> ICE -> EV is not a 30 year transition

> I’d be surprised if there’s a consequential ICE industry after 2040

It started in the 00s, really took off around 2010.

And don't forget that 2040 is in 14 years. You can buy plenty of brand new ICE cars today, the majority of them will definitely still be around in 14 years.

I agree with you, for the mass consumer car market (individual/family transport) as a whole. It's coming fast. However, the current EV technology (mostly batteries + charging) is not a good fit for a whole lot of edge cases, and in the aggregate they matter, too, and thus the ICE engine industry won't really go away anytime soon:

* General-purpose Semis for commercial hauling. Yes, there's some EV Semis on the road today - pilot projects, or specific routes on specific schedules. But there's a lot of general purpose semi-hauling that happens every day on odd/long routes without sufficient chargers in the right places, and they need much bigger chargers. And then there's the specialty semis that carry large/wide loads. I see them almost every day in my area, carrying large chunks of power substations, heavy manufacturing equipment, blades for wind turbines, etc.

* Fire trucks, Ambulances, Tow trucks, Police cars - For various similar reasons, it's tricky with some of these, although in well-constrained cases and with extra vehicles on tap as backup (when the other one is low on charge in an emergency), maybe can kinda work, eventually.

* "Personal" trucks that see heavy towing/hauling use (think: hauling a livestock trailer or farm equipment or heavy materials (or maybe an EV race car!), possibly long distances on a regular basis). The battery range really suffers when you put all the extra weight and drag on by towing, and people aren't willing to turn what was a 5 hour diesel trip into a 9 hour trip with supercharger stops (more time in the heat with animals, more time on the road in general, and do you have to disconnect the trailer just to reach the charge cable?)

* Backup generator ICE engines - home, datacenter, industrial use, etc. The problem here is mostly runtime and peak watts of output vs cost. You can use a battery-based solution for most of these cases, but it currently costs prohibitively more for the same performance specs. When they're being used in austere environments, sometimes there's no electric grid to even charge from, so slap on a massive solar array cost, too.

* All military use of ICE engines in general (transport, generators, etc) - Not insignificant in scope and scale, and obviously they're not going to run EVs or find chargers on battlefields.

These cases will diminish over time, especially as we continue to make advances in charging and especially battery technology, but it will probably take a few decades because there's science challenges, not just engineering ones. The military case might never go away.

I’d argue that garbage trucks, snow plows and fire engines are candidates for EVs. They are large and heavy with plenty of space for batteries. Typically used in predefined routes, traveling less than 100 miles per day.

I would gladly vote for a bond to fund electric trash trucks if that resulted in quieter weekly trash service.

I meant more like bog standard 1500-5500 sized trucks and vans. Depending upon the actual fine details of the use case it's gonna be hard to make the math math.

Your local DPW with a lot of money for new over spec'd trucks, friendly permitting office approving their permit for charging infra, strict 9-5, etc might make it pencil out for their facility maintenance. But a landscaper who's engaged in fundamentally the same work but out of rented space, a landlord that won't get preferential treatment on the install of charging infra, won't qualify for the same fleet discount, works way harder than 9-5, etc, etc. might not make it pencil out.

Local delivery can potentially make great use of EVs, but if you turn up the operational tempo or the range and have drivers slip seating or really racking up the miles it can be a non-starter vs just buying the same thing in non-ev. And of course the fixed infrastructure cost questions still apply.

You might get hybrids but you also have to remember weight matters in a lot of these applications. Can't be rolling around over weight as part of normal business. And a lot of these applications are trying to stay under 10k while still having as much cargo capacity as possible.