I know most of you have never even driven an electric car before buying one. So you might find the prediction that ‘electric vehicles will be commonplace sooner than you think’ strange. But please be brave and read till the end.
We are going through a great revolution in the automotive industry. This is the first time since the first production line of cars by Henry Ford in 1913.
This revolution may become a reality sooner than you think.
Many experts in the industry believe that we are now past the stage where we can call electric vehicles ‘the thing of the future’ as their sales will soon overtake conventional petrol and diesel vehicles.
You may not agree with it, but the world’s largest car companies have expressed the same views.
Jaguar plans to sell only electric vehicles by 2025 and Volvo by 2030. British sports car company Lotus has said that it will sell only electric car models from 2028.
And it’s not just limited to expensive brands.
General Motors has said it will sell only electric vehicles by 2035. According to Ford, they will have only electric vehicles to sell in Europe by 2030, while 70 percent of Volkswagen’s sales will be based on EVs by 2030.
This is not a storm in a teacup or greenwashing (the false impression of a company pretending to be environmentally friendly).
Yes, many governments around the world are setting targets to ban petrol and diesel vehicles, which has fueled this revolution.
The demise of the internal combustion engine (internal combustion engine or biofuel engine) is inevitable and has only been possible through a technological revolution. In modern times, technology revolution comes very fast.
The electrical energy revolution
Take a look on the internet.
From my perspective, the EV market is where the Internet was in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
At that time everyone was talking about the Internet, that now through computers we will be able to talk to each other.
Jeff Bezos founded Amazon. Google replaced Altavista, AskJava and Yahoo. Some of these companies were sold for huge sums.
For someone who stayed away from a computer, the discussion was interesting but boring. How useful will it be to connect to a computer? So we have mobile phones!
But the Internet did not take over the world in a straight line like any other new and successful technology. It went through a process of constant evolution and gave us time to plan for the future.
Internet production was explosive and disruptive to existing systems. It crushed existing businesses and changed our entire way of life. On a graph, this product looks like the English letter S, so technologists call it the S curve.
A time when not many people were interested in the Internet
There are many fluctuations in the ‘S’ shape of production.
It has slow renewal rate initially. At first it only arouses the interest of someone who is obsessed with the subject. Electric cars occur at the end of this curve.
The graph of the Internet begins on October 29, 1969 at 10:30 PM. It was at this time that the University of California at Los Angeles connected with Stanford University hundreds of miles away.
Researchers during this time first wrote L, then O and finally G. By the time he typed ‘login’, the system sat down. After such a start, how can a common man be interested in it?
A decade later, there were only a few hundred computers on the network, but the pace of change was accelerating.
In the 1990s, more people became fascinated with technology and started buying their own personal computers.
As the market grew, prices fell and efficiency grew exponentially. This encouraged more people to come online before it was too late.
After that, S production only went up. In 1995, 1.6 million people came online, but in 2001, this number was 51.3 million people.
Now more than three billion people are users of the Internet. Then the speed of its production stops at one place. This is a time when anyone who wanted to come online got it.
‘You disgraced us by buying an electric car’
We have seen such lightning-fast production in smartphones, photography and even the antibiotics industry. In the beginning, the speed of this production is quite low.
The same thing happened with the combustion engine at the beginning of the new century. Steam engines and printing presses also went through the same situation. The same future is being predicted for electric vehicles.
In fact, they are more popular than the early internet.
In the 1830s, Scottish citizen Robert Anderson built the first crude electric car. But it has only been possible in the last few years that technology has been invented that is now costing more than conventional vehicles.
Quentin Wilson, presenter of the automobile industry show Top Gear and used car dealer, knows this. He has been driving electric vehicles for the past decade.
He took a test drive of General Motors’ unpopular EV1 20 years ago. It cost the company a billion dollars to build and was considered useless. Only 1,000 such vehicles were built, which were later scrapped.
The EV One car’s range was disappointing. After charging, the average driver would only be able to drive it for a distance of 50 miles. But Wilson was tired of it. “I remember thinking this is the future,” he said.
A decade later, when he showed fellow Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson his first electric car, the Strion C-Zero, he was outraged.
‘It was like I had done something really bad. He said you have disgraced us all. get out of here!’
Now they recall the car saying you couldn’t run the heater because it would have reduced the range even further.
But now things have changed a lot. Wilson says the Tesla Model 3 has no range issues. It can go nearly 300 miles on a single charge and accelerate from zero to 60 in 3.1 seconds.
‘It’s very quiet, airy, beautiful. It is fun to drive. All I will tell you is that I never want to go back.’
The computers that control these vehicles, their charging systems and vehicle designs have improved.
But Wilson points out that a large part of the change has come from better battery performance. It is the beating heart of these vehicles.
And then the most surprising change is their falling prices.
A decade ago, a kilowatt-hour of energy in a battery cost $1,000, says Madeline Tyson of RMI, a US-based green energy research organization. Now this amount has fallen to 100 dollars.
Now it has come to the point that they are starting to cost less than internal combustion engine vehicles.
According to Tyson, if you factor in fuel and service costs, EVs are cheaper than gasoline and diesel vehicles. Because they don’t require as much fuel and service.
At the same time, energy density — how much energy you can pack into a battery — is also increasing. Now these batteries have also become durable.
Last year, Chinese company CATL unveiled the world’s first battery capable of driving a vehicle for 1 million miles.
Ride-hailing technology companies Uber and Lyft are leading the race because more savings are possible with vehicles that can travel longer distances for less money.
However, according to Tyson, after further reduction in prices, ordinary consumers will also be able to buy them.
How fast will this change come?
The answer is very fast.
Like the Internet in the 1990s, the electric vehicle market is gaining momentum.
In 2020, their global sales increased by 43% to 3.2 million. This was possible despite a five-fold drop in vehicle sales during the global Covid-19 pandemic.
It is only five percent of the total vehicle sales but we are moving towards S-shaped production.
According to a recent forecast by investment bank UBS, electric cars will account for 20 percent of all new vehicle sales globally by 2025.
Accordingly, by the year 2030, their number will be 40 percent and in the year 2040, apparently all new vehicles sold will be electric.
This is due to a new phase that industry experts call the ‘learning curve’.
By making more of something we can make it better and cheaper. That is why now the prices of computers, kitchen appliances and petrol or diesel vehicles have been made affordable.
That’s why the price of batteries and with it the price of electric vehicles is decreasing.
“We’re at a point where we can actually see this change,” says Rams Naam, an energy and environment expert at Singularity University in California.
He says that as soon as the price of the electric car hits the internal combustion engine, it will be a ‘game changer’ and things will start to change immediately.
Tesla owner Elon Musk also agrees with these views.
Last month, he told his company’s investors that the Model 3 had become the best-selling sedan worldwide. He predicted that Tesla’s new and affordable Model Y could become the world’s best-selling car.
Musk told the meeting that ‘there has been a big change in the way consumers think about electric vehicles. And we are seeing the highest demand ever.’
But before electric vehicles replace conventional petrol and diesel vehicles, much more needs to be done.
Most importantly, it should be easy for everyone to charge their vehicles at an affordable cost, regardless of whether they have a charging facility at home.
It will require a lot of work and investment. But it can happen. It is as if a network of petrol stations was established for fuel-driven vehicles a few decades ago.
But if you still doubt it, I would suggest you to drive an electric car yourself.
Many major companies have now introduced their electric vehicles. So like Quentin Wilson you can test drive anyone. This will let you know whether you want to be a part of this automotive revolution or not.