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Daily Poll 50: Are EVs the future of the car industry?
Electric Vehicles or EVs have been slowly getting more and more mainstream as the years go by. I see more Teslas on the road than ever and it seems a lot of car companies are absolutely committed to electrifying their lineup within the next 15 years or so. I do think the batteries and infrastructure are the biggest problems facing EVs and I’m uncertain that even with all the money and corporate and state backing that it can be solved. That is just me I’m curious to see what you guys think.
https://poll-maker.com/poll4107974x7D35463e-129
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5 Replies
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Cobalt mining has a long way to go with environmental and humanitarian problems and electric cars still have some basic utilitarian hurdles to get past, such as efficient recharging of vehicles that die far away from a charging station and electrical infrastructure being totally inadequate for the scale of the transition they anticipate. The reason car companies are committing to electric has more to do with legislation than it does with market demand. Several states are banning the sale of new internal combustion cars as soon as 2030, and I think the federal government also has a deadline, but I can’t remember when it is exactly. The EPA is essentially forcing car companies to build expensive and unreliable engines for their internal combustion vehicles in an effort to incentivize consumers to switch to electric, and constantly raising the threshold for average mpg requirements. If you’re curious, look at what diesel pickup owners are dealing with. Exhaust after treatment systems are required on Diesel engines now, and they often are not covered by warranties and are expensive to replace and repair. They’re also very unreliable and shorten the lifespan of your engine significantly. Companies that sell delete kits and reprogram the computer to bypass these systems (for less than half the cost of replacing the original equipment) are getting raided and extorted by armed EPA swat teams. These raids have been steadily spreading into the automotive aftermarket as well. Basically government is attempting to force the issue, when we actually have more environmentally friendly options than electric cars.
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I think ammonia or hydrogen are the future since we can retool Combustion engines to run on that fuel as well as still keep the thousands of gas stations that are currently being used. The EPA has made American sold cars worse since its inception in the 70s. No argument there
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The most compelling “bearish” work that I have seen on this is by Steve St Angelo of the SRSRocco report. He cites the work of other phds and mining experts, geologists, etc. to basically argue that we have been and are increasingly seeing diminishing energy ROI, as in regardless of the type of energy, we are needing to use more energy to obtain the same unit of energy for end users. It’s basically a more refined take on “peak oil,” but he argues the shale boom of the last decade or so was basically a flash in the pan and actually illustrates the diminishing returns argument.
I happen to think there is basically next gen level tech that has not been disclosed/“discovered” yet. If that were to happen or something similar then maybe we could see this type of a paradigm shift in autos and more importantly energy density, distribution/creation. But with the current paradigm I don’t see electric cars gaining significant market share even with massive subsidies of various sorts. Any sizable share that they gain will be fleeting because they are expensive in many respects and unreliable, and the current energy distribution system is heavily entrenched in a liquid fuel system.
From an ancap standpoint I think we should maintain a fundamental appreciation for distributed/decentralized forms of energy creation, which need not be low tech but in the current state of the world may benefit from being simple/elegant solutions as we hopefully make as painless of a transition from this late stage empire situation to a freerer and more prosperous world.
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It’s the law of diminishing returns. The benefit from going to using horses to engines is much greater than going from an engine to a better built one. Necessity is the mother of invention and as the need for alternatives fuels became greater I think we’ll be able to figure it out and implement it.
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they way we are doing them, no. Everybody else here has hit on all the key points already. The reality is that efficiency has been ignored at every level of our energy web. If we could increase efficiency by 10 to 15% across the board and commit scientific resources to continually improving that part of equation we wouldn’t need worry about any of the things that EV proponents harp on.