It's not exactly as if I started looking at EVs only recently, I've spent quite a bit of time on keeping up with industry publications, owned one of the first hybrids when they first rolled off the line and try very hard not to spout nonsense. Tech curves definitely will play an important role in mitigating these issues but are in and of themselves probably not enough to allow for a complete electrification of our transport needs.
> the true problems are going to be far different.
Such as?
We are all interested in how technology will change our lives and solve problems but many folks aren't willing to consider that actually solving some problems requires living in a way which is intrinsically different. It might very well be possible that "tech curves" will eventually solve the problem of transitioning everyone now driving gasoline cars to electric but that is perhaps a localized optimization.
Maybe to _REALLY_ solve the problem requires us to re-consider the way we're living. Is it really sane to live 20-50 miles away from where one works and drive a car in bumper-to-bumper traffic as a daily commute? Sure, if the cars were electric, a larger fraction of the energy wasted doing this would be "renewable" or at least "greener" but what about the wasted time, erosion of well-being, and the continued waste of space. Yes, even electric cars need highways, parking lots, and cities which force themselves to be car-scaled rather than human-scaled. How much would we really solve by the transition to electric cars?
These are not considerations which are easy to talk about, but they're the "true problems" which are being swept under the rug by techno-optimists.
Certainly lifestyle transitions will require decades, after all, it took decades to cities to become car-centric. But can happen even within a generation. Many millennials eschew car ownership and are moving back to cities, whereas for baby boomers the car was a rite of passage as well as its concomitant house in the 'burbs.
Transitioning entirely to electric vehicles will also take decades (admittedly it would be less time because car-years are much quicker than people-years).
What will happen is some mixture of both of these along with random jags of reactionary fascination with the happy-motoring era and who knows what else.
Ultimately, we only have a finite quantity of fossil fuels and there is no "free-refill" for the planet. At some point, lifestyles will have to change drastically to accommodate this limitation as population continues to grow.
Even though my commute is quite pleasant: a 20-minute drive on quiet country roads then a 30-minute bus trip followed by a 10-minute walk to the office, I think about this quite a lot. Especially during the "drive on country roads" bit.
I live in a rural area and I really like it where I live, for any number of reasons. I have absolutely no desire to move back to the city that I work in, even though when I was living there I had a lot of fun.
Life is better when it's simpler and one way I can make it simpler is by either working remotely (not a possibility with my current employer), or becoming self-employed. Wasting time commuting, no matter how enjoyable the commute, is still wasting time.
Maybe more interesting angles could have been supplying the gigantic increase in demand for metals required to produce EV batteries, or the regulatory/industrial battle the EV industry faces with the traditional auto and oil industries (notably the Koch brothers).
I find Jacques' concerns to be well thought out, showing that he has actually dug into the numbers. However, I'm interested to know what you see are even more significant problems.
Oddly enough for HN, its a scalability problem (LOL). If you turned the entire known planetary stock of economically useful lithium ore into present gen batteries with 100% efficiency (LOL) and eliminated all competing uses (LOL), depending who's goofy numbers you use, you could give every human on the planet roughly one electric car. Once. There on its relying on recycling, or the market absorbing dramatically more expensive sources of lithium, or income inequality making a car lifestyle unavailable to most people, etc.
Its a kin to the argument of take the amount of copper in the infrastructure of the USA and divide it by the number of people in the USA and multiply that by the population of the undeveloped world, and you end up with more than the worlds known copper reserves. Africa, for example, will never be electrified at least as we in the west understand electrification. Perhaps new technologies or new ways of looking at things... but just picking up the plans for the TVA and dropping them in the 3rd world is literally not physically possible with existing known metal reserves.
Universal EVs are no problem for every status signalling coastal yuppie, theres just not that many of them. If the developed world retains hegemony we MIGHT be able to switch as a culture completely to EVs. But "the world" is not switching to EVs unless the global population shrinks to fit the global resource limits or ... ?
Note that my numbers assume 100% of the world supply is mined AND 100% efficiency (LOL) and there are no limits. I'm not claiming that 1% of that is realistic, but I am claiming its the very hard upper bound is too low even in some kind of star trek post singularity magical handwave world. Maybe you could fuse hydrogen atoms into lithium in a fusion reactor for a hundred years to make the worlds most expensive battery...
I'm not even sure we can pull it off with low range lead acid batteries in low range cars. When discussing infrastructure type stuff, there are only so many pounds of "stuff" currently economically available given current refining technology per human being. There IS enough iron to give us all cars (maybe not crude oil, but at least iron won't be the limiting factor) but there is literally not enough economically lithium recoverable on this planet, at the current technology level.
Also, 1 car per person is probably more than is necessary.
How much is "economically useful or available" lithium is interesting as what makes sense to access now with current technologies changes as demand increases. More expensive techniques get pioneered and then the access cost drops for the technique as it gets optimized - much like the recent fracking boom.
Right now there is very little demand for lithium compared to the economically recoverable reserves. But the way mineral discovery works, as demand increases more money and effort is invested in finding new resources. There is absolutely no danger that ever-expanding lithium reserves will ever be exhausted by any reasonable vehicle production numbers. It's not even a given that per-pound prices would have to increase, as shown by the success of enhanced oil recovery having a break-even in the $30/bbl range now.
Lithium is also just about the least expensive part of battery production. The cost of lithium in the market could increase by an order of magnitude and only affect battery cost by perhaps 10-20%.
It's not reasonable to project 1 vehicle per person globally for many reasons. Economics, geography, the built infrastructure, and demographics affect vehicle ownership. The techno-society changes such a massive increase in vehicles would bring are enormous and unlikely to evolve soon. Transport paradigms that work in one area, say the US, aren't likely to work in all others. Using US vehicle numbers as a world-wide projection just isn't reasonable.
A more reasonable thought exercise would be to replace all the vehicles in existence with electrics. At about 1 billion vehicles on the road today, there's plenty of lithium to do so, even at current known reserves.
Every EV that replaces a regularly driven ICE vehicle is a net win on its own (less pollution in cities, less energy use, works well with renewables etc.) The more the better.
EVs have lots of benefits for developing nations too, EV scooters and electric bikes seem to be big business in certain areas.