Electric cars

Perhaps that's simply because the vast majority of what's written here about EVs is unsubstantiated - or, rather, uncritical - hype?

So, let me reiterate, again...

EVs are not quite (but it's close) ready to replace ICVs yet, for many people's primary-use vehicles. Charging infrastructure is the showstopper, and there is no easy way to sort that. For secondary vehicles, yes, they are absolutely viable - but they tend to be very low use anyway, so there's little emissions gain to be made - and that capability was already filled a couple of decades ago, but the market was not willing to make the compromises, and costs were too heavy.

They are nowhere near ready for heavy-use vehicles, which is where the majority of fuel is burnt, and the majority of emissions are produced.


Where EVs make most sense, in the urban environment, is where private cars - regardless of fuel type - make least sense, because public transport is the sustainable answer.

Tesla are closest to having the range sorted, but only because they are quite lazily happy to lob a metric shedload of the exact same generic cells as everybody else at each and every vehicle, simply because they've opted out of having to fulfill the same price expectations as everybody else, with massive compromises and quality shortcuts that would not be possible for "traditional" competitors. Their current niche allows them the bubble to get away with that, but that cannot last, and they are undoubtedly already finding the transition to the real world very, very difficult. They simply cannot continue to hype their way out of it, and short-to-medium-term survival in their current form is very unlikely, imho. Nobody has ever vapourwared their way out of trouble.

When EVs do break out of their niche, the current artificial cost advantage will VERY quickly be negated - and that will likely be through the inevitability of variable road pricing. Plug-in hybrids will be the route out of that niche, and are on the cusp of making that breakthrough - when we look back, the Outlander PHEV will be seen as the first truly mainstream choice, despite the utter ridiculousness of the whole SUV mania.

Then there's two things which have often been conflated with EVs in this thread and elsewhere - but are actually completely unrelated.

Autonomy is a very, very long way from reality, simply through the utter complexity of edge cases, but mainly through product liability questions. The marketing of the current relatively low-level driver assistance tools as something bordering on autonomy is close to being criminal negligence, imho, and I think we're going to see a very big, messy and expensive lawsuit in the near future - which will probably wind consumer-available tech back a notch or two.

The other one, often wrapped in with autonomy, is Transport-as-a-Service - which has been a commercially-successful urban reality for decades. But taking it out to extra-urban, especially rural, environments faces massive (probably insurmountable) scalability challenges.

You'll notice that I've explicitly flagged a couple of things in that as "imho". That's because they are the only ones which are opinion. The rest is simple reality, whether everybody here wishes to acknowledge them or not, especially the acolytes at the temple of St Elon...