The writer of this article has succumbed to the fallacy of static innovation. He assumes that the Tesla of today will be the Tesla of ten years from now and wonders why people would continue to purchase such an overpriced and underperforming vehicle.
It would be like somebody writing an article in 1992 stating that the personal computer industry is about to crater because there are only so many people willing to pay over $2,000 for a sluggish device that constantly needs to be restarted and chugs away for minutes just loading the contents of a floppy disk.
The fallacy there is that the author would have made the assumption that computers would forever run on a 386 processor and just over a half a megabyte of RAM.
Ten years later, personal computers were nothing like those of 1992. And so it will be with electrical vehicles.
Yes, the flaw of the argument is this line:
“That more and more people will be willing to pay premiums of $10,000 or $20,000 or more to get a vehicle that shows off climate virtue”
EVs have a fraction of the complexity of ICEs and the costs of EV components are steadily falling.
In 10 years a Tesla may by $10K cheaper to buy and $10K cheaper to operate than a traditional vehicle.
At that point Tesla becomes the world’s most valuable company.
“Ten years later, personal computers were nothing like those of 1992. And so it will be with electrical vehicles.”
The fallacy there is that components for computers get cheaper as performance also increased. Tesla and EVs have not shown a Moore’s Law to their costs and performance like computers have.
Just a FYI ... the processor was probably an 8086 or 8088.
Gain market share as the technology improves.
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The entire EV concept is based, almost entirely on our government picking winners and losers that started with tax breaks for rich folks that bought Tesla’s.
I’m no computer nerd but the world of computers and PCs was fueled by capitalism. The US government didn’t pick one company over another and there was ZERO interference from outside entities.
1. I don’t have an issue with EVs or the folks that buy them. But, if you’re going to go GREEN, go GREEN and recharge your battery via the renewable energy route. No more plugging it into an outlet that transfers electricity from a fossil fueled power plant.
2. There shouldn’t be ANY tax breaks/incentives for folks to buy an EV and the $7500 folks get now is a complete slap in the face.
3. The government shouldn’t be spending over $7billion to install charging stations around the country. No more than they should be giving Exxon or BP money to build a gas station.
4. It’s funny that most EV owners love to talk about how it’s FREE. starter putting a meter on the charging stations and making them pay for the service and we’ll quickly see all the liberal hipsters that own them
Throwing tempter tantrums.
5. Even Musk is reverting back to old technology as the information about how disastrous the environmental effects are due to the mining, deforestation, and slave labor/child slave labor is finally coming out and being acknowledged.
6. And of course, we shouldn’t forget that the Chinese control about 80% or more of all the mines that produce the metals needed for the batteries.
So yeah, EVs are here to stay.
That's a nice thought, but wishful thinking. The amount of stored energy required to move a car of a given weight a given distance isn't going to change by orders of magnitude. There might be one or more breakthroughs in electric energy storage technology, but any significant increase in electric car performance will depend on exactly that: A breakthrough. As in, more than just an incremental improvement in the batteries we currently have.
The availability of lithium for lithium-ion cells is problematic. Nickel-iron and lead-acid cells don't currently have the required energy storage density, and face theoretical limits on watt-hours per pound that make them impractical.
So unless we can come up with the "Mister Fusion" from Back to the Future or some similar world-changing tech, there won't be any automatic order-of-magnitude improvements in EV performance any time soon.
So is anybody doing the work at the utilities to grow the power generation 3% per year as projected for ev growth?