Er… 10 years? My “newest” vehicle is 15 years years old. It would be at least 20 years, quite likely 30 before all but a few in the hands of collectors are gone. If you take care of a vehicle it can last a long time.
I strongly suspect my current vehicles will be the last IC engines I own because by the time I need to replace them hybrids, if not full out electric, will be the norm. Yes, even here in the US.
We’re getting creeping metrics even now. Almost never see quarts of anything for sale any more, or even half-gallons of anything but milk. “Liter”, “2-liter”, and the like have become standard sizes for beverages here. The more and more tied in to the rest of the world the US becomes, as other economies continue to grow, the more and more the US is going to become accustomed to the metric system.
Anyhow - it’s going to be at least another generation before all the IC’s are off the road. In the US you do have the problem of longer trips being more common combined with the length of time needed to re-charge a battery. I think you’re more likely to see mostly electric cars with a reserve tank of fuel for an electric generator for extended trips. My sister owns one of those already. She uses very little gasoline over the course of a year, but once in awhile that extended range becomes important.
Does this apply to all equipment or just cars?
It was mentioned upthread that gasoline itself may slowly be phased out.
After 2040, will gasoline fired lawnmowers, generators, or boats be allowed to be sold in UK?
Or distances driven. US drivers routinely drive longer distances and batteries only take you so far before you have to charge again. Unless you can replace the batteries instead of charging, you’re screwed if you want to do a long trip.
I think it is a worthy goal and that it can be accomplished, but as others have sad, a more environmentally focused plan would be to convert the power grid over to renewable sources. I would also like to point out that a lot of fuss is made about “eliminating” fossil fuels, but total elimination isn’t required to stop climate change, but if we can get the majority of the electricity produced by renewables will be on the right track.
I think this is an admirable goal, but the first thing that occurs to me is, “Where are they going to put all the charging stations?” Here in the US, many more progressive companies and cities are installing charging stations in parking lots and decks, but the stations represent only a small fraction of the parking spaces available at a facility. Is everyone thinking that half (or more) of existing parking spaces will be equipped with charging stations? I would think that something like this would be necessary in some areas, but it’s a bit mind-boggling to consider.
Maybe battery technology will be so advanced that this won’t be an issue.
This isn’t a battery chemistry I’m particularly familiar with, so I’ll just throw this report on ya without comment.
[QUOTE=Green Car Report]
According to the report from Chunichi Shimbun, Toyota’s solid-state batteries will offer greater range than current lithium-ion batteries—and, crucially, a recharge time of just a few minutes.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t see why not. Obviously if you had to open the hood, disconnect wires and lug around 200 lb batteries then it would be no good. You would have to make it an accessible cartridge that could be popped out and replaced by a charging station robot/machine. The weight may come down as well in the future.
Here is a YouTube video showing the battery pack in a Tesla Model S being swapped in just a couple of minutes by an automated machine. So it is possible, even if that’s not what’s going to occur. Tesla also offers supercharger stations that can recharge their cars quickly using high-power circuits.
On the other hand, the government is going to have to do some serious thinking about where to raise the revenue to replace what comes in from tax on petrol.
You could do a heavy truck like a train.
A hybrid, using some sort of small low emissions engine to operate the dyno.
You could run the engine on some alternate fuel as its consumption should be lower so it could run something that is more expensive but environmentally happy, and the IC engine could be designed to always run in a peak optimal range.
Maybe run it on hydrogen, alcohol or something cleaner.
Look how much you can move and how far with a relatively small amount of diesel in a freight train
Well, there’s an alternate way. One predicted outcome (might be right or wrong, dunno) is that when the NTSB finally licenses autonomous vehicles for unrestricted use around the year 2021, there will be rapid adoption of vast fleets of autonomous taxis. The economic reason is that if a city with, say, 1 million workers needs 1 million cars, those cars have a very low utilization percentage. About 3-5%. The rest of the time, those vehicles are just idle assets.
With autonomous taxi fleets, competing with each other, fares would drop to just above the cost of providing each ride to the riders. And in general, if the autonomous taxis are battery powered, that means a lower cost per mile, and thus a clear cost advantage - nobody would be able to stay in business offering autonomous taxi services if their vehicles were not BEVs or at least hybrids.
As for where they all charge - obviously the charging has to be robotic. Whether the robotic arm is on the charger or on the car, I don’t know. Makes more sense to put it on the car for maintenance reasons.
So the general concept is as follows :
a. There’s a massive fleet of robo-taxis on the road, and the cost per mile has dropped to where for almost anyone, the cost of maintenance + depreciation + fuel + licensing is more than their annual cost renting rides by summoning them. This is already true for some folks using uber in urban areas - it’s cheaper to summon rides on demand (driven by someone who must be paid and using a gasoline burning vehicle) than the costs of a car.
b. The robotaxis in volume are less total cars than we have now. The reason is that 100% of the fleet is on the road during morning/evening rush hour, and that some people are sharing in return for a fare discount.
c. During mostly the mid-day, the robotaxis would have to park themselves in shifts (that is, only some of them would be needed to pick up passengers) at charging plugs, and presumably extend their robotic arm to get power from the plug. They would charge mostly during the day because that is when solar power would make the cost per kWh cheaper.
As you can imagine, this rough sketch of a rather clean and efficient future has some holes. The NTSB might not license autonomous vehicles for general use. The power grid needs to have time of day based pricing in order to properly support solar power. Who is going to pay for all these charging plugs to be installed? And so on.
Here is a YouTube video showing a robot charger that Tesla was testing. Another idea would be for the charging to occur through induction (i.e., without physical contact between the vehicle and the charger).
Electric cars represent better performance and easier maintenance than ICE cars within similar price points. What EV’s currently lack are the ability to travel continuously with minimal time between recharging. When that changes then market forces will drive a rapid transition to EV’s.
I would expect that to happen long before 2040 so the announcement was political fluff. What should have been announced was an acknowledgement of the natural transition to EV’s and a pledge to meet the electrical needs prior to 2040.
Why is it ambitious? A single kwh will drive a car about 3-4 miles, and a kwh of battery keeps dropping in price. I think it is now about $200, but may be $100 by 2020 or so. So in 2020 you’ll be able to get a 200 mile range car (maybe 60kwh battery) for $6000 in batteries. There are obviously other costs, but there are lower costs for an EV in other areas.
Fuel costs are lower, it costs about $0.10 to drive 3-4 miles (as opposed to about $0.35 in gasoline to drive 3-4 miles), plus with fewer moving parts it will supposedly have lower maintenance costs. Plus the lifespan of an EV may be longer due to fewer moving parts (however the battery may need replacing). But supposedly the powertrain lifespan of an ICE car may be about 200,000 miles, an EV may be closer to 300-500k miles. Over the course of a 200k mile lifespan, an EV may cost 20k+ less in fuel costs and maintenance costs. So even if the EV goes for 5k more than an ICE car, it is still the better financial decision.
Also considering how much prices have declined in just the last 10 years, a trendline is seen. We went from EVs being cars that cost 100k to cars that cost 30k. I’m guessing we will reach a point of parity of EV vs ICE cars sometimes in the 2020. A honda Accord EV will cost 25k new while a honda Accord ICE will cost 25k new.
And if battery prices keep declining, battery life will go up. Cars will come with 500 mile ranges, instead of 200 mile ranges.
And who knows? By then you may be able to ‘rent’ a charged pack the size of a cooler that you can put in your trunk, drive 200 miles on and exchange at the next Loves/Caseys/SuperAmerica.
Where there’s money to be made, people will figure this out.