On Oct 16, 2014, at 9:49 AM, EVDL Administrator via EV <ev@lists.evdl.org> wrote:
> As long as "EVs are ...a poor purchasing decision ..." the > only way we'll get significant numbers of ordinary folks to buy them is to > give them (the people, I mean) cash or other monetary incentives. This is true for most personal car buyers, but the gap overall is narrowing and already favors electric in some very significant categories. First, unless I'm mistraken, the fastest-accelerating 0-60 production car on the market isn't the famous McLaren F1, but the Tesla S. That a luxury electric sedan beats a gasoline-powered supercar on the drag strip (even if not on the salt flats) is remarkable. For those for whom money is no object, electric vehicles are already going toe-to-toe with their gas-powered competitors. Next, those economies of scale already result in superior financial results for many fleet operators, especially for heavy vehicles. See the recent story about Chicago's adoption of electric garbage trucks; they're saving money by going electric. You can therefore expect adoption of electric municipal vehicles to start to skyrocket. Via motors is another example; if you buy their trucks and vans and run them 80% of the time electrically, you've essentially electrified 80% of your fleet even though 100% of them still have a gas tank. And that last point has some silent-but-deadly force multipliers working for it. If an electric garbage truck needs ten times as many batteries as a family sedan that weighs a tenth as much, then each truck is the same for the battery factory as ten cars. A fleet of an hundred such trucks is as big an order as a thousand car sales -- and the former is much easier to pull off than the latter. For the immediate future, personal electric vehicles will remain the province of enthusiasts and early adopters who don't care as much about the financial costs, but it won't be all <i>that</i> much longer before anybody who calculates vehicle expenses over a five-year term will unquestionably pick the electric model as the better investment. And not much longer after that, electric will be akin to an "upgrade" from a manual to an automatic transmission such that only the most extremely short-sighted (or those who prefer gasoline for other reasons) will avoid electric. Cheers, b& -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 801 bytes Desc: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail URL: <http://lists.evdl.org/private.cgi/ev-evdl.org/attachments/20141016/88cdc7c6/attachment.pgp> _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
