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Comment by enragedcacti | Hacker News Reader

> During the installation process, the Megachargers took down the power grid for a good chunk of the city [imagine what happens when 100% of ICE vehicles have switched over to BEV in California by 2035].

A little bit tangential, but 2035 marks the ban on new passenger ICE vehicles. Given the average age of cars in the US, California probably won't even be at 50% passenger BEVs by 2035, let alone 100% of ALL vehicles. Kind of a troubling oversight for an automotive long/short manager seemingly specializing in EV companies.

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My question is what happens to gas stations as the changeover is underway? They make razor thin margins and rely on selling a lot of gas to turn a profit, which leads me to believe there will start to be fewer gas stations even when only 20% of cars on the road are electric (just my conjecture, but it seems to make sense to me).

Now as gas stations start to thin out, that would put a damper on people buying gas cars as they would have to go out of their way to fuel up. Which downward pressure on resale value of cars, making people not to want to buy a brand new gas car if it looks like they won't get any trade in value in a few years.

The only hope that I can think of is when it gets to this point, there would be another "cash for clunkers" type of program to make the transition easier.

As of the news yesterday, Tesla now has contracts with two of the largest gas station chains in the United States to install superchargers.

If EV companies get their way, we probably won’t be buying personal cars except as luxury or work items by 2035. Everything with be subscriptions, either leases, short term rentals, or taxis.

Every EV on the market today is offered without a subscription and you can buy it outright.

Gas stations are trying to become restaurants/grocery stores.

> but 2035 marks the ban on new passenger ICE vehicles.

Don’t worry, there will be a huge supply of like-new cars that have been titled in Nevada for 3 months and driven 10 miles.

Why is it troubling?

Because it's obvious enough that those who aren't experts in that field can easily point it out. That a supposed expert in the field missed it raises concerns by proxy about their expertise in general.

And it's not at all possible that someone making a blog post forgot to put the word "passenger" before "ICE" there?

the big mistake isn't missing "passenger", its claiming that 100% of vehicles on the road will be BEV when the regulation says 100% of sales will be BEV. The average age of cars on the road is about 10 years so a substantial number of vehicles will still be ICE in California in 2035.

Eh, I got the word wrong (switch it to "sales") but it doesn't really change my point.

The sentence is talking about full switchover- that doesn't happen with sales bans. It's not a missing word, no matter what way you want to try and frame it. The sentence is written as intended.

So it’s ok to have a ban on new ICE vehicles, when half of existing vehicles are still ICE?

the obvious: the manager is being sloppy. Whether they are correct or not is irrelevant; thinking and writing clearly about these issues is literally this person's entire day job. A sloppy report is the tip of an iceberg of sloppier thinking.

The conspiracy: the manager has an axe to grind that aligns with incumbent auto-makers' business strengths, suggesting that the analysis is debased in one way or another.

The "mind explodes": the manager is talking their book; behind the manager is a team using mountains of data to design messages that optimally push the market in the direction they want. The purpose of the message is not to be logically coherent to nerds on the internet. The point is to convince a few portfolio managers to behave in one way or another, and perhaps also to signal sentiment analysis algos.

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