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The sheer storage capacity of the battery is less interesting than the cost. Getting below $100/KWh will reduce EV price to FAR below ICE vehicles; while BEV's

The sheer storage capacity of the battery is less interesting than the cost. Getting below $100/KWh will reduce EV price to FAR below ICE vehicles; while BEV's are already at parity with ICE on total cost of ownership, BEV's are going to continue the long descent to MUCH cheaper, and $100 is going to be an important milestone. I think new ICE vehicles are going to be banned in most major economies by 2030, so really, ICE is having its last decade of relevance in new vehicles. Given vehicle replacement cycle is around ~20 years, by 2050 the ICE vehicle stock will be reduced to 99% specialty machines like classic cars, motorcycles, and various heavy equipment for industry.

tachyonbeam 6y ago
I have been a TSLA investor for a few years, I believe in electric vehicles. At 100$/KWh we're talking 5000$ for a 50KWh battery back, which is plenty enough for most people. This could allow us to see $15K-20K electric cars in just a few years, maybe before 2025, which is awesome. Very soon buying a gasoline vehicle, in a modern economy, will have people giving you weird looks. What does have me a little worried though is that most of the world doesn't live in a wealthy city. As electric cars rise, gasoline prices will come down, which will keep gasoline attractive for a while, particularly in poorer countries. Failing ICE vehicle companies will try to sell their gas vehicles to these poor countries as well, and our used cars might end up there too. In other words, poorer countries could keep gasoline cars going for another 30 years after they've been banned here. What are we going to do about that? We're all breathing the same air.
- AgloeDreams 6y ago
  Bigger problem: More than half of Americans do not have a garage to park their car in to charge. Fast charging is great for road trips but it's got nothing on gas fill ups..yet.
  - iamgopal 6y ago
    Or electricity distribution infra not large enough to move that much energy.
    - WorldMaker 6y ago
      We have plenty of distribution infrastructure that moves that much energy during the day to big industrial facilities. A lot EV charging would help "fill in the bathtub" where night-time demand for energy hugely drops in demand graphs. EVs also add other possibilities for smoothing the energy demand curve in vehicle-to-grid "smart grid" capabilities that would let (known) dormant vehicles contribute back to the grid during high demand periods as a new and somewhat uniquely new distributed mobile storage infrastructure.
      - ema 6y ago
        I don't think using cars for grid storage makes sense since you do want to limit cycles. Giving those batteries a second live as grid storage when they're down to X% of capacity might be worth it though. Also yes shifting charging to low demand times will be a thing.
        WorldMaker 6y ago
        I think we are going to learn a lot about the cycle capabilities of car batteries in the next few years. Overall, battery degradation has been much less of a problem in real world EV statistics, at least for actively temperature managed batteries, than many pessimistic models feared. One thing we seem to have growing evidence for is that battery cells resting at full charge for long periods of time may have more of an impact on battery lifetime than cycle counts, and so partial cycles of an active vehicle-to-grid system may actually be a smart plan for extending the expected life of EV batteries, given that evidence. Such systems are still in very early testing/planning, so we'll see as we learn. The fact that it is a possibility, though, greatly changes a lot of the "doomsday predictions" about electricity demand in an all EV tomorrow, so it is worth pointing out as a possibility, even if we aren't certain it is a probability that it will be used widespread.
  - rconti 6y ago
    Citation? I'm very curious about if this literally means "garage" as opposed to "any kind of off-street parking". Our tesla charges in.. our driveway. Our garage is too small to hold a car. When we remodel, I hope to convert our single into a tandem with a lift, holding 3 cars. The tesla will still be in the driveway, though.
    - mperham 6y ago
      Apartment buildings and complexes.
      - bradlys 6y ago
        Or anyone who just doesn't have a parking space and has to use street parking. (Huge amount of people) Even where I live - a suburb with homes averaging $2m - there are a metric shit load of cars parked on the street.
        ricardobeat 6y ago
        Hence we need to develop public charging infrastructure, like has been already happening in Europe. Not a big deal. Installing chargers in apartment parking lots is even easier.
  - WorldMaker 6y ago
    Street level charging is very possible (and growing quickly in Europe). Any street with lamps or parking meters already has easy opportunities for chargers to be added.
    - AgloeDreams 6y ago
      In America this would require some pretty high-level rework of how city infrastructure works.
      - WorldMaker 6y ago
        Not really? We have electricity at the streets. We want additional plugs on the streets, and maybe a credit card reader on those plugs (even that's not a given, really; cars themselves can transmit their payment information these days, or costs could be rolled into existing city taxes/parking fees). This isn't rocket science, this is infrastructure America has been building since the early 1900s.
        nordsieck 6y ago
        > Not really? We have electricity at the streets. We want additional plugs on the streets, and maybe a credit card reader on those plugs Your parent was not saying that it'd be difficult to have a few charging stations on streets, but rather that it would be difficult to add a lot of densely packed chargers on the street. Today, there just isn't that much use for electricity on the street: traffic lights and the occasional parking meter are pretty much it from what I can tell. What you're proposing is adding 100's if not 1000's of amps of electricity to the sidewalk. For many, many streets. The situation is even more dire in the north: while it's not too bad to charge in a garage, particularly if it's insulated, EVs on the street will have to expend a substantial amount of energy keeping their batteries warm during the winter months, meaning that the minimum charging rate for those areas will have to be solidly in the Level 2 range. All of this work isn't impossible or even conceptually difficult. But it is a lot of work, and it's not as simple as just setting up charging stations and hooking them into the already existing infrastructure.
  - lallysingh 6y ago
    A Porsche Taycan gets 214 miles of range in 30 minutes of charge for <$20. https://pod-point.com/guides/vehicles/porsche/2020/taycan https://pod-point.com/guides/vehicles/porsche/2020/taycan The charging rates are getting faster to fit more use cases. It's already pretty good.
    - gambiting 6y ago
      Yes, at the highest rate of charge which: 1) is an optional extra when ordering the car 2) as far as I know, there's only a handful of these 200kW chargers in all of UK, nearly every motorway and public rapid charger are "only" 50kW, so it will take about an hour to get your battery to 80%
  - samatman 6y ago
    Everyone has to park their car somewhere, and most people who don't have a garage (indeed, most people) have to park their car somewhere during work hours as well. This is a problem which solves itself during the buildout phase: BEVs are less attractive to people without a garage, but for people with a garage, it's a no-brainer once they're cheaper than ICE. Those people will want to charge during the day as well, and legislate for charge points in the downtown areas. Malls and other outlying work areas will want to add charge points as well: Malls in particular, anything which induces customers to spend longer at the mall is attractive. A bit of government funding to induce cheapskate office parks to put in electric chargers isn't out of the question. By the time we need them on city streets, it will happen.
    - gambiting 6y ago
      >>Those people will want to charge during the day as well, Why would they though? In my experience owners of electric cars who can charge at home don't bother charging during the day while out and about, because....why would they? They start the day, every day, every morning, with a fresh 300 mile range car. Charging while out at work or in town is a faff, and usually a lot more expensive so....they just charge at home. It's people who can't charge at home who mostly rely on public chargers and charger at their place of work. They have to have a solid and consistent place to charge their vehicles, just like we have petrol stations now.
      - samatman 6y ago
        Main reason would be the relentless progress of solar power. Granted, they might not care as much. But we might want them to care, and I would expect the overnight price of power to climb steadily as our production mix shifts toward solar power. More than half of the US live in parts of the country where solar is high-performance, and it only gets cheaper from here.
  - r00fus 6y ago
    Changing building codes to require retrofits to existing parking garages and dedicated covered parking to include EV charging would be a good medium term fix. THe problem is how do you charge people for the power? For dedicated parking stalls, that could be covered by a blanket fee or giving the owner a key to the charger. For public shared parking that's more going to look like ChargePoint etc.
- evandijk70 6y ago
  If the oil price drops, at least shale oil production won't be profitable anymore, reducing CO2 emissions and eliminating the pollution resulting from shale oil mining.
- Shivetya 6y ago
  I really wish people would stop with accepting lower range BEVs. To truly replace petrol vehicles we should not compromise or suggest drivers do so. Hence hit the three hundred mile mark and go from there with luxury and higher priced models pushing far beyond those numbers; as in 500+ People need to remember, the range is best case range and full charge. This is subject to driving conditions and especially the effect of weather. Lower pack sizes do not charge nearly as quick and this too will hinder acceptance as some will see charge times as a detriment. Wide spread acceptance means more people with a BEV and no home to charge at which means charge times are a real concern So, don't let manufacturers off the hook. Telsa set a bar for range in 2013 that most are barely crossing in range and upped it with the TM3 and TMY. Mercedes and BMW both have offerings coming in with more than 300 miles range. Let us count this low 200 club as we did the sub 100 range, a good first EV for the manufacturer but not what is expected from true BEVs; remember many of the sub 300 club were petrol platforms adapted to electric.
  - rootusrootus 6y ago
    I tend to agree. I have a Model 3 and while it ostensibly has 300 miles of range, as a practical matter it's more reasonable to expect about 200. And There are definitely areas within my state (Oregon) that I don't choose to take my car because it's too easy to end up in a "gotta hang out an extra few hours at a destination charger" or "drive 100 miles out of our way to hit a supercharger" situation.
  - gambiting 6y ago
    I massively disagree - we have ordered(and subsequently cancelled due to covid, but that's not important) an MG ZS EV for my wife, with a range of about 160 miles from its 40kWh battery. That's absolutely good enough for pretty much everything she does with a car, and I see no reason to pay more just for the sake of having a larger battery. At £25k it would have been an absolute steal too.
- samatman 6y ago
  In short? We're going to tolerate it. Embodied energy is a significant fraction of total emissions in a vehicle. It's unclear whether early retirement of existing ICE vehicles is a win; I'm sure someone has done the analysis, and I'm kind of hoping someone will jump in and provide a link to it. Economics is an imperfect proxy for this, but not uncorrelated: if it makes sense in dollar accounting to sell the ICE fleet to developing nations to be used up, that suggests (but does not prove) that it makes sense in carbon accounting as well.
  - hwillis 6y ago
    it's 20k-40k miles depending on the sizes of the vehicles and the size of the battery. ~40 kWh, compact/subcompact on the lower end, and 100 kWh luxury sedan/SUV on the higher end. Phase to google is "cradle to grave" or EOL Local power grid makes a difference but not by much. The worst case for an EV is still better than the best hybrids.
baybal2 6y ago
> Getting below $100/KWh will reduce EV price to FAR below ICE vehicles; LFP cells with volume discounts were already sold for less than $100/KWh for a few years. Not much changed. Cheapest EVs in developed countries have passed the $20k barrier, but I don't see everybody falling for EVs. The type of people who are happy to have just anything to drive buy into something like https://runhorse2020.en.made-in-china.com/product/uwcniFmDXJVs/China-New-Green-Energy-Car-EV-with-EEC-Approved.html https://runhorse2020.en.made-in-china.com/product/uwcniFmDXJ... But even they switch to cheapest, crappiest IC sedans starting at $7k in China (say thanks to $500 per ton steel)
- imtringued 6y ago
  The Renault ZOE is one of the most affordable EVs and it certainly didn't break the $20k barrier even with subsidies.
- tachyonbeam 6y ago
  Tesla is aiming for $100/KWh at the assembled battery pack level rather than just at the battery cell level, so that's a bit of a different milestone, but we're definitely getting there. > Cheapest EVs in developed countries have passed the $20k barrier, but I don't see everybody falling for EVs. AFAIK most of the EVs with a 200+ mile range are above 30K, even after incentives. Some of them are not that amazing either. It will take some time for the prices to come down more and for the offerings to improve. I rode in an VW E-Golf when I ordered an Uber the other day. The acceleration was great and it was a nice looking vehicle, but the base model is 32K and the range is just 125 miles.
  - AgloeDreams 6y ago
    E-Golf is a really bad example as it's an old, ICE-based platform that is replaced by the ID 3. The current Leaf, Bolt, or ID 3 are much better examples. But you are right about the $30K line. I don't think Tesla will touch sub $30k for a LONG time, they are way too addicted to 'best'. Even the Model 3 price has increasingly became more expensive with hard efforts to backtrack the original price with an intent to up-sell aggressively and to hide the $35K model.
agumonkey 6y ago
Let's keep in mind that even a 2020 EV on par with ICE TCO is also very much less polluting ;) Just a tiny reminder
- michaelmior 6y ago
  Is this actually true when taking into consideration the current production process of EVs? Certainly operationally EVs are less polluting, but I'm not sure where things are at considering the entire pipeline. (I'm not intending to bash EVs at all here, I have a PHEV myself and I'd love to get a BEV when the range/cost suits my needs.)
  - intotheabyss 6y ago
    Just from an efficiency POV alone, EVs are better. With ICE you're wasting >50% of the energy to heat, whereas with EVs, that's closer to 10-20%.
    - Judgmentality 6y ago
      I believe GP is asking about manufacturing and production, not operation.
    - michaelmior 6y ago
      Right, but I'm saying I've heard some claim that the environmental impact of efficiency gains are largely offset by the waste produced in the production and disposal of EVs and batteries. I haven't seen a great analysis supporting or refuting this claim. However, I also think that if true, perhaps this is part of the "growing pains" of the EV market. Certainly as the scale of the market grows, we can expect more efficient manufacturing processes and longer lasting technology.
    - SigmundA 6y ago
      Not exactly comparable, if the electricity comes from burning fuel then those losses are at the power plant + transmission losses + losses in the car and drivetrain. power plants are generally more efficient than small combustion engines but all other things in chain must apply. Mix in nuclear and solar and things change of course. However comparing the efficiency of the controller / motor to engine / transmission is apple to oranges, the battery / controller / motor in a EV is just the last part of a long transmission stretching from the engine in the power plant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_long_tailpipe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_long_tailpipe
gok 6y ago
Lucid is explicitly targeting the very high end of cars; the Air will probably be around $150,000. I'm not sure they care too much about cell price.
- akimball 6y ago
  60,000 USD, per the article
  - gok 6y ago
    Hmm I don't see that in the article? Other sources have the CEO saying it will be “well north of $100,000" [1] [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-lucid-motors-evs/lucid-says-its-new-electric-sedan-is-first-ev-with-500-mile-range-idUSKCN2571U2 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-lucid-motors-evs/lucid-sa...
  - jsight 6y ago
    There are different versions, and the price of each range level isn't yet announced. Noone knows what the $60k will have, but it isn't expected to be anywhere close to 500 miles.
  - r00fus 6y ago
    Maybe like the Model3 was supposed to be $35K? Meaning, perhaps after year+ of selling the higher end models?
jillesvangurp 6y ago
2035 in the UK. That's when the current (conservative) government wants to ban sales of ICE cars. I'd say the economic value proposition of ICE is going to collapse long before that. And few companies will be buying ICE vehicles if they can avoid it long before then. 100$/kwh probably has already happened. It's hard to confirm this but I suspect that Tesla is making a nice profit on their cars at this point mainly due to them pushing hard to get production cost down. At this point, they are supply limited so they have little reasons to eat up their profit margins. Competition will fix that. I'd say the next benchmarks here are going to be 400wh/kg (3-4 years out according to Musk) and energy prices for clean energy bids dropping below 1 $ cent per kwh. Basically, we are talking about reductions in sales price and operational cost for most vehicles. At some point the math stops being interesting because we're merely debating by how many of orders of magnitude ICE is more expensive. The cross over point for some forms of commercial transport was probably a few years go; judging from how hot the market for e.g. electrical deliver vans or city buses are.
- gambiting 6y ago
  Well, the UK government said that they want to do that, and yet proposed no actual plan on how to do it. Previously at least you could still buy a hybrid - under this new plan it's only going to be electric vehicles, no hybrids allowed. Which is great, except that the government hasn't answered how all of these electric cars are going to be charged? I have a house with my own driveway so it's not a problem, but what if you live in a terraced house? Apartment? Rent a place? The subsidies and grants for both cars and chargers are being cut left and right, so who is going to build the infrastructure? Private sector? Like ionity is, where they charge £0.69/kWh, making it cheaper to drive a diesel than charging with them(and also charging 6x more than average UK kWh price for the privilege). I've heard an argument that places of work will provide charging points - but why would they? At my own work they said the parking lot is owned by an external company that is not interested in doing any improvements whatsoever so that's not happening, after a massive deal of effort they finally managed to install....2 charging points for a building of 1500 people, you can book the charging session in half-day slots and they are never free. You'd think the "free market" would just solve this problem, but it seems incredibly slow to do so.

tachyonbeam 6y ago

I have been a TSLA investor for a few years, I believe in electric vehicles. At 100$/KWh we're talking 5000$ for a 50KWh battery back, which is plenty enough for most people. This could allow us to see $15K-20K electric cars in just a few years, maybe before 2025, which is awesome. Very soon buying a gasoline vehicle, in a modern economy, will have people giving you weird looks. What does have me a little worried though is that most of the world doesn't live in a wealthy city. As electric cars rise, gasoline prices will come down, which will keep gasoline attractive for a while, particularly in poorer countries. Failing ICE vehicle companies will try to sell their gas vehicles to these poor countries as well, and our used cars might end up there too. In other words, poorer countries could keep gasoline cars going for another 30 years after they've been banned here. What are we going to do about that? We're all breathing the same air.

AgloeDreams 6y ago
Bigger problem: More than half of Americans do not have a garage to park their car in to charge. Fast charging is great for road trips but it's got nothing on gas fill ups..yet.
- iamgopal 6y ago
  Or electricity distribution infra not large enough to move that much energy.
  - WorldMaker 6y ago
    We have plenty of distribution infrastructure that moves that much energy during the day to big industrial facilities. A lot EV charging would help "fill in the bathtub" where night-time demand for energy hugely drops in demand graphs. EVs also add other possibilities for smoothing the energy demand curve in vehicle-to-grid "smart grid" capabilities that would let (known) dormant vehicles contribute back to the grid during high demand periods as a new and somewhat uniquely new distributed mobile storage infrastructure.
    - ema 6y ago
      I don't think using cars for grid storage makes sense since you do want to limit cycles. Giving those batteries a second live as grid storage when they're down to X% of capacity might be worth it though. Also yes shifting charging to low demand times will be a thing.
      - WorldMaker 6y ago
        I think we are going to learn a lot about the cycle capabilities of car batteries in the next few years. Overall, battery degradation has been much less of a problem in real world EV statistics, at least for actively temperature managed batteries, than many pessimistic models feared. One thing we seem to have growing evidence for is that battery cells resting at full charge for long periods of time may have more of an impact on battery lifetime than cycle counts, and so partial cycles of an active vehicle-to-grid system may actually be a smart plan for extending the expected life of EV batteries, given that evidence. Such systems are still in very early testing/planning, so we'll see as we learn. The fact that it is a possibility, though, greatly changes a lot of the "doomsday predictions" about electricity demand in an all EV tomorrow, so it is worth pointing out as a possibility, even if we aren't certain it is a probability that it will be used widespread.
- rconti 6y ago
  Citation? I'm very curious about if this literally means "garage" as opposed to "any kind of off-street parking". Our tesla charges in.. our driveway. Our garage is too small to hold a car. When we remodel, I hope to convert our single into a tandem with a lift, holding 3 cars. The tesla will still be in the driveway, though.
  - mperham 6y ago
    Apartment buildings and complexes.
    - bradlys 6y ago
      Or anyone who just doesn't have a parking space and has to use street parking. (Huge amount of people) Even where I live - a suburb with homes averaging $2m - there are a metric shit load of cars parked on the street.
      - ricardobeat 6y ago
        Hence we need to develop public charging infrastructure, like has been already happening in Europe. Not a big deal. Installing chargers in apartment parking lots is even easier.
- WorldMaker 6y ago
  Street level charging is very possible (and growing quickly in Europe). Any street with lamps or parking meters already has easy opportunities for chargers to be added.
  - AgloeDreams 6y ago
    In America this would require some pretty high-level rework of how city infrastructure works.
    - WorldMaker 6y ago
      Not really? We have electricity at the streets. We want additional plugs on the streets, and maybe a credit card reader on those plugs (even that's not a given, really; cars themselves can transmit their payment information these days, or costs could be rolled into existing city taxes/parking fees). This isn't rocket science, this is infrastructure America has been building since the early 1900s.
      - nordsieck 6y ago
        > Not really? We have electricity at the streets. We want additional plugs on the streets, and maybe a credit card reader on those plugs Your parent was not saying that it'd be difficult to have a few charging stations on streets, but rather that it would be difficult to add a lot of densely packed chargers on the street. Today, there just isn't that much use for electricity on the street: traffic lights and the occasional parking meter are pretty much it from what I can tell. What you're proposing is adding 100's if not 1000's of amps of electricity to the sidewalk. For many, many streets. The situation is even more dire in the north: while it's not too bad to charge in a garage, particularly if it's insulated, EVs on the street will have to expend a substantial amount of energy keeping their batteries warm during the winter months, meaning that the minimum charging rate for those areas will have to be solidly in the Level 2 range. All of this work isn't impossible or even conceptually difficult. But it is a lot of work, and it's not as simple as just setting up charging stations and hooking them into the already existing infrastructure.
- lallysingh 6y ago
  A Porsche Taycan gets 214 miles of range in 30 minutes of charge for <$20. https://pod-point.com/guides/vehicles/porsche/2020/taycan https://pod-point.com/guides/vehicles/porsche/2020/taycan The charging rates are getting faster to fit more use cases. It's already pretty good.
  - gambiting 6y ago
    Yes, at the highest rate of charge which: 1) is an optional extra when ordering the car 2) as far as I know, there's only a handful of these 200kW chargers in all of UK, nearly every motorway and public rapid charger are "only" 50kW, so it will take about an hour to get your battery to 80%
- samatman 6y ago
  Everyone has to park their car somewhere, and most people who don't have a garage (indeed, most people) have to park their car somewhere during work hours as well. This is a problem which solves itself during the buildout phase: BEVs are less attractive to people without a garage, but for people with a garage, it's a no-brainer once they're cheaper than ICE. Those people will want to charge during the day as well, and legislate for charge points in the downtown areas. Malls and other outlying work areas will want to add charge points as well: Malls in particular, anything which induces customers to spend longer at the mall is attractive. A bit of government funding to induce cheapskate office parks to put in electric chargers isn't out of the question. By the time we need them on city streets, it will happen.
  - gambiting 6y ago
    >>Those people will want to charge during the day as well, Why would they though? In my experience owners of electric cars who can charge at home don't bother charging during the day while out and about, because....why would they? They start the day, every day, every morning, with a fresh 300 mile range car. Charging while out at work or in town is a faff, and usually a lot more expensive so....they just charge at home. It's people who can't charge at home who mostly rely on public chargers and charger at their place of work. They have to have a solid and consistent place to charge their vehicles, just like we have petrol stations now.
    - samatman 6y ago
      Main reason would be the relentless progress of solar power. Granted, they might not care as much. But we might want them to care, and I would expect the overnight price of power to climb steadily as our production mix shifts toward solar power. More than half of the US live in parts of the country where solar is high-performance, and it only gets cheaper from here.
- r00fus 6y ago
  Changing building codes to require retrofits to existing parking garages and dedicated covered parking to include EV charging would be a good medium term fix. THe problem is how do you charge people for the power? For dedicated parking stalls, that could be covered by a blanket fee or giving the owner a key to the charger. For public shared parking that's more going to look like ChargePoint etc.
evandijk70 6y ago
If the oil price drops, at least shale oil production won't be profitable anymore, reducing CO2 emissions and eliminating the pollution resulting from shale oil mining.
Shivetya 6y ago
I really wish people would stop with accepting lower range BEVs. To truly replace petrol vehicles we should not compromise or suggest drivers do so. Hence hit the three hundred mile mark and go from there with luxury and higher priced models pushing far beyond those numbers; as in 500+ People need to remember, the range is best case range and full charge. This is subject to driving conditions and especially the effect of weather. Lower pack sizes do not charge nearly as quick and this too will hinder acceptance as some will see charge times as a detriment. Wide spread acceptance means more people with a BEV and no home to charge at which means charge times are a real concern So, don't let manufacturers off the hook. Telsa set a bar for range in 2013 that most are barely crossing in range and upped it with the TM3 and TMY. Mercedes and BMW both have offerings coming in with more than 300 miles range. Let us count this low 200 club as we did the sub 100 range, a good first EV for the manufacturer but not what is expected from true BEVs; remember many of the sub 300 club were petrol platforms adapted to electric.
- rootusrootus 6y ago
  I tend to agree. I have a Model 3 and while it ostensibly has 300 miles of range, as a practical matter it's more reasonable to expect about 200. And There are definitely areas within my state (Oregon) that I don't choose to take my car because it's too easy to end up in a "gotta hang out an extra few hours at a destination charger" or "drive 100 miles out of our way to hit a supercharger" situation.
- gambiting 6y ago
  I massively disagree - we have ordered(and subsequently cancelled due to covid, but that's not important) an MG ZS EV for my wife, with a range of about 160 miles from its 40kWh battery. That's absolutely good enough for pretty much everything she does with a car, and I see no reason to pay more just for the sake of having a larger battery. At £25k it would have been an absolute steal too.
samatman 6y ago
In short? We're going to tolerate it. Embodied energy is a significant fraction of total emissions in a vehicle. It's unclear whether early retirement of existing ICE vehicles is a win; I'm sure someone has done the analysis, and I'm kind of hoping someone will jump in and provide a link to it. Economics is an imperfect proxy for this, but not uncorrelated: if it makes sense in dollar accounting to sell the ICE fleet to developing nations to be used up, that suggests (but does not prove) that it makes sense in carbon accounting as well.
- hwillis 6y ago
  it's 20k-40k miles depending on the sizes of the vehicles and the size of the battery. ~40 kWh, compact/subcompact on the lower end, and 100 kWh luxury sedan/SUV on the higher end. Phase to google is "cradle to grave" or EOL Local power grid makes a difference but not by much. The worst case for an EV is still better than the best hybrids.

baybal2 6y ago

> Getting below $100/KWh will reduce EV price to FAR below ICE vehicles; LFP cells with volume discounts were already sold for less than $100/KWh for a few years. Not much changed. Cheapest EVs in developed countries have passed the $20k barrier, but I don't see everybody falling for EVs. The type of people who are happy to have just anything to drive buy into something like https://runhorse2020.en.made-in-china.com/product/uwcniFmDXJVs/China-New-Green-Energy-Car-EV-with-EEC-Approved.html https://runhorse2020.en.made-in-china.com/product/uwcniFmDXJ... But even they switch to cheapest, crappiest IC sedans starting at $7k in China (say thanks to $500 per ton steel)

imtringued 6y ago
The Renault ZOE is one of the most affordable EVs and it certainly didn't break the $20k barrier even with subsidies.
tachyonbeam 6y ago
Tesla is aiming for $100/KWh at the assembled battery pack level rather than just at the battery cell level, so that's a bit of a different milestone, but we're definitely getting there. > Cheapest EVs in developed countries have passed the $20k barrier, but I don't see everybody falling for EVs. AFAIK most of the EVs with a 200+ mile range are above 30K, even after incentives. Some of them are not that amazing either. It will take some time for the prices to come down more and for the offerings to improve. I rode in an VW E-Golf when I ordered an Uber the other day. The acceleration was great and it was a nice looking vehicle, but the base model is 32K and the range is just 125 miles.
- AgloeDreams 6y ago
  E-Golf is a really bad example as it's an old, ICE-based platform that is replaced by the ID 3. The current Leaf, Bolt, or ID 3 are much better examples. But you are right about the $30K line. I don't think Tesla will touch sub $30k for a LONG time, they are way too addicted to 'best'. Even the Model 3 price has increasingly became more expensive with hard efforts to backtrack the original price with an intent to up-sell aggressively and to hide the $35K model.

agumonkey 6y ago

Let's keep in mind that even a 2020 EV on par with ICE TCO is also very much less polluting ;) Just a tiny reminder

michaelmior 6y ago
Is this actually true when taking into consideration the current production process of EVs? Certainly operationally EVs are less polluting, but I'm not sure where things are at considering the entire pipeline. (I'm not intending to bash EVs at all here, I have a PHEV myself and I'd love to get a BEV when the range/cost suits my needs.)
- intotheabyss 6y ago
  Just from an efficiency POV alone, EVs are better. With ICE you're wasting >50% of the energy to heat, whereas with EVs, that's closer to 10-20%.
  - Judgmentality 6y ago
    I believe GP is asking about manufacturing and production, not operation.
  - michaelmior 6y ago
    Right, but I'm saying I've heard some claim that the environmental impact of efficiency gains are largely offset by the waste produced in the production and disposal of EVs and batteries. I haven't seen a great analysis supporting or refuting this claim. However, I also think that if true, perhaps this is part of the "growing pains" of the EV market. Certainly as the scale of the market grows, we can expect more efficient manufacturing processes and longer lasting technology.
  - SigmundA 6y ago
    Not exactly comparable, if the electricity comes from burning fuel then those losses are at the power plant + transmission losses + losses in the car and drivetrain. power plants are generally more efficient than small combustion engines but all other things in chain must apply. Mix in nuclear and solar and things change of course. However comparing the efficiency of the controller / motor to engine / transmission is apple to oranges, the battery / controller / motor in a EV is just the last part of a long transmission stretching from the engine in the power plant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_long_tailpipe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_long_tailpipe

gok 6y ago

Lucid is explicitly targeting the very high end of cars; the Air will probably be around $150,000. I'm not sure they care too much about cell price.

akimball 6y ago
60,000 USD, per the article
- gok 6y ago
  Hmm I don't see that in the article? Other sources have the CEO saying it will be “well north of $100,000" [1] [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-lucid-motors-evs/lucid-says-its-new-electric-sedan-is-first-ev-with-500-mile-range-idUSKCN2571U2 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-lucid-motors-evs/lucid-sa...
- jsight 6y ago
  There are different versions, and the price of each range level isn't yet announced. Noone knows what the $60k will have, but it isn't expected to be anywhere close to 500 miles.
- r00fus 6y ago
  Maybe like the Model3 was supposed to be $35K? Meaning, perhaps after year+ of selling the higher end models?

jillesvangurp 6y ago

2035 in the UK. That's when the current (conservative) government wants to ban sales of ICE cars. I'd say the economic value proposition of ICE is going to collapse long before that. And few companies will be buying ICE vehicles if they can avoid it long before then. 100$/kwh probably has already happened. It's hard to confirm this but I suspect that Tesla is making a nice profit on their cars at this point mainly due to them pushing hard to get production cost down. At this point, they are supply limited so they have little reasons to eat up their profit margins. Competition will fix that. I'd say the next benchmarks here are going to be 400wh/kg (3-4 years out according to Musk) and energy prices for clean energy bids dropping below 1 $ cent per kwh. Basically, we are talking about reductions in sales price and operational cost for most vehicles. At some point the math stops being interesting because we're merely debating by how many of orders of magnitude ICE is more expensive. The cross over point for some forms of commercial transport was probably a few years go; judging from how hot the market for e.g. electrical deliver vans or city buses are.

gambiting 6y ago
Well, the UK government said that they want to do that, and yet proposed no actual plan on how to do it. Previously at least you could still buy a hybrid - under this new plan it's only going to be electric vehicles, no hybrids allowed. Which is great, except that the government hasn't answered how all of these electric cars are going to be charged? I have a house with my own driveway so it's not a problem, but what if you live in a terraced house? Apartment? Rent a place? The subsidies and grants for both cars and chargers are being cut left and right, so who is going to build the infrastructure? Private sector? Like ionity is, where they charge £0.69/kWh, making it cheaper to drive a diesel than charging with them(and also charging 6x more than average UK kWh price for the privilege). I've heard an argument that places of work will provide charging points - but why would they? At my own work they said the parking lot is owned by an external company that is not interested in doing any improvements whatsoever so that's not happening, after a massive deal of effort they finally managed to install....2 charging points for a building of 1500 people, you can book the charging session in half-day slots and they are never free. You'd think the "free market" would just solve this problem, but it seems incredibly slow to do so.