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Ask HN: Opportunities in the EV market?
There have been reading a lot of news recently about growth of EV:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15224578
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15219469
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15208565
While this change/growth has a lot to do with car manufacturers, what kind of opportunities will it present for companies outside the auto or ride sharing space?
- Jeremy1026 9y agoCharger networks. There are a few big players out there now, (ChargePoint, EVGo, and SemaConnect), but none of them have, to me, really captured the market.
- PaulHoule 9y agoThere are the big car manufacturers but then there are all kinds of smaller and more distributed businesses that revolve around the car. For instance, gas stations do not just sell gas, but they also sell groceries and prepared food, drinks, beer, and other things. Maybe some will become electric car charging centers. If it takes longer to charge your battery than it does to gas up, you may spend more time there and possibly more money. On the other hand, you may charge up most of the time at home or at work in which case you do not go so often. No matter what, people are going to buy the non-gas things they get at gas stations somehow. Every three to six months you change the oil on your gas car. Electric cars will need maintenance, but not the same kind. You'll still need tires, but maybe you won't need to change your brake pads as often because you depend more on regenerative braking. I knew a mechanic in 2002 who saw change coming and decided to establish himself as a hybrid car expert and he started writing service manuals for hybrids. On the other hand, I have no idea how fast change is coming. A few years ago people were talking about the "oil peak" but now people are buying GMC Suburbans as fast they can make them. Some countries are saying big things about the future, but it took Germany 30 years to really begin a promised phase-out of nuclear power. Scares about the availability of lithium could take the place of scares about the availability of petroleum...
- thisisit 9y agoThanks for the insight. Surely the speed of progress is surely a concern and given the amount of petrol cars on the road it will surely take a long time coming. My understanding on lithium is that it is abundant in nature.
- PaulHoule 9y agoLithium abundance has issues. It is not that common in the universe at large (compared to other elements early in the periodic table) because it burns up very quickly in the core of stars. People who have thought about this in terms of nuclear energy think that lithium used for fusion is not all that likely to be a larger resource than uranium used for fission in a plutonium economy. Right now most lithium is mined from a few countries in Latin America that are not globally minded so I could see politics getting in the way. Certainly there are other reserves of lithium that we know of, probably more that we don't know of. When we go looking we often find there are resources we didn't know about. On the other hand, it takes time and money to develop resources. A "baseline scenario" is that it is like oil and other commodities, the price will go up and down.