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Comment by DwnVoteHoneyPot | Hacker News Reader

The future is combustion, plus hybrids, plus electric. Getting rid of investment into combustion and hybrids is mistake similar to the mistake of neglecting nuclear for electricity generation.

An analogy is the people still use the post office, despite email, text messages, instant messages, and video calls.

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Combustion and hybrids will be banned in most markets by 2035-40. Until then, it'll market of declining sales year after year.

Investing in anything in them is a huge mistake. It's like investing in improving black and white tv at a time when color tv have 10% market share and growing 50% a year.

Car companies have no choice but to sell ICE for a while. The demand is still there and they can't convert to EV production overnight.

Yet, the winner of tomorrow will be companies that convert to EV quickly and without going bankrupt. Spending $1B on non-EV technology is not going to help GM do that.

GM will make their money back on this many times over.

While I’m an EV enthusiast, they are in no way ready for prime time in the commercial market for trucks. Battery energy density by weight will need to go up several X before You get into competition with diesel engines for heavy or long range towing needs.

Source: I tow. A lot. I carefully evaluated every EV option on the market, none of them are within a factor of 5 of meeting my needs, including the highest end CyberTruck.

It’s really hard to compete with a high flow diesel nozzle.

When the electrical grid begins to collapse under the weight of "migrating to EV," people will be quite happy these legacy companies didn't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

There are massive needs that ICE is still servicing, and will continue to service for many decades to come.

And electric heat and cooking. This thing lately with trying to ban gas stoves everywhere does not seem realistic. There is a reason everything wasn't done with electricity shortly after it was invented in the first place. It takes an absurd amount of capacity to duplicate the energy delivery of hydrocarbons with electricity. Does that much copper even exist?

'will be banned by 20xx' there will surely be attempts but no way it will actually work.

Banning gas stoves is entirely realistic; Americans have been using electric stoves for many, many decades. Gas stoves were only popular with some because the old 50s-style calrod stoves just sucked, for many reasons, but even back then the electric grid had no problem with them. Modern glass-top induction stoves are far superior to gas cooking in every way. The amount of energy needed for electric stoves is really quite tiny, and very short-term too; it's nothing like that needed for EV charging.

"Smart phones will never succeed. The cellular networks will collapse under the weight of all that data" - someone in 2006

Last time I checked, my smart phone did not consumed 150kW during quick charging.

I think we spend way more on air con than ev charging overall. The average of 10kwh per day or so is nothing.

It's not even remotely close to being the same issue though

I still use a diesel powered flip phone.

Perhaps, but a lot of discussions around EVs seems to focus on the state of technology today, while discussing the impact at some point in the future. The implication that cars and the grid won't improve is disingenuous.

It is just experience. Look at Germany. They are building ONE power line from north to south called SuedLink, they started planning in 2013 and operation should start in 2026. Maybe.

So it is completely correct to take current state of the network and consider it virtually unchanged for decades to come.

If "Many decades" is two to three, probably yes, else i don't think so. Oil EROI is declining faster than ever. New oil wells have shorter and shorter lives. Russia's aggression is just moving the timetable two or three years ahead of time.

> Combustion and hybrids will be banned in most markets by 2035-40.

Banned from being sold, not used*

There's still plenty of time to have those laws repealed.

That's an arrogant and profits-before-survival proclamation only fools should follow.

ICE should go on ice, like DC power grids: effectively extinct before we do.

There is no second earth and there's no time to waste on the tranquil soma of gradualism, denial, and delay. Delay will be measured in millions of avoidable deaths, if not billions.

If you want that on your conscience, by all means, keep drilling, burning extracted fuels, and adding carbon to the atmosphere.

"Merchants of Doubt" - a book, with a website, about the topic of a tiny subset of shills and crazy people in "scientific" fields who have stood in the way of ending such hits as DDT, widespread smoking, ozone depletion, and, of course, climate change denial[0]. It's always the same pattern with them: deny, distract, trivialize ("It's not so bad"), equivocate, delay, calls to "slow down", and be "concerned" that not spraying DDT on kids at school "will harm the economy".

0. https://www.merchantsofdoubt.org

My main issue with combustion isn't really CO2 emissions, but that conventionnal oil has already peaked, and in general, oil EROI will soon reach values between 5.5 and 1.5, when it historically was closer to 45.

Investment into nuclear never stopped, it just doesn't achieve anything positive.

Which makes it a perfect analogy for investment in a V8.

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