4 ms·

Maybe? Tesla's working on a million mile battery suggests to me that battery lifespan will start to dramatically improves.

• coronadisaster 6y ago
  Will Teslas become cost effective at that point?
  • ctdonath 6y ago
    I just ran numbers for Tesla Cybertruck. Depending on gas vs electricity prices, a "Tri FSD" CT, built to million-mile specifications, will pay for itself on gas savings by 0.5-1.5M miles. I think "free truck" operated to design specifications constitutes cost effective.
    • coronadisaster 6y ago
      Too bad you can't buy one...
      • SEJeff 6y ago
        *yet
        • coronadisaster 6y ago
          You can buy nuclear cars yet either...
          • SEJeff 6y ago
            No one is actively trying to build nuclear cars however. Additionally, no one has a prototype nuclear car, because that is a stupid and very dangerous idea. There is a prototype cybertruck, and Tesla is about to announce the location for the factory to build them. It will be either Tulsa, OK or just outside of Austin, TX.
    • mrep 6y ago
      You have to factor in the time value of money though. Car purchase price is an immediate cost while gas and electricity are costs over the life of the vehicle. Your average personal cars only gets driven about 15,000 miles a year and thus those gas and electric costs would be spread out over decades to reach a million miles. Probably still cost effective considering the average truck isn't that much cheaper though.
• kerkeslager 6y ago
  If they or their competitors can deliver, sure. One could equally argue that the fact we don't have a million mile battery already suggests that there may be intractible problems to solve.
  • hwillis 6y ago
    The issue with a million mile battery is one of testing. If your car has 500 miles of range, a million miles means 2000 charges and discharges. At a standard C/5 rate, that's 2.3 years to finish testing. Even at a fairly brisk 1 C that's 83 days. It makes iterating on a design -which can mean changing component amounts by fractions of a percent- incredibly time consuming. Dahn's research is so well respected because he was incredibly good and thorough in measuring tiny amounts of heat and voltage changes in batteries so that you could trace their degradation over a much smaller number of cycles, then try them out at longer scales. Tesla has been funding much of his lab. There are very few people who can do this kind of research outside his lab, and IMO he's a wizard who will end up with a Nobel if he makes a few more big contributions. The bottom line is that the only way to really tell if a battery will last a year or a decade is to watch it for a year or a decade. No amount of technology lets you forecast the future with perfect accuracy, and battery longevity testing takes time. That's the only reason we don't have a million mile battery.
  • imtringued 6y ago
    I'm confused by this. A million mile battery would make ICEs obsolete today. It would be more cost effective to spend $50k on a Tesla Model 3 than to buy 5 Hyundai i10 and driving those to dust. A 1 million mile battery is kinda like fusion. Once it happens there is no going back so I don't think that failing to solve this problem is a blow to EVs.
    • hwillis 6y ago
      A million mile battery does not mean the rest of the car lasts a million miles
      • rstuart4133 6y ago