Even so, the vast, vast majority of cars in the past 100 years have had all of the technical innovation of a washing machine (and that might well be underselling the washing machine!).
> developments are excruciatingly slow
10% a year on average, something like that? ICEVs haven't had that kind of incremental improvement in a loooooong time.
This may be true, but my family's "daily" ICE vehicle costs us about $0.162/mile to run; our actual daily EV costs about $0.028/mile -- almost one sixth as much. It doesn't matter how much more improvements ICE vehicles achieve, they're not going to catch up to the "mostly flat" EV curve.
This is, to me, actually a good because there's no longer any early adopters remorse anymore so no reason not to buy one now because it won't be outdated in six months.
I feel this directly. On paper I've lost more money on my Model 3 than I have on the previous half dozen cars combined, I'm pretty sure. But on the other hand, Ford canceling the Lightning has (at least temporarily) improved the resale value on my Lightning considerably. I couldn't really sell it today for what I paid for it, but I wouldn't be that far off.
Problem is that I don't really love the Tesla, but I do love the Lightning. Ha! So I keep them both but for differing reasons.
> the switch from the previous US charging standard to Tesla's
As an aside, this is finally happening for real! Several models coming to market now are shipping with J3400 (aka NACS) ports standard. Yay! I look forward to a time where the days of various adapters being required are firmly behind us.
The very high deprecation is often noted but the comparison is mostly in relation to sticker price, but the high discounts plus subsidies mean that the average discount for an EV was way higher than on ICE cars. Most of the high depreciation disappears once you take into account what the first buyer would have actually paid for the vehicle (often a five-digit discount), at least in my used car market. Some models seem to actually hold their value remarkably well, particularly those with no/few known issues and no real successors.
"NEW: Latest EV model boasts full charge (200 miles) in only ~5 minutes"
To me, that seems like a leaps & bounds improvement.
What's even crazier is that a tesla 2008 tesla roadster had 28kWh/100mi EPA combined, which is more than today's model S.
Literally there isn't a single combustion car (not including hybrids) which comes anywhere close to this improvement.
Also I don't know about other countries, but I'd argue that in 20 years at least in Europe the fuel economy of diesel cars has gone worse due to emissions, I'm talking about real world usage, regardless of what this WLTP non-sense says.l
Engine and battery performance are analogous.
Uh yes, because it's really hard to improve the efficiency of something that is 4 to 5 times as efficient...