I think in 2008, it wasn't clear whether cars are going to be replaced by electric and what the final efficiency will be. It could also have been more because you would need to convert electricity to fuel first.

So I think as a conservative estimate, it kinda works.

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ZeroGravitas 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Cost would depend on battery manufacturing but the original founders of Tesla created spreadsheets of well-to-wheel efficiency based on available data in 2002 and knew that electric came out as an obvious winner and so commited to starting the company based on that.

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kragen 7 hours ago | parent [-]

A lot of companies started in 02002 based on spreadsheets of available data went bankrupt due to the available data being wrong, or due to things not included in the available data at all. A quick check of Wikipedia turns up:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MStar (patent infringement, the remains bought by MediaTek)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Flash_Brewing_Company (succumbed to competition from local craft breweries, lender foreclosed, the remains bought by private equity)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primaris_Airlines (bankrupt in 02008, unclear why)

And those are cherry-picked from companies that got big enough to be "notable" by Wikipedia's guidelines. Far more companies never reach that level.

The conservative estimate is that any time someone tries to deploy a new technology, it will fail. Most innovations (new technologies or companies) do.

Take a look at the HN front page from 10 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2016-09-28 There we see Uber's self-driving truck initiative Otto (an acquisition), deep learning startup Skymind, a new static Linux distro called Stali, and a bunch of things that weren't innovations. All three of those things failed; Stali hasn't been updated since 02019. LuaTeX, Coinbase, Linux, Wikipedia, and dyeing with indigo are other innovations that feature on that page, but they were already very old.

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ZeroGravitas 6 hours ago | parent [-]

It doesn't change the physics though. I think the author under discussion actually gets this right in some chapters with regard to the superior efficiency of EVs, though not sure if that was a later revision or not.

	▲	kragen 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That's true! What was holding up EVs 18 years ago, or for that matter 18000 years ago, was not physics, but the humans' ability to efficiently make things such as batteries and high-efficiency electric motors. Chapter 21 of draft 2.9.3 from 02008 https://web.archive.org/web/20080906132444/http://www.infere... begins: > In the last chapter, we learned that electrification could shrink transport’s energy consumption to one fifth of its current levels; and that public transport and cycling can be about 40 times more energy-efficient than car-driving. How about heating? What sort of energy-savings can technology or lifestyle-change offer? and it goes on to talk about heat pumps, as today. So I think that even versions from 02008 got this right, though evidently that was at least the 13th numbered draft.