Ask HN: How soon will electric cars replace gasoline cars?

> Any expert or researcher here who can say with facts and not just theory.

It's impossible to predict the future. No one can tell you what's going to happen with facts.

Using the same set of facts (current state of the market and regulations), researchers come up with some wildly different projections. That's why you've seen so many different years (as have I).

The real answer is that no one knows.

One thing to note is that India and China have very aggressive electric car requirements. One (or both, I can't remember) of those countries have mandated that all cars be electric by a certain date.

Very soon! Though not a researched opinion, but still a calculated guess! AI would play a role as most people would not be rich enough to go for fossil cars in the near future. Second, battery packs manufacturers would soon be replacing car engines with electric components. Third, crude oil politics would fade soon, though the price of crude had never been a hindrance in the acceptance of the electric tech, but it did play a role. Fourth, a wild guess, people would feel the need to travel less as tech would help them to do work from home.

I think the best you can do with facts is to simply watch what is currently happening and compare it to what has happened in the past few years. Any prediction is going to be theory, albeit educated theory from some.

Mostly because there are sooo many factors at play and a lot of it is difficult to predict. Infrastructure needs built and it is possible subsidies of different sorts are needed. We still need a robust used electric car market, and it simply hasn't been long enough. We probably also need an easy way to upgrade gasoline cars to electric (I'd look to something that is adapatable across a few sizes/styles of cars or something relying on 3d printing).

That said, I do think the folks reporting replacement by 2018 or 2020 are a bit too hopeful. 1-3 years is all they are giving, and I highly doubt this turnout. Even where I am - electric cars are quite popular in Norway. 2032 seems more likely, especially if you limit the query to new cars being produced or make sure to have enough monetary intervention so that everyone can afford them.

The battery pack in a long-range electric car still costs more than an entire traditional car sells for.

Assembled battery pack cost to the auto manufacturer is around $190/kWh right now, so the 60 kWh battery in a 2017 Chevy Bolt for example costs GM $11,400 at least. The 100 kWh battery in a 2017 Tesla Model S is a roughly $19,000 part.

Electric motors, inverters, DC-DC converters, AC-DC chargers, etc are also costly parts, but contribute less to the cost than the huge battery packs.

There's no way to take cars that retail for $15,000 -- swap a $3,000 traditional powertrain for a $15,000 electric one -- and not double the selling price. If you double the selling price, you're either in a new vehicle segment or you're not going to sell many units.

Until or unless the cost of batteries comes down significantly, electric cars can't move into the vehicle segments with the most new car buyers. It's not going to happen in 2018; even if there's a revolutionary discovery that allows cheaper and higher density batteries, it would take years to commercialize that discovery, then start manufacturing it at scale.

My prediction: EVs don't become a large portion of non-luxury car sales until the mid-2020s at earliest. Luxury car makers are going to start converting first.

What many people don't seem to consider is that it is not about the battery. Even revolutionary changes in battery capacity won't offset the fact that you need electricity to charge them. If you replace your cars with electric ones, your electricity needs are gonna skyrocket.

Hydroelectric plants cannot radically increase their output. Nor you can create new dams at will. Nuclear plants are being dialed back. So the only viable option is to burn fossil fuels in power plants to generate enough electricity.

So essentially you are shifting from burning fossil fuels in small engines to burning them in large plants. Efficiency concerns aside, how does this actually change the status quo? The only benefit of electric cars is being negated. If you bring efficiency into consideration, you might actually end up burning more fuel.

Unless you invent new power generation techniques that do not use fossil fuels and can generate the required amount of electricity, electric cars are basically a hipster dream. Sounds good, but doesn't actually work.

In a sense, they already have. The future is here, today -- it is just unevenly distributed.

Tesla exists as a car company. GM is making battery-powered electric vehicles. So is Nissan. And every car manufacturer that isn't, is at least seriously looking into it, or has a project in the works that we haven't yet heard about.

So, for some people, that replacement has already happened.

The more interesting question is, when are car companies going to stop producing any more internal combustion engine vehicles? When are oil companies going to stop drilling for oil, and processing that into gasoline.

I've heard lots of estimates and wild theories about these latter questions, and I don't have any hard answers for you in this realm. I can say that I think we are going to turn the corner faster than a lot of people realize, and that this time frame will be measured in a relatively short number of years, or maybe a couple of decades.