Yeah, maybe not right now, but EVs are at 1% roughly in the US, so obviously the charging network is going to be a lot better. In fact, all you need is a fixed charging station (no fuel deliveries) since everyone is already connected to the grid, so that would not be a problem unless you plan on taking 400+ miles trips in uninhabited regions.
> time to waste charging up
Today you get roughly 200 miles from a 20 min charge with tesla supercharger, seems like a non-issue if stations are ubiquitous. The government should imo force tesla to standardize connectors and high power charging (this is critical infrastructure, stop playing walled garden). Anyway, that's a smaller kink to iron out.
> The loss of battery, the expense of replacement (it costs the same as the car)
New tech, we're already seeing heavy YoY price reductions. Plus lots of the perceptions of price comes from tesla which isn't a cheap-tier car. Not disagreeing fully, time will tell what the lifecycle costs will end up for a Prius-like EV.
> I honestly see electric cars as a non-starter.
Shit, I have my criticisms too, but non-starter? I mean, I get it that today it doesn't make sense for everyone, but clearly there's a lot of progress in the right direction, on all relevant axes.
I'm very interested in what this will actually look like. 20 minutes may not seem long every 200 miles for an individual person. But it's far larger than the equivalent gasoline fueling, which might take, what? 10 minutes per 400 miles?
There were National Parks that had to close this year due to too much traffic. Will 20 minutes per person provide the throughput? Will we have massive parking lots filled with chargers? Can the localized infrastructure handle that? What does this look like in practice?
1. It's way easier to install 100 chargers at a service station than it is to install 100 petrol pumps. 2. Lots of people can charge at home and will almost never charge anywhere else, so there will be fewer people wanting to charge there anyway. Maybe not at very sparsely populated American states but they surely have space for huge charging car parks anyway?
Each physical “charger” comes off a truck and the concrete foundation is trivial, of course. No limiting factors there.
The infrastructure to route sufficient power and energy to the site? Massive. Think in terms of a small town or aluminum smelter suddenly popping into being on a random street-corner. Every upstream electrical distribution component must be questioned and possibly upgraded.
Once the low-hanging fruit are gone, possible locations will get harder and harder to find.
Source: a friend who manages the physical installation of car charging stations.
1. Medium fast charging at home. Most people will do that. No problems with infrastructure, especially if combined with solar.
2. Slow charging on basically every parking spot at the side of the road in cities. Most people living in apartments will do that. This already exists, it's not a problem. It also means that most trips can now be done with just 50-75% of the range because the car will be able to recharge at the destination.
3. Superchargers for cross-country trips. These will become more expensive and even faster. Most people will use them on holidays.
Still, expanding the grid is a no-brainer, because everyone who comes off petrochemicals are going to need electrification. So, if you can't expand the grid (slowly over time) you have bigger problems.
Not only should it not seem long, but biologically all research shows it being meaningfully unhealthy to not get out of a static position for a longer break more often.
These types of trips are also the 5% exception (as opposed to the 95% errands and weekly errands)
> There were National Parks that had to close this year due to too much traffic.
Zion has had too much traffic for almost 50 years. IMO national parks are better enjoyed on ebikes and public transit - to get to the trailheads.
The external dependency of the petrol car is the production of petrol. Huge amounts of global state focus goes on making sure there is a garage near you selling petrol at a "reasonable" price. I mean wars, repression, pipelines that have their own countries and armies, vast ships across oceans, bending millions of people globally to the needs of us users - "the spice must flow" is a very apt phrase.
Something I do not hear much about but must be hitting military thinkers around the world is ... what happens when EV really takes over.
A tesla powered off my roof can take me to the local supermarket but can you drive a main battle tank on Lithium ? How long does the recharge take from solar cells? How do we fly a helicopter when the only people doing fracking are doing it for military?
Who runs a oil refinary just for the US Navy? And what if the US Navy decides not to sell you their oil from the only working refinary?
The impact on mechanised warfare of the change to EV is something I don't hear much about.
The point is that once everyone is in an EV car, your traditional car hits all those problems. At some point the western world will think "phew we can stop paying Saudi and just drive EVs from our solar cells" - and the whole fucking thing collapses. That's somewhere around 75% of cars being EV.
At the price a liter of any fuel gets at the end of the supply chain, a lot of things become economically viable: beamed energy from space, for instance. One advantage of this is that, contrary to liquid fuel or solar panels or even portable nuclear reactors, the enemy cannot capture your source of power (unless the war reaces space, of course)
Edit: found a source https://afresearchlab.com/technology/space-power-beaming/
Imagine a world where oil stops being sold to the Western world - we have enough EV and solar to keep ourselves happy. Say 2040. And then imagine how Saudi and Iranian armed forces will think - those armies have petrol powered tanks and aircraft. And they have oil wells and refineries in their countries borders. If we blow up the refineries then they won't threaten us anymore. Now add in domestic resistance to the regiemes who see the same calculus.
Once the money stops flowing in the oil will be blown up by someone and quickly.
We are yet to see EV trucks adoption, it is too early to talk about other more demanding uses.
And that accounts for something like 50% of western energy use or more. And yeah there is no replacement for a fuel burning jet engine for an F35. Right now or even decades out.
So what happens to global oil production if half the customers just go away. I don't think the answer is "same as previously just double the price to compensate".
The issue is that the supply chain can / might / will collapse, become more fragile, less reliable etc. States will accept interruptions in oil production if their hospitals can keep running and their citizens keep warm. So that means that the hyper focus on armed support of the global oil industry goes away - and that changes global politics.
Predicting what happens after this 50% ish tipping point is a fools game but something big happens - and that leads to all sorts of effects.
More drones? More missiles and less fighters? I don't know. But there is a new equilibrium and we are probably only guessing what the levers are
Umm, there are many other components to solar, wind and EVs that don't magically start getting produced in your backyard. Not having to buy crude from Saudi Arabia is something the US could do tomorrow, if they wanted to. There are tons of reserves in the US and Canada.
If we could trim peoples requirements to a reasonable worst case rather than a "what if" we could save a huge amount of energy and environment impact.
If it was cheaper to buy, maintain and house a larger car and a smaller one just to save on fuel, people would do it.
It's even better than that. The by far most expensive part –connecting the power source – has already been done. All you need is build a charger. You don't need fuel deliveries so it's in fact a huge logistics simplification.
...with EV market share at small single digits.
It's easy to imagine from some tech-utopian perspective, but scaling that up isn't straight-forward, and we don't know how the business or subsidization should work, or how much infrastructure needs to be rebuilt. Remember, EVs are far heavier than equivalent ICEs.
I don't think any infrastructure will need to be rebuilt. EVs aren't that heavy. Certainly not as heavy as many vans.
One doesn't belong with the others and hasn't remote mountain stations let alone mountains as the name implies. Did you think of Finland?
As an exercise, try the Tesla Go anywhere tool ( https://www.tesla.com/trips ). Note that this is only using Tesla charging stations which are merely a small part of the whole network. But a very convenient part. You plug in for 25 minutes and do a bathroom or lunch break or go shopping or watch a short movie - typically possible since the stops are at convenient locations for that.
Remember that you never need to think about any of this. You tell the car where to go and it will plan all the required stops for you.
Having used an EV for some time now, I don't want to buy one that charges much faster. Once the charging is complete you quickly have to leave the charging spot, because there are fees. So you don't want to be stuck in a queue at the bathroom or shop.
In any case, new chargers have improved to 250 kW and 350 kW is coming, so charging times can be down to 10-15 minutes if the car supports it. And let's remember that most people only need this for long trips, such as going on vacation. I never charge on a public charger day to day. I have not charged anywhere except at home for many months now.
Source: did that with my family several times.
Also, people go on vacation more or less at the same time, so be prepared to be in a line before you can charge.
With people just having to sit inside, because if they leave they lose their spot in line.
A completely reasonable option is to own an EV that covers the vast majority of your needs and rent the one or two times a year you require more.
This is so out of touch with mainstream America and will never happen.
The ability to get in my car and drive where I want to, when I want to (perhaps even away from a natural or man-made disaster) is a freedom that me or many others will not allow ourselves to lose. The idea of having to ask permission to travel outside some radius is unfathomable.
Add to that, that you pay much less per kilometer/mile for the electricity than you pay for gasoline/diesel.
The battery might be the weak point currently, but with faster charging (already today you can charge 80% full in 30 minutes) it will be a non-issue. You could then live with lower capacity batteries. And as battery prices go down you could most likely in 10 years replace your battery for much less than today.
Cars have much bumpier roads and less professional maintenance, and batteries, but at least the motors etc aren't something to worry about.
We're only doing something so insane because we have existing car-shaped infrastructure.
But the future isn't that. The future is mostly one- and two-wheeled personal transport on top of walkable cities.
This is not enough to make an argument. If you could plausibly argue why this approach can't scale or why we will run out of resources, fine.
> But the future isn't that. The future is mostly one- and two-wheeled personal transport on top of walkable cities.
Because you say so? There is nothing - nothing at all - that suggests things are going that way.
If anything there will be more public transport, such as trains, buses and especially subways. And there will be a lot of EVs.
But 99 percent of the time, people don't need the whole car. An electric kick scooter is more than enough, if there was somewhere to ride it that wasn't dangerous due to cars.
Economics will eventually fix this problem and infrastructure will match what people actually want.
Then buy a Nio. Nio has designed their packs to be swappable so you can both charge and swap: