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Electric vehicle battery prices are expected to fall almost 50% by 2026

45 points by doener 2y ago

diminish 2y ago
We need >2000 km ranges in one charge of electric vehicles for widespread adoption.
- manmal 2y ago
  I think a cheap car with 1k km range would sell pretty well already. For many people that’s a once a month charge.
- sho 2y ago
  I think James May made a great point when he said it's not about range, it's about quick and ubiquitous charging. I wouldn't mind if my vehicle could only travel 300km... if I could have the confidence I'd be able to stop and top it up in just a couple of minutes no matter where I was. Faster charging would really make all the difference.
  - hackernewds 2y ago
    Not really. if your choice is a better ICE car at the same price point, why get an EV that has to stop intermittently and has failure modes like broken chargers. It has to be as good. And better
    - amatecha 2y ago
      Yeah, the amount of issues I hear about with chargers not working, and everything relying on using some app? I'm not installing a smartphone app to charge a battery! So far I'm not feeling too tempted about electric vehicles. I'll be happy to find something that avoids these shortcomings though!
      - exitb 2y ago
        It's not a technology issue, it's a service issue. If ICE cars were invented today, you'd need an app at a gas station too.
        amatecha 2y ago
        No doubt. I hope there's more pushback against that crap.
      - Hamuko 2y ago
        EU regulations require charging stations to accept card payments by 2027.
        amatecha 2y ago
        Nice, that's really good to hear! Hopefully other jurisdictions follow the lead there!
    - aidos 2y ago
      Good and better by which metrics? Different people have different requirements.
    - speedgoose 2y ago
      Thankfully they are often better. 95% of new car sales are EVs in my area. It took a few years to get there, people don't necessarily know immediately what they like best. https://elbilstatistikk.no/ https://elbilstatistikk.no/
      - closewith 2y ago
        Norway is an absolute outlier, driven exclusively by tax incentives. In the rest of the EEA, EVs sales are plummeting. https://www.acea.auto/pc-registrations/new-car-registrations-18-3-in-august-2024-bev-market-share-down-by-almost-one-third/ https://www.acea.auto/pc-registrations/new-car-registrations...
        speedgoose 2y ago
        Do you have a source about “exclusively“?
        itsoktocry 2y ago
        Have you looked at the taxes versus incentives for EVs vs ICEs in Norway? If you need a new car and one is triple the cost (because the other is exempt from fees) what are you going to buy? But yeah, it's for the environment, surely. Reverse the policy and see what happens.
        speedgoose 2y ago
        I agree it's a strong incentive, but I'm not sure it's the only one. One example was during the cold wave last winter. ICE owners struggled quite a bit more than EV owners. You also have the problem that ICE vehicles are quite slow and laggy, unless you spend a lot of money on performance ICE vehicles but then they usually tend to be loud and uncomfortable.
  - davedx 2y ago
    Eh I much prefer my Model 3 to my wife’s Mach-E because of the longer range it has. Even with fast chargers on the motorway it’s inconvenient to have to stop regularly to charge and delays your journey. 450km is nice for the Netherlands; if I had 500-600km range then I’d only ever need to charge at home which is way better.
    - carlmr 2y ago
      For me 500km range is also the sweet spot. But it needs to be real range, like including heating in winter or AC in summer. And while I only usually drive 300-350km in one piece, I don't want to buy a car where I have to fear that a drive of this sort ends up waiting to be towed because of battery degradation (500km will realistically be 450km in a few years), or because I missed the last charging station or got stuck in traffic with heating running, and the remaining few km dwindle in front of me. It's rational to fear your phone being under 20% when you still need it. It's just as rational to have 20% buffer when charging your car battery.
      - Ekaros 2y ago
        Real range at motorway speed that is 120km/h in summer. My current cheap ICE has atleast 450 km total including 350 km or so at 120. Which to me would be sweet spot. I could get to nearest big cities and airports there and then back. And only have to think refuelling or charging in couple of days after. In the end that is only two about 2 hour drive stints. And really spending time on those stints instead of getting to destination or being home later...
  - vasco 2y ago
    > I wouldn't mind if my vehicle could only travel 300km... if I could have the confidence I'd be able to stop and top it up in just a couple of minutes no matter where I was. This is called a motorcycle! Mine can do 260-280km on a gas tank, still does huge trips. Once batteries work like gas, you're absolutely right.
    - boomskats 2y ago
      > Mine can do 260-280km on a gas tank, still does huge trips. How is this a motorcycle specific feature?
      - nasmorn 2y ago
        Cars are not built with such tiny tanks
  - closewith 2y ago
    The problem with fast charging, at least here in Ireland, is that it's significantly more expensive than petrol. Our family moved back from an EV to PHEV because we get the benefit of 90+% of our journeys being for free (from solar charging at home), but that last 10% is petrol that is always available. There's also nothing more miserable than being stuck in a queue for a fast charger with a colicy baby. I've offered people cash to get to the front of the queue, although no-one's ever accepted money when they understand why.
- ggm 2y ago
  What % of cars have this range? Not your diesel f150, the real cars real people with real everyday lives drive My Hyundai i30 has a 600km range, max.
  - Hamuko 2y ago
    Range is kinda irrelevant if you live in a place where filling stations are ubiquitous. Going 850 km in my old petrol-powered car required just one five-minute stop.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - vardump 2y ago
      850 km without breaks?
      - Hamuko 2y ago
        Pee break while filling up the car but not beyond that. I had some food on me so I could wait to have a proper meal until I got to my destination.
      - defrost 2y ago
        That's Perth to Carnarvon up the coast road in Western Australia, roughly 8 hours @ 110 km/hr speed limit and one leg of a longer trip from (say) Perth to Broome.
  - closewith 2y ago
    A diesel F150 will easily do 1,000km+ on a full tank.
    - ggm 2y ago
      Yes. That's my point. They can, lots of diesel tractors can. Family cars owned by most people do not have 2000km range tanks and it's ludicrous to define a barrier to acceptance that far north of lived experience for most people. It's called range anxiety for a reason. People are anxious about it. But, it's disconnected from what a trip meter tells us about average commute, daily drive. Cue hoardes of "but i live rural and drive 30,000km a day" responses. Because people don't understand averages and what on average most people do. I know I drive below average, i checked. I do about 1/3 to 1/4 of an average Australian driver. I also know these 200km daily commute drivers are a wild outlier, not the norm. The people whining about e-vehicle range snipe social media to headline their justified concerns to their outlier behaviour and distort the conversation.
- beAbU 2y ago
  Not everywhere is massive and spread out like US. In Ireland I can basically get anywhere in the whole country with one charge and maybe a top-up along the way. I'm more than happy with my 400km range.
  - realusername 2y ago
    People use their car way less than they think. The median work distance in France is 12km in the countryside and 6km in the cities. 25% of the workers travel less than 4km even in the countryside. Source: https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/7622203 https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/7622203 The current range is way above most needs already and I'm not sure cars (electric or not) is even the answer with such a low usage.
    - Hamuko 2y ago
      If people bought cars for their median usage, they'd buy cars with like 1.2 seats and that top out at 70 km/h.
      - realusername 2y ago
        That would not be a bad option to get smaller compared to the small tanks that people are driving right now. Cars are one of the most inefficient form of transport anyways and driving almost never makes sense on large distances. Instead of a large flow of people driving 600km to go to the same place with a single seat used each only once per year, what you would want is public transport instead on those routes, that would be more rational.
        Gibbon1 2y ago
        I remember in Taiwan they had roads and overpasses for scooters. You could rework cities to support small low speed vehicles. The US could build more mass transit. As the work from home vs return to the office struggle shows bashing business to relocate closer to where people work has some merit.
  - 2y ago
- 9dev 2y ago
  People really need to get away from that notion electric vehicles need to be as similar as possible to ICE vehicles. Most people living in cities don’t ever require that range, because 99% of their rides will be constrained to less than 50 kilometers. And even on the countryside, few people need to drive such long stretches on a single charge. Keeping up this stoic desire to not having to change your habits around driving at all is dismissing a lot of the benefits small, lightweight electric cars could get us, if they didn’t need to carry tons of battery around—that isn’t even necessary most of the time.
  - AmericanChopper 2y ago
    If you want people to choose one thing, then you want it to be better than or at least as good as the alternatives. The idea that EVs need to be comparable to ICE vehicles isn’t just some silly argument, it’s literally the choice that consumers are faced with if they want to buy a car. Even if longer range travel is only 1% of what consumers will do with their car (which I’m sure is a number you just made up), why would you get a product that only meets 99% of your needs, when you can get the competing product that meets 100% of them?
    - amatecha 2y ago
      Yeah, and so far EVs almost universally have a couple "no-go" bullet points for me: touch screen controls, and always-online. Either of those just instantly excludes such a vehicle from my consideration. Uhh, unsurprisingly, I have no clue what I'm going to do when my current vehicle becomes unusable! Replace it with another old one, I guess?! >_<
    - 9dev 2y ago
      It’s definitely a hyperbole number I made up. The point is that the technology isn’t equal or better, but different. It has other constraints and capabilities, but pretending an engine is an engine as long as the hood is closed gets us in the current situation where car builders struggle to recreate ICEs, but electric, consumers are never satisfied because they have wrong expectations, and regulators don’t ensure the charging infrastructure that would actually required exists. With an electric vehicle, you can get an extremely low-maintenance, easy to drive, fast accelerating, ecologically efficient car. That has its on merits. On the other hand, it has a lower range than an ICE engine, and is less reliable in cold weather.
- davedx 2y ago
  [flagged]
- wg0 2y ago
  Or 10x longer battery life. Or 100x faster charging time. Something has to change among those factors for wider adoption.
- kyriakos 2y ago
  As an owner of an EV it took me the first 6 months to adapt. The concept is different and you need to adapt your mentality to it. When you use an ICE car you fill up once it goes under 20% When you drive an EV you leave home and it's always full and costs nothing (PV takes care of that). Most places I visit have chargers which means you charge while you do what you have to do be it restaurant, shopping mall, supermarket etc. Things only happen differently if you plan long journey and living on an island that's no issue.
  - amatecha 2y ago
    How does that work when all cars are electric? Fighting with some guy at the grocery store for a charging port? I'm not trying to be inflammatory asking that, I genuinely wonder what the approach is supposed to be if suddenly everyone went and bought an electric car. I always hear that "you can charge all over the place" but I'll see like, two charging stalls in a giant parking lot. I wonder what the future looks like in that regard in, say, 5-10 years.
    - defrost 2y ago
      > I wonder what the future looks like in that regard in, say, 5-10 years. Likely, for one, a great deal more aluminium HVAC|DC cable laid in car parks to support charging; copper's kind of expensive and in short supply but is also a contender. Might be smart to invest in any IPO's launched to raise capital for new proven economically feasible smelters processing infrastructure. The hay to feed all those horses doesn't appear by magic, livery's the future m'lad.
    - kyriakos 2y ago
      Demand and supply I guess. If all cars were EV all parking spots would have a port. Simplistic I know but that's how markets work. Would gas/petrol stations exist every few km if there weren't cars that needed them?
    - aidos 2y ago
      I think really, like your parent said, people charge them at home. In the UK, energy providers have plans where they schedule charging overnight so it costs next to nothing. It costs about £10 / month for a family vehicle that gets daily use.
- ben_w 2y ago
  You commute from Vancouver, Canada to Tijuana, Mexico?
- dudeism_est_03 2y ago
  I personally doubt very much that this range is required. Charging infrastructure is definitely a lot more important. I still drive a diesel because I drive across Europe a lot. My usual journey is 700km, which I can do with ca. 40L. The total my 65L tank would give me is about 1000km depending on the conditions. Anyway, those 700km take about 8 hours with a couple of short stops. If I were to drive 2000km I would definitely need a long break in which I could easily charge. I am not really aware of any ICE having a greater range than that, never mind 2000Km. I’ve once driven the Plugin-Hybrid Kuga and it got very close to the diesel range. It almost made the entire 700km journey with the 40l petrol tank. But these long journeys only happen a few times a year and I think it would be silly to drive a huge battery around for the off chance I am driving across an entire continent.
- woggy 2y ago
  I don't think my Mazda3 has anything near that range
xbmcuser 2y ago
The effect I think will be felt more in home batteries as with many places around the world now hitting curtailments. And stopping net metering for home solar as supply is higher than demand.
sgu999 2y ago
I guess cell-to-pack has some disadvantages otherwise everyone would have started there?
mulperi 2y ago
We would need a standardized, replaceable battery pack that takes us 300-500 km. That would eliminate the risk of expensive battery service and make recharging instant at service station.
- speedgoose 2y ago
  Battery swapping stations looks a lot more expensive and failure prone compared to fast chargers. I think 250kW flat charging curves are almost as convenient. Go to pee and scroll HN for one minute and voilà.
  - KingOfCoders 2y ago
    "fast chargers." Or contact less, constant charging at traffic lights, during parking, on the highway. I'm sure there are people in 1900 who said, "Cars will never work, because I need to by petroleum in a pharmacy!" ignoring how technology will progress. If you had told them, there will be a "gas station" everywhere, those people would have called you crazy.
    - mjevans 2y ago
      As cool as an inductive charging strip would be, offhand, the inherent losses as well as practically microwaving the underside of the car, would probably both be too much. Now, parking lots where a robot lifts an underside contact up if there's a match, that might just work.
      - KingOfCoders 2y ago
        Wirless charging my phone is idiotic from an energy point of view, but convenient. I do thing the last 20.000 years of human progress has been driven by convenience (and security). I'd bet for the more convenient solution every day.
        ssl-3 2y ago
        That's not a very fair comparison. I'm not worried at all about the power efficiency of my phone's charging process. Some napkin math suggests that my pocket supercomputer costs me at most about $1 per year to keep charged and running, or perhaps $5 over the life of the phone, when plugged in every night. I wouldn't notice or care if it were an order of magnitude worse than that at $10 per year or $50 over the life of the phone. So wireless charging of my phone doesn't bother me a bit, and it is something that I use that when it is convenient. An EV doesn't operate at that scale, though. I would care a lot about losing even 10 or 20% of charging efficiency with an EV.
kristopolous 2y ago
I've been calling this shot for years. The cost optimization runway for EVs is much longer than for gas cars. Their adoption will eventually be a pure numbers game as new electric becomes cost competitive with used gas. That's how the pragmatic adoption will happen. You don't need, for instance, catalytic converters or a bunch of other expensive, low tolerance parts and since the fuel storage is electricity, new chemistries are way more feasible. Everything points to a car price crash in the next decade or so. There's already sub-$5k models in China. This will drop even lower when things like inductive road charging or other ways of passive refueling while in use (such as solar). Then you can tear even more out. Imagine office parking lots where inductive charges were put in every parking spot as they laid the concrete being an expected, normal thing. No cables, no plugging. Most people buy used cars today. In the future (10-20 years), most people will have these: frequently passive charging cheap vehicles using non expensive commodity parts.
- standeven 2y ago
  Yes, about 2000 moving parts in a combustion engine compared to 20 in an electric motor. The only reason ICE cars are comparable in price is the 100 years of supply chain competition. EVs will win, but gas and diesel will persist for a long time in niches (enthusiasts, long-haul towing).
  - kristopolous 2y ago
    More rural places without electrification are the big long term use until renewable tech becomes better and significantly cheaper. In the future there will be off-grid unmanned free standing windmill or solar installations with a car charger hooked up to it. People will put such public chargers on their vacant land, say in the desert, for passive income, profit sharing with the installer. Their storage capacity, price and availability will be broadcast by cellular and be part of the realtime routing decision of the vehicle who will be able to reserve a time slot. Whenever such free standing charging station businesses becomes viable, that's when gasolines cars will be in their final decline. Might be 40 years, might be 10.
    - 2y ago
amatecha 2y ago
Nice, I'm glad to hear LFP batteries are gaining popularity. More stable, no nickel or cobalt, IIRC cheaper to produce, way more charge cycles, and slower degradation of overall capacity.
KingOfCoders 2y ago
The biggest problem in Germany at the moment is that a high percentage of chargers are broken. Here is a supermarket with chargers, broken for weeks now. Imagine the outcry if 50% of gas pumps were broken all the time.
- standeven 2y ago
  Tesla superchargers are rarely down. Not sure what they’re doing differently, but it shows that EV chargers CAN be reliable, but a lot of companies haven’t figured it out yet.
  - cevn 2y ago
    This has been changing since Musk fired the supercharger team. I found one location where the entire set was nonfunctional and no indication in the car app.
- rightbyte 2y ago
  I've worked with these chargers. It is shoddy software that usually is the problem. The algorithm to detect ground faults is a major culprit.
- jauntywundrkind 2y ago
  The USA has a bunch of funding available to states to fund charging networks, under the Inflstion Reduction Act. At the beginning of the year we finally got our federal charging standard together, and it's looking really good & useful on this front: To get funding you need real time & historical charger availability and status info (including what charge rates are available), via API. Making sure chargers are both really discoverable & actually usable should be greatly improved!
- kristopolous 2y ago
  All new industries are plagued by functional problems during the scaling stage. Electricity isn't inherently as unreliable in other applications so these problems will eventually be resolved and have approximately the same failure profile as normal electricity.
balboah 2y ago
Except here in the EU where they increase import tax because china producing “too cheap” EVs
- karmakurtisaani 2y ago
  Got to protect the business that failed to innovate when it had the chance.
Ekaros 2y ago
So will this even further destroy resale values of current EVs? As batteries are major component of price so drop in their price means drop in general of the price. Increasing depreciation even further...
- 4b11b4 2y ago
  Yes, think of them as phones
kkfx 2y ago
I still wait here in Europe prices like https://asia.nikkei.com/content/1f9ed40b4b44745e1a39fafaf94b8b74 https://asia.nikkei.com/content/1f9ed40b4b44745e1a39fafaf94b... for cars and BRICS-like prices for p.v. at least for those who want to self-construct. My p.v. is only 5kWp/8kWh LFP because at 2019 prices that's a bit more than a wise economical choice, at BRICS price it would quickly evolve in a 10kWp/30kWh allow me to be nearly autonomous for large part of the year...

45 points by doener 2y ago

diminish 2y ago

We need >2000 km ranges in one charge of electric vehicles for widespread adoption.

manmal 2y ago
I think a cheap car with 1k km range would sell pretty well already. For many people that’s a once a month charge.
sho 2y ago
I think James May made a great point when he said it's not about range, it's about quick and ubiquitous charging. I wouldn't mind if my vehicle could only travel 300km... if I could have the confidence I'd be able to stop and top it up in just a couple of minutes no matter where I was. Faster charging would really make all the difference.
- hackernewds 2y ago
  Not really. if your choice is a better ICE car at the same price point, why get an EV that has to stop intermittently and has failure modes like broken chargers. It has to be as good. And better
  - amatecha 2y ago
    Yeah, the amount of issues I hear about with chargers not working, and everything relying on using some app? I'm not installing a smartphone app to charge a battery! So far I'm not feeling too tempted about electric vehicles. I'll be happy to find something that avoids these shortcomings though!
    - exitb 2y ago
      It's not a technology issue, it's a service issue. If ICE cars were invented today, you'd need an app at a gas station too.
      - amatecha 2y ago
        No doubt. I hope there's more pushback against that crap.
    - Hamuko 2y ago
      EU regulations require charging stations to accept card payments by 2027.
      - amatecha 2y ago
        Nice, that's really good to hear! Hopefully other jurisdictions follow the lead there!
  - aidos 2y ago
    Good and better by which metrics? Different people have different requirements.
  - speedgoose 2y ago
    Thankfully they are often better. 95% of new car sales are EVs in my area. It took a few years to get there, people don't necessarily know immediately what they like best. https://elbilstatistikk.no/ https://elbilstatistikk.no/
    - closewith 2y ago
      Norway is an absolute outlier, driven exclusively by tax incentives. In the rest of the EEA, EVs sales are plummeting. https://www.acea.auto/pc-registrations/new-car-registrations-18-3-in-august-2024-bev-market-share-down-by-almost-one-third/ https://www.acea.auto/pc-registrations/new-car-registrations...
      - speedgoose 2y ago
        Do you have a source about “exclusively“?
        itsoktocry 2y ago
        Have you looked at the taxes versus incentives for EVs vs ICEs in Norway? If you need a new car and one is triple the cost (because the other is exempt from fees) what are you going to buy? But yeah, it's for the environment, surely. Reverse the policy and see what happens.
        speedgoose 2y ago
        I agree it's a strong incentive, but I'm not sure it's the only one. One example was during the cold wave last winter. ICE owners struggled quite a bit more than EV owners. You also have the problem that ICE vehicles are quite slow and laggy, unless you spend a lot of money on performance ICE vehicles but then they usually tend to be loud and uncomfortable.
- davedx 2y ago
  Eh I much prefer my Model 3 to my wife’s Mach-E because of the longer range it has. Even with fast chargers on the motorway it’s inconvenient to have to stop regularly to charge and delays your journey. 450km is nice for the Netherlands; if I had 500-600km range then I’d only ever need to charge at home which is way better.
  - carlmr 2y ago
    For me 500km range is also the sweet spot. But it needs to be real range, like including heating in winter or AC in summer. And while I only usually drive 300-350km in one piece, I don't want to buy a car where I have to fear that a drive of this sort ends up waiting to be towed because of battery degradation (500km will realistically be 450km in a few years), or because I missed the last charging station or got stuck in traffic with heating running, and the remaining few km dwindle in front of me. It's rational to fear your phone being under 20% when you still need it. It's just as rational to have 20% buffer when charging your car battery.
    - Ekaros 2y ago
      Real range at motorway speed that is 120km/h in summer. My current cheap ICE has atleast 450 km total including 350 km or so at 120. Which to me would be sweet spot. I could get to nearest big cities and airports there and then back. And only have to think refuelling or charging in couple of days after. In the end that is only two about 2 hour drive stints. And really spending time on those stints instead of getting to destination or being home later...
- vasco 2y ago
  > I wouldn't mind if my vehicle could only travel 300km... if I could have the confidence I'd be able to stop and top it up in just a couple of minutes no matter where I was. This is called a motorcycle! Mine can do 260-280km on a gas tank, still does huge trips. Once batteries work like gas, you're absolutely right.
  - boomskats 2y ago
    > Mine can do 260-280km on a gas tank, still does huge trips. How is this a motorcycle specific feature?
    - nasmorn 2y ago
      Cars are not built with such tiny tanks
- closewith 2y ago
  The problem with fast charging, at least here in Ireland, is that it's significantly more expensive than petrol. Our family moved back from an EV to PHEV because we get the benefit of 90+% of our journeys being for free (from solar charging at home), but that last 10% is petrol that is always available. There's also nothing more miserable than being stuck in a queue for a fast charger with a colicy baby. I've offered people cash to get to the front of the queue, although no-one's ever accepted money when they understand why.
ggm 2y ago
What % of cars have this range? Not your diesel f150, the real cars real people with real everyday lives drive My Hyundai i30 has a 600km range, max.
- Hamuko 2y ago
  Range is kinda irrelevant if you live in a place where filling stations are ubiquitous. Going 850 km in my old petrol-powered car required just one five-minute stop.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - vardump 2y ago
    850 km without breaks?
    - Hamuko 2y ago
      Pee break while filling up the car but not beyond that. I had some food on me so I could wait to have a proper meal until I got to my destination.
    - defrost 2y ago
      That's Perth to Carnarvon up the coast road in Western Australia, roughly 8 hours @ 110 km/hr speed limit and one leg of a longer trip from (say) Perth to Broome.
- closewith 2y ago
  A diesel F150 will easily do 1,000km+ on a full tank.
  - ggm 2y ago
    Yes. That's my point. They can, lots of diesel tractors can. Family cars owned by most people do not have 2000km range tanks and it's ludicrous to define a barrier to acceptance that far north of lived experience for most people. It's called range anxiety for a reason. People are anxious about it. But, it's disconnected from what a trip meter tells us about average commute, daily drive. Cue hoardes of "but i live rural and drive 30,000km a day" responses. Because people don't understand averages and what on average most people do. I know I drive below average, i checked. I do about 1/3 to 1/4 of an average Australian driver. I also know these 200km daily commute drivers are a wild outlier, not the norm. The people whining about e-vehicle range snipe social media to headline their justified concerns to their outlier behaviour and distort the conversation.
beAbU 2y ago
Not everywhere is massive and spread out like US. In Ireland I can basically get anywhere in the whole country with one charge and maybe a top-up along the way. I'm more than happy with my 400km range.
- realusername 2y ago
  People use their car way less than they think. The median work distance in France is 12km in the countryside and 6km in the cities. 25% of the workers travel less than 4km even in the countryside. Source: https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/7622203 https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/7622203 The current range is way above most needs already and I'm not sure cars (electric or not) is even the answer with such a low usage.
  - Hamuko 2y ago
    If people bought cars for their median usage, they'd buy cars with like 1.2 seats and that top out at 70 km/h.
    - realusername 2y ago
      That would not be a bad option to get smaller compared to the small tanks that people are driving right now. Cars are one of the most inefficient form of transport anyways and driving almost never makes sense on large distances. Instead of a large flow of people driving 600km to go to the same place with a single seat used each only once per year, what you would want is public transport instead on those routes, that would be more rational.
      - Gibbon1 2y ago
        I remember in Taiwan they had roads and overpasses for scooters. You could rework cities to support small low speed vehicles. The US could build more mass transit. As the work from home vs return to the office struggle shows bashing business to relocate closer to where people work has some merit.
- 2y ago
9dev 2y ago
People really need to get away from that notion electric vehicles need to be as similar as possible to ICE vehicles. Most people living in cities don’t ever require that range, because 99% of their rides will be constrained to less than 50 kilometers. And even on the countryside, few people need to drive such long stretches on a single charge. Keeping up this stoic desire to not having to change your habits around driving at all is dismissing a lot of the benefits small, lightweight electric cars could get us, if they didn’t need to carry tons of battery around—that isn’t even necessary most of the time.
- AmericanChopper 2y ago
  If you want people to choose one thing, then you want it to be better than or at least as good as the alternatives. The idea that EVs need to be comparable to ICE vehicles isn’t just some silly argument, it’s literally the choice that consumers are faced with if they want to buy a car. Even if longer range travel is only 1% of what consumers will do with their car (which I’m sure is a number you just made up), why would you get a product that only meets 99% of your needs, when you can get the competing product that meets 100% of them?
  - amatecha 2y ago
    Yeah, and so far EVs almost universally have a couple "no-go" bullet points for me: touch screen controls, and always-online. Either of those just instantly excludes such a vehicle from my consideration. Uhh, unsurprisingly, I have no clue what I'm going to do when my current vehicle becomes unusable! Replace it with another old one, I guess?! >_<
  - 9dev 2y ago
    It’s definitely a hyperbole number I made up. The point is that the technology isn’t equal or better, but different. It has other constraints and capabilities, but pretending an engine is an engine as long as the hood is closed gets us in the current situation where car builders struggle to recreate ICEs, but electric, consumers are never satisfied because they have wrong expectations, and regulators don’t ensure the charging infrastructure that would actually required exists. With an electric vehicle, you can get an extremely low-maintenance, easy to drive, fast accelerating, ecologically efficient car. That has its on merits. On the other hand, it has a lower range than an ICE engine, and is less reliable in cold weather.
davedx 2y ago
[flagged]
wg0 2y ago
Or 10x longer battery life. Or 100x faster charging time. Something has to change among those factors for wider adoption.
kyriakos 2y ago
As an owner of an EV it took me the first 6 months to adapt. The concept is different and you need to adapt your mentality to it. When you use an ICE car you fill up once it goes under 20% When you drive an EV you leave home and it's always full and costs nothing (PV takes care of that). Most places I visit have chargers which means you charge while you do what you have to do be it restaurant, shopping mall, supermarket etc. Things only happen differently if you plan long journey and living on an island that's no issue.
- amatecha 2y ago
  How does that work when all cars are electric? Fighting with some guy at the grocery store for a charging port? I'm not trying to be inflammatory asking that, I genuinely wonder what the approach is supposed to be if suddenly everyone went and bought an electric car. I always hear that "you can charge all over the place" but I'll see like, two charging stalls in a giant parking lot. I wonder what the future looks like in that regard in, say, 5-10 years.
  - defrost 2y ago
    > I wonder what the future looks like in that regard in, say, 5-10 years. Likely, for one, a great deal more aluminium HVAC|DC cable laid in car parks to support charging; copper's kind of expensive and in short supply but is also a contender. Might be smart to invest in any IPO's launched to raise capital for new proven economically feasible smelters processing infrastructure. The hay to feed all those horses doesn't appear by magic, livery's the future m'lad.
  - kyriakos 2y ago
    Demand and supply I guess. If all cars were EV all parking spots would have a port. Simplistic I know but that's how markets work. Would gas/petrol stations exist every few km if there weren't cars that needed them?
  - aidos 2y ago
    I think really, like your parent said, people charge them at home. In the UK, energy providers have plans where they schedule charging overnight so it costs next to nothing. It costs about £10 / month for a family vehicle that gets daily use.
ben_w 2y ago
You commute from Vancouver, Canada to Tijuana, Mexico?
dudeism_est_03 2y ago
I personally doubt very much that this range is required. Charging infrastructure is definitely a lot more important. I still drive a diesel because I drive across Europe a lot. My usual journey is 700km, which I can do with ca. 40L. The total my 65L tank would give me is about 1000km depending on the conditions. Anyway, those 700km take about 8 hours with a couple of short stops. If I were to drive 2000km I would definitely need a long break in which I could easily charge. I am not really aware of any ICE having a greater range than that, never mind 2000Km. I’ve once driven the Plugin-Hybrid Kuga and it got very close to the diesel range. It almost made the entire 700km journey with the 40l petrol tank. But these long journeys only happen a few times a year and I think it would be silly to drive a huge battery around for the off chance I am driving across an entire continent.
woggy 2y ago
I don't think my Mazda3 has anything near that range

xbmcuser 2y ago

The effect I think will be felt more in home batteries as with many places around the world now hitting curtailments. And stopping net metering for home solar as supply is higher than demand.

sgu999 2y ago

I guess cell-to-pack has some disadvantages otherwise everyone would have started there?

mulperi 2y ago

We would need a standardized, replaceable battery pack that takes us 300-500 km. That would eliminate the risk of expensive battery service and make recharging instant at service station.

speedgoose 2y ago
Battery swapping stations looks a lot more expensive and failure prone compared to fast chargers. I think 250kW flat charging curves are almost as convenient. Go to pee and scroll HN for one minute and voilà.
- KingOfCoders 2y ago
  "fast chargers." Or contact less, constant charging at traffic lights, during parking, on the highway. I'm sure there are people in 1900 who said, "Cars will never work, because I need to by petroleum in a pharmacy!" ignoring how technology will progress. If you had told them, there will be a "gas station" everywhere, those people would have called you crazy.
  - mjevans 2y ago
    As cool as an inductive charging strip would be, offhand, the inherent losses as well as practically microwaving the underside of the car, would probably both be too much. Now, parking lots where a robot lifts an underside contact up if there's a match, that might just work.
    - KingOfCoders 2y ago
      Wirless charging my phone is idiotic from an energy point of view, but convenient. I do thing the last 20.000 years of human progress has been driven by convenience (and security). I'd bet for the more convenient solution every day.
      - ssl-3 2y ago
        That's not a very fair comparison. I'm not worried at all about the power efficiency of my phone's charging process. Some napkin math suggests that my pocket supercomputer costs me at most about $1 per year to keep charged and running, or perhaps $5 over the life of the phone, when plugged in every night. I wouldn't notice or care if it were an order of magnitude worse than that at $10 per year or $50 over the life of the phone. So wireless charging of my phone doesn't bother me a bit, and it is something that I use that when it is convenient. An EV doesn't operate at that scale, though. I would care a lot about losing even 10 or 20% of charging efficiency with an EV.

kristopolous 2y ago

I've been calling this shot for years. The cost optimization runway for EVs is much longer than for gas cars. Their adoption will eventually be a pure numbers game as new electric becomes cost competitive with used gas. That's how the pragmatic adoption will happen. You don't need, for instance, catalytic converters or a bunch of other expensive, low tolerance parts and since the fuel storage is electricity, new chemistries are way more feasible. Everything points to a car price crash in the next decade or so. There's already sub-$5k models in China. This will drop even lower when things like inductive road charging or other ways of passive refueling while in use (such as solar). Then you can tear even more out. Imagine office parking lots where inductive charges were put in every parking spot as they laid the concrete being an expected, normal thing. No cables, no plugging. Most people buy used cars today. In the future (10-20 years), most people will have these: frequently passive charging cheap vehicles using non expensive commodity parts.

standeven 2y ago
Yes, about 2000 moving parts in a combustion engine compared to 20 in an electric motor. The only reason ICE cars are comparable in price is the 100 years of supply chain competition. EVs will win, but gas and diesel will persist for a long time in niches (enthusiasts, long-haul towing).
- kristopolous 2y ago
  More rural places without electrification are the big long term use until renewable tech becomes better and significantly cheaper. In the future there will be off-grid unmanned free standing windmill or solar installations with a car charger hooked up to it. People will put such public chargers on their vacant land, say in the desert, for passive income, profit sharing with the installer. Their storage capacity, price and availability will be broadcast by cellular and be part of the realtime routing decision of the vehicle who will be able to reserve a time slot. Whenever such free standing charging station businesses becomes viable, that's when gasolines cars will be in their final decline. Might be 40 years, might be 10.
  - 2y ago

amatecha 2y ago

Nice, I'm glad to hear LFP batteries are gaining popularity. More stable, no nickel or cobalt, IIRC cheaper to produce, way more charge cycles, and slower degradation of overall capacity.

KingOfCoders 2y ago

The biggest problem in Germany at the moment is that a high percentage of chargers are broken. Here is a supermarket with chargers, broken for weeks now. Imagine the outcry if 50% of gas pumps were broken all the time.

standeven 2y ago
Tesla superchargers are rarely down. Not sure what they’re doing differently, but it shows that EV chargers CAN be reliable, but a lot of companies haven’t figured it out yet.
- cevn 2y ago
  This has been changing since Musk fired the supercharger team. I found one location where the entire set was nonfunctional and no indication in the car app.
rightbyte 2y ago
I've worked with these chargers. It is shoddy software that usually is the problem. The algorithm to detect ground faults is a major culprit.
jauntywundrkind 2y ago
The USA has a bunch of funding available to states to fund charging networks, under the Inflstion Reduction Act. At the beginning of the year we finally got our federal charging standard together, and it's looking really good & useful on this front: To get funding you need real time & historical charger availability and status info (including what charge rates are available), via API. Making sure chargers are both really discoverable & actually usable should be greatly improved!
kristopolous 2y ago
All new industries are plagued by functional problems during the scaling stage. Electricity isn't inherently as unreliable in other applications so these problems will eventually be resolved and have approximately the same failure profile as normal electricity.

balboah 2y ago

Except here in the EU where they increase import tax because china producing “too cheap” EVs

karmakurtisaani 2y ago
Got to protect the business that failed to innovate when it had the chance.

Ekaros 2y ago

So will this even further destroy resale values of current EVs? As batteries are major component of price so drop in their price means drop in general of the price. Increasing depreciation even further...

4b11b4 2y ago
Yes, think of them as phones

kkfx 2y ago

I still wait here in Europe prices like https://asia.nikkei.com/content/1f9ed40b4b44745e1a39fafaf94b8b74 https://asia.nikkei.com/content/1f9ed40b4b44745e1a39fafaf94b... for cars and BRICS-like prices for p.v. at least for those who want to self-construct. My p.v. is only 5kWp/8kWh LFP because at 2019 prices that's a bit more than a wise economical choice, at BRICS price it would quickly evolve in a 10kWp/30kWh allow me to be nearly autonomous for large part of the year...