Every time I see someone make the argument that "all cars will be electric by 20XX" I feel like they are incredibly sheltered from rural life. The US is HUGE! Sure the majority of commuting could be replaced by electric cars but I've seen no evidence of them being able to replace ICEs for the "I want to go skiing/kayaking/hiking (pick an activity where your car sits on the side of the road all day) 2 hours away and return on the same day" situation. There are so many changes to infrastructure that need to be made to get there. Sure ski resorts and malls and park and rides might put in 1000s of chargers in their parking lots eventually, but it certainly won't happen by 2023 or whatever this article predicts. Sure the cars might exist, but the charging infrastructure won't by then.
Electric cars can have ICE's strapped onto them, and it works really well. The Chevy Volt, for instance, is perfectly designed to handle the situation you described. It gives you 52ish miles of all electric range, so you can commute and grab groceries and do all of your normal driving on pure electricity. And for various road trips, it still gets 40-ish MPG for hundreds of miles without any electricity needed.
It also needs zero fancy charging infrastructure. Have a regular US household power outlet anywhere in your garage or home exterior? Then you have everything you need to charge it up every night.
We could easily eliminate 50+% of US personal vehicle emissions, simply by putting 2013-era PHEV technology into every single car /SUV / truck, and getting people to plug them into regular 120V US household outlets overnight. Even rural folks would benefit greatly from getting 1 or 2 free "electricity gallons" every night.
Pure EV's are obviously ideal, and way cooler. But even just a little bit of electricity in a PHEV goes a long way to reducing/eliminating emissions.
> It also needs zero fancy charging infrastructure. Have a regular US household power outlet anywhere in your garage or home exterior? Then you have everything you need to charge it up every night.
There will be significant additional load on the Electric grid. This will require the electric grid to be overhauled around the country. Couple this with "smart grid" mandates & you have yet another channel for government control via bureaucracy & regulation. Denizens of cities tend to be more numb to government control & people in more sparsely populated areas tend to be more willing to demand/defend freedom & liberty.
There are many new properties that need to add utility poles. Don't forget power loss over distance.
The big advantage of Gas is you can transport/store the product without the product losing energy.
> We could easily eliminate 50+% of US personal vehicle emissions, simply by putting 2013-era PHEV technology into every single car /SUV / truck, and getting people to plug them into regular 120V US household outlets overnight. Even rural folks would benefit greatly from getting 1 or 2 free "electricity gallons" every night.
Living in Tennessee, it's difficult to ignore the power lines everywhere in otherwise abundant greenery. Electric cars will only add more power lines & infrastructure.
> There will be significant additional load on the Electric grid. This will require the electric grid to be overhauled around the country.
Two electric cars in a household, both charging simultaneously, uses less electricity combined than just one standard clothes dryer or one central air conditioner -- the kind of appliances everyone already has in their home and runs regularly.
It's not nothing of course. And some parts of the grid will need capacity improvements. But we're only talking about 900 to 1400 watts per car here, and most of that only happening at night when there's lots of spare capacity already. I don't see any factual reasons this would crush the power grid -- cars simply don't use enough electricity to cause a major problem.
> For full electric with higher mileage 5000-10,000 kilowatts would be a lot more likely.
I don't think so. Sure, it's technically possible to use that much power, but most people aren't going to empty their Tesla battery every single day, for the same reason most people don't buy a whole tank of gasoline every single day.
You can charge a Tesla on a 1.4kw US household outlet, just like every other car. It will still give you 50+ miles a night. Bump that to just a 3.3kW charger and you'll be pulling over 100 miles of charge nightly. 3.3kW is more than enough to cover 92% of all commuters nationwide, according to USDOT.
Superchargers are awesome and all, and are great for roadtrips, but 99% of people will have no need to pull 17kW down in their home. That's an insane amount of power.
Speaking as someone who's worked in renewables and utilities, I can tell you that the exact opposite is true. Having a reliable load at night would flatten out the demand curve for electricity, making the grid significantly easier and cheaper to manage.
Those utility poles and power lines you worry about are there to handle peak load, which won't be impacted at all by EVs, which will charge predominantly at night.
A solid mix of renewables -- hydro or geo for base load, with solar for peak load and wind to top off intermittent and nighttime demand -- is most efficient when the demand is relatively stable. No more need to shunt perfectly good electricity into the ground just because it's night.
And boy oh boy does it make the grid economics of distributed solar better. If most of your home's solar production capacity is being soaked up by your car, the grid and utility doesn't need to support big buy/sell cycles on sunny days. Electric cars would stabilize pricing and are probably the only way SmartGrid can realistically work.
Unlike refrigerator compressors or clothes dryers, electric cars have a smooth rate of draw and, as small industries pop up to parasitize the big battery in your EV, we'll increasingly see EVs as a home's store of electricity. This will be good for the system in the same way that per-home cisterns dramatically reduce demand on the water systems here in Southern Europe.
The grid can manage electric cars. They can actually make the grid more stable since it's not difficult to ask the cars to slow their charging at certain times. You don't even have to build this into the grid layer: just take these network connected vehicles and tell them to stop charging for 5 minutes out of the hour.
You can even go so far as to have the cars soak up the capacity. If you have a 2kW capacity circuit in the house, you can have the car drop it's draw as the fridge compressor clicks in.
while i think you're incorrect on many points, i'll address one for example:
>The big advantage of Gas is you can transport the product without the product losing energy.
the cost of transportation and infrastructure like for example gas loading terminals and gas stations is higher for gas than electricity. That is the "loss of energy".
Indeed, even when using fossil fuel as the energy source for both a gas-powered and an electric car, the well to wheel efficiency is 14-33% vs 42%, respectivly.
> There will be significant additional load on the Electric grid.
True, but people will be charging their cars most often when they're asleep, so it's less of an impact on peak load. It may be more of a base load/duty cycle impact.
However, even then, this type of load is also easily interruptible and automatically controlled by modern hardware. This makes it more serviceable with renewable power, more easy to make price-sensitive, and more able to provide demand response. (Potentially to the extent of being able to put power back into the grid and act as a negative load.)
(That said, the original idea of a household outlet is a stretch... I understand charging a Tesla at 120V/15A to be glacially slow.)
> The big advantage of Gas is you can transport/store the product without the product losing energy.
So gas tankers and carriers run on unicorn farts now? ;)
> Living in Tennessee, it's difficult to ignore the power lines everywhere in otherwise abundant greenery. Electric cars will only add more power lines & infrastructure.
Continue at the current rate of emissions and pollution, and the only greenery left in Tennessee or anywhere else will be brownish algae.
> Have a regular US household power outlet anywhere in your garage or home exterior?
The irony here is that people living in cities, who would most benefit from the advantages of EVs, are also more likely to live in Condos or Apartments, many of which do not have outlets in their garage.
I had to rule out an EV purchase for just that reason.
The people who live in cities -- as the article points out -- will not need to own a vehicle. Living in a city will become even more attractive as it will be far cheaper to simply hail a fleet vehicle than to own your own car. When this shift happens, watch the urbanization rate across the developed world shoot up, as the price of suburban/rural living will finally begin to reflect its true societal cost.
Suburban and rural dwellers will still need their own car, but even then it makes more sense to have a PHEV than an ICE. And pure EVs with range extenders (parallel diesel/gas generators) make yet more sense, if the aesthetics and modularity problems can be solved. Yes, these solutions are more costly, but them's the brakes. Nobody has a right to live -- cheaply -- far from shared infrastructure.
I agree wholeheartedly with you and my next vehicle will be a plug in hybrid. That said, that isn't what the author is saying. He's saying that all private cars will go away because it will be so much cheaper to just call a self driving electric and I don't see it happening because people will never call a self driving car to the trailhead of a 14'er. It is just so much more convenient to have your own (PHEV).
Same. Self-driving cars/vans would be brilliant for trailhead use. In 2016, hiking Trans Zion, we paid US$120+tip to get two of us from our car to a starting point about 60-90 minutes away. Earlier this year, my brother and I hitched three separate times to save 10 hours of road walking in a storm to get back to our car after Buckskin Gulch. We were lucky with the timing of each ride.
I've been deterred from hiking the Grand Canyon rim to rim by needing to either hike all the way back, or have two cars and add a 5-hour drive. Salt Creek in Canyonlands is another where a shuttle is a help, or crossing from The Maze over the river to The Needles (avoiding many hours of driving back).
Being able to call a self-driving car to affordably make these trips would be great.
The cell coverage isn't even required. If there is no driver waiting for me, I could affordably schedule the car in advance to wait at the trailhead until I arrive: all day if need be. It'd be no more expensive than having rented the car for the day.
If you had a self-driving car, you could let it take you to the beginning of the hike, and then let it drive itself to the end of the hike where you could take it home.
As an outdoorsman this is exactly what I am excited about with self driving cars. It has the possibility of making going even deeper into the wilderness more practical. A self driving car can take you to the trail head, go charge, and then go wait for you. With 300 miles of range you can go most anywhere.
If by "almost everywhere" you mean Europe or Japan, please compare population density. If most of the US had the population density of Northern Europe, or US northeast, or Silicon Valley, it would have similar almost-omnipresent coverage.
US West is more like Siberia, or Canada 100 miles north from the border. There are not enough subscribers to economically cover with GSM / LTE, except in cities and along major roads.
I'm talking about places like India or even Myanmar. To be fair India has probably a much greater population density than the US so maybe you are correct.
Right. I don't necessarily disagree with any of that. I'm just trying to fight the notion that EV's "won't help rural folk", or that electric cars are not compatible with rural life.
If anything, rural and exurban folks will have the most to benefit from electric vehicles and PHEVs (even without any charging infrastructure), since they end up driving more miles on average than city residents.
> I don't see it happening because people will never call a self driving car to the trailhead of a 14'er. It is just so much more convenient to have your own (PHEV).
Self-driving cars can co-exist with short-term rentals. I live in Seattle and recently sold my car because ReachNow is good enough: it does short-term rentals by the mile, but when I go hiking I can do half/full-day rentals, and it still ends up being a lot cheaper than owning a car. And this is before self-driving and the cost savings of EV enter the equation.
> because people will never call a self driving car to the trailhead of a 14'er.
I disagree with this. Why not? Hell, reserve the car for two weeks and have it sit there at the trail parking lot, if you want the old school experience. Still cheaper (for you, for the environment) than full time owning a car which is unused 90% of the time.
Not all private cars will go away, but a significant fraction of car use cases will move to self driving services (especially the ones that involve drinking).
For some this will mean their optimum is less car ownership, and for others no car ownership.
The trend will be amplified in areas with limited parking and high costs of living.
Also, you can always rent a car to go to the trailhead, just like you do on vacation.
None of this is dependent on electric or even self driving cars, as it is all already happening today with ride services and ICE cars, but self driving cars shift the economics considerably away from private car ownership.
Change happens at the margins. For reasons that you and parent comments mentioned, we're not going to go to 100% electric anytime soon. But I think we will see a lot more city dwellers willing to go car-less, and a lot more suburban/rural families willing to go down from multiple cars to just one. That'll still be enough to shake out the less competitive oil companies.
One consideration is that if fossil fuel cars drop to a very low level in cities, the spending put into maintaining the fossil fuel infrastructure might become unsustainable. That would in turn drive up the price in rural area as well. In the end, it is very expensive to maintain parallel infrastructures as such and densely populated cities (unfortunately maybe) drive the trend of which infrastructure is going to win.
Two hours of driving is half a Tesla's capacity, so that scenario is already solved.
It's not going to get any less solved over time.
People will own cars individually for the same reason that people own horses now - they enable a specific kind of activity, or a native appreciation for the object in itself. Certainly motorsport is not going to die any time soon.
What percentage of automobiles are used for touring and racing? I'd guess it's around 3% looking at my state's DMV figures, but form your own opinions I suppose. (A good proxy: Motorcycles are owned largely by the kind of people I'd expect would continue to own cars - 140k out of 4.2 million registrations in my state)
There's about 1 non-passenger-vehicle for every 4 people. I'd guess we see vehicle ownership and registration by private citizens drop to about that number - so 50% reduction total.
A Tesla model 3 has a listed range of 220 miles and it declines in winter and with hills. Therefore I doubt one could actually go from downtown Denver to Vail (~95 miles) for a day of skiing and back in a day without charging at the resort. It certainly couldn't make it from Denver to Salida, CO (~140 miles) for a day of white water rafting without charging during the day. Sure businesses could install chargers in their parking lots but we have a LONG way to go for that and that doesn't help someone going to climb the tallest mountain in Colorado (115 miles) who will park at the trailhead. There are some answers here but personal vehicle ownership isn't going away for large portions of America any time soon.
I thought the article was arguing that electric self driving cars will remove the need for charging and owning, you'll just call a vehicle and it'll drive the route your talking about for roughly sixteen bucks each way. It probably won't be the same car but that's not a problem really.
"Sure businesses could install chargers in their parking lots but we have a LONG way to go for that"
Why's that? I've seen hotels in Spain with dedicated Tesla parking/charging stations. Gas stations will be retrofitted with charging/swapping options. Tesla/other may partner with other businesses to install charging stations on the street.
Cars will leave while you're hiking to recharge. National Parks may well install charging stations and have regular, automated shuttles running the most popular routes.
Plus you're talking about a very specific case to suggest this being an issue for "large portions of America".
>that doesn't help someone going to climb the tallest mountain in Colorado (115 miles) who will park at the trailhead.
just command the car to go on its own and charge at the nearest charging station while you're enjoying the trail :) This is just one illustration how two tech advancements - self-driving and EV - happening simultaneously would help each other and would result in practical revolution.
The vast majority of people are living and travelling within cities. You're talking about a small problem that's getting smaller every year. See this chart:
I wouldn't call the lifestyle of 20% of the planet a "small problem". Also, just because someone lives in a city (which can be as small as 2500 people and isolated[0]) doesn't mean that they never leave it.
This is one of the oddest false beliefs about electric cars. 1) they already have the 300+ mile range for the 4 hour round trip, 2) electricity is totally abundant anywhere. Far more so than fossil fuels.
Building charging stations is really really cheap, because the infrastructure (electricity) already exists everywhere. The reason they aren't everywhere as yet is because there are still relatively few electric cars.
I predict the opposite opinion will be prevail very soon: people will wonder why others even bothered wasting time refuelling their car and spending loads of money.
I don't keep up on EV development, but has the concept of battery exchange as an alternative to mobile charging stations made any progress? Seems like a big factor in the amount of time spent refilling vs recharging their vehicles.
As someone who lives in a very rural area away from the metro with an EV I say: so what?
Unless you're going 300mi+ in a day(which is 6+ hours of driving) you're fine. Even if you are large parts of electric charging infrastructure is coming online at a rapid pace.
Take for instance the Olympic Peninsula. Used to be really hard to get to via EV. There's now a Supercharger in Sequim and Aberdeen with another planned for Forks. If you have electricity all the fundamentals for the infrastructure are there.
I have a friend who lives really in the middle of nowhere. It's 70 miles to the nearest town with a big box store. 100 miles to Reno. He said if he had an electric car with 150 miles range it would totally serve his purposes. The local gas station has an issue. They have to charge higher prices. So most residents buy their gas on their weekly shopping trip to Fernley/Reno. There is the potential if that station closes, then electric cars become vastly more attractive.
Exactly. As someone who grew up in northern Utah it is hard to imagine owning an electric car right now. But most people don't live in northern Utah. Now that I live in DC, I would love an electric car since most of my gas money is spent hanging out in traffic anyways. Big cities, where most of the population lives, is where EVs will really make their debut.
> Sure ski resorts and malls and park and rides might put in 1000s of chargers in their parking lots eventually, but it certainly won't happen by 2023
We drove a plugin hybrid to go skiing last winter.
Once we got to the hotel we were surprised to find a level 2 charger. We plugged in and 30 percent of our miles while up there were pure electric.
If anything, given that ski resorts tend to serve higher income clientele, they are likely to be ahead of the curve with charging stations, especially if they can charge $ for it.
It'd be cool to see National Parks add charging stations. Nearby, any site handling RVs would have some base infrastructure to add charging to their repertoire.
The US rural population is 15% of total population and declining ( "About 46.2 million people, or 15 percent of the U.S. population, reside in rural counties, which spread across 72 percent of the nation's land area" https://www.yahoo.com/news/census-rural-us-loses-population-... )
Next rural population has plenty of vehicles that use gas that could be electric. For example, 4wheel ATVs. A farmer that has an electric ATV could power the ATV with a solar array. Or an electric tractor, water pumps, etc
Lots of opportunity to take ICEs out of the mix. Not just the pickup truck.
The thing you have to remember in energy and transportation is that capital costs are high, and margins are thin.
What do you think happens when a new innovation comes in and takes 20% of your market share? This is what happened in oil with fracking. Venezuela collapsed and everyone else is on the brink.
Replacing 20% of IC cars would be just as catastrophic for oil incumbents as fracking.
Good. Bloomberg estimates the transition will be a $10 trillion upside for those upgrading and replacing fossils[1].
It remains to be seen who the winners will be. Incumbents (Excelon, Shell, SA, etc.) have market share, but will have to strand trillions of assets and reserves. Newcomers (Tesla, etc.) have to survive the energy boom-bust cycle that early fossil went through.
My money is on the newcomers (my startup is one). The incumbents' shareholders simply won't let them strand assets short term to transition to new energy business models.
This is extremely typical in the history of energy (wood, coal, oil, solar, nuclear, wind, and on and on) because of the speed at which things move. First, you come up with a new innovation, pump capital into building tons of it (the boom). Then, someone else comes up with an innovation, which busts you.
It's fundamentally impossible to defend an advantage/monopoly long term in energy (except with governments, e.g. utilities). Coincidentally, this is why we don't see much VC participation in energy, and when they do participate, they usually lose their shirt. The competitive fundamentals of energy aren't compatible with monopoly seeking.
>> It's fundamentally impossible to defend an advantage/monopoly long term in energy (except with governments, e.g. utilities)
I'd argue the causal factors here are more attributable to a combination of natural forces in quasi-free market economies (e.g. competition) and antitrust laws than the specific economics of the energy industry.
I can see this playing out, but not as quickly as the author suggests. Cameras and cellphones last a couple years at the most, and are much easier to replace, than a car is. Sure, everyone wants a self driving car, but not everyone can switch just like that.
The argument that counters this is that hailed rides will be cheaper than driving what you already have. You don't need to make a new purchase to switch.
Even if you have a recent model sitting in the driveway, you may choose to save money by hailing a car rather than driving your own.
I don't know if it'll play out like that, but the article is pretty convincing.
I don't think hailed rides can replace a daily commuter as easily as the author suggests. If everyone were to replace their daily driver by hailing a self driving EV, there would be massive surge pricing as most people would be commuting around the same time.
Surge pricing can be flattened out by making these autonomous vehicles convertible and capacious. During peak commute load, they function as high-density passenger vehicles. During low commute load, they function as light freight vehicles -- courier services, delivery services, even mail.
I could even see someone like Amazon running their own fleet of delivery vehicles and offsetting the maintenance and management costs by letting the vehicles run in "taxi mode" (with flip-up seats) during commute times. Think AWS for vans/light trucks.
In such a scenario, they wouldn't even need to necessarily charge market rates to commuters. They could offer the service below cost and still make money, as their primary profit driver would be their delivery services.
The sheer number of parties that stand to gain from this makes it almost inevitable, to my mind.
It's already close to that cheap, where public transit is relatively expensive and rideshare is relatively widely used and thus cheap. As soon as you take human drivers out of the scenario it gets even cheaper, of course.
Hailed riding only works locally, and there's already public transit cheaper than ride hailing; if you leave your metro area at all i'd bet this assumption that ride hailing is cheaper quickly falls off.
Where public transport exists, sure. But that's only in metro areas, and even then it's on a timetable that's less convenient than hailing a car. It also requires a bicycle or a long walk to travel from origin to departure, and from arrival to destination.
Everybody will still own their car, and use it just for long-haul trips. Daily commuting to work could be cheaper in a hailed (electric) car than driving your own (gas) car.
Why would a car owned by someone else be cheaper than the same car owned by you?
The obvious answer - dividing the cost of the car over more miles - doesn't seem right to me. Driving more miles doesn't generally increase the useful mileage lifespan of cars, it just wears them out more quickly.
Even in the short term, an owner of a large (say 10k+) fleet of cars has a lot of opportunities to drive down cost per car that is not available to an average costumer:
- a guaranteed purchase of 10k cars will get a significant discount over retail price
- not paying dealer overhead
- buying gas (or electricity) in bulk will be cheaper than retail price
- in-house repairs and maintenance will be cheaper
- a lot of people buy on credit, which is expensive. A fleet operator will be able to get cheaper funding (e.g. free by doing an IPO) and eventually fund purchases fully from profit
- an average customer is influenced by marketing and therefore over-pays for non-essential items. A fleet buyer will be ruthless about maintaining best-bang-for-the-buck ratio.
In the longer term fleet operator will transition fully to electric, build its own electricity generation capacity (especially in sunny states like texas or ca, where solar is really cheap), use data from past repairs to drive up reliability and durability of the cars etc.
The first half of the article addresses this specifically. BEVs last longer.
There's plenty of other things to break of course, but when the business model includes selling mobility the incentives are aligned toward durability and reliability (versus selling cars, which incentivizes planned obsolescence). It's worth putting in that extra 5% to make the car last twice as long.
If a car can withstand very high mileage, you get the full economic benefit of those miles only if you drive them before the car loses its value from sheer chronological age.
That means driving as much as a NYC taxi (70K mi/year) instead of as much as a normal car owner.
The author is comparing electric cars to gasoline powered cars. The idea is that the cost of paying to use someone else’s electric car—even with a markup added—would be less than your current gas car’s cost per mile.
The per-mile cost also includes the capital outlay for the car itself. In other words, it might not make sense for you to pay $40,000 for a new electric car, but it could make sense for three people to split that, and drive each persons per-mile cost down.
All of this is in reference to how fast the switch over could happen, and is why it might be much faster than any of us anticipate.
Here's a benchmark for you to consider. In Los Angeles, if your commute is 10 miles or less, the monthly cost of using Lyft for commuting is less expensive than TCO of an inexpensive compact car. That's with current tech.
Here’s the thing about the camera argument: if the new-fangled camera doesn’t work out, you’re out a few hundred bucks. How risk averse are you going to be when $30K is on the line?
The $30k will have already been spent though, right? When the ride-calling service is extremely economical, it will be a sub-$10 decision. You'll be thinking "I can take this Uber for $4, or I have to drive my car and pay for parking/valet, get gas on the way."
Where I live, registration and insurance for each car is $1,500+/year.
First, people won't need their second or third car. We use ours 2-3 days a week at most. It's barely worth the registration and insurance now.
People growing up purely with on-call cars may never buy their own - that's an entire generation coming through thinking like that. Once we're out of the commuting workforce, we might ditch our primary cars and instead get everything delivered and use on-call cars for social engagements.
I think those first stages of dropping the second car will start to happen in the next few years.
I don’t know that Uber will take down the to grocery store for $4, let alone get me anywhere useful like work. Probably someday, but not today, not in the eight years the author predicts, and probably not within my lifetime (middle-aged oldster here). I think the author’s mistake was applying iPhone timelines to cars. What the article says will happen, of that I am confident. But I think the author is off by an order of magnitude in many cases (like oil companies going out of business).
This article makes a number of flawed assumptions:
- It neglects the environmental impact of battery production.
- Diesel motors can be significantly less expensive to maintain and operate, even more so as the reliability of
emissions-reducing technology is improved.
- Battery charging is nowhere near as fast or convenient as a gas station.
- Electricity must come from somewhere. Few places have steady wind and none have 24-hour solar energy.
The world will switch to electric vehicles when they offer sufficient cost-savings, convenience, and appeal. Until we solve all of those things (and not with massive government subsidies), they will continue to play second-fiddle to gas- and diesel-powered vehicles.
> Diesel motors can be significantly less expensive to maintain and operate, even more so as the reliability of emissions-reducing technology is improved.
Source? As someone who owns two diesels(1.1L 2cyl and 3.0L 6cyl) and an EV the oil changes alone make your argument invalid.
You know what my highest per-mile operating cost is(including electricity)? Tires.
Look, I love the simplicity of the diesel as much as anyone else but EVs have a very strong position on operation costs.
When were your diesels built? The new (last five years or so) engines are amazing--they've really come a long way with the emissions systems.
I own two diesels: a 1987 Land Rover Defender 110 with a 300Tdi (no emissions controls, ridiculously smokey) and a 2017 Ram 2500 with the 6.7L Cummins turbo diesel (cleaner than I'd ever imagined).
I think you may have mis-read my reply. I was talking about operating costs, not emissions.
The 3.0L ecodiesel was built last year and yeah, it's much cleaner than our '81 1.2L which is pre-emissions.
The thing is the new engine is full synthetic(only approved oil) so combined with the ~$30 Wix filter an oil change runs ~$110 every 4k. The only maintenance item on our EV was a coolant change at 50k, something you'd have to do on a diesel as well.
That's a different story than my Cummins, which gets an oil change every 15K miles and uses regular 15W40 dino oil. Other than fuel[1], I've only spent about $115 in the first year of ownership and only because I took it to the dealer for an oil change instead of doing it in my garage like I do my other diesel truck.
Even ignoring the oil change(15k seems like a huge interval, 5x what I did on traditional oil) you're still spending ~$0.17 per mile @ $2.80/gal.
For our 5k lb EV right now I'm paying $0.07KWh at about .3KW/ mi for a total of $0.023/mi(hence why tires cost me more than electricity, they're about $1k/35k mi or 0.028/mi).
Even our Ecodiesel that gets 28MPG still costs almost 10x to run per mile compared to our EV(which has similar weight) before you even factor oil changes.
- I did the math on the battery issue that based on some figures I had for energy cost of battery production including mining of resources. I went with a figure of around 110mj of energy per 1kwh of battery. The result was an estimated ~24k km break even point when comparing a model S to a similar sized Volvo. The battery energy costs go down by about half if they are produced only using renewables.
- Actually all the emission reducing technologies adds complexity and lowers the efficiency. This increases cost.
- gas stations will be less convenient when there is no gas. otherwise a great argument for fossil powered cars.
1. Battery production, like any production, has an environmental impact - but the motivation for battery-electric vehicles is to eliminate local environmental impact (e.g. urban centres). If all of the pollution happens at a single source then it's easier to contain, reduce, and eventually eliminate.
2. Diesel fuels are still very dirty - and the reliability of petrol engines is not a big-enough problem to justify switching to diesel engines - and ICE cars have far more moving parts compared to BEVs than just the engine.
3. Tesla did look into fast battery-swap stations that can swap a battery in less time than it takes to fill a gas tank - they stopped further development due to a lack of consumer interest: users are perfectly happy to charge at home overnight, when the car's aren't being driven anyway, and when electricity is often cheaper at night. As more use-cases switch to electric there will be an impetus to adopt battery-swapping, but it remains an option.
4. 24-hour solar is possible with energy-storage, which is what Tesla is looking into, but again, the point of BEVs is to first eliminate local pollution, then make it easier to eliminate energy source pollution thanks to the fungibility of electricity and centralisation of pollution sources.
It's hard to take the article seriously since global warming accounts for 22% of the subsidies. Where did that number come from? How could it even be known?
Meanwhile, Elon Musk's subsidies are well-documented and specific.
1 This article isn't talking about the environmental impact of electric cars, its talking about the collapse of the oil industry.
4 Yet again, electricity is never made from oil. The fact that it takes effort to generate electricity doesn't take away from the articles main point that the oil industry will collapse.
Pardon my coarseness, but the author has his head so far up his own ass as he can’t tell whether the sun is up or down. I say this as a person who ordered a Nissan Leaf the first day they were available, has way too many shares of TSLA in their portfolio, and would love nothing more than watch Exxon Mobile go out of business. But they won’t be dismantling the Keystone pipeline any time soon, let alone in eight years.
Sure, ICEs are complex. But it is a known complexity. So well known that our 80K Scion xB has never had the valve cover off (IOW, nothing internal to the engine has broken). In fact, we’ve done nothing to it but tires and oil. Having never done it, from the shop manual I’d guess I could have the engine of our 200K mile VW camper van on the ground in about 30 minutes, have it rebuild over a weekend, and it’s good for another 100K miles. Complicated though they might be, ordinary humans can figure them out. Hell, the inner workings of an Intel CPU surpassed my understanding years ago, but they still sell millions of them, and my ignorance doesn’t stop me from writing software for them.
Look at the list of common repairs in the article. Almost all of them have one thing in common: the repairs are dictated by emissions testing, not because they’ll leave you at the side of the road. O2 sensor? The car is likely to still run, just poorly. The driver might not even notice. Catalytic converter? Unless it’s plugged from flooding the engine (raw gas will plug a cat), the car will still run. And yada yada for the rest. Of the items on the list, only an ignition coil is going to leave you at the side of the road. Let me put another way: I like our old VW because it gives an opportunity to still work on cars once in a while. The rest of our vehicles, modern cars and motorcycles all, are fucking appliances that don’t need the tender care of an old mechanic. So let’s discard the “ICE cars are complex and unreliable” argument, shall we? And there’s more to the ICE world than passenger cars, as you won’t be plowing a field with an electric tractor anytime soon.
Using a Prius as an argument for EVs is just dumb, because you know what else a Prius has under the hood beside an electric motor? So the more one makes the case with the longevity of a Prius, the more one argues that ICEs are pretty reliable.
By the time I got to the self-driving car portion, I checked out. In six years, new car sales will drop to near zero? That’s not an argument worth having, because you’re arguing with a kook.
There are a few problems yet to be solved. First, the battery system in a Tesla Model S has a carbon footprint from manufacturing that equals driving a midsized gasoline powered car for 8 years. If that doesn't change, then there is no net carbon reductions
Second, battery energy density needs to get dramatically better. Current Li-Ion batteries are about 6 times the energy density of a lead-acid battery of 40 years ago. They need to get 20 times better to equal a hydrocarbon fuel. Third, the increase in electricity demand has to come from somewhere. It isn't viable to replace all electricity generation with wind/solar, without MASSIVE storage investment. Hydroelectric and nuclear will be needed at large scale to cover this demand if coal and gas are not used.
While everyone talks about these technologies getting better at the same rate computers did, they haven't thus far. They might, but the laws of thermodynamics are a steep slope.
The OP is operating in a peacetime mentality. Oil's killer app is war:
Can a fleet of fighter planes run on electricity, currently? No.
Has the Army committed to having 100% of their fleet of tanks running on electricity by 2025? No.
Can you run a supply chain to the front lines of a ground war with electricity? Technically yes, but it's only a matter of time until your wire infra gets cut/bombed.
So I completely agree with the OP, assuming a general absence of armed, land-based conflict in the next 20 years.
That said, think about why the US even _has_ a highway system and domestic airlines. There are two main weaknesses of building transportation infrastructure on rail, from a central-planning perspective:
1. You can shut down an entire country's economy by bombing the rail infrastructure (c.f. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman%27s_March_to_the_Sea, viewing the seceded South as a "country" here...), less so with airfields and asphalt highways.
2. There is no consistent demand for continued production of railroad infrastructure, once it is built, which makes mobilizing production in times of great need (e.g. war) slow and difficult.
How this relates to the OP's argument re: electric cars:
1. While battery technology will continue to improve, the main means of transporting electricity is still the power plant + electric lines, which is relatively fragile compared to oil barges/tanks on trucks + highways. You would need to destroy every oil tanker and truck in America to shut down the energy distribution system -- a much harder task than bombing every power plant -- power plants can't move.
2. With gas-powered cars (and planes, though to a lesser extent), you can keep the production running all the time making civilian vehicles. Turning all those Ford F150s and 737s into tanks and bombers is difficult, but it is way easier to do so if you don't have to build the factories FIRST.
>Can a fleet of fighter planes run on electricity, currently? No.
>Can you run a supply chain to the front lines of a ground war with electricity?
Yes, with cheap solar power and favorable weather condition(alternatively recharge locations which would recharge or repair drones.)
Solar powered drones would be more cost-effective than oil-based armies.
Air/ground units greatest cost is protection of humans inside, making them expensive and energy hungry. Once the human factor is out, there is no point on being dependent on dense energy sources such as oil or static infrastructure such as rails and roads. The ideal fighting unit is cheap and self-sufficient: something like solar-powered aerial drone armed with particle beam weapon(e.g.ion beam) or area-denial beam weapon powered by wind/solar/hydro. Renewable energy is the future of warfare, like it or not.
I did some quick maths and at 16 cents per mile this looks like it would make around 500bn in revenue per year if all journeys in America were converted to electric self driving uber over night! Maybe Uber will succeed after all!
I want fewer fossil fuels as much as the next guy, and while the core argument about ICEs is beyond my expertise, the data the author presents seems to support it so that's pretty neat. However, I take issue with the article's casual conflating of oil with all fossil fuels, and fossil fuels used for transportation with all uses of fossil fuels.
It signals a lack of awareness when the author writes things such as:
>The pipeline was built at a cost of about $7 billion ... Keystone XL will go down as the world’s last great fossil fuels infrastructure project.
Without even straining my memory, I recall that Cheniere Energy's Sabine Pass Terminal opened in the last year. It cost about as much to build as the $7 billion quoted here, and they are planning another now at a higher projected cost [0].
Overall I agree with the author's proposed trajectory and order of events involving self-driving cars, fewer used car sales, and so on, but differ on the time scale. I figure things will progress at one-half to three-quarters that speed, at fastest. I don't think the "simple" argument of "people will select the cheaper option" is as simple when it comes to automobiles. A combination of inertia, identity and utility are going to make it slow going.
Not only am I "not a car guy", I actively dislike the task of driving. So it took a long time for me to really get why people identify with their vehicles, but now that I do, I can see how limited my eco-progressive perspective of "Everyone would prefer to live a car free life just like me!" was. I still arrogantly think everyone else will come around, but it's going to take longer than the author, or younger me, thought it would.
Definitely the generation born after the self-driving car is widespread will be the ones to complete the job. I don't think that timeline plays as cleanly into the oil (or fossil fuel) narrative that this article sets up, though.
And of course there's people like myself -- I love cars, but I actively hate commuting. Not because I mind the driving, or the traffic, but because it's time I'm getting nothing done.
If I lived in or near a bigger city, some of that would be offset by mass transit, but even mass transit comes with a lot of wasted time -- walking to the platform, waiting for the train, driving/walking to the station, what have you. But a self-driving car, or a car I can call on-demand solves all of that. I can walk out of my house, get into a car, and read, catch up on email, or get work done during my commute.
I'll probably still have a car for leisure. I currently have a Jeep that I use for wilderness / beach / outdoor trips, and I can't see that changing any time soon even though I have a gas-electric hybrid for commuting, but if my daily transit needs can be met by a self-driving, plug-in electric, it's a massive ecological benefit while actively increasing my daily productivity and quality of life.
I agree with you that the 100% coverage the author imagines is a LONG, long way off, and I imagine that even of people who feel more like you do, the idea that they're going to start replacing perfectly good cars with expensive replacements is unlikely outside of the top 10-20% of earners, but if enough people like me switch over a significant portion of our driving patterns to those described in the article, it'll be a huge win.
As demand drops, the producers who have the lowest cost will win out over the more expensive options and the market share of those expensive suppliers will drop to zero. I believe that's the basis for predicting the failure of the pipeline.
Talking to people behind self driving car companies the issue is not the self driving technology or laws it's more infrastructure around extremely low latency internet to make self driving cars work in the general wild. This article assumes mass adoption really quickly but who knows how quickly our general infrastructure will be updated to enable this especially in third world countries that are ramping up in traditional cars consumption but are notorious for bad mass scale infrastructure (Brazil/ India).
First of all, over a quarter of oil is used for things other than transport; second, it's gonna take quite a bit longer than this article predicts for oil used in transport to ramp down.
> over a quarter of oil is used for things other than transport
But doesn't transport have the biggest need for power density? Once renewable power density is solved for transport, I would expect the same applications will quickly be applied to the other places oil is used
Plastic production requires oil and improving power density of batteries doesn't help that.
Heating houses to a US standard requires astronomical amounts of energy that will be provided by fossil fuels because they are cheap per BTU. Sure we could design better houses and use more efficient heating technologies like heat pumps, but those are being adopted a couple orders of magnitude slower than electric cars are.
Sure you will, but maybe later. Super cheap energy makes bio-plastics competitive.
Massive solar farms passively making carbon chains when the sun is up. The reason no one is talking about it is that the transportation transition is lower hanging fruit.
There is an interesting line of research into catalysts that use electricity to create stuff like methanol, acetic acid, etc from CO2 and water. Often when you see people comment on this they automatically assume synthetic methanol --> green washed automotive fuel --> yay and I can keep my F150 pickup. But more seriously, pure low weight hydrocarbons --> chemical feed stocks.
The author isn't saying that all uses for oil would be eliminated. It doesn't need to be. It will take far less impact to ruin the oil industry.
They've made huge investments in production -- with 25+ year timelines -- that they'd be unable to make payments on if their incomes fall a mere 20%. And if the market for refined oil shrinks by even 10%, the glut of excess supply will drive prices down enough to put a number of companies deep in the red.
Oil is currently profitable because of its huge scale, high demand, and generous government subsidies. Upsetting any of those variables threatens the industry's already thin margins.
There is a major blind spot that the author fails to address: All vehicles (ICE or EV) have a heavy dependence on petroleum products such as plastics, lubricants, and synthetic rubber. While I believe that EV's are the future, I do not think their success implies the fall of Big Oil.
The amounts differ by an order of magnitude, or maybe even two. E.g. the EIA says 9.3k barrels/day is consumed as motor gasoline (more than half of all consumption of finished products, and the next largest categories are also burn-the-oil, possibly including 3.6k barrels/day of diesel fuel) whereas only 323 barrels/day go to petrochemical feedstocks. https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_cons_psup_dc_nus_mbblpd_a.h...
~60% of oil is used for transportation fuel, so there will be a big impact if that goes away. Oil reserves will also last much longer once oil isn't needed for transportation.
The author acknowledges this, and says oil usage will decline but not go away. Oil is used for a lot more than gasoline. But the contraction of the market will put a lot of companies in a world of hurt.
Why self driving cars should only be electric vehicules? And if the price of oil is going down due to electric vehicules it will make people even more happier to use their already amortized vehicules. And don't forget that a large part of electricity comes from oil in the US.
The flip side is if if and when electric cars become cheap enough it's possible that they will beat ICE on a cost per mile basis _even if gasoline were free_.
Justification: For a car that gets 30MPG the fuel cost per mile is only 6-7 cents per mile. Total cost per mile is around 50 cents per mile. So only 10-20% of the cost is fuel.
OP does not understand that he is far more enthusiastic about his Prius than the rest of the world.
Too much of this article is based on unsubstantiated, overly optimistic predictions, and the reasoning is regularly fallacious. Two examples:
1. OP lists expensive repairs for combustion vehicles, then suggests that because said parts do not exist in EVs, that EVs are cheaper to maintain. This is nonsense, first of all most of the parts listed almost never require repairs (how often do you spend >$1000 to replace a catalytic converter?) and secondly, it is (deliberately?) misleading to ignore that EVs have specialized parts of their own to repair. The fact that there are fewer parts is not enough data to suggest that an EV is cheaper automatically to maintain, or more reliable. Further, there is a risk that some people will spend more money on EV repair because they may require specialized equipment to maintain.
2. His "current estimates" sources are based on extrapolation of current tesla battery performance, which is an uncertain predictor of future performance given how little time the tested batteries have spent in use.
3. When OP leaps to self driving cars as another reason for the emergence of EVs, he also conveniently misses that there is utility and sentimental value in owning your own car.
tl;dr: Will EVs eventually supersede ICVs? Sure. But putting out an article which says with certainty, and a straight face, that no one will want oil in 8 years is just unnecessarily smug.
It's funny that you claim that "most of the parts listed almost never require repairs" when the list explicitly is the top 10 most frequent actual repairs that were performed in 2015.
Also "they may require specialized equipment to maintain" is a guess that's not true, while everything requires particular tools, repairing and maintaining electric drivetrains requires less specialized equipment than ICEs.
From that same article, the average repair cost is $387/year for a typical vehicle. Nowhere near the scary list with >$1000. You feel right into OP's literary trap, which is my problem with the whole article. Overly optimistic sensationalism. 8 years to rebuild our entire infrastructure!
I'd like to see a source for the second, I think you're making the mistake OP lead you to, in the assumption that simply because of fewer moving parts, the vehicle is necessarily easier to work on.
2. Not correct - OP is pointing to current Priuses that have exceptionally long lived batteries "Current estimates for the lifetime today’s electric vehicles are over 500,000 miles." and "But today there are anecdotal stories of Prius’s logging over 600,000 miles on a single battery."
3a. Maybe there is sentimental value to a Mustang... but that crappy car with headliner coming down? .. no..
3b. Utility as in always available, possibly. However consider just the case of a family going from 2-3 cars to a single car. (Which is what my family has done) That alone could halve the number of cars purchased.
1. Electric motors are easier to repair than bus sized diesel engines in trains- not the best comparison to motors and engines that have to be shrunk down and crammed into the family sedan. I'll bet the maintnence savings margin is smaller if not gone.
2. The point is it is too early to estimate batter life with such certainty based on current battery output. Would you buy a Prius with 300,000 miles on it today? I think its a little too early to make that bet before we have regular examples of EVs lasting that long.
3. Even your example shows that there will still be demand for fossil fuelled vehicles.
Point again: are ICVs going to go extinct? Most likely. Are we going to stop using oil to fuel vehicles in EIGHT YEARS? only if you're a smug Prius driver ;).
1. If anything, smaller electric motors have an even larger advantage. Smallest ICE v. smallest electrical motor? Small ICEs have a problem with being too cold.
2. "Would you buy a Prius with 300,000 miles on it today?" - sure if its body/frame is good shape. There is no inherit life span to a machine when its parts can be replaced.
3. "still be demand for fossil fuelled vehicles" - The doubt is about "big oil" to survive with the current cost structure. Yes I bet "little oil" will have a role as a specialized fuel. In Manhattan and San Francisco, it is harder and harder to find a gas station - the land is too valuable to waste on a toxic/dangerous land use. Electric charging stations don't have the same problem that gas stations have.
I can easily see a situation where owning a ICS vehicle in major cities means having to get personal fuel deliveries (if you are rich) or having to drive outside of the town to refuel (time consuming)
It costs less to make an IC engine than to make an electric drivetrain. Replacement cost for a Tesla drivetrain is about $6000 - $15000. Replacement for an volume-product automotive engine is about $2,250 to $4,000. Detroit put a lot of effort over the years into making engine manufacture cheap.
Interestingly, replacing the Nissan Leaf's worn out battery will cost ~$6000. Looking up the price of a Nissan Leaf I could buy from the closest car max: it'd cost ~$8000.
I wonder if vehicle manufacture (not necessarily battery) is going to be cheap enough to simply throw out your car whenever the battery dies?
You think in 2025 we will be talking about children mining by hand in the Congo in horrible conditions to provide all those lithium batteries for that future? There is a price for everything.
Cars have been shipping with sensors and computers since the 80s. When was the last time you heard of somebody's ECU failing? What's that, you've never heard of an ECU before? :-)
Agreed. The sensors which fail commonly fail [1] on high milage ICE cars are in the hot places, exhaust and coolant. Battery cooling and electric motors run at a much lower temperature around 40C [2].
ECU is pretty basic though and they do fail, I guess they all have a designed lifetime.
The thing is the more complex these things become the higher probability they fail. A machine made of 10parts each with 1% of failure rate per annum doesn't just add up to 10%...
Not many people know the relationship between oil and the US dollar.
The golden age of the US dollar was the Bretton Woods system, where every currency was backed in dollars and dollars were backed in gold. There was however no obligation for the Federal Reserve to accept audits of any kind to validate there was enough gold. Therefore the US could print money at will (and it did), until countries such as France started demanding the conversion of their dollars to gold.
To avoid the equivalent of a bank run at the Federal Reserve level, Nixon moved away from the gold standard and since then the US dollar has been allowed to float.
A less known fact, is how the US dollar has preserved its value in this current setup. The answer is: by having an exclusive deal with oil producers where oil is sold exclusively in US dollars. Since everyone needs oil, if you need dollars to buy oil, the dollar gains a relative value.
Having said this, it is important to understand that as energy consumers move away from oil, the US will need to find another way to sustain its currency or it will inevitably crash, along with everything valued in dollars, such as savings, wages, etc.
The dollar doesn't get its value from oil, it gets its value from being the sole currency accepted for your tax bill, i.e. its value derives from its tax base. That is why fiat works, it's what "by fiat" means, and why commodity backing is not necessary. The dollar has been a far better currency since gold backing was removed. Gold was and is a terrible currency.
You're on HN, please don't assume only you understand the complexities of the world. Everything is more complicated than one simple thing, but you don't get to level that critique after claiming the value comes from oil. We're obviously talking about primary driver of value and for every fiat currency its primary value is in its tax base, not in any commodity backing.
The values between currencies fluctuate short term because capital moves around, but that doesn't drive the value of a currency, it merely alters it a very tiny amount. Fundamental forces, i.e. government policies, control exchange rates long term as any currency trader will tell you however this isn't relevant to the topic as bringing up exchange rates is simply a deflection to avoid admitting or accepting that oil isn't why the dollar has value which was the point you made that is being refuted.
And back to moving the goal post. The discussion is about where the dollar's value primarily comes from, not about whether energy is more than just a commodity never mind that energy != oil as oil only makes up about ~4% of world energy production. The value of the dollar does not come from oil, it comes from tax payers, that's the truth; deal with it.
Since economies are deeply interconnected it is clear that it is in nobody's interest to allow the US economy to collapse.
The problem of bimetallism (silver/gold) or just gold, is that they are scarce and not suitable to produce enough circulating currency for everyone, so a replacement seemed fair.
But fossil fuels are an environmental liability. Maybe the future is in some crypto-like thing.
