5 ms·

Every time I see someone make the argument that "all cars will be electric by 20XX" I feel like they are incredibly sheltered from rural life. The US is HUGE! S

by pilom 9y ago

Every time I see someone make the argument that "all cars will be electric by 20XX" I feel like they are incredibly sheltered from rural life. The US is HUGE! Sure the majority of commuting could be replaced by electric cars but I've seen no evidence of them being able to replace ICEs for the "I want to go skiing/kayaking/hiking (pick an activity where your car sits on the side of the road all day) 2 hours away and return on the same day" situation. There are so many changes to infrastructure that need to be made to get there. Sure ski resorts and malls and park and rides might put in 1000s of chargers in their parking lots eventually, but it certainly won't happen by 2023 or whatever this article predicts. Sure the cars might exist, but the charging infrastructure won't by then.

thebooktocome 9y ago
I've seen no evidence for ICEs replacing the horse's role in fox hunting, rodeos, and polo.... Which is to say, ICEs will never go away. But at some point you'll have to be rich enough to own and supply your own gas station to operate one.
jaggederest 9y ago
Two hours of driving is half a Tesla's capacity, so that scenario is already solved. It's not going to get any less solved over time. People will own cars individually for the same reason that people own horses now - they enable a specific kind of activity, or a native appreciation for the object in itself. Certainly motorsport is not going to die any time soon. What percentage of automobiles are used for touring and racing? I'd guess it's around 3% looking at my state's DMV figures, but form your own opinions I suppose. (A good proxy: Motorcycles are owned largely by the kind of people I'd expect would continue to own cars - 140k out of 4.2 million registrations in my state) There's about 1 non-passenger-vehicle for every 4 people. I'd guess we see vehicle ownership and registration by private citizens drop to about that number - so 50% reduction total.
- pilom 9y ago
  A Tesla model 3 has a listed range of 220 miles and it declines in winter and with hills. Therefore I doubt one could actually go from downtown Denver to Vail (~95 miles) for a day of skiing and back in a day without charging at the resort. It certainly couldn't make it from Denver to Salida, CO (~140 miles) for a day of white water rafting without charging during the day. Sure businesses could install chargers in their parking lots but we have a LONG way to go for that and that doesn't help someone going to climb the tallest mountain in Colorado (115 miles) who will park at the trailhead. There are some answers here but personal vehicle ownership isn't going away for large portions of America any time soon.
  - andy_ppp 9y ago
    I thought the article was arguing that electric self driving cars will remove the need for charging and owning, you'll just call a vehicle and it'll drive the route your talking about for roughly sixteen bucks each way. It probably won't be the same car but that's not a problem really.
  - trhway 9y ago
    >that doesn't help someone going to climb the tallest mountain in Colorado (115 miles) who will park at the trailhead. just command the car to go on its own and charge at the nearest charging station while you're enjoying the trail :) This is just one illustration how two tech advancements - self-driving and EV - happening simultaneously would help each other and would result in practical revolution.
  - icc97 9y ago
    The extended range model 3 is 310 miles. You go there, charge it up whilst you're white water rafting and then drive back.
  - prawn 9y ago
    "Sure businesses could install chargers in their parking lots but we have a LONG way to go for that" Why's that? I've seen hotels in Spain with dedicated Tesla parking/charging stations. Gas stations will be retrofitted with charging/swapping options. Tesla/other may partner with other businesses to install charging stations on the street. Cars will leave while you're hiking to recharge. National Parks may well install charging stations and have regular, automated shuttles running the most popular routes. Plus you're talking about a very specific case to suggest this being an issue for "large portions of America".
vvanders 9y ago
As someone who lives in a very rural area away from the metro with an EV I say: so what? Unless you're going 300mi+ in a day(which is 6+ hours of driving) you're fine. Even if you are large parts of electric charging infrastructure is coming online at a rapid pace. Take for instance the Olympic Peninsula. Used to be really hard to get to via EV. There's now a Supercharger in Sequim and Aberdeen with another planned for Forks. If you have electricity all the fundamentals for the infrastructure are there.
- Gibbon1 9y ago
  I have a friend who lives really in the middle of nowhere. It's 70 miles to the nearest town with a big box store. 100 miles to Reno. He said if he had an electric car with 150 miles range it would totally serve his purposes. The local gas station has an issue. They have to charge higher prices. So most residents buy their gas on their weekly shopping trip to Fernley/Reno. There is the potential if that station closes, then electric cars become vastly more attractive.
- psychedelic 9y ago
  Exactly. As someone who grew up in northern Utah it is hard to imagine owning an electric car right now. But most people don't live in northern Utah. Now that I live in DC, I would love an electric car since most of my gas money is spent hanging out in traffic anyways. Big cities, where most of the population lives, is where EVs will really make their debut.
maxsilver 9y ago
Electric cars can have ICE's strapped onto them, and it works really well. The Chevy Volt, for instance, is perfectly designed to handle the situation you described. It gives you 52ish miles of all electric range, so you can commute and grab groceries and do all of your normal driving on pure electricity. And for various road trips, it still gets 40-ish MPG for hundreds of miles without any electricity needed. It also needs zero fancy charging infrastructure. Have a regular US household power outlet anywhere in your garage or home exterior? Then you have everything you need to charge it up every night. We could easily eliminate 50+% of US personal vehicle emissions, simply by putting 2013-era PHEV technology into every single car /SUV / truck, and getting people to plug them into regular 120V US household outlets overnight. Even rural folks would benefit greatly from getting 1 or 2 free "electricity gallons" every night. Pure EV's are obviously ideal, and way cooler. But even just a little bit of electricity in a PHEV goes a long way to reducing/eliminating emissions.
- pilom 9y ago
  I agree wholeheartedly with you and my next vehicle will be a plug in hybrid. That said, that isn't what the author is saying. He's saying that all private cars will go away because it will be so much cheaper to just call a self driving electric and I don't see it happening because people will never call a self driving car to the trailhead of a 14'er. It is just so much more convenient to have your own (PHEV).
  - Analemma_ 9y ago
    > I don't see it happening because people will never call a self driving car to the trailhead of a 14'er. It is just so much more convenient to have your own (PHEV). Self-driving cars can co-exist with short-term rentals. I live in Seattle and recently sold my car because ReachNow is good enough: it does short-term rentals by the mile, but when I go hiking I can do half/full-day rentals, and it still ends up being a lot cheaper than owning a car. And this is before self-driving and the cost savings of EV enter the equation.
  - leereeves 9y ago
    > people will never call a self driving car to the trailhead of a 14'er. As a long distance backpacker I'd love to be able to get a ride to and from the trail at a reasonable price. Of course, we'd also need better cell coverage.
whipoodle 9y ago
What do you think of the actual points raised by the author, though?
- pilom 9y ago
  That the whole "no one will own a car because self driving ones will be so much more cheaper" is hogwash.
  - Lightbody 9y ago
    Replace "no one" with "most people". Do you still say hogwash? He laid out a really solid article. You said "hogwash". If you want to change minds you gotta expand a bit more :)
    - notyourday 9y ago
      You should ask your wife/girlfriend/daughter if she is planning on getting into a self-driving car with no ability to control it.
      - skosch 9y ago
        I don't think I understand this comment, nor do I think I want to try to understand it.
      - drewmol 9y ago
        Or, to that point, if she's ever been in a commercial airplane. /s
        notyourday 9y ago
        With an autopilot and no one else in on an entire plane. Yup. Ask her that.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
lzlarryli 9y ago
One consideration is that if fossil fuel cars drop to a very low level in cities, the spending put into maintaining the fossil fuel infrastructure might become unsustainable. That would in turn drive up the price in rural area as well. In the end, it is very expensive to maintain parallel infrastructures as such and densely populated cities (unfortunately maybe) drive the trend of which infrastructure is going to win.
- nine_k 9y ago
  I suspect electric infrastructure is already more widespread in rural areas than gas stations. How many houses are next to a gas station? How many houses away from these can sustain 2kW load of their electric supply at night?
pm24601 9y ago
The US rural population is 15% of total population and declining ( "About 46.2 million people, or 15 percent of the U.S. population, reside in rural counties, which spread across 72 percent of the nation's land area" https://www.yahoo.com/news/census-rural-us-loses-population-first-time-040425697.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/census-rural-us-loses-population-... ) Next rural population has plenty of vehicles that use gas that could be electric. For example, 4wheel ATVs. A farmer that has an electric ATV could power the ATV with a solar array. Or an electric tractor, water pumps, etc Lots of opportunity to take ICEs out of the mix. Not just the pickup truck.
diafygi 9y ago
The thing you have to remember in energy and transportation is that capital costs are high, and margins are thin. What do you think happens when a new innovation comes in and takes 20% of your market share? This is what happened in oil with fracking. Venezuela collapsed and everyone else is on the brink. Replacing 20% of IC cars would be just as catastrophic for oil incumbents as fracking.
xexers 9y ago
The vast majority of people are living and travelling within cities. You're talking about a small problem that's getting smaller every year. See this chart: http://www.writework.com/uploads/12/122436/english-chart-illustrating-trends-urbanization-around-world.png http://www.writework.com/uploads/12/122436/english-chart-ill...
- adenadel 9y ago
  I wouldn't call the lifestyle of 20% of the planet a "small problem". Also, just because someone lives in a city (which can be as small as 2500 people and isolated[0]) doesn't mean that they never leave it. 0. https://www.citylab.com/equity/2012/03/us-urban-population-what-does-urban-really-mean/1589/ https://www.citylab.com/equity/2012/03/us-urban-population-w...
  - jholman 9y ago
    20% of the planet? How do you figure?
ricw 9y ago
This is one of the oddest false beliefs about electric cars. 1) they already have the 300+ mile range for the 4 hour round trip, 2) electricity is totally abundant anywhere. Far more so than fossil fuels. Building charging stations is really really cheap, because the infrastructure (electricity) already exists everywhere. The reason they aren't everywhere as yet is because there are still relatively few electric cars. I predict the opposite opinion will be prevail very soon: people will wonder why others even bothered wasting time refuelling their car and spending loads of money.
- drewmol 9y ago
  I don't keep up on EV development, but has the concept of battery exchange as an alternative to mobile charging stations made any progress? Seems like a big factor in the amount of time spent refilling vs recharging their vehicles.
all_usernames 9y ago
> The US is HUGE! India and China beg to differ -- and they will have an even more HUGE impact on big oil in terms of uptake of EVs.
- mobilefriendly 9y ago
  I don't disagree about the future, but today the US has more cars and consumes more oil than China and India combined.
danans 9y ago
> Sure ski resorts and malls and park and rides might put in 1000s of chargers in their parking lots eventually, but it certainly won't happen by 2023 We drove a plugin hybrid to go skiing last winter. Once we got to the hotel we were surprised to find a level 2 charger. We plugged in and 30 percent of our miles while up there were pure electric. If anything, given that ski resorts tend to serve higher income clientele, they are likely to be ahead of the curve with charging stations, especially if they can charge $ for it.
- prawn 9y ago
  It'd be cool to see National Parks add charging stations. Nearby, any site handling RVs would have some base infrastructure to add charging to their repertoire.
contingencies 9y ago
Every time I see someone make the argument that "all cars will be electric by 20XX" I feel like they are incredibly sheltered from rural life. Most people live in high density Asian cities. Farmers in China farm smaller plots and already use electric cars, drones and tractors.

by pilom 9y ago

thebooktocome 9y ago

I've seen no evidence for ICEs replacing the horse's role in fox hunting, rodeos, and polo.... Which is to say, ICEs will never go away. But at some point you'll have to be rich enough to own and supply your own gas station to operate one.

jaggederest 9y ago

Two hours of driving is half a Tesla's capacity, so that scenario is already solved. It's not going to get any less solved over time. People will own cars individually for the same reason that people own horses now - they enable a specific kind of activity, or a native appreciation for the object in itself. Certainly motorsport is not going to die any time soon. What percentage of automobiles are used for touring and racing? I'd guess it's around 3% looking at my state's DMV figures, but form your own opinions I suppose. (A good proxy: Motorcycles are owned largely by the kind of people I'd expect would continue to own cars - 140k out of 4.2 million registrations in my state) There's about 1 non-passenger-vehicle for every 4 people. I'd guess we see vehicle ownership and registration by private citizens drop to about that number - so 50% reduction total.

pilom 9y ago
A Tesla model 3 has a listed range of 220 miles and it declines in winter and with hills. Therefore I doubt one could actually go from downtown Denver to Vail (~95 miles) for a day of skiing and back in a day without charging at the resort. It certainly couldn't make it from Denver to Salida, CO (~140 miles) for a day of white water rafting without charging during the day. Sure businesses could install chargers in their parking lots but we have a LONG way to go for that and that doesn't help someone going to climb the tallest mountain in Colorado (115 miles) who will park at the trailhead. There are some answers here but personal vehicle ownership isn't going away for large portions of America any time soon.
- andy_ppp 9y ago
  I thought the article was arguing that electric self driving cars will remove the need for charging and owning, you'll just call a vehicle and it'll drive the route your talking about for roughly sixteen bucks each way. It probably won't be the same car but that's not a problem really.
- trhway 9y ago
  >that doesn't help someone going to climb the tallest mountain in Colorado (115 miles) who will park at the trailhead. just command the car to go on its own and charge at the nearest charging station while you're enjoying the trail :) This is just one illustration how two tech advancements - self-driving and EV - happening simultaneously would help each other and would result in practical revolution.
- icc97 9y ago
  The extended range model 3 is 310 miles. You go there, charge it up whilst you're white water rafting and then drive back.
- prawn 9y ago
  "Sure businesses could install chargers in their parking lots but we have a LONG way to go for that" Why's that? I've seen hotels in Spain with dedicated Tesla parking/charging stations. Gas stations will be retrofitted with charging/swapping options. Tesla/other may partner with other businesses to install charging stations on the street. Cars will leave while you're hiking to recharge. National Parks may well install charging stations and have regular, automated shuttles running the most popular routes. Plus you're talking about a very specific case to suggest this being an issue for "large portions of America".

vvanders 9y ago

As someone who lives in a very rural area away from the metro with an EV I say: so what? Unless you're going 300mi+ in a day(which is 6+ hours of driving) you're fine. Even if you are large parts of electric charging infrastructure is coming online at a rapid pace. Take for instance the Olympic Peninsula. Used to be really hard to get to via EV. There's now a Supercharger in Sequim and Aberdeen with another planned for Forks. If you have electricity all the fundamentals for the infrastructure are there.

Gibbon1 9y ago
I have a friend who lives really in the middle of nowhere. It's 70 miles to the nearest town with a big box store. 100 miles to Reno. He said if he had an electric car with 150 miles range it would totally serve his purposes. The local gas station has an issue. They have to charge higher prices. So most residents buy their gas on their weekly shopping trip to Fernley/Reno. There is the potential if that station closes, then electric cars become vastly more attractive.
psychedelic 9y ago
Exactly. As someone who grew up in northern Utah it is hard to imagine owning an electric car right now. But most people don't live in northern Utah. Now that I live in DC, I would love an electric car since most of my gas money is spent hanging out in traffic anyways. Big cities, where most of the population lives, is where EVs will really make their debut.

maxsilver 9y ago

Electric cars can have ICE's strapped onto them, and it works really well. The Chevy Volt, for instance, is perfectly designed to handle the situation you described. It gives you 52ish miles of all electric range, so you can commute and grab groceries and do all of your normal driving on pure electricity. And for various road trips, it still gets 40-ish MPG for hundreds of miles without any electricity needed. It also needs zero fancy charging infrastructure. Have a regular US household power outlet anywhere in your garage or home exterior? Then you have everything you need to charge it up every night. We could easily eliminate 50+% of US personal vehicle emissions, simply by putting 2013-era PHEV technology into every single car /SUV / truck, and getting people to plug them into regular 120V US household outlets overnight. Even rural folks would benefit greatly from getting 1 or 2 free "electricity gallons" every night. Pure EV's are obviously ideal, and way cooler. But even just a little bit of electricity in a PHEV goes a long way to reducing/eliminating emissions.

pilom 9y ago
I agree wholeheartedly with you and my next vehicle will be a plug in hybrid. That said, that isn't what the author is saying. He's saying that all private cars will go away because it will be so much cheaper to just call a self driving electric and I don't see it happening because people will never call a self driving car to the trailhead of a 14'er. It is just so much more convenient to have your own (PHEV).
- Analemma_ 9y ago
  > I don't see it happening because people will never call a self driving car to the trailhead of a 14'er. It is just so much more convenient to have your own (PHEV). Self-driving cars can co-exist with short-term rentals. I live in Seattle and recently sold my car because ReachNow is good enough: it does short-term rentals by the mile, but when I go hiking I can do half/full-day rentals, and it still ends up being a lot cheaper than owning a car. And this is before self-driving and the cost savings of EV enter the equation.
- leereeves 9y ago
  > people will never call a self driving car to the trailhead of a 14'er. As a long distance backpacker I'd love to be able to get a ride to and from the trail at a reasonable price. Of course, we'd also need better cell coverage.

whipoodle 9y ago

What do you think of the actual points raised by the author, though?

pilom 9y ago
That the whole "no one will own a car because self driving ones will be so much more cheaper" is hogwash.
- Lightbody 9y ago
  Replace "no one" with "most people". Do you still say hogwash? He laid out a really solid article. You said "hogwash". If you want to change minds you gotta expand a bit more :)
  - notyourday 9y ago
    You should ask your wife/girlfriend/daughter if she is planning on getting into a self-driving car with no ability to control it.
    - skosch 9y ago
      I don't think I understand this comment, nor do I think I want to try to understand it.
    - drewmol 9y ago
      Or, to that point, if she's ever been in a commercial airplane. /s
      - notyourday 9y ago
        With an autopilot and no one else in on an entire plane. Yup. Ask her that.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

lzlarryli 9y ago

One consideration is that if fossil fuel cars drop to a very low level in cities, the spending put into maintaining the fossil fuel infrastructure might become unsustainable. That would in turn drive up the price in rural area as well. In the end, it is very expensive to maintain parallel infrastructures as such and densely populated cities (unfortunately maybe) drive the trend of which infrastructure is going to win.

nine_k 9y ago
I suspect electric infrastructure is already more widespread in rural areas than gas stations. How many houses are next to a gas station? How many houses away from these can sustain 2kW load of their electric supply at night?

pm24601 9y ago

The US rural population is 15% of total population and declining ( "About 46.2 million people, or 15 percent of the U.S. population, reside in rural counties, which spread across 72 percent of the nation's land area" https://www.yahoo.com/news/census-rural-us-loses-population-first-time-040425697.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/census-rural-us-loses-population-... ) Next rural population has plenty of vehicles that use gas that could be electric. For example, 4wheel ATVs. A farmer that has an electric ATV could power the ATV with a solar array. Or an electric tractor, water pumps, etc Lots of opportunity to take ICEs out of the mix. Not just the pickup truck.

diafygi 9y ago

The thing you have to remember in energy and transportation is that capital costs are high, and margins are thin. What do you think happens when a new innovation comes in and takes 20% of your market share? This is what happened in oil with fracking. Venezuela collapsed and everyone else is on the brink. Replacing 20% of IC cars would be just as catastrophic for oil incumbents as fracking.

xexers 9y ago

The vast majority of people are living and travelling within cities. You're talking about a small problem that's getting smaller every year. See this chart: http://www.writework.com/uploads/12/122436/english-chart-illustrating-trends-urbanization-around-world.png http://www.writework.com/uploads/12/122436/english-chart-ill...

adenadel 9y ago
I wouldn't call the lifestyle of 20% of the planet a "small problem". Also, just because someone lives in a city (which can be as small as 2500 people and isolated[0]) doesn't mean that they never leave it. 0. https://www.citylab.com/equity/2012/03/us-urban-population-what-does-urban-really-mean/1589/ https://www.citylab.com/equity/2012/03/us-urban-population-w...
- jholman 9y ago
  20% of the planet? How do you figure?

ricw 9y ago

This is one of the oddest false beliefs about electric cars. 1) they already have the 300+ mile range for the 4 hour round trip, 2) electricity is totally abundant anywhere. Far more so than fossil fuels. Building charging stations is really really cheap, because the infrastructure (electricity) already exists everywhere. The reason they aren't everywhere as yet is because there are still relatively few electric cars. I predict the opposite opinion will be prevail very soon: people will wonder why others even bothered wasting time refuelling their car and spending loads of money.

drewmol 9y ago
I don't keep up on EV development, but has the concept of battery exchange as an alternative to mobile charging stations made any progress? Seems like a big factor in the amount of time spent refilling vs recharging their vehicles.

all_usernames 9y ago

> The US is HUGE! India and China beg to differ -- and they will have an even more HUGE impact on big oil in terms of uptake of EVs.

mobilefriendly 9y ago
I don't disagree about the future, but today the US has more cars and consumes more oil than China and India combined.

danans 9y ago

> Sure ski resorts and malls and park and rides might put in 1000s of chargers in their parking lots eventually, but it certainly won't happen by 2023 We drove a plugin hybrid to go skiing last winter. Once we got to the hotel we were surprised to find a level 2 charger. We plugged in and 30 percent of our miles while up there were pure electric. If anything, given that ski resorts tend to serve higher income clientele, they are likely to be ahead of the curve with charging stations, especially if they can charge $ for it.

prawn 9y ago
It'd be cool to see National Parks add charging stations. Nearby, any site handling RVs would have some base infrastructure to add charging to their repertoire.

contingencies 9y ago

Every time I see someone make the argument that "all cars will be electric by 20XX" I feel like they are incredibly sheltered from rural life. Most people live in high density Asian cities. Farmers in China farm smaller plots and already use electric cars, drones and tractors.