When the very first cars were built, only the rich could afford it, but now a large part of the population (in developed countries) has one or more.
What do you think will be such an evolution in the future?
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better to ask, what can the average family afford now, but it won’t be so accessible in the future?
water.
(where i am now, water costs money but is still doable)
Grow an organ for you from your own cells. No rejection or drugs; your body accepts it as its own.
If electric cars follow this path and aren’t replaced with something else like enviro-friendly fuels, electric cars.
I don’t have an electric car, I dislike how many artificially limit things like speed, it shouldn’t be a paid upgrade if the hardware is capable, the amount of tracking worries me too, like Tesla staff could see through your cabin cameras.
I’d rather have environment friendly fuels that work with older cars, even if that requires a new ECU+Fuel pump.
It’s already past the point where only rich people have them. It’s currently one of those things where it’s actually more expensive to be poor.
I bought an EV because it’s cheaper over a few years than getting the cheapest gasoline beater car. It’s a bigger cost up front, but the total cost is smaller over few years.
If anything, only rich people will be able to afford keeping the gasoline cars. Similarly to todays vintage lead fueled classics.
I don’t know where you are, but in Europe it’s much cheaper to buy a used Gasoline car. I just got a 1L petrol car for the equivalent of $10k, I can’t find a good electric car for anywhere close to that.
Hello, fellow European. The starting price of electric cars is definitely the biggest issue (and there isn’t a sizable second-hand market yet).
If you want to spend even less find out if you can convert your car to LPG. I have been driving with LPG for about 2 years and I couldn’t be more satisfied.
According to the german Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection, there is not much difference in operating costs between an electric vehicle and a CNG/LPG vehicle. Source: PDF from June 2023
But this does not take into account the price of the vehicle as such. In this case, lpg is much cheaper.
I am in Europe. You have to look past the purchase price.
What I did was to compare the price of buying €3k beater cars throughout the next ten years versus getting an only slightly used EV for €21k that I expect to drive for the same period.
The purchase price is 7 times higher, yes, but the savings on fuel, taxes and financing makes up for it it less than 6 years in my case.
So in short, I had a pretty easy choice in getting an almost new EV instead of continuing buying and repairing scrap cars as I’d previously done for the same reasons.
My car tax (VED) is £20 a year, Vs £0 on electric. Fuel and the extra £20 tax a year doesn’t equate to the cost of an EV just yet.
EVs are definitely still a luxury, poor people aren’t going round with EVs.
Yeah well, I’m absolutely not saying that EVs are always the cheapest option. In my case it was.
There are many variables to account for when making the decision. I’d just advise people to do the calculations whenever they need a new car. Generally, It’s still not that much cheaper that it pays off to get an EV if you already have a functional car, but whenever you need a new one.
I’ve been thinking about making a webpage to compare car purchases with all kinds of variables, but it’s quite a big project to do.
Not unless they come up with some new kind of battery tech. There’s simply not enough lithium for a global mass adoption of personal electric cars.
Not all EVs are crazy expensive. Some of them are basically at price parity with what a gas version of the same vehicle would cost now.
Afaik there are such fuels, but are much more expensive. From what I read it could shift and rich will be able to ride vehicless with combustion engines using eco fuel, while us plebs will drive electric
Honestly, I don’t even care if that’s the case. Cars are becoming more like living rooms on wheels and less engaging overall (less about driving and more about being driven), so I don’t even care what I drive when the time comes, so long as it isn’t a piece of garbage with a shoddily-built interior. Hell, I’d rather just not have a car at all at that point, but we don’t have the infrastructure here (in the US) for that.
it’s worth noting (not that this makes it better) - that artificially removing features isn’t a new thing with electric cars.
It’s always been cheaper to build only the more expensive version of something, then artificially cripple it for the cheaper version. CPUs are a good example - most CPUs of a given series are basically the same hardware, it’s just that the cheaper versions will be down-clocked, or have some cores deliberately disabled.
Before the tech existed to have heated seats be a subscription service, cars that were sold without that option, would often have the heating hardware still installed in the seats, it just wouldn’t be hooked up. Hell, sometimes literally the only difference between the model with heated seats and without was whether they installed the button to turn them on
This statement about cpus isn’t entirely correct. In the manufacture of precision electronics, there is always a reasonable chance of defects occurring, so what happens is that all the parts are built to the same spec, then they are “binned” according to their level of defects.
You produce a hundred 24 core cpus, then you test them rigorously. You discover that 30 work perfectly and sell them as the 24 core mdoel. 30 have between one and eight defective cores, so you block access to those cores and sell them as the 16 core model. Rinse and repeat until you reach the minimum number of cores for a saleable cpu.
This is almost certainly not the case in car manufacturing, as while you could sell a car with defective seat heaters at a lower price point, what actually occurs is that cars with perfectly functional seat heaters have that feature disabled until you pay extra for it.
I’d also rather have magic cars, but that won’t stop electric cars from being the next wave. At this point there’s so little advancement in new fuels that it’s effectively impossible to hope for that scenario to occur before ICE fades away.
Solar panels on their homes.
Hopefully healthcare.
Full genome sequencing.
The price of sequencing continues to decrease as the technology evolves. I have already seen claims of under $1,000 for a full human genome. I haven’t looked carefully into those claims, but I think we are around there. In some years full genomes will be so cheap to sequence that it will be routine. I want to buy one of those small Oxford Nanopore MinION sequencers in the future. I’ll use it like a pokedex.
Gene editing/therapy could become cheap in the future.
Which is how we get gattaca
I think the full sequencing part would already be Gattaca but I get your point
There is a theoretical future in which full-genome sequencing is performed exclusively by large companies, hospitals, and governments, and the data is stored by them and they can access it.
But the technologies are becoming quite accessible. Unless regulations are introduced to force people to give up their genetic data, which I don’t think is so likely, there will be ways for us to get our sequences without the sequences being stored by a third party. I also think that there will be FOSS tools for us to run our own analyses.
If the news about LK-99 has any element of truth to it, then superconductor-based technologies and maglev transport will become much more affordable in the future.
Joe mama
Ah, I see you’re a man of culture as well
Indoor plumbing and electricity