I doubt the US will push for more incentives. America does not want to put GM or Ford out of business. Also we have a massive oil industry that will prevent the promotion of electric cars. If you want a realistic goal for incentives would be to extend the $7500 tax credit beyond 200K vehicles. The angle would be to allow lower income families to get a credit with the possibility of buying a lower cost car (the Model 3) since most of the tax credits will be used by the time the Model 3 shows up.

 

The author should have read other articles in his own paper about Denmark and removed that country from the graph of incentives in light of that country's announcement that it will no longer waive the 180% new vehicle tax on BEVs.

 

Hilarious! 35 years isn't enough time to go gas free? Think about what travel (propeller driven planes, steam engine driven trains and ICE automobiles) was like in 1934. 35 years later in 1969 we landed a man on the moon in a space ship and returned him safely home. We could do that, but we can't get from where we are today to electric cars in THIRTY FIVE YEARS????? I'm dumbfounded.

 

If you think about it, incentives are a perverse way to do this. Another approach would be to fairly charge for external costs so alternatives stop selling at a discount. A great way to do this is with a revenue neutral, gradually increasing carbon fee and dividend.

Check out Citizens Climate Lobby - Political Will for a Livable World

Ironically, this is an approach many Republicans support.

 

Yes, but unlike Canada (as just one small example) Norwegians have treated their oil and gas industry from the very beginning as a resource that is here for a good time, not really a long time. It has made all the right moves over a few decades to ensure that hundreds of years after the last barrel of oil is extracted, the country will still have the positive run-on effect from a few short decades of insane wealth 'way back when'.

 

Note there is a huge difference between doing something on a small scale and changing the direction of one of the largest industries in the world. Also note humans got to the Moon by 1969, but nobody has set foot there since 1972, that's 43 years, that's more than 35 years. Why hasn't it been done? In part political will, but also the gains have not outweighed the cost. The US moon manned moon missions were an experimental program. It worked, but the cost of scaling it up to an industry wasn't worth it. SpaceX's goal is to lower the cost of getting into space which will make longer manned missions feasible, but SpaceX is just beginning to chip away at the fringes of this problem.

Right now electric cars are a tiny niche market. Sales are 0.3% of worldwide car sales, and that includes plug in hybrids. With the Model 3, Tesla is talking about boosting BEV sales all the way to 0.6% of the market. If you exclude plug in hybrids from the total the percentages get significantly smaller. It takes the entire output from 1 Gigafactory to go from 0.3% to 0.6%. It will take 200 Gigafactories to supply enough batteries to power all passenger vehicles if they have similar range to a Tesla.

That's just supplying the batteries. An entirely new type of infrastructure has to be built to support these vehicles. Right now most BEV owners can charge their cars at home, but around half the population don't have that ability. They may live in an apartment, or an older house that won't support the power requirements, or they might even have a house with no garage. Infrastructure has to be built to enable all these people to charge at or near home. Cities will have to put in chargers along streets in neighborhoods where people can't charge at home and need to park on the street. Apartment complexes will have to put in chargers in most if not all their parking spaces. All these extra chargers will also require the electrical infrastructure to be built up in these areas.

In sunny parts of the world, expanding solar power is a good idea to add to the extra power needed. However, there are parts of the world where some kind of alternative needs to be put into play. Seattle doesn't get much solar in the winter (though summers are sunny). Washington state has the benefit of the most hydro power in the US, but that will become maxxed out when every car needs to be plugged in.

Tesla has built a good prototype long distance charging network with the superchargers, but the current supercharger network isn't feasible for even the Model 3 level of cars on the road. They will have to expand the network pretty far just to accommodate that growth.

The world has to support for an estimated 3 billion cars by 2050. That means something like superchargers for people making long trips and some kind of home charging for those who need some kind of public charger near their home. Building 50,000 BEVs a year is tough enough, building 100 million requires major changes to the car industry that requires a lot of capital investment and time to build all the new infrastructure.

Even if Toyota is talking about fuel cells instead of BEVs, a lot of the problems are similar. The supply network for energy is more like what we have today, but at current technology the transportation and storage losses are staggeringly high. It also requires a lot of electricity as well as fresh water (most of the world doesn't have) to make it. Even making it from natural gas requires electricity and water.

I think fuel cells are a technological dead end, but Toyota and some others are bound and determined to go down that route to the end. I can see why they are thinking that way, the infrastructure is close enough to the gasoline industry they don't tick off the oil companies and they don't have to build a charging network like Tesla is doing.

 

Someone above mentioned to make petroleum based activities match their true cost rather than subsidize EVs. I agree. Primarily because it addresses the larger problems. Today it's cheaper (and faster) for me to drive an ICE from my home to Washington, DC than it is to take the train. Even though my house is 2 miles from a train station that would take me straight to the Amtrak station. That's because gas is dirt cheap, even here in CT. If the price of gasoline (not necessarily all petroleum products, just gasoline) were to increase significantly my behavior would change. All of a sudden it's cost effective to take the train. Then new lines get built because it's actually profitable and there's demand. More people would buy EVs. More stations would get built because there's more demand. A network of charging stations actually becomes profitable because there's higher utilization. A lot of dominos fall from that one act of letting gas prices rise. Of course, there's lots of negatives with rising gas prices, too, especially in the short term where the working poor can't afford to get a shiny new EV.

 

A sudden rise in gas prices has ripple effects through the entire economy. They are short term, the US absorbed going from $1-$2 a gallon to $4 and still bought SUVs.

The working poor are the hardest hit by any increase in daily living costs. In some parts of the US there is adequate mass transit, but that only exists in dense urban areas. Mass transit loses money if the population density is too low and most of the western US has densities below the threshold. Only the urban cores are built up enough to sustain mass transit. Culturally we need to build some transportation alternatives for poor people in low density areas. This would help the US economy quite a bit, but it won't fly in the current legislative climate in the US.

 

I'm not advocating copying Norway. What works there isn't necessarily going to work everywhere else. Norway has a lot of money from their oil business they have decided to invest in public works plus they have a well established grid based on hydroelectric, which is unique to Norway.

Tax incentives aren't necessarily the best idea. The $7500 federal tax rebate is nice in the US, but it can't be fully used by people who aren't already making a lot of money. I don't pay $7500 a year in federal income tax to be rebated and my income is above the American average.

First off there were only 194,000 cars and 4000 trucks on American roads in the US in 1908 and that had risen to a little over 8 million cars and 1.1 million trucks by 1920. Compare that to 128 million cars and 72 million trucks by 1995 (from the latest chart I could find). https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/summary95/mv200.pdf

Car ownership outside the US and Europe was almost 0 in 1908, but it has grown even more since 1920 than in the US.

Cars in 1920 were also staggeringly more simple than they are today. The Model S is somewhat less complicated than a modern ICE, but it's complexity is many times a Model T. It has many more safety features, computers monitoring everything, even the tires are much more complex to engineer than the Model T.

Comparing the electronics market to the car market only goes so far. Electronic devices have a lot higher percentage of software/firmware to hardware than cars do. The electronics business, especially the cutting edge electronics business, is a high margin market and cars a low margin market. A relatively small factory can turn out millions of copies of an electronic device in a very short time, but it takes many very large factories to produce millions of cars.

Innovations like smart phones and iPods also did not require major changes to the supporting infrastructure to take off. Both were made better by support from changes to the infrastructure, but they became hits before the infrastructure was updated. That isn't so for cars with a new energy source. Support for the new fuel source needs to be built out before the general public are going to adopt it.

The softer the technology (ie the more it relies on software and less on hardware) the quicker the transition that can be made. You write the software to support the device once, and then copy it as many times as you need. For about $1 billion investment in manufacturing, you can crank out millions of phones or other similar devices a year. For building cars, it requires a $5 billion battery factory and $5 billion final assembly plant for each increment of 500,000 cars/year. (Tesla got their current factory for $40 million, but that was fire sale prices, building that same factory new would be $5 billion of more.)

The mainstream car companies laughed at Tesla because they assumed they were being naive trying to build cars in Silicon Valley. They knew the differences between building computing devices and building cars and figured Tesla didn't know this. Many still think Tesla doesn't know this, but somehow survived because of government help or fanatical following, or something. Looking at Tesla's plans, it's obvious to me they do know the differences between building cars and electronics. They are applying what works from the electronics business, but they also realize building cars is far more hardware intensive than anything being done in Silicon Valley.

On top of all these difficulties are a few of the largest industries in the world resisting these changes. The top 10 of the Fortune 500 contains 3 oil companies and 2 car companies. There are also some very large foreign companies resisting change.

Replacing the more than 1 billion cars on the road in the world today will take a lot of time and capital investment. It will be slowed down by players resisting change, but even with no resistance, it would still take at least 2 decades.

 

Politically it's a non-starter in the United States. It would definitely help increase demand if something like this was done.

Right now the production for EVs isn't there. If a larger country did something like Norway did, demand would outstrip supply for several years. The industry isn't capable of building more EVs than it currently is, it's supply constrained until we have multiple Gigafactories.

I can't get the table to delete.

Anyway, I agree that 2 decades is very bullish. That's my estimate of the absolute minimum it would take if everyone agreed to put in an all out effort right now.

I've mentioned before the documentary "Pump" which is available on YouTube. It goes into a fair bit of detail about how the car business and car supply business works, it's worth watching. They point out that EVs are the eventual goal, but ICE are going to be around for quite a while because of the huge installed user base, the time needed to spool up battery production, and the need to build out an all new supply chain for powering EVs. The documentary then goes on to make the point that we could drastically reduce the use of fossil fuels if we were willing to convert more biomass into alcohols. Most ICE cars built in the last 20 years are built to take flex fuel, most manufacturers disable it in the firmware. All it takes is a minute with a computer which can talk to the firmware to enable the flex fuel capability. The only manufacturer leaving it turned on in most of their fleet sold worldwide is Ford.

The documentary also talks about where we can get this biomass to make alcohol from. A study done, I believe by the US DOE, found that the US has enough waste biomass every year to provide enough alcohol to fuel 50% of the cars on the road. That's fuel from garbage essentially. The finding was so surprising they ran the numbers again and came up with the same result. I wouldn't be surprised if Canada didn't have similar if not better levels of biomass that could be fermented.

I know that isn't a popular notion with the big EV advocates here, but it will take time for the massive switch to EV power and alcohol has the advantages of working in existing cars and can be put into the existing fuel network. So converting to an alcohol based economy would only take a few years a opposed to many decades for EVs.