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Are We Reaching the Electric Car Tipping Point?
HughPickens.com writes: Geoff Ralston has an interesting essay explaining why it is likely that electric car penetration in the U.S. will take off at an exponential rate over the next 5-10 years rendering laughable the paltry predictions of future electric car sales being made today. Present projections assume that electric car sales will slowly increase as the technology gets marginally better, and as more and more customers choose to forsake a better product (the gasoline car) for a worse, yet "greener" version. According to Ralston this view of the future is, simply, wrong. — electric cars will take over our roads because consumers will demand them. "Electric cars will be better than any alternative, including the loud, inconvenient, gas-powered jalopy," says Ralston. "The Tesla Model S has demonstrated that a well made, well designed electric car is far superior to anything else on the road. This has changed everything."
The Tesla Model S has sold so well because, compared to old-fashioned gasoline cars it is more fun to drive, quieter, always "full" every morning, more roomy, and it continuously gets better with automatic updates and software improvements. According to Ralston the tipping point will come when gas stations, not a massively profitable business, start to go out of business as many more electric cars are sold, making gasoline powered vehicles even more inconvenient. When that happens even more gasoline car owners will be convinced to switch. Rapidly a tipping point will be reached, at which point finding a convenient gas station will be nearly impossible and owning a gasoline powered car will positively suck. "Elon Musk has ushered in the age of the electric car, and whether or not it, too, was inevitable, it has certainly begun," concludes Ralston. "The future of automotive transportation is an electric one and you can expect that future to be here soon."
The Tesla Model S has sold so well because, compared to old-fashioned gasoline cars it is more fun to drive, quieter, always "full" every morning, more roomy, and it continuously gets better with automatic updates and software improvements. According to Ralston the tipping point will come when gas stations, not a massively profitable business, start to go out of business as many more electric cars are sold, making gasoline powered vehicles even more inconvenient. When that happens even more gasoline car owners will be convinced to switch. Rapidly a tipping point will be reached, at which point finding a convenient gas station will be nearly impossible and owning a gasoline powered car will positively suck. "Elon Musk has ushered in the age of the electric car, and whether or not it, too, was inevitable, it has certainly begun," concludes Ralston. "The future of automotive transportation is an electric one and you can expect that future to be here soon."
The move to electric is a natural evolution, and will have a significant impact. The economies of scale in terms of pollution mitigation at power plants will utterly dwarf anything cars have ever been able to do themselves, transmission losses nonwithstanding.
Even if they only displace urban drivers (fewer per-trip miles, more population density facilitating more charging stations), the impact will be transformative. Watch the AQI loop around New York, and you can see air pollution rising and falling along the commuter roads into the City in lock step with the morning commute. I can't even imagine a New York with 50-80% fewer gas-powered cars on the road.
But that's still just evolution. Electric is just a natural step.
Driverless cars are the revolution. Electric makes existing car use patterns better. Driverless makes an entirely new paradigm. It may eliminate mass car ownership. It might eliminate parking lots. It might eliminate light rail in suburban areas. Taxis. Deliveries. Shipping. Police reponses.
Electric makes things better in well-projected ways. Driverless changes everything forever in ways we can't yet even imagine.
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Again, this works in the US with big suburbs where everyone has a parking lot with an electric outlet. In other countries (like good old Europe), where most people live in apartments and there is just no way you can plug your car at night, it doesn't work. It is just impossible until you can refill your car in 5 minutes like with gasoline...
Oh, and many Europeans travel 1000+km on a single streak with their cars on holidays. Again, if the cars you want to sell have to wait 2 times 4 hours to refill in such travel, you're not going to sell many of them.
Ecars are good for commuters that live in houses. There are not many of them outside the US.
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I've heard similar. Likewise there won't be much to be made on EV charge points. But they will be more likely to sell food whilst an EV is being charged.
The service model can be readily adopted in cities where shared car usage already exists in the form of taxis or uber/lyft/etc.
In the suburbs, people tend to allow their cars to accrete items which are useful but not something they'd carry daily if they didn't have the capacity of the car. For example, look at minivans or CUVs - there's usually various child-centric paraphernilia stored inside, or a bag with blankets and jackets. The convenience factor of having these non-essential items along in a private vehicle makes the service model a hard sell to suburban consumers.
Heh.
Hiring a car makes sense when one does not use cars very often.
Subscribing to a car service without personal ownership makes sense in some conditions, like high-density urban areas combined with relatively open travel requirements and for those that do not want to keep a given car for a long time.
We own. We keep cars for a long time, are particular about our cars, and it's less costly for us to own than it is for us to lease. We live in a single-family house on a plot of land, so we have room to park. Our jobs both have room to park. There are no toll roads around here either. Most of these things would not change even if we had autonomous vehicles. It also doesn't snow/rust here, so cars can reach 20 years without needing any body/chassis service if the suspensions are not abused.
I could see someone living in urban New York or Chicago or Boston or San Francisco subscribing to some kind of car service; if their work hours are stable and if the service can always have a nice clean sedan ready for them when they leave for work in the morning and can get a sedan to them in the afternoon or evening quickly after being summoned then it would work.
One model isn't going to work for everyone. Stop trying to assume that just because something works for you, that it would work for everyone else, or because something doesn't work for you, that it wouldn't work for any large portion of the population.
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It won't be the government that pushes people towards autonomous cars. It will be insurance companies.
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EVs cost significantly more than gas cars, don't have the range of gas cars, and apartment dwellers have no way to charge them overnight.
All of which are solvable problems. With scale EVs eventually could be cheaper than gas cars since they have fewer parts. There already are EVs with range competitive with gas cars (see the Model S) and they are only getting better. As for apartment dwellers, eventually apartments will end up providing charging infrastructure though I fully expect this to happen late in the game because the cost isn't trivial.
Electric vehicles will probably reach a tipping point when either A) recharge times get to less than 15 minutes with a 200 mile range or B) EVs with a 500+ mile range are developed and economically feasible. Until that happens we'll see hybrids serving as a technology test platform until such time as the battery technology matures sufficiently. I fully expect most luxury cars to be plug-in hybrids within the next 10-15 years. I think you'll start to see semi trucks and long haul vehicles becoming hybrids with a power train similar to locomotives (diesel with electric motors driving the wheels).
EVs won't reach the tipping point tomorrow or even probably 5 years from now but I do think they are the likely future with hybrids being a stepping stone to get there.
I hope you enjoy having the service track everywhere you go and when you do so, so they can sell it to marketers.
You mean like carrying a smart phone?
But why would I go to my local gas station in the middle of suburbia to charge my vehicle when I can just charge it at home?
Because "home" is an apartment or condo and there are no charging stations in the parking lot.
No. I don't want a self-driving car. First, because I'm one of those weirdos that actually enjoys driving. Second, because I suffer from motion sickness if I'm in a vehicle that I'm not controlling. And third, I'm a software developer and therefore have no faith in software. :-b
At night? Of course. Better yet, at some time between midnight to 7 am. Why do you ask? The power grid capacity is sized for peak hours as there is usually no way to store the electricity generated by big power plants for later use. These peak times occur as people leave home and when they return from work. When everyone is sleeping that generation capacity becomes idle, and then It can easily be put to other uses.
Disclosure: I am a developer, but also a power plant technician.
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It won't be the government that pushes people towards autonomous cars. It will be insurance companies.
To be precise : it will be the lower price of insurance policies that will push many towards autonomous cars.
However, smart insurance companies will see this as a dangerous erosion of their market, and will probably fight against this...
What's next - the "archaic" practice of owning your own home?
You never really own your own home. If you don't pay property taxes, the local government will foreclose and sell the house to someone else. If that person doesn't pay property taxes, rinse and repeat.
People are sick and tired of car payments and insurance payments.
I'm sure that's partly true, but I would bet it's more due to the fact that cars last longer than they used to. It used to be relatively rare for a car to drive 100,000 miles, but now for many cars that's their first scheduled tune-up. If cars weren't lasting longer it wouldn't matter if people were sick of car payments, they'd still have to buy another one when their current car broke down. Yes and there does seem to be some evidence of particularly younger people choosing to live closer to work where they can bike and walk to work, but it's certainly not as big a factor (yet) as cars lasting longer.
The future will be driverless cars, mass transit and bicycles in urban/suburban areas.
That's probably true. Though bicycles may never catch on in the US the way they have in Europe and elsewhere. The car lobby and car culture in the US has been successful at limiting the options for biking.
Have you not heard of "gimbals"?
Do you have kids? Being a parent of a toddler or even a kid up to 5 or so means you have to have a Boy Scout mentality. BE PREPARED. Toting around a few extra pounds of stuff (change of clothes, snacks, first aid, entertainment) is worth every extra joule it takes to do so.
Your advice made sense years ago; these days it does not. 2-5 year old cars with low mileage don't cost much less than brand-new models these days, unless it's some unpopular model (and they're unpopular for a good reason). If the model is popular and well-known to be highly reliable, it'll keep its resale value very well, making it much less worth it to buy used. Also, $15k in cash isn't that easy for most people to come up with on the spot, so most people have to finance. You don't get 0% interest rates on used cars; the rates are much worse. In fact, those low rates are reserved only for people with a good enough credit rating.
Today's crappy economy and ultra-low interest rates have made it so that buying new really makes a lot more sense than buying used.
In addition to this, brand-new cars have much better safety ratings than even 5-year-old models. You're going to fare much better in a crash with a brand-new model that got top scores on the IIHS crash tests than in anything made a half-decade ago. You seem to be worried about risk, from your line about the potential for value to drop, but you're totally ignoring the risk to your health and safety by driving an older model. 50,000 people die every year in the US alone in auto accidents; you could be the next one.
The sea change is already happening - car ownership of all kinds is lowest among millenials. In fact, having a driver's license is no longer the rite of passage it once was - there's a growing group of millenials who do not have a driver's license and have no intention of getting one. Granted, they're generally limited to areas with good public transit, but the car as a form of status symbol no longer applies.
And public transit, especially subways and the like, often get people around faster than being stuck in traffic. (The daily grind of traffic jams will rapidly wear down even the strongest driving advocate). And we know this because distracted driving is either #1 or rapidly becoming the #1 cause of accidents (drunk driving is/was #1) - because driving is boring and horrendous.
Heck, some employers have reported difficulty recruiting people because of the commute. And what was once a good idea to move to an industrial park where land is cheap and you can stuff people in like cattle, businesses are finding that they need to be more urban to attract employees who don't want, or can't, do the commute and want to be close to amenities.
Thanks, but you are sounding somewhat like a zealot. I first researched the data quite a few years ago, but hadn't known what recent improvements have done for electric battery charging/discharging. I DO know that electrical resistance inside batteries can be a source of significant energy loss; in the old days efficiency was only about 2/3, not the 3/4 I estimated in the prior post --and that is why I asked for better numbers! What I didn't know was how much those resistance losses have been overcome, and if the overall efficiency is more like 90% than 75%, that's cool. Next, you ignored the fact that a lot of cars have Diesel engines, which are more efficient than gasoline engines, even if the production-car efficiency numbers are less than the ideal numbers. NEXT, I "whacked it down twice" because you have to charge the battery, and then you have to discharge the battery to use it. Both ways have internal-electrical-resistance energy losses!
Your talk about "fuel cell storage efficiency" is meaningless. A fuel cell works very much like a battery, converting chemical energy to electrical energy. So if a battery can be 90% efficient, a fuel cell should be able to have that efficiency, too. There is no "storage" inside a fuel cell; the fuel is stored in a separate tank. I do know that hydrogen fuel-storage tanks are bulky, but electric-car batteries are bulky too, and weigh more (because of also storing the oxidizer). You do know that overall automobile weight is a factor relating to how big/powerful its drive system has to be?
Flywheels are NOT necessarily super-heavy, especially when they don't have to store energy for a long travel range. Kinetic energy stored goes up with the square of the rotation speed. So if flywheel A spins twice as fast as B, and both weigh the same, A will be storing 4 times the energy. Modern use of carbon fiber can allow construction of flywheels that spin many times faster than ordinary heavy steel flywheels, for greater energy storage with less weight. This was known back in 1970. Do some research! (Not to mention, you appeared to ignore what I wrote about only using a flywheel for rapid acceleration, no 50-mile range needed).
Yeah. And my grandfather insisted on carrying a pocket watch. All you are describing is conservatism related to technology. Such technology adoption issues are solved by the turnover of the human population.
But you're also making the case for how absurd it is that people use additional energy (compounded over several million vehicles I bet it ads up) in the form of gasoline to always carry around stuff they only sometimes need.
The whole system is designed for people having stuff "they only sometimes need". Most commuters only need a single seat and a 20 mile range but they keep the 4 seat SUV with a gasoline engine so they can take the family to the lake once a month. It's not just cars. Most people have a "guest bedroom" and additional extra rooms in their house that are only used occasionally. It gets even worse than that, how often does someone actually use the ladder, extension cord, etc... that's hanging in their garage. I doubt that in an average city that more than 1% of ladders are being actively used at any one time.
The "parent with extra crap" stuff is actually easy to solve. Just get a large duffle bag with all the stuff and throw it in the trunk when the car shows up but there is a ton of "extra capacity" everywhere in modern life. I would venture to guess that if we could efficiently distribute items only when needed that we could reduce our consumption of things like shopvacs, ladders, ext cords, by 90+% because a vast majority of the stuff in the average house is not used on a daily basis and some of it sits and rots for months between uses.