On 16 Jun 2015 at 6:52, Ben Goren via EV wrote: > Imagine if Ford made a ... 2017 electric Mustang ... The demand for > *that* EV would be instant..
I guess that depends on how you define "demand." You might indeed land some buyers. But you have to remember a salient characteristic of most gearheads. It's an attitude that you probably don't share. Many of these guys actively LIKE -- deliberately PREFER -- the noise, stink, and grime that their ICEVs produce. That may even be more important to them than their actual performance. They really DO have "gasoline in their veins." These people will never buy an EV, full stop. They'll never believe that EVs are superior in the very thing that they say is important to them -- raw acceleration -- even when EVs beating them on the track. They'll keep right on trying to top EVs with their crude, dated ICE technology, until they're dead and gone along with their vehicles and the fuel to run them. But I also hear you suggesting that the automakers haven't really put their hearts (and marketing muscle) into their EVs, and there I agree. If they really wanted to "fish where the fish are" with EVs, they'd have to build something heavy, clumsy, and grossly inefficient, with a 50+ year old chassis and drivetrain layout. That's because the #1 selling vehicle in the USA today is Ford's F-series pickup truck. Second place goes to the same damn thing wearing a bow-tie badge. Third place goes to the same damn thing wearing a rampant bull badge. Finally in 4th place we find a car, and it's the midsize Toyota Camry. Right below that is a small car, the Toyota Corolla. There are no sporty cars or muscle cars anywhere in the list of top 30-selling vehicles. Vehicles are a saturated market. If you want to sell one successfully, you pick a target buyer, preferably one not well served by the other vehicles now in the market, and build what he/she wants. This is why it probably DOESN'T make sense for the automakers to build EV pickups and muscle cars. The people who buy those vehicles are less likely to see (or want to see) any advantage in electric drive. For EVs to succeed as conventional vehicles (and that's another issue right there), they should have other characteristics that appeal to people who are open to the very idea of electric drive. This is why the first generation Toyota Prius had mediocre sales and the second generation did much better. For their second try, Toyota determined what kind of buyer they wanted and could capture, and tuned the Prius's size, features, and image to that buyer. I don't have any data, but I suspect that for a very long time, EVs will share more buyers with the Prius than with the Mustang. So for the immediate future, successful EVs that stick to the conventional vehicle model will tend to look and act more like a Prius than like a Mustang. David Roden - Akron, Ohio, USA EVDL Administrator = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = EVDL Information: http://www.evdl.org/help/ = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = Note: mail sent to "evpost" and "etpost" addresses will not reach me. To send a private message, please obtain my email address from the webpage http://www.evdl.org/help/ . = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
