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Comment by vardump | Hacker News Reader

You're right, but for wrong reasons. Internal combustion engines will go away, because electric vehicles' cost curve will destroy them.

IIRC, batteries get 13% cheaper per year, and that means price halves every 5 years or so. Right now 1 kWh of batteries (including BMS) costs about $100. So in 2025 one kWh of batteries will probably cost only $50.

Electric vehicles purchase price will simply be cheaper unless ICE vehicles get subsidies. At that point, for economical consideration you'll need to have pretty compelling reasons to buy an ICE vehicle.

Ultimately even gas station network will be decimated and gradually fade away.

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There are still areas where ICE will dominate simply because batteries aren't practical or economical, despite being a cheaper fuel.

Extreme environments, heavy machinery, etc.

ICE are never going away.

Agreed. ICE will also gain a vintage appeal. I can imagine my grandchildren reacting in wonder to my "classic" jeep cherokee dinosaur juice guzzler.

There will always be collectors and niche uses for ICE vehicles (e.g. backcountry 4x4) even if they get largely displaced by EV

I wonder what will happen to gas prices by then. Will it be feasible to still drive daily in one, or just an hour of fun driving on the weekend?

I'm going to bet that they are going to react more in disgust than in "wonder" at you still owning one of the machines that is ruining their future.

I agree ICE are never going away, but I do think we're seeing the last "innovations" on ICE engines.

No OEM is going to sink billions into R&D when they know everything will go electric in the near future.

So while you may be able to by an ICE Catapillar D10 or a John Deer Tractor or other machinery in 2050, I'd bet it's engine isn't any different to the 2020 version. Same goes for sports cars.

ICE technical advances are in the same territory as advances in CRT, film based photography and coiled coil light bulbs. Nobody took LCD screens, digital cameras and LED lights seriously in the 1990's but here we are today where we only use the new stuff.

Flat panel yield was a problem in the 1990s, every screen had dead pixels. The magic of film grain and a Pentax SLR wasn't that special, kids today don't even know or care. The warm colours of old lightbulbs are forgotten too. Yet there was amazing analog engineering and precision mass manufacturing with these products.

ICE is going that way. The yield on the battery part is being solved, aka range/price. For performance the electric motor has no equal and things like regen are game changing. In time ICE will have specialist applications such as for creating electricity to charge a battery in remote locations, that will be about it. The tech innovation and investment has moved on to electric power trains. The horse has gone and it is too late to shut the gate. Nostalgia is not enough for ICE particularly when the baby boomers have moved on.

"The warm colours of old lightbulbs are forgotten too"

This is obviously not true; when I go to a hardware or home improvement store, there is all sorts of information on the color temperature and purported color reproduction quality of the light bulbs. And "warm white" LEDs that are supposed to imitate incandescent are ubiquitous.

The kind of batteries that we're talking about simply do not operate outside of the 0-35 degree Celsius temperature range. It will never be "ICE to charge batteries" because the batteries will not cycle in those conditions. North of 16C is optimal. The limitation is the chemistry.

If you look at the temperature variance across the planet, you'll realize that there's vast numbers of people for whom batteries are never going to be an option.

"in 2025 one kWh of batteries will probably cost only $50"

https://xkcd.com/605/

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