chris222

BEVs are likely already cheaper to produce than ICE/PHEV and that trend is going to continue. In automotive there is a pretty long lag between what is happening in new product development/the supply chain and what is reflected in products and prices in the current market. As an automaker you have to skate to where the puck is going.

Particularly the Chinese have mastered the truly low cost BEV which is being copied all over the globe (yes with North American crash standards). So many interesting things are happening in China in the EV/battery space.

Road tripping an EV in America is actually not that bad in a lot of regions. With NACS rolling out everyone will have access to Superchargers. I’m in the Northeast and fast charging is very dense here.

It doesnt even seem like it will utilize that much more land either. How much land does a Nuclear site take with all of the zones around it?

Nvidia has 26,000 employees and is worth 1.8 trillion which puts it at 69 million/employee.

Heat pumps move heat so the heat from the waste water is still useful to them.

The transition to full AV-only roads will be slower and quicker than most people think. It will take a long time still for AV technology to be perfected, but once it is proven we will see various bans on human drivers coming in rather quickly. Texas has already been talking about dedicated corridors for AV trucks.

HVDC transmission can help here as well.

iirc the transmission and generation was roughly an even split on the 11 billion raised.

https://patternenergy.com/pattern-energy-closes-11-billion-f...

Tbey just announced the close of financing on Dec 27 so this is great news that the order with GE was confirmed so quickly. Things are moving along nicely.

https://patternenergy.com/pattern-energy-closes-11-billion-f...

The current Superchargers are not even 800v yet.

So true. Elsewhere in this thread I cited 3 major recent suspension recalls for issues that were as bad or worse than Teslas.

If you look at the things people care about in modern BEVs its easy to see why Tesla is winning.

Price, range, charging speed & reliability, performance and software.

It’s pretty obvious at this point with the entire auto indistry switching to NACS that Tesla won.

It’s an intentional choice by both the automaker and the customer. If the reliability issues were so bad they affected sales significantly than Tesla would likely change. You see this all the time with every automaker. There will be various issues and then a quality/reliability push and then things will revert when the beancounters have sway again.

https://www.freep.com/story/money/cars/ford/2023/05/11/ford-...

What does this all add up to now? It just tells me Tesla is a real established automaker now.

If you read into these recalls all of them obviously affected safety of cars on the road which is why the recall was initiated.

Carmakers often know of issues for years prior to a formal recall. This is standard.

Despite this hit peice they still make some of the best BEVs when you consider range, price, charging speed/network and software. These are things customers care the most about. Every brand has reliability and quality issues and tesla is in the middle of the pack statistically.

You might want to study the issues with the non-tesla fast chargers in the United States to see what customers really care about.

It’s a very common recall area. You should really do some research.

https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/car-recalls-defects/jee...

https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/honda-crv-recall-2023-rust-...

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1264789

By the mainstream media press sure. But are customers really following their bullshit? Tesla sales are still outpacing the entire BEV market except for BYD in China.

Yes if you look at customer satisfaction scores.

https://www.autoblog.com/amp/article/car-brands-highest-cust...

They have a pretty reliable service that will come to your house for most of the repairs. You should see if thats available in your area. I have a 2018 Model 3 and two friends have 2019s and we have not had these issues. I think they are overblown, there are millions of Teslas out there now.

Funny they write about Tesla which is selling like crazy with mostly satsified owners and a middle of the pack quality score. There are vehicles like the Cadillac Lyirq that have a near 100% issue rate.

https://www.reddit.com/r/CadillacLyriq/

Rivians have lots of documented issues. It’s pretty much the case with every car. Tesla and Rivian are no different than other brands just because they are pure EV companies.

https://www.rivianforums.com/forum/threads/another-critical-...

All cars have these issues. The article is more hit peice than real journalism which would include statsitics from all automakers. Remember we have lemon laws? Writing negative things about Tesla just gets more hits.

Utility scale battery storage is already here which solves that issue. The price of renewables + storage is cheaper (there have been PPAs in the 8-12 cent range).

Also electric cars are not the demand generators that people think. I live in the New England region and our NE ISO has studied this and put out their forecast for the region already. Heat pumps are a much bigger issue.

https://www.iso-ne.com/static-assets/documents/2023/04/trans...

Thats good for steady baseload but actually a problem since our demand is quite variable and spinning up and down Nuclear is hard.

Not comparable. Wholesale market vs residential price is not the same.

Renewable wind power comes in at a fraction of the cost.

Perhaps with todays prices on large lithium storage which I documented elsewhere in this thread at ~$500/kWh installed for a real project in the United States. Most analysts expect that price halves to $250/kWh or lower in the next decade which radically changes the economics.

There are thousands of companies working on battery advancements within the entire stack right now.

Raw material mining, refinement of materials, recycling, cell chemistry, longevity, density improvements, pack improvements, battery managament systems, thermal systems, safety, packaging, kW scale home batteries, GW scale utility batteries, cars, trucks, buses, planes, trains, automobiles, ships. The amount of capital deployed is in the trillions of dollars.

There is a lot of FUD about wind (less so for hydro which has some real issues) but the scale of the problems that can occur are orders of magnitude less than Nuclear.

Thats a good summary of what it would take but I really think the ship has sailed on Nuclear. I don’t think it will have a significant revival in the United States any time soon.

We did have a chance to be like France in the early 1970’s and we were trending that way as I outlined for the NE region.

For now the focus is all on renewables [wind, solar and lithium based storage]. Technology development is moving quickly and capital is being deployed.

The aging Nuclear, Oil and Coal plants continue to shut down or be propped up for a few years until renewables fully take over.

I don’t see it happening in the United States. I’ll give a small example from my area of the country which is New England.

We had 5 Nuclear power plants (one each in ME, MA, NH, CT and VT) of which the last to be commissioned was in New Hampshire (Seabrook) in 1990. This took from the late 1960’s to 1990 to be commissioned with similar regulatory obstacles.

Since 1990 Maine Yankee shut down in 1997 due to NRC safety concerns and additional money required to fix them. The plant operated from 1972 to 1997. Vermont Yankee shut down in 2014 due to overwhelming public support for not renewing it’s license to operate. The plant operated from 1972 to 2014. Pilgrim in Plymouth Mass shut down in 2019 due to the cost of safety upgrades. The plant operated from 1972 to 2019. Two Nuclear plants remain at Seabrook NH and Waterford CT.

The New England energy market was deregulated in 1998 moving to a wholesale market run by New England ISO. Since 2000 older oil fired and coal fired generation plants have largely been replaced with Natural Gas. Recently renewables and net imports from other areas are trending higher. We have almost no coal or oil fired generation in the entire region today.

The stated plan for NE ISO is to continue to pursue renewables. No new Nuclear projects are on the horizon. The current remaining reactors make up approx. 20-30% of the regions baseload power and are nearing end of life.

The Nuclear plants require bailouts to continue to function. In 2019 CT mandated that half of the Waterford plants output was purchased for 10 years at 4.9 cents/kWh. While this increased customer bills initally, it recently saved money when Nat Gas spiked last year. It also saved a 25% spike in the regions total emissions if the plant were to close and be replaced by Nat Gas.

A summary of some of the risks is explained here:

https://www.iso-ne.com/about/what-we-do/in-depth/power-plant...

And the estimated cleanup costs are ~500 billion, ~50 billion and ~1 billion. Expensive mistakes.