> The Center for Automotive Research and other firms focusing on the impact of new technology on the auto industry don't expect electric vehicles to account for more than 10% of the sales market until the late 2020s. That's when electric vehicles could start to shake things up.
Consider California [1], where it'll likely cross that in the next few years.
I wonder at what point most gas (petrol) stations start to be become uneconomical to run? As they start to close down, maybe range anxiety will start to become an issue for ICE vehicles. Is Norway getting close to this threshold already?
It will be a while. Cars typically last for a bit over 10 years. Thus even if new cars were 100% electric today it would barely show up on anyone gas station bottom line this quarter. Next year it would show up of course, nobody would close but every CEO would mention it in their message to shareholders (along with their plans whatever they might be to deal with it). In 3 years the weakest stations will start closing, but this will be a positive for each on that remains. In 10 years you will need to search for pumps but there will still be enough to drive all major routes in a gas car without range anxiety. In 15 years there will start to be problems, but you will be able to get personal deliveries of fuel (farmers already do this for tractors) and pack a few full gas cans if you need it.
The above assumes 100% electric. However I think electric will hit a plateau at around 90%. For that last 10 % (might be 5) the power to weight advantage of liquid fuel is important enough to keep a few trucks on the road (not cars or SUVs, but perhaps buses and motor homes). While it is possible to make a truck work on electric, many of them are already weight constrained, (because roads and bridges cannot handle anything heavier) or license constrained (without a CDL you can only haul so much), either way less weight in the fuel system translates into more weight they can haul. There is a lot of energy in 100 gallons (400 liters) of diesel fuel, and big trucks and equipment will burn that much fuel in a day. So long as liquid fuel (
including biodiesel) is available some applications will be willing to pay a premium to get it.
Gasoline is already something of a loss leader...they're really convenience stores with attached pumps. Though without the captive audience, and without the space and infrastructure to replace the pumps with electric chargers, I doubt that the convenience stores will have the same level of traffic.
Until electric cars can fully charge in less than 5 minutes, people will need something to do, so entertainment may become a thing (whether that's a coffee shop of an arcade for the kids, or just a place to sit on your phone, I have no idea).
As someone who owns an EV, but doesn't have a charger at home, I wish I could up vote this more :-) The biggest surprise for me is how much I enjoy charging the car -- it gets me out. If you put chargers around a pedestrian downtown core, it would be absolutely amazing. However, I suspect it's going to be huge at the malls in NA.
Unless EVs can charge faster, I really don't see them taking off. Sorry to be a luddite, but time is our number one good in the world and wasting more of people's time isn't scalable.
If I need gas and I have to pick up my kids after school or haul them to any appointment or other event it's not "okay" that I have to sit and wait for 30 mins. for my car to charge. Not. Going. To. Work.
Also, I live in a place that gets extremely cold, life threateningly cold. If my EV fails in that weather I could die.
Then the format would have to change. They are optimized to sell skittles and slurpees as fast as possible, there would be no point in spending 15 more minutes at a current gas station convenience store.
Makes more sense to put chargers in places people park, like grocery stores.
> Perhaps they will charge extra money to charge a car at the full speed the car is capable of and hobble charging speed for a lower price.
This would tie up their charging infrastructure and space for a longer time, making less money. Gas stations & charging venues are usually space-constrained because they're located on expensive real estate. Their goal is to maximize revenue and throughput in small spaces.
No, but you can't browse in a shop while filling up with petrol (at least in the UK where we don't have those locks which keep the pump on while you walk away.)
In New Jersey, at least, the "convenience store" at many gas stations consists of a row of cigarette packs in the attendant's booth and a soda machine outside. We also have plenty of standalone convenience stores here.
The smart ones put up charging stations here (in Norway) :)
Usually the charging stations are a different company like fortum, ionity, tesla etc. They make money on hot dogs anyway and they sell more hot dogs to people charging 15-20 minutes than people tanking for 3 minutes and drive on.
The gas station up the street installed 2 chargers next to the auto wash. The station is next to a sports park and office building, but nothing for general public to kill the time while charging.
Time to start remodeling for upper scale coffee with seating.
>I wonder at what point most gas (petrol) stations start to be become uneconomical to run?
They will re-structure and monetize electrical charging in some manner. After all, the global governments need a way to recapture the vast amounts of gasoline taxes imposed on regular cars.
Maybe, restaurants and coffee shops will take up the slack and put up charging stalls. Since every business is wired for electricity already I can't imagine that it would require significant investment. Whereas gas stations require giant tanks buried under the ground.
Being "wired for electricity" is the trivial part of the requirements for installing charging stations. I expect most restaurants have a 20kVA - 35kVA service, and coffee shops a 10kVA - 20kVA service. Adding 10 2kVA chargers (which isn't a very large charger) would effectively double the service requirements for a restaurant and more than double the requirements for a coffee shop. That's a big capital expense, even if the circuits for the chargers are run on a completely new service (which actually makes "wired for electricity" irrelevant).
To me more telling last time I looked two years ago some zip codes in Santa Clara Valley, BEV were 10-15% of new car sales. I went and checked again. Now it's 20-30% See below[1].
The way I see that is people in those places don't have automotive needs that are that different[1] than elsewhere. And 20-30% of them find BEV's to be viable enough option.
Take away BEV's are mainstream viable and not a niche product.
> The way I see that is people in those places don't have automotive needs that are that different[1] than elsewhere.
They live in a huge, built-up, tech-heavy area that's urban for miles around, with sealed roads and a regular grid structure. Their automotive needs are completely different to someone living in an isolated rural location.
It seems to me that the ability to refuel at home is a good thing for rural drivers. Maybe they don’t buy Teslas, but this is a massive advantage when you don’t live near infrastructure. Autonomy will come last to rural areas, though. Maybe especially in California where they do really weird things with their rural roads.
Half of those things either don't affect rural populations more than urban populations or are benefical to them too, the other half is just pricing in externalities that we need to get rid of no matter what.
A friend lives in a rural location. Their needs are different. First off because the super markets and home supply stores are about 50 miles away. As is cheap gasoline. About half their driving is very short trips in town and long weekly trips to the city to buy groceries and supplies. And enough gasoline to get home and last the week. And get them back to the city next week.
So an electric car they could charge at home and would get them to the city and back would be 'fine'
> Hard to imagine it takes 10 more years for the rest of the country to catch up to California.
At that rate, California won't surpass 10% until the mid-2020s--maybe 2024/5. Remember, it's already 2019 and in a few months, it'll be 2020. Late-2020s is only a 3-4 years past the mid-2020s.
Probably; the design of a radically different automobile model family takes around 4-5 years, which includes R&D, tooling, new supply chains, etc. This is masked by auto manufacturers constantly throwing out facelifts with a couple gimmicks glued on every year, but the majority of big changes usually come out on a decade basis. The Model 3 came out in 2017; if we assume conventional manufacturers started design of dedicated EV platforms during that time then we should start seeing a large burst of EV models coming out in 2021-2022, spurring demand. That will also probably be the do-or-die point for tesla to get their manufacturing squared away, since that's when the industrial juggernauts of Honda, VW, and the like will be retooled and coming online.
To some extent, for some time. Consider the adoption bell curve; I think California has moved from the "innovators" stage to "early adopters" but the country as a whole has not. Consider also what the saturation point for electric cars will be in the near/medium term - I doubt that the other end of the bell curve is 100% adoption.
>New Energy Vehicles (including full electric and hybrid cars) made up 7 per cent of total car sales in China during the second quarter of 2019, compared to 3 per cent in Europe and just 2 per cent in the United States. Chinese drivers bought about 350,000 NEVs versus about 100,000 in Europe.
From "China remains in pole position for electric vehicle uptake despite cuts to subsidies"
The popularity of pickup trucks in the US may hold this back a bit. I imagine the first trucks will have terrible range due to weight and lousy aerodynamics.
Until you can charge and go in 5 minutes gas will still be appealing to many. Currently it looks like a step backwards. Like stopping to rest and feed the horses.
Maybe if we had a universal battery and simple swap out solution. Something like a car wash where you drive onto a track and a machine swaps out the battery?
Everybodies super paranoid about job loss in auto manufacture. If we all move to electric cars, the charging infrastructure is going to need to be massive. In cities, we will need chargers by every parking space and in towns/villages every house will need its own charger. The building, installation, and maintenance will be far from trivial for all these chargers. Also, battery production, car battery refit, and recycling will become industries in themselves. I'm not convinced that people are thinking about all these feeder industries that will benefit from the adoption of electric vehicles. I don't think these jobs will go away, just mutate into something else.
Same goes for solar panel/roof installation, backup battery installation, burying power lines to improve storm resilience, etc. There's no shortage of infrastructure that needs to be built to modernize our system.
Trying to artificially protect jobs in one industry while there's a huge labor shortage in much more productive things like infrastructure modernization or housing construction seems like the antithesis of an efficient market.
Agreed. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, my family lived without electricity for two weeks. We depended on our gasoline-powered truck to procure food and water, transport an ailing grandmother for medical care, and generally survive.
If we and others had depended on the existing electrical infrastructure to power our vehicles, we would have been completely screwed. A chaotic, uncomfortable situation would have become truly dangerous.
I appreciate that use of your vehicles was essential for you during the aftermath of Katrina. But I don't think emergency situations are a good enough rational for using a gasoline-powered car every day. As in many computer science problems, there are benefits from treating the worst case (e.g. medical transport after a natural disaster) and the average case (e.g. commuting to work) separately.
In general, I suspect electric is better in the average case, and gasoline in the case of emergencies. We see this with household power: most people power their houses with electricity, but may use a gas backup generator. For the similar reasons, we should probably drive electric cars to work but continue using gasoline-powered ambulances.
> In cities, we will need chargers by every parking space
There are a number of alternatives that are not nearly as onerous. EVs do not need charging every day, and few people in cities need to drive every day. If you only drive 10 miles a week you can just charge once or twice a month; I already have to move my car twice a month for street cleaning.
IMO portable batteries are the most obvious solution. The lifetime-amortized cost of batteries is <20 cents per kWh, and for larger batteries with low discharge demands it's <5 cents. A small UPS-sized truck drives down your street in the afternoon, dropping off low-profile batteries underneath your car while another guy plugs them in. In the morning the batteries get picked up and taken to be recharged.
In the end the infrastructure is about the same level of effort, but I think the portable vision is much easier to conceptualize. A lot of jobs would be opened for people making these charging trucks. Many more would be opened to drive and operate them, but I'm not sure auto plant workers would want that.
> in towns/villages every house will need its own charger
Unfortunately these jobs are not transferable to auto workers. The processes to make chargers are highly automated, unlike auto manufacturing (outside frame and component production). There will be a lot of very well paying electrician jobs opening... but that's not a profession you can just jump into, despite the number of people who try (and cause fires doing so).
> and few people in cities need to drive every day
Well now, this really depends on the city. Not everyone is living in bike-friendly cities, nor public transport works equally well everywhere. I know quite a few cities where practically everyone who can afford a car is using it as their primary means of getting to work and back home.
There will certainly be new jobs created by this shift, but arguably fewer than the number that will be lost.
And the infrastructure needed to charge EVs largely already exists in the current electric grid. A simple adapter allows people to charge at home, and renovating current gas stations to become charging stations will be cheaper than many alternatives.
This is true of the powertrain for vehicles, however there are still many many other parts which go into a car. Most human jobs are in final assembly, needed here due to the tight spaces and complex customisations in each different vehicle, which will not change in electric vehicles.
There are plants out there where the electric vehicle model is produced on the same body shop, paint, and final assembly lines. The same steps are taken just with different parts/different dimensions.
Exactly, the article falls into a common trap, assuming too much automation and job elimination due to tech. Looking at Tesla, they tried and failed to very heavily roboticize their factory, when in reality humans are fairly cheap for some manual tasks, and skilled laborers are becoming less frequent.
Good point. But if autonomous vehicle fleets arrive I suspect that will no longer be as true.
As more and more people decide to forgo owning a vehicle and just summon autos as needed, the market demand for a variety of different makes and models will decrease considerably. And autonomous fleets will likely want to standardize as much as possible, to make repairs simple and cheap. Ultimately only a fraction of designs may be needed of those on offer today, and the more standardized the options the more likely those will become automated.
The only thing that happens in car factories is the engine is bolted into the car. Engines aren't made in those factories, they're made in separate factories. Changing to BEV cars just means you ship in an electric motor and battery and bolt those into the body instead of an ICE. The only significant difference is having to deal with safety concerning the higher voltage of a battery pack, but that's not very hard (and the battery probably isn't charged before assembly anyway).
I miss mentioning more capable production robots in this article. They are already destroying jobs today. In another 5 years robots will do even more tasks than today. Just look at the production line videos on YouTube for different cars. Vehicles made using less parts will unavoidable lead to factories without humans. Maybe couple bored to death guards will stay.
What the article gets right is that the ev revolution is, after decades of wishes and slow progress, finally taking off. It is also right about the great changes it will bring to the auto industry.
What the article gets very wrong is the timeline. It says,"The Center for Automotive Research and other firms focusing on the impact of new technology on the auto industry don't expect electric vehicles to account for more than 10% of the sales market until the late 2020s"
No, that's all wrong. The big shift is going to start to happen around 2023 when battery prices will fall low enough that ev's will start to have sticker price parity with ice's. Ev sales will explode, slowed down only by how fast production can be increased. By the end of the 2020's they will be over 50%.
The shift to electric autos will reduce their cost a lot and also therefore the economic foot print of the auto industry. At the same time though, many other forms of transportation will become economic that were not economic in the past and this will create many new jobs. You can see this starting already with electric bikes but that's just the first obvious sector. It's difficult to say exactly how things will turn out in terms of total employment but the result will certainly be better than just assuming a decline in autos and no other innovations with the new technologies.
It seems to me that any fundamental change in a product line will result in job loss at this point in time, this is on top of a fewer-parts-in-the-car issue. Cleansheet chances to redesign the supply chain and assembly system gives you the opportunity to modernize (ie. simplify and automate) while you're at it.
It's also an excellent opportunity to out-source or in-source depending on the facts of the matter. 52 card pick up.
I'm afraid of the future with regards to electric cars.
The simplicity and efficiency of current designs means that any further improvements in car quality are pretty unlikely, save for battery improvements.
This suggests that electric cars of the future will be like the smartphones of today: containing largerly the same, or equivalent components with very little to differentiate between them, which means the competition largely boils down to price. And low prices can be only achieved through economies of scale, leading to a winner takes all situation.
If little technological innovation happens and components become commoditized, it becomes easier for new players to enter the market. See for example the fashion industry. There haven't been any improvements to T-shirts in the last decades, but there is more than one company making them.
A major point of difference between car manufacturers will be software. Yes software will eat the car industry! Tesla and Silicon Valley have a huge advantage right now. But don't bet against Detroit, they will catch up because if they don't it's the ball game.
Also I've been predicting for some time that there will be a renaissance in car manufacturing. There's already a company in Italy selling a 'sled' complete with batteries. You get six people in a garage in Detroit that are good with carbon fiber and they can become a car manufacturer. I bet there are lots of under served niches not being filed.
My professional opinion is that Tesla seems to have an advantage because other manufactures do not invest in software properly. The moment one of the big manufactures embrace proper best practice software development and security (i.e. pay for it), that manufacture will gain a significant advantage.
They are massively investing now. I am working for a service provider and we are rejecting several contracts due to lack of man power ( and we are massively expanding)
The key is not just invest and expand, but embrace best practices. It matters how your structure the entire thing and basically something like NASAs programming guide lines, and a CI pipeline with rigorous automated test. The budget should reflect significantly higher allocation to QA than actual development.
Of course the infotainment software do not have to adhere to such stringent requirement, but if they don't push OTA updates for that, then they might as well to avoid crappy software.
Car manufactures have been doing ECUs for years. That is software that needs to work without bugs or it will destroy the engine. You never hear of bugs in them (it happens, but you don't hear of it) because they have figured out best practices that are unknown outside of cars and aviation.
He's not talking about ECU firmware, he's talking about infotainment software. You can't use the best practices for ECU firmware development as you use for other types of software development: it would never get done! Safety-critical software running on bare-metal or an RTOS (like for ECUs, ABS controllers, avionics, etc.) isn't much like software for doing GPS mapping and other infotainment functions, and the development process is entirely different. The latter has orders of magnitude more lines of code and is far simpler in scope.
The OP is right; currently, automakers basically outsource all their infotainment software, and generally do a poor job with it, though it's getting better. Considering how much drivers now interact with these or similar systems (usually on their phones), to do things like stream music and especially navigate, automakers should be doing a better job integrating this stuff into the cockpits for ease of use and safety.
I don't agree with you. There are several tools used in the creation of ECU firmware (and writing it). The software used for detection of car on rollers or road (diesel scandal) was one such tool for example.
What the heck are you talking about? Are you responding to a different post or something? You're not addressing anything I wrote there at all, you're talking about something completely different. My main point was that you can't use the practices used for ECU firmware for other types of software (anything that uses a general-purpose OS), and it's true, it's an entirely different kind of software development.
I was not really addressing ECU programming - that is an entirely different beast. But regardless, Toyota was involved in a scandal where they tried to cover up an error in the ECU that resulted in at least one death.
A subsequent review of their ECU code was quite worrying - it was to put it mildly, a cluster fuck that would result in deaths sooner or later.
The only real difference is the drivetrain, and only enthusiasts really care about the technical differences in ICE drivetrains. Interiors, cargo capacity, reliability, fit and finish, ride quality, etc. will all still differ between BEVs.
E.g. NVH has been getting better pretty much every year despite the fact that car companies have been working on it for decades
These estimates about when electric vehicles are going to take off all seem naively conservative.
The total world wide vehicle market is just under 70 million units a year. Tesla alone has guided for sales of 400k vehicles this year. If they roughly double their output on average each year they will be close to 20% of the total worldwide output in 5 years.
That's naively optimistic. Take a look through the number of vehicles manufactured by Toyota:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Toyota_vehicles
Each one of those represents a market segment that Toyota serves.
Where is Tesla's equivalent: minivan, yaris, rav4, tacoma, etc?
You don't really expect some soccer mom who buys a 30k minivan to buy a model X for 80k+? And I guess, the construction worker can pile his materials in the front trunk on the X too? I mean we only have 4 cars to pick from here..
And consider all of the places worldwide that Toyota sells to.. from rich countries to poor countries. They rely on infrastructure that is available globally to everyone, no matter your living situation. Even if you live in a poor country with little infrastructure and intermittent electricity, you can still get gas for your Toyota.
You might find this comparison silly... but you just said Tesla will produce 13m vehicles in 5 years.. making them 20% larger than Toyota, the worlds largest manufacturer.
>the construction worker can pile his materials in the front trunk on the X too? I mean we only have 4 cars to pick from here.
Where there's a will there's a way. In ~20yr when they're old and cheap the Teslas are gonna make great scrapper cars. All that roof strength and low COG lends itself well to slapping an I-beam on the roof. Obviously a sedan is not a practical work vehicle though.
Too bad Tesla doesn't built their cars with provisions to accept a proper heavy duty roof rack since the vehicle is built to take it. I understand why they don't since that would be an invitation to do all things that would compromise aerodynamics and destroy your range.
Edit: It appears my depiction of poor people doing poor people things with Teslas may have offended some people. I'm not sorry. Nothing you can do will prevent Teslas from moving down the economic ladder with age and mileage just like every other vehicle.
Tesla's habit of not making parts available limits their ability to reach the poor worker who needs to maintain his own car to have any chance of keeping it running.
Sure is, you can haggle about whether it will be in 5 years, 8 years or somewhere in between but I think Tesla growing as big as Toyota is almost inevitable.
In 5 years Tesla will be producing at least 7 models including 2 cars (S & 3) , 2 crossover/SUVs (X & Y), 1 sports car (roadster), 1 pick-up truck, 1 semi-truck.
I don't think Tesla will get as big as Toyota. Toyota is the second highest selling car company, and they're a close second to Volkswagen. Volkswagen Group will be the biggest electric car company in a few years because they're spending the most money on it:
Volkswagen's current and soon to be released battery electrics are the VW e-Up!, VW e-Golf (though this is being discontinued), VW ID.3, SEAT Mii Electric, SEAT el-Born, Skoda Citigo iV, Skoda Vision iV, Audi e-tron, and the Porsche Taycan.
Future Volkswagen battery electrics are the VW ID Crozz, VW ID Roomz, VW ID Buzz, Porsche Taycan Cross Turismo, Porsche Macan electric, Audi e-tron GT, and the Audi e-tron Q4. Volkwagen's roadmap is bigger and broader than Tesla's can be simply because Volkswagen operates at a larger scale.
I doubt VW will be able to compete with Tesla in the near term on EV's. Look at the Taycan for example. It's a nice looking car but unless you had brand loyalty to Porsche it doesn't stack up against the Model S. It's slower in both acceleration and top speed, has less range and for that less good car you pay a lot more money. VWs struggle is going to be producing a car that can compete on specs with Tesla at a similar price point. They just don't have the battery cost advantage that Tesla has spent the last decade building.
> I doubt VW will be able to compete with Tesla in the near term on EV's.
Volkswagen sells EVs cheaper than any Tesla and Volkswagen also sells EVs more expensive than any Tesla, which is the point. The selection of EVs from Volkswagen is already broader than what Tesla offers.
> They just don't have the battery cost advantage that Tesla has spent the last decade building.
The Volkswagen ID.3 will be cheaper than the equivalent range Tesla Model 3. The base model ID.3 (330km WLTP) will be around 30,000 euros, the midrange ID.3 (420km WLTP) will be around 40,000 euros, and I haven't seen pricing for the long range model (550km WLTP) but let's guess 50,000 euros. Volkswagen is officially launching the ID.3 in a few days. They might announce the final pricing then.
It's well known that the Teslas are no good on race tracks as they typically cannot complete even a single hot lap without overheating. In this respect the Taycan is in an entirely different class, it has higher voltage electrics (800V) which allows it to run at sustained high power for much longer periods.
Of course, Musk will likely have the overheating protections disabled on the test car to keep the fanboys happy. Without that the Model S has no chance to beat the Taycan.
I hear people say things like this about Tesla, but I am really skeptical. The company is still highly unprofitable despite having scaled production up significantly. It survives because of investor capital. That kind of strategy runs out of steam when investors stop believing the company's promises of future profits, or when a recession hits.
The things that make them unprofitable are one time capital investments. If you buy a 50 million dollar stamping press the serviceable life of which is measured in decades you probably aren't going to recoup that cost in year one. They are however profitable on a per vehicle basis and they have a lower cost of materials than any other EV maker.
That’s not how accounting for fixed assets work. If you buy a stamp press with a 10 year life, you convert 50m in cash into 50m in fixed assets. Both of these are assets, so this conversion affects liquid cash, but does not change your profits.
You then take 1/10th of the value of your stamp press and subtract it each year (depreciation). This is the amount subtracted from your profits each year.
Accounting as a profession has been around longer than tech companies. They know full well that companies buy fixed assets. Tesla isn’t some special case in this regard.
Toyota sells somewhere around 40 different models and 10 million units worldwide per year. There is no way Tesla is getting to that size in 5, 10, or even 15 years.
Tesla could potentially remain the number one EV manufacturer if the big manufacturers scale their EV efforts slowly and Tesla continues to expand aggressively.
Tesla won't match Toyota. But many other manufacturers are getting into EV's in a big way, starting with VW. The auto market a decade from now is going to look wildly different.
Sure, but that ignores other factors like safety, infrastructure, and winning over public opinion.
In my opinion, there's also the question of whether we really want to further cement America's dependence on cars. We could be investing this money / effort into laying down bullet trains, expanding public transportation, and reforming zoning laws to make future cities more human-friendly.
I doubt you would be able to restrict personal transport again. Anyone with relatives outside the immediate vicinity probably wouldn't want to rely on public transportation. And even if so, let's be honest, having your own vehicle gives you many opportunities and public transport is often inconvenient.
It wouldn't be that personal vehicle ownership would be banned, it would just be drastically reduced. In its place there'd be far better public transportation options, maybe better fractional car usage options, bicycles rideshares, etc.
Many people would still need cars, but instead of every family needing two cars, many could just have one. Then even for the people with cars, they might not drive as many miles on average with the new options open to them.
Obviously it would be easier to reduce car ownership in denser areas so that's where the bulk of the shift would happen.
Changing cities happens on a timeline of decades. We need to get rid of ICEs running on fossil fuel completely until maybe 2040, 2050 at the latest. That is, if we manage a linear GHG emission reduction starting yesterday.
Electric cars are the only option that can be rolled out fast enough. Of course we should start the transformation away from car dependence at the same time, just don't expect meaningful effects until after ICEs are already obsolete.
The top three safest cars ever tested by the NHTSA are all Electric. Tesla alone has been doubling the number of deployed charging stations every year and there are a handful of other entrants building out networks as well. Every home owner with a garage has the infrastructure needed to charge an electric car (aka: a wall outlet). I've not yet met a single person who after riding in a Tesla Model 3 doesn't want one.
>The top three safest cars ever tested by the NHTSA are all Electric
Because the people making electric cars know the buyer demographics and know those people have enough money to justify paying a premium for that thereby making it a marketable feature.
Nobody is wasting the money putting tree-trunk A-pillars and foot thick doors in a Chevy Aveo competitor because protection against something that's less than a once in a lifetime event for most people let alone the vehicle is not high on the priority list of those buyers.
When we were looking at houses a couple of years ago in the UK one thing that I always noticed is that almost nobody seems to use their garage to hold cars - 1 house out of the 20 or so we looked at had a car in it - the rest were full of miscellaneous stuff.
Isn't it possible to get electricity to a detached garage in the uk? My garage is 10 meters from my house, but I do still have two circuits from the house to the garage
That would require a doubling of production capacity each year. Currently they have two factories (?), next they'll need to have four, then eight...
The whole company would have to scale accordingly. That's just not feasible. And I don't believe there has even been a hardware company in the world with exponential growth over an extended period of time.
The factories haven't been operating at 100% capacity. The US factory in Fremont for example is in the process of putting in a new line to produce the Model Y, demand for which should be similar to the Model 3. That alone will enable them to close to double output. Then there is the China factory that is opening in a month or two they built that in ~9 months and they are planning to break ground on a factory in Europe next year.
I like Tesla more than most, I have one myself… however you can't be suggesting that three factories will outproduce 50? That would be some massive gains in efficiency! It seems unlikely that the factories are currently operating at about 10% efficiency.
The Fremont factory is not manufacturing the batteries for its cars AFAIK. You're not doubling the output of entire vehicles there without GF1 increasing its battery production accordingly. Musk and Panasonic were already butting heads over battery production capacity @ GF1, but I haven't been paying attention lately.
Exponential increase of output from a single manufacturer for 5 years is naively optimistic to put it mildly. Scaling manufacture (ignoring if demand even exists) is very difficult and expensive.
They've been able to do it up until now, with >50% CAGR per year since 2010-ish. The question is whether you can naively extrapolate this mathematical growth when approaching established manufacturers in volume.
Tesla has up until now been an excellent example that a billion-dollar revenue business can be built much faster than 100 years ago.
>Tesla alone has guided for sales of 400k vehicles this year.
Which they are unlikely to achieve this year. We can now finally see the year-over-year numbers (the ones that Tesla were telling us were 100s of % growth, due to new model launch a year ago), and those numbers might be down (ie no growth).
But as an industry, EVs will keep taking market share. They just make sense.
I think it's still super premature to assume society will all just shift to EVs, considering the advances being made in zero emissions synthetic fuels, and the utter stagnation in advances for battery tech. Even Porsche who just released an amazing EV to much fanfare is investing heavily in this research, and should it be properly industrialized, it has potential to be highly disruptive to the EV market. All the infrastructure is already there, and altering an existing ICE to run on 100 octane-equivalent synthetic fuel is trivial. If you think big oil is just going to sit idly by and watch the entire transportation industry abandon them, you'd have to be quite naive.
EVs are by no means a panacea, and synthetic fuels are an awesome maturing tech that can go a great deal further to reduce our green house gas emissions, while not requiring an entirely new supply chain infrastructure be built to accommodate. Even Bill Gates has thrown lots of money into Carbon Engineering in Canada to further develop synthetic, carbon neutral fuels.
Consider California [1], where it'll likely cross that in the next few years.
Or Norway, where it is already at 48% [2]Both have higher gas prices and subsidies that help with TCO comparisons. But EV costs have lots of economies of scale yet to achieve.
Hard to imagine it takes 10 more years for the rest of the country to catch up to California.
[1] California New Car Dealer Association report Q2 19 https://electrek.co/2019/08/19/tesla-sales-electric-car-mark...
[2] https://insideevs.com/news/357526/june-2019-plugin-sales-nor...