> I would say that unless there is a serious used EV market and that the poorer people are able to afford an EV, there will forever be a resistance.
Agreed. And I didn't mean to imply, that there isn't a problem for "everyone gets electric". But that will fix itself with (probably) this year's new cars. So in 2-3 years there will be a fledgling 2nd hand market and in 10 it will be of similar volume as it is now (probably still a bit pricier, since there will be a non-car use for used car batteries)
> EVs are definitely not cheaper to construct, maintain or recycle end-of-life.
There I disagree. The EV price is (still) (mostly) the battery, which is _still_ coming down rapidly. I thought maintenance costs were already cheaper, but maybe not. And end-of-life is mostly a scale question, which will be fixed. Especially since we can reuse the batteries.
The same goes for energy cost and CO2 emissions. I think the EV construction numbers largely assume current (or even worst case) energy mixes, but yeah most of these comparison make at least one questionable assumption (like choosing low efficiency gas cars) and are therefore complicated. Still it's quite a fundamental property: EVs are more efficient and large combustion systems are more efficient. At least CO2-wise it will _always_ be more efficient to burn fuel in a large power plant and run an EV. And the electricity mix is significantly better than that^. Price-wise it's a more complicated story, but at least for Germany, we need to import the fuel anyways. So producing locally should work out better (both personally, where using your own solar is basically a tax break and system wide, where EVs provide a reasonably flexible dispatchable load, which has value)
I think the big question is the time scale here, but fundamentally: The biggest market in the world decided to go EV, that makes the position of any non-EV producer complicated to say the least. Everything downstream (second hand market, recycling, ...) hasn't had time to even develop yet.
^ Assuming we are not tearing down anything already installed..
Agreed. And I didn't mean to imply, that there isn't a problem for "everyone gets electric". But that will fix itself with (probably) this year's new cars. So in 2-3 years there will be a fledgling 2nd hand market and in 10 it will be of similar volume as it is now (probably still a bit pricier, since there will be a non-car use for used car batteries)
> EVs are definitely not cheaper to construct, maintain or recycle end-of-life.
There I disagree. The EV price is (still) (mostly) the battery, which is _still_ coming down rapidly. I thought maintenance costs were already cheaper, but maybe not. And end-of-life is mostly a scale question, which will be fixed. Especially since we can reuse the batteries.
The same goes for energy cost and CO2 emissions. I think the EV construction numbers largely assume current (or even worst case) energy mixes, but yeah most of these comparison make at least one questionable assumption (like choosing low efficiency gas cars) and are therefore complicated. Still it's quite a fundamental property: EVs are more efficient and large combustion systems are more efficient. At least CO2-wise it will _always_ be more efficient to burn fuel in a large power plant and run an EV. And the electricity mix is significantly better than that^. Price-wise it's a more complicated story, but at least for Germany, we need to import the fuel anyways. So producing locally should work out better (both personally, where using your own solar is basically a tax break and system wide, where EVs provide a reasonably flexible dispatchable load, which has value)
I think the big question is the time scale here, but fundamentally: The biggest market in the world decided to go EV, that makes the position of any non-EV producer complicated to say the least. Everything downstream (second hand market, recycling, ...) hasn't had time to even develop yet.
^ Assuming we are not tearing down anything already installed..