The non-Honda traditional automakers are getting dragged, kicking and screaming, into actually providing EV options.

Kia and Hyundai’s E-GMP platform has a few hundred thousand vehicles on US roads. They have had reliability issues on the charging unit, though, so I’m not sure if the newest ones have fixed the problems there. Still, they’re moving a decent volume, and electric represents a big chunk of their overall sales now.

GM saw a huge increase in EV sales in the past few years with a lot of newer models on their main BEV3 platform (including the Honda and Acura EVs). I’m a bit biased against GM generally, but I have no reason to assume that their EVs are somehow worse than their ICE vehicles.

Volkswagen, Volvo, Mercedes, BMW, and some other European manufacturers have been trying to make inroads with EV consumers, with mixed success.

Ford recently acknowledged that its Mustang Mach-E and F-150 Lightning were designed sub-optimally as EVs, with too many unique parts and designs for each model, through their traditional way of doing business through existing supply chains and vendors. Left unsaid in that interview, though, is how much they were held back by dealers trying to jack up prices on EVs or discourage their sale (knowing that they get better service revenue on ICE vehicles).

And even though Toyota has tried a whole bunch of other stuff seemingly to avoid building pure battery EVs, they’re launching all electric models of the Lexus ES and the Highlander and finally getting on board.

I think we’re at a critical point, and current U.S. government policy might be discouraging EVs, but EVs have plenty going for them, even with government hostility. I’m hopeful we can see gasoline consumption drop in the U.S. over the next few years.

A gravity storage system that stores about 100 MWh and outputs about 25 MW is much, much larger than the 65 battery containers they’d replace. It stores basically 4 hours worth of energy in what appears to be a large steel and concrete structure 150 m tall (the equivalent height as a 30-40 story building) on a 100m x 100m footprint.

If we’re talking about storing a terawatt hour, then we’d be talking about about 10,000 of these gravity storage systems needing to be built. That’s what I mean by existing technology not really meeting the scale requirements of the problem.

Gravity storage systems all basically suffer from this problem. Water-based solutions need to be sited on favorable geography to have large scale (otherwise water itself isn’t dense enough to compete with concrete and stone and sand).

Meanwhile, storing the same 100 MWh of energy in containerized lithium batteries would basically require a 4x6 stack of 40-foot shipping containers that each can store 4MWh.

We can get there on storage, but we’re talking about decades of planning and implementation, across all technologies, before we can even credibly reach storage representing one whole day’s electricity usage. How many man hours of labor does that engineering and planning and building represent? How much steel, energy, and machinery would these projects use up?

Anyone who talks about this stuff without recognizing the scale involved is basically not serious about solving it. It’s an engineering problem that exists independently of money (and it’s also a money problem, but that part will probably pay for itself because of how valuable a solution to this problem would be).

We have the storage technologies, the only thing missing is money.

When discussing large public projects whose scale is larger than anything before seen, the money is mainly an accounting placeholder for the real resources that need to be expended.

Grid scale storage has been expanding at an exponential pace, but the sheer magnitude of the materials and engineering work that needs to be done to make a dent is pretty huge.

Bloomberg projects that total cumulative installed capacity should hit 2 Terawatt hours by 2035, noting that would represent 8x the number for 2025. But when you compare those numbers to just how much electricity is produced or consumed, with 22,000 TWh per year, we’re talking about demand periods measured in minutes, not even hours, much less days.

At scales large enough to make enough of a dent to show up in global energy stats, we need to recognize that even infinite money would run into the real resource constraints of how much capacity we as a species have for pulling minerals out of the ground, processing them into useful materials, and engineering them to be useful energy storage solutions (whether pumped hydro or other gravitational systems, compressed air, flywheels, or whatever battery or fuel cell chemistries can store energy in an efficient way).

We have some technologies, but need things to improve significantly before storage can actually meet the needs for power that meets demand at any given moment in time. In the meantime, matching supply and demand in real time is a true engineering challenge, not just a monetary challenge.

Supreme Court struck down tariffs enacted by the President under one particular law, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which Trump used to add tariffs to almost everything coming in from every country.

There are longstanding tariffs that are authorized by other laws, on specific countries like China, or on specific goods like lumber or steel or vehicles or semiconductors, unaffected by the Supreme Court ruling.