Nissan Tests 48 kWh Battery In Leaf
cleantechnica.com
cleantechnica.com
Nissan has a 24 kWh battery for a reason: they can sell the car, after incentives, for about the price of a Prius. Doubling the pack would probably add about 10 grand to the price. If Nissan thought that was where they wanted to position themselves in the market, they would have done so already.
Though, personally, a 48 kWh Leaf would be pretty awesome. I'd pay an extra 10 grand for that. It would be a nice middle ground between an 80-grand Tesla and the current Leaf.
Nissan's execs promise a 65% range boost by 2016 [1].
[1] http://insideevs.com/nissan-exec-reliable-125-miles-of-range...
The current Leaf is very close, but I drive over a small mountain range which cuts the range. Affordable electrics with 120+ mile range will be huge.
The Leaf offers the range necessary for my daily commute, 53 miles. It just doesn't do it in the looks department. Now a coupe would be a sweet ride, provided it doesn't look odd.
I guess a 48 KWh Leaf is about the same as the 60 KWh Tesla in range? (it might not be; cheaper/lamer vs. physically larger but more advanced might be a wash).
I've never bought a new car, but 110k on an awd S p85+ actually seems like a legitimate reason to borrow money at ?5%, assuming you drive a lot. Real depreciation is probably way less than on a similar electric car, and if it is just miles vs rough use or time, a battery/tire/brake swap should refurb bit pretty completely after 150-200k miles in 4-5y. If you get reimbursed at government rate for driving, ....
I'm away from my laptop at the moment, but will get the data together as soon as I'm back.
As battery technology slowly improves, the IC engine can become a less and less significant component until it's really just there for emergencies.
Is this not the answer?
Once battery tech gets sufficiently cheap, EVs will blow all the competition out of the water for personal vehicles. At most you'll get EVs with a gasoline-fueled genset for refueling off the grid. But it's more likely you'll just switch to a bigger battery pack for the duration of the few short trips which are incompatible with length and charging infrastructure.
All that you say is true, but will the charging time cripple them for longer distances for the next 20 years at least?
Where I live, the Tesla model S outsells the Leaf by at least 20:1.
I know that the two cars are targeted at different market segments, and that the model S is far more expensive. But that still doesn't explain why the Leaf looks like a deformed catfish. Per unit, it doesn't take a significant amount of money to make something beautiful.
Edit - here's some more evidence:
"Shoppers Say Chevy Volt Expensive, Nissan Leaf Ugly in Study" http://blogs.cars.com/kickingtires/2012/01/shoppers-say-chev...
"Nissan Leaf. Another ugly EV." http://ecomodder.com/forum/showthread.php/nissan-leaf-anothe...
"Fiat calls out Nissan Leaf for being an ugly electric car" http://www.examiner.com/article/fiat-calls-out-nissan-leaf-f...
I've had my Volt for about 10K miles and I love it.
"I feel a thrill when looking at beautiful examples of automotive craftsmanship like a BMW M3 or an Audi S5 or an Acura NSX. But the electrics and hybrids produced by the big players are as exciting as cold oatmeal mixed with three-days-dead road kill. Think machines like the execrable crap-box Prius, Honda's truly awful Insight, Nissan's clock-stoppingly ugly Leaf, and Chevy's Volt, which has all the personality of a beige carpet sample square."
http://insideevs.com/real-world-test-2013-nissan-leaf-range-...
A Leaf typically gets low 70s to high 80s in range, but as soon as you need AC or heat for an extended duration, you've lost a lot of that range (some reports have put the range at only ~30 miles with hotel loads maxing out).
I'll be the first to admit I'm a huge Elon Musk fan (I also own several thousand shares of TSLA stock). Putting the fanboy in me aside, I think Tesla was correct in shooting for such large battery packs in their vehicle. It greatly diminishes the range anxiety EV owners might feel. The other factor you can't control for is that, in my opinion, if you own a Tesla its going to be much easier for you to charge at your workplace or your home. You're probably a high net worth individual who is going to have a much easier time having chargers installed at home or work. Most Leaf owners I'd imagine (NO DATA HERE, JUST MY ASSUMPTION) are city dwellers in condos or apartments where its going to be much more difficult to get charging infrastructure installed above a 15-20A/120V circuit.
The term hotel load refers to the equipment used to provide for the habitability and comforts of the passengers and crew of a vehicle (typically a ship or submarine), or more specificly the electrical load placed on power generation systems by this equipment.
Perhaps cars will start having better insulation too? Double paned windows? To be more efficient with cabin heating and cooling?
If you could somehow power a car while driving on the freeway, you would essentially solve most range problems of electric cars.
EDIT: Yes, you could wire roads only when already performing needed repairs. Yes, you could run wires above roads for power. But why? All of these miles we have of infrastructure, it'll be faster to continue to drive down the cost of battery technology to the point where people will say, "Can you believe we even considered wiring roads?".
My opinion is that battery technology is going to follow that same cost curve as solar modules: http://cloudfront.mediamatters.org/static/images/countyfair/...
Within 5-10 years the cost of battery technology should have fallen to where the cost of the battery is marginal. The trick is to get the cost of the cells down, while reducing the need for so much manual labor to assemble the packs from cells. My hope is that Tesla comes up with a way to automate pack assembly or 3D prints the entire pack, cells and all (perhaps not "print", but laser sinter).
But roads need to be repaved regularly anyway and, depending on the used system, my guess would be that the cost for also installing charging equipment would be dwarfed by the overall cost of maintenance. The same applies to newly built roads.
The problem with batteries isn't so much the cost as their weight. There is a limit to the power density of current battery technology and nothing really in the pipeline to greatly improve on this.
So installing a higher-capacity battery also means having a heavier car, which in turn requires more power to keep it moving.
I try to put my money where my mouth is; when Tesla went IPO, I bought several thousand shares of stock. I'm holding for the long term, as I think they're not just going to revolutionize mobility, but also battery technology.
Your argument is like complaining that The New York Times ripped off The Washington Post's "the" brand.
Most people (myself included) don't know Latin. The number of people that know Latin probably outnumbers the number of people that have heard of Haskell Curry, but both cases are the same in a crucial respect: some guy sees an interesting name/domain, and creates a ripoff site that rides off of the trail blazed by the originator. The fact that they didn't translate "clean" into Latin makes this conclusion inescapable for me.
Here's the damage that the ripoff does: "Hmm - cleantechnica.com? That's probably a 'clean'-tech site made by the Arstechnica guys. I love Ars, so I'll go there and check it out." Suppose that cleantechnica.com puts up misinformation, which people attribute to Arstechnica, which causes people to reduce their visits to both sites - that's not good. True, not everyone will make that mistake. Arstechnica was there first, and the ripoff site should have to bear the costs of clearing up the confusion they've created.
(For those that don't get the reference, here's the original chain that I'd be ripping off: http://www.coldstonecreamery.com/)