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Comment by Lewisham | Hacker News Reader

I'm actually most concerned about the lifetime of the batteries. From what I've read, the batteries top out at 8 years, and presumably degrade before that. As the $20k Chevy Cruze is the same chassis as the Volt, I guess the batteries come out at ~$15k. That's a huge amount of money to renew use of your $40k car after 8 years (unless you see that $15k as some sort of investment in the environment).

The Volt design could/should succeed. But not with battery tech where it is. Those batteries need to do 10--12 years.

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Its a punt for the future. I'd hope that in 8 years a replacement battery has twice the capacity at a quarter the cost. If it doesn't and nothing better has emerged, the electric car is probably screwed as a concept anyway. I'd then hope there's more oil than we think.

I'd hope so to, but battery tech hasn't exactly got a stellar record of improvement, likely because of fundamental chemistry constraints.

While I hate to be the depressive and I'd love there to be a better technology available, my understanding is that the resource requirements for battery production and disposal are sufficiently high that the whole life energy costs of such vehicles aren't actually very impressive compared with conventional vehicles, sadly. Hydrogen fuelled cars are a nice technology but effectively an energy storage medium rather than a fuel because the Hydrogen is sufficiently expensive to extract (though a late friend who was a former industrial chemist insisted that solar-initiated catalytic cracking of seawater to extract Hydrogen was viable), plus the molecules are so small that even the best vehicle fuel tank will leak itself empty within a few weeks.

My best bet would be that we'll end up with waste or algae derived biofuels driving turbines feeding ultracapacitors to drive electric motors. But, TBH, there seem to be nasty issues on pretty much all sides. It may simply be that personal transportation as we currently know isn't sustainably scalable with the information and resources available to us.

I would say that battery tech has improved enormously in the last few years. Look at the battery life of current laptops and mobile phones and compare that to a few years ago. In part, this is due to decreased energy consumption of the electronics, but in no small part this should be credited to improved batteries, too.

I wonder how the battery degrading will affect the depreciation of the vehicle which is usually the biggest financial drain of buying a new car.

Once the batteries die, you've basically got a Chevy Cruze + a bunch of weight dragging down MPG, as well as buyers saying "this doesn't work," so I'm expecting it will deprecate through the floor.

I think the better place EV business model will help alleviate that problem, since you are technically renting the battery and it will get replaced semi-regularly.

http://betterplace.com/the-solution-switch-stations

This will also allow the batteries to improve over time, without having to perform massive upgrades to your existing car.

i doubt it's all in the batteries - the volt is a substantially more complicated car. The volt can get away with a smaller battery than other EVs as it doesn't need such huge range - it'll still be a substantial cost, of course.

I felt this way too, at first, when looking into a Prius. But the batteries are usually warrantied for 100,000 miles. They're also about $2,500 + labor for a new one from a dealer. While this is high for a "maintenance" cost, it's not too bad. Especially considering most people trade their vehicles in every 8 years which would be when it starts to crap out.

> Especially considering most people trade their vehicles in every 8 years which would be when it starts to crap out.

You forget that they sell those old cars to someone who typically resells them to someone else who then uses that car for another 10 years. If the car has to be junked that can't happen. If the battery needs to be replaced, the amount of money you get goes down significantly.

If you crashed your 2002 BMW M3 ($43k new) and it was then useless to you, like an electric car with kaput batteries, you could be back in business for $15k (current used price of that M3).

Sure, but the insurance excess would only be $0–$2,000.

Good point. Let's say the engine just dies for some reason and insurance doesn't cover it.

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