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China, Europe Drive Shift To Electric Cars as US Lags (reuters.com)
Electric cars will pick up critical momentum in 2017, many in the auto industry believe - just not in North America. Tighter emissions rules in China and Europe leave global carmakers and some consumers with little choice but to embrace plug-in vehicles, fuelling an investment surge, said industry executives gathered in Detroit this past week for the city's annual auto show. From a report: "Car electrification is an irreversible trend," said Jacques Aschenbroich, chief executive of auto supplier Valeo, which has expanded sales by 50 percent in five years with a focus on electric, hybrid, connected and self-driving cars. In Europe, green cars benefit increasingly from subsidies, tax breaks and other perks, while combustion engines face mounting penalties including driving and parking restrictions. China, struggling with catastrophic pollution levels in major cities, is aggressively pushing plug-in vehicles. Its carrot-and-stick approach combines tens of billions in investment and research funding with subsidies, and regulations designed to discourage driving fossil-fueled cars in big cities. The road ahead for electric vehicles (EVs) in the United States, however, could have more hairpin curves.
Don't worry, Trump will introduce tax rebates for muscle cars in order to secure a market.
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
I'm all for electric vehicles, but the US has much lower population density. An electric vehicle only works as a primary vehicle if you rarely leave a major metro area. Unless they become cheap enough that it can be a second or even third household vehicle, it's simply not feasible for a lot of Americans.
We still don't have batteries! I'm serious I forgot to buy some at Safeway the other day.
No well seriously, we don't have batteries that can enable us to replace gasoline. We need to improve capacity at least 4x, if not 10x.
Some say the answer is Lithium-Air batteries .. but then hardly anyone is doing any research on order-of-magnitude battery technology improvement .. let alone Lithium Air. Whoever is doing research on new battery concept has virtually no funding. The ones getting slight funding are the people working on incremental updates.
We need companies like Tesla, Google, Apple, Samsung, Panasonic to get serious in funding a foundation or institute that researches advanced battery concepts. Battery research funding budget should be in the billions not thousand.
I laso believe that "Car electrification is an irreversible trend".
So then why give hefty tax breaks to the 1% for buying electric cars today, rather than simply waiting for ten years when it makes sense that all cars are electric? You really aren't going to push the development that much faster than it would happen anyway.
Same is true for solar power and other alternative forms of energy. They are coming, they will dominate - just let that happen rather than trying to pick an exact winning form of that technology today.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I've owned a Chevy Volt for over 3 years now. In the warmer summer months, (I'm in Canada), the small battery supplies pretty much 100% of all my power needs. In the winter or if I decide to go long distance once a year, it switches to gas usage seamlessly. It's really too bad folks see it only as EV or only as gas. It's essentially both without compromise. So you charge it when you don't want to use gas and you can use gas when you need the distance or heat.
There's a large portion of the USA that isn't very densely-packed. We can't exactly visit several countries on a single tank of gas. Or four times as many people in the same amount of land area.
You just don't have to drive as far to get where you need to be. And that's what electric cars are great for.
In a world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king--and the two-eyed man is a heretic.
That's only logical if there isn't some other reason to switch from fossil fuels. As it turns out, the overwhelming majority of experts in atmospheric and oceanic sciences happen to have a reason why we should encourage the transition to vehicles powered renewables sooner rather than later.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I don't understand people. I can't drive to the middle of a mountain range, and charge an electric car. There's no electric grid there. I can easily fill up on fuel wherever a fuel truck can drop some off -- which is basically the very same places that my car can go.
North America is very different than Europe. Paris and London are how many hours away? A European train can take you through ten countries in a single day. In North America, you'd be lucky to hit five major cities in 24 hours of driving.
There's a lot more middle-of-nowhere around here. It's not about electric vs gasolene. It's about portable fuel vs transmission-over-infrastructure. We don't have any infrastructure -- that's why we have roads to get between places.
I would love to live in the future but I have to deal with the present.
Also betting that none of these electric cars from Europe or China are anything remotely close to something I would want to use regardless of how it's powered.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
They are busy building out new battery manufacturing.
OTOH, GM, Chrysler, and Ford are basically too stupid for words to actually build new battery facilities. They instead look at how to manipulate their stock prices and do not care about real long-term profits.
Thankfully, companies like Tesla and Rivian will really destroy the American companies and end up buying them.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Most of you live in cities, more densely populated than in Europe. So the size of that country is really extremely unimportant.
Hire a petrol car for long journeys. Given your pitiful excuse for holiday allowance over there, you can't afford the time to drive long distances anyway, so you fly internal. Where you can't take your car on in the overhead locker.
It'd be nice for these self-proclaimed globalist elites to latch on to something that isn't an obvious failure. I mean, a quick back-of-the-envelope will tell you that an IC engine burning gasoline wins in just about every utility metric you can come up for a personal automobile (buses and trucks are a whole other matter). Yet they're declared the Wave of The Future (TM) by the Davos set.
I would love it if these knuckleheads chained themselves to something real, like roads, bridges, power lines, or any one of a dozen other things that aren't sexy at first blush but where real attention and real monetary investments are called for.
It must really suck when reality just completely fucks over your moronic claim. I'm going to be generous and assume you're just a fucking idiot ignorant of just about every fact on climate change, and not in fact a dishonorable immoral liar.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Oh, fuck you and your warming denialist bullshit.
I don't respond to AC's.
That tax break is not for the 1% but for middle class people who could not afford an electric car without it, or wouldn't otherwise want to spend the full amount on such a vehicle. That in turn has made the market for electric cars an attractive one, where it is economically viable to design, manufacture and sell EVs in larger numbers. With the market (and infrastructure) for EVs reaching a certain critical mass, there's a huge incentive to research technologies to further drive down prices and/or increase range and efficiency. Some believe that the critical mass has already been reached, which makes further electrification "an irreversible trend." This would probably have happened without subsidies as well, but a lot later. And once the market takes off, subsidies can be decreased. In my country this is already happening; the Luxury/Pollution Tax on EVs is still 0% I believe (this tax exceeds the factory price for the more ridiculous SUVs), but companies no longer get the Small Scale Environmental Investment subsidy when they buy an EV, and the income tax payable on company cars is no longer 0% either.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
The citation shows increased PPM of CO2 and increased temperature. No model I am aware of requires that PPM and temperature rise to be in lockstep. That's simply a pseudo-skeptic strawman argument.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Do you deny CO2 in the atmosphere has shot up to record levels?
Do you deny that that increase is not matches by an equivalent temperature increase?
You are the one who wants everyone to fear. It is therefore incumbent upon you to prove the assertion that CO2 leads to runaway warming. The data does not show that any longer, but you are welcome to try so we all may laugh at you just like we do the other religious extremists trying to justify nonsense with faith.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yes I have known about this -- thats why I am strongly in favor of nuclear fusion and cheapening solar energy research so we can detox the atmosphere.
But the problem is that generating fuel from atmospheric, algae, or plant sources will be more expensive than opening a valve on a pipe stuck the ground until we actually run out of oil which may take hundreds of years.
People will always choose the cheapest alternative.
We can come up with cheap ways to generate electricity .. but we also need a better way to store it. Unless we can fit a fusion reactor inside a car (not foreseeable) or allow nuclear fission based RTGs (formerly used in space probes) in vehicles (good luck getting the DMV to approve that).
I suppose if other countries want to be suckers, pay extra buy a substandard product, and have their citizens pay a tax to make Americans wealthy then I'm fine with that. In the meantime, the U.S. should definitely cancel all subsidies and let economics work its magic. Without subsidies, it's about as "irreversible" as flying cars, the population bomb, or the global cooling predictions of the 1970s.
...I need to see faster charging, longer range, and better battery management.
I have wanted an electric vehicle for some time. Almost bought a Volt when then Gen II came out, but the thing is a small 2+2. With me at 6'4" (190cm) and my two 6' tall teenagers, there's no way to fit in the vehicle. (I had the same issue in my Jetta TDI.) Recently bought a Malibu hybrid, which contains the Voltec engine albeit with a much smaller battery. At least I can fit by young boys, though still can't take four passengers comfortably, like in my Avalanche.
Now - if an electric can have the midsize of my 2006 Avalanche and the range (500+ miles) with the ability to recharge in 10 minutes, and the guarantee that the battery won't be sitting in a landfill after losing charge ability in five years, I'm sold.
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
I'll ask you once again to provide citations where climatologists claim PPM and temperature should rise in lockstep? You keep foisting this strawman, which is entirely of your own creation (or rather, the creation of someone like the Heartland Institute, I doubt very much you made it up yourself). Until you provide such citations and can demonstrate that this is what the climatologists are actual stating should be observed, you're just repeating a strawman, a logical fallacy, either because you're ignorant, or you're a liar.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
And, just in case you're the least bit interested, there is an explanation as to why the differential between CO2 PPM increases and observed surface temperature rises, largely because of that substance that covers 2/3s of the planet:
https://www.skepticalscience.c...
But I'm sure you will handwave that away. Once again some random poster on the Internet with no actual ability to assess the data thinks they're moronic strawman somehow topples an entire field of research.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
We have both because sending people to prison limits their future prospects, forcing them further into a life of crime.
Right now plug-in cars are mostly pretty expensive (e.g. Tesla). The primary market for them seems to be people who are wealthy enough to own single-family homes or townhouse style condos in urban environments, where it's easy enough to add a charging port in the garage or on the side of your house. What do people propose doing for charging infrastructure when plug-in cars move their way down the price scale, within reach of people who rent apartments and have to park on the street far from the nearest electrical outlet? Even if you're lucky enough to rent a place that has an off-street driveway spot for your car, good luck getting your landlord to add anything like that. Or are there going to be "public" charging ports that exact exorbitant rates for charging your car, creating yet another way in which being poor is expensive?
Without a good plan to provide equitably-priced charging infrastructure for the masses, the whole thing bears a distinct whiff of champagne socialism.
So I think the real question here is the question of whether or not the practice of introducing massive sums of EVs is actually beneficial to the environment. A huge sum of US power comes to us in the following forms (eia.gov)
Coal = 33%
Natural gas = 33%
Nuclear = 20%
Hydropower = 6%
Other renewables = 7%
Biomass = 1.6%
Geothermal = 0.4%
Solar = 0.6%
Wind = 4.7%
Petroleum = 1%
Other gases = 1%
As you can see, 66% comes from burning limited materials, and really 86%, but nuclear doesn't burn nearly as much fuel in relation to natural gas and coal. So when demand goes up substantially with the introduction of these vehicles it can be assumed that that demand will be filled with a similar distribution of generation. That means that we'll be burning more coal, and slowly depleting reserves of what is now cheaply accessible natural gas. And this doesn't account for all the battery manufacture, recycling, and disposal - which with the right personnel presiding over it is surely a clean process, but with a bad actor with little concern for environmental well-being, could itself be hugely destructive.
There is also the fact that approximately 37% of all CO2 released in the US is a product of generation, by effectively increasing demand you'll simply be shifting the transportation sector into the power grid, and until we're running zero coal, and powered almost exclusively by nuclear or other clean sources it's impractical and an ineffective method for the US to reduce emissions.
And no one mentions that you can build a car to swap a discharged battery for a full one.. 10 to 30 seconds..
Fine - cancel all oil subsidies first please. They outstrip EV subsidies by a large margin. Add in the cost of pollution and damage done to people, and determine the new price at the pump. Then see how much you like paying for gas.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
With batteries, there is the time it takes to recharge. If you could somehow deliver the amps faster, what does that do to the power grid?
Way back in the 70s when I was studying Computer Science. I had a class focused on emulations, and we students had to come up with some sort of thing/system to emulate which the instructor approve and then we'd go and do it. I chose to emulate various forms of electric auto, including hybrids etc. My main source was a book called Alternatives to the Internal Combustion Engine by Robert U. Ayres and Richard P. McKenna.
My conclusion, as I recall, was aluminum oxide batteries which, when exhausted, would be left at the equivalent of a filling station, where you would install fresh batteries the way nowadays you fill up with gasoline. The exhausted batteries would be collected and recharged at special facilities then returned to the 'filling stations'. Thinking about it now, my utopian fantasy is taking the exhausted batteries to a solar recharging plant out in the desert.
There are problems with aluminum oxide batteries, but it always seemed to me they should be solvable problems.
Now, other people, including Elon Musk no doubt, must have considered the model of quickly exchanging exhausted batteries for fresh ones (even if not the aluminum oxide part), and rejected it. Why? (My thought is that maybe they are in a hurry and think building up the infrastructure would take too long. One could start with some particular locale. Maybe I-6 between California's Bay Area and LA. Renting cars to drive along there perhaps with the 'filling stations' at each end?)
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
What range do you think EVs have on a single charge, anyway?
Between 100km and 150km per 20kWh worth of battery charge.
Exact mileage depends on car model.
(e.g.: Tesla use lighter than average material and are designed from the ground up for longer ranges.
Other cars are simply "an electric motor replacing the ICE under the bonnet and batteries bolted wherever there's free place" quick conversion like the VW e-Golf and VW e-Up that VW hastily released in the wake of the diesel scandal, and might have lower mileages).
Also depends on the driver (driving like an aggressive idiot at high speed on the highway, and you'll get a lower range than driving conservatively maybe a bit under the maximum speed limit).
I can drive upwards of 3 hours without a break.
Which is *definitely* not recommanded.
Current recommendations here around in continental Europe is a break each 1 or 2 hours max.
(e.g.: There are big public service campaigns to advise drivers to have at least a quick "turbo-nap" every once in a while when driving long distance)
But let's make the assumption that you are 2 drivers sharing the load, and that you'll switch midway (without charging the car, nor making any break longer than required to change seat - no the best experience, but hey).
With an average-priced EV, that's not even near possible.
Renault Zoe are currently the cheapest e-cars with a decent battery.
(You can even get them for the price of an average priced ICE-car if you decide to rent the battery instead of buying it).
(They are definitely after the same market as Tesla's upcoming model 3, except that Zoes have been on the street for quite some time, and Renault chose the opposite progression from Tesla, release progressively longer range vehicle while staying affordable - instead of long range vehicles while progressively releasing cheaper models)
The latest model has upgraded the battery to 45kWh, which should give you between 200km and 300km of range. (depending on the speed/aggressiveness of driving 130km vs 100km on highway vs. 80km on streets between cities).
That's definitely in near the 3 hours of your example (and by now, both drivers of our assumption should get a nap, or at least make a long break - enough to put quite some additionnal range back into the battery using standard 50kW chargers)
For a car that cost in the general ballpark figure of ~30k USD (not some 100k+ USD Tesla Model S super car).
And all of the above aren't made up numbers, but my actual experience with Zoes.
They are available at the local car-sharing company (though not the more recent 45kWh battery), and I've already driven quite a lot of trip with them.
I can easy get 100km when I drive aggressively or 150km when much more conservative.
The current drawback I see, is that Renault doesn't have collision avoidances option available on their smaller cars like the Zoe.
(unlike VW where - like lots of european constructors - for the last several years even the lowest entry-level model like Up comes with a LIDAR [a.k.a. "City Safety"] in standard configurations,
or unlike all the noise that Tesla is making around their "Autopilot" since a couple of years ago).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Let me get some popcorn....let the flamewars begin! BTW, what's the Godwin equivalent for "Global Warming"?
The problem is that the fossil fuel industry is the most heavily subsidised industry going. A nuclear plant for example is always going to be made to be responsible for complete costs of waste disposal, and yet fossil fuel plants, and cars are allowed to just spew their waste into the environment at no cost.
If you were to make the fossil fuel industry pay it's actual costs - i.e. impact on people's health for example, rather than expect people to subsidise them by paying for their own health issues caused by fossil fuel users then the cost of petrol cars, of power via fossil fuels and so forth would be untenable and the market would change overnight but with massive economic and social disruption as people fail to afford to adjust to paying what they actually should, rather than to continue using their fossil fuel based power source or car at the expense of others.
So given the difficulty in trying to just completely alter the entire economic model of most countries overnight by making it illegal for fossil fuel users and power plants to continue to be subsidised by, say, doubling the price of petrol and electricity from non-renewable sources it's easier to just give at least some kind of counter-subsidy to renewables.
The problem is that the "natural" rate of change you're referring to isn't the natural rate of change, it's a rate of change crippled by the fact that fossil fuel power plants and so forth receive massive indirect subsidies through the fact they're not faced to pay for the actual costs they incur on society.
If you want to learn more search for "fossil fuel externalities". You'll find no end of articles and papers trying to estimate the hidden costs of fossil fuels, and whilst estimates vary it's to the degree of hundreds of billions every year in the US alone. The problem is that the system has been manipulated so long by the fossil fuel industries due to the power of big oil et. al. that they're not even close to playing on a level playing field even with renewable subsidies - they're at a massive subsidised advantage over renewables even when renewables have the subsidies they do.
Problem is the energy trap. Here's what happens when oil actually becomes hard to find, if a renewable transition has not ALREADY HAPPENED (and why "the market will solve it when it gets rare" is a stupid argument:
It costs energy to build renewable infrastructure, when energy is getting scarce and expensive- investing in that infrastructure means a bunch of people who are struggling, has to struggle a lot more.
No government wants to do that. It could easily take as long to transition with manageable investments as the remaining oil lasts - and at each step for the first several years it means having less energy than you otherwise would have. By the time you start seeing returns on the investment you're in the next election cycle - so making the investment is always better left to somebody else... until there is no oil left, and then you CANNOT transition because there is no energy to transition with.
The best way to avoid the energy trap - is to transition while oil is still providing plentiful, cheap energy. It's a basic economic lesson so old that it is recorded in a book that is at least 4000 years old. How did Joseph manage the seven dry years ? By storing food during the 7 good ones.
How did India avoid famines for thousands of years ? By storing food all the time it was plentiful so when the monsoon hit it's occasional long-drought cycle they had enough stored up to survive (until Britain dismantled that system - and they had 3 major famines leading to over 30 million deaths).
Invest in the sustainable option while the unsustainable supply is still plentiful, because when it isn't - you will not be able to convince suffering people to suffer more in order to fix the problem. Whether that's a decade away or a thousand years away doesn't matter. Invest in security now, because even if renewables seem more expensive (they aren't) that's a fallacious way of thinking. Human societies that survived in the long haul are the ones with the foresight to invest in alternative resources when the ones they rely on are still plentiful and it doesn't look like a justifiable expense ot make that investment.
The US is not a good example - 300 years is no time at all. If you want to be one of those societies that make it to a thousand or more, learn what the ones that did, did right.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
I am reading lots of arguments where people go "Well what about THIS random edge case? and THAT one?" You won't win against these people. These are the same people who willingly drop $20,000 on a new truck because they might get 2 inches of snow in the winter, rather than simply $1,000 on a set of good winter tires and wheels. Or $20,000 on a truck because there is the rare occasion they may need to haul something, rather than renting a truck from the local Home Depot or UHaul for a hundred bucks or two.
Electric car usage just moves the fuel use up to the power plant. There are efficiencies of scale but there is no good way to store electricity so all electricity on the grid is either used or wasted. There are also losses with conversion and distance. Then there are the batteries which are expensive and have a short lifetime compared to the auto that they are in. Much of the battery is recyclable but there are costs to the environment for both manufacturing the new car, the battery and disposal for the battery. Usability is another factor, while ranges are getting longer these are not real world as they do not take into account temperature, traffic patterns, battery age etc. I'd like to see a real alternative that does not crap all over the environment but the current crop of electrics are not it.
People in China and Europe would rather live in the US ... where people aren't told (as much) what to drive.
That's what the H1b's I work with from Poland say.
... And all the while they'll be praying to God to save them from the consequences of the climate change they could have avoided. No wonder America is sliding steadily backward.
Only boring people are ever bored.
And many more carcinoma victims. Thanks
It is not that they are sliding backwards, it is that they slide backwards and are now almost going over the cliff. Look at cellphone technology advancement in the past ten years, now it is the car industries turn to do their thing.
So much misinformation here, as is always the case with msmash posts.
If you google electric car sales you get headlines like "EV SALES UP 44%"! But the fact is they are a TINY percentage of the market, and in 2016 overall sales were actually down. Yes, electric car sales are down in the U.S. Go to a reliable source.
China making moves!! No, the local smog protesters are trying to push the government for more electrics because the smog is so bad. But as usual they have it wrong, the smog in Chinese cities isn't from people's cars, it's because of burning coal. China brings on a new coal power plant something like once a week. Many people heat their houses with coal, and cook with coal. So, just like the environmentalists here have done, they are going to go after the INDIVIDUAL Driver in a grand show while the real polluters - the energy industry - are not touched at all. Same thing that has happened in the US countless times.
And people wonder - when problems are exaggerated, lies are told with statistics, and all kinds of FAKE NEWS is spread to keep the electric car evangelicals happy - why nothing gets done. Stop screaming that the world is going to end if we don't all switch to electric cars immediately, stop pretending sales are through the roof, and stop lecturing us about range anxiety -- and more people would look into electrics. Electric car evangelists, and global warming evangelists, and many environmentalists are their own worst enemy. They think they are helping, but in fact they are slowing down progress.
Murphy was an optimist
Apparently nobody cares to remember that tons of people live in an apartment with no garage and no way to charge an EV at home. What the hell would I do with an EV? Run an extension cord down 3 stories and then 300+ feet into the parking lot?
As I've said before, people who live in apartments make up a large portion of the population regardless of where you live. They mostly park in parking areas several hundred feet from their units. Unless the landlord decides to install power in the parking areas, they can't even consider getting an EV. Even if they did, how can they know their next apartment will have power in the parking area?
You, sir, are a myopic, homophobic twit. All you can see is the "range anxiety" that 8s, quickly fading from existence, unable to see the enormous other benefits EVs have--- they are far more powerful than that wimpy Ford of yours (the quickest street legal production car on the planet is the seven-passenger, four-dopr Tesla Model S. With the most aggressive options, the Tesla can take you from 0-60 kph in 2.4 seconds... slam you to 155 kph without any gear shifts at all... only has about a dozen moving parts in the entire drive train... and provides the equivalent of more than 90 miles per gallon. Try that with any stripped-down, two seat, $million-plus Ferrari, Lambo, or Porsche, struggling in single-digit economy--- and what kind of range anxiety are you imagining, when that same Model S can handle roughly 300 miles on a charge, and battery technology is extending that range every year---a thousand miles per charge is within reach in the coming years. You, fool, will never be able to get real performance until that pig-headed attitude of your changes. It was the Saudis that used our oil money to commit the 9/11 attacks, or is your memory so feeble to recall that? If we continue to give them hundreds of billions of our money yearly, what worse terror do you think they will gift us with? Do you really think they are not hoping to blow us to smithereens with our own oil money? Or do you think their fracking and oil sand extraction and deep offshore drilling will give us anything better--- perhaps you have forgotten the billions of dollars in damage the BP Deep Horizons did a few years ago, and perhaps you turn blind eye to the swarms of major quakes they have been having in the Midwest from fracking? And the pipeline the DAPL wants to put through the Missouri River that is a source of drinking water for millions of Americans? It took thousands of American Vets to make them stand down when trying to illegally force that pipeline through Are you aware of the HUNDREDS of pipeline leaks from identical pipes all over this country that cause billions in damage? Open your eyes, cretin.
How ironic that YOU would be calling anyone a "Neanderthal"! You have the language skills of a grade-schooler, and are too blind to notice that Tesla is going gangbusters selling EVs while the market for ICE cars such as you drive fade in popularity. On March 30, when Tesla announced they were ready to, start taking thousand dollars deposits for their latest EV, they amassed 180,000 deposits within 24 hours and 400,000 deposits within several more days. Those are the intelligent one... you, fool, are the true Neanderthal. There are heaps of reasons there are so many eager buyers, and it is because they have seen just how much more powerful, quiet, trouble-free and practical EVs are. I am not one of the imbecile Luddites such as yourself that hide behind the "Anonymous Coward" monickers... I have full confidence in the future of EVs. Every year from now on, EV sales will grow exponentially--- There is my name... Bill Dale... let's see just who is the fool when it comes to what we will be driving in the coming years! EVs will own tomorrow!