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Having trouble finding a primary source, but it looks like EVs are only 0.43% of operational cars in the US. So, something on the order of a half percent decrea

Having trouble finding a primary source, but it looks like EVs are only 0.43% of operational cars in the US. So, something on the order of a half percent decrease in fuel seems reasonable. Likely hitting above their weight as 2 car families opt to drive the new EV over the older gas car. https://www.experian.com/blogs/insights/2021/10/ev-registrations-grow-first-half-2021-non-electric-remains-dominant/ https://www.experian.com/blogs/insights/2021/10/ev-registrat...

melling 4y ago
Yes, I remember when only a handful of people had the iPhone too. Why do we have these silly discussions? Six years ago Tesla was going out of business and the stock price was going to tank. When that didn’t happen, we started having other silly conversations. If everyone in LA and New York drove an electric car they’d sure have much cleaner air. Not sure why the EV Bus Revolution hasn’t started in the United States. https://chargedevs.com/newswire/the-vehicles/byd-delivers-over-70000-electric-buses-almost-all-in-china/ https://chargedevs.com/newswire/the-vehicles/byd-delivers-ov...
- dr-detroit 4y ago
- cnntth 4y ago
  Transit companies get shafted in municipal budgets politically. Increasing ridership by increasing frequency (more drivers / more cheap diesel or lng buses) is a better investment of limited budgets than electrification. But also sometimes transit agencies just do dumb things (see, Boston de-electrifying a few bus lines).
  - ryantgtg 4y ago
    > Not sure why the EV Bus Revolution hasn’t started in the United States. It's mostly because it takes 10-20 years to transition a transit agency to ZEBs. Many agencies in the US are in the process of doing this. The timeline is due to things like: - FTA monies used to purchase existing ICEBs require vehicles to be retained for their "useful life", which is often 12 years/500k miles; - Retrofits or rebuilds of bus garages take many years and hundreds of millions of dollars. The timeline is dependent on design + construction + utility requests (which alone can sometimes take 2-3 years); - Budgets! Along with that comes refactoring service, due to so many vehicle service blocks not being compatible with the ranges of current batter-electric bus technology.
- vanilla_nut 4y ago
  Half the people in New York City don't have a car at all. Adding more cars in dense downtowns is not a solution; cars on streets just don't scale to that density. New York City needs fewer cars, not more. Given the longevity of the modern ICE car (15-20 years) it's going to take a long time to replace existing ICE cars in NYC. In rural places, replacing ICE with electric is surely a good thing. In cities, we need to scale down car use significantly, while scaling up walkability, bikeability, and public transit. Even if we switched every car and every gas station over to electric today, we'd still have to burn insane amounts of coal and natural gas to power those cars -- not to mention the microplastic pollution generated by tires and roads that is actually made worse by the increased weight of electric vehicles. The solution is fewer cars, and those cars that can't be replaced by other modes of transit ought to be electrified.
  - melling 4y ago
    You probably aren’t gonna believe this, but I never said, for the people that don’t have cars to go buy electric cars I simply meant replace all gas cars with electric, and we’d have cleaner air
    - vanilla_nut 4y ago
      Quote: > If everyone in LA and New York drove an electric car they’d sure have much cleaner air. Apologies if I misunderstood you. But surely you can understand how this statement sounds as if you're talking about every person in those cities, not just the current ICE drivers.
      - melling 4y ago
        English can be ambiguous, especially when written quickly online. To pass the Turing test, a computer has to infer the missing context. For example, “is this human really saying the solution is for every human being to buy an electric car ” or is he implying that people should trade in their gasoline cars for electric ones? Statistically speaking, how often do people say everyone should buy an electric car, even if they don’t own or need a car?
- KingOfCoders 4y ago
  Agreed. I had email around 1991 (before we had DNS - we had some different weird address format ;-) when no-one knew what "the internet" is. People I told back than didn't understand the coming changes.
  - jotm 4y ago
    I was an early adopter of "the Internet" in the 00s. Nowadays I'm "too old to know/use X/Y/Z". Damn kids, I helped build this sheet! :D
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
I think the main confounder is that sales are doubling year on year, so the most recent year's sales add the most to the number of cars, but at the same time, those sales will be spread through the year, so will on average only have 6 months of fuel savings.
supergeek 4y ago
Also likely hitting above their weight as people who drive more have a much larger incentive to switch to EVs. Not just fuel costs, but time spent going to the gas station a few times a week if you've got a long commute.
onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
Also - EVs just started to be somewhat available to the average consumer only 3-4 years ago. Given projected growth rates of adoption and the average lifespan of ICE vehicles - this number is going to be quite impressive in 10 years - like the entire oil output of a big OPEC country [1]. i.e. ~10% of all cars on the road in the US will be EVs, and another ~8% will be PHEVs. Combined with rates in China & the EU - the difference is going to literally change the entire geopolitics of the planet. You're looking at ~10M barrels of oil per day - that's ~35% of OPEC... By 20 years - you're looking at 100% of OPEC... [1] https://www.eei.org/News/news/All/eei-projects-26-million-electric-vehicles-will-be-on-us-roads-in-2030 https://www.eei.org/News/news/All/eei-projects-26-million-el...
dr_orpheus 4y ago
It looks like the 0.43% stat is just on EV's and doesn't include plug-in hybrids. If you look at the stats in the article (2.1 mil plug-in + 1.3 mil EVs / 276 mil total cars) it comes out to 1.2%. So I agree that is still reasonable and within the order of magnitude I would expect but I think that is why they are saying "only" because they would expect it to be closer to the 1.2%. But I think one of the things offsetting it and why the plug-ins aren't helping as much is that for longer drives you are running through the plug-in battery or you are just driving a gas car. I would be curious if there was an average miles driven per day/week/whatever for each of the different types of cars.
- KingOfCoders 4y ago
  Hybrids are a scam. They give people a good conscience but use more fuel than equivalent cars as they are heavier and more costly to produce. If you do not tightly watch it, you're burning more fuel. So I'd argue to not count Hybrids as "EV-equivalent". They are not saving fuel.
  - hnav 4y ago
    Depends, "real" hybrids like Priuses definitely save fuel, I'd say the powertrain consumes 20% less fuel before you layer on other energy saving techniques like crap tires.

melling 4y ago

Yes, I remember when only a handful of people had the iPhone too. Why do we have these silly discussions? Six years ago Tesla was going out of business and the stock price was going to tank. When that didn’t happen, we started having other silly conversations. If everyone in LA and New York drove an electric car they’d sure have much cleaner air. Not sure why the EV Bus Revolution hasn’t started in the United States. https://chargedevs.com/newswire/the-vehicles/byd-delivers-over-70000-electric-buses-almost-all-in-china/ https://chargedevs.com/newswire/the-vehicles/byd-delivers-ov...

dr-detroit 4y ago
cnntth 4y ago
Transit companies get shafted in municipal budgets politically. Increasing ridership by increasing frequency (more drivers / more cheap diesel or lng buses) is a better investment of limited budgets than electrification. But also sometimes transit agencies just do dumb things (see, Boston de-electrifying a few bus lines).
- ryantgtg 4y ago
  > Not sure why the EV Bus Revolution hasn’t started in the United States. It's mostly because it takes 10-20 years to transition a transit agency to ZEBs. Many agencies in the US are in the process of doing this. The timeline is due to things like: - FTA monies used to purchase existing ICEBs require vehicles to be retained for their "useful life", which is often 12 years/500k miles; - Retrofits or rebuilds of bus garages take many years and hundreds of millions of dollars. The timeline is dependent on design + construction + utility requests (which alone can sometimes take 2-3 years); - Budgets! Along with that comes refactoring service, due to so many vehicle service blocks not being compatible with the ranges of current batter-electric bus technology.
vanilla_nut 4y ago
Half the people in New York City don't have a car at all. Adding more cars in dense downtowns is not a solution; cars on streets just don't scale to that density. New York City needs fewer cars, not more. Given the longevity of the modern ICE car (15-20 years) it's going to take a long time to replace existing ICE cars in NYC. In rural places, replacing ICE with electric is surely a good thing. In cities, we need to scale down car use significantly, while scaling up walkability, bikeability, and public transit. Even if we switched every car and every gas station over to electric today, we'd still have to burn insane amounts of coal and natural gas to power those cars -- not to mention the microplastic pollution generated by tires and roads that is actually made worse by the increased weight of electric vehicles. The solution is fewer cars, and those cars that can't be replaced by other modes of transit ought to be electrified.
- melling 4y ago
  You probably aren’t gonna believe this, but I never said, for the people that don’t have cars to go buy electric cars I simply meant replace all gas cars with electric, and we’d have cleaner air
  - vanilla_nut 4y ago
    Quote: > If everyone in LA and New York drove an electric car they’d sure have much cleaner air. Apologies if I misunderstood you. But surely you can understand how this statement sounds as if you're talking about every person in those cities, not just the current ICE drivers.
    - melling 4y ago
      English can be ambiguous, especially when written quickly online. To pass the Turing test, a computer has to infer the missing context. For example, “is this human really saying the solution is for every human being to buy an electric car ” or is he implying that people should trade in their gasoline cars for electric ones? Statistically speaking, how often do people say everyone should buy an electric car, even if they don’t own or need a car?
KingOfCoders 4y ago
Agreed. I had email around 1991 (before we had DNS - we had some different weird address format ;-) when no-one knew what "the internet" is. People I told back than didn't understand the coming changes.
- jotm 4y ago
  I was an early adopter of "the Internet" in the 00s. Nowadays I'm "too old to know/use X/Y/Z". Damn kids, I helped build this sheet! :D

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

I think the main confounder is that sales are doubling year on year, so the most recent year's sales add the most to the number of cars, but at the same time, those sales will be spread through the year, so will on average only have 6 months of fuel savings.

supergeek 4y ago

Also likely hitting above their weight as people who drive more have a much larger incentive to switch to EVs. Not just fuel costs, but time spent going to the gas station a few times a week if you've got a long commute.

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago

Also - EVs just started to be somewhat available to the average consumer only 3-4 years ago. Given projected growth rates of adoption and the average lifespan of ICE vehicles - this number is going to be quite impressive in 10 years - like the entire oil output of a big OPEC country [1]. i.e. ~10% of all cars on the road in the US will be EVs, and another ~8% will be PHEVs. Combined with rates in China & the EU - the difference is going to literally change the entire geopolitics of the planet. You're looking at ~10M barrels of oil per day - that's ~35% of OPEC... By 20 years - you're looking at 100% of OPEC... [1] https://www.eei.org/News/news/All/eei-projects-26-million-electric-vehicles-will-be-on-us-roads-in-2030 https://www.eei.org/News/news/All/eei-projects-26-million-el...

dr_orpheus 4y ago

It looks like the 0.43% stat is just on EV's and doesn't include plug-in hybrids. If you look at the stats in the article (2.1 mil plug-in + 1.3 mil EVs / 276 mil total cars) it comes out to 1.2%. So I agree that is still reasonable and within the order of magnitude I would expect but I think that is why they are saying "only" because they would expect it to be closer to the 1.2%. But I think one of the things offsetting it and why the plug-ins aren't helping as much is that for longer drives you are running through the plug-in battery or you are just driving a gas car. I would be curious if there was an average miles driven per day/week/whatever for each of the different types of cars.

KingOfCoders 4y ago
Hybrids are a scam. They give people a good conscience but use more fuel than equivalent cars as they are heavier and more costly to produce. If you do not tightly watch it, you're burning more fuel. So I'd argue to not count Hybrids as "EV-equivalent". They are not saving fuel.
- hnav 4y ago
  Depends, "real" hybrids like Priuses definitely save fuel, I'd say the powertrain consumes 20% less fuel before you layer on other energy saving techniques like crap tires.