The US is somewhat lagging "the world" right now in personal electric vehicle adoption. There are more brands/models/sales in both the European and Asian markets than the US is currently seeing.
The Chinese market in particular is fascinating from an EV perspective. Particularly because it seems to indicate that non-personal vehicles (especially buses, delivery trucks, and semi-trucks) are either going to be not far behind in electrification or even possibly slightly ahead.
It is starting to look like in the US it will be the case that commercial vehicles may electrify faster than the personal vehicle market (at least partly because manufacturers aren't really selling EVs for personal auto sales in a tautological fallacy that they think they won't sell in the US). Amazon's big recent deal with Rivian, for instance, should put a lot of commercial EVs on the streets. UPS' similar older, quieter deals with multiple companies pushing them to hybrid trucks only already and an entire EV fleet supposedly in the next several years. Proterra seems to be making great headwind in the US bus market, as another example.
Faster if oil prices go up, certainly. The problem with estimating time is there are too many factors. We might only be "one big disruption" away from a surprisingly quick transition. We might just continue a gentle slope transition.
I think there are some interesting possible big disruptions on the horizon:
- Oil prices go up (as this article is about)
- EVs become the cheapest powertrain option for any new vehicle. VW's ID.3 is already cheaper than all comparable Golf models, and most of the other German manufacturers expect to hit that switchover (due to efficiencies of scale) for almost all their models no later than 2023. (Chinese manufacturers seem to have mostly hit the switchover point already. Most other Asian manufacturers aren't far behind. Traditional US manufacturers GM and Ford are idiots and lagging everyone else again.)
- Somewhat similar to above, a small disruption in the complex web of internal combustion engine supply chains could potentially domino to greatly increase new ICE vehicle costs, and even potentially have similarly drastic consequences to ICE vehicle repair/maintenance costs. Internal combustion engines (especially compared to EV motors) have a lot of little, very specialized parts. Even just one supplier pivoting could have fascinating consequences. (With perhaps the only counter-disruption being something like 3D printing hitting certain machining specifications that seem currently unlikely.)
The middle one is definitely happening. The article here suggests the first one is maybe closer than people expect. The third one is one I'm amusedly watching, and I think is going to be a quick accident after the middle one happens. If German manufacturers move to certain sales benchmarks, that definitely affect global suppliers that are Germany-based such as Bosch, as just one example of many, and GM/Ford certainly have plenty of Bosch pieces in their supply chains, whether they admit it or not.
> What about the issues with lithium and coltan supply for batteries ?
Lithium is in large supply (Atomic Number 3, right, third place on the Periodic Table), and is easily recyclable from current batteries.
Cobalt is a miniscule portion of current battery compositions. Most battery companies have been working to minimize or remove it. It should be recyclable, but it's never been economically feasible to recycle it from current battery compositions because a) it is such a minority component of current batteries, and b) Cobalt is cheap. (Cobalt is a "waste product" or by-product of Nickel mining today. The threat to Cobalt supply is that most Nickel mines today are in politically questionable regimes such as Columbia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. But Nickel mining is likely something that continues to happen regardless of politics.)
> What about the ~+33% increase required in electric power generation to replace oil in transportation ?
If every car on the road today switched to EV tomorrow, but made sure to charge only during the "bathtub" of off-peak (evening) hours, there's absolutely no increase in power generation needed. Our culture's day-time peak generation capability, which has to account for most of our industrial use, is more than sufficient so long as consumers are smart about when they charge.
(The difference between Peak demand during the day and off-peak evening hours really is huge. "Filling in the bathtub" that the off-peak hours create in the demand chart is considered something of a holy grail for decades in utility grid planning because it would mean more base load generation that doesn't have to shut down every night and can run more continuously/smoothly every day.)
Smart Grid solutions exist and are being planned where cars can even help solve demand problems by acting as sitting batteries (as owners allow them to) that utilities can "loan" power from a car during peak demands, and pay back with "interest" during off-peak (and potentially doing so at an incredibly granular level).
All of which is to say that there are already market solutions to the increased electricity consumption of EVs.
Peak rates might go up, perhaps, but the natural tendency of most EV owners is already to charge during off-peak (at home on the evenings), even without the extra incentives of big cost differentials between peak and off-peak utility rates. Most EVs today already have okay off-peak hours selection tools built-in, even without the detailed electricity price-sensitivity options that Smart Grids might eventually bring to the market. (But Smart Grids are certainly on utility road maps because there's a lot they could do with that extra demand sensitivity.)
I've yet to hear a worst case for EV electricity demand that would need 33% more capacity at Peak demand. That's an interesting and presumably unlikely scenario.
Yes, there's a lot of potential with basically using car batteries to smooth out the intermittency issues... I guess that this might be relatively easy (still, despairing about the slow pace of changes...)
Being at the 3rd place in the atomic table isn't a guarantee of availability - after all hydrogen is first, is 75% of the mass of the universe, and yet isn't directly available to us ! (at a low cost)
And recycling batteries won't help much when the goal is to massively increase production...
Battery production doesn't seem to be the bottleneck in EV production a lot of people seem to think it is. The major battery companies (LG Chem, Panasonic, et al) have all been ramping up to meet the demands they've been contractually asked to meet, and we generally haven't seen shortages or massive price spikes in either direction.
The only EV producer that's outright complained about battery availability is Tesla, and it's very easy to wonder how much of that was marketing spin to cover other production issues (and the accusation of the traditional car manufacturers that car production is hard and has huge startup hurdles), and maybe even PR/marketing spin to their own investors to explain insourcing battery production (building the "gigafactory") rather than partnering with an existing battery manufacturer.
Tesla probably has scaled faster than most other car companies, but yet it has also scaled much less comparably (to say Renault or VW just signing delivery or plant contracts in partnership with existing battery manufacturers rather than building their own factories from 100% "scratch").
I'd love to see a better analysis of the battery market right now. I'm betting the catch-22 that car manufacturers don't feel a lot of consumer demand for EVs has more on bottlenecking EV production than batteries in the current term.
The Chinese market in particular is fascinating from an EV perspective. Particularly because it seems to indicate that non-personal vehicles (especially buses, delivery trucks, and semi-trucks) are either going to be not far behind in electrification or even possibly slightly ahead.
It is starting to look like in the US it will be the case that commercial vehicles may electrify faster than the personal vehicle market (at least partly because manufacturers aren't really selling EVs for personal auto sales in a tautological fallacy that they think they won't sell in the US). Amazon's big recent deal with Rivian, for instance, should put a lot of commercial EVs on the streets. UPS' similar older, quieter deals with multiple companies pushing them to hybrid trucks only already and an entire EV fleet supposedly in the next several years. Proterra seems to be making great headwind in the US bus market, as another example.