An impending black swan for electric cars
cringely.com
cringely.com
That's exactly what the battery factory will do. That is what Tesla is doing: they are going the long way, not dismissing the technology while waiting for a black swan to appear at the end of a rainbow that will save them. Because there won't be one.
I do think that people in metro areas like NY, LA, SF, don't realize what it's like to like in the more sparsely populated parts of the country, and that is still the biggest limitation in my part of the world. 150 miles might be barely adequate _IF_ there were near instant recharges. If I want to test drive a new Ducati, I have to drive 500 miles round trip (and have done it in a single day multiple times)
So you're right, the electric car will become practical for people not because of any capability of the car itself, they are already more than adequate in that regard. It's the batteries. When we have some way to get similar range and speed and ease of recharging as pumping 10 or 20 gallons of gasoline, they will be practical for most people. Not really before and until that happens.
The solutions already exist if we find a way to deploy them. We even have the technology today to recharge your car wirelessly while it's driving.
With wireless induction charging, you won't have to stop driving until it's time to rotate your tires or use the restroom.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/green-tech/advanced-cars/...
A $95K Tesla Model S has plenty of range to qualify as a single car solution
but it just costs too darned much money.
Maybe this is an edge case, but I suspect that a non-trivial number of people have edge cases like these. An electric car might serve well as an everyday vehicle, but it can't truly be a single-car solution at the current time.
The article does mention a hypothetical battery that's twice the capacity and 10x the recharge rate. If that comes out, and if there is a significant buildout in the supercharger network, I could probably switch. However, battery technology has never increased at an exponential rate, and I suspect that it will be a lot longer than 2 years before we see cars that have those properties.
Grabbing a meal halfway through there (if there were a supercharger more than 100 miles into the trip) and back might not be /that/ bad. That's an individual preference, though.
Actually, if they're not charging from flat, it might not even be 30-45 minutes.
I think that people who have relatively routine commitments more than 250 miles away but less than 500 miles away are a small enough segment of the market that you could reasonably describe the market as "disrupted" if those people remained on gasoline cars and most other people went to electric.
That said, I don't buy even a little bit that we're going to go from "no commercial versions of this technology at all" to "being produced in car-battery-sizes and gigantic numbers" in two or three years. If Li-ion batteries aren't good enough, then any electric car disruption is at least 5 years out.
"I wouldn't want to have to give that up, or to have to arrange alternate transportation."
Lets say that lots of people had all electric cars, and they had the same restrictions as the current model S. How long do you think it would take before someone opens a business where you drive your electric car there, park it and plug it in, and drive the gas powered car that is already parked there to your destination, when you return you park the gas powered car, walk over and get into your own electric car and go home? Think Zipcar for the Tesla Set. Pre-arranged membership, fixed price rental on a daily or hourly basis. Different kinds of cars (small, medium, van maybe). You provide gas and damage insurance and a small annual 'retainer' fee.
That kind of business emerges when you have a large cohort of electric car users in a specific geography. I'd start one in the Bay Area if I was bored.
SpaceX didn't do any new science in building their rockets, really. They took functional technology and a lot of great engineering and made it work. I don't think it would be responsible to bet Tesla's success on a battery technology which doesn't exist yet; 50% cheaper Lithium-Ion through Tesla/SpaceX style vertical integration and awesomeness is good enough.
If better battery chemistries come out, then sure Tesla could use them, but the planning for the next car needs to work even if they don't.
It's also the other way around, too, of course. I would have thought it ludicrous in the 90s to have my primary vacuum cleaner be battery powered. But this year, I didn't even think twice about it.
There have been dozens or hundreds or thousands of companies and teams and people working on alternatives to li-ion for 20 years. We're arguably not much closer to a "breakthrough" in energy storage. I'm mildly convinced saying 10x batteries are around the corner is analogous to saying a universal cure for AIDS is coming next week. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but I can pretty much promise you that no company is going to get that tech, design, produce, scale, and sell enough cars a month from now to be a "black swan" for Tesla.
It's a neat experience, and everyone I know prefers it, but it's too damn expensive to get it. I don't think for long, though. And I don't think it's going to take some great battery breakthrough either. I'd say you need about 50 kWh in a sedan, minimum, for it to work well for trips (plus a bit of charging infrastructure). If you want to sell a car for $40,000 (which would be $33,000 after rebates, less in California), that means you probably can't have a pack that costs more than $20,000 (since you can buy a decent gas car for that, and that's before you remove all the gassy bits).
So, $20,000 for a 50 kWh pack == $400 per kWh, which is totally doable. I think when the Leaf first came out, the estimates were that it cost Nissan about $500 per kWh, but if they don't have it down below $400 by now I'll eat my hat. And Tesla probably already has the cost below $300, what with using commodity cells. I think they only reason Tesla doesn't put out a $40,000 sedan is because they know the demand would outstrip their battery supply by a factor of 200 (and murder demand for the Model S), so they have to wait until they build their own factory.
But! Nissan already has their own battery factory. Their batteries are not nearly as energy-dense as Teslas, so fitting 50 kWh worth in the Leaf may be their biggest issue right now. But there's a lot of wasted space in that car. I think they can do it just fine. And when they do, if gas has just tipped north of $4 by then, they are going to make a lot of noise.
They sent me a survey a couple months ago, and one of the questions asked how much extra I'd pay for EPA-rated 150 miles range (instead of the current 75). I was about to drag the little slider up to about $12,000, but it stopped at $5,000 (or $208 per kWh). That may just be a random question with no basis on their current engineering, but I think they're up to something.
http://insideevs.com/nissan-ceo-carlos-ghosn-second-generati...
TLDR: New lithium ion battery chemistry may add up to 60 miles more range to the current LEAF for only about $2000 marginal cost to Nissan while adding no more weight.
The Leaf is a very ugly car, to me, for a young man (though I do know people who pull it off perfectly).
The Volt is almost there, except that its range on battery is about 40 miles (afterward it switches to gas, which defeats my idea). I want a car that can go 140+ (preferably 300+) on a single charge (or have super-fast, and still infrequent, charges) that I can charge at night, and has the prestige of anything less than or equal to a BMW.
There is a particular beauty, to me, in the idea of plugging in my vehicle at night and, the next day, having a new 300ish mile range to be able to use. It's has a beautiful feel to it. The inconvenience of getting gas, gone forever, and replaced by a considerable reduction in price. I love it.
The day that comes, be it in a Tesla family sedan or in a Leaf or BMW electric car or whatever other company ends up making the >= 50k, I will seriously consider and even actively decide that I no longer need a gasoline powered car as my everyday commuter and city and nearby attraction car.
I'd say Volt's only problem is GM's less than stellar reputation. If it came from another car company, its sales would be much higher.
2.Mass Manufacturing will bring down battery cost? No, Batteries are ALREADY being mass manufactured, and the margin on batteries are thin. very thin.
3.As much as everyone like Telsa and likes to fantasize the idea. Telsa are NO expect in battery technology. Panasonic, Sony are.
4. Batteries, due to the possible explosive nature, require a hell a lot of safety testing before it could be put to use. So basically any new battery invention you read now wont come into consumers hand for at least about 3-4 years. And that is already a unrealistic assumption of everything going straight forward and smoothly.
5. So no new battery tech coming. How about Lithium-ion? Well i can assure you Panasonic has been pushing this tech and incremental improvement are still on the roadmap. Just not the big 2 - 3 x improvement you would expect.
6. Lithium, as it stands today, isn't (yet) a variable solution to EV. A lot of articles will claim it is abundance, but that is the same as Hydrogen. It is the process is getting it. The largest Lithium reserve in the world, in Bolivia, while enough to sustain the EV uses, isn't producing any Lithium simply because the cost of extraction is multiple times higher.
That is why many producers like Toyota, and Nissan, or even GM say EV isn't a variable alternative yet. Not because they are paid by Oil Salesman as much as you want to believe. They love alternative energy as well, be it Hydrogen or Battery Powered Cars. It is the current battery isn't up to it. And even the expert in the battery field dont have anything in sight they could look forward to.
Here's where I think you're missing something. It pays to have a CEO with a degree in physics. His background allows him and those around him to ask brilliant questions that rapidly advance the state of the art. Like using lots of small cells and firewalling the groups. This comes straight out of the most basic understanding of thermal dynamics, but obviously that was beyond Boeing's engineers.
It's not so much the expertise at the bottom that matters in cases of strategic investment. It's having the expertise at the top where leadership can guide the course toward more likely and desirable outcomes.
From a distribution point of view, it seems like both batteries and hydrogen are pretty much equally bad. Is there something holding back the powertrain technology with hydrogen?
Maybe we'll have really safe, highly standardized supercharging stations. I hope so. But it's a Hard Problem.
edit: The next-gen Tesla supercharger stations will be 120kw. I don't think those can be free forever, although they're free to premium-paying Tesla customers now.
Electrical transfer is far safer than transfering the same amount of energy in chemical form (e.g. gasoline) and letting any lunatic walk up to publicly accessible nozzles and point them whereever they want with or without a lit cigarette.
* charging leaves zero risk of explosive residue
* it's ridiculously easy to apply interlocks at every step of the transfer.
* the exact rate and requirement of energy transfer is very easily calculated and monitored and self-balancing. Ancillary variables like temperature and thermal expansion are equally cheap and easy to measure with very high precision.
* At scale, the marginal cost of solar power gets really close to free. I have plenty of neighbors who are getting rebate checks from the local utility instead of paying them.
* Energy density remains the biggest hurdle, but it's already provably good enough. The pricepoint is high only because of the small scale of production and the high-end stuff (leather seats, etc) wrapped around it.
Strangely, the author thinks it's an incredible prediction that electric cars and their associated energy-storage technologies will eventually get better, easier to manufacture and cheaper to own. That a point will be reached where the economics make sense for the middle class to start buying such vehicles.
"Black Swan". Really ?!
http://your.asda.com/news-and-blogs/electric-car-drivers-can...
Formula 1 is quite popular in the UK and that sport now has hybrid engine technology with 160 horse power of electric motor waiting at the press of a button, charged by the kinetic harvesting of the vehicle and the turbo powered 1.6 litre petrol engine. They complete the 200 mile race with only 130 litres of fuel.
Electric cars are here and in the public eye.
The amount of energy stored, transported, and sold as liquid automobile fuel is amazing. Current electrical infrastructure is not even close to being prepared to replace it on a "disruptive" scale.
People started getting worked up about it because they can remotely disable the battery if you don't make the lease payments.
But, I just ran the numbers -- a Tesla battery costs about 30 grand. If it lasts 10 years (120,000 miles), and gets 300 miles per charge, that is 400 charge cycles -- or about $75 a fill up. Adding in electric cost ($5 at the cheaper rates), and gasoline price of $3.60 per gallon, then you are looking at getting a car with the equivalent of 22 miles per gallon.
There are promising battery technologies being worked on, but there tends to be a big difference between lab research and what makes it as a viable product. Let's make the most of what we have now instead of waiting for a magic bullet.
They went belly up but there is something intuitive and compelling about the model.