The Electric Car

Interesting article, though it forgets the elephant in the room: self-driving cars.

The two will probably work hand in hand, but it is unlikely, in my opinion, that any electric cars will be charging at home very much, because most electric cars will be owned by companies, not individuals. Why own a car when you can pay a tiny percentage of a cab fare to go anywhere? When a journey that currently costs $50 costs 20 cents, private car ownership will plummet.

What if the self-driving electric cab gets soiled with the last passenger's bodily fluids?

> Gas stations will start to go out of business as many more electric cars are sold, making gasoline powered vehicles even more inconvenient.

That's a great point that I've never considered before.

> On the other hand, the potential exists for a huge rollout of home solar power over the next decade.

Electric cars will convince their owners to install rooftop solar panels, too, which will then convince them to get Powerwall-like batteries for backup, which will then decrease the price of batteries, which will then make electric cars cheaper and more appealing to more people.

It's a beautiful feedback loop.

And wow DOE's predictions are terrible (first source). It's almost as if they went around surveying car manufacturers about their plans to make electric cars in 2013 and then made their predictions for 27 years later based on that. Just terrible.

And 11% cars will be using ethanol in 2040? Really? I'll be surprised if 0.11% of them will use ethanol by then.

> The current range of a Model S tops out at about 300 miles. Even GM is extending it's Volt to 200 miles to effectively compete with Tesla.

Volt is the range-extender, and it doesn't come near that (for battery mileage). You're thinking "Bolt" which is not really meant to be the successor to Volt, because it's a full EV and doesn't have a range extender. That's what they claim it will do on battery alone. It will compete with Model 3, not S.

> Battery technology is difficult, but it would be extremely surprising if the available ranges don't double again in 5 years or less.

I agree. Part of it will be from the natural evolution of Li-ion batteries, and part from Tesla's Gigafactory coming online. I expect battery prices to drop in half again to around $100 in another 5 years, after Apple has launched its electric car, too, and Tesla has made a couple more Gigafactories + the natural progress in density of the batteries. After that we might need some breakthroughs to go to $50 or less per kWh.

$100/kWh should be enough to switch the "Early Majority" to EVs, which is half the population. The other half will need batteries to be $50/kWh (or less) to make EVs cheap enough but also with long enough range for the more conservative gas-powered car drivers, who probably won't accept anything less than a (real) 500 mile range on an EV.

I've always thought that the Google cars have driven 95%+ of their miles in Mountain View, CA where every single aspect of the roads have been digitized, tested and tweaked a million times over. If you stuck one of these cars in a brand new city, it wouldn't work nearly as well.

I would still buy a gasoline car just because there are no charging stations near where I live. Yeah you can charge at home, but if I have to take a longer trip? At least for me, I will wait until charging stations become more available. Could be a chicken and egg problem.