EVs Are Just Going to Win

Medium-duty vehicles, like garbage trucks and city buses, are generally lightweight enough that electricity is a viable option for them. They also have the advantage of running relatively short routes and parking in the same place every night, so it’s easy to set up charging stations for them. The city of Shenzhen, China—home to 12 million people—h

Beyond the prospect of fewer cars per capita, there could also be a significant threat to luxury automotive brands. If you don’t own the car and will use it for only a single trip, you have little reason to care what make or model it is. Cars could cease to be status items, and the automobile market might well become commoditized. For these reasons

As for cost, electric passenger cars will soon be no more expensive to own than gas-powered ones, which is great; but alternative fuels are still quite expensive, which isn’t great. We need innovation to bring those prices down.

So to electrify America’s fleet of trucks, freight companies would have to shift to vehicles that carry less cargo, stop to recharge far more often, spend hours of time recharging, and somehow travel long stretches of highway where there are no recharging stations. It’s just not going to happen anytime soon.

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