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Comment by Gatsky | Hacker News Reader

I think you are ignoring an important part of this question, which is what is going to happen in India and Northern Africa, where most of the population growth will take place over the next 50 years. I don't think these countries can afford an 'economy' EV, or widespread infrastructure to support them, certainly not in the near term. India is certainly making some encouraging moves [1], but your comment seems quite too optimistic and Western-centric.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-58977080

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The top selling EV in China only costs $4k. There is absolutely no reason an electric vehicle should cost more than a typical gas powered car.

https://electrek.co/2021/02/25/this-weird-little-4000-electr...

EV in China is heavily, I mean very heavily, subsidized in China.

Keep in mind I'm not saying EV can't be as cheap, but China isn't the best example.

Unless you're trying to make your own EV factory and compete globally on price, the fact that it's subsidized is irrelevant (unfortunately), because the way subsidies work, the China subsidized price is how much an EV like that costs.

> Unless you're trying to make your own EV factory

Lots of countries manufacture their own cars, unlike some random plastic toys.

Also, You don't get this price when China are exporting them if that's what you're trying to say.

The price is mainly subsidized on the (Chinese) customer's side (there are big incentives to buy EV over gas car, and it's not limited to the price of the vehicle itself: in some places it costs more money to get a plate for gas car than the car itself), not the manufacturing side (obviously it's both, but why it got as low as $4000 is mainly because of the former).

The technology will arrive in India sooner than we think.

EV have very low maintenance compared to gas cars. As time goes on, new EVs will get better real fast. The old EVs will still be solid workhorses despite this.

The problem with India is twofold: manufacturing and import regulations. But someone somewhere will figure this out: they’re trying to fix that same issue with iPhones. Some EV company (maybe Tesla) can piggyback off of the same solution.

That’s when all the “old EVs” with perfectly useful motors, readable easy to upgrade batteries and solar energy will make sense.

Now I’ll admit: this super hand wavy. But ever since I bought my EV, I have just found my transportation costs trending to zero. It’s ridiculously cheap!

> EVs will get better real fast

Other than standardising the batteries, unlocking the chips so they can be maintained and maybe switching to a motor that doesn't require niobium, what's to improve?

Electric motors are a mature technology, and putting a box or a 3:1 teardrop on wheels is quite simple.

Wait till your battery capacity is halved and you have to pay half the price of the car to get it replaced

Wait until gas is $10. How much is invested in oil changes over an ICEs life? Thousands of dollars.

If almost everyone transitions to EVs, wouldn’t that reduce demand enough for oil to bring it down to < $5? The big problem would then be distribution as gas stations go out of business, but if long distance trucks still use diesel, truck stops could service legacy ICE passenger cars.

Yeah, if demand drastically dropped price would likely drop. The main point was that ICEs also have significant maintenance & energy costs. Sticking it out with gas doesn't mean you won't be facing thousands of dollars of additional costs over the life of the car.

Ya, but new cars last an increasing amount of time with reasonable service costs. So they might be around for awhile.

But no reason not to get an EV. I’m on week 4 and would never dream of going back to an ICE.

Thats the traditional economics thinking but it does not accounts for the internal mechanics of oil producer market. The problem is that not all oil sources in the world cost the same to produce [ref:1]. So you may have plenty of oil available at say $90/bbl but not much at $60 because sources like shale/oil sands or deepwater are offline. This means with mass adoption EVs there still would be some oil producers willing to sell cheap but most would be offline for foreseeable future. This has deep implications for oil infra as that cannot be turned on a dime & needs constant development & upkeep. plus there will be not much ROI on long term horizon so financing would be difficult.

Overall I don't see mass EV adoption as a good news for crude oil. If I can get a little conspiratorial IMO this is the reason why there is such a strong push from hydrogen lobby as it provide them for an outlet for existing fossil infra and hope that they can keep it alive with massive lobbying and subsidies.

ref 1: https://imfdirect.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/oil-4.jpg

If everyone transitions to EVs, the remaining gasoline users would have to pay a lot more of the infrastructure. Pipelines, oil platform, refineries etc, are all expensive.

They will have to wait a really long time for that.

https://res.cloudinary.com/nimblefins/image/upload/c_limit,d...

Tesla battery only degraded 20% in 9.5 years.

Tesla is getting half million miles out of batteries. If my model 3 gets half that i’d be ecstatic and 1/4th that i would still be happy (and you can get them refurbed for 15k or less..which is cheap if you get another half million miles… )

15k NOW. The downward cost of batteries means replacements will cost less in the future.

If you have a nickel-cobalt Tesla battery right now, there is going to be at a minimum LFP (no nickel/cobalt) replacements available. Or Li-S, or Solid State, or some sodium ion or maybe sodium sulfur.

If your car lasts ten years, that is going to a completely different ballgame given what is coming down the pipe from technology and scaling.

Even if it drops to 150 mile range, guess what? That is still a car with a ton of use cases: city car, cab, delivery car, etc. Unlike an ICE where the engine or transmission breaks, a battery losing range is still a battery that works.

There’s not enough material right now to make EV batteries for everyone; that price is only going to go up unless a new battery recipe is made commercially viable (including the necessary mass production facilities), or new deposits are made available at similar prices.

You can still sell the battery after, or use it yourself to reduce your electricity bill

So what?

Battery costs are still falling and the typical cost of a battery in a mid range EV is about 6000 USD. For the battery to lose 30% of capacity, it takes 10 years. So your amortized cost (crude) for 10 years is about 400 USD per year.

I am sure the gas costs will be much more than that, compared to EV running costs.

Still a great deal.

This model assumes one person owns the vehicle for the entire vehicles life.

In reality, someone buys an EV new, drives until the battery is worn out, and trades it in. Now the price of used cars just went up $6k across the board because you need to put a new battery in any affordable used car out there.

I think that's a bit overblown, but even in that case I think it's a better deal than playing the odds on an ICE car, that the engine was maintained well by previous owners, that the transmission isn't packed full of sawdust to mask its issues until you're down the road.

Cost of an engine is upwards of 10k and all it takes for an engine failure is skipping a few oil change cycles. An EV battery lasts just as long without having to be maintained as much and when it fails it costs around 6k and in 5 years probably half that amount.

> all it takes for an engine failure is skipping a few oil change cycles.

Any economy car you can buy will easily survive for a very long time even if you completely neglect all maintenance. It is nowhere near true that an engine will fail from missing a few oil changes.

The energy density of lithium-ion batteries per dollar has been doubling every four years for the past 20 years and that trend is continuing which means that by the time you have to replace your battery (assuming 10 years), you can do so at one fifth the original cost (or you can get a battery with 5 times the energy).

Sounds like a good deal to me.

My EV battery has a 8 year guarantee. And looking at statistical data from the same make/model it seems I'll lose 10% max during that time.

Going from 300km range to 270 isn't going to change my life, anything over 200km is perfectly fine for my daily use.

Even after the battery is at 50% capacity in 15+ years from now, I'll need to consider if it's worth it to replace the battery or just take it out and plug it into my house and sell the other bits of the car to someone.

> My EV battery has a 8 year guarantee.

My newest ICE car is 18 years old and my oldest is 34 years old. They work great.

What is their guarantee? You're comparing apples to oranges.

You like old cars and possibly like doing the maintenance yourself, good for you. I don't.

I want to travel in comfort and safety and not have to worry one second about my car breaking down. I also don't want to spend a single second servicing my car myself. I want it to take me from A to B every single time without fail.

I had enough "fun" with cars old enough to drive when I was young and less well-off. Can't beat the excitement of a car randomly breaking down on a remote road in -20C weather. Oh and it just as randomly started working after my uncle drove for 30 minutes to rescue us. Never again.

That ICE car had an 8 year guarantee or less when the first owner bought it too. The guarantee/warranty length isn't full lifetime. We don't know yet what the full lifetime will be in practice yet on some EVs.

The best-selling Toyota in India costs around $20k USD. This is roughly 4x the cost of some of the cheapest new cars available in India. It doesn't look like Toyota is going for that emerging growth.

Sorry, Indian govt. is looking at EVs as a job creation engine. Charging stations, sales and service stations, investments in grid upgrades and installation of renewable energy sources, focus on green Hydrogen, etc.

It is true there is a need to improve infrastructure, but that can be a positive thing to generate employment and invest for the future.

There is also the idea that undeveloped places need to use oil and gas to industrialize just like Europe, the US and China did. The problem with that is there simply was never enough supply.

Yep, countries in Africa skipped the land line phase of phones completely and went directly to cell phones.

It was a lot easier to put one cell tower every X kilometers than it was to run cabling around the country.

A guy named Robert C. Townsend wrote a book about running corporations. A generally extendable warning he wrote about is you can't grow a business by aping established companies and their historical path to success. Whatever angle and opportunities they exploited often no longer exist. And what they do currently makes sense for them not you.

Skipping landlines and going right to mobile is an example of that.

India just got a $10K electric car.

https://www.motor1.com/news/613494/tata-tiago-electric-vehic...

How is availability? In the US, most EVs are hard to get, or have big markups.

(Article says it goes on sale October 10)

Two non-linear learning curves are happening. Indian GDP is increasing and battery costs are decreasing.

it’s going to be cheaper for them to skip out on fossil fuel industry and go EV. It could be more modes of EV than americans are bothered with such as bikes, motorcycles, smaller cars…

What will happen is lower operating costs, independence of charging, and cheaper repairs will win out with vehicle types are maybe around standard vehicle tradeoffs decided existing carmakers.

Even this idealistic picture of developed countries transitioning to EVs is unrealistic.

Most EV's are charged from a grid that's still burning oil/gas/coal to power them. We haven't achieved much of anything in those areas.

The batteries simply DO NOT EXIST to enable a grid that is based off of renewables - or even half off renewables.

Using oil to generate oil is very very rare. It really only happens on small islands where some other power plant doesn’t make sense and there is no connection to a larger grid. For example, many places in Hawaii used oil before solar became cheap enough. Alaska would have also, if it weren’t for abundant hydro that villages and towns off the grid have always been able to tap into.

A large oil/gas/coal burning plant is more efficient than thousands of engines burning petrol/diesel, so just converting a large proportion of the fleet with BEVs nudges us a little bit in the right direction. Further, as the grid becomes greener (which it is, in most places in the world), the transport sector automatically gets greener in large fell swoops, without needing to replace thousands of cars. Plus the power generation plants can be placed far from large residential areas, mitigating the health effects on people.

Yes, but it is NOT more efficient than generating all that power, transmitting it, and then putting it into a battery, and reconverting it into mechanical energy again. End-to-end it is LESS efficient.

A tank of gas does not lose energy in transmission nor in storage, and it is far far more weight:performance efficient.

These places aren't buying new cars at all, though. Nor do they have the "infrastructure" (paved, lighted and signaled road networks are not cheap!) to support a passenger car network like we have in the west either. They are getting by on used/surplus vehicles and lots of spotty access already, and nothing about an EV would do anything but help that process. Electrical grids are much (much) cheaper than fuel distribution in total, and even more so in remote areas.

> These places aren't buying new cars at all, though.

India ranks 4th worldwide for new car sales and will likely take 3rd place in a year or two.

The subject was rural India lacking the infrastructure for EVs, which was a ridiculous point. Obviously there's a market for EV's in Bangalore and Delhi, that's not really much of a discussion. The upthread commenter (who I think is the one you're arguing with, not me) seemed to want to have a carve-out for "EV's can't succeed because of undeveloped regions".

Have you traveled outside of Europe? Things have... changed dramatically since even like, 2015 in B/C tier cities even in South America. I suggest you travel some more and reevaluate. Somewhere like Medellin or Islamabad in 2022 is almost unrecognizable compared to 2000. The third world you grew up watching in 1980s-era national geographic documentaries is absolutely gone, you have to go way off grid to find something like that now.

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