The EV dawn is here
Electric vehicles are already over the tipping point, and are our future. And that’ll change our landscapes.

There’s been a lot of doom and gloom in the press around electric vehicles of late. The Telegraph in the UK is a particular culprit here, as part of its general scepticism about many climate measures, especially net-zero. There’s a steady drum beat of a lack of demand, and people worrying about changing how they drive.
Well, Noah Smith is here to tell us that EVs have already won:
The phenomenon of a superior technology displacing an older, inferior technology is not uncommon, and it generally looks like the EV transition is looking now. When a new technology passes a 5% adoption rate, it almost never turns out to be inferior to what came before; with EVs, that threshold has now been reached in dozens of countries.
Charging beats fuelling
This section in particular made me (metaphorically) punch the sky. The charging experience is so different from the refuelling experience, as to be almost incomparable:
With a combustion car, you’ll be going to the gas station about once a week, spending about 8 minutes there each time. With an EV, it’ll take 30-40 minutes at a station to charge your car fully, but you’ll almost never go to a station. You’ll only go when you’re on a road trip or on those very rare days when you need to drive more than 100 miles in a day. So the proper comparison of filling times is “eight minutes every week, or 30-40 minutes on very rare occasions”. The latter is just much more convenient.
I last used a public charger in July. I don’t expect to use one again until December. And, while I’m lucky enough to have off-road parking and my own charger, there are two banks of slow chargers within a minute or so’s walk. 98% of the time, my car is charging while I’m asleep. Fuel stations are much less of a thing once you go electric.
Charging = better business
Oh, and how about the fact that installing chargers boosts nearby businesses?
A recent study in the journal Nature Communications looked at chargers in California and found that, pre-pandemic, businesses saw an average annual boost of $1,500 when at least one of the devices stood nearby. Another paper examined Tesla Supercharger installations nationally and saw they brought a 4 percent increase in visitors to a business. The effect was particularly pronounced if the chargers were within 500 feet, and if it was the first one in the area.
Sure, the shift to EVs is going to change the dynamics of “fuelling”. Many existing petrol stations are too small and in the wrong locations. And the facilities needed to support fast chargers are different: less convenience store and more café.
But then, petrol stations are very different from coaching inns…
India’s EV drought
Meanwhile, in India they can’t churn out EVs fast enough:
In 2022, BluSmart planned to put 100,000 electric cabs on the road by 2025. Last year, the company scaled down its goal to 10,000 EVs by early 2024 — presently, it has around 8,000. BluSmart declined to comment on its EV supply. Experts told Rest of World that there aren’t enough existing manufacturers for electric cabs to keep pace with rising demand. Growth has been slower than anticipated for most electric-cab companies, due to a shortage of vehicles.
The future is here but, as the old saying goes, it isn’t evenly distributed.