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Comment by michaelbuckbee | Hacker News Reader

Is there any credible doubt that electric cars are the future?

We can quibble about timing, regulatory vs customer preference factors, models, etc. but it's clear from all the data I've seen that EVs (and specifically plug in EVs) are growing at a fast clip and are on the way to becoming mainstream and unremarkable within the next decade or two.

If you were a big auto company, what wouldn't you spend to not lose out on that wave? I look at other industries where fundamental underlying technology changes remade the landscape: the switch to mobile phones, internet penetration, etc.

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I think comparing the switch from gas to EV to internet/mobile phones is quite the stretch. There's nothing really new or different about an EV.

The car market isn't going to experience several orders of magnitude growth spurred by EVs. Most buyers will compare across engine types. So to answer your question

>If you were a big auto company, what wouldn't you spend to not lose out on that wave

I'd spend nothing until the EV I can produce is expected to have profit margins on the order of my other vehicles in that class, discounted at maybe 30-50% of the development cost. Note that brand recognition/green efforts/etc gets wrapped up into the profit margin calculation.

The nail in the coffin here is that early movers get penalized unless they can effectively vertically integrate all the tech used for EVs (e.g. Tesla with their battery specialization). If you want to bet on the battery tech getting commoditized, its in your interest to wait as long as possible.

The problem with this view is that it assumes the EV/ICE differences are a simple swap, akin to moving from a I4 to a V6.

The switch to an EV drivetrain has lead to a much more through redesign of cars and none of the first gen batteries-bolted-onto-existing-chasis type EVs were particularly good. That is, if you don't get on the EV wave early and just wait for cheap batteries, you will be years behind your competitors in producing a properly thought-out EV and will be facing some very tough times.

This seems totally backwards to me. New entrants get to learn from all the mistakes every other entrant has made without any of the costs. New car makers aren't at a 120 year disadvantage relative to Ford.

Waiting may mean you face a patent stockade.

Apple would disagree. They were not first to market with music players, or mobile phones. They looked at what others did, saw their opening, and when they were ready they came in and absolutely dominated the market with products that had been designed with the benefit of knowing where others had made mistakes.

Tesla is already past the Apple point of releasing the iPod. Tesla basically recognized that a range of tech across the tech tree needed for EVs was sufficiently mature that they could produce a systemic leap in EV cars as a system (all while the individual elements of the system were sufficiently mature as to get to a better whole).

Tesla cars are basically the iPhone, while the big automakers are scrambling a bit to make their iPhone clones.

The iPod is decidedly and dramatically simpler than an automobile in every way. The hardest part of the iPod was a commodity part the purchased (e.g. HDD).

What Apple did correctly was determine that the market would pay a lot more for an MP3 player if it was all around better than the competition. Then they kept up momentum by iterating and improving their design before the competition had a chance to respond.

In the audio player market, MP3 Players had significant advantages over CDs and other mediums that drove rapid adoption and since Apple was best in class they quickly developed a monopoly.

The Car market is very different, EVs do not have significant advantages over ICE and there is not rapid adoption so it's hard for a monopoly to develop. EVs currently have range-over-time limitations compared to ICE as well as much lower margins with much higher costs. Those limitations are being addressed but until they are, there's only so much makers can do to tempt buyers.

>> EVs do not have significant advantages over ICE

Disagree.

Advantage 1: EV can be charged virtually everywhere with access to electricity (like parking lots), no gas stations, no gas transportation necessary.

Advantage 2: low maintenance costs. Electrically powered engines are simpler with fewer mechanical elements

Advantage 3: EVs are very quiet, so lower noise pollution

Some disadvantages are short driving range and long recharge time.

A few of those advantages are limited somewhat:

1) Electricity access is plentiful but you need high power if you want to charge in a reasonable timeframe

2) There are fewer moving parts but there is one part that degrades every time you use it, the battery

That said I really want to get a cheap used EV as my next car!

>no gas stations, no gas transportation necessary.

In many parts of the world, being able to transport fuel to where it's needed is a huge advantage. We are a long way from a global electricity infrastructure.

> In many parts of the world, being able to transport fuel to where it's needed is a huge advantage

Just offhand, what % of the new car market would you say those areas represent in the current model year? In 10 years?

It's probably a greater % than those who buy an EV expecting to be able to charge it in a parking lot.

His scenario is highly unusual but it highlights a weakness of EVs. There are numerous scenarios where an ICE can bring extra fuel with it or for multiple vehicles.

While his scenario might me a boundary condition, the comment he was responding to listed a similarly unlikely scenario outside of dense Urban environments.

The reality is we should be heavily promoting/supporting or even requiring EVs where they make sense like dense Urban areas with access to charging and suburban commuters. At the same time we should also recognize that there are many scenarios today where EVs don't make sense and ensure we don't penalize people who need to remain ICE bound. Eventually the EV tech will supplant most or all use cases.

> EVs do not have significant advantages over ICE and there is not rapid adoption

Lots of people would disagree, including myself.

The adoption is accelerating but it's still only a very small percentage of the total market. And while they do have many advantages, they also have many disadvantages; namely range, rate of refuel, and cost.

Even though EVs can meet the needs of the majority of the population, the perception is that they can't and they're inferior. Tesla has done wonders to counter that perception but they're pidgeon holed as being too expensive.

I say this as the owner of both a Leaf and a Model 3.

They monopsonized the supply chain with their decades of supply chain expertise.

There was a lot of mechanics involved in releasing the iPod - e.g. 1.8" hard drive and later flash memory.

Tesla is the Apple here, they're already vertically integrating.

The hard drive wasn't an Apple innovation. Neither was the battery tech. They brought the wheel interface and were willing to gamble that people would pay a premium for a bunch of very expensive components that resulted in a comparatively small player.

The closest thing to an iPod at the time it launched was the Rio players which were flash based and had capacities in tens of megabytes or the Creative HDD players which were battery hogs the size of 2 CD players stacked on top.

Creative had the Nomad Jukebox [0] at 6GB. It used a larger drive and was about the size of a discman, not double. The battery was awesome and lasted all day.

The iPod was more expensive, but they ended up with being able to both buy and rip music.

The size helped using the new smaller drive. But they took off because of their music, I think.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_NOMAD

The Nomad Jukebox is 1.5 inches thick, in 2001 most portable CD players were under an inch thick and there were a few competing for thinnest with the IO-Data HyperHyde being .55 inches thick.

The battery in the Nomad at the time of the iPod launch was four standard AA cells, and you're right that they could last all day if you used Alkalines. You could use NiMH batteries but they were pretty awful; their main selling point in 2002ish was that they had no memory effect compared to NiCADs; not that they lasted as long as Alkalines.

The iPod launched a full 2 years before the iTunes Music store. At launch you could not buy music for the iPod and it still sold like hotcakes.

The iPod had a high capacity rechargeable battery, FireWire (400mbps) and could fit in the front pocket of a pair of jeans. The Nomad Jukebox was the closest thing at the time and it used four AA batteries, USB 1.1 (12mbs) and was praised for passing the jacket test (e.g. fitting in an oversized jacket pocket).

At launch the iPod was not widely bought. It wasn’t it was released for windows and launched the iTunes Store that it got popular.

Check out the sales curve [0] and it didn’t get significant until 2004 when it became the top seller in October and exploded in 2005.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ipod_sales_per_quarter....

In 2002, the first full year of sales, it managed to capture 11% of the market[1] with 475 thousand units and ranking 3rd in a market of only around 4.2 million[2]. That's not nothing.

The market tripped to 12.5 million units in 2003 and Apple's market share continued to grow. By 2009 they had almost 80% of the market.

[1] https://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/Apple_iPod_Number_On... [2] https://www.macworld.com/article/1053499/ipodtimeline.html

For others 'monopsonized' isn't a typo.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony

TIL

The iPad won via software not hardware. More importantly it was keeping everything working from low level firmware to UI seamlessly.

In cars software is far more than the infotainment system. Consider, to increase charge speeds Tesla reolized you should use battery power to heat the batteries as you drive to the charging station. Thinking just in terms of swapping a gas tank for batteries is not going to result in that kind of integration.

Tesla is also looking to integrate super capacitors for regenerative breaking and peak acceleration. Again, that’s a step up from tossing a larger battery pack into a Prius and calling it a day.

Apple was the (second) mover in the currently-dominant space of smartphones with capacitive touch screens, which has also been their most profitable division (IIRC) for most of the past decade. (LG (Prada) beat them to it by a few months but botched the marketing and software.) To wit, Wikipedia's "multi-touch in popular culture" section is divided into "before 2007" and "after 2007": before 2007, multi-touch was the exclusive domain of futuristic sci-fi:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-touch#Popular_culture

Phones are a lot easier to manufacture than cars. There are so many more factors that need to get straightened out in the process.

That's what VW is attempting to do with the MEB platform.

A huge amount of the invention and development in the auto industry happens at the suppliers to the auto makers. It’s not like a car maker needs to start from scratch to design an EV.

Companies are not spending this money because they feel like it. EV drivetrains have a lot going for them. As battery prices drop and infrastructure improves they are only going to get more compelling over time.

In 20 years their could be several suppliers ready to help any car company that survives that long. But, surviving to that point without a high quality EV is going to be difficult.

> and none of the first gen batteries-bolted-onto-existing-chasis type EVs were particularly good

The e-Golf was very well received. It's designed for both propulsion systems. And why not? Sure, skateboard designs are better over all, but electric tech is flexible.

> I'd spend nothing until the EV I can produce is expected to have profit margins on the order of my other vehicles in that class

I think posing the question as a ROI calculation misses context that going forward at some level of risk is how you get the data to model a much better profitability operating point.

Until you produce a few models of EV yourself, how can you know your cost estimate is anywhere near accurate? Add in the uncertainty in the speed of drop in the cost of central components like the batteries and I suspect the uncertainty is sufficiently high to surround both sides of the threshhold where if you set up for a go, you don't know if it will be more or less profitable and the ICE equivalent.

However, if you don't start now, and your competitors do start down the path, then you might end up with a ICE line of cars where your competitors are posting costs well below yours and eating your market share.

But once your competitors demonstrate feasibility, it should be no problem to spin up your own offering, no? You'll be behind by X months, but unless the competitors get an absolute smash hit, thats probably not a big deal.

> I think posing the question as a ROI calculation

Posing it as brain dead ROI calculation like an academic economist would just misses pretty much everything about bringing a new design to market and why companies do things.

The conundrum is. You never make money on a new blue printed design. You make money reselling tweaks of old stuff. But the reality that you need to innovate or eventually go out of business.

Never innovating and eventually going out of business is a valid strategy. That's basically the hedge fund strategy.

But companies that aren't controlled by capitalists never do that because there is nothing in it for the people that run the company. Since that's VW they'll they chose to lose money innovating. So the company stays in business and they keep their jobs and status.

EVs are tweaks though. Nobody buys ICE vehicles. They buy sedans, trucks, SUVs, etc. What the engine uses as an energy input doesn't matter and won't for another decade.

You're thinking of classes of vehicles. Where what I'm referring to is major components, engines, transmissions, suspension, structural design. Those designs tend to be very long lived on the order of 15 to 30 years. Designing from scratch takes a long time and results in teething issues as the design flaws get worked out. The expense and time it takes stretches the ROI out.

Tweaks involve modifying already well understood systems. Risk is limited, return on investment is quick. Allows you to keep making money.

> But companies that aren't controlled by capitalists never do that

I would say that there are a range of companies that are to different mixes of being ruled by accounting vs ruled by innovation. Ironically, I would say the companies most ruled by accounting are the ones with the best foundational resources to make targeted innovation bets (but don't because the ROI doesn't pencil out...).

> I think comparing the switch from gas to EV to internet/mobile phones is quite the stretch. There's nothing really new or different about an EV.

That's a bit hyperbolic. EVs dont require gas. This is a huge seismic shift in the way auto and oil industries were tied at the hip and probably why Tesla is able to disrupt so heavily.

Un-swearing allegiance to Big Oil is the huge gamble.

A working commodity market for things like batteries may or may not happen. You could get a vertical integrator (or several) who monopsonize the key parts. Then what?

Gas cars will still be sold but the threat of legislation is huge. That market could dry up much faster than expected.

The best bet wouldn't be to stay out of the market, but to dabble and know when to strike hard so you can edge out all your laggard competitors.

>> EVs dont require gas. This is a huge seismic shift

Not really.

>> Un-swearing allegiance to Big Oil is the huge gamble.

This is silly.

>> A working commodity market for things like batteries may or may not happen. You could get a vertical integrator (or several) who monopsonize the key parts. Then what?

The batter market will be much larger than cars. I think vertical integration would be the surprise result

Your dismissals have no case. My case is Tesla.

>My case is Tesla

Considering Tesla has a microscopic market share and is financially tenuous...what exactly is your case again?

Big Oil will become Big Energy, and invest in alternatives. They've been doing so for decades. Some will fail, for sure. But these are well capitalized companies and believe it or not have capable engineers and managers who care about the future of the planet (outside of SV if you can imagine that!).

Tesla is on less solid ground than the big makers certainly, but small market share? Tesla is basically the dominant seller in the luxury class in 2018, and that's struggling through the initial ramp up of their model 3.

https://bgr.com/2019/01/09/tesla-model-3-best-selling-car-vs...

>> EVs dont require gas. This is a huge seismic shift

EVs require electricity, they need to be refilled. Sometimes when they are not sitting in your garage. That means that tesla (and others) had to build a bunch of gas station analogs. Seismic only in terms of all the foundations for such things being laid but just a slight evolution.

Tesla only shows one of two things

1) Their profit margins are significantly lower than what traditional manufacturers are willing to sustain for the luxury car market

2) The traditional manufacturers were bad at calculating the profit margin of a luxury EV

Isn't this how competitive markets supposed to work? With entrants competing to offer lower prices to consumers?

Yes. The parent point is that Tesla isn't evidence of EVs being a `seismic shift` or that `betting against big oil is dangerous`.

The general point is that comparing EVs to the internet and/or mobile phones (which became entirely new, and important markets) is ridiculous. In the extreme.

Rephrasing the question somewhat: Who has the bigger advantage?

The car company that spends the most and comes out first?

The car company that waits and is the last to really move to PEV from ICE?

Almost certainly the answer will be somewhere in the middle. A company that can do the shift after most of the hard and expensive work in battery tech has been completed but before their brand is completely ruined and everyone thinks of them as dinosaurs.

> Is there any credible doubt that electric cars are the future?

No, but the future will look very different from what is the current "industry consensus"

Legal side of the question, consumer preferences, and how the developing markets will react to the trend make it all more likely that switch to EVs will not be a drop in replacement for regular cars.

Some conventional car concepts, and even entire car classes simply make no sense if converted 1-to-1 to electric propulsion.

Few current trends will hold in EV era:

1. The global general trend of car turning smaller will continue. Two-seaters are very likely to turn mainstream. Twizzy like microcars will also have a good chance to make debut outside of niche markets.

2. Battery capacity will be becoming more, and more of an irrelevant metric, as people discover that even basic EVs fully satisfy their need for a commuter vehicle. Thus all extensive investments into battery tech and manufacturing, may well go... sideways

3. New manufacturers from the developing world will actually have more headway than established ones as they are there creating brand new markets, while established makers will still be trying to sell electrified versions of "car 1.0"

4. New EVs will themselves see strong competition from "new mobility" and "public transport 2.0"

5. Same will go for two wheel transport. "The 150cc world" has long been thought to be a developing nation only thing, but it is the one currently expanding, and heading West. I am seeing more and more of maxi scooters, and other "Asian type" motorcycle varieties in the West these days. I think that's a very natural consequence of people adjusting to continuously worsening traffic.

I disagree with almost all of this. Cars are getting bigger, not smaller. At least in the US. Very few people are interested in an tiny car suitable only for commuting. They want an all-purpose car that they can use for commuting, shopping, and 700-mile/day vacation drives. People don't trust new brands in cars until they've seen them on the road for a few years. Tiny cars and especially two-wheelers are seen as unsafe by most motorists. That goes back to why bigger cars sell better. Look at the number of people driving around town in full-size SUVs or 4-door pickup trucks.

Most people don’t live in the US. The cars that are popular in the US are already less popular outside. That trend can continue while everyone else moves to smaller electric cars.

Americans still don’t use metric. That hasn’t stopped everyone else in the world.

> Look at the number of people driving around town in full-size SUVs or 4-door pickup trucks.

Unfortunately it is difficult to impossible to get a 2-door standard cab pickup truck any more. And forget a short bed.

I wish, wish, wish I could purchase a new Ford Ranger (ideally 4wd), with a standard cab and short bed - but that's an impossibility. I can't even get something comparable from any other manufacturer.

The only thing I've seen that may be possible is to get such a vehicle as part of a "fleet purchase" - it seems like you can get such a vehicle if you purchase a ton of 'em. But I'd have to somehow sneak one of those in (ie - know somebody buying a fleet and willing to do such a deal for me). So - zero chance there, too.

The sad thing is - Ford sold a version of the Ranger that was fully electric. It's range and hauling capacity were terrible (it used lead acid gel cell batteries), but it was an option back in the early 1990s. They didn't sell many; the few they did went to mainly electric utilities or enthusiasts.

I think you're sadly right. The events that could pull Americans out of mega cars like SUVs and 150's are (IMO) highly unlikely:

1. Cities ban large vehicles in an attempt to fight traffic fatalities, pollution, or congestion.

2. Simple income inequality puts SUVs out of reach for most people where a $10k micro" EV gets the job done.

3. Graduated licensing and insurance makes SUVs economically unwise.

The rest of the world might go for it though. Certainly Europeans are happy with normal sized cars and could go smaller.

> 2. Simple income inequality puts SUVs out of reach for most people where a $10k micro" EV gets the job done.

If that happens, SUVs will become cheaper. It's not like it's significantly more expensive to produce a single SUV vehicle than to produce a smaller car. It's more about market segmentation rather than actual production costs.

> That goes back to why bigger cars sell better. Look at the number of people driving around town in full-size SUVs or 4-door pickup trucks.

The demographic of oversized SUV drivers has been quite stable, and it is very visible in survey data. For the last 20 years, that demographic was just getting older. It is a very generational thing.

On other side, the microcars has been only growing, and given that they were a practically invisible minority just few years ago in USA, their growth can be said to be very strong.

I'd say, this can be translated to China in some ways. There is also a sizeable demographic of people with very strong preference for all kinds of oversized car types, but there is an equally big polar opposite demographic who drive small vehicles by choice. And you have to add people who simply don't have money for anything but a small, mini or microcar. They are a little bit apart from ones driving smaller cars by preference, but they only add to their ranks.

There's some weird stuff here in the USA though with the CAFE rules, which strangely makes building larger trucks the thing to do if you want to pass.

There's a large number of people who want smaller pickups, for instance (I'm one of them - I used to own a 4-banger Ford Ranger - I loved that truck and I wish I never got rid of it) - but they are impossible to find any more. You can't even find 2-door standard cab short bed pickups. It isn't that the demand isn't there for them (the Ranger was a very popular pickup, even at the very end) - but that something about the CAFE rules makes building smaller pickups bad for the total sold fleet in terms of certain EPA stuff (I don't quite understand it completely, but I've read articles about it).

Interestingly too - the size of pickups was increased; what really seemed to have happened, is they "pushed up the models" - ie, what used to be the F-150 (say 1995 vintage) no longer exists. What we see as the F-150, today, is actually the size (and price) of the F-250 of 1995. The F-250 is now the F-350, and so on (it kinda levels off after the 400 class, simply because those and larger were mainly niche sales to individuals, or commercial sales). I don't know if that is truthly real, but if you compare the sizes of the vehicles and options, it feels like something they did.

My current vehicle is a 2004 Jeep TJ (if I could have bought a post-2000 Scrambler I would have); I like the short wheelbase, mainly, and found that I don't really need all the room of a full-sized pickup like I had before. That said, I do sometimes wish I had the room my old Ranger afforded me. There are times I see something on the "side of the road" that I used to pick up, but now I can't (yeah, I'm one of those guys). Oh well - more junk I don't need, right?

I'd love to see smaller vehicles make a come back, because it might also mean smaller pickups and a return to smaller Jeeps and other 4wd vehicles, too! But until those CAFE rules change, I don't know if we'll ever see that here.

BTW - regarding the CAFE rules - from what I recall, they have something to do with the "area" a vehicle occupies, not it's overall size or weight class; I also think it applies only to pickups/"small trucks" - and there's something that plays into the overall sold "fleet" of the manufacturer. Maybe somebody else here could explain it to me better.

>Interestingly too - the size of pickups was increased; what really seemed to have happened, is they "pushed up the models" - ie, what used to be the F-150 (say 1995 vintage) no longer exists. What we see as the F-150, today, is actually the size (and price) of the F-250 of 1995. The F-250 is now the F-350, and so on (it kinda levels off after the 400 class, simply because those and larger were mainly niche sales to individuals, or commercial sales). I don't know if that is truthly real, but if you compare the sizes of the vehicles and options, it feels like something they did.

You can't justifiably make this comparison across such a wide year rage because trucks went from utility vehicles to flagship models in this time and there's been some massive improvements in drive-train tech since the 90s. A lot of that "moving up" is simply technological improvement allowing new trucks to do what old ones couldn't. Trucks have certainly grown to occupy more physical space but their footprints have remained close to the same and their weights haven't increased all that much.

>I'd love to see smaller vehicles make a come back, because it might also mean smaller pickups and a return to smaller Jeeps and other 4wd vehicles, too! But until those CAFE rules change, I don't know if we'll ever see that here.

Agreed. Unless you have some other market you expect to sell them in and consider the US a sideshow you aren't gonna invest the $$ to develop those vehicles.

Bring back the El Camino

Battery chemistry improvements will have far reaching impacts, much more than just in cars. Right now it's just that EVs are what currently is most in demand.

If I were an exec at a car company I would try to hold out as long as possible selling ICE vehicles. The differentiators that justify all the r&d, marketing and bureaucracy of a huge motor company just won't be there for the EV market. We're moving towards a market where cars are much more commoditized.

I imagine we will move towards a few companies creating crash-safe bodies that then get outfitted by lean "OEM"s that put the right size battery in, the right kind of leather seats, puts their badge on it and calls it good.

Existing car companies are too big for this kind of market, so they might as well go out doing what they're actually good at.

> I imagine we will move towards a few companies creating crash-safe bodies that then get outfitted by lean "OEM"s that put the right size battery in, the right kind of leather seats, puts their badge on it and calls it good.

That's exactly VW's MEB platform.

"Volkswagen wants other automakers to use its MEB electric platform": https://electrek.co/2019/02/04/volkswagen-meb-electric-platf...

They're using it for a Golf-sized compact, a sedan, a crossover, and the VW bus reboot. Now they're also marketing it to other manufacturers.

> If I were an exec at a car company I would try to hold out as long as possible selling ICE vehicles.

This is basically Mazda's strategy.

although in Mazda's case they are working on some potentially very profitable upgrades that do not take the same commitment to long-term R&D, like their compression ignition engine:

https://www.just-auto.com/analysis/mazda-bets-big-on-revolut...

Selling an EV to an ICE customer is hard; selling 30%+ better fuel efficiency is easy.

And Fiat, their chairman said they would rather be late than wrong.

I don't want to buy a 20,000 euro battery if I can get by with a 7000 euro one + an ICE that I might run every few months on some longer trip.

That’s one side of it. The other side of the argument is this: I don’t want to pay for a 7000 euro battery and an ICE that has a thousand moving parts and an expensive service schedule.

I just did the 60000km service on my vw with oil change, transmission oil, and 4wd oil. It was 1300 euros. I remember thinking it was my last car with lots of expensive fluid changes...

I’m thinking I’ll get an electric car that does 90% of what I need and then I’ll rent a car if I need to go on a long trip.

I'm sorry, but did I just read that it was 1300 euros to change some fluids? That's absolutely insane. Even buying OEM fluids would only be 100 euros or so, and the labour to do it should be less than an hour, at most.

Yes OEM. Just Engine Oil+filter is 5-600. Slightly less for the 4wd and transmission ones. Hourly work cost in an OEM shop is probably 150€. Maybe even €200. Even in the garage on the corner it's probably 80-90/h.

Tesla maintenance at the vendor is also more than 1000 euro per year.

I have an ICE car and take it to an independent shop. Walking distance. They're mid priced and do good work.

Hybrids are "mainstream and unremarkable" already but non-hybrid cars are still sold. Pure electric vehicles today are at the same place that hybrids were at in the late 1990's.

It's not like mobile phones where the existing market is going to disappear overnight. Cars survive at least 20 years in many cases, meaning gasoline infrastructure is going to be around for a good, long while.

And if you project over the next 2-3 decades it's going to require for electric vehicles to become a majority of the market, it's increasingly possible for the underlying market dynamics to change even more. There is a ton of credible doubt for a future of, "every household has two cars just like 1960's American suburbia, except those cars are electric now".

> Pure electric vehicles today are at the same place that hybrids were at in the late 1990's.

I'd say we're well past that. More like mid-2000s. The "cambrian explosion" will be 2020, when China enforces their EV rules.

>Is there any credible doubt that electric cars are the future?

They seem to be, mostly because of their simplicity compared to an ICE.

But many seem to think we'll gradually keep using more and more EVs until they take over. Much needs to happen infrastructure-wise (hence, politically) before that world is feasible.

> Much needs to happen infrastructure-wise

In what way?

Plenty of utilities have stated that ubiquitous home-charging won't require major modifications to the grid. As residential demand creeps up, some spending and changes will have to be made, but nothing major.

En-route charging infrastructure is getting built up rapidly without public support. Commercial EV demand alone could drive the formation of a very nice charging infrastructure.

I have vague memories of countries running out electricity at peak hours in certain conditions.

In the UK they struggle with water boilers [0]. I'm fairly certain that if we switched all gas cars to electric we'd struggle quite a lot with peak electricity demand, especially during holidays and other events.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_pickup

I always assumed they would be charging overnight when not much else is going on. If we were really smart about it we could adjust the charging according to demand.

That's what is happening already. https://insideevs.com/average-hourly-electric-usage-ev-house...

The thing is that it's cheap to charge at night right now because it's off-peak. With a shift to EV it'll be the opposite.

It doesn't work very well with solar or wind energy since you can't modulate their production.

Obviously solar is out at night but I can't see the problem with wind. I would have thought it was helpful as you could vary the demand according to supply.

>In what way?

Where I live 30% of the price of gasoline is taxes. That's the political, and it changes the economics of EVs in the short term.

>Plenty of utilities have stated that ubiquitous home-charging won't require major modifications to the grid

And I've seen research going the other way, while at the same time we're moving away from burning fossil fuels for base load and going nuclear.

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