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Californians Have Now Purchased Half a Million EVs (arstechnica.com)
According Veloz -- an electric car industry group -- electric vehicle sales in California hit a cumulative 512,717 since 2010. "Months of strong U.S. sales in 2018, preceded by a strong 2017, are starting to show a trend: electric vehicles are selling well, especially in places where there are strong monetary and non-monetary incentives to buy them," reports Ars Technica. From the report: "Overall, this year has seen exponential growth in electric car sales," Veloz wrote. "Electric cars accounted for 7.1 percent of California car sales in the first three quarters of the year, with fully electric, zero-emission car sales outpacing plug-in hybrid sales 4.1 percent to 3 percent respectively." Veloz's data tallies not just fully battery-electric vehicles but also plug-in hybrids as well as the much rarer fuel cell vehicles. The group gets its data (PDF) from the blogs InsideEVs and HybridCars.com as well as a market-research firm called Baum & Associates and estimates from the California Air Resources Board (CARB).
According to data from InsideEVs, the Tesla Model 3 was the top-selling electric vehicle model in the U.S. in November. In November alone, 18,650 of those vehicles were sold in the U.S. To its credit, Veloz's press release isn't too self-congratulatory. The group writes, "Veloz recognizes that, while electric car sales are increasing at a rapid clip, it is not happening fast enough to achieve the deep cuts in emissions that the state needs to achieve to protect people's health and curb negative impacts on the environment."
According to data from InsideEVs, the Tesla Model 3 was the top-selling electric vehicle model in the U.S. in November. In November alone, 18,650 of those vehicles were sold in the U.S. To its credit, Veloz's press release isn't too self-congratulatory. The group writes, "Veloz recognizes that, while electric car sales are increasing at a rapid clip, it is not happening fast enough to achieve the deep cuts in emissions that the state needs to achieve to protect people's health and curb negative impacts on the environment."
Just eyeballing the sales graph, it looks like adoption rate is about doubling every two years or so. Should these trends hold then next decade electric cars will pretty much take over.
What many (nearly all?) don't take into account is that it takes a considerable about of electric to refine crude oil. Gasoline is effectively storage of that energy which creates more pollution to release at the point of use. How much electric varies with some estimates claiming about even on a per gallon, but it surely varies with the quality of the inputs, which includes more than just crude oil, much of it manufactured itself. Add in the industrial pollution, the gas station tanks which usually start to leak after 10 years, the gas/oil tankers eating diesel and the idea of not depending on a depleting resource, it is hard to imagine a world not better off with electric cars.
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
It's mandated by law. CARB (California Air Resources Board) runs a ZEV mandate. Each year, automakers have to sell a certain percentage of zero emissions vehicles. The formula is a bit complex (it also includes partial ZEVs like hybrids and plug-in hybrids). But the quota for 2018 is 2.5% ZEVs. For 2025, it will be 8%.
Every automaker has to sell this percentage of ZEVs. If they fail, they have to buy credits from an automaker who exceeded their quota. If they fail that, they are banned from selling cars in California. And since about a half dozen states representing nearly a third of the U.S. population automatically adopt CARB's guidelines, the automaker would be banned from selling cars to a third of the U.S.
No automaker wants to be cut off from a third of the U.S. market. So they will do whatever it takes to meet the mandated ZEV percentage for the year. If that means running crazy sales and incentives (VW offered a 3 year/30,000 mile lease on an eGolf for $49/mo $1500 down, or $79/mo zero down a few years back), then so be it. In other words, the sales numbers do not represent true market demand. The ZEV mandate means if not enough EVs are being sold to meet the quota, automakers will discount EV prices until it does. (This is also why the best EV deals are in California - only EVs sold or leased in California count towards the ZEV mandate.)
That said, real demand seems to be meeting or exceeding the mandated percentage the last couple years, since I haven't seen a repeat of the crazy year-end sales and incentives. But this isn't a metric you can reliably use to gauge real demand. As the mandated ZEV percentage gets higher, it becomes harder for automakers to subsidize their prices to meet the mandate if there's insufficient demand (the discount for each EV has to be amortized over fewer ICE vehicles). So if the mandated percentage outstrips demand by too much, it'll create a situation where it'll be cheaper for Californians to buy an ICE vehicle out-of-state and bring it in, rather than buy it in California. Thus skewing the official sales figures further from real demand.
Are there still people here who believe in this "long tailpipe" nonsense?
Start reading. Or, if you just want a cheat sheet for the US: here and here.
Here's where the US grid has been heading. Here's where it's going. So note that using, say, 2012 data above actually downplays the improvements of EVs vs. ICEs. Same story with the energy used in battery manufacture (which has been falling in almost direct correspondence to battery prices)
If I was wrong in my assumption that you're an American (most people who ask this question turn out to be), let me know where you're from and I'll give you data appropriate to your location. For example, major EU countries.
Seen on a Japanese food processor: "Not to be used for the other use."
Due to small size and low utilization rate car engines are pretty inefficient even if you compare it to something as dirty as coal power plant. Practical grids have more than just coal on them too. So yeah, electric cars totally do reduce emissions.
good point ... except that the oil industry receives between $10 billion and $40 billion in subsidies every year (depending on what you count as a "subsidy"), you stupid hypocritical dipshit.
i could live a little longer in this prison
100% of petrol/gas cars are using dirty source.
Fewer than 100% of electrical power stations are using dirty sources.
Don't know, but the maths looooooooks like it might favour the electric cars there, your tilting off axiom.
Then there's scale efficiency. One generator creating an enormous amount of power is less wasteful than a million tiny generators creating insignificant power and wasting most of that in the form of heat.
Again, maths.
I am really beginning to think people should be required to be licensed in STEM subjects before being allowed to post on the Internet.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Indeed - modern combined cycle natural gas plants can exceed 60% efficiency (burning a cleaner fuel, at that). A typical (non-hybrid) gasoline car peaks at around 35% efficiency and averages 20-25% efficiency in normal driving.
Coal is such a red herring regardless, as it's been dying, keeps dying, and there's not realistically anything that's going to save it. The overwhelming majority of new power added in the developed world is solar, wind, and natural gas.
Seen on a Japanese food processor: "Not to be used for the other use."
Top five tradeins for a Tesla Model 3:
* BMW 3-Series
* Toyota Prius
* Nissan Leaf
* Honda Accord
* Honda Civic
Yep, that totally sounds like a profile of the rich! Why, just the other day I saw Bill Gates driving around in an old Civic....
Seen on a Japanese food processor: "Not to be used for the other use."
The answer is that they're not,
Nope. The answer is that they are . ...or maybe you think internal combustion engines are a model of efficiency and that gasoline is made of unicorn tears and is carried to the gas stations by pixies riding on rainbows.
No sig today...
Let's imagine that was true. It isn't, but let's pretend. We know that fossil fuels get $22 trillion in subsidies EACH YEAR.
Your number is absurd on it's face, so your subsequent reasoning is suspect as well. The United States Gross domestic product is $19 trillion per annum. Removing any subsidies, real or imagined, wouldn't generate $22 trillion dollars each year for the US treasury.
Beyond that, everyone who goes on about 'fossil fuel subsidies' conveniently neglects to mention those subsidies are the same expenses and deductions that every other business in the US gets. You're not complaining about special treatment, you're complaining that companies you don't like aren't subject to special expenses that grind them into the dust.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
You must be a socialist. Why punish success?
Socialists want to protect people from the harm of being born to the wrong parents, not to punish people for being born to the right ones.
We one percenters are the ones paying 60% of the taxes collected by the government.
And deriving 90% of the benefit. Any asshole can see that this is unfairly biased towards the 1% if they are not willfully determined to miss it.
Stop envying us, get off your butt and work your ass off. You might make a tenth of what my grandpa left in the trust fund.
The most reliable predictor of wealth is the social status of one's parents. You didn't build that, and you don't deserve it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The problem in America is, people still don't see EVs as cost-effective, practical alternatives to internal combustion engine vehicles in most cases!
That's something you can't fix by waving a one time tax credit at people, and really shouldn't attempt to do by mandating purchasing behaviors.
It's just the fact that EV technology still has to mature, like ALL technologies do. Your early adopters pay the premium prices that help fund mass-market viability.
(I can remember back in the early 1990's, paying over $1,200 for an internal CD burner drive. It was an HP 4020i, and only burned media at a 2x maximum speed. Now, you can buy these things off the shelf for about $25 and they record single or dual layer DVD as well as CD media at speeds of up to 52x! But back then, I had a real need for it and could justify that price. Most people couldn't.)
Electric cars still present some big challenges, like practically none of them existing yet that in a pickup truck or van format. If you need to make longer road trips, you barely have any viable options EXCEPT for Tesla, because they're the only one with a fast supercharging network that's built out well enough. (The GPS in the car automatically takes you to the nearest one when you won't make it to a destination otherwise, etc.) And we still barely even have any of America's gas stations on-board with adding EV charging at their locations! If American adopted EVs in any serious way, all of a sudden? There would be huge lines and people stuck waiting hours to recharge their vehicles, and cars with dead batteries stranded all over our roads.
Go on, do the math. And by that I mean the full chain, for both. Getting the fuel, transporting it, storing it, and so on, and so forth. It does happen that if you do that, the "green" suddenly isn't so green any longer.
[citation needed]
This is all hard to follow, but I take it that AC is trying to say that the transport and storage of fuels to be used for EV somehow make them less green than the transport and storage of fuels, then burning them in vehicles designed to burn those fuels?
Well, if that is the case, we always have to remember that the electrics tend to get pretty good MPGe. the Nissan Leaf gets an equivalent 112 mpg https://www.autobytel.com/top-...
In addition, we can charge the EV via a home solar system, negating the transport and storage issue altogether. https://news.energysage.com/so...
But the way I like to look at it is let us assume instead of the present situation, Electric cars are dominant.
So someone comes along with this idea that we should all convert to internal combustion engines with all of their complexity, and install a nationwide system of trains and trucks to deliver fuel to neighborhood refueling stations - to create an infrastructure of an immense amount of transport of flammable materials.
All this to replace plugging our vehicles into an electric outlet. All to replace a multiplicity of energy sources. Solar/wind/nuc/coal/hydro can produce the energy for EVs; with a very specific energy source of petrofuel - with a very minor ethanol component.
Whoever came up with that idea would be laughed out of town.
Yet we have people defending that very system as somehow superior.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.