News service Financial Times has a writeup on the significant growth in EV sales over the last few and next dozen years. Headlined Electric vehicles: the revolution is finally here, the article covers who the players are: recent comers like Tesla and Rivian, Chinese players, and every single old-line car company. Seems everybody’s "charging" to get on the bandwagon.
In a recent post on the Beeb (the BBC), Justin Rowlatt reminds us of the S-curve that adoption of almost all technologies undergoes, and has always undergone: the automobile itself, the transistor radio, the internet, the smartphone, and of course EVs. And points out that we are approaching the upstart part of the curve. You can see a similar curve on the left half of a diagram on page 12 in the first edition of Geoffrey A.
A new study in Nature Sustainability confirms that EVs pollute less overall: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/mar/23/electric-cars-produce-less-co2-than-petrol-vehicles-study-confirms. No lung-destroying emissions at source, and less CO2 emissions, even when the grid isn’t very clean; an exception seems to be one country whose grid is 100% dirty, because there nothing will make a difference until the grid is cleaned up. This is not the first time we’ve advanced this position, nor the first time that EV haters have claimed the opposite.
It is immediately obvious to anyone in an industrialized society why we light our homes with electric light bulbs instead of burning lamp oil: combustion’s lung-killing emissions, its inefficiency, its risk of fire, its greater operating cost, and so on. Since every one of those vices attaches equally well to the insanely complicated gasoline engine, it should be equally obvious that we should propel our cars, motorcycles, snow machines, lawn mowers, etc.
