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Comment by harshaw | Hacker News Reader

I wish people would be slightly more honest about technological change. Smartphones are very special. They are very cheap, easy to mass produce, and you can iterate on them very quickly. Cars on the other hand have a much longer life cycle, involve much more capital, and in general are going to follow an elongated investment / replacement cycle. Comparing these two systems, while enthusiastic and great for a college term paper, seems premature.

I am really excited that there may be a fleet of self driving electric cars in urban areas in 10 years. It's going to be awesome. But I am willing to bet for the rest of us its going to be a more conservative change that is going to evolve over decades.

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I am one of the biggest Tesla fanboys out. Everything Geoff said is true but he makes it seem like this is around the corner and it isn't even close. At least 60M cars are produced annually[0] and there are about 1B currently in the world[1]. A best case for tesla is to grow from ~50K cars to ~500K cars anually by 2020. There isn't an industrial base yet.

Some other manufacturers will contribute of course, but even if 60m electric cars rolled out annually starting now and started replacing ICE cars, that will take (1B/60M) * years, which is 16years and 8months.

The only way this could be sped up would be the rise of self-driving cars, an increase in public transport and the continuation of urbanization. If many manufacturers stopped making ICE cars and we used much less of them we could replace enough of the current fleet for it to be non-trivial in a few decades.

[0]http://www.worldometers.info/cars/ [1]http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2011/08/23/car-population_n_934...

https://www.yahoo.com/autos/s/uber-ceo-tesla-sell-half-milli...

right, to clarify I did factor this in. I mean that not only do self-driving cars work and meet regulatory scrutiny, but they bring about a shift in user behavior where most transportation is on demand and shared. That way less cars can work around the clock and people will not need as many of them.

Also, this is a pretty lofty goal for tesla. They haven't produced working self-driving tech (the ones now work at low speed and highway but are not 100x better than humans), they don't have experience with high volume production, the gigafactory isn't complete yet, etc. I am really excited for this to happen, but I am not sure if when that clock sweeps over into new years 2021 there will half a million autonomous teslas.

Would never bet against Musk though, hope I am wrong.

I hope things pan out the way the article predicts and I'm a massive optimist for EV adoption in the long term. However, there's some obvious wrenches in the plan for such quick adoption, including:

- No great options currently for charging in apartments. Virtually the entire world is on an urbanisation trend, so this segment of potential EV owners is really important for adoption, and isn't being currently served.

- People replace their cars at much slower rates than smartphones.

I think there is a lot of potential for disruption in the transportation sector. Trucking companies and taxi fleets don't care if their vehicles are big, ugly and heavy (as they would be if outfitted with batteries), cost is the main factor. When EV running costs dip below the cost of ICE vehicles (and when battery density improves the range sufficiently), these guys are going to have a huge incentive to invest in EVs quickly.

Also, if someone figures out how to build an electric jet in the next few decades, it will transform the airline industry who are currently held hostage by the price of oil. Perhaps airlines can compete on service rather than price gouging on "extras" that used to be covered by the cost of a ticket, to make up for razor thin margins. Airports could also be built closer to city centres, as the noise and air pollution concerns disappear.

The key technology is battery storage. The energy storage density of gasoline/kerosene/jet fuel is immense, at least 6-7x the best available batteries.

When someone announces a mass-production electrical storage system with 5-10x improvement, we can have electric aircraft as something other than a novelty.

About the apartment thing; one plausible near future is self driving electric cars that scurry off after they drop you off and go find a plug.

I'm not sure why you'd expect that apartment owners wouldn't put chargers in their garages? I'm guessing that a metering or coin operated overnight charger wouldn't cost that much more than a normal charger. There's also the possibility of workplaces providing chargers. Mine does but we're sort of weird.

EDIT: Remember that a parking spot can easily cost over $10,000 so the extra money for a charger isn't that much.

http://shoup.bol.ucla.edu/HighCost.pdf

> I'm not sure why you'd expect that apartment owners wouldn't put chargers in their garages?

I've lived in many apartments, but I've never lived in an apartment that included access to a garage. Many of the apartments I've lived in only had parking available on the street.

I guess it's a matter of density? If you've only got two or three apartments in a building street parking works but for more than that it's really not feasible. If you like living in less dense areas that's great but my sense is that most of the urbanization that's happening is at densities where street parking isn't feasible.

Indeed, the fact that phone contracts effectively force most people to upgrade every two years is an unusual, important, and often-overlooked characteristic of the smartphone market.

It's a big part of why Apple makes such incredible amounts of money from iPhones, but their iPad revenue has dropped off significant.

This is probably the part of it and it probably used to have stronger effect, but right now I think the reason people change smartphones often is the same reason people changed their PCs every two-three years - software increases in features / bloat so fast that if you don't upgrade, you'll quickly be out of the loop (and God forbid you actually update your software - then it will gradually stop working as authors make it bigger and slower).

It's all about life cycle. A typical car lives for nearly 15 years. There are huge numbers of 15-20 year-old cars on the road today. An introduction of a new type of car won't change the life cycle dynamics. Even if auto manufacturers manage to sell 50% of new electric cars in 10 years, there will be tens of millions of old gasoline cars on the road ... just because people keep driving them.

When cars crash, passengers automatically go back to where they started instead of dying, then one can innovate as quickly in cars as in phones.

I agree it's not a good comparison. The network on which smartphones plugged in predated them which is not true for the electrics cars and charging stations.

"Electric cars are always full every morning" is only true for people owning a garage.

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