Back in 2018 I wrote this article and never published it. I still think, that innovation S-Curves are one of the best examples of how a great visual representation can make a very complex topic a lot easier to understand. I hope you like it.
There is a pretty heated discussion going on about whether E-mobility is the right path for a cleaner, more sustainable transportation sector. To cut it short. Yes, I think so and here is why.
In contrast to a lot of other posts, I am going to look at the question from an innovation perspective.
Innovation Life Cycles
Many technological innovations share a common life cycle. They start with the Ferment phase, then reach a takeoff phase and finally reach a maturity phase. This pattern can be described in an S-curve, also known as the technology lifecycle. This observation was futher expanded to innovations by harvard professor Clayton Christensen in the mid 90's, who also wrote the excelent book the Innovators Dilemma, which explains why successful companies who don't innovate eventually fail.
When I first saw a picture of these innovation S-curves in a diagram, it completely changed my understanding of technologic progression, because it is so simple to grasp and accurate at the same time.
From Tube TVs to LED Smart TVs
Take any example you like. E.g. TVs. At first we had black and white tube TVs getting better and better performance like color tv or teletext and then introducing flat screens, which in the beginning were pretty expensive and not better than a modern tube TV. But as time goes by flat screen TVs rapidly increased its perfomance replacing nerly all tube TVs within a few years. Nowadays, flat screens are far more superior than tube TVs ever could have been. This underlines the importance of embracing these technological discontinuities.
Traditional cars vs electric cars
Let's get back to the mobility sector. If you look at both technologies, electric cars and gasonline cars, you can easily tell where on the S-curve both competing technologies are located right now.
Internal combustion engines have been optimized for more than 100 years and have undoubtedly reshaped our world like no other technology. But thruth be told, it is pretty hard to further optimize these engines. The gains in perfomance are getting smaller and smaller while the effort is getting bigger and bigger. We are hitting a physical limit. This is the classic maturity phase of a technology.
Electric motors for cars, on the other hand, are still quite new for commercial vehicles. We are at the beginning of their S-curve, just before a steep increase in performance. But to enable this increase in performance, large investments have to be allocated today to further develop this technology. That is why it is so dangerous to just ignore electric cars and stick to convential internal combustion engines. Even if conventional cars might be superiors to electric cars at the moment. If we postpone investments, we delay the replacement of an old, complicated technology and it will take even longer for electric cars to catch up to conventional cars.
This does not mean, that we should allocate all available ressources on electric cars. There are many more promising technologies which are all able to reshape the future of mobility. But still investing large amount of money into the development of combustion engines is just not worth the marginal gains in perfomance.
In my opinion, the initial question of this whole discussion is simply wrong. Comparing modern gasoline cars to electric cars at this point in time is just an unfair comparison and does not take into account the future potential of both technologies. The real question would be, when will electric cars be superior to conventional cars?
It doesn't matter whether you're an internal combustion engine enthusiast or a fan of electric cars. What really matters is that we invest now in technologies that are at the beginning of their development cycle to increase the chances of bringing mobility to a more sustainable level as soon as possible.
One step further...
Predicting the future is equivalent to playing roulette, because there are simply too many variables that can change over time. However, if you look at one drawback of our current transportation system, you realize that a big part of it is infrastructure costs. For every car you build, you have to build roads, traffic lights, gas stations, etc. A more efficient system would not need all of that infrastructure. That's why I predict that EAVs (electric airial vehicles) will be the next technological advance after electric cars, because of their massive advantages in infrastructure costs. If you look even closer, you'll see that EAVs and electric cars share many of the same technological challenges. The biggest ones being regulations, charging time and energy density. Solving these challenges for electric cars will translate these innovations to EAVs, making them much more capable and attractive for commercial use. Besides these logical innovation steps, the idea that I can fly over my hometown at any time is just pretty cool.
I hope you enjoyed this article. Let me know in the comments, what you think about technologic S-Curves and my bold prediction.