Electric vehicles close to ‘tipping point’ of mass adoption

I think it's fair to assume that America's current grid cannot handle 50% of people switching to EV, so obviously we need to build more. However, it's not like they're switching to EV overnight - even with the best (worst?) scenario it will take years, so hopefully we'll be able to ramp up the grid in time.

Lots of great points to agree with! I do want to point out that rural isn't just about trucks.

Distances are greater (Costco is an hour away), the need for ground clearance, real AWD or 4x4 and lack of a local service center - those are real limiting factors. EVs don't have to replace a truck, just an Outback.

Off the topic a bit, but you got me thinking - I drive WAY less now than I did from the suburbs. Sure Costco is an hour away, but when you only go once a month it doesn't add up to much.

Exceptions abound in Asia, though there are far fewer exceptions in the West.

For example in Taiwan, in their online grocery ecosystem all the market participants use the same kind of SMS verification step that is intercepted at the card network stage (the issuing bank doesn't see this activity). So Visa and MasterCard both generate the challenge, but US card holders do not see this, and US customer support does not know what to do on the back end to support it.

I know somewhere, there is some kind of setting that interfaces with for example, Visa International, but only a credit card industry domain expert with the lingo would know the right words. I suspect I need a Chip and PIN EMV card issued, and it drops to SMS for certain online transaction types, but that's just a WAG at this time.

I've run into similar exceptions elsewhere in transactions that require some kind of national ID number tied to a delivery address for higher-value orders.

The types of risk profiles associated with many new use cases is fracturing credit card handling, but the use cases international travelers encounter is so small it isn't worth addressing just for that demographic. However, as the Net continues to bleed international transactions across borders (AliBaba is just the beginning), I think this will be a very lucrative market for the first-mover to do the Uber-like Herculean work of addressing every jurisdiction's concerns to put them all under a next-generation credit card.

You're not getting my point.

There is no "do A or do nothing at all". It's always "do A or do B". So there is always an opportunity cost.

Do you think people living near coal mines or fracking sites or whatever have it any better?

Do you think that if we didn't mine lithium we'd all become noble savages* again and live in peace with nature?

The objective is to minimize harm, choose the lesser of two evils.

* This is a myth, by the way.

I was turned on to this thread, by an HN user. I work for Audi in Germany. The real stats for our hybrids are not great if you compare to newer Toyota hybrids, for example and as far as all my contacts tell me the situation is identical for all German manufacturers.

We are not selling the Audi Q5 TFSIe 55 - 14KWh battery, around 12KWh usable, and (unless you are hypermiling) ~25-40Km of realistic electric range depending on weather - for lowering real life emissions. We do it for 3 reasons: 1) it allows us to mix in "fake" estimated fuel consumption and emission numbers thus lowering the fleet overalls, 2) we also get money from the EV/PHEV incentive programs, and 3) it is an awesome car, it has a great gas engine, a great electric motor, great transmission, it's actually one of the most fun SUVs to drive. Companies lease a lot of these, because the incentives cover most of the price of the lease and the taxes are close to nothing. But I mean we lease these 60K+ EUR PHEVs for as low as 3000EUR per year (limited to 1-2 years) just to get them out there, get the money from the government, get the official fuel/emission numbers into the fleet average, and a lot of the private buyers are cross-shopping, so it's win all around.

But we know from sale time that most private buyers do not have regular access to a charger at all, at home or work. Which is why most of our customers never plug in the car or do it a few times just to see how it works. They are usually charged while driving from the engine at a big fuel penalty. Most cars have a higher fuel consumption than the equivalent hon-hybrid Audi Q5. But overall the fuel consumption for the hybrid fleet (~9.5l/100Km) is lower than for the ICE fleet (~11l/100Km) because of a number of cars which get to drive a lot and almost only in electric mode. Some charge only during the day so at work and very few only during the night so at home.

In Germany at least charging at a public charger is guaranteed to be more expensive per Km than gas for this car. The cheapest chargers are 50c/KWh and I saw some that charge 65c/KWh + 3-4c/min + 1E/h for the parking + 1E one time plug in fee (that's at best 6E and at worst ~12E for the 40Km electric).

I happen to drive one and since I don't have a charger at home, and 2020 meant I mostly don't go to work, my fuel numbers are bad. I charge once per moth, use it in hybrid mode (dynamic), and once the battery is empty it will try to charge it as long as the engine is running whether it's in static or dynamic mode (most people never read the manual, have no idea how to change some extra modes other than the big button in the center console that switched between EV - hybrid - battery hold). And when this happens the fuel consumption just explodes, I'm visiting friends across town and I get there with >18l/100Km even with no traffic (just the occasional light).

Fun car, not made to save the world unless you can plug it in every night. But if you can it's hands down great!