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Comment by terravion | Hacker News Reader

It is amazing to watch Wright's Law in action as volumes grow to saturation, pulling down the price, to drive saturation. It will be interesting to see if batteries are like processing with self-generating demand, or if it is like prior industrial technologies that seem to hit ceiling based on some sort of inherent demand limit. It is hard to imagine wanting 3 electric cars...

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So the analysis focuses on a single variable: cost, specifically the inflation-adjusted price of one “unit.” (A “unit” is itself sometimes a fluid concept in a rapidly changing field. Consider what “one transistor” meant in 1969, and what it meant in 2005.) So, for example, recasting Moore’s Law to translate computing power into unit cost morphed the familiar “computing power doubles every 18 months” into “transistor costs drop by 50 percent every 1.4 years.”

(Wright's Law is surprisingly hard to google)

source: http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/at-work/test-and-measurem...

That article has really good examples of the problems of overfitting. Better than the standard abstract data science stuff I've seen anyway.

I think there'll be an economic incentive for at least miniaturizing battery cells, while keeping capacity. Even if there is a limit to EV range, where consumers simply won't be interested in cars that go much further, reducing the weight of the battery itself, will be a direct economic boon for the consumer. There might also be some unforeseen boons to cheaper and lighter batteries, kind of how the personal drone market sprung out of the advances made in lithium-ion batteries for Smartphones/Laptops.

> It is hard to imagine wanting 3 electric cars

It's no more difficult than wanting 3 internal combustion engine cars - one for husband, one for wife, one for driving age children.

Or the weekend sportscar/roadster, or the "classic" car (though I wonder if any modern electric will ever achieve classic/collectable status).

As Jay Leno happily points out, some of the oldest and coolest "classic" cars are turn of the last century electric cars. [1]

Whether a current electric car may ever turn heads or have gearhead fans a century from now, you never know, retro fashions are inscrutable from this distance.

[1] An example: https://transportevolved.com/2015/12/29/jay-leno-prepares-to...

EV West seems to be doing a good job of building up a catalog of conversion kits. Model S running gear in a tri-5 Chevy won't be as efficient as the original package, but it is good enough (except for that V8 rumble)

If technology gets good enough batteries become attractive for a wide variety of engines that currently require either electric cords or fossil fuels. Think drones, bicycles, lawn appliances, vacuum cleaners, home UPS, solar energy storage, automated greenhouses, etc. It also could have knock-on effects on the type of powered appliances possible, eg. perhaps you'd want your toaster & cabinet to be mobile so you could have breakfast in bed, but this is impractical with electric cords. I wouldn't worry too much about demand for batteries.

Certainly replacing helicopters with drones seems a pretty obvious step [0].

[0]: http://time.com/4171329/drone-helicopter-ehang-184-ces/

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