The Electric Car Industry is Melting Down. Again.

A recent trip home allowed for a brief survey of former coworkers, revealing two things: 1) Battery and e-car suppliers are getting smaller and/or facing hardship & 2) None of these companies have any projects lined up for next year. This information, taken in conjunction with the recent blow-ups of Bright, Azure, A123, Fisker... Things are obviously going to shit and by my count this is the third time EVs have failed to blow up. Here's my (current) theory why:

Any new technology left to a natural progression will undergo a predictable "adaptation lifecycle," Assuming of course that the technology in question actually survives to full adaptation. Here's a picture of what it looks like:



I prefer to think of the graph in terms of total market penetration, or the summation line in yellow. The time to adaption may vary (the internet took 15 years but singing fish were there in 6 months) but the curve always looks the same. Note the lower "tipping point" (transition into full adoption) and the upper swing into saturation, for future reference.

The problem is electric cars never had the opportunity to naturally progress through this adaptation curve; The whole market is fuxored because there are too many artificial forces repressing or propping up the technology, so it's impossible to know if they are market viable. Subsidies were used to (in theory) jump start the industry past the gestation tipping point which in fairness, has worked before (GPS, anyone? Okay, that's a little different, but still). But as much as I'd love to see a world of electrics, all that free money leads to shoddy start ups and rushed products. Maybe the cost of key components like batteries, needs to come down beofre the math actually works? Who knows... This early flood leads to the bigger problem, distortion of the overall picture, making it difficult to say "yes the world is ready for electric cars" or "no, we need to make them better than we can sell them."

Of course there's the old argument of "once EVs are being built in the same volume as internal combustion cars, the costs will come WAY down! Volumization can only do so much to drive down prices because lithium is expensive and neodymium magnets for motors are expensive AND being gobbled up by China. These materials DO NOT follow moore's law, unlike the internet. And singing fish. So jump starting the industry can MAYBE expose people to the tech and hopefully cause them to fall in love, but it will not necessasrilly drive the prices into the floor.

So now you're trying to introduce a technology into un-holy and un-natural market conditions, but wait: the electric car is a displacement technology. And the tech it is trying to unseat (gasoline) is the MOST un-holy market of them all. Subsidies, taxes, fuck.... WARS to maintain and control supplies. whether you're for or against them, any forced influences will have ripple effects when you're trying to introduce a competing technology. Remember the GPS analogy? Map makers didn't have the world's largest lobbyist group.

Here's the take away: This noise in the system makes the market picture fuzzy, people make mistakes, companies fail.

A vehicle like the Chevy Volt could be the perfect litmus for the new technology but nothing can be learned because it is a political cluster fuck and half the country would now rather suck a Middle Eastern Cock before they'd touch one of them, thar ObAma-Cars. You think GM had any idea what kind of shit storm they'd land in when they started designing this car A DECADE AGO? YOU want to be the NEXT company to sink a few hunderd million into an EV?

Oh but wait- Now gas is $10/gal... All of a sudden, riding around in your Obama-made, Middle East Cock-suck mobile seems pretty reasonable when it only costs $0.50 to charge it up, right? Ha- just kidding; Gas up the bombers.