Electric Scion

I am keeping my 2005 Scion xB. (I tell everyone it stands for eXtra Boxy.)

The xB gets 30 miles to the gallon, which was sweet in 2004. For the first year I had it, so many people wanted to check out the interior I felt like a dealer.

The Scion now has 168,000 miles on it. As I have aged, I have started to notice the lack of seat padding. The inside feels tinny because it is – it’s all sheet metal and plastic to get the best mileage from a Corolla chassis.

Point is I should be in the market for an electric car. But I’m not.

I blame the car companies.

There’s no good reason an electric car should cost what it does. There is a reason, however. The reason is Tesla. They started with the luxury end of the market and have gradually moved down toward the mass market. But a Tesla is still pricey. So is every other electric.

The reason they’re pricey is that they’re copying Tesla, with self-driving systems and software. These are unnecessary. An electric motor has one moving part. There’s no transmission.

But Lucid, Rivian and even GM and Ford want to add all the bells and whistles they can. It increases profit margin. It also makes the things hellaciously expensive to service. Parts cost $1,000 just to hold the electronics.

It should be possible to sell a stripped-down chassis, with an electric motor, and the same electric controls as my old Scion, for even less than the $17,000 my xB cost. Make the self-driving parts and do-hickeys add-ons. Let people upgrade over time, as the costs of the computing power declines. That car I would buy.

But until prices come down the mass market is going to remain out of reach for all these car companies. And if the mass market is out of reach, how can Tesla be worth $1 trillion?