Tag Archives: electric cars

August 2024

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Obviously, there were plenty of goings-on in the U.S. presidential election campaign in August. I’ve talked about that elsewhere, and everybody else is talking about it, so I’ll give it a rest here.

Most frightening and/or depressing story: Human extinction, and our dysfunctional political system’s seeming lack of concern and even active ramping up the risk. We have forgotten how horrible it was last time (and the only time) nuclear weapons were used on cities. Is there any story that could be more frightening and/or depressing to a human?

Most hopeful story: Drugs targeting “GLP-1 receptors” (one brand name is Ozempic) were developed to treat diabetes and obesity, but they may be effective against stroke, heart disease, kidney disease, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, alcoholism, and drug addiction. They may even be miracle anti-aging drugs. But really, it seems like the simple story is that most of us in the modern world are just eating too much and moving our bodies too little, and these drugs might let us get some of the benefits of healthier lifestyles without actually making the effort. Making the effort, or making the effort while turbo-charging the benefits with drugs, might be the better option. Nonetheless, saving lives is saving lives.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: I did some musing about electric vehicles in August. The hype bubble seems to have burst a bit, as they did not explode onto the international commercial scene as some were hoping/predicting. This is partly because public infrastructure has not kept pace with the private sector due to sheer inertia, but I always detect a whiff of the evil oil/car industry propaganda and political capture behind the scenes. Nonetheless, just as I see happening with computer-driven vehicles, the technology and market will continue to develop after the hype bubble bursts. In a way, this almost starts the clock (5-10-20 years?) for when we can expect the actual commercial transition to occur. It will happen gradually, and one day we will just shrug, accept it, assume we knew it was coming all along, and eventually forget it was any other way. And since I seem to have transportation on the brain, here is a bonus link to my article on high speed trains.

those lagging electric vehicle sales

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Since I happen to be in Thailand, here are a couple excerpts from an article about lower than expected electric vehicle sales in Thailand. I am not trying to pick on Thailand or even comment on Thai government policy, but merely give a local example of what seems to be a global trend.

Thailand on Friday signalled it was hedging its bets over its previous all-out commitment to EV cars. Instead, in a new policy announcement, the kingdom is focusing on hybrid vehicle production or HEVs…

…there is a growing realisation that the EV industry, which is capital-intensive and does not support the country’s critical automotive parts industry, has been a mixed blessing.

“We are experiencing an EV oversupply as plenty of EVs imported from China over the past two years inventories,” he explained. At the same time, he confirmed that there are presently 490,000 unsold EV cars in storage. That is 63% of all vehicles produced in Thailand over the last 12 months. In the meantime, EV vehicle sales remain a relatively small percentage of overall car sales in the kingdom. In June, vehicles for the domestic market produced in Thailand were only 34,522 units. A huge drop of 43.08%. This is a catastrophic outcome by all accounts.

Anecdotally, just from moving about the country a bit, I don’t see charging infrastructure. And this echoes what I see in (my small corner of) the United States. We haven’t built the infrastructure to support electric vehicles, and we haven’t made the policy changes like adjustments to the gas tax which funds much of our highway maintenance. So we blame problems caused by a lack of planning and implementation on the technology itself.

But there is something else here. There are winners and losers with electric vehicles. The winners are all of us and our children’s lungs, plus our water and air. But these are diffuse benefits, and politically speaking it is concentrated interests that move the political system. Big business interests like the oil and automotive industries. The reference to “car parts” is telling here. Electric vehicles are superior because they have fewer complex parts and require less maintenance and service. Just like shutting down any sprawling, inefficient, polluting Soviet industry, what is good for society means some loss of jobs and profits for a minority, and that minority has some political clout. So when we hear that electric vehicles are “not catching on”, we can ask how much of this is propaganda driven by big business interests who will lose money if they do catch on.

Nonetheless, I think the hype bubble may have burst but the technology is here and here to stay. It may take a decade or two to really take over rather than exploding onto the scene the way some expected.

October 2022 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story: Hurricanes are hitting us (i.e., the United States: New Orleans and Puerto Rico being the examples) and we are not quite recovering back to the trend we were on before the hurricane. This seems to be happening elsewhere too, like the Philippines. This is how a system can decline and eventually collapse – it appears stable in the face of internal stressors until it is faced with an external shock, and then it doesn’t bounce back quite all the way, and each time this happens it bounces back a bit less.

Most hopeful story: Gorbachev believed in the international order and in 1992 proposed a recipe for fixing it: elimination of nuclear and chemical weapons [we might want to add biological weapons today], elimination of the international arms trade, peaceful sharing and oversight of civilian nuclear technology, strong intervention in regional conflicts [he seemed to envision troops under Security Council control], promotion of food security, human rights, population control [seems a bit quaint, but maybe we would replace this with a broader concept of ecological footprint reduction today], economic assistance to poorer countries, and expansion of the Security Council to include at least India, Italy, Indonesia, Canada, Poland, Brazil, Mexico, and Egypt [maybe this list would be a bit different today but would almost certainly include Germany, Japan, Brazil, India, and Indonesia].

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Here is a big, maybe dumb idea: Maybe the U.S. could build out a modern high speed rail system and electric grid along its interstate highways. Maybe some experts can write me and explain if there are technical reasons this can’t be done. It the reason it can’t be done is that bureaucracy A owns the highways and bureaucracy B owns the tracks and bureaucracy C the power lines, that is not an excuse to fail. You can also charge electric vehicles while they are on the move.

2018 transportation trends

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U.S. News has predictions for transportation technology in 2018. In a nutshell, sales of electric vehicles will take off, but people will also keep buying inefficient gas vehicles because is relatively cheap right now.

According to this article, the commercial rollout of autonomous vehicles has suffered some setbacks, and 2018 might not be the big widespread adoption year.

Automated vehicle developers will push back their timelines for deployment, for good reason. Automated vehicles are coming, but the real question is when. Just over a year ago, tech magnate Elon Musk said he “felt pretty good” about a Tesla driving completely autonomously from Los Angeles to New York without any human interaction by the end of 2017. But at a recent conference, he pushed that date back another two years. Chevy delayed the debut of Super Cruise, and driverless shuttles have yet to move beyond pilot phases.

Society will greatly benefit from automated vehicle safety improvements. However, it’s a good thing that automated technologies are delayed. Automakers are finding it more difficult to design the system than they originally expected. Instead of putting a product on the road that is unsafe, they are responsibly taking the time they need to make sure the system is ready for the public. Patience will pay off in the long run.

I wonder if it is really a setback in technology, or a matter of a few high profile accidents getting a lot of media attention. Markets and regulatory agencies are going to respond to perception, no matter how clearly the statistics show that imperfect computer-controlled vehicles are a huge advance over human controlled vehicles. Insurance companies are somewhat immune to emotion and responsive to hard numbers though, so at some point when there are safer options available they may just jack rates up on people who don’t take those options. It probably won’t pay to be a late adopter.

Volvo

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According to Fast Company, Volvo is planning a move to 100% hybrid and electric cars.

Between 2019 and 2021, Volvo will launch five 100% electric cars–three Volvo models and two under Polestar, its premium brand. The rest of its new models will be either hybrid plug-ins or hybrids that generate power from braking.

The company is moving towards electrification more quickly than it initially thought was possible. In 2015, when Volvo first announced a plan for electrification, the company’s senior vice president of research and development said that the Volvo would focus on hybrids and that it would take time for fully electric cars to be viable.

But battery costs have plunged, falling almost 80% between 2010 and 2016, and are likely to fall further. Charging infrastructure is spreading. New regulations, like an EU law that limits CO2 emissions for cars, and France’s newly announced phase-out of internal combustion engines by 2040, mean that traditional technology has to change. And customer demand is increasing.

Electric cars don’t solve all the problems cars cause of course, such as urban sprawl, pedestrian deaths, obesity, and wasted time. But they solve the air pollution problem (locally, at least, and regionally if there is also a shift to cleaner power plants) and the problem of producing, refining, transporting and storing large quantities of toxic and carcinogenic gasoline and diesel fuel.

electric self-driving cars

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Electric cars and self-driving cars are both going to happen at the same time. Here is Inhabitat on the Nissan Leaf:

We’re just a few months away from the debut of the all-new 2018 Nissan Leaf – and the automaker just announced a killer feature for its next-generation electric vehicle. In addition to a complete restyling and a longer driving range, the 2018 Leaf will be able to drive itself with Nissan’s new ProPILOT Assist autonomous technology.

ProPILOT Assist can take over driving tasks on the highway, which includes accelerating, braking and steering controls. The 2018 Leaf won’t have the full SAE Level 4 technology, which would give it the ability to also drive autonomously on city streets. Nissan says that “in the coming years” the ProPILOT Assist technology will be improved to give it the ability to navigate city intersections.

electric cars about to boom

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According to Bloomberg, electric cars are set for a big boom by 2020 and could lead to a peak and decline in oil demand sometime in the 2020s.

Electric cars are coming fast — and that’s not just the opinion of carmakers anymore. Total SA, one of the world’s biggest oil producers, is now saying EVs may constitute almost a third of new-car sales by the end of the next decade.

The surge in battery powered vehicles will cause demand for oil-based fuels to peak in the 2030s, Total Chief Energy Economist Joel Couse said at Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s conference in New York on Tuesday. EVs will make up 15 percent to 30 percent of new vehicles by 2030, after which fuel “demand will flatten out,” Couse said. “Maybe even decline…”

“By 2020 there will be over 120 different models of EV across the spectrum,” said Michael Liebreich, founder of Bloomberg New Energy Finance. “These are great cars. They will make the internal combustion equivalent look old fashioned.”

car dealers sabotaging electric cars

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The New York Times says car dealers are actively subverting peoples’ attempts to buy electric cars, even when they really want them. One reason they cite is that electric cars need less service like oil changes, and dealerships actually make a lot more money from service than from sales. This may be a rational explanation. But part of the explanation may also be that people can get sucked into longstanding institutional cultures even when they are highly irrational. I face this quite often in my work, and I have faced it around the world – groups of people can be incredibly motivated to defend the status quo, even in the face of incontrovertible evidence that there are better ways, and even when the people in question are young, intellgient, well-educated and well-intentioned. Sometimes the facts just do not matter. I don’t have the answer to this, if you do please let me know.