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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.'
Exactly. A person can buy an old inefficient junker for $500, but if you're having to pump $1500 of gasoline into it every year, and you have to swap out the transmission, then later the timing belt, then later the engine, and on and on.... you're not exactly paying just $500. It's total cost of ownership that matters:
* Purchase price
* Insurance
* Fuel costs
* Maintenance
* Resale
Electric cars perform poorly on purchase price, miscellaneous on insurance, excellent on fuel costs, excellent on maintenance except for the pack, good on maintenance including the pack (due to the long warranty periods and reduced purchase costs a decade+ in the future), and as a general rule, vehicles with low operating costs retain value better than those with high operating costs (because when people are buying a used car, they're doing so to save money).
Trump's plan to get rid of Mueller appears to be 'be so guilty of so many things that Mueller works himself to death.'
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.
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!
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.
Electricity is not free, my friend.
It is cheaper than gasoline.
The price has been increasing steadily at a rate well above inflation where I am
Where is that? Most electricity in America comes from natural gas, which has fallen in price by 80% in the last ten years.
if electric cars start selling I expect it to double or triple in the next 5 years.
Electric cars, which mostly charge with cheap nighttime base load power, make electricity production more efficient and more profitable, so prices should go down, not up.
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.
One thing in particular is that they found the battery manufacturers were not at fault - at least not as much as the other "suspects"
False. (read also following section) In fact, they concluded exactly the opposite of what you claim: they stated that battery manufacturers and patent holders were at fault, as much as the other "suspects".
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
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.
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
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...
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.
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