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Inexpensive Electric Cars May Arrive Sooner Than You Think
catchblue22 writes According to an article in MIT Technology Review, a new peer reviewed study suggests that battery-powered vehicles are close to being cost-effective for most people: "Electric cars may seem like a niche product that only wealthy people can afford, but a new analysis suggests that they may be close to competing with or even beating gas cars on cost. ... The authors of the new study concluded that the battery packs used by market-leading EV manufacturers like Tesla and Nissan cost as little as $300 per kilowatt-hour of energy in 2014. That's lower than the most optimistic published projections for 2015, and even below the average published projection for 2020. The authors found that batteries appear on track to reach $230 per kilowatt-hour by 2018. The authors found that batteries appear on track to reach $230 per kilowatt-hour by 2018. If that's true, it would push EVs across a meaningful threshold."
The authors found that batteries appear on track to reach $230 per kilowatt-hour by 2018. The authors found that batteries appear on track to reach $230 per kilowatt-hour by 2018.
Perhaps some time after 2018 we will see editing of article summaries before they go to the front page as well? Nah, probably not.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
to reach $230 per kilowatt-hour by 2018.
The authors found that batteries appear on track to reach $230 per kilowatt-hour by 2018.
I expect that documentary - even though it was not in any way, shape, or form connected to Michael Moore - is not very popular with this crowd. However, if you were to take the time to watch it you may find it quite insightful. One thing in particular is that they found the battery manufacturers were not at fault - at least not as much as the other "suspects" - as they were doing the best they could with the technology of the time. It will be interesting to see how the market changes now that better batteries are becoming available.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
The authors found that
Ever consider stating a price that is "inexpensive?" I'd say a vehicle with an MSRP in the $10,000-$15,000 range would be inexpensive.
Rapid fill up, longer range, the engine noise and the smell of gasoline in order to satisfy the decades of genetic programming humans have evolved to need after inventing the automobile.
to reach $230 per kilowatt-hour by 2018.
$230 per kilowatt-hour is a completely meaningless number. How much is it going to cost me to replace the battery pack. $1,000? $5,000? $10,000?
*THAT* is what's important.
"Electric cars may seem like a niche product that only wealthy people can afford"
That's because it's exactly what they are, and exactly why adoption is utter shit. People praise Elon musk for leading this charge towards Electric cars but if nobody can afford them he isn't changing anything.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
With all electric there are 1000-2000 fewer wear components in the engine-drive train.
$/kWh capacity is not the relevant metric, because it neglects the number of (full) charge-discharge cycles that the battery can handle. A less expensive battery which needs to be replace twice over the lifetime of the car is not better than a battery twice as expensive which doesn't need to be replaced. The important metric is $/kWh stored over the lifetime of the car.
I wouldn't say they are a niche product just for the wealthy. I sent my 1998 Oldsmobile (that I bought 10 years ago for $4,000) to the scrap yard because it cost more in fuel than a lease on a brand new Chevy Spark EV + Electricity + insurance delta.
Tesla may still be for the wealthy, but there are plenty of inexpensive commuter EVs out there.
Also, FYI, the Spark EV is super fun to drive. Gobs of torque, and low center of gravity makes for quite a pleasant commute.
Although cheaper helps, there are still numerous disadvantages to electrics (range anxiety, ability to recharge cross-country, cold weather conditions, etc.) that aren't up to parity with ICs.
Even if Teslas were $10,000, they'd still be unsuitable for a large portion of drivers. Until infrastructure problems get addressed, or manufacturers get a clue and start incorporating range extenders (I so long for a series hybrid), electrics will be on the fringes of the market.
Although when these guys:
http://wrightspeed.com/
start to retrofit autos, that could mark the critical mass to finally push electrics mainstream.
Ain’t capitalism wonderful! Two cars. Each $40,000.00. One gas 300 m @ 20 mpg @ $3.00/gal = $45.00. Electric: 300m @ $10.00.
Evidently coal is cheaper burned at the mine or at a central station fed by unit trains, than is oil, shipped from anywhere, refined, shipped everywhere. Also batteries cause fewer explosions and fires.
Unfortunately, coal kills more people, even counting the wars, than oil does. And though it is irrelevant, coal makes more carbon dioxide emissions.
Fortunately, one central station is easier to clean up than 100,000 wells, 5,000 tankers, 1000 refineries, 1,000,000 trucks, 10,000,000 gas stations, and 1,000,000,000 cars.
Finally, my country has more coal than oil, and better technology.
Yes, but did 'The authors found that batteries appear on track to reach $230 per kilowatt-hour by 2018'?
I realize you may wish to be spoon fed, but 10 seconds googling "tesla battery capacity" will tell you the Model S battery is 85 kWh. At $230/kWh that is $19,550. Seems to me the economics stays utterly prohibitive except for rich pricks.
...and they all suck. Bad range, and terrible charge. People continue to buy gas cars because these issues are still not addressed in cars they could potentially afford.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
googling "tesla battery capacity" will tell you the Model S battery is 85 kWh. At $230/kWh that is $19,550. Seems to me the economics stays utterly prohibitive except for rich pricks.
And how many owners have had to replace their battery pack? This is not really an expense that owners plan to encounter, though it is an expense that goes in to making the car. That said, the $20k battery pack is a significant part of the cost of the drivetrain. You can't replace the drivetrain on a brand new BMW 3 series for $20k.
It might not be the best deal in motoring, but it is far from the worst. The reduction in cost also suggests that Tesla is on their way to producing a $30k car as promised.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
You have to consider the total cost of ownership, i.e. how much you are paying for petrol/diesel over the lifetime of the car. It's already reached the point where EVs are cheaper in the long run in countries where liquid fuel is more expensive than in the US, assuming you can live with the limitations of EV range and charge times. It's just that the up-front cost is higher.
It's the same situation as solar PV. The initial outlay puts people off, but over the lifetime of the panels they are bound to come out on top. For EV batteries leasing has been tried as a way of spreading the cost but turned out to be crap.
Don't forget that the battery itself has value even once the car is dead. As home battery systems for solar smoothing and whole-house UPS purposes become more common there will be more demand for used EV battery packs.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The tesla is a bad example. The 85w has a range over 300 miles.
My gasoline car has a range of 250 to 265 miles (280 pure highway).
Also, it presumes the old battery has zero value. I'm not sure that's true.
There's also some math problem since a tesla owner site says
http://my.teslamotors.com/it_I...
"1. we know the cost to replace an 85 kwh battery is ~$12,000"
This is apparently with a trade in of the old battery...
Others in the same discussion mention 20 year life spans for well maintained batteries.
And others say that as long as the range exceeds 75 miles, it's usable for their daily driving needs ( so the tesla battery pack could lose 65% of it's capacity and still be fine. Some say 50 miles (which was typical of my usage for my ICE when I was working).
Just FYI...
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
My wife and I made a Nissan Leaf our second vehicle. The lease isn't much more expensive than a similar vehicle.
She hasn't been to a 'gas station' in over a year. It's easy and great to drive. When I'm not going out of town it's my preferred vehicle. It's quiet and cheap to drive. With a pair of snow tires it makes a great winter vehicle.
With +1 on the way we're eying the Tesla X as our family vehicle.
and exactly why adoption is utter shit.
I've started to see more and more electric cars everywhere. Tesla is building them as fast as they can.
The difference between the 60kWh and 85kWh Tesla Model S cash price is $10,000 or $400/kWh so I'm not sure about the article's conclusion that the battery costs $300/kWh.
The Nissan Leaf's battery is closer to $300/kWh (based on comparing the price of a Leaf with the Flex option in the UK, where you buy the car and lease the battery separately); but there appear to be various anecdotal concerns about the Leaf's battery longevity. Tesla's design includes an active battery cooling system, whereas the Leaf seems to be passively cooled, and this is leading to the battery capacity on a full charge dropping rather faster than would be expected over time.
Despite this I think the conclusions are right - Li-Ion battery can only continue to improve, and if any of the several proposed methods of improving the technology are made to work they will get considerably cheaper soon. I think electric cars are here to stay, and it's a good thing.
Price is only part of the problem. Electric cars (the ones you can get right now) are terrible when it is really cold or really hot. In either condition, you need to run cooling or heating, which eats up power. Electric vehicles only work in a few parts of the country. Now, you can bring a blanket when it gets, but that will not help when windows get all foggy, unless you also bring a towel. Hot weather can be averted with a cooler full of ice and a low power fan, or perhaps open windows. Most people don't want to do that though.
Your gas car can fill up in 10 minutes. This is the reason that an electric car needs such a long range to be taken seriously. Personally I think a lot of people would be fine with a car with 100 mile range as a second car, or even as their only car. They could rent a car the 2 or 3 times a year they needed to drive further. I realize there are people who dive hundreds of miles in a single day almost weekly. Electric cars will possibly never solve their problem. But they are a minority.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
"Electric cars may seem like a niche product that only wealthy people can afford"
That's because it's exactly what they are, and exactly why adoption is utter shit.
Adoption is actually going quite well out here in sunny California. Last month, a whole bunch of people (part of a group-buy) managed to get Fiat 500e electric cars for a monthly lease of $83 per month. There were some extenuating circumstances here (federal subsidies, state subsidies, etc) but still -- a lot of electric cars hit the roads over the period of a few weeks.
Electric cars certainly don't make sense for everyone, and if you compare them solely based on range vs. a gas car, the electric car clearly looks inferior. That said, my round-trip commute to work is 20 miles, so I'm really an ideal candidate. I also own a pickup truck that I could use for longer trips.
Which is why I'm now commuting to work in a Fiat 500e. And laughing at people like you who think it can't be done.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
Seeing that a 3 series for the entire car is a bit over 30K, I'd hope the drive train is less than 20K
okay, I'm curious, what do you drive or how do you drive that you get 250 to 265 mile range? I'm in a VW GTI and generally considered to drive like a mad man and get 400 miles on about 12-13 gallons.
Tesla cell costs were estimated to be $180/kWh in 2014. The Gigafactory has been projected to reduce cell costs by 30%, cell production to start in 2016.
Material costs apparently are in the $80-$90/kWh range, so more efficient manufacturing processes have lots of room to drop the costs still.
My neighbor has a leaf. He says it's garbage to drive. He also laughs how Nissan provides a service to tow your car free of charge in case it goes dead. Apparently that's a problem. The only reason he got one was because he got it cheap. Apparently their depreciation is truly astounding. I think he paid 12K for it, it was less than a year old. He claims he gets about 40 miles range out of it as well. Works as long as he only goes straight to work and back and nowhere else.
"Electric cars may seem like a niche product that only wealthy people can afford"
That's because it's exactly what they are
Bullshit. Look at the ebay listings for nissan leafs, 90% of them are under $20K with low mileage, well under. That's not something weirdly unique to ebay either, check any used car site like CarGurus you'll see the same thing.
All 85 kWH Model S cars have an 8-year, infinite mile warranty on battery & drivetrain. If you buy one today, you can drive the hell out of it worry-free, except for what it costs to replace tires, until 2023.
By then, Tesla should have one, possibly 2, Gigafactories in operation and the economics of EV batteries will be very different and in the driver's favor.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
You can't replace the drivetrain on a brand new BMW 3 series for $20k.
Well, maybe you could, but replacing the drive train is not normal maintenance, as would be replacing the battery in an EV. I have never replaced the drivetrain on any vehicle I have owned nor do I expect to have to.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
If you want a 300 mile battery pack, yes.
A 100 mile battery pack for a car with the same level of streamlining would be $6,5k.
For that cost, versus a gas car you get:
* A simpler - and potentially cheaper in mass production - drivetrain
* A drivetrain that's far easier to boost to very high power levels, which with a gas drivetrain costs a lot and requires a very large, heavy engine
* A drivetrain that actually gets more efficient the more powerful it gets, not less (greater max power = fatter conductors = less resistance in normal driving conditions).
* Roughly 1/3rd the fuel cost per unit distance driven, give or take depending on your local gas and electricity prices. For the average US car's 12k miles per year, and say 30mpg comparative, with an average long-term gas price of... oh, let's say $2.40 a gallon... that's saving $640 a year. Given that the packs are usually warrantied for 8-10 years, this alone pays for itself.
* A better environmental impact almost anywhere in the first world even on grid power, with in some regions / countries, dramatically better impact.
* The ability to charge at home, aka, no trips to the gas stations. And side benefits, like having your car pre-heated (or cooled) for you when you arrive, off of grid power.
* Greatly reduced maintenance due to the greatly reduced number of moving parts - and we're not just talking about oil changes or the like. For example, you'll never have to swap out a transmission because there is no transmission (apart from a direct linkage). You're not going to have to replace a timing belt because there is no timing belt. And on and on and on, there's all sorts of things that can break in a gasoline car that don't even exist in an electric car.
Trump's plan to get rid of Mueller appears to be 'be so guilty of so many things that Mueller works himself to death.'
> That said, my round-trip commute to work is 20 miles, so I'm really an ideal candidate.
The average american commute time is 26 minutes. That makes the average worker an ideal candidate for electric. Its just difficult for people to wrap their brains around using that 2nd vehicle, or renting, for those extended trips that happen a handful of times a year.
In the USA & Canada, a great many households have 2 (or more) cars. Many of my friends have ready access to 3 or 4 vehicles when you count adult children who live at home or nearby.
One family I'm very close with have 2 vans at home and regular use of either their son-in-law's car as he usually drives his pickup or his plumbing van or their younger daughter's midsize car as she prefers using a van when she has to ferry around her 3 kids who are 2, 5 & 9 yrs old.
During the warmer months, they'll take turns at the family cottage on the lake which is 3-4 hours away.
And they're not unique among families where 2 or more people their own businesses. I can see potential to replace 2 of those vehicles right now and another in a few years with EVs and no disruption to their regular routines.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
My 30 dollar laptop battery packs and my 15 dollar power tool packs and my 2 dollar iphone batteries? The whole article is off when it fails to take subsidy into account as well as the fact automanufacters actually sell packs below cost to encourage people to buy. When the first large tesla battery came out it was 30 thousand usd. Now it's around 12 with subsidy and below cost.
besides the fact i have a personal grievance with how pollution is advertised with electric vehicles the main thing holding them back is the battery. Once that is reduced in cost and increased in performance they actually become practical. Right now they aren't very practical from a cost perspective at all.
I spent some time in CA last May, a week each in Anaheim and San Francisco. I can't say that I saw many EVs in Anaheim but San Fran - un-freakin'-believable!!!
Unless you were keeping an accurate count, it seemed that EVs were nearly 1/3 of the vehicles in most parts of the city.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
I get about 300 from a tank in normal driving (pure freeway driving is significantly better), but then I have more horsepower than a sane person needs (and yet, half of what I want).
The range on a new Tesla is plenty good, even allowing for headlights and other power drains, but I'd be wary of how it ages. If it fell to 120 or so at the end of the life of the battery pack, that would start to suck, If it stayed above 80% of new, I just can't see that being an issue often enough to matter.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
there are no reserves of pure hydrogen. It has to be 'cracked' from molecules, typically hydrocarbons (nat. gas and oil!) or water, and getting it from water takes a lot of electricity...hello Mr. Coal! And once you create it, it has to be shipped. So it's no cleaner than running batteries, and has some serious downside.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
.
It's why I didn't get a Tesla, much as I admire them - and even Bob Lutz gives Elon credit for making it possible for him to shepherd the Volt through GM's BS management.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
At the moment, the Tesla Model S battery pack is definitely expensive and likely costs consumers about $25,000 for the 85 kWh battery pack. It is likely to last somewhere around 300,000 to 500,000 miles. People are basically paying between $0.05 and $0.08 per mile for it. At a national average of $0.12 per kWh and you get 3 miles/kWh, the electricity cost per mile is about $0.04. With special time of use rates, it is possible to pay for electricity at half that price. Which means $0.02 per mile. That means the cost of electricity + the battery pack = $0.07 to 0.12 per mile.
Assuming super unleaded costs $2.50/gallon, here are some comparisons:
BMW M5, 16 mpg combined, $0.16 per mile.
Jaguar XF, 23 mpg combined, $0.11 per mile
Usually where electricity is expensive, gasoline is also expensive.
Of course, if you are doing this kind of comparison, you are basically removing $25,000 from the price of the car and placing it under the energy/fuel column. So looking at total cost of ownership makes the most sense. Most people aren't yet used to looking at the TCO for a vehicle so electric cars look more expensive up front but if you examine TCO, you'll see that, in many cases, they are less expensive.
People with older cars get new or rebuilt engines all the time. It's not that unusual, though usually it's done more for cars which hold their value better (like ones which have a lot of enthusiasts). There's even companies that specialize in selling fully remanufactured engines. They do cost a lot less than $20k though.
You have to be able to afford an electric car before you can drive one.
Real life experience with my 2012 Volt (since Oct-2011) says yes, they get really reduced range in the cold (I get nearly 50 mpc in summer, around 35 in winter), when running the heater. So I don't - I preheat the car while on my off-grid power (the heated seats help a lot and don't draw squat in the scheme of things, they are a rounding error). The AC is killer-efficient and doesn't use diddly of the power, it's really effective too. I wish they had a heat pump for the cold times. Else, no issues. I'm not going to sell this one - I'll drive it till I can't anymore. For one thing, it's super fun to drive too - and surprisingly fast on the mountain twisty roads where I live. Sleepers are more fun sometimes...
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
Tens of thousands of people per year can apparently afford Teslas just fine, including lots of people in Norway.
Just because you're too broke to afford them doesn't mean that no one is.
Electric cars (the ones you can get right now) are terrible when it is really cold or really hot.
Really? Were you aware that Norway is one of Tesla's best customers. I think Norway is a cold country? Here is blog about someone's trip across the US in winter. Here is a video of a Tesla P85D passing pulled over SUV's after a bad snowstorm. I don't see any blankets.
Oh, and Californians buy many Tesla cars. California is kind of hot, isn't it?
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
For a gas vehicle your correct and it's reasonable to have a drivable vehicle for 20+ years. I say this as I can find 20+ year old beaters in the local paper.
An EV on the other hand will not make it that long, this is great for the car companies killing of the used car market. But nobody is going to put 20k into a car thats is 8+ years old with 100k+ miles on it.
No sir I dont like it.
replacing the drive train is not normal maintenance, as would be replacing the battery in an EV.
Replacing the battery is NOT "normal maintenance", and most EV owners will never need to do it. The Prius battery is warrantied for 150k miles, and many people have driven their cars much further than that, with no problems. These are for batteries made years ago. Battery tech has improved a lot recently, and new batteries being made today should have even longer lifetimes. Future batteries will be even better.
You can't replace the drivetrain on a brand new BMW 3 series for $20k.
That may be true but that is not really relevant since the article is talking about "inexpensive" electric cars and a BMW is not usually what spring to mind when I think "inexpensive car". The questions you need to ask are: can you replace the drive train on a say a Ford Focus for $20k and how long will it last before I need to do that?
Since a Ford Focus costs less than $20k even in Canada the answer to the first question is that yes you can replace it for less than $20k (by buying a new car if necessary). The answer to the next question is that it probably comes with a warranty for 5-7 years which is ~2-3 times the life of a battery pack. Now to offset this electric cars have cheaper fuel and, I would guess, cheaper maintenance but whether this offsets the cost of the battery depends on the individual usage of the vehicle and things like the future price of petrol which is hard to estimate given recent fluctuations in the price of oil.
Couple this the fact that most of us NOT purchasing BMWs would balk at the thought of having to pay $20k every 2-3 years to keep the same car running and I think that they have somewhat overestimated the price at which electric cars can become inexpensive unless there is a workable solution to convert the huge, upfront cost of the battery into a monthly fee which seems unlikely since when it needs replacing depends on both physical age and usage.
People continue to buy gas cars because these issues are still not addressed in cars they could potentially afford.
No, people continue to buy gas cars precisely because they don't know how to make rational financial choices. I was in Mitsubishi dealership getting service on my car, and there was a young couple in there with a sales guy doing the math on a couple of options. The sales guy was trying to push the electric model (as I assume they have been told to), but the young couple was under the impression that electricity cost $1 per kilowatt hour, and accused the sales guy of lying to them when he tried to correct them. On top of that, the young couple assumed that electrics would have higher maintenance costs (because of the battery, I think). These folks claimed they couldn't afford the $350 per month for the electric car. When I left, they were finalizing a *lease* on an SUV for $250 per month. If these idiots had done their homework, they could have gotten the electric for effectively the same per month cost, and after 5 years they would have owned the electric with a very low monthly cost. Instead, they leased an SUV, and in 4 years they will have absolutely nothing, and be back right where they are now. Americans (with some exceptions) are stupid.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
Looking at your figures, you should probably add in that there's resale value to even an old battery. Not sure what it is, but it seems that Tesla has a core charge of around $12k for one, which indicates some things.
I don't read AC A human right
People praise Elon musk for leading this charge towards Electric cars but if nobody can afford them he isn't changing anything.
He changed a lot. Before Tesla, EV were seen as wimpy cars for greenies. But Elon made them cool. They are the muscle cars of the 21st century. There is nothing wimpy about driving a Tesla, and that is important if you want Joe Sixpack to buy an EV.
When I was last shopping for a car (two years ago), I had narrowed it down to either a used Prius or a use VW TDI. I chose the VW only because I found a good one available locally at a decent price. I did a hair amount of research on the issue of battery reliability. What I found is...batteries are lasting far longer than their warranties, which are pretty long. I also found out that it's likely that a single cell will fail before the whole pack. The dealer may tell you that you need a whole new battery and want $10,000 for it, but often, for less than $50, you can just replace the faulty cell. Also, if you search for non-dealer entire battery pack replacements, they can be had for $1200 new. What's interesting about this is that there are ten year old Priuses out there for sale 'parts only, battery needs to be replaced', for reasonable cost. The reasons I didn't go this route was because I didn't have garage space to work on it, and I needed a car quickly and the cheap Prius I was seeing were kind of far away.
It's worth noting that the price of electricity makes this economy variable. The place I live now just had electric rates rise by 30% because they shut down a nuclear power plant. In other, more responsible areas of the US or in other countries, the situation may be better (or worse).
Electric cars (the ones you can get right now) are terrible when it is really cold or really hot.
Horse shit. I own a Miev, and the range is not significantly affected by heat or cold. Running the heater does affect the range, but I can heat the car from shore power before leaving, and that significantly reduces the impact on the range. Make no mistake, if I drive with the heat and AC off, then the range is barely affected by sub zero weather (we had lots of that in upstate NY this year, and I drive the car to work and back every day). A much bigger impact on range comes from driving habits: staying back a little further and using the regen braking instead of the brake pedal, coasting up to red lights instead of maintaining the speed limit until the last second and then braking. If I drive "right" it will increase the range by 20%-30%. extreme cold, by contrast, only affects the range about 5%.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
When it is merely cold, like -20C, electric cars are great. You arrive to a preheated and defrosted car and there are no problems starting the engine. 3kW of heating is quite sufficient when it includes heated seats and heated steering wheel, and that takes 3 hours to use 10% of the capacity of a Tesla 85kWh car. At slightly higher temperatures you can get a lot of benefit from the heat pump instead.
Now, lots of electric cars do not have suitably designed heating systems or batteries to handle -20C reliably. This is true of some petrol cars as well.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Most people don't need the range in reality. They only need it once or twice a year. They are paying a healthy premium- WAY over the cost of renting a vehicle for that once or twice a year that they need the range.
So their argument is sort of like requiring F-650's since once a year they have to carry a sheet of plywood or a piece of furniture.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
About 3% US market share of similarly-priced vehicles ($25K+) in just 4 years, despite many models being unavailable outside a handful of key states.
That's a far cry from "utter shit" for market penetration of a product that's significantly out of the norm and facing strong opposition.
=Smidge=
Honda Element.
I'm very tall and so my choice of cars is limited to those with high ceilings.
I've never had a fillup that didn't go over the low 11 gallon range so that's about 24 mpg. And that's with the "E" light on and the gauge on empty to get to about 11.6 gallons used.
I've gotten 300 miles per tank when I got gasoline that didn't have ethanol in it. So about 27mpg with old fashioned gasoline.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Electric cars are one of the inescapable megatrends of the 21st century. They will
happen slowly, but they will happen because there's no alternative.
replacing the drive train is not normal maintenance, as would be replacing the battery in an EV.
Replacing the battery is NOT "normal maintenance", and most EV owners will never need to do it. The Prius battery is warrantied for 150k miles, and many people have driven their cars much further than that, with no problems. These are for batteries made years ago. Battery tech has improved a lot recently, and new batteries being made today should have even longer lifetimes. Future batteries will be even better.
There are two factors to battery life, the first is the number of charge cycles and the second is the age of the battery. Over time the battery pack will lose capacity. For Prius owners, this process would be gradual and they likely wouldn't notice right away simply because the Prius is a hybrid.
I'm willing to bet that an analysis of older Prius vehicles would show that the battery pack has much less capacity that it did as it was new. Does this mean that it "needs" to be replaced? With a hybrid, it's less of a concern. What if it was an EV? I'm willing to bet that most owners would be demanding a battery replacement because their range would have dropped dramatically.
In the case of the Prius, the battery is used within a certain power/speed ranges (up to about 15 mph), then it switches to gas. This means that the battery pack is under much less stress than the battery pack on an EV. So, while a Prius might go more than 150K miles without having to replace the battery, most of that will be using the gas engine and not the battery pack. Plus, since the battery pack is only used during certain situations, a loss of capacity would be relatively minor with the exception of lower gas mileage. For an EV, a loss of capacity would be very noticeable as range would decrease by a lot.
Battery tech has not improved that much over the last 20 years. Yes, we now have Lithium batteries with no memory and advanced charging systems, but the amount of energy that a battery holds hasn't improved much. So, why do tablets, laptops, and phones last much longer? For two reasons, the first is that the electronics have become smaller which allows a bigger battery to be fitted in the same case. The second is that we have learned how to improve the energy efficiency of electronic components. Perhaps there will be battery capacity breakthroughs, but so far we have just seen gradual improvements.
People (with some exceptions) are stupid.
FTFY
You can't replace the drivetrain on a brand new BMW 3 series for $20k.
Hilariously, you could replace the drivetrain on a brand new Corvette for $20k. A whole LS7 crate motor from Summit is "only" $13k.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Aren't Tesla's already supposed to be very economical taken over their entire lifespan? Any one have the exact cost difference taken over the lifespan of Tesla compared to a typical gas car?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Oh, and Californians buy many Tesla cars. California is kind of hot, isn't it?
Not really. There are some really hot places but few people live there, especially people who can afford a Tesla. Try on AZ or NM for some heat where people live.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It is the battery chemistry. Non-plug in Prius uses NiMH which are supposed to be able to take a lot more cycles than LiIon
Government in norway pays a lot of your electric car cost. Without that, the people will not buy them in said numbers.
Electric car batteries now come with 8 year warranty so that kills your whole argument.
$30k is hardly an ideal goal unless they're aimed at making an affordable car for rich people.
You will save money and live in reality. Any talk of an electric car that competes with todays cars for price and utility is a fantasy. Electric cars are more destructive to the environment to build and use than any fossil fuel vehicle. The global warming cults only support electric cars as another control of peoples lives. Their cult leaders will still drive gas powered SUVs that take them from airport when their G5 lands then back to their 50,000 sq ft homes.
I am so tired of these fantasy land electric cars stories when the laws of thermodynamics say no. If you want a cheep commute vehicle (40 miles round trip) for 2-4 people then buy a big golf cart for $20,000. It will not save you money but you will stupid going to work. It may be cheaper to run if we could stuff the Jane Fonda's in a hole and build nuclear power plants to make electricity cheeper and more available.
Most people don't need the range in reality. They only need it once or twice a year. They are paying a healthy premium- WAY over the cost of renting a vehicle for that once or twice a year that they need the range.
Yes, because I really want to have to rent a car that's capable of long distance travel every time I want to actually travel a long distance... when I could just buy one instead.
That's not what I read. What I read was that EVs are exempt from the huge taxes that gas cars are levied with (like 100% of the purchase price), so that makes them affordable compared to gas cars.
Tesla currently offers replacement battery packs (assuming you are somehow replacing it non-warranty) for $12,000.
Also, regular unleaded is currently around $3.00 a gallon here.
So....
...and they all suck. Bad range, and terrible charge. People continue to buy gas cars because these issues are still not addressed in cars they could potentially afford.
Yes, but they suck quite a bit less than the electric cars of just a few years ago. The state of the art is advancing rapidly; every year there are more EVs and they become competitive for more use cases. The writing is on the wall.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Solar generation can be had, for reasonably sunny sites, for abut $/kW, which puts it ahead of grid. Wind, since the advent of neodymium permanent-magnet alternators in kWish sizes, is also becoming competitive (and a solar/wind combo tends to balance nicely against available load. Alternators are electronics and the Moore's Law improvements are also bringing them down (though the economy of scale isn't there, yet.)
The big missing piece has been a high-capacity, long-lived, low-toxicity energy storage system, to cover calm nights and other weather variations. (Thee days of storage, in halfway-decent renewable energy sites, means you only have to run the backup generator a couple times a year - which you have to do, anyhow, to keep it from rotting internally.)
So these battery improvements should be enabling for off-grid housing, as well.
Won't kill the grid, though. Because all these electric cars will need charging - at several times the consumption of a house. Even in the good sites, adding an electric car to the load bumps the generation's capital cost up again, big time. Win some, lose some.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
> new analysis suggests that they may be close to competing with or even beating gas cars on cost
And will they accomplish this milestone with or without the massive tax subsidies, that heavy thumb that tips the scales of electrics in every "study" but are so seldom mentioned? Let me see a cheap, viable electric car that doesn't have to come with a $10,000 bribe to buy it stolen from the pockets of people who can't afford to be buying a car for me in the first place - THEN maybe I reconsider.
Play fair or go home.
Range anxiety is not a problem with the car. It is a problem with the human. My father is concerned that my Leaf will leave me stranded driving two miles to his house and back, but I can go a city over an back easily. I drop the kids off, go to work, go to appointments, go shopping 10 miles away, work out 20 miles away all in a day without issue.
If I want to travel out of State, I switch vehicles with my wife. The cost of the car plus electricity is less than the cost of gasoline alone for my wife's SUV over five years.
The Leaf was thousands of dollars less than a used Camry of the same model year. I don't see how anyone requiring two cars would not drive an electric.
For many products, price drops if they are produced and bought in large quantities. This is true as long as base material supply is available, or can be established. This, however, is a little bit of a problem for batteries. Based on the currently technology at least.
six of one, half dozen of the other - the end result to the buyer's bank balance is the same
I like to point out that an electric drive trail is likely to be extremely reliable. As in most people have no idea how much more reliable. If you do some math you find this.
Not atypical for a gasoline engine to be shot at about 200-300,000 miles. Lets assume 250k. Assume that the average speed is 30mph. That's 8300 hours of run time. Planetary gear trains and brush-less electric motors will run continuously for ten years. 50000 to 100,000 hours before the gears and bearing need replacement and motors rewound. Given that it's more likely that an EV would rust away before the drive train components failed. Sure you have to replace the battery after 5-10 years, but in return you get a car that is still very reliable. Unlike say replacing a the transmission in an old POS car where you are just waiting for the next complex mechanical part to fail.
Toyota does not guarantee their hybrid batteries for 150K miles in the USA.
Maybe to 150K km but not miles.
Most people don't keep a car to 100K, even today.
My Toyota hybrid has an 80K or 100K warranty depending on whom you speak with--sales, finance, parts, service.
The warranty is time-limited also.
No, it's not equivalent at all. You're claiming that the government "pays" people to buy these cars. It does not. It merely exempts them from paying a tax which gas-car buyers have to pay.
Governments do this all the time. Here in the US, we have taxes on cigarettes. This is to punish people for smoking. Does this mean that the government is paying me, a non-smoker, to avoid smoking? Of course not. I'm not getting any money from the government to avoid cigarettes. I am, however, saving money by not buying cigarettes, both in the cost of the cigarettes and also the tax piled on top (plus healthcare problems, cleaning bills, etc.).
To claim that the two are equivalent is quite simply wrong.
This is no different from Norway's tax on gas cars. It's to penalize people for buying such cars, just like how various European governments have taxes not just on cars, but on engine sizes (so people buying big-engine cars pay a lot more than people with small engines, and consequently people tend to choose smaller, higher-fuel-economy models). No one in Europe is "getting paid" to buy a car with a smaller engine, they're simply paying less in taxes than someone opting for the larger engine option. It's cheaper still to simply not buy a car at all, and just use public transit.
That's quite a bad assumption. I think most people are perfectly capable of managing their finances and making informed choices, and that your statement is mind-blowingly stupid. What kind of idiot comes up with an entire theory based on witnessing one couple?
The fact remains that 80 miles of range isn't enough for a lot of people.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
I agree, they're better than they were, but the fact remains that they still suck.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
"My wife and I made a Nissan Leaf our second vehicle."
And therein lies the problem. The way Electric cars are right now you really wind up needing two vehicles. This reinforces my point that it isn't solving the core issue, and that it's way out of the price range of most regular people.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
How many of them still have a gas powered car?
I'm going to go ahead and assume it's all of them.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
No, it's dead simple to wrap your brain around it. However, it just doesn't make sense to buy two cars when one car can do the job of both. This is why most people don't bother with electric. The Electric car has to be able to completely replace the gas car and in its present format (at least, for the affordable cars) it's not possible to do that.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
...and why exactly do you think people are offloading them? Because they're shitty cars that don't cover a lot of edge cases. Part of the reason people buy electrics is because of the low maintenance and high longevity. The fact that there's a large number of people trying to get rid of them doesn't speak favorably in that regard.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Wow. Just, wow. Aside from the fact that these people are getting subsidised out the ass, you really present yourself as a completely clueless asshat.
10,000 people buying an electric is not making a significant difference in the face of the millions of gas powered cars out there.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
By then, Tesla should have one, possibly 2, Gigafactories in operation and the economics of EV batteries will be very different and in the driver's favor.
Or other possibilities, like Tesla went bankrupt in a way that they don't honor that warranty. But here's hoping you're right.
All that has changed is the $60,000 electric cars are better to the point of acceptability. The $20,000 electric cars that most people could afford are still garbage.
Let's not forget that the majority of people don't buy new cars either. They buy used cars.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
We have 2 gassers and a used Nissan Leaf. It is a great commuter car, and we take the other sedan gasser for weekend tripps mor than 60 miles round trip, and the truck for hauling crap or for family camping trips. The Leaf is our favorite to drive and easily is accounting for 2/3 of the miles our household drives, while the truck dropped from 50% to about 5%.
As the previous poster noted, they are great COMMUTER cars, so unless you get a Tesla or like extra adventure the 75-100 mile ones common today are not great choices for your ONLY car. Still, most folks only need over 75 miles a day maybe a half dozen times a year and could still be ahead by renting for those occasions. Similarly an SUV is a poor choice for your only car more times than not, and people just live with the extra rollover risk and poor fuel economy to be covered just in case they have to go offroading in LA some day.
And how many owners have had to replace their battery pack? This is not really an expense that owners plan to encounter, though it is an expense that goes in to making the car. That said, the $20k battery pack is a significant part of the cost of the drivetrain. You can't replace the drivetrain on a brand new BMW 3 series for $20k.
Very, very few, as it turns out. The Toyotas seem to last about forever, and you know darn well that the haters will be braying about any Tesla failures.
Slashdot, once upon a time, would be agog about an electrical vehicle, Now the site is so reactionary, it's starting to read like Fox News for people who hate anything new.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Have you met many Americans?!
Most two driver households have at least 2 cars already. Often folks have one commuter sedan econo car, and one family sized minvan or SUV. Electrics fit nicely into the commuter niche as they are today, and if the 200 mile ones come out as promised they will make good cars for all but road trips. The charging standards need to catch up to where Tesla already is before they will be viable road trip cars for most.
No, you're the clueless asshat. Just because a new product hasn't completely taken over the market for an older class of product and made it completely and utterly obsolete doesn't mean it's "unsuccessful", or that its adoption is "utter shit". You are a moron. Tesla is selling every single car they make, before they even make it. I don't know of many companies with that kind of customer demand, especially for vehicles costing well over $50k and frequently over $100k.
Additionally, Tesla isn't even the only maker of EVs, only the most expensive ones. The relatively inexpensive Nissan Leaf is doing quite well, and there's a bunch of other electric models out there too from other carmakers.
A crate motor direct from the OEM can be pretty damn expensive, which is why those (third-party) specialist companies exist. Similarly, I'd fully expect a third-party remanufactured battery to cost a whole lot less than a new one from Tesla (i.e., a lot less than $20k).
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I think most people are perfectly capable of managing their finances and making informed choices
35% of americans are behind on bills
Kind of puts an end to that theory.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
My Miata gets about the same fuel economy as your GTI, but the tank only holds about 8 gallons. You do the math.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Yeah, but that's not the point. The OP said he's never replaced the drivetrain on a vehicle; I'm just pointing out that while he might not have, a lot of people do, and it's a big enough business to support a healthy market in rebuilt engines, both companies selling crate motors and companies doing engine rebuilds as a service.
Now obviously, new vs. remanufactured is an issue, as reman engines are a lot cheaper for obvious reasons. It's hard to say if we'll be seeing remanufactured battery packs like this; it's possible I suppose, since each pack is made up of thousands of cells, so if some of those cells fail badly (while others are merely degraded from age), it'd make sense to replace the worst cells and wind up with a pack with a good fraction of brand-new capacity though still less than 100%, for a much lower cost than buying an all-new pack. It's probably a bit early to tell. I have seen one website where some guy rebuilt his Toyota Prius battery pack himself; the problem wasn't the cells, it was the connections, which had corroded I believe. I think he spent maybe $10-20, plus labor, when the new pack was going to cost a few thousand. If problems like this become common, we'll probably see a lot of remanufacturing services popping up for EV battery packs.
For a gas vehicle your correct and it's reasonable to have a drivable vehicle for 20+ years.
Um I smell a special case coming up here.......
An EV on the other hand will not make it that long, this is great for the car companies killing of the used car market. But nobody is going to put 20k into a car thats is 8+ years old with 100k+ miles on it.
And there you have it! Are you serious? Are you sitting there and seriously telling me tht a 1995 anything is superior to a new Tesla?
Okay, let's just for a moment, consider you are with a straight face trying to compare a beater, vehicles usually bought by people who are way at the bottom of the economy, with a high end sports car.
Honey, if you think a 20 year old beater is the car for you, and you are buying it because it makes financial sense, you aren't going to be driving a new Toyota Corolla, much less a Tesla.
Under no possible scenario, no world that can be conceived, is a Tesla, or perhaps even a car that costs over 2 thousand dollars something that is made for your mindset.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Replacing the battery is NOT "normal maintenance", and most EV owners will never need to do it. The Prius battery is warrantied for 150k miles,
Don't forget to mention, that if that so called shitty battery fails at 149,999.9 miles, they will replace the battery for......nothing.
I wonder how many of those fine gasoline engines are completely free replacement at that milage?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
There are two factors to battery life, the first is the number of charge cycles and the second is the age of the battery. Over time the battery pack will lose capacity. For Prius owners, this process would be gradual and they likely wouldn't notice right away simply because the Prius is a hybrid.
I'm willing to bet that an analysis of older Prius vehicles would show that the battery pack has much less capacity that it did as it was new. Does this mean that it "needs" to be replaced? With a hybrid, it's less of a concern.
Dis you just see the goalposts moved? I think I just saw the goalposts move.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Your gas car can fill up in 10 minutes.
The pumps around here, I can fill and drive away in just a couple minutes.
Weirdest reason I ever heard to buy gas over electric, though.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Some people have a garage to store their car, and they have an obvious way to charge the car. Most people don't. Is everyone going to drive to Fry's every day to charge their car? Free charging won't last long if the cars become popular.
This is why the Prius is a better model than the Volt. (Well, if I properly understand the Chevy Volt.) The Prius can charge it's own batteries (off a low powered gas engine).
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Of course, it's not an impossibility that Tesla may run into financial trouble but I don't see them fading away any time soon.
Musk et al have simply done too much of an excellent job in making the mass audience aware of the possibilities of EVs, even if it's at a premium.
Even if the players in Detroit aren't interested in Tesla's corpse, if they were to end up on the rocks, there are other players.
I can see Renault, Peugeot-Citroen, Mitsubishi, Kia or Hyundai, either alone or in partnership, eager to buy it at a discount and that would give them ownership of a desirable brand, with a worldwide exclusive, hi-powered charging network and a partnership with Panasonic, Solar City & Silevo.
They'd be mad to not, at the very least, make an offer.
Musk may crash & burn but unless someone invents a compact Mr Fusion by 2020, his eVision will come to fruition within a decade.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
And they get a pretty nice modern fully equipped factory with lots of room to expand as part of the deal
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
That battery replacement won't be free because warenttes also have a time limit.
AFAIK it doesn't offer it at all it. It is just advertising gimmick. What they had offered couple of years ago, is option to pay $10,000 for the 60 kWh battery, and $12,000 for the 85 kWh battery now and get the replacement battery after 8 years. Which means real price now would be several times more. You can see quotes like $44,564 for 85 kWh now.
Here in Norway they are stimulating buying electric cars. Last month one in four cars sold were electric. :)
Norway is a cold place for the batteries, but it works well. The next problem with all the electric cars, they use as much parking space as a regular car in the city.
But, my electric bike is my best investment, ever
As for Tesla:
"The Battery, like all lithium-ion batteries, will experience gradual energy or power loss with time and
use. Loss of Battery energy or power over time or due to or resulting from Battery usage, is NOT
covered under this Battery Limited Warranty. See your owner documentation for important
information on how to maximize the life and capacity of the Battery"
It is not likely that their battery will loose half of capacity in 8 years. But it is your own risk, not under warranty.
I don't see much drop in range in my Tesla when I use the AC. Heating it will impact the range, though if I pre-heat it using shore power then the range drop is quite a bit less.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
Tesla has charged $10K for an extra 25KWH combined with a $2K supercharger. That means that it is 8K for 25KWh, or $320 / KWH. Now, that was 3 years ago.
.12/kwh for daytime, and only .055 for nighttime. That price makes EVs a FRACTION of the costs of ICE (GGE to .80 on a 30 MPG car).
Since that time, Panasonic has since added more production lines, and more shifts. At this point, in another 2 years, Panasonic expects to have their equipment paid for. And you can bet that Tesla does NOT pay 320/KWH, even 3 years.
Point is, that when Tesla finishes their gigafactory in less than 2 years, they are suggesting that they will be less than $100/KWH.
Now, the interesting part is that when Tesla's Model 3 comes out and is less than 35K WITHOUT SUBSIDIES, it will cost less than the average ICE car that is bought. If the Model 3 is even close to the quality of the Model S, this will destroy every ICE sedan that costs 20K on up. The reason is that owning an EV is a fraction of the costs of an ICE. And compared to OLD ICE vehicles, it is MUCH CHEAPER. So, this will destroy not just new ones, but also kill the resale value of older cars. As that happens, panic will set in to automakers AND the owners. This will likely lead to companies like Honda, Toyota, Audi, MB, VW, GM, Ford, etc will see their sales, profits, and stock prices PLUMMET. And esp. for the German and Japanese whom are pushing hydrogen cars, which are pure junk.
Finally, EVs with more than 150 MPC will be charged every night, and most will not need a daytime charging. Here in Colorado, Xcel charges
And multiple studies have shown that electrical generation and grid are FINE for 100% of all vehicles, as long as less than 25% of them charge in the daytime.
In addition, the studies have shown that it will actually save utilities billions since they will not need to run expensive on-demand systems and can go with nukes and other decent choice base-load power plants.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
do you garage the car both at home and at work? I don't have a garage and we get a couple of weeks of sub-zero temperatures here.
> In the case of the Prius, the battery is used within a certain power/speed
> ranges (up to about 15 mph), then it switches to gas.
No. It uses the battery and/or the gas engine at any speed, depending on load and the state of the battery charge. In my Prius (2007), you can summon up a display that shows where the power is going/ coming from. It's constantly varying: sometimes you're driving under electric power (even at high speeds, if you're going slightly downhill), sometimes under gas (and sometimes with some of the gas engine output going to charge the battery), and sometimes the gas engine is off and the battery is getting charged from the wheels (like going down a steep downhill). If you go to any Prius forum, you can find out more.
But your general point, that a hybrid's battery is less stressed than a full EV, may be true.
It was GM not Tesla that was close to bankruptcy.
It really depends on what you compare to. Take something like a VW GTI, treat it decently so that it last 20-30 years (and run it for all of that), and the GTI will obviously beat the Tesla.
However, note that many of the cars, including several GTIs that crashed into Model S, were totaled and have had SERIOUSLY injuries and deaths. Basically, they are REAL POSs. OTOH, all of the model S occupants walk away. The only one out of more than 50K cars, was a guy that stole it, ran it at 100-120 MPH, and then hit a 1920's light pole that bent SLIGHTLY, while splitting the car into 2 and throwing the driver. Interestingly, he died, but it is thought that had he had a seat belt on, he would have been arrested while trying to walk away.
Now, for the real story, the Model S already blows the doors off any vehicle that costs 50K and above in terms of say a 10 year lifespan.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
For 10K I can replace the engine in a Ford Mustang with a major upgrade. For 17K I can get supercar power that'll boil the rubber off the rims. Hell for less than 7K I can get this baby.....
http://www.americanmuscle.com/...
A lot of 'regular' people have two cars.
How do you get electric costing $10? .06 / kwh. As such, this is less than $6 to go 250 Miles.
First, Tesla gets 250 MPC for the 85 KWH pack. Assuming that you fully charge it, it will be around 100KWH to do so (efficiency losts).
So, here in America, nighttime electric costs is around
Now, gas costs 2/gal today but will go up. However, that means that you pay $25/for the 250 miles. However, note that it does not include oil, gas car maintenance, etc. So, that is minor, however, over 2 years, and at least 25,000 miles, the electricity will be 600, while the gas will be 2500. Starts to add up and that was with gas at 2/gas. Within a year, we will be back to 3 or 4. At that point, gas for the 2 years, will be 3800-5000, which is quite the uptick vs. the 600.
Finally, coal is currently 36% of America's electricity. Due to W's mercury regulations, coal will be below 33, probably 30% by 2018. Now, add on the push to drop emissions, esp. CO2, and I think that we will see coal be less than 25% of America's electricity by 2020.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The point, I think, is that most cars on the road will continue to be ICEs for many decades to come because most cars on the road are old. A quick google says the average age of a car on the road in the USA is 11.4 years. Electric vehicles will have to achieve economical lifespans longer than 10 years in order to make a significant dent in pollution problems.
If you're not worrying about the environment and you're just a rich person shopping for a car, then sure, you can go electric. But the economic implausibility of electric cars dominating the roads should be considered in policy decisions like the current subsidies that are helping the wealthy buy their electric cars for less.
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The questions you need to ask are: can you replace the drive train on a say a Ford Focus for $20k and how long will it last before I need to do that?
Yes, it shouldn't cost more than about $5k, give or take, for an engine and tranny rebuild on a Focus. If it does, you're in the wrong shop.
How long? Probably 20 years...
It's the same situation as solar PV. The initial outlay puts people off, but over the lifetime of the panels they are bound to come out on top. For EV batteries leasing has been tried as a way of spreading the cost but turned out to be crap.
You would think so, but that isn't how capital works...
If the payback period is too long, then it becomes infinite, because there are better uses for the money in that time that would return more money than the power generated is worth.
Your gas car can fill up in 10 minutes. This is the reason that an electric car needs such a long range to be taken seriously. Personally I think a lot of people would be fine with a car with 100 mile range as a second car, or even as their only car. They could rent a car the 2 or 3 times a year they needed to drive further. I realize there are people who dive hundreds of miles in a single day almost weekly. Electric cars will possibly never solve their problem. But they are a minority.
What will "technically work" and what people will accept aren't always the same thing.
Tech people tend to think in terms of technical solutions.
"Well, you really only drive 30 miles a day, what do you need with a car that does 300 miles on a charge?"
Yet that is a real concern, otherwise cars would only have 5 gallon tanks to save on weight and be a reduced fire risk in the event of a crash.
This isn't a technical issue, it is a solution searching for a problem. You're trying to convince people to give up something they have and telling them that it is better. You rail against companies like Comcast when they do it, yet then you go out and do it yourself. It is amusing and sad.
Why on Earth should the average person give up their 300 mile range care they have RIGHT NOW and trade it in for something that takes hours to charge and goes 20% of the distance?
To "save the planet?" Yea, that isn't going to be enough for the average consumer. It works for a small portion of the customer base, perhaps the portion that is buying them right now.
If you want to sell millions of EVs, you're going to have to show people how it is BETTER FOR THEM, not for "mother Earth", which everyone says they care about until it costs them money.
and that right there sums up American attitude : selfishness
Electric car batteries now come with 8 year warranty so that kills your whole argument.
Yes, but the engine in a BMW should last 20+ years without a fuss, so what's your point?
All 85 kWH Model S cars have an 8-year, infinite mile warranty on battery & drivetrain. If you buy one today, you can drive the hell out of it worry-free, except for what it costs to replace tires, until 2023.
Yes, but I can buy a car just as nice as the Model S for half the money, so why would I?
To save fuel? Yes, I suppose it does, but the payback time period sucks, I probably won't own it that long, and I gain the headache of having to deal with range issues.
It isn't a bad idea, but it isn't ready for primetime yet. I can see the day coming when a decent percentage of cars on the road are EVs, but I don't see the day coming when the majority are EVs.
It might, but it will be a lot longer than 5-10 years.
* Greatly reduced maintenance due to the greatly reduced number of moving parts - and we're not just talking about oil changes or the like. For example, you'll never have to swap out a transmission because there is no transmission (apart from a direct linkage). You're not going to have to replace a timing belt because there is no timing belt. And on and on and on, there's all sorts of things that can break in a gasoline car that don't even exist in an electric car.
As a side note, the people buying EVs don't do any of that, just FYI. :)
I have never, in my multiple decades, had to replace a belt, and that includes driving a truck to over 150k miles.
I've never done anything to a tranny other than fluid changes.
I think you're making car maintenance out to be more than it is. Cars in the 0-10 year old range simply do not generally require anything other than fluids and tires.
Assuming super unleaded costs $2.50/gallon, here are some comparisons:
BMW M5, 16 mpg combined, $0.16 per mile.
Jaguar XF, 23 mpg combined, $0.11 per mile
Usually where electricity is expensive, gasoline is also expensive.
Yes, but what such things usually miss is that no one buying a BMW really cares about the cost of gas.
If they did, they wouldn't be buying a BMW.
My Yukon gets 12 mpg. It sucks, but I don't *really* care. Oh I might say "gee, it would be nice if it were better", but if I really cared, I'd drive something else.
Anyone who tells you they bought a Tesla Model S to "save on gas" is lying to you or themselves, it is a $100K car, there is no "savings" to be had there.
I wouldn't say they are a niche product just for the wealthy. I sent my 1998 Oldsmobile (that I bought 10 years ago for $4,000) to the scrap yard because it cost more in fuel than a lease on a brand new Chevy Spark EV + Electricity + insurance delta.
And if that works for you, then great, no worries...
However, those were not the only two choices you had... Sure, if you limit yourself to ONLY those two options, you probably made the right one... but...
You could have bought a 3-5 year old car and saved even more... just saying...
Slashdot, once upon a time, would be agog about an electrical vehicle, Now the site is so reactionary, it's starting to read like Fox News for people who hate anything new.
This.
I've been reading slashdot for a long, long time. It's kind of startling when you think about how far the general audience has shifted.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
No, people continue to buy gas cars precisely because they don't know how to make rational financial choices. I was in Mitsubishi dealership getting service on my car, and there was a young couple in there with a sales guy doing the math on a couple of options. The sales guy was trying to push the electric model (as I assume they have been told to), but the young couple was under the impression that electricity cost $1 per kilowatt hour, and accused the sales guy of lying to them when he tried to correct them. On top of that, the young couple assumed that electrics would have higher maintenance costs (because of the battery, I think). These folks claimed they couldn't afford the $350 per month for the electric car. When I left, they were finalizing a *lease* on an SUV for $250 per month. If these idiots had done their homework, they could have gotten the electric for effectively the same per month cost, and after 5 years they would have owned the electric with a very low monthly cost. Instead, they leased an SUV, and in 4 years they will have absolutely nothing, and be back right where they are now. Americans (with some exceptions) are stupid.
Perhaps they don't want to deal with the range issues, and would prefer to avoid all that headache?
If they don't drive as much in a given month, the SUV still only costs $250 a month, the electric car is $350 sitting in the garage.
Perhaps they want a SUV and not a car?
Perhaps they have other changes in their life and they are not ready for another change, such as a new type of vehicle?
Not everyone sees the world through your eyes.
I have personally changed a timing belt. By the side of the road. Over the course of two days. It sucked.
I have had a couple of transmissions replaced, and a couple more rebuilt. Both were expensive propositions.
In other words, my isolated anecdotes cancel out your isolated anecdotes, leaving us back where we were at the start.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
About 3% US market share of similarly-priced vehicles ($25K+) in just 4 years, despite many models being unavailable outside a handful of key states.
That's a far cry from "utter shit" for market penetration of a product that's significantly out of the norm and facing strong opposition.
No, it is what I'd expect from early adapters who have reasons to buy other than "it makes sense".
"Save the planet" types...
The first 3% are the low hanging fruit, those are the easy sales.
I'd be shocked if it is past 10% in 10 years.
The Electric car has to be able to completely replace the gas car and in its present format (at least, for the affordable cars) it's not possible to do that.
For you, perhaps. But if you pay attention, you might notice that people are now driving electric cars without your blessing.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
I see Nissan Leafs on the road every single day. Many times a day. All over the place. They are for sale because some percentage of *any* model car is always for sale.
From your repeated comments, you clearly don't like electric cars. That's fine. But trying to convince people that they will never catch on when they have already caught on just makes you look like a troglodyte.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
10,000 people buying an electric is not making a significant difference in the face of the millions of gas powered cars out there.
It's a lot more than 10,000. A *lot* more.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
All that has changed is the $60,000 electric cars are better to the point of acceptability. The $20,000 electric cars that most people could afford are still garbage.
I'm driving one -- a Fiat 500e -- and I can tell you firsthand that it's actually a really fun car. Quick, nimble, and extremely quiet.
Maybe you should actually drive one before making sweeping generalizations?
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
If you've been driving stuff that needed transmissions replaced, then you weren't in the market for an EV anyway, you couldn't afford it.
If you could, you wouldn't be driving a car that has a chance of needing a tranny done.
They don't last *forever*, but they are darn close these days.
Oh, and Californians buy many Tesla cars. California is kind of hot, isn't it?
California is, on the whole, temperate. That's why so many people live here. Not hot, not cold.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
I have owned a Smart Fortwo EV for seven months. Neat little car if it meets your needs. It is certainly cheap enough to lease for 3 years: $139/month with about $2000 drive off.
In the Smart Fortwo EV, you do not have to buy the battery. You can rent it for $80/month.
Cut out the FUD, you utter <REDACTED>. You're full of shit, and you either know it or didn't do even a cursory search. First hit for "tesla battery lifetime": http://www.plugincars.com/tesl...
100,000 miles (call it 160.000 KM) is at least eight years of driving for most people. At that point, the battery pack is not only quite functional, it's still got the vast majority of its initial capacity. Yes, the car has lost *some* of its range per charge, but not terribly much.
That's based on 2008 battery technology, too. Science marches ever onward.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
http://www.plugincars.com/tesl... (first result from "tesla battery lifetime").
15% loss by the time you reach 100k miles. Hell, it wouldn't shock me if an ICE car lost that much fuel economy after that much driving,
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
They make a profit on each car sold. If they start hurting for money, they can scale back the rate at which they're ramping up production and investing into R&D. That would probably be a bad business decision long-term, but it would almost certainly make them profitable
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
I'm sorry to hear you are still single and have no idea what living in an actual household is like, but maybe you failed to notice (despite quoting it...) the part where he said "My wife and I made a Nissan Leaf our second vehicle"? As in, they were going to get a second car *anyhow*, like most multiple-driver households do? Sure sounds like the electric car is doing just fine in this niche.
Of course, there's a huge logical fallacy in your argument anyhow. The way you "think", every household would need to have a massive pickup truck just in case they needed to haul seven tons of stuff some day. I mean, you could buy a compact car that gets 4x the fuel economy and can park in "compact" spaces, but the way you can't even stuff a sofa in one of those you would
Who wants to spend the money on that, just for a car that is better for 95% of the driving you actually do? Seriously, the vast majority of the US practically never drives outside their metropolitan area, which means ranges that a Leaf can handle easily and that a Tesla utterly laughs at. If they do need to drive further than that and absolutely can't stand to wait while the car charges (in a Tesla, this wait is 30-45 minutes every four-ish hours, which is a pretty reasonable time to take for a meal), rentals aren't nearly as expensive as buying an ICE car that you only need a few times a year (if that).
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
" it's starting to read like Fox News for people who hate anything new." - you are not wrong there...
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
In 5 years I've seen a total of one leaf on the road. See? My anecdotal evidence is just as good as your anecdotal evidence.
From my repeated comments I don't like the current state of electric cars. They're either over-priced, or under-performing.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Sure there are people driving them. They just happen to represent the vast minority, and there are reasons for that.
I'd like to see electric cars succeed, but they won't as they are now.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Let's do the maths. A Tesla pack is rated for 3000 charge/discharge cycles before being degraded to 80% capacity. 3000 cycles, 300 miles range per cycle, that's 900,000 miles. Even if you drive hard and only get 200 miles range constantly it's still 600,000 miles to 80% capacity.
Rapid charging doesn't harm the battery's life span. Tesla charge at 120kW, which is only 1.4C for an 85kWh model. The packs are actively cooled too. Tesla claim to have tested their pack up to 750,000 miles with continual rapid charging at 120kW and had 86% capacity remaining.
Consumer reports tested 10 year old Prius batteries a few years back and found negligible performance loss. The car is very careful never to over charge or discharge them, keeping them in the 20-80% charge range sweet spot where they don't degrade much.
Recent reports on early model Nissan Leafs also suggest that battery degradation is better than expected.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The answer to the next question is that it probably comes with a warranty for 5-7 years which is ~2-3 times the life of a battery pack.
My Nissan Leaf has a 5 year battery warranty. If it only lasts ~2-3 years I get a new one for free.
There is a taxi company that uses Leafs down in Cornwall. They have some cars with 130k miles on the clock and about 10% capacity loss. Constant rapid charging multiple times per day. There are Leafs coming up to 5 years old now and none of them have needed a battery replacement under warranty due to excessive degradation (there were a few that had cooling issues, they have been fixed now).
For most normal drivers the battery is likely to last the lifetime of the car. Same as a petrol engine.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
It's a question of math and logic.
Yes-- you can blow $10k for capabilities you don't actually need. While you are at it, why not get the undercoating, titanium 24" wheels, self steering package, and every other option because you might need them? Drop a few grand extra for 4 wheel drive even tho all you are going to do is drive it in the city and highways in Florida or Alabama... you want to take it off road into the hill country where there are no roads or you might go somewhere in the winter where it snows regularly.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
So you're not going to be satisfied until some arbitrary, indefensible requirement is met?
For comparison: The Nissan LEAF alone sold more in its first four years than the Toyota Prius in its first four years. EVs in total have sold roughly a third as many vehicles in four years as the *total* Prius sales in the past eighteen years. (536K[1] vs ~1.4M[2])
I don't think anyone could make a credible argument that the Prius was/is a failure, and EVs are on a trajectory to overcome them in market share despite naysayers, FUD and lack of availability.
=Smidge=
[1] http://insideevs.com/monthly-p...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
If you have ever bought a third (turd) party battery for your mobile, you know why this is a bad idea!
replacing the drive train is not normal maintenance, as would be replacing the battery in an EV.
Putting fossil fuel into your mode of transport wasn't normal 100 years ago either. Welcome to progress.
I have never replaced the drivetrain on any vehicle I have owned nor do I expect to have to.
That's because you're old. Young people will grow up with this as normal and you'll spend the rest of your days telling them to get off your lawn.
They make a profit on each car sold.
Unless, of course, with the aggressive warranty it actually is a net loss on each car sold.
I ride a motorbike with a range of 200kms. This range has never bothered me in 30 years of riding, so while 200km looks worse than 400km on paper I don't care. I ride 40km/day if I'm lucky so overnight "refueling" would serve me just fine. And when I go on holiday I fly.
I'm sure I'm not the only person like this, so EVs have a market. If only they made a decent commuter bike I'd buy one today.
If you want a 300 mile battery pack, yes. A 100 mile battery pack for a car with the same level of streamlining would be $6,5k.
Is that an option? I've already done my sums and 160km (100miles) is more than enough for my daily usage. Is it possible to get a Tesla with only 1/3 of the batteries? Not only cheaper but a lot lighter, thus a lot quicker too :)
A friend has a BMW M5, at 23l/100kms and $1.50/litre, that's $1 every 3km. In the first 3 months all he did was rave about the car, now all he does is moan about how much it costs him to run. Servicing over $1000 each, tyres the same, and Insurance is equally ridiculous. Not all people with cash are sensible about how they spend it.
As catastrophic storms brought about by climate change bring the power grid down more and more frequently, the dependence on electric vehicles will be seen for what it is, pie in the sky. And as more people then turn to internal combustion engines, the climate will change more radically bringing with it catastrophic storms ...
Seriously, electric vehicles are coming despite State legislation (read: greed)slowing down the process.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
There are two factors to battery life, the first is the number of charge cycles and the second is the age of the battery.
You don't think the battery chemistry is relevant?
In fact, there are many factors which affect battery lifetime, including pack manufacturing quality, operating environment, both charge and discharge behavior...
Battery tech has not improved that much over the last 20 years.
What do you mean? The energy densities have improved by almost 100%.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
And therein lies the problem. The way Electric cars are right now you really wind up needing two vehicles. This reinforces my point that it isn't solving the core issue, and that it's way out of the price range of most regular people.
Wrong. In 2009, 59% of U.S. households had two or more cars, a figure which has trended upwards steadily since their inception — along with an ongoing decrease in the number of households without cars. Today, most American households literally have multiple vehicles.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
In the Smart Fortwo EV, you do not have to buy the battery. You can rent it for $80/month.
Ah!. Then they have already figured out the cost of replacing a battery pack and amortized it. That also has the side effect of being able to figure out the monthly operating cost of the vehicle. $80 a month plus electricity. I have seen claims that it costs about $30 in electricity. So $110 compared to, say $100 worth of gas per month. I could see how some people will pay the extra $10 a month (plus the extra cost of the vehicle). It is only a TCO of maybe $5,000 more over a five year ownership.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
the unit cost of a Toyota Prius battery pack is between $2,300 and $2,590, depending on the model you have. Installation of a new pack is likely to cost you more. However, for reference, the cost of replacing a battery pack is a little less than the avearge engine rebuild on a similar-age high-mileage car.
Instead of responding with anger and vitriol how about we talk rationally? I'm interested in electric cars and would love to own one once they make economic and practical sense. However given the comments it seems that the warranty on the transmission is far more conservative than that on the battery pack so the ratio is still about 2-3 times longer life for the transmission only it is ~8 years vs. 20.
On top of this the study you linked to made no mention of aging effects without regard to use: battery capacity declines with age and that decline is non-linear with time. If the current technology is post 2008 then I doubt they will have a good understanding of the aging yet and will be using projections which can be inaccurate.
However I admit that I am surprised by the far longer lifetime for batteries that they are claiming which is great. Sadly though this page tells me that they still have a way to go yet. If leaving the battery at -30C or below for a day will invalidate the warranty then the car is still useless for those of us who live in Canada.
Lastly though even at 8 years (with degraded capacity) the "fuel" cost is still significant. At 100k miles for a $20k pack (using the figures from the OP) and assuming $0.10/kWh and that 85kWh=265miles that works out at $0.232/mile. If I assume 30mpg for a petrol powered car that works out at a cost of $6.96 per gallon-equivalent or $1.83/litre which is 2.5 times the current cost of petrol in the US (according to Google)...and that's before we factor in the longer life of the transmission.
So my numbers may have been off but the conclusion is still the same. At the current cost of petrol in the US ($0.70/litre in March 2015) you save ~5.66 cents/mile on fuel so the price per kWh of a battery needs to drop to $66/kWh to match the cost of petrol over a 100k mile lifetime.
I realize you may wish to be spoon fed, but 10 seconds googling "tesla battery capacity" will tell you the Model S battery is 85 kWh.
I realize you may wish to be a dick, but could you try to not be stupid as well? $19,550 may be the cost of a new battery pack, but what about the old one? Are you going to just keep it around for shits'n'giggles, or are you going to let whoever is doing the swapping keep it for a reduced cost of the new pack?
Don't forget the time value of the money, and more importantly, the cash aspect. Most people would not consider prepaying 5-10 years of fuel even if it gave them some 10-20% discount over the net present value of the future gas station stops.
But all things are not equal, and there's the additional savings of not buying junk food at the gas station.
In the USA & Canada, a great many households have 2 (or more) cars.
The reason most households have at least two cars these days is because both adults need to be able to get to their respective jobs, do the shopping, and run errands, etc without having to wait for the person with the one car to get home. Even if our commutes lined up enough to carpool our days off don't always coincide (so one of us just sits home all day then?) and if one has to put in some unexpected overtime it throws the entire carpooling schedule out the window.
It's a fair statement, however, the very high taxes on fuel sold in Europe aren't just there for punitive reasons. While tobacco tax maybe offsets (or more likely, just partially offsets) the negative externalities caused by smoking, such as healthcare costs (which are predominantly a public service in Europe), most of the negative externalities on car use are experienced globally, e.g. global warming. I suspect that taxes on fuel are as much a revenue stream for governments (spent on road infrastructure and all government services, doesn't matter here) as an incentive to use less fuel.
In other words, maybe (IMO: probably) if everyone switched to electric in a country, there would need to be a new tax on electricity, or higher road tolls, or something, to keep things in balance. If this were the case, we could conclude that indeed, the country hands out money for the small, wealthy minority that can afford electric cars - even if no money directly hits the electric buyer's account. Such implicit shifts in public money may occur, even if it's simply not paying 'fuel' tax which is more like just 'tax' which was created in a time when electric was not a policy consideration. Even if such government incentives favor the wealthy, it might be good statesmanship to keep this way, because the psychology of 'cheating' the tax system and evading fossil fuel costs and taxes, and benefitting from rebates, probably has a role in buyer enthusiasm and the establishment of a brand new, possibly local industry faster than without these incentives, and this may ultimately serve the country better than if we just wait out better economies. So it might be like a Kickstarter campaign.
A very accurate model would need to include a lot of uncertainty about technological progress and levels of competition across countries and companies, but the tl;dr is that new taxes are likely introduced once electric cars are widespread, meaning the current policy transfers economic benefits to buyers of electric cars now.
We in the cold climate of Canada experience lead-acid car batteries lasting a minimum of 7 years. The batteries are subject to subzero cold and even at that temperature, a 7 year old battery has enough cranking power to start the modern car. If the battery survives the -20C (about -15F), it will work though the summer.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
'Cost effective' is one thing, and don't get me wrong, a good thing. As sad as it makes me to have to say it, we need to get away from internal-combustion engines. However, for my own purposes, it won't be 'life effective' unless I can get a small pickup truck that is 100% electric, and a highway-legal motorcycle that is 100% electric, too. Otherwise I'm on gasoline engines for the duration.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
most of the negative externalities on car use are experienced globally, e.g. global warming. I suspect that taxes on fuel are as much a revenue stream for governments (spent on road infrastructure and all government services, doesn't matter here) as an incentive to use less fuel.
We're probably quibbling here, but I disagree: while global warming is obviously a problem, we're only recently starting to see really bad effects from it. Cars impose a huge cost on society to support them: roads, bridges, parking lots which consume massive amounts of space, injuries and deaths from accidents, pollution (not just global-warming kind, but the more immediate kind, though this is much less of a problem now than it was with cars decades ago; you used to be able to smell car exhaust easily, now they burn much cleaner), poor health/obesity (from not walking enough), I could go on and on. Now of course, they also enable us economically in many ways, and some of these things would still be present even if everyone took public transit, but cars make things much worse. Having high fuel taxes actually makes more sense than what we do in the US: in the US, we're effectively subsidizing cars because everyone gets taxed to pay for roads and bridges, not just the car users. With high fuel tax, you shift more of the burden for the infrastructure onto the car drivers.
Encouraging people to use less fuel, with high fuel taxes, means fewer driving trips, which means less traffic which means less road wear and less need for more lanes on roads. More people will use public transit which (in theory, not necessarily in reality) means less fuel consumption overall, less traffic (lots of people can be packed into a bus or train), less need for parking lots (thus more efficient use of valuable city real estate, and higher density which again means less need for fuel or any kind of transit), etc.
Now of course, electric cars still have many of the same problems as gas cars: roads/infrastructure, parking, accidents, etc. But the pollution and economic benefits (like not needing to import so much foreign oil; maybe not a problem for Norway but it is in the US) are probably worth it, so a government exempting such vehicles from certain taxes makes sense, at least until there's sufficient adoption. The taxes can be raised later, just like how hybrid vehicles in California got a free pass on HOV lanes for a while, but eventually they stopped that because there were so many hybrids.
or higher road tolls, or something, to keep things in balance.
Yes, of course: the government has to change taxation over time to keep up with changing realities.
the country hands out money for the small, wealthy minority that can afford electric cars
You don't have to be wealthy to afford an electric car. The Nissan Leaf and Chevy Spark are not expensive. They might be more expensive (here in the US) than a comparably-appointed (read: econobox) gas car, but they're by no means expensive, compared to the price of new cars these days. I think Mitsubishi has a low-end EV too.
new taxes are likely introduced once electric cars are widespread, meaning the current policy transfers economic benefits to buyers of electric cars now.
Yes, of course, that's obvious. They keep the cars tax-free (or have a tax credit in the US) precisely to encourage people to buy these things, because they believe it's better for society overall to encourage adoption.
I just bristle at the idea of it being phrased as "the government pays you..."; that's not how tax incentives work, they work by exempting you from tax, so you might be swayed to do something you normally wouldn't. You still have to buy the car, which costs money, and in the absence of such incentive you can always avoid the tax by not buying a car at all, buying an older used car (still taxed, but less), keeping your existing car longer, moving within walking distance of work, etc.
?? Someone didn't understand what I wrote.
Very few people commute beyond the range of a typical EV daily and you'd still have 2 (or more) VEHICLES just not all ICEs.
It's the trip to the cottage, out of town to see the relatives, or the long drive that's the challenge.
So for people who live in any number of 1/2 modern cities, all you need is ready access to an electrical outlet.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Could be because of different (or no) rebates here or something, but the Nissan Leaf and similar smaller EV cars are about twice as expensive as the comparable car of the same make. Glad to hear it's different in the US.
Btw. I agree it's just just a wording disagreement about 'the government pays you' part - I assume that the local pollution and higher oil import dependence are more than offset by European fuel taxes; so you can imagine that you as an electric car driver are asked to pay your due share for road maintenance, public education etc. that's funded with fuel tax, and then immediately the government ''pays you" the equal amount as a handout / incentive. That the net is zero doesn't invalidate either side of the transfer (principle of gross reporting).
I like separating the notions of cash transfer from notions of the underlying economics, because, in principle, funding roads and education is a responsibility that's fairly independent of whether you drive an EV or ICE car. Just because the government mixes money pools and justifies taxes through (sometimes real, sometimes just PR palatable) reasons for individual taxation types, does not the economic fundamentals change.
No need to think of economic transfers differently just because governments juggle with different labels for taxation; often a new tax element starts its life as a disincentivizing (e.g. tobacco), or temporary (e.g. bank taxes in Europe), or targeted funding for something noble (e.g. roads or education) in the public's eyes, but once the taxed population gets used to it, the initially specific targets get relaxed and it'll just be a source of money in the big coffer, the rates can even increase, the original justification is history and the economic landscape may shift over the years anyway.
So much so that if there's an effect that the government wanted to achieve in the first place, and that effect is getting realised, the government can start to worry about how to substitute the punitive taxes. E.g. start with high prevalence smoking; add a moderate tax to disincentivize and fund the pertaining healthcare costs; prevalence gets reduced; tax rates are raised, i.e. about the same tax still gets collected. However a further reduction of tobacco consumption might not be wanted by the government (agency problem), because now a much smaller portion of the population pays high taxes that may fund not just the healthcare costs of smoking, but also warfare, police, education etc. - not to mention employment (tobacco farming) and that smoking today has a cost impact spread over future decades, whereas the government likes to spend the money of taxpayers who haven't even been born rather than avoiding the healthcare burden caused by sick parents and grandparents who used to smoke, once they grow up.
a) The timing belt was a good number of years ago
b) Automatic transmissions take a dump sometimes. It's not uncommon, even on decent cars that seemingly have plenty of life left in them. I was certainly not driving junkers.
c) I'm now driving an electric car, so your triangulation is shit.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
Sure there are people driving them. They just happen to represent the vast minority, and there are reasons for that.
I'd like to see electric cars succeed, but they won't as they are now.
Have you ever notice that adoption of any new technology happens on a curve? Only the lunatics at first, and then a trickle of brave folks, and then all of a sudden ordinary people start adopting the technology? Yeah. Phase III has already started. You probably didn't notice it, or maybe it hasn't happened in your region before.
But it's definitely Phase III.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
How far do you want to go on a single charge and what is the mile/kilowatt-hour spec of the vehicle? There's your spec.
Don't misunderstand, EVs have a place in the market, I don't think it is as big as you are suggesting.
I'm not rooting against them... I'm telling you which way the wind is blowing... and it isn't in favor of EVs replacing gas cars any time soon, at best they'll supplement them with perhaps 10-20% of the overall market... over the next 30 years...
A friend has a BMW M5, at 23l/100kms and $1.50/litre, that's $1 every 3km. In the first 3 months all he did was rave about the car, now all he does is moan about how much it costs him to run. Servicing over $1000 each, tyres the same, and Insurance is equally ridiculous. Not all people with cash are sensible about how they spend it.
If the cost to run a BMW is a concern, then he shouldn't have bought it. If you can actually afford a BMW, the cost of gas shouldn't be an issue.
Yes, yes, I know, people buy cars they can't really afford all the time. I'm simply saying what *should* happen, not what does happen.
---
Side note: What possible "servicing" could he need done that costs $1,000? Change the oil and drive it for 5 years, that is more or less all it needs.
c) I'm now driving an electric car, so your triangulation is shit.
I have come to the conclusion that techies and hipsters from California seem to be over represented on Slashdot...
The reality is that 3 out of every 100 cars sold has some type of electric power train. There is indeed a market for this, but it remains to be seen if it is a large market, or a niche market.
After all, Apple continues to sell Macs, they get a lot of press, people love talking about their Macbook Air and such, but the reality is the Mac has about 6% of the overall PC market. That percentage hasn't moved up or down much in a long time.
There is a market for the Mac, but it isn't ever going to be larger than 5-7% of the PC market unless they change their prices and make them easier to modify.
Likewise, until the range issues and cost issues get sorted, EVs aren't going anywhere. That being said, if an EV comes on the market that is $30k and is a nice midsize car and it has 250 miles of range, then yes, it'll sell. I also think that will be 20 years from now at best, but time will tell.
Sure, rebuilds are possibility, but what's more likely when bat packs age is to repurpose them-- use them in homes to store energy from solar panels to provide juice at night. This essentially takes the house off the grid except when it's making excess energy to sell back to the utility company. Utilities don't like us being so independent, especially in Florida where grassroots are fighting to keep them from passing legislation banning solar panels, but I doubt they can make a case they can back up, especially since California is a lot bigger, has far more solar homes, and has developed no problems as a result.
Utilities here in Southern California have been pushing for a fee they can charge home owners who produce solar. It's not quite problem free...
Jeeps have a lifetime warranty.
I've seen a website where a first-gen Insight owner rebuilt his battery pack, where fixing the problem actually did involve replacing a few cells that had gone bad. Even then, apparently it was less complicated or expensive than you might expect.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Jeeps have a lifetime warranty.
I have two Jeeps. I'm not certain of what you are talking about, because both have this sort of warranty: http://www.jeep.com/en/warrant...
3 year 36Kmile basic 24 hr towing, and 5 year or 100K miles power train.
It's a fine warranty, but about as good as you're going to get considering what a lot of us do with our Jeeps.
side note: since many of us modify the bejabbers out of our Jeeps, you have to be really careful not to mess up the warranty. It's a Jeep thing...
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Your gas car can fill up in 10 minutes.
The pumps around here, I can fill and drive away in just a couple minutes.
Weirdest reason I ever heard to buy gas over electric, though.
Someone moderates that as a troll? My honor has been besmirched!
God no only has slashdot gone reactionary in the comments, the moderators have gone over to the dum side.
Moderation hint - If you don't like what I posted in this case, you could mark it "overrated".
But it's hardly a troll. And this isn't 1998 AOL. Or is it?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
After all, Apple continues to sell Macs, they get a lot of press, people love talking about their Macbook Air and such, but the reality is the Mac has about 6% of the overall PC market. That percentage hasn't moved up or down much in a long time.
There is a market for the Mac, but it isn't ever going to be larger than 5-7% of the PC market unless they change their prices and make them easier to modify.
I stopped reading at the highlighted text. I think you've amply demonstrated that you have no fucking idea what you're talking about. All the other PC makers joined into that race to the bottom, and look where it got them.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
The cars will be glorified Trabants with the same attention to detail. This will continue to mean a lack of uptake without government force.
When American sized (read: large) alternative fueled cars are as affordable as their predecessors, they'll have a chance against regular cars.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
There is already a known method of creating cheap, clean hydrogen using thermal electrolysis powered by a large breeder nuclear reactor. This is tragically doomed because of the hysterical nuclear taboo, but geothermal and thermal solar might be doable.
Storage and transport might be bigger issues, as hydrogen doesn't always sit still and behave itself when pressurized and stored in an ordinary metal tank. If battery tech ever improves, high voltage D/C is going to be a much method of transport vs. screwing around with hydrogen. But the cheap and/or durable batteries have yet to materialize, so hydrogen remains worth thinking about.
Either way, batteries or hydrogen, it's intellectually dishonest to claim it ties us to fossil fuels in the same manner as gasoline. Hydrogen can be made from electricity and there are many, many different ways to make electricity.
>
Yes, yes, I know, people buy cars they can't really afford all the time. I'm simply saying what *should* happen, not what does happen.
Having some experience in this area, I'd go so far as to say that most people who own luxury cars can't afford them. In fact the luxury car is the gleaming epitome of poor financial choices.
1 - $230/kWh is probably an upper bound for 2018 prices
2 - As the Li Ion market continues to grow aggressively, more and more Li Ion materials will be recycled from old batteries, recycling is cheaper than building with new raw materials
3 - There has been projections even lower than $200/kWh
4 - The math we should be doing is a 85kWh battery pack + a 20kW solar PV rooftop installation vs 25 years worth of gasoline + someone's electric bill, sunlight is free, the cost is the infraestructure to convert that into charge on a battery, 25 yrs worth of gasoline + 25 years worth of electric bill is typically upwards of US$ 50k
By 2020 there will be an excellent market for refurbished 85D Model S, the car will cost less than what you will save in gasoline (even with today's low gasoline prices).
The 85kWh pack is the upper model. There's also the 60kWh model with 200 mile range. A base 60kWh Model S can be purchased for less than $70k in some states with local incentives.
I stopped reading at the highlighted text. I think you've amply demonstrated that you have no fucking idea what you're talking about. All the other PC makers joined into that race to the bottom, and look where it got them.
You might look in the mirror...
While Apple itself is a decent sized PC maker, their share of the desktop market is nothing but single digits...
My point was valid, even if you don't want to see it.
Frustrated trying to understand the Slashdot system! Anyway, I'm also in So Cal... Los Angeles, and a member of the EVA of SoCal. We meet in Diamond Bar monthly. I have a highly modified Corbin Sparrow, as well as a very highly modified Chevy S-10 pickup that Sony Pictures converted to EV some years back, and after buying it from them I doubled the size of the battery pack, moved all cells they had installed IN the bed to UNDER the bed, giving me back the entire cargo space in the bed as well as reducing the center of gravity. It has many more major mods specifically to increase its value for educational/ display purposes. Very powerful, great range now. Also, have a YouTube vid: "BMW EV Conversion Burns, Rubber!!!" Would enjoy touching bases with you sometime. "Electric Bill" Dale
When you say "3000 charge/discharge cycles before being degraded to 80% capacity" what kind of cycle is that? Does partially draining the battery and then recharging it count as a full cycle? My understanding was that for lithium based batteries discharging them fully was more harmful than multiple partial discharges and recharges.
If we can get more than half a million miles out of a Tesla battery pack and still have 80% capacity that would be awesome!
Another question though, and this is showing my ignorance. I'm assuming that the Tesla's use Lithium cells. And I thought that Lithium based batteries degraded over time even if they weren't being used. If that is still correct what kind of loses would we expect.
True but not worth crying about. Most people are selfish to some extent and of course that will play into everything they do and even more so when it comes to big purchases like a car.
The solution is to continue improving the state of the art until you get to the point that the electric car is priced similarly to an ICE car. Or until the feature difference is so large that consumers will pay for it regardless, just look at the success of smart phones as a good exmple.
Luckily that seems to be just what Tesla is working towards. They started at the high end making sports cars and luxury sedans. Next is an SUV, and after that hopefully we'll be getting a family sedan. Although I'd love to buy a Model S as my family sedan for now it's more important to build my retirement savings.
Not sure why Chevy's gone resistive. Both Tesla and the Nissan Leaf use a heat pump... I mean, if it's already got the compressor and radiators for A/C, why not do it that way?
A full cycle is a discharge from full to the cut off point where the car won't run any more, and then charging back up to full again. If you run down to 50% and then charge that is generally counted as 0.5 cycles for lithium cells.
The car cuts off well before the danger point of the cells, preventing them being discharged to a dangerous level.
I can't remember exactly what chemistry they use now. It's lithium... I think the Leaf uses lithium manganese, so it's probably that. The cells are made by Panasonic.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Don't forget the profit added to anything you rent. And what about people who sell the car before the battery pack is replaced? That extra monthly TCO compared to gas models is gone completely. If you consider that the battery pack depreciation is factored into the residual value of the car, don't forget that gas engine power-train wear and tear is also factored into gas car depreciation. An engine/powertrain has a maximum mile factor designed into it. Many people can exceed this maximum of course, but it is typically between 100,000 and 150,000 miles. A new engine and transmission will easily exceed the value of a car with that many miles.
Tell that to my neighbor, who's well maintained BMW engine with 40k miles is spurting oil from several seals and firing off multiple warning lights. I would love to see a single person run a modern BMW engine for 20 years without a fuss. Just a single person. :)
Your statement that Macs would be more popular if more modifiable shows that you have no idea what you're talking about. Most people don't modify their computers. There are exceptions, but that's getting into another niche market. Very possibly Apple's market share wouldn't go over 80% because they aren't as modifiable, but that's a long way from 6%.
The price reason is more relevant. Apple doesn't make low-end computers, and therefore anybody who buys a Mac is looking for a high-end computer, while most people are willing to accept design compromises and such to get a cheaper computer. I don't think this will necessarily limit Apple to a low market share, but it's had that effect so far.
GP's comment on why Apple doesn't do that is accurate, but it doesn't change their market share.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
People aren't going to want to rent a car for longer trips. However, many households have more than one car. If I were driving an electric, I'd have taken my wife's vehicle to Gary Con recently, and she would have driven the electric. It's really rare that we both want to drive separately more than an electric's range away.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Most don't do that, but anything made by the millions is going to have a few issues, and that is true with EVs as well.
Thankfully, that BMW is still under warranty, so it won't cost your neighbor a dime. Since it is a BMW, they shouldn't be without a car either, since their BMW dealer will give them a loaner.
My 2015 Yukon XL recently had the Blu-Ray player break, it wouldn't play any discs. It is less than a year old, this stuff happens.
Called the dealer, they dropped off a Buick Enclave loaner, picked up my truck, took it in, fixed the Blu-Ray player, took care of a few minor recall items, changed the oil, washed it, and returned it, all no charge (not even for the oil change). Their view was that if I had to have service in the first year, the least they could do was comp the oil change.
And that is why I'll buy another truck from them in a few years, that is how you take care of the customer. Some dealers are indeed good.
Depends on the car - I had a 2002 that I bought in 2001 that needed new synchronizers in the first 40k, and again in the next 50k because they were very weak shit. The manufacturer apparently abandoned that particular transmission design after only 3 years of use because of this issue.
Yes, that was 13 years ago, but there can be flaws in any design that has cost as a higher consideration than quality.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
If he bought an M5 without knowing that all the parts and service are stupendously expensive, then he was blind.
Any of the factory-tuned special edition cars are like that. It doesn't matter if it's BMW M, Mercedes Benz AMG, etc. And, you don't get 500 horsepower for free - it comes from burning LOTS of fuel.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Where I live, you don't run the heater for comfort, you run it so you can defrost the windshield and the side windows.
At -30C and below, if you drive without the defrost at maximum heat, your windows and windshield will be unusable in 10 minutes.
On the highway, with 4 people in the car, even with the defroster at max you can only defrost small parts of the side windows.
Even when it's hotter, like say 0C or -1C, if you have freezing rain it's hard to get the windshield hot enough so that the rain doesn't freeze on contact and block your view ahead.
Try it! Library of Babel
What car was that?
Aye. I speak from the perspective of a single car/bicycle house hold.
I'm pretty interested in owning an electric car when gasoline is $3.50 a gallon or higher.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
It's not a manufacturer thing. Around here some dealers have started offering a "lifetime" warranty. It's non-transferable, and generally has some asterisks attached to it, such as you have to have the every 15k mile service performed at the dealer or some such. They're obviously banking on the fact that most people don't keep cars more than a few years, and even if you did, that you'd eventually mess up the maintenance schedule and end up voiding it. Though I still wonder what they're going to do with the occasional oddball that manages to keep the warranty going then has a major breakdown on a rusted out 20 year old car. Maybe they just plan on worrying about that when the time comes.
Even if the engine makes it, the transmission won't. For some reason BMW thinks that you shouldn't have to change the transmission fluid so it's a non-serviceable, sealed unit. They last about as long as you might expect a transmission to last if you just drove it and completely ignored the fluid.
It's said that you should look carefully at a used luxury car, because they were often owned by people by people who stretched to simply purchase the car, and couldn't afford the upkeep.
With the said, if you can manage to find a well maintained one, it can be a bargain as luxury cars tend to depreciate quickly. However, the manufacturer will still gouge you for parts, so it's helpful to get one that shares major components (engine, transmission) with a non-luxury model.
Though I still wonder what they're going to do with the occasional oddball that manages to keep the warranty going then has a major breakdown on a rusted out 20 year old car. Maybe they just plan on worrying about that when the time comes.
If I might give you an idea of what they will do. I used to buy Nissans, I ended up getting my Mother in law to buy them also. I bought several of them, and I liked them.
The dealership where I bought mine, started a "Free lifetime inspection". I had it in writing right on a paper that I got with the last car I bought there. The contract said that I would not be charged the inspection fee as long as I owned the car. Parts and labor of course. At the time it was about 15 dollars - not a huge amount
So about 3 years in, I went to pick it up after the inspection. There was the charge for the inspection. I brought it to the attention of the lady at the counter. "Oh, we don't do that any more" was the response.
I took it up to the sales manager, showed them the piece of paper that both they and I had signed. "We changed our poilicy, and you will not get a free inspection any more."
I asked them if that 15 dollars they were going to get was going to be worth the fact that neither I or my wife, or my Mother in law were ever going to buy a Nissan product again. He shrugged his shoulders, and I handed him the 15 dollars.
And to this day, I've kept my promise. I figure several hundred thousand dollars in sales, and gawd knows how much service I've taken elsewhere.
So fuck you Nissan, I hope you have my 15 dollars framed on your president's desk you stupid assholes. Hope it was worth it.
tl;dr version - Its a car dealership, and they will fuck you over any chance they get.
A lifetime warranty simply isn't going to happen.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Surely the Tesla and Leaf also have a resistive heater? A heat pump is not going to produce a useful amount of heat when it's -10F out.
GP's comment on why Apple doesn't do that is accurate, but it doesn't change their market share.
Tell me why market share is important again?
Hint: It's not.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
Or Dubai?
One thing I can't for the life of me understand is why the manufacturers don't install an Eberspaecher or similar good old fashioned fuel burning heater for those of us in colder climates.
The fuel consumption is a deciliter per hour or so, so a 5-10 litre tank (2-3 gal) should be plenty, and you could fuel it with bio diesel or similar if you're CO2 averse. It's well known technology that's already available and popular e.g. here in Sweden, so it should be a no-brainer that you don't use precious battery power to make heat in a car.
Stefan Axelsson
They HAVE a resistive heater, but they don't use it... unless it's -10F out. Especially when you have nice pre-heat scheduling options.
Whereas the Volt is running resistive all the time, no matter what.
Depends. Apple makes a whole lot of profit without dominant market share, but there's advantages in using a system with a significant market share. If I use MS Windows, there's lots of books and websites I can use for reference, and all sorts of software. (I run it largely because there's games on it that I can't easily get on another platform.) It's not a bad operating system if you just want to use your computer. If I were running Haiku, I suspect a lot of my time would be figuring out what to do (which can be fun, but isn't what I want to be doing now).
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
If he bought an M5 without knowing that all the parts and service are stupendously expensive, then he was blind.
Well this is the target market for luxury goods is it not?