One thing to bear in mind is that cheaper fuel (ie, electricity) can change the economies. To contrive a simple example, if electricity is 1/4 the cost of gasoline, you can afford to field three smaller vehicles to carry the same load and still make more money. Perhaps a fleet of physically smaller, more efficient vehicles means more point to last mile shipments and fewer point to point to last mile shipments. Maybe instead of huge batteries, fuel companies build a network of battery-swapping facilities and we build trucks that can go 4 hours per pack and then get swapped, ensuring drivers have breaks and such along the way. Electric trucks don't have to be a plug & play replacement, they give us the opportunity to rethink the entire model.Originally Posted by balki
Battery construction will also change, and financial restrictions that face car builders needing to put together $35,000 passenger vehicles may not affect people building million dollar semis, or affect them in different ways - different packages, different materials. Different chemistries may also come into play - ten years ago, the Tesla Roadseter relied on lead acid batteries, but these days everything has switched to lithium ion. Maybe in another ten years we'll be able to scale out lithium polymer.
There are a lot of pieces in motion, a lot of money pushing these technologies. Certainly unlikely everything is going to change suddenly, but twenty years is a long time in technology.
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