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In the suburbs of Tokyo, free charging stations are starting to spring up. Full charge in 30 minutes. Last I heard, the plan was to roll out 50,000 stations across Japan in a few years. Also, we are transitioning to smart meters and you can choose pricing plans so charging at home is 10 cents a kwh at night.
Tesla has rolled out enough free charging stations that you could drive from Florida to New York to Los Angeles to Seattle for free already. What is surprising is that the number of charging stations then goes ballistic in 2014 and it is nearly complete in 2015.
See the last four maps.
http://www.treehugger.com/cars/tesla...s-usa-too.html
However, almost all trips are local and under 100 miles, so I don't know if this is such an important point. After all, if you had an electric car with a 100 mile range, that would do for 99% of your trips, and if you really wanted to go from Tokyo to Hiroshima, you would rent a gasoline car, take the train, or fly. Gasoline is $6 plus a gallon in Japan, so filling up a 15 gallon tank would cost about $100, whereas charging at one of the stations would be free, or if the battery holds 25 kwh, even if you did it yourself at home, at night, it would $2.50 to drive 100 miles.
My understanding is that GM used to make money in three ways: providing car loans, selling spare parts, and selling the car, in that order. The killer for their first electric car, the EV1, was that the spare part sales would be very low. Clearly someone was losing money or would lose money if the transition were made to electric cars, so sabotage.
Once autonomous driving share electric cars roll out, that will be it for most cab drivers. (There are already gasoline car sharing companies here where you pay a flat fee of a couple of hundred dollars and can take a rental car several times a month.) Electric autonomous cars can also do deliveries. The local supermarket is starting a spend $30 and they will deliver anywhere within 5 miles with a driver. Imagine how much cheaper and easier that would be with an autonomous electric car.
So, the end point for this, which I expect by 2020, is autonomous electric cars with superb anticollision features (I rode a Subaru, and the $2,000 autobraking is absolutely stunning... it is essentially impossible to crash the car into anything), much lower accident rate, much cheaper operation, much cheaper insurance, you can order one to come to your home at a specific time, it will take you to your destination, and then leave, so no time spent looking for parking and much less need for parking (parking lots can then be converted to buildings or something useful) you will pay a couple of hundred bucks per month for say 20 round trips, which will cover going to and from your house to the station or to wherever, walking distance to the station will be much less of an issue, so the premium for housing close to the station will go down (more deflation), and this could even make traveling to and from the suburbs practical again (not that suburbs are necessarily a good thing). This is a reason I think the estimates of public transportation use, such as for the train now being built in Honolulu, vastly underestimate the ridership. They had better make the stations really long for when they have to double the length of the train. Just ask the Japanese train engineers: retrofitting is a bitch and is unbelievably expensive.
My cousin just bought two Nissan Leafs for $150 a month each, no interest on the loan, and he is happy he can charge them for free.
One other thing about electric cars: they have a substantial amount of electricity that could be used to run a household, etc. If an electric car holds 25 kwh, it could run my apartment for several days. After the big quake in 2011, people with electric cars took them to hospitals and let the staff use the electricity. It was a way of moving electricity from where the grid still worked to where it didnt. Municipalities are now looking at electric buses not just from the point of view of cost, but also from the point of view of the buses being able to supply electricity in emergencies. This will be massively deflationary. It is already here.
Hmm, from posts below, people dont seem to believe autonomous cars work. They already exist and work fine. There are just regulatory matters to work out, which will take years. There are autonomous planes that are already in trials for FedEx etc. If you have landed in the fog in Denver, the plane was completely landed by computer. Next come the autonomous trucks. Will there be accidents? Of course. But much fewer than with humans doing it.
Where will the electricity come from? Japan already cut its electricity use 30% over the last 5 years, with no end in sight. LEDs use 90% less electricity, and all the incandescents are going. My office replaced computers, office equipment, and lighting, and cut electricity use by 80% with no change in standard of living. It was simple and didnt really cost anything since the computers were old and had to be replaced anyway, and the building is 35 years old and the lighting would have to be rewired soon anyway. They did all 10 floors, so that is like a drop of 2,000 kwh per day for the building, about what 200 standard houses would consume here. And the retrofitting is accelerating in Tokyo. All highly deflationary. Now the cool roofs (white titanium dioxide) are catching on. JR trains are all being replaced with regenerative braking trains that use half the electricity. Things keep getting better and better here, and no, it is not reflected in the GDP.
Tesla has rolled out enough free charging stations that you could drive from Florida to New York to Los Angeles to Seattle for free already. What is surprising is that the number of charging stations then goes ballistic in 2014 and it is nearly complete in 2015.
See the last four maps.
http://www.treehugger.com/cars/tesla...s-usa-too.html
However, almost all trips are local and under 100 miles, so I don't know if this is such an important point. After all, if you had an electric car with a 100 mile range, that would do for 99% of your trips, and if you really wanted to go from Tokyo to Hiroshima, you would rent a gasoline car, take the train, or fly. Gasoline is $6 plus a gallon in Japan, so filling up a 15 gallon tank would cost about $100, whereas charging at one of the stations would be free, or if the battery holds 25 kwh, even if you did it yourself at home, at night, it would $2.50 to drive 100 miles.
My understanding is that GM used to make money in three ways: providing car loans, selling spare parts, and selling the car, in that order. The killer for their first electric car, the EV1, was that the spare part sales would be very low. Clearly someone was losing money or would lose money if the transition were made to electric cars, so sabotage.
Once autonomous driving share electric cars roll out, that will be it for most cab drivers. (There are already gasoline car sharing companies here where you pay a flat fee of a couple of hundred dollars and can take a rental car several times a month.) Electric autonomous cars can also do deliveries. The local supermarket is starting a spend $30 and they will deliver anywhere within 5 miles with a driver. Imagine how much cheaper and easier that would be with an autonomous electric car.
So, the end point for this, which I expect by 2020, is autonomous electric cars with superb anticollision features (I rode a Subaru, and the $2,000 autobraking is absolutely stunning... it is essentially impossible to crash the car into anything), much lower accident rate, much cheaper operation, much cheaper insurance, you can order one to come to your home at a specific time, it will take you to your destination, and then leave, so no time spent looking for parking and much less need for parking (parking lots can then be converted to buildings or something useful) you will pay a couple of hundred bucks per month for say 20 round trips, which will cover going to and from your house to the station or to wherever, walking distance to the station will be much less of an issue, so the premium for housing close to the station will go down (more deflation), and this could even make traveling to and from the suburbs practical again (not that suburbs are necessarily a good thing). This is a reason I think the estimates of public transportation use, such as for the train now being built in Honolulu, vastly underestimate the ridership. They had better make the stations really long for when they have to double the length of the train. Just ask the Japanese train engineers: retrofitting is a bitch and is unbelievably expensive.
My cousin just bought two Nissan Leafs for $150 a month each, no interest on the loan, and he is happy he can charge them for free.
One other thing about electric cars: they have a substantial amount of electricity that could be used to run a household, etc. If an electric car holds 25 kwh, it could run my apartment for several days. After the big quake in 2011, people with electric cars took them to hospitals and let the staff use the electricity. It was a way of moving electricity from where the grid still worked to where it didnt. Municipalities are now looking at electric buses not just from the point of view of cost, but also from the point of view of the buses being able to supply electricity in emergencies. This will be massively deflationary. It is already here.
Hmm, from posts below, people dont seem to believe autonomous cars work. They already exist and work fine. There are just regulatory matters to work out, which will take years. There are autonomous planes that are already in trials for FedEx etc. If you have landed in the fog in Denver, the plane was completely landed by computer. Next come the autonomous trucks. Will there be accidents? Of course. But much fewer than with humans doing it.
Where will the electricity come from? Japan already cut its electricity use 30% over the last 5 years, with no end in sight. LEDs use 90% less electricity, and all the incandescents are going. My office replaced computers, office equipment, and lighting, and cut electricity use by 80% with no change in standard of living. It was simple and didnt really cost anything since the computers were old and had to be replaced anyway, and the building is 35 years old and the lighting would have to be rewired soon anyway. They did all 10 floors, so that is like a drop of 2,000 kwh per day for the building, about what 200 standard houses would consume here. And the retrofitting is accelerating in Tokyo. All highly deflationary. Now the cool roofs (white titanium dioxide) are catching on. JR trains are all being replaced with regenerative braking trains that use half the electricity. Things keep getting better and better here, and no, it is not reflected in the GDP.
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