The Electric Car | Hacker News Reader

The Electric Car

blog.geoffralston.com

201 pointskatm340 comments

I can't believe he's comparing a $70,000 electric car to a huge bucket labeled "old-fashioned gasoline cars". Of course the $70,000 car is better in almost every way. I've driven a lot of electric cars in the $5,000 to $10,000 range and I assure you they are not better than "old-fashioned gasoline cars". Our last gas-powered car was a used Lexus that cost us $8,000. It's an extremely comfortable luxury car that seats 5 and can easily be driven across the country. A new electric car [1], on the other hand, costs approximately the same but can only seat 2 people and can travel 160 km on one charge. It's top speed is 80 km/h. It takes 6 hours to fully charge. The costly lithium-ion batteries will have to be replaced at some point. True, it is convenient for trips around town without much luggage. I'm fairly confident that the used Lexus will outlast and outrun the new electric car.

1. This is the car: http://chinaautoweb.com/car-models/zotye-zhidou-zd-e20-ev/

If I remember correctly, iPhone came out when most featured phone is either free with a contract or less than 50 bucks.

You can get everything for free with contracts. High end smartphones of the time were about 20-30% off iPhone retail price.

Either way, comparison with smartphones is totally irrelevant.

And you don't "own" it if it's carrier locked (wait out your contract)

Just one more thing, he forgot to mention that we still need to wait for Tesla Model 3.

Not necessarily. Used Tesla Model S's will come down in price, and still have fairly extreme (in my estimation) reliability (which may actually work to keep the price from coming down as much as an ICE vehicle, but still...)

For 10K (+3) if you live in USA, you can buy a Nissan Leaf that came out the 3 year lease, and it is a decent car that seats 5 people with a range of about 80+ miles. Batteries are expensive and will continue to be till the turn of this decade and not a whole lot can be done. The better analogy would be laptops vs desktops, laptops gave mobility but they were heavy did not have the power etc. but by 2004 - 2006 they started to eclipse the desktops, EVs will slowly eclipse, they are expensive with range limitations but as they mature over couple of generations the efficiency gains coupled with economy of scale would make them eclipse ICE. 10 years from now, you will not find a Pure ICE vehicle in new cars, every car will have battery of some meaningful size.

a used leaf will likely only have <50 miles of range. My dad has one and it has been a disaster for him -- the range keeps decreasing and he can do less and less with it.

The 2011 and 2012 were disasters for Nissan. Never buy one of those, especially in a hot climate. I've had my 2013 for two years now and haven't noticed any drop in range at all.

We were one of the first in line to pre-order our 2011 Leaf. The battery capacity bar hasn't budged in four years, and there has been no noticeable drop in range. But we also live in Seattle, where 90F is considered to be unbearably hot.

The $8,000 price I quoted is after heavy subsidies. I imagine that used Nissan Leaf price is also after subsidies. If electric cars become mainstream I wonder what will happen with subsidies.

We just bought a used leaf for 12k at carmax. It was a 2013 with 16,000 miles on it and it easily gets 80 miles to a charge. All of the great things you read about them have all been true for us, super quiet, surprising acceleration, convenience of charging at home. It was hard to get our hands on one as they kept selling them as soon as they'd come in at carmax.

Second hand electric cars, as long as the battery is solid, should be an excellent deal if you're in the sweet spot for commuting distance. 50 miles a day equates to $1000 a year in US gas costs, and £2000 ($3000) in UK petrol costs. Especially in the UK, if you can get a used Leaf for £10-12k* , that's going to be by far the most economical way of running a second/commuting car.

* That seems to be the going rate for a two year old Leaf on Autotrader.

< I've driven a lot of electric cars in the $5,000 to $10,000 range

Bumper cars at an amusement park?

Chinese cars, some with lead-acid batteries, some with lithium-ion. The price of the car is mainly determined by the batteries it holds. The rest of the car is usually cheaply made. Some cheaper ones feel like they don't have any shocks at all. Those in the $10,000 range have amenities such as WiFi, adjustable seats, and rear-facing video camera.

If you want to test drive a Model S and see what all the fuss is about then here are the events: http://my.teslamotors.com/en_GB/events

Also GLiiDE ("chauffeur driven car service, exclusively using electric vehicles") could mean you don't need to own one: http://gliide.co

I think driving in a Model S to give you a sense of where mainstream $20,000 electric cars will be in 10-15 years will give you a much better idea than a $5,000 Chinese electric car that's probably slightly better than a bicycle will.

The "electric" part of the car is maybe 50% or more of an EV cost, and it will be affected by a "Moore's Law"-like law (but with a 2x improvement in 5-10 years instead of 2), and most of the other 50% is stuff like huge high quality wheels, leather materials and all that "luxury" stuff. Drastically reduce that stuff to $20,000 gas-powered car "luxury" levels, and then extrapolate where the "electric" side of the car will be in 10-15 years, and I think you'll get pretty close to a Model S-like driving experience on a much cheaper car.

To give you an analogy (I know, again with the iPhone, but I think they have more in common than not) what you're saying would be more like trying out a $100 "touchscreen smartphone" in 2007 and saying "Wow these suck - they are even worse than regular smartphones because they work so much more slowly having to power that big resolution and those graphics".

So your experience then wouldn't be an accurate prediction of how touchscreen phones, even $100 or $200 ones, let alone the $600 ones, will be in the future, because in 2007 you needed quite expensive components to provide a "good experience" with a "touchscreen phone".

The original iPhone that cost $600 gave you a much better idea of how touchscreen phones will be 8 years later, because now even $100 touchscreen phones have better specs and work better than the $600 iPhone did back then, and can do a lot more, too.

That's why the Model S should give you a much better idea of how $20,000 EVs will be in 10-15 years than a $5,000 EV does today.

Here is the kicker they so conveniently ignore. America's love of the automobile, if not true for other parts of the world I would be amazed, is the freedom it offers. Go anywhere, anytime.

Electric cars limit owners ability to do so. You are on your car's schedule and the current limitations are still extreme. More than one magazine has staged a long drive of an electric car like certain manufactures and enthusiast have only to reveal that you will have to drive out of your way at times and your trip time is greatly extended. The same people who have the means to buy 100k cars; don't fool yourselves the transaction prices on many Ss are there have the extra time.

Think about it, if you can only go 200 miles and have to stop for thirty minutes each time to charge what it does to anything but travel completed wholly in that radius. Then add in diversions to acceptable charging stations.

Pure electrics are fine for metropolitan travel. When their recharge rate becomes very quick or an acceptable range extender; likely hydrogen; becomes available then they will have widerspread acceptance.

To be honest, outside of a small niche electric "cars" aren't there yet. However there is no reason electric school buses aren't worth the time. If you want acceptance to grow then employ the tech where everyone will see it and in a means you can sell on many levels. While an electric school bus would be expensive I would much rather see the Federal subsidy go there than funding a wealthy persons car, someone who could afford it without the subsidy. School systems spend a fortune on fuel and are subject to fluctuations in price. Electrify the buses, solar and wind power the depots, and you can not only charge them but sell to the grid and during times when school is out they could perhaps feed back stored electricty.

"America's love of the automobile"

The smartphone analogy would be the stereotypical hollywood/tv view of teenage girls spending hours talking on legacy landline corded telephones means that demographic will be totally uninterested in texting and social media on smartphones.

America's love of the automobile is waning. Miles travelled per capita has already peaked in several states, starting as far back as 2004:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/01/16/t...

According to that page, it costs 10,880 Yuan (before subsidies). This comes to about $2000, which seems too low to be possible. Or is that without the battery?

I believe that's missing a zero. It costs 40,000 to 50,000 RMB after subsidies.

Your argument doesn't hold. I make a few road trips a year. Only a weekly basis I make at least 20 trips varying in the range of 5-40 miles. That's the pay off for an electric car. If I can save money on gas, and maintainance cost. I'll gladly rent an old-fashioned gasoline car for those 3-5 200+ miles road trips I make in a year.

Spoken exactly like someone who has never driven a Tesla. ;)

> a used Lexus that cost us $8,000. It's an extremely comfortable luxury car that seats 5 and can easily be driven across the country

How much did that Lexus cost new?

How much will a used Tesla go for in a few years?

> and can easily be driven across the country

Yes, NOW. But, you didn't read the article (or your reading comprehension sucks). If 10% of the cars on the road become electric, at least 10% of the gas stations will start to close (since that business is barely profitable), making it increasingly less convenient to own a gas car.

> A new electric car [1], on the other hand, costs approximately the same but can only seat 2 people and can travel 160 km on one charge.

Yeah, today. What about in 5-10 years?

You consistently use current state to argue against future state. There must be a fallacy named for this.

> It takes 6 hours to fully charge.

Tesla's tech is here now and takes far less time. He also released all his patents.

> The costly lithium-ion batteries will have to be replaced at some point.

Yes, in 10 years, when they will be far, far cheaper, due to manufacturing economies of scale. In that time they will lose only 10-15% of their total charging capacity.

> True, it is convenient for trips around town without much luggage.

Using electric motors over gas engines is a HUGE space savings. Again, see: Tesla. (You really need to see one of these up close and drive one. It may be the only thing that will "show you the light.")

> I'm fairly confident that the used Lexus will outlast and outrun the new electric car.

Nope, because the ICE (internal combustion engine) and transmission has hundreds or thousands more parts (any of which can break) than an electric transmission. The Tesla only has ONE GEAR, for example. Teslas, and other electrics with 3-phase AC induction motors, will last faaaaaaaaaaaaaaar longer than gas powered cars. I've seen 60 year old electric motors running like a top, and in googling the reliability of electric motors, they are far higher than gas motors. Coupled with the "tipping point" effect of many gas stations closing up due to lack of business, that cross-country trip will end up needing to be routed through available stations one day...

Did I mention that a Tesla, going the same distance as an ICE vehicle, has 1/3 the carbon footprint.

Source: I own a Tesla Model S P85+ and fully expect this thing to still be in tip top shape in 10 years while continuing to run circles around gas cars (ohhhh, I can't wait till you experience simply passing people by at speed in this thing... you think the thought and it's like you're a pinball coming off caroms to your destination...)

There very likely is no tipping point with gas stations.

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/07/the...

"A 10% reduction would be 221 million vehicles but that is how many vehicles there were in 2000. Was driving an automobile so much more inconvenient in 2000 than it was in 2009?"

> Was driving an automobile so much more inconvenient in 2000 than it was in 2009?

I don't understand this logic. The answer is "no, it wasn't, because there were fewer vehicles." What would happen is that stations would become less dense, and there's a low density point there where "inconvenience" is reached, or at least, gas-range anxiety. This actually happened when gas vehicles were new.

The response also says that demand is already decreasing simply due to the emergence of more fuel-efficient vehicles, so a penetrating EV market may merely accelerate that decline.

I wish people would be slightly more honest about technological change. Smartphones are very special. They are very cheap, easy to mass produce, and you can iterate on them very quickly. Cars on the other hand have a much longer life cycle, involve much more capital, and in general are going to follow an elongated investment / replacement cycle. Comparing these two systems, while enthusiastic and great for a college term paper, seems premature.

I am really excited that there may be a fleet of self driving electric cars in urban areas in 10 years. It's going to be awesome. But I am willing to bet for the rest of us its going to be a more conservative change that is going to evolve over decades.

Indeed, the fact that phone contracts effectively force most people to upgrade every two years is an unusual, important, and often-overlooked characteristic of the smartphone market.

It's a big part of why Apple makes such incredible amounts of money from iPhones, but their iPad revenue has dropped off significant.

This is probably the part of it and it probably used to have stronger effect, but right now I think the reason people change smartphones often is the same reason people changed their PCs every two-three years - software increases in features / bloat so fast that if you don't upgrade, you'll quickly be out of the loop (and God forbid you actually update your software - then it will gradually stop working as authors make it bigger and slower).

It's all about life cycle. A typical car lives for nearly 15 years. There are huge numbers of 15-20 year-old cars on the road today. An introduction of a new type of car won't change the life cycle dynamics. Even if auto manufacturers manage to sell 50% of new electric cars in 10 years, there will be tens of millions of old gasoline cars on the road ... just because people keep driving them.

When cars crash, passengers automatically go back to where they started instead of dying, then one can innovate as quickly in cars as in phones.

I am one of the biggest Tesla fanboys out. Everything Geoff said is true but he makes it seem like this is around the corner and it isn't even close. At least 60M cars are produced annually[0] and there are about 1B currently in the world[1]. A best case for tesla is to grow from ~50K cars to ~500K cars anually by 2020. There isn't an industrial base yet.

Some other manufacturers will contribute of course, but even if 60m electric cars rolled out annually starting now and started replacing ICE cars, that will take (1B/60M) * years, which is 16years and 8months.

The only way this could be sped up would be the rise of self-driving cars, an increase in public transport and the continuation of urbanization. If many manufacturers stopped making ICE cars and we used much less of them we could replace enough of the current fleet for it to be non-trivial in a few decades.

[0]http://www.worldometers.info/cars/ [1]http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2011/08/23/car-population_n_934...

https://www.yahoo.com/autos/s/uber-ceo-tesla-sell-half-milli...

right, to clarify I did factor this in. I mean that not only do self-driving cars work and meet regulatory scrutiny, but they bring about a shift in user behavior where most transportation is on demand and shared. That way less cars can work around the clock and people will not need as many of them.

Also, this is a pretty lofty goal for tesla. They haven't produced working self-driving tech (the ones now work at low speed and highway but are not 100x better than humans), they don't have experience with high volume production, the gigafactory isn't complete yet, etc. I am really excited for this to happen, but I am not sure if when that clock sweeps over into new years 2021 there will half a million autonomous teslas.

Would never bet against Musk though, hope I am wrong.

I hope things pan out the way the article predicts and I'm a massive optimist for EV adoption in the long term. However, there's some obvious wrenches in the plan for such quick adoption, including:

- No great options currently for charging in apartments. Virtually the entire world is on an urbanisation trend, so this segment of potential EV owners is really important for adoption, and isn't being currently served.

- People replace their cars at much slower rates than smartphones.

I think there is a lot of potential for disruption in the transportation sector. Trucking companies and taxi fleets don't care if their vehicles are big, ugly and heavy (as they would be if outfitted with batteries), cost is the main factor. When EV running costs dip below the cost of ICE vehicles (and when battery density improves the range sufficiently), these guys are going to have a huge incentive to invest in EVs quickly.

Also, if someone figures out how to build an electric jet in the next few decades, it will transform the airline industry who are currently held hostage by the price of oil. Perhaps airlines can compete on service rather than price gouging on "extras" that used to be covered by the cost of a ticket, to make up for razor thin margins. Airports could also be built closer to city centres, as the noise and air pollution concerns disappear.

The key technology is battery storage. The energy storage density of gasoline/kerosene/jet fuel is immense, at least 6-7x the best available batteries.

When someone announces a mass-production electrical storage system with 5-10x improvement, we can have electric aircraft as something other than a novelty.

About the apartment thing; one plausible near future is self driving electric cars that scurry off after they drop you off and go find a plug.

I'm not sure why you'd expect that apartment owners wouldn't put chargers in their garages? I'm guessing that a metering or coin operated overnight charger wouldn't cost that much more than a normal charger. There's also the possibility of workplaces providing chargers. Mine does but we're sort of weird.

EDIT: Remember that a parking spot can easily cost over $10,000 so the extra money for a charger isn't that much.

http://shoup.bol.ucla.edu/HighCost.pdf

> I'm not sure why you'd expect that apartment owners wouldn't put chargers in their garages?

I've lived in many apartments, but I've never lived in an apartment that included access to a garage. Many of the apartments I've lived in only had parking available on the street.

I guess it's a matter of density? If you've only got two or three apartments in a building street parking works but for more than that it's really not feasible. If you like living in less dense areas that's great but my sense is that most of the urbanization that's happening is at densities where street parking isn't feasible.

I agree it's not a good comparison. The network on which smartphones plugged in predated them which is not true for the electrics cars and charging stations.

"Electric cars are always full every morning" is only true for people owning a garage.

> The reason electric cars will take over our roads is because consumers will DEMAND them. Electric cars will be better than any alternative, including the loud, inconvenient, gas-powered jalopy. The iPhone demonstrated that smartphones are infinitely better than the feature phones which dominated the world in 2007.

The smartphone revolution analogy makes me cringe. Electric cars are currently playing catch up to their gasoline counterparts in almost every metric except emissions. When the iPhone was released it quite literally leapfrogged the competition (with the exception of battery life). What gives author?

I think electric cars win on every metric except range and refill/recharge time. They have better torque, better efficiency, lower emissions, lower noise, simpler drivetrains, and more reliable motors.

So we just need those fast-charge batteries that garner a press release every couple of months.

Surely they're just around the corner!

For refill time, note that most electric car owners do almost all of their charging in their own garages overnight... not something that's common for gas-powered cars. Long trips are worse for electric cars, sure. But day-to-day driving? Charging is not an issue if you can charge in your garage.

For those of us who live in apartment buildings and don't have a garage where we can install such things, then what?

To me this has always been the biggest obstacle of an electric car.

Wait to buy an electric car until it's convenient for you to charge it?

That means few millenials will ever be able to own them; real estate is just too damn expensive to buy, nevermind the car that you really only can get once you own a house with a garage.

Lots of places don't have super-expensive real estate, unlike the Bay Area and Manhattan. More and more places over time will require apartment garages to have chargers -- already a law for new construction here in Palo Alto.

Personally, I charge at the city parking garage a block away.

So let me get this straight. In the "flyover country" where you DON'T get big city salaries, you're going to buy a $100k-$150k house because you don't make six figures. And then with all the leftover money that you don't have because you're not earning SF engineer salary, you're going to buy a car that costs anywhere from 25%-50% of your house?

Last I lived in flyover country, I bought a $162,000 house on a $55,000 salary, and owned a car a bit more expensive than a Leaf.

So yes, it does work. And that's the owning a house case. There's also the "renting an apartment at a modern complex" case.

Bay area house prices are not proportional (even discarding the effects of higher marginal tax rates). 150K salary for a million dollar house is not easy; 150k house on 50k salary (and a 3x salary difference is a bit of an exaggeration, while house prices are not) is much more plausible.

I bought a foreclosed 70k house in Miami in 2009 (4br - 2.5bth, now worth 150k - rented and cash flow positive) I've lived in the bay area since 2012 It hurts knowing I could buy two or three more houses with what I pay in rent here, similar houses in the bay cost 600-700k yes it really is a 5-10x difference #sigh

Have you seen the vehicle culture in "flyover country"? You will absolutely see people put off repairs and upkeep to their house while they make sure they get a new car every 5 years (or stagger new cars with their spouse, 10 years for each because). If you haven't seen it, I can only ask you believe someone (me) with experience in it (various cities in Texas).

Would it surprise you as well to learn that "SF engineer" isn't the only job in the world that pays a high salary? In Houston for instance, I know dozens of people who earn comparable amounts from engineering in the medical and energy companies. And don't get me started on the consultancies that support them (megabucks) or salespeople paid on commission (ultrabucks). It's actually one of the biggest obstacles to our startup community here: luring good people away from their low-risk, high-salary position in energy, medicine and finance.

Yeah I've never lived in SF but I understand that the economics are different out there. Once you have a note on a million dollar house, what's another $80k for a car? It barely moves the needle.

But when your mortgage is only $1k/mo and then you have to spend another $1k/mo on a car (before insurance or "fuel" or anything else) you might start to wonder.

I've got a Subaru and I figure that car will cost me about $1500/year for the car and another $200/mo for fuel. That's $400/mo insured and everything versus the $1100-$1200 for the Tesla.

Look I'm not saying it's IMPOSSIBLE for people to buy electric cars. But the idea that somehow all the millenials who have generally been screwed by not buying real estate before interest rates went to zero are going to find the cash to start buying electric cars seems pretty laughable to me.

Will some do it? For sure! If you can pull down six figures somewhere with a reasonable cost of living it's totally doable. But there aren't too many places where you can make six figures without everything else costing more too.

EDIT: I live in flyover country. Always have. I'm talking from experience, not how I perceive things from my golden throne on the west coast.

Actually I do live in SF. If you put a million dollar note on a house you are the mother of all house poor.

One point I make is the Tesla is luxo-sport car. Costs a lot new like any other sporty car. So the cost of a new Tesla vs a used gasoline power car isn't really a fair comparison. Looking on Craigslist, you can get a used Nissan Leaf $10k, cost per mile is $0.035. One can run numbers but the cost of ownership is probably $300/mo.

Problematical in places like SF is the lack of parking and thus lack of charging. Though large numbers of people do have or rent garages. In Suburbs a problem can be many people have long commutes that exceed the range of an electric car.

Interestingly a friend just threw down for one of those million dollar homes in SF and is considering an electric car to avoid having to ride the google bus. I'll be interested in how it works our for him. I do have another friend that lives in Oakland, he has a leaf seems to like it.

> One point I make is the Tesla is luxo-sport car. Costs a lot new like any other sporty car. So the cost of a new Tesla vs a used gasoline power car isn't really a fair comparison. Looking on Craigslist, you can get a used Nissan Leaf $10k, cost per mile is $0.035. One can run numbers but the cost of ownership is probably $300/mo.

I guess that's kind-of my point. If millenials can't afford to buy houses they're probably not buying luxo-sports cars. It's not that a Tesla is a bad idea, it's just that the idea that millions of young people with no real assets are going to buy them is a fantasy.

I would suggest that it's roughly as silly as saying pretty soon all the millenials are going to be driving 5 and 7 series BMWs. Not unless those cars come down in price by 80%-90% or everyone somehow magically gets rich AND there's no inflation.

"In the "flyover country" where you DON'T get big city salaries"

Sure you do. I could expect at absolute most a 25% pay raise if I moved to CA. Its not worth it. The ratio in cost of living might be 10:1 but the ratio in income is more like 5:4 or so.

The world is bigger than just the US.

Housing affordability is a major problem in almost every developed country.

> The world is bigger than just the US.

Sometimes it doesn't feel that way, at least according to people here on HN. I live in an apartment block which looks like this (https://www.google.com/search?q=bucharest+communist+flats&bi...), where normal people have actually starting physical fights, with fists and police intervention, over parking spots situated between those buildings, there's no way you could, I don't know, somehow charge your car when you live on the 7th floor.

you dont need a garage, you can just have a lead, my friend was doing it like that in london 5 years ago! just had a lead coming out of his house onto the street!

I guess you have missed the big population trends of the last few decades. More and more people are moving to inner city apartments every one of which is not designed with electric cars in mind. And with property prices reaching astronomical amounts in many places e.g. Australia, UK, Europe, HK, SG the lure of cheaper but smaller apartments is only going to grow.

For me this is is one of the big advantages of hydrogen cars i.e. you use them exactly the same as your existing car.

I agree there's a problem here, but the trend you point out is probably breakeven with respect to gas/electric. Many people how move into a dense city have no car at all.

(Those who do have more money and often garage their car, so they'll add charging to long term garages as demand increases.)

Yes. People moving to inner city apartments are dropping the car altogether, so for them what matters is what's most convenient for car-rental companies when they occasionally rent a car....

In an environment where people only use cars for special trips, not for day-to-day activities, the longer range of gasoline might end up being a bigger advantage than it is for current-day Americans.

It is massively cheaper to solve the problem of extending electricity 5 meters from the inside of the apartment building to the parking lot than it would be to build a global hydrogen distribution network.

You're missing the point. Who is going to pay to extend electricity into each car bay of an apartment building car park ? It's a significant cost that any property developer is not currently doing (they clearly see a weak market) nor likely to do for the handful of people who will request it.

Much of a future hydrogen distribution network already exists (we have transportation companies, gas stations etc) all of whom would be more than happy to add a new technology. Just like they have done already with LPG.

Most apartment buildings didn't have A/C when they were built either. The building I'm in is nearly 120 years old. At some point the landlord ran extra cabling and dedicated outlets so we could have window air conditioning. I imagine that was as expensive or more than car charging stations would be.

The market demanded it, landlords provided it. Keep in mind landlords are in the business of finding ways to deploy capital to increase their rental incomes. That's why they upgrade kitchens and floors - because they can raise rent. Much like air conditioning once was, having an electric car charger certainly seems like an amenity you can charge for.

It's not massively cheaper to solve the problem of the building itself requiring some multiple of its current electrical service supply once all the tenants want to start charging their cars there.

>>For me this is is one of the big advantages of hydrogen cars i.e. you use them exactly the same as your existing car.

Except that you can't, because hydrogen tanks can store very little of it(a lead 70kg bottle can store only 1kg of hydrogen), and hydrogen slowly leaks out through any container you could possibly put it into, so after 4-5 weeks of the car standing still you have an empty tank.

There are a number of players looking to open up that market. It will be a second order effect, once electric charging becomes a market driver for high end apartments. See this link for a quick example: http://cleantechnica.com/2015/04/15/chargepoint-offering-sol...

If you own a Tesla Model S and live near a supercharger network, charging is not an issue. Over 8,000 miles in my Model S, all powered exclusively by the superchargers, free of charge.

Note: I live in an apartment less than 2 miles from the nearest supercharger in Los Angeles and only 8 miles from work. So, the range is never a problem.

Tesla Superchargers are not the solution for this, as they are simply not designed for such use. They were built to help with long range destinations.

There are cases where users, (ab)using them as you do, got a request to reduce their usage. I guess you didn't trigger any flags.

As electric cars become more and more popular, more and more apartment buildings will start offering charging stations. My condo building added them about 2 years ago.

Electric Car-sharing, just like how since you don't have a garage you would use normal car sharing (Zipcar).

If you live in the SF Bay Area: https://us.drive-now.com/

Not only that, but commutes > the range of the car make it impossible as well. The only thing stopping me from buying a leaf is that my commute is 50 miles, so if I don't find a charging station near work, I don't get home.

Electric car infrastructure is "cheap" (compared to say hydrogen stations or even gas stations). Chargers will be everywhere by the time 20% of the car market is electric. I wouldn't worry too much about it if you're not planning to get an EV in the next 10 years anyway.

"don't have a garage where we can install such things"

Why? In the frozen north its, maybe not customary, but not overly unusual, to have parking spots wired for engine block and battery heaters. Theres a whole cultural thing of not blocking other peoples access, a legal framework of not blocking sidewalks, when its OK to share, or not share, someones extension cord, stuff like that. Its just not a serious issue. The cost of one parking spot was rolled into my bachelor pad, but when space was available I could get another spot for $25/mo or whatever it was, surely a charger spot would have some minor additional costs, but chargers are pretty cheap compared to land and pavement and buildings.

I guess the only technological limitation I can think of is service drop size, if you wire up 200 parking stalls at 25 KW each you're probably going to have to upgrade the service drop or implement something "interesting" involving partial charge rates. Presumably someone will start shipping an apartment charger that can bluetooth pair with its neighboring chargers and cooperate such that the total average draw of the entire lot never exceeds 100 KW or something like that. 100 KW is a drop in the bucket for an apartment building, thats like 1000 watts worth of TVs or lights in each of 100 apartments. Dinner time on a hot summer night is a large multiple of that draw.

House service drops used to be just 60 amps a few decades ago and now 200 is pretty standard... if you think service drop upgrades for a house are expensive, imagine the cost of an entire apartment building upgrade LOL. Of course this may be a short term thing... solar panels may mean apartments will be net producers while the sun is up, soon enough.

For passenger capacity, note that most car owners utilize 1/4 or 1/5 of their available seats.

Yet while all 3 of my vehicles (2 cars and a motorcycle) are 2-seaters, virtually all of my driving is solo (and I'm not even talking about commuting -- I'm primarily a bicycle commuter. Okay, my other 3 vehicles have 1 seat and 2 pedals).

The "average" or typical use case is not how people choose their vehicle. They choose it based on the uncommon use case. The executive buys himself a Porsche not because it will get him anywhere any faster, or because she really knows how to drive it, but because it projects an image of what she could do. The SUV is sold on the promise of rugged camping trips and dodging boulders to transport the children safely back home under conditions that can best be described as "apocalypse". Hell, I have many car enthusiast friends who have bought practical, boring cars because they've got that 3rd row seating for hauling their kids' friends.... before they even have kids!

For 99% of use cases, yes, the electric car is cheaper and more convenient. But my next car will be a comfortable, powerful, gas-powered car with AWD. Why? Because today's weight (and efficiency) penalty for AWD is basically zero, and on the one trip to Tahoe a year where chain control is in effect, I won't have to freeze my digits off trying to fit chains (or, worse, get taken out by a vehicle careening out of control in the snow).. and I won't have to hunt down nonexistent charging infrastructure where I don't have a driveway, let alone a garage. It will be for the 2 roadtrips I take a year. It will be because, while the electric car is better for MOST of my driving, it doesn't accommodate the rare circumstances we really buy vehicles for -- Because the electric car isn't enough better at the 99% of use cases to make up for its virtual uselessness at the 1%.

I love electric cars. I've driven the i3, various hybrids, and the Tesla Roadster and Model S. Some day I will own an electric car, but I wouldn't surprise if the tipping point takes quite a bit longer to trigger than he expects.

Peoples choice is guided by what they percieve they will use the car for. So you buy a minivan if you have children, because there will be situations where you need the space, if you have more than 2 children that makes sense. And as you mention, you buy it for the two roadtrips. I know people who spend a crapton on an station wagon two classes larger "because they need to move shit every now and then", completly ignoring that if they just choose the car that fit their every day needs, they can rent the car they need for special occasions and come our way ahead financially.

Many people own 2 cars as well, and it just makes sense to at least make one of them an electric. That is in my opinion will be the tipping point where there is enough demand to heavily invest in proper charging network.

> I think electric cars win on every metric except range and refill/recharge time.

And price. Maybe everyone on here is a millionaire or about to become one, but $70,000 is a lot of money. Hell, even $20,000 is a lot of money for me (I live in Eastern Europe), even though for most of the people in here it looks like small change. And if it matters I am currently living a sort of middle class life in these parts of the world.

The comparison is between cars, not price. Prices will come down eventually. When the iphone came out, did you cry about how it will always be a niche product because the nokia 3310 is so much cheaper?

To be fair the iPhone was a ridiculously expensive proposition when first introduced - something like 3x the normal cost for top-of-the-range phones at the time.

That's not quite true. In 2007 you would see 90% of the Internet comments talk about how feature-less an iPhone was compared to the Nokia N95 (or whatever was its Nokia competitor at the time). In fact there were some memes comparing the iPhone with a rock.

The original iPhone didn't have video recording, had only 2G support (Nokias supported 3G for a while), didn't support MMS, and it didn't even have apps! And of course something like 1/3 the battery life of Nokia phones with 2" screens.

The iPhone at the time "only" had the benefits of a big screen, touch, and an "easy to use interface". But that was about it - which of course was game-changing. But the point is it didn't have "many" benefits over the phones at the time. Quite the opposite (especially from the perspective of Nokia/Blackberry/etc phone users at the time - which were 99% of the people).

Electric cars have maximum torque (and usually much higher than your average gas-powered car in the same class) from the moment you put your foot on the pedal, they give smooth liniar acceleration (no gear changing), are very silent, cost much less to recharge (about 1/5), have 1/3 the maintenance costs, an order of magnitude fewer parts that can break on you, and have the potential to use 100% renewable energy in the future.

Maximum torque will get you home faster by... 1%?

You still can't fly in residential areas at 160MPH.

Whereas big capacitive touchscreen allowed to read text at least twice as fast. And you can actually manipulate websites UI. That's entirely new enabler.

Electric car does not enable you to sleep in it or grow potatoes. It's a great car, but still a car.

one-pedal responsive operation is a win in the same way multi-touch is a win. It doesn't sound like a big deal,but once you get used to it, everything else seems dated.

Operating multiple pedals to operate a vehicle is a leftover from crude technology. Sure, some people like it that way (a set that includes me). But for most people, once they get used to push pedal a bit to go slow, a lot to go fast, let go to stop - they will love it because it makes more sense.

To operate a internal combustion/geared car, you have to modulate the pedal to match the acceleration rate and gears. Max pedal pressure to start, lightening off, re-pressing when gears go up etc. It's normal because it's what we're used to.

Single gear, peak torque engines are much more intuitive to drive. That's why toddler can handle electric toy cars so easily.

You must be joking mate. All movies since 90s tell me that most Americans can't even drive manual transmission. Modern automatic transmission is totally invisible. Some cars even have variator transmission.

I get it, the car is more dynamic. So what? It's an incremental change.

By the way, if you do not like pedals, there is even better technology, called cruise control.

Most electric cars have regenerative breaking. So just lifting off the power pedal will decelerate it (regaining energy for the battery). This means, in most situations you don't even have to switch over to the break pedal, which is quite convenient. For this reason I miss my old stick-shifted car which had a short gear reduction ratio. I could drive it in the city without breaking except for reaching a stop.

That is actually clever. Did not know that. Indeed that somewhat change the driving behaviour.

Does it add more value than the cost premium of the electric car? Doubt it.

We are currently looking at the first generation of mass-made electrical cars. With the second generation in about 2 years from now, we can expect significant cost reductions making most discussions about a "cost premium" moot - the advantages of the concept of the electrical cars are going to stay though.

Not joking at all.

By multiple pedal I'm talking about accelerator and brake, not accelerator brake and clutch.

The i3 has single pedal operation in city mode. This means it uses regen braking to intelligently slow the car down if you lift your foot off. Brake pedal is for emergency or highway stops only.

It's one of those things that, once you get used to, feel a lot more natural.

Modern manual cars behave that way because that's they way they're programmed. If manufactures wanted to, they can make the car behave in any way they want because they're drive-by-wire and the throttle is just an input to the computer. Afaik the break and clutch are still mechanical though.

That said, unless we see a significant leap in battery tech, I think we're stuck with ICE cars for the foreseeable future. But we might see hybrid systems from racing more, that enables the car to become far more efficient in the city.

> and have the potential to use 100% renewable energy in the future.

Except when it comes to manufacturing them.

Recycle them?

The iPhone had a few more advantages than that. WiFi and "unlimited" data with an uncrippled web browser, when everybody else was nickel and diming you for WAP. Email that worked with every major email provider, and didn't require you to play with BES. Voicemail that came from the Internet era instead of the cassette tape era. Oh, how I hate old voicemail systems.

One of my biggest objections to gasoline cars, now that electric cars are practical, is pollution. Hydrocarbon + oxygen = carbon dioxide + water. Carbon dioxide and water are colorless and odorless. So if I smell anything coming out of the exhaust pipe, it's obviously poison. Why are we subjecting ourselves to poison? Gasoline cars have got to go.

Electric wins on, low end acceleration, safety, noise, and at normal driving levels lifetime costs. They require significantly less maintenance, but it's currently more expensive.

Realistically as charging stations become more common you can expect adoption to keep increasing which is a very positive feedback loop.

PS: I suspect eventually we will simply directly power cars on the freeway which eliminates range concerns. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-level_power_supply

I don't think people full comprehend the price drop that is imminent. The total cost of ownership per mile for a car in the U.S. right now is about $0.60. I was watching a panel the other day where someone calculated the cost per mile of a fleet of self-driving on-demand electric cars at $0.08.

That an 86% reduction. People might have their misgivings about any of this stuff... electric, self-driving, carshare, and of course many people will go their own way. But for an 86% reduction in your monthly auto bill, it's going to be an avalanche.

On demand self driving cars will be amazing. A lot of people I know work part time, or have two jobs. Car sharing kinda works, but it is complex to organize over facebook chat at 11PM.

Being able to rent the appropriate car to match the passengers would make it much easier. 7 people? 2 people? 3 people + 6 surfboards? 2 people with kyaks? I can not wait for this to happen.

If a Tesla Model S costs $70000, even if electricity and maintenance are free (and there's no premium for self-driving) you would have to drive it 875000 miles for it to cost $0.08/mile. This seems like the type of thing that is literally unbelievable without more evidence than "I heard somebody on a panel say this".

If the vehicle is self-driving, and managed by Google infrastructure for ridesharing so its highly utilized, how quickly do you cover 875000 miles? A quick Google search indicates that traditional cabs cover 70K miles a year; so that's a <10 year payback period. Not terrible for an asset that's going to be ancient tech in 5-7 years.

Ya, those are good numbers to point out. I was too lazy to link the discussion, but here it is:

https://youtu.be/HnQs1k_0Yys?t=29m36s

The speaker is Stefan Heck from the Precourt Instute for Energy at Stanford. No citation, so I guess it's just math he did.

I assume they're factoring in some reasonable price drop. I would expect the vast majority of self-driving cab rides will be in two-seaters like the Smart Car, which starts at $12,000. You'd buy them wholesale, so it should be even less than that. Not to mention you can get rid of the entire steering column, etc. At $10,000 per vehicle, you only need to drive 125,000 miles to break even.

You won't buy the car outright, and you won't drive all those 875,000 miles. You will rent it as required and others will use it the other 99% of the time.

Look at taxis/Uber and think about what portion of the cost is licensing (Uber's cut in their case), wage and fuel.

The $0.08 is the _marginal_ cost of operation. You're not comparing apples to apples. The $0.60 cost of operating a gasoline vehicle does not include the original cost of the vehicle. (Using your same math: $70,000 car driven 100,000 miles would be $0.70 per mile.)

This would not be referring to the Model S, but something like the $20-30000 Model 3.

What's crazy about 875,000 miles?

Most personal gasoline cars last approximately 200,000 miles, but people rarely keep them that long because for the average driver the car is 10-20 years old. The interior will wear out long before the engine. If the car manufacturers built the drivetrain to last 400,000 miles, they would just be wasting money.

If the car is running 24/7 at 30 mph, you would top 250k miles per year. I imagine they will design the cars to last more than a year, potentially a few, so 750,000 miles is not off the table.

Also in the world where a car is an autonomous income producing asset, initial cost matters a lot less and total lifetime cost matters a lot more. Businesses will do the math and buy vehicles that minimize their cost. Automotive engineers will put more effort into reliability because fleet owners will have data to measure.

It's a different world. A lot of our current assumptions will get rethought.

Of course you won't see 24/7 usage on most cars, just like you don't see 24/7 usage on all electrical power stations.

Unless someone finds an economic activity that you can throw basically unlimited car-hours at in the night time. The yield can be low, but it has to be higher than the variable cost of one more car hour.

Surplus of night time car-hours can support a market for cheap delivery.

I thought about that, too. But I'm not sure whether that's not done better and cheaper by more specialised vehicles (eg trucks)?

I find it hard to imagine a conventional petrol powered car only lasting 200,000 miles. Which manufacturers only build cars to last 200,000 miles?

I can't think of a car I, or my family, have owned which hasn't lasted at least twice that long.

My current car is a 2002 BMW E39 530D. It has almost 900,000 kms on the clock and is still going strong on the original engine. The cloth interior is still in quite reasonable condition. There has of course been the need for minor maintenance (rear shocks were required at the last inspection). Right now I need new door seals and there is some minor rust attended to. However, at a consumption of approximately 7 liters per 100 km on the autobahn, I don't see any need to buy a newer car for quite some time yet.

I had 2001 Suzuki Swift MKII 1.3. I think it had 65,000km on odometer in 2007 when I bought it, but can't be sure because odometer was only going to 99,999km. Now at (1)24,000km it's still going but I had to weld chassis or it would snap in half. Engine is still in very good condition though, only minor expected fixes were required. But yes, Suzuki DOES make cars which are not expected to last more than 100,000km. I've also recently got 2004 Opel Astra H which had already 209,000km and it's in perfect condition both engine and body, so YMMV.

In some sense, if a vehicle is well built, properly maintained, and driven gently, it will last forever. You just replace the car part by part over time.

The issue is if it's poorly maintained or it's abused, or if it's not well built. And a sizable percentage of cars in the fleet fall into at least one of those categories. The number that we need to worry about from a policy perspective is not the life of the car in the best case scenario, it's the life of the car in the expected scenario.

That's not an at all implausible distance for cars that are used all the time - compare it to a taxi or a delivery vehicle, not a personal car.

The real story my be that car sales may decline, gas or electric:

* People drive less; I saw a study showing that significantly fewer millenials are licensed to drive than their predecessors.

* More people live in cities, where the cost of cars is higher (insurance and parking) and the demand for them is less due to the proximity of destinations and the availability of alternatives (public transport, taxis, ride-sharing, car sharing, bicycling)

* Energy costs likely will increase.

* As awareness of climate change grows, people will be less willing to cause greenhouse gas emissions (and the energy in your electric car battery must come from somplace, probably a fossil-fuel in a power plant).

At this point 33% of the USA's energy mix comes from a non-fossil fuel source(http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=427&t=3), and the renewable % has been increasing every year.

Another driver for fewer car sales: More ride-sharing and taxi (Uber) services obviating the need to purchase individual vehicles which see sub-5% utilization.

This is good for the environment too.... IIRC, the embodied cost to fabricate a vehicle represents something like 30% of its net carbon cost. This is pretty significant when you consider the very low utilization rate for a capital asset.

This factor is often overstated - for a few reasons.

Passenger miles are likely to go up, if anything, even if because more vacant miles are being driven to collect people, and also because making a service cheaper leads to higher consumption of that service.

Passenger miles are what causes car sales - cars wear out. For cars which produce revenue then there comes a point where it's more economical to purchase a new one than to attend to medium-difficulty repairs.

So I'm not convinced ride sharing or automated vehicles will lead to fewer cars sold. If anything I would say it has the potential to increase the number of cars sold.

We will also see cars that last longer, since the initial capital investment into reliability will be recouped over more time driven.

I wonder whether machine driving will lead to less wear and tear on cars.

not sure if you meant "car miles" when you said sales, but another point:

* Cars are way more reliable than even 10-15 years ago. Growing up my parents had a rule of thumb that a car was a ticking bomb over 100k miles. Today, a car from a reputable manufacturer is just getting started at 100k.

I do think this has some interesting ramifications as the lifetime of a single car starts to increase - at a time when the tech in a car (e.g. driver assists/self-driving systems) is starting to iterate very rapidly.

if you go to https://www.nada.org/nadadata/ and look at the table "New-vehicle sales and market share, by manufacturer", it gives the following stats:

  Year         Total
  2005    16,945,000
  2006    16,502,700
  2007    16,089,300
  2008    13,194,600
  2009    10,401,700
  2010    11,554,100
  2011    12,734,200
  2012    14,440,060
  2013    15,524,800
  2014    16,437,000

So, I'm not sure that car sales will really decline. It should be noted that the data presented was the source data for the U.S. Census Bureau Statistical Abstract which was discontinued in 2012 because of budget cuts.

No significant impact for remote working since the explosion of the web ?

More than cars, some people are even going away from owning a house and just hop between countries, etc.

You missed the most disruptive potential change that will decrease the number of cars needed: driverless cars. These cars can make car sharing so much easier and more efficient that the numbers of cars needed for getting people around will shrink dramatically.

Imagine all the traffic during the work hours will be taken care of by the cars used to sitting in the parking for a whole 8 hours long. And all the house car sitting in the garage during the traffic hours taking care of the people going to and off work. I wouldn't be surprised if the total number of cars shrink to one third without anyone feel any inconvenient.

According to FiveThirtyEight, the urbanization trend is largely exaggerated. The more accurate statement is that college-educated millennials are somewhat more likely to live in a handful of particularly dense urban locations (think Brooklyn).[1]

In fact, among all adults 25-34 the percentage in urban locations overall has actually declined. The data is a bit hard to interpret for a variety of reasons but the bottom line is that, according to this data: "Millennials overall, therefore, are not increasingly living in urban neighborhoods. Rather, the most educated one-third of young adults are increasingly likely to live in the densest urban neighborhoods. That’s great news for cities trying to attract young graduates and a sign that urban neighborhoods have become more desirable for those who can afford them. But the presence of more smart young things in Brooklyn is not evidence that millennials are a more urban generation."

[1] http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-millennials-are-less...

Thanks; that's useful to know. I should point out that I wasn't only talking about millennials.

The urbanization trend outside millennials is even less however.

If we're talking about the market size for Tesla teh urbanization trend is not at all exaggerated. The US may not be doing much urbanization but the world overall certainly is.

Cars being expensive in cities is nothing new. Mass transit in cities is nothing new. Hard to say what energy prices will do but there's no clear trend[1]. Most people aren't really very worried about climate change[2].

[1] http://inflationdata.com/Inflation/images/charts/Oil/Inflati...

[2] http://www.gallup.com/poll/167843/climate-change-not-top-wor...

> The Tesla Model S has demonstrated that a well made, well designed electric car is far superior to anything else on the road.

I think this is a bit of an exaggeration. What the Tesla Model S has actually shown is that a startup-designed $100k electric car can be comparable to $100k luxury cars (S-class, 7-series... etc) and that classic car makers got complacent on certain features (like electronic UI elements). Much of what he said is true, or could easily be true, for $100k gasoline cars too!

In fact, I think that's enough of an exaggeration for me to question his whole conclusion. He made a good case for why Tesla could be the next big thing, but just like Android popped up against the iPhone, I could see gasoline cars copying many of the advantages—anything that's not a direct result of an electric drive-train.

This isn't to say that electric cars won't take over—I think they very well might—but the blog post doesn't make the best case for it.

I also really dislike that whole argument style of cherry-picking a "disruptive" innovation that happened to succeed but ignoring all the others that either failed or didn't deliver for decades. You can't generalize the smart-phone's success that easily! It feels like a pernicious case of what poker players call "results oriented thinking"[1], which is something I see a lot in business analysis.

[1]: http://www.toppokersites.com/strategy/results-oriented-think...

Too true. It's classic case of "seek and ye shall find."

OP wanted to see all the reasons why something he hopes is true, and he found them all.

He did not want to see any reasons why his hopes might not be true, so he sought none of them.

Interesting article, though it forgets the elephant in the room: self-driving cars.

The two will probably work hand in hand, but it is unlikely, in my opinion, that any electric cars will be charging at home very much, because most electric cars will be owned by companies, not individuals. Why own a car when you can pay a tiny percentage of a cab fare to go anywhere? When a journey that currently costs $50 costs 20 cents, private car ownership will plummet.

The truth is we're really not that close to fully-autonomous cars. Even Elon Musk's most ambitious projections for "autopilot" are a car that can drive itself 90 - 95% of the time but will require an alert, licensed driver to take over if necessary.

Secondly, I don't feel that the possible rise of truly autonomous vehicles (if that even occurs within the next ten years) affects the main point of this article. In fact, the advantages of battery-electric over gasoline become even more pronounced in a world of self-driving cars. The only drawback (speed to refuel) becomes moot as fully-charged vehicles can be dispatched while others direct themselves to charging or battery-swap stations.

> The truth is we're really not that close to fully-autonomous cars.

Google cars are pretty damn close to level 4 autonomous vehicles. They've driven more than a million miles fully autonomously, and Google runs their self-driving vehicle algorithms against simulated virtual worlds constantly (with data previously collected from their self driving cars).

We are so much closer to fully autonomous cars than people think.

I've always thought that the Google cars have driven 95%+ of their miles in Mountain View, CA where every single aspect of the roads have been digitized, tested and tweaked a million times over. If you stuck one of these cars in a brand new city, it wouldn't work nearly as well.

How quickly could a fleet of Google vehicles ingest a major metros geographic data? Assume a similar project as Street View, with minimum wage drivers piloting the data collection vehicles without autonomous mode turned on. Days? Weeks? Under 6 months for sure.

EDIT: Current street view coverage: https://support.google.com/maps/answer/68384?hl=en

Mapping the roads isn't challenging. How do you think humans perform at driving through brand new cities?

Humans don't need cm-scale precise maps in cities to avoid jumping curbs and running into streetlamps. But that's still a requirement for all autonomous cars that have been demonstrated.

I don't see why this matters, though. cm-scale maps aren't hard to produce.

Aren't hard to produce everywhere?

Not much harder to produce than the current street view maps that are almost everywhere...

Not all autonomous cars require that, either. Nor is there any reason whatsoever to believe it will be a requirement in the future.

No, but researchers agree that self-mapping or map-unassisted autonomous cars are much further off into the future than are perfect-map cars, like the ones Google is demonstrating. And the equipment (e.g. LIDAR) on the car is super-expensive. And has lots of moving parts. And is easily foiled. Etc.

I think there is a meta learning curve to driving in brand new cities. I have learned to not try to make missed exits, not speed so that I have time to process signs, tolerate wrong turns, not make unnecessary lane changes, and generally just pay attention. It's also generally safer to drive either in the day or well lighted areas. The only near screw up was trying to pass a car and realizing the rental had no mid end torque. The car in the left lane honked at me.

And the weather is nice 99% of the time. I'd like to see a Google self driving car work in the rain or snow.

You say this like people are good at driving in rain or snow.

They are not.

There is a reason for all of those pileup pictures whenever there is severe weather in the US.

Self-driving cars are going to be WAY better in bad weather than any human could ever be. They will be able to "see" in conditions that humans couldn't dream of. They will be able to control steering far better on slick surfaces. They will be able to respond to emergencies far faster.

I have said this before but it bears repeating, once we get self-driving cars, the insurance companies won't actually let you drive anymore.

I tend to agree on the insurance front, but I suspect that it won't be a ban, just a higher rate if you choose to drive manually.

You say this like people are good at driving in rain or snow. They are not.

I've driven in 42 winters on icy roads with thick snow and limited visibility, without the aid of GPS which has a funny way of disappearing in inclement weather. Google's cars have been demonstrated driving in exactly 0 winters under those conditions. Because they know it would be a disaster.

There is a reason for all of those pileup pictures whenever there is severe weather in the US.

They're driving too fast. But they knew that. They just decided to do it anyways. But they didn't drive that fast thinking that the snow was actually falling leaves or that the windshield was dirty or that the car was suddenly moving backwards, or any of the other ridiculous things that an AI will begin thinking when it falls out of a switch statement, encounters a case it wasn't trained on, or loses its GPS signal.

Self-driving cars are going to be WAY better in bad weather than any human could ever be

I have said this before but it bears repeating, once we get self-driving cars, the insurance companies won't actually let you drive anymore.

I completely agree. One day they will be completely superior to human drivers. But that isn't today and won't be for years. Many years. Like decades.

People said this about nav systems. I know I did. Sure, Google maps was great on the Interstate, but put it on the side roads of Pittsburgh, PA and nav was completely toast.

Guess what? A couple years later and nav systems were better than 99% of people even in places like Pittsburgh. I haven't bought a Thomas Guide (remember those?) in 10 years, I think.

It's going to be like this for self-driving cars. It will be slow progress for a while and then it will just go exponential. Part of the slow progress is that nobody wants to have the first fatality in a self-driving car as it will be an absolute PR disaster.

> But they didn't drive that fast thinking that the snow was actually falling leaves or that the windshield was dirty or that the car was suddenly moving backwards, or any of the other ridiculous things that an AI will begin thinking when it falls out of a switch statement, encounters a case it wasn't trained on, or loses its GPS signal.

Except that autonomous cars will have lidar and radar which sees through rain and snow, accelerometers and wheel monitors to integrate position even in the face of GPS loss, and infrared and ultraviolet cameras which can see much further than human eyes.

You are right. Autonomous cars are worse right now. But they will be way better than humans really quickly.

Look at how fast the DARPA challenge went from "can't complete the course" to "had to slow the vehicles down for safety".

But they will be way better than humans really quickly

I'm naturally suspicious of faith-based engineering.

> I'm naturally suspicious of faith-based engineering.

LOL. I like that comment. However, engineering is part science and part art. The art part often has a significant component of faith.

Moore's Law is a good example of faith-based engineering--because we had faith it would happen we committed resources to make it happen. And that operated well for almost 40 years.

I view self-driving cars in the same light--there is now faith that it will happen, so people are now committing resources to make it happen. And there don't seem to be any insurmountable problems (the biggest problems are "vision" being power and CPU intensive, but a car is a very high-density power source).

I do understand your point, though, initially many people regarded self-driving cars as "AI" and that, of course, remains elusive.

However, what the engineers quickly figured out was that you don't need to approach the problem as AI. There are much simpler heuristics--which is not surprising since driving is a background task for most humans.

Human beings do manage to drive through even severe weather without serious incident more often than not. Meanwhile, i'm not aware that Google's autonomous cars can even handle mildly inclement weather.

The fact remains that autonomous cars are still far worse than humans in this regard.

That other company of which there was an article here a few months ago drove a car autonomously from LA to NYC. Volvo drives cars around Stockholm. BMW has self driving cars on the road. There are self driving trucks right now at work on oil fields in Alaska and in mines in Australia.

It's true that we're not really there yet. And yes there are hurdles like regulation, what about heavy rain etc. But the pace at which things are going...

Freightliner has an autonomous semi-truck (the "Inspiration") working on Nevada roads currently:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self...

It (for now) requires a human driver, but operates at autonomous level 3.

No carmaker has a city-driving autonomous vehicle that doesn't require super-precise, cm-scale, unrealistically always-up-to-date maps for the AI.

The autonomous super-size dump trucks drive along carefully pre-programmed routes using GPS.

We're still a long ways away from practical and safe self-driving cars. AI and computer vision just isn't there yet.

"A long way away" - only true in terms of linear extrapolations of current progress. Think in terms of exponential progress, and we're about 5 years from the majority of trips being done by self-driving car, IMHO. The benefits of self-driving cars are so powerful that they will take over the world even faster than the electric vehicles described in this article...

Think in terms of exponential progress, and we're about 5 years from the majority of trips being done by self-driving car, IMHO

5 years is a fantasy.

Continued exponential increases in device computing power is by no means guaranteed now that chips are at the 14nm feature size.

And the recent progress in AI can only be partially attributed to improved computing power - much of it was from improved approaches to training neural networks. We could stumble into another AI winter and have to wait another 30 years for the next round of big algorithmic AI breakthroughs.

I guarantee you that self-driving cars will not be the mainstream even in 15 years. Probably more.

> I guarantee you that self-driving cars will not be the mainstream even in 15 years. Probably more.

Want to make a Long Bet on that? I'm willing to bet up to $1000 USD, loser pays winner's choice of 501(c)(3) US charity org, that self-driving cars will be mainstream in under 10 years.

What do you mean by self-driving cars? As in highly assistive driving on highways so that you can not really pay attention most of the time whether that's legal or not? That I could (maybe) buy though it's a stretch given replacement cycles.

But something I can summon with an app and take a nap? 50 years may be too soon.

"Level 4: The vehicle performs all safety-critical functions for the entire trip, with the driver not expected to control the vehicle at any time. As this vehicle would control all functions from start to stop, including all parking functions, it could include unoccupied cars."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car#Definition

That's many decades away.

My bet calls for under 10 years.

Now you just need to define "mainstream".

How gauche! No, I don't want to make a Long Bet on that.

I don't live in the United States where every CS graduate gets a Ferrari as a signing bonus (maybe a self-driving Ferrari one day). $USD1000 is clearly a lot more money to me than it is to you.

But if you'd like to take your own side of the bet and choose your own charity, please feel free.

Moreover, I'd like to know what the terms of that bet that you'd be making with yourself. Is it for a generally available car that can drive reasonably anywhere? In San Fransisco but also in small towns without super-accurate cm-scale mapping data (which will never be both everywhere and up-to-date)? Do we consider it a success if self-driving cars blindly drive into construction sites that haven't been mapped? Or crash into newly erected barricades? Because I don't, and that's exactly where we'll be in 15 years.

Autonomous vehicles are quickly approaching what I will acknowledge is probably an 80% solution. In nice weather, when their mapping is perfect in a perfectly-mapped area, and they have a good GPS signal, autonomous cars will work well (and currently are working well in testing).

That's not the standard that's expected. No one lives in a city without road work or construction going on. No one lives in a city where temporary or make-shift signs aren't being erected, or where there are never detours, or where there isn't ad-hoc communication going on between pedestrians and drivers, or where weather doesn't block LIDAR, or, ...whatever.

We will be nowhere near level 4 autonomous vehicles in 10 years time. And not in 15 years, either.

No one in this field is confident of that anymore. Not even Google is making the same bold claims that they were 3 years ago. Their own researchers are publicly hedging now (http://gizmodo.com/how-to-teach-an-autonomous-car-to-drive-1...) and backing away from their most ambitious claims.

The only other group that I'm aware of that's still claiming that we're anywhere near having generally-useful self-driving cars are the established car makers, none of whom have traditionally been serious AI and computer vision research contributors.

Why does it matter how much $1000 is to you if you can guarantee that you won't lose - which you did just a few comments up the tree? And remember, he said "up to", so perhaps you'd feel more comfortable at $100? Or $10?

"The usual touchstone, whether that which someone asserts is merely his persuasion -- or at least his subjective conviction, that is, his firm belief -- is betting. It often happens that someone propounds his views with such positive and uncompromising assurance that he seems to have entirely set aside all thought of possible error. A bet disconcerts him. Sometimes it turns out that he has a conviction which can be estimated at a value of one ducat, but not of ten. For he is very willing to venture one ducat, but when it is a question of ten he becomes aware, as he had not previously been, that it may very well be that he is in error. If, in a given case, we represent ourselves as staking the happiness of our whole life, the triumphant tone of our judgment is greatly abated; we become extremely diffident, and discover for the first time that our belief does not reach so far. Thus pragmatic belief always exists in some specific degree, which, according to differences in the interests at stake, may be large or may be small." - Immanuel Kant

I don't think there will be any more AI winters. Previous AI winters were largely the result of a crash in federal grant writing (DARPA/the Strategic Computing Initiative) to labs at research universities, which depend on them for cash.

This time, the ongoing AI/ML renaissance is funded by private industry, and the value they are extracting from it far outstrips the costs of keeping their in-house R&D labs operating. Even if there's a contraction in the market, I can't envision any possible world where Google/Facebook/etc stop working on AI, and they have the money to keep it up as long as they want.

I assume each car will record its data and upload it. Handily google fiber has lots of upload capacity. Google will then aggregate changes in the maps.

There was a time when you could say the same about street view. Now they're working on the bottom of the ocean.

That's the whole innovation. They reframed the problem in order to make it easier. Everyone used to think about how to get the car to comprehend everything in the world. Google just provides the car a highly detailed map and then the car has fewer things to focus on. They replace some of the complexity by using huge amounts of data. It's a very 'Google' solution really.

This is why Uber and others are scrambling to buy mapping companies. In the future the software goes hand in hand with a hyper detailed map.

I watched one of these a few days ago get stuck at a 4 way stop near Castro St. I think the human driver had to take over.

> They've driven more than a million miles fully autonomously

Zero of those miles were at a speeds > 25 mph. And the cars have averaged > 1 accident per 100,000 miles.

Audi's TTS autonomous vehicle sped up Pike's Peak successfully 5 years ago:

http://www.wired.com/2010/11/audis-robotic-car-climbs-pikes-...

"The car made five runs during a week of testing, reaching the 14,100-foot summit in 27 minutes. The very fastest drivers — in cars putting down more than 900 horsepower — do it in 10 minutes and change, so clearly the car isn’t terribly fast. But the point isn’t the speed, it’s the fact there was no one at the wheel. According to Audi, race officials said an expert driver in car like the TTS would complete the course in around 17 minutes."

Note that none of the accidents Google cars have been involved in were while the vehicles were in autonomous mode.

http://www.google.com/selfdrivingcar/reports/

None of them while a car was moving in autonomous mode*

As I recall there were collisions where the autonomous car was sitting still. Others while in manual mode. Zero the fault of autonomous drivers, so far.

Regardless, autonomous vehicles will improve at a staggering pace due to computing power available to them, and sensors rapidly developing.

~33K [1] deaths a year from car accidents currently due to human drivers. I doubt autonomous vehicles can do worse than that.

[1] http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/accidental-injury.htm

I don't think this is accurate.. It was pretty common to pass the Lexus SUVs that Google was using for their autonomous platforms on the highway at speeds of 65+ MPH. I'm not sure if they're still around since my commute changed, but they were previously all over the Bay Area. I personally saw them on HWYs 101, 280, 880, and 92..

Are you sure the cars were not being driven by a human at those times?

Nope, hence my equivocation.. I've no special insight into the program, but the LIDARs would be spinning and the interiors were lit up with sensors and displays.

Haven't all of their accidents been from other cars rear-ending them, while they've been stationary? Not even worth mentioning the accidents in that case.

> The Google cars have been rear-ended seven times, often when stopped "but also on the freeway," wrote Urmson, director of Google's self-driving car program. In other collisions, the cars were side-swiped or "hit by a car rolling through a stop sign." Eight of the 11 collisions were on city streets.

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/297ef1bfb75847de95d856fb08dc0...

Mentioning accidents makes them sound dangerous. Mentioning that they haven't been at fault in any of them changes that significantly.

In their last monthly report they described the two incidents in detail and they were the fault of the human driver behind them and about as trivial as collisions get.

They're still worth mentioning though. A good human driver can anticipate those situations and minimize the risk. Eg. I will not hard break for a yellow if the driver behind me is tailgating me, I'm super aware of drivers coming out from side roads because some of them just assume that there isn't coming any cars because there usually isn't. Not that an AI cannot learn that, but they're not good in unknown situations.

I'm willing to bet that those would be considered very basic and obvious problems to the people developing these cars. They work on this stuff every hour of every day.

The AI will know (and share with other cars) tendencies for individual intersections and eventually share broader traffic knowledge. There will come a time where we just cannot compete with that. They will know every intersection's peculiarities and we'll know only those that we frequent, at best. They'll adjust for weather conditions too where we'll go by gut feel - e.g., at intersection X, what did people tend to do in light rain, driving West in the morning. What about on a hot day going N-S in peak hour. They will have data at hand for every location, condition and time if need be.

Of course it's obvious to the researchers developing the cars. That doesn't make it simple or easy to solve, something as basic and simple as the halting problem cannot be solved. Data does not help you much in those 0.001% of situations where there is no data or too small a dataset to conclude anything.

An AI can only act according to it's training. If we for a moment assume that it comes from the collective experience of all self driving cars, it's only as good as it's sensors allow it to be. They are simply not there yet. Could an modern AI provide autonoumous commute on the highway today - sure. Can it be trusted to navigate from A to B in urban areas and countryside, most of the time. But "most of the time" simply isn't good enough.

What's hard about detecting the signal ahead as well as the driver behind? The car might just elect to push through the orange rather than stopping abruptly. It could check and make that decision faster than any of us.

Or, if paused in traffic with a car approaching too quickly from behind, it could eat up some of the space in front of it to escape/minimise collision. It could balance this decision with the risk of starting a chain reaction by taking that course of action.

No one's pretending that these vehicles are ready for prime time now, but that they're ahead of what many would expect as the schedule, and could quickly handle what you've listed as a human advantage.

Until it can with certaincy detect the child on the bike behind bushes heading towards the road, it's not ready for 100% autonomous driving. It really doesn't matter how smart or how much experience it does have, if the sensors are inferior to humans.

For some time now they've been able to detect temporary road signs from amongst advertising and other general signage. i.e., changes in speed, maintenance warnings, etc.

If a human can see the child on the bike behind bushes, the car can too. Plus it can do it from multiple cameras at once. And calculate the speed and trajectory. And quickly work out the optimal course of action.

I really think you're overestimating the ability of humans (who get drunk or distracted, routinely speed, etc) and underestimating the progress of self-driving cars.

I'm not overestimating humans, I never said they couldn't fail. What I base my comments on, is people I know that study AI research (mostly graduate students and some doing their doctorate). All of them say that even state of the art AI for a specific purpose, let's say something as simple as face detection (not recognition, just "this is a face") fails for a lot of inputs.

That is not to say some people that are drunk or tired and make the same mistakes as an AI in a driving scenario - the difference is that a computer will always be confused by a scenario that it cannot understand (and in worst case misintreped it), whereas humans have a much easier timer making sense of such situations.

Until we have a strong AI with sensory capabilities akin to our own, I doubt we'll see truly selfdriving cars that require no human intervention. I'd love to be proved wrong, but the research is having a hard time breaking the last 1% needed.

You've confused the prototypes that have just started driving on public roads with the existing vehicles that have been driving for years. The prototypes are limited to 25 mph. The existing vehicles drive at freeway speeds.

The number of miles driven autonomously doesn't really matter if drivers have to intervene even for a second to resolve an issue. If the car is driving by itself 99% of the time, that's not good enough for the "share an autonomous car" use case. It's no good at 99.9% either. Or 99.99%. It's a lot more interesting if google's cars actually had no steering wheel or way of intervening.

Because that's what we're talking about when we talk about the price reduction of a fleet of autonomous cars: the car driving to your house, completely on its own, with nobody in the car. 99.9% isn't good enough, and we're not even close to 99.9%. The difficulty of the last remaining difficult problems will only increase as we approach 100%, too.

I think completely driverless cars are a problem on a similar scale as AI or nuclear fusion, but with the timescales decreased... we're probably going to be always perpetually "five years out" from having them (as opposed to fusion's perpetual "30 years"), even though we're making improvements all the time. We just don't understand the scale of the problems we haven't solved yet.

"It's no good at 99.9% either. Or 99.99%."

That's not completely right.

If that 99.9% covers 100% of certain use cases, they will be used for those cases.

It's like much else in tech, it's not an instant change, it's going to be all about expanding the uses cases over time.

That is the thing with driving - it's amongst other drivers, pedestrians, especially children. There are so few use cases where 99.99% is enough. I can only think of one, highway from A to B - how you get to and from the A and B respectively is not by selfdriving cars.

The thing with autonomous ride sharing though, is that the car has to make it from its last stop to your home on its own. And there's any number of scenarios that can happen on its way... a traffic light could lose power and turn into a 4-way stop, for instance. Or a big event at a large venue where hundreds or thousands of pedestrians are crossing the street and you kinda have to inch forward and wait for some of them to wave you on to go forward (basically everybody jaywalks at that point.)

There's a million different 0.01% scenarios that could happen, and if you ramp the usage of a really really good autonomous car up to scale, you'll see them every day. Unless it can handle all of them without intervention, you simply can't ditch the driver, or you'd face huge PR nightmares when you either hit a pedestrian or you block an intersection and cause huge traffic in a major metropolitan area ("Mayor bans autonomous cars due to one too many gridlocks caused by them", etc.)

I really think it's down to the PR issues and the fact that one too many mistakes can really kill the idea, that companies will be cautious to just not need a driver altogether. And for autonomous ride sharing, you must be able to do nearly half your miles without a driver. Hence why that last .01% is still crucial.

Ahh but you miss an important point - humans are not 100%.. it does not need to be 100% it only needs to be better then your average human.

That's a different metric.

Do they drive properly in rain/fog yet? IIRC they can't drive in rain, which is a hell of a limitation.

What if the self-driving electric cab gets soiled with the last passenger's bodily fluids?

Then it drives to a location to be cleaned at that passenger's expense. And depending on the nature of the issue, it may be treated as intentional vandalism.

Send it to the service hub and ask for another?

It will probably have facilities for identifying that condition and either self-cleaning or notifying the central dispatch system that it needs to be taken out of the rotation until cleaned.

Pretty much the same thing as a human-driven cab.

Worst case, all those things fail, and a dirty cab shows up, and you reject it on the hailing app with an explanation of why, leading to some delay till you get the next available cab. Its not like unexpected failures and delays don't happen with personally owned and operated owner-driven vehicles.

People are still disincentivized from soiling taxis by the presence of the driver. Though at the very least, you'll have to have a membership/accountability system in place, and that becomes harder and harder as you scale.

Cars can drive autonomously, but they can't sense a spill?

Person has a drink inside their bag, no tech that let's the car see through solid objects, it doesn't even know the drink is there.

That's unusual, butnot even the only problem. Someone needs to write something to recognise a liquid container. Not just the one, but all of them, some of which it's never seen before. Not simple.

Doesn't need to recognize liquid containers, hidden or otherwise, just needs to detect spills.

And, AFAIK, moisture sensors for the kinds of materials used in cat interiors already exist, so it's not particularly novel.

As much as I don't like the idea, it seems virtually certain to me that cars owned by a corporation to shuttle around random members of the public are going to have always-on video recording of the passenger compartment.

Austin has a service called car2go where there are cars parked all over the city, and you can pick one up and drive it anywhere in the city. They have you indicate whether or not the car is clean when you get in.

Self driving cars would be even better at this - if the car is dirty, you could press a button, which would send it back to the repair place, and send you a new car.

The same thing that happens if you get into a zipcar with barf on the seats.

I published a piece on exactly this earlier in the week. Admittedly I took an extreme position, but not an impossible one:

https://medium.com/@rorykoehler/carpocalypse-how-the-robot-c...

The major point of value I took from the OP here was that we have no idea what the landscape will look like in 10 years. It is totally open for disruption.

"Ten years ago a prediction that this would be the future would have been met with scorn or laughter"

... this sounds like bollocks, I guess I am an outlier as I worked on J2me apps at the time, but mobile phones where everywhere in 2005, the US was a bit behind, but certainly in the UK mobile wasn't the future, but the present - many of those people used apps and games, they just didn't know what an 'app' was although they used them.

Specifically smartphones. The landscape for which in 2005 was absolutely abysmal. The iPhone was revolutionary in almost every way down to the silence switch and visual voicemail.

The iPhone was evolutionary, not revolutionary, it pulled together a bunch of ideas from a ton of different places (visual voicemail for example was seen in various TAPI applications in the 90's) - what made the iPhone slick, was not what it did - a 2006 era palm did everything the iPhone did - its that it worked better than all of its progenitors.

While I agree with the author that electric vehicles will in not long time dominate the car market, I strongly disagree with point #3:

> Gas stations will start to go out of business as many more electric cars are sold, making gasoline powered vehicles even more inconvenient.

Gas stations even today don't make money with gas, it's next to a loss leader to get customers into the store and spend money on snacks and car parts that won't go away with e-cars (windshield wipers, wiper fluid) - and in many regions gas stations are exempt from normal store opening hours and serve as 24h-supermarket. The convenience of a readily available store, even with a hefty markup, simply is too good to avoid it.

surely they will just change the name of them then to shops :) or stores as you call the over there. over here we have petrol stations and other places called 'services' which basically serve the function you are on about. so i guess we will just rename the petrol stations to services, the ones that survive that is. this cant come quick enough for me!

Aren't they convenient because they're only a few yards from your car? If you no longer need to drive to the gas station to get fuel, it's a lot less convenient, isn't it?

They're convenient because they're right off the freeway. The gas pumps will disappear and be replaced with superchargers.

But once it's no longer an effective loss leader, they might just stop selling gas, which has the same effect.

You can see from land use patterns (at least in the West Coast North American cities I'm familiar with) that at a certain land value the retail gasoline business no longer pencils out, or at a minimum it becomes more of a natural monopoly. Intersections in gentrifying neighborhoods that used to have two or three gas stations increasingly have one or none.

Like drive-thru restaurants and banks, they're pretty effective at sabotaging walkability, so I wouldn't be too sad to see them go (or transition into just convenience stores).

I live in SF. Within 2 blocks of me 3 gas stations have shut down over the past few years, to be replaced with apartments/condos. Probably it's not related to electric cars per se; but it is probably related to the decline in personal driving.

...or the supply limitations on SF's local real estate space

It's probably related to sitting on $2 million of land.

The author completely blundered with that claim. Cars on the road have become more than 10% more efficient over the past few decades, but gas stations didn't go out of business en masse like he prophesies a 10% electric fleet will cause. As everybody else already pointed out, self-driving cars will change everything, not the few years in which the personal vehicle market becomes a little more electric.

>Gas stations even today don't make money with gas

I've heard this a lot, but is this really true? Gas is highly regulated in the U.S. and supposedly a Mom & Pop gas station's gas is just as good as Shell or Chevron..(because they are inspected yearly by the local county's Weights and Measurements department) But the price difference can be quite large, e.g., 15%+ higher sometimes. Also I'm curious how Costco gas is so cheap? Anyway so who is eating up this difference in price? Shell is making quite a bit off gas then? or is the owner of that particular gas station taking the profit?

For Costco, gas is a loss leader for custom loyalty. People go crazy for saving $4 dollars for gas, even if it means waiting 15min in line.

In most areas all the gas comes from the same distribution terminal. Some companies have some proprietary additive blends but in general it really makes very little difference where you buy it (assuming the retailer doesn't have a problem like groundwater getting into the storage tanks, etc).

exactly, so who is making the extra 10% profit? or it's nonsense that owning a gas station is a low margin business?

One element Geoff doesn't cover in the comparison, which I think will slow the take-up, is that the lifecycle of a phone (<2 years) versus the lifecycle of a car (4-5 years?).

And those (from memory, please correct with data) are median averages. For every person still toting an iPhone3 I imagine there are scores still driving a 1993 Camry.

Smartphones exploded in use over the timeframe described, because the technology improved rapidly AND consumers upgraded 2-3 times so could choose the newest and best. Even if cars had similar tech trajectories, the market is moving more slowly.

Of course, electric cars have a secondary market that's much stronger than used phones, which will work against my numbers.

4-5 years? Try more like 10. Cars have only gotten more and more reliable, and that, combined with the economic recession have meant that people hold on to cars for longer and longer.

I see a very simple story: Among friends and family, I don't know anyone who would not get a Tesla, who doesn't already have one, once it reaches their price range. I also want to add that most folks I know are planning to make their cars last until such time as they can switch them out for a Tesla ( Model X preferably as a minivan replacement ).

Once they release a true offroad type vehicle--preferably a pickup, I'll be buying one. I'm not sure the model x does it for me, though it'll be a "maybe."

I live in an area that can have limited access in bad weather, where 4x4 & high clearance are requirements, and right now a Tesla wouldn't cut it.

> Thanks to Sam Altman for having read an earlier version of this post.

Does this add anything to the article, or is it just a way to say "I'm friends with Sam". Do people proofreading a short article expect this sort of thing?

It's there to suggest that he agrees completely with the article, and if you disagree with any of it, you must be crazy.

An excellent but longer and more detailed piece in the same vein is "How Tesla Will Change The World" at

http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/how-tesla-will-change-your-lif...

To be honest, this misses the point in urban areas (which is increasingly where everyone wants to live).

There's too much congestion for cars to work in urban areas, at least for commuting. It doesn't matter whether they are autonomous, electric, petrol, hydrogen or whatever. The capacity of a multi-lane freeway vs a heavy rail commuter line or metro is so small, even with carpooling.

Unless suddenly this trend reverses and everyone wants to live in the suburbs, the car is really in trouble.

I use public transit nearly all the time and for the times I don't, I take an uber. I tried uber once when there was a problem with transit, and the door to door time was something like 4x the metro due to traffic. Never again.

Isn't a big part of congestion due to inefficient human driving?

While it won't be v1.0, I could see autonomous vehicles taking half the cars off the road (car pooling) and then providing much more efficient transit regarding speed, lane changes, real time route selection etc.

This will definitely be more valuable for the suburbs, or cities with poor public transport infrastructure. Perhaps in some places your autonomous Uber will take you to a much more efficient bus hub (departing every 5 minutes) on the city fringe, but I do believe it will work in urban areas as well.

And don't forget, comparing Uber in a time of transit problems isn't really a fair comparison as those are the times when many other people, not used to making that drive, flood the roads. If I drive to the right train station, transit is about 30% faster for me during peak hour so I agree with your point.

Maybe in some cities, but the roads in London are gridlocked all the time and there is something like a 98:2 ratio of people using mass transit vs driving. I would assume it is the same in NYC, etc. No amount of lane selection, car pooling will ever make that better. And unless people carpool from the exact same place to the same workplace, there's going to be duplication of drop off points which probably makes things worse as they'll be downtown with the most traffic.

And no, there was no surge on uber to get that journey. There was other transit routes everyone else will take but I was in a real rush (even routing round the disruption would've still been way faster than driving).

To be honest though, if you're driving to the transit station then you're missing the point. I'm really talking to the masses of people that have giving up/will give up their car entirely and rely on public transit & the occasional taxi (uber, autonomous, whatever) for when they've been out partying or what not.

If electric cars are going to become mainstream we certainly need something far more affordable than Model S. With the money it costs I could buy a Mercedes S-Class which is unparalleled in terms of quality and ride comfort. Furthermore in regions like Europe you can run in all short of inconsistencies with incompatible sockets/recharge stations. Just the other day I was watching a video [1] of a car journalist who tried to make the trip from UK to Amsterdam in a BMW i3 Rx and it took him twice the time it would with a conventional car.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0f0_hqWdTk

... no wonder several manufacturers are working on long-range cars more affordable than the Model S. Examples: Tesla Model 3, Chevy Bolt, ...

While it is a very nice car, the i3 is really limited by its range. Tesla had journalists take a S from Munich to Amsterdam and back without issues a year ago. It took 1-2 hours more (on an 10h trip) than a petrol car would have taken, assuming the petrol car driver did not require rests. But indeed, charging networks need to be expanded/unified. This also sets Tesla apart from other manufacturers, they are taking care of the charging infrastructure too.

Seems that this article fails to mention that owning a house is a prerequisite to buying an EV (electric vehicle). If you rent a room in a house, it's unlikely the landlord is going to install a charger just for you, and the same goes for apartment complexes. So that already excludes a large portion of the population from buying an EV. I bet 90% of EV owners are not renting their residence. (The other 10% can charge at work or other places, but relative to the number of parking spaces, count how many charging stations there are at BigCo)

If you're just commuting; charge it at your workplace? park it anywhere you can access a power outlet? If absolutely nothing is available, spend an hour of your time on the weekend using a supercharger.

Fine for the handful of spaces at work that have a charging outlet. Most workplaces don't have any. Nor will they want to pay for the electricity to charge everyone's car. It's all fun and games to do it for two or three cars as a novelty. It will be an entirely different matter to do it for hundreds of employees. And even if they wanted to do it, and have a payroll deduction or something to pay for it, the electrical grid will need to be upgraded to deliver that kind of power.

I believe that scaling up the electrical grid is going to be the biggest impediment to mass adoption of electric cars. It may happen, but not in 10 years. It will take many decades.

Adding an electrical outlet to parking spot is not very expensive, so as soon as there is a demand on the market, landlords are going to add them to the parking spaces, like they do with other ammeneties, like kitchens or air conditioning. Or at least allow the renter to install one.

The original iPhone had a lot going for it, but I think it was the call-the-Starbucks example that really sold it for me. Remember Steve Jobs on stage looking up the GPS walking path to Starbucks, and having the phone number ready with one-push? It just made perfect sense - a smart phone eliminates the yellow pages.

I don't know if I can find such a feature for an electric car. It's nice that you can plug it in at home, but this is just replacing one need (visit a gas station) with another (remembering to plug it in / staying close to home).

Someone has to be working on battery swaps instead of charging, right? That seems like such an easy solution to what most people consider the biggest problem with electric.

Tesla is working on battery swaps. The problem with it so far is that you have to return to the location where you swapped your battery to retrieve your original battery later, or be hit with a hefty fine.

Tesla has now apparently invited everyone who's ever charged at the Harris Ranch charger, on I5 between LA and SF, to use it. Personally, I tend to stop for dinner there, so supercharging isn't a problem.

One point not addressed in this article: gas will get cheaper and fuel efficiencies will rise. Internal combustion will not just lay down and disappear.

My big qualm with the electric cars that I don't read about is the 40minute-1hour charging. People complain that charging stations aren't near them, but the convenience of pulling into a gas station filling up and being ready for another 400 miles in less than 5 minutes is hard to beat. Even if the charging stations were all around, 5 versus 40-60 min is a big difference.

Yes the only way to get 5 min is with battery swaps.

Electric cars assume that you won't use charging stations at all during day-to-day driving.

How often do you drive that distance? Sure, there are people that take road trips of 200+ miles often, and then it may be more convenient for them to refuel quickly. But the majority doesn't do that very often.

People who don't drive that distance don't need cars, frankly--and not owning a car at all is a trend that's growing faster than Tesla sales.

Most people I know that live in peninsula and south bay of silicon valley have a 10-25 mile commute (1-way) and it would be a huge inconvenience to not have a car. You can't get around with just Uber down here.

Yes, it's unfortunate that people still live in suburban areas that don't have transit.

Humans have not historically all lived in hyper-dense cities that make public transportation more practical than private automobiles. Like many others, I have no intention of doing so personally. And, outside of such locations (and I'd like to see the plan to, for example, move everyone in the South Bay to a few very dense urban centers) it's generally inconvenient to depend on public transit.

People have not historically relied upon private car ownership to get around, either, but the trend of history for the past several centuries is towards urbanization.

There's no way you fill your car in 5 minutes, and Superchargers are noted to take 30 minutes, not 40-60.

It takes no more than 5 minutes from the moment I drive into a gas station to the moment I drive out to refill my Honda civic (10 gal). EPA dictates a maximum pump rate of 10 gal per minute [1].... so the actual pumping phase of fill-ups is just 1 minute for my car.

[1] http://www.epa.gov/OMS/regs/ld-hwy/evap/spitback.txt

How is there no way to fill a car in 5 minutes? I suppose I don't time myself, but it always seem to take between 3 and 8 minutes.

Sorry, what? I fill my car in closer to 2 minutes, not counting time that would be included in either type of refill (pulling in, paying, etc).

If you can get a car to go 200 miles and charge in 1 hour, at a price that is comparable to gasoline, that is probably good enough. Maybe some traveling salesmen wouldn't want it, but even people who take a lot of vacations would be okay. And it'll probably end the cross country road trips, but these actions are total outliers.

I've driven on semi long road trip vacations my whole life. Chicago to Hayward, Wi. A 400 mile trip almost exactly from my parents old house in the burbs.

You'd just take a break halfway and get dinner while the car charges. It's about 7 hours to go 400 miles including a gas stop, piss break and quick dinner. Just make it 7.5 hours and take a long dinner.

The extra 45 minutes charging time is really no big deal if you only have to do it every couple months.

Why wouldn't you have your car charging overnight? It'd be great to not have to bother stopping at a grotty petrol station - can't wait for that to be over.

I have read countless bits about charging times, Supercharger network, hot-swappable battery plans, etc. Surprised you've missed it in electric vehicle discussions and articles.

People mention this frequently, but they never mention how often they procrastinate on stopping by the gas station when it's time to fill up. And the additional anxiety associated with not knowing if you pushed it too far and aren't going to make it to the gas station. Or the times you're later than you wanted because you forgot you needed to get gas. I've never had this problem since getting my Tesla since it's always charged. I've spent maybe 2 hours charging at a supercharger in the ~9000 miles so far. I would have easily spent a similar amount of total time driving to gas stations and filling up in my previous car, since ~5 minutes times ~9000 / ~350 is about 2 hours. And when you're sitting at a supercharger you can do things like eat or read your kindle. And if you needed to stop to eat anyways, it doesn't really take any additional time.

Petrol cars are limited to petrol stations. Electricity is easily and safely available everywhere. I'm sure soon enough many parking locations will come standard with charging. This is already in place in some areas. And if your doing long haul driving timing lunch or a break with their charging doesn't seem unreasonable. So I don't see this being an unsolvable problem at all. Quite the opposite. In 50 years people will probably be reminiscing about 'the hassle' of altering their destination to find a place to fuel their car. That's if we are still driving them at this point!

If this prediction is right, the electric grid will have a tough time catching up. Power plants take a long time to plan, fund and build.

But the electric car can be the tool to enable wider use of intermittent-supply renewable energy, like wind or solar! With some smarts, the cars can be charged at high supply/low demand times, and even feed energy back to the grid when demand is high and supply is low.

There is money to be made in making this happen, people!

Also, I did the math once on how much extra power a city will need if all cars go electric. It is not that much: take Perth, Australia, as an example. We have about 5.5 GW installed power generation capacity (there is a huge gap between this and the actual usage which peaks at less than 3.5 GW usually, but that is another story...). We have say 500,000 cars, driving 40 km/d on average... that's 20 million km driven, at 5 kwhr/km we need an extra 4 million kwhr/day. If the charging is spread over 20 hours, that is an extra 200 MW required to supply them all. A 200 MW power station is small-ish.

"The iPhone demonstrated that smartphones are infinitely better than the feature phones which dominated the world in 2007."

The iPhone had predecessors, some Apple, some Microsoft, many tiny companies with good ideas but no business brains. It like the electric car stood on the shoulders of giants.

The electric car still has two major hurdles (I wish it weren't true I really wish that the prediction comes true): 1) the Oil industry is powerful 2) batteries.

With a car, if I want to take a short trip to the local gas me up station then decide to drive 300 miles just to say hey to a friend...I could do that. With an electric car and today's batteries, each "filling" station would have to be able to provide a fully charged, safe battery pack that is compatible with my vehicle.

If better batteries could be made with oil, adoption for electric cars would be overnight and the prediction manifested.

> Gas stations will start to go out of business as many more electric cars are sold, making gasoline powered vehicles even more inconvenient.

That's a great point that I've never considered before.

> On the other hand, the potential exists for a huge rollout of home solar power over the next decade.

Electric cars will convince their owners to install rooftop solar panels, too, which will then convince them to get Powerwall-like batteries for backup, which will then decrease the price of batteries, which will then make electric cars cheaper and more appealing to more people.

It's a beautiful feedback loop.

And wow DOE's predictions are terrible (first source). It's almost as if they went around surveying car manufacturers about their plans to make electric cars in 2013 and then made their predictions for 27 years later based on that. Just terrible.

And 11% cars will be using ethanol in 2040? Really? I'll be surprised if 0.11% of them will use ethanol by then.

> The current range of a Model S tops out at about 300 miles. Even GM is extending it's Volt to 200 miles to effectively compete with Tesla.

Volt is the range-extender, and it doesn't come near that (for battery mileage). You're thinking "Bolt" which is not really meant to be the successor to Volt, because it's a full EV and doesn't have a range extender. That's what they claim it will do on battery alone. It will compete with Model 3, not S.

> Battery technology is difficult, but it would be extremely surprising if the available ranges don't double again in 5 years or less.

I agree. Part of it will be from the natural evolution of Li-ion batteries, and part from Tesla's Gigafactory coming online. I expect battery prices to drop in half again to around $100 in another 5 years, after Apple has launched its electric car, too, and Tesla has made a couple more Gigafactories + the natural progress in density of the batteries. After that we might need some breakthroughs to go to $50 or less per kWh.

$100/kWh should be enough to switch the "Early Majority" to EVs, which is half the population. The other half will need batteries to be $50/kWh (or less) to make EVs cheap enough but also with long enough range for the more conservative gas-powered car drivers, who probably won't accept anything less than a (real) 500 mile range on an EV.

Must be nice to live in the first world.

I've always wondered if the realization of this electric car utopia in the first world will eventually lead to Lamborghinis and Porches being dumped on us poor people in the third world like hand me down clothes.

I can't imagine what the iPhone has to do with an electric car. The post just refers to a software interface (which all cars now have), a network conncetion, and automatic updates. None of these relies on the powertrain of the car.

TFA is drawing a parallel between the way smartphones, as heralded by the iPhone, transformed the mobile phone market, and the way electric cars, as heralded by the Model S, will do to the car market.

That's what the one has to do with the other.

But it's a really poor parallel. People wanted a smartphone because it was a total game changer. Electric cars are not.

I'm an electrical engineer and I only sort of give a shit what kind of powertrain by car has. My mom? Doesn't know or care how her car works. My dad? Probably against electrical out of old man-back in my dad behavior.

Cost will be the big change. Once an electric car is cheaper than gas, the public will switch. But that is not why people switched to smartphones.

Also part of the reason for the smartphone revolution is the market psychology behind carriers subsidizing very expensive phones. People think their iPhone 6 costs 200 bucks.

Finally, the short upgrade cycle for phones is totally different than cars which last for like 15 years on average.

Smartphones weren't a "total game changer", they were a jump in CPU power and interface smoothness, but the trends were already there (maybe not in the U.S., I dunno).

Both are desperately waiting for the messiah battery to happen.

People like the original author seem to face immense difficulty at wrapping their head around the fact that battery technology does not follow Moore's Law (while even chips have mostly stopped to do so). State of the art battery technology has not improved much this side of the millennium, it has just seen a really big price drop from specialist niche technology to commodity. This makes the battery of a Tesla S a lot more affordable today than it would have been back when Musk started the project (and when he correctly predicted a price drop, and just a price drop, instead of waiting for the miracle battery to happen), but the range would not have been much worse if you built a Tesla around a battery made of crazy expensive y2k cells.

The future's already here. A 2-3 year old Nissan Leaf, top trim with all the features, with 10-20K miles on it and a 7-year factory CPO warranty, costs just $10-12K. That's thousands less than the average price paid for a used car last month. If your commute's less than 40-50 miles each way, you can have all the advantages of owning an EV today, not X years down the line. Zero gas, zero maintenance, zero emission inspections, and damn fun to drive. And you don't need any special charging hardware; you can plug it into any old 120V wall socket overnight.

Eh, I'm not sure the Leaf is the future for most people. Based on what I've heard from Leaf owners, even a commute of 35 miles can be iffy depending on travel conditions. And even if your Leaf can make the trip today, common levels of battery degradation on the Leaf will place that commute out of your range within a couple of years (the users at mynissanleaf.com estimate that a battery can be expected to lose about 10% of its capacity after one year, 15% after two years and 26% after five years under moderate conditions).

For gas stations, the profit from gas is ~1%, but the profit from snacks etc. is much higher. So gas stations could easily add electric charging stations and continue making profit. Source: worked at Sheetz during high school and college, sat through their corporate presentations from time to time.

Now, it is true that the electric charging stations have to compete with an additional category: people charging at home, so there will be gas station closings. The first franchise to add electric chargers should still be profitable, though.

While I'm all on-board for the importance and awesomeness of a wholesale transition to electric transportation, I think this essay leaves out some important considerations.

The primary one that pops to mind for me: people replace their phones every 2-3 years. (http://www.phonearena.com/news/Americans-replace-their-cell-...)

How often do people replace their car?

Just shy of 6 years for a new car: http://www.kbb.com/car-news/all-the-latest/average-length-of...

Obviously a significant portion of those cars remain on the road, just with new drivers. As of 2012, the average age of cars on the road is 11 years: https://www.mainstreet.com/article/how-long-do-you-keep-car-...

Eeeeeee, coming from a country where average age of a car on the road is 10+ years, I would say absolutely no. And about fuel stations becoming less profitable and closing...how do you think stations survive in remote places of the world where there is very few cars? They increase their prices. And some of us will still gladly pay those prices,because we have to drive petrol/diesel powered cars(trucks are not going to be electric powered for a long time).

I find even this view to be pessimistic and limited, because it assumes we need to keep fairly conventional (but electric) cars around, which we don't!

It's likely we'll rapidly end up with something like the computer controlled "carpods" Google is building, which could be radically cheaper than any car people have to be able to drive. Even if they can only go 45mph, that's enough to navigate most major cities at an optimal speed.

Vehicles driving at most 25 mph are regulated much lighter than `cars' in the USA, that's why Google chose that speed limit for their `carpods'.

I have test driven a Model S and I will strive to never purchase a ICE driven car again. I, quite literally, changed my perspective on transportation and my life. Previously, I've been lusting after a used 911 or S4 but no more.

Tesla has my business, especially if they can pull off a ~$35k in a couple of years. All I have to do is make my current A4 & Honda Odyssey make it a bit longer. :)

I think this is a tough discussion to have without discussing the following engineering realities and understanding how the needle moves for each of them over time.

Key Metrics:

Specific Energy Density

Cost/ Unit of Specific Energy Density

Liquid Hydrocarbin Energy Density vs. Galvanic Battery Density

Simplicity and Maintainability

http://qr.ae/7L89on (everyone should read this post.)

Part of the iPhones success was the base of iPod users with music collections in the ecosystem that could only get it on the their phone with an "upgrade". No such thing exists for Telsa. Now when someone figures out drive as a service and it cost <$200/mo for the average user with a commute. You have a disruptive scenario.

We just need to add outlets everywhere. I'd love one, but I don't have a place to charge it.

The electric car is actually fairly inconvenient if you don't have a garage or a parking spot that you rent / cannot install an outlet on.

The cycle time on vehicles is far higher than a cheap smartphone mainly due to their expense. And a large amount of the article's bullet points are not something that would be unique to an electric car.

When you take public transit, as long as the train/bus isn't loud, would you care to notice if it was electric or gas based? Or how fast it got you where you wanted to go with comfort?

Boston has added hybrid buses to their fleet. They are much quieter. I'm a fan.

But I agree about the parking spaces. Even now in new construction, it is considered forward thinking to have 2 or 3 spaces with outlets out of 100. For the future of electric cars, they should at least have conduit to spaces where outlets could be installed.

New construction in Palo Alto, including single family homes, is required to have that sort of thing pre-installed. Conduit only for single-family homes, a lot of conduit and some actual chargers for multi-family and commercial buildings.

If you own a single family home, then electric cars are ok. If you live in a multiunit, rent, do not have a garage or similar, then charging at home is not practical.

Well, you just responded to a Tesla owner who rents in a multi-unit apartment. I charge, overnight once per week, in a city garage 1 block away. I didn't say it was easy or common, but that it's possible and getting more common.

(And if I ever get short, there's a new supercharger in Mountain View.)

Palo Alto's new law mandating chargers in new construction just recently passed; in a few years it will begin to take effect. And they'll probably extend it to renovations of older buildings, etc etc.

I want a Tesla, but you are far and away more dedicated to the idea that I am.

>Boston has added hybrid buses to their fleet. They are much quieter. I'm a fan.

That sentence sounds really weird - one second you're talking about buses, then you suddenly (apparently) claim to be a device for pushing air around. I know what you actually mean, but damn, "I'm a fan" sounds really weird like that.

I though the lesson from the iphone's success was that a product with less features, easier to use and more integrated make great products. With that reasoning plug-in hybrids are the future, although I'm personally rooting for pure electric to win in the end.

To me the best parts of an electric car is that the power-train assembly is much simpler then with a gas powered one and it can be powered with pretty much any kind of energy... whatever feeds your home. and the downfall is of course the range.

A big problem is that battery's require lithium, which is quite rare(not supper rare but still rare enough for it to be a problem).

My prediction is that sales if electric cars wont become exponential until we get cheaper and greener battery technology.

That lithium is rare is a common misconception. It is actually one of the more abundant elements on Earth, especially in seawater [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium#Terrestrial

Also, the on-land lithium deposits considered commercial already have enough lithium to make every car in the world electric, plus provide battery storage (like tesla power wall) for every home in the world. See:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/m4r/stupid_questions_may_2015/cbjf

> In fact, in 2005 few if any of the futurists would have even been able to imagine the kind of device most of us now depend upon.

Well, let's be honest, mod the implementation details, Star Trek pretty much got this correct with the PADD.

If I may nerd out for a moment, the technical manual [+] for the Enterprise (NCC-1701-D) even specified that the entire craft could be piloted from a PADD. This is entirely reasonable based on today's mobile device hardware (I'd argue, if you're offloading computationally expensive tasks to a central processor and using a mobile device solely for taking in aggregated sensor data and outputting navigational commands).

[+] https://cudebi.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/franchise-star-tr...

Without cheap batteries, electric cars are a niche product, unfortunately. And with the Iran deal, oil and natural gas are going to be even cheaper so electric cars would become even more expensive.

I can't believe he said electric cars are more fun to drive. There're fun to drive electric cars such as tesla and fiat 500e, but they're never more fun to drive than most (if not all) other cars in it's price range. The only advantage of an electric car in terms of performance is torque. And it doesn't necessary has more torque. Yes electric cars has maximum torque at 0 rpm, but do anyone actually bother looking at it's torque curve? Different from gasoline cars, the torque of electric cars goes DOWN when rpm goes up. I do believe electric cars make a lot of sense for normal people, especially commuters, but please do not say it's more fun to drive because it's absolutely not.

Do you own one? Everyone I know that owns a Tesla says it's insanely fun to drive. That includes a couple guys I know that own gasoline powered race cars in the same price range as well as Teslas.

I've test driven one and that's why I didn't bought it. Look at all those car medias who put good words on Tesla, is there any one of them said it's more fun to drive than things like the new Mercedes S class? I don't even compare it to sports cars in that price range like corvette or 911. What kind of "race car" are your friends talking about? A charger?

This might happen, but I think Geoff is a little too breathless here. Smartphones cost up to $200 with contract. (Approximately nobody buys unlocked phones in the US.) Almost anybody could scrape up $200, and for those who can't, there are $0-with-contract smartphones by now and <$50 prepaid smartphones.

The Tesla Model S costs $69,900. That is a hilarious amount of money to spend on a car. That's $18,000 more than a Mercedes-Benz E-Class. $20,000 more than an Audi A6. $45,000 more than a Toyota Prius. $50,000 more than a Volkswagen Jetta. You could buy a different, damn good used car for every day of the work week for the cost of a single Tesla Model S.

OK, you say, but the iPhone launched at a high price too. The difference is, the iPhone's price came down in a couple of years and the Tesla's price is still extremely high, even for a luxury car, seven years after the launch of the Roadster. Is the price of a Tesla going to drop $50,000 in the next five to ten years?

Has the Tesla sold well? About 50,000 Teslas have been sold in the United States since 2012[1]. In contrast, Toyota sold over four times that number of cars in June 2015 alone.[2] "Struggling" Volkswagen sold 30,000 cars in April.[3] Even in the luxury category, BMW, Mercedes, and Lexus all sell in excess of 300,000 cars a year[4]. 300,000 cars a year, vs. 50,000 cars in three years.

The author also notes a number of advantages of the Tesla:

> It’s more fun to drive, with smooth, transmission-less acceleration. For most of us it is the fastest car we have ever owned.

> It’s quieter at all times and nearly silent at low speeds.

> It allows you to drive in the carpool lane

> It’s more roomy and has a trunk in the front (the “frunk”) AND a spacious back.

I agree with these.

> [It allows you] to sign up for a cheaper energy usage plan at home.

> It is always “full” every morning one drives it and you never need to go to a gas station.

This is true for people who live in detached houses. People who are ecologically conscious often prefer not to do this, and that makes it harder to gain a foothold among early adopters. In fact, among this segment, and among the younger segment overall, Tesla's biggest competition isn't going to be other car makers; it's going to be the decision not to own a car in the first place. Once Tesla reaches a point of economical mass production, they should seriously consider partnering with Zipcar to install charging stations at Zipcar lots and provide Teslas as Zipcar fleet vehicles; in the long run, they might get more Tesla drivers that way than they ever would selling vehicles to individual buyers.

If electric cars are the future, I'm going to despair that in the 21st century, we're still hauling around individual 300 pound Americans in 4,000 pound, 16 foot long cars. The trends towards young people returning to the city center and not owning cars are both better trends to encourage and more powerful trends than the trend of selling a really nice, $70,000 electric luxury car.

> It has a user interface - including, notably, its navigation system - as superior to that of other cars as the iPhone was to earlier phones.

> It is connected to the Internet.

> It continuously gets better with automatic updates and software improvements.

> It comes with an app that allows you to manage the car from your phone.

None of these are inherent to electric cars, and any luxury marque should be able to copy these, just like they've been copying from each other for years. And once the luxury marques copy these features, they will filter down to all new cars. (This is even assuming that the last three points are a positive, which I don't think they are.)

> Gas stations will start to go out of business as many more electric cars are sold, making gasoline powered vehicles even more inconvenient.

On the contrary, I think not actually having to sell as much gas would be a boon to the gas station. Gas stations make next to zero margin on actual gasoline, and all of their margin on the convenience store. People on road trips will still have to take breaks, use the restroom, and buy a Red Bull. The gas station doesn't really care whether you refuel your car along the way, but as long as they still exist and provide the service of refueling the driver (and how hard is it to set up some sort of metered power jack for your electric car at the gas station, too?), the business of actually selling fuel will be subsidized.

In fact, here's another way to look at it: diesel-powered cars are fairly rare in the US, and yet it's still easy to find a gas station that pumps diesel. Not every gas station does it, but it's not a barrier to diesel fuel sales.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Model_S#Global

[2] http://toyotanews.pressroom.toyota.com/releases/toyota+lexus...

[3] http://media.vw.com/release/976/

[4] http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/01/05/us-usa-autos-luxur...

I don't know where you're getting your numbers, but my A6 I bought 8 YEARS AGO cost more than $49,900. $70k is a lot of money without a doubt, but it's not out of line for a mid-range luxury car. Unfortunately I don't find the Model S to be as nice to drive or ride in (except in terms of acceleration) as the gasoline cars in the same price bracket. That will change, it's not a knock against electric cars in general, but I don't think the Model S is there yet for the price.

I literally googled "Audi A6". The base MSRP starts at $44,800.

> If electric cars are the future, I'm going to despair that in the 21st century, we're still hauling around individual 300 pound Americans in 4,000 pound, 16 foot long cars. The trends towards young people returning to the city center and not owning cars are both better trends to encourage and more powerful trends than the trend of selling a really nice, $70,000 electric luxury car.

Fully agreed. I wish this perspective was far more prominent. There's so many sides to pick, this is certainly not a two-pole issue.

Eh. i would like to see independent garages retrofitting batteries into classic cars.

but man, theres nothing like hearing carburetors on v8's.

There does seem to be a small group of hot-rodder hackers who are doing that, like this guy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=369h-SEBXd8 - the related videos on the side have a few more who are racing electric cars in old bodies. I haven't seen one with a really classic hot rod body, but that would be really cool.

Yeah i've seen that car, theres also this classic mustang that this texas company was working on. I think the biggest issue (like always) is battery location and storage.

Shell, Exxon, BP will pour massive lobby dollars to slow down the spread of electric cars. GM, Ford, Honda & Toyota (and the Dealer network) will get in on the lobbying action against electric cars when they see their current monopolies eroding.

Comparing the spread of the Smartphone (digital device by definition) to the Spread of the Car (physical) and then extrapolating a best case future is wishful thinking.

Smartphones are physical. They exist in my hand.

Then there is the whole theory that car ownership will go away as driverless cars take over.

> Current predictions of the future of electric cars are as wrong as any predictions about the future of mobile phones made in 2005.

I find it odd that Mr. Ralston says this while predicting the future of electric cars. Surely he meant "Everyone else's current predictions…"

I would still buy a gasoline car just because there are no charging stations near where I live. Yeah you can charge at home, but if I have to take a longer trip? At least for me, I will wait until charging stations become more available. Could be a chicken and egg problem.

PHEV. 2016 Chevy Volt with 50mile Electric range and 41mpg when running on gas may be what you are looking for.

Interesting to think about small towns that lack electric car infrastructure: if many of those rely on tourism (thinking a remote seasonal vacation town), as their customers increasingly drive electric cars, they will have to change, which will bring more infrastructure to the whole city.

I'm thinking about visiting a friend ~8 years ago. He lives in a rural area, and back then cell phone signal coverage was terribly spotty. Couldn't go around a curve without risk of losing coverage.

But the situation improved. When I visited a few months back, what a huge difference there was. I was amazed that out in the boondocks mobile phones worked just about everywhere. (Well, at least in that locality.)

Seems to suggest that once the demand for electric vehicle recharging begins to ramp up, the charge-station infrastructure will improve just as rapidly as cell phone towers have proliferated.

Tourism may be one motivator but seems predictable that once electric vehicles are good enough and affordable, small town residents themselves will generate the bulk of the demand for this infrastructure.

The vast majority of small towns don't rely on tourism, however.

Tesla rolled out the "destination charger" program for such places. Lots of touristy small towns in California have many more destination chargers than public J1772 stations. Here's a map for the whole country:

http://www.teslamotors.com/findus#/bounds/49.38,-66.94,25.82...

Note that you can't even see the California coastline anymore. It's mostly rural and touristy.

> and to sign up for a cheaper energy usage plan at home

Wait... What is this??

> The future of automotive transportation is an electric one and you can expect that future to be here soon.

The future is electric driverless cars. How long until they are mandatory?

I think the article is overly optimistic and derives some sort of future prediction based on a simplified past performance of a totally different market. Tesla is a luxury , many of us can't afford it and if we could we would most likely opt for BMW or Benz.

The reason these other car makers aren't moving yet is they are learning from Tesla. You don't want to be a first mover in this industry, you want to move so slightly close to what everyone is doing but still differentiate yourself on brand. Cars today have vastly improved across the board regardless of make. To say gas stations will go out of business is ludicrous at best, Tesla will go out of business sooner as established car brands move in and hurt bottom line for Tesla. In the short while the euphoria towards Tesla will continue but it's headed for a not so pleasant ending. Great for humanity, bad for Musk.

> To say gas stations will go out of business is ludicrous at best, Tesla will go out of business sooner as established car brands move in and hurt bottom line for Tesla.

I don't get that dichotomy. If established car brands move into electric, wouldn't that kill both Tesla and gas stations? Why would gas stations survive?

Gas stations have one shot at survival over the next 30 years: Hydrogen Fuel Cell Vehicles (FCVs).

Part of the reason traditional manufacturers have been reluctant to pursue BEVs (battery-electric vehicles) is that many were betting on liquefied hydrogen as an energy delivery mechanism for FCVs. I presume this was from pressure from current energy companies.

Hydrogen benefits current energy interests because customers would fill up their cars in a way roughly analogous to today's gas stations. Even though the "fuel" product and drivetrain are different, gas stations can adapt for hydrogen.

That is just way too complicated to work out, though, and I think traditional automakers are at the point where they are giving up. The hydrogen infrastructure is hugely expensive and the resulting automotive products are not that much more convenient than BEVs.

Tesla's Gigafactory, enabling products like their PowerWall, is the most straightforward way for us as a society to use more renewables. The problem with wind and solar has always been spotty, inconsistent power generation, and with enough battery capacity, that is no longer an issue. That is a bad sign for gas stations, but an opportunity to pivot for traditional energy companies.

Gas stations have a lot more shots at survival than just FCVs. In 30 years gas stations will likely deliver a wide range of different vehicle energy sources: fossil gasoline, Fischer–Tropsch process gasoline, fossil diesel, biodiesel, CNG, and hydrogen. The only business they will lose are people who can charge or refuel electric or CNG powered vehicles at home. Those will still be a minority in 30 years due to slow turnover of the vehicle fleet and limited availability of home charging stations.

Right now we don't know if electric cars that Tesla has will be the formula for everybody else or that it will be the standard (optimists will claim so). There are so many problems we are ignoring and the biggest which ansible brought up is the battery & cost. Could you charge your battery faster you can fill up your tank with fuel? Yes I'm sure it's improving every year but there's going to be a lot of time that will be required. There are so many other economic unknowns during this time. What if gas became so abundant and cheap due to continued oversupply from some determined group of oil producing countries hell bent on making sure there's a market for their black gold? What if we improved and lowered the cost of extracting oil deep deep below the earth and run into an ocean size worth of supply? What if car technology improves suddenly that burning fuel becomes extremely efficient that batteries can't match? What if somebody comes up with a new type of fuel concoction that you could put into any old used car and get crazy mileage?

If we do arrive at a point where everybody is producing electric cars, wouldn't there still be an interest in buying out existing gas stations and turn them into super charging stations where you can just drive your car through a tunnel and come out the other end with batteries fully charged? Or would battery become so crazy good that you charge it overnight and it lasts for deacades (you gonna put a mini nuclear reactor in your car?)? Maybe it will be possible to just subscribe to some power station in the orbit that charges your battery constantly wirelessly. I'd love to see that happen but the time it will take to get all of these things right is quite long and a lot of things can change during that time.

I hope you are right, I really look forward to that day when we can say the hell with relying on oppressing people (creating some very angry people that are willing to blow themselves up to make a point) in countries where their leaders get all of our dollars in exchange for that sweet sweet black gold.

> In the short while the euphoria towards Tesla will continue but it's headed for a not so pleasant ending. Great for humanity, bad for Musk.

And I can't help but wonder if Musk is okay with that, or even planned it that way from the start?

> Tesla is a luxury , many of us can't afford it and if we could we would most likely opt for BMW or Benz.

You say that as if you're not already aware there will be a Tesla car for $35,000 pre-subsidies in 2017, and a $30,000 Chevy Bolt in 2016, both with 200 mile ranges. That's about the average car price in the US ($33,000). Volkswagen has recently announced a 200-mile EV too, but might be for 2018+.

Considering the cars selling for about as much or close to that started with a 70-mile battery ~5 years ago, then EVs have improved their ranges by 3x in about 5 years. Let's call it 2x if we also account for a ~$10,000 price difference.

I think people in the 2nd hand car market (like me) will quickly switch to electric. They are simpler to fix and cheaper to fix. Nearly all my cars die with head gasket issues, or oil leaks or timing belt issues. does quick count so that's 4 of my cars and 2 of my partners.

Electric engines won't die like that. And when they do, just grab a used one from a junked car and off you go. With 'in wheel' electric motors, this may be as simple as changing a wheel. This is huge for the 2nd hand market. Most people I know who aren't 'techies' are really looking forward to electric cars.

They are simpler to fix and cheaper to fix.

I think you're ignoring the big problem, the battery. When that goes, it is a big deal to replace, and mucho expensive.

A battery is on the order of the same cost as fixing an automatic transmission (which basically all US cars have--most of the US can't drive a stick anymore).

And, in terms of labor, a battery is WAY easier to replace than a transmission.

There's an even bigger bonus that in ten years the battery pack will probably be cheaper and have a better range. So while the replacement may be expensive the car will be dramatically better afterwards.

And you can recycle (sell) the battery pack after you replace it. What do you think is going into Tesla's Power Wall? Why do you think they're pushing leases so aggressively?

This, in my book, is an unknown. I though Tesla said batteries are getting better 10% a year / 18 months. And I'm sure replacing bad cells will be cheaper than the whole pack.

Someone smart will make a machine that will help me test good cells from bad. Someone else will be ripping good cells out of junked cars.

Someone else will be doing hire purchase on batteries - £200 a year, battery pack replaced every 2,000 charges? Something like that? Sounds fine to me.

True, but there's at least one really expensive component of electric cars that needs replacement every 8 to 10 years: the battery. I think the current price is about $10000 for the battery if you order from Tesla in advance.

Maintenance and repair costs of a gasoline vehicle over 10 years can be less than that.

That's not a very good comparison, is it? After 10 years you'd have a nearly-new electric car (from a reliability/repair standpoint) but you'd have a gas car that was vastly more likely to break down and need costly repairs than when you first bought it.

So the electric car doesn't have an interior that will be worn out? Or worn suspension components like ball joints, tie rods, bushings, steering rack? Or air conditioning?

Electric cars also have highly sophisticated power control equipment. In 10 years of sysadmin work, the overwhelmingly most common failures I've seen have been power supplies, voltage regulators, and capacitors. Remains to be seen how well these components will hold up in real-world use in electric cars.

There was a US govt study cited by the Car Talk guys many years ago that found that the annual repair bill for most cars stabilized at an average of $600/yr, until the car died. (Not counting oil changes and regular maintenance.)

I wouldn't be at all surprised if batteries for a car like the Tesla got down to $6000. At that point, the value proposition is already much better than gasoline cars.

$600 a year or $6000 a year?

I think just brake pads, tires, and regular maintenance exceeds $600 a year if you amortize it. Every older car I've owned then started having problems. Even if it's just the A/C compressor or the muffler, you are always replacing something every few months.

$6000 a decade, so $600 a year. Interesting note: Engine maintenance costs are way higher on ICE cars than on electric cars.

If they can get battery costs down, which they're doing at a speed of 10% a year IIRC, then they can decrease that figure to about $200/year a decade from now.

Come to think of it, perhaps in a decade we'll finally have a reliable carbon price, rather than it being an unpenalized externality. That'd make ICE cars fairly uncompetitive quickly.

They are simpler to fix and cheaper to fix.

If you ignore a lot of things. My current car, 2001 Volvo S60, which I still drive as the first owner with now 200.000 km. I had one issue with the drive train, the clutch broke. Everything else which got replaced you will find in the Tesla itself: Tires, Brakes, Air conditioning. Yes, I am still doing regular service to have it in this condition.

BTW: The Tesla has a gearbox. You know, gearboxes need oil as well, like every regular car/device with moving gear.

Electric engines won't die like that.

Yeah, right. Read on: http://www.dailytech.com/Following+Reports+of+Drive+Motor+Re...

You need to look after the maintenance on your cars better.

Your failure rate for service items like timing belts is statistically off the charts if that is true. You're either ignoring the needs or you are buying pieces of unmaintained junk.

I'm yet to experience a failure like this in all my vehicle history, and I've owned some beaters in my time.

BMW has already launched their electric car range. They have moved - you can walk down and buy one today.

The i3 is even more innovative than the Tesla in a lot of ways - it intentionally does not look like a regular sedan, and has been optimised for city driving with upright position, small footprint, tight turning circle etc.

The i8 is a high performance hybrid with a ridiculously low fuel consumption pattern and the ability to drive as an all-electric.

BMW is not waiting for Tesla - it's out there competing in the marketplace where Tesla is not present - compact city cars and high end sportscars.

Tesla is unilkey to go out of business as it has built enormous technical knowledge which will be licensed to other manufacturers, either in IP agreements or by contracting out key personnell.

Companies like Lotus and Porsche make significant money consulting with other car makers just for things like ride and handling. The same thing will happen with electric drive and Tesla.

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