Can 3 million EVs replace 30 million oil cars?

Martyn1981

Piddles wrote: »

Or if you prefer a video Clean Disruption - Energy & Transportation

That made me chuckle. I think it's taken us the two years to stop talking (arguing) about Tony Seba's projections, and that video in particular.

I think his work on disruption and the 'S' curve is fascinating, and whatever we think will happen, I suspect it'll happen faster than we expect.

One thing perhaps that has changed during the intervening time period, is whilst he stresses improvements in LIDAR, Elon Musk's argument for camera's instead, may well be proving right, or perhaps we'll have both as technology gets cheaper.

Place your bets ....... and lose your money, coz this ride is going to get wild.

Piddles

Martyn1981 wrote: »

That made me chuckle. I think it's taken us the two years to stop talking (arguing) about Tony Seba's projections, and that video in particular.

Haha. Sorry to reopen that can of worms! Slick presentations can be deceptive, but the ever shrinking S curve argument is compelling.

Martyn1981 wrote: »

One thing perhaps that has changed during the intervening time period, is whilst he stresses improvements in LIDAR, Elon Musk's argument for camera's instead, may well be proving right, or perhaps we'll have both as technology gets cheaper.

He's wrong. He knows he's wrong. But I don't think many Tesla buyers have any real expectation that their cars can be truly autonomous without some serious hardware upgrades once the technology gets cheap enough for a consumer owned car, if it ever does. At least I hope they don't.....

GreatApe

Piddles wrote: »

You forgot the congestion charge. £250 million for TfL. Coming to a city near you soon....:rotfl:

For most town and cities (not London) around a quarter to a third of real estate is given over to car parks and associated infrastructure no longer required in the age of AVs. Much of it owned by the council. This can be redeveloped for much needed housing and business premises for jobs. Local councils will be big winners with a significant net gain from revenue from property taxes and rents. Removal of congestion and the reduction of transport costs (they'll be using AV services too of course) should mean a big reduction in the costs of council services. In the US, a Morgan Stanley study indicated a net gain of half a trillion dollars for the municipalities. In the UK it ought to reduce central government support for the councils.

For central government, this additional urban housing means less (legislate for no?) urban sprawl and less new transport infrastructure. The near elimination of road deaths and injuries could reduce NHS costs by 15% (sorry, US figures again) with equivalent figures for the police and fire services. Then there's the care and benefits costs (sometimes lifetime) for the seriously injured, many of whom should have been working and contributing taxes.

Similarly, there's the environmental costs to the NHS from transport pollution. AVs are likely to be rebuilt every 3 years due to their high mileage, and their centralised ownership will allow the government to mandate the cleanest technology as it comes available. Now it's more like a 12 year cycle.

The government has earmarked £50 billion to be spent on road improvements. Will any of that be necessary in the age of AVs? In fact, there ought to be a moratorium on all government transport capital projects (and some non transport ones as AVs will transform our lives in ways we haven't yet appreciated).

Transport is a significant element of a county's global competitiveness. A cheaper, more efficient transport system will be a big boost to the economy and tax revenues overall.

You can bet the government will be pushing hard for this. For all our sakes.

Closing down all the unprofitable railways will be a substantial money and energy saving too

That's £5 billion a year saved in just the UK which can be diverted to healthcare or lower tuition fees.

The large central stations can be converted to high density housing or office or retail or a combination of all of the above

The railway lines can be converted (tarmac not steel rails) to roads for electric robo taxis even high speed robo EVs doing 120mph for intercity travel.

Cities like London perhaps adopting mass electric scooters can also cut down traffic and useage.
Allow your tube ticket to let you use a TFL owned electric scooter. Deploy 500,000 such scooters in zones 1-4 cost of maybe as low as £150 million to decrease tube station useage. The scooter maybe being used for 3 million trips per day. With many pick up/drop off points with chargers both at stations and at many other places too. Perhaps even starting robo taxis only in zone 1 so no human drivers in zone 1 plus huge number of electric scooters. Move it to zone 1&2 robo taxis only and just keep expanding. Might soon have zone 1-3 robo taxi and scooters only. With perhaps most trips by most people done by electric scooters maybe 65% of all miles and the remaining 35% by robo e taxi and totally petrol diesel free.

GreatApe

tim_p wrote: »

What’s going to replace the governments revenue from the 27 million vehicles?
VED, VAT, fuel, parking, fines........ we’re not talking small change here but a major source of treasury revenue.

Something like £30 billion

Would be replaced by something like a 10p per mile tax
Or better yet some sort of tax for EVs based on electricity useage.
Perhaps as high as 50p per KWh this is similar cost to users as 10p a mile but greatly incentivise higher efficiency vehicles and sharing

But also bear in mind the governments own cost also falls thanks is to this tech
Think of the amount of money spent by the NHS on transport
As a guess directly or indirectly some £1 Billion a year of the NHS budget is probably moving things/people around

Also no/less need to spend £5 billion a year subbing busses and trains

Piddles

GreatApe wrote: »

Think of the amount of money spent by the NHS on transport

NHS responsible for 5 per cent of all traffic on roads

tim_p

So suddenly the NHS doesn’t need ambulances? Carers don’t need to get to ‘clients’ Doctors don’t need to visit patients? People in villages don’t need to get to hospital appointments, don’t need to bother to visit relatives in hospital. Pharmacies don’t need to deliver medicines.
How do people living in rural areas get around? Don't tell me, they hop on one of your magic ‘3 in 30 million’ vehicles.
Remind me where the 30 Million is coming from.

Martyn1981

Piddles wrote: »

Haha. Sorry to reopen that can of worms! Slick presentations can be deceptive, but the ever shrinking S curve argument is compelling.
He's wrong. He knows he's wrong. But I don't think many Tesla buyers have any real expectation that their cars can be truly autonomous without some serious hardware upgrades once the technology gets cheap enough for a consumer owned car, if it ever does. At least I hope they don't.....

No apology necessary, fantastic thought provoker and personally I think it's an excellent presentation, and change will most likely happen faster than we expect. I suspect a switch to BEV's and then to TAAS will be driven by a multitude of small side effects that are hard (today) to predict, but one that interests me is the possibility of an accident victim suing a driver on the basis that an automated vehicle would have 'coped better', and if such a case succeeds then we'll be pushed out of the drivers seat by rising insurance costs, or not, purely pondering.

Why do you think Elon is wrong about LIDAR being a dead end technology for autonomous cars? Not working in the rain seems pretty significant to me.

Piddles

That video is now two years old and it's quite interesting checking the claims made then by some manufacturers to what they've actually delivered.

One was Elon Musk's claim to have level 5 autonomy in 2019. Tony Seba did say "..even if he misses it by a bit", so he was obviously somewhat sceptical.

Another was $250 solid state short range LIDAR, that hasn't materialised either. Waymo have recently released their short range LIDAR (front and rear or all four corners) for sale to non autonomous car applications for something around $2,000 to $4,000. The long range one (big one on the top) is supposed to be around the 5 figure mark.

For autonomy, it's about "degrees of confidence" in the surroundings, where you are and how fast you are going. The more the sensors agree, the faster you can go. It's the same for the human driver when you think about it; when it's raining you can't see so well, you know the tyres have less grip, etc. so you slow down.

The extra tier of "vision" from LIDAR (not always available to the other sensors - or human eyes for that matter) mean the vehicle can go faster and be safer. It's more than just "vision". The processing can work out position relative to its mapping data and speed according how the shapes of fixed objects it passes change (think of how the cube of a house changes shape as you approach it). All this gets compared to what the other sensors are saying, hence the "degrees of confidence".

LIDAR was never an option for Tesla on both cost or aesthestics grounds, so Musk has been obliged to diss the technology on a "the ends justifies the means" basis. You can bet that the software has been written in way that LIDAR can be just dropped in when pertinent. The end game is the technology and the massive amounts of data that all the ever growing Tesla car fleet provide. Tesla cars themselves are just a short lived stepping stone for him.

Tammykitty

I think anyone that believes people will give up their cars is living in fantasy land.


I live in NI, less than 30 mile outside Belfast - I drive a car, do about 18,000 mile a year.


I did have a small car - changed to a bigger one, with a big boot for carrying stuff that I can have with me wherever I happen to be.


If I try to ring a taxi after midnight it can take an hour to get one, sometimes impossible to get one at 2am, and at around 15 mins at all other times.


The town I live in isn't a tiny hamlet - it has around 10,000 people (so would be classed as Urban)


A personal car isn't just a convenience - its a necessity for me, and it would take a lot to convince me to give it up


Uber does not exist in any useful capacity for me.


It's all well and good saying rollout to rural areas can take longer - but the people commuting into the cities come from the rural areas - the ones that live in the urban areas - a lot of them will already be using public transport.

Piddles

Tammykitty wrote: »

I think anyone that believes people will give up their cars is living in fantasy land.


I live in NI, less than 30 mile outside Belfast - I drive a car, do about 18,000 mile a year.


I did have a small car - changed to a bigger one, with a big boot for carrying stuff that I can have with me wherever I happen to be.


If I try to ring a taxi after midnight it can take an hour to get one, sometimes impossible to get one at 2am, and at around 15 mins at all other times.


The town I live in isn't a tiny hamlet - it has around 10,000 people (so would be classed as Urban)


A personal car isn't just a convenience - its a necessity for me, and it would take a lot to convince me to give it up


Uber does not exist in any useful capacity for me.


It's all well and good saying rollout to rural areas can take longer - but the people commuting into the cities come from the rural areas - the ones that live in the urban areas - a lot of them will already be using public transport.

They will on the grounds of cost and convenience. It's a massively disruptive technology and getting everyone's head around it is going to be challenging.

At 10% of the cost of the average individually owned internal combustion engined car, it's going to be a very strong pull.

There will be the collapse in used car prices. So for people in rural areas there will the benefit of owning the car of your dreams ....for nothing probably. Though the places you'll be able to drive it will shrink.

Uber is a useful service for people to try out the principle. I'm no expert, but I believe one of the surprises was how well Uber can work in rural area as drivers register as a part time (sometimes second) job. Maybe it has yet to develop in your area.

AVs will start in cities as a segregated public transport disruptor, then with intercity connections and freight services, then radiate out from there. It'll be demand led. No one is going to force you. But price and convenience will probably get you eventually as the network grows and matures.