These articles are always "Don't buy an EV yet, MUCH better ones are coming soon".
Same article since 2010, always Coming Soon™.
Same article since 2010, always Coming Soon™.
Solid state is more or less progressing on a time line that hasn't really deviated a lot from what was projected a few years ago. There are a few companies out there that by now have proven that they can build cells that last lots of cycles and generally perform well. Taking those cells to production necessarily involves a series of increasingly larger plants to produce these cells and testing the hell out of the resulting cells. This is a slow process but it seems like a few companies are ramping up production volumes.
Quantumscape is a good example. They are exactly where they said they would be a few years ago. They've delivered sample cells to a few of their customers (VW and a few others) and the tests came back positive. I think this year they are building small production facility to start producing low volumes of cells. If that's successful, we might see some cars from 2026/2027 onwards or so. But I would expect volume production to be dominated by LFP and increasingly sodium ion batteries for cheaper EVs for quite some time. They are good enough. Higher energy density will come at a premium.
go back to 2010 and show past you the batteries we've got now, you'd be impressed by what huge progress there was.
The gain in capacity has also been noticable. It's a few percent per year, but over a decade that adds up.
The Tesla Model S was introduced with 60 and 85 kWh batteries ~10 years ago. Today you can buy vehicles in the same class with 120 kWh, and dozens of models with 85+ kWh: https://ev-database.org/cheatsheet/useable-battery-capacity-...
Of course affordability remains a problem, but the battery capacity per vehicle has drastically improved, even without world shattering breakthroughs in chemistry.
Computers get much better every couple years, but you don't dismiss those as "Coming Soon™".
Did you write this from 2010? _Consumer_ computer products has been barely getting any better for a decade now. (last big WOW for me personally was getting first gen Retina MacBook Pro with SSD).
Now, the phones? Those have improved significantly. The cameras, the on-device AI, and where those two things were blended together - night photography, and translating text within images (even though image translation was first demonstrated on phones in 2010, it's a much better experience now).
"Wow" or not, processors are at least twice as fast per core compared to several years ago, and they have double the cores too. And a 4070 is more than 5x as fast as a 770.
When I see articles talking about electric car improvements that are possible in the next handful of years, 2x is usually at the high end. None of them go near 5x.
With current EVs I'd have to keep that it a very long time just to break even with the energy used in manufacturing. I think I've heard estimates of about 20,000-30,000 miles to break even.
For a number reasons I don't find the current EV offerings compelling enough to trade in my old Golf yet. Right now I don't think there's anything I need to do for my use-cases that I could do better in a current EV.
I’m hoping maybe in a few years a 2023 Ioniq 5 will be affordable enough, but we will see.
I suppose it depends on what risk you're concerned about, but if you've got the cashflow to flush money down the lease rabbithole, you probably don't care too much about a couple grand difference in value down the road on your car, beyond academically.
Or something like that.
Plenty of reasons right now to hold off buying an EV; upfront or operating costs, lack of at home charging, inability to get access to fast chargers for whatever reason, inability to tow heavy loads to desired destinations, etc. I sincerely doubt solid state batteries is one of the concerns on most people's list.