Yves here. Since this article comes from OilPrice, one can expect them to be electric vehicle nay-sayers. Nevertheless, the tacit assumption among many policy makers is that drivers will choose or can be forced to use only EVs. Yet Toyota, admittedly a laggard in the EV race, has not gone full bore for fully electric cars because its believes that the market for EVs is far smaller than advocates believe. From Inside EVs in January:
Former Toyota CEO and current Toyota Chairman Akio Toyoda has long been a proponent of a mixed-fuel future—hybrids, gas engines, hopefully hydrogen eventually, and more… Now, Toyoda says that he believes EVs will soon begin to hit an unofficial market share cap across the globe.
According to Toyoda, that magic number is 30%. He claims that EVs will be capped, unofficially of course, at around 30% of all new vehicle sales. The rest of the market will be satisfied by hybrids, hydrogen fuel cells, and traditional combustion engines….
It’s not clear where Toyoda gets this figure, or if he has a certain date in mind for this cap to happen…
Last year, EVs accounted for around 18% of all new vehicle sales globally. That number is only expected to grow. BloombergNEF, for example, says that EVs will account for 44% of new vehicle sales by 2030 and 75% by 2040. This number, of course, will vary based on country, as some will likely fall behind on existing infrastructure needs.
As an automaker, Toyota has always been fairly conservative with its EV rollout. The brand has been a strong proponent of hydrogen, though it’s looking far into the future for the success of FCEVs. Today, it has accepted EVs as necessary to fill the gap between hybrids and FCEVs, but Toyoda says it will never completely fill the world’s needs—hence the company’s “multi-pathway approach” to the future.
Toyoda says that the infrastructure is one of the largest problems plaguing EV adoption. With more than 750 million people worldwide who lack access to electricity, there will surely be a market where combustion engines continue to exist, however, just because someone has access to electricity doesn’t mean that it is reliable, or that the grid can sustain an influx of EVs in a short period of time without improvements. And this is where Toyoda believes there is still room for hybrids, fuel-cell EVs, and traditional combustion-powered cars.
Having said that, this piece on the EV deterrents seems to go overboard on the purchase price of EVs. Most readers know China has some very competitive offerings that we in the West are not allowed to buy. It also points to long charging times. Some readers will counter with Chinese battery swapping stations. I recall this was under consideration as an option at the time of the very first kinda-sorta serious EV development in the US (I drove an EV prototype in 1993. It was very underpowered). The reason swapping was rejected was that the swapping stations would require markedly more real estate than a gas station and were thus considered too difficult and costly to site.
By Irina Slav, a writer for Oilprice.com with over a decade of experience writing on the oil and gas industry. Originally published at OilPrice
- Renault, China’s Geely, and Saudi Aramco are investing in new internal combustion engine technology.
- Renault and Geely are opting for an alternative way to achieve it, through fuel efficiency and other tech advancements in internal combustion.
- Affordability is one of the factors that make drivers loyal to the ICE technology.
Virtually every single forecast about the future of transport focuses on its electrification—on the idea that EVs will take over roads, displacing the internal combustion engine and making it history.
Not everyone agrees, however, and that includes Renault, China’s Geely and, as of last month, Saudi Aramco. The three are investing in a company that develops powertrain technology for internal combustion engine vehicles. The future may not be as electric as may expect.
Horse Powertrain came into existence at the end of May as a 50:50 joint venture between Renault and Geely. At the time, Renault’s chief executive said that the company would aim to become a leader in “ultra-low emission internal combustion engines and high economy hybrid technologies.”
Decarbonization, then, remains the top priority. Yet Renault and Geely are opting for an alternative way to achieve it, through fuel efficiency and other tech advancements in internal combustion rather than through total electrification.
It is no wonder Aramco is joining the party, especially in light of the recent performance of its EV darling, Lucid Motors. Lucid has seen its share price plummet from over $50 apiece to less than $9 in three years and has missed its own delivery target for the first half of this year even though it boasted record deliveries—of 2,394 cars.
The Saudi oil giant likes to spread its eggs across several baskets, and it looks like the ICE basket is still quite popular. People are still buying a lot more internal combustion engine cars than electric vehicles. A lot of EV drivers want to go back to their internal combustion engine car. Things are not looking good for the electrification of transport, with the normal glitches of new technology still being sorted out. However, they are looking as robust as ever for internal combustion.
“It will be incredibly expensive for the world to completely stamp out, or do without internal combustion engines,” Yasser Mufti, executive vice-president at Saudi Aramco who was in charge of the Horse Powertrain deal, told the Financial Times. “If you look at affordability and a lot of other factors, I do think they will be around for a very, very long time.”
Affordability is indeed one of the factors that make drivers loyal to the ICE technology. For all the efforts EV makers have been putting into lowering the price of their electric vehicles, and for all the government support of the technology, EVs remain costlier than comparable internal combustion engine vehicles.
Of course, affordability is only part of the car equation. Another is fueling or charging time and on this, the ICE car once again beats the EV. For all the talk about how convenient it was to charge your EV overnight in the comfort of your own garage, it has been dawning on forecasting EV bulls that globally, only a minority of drivers have a garage to charge an EV in, while most would need to rely on public chargers. Also, only a minority of drivers would be willing to spend hours charging their car overnight or not.
Perhaps the best testimonial to the enduring power of the internal combustion engine were the latest car sales figures from China. The world’s biggest market, China has been breaking records in EV sales. This seems to have created a perception that half of all cars in China are electric. In fact, the reality is quite different.
Xinhua reported earlier this week that the total number of cars on Chinese roads had reached 440 million at the end of June. Of these, the data showed, new energy vehicles had a share of 24.72 million. Of these, 18.13 million were plug-in electric vehicles—what we commonly call EVs, and the rest were hybrids. In percentage terms, then, EVs represent barely a 4.1% of the Chinese market. In other words, even in the world’s biggest EV market, with billions spent on charging infrastructure and making EVs dirt cheap, most drivers still prefer internal combustion vehicles.
“We believe that as far out as 2035, 2040 and even beyond 2040 we still see a significant number of ICE vehicles,” Matias Giannini, chief executive of Horse Powertrain, told the FT. “More than half for sure, and up to 60 per cent of the population will still have some sort of an engine, whether it is pure ICE, a full hybrid or a plug-in hybrid.”
The internal combustion engine has survived so long and remained the overwhelmingly dominant transportation technology for one simple reason: it has been superior to alternatives and its benefits have outweighed the costs consistently. It is at the cost-benefit analysis state that the EV revolution tripped and fell—because it seems that no one bothered to do that analysis. So the market made it for them, with the EV surge celebrated loudly last year slowing down before the year was even over. Horse Powertrain may yet acquire new shareholders.
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There are two big issues with EV adoption. One is the charging infrastructure, the problem is that EV chargers will not be able to replace ICE infrastructure but will have to be built alongside. Which means planning, real estate, permits, electrical grid support, all of which take years to build out. I often see the logic of “if you build it they will come” meaning that once we reach a critical mass of electric vehicles the infrastructure will spring up to support these. But without infrastructure you’ll never reach critical mass. Existing ICE infrastructure took a 100 years to build and the expectation is that similarly dense EV infrastructure will pop up in 5-10 years.
Second problem, that I don’t see mentioned often, is that modern vehicles, for all their warts are amazingly durable. EPA expected vehicle lifetime is something like 17 years, meaning vehicle sold today is expected to be on the road until 2040. Enshittyfication of the economy means that people can’t afford to replace their old vehicles. My own car is 15 years old and I don’t see a reason it couldn’t last another 5 years at least. So even if new vehicle sales become predominantly EV’s, the mix of vehicles on the road will remain mostly ICE for many years to come, which means that ICE infrastructure will remain in place.
I have a good amount of respect for Toyota from my time in the industry and I think they have a good sense of what the future will look like. In the US people get distracted by flashy media headlines around EV companies, but the real markets of the future are in China, India and Africa, all of which seem to be heavily leaning on the hybrid rather than full EV.
I had an eye-opening experience when visiting the Buffalo-Niagara Falls area last year. We rented a car at the airport and were given a VW electric vehicle for the week. After some initial adjustment, I started to like it. However, we wanted to do longer trips around the area, so we started searching for a charging station.
There was supposedly one near a local mall, but we found out it was for Tesla’s only. Nothing else popped up on our apps or Google searches. In desperation, we took it back to the airport hoping that at least we could charge it there.
Nope. And the rental car agency was less than helpful, they told us they could not let us use their charging facility which was somewhere deep in the private section of the airport. We ended up exchanging the EV for a Chevy Malibu gas model.
Mind you this is in an area that doesn’t have great EV adoption due to the cold weather, but given multiple rounds of Federal stimulus packages since the Great Recession, CARES act, etc. it is hard to believe that there wasn’t some money floating around to put in a decent public charging network in a metro area of 1M.
Where did the money go? [rhetorical question; we all know where.]
My ex just plunked down 40K for a VW and she found out that the Tesla charging stations don’t work due to plug type. So, just like laptop chargers I guess. You think there would have been some standardization in the charging infrastructure.
She also had to have a electrician install a 240V line at her house. I have an 11 year old Lexus hybrid (fancy Prius) that I bought used 8 years ago. Love it. Plan on driving it until I, or it kicks the bucket.
These are just minor technical issues, not difficult to solve. It will just take a bit of time or hire the Chinese. I can see their model now: get on the high speed train and then rent EVs once you get there.
The different plug types indicate different amperages; the Tesla chargers are very high-powered and would fry the battery of my Honda Plug-in, I learned when I thought there must be an adapter.
Agreed, but the biggest obstacle is that electric generation capacity is not expanding, while demand is…California is already importing more than 40% of its power, and when Diablo Canyon shuts down next year, that will require another import expansion…All the while, the global warming fanatics are shutting down coal plants, the major source of electric power….
Whereas, an all electric auto fleet would require a tripling of generation….which isn’t going to happen…
A tripling of generation, eh? Would you care to share the numbers with us?
I suppose that the long and the short of it is that the bottleneck for EVs will be cheap, reliable electricity supplies. If it is expensive, if the electrical grid is unreliable (perhaps by an increased number of EVs), if there are not the stations available to recharge EVS, then there is definitely going to be a hard ceiling and that 30% take up of EVs sounds right to me.
This is a point about EVs that gets short shrift – can the grid as it is handle a big switch to EVs? The answer is no, and I have little faith that here in the good ol’ USA that the grid will be updated. Call me cynical because I am.
The bottleneck is that we can’t generate the electricity we need from renewables, cant distribute it using current tech and the copper available to us on the planet. The fact that gasoline is a much more dense energy source than batteries is just the icing on the cake.
Personal EVs should be (well built/maintainable) bikes/Honda super cub type things. EVs otherwise should be for mass transport, or distributing goods. That might be possible, though even that will present some challenges.
In the latest electricity contracts in Australia penalty clauses are going in for the home so that if your amperage draw increases a certain percentage during a certain time period in the day you will pay extra the whole day.
This will be to stop you profiting from putting a fast charger in the home. I wanted to run a 6mm wire to our garage in 2017 but the local electricity board said they could only do this for so many houses in the street because it is a residential area network. The fix is going in for the corporate fast charging profits.
Well maybe, but a big part of the problem is that fast chargers put a strain on the grid that they’re not built for. And maybe never will be built for.
Electricity production and supply isn’t and never will be able to accommodate the ludicrous EV mandate scam.
So far, Ford has lost billions upon billions with EVs and as the dust settles, VW will admit the same. The so called success of EVs was based mainly on subsidises paid by Western governments to car makers, the same government support that China is accused of, and without these subsidises, without an electric infrastructure, the consumer will not touch this lemon, as can be witnessed by the collapse of the second hand EV market.
The idea that we as a society can continue exactly as we are doing now, just with electric cars instead of stinky gas cars is a stupid fantasy. Where do the simpletons who believe this think the electricity is going to come from? Magic dust? China, with the most massive installation of non-fossil fuel electricity still gets almost 80% of its electricity from fossil fuels, and 80% of this from coal.
Where I live the City has created a department to encourage people to replace their gas-powered heating with subsidized electric heat pumps. They seem completely unaware of the massive GAS-FIRED generating plant in the center of town. SO these people think replacing my 85% efficient gas boiler with an electric heat pump, also ultimately powered by gas, but with more than 20% efficiency loss in generation and delivery, makes sense. I mean, did these people get any education at all? This decarbonisation ideology seems to make people into morons….
Well we do have to decarbonize. The problem is that nobody wants to face up to what that means in practice. So instead we get tinkering at the edges, and feel good stunts.
Heat pumps make a lot of sense *if* you have an energy source that is decarbonized. On the other hand, it’s always better to burn fossil fuels as close as possible to where you use them. An EV that is powered by electricity generated by gas (Or oil I guess if you’re Italian) is probably less efficient that a conventional car.
At the point that we need sophisticated systems thinking – we instead have the dumbest kind of atomic thinking. I truly think our civilization, and maybe species, is doomed.
While heat pumps and electric cars are not ideal, they are better than the alternatives, even using electric sources based on fossil fuels.
Heat pumps use a *lot* less energy than conventional appliances, far less than the local combustion advantage.
Electric cars use less energy than ICE, even when the energy source is fossil fuel. I can’t find the article I recently read, but here’s something from NK:
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/06/when-it-comes-to-the-environment-there-really-is-no-such-thing-as-a-good-car.html
I’m not arguing that either are perfect, but the are better than the traditional.
I’ve compared my older heat pump against my condensing gas furnace. Even with the SEER of the pump, the gas furnace is cheaper. With a ultra modern hi SEER (22 or so) pump, it probably would be a little cheaper. But that is many thousands of $$$.
Plus I like having not all my eggs in one basket. Electricity goes off? I can still run a gas fireplace
Gas not available where I live. Insurance cos will not cover solar installs unless you put on a new roof at the same time. “Regulated “ monopoly utilities use discriminatory rate to kill grid ties and bury you with connection charges and pittance payments for excess kWh. FL insurers looking for any way in the recently declared “Free State of Florida” to cancel policies and deny coverage. Free here means Libertarian version of freedom. Because markets, just die.
“”The problem is that nobody wants to face up to what that means in practice.””
Nobody = military –> start there
Exactly. The US Department of Offense is a huge fossil fuel consumer. Yet this is never talked about for some reason. 🤡
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/18012022/military-carbon-emissions/
Why do we need to decarbonize, are we supposed to stop breathing as well? The PTB just want the majority of us not travelling very far or not at all. That includes me and maybe you as well.
There’ll BP never, ever be enough electricity or charging points. That’s a fact.
Cars are a really dumb solution to transportation. We’ve reengineered our world in ways to make it hostile to people, very inefficient, environmentally hostile and ugly – for what, the ability to sit in traffic jams and breathe in toxic fumes? EVs remove the toxic fumes, but otherwise they don’t really solve any of that. And they increase the environmental and efficiency problems. You need lithium (horrible to mine), more copper. And your built environment now needs much more electrical infrastructure (copper), and tougher roads/bridges. You can mitigate some of this, but that would require a major shift in direction (e.g. the US moving from SUVs/F150s to Japanese mini-cars).
It’s hard to predict what will happen with EVs as there may be tech improvements we can’t imagine. Today the problems are the increased need for copper (the real shortage – forget Lithium), lithium and their weight. Maybe those things can be addressed (though that won’t make it to the street in time to save us from global warming), maybe they can’t. The charging infrastructure is a bigger problem (or we could build bus and tram networks. Hell, for short distances you don’t even need batteries, flywheels work just fine). And everyone’s ignoring the bigger problem, which is none of this stuff scales. How are you going to power heavy machinery (diggers), or heavy trucks. Current batteries simply don’t have the energy density.
Hydrogen’s also not a solution, unless someone can come up with a cheap way of creating it (nuclear power… maybe). You lose a ton of your electrical power generating it, more compressing and storing it and then more distributing it. And its an energy storage medium that’s more dangerous than gasoline.
On top of this noone has really explained where the electricity is going to come from. Today around 20-25% of our total energy usage comes from electricty. We’re struggling to replace that 25% with renewable energy – but somehow we’re going to make up the rest of that with renewable (or nukes). Not to mention the problem of distributing that electricity (there’s not even close to enough copper out there).
The elephant in the room for all of this is that we’ve engineered an extremely energy inefficient world, and we’re pretending we can continue to live that lifestyle, while still transitioning to something renewable. Total fantasy. Gasoline, EV, whatever – it doesn’t really matter. Once you commit to energy dense lifestyles, the human race is basically doomed. ‘Sustainable’ solutions are just rearranging the deckchairs.
Yes. That’s exactly right. For further info, see the first graph in this article:
https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/2025-a-civilizational-tipping-point
Thanks for that link. That was a pretty depressing read. Especially considering that all our massive energy wasting that’s been going on for a while could have been avoided. In theory, at least.
Perhaps the people considering this issue should also own up to the fact that cars, gas or electric, are the most inefficient transportation option available and that rather than enabling single occupancy vehicle use, a transition to investing in mass transit and active transportation should be a priority.
The damage to society due to single occupancy vehicle addiction goes far beyond just energy and climate, including significant damage to the land, social cohesiveness, and our physical health.
Yeah, but the private personal transportation generates HUGE profits for BigOil, auto companies, insurance, electricity generating monopolies, tires, repair, servicing etc. I haven’t done the math, but in the US, this likely represents two or three trillions of cumulative revenue per year. And since the politicians represent the oligarchy, and not us, don’t expect any changes.
In California, the “bullet train” fiasco turned out to be a multi-billion dollar scam (another example of kleptocracy).
And they are ripping out train tracks in Northern Cal, because “environmental concerns”. As if eliminating rail will be better for the environment. The Cal. gov. are typical hypocrites; they clearly don’t care about the environment.
The EV mandate will take effect in 2035, but the crumbling electrical infrastructure has become a laughingstock and we are headed for another fiasco. Good times eh…
Yes. Big Oil and Big Auto have clearly wrecked public transportation solution over the years. The plot vehicle in ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’ was based on reality. Corporations really did buy up and dismantle the Los Angeles tram system in favor of gas-guzzling automobiles.
In the US public transportation as the main way of getting around is impossible and other parts of the world increasingly share that tendency. It has to do with the culture of consumerism, radical materialism, and narcissism. I do believe that if a POTUS, say were to push in the direction of public transportation by educating the public to think differently. We would need a massive social movement to bring people together to be together in public trans.
I’ve read about attempts over the years to create a public transportation system that also allows for the privacy and convenience of a personal vehicle so I think we could do it. But it would take a lot of capital to do it but we all prefer going to war.
I have never seen the parking garage issue addressed at all
If one looks at a much simpler technology, lithium batteries replacing lead acid, it’s been 40 years since lithium batteries were first developed (1985), and yet car batteries are still almost entirely lead acid. In largely new, “niche applications (power tools, cameras, phones, etc.)” at the time of their development, they were adopted.
Or look at how long it took lithium batteries to replace NiMH (1967), what, about 35-40 years?
Cars (electric) are not a novel application, are far more expensive, rely on enormously greater infrastructure, rare earth metals, etc., etc. And that is aside from the world bifurcating into two economic blocks. As George Gallloway likes to say, “buckle up, its [energy transition] going to be a bumpy ride.”
There’s the small issue of, if the largest vehicle manufacturers say “EV’s unlikely to supplant ICE,” and plan their businesses accordingly, then EV’s are unlikely to supplant ICE.
Not that i advocate greater adoption of EV’s, i agree with many of the previous points raised.
I recently came across a Canadian startup called Edison Motors that is designing bolt-on retrofit electric motors for heavy duty trucks, designed to work in conjunction with an onboard diesel generator. Neat concept, although their website gives off vibes that would possibly land them in “The Bezzle” sub-heading on this site…
They could coin a new word for what they are doing . . . if it is for real and not for bezzle.
That new word could be . . . ” dieselectric hybrid” or “hybrid dieselectric” or some such.
I’m going to use something else as an example why the calls for and attempts to force a massive switch to EVs is performative and not based on reality.
Let’s talk about congestion pricing in NYC. There are lots of reasons people were against it, but probably only a couple caused Hochul to ‘postpone’ it.
It all looks good on paper, but to actually do it AND to do it fairly, it means not just forgoing some of the expected revenue for the MTA (the real and only reason the government officials are doing it) and expending a great deal of money prior in order to do it in a manner that lessens the impact on the public to little to nil. There would have needed to be more park and ride locations developed, expanded bus service and utterly reliable public transportation to and from the areas where people needed to get to. In truth the government (state and city) and the MTA did little of what was necessary to put this into effect. They didn’t even really figure out the parking problems on the outskirts of the zone. Lots of problems this would have caused shouldn’t have been but would have been unexpected. Speaking of the unexpected, the first week this was to have been put into effect much of the NJ commuter train system was entirely knocked out by the heat. All the commuter train lines are still dealing with heat delays and cancellations and yes we just had a bridge go out because of it. I don’t even want to imagine the uproar if it had all gone into effect. And as it was a tax credit there is also the affordability issue and how many people were really going to get ‘reimbursed for it’. The public largely rejected it for reason.
Switching a significant portion of our vehicles to electric powered ones sounds great on paper. The obvious drawback being charging – and not just the lack of stations. There is also the time involved in recharging the vehicle. But how about heat problems, or cold problems. How about water. With our extremes in weather can these vehicles even handle short distance commutes, much less long commutes (people with hour and more commutes are more common than is thought of in our society. Then there is the availability of electrical power. Increasing the demand without significantly increasing the supply might mean a windfall for the electric companies but it is a recipe for disaster. There were lots of other caveats in the article, but just as with congestion pricing what I see advocates doing when a problem is brought up and is either denying it is a problem usually citing a study that has little to no connection to reality, or waving the problem away as if it is something that can be solved after the fact, usually with the magic belief in tech and even AI.
I believe that Toyota probably has it right. Largely because they are not in denial about the state of things for either the public or the world. Without significant changes switching to EVs will not happen because they will not work in our actual world and most people cannot afford expensive experiments.
If the government and climate change advocates want this to happen they have to put in real work including real infrastructure improvement before the fact, not after.
In the US and Europe the government is just a mechanism for shifting money around (from the mass of people to the owners of the economy and assorted flunkies).
I imagine the project you describe could be quite easily managed in China, maybe even Russia, where the government has reserved powers of intervention for itself which are not restricted by monetary interests.
Speaking of commuting, one type of performative corporate policy that bugs me is corporations claiming how green they are while forcing employees to return to office for jobs that can easily be done remotely.
Debating who gets to extract what portion of our income for an unnecessary and ultimately deadly product is whistling past a graveyard. Regardless of power plant, the car itself is the problem. There are too many of them; they have poisoned our civic development and our brains. We cannot even imagine a life without personal vehicles and multilane freeways and free parking at this point. Built our own cage, we have.
I drive a 2005 minivan at ~200 k-miles. It has only two seats, and the back holds my tools, supplies, and a sleeping bag for distant jobs. Well (self) maintained, it is good for another 10 years, or until I really and truly have to stop work. I cannot afford a newer vehicle, and do not want one; they need specialty equipment for repairs, another item I cannot afford, and it is hard to obtain (manufacturer-specific) trouble codes. It seems that those who espouse the one-solution-for-all-ills, “the incredible electric vehicle”, do not consider the needs of us “deplorables”.
From a purely utilitarian BTU-watts maximizing point of view, US EV strategy is totally backwards.
Subsidy money should be going to last-mile commercial-industrial-taxi users, whose vehicles can easily see >30,000 miles of use in a year….not white-collar Tesla owners who drive less than 10,000 miles a year in a car that can go 0 to 60mph/100kph in under 6 seconds (as faster than a 1980’s-era Ferrari).
It’s obscene that despite all the EV subsidy money used (which largely benefits Tesla) the USPS-FedEx-UPS-Amazon still overwhelmingly rely on diesel for its last-mile vehicles.
Then within that cohort, the first focus should be on regions with temperate winters as heating the interior is a big energy draw for EV (unlike traditional cars which use waste heat).
At the very least, if I was an omnipotent dictator, I’d force vehicle makers to license Toyota’s hybrid tech to use a powertrain for last-mile delivery vehicles. Then force UPS-Fedex-USPS-Amazon to use that fleet.
In China, BEVs and PHEVs are already 50% of the market and steadily increasing. Some believe the US is still the center of the auto world. Unfortunately this has not been true in terms of units sold for nearly a decade. Also, in terms of unit exports China is now the largest in the world and increasingly these cars are EVs.
BEVs are now cheaper in China than ICE vehicles and have a lower cost of operation. They also are likely to have 300,000+ miles life expectancy.
SO this article could be true for the US but not the RoW.
Here are a few boring questions I have yet to see addressed by anyone on either side of the EV vs ICE bunker mentalities. I live in CT and CT has a huge number of huge apartment buildings and the state government wants even more huge apartment buildings built so that even more people can move in and work at even more local jobs. All of those people living currently and in the future will need to commute to those current and future jobs. Commute = get in vehicle. Has anyone on the “EV NOW” bunker looked at the absolutely huge parking lots these huge apartment buildings have be then outside or underneath? Have they ever counted the number of vehicles therein? Has anyone asked if any of the new apartment buildings being built are also being built with EV charging stations? Well I did. Four being build around the Hartford area and not a single charging station is planned for any of the huge 4 apartment buildings being currently built. Can you find any apartment building being built anywhere in the USA that also has any charging stations being built as part of the project? All the blather about going EV is a crock. How are you going to nightly charge tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of vehicles for people who live is apartment buildings? Hang a cord out of each window? The entire “EV NOW” is a total joke. EV forever by 2035? Delusional. You need infrastructure to be built now for what you dream about happening in 2035. It ain’t being built. No one is building it. Talk is not building it. Talk is a crock of hot air. Reality sucks sometimes but it is real.
The answer is to raise all these buildings by one (or more as necessry) floor, installed in a way that a multiple runaway lithium fires will be isolated,just in case, and these vehicles will all be able to be charged.
I am sure for a property developer, that would be as upsetting as an ordinance to provide social rent.
The alternative to your nightmare is to design living spaces and work spaces that do not require mass commutes in our beloved cars. I used to live close to a bus station that I could walk to, then go to my workplace on the other side of the mountain. The bus line ended at the university, and the ride was free. I had to make the trip only three times/week, so it was never tedious and I could read, study, or grade papers while traveling.
I am sure you are right about apartment buildings in CT or CA (maybe less so) or anywhere else in the US. In China a massive charging infrastructure has been (is being) built out.
As battery technology improves, more and more applications will appear. As energy density rivals ICE, the advantages of batteries may become more apparent. A Chinese firm claims (I emphasize claims) that commuter jets can be powered by batteries and plans to introduce one in three years.
On the infrastructure, remember charging is likely to be off-peak (at night). And yes, US electric infrastructure is awful — look at Houston (oops center of fossil fuel industry)! This may mean that the US will be stuck in the past — the future will occur somewhere else — as Silicon Valley folks say, in the present, the future is here just unequally distributed.
Other issues in the US, and possibly the rest of the developed world with EVs are insurance costs and depreciation.
Tesla’s savage price cuts recently make the latter even more of an issue.
For me discussions and comments around whether EV cars will happen are somewhat at odds with my current reality.
I think I’ve mentioned before that when I go into the office our underground parking garage of, I would guess, 400-500 cars and 200 bikes, often seems to be around half EV’s and electric bikes and we have a LOT of charging stations (though many of the EV’s don’t even use them). I work in fintech, squarely in PMC world (metaverse?), the lot is probably 90% luxury cars. Anecdata, I know, and I’m obviously living in a bubble, especially as my family and friends are Tesla owners, but folks in China probably feel the same way, like the people writing these articles must live in another universe than the one they inhabit.
I believe the world will become a much much larger place well before the end of this century. The ‘Green’ panaceas, the personal cars, electric cars, even public transportation will neither maintain our present economies, nor assure their continuance much further into the future. ‘Green’ fantasies will not replace diesel when it grows scarce and expensive, and without diesel much much more than transportation will collapse under its own weight. Mining is one area that comes to mind. I expect mining will revert to single and double-jack hand-drilling with limited support from gunpowder and guncotton to break the rock. Other components of petroleum crack support much of our existing chemical industries.
It’s very difficult to understand how mining is supposed to function without diesel. Batteries are too heavy and not energy dense enough. But somehow the plan is to increase mining enormously, while not having the energy capacity to power what we have today.
We need to change our built infrastructure. Such that legs and bikes are more enticing to use, or affordable (quasi free) and safe and pleasant and timely, public transportation.
No more sprawls. Aparment buildings, but make them nicer, like you see was done in European cities in 1800s and early 1900, before all that Bauhaus thing.
However, with more and more people refusing to have kids, a natural population reduction/collapse will come, first slowly and then faster. The best possible Jackpot.
The way electric vehicles make a lot of sense right now is if you have a personal parking space that you park your car in every night, and which can be fitted with a charging cable. This probably means garage space, though we could imagine people who have their own outdoor parking spot getting this going without too much trouble.
Electric cars are great with this setup. You come home every night, plug in your car, and drive away the next morning with a fully charged vehicle. You never have to go to a “gas station”, and the difficult, slow, and anxiety prone issue of finding public charging stations does not come up for the most part. Residential utilities are usually willing to work with you on the price of electricity with this setup, since you are charging your car at a time when grid load is the lowest. My wife has been using this arrangement for several years, and it’s fantastic.
Of course, only a relatively small percentage of the population of drivers has access to this situation. Maybe the 30% that Mr Toyoda quotes. The remaining drivers are probably not going to put up with the inconvenience of finding an available public charging station, and then waiting half an hour or an hour for their car to charge. Swappable batteries would mostly solve this problem, but they don’t seem to be on the horizon right now, and would take a ton of cooperation between all the car makers, all the fueling station owners, and all the battery manufacturers. A pretty tall order.
ICE cars set a high bar for fueling convenience that will be tough for EVs to get over.
Solution is simple. Gov’t forces you into mass transit. That way you go when and where the gov’t allows. Likewise gov’t forces high rise/high density housing to improve efficiency of mass transit with enviable byproduct of making it easier to control your movement. It’s all in the sustainable development goals / agenda 2030.
Sure, certain PMC will be allowed their Teslas.
And their mansions.
Just start with public transit.
The southeastern city, which connects Hong Kong to mainland China, announced at the end of 2017 that all of its 16,359 buses had gone electric. The city’s buses are the world’s first 100 percent electrified bus fleet, and its largest—bigger than New York’s, Los Angeles’s, New Jersey’s, Chicago’s and Toronto’s electric bus fleets combined.
For a very good roundup of issues, there is this, from a media guy and mechanical engineer – https://youtu.be/1zunN0lte6I?t=183
https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1811289234709622802
Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand
China is adding renewable energy on an unimaginable scale, building twice as much wind and solar power as the rest of the planet combined (!)
What gets called “overcapacity” is actually China being the only power taking climate change really seriously.
Source: https://theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/11/china-building-twice-as-much-wind-and-solar-power-as-rest-of-world-report *
* https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GSL8zSqbEAAPt63?format=png&name=small
2:39 AM · Jul 11, 2024
https://english.news.cn/20240618/f1b4de010bdb41b88eb1fb2302e2b5ba/c.html
June 18, 2024
China leads world in charging infrastructure installation number: NDRC
BEIJING — China has established a charging infrastructure network that boasts the world’s largest number of installations, the most extensive services, and the most diverse range of options, according to the country’s top economic planner.
As of the end of May, China had erected 9.92 million chargers throughout the country, marking a significant 56 percent year-on-year expansion, Li Chao, an official from the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), told a press conference on Tuesday.
Among them, public charging facilities totaled 3.05 million units, surging 46 percent year on year, while the number of private charging facilities climbed 61 percent to about 6.87 million units, according to Li.
This impressive growth aligns with the flourishing new energy vehicle (NEV) sector in China, which is the world’s largest market for NEVs. Both production and sales figures are experiencing rapid growth.
Li anticipated a continued rise in demand for NEVs among Chinese consumers, further driving the necessity for expanding charging infrastructure…
Well in the simplest view, our freedom of motion will not continue, perhaps we will begin to feel that it is not all about us or our desires, learning reality taught by thermodynamics…
As in Horse Powertrain, don’t forget the ManHour Powertrain. As (I believe) in that 1 gallon of gas is the equivalent of 120 ManHours. Value pricing.
China shows EV’s can work and it has great infrastructure….just sayin…
You appear not to have read the article in full, as is required by our written site Policies. They also explain that Making Shit Up is another violation. Let me quote: “…EVs represent barely a 4.1% of the Chinese market.”
That suggests the footprint of the charging infrastructure is geographically limited.
In other words, you have not disproved the Toyota contention that the limits of uptake are lower that advocates proclaim.
These are the early days of EVs and they are still building infrastructures of charge stations. I fully expect that the % of EVs will grow and grow fast, at least in China.
America keeps the price of automobiles and gasoline artificially low by ignoring externalities like highway repair costs and excess CO2 costs. If gasoline cost $20 per gallon we would most likely be having a much different conversation. A simple metric to understand what is happening is the rapid increase in the number of billion dollar disasters each year in America. How much higher can we afford to go? Would we rather collapse than improve our systems?
https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/high-speed-money-sink-why-united-states-should-not-spend-trillions-obsolete#
China understands a rich, slightly redundant and overlapping transportation system. We don’t. They understand the transportation system as something to serve the society….not profit private shareholders. Big difference.
It’s the difference between purpose driven and profit driven.
When ICE advocates have to lie to support their position, you know that they are getting desperate:
“In percentage terms, then, EVs represent barely a 4.1% of the Chinese market.”
– this framing is a terrible slight of hand.
BEVs may only represent 4.1% OF THE FLEET, but BEVs and other plugins (PHEVs, EREVs) are now (June ’24) at 48.4% OF NEW CAR SALES in China. New sales is where buyer preferences are expressed. Hiding new technology adoption by papering over it with diversionary stats about the high percentage of legacy infrastructure (or legacy fleet) of an economic sector is a sign you are losing the argument.
There is no doubt that for BEVs to fully replace other powertrains does require decent and ubiquitous grids and electricity availability. Obviously many parts of the world don’t yet have that ubiquity (though such areas don’t tend to have high vehicle ownership rates either). The large auto markets of China and Europe have modern and mostly ubiquitous grids, as do many other areas of litoral Asia and other parts of the world. The US, Canada, and Australia less so (that’s what happens in Settler Colonies built on a fast-and-wide land grab / genocide).
If drivers have electricity at home or at work, but there are not yet reliable DC rapid charging networks for longer-journeys (300+ km), then PHEVs and EREVs are a good compromise. So yes, to this extent there will be some demand for ICE as “energy assist” in new vehicle market, for a good while longer.
Like all new technology adoption curves, the costs of batteries (now at $58 per kWh for standard LFP automotive cells), motors and inverters is coming down very rapidly, and many BEVs in China are now priced at parity with the ICE competition.
The target article is wishful thinking by someone vested in the Oil status quo.
The best way to “de-carbonize” would be to only give birth to / father one child in a life time. This has an immediate and long term effect on resource usage… not just fossil fuel but other resources such as fresh water, earth minerals, food etc. Unless we cut population, all the talk about EV’s, solar panels, batteries that have 400 mile range, forcing people onto public transit is all just feel good talk.
I am always entertained by the folks who state that one can ride a bike to work… it has been 115F here for at lease 10 days. Nothing like arriving at work with your clothes soaked in sweat. We get very hot weather every summer. Nearest bust stop to me is 1.8 miles and there are 4 buses per day.
Here in CA Gavin Newsom with the stroke of a pen has mandated no ICE vehicle sales after 2035. No public debate and no public vote. I call that authoritarian. I would like to know his plan for all the folks that make a living working ICE vehicles,.. mechanics, technicians etc. I guess they will all be told “Learn to code” as I understand that EV’s require almost “no maintenance” . Lets see how that promise / benefit pans out.