EVs are the Yugos of the 21st century

Way back in the mid-1980s, communist Yugoslavia exported the Yugo, a compact car that sold for around $4,000. It was so poorly made that bumping into a pole at 5 mph could total it.

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Fast forward to today, and a new class of cars has a similar problem. A minor accident can cause a total loss, even if the car’s been driven only a few miles. The only difference is that these cars aren’t cheap imports from some godforsaken socialist state. These are state-of-art electric vehicles that come with an average sticker price of $55,000.

Why are insurance companies totaling low-mileage EVs that have been in a fender bender? For the same reason you could total a new Yugo when backing out of a parking spot. The cost of repair is exorbitant.

[Today’s EVs are much better made than Yugos, of course, which provided the absolute bottom line on the “no frills” experience. Even its disposability was a feature, in a weird way; they were expendable in a way that high-priced EVs aren’t. But EVs are a niche market in a different way, and prospects for them to cross over into broad use are slim to none, not least because prospects of widespread manufacture look rather dim. We don’t have the raw materials, we don’t have energy on the grid, and we don’t have other infrastructure necessary to support it, including repair/maintenance infrastructure. — Ed]

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