Why electric cars will take over sooner than you think | Hacker News Reader

Why electric cars will take over sooner than you think

bbc.co.uk

111 pointsKaibeezy388 comments

While I'd love this to be the case, I suspect we'll hit limitations in our energy infrastructure that prevent this from happening quite as soon as the article suggests.

Energy use for cars is substantial, a significant percentage of the energy usage of homes. If that energy use shifts from fossil fuels to home electricity supplies we'll need to substantially increase the energy delivery possible to homes.

The total energy usage shouldn't be much of an issue as we'll move electricity use from refineries to charging batteries – I believe these are at least in the same ballpark. But "last mile" electricity delivery is not capable of supporting an electric car in every household (or even half of households) in many areas of the world.

It will be interesting to see what the solutions to this are. Smart grids where cars cooperate to ensure they don't all charge at the same time, and increased use of public fast charging infrastructure (at sites with better grid connectivity) are the most likely I suspect.

In aggregate total energy generation needs to increase, but last mile delivery simply isn’t a major issue. EV’s don’t need that much energy daily and they can charge at night when residential use is low. Assuming ~100% home charging, 1kW per car * 10 hours ~= 40 miles per day ~= 15,000 miles per year.

Drop that to 80% home charging and you’re at 8 hours x 1kW per car.

However, even if car sales go 100% electric it would take ~15 years before 99% of cars in use are electric. That’s a lot of time to ramp up a measly 1-2 kW of load at most houses.

So if the French population switched to electric, we would need 38m x 800W = 30 gigawatts. We have 58 nuclear cores of ~1GW each as a comparison (80% of our energy) - with the upside that nuclear plants produce by night as much as by day, which causes a lot of issues, therefore 800W between 10pm and 6am might allow a much more efficient (and ecological) use of our nuclear energy.

Market-based pricing for electricity is a big thing for people who have electric cars. It'll become even bigger when vehicle-to-grid/house becomes viable in a large scale (The Ford F-150 Lightning has this feature).

Basically you can program your charger to charge the car when the electricity price is the cheapest and feed the energy back to your house (or the grid) when the price is high.

Yes, this should mean much more efficient use of both the grid and nuclear power, both can provide continuous fixed supply for 24 hours but have had to be overbuilt to match up with the demand curve, which up to now has been extremely uneven.

This assumes that if you have driven 160 miles, it will take 40 hours to get the full charge. It does not look like a good selling point for home charging.

To feel at ease, an electric car owner should have a fast charger at home or very nearby. A Tesla supercharger is 72 kW, which is 2-3 times more a detached house can normally receive from the grid.

On average, it's like 800W. My current home charger and cars support up to 7.7 kW. It's something like 4 hours to go from near empty to full for one, and about twice that for the other one (very different sized batteries). But what that really means is that the charger will click on for a relatively short time, then sit idle for the rest of the day. It's likely that most home chargers won't exceed 40A for a while, as past that needs hard wiring. Though I suspect V2H capable chargers will all be hard wired.

The point is things average out over even hundreds of homes. A single home might be charging at 7.7kW all night long after a long trip to refill a 100kWh battery. However, everyone in the country doesn’t suddenly show up with an empty battery every Friday and then need to fully charge that night.

Which means even if people are installing 5+kW charging stations it’s little different than when everyone started installing AC.

The grid is also built on the assumption that maybe one in five ovens are likely to be turned on at the same time, that doesn’t mean each oven can only be used at one fifth power.

You assume that a car needs to be fully charged each morning. If you for whatever reason drive 160 miles each day, but may only recuperate about 40 miles (in rough worst case of say ten hours at a home Level 1 [standard US electrical outlet] charge over night), you still need only need a "full charge" on a 300 mile battery every two days or so.

The economics shift even more the closer you get to the mean daily commute of 32 miles roundtrip. For instance if you travel 45 miles daily and only charge 40 each night you'd need nearly two full weeks before your range dipped below 200 miles. At that rate you'd need a full charge maybe once every month and a half (assuming of course that you have no other sources of topping up your miles in a month in a half, such as convenience chargers while shopping or work sponsored chargers during the work day).

In the Netherlands the average car drives 32 kilometres per day. You can easily charge that much at home.

I wouldn't be so sure about that, but I tried to look up some numbers and couldn't find any for the capacity planning of last mile delivery. 10 kWH per day is about the average electricity use per home in the Netherlands, so the aggregated impact will definitely be huge. Especially as more an more homes are switching to electric heating and cooking (until recently pretty much all homes here used natural gas). So household electricity consumption will take a huge leap in the coming decade(s), and I would think this will also affect last mile.

Also take into account standard home chargers here are 16A@230V=3.7kW, but 3 phase chargers that can do 3x16A, 10kW are gaining popularity. Only if the chargers remain 'dumb' and all start pulling max current when everyone gets home at dinner time that will be an issue here for sure

Daily electricity is highly correlated. Consider, people rarely microwave anything at 3AM. This also means houses get wired to allow multiple loads at the same time as you might only turn on the Microwave for 5 minutes a day so that’s adding 0.083kWh to your daily total, but you don’t turn off the lights just because you want to use 1.2kW heat up some leftovers.

Further, several people in a neighborhood might all microwave something during the same commercial break. Unlike most things the grid is built for peak instantaneous demand. As such distribution needs to account for huge local demand spikes. EV’s increased demand will result in some new distribution infrastructure, but it’s mostly regional not last mile.

On the other hand, solar panels on the roof are also taking off. That's probably not enough for heating, but might be for everything else.

If people get obscene bills for charging their cars during peak hours or find themselves having to adjust plans around charging that will stunt EV adoption.

> The total energy usage shouldn't be much of an issue as we'll move electricity use from refineries to charging batteries – I believe these are at least in the same ballpark.

I wouldn't be so sure. Back of the napkin estimate: for every 2M electric cars, you need 1 more nuclear power plant.

  - approx. 18 kWh per 100 km for a Tesla
  - let's say 15000 km per year (close to the average in France for example)
  - total consumption over a year for 1M cars is roughly 2.5 TWh
  - total production of a nuclear power plant varies, but is roughly 5-7 TWh per year on average

That's a lot of extra power if you want to replace all the cars. For example in France, that'd be the equivalent of 20 extra nuclear power plants, or the equivalent in nuclear + solar + wind + coal/gas/...

Interesting calculation! But the point of shifting electricity usage from refineries to car batteries still stands: Apparently it's 1.5 kwh per liter of gasoline [Edit: this might not be accurate, or might be mainly related to drilling, see comments below]. At 7-8 liters/100km we've already covered 11 kwh.

Edit: And 7-8 liters/100km for a Tesla seems optimistically low. But maybe 18kwh is also optimistic.

I can't edit my own post anymore, but I've looked into it more. Total average production should not be an issue, at least in Europe. However peak power could be and will require some care.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27361065

Sweet. Maybe we invest in travelling wave reactors or electromagnetic rod / saltwater harness designs.

Or we just start building more nuclear infrastructure on less safe designs (although not sure why we should do that when we have safer designs available), given that the consequences of not pushing nuclear immediately vastly outweighs the consequences of pretending it's less safe than the status quo.

Those numbers are why I’ve always thought cleaner fuel options were the real future here (like natural gas and hydrogen).

> Energy use for cars is substantial, a significant percentage of the energy usage of homes. If that energy use shifts from fossil fuels to home electricity supplies we'll need to substantially increase the energy delivery possible to homes.

Will it, though?

Earlier this year I had 12kW of PVC installed for about A$7k. That nets me, this time of year (3 weeks away from the winter solstice in AU) about 35kWh a day. In summer I expect an average of 50kWh / day.

A Tesla 3 standard has a 50kWh battery - providing 350 km driving range. The 75kWh long range version provides 500km range.

So worst case (winter) A$7k of residential grade panels can provide charge for 200km / day - and that's on a Tesla, which is definitely a premium EV in this part of the world. (A vanilla model 3 is A$63k - the long range version A$78k.) Add in off-peak grid charging (say A$0.10 / kW) and we're really knocking ICE out of the game.

For a lot of people, not just in the same part of the world I'm in, factoring in some panels on the roof would be a proportionally small capex delta, but make the TCO hugely more compelling.

The grid is sized to handle peak loads in the early evening. Electric cars tend to be driven during peak hours and charge at night so while total energy used (kWh) will go up substantially, the grid itself does not need to handle substantially more power (kW) than it currently does.

Car charging can also be scheduled to happen off peak if possible.

> suspect we'll hit limitations in our energy infrastructure that prevent this from happening. Energy use for cars is substantial, a significant percentage of the energy usage of homes.

I'm not sure this is true. I've been driving a electric car in the US for multiple years now (approximately 50 miles of driving daily), it's only added about ~15% to my electric bill, if that.

Charging the car only requires ~800 to ~1400 watts, is done for about 10 to 12 hours all overnight, and can be done on any regular household AC outlet. If your home has the electricity for a Desktop Gaming PC, or any Window Air Conditioner, then it already has enough electricity for a EV car. Similarly, if plugging in a new Window AC doesn't bring your grid service down today, a new EV shouldn't either.

Obviously in aggregate, utilities will need more capacity. But it's not that much more, it should only be an issue in places where the grid is already unregulated, broken, underserviced and/or under-maintained today -- only an issue in places where brownouts/blackouts already regularly happen (places like Texas, California, maybe NYC).

Last mile infrastructure can be upgraded incrementally. It doesn't have to be upgraded immediately. The cost won't be unmanageable when it does get upgraded.

In addition, solar panels are localizing production and already taking load off the grid. Smart charging is already here and can be adjusted to charge when the sun is shining and wind is blowing hardest.

The future is here already it's just not widely distributed, but the capital to do all of these things is cheap and readily available.

I don't see any insurmountable challenges here.

> and readily available.

Capital is readily available for the middle-class people living in middle-to-high-income countries (most of those people also happen to be white), the rest of the world (mostly non-white people) don't have easy access to capital in order to improve their electric grid.

I'm not sure exactly where you are referring to with your ominous vague racially charged allusions, but if it's Africa or Asia then China is already supplying capital, know how, materiel and building out infrastructure.

Those are the same people that will be getting electric cars in the next 10 years. The "rest of the world" buys the used cars the rich people are done with, so they won't be seeing electric cars for 15 years or so.

> The total energy usage shouldn't be much of an issue as we'll move electricity use from refineries to charging batteries

Don't forget about the taxation aspect - as the sales of petrol and diesel fall, so does the tax revenue.

In many countries tax represents over half of the end-user price of petrol and diesel. How will governments replace this as the revenue drops away?

"Don't forget about the taxation aspect - as the sales of petrol and diesel fall, so does the tax revenue."

I'm amazed this myth persists for those in floating currency areas.

Money doesn't stop at its first use. Instead the money is spent on something else, which is taxed.

For every $100 a government spends it will get $100 back for any positive tax rate. It's a simple geometric progression, and looks just like a stone skipping across a pond.

Do the maths and you'll see what I mean.

What stops that tax turning up instantly is that it takes time to spend the money - sometimes a long time. Which is what we generally call 'savings'.

None of that matters though in a sovereign currency area. Savings are functionally voluntary taxation - which from the other side of the balance sheet are called 'borrowing'.

Once you have the causality straight in your mind fearing running out of tax revenue is like fearing you're running out of water in the hot tub just because you've turned the pump on.

Regarding tax revenue. In many states in the U.S. they “simply” nail you on your yearly registration fee. It’s an awful system as it’s punitive at the moment. I now pay over $200 a year on that fee due to it being an electric vehicle. My car is 2 years old with < 12k miles on it. I pay way more in taxes than I would with a petroleum fueled car.

They could start actually taxing companies.

In the Netherlands, extra taxes (on top of VAT) levied on fuel and vices like tobacco and alcohol put about 11 billion euros a year into the state coffers. Meanwhile, big tech companies funnel money through the country to tax havens. Uber had 50 shell companies in the Netherlands to dodge taxes on 6 billion in revenue (https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-tax-avoidance-50-dutch-...).

> Don't forget about the taxation aspect - as the sales of petrol and diesel fall, so does the tax revenue.

That depends on whether people put the money they save in a savings account, or actually spend them on other taxable goods and services. And it depends on the tax rate on fuel and electricity in that country. Fun fact, the consumer tax on electricity is much higher than that on fuel in Norway (and the fuel tax is pretty steep already here). But electricity is so cheap that it's still extremely affordable. And obviously, an EV will spend much less money on electricity, so yes, the revenue from tax on electricity will be lower.

But there's another side of the equation. Norway recently found out they could save millions on reduced ventilation requirements when building a new tunnel. It's also likely that health care costs will be reduced, although that's harder to measure.

IMO, governments should just increase other taxes if they have budget troubles due to the shift to EVs. Preferably higher taxes on the wealthy. Then we can slowly work on finding ways to tax according to actual road use. Maybe more toll roads, or maybe a tamper-proof device that measures and reports miles driven.

Increase road tax on currently subsidised cars and invest in public transport infra?

In the US today usage based taxes such as gas fund only half the money spent on roads. They should probably add in some sort of usage tax based on weight/size/emissions/noise that will apply to all vehicles.

By taxing electric cars. (Back to) taxing per KW/HP or just raising the other taxes, I guess. Why would they give up that income?

Tax on electricity?

Where I live it's unlikely that the next car won't be an electric. Everyone I know who bought a car the last year bought an electric. My only concern is that I need a practical car, not something like a Tesla. I need ground clearance, for example (lots of snow here). It looks like that won't be a real problem, or at least it's getting there. At worst it would be a chargeable hybrid.

Charging won't be much of a problem. Chargers everywhere, it seems (last summer's holiday was a long car trip through half the country, due to Covid), and I have 400V 3-phase at home (as most do in this town) so I can get a fast charging station.

And we have charging stations at work already.

I imagine the situation is different in the US, longer distances, for example.

Hyundai Kona EV is a good choice, as is the VW ID.4.

There's snow here too and I do just fine with a Hyundai Ioniq.

Also: fast charging at home is completely useless. A 22kW AC charger (which is around 7-11kW actual for most EVs) will charge pretty much any car from 0-100 overnight.

Just a normal plug with 2kW is enough unless you come home with an empty battery every day.

The Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV might suit you. It's a 4WD SUV. You get 50km of battery range before the petrol motor kicks in, so it has a lot of the advantages of electric without paying all that much more for it.

That new electric F150 looks pretty good for that use case.

The ID.4 has 8 inches of ground clearance.

Ford has an all-electric SUV now.

A HVDC cable from Sahara to America would loose 50% of power, but still would charge your car overnight. As solar install itself is around 50% of it's cost, it's probably cheaper to do so in a dessert than over your house.

HVDC is expensive, solar panels are cheap, so it's usually cheaper to keep the solar panels local even if they're much less efficient than they are elsewhere.

https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2020/12/27/the-future-of-...

This is one of the places where hydrogen might actually be viable.

Use a huge excess of solar power to generate hydrogen, transport hydrogen via oceans to ports, store it and convert it back to electricity locally when needed.

This more than anything else is why I am anticipating a lot of electric cars being tiled in PV.

Putting the cells on the cars is absolutely not going to fully charge them in most cases, and the same logic that leads to comparative advantage says to do this after better locations already have PV, but such cells will get 50-90% of the average daily requirements of the typical driver depending on location, season, and car size, which in turn will reduce infrastructure needs elsewhere.

In any case, getting 5-10 extra miles just by parking your car under sunlight while you are shopping would be nice!

The question is the cost.

The amount of panels you can put on a normal car is around 1-2 square meters max. That's not enough to give any kind of measurable range advantage.

The thing they're good for is running AC in the car when it's parked, without affecting the range. (Prius does this, I think the new Ioniq 5 has this)

It would be 5-10 miles parked outside for the day, not just while you were shopping.

> The total energy usage shouldn't be much of an issue as we'll move electricity use from refineries to charging batteries – I believe these are at least in the same ballpark.

That would interesting to figure out. How can we do that?

Not all refineries will cease production. How many?

Swappable batteries. If the industry creates a standard you could swap full battery packs in seconds at existing gas stations.

Trust is the issue that needs to be resolved with swapping batteries. I'd compare it to a parachute, would you use a parachute packed by some rando you met on the street?

If I go in to swap a battery, what guarantee do I have that the previous user didn't drive it into a rock and puncture a cell? Can I be sure they didn't leave malware in the battery's software?

If all these checks are being done at the swap station, will it still be cost-effective?

Also: Modern EVs use chargers up to 350kW and have 400-500km range. A 15-20 minute break every 500km shouldn't be a dealbreaker for anyone.

I was about to say that I don't see this happening due to the way batteries are being built into the chassis.

Then I looked it up and it's being done right now with the Nio with a 3 minute battery swap in China. https://youtu.be/hTsrDpsYHrw?t=382

580km / 360 miles range. I'm very impressed!

> The total energy usage shouldn't be much of an issue as we'll move electricity use from refineries to charging batteries

So you'll have to build and bring online a whole new set of power plants in place of all those refineries then.

I think this is definitely a very large issue and no trivial undertaking.

We've got a good 15-20 years before EV density becomes an issue in most countries.

Japan, with their 1-phase 110V network won't be converting to EVs soon.

But here in the Nordics pretty much every house has 3-phase 230V and already wired for electric saunas and multi-kilowatt heaters. Adding a plug to charge an EV is a non-issue.

In NL, they are hard at work upgrading the energy network everywhere; newly built neighbourhoods already have 4x the electricity capacity they would previously have. This is in part down to the shift to electric vehicles, in part due to the reduction or removal of dependency on natural gas (for both climate and political reasons, we get ours from Russia), and in part due to people generating their own power via solar panels. A report is at [1], tl;dr they need and probably will invest billions in the power grid to be nationally carbon neutral by 2050.

I mean the nihilist in me says it'll be far too late by then and we'll be well into a cataclysmic chain reaction and consequent extreme climate shift, but hey.

https://www.netbeheernederland.nl/_upload/Files/Samenvatting...

> It will be interesting to see what the solutions to this are.

I imagine that battery prices are going to be driven down by the cars, and come into their own in terms of supporting old grids

A solar farm is capable of producing 350 Mwh per year/per acre and it takes 18 kwh to power a Tesla for a 100km ride [1], so a single acre of solar power can produce enough energy for 19,000 of those rides, or power 190 cars (10.000 km per year) just by putting a bit more than the roof of their parking lots in solar cells!

Maybe you don't need that much of a grid update at all, and even maybe quite the opposite if you consider that you car could power your house indirectly using solar power. Best case, you'd be actually the grid even less than you do with out an electric battery in your garage...

Where are you finding that an acre of solar will generate 350 Mwh of power?

My local solar power plant is nowhere near that kind of output.

http://newsroom.fpl.com/2019-03-28-FPL-announces-plan-to-bui...

> Maybe you don't need that much of a grid update at all

Besides the tons of batteries that are needed?

> if you consider that you car could power your house indirectly using solar power

Well besides the times where you drive your car. Also the car's batteries wouldn't last very long due to constantly being cycled.

This misses the point. The issue isn’t the generation, it’s the last mile grid infrastructure to the huge portion of homes/apartments where solar isn’t feasible.

Combined with the increase of conditioning power consumption it might happen sooner than later.

> they don't all charge at the same time,

Battery swaps

It's a little disheartening to read most of the comments in this thread. They sound a lot like the complaints about the lack of the tank stations during the transition from horse power to ICE.

> They sound a lot like the complaints about the lack of the tank stations during the transition from horse power to ICE.

How so? With ICE engines you just bring an extra tank of fuel if you’re going somewhere without fuel stations.

There's more power sockets than fuel stations

Read the comment. We’re talking about locations that don’t have gas stations. There won’t be gas stations or sockets. Cross country highway trips on two lane roads, back country driving, etc.

Yeah exactly. We have a very large and robust electrical grid, with amazing geographical coverage.

Is recharging on 110 even a thing? Even on a 50A RV socket you are talking 12hr recharge.

The first larger production of ICE automobiles was in 1888, with Benz.

The first automobile with a wider impact was Ford Model T, 1908, 20 years later.

And car ownership only took over after WW2, some 60 years after Benz.

With EVs I guess Prius was the Benz moment and Tesla was Model T. Even with today's accelerated rate of tech progress, I'd be surprised if EV are 50-50 with ICEs faster than 2035.

WW2 is an important mark in that history because following it was a massive infrastructure investment in roads intended primarily for cars, and consequentially investment in gas stations and fast food along such roads.

EVs don't need to reinvent the car-primary road, nor do they need to reinvent fast food and road tourism. A lot of comments here and elsewhere get bogged down in problems of reinventing the gas station but get stuck on trees and miss the forest that we don't need to reinvent the business model (gas stations made their highest margins by partnering with convenience stores and fast food operators and encouraging longer, healthier breaks), nor do we need to reinvent the electric grid (maybe we'll need investments into it, but not substantial reinvention), nor do we need to match the volume of existing gas stations because home charging shifts the economic equation drastically.

We don't need another WW2-level event "in forty years" to rapidly shift to EV. We may only need to see the right "snowball" conditions, and I feel like they are more likely than not, and possibly are going to be surprisingly faster than a lot of people expect.

If only EVs are sold by 2030 (as current manufacturers mostly expect) there will be a drastic shift in vehicle supply. That may potentially snowball into larger supply issues with the overall ICE supply chain. As suppliers leave ICE part niches, that will open holes in repair and maintenance supplies, increasing ICE vehicle maintenance costs [ETA: which will have snowball effects on the prices of used ICE vehicles].

I also think that even brief hiccups in gasoline demand will see prices spike, in turn causing more hiccups and shifts in demand. As patterns of demand changes shift, low margin gas stations will get out of the game entirely. Higher margin stations become more likely to hedge their bets with fewer pumps and more electric chargers (and continued/increased reliance on convenience storefronts, grocery stores, and fast food margins). Range anxiety for ICE vehicles will return with a vengeance. I think/hope it will happen a lot faster than people expect given the inherent complexities of gasoline supply chains and how much of "last mile" of gasoline pumps and stations are already operating on drastic, razor thin margins (and have been for decades).

(Also, the EV1 in 1996 might more accurately be the "Benz moment" than the Prius.)

True, we have a lot of the infrastructure in place. But most of the brands that think they will switch all production to EVs are luxury brands.

A. Estimates are almost always too optimistic.

B. Most cars sold in the world are not luxury cars.

I think EVs will snowball, especially with features that ICEs can't match such as:

1. frunks

2. flat floors and more interior space overall

3. wheels that can be placed closer to the corners of the car (better maneuverability, so easier turning, easier parking, better stability, etc)

4. reverse charging that can even be used to power up entire homes, etc.

Unfortunately inertia is a powerful force, that's why I think critical mass will happen around 2030 and 2035 would be where I see sales of ICEs and EVs becoming equal. And then we need to replace the cars in use, keeping in mind that it takes 10+ years on average for cars to be retired. More like 20+ years in developing countries.

> But most of the brands that think they will switch all production to EVs are luxury brands.

I don't that's the case any longer. The article here ends with something of a summary, but at this point all of the German manufacturers are saying that they are going all in on electric (across every brand/model) by the end of this decade. Swiss manufacturer Volvo says they are expecting nearly the same. The Korean conglomerate (Kia, Hyundai) has been saying something similar (albeit they still seem to be hedging with hydrogen fuel cells a bit). Japanese manufacturer Nissan has been preparing for the switchover more than most and also expect to be all electric by the end of the decade. (Except for Nissan of America which has gone so crazy the board threatened to rebrand them back to Datsun in order to jettison them.) Honda has said they expect nearly as tight a shift over. (Though Honda of America isn't paying attention either.) GM is hedging its bets but still expects to be 75% electric by the end of the decade. (GM has always made a point since the original Volt of focusing its electric efforts in the non-luxury Chevrolet brand first.) That's all just off the top of my head, and covers a huge gamut of non-luxury brands.

A reflection of how the article is shallow and has no discussion on the very real challenges adoption faces, just an “it’s just like the internet” analysis featuring an s curve.

I agree. There is a great old talk from Rory Sutherland called “Life Lessons from an Ad Man” [0] which is worth a watch in regards to our perception of value. Especially relevant is the anecdote about improving the train journey between Brussels and London, which is toward the start of the video.

Edit: I guess my unstated point is that we should be looking to improve the user journey, not necessarily match the existing technology. For example, I take public transport because I can read or even sleep, and not because it’s faster or cheaper than taking my own car.

[0] https://www.ted.com/talks/rory_sutherland_life_lessons_from_...

I want electric vehicles, but I don't want all the auxiliary Internet connection/tracking that will come with it. Fuck all that shit.

Not all EVs have an "auxiliary internet connection". My car only has a SIM for an one-way SOS button.

Tesla is the only one that has it in all cars, because they use their fleet to train their neural networks.

I'm pretty sure you can opt to not pay the monthly fee to have an internet connection in your car, if you get a Tesla.

I'm not familiar with the option, but that doesn't sound like it garauntees that Tesla won't still use it for their own purposes.

There's an option to limit data sharing as well.

Unfortunately this has become a standard even for ICE cars and producers are considering this a selling point. "Hey Google, feed me with sponsored POIs as I drive through the city". Just imagine... an unskippable ad on the dashboard touchscreen.

Just don't buy a Tesla. There are other options.

If you've seen any local governments try to get something like light rail projects moving in a metro area that doesn't have it, maybe you'd understand.

Infrastructure problems aren't unsolvable because of lack of technical ways to accomplish, its usually other issues not related to the solutions.

Gotta realize that 99% of people like drama, love to see others fail and say they said so, and that's OK. Much like how Tesla no longer has a press department, we should just focus on the work and people will catch up eventually.

I fully agree with you. We also tend to stick to old paradigms, like "the grid will not take it", ignoring that you could build a much more flexible grid and distributed electric generation infrastructure.

Smart Grids have been a thing for a good 20 years now. They're actually a reality in many many countries, people just don't know it since it doesn't affect their everyday lives in any way.

Mostly issues about EV charging aren't technical, but political.

Which isn't even that expensive.

The charging story is still far from ideal. Even if a large-scale supercharger network is developed and deployed it still takes far too long and needs to happen far too frequently to be convenient is many places in the USA.

I was idly watching a Hasan Piker Twitch stream this weekend when he was in Austin, TX and most of the time in a rented Tesla they were very concerned with finding charging stations and the range predictions were dropping far quicker than expected in the hot Texas sun. Also, due to it being a livestream, the supercharging stations were a liability because of the time needed to charge and how "fans" could locate and cause security problems. Gas stations even 100 years ago operated faster than superchargers promise to in the foreseeable future.

But isn’t that a niche case? I’d have thought the vast majority of car usage is short local trips and regular commutes, not road trips. If you’re able to charge the car at home that should cover most usage.

People expect vehicle to work even in the one-off cases like long trips. You can't just design for the median trip.

It’s not the median, it’s the 90th percentile of car miles. And people do have alternatives for longer trips - either using charging stations, renting a different vehicle with better range characteristics, or mode switching to another form of transport, like a train.

This is where someone always chimes in with ‘but what about people who live in rural Idaho and need to drive eighteen hours to a hospital once a quarter and they need to tow their boat when they do it’

There are outliers who have specialist niche needs. But the vast majority of trips taken by the vast majority of drivers are short range and start/terminate at home.

Most electric car owners don’t rely on public charging infrastructure at all.

And with charging stops once you embrace it the dynamics are different:

With fossil fuels you first drive to the pump, fill up, then take a break for restroom, food, ...

With an EV you drive up to the charger, connect and do the other things. A while later you come back and drive on.

Also instead of a long charging stop when the battery reaches 0% you can plan for multiple short stops, which is positive for concentration. (Given enough chargers)

> Most electric car owners don’t rely on public charging infrastructure at all.

Right. For commute usage you charge over night at home and/or at the office while working and can completely avoid the weekly (or whatever) detour to the gas station completely.

>>Most electric car owners don’t rely on public charging infrastructure at all.

Will this be the case going forward? I wouldn't consider apartment dwellers a niche case. It is a lot to ask for apartment building to install chargers at every parking place.

I wonder if most families with an electric car have a second car with an ICE.

I can see having one car that’s really only good for local driving, but if I were considering whether to go all electric “this car can handle 90% of what your old car could do” doesn’t sound like a great pitch.

This reads like the comment of someone who has never lived outside of the coasts. It's very common to do 300+ mile road trips every other month in the Midwest on a whim. Yeah, the most number of miles might be those commuting from bedroom communities/suburbs, but the important metric in this case is what percentage of people also take long distance trips and how often. I don't even live in a rural area, but I don't think I could reasonably own an EV as an only vehicle and don't really expect to for a decade.

People buy for optionality. Otherwise pickup trucks and second homes wouldn’t be so popular.

Very true the average day is drive to work> drive from work to home maybe stopping at a supermarket on the way.

People without a ton of disposable income who can’t afford to rent a car for fun don’t want a car that only fits _most_ of their use cases.

If I could (hypothetically) buy an electric car that’s affordable, cheaper to run, more reliable than an internal combustion car, less environmentally damaging, and covers most of my normal usage, I’d be on it like a shot, even if it means I have to figure out another solution for occasional stuff like house moves and driving holidays, and I think a lot of other people would too.

I think the biggest blocker right now is just price. It seems like electric cars are either very expensive or not very good.

Charging networks are definitely an important part of the overall solution but I don’t think they’re the whole story. I think if enough people have EVs, charging networks will inevitably follow, rather than the reverse.

Edit to add: I’m assuming I can charge at home in this scenario, which I realise may not be easy for many people (eg in apartment blocks). I would have thought that’s a somewhat different problem from charging networks, though.

Price will block you again. You pay as much insurance and tax on cars that sit around doing nothing as cars you use every day. You have to drive the extra car a lot more than the average person to make it worth having a second car sitting around for rare trips. Renting is expensive enough that the rare trip has to be very rare before it is worth it.

For most people the oversized SUV that can do anything they need is a more economical choice than a similar SUV and even a "cheap beater" car for most of their driving - and of course most people would demand both cars be expensive nice cars.

People without a ton of disposable income probably aren’t buying electric vehicles today (or brand new cars in general). The industry will cater to those folks in the medium term, I think; but for now I think it’s just one of the trade offs of being an “early adopter”.

At least in the US, this is very regional. As an example, I don’t use a car at all for commuting or short local trips because I live in a dense urban area. When I do need a car it is almost invariably for those cases where range and recharging are a material limitation, so I have an ICE.

In the agricultural regions of the US where I’ve lived in the past, distances are intrinsically long even in the small cities and infrastructure sparse. Real shopping may be 70+ miles away (but road speed is 80-85 mph so not that long). In other non-coastal city I’ve lived it was normal for people to do a 300 mile (each way) drive twice a month between cities. While more niche, a lot of working trucks in the agricultural and mining regions of the West are modified to increase their range — almost twice the range of the F-150 Lightning on a single charge. There is little charging infrastructure at all, and what exists is clearly positioned to target tourists from the coast, not the driving patterns of people that live there. There may be charging stations in these towns one day but I suspect it won’t be for a long time and range will still be a very real issue for a significant percentage of people.

There is a chicken-and-egg problem with the lack of range and lack of charging stations that make them unusable in many parts of the US. If no one buys EVs then no one will build charging stations, and the lack of range in regions that really need range means they aren’t a practical vehicle absent ubiquitous charging stations in places that probably won’t pay for the investment.

That is my usage pattern yes but then I’m used to having one car satisfy both the use cases. In many developed countries one could rent a car for road trips, but not in India unfortunately. There are some rental companies but it’s mostly a hit and miss and when it misses the experience is a shitshow.

While I can afford to buy two cars it’s a big capital expenditure that’s extremely under utilized.

And so my wait continues, looks like I’ll be stuck with ICEs for at least a half a decade.

Agreed.

Half a decade seems too optimistic to me though - lack of charging facilities at residences, current power grid cannot support any significant usage of electric cars, little space for charging stations in cities etc.

Though if fuel taxes & prices continue to rise in current fashion, ICE might become too costly to use.

Well, the use-case I mentioned above was not a road-trip but just driving around Austin doing errands. Many places in Texas are routinely 30+ miles away from each other.

All recent electric cars can manage multiple 30+ mile trips on a single charge. Bad privacy around supercharger stations due to streaming is definitely an edge case.

For particularly short trips I would hope that even smaller forms of transportation like bikes and e-scooters would gain some ground.

Looks like a huge percentage of car traffic in the most congested cities is under 3 miles: https://cal.streetsblog.org/2019/09/16/bikes-and-scooters-co...

I use public transport or bikes for local trips, the car is for all the exceptions.

> due to it being a livestream, the supercharging stations were a liability because of the time needed to charge and how "fans" could locate and cause security problems.

Doesn't seem to be something most car owners would have to contend with.

Destination chargers seem a key point. If I could reliably add significant charge while spending time in a store/restaurant I’d probably never worry about range.

Destination chargers will be a huge thing for people on road trips.

If your Mom & Pop coffee shop/restaurant adds a few 22kW AC chargers on their parking lot, those will show up in the "find me a charger" navigators in thousands and thousands of EVs. This _will_ drive new business.

If I have the choice of stopping at Generic Station Chain Alpha to charge vs. a smaller shop on a road trip or vacation, I'll always pick the latter one.

Doubtful most places will have 22kW AC chargers. Most cars won't be able to accept that much AC. That's a 120A circuit by itself on the grid side, and most cars max out at 40A or less right now, because it's more power than that is usually supplied by DCFCs instead (makes the onboard power electronics much cheaper, and you can go to higher power for DCFC easily).

For 120 volt 1 phase land, yes. Over here it's a semi-basic 3x32A 230VAC connection.

Some cars only use one phase (1x32A = about 7kW) Others use all three phases in different formations, usual charging speed is 7-11kW. I think only a few specific Tesla S models and the Renault Zoe can utilise the full 3x32A.

But yea, its mostly a cost-cutting maneuver on the car manufacturer's side to limit the onboard AC charger.

True, but it doesn't look like we're trending towards an entire parking lot/garage of chargers at the mall/grocery/theater/rec site/etc.

It'll probably trend like WiFi did. Initially it was seen as a luxury to draw people in. Nowadays people get pissed if you don't have it.

I doubt we will have dedicated "gas" stations for electricity in the future. Most car parking spaces will come equipped instead.

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It’s not like they all need to be fully functional at the same time. I could see it being only a few are active at a time and it rotates the load as vehicles fill or leave.

Supply is well matched with current demand.

The Tesla "charging station" I've personally been to was a few chargers on the edge of a supermarket parking lot (I live in rural-ish Michigan).

> Also, due to it being a livestream, the supercharging stations were a liability because of the time needed to charge and how "fans" could locate and cause security problems.

Ahh yes, a problem that will certainly affect the majority of Tesla owners.

Fast swap batteries is the solution.

I remember a company years back was taking this approach.

If we standardize on battery size/format. Then it becomes possible to drive up. Have a machine swap out the battery, and have you off again in less time than fuelling at a gas pump.

It also removes my biggest concern about owning an electric car—the replacement cost of its batteries.

Pick any random apartment complex in the US and pretend 80% of the residents there own an EV, not a hybrid, but a fully electric vehicle.

Where and how do they charge it?

If you've lived in an apartment complex, think how often they upgrade anything, much less something they may not be able to charge (financially) residents appropriately.

I don’t know whether on-street parking is as common in the US as it is in Europe, but the solution being quite widely adopted in the UK is to utilise the “leftover” current from when street lighting was converted from sodium to LED to retrofit EV chargers to the lamppost. It works really well up to about 7 kW I think. This is then supplemented with inner city rapid chargers at 22-50 kW.

Not as cheap as charging from the wall but (in London at least) other incentives like free on street parking and no congestion charge more than make up for it.

Any actual detail?

A "normal " sodium street lamp is (was) usually 250 W while a "modern" LED lamp is usually 50-70 W, and typically posts are 25-30 meters apart.

So, you have (roughly) 200 W "excess" per post, you need 35 lamps to leds replacement to make 7 kW and this would mean 35 posts at 30 meters each = roughly 1 km in length.

How many (electric) cars will be parked along this 1 Km stretch of a street? I would say as much as 200 (once the conversion to electric will be 100%).

But even supposing that each lamp post can actually house several 7 kW outlets, enough to cover the 30 m stretch, let's say 6 outlets as each car will take 5 meters along the road 5x6=30, the cable for the single car (or at the most two) parked right in front of the post will be a "normal" length but to get to the farthest ones you will need a 20 m cable, not exactly handy to carry around or to store.

And anyway you are now at around 6x7=42 kW of power per post (as opposed to the original 250 W) and - per kilometer, one side of the street only - you are around 35x42= 1470 kW (as opposed to the "current" 35x0.25=8.75 kW.

You're right, I've done a bit more research into this. The company in question (Ubitricity) are uprating lampposts to 25A single phase at 240V, so 6 kW per post. Even though sodium (and earlier flourescent) lighting never used anything like that much current, I can't find a source to confirm whether or not the lampposts were originally rated at 25A or lower.

On your calculations of how many cars can charge at once, I would keep it simpler and say that a row of parallel parking typical in UK cities, there is one street lamp for every 5 cars. 50 kWh charge overnight, approx 300 km range for every fifth car.

Supposing 100% EV adoption - well, already not everyone drives themselves to work/kids to school in UK cities (where most on-street parking takes place) - but if they do, and have charging at work plus some nearby rapid charging, that should do the trick, assuming a typical commute by road isn't more than 50 km each way. It's certainly in the ballpark.

As I see it, as long as the amount of (electric) cars will be a fraction of the total, it can be managed, but as soon as the amount will increase this "lamp post" approach won't work and something different will be needed.

A practical example is the following:

1) you use 20% battery per day

2) you get home at 20:00, with battery at 60%

3) you find the "right spot" near the lamp post free

Now, do you "risk" postponing the recharge one or two days or you "fill it up to the brim" right now?

And, then, let's say that after 4 hour recharge you will be at 100%, will you at 24:00 unplug and move the car (to allow someone else to recharge)?

Or will it be possible (at 24:00) for the owner of the car parked right after yours to unplug your car and connect his/her own?

And why should he/she wait until 24:00, and not unplug yours when he/she arrives at 20:15?

Most probably, at least when the numbers are small, there may be some form of "rechargiquette" but I doubt it would last for long.

The question is whether it really is the right answer to invest enormous sums of money and infrastructure into enabling rich people to have electric vehicles, or does it make more sense to just... not. Don't upgrade onstreet parking, take the money and build a bus service, a train service etc. Cars are fundamentally a non-scalable solution for dense urban areas. They're just really inefficient and if you're living in a city where you can only get onstreet parking you're probably better of taking a bus or a train to get around anyway. It's also a massive bonus for everyone between you and where you want to commute that they don't have to deal with your traffic anymore.

London has already made this decision - they go out of their way to make it uneconomical to drive in London. Why suddenly unlearn everything about public transport.

That's fair. If self-driving cars pan out, then ideally, we'll soon be able to live in a world where we can all ride in electric cars without owning one. These self-driving electric taxis can then charge at fast chargers on lots somewhere out of sight.

Apart from that, why invest in charging infrastructure? Probably because, even though we've made it inconvenient to drive, some people insist on owning a car in the city. Maybe they are just being idiots, or maybe they need it for their work/business. If we don't make it more convenient to go electric, they will just stick with gas cars. Every little bit counts.

Trains, yes sure, but people love the convenience of a door-to-door service. I think Elon's idea of electric robotaxis and tunnels to alleviate traffic is not a bad one. It could work. We could also eventually have hyperloop "pods" that route themselves in a network tunnel underground. This would make it possible to avoid having to transfer from one train to another multiple times. Sounds sci-fi? Sure, but without a vision, there's no innovation.

As I understand it, the UK's original street lighting served the dual purpose of absorbing the night-time production of coal power plants, which are hard to throttle. Now that we barely use coal, and instead regularly throttle our gas plants, there isn't the "leftover" current that you think.

I interpreted it as having the infrastructure to deliver ~7kW to the kerb, which is a hangover from the previous lighting systems.

As parts and systems (cabling, transformers, etc) get replaced, I have no idea if the new parts will maintain this "excess current" (assuming OP really was talking about that), but even if they do, the power still has to some from somewhere.

In non-SF California cities (I'm most familiar with San Diego) nice apartment complexes will boast about 2-5 electric chargers, and somebody else probably already booked them! The hardly have space to put anything else in other parking spots too, unless they find a way to hang the charging cables from the ceiling.

I stayed in a hotel in Canberra that was set up like that (charging cables hanging from the ceiling). It was just normal domestic extension cables, so not obviously dangerous. Fortunately I was tall enough to reach up to connect my car's charger to it to charge it overnight; I don't quite know how they would have expected someone my wife's height to grab them.

> Pick any random apartment complex in the US and pretend 80% of the residents there own an EV

To pretend that, you'd also have to pretend that it's 20 years or so (if not a few more decades more) in the future. EVs are not gonna replace billions of the on-road vehicles over night, average of each is driven for a decade or two.

Over 20 years, as more EVs show up, more apartment buildings upgrade their electrical infra to keep up. How so? Compare the number of charging spots in buildings 20 years ago to now.

Don't apartment blocks in the USA have parking inside the complex? i.e. you buy an apartment and a numbered parking space or two? (I don't know -- I've never lived in one, so genuinely asking.)

Then the answer to your question is: through a normal 110V power point in their parking space. Which might involve a visit from an electrician to wire it up, and (possibly) installing a submeter for the consumption -- but nothing complex beyond that.

Depends on region, age and wealth.

The typical apartment around here is a triple decker with on and off street parking totaling about the same number of spaced as combined number of bedrooms in the unit +/- 20%

I've never seen one with an EV charger but you could string a 120v cord to the nearest outlet if you wanted. There's usually an exterior one somewhere. It's a tossup whether it's on nobody's bill or is billed to a random unit.

Typically you'll find chargers in parking garages. The commercial property companies tend to build them out about a little bit ahead of demand.

Most apartments in suburbia (outside metro/city areas) are typically a 3 story building and parking lots that are usually 40 feet or more away from the structure. Most apartments don't have numbered spaces, just general parking. Even numbered spaces are commonly not honored by whomever has guests.

Throw in northern snowy climates where a snow plow clears an entire lot and you really can't have charger stands everywhere. There are a lot of infrastructure problems to solve for renters. Not impossible, but EV everywhere isn't going to happen sooner than we think.

It depends. Most have garages without assigned spaces. Some are street parking. Where possible they just have surface lots because it is cheaper. None of these are wired.

That's because the infrastructure is not ready yet. I live in one of Europe's most dense areas, with street parking anf thin roads. Local gas companies started installing chargers in many places, essentially transforming two existing roadside parking spots into charging stations. Most people do only short trips and wouldn't need to charge more than 1-3 times a month, so this should generally work out as long as there are enough spots, and else its a trip to a nearby fast charger.

On the parking lot, obviously. It isn't technically hard to put a slow charger for every parking place.

Street parking or a garage? It's there a lot?

My brother in law was considering a Tesla, so I decided to see what charging stations are near us, just outside of Chicago.

The nearest Electric Charging Station of ANY kind is 3 miles from him, in the back corner of a Chevrolet dealer's service bay. He doesn't have a garage, nor electrical service capable of dealing with charging.

As for me, I've only got 100 amp service, so I'm not sure how well I'd fare. I also don't know how long a charging cord would last outside in the Midwest. The nearest actual superchargers are 1/2 hour away. There are at least 100 gas stations in that range for me.

Infrastructure is the problem, no matter how well it might be glossed over for an outsider, this short little peek into reality has me knowing I won't be going electric in the next few years, at least.

Have been charging cars outside in New England for several years now, right through the winters. Biggest issue has been that sometimes the charge port cover can be hard to open or close when iced, but cars charge just fine under a dump of snow.

My house has 100amps service and I was able to install a 14-50 outlet (240V/50amps) which allows me to charge at sustained 32amps. It all depends on what other load do you need to handle, for me the only other significant load was the A/C, everything else is gas powered. Don't even have to go that high, even a 240V/30amps outlet (24 amps sustained) will still charge a car in a reasonable amount of time. Keep in mind that you will rarely need to charge from 0 to 100%, most of the time will be a fraction of that. For me it's usually 70% to 90%, but, of course, YMMV.

I plug my Leaf SV+ in a 110v plug and it works fine (I charge once a week, 350km capacity).

I'm starting to think it is a feature, not a bug: peasants should stop being able to move anywhere so easily. The fact you can't easily charge a personal vehicle? Good.

Bunch up in overcrowded cities, use public transportation only so we can keep the outside clean for the new nobles.

This is an opinion I am slowly arriving at - EVs are a very expensive way to force a change in how far people expect to be able to travel.

That was never a goal, just an engineering limitation. If someone builds a 2000 mile EV it's still an EV and nobody is going to shout that it has too much range.

True, but mandating a switch to EVs is certainly not an engineering limitation.

We are currently talking to a fuel station company in East Africa to deploy solar powered battery banks for electric bikes across 250 of their petrol pumps. We have already powered two of their stations with panels and batteries as a proof of concept. They know there is an energy transition coming from fuel to electric and they want to be at the beginning of this curve. The transition has started across the world.

Ramez (in the article) is on my Board. He has always maintained that price point/economics is crucial for tech to become main stream, to a point that adoption often can be much faster than anticipated. This has definitely been true for solar adoption so far - it has beat all expectations until now. I won't be surprised if this happens for EVs too.

Switching all fossil-fuel powered appliances (including electric cars) to electric will reduce our total energy needs by half due to the inherent efficiencies in electric machinery. Source: https://www.rewiringamerica.org/handbook, page i

Unfortunately the IPCC report on climate change doesn't take into account "committed emissions", meaning that once you buy a fossil fuel-powered car it keeps emitting CO2 for its lifetime. If we take into account committed emissions from existing cars, gas water heaters, driers, etc, then we're already near 1.8C of warming. Source: https://www.rewiringamerica.org/handbook page 11

This is one of the biggest coordinated behavior changes we'll have to make: every time a fossil fuel-powered machine in our home dies, we have to replace it with one powered by electricity. The good news is that with the right financing this will save people money. Source: https://www.rewiringamerica.org/household-savings-report

"Companies that run big fleets of cars like Uber and Lyft are leading the switchover, because the savings are greatest for cars with high mileage."

Nut uber and lyft dont pay for the vehicles or their maintenance, they dont invest in cars. Or have i missed something?

In my country there are middleman companies which own the cars, which might be more effective to maximize the uptime of the vehicle. Maybe this is what the article refers to?

I am thinking how weird it would be if the EV charger revolution sneaks up on conventional gas station businesses and forces large oil companies to go out of business. Because they did not realize they were supposed to be "energy" business, not just oil/diesel/gasoline/petroleum business.

If they don't pay attention, this seismic shift could really cost them.

Most oil companies have already been in the clean energy business for a while

Would like to see some stats, specifically what percentage of their yearly spending goes into clean energy. Also useful to know what they consider "clean energy", because there's no such thing as "clean natural gas".

I don't have any stats but it's what I heard from people in the industry. Could be very hand-wavy

Oil companies might INCREASE oil production if the renewable energy really goes meteoric. They'll just use all the cheap renewable energy to ramp up plastic production.

Plastic uses about 8% of oil:

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/21419505/oil-gas-....

Many Governments are starting to ban single-use plastic products.

Well, er, assuming that demand for plastic rises by about 20 times, maybe…?

Like, what’s the motivation here? They’re not Captain Planet villains. Dying industries do not generally hold on out of _spite_; there has to be money in it.

I want to replace my aging car (Mazda 3 from 2005), it’s served me great and it has no issues at all after 200k km (125k miles) but my gf is pregnant so I’m more concerned about space and especially safety. Even if my car has some important safety features like traction and stability control, lateral airbags etc. there’s been 15+ years of safety improvements.

And I feel like it’s a terrible moment to buy a car. I’d like my next car to last for many years like my previous one, but ICE ones feel obsolete right now, and regulations are going to make it increasingly difficult to keep owning one.

But EVs are just not practical for my use case (I don’t drive often but when I do it’s long distance) and in my country (very few charging stations). I feel they're just not quite there yet.

Also very concerned about battery degradation, seeing how it’s been with phones and other rechargable battery products I’ve owned.

Unless your car lacks side curtain airbags does particularly poorly on the partial front overlap test safety improvements have been negligible since the roof strength increases of the early '00s.

Most of the advances since the 2000s have come from cheaper tech enabling things like automatic braking and stuff that makes texting your way into the back of a stopped semi truck less fatal when applied at scale. Is that worth $30k? I dunno, not my money.

Not true. Automatic emergency braking (AEB) has been shown to reduce frontal crashes by about 43% and injuries in those crashes by 64%. That's a pretty big sizable jump. I can personally attest AEB has kept me out of at least one crash.

Source: https://www.consumerreports.org/automotive-technology/automa...

You are misrepresenting the capability of AEB.

AEB will prevent you from rear ending someone at <10mph in stop and go conditions and knocks 5-20mph (being really generous on that upper bound) off the contact speed for higher speed rear endings (that most people won't ever get in over a lifetime).

It mostly does not prevent the kinds of accidents where people get injured (save me the anecdote about how your brother's roomate's uncle backed his semi into the loading dock a little too hard and hurt had a sore neck the next day).

Don't get me wrong, for what it does it works, but it is not the magic want the internet tends to act like it is. you have to weigh the potential improvement against the price of a new car.

ESC (or call ESP, VSC, DSC, whatever) is also a huge improvement. It's shame that it failed to standardize the name despite the goodness.

Yes I also got the impression that around the early 2000s there was a much bigger leap in terms of car safety than in the 15 years or so since.

It is a terrible moment to buy. 800V charging tech is just becoming available, Hyundai Ioniq 5 and Kia Ev6 are like next gen comparing to VW ID3 and ID4, Skoda Enyaq, even Tesla Model 3 will struggle to keep up.

I expect much more clarity in next 3, 4 years regarding long-term ownership.

With your phone you charge it to 100% and then use it down to low charge. Everyday repeat. It's basically the worst case scenario for a lithium battery. An EV you can keep it a comfortable 70% charge until you need to go long distance. And you don't cycle it daily to 100%

Will consumers accept an obvious downgrade in the car range? Because I do not. Once the EVs market share will exceed the critical mass, charging electricity for EVs will become what petrol is now - heavily regulated, excise tax, etc. Recycling of the batteries is the elephant in the room.

We need four major changes to our economies, and these require political willpower:

1. Direct user road charging, including a User Interface inside the vehicle to communicate costs (based on weight, location, time, distance). This will have positive externalities by shifting use from peak to off-peak.

2. Smart charging for EVs based on current energy prices. Makes sense for as much charging to be done overnight when demand is low. Could also be used for other appliances.

We want to avoid the dumb situation of commuters getting home at 6pm, plugging in the car right at peak usage, and the charging to be completed at around midnight when demand is lowest anyway. Better to shift that demand.

3. Carbon tax.

4. Overhauling road design to suit autonomous vehicles instead of just human drivers.

Range anxiety is a thing, but usually overstated by a lot.

It's really hard to unlearn the ICE way of "drive until the light turns on and then fill up to 100%", which is in no way relevant for EV drivers.

With an EV you drive to the supermarket, plug in your car to the destination charger (22kW), do your shopping, disconnect and drive home. In my case I have more charge when I get back than I did when I left.

As for recycling, it's a hard industry to gauge. There just aren't enough car batteries at end-of-life to actually have any kind of process down. Most manufacturers are preparing for it though. VW already has a factory running that can recycle up to 96% of materials from their batteries at a rate of 3000 batteries per year

> With an EV you drive to the supermarket, plug in your car to the destination charger (22kW), do your shopping, disconnect and drive home.

That's fine if your destination is 5 miles away, it doesn't work when your destination is 500 miles away.

Long distance travel represents a small portion of total trips, but it's frequent enough that if you can only afford a single car, it needs to be able to make those trips. Fast charging is a hard requirement for mass adoption. Maybe it doesn't need to be quite as fast as filling up a gas tank, but it needs to be short compared to the time spent driving. 20 minutes for 200 miles might be acceptable, 30 minutes for 60 miles is definitely not. Once the infrastructure is there, I'm in. And as that infrastructure becomes more common, EVs with shorter ranges (and thus cheaper batteries) become viable. Right now there are about 5,000 fast charging stations in the US, for comparison there are 136,000 gas stations.

Small EVs are averaging around 3.5-4 mi/kWh. 60 miles would therefore be around 18kWh. You're postulating a mere 36 kW charger there. We actually have 150 kW chargers as being common, with 350 kW being reasonably often seen.

That said, not all cars will necessarily reach that level. Neither of my EVs would see a benefit from the 350kW chargers, as it requires a 800V battery architecture. But expect cars in the next 10 years to be generally 800V systems. So you're looking at 1000 mph of charging speed with 350kW chargers. There may be limits such that cars don't actually get all 350kW, but... yeah, we're already beyond your "acceptable" level. It's just not evenly distributed.

And yeah, there's fewer fast charging stations than gas stations, but if most daily charging is done at home, you don't need as many as gas stations. 5k is probably too few, but 136k is almost certainly too many.

No, I'm saying the 36kW charger is unacceptable. A 150kW charger is the bare minimum that might be acceptable and you're adding about 10% to your travel time for recharging. 350 kW is still about an order of magnitude slower than filling an equivalent sized gas tank, but is probably fast enough.

And of course the fast charging capability is useless if it isn't along the route you need to travel. While we may not need quite as much coverage as gas stations, you definitely need regularly spaced stations along major routes like the interstates. It honestly doesn't even need to be a huge number - 4 stations spaced every hundred miles along the interstate system would only be 1900. It would take 27000 stations to get 1 for every hundred miles of paved road in the US, but that can come later as demand increases.

The Wegmans nearest my house has free charging for EVs, but only two spots. Your use case is the ideal, I think, but we're a long way from being able to support it. Rough guess, I'd say there are often more than a hundred cars in that parking lot.

This is a solvable problem, but it does need to be solved, and I don't think anyone really knows what the optimal solution looks like. Does Krogers start a side business selling electricity to its customers? Does a charging network lease space in their parking lot? What self-driving is actually a thing, do we just have our cars go charge themselves while we shop?

Electrification is a necessary change, but it's also a huge change, with a lot of ramifications and ripple effects we're still thinking through.

Here in Finland the three big grocery chains are all competing for charging use.

One has been doing it for a few years now and has multiple 22kW and 1-4 50kW chargers at most larger stores.

One has installed at least one 50kW on most stores, with the goal of having one at every store by 2024

And the last one is doing a huge push with 150kW superchargers and multiple 22kW ones to all stores. They previously had a 3rd party doing the chargers, but it was a complete shitshow of broken chargers and backordered spare parts.

Only one of those is giving away electricity for free, the rest require an RFID tag or app - with discounts if you've got the store membership card.

I do see that in the future all malls and larger stores will have a charging grid in the parking lot. Either for free (just to get people in the store) or at a competitive price. It really doesn't require that much more electricity than the parking lot lights do - the total power usage of a Type 2 charging grid is less than most big stores spend on air conditioning :)

> Only one of those is giving away electricity for free, the rest require an RFID tag or app - with discounts if you've got the store membership card.

There will be an increadible itch to fully control and trace the charging patterns and behaviours of both cars and individuals. I can refuel ICE car with petrol within 3 minutes paying cash and no loyalty card.

> With an EV you drive to the supermarket, plug in your car to the destination charger

When EVs will be so cheap that I can have one small EV for the city and one real car for long journeys, I'll happily get one.

First and second generation Nissan Leafs aren't that expensive any more. And they're more than capable for grocery trips and driving around town.

A lot of petrol cars have a 200-300 mile range already when you use real-world mpg figures, and no-one even mentions it. Ordinary electric cars can do 30 minutes charging every 3 hours of driving, the cutting edge can do 20 minutes charging every 4 hours, and both figures will be markedly improved by the end of the decade.

People often say that their electric car is “just a better car”, or “a car from the future”. To explain what this means, here are some upsides and downsides I’ve observed during the last 15 months of owning a first gen Hyundai Ioniq:

+ Less noise. That’s one of the most important benefits to me. Long road trips become enjoyable, and are no longer scary.

+ Acceleration is smoother. My wife remarked it feels like a hovercraft or something.

+ Adjustable power - if I need to overtake, I enable sport mode and enjoy the acceleration. Other than that, I use economy mode which throttles the available power.

+ Less (or no) subtle vibrations from the engine that carry into the cabin.

+ Charge at home 80-90% of the time. No gasoline spills, no upselling in the gas station store.

+ Cheaper to operate. I save 60-65% in fuel compared to the old car. Teslas who accelerate strongly a lot, and non-ideally built cars (like a pickup) will not save as much in countries with expensive electricity, but might still save 30-50%.

+ Cheaper maintenance (-50%), and less appointments to take.

+ The heat pump heats up way faster in winter, like 2-3x faster than a normal ICE.

+ It looks like a small-ish car from the outside, but the trunk has proven big enough to go on vacation with 2 kids.

+ Destination charging at the grandparents’ is great.

- The 28kWh battery will last me 175km in winter, and 200km in summer. A small battery is great for the environment, but I’d be happy about more capacity. The sweet spot for me would be 60kWh in this car (it was/is the most efficient EV, so other EVs will need more capacity to match it). When I drive a lot, I have to be way more mindful about charging than with an ICE, but this improves with every charger being added to my area. They recently built a “hyper charger” very near my son’s school, which basically eliminated range anxiety in daily driving.

- Slow charging at home. Mostly not an issue, but if the battery is empty and I need to get somewhere, I need to drive to the next fast charger. Happens 1x a month or less.

- Fast chargers are sometimes broken or taken. Don’t empty the battery completely (that’s bad for lifetime anyway) so you can get to another charger. Happened once for me, so far.

- Tires might wear out early as it’s so easy to stress them with acceleration. So far, no signs of that though.

+/- Virtual engine sound simulation is annoying (I often turn it off, but it re-enables every restart), but it has probably saved my cat once because he hid under the car and was startled away by the sound.

As an owner of the newer Ioniq (38kW battery), I agree with all these points. With the exception that I get around 200km range in the winter and 250-280 during summer.

This is the best car I've had for winters. -20C outside and it'll be toasty warm (like T-shirt warm) in around 5-10 minutes. That's faster than any ICE I've ever had, including the one with an extra fuel heater.

Slow charging at home isn't really an issue, I can get around 2kW from a normal shuko plug, which will charge a good 20kW overnight (10 hours or so).

Noise and vibration are build issues as much as anything. They may be easier to manage with an electric drivetrain, but lots of ICE vehicles are quiet and smooth.

Fair enough. I looked at some rankings, and it seems German manufacturers manage to build some very quiet ICE cars.

Another major con is the price. Electric cars are still easily twice the price of the equivalent ICE car.

And simultaneous to this transition is the all-App-dashboard and the conversion of cars into app store enabled entertainment, Internet, and social media steal-all-your-privacy agents. If there was ever a period when it is wise to maintain one's existing, non-App-capitalized combustion car while the shit show settles, now is that time.

I will not consider buying an electric vehicle until I can dependably and conveniently access recharging stations comparable to superchargers. Even that is a big sacrifice at 30+ minutes for a full charge - as opposed to 5-10 minutes to top off a gas tank with a similar range.

I live in the US midwest. There are only three metropolitan areas I could make it to one-way without factoring in extensive detours for re-charging. Charge stations with that kind of capacity are still extremely rare here - even 9 years after the Model S launch. Not to mention the nightmare which is compatibility across charging networks.

I want an EV eventually, but I cannot justify it until the charging situation improves by an order of magnitude.

Looks like 17% of Americans, and declining, live in the Midwest[1]. Meanwhile the south and west are home to 60% of Americans and growing. I'd expect to see these warmer growing regions, especially the densely populated coasts, to see investment before the Midwest. It might take a while before your requirements are met.

[1] https://www.census.gov/popclock/data_tables.php?component=gr...

Maybe. But the denser the population, the fewer vehicles there are per capita. Plus the midwest gets an immense amount of through traffic as it's impossible to get from one side of the US to the other without passing through here.

The problem isn't a lack of rapid charging stations in rural towns since long-distance travel will almost always involve passing through major urban centers. The problem is even large cities in the midwest like Kansas City and St Louis have relatively few stations which come close to approaching the convenience of a gas station, which makes long-distance travel frustrating.

Petrol service stations are already a marginal business and closing in droves. There will be a tipping point where they will no longer be economically viable on interstate highways and it will be ICE car drivers who will experience range anxiety.

There were plenty of “won’t happen, can’t happen” arguments against mass takeover by digital cameras, CDs, etc. - then they did, very fast. Megabrand Kodak had a five-year plan to transition; customers switched en masse in about five months (how many now even know what Kodak is?).

Living near Atlanta, I see lots of electric cars. Many are switching; few switch back.

Gas savings & longevity is substantial, to the point of likely paying for itself in the lifespan of the vehicle. Big motivator.

Most of the naysaying arguments are obsolete. The few remaining are solvable. Really wasn’t that long ago gas cars barely existed, yet here we are. Change is coming fast.

My sadness is I don't see the entrepreneurial entry points as low down the scale as they were for Internet. A one or two person start up in the EV world is not going to survive in order to grow. The supply chain for cars is big capital intensive and dominated by the whims of the big players.

I am not sure where / if I can play at that table :-(

Conversions is my first thought. In fact, I would love to do this for all kinds of vehicles for the rest of my life heh.

Is there much advancement in that space? I would love to get a panel van in the nearer future but I won't buy a combustion car nor do I have 50.000 € to to spend on a new eletric one.

It would be great to be able to get an older MB Sprinter with a motor defect and to retrofit it with some standardized solution. The last time I looked up on that, the only option was to get a very custom solution which wouldn't be feasible due to the high cost for planning and certification.

It's so weird that I have a mental conflation of Electric and (semi-)autonomous vehicles.

I assumed the effort to build a conversion would include the various controls brakes etc to be software controlled. But I guess not

I'm waiting for an electric mini van. The biggest Tesla isn't really competition for the Honda Odyssey. I would switch in a heartbeat to something comparible with >150 Mike's of range.

>It is certainly what the world's big car makers think.

That is what they hope. Unfortunately for them there is something else going on right now. The cities have started giving up on the "everyone will drive everywhere" approach to transportation planning. That is caused by the realization that cars cause most of the problems cities face. Current internal combustion cars are already fairly clean in terms of emissions so an electric cars are just more of the same problem to be fought.

A few of the biggest cities have. Most give lip service to the idea, but their actions show that they care about public transport more for a place to send money/power to their friends than any ability to get people around. (Money meaning cash to contractors and unions regardless of results, power as in another appointment to someone who helped them out)

"Fairly clean" vs "zero local emissions" is a huge deal in cities with millions of cars.

EVs produce more tire dust, which makes up a large percentage of PM2.5 pollution.

On net EVs will degrade public space less than gas vehicles, but car-free spaces are still much nicer to live in.

https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1129809_tire-dust-is-po...

Jokes on them - I thought they would take over last decade. More seriously, in their graph it doesn't seem like US electric car sales is accelerating. What gives?

Probably a number of things:

The US government isn't very interested in pushing them (though this may change as it re-enters Paris and so on).

The US doesn't have the same range of electric cars available as Europe or China. There's no US equivalent of the 20k VW e-up, say, or the Renault Zoe. This will likely change.

The US is much more sparsely populated than China or Europe, and average journey lengths are longer. This makes cheap electric cars with small batteries, in particular, unattractive. This is harder to change.

Electric cars are also somewhat politicised in the US, caught up in a culture war. This is essentially unique, and who knows whether it'll change.

I doubt the infrastructure is in place to easily charge your car if you are not in a city. Someone else can verify if the mileage per charge is feasible in places where you need to drive to do anything.

We should expect China to have the most EVs since the CCP is basically mandating it.

Americans barely wore face masks. The government will literally have to print trillions again and give tax credits to get a mandate out to the public (our weirdo American capitalist version of CCP mandates at this point).

I live in a pretty big city. I can't remember ever actually seeing a charging station for electric cars.

They're probably around. But I don't see them, so I don't know that they're around. This definitely makes me more cautious about getting an electric car.

We own a house, so we can put in an electric charger, but that would mean parking inside our garage. The problem is that our garage has been taken over by storage (working on that problem) and my woodworking. And when we do park the car in the garage, it's hard to get around the washer/dryer to get into the house.

We've already decided not to park the car in the garage except during big storms.

So even though we should be able to charge at home, we couldn't really do it well.

There are a ton of problems with how things are set up for the majority of people in regards to charging EVs. There's a lot of momentum to overcome.

You don't need some special charger. I charged from a normal wall plug for ages until I paid an electrician to upgrade it (and even then it was only an upgrade to a 15 amp circuit). You'll recharge fully overnight without any trouble.

What you'll end up doing is just buying one of those outdoor-rated extension leads that you can find in a gardening store and running it under the garage door out to where you park the car.

I suppose the concern in rural/suburban areas is what happens when you need to be on the road? If you really need to charge, do you have to go out of your way to find a charging station? Gas stations are everywhere.

If you are not in a city you charge in your garage or in your driveway. The true last holdout for ICE cars will be urban areas dominated by street parking.

They need more brands and more models. And they need cheaper models or at least a big second hard market of old, beat up EVs.

It's been clear the whole ICE chain is full of tipping points and hidden boosters that we have been seriously starting to accelerate towards for at least a decade now. This article actually doesn't even touch on many of the most important ones. Vehicles aren't just about the vehicle themselves, they include the whole chain needed to supply them with whatever energy they need and all the consequences said chain entails. For ICE, that means gasoline or diesel, and in turn a massive global supply chain with unavoidable geopolitical implications. Much the supply chain has the property of extremely high capex and fairly fixed by significant capex working upon a fairly cheap input.

A modern refinery for example costs billions of dollars and then huge amounts more to keep running. What makes it all work is that it can be amortized with great reliability (demand for personal mechanized transportation isn't going anyway) across tremendous numbers of people. This shows up in how the industry itself tends to calculate the costs of refineries, which isn't in straight price but rather capex outlay per barrel of oil. For a long time refineries tended to be around $10-15k/barrel outlay, though that has gone up, and then operating cost. It's most efficient to run it at max capacity all the time.

But if a critical mass of people switch to electric, suddenly the same fixed costs have to be spread out across a group that's shrunk enough that they see a significant cost increase at the pump. This shifts the economics against it further, and also begins to shift the economics for ships, pipelines and gas stations themselves, which encourages more BEV usage, which then repeats and boom we've got a driver for a classic equilibrium shift which makes for the steep part of an S-curve.

And I think this sort of thing is rife through the industry. There are lots of hidden subsidies that are politically viable because the industry is necessary and in turn rich/powerful which it uses to entrench itself further. But as the bottom falls out those will get questioned more too. For a lot of countries they could get rid of significant externalities, geopolitical risk/unpleasantness, as well as explicit subsidies if they no longer depended on oil for transportation.

BEVs also tie in nicely with a host of other positive spirals, like plummeting renewables driving demand for batteries both for vehicles and the grid (and vehicles indeed could play a major part in that creating genuine new economic value out of a time period when current vehicles are just sitting around depreciating). Enhancements to the grid also enhance every single electric user on the grid, so the amortization and ROI there can be fantastic too.

So yeah, as well the vehicles themselves seeing a mass production rocket, there's a ton of other drivers pushing for a relatively sudden phase change. It'll be an interesting decade.

Anyone else shocked at how long it is taking incumbent automakers to actually bring EVs to market? They always seem 2 years away and then what they announce (other than VW, maybe) seems like a half hearted incremental step from ICE vs the completely rethought tech implementation of Tesla’s.

You will be in the worst spot if snowbounded on a freeway with any electric vehicle and definitely no heat.

I know people who have died from Carbon Monoxide poisoning when they got snowbound in an ICE car.

In an electric car if you are snowbound, turn off the cabin heating and rely on seat heaters. They use about 50W each, so would last 1000 hours if you have 50kWh of life left in your battery.

Norway has several dangerous mountain crossings where you need to wait for a long time so you can drive behind a snow plower. This country is like a worst case scenario for EVs in this regard. Yet the share of EV sales is over 50% now.

Here's some Google-translated articles for you:

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=no&tl=en&u=https:/...

EVs with a decent battery is now considered much safer as far as I can tell. I've never heard of anyone dying due to getting stuck in the snow with an EV, despite there being tens of thousands of EVs here for many years now.

This will never happen in an EV: https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/boy-1-and-mom-killed-b...

Cool. Maybe electric vehicle adoption will stop around 95% then, people in very snowy countries can still drive some fossil fueled vehicle (or simply carry around a small kerosene heater in their trunk). For the vast majority of the world getting snowed in is not a common enough problem to drive vehicle choice.

Might you have heard of the US? Salt Lake, Denver, Minneapolis, Chicago, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, DC...

The US as a whole has less than 5% of the worlds population, and even in the states there are plenty of people in places like Florida and California where the threat of getting snowed in is pretty minimal. Most countries with significant snow risk are also pretty sparsely populated, so 95% is not far off.

It’s pretty far off if you’re talking about the population that can afford Teslas.

That is also true of a gas vehicle.

You can start, heat, then turn off. And this can go on for 72 hours on a full-tank in 28 degree weather. Bet you can’t do that with today’s electric car.

Here's a video with a Tesla Model 3 keeping the cabin at 21 C for 71 hours in -4 C (24.8 F) weather.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpzB3RbjuHI

That car has a heat pump for cabin heat, which has a coefficient of performance of 3-4. That means you only need 1/3 of the heat energy as electrical input.

Compare that to a gasoline engine, where almost all the energy in your fuel is wasted as heat outside the cabin. I don't know what fraction actually makes it into the cabin - but I'm guessing it's single digit percent.

> Bet you can’t do that with today’s electric car.

Do you realise an electric car comes with a massive electric battery that you can use to run the heater?

Unlike a petrol or diesel car, you won't be risking poisoning yourself while you sleep either.

You can run a 1500w resistive heater for 50 hours on a 75kwh battery.

I run a 1500w heater in my 30ft RV and it holds comfortable temps down to freezing, in a small vehicle it should have no problem even down to very low temps, 750 watt might be plenty to keep the interior at a safe temp.

"This article has been sponsored by Elon Musk".

Its not even clear how we are supposed to produce the necessary amounts of electricity if a significant amount of cars are EVs.

This feels like it has been written for the upper class, ignoring the reality of 80% of the people :-)

We already have capacity for that much electricity generation. We'll have to be careful about managing the peak usage - smart chargers which can be remotely cut off will probably be mandatory.

As an example, the UK grid yesterday saw a peak of about 30 GW, but was sitting at 20 GW for most of the night. (https://gridwatch.co.uk/). That's about 70 GWh of overnight capacity that could have been used (the grid has to be sized for peak loads).

The average car in the UK drives about 7000 miles a year (https://www.bymiles.co.uk/insure/magazine/mot-data-research-...). An average EV might get 3 miles per kWh.

So the average car, on an average night, needs 20 miles of range - which is about 6.4kWh. Our grid excess capacity of 70 GWh means we can charge just under 11 million cars before we're using more than our current peak electricity demand.

The UK grid is designed for more capacity than todays peak, though. The maximum delivered power in the last year was 47.275 GW. If we maximised the grid at that level all year we'd be adding an additional 17 GW compared to yesterday. That's 408 GWh, or enough power for an additional 63.7 million cars (on top of our 11 million) - a total of 74.7 million average cars. The UK currently has around 32.9 million registered cars.

There is undoubtedly going to be hotspots which need more work, but overall the additional load of electric cars (with smart chargers which can shed load if needed) is within the limits of the current grid and generation capacity.

From your first link, isn't a lot of that difference between 30 GW peak and 20 GW at night due to solar? It seems to provide about 9 GW during the day, that removes most of your estimated 70 GWh of extra overnight capacity (unless I'm reading it wrong).

> That's about 70 GWh of overnight capacity that could have been used...Our grid excess capacity of 70 GWh means we can charge just under 11 million cars before we're using more than our current peak electricity demand.

You've ignored all losses. Transmission and distribution losses, the latter of which are worse for low-voltage customers (ie, domestic use, and is over 10%), total around 15% for domestic use. As well as that, charger loss is around 15%.

Adding all that up, a car that needs 20 miles at 333 Wh/mile needs 9kWh of generated supply power, or barely 8 million cars (assuming this power is actually available).

There is also the obvious problem that there is no solar availabe at night, which makes up a relatively large percentage of the UK's energy mix (over 8GW right now, as I just looked).

>The maximum delivered power in the last year was 47.275 GW

How much of that peak power was from peaking plants, for example, the 1.8GW pumped hydro storage at Dinorwic?

A huge part of the problems with EVs are related to unrealistic and misleading estimates. Please be careful with the maths.

The comment you're replying to was in response to the parent comment, who said "Its not even clear how we are supposed to produce the necessary amounts of electricity"

You can argue about efficiencies (which it's true, should be taken into account) - but the point remains. The current grid already has very close to the capacity required for electric cars. Maybe we'll need to add a few power stations or interconnects, maybe we'll need to upgrade some local infrastructure here or there, but it's not like we're an order of magnitude off.

There's currently close to 100 GW of installed capacity on the UK grid (https://www.statista.com/statistics/496283/total-electricity...) - even if you completely stripped out all the variable-supply renewables like solar and wind, you'd still be left with a substantial margin. There's no solar overnight - true - but there's also very little solar on dark cloudy December days (when demand is often high) and the grid manages to deliver ~40GW peak then without issues. The pumped storage couldn't have been more than 2.8GW - because that's how much is installed. In fact, apparently overall demand has dropped year on year - the overall peak was 62 GW, in 2002.

At least in the UK, National Grid (the grid operator) agrees - https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/journey-to-net-zero/5-m.... There's not an issue with overall capacity.

I think you are ignoring the fact that we can produce extraordinary amounts of electricity from sources that were not available at economic scale 10 years ago.

Furthermore, people do want to have their own car, and they are going to become the more affordable than their ICE counterparts and the polluting and flammable oil they need.

[1] https://www.tesla.com/en_EU/support/european-union-energy-la...

I can't begin to tell you how excited the thought that I can have my car mostly powered from solar panels on the garage roof makes me.

The recent outbreak of ‘range anxiety’ among combustion-engine owners in the Southeast US when the colonial pipeline went offline illustrates very clearly how thin a myth of ‘independence’ has been built around gasoline cars.

You can hit the open road and just keep driving - as long as a complex global energy distribution network keeps up just-in-time fulfillment of fuel to gas stations along the way.

Whereas an electric car, powered with charge gathered from the sunlight that struck the roof of your own home? That’s truly independent.

This is _exactly_ the niche the Ford F-150 Lightning is marketed towards. The "you can power your house from your car battery" was like custom made for Texans who still remember the power outages last winter.

You can get a car, that you can charge at home, for free, AND you can also use it to run your house if the grid goes tits up again? Sold!

Yeah, like, it sounds too good to be true. People like to think you are incredulous for believing that it might be possible. Yet, it will be a reality that will change the world.

It was fun for the first few days and then you get kind of used to it.

But what never gets dull is laughing at people paying to fill their cars with liquid explosives.

Your comment kind of assumes that tomorrow every car in existence will turn into an EV. If you realize that it will actually be a more gradual process, the question actually becomes "but who will provide supply for a thing that is in such demand?!", and then, well, you know.

The reality of 80% of the people is that they don't have a car.

Actually the majority of households in the uk own at least 1 car and a there are over 35 million cars and 5 million vans in the uk.

To address your 3rd point (can't talk about the first 2 ones), it seems very Western-centric. If you go to a poorer countries you'd see old cars imported from Europe (or Japan - in the eastern parts of Russia you see a lot of right hand drive cars!) which are there because they're no longer economical to run in their home countries. Also trucks and buses.

Without regulations or any sort of push, these vehicles will probably keep chugging along for another few decades. A benevolent leading country like the USA that seem to only exist in myths and legends of the past would probably push the poor countries by coupling economic aid with environmental regulations, and then selling them "new and clean" vehicles made in Detroit.

Maybe China will step up, although of course we in the West attribute their actions to wanting something in return, unlike the benevolent USA. ;) Let's not talk about the EU government, which is just a stupid club of paper pushers...

In a PR quote, some bigshot from a conventional car company said,

"We will produce cars for the millions instead those that cost millions".

Let's see how far they go.

More nuclear reactors would solve the problem best

Given the time it takes to build a nuclear reactor, this is a path we should have started 15 years ago.

Correct. And what is the second best time to start down that path?

We will do it with "green energy" using "green technology" in the new "green economy" duh....

Yeah yeah. And I get downvoted for saying the glaringly obvious. Oh well, I can take that and laugh :-)

Until electric vehicles are like-for-like with petrol/diesel, I'm unlikely to buy one. And by this I mean range, power and price. I can buy a MB/Audi/BMW, 3.0 litre diesel or petrol, that's 0-60 in 6s or less depending on version, a full tank range that is 500 miles for petrol and 700-800 for diesel. And I can buy that starting at £30k.

The closest similar performance, and I hope to be corrected, is the top end Teslas, where you pay more and more for the batteries. A Model S long range, is £83k, 50k more.

The article is probably correct, because governments are incentivising electric cars. And the "demand" and "supply" by manufacturers is also pushing in that direction.

I don’t think there are any sub £30k Audis that do sub 6s to 60. Base S3 is £38k

Honest question, 3.0 liters from a with a premium badge go for 30k£ in UK?

New, and absolute basic is £29,995 for the smallest model/chassis, up to mid 30s, then you start adding on stuff like trim, seat packages and so on.

EVs will be better in plenty of ways, lack of exhaust is good (though at the moment all of my electricity is produced by coal so.. not really a win in my opinion until that changes), regenerative braking is probably better than brake pad dust covering the roads... etc.

I am however pessimistic about the fiscal future of it. Yeah it's cheaper to operate now but it's only a matter of time before taxes from fuel drops to the point that they start charging us by the mile or mandating all EV charging be reported and taxed.

For this headline to be accurate, electric cars would have had to have taken over in 2010. It's much later than I expected already.

No talk about the lack of chargers and energy capacity which will be the show-stopper in most regions outside some of the most urbanized ones. Large battery cars that weigh 2 tons don't make sense for most urban dwellers who at most want to take the kids to school and back. Small electric 'cars' will emerge when regulations allow it. For trucks and other powerful cars, a diesel engine will probably make more sense.

The F-150, the most popular truck and vehicle in the US, is going electric with next year's model. They're advertising 300 mile range, 5 ton towing capacity, and 4 AC outlets in the frunk capable of running power tools.

I think many people will be surprised just how fast electric trucks are adopted by suburban and rural folk.

> Small electric 'cars' will emerge when regulations allow it

Right on the money. The most popular EV in China is a tiny car with 100 mile range that costs $4500.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/adv...

The regions outside urbanized ones will deploy solar faster than in the cities, so they will end up with very cheap power in the middle of the day.

You can charge a car from an ordinary domestic power plug -- particularly in a low density area where you can park the car close to the house -- so you don't need specialised charging infrastructure.

> from an ordinary domestic power plug

At night, when there is no solar. I think you're being very optimistic

I believe here in Dubai Uber owns a fleet of cars, and drivers can rent/lease the vehicles. That way the vehicles are nice and standardized, eg. it's almost always a Lexus ES 350.

For me I feel disappointed that hydrogen fuel cells never took off. Toyota spent a fortune researching them, making them safe to avoid Hindenburg disaster type imagery. But it never really seems to have caught on. You can add a hydrogen pumping station to an existing petrol station too. Plus you don't need to add a charging station to your house. So there are lots of pluses.

Currently hydrogen fuel cells have a slight range advantage and speed of refueling advantage. However the efficiency of creating and compressing / liquifying hydrogen and then turning back into electricity in the cell is around half that of just charging a battery.

Fuels cells currently also don't put out as much burst power nor can they store energy from regenerative braking so a fuel cell car needs a traction buffer battery like a hybrid.

Pretty skeptical for hydrogen fuel cells at this point, battery cost are dropping fast while energy density going up along with charge rate, fuel cells are being left behind pretty quick.

I don't need to "add a charging station to my house". I already have multiple outlets outside of my house. If I want to be fancy, I can spend 500-1500€ and add a real Type2 charger with load balancing and remote control features.

Just FYI about hydrogen cars:

- They are just EVs with smaller batteries, a large part of the battery is replaced with a hydrogen tank + fuel cell. - The WHOLE hydrogen storage system will need to be replaced fully every 10 or so years. Hydrogen is really really small and has a habit of escaping every vessel you try to keep it in. - Currently the government subsidised price for H2 in Germany is 9.5€/kg. It takes about 1kg of hydrogen to drive 100km. Would you pay almost 10€/100km to drive a car? While an EV can do the same trip for 1-3€?

Do you know the amount of bureaucracy needed to store multiple hundreds of kg of pressurised highly flammable gas (hydrogen) anywhere?

Compare that to the amount of work needed to install what is essentially a fancy power outlet.

I initially thought they would take off, when I didn't know about the tech. Then I found out they charge batteries so they kind of have the worst of both worlds.

Whoever designs a cheap, safe, durable, light, easily mass produced hydrogen storage material will be a multi billionaire.

A charging station at home is a net benefit in my book. That’s a good chunk of time saved each month.

I think we could go a long way in increasing the efficiency of the design. A quick search shows a record holder with 14,573 miles per gallon. All electric seems like more of a possibility if we drastically altered the current designs. It's something that would take top down regulation like carbon taxes. Left to our own devices we seem to go for bigger and faster.

Besides environmental concerns, is there anything in EV cars that benefit the car makers? I wonder if EV have some engineering advantages that make them more desirable for the car makers to push them.

Just wet dream.

Did they try electric cars in winter in Europe? Do you think you'll able to ride more thann 500km without worries about power?

Electric cars are blind line and it fits only for makers because of money.

gawd I hope so! Otherwise there are going to be a lot stranded Norwegians come next winter.

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/05/business/norway-electric-...

If I remember correctly they hit record in Norway because of dotations / taxes

-24C last winter, took 7 minutes for my EV to become too hot to have a jacket on inside.

Also: where are you driving if you're 500km from the nearest outlet?

> Do you think you'll able to ride more thann 500km without worries about power?

I mean, you can't do that even during summer with current vehicles :D

Ha Jeremy Clarkson. Luckily most people who drive cars are not in the slightest enthusiasts and just want to go from A to B.

"It doesn't sound like a car" is exactly what makes EV good.

it really does not matter that much, because having this flavor or that flavor of cars solves nothing. the real solution is to innovate public, shared and yet-unfolded transport.

if all cars in a city were public shared pool cars used by optimal number of people (not 1 person per car), then perhaps we would've seen much lower traffic levels.

pollution from car production and exhaust is a very long story to even touch it.

Remote work solves both issues and will have a bigger impact than both

They will not take over any time soon. Tesla and co had a decade now, I have seen a handful (literally) of electric cars in the last 3 first world countries I have resided, all of them 30+ million population, and I have been to the cities. Now explain to me how the adaption will happen in the poorer countries(the people just ride a cheap motorbike) with no infrastructure and money. Forgive me my scepticism on the matter, but I will believe it when I see it.

The people in poorer countries aren't driving 2021 BMWs either.

It takes a while for new cars to become old cars in order to be cheap enough.

Where are you travelling? I feel like I see Teslas all over the place, no matter what city I am in, big or small.

Europe and LATAM. I imagine some US states and Norway might look different, but I have not been there yet.

Electric cars aren't as good for destroying the planet as gas cars, but they're better than nothing I guess. We can still get the job done, it'll just take a bit longer.

I'm not going to buy an electric-only car until these issues have been solved:

1) range - when driving on a motorway, with regular pauses every ~2.5 hours, it must be possible to drive two periods without charging: 5 hours at regime speed, plus some slack, means 700 km.

2) comfort - range must be long enough that manufacturers do not need to focus too much on aerodymanics vs internal space; the correct outline is: horizontal, very steep, horizontal; an arc like a Prius is an abomination.

3) predictable battery life span - I'm not advocating for a huge life span, I understand there are limits, but I want to know in advance how the range evolves as my car ages. ICE vehicules are very clear on this point: range never changes.

I think / hope / wishful think that in the near future, e.g. with solid state batteries, battery technology will take a quantum leap (like internet speeds did, as the article makes an analogy to) so that things like range and aerodynamics trade offs will no longer be a concern - to the point where they far exceed that of ICE's. That would be the real futurology / science fiction flex, a car that can go two, three, five times as far on a single charge than an ICE can.

And if on top of that self-driving capability improves, it could mean, especially with better comfort, people can do 8+ hour drives without having to stop.

It's not likely at the moment, but I'd be willing to put money on it being the case in 10-20 years.

Of course, I could be vastly underestimating the possibilities, like with e.g. smartphones that are far more advanced than the best things we see in science fiction.

The percentage of the global population that has ever driven 140km/h (87mph) as an average speed for five hours continuously is tiny. Fine if that’s your use-case but it is a vanishingly small niche.

That's not what I wrote.

I don't want to be bothered every time I stop.

1) We did a 3000km road trip in a Tesla. We only spent 15 minutes waiting for a charge to complete. All other time spent charging was overlapped with toileting, eating or sleeping.

2) Electric cars are the leaders internal space. The most obvious example is the frunk on the F150 lightning.

3) Every electric car with a battery thermal management system (aka pretty much every car except the Leaf) has outstanding battery life. Take a look at the battery warranty and realize that has to assume the owner has abused the battery, anybody who doesn't should do much better.

1) I don't want to be bothered every time I stop. Charge should be enough for 5 hours driving.

2) that is a nice example, but definitely not the norm.

3) the most important point is not longevity: it's predictability.

Oil prices [0] are at breathtaking all time highs. As in "wow, these prices are really high". Fighting peak oil turns out to be really expensive.

I'd say electric cars are guaranteed to take over in the near term. But there is an open question about what % of people will still have cars.

The future isn't set in stone. Maybe it'll be hydrogen, maybe it'll be electricity, maybe it'll be no car. But there isn't really a plausible path for internal combustion powered by fossil fuel.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/crude-oil-prices

There are soo many things wrong with your interpretation of that graph...

First thing to ask is "WTF happened in 1971" which is where the price of oil really started to take off, hint is has NOTHING to do with "peak oil"

The price of oil, in many ways, is a reflection of the health of the economy, spiking oil prices are a sign of a bad economy not a sign of "peak oil"

It's not 1971, but 1973, and we know what happened, the OPEC:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_oil_crisis

Peak oil doesn't mean that there is not more oil, but the point in time where it doesn't make economic sense to extract it, or because demand has fallen or because all the easy oil has been extracted. Some people think that was in 2005.

I have been reading about that concept a little lately and some serious people are saying that the oil companies investment have been fallen and, if that trend don't reverse, we will see a fall in production of 50% by 2025. That sounds pretty incredible to me, but the economic consequences would be very serious.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil

What happened in 1971 is more than just that single year but 1971 was the start of a major shift in world economics that included the formation of OPEC

I would also be surprised if many people even know what OPEC is beyond the simplistic narration seen on the news when OPEC raises or lowers production

As to your final point about reduced investment in oil, this is really a shock? The US and US Allies are all demonizing Oil as the greatest threat to world, as the source of all the worlds problems, so much so that many top financial firms have pledged to reduce or eliminate all loans that go to oil production or refinement, in addition to scaring the population into making them to be Public Enemy number 1 more so than evil Tobacco or even Terrorist.

And you are shocked that investors want dont want to dump money into a market that every government is trying to kill? Really?

They were literally paying people to take oil a few months ago

Brent was far higher than now from 2009-2014

Correcting for inflation tells a different story: https://inflationdata.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2020/0...

The inflation adjusted chart tells the same story. It shows the price can, in extreme circumstances, plunge back to slightly above the long term average price. Otherwise it sits much higher. Prices from 2004-2016 are the only thing making the prices in 2019 look reasonable.

Can anyone explain why [1] is not acceptable but [2] is?

I assume because its cars then it gets a free pass but bitcoin is disgusting and threatens the entire fiscal system so let's talk about how much electricity it uses? Is it propaganda? Currency in general uses lots of electric, so do cars, so do humans as a whole.

Is electricity 100% powered by renewables yet? We've made progress sure but we have a long way to go. And all the jobs that gas stations facilitate, I guess they are going away very shortly.

I suspect a squeeze is incoming - gas prices will rise as electric takes over, eventually gas will disappear as the last stations close up.

But, if it's anything similar to the IPv4 to IPv6 transition we have a few decades yet.

[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952 (Bitcoin consumes 'more electricity than Argentina')

[2]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-57253947 (Why electric cars will take over sooner than you think)

EV are displacing an existing technology and replacing it by centralized electricity production that is more cost-effective and can be swapped later on for renewables.

Bitcoin does not actually displace anything (at least with how it is used right now) but consume electricity.

In short, EV are a neutral change short-term and a positive one long terme as we move to renewables. BTC are a negative change short-term and could stay negative in the future.

>Bitcoin does not actually displace anything (at least with how it is used right now) but consume electricity.

Even the "bypass capital controls" argument runs into the problem that most of the benefit comes from USD exposure.

That seems like a disingenuous question. The correct set of questions are:

1. Do electric cars solve an existing problem in a more efficient way? 2. Does BTC solve an existing problem in a more efficient way?

The answer to #2 seems to be a clear no. The problem of payments is solved much more efficiently without the artificial proof of work requirement.

The answer to #1 is perhaps debatable but at least there's something to debatable.

I'm by no means an expert in crypto, but maybe that makes me semi qualified to say why at least they feel different to an outsider - replacing gasoline with electric seems at least like a potential win in terms of cost analysis. I can (theoretically) power my car with renewables? Awesome, and it makes sense that moving a vehicle would require some form of energy. It is nowhere near as obvious that the power output of Argentina should be required for a currency, as evidenced by various other proof algorithms. Is Bitcoin so useful to humanity that the tradeoff of burning forests is worth it, when there are alternatives?

Further, because Bitcoin is a currency, mining wants to be profitable, so mining is not incentivized to pursue renewables if they are more expensive than e.g. coal. However, when powering my electric car, if I have the privilege, I don't defeat the purpose by paying my electric company more for wind power.

Edit: I'm slow, everybody else said it better.

Vehicles are a very helpful tool for numerous aspects of human life. Bitcoin is nothing more than a speculative asset to make a few people richer. It serves no real benefit to human society that can't be fulfilled in a less energy consuming way.

Electric cars will replace existing vehicles and will shift energy consumption. Bitcoin is creating new energy consumption.

Are you insane? EVs don't increase energy useage. It shift energy usage from pure fossil fuels to a mix of fossil fuels, renewables and nuclear energy. Renewables are growing way faster than fossil fuels now, so by the time EVs is really starting to add demand to electricity production, most of that will be renewable.

If you add up all the electricity needed to refine, transport and pump fuel, you end up with a decent percentage of that needed to drive an EV anyway.

What's more, EVs have several other benefits to society. They're more quiet, there's less local pollution, you can save millions on reduced ventilation in tunnels, etc. These are objective benefits.

The benefits of cryptocurrency in a modern democracy is mostly subjective and speculative at the moment. So far it seems to be purely a speculative investment object, sometimes pure gambling and scams. I'm not saying I don't think cryptocurrency can be a good thing in the end, I just don't think Bitcoin is it. IMO exchanges should be banned from trading purely speculative PoW cryptocurrencies with no guaranteed reserves behind them. (Ethereum 2.0 or stable-coins are OK in my view)

> Money uses lots of electric

Traditional digital money uses several orders of magnitude less electricity. So the "replacement" is just simply worse in this regard.

Yes, I've heard some idiotic claims that traditional banking uses more resources, but this generally includes cash and things like investment banking, which is not what Bitcoin is replacing. Personally I don't use cash at all anymore anyway.

> Is electricity 100% powered by renewables yet?

Irrelevant. We can't transition to 100% renewables first, and only then start building EVs. That'll take too much time. We develop both in parallel and aim at hitting 100% renewables and 100% EVs around the same time.

> But, if it's anything similar to the IPv4 to IPv6 transition we have a few decades yet.

IPv6 didn't offer enough benefits until we started running out of IPv4 addresses. The benefits of EVs are massive to society as a whole. Yes, there are infrastructure challenges, but they're simpler. A lot of people can transition just by plugging in in their garage.

Norway went from ~0% sale of electric cars to over 50% (~75% with PHEV) in just 10 years. And that's with way more primitive infrastructure, and really crappy EVs for the first 7 of those 10 years. Even from 2016 - when our HOA prepared the garage for EVs - until now, the solutions are just so much better. Used to be you needed an individual circuit from the circuit box to each charger. Now you just have one shared channel where you can connect a charging station at any point along it. When we got our EV in 2015, 50kW fast charging was the highest. Now there's 350kW fast chargers. Even my tiny local supermarket has two 150kW fast chargers.

No, I'm in the camp that this transition will happen surprisingly fast. It already has in Norway. It'll probably be faster in many other countries since EVs and infrastructure tech is so much better now. I think the transition from feature phones to smart phones (after the iPhone was launched) is a better comparison.

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