Paris reduced car mode share by 45% since 1990: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/01/the-automotiv...

Somehow that seems to totally escape everyone here.

It is also common wisdom that gasoline demand growth (and more generally energy growth) is the most direct and reliable indicator of economic trouble, more so than any other (mostly because governments "change" (a cynic would say falsify) essentially all other indicators).

And lo an behold ! This matches the data in other sources:

https://www.google.com.au/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f...

https://www.google.com.au/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f...

(note that the last graph is without taking inflation into account, so the real "zero" level is somewhere between 1.5 and 2.5% at the moment and therfore hasn't seen a single year of real economic growth since 2000 or so, and has had a few years of double digit "real" declines)

So I think we can safely conclude that the real issue is that Italy has seen a very long an disastrous economic recession, and that they are in fact not buying a lot of electrical cars.

This is also very much not a positive evolution. This is going to have cost a LOT of Italians a LOT of quality of life.

But try living in Belgium, a bit more rural Germany or the Netherlands (perhaps with the exception of Amsterdam) and things are definitely less accessible if you want to get out of the city for a bit.

If you mainly use public transports, then you know what places are easily reached that way, when the last train, bus, etc. goes in the evening.

There is stuff that is hard to do with public transport (be in the middle of nowhere early in the morning) and there is stuff that is hard to do with a car (go out drinking in a city center).

But outside of it, many parts of London will have people drive all over the place. If you're in Havering or Barking and Dagenham or other areas on the perimeter of London, a car is basically seen as mandatory for anyone over 16 or so.

I suspect it's partly cultural too; a lot of the Hacker News/Reddit user/cosmopolitian 'liberal' mindset becomes a lot less common outside of tech hubs and densely populated urban areas.

I also disagree that anywhere in London requires a car. And doubly that anyone from the perimeter requires a car early on. I know many people who lived in these areas and did not learn to drive.

Smaller towns and rural areas in the UK do require having a car to live effectively in.

But in all seriousness, that does look pretty poorly connected, but it also looks like the only place. Some people I know from Slough, Kew, and Watford all don't know how to drive, and none seems to have suffered from it.

It's about £650 for a one-way helicopter trip from the airport to a City based helipad. I do it every day... XD

And then there are segregated bike routes all over the place, in addition to lots of on road accommodations.

Do you just not think anywhere there is "out of the city"?

You can always rent a car when you want one. Just checked some prices and in the off season here in Barcelona you can pick up a car for $1/day...

Feel free to add a source that is transparent about all non-fuel costs.

There's tons of false advertising, e.g. rent a car for 1 euro a day (service charge), but also pay a maintenance charge, an insurance charge, a monthly membership fee etc etc.

For example I have a 3 euro a day rental, but I also pay monthly.

Typically cars will cost about 30-35 euros or so per day, for the cheapest ones, with possibilities here and there to do 15-20 in certain seasons under limited conditions.

See here for numbers: https://dollarsandsense.sg/complete-guide-buying-car-singapo...

Their example car worth 50'000S$ (~36'000 USD) will end up costing 160'000S$ (116'000 USD) total.

Singapore is expensive because of the additional taxes that get added on to the base price. From what people (on HN in fact) have told me most Scandinavian countries levy significant extra taxes on car purchases.

So the $40k car might actually only be $15 to 20k in other countries such as Germany and Belgium?

The Netherlands: 36,500 Belgium: 35,000 Germany: 37,500 Sweden: 31,000

These may not be exactly comparable feature-wise, but those extra taxes don't seem to have a big impact.

The only decline in car ownership was in 2008, and that was because of the financial crisis, not because of great public transport (which has actually been getting worse in my city in the last few years). The story that people are giving up cars in masses is mostly a myth, even though it might look like that if you live in certain bubbles in the largest cities.

If enough families get additional cars that could also easily offset whatever young people are doing. It's more complex than "there are more cars, thus people giving up cars is not a trend"

True, but the embedded carbon cost of each additional vehicle is roughly equal to 10-12 years of driving that vehicle.

This is not really true, though you can adopt certain extreme assumptions that would support such a claim.

Using statistically average assumptions (12 tonnes of embedded carbon/"average" car, 180 g CO2/km, 14,000 km/year) results in DIRECT CO2 emissions from burning the fuel alone to be roughly equal to 5 years of use.

But to get a like for like comparison, you should add the embedded emissions in producing the fuel, car service and maintenance, accidents, infrastructure costs etc... under such considerations the embedded carbon cost of the vehicle will roughly equal to 2-3 years of use.

FWIW.

On the other hand, if there was a way for me to get to work with public means, I’d do it (28 miles/day commute) I’d still keep my car and still flirt with the idea of having an extra beater (I.e an extra car for the wife) lying around for weekends [1]

I wor the day that I loose my ICE car though. The ICE car, if terrible, is one of the most important tools for the maintenance d liberty (with no AI, of course). As an example, the pentagon papers would not have been published (and therefore hasten the end of the Vietnam war) if not for the mighty station wagon.

[1] when you have kids having either parent able to take the kid out to an event and maintain the other’s ability to go to stores quickly is a massive increase in flexibility.

Nobody suggested this. The point is that when public transit is effective, it becomes more attractive because of the cost savings relative to owning a car. In the absence of effective public transit, commuters will still tend to buy cars regardless of the expense because they don’t have a good alternative.

it's half an hour wasted vs an hour doing something productive.

greetings, eMBee.

How do your french friends in the rural countryside manage without cars?

And yeah, it's very common for someone who lives in the city themselves to have all of their friends also live in the city. Not many young adults out in the boonies, plus how would you ever meet and become friends with them in the first place if you couldn't get there?

Even the regional railway lines often get you faster where you need to go than a car would, especially during rush hours.

There's also the rarely mentioned factor of parking space becoming increasingly harder to find and more expensive in city centers. In my region, this is being solved by building affordable, or even free, parking decks near subway stations on the fringes of the city.

But even with that the parking situation still remains tense.

One (there are many pros and cons) slightly positive side effect is that efficency have to increase. It’s unavoidable as humans in general seems to have a will to survive.

What seems to slow it down is mainly an unbridled capitalism, which is why for example China in a weird and somewhat unexpected fashion leads the way.

EV’s are not only more energy efficient, they also have a positive impact when it comes to proximity pollution.

Do you think nobody lives in the countryside any more? Do you think the next generation will permanently live in cities? Who do you think will grow your food and look after your open spaces?

My point was the author of my parent comment probably has a very skewed view of the need for cars, if all their friends are young metropolitan professionals.

They have a blind spot to the needs of a lot of other people.

Less and less people. Pretty much all of my extended family moved out two decades ago, for example, and several no longer live in the countryside because their region is no longer countryside.

And AFAIR France at least a few years ago had a problem with farmer solitude stemming from this, and ultimately from farm automation.

In the context of the thread and with my own situation in mind I’m not surprised that the demand for oil to support public transport is decreasing.

I’m with you that the car is going nowhere!

I think we just missunderstood each other a little bit.

Robots, i hope.

Funny, I have the opposite dream for technology where it alleviates the need to pack in as tightly as possible into cities for no particular purpose other than a job. While some people do truly love the city for the density and variety of amenities (I did when I was young), many people are forced to go there because that's where the good jobs are. This is made obvious by the number of people willing to commute an hour in from suburbs.

Ideally the only people living in high density are people who want that, which could easily be enabled by technology (remote working).

We can't all move into the cities and leave the countryside as a wasteland. Many people want to live there, and we need people to live there to keep the spaces living and working.

I worry that many people in tech have never spent any time outdoors and have no appreciation of nature at all.

I guess I'll become an agricultural robot repairman like the guy in Interstellar when I grow older.

Every time I had to drive to the house, it was a huge pain in the ass. The agents wanted to meet in the middle of the week, so I'd have to drive in the morning, find a coffee shop or library to work from, drive to the house, go back to the coffee shop, then finally drive home. It was a couple hours+ dead time every day.

Where I ended up buying I took the train (working the whole way), rode my bike 15 minutes, viewed the house, rode back to the train station, and took the train home (working the whole way) - whole thing fit in a regular work day + lunch break.

Now if I lose my job and wind up having to commute, I'll still have the train time to work, do personal projects, etc. but if I'd been in a car I'd just be sitting there getting out of shape and wasting my time (and trashing the planet).

Even though living in the country means I'll definitely need to buy a car, it should (hopefully) only be one for our three person household, and the drive vs. train visits to view places was a helpful reminder of how much I hate car commuting.

This does not sound like a public policy solution, but parents paid more for bigger flats

What newer apartment blocks brought was an option to stay in the city. Surely a 3-bedroom apartment with a big living room and a kitchen costs more, but prices are comparable with own houses in far away suburbs. That gives an option to stay with kids if not in the city center then at least within a short ride from it in public transport.

I'd bet that diesel vehicles had more to do with the big decline in Italy, and the smaller decline in Germany, than anything else.

For example, this EU diesel consumption chart showing a correlation on timing between the drop in gasoline consumption and the rise in diesel previously:

https://i.imgur.com/qV3CxY1.png

I'd be very curious to see if Germany's drop in gasoline consumption coincided with an increase in diesel consumption.

The large diesel vehicle boom perfectly coincides with Italy's drop in gasoline consumption:

https://i.imgur.com/UGVFxt6.png

Italy went from ~33% of new cars being diesel, to ~60% in only four years.

Germany went from ~30% of new cars being diesel, to ~48%, in just seven years.

The UK went from 15% to 50% over a decade.

I wonder if overall the economic benefits were worth it, based on what evidence is coming to light regarding the health effects of diesel vs petrol.

There's a known solution to sort out the SO2 emission, but it would cost a bit more.

The problem isn't pushing diesel over petrol, the problem is letting the car vendors cheat so blatantly, apparently with political backing (in Germany at least).

Not if you're Volkswagen.

diesel cost MORE than petrol already even in Europe and modern diesel engines consume as much as modern petrol engine with automatic transmission, in past diesel used to be more efficient, but this benefit was wiped out

In most of Europe (the UK is one exception I know of) diesel costs less at the pump than petrol. The cars themselves cost a little more, but the fuel usually is cheaper.

Excluding hybrids, the current generation of petrol engines (as they historically have done) have a lower fuel economy that diesel. A new VW Passat for example can be configured with a 1.5l petrol engine which achieves 53.3mpg (UK) or a 2.0l diesel engine that achieves 68.9mpg (UK) [0].

Diesel fuel itself has around 15% more energy per volume than petrol, and the properties of its combustion just make it more efficient than petrol, so I don't see how this will ever change, unless a new method of combustion is adopted. I don't really see that happening though, as hybrid and EV technology will likely take over from pure ICE vehicles.

[0] https://www.volkswagen.co.uk/app/configurator/vw-gb/en/passa...

I remember when I got my license around 2008 everybody was freaking out in the idea that the price would approach 1 euro per litre. Now after years of recession the price casually goes to 1.80 especially in the islands. So people just drive less and also more reasonably (not fast accelerations, showing off etc.). A welcome side effect is the big reduction in road accidents.

High unemployment rate is also a very likely culprit: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?id=LRUN64TTG...

[1] https://blog.toyota.co.uk/honest-john-honours-toyota-verso-f...

The newer models feel lighter and more nimble. Almost as if they've got rid of a significant chunk of their unneeded, inefficient components from under the hood and replaced them with something radically different.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=metric%20system%20tale...

Contrast with a gallon, which is too much liquid for most people to ever drink in one sitting. I feel I have way less handle on a gallon than on a liter.

Also, this guy's arguments come off as really shallow. To quote from what you're citing:

> A meter does not match anything; a foot does. I can imagine the meaning of “thirty feet” with minimal effort. A mile, from the Latin milia passum, is a thousand paces. Likewise a stone (14 pounds) corresponds to . . . well, a stone. An inch (or pouce) corresponds to a thumb. A furlong is the distance one can sprint before running out of breath. A pound, from libra, is what you can imagine holding in your hands.

These are lame ass examples.

A stone is "a stone"? Goddamn, there's stones of all sizes. You can rationalize any unit of mass that way. A furlong is how long you can sprint before running out of breath?? That surely varies a lot by athletic ability (and many people don't run at all, and certainly couldn't make a whole furlong at a fast pace). A pound is what you can "hold in your hands"? Huh? Surely that depends on the density of the material in question and the size of your hands. None of these are helping me out at all.

You can make better arguments by flipping the tables. 0 degrees is where the weather turns from rain to snow. 1 Liter of water weighs 1 Kilogram (compared to a gallon of water weighing 8.336 pounds). 1 Kilometer is simply 1,000 meters. I could continue but I think I've made my point.

The author hasn't demonstrated that legacy metric systems are innately superior. All he's demonstrated is that it can be hard for people to switch, which is true of many people. He hasn't a lick of evidence pointing to people in SI-using countries being less able to visualize what a kilogram or liter or kilometer are. And he won't be able to, because all units are arbitrary, and SI's convenient allowance for powers of ten always allows you to pick a right-sized unit to work with that doesn't yield a number that's either too big or too far off into the decimals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_punctuation

One finger in height is an 1/8th of an ounce, two is a 1/4, and 4 fingers high is 1/2. But I've never been quite sure how much a "lid" is.

But if it takes a stone of weed to get you stoned, it's very bad weed, or you have a very high tolerance.

However, I suspect that was a rather sarcastic response.

What's so difficult? A handle is 1.75L or about half a gallon...

E.g. I’ve completed some basic carpentry projects. At the start I couldn’t have told you how much ⅛ of an inch was. Now I’ve got a good feel for that length. There is no reason why I couldn’t have learned what ½cm looks like instead as both are equally arbitrary.

TL;DR: any measurement unit can be learned; Metric strength in the simplicity of conversions.

It's not, though your sample is somewhat optimistic. For most vehicles it's closer to 20% than 34.

The interesting point is that electric cars don't reduce oil consumption by ~20%, they reduce it by ~100% (or ~99.5% since 0.5% of US electricity comes from oil).

That's about to be a dramatic drop in oil consumption as they come to be even a significant minority of vehicles.

In aggregate, oil consumption may drop, but it doesn't account for the possibility that fossil fuel consumption (natural gas, coal) in the energy mix of power generation will rise to meet the increased electricity demands from charging electric cars at home and workplaces. At least, until we completely figure out an efficient way to harness renewable energy like solar inside (swappable) batteries.

That's a relevant distinction for climate change, not if you're an oil company, or Russia and OPEC. Pre-tax oil prices are liable to trend lower -- and give countries an opportunity to raise fuel taxes without causing significant consumer harm, reducing oil demand even further.

And the capacity increase is poised to come from mostly non-fossil sources anyway. Expanding coal is preposterous -- solar is already cheaper and the only people who don't hate it for five different reasons are coal mining companies. Natural gas might be expanded somewhat, but even there solar is cheaper, and anyway natural gas releases less carbon per KWh than oil (much less coal) even before accounting for the greater efficiency of electric vehicles.

> At least, until we completely figure out an efficient way to harness renewable energy like solar inside (swappable) batteries.

Electric cars already do this. The batteries hold more charge than the average daily commute, so all that's required is to charge the vehicle during daylight hours.

What's old is new again.

[1] https://qz.com/1183779/europes-intoxicating-love-affair-with...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

[1] https://inflationdata.com/articles/inflation-adjusted-prices...

Perhaps EU countries raised gasoline taxes in that period, or people got poorer.

Pretty soon we will be as good as 1985.

https://www.mpgomatic.com/2007/10/16/honda-civic-gas-mileage...

1985 civic was quite small, about 150" in length and small engines usually < 100 horsepower. the new civic is (169.3 in) 4,300 mm, considerable larger.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_Civic_(third_generation)

you can see the evolution in civic size by car generation here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_Civic#Ninth_generation_(...

It has electric range of 48 miles - perfect for the daily commute ~30 miles round trip. A nice gas option is there just in case the battery is gone - which I used couple time.

The charge point app shows that the car took in 169KWHr in Oct. I figure if it is charged at home 15c / KWHr = ~$23. That's 50% to 75% cheaper than my last commuting car's gas cost.

I am doing my share to reduce the oil demand.

Looks like 49% of California's Electric still comes from NG from 2016. Solar was < 10%.

Hopefully solar will be higher and higher percentage of it soon.

I love to see the 50%+ or more Ca's roof top, parking lots cover with solar panels.

I like to a solar deployment system such that: * a 40 ft container pull up to a parking lots. * A machine drill 4, 6, 8 1x6 ft holes on the ground. * A concrete 1x6 ft concrete anchor beam drop down - secured. * Some posts erect on site in a half hours. * The per-fabricated solar panel pull on top and fasten. * The whole solar deployment is finished in < 4 hours.

https://www.cnbc.com/2014/03/18/pilots-hate-glare-from-world...

[1]https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/comparempg.shtml?words=#id=1...

"Oil use for cars peaks in the mid-2020s, but petrochemicals, trucks, planes and ships still keep overall oil demand on a rising trend. Improvements in fuel efficiency in the conventional car fleet avoid three-times more in potential demand than the 3 million barrels per day (mb/d) displaced by 300 million electric cars on the road in 2040. "

So yes, you are right fuel efficiency is a big factor; that's in fact exactly what the report says.

However, the article then goes on to claim that the report's prediction of electric car growth is actually off and that the impact will be much larger and much sooner than the report predicts. They also call out the notion that electric buses are currently already having a bigger effect than electric cars. I think they are right and that there are more currently oil intensive sectors where electrification is going to have an impact in the near future.

They then they get a bit hand wavy citing diesel demand declines in Germany that probably have much more to do with Diesel-gate and the sharp drop in demand in Italy, which in all likelihood has everything to do with the bad economy there and nothing whatsoever with electric cars. Also Germany is actually way behind in deploying electrical vehicles compared to e.g. the US, Scandinavia or the Netherlands.

In my view the real drivers here are going to be economical and not environmental. E.g. buses burn a lot of diesel. Diesel is expensive. Electricity is not. Therefore any reasonably priced electric bus is going to be saving cost. Which is why that is already having an impact.

The same is about to happen to most commercial operations involving cars. There are already police forces driving Teslas, which aside from being cool and good PR is also saving them a good bit on fuel. My bet is the taxi sector will start transitioning to being mostly electric in the next few years already. Fuel expenses are an enormous chunk of their margins. Same for local deliveries in cities. As long haul trucks become electric and self driving, that will also have a cost impact (eliminating the two single most cost factors of people and fuel). Aviation and shipping are next. That's starting to happen but will probably accelerate towards the end of next decade as technology matures. Also the economic life of such vehicles is much longer so this will happen slowly. But it's the same principle: fuel is by far the biggest cost factor and eliminating that changes the game.

Right now going electric doesn't quite make sense everywhere yet but that abruptly changes as volumes go up, prices go down, electricity becomes cheaper, and infrastructure gets deployed. By 2040 it is not even going to be close in terms of cost advantage. I'd actually say that by 2025 it is going to be very uneconomical to be burning fuel in cars (it arguably already is today); downright silly by 2030, and completely bat-shit insane by 2040. Somewhere in that time line any manufacturers still depending on internal combustion engines will be wiped out by a near complete collapse of demand and their profit margins. That's why essentially all of them are simultaneously investing heavily to make that happen while downplaying how fast it is happening so they can buy some more time to make it happen. They are all scared shit-less this will happen before they are ready to deal with it.

All this will also have an effect on oil production and related investments. In short, oil investors are already divesting. That cat is already out of the bag. Two things seem certain, decreasing demand and increased uncertainty over reliable supply and the resulting price volatility are going to be major concerns for anyone having oil as a dependency. It's not that there's not enough oil, it's more a matter of having an economic way of actually getting it to where it is needed at a predictable price.

2. Fewer people use private transport because public transport is slowly improving in Western countries

3. More people elect to own mopeds, which eat like 10 times less gas than a car

4. More people move to big cities, pushing even bigger incentives to abandon private vehicle ownership

1. various technologies to vary cam timing and lift, which allows you to keep the engine efficient over a wider range of rpms. Forms of this have been around a long time but they are become more widespread and more capable.

2. direct injection - where some or all of the fuel injectors inject directly into the cyclinder, rather than into the intake manifold just before the cylinder. Because the fuel can be added just when you want it to ignite, you can leverage higher compression ratios and/or turbo chargers without pre-ignition

on top of this there have been some small improvements in tire CRR, aerodynamics, materials. But a lot of the use of lightweight materials seems to coincide with also making the cars bigger. They certainly haven't gotten lighter overall!

If cars had stayed the same dimensions since the 1980s, the fuel economy savings would seen WAY more amazing.

I am not speaking of hybrid cars where the technology change is obvious - I am speaking only of pure ICE cars.

The "technology", where there is any at all, consists of mostly petty optimizations to the existing ICE model ... engine start/stop at intersections, cylinder deactivation at cruising speeds[1], optimizations to cam timing and making the fuel injection system behave more like a Diesel engine, even when it is a gasoline engine.

Again, all petty optimizations that don't represent any interesting technology and I find it laughable to see car advertisements in 2018 for various aspects of the engine/drivetrain.

The real gains have been from switching 6-cylinder, 3.x Liter engines out for 4-cylinder 2.x Liter engines and attempting to make up the difference with turbo and super chargers (sometimes both!)[2].

The end result is what you would expect to see in a mature, already optimized, already spec'd technology: very small incremental gains that have large tradeoffs in other areas. These little 2L 4-bangers are loud, they vibrate a lot, and they're going to be very finicky in terms of maintenance when the dual turbo/super chargers get to 8 and 10 years old.

I can't wait to never see any of them again.

[1] I think this is only applied to 8 cylinder engines which are turned into 4 cylinder engines at highway cruising speeds.

[2] ... and generally failing. I hope this "wisdom" is lost to time because we move away from ICE cars entirely, but for anyone still interested: "There's no replacement for displacement".

I regularly forget that most people here are in the US. The vast vast vast majority of cars in Europe are smaller than 2 litres, even diesels. Most petrol (gas) cars here are 1.2-1.4L engines, while most diesels are 1.6-1.8. A 2l VW golf is pretty much the top of the line in terms of "standard" cars, before you get to "performance" style cars.

I have the next model up, a 1.6L 4-cylinder. It is quiet to drive and has good fuel economy.

This article doesn't recognize the trade-off of increased demand on the power grid, and source of that fuel.

If they were talking about greenhouse gases, then the answer seems to be that it depends on where you live and how/what you drive, but an electric vehicle almost always produces less emissions than an equivalent gas powered one. [2] does a decent job explaining though I feel he leaves a few parts out for the sake of clarity. For example, driving a P100D isn't the equivalent of driving the average car. It's more like driving a sports sedan (like a BMW M5), so those sorts of vehicles would probably be a more fair comparison. In the same vane, the whole US car fleet includes lots of SUVs and other trucks, which if there were equivalent electric models, would obviously not go as far as a Leaf. It would be great if there was a US calculator that worked like [3] does for the UK so that we could do the same sort of comparison based on the mix where we live.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_generation#Product... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RhtiPefVzM [3]https://www.nextgreencar.com/tools/emissions-calculator/

My old Honda 2001 gets between 35 and 40Mpg consistently.

The truth is that gasoline is still king because it is the fastest way to recharge your car. Manufacturing process and incremental improvements have made combustion engine far more efficient and cleaner. It's likely that this trend will not weaken, instead get even more boost more than ever because it offers a cheap alternative to electric cars.

Coupled with a low oil price, we aren't going to see combustion cars disappear like HN folks would have you believe, instead we will see consumers voting with their money.

At some point we will see combustion engine that approach somewhere a bit shorter than the 80~85% theoretical limit of combustion engine efficiency, but that is still an insane improvement to what we already have.

I don't disagree that electric cars will get more popular, but a cheap oil price and highly efficient combustion engine that is coming is not going to lead to an apocalyptic future where sportscar owners are banished to remote islands, free to cause all the pollution they want.

"but we have over 60% efficiency from our combustion engine!" they yell to no avail. The silence of electric cars whirring in the cities snuffs out Doug Demuro's fans.

No, that's not why. Gasoline is still largely king because it's the legacy technology, so it has a very wide install base and it's still cheaper.

The average person very rarely drives the full range of an electric vehicle within a day, so the charge time almost never becomes a limiting factor. Indeed, for many people, having to fill up at a pump every so often brings more inconvenience into your life than simply plugging in your car at home or the office every so often. Once you have access to a charging station at some place you're already going regularly to anyway, electric becomes more convenient than liquid petro fuel.

Do you know why it's so popular? You can fill up anything from cars, jets, boats, planes several folds faster than the current battery charging technology. Battery also tends to have a fixed weight even if its used up which becomes a no-go for the military and aviation.

If what you say is true about the average electric vehicle driver, that they rarely charge and it's a none issue, consider for a moment the average gasoline vehicle driver, who can't afford an electric car, who doesn't care as long as it takes them from A-Z as cheap as possible, who are more likely than the electric car driver to leave in less affluent neighborhoods requiring longer commute, the downtime is more expensive than someone who can afford to wait around 30 minutes to get a partial charge. When you start to leave the city core and drive long distances, the ability to quickly recharge energy and get going again is critical.

The infrastructure for battery charging has quite some time to go before catching up. Ironically with the increase usage of such power stations, the power to manufacture both batteries and charging stations would still cause pollution and harm to the environment.

There's no silver bullet here and electric cars will be just another niche for people who are rich enough to care about the environment, while majority of wage earners would be lucky to even afford a used gasoline car.

Public mass transportation will benefit the most from reduced cost of operation due to fuel, but that's also minimized the trend of falling oil prices.

When oil became cheap, people chose to go around half the earth than through the quicker Suez canal. It's a testament to how powerful the price of oil is in our society.

Even if ICE efficiency can improve substantially, can it match the rate at which the price of batteries is falling? Morgan Stanley predicts EVs will reach price parity with ICE in 2025 and then continue to get cheaper.

https://insideevs.com/morgan-stanley-evs-price-parity-ice-20...

Add to that cheaper fuel and maintenance. I think you are being too optimistic about ICE's future.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_power_stations...

It's also not a simple matter of getting rid of these plants, there's an entire political stake in seeing these continue to run, and there simply is no other way to scale up quickly and at a lower unit cost using alternative renewable sources of generating electricity.

You can always burn more coal or some non-renewable sources to meet your varying peak demands. Not so with other sources like solar panels or hydroelectricity.