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Pure EV’s prices keep dropping to the point where oil doesn’t look price competitive 5 years from now let alone ethanol.

The 2023 Chevy Bolt has a 247 mile range and a $27,000 MSRP without government incentives. That’s still a higher cost of ownership than a used ICE, but things are getting a lot closer. https://www.chevrolet.com/electric/bolt-ev-2023




That is, of course, if your Chevy Bolt does end up in flames. According to letters from GM, never park your Bolt under the same roof you live and to be safe, park it away from any structure.


In regards to battery degradation, how much of that range can I expect to see after the first 100000km?


If you assume the Model S and Model X are representative of other EVs, then about 94% of it: https://electrek.co/2018/04/14/tesla-battery-degradation-dat...

And keep in mind that degradation is fastest at the beginning, so at 200000km, you have about 92% of what you started with, not the 88% you'd expect if it were linear.


Those numbers are phenomenal, hard to believe to be honest. Tesla owners, testing their Tesla's to publish results in a pro Tesla publication isn't exactly what I'm looking for. There must be scientific measurements writeups of these issues.


Easy to achieve if the batteries are overallocated at the start and software limited.


given the markets involved, look at the electric golf-cart sized cars coming out of China for a more competitive price point of several thousand us dollars, far cheaper than something on the us market.


I keep being told EVs being cost effective are right around the corner, yet the prices for clean energy on my electric bill are 35% higher and government subsidies for the industry are never ending.


That's probably because you're paying the feel-good tax, and not a true accounting of the costs. Just like how oat milk is more expensive than cow's milk at retail, even though oat milk is almost free to produce relative to cow milk.


Isn't that due to scale of production? It does not take that much oat to make the milk. And cow milk gets bad fast and should be alot more expensive than cow milk really.


But isn't the price of cow milk held artificially high?


People are also notoriously bad at managing their money. If you have the money and suck at using it, EVs and solar panels make a lot more sense, and you should actually do it, we really need to scale up those industries.


Isn’t the amount of mining waste extremely energy intensive to produce a single EV battery?


That’s mainly a talking point used by oil and gas lobbyists to keep their industry from getting crushed by alternative fuels and EVs


Still incredible to consider how much material we'll have to dig out of the ground to deliver hundreds of GW of renewable electricity production potential in the form of solar and wind. For grid scale electricy storage, there's not enough Lithium and cobalt in the Earth's crust to build the needed capacity. Maybe widespread deployment of hydrogen can help


> For grid scale electricy storage, there's not enough Lithium and cobalt in the Earth's crust to build the needed capacity.

That’s widely incorrect. How exactly much batteries we need, what their chemistry should be is up for some debate as are exact numbers for commercially viable raw materials etc.

But using the numbers from here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth... and using the deepest mine * land area of earth gives enough lithium to build batteries to store roughly 200 years world of the total electricity generation of the entire planet.

Clearly we are never going to actually mine that much lithium, but just as clearly we don’t need anything like that much eitehr.


> using the deepest mine * land area of earth gives enough lithium to build batteries to store roughly 200 years world of the total electricity generation of the entire planet.

Strip mine the entire planet to a depth of multiple miles, and the resulting batteries are still few enough to talk about in human terms. This is not good.


I really don’t think they are worried considering coal usage is at an all-time high and the US president is going to dictators begging for oil, hat in hand.


> the US president is going to dictators begging for oil, hat in hand.

A big advantage of EVs is that presidents of the future shouldn't need to beg for oil as much, as road transportation energy supply market would be largely domestic.

But we clearly aren't there yet.


I feel like a broken record at this point, but even if a large part of passenger cars move to electric, industrialized countries still consume incredible amounts of fuel for: all planes, ships, trucks, freight trains, plastics, most fertilizers, heating, electricity production, road building etc


Ok? What does that have to do with EVs? Those are all different problems to solve. You can’t say we shouldn’t partially focus on fixing a problem because it doesn’t fix every single problem we have.


EVs lower dependence on oil, but we'll have to keep begging Saudi Arabia and many similar countries, which was the mistaken assumption of the comment I am responding to


There are emerging/existing solutions for many of these use cases

> planes

Sustainable aviation fuel, synfuels

> trucks,

Hydrogen fuel cells

freight trains,

Batteries, renewable diesel, synfuels

> heating,

Heat pumps

> electricity production

Outside of some remote islands petroleum is hardly used for electricity production.


Trains are electric in Europe for 50 years now.


Freight rail, not passenger


Not compared to the lifetime energy intensity of driving a gasoline powered car.


Not even close to even 5 years of fossil fuel usage in a car.


If you’re buying a new car today the right EV’s can easily have a lower TOC. The used market is based on what was manufactured 5-10+ years ago so it looks very different.

In terms of clean energy, inflation adjusted US wholesale rates fell as we dramatically reduced the grids carbon footprint. 2022 is looking like a major anomaly, but that’s in part because natural gas prices are through the roof due to Russia’s invasion.


> I keep being told EVs being cost effective are right around the corner, yet the prices for clean energy on my electric bill are 35% higher

I don't see how that's relevant. The alternative for your house isn't powering it with gasoline.

> and government subsidies for the industry are never ending

You should expect that when it's still "around the corner".

And it could make sense to continue subsidizing EV purchases once prices are similar. Or even beyond that, if you want new-ish EVs to be competitive with a bigger chunk of used gas cars in upfront price.


How much does it cost to replace the battery?




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