[jlj]

In the US there was a "cash for clunkers" program about 10-15 years ago that tried to clear out ineficient older model cars. It was fairly successful and stimulated purchases of newer cars. The downside was that some perfectly fine cars were scrapped.

I suspect that gas stations will start swapping pumps for chargers, and that will motivate people to switch too.

By the time this all happens though we will have more car sharing programs and maybe autonomous vehicles, so the ownership paradigm will be different in 2030 compared to now. Why buy a car that sits idle for 90% of the day?

[djrogers]

> I suspect that gas stations will start swapping pumps for chargers, and that will motivate people to switch too.

This may happen some places, but I expect the charging infrastructure to ultimately look very different from the refueling one we have today. Today's fueling infrastructure is the way it is largely due to the difficulties of storing and pumping fuel safely (physically and environmentally speaking). There's no reason that an electric car shouldn't be able to 'refuel' at a restaurant, grocery store, or at work (ie, where we see most charging places pop up).

Having four-corners real estate and employees dedicated for electric charging all over even city is just inefficient.

[ghaff]

Assuming charging will take at least 15 minutes or so, you really would like to be able to charge somewhere that doesn't involve hanging around a crappy convenience store while your car charges. A deadish mall near me has some Tela chargers right next to a popular grocery store. I expect that sort of thing will be fairly common.

[jlj]

Agree, but my point is that when the gas pumps are gone or hard to find it will make owning an ICE vehicle more inconvenient and encourage use of electrics.

[ghaff]

Because you want to customize it, leave stuff in it, hop in it right now, etc. Most of the cost associated with owning a car--especially outside of the snow belt--is in the mileage so having a car that spends a lot of time idle isn't really all that economically inefficient.