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How automakers can drive electrified vehicle sales and profitability
- mehwoot 10y agoAccording to the research result, we can see that the same batteries can be produced at 227 kWh per kWh in 2010... and that by 2020 there will be $ 190 per kWh and $ 20 per kWh less than $ 100 per kWh. What
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- tlrobinson 10y agoDefinitely sloppy. From the report (PDF: http://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Industries/Automotive%20and%20Assembly/Our%20Insights/Electrifying%20insights%20How%20automakers%20can%20drive%20electrified%20vehicle%20sales%20and%20profitability/How%20automakers%20can%20drive%20electrified%20vehicle%20sales%20and%20profitabilityMcK.ashx http://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Industries/Automoti... ) From 2010 to 2016, battery pack prices fell roughly 80% from ~$1,000/kWh to ~$227/kWh Current projections put EV battery pack prices below $190/kWh by the end of the decade, and suggest the potential for pack prices to fall below $100/kWh by 2030
- cr0sh 10y agoUp-vote for the better explanation - but you basically stated what I did as well (but mine was a guess - a correct educated guess, but still a guess)... I think your's wins!
- refulgentis 10y agoFor later viewers who won't understand the down votes, because comments have relative times after an hour: this is a content-free quibble over who deserves credit, the grandparent, who linked an original source with a perfectly pulled quote, or the parent, who "guessed" 4 minutes later.
- caminante 10y ago/Off topic IMHO, the thread's already self-policing (with a downvote mechanism). Personally, I found your comment confusing. Currently, cr0sh's other comment has already been pushed down by sibling comments. Suggestion: add links to specific comments.
- refulgentis 10y agoI explicitly said parent and grandparent, and frankly, it's helpful to point out toxic behavior, it encourages down votes.
- caminante 10y agoBy the time your comment was made, cr0sh's other comment [0] -- which you didn't give relative directions to -- had already been pushed down. Thus, I didn't follow at first. I don't think you have to direct other people to downvote on HN. Again, the community's good at self-policing. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13556024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13556024
- molyss 10y agoI feel like I' on a poorly written simple english wikipedia page...
- cr0sh 10y agoBased on the rest of the article, I think this should read: > According to the research result, we can see that the same batteries can be produced at $227 per kWh in 2010... and that by 2020 it will fall to $190 per kWh and... ...and that's where it lost me - but something about it falling to $100 per kWh (maybe by 2030?)...
- Gibbon1 10y agoThis is from the linked paper. 'From 2010 to 2016, battery pack prices fell roughly 80% from ~$1,000/kWh to ~$227/kWh (Exhibit 4).4 Despite that drop, battery costs continue to make EVs more costly than comparable ICE-powered variants. Current projections put EV battery pack prices below $190/kWh by the end of the decade, and suggest the potential for pack prices to fall below $100/kWh by 2030' So in 6 years the cost of battery packs has dropped 4 to 5 fold. And by 2030 may drop a total of 10 fold vs 2010 prices.
- kstenerud 10y agoIt's a machine written blogspam article, and probably shouldn't be on HN.
- Shivetya 10y agoI am quickly coming up to my next car purchase and I am debating the one last hurrah of another convertible or to swap over to an EV. I am still not convinced of the value of the current generation of EVs (200+ mile range only) and don't consider any of the sub 200 viable automobiles. This might be the first time I consider a lease. I have seen what happens to current and previous generation EVs and unless you just plan to keep it you will get soaked. I also would like to see more movement on availability of charging outside of home.
- ENGNR 10y agoLeases are definitely looking more attractive. You could also consider that the battery is an expendable component that you'll be able to upgrade separately to the chassis once the tech improves anyway. Personally I think software upgradability is the most important criteria, which means either Tesla or lease and let someone else deal with rapid obsolescence.
- tlrobinson 10y agoI agree regarding leases being attractive. I feel like between EVs and self-driving cars the auto industry is in a very rapid period of innovation. Of course the price of leases may factor that in.
- benjaminjackman 10y agoExcept that if I recall correctly Tesla has also stated that they expect to upgrading the hardware yearly as well (e.g. sensors). So an apt analogy may be an iPhone. iOS still get updates (which is great) but eventually you are going to need to get a new phone (/car).
- djrogers 10y agoWhy don't you do both buy a used Tesla Roadster. You'll get one last hurrah with a convertible, and take advantage of the electric car depreciation you seem to be convinced exists. Except they've managed to hold their value pretty well... Still, and attractive option, especially with the 3.0 battery upgrade available!
- tlrobinson 10y agoThis looks like blogspam, probably best to link to the actual McKinsey page: http://www.mckinsey.com/industries/automotive-and-assembly/our-insights/electrifying-insights-how-automakers-can-drive-electrified-vehicle-sales-and-profitability http://www.mckinsey.com/industries/automotive-and-assembly/o...
- sctb 10y agoThanks, we've updated the link from https://hardavenue.com/tesla-electric-battery-price-reduced-significantly/ https://hardavenue.com/tesla-electric-battery-price-reduced-....
- jbmorgado 10y agoNot questioning the accuracy of the predictions, but this article is so full of typos that it makes it hard to read and get the relevant information.
- melling 10y agoWhat is the environmental impact of EV car batteries? Making them and recycling them? When we have a billion EV's and batteries in every home with solar, will we have a problem?
- jbmorgado 10y agoWell that will depend on what are the materials they are being built with when that happens. The materials being used presently won't scale to such big numbers as you purpose, so it will all depend on the alternative materials being used by then.
- ergo14 10y agoSo... how long these batteries last? What about enviromental effect related to their recycling? That information is interesting.
- mark242 10y agoThey last. I have a 2-year-old electric Ford Focus and have noticed nearly zero battery degradation; the range has been consistent since day 1. Recycling the batteries is undoubtably less of an impact than even the recycling of engine oil from an ICE car over the same timespan.
- Neliquat 10y agoGot any facts to back up: 1. Zero degradation 2. Recycling (and producing) batteries has less e impact than petrol
- maxsilver 10y ago> Got any facts to back up: 1. Zero degradation Zero degradation is simply not true (all batteries degrade) but the degradation issue is largely overblown. I own a 4-year old EV, with over 45,000 miles and well over 500 battery cycles. It has degraded, but only a small amount (less than 10%). Anecdotally, liquid-cooled batteries (Tesla, Chevy) seem to resist degradation better than air-cooled batteries (Nissan Leaf, Renault Zoe. But that assumes high temp swings -- if your careful with air-cooled ones, they can last a long time as well. One thing some manufacturers do is 'lie' about battery capacity, which really helps sell the "zero degradation" claim. If a EV has a "16.5kwH" battery pack, the car might only actually let you use 10.5kwH of it. This way, use is gentler on the pack (you never really go from "full" to "empty", but from "80% full" to "20% full", and the car hides that fact from you), and the pack can swap out degraded cells for unused ones as needed, to maintain the illusion of no degradation. As of today, I think degradation has become a non-issue now that range capacity is decent. Even if a 2017 Chevy Bolt degrades a full 30% after 10 years, it would still be a car that gets ~160 miles on a single charge, which is still useful to many people. (That's 50% more range than a brand new 2017 LEAF gets today, and LEAF is the #1 selling BEV in the US).
- woodandsteel 10y agoA nice thing about this trend is that it means if you buy an EV today and replace the battery in, say, five years, the new battery will probably cost much less and also have much greater range. So you will have a car that gets better as it gets older, at least in some important ways.
- mtgx 10y agoUnless, of course, the car manufacturers get the bright idea to make EV batteries "irreplaceable", too - you know, for "better efficiency" or to make the cars "leaner" or whatever their excuse would be.
- wfunction 10y agoOr if they do the opposite (planned obsolescence).
- Kluny 10y agoThey'll probably remove the headphone ports while they're at it.
- c22 10y agoImagine thinner cars!
- Dylan16807 10y agoWhen a battery "can't" be replaced on a consumer device, that generally just means you need a soldering iron or to pry it open. Many car repairs are already vastly more difficult than that, so those barriers would be negligible. It's hard to think of an equivalent.
- mikeash 10y agoI can't imagine people would put up with that. People buy new smartphones every few years, but they expect their cars to last decades. The average age of cars on American roads is 11.5 years. If you try to convince people to accept a sharp reduction in car lifetime, it had better come with a sharp reduction in price, or people won't buy it.
- marze 10y agoThe details can be debated, but the trend is real and has tremendous real world implications. Clean air, enables 100% solar, 2.4 sec zero to sixty, and so on.
- Neliquat 10y agoClean in the city, most of that power is still from coal, just further from your tailpipe. You are just moving numbers around.
- Cerium 10y agoStill, it is cheaper to add emissions monitoring and control on a single power plant than a few hundred thousand moving power plants.
- SomeCallMeTim 10y agoMy roof is covered in solar, enough so that I'm net negative on electricity. No coal power here.
- akshayn 10y agoThis is no longer true in most of the USA (and many other countries) [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_long_tailpipe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_long_tailpipe
- johngalt 10y agoBut those numbers being moved around are not equivalent. A centralized power plant is vastly more efficient and clean than thousands of little gasoline engines. This is true even for coal. Not to mention it allows us to make policy decisions about where our energy comes from at the source without changing anything at the consumer side. If we find out that <energy source> is unhealthy, unsustainable, running out etc... We can change one power plant rather than millions of autos. If OPEC turns the taps off, we aren't all suddenly paying twice as much to drive to work.
- woodandsteel 10y agoWe are moving from fossil fuels to renewables. There are a number of different parts in the ff system, and we can't replace the whole thing all at once, so we are working on different parts, and over time. And it's working. But I bet you already knew that.
- jacquesm 10y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=basitmakine https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=basitmakine flagging this as spam.
- reneherse 10y agoWhy? (It's not obvious to me by your link.)
- thefalcon 10y agoOriginally this was a link to hardavenue.com instead of the source. It has been updated by the mods. (I had also flagged, which apparently stuck around after the change so I've now unflagged the article.)
- linkregister 10y agoHelp me out; I can't see a common theme except this person really likes a site called hardavenue.
- tlrobinson 10y ago"Really likes", or "owns"/"runs"/"works for"?
- linkregister 10y agoNext time just say "this person is spamming a site that he/she owns" instead of the cryptic statements you made. Clarity is important.
- kumarski 10y agoLet's talk about performance capabilities. Primarily galvanic battery chemistry gains? These have not been on the rise and would need to be for batteries to ever take any meaningful marketshare from Coal.
- F_J_H 10y agoGive it time...
- ridgeguy 10y agoCost reduction of existing battery technology is all that's needed to make batteries widely useful for grid energy storage. No new chemistry needed, just economies of scale. This is happening in CA [1] and elsewhere. The trend will enable renewable energy sources like wind and solar to meet larger portions of total electrical demand. That will cut into coal's power generation market share. Probably pretty rapidly. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/business/energy-environment/battery-storage-tesla-california.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/business/energy-environme...
- jwatte 10y ago"by 2020 there will be $ 190 per kWh and $ 20 per kWh less than $ 100 per kWh." Wat? Anyway, we already know this. I'm hoping for third party battery packs by the time I need a fresh set for my 2011 Leaf. (Still years away)
- anw 10y agoAn interesting thing: > Around half of consumers in the US and Germany say they comprehend how electrified vehicles and related technology work versus almost 100% of consumers for ICE vehicles I wonder if the almost 100% who say they comprehend how ICE vehicles work actually do understand it–even in a limited regard. It's easy to feel you understand something if you are familiar with it for the majority of your life.
- Neliquat 10y agoHonestly, less than 5% truly 'understand' moving flux distributions or top cylinder quenching effects. I think it means that they are comfortable with what their (limited) understanding tells them. I have built a dozen engines and am still learning.
- mikestew 10y agoAs an ex-professional auto mechanic who has on multiple occasions explained to customers the problems their vehicle is having, I can say with confidence that the number of ICE owners who have the faintest clue as to how their vehicle works is nowhere near 100%. At best, gas goes in and goes "boom" at some point. Most owners of ICEs know about as much about how an ICE works as I know about how a nuclear reactor works (which amounts to "something something fission, heats water, and spins a turbine with steam). And if that's the bar, then customers sure as hell know how an electric motor works.
- zackmorris 10y agoI had no idea lithium ion batteries had become so inexpensive. Here is the top search for "kwh battery" on eBay right now: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Li-ion-Lithium-24vdc-100ah-2-4kwh-NEW-2015-VOLT-Battery-Off-Grid-Solar-Battery-/182436435488 http://www.ebay.com/itm/Li-ion-Lithium-24vdc-100ah-2-4kwh-NE... So with shipping, $869.96 for 2.4 kwh, or about $362/kwh. A $3 gallon of gasoline has 33 kwh, but only 8 kwh of usable energy due to the inefficiency of internal combustion engines, so $0.375/kwh. So batteries are somewhere around 1000 times more expensive than gasoline, but, if they can be recharged more than 1000 times they may actually be cheaper. 1 kwh of electricity costs about 10-20 cents usually (call it $200 per 1000 charges). That's a total of $1069.96 for 1000 cycles, maybe $1269.96 for 2000 cycles, etc, something on that order anyway. So $1 per cycle per kwh is pretty close to a breakeven against gasoline, and batteries are only going to get less expensive.
- jjawssd 10y agoLithium ion battery capacity decays with each charge down to 50% after 500 cycles
- mikeash 10y agoThat depends greatly on the specific battery chemistry, the temperatures the battery is exposed to, the charge levels, the charge rates, etc. You can't just make a blanket statement like that.
- Reason077 10y agocapacity decays with each charge down to 50% after 500 cycles Not true with modern EV batteries. Tesla's packs typically show less than 8% degradation after 100,000 miles, which would be approximately 500 cycles. https://electrek.co/2016/06/06/tesla-model-s-battery-pack-data-degradation/ https://electrek.co/2016/06/06/tesla-model-s-battery-pack-da...
- applecore 10y agoTesla batteries only show very little degradation because their capacity is limited by software[1]. You can "increase" your battery capacity by ordering a $9,000 software update. [1]: https://electrek.co/2016/07/26/tesla-upgrade-software-limited-battery-pack-model-s-x/ https://electrek.co/2016/07/26/tesla-upgrade-software-limite...
- spenrose 10y ago"These new scenarios do not reflect hippie idealism, they just take seriously a) the cost curves demonstrated by PV, EVs, and batteries so far, and b) what countries said they would do in Paris. ... If these forecasts play out, fossil fuels could lose 10 percent market share to PV and EVs within a decade. A 10 percent loss in market share was enough to send the US coal industry spiraling, enough to cause Europe’s utilities to hemorrhage money. It could seriously disrupt life for the oil majors." http://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/2/2/14467748/electric-vehicles-oil-market http://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/2/2/14467748/elec...
- prostoalex 10y ago> It could seriously disrupt life for the oil majors. Things weren't exactly groovy for them the last few years with sub-$40 oil.
- adrianN 10y agoThey still have billions in profits each year.
- audunw 10y agoI wonder, if the oil price crashes, and the gasoline prices fall, will that become a setback for EVs? Or will people have already lost confidence in ICE by then? I imagine that if gas stations start to shut down due to low profitability, people will start worrying about whether their local gas stations is still operating in 5 years. So even if gas becomes dirt cheap, it might not become a setback. We'll see. Interesting times ahead.
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- Scoundreller 10y agoWhat happens to the economics when governments start charging some type of road tax on non-gas vehicles to replace gas taxes for road maintenance?
- glibgil 10y agoFlying cars
- aoeu345 10y agoWhile Tesla finances and maintains road tunnels for Tesla owners to drive in.
- _delirium 10y agoBack of the envelope calculation for the U.S.: Using the national average gas tax of 48¢/gal, if you were to charge an electric vehicle an equivalent of what, say, a 30 mpg vehicle would pay per mile, it'd be 1.5¢/mile, or $150/yr for a vehicle that does 10,000 miles a year. I don't think that's really a huge change to the overall economics either way, though it could push some marginal cases from above to below breakeven.
- kirrent 10y agoI visited New Zealand recently and was told that the reason Diesel was so much cheaper than unleaded was because it didn't have the road tax built into it so agricultural vehicles wouldn't have to pay for road they weren't using. As a result Diesel cars had to keep a logbook and pay a tax based on their mileage. Didn't ever get to see it in action.
- sitharus 10y agoThere's not much to see, it's just a window sticker like the registration. It has the highest allowed odometer reading. For cars this is just checked against your dash odometer, for heavy vehicles (over 2.5 tonne iirc) it's checked against a tamper proof hub mounted odometer.
- glibgil 10y agoOr, you know, automakers can see their wealth destroyed like every other industry that is made more efficient through technology
- Gibbon1 10y agoThe automakers have a short term problem. Which is their profit margins are aligned with being an older stodgy industry. However they now need to make large investments in new technology driven by a real risk of going out of business if they don't. The last time we saw something like this was the big push to add emissions controls and improved crash safety back in the 1970's.
- cowardlydragon 10y agoHow hard is it to spin off / startup a separate EV company?
- mbloom1915 10y agosolve the problem of making EVs useful for city livers and then we can start to talk about real adoption - suburbia has luxury of charging EVs overnight when affordable but people living in apartments/condos/etc and parking on the street every night do not have accessible EV charging infrastructure
- Reason077 10y agoThat's already improving, though. I see lots of on-street charging points being installed here in London. Still not quite as convenient as having your own home charger, but certainly viable.
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- maxsilver 10y ago> people living in apartments/condos/etc and parking on the street every night do not have accessible EV charging infrastructure DC Fast Charging mostly solves this problem -- roughly 80 miles in 30 minutes. Grab lunch while charging your car, and your battery is filled for the week. There aren't a ton of stations that support that speed yet, but more are being built every year. > suburbia has luxury of charging EVs overnight This is one of the few luxuries suburbia offers. Urban apartment/condo dwellers get dozens of benefits that suburban households don't, it seems only fair that suburban folks get a few things to enjoy.
- galago 10y agoYeah, I visited Rome last month, which is a city filled with small fuel efficient cars and really expensive gasoline. I didn't see a single electric. My guess is that because people live in apartments, they haven't figured out how to get charging at street level. It seemed there were parking permits for residents, but people don't own their spaces. For now its an interesting, unsolved problem.
- ayuvar 10y agoI saw a handful of Twizys when I was in Rome a few years ago, still not quite sure where they charged.
- Animats 10y agoGiven current system costs and pricing ability within certain segments, companies that offer EVs face the near-term prospect of losing money with each sale. Under a range of scenarios for future battery cost reductions, cars in the C/D segment in the US might not reach true price parity with ICE vehicles (without incentives) until between 2025 and 2030, when battery pack costs fall below $100/kWh... So the real business is 7 to 13 years away.
- cowardlydragon 10y agoAnd they are ceding all of it to Tesla.
- kristianp 10y agoInteresting that Honda has gone down the Fuel cell route, with EV coming soon for the clarity. Fuel cells are not going to win in this market due to the Tesla effect. http://automobiles.honda.com/clarity http://automobiles.honda.com/clarity
- prostoalex 10y agoToyota is also selling a fuelcell Mirai in limited markets.
- Animats 10y agoYes, you can buy a Toyota Mirai in California. Toyota is selling about 100 a month. This includes three years of hydrogen, and they even have some filling stations.
- astrange 10y agoHydrogen isn't a clean fuel, since the cheapest way to make it right now is from natural gas.
- adrianN 10y agoThe battery in a Tesla is also not clean fuel because the cheapest way to charge it is from coal fired power plants.
- astrange 10y agoTrue for most of the US but the Mirai is only sold in California which doesn't use more than 6% coal.[1] Fuel cells seem like they'd be good for vehicles that can't have charging downtime. But then again hydrogen seems obnoxiously difficult to store what with all the escaping and the catching fire, so maybe we can stick to ICE and synfuels? [1] http://www.energy.ca.gov/renewables/tracking_progress/documents/current_expected_energy_from_coal.pdf http://www.energy.ca.gov/renewables/tracking_progress/docume...
- transfire 10y agoEVs would be completely viable and cheaper then ICE right now if we had more functional government. It is not terribly difficult to add inductive charging to roads from an engineering perspective.
- Proven 10y ago"Consumer demand is starting to shift in favor of electrified vehicles and has strong disruption potential" Bull. It's a joke to talk about customer "demand" when a single damn car hasn't been sold without government subsidies. Parasites.
- astrange 10y agoYou don't think the gasoline car system has subsidies?
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