Wanna bet on that? Those highly optimistic estimates come from people who can’t do math!
Average age of cars on the road is 11 years. That is 11 years to replace half the fleet of cars. EV’s currently have 2% of the sales and it took 20 years to reach that. I think EV’s will be doing very, very well to reach 50% market share in 11 years. That still leaves 8 million new internal combustion cars and trucks being sold every year to replace the roughly 13 million vehicles that leave the road every year.
Pn the 1950s the magazine covers were full of renderings of the flying cars we would soon be driving. Also, if by some miracle I am still alive in 2030, I doubt if I will still be driving.
There is not an electric car being made that is practical as an only car in a Western NY climate. Would you want to be stuck for a day or two on the NY Thruway in a blizzard in one?
I’m with you. It’s a hybrid. We don’t call diesel locomotives “electric” just because their diesel engines drive electric motors. The Volt is essentially the same concept.
All it’s gonna take is another gas price crisis. During the last one (W administration) I had people stopping me at gas stations offering me absurd sums of money for my CRX because it was a lot more fuel efficient than the SUVs they were driving. Sometimes I think I should have taken them up on it, but it’s kinda nice having one of the only near-mint-condition CRX’s left in the rust belt.
People are generally fairly stupid, especially when it comes to long-term memory. As soon as the gas prices went down again they stopped caring about fuel efficiency and went right back to buying lifted bro-dozer trucks. But start charging them $5 a gallon and they’re gonna get very jealous of their neighbor in the Tesla who never needs gas. And with other EVs coming online including affordable ones from the likes of Hyundai/Kia, it really won’t take much to make their popularity explode.
Also the “it took 20 years to get this far” comment, while technically accurate, is a bit misleading. Technology does take extra time to be adopted when oil companies buy the battery patents and sue any car maker that tries to use that technology.
20 years, coincidentally, is how long patents generally last.
One problem that haven’t been solved with EVs (ignoring the environmental cost of battery production): The huge battery cost. The new Audi E-Tron is selling poorly. Why? It costs a lot more than folks want to pay:
"Electric vehicles “have not had the lift that [the industry] expected,” Roger Penske, CEO of Penske Automotive Group, told analysts last month on an earnings call, specifically calling out the Audi e-tron’s slow retail start.
Penske said there had been “significant cancellations” of e-tron preorders, and the main issue was affordability.
“I think there is some sticker shock. The customers that thought these would be more affordable, like a Q5. But when you’re looking at an $80,000 vehicle in a $1,500 payment, it gets — it’s really aggressive from the OEM standpoint,” Penske said.
And take the new “Mustang”, $45,000 base (which won’t be made at first), $5,000 extra for the longer range version.
It’s being solved as we speak. The new Tesla truck, despite being if possible uglier than the Aztek, is gonna be $80k at the top end. That’s for the 500 mile range, 0-60 in 2.9 second all wheel drive version.
That’s actually fairly cheap in the truck world. People are happily paying 70 grand for a similarly-equipped F150 King Ranch, and it hauls 1,000 pounds less, and tows 1,000 pounds less, is much slower, and you still have to fill it with gas.
And that’s comparing top-end to top-end. The base model of the Tesla truck will be 40 grand, and it’ll still do most of what the top-end does, just slower and shorter range.
As battery technology improves, costs will come down. The $80k truck already outperforms the $100k Model S of 5 years ago.
We had similar conversations around the turn of the century. Cars were a lot more expensive than horses, and there were a lot more inconveniences (I’ve got hay in my barn, but the nearest gas pump is 40 miles away!), and unlike this transition, horses were a lot more reliable than early cars.
But cars still replaced horses, to the point that now horses are with rare exceptions only kept for recreational purposes.
Yes, it is misleading. It actually took 120 years to get this far! EVs have been available constantly for the last 120 years, just in very small volumes. Battery technology took big jumps from lead-acid to nickel metal hydride to lithium ion.
But the choice of 2 or more entrants into the market is a more significant step. I agree that higher gas prices will push people into EVs. If that happens, I predict we will see lots of dead EVs by the side of the road because they haven’t learned how to plan their recharges and trips.
You’re probably not wrong. After all, people still run out of gas.
As a guess, one advantage of that ugly body is that all those flat panels will be pretty cheap to manufacture, trimming costs significantly. Also, apparently it’s going to be available in stainless steel only, so no paint costs.
