Has Tesla signed the death warrant for the ICE?

It was signed long before Elon arrived,he has just given it a huge shove and good on him.

Also spotted this,



ICE will still be around for a long time though,there are many many problems to overcome with mass EV`s.

Most of the EV movement is still pushbike based,best power to weight ratio`s and a good healthy cottage industry,
have a peep here for some super creations and innovation,

www.electricbike.com/

Tesla are doubling the number of supercharger points over the next year. Yo can also charge it over night at home. Unless you do more than 200 miles in a day on a regular basis I don't see why you wouldn't buy one if you were in the market for a new car in that price bracket.

don't forget that when the motor isn't turning, it doesn't use any electricity - so the only realistic way they would run out of juice in a traffic jam is if your stereo and climate control sapped all the power

Ok to put a few points across from the point of view of an Electrical Engineer. My research is into Supergrids (connecting all of Europe up with DC) and a bit of distribution network stuff (The bits that connect your house to the backbone of the National grid) with an eye towards electric vehicles. I'm not directly researching the impact of EVs on grids, but I am on the outskirts of that and hear a lot about it.

If everyone switched to EVs today and used them in the least intelligent way possible we'd be Canoeed. The peak loading at 6pm when everyone gets home from work and puts the cars on charge would be crazy high and would be above present grid capabilities. However, there are two key reasons this isn't the massive problem its often made out to be: 1. Where the hell are we all suddenly getting these cars from? Tesla don't reckon to build more than 500k a year and they certainly aren't all coming to the UK, 2. we don't expect the charging techniques to remain dumb. By the second point I mean that there already simple mechanisms to avoid rush charging of all EVs when people get home and there is a lot of research into making them even more intelligent. You don't need your car until tomorrow? Set it to charge overnight using cheap electric, of which we have plenty. Worried you might have to pop out this evening and want the car fully charged just in case, don't set it to charge overnight, set it to charge now, expect a cost penalty for this feature. Even better than this is the possibility to use EVs as grid storage: Know you aren't going over 100 miles a day, allow the grid to use the rest of your battery as grid storage and get paid for the feature. This one has some challenges on battery life and battery conditioning, I am not sure how much this will affect the life of a Lithium battery but people need to realise that modern batteries are not like the NiCD or NiMH rechargables of old and they wont lose all their capacity in 5 charge cycles. That's not to say there isn't a capacity penalty though ...

As to the source of energy argument, it is always more efficient to generate your electricity in a large plant than at each individual car, regardless of whether that's a coal, gas or whatever plant. Ideally we need to move away from fossils as our source of energy and this is something we are slowly doing. Moving to nuclear is one part of the job but we seem to be struggling with that. Moving to renewables is even better and this is something we are doing even slower for a couple of reasons: cost and intermittency. The cost of energy is going to rise, it has to rise. Just because coal is a cheap way to produce electricity does not mean it is a good one, we need as a society to realise that there are costs to producing energy from fossil fuels and they are presently environmental rather than fiscal and that is a bad bad thing. The intermittency of renewables can be solved, either by using our new EVs as batteries, or by sharing our energy production across a wide area (say, the whole of Europe using a supergrid for example ...).

Moving out of my tiny sphere of expertise. Battery materials: There is bloody tons of lithium, its just a case of mining enough of it and paying for the refining. Not a trivial task but it can be overcome. Battery technology is coming along but how far it has to go is yet to be seen. Charging is an industry in a massive state of change. More charging points will come as they are required, but I doubt they'll stay free. Faster charging is coming but there is a limit to how fast charging can be. Wireless charging is becoming more technically viable but I really have my doubts anyone will ever pull up large sections of motorway to enable charging on the go. Carparks and other places where cars stop for a bit however, I can see those becoming wireless allowing you to top up when you are out and about. Fundamentally we are going to have to change our car use habits, as with the cost of energy, we need to realise that we've had it easy up until now and that has a cost, again its an environmental one and again we need to change our ways. In the case of car use, it shouldn't need to be any more expensive than petrol, but perhaps we'll need to put some more thought and planning into our trips. It wont be all that hard.

Will EVs be the end of ICE cars? In our lifetimes I expect we'll see a massive uptake of EVs but I doubt they'll even reach 100% of sales, let alone 100% of active vehicles. ICE cars will go the way of Vinyl and become something for enthusiasts which is no bad thing. Eventually ICEs will probably be ruled out by law, but I would not expect to see that in my life! When we look back on it though, I wouldn't be surprised if the Tesla 3 is seen as the turning point.

So I accidentally wrote an essay. TL:DR we wont change to EVs overnight and we will fix all of the problems gradually over time.

Thanks Clem
Good read, intelligently written.