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Fiona Jones's avatar

All environmental issues aside, it is consumer utility that will tilt gravity towards EV's. The tech sector is building an entire ecosystem of supporting technologies, business models and apps around EV's that will transform the way we live. Consider one of the last big inflection points - the advent of digital imaging. Not a big deal on its own, but it changed everything. Digital photography went mainstream because of the ease of use and all of the associated editing, photo sharing, uploading apps that went with it. Yes, many jobs were lost and investment in photographic and processing equipment was stranded. But consider what value and jobs have been enabled by digital imaging - the entire e-commerce universe, Amazon, FB etc, Youtube, Zoom, almost everything we do on a computer. Not all good, but no one is going back. We are on the cusp of a similar revolution in transportation that will spawn massive value-adding industries and businesses based on autonomous drive and connected, shared vehicle networks. And that could have many social benefits for people that cannot drive for any reason, could cut down accident rates, relive traffic congestion, etc. The size of the prize for the tech sector if it can wrestle a large part of the transportation sector away from oil companies is immense and they are throwing limitless resources at this challenge. And the more of an eco-system that gets developed around EV's, the less consumers will want to be on the outside of that. That potential has more charm for any politician than facts about relative carbon intensity or ethically produced oil. Sure, we will still need oil, but much less of it than was forecasted even a year ago.

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Roy Brander's avatar

It's instructive to compare to other technological switchovers. About 2005, I saw a graph of the declining price of a 1024x768 flatscreen LCD monitor with a 1024x768 basic Tube monitor. Both were getting cheaper, steadily, but the LCDs were getting cheaper much faster. You could see the two cost lines would intersect about 2008-9. I knew that there would be very nearly zero sales of CRTs in 2010, because CRTs had NOTHING to recommend them except lower cost: heavier, fatter, worse picture.

So it is with ICE (internal combusion engine) vehicles. They're more expensive to run, per km, more maintenance per year, louder, dirtier, smellier, and less-reliable.

It's unfortunate, how much initial-cost drives decisions, or we'd already be selling nothing but heat pumps instead of gas furnaces, and nothing but EVs.

The "national fleet", as it were, will probably be only at 10%-15% EVs when it becomes 100% EV sales, in the late 2020s. Then it will take another 20 years, because people won't (and shouldn't) toss out their ICE vehicles while they have many years left, and the car factories can only replace 5% of the national fleet every year. (Peter Tertzakian devoted a chapter to this issue in his 2006 book.)

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