4x4van wrote:
Think about something as simple as a flashlight, and the difference between those available 20 years ago vs today. Think about the difference between a rotary dial landline phone of 35 years ago and the smartphone in your pocket today. Think about the difference between a home movie camera/projector of 35 years ago vs the drone mounted HiDef cameras of today.
The pace of technology advancements will make every current argument against an EV RV moot within 20 years. Battery weight, capacity, cost...electric motor efficiency, regenerative technology, charging technology...
Progress is not uniform, and often somewhat unpredictable where breakthroughs will come. Some technologies are mature, at least until someone stumbles on a breakthrough, and have not and likely will not change much at all. The microwave ovens we use today are not all that much different from those of decades ago, and all use the same basic magnetron developed during World War II. New house construction employs pretty much identical techniques and often materials to what was used over 40 years ago to build my house; the biggest difference would likely be in tastes and style, as I don't think brick ranch houses with large roof overhangs are particularly popular at present (however practical they may be).
Flashlights have had only one significant change: the development of white LED technology, which was mainly the result of discovering semiconductor materials with the appropriate properties on the atomic level to emit blue light. (White LEDs are actually blue LEDs with phosphors that absorb some of the blue light and emit other colors. LEDs in themselves are inherently monochromatic.)
Electric motors are not going to double in efficiency, given that good motor designs are already around 90% or so efficient. Battery technology may improve dramatically, or it may have only incremental advances due to better and more efficient manufacturing processes and economies of scale.
Many of the advances cited are largely due to continuing improvements in microelectronics, primarily developing technologies to make smaller and faster transistors and circuits. There are hard limits on how far this will continue, at least without fundamental changes in how they're made, as the sizes are approaching atomic scales today with feature widths that could be measured in a fairly small number of atoms. A lot of research is going into various techniques of 3D circuit design, but there's no great breakthrough on the horizon that I'm aware of.
I don't know what the future holds, of course; and it's quite probable that there will be more electric vehicles around as time goes on since the technology is maturing. That said, I am convinced that it's an error to project that the progress made when a technology is first developing or experiencing a major breakthrough will continue at the same pace forever, and make assumptions based on that. Likewise, it seems many futurists tend to overestimate the rate at which infrastructure changes (cities, charging stations, houses, etc.)...and often underestimate the rate and or direction of societal changes. (It's fun to look at some of the old Popular Science etc. articles about what life would be like fifty years in the future, when everyone lives in domed houses and has flying cars and so forth. One wonders whether they really stopped to consider how practical it would be to tear down and rebuild every house in the nation over the course of a decade or two...or even to see how many of the houses then existing were over fifty years old already.)
