Ford Raises Prices of F-150 Lightning Electric Truck by Thousands of Dollars | Hacker News Reader

Ford Raises Prices of F-150 Lightning Electric Truck by Thousands of Dollars

nytimes.com

18 pointsgoindeep14 comments

Pay walled, which is okay, but I'll add my 0.02 Antipodean dineros anyways.

Electric vehicles have a somewhat large high tech battery in them and associated charging and power delivery electronics, ex factory, which is factored in to the price.

ICE vehicles are largely made from iron and aluminium, which are extremely abundant and relatively straightforward to extract and refine.

But those iron and aluminum alloys are made into thousands of moving parts? Fuel injectors, timing chain, oil and fuel pumps, turbos, cooling, and the electrical system. Yet some of them sell for 10% of the price of a F-150 Lightning...

We live in a world where absurdly powerful VLSIs sell for a just few hundred dollars per unit. You don't need to think very hard to realize that all of that stuff cost next to nothing to manufacture.

My $0.02: ICE vehicles require extremely tight tolerances in their engine bits, while EVs generally don't (and have a lot fewer parts to boot). The complication (as you alluded to) in EVs is chemical, rather than mechanical. And the supply chains therefore, are just about as complicated, just in different ways.

Because we have no way of machining extremely precise parts with modern technology at a low cost...

That low cost part is the challenge. There are a pile of precision parts that are expensive because of this exact issue. It's just a different problem than EVs.

We have ways to manufacture cars at the price point we do due to a century of optimization. It's fundamentally a very, very hard thing: we're containing a gasoline explosion many times per second.

Electric vehicles are expensive, in my opinion, mostly because they're new.

It's like CRTs versus LCDs. My first LCD cost $2500. A the time, CRTs were cheap.

However, making a slab of silicon with liquid crystals is a lot cheaper, fundamentally, than a vacuum-filled glass cavity with an electron gun and all the other stuff that goes into a CRT.

If I were to estimate the cost of making a gas car, or a CRT, without that century of optimization, it'd be astronomical almost to the point of being impractical.

The problem is that batteries are bigger and heavier than engines.

I'll agree there are few high tolerance moving parts in an electric motor vs an ICE engine.

But otherwise they do infact have equally precise tolerances, probably more so given they've tend to operate at much higher RPM.

We know that the Tesla Plaid motor is an extreme example of tight tolerances.

I’d say the difficulty with ICE in cars today is the precision of design, not precision of machining.

> ICE vehicles are largely made from iron and aluminium, which are extremely abundant and relatively straightforward to extract and refine.

And that's the reason why economy of scale works for ICE and does not really work for BEV. BEVs are dependent on materials which are abundant, but hard to extract (Lithium), not abundant at all (Cobalt, Nickel) or already maxed out and can't increase mining further (Copper)

https://archive.ph/rIZjC

If you wanted to bet on the failure of the push for electrification of transport within the next 20 years, how would you invest your money?

Doesn't matter. Dealers are putting $50k markups on them and people still buying them anyways.

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