GRA
Well-known member
WetEV said:Consider something you might know about, EV conversions. Take a car, usually older with a blown motor, buy it cheap, and put batteries and an electric motor into it.GRA said:WetEV said:If there had never been any subsidies or mandates, the EV growth would have been slower, but would still happen. Batteries got better and cheaper driven by uses other than cars until after 2010. The rational for subsidies and/or mandates is to speed the process.
Hydrogen fuel cell powered cars might happen on their own if and only if hydrogen gets cheap. And that's not even going to start for "5 to 10 years".
Cheap is relative. What the study forecasts is that H2 will be comparably priced with gas on a per mile basis in the U.S. in 5 to 10 years, which means that it will be competitive in areas with higher gas prices sooner. Always assuming that the forecast is accurate and the required steps are taken, neither of which is ever guaranteed.
I have serious doubts about your claim that (P)EV growth would have happened without subsidies or mandates this time. Sure, Nissan and GM might have been able to sell a few LEAFs and Volts to Hollywood celebs and the like, and Fisker might have done so too, but would Tesla ever have appeared let alone survived to produce the Model S (and maybe the Roadster too) without government funds?
Did you follow that scene much?
At first, it was hobby projects. Then various places started offering parts for common conversions, such as VW beetles. Then various places selling predone conversions. For one place, it was all electric VW beetles. For another, it was all Toyota Corollas.
Battery prices kept falling, so the cost of a conversion kept falling. As the volume of conversions kept rising, parts needed became more available and cheaper. And as places started selling predones, you didn't need to be a geek to get one. I don't have a good source for statistics, but it went from it was easy for me to know of everyone that owned an EV on the West Coast to far too many to count over a decade. Perhaps a hundred conversions. Or more. Subsidies and mandates didn't apply to conversions.
The above is history pre-2008. Next is speculation.
A possible next step is the one Tesla did with the Roadster. Buy new cars without engine, and make it electric. Without the mandate that created the EV1 and expanded the market and investment for EVs, this wouldn't have happened when it did, but it seems to me like it was going to happen even with no subsidies. Sooner or later the profitable business of converting VW bugs is going to run out of VW bugs to convert. Then what? Buy the tooling from VW Mexico or Brazil when they phased out the Beetle? Maybe, if they could get it cheap enough. Buy Fiat Spider bodies from Fiat? Or something else?
Or perhaps it happens a different way. EV dragsters (such as White Zombie) were showing up gas cars on drag strips. Perhaps someone like Porsche decided to make a car that could hold it's own against the EVs... by engineering an EV. Initially as a halo car and very spendy, but as the demand would grow and the cost to produce would fall, volume would build... And competition would show up.
The path to market for EVs with no subsidies or mandates is from the top end. When a $80k converted car can beat up a $1million "super car" on the drag strip, someone's going to figure it out.
Next, price of EVs is going to fall as cost to produce EV declines with increasing production and as competition increases. Sure, first BEVs start as very expensive cars. But they don't stay there.
Oddly enough, back when I was doing solar in the early '90s a few of my customers had conversions; the one I remember best was a Karmann Ghia. There were also companies like Solar Electric Engineering? who did Escort and Fiero 'production' conversions, or at least claimed to - I always felt the guy running it was a bit of a con artist.
But they, and later cars like the tzero out of which Tesla's Roadster grew, were never going to be more than a trickle of orders for geeks and the few ideologically-committed individuals who were willing to pay a high price for them while also putting up with their limitations, I e. City cars only. I've been re-reading Michael Schiffer's 1994 book "Taking Charge", which in addition to detailing the early history of BEVs in the US ca. 1900s, forecasts the 'near' future thanks to the 1990s CARB mandate, the conversions you mentioned, the impending arrival of the 'Impact' (not yet known as the EV1), etc. He brings up all the points you do to arrive at a favorable prognosis, albeit 10-20 years earlier.
But then (and in the 1900s) as now, the public simply wasn't ready to adopt short-range BEVs that couldn't tour. Only the development of much better, bigger batteries and faster charging infrastructure in the past couple of years plus mandates and subsidies has brought BEVs even into the conversation for the mass market, and we're still several years away from the needed capability/price point.
WetEV said:Hydrogen relies on subsidies and mandates completely.
For now, sure. Reduced costs for RE H2 would be a game changer. And QCing is also completely reliant on subsidies and mandates, because no one is yet able to make a profit on them at electricity prices equal or less than gas.
WetEV said:I'll likely never see an FCEV beyond several I've seen at University Engineering exhibits.
What, Anheuser-Busch doesn't sell beer in your area? I expect you'll also see them on high speed ferries on Puget Sound in the not too distant future - it's not as if BEVs have a hope of doing that job anytime soon.