Everything can be worked around. It is within current technology to pull up and have the whole battery swapped out giving an instant charge. It probably ties in to the ongoing trend where you don't own anything but instead lease everything and have to pay perpetually.

That was tried ages ago, the idea being that you buy the car but lease a battery option. In theory you would pull up at a station, slide the empty battery out and slide a charged one in.
Nice, but
To have the same effectivity of petrol or diesel the sheer amount of batteries on stock that all the stations would require would be astronomical, a station would also require an enormous amount of energy to charge the duds and keep the rest on charge. The infrastructure would have been magnitudes higher that that required for fossil fuels.
But the main killer was that all car manufacturers would have to have standardized fittings and we still can´t make standardized chargers for laptops.
In the end it was deemed totally unpractical and the idea was dumped.

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Back in Bavaria, god´s own belly button.

I think you will find that within 2-3 years EVs will be on par with ICEs Priceline and then cheaper due to battery development without pixie dust.

With approx 200 moving parts compared to 1000 and minimal servicing they are already cheaper to run for both fuel (off my roof) and servicing...

I would love to share your optimism, fuel off your roof, I take it solar panels, don´t have solar panels, don´t have a roof, much like millions of other people.
Then there is only so much energy you can squeeze into a battery, even one made with pixie dust. What people seem to forget that at the beginning of the mass personal transport age EV´s were very much on par with ICE´s, and after a decade or two running in competition the EV lost out to the ICE in every aspect. Why do you think today will be any different, if you factor in scalability and the sheer amount of cars needed?
I have heard arguments that not everybody should drive and people should use public transport, that could work if it were feasible, but it would also mean that only those who can afford it can drive.
We would probably see the politician who suggests that tarred and feathered and driven out of town on a rail.

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Back in Bavaria, god´s own belly button.

There is such a large mass production industry behind ICE's... last year I bought a brand new car, not just new to me but brand new from the factory, for less than 12000 chf. And this is with the 1000 moving parts etc.

Dont forget also that the 1000 parts in an ICE are plain old aluminium and iron, while an EV is chockfull of lithium, cobalt, copper etc etc.

It'll be a loooong time before EVs will catch up to this price, and offer all the fueling/range convenience that this 12k car has.


I wonder about the route of turning electric energy into liquid carbon based fuel. I know there is a plant in Holland somewhere that turns out about 1000 Liter a day. It was in the news recently as it is kerosine, and they want to start trials with using this fuel for airplanes. If this sort of fuel, made form CO2 from the air, water and electricity, becomes abundant due to aviation, why not use it in cars too ?

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Happiness is a full tank of gas (or better yet, diesel !)

And how much energy does it costs to produce that synthetic fuel?

Do you know how much fuel is used currently every day?
According to this statistics: https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/global_oil.php

it's 92 million barrels per day in 2020.

That's 14.6 billion liters in my book. Per day.
You'd need 14 million factories the size of that proof-of-concept plant.
Or 1400 that are a 10000 times bigger...

In the end, it's the same with as with hydrogen - lousy efficiency and an effort for the people controlling oil to keep controlling individual mobility (and extracting money from people for it).
There's a reason Elon Musk calls the fuel cell the "fool cell" ;-)

Crude oil is too valuable a resource for tens, hundreds of thousands of other products to burn it.

Also, I have little hope in the short-term for charging your car with solar-cells on its roof. First of all, a lot of cars are mostly underground.
Then, there are good reasons to believe that the solar-cells don't age very well when exposed to the elements like this. So you're looking at replacing them rather often, which totally defeats the purpose.

Energy storage in batteries is very efficient in the short-term.

As for prices of the cars: I don't see them falling.

Maybe for small vehicles with small batteries. But the days of the 1000km-with-one-tank car are slowly coming to an end.

At the same time, in a couple of years we will see the speed by which infrastructure for ICE-cars is being scaled back (gas-stations that actually sell gas), garages, availability of spare parts to increase because economies of scale no longer apply to it.

Of course, this will cost a lot of jobs. But at the same time, if crude oil is no longer a resource worth fighting a war for (and have other people die), the world may end up just a little bit more peaceful.

Pfff, Elon Musk will say whatever necessary to promote his goals. It is not gospel or automatically the truth.

If enough people are not able to meet their needs with an electric car, governments will adjust policy to meet the demand of the voters. In the end all those climate protesters on TV are just a small (but big mouthed) minority. Lets see what happens when people, due to the abolishing of ICE cars, cannot afford to travel to work anymore.

Check slide 16 for battery cost curve.

http://www.sccer-soe.ch/export/sites...ool_Santis.pdf

The biggest risk, IMO, for ICE is government intervention. With continued and increased penalties for carbon emissions and subsidies for EVs as well as the riding the battery cost curve, it would not surprise me at all if EVs became cheaper than ICE vehicles much sooner than people believe.

In Holland there was a big stink about the EV subsidies. People figured out that it was just more shoveling money to rich people. Why give someone 25k subsidy to buy a 100k car ? Try explaining this to a divorced mom with 2 kids having trouble to pay her taxes, to keep her 2k 13 year old car running. Plus, after the subsidy on lease cars runs out after x years, all those clean cars partly paid for with tax money were shipped abroad, so no longer contributed to Hollands clean air.

Have finally decided to hold off for the Mustang.

https://www.de.ford.ch/personenwagen...:all-prospects

Looks like a re-badged Tesla.

The internal code-name for the project was "Edison" for a reason...

That's all true and right.
But higher-end cars at least partly pay for the R&D necessary to bring features to smaller, cheaper cars.
At least in Europe.

Airbags and satnavs didn't start their lives in the ultra-compact segment.

Are you new in Europe?


That's not how politics in the EU usually works ;-)
Since then did individual hardships influence EU-legislation?

This is part of the larger goal to decrease CO2 emissions (treaties signed by governments, Kyoto, Rio, whatever) and to make cities more habitable.

Also, in case you missed it: Europe as a market is now barely an also-run.
You think touch-pads and large displays in cars are a disgrace and you want the buttons, levers and mechanics back?
Tough luck, the Chinese love their shiny blinkenlights and sorry, we don't sell enough cars in Europe anymore to make an exception for you luddites.

Same with engines.

What really counts is China. And China has a quota on how many electric vehicles you need to sell as a vendor before they beat you with a stick.

Do you know how expensive it is to develop an ICE engine these days? There's maybe a handful companies that can do this - and AFAIK all have stopped development of ICE engines because they cannot be sure they can recoup the costs.
They're slowly adding more powerful hybrid engines to their cars until the ICE-engine is merely a range-extender like in the i3 (where it incidentally has recently also been discontinued) to meet law-mandated efficiency goals.

So, ICE is dead.
If you liked them or still like them, buy one now and drive it a couple of years.

Well, I like my ICE equiped car, and looking at Cuba I should be able to keep it running a long time

And about EV's, there might be backpedalling. Like (again in Holland, I follow the Dutch news so..) they now figured out that chopping down forests may make for CO2 neutral electricity but is actually very polutant. Looks good on paper but most woodchips come from abroad (americas I believe) and have to be boated to Holland . Also whole habitats are being destroyed in the process with large impacts on wildlife, as a forest does not grow back overnight. And environmental action groups have to nerve to say that they are not to blame, 'they were wrong but did not make the final decision, and can therefore not be blamed'.

So maybe at some point politicians will come to their senses too about EVs. How can a 2500kg Tesla, including productions and use, be more eco friendly than a 800kg Suzuki ? Its just such a pity that before stupid politicians come to their senses a lot of money and resources have been wasted, which Joe Public has to pay for.

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Happiness is a full tank of gas (or better yet, diesel !)

Not cheaper (largest part of the cost of owning a car is purchase-price and thus deprecation).

Even with free energy, you'd likely never recoup the cost of a Model 3 vs. buying a Hyundai i10 or Dacia Sandero.

While taxes on fuel could be raised significantly, with no technical limit, there's of course the mentioned social problems and the fact that there is a point where people will try to circumvent taxes (e.g. by feeding Diesel engines with heating-oil), as can be seen with cigarettes.

So, currently government hope that EVs become cheap enough and that there are enough cheap, used EVs by 2030 so that large parts of the people aren't priced out of the individual mobility market

Those are 1950s cars.

Good luck with keeping a car made in the last ten years working another ten years.

They are increasingly made with planned obsolescence.

A few years back there was a study that showed how EV´s could actually be a real alternative to ICE cars.
They would have to be very lightweight, best made out of carbon fibre with a single seat and with bicycle wheels.
Now I could get my head around a steam car, perhaps Howard Hughes get´s the last laugh after all.

I think there's plenty of good chance for that with most of the japanese ones

For me the first point on slide 41 says it all: in 2040 only 35% of new cars sold will be EVs. This tells me ICE cars will be dominant for a long time. Also slide 31 shows how useless moderately priced (if you call 50k moderate) EVs are.

If you really believe in the whole global warming CO2 story (and peoples impact on this) and you want to do good, ditch your car and get a 125cc scooter. You'll be amazed what a scooter like that can do.