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The Electric Car Revolution Is Finally Starting

6 points by gricardo99 11y ago

arprocter 11y ago
A big thing which isn't mentioned in this article is charge time - if after 200 miles I have to stop and plug in for x hours then hydrocarbons will always have the edge
- ForHackernews 11y ago
  That's really only an issue on a long cross-country roadtrip. Most normal trips will end at either your house or your place of work. Presumably both those places will eventually have charging stations.
mtgx 11y ago
> Thanks to continuous improvement, General Motors last year said the new lithium-ion packs now cost it about $145 per kilowatt-hour This worries me, and I haven't seen any media entity talk about this, and they seem to just take it for granted. But if even Tesla (which so far had the cheapest EV batteries) said its batteries are no less than $300/KWh, while everyone else was buying them for $400/KWh, and even with the Gigafactory online it will only drop the price of the battery by 30%, I'm really worried GM is cutting some corners here. Tesla's battery has a warranty of 8 years and I believe 100,000 miles. It's possible that GM used much poorer quality batteries that will die out after 3 or 4 years, just so the company can use such a large capacity battery and fit into that pricing point. Yes, I'm aware the article points to Tesla saying the Gigafactory will help drive the price point of batteries to $100/KWh, but it didn't mean immediately. It could've meant within 10 years, as it seems the price of batteries for a given capacity drop by about 50% every 5 years. GM claimed it already used $145/KWh batteries. I wish journalists would ask them about how they got that to happen. Because if that was real and they were actually great batteries, it would be a much bigger game-changer than the Bolt itself. But as I said, I doubt they're taking advantage of any breakthrough, and they are likely to use batteries that have a much smaller lifespan than the ones in Teslas, or Leafs, and so on.
- ForHackernews 11y ago
  GM is the world's second largest auto manufacturer. They employ hundreds of thousands of people, and have factories on every continent except Antarctica. I could easily believe that GM has access to economies of scale that Tesla can only dream about.

6 points by gricardo99 11y ago

A big thing which isn't mentioned in this article is charge time - if after 200 miles I have to stop and plug in for x hours then hydrocarbons will always have the edge

ForHackernews 11y ago
That's really only an issue on a long cross-country roadtrip. Most normal trips will end at either your house or your place of work. Presumably both those places will eventually have charging stations.

mtgx 11y ago

> Thanks to continuous improvement, General Motors last year said the new lithium-ion packs now cost it about $145 per kilowatt-hour This worries me, and I haven't seen any media entity talk about this, and they seem to just take it for granted. But if even Tesla (which so far had the cheapest EV batteries) said its batteries are no less than $300/KWh, while everyone else was buying them for $400/KWh, and even with the Gigafactory online it will only drop the price of the battery by 30%, I'm really worried GM is cutting some corners here. Tesla's battery has a warranty of 8 years and I believe 100,000 miles. It's possible that GM used much poorer quality batteries that will die out after 3 or 4 years, just so the company can use such a large capacity battery and fit into that pricing point. Yes, I'm aware the article points to Tesla saying the Gigafactory will help drive the price point of batteries to $100/KWh, but it didn't mean immediately. It could've meant within 10 years, as it seems the price of batteries for a given capacity drop by about 50% every 5 years. GM claimed it already used $145/KWh batteries. I wish journalists would ask them about how they got that to happen. Because if that was real and they were actually great batteries, it would be a much bigger game-changer than the Bolt itself. But as I said, I doubt they're taking advantage of any breakthrough, and they are likely to use batteries that have a much smaller lifespan than the ones in Teslas, or Leafs, and so on.

ForHackernews 11y ago
GM is the world's second largest auto manufacturer. They employ hundreds of thousands of people, and have factories on every continent except Antarctica. I could easily believe that GM has access to economies of scale that Tesla can only dream about.