Ten years ago $30k got you 75 miles of range out of a Nissan Leaf. Fast forward to present day and you will spend less money before adjusting for inflation and get 259 miles of range in the same class of vehicle (Chevy Bolt EV).
When many automakers say they will only sell EVs by ~2035, it sounds a bit far-fetched, but in the context of the past 10 years it’s hard to deny the high probability that gasoline vehicles will make basically no sense by the 2030s on the basis of value.
Gasoline cars will simply cost more to own, end of story.
Electric cars are cheaper to operate that gas RIGHT NOW, with less maintenance. No reason to hold off just because they're going to get better.
That’s a slight exaggeration but not by much (diff oil needs changing and the tyres need rotating).
It’s amazing.
> Electric cars are cheaper to operate that gas RIGHT NOW, with less maintenance.
My timeline for owning a vehicle is 15+ years. I'm not going to buy something that is instantly obsolete. I'm also not going to buy all this vendor lock-in nonsense all these EVs come with. If they were basic rides with an electric drivetrain, sure, but they try to make everything the millennium falcon.
You should look up how much fun it is getting service and parts on a new vehicle nowadays. You're rolling the dice that you won't burn down your home and/or have a lawn ornament because you can't get parts.
I don't drive very much, under 10,000 km per year.
I've done the maths and for me an EV is more expensive over an expected 10 year lifespan.
Granted I drive significantly less than average, but fuel costs here are a fair bit higher than in the US so for a lot of people buying at the bottom end of the market it may still not be true that an EV is cheaper.
Meanwhile, on this planet, the necessary standard didn't emerge from government or industry.
Do people care about range with internal combustion vehicles? Not really, if they can get between gas stations. It takes very little time to refill, and each vehicle (regardless of manufacturer) uses the same stuff.
The trouble is that standardizing when there is hot competition is very political. Things need to cool down a little before it can be done, and you don't want to standardize until designs naturally converge.
You don't want government to get involved early when engineering is involved.
EVs will be a pain until a standard emerges though. I can't wait until I can drive up to a station and get a pre-charged battery.
Don't standardize the chemistry, or the voltage, or the current limit, or the charging rate, or anything else... just make it fit. Then require the industry to adopt standardized power converters and chargers under similar auspices. For the hardware, don't specify voltage, don't specify cost, don't specify charging time, don't mandate anything except the ability to charge a particular class of battery.
Simply mandating the form factor, connector, and handshaking could have made all the difference. We would have manufacturers competing to see who could build the most economical and/or performant batteries, chargers and converters. Charging could take place at times and places that optimize efficiency. Filling up an EV could take less time than getting gas, not more. And there would be no chicken-and-egg problem to impede adoption, as we're seeing now. You would not be stuck with the batteries or the charger that your car came with.
We will kick ourselves for the next 50 years for not doing this.
Apple would argue the EU was stepping on their toes by imposing USB-C. Maybe whatever proprietary connector Apple comes up with is better in some technical ways. But that benefit has to be weighed against the emergent benefits of standardization.
Maybe 120V AC isn’t objectively the best. But isn’t it nice you don’t have to think about it before plugging into a wall? I think so.
Just like miles and gallons..
It is not indeed, 240V AC is better as you need only half the current for the same amount of power.
The way to get best range+efficiency out of an EV these days is cell-to-pack where the pack is basically integrated into the frame. I think it's on the order of 20% better range for 10-20% lower production cost. There's no way a standardized swap pack could match the engineering numbers of that, which makes it an economic no-go.
And by the time the swap standard was implemented, demonstrated, and platforms changed to it, it would be 10 years. Batteries with this tech, sulfur, alu-air, etc will triple the density for half the current cost by then. An EV will go 800 miles on a pack that is 2/3 or 1/2 the size/weight, and remember there's a pseudo-rocket equation on these big battery packs.
If someone doesn't immediately and intuitively get that -- and you're hardly alone in that respect -- I've found that no rational, math-based argument will persuade them. The ship has sailed, your side won, and now we all get to deal with the consequences.
Batteries with this tech, sulfur, alu-air, etc will triple the density for half the current cost by then.
Exactly! But you will have to buy a new car to take advantage of them, because your current car was designed as a battery with wheels rather than as a drivetrain powered by a battery. It didn't have to be that way, but again... your side won.
The point is that to compete with ICE, you need the extreme integration to break the ICE point-of-sale cost advantage. I agree in a perfect world a swap would be so nice to have as an option, if only for a cheap repair or upgrade as you point out.
I think the other problem was economics. You buy an EV, a massive component of the cost is the battery, yet you might get a lemon battery next time you swap, and then the "swap service" refuses to accept it back. Yes the battery could be a service and never explicitly owned...
Also, it is hard to imagine such a massive component being swapped without extreme wear / damage on the swap site. Sure theoretically it should be solvable, but real world? people freak out over microscopic paint chips.
IIRC Teslas were originally designed to be swappable in some manner. But it was never done.
The other thing is that it will likely happen with semis I would guess, which have longer lifespans and invested value in the actual equipment.
That's always been the most frustrating point to argue against, I think. Batteries can be insanely well instrumented. You can tell exactly how much charge has been sent into the battery and pulled out of it. You can tell how old it is, and you can tell how many charge/discharge cycles it has undergone. When you get a 'lemon', you are not going to have a hard time convincing the refill station that (a) the battery isn't delivering the stated performance; and (b) whatever is wrong with it isn't your fault.
There is no reason any normal human being should feel any pride of ownership towards a car battery. No reason on God's green earth. It is no different from the propane grill cylinders you swap out at the grocery store, except that with the battery you can see its entire service history courtesy of the embedded controller. You pay for the gas you use, and you pay for the charge you move.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/883118/global-lithium-io...
It's the same thing with many techs. In the 70's we thought we would run out of oil by 2000, and a lot of asshats in the 80's and 90's crowed about how stupid those so-called experts were.
What happened in the 80's and 90's was ground sensing radar found more oil, horizontal drilling found ways to access more of what was there, and zeolites saw widespread use as a catalyst to increase the amount of gas and diesel recovered from a barrel of oil. And over time production of zeolites made that process work better and better. It's very much like when Apple went to non-replaceable batteries. Battery life doubled in that model because 3 different parts of the problem got improvements. Density, volume, and power management all contributed almost 30% each.
Between "Oh Shit" and "Told Ya", we could produce twice as much fossil fuel as we knew how to do at the time. The same will happen with Lithium. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle and Replace.
Volumetric numbers from the DOE suggest it went from 55 Wh/l in 2008 to 450 in 2020, which a compound interest calculator tells me is about 20% per year. Which is an awful lot.
Physics world says 80Wh/kg when Sony introduced them in 1991, and 300 today (although someone above said 270 is what ships), which looks like about 5.1%. But the lab experiment numbers are substantially more than that https://physicsworld.com/a/lithium-ion-batteries-break-energ... and shows that the exponential curve was visible back in about 2014. These of course have little to do with production numbers. The bigger the breakthrough the longer it takes to commercialize (or the more watered down it becomes to be commercialized). That was the wisdom when Wall Street was interested in new battery companies.
5% means every 14 years power doubles. We've been flirting with electric vehicles at least that long.
I am quite certain they are just doing alchemy and have tricked us all (it is of course well known that chemE’s are actually the cleverest type of engineer).
But when (if?) I own my own house and can charge at home, I'll be in even with the current state of batteries.
That scenario pushes the existing fuel delivery infrastructure to its limit already, and electric chargers provide significantly fewer passenger miles per fueling minute than a gasoline pump does. In practice, a lot of emergency plans will need to be completely overhauled to not assume most people will be able to drive themselves out of the danger zone.
The typical range of a fully charged electric car these days is sufficient to get out of the way of almost any predictable natural disaster. So the trick is just keeping them all fully charged at home. Any homeowner can in theory have a charger off their home power grid, but for folks in apartments and condos there will need to be a lot more than just a few chargers in the corner of the garage. There may even need to be street-side solutions. But it’s all doable and the engineering is straightforward.
People allow gas cars to sit with nearly empty tanks because it is so fast (and expensive) to fill them up. Electric cars are slow and cheap to “fill up” so the mindset and culture about it will change over time.
Maybe, and maybe not. The one time I had to do this myself, I started with a full gas tank and still ended up stopping to fill a couple of times. An evacuation is hardly the ideal condition for range, with lots of stop-and-go traffic. You need to not only get out of immediate danger but also find some safe place to lodge overnight that doesn’t interfere with the people behind you that also need to get out.
Many ran out of gas but roadside assistance were able to fuel them up and get them going again.
Houston is a city that is so large that it should have frequent passenger train service to other metropolitan areas, but it doesn’t because it has been designed for cars and planes.
You can fit a lot of people in a train, and in emergencies even more people can occupy the train in standing areas.
When cars get stuck in traffic where they’re going <25mph their main flaw is revealed: the fact that you can frequently beat a car stuck in traffic using a bicycle.
That‘s true! Vienna, Austria has over a thousand street-side chargers already. They‘re tiny and right next to the parking spot.
There are average people and EV fanboys. It's just that fanboys call the other people skeptics.
EVs are in early adoption still, from my point of view. Try to pump it all you want, but EVs offer far less utility for a higher price, and they are more inconvenient.
Until the industry standardizes on batteries and stations offer pre-charged battery swaps, I'll hang on to my ICE machine.
I've seen so many TCO reports on Teslas being cheaper than new ICE cars, and that was before the Tesla price cuts and the insane inflation in new car costs in ICE.
As for the "new car cost", I suspect Tesla is already at cost-per-vehicle parity with an ICE, but Tesla is keeping a high margin on their cars. With sodium ion and high density LFP chemistries coming to mass production this year, ICE cost advantage's days are numbered. Supply constraints will keep ICE marginally cheaper for probably 5 years in some consumer car classes.
But "far less utility for a higher price and more inconvenience" is pretty much bunk. But I would keep an ICE if I was in the Midwest.
You are thinking last year when the auto market was out of whack due to COVID related shortages. Tesla's operating margin is down to 9.6% in 2Q 2023; compared that to Hyundai's 9.5% and Kia's 12.5%.
>> With sodium ion and high density LFP chemistries coming to mass production this year, ICE cost advantage's days are numbered. <<
LFPs are still limited to entry-level, low-range EVs because of low energy density and weight. The cost of LFP's is't that attractive when the price of lithium is above $20K.
Lots of them. They're really gaining traction in the UK (where I live) - so much so that I hear compete b****s every day about EVs, and I'm tired of hearing it. I'm on my phone so can't type all the examples but essentially I've heard every advantage of them being said to be untrue, and that ice cars are better for the environment, etc.
The right wing press in this country has a lot to answer for.
https://theicct.org/aviation-global-expecting-electric-jul22...
Yes, I know it's probably a silly solution :-)
Maybe a chemist would know if this is possible
It hugely depends on the cost of electricity. Last year some European countries (Netherlands IIRC) had those so high, that it was actually more expensive to drive EV than ICE.
I guess that depends on your perspective and/or where you live.
I rented a Tesla in December once and was freezing the whole drive. A gasoline engine generates extra heat you can use to heat the cabin, whereas an electric car needs extra heaters (which IME weren’t working that well in that old Model S)
CVTs enter the chat.
> At a 20% efficiency, that's 2600 Wh/kg.
Hybrids do better, of course.
(I don't remember details, but we decided to specifically avoid cars with CVTs because of reliability issues. Sure enough, the only person I know with a CVT is having belt slipping issues. Seems like certain manufacturers were switching back to dual clutch arrangements)
Fuel Energy by mass (Wh/kg) Energy by volume (Wh/l)
Diesel fuel 12,700 10,700
Gasoline 12,200 9,700
Natural gas (250 bar) 12,100 3,100
Body fat 10,500 9,700
Both aren't commercialized either... For some reason, I suspect sulfur techs will go to market sooner.
What is apparent is that in 10 years battery tech will be in a much better place than it is now: 2x - 3x the density, safer, 1/2 or less the (inflation adjusted) cost. Sure that's not Moore's law rate, but that will be nonetheless revolutionary.
240 wh/kg has already been commercialized by Gotion in LMFP chemistry, so that's cobalt-free/nickel-free. 160 wh/kg sodium ion should utterly revolutionize city transportation, you don't even need lithium for that and it should be a 200-300 mile car (EPA not WLTP) or better.
IMO most car companies are probably chasing the high density LMFP and Sodium Ion for the next 5-7 years, and leaving nickel-cobalt for things that truly need it. The issue with nickel-cobalt is that the safety systems consume so much at the pack level that 200+ wh/kg LFP is basically the same density. And Gotion's 240 wh/kg will probably be functionally more dense at Cell-to-Pack densities as well as cheaper.
We still need that high density breakthough through, the US Market will probably demand 400 mile ranges (see Tesla range "fraud" story) for true mass market stupid driver adoption, especially for all those men that just have to drive a full size pickup and then buy things for it to tow.
Advantages: no runways needed at airports, can get back some energy on the way down through regenerative braking, more efficient propulsion and less air resistance at higher altitude (electric motors don't need oxygen to function), no pollution from combustion.
Sounds amazing.
Those higher density batteries are great when cost doesn't matter (like in the aviation market) but cost is the only variable that matters when it comes to mass producing electrical vehicles. The game is not who can build the most ridiculous car for 100K but who can produce the most useful car for 10K. Toyota is going to have their ass handed to them very soon in that market unless they get their act together.
People that obsess over range are missing a few important points. With fast charge times, range matters less, and if your car is fully charged every morning, the times when you need to charge before you get home reduce to the rare occasions when you actually drive the cars maximum range in a single day. Which for the average driver isn't that often. The point of having a large battery is reducing those occasions to almost zero. If that matters to you, just spend more money and you'll be fine. There's no need for new batteries for this.
The point of a having a smaller battery is that the few times per year that you have to stop to fast charge them isn't worth the price difference in terms of time spent. Especially when that time is basically only around 30-40 minutes. Companies that operate vehicle fleets get this. They get the battery size they need, not the largest one. That's why most electrical vans have batteries that aren't bigger than those in cars. Smaller even sometimes. Smaller battery means more useful load. The reduced range is fine.
Toyota doesn't need a new science fiction battery, it needs battery production infrastructure producing batteries by the twh per year. Nothing else is going to enable them to mass produce cars at the same rate they are producing ICE cars. They are not building those factories yet. I'm not sure what they are waiting for at this point. But they are running out of time. Cheap EVs are going to be on the market pretty soon. They already are on the market in China. The main constraint for that is battery production volume. Some companies are investing in that as fast as they can; Toyota so far isn't.
To put it mildly. Energy density in the current leaders in that category, lithium ion batteries, 250-270 wh/kg. So, provided a similar or better ratio of watt-hours to unit of volume, we’re basically looking at tripling the energy storage of EVs or significant weight reduction, in the ideal scenario of this design being a safe and cost effective replacement for current batteries.