Hacker News Reader

Comment by Caius-Cosades | Hacker News Reader

"They know the future is 100% EVs"

Meanwhile: "Volvo Cars abandons 2030 EV-only target" https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/volvo-...

"BMW backs away from £2billion electric car pledge amid plans to stick with petrol and diesel vehicles" https://www.gbnews.com/lifestyle/cars/bmw-backs-away-from-ps...

"Audi Changes Strategy, Backs Away From Electric" https://www.dagens.com/autos/audi-changes-strategy-backs-awa...

"Volkswagen Walks Back EV-or-Bust Strategy That Rankled Rivals" https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-16/volkswage...

Future was supposed to be nuclear powered everything at one point in the past. Lo and behold the future, we're burning coal and making fields of things that have limited lifecycles and that can't be efficiently recycled, and that are completely reliant on weather being nice.

View on HN

The articles you linked are pretty much confirming what I was saying exactly:

Volvo: "saying it now expected to still be offering some hybrid models in its lineup at that time."

VW: "will need more plug-in hybrids as EV sales decelerate."

(I'm not clicking the link on the site for the channel that has Nigel Farage, funny though.)

It's gonna be hilarious 10-15 yrs after the purchase when the owners of electric vehicles find out that their cars batteries have gone to shit, essentially making their cars resell value 0, while the ICE resell value will likely be even higher then it'd be today, precisely because the used EVs are garbage, effectively removing them from the market.

Personally I'd welcome an electric only revolution, because they're a lot less noisy and I hardly ever need a car. But it's future has always been entirely made up marketing speak to prop up shareholder value

It's still early on solid state batteries, but there are some working prototypes now. Samsung is now shipping prototype solid-state batteries to manufacturers. 500 Wh/kg, 9 minute charging, 20 year life are claimed.

Manufacturing is hard and early versions will be expensive. BYD management claims that solid state batteries will be for the high end. They're pushing lithium iron phosphate for now.

Samsung just announced a small solid state battery for wearables. This technology may appear in small devices before it's in cars.

Meanwhile, in reality, there's an article on HN right now that appears practically side by side with this one from Goldman saying batteries are going to be 50% cheaper by 2026.

The most likely scenario in 10-15 years is that the batteries have degraded some low double digit percentsge, which matches most real world data that I've seen, but will otherwise still be as viable as any other vehicle. And if battery prices do drop as is being predicted replacing them with something similar should not be prohibitively expensive (and possibly will mean extended range as well).

If you give me your email I can send you an email at the end of next year, confirming that there will not be any significant battery improvements in any car sold by that year

These kinds of announcements/articles have been published every few months, and pretty much never end up in any products because theyre pretty much never economically viable after scaling it up

I'm even willing to put money on that, if you actually believe your own words to be true, I'd easily bet pretty much any amount that we will not have a 50% upgrade in battery capacity in any car as compared to the previous model that's been published 1-3 years prior to that. To keep it simple, say $10 000? It'd be easy money if you yourself think you weren't just talking none sense ( ◕ ᴗ ◕ )

Ars debunked this weird idea that batteries aren't improving a few years back: https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/05/eternally-five-years...

I didn't mean they didn't improve at all. They absolutely have. Just not enough to matter in the context of cars.

And even if we did get a 50% battery capacity upgrade in 2025 as compared to 2024 - while I wouldve lost the bet... My original point would've still been just as correct, because even at that point, they're still annoying to work around vs ICEs and their biggest cost would still come from a single component (battery) that has a pretty short expected lifespan compared to a regular engine

And you yourself likely know that as well, considering you didn't even acknowledge my bet ( ◠ ‿ ・ )

I didn't bother acknowledging your bet because a) it feels like a bad faith proposition and b) it's a goalpost shift from my first comment which was about batteries getting cheaper, not more efficient.

I'd also argue we're seeing battery improvements in cars pretty consistently, which is one of the reasons I can now buy an EV with 350km range for AUD$30k.

The bet was definitely an afterthought, but definitely not made in bad faith. The claim of 50% improvement yoy in a long established category like batteries was just so outlandishly improbable to me, that it'd be willing to bet that that's not gonna happen.

There have definitely been improvements in that regard, just not in such a short period of time

>The world’s largest battery maker CATL has announced a new electric vehicle battery pack with a 1.5 million kilometre, 15 year warranty.

https://thedriven.io/2024/04/03/catl-announces-electric-vehi...

ICE resale is tanking already and no way it can bounce back ever again. Electric is just a superior technology minus charging time.

I'm about to buy my first car and while I can't afford an EV I'm very grateful for EVs dropping the 2nd hand market so hard. Currently Mazda 2 from 2020 is half the price of a new BYD Dolphin here and if I needed to drive more I'd get the latter but for that price a cozy road trip rain shelter is too hard to resist!

Interesting, I just checked on the most popular used car listing site for my region to check if things changed since the last time I was interested - at least in my region, electric cars deprecate massively more here even now.

You get a price drop of 60-70% within 40-60k km for electric vehicles, the ICEs usually only drop by ~50% by 80-100k km. That's less deprecation despite higher usage.

And these electric cars are mostly ~4 years old while the ICEs are 6+ years old.

At least in my region, ICEs resell way, way better

/Edit: the Mazda 2 costs 21k€ new, the byd dolphin 30k.

If you're buying a 4years old Mazda for 1/2 of the price of a new byd dolphin, you're actually paying 70% of the list price of the Mazda. That's kinda proving how high ICEs are reselling vs the electric vehicles. The equivalent electric vehicle would've deprecated more

Seems like our regions have vastly different markets. For the record I'm in Thailand that manufactures BYD and Mazda cars. New Mazda 2 starts at 21k usd and new byd dolphin at 15k. Obviously there's no real 2nd hand market for the Dolphin yet but 5 year old Mazda 2 I'm looking at rn is at 10k so -50% in 5 years which is just massive! The 2nd hand ICE market is so doomed.

ICE cars gonna lose value real fast the further EV revolution goes because why would I buy a used ICE car when I can buy a new EV that has 10 times the fuel efficiency and no basically no maintenance overhead? It's a better car in every single aspect minus the refuel time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com