Isn't this just the corporation circle of life?<p>Hot new company appears. It offers great value and undercuts the old guard. As they grow in market share their rate of growth starts to slow as do their investor returns. They start to focus on locking people into their ecosystem with integrations instead of acquisitions. Then once it's hard to leave, they jack up the price. The captive audience has to keep paying despite diminishing, but non-zero, value to them. Eventually prices become too much and they are undercut by the next startup a generation later. The cycle continues.<p>Tesla will lock up most of the supercharger market, become indispensable and then eventually charge like it. See also cloud and streaming services.<p>I wish companies could be happy to reach a stable equilibrium where profits and prices are both steady but that doesn't seem to be possible under the growth model.
> <i>When the EPA devised MPGe in the early 2000s, the government agency calculated that 33.7 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity is comparable to a gallon of fuel in terms of its energy content.</i><p>This (or some other) baseline should be used. A $/gallon price should be displayed per this figure, for electricity, in all signage & at the pump.<p>I think there deserve to be a lot of super pissed off angry electric car drivers, who rightfully see & understand they are paying an equivalent of like $8/gallon for gas. Electricity costs should be on par per dollar with energy delivery costs of gas. But we accept shitty infrastructure & dont even realize how sickeningly maddeningly cheap car drivers are handed energy. Absolutely uncool, unacceptable.
What kind of article is that? A summary of a few Reddit and Twitter posts, almost seems like it's been autogenerated. A human journalist would maybe have thought of including the info by how much fuel costs for combustion engines have increased over the same period.
I keep seeing parallels with razors and razor-blades.<p>As well as with heroin and the heroin-dealers: "The first hit is always free."<p>Once you have that electric car, you have no choice but to use electricity, no matter what the current rate for it happens to be. (Ditto for petrol and diesel, of course.)
The distribution utility infrastructure in the US will need to double its capacity in order to service just a 40% EV penetration rate. That will increase electricity costs substantially. Perhaps the transition has not been very well thought out.