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Well I don't think that any battery will ever cost less than $1000 to replace.
Obviously at present the market of used EVs is very small, but I don't know if in ten years the EVs as a whole will be much less affordable than present day gasoline vehicles.
I am not an optimist on infrastructure for EVs outside of single family homes with garages. I think people come to blows over parking spaces carved out after snow storms. I don't think people will share EV chargers very well. Personally, I think automakers will be selling hybrid gasoline cars in 2050. But I also think the poor will be increasingly forced into public transportation.
At least you seem to be more realistic when it comes to EV's and mass adoption. I think a lot of pro EV posters ignore the budgets of people on lower incomes or those who don't have the luxury of a garage to charge their EV. In the city where I live there are tons of houses where people rent the basement to make payment on their mortgages and there are so many cars on the streets. I can't see the landlords allowing them to charge their car in the garage.
I think there will be a mass adoption only when charge times are as almost as fast as filling at the gas pump and when batteries cost at least under a 1K. Otherwise like you said the middle class and below will be forced into public transportation. It's hard for me to see a future where there aren't any cheap used EV's for young people, new drivers, and those on limited budgets to have as an option.
In the city where I live there are tons of houses where people rent the basement to make payment on their mortgages and there are so many cars on the streets. I can't see the landlords allowing them to charge their car in the garage.
I tell the story of my brother's boutique 79 unit highrise in Buckhead, a wealthy suburb of Atlanta which is the wealthiest zip code in the South outside of Palm Springs. There are 21 luxury units in the building (built 2002) which sell for upwards of $2 million. Although I read about some condos wiring an outlet at your reserved space which ties into your electric meter for your apartment, this one has decided to put in two commercial electric chargers in the parking garage. Admittedly that is easier than going to the McDonald's across the highway, but it still means millionaires getting up at night to drive their cars from their private spots to the two charging devices and coming back a few hours later.
One condo closed at Christmas for $1.945 million and it is located one floor above the garage so he only needs to take the elevator down one floor to get to his car. Now can you imagine someone who has that kind of money sitting up at 3AM and staring at his phone to see if the charger is free so he can go to the garage and move his vehicle to the charger?
I actually could see people buying PHEVs so they can always drive if something goes wrong and they didn't charge up.
My brothers Mercedes EPA estimate is 52.5 gallons of gasoline per month to drive 15,000 miles per year. It would be nice to have a Polestar II, but is it really worth the hassle?
Now these are people with some real money. What about people who live in apartments some of which don't have garages and are in dangerous neighborhoods?
Even if EVs are priced the same as gasoline powered vehicles, some people won't switch voluntarily thinking that the price of gas is what they have to pay to have a working vehicle available every day.
6 cameras, including one watching you; safety score apps for insurance etc.
Other issues include the inability to fix your own car, one must call someone to change a tire; you are condemned to roadside assistance.
Also, Tesla in Canada at least is opening charging stations to all EV's; that'll create some long lines.
And, switching to EV's period is going to place a lot more stress on an already stressed electrical grid.
Who is to say the savings EV owners are getting now will be there in the future?.
Electricity could become quite a bit more expensive.
I for one am not overly worried about "Big Brother".
I for one am not overly worried about "Big Brother".
One may not be concerned about "big brother" , but it should be concerning how much control the automotive OEM's have over a vehicle that you've bought and own.
For an example, Tesla locks 80 miles of customer’s battery range for $4,500 ransom. Now it all worked out in the end, but what a hassle.
Another thing, which Youtuber Rich Rebuilds cast the spotlight on Tesla, is the right to repair ones own vehicle. He had purchased several salvaged Tesla's and rebuilt them, but he had to fight with Tesla for parts and other things.
EV's are going to become more and more popular, until the grid hits it's tipping point of overwhelming. Then, it'll be discovered that the ICE wasn't so bad in the first place.
Think about weather events to come. (Not just the flooding/storms from Vegas to Boston, currently.) Those poor folks are going to need to learn to ride horseback, if they want to visit the Piggly-Wiggly, that's likely CLOSED too....
There are at least a few ways that with the general grid down, that an EV owner ostensibly has pathways to pursue for backups in a way that ICE vehicles do not. EVs both directly through V2L or V2G or indirectly through greater research, development and production savings of batteries that can be used for home backup systems. You also have to remember that ICE vehicles are incredibly inefficient. Even were you to generate your electricity from petroleum sources, the net efficiency is still in favor of EVs over ICE vehicles of similar make. This is simply the case on an engineering and physics level. Now on top of that, the EV is incredibly more efficient than any ICE vehicle by a massive margin when it comes to any other energy source--petroleum is the standard ICE powertrain's *best* case scenario and it doesn't even get a win on that.
Weather events to come, or trying to mitigate such, is a pretty good argument for switching to EVs en masse given the incredible inefficiency and rather sizable emissions of consumer vehicles. Do we want to play the smart long game or not is still unclear
Quote:
Originally Posted by Stockyman
Will cheap used electric cars be available for first time drivers or those with low income? If so will it happen when batteries cost less than a $1000 to replace? Or will it have to be cheaper than a grand to replace when it comes to used vehicles?
You won't get much in cheap used electric vehicles until you get through that tipping point of mass adoption of *new* electric vehicles. After all, pretty much all used vehicles started off as new vehicles at some point. As for replacing batteries for less than $1,000, that remains to be seen, but it's also not clear that's necessary. The primary reasons that EVs have started taking off and how the drawbacks have been mitigated is that a lot of these factors are intertwined. A cheaper cost per kWh pack has generally partially come through the use of less material and thus less volume, weight, and cost per kWh. Doing that means that it's more feasible to have larger capacity (though not necessarily size and weight) battery packs. As one of the main reliability / longevity factors of EV battery packs is the number of duty cycles they go through (1,500 is a good rough idea of usage before serious degradation), this means that with the larger capacity battery packs and greater range they provide, each duty cycle allows for more miles. A decade ago, an EV with a small 24 kWh or smaller battery pack with an effective real world range of 60 miles (and a rated range of 73 miles) wasn't that uncommon. That lands you around ~100K miles which isn't a lot. However, we're at about 250 miles on average and that yields about 375K miles which is a significant jump, so that's a lot more miles before on average needing a replacement.
As for the cost of replacement, it's unclear how quickly it'll go down. It certainly went down about an order of magnitude per kWh over the previous decade, but it's not clear if we'll see the same magnitude drop over the course of this decade when it comes to new vehicle batteries and how much that will cost. What is likely to happen though is that a third-party market will likely develop with more vehicles on the road which should make it cheaper. Previous EVs generally did not get to the point where there were millions of vehicles with shared battery pack technologies on the roads which is why getting a replacement for something like a Ford Focus EV from a decade ago is quite difficult. These days, it's not rare to expect EVs to sell in large quantities over its production run, and what's more, for there to be shared platforms where it's several vehicles that have that shared platform. This means wrecks and defunct vehicles to scavenge cells and modules and other parts from as well as a large secondary market where it may actually make economic sense for there to be third parties to develop new replacement, and possibly enhanced, battery packs. You can see an inkling of how having a large volume helps with the Prius powertrain with the number of Prii sold as well as vehicles that shared its powertrain which are many. They were originally quite costly to replace the batteries, but the sheer volume meant that salvaged cells, modules, or even entire packs started coming into the market as "remanufactured" packs that were a lot cheaper than an OEM replacement and then finally there came on to the market brand new third party replacement packs that were even better than the original packs.
Another important point to mention on vehicles though is that the US market in general has moved away from cheap, new subcompacts that are very affordable when new. This started will before the supposed tipping point of EV new vehicle market share and the ones that are available now are mostly of established models though even those are getting cut. This isn't an EV thing in particular--it's more that we've moved towards increasingly massive new vehicles. This doesn't have to be the case as there are much more affordable EVs in other parts of the world--they just don't make it here.
Quote:
Originally Posted by scarabchuck
One may not be concerned about "big brother" , but it should be concerning how much control the automotive OEM's have over a vehicle that you've bought and own.
For an example, Tesla locks 80 miles of customer’s battery range for $4,500 ransom. Now it all worked out in the end, but what a hassle.
Another thing, which Youtuber Rich Rebuilds cast the spotlight on Tesla, is the right to repair ones own vehicle. He had purchased several salvaged Tesla's and rebuilt them, but he had to fight with Tesla for parts and other things.
Yep, Tesla's going more for the closed off Apple model, which to be fair, has been rather successful. However, if that rubs someone the wrong way, there is at least a lot of other offerings now that aren't Tesla.
Last edited by OyCrumbler; 08-01-2022 at 11:17 AM..
At least you seem to be more realistic when it comes to EV's and mass adoption. I think a lot of pro EV posters ignore the budgets of people on lower incomes or those who don't have the luxury of a garage to charge their EV. In the city where I live there are tons of houses where people rent the basement to make payment on their mortgages and there are so many cars on the streets. I can't see the landlords allowing them to charge their car in the garage.
I think there will be a mass adoption only when charge times are as almost as fast as filling at the gas pump and when batteries cost at least under a 1K. Otherwise like you said the middle class and below will be forced into public transportation. It's hard for me to see a future where there aren't any cheap used EV's for young people, new drivers, and those on limited budgets to have as an option.
The topic and article was specifically on new vehicle market share though--a new vehicle purchase is generally not a great idea for someone on a limited budget. Used vehicles generally serve that segment, but without having EVs with sizable new vehicle market share, then there's not going to be a lot of used EVs since you need vehicles that were new at some point to be used. It'll certainly be a lag time for used vehicle sales versus new vehicle sales in terms of EV adoption rates, but that's been the case for everything including ICE vehicles at one point.
As for charging times to be almost as fast as filling at the gas station, that's likely to come fairly soon as charging speed has been among the fastest improving metrics for EVs. However, you should also consider that charging as done with EVs, even without charging at home, isn't necessarily the same paradigm as gas station refills. There are the fast chargers that are often near highways that are a more or less direct analogue, but this isn't necessarily how most people will charge even if they don't have charging at home. Big box stores and shopping centers can and actually do have fast chargers installed at their parking lots and even at current charging speeds, the thirty minutes to an hour you might spend at one of these places once every week or two while *parked* is enough to cover you. Even cheaper to install and also integrated with parking would be things like workplace parking charging stations using level 2 chargers which over the course of a single work day also charges enough to cover you for a week or two. These chargers are often so cheap to install and to operate that they even get rolled into the parking fee or given as complimentary. Remember, EVs are a lot more energy efficient than ICE powertrains. They do not require nearly as much energy per mile driven. On net, it's generally going to be cheaper.
As for landlords not allowing people to charge, that's not always the case. As EV adoption rates go up, it becomes a more desired feature of vehicles. The landlord doesn't care that your life was made more convenient, but they do want to be competitive in the housing market and so if it gives them more or a larger selection of clientele to offer such, then so be it.
I do think one interesting crinkle though will be how improvements to EV efficiency might change the charging landscape. Having a dedicated 220V/240V level 2 charger isn't that expensive to install, but it is an expense that for some budgets will hit harder than others. However, some EVs right now can recover tens of miles overnight on a standard wall socket which is about in line with the average number of miles driven per day in the US. It may be that slowly moving EV efficiency to around 3 miles per kWh as they are now to 5 miles per kWh or greater then greatly opens up the viability for a lot of people of charging enough to more than recoup their average daily miles overnight from a standard socket. If you go significantly up with efficiency of EVs *and* efficiency of solar panels, which I think will both happen, then the end of the decade will likely start seeing the introduction of solar panels as a common option for EVs which will extend the time/miles needed between charges and lower the number of kWh draws needed.
Last edited by OyCrumbler; 08-01-2022 at 11:26 AM..
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