> if electric utilities were to pay $15,000 per battery, the battery alone in a 10-year-old Tesla would retain more value than an entire vehicle powered by an internal combustion engine (ICE).
a) why would a utility pay that much ($2.2/cell) for a bunch of heavily-used 18650s when you can buy lightly-used 18650s on eBay today cheaper?
b) if you look up used 2007 Mercedes S550 for sale in the US, you'll see plenty that sell for $15k+.
battery degradation is proportional to energy x time. if you need 3x more to push all that weight, is it is dead 3x earlier.
it's just like how you waste breaks 3x faster breaking a cayenne instead of a sedan.
If there's 18 kWh of the 24 kWh left, that's just $222/kWh. That would be a fantastic battery system for an off the grid home.
Pity, because I quite like the styling. They're nowhere near that cheap in the UK (ebay has exactly one, at £11,000) while Leaves are widely available.
Depreciation seems to be brutal for electric cars, and not just for the battery. It's more like the mobile phone market in the early 2010s: every year brings new features and is noticeably better.
For $4k it's an absolute steal for a daily commuter car. It made me realize that driving could be a fun activity.
Good point. However, this also means that utilities are going to adopt renewables a lot more since storage will be getting cheaper.
One might imagine a machine to rapidly tear the cells out of car battery packs, automatically test each cell, and then reassemble the rest into a new utility level pack.
It might turn out to be better to just grind the whole lot up in a fire suppressing environment, extract the lithium metal, and remake the cells from scratch though.
Things like double digit subsidies and grants for eco-* stuffs in China and EU distort the picture.
What it means is that biggest Chinese EV makers with big enough GR-office can get cells for 20% of what is a wholesale price for Western buyer.
Chinese complain that 2kw/h battery packs for scooters cost $400 retail. They probably don't know how much they cost in US.
The current situation is that EV resale prices for everything but Teslas are plunging like a rock. Three year old Fiat 500e's are selling at auction for $4k, which is already less than the author's purported resale value of their batteries at 10 years.