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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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.