As much as I would like to see this shift—and I spent the first fifteen years of my career working to achieve it—the economics are challenging. Based on the BYD e6 and the Toyota RAV4-EV, we can expect a BEV SUV to consume about 55 kWh / 100 miles. For a 300 mile range, that means we need a battery pack in the neighborhood of 200 kWh.
Current battery pack prices are estimated at an industry average near $300 / kWh, with Tesla possibly breaking below $200 / kWh. That puts the pack cost in the range of $30,000 to $40,000 with Tesla's cost structure, and around $60,000 for everyone else. Add in the rest of the vehicle and we have prohibitively-expensive SUVs.
Even with costs projected to fall to near $100 / kWh in the early 2020s, we're still talking about $20,000 battery packs, increasing total vehicle cost by roughly a third.
The obvious solution will be to reduce the range between charges in order to have smaller and cheaper battery packs, but history shows that degrading performance is a sure way to just sell fewer vehicles.
There are other ways out of the cost trap. Variations on ride-sharing and public transit could allow people to share these costs. For instance, GM has been working for nearly two decades on the "skateboard" concept for vehicle architecture, and I can see that evolving toward a model where the expensive components are shared on an "as-needed" basis. With the growing popularity of ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft, the underlying cultural changes needed for this model to work may be in the works.
A sure, though painful, path out of the trap is the increasing price—and increasing variability in price—of oil, coupled with increasing global population and demand for fuel. The trend is clear: by the end of the 2030s, crude oil is likely to be consistently above $200/bbl (and probably a more like $400/bbl, as resources become more costly to extract). At such prices, SUVs that cost 50% more than today's prices might seem like a reasonable trade-off.
A couple of possibilities come to mind. Perhaps the IS are pushing back against disclosing an active investigation involving the President. Or perhaps Trump is descending into full-on paranoia (not uncommon, as I understand it).
I've been saying the same. Hopefully newsroom editors and media owners will listen. There's a huge swath of the public who will probably tune out real journalism that doesn't include the President's words, so this is not without risk, but I can't help thinking it's a marvelous opportunity.
Minor but relevant quibble: you write that "it is really bad to drink a lot of lead." In fact, there is no lower limit to the toxic effects of lead; it's really bad to drink even a little lead. While government agencies like the CDC and OSHA necessarily set limits for regulatory purposes, the effects of lead scale with dosage, and unlike many substances, don't disappear at low levels of exposure. Flint's water is an unmitigated disaster that cannot be fixed for those exposed.
Though I cannot be sure, I suspect that the information disclosed to the NSA could be used to locate individual cell phone users and determine ther identity without a warrant, as happened with Rigmaiden.
Additionally, it is possible that similar orders exist with Sprint and other carriers; there's nothing here to suggest that Verizon is unique.
As much as I would like to see this shift—and I spent the first fifteen years of my career working to achieve it—the economics are challenging. Based on the BYD e6 and the Toyota RAV4-EV, we can expect a BEV SUV to consume about 55 kWh / 100 miles. For a 300 mile range, that means we need a battery pack in the neighborhood of 200 kWh.
Current battery pack prices are estimated at an industry average near $300 / kWh, with Tesla possibly breaking below $200 / kWh. That puts the pack cost in the range of $30,000 to $40,000 with Tesla's cost structure, and around $60,000 for everyone else. Add in the rest of the vehicle and we have prohibitively-expensive SUVs.
Even with costs projected to fall to near $100 / kWh in the early 2020s, we're still talking about $20,000 battery packs, increasing total vehicle cost by roughly a third.
The obvious solution will be to reduce the range between charges in order to have smaller and cheaper battery packs, but history shows that degrading performance is a sure way to just sell fewer vehicles.
There are other ways out of the cost trap. Variations on ride-sharing and public transit could allow people to share these costs. For instance, GM has been working for nearly two decades on the "skateboard" concept for vehicle architecture, and I can see that evolving toward a model where the expensive components are shared on an "as-needed" basis. With the growing popularity of ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft, the underlying cultural changes needed for this model to work may be in the works.
A sure, though painful, path out of the trap is the increasing price—and increasing variability in price—of oil, coupled with increasing global population and demand for fuel. The trend is clear: by the end of the 2030s, crude oil is likely to be consistently above $200/bbl (and probably a more like $400/bbl, as resources become more costly to extract). At such prices, SUVs that cost 50% more than today's prices might seem like a reasonable trade-off.
A couple of possibilities come to mind. Perhaps the IS are pushing back against disclosing an active investigation involving the President. Or perhaps Trump is descending into full-on paranoia (not uncommon, as I understand it).
Minor nit: you may mean Rockwell; not The Police:
https://g.co/kgs/DOk5v2
I've been saying the same. Hopefully newsroom editors and media owners will listen. There's a huge swath of the public who will probably tune out real journalism that doesn't include the President's words, so this is not without risk, but I can't help thinking it's a marvelous opportunity.
Minor but relevant quibble: you write that "it is really bad to drink a lot of lead." In fact, there is no lower limit to the toxic effects of lead; it's really bad to drink even a little lead. While government agencies like the CDC and OSHA necessarily set limits for regulatory purposes, the effects of lead scale with dosage, and unlike many substances, don't disappear at low levels of exposure. Flint's water is an unmitigated disaster that cannot be fixed for those exposed.
http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/csem/csem.asp?csem=7&po=8
Though I cannot be sure, I suspect that the information disclosed to the NSA could be used to locate individual cell phone users and determine ther identity without a warrant, as happened with Rigmaiden.
Additionally, it is possible that similar orders exist with Sprint and other carriers; there's nothing here to suggest that Verizon is unique.