Tesla owners are overwhelmingly men, and the most common occupations are engineer, software engineer, and manager of operations, one study found.
Tesla owners are overwhelmingly men, and the most common occupations are engineer, software engineer, and manager of operations, one study found.
This is why BEVs are fundamentally just a fad. It is a toy for rich white men and little else. It is fundamentally too expensive for normal people. They’re not even the most important car in the household, and is usually just the second car.
In the 90’s you could’ve written an equally true headline replacing “Tesla owners” with “PC owners”. It’s not an indication that BEV’s are a fad, it’s an indication that wealth inequality and sexism continues to this day.
There is no Moore’s law of batteries. BEVs are always going to be fairly expensive compared to other types of cars. They will not magically improve like PCs have.
Not to mention BEVs are old technology. They literally pre-date internal combustion cars.
@Hypx There’s no Moore’s Law for batteries because they’re a different technology. Transistors today are still fundamentally the same as the first transistor, made in 1947. Batteries, on the other hand, are constantly evolving. The first LiPo battery wasn’t invented until 1997, and there are multiple new battery technologies currently being studied, like solid state batteries.
@L4s @Catch42
Are you seriously joking? A transistor today is much smaller and faster than what existed in 1947. That is what is driving Moore’s law.
Batteries evolve only very slowly, and run into hard physical limits at every step. As a result, BEVs are very expensive and have major downsides like weight, long recharge times, etc.
@Hypx Yes transistors are smaller and faster, that’s the literal definition of Moore’s Law. But a transistor today is a smaller, faster version of the exact same technology as the first transistor, applying a small signal to pass current between doped semiconductor junctions, the only major difference being changing the semiconductor from germanium to silicon.
Batteries, however, are fundamentally different from when they were first invented. Yes, it’s still storing electrical energy as chemical energy, but the chemistry has changed so much since the first batteries. The word “polymer” wouldn’t even exist for another 20 odd years. And new technology is constantly being discovered, such as solid state batteries or supercapacitors.
And if you want to talk about physical limits, Moore’s Law is essentially dead. We’re nearing a point where you’d have to split atoms to make a smaller transistor. Batteries are limited by their chemical makeup, transistors are limited by the laws of physics.
@L4s @Catch42
That’s ridiculous. You basically admitted that we switched from germanium to silicon, but that this apparently doesn’t count as a difference.
Not to mention that this is massively off-topic. The point is that batteries do not improve as fast as transistors did in the 1990s. Hence why an analogy is wrong.
And if you are aware that Moore’s law is (more or less) dead today, then you should understand the problem that batteries are facing. They too are hitting hard physical limits. You talk of solid state batteries but they are nowhere to be found right now. Clearly, this is a hard problem and future batteries will not magically be far superior.
But ultimately, there are other green ideas not called the BEV. Including other types of EVs. This is why I try to make it clear that I am talking about BEVs specific. Not EVs in general. Once other people become aware of this fact, it will become much clearer that the BEV is a fad. It is an expensive and very limited idea. It is arguably an idea stuck in the mid-2000s, and its advocates have simply failed to move on.
I think the point that is counter to yours is that we are nowhere near the fundamental limits of energy density for batteries. It’s probable we are near a fundamental limit for LiPo, but the point is that battery tech improves by changing technologies/chemistries. BEVs couldn’t exist at all when the best rechargeable battery tech was lead-acid, but were enabled by LiPo. Theres most likely a type of battery you can’t even imagine that has yet to be invented that could store >10x or more energy than current LiPo per unit cost or mass.
I would say that’s pretty unlikely there will be a 10x improvement in battery chemistry. At some point, we will have to deal with the fundamental limitations of the technology. That will likely imply a different kind of EV. Other conversations in this thread have brought up the FCEV, which is honestly the mostly likely guess for what comes after the BEV. In other words, the solution is to move beyond batteries, not pretend we can just improve batteries ad absurdum.
Also, this is basically the point of the book The Innovator’s Dilemma. Technology does not improve linearly exclusively. At some point, major shifts in the market will have to happen. If you think about this problem honestly, you probably have to conclude that the limitations of the BEV must be solved by a big leap forward, not incremental improvements in batteries. And if you can reach that conclusion, then you must realize that the BEV has to be a transitional technology. Perhaps, even a fad.
Do you have anything to support this? EVs are increasing share of the market so when do you estimate that will end? Do you also think EVs are a fad in China?
There’s plenty of BEVs that are competitively priced to any other new car: https://www.caranddriver.com/features/g32463239/new-ev-models-us/
They might not be the car you choose to take on a road trip, but most days, I only need to drive less than 20 miles anyway.
You’re joking? The first one on that list is literally the Hummer EV. Completely unaffordable for most people. This is just more evidence that BEVs are a fad, not the other way around.
And there are 5 other cars below $40k. Just because 1 car is expensive doesn’t mean others are.
The list is dominated by SUVs and pick-up trucks. The “below $40k” market is all subcompacts or compacts and are the equivalent of $20k ICE cars. It is not a competitive technology. If anything, it just proves how underwhelming BEVs actually are.
https://www.caranddriver.com/chevrolet/bolt-euv
So you just have a hydrogen full cell manufacturer’s name as your username and post extensively in https://kbin.social/m/Hydrogen for fun or do you think you maybe have a conflict of interest here and are being disingenuous?
Because I want to tell the truth, not swallow marketing propaganda from Tesla. In reality, BEVs are a fad and no amount of wishful thinking will change that.
The name is a coincidence. I’ve used this name for a long time (from elsewhere to be clear).
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Maybe you should visit some poorer countries. BEVs are incredibly far away from being mainstream. Not to mention how much of the “success” of BEVs is due to subsidies. It is not an organic market.
The point is that you cannot compare BEVs to computers. And certainly not the period from the 1990s. BEVs are improving at a slow rate and will have major physical limitations preventing them from going beyond a certain level. That is the point.
And because of that, they are going to end up being a fad. By the time they are “ready” to take over, technology will have moved on and BEVs will be obsolete.