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Comment by jseliger | Hacker News Reader

I hear what you're saying, but I think the shift will happen faster than is commonly anticipated. The simplest way to sense this is to just drive a Tesla. Doing so is reminiscent of seeing early iPhones. There is a strong sense of, "Ah, yes, this is obviously the future."

As soon as the initial cost of electrics becomes remotely competitive with gas-powered cars, pretty much everyone is going to want one. Yes, there will be the much-ballyhooed challenges of installing charging stations in parking garages and so forth. All those commonly cited issues will remain issues, but they'll be like AT&T's initial network congestion due to iPhones: short-term problems that'll be overcome because the product is that good.

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Another reason things will change fast is that, like film cameras, gasoline cars have a long logistical tail. As soon as they start to fall out of favour, there's a feedback loop. Suppliers and mechanics close close. Fuel prices rise as fixed costs are amortized over fewer buyers. Gas stations are further away. You can't get the fuel or parts, who'd want a car like that? And so more suppliers close.

Even if you are stuck with a gasoline car, can you keep it running? Many of those two billion cars will end up scrap or modified with converter kits.

The dismantling of the existing infrastructure might be a bigger challenge than you are letting on. I think that Tesla has the advantage of being a centralized, adaptive force for change, while gasoline and automotive suppliers are disparate and do not act as one cohesive force. There is a huge money advantage for the existing players, but perhaps their immobility will nullify that cash advantage.

The most vulnerable part of the existing infrastructure is "the little guy", gas stations that are franchises and can fold if demand falls below costs. But they are also the most visible part of it to consumers. Having to drive out of your way to get fuel would be an increasingly annoying chore.

I'm a little worried about the industry and workers that would be affected by such a huge change. I don't know what could be done, especially in the name of progress, but it's something that needs to be considered.

but neoliberalism is good and without any drawbacks. the unhaltered gallop of technology will have no bad consequences whatsoever.

I think you were trying to parody comments on HN or elsewhere but I've rarely, if ever, heard anyone espouse such a view. The overwhelming majority agree that increased automation will lead to higher productivity but also cause unemployment. It's easy to write a snarky comment like that one, but I don't think it really adds value to the conversation.

There are definitely some people here who espouse the view that the technological changes will certainly create new jobs that replace the ones that disappear and there is no worry about unemployment going up. I think they are in the minority though and not really parody-worthy.

I echo your sentiments; unfortunately the problem is much, much bigger than this.

The value of human labor has been steadily declining for decades; driving down the political power of laborers.

Self driving trucks & taxis, delivery drones, robots, I don't even. https://vimeo.com/190609870

Our society is going to undergo a dramatic shift.

Yes, technology has created new jobs, but it has also massively devalued it; a highschool graduate can no longer support a family at a lifelong factory job.

> a highschool graduate can no longer support a family at a lifelong factory job.

It's worth keeping in mind that this was only ever true for a large number of people in a very short window in history, basically a few decades in the middle of the 20th century. Before that, you had (essentially subsistence) farming, craftsmen (neither of which could be done without substantial apprenticeship, ie education) or sweatshop factory working (which did not allow for the kind of middle class supporting a family you have in mind).

I am very curious what led that time in history to spread wealth so evenly. I don't know much about it, but for about 50 years technology was giving us such amazing, shared increases in productivity and standard of living that people dreamed of a post-labor society. (like star trek).

I met someone who's been with a company for nearly 30 years. When they started, everyone got 15 vacation and 12 personal leave days a year.

It's unthinkable now. Why?

I might consider a Tesla, but for the logistics of using one. I live in a western Chicago suburb and commute to a northern suburb. Despite the many commuting routes I take, I have never seen a charging station. I cannot charge at work, nor can I charge at home (I park in a garage in a apartment building that has no EV charging abilities or even 120v outlets available).

That won't be the case in a decade, though, yeah?

If you can't charge overnight, you really shouldn't have an electric vehicle. You end up MORE inconvenienced than a gasoline/diesel driver, instead of LESS inconvenienced.

Apartment landlords are coming around, quickly, though - it's a selling point and not all that expensive to install a few 240V outlets in the garage.

If you CAN charge overnight, waking up to a full 'tank' every morning is amazing! It's a surprising benefit that isn't immediately obvious to the new EV driver.

> If you can't charge overnight, you really shouldn't have an electric vehicle.

That's true now, but may not be so in a few years if aluminum-air battery technology continues to improve. Aluminum-air batteries have much higher energy density than lithium ion, but they cannot be electrically recharged [1] so when they are out you have to swap them.

The idea is that you build car with both a small lithium ion system and a large aluminum-air system. Lithium ion has higher power output, so you want that to actually drive the vehicle. You use the aluminum-air to recharge the lithium ion, to extend the range.

Current experiments with this approach add about 1200 miles to the range of the car compared to a pure lithium ion system.

If starting from full on both batteries you got 1400 miles, that would be enough to let a lot of city drivers go a month between having to go have the aluminum-air batter swapped out in the worst case where they are not able to do any plug in charging. That would be quite feasible for many people, assuming that there was a battery swap place within reasonable distance.

[1] In other words, you cannot recharged them by forcing a reverse current through them like you do normal rechargeable batteries. They essentially have to be rebuilt with new anodes, and the old anodes become scrap for recycling.

Sounds complicated. Musk has said that Lithium batteries are improving at a rapid enough pace that they expect impressive increases in capacity and duty cycles by the third iteration of the Model 3.

A friend of mine drives a Tesla. She can only charge at work, and that was enough for her. For context, we're in the bay area, where long drives are quite common.

I live in London. What garage would that be? Most houses don't have one.

Although I know it is inevitable, I'll be sad when my muscle car is driven off the road.

Cranking Red Barchetta at full volume? I know what you mean. Though I'm a little more saddened thinking of the day when autopilot replaces me at the wheel.

Yes, manually driving a car will become illegal probably sooner than one expects.

While I'd like to leave the driving to Otto most of the time, sometimes I really like to drive myself, and would miss it.

I like my drag racing manual transmission and clutch, it's a heluva lot of fun to drive on the open road, but it's agony in heavy city traffic. (The engine just will not run at low speeds, the clutch is very grabby :) It can be really hard to get moving uphill from a standstill without rotating the tires in place a few times.)

There's no reason why manual driving needs to be made illegal.

A much more likely scenario is that safety features, starting with AEB collision avoidance, will become mandatory.

This will progress to the point where autopilot will always be running in a supervisory role, ready to take over in an instant if you're doing something dumb that could harm yourself or others.

It takes about 25 years to cycle the road-going fleet

Older cars can be prohibited from using, first, HOV-style "automatic" lanes, then highways in rush hour, then highways altogether, much sooner than that.

There's an alternate feedback loop. As more people drive electric cars, demand for oil drops and decreases the price of gasoline, making gasoline cars more economical.

I predict a bifurcated market: Cars wind up as electric while light trucks (and their large SUV brethren) stick to fossil fuels.

> There's an alternate feedback loop. As more people drive electric cars, demand for oil drops and decreases the price of gasoline, making gasoline cars more economical.

A car payment is maybe $200/month. Car insurance is maybe $100/month. 12,000 miles/year at 30MPG and $2/gallon is $67/month.

~$1.20 of the $2/gallon is taxes, refining, distribution and marketing.

So if the market price of crude oil falls by 75%, its contribution to a gallon of gas goes from $.80 to $.20. That's $20/month difference, or ~5% of the cost of operating a car.

And that's assuming crude prices actually fall by that much, and that governments don't raise the fuel tax to make up revenue and/or fight climate change. It's not hard to imagine adding $.49/gallon to the gas tax.

Governments will increasingly switch from fuel excise to road use taxes, in most cases removing the excise to help bolster their domestic oil industry.

Road use taxes are dumb. The only reason to have gas tax instead of funding roads the same way we fund the military is to discourage fossil fuel use.

And most governments, including most of the high population US states, don't have any domestic oil industry to speak of.

This may be true, but the cost of oil would have to drop below the cost of electricity.

According to this article, gasoline would have to be very cheap in order to compete with the cost of electricity. At one point the marginal difference probably doesn't matter.

That recalls Kodak's mistake: not anticipating how very fast consumers/users can switch to new tech, no matter how vested in old technology they were. The switch from film to digital was a no-brainer for most people. Having driven an EV for two years, I think many will feel the same about electric cars.

Definitely. I'm waiting until the engine fails in my 15-year-old jeep to purchase a new car, but as that's close on the horizon, the only consideration is which EV. Not buying another carbon-emitting vehicle if I can help it.

One day there will be conversion kits to replace the gas motor with electric. Maybe that will exist in time.

I don't know. :/ Are you thinking about a particular niche? For example, I don't remember conversion kits for regular gas automobiles to switch to unleaded. Not exactly the same thing, but perhaps somewhat comparable? And given the state of engine integration in vehicles today, I'm not sure how easy it would be to replace everything that's different between an electric vehicle and an ICE one. For example, batteries versus fuel tank.

Or am I thinking about this wrong?

Regular gasoline cars run fine on unleaded gas, so no conversion kit was needed. But you are right in being skeptical - it wouldn't make sense to convert a gas powered car to electric. You wouldn't just swap a combustion engine for a electric engine. You'd need to change everything - engine, transmission, gas tank, air conditioning, dash/info center. And then you'd want energy recovery, so you'd change out braking systems. Best case is you'd end up with a heavy, expensive, inefficient, poorly balanced electric car.

> dash/info center

Hell no. I'm keeping the tape deck!

The rest does sound quite plausible though. At best one would end up with an improperly balanced car from the difference in engine weights alone unless pains were taken to ensure the car's weight and weight distribution stayed the same.

conversion kits did exist for the fuel change. It was mostly about putting in harder valve seats. The lead was a useful lubricant for the valves.

My idea is that the small block Chevy engine is ubiquitous in the hot rodding world, and it is often combined with a Turbo350 transmission. This combo (or one roughly the same shape) has now been built by GM over 100,000,000 times. They hit that milestone in 2011! http://media.gm.com/media/us/en/gm/news.detail.html/content/...

So we take the Remy250 motor, used to propel the Chevy Tahoe Hybrid (I own one), the Remy is small, about the size of the torque converter in the Turbo350 transmission. That leaves the shape of the engine as a shape to fill with lithium batteries, and the rest of the transmission case can hold the inverter. There is enough room, I have measured.

You may only get 50-100 miles, but it could be a drop-in replacement. Since all the mess is self contained in one blob, it is a matter of yanking the old stuff out and shoving the new stuff in. Basic hot rodding, being done since the automobile was invented.

If it could retail for $20,000 to $25,000 the aftermarket industry would eat it up. I am a SEMA member for 12 years, so I know.

Any VC want to fund this idea? I have most of the pieces pulled together, just need to pay for some engineering time.

If it's a Jeep with the 4.0 you'll be waiting a long time for that engine failure.

It's a lot easier not to be vested in old technology when the replacement runs for longer without new infrastructure and doesn't cost a couple of months' wages to upgrade, a few more if the old technology is rendered obsolete...

Smartphones still don't run as long as 2006 dumb phones. People just noticed that was a rarely used feature.

That's a problem for trucks and buses though.

They have a different Problem and might need a different solution. Hydrogen might be cost effective at truck-scale.

Compressed natural gas is used in some buses right now.

I'm convinced that ammonia will be used rather than hydrogen for these applications, but it amounts to the same thing.

This is patently false. If you turn off your WiFi, 4G, Bluetooth and NFC, and only use your phone for calls and SMS, a smartphone can easily last a week. More than a dumbphone with the same features.

Agreed. You can also lower the brightness of the screen when you don't need it. My Sony Xperia Z5 Compact in "Stamina Mode" (basically what you're describing) can last for 7-8 days as far as I can tell.

As much as I would like it for electric cars to be commonplace, I think there are bigger hurdles.

Free charging stations are going to be less appealing when you have hundreds of cars recharging every hour, not to mention the increased space requirements because a car takes 2-4 minutes to refuel but 30 minutes to refill the battery. Someone will have to pay for the price of energy and infrastructure (don't say the government will: actually they make a lot of money on gasoline and diesel, at least in Europe, and they will have to recoup that too!). And right now one of Tesla's selling point is the free recharging stations.

The charging time itself is an issue. It's a real pity that Tesla's battery swap stations programme was halted. If you're traveling with two kids you certainly don't want to waste half an hour while they're both asleep just to charge the battery... :-)

Scaling production and having a compelling product is already hard enough, and Tesla's being excellent at that, but scaling the infrastructure for consumers is a whole different business.

Tesla is already beginning to end free charging. Any car ordered after 31/12/2016 will be limited to 400 kWh (~1000 miles) of free charging per year, after that you have to pay. 1000 miles is around 10% of the distance most cars go in a year. And reserved != ordered, so this limit applies to all Model 3s.

> 1000 miles is around 10% of the distance most cars go in a year.

Comparing usage of the supercharger network to the total amount driven by the car in a year doesn't make much sense. You only need the supercharger network when going a long distance; otherwise, you can charge at home or perhaps at work.

Exactly. But when it's free, people do crazy things like queue for half an hour to charge at a supercharger even though they could easily charge at home. I think this is the primary motivation of the new rules, to restrict supercharger use to those actually needing it.

I heard (secondhand info and all that) that there's some taxi startup somewhere that is using all Teslas, but instead of approaching Tesla about installing superchargers for their own use[1], they decided to just use the existing public superchargers, tying them up and creating long delays for anyone else who wants to use them. So it seems that this new rule is meant to combat that type of behavior.

[1] Apparently companies can approach Tesla about installing their own private superchargers, though I don't know the details.

They're 'Tesloop', based in LA. I've seen complaints on the Tesla forums from LA area Tesla owners about how they keep hogging up the chargers. E.g Charging for Supercharging Won't Deter Local Fleet Operators

https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/5bonff/chargin...

Many people will probably only seldomly need to charge at stations, as they'd probably charge their batteries at home each night. Many office parking places will probably have charging stations as well.

Tesla discontinued battery swap because people do prefer to spend 1/2 hour charging, even when traveling with sleeping children.

Note that this is only an issue for long-distance travel; for day-to-day driving, most people will charge in their garage, their apartment's garage, or at a street-side charger.

Well, there was one battery swap station, and you had to book it and pay for it. Not exactly encouraging.

Who is going to scale the street-side charger network? In Europe, a lot of cars are parked outdoors during the night. In smaller towns, parking spots around residential areas aren't even painted.

Many other cars are parked in shared garages that don't guarantee one plug per car. I guess garage owners could install the chargers (but that would be hundreds of kW if electric cars were really commonplace---that is expensive infrastructure) and meters, but still it's hard to reach critical mass.

I'm not sure how to reply, given that the things you say are hard are beginning to happen already.

In a handful of big metropolitan areas. Good luck doing that throughout multiple continents. Most European countries are still on the order of magnitude of 1000 total EVs sold per year. Growing, sure, but still hardly a serious market penetration.

And I am talking about problems with scaling: "beginning to happen" and "available for everyone who needs it" is not the same as "available for everyone". Installing a dozen chargers, unused most of the time, in a shopping mall's 1000-car parking lot is not the same as installing a few hundred chargers in a multistorey parking downtown that previously only needed to power some neons.

Your error seems to be that you insist on seeing a big-bang overnight solution that works for Everyone(tm). That never happens.

There are millions of people in Europe who has a private garage/carport/parking spot and can afford to install a charger there, and who lives within round trip battery capacity of where they need to go. Millions more who don't, but whose employers can be convinced to install chargers. That's more than enough for the kind of critical mass where apartment block landlords, employers and shopping centre parking lots will start to install chargers, not for novelty or green credentials, but for naked self interest. It's not overnight, but it will be very quick.

"Tesla discontinued battery swap because people do prefer to spend 1/2 hour charging, even when traveling with sleeping children."

That was set up to fail.

There was only one battery swap station. It was aimed at people commuting between LA and SF. Except:

- you had to book in advance to use it

- you had to pay a fee to use it

- it was set up across the street from a Tesla Supercharger

- despite ostensibly being for the commute between those cities, it was actually 15 miles away from the freeway, making for a significant detour

If I was Elon Musk and wanted to demonstrate how people would much rather use charging stations than any kind of battery swap program, I think the above is a pretty good example of how I'd set up my battery swap program (for failure).

15 miles from the freeway? Try less than a mile from I-5: https://goo.gl/maps/bDJACbS8XNE2

As a Tesla owner, I didn't think all of the past back-and-forth about the swap station in blogs was that interesting. I eat dinner in Harris Ranch.

Battery swap doesn't really scale. It's hard to imagine battery swap stations being set up wherever you could conceivably need one, with all the associated infrastructure and labor costs, just so you can swap a battery in 10 minutes rather than supercharge in 30.

And remember, chargers of the future will be faster still. CCS has been designed to scale to at least 300kW.

Yeah, it definitely seemed like it was too complicated of a process to be able to be anyone near as simple as recharging or refueling is.

From first principles, a battery swap station seems to add just one relatively isolated component to an existing charge station... they would use the same power infrastructure, the same authorization protocols, the same locations...

The economics completely change with fleet vehicles (aka, self driving taxis). Instead of taking an entire car out of commission for half an hour, you can just replace the battery in 1 minute and keep the car on the road and earning money. Because both the car and battery swap station is owned by the same company, there's no arbitrage between trading an old, worn out battery and a new battery and fleet cars can be designed alongside the swap station to make the entire process entirely automated.

But the big plus is that if you design a fleet system around battery swap, you can get away with puny batteries on the vehicles. A battery sufficient for 1 - 2 hours of city driving is optimal which saves both cost and weight for the vehicles. Instead of relying on expensive, power dense advanced Lithium batteries, you can shove cheap batteries into the thing, scatter the entire city with drive-thru swap stations and drive the cost of transportation way down.

While that's true, I think you can also have taxis stop at charging stations more often when they aren't in use. Particularly if you have self-driving taxis, you're not bothering passengers by doing that. You could even have trucks with large batteries which act as mobile charging stations.

i strongly disagree with your thesis that a 1-2 hour long driving capacity sized-battery is optimal. If you have an electric car, being able to not constantly worry about whether you can drive home is far more important than the cost of recharging. its so cheap it almost doesn't matter, like $10 for an 85kwh tesla. not worrying about running out of power is the big value.

Yes, for individually owned cars, range anxiety is a real thing. I'm talking about electric taxis which shuttle multiple people around on short trips throughout the day.

I believe that battery swap was effectively a scam. There was some arbitrary full recharge time that had to be met to access some rebate program, and Tesla did exactly as much as they needed to do to meet the terms and then stopped.

Electric cars are the future, and Tesla's are cool, so don't take this as a negative. The complexity of battery swapping was in ownership of the batteries, not in the physical swapping. It maybe makes sense for big taxi firms, but not for standard consumers.

edit: adding a link with some corroboration since I got downvoted: http://insideevs.com/carb-zev-program-changes-tesla-takes-la...

If you're traveling with two kids you certainly don't want to waste half an hour while they're both asleep just to charge the battery... :-)

Supercharging time is almost never wasted. You (and the kids) need a break after 3-4 hours on the road anyway. Quite often, in my experience, the car is recharged and ready to go well before the occupants are!

I don't think you'd ever want to take a road trip with me. One of the big reasons I bought a VW TDI is that I can go for 8+ hours without stopping at all.

I hope you are exaggerating. Otherwise I don't think I want to be on the same highway as you either.

People like you are a hazard on the road. Driver fatigue is a real thing - and saying you can go 8 hours without stopping isn't a testament to how awesome you are - it's a testament to how little you care about others sharing the road with you.

Some people think they have super-human reflexes, or are immune to fatigue, or have trained themselves to task with a phone and driving. Most of these people are wrong. Chances are, you are just an ordinary driver - and there is nothing wrong with that.

I'm more than willing to admit I'm an average driver - and so I will take breaks, or forgo using the phone, or drive slower to compensate for that. Yes, sometimes I do drive poorly (sleep deprived, stressed, or in a rush) - but I'm never going to claim I can go 8 hours without a break. That's going a bit far.

Truck drivers are allowed to drive 8 hours without breaks. I suspect most of them do.

Very few people what to go 8 hours without a break.

Sure but I will want to take a break at the beach, at an attraction, or worst case at a supermarket.

When going from Palm Beach to Orlando, we traded more time on the road for a visit to Cape Canaveral. (Way) more than 30 minutes, but the kids didn't notice neither that nor the 5 minutes stop to fill the tank...

Oh well, at least if there is going to be some kind of valet service around superchargers, it's going to be more healthy than a job filling up tanks.

Absolutely. We're still in the infancy stage of charging infrastructure.

However the time and costs to build them are really pretty small (and will continue to improve with scale). You can easily put them in wherever there is parking and a grid connection.

Businesses, restaurants, malls, hotels, etc, are already starting to figure out that having charging is a great way to attract more customers. We'll see this snowball as market share of EVs grows, and it will get to the point where you can charge at most attractions you'd conceivably want to stop on a long trip.

Tesla's move to PAYG supercharging is also positive for the wider charging industry and should encourage more investment by 3rd-parties.

"The charging time itself is an issue"

I've thought about this, and I disagree. I think driving habits - and fueling stations - will simply change along with it. Truck stops are especially experienced with this. Older pumps can take a good while to fill the tanks. Improvements were made so they are faster, but they are still slow compared to cars. Hence the tendency to have a bit of shopping and food at a good number of fueling stations.

For passenger cars, this can turn into a number of things. Entertainment places, coffee shops, and the like fit in well here - as do fast food with play areas and other such things.

This will take time, but I think it's right. If you are charging your car overnight, the only time you'll need to charge mid-trip is on long-distance trips. If you're driving 10 hrs, you'll need to take an hour-plus break sometime in the middle of it regardless.

I had that iPhone moment when I first drove my kei car (Suzuki Lapin) in Japan. It cost around USD13K new, gets around 80 mpg, carries four people easily or decent amount of cargo, and is packed with simple and useful tech like exterior cameras, radar-assisted braking, airbags, touch screen, etc. If I could own this car in America, I definitely would.

That's a lot of tech for $13k new!

Good point - I might go for one of these myself

Once you factor in the cost of the home charging station(and the required charging infra) and the battery and other electric components ,electric cars are(and will stay) more expensive ,meaningfully than ICE-cars. And ICE cars are much more reliable , they don't need an expensive battery swap every 5 years.

And when fuel is priced low it isn't more expensive than electricity.

So yes, an EV might have some extra benefits and some western consumers might be willing to pay more for that, others won't and especially not people at the 3rd world.

So only 10% global penetration rate unless there's some government incentive by 2040 and maybe longer seems likely.

> they don't need an expensive battery swap every 5 years.

You are right, but ICE cars need all manner of other maintenance often new transmissions or outright replacement. This is a minor issue, and is exactly the kind of problem that the GP poster was talking about. These battery replacements will be talked about like they are a huge showstopper, but the reality is probably closer to wasting a an hour or two at the mechanic or dealership and some kind of fee as they take the old battery for refurb and give me a fresh one.

And someone will figure out how to charge a car on a normal outlet.

Charging a car on a normal outlet is already possible. It just takes for-fucking-ever. You can't draw enough current from an outlet to charge it in a short span, without tripping the breaker or burning out your home wiring.

There will be some solution to this too, we will come up with some clever hack, like pluggable capacitors, multiple breakers or something. Or better outlets and breakers will become the norm.

I had 2 new breakers put in for an office of mine a few years it cost less than $200. If I could pay this then pay half as much for fueling my car for the next year, I would do it every year.

I think the "power wall" product by Tesla solves this.

You can already buy a portable box that lets you combine the power from two different circuits that are out of phase with each other, to get twice the power. I saw a post by a Tesla owner who uses it to get effective Level-2 charging from friend's country homes.

The box is empty, right? Two out-of-phase 120V circuits are a 240V circuit.

In America and other countries with 110v mains, you might have a point. In the UK, my Ampera charges to full in 4 hours.

In America, most houses have some 220, intended for a clothes dryer and perhaps an oven or air conditioning.

For a Tesla, a standard 110v circuit charges at 3.5 mph; 220 is 2x or 4x depending on the amperage of the circuit.

In US, many houses have 240v outlets in addition to 110v, for high-energy devices like stoves and dryers and large washing machines.

http://diy.stackexchange.com/questions/30926/what-types-of-e...

The fuse box is normally located in the garage anyway. It strikes me that it should be fairly cheap to install a higher amp hookup for the car in that case.

We had the same issue. Our 120V circuit couldn't recharge fast enough overnight to handle ~ 50 miles daily of commute/errands. We ended up getting a 240V/40AMP circuit installed for a 32AMP charger and now it charges in ~ 3 hours. The faster charger also meant we could time it to always use the night time electricity rates.

I have a nissan leaf. It is plug every night on a normal outlet. It is a 49 month leasing. Battery replacement will not be my problem.

Well it is, in a sense that it's part of the cost of your lease. But if it's still affordable enough, then that alone would indicate that it's not really a costly problem in general.

> Once you factor in the cost of the home charging station(and the required charging infra) and the battery and other electric components ,electric cars are(and will stay) more expensive ,meaningfully than ICE-cars. And ICE cars are much more reliable , they don't need an expensive battery swap every 5 years.

Once you factor in the cost of initial purchase (and the the new cables required) and the case and other attachments, touch-screen phones are (and will stay) more expensive, meaningfully than flip-phones. And flip phones are much more reliable, they don't have a screen that breaks when you drop it, etc.

Not really a valid comparison. Flip phones basically do just one thing, which is make calls or SMS. Calls and texts are just a very minor part of what smartphones do. It's actually a little surprising we still call them smartphones at all. If you downgrade from a smartphone to a flipphone, you've lost an incredible amount of functionality.

Meanwhile, electric cars, while nicer in many ways than ICEs, still fundamentally perform the same task. And if you downgrade from an electric to an ICE, you haven't lost any functionality.

That's just not true, many flip-phones ran S60, which had most of the features of a current smartphone: camera, music player, web access (full, not WAP) over 3G and WiFi, running downloadable apps, GPS, etc.

I was running a podcast downloading app and writing Python scripts on my E65 before the iPhone even had the Store.

The home charging station is a clothes dryer outlet.

As an owner of a pure electric car (and a home renter) for more than 5 years, I logged in specifically to respond to this.

In 5 years, our Leaf has needed new tires, brake fluid, and... windshield wiper fluid and blades. We didn't need any new infrastructure. We plug it into a normal outlet at night, and it's full every morning. We've been taking the money we save on not doing transmission fluid and clutches and oil changes, and all of that stuff and put it in a savings account. In another 3 years, we'll need a new battery, but by then, it will probably be twice the capacity of the old one. (Nissan has discontinued the 24Kwhr battery, so fingers crossed, we'll get a 40KWhr battery when the time comes).

From a more global perspective, even here in Northern California, electricity is very inexpensive at night, because of all the spare generator capacity. Practically everyone can plug in their car at night, and with nothing more sophisticated than a $10 outlet timer, fuel up the fleet no problem.

Will every car be electric in 2040? Probably not, because cars last a long time. But I'll bet there will be very few gas cars sold by then. Battery prices are falling over 7% a year, and that's the most expensive part of an EV.

Exactly. Experts have been describing for some time that, especially down the curve, maintenance costs for electric cars will be substantially less and lifetimes (less untolerated obsolescence) longer.

Switch to composite construction and other corrosion resistant materials, and...

Another reason not to let DRM dominate this emerging market; so that we are not faced with profit-driven forced obsolescence.

>especially down the curve, maintenance costs for electric cars will be substantially less and lifetimes...

There was a time when the maintenance cost of cars (traditional) were little. Things changed because now things are made to fail after sometime aka planned obsolescence.

Do you think electric car companies will be different?

Did you ever own such a car? Did you find the regular tuneups (points, plugs, distributor, vacuum, etc...) to constitute "little maintenance"?

>Did you ever own such a car?

I did. It did't require "regular tuneups". You pour petrol and plain tap water for coolant in the radiator and the thing just goes...When it get stuck, you open the hood and take a peek, pull some wires, adjust some plugs and it goes again...

I don't recall any really expensive repair work in the 15 years that we owned that car.

> There was a time when the maintenance cost of cars (traditional) were little.

And those same engines had no power.

If you want a Model T engine, it's really uncomplicated.

You just won't be able to drive on any modern highway.

Practically everyone can plug in their car at night, and with nothing more sophisticated than a $10 outlet timer, fuel up the fleet no problem.

Even that expense should disappear. My Fiat 500e lets me set a timer to start its charge.

And then the next step is to talk to the grid in realtime and soak up any excess wind energy when demand is otherwise low and pause charge if there's a sudden spike in demand and get a discount from the utility company for helping them out. This is already built into some chargers, but should be standard in cars in future.

> Electricity is very inexpensive at night, because of all the spare generator capacity...

What do you think will happen (to the the electricity charges at night) if every one does that?

Personally I hope demand will rise enough to make the stupid oppressive darkness-destroying asinine "security lights" the damnpowercompany constantly pushes much less affordable.

It seems unlikely that demand will rise to daytime and early evening levels, however.

I can't make sense of your comment. Can you please clarify a bit?

I don't like the subsidized outdoor security lights that only exist to increase demand for nighttime power. I hope that nighttime demand will increase so that those lights will no longer be economical. I look forward to actual darkness in rural areas as a result.

> they don't need an expensive battery swap every 5 years.

You need to stop thinking about electric vehicle batteries like those in your phone or laptop.

EV batteries have a lot more (and better) management, keep things within (or closer to) optimal temperature and state of charge which all have major impacts on battery life.

Tesla has a battery pack with over 500,000 miles of simulated usage that's still got more than 80% of it's capacity. Surveys of Model S owners has shown that degredation is not an issue. [1]

[1] https://electrek.co/2016/06/06/tesla-model-s-battery-pack-da...

EVs are fundamentally simpler and cheaper to build than combustion vehicles. Fewer parts, less complexity, more commoditisation and potential for economies of scale.

The only reason EV's are more expensive today is battery prices, which are dropping rapidly and will continue to do so.

ICE cars are much more reliable , they don't need an expensive battery swap every 5 years.

In testing, modern EV batteries last much longer than this already. Even after 10 years and hundreds of thousands of miles, you're still likely to have over 80% of the original capacity. In something like a Tesla, that's still a very useful vehicle. And the battery technology will only get better.

Not sure if your analogy is really proving what you want it to. The iPhone is still a small minority of phones in use worldwide.

I think it's a fair analogy: most people don't have iPhones, but a huge portion of people have a smartphone. Tesla doesn't need to be the only source of electric cars, there are plenty more mainstream options.

True, but the iPhone strongly influenced nearly every phone that came after it. It changed the industry.

I think the argument is that the iPhone set the trend for what all phones looked and felt like (large, touchscreen-based devices that can run third party applications).

Saying that the iPhone is a small minority of phones is similar to saying that Tesla will have a small minority of vehicle sales, which is undoubtedly true, but doesn't portray the reality that a ton of other car manufacturers will be selling electric cars.

Well a huge fraction of the world is still on shitty $20 keyboard phones that are technically running Android but are more like feature phones in terms of capability and specs. You can't really argue that those are descended from the iPhone in any meaningful way.

Oh definitely. I think the point is that the trend in automobile sales is toward a vast majority of new sales being electric cars, just as the trend in phones is towards smartphones[1], and those smartphones overwhelmingly resemble the first iPhone.

1: http://qz.com/418769/theres-still-plenty-of-money-in-dumb-ph... (disclaimer: it was really just one of the first results when I searched for a comparison of feature phone vs smartphone market share)

iPhone ushered in a wave of capacitive touch smartphones. GP posits not that Tesla is the future, but that all-electric is.

>I hear what you're saying, but I think the shift will happen faster than is commonly anticipated. The simplest way to sense this is to just drive a Tesla. Doing so is reminiscent of seeing early iPhones. There is a strong sense of, "Ah, yes, this is obviously the future."

What part of it says "this is the future" vs. "this is what it feels like to drive a car that costs 6 figures"? Because I very much got the latter.

How will it work for all those millions of people in European cities who have car, but park it on tbe street because Thor house has no garage?

I think it's pretty obvious there we need to be curbside charging infrastructure.

I don't know the details of how expensive it is, or how secure, but Dutch cities are installing charging stations on the street curb. Typically one unit can charge two cars. To charge, plug in your cable, enter payments details and the car will be charged.

People can afford to buy a new iphone every couple of years, and the cost was built into your monthly plan. Moore's Law made them worth buying every couple of years.

Electric cars are expensive and they don't improve rapidly.

How do air conditioning and heating impact the range of an all electric car? That is supposedly what really hurted Nissan Leaf.

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