[redpoint5]

Originally Posted by ldjessee00

Hello Redpoint5,

Your an EV fan? I would not have known that from your comments on this thread.

I've commented in many threads and I take the stance that it's best to be most critical of the things you care about.

I think the better analogy is that electricity and petroleum are the equivalents with the battery pack is the fuel tank.

That's precisely what I said. "a battery is the equivalent of a fuel tank".

You linked to an article that has missing data in its chart. Also, a trend is more than month to month sales fluctuations. You also show a chart that shows that BEV sales numbers will increase.

The main data that is missing is the Prius Prime, which is not a "pure" EV. Those other cars that sell 30 per month didn't just happen to crank out 20,000 one month, so they can be ignored. The 10% less EV sales takes into account the missing data. It would be slightly worse if not.

Well, we will see in 2 to 3 years if there is some introduction into the market of new battery technologies. We will also see if there is an increase in BEV sales.

Our disagreements aren't on whether or not EV sales will increase, or if technology will improve; it's in the rate of those things advancing. We'll likely have another year of stagnant or perhaps down EV sales, then I expect them to slowly start picking up again.

If EVs weren't selling like hotcakes with a $7,500 advantage over conventional vehicles, then they have a lot of ground to make up once those subsidies are over. As I've pointed out in other threads, what do you think would happen if the RAV4 had a $7,500 tax advantage over all other vehicles? We'd see 90% of sales going to the RAV4, and yet even that advantage isn't enough to drive an EV sales explosion.

Airplanes cost more to fly, in both real and unpaid for costs, than driving or train, yet people take airplanes more often than trains... If it was just cost, trains would win everytime.

Gonna need you to show your work again. The first check I did for a theoretical trip from Portland to Vegas on Feb 12th showed the lowest fare on a train is $137 and will take 30 hours. Spirit airlines is $33 for the 2hr flight. If you don't like Spirit you can fly Alaska for $69.

Most trips I check train vs flying, because I've never been on a train in the US. Every time it's both more expensive and takes much longer. I wouldn't even mind about it taking so long if I could sleep and wake up at my destination, but taking over a day to get to Vegas is silly. I can do the drive in less time.

Maybe if the train hovered the trip could be cut down to 10 hours and the ticket price would be $1,000 or something.

As an aside, commercial jets can get 100 passenger miles per gallon of fuel. This source puts the most efficient inner-city rail at nearly equal to commercial flight, and all other rail at less efficient:

https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10311

Besides all that, most mass transit will die on the vine once autonomous vehicles become commonplace. We shouldn't be expanding an infrastructure that already struggles to be useful, or pollutes more (such as city busses), we should be preparing for autonomous EVs.

Think of all the money spent to build airports, to expand airports, then all the money the government spends to run air traffic control (a cost the airlines mostly do not have to pay for). The system is rigged to support airlines and air travel here in the US. In other countries, not as much. Oh look, they have better train systems.

Airports are mostly funded by consumers, which is why you see a significant portion of the cost being accounted for as airport fees. Talk about rigged systems, trains are subsidized perhaps at the largest proportion than any other mode of transport. Maybe space flight is the only more heavily subsidized form of transportation... or the school bus system.

US Federal Highway system is not required, it was only seen as needed by the military, to help move forces around quickly inside our country. The country actually was successful without them. All roads were maintained by states, counties, townships, or cities before that and the majority of roads still are.

The fact that the US got by with poor/no roads 80 years ago isn't an indication that we can shift road infrastructure funds to floating trains now.

Scandinavian countries have a tiny population density, yet trains are still successful there... So population density is not needed nor a requirement for trains to be successful.

I'd like to be wrong on this, so here's your opportunity to show me how trains in Scandinavian countries have become a dominant mode of transportation in a free market. We've already established that EVs are only dominant there due to massive market manipulation.

quote]
What it takes to make a rail system successful, like our highway system, is continuous investment to maintain and improve the system over time.[/quote]

What it takes to make a rail system successful, like our highway system, is continuous investment to maintain and improve the system over time profitability.

For EV sales to outnumber ICE vehicles in the US, I think that will take several manufacturers producing EVs in mass. That will take time, and given the automotive industry, I would guess 10 years.

That's the significant metric to me; the point in time that EV sales account for 50% or more of vehicle sales. 10 years is 2 generations in the automotive world. No estimates I'm seeing project 50% sales in 10 years, though I'd be happy if that came true. Most project a 2045 timeframe. I optimistically throw out a guess of 2040.

Stories like this, from a small town in Indiana, is why I think we are further along and closer than you to EV dominance by any metric.

I hope you're right.

In 2008 I bought an SSD drive for my grandpa's PC, and it was such a game changer that I declared in 2 years, half of all consumer drive sales would be SSD. 12 years later, we're just now hitting that point. My uneducated guess was off by a factor of 6.

It's easy to see the value of a great new technology, but it takes time for the market to shift.