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I like reading the comments to my videos. I spend a minimum of one hour each day reading comments because I see them as a very valuable qualitative insight into what people think about my content, what they like or dislike and what they would like to see in the future. The comments section is also often a great source of video ideas.
But recently I am being driven out of the comments section because its getting frustrating to read the same type of comment over and over.
So today I'm doing this video which is a collective response to all these comments and a very simple and objective explanation of why EVs are not around the corner and why internal combustion is not dead and won't be dead any time soon.
Now before we begin I feel that it's very important that I say something first and that is that I am in no way against electric vehicles and that I do not believe that internal combustion is a permanent and future-proof solution to human mobility. What I do believe is that the challenges present in humanities future are substantial and extremely complex, however believing that an aggressive push for the electrification of mobility will resolve these challenges is incredibly short-sighted.
Refueling a combustion car to 100% takes between 2-7 minutes and gives you an average range of around 500km (310.6 miles). If the vehicle is a diesel the range is usually around 700km or more. At the extreme end of the scale we of course have combustion vehicles whose ranges easily exceed 1200km. Now according to the USA Federal Highway Administration - Department of Transportation the average american drives 14,263 miles or 22.954 kilometers. The average EU citizen drives 7021 miles or 11.300 km every year. Now if we take the average between USA and EU to be the global average this gives us 10642.224 miles or 17.127 km per year. Now let's forget our optimistic 2 minute gas station stop. Let's say that we spend 7 minutes at the gas station every time. The end result is that the average citizen of planet earth spends 239.8 minutes or 3.99 hours every year refueling the average combustion car.
Now the average current electric car adds around 3.5 miles or 5.6km of range for 1 minute of charging. But let's forget the average. Let's take this. A Porsche Taycan turbo. It costs around 150.000 $ or 160.000 EUR and while it definitely doesn't have an actual turbo it can add 14 miles or 22km of range for 1 minute of charging if you can find a level 3 charger.
This means that if you're an owner of a Taycan turbo that only charges on level three chargers you will spend 12.9 hours each year charging your Porsche. This means that if all of our cars somehow magically turned into Taycans and all of our gas stations magically turned into level three chargers we would still spend more than three times as much time recharging as refueling leading to large waiting lines on all the charging stations. Which means that we need more than three times as many level three charging stations as we currently have gas stations.
So charging stations won't work. Well there's an easy fix for that let's all charge at home. Well that's why we're here. Can you imagine every car here having a charging station for itself? Because that's what you need to guarantee that everyone can go to work tomorrow. And all of them have to work. All the time. Again imagine the amount of cables, labor and maintenance needed to make that happen for just this one single residential area alone. And there's millions of residential areas like this around the world. Getting them all equipped with charging stations is an even more massive undertaking than building three times more level three charging stations than gas stations.
Now I know what you're saying, charging times and ranges are improving all the time so all of these statistics don't matter. Yes, battery technology is advancing, but it's not doubling in capacity or charging times every year. It's improving a little at a time. And remember, we're basing our whole scenario on a very expensive luxury car . It will take some time for the taycan's specs to become the industry average. It took us almost a century to increase the average horsepower output of a car from 26hp in 1930 to 128hp in 2018. It also took us a century to build the infrastructure to support combustion cars. The roads, the workshops, the gas stations. Even something that's relatively simple in comparison such as increasing a usb stick's capacity from 8MBs to 256 GB took a decade. Big changes take time.
A special thank you to my patrons:
Daniel
Daniel Morgan
Pepe
Brian Alvarez
Jack H
Dave Westwood
Joe C
Zwoa Meda Beda
Toma Marini
Nelson
#d4a #bev #ice
00:00 The comments
02:22 The logistics
10:59 The statistics
18:23 The pessimistic