The electric car industry hasn't remotely boomed. Electric cars are still deeply strangled by two key factors: industry inertia and the cost/supply of lithium batteries. Once those two factors are solved (and a build-up of lithium mines is key to that) electric cars will go from being a niche within a niche to utterly dominating the market very, very quickly.
Within the next decade we might see companies like Hyundai/Kia, Toyota and Honda selling more EVs than ICE. Take the Kia Niro EV as an example: if the cost of batteries halved and the supply was unconstrained, there is little stopping that kind of product from dominating the market—starting with two-car households with off-street parking.
With their lithium cell investments, Telsa are well positioned to benefit from this boom, but they need to think carefully about their positioning. Right now they're a luxury brand with no serious competitors; when Telsa's drivetrain advantage is substantially neutralised, their mind share is likely to stagnate.
In my opinion Tesla needs to prepare to be in the budget space. They need to partner with an external manufacturer to sell a product with normal door handles that competes with Hyundai and Toyota. Because once the cost of batteries falls, I predict a substantial slice of their market will simply disappear to the economy manufacturers. I suspect that many people who love Telsa really just love the idea of electric vehicles and they'll be buying something more like the Kia Niro EV.
> The electric car industry hasn't remotely boomed.
Plug-in electric sales in 2018 were up 61% over 2017, which was 51% higher than 2016 (via quick wikipedia check).
What numbers would you want to see before calling that a "boom"? How much higher than 60% growth does something have to have before it's not "strangled"?
I think that's silly. Clearly these things are going somewhere. Production at all levels is adapting to compete, and that means some areas (like Li production in the linked articles) are going to outstrip the field which remains limited by other things. But even right now they're clearly out of the "niche within a niche" category and growing very well.
Of course EVs are booming in relative terms. Things boom all the time in relative terms. That's not remarkable.
The pure EV market will eventually dominate vehicle sales in most segments, and most of the rest will be PHEV. Have EVs even hit 1% of worldwide vehicle sales yet? Call me back when it passes 10% and we'll talk about an EV boom.
The current trend is under 4 years until EV’s are 10% of global car sales. It’s likely adoption will slow down at some point, but 50% of all new car sales being EV could happen within 10 years. Though it would take much longer for EV’s to represent 1/2 of all cars on the road.
2.3% - at 60% annual growth would be ~100% in 8 years. Exponential growth is always unintuitive, but I'd expect many people in this community to understand it.
Next questions
What is the sustainable growth rate? Higher than 60%? Lower?
And are we going to, in 10 years, see more EVs sold (for much less each) than ICE vehicles are sold today?
The answer is we'd better, as we have to get those ICE vehicles off the road.
And I'm genuinely impressed that it's that high. I expected the Toyota Camrys and low cost Indian scooters to dwarf EV sales more than that—but I had forgotten about the Chinese manufacturers!
But I still agree with your point though, I don't call 2% market share booming. Not to mention the amount of incentives involves in pushing these numbers.
Battery and Charging point is still the biggest issue in most places around the world.
But if you include indian scooters, why not include pedelecs, or hover boards? And going the other way electric buses, and electric trains? Its useful to know the total number of electric people movers, its also useful to know how many electric cars there are. There is no moral component to that.
I'm pretty sure that Tesla alone is over 1% (maybe 1.5 to 2%?) of the US car market. Worldwide is likely to be even higher for electric cars in general.
The thing is that shifts in large markets like this take a long time to really be realized. It has taken Tesla 15 years to go from 0% to over 1%. Their current aggressive plans call to double that in another 2 years.
The real question is what kind of change can they make over the next 15 years. And for that, we need the crystal ball...
Oh, I underestimated total sales. For some reason I thought the US was closer to 15 million sales this year. I do think that estimate may be slightly undercounting Tesla this year, but I could be wrong.
yesterday I had a dollar in my pocket, today I have 2 dollars. Dollars in my pocket is booming right now. But relative to amount of dollars I have or that in the world, not so much. So I think other statistics would be more useful to determine quality of boom.
Last month you ate one doughnut, this month you ate two, so month-to-month growth is 100%. Is your consumption of doughnuts booming? To say that it is, I'd need to see doughnuts replace a significant portion of your calorie intake first.
Toyota RAV4 alone sold more than all plug-in cars combined.
I meant in the US. In comparison all Tesla models sold 192K last year, for a marketshare of a whopping 1.1% (information is also from carsalesbase). It's funny that you're comparing US sales for Rav4 (just one of half a dozen popular Toyota models), with worldwide sales of electrics, and then extrapolate Tesla figures even though we're in the middle of the year.
Out in the real world very few people can afford a $45k+ car.
I think a robust charging network is a third dependency. You need to have a garage, or commute to someplace with or near a charger. Down here in San Diego (East County), I don't see a lot of the latter.
It's a dependency for dominating the entire vehicle market, but it's not a dependency for the substantial slice of the market with access to off-street parking at home. That's probably at least 10–20% of the market right there.
Add to that the slice of the market with access to off-street parking at work which can be retrofitted for charging. As EV sales grow, car parking will adapt and recharging will be bundled into the cost of parking. That's another 10–20%.
Once you've sold to those markets, the "robust charging network" will solve itself.
The electric grid is really well built out at this point. Every street lamp, every electronic parking meter, every exterior wall outlet on a building is a possible Level 1 "trickle" charge. We have the ubiquity of power everywhere, just not the access in most current situations (street lamps and parking meters don't currently have outlets; exterior building outlets are intentionally hidden away from parking lot usage; places that do have those don't have processes for clearing access to them / may want ways to bill the extra electric usage).
Cars spend most of their day sitting somewhere and most of that often less than a meter from any sort of electric grid connection (just most of those can't be hooked into today). (I like to play a game of spot the nearest electrical object from wherever I park. It's rarely hard.)
Fancier, higher voltage/current Level 2+ chargers are great, but it should be incredibly easy to very quickly up the number of Level 1 charging spots on the electric grid: aka add more traditional wall outlets in parking lots/garages/streets. That sort of bootstrap should be something we talk about more, because it really is hard to beat the ubiquity of our electric grid build-out already. We can take advantage of that.
I didn't say it would replace the need for a changing network.
I do say that in Summer you could get an average of 50 kilometres per day from solar in the Lightyear One (if you live somewhere sunny). That would cover the daily commute of many people. You could go months without plugging in.
The 3.8 mile range figure is from the Experimental Toyota Prius article you linked.
I’ve also used my home rooftop solar PV to charge a Hyundai Kona. Unless this “lightyear one” has solar panels the size of six parking spaces, I suspect the reason they claim so much more than Toyota is because it’s BS.
> The 3.8 mile range figure is from the Experimental Toyota Prius article you linked.
Read the article again. You're confusing the small solar panel Toyota has as a current production option with the new experimental solar Prius which has much larger panels.
> I suspect the reason they claim so much more than Toyota is because it’s BS.
Based on what? The fact that the Lightyear One is being developed by members of Solar Team Eindhoven who have won the World Solar Challenge race three times? How many times have you won the World Solar Challenge?
When I visit https://lightyear.one/ the default location for the range estimate is "Rotterdam, Netherlands" and the default display is "year max" which is "5311 Wh, 59 km per day"
Firstly, the moment you select "Summer" that drops to "2731 Wh, 30 km per day" so the headline figure of 59km is already exceeding even their claimed summer range by almost 100%. So they're fudging figures right from the front page.
Secondly, that's 6.9 miles per kWh, whereas the Tesla Model 3 gets 4.1 EPA-rated miles per kWh [1]. So they're going to be 69% more efficient than Tesla?
A 69% increase in efficiency is a 40% drop in battery cost for the same range. To me it seems unlikely that Tesla, Hyundai, Nissan, Kia, Mercedes, Jaguar and Audi would have all left a cost saving that big on the table, if it was easy to achieve.
Thirdly, [2] says the Lightyear One has "five square meters of integrated solar cells", and that "The 12 km/h added by the solar roof and hood during daylight exposure extends the range as you drive", i.e. 7.4 miles/hour of solar charging. Even assuming they're 69% more efficient than Tesla, that means they're getting 1.08kW out of 5m² of solar panels.
For comparison, if you look at a random rooftop solar installation in California [3] with 40m² of panels, from 9am-5pm the mean output was 4.5kW - so with 5m² of panels, the output would only average 0.55kW. So the Lightyear One claims 96% more output - even making the very generous assumptions that "during daylight" is only the peak 8 hours a day, that the shade and angle of the car panels are as good as a residential rooftop solar installation, and ignoring winter and places less sunny than California. Unless they're using solar panels made of Unobtainium, used in price-no-object applications like satellites, this seems unlikely to me.
Seems to me there are two possibilities here:
1. They've developed an EV 69% more efficient than a Tesla, AND solar panels 96% more efficient than rooftop solar, AND rather than selling either of those technologies to the existing car or solar companies that would very much like them, they've decided to start their own car company.
2. They're quoting efficiency figures for driving at golf cart speeds, or solar figures for noon in the Sahara desert, or daily range figures assuming you'll visit a plug-in charger every so often.
I know which I think is more likely - and my €149,000 will be staying firmly in my pocket.
Personally I think it's unlikely that Tesla, Hyundai, Nissan, Kia, Mercedes, Jaguar and Audi were all so blinkered in their thinking that they forgot about better aero and reducing weight when doing so could save 40% of the cost of the most expensive part of the car.
If you think that's likely - and it would be great news for EVs and the environment if it was the case - I suppose we'll have to agree to disagree about the credibility of Lightyear's claims.
They're not blinkered. Audi and Honda are using wing cameras for improved aero, but they're not willing to commit to the Lightyear One's shape or to use in-wheel motors. A car like the Porsche Taycan has all wheel steering so it's not going to use wheel covers.
It's like you're not even reading what's in front of you. Compare and contrast the following cars:
Have a look at them all. Think about their shapes. Think about their weight. Think about the engineering and design trade offs that are being made. Think about materials and manufacturing costs. Think about the market segment they're targeting. None of this is amazing or mysterious.
The Tesla Model S has a Coefficient of drag * area (or CdA) [1] of 0.562 m² so to have 40% less drag, the Lightyear One will need a CdA of 0.337 m² or better. (Choosing the Model S as I can't find CdA figures for the Model 3)
The GM EV1 only seats 2 passengers, it's 1.77 m wide and 1.28m high, it even has fender skirts [2]. Its CdA of 0.367m² is still only 35% below the Tesla.
The Lightyear One seats "5 adult passengers", and it's 1.90m wide and 1.43m high.
So the Lightyear One is wider, higher, and has 3 more passengers than the EV1 - but it's going to have less drag?
One of us might not be reading what's in front of us, but I don't think it's me :-p
I don't understand why you're going to so much effort to be wrong. The Lightyear One's drag coefficient is under 0.2, the Model S has a drag coefficient of 0.24. The Lightyear One is lower and narrower than the Model S. The Lightyear One is lighter than the Model S. The Lighyear One has in-wheel motors for greater efficiency, the Model S doesn't and neither did the EV1.
You need a garage, and a circuit with 60A capacity. Most houses built today have 200A total capacity, older homes are 100A. At some point the electric grid will need updated.
Yes, but it is quite slow. Even 12 hours of charging might not be enough for someone's commute. For example, let's look at Honda's PHEV, the Clarity.
17kWh battery.
47 miles EV range.
Charge time @ 120V = 12 hours. It essentially can charge up to 4 miles of range per hour on a standard circuit in a US home. Cold weather? Your power needs go up, range goes down, and charge rate drops as well. 15 amps @ 120V EV charging is not practical for most EV owners, at this time, but you are correct that it is possible.
Why would you pick a PHEV for comparison? They are going to get a worse MPGe (because of the extra weight) and have a smaller battery (no catching up on charging during the weekend).
But more importantly, they can backup to gas so if you can only do 80% of your trip electric there is no real problem, you still are getting great fuel economy.
Slow and steady "wins the race" though. An average car is parked more than 12 hours a day. (The average is even closer to 23 hours than it is to 12 hours.) You easily cover the average commute even at 4 miles range added per hour (and as sibling post points out, some EVs do even better than that in a Level 1 charge) even just charging a car ~50% of the time that car spends parked.
Average commute for the US is 26 miles a day, but more than half drive considerably less than the average.
For the people for whom an electric car makes sense, the overwhelming majority could make due with a level 1 charger (12 amps 110 volts).
L1 charger provides 4-5 miles of charge per hour, so 8 hours in the garage at night would more than make up for the commute. If you have a larger range (200+ miles) you can make it up on the weekends.
If you have a 100+ mile commute each day, sure get a L2 charger. Or better yet, buy a hybrid.
The average car gets what, 12K miles a year? That's about 8 hours a night on average. You could easily get by without a 60A socket, and even if you do have a fast charging socket you're not going to be pulling 50A all night.
2 million of the 70 million cars produced annually in the world are electric. It went from fringe to industrial, talking about a boom is acceptable IMO.
It still have a 35x potential growth, so it can "boom" again, but the EV industry now is huge
> It still have a 35x potential growth, so it can "boom" again, but the EV industry now is huge
One of the hyped upsides of electric cars is decreased maintenance costs leading to a decrease in per-km capital costs of driving. If this is true, unless induced demand from this causes people to drive more, EVs effectively will shrink the total car industry pie, leaving something less than 35x potential growth.
Cynical view: maintenance burden will stay roughly similar, because fault rate is not ultimately driven by technology, but by how much the market is willing to bear. In other words, companies under competitive pressure will cheap out on materials and cut corners in the manufacturing process, making their cars as faulty as they can get away with, and unless something changes structurally in the market (e.g. death of used cars market, much less car ownership, much more leasing), the existing fault rate of petroleum-powered cars tells you what the market is willing to accept.
I think that a pretty good argument against this view is to note that the fault rate has been steadily decreasing over time. This suggests that minimizing the fault rate is a strong competitive advantage, and the limiting factor is therefore not what the market will bear, but what is technically possible right now (without sacrificing other things that matter for competitiveness). Should a new technology arise that will increase reliability and durability, it will be rapidly adopted and push fault rates down across the board.
I don't think the decreased maintenance costs will actually happen initially.
Big design changes like the shift to EV require lots of new parts to be designed, and every new part has a non-zero chance of a reliability issue. 5 years time, we'll be talking about the motor mount point which rusts through and causes a chunk of EV cars to fail.
A 2nd effect is as cars get more computerized, 3rd party repairs will get much harder, and manufacturers will drop support for first party repairs when it no longer makes financial sense, so a lot of otherwise good cars will get sent to the scrapheap because they couldn't get some firmware update etc. That will overall increase the cost of motoring.
Disagree with maintenance: electric motors are enormously simpler than ICE, and really well understood. Removing high temperatures, fuel, lubrication and exhaust from the system is a huge advantage.
Agree on digital scrapheap, although this applies to a lesser extent to ICE vehicle too. We should be demanding open sourcing of car code after warranty expires.
The electric drivetrain is simpler, but electric cars tend to require more parts in order to replace the heat and rotational power you get "for free" with a combustion engine.
Electric cars need to have separate motors to drive the AC compressor instead of a simple belt.
Electric cars need resistive and/or reverse cycle heating instead of using engine heat.
Electric cars (if they care about battery longevity) need elaborate heating/cooling systems for the battery.
Nearly every car over 10 years old has failed AC. In most EV cars, the AC is critical to maintaining battery health. I could imagine a failed AC unit causing the battery to over/under heat, and the resulting damage causing the entire car be scrapped.
I realize it's only one anecdotal datapoint, but my 4.5 year old electric LEAF has literally never the dealership or any other mechanic since delivery and all I've had to do is charge it, add washer fluid, plug a tire leak, and change the wiper blades once.
I think that a fleet of 10 electric cars owned over 10 years is likely to cost less than half in maintenance costs than a comparable fleet of 10 ICE cars over 10 years.
I disagree. The ICE car after 10 years will have seen less maintenance costs after 10 years. The electric car will have had the battery replaced, which will eat up all the cost of oil changes.
Of course batteries are coming down in price. Time will tell how this plays out.
I believe the 8 year warranty is driven by the federal requirement to warrant emissions systems for 8 years/80K miles. I think that all EV manufacturers are providing at least that level of warranty for battery and electric motor and think that it's likely linked to the federal emissions control warranty requirement.
There's a school of thought that past the warranty period, the traction battery is likely going to last the lifetime of the vehicle, by definition (in that when the battery dies, there is likely no economically sound way to replace with a new battery, so the choices are fit a junkyard battery or junk the car).
> when the battery dies, there is likely no economically sound way to replace with a new battery
While I can imagine that being a very likely scenario; I can also imagine a future where someone down at the local shopping mall will change the battery out for a Chinese compatible unit while you do your shopping. In the same way the currently do for phone batteries, screens etc.
It would be great for standard agencies / governments to get out in front of the electric car industry and demand standardised form factors for batteries and charging infrastructure. At the moment it would probably limit innovation too much though.
Exactly. In a decade or two, I can imagine thriving third-party shops specialising in battery upgrades for all popular electric vehicles.
They don't really exist today, because contrary to what anti-EV FUDsters believe, there just aren't many EVs with worn out batteries yet. Perhaps there are a few, but the number of EVs written off in accidents (and thus making donor batteries available) is much, much greater.
I wouldn't call them thriving. I agree they will exist, but unless the price of batteries come down a lot they won't be cost effective. By the time a car needs a new battery it will already have a lot of other wear and not be worth much. Spending $5000 on a battery for a car worth $3000 after the fix isn't a good deal for most people. (if you keep the car for 10 more years it is, which is why the industry will exist) Of course both dollar values are made up, they are realistic with today's prices but subject to change.
They don't explicitly state a warranted capacity for the Model S/X, but I've never heard of an S/X battery with more than ~20% degradation that wasn't considered faulty by Tesla. Whatever Tesla's reason is for not stating a specific capacity, it's not to screw over S/X owners, and I'm sure that 30% capacity loss within 8 years would be considered a fault.
We don't yet know how they stand up over >8 years of service, of course, but there are many examples of very high milage Tesla vehicles (> 200,000 miles) that are still on their original battery and show only modest degradation.
People HATE the maintenance requirements of cars. If Tesla can establish their cars as almost never needing service with a usable life of something closer to 1 million miles and decades of use then suddenly paying a premium for their models can be spread over much greater periods of time.
Personally, I wish they would decouple the platform from the comfort center. Have chassis form factors for various purposes (single person/roadster, crossover, truck, utility, etc) and branded “comfort centers” housing the human interface stuff. Make it so the comfort center can be changed out when ever and keeping the same underlying platform.
It only took Kia 6 years to out-Toyota Toyota, that is to go from producing the worst mainstream cars in the us to the best in initial and 3 year quality metrics (and well above Toyota).
(2009 when they built first US production line to 2015).
I agree with both of you, cheekily. I genuinely can’t wait for Toyota to do a full BEV. I realize they say mainstream BEVs are a pipe dream still, but I think it’ll happen eventually.
That is a seriously high bar, and extremely unlikely (there are lots and lots of things on a car that break that have nothing to do with the drivetrain). I think a better first goal is to get the reliability up on par with the other domestic manufacturers, and get the repair time down to something comparable as well.
I got pretty close a few weeks ago to picking up a Model 3P but the maintenance stories spooked me. I am just not enough of an EV/Tesla enthusiast to deal with that on my commuter car.
The one thing I actually truly care about is the financial risk of large repairs. (For example, I had an issue which unexpectedly forced me to spend $3-4K on camshaft-related major engine work.)
Maintenance itself (oil changes, minor repairs) is something I'd like to eliminate, but that's a lower priority. Electric cars score better here, but it's not my top concern.
The real, key issue (to me) is whether the drivetrain is expensive. If it's expensive to build, and if it can fail in a way that something needs to be replaced, then it's going to be expensive to repair if/when needed.
And both gas cars and electric cars have expensive drivetrains, just for different reasons. On a gas car, major engine and transmission work is expensive. On an electric car, battery pack replacement is expensive.
Maybe one is less expensive than the other, so there could still be a net win here, but I definitely don't think electric cars have completely escaped the problem.
Biggest long term maintenance expense in an EV is battery replacement, which best estimates right now put the industry at roughly a 15-30 year replacement rate. Depending on how you finance it, a battery replacement should be doable for <= $150/month average, and that's assuming a full replacement. (Depending on one's range needs/usage patterns some people might be able to make 20-50 years on the capacity degradation curve of a vehicle's original battery before needing a replacement, given current evidence.)
Electric motors have way fewer moving parts and fluids and currently are generally expected to outlast any car frame they are put in.
Most EVs advantage regenerative braking so break maintenance cycles are also longer to comparably sized ICE vehicles.
The other maintenance risks are the exact same between an EV and any other car, things like: HVAC, plastic degradation, rust, and accident damage.
The one unique Tesla risk on a 15-year horizon is their software updates. Their penchant for over-the-air software updates is handy in the short term, but possibly a risk in the long term lifespan of a vehicle. Though that's a risk Tesla would hopefully be incentivized to avoid (for bad PR at least), and possibly a mitigatable risk.
Most cars have a vigorous service schedule that is an endless sea of tire rotations, brake servicing, oil changes, belt replacements, among all of the unexpected maintenance of thousands of moving, wearing parts.
A Tesla or a comparable EV, in contrast, is a cartoonishly simplified variation with magnitudes fewer parts and maintenance needs. The probability of an EV requiring less maintenance than a ICE car is 100%.
Of course right now those EVs come at a premium, but as they hit the mainstream this is going to be a critical differentiation.
Same! Mine's a 30 year old Volvo wagon and a 32 year old sedan. Besides oil changes, I've spent about $2000 in the last 5 years of ownership. I was only left stranded once, but that was because the NAPA in the middle of Nebraska didn't have the part I needed to get back on the road. I would doubt that the same NAPA has many Tesla parts in stock as well.
If Tesla is to ever have the same reputation, it will be because they made issues trivial to diagnose, dead simple to replace and allowed other manufactures to make replacement parts.
However, this whole argument is moot, because the era of the 15-30 year daily driver is over anyway. When my ignition computer failed, it was $35 to swap one out from a junkyard. You just have to unplug the old one, and plug in the new one and off you go. What's the procedure for replacing a computer on a 2018 Tesla in the year 2038?
Furthermore, any new car has little maintenance to really worry about within the first 100k miles. If you are upper middle class in a bougie area, you're probably buying a new car before maintenance is really an issue anyway. (cue everyone chiming in that their Subaru's turbo blew up 100 miles outside of warranty)
As the saying goes, ask people what they want and they'll ask for a faster horse.
It isn't obvious to me people are asking for vehicles to last a million miles, people aren't clamouring for current vehicles that have done a million miles or are old enough to have done. That million mile car is also going to be a 20+ year old car, with 20 year old safety features, and 20 year old phone integration, and its also going to take 20 years for Tesla to establish that reputation.
That's not to say you're wrong, but it will take a fundamental change in peoples understanding of car ownership closer to how they own houses, that will take time, longer than Tesla has.
Brake pads should last twice as long on an EV because the motor is used to recuperate energy. Here's a good braking demonstration with the Audi e-tron descending Pikes Peak:
twice? You only need brakes on an EV to stay still at the lights or in an emergency brake. That is it. The brakes last well over the entire lifetime of the car.
It's the US where there currently isn't a strong "second place" to Tesla yet. There are a lot of competitors depending on region, but that's also the problem is that there are so many competitors that quality is a very broad spectrum and margins are low. VW's (US EPA mandated) Electrify America (and its alliance in turn with players like ChargePoint) is probably the one to watch for up-and-coming national second place competitor to Tesla's charging network, but they are years behind in build out right now.
I have a Nissan leaf. When I talk to people about it, it amazes me how many people think anyone can use the Tesla network. Noone other than Tesla cars can!
And Teslas can use non-Tesla charging networks. Tesla should standardize on CCS plugs where it makes sense to (like they've done in Europe) and open their chargers up to other EVs.
Tesla was recently denied a government subsidy in New York because they're not offering CCS charging, which is fair enough. If they're not going to make it available to all EVs then the utility of the infrastructure is limited and they shouldn't get any discounts funded with public money:
I mostly agree. I see the lengths to which people go to save a few cents on gas (like $1.20 vs $1.13/litre around here) and I can't help but think that once the "gas" price of EVs starts to permeate the mass consciousness, ICE vehicles are done for (outside of some specific niches). I pay ~$1.25 in electricity to go 100km in my EV (overnight charging at home), someone in a comparable car would be paying about 10x as much. People, by and large, have not understood this.
As for Tesla, they don't have any intent on being in the proper budget space, ie $15k mini cars. They've stated they will release a compact car in 3-5 years (no other info), but I doubt it'll ever cost less than $25k, probably more like $30k. And that's probably just fine and dandy with Tesla, as Apple has shown capturing a high-end clientele and their fat profits is a great place to be.
Their plan for the "budget" space is robotaxis, which of course depends on their FSD program. We'll see how that goes.
> I pay ~$1.25 in electricity to go 100km in my EV (overnight charging at home), someone in a comparable car would be paying about 10x as much. People, by and large, have not understood this.
I understand this, but the numbers are incredibly location dependent. Where I am, there is no time of day metering, and electricity is $0.15/kWh. Gas is $1.16/litre.
As an example, to drive 100km in a model 3 (20kWh) is about $3, vs my current fuel efficient Yaris (I get 5.9l/100km) is $6.85. At that price difference of $3.85/100km, I have to drive 500,000km for the fuel to break even with the purchase price difference. Different cars and target markets, of course, as you mention.
I really want a large carbon tax placed on fuel, to make the calculation work for me to go electric. A $30k (Canadian) car would help the calculation, as well.
Yeah, I think the tipping point for gas price sensitivity to cede to a (much) faster boom in EVs is likely a lot closer than many analysts currently expect. Because that tipping point is also concomitant with the "range anxiety" switchover point. Once gas prices hit certain peaks, station shutdowns will snowball (as evidenced from previous events such as the 70s oil crisis, 00s recession, et al), and long range price volatility (rural/interstate gas prices versus daily driver city gas prices) will change the economics of a lot of long term trip planning quickly to ICE trips (back to) being as range sensitive or more than comparable EV trips. Gas logistics may be a lot easier to disrupt than a lot of people expect right now.
The business plan always was to start at the high end with the Roadster, then the deluxe sedan and then the affordable Model 3. The Model 3 has cheaper door handles than the Model S.
Tesla is about building car factories rather than cars. Once you have the robots doing as they are told then you can make whatever you want.
If you had to recycle a Lamborghini and a Dacia Sandero then you would probably end up with near equal piles of raw materials for both vehicles, give or take a bit of steel.
The other input is energy. The cylinder head on the Lamborghini takes a bit more work to make than the lump of iron that comes with the Dacia. But, if you have built out lots of renewable power then you can get those CNC machines and other robots doing overtime.
Tesla with their vertical integration business model are finding customers at their price point and they can't make cars quick enough. Despite the sceptics, it is working.
Personally I think the budget space will be filled with an electric version of a 'Dacia Sandero' but made in China. EVs are more pleasant to be in as there is not the vibration and noise from the engine, or the local cloud of pollution.
Because of this and the realities of driving in city/town areas there really is a need for a vehicle far simpler than a Model 3, something without the bells and whistles. Honda have something in the works that is nearer the brief. They are going with a low range EV that is not going to pretend to do hundreds of miles on a charge. This is for the two car family where car two just needs to do the shopping, pick the kids up and get into congestion charging zones. In China there are plenty of BYD fit for purpose EVs that are budget and will be making their way to Western markets in due course.
The legacy brands in Europe and the USA are stuck with having to do things the old way with existing supply chains. To make an EV all they need is to buy the bits from Bosch and shove them in to final assembly but they aren't doing it.
Taking about legacy brands, most of them do have exactly those low range fully electric models available that you're talking about, e.g. the VW e-up, which is a great choice for a daily commute.
They aren't very aggressive about growing the market though.
Assume 12-15k miles a year and a 6-8 year useful life total cost to own and you might be surprised. People debate the details but even compared to a toyota camry or honda accord the model 3 is pretty affordable.
The power grid is built to handle peak demand. Residential charging is likely to peak at night, when domestic demand is at its lowest.
If natural charging patterns are not advantageous enough it's fairly straight forward to install smart meters that charge a different electricity price depending on time of day. The options range from simple off-peak pricing already offered in many places all the way up to live updating prices based on electricity spot prices and transmission capacity (this would also go a long way towards using solar and wind more efficiently).
The big problems are likely shops offering EV charging and industrial facilities with fairly constant power requirements charging trucks and heavy equipment. But those are comparatively easy to scale.
It seems like EVs would add 25% to electricity demand.
The big question is how you deal with the peaks. Ideally all cars would be able to charge overnight, so you could potentially spread that demand over 12 hours or more.
Given that Tesla are currently one of few compelling EVs available in volume, that's an unproven thesis. Get back to me when there's direct competition from BMW, Mercedes, Volkswagen, Genesis etc with comparable products at comparable volumes. I think more than a few Tesla customers would be just as happy to be driving a G70 or C-Class EV.
Don't get me wrong—I think the Model 3 is a (mostly) stellar product and I'd love nothing more than to see Tesla come to dominate American car manufacturing. But for that to happen they'll need to swallow their design egos and offer simpler cars with normal door handles and widely available parts for inexpensive repairs. Until that happens they'll find their growth ceiling very soon.
The boom is going to come pretty soon. According to the experts around 2023 dropping battery prices (they went down 35% in 2018 alone) means BEV's will reach sticker price parity with many comparable ICE's.
Many of the big manufacturers have realized this in the last year or so, and are scrambling like crazy to get into EV's. The best example is VW, which in the last year has signed contracts for 48 billion dollars worth of batteries, and is building three big EV manufacturing plants and partially converting 4 old ICE plants, and has a couple of dozen models coming out in the next 5 years.
If you want to follow these developments, a good source is cleantechnica.com. Another is electrek.co
Re " In my opinion Tesla needs to prepare to be in the budget space." There are entire large traditional car companies that build no, or very few, budget cars.
To make electric cars cheaply, it will take several changes, some of which look promising, but should not be underestimated for time and difficulty:
It will take widespread adoption of level 4 autonomy to make crashes rare
Scaled-down lightweight EVs will have to become available and accepted, especially w.r.t. safety
It will take finding the sweet spot for some markets: E.g. on-demand scooters, privately owned semi-enclosed trikes with light-enough removable battery packs for apartment dwellers, etc. Vehicles will need a "Cambrian explosion" of variety.
It will take regulatory changes to support the above
Other form factors are nice, but also indirectly related.
On the other hand it may only take one tiny disruption in ICE engine supply chains, or one large production ramp up to an order of scale efficiency boost to drop EVs below ICE vehicle costs on a like-model for like-model basis. With all of the major German automakers now on an "electrify everything by 2023" plan, one or both of those disruptions may exactly happen within the next five years.
In terms of production, Tesla is definitely making moves to get to a mass production position. With their recent price drops, the Model 3 is actually pretty affordable. Tesla's big problem now is with marketing. Making money selling the Model S by word of mouth alone was easy, but that's not going to be possible with the Model 3,and Tesla still hasn't caught on despite weak sales. They need to start buying ads ASAP.
They have booked relative to prior production and future estimates for production are on the rise. Volkswagen for example is near the release of a car based on a new platform for mass production of a more affordable (than Tesla) option that falls at the lower end of the Tesla in terms of range. Many other examples abound. The very near future will show tremendous year over year growth in the EV sector. Seems like a boom to me.
I'm pretty sure there's still 5 years worth of exponential growth potential from people who do have garages or otherwise will have the ability to pay for getting a plug somehow, and from new construction that's already set up for charging plugs (I believe it's required in some places like California now?)
Then what will happen in the 5-10 year time frame is that EVs will be significantly cheaper than ICE vehicles (maybe not purchase price at first, but certainly TCO).
Is there electricity anywhere near where you park? Think about what it would cost to set up a plug. It might be quite a bit, but unless electricity is really far away, it's not a crazy amount either.
If buying an EV would save you a significant amount of money over a 10 year period, it's likely that you'd be willing to use some of that savings to pay to have a plug set up. Maybe you can't set up that plug yourself, but as long as you're willing to pay a bit extra over the cost of electricity, there's going to be companies willing to set up plugs along the street. Once investors see that the transition to EVs is guaranteed, I'm certain there will be a rush to put up chargers, since the company that gets a street is likely to keep a monopoly on that street for a long time.
The other way to get street side charging is simply to get governments to do it. That's what Oslo has done. They started out being free, but now there's a reasonable fee on them, and I think that's much more sustainable. With some luck in the elections I could see something like that happening in several areas of the US. It'll be much easier to sell this policy once EVs are a bit cheaper, so I think it's possible if democrats gain some control, especially if they gain some support for some kind of Green New Deal. It's a great investment to boost the economy long term. Generates lots of decent work in the short term, and massive benefits to the public in the long term since it'll guarantee them cheap charging, leading to big savings to operate their vehicles.
There's another way to think about it: setting up a plug for your car is a very tiny fraction of the work/infrastructure required for your apartment, which somehow you found the way to pay for (either directly, or through renting). This kind of work is relatively easy to finance if the demand is there, since it's an investment that's likely to last a very long time and generate a lot of value.
There's also the fast charging model, which can be OK if you have a car with a fairly large battery and don't drive too much. You might be able to get by with charging once a week, and you could probably do it at a location where you'd spend some time anyway, such as a supermarket, near a restaurant or exercise studio. It causes some extra wear on the battery, but not an unreasonable amount.
Charging infrastructure seems likely to be a bottleneck, too. Not everyone can charge at home (on-street parking, apartments, etc). And then there’s the demands on the grid as an increasing number of people get home in the evening and start to charge their cars
Seems to be a different story in the US versus Europe.
In Europe they have a lot more competitors either with cars now or coming soon e.g. VW ID3, VW Polestar 2, BMW i3, Honda e, Peuegot e-208, Renault Zoe, Nissan Leaf, Hyundai Kona EV, Mercedes EQC400/EQS, Audi eTron, Jaguar I-PACE etc.
Tesla has largely had the market to itself but now you are seeing much higher quality cars with only slightly less range.
Most of those are either quirky and compromised or simply not (yet) available in serious quantities.
I'm personally looking forward to the Hyundai/Kia models, as they seem to be closest to getting the formula right—enough range, enough power, enough fit and finish. Once the cost and supply of batteries is "solved" they could dominate the economy segment for a while.
Volkswagen might do well in electrics, but that remains to be seen. Personally it'll take a while for the dieselgate stench to leave that company, at least for me. (I don't care so much about the actual emissions, for me it showed the contempt they have for their customers.)
Volkswagen is investing a lot in electrics. They're doing it to clean up their image from the diesel emissions scandal, to meet the new emissions standards being set by the EU and others, and to avoid being locked out of markets which have already set timetables for banning ICE cars (like Norway and the city of Paris).
Please, you're acting like an employee of their marketing department. Your rabid enthusiasm is not interesting. They're a car company that wants to be successful, not a sports team. Still, good luck to them—and maybe I might even consider an electric VW in the future—but it'll be a while before their reputation is repaired.
(And thankfully their EVs won't have their junky and jerky DSG transmissions...so that's another plus.)
Dealers make most of their profits in the service bays, not on the sales floor. It's much better for them to make a few hundred dollars profit selling a car that will (statistically) regularly return to the service bays than to make a thousand or more on a car that will not darken their service bays nearly as often.
In higher end they are marginal next to Tesla share. Low end, Nissan, VW and BMW gained some foothold simply by entering it earlier than Tesla with model 3.
> In my opinion Tesla needs to prepare to be in the budget space. They need to partner with an external manufacturer to sell a product with normal door handles that competes with Hyundai and Toyota. Because once the cost of batteries falls, I predict a substantial slice of their market will simply disappear to the economy manufacturers. I suspect that many people who love Telsa really just love the idea of electric vehicles and they'll be buying something more like the Kia Niro EV.
In my opinion Apple needs to prepare to be in the budget space. They need to partner with an external manufacturer to sell a product with a physical keyboard that competes with Blackberry and Palm. Because once the cost of touchscreens falls, I predict a substantial slice of their market will simply disappear to the economy manufacturers. I suspect that many people who love Apple really just love the idea of smartphones and they'll be buying something more like the Blackberry Curve 8300.
This feels a little unwarranted (almost rude?) and without considering the differences. So let's do some proper analysis of your statement and comparison of the car market and the phone market.
1. Smartphones provided a new type of utility and a very significant leap of value to the user (I bet most people do other stuff than calling for the vast majority of time spent with their phones, which was not the case with feature phones or generally before the iPhone). Electric cars provide a minor difference in new utility and probably also value. It's more a difference in the means rather than a difference of the end result.
2. Phones are significantly cheaper than cars. Thus, there's a much larger market unit wise than cars (there are probably a similar number of units in use at any point in time, but cars don't get thrown away after 2 years...)
Apple did something similar which is pretty well known in disruption theory. They moved up the market and became a truly premium phone company. That's also why they have a quite small portion of the market unit wise (less than 10%?). They are actually not dominating the industry, they are a niche player (but very successful at that, as seen profit wise, especially compared to their competitors). They are also really good at being a premium phone maker, and have leveraged a lot of other core competencies (look up on Wikipedia for more about that concept) well such as their software competencies and their ecosystem thinking (locking their users into their ecosystem and providing most key parts of that ecosystem).
So what about Tesla? They are hardly as good as Apple premium wise. The market for premium is also a lot smaller for cars, especially if you move upwards from where Tesla is right now. It's also very hard to make a profit in that market, and most make a profit by combining a mass scale operation (more or less all premium car brands are owned by one of the big car companies). So is (more) premium a great direction for Tesla? I doubt it. It will hinder economies of scale which have proven difficult to not have.
So, unless Tesla partner up, don't believe electric car engines/drive trains will become commoditized in the near future and/or have some significant premium/lock-in/ecosystem stuff up their sleeve, it looks like budget is the way to go... They might stay in the premium but not luxury segment, but it's cut throat with lots of competition. To me that sounds like a lost opportunity and waste of some significant base innovation.
And... I guess above is why Tesla seems to desperately try to find additional competitive barriers; self driving, fully automated manufacturing, quick charge network, etc. But, they are long shots so far. It's difficult to innovate one area, very much so multiple areas simultaneously.
The Model 3 one? Doubt that they're significantly more expensive. They have some problem with frozen door handles which they should probably get some fix for, like putting in a heating element. That would add cost, but also not much.
It's not so much about cost but rather simplicity of manufacturing, ease of use, robustness, and not signalling that they want to be clever for the sake of it.
The door handles are a symptom of the design ego of Tesla. It's the same thing with the elimination of nearly all physical buttons. It's the right instinct but they've taken it too far.
Are you a Tesla owner or a troll? Because I'm an owner and can tell you this is an exaggeration.
And the S and X door handles can be repaired for much less than people are buying the replacements. The rebuild kit uses stainless parts instead of cast.
I suspect Tesla knows their space fairly well. Until there is a car that can go 400 miles on a single charge and recharge in 2 minutes, with cheap repairs and work well in all weather conditions for a decade or two, you won’t see the masses jump on EV. You may see people in cities (often these are more affluence).
I don’t really see EV becoming wide spread (I.e. ~50% of the market) for at least 10-15 years. Even then, power prices will spike at homes. I don’t even want to imagine what that’ll cost.
Even if people's home power bills spike, they'll still save plenty of money by not paying for gas. In parts of the US, a decent commute will cost one $200 to $300 in gas a month, and charging an EV off the grid for the same range will cost a lot less.
Is this really a good thing for the environment? Grid power is still mostly fossil. Even if we posit that fossil -> power station -> grid -> battery -> motors is, say, twice as efficient as fossil -> fueling station -> combustion engine, it's a lot more than twice as cheap. So wouldn't we expect the shift to EVs to cause energy consumption to rise, and hence also emissions?
I understand the argument that it's easier to upgrade centralized power generation to green technologies than the entire fleet of vehicles, but the timing is critical if that is to be a net win for emissions, a nuance which seems to be swept under the rug as everyone's keen to avoid fuel taxes by switching to EVs.
Of course, if everyone switches to EV electricity demand will spike and prices will rise, and governments will be eager to reclaim lost fuel tax revenue with other automobile focused taxes. It might not stay cheaper.
The timing is fine. Large power plants are already far more efficient than burning gasoline in tiny ICE's. On top of that, fossil fuels are only 65% of electricity generation in the USA. https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3
For most people 300 miles of range is plenty. Longer range and quick charge time only matters when you are taking a long trip - and I would say 10min charge time will be sufficient to make it moot point when comparing to ICE cars.
Look at the graph in the article. Lithium cost $5000/ton 4 years ago. Now it costs more than $11,000/ton. The only difference is the period in between where the price of lithium was almost $21,000/ton.
Presumably the mines operation 4 years ago were profitable. Now there's all these additional mines, and demand still has the price doubled in 4 years. And yet somehow the story is that EVs aren't succeeding? I see just the opposite- EVs are succeeding so much that the industry supporting them is growing and profiting very nicely.
Note that this is the spot price of lithium, which no large consumer of lithium pays. All the big users of lithium (like Panasonic) buy it based on long term contracts with companies like Albemarle (which bought Rockwood Lithium just before the recent boom). Thus it's very misleading to look at spot prices for reaching any determinations about the prospective returns from lithium mine investments.
Fun fact, there is no spot market for lithium. Lithium is sold on a contract by contract basis and there isn't an equivalent of the London Metal Exchange price.
Probably because most uses of lithium are heavily processed and it's not particularly useful or safe in it's raw form, so if you're going to use it you're more likely to need an oxide or something instead of the raw metal.
Predominantly market size, it was considered a speciality metal and we didn't need nearly as much of it in the past. More on the lines of going to a specialty store than Walmart so you'd either go to a broker to get what you need or buy it directly from a mine if you needed a very large supply.
"And yet somehow the story is that EVs aren't succeeding"
That isn't the story. Even the headline calls it an "electric-car boom". The story is that there is a rush to build lithium mines to get ahead of the demand, which seems eminently reasonable.
This was so evident 2-3 years ago it’s ridiculous.
I worked on a bunch of projects in 16/17 and what I told all my clients is get to production and lock down offtake agreements ASAP as the amount of projects coming online was huge for the short term (with regards to hard rock lithium) and even worse long term (salars etc).
Even the most optimistic of ev adoption rates showed oversupply by 2023.
Some other facts I remember just as points of interest:
* lithium market is opaque. No open market and all contract based so very difficult to price.
* one major unknown that will further add to supply is recycling, with some tech I remember showing cost effective recycling of up to 80% of lithium.
* major bottleneck in short to medium term are the converters ability to refine. Premium will be placed on higher % Li product to increase recovery rates.
So yeah no surprising at all.
(Am a mining/mechanical engineer)
If you had to guess what will be the price of lithium once those big mines come online? 5000/ton Li2CO3 (at 99%) or even lower? And do you think there will ever be an open market with future contracts?
On the first question it’s been a while so haven’t really followed too closely, but once the salars come online depending on the agreements they have in place they really will have the ability to set the price to whatever they want (as they have been doing for past 3-4 decades). These hard rock mines are making serious money on the fact that the big 3/4 missed the boat (somehow) on the lithium/ev boom. I reckon they will be they will set production/prices to a point just below the number where hard rock equivalents are commercial.
With regard to opening the market I personally don’t think so. If the market didn’t have big players in it then yes it probably would have by now. That being said there were/are a lot of mid stage converters coming online that are disrupting the old guard and taking whatever is out there and not being secretive on pricing so maybe?
I remember looking at that project back in the day and couldn’t make the numbers work. Not sure if much has changed.
Firstly it’s an underground mine which is inherently much higher risk/cost compared to open cut.
Second logistically it’s a world away from customers (Asia etc)
Again if they had kicked it off back when, and were in production now they could have locked in some good terms from the starved customers and maybe set themselves up as a player, unfortunately I think they have missed the boat.
I'd that they don't have any measured resources on their list, it's half inferred and half indicated. So moderate uncertainty about everything down there.
Most markets are open, it’s the more exotic/specialist metals that are closed. With lithium it’s just the way it’s always been. Historically the market for lithium was industrial uses (lubrication etc) and there were only 3-4 big players that produced it (and often as byproduct of other processes). The big 3/4 companies would produce and often even refine it internally so no need to publish prices. The ev boom is obviously changing that, and they missed it somehow, hence the hard rock miners filling in the demand gap these next few years
It seems like people often forget how applicable EVs are to in city heavy commercial vehicles such as garbage truck, buses, service vehicles
The high torque nature and predicable nature (at least in the case of garbage trucks and buses) make them ideal candidates for EV. Arguably much more viable use case (at least initially) than household vehicles.
EVs are a clear winner for jobs like that. Has the prediction of EVs being low on maintenance bore out? If so, its further incentive for commercial and public use. Municipalities benefit greatly from predictable, constant expenses.
I know Leafs have had their service lives (at least for their batteries) revised up recently. Solid state is where it’s at.
Although I agree, I was interested in the article about how poorly planned EV city owned equipment was a huge strain on the power grid that city planners didn't seem to understand how to do right. I look forward to what I expect to be the near future where cities start sharing best practices on this and collectively we do this right.
Taxis, city buses, UPS trucks, etc, all tend to be busy during the day. They get charged overnight, when grid demand is lower, and take advantage of low off-peak electricity prices.
The idea that these things place a “huge strain on the grid” as the poster above suggests just sounds like more made up FUD.
No, the poster above is right. There was an article about this a month ago or so. Anyways, the TLDR is that vehicles need to charge more often than just nightly and not just at the main depot. Transit agencies need to build heavy duty fast charging infrastructure scattered across many locations in the city. This has been so far a large upfront cost which holds transit EV expansion at bay.
If their vehicles need to charge more often than just overnight, then they need to consider whether they are buying the right vehicles for the job.
The examples I mentioned are from London, which has a growing fleet of hundreds of heavy electric vehicles (city buses, UPS trucks, etc). All of these charge exclusively overnight.
Why move a heavier battery pack around if you can have a charging station at both ends of your route? Certainly lower weight means lower cost battery packs and overall higher efficiency since you're not dragging around spare energy for most of your day.
The postal service here got 4-5 tiers of electric vehicles too, from large vans, to tiny trucks, to "golf-carts", to electric cargo trikes, to a sidewalk friendly electric trolly.
I think that a lot of people (including the authors) think that electric vehicles are only cars. You only need to walk around the streets of Beijing to notice that far more electric vehicles are scooters and busses. Not the Bird kind of scooters but the scooters that you see in very congested cities as well as the chaps who deliver your pizzas. They are completely silent, it’s surreal. They also omitted obvious other uses of lithium batteries like electronic gadgets and solar farms.
After a half century of jaw-boning about the need for renewable "green" energy, we now have a repeatable scalable tech template similar to the [oil well + refinery + piston engine] or [coal mine + pulverizer + furnace + turbine] tech templates that scaled fossil fuel energy. It is: [wind turbines and/or solar PV panels + lithium ion cells].
By repeatable and scalable tech template I mean something that no longer requires non-incremental forms of R&D. We no longer have to think that deeply about it. It's now in the realm of "see that stuff? Build more stuff like that."
The solar/wind+li-ion template can, if scaled, power almost all current human industrial activity with the exception of long-haul heavy vehicles (land, sea, or air) and rockets. Those are important things but they're collectively less than a quarter of all fossil fuel use.
The key is "if scaled." We are going to need more lithium. Good news is that it's not really all that rare. Bad news is that until quite recently there hasn't been serious investment in getting it. Look at what we invest in getting oil vs. lithium.
That's because until quite recently there hasn't been the demand to justify that investment. Now there is. Lithium prices have exploded, signaling the need for more. The price signals are working. Good.
It's normal during this kind of scaling to have periods where it looks like investment is outpacing demand and vice versa. Demand and supply don't scale at the same rate so you get price spikes in both directions. This doesn't change the underlying reality now in effect.
There is already a backing up of IC car production in the luxury car markets as large numbers of people are delaying the purchase of new IC based cars in anticipation of a new EV supplanting it based on lower running costs, lower maintenance costs et al. In addition, these longevity factors are making EV buyers move up-market. This has gutted Mercedes and BMW sales, among others.
https://electrek.co/2019/07/24/tesla-model-3-outsellin-gas-p...
Well, this topic went south really fast! I'm surprised the new Goodenough battery design hasn't come up!
Getting back to an actual discussion of lithium, it'll be very interesting to see if the Goodenough solid electrolyte batter works well enough with sodium. If so, a lot of expensive lithium mines will be worth a lot less over time!
The Goodenough battery (he invented LiON batteries for those who don't know) looks to improve on LiON in most important areas:
- higher energy density (~2x)
- not flammable
- faster charge rates
- many more charge cycles (~100x more)
- better performance in cold conditions
- either lithium or *sodium* based glass electrolyte
Apparently 89 companies are evaluating the patents for production:
Goodenough didn't invent li-ion, he invented the cobalt oxide cathode that dominated the industry until nickel and iron cathodes came along.
Goodenough is 97 years old and while he is still apparently sharp, he is not leading the lab that gets publicity under his name. From what I've seen he's more of a mentor. I, and many others[1], are extremely skeptical of the claims coming from that group. At best, they have been putting out very misleading papers that gloss over key factors or lie by omission to make their research look like they're making massive breakthroughs. At worst, many of their claims break basic rules of conservation of energy.
Either way they haven't given much evidence they have a better battery. One of the ways they produce these claims is by creating several cells, each optimized for maximum performance in one area while totally sacrificing every other metric. Then they put every good metric in the abstract and conclusion, while if the battery was balanced for lifespan, power, and capacity it would perform poorly in all ways. Beyond that they also make some absurdly high ion mobility claims in mundane materials, and nonsensical energy balances. Honestly, it has a lot of signs of bunk science... but it does seem mixed in with good (but routine) work, so it's kind of perplexing.
The problem is you need to buy land and equipment and pay for it. 5 years is a good time to plan for to ensure that you can make your payments. If you are not breaking even on the startup costs after 5 years the investment will probably never pay off.
Eventually you pay off the land and your costs go down. You can keep equipment running for a long time, but it wears out. You are risking all the time though that the mineral demand might drop and now you have a worthless mine (which you need to do environmental cleanup). With equipment you risk a new process making your old equipment unable to produce what the market demands so you have to replace it.
Of course everybody understands you plan on mining for longer than 5 years. However you have a 5 year plan to get the mine operating and prove it can make money.
If you try and time the market at horizons greater than five years when that’s your startup time from planning to production sometimes you’ll win big and sometimes you’ll discover you’ve made a genuinely awful investment. With a ten year turnaround time you could easily have the technical, social or economic environment just destroy the viability of your investment. Imagine you’re investing in a new city somewhere in Malaysia or Pakistan and the government falls or there’s a war. Imagine you’re going to build a new auto manufacturing hub in Nigeria and the entire West African economy tanks because Ebola goes pandemic. Timing the marker is fantastic if your bet pays off but nothing is guaranteed.
The point is more to not try timing the market. There are all sorts of things one could reasonably say about what would be right or wrong for these unstable areas, but fundamentally the most long term good would be if they could engage in slow but steady development of both their natural resources and their infrastructure. I'm quite confident lithium will continue to be quite valuable for at least a generation. Remember, we still use NiMH and even NiCad batteries in some cases. Even if science has already discovered the magic new battery chemistry that will replace lithium ion, you're most likely looking at 5-10 years before the very first commercial applications come about.
I don't remember exact context, but I recall a long time ago someone was talking about shipping medicine and such to a particularly poor area of Africa, and the reply was basically "There are no roads here to ship the medicine on."
NiMH and NiCad batteries do have some useful properties. We still use Lead Acid too, despite it begin a truly awful battery in terms of energy density and based on fairly ancient designs because it's incredibly robust against environmental changes, can delivery incredibly high currents and don't care about how to charge them; you can comfortable load them up by plugging them into a 14.4V supply.
NiCad for example is great for low temperature environments and they can deliver almost 100% of their capacity at the maximum rated discharge. They are essentially lead-acid with a tad more energy density and being very sensitive about how they're charged.
NiMH don't have that great of a capacity at maximum rated discharge but they do have a very very low internal resistance while still (almost) matching Lithium batteries in energy density. Additionally, they are almost perfectly constant voltage until discharged, making them suitable for applications where you might not want a complicated voltage controller.
Lithium is actually a fairly difficult cell. Drawing maximum discharge will reduce capacity, they don't like shocks or extreme temperatures and their voltage stability is meh at best. They also heat up a lot when charging or discharging, making cooling circuits required in some scenarios. They do have extraordinary energy density though.
Don't discount other battery types; battery chemistry dictates the behaviour of the battery under load scenarios, Lithium batteries aren't always the answer.
Yeah we always do. Mining is incredibly cyclical boom/bust In Australia for this reason.
Also it’s just as difficult to leave it in the ground. Any decent mining operation takes at minimum 2-3 from construction to production so you still need to take that into account (unless you lock down some offtake agreements to hedge the risk)
How financialized are mines, for want of a better term? i.e. Are people buying the mining company's shares assumed to be taking the gamble on what prices will be in 5 or 10 years, or do mining companied buy a ton of futures to try to even things out?
Both, depending on the company. The great companies are play heavily in the futures market, as a result their production is mostly locked up when the boom comes and so they don't make any extra money. The not so great companies sell to market mostly, and make a ton of profit in the boom years and are lucky if they don't go bankrupt in the bust years.
Of course great and not so great are by my definition of great. You can do should do your own investigation.
This is no big deal. Prices will tank and an equilibrium will be reached. This kind of stuff happens all the time when supply lags demand and then catches up and you have a little bit too much supply.
Aren't other metals like Nickel and whatnot are the main bottleneck for the vast numbers of batteries required for the electric car boom? Didn't we already know for the long time that lithium is very abundant, but it's those other metals (which are required much less by mass, but still required) that might be a problem, and this is why different companies are betting on different lithium chemical processes, because they don't know for sure which secondary metal will become the bottleneck?
Cobalt yes, kind of. Nickel absolutely not. Every single car, globally, could be electrified without making a big dent in nickel demand. Stainless steel is FAR more demanding of nickel.
Cobalt is tricky because in most places it's a byproduct of nickel mining, and it is only mined on its own in a couple places (notably the DRC). Despite that it's fairly likely that it will scale well, and it also becomes less and less relevant as electrodes reduce the amount of cobalt they use.
Virgin spheroidal graphite is another possibly-constrained supply, as it's a very particular kind of hard coal. Luckily it can be produced artificially- batteries use a roughly 40-60 mix and it costs roughly the same. IIRC natural graphite has a slightly higher power output and synthetic graphite has higher capacity, due to the nanoscale patterning of the graphite grains. As coal mining decreases graphite will probably just become more artificially produced, since it can be made from essentially anything.
Exactly. The potential market for grid storage for renewables will be similar in size to the market for EV batteries once the cost of battery-backed renewables falls below the cost of a grid connection. And once that does happen, power grids worldwide are going to rapidly enter a death spiral as their fixed costs are spread between fewer and fewer users.
Why? The role of the grid will still be arbitrage between power generation and power consumption. A flat in a high-rise in a city doesn't have anywhere to put solar panels; a factory couldn't possibly sustain its power consumption with on-site renewables, and no amount of on-site battery storage will change that. Somebody needs to buy power from net producers, and sell it to consumers.
Yes, of course power sinks gain value from having their own power buffer, even if only to take advantage of fluctuations in energy cost. But why would this cause grid collapse? They still need the energy delivered, at some point. It puts whoever runs the grid in the quite enviable position of power market middleman. Far from collapsing, I would expect grids to do extremely well out of such a shift.
There’s so much energy waste in electric cars from the greater number of times energy must be transferred specifically where it’s changing form. I don’t really see how this can be minimized or changed enough to make and electric car world (or even hybrid electric) scalable in a way that isn’t problematically energy-inefficient. So, I’m at least a little tired of the idea that electric cars are such a groundbreaking solution.
I have nothing against them/people who use them but I’m not convinced that it’s the solution to the looming crisis/possibly explosive break up in our love affair with crude oil. Plus, I’m a little afraid that here in the US we’re about a minute away from destroying Appalachia even moreso—I.e. due to particularly destructive coal mining practices and mountain topping, etc. So I’m apprehensive about increased strain on the power grid. (And I’m not keen on nuclear power either). But I welcome some kind of paradigm shift/future work that reveals I am wrong in this regard. It would be awesome if someone re-engineered and improved some aspects of these things rendering them more effective and less destructive.
One a country tells its population to go electric and put the infrastructure in place to support that, people adopt EVs at a pretty fast pace and end up pretty happy about it.
Hey. That looks like what happens with crude/natural gas/agriculture/any commodity. While it is worth being reported, this is Econ 101 supply and demand. Price volatility is part of the market.
There are other problems arising for electric cars: road tax.
Electric cars are way havier than most cars and have so much traction that road maintenance will be much more expensive when everybody has an electric car.
This is why countries like Norway and the Netherlands are thinking about raising the road tax for electric vehicles.
I also think this is why brands like Toyota are still thinking about hydrogen cars. They still don't believe 100% in electric battery cars.
This is hilariously misguided with little real truth to it.
Are electric Cars heavier? Yes...but not really by much. Sure a Model S is heavy, but it is a full size car designed to compare with other 4000-pound range cars and a side effect of the platform's age meanwhile a Model 3 is less than 10% heavier than a BMW 3 series.
The traction idea is just absurd.
The real reason why Norway wants to raise the road tax is because the taxes they use on gas cars and gas itself is used to pay for road repair and if there are no gas cars then there is no road upkeep budget.
Also, Toyota wants to do hydrogen because they are materials-cheap, offer specific marketable advantages, and easy to build under current architectures enabling larger profits.
Toyota is also probably stuck in a weird version of the sunk costs fallacy at this point, having spent R&D money continuously on hydrogen fuel cells and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles since the 1990s. Luckily for them, a good hydrogen fuel cell vehicle is just a good EV with a really weird "refillable battery", so their sunk costs aren't likely to sink the company because the rest of the "drive train" is the roughly the same for HFC and battery EV.
Exactly, they were originally acting extremely forward thinking. The one thing they simply did not see coming is the mid-2000's mobile tech revolution. The cost of lithium batteries fell like a rock to where they are today (due to smartphones, etc) and that was simply unforeseeable 20 years ago. What Toyota needs now is a single skateboard platform for both BEV and FCEV and then to simply build the FC models with a dummy pack structure and keep the entire rest of the design the same.
To keep weight/handling similar they could probably even fill it with as many batteries as they can subtracting only the full weight of a filled fuel cell (ie, it may not be so much of a "dummy" pack). That might keep HFC EVs in line to be the last surviving PHEV model as ICE retires, which would keep/permanently enshrine Toyota's (Prius) spot in the PHEV hall of fame.
Well, to be fair, a Model S weighs more than some F-150s, and a Model 3 can weigh more than 4000 pounds, which is pretty porky for such a small car.
But ... I don't see what that really has to do with paying for roads. We will replace the gas tax, and in fact most places are already talking about how to do it. Doesn't seem like an intractable problem at all, and will probably be fixed well before EV adoption gets into the double digits.
I agree wholly on the second point though I will say as per the weight thing, the Model 3 actually weighs about 150 pounds more than a BMW 3 Series, its direct competition. Not a really light car but also not crazy heavy as claimed. The same goes for the Model S whereas its competition the MB S-Class, Audi A8, and BMW 7 Series all have similar weights.
They are heavy cars for sure, compared to most compact cars, but that's more of a factor of their size and class rather than their drivetrain. Future BEV's will gain range from lighter drivetrains so it's def. a goal they will be seeking.
Well maybe this is different in the US but in Europe electric cars are easily 20% heavier than similar models.
The traction idea is not absurd. Tesla owners claim the tires last around 25000 kilometers instead of 60000 when the drive 'insane' all the time.
Takeshi Uchiyamanda was always talking about the environment when he talked about hydrogen. And even now he sees that battey cars are taking off he still stand by his point.
The first two points don't really apply to future electric cars however.
Euro Electric car models (like the e-golf or such) are generally adapted gasoline models that require additional hardware to make the design work, this is obviously inefficient. To make it clear, the current non-tesla/Jag/Audi EVs are almost all examples of designs that will not be seen in the future so I don't think they are fair to compare. The VW ID3 would probably be the best example of a future euro electric car.
The traction idea is absurd for a few reasons: 1: fast cars exist currently. 2: There is no proof to the idea that accelerating hard has any effect at all on roads. 3: Tesla's Performance is incredible, sure...but that's a $100K car, it is not what will be sold mass market or bought mass market. It's priced near that of a Porsche 911 turbo, which accelerates somewhat near to the level of the Model S and has never been this kind of issue.
1: they are not all in on FCEV
2: Their own chart shows them believing that BEVs will eventually outsell Fuel Cell (but of course not before FC takes off..which it hasn't. )
Tire manufacturers warranty their tires for a specific amount of miles/kilometers. If a person buys a set of tires that are supposed to last for 50,000 miles (assuming they buy the correct size, load, and speed rated tires for their vehicle) and the tires wear down in half that distance, we would have seen a spate of people claiming their warranty replacements, and we have not.
That's been debunked here in Norway. The major factor to road wear and tear is and has always been trucks and other heavy vehicles.
> - It does not matter how many passenger cars drive on the roads. Only heavy transport wears it down, says Arild Ragnøy at the Norwegian Public Roads Administration.
> - All the analyzes I have seen show that all wear and tear comes from the heavy trucks, zero from private cars, says Harald Tune Larsen at the Department of Transport Economics.
> The major factor to road wear and tear is and has always been trucks and other heavy vehicles.
What about electric trucks and other heavy vehicles? Or is there little difference since these vehicles would probably have been diesel with a lot of potential torque anyways?
That I do not know, diesel trucks are very torquey, though Elon said that their Semi could probably pull a diesel up a hill in a tug match.
I live in a pretty steep hillside of the town, and the electric garbage truck here handles it like a boss. It's made by Geesinknorba, but I couldn't find any specs.
".. that road maintenance will be much more expensive when everybody has an electric car."
Not really. As far as I've read, road wear grows exponentially with weight. Ah, you think, so EVs WILL make it much worse. No. What it means is that road wear is heavily dominated by heavy duty vehicles. Big trucks and such. Not personal cars. What EVs would add is a drop in the bucket.
The traction thing depends on the vehicle. My EV (Kia Soul EV) defaults to an "Eco" mode where traction is limited. The range you get is heavily dependent on driving style, so EV owners do have incentive to drive smoothly. It also increases tire wear. Most people don't like to throw away money. Yeah, you get some Tesla owners that will use "insane" mode all the time.. but that's probably a minority.
"This is why countries like Norway and the Netherlands are thinking about raising the road tax for electric vehicles."
Norway is pretty damn far away from making EVs pay more than ICE. There's still a lot of financial incentives for EVs, and pretty much everyone is on board with phasing them out slowly and keeping with the target of 100% of new cars being zero emission in the 2025-2030 time frame.
They just added toll fees for EVs in Oslo, but it's still much less than what ICEs pay.
Kinda useless build up. More material are been used to build dense battery and they don’t use only lithium as major source for these new types of batteries.
Within the next decade we might see companies like Hyundai/Kia, Toyota and Honda selling more EVs than ICE. Take the Kia Niro EV as an example: if the cost of batteries halved and the supply was unconstrained, there is little stopping that kind of product from dominating the market—starting with two-car households with off-street parking.
With their lithium cell investments, Telsa are well positioned to benefit from this boom, but they need to think carefully about their positioning. Right now they're a luxury brand with no serious competitors; when Telsa's drivetrain advantage is substantially neutralised, their mind share is likely to stagnate.
In my opinion Tesla needs to prepare to be in the budget space. They need to partner with an external manufacturer to sell a product with normal door handles that competes with Hyundai and Toyota. Because once the cost of batteries falls, I predict a substantial slice of their market will simply disappear to the economy manufacturers. I suspect that many people who love Telsa really just love the idea of electric vehicles and they'll be buying something more like the Kia Niro EV.