Doing it by 2040 is same as doing nothing, because gasoline cars will be clearly competed away by that time without any legislative action.
"Around 2024" is what they said yesterday.
"Volvo’s transition will be gradual. It plans to still produce existing models with conventional engines after 2019, but it will no longer introduce new models with the older technology. Depending on demand, Volvo will completely phase out cars powered solely by gasoline or diesel by around 2024."
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/05/business/energy-environme...
The way I see it -- plugin hybrids with a minimal 50 mile electric range will start to become the norm, then with fewer people buying gas, many gas stations go out of business. Electric charging pops up at work and at the big box stores. Possibly metered, or subsidised by purchases. Then plugin hybrids become electric only once the gas stations disappear.
The Model 3 coming off the lines in the next few days is the same price as a Honda Civic.
So... 2x in range and 1.0 in price sound good? That's probably 3-4 years out at the current rate of improvement in battery technology.
The Model 3 has an estimated 215 mile range where as a 2017 Civic is estimated a 521 miles. The annual improvement in capacity for Lithium batteries is 8%. So in 4 years you can expect battery packs of equivalent size to go for 293 miles.
So 1.95x the price for .4x the range today and if all things except battery price remain the same, then 1.95x the price for .56x the range.
The biggest problems for electric car is fast charger availability and the fact that DC Fast charging degrades the batteries over time. Deploying DC Fast chargers to homes isn't feasible so charging a 200+ mile battery from 10% to full would take hours using a Level 2 charger.
The way they do it:
* Charge overnight, start every day full * Supercharge on long trips * If you have a Leaf, the definition of "long trip" is a bit short
Done. No DC fast charger needed at home.
I think what you don't understand is that it isn't feasible for everyone to install a L2 Charger in their home. 240v connectors in garages might be an option for new construction but aren't common in older construction. The installation cost isn't a fixed number and there are several factors that can raise that cost into the thousands of dollars. That's even assuming you own a home, if you rent then it's probably not an option. If you live in an apartment or condo then it's even less a possibility.
If owning an electric car requires access to an L2 Charger to be feasible then there will have to be serious infrastructure changes before most ICE car owners will consider them practical. Charging stations will have to be readily available everywhere, not just in your home garage assuming that's even an option. Sure your office parking garage might have two or four charging stations today that were easily installed but what will it take to install 20, 40, or 100? Can our grid even support that scale?
Most people can't afford new cars let alone 200+ mile EVs and ~100 mile EV has a number of caveats that will necessitate lifestyle and behavior changes for a lot of people. My Leaf typically reports 93-96 miles range at 100% charge and I commute ~25 miles one way. That should leave me with around 40 miles of overhead and yet that's rarely the case. Driving in excess of 55 miles an hour for prolonged periods of time quickly depletes the battery as does rapid acceleration. If I'm not paying attention to my driving then I can easily arrive at work with a battery at 40% capacity.
EVs are currently practical for a small subset of the population however there will need to be significant changes in the electrical grid, charging infrastructure, EV range, and EV cost before mass adoption is even possible.
I say all of this not to claim that charger access is not an issue -- it is -- but to point out that solutions exist.
Also, I hope this is a good illustration of why you should not tell other people on HN that they don't understand something.
How so? The OP said that by 2040 there wouldn't be ICE vehicles on sale and the reply we're on remarked about the need for dramatic improvements in battery. I stated that I felt charger availability and battery degradation would be limiting factors. We're discussing charger availability and two of the key factors to availability are infrastructure and cost.
> So, apparently, you don't understand how people who currently own electric cars & can charge at home do charging.
> Also, I hope this is a good illustration of why you should not tell other people on HN that they don't understand something.
I think you should heed your own advice because as I stated before, I own an electric car, charge from home, and don't have a L2 Charger.
> I've had several friends who've had to go back and forth a few times with their electrician to get a L2 charger installed at their house.
Are you implying I didn't try hard enough to get a L2 Charger? I can get one installed, I haven't and you have literally no idea why nor have you asked.
> I live in an apartment, and after 3 years of lobbying, my complex installed a charger.
That's great, what happens when 10 tenants at your apartment all buy EVs? Do you have to petition for another 3 years to get additional chargers installed? Or does your complex implement fines to encourage sharing? The parking deck at my office has 4 spots for 2 chargers and charges you $20 if your car occupies a spot for more than 4 hours because the demand exceeds the capacity and they're not about to shell out for additional capacity.
Things like requiring new construction to offer chargers is great but it will only take us so far. How many L2 or DC Fast Chargers can be supported by the transmission lines being installed with that new construction? As soon as 50% of the parking spaces in that new construction demand access to chargers there will be a reckoning because the cost to install the necessary equipment will be significant. Eventually we're going to run into a situation similar to what happened in Australia with solar deployments, the demand for charging stations will put such a demand on the grid that a moratorium will be imposed.
I did however find this article (https://electrek.co/2017/05/07/tesla-limits-supercharging-sp...). This seems to imply that the packs are damaged by repeated Supercharger use and will automatically throttle themselves to lessen the damage being done.
Tesla seems to be very coy and dances around the subject because they don't want to attach any stigma to fast charging while EVs are still in their infancy as it might negatively impact their adoption rates.
In the article you linked, the customer appears to have noticed a slight decrease in the peak charging rate. It doesn't sound significant to me. There are certainly other Teslas out there which are supercharged 100% of the time, Tesloop is one example.
That's one of the three reasons Tesla gives for throttling the charge rate.
> In the article you linked, the customer appears to have noticed a slight decrease in the peak charging rate.
From 120kW down to 90kW peak charging rate is only slight? I realize it's peak and not average but a 25% reduction is only considered slight?
Also you said that Tesla disagrees with me about the affect of DC fast charging on battery life. The statements from Tesla seem to agree with me and they have implemented technologies to mitigate those effects in the form of peak rate throttling over time.
You seem to misinterpret Tesla saying it's fine to DC Fast Charge to mean that it has no detrimental affects when they really mean that they have protocols in place to ensure the pack will not degrade to the point that a warranty replacement is necessary.
Edit: I will say 5.6s is pretty darn quick. I would consider anything quicker than ~7s to be more a fun thing to have than a practical, neccessary acceleration.
"Right now a Tesla has 250 miles of range"
If you buy that model, sure. But the base Model 3 only has a range of 215 miles, and that's assuming you're not using the heater or A/C.
"The Model 3 coming off the lines in the next few days is the same price as a Honda Civic."
Where the hell are you getting your numbers? The Civic starts at a little over $18k, whereas the Model 3 starts at $35k. Even the Civic Type-R is only $32k, but that's a different beast than a regular Civic.
Battery swap sounds reasonable.
Lithium ion car batteries will get to 1/2 or 1/3 the price within a decade. By that point, electric cars will always be cheaper (edit: than current ICE TCO)
When we're at 1/10th the cost (which may happen!) it seems quite likely that fossil fuels will all be more expensive than storage backed renewable energy. As the demand for fossil fuels shrinks to a tiny fraction of its previous size, prices will also go down, as only the cheapest to extract oil will still be profitable.
In this hypothetical future, it may be possible for gas cars to be as cheap as an electric car, but it remains to be seen. In any case, the cost of energy will be lower than it is now.
As they always say. Please don't give volvo any credit or publicity for issuing the same old "three of four years from now we will have some more bolted-on hybrid models and some electric-clown-car[1] that nobody wants."
BMW and Audi and Merc (and now Volvo) can just recycle these press releases every few years - nothing changes but the three-years-off date.
[1] BMW i3, Merc B class ...
> Depending on demand, Volvo will completely phase out cars powered solely by gasoline or diesel by around 2024.
They aren't killing gas engines, they are just moving to Hybrid drive trains.
Every high tech product follows a law that it gets 20% cheaper when volumes of production double, and electric cars make up about 1.2% of the market now. So, they are going to fell 3x by the time production volumes reach 36% of the current car production, or about 25% of then-current car production.
But, they will actually own the market before then because cost of owning and operating an electric car is much lower than comparable gasoline powered one.
Easy to see that this curve converges to 100% of market share with quite a bit of margin. At least 2x margin.
There is nothing inherently costly in producing an electric car. Transmission is simpler because it doesn't need a gearbox. It has much lower center of gravity due to heavy battery so little mechanical trickery is needed to make it stable on the road. Electric motor is much cheaper than a complex ICE which also requires a lot of service. Only stumbling block is the battery - and they are getting cheaper every month. Most of the existing cost of electric cars is due to low production volumes as they eat away market share - there is a limit on speed of market adoption as well as factory retooling and business acceptance of the fact that electric cars are the future - but these are just technicalities, there is absolutely nothing preventing making a $15,000 mass market Ford Focus-like electric car, if built in Ford Focus-like volumes, that is.
Where to read more about this law?
Same thing now, with about 24 average mpg an existing car makes, eats 10 million barrels of oil per day (counting 81.5% average oil refining efficiency), or more than 20% of entire U.S. energy use - all kinds of energy, that is 7x more energy (ok, about 3.5x more given average efficiency of electricity production).
Even if that electricity was produced from oil on old-style single-stage thermal plants (a crazy idea - that would be the most expensive electricity in the world and no one is going to do that for sure), it would mean 2.7x savings. In reality, because most of that will be cheap coal and natural gas and renewables, there will be more than 10x savings.
The price has a large intractable stone in it - the battery cost. It won't go down very fast until new technologies are adopted. And it take a giga-factory to adopt a new technology. Rule of thumb: battery tech has to double the charge and halve the weight or nobody is interested in building the factory.
The center of gravity argument depends upon the current heavier batteries - but e-cars can't take off until something like metal-air batteries are working. And they weigh just about as much as a gas tank does.
As for complexity, sure compared to the mechanical engine it's simpler - 100's of parts vs a dozen. But the software has just exploded by orders of magnitude. Millions of lines of code instead of thousands. We mustn't underestimate this.
Then, there's a core of car buyers that have to grow old and die, and be replaced by e-car enthusiasts before the market moves significantly. Beta-Max was better than VHS (for the old videotape guys out there) but it died simply by being too late.
No, we won't see a $15,000 focus for decades.
The advances you are apparently dismissing as incremental have been enormous.
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v5/n4/abs/nclimate256...
Maybe its only one order of magnitude -- if I remember correctly, there were about 300,000 lines of code running on the main processor of the Toyotas that were investigated for unintended acceleration, with functions like "throttle angle control" that took several thousand lines.
It seems like there are still too few EVs to fully understand their lifespan and long-term maintenance costs (including battery replacement).
I also want to see how fast "fast charging" will be and what kind of adverse impact it has on the battery. Is it acceptable to the usability and lifespan of the vehicle to routinely charge on fast chargers? I don't want to sit at the charging station for 45 minutes when a gas car can be fully fueled in 5 or less.
At home, my expectation is that a vehicle does not need a garage, so charging at home may present a logistical challenge (OR, weather-proof outside charging stations might also be deployed). Likewise for apartments and condos with shared parking.
I think all these issues can be overcome, but they will need some thoughtful approaches to ensure that EVs are reasonable for as many people as possible to own and use, not just the wealthy.
That matters because battery capacity fade increases non-linearly with depth of cycling. If both a Leaf owner and a Model S owner drive 40 miles per day, I'd expect the Leaf battery capacity to fade more than 3x as fast as the Model S capacity, because of the deeper battery cycling. That's true even of the Model S 60/60D that had a 75 kWh battery software-locked to 60 kWh of usable capacity. The capacity fade is linked to the physical characteristics of the battery; the software unlock to a full 75 kWh just bought the option to discharge the battery more deeply for longer uninterrupted driving.
So, a net price of about $1K/kWh of battery seems to be the going rate.
How would that be possible? Charge and discharge cycles are closely monitored and controlled by computers.
The charging protocol is pretty well-designed for electrical safety already.