Electric vehicle battery prices are expected to fall almost 50% by 2026
goldmansachs.com
goldmansachs.com
Their adoption will eventually be a pure numbers game as new electric becomes cost competitive with used gas. That's how the pragmatic adoption will happen.
You don't need, for instance, catalytic converters or a bunch of other expensive, low tolerance parts and since the fuel storage is electricity, new chemistries are way more feasible. Everything points to a car price crash in the next decade or so. There's already sub-$5k models in China.
This will drop even lower when things like inductive road charging or other ways of passive refueling while in use (such as solar). Then you can tear even more out.
Imagine office parking lots where inductive charges were put in every parking spot as they laid the concrete being an expected, normal thing. No cables, no plugging.
Most people buy used cars today. In the future (10-20 years), most people will have these: frequently passive charging cheap vehicles using non expensive commodity parts.
EVs will win, but gas and diesel will persist for a long time in niches (enthusiasts, long-haul towing).
In the future there will be off-grid unmanned free standing windmill or solar installations with a car charger hooked up to it. People will put such public chargers on their vacant land, say in the desert, for passive income, profit sharing with the installer.
Their storage capacity, price and availability will be broadcast by cellular and be part of the realtime routing decision of the vehicle who will be able to reserve a time slot.
Whenever such free standing charging station businesses becomes viable, that's when gasolines cars will be in their final decline. Might be 40 years, might be 10.
Other future imagining: a bunch of wrecked or old EV's being used for their battery capacity, buffering power from solar. Charge station of old cars holding juice for new ones.
When we're talking batteries that cost in the thousands, it starts to make sense
This will work against all new cars in general.
That's a right to repair argument, which is a different issue.
There will likely be consumer protection laws and maybe even an "Open Car" project in the same way there's open hardware today.
Are you implying a covetous car manufacturer won't be as protective with their gasoline vehicle line?
But it is so much easier. How car will tell that mechanical part has been changed? It can't.
They're both naturally rather simple affairs: In their most primitive forms, a fuel tank is just a container that holds fuel, and a battery is just a collection of cells.
But nothing at all prevents either thing from being rather more complex than that with the inclusion of necessary electronics that are DRM-locked.
ICE vehicles have hundreds of CAN bus or SPE -networked devices that feed into an MCU that can refuse to work if they're not first-party devices.
This isn't something novel to EV, at all.
It's no easier, or harder: There are components in both systems that rely on network communication which could easily be vendor-locked by a central computer.
And then there's the immensely popular $4,000 Wuling Hongguang Mini EV https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuling_Hongguang_Mini_EV
Meanwhile the average used car in the USA is $25,000 https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/buying-a-car/when-to-bu...
So this is already a reality, we're just living in the time of the disruptive arbitrage interregnum.
Do you think the engine is what makes a car expensive? Building a $10k ICE car wouldn't be difficult.
That's why electric car adoption is an s curve
You and literally millions of people. It was obvious to anyne paying attention.
What was ludicrous, then as now, were the people saying Tesla was going to bankrupt every car company. Instead, if it wasn't for tariffs, the Chinese manufacturers would be eating everyone's lunch.
There was an intentional hollowing out of the US industrial base because pillaging and gutting for profit made stock go up faster.
Now we sit on top of wrecked husks: GE, RCA, GM, Motorola. It was all intentionally dismantled and sold off.
The problem isn't Tesla or electric cars, it's the conservative orthodox economists and their political lackeys that looted the industrial base in order to manufacture stock bubbles and claim it as progress
And it will never be addressed until people stop claiming drag queens and bathroom signs have somehow swindled their wealth.
Imagine the outcry if 50% of gas pumps were broken all the time.
The algorithm to detect ground faults is a major culprit.
To get funding you need real time & historical charger availability and status info (including what charge rates are available), via API. Making sure chargers are both really discoverable & actually usable should be greatly improved!
My p.v. is only 5kWp/8kWh LFP because at 2019 prices that's a bit more than a wise economical choice, at BRICS price it would quickly evolve in a 10kWp/30kWh allow me to be nearly autonomous for large part of the year...
I think 250kW flat charging curves are almost as convenient. Go to pee and scroll HN for one minute and voilà.
Or contact less, constant charging at traffic lights, during parking, on the highway.
I'm sure there are people in 1900 who said, "Cars will never work, because I need to by petroleum in a pharmacy!" ignoring how technology will progress. If you had told them, there will be a "gas station" everywhere, those people would have called you crazy.
Now, parking lots where a robot lifts an underside contact up if there's a match, that might just work.
I do thing the last 20.000 years of human progress has been driven by convenience (and security).
I'd bet for the more convenient solution every day.
I'm not worried at all about the power efficiency of my phone's charging process.
Some napkin math suggests that my pocket supercomputer costs me at most about $1 per year to keep charged and running, or perhaps $5 over the life of the phone, when plugged in every night. I wouldn't notice or care if it were an order of magnitude worse than that at $10 per year or $50 over the life of the phone.
So wireless charging of my phone doesn't bother me a bit, and it is something that I use that when it is convenient.
An EV doesn't operate at that scale, though. I would care a lot about losing even 10 or 20% of charging efficiency with an EV.
It would mostly be a challenge for mechanical engineers, to come up with some solution that does not ruin driving characteristics too. Perhaps even involving some heavily computerized active suspension, just not a dangling ticket trivial mini trailer that swings into dangerous resonance...
Swapping the floorboard batteries, yeah, won't happen. You'd rather see the battery car self-driving in close slipstream formation connected with a transmission wire that's never mechanically loaded.
Going cross country? Swap out for a massive battery. Just doing city runs? Get the smaller lighter cheaper battery
(I know nothing about how intra China VC works or does not work, but battery swap schemes sound like an effective capital trap - note that those traps tend to work best when even the ones setting them up don't recognize their nature, I'm not accusing anyone on doing it on purpose!)
Plus, fast charging wears out the battery sooner, reducing car lifetime even further. Not very cashmoney from an ecological nor an actual cash money perspective. If you're gonna spend 2x the ICE car cost on an EV it should at least last you longer.
Agree that fast charging wears the battery more, but it's mostly fine. Cars are built to be used and it's better to fast charge current gen batteries when you need it than waiting for better technology while driving an ICE car.
> a decade ago
Well there was also that GM EV1 that didn't work out in 1996, I guess that's it for EV, wrap it up folks.
Charing for 30 minutes isn’t a real issue after a long drive.
Replacing individual battery modules will become cheap enough it will extend the life of battery packs enough.
And once the whole battery needs replacing it will be ok financially.
I can't imagine being forced to hang out at a truck stop for 30 minutes rather than getting back on the road.
Or maybe you'd rather imagine having to migrate because your city is under water and there is no more food, due to changing climate?
Your convenience is beside the point, society will adapt.
That would be solving so many problems.
1. Repairability - You can replace all packs, or just some. Depends on your financial situation.
2. Independence - You are not dependent when your company will stop manufacturing your special battery pack.
3. Longevity - You can buy 10 year old car with dead battery and buy latest set of standard packs with latest battery technology, suddenly your car is having twice the range than it was a new. Like HDD -> SSD
4. Less dependency on street infrastructure - You can charge the car on a charger or if you can't charge at your place, you can just pull one or two packs out of your car and charge them on 230V in your apartment or hotel room.
5. No wall box needed - You can have two sets of these standardized packs. You can put one into garage where it will be charged during the day (i.e. Solar array) and you can use the other one in your car. Swap them when needed.
Faster charging would really make all the difference.
Different people have different requirements.
It took a few years to get there, people don't necessarily know immediately what they like best.
In the rest of the EEA, EVs sales are plummeting.
https://www.acea.auto/pc-registrations/new-car-registrations...
But yeah, it's for the environment, surely. Reverse the policy and see what happens.
And while I only usually drive 300-350km in one piece, I don't want to buy a car where I have to fear that a drive of this sort ends up waiting to be towed because of battery degradation (500km will realistically be 450km in a few years), or because I missed the last charging station or got stuck in traffic with heating running, and the remaining few km dwindle in front of me.
It's rational to fear your phone being under 20% when you still need it. It's just as rational to have 20% buffer when charging your car battery.
In the end that is only two about 2 hour drive stints. And really spending time on those stints instead of getting to destination or being home later...
This is called a motorcycle! Mine can do 260-280km on a gas tank, still does huge trips. Once batteries work like gas, you're absolutely right.
How is this a motorcycle specific feature?
There's also nothing more miserable than being stuck in a queue for a fast charger with a colicy baby. I've offered people cash to get to the front of the queue, although no-one's ever accepted money when they understand why.
My Hyundai i30 has a 600km range, max.
It's called range anxiety for a reason. People are anxious about it. But, it's disconnected from what a trip meter tells us about average commute, daily drive.
Cue hoardes of "but i live rural and drive 30,000km a day" responses. Because people don't understand averages and what on average most people do. I know I drive below average, i checked. I do about 1/3 to 1/4 of an average Australian driver. I also know these 200km daily commute drivers are a wild outlier, not the norm. The people whining about e-vehicle range snipe social media to headline their justified concerns to their outlier behaviour and distort the conversation.
The median work distance in France is 12km in the countryside and 6km in the cities.
25% of the workers travel less than 4km even in the countryside.
Source: https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/7622203
The current range is way above most needs already and I'm not sure cars (electric or not) is even the answer with such a low usage.
Cars are one of the most inefficient form of transport anyways and driving almost never makes sense on large distances.
Instead of a large flow of people driving 600km to go to the same place with a single seat used each only once per year, what you would want is public transport instead on those routes, that would be more rational.
The US could build more mass transit.
As the work from home vs return to the office struggle shows bashing business to relocate closer to where people work has some merit.
After the All Ireland semi-final this year, there were multi-hour queues for fast chargers on the M7. Multi-minute queues for petrol.
This is reflected in sales, where even with tax and BIK incentives, EV sales are falling sharply and second-hand EVs are being exported because the market has tanked.
I don’t understand how they expect poor people to buy these massively.
Been saying this forever: most of the cost of gasoline are "road taxes". You think the government is just to let that revenue disappear as people shift to EV usage? No, your EV will be just as expensive to operate, they will add taxes to your charger.
Part of this is that EVs are much more expensive than the average car (over the whole fleet - new cars are much closer in price), and so EV drivers are self-selected to be wealthier, therefore willing to pay more. Another factor is the lack of competition and alternatives, especially at motorway petrol stations.
When I charge at home, I pay about €0.01-0.02 / km.
Assuming ~€0.10 / km for a reasonably economical diesel nugget...
That's a little more than 10% for home charging :)
If I am driving far enough to warrant a charge, chances are I'm spending some time at my destination before coming back. 4 hours at 7kW (slow AC charge) is 28kWh, which ~40% of my total battery capacity, or about 200km of range. It probably won't get me home but I can probably get to another less busy charger on my way home.
I do agree though, the charging infrastructure needs to be built out much more. I dream of a day where every parking space in every parking lot has a slow charging port, and there are much much more ~50kW installed. But the current level of build-out is not that bad, and when combined with home charging it's basically a non-issue ~80% of the time.
Maybe next time, get your car topped up before going to the game, and then afterwards you can just drive home, skipping probably the majority of the surge traffic. Or take the bus!
Keeping up this stoic desire to not having to change your habits around driving at all is dismissing a lot of the benefits small, lightweight electric cars could get us, if they didn’t need to carry tons of battery around—that isn’t even necessary most of the time.
With an electric vehicle, you can get an extremely low-maintenance, easy to drive, fast accelerating, ecologically efficient car. That has its on merits. On the other hand, it has a lower range than an ICE engine, and is less reliable in cold weather.
Consumers are satisfied with buying ICE vehicles, which is why 90-something percent of them do just that when buying a new vehicle. You’re not saying anything about consumers expectations here, what’s happening is (most of them) just they don’t want what EVs are selling. You can’t be wrong about wanting something, we’re all allowed to choose what it is that we want for ourselves.
This is just the EV version of “the world would be much nicer if everybody thought like me” argument.
I consider my ICE low maintenance, too. Semi-annual service, brakes and tires as needed. How much better are EVs?
I think I don’t like that people see consumption as a birthright, and pretend there aren’t any consequences.
Plenty of ICE vehicles are starting to get these features as well, but I don’t buy those cars either, and all of the half decent EVs seem to have (nearly) all of those features I hate, configured in the worst way I could possibly imagine.
Consumption is my birthright. You can do whatever you want.
Very true! But most people in cities can't charge at home (street parking, rental, etc).
So charge time and access (finding a working station with a reasonable wait time) must also be considered before we tell people they're dumb for resisting change.
Likely, for one, a great deal more aluminium HVAC|DC cable laid in car parks to support charging; copper's kind of expensive and in short supply but is also a contender.
Might be smart to invest in any IPO's launched to raise capital for new proven economically feasible smelters processing infrastructure.
The hay to feed all those horses doesn't appear by magic, livery's the future m'lad.
I still drive a diesel because I drive across Europe a lot. My usual journey is 700km, which I can do with ca. 40L. The total my 65L tank would give me is about 1000km depending on the conditions. Anyway, those 700km take about 8 hours with a couple of short stops. If I were to drive 2000km I would definitely need a long break in which I could easily charge. I am not really aware of any ICE having a greater range than that, never mind 2000Km. I’ve once driven the Plugin-Hybrid Kuga and it got very close to the diesel range. It almost made the entire 700km journey with the 40l petrol tank. But these long journeys only happen a few times a year and I think it would be silly to drive a huge battery around for the off chance I am driving across an entire continent.