The premise turns on the batteries: They are still expensive and need replacing every 7-10 years. If you're modeling the cost of ownership, you should be factoring in a new battery pack after 10 years. (Message to ye who covet 1,000,000 miles) Therefore, the rate of adoption will be somewhat modulated by the ecosystem of lithium ion materials and production. It's obvious Tesla sees this as a crux since they are investing billions in battery production.
Li ion Battery cost per KWh has already been falling at about -14% annualized over the last 10 years [0]. However, mass adoption of EV autos changes the demand side considerably and we therefore cannot assume the same rate of decline as we have seen recently. Perhaps we will, given the ramping production, but if they don't move more or less in step, prices could be somewhat stubborn.
Most internal combustion engines are only good for ~200,000 miles, even with excellent maintenance. A worn-out engine is good only for scrap, but an EV battery pack with 50% capacity is still very useful as a solar storage battery.
Most of the 2011 Nissan Leafs are still going strong with ~80% capacity. Their outright failure rate is less than 0.02%. Cell and battery pack technology has improved dramatically since then, so I'd be very optimistic about the useful lifespan of a brand new Model S or Chevy Bolt.
Depends on the kind of car you get, but certain cars regularly get to twice that with proper maintenance. Of course, the interior and exterior start falling to bits around the drivetrain anyway.
In large swaths of the United States (and, presumably, most of Canada) road salt will destroy most cars long before the drivetrains are worn out. Collisions also destroy a significant number (in some cases partially destroying the drivetrain too, but not always). In both cases the drivetrain almost always gets disassembled for parts unless there's something really unimpressive about it. Pretty rare to see a car body go into the crusher with the engine still in it unless it was a bad frontend wreck, at least in my experience.
Electric vehicles will be subject to the same body rust and general degradation issues as combustion cars, and it's not obvious that the residual value of a battery pack is going to be that much higher than the residual parts value of an engine in a rusted-out but otherwise operable gas car.
We'll see, I guess, but it doesn't seem on the surface like the economics are likely to be all that much different on the scrap / recovery side of the equation. I suspect that supply chain and labor costs will dominate the price of used batteries rather than the lithium metal itself.
I replaced the engine and transmission in my vehicle at around 220k. I intend to get another 300k out of it, hopefully long enough for the first wave of cars to be remote controlled into the nearest lake and legislation to be passed requiring some security rating that does not yet exist.
I had 250k on an +20 year old Toyota pickup, though things slowly start to crap. Leaky carb diaphragms due to ethanol, harmonic balancer wearing out, corroded brakes lines, bad clutch cylinder, dead ignition module. Donated that after buying a new Toyota pickup. Had that for 12 years now with zero problems.
Purchased a used 2015 Nissan Leaf recently and very happy with that. We'll see how the battery holds up.
I think many will ditch their cars not due to engine wear, but for stupid reasons like their smartphone not linking to the stereo.
I think a much better reason that people ditch their cars is the increased safety in the newer models. Very few cars had side air bags and a decent amount didn't have ABS 15 years ago. There are a lot of other improvements surely made that I don't know about.
In Japan everyone junks their cars in 10 years because of the mandatory car check-ups (we pay $400-$2000 every 2 years for the check-up then have to pay every year once the car hits 10 years old). There are some exceptions and I don't know all the rules as I just own one car.
> for stupid reasons like their smartphone not linking to the stereo.
I'm hoping to install an after-market (Pioneer) wireless CarPlay stereo in our 2009 Mazda, assuming it can wire in to the existing reversing camera. The car's just fine, but it's stupid having this double-DIN stereo with a screen that's always turned off because it's useless.
In recent years there's been a shift toward smaller engines with turbochargers. I have heard folks with luxury sports cars (Audis, mostly) complain about the cost of a busted turbo, and I've wondered whether people who bought an ordinary-seeming car with a turbocharged 4-cylinder are going to be in for a nasty surprise at 50k or 100k miles.
But I don't know what the life of turbos is, or if the cost of an Audi turbo replacement is partly/largely because it's an expensive car to begin with. Will Toyotas and Chevys be cheaper?
Turbos have one moving part which runs (typically) on an oil bearing. They are basically immortal IF run at spec pressure and if not subjected to oil starvation. When you see busted turbos, it generally means it's been run at higher-than-spec boost.
I have a pair of Peugeot Partners(small mini-van cars) from 2001 - they both have turbo charged diesels. When they first came out people were saying that because of the turbo the engine will die quickly. The cars are both 16 years old, and have 250 thousand miles.......each. They are giving away to rust slowly, but the engines run absolutely fine.
I personally drive a 381bhp 2.0 petrol with the largest turbo installed in a production car ever(GLA 45 AMG) and I know a few people who have done over 100k miles in those cars - no problems with the engine.
Veyron has multiple turbos, I don't think any one of them is "bigger" than the single turbo used in the 45 line of AMG cars. Well, they might be physically bigger(I don't know), but what I mean is that it provides the highest pressure(28psi) of any turbo used in a production car.
Glad to hear it's not more than that. I feared that this would be big profit driver for dealers doing repairs — and something that most consumers wouldn't consider when estimating the total cost of ownership of a $20-30k vehicle.
Turbos are fairly accessible, and so it isn't a lot of labor to replace (a few hours), and the turbo itself is only a few hundred.
The real worry about turbos is the common failure mode is it starts putting engine oil into the intake. In a gas engine that probably doesn't mean anything, but in a diesel engine that results in a run away engine: max throttle, higher RPMs than the engine is designed for - all while they engine is burning away its own oil that might protect things until the engine explodes. (In modern engines they put throttle valves specifically to shut off air if this happens, but old timers in industry can tell you stories)
>"Most internal combustion engines are only good for ~200,000 miles"
Interesting and I think that figure is is generally accepted and I believe this is due to shear stress on the engine block no?
I know older cars that came out of Detroit when engine block were cast iron could get up to ~300k miles(the slant 6 comes to mind) but I believe nearly all engine blocks in recent makes are aluminum now.[1] The referenced article says there's parity between now between the two but that doesn't correlate with my own admittedly limited and anecdotal observations.
Unavoidable sliding friction on pistons, valves, and camshafts results in wear. The crankshaft journal bearings are partially lubricated and wear out. Because on the power stroke the film of oil between the crankshaft bearing and the crankshaft gets squeezed out resulting in direct contact. Fully lubricated journal bearings generally last 'forever'
Even if you solved the above problems, some parts like springs, valve seats, and other moving parts would eventually suffer from fatigue.
Interesting calculation to make it to look at the lifetime of automotive engines in terms of hours. 200,000 miles divided by 30 mph gives a lifetime of 6600 hours. Compare with industrial electric motors and gear trains where life times of 50,000 hours are common and you can see where things are going with electric cars.
Most wear is during startup before oil pressure comes up. Some aircraft engines have electric oil pumps, so that oil pressure is at 100% before the engine starts. It's common to bring up oil pressure before starting on very large Diesel engines (ships, earthmovers, tanks) to extend the life. Those usually have a starting engine to provide startup power. Large diesels are often cranked with no compression (all valves lifted) and no fuel flow to get things well lubricated before combustion starts.
Auto engines could be run that way, but the slow cold start process acceptable for heavy equipment would annoy motorists.
All of this is true, but in my experience, it's the rare engine that meets its end due to piston/cam friction. Usually, the engine is abandoned due to the cost of maintaining all the things attached to it (e.g., water pump, alternator, master cylinder, etc.). If you're willing to suffer the nickel and dime expenses, the actual pistons/valves/camshafts usually last many hundreds of thousands of miles.
EVs don't have as many things attached to the engine. I wonder if some "new" EVs will just be refurbished older EVs with a new battery and cosmetic changes.
People want new bodywork, seats, electronics, etc.
It might be possible to make all that replaceable, so that a car can be fully refurbished, and certainly that is done to commercial vehicles all the time (passenger buses, etc.), but not sure about the economics of doing it to light-duty cars and trucks. The body itself is probably not that expensive.
Certainly seems like it ought to be possible to pull the motors out of an old car and drop them into a new one. But then again people do that with gasoline engines all the time, too. If you blow a head gasket in a lot of cars, the "fix" is often to replace the engine with a remanufactured engine that comes out of a crate. It's cheaper to do that than to pay for the labor to actually replace the gasket in a shop, at least in a high-cost area (NE US, especially at dealers).
> Compare with industrial electric motors and gear trains where life times of 50,000 hours are common and you can see where things are going with electric cars.
To be fair, industrial engines (for generation and the like) reach 20-30k hours.
In the days of the Slant-6, cars never got to 300k miles unless they had ridiculously meticulous maintenance. Detroit cars were lucky to get to 100k without falling apart. These days, cars are barely broken-in at that age, and 200k is nothing remarkable. If you're not getting that kind of lifetime, then you need to stop buying a crappy brand.
>"In the days of the Slant-6, cars never got to 300k miles unless they had ridiculously meticulous maintenance"
As the former owner of mid 1960s Slant 6 purchased with ~ 220K miles on it that I personally put another 120K before the block cracked I am telling you that you claim of "never" is just plain wrong.
Aside from periodic oil changes I wouldn't describe my maintenance regime as ridiculously meticulous at all.
There are many vintage Duster/Dart/Valiant owners with cars that have 200K and greater miles on them. Here are some links with attestations that corroborate this fact:
How ironic that you put it that way, considering that I've known slant 6s with 300K on them. I don't know if they all did that, as I've never known a slant 6 to die, so I'm not knowledgeable of their average life. And every small block Chevy (of that era or a little later) I've owned or knew the owner could easily top 100K. The later American compact four cylinders, OTOH...
> Perhaps we will, given the ramping production, but if they don't move more or less in step, prices could be somewhat stubborn
There's somewhere in the range of 35-50 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of annual lithium ion battery production capacity at existing manufacturing facilities worldwide right now. By 2020, under three years from now, that will triple or quadruple to 150-200 GWh, based on new factories that have broken ground or money already committed to expansion from BYD (20 GWh), Boston Power (10 GWh), LG Chem (7 GWh), CATL (50 GWh), Panasonic/Tesla (35-50 GWh), Foxconn (15 GWh), Samsung SDI, SK Innovation, and others. Given how long it takes auto manufacturers to take new cars to market and grow their sales (years) and how few are actually far along enough to hit the market in the next year or two, I don't think the supply side of the battery market will have any trouble keeping up with demand. It may even be too much, lowering prices.
"The problem is not that there is not enough copper in the world, but its conversion to copper foil that is the problem." That's only ever going to be a very short term problem.
What's a good company to invest in here? Panasonic? Trouble is that lithium batteries are a drop & their bucket. BYD? (I thought BYD was just LiFePo4. better for storage not so much for cars. Though they make busses.)
Some believe Tesla is properly described as a battery company instead of a car company. Their valuation is high for current sales though, obviously investors are buying on growth potential. Regretting selling my shares.
BYD also makes cars. You can buy this one in the US https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BYD_e6 and it was apparently the best-selling EV model in China in 2016.
Our experience with LiFePo4 is they are slightly cheaper at the cost of performance. If batteries make up the bulk of the cost of a BEV they would probably be the best choice for general fleet vehicles.
Cartels are unstable by their nature, OPEC is the exception not the rule. Cartels can only thrive when there is a lack of competition and strong enforcement between member nations. There is a reason why we don't hear of coal or natural gas cartels which are substitute goods for oil.
Even OPEC is not much of an exception: they've only occassionally been effective at coordinating outputs, and supply dynamics typically overwhelm OPECs ability to respond.
OPEC is definitely an exception in that it stayed together even though there are multiple times when it wasn't clearly in any of the members' economic best interests to participate or maintain the cartel's supply control. This is pretty obviously because it's a political rather than economic organization: the member states have political reasons for wanting to remain in control of the supply which probably exceed the rational reasons for pursuing revenue maximization.
It seems unlikely that the countries with significant lithium reserves have enough in common politically, to maintain a similar cartel.
Not that some might not try. But they will also have to deal with the fact that OPEC did it first, and major powers may be unlikely to allow that to be repeated.
How many industries industries are currently controlled by cartels? Maybe OPEC in oil and DeBeers in diamonds. But even in those cases, the cartels still have limited overall effects. OPEC has trouble policing its members, and DeBeers has competition.
Why do you think that lithium producers will be able to form a cartel, when almost no one else can?
Highly unlikely. Lithium is one of the cheapest and easily-supplied materials required. By some measures a larger percentage of world cobalt production is used for batteries than lithium.
Lithium and cobalt are both in high supply in almost all countries, unlike oil.
Wikipedia isnt exhaustive but the real reason is that hard rock deposits, primarily spodumene, are only economical at high volumes. Spodumene is present basically everywhere hard rocks are. Lithium brine, which makes up almost all of all current battery lithium, exists almost totally in three countries.
I don't know a ton about mining history, but it seems that mining has always depended on cost efficiency. ("Duh?") eg, Froth floatation mining is the only reason that a ton of gold mines in the Pacific NW were ever cost effective, and formerly closed mines reopened as the technique came into use.
Can only assume that as the price and demand on various precious metals change, the techniques and regions which can produce them economically will change as well.
That's correct. The basic difference between brine and hard rock is that brine is simple to purify but can't be extracted any faster than lithium salts dissolve into water. Benefication and purification of hard rock lithium requires big grinders, flotation and acid baths, essentially the same process as mining any other metal. To justify building all that you need to be able to sell a lot, but once you do the cost is totally amortized.
As an extreme example, coal mining in the US is so efficient that each miner produces 55 tons of coal per day. That kind of efficiency is enabled by the scale and investment.
Current lithium sources are "easy pickings" and low-startup. It's like a single guy panning for gold by hand. He's just doing it for the chance at a buck, where gold is very convenient. Spodumene mining is froth flotation.
"Extremely high" requires the qualification that it's only high in comparison to the current market price, but not high in the sense that it makes use in batteries uneconomical.
Currently, a very small proportion of the cost of the battery is lithium. As battery production increases, the market price of lithium will go up, potentially by several times. This will make spodumene deposits economical to extract, but it will not have a meaningful effect on the cost of the batteries.
The preliminary work to open these deposits for extraction has started in many countries, for example the Keliber project in Finland is currently undergoing the environmental effect study.
This line of reasoning supports the original comment they reply to that you can't count on battery prices to drop. Even if costs aren't substantial enough to affect EV sales, eventually batteries will need replaced.
I like the concept of EVs, but there are still 2 problems I can't get over. The first is that the environmental impact of building the car doesn't get much coverage and focus is on the impact of running the car. Are they really good for the environment? Who knows. The second is that recharging still takes too long and so I would want some type of range extender which bring oil back into the picture.
> This line of reasoning supports the original comment they reply to that you can't count on battery prices to drop.
No, it doesn't. The cost of lithium in the batteries is such a minor expense, that changes in lithium prices cannot move the price of a battery in either direction. The batteries are getting cheaper because of reasons unrelated to lithium, and even if the price of lithium were to quadruple from present levels, these other factors would totally dominate the price of the battery.
If something is currently 1% of a price of a good, and it quadruples in price, it can at worst cause a 3% move up in the price of the good. If, at the same time, a different reason causes the price of the good to fall 40%, this 3% move up hardly registers.
«The first is that the environmental impact of building the car doesn't get much coverage and focus is on the impact of running the car.»
From what I've seen it gets far too much coverage because it seems like one on the many list of excuses why electric cars are "just as bad" as ICE cars.
The key part being that "just as bad": the vast environmental impact of building a car will always be the steel/aluminum/plastics of the frame and interiors. That doesn't really change no matter what sort of car you buy, except that obviously bigger, heavier cars have more impact than smaller ones and electric cars typically have the most incentives to be small and efficient in frame size and cabin weight, too.
Yes, batteries have a slightly different environmental impact at build time than a traditional gas engine, but they are more easily recycled too. Don't forget the environmental impacts of oils and lubricants and coolants used for all those moving parts in a traditional and randomly spilled across the pavements of a city and constantly (every few months) topped up or replaced. Operating environmental impact is hugely different, and that probably matters a lot more than the build time environmental impact.
No I haven't, I have never known a person who owns either. However, a quick search confirms my suspicions that it takes significantly longer to charge batteries than to fill a gas tank. A journey that takes more than 1 recharge would be considerably more difficult than the same trip in a gas car.
>The first is that the environmental impact of building the car doesn't get much coverage and focus is on the impact of running the car.
Here is a first order analysis: A car that travels 200,000 miles in its life @ 30 mpg (nation avg is 25.5) will burn 6667 gallons of gasoline, weighing 42,000 lbs. The weight of the gas burnt is over 14x more than the weight of the car. Those 6667 gallons produce 133,340 lbs of CO2. The average car burns its own weight in gasoline in 12,000 miles, less than a year of driving.
No. High volume, not high price. About a third of lithium is mined as hard rock currently, for about the same price as brine. The individual mining operations just have to be large.
Teslas have been showing around ~8% degradation at 100k miles. Battery degradation drops fastest at the beginning, so it would be unsurprising for the batteries to still have 80%+ capacity at 250,000 miles. That's quite good.
Also 80% capacity seems still quite useful for many other applications like grid storage. It's really only an issue when weight and space are at a premium. There will probably emerge a robust secondary market for used EV cells.
A guy in this submission was saying he would give 50% margin on his actual driving range for battery degradation. At this rate that would take over 600,000 miles to get to 66% of original capacity, and probably longer.
I agree that the secondhand battery market will probably be very strong, but it's also likely that the tail end of electric vehicles will be extremely long regardless. In older cars you stop caring so much about the little things breaking, and if the car still goes places, people will still want it. In all likelihood Tesla vehicles will still be going places for several decades.
It could go either way, honestly. Solar has shown that as production is vastly overbuilt, prices plummet and a lot of people go out of business because they were assuming higher prices than they were able to charge.
It seems likely that lithium ion battery production is going to face a similar fate. Tons of people interested in the space, enticed by a market that's set to explode in size.
Note that solar production, or dram production, or flash memory production generally doesn't go down during the shakeouts. It does cause fluctuations in dram and flash memory prices.
You have to distinguish between manufacturing costs and market price. The costs are going to be down as the volume is going to be raised massively, if a significant part of the car production is going to be electric. Which also implies that the free market prices are going to go up short term for all car manufacturers, who have not secured their own battery supply.
But for those who have, or even have their own battery production (Tesla), costs are pretty much guaranteed to go down, as measured by scale, industrial production is just about to start.
It is also not as clear as you put it, that you have to get a new battery pack after "10 years". With batteries having 50 kWh and more, longer lifetimes are to be expected. And unlike car engines, batteries don't fail randomly, they have a clear observable capacity loss. You can either decide to just keep driving your car, if you can live with just 70% of its original range, or update your battery, but then the old battery has a resale value proportional to its remaining capacity.
You're a different market segment. They're not planning on selling cars to people working on their 400,000th kilometer. No carmaker is. They all sell cars to people who buy new cars, preferably every couple of years. If they succeed (and the cars can last as long as a well loved Camry or Hilux) You may be able to acquire a second hand one to your liking in a few years.
It sounds like you bought it used? While I'm unsure of a Tesla's longevity, it looks like you could buy a used Tesla for $35k these days. Which is cheaper than your $15k + $42k. No gas -- but I'm not sure how much it would cost per kilowatt hour. Now if you were to get a Tesla $35k and install a solar roof for $10k then you're looking at $45k and a renewable energy system, taking power out of the oil companies' hands and actually cheaper than the $57k... and that would be "free" power indefinitely -- way cheaper than the fact that you will have to continue to put oil and gas in your car.
Speaking of which, did you factor in the oil change costs? Assuming $30 an oil change, you're looking at $12k in oil changes. That's now $69k for your Camry.
Plus, the Tesla looks cooler and has faster acceleration than your Camry.
I don't think i've listed a used tesla for $35k on my niche site BUT there was an offer from a wholesaler / dealer at $35K to a seller. Have a look, I am listing private sale and dealer side : https://onlyusedtesla.com/ its my side hustle.
I'm curious, though, about the listings with regards to mileage. As has been said many times, electric cars don't wear out in the same way as ICE based cars. For an ICE, mileage is a rough approximation of how dependable the car will be. But the thing I would be concerned about when buying a used Tesla is the battery health. I would love to see a number for each car with how many miles of range the computer shows when the battery is at 100% charge, in miles and as a percentage of the initial rating from Tesla. Mileage doesn't really cover it; you can have one battery at 80% capacity because it was frequently used in Ludicrous mode, deeply discharged on long trips, and often supercharged back up to full, while another was gently discharged some few percent a day for a commute and slowly trickle charged overnight.
And the biggest differentiator, to me, of a sales site is the quality of their parametric search and database. You have a small enough inventory right now that I can manually scroll through all your listings and pick out the ones I am considering, drop the top 6 in a spreadsheet and compare them - but this should be done automatically on the site.
For some examples of parametric searches, Digikey is amazing. If you haven't from them, go check this out: https://www.digikey.com/products/en/capacitors/ceramic-capac... (understand that to an EE, each of those categories makes sense and perhaps 1/3 are relevant to their purchase decision). Now imagine trying to do this if all their parts were on Craigslist. Newegg probably is among the best in their business, when you weigh in availability and customer service, but there are too many cases where I have to select both "Yes", "1", and a few numbers greater than one to identify a value. Amazon is terrible, because you have to select a category, and the data is all provided by the seller and barely normalized. For normalization, at this point you can just manually update the database so they all filter correctly. At scale, you could get a photo of the car's VIN number and look up all the specs, with the user just entering mileage...or heck, it's Tesla, they know how many miles are on each car and what the battery health is.
Also, for the comparison, a visual is nice. Here's an example bubble chart I did when looking for a Craigslist winter beater: http://i.imgur.com/AjHRHOA.jpg Mileage (or battery health?) on one axis, and cost on the other, bubble size and color can indicate age or model.
Dang! Thank you for the feedback.
Battery health! ok let me see how i can solve this.
drop the top 6 in a spreadsheet and compare them - but this should be done automatically on the site. ( OK)
email me, its in the site footer. I am working on updates over the weekend and just signed a dealer to list their used tesla inventory.
You could go longer if you did periodic oil analysis plus put on a new filter (and top up the remainder) between changes. Could probably double the figure to 10k, depending on engine age.
> [New] research from Bloomberg New Energy Finance indicates that falling battery costs will mean electric vehicles will also be cheaper to buy in the U.S. and Europe as soon as 2025.
The article isn't predicting that we'll soon all be driving a Tesla Model S or claiming that electric cars are price competitive right now.
There aren't a lot of cheap electric car options right now, but the situation is improving. The Chevy Bolt is available now, and the Model 3 should be out in a few months or so. They're still more expensive than I would care to spend on a car, but eventually as costs come down, it's not unreasonable to expect electrics will show up in lower cost vehicles.
I'm kind of hoping someone puts out a well-engineered low-cost electric without any of the self-driving or always-on-phone-home-wireless-connectivity stuff, or any other features that aren't absolutely required. No infotainment, just an FM radio and window cranks. Maybe not even AC or power steering. Just a simple small car, kind of like the VW beetle was in the 1960s.
Presumably a 15K Camry is a used one (New ones start at 23K) so it would make compare also compare to a used Tesla. Used Model S' can be bought for as little as 40-46K, depending on where you buy[1].
Assuming electricity costs ~1/3 for the same distance as gas, then the used Tesla starts to make some sense, even when compared to the Camry (While being a much nicer car to drive).
When you buy a Tesla you pay upfront the whole price (yes I know you can have some financing and re-pay it monthly) no matter how many miles you put on it, with the gas you pay as you go, i.e. the costs are directly connected to the use you make of it.
It is the same thing (I use to have this argument often) with "green" (energy saving) houses, once you strip from the equation "moral" or "ethical" considerations (lowering the carbon footprint, etc.) the fact is that you have to pay upfront a large sum of money that may (if the house is actually used) be repaid/compensated by the savings over the next 10/15/20 years, in the meantime you will have to pay (anyway) the utilities fixed fees (and rest assured that those will continue to raise).
My Bolt cost only slightly more to insure than my Prius. It cost about $45k USD and while small for a car in that price range, fares favorably in terms of comfort and feature.
So yeah, a $15k 2003 Camry used exclusively for long haul trips in sequence isn't approachable by EVs yet. But if you compared it to a Fiat 500e that's been used and refurbed (selling in my county for about $13k) and you're NOT constantly doing 280mi trips... you'll find something competitive.
Depreciation, insurance, gasoline and maintenace have each been about a quarter of the cost of my small japanese car over 15 years. I keep a detailed spreadsheet.
While this seems drastically unrealistic from the viewpoint of someone in the US, from a European point of view, I can totally see that electrics become very viable - take a look at the new cars from Citroen, Renault and Hyundai in terms of decent to serious range (200-300km+) and Europe seems more likely to push regulations than a Trump-administration US.
I have an electric car in the US and a 60+mi/day commute. My new electric car is so so so much cheaper to operate. It's actually below half the cost of using my older but still quite efficient Prius.
It'll still take time for me to see savings over a car in the $20-$30k range. But in terms of daily operating costs for equivalent priced cars I'm there. Gas prices can only go up and electrical storage is on a downward trend.
>It'll still take time for me to see savings over a car in the $20-$30k range.
Consider that a great deal of that price difference may just be scale. Combustion engines are extremely complex and have hundreds of parts, and require tons of automation and labor to make and assemble. Batteries can be spat out of a few machines. Batteries are heavier, and made of more stuff than an engine+transmission, but they are way simpler to build.
Also the highest material expenses of batteries, nickel and cobalt, may also become cheaper at scale.
> at-home charging stations for apartment dwellers are just a not-thing
Not yet. The technology is absolutely ready, it's just stuck at the chicken-and-egg stage in most places. Anywhere you can fit a parking meter, you can fit an EV charger. Rolec produce a street light with a built-in EV charger.
On-street EV charging is ready and waiting for the demand. I think it's almost inevitable that every parking space will eventually have an EV charger.
How do you propose they charge their cars? On some nights you can fit 20 cars on each side. On others, 10 cars. Sometimes you can park right in front of your house, sometimes you have to park two streets away because there was no room on yours.
Do we just install a charging point ever ~10 meters? If yes, who is going to pay for the absolutely enormous cost of ripping out every single street in the UK to put the necessary cables down? Won't it be an eyesore? How about vandalism and damaged cables?
> who is going to pay for the absolutely enormous cost of ripping out every single street in the UK to put the necessary cables down?
Same questions could have been asked about fiber optics, cable TV, electricity, telephones, water and sewers. Yet we have that infrastructure.
Also, some people believe by the time that future will come many people would opt out of buying cars, in favor of driverless taxis. These don’t need to stay parked in residential areas.
Sure, but right now the electric cars are entering the market by storm - and soon we will run out of places to charge them. Those odd few places around the city centre that offer charging are not longer enough. This is a problem that needs to be solved long before autonomous vehicles are even a thing(not to mention that many people will still prefer to own a car)
Market economy should be OK solving such problems.
If we’ll start running out of places to charge EVs, the existing places will raise their per-KWh prices to maximize their profits. This in turn will create incentive to install more plugs, and upgrade electrical grid and generation to supply them. No need to bury millions in advance installing the infrastructure before there's a demand.
>Do we just install a charging point ever ~10 meters? If yes, who is going to pay for the absolutely enormous cost of ripping out every single street in the UK to put the necessary cables down?
Yep. Most homeowners will just install their own charge point on their own front wall, which costs £150 after subsidy (£600 unsubsidised). If your street has chronic parking problems that mean you can't always park in front of your house (a definite minority outside of London), the council or a charge point provider will need to sort it out. The Office for Low Emission Vehicles already provides subsidies to any local authority that wants to install on-street charging infrastructure.
Given the cost savings of running an EV, the infrastructure will pay for itself quite quickly. Shared charge points use a contactless payment system, so it's easy to recoup the cost of installation and maintenance over time through a small premium on metered electricity rates.
Most EV charging cables automatically lock in place, which prevents the petty nuisance of someone unplugging your car for a laugh. If someone chooses to vandalise a cable carrying 7kW, they're likely to experience very swift karmic retribution. The charge point itself may be a target for vandalism, but it's no more attractive a target than any amount of other street furniture. Cars and bicycles are an easy target for vandalism when parked, but it's relatively rare in practice.
>> If someone chooses to vandalise a cable carrying 7kW, they're likely to experience very swift karmic retribution.
Which brings up another interesting point - if you do any work in UK and have to run an electrical cable across the pavement, you have to mark the area so that people won't trip over your cable or electrocute themselves.
In the picture I posted, if you had a charging point on the wall of the building, you would absolutely have to run it across the pavement to get to your car - so how can this be allowed? What about wheelchairs riding on the pavement? Or prams? Or people who trip over the cable?
Can someone else who parks in front of your house use your cable? If not, why not? The street parking is free for everyone, anybody can park there, electric car or not.
>> (a definite minority outside of London)
You mean outside literally any city in UK. Terraced houses are bread and butter of living in the UK and they all have the same problem - you usually don't park in front of your own door.
>if you had a charging point on the wall of the building, you would absolutely have to run it across the pavement to get to your car - so how can this be allowed?
On-street chargers can be mounted to a bollard or lamp post at the kerbside, avoiding a cable run across the pavement. Alternatively, the cable can be routed through a sunken channel with a removable cover, similar to a standard drainage channel.
>Can someone else who parks in front of your house use your cable? If not, why not?
A private EV charger running from your own electricity supply has a lockable receptacle. A shared EV charger uses contactless cards for billing.
>You mean outside literally any city in UK. Terraced houses are bread and butter of living in the UK and they all have the same problem - you usually don't park in front of your own door.
70% of UK households have access to off-street parking. The other 30% do pose some significant challenges, but they're not insurmountable.
> Anywhere you can fit a parking meter, you can fit an EV charger
Parking meters is not a thing in Europe though. Usually there's a single ticketing machine, possibly behind a door. You either get a paper ticket and put it behind the windscreen or pay before leaving to get through the barrier.
Judging two trips to Europe in the past 20 years I'm going to suggest that those parking meter things are replaced about every 10 years. If EVs start to take off I expect that cities will move to US style parking meters with a built in chargers as they replace their meters on the normal cycle.
Note the I've seen a lot of the Europe style meters in the US. Each city gets to choose, and the one machine for numerous parking spaces has some advantages, and other disadvantages.
Devices themselves - yes, but not the style. That'd require massive replanning of sidewalks and parking lots though.
At least in my city, there's literally no space on sidewalks for per-car meters. And there're no designated spots on many streets - all spaces are fluid. Nobody would be guaranteed to park in front of one. While somebody may be in front of two. Most public garages and big lots are bumper-to-bumper 90-degree parking with not much space either.
Of course, there's plenty of space in suburbs. But there's no parking meters at all over there.
Some parts of the bay area require new construction of homes and apartments to put in chargers, some apartment complexes have them, and there are a few chargers on the street and in public garages. It's all headed in the right direction.
Requiring new apartments to have chargers is the wrong direction if you consider that it just increases costs for people who don't own automobiles (in my building of seven apartments one person owns a vehicle).
Electric cars have a lot of advantages but they still have enormous negative externalities on cities.
I'd be happy to pay a premium in cities if it meant all the cars were electric so the air was that much cleaner, even though I don't have a car of my own.
Sure, but is that a reason to force everyone else to do the same? The easier you make it to use a car in a dense place, the more people will do so, and the more people who walk and cycle will die.
The charger rule doesn't change the minimum number of parking spaces, and adding chargers for a small fraction of spaces is a tiny expense compared to the overall cost of parking spaces.
You might want to spend your effort on the parking space rule instead of the extremely minor issue of electric chargers.
I do - I just dislike the idea that the building should be forced to have any parking. My current building has none (as did my last one) and was more affordable for it.
I plug my car into a normal outlet and drag a cord across the sidewalk (my neighborhood is single family), so it depends. If there is an outlet near where you park your car, you may have everything you need for a charging station.
Very much this - and it describes nearly everywhere I lived the first 35 years of life. Apartments, rural communities and smallish cities (50-60k).
The things these have in common were winters (indiana), employers without a decent area to change clothes in, lack of places to safely store a bike, lack of places to safely ride the bike, and a lack of public transportation. Some employers wouldn't hire you if you didn't have reliable transportation (a car) : Even McDonalds inquired about this in the late 90's. One job preffered one to have a vehicle occasionally to take deposits to the bank and get small change for customers. The penalty was crappier work hours because you could not meet business needs. The bank wasn't far away (8-10 blocks) and was in a tiny town (less than 3k people), yet the store was neither busy enough nor in a crime area high enough to qualify for an armored car service.
And that's not to mention things like having to go travel to wash clothes or, like some even smaller towns than the one mentioned above, not having even a convenience store in town to get basic items.
Perhaps pilots should be required to provide their own airplanes? It's ridiculous that the job wants to force their employees to provide their own $20,000 metal box. Perhaps what they want is a contractor, not an employee.
My 35mi commute with no practical public transit options is a requirement.
But also, I have a child, not yet 3. If you're going to say that I shouldn't have a car in this scenario you're either single or uninvolved in the realities of having a child.
I understand that manufacturing batteries has negative externalities. I'd argue that removing myself from the carbon spraying game has immediate impact (we cannot stop ACC now, but we can temper its course), and that's good. Reducing the US's economic incentive to screw with the world's politics to maintain gas prices: also good.
Cars are thoroughly useful, granted. But the frequently-repeated parents claim that its impossible to raise a child without one, are given lie by the fact that millions of folks do it every day.
I rent a home right now (and I've rented a half house before). So yeah, that's a challenge.
The other option (and I do this a lot) is to just go to whole foods and use their monster-fast chargers. You can do a whole car in just a few hours with an L3 charger, it's amazing. This is more expensive than using any kind of outlet, but so is gas.
Please forgive the imposition, but if you live in the dense and expensive part of the city, you probably are best off simply not owning a car.
>go to whole foods and use their monster-fast chargers. You can do a whole car in just a few hours
I'm sorry but things like this always come up and I can't keep my head from shaking at these types of comments.
So, you don't have other options to charge and simply go somewhere else where there is a charger that can do a car in "a few hours"?!
So, I guess you say if you can do it, everybody else in that situation can, too? A short thought experiment, if everybody else did exactly that, how often would you say you will find your charger occupied? And since it is "a few hours" per car, you are in for a nice long shopping spree in whole foods while you wait for the guy in front of you to finally drive off. IF you are already next in line, that is. "Hi Honey, sorry, it'll be a couple of hours till I'm home. What? No, I'm not working late, I just want to gas up the EV and there is one person in front of me."
And before you say "But there are two or three chargers there" I say: And all would be constantly occupied if EV adoption would take of as many here wanted it to. The only way this could technically happen would if if at a snap of a finger suddenly every parking space had a charger available. Then the EV industry could go "Buy an EV today, no matter where you park, you can always charge it" Before something like that is in place, the odd charger at whole foods ONLY works as a solution as long as only a tiny subset of driver choose an EV. If not, you will find yourself cursing all the other EV drivers that constantly block your charging spot and you curse at anyone who still tries to drum up support for EV adoption. Cause that just means an even longer queue to get to your charger.
> I'm sorry but things like this always come up and I can't keep my head from shaking at these types of comments. So, you don't have other options to charge and simply go somewhere else where there is a charger that can do a car in "a few hours"?!
You can fill a car from a dead charge in a few hours with these type 3 DC chargers. If your car's battery is NOT empty, it'll go significantly faster. Or if your car has a smaller battery.
> So, I guess you say if you can do it, everybody else in that situation can, too? A short thought experiment, if everybody else did exactly that, how often would you say you will find your charger occupied? And since it is "a few hours" per car, you are in for a nice long shopping spree in whole foods while you wait for the guy in front of you to finally drive off. IF you are already next in line, that is. "Hi Honey, sorry, it'll be a couple of hours till I'm home. What? No, I'm not working late, I just want to gas up the EV and there is one person in front of me."
Yours is a great example of a terrible comment. The kind of comment where you showed up wanted to yell at people about something, not talk about something. This discussion is about short term solutions for people in an early electric car market, specifically because the infrastructure isn't there for everyone yet.
That's okay, most people in this discussion do not have the option to purchase a pure electric car, yet.
> And before you say "But there are two or three chargers there" I say:
See what I'm saying about "yelling at" rather than "talking to"?
> If not, you will find yourself cursing all the other EV drivers that constantly block your charging spot and you curse at anyone who still tries to drum up support for EV adoption.
Quite the contrary. EV drivers are pretty good about this and we share where we can. Driving an EV is a interesting experience, because other EV drivers on the road will interact with you.
And you can fill a fuel tank with gas in 10 mins. Really wide spread adoption of electric vehicles will require a Nobel prize winning jump in battery tech.
And governments will tax electric cars to make up for the loss of fuel duty.
Really wide spread availability of home, apartment, and work chargers doesn't need a Nobel Prize. Plugging and unplugging takes a few seconds, and having cars with big batteries plugged in a lot is a great way to store "excess" solar and wind energy.
The number of times a full recharge time has bit me is 0. But yes, if you exceed the full range of the car in a day and do that every day, an EV is not for you.
Not at all. A Tesla already can recharge significantly in 20-30 minutes, and the Hyundai Ionic takes even higher charge rates than a Tesla, compared to its capacity. If you add to that the ability to slowly charge at a cheap power outlet when you are parking, recharging is not a technical challenge. We just have to equip more and more parking places with power outlets, as demand increases.
If chargers become widely available then this is only a consideration for long road trips. Otherwise your car can be charging at practically any time it's not being driven. Meaning it stays near full battery most of the time you start driving. That's not true for gas; you don't have a gas line connected to your tank in every parking lot.
Teslas have a driving range of ~200 miles or something like that right? After driving 200 miles, most people are happy to stop and stretch their legs for 15-20 minutes. Tesla superchargers take about 30 minutes to charge your battery most of the way. Drive another 200 miles and you're ready for lunch or dinner, which could be a ~1 hour break, if you're not getting drive-thru and a chance for a much longer charge.
The only limiting factors I see are cost, the availability of charging options (and density of locations) and charging for apartment dwellers. Charge times are probably "good enough" already and likely to get better.
Until battery/recharging tech makes that leap, we have plug-in hybrids. My Chrysler Pacifica PHEV minivan gets 30 miles on battery before reverting to a regular hybrid getting 30 MPG.
That would turn into a grind pretty fast--if it can't charge up in 20mins. it's a no-go long term unless it's in your garage (or someplace else you want to be).
Are you sure? Super fast discharge and charge cycles are only part of the story. I have seen that the Nissan Leaf battery problems stem from heat, choosing a poor mixture of electrolyte and additives in the Lithium. Why do Lithium batteries die? By Professor Jeff Dahn - WIN Seminar Series[0]
If that's the sole charging method, then a faster battery degradation is expected. Note that fast charging adds quite a lot of heat. Worst case is starting with a low charge, fast charging, going to a highway, fast charging at the destination. I've only done it once while traveling so I don't think the battery even cared – I still have full bars on a 1.5 year old leaf.
Note that the Leaf's battery is not actively cooled (it does have heaters for extreme cold). So it could be the case that people living in colder climates could get away with it with little degradation.
As others point out, more apartment and civic/street chargers will eventually begin to show up.
Don't forget too that there are certainly other interesting infrastructure solutions to deal with as well. A lot of people's cars spend most of their week in the parking lot of a job, so chargers in work places can be a more than good enough option for apartment dwellers.
The interesting thing to electricity is that the grid infrastructure is already very well distributed. Just about anywhere your car sits for more than a few minutes could potentially be a charger. The question is probably less when such things will show up and more what sort of interesting things people will do with that.
There are all sorts of interesting possibilities, such as inductive chargers embedded into street beds and parking lots that the only need is to park on top of them to get a charge.
Two apartments that I lived in had easy access to an outlet in the carport. Not ideal, but enough if you do about 12k miles a year and park 10 hours a day.
Yep. The energy costs in my Leaf are $0.02/mile, and that's if I charge at home. There are 1000 L2 charge stations around Kansas City, and many L3, all free.
So far cheaper to operate is correlated with smaller/lighter cars. The lower safety ratings of these small cars in offset crashes suggests that owners of these cars are taking a greater risk on the road.
While this seems drastically unrealistic from the viewpoint of someone in the US...
What!? So many people in the US live in urban environments where getting an oil change and emissions tested is yet another errand and yet another expense. Your "fuel" costs basically get halved. Factor in the time you save by never having to run the myriad errands required of petrol car owners, and if you want to have a shiny, great looking, fun to drive new model car, you're already out ahead! With the subsidy, it's been like that for years, and with the pace of improvements in battery tech and economies of scale, it will also be true without the subsidy.
Getting a state inspection and oil change costs about $50, once a year - if you're actually urban, you might not rack up 5k miles in a year, and could get by on a single oil change. Especially if you shelled out a little more for the newer, high-mileage motor oils.
I don't know what this myriad of errands you speak of are...
>and oil change costs about $50, once a year - if you're actually urban, you might not rack up 5k miles in a year, and could get by on a single oil change
Um, that's a really bad idea. Even if you are using 5k rated oil, you should get your oil changed every 2.5k or so if you are always in city driving.
Why is that?
Severe conditions. Pretty much every oil bottle and car manual says change your oil more often in "Severe conditions". Of course most people think of severe as stomping on the gas and going 100mph, or driving in mud and deep water, or something else just as crazy. Of course that's only part of what your manufacturer calls severe, this is also called severe conditions
* Driving repeated short distances.
* For extended periods of idling or low speed operation.
* More than 50% of driving in heavy city traffic in temperatures above 90°F.
Now you're just making stuff up, right? To support the narrative of the major hassle of oil changes, right?
(FTR I change my oils every 18,000–19,000 miles, or maybe once in 2 years, and while my city living and driving tends to focus not on churning on grid-locked centre but rather a bit more flowing sub-urban areas – still a far cry from countryside driving – a necessary 2,500-mile oil change scream nothing as loud as a garbage engine, vintages be excluded. Perhaps I should avoid talking about cars with Americans, they seem to live in a complete wacko-world when it comes to many things driving.)
>>Um, that's a really bad idea. Even if you are using 5k rated oil, you should get your oil changed every 2.5k or so if you are always in city driving.
If you love spending loads of money on oil, sure, but there's absolutely no point.
Oil change every 10k miles for new cars is more than enough. My last car had a recommended oil change every 18k miles, or every 12k during "heavy use". I had it changed at 10k and was told it was too early(based on the condition of the oil, not what the manual said).
> If you love spending loads of money on oil, sure, but there's absolutely no point.
I change my own oil on my vehicles. With synthetic oil and a new filter, it doesn't cost more than $75 USD per change, and you can take it lower if you get the oil on sale. Mineral oil, even cheaper.
> Oil change every 10k miles for new cars is more than enough.
For new cars, sure. I have used vehicles with > 100k on the odo; I tend to change my oil every 3-4k (so about 3-4 times per year). I could probably go longer between changes, but it would require me to have analysis run. If I'm feeling lazy, though, I know that I can safely get away with a new filter and top-up with a quart or so of oil.
> My last car had a recommended oil change every 18k miles, or every 12k during "heavy use". I had it changed at 10k and was told it was too early(based on the condition of the oil, not what the manual said).
You can't really tell what the condition of the oil is just from looking at it. To really know, you have to have it analyzed:
Why are oil changes so frequent in the USA? Here in Germany the manufacturer's recommendation is usually an oil change every ~10k miles or once a year (whichever come first).
It's basically the same for modern cars in the US, too.
I lease a Toyota Corolla and bring it in for the regular maintenance every 6 months, as instructed. They only change the oil every other visit, or roughly every 10-12k miles. The other visits are just inspections and tire rotations.
The maintenance guide says the oil should be changed every 5k miles only if driving under "special operating conditions":
- Driving on dirt roads or dusty roads
- Driving while towing, using a car-top carrier, or heavy vehicle loading
- Repeated trips of less than five miles in temperatures below 32°F / 0°C
- Extensive idling and/or low speed driving for a long distance such as police, taxi or door-to-door delivery use
It depends on cars, and on quality of oil and on driving style/habits, I had a (German BTW) turbodiesel car where the on-board computer would tell me when the oil change was necessary, and it averaged every 30,000 to 33,000 km (which happened after a little more than one year). I changed car only when (12 years old) it was around 340,000 km without having ever had any engine related issue (and it was still running fine, I changed it only because a relative's car with only 80,000 Km became available).
Because it is "harmless" and supports the oil change companies therefore they spread the myth that you need to change your oil more often than is required as a treat to your engine.
Ummm, most modern cards can go far above 5000 miles, and definitely longer than 2500 miles. If you have an old beater from the 90s, it might be a good idea to change it every 2500 miles but definitely not any car made in the past decade.
"One GM car Edmunds drove went 13,000 miles before the monitoring system indicated the need for an oil change. We sent a sample of that oil to a lab for analysis. The results showed that the oil could have safely delivered at least another 2,000 miles of service."
To be honest, most of these things, you don't actually care about the engine oil, so much as greasing all the other bearings that are involved in the typical oil-change/service.
that's true if you're squirting your oil thru a screaming hot engine full of a thousand moving parts ... on an electric you're really just lubricating the gear train (which is likely simpler because of the greater range of an electric motor) which is not running anywhere as hot as a traditional engine
Errands I recall from the top of my head from having owned various vehicles, exclusive to only those applying to internal combustion vehicles:
Repair of the radiator.
Emissions testing.
Oil change.
Repair of the ignition system (90's Honda CRX).
Repair of the fuel pump.
Change transmission fluid.
Replace timing belt.
Ignition related tune-up, including change spark plugs (Toyota.)
Re-adjustment of ignition timing. (Toyota)
Replace car battery.
Replace alternator.
Replace starter.
Younger folks aren't as aware of things like the above, because the details of this are now hidden away behind mandatory dealer visits. Seems like our society is getting more authoritarian and encouraging you to know less. It will be far easier to make electric vehicles reliable and they will be much more reliable than internal combustion engines, and this will save society countless person-hours which can go into other sectors of the economy and human advancement.
My oil and everything else that needs changing is changed at the yearly mandatory service. You will have to do it in an electric car too so you're not saving any time here.
You will also have to change tyres when they wear out, same as with a normal car, same with brakes and everything else.
The only true point here is that the fuel cost is a lot cheaper especially over here with petrol at over $8/US gallon.
My oil and everything else that needs changing is changed at the yearly mandatory service. You will have to do it in an electric car too so you're not saving any time here.
Actually, I don't have that. I have one service based on mileage coming up, which seems like it will be the only one I will ever hit before my lease is up. I've taken it in once for a firmware upgrade, and I've had my EV for a year and a half. (And the dealer washed my car, so for me, it was folded into a car wash errand.)
> Factor in the time you save by never having to run the myriad errands required of petrol car owners
Actually the EV takes MORE time fore those myriad tasks. With the EV you take an extra minute every night to plug it in, and an extra minute to unplug it in the morning (most of this is time to coil the chord - maybe the time is only 30 seconds, it of course depends on how the location of the charger relates to the front door). With a gas car you spend 10 minutes once every two weeks to put in more gas. As a result the EV cots you 5 minutes a week.
Note that the time for an EV is part of the routine so it is easy to forget about it, but it is still real time.
Actually the EV takes MORE time fore those myriad tasks.
No, you still save time. Since those 30 seconds are folded into each non-car errand, they really come out of the errand/task-context-switch overhead. By requiring fewer errands, you actually save time.
Of all the words I would use to describe the current electric cars (and hybrids) on the market (except Tesla), "great looking" would not be one of them. I don't understand what they're thinking in designing the boxy, heinous, toy-ish electrics that are available now. I would rather walk then have to ride in a BMW i3 or Nissan Leaf.
"I would rather walk then have to ride in a BMW i3 or Nissan Leaf."
I trust that is an exaggeration? Strikes me as a pretty odd attitude.
In much of Europe, with tiny streets and parking allowances, I liked that people considered their car more of a practical thing than a fashion choice. In Australia or the US, men act emasculated if they aren't driving a large ute/truck, whereas it's more often the default in Europe that they're just in whatever is easiest to park - a three-door hatch or a small-factor SUV (that would be similar in size to a hatch in Australia).
> In Australia or the US, men act emasculated if they aren't driving a large ute/truck
I wish that here in the US we could still get a small pickup, with a 2-door standard cab and a short bed, but CAFE rules have prevented auto makers from going that route.
I hate four door, extend cab pickups. I hate the long wheelbase. I'd like to be able to buy a new small Ford Ranger again (4wd this time) - but I can't. Even the Wrangler has gone almost exclusively 4-door and "big".
I can't see myself in a car (well - beyond something like a Mustang GT or similar - but I already know one of those would get me in trouble with the law super-quick); I'm currently driving a loaner Camry from my repair shop (while they take care of some problems with my recently purchased TJ), and while it's been a great car (250k and runs like a dream, honestly - for a 1993 its not bad at all!), it just feels wrong to me.
So, for now I'm going to stick with my VehiCROSS and TJ - both used and paid-for, but both suck the cash outta my wallet in so many ways. And let's not talk about the carbon footprint for either (both get around 15 mpg or less - ugh). But I don't have a problem going off-road.
Which for an EV, I'm just waiting for this possibility. Right now, though, there isn't a big enough demand for EVs period, let alone pickups or 4wd. I've seen a couple of EV pickups (Ford actually made an EV Ranger back in the 90s), but the latest concept I've seen is just yet another extended cab monstrosity (but AWD). I don't want or need that.
What would be cool to see would be the OX truck with an EV option (but I doubt that will happen, as it doesn't fit its use or demographics - nor are they likely to be sold to regular consumers).
Finally, of the EVs I have seen - outside of the Tesla - the Volt actually looks rather nice, for a small car.
I have a Leaf and a 4 door Toyota pickup. I'm 6'5" at 240 LB. The Leaf has much more room than the truck. I have 1/2" of headroom in the truck, and no vertical field of view. I have several inches in the Leaf. I can also put the seat all the way back, and put adults in the rear seat. Can't even put a kid in the rear seat of the truck.
They'll make electrics that don't stand out when there's a market for them. Toyota makes a Camry hybrid but the kind of people who buy hybrids still prefer to buy Priuses.
Although having seen them all in person, I actually prefer the design of the Leaf and i3 to the Tesla. They look a bit cheap but the Tesla looks... disproportionate(?) in person. Maybe it'd just a difference in US design taste vs EU/Japan.
As far as all electric I agree with you but for hybrids you have some nice choices. For example, the Ford Fusion hybrid and plugin use the same chassis as the Fusion non-hybrids. Some people even remove the hybrid branding:
Chrysler's Pacifica PHEV also has really good looks. I think it looks even better than the conventional gas version: https://goo.gl/photos/ptC2XrJ6NnbtaDEE6
Because it's not about real outcomes, it's about being seen "caring" about the environment, or whatever. The marketing people have the buyers figured out or it wouldn't be that way.
I still chuckle when I see a Prius, especially that newer one that looks like a Batmobile. People are daffy suckers.
Of all the words I would use to describe the current electric cars (and hybrids) on the market (except Tesla), "great looking" would not be one of them.
Battery capacity is also improving as well as the speed of charging. So a 350-400 mile battery that can be charged in 5-10min would be good enough for 99% of use.
The way the market works though lets say 30% of the cars changed to electricity. Now some gas stations will be unprofitable so would change to charging stations or close down. It would become more inconvenient to find a gas station to fill up so more people would shift to electric as that is good enough for their daily use. The cycle would just accelerate the demise of the gas car I expect 2030 electric won't just be cheaper but more than 70-80% of the vehicles on the road. This does not take into account AI or self driving cars as if that happens majority of car owners would be corporations like Uber/Lift that would look at long term costs not upfront costs. Where repair and service cost savings some electric cars are already going to be cheaper in the next 2-3 years let alone by 2030.
Back of the envelope numbers: Tesla uses 75KWh batteries at 400vDC to go 250 miles. Trying to refill that in 5 minutes is going to be dumping some serious power into the battery in a very short time.
To recharge 75KWh in 5 minutes (1/12 hour) at 100% efficiency would take:
(75,000 / (5/60)) / 400 = 2,250 amps (900KW)
That is going to be one BIG connector and cable going into the car... and the battery's internal wiring will need to be increased by 10x (or more) to carry that current to the cells.
For comparison, the Tesla SuperCharger uses 400v at 250 amps (100KW). To do the charge in 5 minutes would be an order of magnitude more power. It's a pretty good bet that the SuperChargers are close to the max charge current the batteries can accept.
Any inefficiencies in the system will result in waste power that will also have to be dissipated - if the charger were 90% efficient, it will have to get safely dissipate 100KW (1MW * 0.1) for the duration of the charge. A quick google search indicates lithium ion batteries are close to 100% efficient in charging(!) so that really good - the charge won't be cooking the cells themselves, although the battery's wiring and charge current control circuitry will need to be kept cool.
It's not so bad- the connector would be tricky, but you can fit that much power in a normal sized connector[1]. For a real charging network you would need supercapacitors at the stations, not a 1 MW feeder per car, since people won't be constantly charging. You would need a very large capacitor for this purpose, but that wouldn't really be a problem. It wouldn't even be that expensive relative to the cost of a car.
You'd have to scale up the size of the internal wiring, but not that much. The wires are sized for efficiency, not heating. For extreme speed charging it's acceptable for them to heat up briefly.
Finally, a 5 minute charge would be an average of 12 C (1 C means charging in an hour, .5 C means 2 hours, etc). This is high, but there are plenty of batteries that can do it- there are batteries that can charge/discharge up to 40 C. Even if it isn't good for the batteries, that's not really a problem since it would be needed pretty rarely.
The way we regulate in a lot of Europe, may hit some issues as more electrics go on the road. Petrol taxes are a pretty important revenue source. Exempting electrics from that (by default) and all the other taxes help make them viable will eventually result in a meaningful revenue loss. It's also problematic to selectively benefit people who buy new cars and can afford to pay more upfront but less in running costs.
Even libertarians hate toll roads in practice but it would reduce traffic in big cities. The suburban commuters flood the interstates but don't pay for infrastructure.
One of the major issues I've had with toll roads is with the penalties for late payment (and with late payment penalties to government in general). I used toll roads on my commute often times i would take new routes depending on traffic and forget which parts required a toll.
It is mafia-like to more than double the amount owed for being late, if only for one day. I think this is a huge problem. Research and studies have shown that if you lower the penalties, you will actually collect more revenue. It is unconscionable that governments rail against late fees by banks, yet can more than quadraple in a period of six months or less.
There was a toll road I took in/near Boston crossing a single bridge where there was no way to realise as I approached, no way to pay in advance and no way to pay after realising. In a rental car, I was forced to wait on notification via the rental company and pay $50ish in charges. For a small, single bridge.
The modern toll roads in France are excellent. So quick and easy.
I bet most drivers would hate toll roads much less if they didn't clog traffic. There are a toll plazas around the U.S. that don't require drivers to slow down while driving through. Once these are the norm, I would expect tolls to be less unpopular.
My favourite tollbooth in the US was one where I handed cash to the attendant who gave me change and then paid the toll with coins by reaching outside their booth and depositing them in the machine.
How would you collect a mileage-based tax? Collecting it on the spot on toll roads seems like the most straightforward way to implement it.
Here in Japan the majority of the highway system has been privatized and they all have tolls, and it seems to work just fine. Driving solo between two cities 4 hours away is often more expensive in tolls alone than taking the bullet train.
It would become part of the same process of renewing your registration and getting smog checks. It would probably be like smog checks where there are many depots to get read, run by small businesses and gas stations. I would actually just roll it into the entire smog check system we have currently.
Far more efficient than toll roads, where you have to build toll infrastructure, hire employees, do enforcement and create traffic jams at every toll booth. RFID toll trackers are not enough in preventing the traffic jams. On top of that, you don't have to build anything to implement it today to create a usage tax for roads, since smog check equipment already checks your mileage. It also applies to all roads instead of a select few roads. To determine the distribution of where the tax money should go, you use the passive traffic tracker systems we have almost everywhere.
The libertarian sensibility is to make people who use the resource pay for it, so tolls are the correct way to pay for roads. If we could get a national system that charged based on the odometer, this would also be an option.
well insurance companies have something similar now where they track your driving using GPS.
In principle I like that because you pay for the risk you are, but in practice it sucks because I have no way to force the insurance company to just use the data to charge me insurance and not to track my peccadilloes.
I think GP was saying that, however much they might like private pay-per-use roads in theory, libertarians are still annoyed with road tolls in practice.
Not that I agree with that assessment, but that seems to be the intent.
You could give a Tesla buyer $5K tax credit or you could give decently specified bicycles with locks and lights to 10-20 people for the same money.
We don't tax non-smokers for daring to breathe nicotine free air, yet we shifted away from governments paying for hospitals with tobacco revenue. Tobacco is crazily expensive nowadays and it takes so long to buy it (with the new all brown packaging looking the same) that it seems to be priced out of accessible addictability. I think ICE motor cars will go the same way, plus there is that external cost of everyone benefiting from clean air.
Sure. And my dry cleaning, and my weekly shopping all just fit on my bike and.. Oh. Wait.
And my friends who live 20+ miles away will be delighted to have me over for dinner after having worked up a sweat. Not to mention being lucky enough to then pedal 2+ hours after that dinner.
My partner who's got a back injury? Well, tough for them, they should just stay home.
Bikes are a great thing. I have one, and I use it regularly - but they're not an either-or proposition in many environments. The way our cities are structured, we need cars. (On the West Coast. The East Coast has the benefit of a more traditional layout, often making them more walkable)
American attitudes to cycling are about 20 years behind the times. Cycling is a completely practical mode of transport for everyday journeys, even in low-density suburbs and moderately rural areas.
Yes, you can fit all your shopping on a bicycle. You can even take your kids to school on one.
Yes, your partner with a back injury can ride a bicycle. So can someone with coordination or balance problems, missing limbs or any number of other impairments.
1) These are all specialty bikes, and well outside the price range suggested in the GP ($250-$500)
2) No, my partner can't ride a bicycle. As advanced as your powers of remote diagnosing may be, they're wrong. It's not an option. We tried. (I'm from Germany. I'm somewhat acquainted w/ the idea of specialty bikes, and trust me, I looked at them)
3) Theoretically, I might fit my shopping needs on a bicycle. Alas, transportation here is so completely shot that taking that bike onto the road (what bikelanes?!?) is essentially a suicide attempt. Colleagues who have the ability to bike to work usually end up with about 1-2 severe accidents (broken bones) per year.
And yes, e-bikes might address the distance problem. I still can't do it in much less than 2 hours because... I live in LA. Nobody goes 20 miles in less than two hours ;)
4) Even if there was the political will to make it happen, no, not all American cities could look like this without ~20-30 years of rezoning and construction. US city planning is... special.
European solutions cannot simply be transferred to the US, as much as I'd wish for that. (Remember, I'm German - I've lived in cities friendly to people, instead of cars. I miss it).
And that's why the suggestion of getting rid of the e-car subsidy in favor of bikes won't work in the US. Nobody will use the bikes because the infrastructure doesn't exist.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't also work on improving the infrastructure, and on changing city planning, and creating workable public transit, and all those things - but they're long-term projects.
You live in nearly the most bicycling-hostile place on the planet. This is important context for your comment.
Everyone's different, but my experience was that leaving LA did wonders for my mindset, health, and general well-being. Though, rather paradoxically, 90% of my bike commute (Santa Monica to El Segundo via Venice and Dockweiler beach) was great. That other 10% was brutal, and my ribs still hurt.
Also - "Nobody will use the bikes because the infrastructure doesn't exist." - perhaps that money could be used to build it?
Using the money for infra would certainly be a better use than actually buying bikes. Ideally, we work on e-cars as well, because infrastructure projects move on the order of decades (SF does not hold the monopoly on NIMBYism :)
But while LA is certainly exceptionally bad, many cities in the US suffer from sprawl to an extent that bikes are, right now, impractical. (Which we need to change, no doubt.)
Phoenix is arguably not very well suited to human habitation without artificial life support... (air conditioning, which may prove necessary to sustain humans as the wet bulb temp increases)
I forget HN is USA car culture with no public transit until hyperloops magically happen! This is a cultural difference, you Americans can't even walk unless it is a hike up Half Dome or something, walking to the shops is just not allowed - jaywalking they call it?!?
In Europe we have trains for going direct to city or town centre, with plenty of stops in between. I spend quality time with my phone on the train journey there, I arrive alive rather than tired out by breathing the exhaust from the car in front, as happens if you 'sit in traffic' warming the planet. Furthermore, I can drink sociably when out on bike/train - I don't have to ride the road to the station on the way back and I don't have to be the boring driver who cannot go with the party. I also don't disturb people revving an engine late at night or risk the lives of others at the wheel of a two tonne machine. I don't take up parking space or impose on my hosts that they provision parking arrangements for me. As for the sweat thing, that is not a problem on a bike, however, trapped in a tin box, sat on a seat that never gets washed, with 360 degree greenhouse, that can be bad for the sweat thing, even with air-con. I am also not tied to an invisible cord to the car, only able to make a certain amount of paces from it, free rather than chained to all this moral baggage.
Dry cleaning? Basic 30 wash for me. Drip dry. I go to weddings, interviews and posh business things, I am even on first name terms with the guy in the dry cleaners, but my needs for dry cleaning are not in your American league of consumerist normality. The idea that I could not do my dry cleaning because I didn't have a car - I so would love to have that problem rather than laugh at those that do.
Shopping. Do you Americans eat your own weight in food every 168 hours? Yes growing children do need mountains of food but you can get all that stuff delivered these days and you can pick up really fresh nice food on a daily basis from better shops than that big box store you Americans have to drive to.
...ah backs.
Back injuries happen in many ways, IMHO those that don't cycle are headed for back injury from spending too long sitting down, sitting in cars and putting on the pounds.
I know you propose 'cars for all' as the only real world way, but what about blind people? Tough for them. Or people with no arms maybe they should just stay at home. That excuse for 'must have cars' is sub-par for HN logical reasoning.
> I forget HN is USA car culture with no public transit until hyperloops magically happen!
> Do you Americans eat your own weight in food every 168 hours?
Please just don't. Building upon and reinforcing stereotypes doesn't add to the discussion. Regardless of what you're responding to, do better than this. Some people don't have access to good public transportation: that's just a fact. Sharing how you approach life is great. Doing so in a way that bashes a group of people—regardless of what group it is—isn't helpful or make your statements amenable to reasoned consideration. HN is a community you choose to participate in. Are you accurately described by the statements you attribute to the HN community?
Once you're done with your tirade, let me gently direct you back to what I actually said: "Bikes are a great thing[...] but they're not an either-or proposition in many environments."
While you could maybe be a bit less polemic about it if you'd actually like to engage in a debate instead of yet another Internet flamewar, you've understood the core of the problem: Introducing bikes in the US is a cultural issue. It's a long slog. Dropping a subsidy for e-cars (which is crucial to drop pollution levels and break petroleum dependency) for bikes nobody will use right now is... not helping anybody.
You might also want to improve your understanding of another culture before you insult them wholesale. So, a few things:
* "jaywalking" means illegally crossing the street. Which exists in Europe as well as the US.
* "As for the sweat thing, that is not a problem on a bike". You really might want to learn about humidity.
* "you can pick up really fresh nice food on a daily basis from better shops". No, no you really can't. The shopping situation here is dismal.
Giving a bike to a person who may or may not be interested in a bike is a good way for that bike to collect dust in storage(or put up for sale). Heck, even people who go out and spend their own money on bikes frequently end up abandoning them after their motivation wanes
It's more about gov't subsidy than personal preference. I hate driving, but my car is definitely not collecting as much dust as I'd like it to. It would be smart of us to have good bike infrastructure - compared to subsidizing personal autos it's cheaper, more capacity, improves local economy, more environmentally sustainable, and lower health costs.
100% agreed! I regretted my comment after I made it because the bike subsidy was just an example, and I responded to the example and not to the actual point of the post.
Some countries are considering taxing your own production. In many countries the tax on fossile fuel is an important income for the state. The money needs to come from somewhere. (It seems very shortsighted to penalise expansion of solar power right now though.)
If I produce solar energy to be stored in a few Tesla power walls for my own usage I don't see how they'll be able to tax me. I own and control all the hardware and monitoring and could modify accordingly.
Cells from EVs will likely be downcycled for use as stationary storage (think Tesla's Powerwall and similar). Often only a couple of cells go bad in a pack, so they are easy to repurpose. In Norway some of the larger charging sites have huge stationary batteries as buffers (evens out spikes and act as phase balancing).
You can recycle 100% of the lithium in a li-ion battery, but atm it's more costly to recycle than just mine the stuff - hopefully this will change in the near future.
Well, the calculation I made is to put 150% of my highest most recent daily usage - i.e., commute + pickup kids + store + random errand. Combined with wear/tear range reduction, I add a buffer of 50% so reduce advertise range by 1/3 for "usable range". So 200km*1/3 is somewhere around my comfortable range.
What is regularly? We probably take 2 road trips of 3500km a year, probably 4 trips of 1000km a year, and probably 10 trips of 350km a year. In the Western US things are very spread out. We live in a city of nearly 3 million people, but the next three closest cities of comparable or larger size are 300km, 700km, and 1000 km away. And if your wondering why we don't fly, it's because we have 7 children so it's cheaper to drive.
That's really the relevant point here: at what point do the savings of an electric car make it such that renting another car for the longer trips still ends up with that coming out on top?
There's definitely a long tail of people who drive further regularly for whom electric cars won't be so practical.
I think nothing of a 250km one-way jaunt--to go to supper with family on Easter. On average, every other month, I either make that trip or a 1000km one-way trip. When I was younger and did a lot of camping, a 300km jaunt (again, one-way) for a monthly camping trip was typical.
300km is a bit much for a commute (I've only had a 50km one-way commute personally, although I do know a few people with 100km commutes), but it's not really that far for a trip you might take on a 3-day weekend to the beach or the mountains. The US really is that large: I might describe myself as living "close" to Chicago since it's the closest city that most people stand a chance of putting on a map, but it's basically as far away as Brussels is from Paris.
My wife and I have a small hybrid commuter car (we'd probably have an EV if we could reasonably install a charger at our Condo). When we go on a significant trip, we generally rent a bigger car or minivan for a more comfortable trip.
We get the advantage of an easy to park and fuel efficient car for the daily commute, but also can take advantage of a larger car for the big trips.
It's about round trips in large cities. For example, if I want to drive from san jose to sf and then come back that is about 220km in one day for 2 hours on the highway.
I drive SF to SJ on the reg in a Bolt. With a 220 charger I recover charge overnight. My other commute is SF to Mountain View, I can recover that at night with a standard outlet set to 12A mode.
That's well within the range of most electric vehicles on the market.
A car that gets 250 km on the European NEDC test cycl will only get 150 km when driving at leisurely highway speeds with AC loaded (for example Nissan admits to this on their very own website for the Leaf); and even less than that at actual motorway speeds.
But it's all right. I mean, just for road safety you should take a 30 min break after every hour on motorway unless you're some sort of superhuman. Who could argue it's not a perfectly decent range for travelling? (edited for clarity)
And you can spend that time just thinking where to invest all the money you save from oil changes.
> What do you think: do inconvenient facts go away with a down vote?
Whining about internet points is annoying.
I agree that a Leaf isn't practical for longer trips. EV viability will improve with easier access to rental cars for longer trips. Zipcar doesn't have the coverage necessary to do this in most cities. Maybe Getaround will improve to the point where it's practical.
I consider most EVs to be equivalent to being 100% reliant on public transit; good for commutes, but unacceptable for recreation. And that's okay.
> I mean, just for road safety you should take a 30 min break after every hour on motorway unless you're some sort of superhuman.
No need for being a "superhuman". All you need is plenty of Mountain Dew, a gas station burrito, a few No-Doz, the window rolled down and the music turned up!
The miles just fly by.
I've easily done 10 hour, 800 mile trips only stopping for gas once or twice. I'll grant that was in the past when I was younger, but even today two or three hours at a stretch would be no problem (heck, just to drive from here in Phoenix to Tuscon would take that long - why stop?).
> And you can spend that time just thinking where to invest all the money you save from oil changes.
I do my own oil changes, and maybe spend a grand total of a few hundred dollars a year doing them. Honestly, I probably spend more on fast food per year (now that is really something I would love to drop - if only it wasn't so tasty at times).
I don't think you'll see anyone saying that a car with 150km of actual highway range is good for long-distance trips. Which is why a bunch of carmakers are building or planning cars with much longer ranges, similar to Teslas, which are fine for road-tripping.
Of course not, nor did I claim that. However, driving at highway speeds contributes the other part and these figures are pulled straight from Nissan's own web page. (The exact figures are: driving at highway averaging 88 km/h with outside temperature 30 degrees Celsius and using AC – cabin temp is not told – would give you a range of 152 km. Rated at 250 km NEDC.)
Driving at highway speeds obviously isn't a big part of NEDC rating for EVs.
I think Nissan's being a bit conservative there. But I deliberately avoided the Leaf because it's such a first gen car.
The Leaf is much worse off than the Bolt or even a 500e when it comes to this. My bolt, I've worked out it is about a 7% range loss using A/C on those hot MtV 280 commutes.
I've driven to Watsonville then back to SF in one day and been comfortably in my range in a Bolt. So... it's getting good very fast. I really do like my car.
That's why nobody claims NEDC rating is useful for highway trips. You first replied to gsnedders, and I don't think he was talking about a NEDC rating, he appeared to be talking about an actual range.
We were talking about cars with 200km-300km of actual range... the whole point of the discussion is that newer electric cars have significantly improved range compared to the previous generation.
This wouldn't surprise me, although manufacturing lithium batteries is still a bit complex. The railroads already use all-electric drivetrains; short-range locomotives carry batteries only, while long-haul ones use diesel to generate electricity and power the drivetrain. The big advantage of an electric drivetrain is regenerative braking, which is just as useful in cars (think of the Prius and its remarkable mileage) as in trains.
Over the medium term, I'd expect to see a car market that looks a bit like the train market: all-electric cars for city driving, plus hybrids for traveling in the country or in underdeveloped areas. Fossil fuels will probably never go away entirely (certainly the military will always need them), but oil is good for things other than fuel; 100 years from now, I expect electric cars will be the usual option while gasoline-burning hybrids are an expensive curiosity.
(Or we might move to a mix of electricity and hydrogen fuel cells; Toyota's betting on this, since natural-gas refining releases waste hydrogen. Safe containment of hydrogen is harder than safe containment of gasoline, though...)
We still have the occasional steam powered traction engine go past our house. We live on a very steep hill, so there is a lot of stoking to get up pressure before they attempt it. I'd say we see them 2 or 3 times a year. Really cool beasts.
And yet I'm not surprised; all sorts of things turn out to have valuable niche uses despite being superseded in the mainstream. Now I'm wondering if the future might hold robot-driven sailing ships (wind and solar are renewable, and ocean shipping isn't exactly about speed) -- and I'm certainly not betting on internal-combustion engines going away for good.
> Or we might move to a mix of electricity and hydrogen fuel cells; Toyota's betting on this, since natural-gas refining releases waste hydrogen. Safe containment of hydrogen is harder than safe containment of gasoline, though...
.. in part due to assuming that the price of the internal combustion engine is "going to go up as a result of more stringent regulations especially regarding to particulate regulations", but also assuming that the battery (A) accounts for 50% of the sticker price today and (B) will drop by 77% by 2025. I wouldn't bet on these being the case (particularly on there being effective regulation in the US)
California can set the regulations independent of the Feds. That alone will be enough to change the market. This is why we have catalytic converters for example.
Even with mass production, the chemistry does not change. Limited Co supplies and a decreasing, but still present need for rare earths will only prop up prices.
Add to that new and exotic electrolytes and improved anode coatings, and it'll be a wonder if prices come down at all.
The existing battery packs have (vaguely) reasonable performance characteristics, I wouldn't think that manufacturers would adopt things that increase costs more than they increase performance.
(In fact I would expect them to mostly adopt things that cut costs without sacrificing performance)
we got a >50% reduction in price in last decade, while the chemistry stayed the same. Cost of materials accounts for a small fraction of the cost, and there's a lot more fat to cut in processing.
> but also assuming that the battery (A) accounts for 50% of the sticker price today and (B) will drop by 77% by 2025.
With the number of battery factories being built around the world I wouldn't discount it. Tesla, Daimler, and Panasonic, I wouldn't be surprised if there were other too.
Don't forget the sticker price includes a profit and both R&D + advertising costs etc. The leaf also has a rather anemic range. Run the numbers for a more reasonable 220+ mile range and battery's are going to near 1/2 the construction costs.
However, projections are notoriously non-predictive. If you had extrapolated the gasoline prices from 10 years ago, you'd expect that we'd be paying $10 a gallon, rather than almost half of what prices were then - even in raw dollars, ignoring inflation.
1. Gigantic longevity. Electric Vehicles will likely run 1 million miles or more without requiring any significant repairs except a net battery pack. Internal combustion engines develop all kinds of problems related to burning petroleum for energy.
2. No gas charges. For the $35k Tesla, if you get an invite from a current Tesla owner, you can get $1k off and a free lifetime supercharger usage. Supposing you always use a super-charger and had no gas charges, on 200k miles you just saved $25k in gas charges...so your Tesla's net cost came in under $10k!! And it's probably still got a long life ahead of it so would have far more resale value than an internal combustion vehicle with similar mileage.
So it makes a lot of sense for everyone really to buy a Tesla :-D!
That said if electric vehicles do last far longer than traditional vehicles you could reduce car sales by as much as 75%+...if you add in another trend of transportation-as-a-service via on-demand vehicles (e.g. Uber), that could reduce car sales by a similar amount.
Both combined could decimate the current car industry as we know it which has a lot of impacts on inputs e.g. mining for metals, etc. which go into car manufacturing. It does make the world a lot more efficient. If you look around the US, all you see are parking lots and cars everywhere sitting around (for like 97% of their life).
As much as Uber seems to be a shady business all around with their recent legal troubles, one major benefit I've seen is that my family is able to rely on fewer personal cars. There are 7 of us living in this house, all working different jobs and some of us going to school. Coordinating that many destinations and schedules is a major pain, and we did so for a while on 4 cars, with lots of sharing and rides. Uber helped us to fill the gap without being at the mercy of the bus system, and if we leaned on it a bit more, we could reduce our reliance on our cars considerably I think.
I don't see this system replacing personal cars in its current form; frankly Uber is far too expensive. But if self-driving cars become a thing, and I could essentially hail a taxi and pay something closer to a bus fare? I'd drop my car in a heartbeat.
Less than bus fare. Significantly less bus fare depending on where you live e.g. Japan (where bus fare for short rides can be $20!). I think electric self-driving cars should cost less ten cents per mile.
1. Lots of things on cars wear out over the years other than the engine/emission system. Some of the most expensive common car repairs are water pumps, AC compressors, brake lines, suspension parts, wheel bearings and brake parts, etc. EVs have all of those things, and they suffer no less wear-and-tear than ICEs. Even a full transmission or engine costs far less than replacing the battery in an EV, too.
2. The referral program is only for the Model S and Model X, which start at $70K. There is no discount and no free charging with the $35K Model 3.
> EVs have all of those things, and they suffer no less wear-and-tear than ICEs.
Brakes suffer less wear and tear.
Water pumps may be present, but they are not for the engine. If present, they are usually for an actively cooled battery. They are needed mostly for charging operations and do not run all the time. Meaning less wear and tear on them. They are also electrically operated, so there's no belt wear and tear.
Batteries very seldom suffer catastrophic failures, as opposed to, say, a transmission.
EVs can be much simpler than ICEs. Currently some of them are not, but they can be. The list of things that EVs do not have is even larger than the things they do have in common with ICEs.
Anyway, I will concede the point as being generally true – there are lots of other things that may break and are shared no matter how you power the car.
However, there's something that's harder to measure: everyday annoyances caused by parts that are "working", but not as well as they should. Engines with low compression, faulty spark plugs, or partially broken sensors feeding incorrect data to the engine's control unit. Things like that make the car feel "old", cause multiple annoying trips to repair shops, and lead people to replace their cars. Modern AC motors will run much longer, and just as well as when they were brand new. They are certain to outlast the battery that feeds them.
I have a Nissan Leaf, which I think is the best-selling EV outside China. It actually doesn't have an actively cooled battery, but like every other EV I'm aware of, it has a water pump and coolant. The pump and fan can be pretty loud actually, especially while charging.
It also has all those same problems you described. Noise from the suspension that can't quite be pinpointed. Partially broken sensors feeding incorrect data to the ECU (usually means the 12V battery voltage is low). Failing to turn on then working just fine minutes later. Throwing error messages about brakes, or "t/m malfunction", or going into "turtle mode" when the battery isn't low, or other inscrutable conditions that usually solve themselves but lead to multiple annoying trips to repair shops.
I have read forums and talked with many Leaf owners in researching my own purchase, and while there have been a few niggles reported (random charging problems, or noises, or ...), none have listed problems like this, and not all in a single car. I suppose it is possible you got one car with that many problems (or one undiagnosed issue causing many problems), but then you should be returning the car as a lemon or taking the dealer/Nissan to court. For example, going into turtle mode when the battery isn't low would be inexcusable and cause for a complete fix under warranty.
But you can read the leaf forums as well as I, you know this is way out of the norms, so why do you write like it's expected of every Leaf? I conclude this is FUD.
Yes. EVs have liquid cooled chargers/inverters, motors, and usually batteries (the Nissan Leaf being the main exception to that). That means they have coolant tanks and water pumps to move the coolant just like an ICE.
The 2015 Nissan Leaf that I looked at has a liquid cooled charger/inverter. It runs when the car is plugged in, not when driving. It runs off an electric pump and handles fairly low temps, compared to an ICE water pump driven by a belt off the engine and dealing with high temps. The Nissan manual said the coolant is expected to last 100K miles (obviously the equivalent of charging for that many miles).
I don't think electric vehicles will average 1 million mile longevity. Sure, they're vastly more reliable than combustion engines, but there are other concerns.
Most cars are scrapped due to transmission or engine problems. Don't discount the way car electronics, interiors, and bodies deteriorate.
I'm curious how many electrics have been taken out of services for reasons other than collision damage. I couldn't find any reliable information from web searches.
Motors in electric cars are a commodity and the drive train is far simpler. These parts will either last the life of a car or at least be cheap/simple to replace.
The wear and tear to the interior of the vehicle over 1 million miles is a greater concern, but even that could be addressed via modularity.
I wonder how much of a car's depreciation in value is due to simply having an outdated style.
If you drive a 10-year old Audi but your neighbour or co-worker has just bought a new Audi, you will feel the need to upgrade even if your car has no mechanical problems.
> If you drive a 10-year old Audi but your neighbour or co-worker has just bought a new Audi, you will feel the need to upgrade even if your car has no mechanical problems.
I got around that "issue". I drive an almost 20 year old Isuzu VehiCROSS. One the most capable full-time 4WD vehicles around. The thing handles like a sports car whether on pavement or dirt. I bought it used, spent more money fixing it up for daily driver usage, plus added a lift, some rock sliders, and a roof basket, among other upgrades.
I may only get 15 mpg from the beast, but none of my neighbors or co-workers own one, and likely never will; it's one of the most unique vehicles you can easily own, since there are less than 5000 in the United States alone. It's also mostly easily repairable, sharing parts with the Rodeo and Trooper (interior and exterior panels excepted).
I don't have to worry about what my neighbor owns - my truck (and yes - it is a truck - body on fully-boxed ladder-frame construction with a straight axle rear and IFS front) is so unique, so far I've only seen two others here in Arizona this year (last year I saw about 3, the year before about 5 - and I am certain most of those were "repeats" - there really aren't that many owners of the VX here in Arizona who "daily drive" them).
I love driving her - I grin ear-to-ear just thinking about driving my VX.
> Both combined could decimate the current car industry as we know it
I think this point is not fully appreciated by investors. Even if, say, Tesla execute perfectly and grab 50% of the entire car market, it will not mean much if the market shrinks by 80%.
One thing I'm surprised about is the way Gogoro scooters are being rolled out and sold. The model 2 has a retail price of below $2,000 and is pretty much ideal as a city commute scooter. But they're not selling them for individual use, only in cities where they have their battery exchange charger stations set up.
So I have to wonder: what kind of loss-leader is the cheap gogoro 2 scooter? Because I guarantee I would buy one (and a charging station that let me trickle-charge one set of batteries while I ride around on the other) if they were for sale. I have a 10 year old vespa that I love, but is starting to get long enough in the tooth that I'm considering a replacement.
But they're not going to be sold in san francisco (or pretty much anywhere else in the US unless you're really optimistic), because they want to have a citywide network of single-use battery exchange stations.
By single-use, I mean: only good for this one product. With gasoline, you can fuel anything, but they are basically angling for a whole-city distribution of a single thing: battery packs just for a scooter. This strikes me as a pretty bad model, which circles me back to the start. I wonder how much the scooter actually costs, if they're willing to leave this much market on the table for individual bike / charger sales.
I suppose it could also be NTSB certification holding them up too.
For now. In 5-10 years the debate will be "why do we have gas cars at all now that electric cars are all faster, drive farther, don't pollute, and are solar powered."
In my opinion, not having to deal with oil spills and carbon emissions will certainly win out in the long run.
Putting solar panels on a car is a good idea that sounds like a dumb idea that sounds like a good idea.
Solar panels don't actually generate anywhere near enough power to supply a car continuously. (1 horse power is about 700 watts. If it takes 10 HP to maintain highway speeds, that's about 7000 watts, more than most rooftop solar installations.) So, driving forever on a sunny day without stopping isn't something that's attainable except on specially-built cars with tiny motors and giant bodies and don't move at highway speed.
However, if I think about how I use my own car on a typical day, I drive a couple miles to work, park in the sun for about 8 hours, and then drive a couple miles home. Maybe stop on the way for groceries. If I had an electric car with a solar panel generating a hundred watts or so while it sits in the parking lot, that might be enough to keep the battery topped off.
I'd still have to plug in once in awhile if I drive around more than average or if I'm going on a long trip, but if it noticeably reduces the number of times I plug in per year, that's probably worth the added weight and cost.
(I realize that by "solar powered" you probably meant rooftop solar and charging at home or perhaps utility-scale solar.)
(I also realize that I could just ride a bike, but I'm lazy and technological cost-benefit analyses are more fun.)
I've always enjoyed the alternate idea of parking areas having shelters covered in solar panels.
Has the nice advantages of keeping your car cool in the summer and removing another piece
of complexity in your car.
You could also set up the charge stations such that they either draw from the solar panels or
from an alternate power source in the winter when there isn't enough sun to keep a really
simple solution.
I'd be surprised if you could get a full kWh per day out of solar panels on a car itself; they're at a non-ideal angle, can be parked in half sun half shade, etc.
Most cars get really close to 3.3 mi/kWh. So unless your commute is really short, it's not going to make a huge impact on the number of times you need to plug in.
My commute is really short. I don't drive long distances very often, so I think it would make a difference.
Another way to look at it is if I could get one extra kWh per day from solar and can go 3.3 miles per kWh, that's about 100 extra miles of range per month. I typically drive maybe 200 or 300 miles per month, so that's a pretty big reduction in total plug-in power that I would need. (In our Oregon winters it might not help so much, or if I can't reliably find sunny parking spots.)
You gonna get rid of jets and trains, or make them electric too?
The petrol industry has many friends, they serve many markets.
Look at what comes out of a barrel of crude[0], an incredible number of products which aren't going away, even if every car/truck/bus/vehicle on the road was electric.
Even if electric car range passes gas powered in 10 years, it is really the refuel vs recharge time that needs work. Range is already good enough for a majority of use cases.
It's totally feasible to own an EV without home charging in Norway now, especially if you get one of the longer range ones like Opel Ampera-e (/ Bolt).
I've made this point before and people are always skeptical. Consider how many fewer moving parts an electric car has. It's like the difference between solid state electronics and vacuum tube electronics.
Vacuum tubes can work a very long time without breaking, if they are never turned off.
Wankel engines have less moving parts then piston engines and can last longer because of it. Problem with Wankel engines is that they need heat and a good seal to be efficient.
Stirling engines could, in theory, be superior to bout piston and Wankel engines, in efficiency and lifespan. [0]
Fuel cells used to power electrical engines is yet another alternative that combines the high energy density of liquid fuel with robustness of very few moving parts.
This projection that electric cars will soon become cheaper than gas cars assumes an exponential decay in cost. All exponential trends ultimately cease due to some physical limiting factor. We're seeing Moore's law sputter to a halt because it is getting more expensive (and not less) to make smaller features on microprocessors- semiconductor manufacturing processes are just not scaling the way they have for decades. Nevertheless Moore's law was a truly exceptional exponential ramp unrivaled in the history of technology. Does battery manufacturing have the same advantages that will allow for a tremendous long-term exponential ramp analogous to Moore's law? I am wondering how long it will take for battery technology to "hit the wall". Hopefully batteries will become significantly cheaper, safer, and faster to charge but I am skeptical that we will be able to ride this exponential curve for anywhere near as long as we've benefited from Moore's law. I hope I am wrong.
Though I don't think it needs to drop exponentially. Take any of the new EV (Leaf, Bolt, Model 3) that are $35k and drop the price by 2/3, keep the 200 mile range, and ICE car sales will die fast. ICE car prices are not dropping. EV only need to drop below ICE, not a continuous Moore's law.
I bought a used 2015 Leaf recently for $8500. Yes, it's only 80 mile range, but that gets me to work for two days without charging. It's nearly free to drive; $0.02/mile energy costs, or nothing if I charge for free at local charge stations.
There's the flipside to consider too: ICE car prices are as low as they are today because of huge efficiencies of scale in existing engine supply chains and also a large inventory of used cars. Used car inventory is something that will market align over time. Engine supply chain disruptions are hard to predict, but can snowball quickly.
> “On an upfront basis, these things will start to get cheaper and people will start to adopt them more as price parity gets closer,” said Colin McKerracher, analyst at the London-based researcher. “After that it gets even more compelling.”
"Research" needs to include repairs for accidents (even though I've never been in an accident in my own cars). Because I'm OK with the upfront basis, but definitely not OK with the after. I've seen many articles regarding rare parts and long repair times with Tesla. I've put in $5K of repairs in past 2 years for my aging gas car... about 10% of what I plan to spend on my next car, so repairs are a big deal and even more so when (not if) I get into an accident.
...'will be cheaper to buy in the U.S. and Europe as soon as 2025'...is the sub head. The article makes a number of assumptions to reach this conclusion
The parent is saying that these assumptions will be incorrect in other parts of the world. If you limit the statement in the title to US/EU then it becomes a more reasonable claim.
That's literally what the article is claiming though. If you limit the statement to just the title here, it's not an article, it's just a headline, and headlines are not there to tell you the entire story.
The title implies that the cars are actually getting cheaper, not that social costs are being externalized into this market.
The suggestion to change the title is valid. It's not the cars that are getting cheaper, it's the laws that are getting more expensive. That has nothing to do with the efficiency of the production or operation of EVs. It has everything to do with social policy surrounding the use of fossil fuels.
>It's not the cars that are getting cheaper, it's the laws that are getting more expensive
Not quite, it is the case that electric cars are getting cheaper, and that analysts expect them to continue getting cheaper. From the article:
>“One is EV technology cost reductions because there are more breakthroughs in the cost of technology and more volume, so the cost of EVs will go down. ICE going to go up as a result of more stringent regulations especially regarding to particulate regulations.”
Li ion Battery cost per KWh has already been falling at about -14% annualized over the last 10 years [0]. However, mass adoption of EV autos changes the demand side considerably and we therefore cannot assume the same rate of decline as we have seen recently. Perhaps we will, given the ramping production, but if they don't move more or less in step, prices could be somewhat stubborn.
[0] https://cleantechnica.com/2015/03/26/ev-battery-costs-alread...