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Comment by ck2 | Hacker News Reader

I'm really looking forward to buying my first electric car secondhand in a decade.

Should be lots of hobbyists rebuilding their own battery packs - pick up a dead car with no range left and make it like new.

Many thanks to early adopters!

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Should be lots of hobbyists rebuilding their own battery packs - pick up a dead car with no range left and make it like new.

Except, aren't the battery packs a very significant portion of the value of the car? I don't see how you will be able to replace them cheaply enough to come out on top, unless you use inferior battery technology and settle for two-digit range.

Two digit range in a dirt-cheap super-fast roadster? Yes, please.

* very low two digit. If you use, for example, a bunch of lead-acid or something like that, you'll see much more than 2-3x reduction in capacity.

Even with a 6X reduction in capacity, that gives me a ~40 mile range (assuming the Tesla Roadster's 241 mile range), which is enough to get from from the house to the coffee shop to the office to the cafe and back home.

At "only" 6x reduction in capacity, you're still looking at $10,000 of battery if you get a Li-Ion battery. I'm not sure of the costs of a lead-acid, but expect 2x the weight of an equivalent Li-Ion, up to 10x the volume, and much less flexibility in shape.

Sure, if you only travel a handful of miles and you don't mind dropping $20k+ on a car with that kind of range, it works. But it isn't a panacea.

In a decade batteries should cost quite a bit less than they do now.

And why would that be? Are raw materials getting cheaper?

If you're banking on battery technology improving, don't. Battery tech marches very slowly.

Well, from the horse's mouth but Musk would disagree:

http://takingpitches.com/2012/09/22/elon-musk-the-role-of-an...

He makes it sound as though the raw material cost is not the problem.

Also, Deutsche Bank in Dec 2010:

http://bioage.typepad.com/files/1223fm-05.pdf

Relevant bit:

"Based on discussions with industry experts and several automakers, the DB Auto team has lowered its advanced lithium ion battery cost projection by about 30% for 2012. Current prices have fallen from $650/kWh+ in 2009 to about $450/kWh now, and DB’s forecast is the price to fall at about a 7.5% CAGR from 2012 through 2020 to about $250/kWh."

And lots others on Google. I don't know enough about it to judge who is credible but I do believe that laptop batteries don't cost as much as they used to. It's not like Moore's Law, but I think prices have been falling pretty steadily.

In that case, hope that a charger standard would emerge fast. It would be useless to buy a car that uses an obsolete charger system, that you can't charge at whatever the future standard would be. Still, maybe there will be adapters to charge cars from a different charger standard.

Tesla open-sourced their connector design and specification. Let's hope it's good enough to be reused by other manufacturers so we won't have a connector/charger war.

It looks like there already is a standard, and the Model S makes use of it (as well as the Leaf, Volt, et al).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAE_J1772

Did they standardize the side of the car for the receptacle?

It said it was a North American standard.

Fuck can we please get some international power standards for once ever.

Quit whining and buy an adaptor. And maybe a transformer.

Didn't read the article very closely?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EV_Plug_Alliance

"It said it was a North American standard."

A little confused, North America (or the individual countries) doesn't have a standard for side for gas.

I meant the connector. Point is that electric cars are pretty much just hitting the market and it would be really silly not to internationally agree on a plug for the thing. Since it takes DC power in anyway, you need to convert it from whatever arbitrary voltage AC power your given country has.

Oh, gotcha... I hope they agree on a side of the car also. ATM / Drive Throughs work well, Gas Stations do not.

Model S makes use of SAE J1772 only via an adapter, and it's not clear that the average Model S owner is going to make frequent use of J1772.

Tesla is recommending that Model S owners either install an RV style 50A 240V outlet in their homes, or else install a charging station that has the Tesla connector that is currently only used on Model S. The Superchargers also do not make use of J1772.

If hotels end up installing J1772 and not Tesla charging stations, then perhaps Model S owners will use the J1772 adapters at hotels.

Yep, this is exactly what I'm planning to do. The early adopters will dump their cars to upgrade a lot sooner than they really need to, and it'll be easy to grab one for a really low price at that time.

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