You actually can’t ‘just all retool the factories’. The mining of certain materials, notably copper, becomes a limiting factor.
To produce the worlds 100,000,000 motor vehicles per annum (given a generous assumption of 50kg of copper per electric vehicle) would require 5 million additional tons per year, a 20-25% increase over current figures. Meanwhile the cost of refining increases exponentially with decreasing ore grade.
Sure not every manufacturer would go out of buisness, but the industry would absolutely collapse.
Sounds like a supply problem with copper. I read a couple weeks ago about some progress with salt based batteries. Progress is being made on that front. Progress that would be exponentially faster if the manufacturer’s wanted to.
Regardless of the materials issue, the industry could adapt. There’s oodles of money to make significant change, and of course they would if they had to in order to continue making money at all. Just like any industry that experiences challenges. Fracking was once considered far too expensive. Then they figured out how to guide drills beneath the surface and what do you know, now it’s mainstream.
Ideally, if this were to occur, the industry would realize what you’ve pointed out and simply reboot all the small hatchbacks and wagons they used to make, as a method of stretching the amount of minerals we have over a longer period of time.
Blue sky thinking but maybe the governments of the world would realize the mineral issue, and instead of allowing 100 million cars to be manufactured each year, they took those minerals and created a transportation network with them that would render personal vehicles irrelevant.
You actually can’t ‘just all retool the factories’. The mining of certain materials, notably copper, becomes a limiting factor. To produce the worlds 100,000,000 motor vehicles per annum (given a generous assumption of 50kg of copper per electric vehicle) would require 5 million additional tons per year, a 20-25% increase over current figures. Meanwhile the cost of refining increases exponentially with decreasing ore grade.
Sure not every manufacturer would go out of buisness, but the industry would absolutely collapse.
Sounds like a supply problem with copper. I read a couple weeks ago about some progress with salt based batteries. Progress is being made on that front. Progress that would be exponentially faster if the manufacturer’s wanted to.
Regardless of the materials issue, the industry could adapt. There’s oodles of money to make significant change, and of course they would if they had to in order to continue making money at all. Just like any industry that experiences challenges. Fracking was once considered far too expensive. Then they figured out how to guide drills beneath the surface and what do you know, now it’s mainstream.
Ideally, if this were to occur, the industry would realize what you’ve pointed out and simply reboot all the small hatchbacks and wagons they used to make, as a method of stretching the amount of minerals we have over a longer period of time.
Blue sky thinking but maybe the governments of the world would realize the mineral issue, and instead of allowing 100 million cars to be manufactured each year, they took those minerals and created a transportation network with them that would render personal vehicles irrelevant.
I don’t see that happening in my lifetime though.