I’m sitting in an electric car in a large Chinese city right now. Looking around I count 7/10 cars are electric, easily recognizable by green license plates, all from brands I’ve never seen in the US. The electric cars are cheap and I don’t see any evidence that they are poor quality. It feels like there’s absolutely something transformative happening here which the US is missing out on.
Not really honestly. It is a reality that falling behind manufacturing means America also becomes less of a military powerhouse. Something that I’m genuinely happy about anyway.
> America also becomes less of a military powerhouse. Something that I’m genuinely happy about
Why so? Sure, it would be a nice world if no country was a military powerhouse, but that's not the world we live in. If the choice is between the US or China being the military powerhouse, why would you pick China?
Of course in practice there’ll always be war and militaries. It’s not about that, it’s about how just and fit to rule is the guy with the longest stick.
There are plenty of us who will be forever bitter about this period in history of US dominance. You may not have noticed from your garden in Virginia, but entire countries have been bombed to rubbles and and entire populations killed or forced to migrate. Still continuing too. In that sense, we’d much prefer actually good and just people ruling the world, not US or Russia or China etc.
Sorry, it’s really funny, I just realized my sentence was grammatically ambiguous. Now edited to clarify. Intended meaning was neither the US nor China nor Russia make just and good rulers, judging by what they currently do in their current spheres of influence.
>> your garden in Virginia
> I don't live in Virginia and I don't have a garden.
It’s a figure of speech, representing stereotypical upper middle class American.
> If you don't think the US makes the grade, who do you think does? Anyone?
People who actually let others live in peace and harmony, people who are guided by a strong set of morals. If you think you’re free to do whatever, you’ll do whatever. If you think you’re free to do whatever when others aren’t watching, you’ll do whatever when others aren’t watching. Muslims think neither and historically they have a proven track record of compassionate ruling, as opposed to the neo-feudalistic dog eat dog world we live in which is really just Middle Ages Europe with a higher baseline wealth.
> Intended meaning was neither the US nor China nor Russia make just and good rulers
I already got that that was your intended meaning. I was asking who you think do make just and good rulers. Apparently your answer is "Muslims", which I guess means we're just going to have to disagree.
Look, this is a public forum. I have no obligation to tailor my comment for each and every reader, I just picked a common and relevant demographic for use in a figure of speech, what’s wrong with that?
> I have no obligation to tailor my comment for each and every reader
You weren't responding to "each and every reader", you were responding to me. Your "figure of speech" was not justified when responding to me. Whether it would be justified when responding to someone else is irrelevant.
China has not bombed entire countries into ruble. China is not currently sponsoring a state sponsored act of genocide.
I don’t really care what peoples “feelings” are on this. It’s a fact that America has fucked over literally billions of people over absolutely nothing. This is something that China has not done.
Speaking about incentives, China has an incentive to NOT do this. Their economy thrives on a global strong middle class that can buy goods. America does not have this incentive. America’s incentive is to create petrodollar dominance through its military.
So yes, I’m not going to be cheering on China because superpowers generally mean people suffer. I will however cheer on America’s sliding into irrelevance and weakness because it literally means less dead kids and less burnt generations.
> Your thoughts do not match what’s on the ground.
> China is not currently sponsoring a state sponsored act of genocide.
> China has an incentive to NOT do this. Their economy thrives on a global strong middle class that can buy goods. America does not have this incentive. America’s incentive is to create petrodollar dominance through its military.
> It’s a fact that America has fucked over literally billions of people over absolutely nothing.
Oh, not over nothing... Israel has to exist, because if Israel doesn't exist then Israel won't exist. Which is why Israel obviously has to always exist.
> This is something that China has not done.
The ongoing oppression of Uighurs, Tiananmen Massacre? Clearly China would do equally worse acts as US if she had the power US has.
> Speaking about incentives, China has an incentive to NOT do this. Their economy thrives on a global strong middle class that can buy goods. America does not have this incentive. America’s incentive is to create petrodollar dominance through its military.
Never thought about it like this... Maybe you're correct and a China-dominated world would be less violent. Still, the cultural homogenization policy they employ would clearly cause much harm if their borders were wider. Just look at the amount of oppression it's resulting in at the moment.
Instead, its government happily supported the genocidal Khmer Rouge, invaded Vietnam in retaliation for overthrowing that regime, and currently provides diplomatic, financial, and technical support to the Russian government which is currently bombing Ukraine into rubble (or as you cutely put it, "ruble").
Because hey, there's no point in China's regime letting a peccadillo such as Putin's murderous assault on Ukraine come between their limitless friendship, now is there?
So are you happy with the crimean anexation? With turkey and syria pounding the kurds? With the various genocides and the dozen landempires that want to restart the great game? its okay to say us partially bad, but saying the us everything bad shows cluelessness?
I was in Shanghai this year, and in the city center, it is actually unsettling how quiet it is. Every motorbike is electric and probably 70% of the cars (at least in the CBD). It's not silent by any means, but the background hum of motors is mostly absent, it took me a while to even realise that is what felt off. Like watching a movie with the sound effects removed.
In reality the noise is mostly from tyres anyway. You don’t feel your neighborhood is actually quieter when most cars are EV. For me the really nice thing is kids that are barely taller than exhaust pipes or being carted are exposed to absolute ZERO emission. As a parent in a parking lot you feel much less stress.
Not sure where you’ve experienced but when I was in Shanghai it was definitely noticeable, nowadays I’m in Tokyo and I can’t wait for all the mopeds and motorcycles in particular to get electrified.
Could be related to speed and asphalt and macadams. I travelled to Guangzhou a few months ago, the noise on the road is comparable to Beijing, despite having significantly higher proportion of EVs.
It's kind of funny to think that the majority of the "car engine noise" in cities of the future might all be that "fake engine noise" speaker produced stuff.
If that ends up being the case, then I hope it comes with a toggle so that it can be turned off and then most people realize how gauche it is in the way of a cell phone ringer to be broadcasting fake engine noise constantly, and then we realize for safety sake, both mental and physical, that cars should be bisected from other modes and the general public. Because we can’t deal with the noise, but we also can’t have silent vehicles rocketing through the streets, controlled by people texting with their ringers off
They're going to eat our lunch because we let our legacy ICE vehicle manufacturers dictate the terms of the shift to electric. We have to be better about identifying economic developments that are likely to be concerns for domestic stability and national security, and not let greed and fear in the corporate class stop us from making the necessary changes. Another arena where we've already lost, in a sense, and will need to play hardball catch-up is healthcare: other countries have a more stable and hour-for-hour productive workforce because their workers can get preventative care and treatment for illnesses quickly and without a fuss. If we have to trash the medical insurance industry to reach parity with our peers, so be it.
Hm, that's measuring everyone against the same dollar; Americans are productive by this measure because everything is expensive. I wonder if there are other benchmarks for productivity, adjusted for local market basket.
The numbers are in Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) USD so they already measure how many goods in the local market basket can be bought per working hour (on average, as these GDP numbers don’t account for income or wealth distribution).
For healthcare it might be getting to the point where the numbers are nearly incomparable. PPP seems like it'd be more inappropriate than usual for measuring a particular industry. US healthcare is known to be quirky.
Although there doesn't seem to be any obvious evidence here that the US could be lagging behind. Per-person the US is still a bit of a productivity outlier to the upside. When they aren't legislatively restrained they tend to work hard and in an organised way.
I guess that's measured off the entire GDP, divided by the whole working population? I would imagine most of US's GDP comes from services and finance, not manufacturing.
Also if the US makes very expensive widgets, but can't make cars cheaply, it would still show up as high worker productivity. It's not really the same as engineering efficiency per (PPP) dollar.
> we let our legacy ICE vehicle manufacturers dictate the terms of the shift to electric
Is that true? There was a policy push here to sell EVs, though there of course is continuing debate about what the magnitude of that push should be. The market so far in the US has spoken against greater adoption of EVs, for various reasons.
OP's article doesn't mention or discuss two very salient factors: one, that EV use in Shanghai is massively subsidized, both at the point of sale (EVs are free to register, whereas ICE vehicle registration starts at $15k) as well as to the producers; and two, whether such a subsidy is in fact for the long-term benefit of the public.
> other countries have a more stable and hour-for-hour productive workforce because their workers can get preventative care and treatment for illnesses quickly and without a fuss
No one would argue that healthcare in the US couldn't be improved, but I disagree that the payment model is the biggest issue. The way I see it, the biggest issue by far is that people are just very, very unhealthy! A full three quarters of adults are either overweight or obese. No country can have a cost-effective healthcare system with this kind of population.
And the distribution of healthcare spending is extremely lopsided, with the top 5% of spenders accounting for over half of all healthcare expenditure, and the bottom half of spenders comprising a mere 3% of spending[0]. (A few countries with socialized healthcare are starting to toy with the idea of just letting those high spenders die, with assisted suicide.) I don't know that a better system can be achieved without first promulgating a culture that values being healthy.
In a system where healthcare is socialized, you also get strong incentives to introduce policies that can reduce that cost. Examples would include the UK's ban on cigarette branding, introducing a tax on sugar in soft drinks, and banning smoking in public spaces.
Where I live in Germany we have a system I would characterise as somewhere in-between a fully socialized single payer system and the American system (you have insurance companies you choose between, but you're required to have some kind of insurance, and there are a set of "public" insurances that must meet a certain standard at a certain price). But here I can't buy a sugar free Fritz Limo, nor go to a popular bar or club without inhaling smoke.
Obviously countries can enact such policies without socialized health care, and things are not all sunshine and rainbows in the NHS. But I reckon that waiting around until there's a healthy populace before bringing in a better health system might not necessarily be the best strategy.
> you have insurance companies you choose between, but you're required to have some kind of insurance, and there are a set of "public" insurances that must meet a certain standard at a certain price
That's basically Obamacare. Except in the US most people still get health insurance through their employers.
Both the public and private insurances are far more regulated in Germany than Obamacare.
If you're on a public insurance in Germany, you rarely pay any substantial copay, and there's no concept of a deductible. Not only that, but the price of the policy is a percentage of your income (capped at some absolute upper limit), so if you make little, you pay little.
Prices paid by public insurers to healthcare providers are fixed, and even the private insurers aren't allowed to pay providers more than a certain multiple of the public rate.
In other words, in Germany, the government has a much stronger hand in setting prices for both patients and insurers than under the Obamacare system.
The conservative heritage foundation got the idea from Switzerland. Romney then adopted it from the heritage foundation Massachusetts and Obama decided it was the path with the most Republican (and so bi-partisan) support so pushed it for the rest of the country.
Obama worked really hard to get Republican buy-in. He held that big meeting with Congress that was meant to be a sort of a summit (where they stonewalled him), and even let Pelosi kill the public option. Nothing doing; the problem wasn't that it was good or bad policy, it was that it was Obama's policy (after it was Romney's, after it was the Heritage Foundation's).
> In a system where healthcare is socialized, you also get strong incentives to introduce policies that can reduce that cost. Examples would include the UK's ban on cigarette branding, introducing a tax on sugar in soft drinks, and banning smoking in public spaces.
Strictly speaking the incentives don't change much. People have a strong incentive to stay healthy no matter what system is in place, and the insurance companies have a strong incentive to make sure people know about the risks of sugar drinks etc.
That example is silly. It implicitly suggests that if a country suddenly switched to a fully socialised healthcare system their cities would suddenly becoming more walkable. Or if an economy liberalised then their cities would magically become less walkable. The chains of causality there are absurd.
The most plausible link would be if people couldn't afford cars under a socialised healthcare system; but I doubt anyone is going to try and argue that seriously.
> It implicitly suggests that if a country suddenly switched to a fully socialised healthcare system their cities would suddenly becoming more walkable.
No. It does not. Not "suddenly" or "magically".
What does happen is that social health concerns and advice feed back into other public policy making decisions.
Advertising agencies get contracts for campaigns to improve health awareness, walking and biking paths become routine considerations in city planning, etc.
This takes decades to iterate through from non existent to commonplace.
Yeah sure. You got any references for this ridiculous linkage of local town planning and healthcare funding scheme?
You might like to check whether the layout of the citys involved were decided on before or after the invention of the car - and the introduction of universal health care - before you post anything. That'll probably come up.
I mean, the ultimate reason why the US doesn't have China's electric vehicle policy is that the US is a democracy, and it would be massively unpopular. The median US voter is, like, a 40-something mother in a random suburb of Pennsylvania, who doesn't have a college degree, has a house with a mortgage, and is moderate but doesn't pay much attention to politics. To get Chinese policies enacted in the US, people like that would have to be convinced that mass-producing electric cars was more important than preserving local forests (need 'em for a factory site), paying workers prevailing wage (drives up production costs), keeping gas and ICE car registration cheap (makes electric less competitive), having cheap goods on sale at Walmart (strong currency makes imports cheap but exports expensive), avoiding noise and dust from construction (have to put the power lines somewhere), running a low government deficit (manufacturing subsidies aren't free), etc. There's a lot of trade-offs that people don't want to make.
> people like that would have to be convinced that mass-producing electric cars was more important than preserving local forests
As though there isn’t a glut of underutilized parking lots littering literally every American metro where the local forests were bulldozed decades ago
> paying workers prevailing wage
Subsidies are there to pay for wages and for automation to be less reliant on labor costs, of which China automates waaaay more than the USA does
> running a low government deficit
Industrial subsidies have the potential to pay back far more than the government puts in, and would be much smaller in size than other boondoggles the US government pays for
Honestly I think this is all just excuses and China just took advantage of the incompetence of our leadership to leapfrog us. Since when did Americans not want to be #1?
The average American voter likes parking lot and starts foaming at the mouth when talking about reducing minimums.
The other dirty secret is that government debt is actually very high in China and it’s a bit of a problem. Local and provincial governments in China have very little taxing power and so have been financing via opaque off-balance-sheet shell companies, and the exact number is not known but estimated at $8T. And now local government services are cutting back or even collapsing since the Chinese property market that was the collateral for a lot of this debt is in dire straits. https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Markets/China-debt-crunch/C...
Yeah, therein lies the real problem, America doesn’t do it mostly because those with political influence don’t want to; everything else is face-saving excuses/Americans thinking they’re morally and culturally superior to everyone else despite getting our asses handed to us.
But I’m optimistic that if the federal government could wrest control away from (selfish) local governments and set a national agenda people can get behind, progress will happen. The CHIPS act demonstrated some amount of this, but it can go much farther, both into other industrial verticals but also in reversing dumb local NIMBY policies.
The USA can do this in a more fiscally responsible way than China did if they can get corruption under control. Anyway if there’s anything the USA has a lot of, it’s money.
Sprawl is the major difference and a major reason behind range anxiety.
Chinese cities are very very dense, and very new due to urban redevelopment projects in the 2000s-2021. For example, the urban core of Shanghai is around 20 miles end-to-end, so the same size as Wichita end-to-end, yet has a population of around 20mil compared to 350k.
This helps sustain both public transit as well as EVs with minimal range anxiety.
The industrial policy aspect of EVs also helps ofc, but big picture it works with the range and size of Chinese metropolitan areas.
The issue is the sprawl factor simply can't be solved in a country as spread out as the US, so long range batteries (looking at you Idemetsu Kosan and Toyota) or hybrids are the best solution in a sprawly semi-urban environment.
Most people don't, but the perception of distances are different in the US versus China.
The average round trip commute in the US is 42 miles [0] versus 11 miles in China [1]. This means the average American needs to charge almost 4x more often. Alternatively, imagine the range anxiety a Chinese driver might have with an EV with a range of 80 km/50 mi.
When you purchase a vehicle, you also take into account edge cases like interregional or intercity travel like roadtrips, family, or business.
Charging infra can get spotty very fast outside of dense regions. With the sheer density that most of China has, you don't have to worry about dead zones as much. Furthermore, that density also means you have alternative options for inter-city transit (eg. Sleeper Buses, Trains) that don't really exist at the frequency needed in the US.
The differences in expected distances also plays a major role in EV design - a number of Chinese EVs at the lower price range (eg. BYD Seagull, Wuling EV) have much smaller trunk sizes compared to Western oriented hatchback EVs like the Nissan Leaf, because there isn't the need or the expectation to do almost all your shopping with your car when high density urban environments allow you to have various options downstairs or rapid delivery (like 1 hour delivery).
Consumer Habits for Chinese are different from Americans, and the model that worked for China doesn't necessarily work for the US. That said, the Chinese style model would work well in similarly dense Western+Central Europe and Japan.
The advantage is flexibility. It is occasionally very useful to be able to drive for far longer than that. It increases competition between petrol/charging stations since people can choose to go to a cheaper one instead. They could also maximise the impact of loading up a full charge/tank at a cheap place.
And there are lots of factors that reduce the range - hilly or mountainous terrain, aircon/heating, number of passengers or load, and driving style.
Longer range also improves security since people don't necessarily have to stop in places where they feel unsafe.
A fast charging solution massively improves things for EV though - gleaning from TA, the battery packs of Chinese EVs seem to be exchanged at charging stations.
> the battery packs of Chinese EVs seem to be exchanged at charging stations.
Nio (a Shanghai firm) is the primary battery swap EV car brand, but by market share (BYD and Tesla) most EV cars in China don't support battery swapping.
That said, Geely, Changan, JAC, and Chery are looking at battery swapping as well in order to differentiate themselves in the Chinese EV market which is dominated by BYD with secondary marketshare for SAIC and Tesla.
Given BYD's dominance in the Chinese EV space, I'm not sure how much market share secondary brands can gain, and this is influencing the mass EV export attempts by Chinese players leading to multiple trade wars as smaller players in the Chinese market who tend to be funded or owned by regional governments are subsidized by those local governments to export abroad and/or start price wars domestically in China.
> A fast charging solution
Battery Management Systems and Battery Chemistry are hard. BYD is a leader in the space because they've been manufacturing batteries for decades (ever used a cellphone in the 2000s or an iPhone before 2016? - it was using a BYD battery)
Other EV players in China not so much.
BYD is basically a battery maker who became an automotive manufacturer, but the other players in the Chinese market are automotive players who don't have the domain experience in battery technology.
> To get Chinese policies enacted in the US, people like that would have to be convinced that mass-producing electric cars was more important than [...] keeping gas and ICE car registration cheap (makes electric less competitive)
It's worth noting that car registration in Shanghai was staggeringly expensive before electric cars were a possibility. That's just a continuation of existing Chinese policies; it obviously helps electric cars, but that was no part of the intent of the policy. (I assume the intent was some combination of reducing traffic times and reducing pollution from exhaust.)
Beijing went with a lottery instead of an auction, but a separate lottery pool for electric cars sealed the deal for them in Beijing as well, even before China had a lot of its own options and Tesla built the Shanghai plant, you would see a lot of Model S’s on the road circa 2015-2016.
You say support, I say coercion. There is no federalism in China. It's all mandated, even if the language used is ambiguous enough to be interpreted as voluntary, policy in China is never discretionary when orders come down from above.
(Technically there's no federal government, period. There's just the bureaucracy and the party. The party's leadership determines policy, the bureaucracy carries it out. Local decisionmaking exists when micromanagement reaches its limits, and ultimately it is a system of gap-filling. Or, in a sense, it's a system that the 9th and 10th Amendments of the US Constitution anticipated and therefore needed to be addressed, 200 years early)
Amongst other things, I believe one of the motor-vehicle electrification catalysts in China is the fact that China's electric grid uses 220V AC as its standard for normal receptacles/outlets.
Even though the prevalence and availability of EV Charging stations is a general issue across countries, having 220V AC makes the current state more bearable especially for residential charging use cases. For many in the US, adding a new 220V circuit, or having the option to add one, ends up being a cost-driven obstacle for adoption.
Electrification in China has happened across all modalities of motor-vehicles, where all the previously hyper-prevalent gas-powered motor scooters of yesterday are also EVs.
Despite being massively impressed by those EVs I can’t help but wonder what the end games will be for all these EV makers that are ALL losing money. Worldwide only BYD and TESLA are actually making a profit. And leaders of the market seem to have little enduring advantage. Who remembers HTC smartphones that were all the rage? If someone comes up with actual autonomous driving, it’s gonna sweep all the net profits away just like Apple did with smartphones. And it probably will matter little if the autonomous software is run on ICE or BEV platforms.
The end game for many is to go out of business, get bought up by competitors and consolidate like _intended_ outcome of other PRC industrial policy. Set up competitive enviroment to force producers speed run to a $250 model-T while everyone else could only make cars for $1000. The entire point is to have so much competition to force manufactures to improve processes/drive down prices/affordability in short time and then settle with a few large but sustainable survivors that are globally competitive / can compete with western incumbants. Entire EV stack also interesting in that it sells EV piles, other electricity infra. Eventual autonomous driving = large network sensor fusion = cheap EVS with lots of sensors can push PRC telco/surveillance hardware, semi/data etc etc. Lot's of high value industiries, also dual use, and we can extrapolate where that could go.
Depends what "autonomous driving" means. If it's "sit in the drivers seat responsible for any accidents but not doing anything until the system gives up or fails" for many thousands of dollars then yeah, I don't think the majority of people want that. If it's "as if someone else was driving, even in corner cases, and you don't take the risk/liability directly since you're not in control" for a couple thousand then I think the vast majority want that. Doubly so if driving yourself remains an option for enjoyment when desired.
That combined with a non-subscription-based price. You pay for the product, you take it home and you own it. If it’s a couple thousand/year, it’s a non-starter.
The end game is:
sell cheap cars to the rest of Asia, Africa, South America, the Middle East.
Own the future of transportation.
Profit.
Transport is going to electrify FAST in the coming years.
Autonomous is a red herring.
It's relatively easy to get information about what goes on in China. You just have to speak/read Chinese. Then you have access to a social media environment with 1 billion+ people, and you can pretty easily learn about major happenings in the country.
If you don't know any Chinese, then you're reliant on Western media for your information about the country. The general level of coverage of China in Western media is abysmal. It's usually spotty, poorly informed and hyper-negative. Imagine if your only knowledge about the US were from news stories about school shootings. You'd have basically no idea about what the US is like.
And the IP does not belong to the American government, why are taxpayers forced to subsidize such an expensive and potentially dangerous endeavor anyway? Not to mention that IP theft hs two metaphors in it - property, and theft, as the equating of intellectual property - a statutory creation - and real property - which exists unless you don't believe in your lying eyes - is ultimately the bad faith muddling of legal fiction and reality. America would absolutely know the difference, as one of the most prolific thieves of real property in recent memory (see: why and how the state of Georgia exists in the first place, or 'manifest destiny', or 'civil asset forfeiture'). Since there is no private property in anything close to the way the west conceptualizes it in China, nor anything resembling rule of law, what even gives America the right, beyond realpolitik, to even assert not just equivocation but effective extraterritoriality considering that American courts have a presumption against extraterritoriality as part of its doctrines.
This is not to endorse the CCP in any of its actions, but it is really not the business of the American government to impose its definitions and legislations upon the world in such a cavalier fashion. The jingoistic stench is the free prize, and it creates an artificial unifying point for the CCP to rally its citizens, who all go through indoctrination in nationalism but certainly by no means all buy into it, to focus on something that, probably thanks to the lack of cultural and historical competence amongst government officials in general, reinforces the primary raison d'etre of the CCP in the first place. After all, it's effectively the last country to take Westphalian Sovereignty at face value, however insincere it might be. I would categorize American policy as neo-imperialist, but are Americans even bothered by the idea that they are the evil empire? Are we the baddies?
I own (formally, since it's the OEM the de-facto owner being a connected closed source device) a MG ZS EV 2022 long range and I'm happy enough, I also seen the IMMENSE price delta from the west and the rest of the world (less than 10k€ in BRICS and adjacent countries, less than 40k€ in the EU, for the very same car).
My take is that:
- we, the west, are failed. Chapter 11 if you are from the USA;
- current BEVs ALL are national security and citizens serious threats because they are rolling surveillance stations able do create strategic disruption targeting specific people or a whole country;
- Chinese EVs have even BETTER design the westerners (which are (more than) half Chinese anyway in most cases) but have a terribly crappy crapware, so to came back to the first point, we are failed but we still have some point of excellence only usable to save us IF we annihilate the current finance-focused management to came back to an industry focused one.
Just as an anecdote: having a p.v. system and working from home I want an integrated system to charge "my" car. Well, first of all there is exactly NO ONE able to charge DC-to-DC directly even if cars and p.v. batteries are normally 400V lithium with similar BMS and a direct DC-to-DC charge exists since years (CCS in EU, I do not know in USA the correspondent name, ChaDeMo in JP etc). This alone means around 30% of wasted energy, much more electronics, much bigger costs for nothing.
Anyway in the whole market of a gazillion of domestic charging station ONLY TWO VENDOR exists with LIMITED p.v. integration Fronius and Victron. All the others talk about green new deal in advertisement but have no p.v. integration and even worse they are cloud-bound and hyper priced for what they are.
Anyway, having already a Victron battery inverter to be semi-autonomous in case of blackouts (AC coupled p.v., when I build my p.v. hybrid inverters was not a thing) I choose Victron EVC, formally a semi-FLOSS Debian based platform... Well... The EVC it's as open as a bank vault for it's customer, I can't set a gazillion of useful stuff like "hey I want to charge from p.v. as much as possible BUT I also want to charge from the grid if needed at this amount of amps", not to count all issues (not start charging from the p.v. even if power is available demanding manual actions to make it so, charge from the grid while in p.v. mode stating the contrary for a non-settable amps and hard-coded time and so on).
The car itself allow for a LIMITED V2L usage, but have no integration with a home inverter, so no way to simply "plug in the big battery on wheel" and keep the home powered during an outage even if it's damn simple to do so. Anti-islandic devices (to decouple the home "microgrid" from the national grid, to avoid feeding the grid during an outage) are potentially cheap, small and simple enough anyone with p.v. should be mandate to own one with a standard protocol so it's damn simple plug in the car and being on battery and eventually available p.v. The tech is there since years, simply nobody have enforced or even sell this option.
Long story sort it seems 99% of those who push electric convergence, like those who have pushed the similar all-to-IP convergence, have no damn clue on how to proper implement the green new deal and damn really going all-electric. OR maybe they have a clue but they do dislike the fact that such new deal only work if in end-user ownership, hands, not as a service...
