I feel like writers of such a study have spent exactly 0 days in rural America (which is a very, very large portion of America.)
How much does it cost to replace the gasoline infrastructure with charging in North Dakota?
How many people living in rural America, driving gasoline trucks and using them on the job are going to "suddenly stop driving them", pay to get rid of them, and switch to an all-electric truck? And who is covering the costs of blanketing those rural areas with charging stations that are fast enough to remove the pain of waiting to charge a truck that needs enough power to haul a fifth wheel?
"NoDak" is a bad example - that state is fairly well off and organized. Years ago they got it their head that having 100% cell coverage was a good idea so they did it. New federal recommendations for shoulder width so they went and redid their roads. The /tiny/ ILEC that serves my family farm years ago ripped out all of their copper and only runs fiber.
If someone got it in their head that non-gas cars were what they should be doing in North Dakota, it would happen.
I think poorer states with more conflicted interest would have a harder time.
To a point, but a lot of it goes in the future fund. North Dakota is still a farming state and #1 honey producer of the USA. Oil will probably last quite a while given the costs keep dropping as the technology progresses, but the state is mindful of a bust since its happened before.
In the rural parts of the state, yes. That ends up being roughly 60% of the state[0]. In terms of pricing, my family who's nearest neighbors are over a mile away pay less each month than I do for more bandwidth than I get, and I live in a major tech hub.
There's a bit of encouragement from the state government and the rural providers also get free money that everyone else in these United [sic] States pays on their telecommunications bills. However it is still a good example of what can be accomplished in consumer Internet if not for the mega-corporations we have doing it today. If a small provider who's customers are frequently over a mile apart can do fiber to the home, why can't we have the same in metros?
The one disadvantage is the transit providers they plug into aren't the best - IIRC I was going through cogent in MSP to get to most popular cloud providers. Their network is worth looking at though[1][2]
Yep. Rural electrics, local telephone companies, and some cable companies have fiber. It probably is a function of most places now having multiple providers.
The general dynamic of North Dakota has always been a bit of an amazement to me. Its like "nope, not gonna do it" to "let's get on with it, oops done" happens like a flip of the switch. I think folks give too little credit to a farm state's love of "better". Its a weird, stubborn, leap-style advance on getting stuff done.
Are you accounting for the possibility that rural America is not big and rich enough to uphold the world's gasoline infrastructure all by itself?
Cheap gasoline, as an industry relies on the economies of scale to a large extent.
That is what this article is talking about.
If the demand drops, the price goes up, leading to a further drop in demand, which drives up the prices, which...
At some point, it becomes more costly to continue supporting gas.
Small planes use 100LL which is expensive but fairly widely available, despite being a very small market. It seems reasonable to expect rural use of gasoline to be bigger than that?
>If the demand drops, the price goes up, leading to a further drop in demand, which drives up the prices
This is nonsense. A drop in demand reduces prices. Yes, there are economies of scale in oil production/refinement, but they are dwarfed by the marginal cost of extracting the last barrel, which is what drives the global price of oil.
This is a typical refrain, but doesn't account for second-order effects.
At first, the price will drop. But the ongoing supply will pile up and need to be stored somewhere. Storing stuff is generally more expensive than not producing it. So production downsizes, and the little amount of product that ends up being produced costs more per unit than the larger-scale production process, and so prices go up.
Also, prices will go up at the end of this transition due to scarcity and an ability to weasel money out of people who will pay more to hold on to what they're used to.
Nice clickbait though. I remember seeing those headlines about flying cars - "In 2020 most cars will be flying!" a decade or so ago. Such a writers are detached from reality, or their reality is based on their very closed and hermetical environment.
> I remember seeing those headlines about flying cars - "In
> 2020 most cars will be flying!" a decade or so ago.
Can you provide some links? Because I can't remember any such headlines. (Pretty much all the articles I remember about flying cars had the tone that "it's much more complicated than science fiction movies make us believe".)
Ugh, tried to found some, but Google is not helping. Those were paper based papers about science and gizmos. I think I have seen some in old Playboy magazine once as well. We are talking here about 10+ years ago, so web was not everywhere yet.
Generally speaking you're spot on and I think the 'report' is unrealistic. The one wild card I could see accelerating EV in the heartland is wind power.
If you look at wind speed maps of America (http://apps2.eere.energy.gov/wind/windexchange/wind_maps.asp ) there is huge generating capacity going right through the Dakota's. With the decline in manufacturing jobs, politicians there may soon see investing in wind energy jobs as the future.
That doesn't solve the problem of making an electric truck that meets the needs of rural America, but it does put a lot of cheap energy in their backyard waiting to charge giant truck batteries.
The big issue for a lot of people in my area is power. You get an impressive yield of it out of EVs and the cost savings is a no brainer, but the battery life gets absolutely destroyed when you work the motors the way you work a gas engine when doing things like pulling equipment or snow/earth moving.
Agree; the "charging problem" is a huge obstacle for the electric vehicle industry.
We're going from a world where vehicles need to "recharge" (refuel) once every week or so for about a minute and a half to a world where they will need to recharge nearly every day for several hours.
Nevermind what happens to the electric grid when all this energy that was formerly being moved in tanker trucks in the form of gasoline now has to be moved over the grid and down to consumer homes.
I'm all for electric vehicles, but they have enough problems that any switch will be long and slow because we as a society will have to change the way we build and live in cities to deal with those problems (just as we did when gasoline vehicles replaced horses, so there's precedent).
This is something I think a lot of people fail to understand. For daily use, EV charging is a convenience, not an inconvenience. It only takes me five seconds to plug in my car in the evening. It may take several hours to charge, but that happens while I'm eating dinner or sleeping or whatever.
When you drive more than the car's range in a single day, then it flips, of course. For me, and I think for most people, this is rare enough that it's still a net win.
It also flips if you can't plug in at home. For a lot of people that's easy, but for many it's tough. Thankfully installing a charger is pretty easy, so it comes down to convincing the powers that be to do it, or at least allow it, which gets easier all the time.
Agree with the conclusion. Eight years?! The average car on American roads today is 11.5 years old. Average. Cars just don't get cycled out that quickly.
> It also flips if you can't plug in at home. For a lot of people that's easy, but for many it's tough.
You mean like if you live in an apartment, and you get one covered parking space (if you're lucky)? And if you're married (or have a roommate), and you both have cars, well, your apartment complex might put in chargers for the covered parking, but they probably aren't putting chargers on the uncovered parking, so only one of you can charge per night.
My perception is that the apartments consider the non-covered parking to be for visitors. It therefore seems to me less likely that they will install chargers for those spaces. (There is also perhaps the issue of the electrical chargers being out in the rain, but that wasn't part of my reasoning.)
Disclaimer: I don't own any apartments, and I'm only guessing about how apartment owners think.
The current grid is in most cases perfectly capable to deliver the required energy to charge cars if we all were to switch to EV's.
The maximum output of the grid has seldomly been a problem, it scaling the production of electricity up/down to match the demand which is difficult.
Some argue that adding thousands of EV's to the grid (each with 60-100kWh capacity) will actually help 'balance' the grid demand and make it more efficient.
If nothing were to change, then sure. But what about wireless charging at stop lights? Or the batter tech on HN last week that has longer range and only takes 5min to fully charge?
How much does it cost to replace the gasoline infrastructure with charging in [rural USA]?
If wind and solar keep improving, eventually they'll have such a price advantage over fossil fuel that everyone in rural areas will just convert their gas engines to liquid anhydrous ammonia. Many rural areas already have distribution infrastructure in place, and with cheap enough power it can be made from water and air with fairly minimal manufacturing facilities.
"Stanford University economist Tony Seba" is not a real Stanford faculty member. He's a "thought leader" and "keynote speaker". It says so right on his web site.[1] He lectures at Stanford Continuing Studies, which is Stanford's edutainment night school. Current courses there include "Great Opera Performance" and "The History of Wine". There are no admission requirements for students. (I've taken a class there taught by a former personnel manager for a major hotel chain. Good insights on how to hire maids.)
I agree with the other comments here that the timeline is a likely too aggressive, but it's probably not too early to start thinking in "death spiral" terms for a big chunk of the oil and gas industry.
It's not crazy to predict a pretty vicious feedback loop where at 15-25% EV car usage that gas stations start closing, more EV cars are sold so further gas stations close, as demand falls even further, even more close, etc.
I still feel like there are some weird brand/identity aspects to the denialism about the EV future.
If I introduced a gas powered vehicle tomorrow that:
- Had 1/3 the parts of today's vehicles
- Cost 1/10th the energy per mile
- Would work for 90% of people's commutes
- Comparable sticker price
There'd be no question that it would massive disrupt the current infrastructure.
> It's not crazy to predict a pretty vicious feedback loop where at 15-25% EV car usage that gas stations start closing...
OK.
> ... more EV cars are sold so further gas stations close...
Not so fast. For this to be a feedback loop, the first set of gas stations closing needs to cause more EV cars to be sold (presumably because it's less convenient to buy gas). But if 15-25% of the gas stations closed, that might mean that there are 8 instead of 10 within a 2 mile radius around my house. That's not going to be the tipping factor in making me decide to buy an EV.
He's right about the general direction things are going, but I don't think it'll go that fast, nowhere near that fast. Anyways, I like it. Cleaner air, and reduced maintenance costs. As for gas powered cars disappearing completely, it remains to be seen if electric cars can compete with gas powered cars on price - electric still has a lot of work to do in this area.
Sounds like someone shorted the oil industry and is hoping to make a killing.
The replacement rate for the consumer-fleet is, depending on who's counting, somewhere between 10.2[1] or 11.5 years (can't share the source).
So right there, the prediction requires millions of car owners to find more value in switching than the cost of 2.2+ car-years. Granted, network-effect pickup is not linear, but I have difficulty seeing how that happens. I still see commercial interstate transport as the first place we see real change, and would be surprised if eight years from now 50% of long-haul trucks are automated. The sunk costs in gasoline infrastructure are enormous, and I just don't see the countervailing pressure to force abandoning it without what I would consider frankly draconian legislation[2], and now.
[2] For reference, I'm pretty far on the "you climate-denier morons are killing us all" side. I just don't see how you destroy that much wealth with anything not draconian.
I wish, if not 2030 at least 2040, this report is one extreme. The other extreme are reports published by Oil industries that predict 10% EV penetration even around 2030 or 2040 which are laughable as well given how much tech changed in just 5 years
"Crude oil prices will drop by half in eight years" seems like the kind of thing you go bet on and make a lot of money off of, not the kind of thing you publish in an article on the internet.
This won't happen until EVs roughly hit price parity with ICE. Most people aren't willing to pay more for an EV. Many people would pay a premium for ICE (for ease of refueling).
But once EVs are cheaper the change will happen quickly. But quickly in terms cars still isn't fast. Even if another ICE was never built or imported to the USA, it would probably take about 8 years for EVs to the majority. We keep old cars around for a long while.
Also, a lot of people assume self driving and electric go hand in hand. But really, there is no reason they need to. In fact, if you really do have a fleet of cars, that might make EVs less attractive due to charge time. Though you can make it work anyway.
Not long then, a Chevy Bolt's only twice a Honda Fit. ICE cars won't disappear in eight years (as the article claims), but I could see price parity in that time.
I'm hopeful that self-driving electric cars will become the norm in the next 10 years, but I don't think it will kill the fossil fuel industry. A 50% discount on crude, fueled by decreased demand for personal transportation, simply gives more freedom to other industries that rely on fossil fuels. Imagine how cheap an international flight might be, for example. Efficiency will be gained in other sectors.
As I've said I don't know how many times before in these threads: This doesn't take into account, not even rural areas, but areas that are simply not metropolitan cities. The idea of vehicles-on-demand out here where I live, where I still commute between farmers fields, is utterly laughable. Who on Earth is going to buy them and operate them? And where is everyone going to warrant the service?
More to the point, when you're doing things with your vehicles that don't involve just moving from A to B with a laptop case, the idea of sharing vehicles gets a little more complicated. A good 4/5 of my friends have done some kind of modification to their cars, not adding spoilers or that nonsense, but changing how they work to do a job better than they did before. Add to it other tasks like towing equipment, pulling other vehicles loose from mud, plowing snow, on and on and this idea that no-emissions EV's are going to replace all of this is frankly stupid and shows once again the disconnect between a whole LOT of the US alone and I'd imagine elsewhere and the cities.
I'm not saying gas is forever, it is obviously going away and you'd be stupid to say otherwise. But to say that because Tesla and Chevrolet has made an admittedly perfectly good and arguably attractive alternative to the compact runabout used by a lot of city dwellers who hate driving anyway means that all gas powered cars are going away is fucking absurd. The only EV I know of capable of towing ANYTHING is the Tesla Model X, and even then it's towing capabilities have gotten extremely mixed reviews, ranging from complaints about the range absolutely plummeting when anything of substance is being moved, to the vehicle not handling the strain on the rear axle well.
I know I'm in the minority here on HN not living in a huge city with infrastructure aplenty who's ready to bail on cars forever, but seriously, there is so much ground to cover yet for EVs.
"This doesn't take into account, not even rural areas, but areas that are simply not metropolitan cities. "
The report takes that into consideration that's why it states that "95 percent of U.S. passenger miles traveled will be served by on-demand autonomous electric vehicles owned by fleets". Simply, you fit in that 5% left.
Mostly scrap. If you're in the market for a vehicle, do you take a gas-powered car with high operational and maintenance cost, or do you buy one with low costs?
Most people won't even buy, as it's cheaper and faster to rely on a self-driving vehicle that picks you up like a taxi would.
Existing cars are about as valuable in those scenarios as a horse and buggy.
Quite a few people were I live own trucks or SUVs. Also, we have buses here, but the only people who ride them are ones without cars. People do take Uber of course, but that's generally when they're not in a state to drive, or they don't have their car in walking distance.
I have a hard time seeing it be very soon outside of major cities, where "car in walking distance" has always been somewhat nonsensical given the ubiquitous public transportation.
So what is it about being autonomous that will change the game? Because taxis haven't made owning cars obsolete. I know exactly zero people who prefer taking a taxis over owning a car, although a few would be in favor of public train transportation .
It's not going to happen as fast as the report claims, but if it did I can only expect that these cars would be either "recycled" or sold to other countries where electric autonomous cars are still the future.
The US is about 4M square miles. So with 1M cars, you could cover every second grid point and have a car standing by within √2 miles of everyone. This is obviously impractical with human-driven taxis, but with self-driving taxis you could get there. The number of self-driving taxis to take every urban dweller to and from work would probably be around 20M, so covering the country would be only 5% extra.
Similar things to what you said were said about electricity and telephone service in the early 20th centure. Sure, you could provide it in cities, but the cost in the country would be prohibitive. But a combination of the right technologies and regulation promoting universal access made it happen.
> The US is about 4M square miles. So with 1M cars, you could cover every second grid point and have a car standing by within √2 miles of everyone. This is obviously impractical with human-driven taxis, but with self-driving taxis you could get there. The number of self-driving taxis to take every urban dweller to and from work would probably be around 20M, so covering the country would be only 5% extra.
This is flatly ridiculous. Yes mathematically sound but you're forgetting the concentrations of people vary extremely widely and so the demand for the cars would also vary extremely widely. And yes, you could then stack more in the urban areas but then we come back to the same problem: what company is going to operate the 5 or so that service my town, and why would anyone in my town use them versus their own already owned cars? And unless we plan to have some that are capable of pulling boats, moving equipment, towing trailers, and what have you you've addressed maybe 60% of traffic.
> Similar things to what you said were said about electricity and telephone service in the early 20th centure
Except the obstructions to getting phone and electrical service to the rural areas were a lack of funding and some difficult terrain in places, and a need for more switchboards. Show me an EV that can pull a trailer holding four horses (about 4 tons) a few hundred miles and I might believe you, but to my knowledge, that doesn't exist.
I think that the technical limitations of EVs (range, towing, etc.) are things that will not be overcome. I don't want to say it will be easy, but it will be a matter of a motivated company (or companies) applying resources to to solve a problem.
The far more wishful thinking part of the article is the idea of a retreat from ownership and on-demand vehicle usage. I'm sure it will be an option. Avis and Hertz will build fleets of summonable cars that you pay in a monthly fee and it picks you up and drops you off. That sounds great as a city dweller, but there are lots of parts of the country where that simply isn't tenable. I know of hundreds of towns in my state that have a population of less than 500 and are at least a hour drive from a town with more than 5000 people. No car company can fix that problem, and even if they create a great incentive to move to cities, that would be a glacial process, and that kind of migration would only make the idea less tenable for people that choose not to move to cities.
As you mention there is all the people that modify their vehicles, but even simpler--how many people with young children have a car seat semi-permanantly installed in their back seat?
And the other point I never see brought up when you see these pie-in-the-sky predictions--there were 254 million motor vehicles registered in the US in 2012. (1) There were 17.55 million light vehicle sales in 2016 (2). Obviously some of the 254 million are vehicles that would not get replaced in a migration to electric/autonomous, and some people would likely migrate to an on-demand model, but it certainly suggests that a complete cut-over in 8 years time would be very difficult especially for people living in poverty who today might be driving a 20 year old vehicle that they paid $1000 for, and can't afford a new vehicle, and may have reasons that an on-demand model wouldn't work for them (rural poor for example.)
> There's a whole world out there outside of rural America.
I think you'll find rural America is actually the world outside most people's world, but I digress...
> USA is #41 at 82.4% urbanization:
By population, not the meaningful things when it comes to vehicles, which are distance and density. A car that can do 300 miles on a charge is perfectly fine when the furthest you drive is 30 minutes to get to the "good" grocery store, it isn't even close to taking on the full duties of vehicles that do upwards of 300 miles a DAY, none of which occur anywhere near a charging station.
How will the police patrol roads when all these cars are self-driving?
Police forces will either need less patrol officers or they'll need to re-assign them somewhere other than roads. Or maybe surveillance inside vehicles to prevent any crimes being committed whilst in-transit.
What happens when someone decides to drive a non-autonomous car on the road? If they are banned someone is going to need to pull them over. If there are less police officers patrolling the roads, who will be doing all this enforcing of self-driving cars?
I like futuristic projections in that we really don't know how things will settle after a shake-up.
The problem is that the feedback loop on the commodity side goes in the wrong direction for a "death spiral". A reduction in the number of gasoline burners on the road causes a reduction in the price of gasoline, which makes gasoline burners MORE attractive, not less. Also because turnover on automobiles is slow, 8 years seems much too fast, if it ever happens at all.
Not having to pump gas in the freezing cold. I don't need any other reason to drive an EV. Not this one in particular:
>“The electric drive-train is so much more powerful. The gasoline and diesel cars cannot possibly compete,” Seba said. The parallel is what happened to film cameras – and to Kodak – once digital rivals hit the market. It was swift and brutal
I don't buy it because people don't buy cars for efficiency, they buy it as status symbol. So no, autonomous-vehicles-on-demand won't kill personal cars. They'd still make life easier in foreign trips though. And BMW can still make expensive electric cars and make profit happily.
Also, for convenience for families and people who haul stuff in the back of their trucks. Is soccer mom going to be using autonomous vehicles to haul her kids around?
curious how this will play out in the long-haul truck routes across the Australian Outback.
on the one hand it's currently large diesel or gas powered trucks with very large fuel tanks and few service/fuel stations en route.
on the other hand, if a 600 horsepower electric truck could be recharged at solar powered charging stations spaced out more frequently on all these remote roads -- well, they do have plenty of sunshine down there.
And, presumably, most of the United States will starve to death?
Tractors? Semis? Diesel trains? How exactly will we electrify those? In 8 years?
My girlfriend drives a 20-year old ICE vehicle. I suppose everyone with a 5-year old ICE vehicle will just ditch theirs, and buy a brand-new, $35,000 EV by 2025?
If you read the report you would know that this is not what they are claiming. The report bases everything on a simple assumption - it will be much more expensive to own the car vs to have one rented to drive you to your destination.
Also the report talks mainly about the passenger cars, but electrifying semis and tractors is not really that unrealistic.
Exactly. Banning cars with a combustion engine in the cities in the near future would be a really welcome step, but considering how large investment it would require then I do not think that it would really happen before than 10-15 years after wider adoption of electric engines.
It's a shame these financial press editors are so naive.
I'm an electric transportation fanboy. I'm a Tesla Motors customer and I have a photovoltaic array on my roof. I've done these things because I'm an early adopter, not because they're even marginally cost effective in 2017.
The economics aren't happening for an EV tipping point in one decade. Certainly not in the vast US.
Why not? Because: the places people in Sili Valley call "flyover country." Because: utility companies. Because: recharging time. Because: infrastructure. In the US, we have our own kind upper class twits (cf Monty Python). Many of them live in Sili Valley. The guy who wrote this study is a candidate for that honorific.
EVs require widespread charging capability. I'm lucky. I own my own house, and I had the money (til I spent it) to upgrade my electric service and get my 40A charging port installed. It cost money, and it leveraged resources (house, driveway) I already own.
The charging rate at 40A is about 26 mph: one plugged-in hour gets me 26 miles of range. It all works for me: it's my car, and I sleep. Still, a fossil-fuel vehicle can take on a full load of fuel in a few minutes.
What about apartment dwellers? There may be a few apartment developments offering charging ports. But not many. It's costly to add that stuff. Tell landlords they have to install charging ports at the rate of one or two per apartment, by 2022. Let us know how those conversations go.
It's true that car charging is a time-shiftable load, so it won't require a lot of extra peak-load generation capacity. But for time shifting to work at scale we need to persuade the electric utilities to implement some sort of "smart grid." It takes years of regulatory battles to do easy stuff. And the "smart grid" is hard. Tell the legislatures, bought and paid for by big companies, they'll be compelling utilities to adopt smart grids in five years. Let us know how those conversations go.
OK, OK, those things aren't important, because robot uber. Because of self-driving hired vehicles. Visit Ohio or New Mexico. Tell the third-shift nurse she'll be taking cabs to work from now on. Tell the electrician who rigged my 40A port she won't own the van she drives to work sites, and won't even control it. Let us know how those conversations go.
Telll robot uber's investors they have to pony up the capital for all those robot taxicabs, and the insurance costs for operating them 365 days a year rain or shine, sleet or snow. Let us know how that conversation goes.
Yes, electrified transport is the future. Yes, peak oil will look like declining oil prices and gas stations getting steadily shabbier as demand dries up and margins get thinner. But is it gonna "tip" by 2027 in the USA? no. In Norway and Singapore? Maybe.
How much does it cost to replace the gasoline infrastructure with charging in North Dakota?
How many people living in rural America, driving gasoline trucks and using them on the job are going to "suddenly stop driving them", pay to get rid of them, and switch to an all-electric truck? And who is covering the costs of blanketing those rural areas with charging stations that are fast enough to remove the pain of waiting to charge a truck that needs enough power to haul a fifth wheel?