What It Will Take To Live In An Electric Car Society

What It Will Take To Live In An Electric Car Society
By Nitish Kannan
Aug 27 2014
<http://techdrive.co/2014/08/will-take-live-electric-car-society/>

One of the most disruptive technologies that will transform the 21st century will be the shift from a fossil fuel based transportation society to a purely electric car society. The electric car will cause a major disruption in the grid, energy generation and how we “fill up” our personal transport vehicles each day.

I predict that within 16 years almost all our cars will be plug in vehicles based on a few market trends. The reason for it might take that much time is that it will take our human civilization many steps to get to the point where a vast majority of all transport comprises of plug in electric cars. So to get right to it, what does it take to live in a fully electric car society by 2030?

There are three factors being addressed today that will make plug in vehicles vastly superior to all forms of transport and make electric cars the only choice that makes sense for consumers. First factor is availability of better batteries as well as making enough of them to keep up the capacity needed if every car were an EV.  The second most importance factor would be rapid expansion of free supercharging stations similar to how Tesla has covered three continents with free solar powered supercharger stations. Finally, the third factor to be addressed is having enough solar power that provides free electricity. This would enable car makers and utilities to sell enough power to make a profit and still provide free electric car charging to EV car owners. I believe that having free charging is one of the most important aspects to making the electric car transition a viable and appealing option to consumers as Tesla has done today.

One of the important issues that must be addressed to make every car sold to be electric by 2030 is making sure that there are enough batteries to supply to all the car makers (i.e., with enough lithium cells to power their electric vehicles). It is estimated that soon Tesla alone will use more lithium battery cells than all the computer and mobile phone manufacturers combined. Moreover, to address this particular issue, Tesla is building a so called “Gigafactory” just to eliminate battery production constraints so it can manufacture over 500,000 electric cars per year. I predict that many more like these will need to constructed globally to make lithium cells for electric cars at a very cheap rate.

Another issue regarding the topic of battery cells is making sure that batteries have adequate capacity for electric vehicles range. Despite the fact that the Tesla can do 250+ miles a charge, having a larger capacity battery will make charging less frequent for consumers. For instance, a new solid state battery technology in labs today could in theory make a lithium battery pack have twice the capacity and cost a third less. This would enable an electric car like the Tesla to do well over 500 miles on the same battery pack if the cells were replaced with solid state batteries. I believe this will be the breakthrough in the next few years that will make electric cars far cheaper and the range much longer that finally convinces the vast majority of the public to change its perception on electric cars.

[snip]