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Comment by sjwright | Hacker News Reader

Even if we get to 99% EV within fifty years, it’s going to be a long while after that before EV takes over 100.000% of ICE.

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There are something like 1.4 billion vehicles in operation world wide and 80 million new vehicles are sold every year.

That is at most 17 years once new vehicle sales are effectively 100% electric which will probably happen around 2030. The value of used gas cars will deteriorate rapidly as the spare parts and repair networks disappear and electric vehicle costs become much cheaper pulling forward demand for the transition to electric.

You making a lot of assumptions that arent born out by current experience. Its not uncommon for 100 year old cars to be registered and driven on public roads today. I personally have registered “daily drivers” from the 1970s and 80s. I actually rebuilt my 1972 motorcycle using factory parts from the dealership. As cars get rare they tend to increase in value, which also increases the return on effort/money put in to them. The “last running ICE car” is going to be a prized gem in a collection, not scrap metal.

and when 90+ precent of the cars on the road are EV - where are you going to get gasoline? or think how much an oil change will cost when motor oil becomes a specialty item

> You making a lot of assumptions that arent born out by current experience

current experience assume easy access to gasoline and motor oil that has been true for 100 years - that will pass in time

I've been wondering if the cutoff is actually much earlier. Say 50% of cars on the road are EV, how many gas stations can continue to run profitably with 50% less customers? Even getting and refining the gas requires massive global supply chains to transport and refine, what happens when there's a 50% drop in customers? Do they lose their efficiencies of scale? Do prices rise substantially as this happens?

I suspect once we reach a certain thresholds it will create other push factors toward EV's and accelerate their adoption.

It is my understanding that refineries cannot change the percentage of gasoline that comes from a barrel of oil. If electric cars become as popular as ICE, either gasoline will be used in other things, or other oil distillates will become very expensive. Likely no more cheap air travel, propane, etc.

I expect we will hit a wall that will inhibit adoption.

I'm not a petrochemist, but I think reforming/cracking is an old technology which allows you to produce syngas and smaller alkanes (methane, propane etc).

Gas stations are an interesting case, because most of them make most of their money selling snacks and beer. The gas money largely goes to the oil company.

I believe this is right, but gas is still the main reason people stop there. If people aren't stopping to buy gas then they will not be making their impulse/convenience purchases and the gas station still loses their profits.

It's somewhat more complicated because many also function as convenience stores, but most convenience stores near me have already died so I doubt that would save them.

On the other hand if you're stopping there for a charge, you'll be spending longer and have more time to consider just popping in for a snack.

That will work for some, most notably the big ones on the side of highways, but I assumed most people would be charging at home, at least for city driving. The earliest adopters will also be the most wealthy that are more likely to have rooftop solar to leverage.

Then they are gonna be safe. s/gas/EV charging

Museum pieces are not what we are talking about here.

I have one, too. Not really as a daily driver, gas mileage just sucks. When the daily driver is about to be replaced one day, it will certainly be by an EV.

I think that the main issue will be maintenance of ICEs in the future. Like try to find a garage that is able to tube carburators these days. It will be a while until we reach that point so.

Exactly why I brought up very early cars and my carb’d motorcycle. They go out of common use but dont disappear anymore than carriages or horses have. Fully urbanised and developed countries have them as a collection or passion project and do silly things like bodge or manufacture specialty parts and fuel blends while reading esoteric haynes manuals on carb tuning. Meanwhile they remain commonplace where it makes sense, small portable two strokes, aircraft, developing nations, etc.

The thought that civilization is going complete displace and lose hydrocarbon based engines and logistics in 17 years... Its optimistic I guess?

Well, you still get OEM parts for Zenith carbs from the 60s. So I guess there will always be a rest of ICE powered cars. I wouldn't mind using green fuel or gas. Which might be the way forward for classics, mainstream I honestly only see EVs and fuel cells in the developed world.

You can DIY mod carb engine to EFI using plethora of cheap user programmable ECU modules and oem/salvage yard parts, its almost Lego at this point in time with everything understood and tons of documentation in the open. Throttle body, MAF, Lambda sensor, one fuel injector, fuel pressure reg, fuel pump, crankshaft position sensor, ECU, laptop to program and tune the ECU, all in all <$500. As a bonus you get to delete distributor and convert to electronic ignition for free. There are even plug&play kits for early troublesome mechanical fuel injection systems in ~$600-1000 range https://kjetkillers.pl/en_US/c/EFI-Electronic-Fuel-Injection...

You dont need top of the line $1700 Haltech elite 2500 or Link G4X FuryX if you arent seriously racing.

~$350 full standalone ecu http://ottomotive.pl/sklep/komputery-standalone/easyecu-2-pl... or http://ecu-shop.eu/produkt/ottomotive-easyecu-micro/

~$150 simple piggyback able to work in standalone mode http://ottomotive.pl/sklep/komputery-piggyback/digital-ecu-c...

Maybe one day! I also have the option to take the EFI from one of the following model years. I suck at electronics, and the wiring is already a royal mess (wasn't me so!).

That would be true if the oldest cars are being removed from the pool, but that isn't how it works. Cars crash, some models wear out, some just have too little resale value to keep going, etc so they're removed from the pool earlier. Other cars are very desirable so they're get around much longer. It's not a perfect circular system.

I was talking about the proportion of the worldwide fleet, not proportion of new sales. Remember, not all vehicles are passenger cars. And not all vehicles always near electric infrastructure.

I don't know about that, consider other tech that got superseded by new methods. It only took a couple of decades for there to be no companies manufacturing CRT TVs any more.

The use cases of vehicles are much wider than the use cases of TVs.

fifty years? no way. But even if you're right, what point are you trying to make?

My point is that there's a long tail of vehicles out there. Whether the fleet transition from ICE to EV is fast or slow, getting the long tail fully transitioned in a similar timeframe is implausible.

Heck, we haven't even transitioned 100.000% away from horses yet.

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