Battery Electric plug in (BEV), sales for Tesla in 2021.

[cromwell]

In 1900, almost all city and short haul transport was by foot, by cycle or horse and carriage. By 1910 it was almost entirely automobile, there was an incredibly massive change.

Indeed. And in the UK at least politicians are trying to return us to the halcyon days of 1900, minus the horse.
New Highway Code guidance comes in on the 29th of Jan that prioritises pedestrians and pushbikes. Cars have to give way to pushbikes at roundabouts etc.

Whilst I have my doubts about 2 years from now, I do believe 2030 will see the clear and present demise of the mass market fossil fuelled vehicles and the rise of the cheap second hand EV with good viable years left in the battery.

Well that would be nice. Because atm anyone can go out and buy a £5,000 car with years of life left in it. In at least the early days of the electric revolution you can forget that.

Yes our world is changing. Whether for better or worse, we won't know until we get there. But bearing in mind the way the ordinary person has been treated during the pandemic it is my opinion that authoritarianism is on the rise. One Tory minister has described owning a car as "outdated 20th century thinking", so make of that what you will.

What I make of it is that Joe Soap will be expected to get around on his pushbike of the proletariat or his electric scooter (oops, you just hit a pot hole and got thrown off) or on non-existent public transport.

Do we have the calibre of politician that we need to oversee this change to the brave new world?

[Suff]

The politicians can burble all they want. This is now a business thing. The push and impetus was given, subsidies still exist, but only for the very cheapest EV models.

If you think that of the 2.6m cars and vans sold in the UK each year, 1.3m of them are corporate. Now whilst the average joe bloggs tries to avoid expensive maintenance of their vehicles, businesses tend to do dealer maintenance or have their own shops to do that. They pass it off as a cost and take it out of taxes. But, still, it lowers income.

Now an EV doesn't need oil changes, air filter changes, fuel filter changes, an EV doesn't burn fuel and can be charged, at the company premises, on company cost electriciy. Decent EV's have regenerative braking which means brake pads can easily last 100,000 miles or more. Even better, the company can charge their vehicles at up to 200mpge (miles per gallon equivalent), at corporate costs, then sell charging capability to their staff which is more than they are paying, covering some of the costs to their fleet.

The technology being ramped into EV's include active traffic monitoring, crash avoidance systems, threat warnings and even the ability to bring the vehicle to a stop at the side of the road if the driver falls asleep. None of this is a self driving suite, just a spin off which bleeds down into the normal vehicle.

So now you have a vehicle which requires minimal maintenance, is far safer, costs "significantly" less to fuel and also has a much higher resale price after 3 years because the vehicles themselves have a life expectancy up to 20 years depending on mileage and battery usage patterns.

3 years after sufficient supply is available for Corporate vehicles, you are going to see 0.5m EV's a year sitting on forecourts on sale at reasonable prices. Rising to 1m in the next 2 years. 5 years after that and your FF vehicle is going to be an expensive anachronism.

I see 2022 as a year with sufficient supply available for corporate vehicles. That means 2025 with up to 0.5m electric vehicles on the forecourt and 2030. Well. End game.

No politicians required. This is how the world changes.

As for owning a car becoming an anachronism? It is based on the premise that self driving vehicles will remove much of the need for the daily grind of vehicles. It is usually promoted by people who live in large cities with huge integrated transport environments where driving your own vehicle is a pain. No they don't live in the real world, but it is valid for their lives and a good third of people who live in the UK.

I would suspect that easy access to a self driving vehicle could easily kill the second car market.

Before you tell me that self driving vehicles are 20 years away, you need to go delve into the world of AI and creating an aware computer and then training that awareness to drive. It is driving the ultra compute power world to warp speed. Nvidia and Tesla have both realised that teaching an AI 17 years of human awareness, then adding on the ability to drive, requires levels of compute power never seen before. Nvidia is taking their traditional approach with massively parallel graphics processors. Tesla is creating a "training tile" with a grid of 25 ultra fast AI processors. I know you'll understand this one as you understand hardware. Here is the Cleantechnica rundown on it. (still one to go).

Moving away from raw compute performance, Dojo and its its jaw-dropping engineering puts all supercomputers to shame in almost every other way imaginable. To logically explain this, we need to start at the beginning, the small scale.

That article is one of a 4 part examination of the Tesla Dojo AI training computer. It was heralded as a 1.1 exaflop computer but they used 16/8bit instead of the industry standard 32bit. Still it makes the #6 most powerful computer in the world. But the next few articles explain why, in terms of AI training, it beats the rest into the dust.

This it the power you need to train an AI. Also, interestingly, I would not put it past Tesla to mine bitcoins once the AI is trained.....

Care to bet they can't do it? Because the amount of money and compute power being thrown at this is going to turn our transport lives upside down, not doubt about that.

[cromwell]

No politicians required. This is how the world changes.

But in order to make that change we have to have a sufficient supply of electricity. Which means nuclear for reliability.
Are we going to have that in a timely manner? (Genuine question, I don't know). The decision to go ahead with nuclear is down to politicians, not businessmen.

the amount of money and compute power being thrown at this is going to turn our transport lives upside down, not doubt about that.

no argument there.

[Suff]

I think supply follows demand. The government has been trying to stoke demand and pushing for charging points and infrastructure.

Points to remember.

EV uses less than half the energy that a ff vehicle burns. So electricity draw will be far less. Some estimates are less than 20% of current grid capacity.
Whilst you fill up a ff car on the way to work, on the way home or at the weekends, an EV can be plugged in and set to charge at a low point of the evening. Yes, I know, there will be significant numbers which do not have home access charge points. But the majority will. Also charge points will come to where vehicles are as well as vehicles coming to charge points. Night time power draw is around 33% of grid capacity or less. +20% means power draw at around 53% of grid capacity for night time charging
EV's with current "average" capacity packs will require charging once per week on the average 20 mile per day commute. That is something like a 2 hour 20 minutes charge a Week on a 20kw charger or 20 minutes a Day.

This is for the fairly common 170 - 200 mile range becoming the standard for current mass market EV vehicles. This is the range being sold by VW for their ID.3 which has an OTR of £30,000. Not "cheap" by any means, but when you consider a VW Golf is £24k and you are saving around £350 a year on fuel (minimum), just for the daily commute. For Mrs S, who was doing 30,000 a year, that is nearer £1,500 a year savings. Factor in zero servicing and that snowballs.

When EV's start shipping at less than the price of a Golf, expect markets to change. Demand will drive supply. Just as it did with petrol for cars in the second decade of the 20th century.

It might be worth having a look atvehicle interconnectivity plans when understanding the future of EV's. V2G, V2X etc. This changes the whole balance of the energy mix in the country and also will drive different sizes of vehicle batteries. It is also going to create a whole new energy market in which people can make money and mitigate the cost of driving their vehicles by pushing their vehicle energy into the grid when it is needed and suck it out when they need it or when it is cheap to do so (renewable oversupply). Also this link. I've spoken to Jim on forums, on and off, for a decade now.

This is not a simple "build a new fuel station" situation. It is a very complex and integrated situation where people with roof space will, literally, be able to fuel their vehicles from their own solar and then sell it to the grid when power is needed.

Today vehicle fuel is a 1 way thing. They refine it and sell it to you, you burn it. When we go electric, they sell you a reservoir of energy and you can choose what to do with it. Drive it, sell it, store it, use it at home. The price you pay may depend on when you charge it and the price you get may depend on when you sell it.

Have a read. The energy world of the last 100 years is not going to be the same in 10 years time. Mass EV uptake is one of the factors in this transition.

[Suff]

For those who are interested, there is a video on youtube where a Tesla model 3 owner talks about his 100,000 miles with his Model3. There is an article about it on Tesmanian. One key thing covered was that after nearly 4 years and 100,000 miles, the battery had lost 2.2% of range.

This is a big thing for people to understand. OK he does a lot of miles, so his charging pattern will be good, not like other driving patterns. Charging behaviour is really important for range loss as it comes down to charge cycles. These cells only have 500-1,500 full charge cycles depending on what you do to them. Dropping constantly to 2% and charging to 50% then dropping again will drive 500 cycles. Dropping to 60% and charging to 90% will see the full 1,500 cycles but that is only a partial charge cycle and could be good for 25,000 of them or more. 2% to 50% is a Full charge cycle. Doesn't make sense? It doesn't seem logical but if you understand Lithium Ion chemistry it makes sense.

This is one of the first long term video's I have seen about the Model 3. Which only came out in volume in 2018. The article also talks about the German owned Model S which is close to 1 million miles. That had to have a battery change and 3 motors. But, interestingly, not a transmission. That being said, 1m miles is 10 car warranty lifetimes. One battery and 3 motors for 10 lifetimes? Seems not too bad for a 2014 vehicle which has seen extensive upgrade work since then.

The direct link to the video is here.

https://youtu.be/Sveg7IyGzQI

[cromwell]

I am seeing more Tesla 3's around.
Are they all white?
Not the best looking car ever but I appreciate that's not the point of them.

[Suff]

I am seeing more Tesla 3's around.
Are they all white?
Not the best looking car ever but I appreciate that's not the point of them.

Originally the default colour was Black. Now it is white. Another colour costs more money.... As most of these vehicles are company vehicles, I would not expect any extra expense on colour.

You will probably see more Model Y soon. They started coming to the UK this month, Europe has had them for nearly 6 months now. They come in from China and the Shanghai factory has nearly twice the capacity to produce Model Y than it does Model 3. Although the Model 3 comes from both the US and China right now.

The numbers will go up dramatically over the next 18 months. Tesla produced 500,000 vehicles world wide in 2020. Yet in December 2021 the run rate for Shanghai was 850,000 per year. Berlin remains bogged down in environmental regulations (BS created to stop anyone building any businesses in any area not already concreted over). If they get a single car sold before end March I'll order them a halo.

I expect quite a few Model Y's may come from Texas before Berlin is allowed to ramp up. Have a look at the factory, it is nearly a mile long and quarter of a mile wide. Specced for 2.5m vehicles a year. That was yesterday, day 565. When this goes into production, things are going to change in terms of volume.

No wonder BMW is spouting dire portents about how going EV now is going to damage the climate. Nope, it's going to eviscerate BMW and a few others. I think they finally ran the numbers. Tesla has stated they will grow, on average, 50%, between 2020 and 2030.

This is what it looks like.

2020 500,000 (Greater than JLR)
2021 750,000 (Actual 936,172)
2022 1,125,000 (Fremont is currently 600k capacity, Shanghai 850k + Berlin +Texas although low numbers initially)
2023 1,687,500 (Greater than Mazda)
2024 2,531,250 (Greater than BMW)
2025 3,796,875
2026 5,695,313 (Greater than Ford)
2027 8,542,969 (Greater than GM)
2028 12,814,453 (Largest vehicle manufacturer in the world)
2029 19,221,680 (dominating)
2030 28,832,520 (Godlike)

BTW they intend to top out at 20m, not 29m.

If you were the CEO of BMW what would you be saying? Because their growth plan is? Isn't!