World EV Sales Now Equal 18% of World Auto Sales
cleantechnica.com
cleantechnica.com
- Fill up without going to a gas station that shoves ads down your throat, might skim you credit card, and you may need to wait in line for (Costco near me)
- Pre-condition your car in the garage without fear of murdering someone
- Electricity to juice up a car is often much cheaper than the price of gas for an ICE car
There are of course down sides in some scenarios, but I will never go back from EVs. Even road tripping in our Tesla Model Y is a blast.
For a lot of people the only time they will use a charging station is when they are driving far in excess of their normal day and it will force a 30 minute break after 3 hours of solid driving. People also expect that they will be full charging rapidly but where you are going likely has cheaper trickle overnight charging than the rapid charger so you fill up as little as you need only. The other possibility is you avoid the charge all together by using slower roads which avoids the waiting at the charger and uses less power per mile and often is a similar time for something that is nearly within range.
Once people get used to this its got a lot of benefits most of the time and people love their EVs because they do free them from petrol station trips on a regular basis.
>In the end, plugins represented 18% share of the overall auto market (with a 13% BEV share alone).
Regardless, this is a happy trend!
Given the usual intention of "how green are we?", I would suggest counting them as 80% of a "real" EV, for the same reason that I give when the discussion turns to putting PV cells physically on a car[0]: most driving is short trips where this is fine, and the longer trips, while they absolutely exist, are less common.
[0] though with different underlying causes that means this is coincidentally 80% and they may diverge
That said, it is clear to me that the fuel economy one will get with the Prius Prime will depend heavily on the relative frequency of the various trips one takes.
Not bad, definitely a hell of a lot better than the early Prius, but definitely nowhere near BEV efficiencies. I feel like a small-battery BEV is a better proposition for many, especially as pure BEVs have significantly better pure-electric drive-train efficiency than plugins, and less maintenance.
If it can do, say, ~75km pure electric with reasonable climate comforts, then I imagine it should be able to handle a majority of commutes with just home charging and is for all practical purposes a BEV in daily operation.
It gets muddy below that though, requiring either quite limited total daily driving or multiple charge rounds every day...
But even then: if you go 100 km between charging and the battery only lasts half of it, that's still half your fossil fuel that's replaced with a municipal electric grid that is inherently more efficient even when also purely fossil fuelled, and also is being rapidly greened.
Random online sources[0] seem to suggest that the average daily US commute is 41 miles, or 65 km. The median or geometric average might have been better, but that suggests that the "average US citizen" would require 2 charges per day with less than 75 km of battery range.
If you go much shorter than this - say, 20km roundtrip - then you are also getting into bicycle commuting territory, at least outside the US where bikes are given priority in traffic.
[0]: https://www.zippia.com/advice/average-commute-time-statistic...
> But even then: if you go 100 km between charging and the battery only lasts half of it, that's still half your fossil fuel that's replaced with a municipal electric grid that is inherently more efficient even when also purely fossil fuelled, and also is being rapidly greened.
If you divide the all-electric range with battery capacity, the Prius Prism consumes 191 Wh per km in all electric mode, while a Hyundai Ioniq 6 consumes 133 Wh per km - you are paying for the complex hybrid drive-train in electric efficiency. In ICE mode, the same car consumes around 3.5 L per 100 km mixed driving, while fully petrol VW up! uses 2.9 L per 100 km mixed driving - not bad for a gasoline vehicle, but also not amazing. Data from their respective Wikipedia articles.
If you rarely ever need the gasoline engine, sure - then you're just driving a somewhat inefficient BEV with a miniscule battery requiring recharging at least once a day. If the gasoline engine comes on, then you're just driving a gasoline vehicle from that point on with good - but far from the best - fuel efficiency.
Either way, you might still be better off with a small BEV with a tiny battery, like a used Renault Zoe, VW e-UP! or the upcoming VW ID.1. Better efficiency and longer battery-range so you don't have to recharge once or twice every day, and without being the worst of both worlds when they are serviced like is the case for a hybrid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_life_cycle
The last one is likely going to the the thorniest problem for many who need a car now, regardless of long-term operational costs. I expect EV tax credits to dwindle into nothingness, further expanding the price disparity.
I want to get an EV, but as a renter without overnight charging, I fear I would have to plan my life around how to keep my car charged. Currently, I know that I can fill the car at the spur of the moment at nearly every block in under five minutes.
Edit: added cold weather
The sticker price is dominated by the battery prices, which appear to be currently limited by resource supply rather by the energy requirements of turning rocks into batteries; the range follows from the battery price; cold weather issues that I'm aware of are also fixed by a bigger battery pack.
That leaves the fill-up time.
You would be right to say that reducing this to 5 minutes would need a technological leap, but I don't think it's truly necessary. First: it is easy to imagine a high-level government requirement that one-in-n street lights is retrofitted with a charging port for electric vehicles[0].
Second: PV cells are also getting cheaper, to the point that many EV makers are just slapping them on as afterthoughts. When this gets raised, the conversation diverges into two groups, those saying "that only gets you 8 miles per day, which is terrible" and those saying "that only gets you 8 miles per day, which is 80% of the average actual usage of a vehicle so this is good". In either case, trickle-charging even while you're driving will reduce both the degree to which you as a driver need the charging infrastructure and also the cost to the municipality of installing the kind of charging infrastructure I've described.
This doesn't reduce fill-up times, for which we would still need to think in terms of 30 minute breaks. This would definitely change the character of European petrol stations… though from what I remember of US gasoline stations on that one road trip I've been on from Davis CA to Salt Lake City, perhaps less so the American ones.
[0] or something along similar lines if my assumption that all residential areas have street lights is false
Charging rates keep getting faster and faster, but as someone with a Tesla for the last few years it has never once been a problem.
When you charge at home you wake up "full" every day and on road trips an extra 15m every few hours isn't a big deal. When I go to Buccees in Texas, by the time I use the restroom, get some water, and walk to/from my car is usually charged.
And the last thing I'll add on that point is that I've found the extra "fill up" time to be a healthy thing. Between autopilot/FSD and a 15m break every few hours, I arrived to my destination much more refreshed.
You are right about the cost thing, but I think competition from China will drive prices down a lot in the next few years. Trade regulations won't be enough when they start making EVs for half the price.
I understand your point of view, and would agree with it if OEMs were not constantly and consistently advancing the technology. Software updates alone have given considerable range increases. And solid state battery tech is very real, to the point of being a silver bullet for mass adoption if it arrives within the next 4 years.
Batteries are getting cheaper, denser, faster to charge and more durable every year. It's not a miracle improvement as sometimes is announced but the evolution is constant and CATL for example is already starting the mass production of 500Wh/Kg which would be impossible to imagine not long ago.
Almost solid state batteries will give extra range for high end cars but the bulk of the cars I suspect will be Sodium Ion.
I also expect Sodium Ion will be big in home storage and solar systems and potentially grid storage too. The reduced price per KWH at similar sizes and densities as Li-pho combined with being impossible to set on fire will make them popular in a range of big battery uses.
That's a bad outcome, obviously, and the EU competition probe's intent will be more to make "a level playing field" for EU car manufacturers.
To be fair, we do see EU brand electric cars locally: VWs and BMVs, even an electric Skoda; but also more of the Hyundai's, Kias, Polestars, Nissans, a lot of Tesla's (assembled in China) and of course the LEVC taxis (LEVC is owned by Geely China).
And many more in the works, both from EU and other car manufacturers.
But also I feel that if the EU car manufacturers held back on the EVs that we deserve while China did not, that's on them. If they made the wrong bet, to protect their incumbent ICE business, then Geely's subsidiaries can and should supply the new vehicles instead.
[0] https://apnews.com/general-news-cdae456e8c1948e5b7f01c602eda...
BMW deserves something like a Golden Raspberry Award, for how utterly ugly the fake plastic grill is. And I doubt that the owners need a huge SUV like that. I'm sure it never goes off the tarmac.
https://www.standard.co.uk/tech/bmw-ix-review-electric-suv-b...
Power companies in the US are primarily government regulated monopolies. These are the same monopolies that duped the public into replacing incandescent bulbs with LEDs claiming they would save power. At the same time, though, these companies lobbied the regulatory bodies and stated that their projected profits were down, because consumption was 'lower than expected' and hiked our rates across the board.
There is competition in the gasoline space. There is none or next to none in the power space.
What do you think will happen to the costs of 'fueling' electric vehicles here in the US when 50% or more of our vehicles are electric?
Time to revisit those rates!
They are for sure... At the end of the day the state is not going to let the grid collapse as a matter of national security. Grid connections will be demanded for a certificate of occupancy, and anyone that refuses will learn about all the military equipment our police forces have been gifted.
Folks who argue against the self-generation route tend to assume that solar and storage has to cover 100% of usage. That's unnecessary, and specifically why I called out fossil-fueled backup. For my own usage, a 14 kilowatt PV array, 20 KWh of battery storage, and a 2 kilowatt generator with remote start (controlled automatically) lets me fully disconnect forever.
I haven't yet, mostly because I have NEM 2.0 and the very-high fixed grid charge hasn't kicked in yet. Once it does, there's little reason for me to stay. My system paid itself off in <4 years of avoided costs, but I did it on the cheap by buying used hardware and doing the installation myself. When I set out on the build, I projected my payback time to be closer to 7 years. Rates went up faster than I expected and my usage also went up more than I expected once the electricity was free. I ended up getting an induction cooktop, a heat pump, and an electric car.
And I totally agree with you that this approach is wasteful from the perspective of global optimization of overall resource utilization. If this were Factorio and not the real world, the self-generation approach would be dumb. But in practice, the retail cost of electricity is rising fast while solar and battery costs have plummeted. That reduction in cost has really moved the needle on the microeconomics.
The large size of the array means that even an overcast day produces more than I usually need. The battery capacity only feels small when using the pool heat pump to warm up the hot tub, which drains one of the two 10 KWh batteries. The workaround is to preheat it during the day when there's excess solar and then only spend the energy to keep it warm.
I do plan to increase the battery array size eventually, but mostly so I have enough peak power to both cook and do laundry at the same time without needing to do so during the day to avoid pulling anything from the grid.
Batteries themselves are cheaper over their lifetimes than fossil fuels. The wibble factor for that being quite how long battery lifetime is. This is a Vimes Boots type of failure, as it means the rich can afford to spend less money than the poor.
If there's a fair-priced market for mid-life batteries, and/or good financing available for packs that you want to keep around for a decade and may keep around for two decades before replacing, then this may help with batteries, but even then a grid is cheaper if you can do it (keep the batteries for mobile storage needs, which is mostly transport but also disaster relief).
Global power grid is only going to happen if very large governments do it deliberately; this may well happen for the same reason China did the Belt and Road Initiative, though a suitable capacity global grid would by itself be about the same sort of scale (in both time and money) as the entire Belt and Road Initiative.
Grids are also basically a requirement for cities: while one can put PV on the side of a skyscraper, this won't be suitable for every single person in every single apartment.
The corruption of DEI does not benefit the little people, but the political consultants and PR departments.
LED bulbs are more efficient, what is your point?
> There is competition in the gasoline space. There is none or next to none in the power space.
Really, how much of our oil comes from dictators that turn the tap down to manipulate the global oil price whenever it suits them? This is an insane statement.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/imports-...
While cost per kilowatt hour has decreased significantly over the last decade, consumer prices have /increased/ significantly.
This is because the electric grid in the US is semi-regulated monopolies.
The same is not true for Oil, Gas, or Natural Gas as there is competition in the marketplace. The competition is light, and there are few players, but few is always better than a single supplier.
Single suppliers /always and forever/ raise prices beyond what the market can sustain, because they can.
The US government heavily subsidizes gasoline (and every other fossil fuel), which is just as market-distorting as what you describe. The market price does not reflect the real cost of production.
Source? AFAIK the articles/studies that make that claim use a very generous definition of "subsidies", which include stuff like accelerated depreciation[1], and not taxing externalities associated with carbon emissions.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidblackmon/2013/01/02/oil-ga...
>Explicit subsidies accounted for only 8 percent of the total. The remaining 92 percent were implicit subsidies, which took the form of tax breaks or, to a much larger degree, health and environmental damages that were not priced into the cost of fossil fuels, according to the analysis.
the thing we 'defend' are 'our interests' and top of those are secure shipping lanes, pipelines, and cooperative regimes for the smooth, stable supply (and therefore pricing) of the oil that fuels our emp^H^Hconomy.
In states with deregulated markets, there's tons of competition.
Gasoline pricing is highly regulated.
Pricing arguments are a distraction from the idea that spewing garbage into the air just to buy groceries when there's an alternative is terrible.
In what jurisdiction? In most developed countries they're anything but. Prices go up and down in response to crude oil prices and other factors. If that counts as "highly regulated", I don't know what you'd call prices that are set by government review boards.
This conversation is a bit ironic, considering the number of politicians that use gas prices as a talking point (and their followers who parrot those points)
That's a very creative interpretation of "regulated" means.
Perhaps if we want to restrict the definition of regulated, then sure, I'll accept that gasoline isn't regulated, but it's hardly laissez faire pricing: the government frequently steps in to squash market pricing. There's a reason you don't see an 88-cent swing in gas prices as your drive across town (88 cents being the historic margin between wholesale and retail)
Note that during this exchange you've completely ignored the fact that many states are electricity deregulated. At this moment I can pick from dozens of providers with an array of pricing plans.
Are crude/gasoline prices not a product of the market? I guess you could argue that it's not the true market price because you could always compare it to the counterfactual price where there's no government involvement in oil production whatsoever, but the government is effectively hands-off when it comes to pricing. It might have policies to promote oil production/trade, but prices are set by interactions between market participants (ie. supply and demand) rather than some sort of government board.
>I'll accept that gasoline isn't regulated, but it's hardly laissez faire pricing: the government frequently steps in to squash market pricing. There's a reason you don't see an 88-cent swing in gas prices as your drive across town (88 cents being the historic margin between wholesale and retail)
Maybe that's because gas station have similar business models and expenses, which means nobody can charge a $0 markup on wholesale, and competition between stations means that nobody can charge too much above that?
>Note that during this exchange you've completely ignored the fact that many states are electricity deregulated. At this moment I can pick from dozens of providers with an array of pricing plans.
Actually if you read this exchange carefully I never claimed that electricity had regulated pricing, only the existence of government price boards (in general, not specific to electricity). :^)
Petroleum for transportation currently accounts for 27% of US energy usage (https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/).
If 100% of cars switch to electric (not happening any time soon) - we only need 25% * 27% = 7% more electricity.
We'll be on pace to add that much just in solar in 3 years. It's not going to be a problem to handle electric vehicle adoption over 15 years.
> 25% * 27% = 7% more electricity
There is no relation between amount of petroleum used and amount of electricity generated in the data provided by you. All you can say is we need the equivalent amount of 7% extra of total energy used today. You did not provide any data about how much of total energy used is electricity . If electricity is 7% of total energy usage, then we need 100% extra to charge all the cars.
TLDR: your math is wrong.
There is.
> All you can say is we need the equivalent amount of 7% extra of total energy used today.
No.
We know how many BTU equivalent are used for electricity generation vs gasoline for transportation. And how much BTU equivalent is needed to power electric cars.
> TLDR: your math is wrong.
It probably is. Looks like transportation is 36% not 27% - that comes out to ~9% instead of ~7%.
The point still stands.
Show us the data.
> There is.
There is literally no relation.
"Cars use 27% of total energy in US. And 25% of 27% is equal to 7% of electricity generated." HOW??
According to some sources, electricity accounts for about 20% of total energy usage. So with your numbers, we would need extra 6.75% of total energy used. 6.75% of 20% is an extra 33.5% of electricity.
100.4q BTU total US energy usage.
37.8q BTU electricity (~37% or ~18% depending on how you count loss).
27.5q BTU transportation (~27% OR ~36% depending on how you count loss).
You're assuming that ~60% of NEW electric generation will come from fossil fuels. We won't have a ~60% loss in electric generation from solar & wind - which is currently ~90% of NEW generation. In 5 years, coal & natural gas will likely drop to ~0% of NEW generation.
If you take energy use used for transport (27.47), multiply it by 25% (because it's more efficient), you get 6.87. That's 18% of how much we generate in electricity today (37.75), not 7%.
So we need extra 7q BTU of electricity, right? Which is about 18% of 37.8!
So, not 7, not 9, we would need at least 18% extra electricity.
TLDR: Your math was wrong!
(Disclaimer, in full support of electric cars, just want accurate numbers)
Americans used 135B gallons of gas in 2022. Going to ignore diesels for now. Average MPG of a car is 25. 135*25 = 3.3T miles. Teslas get 26 kWh per 100 miles, or about 1/4 kW per mile 3.3T miles / 4 = ~825B kWh = 825TWh or 2.815 quadrillion BTU
I sadly have to run and can't make heads nor tails out of the link posted for US energy usage - but at least we know what goes on one side of the equation now.
Current electricity generation is 37.8q BTU.
It depends how much energy is lost in generating electricity.
Since >90% of NEW generation currently comes from solar & wind - the loss will be minimal compared to current methods (coal & natural gas with an average loss >50%).
I'm assuming that by the time electric vehicle adoption picks up close to ~0% of NEW generation will come from coal or natural gas.
If we would continue to generate ~60% of electric from fossil fuels - it's maybe a net negative trade to move them to electric. But in 15 years - the grid will be <30% fossil fuels, and in 30 it will be close to 0.
https://cleantechnica.com/2023/10/06/a-heat-pump-water-heate...
That's right, the typical household uses more electricity to heat water than they would to charge an EV.
That line of thinking totally ignores the opportunity cost of being able to use the savings from the water heater elsewhere, or not generating the electricity in the first place. Consumption is consumption. You can't pretend it isn't by bundling it with something else.
>That's right, the typical household uses more electricity to heat water than they would to charge an EV.
That's a leap in logic. Specifically, it assumes that "the typical household" uses an electric water heater.
We need to "electrify everything" and for that (including home heating and industry) I've seen figures around doubling our electricity needs (while lowering our energy needs overall since burning stuff is so inefficient).
Luckily, wind and solar are incredibly cheap sources of electricity and not burning fuel in inefficient cars (or home boilers) frees up a whole lot of fossil fuels for other tasks.