The EV Transition Is Harder Than Anyone Thinks

These articles always miss the most important point. People are buying EVs because they're better. That's the whole point of Tesla making attractive vehicles, aesthetically and functionally. That market pull allows for an S-curve in the technology, since it reduces market risk for investing in each increase in scale.

This is a completely different scenario than what the article suggests, which is that EVs are some kind of medicine for climate change that society is trying to have discipline about. Not so. It's a life or death situation for the auto industry, they don't have a choice. They either join the race or die. This makes most concerns about the transition irrelevant. For example, laws banning gasoline cars by 2035 are as useful as laws banning flip phones by 2015 would have been.

I see a lot of analogies between this and mobile phones.

The Motorola DynaTAC was made commercially available in 1983 and not very useful considering the lack of coverage infrastructure. Within 30 years we went from 30min of talk time and 8h standby through hours of talk time and weeks of standby to days of talk time and a day of usage, not to mention a whole spectrum of form factors and features.

And nobody, especially the incumbents, could predict the final shape the devices would take, sometimes to their demise(like in the case of Nokia).

The Mitsubishi i-MiEV was slow, expensive and small, with little range.

The Tesla Model 3 costs roughly the same (comparing to the 2011 MSRP for the Mitsubishi) adjusted for inflation, but is much better in every aspect.

That's less than 15 years of development. Who knows what will happen by 2035? Maybe we'll ditch lithium in favour of sodium, just like cobalt stopped being neccesary? Maybe the battery manufacturer Amprius will get acquired by a car company and scale the production of its 500Wh/kg batteries well beyond the planned 5GWh/yr? Maybe we'll have slow chargers attached to every streetlamp?

Norway is largely there regarding transitioning, despite having a cold climate. Took less than 15 years and their grid didn't collapse. Sounds like something the rest of the wolrd is capable of doing eventually.

I'm in the midst of trying to get an electric car charger installed in my garage. Don't shoot the messenger.

I live in Las Vegas, in a 25-year-old subdivision. The homes' 200-amp panels don't have enough spare capacity to add a charger. (3 old less-efficient HVAC units, pool pumps, hot tub, electric oven, clothes dryer, etc.)

So to add a charger, I have to get my home's service raised to 400 amps. That wouldn't be a big deal, except... the neighborhood's transformers are already over capacity, too. A few of the homes already added 400-amp service so they could add Tesla chargers, and there's no capacity left in the neighborhood.

Nevada Energy is willing to add a new transformer in the neighborhood - but they want to charge me $20,000, plus the costs of trenching the new 400-amp line from the transformer to my house, plus the new panel, plus the charger. It's looking like a $40,000 installation.

Or... I could just put solar on the roof, build a separate isolated 200-amp panel powered by solar, and charge the car from that. (Plus move over the pool pumps, hot tub, etc while I'm at it.) That isn't free, either, but at least it'd cut my electric bills long term instead of adding to 'em.

I don't know how many homes & neighborhoods are in this situation, but I was surprised that a 25-year old neighborhood is having this problem.

The transition to luxury EVs is hard. The transition to EVs is less hard. Things get easier if you throw out some of the requirements that we didn't need in the first place.

For instance, we don't need cobalt to make batteries. LFP cells are fine, though they may need extra insulation and heating/cooling systems in cold weather.

We don't need copper for the main power cables. Aluminum is fine as long as you can properly engineer the connectors.

For that matter, we don't need copper for the motor windings either. Aluminum could work there too, it's just that the motor will tend to be physically larger and less powerful.

We don't need rare earths for permanent magnets, though again this means a bulkier and less powerful motor (unless you go with induction, but induction motors aren't as efficient as permanent magnet motors).

We don't need cars with 300 mile range batteries. We /do/ need cars to be able to make long trips in a timely fashion, but that can be addressed by increasing charge station availability or (what would be much better) electrifying our major highways so that vehicles don't even need to stop to recharge. If the average car has "only" 100 miles of range rather than 200 miles, that translates to being able to make a lot more cars with the same amount of batteries, and the cars can be a lot lighter.

Most people buying Rivians and Lightnings and electric Hummers are wasting resources that could have gone towards building three or four boring sedans or minivans. Some people really do need trucks for what they do, but we could adopt policies that discourage truck ownership rather than encourage it (e.g. CDL requirement for vehicles with more than a certain power/weight, get rid of the chicken tax to improve availability of smaller trucks, add visibility regulations to prohibit comically tall grills).

The infrastructure is harder than the vehicles. New power plants take longer to get built than new vehicles.

Electric vehicles offer opportunity for innovation, but they don't have to be innovative. The zooming Teslas and Mach-E Mustangs get the attention. But that's not where the volume is. The electric Ford Transit is just a Ford Transit with electric drive. It's boring, but useful. Commercial vehicles which make many stops, from Amazon to the U.S. Postal Service, are rapidly going electric.

The real question is, when do electric vehicles become cheaper than IC vehicles. Last year, the same vehicle in electric seems to cost about US $10,000 more. This year, the Ford E-transit is about $5000 more than the IC version. It's harder to tell for passenger vehicles, because manufacturers are treating "electric" as a premium option and dumping in all the high-markup stuff such as leather seats. At some point somebody will come out with something comparable to the Toyota Corolla at a comparable price. BYD already has, but they don't sell in the US. Then electric sales will take over.

"EVs will/will not create more pollution than they eliminate."

I'm just skeptical about the heavy push for passenger EVs: while they're a small fraction of the carbon emissions pie in the world, they manage to be what we spend the most time talking about. It just seems like getting new cars has the added benefit of us buying shiny new stuff without concentrating on the heavy lifting. (Or disrupting industries that would lower gdp)

Last summer I did a 4200km roadtrip in my 41kWh Renault Zoe from southern Germany to northern Spain. The car is *absolutely not* built for long range. There were significant gaps in the charging network in some regions. The terrain was largely mountainous and traffic was fairly bad.

Despite all this, the trip was great: The car never was a limiting factor and always could go further than me as a lone driver (maximum daily distance: 660km). With 2 apps, google maps and some planning while charging it was possible to reach basically every place I wanted to go. Unlike the dozens of broken down ICE cars i saw, the Zoe had zero issues. The only problem worth mentioning was a company called EDP supplying too few and totally unreliable chargers in Asturias and Galicia.

With a car with a longer range charging on the highway becomes less and less important, so as long as there are plenty of 11kW chargers in cities for overnight charging or 300kW chargers for day charging (solar!), EV use is easy and already 100% usable. If you can charge at home for your daily commute and we are smart about the timing, I see few issues here.

For 90 years, the whole of humanity poored all resources into IC. They got so good, they can go to the moon and back without more then basic maintenance.

We are maybe 10 years into mass market adoption and still have internal resistance to research investments in all major IC companys. So we are not even near the part, were the break throughs happen and far away from the moment the whole affair plateaus out.

We also go against the most entrenched resource industry if ever there was one. Half of the middle east and russia, all dependent on this technology failing. But somewhere, in some cooperate battery lab, there sits someone, who will deal it a lethal blow. And as ECs push ICs into the uneconomical lethal zone, the resistance to it will fade.

I don't think I'll be buying an EV for at least another 10-15 years. I usually buy used and considering the best is yet to come with EVs and it will likely be in someone's hands for a few years before it's thrown on a lot for something I'd be willing to pay I'm just not seeing one for me in the near future. I'm also not looking forward to a future where buying a used car entails having to sign up for a monthly butt heater subscription.

Besides climate, there is one point about EV/ICE that never gets discussed: for decades now, we are polluting our environment with ICE emissions, in some places to unbearable levels. Why is this still allowed? I would have expected to make it mandatory to require an electric engine to every new car since hybrid technology became available, if not for anything else but having those cars capable of doing at least the urban stop-and-go without the stink.

Looks like we became so used to poison each other's breathing air that we don't even question it any more, we think it's some kind of inherited right we have. But guess what - I am also not supposed to throw the content of my potty out of the window anymore - nowadays that's not only unacceptable behavior, but outright forbidden. Because better technology became available to solve the problem.

Those of us who understand how EVs work have been saying this for years. I think we all hope everything magically gets solved simultaneously to make all the deadlines work. I expect most of us know it probably won't actually work, but we also don't want anything to stop us trying, so we just... keep moving forward. I think we also hope nobody tells the consumers that they're in for at least a decade or more where everything is terrible, or they might not buy the cars; none of this works if they don't buy the cars.

Based on USGov estimates, we need to increase lithium access by 2.5x every year for 18 years. We need something like 10x the grid capacity to serve the new power demands (and that's not considering that, for example, most green energy supply fluctuates). Land still has to be acquired to build out all the new infrastructure. Supply lines need to be increased and made robust enough to build all the cars without more delays. Skilled workers need to be added to service the new industry demands. And then we have to hope somehow that all the industry EVs are replacing get new jobs and don't depress the economy, hurting EV sales/investment. Oh, and probably at least half of all new EV infra funding is based on robust credit markets.

> Volvo cars CEO Jim Rowan boldly proclaims that electric vehicles will reach price parity with internal-combustion-engine (ICE) vehicles by 2025. Not likely, counter Mercedes-Benz’s chief technology officer Markus Schäfer and Renault Group CEO Luca de Meo.

"If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong." — Arthur C. Clarke

Maybe all of them are right for their own companies.

"Anyone" already knows the EV transition isn't that easy. It is basically only lobbyists, politicians and journalists who seem to life in a world divorced from reality. Esp. journalists, who are fighting on the forefront of peope-manipulation. Journalism seems to be dominated by wishful thinking and political dogfights. Gone are the days when a journalist actually reported about what is going on, not what they would like to see.....

I'm shopping for a car now. I want to buy an EV in principle, but there aren't any specific EVs I want to buy. I'm a highly motivated buyer, completely sold on the benefits, but there just isn't anything that meets my requirements. So for all intents and purposes I'm tallied in the same column as someone who thinks EVs will destroy the power grid and ruin the auto industry.

I still haven't quite figured out how all the people that street park because they don't have driveways or garages or even a place directly out front of their house are supposed to use EVs. Cities are not building the infrastructure to support that at all.

There are alternatives to cobalt, nickel, manganese and even lithium in batteries. There are a lot of articles being written how EV:s are not possible because they require so much materials and often mention cobalt and nickel.

A Tesla Model 3 version that has been available to buy for a long time already has LFP batteries don't contain cobalt, nickel or manganese [1]

Hence, are the articles actually worth it if they don't acknowledge this?

1: https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/a-closer-look-at-lithi...

If they real purpose of both manufactures and consumers of EVs was to combate climate change, then a much easier, cheaper, and better solution would be for everyone to discourage driving and promote public transportation and telecommuting. That would not only reduce emissions much more effectively, but the money saved in maintaining expensive and unnecessary infrastructure like thousands of miles of highways and bridges could be invested in maintaining and expanding public transportation and in bringing, fast, reliable and inexpensive internet access to every household so more people can telecommute to work/school. But cars look nice and they are fun to drive.

I'm betting many of the policymakers understand as much about EVs, the power grid, and global supply chains, as they do about TikTok.

They have to deal with the metal/battery recycling problem otherwise they have to make a fleet of batteries every n years and deal with staggering landfills. Uneven distribution of raw materials in such a case will cause tensions.

I wish there is a dumb car with an ev powertrain and nothing else. No screen, telemetry, autopilot nothing.

I think it's bizarre to make the claim that EV users generally should be encouraged to charge during the day instead of night using the argument that California, at some times, has a surplus of solar energy it is unable to utilize.

There is no attempt to argue that any states other than California have a solar surplus, no cure for the rolling blackouts they do occur during the peak hours in California, or any analysis about how many electric cars would eliminate that California surplus.

It's such a niche of a niche perspective.. I'm pretty sure there's good reason why my utility provider sells me energy at $0.01 overnight and $0.17 during the day.

I can still remember when EVs were physically impossible, and then when they were possible but worse than ICE for the planet, then when they were only toys for rich playboys and on and on.

So I'm surprised by the headline claiming everyone thinks this is going to be super easy.

The big question is what sets him apart from all the naysayers saying many of the same things that he's apparently never noticed during his in depth investigation of the matter.

This also misses the point that EVs are cheaper over time. There is currently a slightly higher upfront cost, but there are no oil changes, less break wear due to regenerative breaking, no transmission to service, no spark plugs, no timing belt, no engine air filter, etc.

In my experience with an EV, all you need to do is rotate the tires and add window washer fluid. That's it!

One would say it was ill-thought.

Remote working is reducing the need for having any car, and its utilization. People who are eco-conscious may rather choose to refurb an old car they use sparingly rather than buy a few new tons of common and rare metals. And most cities in europe are ill-suited for cars that need regular charging. All this infrastructure was for 26% of CO2 (before remote work).

Cars have no place in a sustainable future.

Independently from their source of power, a society built on cars as the primary mean of transportation is unsustainable and will always be.

We don't need to invest trilions in transitioning fuel engines to EV. We need to invest them in rebuilding our cities and suburbs to be walkable and to minimize the need for travels.

It's essentially impossible to upgrade existing residential neighborhoods to 200A service at every home. Nobody's going to pay for that infrastructure. This alone is going to limit the scale of adoption. Never mind the millions who will never have access to a dedicated charging station.

I’ve been driving EV for quite a while, if you have your own garage it is a no Brainer because you essentially have a “pump” at home. It’s like you don’t go to a gas station to charge your phone. Charge at night, same here. It is just so much better overall with next to nothing maintenance.

The tinkerer in me loves to own a vehicle I can easily service myself. Electric vehicles, in their current form, can easily electrocute an amateur DIY mechanic to death.

I love older purely mechanical vehicles. Their simplicity means that I can fix most things with duct tape or a piece of metal wire.

I'll never get why PHEVs never caught on. They're no more complex than a hybrid and combine the best aspects of both ICE and BEV vehicles. They require no charging infrastructure, and need only a fraction the battery weight of a BEV.

Most of combating climate change debates implicitly assume that reducing GHG emissions alone will stop or slow down significantly the climate change. I am afraid we already passed that point. At least in short term we should give a serious consideration to active climate engineering that working together with limiting GHG gives us a fighting change to restore the planetary climate to a set-point we are comfortable with. Unfortunately, most of debates are emotionally charged and single-mindedly focused. My hopes for a rational multi-prong approach to climate control are low.

>going to scale threatens people’s long-held beliefs, ways of life, and livelihoods, many of which will be altered, if not made obsolete.

This is the biggest challenge. You can't teach an old buyer new concepts without ramming it down their throat. The biggest transition hack will be training mechanics to become EV-focused. We have about 40 years of mechanic knowledge to churn before their knowledge retires with them. Eventually, fixing engines becomes cost prohibitive, and the roads will grow silent. Only then will the throat-ramming process be complete.

Someone enlighten me please.

I’ve been wondering why we don’t concentrate on sodium batteries instead of lithium for EVs. They’re heavier but is that really a problem?

Today’s cars are heavy as hell, there must be ways to make lighter vehicles that balance the weight of sodium, no?

The main barrier in EV adoption is the price difference, which, if I understand correctly comes mainly from the battery.

Take all the heavy/expensive crap out of modern cars, use sodium batteries instead of lithium and you have yourself a winner, right?

That all seems like obvious choices to me.

Where am I wrong?

And rightly so. The best car for the environment and for you and for the economy is the one you don't buy.

Subsidizing buying new cars is an incredibly misguided policy no matter what the new car is. The emissions an costs of production are nothing to scoff at unless you're an extremely heavy driver.

>given the sheer tonnage of lithium, cobalt, and other raw materials needed for EV batteries, that figure is overly optimistic, suggests the mineral market analysis company Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, unless nearly 300 new mines and supporting refineries open by then.

This is the real show stopper. We lack the supply chains necessary to replace all the cars with electric models. This simple fact should give rise to other questions about the practicality of mass conversion to electric vehicles.

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As for me, if the supply chains got fixed. I've got the cheapest house in town, with 100 amp 240 volt service. Without spending 10% the cost of the house to get a bigger utility panel, the NEMA 6-50 240 volt / 50 amp breaker option seems barely doable, so in theory I could charge a car overnight at +30 miles range/hour.[1]

[1] https://www.tesla.com/support/home-charging-installation/mob...

It's actually very easy. As soon as electric cars are better for the customer, people will automatically start buying them. As soon as that happens, manufacturers will ramp up production to meet demand. Transition over.

I for one can't wait for the new 2024 Mini EV. With double the range of the current model and on a dedicated EV platform it'll be the perfect little car.

I can't be bothered with an SUV as a single person.

The fear of collapsing the energy grid is why I think it would be a good idea to put solar cells on electric cars, even though that's not a great place to put solar panels if all else was equal.

I think if the batteries will be too big of an issue then we will end up going hydrogen for cheap cars and battery ev for more expensive vehicles for people who drive a lot.

The only transition that matters is to mass transit. I transitioned away from a car by moving into a dense urban environment. Best car I ever owned was the nonexistent one.

Wow, I didn't expect this many oil shills in this thread.