# On the possible death of internal combustion by 2030????



## sponge_bob (Aug 11, 2013)

First of all I am sceptical that this will come to pass so soon and am inclined to add 10 years to every forecast in the paper ....but it will come to pass some time. 

Stanford Lecturer *Tony Seba *says that we will switch heavily to Autonomous driving EVs by 2022 and that petrol and diesel engines will be legacy products by 2025 in effect with none available by 2030. 

What is not mentioned in this report is that once Autonomous EVs hit around 30% of new vehicles then the remaining 70% will become increasingly and then extremely difficult to insure and that only persons with impeccable driving histories will be able to insure a non Autonomous vehicle. That will sweep the rest of the fleet off the road in fairly short order.

https://static1.squarespace.com/sta...30c5/1494888038959/RethinkX+Report_051517.pdf



> We are on the cusp of one of the fastest, deepest, most consequential disruptions of transportation in history. By 2030, within 10 years of regulatory approval of autonomous vehicles (AVs), 95% of U.S. passenger miles traveled will be served by on-demand autonomous electric vehicles owned by fleets, not individuals, in a new business model we call “transportas-a-service” (TaaS).
> 
> The TaaS disruption will have enormous implications
> across the transportation and oil industries, decimating entire portions
> ...


One tipping point has already been reached, IE that the car battery _might last longer_ than the average car. This is using existing battery technology not some 'breathrough' tech that is rare in the wild. 



> More vehicle lifetime miles, lower operating costs
> Vehicle lifetime miles. Tesla’s first vehicle (Tesla S) is now 20 months old and has clocked over 280,000 miles. It reached 200,000 miles with only 6-7% battery degradation


I will say that Sebas paper (linked above) is causing massive conniptions at the highest levels already and it is only just released. It will clearly inform projections of highway capacity requirements globally from now on. 

However I think personally that more road space will be required in cities as the EVs will maintain a greater distance from each other than drivers currently do and will adapt badly to sensor driven separations in bad weather. 

And most of the worlds cars are in countries with long crap winters.  

I also think that S2 roads are inadequate for any proper Autonomy and that 2+2 minima are required as there will always be people in a hurry and people not in a hurry _in any given roadspace_ full of Autonomous EVs.

Better build those 2+2 roads while diesel is still cheap then. If fact if Seba is right then the perfect time to build a global shedload of high capacity roads will be in the 2020s as cheap diesel is dumped on the market.


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## ChrisZwolle (May 7, 2006)

There is quite some debate whether Level 5 autonomous vehicles will enter the market so soon. Experts say that Level 4-5 autonomous vehicles are exponentially more complex to develop than current level of autonomous vehicles. It is not a linear development from level 1 to 5.

We're not just talking about some autonomous driving in relatively controlled environments like freeways and divided highways, but on every road and street, no matter how difficult, and in any weather condition thinkable. This is not just simply the next step in autonomous driving. The final step of fully autonomous driving might take much longer to achieve than many people think. You read stories about such vehicles entering the market on a large scale in the late 2020s, but also in the 2070s. 

It also sounds premature to name specific dates when fossil fuel cars will become obsolete while there is currently not a single electric vehicle on the market that has the same specifications as internal combustion engine vehicles in terms of price, range and charging time. 

The current owners of electric vehicles are by no means representative for the average driver. In the Netherlands 90% of cars are privately owned but only 5% of PHEV and EV are privately owned for example.


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## sponge_bob (Aug 11, 2013)

ChrisZwolle said:


> The current owners of electric vehicles are by no means representative for the average driver. In the Netherlands 90% of cars are privately owned but only 5% of PHEV and EV are privately owned for example.


That is because mass market EV sellers like Nissan realised early on that people would lease EVs but _not buy them outright_( in case the battery pack dies which is a €10k replacement part on its own) . 

Everyone I personally know with a Nissan Leaf has leased it, when their lease is up they think they will get another one in its place. All have a privately owned diesel as well for long range tasks. 

Nissan have part modularised their latest batteries, in fairness, in response to the failure anxiety. They also offer a 5 year drivetrain/battery warranty with only 100k KMs of distance covered and 3 years or 200k KMs on the rest of the car. How confusing. Your most expensive part has the lowest warranty for many use cases.  

By around 200k kilometers I would expect a Nissan Leaf Battery to lose 33% of its capacity when new. Tesla are claiming they went much further than that, charged more often and lost less than 10% of the new capacity in so doing. 

But the ownership model for EVs is fundamentally different right now and the assumption in the paper is that EVs will be like dial a cars rather than owned in future. I do not disagree with that assumption.


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## sponge_bob (Aug 11, 2013)

Try google translating next time. In other developments Ireland announced that new Petrol and Diesel cars will not be registered any more, starting from 2030 as it happens.


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## mgk920 (Apr 21, 2007)

I just have the sense that these rules are almost certainly going to be delayed, if not outright cancelled, as the reality of the technology being unable to keep up with those political demands sets in.

Mike


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## sponge_bob (Aug 11, 2013)

mgk920 said:


> I just have the sense that these rules are almost certainly going to be delayed, if not outright cancelled, as the reality of the technology being unable to keep up with those political demands sets in.


I reckon they will set a 2030 date, as a vague target fairly soon, and change that to 2040 a few years later. 2030 will probably end up as a 50% of all vehicles target in the end. 

In the end one big breakthrough, or a whole lot of small breakthroughs, are needed to get to all electric on ground. 

https://qz.com/1588236/how-we-get-to-the-next-big-battery-breakthrough/


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## ChrisZwolle (May 7, 2006)

ChrisZwolle said:


> The current owners of electric vehicles are by no means representative for the average driver. In the Netherlands 90% of cars are privately owned but only 5% of PHEV and EV are privately owned for example.


Two years later the conclusion hasn't changed much. EV sales remain very dependent on fiscal incentives for company cars.

PHEV was huge, until they ended incentives, the sales have dropped to almost nothing since. Many PHEVs are being exported because many are too large and expensive to operate for most private owners. The resale value is higher abroad than in the Netherlands, making it unattractive to sell as a used car in the Netherlands.

Since this year, the car value over € 50,000 is not incentivized anymore. Sales of the Tesla Model S, X and Jaguar I-Pace have fallen to very low levels, while 'cheaper' EVs are doing well but most have a waiting time of a year or more.


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## mgk920 (Apr 21, 2007)

Also remember that straight battery-electric was one of the technologies that was being offered in the earliest days of automobility (think: 'late 19th century') and that it failed in the market because of the same problems that are afflicting it now - these include range on a charge, cold weather performance, turnaround time on refueling/recharging, etc. From what I have seen in recent years, these issues have not improved enough for the technology to catch on with the motoring general public.

Add such additional factors as power supply upgrades to handle mass recharging and it still has a looooooong way to go.

I am very intrigued by the idea of overhead catenary wires for straight-electric big-rig trucks/lorries and perhaps intercity buses and believe that it worth seriously pursuing, though.

Mike


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## ChrisZwolle (May 7, 2006)

The range of new EVs is increasingly satisfactory. Many manage to get a 350 - 400 kilometer WLTP range, which is much more usuable than the first generation of EVs, with the exception of the Tesla Model S, the first generation is technically still superior to many new EVs. 

Charging speeds are also advancing faster than most people anticipated. There are much more powerful chargers on the market today than even 3 years ago, so those 10 > 80% fast charging sessions require only a short time if the EV is capable of charging at such speeds (350 kW for example). 

So the range and charging speed are increasingly satisfactory for both everyday use and longer trips. The one thing remaining is price. Even without taxes, EVs are much more expensive than heavily taxed petrol cars, for example the new electric Opel Corsa or Peugeot 208 are still almost twice as expensive as their fossil fuel counterparts.


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## Kanadzie (Jan 3, 2014)

^^ 400 km is still weak though - what happens when the car is at year 10, and it is -20*C outside, and its dark... and your distance is 800 km.



mgk920 said:


> I just have the sense that these rules are almost certainly going to be delayed, if not outright cancelled, as the reality of the technology being unable to keep up with those political demands sets in.
> 
> Mike


This already happened. Those with a certain memory will recall California's push to start having a certain percentage of new cars as electric starting in 1993 going to a large proportion or fully by like 1998 or something.
They ended up delaying and then abandoning the rules, but some car companies did come up with some electric cars that they started selling or leasing around 1997 (specifically, GM EV1, Honda EVPlus, Ford Ranger and Toyota RAV4 had some electric models... think there was also an odd looking Nissan station wagon...)

On the flip side, electric cars have a particularly huge advantage to gasoline, being that you can "refuel" at home. I really hate going to the gas station particularly when commuting to or from work... imagine trading that to a simple plug and unplug... on a long trip, the charging is terrible and a huge pain, but for normal commuting, this thing is great.

aha: https://www.nytimes.com/1995/12/26/us/california-is-backing-off-mandate-for-electric-car.html

Fuel cells... hahaha that takes me back  Now the batteries have gotten better enough that nobody gives a damn about fuel cells... but battery still isn't that good (but more so !)


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## 54°26′S 3°24′E (Oct 26, 2007)

Coming from a country with cold winters, long distances, and hilly terrain, but where the EV share of new car sales nevertheless was close to 50 % this first half year, and traditional petrol + diesel only accounted for about 30 % in June, this discussion was more interesting some years ago than now. A lot of the fears seen back then regarding e.g. lifetime of batteries have not really materialized as major issues. 

For most people, the convenience (and at least for Norway, low cost) of charging the vehicle at home far outweighs the perceived disadvantage of long-distance travel charging pit stops. A large majority of travels are local and regional, after all. In principle, Tesla has demonstrated that battery swap could be done faster than refilling of petrol (see below), but unfortunately, they did not find a good business model for privately owned vehicles and gave up on this. Due the relatively large value of the battery, swap is probably only feasible for fleet cars where the leasing company also owns the battery, or if the car is owned privately while the battery is owned by the swap station owner. The latter model is in fact still pursued in China (https://www.teslarati.com/nio-battery-swapping-station-power-swap/). In the mean time, there is a lot of both incremental and disruptive technological development addressing both battery capacity per mass and charging times.





Plug-in cars (electric and hybrids) accounted for 2.1 % of global car sales in 2018, up 72 % from 2017. While 2.1 % does not sound like much, it means still that a continuation of the current growth rate would need only 7-8 years before plug-in cars had a 100 % market share, i. e. well before 2030. Even if the growth currently in fact is accelerating, I assume there will be some market segments where combustion engines still will prevail for some years beyond that horizont, e.g. in areas with poor electric supply. However, that plug-in cars will be dominating in a few years in all developed markets, almost seems like a no-brainer to me. With the growing markets, economics of scale will ensure that prices also will drop significantly. An electric car is inherently a much simpler design with fewer moving parts than a vehicle with internal combustion drive line.


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## Kanadzie (Jan 3, 2014)

^^ surely Norway's heavy EV marketshare is related to the taxation differences though... ICE cars are very heavily taxed as I understand.

I think being cheaper due to simplicity isn't likely. The electric drivetrain is made of so much more expensive materials and necessarily so (e.g. motor copper and niobium, battery lithium, etc). A gasoline engine can easily be made of some grey iron and steel and gas tank of stamped steel or plastic, material costs are so low (granted - modern cars typically have much aluminium and more exotic materials in the engine today)


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## Stuu (Feb 7, 2007)

The Natural History Museum in London recently posted some figures about the conversion to electric cars. To convert to electric vehicles just in the UK it would take:

207,900 tonnes of cobalt - just under *twice the annual* global production
264,600 tonnes of lithium carbonate (LCE) - *three quarters the world's production*
at least 7,200 tonnes of neodymium and dysprosium - *nearly the entire world production of neodymium*
2,362,500 tonnes of copper - more than *half the world's production in 2018*

For reference, there are around 31m vehicles in the UK, about 3% of the world total.

If every vehicle were switched to a battery version, it would take every bit of cobalt produced for the next 66 years. And that's assuming none need replacing over that time.

Someone needs to invent a better battery!


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## 54°26′S 3°24′E (Oct 26, 2007)

Kanadzie said:


> ^^ surely Norway's heavy EV marketshare is related to the taxation differences though... ICE cars are very heavily taxed as I understand.


Of course this is the main driver in Norway's case. I just wanted to point out that the perceived technical issues pointed out does not stop people from buying or being satisfied with EVs. And even if the the market penetration in Norway is high, it accounts for a small share of the global market and growth of EVs.



Kanadzie said:


> I think being cheaper due to simplicity isn't likely. The electric drivetrain is made of so much more expensive materials and necessarily so (e.g. motor copper and niobium, battery lithium, etc). A gasoline engine can easily be made of some grey iron and steel and gas tank of stamped steel or plastic, material costs are so low (granted - modern cars typically have much aluminium and more exotic materials in the engine today)


Battery prices have plummeted over the last decades, and all prognoses indicates that they will continue to do so. Even so, the material share of a battery's overall cost is small, and for the overall car price almost insignificant. Just like for other car, the real value is in the development, production and distribution, not in the raw materials.











Stuu said:


> The Natural History Museum in London recently posted some figures about the conversion to electric cars. To convert to electric vehicles just in the UK it would take:
> 
> 207,900 tonnes of cobalt - just under *twice the annual* global production
> 264,600 tonnes of lithium carbonate (LCE) - *three quarters the world's production*
> ...


Of these materials, cobalt is an obvious bottleneck, as not only the production, but the acual identified global resources are limited, and mostly extracted in questionable ways from the Democratic Republic of Kongo. However, the use of cobalt in cathodes is not necessary, and alternatives exists (e.g. Nissan is not using cobalt in their batteries, from what I understand) and are being developed. In any case, recycling system for the batteries of EVs should be a high priority for the industry and governments.


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## ChrisZwolle (May 7, 2006)

One thing that I think is overlooked when looking at EV sales in Norway (and the Netherlands), is the very low new car sales per capita compared to other high-income countries. 

A large proportion of private owners have fallen out of the new car market due to high taxation, and opt for a second-hand car. The average age of cars across Europe is increasing. The average car age is now around 10 years: which means the average motorist drives a € 5000 car, not a € 50,000 one. 

Used cars are so much cheaper that no new EV can compete with it. I just bought a fairly luxury, 2 year old Hyundai i20 for € 13,000. An EV with a decent range still costs € 35,000 or more. It will prove much more difficult for EVs to enter the mainstream private market than it is to enter the company car market.


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## Coccodrillo (Sep 30, 2005)

I suppose there will not be a single type of fuel as there is now, in the future (we can consider petrol and diesel as two variants of the same thing). Long distance trucks might remain with diesel or partly switch to gas combustion engines (of different types), private cars might partly be hybrid or use batteries with night and en route stops for recharging, urban buses might make frequent short stops (especially at the end of their lines) so to have small batteries. And where trolleybuses are in use extension of existing lines is increasingly being done by trolleybuses which charge their batteries when under overhead lines or by bimodal buses (that can run electric with overhead line OR diesel).


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## sponge_bob (Aug 11, 2013)

Long Distance trucks will probably switch to electric if there is a standard battery pack, a *Europack* lets call it, and they pull into a truck stop along a motorway and a bloke with a forklift does the swap job in 5 minutes. 

These truckstops will drink as much lekky as a small town needless to say and will have to be colocated with existing 100kv standard HV lines to feed them. It seems that cars will all have different battery packs, mainly underneath, and that Pack swaps will not be feasible but they would be with HGVs if some standards were enforced. 

They will be allowed to run diesel in rural areas to charge those packs but will be forced to run in EV mode in populated areas where Particles are an issue. 

Eventually the power density of a Europack will increase within the same form factor and they can ditch the backup diesel engine thereafter. 

I feel that stage one of the fleet conversion will be the standardisation of the battery HGV Europack within the next 5 years.


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## Kanadzie (Jan 3, 2014)

^^ I wonder how they will handle the weight restrictions on HGV because of the need to carry the heavy battery...


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## sponge_bob (Aug 11, 2013)

Kanadzie said:


> ^^ I wonder how they will handle the weight restrictions on HGV because of the need to carry the heavy battery...


You will save quite some weight on the engine if it is a secondary one (for charging not for driving). As far as I know the universal EU HGV limit is 44 tons and 11 tons per axle. However countries are allowed heavier trucks if they want and some have 60 ton limits, not where I am though where the exceptions are only for 6 axle trailers and 46 ton aggregate weights. 

Tesla had kited out an EV HGV concept and I believe the following number is for a 300 mile/500km (5 hours of driving ...ish) unit. 

https://www.teslarati.com/how-much-tesla-semi-truck-battery-pack-weigh/



> we can do some simple math to estimate the Semi’s batteries would weigh *about 6,000 kg*. We aren’t sure about the new battery weights for the upcoming battery updates, but we can assume a 10-15 percent reduction from several factors (storage density, improvements in chemistry, packaging lightening) without being too aggressive or overly optimistic. Going with the fifteen percent reduction, that 6,000 kg drops to *5,100 kg.*


This was for a pure EV with no equipment for picking supply up save via a plug and only with an electric engine. If you add a diesel engine and some power conversion gear the combined weight of motors, engines, power electrics and batteries could approach 10 Tons out of 44 tons, initially anyway.


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