FREE PARKING, FREE CHARGING, FREE ROAD TOLL: The UAE, one of the world’s top fossil fuel producers, is embracing battery electric vehicles in earnest.
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ROLLING OUT: In many parts of the world, including the UAE, there’s an explosion in electric vehicles. Most nameplate carmakers, as well as hundreds of new entrants, are piling into the market.
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SPOILT FOR CHOICE: From just a few EV brands, customers are getting spoilt for choice by the day, with nearly every car maker rolling out their battery electric vehicle contenders. Several new electric vehicles hit the road in 2021, with more to come in 2022 and beyond.
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CHEAPER LONG TERM: A Consumer Reports study published recently found the average EV driver will spend 60% less to charge the car, truck or SUV and half as much on repairs and maintenance (with no oil changes needed and significantly less moving parts) when compared with the average owner of an internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle.
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Dubai has unveiled major steps towards greener transport — creating dedicated EV parking spaces (free until July 2022), free Salik (road toll) tag, and free charging (till December 31, 2021) through Dewa’s public EV charging network. EV registration is also free. In other emirates, EV registration is free or reduced.
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TIPPING POINT: Industry experts say that in the near future — perhaps within the next three to five years — most carmakers would offer EVs that are genuinely useful, versatile and at price points customers would find compelling. Many automobile companies are rolling out various models of electric cars in the UAE.
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RUN RATE: Tesla is an early entrant in the UAE EV market, pushing electrification of transport in an oil-rich country. A look into the EVs available in the Emirates now shows the list of carmakers going electric is growing. Not all the existing brands are represented ye. And EVs have usually higher up-front cost, though are known to be more cost-effective in the long run.
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CUSTOMER CONCERNS: Where are the charging points? EVs are too expensive? I can’t wait forever to get badly-needed spare parts. For wanna-be electric vehicle (EV) owners, these are valid concerns, even turn-offs. But it doesn’t mean EVs are useless. No, far from it. They’re signs of the times. The solutions to customers questions/concerns, inevitably, lead to multi-billion-dollar opportunities — and a disruptive way of going from point A to B.
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EARLY ADOPTER: In 2017, Dubai purchased 200 Teslas to expand the city's airport taxi fleet, including some Model X's. Currently the king of EVs, California-based Tesla has started rolling out new Model 3s/Ys from its Shanghai, China “gigafactory". The factory's initial production rate target is 3,000 cars a week, eventually ramping up to 250,000 electric cars per year. The first assembled Model 3s were delivered in December 2019, just twelve months after Tesla began site grading on the Gigafactory in December 2018.
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TAKEOVER? How soon will EVs take over our roads? Estimates vary widely, from the low end to the high end of industry guess-timates. In 2016, only 0.1% of the total vehicles sold were EVs. At the low-end of industry estimates, only 1% of vehicles sold in the world will be EVs by 2040. At the high end of estimates it’s as much as 50%. That’s a huge gap, which reflects an analyst’s bias, instead of real market trends. Estimates are only informed guesses. History, however, is a best teacher. The transition from horses to cars for transport happened in just a few short years.
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DISRUPTION: Experts point to the history of the telephone, which Alexander Graham Bell invented in 1876. In 2007, Apple’s iPhone kicked off a radical transition, leaving non-smart phones to bite the dust. Would EVs then do to internal combustion engines, what the smartphones did to payphones? Even car companies are increasingly that convinced some kind of disruption due to convergence of technologies — batteries, computers, AI — is inevitable. Jaguar plans to sell only electric cars from 2025.
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INTENSE: These two VW models are made in China — for China. The mainland is a huge part of the EV story doing its run across the globe: There are now 486 EV manufacturers registered in China itself, more than triple the number from 2017. Amidst the super-intense competition, many of them may go bust. But here's the upside: The survivor — or survivors — of this ruthless internal competition in China could prove unbeatable on the global stage. It's like how Alibaba survived ruthless e-commerce contest at home, and now slugging it out in the world.
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BATTERY SWEEPSTAKES: Huge investments are being poured into battery research sweepstakes, and a 1,000-km-range EV may be just around the bend. This is not to mention improvements in electronics and chemistry. Battery design life enough to cover 1 million kilometres will also cut the overall ownership cost of EVs.
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NEW NORMAL: Electric (and driverless), maglev trains had pushed diesel or steam-powered trains to obsolescence. The shift from ICE to EV may not happen tomorrow. And it’s true: With EVs, we still have to charge them often to cover long distances. However, today’s EVs with a range of 380km to 600km becoming the “new normal” — and market winner.
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KEY DRIVER: Nearly 220 years since the Italian physicist Alessandro Volta unveiled the “voltaic pile”, the world’s first electric battery (in 1800), batteries have incredibly improved in performance. Capitalism is the key driver: There's a high investor appetite and huge amount of human capital poured into research and development of batteries.
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ATTRACTING ATTENTION: In the last 30 years or so, besides artificial intelligence (AI), no other technology has attracted so much attention from university researchers as much as EVs. Yet these two technologies reinforce each other.
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PATENTS: The numbers are quite mind-boggling: Since the early 1990s, more than 300,000 patents related to batteries had been published. Over 30,900 patents had been granted. Some 6,400 battery-related patents had already expired.
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MOVING THE NEEDLE: The Chinese, Japanese, Koreans and Americans are investing heavily in battery research, development and manufacturing. European regulators and companies, keen to move the needle, have made huge bets on renewables, too. EVs, renewables, high-powered chips, apps, AI and proactive regulations are part of the same ecosystem, and potentially virtuous cycle.
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PACKED WITH SURPRISES: Ford’s electric F-150 Lightning is packed with surprises, with a ridiculously low starting price of $40,000. This “truck for the masses” can power your house for up to 3 days during a blackout. The result, Ford has received at least 44,000 pre-booking for the Lighting, which will initially rollout of the assembly line in 2022.
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CAPABLE: The Hummer EV features GM's brand-new Ultium battery-pack technology and has an estimated 560 km of driving range per charge. The HUMMER EV brings an 800-volt electrical architecture with 350-kilowatt fast-charging capability. This means you could potentially add another 160 km of range with 10 minutes of charging.
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NO CHOICE: About a dozen countries and some 20 cities around the world have either banned or proposed a ban on the future sale of passenger vehicles powered by fossil fuels such as gasoline, LPG and diesel. Toyota, the Japanese carmaker is poised to re-enter the electric vehicle segment with the 2022 bZ4X crossover, which boasts edgy styling that sets it apart from its ICE-power siblings. The production version of the bZ4X is expected to hit Toyota showrooms in mid-2022. Toyota has announced it will have a family of seven bZ models by 2025.
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