Comment by adjejmxbdjdn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adjejmxbdjdn | Hacker News Reader

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ICE -> EV is not a 30 year transition.

I’d be surprised if there’s a consequential ICE industry after 2040 (that doesn’t mean there won’t be ICE cars being driven, just that they won’t be selling outside niche industries after 2040).

The collapse of ICE vehicles will happen sooner rather than later due to a few fundamental reasons.

- China has gone all in on EVs. It’s hard to compete against the Chinese and they’re unlikely to ever develop the skills and capabilities to develop cheap ICE vehicles.

- The Strait of Hormuz fiasco has pretty much convinced countries about not being dependent on gas. Electricity is an energy abstraction. It allows you to run your EV no matter where you get your energy from because almost all sources of energy can easily be converted to electricity. Running your vehicles on this abstraction provides a lot of sovereign flexibility.

- ICE infrastructure is incredibly expensive to maintain. You have so many dedicated gas stations spread out all over that use up valuable space and resources, but also then need to be supplied with gas coming from all over the world. As EVs take meaningful share from ICE vehicles, the cost of maintaining this infrastructure for each ICE vehicle driver will keep rising. As demand goes down, gas stations will start shutting down, and then the distance between 2 gas stations or your home and thr closes fast station may increase, and range anxiety will start working against ICE and in favor of EVs.

- ICE vehicles are 100+ years into their development. EVs are just getting started. And they’re almost close to parity. It’s not clear how ICE will maintain any edge outside of very niche use cases as EVs continue to improve.

> ICE -> EV is not a 30 year transition

> I’d be surprised if there’s a consequential ICE industry after 2040

It started in the 00s, really took off around 2010.

And don't forget that 2040 is in 14 years. You can buy plenty of brand new ICE cars today, the majority of them will definitely still be around in 14 years.

I agree with you, for the mass consumer car market (individual/family transport) as a whole. It's coming fast. However, the current EV technology (mostly batteries + charging) is not a good fit for a whole lot of edge cases, and in the aggregate they matter, too, and thus the ICE engine industry won't really go away anytime soon:

* General-purpose Semis for commercial hauling. Yes, there's some EV Semis on the road today - pilot projects, or specific routes on specific schedules. But there's a lot of general purpose semi-hauling that happens every day on odd/long routes without sufficient chargers in the right places, and they need much bigger chargers. And then there's the specialty semis that carry large/wide loads. I see them almost every day in my area, carrying large chunks of power substations, heavy manufacturing equipment, blades for wind turbines, etc.

* Fire trucks, Ambulances, Tow trucks, Police cars - For various similar reasons, it's tricky with some of these, although in well-constrained cases and with extra vehicles on tap as backup (when the other one is low on charge in an emergency), maybe can kinda work, eventually.

* "Personal" trucks that see heavy towing/hauling use (think: hauling a livestock trailer or farm equipment or heavy materials (or maybe an EV race car!), possibly long distances on a regular basis). The battery range really suffers when you put all the extra weight and drag on by towing, and people aren't willing to turn what was a 5 hour diesel trip into a 9 hour trip with supercharger stops (more time in the heat with animals, more time on the road in general, and do you have to disconnect the trailer just to reach the charge cable?)

* Backup generator ICE engines - home, datacenter, industrial use, etc. The problem here is mostly runtime and peak watts of output vs cost. You can use a battery-based solution for most of these cases, but it currently costs prohibitively more for the same performance specs. When they're being used in austere environments, sometimes there's no electric grid to even charge from, so slap on a massive solar array cost, too.

* All military use of ICE engines in general (transport, generators, etc) - Not insignificant in scope and scale, and obviously they're not going to run EVs or find chargers on battlefields.

These cases will diminish over time, especially as we continue to make advances in charging and especially battery technology, but it will probably take a few decades because there's science challenges, not just engineering ones. The military case might never go away.

Look, sure. No one is saying "no ICE ever". Some people still ride horses.

125 years ago cities were built around horses. Stabling. Breeding. Feeding. Grooming. Street cleaning (turns our horses poop a Lot). By 20 years later that's all gone.

Sure horses survived in rural areas. Sure the Amish use them today as then. But the horse-based industry has (in real terms) vanished.

ICE is headed the same way. It will exist, but no daily-driver car will be ICE. EVs win, because in cities they are better. Because they're cheaper to own.

If Ford wants to own the ICE niches, fine. But it won't be cars.

It's not quite that simple though. A lot of these edge cases are necessary for everyone to live their cushy little city lives. It's not a matter of outmoded things. We will still need ambulances, and we will still need livestock trailers, and everything else on my list, for all of the foreseeable future. Unless batteries and charging gets a lot better, we'll still be manufacturing and improving ICE engines for many applications. Just not simple passenger cars.

ICE cars/vehicles aren't going to disappear overnight. There are enough used ICE vehicles for ALL of the edge cases and a ton more for the next 20 years. There is no need to buy new ICE vehicles.

You are underestimating how countries and towns can drag their feet. I live in Germany, in an apartment, in a large city. There's hardly any public charging infra in a 1km radius (if I discount the supermarket parking lot with ~3 chargers), maybe still zero and not hardly any.

Yes, some of my friends who live in a house with a garage are very happy with their EVs, I'm still calling it absolutely ridiculous without spending extra time driving somewhere, then charging, then driving back (or a folding bike maybe).

How good they are literally does not matter at all if I can't fill it up.

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