alt Hacker NewsThe small part in me understands that, they are banking on three things 1) oil will be cheap because of EV boom and hence EV dominance will be slow and could take couple of decades 2) electric Energy cost will rise significantly because so much charging and energy infrastructure required. 3) Battery will reach at par with gasoline and matured standardised comodity, that will be the perfect time to enter.
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For a while maybe, but cheap EVs are being manufactured in Europe as well, and while this could reduce petrol prices, it's also going to reduce the need for petrol stations, and I think makes petrol basically dead even in a cheap-petrol scenario.
A Renault Twingo is going to cost something like 20,000 euros. That's twice the price of a Dacia Sandero, but a Dacia Spring is 16,900. The difference is only 4000, which could easily be a year's petrol.
I think #1 will probably play out to a certain extent. Perhaps as an oscillation between low and high as each wave knocks more gas stations out of business and refinery capacity offline. But I have to say, even low prices on gas won't make me go back -- I prefer my EVs in all regards to the ICE equivalents, with the sole exception of marathon (>450 miles per day) road trips, which is not my use case.
I hope #2 won't be the future. It's not as easy to just jack up electric prices because EVs are charging, because they are regulated, and electricity is used for way more than cars (if my napkin math is right, on average people will use around 30% more electricity if they go full electric).
I expect that as a practical matter #3 is here now, it just hasn't filtered down to retail car sales in the US yet.