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Debatable if it’ll go down by a significant amount. Still have electric cars being infeasible from a price and charging standpoint for much of America (and our
by spacephysics 3y ago
Debatable if it’ll go down by a significant amount. Still have electric cars being infeasible from a price and charging standpoint for much of America (and our electric grid can’t come anywhere close to handling a sizable percent of people changing to electric)
Batteries are getting better, but energy density is still superior with oil
Oil used for many manufacturing processes and items. I’m all for switching from plastic to glass, but the world loves plastic
Speaking of the world, developing nations still rely on coal, never the less moving to electric cars
I’d like to think we would make progress in medium term, but given the geopolitical instability, if a major world war breaks out (if it hasn’t already), I think we’d be stuck in time with oil-to-electric progress unless there’s some national security reason to go away from it.
But relying more on our grid seems to be more of a national security risk, given it’s weakly protected. And the US has been (still is?) a net exporter of oil. Worst case we ramp up production if the Saudi’s/OPEC do something crazy.
I’m still young, but I see a constant cycle of XYZ tech being promoted, promised, investors jump in, then it evaporates for 5-10 years and we slowly get the actual promises (sometimes). There’s a famous graph for this somewhere.
- bombcar 3y agoThe family requirements lead me to get a minivan. There simply is no electric one, and the closest you can get is the Chrysler PHEV, which is so much more expensive than the other options (and you lose the stow and go seats) that even with the tax rebate I can’t fully take advantage of its not competitive. $10k buys quite a bit of fuel. But if someone wants to send me $10k I’ll buy the Pacifica today ;) Otherwise it’s a Kia or Sienna for us. We’ve even looked at going up to the electric Transit and the money just doesn’t work out.
- avidphantasm 3y agoHave you considered the Toyota Hybrid minivan? The people I know who have them love them. Might be a good compromise.
- bombcar 3y agoThat's the Sienna. Downsides - second row seats are not removable, there is no interior kidspycam, they just don't exist (have waited 1+ years so far, and time is running out) Upsides - best mileage
- datavirtue 3y agoI would add that they also do not reduce CO2 or human suffering very much. Ford is switching to hybrid instead of full EV and people are going to eat it up. Had they presented hybrid options when building a truck I would have bought one already. For some reason they have been sandbagging the option but are now slated to go full hog. EV battery weight is the killer. Nevermind the charging issues.
- legulere 3y agoChina has a comparable oil consumption to the US and has almost gained 25% market share for BEV. But also in the US electric cars sales are rising. You are most likely thinking of the Gartner hype cycle, which is about visibility of topics. I think we reached the plateau of productivity by now. BEV cars also have their issues, but in many cases are the better pick over ICE cars. A way more fitting graph to look at now are sigmoid functions, also known as sigmoid functions. They tend to model the technology adoption life cycle fairly well. Adoption in the beginning is fairly slow then speeding up just to slow down again until the technology is affordable and good enough to also handle special needs. We are currently in the phase of accelerating adoption that looks like exponential growth.