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I think for the EV skeptics it’s easy to forget how fast battery chemistry has been evolving. There’s an common assumption that the EV status quo of 300 mile ra

by dangus 3y ago

I think for the EV skeptics it’s easy to forget how fast battery chemistry has been evolving. There’s an common assumption that the EV status quo of 300 mile range at barely-affordable prices will continue forever, and therefore with all the woes surrounding charging and bad weather affecting range, EVs are dead in the water. Ten years ago $30k got you 75 miles of range out of a Nissan Leaf. Fast forward to present day and you will spend less money before adjusting for inflation and get 259 miles of range in the same class of vehicle (Chevy Bolt EV). When many automakers say they will only sell EVs by ~2035, it sounds a bit far-fetched, but in the context of the past 10 years it’s hard to deny the high probability that gasoline vehicles will make basically no sense by the 2030s on the basis of value. Gasoline cars will simply cost more to own, end of story.

hinkley 3y ago
Are batteries still on a roughly 3-4% annual rate of improvement? Or has that shifted? So,e of that will have been aerodynamics (the industry is slowly boiling the frog on styling vs aerodynamics) and motor efficiency, which has climbed a lot in the last 15 years.
- jackmott42 3y ago
  energy density hasn't really changed for 15 years, price dropped a lot though, but price drop has also paused recently. There is no telling if any progress will be made or not. Maybe! Maybe not.
  - Detrytus 3y ago
    Actually, when demand for EVs goes up, lithium mining won't be able to keep up, so in the next decade or so we'll see steep increase in battery prices.
    - hinkley 3y ago
      In the next decade you will see more reliance on technology that becomes cheaper than simply throwing lithium at the problem. It's the same thing with many techs. In the 70's we thought we would run out of oil by 2000, and a lot of asshats in the 80's and 90's crowed about how stupid those so-called experts were. What happened in the 80's and 90's was ground sensing radar found more oil, horizontal drilling found ways to access more of what was there, and zeolites saw widespread use as a catalyst to increase the amount of gas and diesel recovered from a barrel of oil. And over time production of zeolites made that process work better and better. It's very much like when Apple went to non-replaceable batteries. Battery life doubled in that model because 3 different parts of the problem got improvements. Density, volume, and power management all contributed almost 30% each. Between "Oh Shit" and "Told Ya", we could produce twice as much fossil fuel as we knew how to do at the time. The same will happen with Lithium. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle and Replace.
      - tadfisher 3y ago
        That's not what Peak Oil means, but I think you know this. The cost of oil will never return to pre-2000s levels because meeting demand necessitates more expensive extraction technologies like shale and offshore. In that sense (the correct one), the prediction of peak oil by 2000 was remarkably accurate.
        ffhhttt 3y ago
        If you adjust by inflation oil is now cheaper than it was between 1980 and 85.
        hinkley 3y ago
        As is food.
        alanh 3y ago
        Isn't that cherry-picking? That was the peak of the oil crisis
    - xbmcuser 3y ago
      Some chinese car manufacturers have already moved to sodium ion for car batteries. It is quite funny to me when people bring arguments of how electric cars won't work they are unaware the rate at which things are changing in the space. And that their arguments have been invalid in 2-3 years but they read the article from 5 years back and then never bothered to update themselves. The same is the case for solar tech.
  - hinkley 3y ago
    That doesn't sound right, so since nobody else has piped up I decided to actually try to find the answer myself. Volumetric numbers from the DOE suggest it went from 55 Wh/l in 2008 to 450 in 2020, which a compound interest calculator tells me is about 20% per year. Which is an awful lot. Physics world says 80Wh/kg when Sony introduced them in 1991, and 300 today (although someone above said 270 is what ships), which looks like about 5.1%. But the lab experiment numbers are substantially more than that https://physicsworld.com/a/lithium-ion-batteries-break-energy-density-record/ https://physicsworld.com/a/lithium-ion-batteries-break-energ... and shows that the exponential curve was visible back in about 2014. These of course have little to do with production numbers. The bigger the breakthrough the longer it takes to commercialize (or the more watered down it becomes to be commercialized). That was the wisdom when Wall Street was interested in new battery companies. 5% means every 14 years power doubles. We've been flirting with electric vehicles at least that long.
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    This is because batteries are, of course, magical devices produced by chemE’s and only begrudgingly handed over to the EE’s, along with instructions like “do not puncture the pouch, or the magic spirits will get free and erupt into a vile flame which burns water.” I am quite certain they are just doing alchemy and have tricked us all (it is of course well known that chemE’s are actually the cleverest type of engineer).
- acover 3y ago
  In 8 years costs per kWh dropped from $732 to $151 usd-2022 [0]. Halving every few years but it's been slowing down. [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/883118/global-lithium-ion-battery-pack-costs/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/883118/global-lithium-io...
linuxftw 3y ago
I remain skeptical until the products are real and affordable. No reason to buy an electric car now if they'll have potentially double the range in a few years.
- xsmasher 3y ago
  By that logic it never makes sense to buy a computer. It'll be obsolete in 18 months! Electric cars are cheaper to operate that gas RIGHT NOW, with less maintenance. No reason to hold off just because they're going to get better.
  - lostlogin 3y ago
    For a Leaf the dealers response to ‘where do I go to get it serviced?’ was ‘don’t bother, nothing to service. That’s a slight exaggeration but not by much (diff oil needs changing and the tyres need rotating). It’s amazing.
  - linuxftw 3y ago
    Companies literally made this calculus decades ago during the boom years of Moore's law when it came to purchasing computer hardware. > Electric cars are cheaper to operate that gas RIGHT NOW, with less maintenance. My timeline for owning a vehicle is 15+ years. I'm not going to buy something that is instantly obsolete. I'm also not going to buy all this vendor lock-in nonsense all these EVs come with. If they were basic rides with an electric drivetrain, sure, but they try to make everything the millennium falcon. You should look up how much fun it is getting service and parts on a new vehicle nowadays. You're rolling the dice that you won't burn down your home and/or have a lawn ornament because you can't get parts.
  - Turskarama 3y ago
    I bought a Kia Rio, the cheapest EV I can buy in my country (Australia) is an MG4 for around twice the price (~$20k for the Kia, ~$40k for the MG). I don't drive very much, under 10,000 km per year. I've done the maths and for me an EV is more expensive over an expected 10 year lifespan. Granted I drive significantly less than average, but fuel costs here are a fair bit higher than in the US so for a lot of people buying at the bottom end of the market it may still not be true that an EV is cheaper.
iamatworknow 3y ago
To me it all still comes down to charging infrastructure. The current state of batteries is good enough for me, but I live in an apartment and can't charge at home, and the availability/reliability local charging stations are a crap shoot, nevermind charging on a road trip. But when (if?) I own my own house and can charge at home, I'll be in even with the current state of batteries.
- kd5bjo 3y ago
  My primary concern with the charging infrastructure is how well it will handle a large number of people taking emergency trips at the same time. How do you evacuate south Florida with an incoming hurricane, for example, when most people have switched from gasoline to electric cars? That scenario pushes the existing fuel delivery infrastructure to its limit already, and electric chargers provide significantly fewer passenger miles per fueling minute than a gasoline pump does. In practice, a lot of emergency plans will need to be completely overhauled to not assume most people will be able to drive themselves out of the danger zone.
  - snowwrestler 3y ago
    This is a good point and I think the answer is that solutions for in-place charging will need to be regulated or subsidized into existence in step with the shifting market share of electric cars. The typical range of a fully charged electric car these days is sufficient to get out of the way of almost any predictable natural disaster. So the trick is just keeping them all fully charged at home. Any homeowner can in theory have a charger off their home power grid, but for folks in apartments and condos there will need to be a lot more than just a few chargers in the corner of the garage. There may even need to be street-side solutions. But it’s all doable and the engineering is straightforward. People allow gas cars to sit with nearly empty tanks because it is so fast (and expensive) to fill them up. Electric cars are slow and cheap to “fill up” so the mindset and culture about it will change over time.
    - kd5bjo 3y ago
      > The typical range of a fully charged electric car these days is sufficient to get out of the way of almost any predictable natural disaster. Maybe, and maybe not. The one time I had to do this myself, I started with a full gas tank and still ended up stopping to fill a couple of times. An evacuation is hardly the ideal condition for range, with lots of stop-and-go traffic. You need to not only get out of immediate danger but also find some safe place to lodge overnight that doesn’t interfere with the people behind you that also need to get out.
gorjusborg 3y ago
Are there EV skeptics? I don't think so. There are average people and EV fanboys. It's just that fanboys call the other people skeptics. EVs are in early adoption still, from my point of view. Try to pump it all you want, but EVs offer far less utility for a higher price, and they are more inconvenient. Until the industry standardizes on batteries and stations offer pre-charged battery swaps, I'll hang on to my ICE machine.
- AtlasBarfed 3y ago
  EVs are quieter, smoother, higher torque, better accelerating, for simpler drivetrain, less maintenance. I've seen so many TCO reports on Teslas being cheaper than new ICE cars, and that was before the Tesla price cuts and the insane inflation in new car costs in ICE. As for the "new car cost", I suspect Tesla is already at cost-per-vehicle parity with an ICE, but Tesla is keeping a high margin on their cars. With sodium ion and high density LFP chemistries coming to mass production this year, ICE cost advantage's days are numbered. Supply constraints will keep ICE marginally cheaper for probably 5 years in some consumer car classes. But "far less utility for a higher price and more inconvenience" is pretty much bunk. But I would keep an ICE if I was in the Midwest.
  - tooltalk 3y ago
    >> As for the "new car cost", I suspect Tesla is already at cost-per-vehicle parity with an ICE, but Tesla is keeping a high margin on their cars. << You are thinking last year when the auto market was out of whack due to COVID related shortages. Tesla's operating margin is down to 9.6% in 2Q 2023; compared that to Hyundai's 9.5% and Kia's 12.5%. >> With sodium ion and high density LFP chemistries coming to mass production this year, ICE cost advantage's days are numbered. << LFPs are still limited to entry-level, low-range EVs because of low energy density and weight. The cost of LFP's is't that attractive when the price of lithium is above $20K.
- djaychela 3y ago
  >Are there EV skeptics? I don't think so. Lots of them. They're really gaining traction in the UK (where I live) - so much so that I hear compete b****s every day about EVs, and I'm tired of hearing it. I'm on my phone so can't type all the examples but essentially I've heard every advantage of them being said to be untrue, and that ice cars are better for the environment, etc. The right wing press in this country has a lot to answer for.
Turskarama 3y ago
This depends on if battery production can continue to be scaled up by another order of magnitude. That's a very short period of time for monstrous growth in multiple industries, it's by no means a sure thing.

by dangus 3y ago

hinkley 3y ago

Are batteries still on a roughly 3-4% annual rate of improvement? Or has that shifted? So,e of that will have been aerodynamics (the industry is slowly boiling the frog on styling vs aerodynamics) and motor efficiency, which has climbed a lot in the last 15 years.

jackmott42 3y ago
energy density hasn't really changed for 15 years, price dropped a lot though, but price drop has also paused recently. There is no telling if any progress will be made or not. Maybe! Maybe not.
- Detrytus 3y ago
  Actually, when demand for EVs goes up, lithium mining won't be able to keep up, so in the next decade or so we'll see steep increase in battery prices.
  - hinkley 3y ago
    In the next decade you will see more reliance on technology that becomes cheaper than simply throwing lithium at the problem. It's the same thing with many techs. In the 70's we thought we would run out of oil by 2000, and a lot of asshats in the 80's and 90's crowed about how stupid those so-called experts were. What happened in the 80's and 90's was ground sensing radar found more oil, horizontal drilling found ways to access more of what was there, and zeolites saw widespread use as a catalyst to increase the amount of gas and diesel recovered from a barrel of oil. And over time production of zeolites made that process work better and better. It's very much like when Apple went to non-replaceable batteries. Battery life doubled in that model because 3 different parts of the problem got improvements. Density, volume, and power management all contributed almost 30% each. Between "Oh Shit" and "Told Ya", we could produce twice as much fossil fuel as we knew how to do at the time. The same will happen with Lithium. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle and Replace.
    - tadfisher 3y ago
      That's not what Peak Oil means, but I think you know this. The cost of oil will never return to pre-2000s levels because meeting demand necessitates more expensive extraction technologies like shale and offshore. In that sense (the correct one), the prediction of peak oil by 2000 was remarkably accurate.
      - ffhhttt 3y ago
        If you adjust by inflation oil is now cheaper than it was between 1980 and 85.
        hinkley 3y ago
        As is food.
        alanh 3y ago
        Isn't that cherry-picking? That was the peak of the oil crisis
  - xbmcuser 3y ago
    Some chinese car manufacturers have already moved to sodium ion for car batteries. It is quite funny to me when people bring arguments of how electric cars won't work they are unaware the rate at which things are changing in the space. And that their arguments have been invalid in 2-3 years but they read the article from 5 years back and then never bothered to update themselves. The same is the case for solar tech.
- hinkley 3y ago
  That doesn't sound right, so since nobody else has piped up I decided to actually try to find the answer myself. Volumetric numbers from the DOE suggest it went from 55 Wh/l in 2008 to 450 in 2020, which a compound interest calculator tells me is about 20% per year. Which is an awful lot. Physics world says 80Wh/kg when Sony introduced them in 1991, and 300 today (although someone above said 270 is what ships), which looks like about 5.1%. But the lab experiment numbers are substantially more than that https://physicsworld.com/a/lithium-ion-batteries-break-energy-density-record/ https://physicsworld.com/a/lithium-ion-batteries-break-energ... and shows that the exponential curve was visible back in about 2014. These of course have little to do with production numbers. The bigger the breakthrough the longer it takes to commercialize (or the more watered down it becomes to be commercialized). That was the wisdom when Wall Street was interested in new battery companies. 5% means every 14 years power doubles. We've been flirting with electric vehicles at least that long.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  This is because batteries are, of course, magical devices produced by chemE’s and only begrudgingly handed over to the EE’s, along with instructions like “do not puncture the pouch, or the magic spirits will get free and erupt into a vile flame which burns water.” I am quite certain they are just doing alchemy and have tricked us all (it is of course well known that chemE’s are actually the cleverest type of engineer).
acover 3y ago
In 8 years costs per kWh dropped from $732 to $151 usd-2022 [0]. Halving every few years but it's been slowing down. [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/883118/global-lithium-ion-battery-pack-costs/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/883118/global-lithium-io...

linuxftw 3y ago

I remain skeptical until the products are real and affordable. No reason to buy an electric car now if they'll have potentially double the range in a few years.

xsmasher 3y ago
By that logic it never makes sense to buy a computer. It'll be obsolete in 18 months! Electric cars are cheaper to operate that gas RIGHT NOW, with less maintenance. No reason to hold off just because they're going to get better.
- lostlogin 3y ago
  For a Leaf the dealers response to ‘where do I go to get it serviced?’ was ‘don’t bother, nothing to service. That’s a slight exaggeration but not by much (diff oil needs changing and the tyres need rotating). It’s amazing.
- linuxftw 3y ago
  Companies literally made this calculus decades ago during the boom years of Moore's law when it came to purchasing computer hardware. > Electric cars are cheaper to operate that gas RIGHT NOW, with less maintenance. My timeline for owning a vehicle is 15+ years. I'm not going to buy something that is instantly obsolete. I'm also not going to buy all this vendor lock-in nonsense all these EVs come with. If they were basic rides with an electric drivetrain, sure, but they try to make everything the millennium falcon. You should look up how much fun it is getting service and parts on a new vehicle nowadays. You're rolling the dice that you won't burn down your home and/or have a lawn ornament because you can't get parts.
- Turskarama 3y ago
  I bought a Kia Rio, the cheapest EV I can buy in my country (Australia) is an MG4 for around twice the price (~$20k for the Kia, ~$40k for the MG). I don't drive very much, under 10,000 km per year. I've done the maths and for me an EV is more expensive over an expected 10 year lifespan. Granted I drive significantly less than average, but fuel costs here are a fair bit higher than in the US so for a lot of people buying at the bottom end of the market it may still not be true that an EV is cheaper.

iamatworknow 3y ago

To me it all still comes down to charging infrastructure. The current state of batteries is good enough for me, but I live in an apartment and can't charge at home, and the availability/reliability local charging stations are a crap shoot, nevermind charging on a road trip. But when (if?) I own my own house and can charge at home, I'll be in even with the current state of batteries.

kd5bjo 3y ago
My primary concern with the charging infrastructure is how well it will handle a large number of people taking emergency trips at the same time. How do you evacuate south Florida with an incoming hurricane, for example, when most people have switched from gasoline to electric cars? That scenario pushes the existing fuel delivery infrastructure to its limit already, and electric chargers provide significantly fewer passenger miles per fueling minute than a gasoline pump does. In practice, a lot of emergency plans will need to be completely overhauled to not assume most people will be able to drive themselves out of the danger zone.
- snowwrestler 3y ago
  This is a good point and I think the answer is that solutions for in-place charging will need to be regulated or subsidized into existence in step with the shifting market share of electric cars. The typical range of a fully charged electric car these days is sufficient to get out of the way of almost any predictable natural disaster. So the trick is just keeping them all fully charged at home. Any homeowner can in theory have a charger off their home power grid, but for folks in apartments and condos there will need to be a lot more than just a few chargers in the corner of the garage. There may even need to be street-side solutions. But it’s all doable and the engineering is straightforward. People allow gas cars to sit with nearly empty tanks because it is so fast (and expensive) to fill them up. Electric cars are slow and cheap to “fill up” so the mindset and culture about it will change over time.
  - kd5bjo 3y ago
    > The typical range of a fully charged electric car these days is sufficient to get out of the way of almost any predictable natural disaster. Maybe, and maybe not. The one time I had to do this myself, I started with a full gas tank and still ended up stopping to fill a couple of times. An evacuation is hardly the ideal condition for range, with lots of stop-and-go traffic. You need to not only get out of immediate danger but also find some safe place to lodge overnight that doesn’t interfere with the people behind you that also need to get out.

gorjusborg 3y ago

Are there EV skeptics? I don't think so. There are average people and EV fanboys. It's just that fanboys call the other people skeptics. EVs are in early adoption still, from my point of view. Try to pump it all you want, but EVs offer far less utility for a higher price, and they are more inconvenient. Until the industry standardizes on batteries and stations offer pre-charged battery swaps, I'll hang on to my ICE machine.

AtlasBarfed 3y ago
EVs are quieter, smoother, higher torque, better accelerating, for simpler drivetrain, less maintenance. I've seen so many TCO reports on Teslas being cheaper than new ICE cars, and that was before the Tesla price cuts and the insane inflation in new car costs in ICE. As for the "new car cost", I suspect Tesla is already at cost-per-vehicle parity with an ICE, but Tesla is keeping a high margin on their cars. With sodium ion and high density LFP chemistries coming to mass production this year, ICE cost advantage's days are numbered. Supply constraints will keep ICE marginally cheaper for probably 5 years in some consumer car classes. But "far less utility for a higher price and more inconvenience" is pretty much bunk. But I would keep an ICE if I was in the Midwest.
- tooltalk 3y ago
  >> As for the "new car cost", I suspect Tesla is already at cost-per-vehicle parity with an ICE, but Tesla is keeping a high margin on their cars. << You are thinking last year when the auto market was out of whack due to COVID related shortages. Tesla's operating margin is down to 9.6% in 2Q 2023; compared that to Hyundai's 9.5% and Kia's 12.5%. >> With sodium ion and high density LFP chemistries coming to mass production this year, ICE cost advantage's days are numbered. << LFPs are still limited to entry-level, low-range EVs because of low energy density and weight. The cost of LFP's is't that attractive when the price of lithium is above $20K.
djaychela 3y ago
>Are there EV skeptics? I don't think so. Lots of them. They're really gaining traction in the UK (where I live) - so much so that I hear compete b****s every day about EVs, and I'm tired of hearing it. I'm on my phone so can't type all the examples but essentially I've heard every advantage of them being said to be untrue, and that ice cars are better for the environment, etc. The right wing press in this country has a lot to answer for.

Turskarama 3y ago

This depends on if battery production can continue to be scaled up by another order of magnitude. That's a very short period of time for monstrous growth in multiple industries, it's by no means a sure thing.