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.