I remember seeing loads and loads of analyses like this back in the 2000s on a site called The Oil Drum about why electric cars would never work at scale. (Spoiler: My family has two EVs.) They always assume that the technology will never get better, that industrial economies of scale don't exist and therefore that prices don't decrease with scale, that currently developed reserves of resources like lithium equal total reserves, etc.
I do think it will be a while before electrification of long haul aviation is practical. Aviation -- all of it -- accounts for only 7% of global oil consumption as of 2024. We could cut oil consumption by more than 80% without touching aviation. Most oil is burned in cars and trucks and those can be electrified today, so we should focus our energy on that and on replacing fossil fuels in electricity generation and take the win there.
Related tangent:
The popularity of toxic dogmatic pessimism on the political left is really problematic. It stops people from offering positive, expansive visions of the future. It's one reason the fascists are winning by default. They don't buy this shit, so they tell stories about the future that aren't "and then we all die in a great Malthusian catastrophe, the end." The fascist vision of the future sucks, but it's better than that, so it wins hearts and minds.
Ask yourself: what if our civilization doesn't collapse? Then what? The assumption that it will collapse prevents people from thinking about the future. Malthusianism is a thought stopping cliche.
> They always assume that the technology will never get better, that industrial economies of scale don't exist
The technology hadn't improved not much more than a quarter's worth so far in my lifetime as far as EV is concerned.
Wh/kg figures hasn't changed, even fusion seems closer than solid state batteries, mileage figures for EVs is same 4mi/kWh, battery recycling still hasn't been figured out. They can't even recover Lithium out of Lithium ion batteries. wtf.
Meanwhile, computers had gotten like, up to petaflops per nation to per building to per node. Wireless Internet went from kilobits to gigabits. Everyone wears UNIX or Linux watches.
IMO, optimistic heuristics floating around EV is too shallow. The model just doesn't have enough parameters that it's expecting growth where it should not and vice versa. It just needs way more grounding to be meaningful.
> The technology hadn't improved not much more than a quarter's worth so far in my lifetime as far as EV is concerned.
Average EV range has increased 2.7 fold in the years 2010 to 2021[1] and has continued to increase - by 40% since then. Neary a 4-fold improvement in 15 years.
Charging tech has improved from the initial Level 1 (1kW) and Level 2 (13kW) technology to fast charging (150kW) or 350kW (current fastest commonly available) while BYD is promising 1MW charging soon. A 350 fold increase with more to come.
Prices for EV batteries exceeded $1000 per kWh in 2010, down to $111 per kWh in 2025 - a 90% drop.
The technology has improved dramatically.
[1] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/evolution-of-...
> Average EV range has increased 2.7 fold
Don't dodge the question like that. I said efficiency hasn't improved. You basically said, the car got 2.7 fold bigger.
Consider that Gen1 Nissan Leaf already had 24kWh battery and 200km(125mi) rated range. Today's EV with 100kWh battery packs has at most 500mi - literally zero improvement.
CHAdeMO supported up to 62.5kW since 2009 or so. It can do 400kW now, that's still not even 10x improvement.
Battery cost did marginally decrease. Currency inflated a bit over time. Battery capacity increased accordingly from those. And you spun that into a "350 fold increase".
Shame on you.
> Don't dodge the question like that. I said efficiency hasn't improved.
That's not what you said and to avoid confusion, as usual, I provided an exact quote of what you claimed before providing my response.
To repeat, your actual exact words:
> The technology hadn't improved not much more than a quarter's worth so far in my lifetime as far as EV is concerned.
Your attempt to twist away from your original claim while suggesting that I've acted in a shameful manner does not suggest that you're making any attempt to engage honestly or with good faith.
Computers have psyched us out. There is no other technology in human history that has ever seen a capability growth curve like Moore's Law. Even aviation, which went from biplanes to moon landings in 50 years, doesn't compare.
Still, there has been huge improvement in batteries. The main improvement has not been in energy density but in cost. Find some graphs of battery cost per kWh of storage. Storage cost has dropped by almost 10X in the last 15-20 years. Reliability and rapid recharge capability have also increased a lot.
Still, for medium to long haul aviation we probably would need at least a 3-4X improvement in energy density per unit volume and mass, and I don't see that happening soon. It's likely that long range aviation is stuck with liquid fuels for the foreseeable future. But as I said it's only 7% of oil consumption. We should just let aviation keep going as-is and cut fossil fuel use in terrestrial transport and power generation.
Part of why we're not recycling batteries much is that lithium isn't expensive enough to make the investment in it profitable. The major cost in batteries is the manufacturing process, not the lithium itself. If lithium prices go up there'd be an incentive to figure out recycling.
Cost doesn't matter when something is just too darn heavy to be viable aviation fuel. Can't fly rockets on sails just because it's efficient.
> Wh/kg figures hasn't changed
Maybe I misunderstand you, but taken at face value, this assertion is incorrect.
Battery density (Wh/kg) has more than quadrupled since the 90s. See e.g. https://rmi.org/the-rise-of-batteries-in-six-charts-and-not-...
Price is also dropping fast!
The learning rate for Li-ion batteries right now, is around a 35% price reduction for every doubling in installed capacity.
The Oil Drum was converted to a static archive site in 2013, in part because they were finding it hard to attract quality content.
Gee, maybe that was because it was clear Peak Oil (in the we're running out sense) wasn't happening?
This comment was made to the shuttering announcement: "8 years means The Oil Drum came online in 2005, basically matching the start the current plateau in crude oil production."
Global oil production has increased since then. The price of West Texas crude has gone from $100 (which would be $136 in today's dollars) to $64 now.
The left wing pessimism stems from a moralistic view. The underlying idea is that we deserve to suffer, so suffering is predicted.
I didn't mean to imply that the right didn't have its own doomer narratives. The current hotness seems to be demographic predictions of doom, "great replacement" theories, etc. I'm very skeptical of those too.
What I was getting at though was -- I think the left allows its doomer narratives to be intellectually paralyzing. If everything is going to crash and collapse and burn, there's no need to actually try to solve problems or offer a compelling narrative about the future.
The right doesn't do this. They feed their own doomer narratives into a "rage against the dying of the light" narrative. This results in all kinds of ugly racism and persecution and authoritarianism, sure, but it doesn't lead to paralysis. So, as I said, they win by default. In the battle for hearts and minds, they win if they're the only ones that show up.
Edit:
Another way of saying it would be to say that for the left its doomer narratives are demotivating, while the right treats its doomer narratives as motivating.
<2.5% of US vehicles are electric.
I bought $AMR, $FCG, $UAN, and $POWL.
I bought $TSLA and sold almost at the top as well, but for different reasons than fundamentals. (Greenback boomerang CCP dollars etc...)
Chemistry doesn't lie and it imputes all of human behavior.