I have a drive way, and it’s not solved for me. My driving needs would require me to be frequently filling up at charging stations.
These kind of “it’s solved” statements are very much picking the facts to fit the conclusion, rather than the other way around. Pointing this out usually elicits a “well you should change your lifestyle to better suit the features of an electric car”. If you tried to say that about software features most of us would intuitively know how dumb it is, but it’s supposedly a much more reasonable argument when made about transport.
I think he sort of suggests the "true problem" in the beginning by questioning the premise of even owning a car. He decided, perhaps wisely, to not go down that rabbit-hole.
We are all interested in how technology will change our lives and solve problems but many folks aren't willing to consider that actually solving some problems requires living in a way which is intrinsically different. It might very well be possible that "tech curves" will eventually solve the problem of transitioning everyone now driving gasoline cars to electric but that is perhaps a localized optimization.
Maybe to _REALLY_ solve the problem requires us to re-consider the way we're living. Is it really sane to live 20-50 miles away from where one works and drive a car in bumper-to-bumper traffic as a daily commute? Sure, if the cars were electric, a larger fraction of the energy wasted doing this would be "renewable" or at least "greener" but what about the wasted time, erosion of well-being, and the continued waste of space. Yes, even electric cars need highways, parking lots, and cities which force themselves to be car-scaled rather than human-scaled. How much would we really solve by the transition to electric cars?
These are not considerations which are easy to talk about, but they're the "true problems" which are being swept under the rug by techno-optimists.
No, it just doesn't work. Electric cars aren't facing challenges because they're just too darned new and people just can't deal with the change, they face issues because on all the metrics that people really care about, electric cars eke out a small win on a couple of them at the cost of major losses on quite a few more of them. They really are inferior solutions for many car use cases, perhaps even the majority of them.
Hopefully that will change, and there's good reasons to believe that's a very plausible outcome (though not guaranteed), but you won't convince people by trying to essentially argue the problem is in the people and not the cars, because frankly, that's obviously not true, to the point of being insulting. Insulting your listeners is not a good argument technique.
It's still an issue, requiring large infrastructure investments to build battery stations and the charging equipment. Compare this to gasoline and it's precursor mixtures which could be derived from coal, for which there already existed massive distribution infrastructure.
I think the author reads entirely too much into the supposed psychology of an IC powered vehicle instead of the much more simple explanation: path dependency.
Almost every problem is solvable if you throw enough money at it. My point isn't that we're stuck with an unsolvable situation but that EV manufacturers are driving up sales faster than they, governments, or other companies are building the infrastructure to support them. There are 1.2bn cars on the road, even a fraction of that fast charging is a higher load than anything we regularly do now. And that's on top of what we already consume. Imagine just 5 locomotives running at maximum in close to every gas station today and you'll visualize the magnitude.
And all that is a problem only as far as people planning today under the assumption that they can just quick charge in 15min and it can only get faster. But they ignore the aspect of scaling. We are nowhere near providing quick charge capability as people imagine when they make such assumptions. And we won't be in 2030 either, when many manufacturers decided to have a fully electric fleet. Which isn't to say that we should stop buying EVs, we should just stop making unrealistic assumptions under best case conditions when planning or comparing tech.
It's the kind of assumption people get wrong even when thinking of household items like an electric stove. If each element is 2.5-3KW the assumption is they'll operate at that level even when running together. Then they scratch their head when the food just doesn't seem to get cooked as fast as they expected all of a sudden. Scaling up never comes to mind.
As for hydrogen, the best business case for it probably does not overlap the one for BEVs. It should target everything batteries can't, as many other commenters here pointed out. Some public transport operators are building as we speak fleets of fuel cell trains (to the tune of hundreds of millions) because overhead lines are missing in many areas they service and the alternative is diesel. There's a case to be made for quick "diesel like" refueling especially when in the hands of organized operators.
OK, I guess it's a problem with no known solution, even though EV sales are climbing nicely.
Me, I've owned an EV for 6 years, and live in an apartment. 6 years ago the pessimistic estimate was that what has actually happened today is impossible.
There are so many massive, complex, institutional problems with the auto industry that I am not sure "not as many more people are wanting new EVs as we thought" is the problem the article, and the executives it quotes, think it is. It feels like the industry is blaming consumers for not wanting what they're willing to make and support. It should be other way around.
We don't have a usable national charging network. EVs still don't have the range of gas-powered cars. Many EVs are much more expensive than similar gas-powered cars. Few mechanics and dealers fully understand how to work on EVs. Conspiracy theories are rampant - somebody told me they thought the tires on EVs would give them cancer; another person told me he thought all EVs were just explosions waiting to happen (as though an IC engine is better!).
Chevy recently attempted to discontinue its small, affordable Chevy Bolt in favor of larger, bulkier, more expensive vehicles built on a new platform. It did this during a year where the Bolt sold record numbers and was widely hailed as one of the best and most economical EVs around. The Bolt converted people - myself included - who could not or would not have otherwise bought an EV, and Chevy tried to discontinue it (and later relented and said they'd offer a new version of it in the face of popular demand).
But sure, it's the consumer's fault. How dare people not buy new cars.
So the argument for EVs here is not that they're better, but that the experience of owning a gas car will eventually get worse, bringing the convenience bar down to meet EVs? That's hardly compelling. It also reminds me of some people's efforts to "improve" public transport which seem to consist only of intentionally inconveniencing car drivers, but doing barely anything to actually improve the alternatives
It's interesting to me how this is portrayed as a problem that workplaces need to deal with, and not the real issue which is that EVs are still seriously impractical.
right idea, wrong place wrong time. Gas is becoming cheaper but there exist people who are buying electric cars just because they have money. Such people don't travel so far with their car to need switching their batteries. They normally travel to work. So if you want to solve a problem start with the problem not the solution!
OT: For electric cars to succeed someone really needs to step-up and standardise the plug. It's ridiculous to have charging stations that are tied to a particular brand of cars.
EVs are a textbook case in falling in love with a solution, not the problem. The focus should be on producing an efficient, reliable and cost effective _public transit systems_ that are widely accessible to as many people as possible.
These kind of “it’s solved” statements are very much picking the facts to fit the conclusion, rather than the other way around. Pointing this out usually elicits a “well you should change your lifestyle to better suit the features of an electric car”. If you tried to say that about software features most of us would intuitively know how dumb it is, but it’s supposedly a much more reasonable argument when made about transport.
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