My guess:
Short term, maybe. Sales projections for electric cars in Europe are likely... optimistic.
Long term, yes (Northvolt and other competitors), because markets are fairly efficient at generating sufficient supply given a long enough window.
Short term, maybe. Sales projections for electric cars in Europe are likely... optimistic.
Long term, yes (Northvolt and other competitors), because markets are fairly efficient at generating sufficient supply given a long enough window.
Half of Europe has already announced phasing out ICE-based cars in the next 10-15 years, Audi has announced they're shifting off of ICEs. A shift towards fully electric is inevitable.
Running cars mostly on current battery technology seems entirely feasible to me? Perhaps a bit inconvenient at times, but far from disaster.
Even if the chemistry doesn't improve, we can always move to a model where you quickly swap batteries at a 'petrol station' instead of slowly charging them.
Of course, a hybrid world is also entirely feasible: where most cars are electric, but some people with long range needs drive a hybrid like a Prius or even ICE-only car.
(After all, from an environment point of view, 90% of people moving from ICE to electric is 90% as good as the full move. Economically, the people with the minority technology will lose out on benefits of scale, of course.)
These remind me of EU state adherence to carbon reduction targets. I would be - very - suspicious of anything a company in this industry, or a country, promises when they have something to gain from making a target and little or nothing to lose from missing it.
> A shift towards fully electric is inevitable
Agreed, but keep in mind that electrification itself took 50-60 years to play out. It will eventually happen, but it will happen over several decades.
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/society/201...
I was referencing the 2020 NDC targets (55% by 2030), but fair enough.
Lots of things get announced, particularly from governments and auto manufacturers.[1] Doesn't mean anything.
[1] If all their (government and automakers) announcements led somewhere by now I'd be able to sleep while my car self-drove me to my vacation destination. Governments particularly are prone to be wrongly optimistic when announcing their policies.
In a few years, the situation changed from a few power plugs in the corner of a parking and some street charging to hundreds of chargers in big parkings, the airport has more than a thousand, business areas hundreds, fast charger in all gas stations, and a lot of home chargers. It will scale up.
I don't even mention other factors like charging time (during vacation time we have queues on gas stations, where fueling car lasts 2 minutes), extending abilities of electric grid to meet larger demand, fixing last mile electric network to do the same. There are some ideas like bidirectional charging, smart charging, etc. but we don't know if we any of this can be actually applied.
Car manufacturers are very happy about EV cars, as they are very expensive, there are no trained non-official repair shops, parts supplirers, so people are forced to use official, overpriced repair channels, so they keep pushing them.
[1] https://www.greencarcongress.com/2019/06/20190624-uk.html
In terms of charging times, many people simply charge at home. On average EV users spend less time at fast charging stations than ICE drivers do at gas stations especially if you include time driving to a gas station. If you’re filling up everywhere you park you only need fast charging on several hundred mile trips.
The GP does have a point there. A lot of vacation travel in Europe happens by car - the traffic jams at the summer holidays on the route from Munich down to Slovenia and Croatia or from Munich to Italy are legendary, and this one drive and how it works out is what determines the purchase decisions for many Germans.
I'd love if the railways could be used - but the network especially in the Balkans is shoddy, international booking is a nightmare, it is about 4-8x (!!!) as expensive as a car ride for a family of four... so yeah.
8 weekends/year * 2 days * 8h/day * 200kW fast charging * 20c/KW premium (over electricity rates) = 5,120$ per year. Fast chargers cost ~50k to install so payback is only 10 years.
Granted this assumes higher than normal rates for those weekends, but not excessively so.
My guess is, IRL it's not as lucrative in practice as your math makes it out to be.
However, EV fast charging locations along major highways tend to have a lot of unused capacity.
In the evening this road will be full, bumper to bumper. There are many streets like it. https://maps.app.goo.gl/Fk68kARYkuxS6FnN8
There are things that can be done about it, e.g. lamp post charging but it's not simple.
This is one of those transition points where charging infrastructure needs to be appropriate for the number of EV’s. Building out massive infrastructure early is simply a waste of money.
I'm not sure this is a real motivation for them. I know a lot of people with EVs (Norway), and I don't know of anyone who has had a problem with the car unique to EVs requiring repairs. I had a problem with the lead-acid 12V battery, but it was on the warranty anyway. Others with the same model has had problem with the gearbox, because the parking mode engages a bolt in the gearbox that can break if you put the car in park while the wheels are rolling... anyway, that's just because it was not a clean-sheet EV design. It's a hold-over from ICE version of the vehicle. So that's yet another source of expensive repairs that goes away with clean-sheet EV design.
Most issues with battery pack is still within warranty on most cars on the road. So in the short term, issues with the battery must be a huge cost for car makers.
Training of repair technicians for EVs is also quickly becoming quite routine here. I don't know how the situation is with non-official repair shops here, but don't think training is the issue there.
Meanwhile, service costs are lower than for ICE. So there must be less service/repair revenue in general.
Tesla is a bit different of course, don't think there's much non-official repairs being done there, but it has more to do with software, vertical integration and being a new brand, than being an EV. A friend with a BMW (ICE) has had similar problems with being locked into overpriced service/repairs.
Edit: > I don't even mention other factors like charging time (during vacation time we have queues on gas stations, where fueling car lasts 2 minutes), extending abilities of electric grid to meet larger demand, fixing last mile electric network to do the same
These are mostly "fixed" in Norway, and it has taken less than 10 years (most development has been in the last 5). I regularly drive 2h trip to a cabin in 27kWh Kia Soul EV. I've driven cross country in a 70kWh Tesla Model S. In both cases the charging I've needed has taken exactly 0 extra minutes of my time, because in the first case we need to buy food on the way, and in the second case we took way more breaks than we spent waiting for fast charging. There can be queues at specific times on some congested charging stations. But it's getting better as EVs get bigger batteries (people can drive farther without fast charging) and more people get charging in their garage or street-side charging. Charging stations often have more chargers than fuel stations have fuel pumps, and they're not as burdened by people charging/fueling for their daily needs, since most people charge at home for that.
Studies indicate that you wouldn't need to produce much more electricity if there's a bigger effort to make buildings more energy efficient, and the grid doesn't need expansion if most charging is done at night.
That report seems dubious. The math simply doesn't add up.
For instance, the report claims that to replace all the cars on the road in the UK, it would take "... 2,362,500 tonnes of copper... [which is ] at least half of the world’s copper production during 2018."
But the world produced 16,890,000 tonnes of copper in 2020 (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_copper_pr...). From that same page, it seems that the annual copper production has not changed much in the last 5 years.
So it's not half of annual production, it's more like an eight.
Secondly, to replace all the cars on the road in the UK (~33M units), at the current replacement rate of ~2.5M/year (https://www.goodcarbadcar.net/uk-total-auto-industry-sales-f...) would take about 13 years. So now we're talking about about one eight of annual copper production spread over 13 years, which would be about 1% of annual production per year.
Of course ICE vehicles also require quite a bit of copper...
It seems not unreasonable that replacing all vehicles in the 5th largest economy in the world would take ~1% of the copper output of the world (assuming zero recycling!) over a period of 13 years.
Lithium exists in huge amounts and projects are underway all over the world. Literally in every continent. The lithium market is growing like crazy.
There are also many cobalt, nickel and graphite projects underway. I think the article might have mixed up copper and nickel.
This doesn't account for the huge amount of lower tier cars that will use LFP or High-Manganese cathodes. Or for the fact that even high nickel cathodes will basically remove cobalt as well.
Switching to high density anodes such a Li-Metal or Silicon will massively reduce the materials requirements per car on the cathode side as well.
Not to mention that sometimes in the next decade we might go away from the transition metals completely.
> Car manufacturers are very happy about EV cars,
You clearly don't know anything about car industry.