Electric car battery prices are going back down faster than expected (2023)

I'm in the US and I don't see any current manufacturer lowering their price over time. They'll either have higher margins or they'll just add more features to raise the price.

  Average car price in 2002 was ~$19k. 
  Adjusted for inflation is ~$33k.
  Average car price in 2024 is $48k.

If a company was run in a more sane way where they want to provide cars at a reasonable price where the company can pay it's employees a fair wage then maybe that could happen. Instead, most US corporations pay employees as low as possible, take as much money from the consumer as possible, and have the excess go to executives and shareholders.

> For example, much of their value is in the software, which replicates for nearly zero marginal cost.

People have been saying this for decades now and conveniently forget that replacing CD cases with Internet downloads doesn't eliminate the fact that software engineering is expensive in itself.

Crazy how TurboTax isn't $5 or Tesla FSD doesn't come standard. So much for zero marginal cost.

I'm a little afraid "economies of scale" will turn into a steering wheel one or two pedals and an ipad, no other controls.

You skipped the complex heat pump system needed to regulate battery pack temperatures (and used for cabin temps as well).

BMW i4,i5,i7,iX built in mid to late 2023 use an outsourced system that widely failed in cold temps. Tesla has a famously ingenious simpler but efficient custom in house design.

Has anyone projected levelized cost of energy (renewables & storage) with these assumptions around storage costs plugged in?

Initially raw materials were anticipated to be hard to come by, competive forward contracts put up prices as "shortages were forecast" and mining companies went hell for leather to open new lithium (and other elements required) prospects ...

Recently (last six months) it has become clear that more raw prospects were opened than actual demand existed for (glut of future supply), as a result a number of 'fresh' lithium mines have been recently shuttered.

In the post mining concentrate processing game ground has been broken on several processing plants that take mined concentrates and produce usuable raw minerals - Tesla in Texas, for example, now has a pipelined spodumene processing plant and adjoining battery manufacturing facility that will soon be completed.

Much of this flux from expensive to cheaper comes about from the interplay of forward contracts - it takes 18 months and more to bring new mines to production, to bring processing plants to completion, etc.

What's behind the drastic downturn in nickel and lithium prices, and what does it mean?

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-01-26/examining-the-drastic...

Because that question is more of an economics research paper or policy brief than a mass media article. And in that arena data are currency, ie largely not public.

Generally, there’s a lot of economics principles at play. Economies of scale mean as more is produced, often, still further increases in production are possible more cheaply than previously obtained. First semi chip produced might cost billions. The billionth chip might be pennies. There’s also a concept in the environmental economics that pulling finite resources out of the ground responds to increasing demand similar to pulling more money out of a bank via loans. Ie the most easy to obtain resources are mined first and the cost increases from there. In practice, too, producer relationships matter. A company buying batteries for EVs (ie at that scale) for their 5th year in a row is going to have demonstrated to their suppliers that, indeed, they can write a check for all the materials they’ve ordered much more than in year 0. So their suppliers have better information about how reliable their needs are, and so on.

Lots of complicated things not generally in the public knowledge nor easy to explain quick enough to not get scooped by another organization.

I mean, there clearly isn’t a decrease in demand; electric car sales globally continue to increase. LFP batteries getting more common might be one factor; they have lower materials cost than conventional lithium ion batteries.

I think there's been a big scaleup of capacity that's coming on-line exactly as BEVs are declining in popularity.

Marginal improvement? The gas tax is my state is relatively high at $.50/gal. If I have to pay that back directly to the state we’re still looking at like $12 vs $70 to charge a battery vs fill a gas tank. On top of that take away most of the engine maintenance costs and you’re coming out way ahead.

I tried pointing this out in an ev thread and got downvoted. The expense of driving is really maintaining the roads. Sounds like you’ve actually looked at the price components of gas and understand why they’re so outrageous.

My personal prediction is all those carbon taxes on gas transfer over to evs and get renamed to something else.

Markets open to competition from BYD will see massive price drops.

Fingers crossed, we might just see more affordable EVs hitting the streets soon!

Someone will grab the low end, currently served by cheap ICE cars and the second hand market. Premium and prestige brands will of course continue to charge premium and prestige prices, because that is their market.

there's enough competition in the EV sector for margins to remain fairly low. o saw a chart once. Tesla is the only one with big margins, i remember.

But most of the drop is in 2024, so is fairly firm.

Manufacturers continuing to use low cost imported parts instead of high cost US manufactured parts will cause prices to increase?