No, electric vehicle sales aren’t dropping. Here’s what’s really going on::Tesla has been slashing prices. Ford just cut the price of its Mustang Mach-E, too, plus it cut back production of its electric pickup. And General Motors is thinking about bringing back plug-in hybrids, arguably a step back from EVs.
This is a concern for me also. Tesla is the Apple of car companies: hipster-centric, proprietary everything, overpriced, and really bad from a privacy perspective.
I was looking at Toyotas as I hear they are reliable and have PHEV and other options, but supposedly their data privacy is also extremely poor.
I don’t need a lot of the “smart” features of modern cars. I don’t need my car phoning the mother ship with it’s precise location and other metadata every 3/5 of a second.
I only want a rock solid drive train, basic usable control interface, a radio and maybe a USB port to play my own MP3s. Don’t need apps or even navigation. I feel like most EVs are very centered on bell and whistle features and their cost is greatly inflated because of it.
Personally, I’m keen to see if the proverbial doors get blown off the first few gens of electric cars, and the FOSS community makes headway.
I would happily buy an old Leaf if I knew we could handle all the software ourselves, and just do battery swaps when the range wasn’t enough any more.
3rd party leaf batteries already exist
Automotive software is a regulated industry. No government is going to let John Doe off the street flash custom firmware onto a car and allow it on the road.