The small part in me understands that, they are banking on three things 1) oil will be cheap because of EV boom and hence EV dominance will be slow and could take couple of decades 2) electric Energy cost will rise significantly because so much charging and energy infrastructure required. 3) Battery will reach at par with gasoline and matured standardised comodity, that will be the perfect time to enter.
I think #1 will probably play out to a certain extent. Perhaps as an oscillation between low and high as each wave knocks more gas stations out of business and refinery capacity offline. But I have to say, even low prices on gas won't make me go back -- I prefer my EVs in all regards to the ICE equivalents, with the sole exception of marathon (>450 miles per day) road trips, which is not my use case.
I hope #2 won't be the future. It's not as easy to just jack up electric prices because EVs are charging, because they are regulated, and electricity is used for way more than cars (if my napkin math is right, on average people will use around 30% more electricity if they go full electric).
I expect that as a practical matter #3 is here now, it just hasn't filtered down to retail car sales in the US yet.
> with the sole exception of marathon (>450 miles per day) road trips
I've done 4 3000km road trips and intentionally took the EV leaving the ICE vehicle at home. It's a better car, and we need to stop to bathroom anyways, so charging isn't inconvenient. Saving a few hundred dollars in fuel is nice, too.
Long EV trips are possible amd convenient if there are enough chargers along the route. Sadly, this isn't the case on many routes in the US, at least. Europe is doing much better. I have no experience in other places.
Different people optimize for different things. I have a 450 mile trip (each way) next weekend. I can do it in 1 full tank of gas, but realistically I’ll stop once to fill up halfway. I don’t plan any other stops. If I had an EV, I’d probably have to stop twice, for 30+ minutes each, extending my already long trip by an hour each way.
Honestly, even my Lightning could do 450 with one stop, and it’s not the poster child for high range. My model 3 would do that no problem and the stop would be half as long.
My back and butt beg me to stop every couple hundred miles anyway, so on a long road trip I plan for a lunch stop. Longer than 450 and I stop for the night or fly. But I don’t love road tripping no matter how big the has tank.
Like what route? Everytime I've talked to someone who claimed they couldn't buy an EV because of a certain route, abetterrouteplanner.com showed it was covered.
A day trip from Seattle into the cascades for hiking is a scenario that pushes EV range. I'm sure that I can't properly reach some hiking destinations. Going uphill into the Cascades eats battery range in a way that I still find hard to estimate.
Another other example that I couldn't make work was multi day stay in Gardiner to visit Yellowstone National Park.
Third example where I struggled was a weekend trip to Lincoln City, OR. No usable chargers within the city or along the coast. The ones listed on maps have restrictions. The only way was to get a full charge at the last station on the way there and keep careful watch over the remaining range while there.
ICEs have access to a much denser network of gas stations, which eliminates range concerns. EVs aren't there yet and the additional trip preplanning imposed by that is real effort at times.
For a while maybe, but cheap EVs are being manufactured in Europe as well, and while this could reduce petrol prices, it's also going to reduce the need for petrol stations, and I think makes petrol basically dead even in a cheap-petrol scenario.
A Renault Twingo is going to cost something like 20,000 euros. That's twice the price of a Dacia Sandero, but a Dacia Spring is 16,900. The difference is only 4000, which could easily be a year's petrol.
A modern small and medium-sized car in Europe consumes like 4-6 liters/100 km. Even if one drives 15 thousands km/year (way above average) that gives like 900 liters of gasoline per year or like 1500-1700 euros with typical European prices.
And electricity is not free especially when using fast chargers. So at the end the savings is about 500-1000 euros per year. Which still is a good deal, but explains why people prefer to buy small gasoline cars. I think electric car premium must be below 2 thousand euros plus infrastructure must improve before gasoline car sales in Europe start to collapse.
Ah. I hadn't realised that modern petrol cars had gotten that efficient.
When I had a petrol car it was like at least 12 L/100 km, probably more. I remember 100 km drives (Stockholm-Uppsala and back) costing hundreds of Swedish crowns in petrol.
> When I had a petrol car it was like at least 12 L/100 km, probably more
What was it? That's approximately what my late-90s Range Rover does, although it's converted to run on LPG which is much cheaper and much much much cleaner.
