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Comment by enchiridion | Hacker News Reader

Tesla basically created the electric car sector. Almost every major car company has or will have an electric out in order to compete.

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Whoever invented lithium batteries created the electric car sector (In fact he won a Nobel prize for it, https://news.uchicago.edu/story/john-b-goodenough-shares-nob...). Everything else has existed since the 1800s (although it has been refined over time). There were even attempts at electric cars in the 1800s. In fact, almost 40% of all cars in 1900 were electric! If they had lithium batteries in 1890 we would have been driving electric cars for the last 130 years.

GM had a great electric car in the mid 90s that couldn't compete due to lead acid batteries being heavy and having poor energy density (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1). Put Lithium batteries in an EV1 and people still wouldn't have wanted it because oil prices were low, but it beat the Model S to market by nearly 20 years and again given a better battery technology like lithium would probably have led to a majority of cars being electric today.

Why do designers seem hellbent if making electric cars look strange.

The tide seems to have turned... a bit.

The main driver for car companies to produce electric cars is not competition with anyone, it's the new stricter fleet emissions standards in the world's two biggest car markets: China and Europe. Car companies will market and sell electric cars in China and Europe in preference to other regions for the time being because of this.

There's no urgency for Toyota to produce electric cars because they've been making hybrids for a long time and they're already in a good position with the new emissions standards.

None of that addresses my points. Electric cars haven't escaped being toys for rich people, if they had you wouldn't be seeing Europe and California talking about the need to protect electric cars via legislation. On the other front, increasingly efficient ICE engine designs have done far more to reduce emissions in the present.

This seems like a well reasoned argument.

Have improved emission standards done more to comeback air pollution that Telsa?

I’m no expert, but I’m willing to bet: yes.

Will has improved emission standards always out compete electric vehicles? I’m willing to bet: no.

Not sure why that matters.

We definitely want to improve ICE engines too.

With any new technology, the real trick is to produce a marketable product then keep iterating, with customers providing the revenue.

Big LCD TV’s, for example, used to cost over $10,000.

Now that Tesla has proven the product, we are now getting a battery arms race...

Anyway, this is all well known about how technology works... Apple I to iPhone...

Now where are consumer robots?

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