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Electric vehicles close to ‘tipping point’ of mass adoption

theguardian.com

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Re: Electric vehicles close to ‘tipping point’ of mass adoption

#61

Post by jillesvangurp »

k__ wrote: post #4

Good to hear. I'm not driving much myself lately, but I'm really excited about the health impact of removing combustion engines from our cities.

Same here; but living in a big city I can't wait for diesel fumes to not be a thing when I'm riding my bike across town. It's not just annoying, this stuff is actually killing people. But because it's a slow killer nobody seems to care much. EVs are changing that as well; people are getting more critical of pollution like this because they know it is not necessary. The recent lock downs were kind of a preview of what might be in our near future when transport is cleaned up.

In terms of tipping point, the other thing that is happening (besides battery cost dropping) is the massive ramp-up in production volume. Just a few years ago, Tesla producing more than 50K cars was news worthy. Last year they did half a million and they have a few more factories coming online this year. Also VW, GM, and other manufacturers are producing cars by the hundreds of thousands per year as well. Soon it will be millions. By mid this decade, the second hand EV market will also start ramping up. Right now a lot of people are still on their first EVs.

It's basically a supply constrained market: people are buying these things as soon as they get produced. Most of the popular EVs have waiting lists for getting them and would be selling more if they could produce more of them. These manufacturers are still learning how to produce and design efficiently. A lot of the cars on the market right now are still designed to come in both ICE, hybrid, and EV configurations. That makes them less efficient and more costly to make. It's just not optimal. A few years from now, that will stop being a thing. There will just be too many purposely designed EVs on the market that will be a better deal overall.

It's going to take a while for manufacturers to switch to producing EVs only. Production volume overall is something like 90M cars per year and only a few percent is EVs currently. Probably by the end of the decade it will be the other way around. There are billions of vehicles (cars, trucks, etc.) it will take a while for those to disappear. That being said, it will be similar to horses disappearing from the streets early last century. Once it makes sense economically, people will switch as fast as they can (function of price and production volume).

Re: Electric vehicles close to ‘tipping point’ of mass adoption

#62

Post by Der_Einzige »

pretendscholar wrote: post #37
mrtnmcc wrote: post #16

Will be watching for the success of Rivian and Cybertruck to see if the rural market can accept electric.. but can't think of any good reason why not, other than pride and prejudice. (FD, I grew up in the country).

Range anxiety?

Tesla cybertruck claims over 500 miles if range, which is more than most gas vehicles...

Re: Electric vehicles close to ‘tipping point’ of mass adoption

#63

Post by ghaff »

Shivetya wrote: post #52
dm319 wrote: post #3

The UK plan for no ICE vehicles to be sold by 2030 is fairly ambitious. I'm seeing more and more electric vehicles on the roads, but I think some regular customers will be disappointed by how poor the infrastructure is. Not only that electric chargers aren't as prevalent as they need to be, but the number of high-speed chargers are tiny (think a couple of locations per large city), but an even bigger problem is the h…

Own a TM3, my issue isn't traveling from city to city but its instead trips where the round trip is over two hundred but I am not traveling by any major route. There are lot of what I call "country drives" where the quick route may not involve highways and with an ICE car those country bumpkin gas stations are all you see. So until charging becomes as ubiquitous to where the country store has "two pumps" or such peop…

Yes, with very few exceptions, late night driving, very rural locations (where you at least want to top off sooner than you normally might), etc. you basically don't need to plan driving an ICE. There will be some sort of gas station along your route. You're almost certainly not going to have to alter your route for sake of hitting a gas station in time. (And even if you have to wait for an available pump somewhere, the car in front is only going to take a few minutes to fill up.)

Re: Electric vehicles close to ‘tipping point’ of mass adoption

#64

Post by mrtnmcc »

ogre_codes wrote: post #56
pretendscholar wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Range anxiety?

Few people regularly drive more than 300 miles in a day. Most people drive less than 50 miles a day. The fact that you start every trip will a full charge means you only worry about range on the longest trips.

I do enjoy driving down country roads which won't have superchargers for some time, but these trips are usually <300-500miles and by it's nature the route is flexible enough to hit a supercharger near a highway if necessary.

Re: Electric vehicles close to ‘tipping point’ of mass adoption

#65

Post by 908B64B197 »

mywittyname wrote: post #30
bpodgursky wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that the entire length of Britain is 600 miles, going ICE-free seems almost... easy, compared to the US. You really don't have the concerns about long-haul trips impacting range. Obviously there are point-charging concerns etc, but that's something you can throw small money at to fix. You don't really need to convince consumers they won't be stranded in the mountains and freeze to death.

Long haul trips were never the biggest concern for EV adoption, that's something that can largely be worked around through planning. The biggest concern has always been charging infrastructure. EVs are great for people with garages, but not so much for the people in cities with no dedicated parking spot. Banning ICEs is probably the best mechanism to get society to solve this problem. Otherwise, most city-dwellers wi…

> EVs are great for people with garages, but not so much for the people in cities with no dedicated parking spot.

That's one of the reasons I'm hopeful for self-driving taxis. Unless cities magically start allowing garages to be built.

Re: Electric vehicles close to ‘tipping point’ of mass adoption

#66

Post by ghaff »

mywittyname wrote: post #60
bpodgursky wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why you assert this. It is the concern for literally every person I know who would otherwise have bought an EV, including myself. People like the freedom to take longer road trips without meticulous planning, and without sticking to certain interstate routes which skip the interesting parts of the country.

I never said it wasn't a concern, I said it wasn't the biggest concern. If all the gas stations around your house disappeared, would your first concern be how you are going to get to Indianapolis? No. It's going to be how are you going to get work/school/etc everyday (assuming you don't work in Indianapolis). EVs have an issue where most drivers have to own their own gas-station equivalent. And people without the spa…

Both things are concerns, at least when you get to longer trips on secondary roads in rural areas.

Re: Electric vehicles close to ‘tipping point’ of mass adoption

#67

Post by mikestew »

Loughla wrote: post #20
lastofthemojito wrote: post #12

I'm really curious to see how the used electric car market shapes up. New cars (electric or not) are pretty expensive. The average price of a new car in the US just topped $40k, which is out of reach of many car buyers. The people who buy new obviously tend to be well-off, and are often older. Then at some point down the road, those cars end up in the hands of (on average) younger, less-wealthy folks. But younger fol…

>a depleted battery pack means less range or costly repair, etc. This has actually stopped me from buying a used EV in the last year, twice. Dealers aren't up front about used cars history in general, and, again from just the two I looked at, they are 1000% hiding any information they can regarding the battery packs. This is the largest hurdle to the used car market (after the shortage of used EV's because of their n…

The computer on an EV will tell me the state of the battery. You can ship an ICE over to the best mechanic in the world, and that mechanic won't be able to reliably tell you state of, for example, the bottom end bearings. Not without cracking the engine open, anyway. A compression test will reveal a lot, but it could still break a piston ring tomorrow.

That said, I'd not hesitate to buy a Honda with over 100K miles on the clock. But the point is that checking the state of a singular point of most likely failure (battery) is many orders easier to check than the state of an ICE.

Re: Electric vehicles close to ‘tipping point’ of mass adoption

#68

Post by imglorp »

ntsplnkv2 wrote: post #59
ajross wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the number of high-speed chargers are tiny (think a couple of locations per large city) That's not so far off. Even large cities in North America have no more than a few dozen gas stations (and the UK likely fewer still due to things like London's congestion pricing reducing vehicle count). Once-a-week-or-so fueling doesn't really require a huge amount of infrastructure. That's one of the reasons we're all addicted…

The real issue is charge times. Gas fillups take a few minutes at most - meaning no long lines. Once charges are close to that speed I think EVs will really take off.

On the road for long trips, yes absolutely. But the EV usecase also includes low and medium speed charging at home overnight, and while at your destination (say a retailer) which you can't do with your ICE car. So overlapping but not identical comparison.

Re: Electric vehicles close to ‘tipping point’ of mass adoption

#69

Post by xirbeosbwo1234 »

mrtnmcc wrote: post #16

Will be watching for the success of Rivian and Cybertruck to see if the rural market can accept electric.. but can't think of any good reason why not, other than pride and prejudice. (FD, I grew up in the country).

I doubt the Cybertruck will ever make it to production. Tesla enjoys building cars that kill people, what with the wheels falling off and the computer driving straight into walls, but I suspect the NHTSA will draw the line at a three-ton knife purpose-built for cutting pedestrians in half.

Tesla isn't your champion. Literally every other manufacturer has a better chance. Mostly because they build cars that actually work, but also because Tesla reeks of Silicon Valley arrogance and irresponsibility.

Re: Electric vehicles close to ‘tipping point’ of mass adoption

#70

Post by rini17 »

seanalltogether wrote: post #41
dm319 wrote: post #3

The UK plan for no ICE vehicles to be sold by 2030 is fairly ambitious. I'm seeing more and more electric vehicles on the roads, but I think some regular customers will be disappointed by how poor the infrastructure is. Not only that electric chargers aren't as prevalent as they need to be, but the number of high-speed chargers are tiny (think a couple of locations per large city), but an even bigger problem is the h…

The number of people in the UK and Ireland that have to park overnight on the street is way too high to start banning ICE vehicles within the next decade. Electric infrastructure isn't enough, they will have to completely revamp entire neighborhoods to provide space for permanent and predictable overnight parking for residents.

After street lighting was upgraded to more energy-effective LEDs there's surplus capacity. Making every pole available for slow overnight charging does not mean to "completely revamp entire neighborhoods". The possibility to sell the electricity might even become attractive for municipality or utility.

Also, parking is going to be overhauled anyway, after decades of cars occupying every nook and cranny, there's a strong push to free the streets.

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