Gasoline, Diesel Vehicles Dominate India's Auto Market, EVs Lag (reuters.com) 102
India's road transport minister on Tuesday warned local and foreign automakers to either cut production of polluting diesel vehicles or face higher taxes and levies, setting alarm bells ringing in the world's third-largest car market. From a report: Here are some facts about India's automotive market, the biggest after China and the United States, where players such as Maruti Suzuki, Tata Motors and foreign giants such as Mercedes and Volkswagen operate. In India, about four million passenger vehicles were sold in the fiscal year that ended in March, according to data from the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers.
Petrol vehicles have been the top sellers in recent years -- increasing their market share to around 68.4% in January-July 2023 from 42.5% in 2014, according to data from automotive market intelligence provider JATO Dynamics. Cost-conscious Indians are preferring to buy petrol cars as they are cheaper than diesel, even though diesel cars offer better fuel efficiency. In the luxury segment, though, which includes cars and SUVs made by Mercedes, BMW and Audi, petrol variants have accounted for 62% of sales so far this year, down from 68% in 2021, according to JATO Dynamics.
Tuesday's warning from minister Nitin Gadkari targeted diesel carmakers, whose market share has seen a steady decline to nearly 18% of passenger vehicles in January-July this year from 47.9% in 2014. But when it comes to luxury cars, diesel variants remain in vogue, with their market share rising to 33% so far this year from 31% in 2021.
Petrol vehicles have been the top sellers in recent years -- increasing their market share to around 68.4% in January-July 2023 from 42.5% in 2014, according to data from automotive market intelligence provider JATO Dynamics. Cost-conscious Indians are preferring to buy petrol cars as they are cheaper than diesel, even though diesel cars offer better fuel efficiency. In the luxury segment, though, which includes cars and SUVs made by Mercedes, BMW and Audi, petrol variants have accounted for 62% of sales so far this year, down from 68% in 2021, according to JATO Dynamics.
Tuesday's warning from minister Nitin Gadkari targeted diesel carmakers, whose market share has seen a steady decline to nearly 18% of passenger vehicles in January-July this year from 47.9% in 2014. But when it comes to luxury cars, diesel variants remain in vogue, with their market share rising to 33% so far this year from 31% in 2021.
Of course. (Score:4, Informative)
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Technically you are right about "destroying the US economy", but that's not the whole picture. The people in power decided to accelerate Schumpeter's "creative destruction" by forcing advanced economies to transition to clean energy and manufacturing. The high price of this transition and mistakes made in the progress are covered up by governmental spending and money printing. Public opinion is shaped via media propaganda.
In the meantime, all dirty manufacturing and energy is left for "the rest" of the worl
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"Clean" is a marketing term used to inspire consumers to pay the premium. It's a winner-take-all battle for the next kind of economy with the first mover advantage. "Economical" is a synonym for "commodity" -- a sizeable market for now, but one which will shrink as the global consumer eventually decides to upgrade.
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While if you get technical enough, there's no such thing as perfectly clean energy or manufacturing, it is indeed possible to clean them up to the point that it becomes a non-issue.
It being more economical to offshore the dirtiness is, I think, a temporary affair. I'm already seeing signs that the Chinese are fed up with their pollution and doing things about it. That cuts down potential areas to be polluting substantially.
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Well...yeah?
Why, did you want the petrochem plant in front of your house instead of somewhere in Generistan?
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People act like it's still just a Western problem, meanwhile so many people are driving around Asia in 2-stroke gas scooters (each one of which pollutes more than a full-sized modern American gas TRUCK), that pollution levels in many Asian cities are considerably worse than they EVER were in places like Los Angeles.
Americans produce 15.32 tons of CO2 per capita; Chinese 7.44; India 1.89.
https://www.worldometers.info/... [worldometers.info] (I suspect any source would provide a similar ratio.)
I disagree that developing nations get a free pass. But to the extent that we should be badgering third-worlders to take "greener" transportation, I suspect Americans with an iota of self-awareness would find the words stuck in their throat.
(Would that the same happened whenever a Southerner thought to criticize the economic policies of productive
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The higher volume
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As for your deluded fantasy about California's economic environment, desperate Southern chambers of commerce have been spouting that crap for literally thirty years, and somehow California is still the 5th largest economy in the world. No other state is even close or projected to become close in a meaningful timeframe.
This is a well trodden trope that California likes to roll out there. Truth is California is not and never has been the 5th largest economy in the world. The truth is California economy is apart of the United States economy and that is what is counted on the world state. Not the individual participation of states or providences of larger nation states, which California is apart of.
We wont' go into the back flips that some economists go into to get this 5th largest figure. Safe to say that most econ
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California's is the 5th highest based on this really advanced type of math called counting.
Even for right-wing copium, your reaction is borderline hysterical. North Korea called and wants to hire you as a news anchor.
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It's just so adorable when a Californian finds out his state isn't as great as he thinks it is. Wonder what the result would be if he found out compared to some, California sucks.
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I'm sorry whatever sister-fiddling state you come from is a third-world economy compared to California, but maybe take some responsibility.
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Let me know if that ever happens. I doubt it's as adorable as a redneck having a full-blown psychotic episode in reaction to US Commerce Department data.
Denial isn't just a river in Egypt. Dont' worry California will become a sane state one day.
Got no brain you mean (Score:1)
China is installing more solar and wind than the rest of the world combined.
All that from a poorer country. You claim America doesn't have the money to compete with China and do the same? LOL Chinese people are already much cleaner than Americans are.
SO sick of little guys getting called polluters (Score:2)
[Americans] are more polluting than 94% of the people in the world.
How about presenting separate statistics for fuel use and pollution generation directly by consumers vs. the other uses over which they have no control? Things like the fuel use of manufacturing plants sited in the country (especially building products for export), the energy source mix chosen by the available utility companies, the transportation modes chosen by the megacorps for their supply chains, and so on.
I'm SO sick of presentations
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Well, that's up to you. It's trivial to know today where something was made. Just boycott things made in India or China.
But how could you, it's so awesomely CHEAP! Look at those low, low prices! And you're not a sucker that would pay twice as much for something than he'd have to just for that "made in the U.S.A." label, are you?
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Chinese coal consumption has remained steady over the past decade. They aren't building new coal plants, they are replacing existing ones. They are also massively increasing energy use on the back of large scale green programs and rolling out nuclear and renewables both in terms of supply as well as consumption at a far faster rate than the USA.
Time to update your conservative talking points.
India on the other hand...
Chinese coal plants. (Score:2)
Chinese coal consumption has remained steady over the past decade
As opposed to the US', which has been dropping like a rock.
They aren't building new coal plants, they are replacing existing ones.
Even assuming that's true (no flame intended, I'm just not checking it before this posting): that's also as opposed to the US, which has, rather than replacing old coal plants with new ones, been converting them to natural gas (half as carbon-emitting) or just retiring them and building out other, less- or non-carb
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China's EV market has exploded, and they have the best EV tech in the world. Best batteries, top notch drivetrains.
The "pass" they got was to agree an aggressive Paris target for reaching peak emissions in 2030, and are on track to reach it 5 years early. And at a level about 1/3rd the peak emissions of the United States, per capita. China installed more renewable energy than the rest of the world combined, year after year.
Turns out if you engage with these developing nations, show them that it's actually a
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An American is more polluting than a Chinese person and India added together.
Stop conflating ordinary citizens' personal fuel use and pollution emission with "their share" of that of industrial megacorps and commercial operations.
The choices of the latter are made by a tiny fraction of "The 1%", not the personal decisions of the bulk of the population.
(Or are you calling them "polluting" because they aren't ALL out in the street campaigning for politicians promising still more draconian government intervent
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Let me lay some valuable wisdom on you:
You can only control the things within your purview. Don't worry about what other people do or think.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The West is Dilusional (Score:4, Insightful)
Western companies are delusional if they seek mass-market adoption of EV in India. Do you realize how many people live there on $1/day income? EV's are a status symbol, nothing more.
The world is splitting into two camps. Virtue signaling G7 and "the rest". Clean energy and advanced manufacturing for the first camp. Dirty power and 20th century mass production for the rest.
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The biggest problem with India and other third world nations is lack of electrical infrastructure. Much if not most of India sees daily scheduled blackouts because their electrical generating capacity can't meet existing demands. If they would create green hydrogen along the coasts, they could distribute it to existing fuel stations. It would be almost the same as distributing propane, and that is a well established model. Fuel cell vehicles are what is practical most places in the world, not EVs. The fanat
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If we have cheap, abundant, and "green", hydrogen available then I'd expect it to be used to synthesize liquid hydrocarbon fuels. The reason why we'd go through the extra effort of using hydrogen to make liquid hydrocarbon fuels is in the parent comment on the difficulty and dangers of containing hydrogen as a fuel, or even propane as a fuel. A propane spill is more likely to be a fire and asphyxiation hazard than gasoline or diesel fuel. Gasoline will hold a flame if poured out on concrete but jet fuel
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EVs are decent for most use cases and seem to be where we're headed, like it or not.
Like it or not there's professional economists that estimate that even with an all out effort to replace internal combustion engine it would take twenty years to build out all the mines and factories required to build enough battery electric vehicles to keep up with vehicle demand. Even then with vehicles having a "half life" of about ten years if we started right now with a massive build up of BEV production we still have half the vehicles on the road powered by hydrocarbons in thirty years.
If you want to
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Re:The West is not Dilusional (Score:2)
>> Much if not most of India sees daily scheduled blackouts because their electrical generating capacity can't meet existing demands
EVs help with that by providing scale buffer storage, and consumes when other demand is low....
Hydrogen not, because it consumes 4x more power to generate than to recharge an EV.
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Western companies are delusional if they seek mass-market adoption of EV in India. Do you realize how many people live there on $1/day income?
And yet they are the 3rd biggest auto market, even with those poor people.
No reason they can't buy EVs instead of the diesel cars they are already buying in large numbers.
You are a little bit right by accident. They won't be buying expensive Western cars but cheap home build and Chinese ones.
You need a -1 ingorant Westerner mod
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India has a rapidly growing middle class. A lot of used cars from Western and Japanese manufacturers end up there. It's a major growth market for tech like phones too.
Now that EVs are getting very affordable compared to mid-range fossil fuel cars (and downright cheap for used ones), and the cost of ownership is much lower, they are attractive vehicles in India. The government wants to promote them to help with clean air too.
The opportunity is there, we just have to make sure it is taken. Unfortunately India
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India has a rapidly growing middle class. A lot of used cars from Western and Japanese manufacturers end up there.
People who are actually middle class can afford to buy new cars. And I say this as someone who never has, and at this rate, probably never will.
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Western companies are delusional if they seek mass-market adoption of EV in India. Do you realize how many people live there on $1/day income? EV's are a status symbol, nothing more.
Let's be honest, in a country like India, it's not even EV versus ICE. Car ownership in general is a status symbol / luxury item.
What about E-bikes and scooters? (Score:2)
Seems to me they're focusing too much on large vehicles. Unless that market is growing awfully fast.
Re:What about E-bikes and scooters? (Score:4, Informative)
Seems to me they're focusing too much on large vehicles. Unless that market is growing awfully fast.
I had an interesting conversation with a man from India that could explain why there is a focus on large vehicles, the owners have money to pay bribes.
A cheap piece of shit car, scooter, or auto-rickshaw (a three wheeled conveyance common to India) would rarely have license plates, would have been bought and sold with cash, and so there's no real public record of who owns it. Further, the driver is unlikely to have a license to drive, unlikely to have a permanent address, or have any money to pay a fine even if the police bothered to try to track them down.
Fuel for vehicles are heavily taxed in India but kerosene fuel for cooking is not taxed, or maybe even subsidized. This cheap kerosene fuel is not all that efficient in a gasoline engine but it will make them go. By "not efficient" I mean it leaves a trail of blue smoke from all the particles of unburnt fuel and soot. If anyone has seen video from the streets of India then they likely know what I'm talking about. There's fines for using cooking fuel in road vehicles but, again, good luck in enforcing it when the people breaking the law are so common and they are unlikely to have any documents to track them down.
People with nice cars and big trucks are going to have all their papers in order, will never ever pour cooking fuel into the tank, will have a proper license, and everything else in order because the police will stop them for a bribe or a legit fine because if they end up in a court for too many violations they could end up losing a lot of money, perhaps even lose the vehicle, to pay the bribes and fines.
In a different conversation with a soldier in the US Army he mentioned how the diesel engines they used would run on just about anything. The problem was though if someone ran it with fuel too far out of spec in the engine it would likely leave it inoperable by the end of the day. It had something to do with how diesel engines are lubricated and cooled versus how gasoline engines did so. The military grade engines were built for a wide range of fuel so running them on kerosene would be fine but running on gasoline would be reserved for a last ditch effort to get everyone back to base, in which case it would need some repair before being returned to service but as he put it "the truck would get you home". The commercial-off-the-shelf diesel trucks used around base though could be torn to pieces if run on kerosene, but some of the lazy soldiers would still try their luck with topping off tanks with the readily available kerosene jet fuel than go through the trouble of going back to the motor pool for proper diesel fuel. This was rough on the engines but hard to track down who put the jet fuel in the diesel truck so it was rare to see anyone punished for it. This is relevant to our story because if someone with a big truck in India tried a similar trick of burning cooking fuel in their diesel engine then that's not only a fine if caught by police but putting a very expensive piece of equipment at risk of very expensive to repair damage. It's cheaper in the long term to just pay the extra taxes on diesel fuel.
Oh, and the reason people in India still cook with kerosene so much is because the electric grid is often unreliable. It's preferable to cook with kerosene because if the power goes out then there's still a hot meal and people not getting sick from food poisoning. That also explains why electric vehicles are not popular in India. There's a few stories on why and how the power goes out so often but this is already getting long, use your imagination and you'll likely get close to figuring it out.
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Public transport including rickshaws run on CNG in India. CNG is way cleaner than Diesel or Gasoline
Diesel is mostly used in long distance trucks and farm machinery and luxury SUVs. Diesel is subsidized to an extent to support farmers but luxury car owners also get the subsidy. Gadkari doesnt want luxury diesel cars and is willing to add an additional tax so that its just cheaper to use gasoline cars in the cities.
2/3rds of all new 2 and 3 wheelers being sold in India ar
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Modern common rail diesels have VERY high pressure fuel injector pumps and they require good lubrication or theyll burn out in seconds. The diesel fuel itself is the lube and petrol/gasoline (dont know about kerosene) simply cant do that job. Hence old diesels might have run on it for a while but a modern diesel would die at the bottom of the road.
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I live in India and your article may have been true many years ago but not anymore. Rarely anyone uses kerosene - it is not available anywhere other than in Govt rationing stores (only people below poverty line eligible to buy it and only limited quantities). Cooking gas is the most common mode of cooking and is prevalent even in villages. My cousins in their village were using dry wood for their kitchen a decade back. Now they have all switched to cooking gas (which was subsidized by the govt).
Vehicle with
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Fuel for vehicles are heavily taxed in India but kerosene fuel for cooking is not taxed, or maybe even subsidized. This cheap kerosene fuel is not all that efficient in a gasoline engine but it will make them go.
Kerosene can be burned in a gasoline engine, but only after it has been significantly modified. First you have to vaporize the fuel, it is not enough to atomize it. Second, if compression is higher than about 6.5:1 then you will get predetonation because kerosene has a very low octane rating. That means you can run it in a flathead ford, but not any vaguely modern engine — they all have compression over 8:1. Vaporizing the fuel is not too hard (it can be done with heat) but reducing the compression ra
Electrification is a predicate to EVs (Score:2)
Gasoline or diesel can be transported by hand, if push comes to shove. Electrons require electrical conductors.
Then again, the treehuggers simultaneously fighting for mass EV adoption and against transmission line buildout seem to think otherwise. So who knows, maybe I'm wrong and it's some cigar-chomping, tophat-wearing, port-swilling something-or-other holding back the electric car, not the lack of technology to support the barely-existant technology.
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The treehuggers will claim that people can use solar panels to charge up their electric vehicles. These are people that didn't do the math on how large these solar PV arrays would have to be in order to get any meaningful miles in any meaningful amount of time from solar power. They also ignore that if the weather was bad that day then there would not be enough sun to go anywhere, not unless the PV array was made even more absurd in size. If the weather got real bad then the PV array could face wind or h
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India only has nuclear power because it needs the ability to manufacture nuclear weapons, and point them at Pakistan.
It's not a suitable solution for other developing nations that aren't interested in the military uses. Too slow, too expensive, and frankly we can't trust some nations to use them. Fortunately the don't need them.
Come on MacMann, have your arguments really got this pathetically poor now? Focusing on just one solar PV array, no grid scale, no mix of other renewables, just a single house with a
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It's hard to imagine a more damning assessment of nuclear power in India. Been working on thorium for 70 years, still doesn't work properly. When the CIA decided that it didn't want India to have so much nuclear power, it assassinated a number of key personnel. Last time I checked I don't think any wind turbine engineers have been assassinated to stop development of renewable energy/wind based WMD.
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Gasoline or diesel can be transported by hand, if push comes to shove. Electrons require electrical conductors.
Then again, the treehuggers simultaneously fighting for mass EV adoption and against transmission line buildout seem to think otherwise. So who knows, maybe I'm wrong and it's some cigar-chomping, tophat-wearing, port-swilling something-or-other holding back the electric car, not the lack of technology to support the barely-existant technology.
You gotta wonder about the quality of the modern education that they got with their useless degrees and soon to be Federally absolved student loans.
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EVs lag because ... (Score:2)
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>> And when your EV is 'empty' and the electricity is still out, you turn on the generator.
Reasoning makes no sense.
Too expensive any more.
V2G and V2L vehicles make the cost of transportation AND the cost of emergency electricity go down by a factor of 3x. Nobody will own an ICE generator any more.
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Nobody should be surprised (Score:2)
EV's have not gotten anywhere close to scale approaching the order of ICE vehicles and thus prices are not going to drop on these so it will be years for them to go through the process.
-Right now they are getting more affordable but are still firmly in the upper mid to luxury range
-After that they will reach price parity with your standard US/European vehicles, think your Honda Accords, Toyota Camry type area
-After that when battery production is in full swing they will be available at the rate to make EV's
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Fact is nobody should be making prognostications about the EV market when we are in a transition phase
You should have said that first and saved us from reading your first 5 paragraphs doing exactly that...
Oh, and the rest of your post too.
Fact is China is making huge numbers of EVs, selling a big and rapidly increasing % of EVs. And making cheap ones too. Easily an example India can follow.
China are adopting EVs so fast there was an article here the other day talking about peak oil in China already being reached.
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Fact is China is making huge numbers of EVs, selling a big and rapidly increasing % of EVs. And making cheap ones too. Easily an example India can follow.
China are adopting EVs so fast there was an article here the other day talking about peak oil in China already being reached.
I think the electrical infrastructure in China is actually better than that in India.
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You obviously didn't read the comments for that article, the US hit peak oil in 2018 which goes to show that peaking doesn't mean much.
The difference being America peaked at 12t each and are currently 7t each. China might be peaking at only 1t. [ourworldindata.org]
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EVs have no reason to be more expensive than ICEVs. they have far fewer parts and far less labor to manufacture.
You may have heard of this thing called a battery, it is quite expensive to make a good one.
As long as you are willing to use a reasonable size battery instead of wanting a 500 km range battery (nobody drives 500 km a day in India. The roads are not conducive to it) EV prices can be reasonable.
The distance traveled in a day is only one factor, there's also convenience of charging. If it's difficult to get access to a charger then you need more range so that you don't have to charge every day.
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We're talking about cars here. Try to stay on topic.
Our government has announced all kinds of charger subsidies too, but there's still a shortage of them in most of the country.
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we're talking about India and transportation of people here. Try to stay on topic.
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The thing about a country with mostly young people there are not as many NIMBYs and entrenched interests. Things tend to happen fast as everyone's hustling to make a better life. When Govt gives out subsidies in India, things moooooooov. its not like the US where California has still not finished an HSR in 20 years.
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Is this news really any surpprise? (Score:2)
Geez... does anyone really think that India has the electric infrastructure in place to even begin to support electric vehicles? How many Indians live in villages without electrical infrastructure? Hell, California can barely manage to keep the lights on during an extended heat wave even without factoring in all the parked Teslas sucking power off the grid during the daylight hours. If California can't do it now, does anyone think India, can anytime in the foreseeable future?
This is the lie of electric v
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Geez... does anyone really think that India has the electric infrastructure in place to even begin to support electric vehicles?
I suspect those that believe India can switch to EVs by putting windmills and solar PV arrays everywhere. That's a fantasy though, there's a lot of material and labor that has to go into installing and maintaining wind and solar power. So long as they can get fossil fuels with less effort they will do so. What can get more energy per the same material and effort as fossil fuels are hydro, nuclear fission, and maybe geothermal. Onshore wind does very well in many locations on material and labor costs but
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Yeah, and I live in California and voted for some of those turkeys in government who are trying to phase out fossil fuels without having sufficient alternatives in place. I'm ashamed to admit it but I voted for some of them only because the alternatives were much more scary. The "Looney Left" is a problem, and they sponsor such idiocy as you mentioned in your post, but they tend to be more sane all in all than the pr
Grid reliability? (Score:2)
Googling around, it looks like roughly half the country may experience *daily* power outages, with a strong split between rural and urban. Hard to get good data though, and I don't want to link a pay site.
I also don't want to spread stereotypes. It's probably getting better, but how much better? The USA seems to be going in the other direction--a lot of my neighbors have purchased generators in the last few years, but we're in a rural area subject to what they call "public safety power shutoff" and IMHO
You don't say? (Score:2)
Cheaper transportation dominates a market where people have to get by on an annual budget that the average American blows on crap he doesn't need in a week?
Who would have thought?
Takes a few years. (Score:2)
Yep exactly.
the thing is: on the high end cars, and for motorcycles, electric is already cheaper to buy AND to operate.
For the low end cars, those are cheaper to operate, but not yet cheaper to buy.
Takes 2-3 years from now on..
Scalability (Score:2)
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Can I import some? (Score:2)
I really liked my diesel Passat. Can I import one from India?
It was sad: they issued a firmware patch to address the Dieselgate tuning about a month after I sold it back to VW. If they'd been faster, I'd still be driving it.
Unfair to India and pretty irrelevant to climate (Score:2)
Until we change the way we generate electricity, it literally doesn't matter what the uptick of EV "zero emissions" cars is globally. It's only zero at the tailpipe. Chances are the energy is coming from a coal-fired power plant, which is dirtier than gasoline. India is not leading on that one, because they literally can't. India's EV adoption is therefore irrelevant. EV== good is not a valid premise. It's more nuanced than that.
In the U.S., EV promotion and subsidy is an important step that drives all impo