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Comment by jseliger | Hacker News Reader

I really hope we'll reach the end of the Oil Age, but as one gets older it becomes hard not to be sceptical of these claims. Seeing is believing.. more evidence.

Tesla keeps outperforming other car makers, even in a difficult environment: https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/02/tech/tesla-sales/index.html.

VW's electrics are about to hit: https://electrek.co/2020/07/13/volkswagen-vw-id-3-electric-c....

Electric semis are moving towards production, by Tesla, Daimler, and others.

Even electric bikes and scooters are still seeing massive sales growth. If you've not tried you, you should.

The change is happening. Long-haul plane flights will remain on fossil fuels for the foreseeable future but the rest of the world is changing, fast.

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What metric are you using to conclude Tesla outperforming other car makers? In 2019,BMW sold ~9 times as many cars, Toyota and VW AG sold 30 times as many. Are we just assuming that its rate of growth will continue indefinitely, even as the other carmakers continue to electrify their line ups?

I do agree that oil is on its way out though.

Old cars will remain in use. Electric car sales, even after the big companies start making them, will only represent, say, 50% of all sales.

The world will be majority electric in probably 30 years... If we're lucky.

I will take the other side of that bet. 15 years top. We're at an inflection point economically and politically. If the political will isn't there (of all the things wrong with China, they are at least moving very fast to electrify transportation), you'll buy electric because it's cheaper per mile (half the cost) than internal combustion. Range is solved (Model 3/Y have ~300 miles of range, S/X almost 400, Cybertruck is anticipated to have 500 miles), charging is solved (Fast DC charging networks, Tesla's primarily with others catching up), it's all up to get the cost down a bit more.

Not related to oil directly, but three California utilities did the math and showed peaker plants are no longer cost competitive against solar backed by batteries [1] [2]. The transition to electrify everything is in full swing.

Disclosure: TSLA investor/owner.

[1] https://www.bloombergquint.com/technology/new-california-stu...

[2] https://library.sce.com/content/dam/sce-doclib/public/regula...

Yes, they’ll sell more as they get cheaper.

Range is solved for many uses. But in my case, I only have a single car. It needs to get me around town, as well as drive me halfway across the US to see my parents for Christmas, in addition to driving me to out-of-the-way places for hiking. Take Big Bend National Park, for instance. The nearest city is two hours away. The park itself is so large that there is a gas station within the park (also, the next gas station is an hour north). I would not expect to find a charging station within two hours of the park. And even if there is, simply replace BBNP with a less popular remote place.

If I had two cars, electric is completely doable, but for one car, it needs to work everywhere, which isn't possible yet.

I am working to get Tesla destination chargers installed in US national parks (Tesla donated chargers to Parks Canada for their parks [1], but US gov bureaucracy is....annoying). And when you say "everywhere", the Tesla Supercharger network is already extensive globally [2]. To install a bank of destination chargers is a few thousand dollars and a few days of construction time. Supercharger stations are a bit more (~$150k, planning, construction, utility support for large amounts of current on demand), but also doable.

Our household is exclusively Teslas (Model S, X, Y) and we drive ~30k miles a year collectively across the country. It can be done without sacrifice.

[1] https://electrek.co/2019/09/06/tesla-donate-electric-car-cha...

[2] https://supercharge.info/map

Tesla can indeed do that though. The super charging network is insanely good.

Edit - take your extreme big bend example. I was able to map it. Try it out at https://abetterrouteplanner.com/. Had me stop at Fort Stockton, TX. You would need to top off in the park, perhaps at an RV site.

That said - how many trips to big bend per year do you do? For most people, you can rent an ICE car once a year for ~$150, and still satisfy 99% of your driving with other options

The average age of a car in the US is 12 years: https://www.statista.com/statistics/261877/average-age-of-pa...

I appreciate your courage. 30 years is a short time when many cars have a far higher lifespan plus for you to win this bet it would mean that US car sales are 100% electric in probably something like 10 years.

I appreciate the kind works, but this is for my kids. Don't mistake desperation for them to have a future for courage. Climate change is going to impact everyone.

There is going to be a tipping point where things will start to change much quicker.

#1 Price of EVs is going down fast and will continue to decline as the price and weight of batteries drops.

#2 As vehicles on the road shifts to EVs, gas stations will become less and less profitable and the number of gas stations will decline, slowly at first, then very quickly in areas where land values are high and there are more profitable uses for land.

#3 As the number of gas stations decline, the single biggest advantage of ICE vehicles melts away and the fact that EVs are charged at home will become increasingly appealing. Gas stations will be around for a long time, but they will be increasingly scarce.

Obviously, we're nowhere close to the above happening now, but if 50% of cars sold are EV, the economics around ICE vehicles will change massively. There are a lot of other bits here too, ICE vehicles require lots of maintenance and dealerships will start to struggle as well with lower sales.

This is going to happen slowly at first, then it is going to happen very quickly once the economics and benefits of owning gas powered cars starts to break down.

I agree with your first 2 points, but the thing which I can't wrap my head around is point 3. The ability to run a cable from your home to your car will always be a physical impossibility for millions of car owners.

From what I can tell the idea of battery swapping stations seems to be dead in the water. And I seem to remember that 15 miles minute of charging is where we are (numbers might be old), meaning many more visits to third party charging stations and each visit taking longer than a liquid fuel pump.

I'd love an electric car, but without a private driveway for personal infrastructure, it just doesn't make sense until the third party infrastructure is ubiquitous or there are huge gains in charge speed, or both. I see the odd one in random places: private underground car parks, KFC, odd hotel car park, but these can only cater to the enthusiast who can also charge at home. Hopefully I'll be wrong sooner rather than later.

This is the main thing holding me back from going electric. I live in a metropolitan area, I park on the street. There's no way for me to get electricity to my car... and there's not a chance in hell I'm fucking around at a charging station for 2 hours in the middle of a commute.

Gas stations also aren't going anywhere. The average age of a car in the US is 12 years old. That means that, even if today we switched to only selling 100% electric cars off the lots, we're looking at 12 years (!) before 50% (!) of the cars on the road are electric. Finally, the current trend of free-or-almost-free charging stations is going to go away very quickly once electric cars become more mainstream -- I wouldn't be surprised if a "charge" ended up costing about as much as a tank of gas. This kills one of the main arguments for going electric in the first place.

> The world will be majority electric in probably 30 years... If we're lucky.

Whether the world is "majority" electric or not won't help the economies of these countries. One way or the other, demand for oil is on decline that is destroying the price of oil. All these countries that depend on fat oil profit margins are going to suffer as their margins decline to zero. In a few places, players are already dropping as margins for oil production have gone negative. (The cost to pump is greater than the price of crude) There are big surpluses now, even while electric cars are still a small percentage of vehicles sold as the mix shifts to electric, demand and prices of oil drop.

For me it's helpful to think not in terms of cars sold, but total miles driven. A sedan occasionally driven by an elderly to run errands and a FedEx truck both count as "a vehicle", but the difference in fuel usage is substantial.

With that in mind, Tesla's semi-truck pre-orders (for Wal-mart et al), Amazon's Rivian pre-orders and USPS' announced mandate to partially electrify its fleet are far more impactful for energy markets.

I don't understand why companies like Toyota and Honda and Hyundai haven't moved on electric. Ford and GM I understand, I don't expect them to do anything anymore, but 10 years ago I thought the Japanese and/or Korean companies would be shipping multiple electric models by now.

Tesla, with so little marketshare and so many fewer dollars in revenue, seems to have made incredible progress.

Toyota is shipping multiple electric models, though. The RAV4 Prime is quite impressive.

because they bet on natural gas. however, the us politics dictate we must go into batteries, even tho they have their own problems ;-)

Hyundai is doing it. They started out with the lackluster Ioniq EV, but the Kona EV has proven to be quite popular, and seems like a very decent, fairly aggressively priced vehicle. It's cheaper than the closest comparable model, the Kia Niro EV, and has a slight edge (e.g. battery warmer except on the cheapest model). Still more expensive than the Bolt, but arguably a better car.

I don't think there are batteries that meet Toyota's durability standards.

Toyota wants their cars to be able to last a million miles in extreme environments (-40 degrees Alaska, +120 degrees F deserts). You can't do that with today's off-the-shelf battery technology.

Gas cars can't go a million miles on one engine, either, and need endless maintenance. EVs already get past a few 100k miles with much less work. EVs will be first to 10^6 miles.

Nissan Leaf introduced ten years ago, over 470000 sold by May 2020 [1], the actual "below $35000 car" from established manufacturer.

The difference? No hype, deliverers promises, no crashes on autopilot - at least widely known [2] vs [3]. Old fashion in this age of attention grabbers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Leaf

[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=nissan+leaf+crash+&oq=nissan...

[3] https://www.google.com/search?q=tesla+crash&oq=tesla+crash

Part of it is culture and general pathologies - the upper management still thinks hydrogen is a workable idea which would be a bit more faie back in the 1990s or 2000s when batteries hadn't caught up.

Another factor is the general innovators dilemma where they have tremendous sunk costs in their old fuel burning ecosystem.

To be fair generally moving from a mature and high scaled to an untested and new approach is expensive and downright reckless looking levels of risk, only vindicated after a success when the unforseen or unbelieved shoe drops.

Yes, I don't deny there are good signs to be hopeful this time.

Also those energy packs, once no longer usable in a car, can still be used for years for domestic solar energy storage.

On the long term, planes will move from fuel to hydrogen, too... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen-powered_aircraft

Elon and other CEO's in the transportation space owe alot of their success to the Obama administration. Massive loans to a variety of electrical car makers and the privatization of space access in the US.

I'm sure any American Government support for electrics pales compared to what the Chinese government is doing but isn't government investment a great thing? That's what every sane country with a car industry should do :-)

Government investing in technology is great. Wish we did more of it.

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