The Electric Car Revolution Is Finally Starting
slate.com
slate.com
Most normal trips will end at either your house or your place of work. Presumably both those places will eventually have charging stations.
This worries me, and I haven't seen any media entity talk about this, and they seem to just take it for granted. But if even Tesla (which so far had the cheapest EV batteries) said its batteries are no less than $300/KWh, while everyone else was buying them for $400/KWh, and even with the Gigafactory online it will only drop the price of the battery by 30%, I'm really worried GM is cutting some corners here.
Tesla's battery has a warranty of 8 years and I believe 100,000 miles. It's possible that GM used much poorer quality batteries that will die out after 3 or 4 years, just so the company can use such a large capacity battery and fit into that pricing point.
Yes, I'm aware the article points to Tesla saying the Gigafactory will help drive the price point of batteries to $100/KWh, but it didn't mean immediately. It could've meant within 10 years, as it seems the price of batteries for a given capacity drop by about 50% every 5 years.
GM claimed it already used $145/KWh batteries. I wish journalists would ask them about how they got that to happen. Because if that was real and they were actually great batteries, it would be a much bigger game-changer than the Bolt itself. But as I said, I doubt they're taking advantage of any breakthrough, and they are likely to use batteries that have a much smaller lifespan than the ones in Teslas, or Leafs, and so on.
I could easily believe that GM has access to economies of scale that Tesla can only dream about.