Hi everyone! Sorry for taking 5 months to post another edition of #RbPi.
To be honest, it felt very wrong to chirp here about the EV revolution, while in Gaza unarmed demonstrators were being mowed down by soldiers like I used to be, with the entire Western world caring approximately zero minus about this atrocity it's enabling, and with me too paralyzed to write anything about Israel-Palestine for a long time.
Well now I wrote something, will likely write more, and feel a bit more entitled to write about EVs again. And I should do EVs, because I know I've been making a difference on that, while on I-P I don't feel I've made any difference in years.
That aside, I want to stay in this post at a bird's eye level view, away from recent news tidbits, and address the question why EV adoption hasn't yet skyrocketed and invaded the mainstream - outside of a few enclaves (Norway, Iceland, Major Chinese cities, US West Coast cities).
I am fairly optimistic it will happen sooner or later, partly because West Coast cities set global consumer trends, and Chinese cities set global industrial production trends - and partly because most of the world's leading economies now take climate change very seriously. Don't get me wrong: EV sales *are* increasing rather fast (globally through July, almost +70% over 2017) . But the growth pattern in the US has become very odd and potentially problematic (see below). And believe it or not, we need EV adoption to accelerate even faster, and to start toppling the oil economy so that we won’t have to deal with nonsense like Keystone XL.
Why isn't it happening sooner?