Speaking of questioning motives, according to Edmunds the cheapest electric vehicle today is the Morris Mini Cooper SE at $30,750 while the cheapest gas-powered car is the Mitsubishi Mirage at $13,995. It should also be pointed out that many people can’t afford to buy new cars at all these days, relying on used and there isn’t much of a supply of used EVs.
Elon Musk’s solution to that is larger and more plentiful subsidies which, coincidentally, are the source of much of his cash.
Bans on internal combustion vehicles will mean that a lot of people just won’t be able to afford the mobility that personal vehicle ownership provides. Such bans are also the sort of thing that makes you question people’s motives.
Also note that if there’s one thing we should have realized over the last ten months it is that there are risks in crowding people into cities and forcing them to rely on public transport.
Presumably, as the technology matures, prices will become more affordable over time.
But there are also other costs. We looked at maybe getting a used electric as a commuting vehicle for my wife before Covid. But in order to get the benefit of a high-amp charger in our home (built in the mid-1990’s), we’d have to upgrade our electrical panel which is $5-6k by itself.
There is no Moore’s Law for batteries and it’s actually more likely that prices have plateaued than it is that they’ll decline. Half an EV’s cost is the powertrain compared with 18% for an internal combustion engine vehicle. To date economies of scale have been elusive.
ICE and electric cars have different tradeoffs. With ICE, the motor is complex while the energy source is simple (a fuel tank). Electric cars have simple motors while the energy source is complex (lithium-ion battery).
Excepting the battery, electric cars are simpler and cheaper to construct then ICE vehicles.
If engineers can get cost of the battery low enough, electric cars should have a cheaper manufacturing cost then ICE cars. We don’t know how much more the costs of lithium-ion battery can be reduced from mass production scale.
If they become popular, or mandated, they’ll drive electricity prices through the roof, putting many Americans afoot, which may be the actual goal of the greens.
Let’s do a side by side comparison.
The numbers just aren’t there. The cost of the powertrain on the EV is more than the whole ICE car. In the absence of a major breakthrough in batteries EVs will always be a lot more expensive.
We don’t know the answer to battery scaling. Its gone down from $1000/kWh to about $150/kWh in 10 years.
Can engineers drive it through mass production scaling to $30kWh?
What’s the general rule of scaling, 30% price reduction for every 10x scale?
There’s an old Yiddish proverb. As di bubbe volt gehat beytsim volt zi gevain mayn zaidah. If my grandmother had balls, she’d be my grandfather.
There’s no evidence for economies of scale. Toyota is selling twice as many Priuses as it did ten years ago. Yeah, I know it’s a hybrid but it does use batteries. They have shown no signs of any economies or of being able to scale production to that level. And I haven’t even gotten into the parts rejection issue. One of the reasons batteries are so expensive is that they must make more than one to get one usable battery.
I really do understand mandates in places like LA with smog problems, But nationwide, apparently you have to believe in the windmill and solar panel fairy to think they make any difference in co2 emissions.