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by marcosdumay 1268 days ago
Oh, you mean some non-zero investment is required? What change doesn't require investment?

In all likelihood, gasoline transportation costs an order of magnitude more than electricity. And that's not just infrastructure that is already paid for. There is a much larger maintenance cost, an ongoing labor cost, and a much shorter useful life for anything related to fossil fuels.
1 comments
dsfyu404ed 1268 days ago
>In all likelihood, gasoline transportation costs an order of magnitude more than electricity.

This statement just doesn't pass even the most lax economic sanity check.

Why don't all the use cases where people don't care about anything other than the bottom dollar and don't run up against the weaknesses of modern batteries already run electric vehicles. I'm thinking like low daily mileage fleet of small vehicles in a warm climate somewhere with high fuel costs. Like why doesn't an EV Fiat Promaster exist and why doesn't every tradesman in Sicily run one? If the numbers penciled out then surely we'd have it, at least in some niche somewhere. We are starting to see mass EV adoption but it's right on the margin and the details on any specific use case make it cheaper or maybe not.

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rainsford 1268 days ago
Because vehicles are expensive and people don't replace them all that often? Affordable, capable EVs are relatively new and being competitive with gasoline vehicles doesn't necessarily mean they're so competitive that it makes sense to prematurely replace a working gas powered vehicle.

Longer term though, EVs replacing gasoline vehicles for those kind of use-cases is exactly what we're going to see. In the US, the postal service intends to start deploying tens of thousands of EVs over the next few years as they replace older gasoline powered delivery vehicles. The economics do apparently work out and pass the sanity check, just not overnight.

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marcosdumay 1268 days ago
Well, you seem to not have read my answer...

But anyway, your answer is because transportation costs are irrelevant for both gasoline and electricity. So, even tough they are much cheaper for electricity, none makes any difference, and nobody picks a power source based on them.

But some people makes a huge effort to focus on this non-issue and turn it into a showstopper on their discourse. People resorting to this is good evidence that there aren't any large showstoppers for cars electrification.

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