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.
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.
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.
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.
Other future imagining: a bunch of wrecked or old EV's being used for their battery capacity, buffering power from solar. Charge station of old cars holding juice for new ones.
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.
Ok name an EV part you can be a DRM asshole with and tell me the mechanism by which you're enforcing the DRM and I'll bet it's equally enforceable with a similar mechanism on the gas vehicle.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Are they profitable though? Sounds like a painful investment trap, where the company can always declare projections of a happy future once a certain threshold would be reached in terms of installed base of compatible cars with interchangeable batteries, and every time growth in installed base starts to visibly miss the optimistic prognosis they can say "uncle" and force a reset by introducing some new incompatible format "this time it will be better, need more money, now!"
(I know nothing about how intra China VC works or does not work, but battery swap schemes sound like an effective capital trap - note that those traps tend to work best when even the ones setting them up don't recognize their nature, I'm not accusing anyone on doing it on purpose!)
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.
Renault also did battery as a service a decade ago, with some battery swaps. The maths didn't work at the time but maybe BYD and NIO will this time.
Agree that fast charging wears the battery more, but it's mostly fine. Cars are built to be used and it's better to fast charge current gen batteries when you need it than waiting for better technology while driving an ICE car.
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.
As cool as an inductive charging strip would be, offhand, the inherent losses as well as practically microwaving the underside of the car, would probably both be too much.
Now, parking lots where a robot lifts an underside contact up if there's a match, that might just work.
I'm not worried at all about the power efficiency of my phone's charging process.
Some napkin math suggests that my pocket supercomputer costs me at most about $1 per year to keep charged and running, or perhaps $5 over the life of the phone, when plugged in every night. I wouldn't notice or care if it were an order of magnitude worse than that at $10 per year or $50 over the life of the phone.
So wireless charging of my phone doesn't bother me a bit, and it is something that I use that when it is convenient.
An EV doesn't operate at that scale, though. I would care a lot about losing even 10 or 20% of charging efficiency with an EV.
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.
Do you stop for food? Buccee's is already half restaurant and targets long distance drivers. Charge yourself while charging your vehicle. Many suburban gas stations have some form of food service attached as well.
In the near future, electric vehicles will be obsolete and we'll be running off rainwater and people will be parking their cars outside to harvest it. California will be mostly unlivable.
I think James May made a great point when he said it's not about range, it's about quick and ubiquitous charging. I wouldn't mind if my vehicle could only travel 300km... if I could have the confidence I'd be able to stop and top it up in just a couple of minutes no matter where I was.
Faster charging would really make all the difference.
The problem with fast charging, at least here in Ireland, is that it's significantly more expensive than petrol. Our family moved back from an EV to PHEV because we get the benefit of 90+% of our journeys being for free (from solar charging at home), but that last 10% is petrol that is always available.
There's also nothing more miserable than being stuck in a queue for a fast charger with a colicy baby. I've offered people cash to get to the front of the queue, although no-one's ever accepted money when they understand why.
> I wouldn't mind if my vehicle could only travel 300km... if I could have the confidence I'd be able to stop and top it up in just a couple of minutes no matter where I was.
This is called a motorcycle! Mine can do 260-280km on a gas tank, still does huge trips. Once batteries work like gas, you're absolutely right.
Eh I much prefer my Model 3 to my wife’s Mach-E because of the longer range it has. Even with fast chargers on the motorway it’s inconvenient to have to stop regularly to charge and delays your journey. 450km is nice for the Netherlands; if I had 500-600km range then I’d only ever need to charge at home which is way better.
For me 500km range is also the sweet spot. But it needs to be real range, like including heating in winter or AC in summer.
And while I only usually drive 300-350km in one piece, I don't want to buy a car where I have to fear that a drive of this sort ends up waiting to be towed because of battery degradation (500km will realistically be 450km in a few years), or because I missed the last charging station or got stuck in traffic with heating running, and the remaining few km dwindle in front of me.
It's rational to fear your phone being under 20% when you still need it. It's just as rational to have 20% buffer when charging your car battery.
Real range at motorway speed that is 120km/h in summer. My current cheap ICE has atleast 450 km total including 350 km or so at 120. Which to me would be sweet spot. I could get to nearest big cities and airports there and then back. And only have to think refuelling or charging in couple of days after.
In the end that is only two about 2 hour drive stints. And really spending time on those stints instead of getting to destination or being home later...
Not really. if your choice is a better ICE car at the same price point, why get an EV that has to stop intermittently and has failure modes like broken chargers. It has to be as good. And better
Yeah, the amount of issues I hear about with chargers not working, and everything relying on using some app? I'm not installing a smartphone app to charge a battery! So far I'm not feeling too tempted about electric vehicles. I'll be happy to find something that avoids these shortcomings though!
People really need to get away from that notion electric vehicles need to be as similar as possible to ICE vehicles. Most people living in cities don’t ever require that range, because 99% of their rides will be constrained to less than 50 kilometers. And even on the countryside, few people need to drive such long stretches on a single charge.
Keeping up this stoic desire to not having to change your habits around driving at all is dismissing a lot of the benefits small, lightweight electric cars could get us, if they didn’t need to carry tons of battery around—that isn’t even necessary most of the time.
Yeah, but as it turns out our planet can’t sustain that model of consumption. The challenging technology requires you to insert a plug at night. Is that really that tough of a sale?
Yes, because the majority of people dont leave in the suburbia with their own garage. People leave either in apartments with shared parking that may have like 2-3 charging spots, or they just street-park and they have 0 charging spots. It is very annoying to have to search and fight for a working power plug multiple times per week.
If you want people to choose one thing, then you want it to be better than or at least as good as the alternatives. The idea that EVs need to be comparable to ICE vehicles isn’t just some silly argument, it’s literally the choice that consumers are faced with if they want to buy a car. Even if longer range travel is only 1% of what consumers will do with their car (which I’m sure is a number you just made up), why would you get a product that only meets 99% of your needs, when you can get the competing product that meets 100% of them?
It’s definitely a hyperbole number I made up. The point is that the technology isn’t equal or better, but different. It has other constraints and capabilities, but pretending an engine is an engine as long as the hood is closed gets us in the current situation where car builders struggle to recreate ICEs, but electric, consumers are never satisfied because they have wrong expectations, and regulators don’t ensure the charging infrastructure that would actually required exists.
With an electric vehicle, you can get an extremely low-maintenance, easy to drive, fast accelerating, ecologically efficient car. That has its on merits. On the other hand, it has a lower range than an ICE engine, and is less reliable in cold weather.
> consumers are never satisfied because they have wrong expectations
Consumers are satisfied with buying ICE vehicles, which is why 90-something percent of them do just that when buying a new vehicle. You’re not saying anything about consumers expectations here, what’s happening is (most of them) just they don’t want what EVs are selling. You can’t be wrong about wanting something, we’re all allowed to choose what it is that we want for ourselves.
This is just the EV version of “the world would be much nicer if everybody thought like me” argument.
Yeah, and so far EVs almost universally have a couple "no-go" bullet points for me: touch screen controls, and always-online. Either of those just instantly excludes such a vehicle from my consideration. Uhh, unsurprisingly, I have no clue what I'm going to do when my current vehicle becomes unusable! Replace it with another old one, I guess?! >_<
I think it’s unreasonable for people to think everything has to be business as usual whereas the true cost of a galon of fuel should have been 50 dollars if we facor in the environmental cost.
I think I don’t like that people see consumption as a birthright, and pretend there aren’t any consequences.
This is the main reason I never plan on buying one. I really hate all of the car-driven-by-a-computer functionality. I don’t want to drive a car where an internal computer can take over control of the vehicle, I especially don’t want one where the computer in charge of the car can connect to a network, I never want to drive one that has a mandatory always on connection. I also really want buttons, dials and switches, and think a yoke is such a stupid idea for a road car…
Plenty of ICE vehicles are starting to get these features as well, but I don’t buy those cars either, and all of the half decent EVs seem to have (nearly) all of those features I hate, configured in the worst way I could possibly imagine.
> Most people living in cities don’t ever require that range
Very true! But most people in cities can't charge at home (street parking, rental, etc).
So charge time and access (finding a working station with a reasonable wait time) must also be considered before we tell people they're dumb for resisting change.
Not everywhere is massive and spread out like US. In Ireland I can basically get anywhere in the whole country with one charge and maybe a top-up along the way. I'm more than happy with my 400km range.
I'm also in Ireland and while 400km might get you anywhere in the country, it won't get you home. Fast charging here is more expensive than petrol (over twice as much per km in many cases), the charging infrastructure is not reliable, and it's very easily overwhelmed.
After the All Ireland semi-final this year, there were multi-hour queues for fast chargers on the M7. Multi-minute queues for petrol.
This is reflected in sales, where even with tax and BIK incentives, EV sales are falling sharply and second-hand EVs are being exported because the market has tanked.
I remember when the major advantage of EVs were “you won’t pay for gas anymore.” And now it switched to “well, it’s 10% cheaper than gas but the car itself is 3 times more expensive.”
I don’t understand how they expect poor people to buy these massively.
Been saying this forever: most of the cost of gasoline are "road taxes". You think the government is just to let that revenue disappear as people shift to EV usage? No, your EV will be just as expensive to operate, they will add taxes to your charger.
That would not be a bad option to get smaller compared to the small tanks that people are driving right now.
Cars are one of the most inefficient form of transport anyways and driving almost never makes sense on large distances.
Instead of a large flow of people driving 600km to go to the same place with a single seat used each only once per year, what you would want is public transport instead on those routes, that would be more rational.
I personally doubt very much that this range is required. Charging infrastructure is definitely a lot more important.
I still drive a diesel because I drive across Europe a lot. My usual journey is 700km, which I can do with ca. 40L. The total my 65L tank would give me is about 1000km depending on the conditions. Anyway, those 700km take about 8 hours with a couple of short stops. If I were to drive 2000km I would definitely need a long break in which I could easily charge. I am not really aware of any ICE having a greater range than that, never mind 2000Km.
I’ve once driven the Plugin-Hybrid Kuga and it got very close to the diesel range. It almost made the entire 700km journey with the 40l petrol tank.
But these long journeys only happen a few times a year and I think it would be silly to drive a huge battery around for the off chance I am driving across an entire continent.
As an owner of an EV it took me the first 6 months to adapt. The concept is different and you need to adapt your mentality to it. When you use an ICE car you fill up once it goes under 20% When you drive an EV you leave home and it's always full and costs nothing (PV takes care of that). Most places I visit have chargers which means you charge while you do what you have to do be it restaurant, shopping mall, supermarket etc. Things only happen differently if you plan long journey and living on an island that's no issue.
How does that work when all cars are electric? Fighting with some guy at the grocery store for a charging port? I'm not trying to be inflammatory asking that, I genuinely wonder what the approach is supposed to be if suddenly everyone went and bought an electric car. I always hear that "you can charge all over the place" but I'll see like, two charging stalls in a giant parking lot. I wonder what the future looks like in that regard in, say, 5-10 years.
> I wonder what the future looks like in that regard in, say, 5-10 years.
Likely, for one, a great deal more aluminium HVAC|DC cable laid in car parks to support charging; copper's kind of expensive and in short supply but is also a contender.
Might be smart to invest in any IPO's launched to raise capital for new proven economically feasible smelters processing infrastructure.
The hay to feed all those horses doesn't appear by magic, livery's the future m'lad.
I think really, like your parent said, people charge them at home. In the UK, energy providers have plans where they schedule charging overnight so it costs next to nothing. It costs about £10 / month for a family vehicle that gets daily use.
Demand and supply I guess. If all cars were EV all parking spots would have a port. Simplistic I know but that's how markets work. Would gas/petrol stations exist every few km if there weren't cars that needed them?
Yes. That's my point. They can, lots of diesel tractors can. Family cars owned by most people do not have 2000km range tanks and it's ludicrous to define a barrier to acceptance that far north of lived experience for most people.
It's called range anxiety for a reason. People are anxious about it. But, it's disconnected from what a trip meter tells us about average commute, daily drive.
Cue hoardes of "but i live rural and drive 30,000km a day" responses. Because people don't understand averages and what on average most people do. I know I drive below average, i checked. I do about 1/3 to 1/4 of an average Australian driver. I also know these 200km daily commute drivers are a wild outlier, not the norm. The people whining about e-vehicle range snipe social media to headline their justified concerns to their outlier behaviour and distort the conversation.
Range is kinda irrelevant if you live in a place where filling stations are ubiquitous. Going 850 km in my old petrol-powered car required just one five-minute stop.
That's Perth to Carnarvon up the coast road in Western Australia, roughly 8 hours @ 110 km/hr speed limit and one leg of a longer trip from (say) Perth to Broome.
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.
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.
>I've been calling this shot for years
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.
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.
Small perk of the iron-air battery (such as the largest battery in the world, being built in Maine, https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/long-duration-energy-st... ), is that it's also bulky & heavy, which is harder to steal!
Other future imagining: a bunch of wrecked or old EV's being used for their battery capacity, buffering power from solar. Charge station of old cars holding juice for new ones.
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.
This will work against all new cars in general.
Ah, the blessing of being in the fraction of a percent that knows how to fix their cars and has the tools to do so.
Companies not respecting consumer rights isn't an inherent property of having an electric drivetrain.
That's a right to repair argument, which is a different issue.
There will likely be consumer protection laws and maybe even an "Open Car" project in the same way there's open hardware today.
Are you implying a covetous car manufacturer won't be as protective with their gasoline vehicle line?
> Companies not respecting consumer rights isn't an inherent property of having an electric drivetrain.
But it is so much easier. How car will tell that mechanical part has been changed? It can't.
Ok name an EV part you can be a DRM asshole with and tell me the mechanism by which you're enforcing the DRM and I'll bet it's equally enforceable with a similar mechanism on the gas vehicle.
Sorry but no, it can.
ICE vehicles have hundreds of CAN bus or SPE -networked devices that feed into an MCU that can refuse to work if they're not first-party devices.
This isn't something novel to EV, at all.
Are you saying a new EV will ever be cost competitive with a used gas car? If so, I disagree, unless heavy penalties are imposed on using an ICE.
There's already sub $10,000 conventional form factor EVs such as https://electrek.co/2024/03/06/byd-launches-cheaper-seagull-...
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.
A used Dacia ICE is quasi unbeatable, you just can’t compare apples with oranges.
Yes because those have features we want in cars.
Do you think the engine is what makes a car expensive? Building a $10k ICE car wouldn't be difficult.
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.
I've worked with these chargers. It is shoddy software that usually is the problem.
The algorithm to detect ground faults is a major culprit.
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.
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!
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.
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...
Yes, think of them as phones
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.
Battery swapping stations looks a lot more expensive and failure prone compared to fast chargers.
I think 250kW flat charging curves are almost as convenient. Go to pee and scroll HN for one minute and voilà.
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.
You say won’t happen, but there are Chinese companies that offer you different size batteries based on need.
Going cross country? Swap out for a massive battery. Just doing city runs? Get the smaller lighter cheaper battery
Are they profitable though? Sounds like a painful investment trap, where the company can always declare projections of a happy future once a certain threshold would be reached in terms of installed base of compatible cars with interchangeable batteries, and every time growth in installed base starts to visibly miss the optimistic prognosis they can say "uncle" and force a reset by introducing some new incompatible format "this time it will be better, need more money, now!"
(I know nothing about how intra China VC works or does not work, but battery swap schemes sound like an effective capital trap - note that those traps tend to work best when even the ones setting them up don't recognize their nature, I'm not accusing anyone on doing it on purpose!)
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.
Renault also did battery as a service a decade ago, with some battery swaps. The maths didn't work at the time but maybe BYD and NIO will this time.
Agree that fast charging wears the battery more, but it's mostly fine. Cars are built to be used and it's better to fast charge current gen batteries when you need it than waiting for better technology while driving an ICE car.
> Renault
> a decade ago
Well there was also that GM EV1 that didn't work out in 1996, I guess that's it for EV, wrap it up folks.
"fast chargers."
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.
As cool as an inductive charging strip would be, offhand, the inherent losses as well as practically microwaving the underside of the car, would probably both be too much.
Now, parking lots where a robot lifts an underside contact up if there's a match, that might just work.
Wirless charging my phone is idiotic from an energy point of view, but convenient.
I do thing the last 20.000 years of human progress has been driven by convenience (and security).
I'd bet for the more convenient solution every day.
That's not a very fair comparison.
I'm not worried at all about the power efficiency of my phone's charging process.
Some napkin math suggests that my pocket supercomputer costs me at most about $1 per year to keep charged and running, or perhaps $5 over the life of the phone, when plugged in every night. I wouldn't notice or care if it were an order of magnitude worse than that at $10 per year or $50 over the life of the phone.
So wireless charging of my phone doesn't bother me a bit, and it is something that I use that when it is convenient.
An EV doesn't operate at that scale, though. I would care a lot about losing even 10 or 20% of charging efficiency with an EV.
How does this relate at all to what you're responding to?
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.
This would make the cars significantly more expensive and heavier, negating any advantage.
Hmm what should we call it? Not AAA- maybe DDD?
It’s a solution for a problem that won’t exist.
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.
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.
Do you stop for food? Buccee's is already half restaurant and targets long distance drivers. Charge yourself while charging your vehicle. Many suburban gas stations have some form of food service attached as well.
Can you imagine riding a horse or walking to your destination? Because that's the alternative if cheap oil isn't readily available anymore.
Or maybe you'd rather imagine having to migrate because your city is under water and there is no more food, due to changing climate?
Your convenience is beside the point, society will adapt.
In the not too distant future there will be contact less charging everywhere, at Walmart, at work, at home.
In the near future, electric vehicles will be obsolete and we'll be running off rainwater and people will be parking their cars outside to harvest it. California will be mostly unlivable.
Luckily not living in California but at the baltic sea, 50m above sea level, 2km from the coast.
Just use salt water from the ocean instead. It's got electrolytes, it's what the cars crave.
Except here in the EU where they increase import tax because china producing “too cheap” EVs
Got to protect the business that failed to innovate when it had the chance.
I guess cell-to-pack has some disadvantages otherwise everyone would have started there?
We need >2000 km ranges in one charge of electric vehicles for widespread adoption.
I think James May made a great point when he said it's not about range, it's about quick and ubiquitous charging. I wouldn't mind if my vehicle could only travel 300km... if I could have the confidence I'd be able to stop and top it up in just a couple of minutes no matter where I was.
Faster charging would really make all the difference.
The problem with fast charging, at least here in Ireland, is that it's significantly more expensive than petrol. Our family moved back from an EV to PHEV because we get the benefit of 90+% of our journeys being for free (from solar charging at home), but that last 10% is petrol that is always available.
There's also nothing more miserable than being stuck in a queue for a fast charger with a colicy baby. I've offered people cash to get to the front of the queue, although no-one's ever accepted money when they understand why.
> I wouldn't mind if my vehicle could only travel 300km... if I could have the confidence I'd be able to stop and top it up in just a couple of minutes no matter where I was.
This is called a motorcycle! Mine can do 260-280km on a gas tank, still does huge trips. Once batteries work like gas, you're absolutely right.
> Mine can do 260-280km on a gas tank, still does huge trips.
How is this a motorcycle specific feature?
Cars are not built with such tiny tanks
Eh I much prefer my Model 3 to my wife’s Mach-E because of the longer range it has. Even with fast chargers on the motorway it’s inconvenient to have to stop regularly to charge and delays your journey. 450km is nice for the Netherlands; if I had 500-600km range then I’d only ever need to charge at home which is way better.
For me 500km range is also the sweet spot. But it needs to be real range, like including heating in winter or AC in summer.
And while I only usually drive 300-350km in one piece, I don't want to buy a car where I have to fear that a drive of this sort ends up waiting to be towed because of battery degradation (500km will realistically be 450km in a few years), or because I missed the last charging station or got stuck in traffic with heating running, and the remaining few km dwindle in front of me.
It's rational to fear your phone being under 20% when you still need it. It's just as rational to have 20% buffer when charging your car battery.
Real range at motorway speed that is 120km/h in summer. My current cheap ICE has atleast 450 km total including 350 km or so at 120. Which to me would be sweet spot. I could get to nearest big cities and airports there and then back. And only have to think refuelling or charging in couple of days after.
In the end that is only two about 2 hour drive stints. And really spending time on those stints instead of getting to destination or being home later...
Not really. if your choice is a better ICE car at the same price point, why get an EV that has to stop intermittently and has failure modes like broken chargers. It has to be as good. And better
Thankfully they are often better. 95% of new car sales are EVs in my area.
It took a few years to get there, people don't necessarily know immediately what they like best.
https://elbilstatistikk.no/
Norway is an absolute outlier, driven exclusively by tax incentives.
In the rest of the EEA, EVs sales are plummeting.
https://www.acea.auto/pc-registrations/new-car-registrations...
Do you have a source about “exclusively“?
Good and better by which metrics?
Different people have different requirements.
Yeah, the amount of issues I hear about with chargers not working, and everything relying on using some app? I'm not installing a smartphone app to charge a battery! So far I'm not feeling too tempted about electric vehicles. I'll be happy to find something that avoids these shortcomings though!
It's not a technology issue, it's a service issue. If ICE cars were invented today, you'd need an app at a gas station too.
No doubt. I hope there's more pushback against that crap.
EU regulations require charging stations to accept card payments by 2027.
Nice, that's really good to hear! Hopefully other jurisdictions follow the lead there!
People really need to get away from that notion electric vehicles need to be as similar as possible to ICE vehicles. Most people living in cities don’t ever require that range, because 99% of their rides will be constrained to less than 50 kilometers. And even on the countryside, few people need to drive such long stretches on a single charge.
Keeping up this stoic desire to not having to change your habits around driving at all is dismissing a lot of the benefits small, lightweight electric cars could get us, if they didn’t need to carry tons of battery around—that isn’t even necessary most of the time.
Even if you drive 10km per day the big advantage of long range is that you don't have to refuel/recharge frequently.
Yeah, but as it turns out our planet can’t sustain that model of consumption. The challenging technology requires you to insert a plug at night. Is that really that tough of a sale?
Yes, because the majority of people dont leave in the suburbia with their own garage. People leave either in apartments with shared parking that may have like 2-3 charging spots, or they just street-park and they have 0 charging spots. It is very annoying to have to search and fight for a working power plug multiple times per week.
If you want people to choose one thing, then you want it to be better than or at least as good as the alternatives. The idea that EVs need to be comparable to ICE vehicles isn’t just some silly argument, it’s literally the choice that consumers are faced with if they want to buy a car. Even if longer range travel is only 1% of what consumers will do with their car (which I’m sure is a number you just made up), why would you get a product that only meets 99% of your needs, when you can get the competing product that meets 100% of them?
It’s definitely a hyperbole number I made up. The point is that the technology isn’t equal or better, but different. It has other constraints and capabilities, but pretending an engine is an engine as long as the hood is closed gets us in the current situation where car builders struggle to recreate ICEs, but electric, consumers are never satisfied because they have wrong expectations, and regulators don’t ensure the charging infrastructure that would actually required exists.
With an electric vehicle, you can get an extremely low-maintenance, easy to drive, fast accelerating, ecologically efficient car. That has its on merits. On the other hand, it has a lower range than an ICE engine, and is less reliable in cold weather.
People keep extolling EVs as being "low maintenance", but I'm not sure the data bears that out. They have all kinds of issues, just different ones.
I consider my ICE low maintenance, too. Semi-annual service, brakes and tires as needed. How much better are EVs?
> consumers are never satisfied because they have wrong expectations
Consumers are satisfied with buying ICE vehicles, which is why 90-something percent of them do just that when buying a new vehicle. You’re not saying anything about consumers expectations here, what’s happening is (most of them) just they don’t want what EVs are selling. You can’t be wrong about wanting something, we’re all allowed to choose what it is that we want for ourselves.
This is just the EV version of “the world would be much nicer if everybody thought like me” argument.
Yeah, and so far EVs almost universally have a couple "no-go" bullet points for me: touch screen controls, and always-online. Either of those just instantly excludes such a vehicle from my consideration. Uhh, unsurprisingly, I have no clue what I'm going to do when my current vehicle becomes unusable! Replace it with another old one, I guess?! >_<
I think it’s unreasonable for people to think everything has to be business as usual whereas the true cost of a galon of fuel should have been 50 dollars if we facor in the environmental cost.
I think I don’t like that people see consumption as a birthright, and pretend there aren’t any consequences.
Lol fuel would be dirt cheap if we removed taxes.
Consumption is my birthright. You can do whatever you want.
This is the main reason I never plan on buying one. I really hate all of the car-driven-by-a-computer functionality. I don’t want to drive a car where an internal computer can take over control of the vehicle, I especially don’t want one where the computer in charge of the car can connect to a network, I never want to drive one that has a mandatory always on connection. I also really want buttons, dials and switches, and think a yoke is such a stupid idea for a road car…
Plenty of ICE vehicles are starting to get these features as well, but I don’t buy those cars either, and all of the half decent EVs seem to have (nearly) all of those features I hate, configured in the worst way I could possibly imagine.
> Most people living in cities don’t ever require that range
Very true! But most people in cities can't charge at home (street parking, rental, etc).
So charge time and access (finding a working station with a reasonable wait time) must also be considered before we tell people they're dumb for resisting change.
Not everywhere is massive and spread out like US. In Ireland I can basically get anywhere in the whole country with one charge and maybe a top-up along the way. I'm more than happy with my 400km range.
I'm also in Ireland and while 400km might get you anywhere in the country, it won't get you home. Fast charging here is more expensive than petrol (over twice as much per km in many cases), the charging infrastructure is not reliable, and it's very easily overwhelmed.
After the All Ireland semi-final this year, there were multi-hour queues for fast chargers on the M7. Multi-minute queues for petrol.
This is reflected in sales, where even with tax and BIK incentives, EV sales are falling sharply and second-hand EVs are being exported because the market has tanked.
I remember when the major advantage of EVs were “you won’t pay for gas anymore.” And now it switched to “well, it’s 10% cheaper than gas but the car itself is 3 times more expensive.”
I don’t understand how they expect poor people to buy these massively.
It was always subsidized.
Been saying this forever: most of the cost of gasoline are "road taxes". You think the government is just to let that revenue disappear as people shift to EV usage? No, your EV will be just as expensive to operate, they will add taxes to your charger.
People use their car way less than they think.
The median work distance in France is 12km in the countryside and 6km in the cities.
25% of the workers travel less than 4km even in the countryside.
Source: https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/7622203
The current range is way above most needs already and I'm not sure cars (electric or not) is even the answer with such a low usage.
If people bought cars for their median usage, they'd buy cars with like 1.2 seats and that top out at 70 km/h.
That would not be a bad option to get smaller compared to the small tanks that people are driving right now.
Cars are one of the most inefficient form of transport anyways and driving almost never makes sense on large distances.
Instead of a large flow of people driving 600km to go to the same place with a single seat used each only once per year, what you would want is public transport instead on those routes, that would be more rational.
I personally doubt very much that this range is required. Charging infrastructure is definitely a lot more important.
I still drive a diesel because I drive across Europe a lot. My usual journey is 700km, which I can do with ca. 40L. The total my 65L tank would give me is about 1000km depending on the conditions. Anyway, those 700km take about 8 hours with a couple of short stops. If I were to drive 2000km I would definitely need a long break in which I could easily charge. I am not really aware of any ICE having a greater range than that, never mind 2000Km. I’ve once driven the Plugin-Hybrid Kuga and it got very close to the diesel range. It almost made the entire 700km journey with the 40l petrol tank. But these long journeys only happen a few times a year and I think it would be silly to drive a huge battery around for the off chance I am driving across an entire continent.
As an owner of an EV it took me the first 6 months to adapt. The concept is different and you need to adapt your mentality to it. When you use an ICE car you fill up once it goes under 20% When you drive an EV you leave home and it's always full and costs nothing (PV takes care of that). Most places I visit have chargers which means you charge while you do what you have to do be it restaurant, shopping mall, supermarket etc. Things only happen differently if you plan long journey and living on an island that's no issue.
How does that work when all cars are electric? Fighting with some guy at the grocery store for a charging port? I'm not trying to be inflammatory asking that, I genuinely wonder what the approach is supposed to be if suddenly everyone went and bought an electric car. I always hear that "you can charge all over the place" but I'll see like, two charging stalls in a giant parking lot. I wonder what the future looks like in that regard in, say, 5-10 years.
> I wonder what the future looks like in that regard in, say, 5-10 years.
Likely, for one, a great deal more aluminium HVAC|DC cable laid in car parks to support charging; copper's kind of expensive and in short supply but is also a contender.
Might be smart to invest in any IPO's launched to raise capital for new proven economically feasible smelters processing infrastructure.
The hay to feed all those horses doesn't appear by magic, livery's the future m'lad.
I think really, like your parent said, people charge them at home. In the UK, energy providers have plans where they schedule charging overnight so it costs next to nothing. It costs about £10 / month for a family vehicle that gets daily use.
Demand and supply I guess. If all cars were EV all parking spots would have a port. Simplistic I know but that's how markets work. Would gas/petrol stations exist every few km if there weren't cars that needed them?
If all cars are electric and charging speeds are still relatively limited, then almost every spot in almost every car park will have its own charger.
some places have a couple of chargers, which is nowhere close to "the whole parking lot"
Didn't imply that but neither are EVs that common at the moment to be a problem.
What % of cars have this range? Not your diesel f150, the real cars real people with real everyday lives drive
My Hyundai i30 has a 600km range, max.
A diesel F150 will easily do 1,000km+ on a full tank.
Yes. That's my point. They can, lots of diesel tractors can. Family cars owned by most people do not have 2000km range tanks and it's ludicrous to define a barrier to acceptance that far north of lived experience for most people.
It's called range anxiety for a reason. People are anxious about it. But, it's disconnected from what a trip meter tells us about average commute, daily drive.
Cue hoardes of "but i live rural and drive 30,000km a day" responses. Because people don't understand averages and what on average most people do. I know I drive below average, i checked. I do about 1/3 to 1/4 of an average Australian driver. I also know these 200km daily commute drivers are a wild outlier, not the norm. The people whining about e-vehicle range snipe social media to headline their justified concerns to their outlier behaviour and distort the conversation.
Range is kinda irrelevant if you live in a place where filling stations are ubiquitous. Going 850 km in my old petrol-powered car required just one five-minute stop.
850 km without breaks?
That's Perth to Carnarvon up the coast road in Western Australia, roughly 8 hours @ 110 km/hr speed limit and one leg of a longer trip from (say) Perth to Broome.
Pee break while filling up the car but not beyond that. I had some food on me so I could wait to have a proper meal until I got to my destination.
I think a cheap car with 1k km range would sell pretty well already. For many people that’s a once a month charge.
You commute from Vancouver, Canada to Tijuana, Mexico?
Or 10x longer battery life. Or 100x faster charging time. Something has to change among those factors for wider adoption.
I don't think my Mazda3 has anything near that range
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