tokipin

These articles always miss the most important point. People are buying EVs because they're better. That's the whole point of Tesla making attractive vehicles, aesthetically and functionally. That market pull allows for an S-curve in the technology, since it reduces market risk for investing in each increase in scale.

This is a completely different scenario than what the article suggests, which is that EVs are some kind of medicine for climate change that society is trying to have discipline about. Not so. It's a life or death situation for the auto industry, they don't have a choice. They either join the race or die. This makes most concerns about the transition irrelevant. For example, laws banning gasoline cars by 2035 are as useful as laws banning flip phones by 2015 would have been.

This is somewhat along the lines of my current theory, which is that night owls vs early birds is about sensitivity to the environment. The reason night owls stay up late is not because it's late, but because it becomes quiet enough that the environment they're sensitive to stops taking attention and they can direct that attention inward. According to this theory, it would make sense for introverts to be more affected by this as they would accumulate an "introversion deficit" throughout the day.

That's roughly my thinking on Toyota's strategy if we give them the benefit of the doubt. They want to own a larger piece of the ICE pie as it shrinks. This is a great strategy. What they might not appreciate is that the oil pie will also shrink and that both of these industries will have increasing costs across their entire supply chains as volumes diminish. Their vehicles will suffer for both ICE tech and gasoline propulsion and be completely outcompeted on cost and convenience. This will happen over a much shorter time frame than they expect.

Green solutions are part of the continuing decentralization through technology and will be just as popular in developing countries as in first world countries. One practical example of this is that green tech can be financed in bite-sized chunks, compared to the large commitments needed for power plants.