I've been calling this shot for years. The cost optimization runway for EVs is much longer than for gas cars.
Their adoption will eventually be a pure numbers game as new electric becomes cost competitive with used gas. That's how the pragmatic adoption will happen.
You don't need, for instance, catalytic converters or a bunch of other expensive, low tolerance parts and since the fuel storage is electricity, new chemistries are way more feasible. Everything points to a car price crash in the next decade or so. There's already sub-$5k models in China.
This will drop even lower when things like inductive road charging or other ways of passive refueling while in use (such as solar). Then you can tear even more out.
Imagine office parking lots where inductive charges were put in every parking spot as they laid the concrete being an expected, normal thing. No cables, no plugging.
Most people buy used cars today. In the future (10-20 years), most people will have these: frequently passive charging cheap vehicles using non expensive commodity parts.
You and literally millions of people. It was obvious to anyne paying attention.
What was ludicrous, then as now, were the people saying Tesla was going to bankrupt every car company. Instead, if it wasn't for tariffs, the Chinese manufacturers would be eating everyone's lunch.
American car manufacturers have fallen greatly after the Jack Welshification of the industry over the past 50 years.
There was an intentional hollowing out of the US industrial base because pillaging and gutting for profit made stock go up faster.
Now we sit on top of wrecked husks: GE, RCA, GM, Motorola. It was all intentionally dismantled and sold off.
The problem isn't Tesla or electric cars, it's the conservative orthodox economists and their political lackeys that looted the industrial base in order to manufacture stock bubbles and claim it as progress
And it will never be addressed until people stop claiming drag queens and bathroom signs have somehow swindled their wealth.
Yes, about 2000 moving parts in a combustion engine compared to 20 in an electric motor. The only reason ICE cars are comparable in price is the 100 years of supply chain competition.
EVs will win, but gas and diesel will persist for a long time in niches (enthusiasts, long-haul towing).
More rural places without electrification are the big long term use until renewable tech becomes better and significantly cheaper.
In the future there will be off-grid unmanned free standing windmill or solar installations with a car charger hooked up to it. People will put such public chargers on their vacant land, say in the desert, for passive income, profit sharing with the installer.
Their storage capacity, price and availability will be broadcast by cellular and be part of the realtime routing decision of the vehicle who will be able to reserve a time slot.
Whenever such free standing charging station businesses becomes viable, that's when gasolines cars will be in their final decline. Might be 40 years, might be 10.
But you can replace any of those 2000 moving parts with same one from eBay. You can either make your own if you know how. You can't change DRM locked part unless it is a new one and installed by approved technician using approved software for installation. Have you been naughty boy? No parts for you.
Inductive road charging is pretty hard to imagine being feasible. The efficiency of inductive charging at a standoff distance while moving at high speed will be abysmal. About as hard to conceive of as UBeam working out.
The biggest problem in Germany at the moment is that a high percentage of chargers are broken. Here is a supermarket with chargers, broken for weeks now.
Imagine the outcry if 50% of gas pumps were broken all the time.
The USA has a bunch of funding available to states to fund charging networks, under the Inflstion Reduction Act. At the beginning of the year we finally got our federal charging standard together, and it's looking really good & useful on this front:
To get funding you need real time & historical charger availability and status info (including what charge rates are available), via API. Making sure chargers are both really discoverable & actually usable should be greatly improved!
All new industries are plagued by functional problems during the scaling stage. Electricity isn't inherently as unreliable in other applications so these problems will eventually be resolved and have approximately the same failure profile as normal electricity.
Tesla superchargers are rarely down. Not sure what they’re doing differently, but it shows that EV chargers CAN be reliable, but a lot of companies haven’t figured it out yet.
This has been changing since Musk fired the supercharger team. I found one location where the entire set was nonfunctional and no indication in the car app.
Nice, I'm glad to hear LFP batteries are gaining popularity. More stable, no nickel or cobalt, IIRC cheaper to produce, way more charge cycles, and slower degradation of overall capacity.
The effect I think will be felt more in home batteries as with many places around the world now hitting curtailments. And stopping net metering for home solar as supply is higher than demand.
My p.v. is only 5kWp/8kWh LFP because at 2019 prices that's a bit more than a wise economical choice, at BRICS price it would quickly evolve in a 10kWp/30kWh allow me to be nearly autonomous for large part of the year...
So will this even further destroy resale values of current EVs? As batteries are major component of price so drop in their price means drop in general of the price. Increasing depreciation even further...
We would need a standardized, replaceable battery pack that takes us 300-500 km. That would eliminate the risk of expensive battery service and make recharging instant at service station.
That may be, but BYD has made it work reliably and enables you to do battery-as-a-service which actually makes a lot of sense for EVs, since that's usually the lifetime limitation. Second hand EVs become actually viable that way.
Plus, fast charging wears out the battery sooner, reducing car lifetime even further. Not very cashmoney from an ecological nor an actual cash money perspective. If you're gonna spend 2x the ICE car cost on an EV it should at least last you longer.
I believe GP might be taking about an add-on, not a substitute for the existing battery. Perhaps a tiny trailer hooked up to a standardized coupling that you rent when you are venturing out on something that's more than an hour of driving.
It would mostly be a challenge for mechanical engineers, to come up with some solution that does not ruin driving characteristics too. Perhaps even involving some heavily computerized active suspension, just not a dangling ticket trivial mini trailer that swings into dangerous resonance...
Swapping the floorboard batteries, yeah, won't happen. You'd rather see the battery car self-driving in close slipstream formation connected with a transmission wire that's never mechanically loaded.
Or contact less, constant charging at traffic lights, during parking, on the highway.
I'm sure there are people in 1900 who said, "Cars will never work, because I need to by petroleum in a pharmacy!" ignoring how technology will progress. If you had told them, there will be a "gas station" everywhere, those people would have called you crazy.
I don't think that whole battery pack will be standardized, more like it will have slots for smaller standardized packs (i.e. 10kg ones). Similar to standardization in PC.
That would be solving so many problems.
1. Repairability - You can replace all packs, or just some. Depends on your financial situation.
2. Independence - You are not dependent when your company will stop manufacturing your special battery pack.
3. Longevity - You can buy 10 year old car with dead battery and buy latest set of standard packs with latest battery technology, suddenly your car is having twice the range than it was a new. Like HDD -> SSD
4. Less dependency on street infrastructure - You can charge the car on a charger or if you can't charge at your place, you can just pull one or two packs out of your car and charge them on 230V in your apartment or hotel room.
5. No wall box needed - You can have two sets of these standardized packs. You can put one into garage where it will be charged during the day (i.e. Solar array) and you can use the other one in your car. Swap them when needed.
The only people who say "I don't mind stopping for 30 minutes to charge!" are people who dont drive much. For people who travel by car a lot, that's insane.
I can't imagine being forced to hang out at a truck stop for 30 minutes rather than getting back on the road.
Readit News
Their adoption will eventually be a pure numbers game as new electric becomes cost competitive with used gas. That's how the pragmatic adoption will happen.
You don't need, for instance, catalytic converters or a bunch of other expensive, low tolerance parts and since the fuel storage is electricity, new chemistries are way more feasible. Everything points to a car price crash in the next decade or so. There's already sub-$5k models in China.
This will drop even lower when things like inductive road charging or other ways of passive refueling while in use (such as solar). Then you can tear even more out.
Imagine office parking lots where inductive charges were put in every parking spot as they laid the concrete being an expected, normal thing. No cables, no plugging.
Most people buy used cars today. In the future (10-20 years), most people will have these: frequently passive charging cheap vehicles using non expensive commodity parts.
You and literally millions of people. It was obvious to anyne paying attention.
What was ludicrous, then as now, were the people saying Tesla was going to bankrupt every car company. Instead, if it wasn't for tariffs, the Chinese manufacturers would be eating everyone's lunch.
There was an intentional hollowing out of the US industrial base because pillaging and gutting for profit made stock go up faster.
Now we sit on top of wrecked husks: GE, RCA, GM, Motorola. It was all intentionally dismantled and sold off.
The problem isn't Tesla or electric cars, it's the conservative orthodox economists and their political lackeys that looted the industrial base in order to manufacture stock bubbles and claim it as progress
And it will never be addressed until people stop claiming drag queens and bathroom signs have somehow swindled their wealth.
EVs will win, but gas and diesel will persist for a long time in niches (enthusiasts, long-haul towing).
In the future there will be off-grid unmanned free standing windmill or solar installations with a car charger hooked up to it. People will put such public chargers on their vacant land, say in the desert, for passive income, profit sharing with the installer.
Their storage capacity, price and availability will be broadcast by cellular and be part of the realtime routing decision of the vehicle who will be able to reserve a time slot.
Whenever such free standing charging station businesses becomes viable, that's when gasolines cars will be in their final decline. Might be 40 years, might be 10.
This will work against all new cars in general.
And then there's the immensely popular $4,000 Wuling Hongguang Mini EV https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuling_Hongguang_Mini_EV
Meanwhile the average used car in the USA is $25,000 https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/buying-a-car/when-to-bu...
So this is already a reality, we're just living in the time of the disruptive arbitrage interregnum.
Imagine the outcry if 50% of gas pumps were broken all the time.
The algorithm to detect ground faults is a major culprit.
To get funding you need real time & historical charger availability and status info (including what charge rates are available), via API. Making sure chargers are both really discoverable & actually usable should be greatly improved!
My p.v. is only 5kWp/8kWh LFP because at 2019 prices that's a bit more than a wise economical choice, at BRICS price it would quickly evolve in a 10kWp/30kWh allow me to be nearly autonomous for large part of the year...
I think 250kW flat charging curves are almost as convenient. Go to pee and scroll HN for one minute and voilà.
Plus, fast charging wears out the battery sooner, reducing car lifetime even further. Not very cashmoney from an ecological nor an actual cash money perspective. If you're gonna spend 2x the ICE car cost on an EV it should at least last you longer.
It would mostly be a challenge for mechanical engineers, to come up with some solution that does not ruin driving characteristics too. Perhaps even involving some heavily computerized active suspension, just not a dangling ticket trivial mini trailer that swings into dangerous resonance...
Swapping the floorboard batteries, yeah, won't happen. You'd rather see the battery car self-driving in close slipstream formation connected with a transmission wire that's never mechanically loaded.
Or contact less, constant charging at traffic lights, during parking, on the highway.
I'm sure there are people in 1900 who said, "Cars will never work, because I need to by petroleum in a pharmacy!" ignoring how technology will progress. If you had told them, there will be a "gas station" everywhere, those people would have called you crazy.
That would be solving so many problems.
1. Repairability - You can replace all packs, or just some. Depends on your financial situation.
2. Independence - You are not dependent when your company will stop manufacturing your special battery pack.
3. Longevity - You can buy 10 year old car with dead battery and buy latest set of standard packs with latest battery technology, suddenly your car is having twice the range than it was a new. Like HDD -> SSD
4. Less dependency on street infrastructure - You can charge the car on a charger or if you can't charge at your place, you can just pull one or two packs out of your car and charge them on 230V in your apartment or hotel room.
5. No wall box needed - You can have two sets of these standardized packs. You can put one into garage where it will be charged during the day (i.e. Solar array) and you can use the other one in your car. Swap them when needed.
Charing for 30 minutes isn’t a real issue after a long drive.
Replacing individual battery modules will become cheap enough it will extend the life of battery packs enough.
And once the whole battery needs replacing it will be ok financially.
I can't imagine being forced to hang out at a truck stop for 30 minutes rather than getting back on the road.