Curious as to why American EVs never took off. The US is the most advanced country technologically and has the greatest soft power in history to make deals.

▲

rsynnott 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> The US is the most advanced country technologically

Certainly not in cars. The US car industry really more or less stopped even _trying_ to compete internationally in the 90s or so. The sole exception was Ford, but they went for an unusual approach where Ford Europe designed its own cars, using parts from Bosch etc. Ford Europe is now also all but dead in the consumer space, too. To a large extent the US car industry survives due to protectionism (notably this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax).

	▲	rsynnott 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Incidentally, it's far from what you'd expect, but the US is actually probably more influential in public transport than private transport on an export basis; Cummins is very competitive in the diesel engine space for buses, and the ridiculously-named Wabtec (previously GE and Westinghouse's train-y divisions) is big in locomotive tech. Though AIUI US companies are largely failing to keep up there, now, too; diesel city buses are on the way out, and electric bus powertrains are largely Chinese or European.

▲

diego_moita 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Several reasons:

1. Unlike the rest of the world, EVs were sold in the US as muscle cars for rich people (e.g. Tesla). Everywhere else they're cheap cars for urban commuters (e.g. BYD).

2. Republicans sabotaged every attempt from the Democrats to get EVs going on.

3. Space and demography: EVs do very well in small countries (e.g. Europe) or big countries with a concentrated population (e.g.Brasil, Nigeria). They do poorly in countries with big distances and a spread out population.

	▲	xethos 14 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> EVs were sold in the US as muscle cars for rich people Yeah, the Nissan Leaf was a high-torque monster. Though to describe the BMW i3 as a muscle car is... not the descriptor I would use. EVs were not sold by every OEM as high-power drag-strip rock stars - that's just what it took to get Americans to pay attention
	▲	Hikikomori 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		3. Sweden/Norway have a lot of EVs while distances are not small like Netherlands etc and are also less urban than the US.
	▲	actionfromafar 16 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		3. Will change soon enough. Except in the land of the free, oil.

▲

nutjob2 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> The US is the most advanced country technologically

Because the US is the most backward advanced country socially/politically

▲

jfengel 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Incumbent American automakers had a hard time switching over. EVs require significant expertise that they didn't have, and didn't particularly want to acquire.

Only Tesla designed cars to be electric from a clean sheet. And they were doing extremely well for a long time, and had an enormous lead. But they squandered it in a variety of ways.

The automakers and oil interests spent a lot of effort badmouthing electric cars. To hear Americans talk about it, they need to haul giant boats on their daily 400 mile commutes into uncharted forest. They didn't come up with "range anxiety"; it was deliberately spread.

For a while there was a partisan divide about it, with electric cars seen as a hippie-liberal choice, much as hybrids used to be. Then circa 2020 Elon Musk began to systematically alienate that market.