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Originally Posted by Onlydo2days
If you have a centralized fleet, then powering EVs is much more cost effective for the fleet than using gasoline.
Agreed
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The SDC taxi's putting 50k miles a year on them will reap tons of savings from this. With battery storage/solar, the fleets could be powered with renewables.
Renewables are a clown show for reliability. Not to mention absurdly expensive. In desert environments (Cali or Nevada) it might pay off.
You don't need to invoke them. Electricity is cheaper than fuel. But electricity costs will be rising (thanks to renewable madness) and fuel costs will be dropping, particularly if EVs take hold. You saw what a 1% oversupply did to oil prices this year; what do you think 5% of cars becoming EVs will do to oil prices? The lower limit for the bulk of oil, extraction costs, is probably below $10 per barrel for the huge fields.
The other major problem is the power grid. Put simply, transportation uses almost as much energy as we use in electricity:
The power grid simply could not handle the load of such a shift from petroleum as a source of energy, to coal and nuclear. Massive build outs would be required of nuclear and coal. Renewables are unreliable and incredibly expensive, so they're not going to fill the gap. A couple of cloudy/snowy days in a row in the US, and your entire city grinds to a halt as all EVs are stranded, blacking out the power grid as well as all the baseload can't handle the demand of plugged in cars. Electric cars cannot be viably powered by renewables with current or 10+ year technology. Sans renewables, large scale electric cars aren't viable without hundreds of billions in (very unlikely) infrastructure spending. It's even more unlikely given the deeply entrenched political dickheadery (created by the green lobby) around building more coal or nuclear power stations, which is the only way you can scale to 5%, let alone 25%, let alone 100%, EVs.
This is one of the many reasons why Toyota thinks that EVs simply have no future on a large scale in the next 15-20 years, and that hydrogen fuel cells are the only viable future. You may think they are nuts (it certainly seems like it on the surface when you see TSLA pumping out perfectly good EVs without any of the fuel cell hassles), but when you actually get into the economics and logistics of more-than-1% EVs, you see why a lot smart experienced people are betting on such a weird and complex and energy inefficient technology as hydrogen fuel cells, rather than the obvious and simple choice of EVs.
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So obviously paying 30k for a nice SDC EV is a much better deal than paying 30k for an SDC ICE when your saving 30-50k in fuel costs over the life of the car.
The savings are fictional. On the other side, you have rare earth demand pushing up prices, and if the environmental damage/energy cost ever gets priced in, they'll be even more expensive.
A cheaper outlook for EVs simply can't happen once you get over 2%-5% EVs. ICEs will be cheaper for a very long time.
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Something like the Leaf or Bolt can sell for 25-30. That is on par with a new Corolla for 18k.
Well, no. Not without subsidies. And you're making out like a $15k is the same as a $30k car. It is for wealthier people, but the mainstream is extremely price sensitive.