5 ms·
These articles are always "Don't buy an EV yet, MUCH better ones are coming soon". Same article since 2010, always Coming Soon™.
by grecy 3y ago
These articles are always "Don't buy an EV yet, MUCH better ones are coming soon".
Same article since 2010, always Coming Soon™.
- jncfhnb 3y agoThey’re not wrong per se. the tech has been improving quickly.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- czbond 3y agoJust lease for the next 5-7 years - best risk mitigation I can think of
- Syonyk 3y agoYou definitely won't risk leaving large sums of money in your bank account... I suppose it depends on what risk you're concerned about, but if you've got the cashflow to flush money down the lease rabbithole, you probably don't care too much about a couple grand difference in value down the road on your car, beyond academically.
- gnicholas 3y agoThe WSJ just ran an article about how it may make sense for consumers to lease rather than buy, at this particular juncture. This is especially true where the vehicle doesn't qualify for federal tax credits if purchased, but does qualify if leased.
- gmerc 3y agoThe same is true for AI at this point. this happens when technological progress accelerates sufficiently.
- candiddevmike 3y agoAccelerates or plateaus?
- notatoad 3y agothey are getting better. every year there's the promise of a new big leap forward in a few years. but in the intervening few years all the previously announced "big leaps" come to market, so by the time an announced technology comes to market, it's just an incremental improvement. go back to 2010 and show past you the batteries we've got now, you'd be impressed by what huge progress there was.
- Mystery-Machine 3y agoLike what? Can you give some examples of the huge battery progress within the last 14 years?
- slavik81 3y agoIn 2010, lithium ion batteries cost $450/kWh. In 2023, lithium ion batteries cost $139/kWh. The gain in capacity has also been noticable. It's a few percent per year, but over a decade that adds up.
- w-m 3y agoSales weighted battery capacity has nearly doubled since 2021: https://www.adamasintel.com/average-battery-capacity-converging-top-markets/ https://www.adamasintel.com/average-battery-capacity-converg... The Tesla Model S was introduced with 60 and 85 kWh batteries ~10 years ago. Today you can buy vehicles in the same class with 120 kWh, and dozens of models with 85+ kWh: https://ev-database.org/cheatsheet/useable-battery-capacity-electric-car https://ev-database.org/cheatsheet/useable-battery-capacity-... Of course affordability remains a problem, but the battery capacity per vehicle has drastically improved, even without world shattering breakthroughs in chemistry.
- geuis 3y agoIt's like any product based on a rapidly advancing set of technologies. There's a trade off financially between needing a product now or soon, and when the next major commercially available version is available.
- TaylorAlexander 3y agoYep and since 2010 I’ve not purchased one. Current EVs are very expensive and I couldn’t really afford one unless it had pretty decent range and was available used for $20k. Notably there is no place to charge them at my apartment complex. I’m hoping maybe in a few years a 2023 Ioniq 5 will be affordable enough, but we will see.
- AYBABTME 3y agoI just bought a used Ioniq 5 for $26k so it's not that far off your target goal.
- TaylorAlexander 3y agoHey nice and congrats!
- megaman821 3y agoThere is no use in hanging out for solid state batteries in the near future. The volumes will be small, the tech will be bleeding edge, and the batteries will be very expensive. The best fit for these batteries right now is drones.
- toss1 3y agoIndeed! But can we actually purchase solid state batteries with higher Wh/kg for drones (or other uses)? It'd be great to see some such on the market, not just in labs for the automobile-makers.
- Dylan16807 3y agoWhere does it say not to buy? Computers get much better every couple years, but you don't dismiss those as "Coming Soon™".
- coffeebeqn 3y agoI’ve seen people do that with GPUs! But this is an issue with all hardware. The available smartphones will also be better in a few years time but most people tend to settle for what fulfills their current need
- Dylan16807 3y agoYou've seen people mock the entire idea of buying a GPU because improvements keep being promised? Because that's what I'm saying GP doesn't do.
- caskstrength 3y ago> Computers get much better every couple years Did you write this from 2010? _Consumer_ computer products has been barely getting any better for a decade now. (last big WOW for me personally was getting first gen Retina MacBook Pro with SSD).
- switch007 3y agoThe M1 didn’t impress you?
- ben_w 3y agoI only got around to replacing a 2013 MacBook Air with an M1 MacBook Air last summer. The M1 is better when performance matters, like AI… but most of my experience isn't performance limited anyway. The improvements the M1 brought used to be the normal rate of change each year, and their absence since 2013 was how I was able to keep using that machine all that time. Now, the phones? Those have improved significantly. The cameras, the on-device AI, and where those two things were blended together - night photography, and translating text within images (even though image translation was first demonstrated on phones in 2010, it's a much better experience now).
- somerandomqaguy 3y agoAre you and I reading the same article? There's little about it that implies that one should hold off purchasing an EV for the sake of solid state batteries. Plenty of reasons right now to hold off buying an EV; upfront or operating costs, lack of at home charging, inability to get access to fast chargers for whatever reason, inability to tow heavy loads to desired destinations, etc. I sincerely doubt solid state batteries is one of the concerns on most people's list.
- Syonyk 3y agoYup. Meanwhile, if you did something like a 2011 GM Volt when it came out, you'd be several thousand gallons of gas and a rather larger amount of money ahead over "waiting and seeing."
- joking 3y agothe fuck up is that they will sell you a full new vehicle instead of a new battery. The same way that you can't put a newer more efficient ice in an old ICE car. It's a shame that cars are not more modular.
- Lio 3y agoI've had the same car since 2014 because I don't drive much. From my perspective this is still good advice. With current EVs I'd have to keep that it a very long time just to break even with the energy used in manufacturing. I think I've heard estimates of about 20,000-30,000 miles to break even. For a number reasons I don't find the current EV offerings compelling enough to trade in my old Golf yet. Right now I don't think there's anything I need to do for my use-cases that I could do better in a current EV.
- jillesvangurp 3y agoTechnology has actually improved massively since 2010. There's nothing wrong with the batteries on the market today. Relative to 2010, they are safer, provide better energy density, use less problematic materials like cobalt, etc. There are also a few new chemistries like LFP and sodium ion. Solid state is more or less progressing on a time line that hasn't really deviated a lot from what was projected a few years ago. There are a few companies out there that by now have proven that they can build cells that last lots of cycles and generally perform well. Taking those cells to production necessarily involves a series of increasingly larger plants to produce these cells and testing the hell out of the resulting cells. This is a slow process but it seems like a few companies are ramping up production volumes. Quantumscape is a good example. They are exactly where they said they would be a few years ago. They've delivered sample cells to a few of their customers (VW and a few others) and the tests came back positive. I think this year they are building small production facility to start producing low volumes of cells. If that's successful, we might see some cars from 2026/2027 onwards or so. But I would expect volume production to be dominated by LFP and increasingly sodium ion batteries for cheaper EVs for quite some time. They are good enough. Higher energy density will come at a premium.