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Your Next Car Will Plug-in. the One After That May Not Exist...

posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday July 26 2017, @05:55AM   Printer-friendly
from the I'm-sorry-Dave,-I-can't-do-that dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

[...] some experts believe as much as 95% of passenger miles could be electric, autonomous by 2030, thanks to some basic economics. Because electric vehicles cost a whole lot less to drive and maintain—but more to buy—and because autonomous vehicles greatly reduce the cost of commercial driving, a combination of the two technologies will make autonomous Transportation as a Service exponentially more cost competitive than either owning a car, or hiring a car and driver. It's also exponentially more profitable for car companies, who have long feared the loss of maintenance and service profits associated with a transition to electric cars.

This question will come up more frequently as self-driving technology advances. Will perfection of that technology make a difference, though, in the face of social behaviors that have been deeply ingrained over the past century?

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  • (Score: 2) by zocalo on Wednesday July 26 2017, @11:49PM

    by zocalo (302) on Wednesday July 26 2017, @11:49PM (#544925)
    To clarify, I didn't say I was driving 500-600 miles a day, just that was the range of my car on a full tank. My particular (rather niche) corner case is actually my hobby/secondary career - photography - which will often entail driving a couple of hours before dawn to the middle of nowhere, doing a sunrise shoot, then puttering around the locale with my camera during the day waiting for sunset before driving home again, or a bit of wild camping somewhere if I'm doing a multi-day trip. With an ICE I can avoid the whole rural forecourt issue simply by filling up at a convenient point on the way out, but with current EVs I'll need to factor at least one re-charge into the middle of a trip, and probably three for a typical Scottish Highlands trip. That is certainly doable, but it would also mean quite a large chunk of time out of the trip given the UK's current distribution of charging points [zap-map.com] and the nature of some of the available roads, which were essentially route-planned by wandering livestock and flowing water. It might only be 30-50 miles to the nearest charging point, but if it takes three or four hours just getting there and back, the loss of time and flexibility with the weather and location selection starts to significantly detract from the reason for going in the first place.

    Absolutely agree on the cost issues; I could probably save quite a bit (at least with current comparative costs), not to mention cut back on the pollution I'm creating which bothers me as well, but right now the logistics of a pure EV are just too much of a stretch. On the plus side, the number of EV charging points in the UK is going up fast (262 points in the last 30 days [zap-map.com], apparently) so I figure if I go with a hybrid for my next car, then if this initiative works as well as I hope it will, then combined with further tech advances by the time I'm thinking about my next-car-but-one a pure-EV might actually be doable.
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