By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –
The number of electric vehicles (EVs) on the road doubled worldwide to 2 million in the past year with 40% of EVs being in China. If the number of EVs went on doubling annually, they’d take over the world in short order.
Moreover, all-electric automobiles outsold plug-in hybrids in Europe for the first time in six quarters last quarter.
Batteries for EVs only cost 1/5 of what they did a decade ago.
Electric cars are most environmentally friendly if they are run on the owner’s solar panels. But even without that key element, they are cleaner than gasoline cars for 97% of Americans.
6% of all new car sales in the Netherlands were EVs last year, as the northern European country of 17 million aims to have 50% of all car purchases be electric in 2025, only 8 years from now.
Meanwhile, India’s government is even more ambitious, saying it wants only electric cars to be sold in that country by 2030.. Some 3 million passenger vehicles are sold every year in India, a country of 1.3 billion.
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We’ve got solar panels on our house and we lease a Leaf. It’s not our primary car – for long distances – but we use it the majority of the time.
Oh, and Trump, fuc* you.
Chalk it up to cynicism (experience) about Trump, but do you think he and his masters really believe their own weak bull shit about letting the sacred Invisible Hand work its magic?
The dirty fossil fuels are heavily taxed by various levels of government. Could this explain their reluctance to defund themselves and do we have to set up a lottery to upkeep the roads.
We’ve had solar panels on our roof for 6 years – and we have a Lexus Hybrid – it uses half as much gas as the Subaru Forester we owned previously.
Our next car will be a Tesla Model 3.
PS: More than 20% of Australian homes now have solar panels.
Take away the government’s behavior modification of throwing our own tax money at others to buy EV and sales would drop like a rock
Actually not true . . .
The economics of non-carbon energy versus carbon energy are all in non-carbon’s favor.
Chinese companies are very, very good at designing and making hardware and Indian companies are very, very good at making software. Between the two, the carbon energy market is going to be heavily battered over the next few years.
Chinese companies are focusing on four things:
– Solar energy harvesting systems that are real inexpensive and reasonably efficient.
– Wind energy harvesting systems that are real inexpensive and reasonably efficient.
– “powerwall” type energy storage systems that are real inexpensive and reasonably efficient.
– Low energy usages devices (LED lamps, etc).
As those four hardware technologies drive the costs through the floor, I expect Indian software companies to work with Chinese hardware companies on developing very efficient energy management systems to make the Chinese hardware even more reliable and inexpensive.
This is the trick the laptop and smart phone makers figured out – make very energy efficient hardware then layer on top, very good energy management technology so the resulting merger of technologies results in very powerful and efficient systems.
Even without non-carbon subsidies and even with the tremendous public subsidies the carbon energy folks get, the economics will still drive carbon energy companies into bankruptcy.
“Take away the government’s behavior modification of throwing our own tax money at others to buy EV and sales would drop like a rock”
You’re right. But government has always had a role in behavior modification–if it’s clearly better to have EVs and clean energy (for political reasons as well as environmental) then it’s appropriate for some intervention to get the market going.
Take away massive Big Oil and other Big Carbon government tax breaks and their stock share price would plummet like a stone.
The Interstate Highway System was a huge intervention by the government into automotive behavior. Literally subsidizing the mass exodus to the suburbs, where all travel must be by car.