> Price of a conventional car powertrain: $6,000
Can anyone provide a better source for this?
This is exactly the opposite of what I expected. I thought electric powertrains had far fewer (in the hundreds, even) moving parts?
Edit: Coffee hasn't kicked in yet. As user analognoise points out, this is literally answered by the sentence that follows the above: How soon that day arrives is almost solely a function of the price of batteries.
For example GM’s list price for the Bolt battery is $15,734. Now this is the replacement cost Bolt owners pay for a new battery not the actual cost, but it gives an indication of their cost.
https://electrek.co/2017/06/12/gm-bolt-ev-battery-pack-price...
-edit- found it https://www.quora.com/How-much-power-is-required-by-the-moto...
80kw to accelerate and 1 kw to maintain.
-edit 2- how come no ones put 3 solar panels on top of an EV? Three of the following could output 1 kw and fit in the space available.
http://www.solarwholesale.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Sil...
Seems like an obvious for electric semis where there’s often plenty of sun (aka an ever increasing portion of the US)
As for the other question, the solar panels provide way too little charge for the given area. When EVs are all about to have 100+ kWh batteries soon, it doesn't make sense to have a solar roof top:
https://www.engineering.com/ElectronicsDesign/ElectronicsDes...
If a company could move their trucks for “free” for 5 hours/day they would.
Even if the panels can generate 100 kWh a day for the trucks, that's still like 1/10 of the day, so more like an hour. But 100 kWh seems really unlikely, even in the future.
Not by a huge amount. You could get 3x that with just about the best solar panel, but they didn't appear to factor in the losses from having the panels facing up-ish and not toward the sun, so you also lose another big chunk of power.
> If it doesn’t make sense today it will in the future.
Doubt it. Solar panels can only be so efficient.
> If a company could move their trucks for “free” for 5 hours/day they would.
Sure, but we're looking at more like fifteen minutes.
Put the solar panels on the ground. They'll give you more "free" range, with less effort.
Mind you I wonder if electric cars can get a million miles out of them, like well maintained conventional cars can do.
That's not the case with electric cars and their batteries. They're deeply integrated with the rest of the powertrain.
ICE: powertrain + fuel tank ~$6,000 (or whatever your local currency) …
EV: powertrain + fuel tank ~$16,000 …
That makes more sense, but then you'd need – cost of fuel per mile/kilometre
ICE: 10¢ a mile
EV: 1¢ a mile (or sometimes free?)
That's why people are buying electric vehicles already. Okay, maybe it's partly environmental, but surely it is also because they figure that running costs are lower over the lifetime so they might break even overall. As battery prices drop, electric vehicles only become even more economical in the long run.
So I imagine that there will be a significant uptake in the U.S. when people can expect to save money within the life of a lease, which could be as soon as 3 years with a few bumps in fuel prices.