alt Hacker News> Two years of wasted time
Try two generations. I think it was obvious since the oil shocks that fossil fuels were not a good bedrock of the economy.
Replies
Well, perhaps, but the time for the followers in the field to push on EV manufacturing capability has been the past 5-10 years. And the US majors are all followers, not leaders. About two years ago they all put out press releases saying "we are not seeing EV sales so we are pulling back on manufacturing" meaning "we couldn't figure it out and are scared so we are abandoning our future."
With the strangle hold that these industries have on getting the government to bail them out, we are in a really bad position on the national level. We have let bad politics and weak management override good economic decision making.
It's interesting to try to work out what the civ-style "dependency tree" of viable electric cars has been. It requires at the bare minimum high energy density light batteries, which were a spinoff of the cellphone revolution. As well as high efficiency digital power control, which while not impossible in 1970 would have been larger and heavier without modern SiC semiconductors.
Solar panels are an even more remarkable example of compounding a thousand different 1% improvements.