Electric cars are no longer held back by crappy, expensive batteries | Hacker News Reader

Electric cars are no longer held back by crappy, expensive batteries

slate.com

106 pointsjseliger169 comments

I'm all for electric vehicles, but there are a few things that have bothered me about its mass adoption.

Right now, electrics comprise a tiny part of the automobile market share. Yet Tesla is already running into supply issues, particularly with lithium as there are only 3 companies in the world that do industrial-scale lithium mining, that too in a handful of mines around the world.

Secondly, I suppose we're currently in the honeymoon period for electrics. But what will happen 5-8 years down the line, when all the early mainstream adopters of electrics will have to replace their batteries? Is it feasible to recycle all those batteries?

Yes. You can think of all those batteries as high quality lithium ore.

I wonder how slate got the idea that they're not "expensive". Maybe the prices have been manipulated independently of supply.

Battery costs are five years ahead of the predicted price curve:

http://cleantechnica.com/2015/03/26/ev-battery-costs-already...

GM says li-ion pack costs for its Bolt are ~$145/kWh, predicting $100/kWh by 2021: http://www.hybridcars.com/gm-ev-battery-cells-down-to-145kwh...

Tesla confirms its costs are below $190/kWh: https://forums.teslamotors.com/forum/forums/battery-cost-bel...

Batteries are following the same price curve of solar panels, and are about to get stupid cheap.

EDIT: If Tesla is able to drive down battery costs to below $100/kWh, I assure you, EVs won't be the biggest success story; you'll be able to turn every wind and solar generator into dispatchable generation cheaper than coal, nuclear, and natural gas. We'll be off fossil fuels in ~10-15 years.

Nitpick: the unit you mean is kWh, not kW, which is a different, though related, unit of merit for batteries. (kWh measures capacity; kW measures output.)

Thanks for the correction! Comment updated!

I think there's a bit of confusion about Pack prices vs Cell prices. The $145 is cell only, which is one of the reasons it is so much lower. There don't seem to be consistent pack-pack price comparisons.

I agree there is a disparity between the Bolt's cell-only cost vs Tesla's cost all-in on a pack. Regardless, the cost is below $200/kWh, and it appears that the cost decreases will continue.

This is a real problem and a real concern.

An EV essentially is a car with a very expensive fuel tank (the battery), made out of specific materials and properties. While it is efficient in energy use and can make use of fungible electricity, lithium is rare, limited to specific areas of concentration, and can (as any material) only be partially recycled.

There's lithium elsewhere on Earth, or more precisely, in seawater, but processing seawater for minerals (uranium is another which might be extracted) is expensive in the sense of requiring a lot of energy (arguably the ultimate definition of cost is energy requirements).

At US rates of auto ownership scaled to the world and future populations, known lithium reserves would quickly be exhausted -- a few decades, if that. With recycling, yes, some of that would be re-used, but even at 90% material recoverability (and references I have suggest 30% is far more common), you'll lose ~50% of your original material in 7 generations. (The formula: remaining material = (portion recoverable)^generations. So: 0.47 ~= 0.9^7.)

Other options include other forms of energy storage (including possibly synfuels), other battery components, or we all just start walking a lot more.

There's someone in Halifax researching Sodium Batteries, which would be a fair bit easier to find than lithium, though less effective.

Sodium batteries have been around since the 1960s.[1] They're a high-temperature battery, 90°C and upwards. Ford built some experimental vans with sodium-sulfur batteries in 1991. Two of them caught fire. That technology was abandoned for mobile applications.

There's still interest in this for stationary energy storage on power-grid scale. But not for mobile. Sodium catches fire if exposed to air.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium%E2%80%93sulfur_battery

Sodium-ion batteries aren't necessarily the dead end you might think.

Faradion has been working on portable batteries w/ decent energy density (~150 Wh/kg), excellent charge-discharge performance (93% capacity after 1000 cycles) and competitive costs: http://www.faradion.co.uk/about/news/2015/05/489/

Recent formulations for sodium rechargeable batteries are room-temperature and non-flammable: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4525335/

Here's a a short article progress being made getting Na-ion batteries into an 18650 form-factor (their current prototype has an energy density of about 90 Wh/kg): https://news.cnrs.fr/articles/a-battery-revolution-in-motion

While energy density is lower than Li-ion, there's probably a good argument for longevity, safety, and material costs.

Sodium batteries run at very high temperature and are finicky. They have been used for decades on submarines where they can be managed by trained personnel and where a large heat sink is available. I would be wary of consumer sodium based batteries.

I think that's sodium-sulfur batteries. There is work being done on sodium ion batteries. And also aluminum ion batteries. In thoery these are both similar to lithium ion batteries. In practice figuring out how to produce high quality ion batteries is not easy.

another one is potassium, and giving that the future is metal-air batteries, potassium works great there (its oxide seems to behave better for recharging in that scheme than lithium's)

Wrt. possible short-term lithium supply issues, i can see how Musk would just build a new mine operation if necessary, like a Giga-ship to mine it from seawater :)

I wonder what the hurdles are to private nuclear reactor ownership?

Most of the power generation reactors in the US are privately owned, so probably about the same.

I've kept a modest watch on battery technologies, and there are some interesting developments, though most are fairly modest.

You've got the fundamental problem that battery energy storage densities by weight are ~1/100 - 1/50 that of liquid hydrocarbon fuels. Synthetic analogs of petrol, kerosene, and diesel would be quite useful (though expensive). All but irreplaceable for some uses (heavier-than-air flight, marine propulsion).

Among batteries, you have:

1. Liquid / molton salt batteries. Some of these have highly abundant substrates. The problem is the 300-600C+ temperatures they operate at. Especially in vehicle applications.

2. Metal-air batteries. Iron and aluminium particularly. Here the oxidation is supplied from air. You're consuming the (anode?) in use, and it's got to be replaced, but that can include recycling. Abundant but problematic.

3. Fuel cells. A reaction, typically of hydrogen and oxygen, producing electron flows. The problem is the reaction chamber, which usually requires scarce catalysts (e.g., platinum) which are a) expensive and b) rarer than lithium.

4. Advanced allotropes. Carbon or silicon or other materials which are abundant but offer unique properties in new molecular forms. While this is well outside my area of expertise, it's an un(der) explored area which might pack some suprises.

5. Biocells. Life does some amazing things with enzymes and other agents, including maintaining an exceptionally high voltage potential across cell membranes (see Nick Lane's book, recently mentioned here via Bill Gates). Humans utilising biological mechanisms to provide electricity might offer another out, though this again is highly speculative.

The advantage of my #s 4 & 5 is that they could rely on highly abundant elements arranged in complex molecules to perform desired functions. Experience suggests that such molecules are difficult to come up with, degrade quickly, and have narrow operating bands in which they're viable. But at least the abundance constraint is removed.

Oak Ridge National Labs is doing research on sodium batteries as well (this is a very recent thing).

processing seawater for minerals (uranium is another which might be extracted) is expensive in the sense of requiring a lot of energy (arguably the ultimate definition of cost is energy requirements).

But it has to be done only once when the battery is produced, right?

Yes. But there's a constant flux of lithium require (flow) for an economy based on battery storage -- or at least so long as lithium is your battery substrate.

How much is determined by the storage per vehicle, vehicles per capita, lifetime of the battery pack, and recovery rate of recycling.

If you go to an inventory of mineral or element prevalence in the Earth's crust, you'll come up with a list of elements and what percentage (usually by mass) they constitute of the Earth's crust.

Strategic minerals: iron, copper, zinc, silver, gold, tin, lead, mercury, gallium, etc., etc., all have specific rates of occurrence. We mine them from ores in which they're more concentrated, because that's easier (again: less energy requirement), but those ores are scarce. Ultimately the question becomes how much energy is required to access minerals vs. how much energy do they make available. If the first exceeds the second, they're a losing proposition no matter the technology applied to extraction.

Ore concentrations are formed by various mechanisms -- and I understand them only partially, this isn't my field, though I'm studying it now. Iron, for example was largely concentrated into ores billions of years ago, during the first big flourishing of life on Earth, in the Great Rusting. Biological activity, mostly algae, concentrated what had previously been unoxidised molecular iron (sourced from cosmic material that coalesced on Earth).

Other mineral ores seem to also have biological origins in concentration, some various chemical transformations, some geological activity (coal, oil, and natural gas most notably), some are pretty directly remnants of late meteor or asteroid impacts -- especially gold and heavy elements which would otherwise have sunk to the Earth's mantle and core.

The saudi oil minister said that if everyone in the world had as many cars as the US, then they wouldn't have enough oil. So that's a very aggressive yardstick you're setting for EVs.

It would be much more sensible to electrify the cars/busses/trucks/delivery vans that are driven a lot, that are driven in stop-start traffic, and that are driven in heavily populated areas first. That gives you much more bang-per-buck in terms of pollution and CO2 reductions.

Don't forget noise pollution.

There are a lot of things which fail to scale to an Earth-of-Americas. And some pretty good reasons to think that's generally not possible.

Pointing out which specific subcases remain impossible doesn't disprove the larger case.

There's a good question as to how scalable EV's are generally. Present scale is minuscule. A small feaction of a percent in the US, and that actually fell in 2015. I'm not sure what 2016 and future trends (based on pre-orders) look like.

I'm really looking forward seeing big cities adopting EV for buses and cabs. In London the black cabs are noticeably more smelly than regular cars, and buses are... well buses.

> arguably the ultimate definition of cost is energy requirements

No, it's not. The ultimate causes for costs are human labor and taxes (including similar concepts like rent or license fees) – everything else derives from that.

You're not paying the Sun for its energy output, but the workers that mine the materials, process them, and build solar panels.

I didn't say conventionally, I said arguably.

Solar flux is a given, and isn't modifiable by human activity. But the flux reaching Earth is limited, and in the sense of that which you give up -- opportunity costs -- there's only so much of it available. Stored solar flux -- as biofuels, wind, hydro, or fossil fuels -- represents an exergic potential (value) with an eMergic cost.

Economic prices fail to consider that emergic cost entirely, but in a very real sense it's an account balance being depleted. Environmental sinks also have costs associated with clearing and negative impacts.

Howard and Eugene Odum, ecologists, coined the term emergy and discuss it. There's a fair literature concerning it in ecology, though little or none in economics. I believe economics is in error here.

Again, very much not mainstrem econ. You'll find treatment in ecological, biophysical, and thermoeconomics however: Georgescu-Roegen, Daly, Hall, and Costanza, among others.

http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-10-06/energy-ecology-...

(By Howard Odum's daughter.)

> Right now, electrics comprise a tiny part of the automobile market share. Yet Tesla is already running into supply issues, particularly with lithium as there are only 3 companies in the world that do industrial-scale lithium mining, that too in a handful of mines around the world.

Why would any consumer have to care at all about this? If it really becomes a problem the price of EVs will go up and then people won't buy them. You're letting details you needn't worry about influence your possible purchase now? That makes no sense. Do you worry about how Ford is going to source their parts when they run into supply chain issues (which they do)? Do you worry about any other company's supply chain issues? You are repeating anti-EV FUD.

> I suppose we're currently in the honeymoon period for electrics. But what will happen 5-8 years down the line, when all the early mainstream adopters of electrics will have to replace their batteries? Is it feasible to recycle all those batteries?

A) All manufacturers have buyback/replacement programs in place that they have to uphold with the customer. Again, you needn't worry about the details as a consumer beyond that.

B) If you really insist on worrying about the details, look at some actual historic data instead of FUD; the price of EV batteries has been dropping dramatically over the last 10 years. All real signs (the fact that manufacturers keep opening new plants and increasing capacity, and that there is no real shortage of Lithium in the world despite the "3 companies" baloney) point to them continuing to drop.

The only REAL reason to consider not buying an EV right now is the dramatic pace at which they are improving. But to me that just points to leasing instead of buying one.

Consumers should absolutely consider whether we are on a sustainable growth curve. How common will electric charging stations be if it turns out that EVs can't rise above 10% of the total car market? If hydrogen-powered cars all of a sudden became the norm, EV drivers will be much less well-served than if EV sales continue to scale (as most EV purchasers probably assume they will).

> How common will electric charging stations be if it turns out that EVs can't rise above 10% of the total car market?

One of the beauties of EVs is you don't need charging stations. I leased a Nissan LEAF 2 years ago, and it almost only gets charged at home.

You can't really know whether EVs are going to take over or not, it depends on too many factors. If our government gets bamboozled with Hydrogen the way they did with Ethanol, then yeah Hydrogen cars could become more popular than EVs.

But I would argue that even in that world, EVs are the better choice. They are lower maintenance and like I said, you don't need refueling stations. Your car refuels while it's parked in your garage.

The best part of an electric car is starting every day with a full tank. I could never switch back to gas for that one reason.

[edit: yes, I know it's an anachronism. I still dial phones, too.]

But what proportion of houses have off road parking in your own garage.

Also think what does this do to the Electricity Grid if a non trivial amount of EV's are put on charge every night.

Overnight demand is substantially less than daytime - last night's demand in the UK was about 20% lower:http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/index.php

The grid would prefer a another demand curve, so overnight charging is helpful.

Is that going to be the same when say 15%-20% of the nation plugs in a car every evening - its going to the surge when people go to make a cup of tea when the adverts are on during coronation street look tame.

Car charging is a steady, predictable usage of electricity. People don't all arrive home at the exact same time.

Additionally, being giant batteries, electric cars have the means to charge when most advantageous to the national grid. Most electric cars already have an option to wait to charge until off peak rates happen. (Off peak rates being cheaper because low overall demand.)

But electric cars may be useful to the grid as giant surge protectors for things just like that cup of tea electric kettle break. Under some of the "smart grid" proposals, the electric companies would be able to not feed electricity to a vehicle in those brief moments of high demand on the grid, prioritizing immediate needs like people's kettles. Furthermore, "smart grid" ideas could even use electric cars as battery backup options, "leasing" already stored energy back from the car and paying it back later, as changes in demand happen.

Even if some of those "smart grid" ideas don't get nationalized, you could still theoretically take advantage of some of those kinds of things in your own home.

So if anything, electric cars may be surge stabilizers rather than surge causers.

Street parking solutions are being proposed. Many streets already have power to the street (street lamps and similar street furniture) and chargers become the new parking meter. Also, there's experiments in street-installed inductive chargers (like the wireless chargers you can buy for many phones these days) and even companies exploring the logical extreme of street-level inductive chargers the "power road" (where the car can draw an inductive charge even while driving), which seems unlikely to be pragmatic but still interesting to experiment with.

>One of the beauties of EVs is you don't need charging stations >Your car refuels while it's parked in your garage.

So not only do you need to own a charging station you also need a house and a garage, got it.

And then the 240V charger in the garage, in case you want to actually charge your car faster than eight hours. (IIRC, its 72-hours to charge a Tesla on 110V)

You do not need to own a charging station. My Leaf charges to 100% overnight just fine and it plugs into a standard 110 wall outlet in my house.

You also don't need a garage, as they charge just fine outdoors (been charging mine in my driveway for 1.5 years), but that's just arguing semantics at this point.

Most hydrogen-powered cars are electric cars. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_vehicle (listing upcoming hydrogen vehicles, all using fuel cells).

And that's actually the point of switching cars to electricity: we have many sustainable ways of making electricity, and zero ways of sustainably making gasoline. Get cars running on electricity, then continue building out the infrastructure.

>zero ways of sustainably making gasoline

This is untrue, actually. You can depolymerise virtually anything carbon-based into oil. It's currently more expensive than digging it out of the ground, but we'll never run out of oil.

What's more, assuming the carbon in the feed stock originally came from the atmosphere, burning the resulting product is carbon-neutral.

Something to think about, given the unbeatable energy density of gasoline (barring nigh-magical battery technology).

This is where we should be heading IMHO. Synthetic petroleum fuels that are carbon-neutral. This lets us keep using the existing infrastructure for transporting and retail sale of fuel, lets people keep using their current cars to maximize that value. Saves the absolutely massive investment that would be necessary to upgrade electical generation and delivery infrastructure to power a large fleet of EVs.

No, it absolutely is not. Of all the ideas of how to power transportation in the future this is one of the worst.

First, the idea that it is carbon neutral is absurdly wrong. If you're pulling the carbon out of anywhere but the atmosphere (and you are), then it's no more carbon neutral than pumping oil out of the ground and burning that.

Second, it's hugely inefficient. If you're manufacturing fully synthetic petroleum, then that synthetic petroleum is acting like an energy storage medium, a liquid battery, rather than as a true fuel (a source where you're getting more energy out than you put in.)

Any kind of battery source which has to be physically moved around via other sources of transportation is hugely inefficient compared to EVs with actual batteries where the energy merely has to be sent down transmission lines and the like. The losses involved in moving electricity around are far, far less than moving synthetic petroleum or hydrogen or any other "pseudo battery".

Lastly, internal combustion engines are extremely inefficient themselves, especially compared with electric motors. They require tremendous upkeep and have energy losses that are three times that of EVs. So even if you could make the claim (which you can't) that your synthetic petroleum energy storage medium is 100% as efficient as moving power around, the ICE is going to result in needing to use up 3x as much energy to move your vehicle from Point A to Point B compared to an EV.

Synthetic petroleum is a really, really bad idea and should not be pursued.

I agree fully, synfuels are a hugely naive idea. However, I've been pondering the use of direct-ethanol fuel cells in the place of 'range extenders' that are currently on some EVs. Advantages are legion: ethanol has a ready (and in possibly sustainable) supply chain, ethanol is a liquid with comparable-if-low vapor pressure as gasoline, i.e. readily handled, ethanol is not hugely poisonous like methanol, has quite decent energy density, etc. Fuel cell conversion is acceptably efficient (compared to ICE anyway), so not that much fuel would be needed; most consumers would prefer to charge at home anyway, for cost reasons. The fuel cell would be used to back-up the battery, therefore it wouldn't have to be really large - it only needs to provide the mean load, not the peak load. And you'd never have 'range anxiety' again...

Disadvantages?

I shall address your points by paragraph:

1) Erm. There's only really two places you can get carbon - the ground, or the atmosphere. Any biofuel eventually comes from plants or algae, which get their carbon from the atmosphere. I don't really know where else you had in mind.

2) That doesn't make it inefficient. The whole point is that it's acting as storage rather than fuel. That's what makes it carbon-neutral - the carbon comes out of the atmosphere, then goes back (instead of out of the ground and into the atmosphere).

3) Not sure I buy that. Electricity distribution is hardly lossless (and what powers the power station?). Our best grid-scale storage solutions run about 75% efficient, while car-scale batteries leak charge much faster than a gasoline tank leaks gasoline. And both a gasoline car and an EV have to carry around heavy energy storage - the difference is the gasoline tank gets lighter as it empties.

4) To be fair, you have to compare the efficiency of the ICE to the combined efficiency of the motor, power station, and all intermediate storage (every time the power moves from one battery to another, you lose some, while gasoline can be stored and dispensed fairly losslessly). Transmission costs also have to compared like-for-like - grid scale distribution runs about 95% efficient, while oil tankers are 97-98% (though you have to factor in last-mile, and trucks are ten times as thirsty). I don't think the calculation is as clear-cut as you're making out.

It's also worth querying what exactly "efficiency" means. If the source is sustainable (and biofuel is), raw energy wastage is less important than gross environmental impact and safety. It's not clear to me that mining nuclear materials and dealing with the waste, or mining rare earth metals to carpet the land in solar panels, are necessarily better or more sustainable solutions that carpeting the land in fast-growing, high-energy crops and fuelling all of society that way. Perhaps it is a bad solution - it depends on how the numbers fall exactly on things like land use, (and possibly your values regarding safety decisions). If it's already been thoroughly analysed and found wanting, then I'd love to read that. But at the moment you've not really made an argument commensurate with the strength of your opinion.

Various processes to make synthetic gasoline were patented more than hundred years ago, and at some times (ww2-1950ies) it has been successfully done at scale.

We don't do it because currently oil is so obscenely abundant and cheap, that it's not economically worthwhile to seriously consider alternatives to just pumping some more oil out of the ground.

> If it really becomes a problem the price of EVs will go up and then people won't buy them.

Taxpayers, for instance, have reason to worry about this, because things are driven ahead by subsidies. We don't necessarily have a market that would work the way you assume because of external pressures.

Re: wind power.

But what will happen 5-8 years down the line, when all the early mainstream adopters of electrics will have to replace their batteries? Is it feasible to recycle all those batteries?

I quoted this below, but yes: http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2016/05/09/3775606/used-sec....

Furthermore, lots of research is going into electric battery recycling. I've worked on EV-battery-related grant applications that also demonstrate promise. I can't say more about them, but I'm optimistic.

At the moment, lithium commodity prices remain oddly low if most people expect reserves to run out (if you (in the plural you sense) expect reserves to run out, there's a fortune to be made!). See also http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/Is-There-Enough-....

Supply issues are normal when demand rises suddenly. They aren't necessarily indicative of the long-term productive capacity of the Earth.

Websites go back and forth on this, but truly scientific analyses of "will we run out of X" are few and far between. But there's just no point in looking for a new quarry if the demand isn't there. You think it will be, but technology is capricious -- someone could invent a new gizmo that renders your investment worthless, so market forces generally don't support dragging a bunch of resources around until there's no other option.

There are ten pounds of lithium in a car battery. It's about as common as copper. That's hardly the end of the world.

http://gas2.org/2008/10/13/lithium-counterpoint-no-shortage-...

Wild bet: Musk is planning on spatial extraction to provide itself lithium.

In case you missed this a few years back (not musk, but his peers):

http://www.planetaryresources.com/

I did not.

Mineral extraction of non-renewable resources is a funny thing - when demand moves up, eventually supplies will drop, and prices rise. Then people either find a way to extract energy from a different mineral, or build better technology to remove it from rock, and prices go back down. The drop in oil and gas prices over the last few years being a perfect example of this, as it is due to new drilling techniques.

When the current lull in oil prices ends, electricity will take its place. And we will start the same cycle for batteries that we have lived through over the past 100 years with oil -- either technology will bring out more lithium, or research will move us to use a different fuel source.

    > particularly with lithium as there are only 3 companies in the world that do industrial-scale lithium mining, that too in a handful of mines around the world.

It appears that there are more than 3 lithium mining companies[1]. Care to provide your source to prove otherwise?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_as_an_investment

> Is it feasible to recycle all those batteries?

Why recycle when you can give them a second life?

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/538541/nissan-gm-give-ev-...

No recycling involved. Just use the batteries as they are as cheap power storage.

The reality here in second-tier Chinese cities is that most people already get around, if not always then at least often, by electric vehicle.

They've either never had cars, have bought cars but have problems parking them or getting anywhere due to traffic (many cities were not designed for cars, and now have millions of them clogging every available space on and off the road network), or just jump on the back of black-market 'taxi' e-bikes to zip about. E-bikes already carry a large proportion of people in Chinese urban environments. There is no way that e-bikes, subways and buses combined are not the dominant people-movers in the country, today. While I did see some e-bikes in Japan, they were nowhere near as numerous. China is leading the way.

Typical Chinese e-bike cost new is USD$500 or less. Battery replacement (good for 1 year or so) is currently about USD$150 or less. They do get stolen a lot, unfortunately.

I went last month for a road trip in Cuba, where most of the bikes seem to be AVA1000. This electric scooter is everywhere: http://cubanclassics.blogspot.fr/2015/02/2014-unison-interna....

It was quite an shock for me to go back to Paris and realize how much my neighborhood is polluted by toxic fumes and deafening engine back-fire.

True statement. Having been visiting China annually for the past 10 years and seeing the transportation transition from mopeds to E-bikes first hand, I can attest to that. And the price has really been going down significantly because of the mass production and economy of scale (exports are a major contribution). Typically e-bikes with traditional car batteries are starting at around 2000 RMB. Some newer ones with Li-ion batteries are priced slightly higher.

However, e-bikes are seeing a decline and/or full ban in top-tier Chinese cities due to new traffic regulations and new road design. It is still the predominant transportation tool in 2nd-tier and small cities where public transportation is scarce and downtown areas are smaller.

However, e-bikes are seeing a decline and/or full ban in top-tier Chinese cities due to new traffic regulations and new road design.

I'm not sure what you identify is a trend as you suggest, rather I think it's just some exceptions. IMHO such regulations are generally for a small area, the equivalent of a pedestrian only mall zone or a few central downtown blocks. Often the motivation is to show off how "modern" the city is (as upwardly mobile Chinese city mayor / party member assumes modern exists in foreign perception, after publicly funded junket to Europe/Singapore/etc.).

I wouldn't be surprised if, in the future, we see such exceptions reversed. After all, old people have to get around and there is tremendous acceptance here of e-vehicles to cater for that market. (Theirs are often covered with a passenger area at rear, and lockable.) This factor alone adds reasonable weight to allowing smaller e-vehicles in the heart of all cities. What has been banned in the heart of many cities is motorbikes, and for good reason.

Interesting article but the timelines seem way to conservative to me.

For example if batteries continue to improve over the next four years as they have over the past four years, according to the article then in 2020 the batteries will weight 1500 lbs, travel 1142 miles on a charge and cost about $10k. (Or a 500 mile battery for $5k) And the cost of electricity will be, at today's rates, $1 per "e-gallon"

Who wouldn't want that? Project this to 2040 and the numbers become just ridiculous but the article suggests just 35% market share by then. I don't think so. By 2025 the market will almost certainly be strongly in the favor of electrics.

Fuel engine are improving too and oil price doesn't seem to want to go down any time soon. I'd say we have an interesting 10 years ahead. Electric is probably going to win, but time estimates are very hard to do. Don't forget that replacing a car fleet is expensive and takes years. A modern car can easily last 15-20 years, so even if we started replacing fuel with electric today (which we are not), replacing the whole car fleet would require 15-20 years. I don't see the 35% so far fetched in 2025...

And don't forget that there are millions of people who have a car right now, but who wouldn't have a place to charge an electric car. People living in apartments, terraced houses, especially in the UK it's very common to see rows upon rows of houses, none of them with their own driveway.

I know what you're getting at but I don't think the above comparison is entirely fair. Those houses don't have petrol pumps outside them either

Yes, but I go to a petrol station once a month, takes me 10 minutes to fill up and the whole tank lasts me for the whole month. With electric cars there are two ways out of this, either build enough electric charging points that you can charge while you are at work, or make every single car supercharger-compatible. I personally don't think the first option is likely, I don't see why my work(or any other) would have literally every single parking spot wired for charging(there's over 1000 parking spots at our office), and as for the second option, even 30 minute charging is excessive, it's fine o long journeys so you can go an have a coffee and stretch your legs, but if you want to quickly "fill up" after work 30 minutes is not acceptable. That's why I said that for majority of people charging at home is ideal - but a lot of people don't have private place to charge at home.

Yeah I understand what you mean and I think you're right. 1000 charge points is unacceptable but do we really need that? Given the current generation Tesla can already self navigate pretty well what's stopping the cars navigate the car park in your absence and charge themselves at a few central charge points.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uMM0lRfX6YI

I think it is entirely fair. You can fill gas or diesel up at a station quite quickly. To charge batteries so that you can use the car, you really need a charging station available every night or day.

I don't really agree I'm sorry to say. It kinda makes assumptions about charge rates, charge locations (home, work, car parks) or even the means by which cars are "refilled".

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=H5V0vL3nnHY

Sure, but we are having a conversation about whether it's possible that electric cars will have 35% market share by 2025. Considering that apart from a few first-world countries(and even then, only in big cities) there is very little infrastructure to fully support a large fleet of electric vehicles, and the battery swapping technology is not available anywhere apart from a couple tesla testing stations, I don't think that's possible. It would require a huge investment, and even then, cars easily last 15-20 years, so expecting 35% of the market to be electric in just 9 years is crazy.

35% Market Share generally means in this context: "35% of the cars sold in the year 2025 will be electric".

If you want to talk about the number of cars in use that are electric, then "installed base" may be the more traditional term.

Market share generally preceeds, installed base, especially in markets with durable goods.

I understand the skeptical point of view and its fair enough, we'll all just have to wait and see how this all plays out. I'm more optimistic bearing in mind that nine years ago the electric car industry barely even existed and its ramping up at an astonishing pace over the last three years.

To avoid making assumptions, I'm thinking of the cars that you can get right now. I live in northern Europe where the "charging stations" are actually abundant (in the form of electric feeds to parking places, currently needed for the convenience and benefits of engine block and cabin heaters in the winter) but charging an electric vehicle still takes quite some time.

But if we allow for technical development, then both electric and gasoline/diesel/lpg cars will also move ahead.

I'm getting down voted for giving my point of view and trying to be cordial at the same time but cest la vie.

I agree there is progress to be made on fossil power cars but it's still unsustainable in any analysis. We're also not seeing anything like the kind of gains that are needed medium to long term. Progress through one technique yields a regression in other areas (emissions vs efficiency)

I too live in Northern Europe (Ireland) and we're really badly setup for electric car adoption as it stands now though the situation is slowly improving. Policy and infrastructure here (as I imagine in other countries) always lags demand.

Fwiw, I didn't downvote you. It could even be just someone's mis-click. It happens.

Over here (Finland), you can also buy almost completely renewable fuel for flexifuel cars (85 % alcohol made of food waste, not sure how the 15 % of gasoline is produced.)

BTW, one thing I didn't know until just googling around now: Ford model T was also a flexifuel car (i.e. it could run on ethanol).

We would probably solve that by putting up more charging points at the roadside (there are quite a few of these around already in the UK), with a card reader for payment or perhaps a payment chip within the car's charging connector.

Where I live (in a dense German city) there wouldn't even be space at the roadside to install charging points; even the street lights are attachted to the houses because there was no space left. I have the same situation at work, so personally have a difficult time imagining to own an electric car anytime soon.

Where do the normal cars park?

By the side of the street. In between the street and pedestrians passage. Or between street and bicycle path. Sometimes diagonally.

The only possible charging would be some stuff that's underground and comes out of the ground right next to the car. Hopefully attaches to the bottom of the car, so there're no hoses/wires flinging around.

And some cars are parked at grey-legal spots blocking other cars. People just leave their phone numbers if someone needs to get out earlier. That is super common when you know people around and can expect to drive away sooner than your neighbour.

Or overhead?

Here is an example of such a street: https://www.google.de/maps/@51.2310008,7.0720156,3a,75y,127....

You bascially park your car somewhere half on the street, half on the curb. The sidewalk is just wide enough for people to walk there.

On the other hand,car ownership in dense urban areas shouldn't be the norm. The future is also in active transport (walking, cycling) and transit, not only electric cars.

So if you want a car for hobbies (e.g. getting to backcountry) or transporting your kids around, you shouldn't live in an urban area?

If you want a car for hobbies, you should figure out where to store it when you're not using it. Maybe rent a spot in an underground car park somewhere in the city. Public transport is just fine for transporting your kids around, and will be much better when there're less cars on the city roads.

There's no reason you can't have a car in an urban area, but we should work towards a transport model that doesn't require you to own one. Public transport in combination with cycling for short distances plus a solid carsharing infrastructure should be sufficient for a large chunk of the population. Even removing 30% of the cars from the streets would go a long way to improve the situation.

When I was living in Montreal for a couple of years I signed up to a community car share scheme. No insurance, no maintenance, no road taxes so it worked out cheaper to "rent a car" just when I needed it: https://www.communauto.com/index_en.html

With a good, cheap, reliable public transport system with this as backup I could easily get rid of my car if I lived in an urban area but still needed to get around at the weekends.

That's what I don't get about 'car sharing'. Everybody wants the car on the weekend. If the service has to have enough cars for everybody, what's the difference between that and leasing/owning? It doesn't save on cars that's for sure.

Do you really want a car every day of most weekends? What for?

(I suspect the "good, cheap, reliable public transport" thing the parent mentioned is important)

In my experience of using the service, and Montreal is a much smaller city than London (where I am from), you don't want a car every weekend. I was usually able to find a car for hire as long as I booked in advance (esp for Bank Holiday type weekends) but sometimes it meant going to a different location than the one right next to me. As the system get's more popular and more people use it then they are able to purchase more cars.

> It doesn't save on cars that's for sure

I disagree. Several of my friends also used the service, just between us that saved having several cars. If you need a car all weekend, every weekend then the service is probably not for you. But if, like me, you needed it every so often then it saved a lot of money over the course of a year.

I doubt that everybody needs a car on the weekend: People that want the car to go to work are actually less likely to need a car on the weekend. However, even if we concede the point that everybody want a car on the weekend, there's still the question of whether everybody needs a car on the weekend at exactly the same time. Given that most parking spots on my street are still full at any given time during the weekend, I doubt that.

Hah yes. In the early days of Zipcar in NYC (not sure if this is still allowed as I moved to the country and now drive a gas guzzling truck), I reserved every weekend for 48 hours for a full year in advance. Then on the Friday before the reservation started I would decide what I really needed, as there was no cancellation penalty. I probably only used it every second or third weekend, but noticed it really improved my "get out there and do something" motivation, as I set the default for "I have a car."

Probably wasn't good for Zipcar though.

We have a system like this in my hometown, Bergen. I live 50 meters away from two parking garages containing four share cars each. I can reserve any of these at any time via a web app, given that no one have reserved them already.

Payment is $10 per usage plus a surcharge per kilometer driven. Key management is handled either with an electronic card key which checks the current reservation status, or key drop boxes to which all members have access. It's both cheaper and more convenient than owning a car, since I only use a car once per week on average.

If you only use it a couple of times a month, it would be cheaper to rent one than to own one.

If you are over 26 then maybe....at least in the UK if you are younger than 26 you have to pay a MASSIVE young driver surcharge(a car can cost 30 pounds/day to rent, but a young driver surcharge can be 100 pounds/day). It's literally cheaper to lease, a brand new Citroen C1 will cost you 100 pounds/month + ~80/month in insurance. The car is new so whatever goes wrong with it you are covered, you just have to put petrol in it.

As someone who comes from a place in the world that can see -30C in winter, I disagree. For 2-3 months of the year cars(and in cities buses) are the only way to travel anywhere.

I can't see people liking that. Charging at home works because you can sleep while it happens. Road side charging takes time away from some other part of your waking day. Wikipedia is saying 40 minutes for an 80% super charge for a Tesla. That's a sizable chunk of time to be loitering at some random location.

I think it would work fine. Parking meters exist for a reason - a lot of people park their cars on the street and go do whatever they came to do. You could upgrade the meters to also support payment for charging.

Installing roadside charging points is the only approach that I can see working for inner cities - maybe create "charging only" zones where you can only park and charge cars - parking a normal car there getting a ticket.

NB I live in central Edinburgh in a flat and there is no way we could have an electric car without some changes to the parking/charging infrastructure.

At least here in Oslo, there are charging stations on every other street in the city center ( https://m.ladestasjoner.no/map ). You need to park anyways, and parking beside a charging pole will not take any more time than just street parking in general, as the number of electric vehicles increase I would expect there to be poles everywhere.

And if you live outside the center. Where there are no poles, can have a driveway with charging or use your block's parking garage.

There are inherent limits on battery energy density.[1] Lithium-ion is nearing the limits of that chemistry. Magnesium-ion could potentially have about 30% more energy density, but so far, nobody can get it to work. Lithium-sulfur may be the next big step. Those actually exist.[2] However, they present a major hazardous waste problem, much worse than lithium-ion batteries.[3] The ultimate limits on energy density are probably 2x or 3x above the best current products. Basic problem: higher energy density comes from elements that are highly reactive.

Cost can be brought down through manufacturing economies. We'll have to see if Tesla meets their price point with their Nevada factory.

[1] http://www.tedsanders.com/graphs/batteries-over-time [2] http://www.sionpower.com/ [3] https://yosemite.epa.gov/OSW/rcra.nsf/Documents/CC7D81DF3070...

Ramez Naam has done lots of research/writing about "learning rates" for power technology. Here's a writeup from late last year on lithium ion batteries: http://rameznaam.com/2015/10/14/how-cheap-can-energy-storage...

There are two different studies, one which shows a 15% and one which shows a 21% learning rate (decreased price due to volume).

One thing that's worth noting is that lithium ion energy density (Wh/kg) has not increased appreciably in the past few years (~200 Wh/kg) - we're probably maxed out w/o switching chemistries. Oxis and Sony are targeting 500 Wh/kg Li-S batteries for 2019/2020, but I'll believe it when I see it - most of the Li-S research is super gee-whiz (lots of coated nanotubes, nanocomposites, etc) but that stuff never tends to make it outside of the labs, and if it does, will be quite expensive.

> if batteries continue to improve over the next four years as they have over the past four years

If CPUs had improved similarly, we would now have machines running at 100GHz. Just saying that extrapolating technology is a tricky business.

What about making the battery packs "hot swappable". You pull into the station, the current pack is unloaded and a new one is loaded. I It can also have interesting effects on the battery upgrade you need to do every X amount of years. The packs could be owned by the gas station chain, so you can stop at any of their establishments and get a new one refiled.

These battery pack charging stations could then also be used as power offloading for local power generation.

Tesla designed that, built one, then dropped it last year as nobody was using it. It could be more useful in vehicles which don't charge as fast, perhaps?

The french car maker Renault tried this : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault_Fluence_Z.E. (<- the point is in the link)

It didn't work.

Just escape the .: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault_Fluence_Z%2EE%2E

Sounds like it wasn't profitable, at least in 2013: "The company's financial difficulties were caused by the high investment required to develop the charging and swapping infrastructure, about US$850 million in private capital, and a market penetration significantly lower than originally predicted..."

There have been many demos of hot swappable battery packs. However as long as every car maker has their own battery packs and swapping methods it means you'll need a half dozen different swapping stations at each location making the whole concept very financially inefficient.

One of the founders of HTC is doing this for mopeds. With a much smaller battery, you just pull it out and carry it with you to the swapping station. Seems quite interesting:

https://www.wired.com/2016/01/electric-scooter-maker-gogoro-...

Shai Agassi tried that with Better Place. It raised about $850M and filed for bankruptcy after 6 years. Less than 1400 cars were using the 38 deployed swapping stations in Israel and Denmark.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Place

I've been shopping for a used car in the Bay Area, and it looks like used electrics are even easier to buy (and harder to sell) than former rentals. That's not a good signal.

Like any 1.0 product. The technology evolves so rapidly it loses 90% of its value in a few years.

It reminds me my first digital camera, 2000$ and 3 years later you could get better for 500$.

Not really. I sold my Prius for more than I paid for it back in 2005/6.

Electric cars are tough in that nobody knows how well they age. Based on my experience with lithium batteries, I'd be a bear in the value!

I own a 2014 Nissan Leaf. Except for the battery and motor, almost every technology in the car is what you'd find in a regular vehicle. Any obsolescence can be dealt with by a battery upgrade (motors are a century old technology, I doubt that'll improve much in 5-10 years).

ahhh gotcha, so just the internal energy source and the part that locomotes it. Nothing too important then, eh?

edit: yes, it was a joke. However, not for nothing, this is still a bizarre comment indicating that only the highy technical nuances in the car are nuances and that it should be trivial to swap them out. The battery is tied to the drive train each having a highly specialized and proprietary function. The power train uses a "centuries old technology" a synchronous electric motor.

I am just jokingly pointing out that all cars use technology for motors grounded in history. Leaving aside considerable differences in size, weight, calibration, horespower or interconnection as well as subtle differences converting the imperial system into metric, sure, I guess you could argue motors are a commodity.

As for the battery, the leaf's is great. Slated to hold 70-80% of its charge for around a decade. However, again, this was a limited production run-rate and can't really be decoupled from the drive-train without a significant degree of knoweldge and tooling making it highly unlikely someone would do this for any other reason than to learn a massive amount and have a really cool project. The battery is a 24kWh supercell constructed out of 192 subsells with a cooling stack and whatever battery chemistry they are using[0]. So yeah, I was having a playful joke here.

I don't think anyone was arguing that EVs are overtly complicated due to the new radio & blue tooth technology they have to interface with the stereosystem...it's all about the powertrain/motor & energy source interface. jeez...

[0] Googled it, fairly standard: lithium ion manganese oxide batteries, like the kind grandma used to bake.

hliyan said the motor doesn't need upgrading..

Just the battery. A single (nearly) drop in box that could contain batteries, reversible fuel cell, or a micro fusion reactor.

This is wrong. The battery is not tied to the drive train. Given the same electrical interface, dimensions and a compatible BMS, swapping out for a lighter, cheaper battery IS trivial. Even cell level replacement is possible -- it's actually happening commercially where I live.

Again, this isn't my area, but conventional ICE vehicles are typically a total loss if they need the entire engine & gas tank replaced. So, again, I am sure I am not totally correct/wrong here in the entirety but my point was just that:

> Except for the battery and motor, almost every technology in the car is what you'd find in a regular vehicle.

This statement I found funny because it was stating that the core technological difference between ICEs and EVs was the energy source and the motor. Again, I didn't mean to be insulting here, it's just like, no one thought it was the windshield wipers, so I made a joke about it. However, this second part:

> Any obsolescence can be dealt with by a battery upgrade (motors are a century old technology, I doubt that'll improve much in 5-10 years).

I am highly suspect of. Again, I have no reason not to believe you, but realistically you would have to get the battery from Nissan as it would be prohibitively expensive from a 3rd party and likely void the warranty. Hence why I said a fun software project but not something an average user would employ as the core battery pack[0] is buried under the entire enterior and interfaces through wht are almost certainly proprietary connections and closed API/systems.

Also, and again this is going on statements made by Nissan which are self-serving[1] Nissan is swapping 5 batteries a year and recycles 15-20. So I was simply pointing out that if we back out the 2016 statistic back to when Nissan launched the leafin Dec 2010, they would be somewhere around 6y * 5 = 30 replacements span of the fleet. So, I was just poking a bit of fun in jest at what you sort of intimated was just a casually routine procedure.

Again, you are correct[2], like they do have a battery replacement program and you can rent/pay to be in it as of 2014. I am just pointing out that these are the core differences between ICEs and EVs.

> Given the same electrical interface, dimensions and a compatible BMS, swapping out for a lighter, cheaper battery IS trivial.

Again, after reading this, I realized you could be trolling. Like, of course that's correct, if you take away the proprietary elecrical interface which is likely hardware/connections AND software based, found/built a compatible BMS, e.g. the core Battery Management System of the deeply integrated cell chemistry with the electrical internals that support it and likely interface with a larger system at the pack and vehicle levels...and you take apart the entire interior of your vehicle to get at the battery which is under all 4 seats and the carpet...disconnect all the wiring which runs throughout the entirety of your car...then remove the 480lb pack and get at the 192 subcells...

then yeah, it's like super trivial. So easy a caveman can do it. But again, I was just sort of having a laugh (not at your expense might I add) at how you just sort of casually imply that except this super (unique/difficult/X) stuff then Y is essentially trivial. But it's not a big deal, I just wouldn't imply it is as common place as you did.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Leaf#/media/File:2013_N...

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Leaf#Battery

[2]http://www.autoblog.com/2013/06/20/nissan-leaf-battery-repla...

> This statement I found funny because it was stating that the core technological difference between ICEs and EVs was the energy source and the motor.

That might be the main difference between EV and ICE cars. The similarities are much bigger though. Eg they can use the same technology for providing safety at high impact speeds, and the same aerodynamic shape.

The ICE is but a part of what makes a modern car.

> This statement I found funny because it was stating that the core technological difference between ICEs and EVs was the energy source and the motor.

Have you ever looked at the e-Golf? It's just a normal golf except it has a battery and a electric motor. The rest of the vehicle is exactly the same.

> Given the same electrical interface, dimensions and a compatible BMS, swapping out for a lighter, cheaper battery IS trivial.

I don't know about the US, but over here in some European countries, there's this thing about vehicle type approval. Changing things like the drive train, brakes, engine or a different type of fuel tank might not be possible because then the vehicle's not conforming to regulation.

I could imagine this could be a problem with a changed battery type as well, even if dimensions etc are the same.

Incidentally, I bought a former rental and it's great! No problems at all.

People always say "But what if some idiot has thrashed it?" Well, probably some idiot did, but at least they only did it for a couple of days... much better than buying a car which was solely driven by some idiot.

Fleet cars are also a pretty good buy. They do quite a bit of checking before selling them and the maintenance was very likely by the book.

According to the article, we are now held back by expensive, non-crappy batteries.

But the price is dropping, and eventually will be affordable.

Forget the batteries look at the cost of replacing aluminum quarter panel which is welded on. For the Model S it's supposedly $15,000+ just for the part then fixed at a Tesla approved bodyshop. That's nuts!

I did the math and for comparison on a $3 million Enzo Ferrari a hood (couldn't find a quarter panel) unpainted and used is about $10,000. http://www.ferrparts.com/en/usd/diagrams/front-hood-and-open...

I like electric but I can't own a car that will cost so much to repair. A $15,000 bill not including labor on a $70,000 vehicle 20% of the total vehicle cost is not worth it.

I'm not sure what this complaint has to do with electric cars in general -- sure, expensive cars are expensive.

Your Tesla number is definitely incorrect; I rear-ended someone in traffic and fixing the front-end was $10k of parts and $10k of labor. Not a surprising amount given what the car costs.

I suspect a Chevy Bolt will cost about the same to repair as other Chevy cars with a similar price.

> I rear-ended someone in traffic

Emergency braking safety system didn't kick in?

I have an early car, without the necessary sensors.

Not to mention that even my 2014 Mercedes A class doesn't have that, for some reason.

And we are comparing new part with totally unrelated used part because it's more fun? Would also be nice to have a source for Tesla part price.

You're talking about a $60k+ (realistically probably more like $80k) vehicle. Aluminum body panels for luxury cars in that class have long been similarly priced. If you bought an all aluminum Audi A8 in 1999 for a similar price, you'd be in a similar situation. If you balk at that kind of repair bill, you shouldn't be considering a car in that price range.

Your comparison of the used Ferrari hood is hardly applicable at all. First it's a used part, second it's a carbon fiber part, not aluminum.

Additionally, why would you expect to pay the price for the part yourself? That's what insurance is for. In reality, Tesla is doing you a favor by making their body panels so expensive because that means it's easier for your car to get declared a total write off in an accident and you can get a new car instead of a busted up repaired car that will never be the same (as anyone who's had a car repaired from a major accident can tell you.)

Lastly, I'd imagine the cost of Tesla body parts has a lot to do with the fact that they are in extremely high demand right now because there's still a waiting list. Any body panel Tesla sells you can't be used to build a car.

> In reality, Tesla is doing you a favor by making their body panels so expensive because that means it's easier for your car to get declared a total write off in an accident and you can get a new car

I think the chance of getting new value for your totalled car is pretty slim, unless it was written off in the first year or you're paying extra for GAP insurance.

My car got written off by an insurance company last year after someone drove into me. I ended up taking a settlement and getting the car fixed myself, there was no way their write off settlement would by me anything like the car I was about to lose. I also hate "throwing away" something mechanically sound over a few body panels, some panel beating, and some paint. And it is certainly not the 'green' choice either!

If your car gets hit to the point where you have to replace body panels it's not as mechanically sound any more as you might think. Only weird, edge case accidents can result in a body panel being destroyed to the point of replacement where the actual structure of the car hasn't been bent or warped in ways that will permanently alter the handling and behavior of the car.

As for being green; when you write off a car it's not like it just gets buried in the ground whole. It gets parted out and the parts all get sold. It's actually quite green. :P

Your insurance will give you replacement value for the car that was destroyed. No that's not original MSRP but it's what the destroyed car is worth. If you're really intent on repairing it, you usually use that money to buy the written off car from whoever the insurance company ends up selling it to (usually whatever mechanic or storage place the totaled vehicle is physically located) and then pay to have it repaired. If the total of that procedure is higher than what the insurance company gave you, then it's a bad idea to do that. :)

> In reality, Tesla is doing you a favor by making their body panels so expensive because that means it's easier for your car to get declared a total write off

How is that a good thing? Does that mean that it would be even better if a paint scratch meant the car had to be replaced? This replacement is not free in the long run, insurance companies are not charities and someone is paying for the delight owner's receiving a new car instead of having it repaired.

Now they'll just be held back by lack of a widespread charging infrastructure.

The next big problem is the lack of a unified charging infrastructure. Yes, you can buy a trunk full of adapters.[1] Teslas use their own plug, for which there are a CHAdeMO adapter, a J1772 adapter, and adapters for standard 120VAC and 240VAC outlets. A full set of adapters is about $700. [2]

The Chevy Bolt uses Combo Cord, which supports J1772 and CCS.

Looking around Silicon Valley, almost all charging points have J1772. Some are free, some require payment, and some require membership in a charging plan. Higher power stations are mostly CHAdeMO.

There's a big retail markup on electricity. $0.59/KWh at some stations. And there are payment "plans", which look like cellular phone plans. Tesla's "Supercharger" is supposedly unlimited once you've paid your $2500, but apparently if you use ones near your residence, they send you nag messages saying it's really for travelers.

[1] https://www.evseadapters.com/ [2] http://shop.teslamotors.com/collections/model-s-charging-ada...

> Tesla's "Supercharger" is supposedly unlimited once you've paid your $2500, but apparently if you use ones near your residence, they send you nag messages saying it's really for travelers.

Because its meant only for travelers. Its for unlimited cross country travel, not as your local free filling station.

Yes, but you don't need chademo. Your car comes with 120 and 220v, plus j1172, plus you don't need an adapter for superchargers. So $0 additional cost. Plus it comes with the wall charger. So you might live in a place with Chademo, but its only useful if it exists, and there is no high power charger. So the extra set would $450, but you actually need $0 extra - and it fits in the corner of the trunk. I've owned a tesla since 2012, and I don't have chademo. I've spent exactly $0 extra on the plugs you suggest. I have been from seattle to portland, eastern washington, Vancouver BC, Whistler, Banff. Just using regular j1772 and superchargers.

I live in an area with a lot of CHAdeMO chargers, and I've never been tempted to buy the adapter... near-home charging (I have an apartment) and superchargers have done the job, even for longer trips.

When the bosses wanted iPhones, the company got iPhones. When the bosses want to plug in their electric cars, the parking lots will get charging stations.

* The parking lots will get 2 or 3 charging stations per 1000 spaces, like many parking garages in SF currently.

Charging stations is the wrong word. The charging part is already embedded in the car. All you need is a 240 volt socket.

Nope. "Charging station" is widely accepted to mean the socket, its associated parking space, the control/payment electronics, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charging_station

Two car households look like a large enough market to get past the chicken and egg problem. The vast majority of daily driving is within the range of a base model Tesla.

If Norway is any indication, it shouldn't be much of a problem. Once the EV market share hits a certain threshold, build-out of charging infrastructure explodes, as it becomes a good investment.

Grocery stores are starting to have deals with charging station companies, because it gives them a competetive advantage to have a charging station at their store.

Some government incentives can be great to give the infrastructure that initial boost (to help boost initial EV sales) but it seems the market can handle it after that.

This is going to sound flippant, but I mean it seriously: The advantage to fungible electricity seems to me that we've already solved the hard parts of charging infrastructure. We have electric grids that reach just about every building, and with modern lighting standards most parking lots and parking facilities too.

Certainly there are "last mile questions" like number of charging devices and type of charging plug(s) and adding plugs to circuits/stringing new circuits near building exteriors and in parking lots and figuring out who to charge for that, but none of them have particularly "hard" problems left to solve at this point.

And if we go the Hydrogen route, then batteries definitely won't be what holds it back. But certainly other factors will.

obviously Tesla is the front runner for spearheading the insudtry by virtually every metric & subsector (except maybe price). Look, I love Tesla and have been bullish on the company for a pretty long time, so I am biased, but why can't other car companies have quality cars and aesthetics.

* Fisker Karma: The car looked super sleek, was super sexy and from an engineering standpoint it was a heap of shit.

* Chevy Volt: Was an ICE car that had the worst of both worlds. Not particularly attractive.

* Rimac Concept One: Ok this car was fucking brilliant but it was like $1M USD.

* Prius: Pretty decent as far as hybrids go. Aesthetics are lacking what many might consider: the ability to not look like a cross between a golf cart and a mobility scooter.

* Chevey Bolt: Seems to have pretty amazing specs. Aesthetics are sub-par for sure.

Yes, Tesla's thing was making a compelling electric car, however other manufacturers seem to be doing alright in actually making the car. They just need to bend the metal in a way that doesn't look fucking horrible and Tesla will have a bit harder of a time of it.

Edit:

Here is a quick album I made. Nearly every car looks the same:

http://imgur.com/a/HEsyf

edit 2:

Here[t] you can see Tesla's offerings. The roadster is omitted. However, of the 4 cars, they made: roadster and the models s,3,x,y* you would be hard pressed to confuse them for any of the cars in the above album. However, those in that album are very close to one another aesthetically.

[t]http://st.motortrend.com/uploads/sites/5/2016/05/2017-Tesla-...

* they haven't made y yet....

I think the Chevy Bolt looks ok, fairly similar to other current small cars. The BMW i3 is hideously ugly. The Nissan Leaf is growing on me, but maybe that's just because I bought one and now have some form of Stockholm Syndrome. The headlights are stupid looking, but I like the rest of the car.

It's too bad about the Volt. I drove one a few times... It isn't a terrible car at all, and bypasses the gaping flaws in a pure electric vehicle.

What's too bad about the Volt? I may be about to buy one of the new ones. The 2016 model has better electric range and looks better too.

It doesn't seem to have done too well in the market and gets ragged on a lot. IMO a good concept.

I guess I live in a bubble. Here in Sunnyvale I see them everywhere.

They are great cars, nice and quiet, very comfortable seats, good performance, full set of options (no self driving) and GM offers excellent warranty coverage. Puritans don't like the hybrid part, but the simple fact is that there isn't sufficient charging infrastructure to support pure EV cars in most places and certainly if I take a trip into the country I won't be able to charge it for the trip back, but can easily refuel. They do increase demand for power plugs at employers, residential buildings, shopping centres, etc so I think they help the cause and improve the practicality of pure EV vehicles. Take one for a test drive, my favourite comment is, "Oh, these are actually nice." There is enough EV trashing going on as it is, some people would do well to actually put some thought into their opinions before sharing them.

What do you see as the 'gaping flaws' of a pure electric vehicle? I would never want a hybrid, as I would optimize for either an ICE or EV but there doesn't seem to be space in a consumer vehicle to have a workable hybrid that is better than either of its pureplay counterparts.

A few:

- Road trips. Range needs to accommodate the 95th percentile trip, not the mean.

- Apartment living

- Unknown depreciation curve

The other inconvenient fact is that you need to drive a lot for the TCO of an electric car to be lower than a similar gasoline car.

- Road trips.

Someone should make a novel rental program where you can swap an electric for a fresh one every 200 miles or so, like getting fresh horses. It would let more people try the vehicles while also offering a faster solution for road trips (assuming Tesla owners would get a significant discount).

Median daily distance is actually close to about 30 miles in the US. I'd be surprised if the 95th percentile (equating to more than once per month) wasn't already within the range of a Tesla, though the report doesn't have that figure.

https://www.aaafoundation.org/american-driving-survey-year-o...

I travel regularly to NYC from Albany (about 150 miles). Many other people do as well, based on the NYC->ALB traffic you see on weekend evenings.

It's a trip that is definitely in the range of a Tesla from a point A to point B point of view -- but you end up with lots of overhead. Did I fully charge before the trip? Will I do a side trip? Will I drive around when I get there?

The electric car adds a lot of complication, and doesn't really solve any problem right now.

Its similar to the decision process of common carrier vs. car for any moderate/long range trip.

I want to say straight out, I agree that range-anxiety is real. People need to be comfortable that the car will be able to go wherever they need to go, whenever they need to do there. That is, at least in America, the cultural equivocation that driving === freedom.

That said, this statement:

> The electric car adds a lot of complication, and doesn't really solve any problem right now.

leaves me obligated to point out a few things. I will reason from analogy for point:

1. I just quit smoking, it wasn't obvious that it solved a problem right now, but I hope it will eliminate some later ;).

2. It doesn't matter, at least by Tesla's conception, that electric cars solve anything. Obviously, it is a mission driven company but that mission doesn't/shouldn't matter to the end user. Electric cars should be great for their own sake, and as good or better than a comprably priced ICE.

> workable hybrid that is better than either of its pureplay counterparts.

I don't really need my Prius to be better than an EV or a pure ICE, I just need something that works with existing infrastructure (not much EV infrastructure in Idaho where I live, and we make semi-regular trips to nothern Idaho to visit family) while getting decent fuel economy and reliability.

Actually, now that I think about it, from a reliability aspect my Prius trumps conventional ICE engines. The much simpler design of the Atkinson cycle engine, since it can sacrifice torque that the MG's can compensate for, leads to some pretty impressive durability and a relatively cheap replacement should it be necessary - it's much more likely (guaranteed, really) that I will need to replace the battery pack before I hit 300K miles but the engine and MG's will last until the car falls apart.

Uh... what about the leaf?! IMO that's the car spearheading the movement right now.

As time goes on, CAFE standards tighten, etc., aren't cars converging on whatever turns out to be the aerodynamically optimal shape?

They look like every other car to me, I have no idea what you are talking about.

One more for the list -- I got a Mercedes B250e three months ago and have been quite happy with it. It has a Tesla drive train [0] and although the official range is 83 miles per charge, I consistently get around 105. Bonus -- the CarPlay integration is really well-done.

[0] http://www.plugincars.com/mercedes-b-class-e-cell

I recall reading an article (can't find it at the moment) that suggested that the ugliness of hybrid/electric vehicles was, in general, a deliberate move; that people buying an EV didn't actually want an EV (even if they thought they did); they wanted their neighbors to think they wanted an EV, and designing EVs in a distinctive style allowed that market to be tapped much more effectively than if EVs had followed the design patterns of IC vehicles.

> Rimac Concept One

Nice! I wonder if it's available with a combustion engine.

> There is no Moore’s law for battery storage—the power of batteries doesn’t magically double every two years.

> Put another away, the battery pack in the 2017 Volt will cost less than 10 percent more than the one in the 2012 Volt. But it will be more than four times more powerful.

Intel wishes its chips still quadrupled in performance every 5 years.

> We’re moving toward a world where more and more cars will either run primarily on gasoline but with an assist from powerful batteries or primarily on powerful batteries but with an assist from gasoline.

He's saying that in article talking about how cheap batteries have become and how in a few years they'll be $100/KWh? Within 10 years all EVs will have 100-150 KWh batteries. That's 400-600 mile ranges.

The only place where you'll see "hybrids" is some niches where batteries alone couldn't possibly make sense, but I have a hard time coming up with ideas for vehicles where batteries alone wouldn't be enough in 15 years and they're smaller than say a train or an airplane. Even buses should do just fine with a 200KWh battery for a 16-18h work-day.

> Earlier this week, Bloomberg New Energy Finance released a report arguing that by 2040, 35 percent of annual vehicles sales will be electric.

It will be at least twice as much by 2030. By 2025 few will want a car that isn't an EV, and the car makers will have no choice but to start competing in EVs as their primary cars.

> But it will be more than four times more powerful

It's also more than twice as heavy

I just find it funny, that they think that moore's law means that chips magically improve, that it is not dependant on the hard work of people.

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