexpectedly.
I think the whole automation of everything in a car is a bit silly. Transmissions are whatever for me, although the full lane assist, cruise control, adaptive cruise control, even automatic wipers and headlights makes people feel so much more disconnected from the car, which I think leads to unsafe habits or worse, unable to handle the car in situations where the automatic systems fail or become unreliable (e.g poor visibility, wet roads, unmapped roads, off-road, obstructions on the road, road works, etc).
Also why manual transmissions for everyone ? It’s kinda slow and cumbersome. It’s fun to pretend play being a good pilot, but that’s obsolete.
"Birth control leads to riskier behavior and more pregnancies."
The way we use the van, 90% of our drives are under 20 miles round trip. The rest are longer road trips. I've been waiting eight years for Honda to make an electric or even a plug-in hybrid where the gas motor just charge the battery.
It would be perfect for my family. I guess that's not happening now.
A new vehicle makes no sense. Unless I went a budget used Prius (with a good hybrid battery system). No plan to make changes.
Take care - the Hybrid battery can be expensive to replace and they do eventually fail. Note that Toyota changed from NiMH to LiIon 2017/18. I recently had to wreck an old Toyota Hybrid because replacing the dead battery was going to cost 2/3 of the value of the vehicle. Context: New Zealand.
I don't have charging capability at my apartment or work. On occasion, I do 300 mile trips (adirondacks/nyc). Skeptical of winter performance. I have no interest in "frequent updates, slick infotainment software, and advanced driver-assistance systems". Frankly, no spare tire is a no starter for me also.
That does not bode well for German car makers either I'm afraid. Take BMW for instance: they started off with two "pure" EV models, the i3 (a compact car) and the i8 (a sports car). Both of them promising, but neither a particular bestseller. So they switched to offering electric drive as an alternative to IC engines in several (most?) "regular" models. But I agree with TechCrunch that this is more of a cop-out than a winning strategy...
> Consumers, mostly those who buy EVs from the likes of Tesla, Rivian, and BYD, have grown accustomed to the frequent updates, slick infotainment software, and advanced driver-assistance systems. Honda has yet to make significant progress in any of those domains.
Here's an idea: what about making an EV free from this enshittification? One where you can decide yourself when to install an update, like in the "olden days" a few years ago? One that doesn't pretend to have an "autopilot" which isn't really one? I think there would be a market for such an EV.
Time will tell, but I think it’s a long term mistake.
Just look at Nissan, which is broke as a joke, but they still put a new Leaf model on the market.
Lately there’s been a vibe that the EV experiment has died off, but that really isn’t true looking at industry reporting.
There is stalling that seems related to subsidy expiration and/or scale back, but we could argue that subsidies expiring is happening because the subsidies aren’t needed to sell vehicles anymore.
20% of new vehicles sold globally are EVs. Critical mass has been achieved, and not just in China (20% of vehicles sold in Europe are EVs).
This is also an admission that Honda is just giving up on Acura completely. That $50k two row luxury SUV buyer that is such an industry staple buyer for the US auto industry is going to be buying Rivian R2s instead of an EV Acura MDX.
The oil industry spends a lot of money on astroturf.
"Grown accustomed to" is a funny way of saying "begrudgingly put up with because the alternative is buying a new car, but really they would rather not have to deal with that crap at all."
I don't want anything of the sort as a consumer, so auto makers who don't "get" it either are fine by me. Nay, heroes.
The last 5 years just don't show it. The EV market is still small and infrastructure missing in most of the world.
Toyota played it safe and made bank when everybody was saying they were doomed.
German automakers went hard on EVs. VW group sold 1 million fully electric vehicles in 2025, they will probably overtake Tesla in a couple of years for the biggest non-Chinese EV automaker by sales, but is it paying off financially?
At the same time german premium brands have a very hard time differentiating when Chinese cars offer similar quality at half the price even after tariffs.
EV sales keep on growing world wide by juicy double digit percentages. Some markets less than others of course but the net effect is that all that legacy business keeps on shrinking because all that EV growth is at the cost of that legacy business.
The main issue with Honda and other Japanese manufacturers is that they are hopelessly dependent on Chinese suppliers to ship any EVs at this point. They've dragged their heels on doing their own tech and at this point while they might have some promising things in their labs, they lack supply chains and factories to mass produce any of it by themselves. That's going to take many years to turn around. Without guarantees that they'll be able to match the Chinese on cost. And the EU, Koreans, Chinese, and even US companies like GM are picking up the slack and growing EV sales at their cost.
Toyota seems to finally be producing a lot of EVs now to counter that. They've been catching up fast in the last year or so. But most of these EVs come with a lot of Chinese tech inside. Their alternative was to cede that market to competitors. Which seems to be what Honda is doing. I don't think that will end well for them.
China is already selling EVs to countries that haven’t even had many cars before, like Nepal. Is 75% of the world car market just going to be there’s because western auto manufacturers overfixated on their own very mature car markets?
Mercedes-Benz sells 9 different fully electric models and that ignores their trucks and vans.
BMW sells 9 different fully electric models across their BMW/Mini/Rolls Royce brands.
Volkswagen sells more than *30*.
I don't think western automakers can compete in any case unless they can either differentiate their offering or significantly lower the cost of core components like batteries.
> For the fiscal year ended March 31, 2025 (FY2025), motorcycles accounted for about 17% of total revenue, while cars made up around 65%.
I wonder what the plan is for motorcycles, where in much of Asia cars aren't really viable and there are no real competitors to Honda engine bikes.
No wonder I've not seen one yet
I watched the reviews on YouTube, and they're all quite favorable.
e-bikes/mopeds?
It's a shame that US law doesn't have a nice in-between that would slot these bikes between proper e-bikes and motorcycles.
Hundreds of millions of motorcycles are still in active use with no real incentive to change
Maybe the answer is truly "no, that wouldn't actually be practical for how people in those places live" for some reason, but I'm genuinely curious.
I was in China last year and one apartment complex I stayed at had a garage full of e scooters and bikes all plugged in to charge.
The streets in China are remarkably quiet now with so many electric vehicles.
https://www.motorcyclesdata.com/2026/03/11/electric-motorcyc...
I think Vinfast would like to have a word with you…
Better hope your vehicle is never damaged.
I know the US primarily uses diesel for its trains, but have you ever been outside of the US before?
- $0.005 to $0.01 per ton-mile (for ocean ships)
- $0.05 to $0.08 per ton-mile (for diesel trucks)
- $0.015 – $0.025 per ton-mile (for electric trucks)
- $0.007 per ton-mile (for diesel trains)
- $0.002 per ton-mile (for electric trains)
- $0.002 – $0.004 per ton-mile (electric ships, not widely deployed yet due to battery weight)
The real Mad Max will be roaming the apocalyptic wasteland in a Kia EV5.
The breakeven for this is so bad that it's only worth it for the gullible "wow" factor from the general public asking about it.
The person I know who loves FSD has soured on updates since the last one changed how the car handles simple things like intersections, and it's added a lot more stress.
Cars should be appliances, boring and reliable, not something to amaze and delight you. Especially since the latter usually changes into "sell ads and your personal information".
Sadly, this view is considered antiquated and anti-technology by a younger generation of people who think what we see in sci-fi shows should be reality (good or bad). And if you don't get that vision then you're some dumb luddite who should be banished from society.
What's kind of remarkable is the onslaught of vehicles, many EV, which have critical functionality issues that are being ignored, but they have WiFi + hotspot on board! And if you want to do basic things with your own vehicle, like get the climate control ready before you leave on a trip you now need an app, a smartphone, and Internet connection and a subscription...to do things that could easily be done via some local BLE or WiFi connection.
I see a lot of car companies rush to make "immersive" driving experiences while neglecting the basics. The Ioniq 5 / EV6 have ICCU issues that are not addressed which can leave the car stranded and the replacement parts have the same mysterious failure modes, the Jaguar I-Pace had numerous failures including a UI that would lag for basic things like changing air conditioning settings, the last generation Leaf (just prior to the current re-design) has battery issues that have forced people to do lemon-law buy backs, the Ford Mach E has a Tesla-style iPad center display that can't be turned off at night so it's a distraction (among other issues with the poor concept), but it has OTA so awesome!
Absolutely, the sooner the better. The truth is, auto companies can track you, show you ads, and otherwise jerk you around without going all the way to having a "software defined vehicle." You just get a worse user experience.
The thing can't even do OTA updates without you connecting your phone to the car's bluetooth.
Agree, but then how do you get people to change them?
Even today my wife left her phone on the charge pad and the car beeped as we walked away to alert us - a feature that didn’t exist when we first got it.
Enshittification may come, but maybe there will be an Apple-like benevolent dictator that keeps it mostly clean.
Edit: I should say that I will never trust any “self-driving” at all based on cameras alone. It can’t even do Autopilot without me intervening on most trips.
My driving experience/controls has not changed since I bought it 18 months ago. They added an option for Grok which I don’t use, and the FSD is much better now. And enabled adaptive headlights.
>The person I know who loves FSD has soured on updates since the last one changed how the car handles simple things like intersections, and it's added a lot more stress.
The most recent FSD update made me recommend a model 3 or Y to my parents.
The moment a battery without lithium comes out, legacy car engines are dead for good.
But my guess is maybe Honda will wait for Tesla or another US based auto company with EVs to fail and buy that company. Seems that is how large companies do "innovation" these days.
Maybe. But here's the thing... most cars today feel completely lifeless.
Honda knows how to build an engine and wrap it in a car that actually makes you feel something. That still matters.
Anyone here driven an S2000?
It's still the best car I've ever owned. Light, raw, grippy, and genuinely fun -- every drive felt like an event, not just transportation. (And it was still an affordable car!)
They killed it around 2010. I've never found anything that captures that same feeling since, at any price point.
So yeah -- Honda will always have a place in my heart. When they want to, they build something truly special.
Here's one of their marketing films they can use to find inspiration again.
* Failure: The Secret to Success - A Honda Documentary - YouTube // https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOVig5H7UbM
China: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/electric-vehicle-sales-i... Europe: https://eleport.com/ev-sales-in-europe/ USA: https://www.statista.com/outlook/mmo/electric-vehicles/unite...
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/2025/11/china-elec...
They refine technology not really invent it (maybe invented VTEC). The transition to EV will be very gradual, I don’t even think we have enough rare earth metals and electrical grid capacity to go even twice as fast in adoption?
Honda is waiting for the standards and technology to settle out and become commodity technology, then they implement and iterate to a refined and reliable product.
It doesn’t seem like a winner take all market for EV? What would be the most? Perhaps I am ignorant on that part of market dynamics.
*edit for typos
OK? Then don’t forget to add a replacement battery, replacement battery heating and cooling system, factor in a few extra sets of tires over a lifetime of the vehicle, you can also assume the suspension will wear out earlier, so at least ball joints if not also struts.
I’m an automotive EE, there is no free lunch.
I have a car we just got rid of in our research shop, in order to replace the battery the entire rear suspension and half of the interior had to come out. To an insurance agency, the car was literally totaled between the cost of the battery and the labor to replace it.
Inflation calculator site says 45% inflation since 2011, USD.
Capitalism over there is at another level, and cars are so complicated with tiny changes can have huge problems. Look at the immobilizer chips that Kia dropped to save $5, which resulted in thousands of car thefts and the whole Kia Boyz phenomenon.
That was in 2008, which was 18 years ago. Comparing China in 2026 to China in 2008 is like comparing Japan in 1978 to Japan in 1960.
I also have some concerns about our grid, but not from EVs. AI is already consuming more 5% of the grid, more than twice that of EVs (~2%), and is growing far faster. I've seen estimates as high as 17% of the grid by 2030. Most EVs are also charged in off-peak hours when there's plenty of capacity.
This is not an issue, it’s the one the things that the anti-EV/baby boomer crowd throws out that is completely unsubstantiated. We have plenty of rare earths, America just lit their rare earth refining capacity on fire when China said they would do it for us at a much cheaper price. China doesn’t have a shortage of rare earth refining capacity, and they are producing most of the Eavs in the world as a result. EVs mostly charge at night when the grid is underutilized anyways.
China won the EV war a few years ago while the Japanese spent too much wasted time on hydrogen. Honda just doesn’t have anything to offer that BYD already does much better. That the Chinese auto manufacturers will slow down EV advancements and refinements long enough for Honda to make a significant improvement is a bit ridiculous.
And it must, environmental concerns aside nobody wants to be beholden to oil prices ;)
They are an unstoppable force and we ignore them at our own peril.
Is it possible to deliver and store electricity in a more efficient way perhaps? Rumor has it that it does, but not in a way you can put a meter on :)
Even as someone that loves electric vehicles and uses public transportation a lot, it's hard to get behind these extreme "let's ban X and go all on Y" views. It ignores how things work in the real world.
Totally disagree. One of the reasons I drive an EV is so I _can_ plug it in and never go to a gas station again. What a useless exercise and waste of my time, especially for a penny-pincher like me who would wait in like for 20 minutes at Costco for gas.