8 ms·

40 GWh or half a million vehicles per year (80 kWh each). A lot but also not a lot if you consider hundreds of millions of vehicles need to be replaced. If we

40 GWh or half a million vehicles per year (80 kWh each). A lot but also not a lot if you consider hundreds of millions of vehicles need to be replaced. If we used plug in hybrids with 10 kWh batteries, this would be enough for four million vehicles.

eveningcoffee 4y ago
Yes, but do customers want plugin-hybrids instead of fully electric?
- Gravityloss 4y ago
  If it's a lot cheaper for similar range, yes. Or if it has better range for same price (ie compared to a small battery electric car). It depends on your driving profile. For most of the year, I do small trips, below 50 km per day. Then I do maybe 10 200-400 km trips a year. I could get maybe 80% electric kilometers with a modest plugin hybrid.
  - seneca 4y ago
    The biggest concern I've heard for hybrids is lifetime maintenance cost. You have both the legacy ICE and transmission, as well as electrical components to maintain. That's a major hypothetical disadvantage to all electric. Does anyone have numbers for this?
    - twblalock 4y ago
      Toyota Priuses have been sold for over 20 years (closer to 25 actually!) and they are very reliable. There are Prius taxis with half a million miles on the original battery.
    - jointpdf 4y ago
      This is a great site for long-term reliability data on many cars: http://www.dashboard-light.com/vehicles/Toyota_Prius.html http://www.dashboard-light.com/vehicles/Toyota_Prius.html. The Prius has the highest reliability score of any compact in their list. This explains where the data and scores come from: http://www.dashboard-light.com/click-here-first/ http://www.dashboard-light.com/click-here-first/
  - twblalock 4y ago
    Plug-in hybrids are in a weird spot in the market. People who have access to home charging can buy long-range EVs which are much nicer to drive. People without access to home charging can buy non-plug-in hybrids or gas-powered cars. Most plug-in hybrids cost a bit more than the non-plug-in versions of the same car and their battery-only driving range is quite short. No matter where you are in the car market, plug-in hybrids are a weird compromise, delivering all the slowness of a hybrid and the requirement to have access to charging like an EV, for more money than a normal hybrid car.
    - tempestn 4y ago
      The other disadvantage hybrids have is that you have all the complexity of a both an electric and a gas car. One nice thing about full electric is that you do away with much of the regular maintenance of an ICE car.
      - Tagbert 4y ago
        There is that, but in a plug-in hybrid, the gas engine does not get used a lot. When it does, it is usually operating in a serial hybrid mode and runs within an optimal range without much stress. Actual wear and tear and maintenance are much less than in a conventional ICEV. You see this with Priuses and Volts. The gas engines live an unstressed life and last much longer. The Volt keeps track of usage and alerts you when it is time for an oil change. They can easily go 18 months between oil changes.
        tempestn 4y ago
        That's fair, but still a big difference psychologically between 18m and never. Plus various other fluids. Even brake pads and rotors—on pure EVs they basically last forever thanks to regenerative braking. Perhaps modern hybrids do have that benefit as well now though.
        saalweachter 4y ago
        I mean, you take your car in to the shop once a year for its inspection, they take care of it all for you. The only difference with the BEV is they don't charge you $X0 for the oil change.
  - pornel 4y ago
    The problem is that hybrids are good only for range anxiety. You assume you're getting an EV and a great range — best of both worlds. The reality is that you get worst of both worlds: a crappy low-end EV experience with worst-case charging, and a poor ICE car with even less cabin/cargo space than a pure ICE (and much less than a pure BEV). In hybrids, the battery is very tiny, so lasts for a day or two instead of a week or more. This means having a home charger is an absolute necessity. Small batteries don't support rapid charging, so you won't be able to use many public chargers, even if you were patient enough to wait hours instead of minutes. Horesepower of hybrid cars is advertised as a sum of EV+ICE engines together, but that's a rare scenario. You'll be mostly using underpowered EV-only half when you can, and then the underpowered ICE-only half when you run out of juice. When you're on electricity, you're lugging an ICE engine, and when you're road tripping, you have worse fuel economy due to lugging a useless battery and an EV motor (regen doesn't do much even when it works, and highway cruising is the worst-case scenario for it). In many hybrids transmission/clutch adds a lag, so you don't get the sweet instant torque BEVs are known for. You have worst-case maintenance costs. On top of all the moving parts of an ICE engine and a complex gearbox, your battery will wear out sooner. A small battery will tend to be cycled 100% to 0%, instead of kept in the 80%-50% range that is much gentler for lithium batteries.
    - brianwawok 4y ago
      Exactly. They were made to check compliance boxes and not be a useful car.
      - SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
        I don’t think you or GP have owned one. I’m an automotive EE, I’ve had almost all types of vehicles to drive. I really like the Wrangler plug in hybrid. My week to week saw almost zero gas being used, it was like having a full electric and I could still drive wherever I wanted. With 4Low and diff lockers. Loved it! I drive ~12mi a day, works great for me, but I know it’s not for people with commutes.
        Lio 4y ago
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- eliseumds 4y ago
  In emerging markets, hybrids are a much smarter choice. Here in Brazil there are few fast chargers (say 40kW+), and a great bunch of them are broken anyway. My next car will be a plug-in hybrid. Maybe an electric in 10 years.
  - moffkalast 4y ago
    Indeed the infrastructure's just not there yet in most places, and not just Brazil, it sucks basically everywhere. PHEVs can be charged at home and should have enough battery range for those short daily errands across town, while having the range of a normal ICE car for long trips where the lack of fast chargers is most critical. Plus they'll break down more due to higher complexity and the repair shops will love and lobby for them so win-win-win.
    - brianwawok 4y ago
      Yuck oil changes plus battery wear. PHEVs are the best of both worlds, I would recommend them last (after EV and then basic ICE)
      - jader201 4y ago
        Did you mean “worst” of both worlds?
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      Plug-in hybrids and EVs cost less to maintain and repair, finds Consumer Reports https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1129728_plug-in-hybrids-and-evs-cost-less-to-maintain-and-repair-finds-consumer-reports https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1129728_plug-in-hybrids...
      - moffkalast 4y ago
        EVs are indubitably miles ahead in terms of being simple to maintain mechanically since it's a sealed fixed gear system (the software is another matter, but let's disregard that for now), but I don't believe those numbers for the PHEV for a second. You're maintaining both an EV and an ICE at the same time in one car with both needing to interface with each other in complex ways. There's bound to be in the range of 4x as much that can go wrong compared to just one or the other. You'll have the mechanical issues of the ICE coupled with the software problems of an EV. It's an absolutely stupid idea to even consider doing these sort of overcomplicated hybrids, but unfortunately it's also the only way to get around the abysmal battery capacity we currently have.
- 01100011 4y ago
  I love my EV, but I'll be switching to a hybrid when the lease is up. EVs are great but charging is currently a pain. I have no doubt I'll switch back to an EV in a few years, but right now, they're not worth it to me.
- eulers_secret 4y ago
  As an apartment dweller, I would want a regular hybrid. So would the folks I know who only have street parking. For many of us, electric or plugin just strait-up aren't an option. We get forgotten about all the time, but lots of us exist!
  - coryrc 4y ago
    This is why we need charging at where you park for work. Or build densely and pedestrian-friendly enough you don't need any car.
  - ericd 4y ago
    The streets of Paris have lots of chargers along the sidewalks, seems like cities elsewhere should be able to pull that off as well. Doesn’t even need to be high powered if they’re intended to be parked at overnight.
    - burntoutfire 4y ago
      There'd have to be charger every 5-6 meters or so along most sidewalks where I live to make electric viable. Certainly not impossible, but sounds like an absolutely massive investment.
      - stevage 4y ago
        Really so much more than a parking meter for every spot?
        erik_seaberg 4y ago
        No meters in neighborhoods around here, just painted curbs. I only see meters on very dense downtown blocks, and many seem to be solar powered (which seems feasible for an LCD and a card slot).
        burntoutfire 4y ago
        In my city, there's maybe a parking meter for every 20 spots. Plus, most spots are in non-metered areas. PLUS, the meter does not require a very high voltage power line...
bretpiatt 4y ago
For VW to build 10 million electric vehicles to keep numbers up [1], at 60kWh per vehicle which approximately the midsized ID.3 [2], they need to build roughly 12x this capacity, so ~$240B investment which is about what the whole company is worth today [3]. [1] https://www.best-selling-cars.com/brands/2020-full-year-global-volkswagen-group-worldwide-sales-by-brand-and-market/ https://www.best-selling-cars.com/brands/2020-full-year-glob... [2] https://www.drivingelectric.com/volkswagen/id3/range https://www.drivingelectric.com/volkswagen/id3/range [3] https://ycharts.com/companies/VWAGY/enterprise_value https://ycharts.com/companies/VWAGY/enterprise_value
- oblio 4y ago
  They don't have to build absolutely every battery, they can still work with partners.
  - bluGill 4y ago
    This is also a first investment. They can wait a year and invest double in a larger plant - when building something for mass manufacture you start with a smaller plant to learn how to do it, and then a larger one applying all the expensive lessons learned the hard way from the first. Sometimes this cycle is repeating dozens of times.
- nine_k 4y ago
  Won't a next factory cost less, due to the accumulated know-how, optimizations, improvements, etc? I suppose the investment goes not just to civil engineering and land.
- rgbrenner 4y ago
  The 20b covers 6 of these plants… totaling 240gwh or 3m vehicles (4m ID.3s).
gadflyinyoureye 4y ago
Hybrids make more sense than EVs when you compare emissions over the course of the cars life. https://www.emissionsanalytics.com/news/hybrids-are-better https://www.emissionsanalytics.com/news/hybrids-are-better
- jlmorton 4y ago
  That's not what that link says. It says that hybrids deliver a larger CO2 reduction per unit of battery, and because batteries are scarce, we would do better CO2 reduction by focusing limited battery capacity in hybrid vehicles, as this would lead to the greatest number of miles traveled on electric charge, along with some savings from the weight of batteries. It definitely does not say that BEVs have higher emissions over the course of a car's life. It pretty clearly shows that BEVs have the largest decrease in CO2 emissions, as you would expect.
  - jeffbee 4y ago
    And yet, there are plenty of BEVs on the market that will never have lower emissions than a Prius Prime. Some of this junk is leaving the factory with embodied carbon higher than the lifetime emissions of a plug-in hybrid. Looking at you, Polestar.
csours 4y ago
Disclosure: I work for GM, this is solely my own opinion and experience. There is a strong assumption that battery costs will come down, and raw material extraction will ramp up. It is important to remember that we are currently extracting megatons of fossil fuels and just burning them to ash and carbon dioxide yearly. There is also a strong assumption that batteries will be very recyclable in the future (recycling batteries will make economic sense) Consider that a plug in hybrid needs two full propulsion systems. Both of those systems need to be engineered, tested, integrated, built, warrantee-ed, and serviced. If battery prices do come down, the cost of the extra battery pack will soon be lower than the added cost of the ICE propulsion system. It is my understanding that these factors led GM's leadership team to stop producing the Volt (plug in hybrid) system and transition to all EV. If, however, battery prices stay high or go up for an extended period of time, this bet will look worse. Fortunately for consumers, there is choice.
- atlasunshrugged 4y ago
  This is a really helpful industry perspective, thanks csours. When GM and others are thinking about this, is it focused on beliefs in specific markets or globally? I know that many commodities trade globally but there is a ton of noise in DC about critical mineral supply chains and America's reliance on China but at the same time minimal movement on extraction and even less on processing domestically because of the environmental factors/NIMBYism. But if there were another trade war with China, would that change the equation for GM or are the rest of the markets a large enough weight that doesn't matter? Do you think GM and others believe there will be U.S. mines brought online or that all the growth in extraction will come from abroad? Given the pushback in other places (e.g. Serbia's Rio Tinto mine, Mexico nationalizing their sector, etc.) I'm pretty skeptical about being able to depend solely on foreign growth.
  - csours 4y ago
    I believe government incentives and regulations will have a huge effect on the speed of adoption in a country, and China and Europe have both of those. I don't think mineral extraction will have much effect on locality. Shipping is pretty cheap - we already move oil to refineries and gasoline to filling stations. GM does have a >> “strategic investment and commercial collaboration” with Controlled Thermal Resources (CTR) to procure lithium from Southern California’s Salton Sea https://www.hagerty.com/media/news/gm-ctr-lithium-partnership-salton-sea/#:~:text=Earlier%20this%20month%2C%20General%20Motors,that%20seeks%20to%20minimize%20the https://www.hagerty.com/media/news/gm-ctr-lithium-partnershi...
jillesvangurp 4y ago
Or build smaller cars. Not everybody needs an 80kwh SUV. That's just the current market, which seems to favor stupidly big, heavy, and inefficient cars. That's not going to stay that way and VW is already planning to build smaller and cheaper cars. There are some cool vehicles hitting the market now that emphasize efficiency and range over just being big. E.g. Lightyear has very good aerodynamics and weight and a few other manufacturers are focusing on that as well. A light city car like a Nissan Leaf does pretty well with just 40kwh. The original one shipped with just 20kwh and that was a relatively heavy vehicle. Imagine the same vehicle with twice the energy density. It would have a lot more range. A few kwh go a long way on light vehicles. Electrical motor cycles have somewhere in the range of only 4-8kwh. A lot of electrical bicycles have less than 1 kwh. 10kwh is plenty for a light vehicle. Anyway, hybrids have all the downsides of owning an ICE car (lots of moving parts, pollution, expensive fuel, maintenance cost, etc.) with only some of the upsides of owning an EV (torque, fuel economy, etc.). Basically, in terms of cost and complexity, they don't make a lot of sense. The cheaper batteries get, the less sense they make. Right now EVs are just really expensive which means not everybody can afford one. However, cheaper, smaller EVs are perfectly feasible and a lot cheaper to make. Once the high end market saturates, smaller, lighter and cheaper EVs are the next obvious growth market. From next to nothing to many millions in volume is going to happen relatively quickly. In such a market, hybrids don't really stand a chance. Those hundreds of millions of vehicles will be replaced over the course of 2-3 decades. Annual production volume of cars will be mostly EVs by mid next decade; in about 15 years. From then on, another 15 years or so later, most ICE vehicles will have been decommissioned. The value proposition at 2022 cost levels is already pretty great for EVs (with incentives and if you can afford them). Another 3 decades of technical improvements, economies of scale, etc. is going to only improve the economics.
- rodet 4y ago
  Making lighter vehicles is a big strategy to make electric affordable quick indeed. Maybe some companies will manage to find good solution and implement them quicker than car makers? Renault managed this with the Twizy. I investigated myself plugin hybrid vs full electric, and full electric won for the simple fact that a plugin needs to be charged every day I will drive somewhere. For the electric, I can recharge it once a week or twice a month and it will cover my needs. I don't have an in-house charger so this is a massive difference.
paganel 4y ago
> you consider hundreds of millions of vehicles need to be replaced. They probably won't be all replaced. A minority of people (I'd put it at around 15-20% max) will afford to own an EV (price + place to charge it), while the great majority of us will be left with old combustion-engine cars, Cuba style (or until the law will prohibit them entirely, most probably).
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
goodpoint 4y ago
Or, even better, build less cars and more trains.
fulafel 4y ago
We need to cut down on cars a lot, the emissions equation doesn't make sense otherwise. Because (a) replacing cars is hugely CO2 intensive and (b) there doesn't seem to be any reasonable timescale path to leaving the currently known oil/gas deposits in the ground and not pumping & burning them up. Until there is, EVs are just additional emissions.

eveningcoffee 4y ago

Yes, but do customers want plugin-hybrids instead of fully electric?

Gravityloss 4y ago
If it's a lot cheaper for similar range, yes. Or if it has better range for same price (ie compared to a small battery electric car). It depends on your driving profile. For most of the year, I do small trips, below 50 km per day. Then I do maybe 10 200-400 km trips a year. I could get maybe 80% electric kilometers with a modest plugin hybrid.
- seneca 4y ago
  The biggest concern I've heard for hybrids is lifetime maintenance cost. You have both the legacy ICE and transmission, as well as electrical components to maintain. That's a major hypothetical disadvantage to all electric. Does anyone have numbers for this?
  - twblalock 4y ago
    Toyota Priuses have been sold for over 20 years (closer to 25 actually!) and they are very reliable. There are Prius taxis with half a million miles on the original battery.
  - jointpdf 4y ago
    This is a great site for long-term reliability data on many cars: http://www.dashboard-light.com/vehicles/Toyota_Prius.html http://www.dashboard-light.com/vehicles/Toyota_Prius.html. The Prius has the highest reliability score of any compact in their list. This explains where the data and scores come from: http://www.dashboard-light.com/click-here-first/ http://www.dashboard-light.com/click-here-first/
- twblalock 4y ago
  Plug-in hybrids are in a weird spot in the market. People who have access to home charging can buy long-range EVs which are much nicer to drive. People without access to home charging can buy non-plug-in hybrids or gas-powered cars. Most plug-in hybrids cost a bit more than the non-plug-in versions of the same car and their battery-only driving range is quite short. No matter where you are in the car market, plug-in hybrids are a weird compromise, delivering all the slowness of a hybrid and the requirement to have access to charging like an EV, for more money than a normal hybrid car.
  - tempestn 4y ago
    The other disadvantage hybrids have is that you have all the complexity of a both an electric and a gas car. One nice thing about full electric is that you do away with much of the regular maintenance of an ICE car.
    - Tagbert 4y ago
      There is that, but in a plug-in hybrid, the gas engine does not get used a lot. When it does, it is usually operating in a serial hybrid mode and runs within an optimal range without much stress. Actual wear and tear and maintenance are much less than in a conventional ICEV. You see this with Priuses and Volts. The gas engines live an unstressed life and last much longer. The Volt keeps track of usage and alerts you when it is time for an oil change. They can easily go 18 months between oil changes.
      - tempestn 4y ago
        That's fair, but still a big difference psychologically between 18m and never. Plus various other fluids. Even brake pads and rotors—on pure EVs they basically last forever thanks to regenerative braking. Perhaps modern hybrids do have that benefit as well now though.
        saalweachter 4y ago
        I mean, you take your car in to the shop once a year for its inspection, they take care of it all for you. The only difference with the BEV is they don't charge you $X0 for the oil change.
- pornel 4y ago
  The problem is that hybrids are good only for range anxiety. You assume you're getting an EV and a great range — best of both worlds. The reality is that you get worst of both worlds: a crappy low-end EV experience with worst-case charging, and a poor ICE car with even less cabin/cargo space than a pure ICE (and much less than a pure BEV). In hybrids, the battery is very tiny, so lasts for a day or two instead of a week or more. This means having a home charger is an absolute necessity. Small batteries don't support rapid charging, so you won't be able to use many public chargers, even if you were patient enough to wait hours instead of minutes. Horesepower of hybrid cars is advertised as a sum of EV+ICE engines together, but that's a rare scenario. You'll be mostly using underpowered EV-only half when you can, and then the underpowered ICE-only half when you run out of juice. When you're on electricity, you're lugging an ICE engine, and when you're road tripping, you have worse fuel economy due to lugging a useless battery and an EV motor (regen doesn't do much even when it works, and highway cruising is the worst-case scenario for it). In many hybrids transmission/clutch adds a lag, so you don't get the sweet instant torque BEVs are known for. You have worst-case maintenance costs. On top of all the moving parts of an ICE engine and a complex gearbox, your battery will wear out sooner. A small battery will tend to be cycled 100% to 0%, instead of kept in the 80%-50% range that is much gentler for lithium batteries.
  - brianwawok 4y ago
    Exactly. They were made to check compliance boxes and not be a useful car.
    - SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
      I don’t think you or GP have owned one. I’m an automotive EE, I’ve had almost all types of vehicles to drive. I really like the Wrangler plug in hybrid. My week to week saw almost zero gas being used, it was like having a full electric and I could still drive wherever I wanted. With 4Low and diff lockers. Loved it! I drive ~12mi a day, works great for me, but I know it’s not for people with commutes.
      - Lio 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
eliseumds 4y ago
In emerging markets, hybrids are a much smarter choice. Here in Brazil there are few fast chargers (say 40kW+), and a great bunch of them are broken anyway. My next car will be a plug-in hybrid. Maybe an electric in 10 years.
- moffkalast 4y ago
  Indeed the infrastructure's just not there yet in most places, and not just Brazil, it sucks basically everywhere. PHEVs can be charged at home and should have enough battery range for those short daily errands across town, while having the range of a normal ICE car for long trips where the lack of fast chargers is most critical. Plus they'll break down more due to higher complexity and the repair shops will love and lobby for them so win-win-win.
  - brianwawok 4y ago
    Yuck oil changes plus battery wear. PHEVs are the best of both worlds, I would recommend them last (after EV and then basic ICE)
    - jader201 4y ago
      Did you mean “worst” of both worlds?
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    Plug-in hybrids and EVs cost less to maintain and repair, finds Consumer Reports https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1129728_plug-in-hybrids-and-evs-cost-less-to-maintain-and-repair-finds-consumer-reports https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1129728_plug-in-hybrids...
    - moffkalast 4y ago
      EVs are indubitably miles ahead in terms of being simple to maintain mechanically since it's a sealed fixed gear system (the software is another matter, but let's disregard that for now), but I don't believe those numbers for the PHEV for a second. You're maintaining both an EV and an ICE at the same time in one car with both needing to interface with each other in complex ways. There's bound to be in the range of 4x as much that can go wrong compared to just one or the other. You'll have the mechanical issues of the ICE coupled with the software problems of an EV. It's an absolutely stupid idea to even consider doing these sort of overcomplicated hybrids, but unfortunately it's also the only way to get around the abysmal battery capacity we currently have.
01100011 4y ago
I love my EV, but I'll be switching to a hybrid when the lease is up. EVs are great but charging is currently a pain. I have no doubt I'll switch back to an EV in a few years, but right now, they're not worth it to me.
eulers_secret 4y ago
As an apartment dweller, I would want a regular hybrid. So would the folks I know who only have street parking. For many of us, electric or plugin just strait-up aren't an option. We get forgotten about all the time, but lots of us exist!
- coryrc 4y ago
  This is why we need charging at where you park for work. Or build densely and pedestrian-friendly enough you don't need any car.
- ericd 4y ago
  The streets of Paris have lots of chargers along the sidewalks, seems like cities elsewhere should be able to pull that off as well. Doesn’t even need to be high powered if they’re intended to be parked at overnight.
  - burntoutfire 4y ago
    There'd have to be charger every 5-6 meters or so along most sidewalks where I live to make electric viable. Certainly not impossible, but sounds like an absolutely massive investment.
    - stevage 4y ago
      Really so much more than a parking meter for every spot?
      - erik_seaberg 4y ago
        No meters in neighborhoods around here, just painted curbs. I only see meters on very dense downtown blocks, and many seem to be solar powered (which seems feasible for an LCD and a card slot).
      - burntoutfire 4y ago
        In my city, there's maybe a parking meter for every 20 spots. Plus, most spots are in non-metered areas. PLUS, the meter does not require a very high voltage power line...

bretpiatt 4y ago

For VW to build 10 million electric vehicles to keep numbers up [1], at 60kWh per vehicle which approximately the midsized ID.3 [2], they need to build roughly 12x this capacity, so ~$240B investment which is about what the whole company is worth today [3]. [1] https://www.best-selling-cars.com/brands/2020-full-year-global-volkswagen-group-worldwide-sales-by-brand-and-market/ https://www.best-selling-cars.com/brands/2020-full-year-glob... [2] https://www.drivingelectric.com/volkswagen/id3/range https://www.drivingelectric.com/volkswagen/id3/range [3] https://ycharts.com/companies/VWAGY/enterprise_value https://ycharts.com/companies/VWAGY/enterprise_value

oblio 4y ago
They don't have to build absolutely every battery, they can still work with partners.
- bluGill 4y ago
  This is also a first investment. They can wait a year and invest double in a larger plant - when building something for mass manufacture you start with a smaller plant to learn how to do it, and then a larger one applying all the expensive lessons learned the hard way from the first. Sometimes this cycle is repeating dozens of times.
nine_k 4y ago
Won't a next factory cost less, due to the accumulated know-how, optimizations, improvements, etc? I suppose the investment goes not just to civil engineering and land.
rgbrenner 4y ago
The 20b covers 6 of these plants… totaling 240gwh or 3m vehicles (4m ID.3s).

gadflyinyoureye 4y ago

Hybrids make more sense than EVs when you compare emissions over the course of the cars life. https://www.emissionsanalytics.com/news/hybrids-are-better https://www.emissionsanalytics.com/news/hybrids-are-better

jlmorton 4y ago
That's not what that link says. It says that hybrids deliver a larger CO2 reduction per unit of battery, and because batteries are scarce, we would do better CO2 reduction by focusing limited battery capacity in hybrid vehicles, as this would lead to the greatest number of miles traveled on electric charge, along with some savings from the weight of batteries. It definitely does not say that BEVs have higher emissions over the course of a car's life. It pretty clearly shows that BEVs have the largest decrease in CO2 emissions, as you would expect.
- jeffbee 4y ago
  And yet, there are plenty of BEVs on the market that will never have lower emissions than a Prius Prime. Some of this junk is leaving the factory with embodied carbon higher than the lifetime emissions of a plug-in hybrid. Looking at you, Polestar.

csours 4y ago

Disclosure: I work for GM, this is solely my own opinion and experience. There is a strong assumption that battery costs will come down, and raw material extraction will ramp up. It is important to remember that we are currently extracting megatons of fossil fuels and just burning them to ash and carbon dioxide yearly. There is also a strong assumption that batteries will be very recyclable in the future (recycling batteries will make economic sense) Consider that a plug in hybrid needs two full propulsion systems. Both of those systems need to be engineered, tested, integrated, built, warrantee-ed, and serviced. If battery prices do come down, the cost of the extra battery pack will soon be lower than the added cost of the ICE propulsion system. It is my understanding that these factors led GM's leadership team to stop producing the Volt (plug in hybrid) system and transition to all EV. If, however, battery prices stay high or go up for an extended period of time, this bet will look worse. Fortunately for consumers, there is choice.

atlasunshrugged 4y ago
This is a really helpful industry perspective, thanks csours. When GM and others are thinking about this, is it focused on beliefs in specific markets or globally? I know that many commodities trade globally but there is a ton of noise in DC about critical mineral supply chains and America's reliance on China but at the same time minimal movement on extraction and even less on processing domestically because of the environmental factors/NIMBYism. But if there were another trade war with China, would that change the equation for GM or are the rest of the markets a large enough weight that doesn't matter? Do you think GM and others believe there will be U.S. mines brought online or that all the growth in extraction will come from abroad? Given the pushback in other places (e.g. Serbia's Rio Tinto mine, Mexico nationalizing their sector, etc.) I'm pretty skeptical about being able to depend solely on foreign growth.
- csours 4y ago
  I believe government incentives and regulations will have a huge effect on the speed of adoption in a country, and China and Europe have both of those. I don't think mineral extraction will have much effect on locality. Shipping is pretty cheap - we already move oil to refineries and gasoline to filling stations. GM does have a >> “strategic investment and commercial collaboration” with Controlled Thermal Resources (CTR) to procure lithium from Southern California’s Salton Sea https://www.hagerty.com/media/news/gm-ctr-lithium-partnership-salton-sea/#:~:text=Earlier%20this%20month%2C%20General%20Motors,that%20seeks%20to%20minimize%20the https://www.hagerty.com/media/news/gm-ctr-lithium-partnershi...

jillesvangurp 4y ago

Or build smaller cars. Not everybody needs an 80kwh SUV. That's just the current market, which seems to favor stupidly big, heavy, and inefficient cars. That's not going to stay that way and VW is already planning to build smaller and cheaper cars. There are some cool vehicles hitting the market now that emphasize efficiency and range over just being big. E.g. Lightyear has very good aerodynamics and weight and a few other manufacturers are focusing on that as well. A light city car like a Nissan Leaf does pretty well with just 40kwh. The original one shipped with just 20kwh and that was a relatively heavy vehicle. Imagine the same vehicle with twice the energy density. It would have a lot more range. A few kwh go a long way on light vehicles. Electrical motor cycles have somewhere in the range of only 4-8kwh. A lot of electrical bicycles have less than 1 kwh. 10kwh is plenty for a light vehicle. Anyway, hybrids have all the downsides of owning an ICE car (lots of moving parts, pollution, expensive fuel, maintenance cost, etc.) with only some of the upsides of owning an EV (torque, fuel economy, etc.). Basically, in terms of cost and complexity, they don't make a lot of sense. The cheaper batteries get, the less sense they make. Right now EVs are just really expensive which means not everybody can afford one. However, cheaper, smaller EVs are perfectly feasible and a lot cheaper to make. Once the high end market saturates, smaller, lighter and cheaper EVs are the next obvious growth market. From next to nothing to many millions in volume is going to happen relatively quickly. In such a market, hybrids don't really stand a chance. Those hundreds of millions of vehicles will be replaced over the course of 2-3 decades. Annual production volume of cars will be mostly EVs by mid next decade; in about 15 years. From then on, another 15 years or so later, most ICE vehicles will have been decommissioned. The value proposition at 2022 cost levels is already pretty great for EVs (with incentives and if you can afford them). Another 3 decades of technical improvements, economies of scale, etc. is going to only improve the economics.

rodet 4y ago
Making lighter vehicles is a big strategy to make electric affordable quick indeed. Maybe some companies will manage to find good solution and implement them quicker than car makers? Renault managed this with the Twizy. I investigated myself plugin hybrid vs full electric, and full electric won for the simple fact that a plugin needs to be charged every day I will drive somewhere. For the electric, I can recharge it once a week or twice a month and it will cover my needs. I don't have an in-house charger so this is a massive difference.

paganel 4y ago

> you consider hundreds of millions of vehicles need to be replaced. They probably won't be all replaced. A minority of people (I'd put it at around 15-20% max) will afford to own an EV (price + place to charge it), while the great majority of us will be left with old combustion-engine cars, Cuba style (or until the law will prohibit them entirely, most probably).

deleted 4y ago

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goodpoint 4y ago

Or, even better, build less cars and more trains.

fulafel 4y ago

We need to cut down on cars a lot, the emissions equation doesn't make sense otherwise. Because (a) replacing cars is hugely CO2 intensive and (b) there doesn't seem to be any reasonable timescale path to leaving the currently known oil/gas deposits in the ground and not pumping & burning them up. Until there is, EVs are just additional emissions.