As soon as the initial cost of electrics becomes remotely competitive with gas-powered cars, pretty much everyone is going to want one. Yes, there will be the much-ballyhooed challenges of installing charging stations in parking garages and so forth. All those commonly cited issues will remain issues, but they'll be like AT&T's initial network congestion due to iPhones: short-term problems that'll be overcome because the product is that good.
Even if you are stuck with a gasoline car, can you keep it running? Many of those two billion cars will end up scrap or modified with converter kits.
I predict a bifurcated market: Cars wind up as electric while light trucks (and their large SUV brethren) stick to fossil fuels.
A car payment is maybe $200/month. Car insurance is maybe $100/month. 12,000 miles/year at 30MPG and $2/gallon is $67/month.
~$1.20 of the $2/gallon is taxes, refining, distribution and marketing.
So if the market price of crude oil falls by 75%, its contribution to a gallon of gas goes from $.80 to $.20. That's $20/month difference, or ~5% of the cost of operating a car.
And that's assuming crude prices actually fall by that much, and that governments don't raise the fuel tax to make up revenue and/or fight climate change. It's not hard to imagine adding $.49/gallon to the gas tax.
And most governments, including most of the high population US states, don't have any domestic oil industry to speak of.
According to this article, gasoline would have to be very cheap in order to compete with the cost of electricity. At one point the marginal difference probably doesn't matter.
The value of human labor has been steadily declining for decades; driving down the political power of laborers.
Self driving trucks & taxis, delivery drones, robots, I don't even. https://vimeo.com/190609870
Our society is going to undergo a dramatic shift.
Yes, technology has created new jobs, but it has also massively devalued it; a highschool graduate can no longer support a family at a lifelong factory job.
It's worth keeping in mind that this was only ever true for a large number of people in a very short window in history, basically a few decades in the middle of the 20th century. Before that, you had (essentially subsistence) farming, craftsmen (neither of which could be done without substantial apprenticeship, ie education) or sweatshop factory working (which did not allow for the kind of middle class supporting a family you have in mind).
I met someone who's been with a company for nearly 30 years. When they started, everyone got 15 vacation and 12 personal leave days a year.
It's unthinkable now. Why?
Apartment landlords are coming around, quickly, though - it's a selling point and not all that expensive to install a few 240V outlets in the garage.
If you CAN charge overnight, waking up to a full 'tank' every morning is amazing! It's a surprising benefit that isn't immediately obvious to the new EV driver.
That's true now, but may not be so in a few years if aluminum-air battery technology continues to improve. Aluminum-air batteries have much higher energy density than lithium ion, but they cannot be electrically recharged [1] so when they are out you have to swap them.
The idea is that you build car with both a small lithium ion system and a large aluminum-air system. Lithium ion has higher power output, so you want that to actually drive the vehicle. You use the aluminum-air to recharge the lithium ion, to extend the range.
Current experiments with this approach add about 1200 miles to the range of the car compared to a pure lithium ion system.
If starting from full on both batteries you got 1400 miles, that would be enough to let a lot of city drivers go a month between having to go have the aluminum-air batter swapped out in the worst case where they are not able to do any plug in charging. That would be quite feasible for many people, assuming that there was a battery swap place within reasonable distance.
[1] In other words, you cannot recharged them by forcing a reverse current through them like you do normal rechargeable batteries. They essentially have to be rebuilt with new anodes, and the old anodes become scrap for recycling.
While I'd like to leave the driving to Otto most of the time, sometimes I really like to drive myself, and would miss it.
I like my drag racing manual transmission and clutch, it's a heluva lot of fun to drive on the open road, but it's agony in heavy city traffic. (The engine just will not run at low speeds, the clutch is very grabby :) It can be really hard to get moving uphill from a standstill without rotating the tires in place a few times.)
A much more likely scenario is that safety features, starting with AEB collision avoidance, will become mandatory.
This will progress to the point where autopilot will always be running in a supervisory role, ready to take over in an instant if you're doing something dumb that could harm yourself or others.
Or am I thinking about this wrong?
Hell no. I'm keeping the tape deck!
The rest does sound quite plausible though. At best one would end up with an improperly balanced car from the difference in engine weights alone unless pains were taken to ensure the car's weight and weight distribution stayed the same.
My idea is that the small block Chevy engine is ubiquitous in the hot rodding world, and it is often combined with a Turbo350 transmission. This combo (or one roughly the same shape) has now been built by GM over 100,000,000 times. They hit that milestone in 2011! http://media.gm.com/media/us/en/gm/news.detail.html/content/...
So we take the Remy250 motor, used to propel the Chevy Tahoe Hybrid (I own one), the Remy is small, about the size of the torque converter in the Turbo350 transmission. That leaves the shape of the engine as a shape to fill with lithium batteries, and the rest of the transmission case can hold the inverter. There is enough room, I have measured.
You may only get 50-100 miles, but it could be a drop-in replacement. Since all the mess is self contained in one blob, it is a matter of yanking the old stuff out and shoving the new stuff in. Basic hot rodding, being done since the automobile was invented.
If it could retail for $20,000 to $25,000 the aftermarket industry would eat it up. I am a SEMA member for 12 years, so I know.
Any VC want to fund this idea? I have most of the pieces pulled together, just need to pay for some engineering time.
Free charging stations are going to be less appealing when you have hundreds of cars recharging every hour, not to mention the increased space requirements because a car takes 2-4 minutes to refuel but 30 minutes to refill the battery. Someone will have to pay for the price of energy and infrastructure (don't say the government will: actually they make a lot of money on gasoline and diesel, at least in Europe, and they will have to recoup that too!). And right now one of Tesla's selling point is the free recharging stations.
The charging time itself is an issue. It's a real pity that Tesla's battery swap stations programme was halted. If you're traveling with two kids you certainly don't want to waste half an hour while they're both asleep just to charge the battery... :-)
Scaling production and having a compelling product is already hard enough, and Tesla's being excellent at that, but scaling the infrastructure for consumers is a whole different business.
Note that this is only an issue for long-distance travel; for day-to-day driving, most people will charge in their garage, their apartment's garage, or at a street-side charger.
Who is going to scale the street-side charger network? In Europe, a lot of cars are parked outdoors during the night. In smaller towns, parking spots around residential areas aren't even painted.
Many other cars are parked in shared garages that don't guarantee one plug per car. I guess garage owners could install the chargers (but that would be hundreds of kW if electric cars were really commonplace---that is expensive infrastructure) and meters, but still it's hard to reach critical mass.
And I am talking about problems with scaling: "beginning to happen" and "available for everyone who needs it" is not the same as "available for everyone". Installing a dozen chargers, unused most of the time, in a shopping mall's 1000-car parking lot is not the same as installing a few hundred chargers in a multistorey parking downtown that previously only needed to power some neons.
There are millions of people in Europe who has a private garage/carport/parking spot and can afford to install a charger there, and who lives within round trip battery capacity of where they need to go. Millions more who don't, but whose employers can be convinced to install chargers. That's more than enough for the kind of critical mass where apartment block landlords, employers and shopping centre parking lots will start to install chargers, not for novelty or green credentials, but for naked self interest. It's not overnight, but it will be very quick.
That was set up to fail.
There was only one battery swap station. It was aimed at people commuting between LA and SF. Except:
- you had to book in advance to use it
- you had to pay a fee to use it
- it was set up across the street from a Tesla Supercharger
- despite ostensibly being for the commute between those cities, it was actually 15 miles away from the freeway, making for a significant detour
If I was Elon Musk and wanted to demonstrate how people would much rather use charging stations than any kind of battery swap program, I think the above is a pretty good example of how I'd set up my battery swap program (for failure).
And remember, chargers of the future will be faster still. CCS has been designed to scale to at least 300kW.
But the big plus is that if you design a fleet system around battery swap, you can get away with puny batteries on the vehicles. A battery sufficient for 1 - 2 hours of city driving is optimal which saves both cost and weight for the vehicles. Instead of relying on expensive, power dense advanced Lithium batteries, you can shove cheap batteries into the thing, scatter the entire city with drive-thru swap stations and drive the cost of transportation way down.
As a Tesla owner, I didn't think all of the past back-and-forth about the swap station in blogs was that interesting. I eat dinner in Harris Ranch.
Electric cars are the future, and Tesla's are cool, so don't take this as a negative. The complexity of battery swapping was in ownership of the batteries, not in the physical swapping. It maybe makes sense for big taxi firms, but not for standard consumers.
edit: adding a link with some corroboration since I got downvoted: http://insideevs.com/carb-zev-program-changes-tesla-takes-la...
Comparing usage of the supercharger network to the total amount driven by the car in a year doesn't make much sense. You only need the supercharger network when going a long distance; otherwise, you can charge at home or perhaps at work.
[1] Apparently companies can approach Tesla about installing their own private superchargers, though I don't know the details.
https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/5bonff/chargin...
I've thought about this, and I disagree. I think driving habits - and fueling stations - will simply change along with it. Truck stops are especially experienced with this. Older pumps can take a good while to fill the tanks. Improvements were made so they are faster, but they are still slow compared to cars. Hence the tendency to have a bit of shopping and food at a good number of fueling stations.
For passenger cars, this can turn into a number of things. Entertainment places, coffee shops, and the like fit in well here - as do fast food with play areas and other such things.
Supercharging time is almost never wasted. You (and the kids) need a break after 3-4 hours on the road anyway. Quite often, in my experience, the car is recharged and ready to go well before the occupants are!
People like you are a hazard on the road. Driver fatigue is a real thing - and saying you can go 8 hours without stopping isn't a testament to how awesome you are - it's a testament to how little you care about others sharing the road with you.
Some people think they have super-human reflexes, or are immune to fatigue, or have trained themselves to task with a phone and driving. Most of these people are wrong. Chances are, you are just an ordinary driver - and there is nothing wrong with that.
I'm more than willing to admit I'm an average driver - and so I will take breaks, or forgo using the phone, or drive slower to compensate for that. Yes, sometimes I do drive poorly (sleep deprived, stressed, or in a rush) - but I'm never going to claim I can go 8 hours without a break. That's going a bit far.
When going from Palm Beach to Orlando, we traded more time on the road for a visit to Cape Canaveral. (Way) more than 30 minutes, but the kids didn't notice neither that nor the 5 minutes stop to fill the tank...
Oh well, at least if there is going to be some kind of valet service around superchargers, it's going to be more healthy than a job filling up tanks.
However the time and costs to build them are really pretty small (and will continue to improve with scale). You can easily put them in wherever there is parking and a grid connection.
Businesses, restaurants, malls, hotels, etc, are already starting to figure out that having charging is a great way to attract more customers. We'll see this snowball as market share of EVs grows, and it will get to the point where you can charge at most attractions you'd conceivably want to stop on a long trip.
Tesla's move to PAYG supercharging is also positive for the wider charging industry and should encourage more investment by 3rd-parties.
And when fuel is priced low it isn't more expensive than electricity.
So yes, an EV might have some extra benefits and some western consumers might be willing to pay more for that, others won't and especially not people at the 3rd world.
So only 10% global penetration rate unless there's some government incentive by 2040 and maybe longer seems likely.
In 5 years, our Leaf has needed new tires, brake fluid, and... windshield wiper fluid and blades. We didn't need any new infrastructure. We plug it into a normal outlet at night, and it's full every morning. We've been taking the money we save on not doing transmission fluid and clutches and oil changes, and all of that stuff and put it in a savings account. In another 3 years, we'll need a new battery, but by then, it will probably be twice the capacity of the old one. (Nissan has discontinued the 24Kwhr battery, so fingers crossed, we'll get a 40KWhr battery when the time comes).
From a more global perspective, even here in Northern California, electricity is very inexpensive at night, because of all the spare generator capacity. Practically everyone can plug in their car at night, and with nothing more sophisticated than a $10 outlet timer, fuel up the fleet no problem.
Will every car be electric in 2040? Probably not, because cars last a long time. But I'll bet there will be very few gas cars sold by then. Battery prices are falling over 7% a year, and that's the most expensive part of an EV.
Even that expense should disappear. My Fiat 500e lets me set a timer to start its charge.
Switch to composite construction and other corrosion resistant materials, and...
Another reason not to let DRM dominate this emerging market; so that we are not faced with profit-driven forced obsolescence.
There was a time when the maintenance cost of cars (traditional) were little. Things changed because now things are made to fail after sometime aka planned obsolescence.
Do you think electric car companies will be different?
I did. It did't require "regular tuneups". You pour petrol and plain tap water for coolant in the radiator and the thing just goes...When it get stuck, you open the hood and take a peek, pull some wires, adjust some plugs and it goes again...
I don't recall any really expensive repair work in the 15 years that we owned that car.
And those same engines had no power.
If you want a Model T engine, it's really uncomplicated.
You just won't be able to drive on any modern highway.
What do you think will happen (to the the electricity charges at night) if every one does that?
It seems unlikely that demand will rise to daytime and early evening levels, however.
Once you factor in the cost of initial purchase (and the the new cables required) and the case and other attachments, touch-screen phones are (and will stay) more expensive, meaningfully than flip-phones. And flip phones are much more reliable, they don't have a screen that breaks when you drop it, etc.
Meanwhile, electric cars, while nicer in many ways than ICEs, still fundamentally perform the same task. And if you downgrade from an electric to an ICE, you haven't lost any functionality.
I was running a podcast downloading app and writing Python scripts on my E65 before the iPhone even had the Store.
You are right, but ICE cars need all manner of other maintenance often new transmissions or outright replacement. This is a minor issue, and is exactly the kind of problem that the GP poster was talking about. These battery replacements will be talked about like they are a huge showstopper, but the reality is probably closer to wasting a an hour or two at the mechanic or dealership and some kind of fee as they take the old battery for refurb and give me a fresh one.
And someone will figure out how to charge a car on a normal outlet.
http://diy.stackexchange.com/questions/30926/what-types-of-e...
For a Tesla, a standard 110v circuit charges at 3.5 mph; 220 is 2x or 4x depending on the amperage of the circuit.
I had 2 new breakers put in for an office of mine a few years it cost less than $200. If I could pay this then pay half as much for fueling my car for the next year, I would do it every year.
EVs are fundamentally simpler and cheaper to build than combustion vehicles. Fewer parts, less complexity, more commoditisation and potential for economies of scale.
The only reason EV's are more expensive today is battery prices, which are dropping rapidly and will continue to do so.
ICE cars are much more reliable , they don't need an expensive battery swap every 5 years.
In testing, modern EV batteries last much longer than this already. Even after 10 years and hundreds of thousands of miles, you're still likely to have over 80% of the original capacity. In something like a Tesla, that's still a very useful vehicle. And the battery technology will only get better.
You need to stop thinking about electric vehicle batteries like those in your phone or laptop.
EV batteries have a lot more (and better) management, keep things within (or closer to) optimal temperature and state of charge which all have major impacts on battery life.
Tesla has a battery pack with over 500,000 miles of simulated usage that's still got more than 80% of it's capacity. Surveys of Model S owners has shown that degredation is not an issue. [1]
[1] https://electrek.co/2016/06/06/tesla-model-s-battery-pack-da...
Saying that the iPhone is a small minority of phones is similar to saying that Tesla will have a small minority of vehicle sales, which is undoubtedly true, but doesn't portray the reality that a ton of other car manufacturers will be selling electric cars.
1: http://qz.com/418769/theres-still-plenty-of-money-in-dumb-ph... (disclaimer: it was really just one of the first results when I searched for a comparison of feature phone vs smartphone market share)
What part of it says "this is the future" vs. "this is what it feels like to drive a car that costs 6 figures"? Because I very much got the latter.
Electric cars are expensive and they don't improve rapidly.
Electric cars are an order of magnitude more efficient than ICE cars. The only thing keeping them from going mainstream is the existing industrial base. With growth now impossible in that sector, mainstream adoption is just around the corner.
Citation needed. (I don't think more than a factor of 3 is possible, in ideal circumstances.)
Now, the current market share of electric cars for new cars in the US is 0.62% (it is 0.08% in China). By 2040, in terms of new car sales, the market share is expected to be 35% worlwide [1]. That is a 6 orders of magnitude increase (at 2x each time) in 24 years, using the US number. So, extrapolating and saying the market share doubles every 4 years (24/6), you'd be reaching 70% electric in new cars by 2044 without regulation. With regulation banning non-electric cars as soon as it make sense for each country, I expect it to go 50% of all new cars electric one year, 100% the next.
Either way, by 2048 the number of new gasoline cars will be negligible, but the existing stock of cars already sold might take a few more decades to dwindle.
[1] The capital has super strict emission verification requirements on account of being in a former lake basin surrounded by mountains and boasting a 20-30 million population depending how you count...
But long after the original rear-engine design was discontinued in the US, they made them in Mexico for the domestic market there. They wouldn't pass crash standards and thus were illegal to import into the US (although people periodically tried, and I suspect if you were even slightly cagey about it, you could have made it work using an old hulk's VIN; there are certainly enough of them around in junkyards).
The last ones were made in late 2003, so they actually overlapped the production of the "New Beetle" by several years.
Interestingly, a decree prohibiting the issuance of taxi permits to 2-door vehicles reportedly contributed to the decline in sales, which shows you the role of government in killing off older products. They might still be made if not for that, just for the Mexico City taxi market.
For example, just adding supercaps means you could recover 20 to 30% of your energy from regenerative braking. This will happen when tech is ready(cheap in big quantities), and it is getting ready. It is not just Tesla, but hundreds of companies working on those problems.
But also, the real shock is making cars self drive because suddenly your cars do not need to stay in a static place for hours in cities. Today cars carry an average of 1.1 to 1.05 people in cities, but are made to carry 5 to 6 people, they weight over 1500kilograms for moving 80 kilos.
If you can make cars 5/6 smaller like you can easily do with electric(it is very hard to make a small 4 stroke engine) you can improve enormously the efficiency and reduce contamination of cities.
No, actually it's not. That's nonsense.
You can buy today a 5 hp 4 stroke outboard engine, weighing about 25 kg (including transmission, housing, controls etc), for $1300 brand new.
http://www.ebay.com/bhp/5-hp-outboard-motor
Furthermore, what you are proposing is not new: a tiny car with a tiny engine for one person. That's called a microcar. Wikipedia has a long list of these, starting from the 1950's onward to today, some of which have sold in quite large numbers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcar
A modern, electric example is the Reva (G-Wiz in the UK), which was produced from 2001 to 2012.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REVAi
Given that these already exist, why are they not the solution to our problems? For one, they're well-documented death traps. They use a loophole by classifying as a four wheel motorbike, meaning they don't need to be crash tested. Also, they are a replacement for only a small part of what a real car does, and this is the part that's also most easily replaced by public transport.
Your right. And, that outboard you linked to would be even cheaper if it were the motor only.
To add to this, here's[1] a video of a tiny 4-stroke engine.
And here's a video of a tiny V8 4-stroke engine[2] that "sounds like a big American V8".
I think cars being as large as they are has absolutely nothing to do with a size of the engine. There are some cars with absolutely tiny 4-stroke engines and they are still "large" because anything smaller would be unstable on the road. You can't make a cabin for a single person on 4 wheels, because it will fall over in any turn - you have to make it a motorcycle, or a tricycle - and you are losing a lot of things that make a car a car at that point. Not to mention the fact that I don't want my car to be a tin can - I want to be comfortable.
That's fair enough, but many people will enjoy having access to economical transport without sinking tens of thousands of dollars in to a depreciating asset.
And while people sometimes appreciate a lot of space in a car, most often, when they commute , they might not need that.
In ~15 years of car ownership, I have never owned a car less than 10 years old, and I don't understand this at all. Currently I drive a 2002 Peugeot 307. Regular maintenance costs me less per year than the depreciation cost alone on a new car, and I've never had a breakdown that's left me stranded. Not once.
But anyway, my point is exactly what you say: the risk of having a breakdown is small enough for any well-maintained car that it's pretty independent of car age.
I have always been surprised that car manufacturers haven't done a better job of rolling regular maintenance expenses into the initial cost of a car (and thus, into the financing arrangements that support most new-car purchases), because doing so would appear to be something of a win-win: a more reliable car for the consumer and also a more reliable-seeming car for the manufacturer to tout. But I think the mandated separation of auto manufacturers from retailers and servicers in the US tends to conspire against this.
Our experiences differ. In my own, they own a car. They just wind up impoverished as a result.
The only exception is in places with good public transport and cycling/walking infrastructure in human-scale development, but those places tend to be pretty pricey.
If you can let your self-driving car drive uber and get you something like $10/hour while you are at work, I think some people would do this.
One argument in favor of a gradual transition though is limited battery supply. However, if there's a market for more cells, I don't see any reason to expect that the necessary factories won't be built.
(Some googling led to a claim that the average car life expectancy is about 8 years and 150,000 miles. That seems low to me, but maybe I'm biased by having owned long-lived reliable cars.)
I really don't see why that sentence deserves a smiley. Ice caps doomed seems to mean a lot of unexpected, including threatening, consequences for me and you.
I, personally, can't do much, so I'm just going to watch the show in this restaurant at the end of the universe :)
(again, with the smiley)
Then there's reduction of ocean salinity, affecting existing ecosystems established around the current level (and with a rate of change too fast for gradual adaptation).
And not to forget about the disruption of existing ocean currents, which significantly affect weather patterns. And if I remember correctly, atmospheric circulation would also be affected.
Open shipping lanes are well and good, but when you can't grow the usual crops where you used to be able to grow them, because the climate is no longer appropriate for them in that location, and seafood catches are lower because the ecosystem is disrupted in a big way, you may well find that all that extra cargo capacity is used up just shipping food to places that used to be able to grow their own.
More like a pretty severe :( in my book.
Demand for oil has been consistently rising for 100 years. Imagine you run an oil refinery and 5 years ago you thought the market would rise 25% by 2040. Now you discover that it will not grow at all. Pretty shocking.
I'm not saying that the progress is not impressive, but 10% maximum market share in 24 years doesn't feel like a shock.
Also, the polar ice caps are doomed :)