I like insideevs, but the loading times, page design ux are crazy (with lot of ads and analytics) and you do have more forum participation, but for clear content hybridcars(dot)com, is the a much much better place asthetically, but participation is a bit muted, but the content quality is great.
Tesla has proven that electric cars can be fundamentally superior to their ICE counterparts in nearly all respects, except for cost (for now) and the speed to refuel (which is made moot by the convenience of refueling from home if you have garage access).
The trend toward EVs despite low gas prices should be no more baffling than the trend toward smartphones despite low flip-phone prices.
Final nail in the coffin will be ride sharing services. You won't care as a consumer who just wants a ride, and businesses will purchase electric cars because it makes business sense.
I'm still not convinced about the product life. We have 20 year old ICE vehicles running absolutely perfect (well-maintained and designed ones), is the same possible with an electric car? Also are the byproducts of manufacturing an electric worse than an ICE vehicle. We need to think about the environment as a whole. I'm still convinced electric mass transportation would be better than investing in individual carmakers.
> We need to think about the environment as a whole.
Actually, I'm not so sure about this. It's easy to see the case for "a little more pollution, but far away" over "a little less pollution, constantly hanging over your head".
> I'm still not convinced about the product life. We have 20 year old ICE vehicles running absolutely perfect (well-maintained and designed ones), is the same possible with an electric car?
An electric car has no more than 50 moving parts. For the powertrain, you'd only ever need to swap the battery pack or the electric motor (weighs about 70lbs). Electric vehicles by their nature embody longevity.
> Also are the byproducts of manufacturing an electric worse than an ICE vehicle.
No.
> We need to think about the environment as a whole.
Yes. Electric vehicles are only one part of the mobility equation.
> I'm still convinced electric mass transportation would be better than investing in individual carmakers.
You're going to cover every American suburb with electric mass transit? If so, the cheapest way to do so is with electrified self-driving vehicles.
Electric motors are much simpler and easier to maintain than an ICE. There's no reason you couldn't keep an EV running optimally for 20 years, assuming you replace the battery at regular intervals.
Sorry to nitpick, but it's not about "simplicity". It's mostly about lubrication and temperature gradients.
Wear and fatigue have nothing to do with out brains ability to comprehend the system. But it's usually easier to design reliable machine that is somehow simple. So it appears to layman as if "reliability = low number of moving parts". But it's bit like saying "lots of megahertz makes good computer".
All other things being equal, a CPU that runs at a higher clock rate is faster.
We're also talking about machines that are maintained by human mechanics throughout their lifespans, not Mars rovers. If a machine is simpler in design, it ought to be easier for a mechanic to replace a part, no?
In real life all things are seldom equal. In many cases less moving parts is more reliable. Thats if the parts we're there to give you more features. But sometimes they are there to give you more reliability.
My favorite counter example is car timing belt. Replace it with chain and you add about 200 moving parts, while increasing reliability and maintainability. Now add roller sleeves around the pins of the chain, you doubled the amount of moving parts and again increased the reliability and reduced friction. The thing with chains is that they typically start to make noise long before failure, saving you from complete engine overhaul. Belt might just snap.
(Though for noncritical applications opposite is true. Belt drive requires no lubrication and they are silent and light weight. Id love to replace messy bike chains with belt drive.)
In real life all things are seldom equal. In many cases less moving parts is more reliable. Thats if the parts we're there to give you more features. But sometimes they are there to give you more reliability.
You state this as if it were a dichotomy: that parts only provide features or reliability. That's not true. In many cases, parts exist only because they are essential to a particular design. A fundamentally different design may have fewer parts, better features, and better reliability all at once.
Yeah, the refuel part of the equation seems much smaller than a lot of people make it out to be.
Once you've got parking charging 95% of driving it will be a net time saved(from visiting gas station). On the instance where you'll be driving more than 250mi I haven't yet found the SuperCharger wait times to be an annoyance. There's still a subset that will want fast refuel but I think it's smaller than at first glance.
It still seems like a pretty big deal outside the high end of the market. If you don't own your own home with a garage (which I think is the majority of Americans), how the heck are you meant to plug them in?
Chargers work outside, I fully expect to see charging infrastructure built out for:
-Work parking(Leeds cert already has started this)
-Apartments(upscale working to downscale probably)
-Exterior parking.
Even if you don't have a garage there's no reason you can't still plugin where you park at home(or at work) since most chargers are all weather.
There's also a huge incentive to built charging infra at shopping areas as you've got a captive audience(for 20-30 mins). There was a leaked slide deck a while back from some of the SuperCharger contractors showing businesses in the area where SCs installed seeing at 50% boost in revenue.
Are you thinking of affordable charging, or the commercial chargers that are springing up in parking lots all over the place that cost like $4 an hour? Because I don't see how the latter solves the problem for people who are not rich, but it seems to be the only solution anyone has to offer right now.
I'm not saying I think the problem is intractable, just that I think fueling is still a big problem with EVs for most people.
It's a problem which will go away as popularity grows.
If you have your own garage then you're all set now, obviously.
If you park in a shared garage, it's pretty simple to install a charger there. Garages still have electricity. It could be dedicated for you, or shared with metering. Either way, it's pretty straightforward. What can be hard, depending on who you're dealing with, is convincing the garage owner to let you do this. As EVs become more common, catering to their owners will become more desirable. It's one thing to block installing chargers when one tenant wants one, and quite another when 10% of your tenants want them.
The same story plays out with street parking. In terms of infrastructure it's no big deal, and the main obstacle is political. As EVs become more common, that will go away.
Good news is Oregon(and some other states soon) has laws that your HoA cannot legally prevent you from installing a charger(although at your own cost).
Car parks in the future (in front of apartment complexes, office complexes, shopping malls) will simply have power outlets.
This is already natural in cold climates where you can't leave your car at work or outside the apartment without plugging in your engine heater. I'd guess it's common in Alaska or parts of Canada (it is in e.g. North Scandinavia). It's not very expensive infrastructure.
Yep, in places with snowy winters this is old hat. All outdoor parking spaces associated with housing have electric sockets for block heaters and interior heaters. They are sized to accomodate everyone's heater timer turning on ~simultaneously every morning, I guess on the order of 1 kW per car. (Indoor heaters are higher power than engine block heaters, but not everyone uses them).
Next time it goes dark in the night, look at the streets light in your city.
Whenever you live, if you live in America, Europe or Asia, there is already a big electrical infrastructure installed.
This lighting infrastructure goes unused by day or by night by using more efficient lights(LEDs) that need much less energy and could be controlled much better than old technology.
I have an EV so I had to power the office parking of my company. It took a day. Extremely easy.
> If you don't own your own home with a garage (which I think is the majority of Americans)
I'm not sure why ownership matters... Renting a home with a garage works just as well.
I'm also kind of curious why you think a majority of Americans don't have off-street parking? In suburban and rural areas it's standard to have a garage or at least a permanent parking spot. To me it seems like only in the very densest cities that people have to use street parking. And even in the city there are plenty of apartments/condos with dedicated parking.
What kind of neighborhood is representative of what you're imagining? Maybe I'm just not picturing it right.
Sorry, you're right — poor phrasing on my part. I just meant "have." I meant apartments and condos, where you usually have to park in a parking lot. Parking lots usually don't have outlets for you to plug into, much less the 240v ones that can charge a Model S in less than a week.
The scenario I'm sketching obviously isn't guaranteed, but it's gotta be more than 10% likely and probably less than 85% likely. At the very least it's likely enough to scare conventional carmakers.
Having just purchased a new ICE vehicle, considering I drove my last car for ~13 years, I expect my next car will be both electric or hydrogen fuel cell and fully robotic. If it even makes sense to own a car at that point.
Don't hold your breath on the hydrogen fuel cell. Hydrogen makes a terrible battery. Cynically, I believe the Bush administration pushed hydrogen fuel cells because they knew they were unsuitable, copying the existing paradigm of liquid fuel and filling stations but failing to compete with petroleum on cost, convenience, or even environmental sustainability - in fact all the ways of making hydrogen involve petroleum!
If you live in a place like the PNW where electricity is cheap there's some really awesome synergy there.
First month of owning an EV I put ~3k miles on it at ~$40/mo electricity bill increase. Most EVs range from 230-330 Wh/mi, gas for the car it replaced would have been ~$250. If you drive a lot EVs make sense for a bunch of reasons(no oil changes drop the per-mile cost even lower).
Or somewhere with great solar power potential. For example Kihei on Maui - you can power a whole house with central air and still have enough energy to charge up an EV just with rooftop photovoltaics.
If car manufacturers were having some common sense there would have been a car battery standard that allows easy battery switch at the gas station. In that case the driver's time for refuel is 30 seconds.
That is my general gripe with modern gadgets - we had something very good with AA, but now everything with li-ion is proprietary and impossible to replace/charge outside.
The reason for this is that the battery tech simply isn't really there yet. Battery tech is an intensive research area still, even at the basic sciences level. Does it make sense for companies to standardize if they're still iterating fast on their battery designs?
> “The government is regulating what automakers have to produce to meet new standards, but it isn’t what consumers want to buy,” said Michelle Krebs, an analyst with the firm Autotrader.
Why doesn't the fed just use higher taxes on gas to disincentivize gas guzzlers, and let the market take care of the rest?
US gas prices are ridiculously low compared to most of the developed world.
a long time ago the us decided to tax gas on volume rather than price. if gas is $1 a gallon, the tax is $0.25. if it's $4, the tax is still $0.25. It would be difficult to impose a new gas tax, even more difficult to impose a price based tax.
I think a lot of the oddity in regulation (and taxes) is those are fights that were won. It's not exactly sane, but sometimes you have to go with what's achievable over what's right. And then hope the net effect pushes behavior in the direction you wanted.
A sneaky way would be to set them by percentage when gas was low such that it lowers taxes at the moment, but creates higher taxes on average through the typical boom/bust cycle of gas.
That would disproportionately penalize poor people. Imagine gas prices suddenly spike due to a new gas tax, poor people who can barely afford a used 2001 Toyota Camry are now even worse off, while your typical doctor or software engineer just goes out and buys a fancy new hybrid or electric car.
Sure it may eventually change market conditions to favor electric vehicles, but it will be a long time before there are cheap, used electric vehicles for poor people to buy.
Many cities have local gas taxes that are used to subsidize public transport. In Quebec for example, there is a tax applied only in Montreal (where the public transport system is almost usable, compared to other North American cities), so gas is always 5-10¢/L more expensive in the city. So people living in poorer rural areas aren't affected.
Other upside: a lot of gas stations have closed, converted to apartment/condo buildings, which helps to revitalize parts of the city.
Downside: I don't feel like the provincial government has been investing at all in public transport. On the contrary, they're investing in more unsustainable highways to make suburbans happy. 1960s nostalgia.
In Finland they have envisioned somekind of transmitters to all cars that would signal if the car passes certain border close to Helsinki. This passing would cause 20 cent traffic payment to be billed from that driver. Costs of the system millions, goal is to bring down congestion. (As if people would want to sit in traffic.)
If you are poor, why would you be driving a guzzler like that? Aren't most used US Camrys V6es or at least 2.2-2.4L? I realize if you are poor you might not have much choice, but if I was poor I'd at least aim for an 1.4-1.6L car, even for a full sized model.
If more people made that decision, it would drive up demand and second hand for those cars, meaning it would be more attractive for new car buyers to go for them. For years now it's been the case that manufacturers launch 10 engines in some markets, but in the US they launch with a single guzzler engine option doing 25 mpg or even less.
> That would disproportionately penalize poor people.
Sadly so will climate change. The poor will be fucked no matter what.
That said, you could probably mitigate the issue somewhat by providing tax credits for gas for low income people. Generally proponents of the carbon tax want it to be revenue neutral, which means we have an opportunity to return the money to the people in a fair way.
Sure, everyone loves subsidies when they are the ones getting them.
Having the government pick winners is a losing proposition. The correct solution is to properly price the externalities of ICEs, then let the market sort it out.
I agree carbon tax is the right way to go, although politically it might be difficult(see other thread here). I'd rather have something(subsidies) than nothing at all.
Maybe it was a good thing to prove the viability of electric cars, but I find it hard to believe 5-7k a car is best use of green energy spending. And that's a car that still is mostly just running on coal or natural gas because that is what are grid is made out of.
That story is about rare earth metals. There are no rare earth metals in Tesla's batteries or in their motors:
Tesla does not use rare earth metals in our battery or motor. Typically, rare earth metals apply to DC motors, which use magnets. One of the reasons we use an AC induction motor is it does not require magnets, which often contain the rare earth metals.
Meanwhile in Georgia which used to have one of the best electric vehicle tax credits in the nation has decided to not only gotten rid of it but now requires everyone to pay a $200 tax annually for owning one. [1]
In a way this is understandable since road tax comes from gasoline sale and electric vehicles don't require gas. However I wonder how they will treat something like Chevy Volt that can run on both electricity and gas.
It was very kind of Saudi Arabia to allow us to develop so much oil extraction technology at $100 and now teach us how to use that new technology profitably at $35.
I'm not exactly a fan of fracking and tar sand extraction, but it is quite an achievement.
Move to electric vehicles and produce the electricity needed by burning fossil fuel in large scale regional plants with higher efficiency, where it is also economic to invest in filter systems to reduce pollution.
Cars are going to get much more expensive with these fuel efficiency mandates and the affluent will drive electrics, while everyone else will drive old cars.
We have ever increasing crashworthiness requirements, which make cars heavier, which increases car weight. We have a ratcheting fuel efficiency mandate. The convergence of these two pushes for lighter, more crashworthy cars, which means expensive materials. Electric cars may be price competitive very soon as prices for batteries fall, and as prices for gasoline cars increase.
However, these regulations, while well meaning, will be counter-productive. People simply can't afford new cars anymore and are driving old cars much longer. We have a lot of 1990's engines out there in fairly reliable cars, and these emit far more pollution than a modern car, nevermind the fuel efficiency.
Electric cars trade pump prices for grid prices. In the long run, that should make sense whether there's an oil glut or not, since oil should affect prices in both columns.[0]
Hybrids trade pump prices for cost of additional (non-oil-based) components. That's going to be a better trade when pump prices are high. It's more contingent.
So... low oil prices could mean we should see more electrics, but fewer hybrids.
[0] Should, hasn't yet, I don't know why. So far lower oil costs are reflected in transportation fuel, but not in household electricity costs.[1]
Maybe because the grid just takes a really long time to shift its energy portfolio? Maybe I'm just completely wrong...
"So far lower oil costs are reflected in transportation fuel, but not in household electricity costs."
In 2014, petroleum only accounted for 1% of US electricity generation, so the price of oil isn't likely to have much of an effect on the price of electricity:
Now if the government would just raise the fuel tax, we'd really be in business. Start making up for the drop in prices and incentivize electric vehicles on the consumer side as well.
This is a good point. It's important to remember, though, that local and state governments think in the short term. In the short term, gas vehicles are going to be around for a long time. The average age of cars on U.S. roads is at a record 11.5 years, according to research firm IHS Automotive.[0]
That is to say, if 2015 were the last year anyone could buy a gasoline-fueled car, we'd be looking at 2027 for that last batch to age out.
Gas and oil will not be cheap forever. Now it goes down but when investors or governments want to rise its price, it can be easily changed. Just make some "noises" or "predictions" and the price will be affected.
Besides, electric cars have zero road emission. Drivers will not see the exhaust emissions by themselves. Electric cars shifted the emissions to the power plant so drivers will have less feelings about their contribution to global warming.
It's not just shifting emissions, those emissions are decreased, significantly in places like California with lots of non-carbon electricity, and almost entirely eliminated in places like Norway which have a surplus of clean energy.
And there is a clear path to eliminating the remaining emissions, unlike in an internal combustion vehicle.
> Electric cars shifted the emissions to the power plant so drivers will have less feelings about their contribution to global warming.
Even the filthiest conventional power plants are significantly more efficient than the internal combustion engine and emit fewer greenhouse gasses.
Aside from that, the electric grid is becoming cleaner by the month which means EVs automatically become cleaner as we transition to renewables and clean generation. Gasoline engines never become cleaner.
That's the main sustainability argument for EVs: de-coupling transportation from oil or any particular fuel, thereby enabling a clear path as the grid continues to transition to renewables.
Let's not discount the value of shifting the emissions though. Look at the air quality in major cities and the health effects that has on the billions of urban residents.yes the majority of that might not be from cars but any electric whatsit give us the ability to move the pollution and a world where the emissions are all just moved away from the people is still a better world.
Other than, well we are seeing the results of two to as many of five years of the pipeline coming out finally. It isn't like they can plan for cheap gas. GM would know this best with the second generation Volt landing when gas prices were already on their way down.
The real opportunity here isn't for the automakers, it is for the Congress to change the law with regards to fuel taxes so as to set a floor price on fuel to encourage the shift to more economical vehicles; not necessarily full ev. A tax system could be set to provide a floor and a ceiling - meaning if the product price got to high the tax would decrease a bit to compensate
Still, what did you expect from the big companies in the face of the fleet mileage requirements? You cannot do that without at least hybridization. Finally, with GM, did anyone really expect them to cede the everyday car buyer market when it came to electrics. GM even has the production capacity to make the cars when people want them
81 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 178 ms ] threadit's invite only, though.
It's quite technical, but the content is good.
The trend toward EVs despite low gas prices should be no more baffling than the trend toward smartphones despite low flip-phone prices.
Actually, I'm not so sure about this. It's easy to see the case for "a little more pollution, but far away" over "a little less pollution, constantly hanging over your head".
An electric car has no more than 50 moving parts. For the powertrain, you'd only ever need to swap the battery pack or the electric motor (weighs about 70lbs). Electric vehicles by their nature embody longevity.
> Also are the byproducts of manufacturing an electric worse than an ICE vehicle.
No.
> We need to think about the environment as a whole.
Yes. Electric vehicles are only one part of the mobility equation.
> I'm still convinced electric mass transportation would be better than investing in individual carmakers.
You're going to cover every American suburb with electric mass transit? If so, the cheapest way to do so is with electrified self-driving vehicles.
Wear and fatigue have nothing to do with out brains ability to comprehend the system. But it's usually easier to design reliable machine that is somehow simple. So it appears to layman as if "reliability = low number of moving parts". But it's bit like saying "lots of megahertz makes good computer".
We're also talking about machines that are maintained by human mechanics throughout their lifespans, not Mars rovers. If a machine is simpler in design, it ought to be easier for a mechanic to replace a part, no?
My favorite counter example is car timing belt. Replace it with chain and you add about 200 moving parts, while increasing reliability and maintainability. Now add roller sleeves around the pins of the chain, you doubled the amount of moving parts and again increased the reliability and reduced friction. The thing with chains is that they typically start to make noise long before failure, saving you from complete engine overhaul. Belt might just snap.
(Though for noncritical applications opposite is true. Belt drive requires no lubrication and they are silent and light weight. Id love to replace messy bike chains with belt drive.)
You state this as if it were a dichotomy: that parts only provide features or reliability. That's not true. In many cases, parts exist only because they are essential to a particular design. A fundamentally different design may have fewer parts, better features, and better reliability all at once.
Once you've got parking charging 95% of driving it will be a net time saved(from visiting gas station). On the instance where you'll be driving more than 250mi I haven't yet found the SuperCharger wait times to be an annoyance. There's still a subset that will want fast refuel but I think it's smaller than at first glance.
-Work parking(Leeds cert already has started this)
-Apartments(upscale working to downscale probably)
-Exterior parking.
Even if you don't have a garage there's no reason you can't still plugin where you park at home(or at work) since most chargers are all weather.
There's also a huge incentive to built charging infra at shopping areas as you've got a captive audience(for 20-30 mins). There was a leaked slide deck a while back from some of the SuperCharger contractors showing businesses in the area where SCs installed seeing at 50% boost in revenue.
I'm not saying I think the problem is intractable, just that I think fueling is still a big problem with EVs for most people.
If you have your own garage then you're all set now, obviously.
If you park in a shared garage, it's pretty simple to install a charger there. Garages still have electricity. It could be dedicated for you, or shared with metering. Either way, it's pretty straightforward. What can be hard, depending on who you're dealing with, is convincing the garage owner to let you do this. As EVs become more common, catering to their owners will become more desirable. It's one thing to block installing chargers when one tenant wants one, and quite another when 10% of your tenants want them.
The same story plays out with street parking. In terms of infrastructure it's no big deal, and the main obstacle is political. As EVs become more common, that will go away.
Here almost all of them are metered at 0.24c / kWh(even for chademo) which is about 4x actual electricity rates but much better than that.
This is already natural in cold climates where you can't leave your car at work or outside the apartment without plugging in your engine heater. I'd guess it's common in Alaska or parts of Canada (it is in e.g. North Scandinavia). It's not very expensive infrastructure.
Whenever you live, if you live in America, Europe or Asia, there is already a big electrical infrastructure installed.
This lighting infrastructure goes unused by day or by night by using more efficient lights(LEDs) that need much less energy and could be controlled much better than old technology.
I have an EV so I had to power the office parking of my company. It took a day. Extremely easy.
I'm not sure why ownership matters... Renting a home with a garage works just as well.
I'm also kind of curious why you think a majority of Americans don't have off-street parking? In suburban and rural areas it's standard to have a garage or at least a permanent parking spot. To me it seems like only in the very densest cities that people have to use street parking. And even in the city there are plenty of apartments/condos with dedicated parking.
What kind of neighborhood is representative of what you're imagining? Maybe I'm just not picturing it right.
And the cost is falling with astonishing rapidity: http://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/01/chevrolets-bolt-is-an-el.... We may end up in a situation in which electric cars are cheaper and simpler than ICE cars sooner than is commonly supposed.
The scenario I'm sketching obviously isn't guaranteed, but it's gotta be more than 10% likely and probably less than 85% likely. At the very least it's likely enough to scare conventional carmakers.
First month of owning an EV I put ~3k miles on it at ~$40/mo electricity bill increase. Most EVs range from 230-330 Wh/mi, gas for the car it replaced would have been ~$250. If you drive a lot EVs make sense for a bunch of reasons(no oil changes drop the per-mile cost even lower).
Leafs come in around 230 Wh/mi from what I hear which is even better from a cost perspective.
That is my general gripe with modern gadgets - we had something very good with AA, but now everything with li-ion is proprietary and impossible to replace/charge outside.
Why doesn't the fed just use higher taxes on gas to disincentivize gas guzzlers, and let the market take care of the rest?
US gas prices are ridiculously low compared to most of the developed world.
I think a lot of the oddity in regulation (and taxes) is those are fights that were won. It's not exactly sane, but sometimes you have to go with what's achievable over what's right. And then hope the net effect pushes behavior in the direction you wanted.
Pigouvian taxes on high-carbon fuels are ridiculously unpopular. The median voter (http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Rational-Voter-Democracies-Polici...) does not perceive the TCO of cars, the fuel supply chain, and parking spaces (http://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Free-Parking-Updated/dp/1932...). So CAFE standards and other kinda crappy, second- and third-best workarounds get used instead.
Sure it may eventually change market conditions to favor electric vehicles, but it will be a long time before there are cheap, used electric vehicles for poor people to buy.
Other upside: a lot of gas stations have closed, converted to apartment/condo buildings, which helps to revitalize parts of the city.
Downside: I don't feel like the provincial government has been investing at all in public transport. On the contrary, they're investing in more unsustainable highways to make suburbans happy. 1960s nostalgia.
You Canadians are freaking smart.
Everyone got pissed off, and refuse to pay, but still drive on the highway anyway.
Result: still the same amount of traffic, and now the government is sitting with billions of Rands worth of new debt.
If you are poor, why would you be driving a guzzler like that? Aren't most used US Camrys V6es or at least 2.2-2.4L? I realize if you are poor you might not have much choice, but if I was poor I'd at least aim for an 1.4-1.6L car, even for a full sized model.
If more people made that decision, it would drive up demand and second hand for those cars, meaning it would be more attractive for new car buyers to go for them. For years now it's been the case that manufacturers launch 10 engines in some markets, but in the US they launch with a single guzzler engine option doing 25 mpg or even less.
Sadly so will climate change. The poor will be fucked no matter what.
That said, you could probably mitigate the issue somewhat by providing tax credits for gas for low income people. Generally proponents of the carbon tax want it to be revenue neutral, which means we have an opportunity to return the money to the people in a fair way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug-in_electric_vehicles_in_t...
Having the government pick winners is a losing proposition. The correct solution is to properly price the externalities of ICEs, then let the market sort it out.
Tesla does not use rare earth metals in our battery or motor. Typically, rare earth metals apply to DC motors, which use magnets. One of the reasons we use an AC induction motor is it does not require magnets, which often contain the rare earth metals.
https://my.teslamotors.com/de_AT/forum/forums/no-rare-earth-...
In a way this is understandable since road tax comes from gasoline sale and electric vehicles don't require gas. However I wonder how they will treat something like Chevy Volt that can run on both electricity and gas.
[1] http://www.govtech.com/state/Georgia-Slams-Brakes-on-Electri...
I'm not exactly a fan of fracking and tar sand extraction, but it is quite an achievement.
We have ever increasing crashworthiness requirements, which make cars heavier, which increases car weight. We have a ratcheting fuel efficiency mandate. The convergence of these two pushes for lighter, more crashworthy cars, which means expensive materials. Electric cars may be price competitive very soon as prices for batteries fall, and as prices for gasoline cars increase.
However, these regulations, while well meaning, will be counter-productive. People simply can't afford new cars anymore and are driving old cars much longer. We have a lot of 1990's engines out there in fairly reliable cars, and these emit far more pollution than a modern car, nevermind the fuel efficiency.
Did sales of electric cars grow or decrease in 2015 compared to 2014. Answer: http://insideevs.com/monthly-plug-in-sales-scorecard/
What about sales of ICEs? http://www.zacks.com/stock/news/202980/us-auto-sales-hit-all...
So if overall car sales are up by EV sales are down, tell me why we are so bullish on EVs?
Hybrids trade pump prices for cost of additional (non-oil-based) components. That's going to be a better trade when pump prices are high. It's more contingent.
So... low oil prices could mean we should see more electrics, but fewer hybrids.
[0] Should, hasn't yet, I don't know why. So far lower oil costs are reflected in transportation fuel, but not in household electricity costs.[1] Maybe because the grid just takes a really long time to shift its energy portfolio? Maybe I'm just completely wrong...
[1] http://www.eia.gov/pressroom/presentations/sieminski_0226201... : slide 11.
[2] Yes, embedded footnotes. And unreferenced footnotes. Madness.
In 2014, petroleum only accounted for 1% of US electricity generation, so the price of oil isn't likely to have much of an effect on the price of electricity:
http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=427&t=3
That is to say, if 2015 were the last year anyone could buy a gasoline-fueled car, we'd be looking at 2027 for that last batch to age out.
[0]http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-ihs-average-c...
Besides, electric cars have zero road emission. Drivers will not see the exhaust emissions by themselves. Electric cars shifted the emissions to the power plant so drivers will have less feelings about their contribution to global warming.
And there is a clear path to eliminating the remaining emissions, unlike in an internal combustion vehicle.
Even the filthiest conventional power plants are significantly more efficient than the internal combustion engine and emit fewer greenhouse gasses.
Aside from that, the electric grid is becoming cleaner by the month which means EVs automatically become cleaner as we transition to renewables and clean generation. Gasoline engines never become cleaner.
That's the main sustainability argument for EVs: de-coupling transportation from oil or any particular fuel, thereby enabling a clear path as the grid continues to transition to renewables.
The real opportunity here isn't for the automakers, it is for the Congress to change the law with regards to fuel taxes so as to set a floor price on fuel to encourage the shift to more economical vehicles; not necessarily full ev. A tax system could be set to provide a floor and a ceiling - meaning if the product price got to high the tax would decrease a bit to compensate
Still, what did you expect from the big companies in the face of the fleet mileage requirements? You cannot do that without at least hybridization. Finally, with GM, did anyone really expect them to cede the everyday car buyer market when it came to electrics. GM even has the production capacity to make the cars when people want them