Anytime society has an enormous demand for something, especially people/institutions with money, it gets done.
If there are hundreds of billions or even trillions riding on upgrading the grid and securing mineral resources/researching alternative solutions, it will get funded and figured out.
There will be $20,000 economy EVs with crappy everything but still go A to B. There will be grid upgrades to handle everyone charging (really topping off is more realistic, few drive more than ~25 miles/day, the upgrade to accommodate this might simply be "grid smart" chargers). There will be alternative chemistry batteries that don't need rare earths (like LFP in some Teslas).
Toyota is just stubbornly refusing to take the L on their 30 years of research into this. I don't blame them, but I'm not them, so I'll call it how it is.
EVs are definitely going to remain a first-world item for my lifetime at least. If everyone other than Toyota goes completely electric, Toyota is going to be the monopoly automaker in every underdeveloped country and will be laughing all the way to the bank. I’m with the Toyota CEO on this one. If you’ve stepped outside a devolved country for even a few days… I just can’t fathom how all-electric is going to be realistic
I live in Vietnam and we have EVs for "normal people" here.
EV doesn't mean "cars". The V is for vehicles. We've had electric scooters on the roads for many years. In some cities, especially in the north they are nearly the majority of vehicles on the road.
But even if you limit yourself to cars, a friend just bought a Volvo S90 Recharge electric car to drive in Ho Chi Minh City.
And the first electric bus route launched earlier this year.
Toyota will never be very popular in Vietnam. If anything the Kia Smile is probably the most popular car and will be for a long time.
If there's one thing I've learned is that one shouldn't underestimate the sheer speed at which a maturing technology cheapens itself in a drive downmarket.
Cars themselves went from being a rich person's curiosity to mostly-affordable to ubiquitous in the space of 50 years.
Airline travel went from a luxury for the rich to broadly affordable in about ~30 years.
For more recent examples see smartphones - in less than 10 years it's gone from exclusively high-end device to near-universal adoption across the world.
It's often hard to figure out what technologies will stick and what will never resolve fundamental flaws - but once it sticks in the high-end market there is a good bet it will rapidly drive its way down the price scale, at a far faster speed than you might expect.
What surprises me is how they managed to make them artificially degrade anyway through terrible cooling. We could have truly eternal LEDs for only minor increase in material cost but no, they have to overheat and burn out to secure profits for Philips.
One of the main reasons for this is research funding and regulation by the European Union. Something similar is probably going to happen with hydrogen production over the next years. (Not as fuel for cars but for industry)
Mandatory reminder that hydrogen as fuel for cars is an incredible waste of primary energy and will be for a long time.
A petrol car engine is inefficient due to constraints (small + no cooling source other than air).
An electric engine + battery is extremely efficient (the "downside" is you can't use the wasted energy to heat up the car in winter like an ICE).
An electric engine + hydrogen fuel tank brings back inefficiency, and you can't even reuse that wasted energy because most of this waste is electrolysis.
On the other hand, you can refill a pressurized hydrogen tank in seconds. Electricity itself is merely a mode of energy transmission. Energy storage has and will continue to be a huge innovation area as the current means of battery charging are either slow or low capacity. We’re getting really good at getting energy from the sun, and excess energy not consumed is wasted, so why not make hydrogen? Heck, why not have fuel stations in the middle of nowhere have a well (for water extraction) and an array of solar panels so the station can produce its own product to sell?
I can see a future where you can opt for a hydrogen fuel cell EV rather than a battery powered one. Efficiently using the hydrogen will be a non-issue if we are able to trivially produce a vast abundance of it.
It’s hard to say that an EV is just as good (for the consumer) as an ICE engine if I am taking a road trip and one of many fill-ups makes me wait for hours. There are these uncommon cars that opponents usually cite and are sometimes unfairly dismissed. I say this because we can and will make EV technology better and cheaper and I’m willing to bet money that hydrogen fuel cell in lieu of batteries will become a thing.
Solar power is 1.68% of the USA's primary energy mix in 2021. Wind is 3.89%, about 2.5% more than a decade ago, and the trend is not accelerating that fast.
It is not even 3 decades to 2050, which is the USA's target date for net zero carbon, so with conservative estimates primary energy from wind should increase by at least 10% per decade, so 4 times faster than last decade.
Where is the vast abundance of renewable energy that you are talking about? Now is not the time for deploying another massively wasteful technology just because some people want to go on road trips without taking a 30 min break (a recent EV fast charge does not take hours) every few hours.
I don’t think those extrapolations are totally fair. You’re assuming today’s technology is frozen, inflexible, and adoption is going to linear. If we have learned anything from the last decade it is that adoption curves are getting steeper.
If you recall from my original post, I said nothing about that hypothetical, abundant hydrogen being born from any particular source, but I did have solar in mind specifically. I personally think solar cells and panel arrays will get more efficient at producing power that we will eventually have a global excess. If we have grids producing renewable electricity when conditions allow, they can redirect some of the excess energy and use electrolysis to produce hydrogen creating energy reserves for when the power source is not available to them.
Hydrogen is still not super efficient because we have not even scratched the surface of optimizing it’s consumption. If we had concerted efforts towards that goal, we can get it to work for us in ways we never thought possible. I don’t think lugging around large batteries is the future, rather our fuel storage needs will be met by hydrogen tanks.
I'm not assuming linear adoption. I explicitly said that even if adoption was FOUR TIMES faster than now, the amount of renewable energy would barely reach the same amount of primary energy as we use now by 2050.
This is a optimistic scenario. Current trend is mostly linear. See:
You can choose linear/log, it doesn't look exponential to me.
Add to this the fact that primary energy generation is increasing all over the world, so the share of renewables is increasing even less.
The target is 2050. There is no R&D that will get rid of electrolysis and Carnot cycles by then. Maybe by the end of the century if you want. But for the next 30 years, batteries will be in the lead.
Your source is counting the share of electricity generation. My source[0] is counting the share of primary energy; including fuel, heating, etc. I believe the latter is more relevant for the current discussion (CO2 emissions and cars). Electricity is not even half of our primary energy use.
> We’re getting really good at getting energy from the sun, and excess energy not consumed is wasted, so why not make hydrogen? Heck, why not have fuel stations in the middle of nowhere have a well (for water extraction) and an array of solar panels so the station can produce its own product to sell?
We are nowhere near being able to satisfy 100% of our energy demand with solar or even a renewables mix, except for a unicorn scenario in which we have high winds and a sunny sky at the same time. On top of that, it is extremely wasteful to use that energy to produce hydrogen and then pipe it around, compared to storing it in batteries - either portable ones like in cars or bigger house or grid-sized ones.
If we have excess solar energy, it would be great to make recharging your car free at that time, although I know that's a pipe dream due to the profit motive.
I always figured the solution was a cantenary or third rail style system on major highways.
The EV trickle-charges and uses direct grid current while driving in between cities, and then a 200km range at the endpoint of the journey is more than ample.
Those are great points, actually and your comment provides so little detail that I begin to question the intentions behind it.
We have yet to design many vehicles around a hydrogen fuel cell and we have yet to really realize it’s full potential as a power source, dismissing it on these grounds is simply short-signed thinking.
We can extract this resource from a very abundant resource, water, which is huge. With only energy (from the grid or a micro-grid) and water as inputs, you can produce a substance that is able to store energy for later use who’s only byproduct is water.
I do agree that EV's will eventually be much cheaper than ICE vehicles, since they're mechanically much simpler (they're basically a battery with an electric motors and 4 wheels). The devil is basically in the battery chemistry, which is extremely difficult to improve on.
Ignore all the "revolutionary" new batteries you hear about almost every week. None of them are heading for production for the same reasons: their capacity or durability are much lower than current Li-Ion batteries.
What we don't see here in North America are small cheap EVs for doing small tasks in the city. All EVs here are big and expensive. There is a huge proliferation of electric scooters in the city, in particular in low income areas, and while you may see the occasional 3 wheeler, you never ever see small 4 wheel EVs.
> In some cities, especially in the north they are nearly the majority of vehicles on the road.
lol, do you really live in Vietnam?
How many electric scooters do you see on the street in compare to the gasoline counterparts? Honda alone deliver about 2.7 million bikes per year in Vietnam. All of the Honda bikes are ICE. The number of new electric scooters is not even six figures.
> Toyota will never be very popular in Vietnam.
Recently Toyota is not as popular as some years ago. But they still ship the most passenger cars among other manufacturers last year.
Honda doesn't deliver 2.7 million bikes a year. Maybe they did a few years ago and your info is out of date? Sales of petrol bikes have been declining for a few years in Vietnam, as the market has become saturated.
Honda, Yahama, Suzuki, Piaggio, and SYM combined sold 2,492,372 units in 2021. And that wasn't a massive crash due to covid, sales were "only" down 8.1% compared to 2020. Honda is about 75% of the market. So around 1.8-1.9 million bikes.
> The number of new electric scooters is not even six figures.
Sure, I didn't say it was a big thing nationwide, I said some cities, so we're not really disagreeing. They make up 10% of sales now, not 50%, and even if they did it would takes year to replace all the aging bikes on the road.
I said there are some cities in the north where they are very popular; I'm not talking about Ho Chi Minh City or Hanoi. I don't pretend to know why some cities seem to have tons, whether it is local policy (I think this is what happened in central Hue) or because cheap Chinese ones have been available for a while (I think this explains some of the border towns) or what. Lạng Sơn is one place where I remember them being very popular.
> But they still ship the most passenger cars among other manufacturers last year.
Toyota sold 69,002 cars in 2021. Hyundai sold 70,518. THACO also technically sells more than Toyota but they sell under multiple brands so it's not really the same thing.
But you're right that I overstated things with Toyota; I was pushing back against the ridiculous claim that they will somehow have a monopoly and went too far.
When you said "[electric scooters] especially in the north they are nearly the majority of vehicles on the road", it's definitely wrong. They are popular against certain demographic segments (e.g. students), but they're nowhere near the majority of vehicles on the road.
Have to agree 100%. During my time there this year I saw maybe 1 or 2 electric scooters? I did see some Vinfast electric charging stations though.
Vietnam is still a relatively poor country (~$600USD/month average wage). It's going to take a long time before the current vehicles on the road are replaced with new ones.
It's still pretty common to see people riding around motorbikes from the 80's and 90's.
> But even if you limit yourself to cars, a friend just bought a Volvo S90 Recharge electric car to drive in Ho Chi Minh City.
The heck does this mean? Suddenly, vietnam is going to follow the trend and buy electric cars? This car costs something like $60k in Vietnam. The country gdp per capita is $2700. Most people who can buy cars will probably buy an old gas car.
The most common car I saw in Vietnam was some colossal Ford truck. Straight up American-sized and bigger than anything I’ve seen anywhere else in Asia.
Everything was either a tiny scooter, or a massive truck well oversized for the narrow and crowded roads.
In countries where wealth divides are big, people go all out on large and expensive items. I could see 60k electric cars taking off among the top 2%, which still amounts to millions of people.
Isn't that the point? That people in poor countries mostly buy old cars from other countries? Which currently of course means they are gas powered. But what about the day when old cars start to be mostly electric? Wouldn't electric cars become equally, if not more attractive to poor countries?
Electric cars don't age in same way as mechanic/based ones which we had 100 years to perfect. People buy those used cars from other countries because any skilled mechanic in dirt poor country can repair most of it, dismantle engine to last screw. And nobody is importing a Maserati for example.
I don't see this happening in EVs, at least not current generations. On super-proprietary cars like Tesla probably never.
Electric cars are made of the same metal and plastic that ICE cars are so we'll see. Wireless technology already allowed Africa to leapfrog over some of the mistakes of the west. EV vehicles backed by solar and stationary batteries may let them leapfrog again.
It absolutely happens with EVs as well.
I’m Ukrainian, here people have been importing totaled cars from US for years, including a lot of Nissan Leafs and Teslas. Some businesses restoring those totaled Teslas grew from a garage shop into large and successful enterprises.
I think this is a myth in several ways. First of all, modern ICE cars are anything but easily repairable with their complex exhaust treatment and turbo chargers. They are very delicate machinery and won't be on the roads for 40 years like cars from the 80ies might be.
And then, electric cars seem to be pretty easily repairable. Just look at all the home-built electric conversions. Or the guy who builds new Teslas out of totalled ones.
I think it is even the other way around. There was a startup in Germany which designed a small electric truck with Africa in mind. Basic, cheap, not only repairable but designed to be assembled by the customers. This is way cheaper to do with electric technology then with combustion engines.
Buses and taxis make the sense to switch to EV:s first, since they drive the most and the total lifetime cost is dominated by energy cost and maintenance, not the investment.
If you think about the limited battery supply chain, with the minerals, components, modules etc, it doesn't make so much sense to put them to huge battery SUV:s that mostly just sit on the driveway or office parking lot.
This too will eventually happen, but it's better for the economy and the climate to put them where they are actually displacing the most fossil fuels.
I think that's part of the problem I see with the discussion regarding EVs in that everything is framed with the concept of a car and that some how all cities across the world will have the same kind of infrastructure standards (aka US styled stroads, Euclidean zoning, and so forth). If anything, EVs like you stated are likely to be slimmer, slower, and more useful to get around on than just replacing the SUV's ICE components with batteries and electric motors.
Adding to that, vehicles with built in solar panels will also add some attractiveness to this for development countries. No need to pay for fuel/electricity.
Sure it might take up to a full day to get 50-100 miles in the battery, but with smaller vehicles (three wheelers, motor bikes etc) it will definitely work out. Certainly considering many development countries are mostly sunny places like south east Asia, Africa, and south America.
It doesn't cost 9 lakhs. It costs 19 lakhs (about 23,000 USD). Tata cars never had solid build quality nor blindly trusted by Indians. Please state facts with sources than making false claims
The source[1] I found immediately showed a range from 8.5 to 11.8 lakh. If you're going to criticize someone for not providing facts and sources, you should do the same yourself.
I drive a Tata Nexon EV 30kwh battery, 3.5 KW charger which I bought for Rs 1.6 million (16 lakh). The new ones with 40kwh battery, 7 KW charger costs Rs 1.9 million (19 lakh). On road is lesser due to subsidies (not sure if there are any active subsidies).
Tata Tiago is priced much lesser. I would be vary of range as advertised (unlike many other countries). My car gives me practical range of 220 kms and the advertised range is 312 kms. I drive at 115 to 125 WH per km, my wife drives at 135 to 150 WH per km.
Tata cars are heavily built man. They are rock solid, have great safety ratings and many prefer them for their build quality.
What I understand is that in India
- Buy Maruti for efficiency and low cost of spares and service
- Buy Tata or Mahindra for build quality and sturdiness
- Buy Honda / Hyundai for good engines but high cost of spares and service.
I was originally going to bring up previous experiences (years ago) watching crash tests with Indian-market Tata cars being pretty much nightmares in crash tests, but looking at their recent stuff it doesn't look half bad. Good on all those engineers working hard to deliver a good product and save lives. If these EVs being talked about are on similar design platforms, they're probably pretty decent safety-wise.
You realize Tata's latest cars have the highest safety rating in India, right ?
All the Korean-Japanese makers otoh are selling sub-standard "tin-cans". Anyone who knows Hindi can check out what Indians broadly think of Tata (as opposed to say, Suzuki) on Youtube.
Yeah, I don't know if I would associate Tata cars with "solid build quality, and blindly trsuted".. Cheap, less safe, but made for Indian roads - sure..
India's car industry is a bit of a sad story. The market is flooded with cheaper cars that would never think of showing up to any safety tests. The Volkswagens, Toyotas, and Fords that do come to the market are "made for India" models which means they are severely handicapped in the safety department in order to cut the costs to compete. VW at least a few years ago when I knew would sell you the same car platform, but good luck trying to get service for it anywhere in India without paying near German costs.
I have been living outside India for a long time, so my impressions may be outdated.
I mean, something has got to give. Of course we can also shift the goalpost by adding safety to any degree (and then we could do the same with the average gas driven cars used in the region you are looking at).
However, the claim merely stated: "EVs are definitely going to remain a first-world item for my lifetime at least". It's pretty safe to say, looking at what we already have and how quickly it scaled in the last years, that this is complete nonsense and will be increasingly so.
I don't excuse less safety-minded construction, but a lot of what makes modern cars in the West safer is equipment like side airbags, traction control, cameras and sensors, which in turn costs money. Construction standards haven't changed much since the invention of monocoque chasses.
Also, most traffic in India and other 3rd-world countries drives at much lower speeds than in the US etc.
EVs have already hit it big in China now for more than a decade in the form of electric bicycles (the cheap kind, not the fancy > $1k ones we want in the west).
> EVs are definitely going to remain a first-world item for my lifetime at least.
In India there are some relatively cheap EVs on sale, and they're all picking up stream.
By cheap, this is what I mean: the price of Tata Nexon EV is slightly over the price of Hyundai Accent (called "Verna" over here) and maybe equivalent to the price of a Kia Seltos. The Nexon EV is now a fairly common sight in Indian cities.
Then there's the slightly more expensive MG ZS EV, which at this point I'm seeing on the roads fairly frequently.
Haven't seen too many Hyundai Kona on the road. Tesla is unfortunately not in India yet. There are some super-expensive EV models from Mercedes and the likes, but those are very expensive.
(Disclaimer: I'm NOT affiliated in any way with any of the brands I mentioned).
While they are starting to sell more EVs in India, as soon as you travel even half an hour outside of a major city the infrastructure gets... rather average. While people who live in New Delhi will be able to charge their car, that's not the case in the majority of the country.
It's way easier to charge your EV in rural areas using local small scale wind/solar/hydro than it is to lug around immense amounts of liquid fuel to said remote areas.
You don't need hectares of panels to charge an electric rickshaw or a scooter.
You have to keep in mind that India’s best selling cars are usually under the 8 lakh price barrier. EVs are not there yet, but its only a matter of time before they go under that mark.
Tesla will have cars capable of driving across the country 100% autonomously by 2018.
Maybe The Tiago EV will ship for 8.5 lakhs, but I'll believe it once I actually see meaningful shipments at that price. Cool if they do though, don't get me wrong. But plenty of promises in the car industry get left at just promises.
Tata has awesome reputation. Also, they have a 23000 USD Car, 17000 USD car and now they are taking bookings for this.
Also, the said car already has a gas version. This EV version is modified version of that, the exact thing they did with the other 2 EV cars (Both have gas versions)
Check out their website. Its not a concept car. It has actual production facilities and will be modified for EV versions.
I don't doubt the car will exist. I just wonder what the price will be when it ships in volume. Prices seem extremely variable these days.
I guess it would have been better to show the Model 3's $35k price point as example. Or the massive hikes the Mach E has had. Keeping car prices low has been challenging, especially EVs.
Good on them if they can keep those prices low for a while though!
Different countries entirely. Tata's vehicles may undergo some price inflation, but they're not suddenly going to become $50k vehicles intended for the US market. As for Tesla, why on Earth would they bother selling a $35k car when they're having trouble keeping the $45k one in stock? Same with the Mach-E and the F150 lightning.
> Tata's vehicles may undergo some price inflation, but they're not suddenly going to become $50k vehicles intended for the US market.
I get that, and I get the car mentioned will probably never even get close to $30k+USD equivalent.
> As for Tesla, why on Earth would they bother selling a $35k car when they're having trouble keeping the $45k one in stock?
As for Tata, what if they similarly can't keep the 8.5 lakhs version in stock? Why would you bother selling it for 8.5 if your entire output of those cars could sell for 9.5 or 12 lakhs? What's the secret sauce that means Tata can manufacture infinite cars while everyone else is seemingly so supply limited? How are you so sure Tata won't experience the same kinds of pressures Ford and Tesla and everyone else seems to be experiencing IRT making EVs?
The no clutch and better performance is a huge plus, and I don’t think Indians truly realize it because most haven’t driven decent automatic cars.
There are absolutely NO good cars with CVT or DCT transmission under 10 lakh. There used to be one model, Maruti Baleno, but that’s now switched to AMT instead.
If I can get CVT-like performance (or really, much better) for under 10L, I’ll take it. The EV is just the cherry on top.
It will be all electric because electric cars will be the most affordable. You can buy decent $3000 electric cars from alibaba.com today. [1] Check out this article about it. [2]
They're great assuming you'll never be on the road with any other 1 ton vehicle that might impact you at 30mph+. Then they're fiery death traps that you'd hope to never experience again, if you survive.
EDIT:
100Ah 12V battery? So an electric golf cart, supposedly rated to go up to 50mph, with a "bed" and four seats and a lot of extra weight and drag. You're barely going to go 10 miles at 30mph in this even without four people and cargo in the bed of this "truck".
Most of the world only needs a car that will do 45mph with a range of about 50 miles. Both the model T and model A would have struggled to do 50mph. Those cars effectively built the suburbs. About 50% of them are still on the road today, even though the last Model A rolled off the assembly line in the early 1930s, and the model T before that. LiFePO4 batteries are rapidly dropping in price, 100 miles of range is plenty for most families. Especially globally.
Streetcars built the suburbs, then cars of the 40s and 50s expanded that. Model T and A proved the performance of cars, but they were still largely toys for the wealthy or workhorses. Not necessarily white collar workers commuting to the office.
Plus, suburbs didn't come into full force until after WWII in the US. Show me the massive amount of suburbs which were founded in the 1920s or earlier which were only accessible by car.
Most of the world only needs a car that will do 45mph with a range of about 50 miles.
What people need most of the time is basically irrelevent though. If you need a car to drive 20 miles a day for 364 days of the year, and 300 miles 1 day a year, then you need a range of 300 miles. It's the outliers that determine the requirements, not the typical use cases.
Nope, no they don't. You can rent a vehicle or use public transport for the 1 day special trip.
I did this calculation when I switched from ICE to a cheap EV. With just the money I save a gas+maintenance yearly our family can _fly_ to our yearly vacation spot (~1200km away) and rent the biggest fanciest Mercedes for the week. And we'll still have money left over.
Or we could load our EV on a night train, wake up at the destination and drive around all week.
Or we could rent an ICE car for the week.
There was zero point in spending ~20k€ more for the car just to match that once a year event.
With just the money I save a gas+maintenance yearly our family can _fly_ to our yearly vacation spot (~1200km away) and rent the biggest fanciest Mercedes for the week. And we'll still have money left over.
And if you need to do a second trip that year? Or a third? Or 10 extra trips? The marginal utility of a cheaper EV starts looking really expensive. This is how people think. Owning a car that can cope with the outliers is a hedge against a period where you have to make lots of unexpected long trips.
People enjoy the freedom of ICE cars and their ability to go on essentially unplanned long journeys. Giving that up to use a cheaper EV will be a very hard sell.
I'm in the UK. 28 days of paid vacation time is the legal minimum (22 vacation days, plus 6 bank holidays). I get quite a lot more. Some places around the world have higher legal minimums. People in Brazil all get at least 30 days.
And people's plans are already made for whatever days they get, so unless there's a sudden influx of vacations, more trips just won't happen. That is of course expecting people can also afford extra trips, the locations themselves often being quite expensive.
And people's plans are already made for whatever days they get...
Maybe I'm unusual but I rarely have any plans further than a couple of months ahead. Whether I'll be going on any long trips in the next 12 months isn't something I have any idea about yet. It depends on loads of factors (money, weather, work, whether I can pick up a bargain, etc.)
Going anywhere where EV couldn't reach would most often require some sort of reservations; hotels, skiing resorts, museums, sight seeing etc all require some sort of planning if you don't want to absolutely burn money buying things ad-hoc, which would go counter the point of saving money with an ICE anyway.
A month or two in advance is just fine, most people can do as much. They do know how many days of vacation they get though, and it's unlikely to change, so any plan you have you keep.
I think you're vastly overestimating the resources the average person (read: income under 40k) has to do things like drive 300 miles in one direction, multiple times a year
The VW ID.Buzz is the only vehicle at the moment that could handle all the outliers of my life. (And maybe a Model X Tesla, but I'm not made of money).
I could go camping with it, I could use it to haul stuff. It can fit seven adults and two dogs at the same time.
But for daily driving it'd be a huge pain. I don't need a car that big 90% of the time, a smaller, nimbler car is much more practical.
Only if you assume that there are no alternatives to your personal car that can take care of that usecase. For example, I don't own a car despite needing to move heavy objects once or twice a year. I simply rent something, or ask a friend. That's much cheaper than owning something that I only need rarely.
Is it? My car doesn't go fly or go 600 mph, so it's basically useless to me on that yearly outlier trip that takes me cross-country to visit relatives. Somehow I manage though.
That's assuming you have the money to overfit to your 1% use case. Otherwise you're paying $xx,000 to drag around batteries that you don't need most of the time.
Entirely depends on your point of view of a "perfect world" and the realism of that. I'd love to just have transporters entirely powered by 100% renewable energy capable to send me anywhere at light speed, but that's not the world we live in.
Does a "perfect world" imply me missing birthdays? Does it imply me missing lunch with close friends? Does it imply me not taking a job outside the local bus line? Does it imply me not visiting a dying relative? If I'm limited to either entirely public transit or a vehicle which can barely do 10 miles at 30mph then yes, I'll miss many of these things.
Covering only 95% cases means you save a lot of money, part of which can be used for those rare events. Does taking a taxi to see a dying relative a couple hundred miles away cost a lot? Sure, but owning a ton of unused capacity for years costs a lot more.
> EVs are definitely going to remain a first-world item for my lifetime at least
I disagree. iPhone remained a first world item. Smartphones are being adopted even in the poorest countries.
I'd argue that it's in the third world where the advantages of the EV are particularly important. Lower operating costs, simpler maintenance, local power sources.
Most of the developing world is where there is a lot of solar radiation. Solar PV has already the lowest generation costs. It's already the power source that requires the least capital investments, and works the best in the regions with underdeveloped infrastructure (see stories about Afghan farmers).
Yes, 50K vehicles are too expensive for countries with a GDP of < 10K per capita. They are even too expensive for most of the EU. But eventually the cost parity will be reached, and at some point it will be more economical to produce budget and low margin EVs than to support a legacy supply chain of ICE vehicles.
Even the bleakest estimates predict EV cost parity in 10 years. 20 years for nearly complete fleet replacement. So in 30 years or so an ICE vehicle will be like a steam engine. TCO parity will happen sooner, and most vehicles are replaced after 10 years, so the majority of the cars will be EVs in 15 years or so (in high GDP countries). And if the majority of the cars produced are EVs, and they are less expensive, the developing world will switch too.
This is a very narrow view that probably stems from the fact that people in the US tend to think only of Teslas and other luxury cars when they think of EVs. Low end EVs, of kinds that either wouldn't obtain road safety approval in the US or appeal to consumers who are looking for large comfort cars, are rapidly emerging and are poised to dominate China, India and other non-Western countries in coming years
In many ways cars are basically a first world item, even today. Go to various urban centres worldwide and you’ll find a majority of other vehicle types.
That's roughly my thinking on Toyota's strategy if we give them the benefit of the doubt. They want to own a larger piece of the ICE pie as it shrinks. This is a great strategy. What they might not appreciate is that the oil pie will also shrink and that both of these industries will have increasing costs across their entire supply chains as volumes diminish. Their vehicles will suffer for both ICE tech and gasoline propulsion and be completely outcompeted on cost and convenience. This will happen over a much shorter time frame than they expect.
Green solutions are part of the continuing decentralization through technology and will be just as popular in developing countries as in first world countries. One practical example of this is that green tech can be financed in bite-sized chunks, compared to the large commitments needed for power plants.
I think you're greatly underestimating momentum for the change. China and India are first hand feeling the effects of climate change, global warming, cyclical warming or what ever we want to call it. They may not be able to switch off of fossil fuels immediately, but their politicians and bureaucrats aren't walking around blindfolded either. Meanwhile russias barbaric war in Ukraine and energy (and food) blackmail has put Europe (and really rest of the world) on notice about relying on fossil fuels. Europe will never go back to fossil fuels at least in pre Feb 20200 capacity, and is on overdrive to move to non-fossil fuels. Fossils are out, electricity is in. And so will be EVs.
> EVs are definitely going to remain a first-world item for my lifetime at least.
How much longer are you planning to live?
EVs WILL be the VAST majority of autos sold globally in 30 years.
Depending on the curve, ICE vehicles could still make up the majority of vehicles on the road - but the writing for them will have been on the wall for a long time - probably within 10 years.
We already have a lot of excess capacity at night. Slowly charging EVs could even be a net-boon for required peaker plants if people could cover their own needs for the 15% of the day
That was my first thought. Once the world's richest economies hit the EV tipping point where automotive gasoline becomes a shrinking market, gas costs are going to go crazy, especially since things like refining capacity will go down as costs are cut and new investment goes to zero.
The market for cheap electric cars and scooters/bikes will explode as consumers worldwide see the price of gas get higher and higher. Many of these cheap EVs won't be sold (or even legal to sell) in North America, but someone somewhere will meet that demand.
The telling fact is that oil companies refuse to start new oil fields even when they have the permissions.
Opening up a new field costs mucho $$ and it takes a while to pay it back before it'll start making a profit. And it seems that their analysis shows that 25+ years in the future they're not making as much as they are today so there's no point in spending money up front.
It's easier just to sell their existing inventory at insane prices.
I can totally imagine underdeveloped countries where you’ll find a lot of:
- Used Chinese EVs which costed around 10-15k USD new.
- Used and older upmarket EVs.
- Low speed and low range EVs that cost around 1-2k USD new.
This is ignorant of the facts. China has many very cheap EVs for from scooters to bikes to trikes to small carts to small cars all the way to buses, and they are used across the entire economic spectrum.
Getting gas is not easy. But have a solar or wind slowly charging an easier to maintain vechicle … why 1st world. In fact due to apartment living some cannot go there.
> Apartment living + EV is not a technical problem, it's 100% a political/social one.
It is not 100% political. In a single family home you can (usually) put enough solar panels on the roof to charge an EV. An apartment has only one roof for dozens (or even hundreds) of apartments, so that's not going to work.
Depends on your aparment blocks of course. Over here we have parking spaces for residdents living in apartments, which have electrical outlets. The space is already there, just needs an electrical upgrade
Considering we've switched from overhanging wires to putting our electric infrastructure underground (very, very expensive), I think we can pull off upgrades in parking lots too.
You need to run a fancy extension cord and use a professional to do it. That's pretty much it. You can spend a little extra to get load balancing if needed, the tech is multiple decades old.
The only issue is people being against it politically/socially.
Load management is 50+ year old technology, you don't need a javascript-powered IoT device with NFTs and Blockchain to do it.
The chargers can either do it by themselves (adjust load to match hookup to grid) or the power company can manage it. Usually it's a lot easier just to manage it locally.
Ah yes. That's probably the reason that you "just" need to install a separate substation next to charging stations. Because it's "just" easy with a 50+ year technology.
Ah, we seem to have differing views of what is a "charging station".
You're thinking of the fridge-sized units with the wrist thick black CCS cable. Yes, those need very specific grid hookups.
I'm thinking of, you know, a household plug. The kind an American would plug in their dryer to. You don't need a separate substation to run a dryer, right? Even if an apartment building has 20 of them.
One of those can charge 100-150km of range to a car overnight easily, which is more than the average person drives every day. YMMV.
In truly underdeveloped countries, the gas infrastructure is worse than the electric grid. EVs give the country an excuse to focus on one infrastructure instead of two. Underdeveloped countries are in a decent place to leapfrog the developed world on EV adoption because there's less reliance/inertia in existing gas infrastructure and vehicles.
(Just as some underdeveloped countries have been able to jump over transitionary steps in internet infrastructure and where they are seeing investments in internet infrastructure it is often faster on average than developed world averages because they jump straight to fiber everywhere skipping over many copper wire intermediaries.)
>If you’ve stepped outside a devolved country for even a few days…
I've noticed, especially recently, that a lot of tech people are hilariously out of touch with anything outside of first-world metropolitian environments.
Americans are famous for not realizing that there's an entire world outside their borders. They think everyone needs to go 80 mph on the highway, sorry _freeway_ for 1-2 hours to get to their job.
For example, anytime I see someone espousing the virtues of EVs and lambasting pickup trucks and SUVs, or how <popular> infrastructure should be just erected, nearly every time they are only concerned/knowledgable with city life and don't have a single clue what life in rural/undeveloped regions are like. Sometimes I wonder if they even understand how the world functions in general.
Incidentally, yes, some people do need to drive an hour or two down the freeway to commute. Not everyone has the luxury of, nor necessarily likes, city life with decent public transport and tight population density.
Most of the world's population lives in cities, and the trend shows no sign of abating, even with the pandemic. It is completely fair to prioritize energy and land usage there.
A rural/suburban lifestyle where you commute hours a day is inherently energy-intensive, and the rising price of oil is going to put a serious cramp in the lifestyles of wannabe ranchers. Not to mention that roads and oil is pretty seriously subsidized by governments as they are essential for commerce. What happens when oil gets too expensive even after subsidies? Let's see. So far the SPR of the US has had the biggest drawdown in its history just in 2022 in an attempt to rein in the price of oil. I daresay that ends with the Midterms.
You can have decent public transport with low population density, it just costs more (but probably less, or at least not more by a lot, than alternatives, if all externalities are included). Switzerland has villages of hundreds of people served by regular frequent rail (and it's pretty much the norm). Bulgaria, the poorest country in the EU, has that too (in very specific cases, not as a general rule, but still).
> Toyota is going to be the monopoly automaker in every underdeveloped country and will be laughing all the way to the bank
You are probably aware that ICE vehicles can run on LPG or hydrogen and even diesel cars can run on synthetic dimethyl ether (DME). A PHEV with a 10 kWh battery or an EV with a small backup combustion generator make total sense as one can charge at home with a wall charger. Use the car regularily for urban trips of less than 50 km and run on some sort of fuel when one needs extended range for extraurban trips. Renault did exactly this with the new Captur PHEV. In markets where suffcient H2 infrastructure becomes available, automakers could sell a variant with a H2 tuned engine and fuel tank, in other markets they could continue to sell the gas version or gas/LPG. Of course, if one wants people to use LPG rather then gas, the gas tank can be made smaller as it's only required at power startup. Others automakers targeting first world countries with sufficient H2 infrastructure will use fuel cells combined with a smaller battery to accomplish the same thing and fully ditch the ICE.
I too think Toyoda-san has the right market approach. They also have a headstart in H2 tech.
Toyota has demonstrated this on the Corolla H2 Concept. Their CEO, Akio Toyoda also raced this car to emphasize safety. The engine is not fundamentally different from e regular ICE engine, probably other seals, fuel lines and injectors. A quote from the press release[1]:
The car utilizes the turbocharged inline-3-cylinder engine from the GR Yaris, but with a few alterations to accommodate the hydrogen fuel.
Because the hydrogen is delivered in pressurized gas form, the same kind used in its Mirai FCEVs, Toyota teamed with Denso to develop special fuel injectors that could safely and efficiently introduce the hydrogen—which has a higher ignition temperature than gasoline and eight times the combustion speed—into the combustion chambers.
“Controlling abnormal combustion is the key to hydrogen engines,” said Naoyuki Sakamoto, the Chief Engineer of the project. “The abnormal combustion has the potential to add stress to the engine hardware. Therefore, we developed high-heat parts as well as adjusted the ignition timing and fuel ratio for the Corolla Sport H2 Concept.”
There’s a reason why many countries are transitioning to EVs, and it’s not mainly for the environment. With the end of cheap oil and the rise of economical EVs from companies like Tara, I feel that you’re wrong on this one.
Toyota is living in the past, and resting on their laurels just like GM did decades past. I used to be a Toyota loyalist. Not anymore when it’s clear where the future lies
> EVs are definitely going to remain a first-world item for my lifetime
Lithium-ion cars, sure. The EV category, however, is far larger. Economies of scale go both ways. If "everyone other than Toyota goes completely electrics," maintaining consumer gasoline-distribution infrastructure becomes solely Toyota's problem.
You need to factor in that China is pushing heavily for EV and Chinese car manufacturers will handle part of the demand for cheaper EV in China and other countries.
Same for India, Tata will probably not stop making combustion engines for a while but they will have to produce cheap EV for their market and abroad.
Toyota may resist for a while but they will lose market share in luxury and middle-range cars as combustion engines get banned or at least restricted in wealthy countries and will remain too expensive for emerging markets.
So Toyota may end up producing the cheaper models of ICE cars only.
I think once they figure out self-driving, car ownership will plummet and most family cars will be replaced with self-driving taxis and shuttles, which will be electric.
Society subsidizes car ownership to an extreme degree, from the environmental impact, parking space to road infrastructure etc.
A lot of people live in cities, and in a lot of cities, there is just not enough space for cars.
Would love to know where all the $6k Leafs are hiding now. Your statement was true before the pandemic and the used car market becoming wild. Now cars that would sell for that price are being listed for $12-15k…
So 10k+ in for a 5+ year old car with a “reconditioned” battery that should last another year or two for 100 miles range on a good day? All the early Leafs suffer from short range along with terrible battery degradation. Where’s the value in that against my current paid for ICE car that will last me another 100k plus miles with no range degradation and that can charge to 400 miles in less than 5 minutes?
If you compare "your current paid for ICE" to any other vehicle ever made, it's always a bad proposition. No calculation in the world will make it worth it.
Sure, but they usually don’t cost so much to fix. Most engines don’t catastrophically fail and in the given scenario an ICE car would be a better choice than a used electric with a reconditioned batter.
Labor these days is super pricey. Like parent, they tacked on $6k to install a $4k battery. The same thing is happening in auto shops if you can’t DIY a cheap part repair.
What kind of similar problems are you referring to? A punctured gas tank? That seems fairly obvious to me.
What do you mean by break? Everything at some point breaks. If you do your research to buy a quality and cared for vehicle in the first place, keep it maintained, 300k miles is of minimal cost and effort.
That would get plenty of people to work and back in a lot of cities.
I suspect we'll see an overlap in wealthier households of a petrol or plug in hybrid for longer journeys, and a second hand EV for the daily commute, idling in traffic wastes significant petrol.
> EVs are definitely going to remain a first-world item
And that's fine. Remember, EV cars don't just compete with ICE vehicles. They compete with walkable cities, bicycles, scooters(ICE or EV), busses and other mass transit. They will face that competition even in the first-world.
Good points. Plus, there are many countries and districts where it is just not feasible. Wander into the deserts or jungles and tell me how to reliably operate and refuel EVs in those harsh environments. Toyota leads the way with offerings like the Land Cruiser, Prado, Hilux, etc.
How do you refuel ICEs in harsh environments? Someone has to drive the huge tanker full of fuel over there a bunch of times a week, right? What if there's a some kind of weather event and the roads are unavailable for two weeks, how does the Land Cruiser get refueled then?
With EVs people in remote locations can have local infrastructure to generate what they need locally.
You can carry gas tanks with you on long desert crossing trips, and refuel in minutes. How are you going to do that with an EV? Not to mention that the high heat (45+ C) might take a toll on the range of batteries.
People in hot countries still tend not to drive several hundred mile trips trough the desert, they work reasonably close to where they live. For whatever around-the-globe fun trip you can of course rent whatever you want
The mindset of the group of people that think $20,000 is economy (and that it "will" definitely get done) reflects everything that is wrong with a lot of recent ESG propaganda and policies. That is, ignorance of the state of most of the world outside of rich, first class bubbles.
The problem is that EV cars have a finite lifespan on the most expensive component of the car... the battery. It is not modular despite being composed of several individual cells, and often you are not allowed to work on it yourself. Once the battery is dead that's it. You either pay 3k or bust.
But the same is true of ICE cars. Transmission, engine, catalytic converter, fuel pump, alternators (not to mention routine maintenance like oil changes). EV's win on ongoing maintenance, and even if you have to replace a battery at an authorized dealership, you will still come out ahead versus the maintenance cost you would have otherwise paid.
In terms of 'catastrophic battery failure' compared to 'catastrophic engine failure' - not sure the EV would lose that battle either.
In short, yes, EV's have a finite lifespan, but so do ICE cars, and ICE cars are much more complicated, with many more expensive components that can fail, and are extremely expensive to replace.
Engines and transmissions last 15+ years, easily 20+ with regular maintenance. Everything else you mentioned is cheap and easy to replace.
Yes, other than the battery, EVs are very low maintenance. But that doesn't matter at all to low income people who usually buy 10 year old cars. They are guaranteed to owe a large repair bill on any car that is available to them.
Batteries last a long time too. The Leaf is a bad example because they messed up the battery management somehow, but there are Teslas on the road with lots of miles and very little battery degradation.
There's an interesting statistical bias in the Used EV Market that first owner life statistics are way up on average versus comparable ICE models. We're edging past the point where that's likely "just" a symptom of early adopters and it may indicate easier maintenance curves on EVs and longer useful lifetimes for EVs and that the used EV market may look very different than the used ICE market. Though as stated, it will likely be another decade or two before we have a stable market to figure that out.
What you're saying doesn't make any sense. Catalytic converters, fuel pumps, and alternators are easy to replace. This doesn't mean that ICE cars just disappear from the road when those components fail.
Anyone with mechanical knowledge, tools, and patience can rebuild an engine or a transmission. It really is not that difficult.
When you have a vehicle with a monolithic conformal battery pack, once you can't buy a new one the car is junk. Unless you just so happen to own a factory you can afford to retool.
There will be a huge 3rd party industry replacing and upgrading batteries for EVs.
It doesn't exist yet beyond some small enterprises because there isn't enough volume: even 10+ year old EVs are still going strong with very few battery issues. We need to wait longer to get any business going.
There was a dude in Finland who replaced and upgraded Nissan Leaf batteries, he had to stop because it was a) impossible to get new batteries due to huge demand b) ran out of customers.
I've thought about doing this, but I envision the legal headaches and DRM that will inevitably creep into the batteries being not worth the effort. It's even possible to DRM at the cell level, and I fully expect OEMs to do that.
You can't get DRM "at the cell level". The batteries are just simple Panasonic 18650s, adding some DRM component to each and every one of them would be cost-inefficient and would also cause a huge problem if the chip fails during warranty.
The controllers are black boxes though, but you can get 3rd party units for Tesla batteries _today_. JerryRigEverything on Youtube built his own EV Hummvee on the military chassis using some Model X batteries and all 3rd party electronics.
It wasn't plug and play, but perfectly doable in a semi-well stocked home garage.
The bigger problem is batteries have moved into "structural elements" in the current "skateboard" designs. Removing the batteries potentially damages the foundational structure of the car and may need expensive mitigations.
Not following you here: Your suggestion for evidence that 3rd party batteries will be available is that some guy in Finland couldn't get enough supply?
A single hobbyist in Finland could run a profitable business replacing Nissan Leaf batteries unofficially. The dude managed to install a 25% larger battery in the car and fool the on board computer to accept it.
Just imagine what can be done with actual resources and R&D.
The current limiting issue isn't skill or technology, but available new batteries. They can't make them fast enough even for new cars, never mind for spare parts.
But when battery production ramps high enough, there's absolutely nothing preventing people from upgrading existing batteries with more modern tech - bigger battery capacity in the same space.
There will also be a huge industry converting "dead" EV batteries to in-house battery backups. A car with 50% battery degradation is a bit iffy, but the battery will still have tens of kWh of usable capacity. Enough to run a house for a day or two in a pinch - or just store cheap energy and sell it back to the grid when the price goes up.
>Anyone with mechanical knowledge, tools, and patience can
Just like everyone with a PC and an internet connection can become a software developer; there are a few steps in between why it doesen't "just" happen
I don't think he is making the argument that anyone can/will do it, but that there is and will be plenty of mechanics willing and able to do the work and able to procure the parts, which he saying will not be the case with replacement battery packs on old cars.
There is some reason to believe this; stories like this [1] are going around, where EV owners have been told they need to replace the battery pack but, by the way, the part cannot be procured.
I have driven approximately 700k miles across five vehicles and never touched any of these, nor have I ever been concerned about them, except with the vague idea such things can become a problem around ~250-300k miles.
What I have had enormous trouble with in all ICE cars is the electronics, which if anything are more populous in EVs.
The idea that "EV maintenance is clearly superior to ICE maintenance" seems like a baffling canard to me, aside from relieving me of the very minor burden of changing my oil twice a year or so, and some even more infrequent $20 filter replacements or simple spark plug replacements I've had to do exactly once which required only a deep socket. I've done more maintenance on my desktop computer.
I’ve had a few electronics failures happen within two years of owning a car. Let’s give your EV a lot longer than two years before we pass judgement on it, though. I’ve had displays fail at 30k, that’s obviously not an ICE problem. (It was bad solder.)
None of my cars stayed with me longer than 220k, but I have never heard of anyone that wasn’t driving cars from the 70s and 80s having to do those things, or with very high mileage.
The drivetrain in an EV is WAY simpler than any ICE. That alone will provide a ton of reliability. There's pretty much just one moving part in the engine and it's pretty binary. It's either working or it's completely broken.
No more weird running issues where it works just fine to 2000rpm, but at 4000rpm makes that weird noise. Or the transmission rattles a bit at exactly 3700rpm, but is fine on other rpms.
Yes, an electric motor is conceptually simpler. Yes, there’s less moving parts. But the powertrain in modern cars is engineered to a point where it is incredibly reliable and can be expected to last to the point where the rest of the car is falling apart too.
There will be plenty of “weird running issues” from software bugs and electronics failures, which are the worst and least reliable parts in ICE cars as well. An EV is not just a simple electric motor packed into a case.
Finally, as I noted elsewhere in the thread, Tesla is offering the same powertrain warranty on Model 3s that Kia is offering on their ICE cars. Clearly Tesla doesn’t have any more faith in electric powertrains than Kia has in ICE powertrains. If the EV powertrain was really so much more reliable than ICE, Tesla would be offering a standard 250k mile warranty on the powertrain instead of the same 100k warranty offered by some ICE manufacturers.
Engine work, transmission maintenance or rebuild, replacing fuel pump, belts, alternator, etc. these are all totally standard and very common repairs for ICE vehicles no matter how many miles you say you’ve driven without having to touch them…
EV maintenance costs have been well studied at this point and are lower than ICE, and for very sensible reasons, it’s not a mystery or a canard.
There have been many many studies. Here’s a random one;
Very common? You have anything to back that up? I don’t even know anyone whose had to do any of that. I know that people do, but certainly not “commonly” unless they’re driving a very old, high mileage car they don’t want to part with.
I’ve seen lots of electronics failures. This will only be worse in EVs, or at least EVs like Teslas, where things like door handles have been motorized.
The average age of a car is ~12[0] years in Finland. Out of the 7 people I often interact with that have cars, 7 have had those, and a lot of other parts fail
Either there is something especially harsh about Finland's environment, or whatever cars they're making there are uniquely bad. That's absolutely unheard of where I live. 12 years is definitely not what I meant by "old".
Of course a sufficiently old car will be falling apart, whether it's part of the "ICE" or not - the suspension and shocks will be need to be replaced, door seals degraded or positively worthless, interior will be faded and cracking, wheel bearings fail, AC compressor goes out, various sensors fail (my favorite so far was the antitheft sensor)...when everything starts going bad, that's when I would expect the engine to be just be worn; basically, I would expect the ICE to last as long, or outlast, the rest of the car, save any issues on the left hand of the bathtub curve from manufacturing defects that should be covered under warranty. What you're saying is totally wild and alien to me. Mechanics must get a lot of business there.
If EVs are so reliable and maintenance free, why is the Tesla drivetrain warranty only 100k miles on the Model 3? That's no different than many ICE cars (eg I know Kia has the same warranty on ICE cars), and also well within the middle of the bathtub curve for an ICE car.
A thing to consider is the average means there are tons of older cars in the mix, but some new ones slowly creeping in. There are lots of cars from the 90s or even 80s driving around where I'm from. Weather can be quite unforgiving for cars here, temperature ranging from -25C(-13F) to +30C(86F) year round. Lots of salt and some types of pavement seem to be exceptionally bad for timing gears[0]. Owning a car is likely the most expensive thing a normal person can do in Finland.
I think it's fair to say, based on your own link which is about research into why timing belts are not lasting as long as everywhere else (a third to half the time!), some of this is outlier. And they note that this dust would also abnormally wear brakes, anything rotating, and the car's painted surfaces, which EVs also have.
But for the rest of it, like temperature differences...this is still going to be a major impact on EVs, and like ICE cars, it won't be just the engine you have to worry about.
As I noted upthread, Tesla has the same powertrain warranty that, say, Kia has. It isn't much of a testament to the vaunted EV reliability that the most famous EV manufacturer doesn't have more faith in their electric powertrains than Kia does in their ICE powertrains.
Each of those components can be replaces for much less. I recently spent 700 on replacing the alternator, 12v battery, engine pulley, and spark plugs. That's significantly less than replacing an EV battery.
EV batteries generally don't die outright. They just lose capacity. So instead of a 300 mile range you have a 250 or 200 mile range. It's still a useful vehicle, just not as valuable.
True. But since every point has at least three counterpoints (true, false and anywhere in between), I will provide a counterpoint.
> They just lose capacity. So instead of a 300 mile range you have a 250 or 200 mile range. It's still a useful vehicle, just not as valuable.
This is true for urban environments where infrastructure is plentiful, and making it to the next recharging station is not a problem.
There are, however, many places on this planet that have resisted urbanisation (for one reason or another). On the A87 highway from Adelaide to Alice Springs in Australia, service stations can be up to 300 kms apart in some places. Losing 150 km of the driving range out of 450-500 kms on a brand new battery means that the vehicle will not be able to make it to the next service / recharging station.
People going across South Australia into Western Australia on the federal highway bring extra fuel along because there are no service stations in between. Yes, people still travel by cars and, no, they can't bring a spare battery with them but they bring extra canisters filled up with petrol/diesel. Also, going up the coast in Western Australia can be a pretty harrowing or even lethal experience if the vehicle runs out of power especially at the turn of dry and wet seasons when weather turns a holiday road trip into a gamble with life.
Cape York in Far North Queensland is not electrifed at all, and is powered locally by diesel generators. Electric vehicles are of no use in Cape York.
I imagine there are multiple similar fringe areas in countries such as Canada, the US (Alaska certainly comes to mind), Argentina, Brazil, Russia, west and nort-west of China and probably many others that require the infratructure to be built first and, until that happens, the liquified hydrocarbons are still the only viable option.
Service stations can be 300 km apart because this seems to be an acceptable distance with gas powered cars. If there is a demand for service stations every 150km, wouldn't you think they would be built?
The remote regions you describe, currently powered by diesel generators (where does that fuel come from?), isn't there an incentive to power them by solar and also charge electric cars that way?
And even if there are some remote spots on earth where electric cars are not useful, how large is the market share for cars for these regions? If Toyota continues to make land cruisers for those regions, what does it matter for eletrifying 99% of all other cars?
Generally with far apart service stations they can't be closer because everything between is desolate. These stations are already on the outskirts of civilization, there isn't support to have people drive an extra 150km to man a service station.
Depending on geography diesel comes from boats, tanker trucks or planes. Solar might start getting some niche use, but it's not reliable even with batteries at a reasonable scale. The main benefit to diesel generators is it's pretty easy to fix and maintain them with minimal equipment. The amount of diesel per person for a generator isn't that much, even smallish planes can carry about a week of diesel for about 10-20 people.
Service station distance is also a factor of gas supply chains. You need gas trucks to stop at stations every so often. They could be closer together, but that means more truck stops and that means more labor costs, etc.
EV charging stations just need an electric grid connection. Some maintenance/labor is still a good idea, but it isn't necessarily the same regularity and overhead costs of a trucking-based supply chain.
Being able to point out niche situations where stock EVs with degraded range would, right now, be a problem is not an argument against shifting to a mostly- or completely-EV world over the course of several decades. It's an argument in favor of making the kinds of changes to our infrastructure that such a transition will require and support.
Maybe these situations will require more service stations be built. Maybe they'll require the development of better towable battery packs. Maybe they'll require the development of specialized vehicles for the, relatively speaking, very small number of people who need to make these trips on a regular basis.
What they don't require is maintaining our horribly-wasteful fossil fuel based transport system indefinitely.
This is true, but an EV that needs a battery swap is still carrying along a ton of mechanics that, compared to an ICE vehicle, are likely to be in generally better condition.
People used to do powertrain replacements on used cars, after all. (Maybe still do? The used cars I see are generally in better mechanical shape these days.)
This is one of those statements which are true only if you live in California.
A 5-6 year old EV battery is unusable in winter at low-ish temperatures. Not only do you lose range when parked, you can be in real trouble if you’re stranded in a snowstorm.
These issues are manageable with a new car of course!
> This is one of those statements which are true only if you live in California.
I definitely don't live in California.
> A 5-6 year old EV battery is unusable in winter at low-ish temperatures.
A brand new EV gets less range in winter. A used EV gets less range in winter. A used EV in winter gets less range still.
But that doesn't make it unusable, it just changes the use case. A 300km range (when new) EV might reliably get 50% range in winter, and 70% range when 6 years old, combining for 35% of new range when used and in winter - plenty of buffer for an average driver's commute, but wouldn't want to use it for a winter road trip.
> you lose range when parked
Same applies whether it's a new EV or a used. If I were driving an EV in the winter (gets to -20C here regularly), I'd definitely be looking to park somewhere I could plug in - which are pretty common. As is, I drive an ICE, and I have to turn my car on for a few minutes to warm the engine before I start driving (or else the windshield becomes an unusable fogged-up mess before the end of the block)
> you can be in real trouble if you’re stranded in a snowstorm.
Yes, monitoring weather is important regardless of your vehicle choice. The only time I've been stuck in a snowstorm was when knowingly going for a weekend camping trip when a blizzard was forecast. (the solution was bring extra food in case we got stuck)
> These issues are manageable with a new car of course!
> It is not modular despite being composed of several individual cells, and often you are not allowed to work on it yourself.
At least with current tech, battery chemistry makes such replacement extremely tricky without a full replacement. You can technically swap individual packs in a Model S/X battery[0], but it'll inevitably die[1][2] because of how voltage balancing works.
Packs each with their own BMS would be interesting but I'm sure the automakers have already considered the tradeoffs for a lot of ideas like this.
This is quite amusing. Unless the battery has some cliff where it stops working (very unlikely) my anecdotal experience is that the battery has a very slow degradation rate (2-3% over 5 years - great considering I have a 75mi roundtrip commute).
On the other hand, I don't pay for: oil/fluid changes, filter replacements, transmission/engine rebuilds or smog checks. Probably forgetting a half dozen other things too.
Add all that up and it's a free battery replacement in 10 years which I don't even think I'll need.
What does fundamentally prevent a battery from being worked on? Finite lifespan applies to anything. Not being modular seems like an odd criteria to impose. Surely you can open a battery and work on its sub-parts. Not allowed to work on it? I don't know if you're being sarcastic or not, but vast majority of the world does not have the same set of laws and regulations.
It's a pipe dream that we could have regulatory sense, but if they were standardised this would not be a problem, you'd just pay $200/kWh or whatever the going rate is at the time.
I don’t want standard boring in my phones (I iPhone) and I don’t want standard boring cars in my car (I Tesla). In both cases I opt into vendor repair lock-in for a better product.
Proprietary monoliths where you have to take or leave the entire package based on what is most profitable is not how you get creativity and innovation.
If you had to rent your cell phone off of ma bell with no other equipment allowed on the network we wouldn't have iphones.
If roads had ford specific infrastructure like the future elon imagines we wouldn't have tesla.
A balance between interoperability, end user control, and freedom for manufacturers is how you get innovation. In the current auto market you have none of the above.
That's not too far off from the cost for a replacement for the Model S packs. It can be much less expensive than $200/kwh for third party shops, as the bad battery can be refurbished often offsetting much of the cost.
In both of those cases the cost is $x and a mostly functional battery. This is substantially higher than $x and will track with the cost of dealing with whatever anti repair countermeasures tesla puts in place, not the cost of storage..
For all the talk of "anti repair countermeasures", its not really something that we've seen in practice. Refurbishing batteries just isn't a cheap thing to do.
It sounds like there may even be a fully new battery option available for early Model S vehicles in the near future.
> Engine replacements are complicated. Many specific parts.
If you buy a full replacement engine (as opposed to parts to rebuild an engine), replacement is quick and easy in an ICE. In endurance racing an engine can often be replaced in less than 30 minutes. In non-racing conditions you'd do it a bit slower but it's not hard.
I would imagine that cars built for endurance racing, where this is known to be a common thing, would be designed to make it easy, while cars built for the general public will not have such a guarantee—some will be easy, some will be annoying, and some will be outright pains.
the "several individual cells" are welded together and also a structural component of the vehicle. You are not allowed to work on them yourself to not electrocute yourself to a crisp.
Chevy Spark supposedly starts at $13600, available inventory seems to start at $14595 + tax, title license and fees. I have never bought a new car so I don't know the + part, but that's got to be getting close to $20k.
Ya, the horrible thing is that I’ve never seen a Tesla used for under $20k. Until we can get some used Tesla vehicles at economical price points, EVs will just not be mainstream.
Ok, there is some sarcasm in that. You can get a Leaf for cheap.
Battery cost are still falling 10-15% a year. $100 kWh batteries are here already. ie Tesla battery costs per car ie 50kwh are $5500-6000 Musk is selling $35k+ not because he can't make cheaper cars but because he can make higher margins on expensive cars with battery production capacity he has. We will get high quality cheap electric cars once the battery production capacity is higher than the demand for expensive cars. Which will be here a lot faster than people are thinking.
You're talking about different things - $20,000 is pretty close to the bottom end of new car pricing in the USA. If you want more economy than that you have to buy used, which I'm sure will be an option a few years after those $20,000 EVs are sold new.
And of course people are talking about "economy" relative to the USA, it's where half the people on this site live. Nobody is saying car prices are the same everywhere in the world, and that's not going to be the same with widespread EVs either.
What? Of course those $20,000 economy EVs will be sold in places where $20,000 vehicles are considered "economy" vehicles. Does any car dealer in California consider the price of used cars in Havana before pricing theirs?
If anything, there's no reason why those rich, first class bubbles should be able to buy $40,000 luxury ICE vehicles when the world is slowly burning, but try telling them that, and now those people who just lectured you about "first class bubbles" will brand you a Marxist.
Some people just want the status quo, whatever the ultimate price is. They can't be reasoned with.
Are California car dealers allowed to sell to people in Havana? I thought the embargo was back in place, and America is back to trying to make life as unpleasant as possible in Cuba.
That includes ensuring that Cuba does not use electric cars
This is so patently false it's scary. There is an enormous demand for a cure for cancer, dementia, heart disease etc. Yet they haven't even close to materialized. There is an enormous demand for room environment super conductors yet it isn't fixed. It's all sunflowers and rainbows to think like you are thinking but it's just not reality.
To be fair, most of the problems are not technical but scale. We know how to build stronger grids, and how to produce more electricity, and how to refine lithium. We haven't got a clue what to do about dementia or room temp superconductors or cold fusion.
That said, I am also quite a bit more pessimist than OP that we will see a full conversion in the near future. It will be a long, and quite possibly painful, process.
It's really more about production than integration. We simply don't have the supply volume or production capacity on hand to rapidly replace existing ICE cars. Things are improving, but overall cost is going to stay high until lithium battery and other costs come down.
Then, you have the issue of rolling out updates to grids. There's a variety of options, all well technically understood, and little movement in many areas. California, for example, ought to have buried a lot of its electrical lines. Construction work during droughts seem like a good way to start a wildfire, as is installing new overhead lines.
Yes, exactly. Toyota is refusing to take the L on this because Toyota is the market leader in gas-electric hybrids and Toyota is not the market leader in EVs. This is business strategy 101.
>This type of thinking is what hurt Kodak ultimately I think. They invented the first digital camera, then scrapped it because they made money in film.
There is nowhere near as much money to be made in the digital camera market. They failed to adapt, but at the same time, there was no saving what was an immensely large company even if they did adapt.
Film revenue for Kodak was $16 billions in 1996, adjusted for inflation that would be $30 billions, that number will make anything digital look like nothing (15 billions is the current revenue for the entirety of the digital sensor market in current dollars and Sony has 43% of that pie, a share that has been dropping as more competitors have entered the market and as Samsung kept improving.). You see a Sony sensor in many phones, but Sony doesn't make anywhere near film-era Kodak revenue on that side of their business. The higher end camera business is more profitable, but it doesn't sell much in volume, and the low end of the camera business has almost disappeared because of smartphones. (Canon, the biggest producer of digital cameras, has all but ceased making compact cameras apart from their G7X model. You can still find other models on the market but they're older unsold stock and refurbs. They also announced they would stop producing new DSLRs and will solely focus on making a narrow range of mirrorless cameras. To put it bluntly, the digital camera market is in a very unhealthy state. Don't solely look at price tags either, Leica for example makes some of the most expensive cameras on the market but.. their revenue is $400 millions, not even $1B)
This is all correct, but kinda shifting timelines.
For example, if Kodak had been first to digital, that doesn't mean they'd have had to give up any film at all. And since they were first, they could have set margins where they liked. Whether it would have survived and thrived...who knows. As others have pointed out, computers weren't commonplace back then.
Digital cameras did get commoditized, nearly 30 years after Kodak had invented it. So obviously, by today they'd had to have move on. High end sensors, glass, heck even cloud computing, something akin to Google Photos... there's no telling where they could have been if they'd have leaned in early.
That said, you point out the sensor market is 15 billion today... and Sony has about half. This is way, way more money than Kodak makes anymore. Today Kodak is at about a billion revenue per year.
In this context, it's sort of interesting to compare Google's approach of trying a million ideas, then killing the ones that don't take off or don't make money. Maybe that's how you stay ahead of the game and don't become a Kodak, which failed to sustain an experimental new business for long enough. Google takes quite a lot of shit for this approach (understandably).
But are any of Google's side projects an existential threat to their main business of search / ads in the way that digital cameras were to film for Kodak?
Kodak and Sears are my favorite example of this sort of thing, Kodak not only invented the digital camera, they also had a robust business in the 90s of developing color film onto both prints and a CD. Instead of seeing the writing on the wall, they resisted digital because it cut into both film, and their existing way of getting those pictures onto computers.
Sears, after dominating mail-order for a century, marketed Prodigy, a successful early dial-up network. But they were by that point heavily invested in malls, and were beat out as the 21st century's Sear's, Roebuck and Co. by a bookseller.
I think the way to look at cases like these is to recognise organisations aren't monoliths, but a mass of individuals each tugging in their own direction. Clearly, there were inventors, progressives and visionaries within these companies that correctly predicted future trends and were trying to steer the ship to capitalise on them, but for some reason, other voices drowned them out.
And that right there is why a good CEO can make or break a company. They don't have to be experts in everything, but they need to be good enough to tell which of their experts working for them to believe, or to bring in outside expertise when needed.
Completely agree. I think the darker side though is that successful individuals must not only have good ideas, but advocate for their ideas effectively. I still haven't figured that one out, personally
Sears I think hurts the most. I used to love looking through the catelogs as a kid. It felt so futuristic.
All they had to do was have the foresight to move that model onto the internet. They had the supply chain, warehousing, etc. They may have even been able to have done their own logistics, since every city had a Sears. Kinda how Walmart does deliveries now.
And as you mentioned...they got crushed by a bookseller :(.
The problem for Sears was that mail-order was killed off by malls and big box before web-orders took off. Sears was losing 150M a year on catalog in the early 90s. If they didn't invest in malls and strip malls, they'd have been out of business before web shopping was significant.
Amazon was the right size to grow with the market. Amazon didn't even start selling clothing until 2002.
Which is why I always find Service Merchandise the more interesting case study than Sears. Service Merchandise was an "upstart" trying to hit Sears where it lived in the 90s and basically was the American vanguard of what today we tend to call the Ikea model (and which Amazon keeps hinting they might do at some point): (relatively) big just-in-time fulfillment warehouses with attached showrooms.
Service Merchandise hit some weird bad luck in early franchising (and franchising may have been the wrong choice/it's own bad luck) and accidentally got somewhat region-locked into the US South East, but the business model was from today's perspective ahead of its time, directly addressed that "mall shopping need" while still keeping what made catalogs and drop shipping useful (and relatively efficient just-in-time logistics).
It would be an interesting "game" to play 20/20 Hindsight with those companies -- knowing what we know now, how could they have successfully navigated into the new world.
Sears seems like it could have transitioned if it didn't have its head up its ass. The death of film means Kodak would have to constrict and double down on printing, and simultaneously expand their general chemistry efforts into new markets (which I believe they did but too little too late).
How a company that was focused on their legacy customer relationship system and logistics operations lost out to a company that was focused on building the future of customer relationships and logistics is a lot less difficult to understand.
I remember it differently. Also, actual history is different too.
> Bezos finally decided that his new business would sell books online, because of the large worldwide demand for literature, the low unit price for books, and the huge number of titles available in print.
Yeah, they sold books, I didn't say they didn't. The couple paragraphs above the one you link talk about Bezos wanting to participate in the internet business boom and then the ones you link talk about commerce.
Selling books was never the ambition, it was only the path.
Yes they only sold books at that point because it was the easiest thing for them to sell (thus the MVP). IIRC they did not hide their ambition to go beyond that.
Toyota is different. They’re also making EVs… they’re just not _only_ making EVs. If EVs really start to take off on their own, Toyota will already have multiple offerings to fill that gap
Companies can't change their DNA any more than an individual organism can. Kodak was right to avoid digital photography - and in fact they probably should have stuck with film a little while longer even if it is niche. The public perceives DNA switches all the time, but that's an illusion generated by a free market and it's ability to plug in new sources of value (and unplug old ones) relatively seamlessly.
Yes, a companies DNA can be quite an obstacle to survival in changing markets, but that sounds like a cheap excuse for bad management. The reality is rather: nothing stays forever. All technology markets are in a consistant change and you always have to adapt your company constantly, if you want to survive or even prosper.
One good exampel is Apple. They were a computer company which was doing well again after the return of Jobs. Then came the iPod. And revenue exploded. But when the rumors of a phone appeared, a lot of people would comment: no, they won't do that as that would eat into their cash cow iPod. But we know how this ended. They released the iPhone, grew multiple times the size the company was and eventually even stopped making iPods.
Back to Kodak: they did invent the digital camera, but at a time it was way too early for being a product. But more importantly, they did bring some important digital cameras to the market in the late 90ies, the first usuable DSLR were Nikon/Canon cameras equipped with Kodak guts. They started the professional digital camera market. Without Kodak, it might have happened years later.
And at that moment, when the writing for film was clearly on the wall and they actually had managed to kick start its killer, they dropped the ball. Good management would have seen that they could "protect" film sales only on a per-quarter basis, but it was a dying business. They should have used the billions of cash they still had, to gain a solid foothold in the digital camera business, perhaps even outright bought Nikon, which was limping for a while.
Or invest strongly in all the adjacencies of digital imaging, which they did far too late.
Is this also arguing that Netflix should have stuck with being a DVD-by-mail company rather than pivoting into being a streaming company?
I think you can find examples of failed pivots and successful pivots but I'm not sure that "big companies should stick with their current cash cow and never pivot" is a best practice.
The remains of Kodak does make film today, albeit in fewer varieties than they once did, and with far less production capacity.
Any yes, people are all over it to the point that the most popular varieties can be difficult to find in stock, and prices have climbed significantly from a few years ago.
There's people now trying to recreate the Polaroid instant film technology and keep it alive. Even when those cameras were current, the pictures they made looked like crap.
Nobody was ready to make use of digital images until computing was enough of a presence in daily life, digital storage was cheap enough, and sensor resolution increased to compete with casual use of film. That wasn't going to happen in the 70s or 80s.
Yeah, why would Toyota want to go all in on EV and lose the ICU/Hybrid market lead that they worked so hard to accomplish? And ICU/Hybrid are still dominating sales worldwide. You see those who go all in EV are usually those brands with not much to lose (like Volvo).
It's not like they're not going in EV, they are just doing it at their pace (which is slow typical of Toyota).
Tesla already got the first mover advantage. Kia/Hyundai/Ford etc are fighting for second place. The gap between second and the rest won't be as large as Tesla vs second.
> Yeah, why would Toyota want to go all in on EV and lose the ICU/Hybrid market
The same reason Apple went all in on the iPhone and dropped their lucrative iPod business. You drive your car on the road that takes you to the next level, not the familiar one that's heading off a cliff.
Tesla has already lost the lead in sales. BYD (Chinese brand) took over for the lead for Plug-in EV sales this year. Tesla's has decreased over time and will likely continue to decrease. Kia and Ford aren't really in the picture (among top 5 sellers). Volkswagen, SAIC and Volvo are selling more EVs than Hyundai.
I think you are ignoring an important part of this question, which is what is going to happen in India and Northern Africa, where most of the population growth will take place over the next 50 years. I don't think these countries can afford an 'economy' EV, or widespread infrastructure to support them, certainly not in the near term. India is certainly making some encouraging moves [1], but your comment seems quite too optimistic and Western-centric.
Unless you're trying to make your own EV factory and compete globally on price, the fact that it's subsidized is irrelevant (unfortunately), because the way subsidies work, the China subsidized price is how much an EV like that costs.
> Unless you're trying to make your own EV factory
Lots of countries manufacture their own cars, unlike some random plastic toys.
Also, You don't get this price when China are exporting them if that's what you're trying to say.
The price is mainly subsidized on the (Chinese) customer's side (there are big incentives to buy EV over gas car, and it's not limited to the price of the vehicle itself: in some places it costs more money to get a plate for gas car than the car itself), not the manufacturing side (obviously it's both, but why it got as low as $4000 is mainly because of the former).
The technology will arrive in India sooner than we think.
EV have very low maintenance compared to gas cars. As time goes on, new EVs will get better real fast. The old EVs will still be solid workhorses despite this.
The problem with India is twofold: manufacturing and import regulations. But someone somewhere will figure this out: they’re trying to fix that same issue with iPhones. Some EV company (maybe Tesla) can piggyback off of the same solution.
That’s when all the “old EVs” with perfectly useful motors, readable easy to upgrade batteries and solar energy will make sense.
Now I’ll admit: this super hand wavy. But ever since I bought my EV, I have just found my transportation costs trending to zero. It’s ridiculously cheap!
If almost everyone transitions to EVs, wouldn’t that reduce demand enough for oil to bring it down to < $5? The big problem would then be distribution as gas stations go out of business, but if long distance trucks still use diesel, truck stops could service legacy ICE passenger cars.
Thats the traditional economics thinking but it does not accounts for the internal mechanics of oil producer market. The problem is that not all oil sources in the world cost the same to produce [ref:1]. So you may have plenty of oil available at say $90/bbl but not much at $60 because sources like shale/oil sands or deepwater are offline. This means with mass adoption EVs there still would be some oil producers willing to sell cheap but most would be offline for foreseeable future. This has deep implications for oil infra as that cannot be turned on a dime & needs constant development & upkeep. plus there will be not much ROI on long term horizon so financing would be difficult.
Overall I don't see mass EV adoption as a good news for crude oil. If I can get a little conspiratorial IMO this is the reason why there is such a strong push from hydrogen lobby as it provide them for an outlet for existing fossil infra and hope that they can keep it alive with massive lobbying and subsidies.
If everyone transitions to EVs, the remaining gasoline users would have to pay a lot more of the infrastructure. Pipelines, oil platform, refineries etc, are all expensive.
Yeah, if demand drastically dropped price would likely drop. The main point was that ICEs also have significant maintenance & energy costs. Sticking it out with gas doesn't mean you won't be facing thousands of dollars of additional costs over the life of the car.
My EV battery has a 8 year guarantee. And looking at statistical data from the same make/model it seems I'll lose 10% max during that time.
Going from 300km range to 270 isn't going to change my life, anything over 200km is perfectly fine for my daily use.
Even after the battery is at 50% capacity in 15+ years from now, I'll need to consider if it's worth it to replace the battery or just take it out and plug it into my house and sell the other bits of the car to someone.
That ICE car had an 8 year guarantee or less when the first owner bought it too. The guarantee/warranty length isn't full lifetime. We don't know yet what the full lifetime will be in practice yet on some EVs.
You like old cars and possibly like doing the maintenance yourself, good for you. I don't.
I want to travel in comfort and safety and not have to worry one second about my car breaking down. I also don't want to spend a single second servicing my car myself. I want it to take me from A to B every single time without fail.
I had enough "fun" with cars old enough to drive when I was young and less well-off. Can't beat the excitement of a car randomly breaking down on a remote road in -20C weather. Oh and it just as randomly started working after my uncle drove for 30 minutes to rescue us. Never again.
The energy density of lithium-ion batteries per dollar has been doubling every four years for the past 20 years and that trend is continuing which means that by the time you have to replace your battery (assuming 10 years), you can do so at one fifth the original cost (or you can get a battery with 5 times the energy).
Battery costs are still falling and the typical cost of a battery in a mid range EV is about 6000 USD. For the battery to lose 30% of capacity, it takes 10 years. So your amortized cost (crude) for 10 years is about 400 USD per year.
I am sure the gas costs will be much more than that, compared to EV running costs.
This model assumes one person owns the vehicle for the entire vehicles life.
In reality, someone buys an EV new, drives until the battery is worn out, and trades it in. Now the price of used cars just went up $6k across the board because you need to put a new battery in any affordable used car out there.
I think that's a bit overblown, but even in that case I think it's a better deal than playing the odds on an ICE car, that the engine was maintained well by previous owners, that the transmission isn't packed full of sawdust to mask its issues until you're down the road.
Tesla is getting half million miles out of batteries. If my model 3 gets half that i’d be ecstatic and 1/4th that i would still be happy (and you can get them refurbed for 15k or less..which is cheap if you get another half million miles… )
There’s not enough material right now to make EV batteries for everyone; that price is only going to go up unless a new battery recipe is made commercially viable (including the necessary mass production facilities), or new deposits are made available at similar prices.
15k NOW. The downward cost of batteries means replacements will cost less in the future.
If you have a nickel-cobalt Tesla battery right now, there is going to be at a minimum LFP (no nickel/cobalt) replacements available. Or Li-S, or Solid State, or some sodium ion or maybe sodium sulfur.
If your car lasts ten years, that is going to a completely different ballgame given what is coming down the pipe from technology and scaling.
Even if it drops to 150 mile range, guess what? That is still a car with a ton of use cases: city car, cab, delivery car, etc. Unlike an ICE where the engine or transmission breaks, a battery losing range is still a battery that works.
Cost of an engine is upwards of 10k and all it takes for an engine failure is skipping a few oil change cycles. An EV battery lasts just as long without having to be maintained as much and when it fails it costs around 6k and in 5 years probably half that amount.
> all it takes for an engine failure is skipping a few oil change cycles.
Any economy car you can buy will easily survive for a very long time even if you completely neglect all maintenance. It is nowhere near true that an engine will fail from missing a few oil changes.
Other than standardising the batteries, unlocking the chips so they can be maintained and maybe switching to a motor that doesn't require niobium, what's to improve?
Electric motors are a mature technology, and putting a box or a 3:1 teardrop on wheels is quite simple.
The best-selling Toyota in India costs around $20k USD. This is roughly 4x the cost of some of the cheapest new cars available in India. It doesn't look like Toyota is going for that emerging growth.
Sorry, Indian govt. is looking at EVs as a job creation engine. Charging stations, sales and service stations, investments in grid upgrades and installation of renewable energy sources, focus on green Hydrogen, etc.
It is true there is a need to improve infrastructure, but that can be a positive thing to generate employment and invest for the future.
There is also the idea that undeveloped places need to use oil and gas to industrialize just like Europe, the US and China did. The problem with that is there simply was never enough supply.
A guy named Robert C. Townsend wrote a book about running corporations. A generally extendable warning he wrote about is you can't grow a business by aping established companies and their historical path to success. Whatever angle and opportunities they exploited often no longer exist. And what they do currently makes sense for them not you.
Skipping landlines and going right to mobile is an example of that.
it’s going to be cheaper for them to skip out on fossil fuel industry and go EV. It could be more modes of EV than americans are bothered with such as bikes, motorcycles, smaller cars…
What will happen is lower operating costs, independence of charging, and cheaper repairs will win out with vehicle types are maybe around standard vehicle tradeoffs decided existing carmakers.
A large oil/gas/coal burning plant is more efficient than thousands of engines burning petrol/diesel, so just converting a large proportion of the fleet with BEVs nudges us a little bit in the right direction. Further, as the grid becomes greener (which it is, in most places in the world), the transport sector automatically gets greener in large fell swoops, without needing to replace thousands of cars. Plus the power generation plants can be placed far from large residential areas, mitigating the health effects on people.
Yes, but it is NOT more efficient than generating all that power, transmitting it, and then putting it into a battery, and reconverting it into mechanical energy again. End-to-end it is LESS efficient.
A tank of gas does not lose energy in transmission nor in storage, and it is far far more weight:performance efficient.
Using oil to generate oil is very very rare. It really only happens on small islands where some other power plant doesn’t make sense and there is no connection to a larger grid. For example, many places in Hawaii used oil before solar became cheap enough. Alaska would have also, if it weren’t for abundant hydro that villages and towns off the grid have always been able to tap into.
These places aren't buying new cars at all, though. Nor do they have the "infrastructure" (paved, lighted and signaled road networks are not cheap!) to support a passenger car network like we have in the west either. They are getting by on used/surplus vehicles and lots of spotty access already, and nothing about an EV would do anything but help that process. Electrical grids are much (much) cheaper than fuel distribution in total, and even more so in remote areas.
The subject was rural India lacking the infrastructure for EVs, which was a ridiculous point. Obviously there's a market for EV's in Bangalore and Delhi, that's not really much of a discussion. The upthread commenter (who I think is the one you're arguing with, not me) seemed to want to have a carve-out for "EV's can't succeed because of undeveloped regions".
Have you traveled outside of Europe? Things have... changed dramatically since even like, 2015 in B/C tier cities even in South America. I suggest you travel some more and reevaluate. Somewhere like Medellin or Islamabad in 2022 is almost unrecognizable compared to 2000. The third world you grew up watching in 1980s-era national geographic documentaries is absolutely gone, you have to go way off grid to find something like that now.
20k? EV drivetrains are so much simpler than ICE. The fact you can buy in some market somewhere a 20k ICE car means in equivalent dollars, a 10k EV car is possible once the tech maturity of sodium ion and components and all that scaling happens.
We are so used to EV drivetrains being more expensive, we can't think of the possibility of EVs become so cheap, but I predict they will, and with sodium ion batteries at 140wh/kg coming into production next year, along with 200+ wh/kg LFP and LMFP, it's going to h ppen sooner than I would have guessed only a couple years ago.
I will agree with Toyoda that a PHEV has a functional place in the next two decades. They were one of the top PHEV companies so they probably have the platforms already, so may as well use them.
But make no mistake the arrival of usable sodium ion to me is the game changer for the mass production EV: the napkin math says that 140wh/kg cell density if it is efficiently packed (90% is current cell-to-pack expected ratio) will make a 200-300 mile car. That's no cobalt, nickel, or lithium.
And a city car only needs 150 miles of range for the "second/third world" urban centers in some teeny car.
200 wh/kg (cell) LFP/LMFP should be 300-400+ mile cars. That leaves the cobalt-nickel and whatever comes out of initial solid state into exotics, supercars, and long haul trucking.
And if those sulfur batteries papers are legit, that will also be dirt cheap and near-solid state densities.
But yeah, I think in ten years a cheapo EV will be 1/2 the cost of what a cheapo ICE will be. We'll know when the Chinese invade the US market. Luxury cars and big cars will still be dominated by equivalent doodads costs, but I think possibly in ten years the industry will hit 50% of ICE drivetrain cost.
The age of PHEV should have been 2005-2020. The dumb shits in regulatory should have seen the Prius/Insight in 1997 and been HOLY SHIT ALL CARS SHOULD HAVE THIS AND BE PLUGINs. And yet... yeah nothing that was the Bush Administration circa 2000, haha. Not happening.
Now? Why invest in a brand new comprehensive PHEV platform? All existing ICE platforms are "last hurrahs". Like, holy shit ALL ICE PLATFORMS are dinosaurs. They won't invest in new ones, no way, they need ALLLLL that for EV switchover to stand a small chance of surviving the big paradigm shift. No new engines, no new transmissions, no new gee-whiz ICE tech. The last gasp was Mazda's compression ignited gasoline engine, that's probably it.
If the regulatory agencies had said in 2000, "in 10 years all consumer cars will be hybrids, ideally with PHEV hybrids, and ideally in increasing all-electric range capability, and we will deliver a good subsidy and a hefty penalty" and moved the entire industry to PHEV, we'd have had a good decade of ramp-up to hybrid platforms, getting everyone used to home charging, had great gas mileage, had 50-80% of consumer daily trips fully electric, and probably had all electric drivetrain components further down the maturity path.
But... we don't. PHEVs probably could still make an impact in the next ten years, but there is no way our nonfunctional congress could get that done. Instead, it is full bore on full EVs and people carrying around 5x-10x more batteries than they need for driving.
My idea for that is to offer a city car that has about 100 miles of range, and then an optimized aerodynamics "trailer" that is either a battery or a gas generator that extends the range of the car. You could rent them, swap them at exchange kiosks (fully charged/fueled) at highway truck stops, and bam no recharge issues on the car's main battery. That would be cheap EV cars that maximize battery supply. All you need is a trailer hitch and a special charging port on the rear of the car.
That inside-out rotary engine would be perfect for a really long range extender that uses synthfuels or fossil, or for long haul semis. Oh yeah, semis would be perfect for a two-behind booster battery. It could have drive wheels to help stabilize in crosswinds, it could have aero shape to help with the "flying wall" effect of most trailers. The trailers could also do hydrogen, although I still think hydrogen is a trojan horse by the petroleum companies.
IMO the biggest challenge is the rapid recharge (< 5 minutes).
You just think of a college football Saturday where 100k people drive in, tailgate all day and then either stay in a hotel or head back the same day. Often coming from 3-4 hours away.
It’s simply not realistic for all those vehicles to need to do 45 minutes of charging.
How many of that 100k are driving 3-4 hours each way?
5 minute charging is a nothing burger. If they are tailgating for hours, they can do normal level 2 and get what they need.
5 minute charging is something that sounds like a good idea if you've never had an electric car, and are used to only charging at very specialized locations that you have to seek out and spend dedicated time at, ie gas stations. But after actually having an electric car, the idea becomes superfluous. Current charging speed is going to be just fine for 99-99.5% of those driving long distance to a football game.
How many miles do you want to get in the weeds about? It’s already possible to drive a Chevy Bolt 700 miles from Philadelphia to Chicago, I’ve done it. The fast charging infrastructure is there, but at some point humans need to recharge, too.
4-5 people in a vehicle loaded with luggage or other gear. People driving to beaches during the summer. People going to Disney. People travelling to ports to go on a cruise.
For pretty much every European a 1000km round trip is something you do on a special vacation. And you stay for a few days on the other end :D Definitely not something you do on a weekend to go see a sports team.
There are some UK football fans who do that, but they're on a bus and can sleep both ways (usually they don't, they get shitfaced)
I could drive to my alma mater, power a TV off the car all day, and drive home without expending even 15% of my car's battery. Its less of a drive than my wife's commute to work every day, and that's not very far at all. I acknowledge that's probably not even 30% of that crowd, but clearly that'll be some percentage of that 100k.
100k people drive in. All individually in personal vehicles? Most commuting 4 hours away? No.
Even if the average occupancy gets to 2, you've massively reduced the energy needs.
I really doubt the failures of electric vehicles are because of college football. If that's truly the case I feel really bad about the future of the human race.
>When that gets solved, you’ll see rapid adoption.
What we need is not an EV that can drive 400 miles and charge in 5 minutes, but public transportation infrastructure that can ferry you from your home to the massive gathering place and back without you and the other 100,000 attendees needing to drive your own 3 ton vehicles.
I'd like to see what kind of electrical infra you need to (even partially) charge 20k cars in 5 minutes.
That's about one Tsar Bomba of energy.
This is too high by 4 orders of magnitude. 100 kWh is a larger than average battery capacity for a contemporary BEV [1]. That's 2000 MWh for 20,000 vehicles charging from empty (modulo charging inefficiencies). 1 megaton is 4.18 * 10^15 joules or 1,162,000 MWh [2] while the Tsar Bomba had a yield of at least 50 megatons as tested [3]. So charging 20k electric cars from empty requires about 0.003% as much energy as the Tsar Bomba released.
This problem specifically is why I keep an eye on the Graphene Aluminum Ion battery technology coming from Graphene Manufacturing Group.
Graphene has seemed to be the key to rapid charging while maintaining temperatures for over a decade. The challenge was always getting enough usable graphene at low cost without mining.
The problem here is that not all people driving there will need to rapid charge from zero to 100% percent.
It's perfectly enough to have rows of 22kW three phase chargers there, during a 2 hour(?) ballgame you get a good 100km of range - enough to take you back home or at least to the nearest rapid charger if you need one.
Or you could have rows of 100kW+ chargers with smart load balancing. The CCS connector tells the charger how much battery is left in the car so the load balancer can prioritize cars with less charge dynamically.
Ford is selling a gas generator as an e-F150 accessory. A lot of tailgaters come in pickups, and having electricity seems useful, might even be better than status quo.
> It’s simply not realistic for all those vehicles to need to do 45 minutes of charging.
But in your example there are two long periods of time where the cars are stationary, right? They're parked all day while partying and parked all night when they're staying at a hotel. Any pauses in the driving can also come with charging up.
It’s a use case that will affect a large amount of people.
Really no different then solving a drive down the coast to Orlando. When every car on the highway has to stop to recharge to do a long drive a 45 minute recharge will bottleneck the entire highway system.
The rapid recharge is the key use case to address EV adoption. I’ve owned 3 and I’m speaking from experience.
Extremely few people drive more than 50 miles to a sporting event. And for the people who are forced to do it because they live in the sticks, there are not enough of them to sway the ship's direction on this.
I've seen a gas station photo advertising $8/gal prices in the LA area. When that goes nationwide, the energy-intensive lifestyle of Americans will come to an end including driving 700 miles to a ball game and towing jet skis around.
It might happen but it might not happen as quickly as they would like. Recent geopolitical issues have substatically harmed supply chains for EVs. There's a reason Tesla has abandoned their plans for a mass market vehicle and are instead sticking in the $40k+ vehicle business.
Many of Toyotas competitors have de-emphasized investments in their ICE products to pursue EVs that they can't produce in large enough volumes for longer than anticipated. Toyotas strategy is going to work well at least in the mid term.
They weren't making very many of them before the supply disruptions. They made and sold a total of just 367,500 cars globally in 2019. Toyota does that every two months in just North America. Today, Tesla announced a miss versus forecasted sales/deliveries last quarter, and lowered their forecast going forward.
The point is, Tesla choosing not to pursue the mass market is no reflection on how viable that market is. At Tesla volume, they are better off devoting their production capacity to the upmarket. The upmarket has better margins, so you sell there until you saturate demand.
This is true, but not because demand for Model 3 and Model Y are much stronger than expected. It's because scaling production is taking longer than expected.
I really don't see the L here. Plug-in hybrids are essentially more capable EV's, Toyota makes them, and if they bet wrong on EV's, it's not going to be difficult for them to convert production from plug-in hybrids to full EV's. On the other hand, if Toyota is betting right and everyone else is betting wrong, it's going to be a lot harder for other companies once they lose the know-how to make ICE cars or hybrids.
Plug-in hybrids have two power trains you need to service. They are an excellent gateway drug to full EVs, but not the ultimate solution.
They're also pretty good for special use vehicles, a Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV is pretty much the best EV-ish vehicle if you need to tow a bigger load for long distances without shelling out 100k€+. And you can still drive on full electric around the town cheaply.
Honest question: what are the service intervals like for the ICE part of plug-in hybrids?
Considering they are unused most of the time, I'd expect very infrequent maintenance, and even some parts switching from X years to lifetime.
Edit: a short Google search [1] shows that for actual cost, plug-in hybrids have the same cost per mile than EVs, which is half the cost of ICE cars. It makes sense to me because batteries are a lot smaller/cheaper, the ICE doesn't get used all that much, and there is regenerative braking.
Toyota's hybrids are wonderful, dunno about other brands.
The Prius engine is a good gateway drug to full EV ownership, you'll learn that the amount you press the accelerator doesn't correlate with the engine RPM at all. The car picks whatever it thinks is efficient to move the car, any extra is stored into the EV system.
Some PHEVs force the engine to run until it's warm before allowing it to sleep. And if you need to run the AC or heating, it also requires the ICE to be on.
Sure. My point is that Toyota has hedged this bet fairly aggressively and is well equipped to transition to "full EVs" if that turns out to be the right call in the long run.
Billions was poured into this and I remember it being a big item in healthcare reform. But im still answering the same questions and filling out the same forms every time I go see a doctor.
Generally more money and mandates from top down don't work
All of my doctors use Epic, and I do not have to answer the same questions. When my wife gave birth in the local hospital, which also uses Epic, they had all her info from her primary physician and OB. The kids’ pediatricians also has access to information since birth, and my doctor can see the information from my vasectomy that a different doctor in a different practice performed.
All the labs are also easily accessed online, and I can easily login to my account and download them all to Apple Health app in my phone.
EVs = Tesla is probably the biggest misunderstanding many people have. EVs are about the energy source for propulsion and not about the smarts (real or claimed). A car with10 year old features powered by electricity is a perfectly usable vehicle without needing any of the glamorous things that tesla adds.
$20k is still too expensive of a car for a lot of people in the US, and for most outside the developed world. Toyota is just keeping that population in perspective.
Toyota doesn't even sell a car in the US that you can buy for $20k. The cheapest Corolla is $20,425 but you can't actually buy it at that price in practice. EV's actually have a huge advantage in that you can make a car at nearly any price point you want by trading off range. For example in China the top selling EV is a $5000 EV made by Wuling[1] with a 75 mile range, they offer slightly higher trims for more range. For the majority of people who live in cities a 75-150 mile range small vehicle is good enough and for something like that you can build it for $5-10k easily.
I wonder how much the US market is limited by safety requirements here. What happens when a giant SUV runs into one of those things on the highway in LA?
Do you not worry about the transmission, water pump, radiator, or even the engine itself failing? Does that mean you don't buy 2nd hand ICE cars at all?
I've had a water pump die on me within 6 months of buying a 2nd hand car. In nearly 20 years of driving 2nd hand cars I've had more issues with ICE cars I've bought than I have with the two used EVs I've bought.
No I don’t because I inspect and research the cars I buy to avoid dumpster fires. After 20 years of car ownership I’ve never once had a breakdown or an expensive repair. Furthermore I haven’t had any issue that a $150 toolset, a jack, and a youtube video couldn’t fix in an afternoon.
And you don't believe you can do the same with an EV? When I test drove the first EV (a Nissan Leaf) I bought, I took an OBD2 dongle with me and evaluated the data after the fact. I was able to confirm the battery health and capacity, the charging rates seen, etc.
With that in hand, I was confident in the health of the EV and made my purchase.
In the future it may very well be possible to do the same home repairs on your EV. We're barely past the first decade of publicly available EVs. A number of early EVs have plenty of guides out there on how to replace and rebuild battery packs on your own, and aftermarket mfgs are starting to produce speed controllers and ECUs for custom EVs.
It's just a new wave of tech, and that too will become normal over time just like ICE cars themselves.
Things happen with ICE vehicles too. But you can easily find a model that has a really good track record for reliability and is easy and cheap to repair.
Batteries on the other hand will eventually break down. Sure, eventually it will become cheaper to repair and replace. But the oldest EVs on the road are probably Teslas. The Model S is something like 10 years old now? And a full battery replacement is still hugely expensive. A decade on and EVs are still luxury items.
The cost of the vehicle and maintenance over 10 years would have to be dramatically less in the average case for regular people to start buying them. In that sense I think Toyota has plenty of run way.
Used ICE cars have all sorts of failure modes that EVs don’t. More parts get physical wear, and once a car gets old enough something is always breaking, and all that adds up in cost. It’s pretty clear EVs need less maintenance over time, though I don’t know where the break-even point is. I suspect batteries will continue to get cheaper over time as well.
no, instead 2nd hand ice cars have to work about a degraded and very expensive engine. an EV battery is likely to last somewhere around 200000 miles (https://www.consumerreports.org/hybrids-evs/evs-offer-big-sa...), and over that period require essentially no engine maintenance compared to gas cars which between oil changes, break pad replacement (which EVs avoid due to regenerative), and all the other things that can go wrong with an ICE have an extra roughly 500-700 per year of additional maintenance cost.
My car should easily last 200K - 250K miles. At least data shows that my model should easily hit those numbers.
My yearly maintenance is 250-325USD per year. Occasionally you need to replace the brake pads. And a few other things come up sure. But over 10 years I’m only looking at 5KUSD unless something horrible goes wrong. And I could probably get it cheaper. At my level of fuel consumption I’m looking at another 4K over 10 years.
I can’t find an up to date quote, but in Australia, the Tesla 3 years service plan for a rear wheel drive Model 3 was 1.75 times the cost compared to the standard service for my car in 2018.
Non Tesla EVs do better. And some are half the price or less than what I pay for annual servicing. But I still have to cough up 3-4 times more money 2nd hand. So potentially a 2nd hand EV based on current prices will start to be cheaper in 8ish years. Not including the loan I’d have to take out to pay for the thing.
I learned it takes a lot of grid power to extract, ship, process, store and sell gasoline than it takes to just charge an EV… seems that the reduction of demand of fuel would also reduce grid loads.. plus, just charge at night. cheaper rates usually.
No clue. It's by no means unsolvable (simply charging at off peak times should suffice in many areas), but it does remain true that electricity that goes to the oil refinery can't necessarily make it to a house.
I'd much rather we let people not drive at all if they want to as a way of reducing the strain, as well as allowing LEVs or small electric cars on the road for the people that don't insist that they need to tow a boat and a caravan up a mountain at 20 over the speed limit 200km away with a pallet of plywood to drop their kids off at school.
And during normal used car markets like the one we had in 2015, one could find a used Nissan Leaf, not even out of warranty yet, for $12k. That’s what I paid for my first car, 26k miles on the odometer.
Today you’d be lucky to pay that for a Leaf, and if you do it’ll be far more used with far more battery degradation. That’s not a knock against EVs, it’s a product of the car market we have today.
Hydrogen has by far the best subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act, though. Funneling money from taxpayers to corporate coffers via government subsidies has proven a winning strategy in many other industries.
Cynically, Hydrogen subsidies today are simple greenwashing of traditional Oil & Gas subsidies and still are benefit the same corporate coffers. Most hydrogen production is a side project of the oil & gas companies and a "by product" of refining operations.
I'm pretty cynical by nature, but I don't think that's what's at play here. The IRA's hydrogen production subsidies explicitly don't apply to hydrogen produced from fossil fuels; it has to be from zero-carbon production chains. Moreover, the IRA has upended the economics of the hydrogen market - with the subsidies, electrolyzed hydrogen is now cheaper than methane-derived hydrogen. [1]
There's also significant subsidies for hydrogen storage technologies, hydrogen vehicles, and hydrogen fueling stations.
Personally I'd take this at face value: the point is that hydrogen has the potential to decarbonize a lot of industrial & transportation uses of fossil fuels, and so it's attempting to build up the necessary technology and infrastructure to make this practical. There are always side effects when you throw massive amounts of money at a problem, so I'd expect some boondoggles, but at least the intent of the law isn't a boondoggle.
What advantages do hydrogen cars have over ICE or electric? I know very little about them. Electric, optimistically, is cost effective (especially if you have solar panels) and convenient. ICE at least has industry momentum going for it. But Hydrogen? Unsarcastically, why?
There are two reasons why Toyota is pursuing hydrogen.
First, the well known short comings of BEV as often pointed out on HN. The most common is range anxiety (dead electric car) and how long it takes to recharge (30 minutes at a quick charging). With a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle, it has a higher energy density so its range is farther and it takes about 10 minutes to fuel up a Toyota Mirai with hydrogen. This is the reason why commercial trucks and long distance trains are looking at hydrogen fuel cells. [1] [2] [3]
The second and probably more important reason why Toyota is betting on hydrogen is that the Japanese government mandated it. [4] By 2050, Japan wants to transition off fossil fuels using a combination of electrification and hydrogen/methanation/synthetic fuels/biomass. See slide 2(2) Energy Outlook of Carbon Neutrality in 2050 from [4]. This make sense to Japan. Japan is not only looking passenger vehicles. Japan is thinking about how to wean off commercial trucks, heavy industry, and shipping off fossil fuels. It thinks that hydrogen fuel cells may be the answer.
The biggest drawback with hydrogen is that transporting long distances requires cooling hydrogen to –253 °C [5]. However, in 2006, the US Department of Energy had already talked about using ammonia as the "hydrogen carrier" [6]. Ammonia can be transported at –33 °C [5]. The Department of Energy envisions transporting liquefied ammonia via pipelines, trucks, and tankers. Then "cracking" it back to hydrogen at a substation.
>Ammonia may be considered as a potential hydrogen carrier for hydrogen delivery and for off-board storage, such as at refueling stations and for stationary power applications. Ammonia, delivered to refueling stations and stored onsite, would need to be reformed prior to vehicle filling and levels of trace ammonia in the hydrogen stream would need to be reduced to meet fuel purity requirements (e.g., < 0.1 ppm NH3) for PEM fuel cells. The use of ammonia as a hydrogen carrier is being investigated further by DOE’s Hydrogen Delivery Program and the FreedomCAR & Fuel Partnership’s Hydrogen Delivery Technical Team.
Hydrogen fuel cells can't compete with battery EVs on energy efficiency, if the hydrogen is produced from electricity by electrolysis. (Most hydrogen is made from natural gas.)
Hydrogen beats batteries in terms of energy density, so maybe it has a future in aviation. I think ground transport will eventually all transition to battery electric (and hopefully we'll get electrified roads at some point so battery size and range isn't really an issue anymore) unless energy somehow becomes so cheap that we just don't care how inefficiently it's being used. I don't expect that to happen any time soon though.
I've seen some interesting data that suggests hydrogen fuel cells may not even have a future in aviation. Air travel does currently rely on some efficiencies from planes being lighter as they travel due to fuel spend, which is something that hydrogen fuel cells would share. But the theories I've read suggest that torque will be the huge overriding efficiency (and safety) benefit to electric aviation (that electric motors have access to nearly 100% torque at all speeds, if you have the available power draw). In that case, hydrogen fuel cells become a massive power draw bottleneck on torque, dropping motor efficiency, so you want a big parallel battery for moments of large power draw. At that point if you are already building around the weight of a large battery you might as well right size the battery for complete range and drop the inefficient of "dual power sources".
From what I've read that seems to already be playing out in small planes that fully battery electric is winning over hydrogen or hybrid hydrogen/battery. It will probably be another decade or so before we see how it plays out on the larger planes.
The only place I've heard hydrogen might win out is large sea transport (large cargo ships and cruise liners), and even then there are interesting recent developments in wind power for ship's cruising speeds and battery charging that are going to be competing with hydrogen
I agree it makes sense for ships to use hydrogen. You might have a point about power density of fuel cells being too low for aviation. I don't think batteries will work for aviation except for very short flights, unless there's a major technological improvement -- in the near term probably the best low-carbon option is some kind of synthetic liquid fuel.
> Toyota is just stubbornly refusing to take the L on their 30 years of research into this. I don't blame them, but I'm not them, so I'll call it how it is.
no Toyota is just not buying the "all in" bet on EV, and they keep researching on other alternatives such as Mirai with fuel cells; the article is quite clear on that.
this imho makes Toyota more reliable than other manufactures who are running at making only SUVs with shitload of batteries just to please the market, greenwashing and not innovating at all.
I hope a lot of these people (assuming they're not willing to go car-free, which would be ideal) will switch to low-speed electric vehicles. They're much cheaper than standard cars, take up less space, and are far less dangerous to other road users. This one from Polaris is $15k, and there are off brands for much less. https://gem.polaris.com/en-us/e4/
I refuse to buy new and my current car cost me $15kAUD. Which is 10KUSD (ignoring supply chain issues for a while). My previous car was an older generation of the same model and lasted over a decade. My current car should too. And upkeep is fairly cheap all things considered.
20K isn’t economy. Half that and make sure the car still runs for over a decade with reasonable maintenance costs.
"Now include the AUD1.80/L fuel costs into the life of that car."
While remembering, of course, to include AUD0.30-0.60/kwh for charging the EV (or AUD$6-$12/100km for a typical EV).
where by cheaper you mean slightly more expensive if you compare to public charging stations that are the vast minority of charged miles, and 9x more expensive than charging at home.
There is only a sliver of society that is demanding EV’s. I have a normal amount of friends, hundreds of acquaintances and work associates and guess what? Not one of them is demanding EV’s. The government on the other hand is doing it’s best to lure me with incentives and scare me with high gas prices. So what society are you talking about that is demanding them?
While demand for EVs is certainly growing and in some areas a total switch may be already possible, there still is an enormous critical demand for ICEVs in the world. There are areas in the world where people drive long distances by car, but the homes don't have electricity yet. Especially in non-Western countries.
Nobody in their right mind would buy an EV there. It may look differently in 10 or 15 years from now, but this is the reality today and this is one of Toyota's markets. They are the maker of the Land Cruiser and the Prius.
There is a reason, why the Prius is so wildly popular all over the world. It is capable of driving long distances anywhere, but it saves money at the same time, while it almost never breaks down. Toyota is not ignorant at all. They realize that now is the time for gradually transitioning to EV, but not for making a sudden dogmatic switch to EV, while ignoring what people actually need. The logical outcome of this though process is the hybrid car. And then the plug-in hybrid. And then the EV - at some point in the future.
Where in the world do people drive long distances in a car, but don't have electricity? And do many people actually live there? For example the desert might not have power lines, but it doesn't have many people either.
tata tiago ev is a $10,000 ev that launched a FEW DAYS AGO. Sure it wont have all features of tesla but it is still ncap 5 stars so its not a death box and will be sold hopefully by thousands
Until you can charge from empty to full in under a few mins and get 700+ real range miles EV's will remain a niche product. It's just not worth the hassle of have to plug your car in any chance you get like an old iphone.
2030 is around the year I think they will become an intelligent buy.
700 real range miles? Why are you holding electric cars to a higher standard than most petrol cars? The average car driven realistically (cities, towns, rural roads, and motorways) gets about 300-500 miles from a full tank.
Why do electric cars, which you have specified to have to charge in minutes just like petrol cars, need to have double to 50% extra range?
More broadly, having to go 700 miles is a niche issue, I don't drive a lorry/flatbed etc. I drive for more than 3 hours maybe two to three times a year. The vast majority of people are in this situation, in the US, in Asia, in Europe, everywhere. Getting 300-400 miles range and charging in 20 minutes is what is needed. The blockers are initial price, and charging infrastructure.
Lol who's driving 700+ miles (10+ hours?), taking a few minutes break, then driving another 700+ miles? I mean, I'm sure there are people out there that do that but even semi truck drivers don't drive that much thanks to federal regulations. Even you actually do drive that much, I'm guessing you know people who don't. An EV that gets 300+ miles to the charge and can be charged (at home!) overnight will do just fine for them. Waking up with a "full" "tank" of "gas" every morning really makes you rethink range and range anxiety.
but there is no "enormous demand" for EVs. Some (small) demand is manufactured by huge subsidies. There is also a subset of the upper middle class that does it for environmental/prestige reasons, but that's also small
It sounds plausible at least. The average per year in the US is around 14000 miles according to the FHA, which would be a little under 40 miles per die.
I'd expect the distribution of individual amounts driven to be such that the median would be lower than the mean, but a little searching has failed to turn up any details on that distribution.
There are some people who drive for work (eg. traveling salespeople, rideshare & delivery drivers, most tradespeople) and then there are others that drive to commute to an office for 8 hours. Rideshare & delivery drivers might be on the road for 8+ hours/day, tradespeople & traveling salespeople for 4-5, office workers for 20-60 minutes, with a skew toward the lower end of that. That's a pretty skewed distribution.
It's more like ~35-40 miles per day in the US (which will tend to be higher than in other countries).
"The United States Department of Transportation Federal Highway Administration said that the average driver traveled 12,724 miles in 2020. That’s down from 14,263 average annual miles in 2019. The 2020 average equates to 1,060 miles per month per driver, or about 35 miles per day. By comparison, the DOT said the average annual miles was 13,476 in 2018."
The grip of gasoline and corruption of government is severe enough that it is unlikely EV's will be able to scale to current gas vehicle use.
1. Electric charging will never be standardized. Gas is gas. Until we pass laws saying your electric car cannot have subscriptions or non compatability for charging you will always be stuck with specific types.
1. Gas stations are contracted to sell gas. That contract can say "no electric". The stores make money from gas customers. The drive range of EV's would have to run circles around gas to compete, and if it does, they won't be customers anyways.
2. The vast majority of people cannot charge an ev rapidly, if at all. Parking infra did not take access to electricity into account. I know at universities you have to pay extra, and it's just a normal 15A outlet.
3. Ev companies, especially Tesla, are rent seeking. The average consumer cannot afford it. Packages and subscriptions to your own vehicle are a cyberpunk dystopia.
We already cannot properly handle power demands. 100% green initiatives lack on demand scaling, especially in disaster conditions. The base cost of natural gas electric generation means it must take up a chunk of overall power gen.
Tesla is the only incompatible brand. All other brands use standard plugs. The standards are different in different regions but that's fine. I'm not driving from California to Japan with my car.
Also, Tesla was mandated to use the (CCS) standard in Europe recently, has voluntarily switched to the standard in Asia, and claims they will voluntarily do it in the US when they've hit certain sales goals/gross margin levels.
>1. Electric charging will never be standardized. Gas is gas. Until we pass laws saying your electric car cannot have subscriptions or non compatability for charging you will always be stuck with specific types.
Ehm, it's already standardized, or 90% there, in most of the world. In the US it's basically just Tesla, and they announced they'll also conform. And tbh when they invented their own standard it made sense, it's just no longer necessary.
>2. The vast majority of people cannot charge an ev rapidly, if at all. Parking infra did not take access to electricity into account. I know at universities you have to pay extra, and it's just a normal 15A outlet.
I need rapid charging along highways but not really in a parking - even the slowest available single-phase charger (apart from using a standard wall plug) gets you 41km range in 1 hour in a model 3. That's not quick, but you're likely parked for at least 2 to 3 hours (university, concert, shopping mall, restaurant, movie theater) - if not overnight/a full work day - so that minimum of 82km is already more than what most people drive in a day.
We just need cars to have a decent (350km+) range to start with (range anxiety is a thing, efficiency in winter drops significantly, highway driving consumes more, batteries age and lose about 10% over 8 years) so that missing 2 or 3 charges in a row doesn't ruin anybody's day.
>3. Ev companies, especially Tesla, are rent seeking. The average consumer cannot afford it. Packages and subscriptions to your own vehicle are a cyberpunk dystopia.
Tesla is indeed very pricey and their promise of 35K dollars was not really met, even though it existed (with some caveats) for some time. But we're starting to see decent (not crippled with a comically small battery) models from other manufacturers and we'll hit the 20k threshold for an OK car very soon if we haven't already done so, and then 15k, and then 10k (maybe not in the western world but I'm sure China and India will manage - with cars which are actually safe and which make their buyers happy).
Don't judge the entire market by looking at Tesla. They got there first, we owe them this revolution, but they're no longer alone in this space. But don't judge it by looking at Toyota either, they were asleep at the wheel, completely missed the revolution and are now busy coming up with some bullshit to explain it's best for everyone.
If there are hundreds of billions or even trillions riding on upgrading the grid and securing mineral resources/researching alternative solutions, it will get funded and figured out.
There will be $20,000 economy EVs with crappy everything but still go A to B. There will be grid upgrades to handle everyone charging (really topping off is more realistic, few drive more than ~25 miles/day, the upgrade to accommodate this might simply be "grid smart" chargers). There will be alternative chemistry batteries that don't need rare earths (like LFP in some Teslas).
Toyota is just stubbornly refusing to take the L on their 30 years of research into this. I don't blame them, but I'm not them, so I'll call it how it is.