Comment by progressiveweb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by progressiveweb | Hacker News Reader

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I agree. The author has no understanding of the history of the automotive industry. We've seen this hype phase before returning to reality.

The truth is that gasoline is still king because it is the fastest way to recharge your car. Manufacturing process and incremental improvements have made combustion engine far more efficient and cleaner. It's likely that this trend will not weaken, instead get even more boost more than ever because it offers a cheap alternative to electric cars.

Coupled with a low oil price, we aren't going to see combustion cars disappear like HN folks would have you believe, instead we will see consumers voting with their money.

At some point we will see combustion engine that approach somewhere a bit shorter than the 80~85% theoretical limit of combustion engine efficiency, but that is still an insane improvement to what we already have.

I don't disagree that electric cars will get more popular, but a cheap oil price and highly efficient combustion engine that is coming is not going to lead to an apocalyptic future where sportscar owners are banished to remote islands, free to cause all the pollution they want.

"but we have over 60% efficiency from our combustion engine!" they yell to no avail. The silence of electric cars whirring in the cities snuffs out Doug Demuro's fans.

> The truth is that gasoline is still king because it is the fastest way to recharge your car.

No, that's not why. Gasoline is still largely king because it's the legacy technology, so it has a very wide install base and it's still cheaper.

The average person very rarely drives the full range of an electric vehicle within a day, so the charge time almost never becomes a limiting factor. Indeed, for many people, having to fill up at a pump every so often brings more inconvenience into your life than simply plugging in your car at home or the office every so often. Once you have access to a charging station at some place you're already going regularly to anyway, electric becomes more convenient than liquid petro fuel.

> No, that's not why. Gasoline is still largely king because it's the legacy technology, so it has a very wide install base and it's still cheaper.

Do you know why it's so popular? You can fill up anything from cars, jets, boats, planes several folds faster than the current battery charging technology. Battery also tends to have a fixed weight even if its used up which becomes a no-go for the military and aviation.

If what you say is true about the average electric vehicle driver, that they rarely charge and it's a none issue, consider for a moment the average gasoline vehicle driver, who can't afford an electric car, who doesn't care as long as it takes them from A-Z as cheap as possible, who are more likely than the electric car driver to leave in less affluent neighborhoods requiring longer commute, the downtime is more expensive than someone who can afford to wait around 30 minutes to get a partial charge. When you start to leave the city core and drive long distances, the ability to quickly recharge energy and get going again is critical.

The infrastructure for battery charging has quite some time to go before catching up. Ironically with the increase usage of such power stations, the power to manufacture both batteries and charging stations would still cause pollution and harm to the environment.

There's no silver bullet here and electric cars will be just another niche for people who are rich enough to care about the environment, while majority of wage earners would be lucky to even afford a used gasoline car.

Public mass transportation will benefit the most from reduced cost of operation due to fuel, but that's also minimized the trend of falling oil prices.

When oil became cheap, people chose to go around half the earth than through the quicker Suez canal. It's a testament to how powerful the price of oil is in our society.

Its by no means certain that ICEs will get sufficient investment to improve as much as you say. Dieselgate, carbon taxes and outright bans in much of the developed byworld, China and India choked with pollution make it a risky proposition.

Even if ICE efficiency can improve substantially, can it match the rate at which the price of batteries is falling? Morgan Stanley predicts EVs will reach price parity with ICE in 2025 and then continue to get cheaper.

https://insideevs.com/morgan-stanley-evs-price-parity-ice-20...

Add to that cheaper fuel and maintenance. I think you are being too optimistic about ICE's future.

Hybrid ICE is the future IMO. EV"s will be a niche market for short range, low use transportation.

china and india have pollution from burning coal to generate electricity. China and India alone makes up 70% of the world's top 10 biggest coal powered generator.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_power_stations...

It's also not a simple matter of getting rid of these plants, there's an entire political stake in seeing these continue to run, and there simply is no other way to scale up quickly and at a lower unit cost using alternative renewable sources of generating electricity.

You can always burn more coal or some non-renewable sources to meet your varying peak demands. Not so with other sources like solar panels or hydroelectricity.

Coal is certainly a big factor in China and India's air pollution. But that does not discount that they are both going after other sources of pollution, particularly vehicles, which is the subject of this discussion. China is being particularly aggressive, as the article points out the biggest chunk of displaced oil consumption is electric buses of which China has 90+% of the world's total.

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