I love the idea of "EV everywhere", but failing to acknowledge that vast swathes of the world do not have electric grids capable of supporting "all new cars are EV", or in some cases any grid at all, seems questionable.
Covid, a temporary vehicle disruption, caused used vehicles to appreciate in value instead of depreciate. The market is not very robust at all, unless you think paying above sticker price for a used car is something people can do. Keep in mind the people who would need to buy these are not the landlords who can install the infrastructure.
There are probably a half dozen platforms that we could declare 'good enough' and stop all major R&D in. Maybe some changes to the interior/self driving systems as those are being researched for EVs anyway. Maybe some minor tweaks to the internals as issues are identified at scale. The design and production is good today, and it wouldn't be a major loss if they represent the height of consumer ICE while EVs take over.
A large reason why car manufactures update model lines is to comply with updating emissions, efficiency, and safety regulations. This is the environmental condition that forces major model refreshes.
You’re not going to believe me, but: you can literally just charge an electric car with a 120V outlet.
Generation capacity is also not a problem. The US used to double electricity generation every decade for like three or four decades in a row in the middle of the 20th century. A single doubling would be more than enough to power all electric cars, and there is no way we are going to switch all of them over to electric immediately. It would take 10 years from today if literally not a single new gasoline vehicle was sold in the US and EVs magically boosted production today to compensate. Oh even incredibly optimistically, you’re talking about two decades to transition which is much more time than needed to produce enough electricity. This is not at all the showstopper that folks on the internet claim it is with even a cursory look at historical data.
In fact, electric companies need the additional demand to help justify and pay for building out new clean electricity production. The extra electric demand is essential for preventing a cost spiral as we transition to clean electricity. But again, that is sort of the opposite of what every commentator on the Internet says.
> You’re not going to believe me, but: you can literally just charge an electric car with a 120V outlet.
This is probably not viable for the majority of people. The median commute in the USA is 41 miles round trip. Depending on city/highway miles and driving style, you're looking at 10-14kWh that you need to replace. On a 120v outlet you're looking at 1kW-1.5kW depending on EVSE and your house's wiring, so the window is going to be something like 7-14 hours of plug-in time just to offset your commute. Run some errands, go out for dinner with friends for a few hours, and the battery situation quickly gets dire for the average person (keep in mind that 50% of people have even longer commutes than that!)
(edit: 120v charging is also fairly inefficient, so your 1kw charger may only deliver 800w. I didn't incorporate this in my #s)
A lot of people with shorter distance commutes are also going to be in urban areas, where condos/apartments are more common and you can't just plug into a random 120v outlet safely/legally (some municipalities have legalized running extension cords across the sidewalk but I don't think this is scalable- imagine an apartment building with 100 extension cords running from the street into people's windows).
I think we're a long way from EVs being usable for everyone (although I think EVs are also viable for a lot more situations than people expect- it's just dependent on factors like proximity to L2/L3 charging, whether or not you can charge at work, etc)
You’re at home 12-15 hours per day, and with all the pure BEvs you can get today, you can buffer over the weekend too. 1.2kW gets you 14.4-18kWh. 4 miles per kWh is common for Tesla’s most popular Model 3 and Model Y, and improvements are coming. So 58-72 miles per day and more on the weekend. Much more than enough for the average commute, and you can buffer 250-400 miles. And if you need more, just use Superchargers. Overall you’d STILL spend less time at fast chargers than typically used for gas stations.
Plus destination chargers and charging at work.
This works much better than you might think if you’ve never tried it yourself.
I think the real fun is when we get more than 50% of the way, because the remaining gas-powered things need to have refineries and distributio too, and I have not kept track of what the plastics and other oil-consuming industries will do when gasoline becomes less in demand.
Electric lawn mowers, weed whackers, etc have been around for decades. School buses, utility vehicles, farm equipment (some things that are diesel, too) will all need power. If your combine and harvester require diesel and unit economics drives the price of diesel through the roof, your food will cost somewhat more. As will the cost of delivery.
What's the state of electrification of heavy machinery?
Operating cost of tractors and harvesters, etc, may fall dramatically, in fact, as battery powered operation is cheaper than diesel. Same for electric semi trucks.
Not my intention at all, and to be honest, I still don't see it. It's likely I'm not recognizing the full connotations of my phrasing (some of which was borrowed from the comment I was replying to). I've edited the comment to try to use more neutral phrasing.
these companies have global supply chains across dozens of countries, multi year contracts with suppliers, many existing locations and tens, if not hundreds of thousands of employees. It's not a videogame, you can't just open a dropdown menu and declare you're now a different company.
Also of course the customers aren't there. EV sales in Japan is 2% of the market, 7% in the US, 15% in Europe and China. Makes no sense to drop everything and ignore 90% of your consumers.
That’s true, which is why countries are enacting new fossil fuel vehicle sales by future deadlines. It gives industry time to reconfigure but also doesn’t let them off the hook to deliver.
There are a lot of parallel actions that need to occur. Many many landlords will need to be forced by statute to provide charging facilities. For the many who only have street parking, their mobility and therefore economic productivity will be a problem unless the city and regional transportation dynamics also change. I don't see every lamppost becoming a charger, and there are more parking places than streetlights anyway.
Right, and landlords are not the only barrier either.
To accommodate the larger loads from charging EVs landlords will need larger grid hookups. They’re expensive and utilities don’t just give those out, they build them to sell you more electricity. If none of your tenants own EVs (yet), the utility will still want compensation for their investment regardless. Who provides that is not answered nationally, but by state utility commissions.
There’s lots of parties involved to answer the EV infrastructure question, electrical coops, investor owned utilities, property management companies, utility boards, local, state, and national governments. They all have vastly different incentives and electric car users need them all to walk in lock step to provide adequate EV infrastructure. I don’t see that happening without a serious public mandate, and visionary charismatic leadership.
By the concerns you raise, we need to note that "landlord" covers a lot of ground. There are owners of large buildings, and there are owners of one or two small apartment buildings, and there are owners of grandma's house rented out or one half of a two-family. Each has its own challenge.
Even as a property owner, the wife's car in the driveway put mine in the street.
This is such an understated point, especially on HN! EVs can be great for certain use cases and individuals but, as as renter, do not fit my situation at all.
EVs use energy much more effectively and can be charged from local renewables. The import of petrol and its distribution is also a massive headache in many places. What is likely needed though is a way to charge EVs ar just a couple of hundred watts, to not overload anything.
You need (at current market rates) something in excess of $10k in solar panels to be able to fully charge an EV, plus additional high power charging equipment so that you can get more than a few miles of charge per hour. The other generally available renewable is wind.
Wind generators look like prices are somewhere around a dollar per watt of maximum output once you get beyond low end ~400W outputs. So again you're looking at 10s of thousands of dollars in hardware.
Both Solar and Wind are not continuous generators, so you'll need batteries, which for a reasonable capacity you're looking at more than 10k.
There are micro hydro generators but they all require a reasonable head and flow, and the way they throw around generation figures I couldn't work out when they were talking maximum output vs cumulative output over a day, month, or year (TBF this is a common problem with all discussions I can find about home power generation).
Geothermal generators are out of the question, they're not generally available, and there's no real small scale story that generates power in "I have an EV" quantities that I can find.
Do you have evidence this situation is common? No claim of inter-division sabotage is mentioned in the linked article and I have not heard similar claims.
I don't doubt that sabotage happens inside dysfunctional organizations. There are plenty of stories of internal sabotage. However, I don't know of any evidence that this is either a widespread occurrence between ICE and EV divisions or that this is a problem inside specific automakers.
The unfortunate reality is that EVs are still quite expensive for some applications and it's pretty critical that the world is able to move things and people around for the system to function. There are plenty of people that need the inexpensive transport that ICEs provide. We all know that there are externalities that cost doesn't account for, but until they are accounted for the choice between an EV and an ICE is not really a choice at all for billions of people.
If we cared about inexpensive transport, then we'd build out more trains and public transport. Most people use cars because the public transport in their city is somewhere between shitty and nonexistent.
This is true in high-density to medium-high density situations, like most of the east coast. I challenge you to describe such a system that works for eastern Montana. The US is very large, and a lot of important things are done in places where the density is insufficient to support a greyhound route, let alone high speed rail.
Not everyone lives in a city, and if they did the nation would cease to function.
I'm oversimplifying here, but carmakers do need EV divisions to bridge the gap. They need to be independent but be supported by the top of the organization. There's way too many stakeholders involved in the ICE orgs that could hamper progress here.
Another thing - these companies need to commit to building actual EV-first platforms instead of doing the weird platforms that supports both ICE and BEV which come with tradeoffs in packaging and driving dynamics.
In the near term (1-3 years), no role in a traditional oems has incentives to make evs.
dealers make money from maintenance. evs have less maintence.
car salesmen are trained to negotiate, not educate consumers about evs.
factory workers/unions: evs require less factory workers.
many engineers have the wrong skills for evs.
executives also have the wrong skills. they are trained to negotiate with suppliers and focus on core competency. core competency changes from manufacturing engines to battery and electric drive train. innovation may require insourcing if suppliers fail.
investors want dividends and not to speculate on evs.
imho, it makes more sense for startups and tech companies to make evs.
There's no need to speculate on the EV market. Especially in most western countries. EVs are here and people want them.
VW alone had a backlog of 300.000 cars in 2022.
Companies care about making a profit and even the stoic Germans that where mostly wishy-washy for a long time on their strategy, have finally started to mass-producing them.
I agree... the speculation is becoming less on the market and more on whether these companies can execute. Everyione knows it's in their long term interest to make EVs.
However, registration of new cars is up quite a bit in Germany.
EVs actually outpaced Diesel in Germany. [0]
A lot of those sales are from purchases from 2022 though as companies couldn't produce enough then because of chip shortage.
VW, and EVs, in Germany are dropping a bit but that's not necessarily because people don't want EVs on principal. Last year was the energy crisis and some people are now stuck with contracts paying 50Cents/kWh. Inflation is still high and Germany is in a recession. Some analyst argue that car sales will have slump this year, not just EVs, because of this.
Volkswagen, and the rest of the German manufacturers in particular, also have no cheap EV cars.
The cheapest EV car VW has is the e-up which is a miniature city car and that starts at 30k. The gas version starts at 14k. It's no wonder, even with subsidies, that they have issues selling them.
And no one cares, because California is not the world. Yes, it's a great place to live, but people in California need to stop pretending the rest of the world looks like them. Not to mention California is not problem free. EVs work great but you're running out of water. Once those desalination plants fire up, and they're coming, EVs won't be that cheap to run any longer.
We are not running out of water. We have drought, not shortage.
Most of the water goes to agriculture, much of it not well suited to the climate. Most of the rest is for non-functional grass (won’t ever be used, just to look at).
There is no other place on the planet that has the exact same mix of electricity costs, government incentives, favourable weather and a myriad of other factors that make California an excellent place to own EVs.
This surprised me too. PG&E is now up to $.36 per kwh off-peak. A 333 mile 80kwh model 3 costs $0.09/mile to operate. A Prius with a 56 mpg fuel economy and 11.3 gallon tank can go 630 miles. At $4.50 gas that’s $0.08/mile
Okay, we will just ignore the 50-70% of customers who do not want an EV now - We don't want their money. Batteries are getting better every day but a lot of people:
1. Don't live in a house with a charger.
2. Don't want to drive to a DC charger and sit there once a week.
3. Can't afford a $60K SUV for their family.
4. Want lifestyle vehicles like jeeps, trucks, vans etc. that require much larger and more expensive batteries.
Just so we're clear: a charger can plug into a normal wall plug, so if you have a garage with a wall plug then you're set. If not, you're talking about paying <$500 (and probably less than half that) for an electricial to fix that.
Sure, and there are about 100,000,000 gas powered cars in the US. Even if every company stopped producing gas cars immediately, there still would be no shortage of gas cars for decades.
And, many apartment dwellers either have easier access to public transit and walkable tasks, and so make fewer car trips than single family home folk, and they make shorter car trips since they live in a denser environments where everything is closer.
No, not sacrifice. Even if all ICE car production ended tomorrow, there are 100M cars in the US.
And my point wasn't that apartment dwellers won't get to have cars any more, just that they would rely on destination charging, or hopping over to a supercharger-esque place for 15 minutes/week. I wouldn't want to use public chargers only with my EV, but that is because I live in a rural area and therefore need to drive a lot. If all of my trips were 1/3rd the distance I don't think I would mind using a public charger to stay charged.
Then go drive your car to a charging station sometimes and make a phone call or eat a sandwich. Is it really so dramatically different than filling up gas at the gas station? The only dramatic difference is EV charging is vastly cheaper for the consumer.
It takes only a few minutes to fill a tank with gas. It takes so little time you have maybe just enough time to get a drink out of a vending machine or fridge. No one goes to a gas station to eat lunch. Most gas stations aren't staffed or set up to serve food even if people wanted to.
Obviously the infrastructure will evolve. People will adapt. The world will keep spinning. I honestly don't understand how most people survive in a constantly changing world when even the slightest deviation from their repetitive norm results in throwing their hands in the air and giving up!
Many garages are not attached or people park on the street! Also level 1 charge is reeeeally slow. It works fine with my PHEV (only a 14 kWh battery) but would not be able to charge a fully used EV battery overnight
My option for charging my car would be dropping an extension cable from the fifth floor where I live, down to street level and then to wherever within 1.5km I found a parking space.
Yeah and a normal wall plug will run at 20 amps, which will take almost 10x longer to charge a car than a Supercharger. Meanwhile, a ton of people rent and can't arbitrarily add chargers to their home. Even if they own, it's common for many cars to need to park on the street far from access to a plug.
Have a look at Europe. Many many people there live in apartment buildings. Some not even a garage. Others can't install chargers because the owner and the local government all have to agree.
It's just not that easy...
I myself know people who would happily pay. But the town didn't allow them to have a charger cus then theyd have to allow it for everyone and then the grid around their apartment complex couldn't handle it.
> Just so we're clear: a charger can plug into a normal wall plug, so if you have a garage with a wall plug then you're set. If not, you're talking about paying <$500 (and probably less than half that) for an electricial to fix that.
About 2/3 of US housing units have either a garage or carport; about 1/3 do not, and some carports (especially for units that aren’t detached single-family homes) are detached overhead shelters without electrical infrastructure not convenient to connect to the panel for the home.
The infrastructure will catch up as sales increase. A lot of people who say they don't want them can be convinced pretty quickly. Anyone who wants vehicles that will never be electric can just deal with it and pay exorbitant markups to make us deal with their frivolous emissions.
> we will just ignore the 50-70% of customers who do not want an EV now
Most of them do not want an EV because of the charging+range situation. I agree fast chargers need to be more universally available like gas stations are today. Range concerns are relieved when fast charging is everywhere.
Really what I think we need is for gas stations to just put in 2-4 charging stalls. Maybe replace one of their gas pumps with a charger. Electricity is already everywhere, including at gas stations. Our infrastructure will need to upgrade just as much as our vehicles.
> Batteries are getting better every day
More like every decade, but yes. They are trending better!
> 1. Don't live in a house with a charger.
(US) Standard 120v plugs can charge a car. Not much, but can usually recover a daily commute overnight, which is, I dunno, the vast majority of vehicle usage? Even then, a dryer plug can recharge that use in just a couple hours.
That said, apartment complexes and parking garages MUST take action for this to work. But I think consumers will demand it more and more and the pressure will be unavoidable at some point.
> 2. Don't want to drive to a DC charger and sit there once a week.
They're already doing this with gas stations. But you can charge at home or at work or while shopping! Only use fast DC chargers when you're traveling or already out running errands. It's in businesses' best interest to put a couple DC fast chargers in their parking lot anyway.
> 3. Can't afford a $60K SUV for their family.
Not everyone needs an SUV, let alone a $60K one. Besides, as manufacturers commit to making more EVs, they will become more affordable and people WILL buy them.
> 4. Want lifestyle vehicles like jeeps, trucks, vans etc. that require much larger and more expensive batteries.
I don't think gas cars are going entirely away soon, but we should at least flip the ratio so that there are only as many gas cars as there are EVs right now. For the most part, gas cars should be the lifestyle toys; not the other way around.
--
PS. I don't think EV prices will ever stay as low as gas cars (scaled with inflation) since, at least so far, their overall reliability is higher and maintenance costs much lower. So few moving parts. No engine, no transmission, no oil, no explosions (hopefully), and almost no use of brakes! Worst-case scenarios I've seen (rarely) so far include swapping out the battery or replacing the computer. With regular tire and glass care, along with occasional HVAC service, they should last quite a long time. So the higher cost is an investment that yields much longer returns.
> Really what I think we need is for gas stations to just put in 2-4 charging stalls. Maybe replace one of their gas pumps with a charger.
You can't just replace one thing with another. Replacing gas pumps with fast charger alone has a ton of problems. The most obvious is even the fastest charging EV charges slower than even a land whale SUV can fill its tank.
I've seen few gas stations with a layout such that someone parked at a pump for 20 minutes wouldn't cause a huge traffic problem both at the station and spilling into the street.
Then you've got to route a high voltage power line right by gas pumps and tanks. Typically at a gas station you want to minimize ignition sources.
Then there's getting enough power to the station itself. If the station doesn't have the right power running to it, say it's only on a single phase power. Tesla doesn't just plop super charger stations just anywhere.
Because charging takes a while charging stations tend to be sited near actual destinations while gas stations are sites at intersections and freeway off ramps. No one will want to use a charger at a gas station and be stuck with only a couple vending machines for food and drink.
It's a better investment to put EV charger at locations a car would reasonably sit for a half hour or more like a parking garage/lot.
I don't think the suggestion here is to throw out all the ICE cars currently in production — just to focus all new development efforts on EVs. Everyone would still be able to buy ICE cars if they need them, but the suggestion is for EVs to be the default and ICE to be the "oh, you don't have a garage? We can accommodate that" option.
The article says that any new ICE designs that have been started should be completed. Given that's a 7 year cycle, that means that manufacturers who follow the advice will be introducing new combustion vehicles for the rest of the decade.
Those designs can then be sold for at least another decade. I hope by 2040 there is little demand for combustion vehicles...
Even then CA and a lot of other places said they’re going to stop allowing sales of new gas cars by 2035 and considering the auto industry could lobby that bill out of existence if they really wanted to that means the major auto players are planning on phasing out EV sales by 2035.
I think automakers should think more about composite materials and solar panels. Electric vehicles are in demand and sort of inevitable for most people, but EVs with upgradeable solar panels is the way to go. Efficiency in those panels may not be perfect, or even great, but one day they will. Then we will have truly grid-free transpiration for most people, in most places.
Who cares what disruption comes from arbitrarily limiting carbon, nitrogen, etc. — starvation is for the plebs, while I am a noble savior for causing a famine to solve problems a century away!
Where does the electric energy required to replace all cars with electrical ones comes from? We already have energy problems in EU, how would we handle massive increases for EVs?
Burn the oil that would have gone into cars in a power plant... You can propel an EV 2-3x as far as an ICE vehicle with the same amount of oil because power plants are much more efficient than car engines.
In addition, you offset the electricity used to refine the oil into gasoline/diesel which I saw a study once that said it could get us 25% of the way to making up the increased electricity demand from EVs.
So basically we would like to cut down on using oil by… burning more oil.
And how are EVs more efficient then standard cars if they have less range and don’t work as well in certain climates and can’t go where the electricity is not readily available?
We are already polluting the environment by burning stuff for electricity, how does any of this help?
And where to we get all the chemicals for the batteries and what do we do with them when they are useless?
> So basically we would like to cut down on using oil by… burning more oil.
For now. Until we build more renewable energy plants. Miles per ton of CO2 is better with EVs no matter how you power the EV.
> And how are EVs more efficient then standard cars if they have less range and don’t work as well in certain climates and can’t go where the electricity is not readily available?
EVs are less convenient, no argument there. But they're still more efficient. Even in cold climates. 90% of new vehicles sold in Norway are EVs or plug-in hybrids.
> We are already polluting the environment by burning stuff for electricity, how does any of this help?
Switch to renewables and then you stop burning stuff. Until then, burning oil for power is better than burning oil to propel cars.
> And where to we get all the chemicals for the batteries and what do we do with them when they are useless?
Tesla recycles 90% of the important metals in their batteries.
The overly simplified armchair analysis is overly simplified. EVs and ICE vehicles are apples and oranges. Separate divisions are absolutely required to have a smooth manufacturing transition.
You are a car manufacturer, you have to choose how you allocate resources. Most of your income comes from ICE vehicles, and only some from EV. So you give most RD resources to ICE because it makes most money, good business sense. Some years pass, and the market of EV’s grow. But you still make most of your profits from ICE, so you only grow EV resources a bit.
More years pass. Now the market flips, 60% EV, 40% ICE. So:
- ICE is making a loss, because there is not enough demand
- EV is making a loss, because you did not invest enough, and cant keep up with competitors which went all in.
-> You cant invest more to EV, because you don't have the money, and if you could, you would still be years behind.
Yes. I agree completely. It’s the traditional investors dilemma or counter positioning (7 Powers book). The solution is the mantra from the previous Microsoft CEO: "Be bold and be right". You can say what you want about Ballmer, but I think he was right on this one.
I personally think electrified vehicles are the way to go. They're quieter, accelerate faster, require a lot less maintenance and don't smell as bad.
However, I'm not convinced lithium batteries are the answer. It's a fairly limited material, recycling is super difficult. With higher volumes it doesn't seem prices are shifting much. And that's all without the charging problem.
Hydrogen may solve a lot of problems? But it has its own set.
Going entirely in on lithium EVs today feels a bit premature.
Honestly we need more EV’s with worse battery tech. We have alternatives to lithium ion like LIFEPO4 and we should make more cars that use them and are cheaper as a result
> Going entirely in on lithium EVs today feels a bit premature.
Exactly. It's like when they phased out paper bags claiming that plastic could be reused and it was better for the environment to spare the trees, and then only later it was realized that plastic bags became a major pollution source and the decision was made to slowly try to roll out paper bags again.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 201 ms ] threadIf I'm an automaker, I'm going to root for all of my competitors to drop internal combustion immediately and have it all to myself.
Meanwhile the rest of the company is free to do the switch.
A large reason why car manufactures update model lines is to comply with updating emissions, efficiency, and safety regulations. This is the environmental condition that forces major model refreshes.
Generation capacity is also not a problem. The US used to double electricity generation every decade for like three or four decades in a row in the middle of the 20th century. A single doubling would be more than enough to power all electric cars, and there is no way we are going to switch all of them over to electric immediately. It would take 10 years from today if literally not a single new gasoline vehicle was sold in the US and EVs magically boosted production today to compensate. Oh even incredibly optimistically, you’re talking about two decades to transition which is much more time than needed to produce enough electricity. This is not at all the showstopper that folks on the internet claim it is with even a cursory look at historical data.
In fact, electric companies need the additional demand to help justify and pay for building out new clean electricity production. The extra electric demand is essential for preventing a cost spiral as we transition to clean electricity. But again, that is sort of the opposite of what every commentator on the Internet says.
This is probably not viable for the majority of people. The median commute in the USA is 41 miles round trip. Depending on city/highway miles and driving style, you're looking at 10-14kWh that you need to replace. On a 120v outlet you're looking at 1kW-1.5kW depending on EVSE and your house's wiring, so the window is going to be something like 7-14 hours of plug-in time just to offset your commute. Run some errands, go out for dinner with friends for a few hours, and the battery situation quickly gets dire for the average person (keep in mind that 50% of people have even longer commutes than that!)
(edit: 120v charging is also fairly inefficient, so your 1kw charger may only deliver 800w. I didn't incorporate this in my #s)
A lot of people with shorter distance commutes are also going to be in urban areas, where condos/apartments are more common and you can't just plug into a random 120v outlet safely/legally (some municipalities have legalized running extension cords across the sidewalk but I don't think this is scalable- imagine an apartment building with 100 extension cords running from the street into people's windows).
I think we're a long way from EVs being usable for everyone (although I think EVs are also viable for a lot more situations than people expect- it's just dependent on factors like proximity to L2/L3 charging, whether or not you can charge at work, etc)
Plus destination chargers and charging at work.
This works much better than you might think if you’ve never tried it yourself.
Electric lawn mowers, weed whackers, etc have been around for decades. School buses, utility vehicles, farm equipment (some things that are diesel, too) will all need power. If your combine and harvester require diesel and unit economics drives the price of diesel through the roof, your food will cost somewhat more. As will the cost of delivery. What's the state of electrification of heavy machinery?
Also of course the customers aren't there. EV sales in Japan is 2% of the market, 7% in the US, 15% in Europe and China. Makes no sense to drop everything and ignore 90% of your consumers.
To accommodate the larger loads from charging EVs landlords will need larger grid hookups. They’re expensive and utilities don’t just give those out, they build them to sell you more electricity. If none of your tenants own EVs (yet), the utility will still want compensation for their investment regardless. Who provides that is not answered nationally, but by state utility commissions.
There’s lots of parties involved to answer the EV infrastructure question, electrical coops, investor owned utilities, property management companies, utility boards, local, state, and national governments. They all have vastly different incentives and electric car users need them all to walk in lock step to provide adequate EV infrastructure. I don’t see that happening without a serious public mandate, and visionary charismatic leadership.
Even as a property owner, the wife's car in the driveway put mine in the street.
Wind generators look like prices are somewhere around a dollar per watt of maximum output once you get beyond low end ~400W outputs. So again you're looking at 10s of thousands of dollars in hardware.
Both Solar and Wind are not continuous generators, so you'll need batteries, which for a reasonable capacity you're looking at more than 10k.
There are micro hydro generators but they all require a reasonable head and flow, and the way they throw around generation figures I couldn't work out when they were talking maximum output vs cumulative output over a day, month, or year (TBF this is a common problem with all discussions I can find about home power generation).
Geothermal generators are out of the question, they're not generally available, and there's no real small scale story that generates power in "I have an EV" quantities that I can find.
Rather than firing somebody you just let them be re-org'd down to nothing.
I don't doubt that sabotage happens inside dysfunctional organizations. There are plenty of stories of internal sabotage. However, I don't know of any evidence that this is either a widespread occurrence between ICE and EV divisions or that this is a problem inside specific automakers.
Not everyone lives in a city, and if they did the nation would cease to function.
Another thing - these companies need to commit to building actual EV-first platforms instead of doing the weird platforms that supports both ICE and BEV which come with tradeoffs in packaging and driving dynamics.
dealers make money from maintenance. evs have less maintence.
car salesmen are trained to negotiate, not educate consumers about evs.
factory workers/unions: evs require less factory workers.
many engineers have the wrong skills for evs.
executives also have the wrong skills. they are trained to negotiate with suppliers and focus on core competency. core competency changes from manufacturing engines to battery and electric drive train. innovation may require insourcing if suppliers fail.
investors want dividends and not to speculate on evs.
imho, it makes more sense for startups and tech companies to make evs.
VW alone had a backlog of 300.000 cars in 2022.
Companies care about making a profit and even the stoic Germans that where mostly wishy-washy for a long time on their strategy, have finally started to mass-producing them.
https://insideevs.com/news/584419/volkswagen-evs-sold-out-eu...
https://thedriven.io/2023/07/06/customer-resistance-volkswag...
However, registration of new cars is up quite a bit in Germany. EVs actually outpaced Diesel in Germany. [0]
A lot of those sales are from purchases from 2022 though as companies couldn't produce enough then because of chip shortage.
VW, and EVs, in Germany are dropping a bit but that's not necessarily because people don't want EVs on principal. Last year was the energy crisis and some people are now stuck with contracts paying 50Cents/kWh. Inflation is still high and Germany is in a recession. Some analyst argue that car sales will have slump this year, not just EVs, because of this.
Volkswagen, and the rest of the German manufacturers in particular, also have no cheap EV cars. The cheapest EV car VW has is the e-up which is a miniature city car and that starts at 30k. The gas version starts at 14k. It's no wonder, even with subsidies, that they have issues selling them.
[0] https://www.marklines.com/en/statistics/flash_sales/automoti...
EVs remains widely unpopular for valid reasons.
The government should stop trying to so drastically re-engineer the industrial economy given the potential for unforseen wide ranging consequences.
Most of the water goes to agriculture, much of it not well suited to the climate. Most of the rest is for non-functional grass (won’t ever be used, just to look at).
This will all fix itself sooner or later.
1. Don't live in a house with a charger. 2. Don't want to drive to a DC charger and sit there once a week. 3. Can't afford a $60K SUV for their family. 4. Want lifestyle vehicles like jeeps, trucks, vans etc. that require much larger and more expensive batteries.
Just so we're clear: a charger can plug into a normal wall plug, so if you have a garage with a wall plug then you're set. If not, you're talking about paying <$500 (and probably less than half that) for an electricial to fix that.
I'd love to be able to get an EV, but it's a no go. Also, there are no electric family MPVs.
https://www.builderonline.com/money/economics/80-percent-of-...
And, many apartment dwellers either have easier access to public transit and walkable tasks, and so make fewer car trips than single family home folk, and they make shorter car trips since they live in a denser environments where everything is closer.
So, I think this issue may be overblown.
And my point wasn't that apartment dwellers won't get to have cars any more, just that they would rely on destination charging, or hopping over to a supercharger-esque place for 15 minutes/week. I wouldn't want to use public chargers only with my EV, but that is because I live in a rural area and therefore need to drive a lot. If all of my trips were 1/3rd the distance I don't think I would mind using a public charger to stay charged.
About 2/3 of US housing units have either a garage or carport; about 1/3 do not, and some carports (especially for units that aren’t detached single-family homes) are detached overhead shelters without electrical infrastructure not convenient to connect to the panel for the home.
Most of them do not want an EV because of the charging+range situation. I agree fast chargers need to be more universally available like gas stations are today. Range concerns are relieved when fast charging is everywhere.
Really what I think we need is for gas stations to just put in 2-4 charging stalls. Maybe replace one of their gas pumps with a charger. Electricity is already everywhere, including at gas stations. Our infrastructure will need to upgrade just as much as our vehicles.
> Batteries are getting better every day
More like every decade, but yes. They are trending better!
> 1. Don't live in a house with a charger.
(US) Standard 120v plugs can charge a car. Not much, but can usually recover a daily commute overnight, which is, I dunno, the vast majority of vehicle usage? Even then, a dryer plug can recharge that use in just a couple hours.
That said, apartment complexes and parking garages MUST take action for this to work. But I think consumers will demand it more and more and the pressure will be unavoidable at some point.
> 2. Don't want to drive to a DC charger and sit there once a week.
They're already doing this with gas stations. But you can charge at home or at work or while shopping! Only use fast DC chargers when you're traveling or already out running errands. It's in businesses' best interest to put a couple DC fast chargers in their parking lot anyway.
> 3. Can't afford a $60K SUV for their family.
Not everyone needs an SUV, let alone a $60K one. Besides, as manufacturers commit to making more EVs, they will become more affordable and people WILL buy them.
> 4. Want lifestyle vehicles like jeeps, trucks, vans etc. that require much larger and more expensive batteries.
I don't think gas cars are going entirely away soon, but we should at least flip the ratio so that there are only as many gas cars as there are EVs right now. For the most part, gas cars should be the lifestyle toys; not the other way around.
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PS. I don't think EV prices will ever stay as low as gas cars (scaled with inflation) since, at least so far, their overall reliability is higher and maintenance costs much lower. So few moving parts. No engine, no transmission, no oil, no explosions (hopefully), and almost no use of brakes! Worst-case scenarios I've seen (rarely) so far include swapping out the battery or replacing the computer. With regular tire and glass care, along with occasional HVAC service, they should last quite a long time. So the higher cost is an investment that yields much longer returns.
You can't just replace one thing with another. Replacing gas pumps with fast charger alone has a ton of problems. The most obvious is even the fastest charging EV charges slower than even a land whale SUV can fill its tank.
I've seen few gas stations with a layout such that someone parked at a pump for 20 minutes wouldn't cause a huge traffic problem both at the station and spilling into the street.
Then you've got to route a high voltage power line right by gas pumps and tanks. Typically at a gas station you want to minimize ignition sources.
Then there's getting enough power to the station itself. If the station doesn't have the right power running to it, say it's only on a single phase power. Tesla doesn't just plop super charger stations just anywhere.
Because charging takes a while charging stations tend to be sited near actual destinations while gas stations are sites at intersections and freeway off ramps. No one will want to use a charger at a gas station and be stuck with only a couple vending machines for food and drink.
It's a better investment to put EV charger at locations a car would reasonably sit for a half hour or more like a parking garage/lot.
Those designs can then be sold for at least another decade. I hope by 2040 there is little demand for combustion vehicles...
Yes exactly. It's a so sad too bad situation at this point. Should be happy you're allowed a car at all.
Allowed? Who put you in charge?
Who cares what disruption comes from arbitrarily limiting carbon, nitrogen, etc. — starvation is for the plebs, while I am a noble savior for causing a famine to solve problems a century away!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_campaign
And how are EVs more efficient then standard cars if they have less range and don’t work as well in certain climates and can’t go where the electricity is not readily available?
We are already polluting the environment by burning stuff for electricity, how does any of this help?
And where to we get all the chemicals for the batteries and what do we do with them when they are useless?
For now. Until we build more renewable energy plants. Miles per ton of CO2 is better with EVs no matter how you power the EV.
> And how are EVs more efficient then standard cars if they have less range and don’t work as well in certain climates and can’t go where the electricity is not readily available?
EVs are less convenient, no argument there. But they're still more efficient. Even in cold climates. 90% of new vehicles sold in Norway are EVs or plug-in hybrids.
> We are already polluting the environment by burning stuff for electricity, how does any of this help?
Switch to renewables and then you stop burning stuff. Until then, burning oil for power is better than burning oil to propel cars.
> And where to we get all the chemicals for the batteries and what do we do with them when they are useless?
Tesla recycles 90% of the important metals in their batteries.
You are a car manufacturer, you have to choose how you allocate resources. Most of your income comes from ICE vehicles, and only some from EV. So you give most RD resources to ICE because it makes most money, good business sense. Some years pass, and the market of EV’s grow. But you still make most of your profits from ICE, so you only grow EV resources a bit.
More years pass. Now the market flips, 60% EV, 40% ICE. So:
- ICE is making a loss, because there is not enough demand
- EV is making a loss, because you did not invest enough, and cant keep up with competitors which went all in.
-> You cant invest more to EV, because you don't have the money, and if you could, you would still be years behind.
So you're toast.
However, I'm not convinced lithium batteries are the answer. It's a fairly limited material, recycling is super difficult. With higher volumes it doesn't seem prices are shifting much. And that's all without the charging problem.
Hydrogen may solve a lot of problems? But it has its own set.
Going entirely in on lithium EVs today feels a bit premature.
Exactly. It's like when they phased out paper bags claiming that plastic could be reused and it was better for the environment to spare the trees, and then only later it was realized that plastic bags became a major pollution source and the decision was made to slowly try to roll out paper bags again.