By Bradd Libby
We are coming up on the eighth anniversary of RethinkX’s report ‘Rethinking Transportation 2020-2030: The Disruption of Transportation and the Collapse of the Internal-Combustion Vehicle and Oil Industries’, so I thought it would be a good time to revisit some of the myths, some of the “fear, uncertainty, and doubt” (or “FUD”), that those who are dubious about electric vehicles and autonomous vehicles have ridden right into the ground over the past years.
While eight years might not be a lot in the cosmic scale, it's an eternity when it comes to electric vehicles (EVs), the lithium-ion batteries that power them, and the artificial intelligence systems that are driving (literally!) autonomous cars and trucks.
In honor of eight years of ‘Rethinking Transportation’, here are ‘8 Myths about EVs that were common to repeat a few years ago, but for which now is the time for them to be sent to the scrapyard’.
When Tony Seba and James Arbib were writing ‘Rethinking Transportation’ ten years ago, there was really no such thing as a cheap, good EV. The smart Fortwo had a manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP) of about $28,000 for only about 70 miles of range. The Mitsubishi i-MiEV cost $23,000 for 62 miles of range (about 100 km).
These cars were cheap, but not good. (Honestly, there are electric bicycles today with longer range.)
In 2016, the longest-range EV on the market was the Tesla Model S P100D, with an MSRP of an eye-watering $134,500. These cars were good, but not cheap. (In fact, in 2013, Motor Trend had designated the Model S its ‘Ultimate Car of the Year’, choosing one vehicle from the magazine’s 70-year-history to be the best of their ‘Car of the Year’ winners.)
But now, just a few years later, electric passenger cars have gone from being expensive or disappointing, to being affordable and practical.
This graph shows the 200-mile equivalent cost of every make and model of fully battery-powered EV in the US since 2010. The lowest-cost vehicle in every year is marked with a tomato-colored dot. Tony’s original prediction estimate from his 2014 book ‘Clean Disruption’ is shown as a solid blue line.
(For more about the methodology, see here, under ‘Transportation’)
The decrease in cost (for the given level of performance) has been staggering. The purchase price of electric vehicles in the US is now on-par with internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles. And, after purchase, the maintenance costs of EVs is a fraction of the costs for ICEs.
And that is just the US. In the past few years we have seen on the Chinese market a XPeng P7 for a price of about $36,000 for just over 300 miles of range, the BYD Han EV for about $33,000, the Geely Geometry E Firefly and Baojun Yunduo in the $13,000 dollar range, and the BYD Seagull for less than $9000. All of these vehicles are rated at 200 miles of range or more.
In 2017, when ‘Rethinking Transportation’ was published, there were only about thirty models of electric cars on the market in the US, and only half of those had more than 200 miles (320 km) of range. (All were Tesla variants, except for the Chevrolet Bolt EV.)
As of 2024, there were 125 models on sale in the US and more than 98% had more than 200 miles of range. In China there is even a $9000 version of the Huonguang Mini EV with nearly 200 miles of range. In 2014, Tony Seba, RethinkX co-founder predicted that a 2023 vehicle with that performance would cost $15,616 - a difference of $125, or less than 1%...
The simple fact is: before ‘Rethinking Transportation’ was published and before that, when Clean Disruption was published, it was difficult to find an affordable car with sufficient range for most families. Today, nearly every EV on the market can do 200 miles or more per charge.
Not only has the range of typical electric cars increased, the number of fast-charging stations has increased dramatically too. The phrase “range anxiety” has largely disappeared from the conversation about BEVs and this myth should, too.
The dramatic cost declines in electric vehicles and their rapid performance increases have been driven largely by the decrease in cost and increase in performance of lithium-ion batteries.
This type of battery was originally developed for use in consumer electronics like laptops, phones, and digital cameras. Unfortunately, they also contain materials like nickel, cobalt, manganese, and lithium that were in limited supply at the time, or whose production had serious negative repercussions, like the use of child labor.
But as the market for electric vehicles has grown exponentially, so have the offerings by battery manufacturers. When ‘Rethinking Transportation’ was published, consumer electronics were the largest market for lithium-ion batteries. But now, electric vehicles are the largest market and so battery manufacturers have responded by offering products more-suited to that market.
For example, lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries “made up just 6 percent of the market in 2020, they’ve now jumped to roughly 30 percent.” LFP batteries do not contain nickel, manganese, or cobalt. One result is that cobalt is now trading at 20+ year price lows.
And lithium is not in short supply either.
We are producing more than ever - ten times more than two decades ago. We are finding more than ever too.
Unlike oil, which is used once before it needs to be replaced, battery materials are stockpiles, not flows. Batteries can be used many thousands of times before they need to be recycled, at which point they can be used many thousands of more times. So we can stop recycling the myth that electric vehicle are constrained by the supply of nickel, cobalt, lithium or similar materials.
Batteries do not create electric power, they only store it. So, electric vehicles can ultimately only be as ‘clean’ as their power source. As a result, it was common just a few years ago to remark that electric-powered cars were really coal-powered.
But, just as battery and vehicle technology have changed quickly, so too has national scale electricity production around the world.
As recently as 2004, half of the electricity produced in the US came from coal. By 2014, when ‘Clean Disruption’ was published, that figure had dropped to about 40%. By 2017, when ‘Rethinking Transportation’ was published, it was just under 30%. And by 2023, less than 16%.
In the UK, the disruption has been even more dramatic. From 2000 to 2015, British electric power derived from coal averaged about 30%. (In the 1980s and early 1990s, it was more than 60%). Today, ten years later, it is zero. Literally zero. The last coal-fired power plant in Great Britain closed in late 2024, ending nearly a century-and-a-half of coal-fired electric power production in the UK.
Similar trends have been seen in many countries—from Canada, to Australia,
to Spain and more. In Norway, which is the world’s number-one EV market by market share, more than 95% of new car sales have been battery-electric so far in 2025. There, the electric grid is powered almost entirely by hydropower and wind, and has been for decades.
When ‘Rethinking Transportation’ was published, autonomous taxi services were science fiction. Today, they are reality.
Waymo, a service founded by Alphabet (Google’s parent company), has recently said that they are booking 200,000 paid trips per week in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Phoenix combined. In China, Baidu reported 1.1 million paid rides in Q4 of 2024, an average of about 100,000 rides per week.
It is not just full-sized vehicles for human passengers that are operating autonomous services. Nuro is rapidly expanding its service area and Starship Technologies has launched a grocery delivery service.
‘Robotaxis for burritos’ can eliminate the need for many car trips and, like taxis for people, these services are already on the road. Perhaps it was OK a few years ago to doubt to that fully autonomous vehicles were possible, but now that we are seeing them roll around the roads, repeating the myth that autonomous driving does not work should come to a full stop.
If you have been following the development of autonomous vehicles, it is easy to call to mind some tragic events that have occurred in recent years. Examples include the March 2018 accident in Tempe, Arizona, where an autonomous Uber vehicle undergoing driver assisted testing struck and killed a pedestrian crossing a road, or the October 2023 incident in San Francisco, where a Cruise self-driving vehicle ran over an dragged a pedestrian who had just been struck by another, human-driven car. (Both Uber and Cruise, a division of GM, have since shut down their autonomous vehicle efforts.)
Any new technology, especially ones related to transportation, carry an elevated safety risk in their earliest years of operation. But as the technology develops, safety improves.
According to Waymo, a study by the insurer Swiss Re showed that Waymo’s Driver software has “demonstrated better safety performance when compared to human driven vehicles, with an 88% reduction in property damage claims and 92% reduction in bodily injury claims” across 25.3 million miles of driving. (Tesla has made similar claims about their vehicles.) More than one million people are killed worldwide each year in traffic accidents, so anything that has the ability to reduce that number even by a fraction could have a staggering effect on safety.
Individual incidents, no matter how tragic or memorable, do not outweigh hard evidence, and the evidence is showing that autonomous vehicles have been safer than human-driven ones, and are getting safer still.
As the myths of autonomous, electric taxis have successively aged into irrelevance, critics have turned to increasingly desperate and dubious new claims.
‘Rethinking Transportation’ estimated that the cost of operating an autonomous, electric taxi to be $0.16 per mile (about $0.10 per km), eventually falling to about $0.10 per mile (6 cents/km). We are already seeing similar numbers in operating robotaxi services.
But in the years after ‘Rethinking Transportation’ was published, various articles claimed that ‘Turning autonomous cars into profit won’t be easy’ or that the ‘Robotaxi revolution has one significant flaw: Cost.’
The argument that taking the cost of a taxi driver out of a vehicle and removing most of the fuel and maintenance costs by using electric vehicles will somehow result in a high cost of operation was only achieved by the mental gymnastics of assuming that robotaxis will require expensive taxi licenses, have very high insurance costs, and high costs of human back-up monitors, none of which have come to fruition.
Finally, relying on the myths that electric vehicles are expensive, the materials to make them are limited, and other forms of wishful thinking, critics of robotaxis have convinced themselves that electric and autonomous vehicles cannot revolutionize personal transport and goods transport in any reasonable timeframe.
Reality has proven otherwise.
In Norway, where I live, the personal new car market was more than 75% diesel-powered in 2011. Just thirteen years later in 2024 (the last year for which there is complete data), the market was 87% battery-electric vehicles, playing out in an S-shaped curve that we have seen time and time again with new technologies of all kinds.
All indications from the rapid recent growth rate of Waymo and Baidu’s services, as well as a projected upcoming launch of Tesla’s Cybercab- based service scheduled to start in Austin, Texas, are that the portion of vehicle-miles served by AEVs is following the same pattern RethinkX has seen time and time again across many domains.
A lot can change in just a decade or so. The state of the autonomous, electric vehicle market has changed dramatically in just the past few years - Your opinions about it should have too.
