Sunday, November 26th, 2017
Stephan: Donald Trump and his band of carbon zombies to the contrary, the world is moving very quickly to electric vehicles, from scooters to semis. By 2040, most of Europe as well as China has committed to an all EV policy. That's just 22 years. I don't know if they will make it, but I do know we will be far past the tipping point, and that it will produce millions of jobs and hundreds of billions of dollars of business. It's not clear what place America will have in this trend.
Electric vehicles will soon be superior to gasoline-powered vehicles in every single respect — with longer range and possibly even faster fueling. That’s the key takeaway from the latest product announcements by Tesla’s Elon Musk and other car companies.
Major media coverage in recent days has focused on Musk’s unveiling of a sleek new electric truck with a 500-mile range. But the news of the last week also includes Musk rolling out the Tesla “Roadster” with a 620-mile range “to give a hard-core smackdown to gasoline cars. You’ll be able to drive from Los Angeles to San Francisco and back” without recharging.
A 500 to 600 mile range–which is over double the range of most current electric cars–means you could do almost any kind of typical driving and then recharge overnight, either at home, or a hotel, or a shopping mall–or even a rest-station during dinner, since Tesla and other super-chargers can already do a major recharge in a half hour.
To much less fanfare, however, Fisker Inc. (formerly Fisker Automotive) filed patents last week on a solid-state battery […]
Cool stuff. Technological progress but as usual it is not fast enough…panacea is always 3 to 5 years away. Hope for the best, cannot wait for IC engines to be gone.