GRA said:
Last month I mentioned a section of the November C&D titled "Battleground 2025: The Fight for the Future of the Car", which contained a variety of articles by C&D's gearheads, and which I promised to provide links too when they were online. Here they are:
Thanks, Guy! I read this one:
GRA said:
"What Replaces Gasoline" [BEVs and H2]: http://blog.caranddriver.com/what-replaces-gasoline-hydrogen-may-be-winning-the-zero-emissions-battle/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
What struck me, more than ever before, is not just that CA is wasting a fortune building hydrogen refueling stations, but that the carmakers which have no desire to build BEVs are gaming the system to ensure that they never have to. It was put clearly in the following (partially-incorrect) statement:
Car and Driver said:
Which is why, at present, no carmaker (other than Tesla) wants to sell one more electric than it absolutely has to.
It seems the writer cannot see beyond Tesla and does not realize that Nissan also intends to dominate the BEV space. But with that correction, the statement *may* be close to being correct.
So, the question is: Where does this all leave BEVs and FCVs? Here's my take:
FCVs: For companies which would prefer to just make the minimum number of compliance cars and never actually deliver to the real vision of CARB, it's clear that CA has left the barn door wide open with the new H2 rules. The fact is, for a limited-production vehicle, the real cost is not in the manufacturing, but in the design, tooling, testing and certification. To comply at the lowest possible cost, you need to build the smallest number of vehicles, regardless of the cost of the vehicle. And CARB has reduced the impact of their mandates and increased the costs to the taxpayers with their new rules. No, Toyota, Hyundai and Honda are not "backing" FCVs, they are simply gaming CARB and therefore ensuring that the smallest number of ZEVs hit the streets this decade.
BEVs: It seems clear that the upcoming rules from CARB will effectively minimize the number of ZEVs on the road. Since FCVs will continue to cost multiples of ICEs and BEVs for at least a decade, there will not be a push by any manufacturers to build them in quantities. As a result, there will also be no incentives for private industry to operate refueling stations. Those will simply be govenment-paid and operated by compliance-car-manufacturer-owned companies designed to collect the govenment handouts. What this means is that these companies will NOT be making any BEVs. This is likely terrific news for both Nissan and Tesla, but terrible news for both the environment and the consumer. It seems like both companies got in at the time when the BEV credits were sufficient to help them ramp up their volumes. As many of the other manufacturers bow out of the BEV market under the new rules, they should be able to continue on their paths and dominate the BEV markets if they can execute on their plans.
Simply put, CARB has bifurcated the market between those companies which will back BEVs and those who will back FCVs (and will deliver the minimum govenment-mandated quantities of ZEVs to the market). Only the BEV-focused companies will be ramping up the production of ther ZEV vehicles and begin to make a dent in ICE and hybrid sales.
Overall, it seems that by trying to enable a second technology to enter the ZEV market, CARB really has ensured there will be *drastically* fewer ZEVs on the roads than if they had let the market sort out the technology. Personally, I think CARB is really missing their mandate by doing so. It's a shame, since they are doing this at just the time when they were finally starting to fulfill their original mandate.
Oh, and to answer the question in the title: "What replaces gasoline?" The answer is still electricity for BEVs. No amount of government regulations can change the physics of what the optimum solution is. They can only distort things for so long. We'll see if FCVs will eventually win out for some fleet applications where BEVs are currently having trouble competing. But gasoline will be allowed to reign for a while longer while CARB fiddles with hydrogen.
