On the other hand using improvement over the same timeline, drawing a line on a graph and saying "look how X Y is gonna be in Z years" is the same exact type of stupid but pointed in a different direction.
In 1991 lithium was highly immature technology and would take about a decade to make it into fragile electronics. It took another decade to make it into power tools. Now it's viable in high end commuter vehicles. If it was easy to predict the future a decade out with any reliability we wouldn't be having this discussion.
But the issue is that, _even at the time of the statement_, the price has been decreasing over time! It's falsifiable at the time of the statement! You don't need to see the future to dismantle that argument.
Inversely, costs have gone down over time for a long time. You could make the inference that there's a floor, of course, and it's reasonable to do so! But it's hard to disprove the claim that prices will keep on going down.
The former is just on its face wrong based on the current facts, the latter is a judgement call about the future. Totally different beasts, and driven from different things.
I agree that it's generally more likely that a 15-year trend will continue than change. If we're talking about a year, that is. But 5 years? 15 years? 100 years? 1000 years? At some point, the general assumption changes.
But without trend data, I also agree that assuming price stability a better general assumption than assuming a major price drop. Historically, very few things keep getting cheaper. It requires a) large society willing to keep making R&D investments, and b) a technological domain with a lot of possible ways to keep lowering costs.
And what I mostly agree with is the proverb, "It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future."
At some point, there's going to be a price floor that the research, materials supply and competition simply won't break through.
Guessing when that is going to happen is more luck than anything. I do not see it continuing to get exponentially cheaper for long, though.
LiFePho has removed most of the precious metals out of the equation, and the demand for electric cars will continue to compete against the growth in demand for battery storage for renewables. For an analogy, lumber prices have shot through the roof over the past few years where I live due to construction booms. Nothing about the technology has changed, and supply hasn't fluctuated greatly. These same pressures are going to be pushing against lithium batteries getting exponentially cheaper over the next few years. I don't doubt that they will find room to bring prices down, but there is a floor out there somewhere close by.
Electric airplanes could carry these for takeoff and maybe jettison at a preplanned location for recycling.
Regardless, 1 year isn't the correct duration for a bet. People average owning a car for ~6 years, and the average lifespan is something like 12 years.
But depending on terms, I might take a year-over-year bet for battery prices. Demand is high and the pandemic has caused significant supply chain problems. They could well have gone up this year. And indeed, a quick look at news reports suggests key components, including lithium and cobalt, are surging in price. Fine examples of why assuming a historical average has future meaning can get you into trouble.
Meanwhile LiFePO4 batteries, which are currently the most popular chemistry(at least in China), contain no cobalt whatsoever.
Lithium prices have gone down in the last few years, and Cobalt isn’t a necessary component.
A first-order approximation leaves a lot to be desired, but it's better than a zeroth-order approximation.
If you're coming up to the end of a logistic ("S") curve, then assuming a linear growth (or worse, a fixed rate of increase each year, ie exponential growth) is much worse of an assumption than assuming zero change, if you extrapolate too far.
On the other hand, if you are not interested in making long run predictions but only short run predictions, then first order approximations will tend to be more accurate in a small region around the base, but that region might be quite small.
Technology follows an S curve. First it increases slowly, then faster, then more slowly again. It's silly to assume mature technologies will keep getting better at the same rate and silly to assume immature technologies won't get better. Without specifying the technology, one assumption isn't really sillier than the other - physical limits are unintuitive.
Put nearly any electrical device in a box, anything from a television to a cement mixer, and it will raise the temperature of the air in that box by exactly the same amount as the watts it draws from the power source. A 500w television puts out exactly as much heat as a 500w heater.
Analogously, if electricity is carried with the flow of charge - electrons - around a circuit[1], when you extract 100% of the energy as heat, the electrons stop moving and build up in the heater. So you can take the rest of the wiring away because it's doing nothing and save 50% of your costs. Then, a buildup of charge makes a voltage, and a voltage potential difference can drive a current. Therefore you can get 100% of the power out as heat, save half your money on wiring, and use the growing potential difference to power something else. Electricity makes no sense whatsoever.
OK, so that's troll-physics nonsense, but does extracting all the "energy" stop the electrons moving? If not, why not, what energy isn't being extracted? If so, why doesn't that stop current flowing - isn't "free electrons" part of what makes something a conductor of electricity?
[1] though the energy is carried in the e/m field around the surface, somehow
When factoring in the shape of the exponential decreases in costs, and that penetration of most of these technologies is at or before the inflection point (between 5%-15% market penetration), it is more likely that the cost declines will ACCELERATE moving forward rather than slow down.
Why has it felt that laptops and PCs haven’t progressed as much in the 2010s as in the 1990s or 2000s? Because in 1995, there was not a computer on every desk in every home. But now not only is the market saturated with laptops and PCs, people are walking around with mini internet connected “super computers” everywhere they go.
Unfortunately, even a very small amount of noise in the data makes is basically impossible to know where you are in an S-curve.
Much safer to make predictions based on the far more limited good news that PV+battery is already cheaper than coal for electricity or ICE for cars.
Hmm… question for anyone who knows: with current tech, how much would it cost to develop a significant PV-powered electrolysis-and-Sabatier-process plant in any of the big coastal deserts, for exporting methane?
What are you thinking about as the carbon source? If coal, then this has been commercially viable for decades. In North Dakota there is a 1.5 gigawatt installation running since 1984. That one uses electricity from coal power IIUC, but today PV is cheaper than coal for electricity.
If you are talking about CO2 from direct air capture, the optimistic cost estimates of your CO2 feedstock are around $600/tonne. 1 tonne of CO2 gives ~137 kg of methane at 100% reaction yield, due to the molar weight ratio of CO2 to CH4.
So per tonne of methane produced, the CO2 cost alone is above $4000. For comparison a tonne of natural gas in the US today costs between $500 and $1000 for the end user.
This means that CO2 capture from air needs to become two orders of magnitude cheaper than today before this scheme works out.
I would say hydrogen electrolysis and then liquefaction for large scale distribution/export is way more realistic. This is what the EU seems to be going for together with Northern Africa.
> 1 tonne of CO2 gives ~137 kg of methane at 100% reaction yield, due to the molar weight ratio of CO2 to CH4.
I think it’s more like 363 kg given the ratio of molar weights: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=co2%20molar%20weight%2F...
(Looks like an extra factor of two, but I can’t figure out why, everything I play with in WolframAlpha is a factor of two in the wrong direction)
While true, my point is that when combined with the fact that we are pre-inflection point, and the economics now stand on their own (renewables, Electric Vehcile TCO and various Energy Storage applications being already cheapest, competitive or very close too) it is not unreasonable when mapping out the 5-15 year future to bet on an acceleration of cost declines over a deceleration. Particularly because the actual driver of unit cost declines (Wrights Law/Moore's Law) is the doubling / magnitude of units manufactured and put through the system, for which with all the factories being ramped up and planned - point to the positive in my view on it.
Regarding your PV-powered and electrolysis-Sabatier (electrofuel) methane, I think there are two important considerations. In order for methane (or other e-fuels like hydrogen or longer chain hydrocarbons) to be made economically, the capital cost of the equipment needs to be utilized as close to 100% of the time as possible. We already know that PV excess will be centered around the daytime peak (5-7 hours per day) meaning that there would also need to be plenty of excess wind to balance this out to get anywhere close to 100% utilization of the excess energy. Until the electricity grids get sufficiently saturated with renewables broadly, most e-fuel applications will continue to not be competitive, particularly as things like energy storage applications (possibly run off an e-fuel) are likely to be economical prior there being an opportunity for the export of excess e-fuels. That's more at the a end of the S-Curve as far as I can tell.
The main argument for hydrogen AFAICT is that it can be exported overseas or stored for inter-seasonal use.
Batteries can't do that, as 1) when compared to literal rocket fuel, they're impractically heavy to put on a cargo ship for bulk transport, and 2) batteries trickle-discharge so after a month or two the battery will be flat.
I barely remember the process from school, something like this rings a bell: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalytic_reforming
Because computer development is driven by network upload bandwidth. And maximum network upload bandwidth has been stagnant for almost 15 years.
And vast network upload bandwidth increases are quite technically possible--but has been politically damped rather than adoption curve damped.
The input variable is the cumulative number of units, and of course we can’t be exact about the trajectory of that number, but we can infer from X MWh manufactured -> $/MWh.
And yet we do it every ~18 months with semiconductors.
Imperfect to be sure, but if you don’t skate to where the puck is headed, you will miss opportunity.
So, this is about to stop. Very soon. Quantum tunneling, yield rates, etc are all starting to be cost prohibitive.
<10nm stuff was already delayed. There's plans for 3nm. It's unclear yet whether 2nm will work.
Even if hypothetically it does, there's a very real limit - an atom is only 10x smaller than 2nm.
No improvement trend goes on forever. But why is this the moment lithium ion hits the wall? It’s like trying to call the end of a bull market.
The biggest problem is lithography. ASML managed unexpectedly for many in the industry including Intel to solve technological problems with extreme ultraviolet sources, but shrinking transistors significantly further requires soft x-rays and the perspectives of that now for mass lithography are much more uncertain than for EUV ten years ago.
People have been saying that for over 10 years though. "Very soon" keeps being punted off by another 5 years every 5 years.
And outside of data centers, single-thread performance is still king.
Performance per watt has improved, but that's not a metric the typical end user cares much about.
And performance per watt absolutely is important. People care a lot about battery life of their laptops and phones and that's strongly dependent on performance per watt.
Since that number is purely theoretical, we can construct a theoretical scenario in which its theoretical nature would become absolutely obvious. Take a 7nm process node transistor and stack it 100 times. Such a process would be called a 0.07nm process.
That's certainly a real limit, but what is it a limit on? It is not obvious from first principles that it takes n atoms to implement n transistors.
On the other, yes: continue current trends and single atom transistors become standard in 10-32 years.
A jump from "all past predictions failed" to "and so will all future predictions" seems rather bold to me. In the end it's like a somewhat upended variation of the "x decades to practical fusion" thing where we all hope that the old joke that x might be a natural constant is eventually proven wrong.
Improvements still happen, but not always in the same way. If you implemented an application in 2003 assuming we'd have such a processor you'd be very disappointed. Counting on exponential improvements to continue is risky bet.
Yes this isn't single-threaded performance, but I think we should keep in mind that exponential improvement in price/performance over many decades is possible, if never certain.
Sources - https://www.alternatewars.com/BBOW/Computing/Computing_Power... - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M1
While it might be the case that today’s EVs will not be economically longer-lived than 15 years, the overall average age of a car in the US is 12 years, and most of my cars have been bought with 10 or more years on them as it makes for very inexpensive motoring (no need for collision or comprehensive insurance, no financing interest, and nearly no depreciation).
I bought my 2015 LEAF new and suspect it will not be economically viable in 2030 while our 2005 Honda CR-V is 16 years old now, still going strong, and most likely will still be in service in 2030.
However, battery prices are going drop further. Your Leaf has a 24kWh pack. At the current $100/kwh price, thats $2400 for a completely new battery. In the future I'm sure you could get an even higher capacity replacement.
Rapidgate was a thing, the battery heated up when driving, you stop to recharge -> battery heats up even more -> overheat -> limiters engage and you're charging at hand crank levels of power.
In comparison, a tesla could charge to 80%, never drain to below 20%, and charge weekly instead of daily.
But you need to maintain it and have it inspected instead!
And you're also paying with your safety - ten years is a very long time in safety technology these days!
At 4K miles per year (my average pre-COVID), if my risk is average, I’d expect to be in a fatal accident slightly less than once every 22K years. I’m OK without the latest driver aids at that low level of risk.
According to most studies EVs are more eco-friendly after around 50-100k miles depending on each individual country's energy production profile.
At 4k miles per year you'd need to drive a brand new EV for over 12 years to break even CO2 wise.
Driver aid, ok. But passive safety?
I’d probably be much better off to take less stress at work over car payments and/or lose 5 pounds on an all-risks basis.
Note: things like collision avoidance and adaptive cruise are still luxury features and the OG poster wouldn’t have bought those anyway.
I just went from a 2009 Land Rover to a 2020 Land Rover, so almost exactly 10 years, and one of the the main reasons I did it was safety features. They weren't standard on my model before and they are now. It's night and day.
I think passive safety of modern cars has significantly improved too - they periodically up the ante on what it takes to get full scores in EuroNCAP for instance (2). A "top rating" car from 10 years ago would probably now be scarily-bad compared to the latest requirements that new models ace.
What leaves me even more fumbled is how easily RWD Tesla’s spin out and crash with regen and snow. Take the gas pedal of and you’re going off roading. With normal car you’d struggle to even trigger ESC, let alone loose it.
Where did you get this info from? This is contrary from everything that I've heard from my local Tesla owners group. To the point that they don't even have to swap to snow tires during winter.
Some video examples:
[1] https://youtu.be/v_bfRm5hGN4?t=203
There’s more than one and obviously we don’t know the state of tyres, but even with bald ones seems any car with ESC should handle such manoeuvre...
"271 fatalities and over eight hundred injuries in the United States with more injuries and fatalities occurring internationally" and would have been detected by a TPMS which costs a few dollars.
The number one complain has been the powertrain. I know the automatic transmission is the weak spot in most vehicles, but I have heard of complete failures before 100k.
Could you give your evaluation of the vehicle?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Australian_SOTG_patrol_Oc...
Australian, not American.
And I've literally seen it for myself, and I just also linked a photo of them doing it!
I'm not Australian!
I wouldn't own anything else to be honest. I've always driven one, and I also work professionally with a fleet of them and I don't have any problems at all. My last personal one never needed any work at all over ten years. Even if they were unreliable, if it's the kind of form factor you're after I don't think anything really challenges them on the market.
I think they're also a uniquely egalitarian vehicle - if you see someone driving a Land Rover it could be a farmer, a teenager in their first car, a parent doing the school run, an Army unit on exercise, a professional footballer, literally the Queen, or anything in between. You can drive the same car to the rubbish dump and to Royal Ascot and it looks completely appropriate in both cases! I don't think there's any other vehicle even remotely like that.
https://www.subaru.com/engineering/safety.html https://www.nissanusa.com/shopping-tools/build-price?models=...
It's kinda sorta doable by yourself, but it's a HVDC circuit so you _really_ need to know what you're doing.
Actual brand-name shops are slowly able to replace individual failed cell packs instead of just swapping the whole battery.
The big problem is that batteries aren't really failing and because of that the manufacturers don't really have a process in place for replacements, each operation is a custom job.
Those are pretty wide error bars, last time I looked at used Leaf's they were selling for somewhere in that range. Admittedly first gen leafs with the 24KWh battery.
Why not? There are already companies who specialize in replacing early-model LEAF batteries with new, higher-capacity ones. By 2030, I imagine this could be a pretty widespread industry - perhaps even rebuilding/remanufacturing OEM battery packs with new cells.
And so long as the battery still works, that LEAF will always be "economically viable" because unlike combustion vehicles, there are practically no ongoing maintenance costs.
If you want to spend $5K on a car in 2030, you’ll have way better options than a 75 mile range, 6kW charging (20-24 miles per hour) 2015 LEAF (CHAdeMO will be fully dead by then and most 2015 LEAFs don't even have it.)
No doubt you’ll be able to buy great $5k combustion cars in 2030, but ongoing fuel and maintenance means their true cost is a lot more than that! And in some parts of the world, increasingly stringent emissions controls mean that combustion cars become more expensive, or even illegal, to drive in cities.
You’re right about CHAdeMO, but anyone buying a 75 mile EV isn’t going to care too much about fast charging anyway. And by 2030, someone may have come up with a retrofit and/or adapter to make old LEAFs compatible with CCS?
I do all the maintenance on our cars (ex- tires, body, and warranty/recalls). The LEAF has already had one battery repair under warranty (at around 17K miles, out of service for several weeks and likely a $2K+ repair at future independent rates-was 2 techs for most of a day plus pages of special sealants and consumables)
Other than that it has needed wipers and windshield fluid and that’s it. If that pattern keeps up, they’re still headed to the scrapyard en masse, I think.
10 years of R&D on batteries by some of the biggest corporations in the world should provide some new innovations.
The only point I have left that I have to agree with, and that's a huge one, is recycling.
Our governments across the planet have failed to enforce sustainable recycling pipelines in the plastics industry, how would this be any different?
Why is my laptop battery useless after a year and has only 60% power capacity?
How is this even legal that warranty for batteries is 6 months?
I think that in order to make more sustainable battery tech, we need better recycling pipelines for it. And more important: all the plastics, chips, and pcbs needed around it need to be 100% recycled, not upcycled. And manufacturs reusing only 10% of their materials aren't worth a shit.
The ironic thing today is that a simple plumbum/acid based battery is more sustainable than a lithium ion one. It's energy density, however, is a joke. But it never gets useless, and is maintainable, and, more importantly, doesn't lose energy density over time so it's ideal for buildings that have a longer lifetime than a car.
Anyone got any cons?
But that's the problem.
The cost of solar and batteries is declining rapidly. For how long? We don't know. Exponential curves eventually flatten out. We had Dennard scaling until we didn't.
So the question is, do they get cheap enough before they hit the wall?
We have two choices. Choice one, build new nuclear plants, and then if alternatives are even cheaper, we pay the current/historical price for electricity for a while instead of some lower price (or the investors in the nuclear plants lose money, take your pick). This also gives us new nuclear plants to use to destroy all the stupid plutonium created by old nuclear plants, even if it costs more, and we really do have to get rid of that stuff.
Choice two, we don't, and bet everything that the alternatives get cheap enough before we hit the wall. In which case we're completely screwed if we bet wrong, because it takes a long time to build new nuclear plants, so if we don't start now by then it'll be too late.
This is another reason to do both. Use nuclear for baseload and you remove all the storage you would need for solar to work overnight. Meanwhile demand is higher during the day when solar is generating, so still use that there. It reduces the amount of storage you need from the entire night to just the high demand period between sunset and when people go to bed.
> All we need is political will to implement the change.
You only need political will for subsidies.[1] You only need subsidies if it's not actually cheaper.
[1] Or regulatory approval, but let's not bind everything in red tape all around, shall we?
If it is cheaper then people just do it on their own without any government involvement.
If you instead use renewables, batteries, and power-to-gas you can also reach net-zero emissions without waiting twenty years until you have enough nuclear plants. Renewables and batteries are already cheap enough to compete with fossil fuels, and provide enough stability to reach a high percentage of the energy demand. 50% renewables is doable with hardly any storage at all. Power-to-gas can provide the storage needed for seasonal variations, but there are still cost problems with that.
Imo the lack of political will for the energy transformation mostly takes the form of unpriced externalities for fossil fuels. There still is no carbon price that is even close to the actual damages. Damages from the extraction of fossil fuels are not paid for by the companies either. Coal plants still emit tons of Mercury without paying for it. Aviation fuel is essentially untaxed. The list goes on and on.
That's what baseload is.
> Renewables sometimes produce pretty close to 0 energy.
Which is why they need storage, and storage is expensive. If you do half nuclear and half renewables, you only need half as much storage.
Less than half, because you can use pricing to shift demand.
Suppose you have 50 GW of nominal demand, but solar generation is at 10% of normal because it's overcast. You can get demand down to 40GW through price incentives. If you had 50 GW of solar which is down to 5 GW, you would need to cover 35 GW from storage. If you had 25 GW of solar which is down to 2.5 GW, and 25 GW of nuclear, you only have to cover 12.5 GW from storage. Less than half as much.
Baseload, is really minimal load in the grid. There are many ways to produce the minimal amount. Real difficult part is to provide the max load demand on the grid.
Basically current nuclear technology is inflexible in economic terms (also quite a bit in practical terms), shown historically by most grid storage being deployed when nuclear was being built out.
And for extra points, this phases out oil and coal faster. 1TWh of solar replaces 1TWh of coal, but 1TWh of solar and 1TWh of nuclear replaces 2TWh of coal.
Is this normal where you live (presumably the US)? I find that really wasteful. Cars last twice that in my country, and we have tropical, seaside (salt = rust) weather to deal with.
So I'd say a lot of this depends on the model, and possibly the make.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/28/25percent-of-cars-in-us-are-...
Like, take something you might not be interested in and just "don't get". Your conclusions will be very quick but based on the current state of things.
The people that "do get it" might be crazy, or they might be seeing a longer trend that they've been following so long that they never articulated it, and aren't even capable of articulating it.
How is one supposed to form opinions on new topics where the state rapidly changes?
You can rapidly filter a lot of noise out of energy news with knowledge of physics and chemistry from 100-level university courses (or equivalent) [1]. But most people never acquired this knowledge and a lot of those who have only retained it long enough to pass tests in school. 10 years later they don't remember the difference between power and energy or why some chemical reactions are exothermic and others endothermic.
[1] This knowledge is actually helpful to filter news in general when it makes assertions about the physical world.
Well, you don't see poor people buying EVs that much. That's car manufacturer statistics, which I believe deserves a good degree of trust.
In the market for new cars, poor people buy cheapest IC cars, but not cheapest EVs.
I will take the point that middle class is now buying budget EVs, but you don't have real economy class EVs selling that well in the West, and in China as well.
Wuling Mini EV will classify as a true economy class EV, but what people lauding it don't say it that Chinese IC vehicles in the same price range outsell Mini EV many, many times over.
You don't see poor people buying new cars that much. Which for now is pretty much the same thing as not buying EVs, since almost all EVs on the road are relatively new.
That's starting to change here in Norway. There's a decent amount of used EVs entering the second-hand market. And if you can deal with the short range it's definitely preferable to buy one, since they're way more reliable than on older used ICE.
The other things helping people buy cheaper EVs here is that it's easier to deal with the shorter range since you have fast charging stations everywhere now.
So what needs to improve is: - More used EVs (just have to get middle class people to buy more EVs and wait 5-10 years) - Better charging infrastructure (again, get the middle class to buy EVs to help fund the build-out) - Cheaper EV batteries (again, just get whoever can to buy more EVs, to fund R&D and drive economies of scale)
That's why it's so damaging when countries make EV incentives with caps. Just make it a percentage of the price (or cut all taxes) and don't worry about the benefits going to rich people buying luxury EVs. Increase income taxes on the rich instead if that's a problem. This is like the one case where trickle-down economics kind of work, since buying expensive EVs now makes future EVs and charging stations cheaper.
And I think cheap BEVs will be a HUGE benefit to poor people in the future, since it saves on gas and maintenance costs in the long term.
The may be a lot of people who have the time, inclination, space, and access to tools to do a conversion but are blocked by the cost barrier. That probably includes at least some poor people. Mostly I'm thinking of young college-age people who might not necessarily be experiencing poverty but also don't have any significant wealth either. Maybe they live with their parents and are having trouble finding work.
I'd like to see EV conversions have the same level of subsidy as OEM cars; that could make it a worthwhile and cost-effective endeavor for a lot of people. It could also provide jobs for local mechanics, for customers who don't want to do the work of converting the vehicle themselves. There are a lot of gas-powered cars on the road. They aren't all worth converting, but some of them are. It seems a waste to replace them all rather than convert the ones worth converting.
I suspect that if I ever convert my Highlander to an EV (which is something I'd like to investigate should its current drivetrain eventually give up the ghost), it'll likely entail needing to remove the transmission entirely (and maybe replace it with a fixed gearbox of some sort?). And given that it's AWD, that complicates things further, since there are very few AWD/4WD EV conversions.
That said, if there are solutions to this problem, and said solutions prove viable, then this makes EV conversion a lucrative business, and opens it up to most cars on American roads.
Converting something with a manual is probably easier than an automatic (especially if there's some software controlling when to shift the automatic based on some engine sensors which aren't there anymore), but there's no fundamental reason why you couldn't just keep the transmission even in an automatic. Especially if bolting a motor on where the engine was is far simpler than re-engineering half the drive train. (You might be able to get rid of or disable the torque converter, though.)
At this point I think the biggest roadblocks to EV conversion are cost and availability of parts so you don't have to design and build everything from scratch. And I think subsidizing conversions would help with both of these. If there's a big enough market, you might even get reasonably priced kits (possibly from the original vehicle manufacturer) that has everything you need including battery boxes and can be installed by someone who's done it before in less than a week.
(Battery boxes are usually the most difficult and time consuming part of a conversion, since they're usually constructed in an ad-hoc way to fit whatever battery you're using into wherever they would fit. Having something that's actually engineered and possibly even crash tested would be great.)
I’ve been wondering whether the opposite is true. We might find the cost of replacing the battery puts a floor on the price of old EV’s. I wouldn’t be surprised if we are coming to the end of bangernomics.
Even if the battery does die, I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot of secondhand batteries with half a million Ks of mileage put up relatively cheap. You don't need to go straight to brand-new.
I believe the same, if you race for the lowest cost possible, eventually an EV will be cheaper than the cheapest IC powered car for those exact reasons.
... But as I said above. Wuling MiniEV costs like $5500, which is cheaper than low-end Chinese petrol, or diesel engined sedans priced at $7000-$8000, but is still massively, massively outsold by IC cars in its price bracket despite China's massive subsidies for EVs, and quite draconian curbs on IC powered cars.
200 miles (on the EPA cycle) really is the minimum for a pure electric car IMHO. 250 miles, really. Otherwise it looks like less of a value than an IC car.
Economy of scale is a thing, and imo it's OK to use the rich and the wealthy as 'guinea pigs' of sorts (which mostly is voluntary as the wealthy are more likely to make riskier bets on new tech than people living paycheck-to-paycheck).
As EV market extends downwards on the economic 'pecking order,' I'm really hoping even more drastic cost reduction and lower barriers of entry into the EV market for folks that are not rich.
Even in Europe there are plenty of countries where many people can't afford an EV. They can afford second-hand ICE cars. So unless there can be a second-hand market of EVs for about 6K without worrying about the battery, and with a similar functionality of a second-hand ICE car, then yes, EVs will be for upper income brackets.
And I'm not even mentioning that most people lives in apartment buildings, and it's very likely that your car sleeps in the street.
I've seen this discussions around here. People won't buy EVs in the near future because they are expensive, have very low range, you have to have a house, or own a flat (because nobody will pay for a charger installation in a rented flat) with garage, etc.
What people is buying is little electric Scooters. Most of them are <500€ and you can charge em everywhere. It makes sense for travelling inside a city. Spending 20K for not being able to go from Santiago to Madrid, doesn't make any sense.
That hardly qualifies as a second-hand market car.
> Street chargers are scarce, and usually expensive
In the past they didn't exist. Today they're scarce. In the future it'll look different. This thread is about trends after all.
> And I have a hard time picturing a charger in every parking space in my city.
We can start smaller of course, it only needs to be scaled up with EV adaoption, not reach 100% penetration immediately. The electric scooters you mentioned would benefit too.
Where did you get this idea? People pay for an AC, a conciege, a cycle room, a roof terrace, a fucking gardener but they wont pay for a charging point? Also why does it have to be rented?
People in Switzerland, Norway, or maybe some part of Germany may have no problem. For me it's a rather heavy price.
Not to mention dumping capital on an asset which isn't even yours. No thanks.
When I hear “expensive toy for the rich”, I think of a millionaire’s 3rd lambo, not Bill’s Silverado lease. Initial Teslas were sports cars, and now it’s squarely in middle class territory. Still a big improvement and a big market, and in several years, that leads to a good second-hand market and even cheaper EVs.
I think for many (not all, of course) people the problem is not price as much as practicality. I could probably be convinced to spend more for an EV, but without chargers in most apartment buildings and with limited charging networks where I might go, it’s not justifiable yet.
The drop in diesel and gasoline prices recently only cements the value of an ICE vehicle.
It costs me about $6.00 to charge my 60kwh EV, which has a range of 238 miles.
You can't buy an EV if you can't charge at home. And you won't buy an EV if you can charge at home if you're not sure you can charge it if you move. (Not to mention if you think you might move to another state, not being able to drive your car there is a question mark)
But many people, including myself, think that EVs are better in general. If I was comparing a $15k car to a $20k car, I could be convinced to spend more on an EV if I was just comparing the vehicles themselves in an ideal environment. But that decision doesn’t make sense until the “practicality” problem is solved.
People buy BMW but they are not the most cost-efficient cars. People buy cars in London , using public transport is cheaper. Cars are prestiege, a point of pride, 'Freedom', an obsession, a place to have sex, and more to all kinds of people.
In a handful of countries.
I'd say EV are making inroads there exactly because of no infrastructure, and tech.
In Vietnam, people choose electric scooters over petrol largely because their maintainance free nature, and no need for fluids, or waiting at petrol pumps.
People like that they don't risk expensive, and lengthy breadown of their scooter when their job depend on it.
Jeep has backed off, yet again, from producing an all-electric Jeep Wrangler. They originally announced one for 2020. Then 2021. Then 2022. They shipped some "mild hybrid" things. They just showed an all-electric Jeep Wrangler, but it's a "concept car" only. And, for some reason, has a 6-speed manual transmission.
Even when Jeep was still talking about a 2022 Wrangler EV, it was announced as being available only at the highest "trim level", priced 2X over the base product.
Ford just slipped the electric Ford F-150 to the 2023 model year. "The estimation for the base price is $100,000" says one source. For a pickup truck whose current base price is $28,940. Ford's electric Mustang starts at $61,000. The base gas-powered Mustang is $27,155.
This seems to be a pattern with US manufacturers. Electrics cost 2x the price of the gas model.
You do, however, see upper middle class people buying them. Which wasn't the case a decade ago, when the Leaf came out [1].
Poor people buy 5 to 15 year old used cars. There aren't that many 5-15 year old used EV's.
Yet.
Now they have a much, much better car for significantly lower price produced at much, much higher volume.
This is just gone continue, each generation produced will move down market.
Poor people will never buy new cars, but 2nd hand Bolt EV are already a bargain considering what you save on fuel cost.
As more EV are produced, more EV are gone be sold second hand. And at the same time new cheaper EV are gone be interceded in the market.
There is no inherent reason why an EV should be more expensive then a gas car, but there is a 100 year technology and infrastructure gap, this gap needs to be filled by the rich, upper middle class and now the middle class.
This is basically the same with every new mass technology.
https://electrek.co/2021/02/18/bolt-ev-recall-chevy-software...
My understanding is that phone batteries are extremely different from batteries for large storage. They have vastly different cycle and draw requirements (you can't quick draw on your phone battery). I don't think these studies are being nefarious, but looking at different batteries, where this article is averaging. Reading the article it doesn't give any inclination that they are differentiating these types of batteries.
Additionally, the power electronics have improved a lot, too, and continue improving.
As others have noted, Tesla went from their induction motors (which use no rare earths) to a somewhat more efficient combination of switched reluctance and brushless DC motor using some rare earth magnets.
There are also various improvements to rare earth magnets. Magnetic energy density improves somewhat. Cooling schemes improve. Even alternatives to rare earth magnets (certain phases of iron or nickel, for instance) have been and are studied.
I think improvements in cooling schemes is a big part of future improvements. As well as reduction in eddy current losses through better litz wire, maybe playing with the grain structure of the conductor, etc.
Longer term, there's also the possibility of superconducting motors. Although that's mostly for larger scale applications, (near-)room temperature superconductors also have been demonstrated and folks are searching for methods to allow them to work at lower pressures.
So I think there's actually lot of room for improvements beyond low effort prototypes from big automakers. Tesla is doing really well with high efficiency powertrains. There's also the added dimension of integration with reduction gearing (as electric motors like to spin fast).
I know that hating on Tesla is a thing, but don't forget the higher torque, better efficiency, lower heat generation in the stator windings. And the fact that this type of motor first showed up in the Prius and Tesla made a better version of it. Yeah they're getting away with saying they invented it Prius were touting their continuously variable transmission instead of thier motors.
Toyota could've gone all-in on pure electric cars (and better plug-in hybrids than they had at the time) a good decade ago but instead they continue to waste money on hydrogen.... Only now finally announcing pure-electric cars in the US: https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/10/22187113/toyota-electric-...
It's really sad. It's really bad for the climate that they just sat on the Prius drivetrain, which is 95% of the way to a pure electric car, for over two decades (it was released in 1997... it's 2021 right now!).
Literally, people have modded (i.e. added extra battery capacity) Priuses from 2003 to be pure electric even at highway speeds with the same motor and controller. They had everything sitting right there. It's incredibly frustrating.
Toyota sold 100k Priuses it's first year (2005), and peaked at 237k Priuses in 2012. At that time, nobody had the capacity (nor the materials), to produce that many battery packs for full EV use. In hind sight, they could have committed fully to LiIon batteries for the future, but in early 2000s, it wasn't clear at all what technology would actually win. The contenders were, as I recall, hydrogen, rechargeable batteries, and bio-fuels. Toyota had concept vehicles for each of those, and the hybrid-electric was the practical compromise at the time. Toyota, being a large scale manufacturer, could not design a car around a critical component which were in short supply, like LiIon batteries.
Tesla decided to go the rechargeable route, invested heavily in battery manufacturing, and bet on LiIon analog of Moore's Law. Since they weren't going to sell 100k vehicles any time soon, they could scale along the way. Tesla didn't deliver 200k vehicles until 2018. (On a side note, Tesla also had Elon leading it. All of his 'crazy ventures' lead to colonizing Mars. What kind of a vehicle would be most practical on Mars? Not gasoline. Not hydrogen. Yep, EV. And what internet technology is the most practical on Mars? Yep, satellite constellations. What transport technology is the most practical on Mars? Underground tunnels. And so on.)
Currently, all the automakers except Tesla are scrambling to secure battery capacity. Tesla is in a very nice position right now.
Turned out, solid state batteries are much harder to mass-produce than they thought. Supposedly they will have prototype this year.
Counterpoint: that flamethrower, which probably won't be of much use in a thin atmosphere lacking oxygen.
DogeCoin FTW!
It's not Toyota's fault, it's a government mandate in Japan. That's why the CEO of Toyota has bashed full EVs in public and why Toyota is the only manufacturer actually pushing fuel cell vehicles instead of going all-in on EVs like everyone else.
From Japan: Strategic Hydrogen Roadmap [0]
> Japan’s Prime Minister, Yoshihide Suga, recently announced that Japan will aim to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. To decarbonise its economy, Japan is increasingly looking to future fuels such as hydrogen and innovative technology.
> Japan’s Hydrogen Roadmap has an ambitious goal of: > 40,000 fuel cell vehicles by 2020; 200,000 fuel cell vehicles by 2025; and 800,000 by 2030; > 320 hydrogen refuelling stations by 2025; and 900 by 2030; and > 1,200 fuel cell buses by 2030.
> In Japan there are currently: > 3,800 fuel cell vehicles; > 135 hydrogen refuelling stations; > 91 fuel cell buses; and > 250 fuel cell forklifts.
Basically Japan's problem is two-fold. Their electric network is a 100V system, split to 50Hz and 60Hz sections because of historical reasons. There's no realistic way to build a charging network for electric cars in Japan.
The second part of the problem is that Japan is also heavily reliant on imported coal and natural gas for its electricity production[1] (around 60-70%).
They're betting on Hydrogen fuel cells, because that is the one thing they can produce themselves and not rely on other countries so heavily.
[0] https://www.mfat.govt.nz/en/trade/mfat-market-reports/market... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Japan
Supposedly Tesla's early cars used off the shelf lithium ion laptop battery cells to get around these patent issues.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_encumbrance_of_large_au...
Probably the biggest gains going forward will be around improving the ratio of power output to weight, and reducing manufacturing costs (of both the motor and the controller). Maybe also increasing maximum RPM and improving durability, for whatever application where current motors aren't good enough.
It might also be nice to have more standardization and modularity. In the EV conversion world, there's kind of a defacto standard of motors made specifically for conversion mostly using a B-face with a 1 1/8th inch shaft with a quarter inch key slot. That helps a lot, as you can buy a motor from one company and a transmission adapter plate and coupler from another company and have pretty good odds it'll work. There are apparently ways to get almost any motor to work with almost any transmission, but that usually requires custom fabrication. (Obviously you can also ditch the transmission and just connect the motor directly to the drive shaft or transaxle or whatever. I don't know much about that route.)
I'm currently doing a conversion that uses a Netgain Hyper9 [1]. They cost about four and a half thousand dollars (including controller) and they're pretty bulky and heavy. They're really efficient though. An OEM manufacturer I'm sure could have a motor made much more cheaply and design it to run at a much higher voltage and produce correspondingly more power. I think the Hyper9 just uses magnetized iron or something like that for the permanent magnets. No rare-earths, so it might be pretty cheap to make something like that in volume. They serve the conversion market though, so it's kind of niche product. I have no idea what Nissan spends to make something like a Leaf motor.
The real question to answer is the efficiency compared to existing energy sources.
You want to see the real writing on the wall?
The IPCC report takes 10 year old settled science and makes models using it.
The real, more recent data is much, much worse.
Where can I read anything on this?
Basically, the IPCC doesn't publish studies - they study compilations of studies, every 4-5 years. And when they start compiling, they have a cut-off date at the very start and only use studies that have been both completed and have passed peer review from before that date.
Meanwhile, the studies themselves have the same problem - they obviously can't start the study with incomplete data and update the data as they go. The studies need to start with data that finished before they started the study.
And on top of that, they're necessarily a reserved body (Icd say "conservative" but that's ambiguous in politics) - IPCC is run by a bunch of governments trying to figure out the bare minimum of emissions reduction they need to commit to, to not be negligent - they don't want to hear bad news unless it's certain.
The end result is that the data in the report is 10+ years out of date.
The compounding effect of this along with the time lag is just so damn disturbing.
This is simply not true. I'm sure there are some bad articles out there but that's true for anything.
See e.g. https://www.cell.com/joule/pdf/S2542-4351(18)30386-6.pdf where they authors find non-intermittent power production to be necessary even under an assumption of a further 75% drop (from 2018 levels) in battery prices.
Solar power and electric cars aren’t impractical because of the price tag of the technology but because of their fundamental properties.
Solar power cannot produce electricity on demand which is why solar (and wind parks) can never compete in a free electricity market where prices are formed based on supply and demand.
A product such as electricity is worthless if it’s all produced during peak hours even if demand is low to moderate at the time or extremely expensive when it’s hardly produced while demand is high. Even if solar and wind parks would cost nothing to build, this problem wouldn’t go away simply because prices are formed by supply and demand which have to be in balance for prices no to fall or jump extremely.
This is the reason why Germany’s electricity costs twice as much to the end user as compared to France and still causes up to ten times as much of greenhouse gas emissions per kWh as compared to France.
As for electric cars: The fundamental problem is refueling time and its geographical flexibility. A car with a combustion engine can be refueled within minutes anywhere on the planet. An electric car has to be refueled for at least an hour and needs to be recharged at a station while an ICE car can be refueled on the right-most lane of a highway if you run out of fuel and someone with a jerry can comes to your rescue.
The fundamental problem with battery electric cars is that energy is changing its form during refueling (electricity => chemical form) which is why there is an upper limit to how fast such a car can be refueled.
For ICE cars, the energy is put into your tank without changing its form which is why ICE cars can be refueled within seconds if necessary (see Formula 1 cars).
This limitation is the main problem with battery electric cars and the reason why you won’t see any large numbers of police or emergency vehicles which are battery powered in the foreseeable future.
There is a reason why solar/wind and electric cars remain highly subsidized in many countries despite of the fact that the technology is becoming cheaper. Both products wouldn’t be able to compete in a free market due to their fundamental shortcomings.
Tesla did $1.6 billion in regulatory credits in 2020. Tesla stock based compensation in 2020 was $1.7 billion due to Elon Musk's performance based compensation plan and TSLA skyrocketing. So the car business is clearly profitable.
Then there's the capitol expenditure on building out new factories and expanding their production capacity. From Tesla's 2020 Q3 10Q filing:
> we currently expect our capital expenditures to be at the high end of our range of $2.5 to $3.5 billion in 2020 and increase to $4.5 to $6 billion in each of the next two fiscal years.
They're planning on spending up to $12 billion between 2021-2022 to build out new factories and expanding their capacity. Their car business is clearly profitable, they're just spending all of the money to grow.
GP's claim is that Tesla would not be profitable without regulatory credit sales: this is true. Tesla's profit for 2020 is $721M and its credit sales for 2020 are $1.58B, just over double. It's fair to say that, were those credit sales to fall to zero, Tesla risks losing its profitable status. Here we're effectively discussing net profit margin for the company as a whole.
Your claim is that Tesla's automotive gross margin on car sales is 20%. This is also true, but only includes COGS (Cost of Goods Sold), so car parts and assembly costs. It does not include other expenditures such as CapEx or R&D. 20% sounds great (and it is), but when we look at the net profit margin, $721M of profit on $31.54B of revenue gives only a 2.2% net profit margin which is not as impressive.
It's therefore rather unfair to say that GP's claim is a misconception, it's actually perfectly true.
Say you have an opinion piece in a news paper that says that electric cars will always be expensive toys for the rich. It relies on a scientific paper published in a technical journal 2 years ago. The scientific paper does not perform original research but relies on a study published 2 years ago, which study relies on official data reported by companies six months before publication.
Perhaps nobody in this propagation chain meant to mislead. But in the end they are using old data that assumes that battery costs are five times what they are in reality and twenty times what they will be in the near future (for example) and draws all the wrong conclusions.
Similar things are happening with articles and public comments about renewable energy. There are numerous arguments about how we will always need coal power or nuclear power, or natural gas and they all base it on old studies with obsolete high costs of batteries. These articles commit a further error by also neglecting the every decreasing costs of solar and wind power. These articles are even more egregious because while a car lasts only 10-15 years a power plant is supposed to last at least 30 (for coal or gas) and up to 60 (for nuclear). Furthermore, nuclear plants take 5 to 10 years to even build. In those years the costs of batteries and renewables will only go down further.
In the financial press there were many articles about how Tesla will never be profitable, how it is an extravagant way for shareholders to subsidize luxury car buyers, how it will always rely on government subsidies and will need more of them, etc. Well, guess what the federal tax credit expired and lo and behold tesla is profitable.
They weren't necessarily lying. But they were using automotive industry assumptions, and the auto industry with their internal combustion engines is a mature industry with few opportunities for cost reductions. But as far as batteries and electric motors and power semiconductors go ... well we are just getting started on them and hopefully we will have many opportunities for cost reductions.