YouTube 1. I had no idea Teslas weighed so much 2. Here is one going 10.4
- Thread starter Mook
- Start date
Still think there is one big factor you're not considering....Cost.
The cheapest full EV is the leaf. Less than 100 mile range. Next step up is the "35k" model 3, 219 mile range. Now, once you get up to the higher mile range EV's, you'r talking $60,000+. Whereas, you can get a loaded gas car that gets 400+ miles on a tank for half of that price.
Not everyone can afford a $60,000+ car, and, it goes without saying, as soon as you start increasing range with higher capacity batteries, the price will go up. Not everyone supports EV's, either and wants an all electric car with LIMITED ranged.
The cheapest full EV is the leaf. Less than 100 mile range. Next step up is the "35k" model 3, 219 mile range. Now, once you get up to the higher mile range EV's, you'r talking $60,000+. Whereas, you can get a loaded gas car that gets 400+ miles on a tank for half of that price.
Not everyone can afford a $60,000+ car, and, it goes without saying, as soon as you start increasing range with higher capacity batteries, the price will go up. Not everyone supports EV's, either and wants an all electric car with LIMITED ranged.
this is in part because politics is picking winners. hydrogen is big in japan. batteries are subsidized here and elsewhere. and you can use politics to squeeze emissions as tight as you want, making them impossible to meet with ICE. not because EVs are competing evenly and are simply better.
subtract out tesla and you don't even have anything interesting. you have niche cars for fleets and cities and normal people where they make sense. there's literally zero hot and sexy at that point. you have tesla with hot and sexy, at the hot and sexy price point.
the model 3 will be the closest thing to a real mainstream competing car, perhaps ever. if subsidies run out it will even have to compete more directly. and the question will be if it does out compete its peers and can be sold profitably. i guess we will see. and to be clear i'm not anti-tesla or EV, what i am is highly skeptical EV is now or will be soon a technology that can compete without the politics, a technology regular people want to live with and can afford, and that tesla can make a buck on. vs. some kind of parallel or serial hybrid, by which i mean electric in conjuction with ICE (prius) or as extra supplement (i3).
you tout product line development, but what matters is actual sales. and if you look at the inside ev sales, plenty of those are hybrids with an ICE engine as well. remove tesla and would you be talking like ICE is in its death throes? can you really claim a technology or industry is about to bounce out the door when the only way you appear to (perhaps you have others) be able to support that claim is by focusing on a single company/example in it? subtract tesla and you aren't making this claim at all, are you?
yes, there's always improvements, and the headlines you read about them today were in popular science every decade for the past 100 years as well. you keep applying moore's law to batteries because you've grown up seeing it applied to computers and cell phones around you all your life. but are ignoring that batteries move much more slowly because they are bound by chemistry. some guys in a lab probably did do something awesome. great. how long until they are actually able to commercially produce what they did into your car and guarantee the bust into flames rate will be 0%? exponential growth in this regard is an extremely bold claim.
#WRONG
No doubt that luxury car companies are moving towards electric, but the market is very small. In the global economy, I can see ICE cars reigning for next 30-40 years. Remember, there's large portions of the world who do not have electrical grids to support charging and more importantly wealth to buy EV's.
Lastly, EV's are a stopgap technology.
I think people are overreacting a bit when it comes to price and the near future outlook. It’s simply a piece of new tech that you will pay a premium for now...... remember DVD players? When they first came out your basic one was 300+ dollars. Now they are next to nothing.
I would assume by 2020-2025 there will be a large price range for decent mile EVs
I would assume by 2020-2025 there will be a large price range for decent mile EVs
Most electricity in the US comes from burning fossil fuels. I was wondering if anyone has links to any studies where they compare using fossil fuels in the cars versus using fossil fuels to make electricity for EV and their efficiency and/or environmental impacts. Renewables only account for about 15% of our electric supply.
All that video tells me is I need a E63 AMG Wagon in my life. It sounds glorious.
not really. They are just getting started and WILL dominate the car industry just as Electric LiPo/Brushless has dominated Radio Control cars.
In the RC world every single performance record is now held by electric vehicles.
Traxxas sells a 100mph+ RC car that box stock is capable of almost 110mph, and 0-60 about as fast as a Tesla P100D if you know how to drive it. Car & Driver got an 11.7 @ 101mph out of it over an entire 1/4 mile. And if you can drive, it will nail 60mph in 2.3 seconds, faster than a P100D.
they had electric cars 100 years ago too though. it is wrong to put these things in the context of tech based on transistors because it is based on chemistry. advancements from EVs come just as much from related technology than anything to do with the drivetrain, ie. the i3 with a carbon fiber body, not that it's a mainstream affordable thing yet either.
most of the time the greenest option is maintaining an already existing car, unless your car is a colossal pile of shit. as it requires a lot of energy to build a new car period, then moreso if it's a full EV and full of batteries. iirc it seemed a fair amount of cars would not even truly become a greener state until they were in the hands of the 2nd owner.
how green the local power is feeding into your car varies greatly regionally. there's def studies that try to look into accounting for the total cost of the car out there though.
c'mon, it's a pretty big stretch to compare rc cars to the car industry.
I’m just going to answer some of these posts while I have a few minutes. So if I don’t answer a particular post I’m not ignoring you. I’ll get to these as I have time and I’m sure my responses are going to elicit even more comments.
So I see two fundamental mistakes here:
1. You’re assuming that cars are not getting more efficient and that scales of economy aren’t making these cars cheaper by a factor of multiples.
2. You’re only using the initial purchase price of each vehicle to determine ownership costs.
So let’s touch on both of these. The first one one is pretty easy. The cars demonstrably are getting cheaper and more efficient. Battery costs for Tesla have dropped considerably since the roll out of the S, so much so that the current base model S is as fast as the original top of the line performance model, is equipped with much more equipment as standard, has all wheel drive and is about $20,000 less. You’re giving up 10 miles of range in this comparison but the point remains: The new base model car is exponentially cheaper, as fast as the original car, more efficient and better equipped and Tesla attributes all of that to increasing scales of economy and lower battery production costs.
If you want a more apples to apples comparison you can compare the original P85 performance model to the standard 100D now offered. The non-performance 100D is faster than the original P85 and gets you 335 miles of range to the original P85’s 265. And we’re not even factoring things like autopilot in... stuff that the original car didn’t have.
At the end of the day you have car that costs the same, has nearly 25% more range than just 3 years ago, is faster and better equipped. So they’re not getting more expensive. They’re very much getting cheaper.
The Chevy Bolt is a great example of that. The Bolt has 235 miles of range for what? $35,000 I think? That car has a 60kwh battery pack. When the Model S first came out the replacement 60kwh battery pack was $40,000. The customer replacement cost for the battery pack in the Bolt is just under $16,000 for the same 60kwh and GM has disclosed that they are paying LG $146/ kWh for their packs which means the effective cost of that pack is around $8700. Prices have dropped a lot and not only will they continue to do so but you’ll see cheaper, better cars.
As the technology continues to get cheaper it will continue to trickle down into cheaper and cheaper market segments. The last segments will be the ultra inexpensive cars but it will happen.
Point Number 2: Assumption of Fixed Costs for Both Cars
There are so many expenses you don’t incur on an electric car that you would on an internal combustion car. The most obvious is gas. Assuming you buy a car that averages 20 miles per gallon and drive 1000 miles a month your monthly fuel expense (assuming $2.50 per gallon) would be $125. That same 1000 miles a month in a Model 3 or Bolt would cost you $35. Beyond that the IC car requires regular maintenance in the form of oil changes, belt changes, filter changes, etc. The electric car does not. The IC car has literally thousands of failure points. Bearings, pulleys, gaskets, hard parts and then the hundreds of parts in the transmission, not to mention the consumable soft parts. Not only does the likelyhood of failure increase exponentially with an IC car but the labor to perform the work is much more involved. If the engine on your 535i tanks BMW needs to drop the front cradle, detach all the accessories, remove the exhaust, drain all the fluids, replace any necessary ancillary components, etc. It takes days to do and if you’re lucky enough to be able to find an engine for cheap, the labor to replace it will often total out the car. Conversely replacing the drive unit in an electric car often takes just a few hours, is much less involved and best part... It will be a cheaper part to replace because it can be rebuilt and stored on site.
And this is a point I can prove as nearly all of the early Model S motors have been replaced by Tesla. If that were an engine the sheer cost of replacement would have bankrupted them but since it was an electric motor they simply removed the motors and rebuilt them, often surprising people with a new motor when they had come in for much more basic service. That’s how easy it was. Their cost was essentially labor which again was cheaper because it’s easier/ faster to replace the drive unit than it is an engine.
An engine is generally replaced when it’s not feasible to fix it. It’s then scrapped. An electric motor generally doesn’t experience the same catastrophic failures and as such can be re-built for an insignificant amount of money. This is assuming worst case scenario but I can say this as someone that worked on cars and has an intimate knowledge of the working of the Model S: I would so much rather pay out of pocket to have a used motor put in a Model S than I would to have an engine put in a 535i or even a more pedestrian car. Then there’s the intangibles that people don’t consider such as oil leaks and the fact that as tolerances increase your gas mileage decreases.
But as far as long term outlook goes, all things equal an electric drivetrain is going to cost less to maintain, is going to cost less to fix, is going to be easier to fix and is going to be more reliable in the first place. Look at the Tesloop Model X with 300,000 miles. It’s experienced almost nothing in the way of battery degradation, is on it’s original motors, isn’t spewing oil out the exhaust and shows literally no signs of stopping. It still makes daily LA - Vegas trips.
So I see two fundamental mistakes here:
1. You’re assuming that cars are not getting more efficient and that scales of economy aren’t making these cars cheaper by a factor of multiples.
2. You’re only using the initial purchase price of each vehicle to determine ownership costs.
So let’s touch on both of these. The first one one is pretty easy. The cars demonstrably are getting cheaper and more efficient. Battery costs for Tesla have dropped considerably since the roll out of the S, so much so that the current base model S is as fast as the original top of the line performance model, is equipped with much more equipment as standard, has all wheel drive and is about $20,000 less. You’re giving up 10 miles of range in this comparison but the point remains: The new base model car is exponentially cheaper, as fast as the original car, more efficient and better equipped and Tesla attributes all of that to increasing scales of economy and lower battery production costs.
If you want a more apples to apples comparison you can compare the original P85 performance model to the standard 100D now offered. The non-performance 100D is faster than the original P85 and gets you 335 miles of range to the original P85’s 265. And we’re not even factoring things like autopilot in... stuff that the original car didn’t have.
At the end of the day you have car that costs the same, has nearly 25% more range than just 3 years ago, is faster and better equipped. So they’re not getting more expensive. They’re very much getting cheaper.
The Chevy Bolt is a great example of that. The Bolt has 235 miles of range for what? $35,000 I think? That car has a 60kwh battery pack. When the Model S first came out the replacement 60kwh battery pack was $40,000. The customer replacement cost for the battery pack in the Bolt is just under $16,000 for the same 60kwh and GM has disclosed that they are paying LG $146/ kWh for their packs which means the effective cost of that pack is around $8700. Prices have dropped a lot and not only will they continue to do so but you’ll see cheaper, better cars.
As the technology continues to get cheaper it will continue to trickle down into cheaper and cheaper market segments. The last segments will be the ultra inexpensive cars but it will happen.
Point Number 2: Assumption of Fixed Costs for Both Cars
There are so many expenses you don’t incur on an electric car that you would on an internal combustion car. The most obvious is gas. Assuming you buy a car that averages 20 miles per gallon and drive 1000 miles a month your monthly fuel expense (assuming $2.50 per gallon) would be $125. That same 1000 miles a month in a Model 3 or Bolt would cost you $35. Beyond that the IC car requires regular maintenance in the form of oil changes, belt changes, filter changes, etc. The electric car does not. The IC car has literally thousands of failure points. Bearings, pulleys, gaskets, hard parts and then the hundreds of parts in the transmission, not to mention the consumable soft parts. Not only does the likelyhood of failure increase exponentially with an IC car but the labor to perform the work is much more involved. If the engine on your 535i tanks BMW needs to drop the front cradle, detach all the accessories, remove the exhaust, drain all the fluids, replace any necessary ancillary components, etc. It takes days to do and if you’re lucky enough to be able to find an engine for cheap, the labor to replace it will often total out the car. Conversely replacing the drive unit in an electric car often takes just a few hours, is much less involved and best part... It will be a cheaper part to replace because it can be rebuilt and stored on site.
And this is a point I can prove as nearly all of the early Model S motors have been replaced by Tesla. If that were an engine the sheer cost of replacement would have bankrupted them but since it was an electric motor they simply removed the motors and rebuilt them, often surprising people with a new motor when they had come in for much more basic service. That’s how easy it was. Their cost was essentially labor which again was cheaper because it’s easier/ faster to replace the drive unit than it is an engine.
An engine is generally replaced when it’s not feasible to fix it. It’s then scrapped. An electric motor generally doesn’t experience the same catastrophic failures and as such can be re-built for an insignificant amount of money. This is assuming worst case scenario but I can say this as someone that worked on cars and has an intimate knowledge of the working of the Model S: I would so much rather pay out of pocket to have a used motor put in a Model S than I would to have an engine put in a 535i or even a more pedestrian car. Then there’s the intangibles that people don’t consider such as oil leaks and the fact that as tolerances increase your gas mileage decreases.
But as far as long term outlook goes, all things equal an electric drivetrain is going to cost less to maintain, is going to cost less to fix, is going to be easier to fix and is going to be more reliable in the first place. Look at the Tesloop Model X with 300,000 miles. It’s experienced almost nothing in the way of battery degradation, is on it’s original motors, isn’t spewing oil out the exhaust and shows literally no signs of stopping. It still makes daily LA - Vegas trips.
I think you missed the part where I said I’d address one post at a time as I had time. ;-)
But to boil down my response to your statement... If the market is presented with a better product/ technology for the same or less money the market generally embraces that product, even if the initial iteration is cripplingly expensive and seemingly somewhat handicapped. The iPhone is a great example of that.
We’re not going backwards. It’s not like all these companies are going to announce huge investments in electric and then just backtrack. If we were to plot out the point at which these companies have been announcing shifts into electrification of their model ranges, conversion of their existing offerings to electric, or announcing that they were ceasing investment in legacy technologies (Volvo and Diesel) you’d see that they’re happening with increasing frequency. The train is rolling and the more the market sees that this is where things are going, the more frequent we’ll see announcements like this.
The ship has sailed. This is where the industry is going. I can’t understand how so many people don’t see the writing on the wall. The internal combustion engine is dead technology. It will continue to improve, sure, but we’re in the death throws of internal combustion engines for most practical applications.
But to boil down my response to your statement... If the market is presented with a better product/ technology for the same or less money the market generally embraces that product, even if the initial iteration is cripplingly expensive and seemingly somewhat handicapped. The iPhone is a great example of that.
We’re not going backwards. It’s not like all these companies are going to announce huge investments in electric and then just backtrack. If we were to plot out the point at which these companies have been announcing shifts into electrification of their model ranges, conversion of their existing offerings to electric, or announcing that they were ceasing investment in legacy technologies (Volvo and Diesel) you’d see that they’re happening with increasing frequency. The train is rolling and the more the market sees that this is where things are going, the more frequent we’ll see announcements like this.
The ship has sailed. This is where the industry is going. I can’t understand how so many people don’t see the writing on the wall. The internal combustion engine is dead technology. It will continue to improve, sure, but we’re in the death throws of internal combustion engines for most practical applications.
The problem is that right now for most Americans and the majority of the automotive consumer population worldwide is that EV’s aren’t a “better” technology due to issues with range, slow charging, and cost (which is subsidized by Governments worldwide). You used the example of the iPhone above, but the difference is that cellular technology was developed and reliable when the product was launched. The iPhone is a device that tapped into that network. The current network for charging EV’s is very spotty and painfully slow compared to a gas pump.
I have no doubt that the economies of scale and technology will drive the costs of batteries down. Until then, EV’s will be a novelty for the rich or do-gooders. It’s going to take a long time for the ICE to be overtaken by EV’s and by then what’s the next technology? As I’ve said, EV’s are a stopgap technology.
is it also not a false assumption to assume ICE has plateaued and is not improving either? not at the same rate but i don't think that tech has no legs left.
this is a great point but also one that's easier for a business to handle in spreadsheets, but harder for a consumer to plot out and swallow in their mind.
why was this done was their something wearing or poorly designed on them? or is this somewhat normalish??
Range and slow charging aren't an issue. I drive a ton and charge my car on 110v at a range of 4 miles per hour. That's right. My car gets 4 miles of range for every hour it charges. It's not a problem with the car or electric cars because most people would just install a 240v outlet and be charging at a rate of at least 30 miles per hour. But since the car is effectively always plugged in it doesn't matter. If you're the average person driving 40 miles a day you could go a week without charging which means charge speed is a non-issue. If you're drive a couple hundred miles a day you'd be charging overnight and your 200 miles would be replenished in 6.5 hours. My entire job is driving and I'm doing just fine charging at 4 miles per hour. You're waking up every day with a full tank of gas. So then let's assume you're talking about taking road trips.
That problem is largely addressed for Tesla but other companies are creating standards for fast charging as well. Porsche and a few other automakers are already rolling out 350kw charging stations that charge at double the speed of Tesla's superchargers. The new Porsche Mission E will charge 248 miles in 15 minutes on their charge network. At that speed, charging times becomes a non-issue for road trips. Tesla doesn't like to be out-done and has teased that they're working on something even faster than that.
The point is, enough people are onboard that their purchase will subsidizing future charging development and those chargers will bring even more people into the fray until that's the standard and suddenly we're all wondering what we ever worried about. But now that it's obvious there's much more investment into this segment, there's going to be much more investment into charging infrastructure. What does that look like? Well, let's look at Tesla's supercharger map from just 4 years ago.
And then the current map:
Now if a small scrappy startup can pop up a network that substantial over just 4 years, beginning in a time when they effectively had the entire market, what do you think the combined efforts of several legacy manufacturers can do? People keep acting like it's going to take decades for these cars to be able to charge everywhere and charge everywhere quickly while completely ignoring the fact that a cash strapped startup created a country-wide network in less than 4 years. This is a non-issue and while it might present an inconvenience for very early adopters, much like it did for Tesla's very early adopters, enough won't care enough that they'll buy the cars anyhow and subsidize future development as we've already seen with Tesla. After all, pretty all original Tesla owners bought a car that by today's standards almost every electric naysayer will tell you nobody would buy. Now you trickle that down to lower dollar markets and you're absolutely going to have a higher take rate.
In a way I agree but in other respects, people were giving up basic assumed luxuries of a phone when they bought an iPhone. There was no copy and paste, no MMS text messages and just 2G network connectivity. People mocked it for it's inferiority but we all know where that went. People seem to have little vision when it comes to how quickly things can change. See my previous comments about superchargers popping up.
There's nothing to indicate that EVs are a stopgap technology. I mean, what do you have to substantiate that claim other than you're opinion? It's an ambiguous statement with no timeline. I can say that TVs are a stopgap and I'd be right but I have no idea what's going to replace them. There's very real reason to believe that EVs are the next evolution in transport though. They exist, they're getting better and cheaper by a factor of multiples and the market is showing strong signs of moving in that direction.
I didn't say it has no legs. In fact, I said it's going to continue to get better until it disappears. There are certain things that no matter how "good" ICE gets you can't eliminate. You can't eliminate the fact that they get less efficient with time or the fact that they create more emissions as the miles stack up or the fact that they have exponentially more consumables that require regular replacement... They have worse power delivery and their drivetrains have exponentially more points of failure then an electric drivetrain. The most efficient ICE in the world won't change any of this and is an inferior means of propulsion on top of all of that. So all things equal, with a lower price and charging/ range issues solved, who would ever choose that? Maybe enthusiasts but that's it.
Then there's other stuff like the fact that in cities like Los Angeles where the topography has us basically basting in a bowl of our own tailpipe emissions you can effectively eliminate or drastically reduce smog in big cities to the point that even if people's arguments about electric cars being just as dirty as gas cars were true (they're not) at the very least you could move the pollution away from where the people are.
Nah, I disagree. It's just something people don't consider but grasp very quickly once you explain it to them. When people ask me about my car they have a litany of questions and when I run down the list of the advantages and show them the math it's very easy to grasp. People just don't do it. I very seriously considered buying another 535i for $25,000 and that $25,000 car over 5 years ended up costing as much to own/ operate as a $50,000 used Model S and the longer you keep them the worse the math gets for the BMW. And nobody would consider the BMW a ridiculously expensive car at $25,000.
There was a bushing that would wear to the point where it would fail. It would at first manifest itself as a noise in the motor and then if you ignored it for a looooooooong time the motor would eventually fail. Almost nobody's motor failed despite most of them being replaced and even a motor that failed simply had the bushing replaced and it was ready to go again.
I'm talking about developed countries here. In third world countries I don't see full adoption for electric being a thing soon. You will get to the point where electricity is going to be cheap too. Look at how much cheaper/ more efficient solar has gotten and continues to get. We will get to a point where in all but the most undeveloped of areas power is eventually going to be a non-issue.
And I know that statement is going to rustle some jimmies too but that's a different topic.
That's such a silly argument I can't believe you'd make it. There is absolutely no comparison to be made to electric cars from 100 years ago. The major push for electric really started in 2008 with the Tesla Roadster and in that 9 year stretch we've watched an underfunded startup take electric cars from being tethered to a city, slow and with poor range to being literally one of the fastest production cars in the world, with over 300 miles of range that is able to travel the country. If you plot the improvements in range/ efficiency over the past 9 years you'd have an exponential chart, not a linear. People act like they've been working on improving electric cars since the 1800's. It's just not true. The investment and research has come largely in the last 10 years. Go ahead... Plot out basically any metric and you're not going to have a linear line on your chart; you're going to have an exponential line.
Totally agree on this but that's not the world we live in. It's not as if people are faced with the prospect of keeping their car or buying an electric car. We live in a society that's buying new cars either way. So to base any argument off something that's not happening either way is a bit disingenuous.
It's definitely greener in some parts are dirtier in others but I don't believe it's ever dirtier to power an electric car than a gas car. Not to mention the point I made earlier how even if the pollution was equal, with an electric car that pollution is being moved away from high concentrations of people. Not to mention all the other long term pollution that people don't consider like consumables, replacement parts, less recyclable components, more points of failure requiring more replacement parts, etc.
Another thing I see people talking about is how battery technology doesn't quite improve at the speed of other technologies and while an argument can certainly be made for that, it becomes largely irrelevant if the technology can be made cheaper. Here's a graph I made showing the cost per kWh to make a car battery from 2010 until now:
To put that into perspective, the 85kWh battery pack in the original Model S would have had a net cost to Tesla of about $55,000 whereas just 5 years later their larger 100kwh pack now has a net cost of about $15,000 and that's not even using Tesla's new cell or with the economies of scale of the gigafactory fully online. If that number isn't telling and doesn't clearly demonstrate the improvements being made and the speed at which they're being made, I'm just not sure what else does.
ONE company... working largely by itself... with limited funds... effectively increased range by 25% and decreased cost by 72% in 5 years.
At a very real price point of 100/ kWh a 50ishkWh pack could be installed in a mid-size car with a practical range of about 250 miles at a cost of about $5000 for the battery and maybe $2000 for the motor/ inverter. So $7000 for the drivetrain. What's an ICE engine, accessories, transmission and ancillary parts cost on a car like the Fusion? I'm guessing $5000ish on the best of days not considering the cost of warrantying the more complicated drivetrain. We're just a couple of years off from parity in terms of price and once you get even remotely close to parity nobody is going to pick the drivetrain that requires more maintenance, delivers less power, has a worse powerband, likely won't last as long and has a thousands of points of failure. Just isn't happening. The door has been opened. There is no shutting it.
To put that into perspective, the 85kWh battery pack in the original Model S would have had a net cost to Tesla of about $55,000 whereas just 5 years later their larger 100kwh pack now has a net cost of about $15,000 and that's not even using Tesla's new cell or with the economies of scale of the gigafactory fully online. If that number isn't telling and doesn't clearly demonstrate the improvements being made and the speed at which they're being made, I'm just not sure what else does.
ONE company... working largely by itself... with limited funds... effectively increased range by 25% and decreased cost by 72% in 5 years.
At a very real price point of 100/ kWh a 50ishkWh pack could be installed in a mid-size car with a practical range of about 250 miles at a cost of about $5000 for the battery and maybe $2000 for the motor/ inverter. So $7000 for the drivetrain. What's an ICE engine, accessories, transmission and ancillary parts cost on a car like the Fusion? I'm guessing $5000ish on the best of days not considering the cost of warrantying the more complicated drivetrain. We're just a couple of years off from parity in terms of price and once you get even remotely close to parity nobody is going to pick the drivetrain that requires more maintenance, delivers less power, has a worse powerband, likely won't last as long and has a thousands of points of failure. Just isn't happening. The door has been opened. There is no shutting it.
No, what matters is vision and being able to see where the industry is going... In my opinion of course. Again, look at the iPhone. In 2007 if you would have looked at sales of smart phones relative to other phones they were a blip on the radar and Apple was that blip but you could very clearly see that the people that had them loved them despite their shortcomings and soon it was evident that everyone was going to make their own. My whole point is that I'm seeing something most of you aren't. If I could point to sales to make my point we wouldn't be having this conversation in the first place.
Again, it doesn't matter if pack price continues to drop at the rate it is. We could theoretically stay at this efficiency level (but we're not) and the pack cost continues to decline rapidly... something like 80% in 7 years. And when I apply Moore's law it's not on a micro level but more a macro level in relation to charging speeds, battery technology, efficiency of the cars, etc. We've seen yuuuuge improvements in all of these metrics and those improvements seem to be happening at an ever increasing pace.
but it's not, it's just a further point that the tech is not new and this stuff does not follow moore's law. you make your own false analogy in this thread to transistor tech with tvs and lastls1 to dvd players. 100 years ago, you didn't have either of these, but you did have battery powered cars.
but there are still plenty of slow and poor range electrics, you are comparing apples to oranges here and write this statement as if tesla just cracked the formula and it was a technological leap to achieve these things. but that's not exactly what happened. it was that instead of making the typical light/short/slow city car, they threw talent and fuck it money and just said hey let's make a great car. and they did, and at a great price, and found a market that welcomed it. credit is given where credit is due - but you make it sound like leafs became teslas. leafs are still leafs and teslas are in their own separate ev class.
do you really? hasn't teslas range been static to linear? how much of these improvements are battery/tech related vs. materials/lightening (which will help all cars?)
but we have been working on batteries, have we not?
no, it's not a computer, it's not a phone, it's not a dvd player, it's not a tv
hard to find anything with charge times, i'm settling for this as a meh proxy
nonetheless not something i would call exponential.
Another thing I see people talking about is how battery technology doesn't quite improve at the speed of other technologies and while an argument can certainly be made for that, it becomes largely irrelevant if the technology can be made cheaper. Here's a graph I made showing the cost per kWh to make a car battery from 2010 until now:
To put that into perspective, the 85kWh battery pack in the original Model S would have had a net cost to Tesla of about $55,000 whereas just 5 years later their larger 100kwh pack now has a net cost of about $15,000 and that's not even using Tesla's new cell or with the economies of scale of the gigafactory fully online. If that number isn't telling and doesn't clearly demonstrate the improvements being made and the speed at which they're being made, I'm just not sure what else does.
ONE company... working largely by itself... with limited funds... effectively increased range by 25% and decreased cost by 72% in 5 years.
At a very real price point of 100/ kWh a 50ishkWh pack could be installed in a mid-size car with a practical range of about 250 miles at a cost of about $5000 for the battery and maybe $2000 for the motor/ inverter. So $7000 for the drivetrain. What's an ICE engine, accessories, transmission and ancillary parts cost on a car like the Fusion? I'm guessing $5000ish on the best of days not considering the cost of warrantying the more complicated drivetrain. We're just a couple of years off from parity in terms of price and once you get even remotely close to parity nobody is going to pick the drivetrain that requires more maintenance, delivers less power, has a worse powerband, likely won't last as long and has a thousands of points of failure. Just isn't happening. The door has been opened. There is no shutting it.
so you have your own linear graph here as well. the important part for buyers isn't that the trend is declining but when it is price competitive though, and most certainly ideally without subsidy. even with subsidy the cars are reasonably pricey though. and even at price parity there is still the question of convenience around charging. if an unsubsidized ev was at price and charge parity with hybrid or ice sure it's a no brainer to pick ev. will that be 2020 or 2025?
i think odds are decent that this changes before the parity is ever reached, if self-driving cars go truly trustable and political liability is worked out. i don't need to own a car if i can just summon an uber pod when i want to go anywhere at my whim. i don't have to worry about charge time because like k1 they just juggle fleet size and demand so i am never waiting on a car, they are waiting on me.
this seems a totally false comparison. it's like you're saying early adoption of technology guarantees technology and market success, because iphone bro. ignoring that plenty of early adopters bought tech that ultimately did not gain market share or it even fell to 0.
you should not mention moore's law in the context of any of this. anything even relatively exponential is not moving anything like moore's law. notice the y-axis, see how it is graphed in log scale?? show me which li-ion or tesla or ev chart needs to do that.
Thread Info
-
Created -
693Replies
-
21KViews
-
Participants list
