Well, they have boosted the range fourfold so that is a good start.

You want to bet against progress?

Incremental increases are progress.

You can bet against progress, I won’t!

Jovial Monk wrote on Aug 23^rd, 2017 at 12:35pm:



Oh dear. JM thinks every body lives within 400km of the city, so every home can have one.

Volkswagen launched its I.D. concept car, which is set for production in 2020 and will have an electric range of at least 400 kilometers. Herbert Diess, head of the VW brand, described the car as “revolutionary,” comparing its impact on the brand’s history to the Beetle or the Golf. This followed an earlier announcement that the VW Group aspires to get a quarter of its sales from electric by 2025 and is planning 20 models.

Mercedes launched an equivalent Generation EQ concept car that will become a new sub-brand with at least 10 plug-in models. Dieter Zetsche, its CEO, announced: “We’re now flipping the switch … ready for the launch of an electric product offensive that will cover all vehicle segments, from the compact to the luxury class.”

In other announcements, Opel unveiled the Ampera-e (a European clone of the Chevrolet Bolt); and Renault and BMW detailed upgrades of the Zoe and i3 respectively, with Renault commenting: “Our vision of the electric market is that it is not a niche market.”

• The rapid growth in EV sales in China, which is now the world’s biggest market and dominated by national manufacturers. Non-Chinese carmakers are desperate to succeed in this expanding market and terrified their Chinese competitors, like BYD, will soon be successfully exporting to Europe;

• The astonishing fall in the price of battery packs to around $150 per kilowatt hour, a level which makes EVs competitive with conventional vehicles. Also, it is possible to produce affordable EVs with ranges of over the psychologically important 300 kilometer range;
The success of the Paris climate talks is driving a progressive tightening of car CO2 emissions limits around the world, inevitably leading to a gradual phase out of fossil fuels. This has been hastened by the dieselgate scandal and the realization that the rest of the world will not be tricked into using diesel as a way to artificially reduce CO2 emissions as Europe did;

• The remarkable pre-sales of the new Tesla Model 3 — a car for which 400,000 drivers put down $1,000 each without even sitting in it. Suddenly even German premium carmakers recognized that a true market exists that they needed to supply it.

Dutch politicians have voted through a motion calling on the country to ban sales of new petrol and diesel cars starting in 2025.

The motion has only passed through the lower house of the Netherlands’ parliament, and would need to pass through the Dutch senate to become legally binding. But its success in a majority vote puts the earliest date yet on just when a major country might begin phasing out polluting transportation.

Initially, the motion – proposed by the Labour Party (PvdA), the junior member of the Netherlands’ coalition government – aimed to ban petrol and diesel cars entirely, but it was dialled back. As it stands, the proposal would allow existing cars to stay in use, but would “strive to prevent” the sales of any future ones, ensuring that Dutch roads gradually electrify over the next decade or so.

But the motion was opposed by the Labour Party’s coalition partners, the centre-right VVD, whose leader, Halbe Zijlstra, called the plan “unrealistic”, according to a report from the Dutch state broadcaster NOS. Zijlstra was particularly concerned about whether or not the proposed law would conflict with the country’s energy agreement, which commits the Netherlands to certain decarbonisation targets by 2020.

The leader of the PvdA, Diederik Samsom, says that the proposal would be feasible – and that the energy agreement wouldn’t conflict with it. “That agreement runs until 2023, we are free in what we do after that. We are ambitious, perhaps other parties are less so”, he said.

Electric car sales in the Netherlands currently stand at just under 10%.

A recent thinktank report suggests that 10 years after that a third of all the vehicles sold in the world will be electric.

New electric cars must travel further and need less time to recover from their journeys than those that can be bought today, when long journeys are still fraught with anxiety. This means lighter batteries that hold more charge and can be charged more quickly; they are appearing already and the huge amounts of global investment make it likely that progress will continue and technology will supply what the market needs.

Looks like major improvement to battery technology will happen sooner rather than later.