Comment by tw04
10 hours ago
>I wonder how developing electric motors compares to combustion engines. My hunch says that it’s the main reason the Chinese high-tech electronics industry was able to develop and iterate leading electric vehicles so fast.
The talent had very little impact to be honest. The primary factor was a government looking 50 years down the road seeing that:
1. ICE engines have little to no long-term future in transportation.
2. global warming is a thing whether the right wing in the US likes it or not.
3. They were never going to overtake the West in ICE engines and had to attack from a different angle.
The US' lack of breakthroughs in EVs has little to do with technology or expertise and everything to do with an administration that is openly hostile towards EVs and renewable energy in general. For the rest of the planet, EVs becoming the primary form of transportation is just an obvious and logical conclusion, even if it takes us another 25-50 years to get there.
China saw it and decided to heavily incentivize and subsidize the rapid expansion of EVs both to fix the air quality issues in China and corner the market.
> The US' lack of breakthroughs in EVs has little to do with technology or expertise and everything to do with an administration that is openly hostile towards EVs and renewable energy in general.
It has nothing to do with the current administration either. For one thing, China's dominance predates it. For another, the EU and Japan have failed equally hard at capturing any meaningful EV marketshare.
1. There is still no good answer for air transport, trans-oceanic shipping, long-haul trucking, and long-distance rail. ICE will be used there for a good while longer.
I think air transport and oceanic shipping will probably still take time owing to energy density concerns, but there are electric trucks already (with trials of roadside charging rails that can actively charge during driving), and for a large part of the world, electrified trains are the norm. It's a uniquely US problem that rail isn't electrified, even other major OECD countries are above 50% if not more, while in places like India it is almost 100% electrified railway (one of the largest networks in the world).
With mandatory breaks you have to take while trucking in a lot of countries, is it really that far out? I would imagine you could charge while you sleep.
The current admin is actively hostile to EVs, but I think the real problem was the chicken and egg issue of charging stations: they wouldn't be built because there wasn't enough demand for them and EVs would be limited in sales because they wouldn't have chargers to use on the road.
This is where Tesla made a huge difference with Supercharger stations. I am no fan of Elon, but that work was fundamental in making EVs viable in America.
Nevertheless, there seems to be zero buy-in from commercial players in the US. It's such a weird uphill battle.
I live in the US, but every summer I spend a month in Sweden, and the past two years I've rented EVs for the entire stay, and the buildout of chargers these past 4-5 years has been astonishing. It's gone from crap to fantastic in a very short time, and that's without massive government intervention or subsidies or screaming and cajoling.
Because in Sweden, the primary driver of charging stops along highways and in the cities are gas stations.
They already make all their profit from incidental purchases and not the gas itself, so them pivoting to EV charging stops makes perfect sense. They already have the infrastructure in place to sell you overpriced hotdogs and coffee and snacks for your road trip, they already have restrooms in place.
But they also do the same in the cities, it seems like every city gas station has also put up a couple of 350W charging stations. It's not half-assed, they mean business. They all see the writing on the wall, in neighbouring Norway EV's are 90+% of all new car sales, Sweden is at ~30% right now, and climbing, so gas stations will go out of business if they don't pivot to EV charging.
It's fundamental market economy forces at work, the kind of stuff that the US normally prides itself of.
So why is that not happening in the US?
I think it's because the incumbents do not know how to build competitive, desirable, affordable EVs. I'm just an armchair observer, but that makes a fair amount of sense.
The other part is that a lot of money is made in the production and sale of fuel and those players have significant influence in how things work -- this is evident in the Trump admin's demonization of renewables and going all in on fossil fuels.
Watching all this craziness from the sidelines is crazymaking and heartbreaking. We can only keep China at bay for so long, and then when the dam breaks the domestic auto makers are going to go down, along with the whole economic ecosystem that supports them. It doesn't have to be this way...