I don’t think heavier batteries with less battery life are gonna do much for Americans.
Not unless we can get into small vehicles real quick- and given that the chicken tax has been imposed by executive order since 1964 I don’t see that happening.
"To circumvent the tariffs, imported Ford vehicles replace rear windows with metal panels and remove the rear seats and seat belts. The removed parts are shredded and recycled in Ohio."
What an unbelievable waste. Why hasn't this cold-war relic been long abolished?
I don't see how a tariff on larger vehicles means that the US market can't switch to smaller vehicles. Isn't it even the opposite because smaller cheaper cars can be directly imported from overseas? I agree the US market is incapable of switching to smaller cars in the near future, but i doubt the Chicken Tax has much to do with it.
I think the smaller EVs currently on the market can fill a niche in America for city commuters, but only if they're cheap, and I think you'd be stretching their limits for faster highway commuting or longer travel. The sedan sized EV is I think the smartest choice for EVs in the American market, but they're still too expensive.
Plug in series hybrids might be a good stop-gap, as they're cheaper and solve some of the range and size issues current EVs have. You can have a smaller car, still capable of good speed and range, and at half to a third of the cost of an equivalent performance EV.
For anyone not aware of the term, a series hybrid is an EV drivetrain that has a smaller battery and an auxiliary petrol generator onboard to fill the battery if it gets low, or you demand more power from it. At first thought, that sounds ridiculous, but we're talking about compromises to fit specialty requirements here, and in that context they make a lot of sense. (also good EV conversion potential, since all you do is upgrade the battery and ditch the petrol engine once battery prices make sense)
It's not ridiculous at all, past a certain size basically all diesel vehicles are diesel-electric, meaning they run diesel engines to produce electricity to run electric motors.
All diesel trains do this to avoid needing giant gearboxes, mining trucks use it to cut weight, modern ships use it to enable articulating motors.
Now we are slowly reaching the point where it becomes desirable even for car-sized vehicles.
The main reason those cheaper EVs are not widely available yet is that the more expensive vehicles are more lucrative and the whole market is supply constrained. So, most manufacturers are just churning out big expensive SUVs as fast as they can and are allocating all their battery supplies to that because they make more profit on those. As the market continues to double in size for the next few decades, inevitably, they'll start churning out cheaper/smaller/lighter vehicles as well. Basically, the market is far from saturated yet so that might take a few years.
Hybrids have a role in the market for the brief period of time that battery production capacity is not large enough yet to replace them with cheaper EVs. But they are inherently more complex and costly to manufacture and drive. So, that's not going to last long.
Price and performance are all that matters. Americans like big cars but they also like cheap cars. So, a lot of the big cars on the road aren't necessarily very good cars. They just look big. Because size is the key selling point. Americans buy the biggest car they can afford; not the best or the most economical car.
How do you make a big car move further? Simple, you put a bigger battery in it. Those nice trucks that Ford is producing now come with enormous batteries. The main issue with that is that it drives up the cost and reduces the market size. So, Ford is doing what Tesla is doing: find cheaper/heavier batteries and offer the same product with less range in the lower price segments and reserve the premium batteries for the more expensive models. That way they can sell big cars to people that want to buy the biggest car they can afford. Never mind it will only go for 150 miles or so. You want 300+? Buy a better car. With a lot of the EVs in the market, you can spend tens of thousands of dollars on extended range versions. The difference is mainly the battery size and weight.
This is huge. To date, Tesla has been the only non-Chinese manufacturer talking iron. LFP is often touted for being cheaper than NMC, but given growing insecurity around battery-grade nickel supplies, using the far-more-prevalent iron and phosphate isn’t just about cheaper cars. It’s about having cars to sell in the first place.
With respect to range anxiety, pretty much every EV in the 200 to 300-mile range is sold out. (I was looking.) And Ford deploying LFP doesn’t mean it has to go 100% LFP in every vehicle. Just having the extra vehicles will win it market share.
(As to why now, the last of the patents in a critical suite expired in April [1]. Steve LeVine writes excellently to this topic [2].)
There were plans in Japan for wide use of hydrogen as the fuel of the future.
Japanese car manufacturers aligned on that, but weren’t keen on building the necessary infrastructure.
You could lease a hydrogen fuel cell car in CA. There was even a lot of state incentives if you did. But very few fueling stations (iirc, only two in the whole Bay Area)
Because the infrastructure needed would be bonkers, and creating fuelibg stations is not really a solved problem. You also loose a big amount of energy converting from electric to hydrogen and back. The cars themselves almost always have low storage because the tanks are very big. Hydrogen car performance is also a lot lower then pure EV.
The infrastructure needed to create a power grid for people to charge electric vehicles at home would be double-bonkers.
Upgrading fueling stations seems much easier than mining all of the copper needed to add all of the extra lines for EV charging, and then upgrading the whole national grid.
Supposedly one company has claimed 95% efficiency on creating hydrogen from electrolysis:
There are ancillary benefits to upgrading the grid that retrofitting pipes to pump hydrogen doesn’t bring. Most of America and Europe would do just fine without upgrades, for most of the population. And the jurisdictions touting hydrogen (e.g. Japan) have 70s-era anti-nuke greens in power.
Hydrogen is a smart hedge to pursue. But thank goodness it’s mostly Japanese tax dollars doing it.
Current Japan regime isn't anti-nuclear but they are the regime that encouraged nuclear plants. Now nuclear is unpopular for obvious reason so the regime is struggling about future energy plan. Thanks (/s) to putin, nuclear is now re-evaluating. I feel Germans are more anti-nuclear.
Why Japan encourages hydrogen is not very related to nuclear (except that the gov want to feed jobs to heavy industry companies that worked on nuclear), but related to lack of every local materials/fuels. I think hydrogen research should be encouraged, but Toyota should release more PHEV/BEVs early.
There's already tons of available lines going to a ton of people's homes. It only took a dozen or so feet of cable to add a 14-50 outlet in my garage.
Their homes were built expecting them to be able to pull 150-200A of power. It doesn't take that much power to charge an EV overnight. Mine charges way faster than it needs to on 32A 240V.
There is some loss in batteries but like we can measure things and hydrogen comes out way short in terms for miles driven per kWh of electricity in the grid.
Fueling stations are a solved problem. There are compact, modular, on-site hydrogen generators designed for installation in places like gas stations. I recently met the founder of this company: https://genh2hydrogen.com/ that is doing exactly this - they're currently taking pre-orders and looking for final funding, but they have the engineering and prototyping in place. The Department of Energy even offers interest-free 30 year loans for any stations that want to buy one.
A quick Google shows that a Tesla supercharger installation is about $250k including the power grid infrastructure upgrades needed. The self contained hydrogen generator and fueling pump from H2 is about $2 million, but it's also interest free and can be paid over 30 years and the profits of it go to the operator, which isn't true of the Tesla superchargers.
Larger and more popular gas stations can do about half a million in revenue per month selling gas, which they only have about 2% margin on. Hydrogen has the electric cost eating into margins, but even then it should be pretty profitable and much much higher than 2%.
Although it's a big up front cost commitment, the economics definitely seem feasible if hydrogen fuel cell cars start getting more popular over the next decade or more.
Thats yoyr problem right there.. its 10x the cost and only feasible if hydrogen cars become the norm, and hydrogen cars will not be the norm if no fillingstations are available. Meanwhile with an EV, I will never really need to visit a charging station, unless Im on a road trip.
If range was the only important thing, we would drive Citroen 2CV with spare cans of gaz in the trunk. But we don’t, and very few cares about the Mirai.
I really think the push for hydrogen (highly impractical at scale) by the right wing press is part of fossil fuel industry attempts to spread fud around battery evs.
Exactly, my money would be on an inert storage format - if you could mass produce hydrogen and keep it around safely inert (with low energy cost to convert it back), EVs would be beat so bad in the long run it wouldn't even be funny...
EVs are nice in short term but battery issues like these illustrate their (should be obvious) shortcomings.
WRT to this battery technology, ironically the same sector being targeted by hydrogen might benefit, i.e. rail tech - if you stick a high number of cheap batteries onto a large, heavy motorcar, the energy differential is almost negligible as you make up for it in part through momentum, but also just scale (more passengers transported per watt, more charge available per trip).
The most commonly used process creates a mixture of steam, hydrogen and CO2. The water is condensed and the CO2 removed to purify the hydrogen product. The CO2 is a concentrated stream. This is sometimes captured and sold as a byproduct (eg food grade CO2 for beverages or dry ice).
I would buy one for my next vehicle (it will be a ways off), except my area will take a while to be covered, with the amount of driving I do I would not need to refill for several months, and I could still take it on cross country road trips without worrying too much about even stopping at a charge/gas station.
As it stands, I will not be buying any EV, you will have a very hard time convincing me otherwise, too many drawbacks to not enough range, ridiculously high charge times, expensive battery repairs, in addition to not being much better than a gasoline vehicle as far as ECO costs.
A Tesla model 3 hypermiled like this Mirai got 606 miles [1]. The Mira's normal range is about 400 miles.
> you don't have the battery problem (at all).
The Mirai still has a small lithium battery like a hybrid since fuel cells cannot put enough instantaneous power (only 128kw and has start up time) for normal driving they need a buffer battery that is recharged by the fuel cell. Since this battery is so small it can't benefit as much from regen like a normal BEV and has pretty poor performance as well (182hp). All this in a car that weighs more than an equivalent BEV due to heavy 10,000 psi hydrogen tanks and complexity with the fuel cell and buffer battery.
I personally believe hydrogen is a dead end for automobiles, the end to end efficiency is much worse (creating and compressing hydrogen) vs just charging a battery not to mention the issues of storing a transporting hydrogen safely [2].
Hydrogen fuel cell cars are in fact better than gasoline. A fact that I think often gets overlooked.
But note, they do actually have batteries, similar to ICE serial hybrids.
They key thing of course, is that building lots of batteries is not a 'problem', and it's lack of being a problem is exactly why BEVs are better than fuel-cell hydrogen cars for basically everything, except maybe long distance air transport.
> why BEVs are better than fuel-cell hydrogen cars for basically everything, except maybe long distance air transport.
The place where BEVs have yet to prove themselves is when energy density is absolutely critical. Long distance transport of any sort (air, sea, train, semi) is really the next places for them.
Semi is a maybe at this point. Train MIGHT make sense, but, IMO it'll probably make the most sense as an energy capture/getting the train up to cruising speed aid rather than as the sole power source. Heck, for train, it'd make sense to instead electrify the rail system. Sea seems unreachable (Sails make more sense at this point which is sort of wild). Air, IDK, there are definitely projects to hit it, but I don't see a large commercial plane doing BEV. Perhaps for smaller regional hops it'll make sense.
How? Rail at least provides a direct conductive path. Electrified highways would require inductive charging at 65mph (not feasible) or building overhead pantograph systems (expensive but at least vaguely tractable). Either requires specialized vehicles.
Europe could pull it off due to its density, but the stretches of American highway which would benefit the most from it, would be a huge challenge.
You do not conduct your electricity over the rails you drive on. Even with trains it's overhead wires. The same principle has been demonstrated to work on (small parts of) the Autobahn. All it requires is a dedicated lane where trucks could tap into overhead wires.
Yeah, I don't know, but I was thinking like a strip in the middle and then maybe a metal tire under the middle of the car that contacts the strip. Obviously you wouldn't want it to electrocute you if stepped on and low voltage doesn't travel well so it would certainly require some innovation.
False. We will have to drastically increase mining to have enough BEVs for everyone. We will go with hydrogen cars instead simply because this is nuts and unsustainable.
Because we've intentionally designed it so that we have to rely on cars or else we can't function, which puts us at the mercy of other countries for our day-to-day existence. If we can't get cheap oil, we can't function because of this intentional fragility.
Solving for battery chemistry is cheaper and faster than rebuilding all of America (outside of a few metros where cars aren’t needed) around mass transit and walkability.
Personally, I would love if urban planning was structured in a way so that all new development was anti-car, and redevelopment slowly transitioned away from prioritizing automobiles, but that doesn’t appear to be in the cards.
I think redevelopment can happen, and in fact the growth in BEV tech is the trigger. Ebike sales have been staggering since the pandemic era started, and high gas prices have kept the trend going. And while some may switch back in time, the entire calculus of what vehicles are feasible for tripmaking changes with small BEV - an assisted cargo bike can go pretty fast! While the highways are out, they use the available battery resources more efficiently than a car for nearby destinations, which are the majority of trips, so in a competition for tripmaking market share they will come out ahead. That makes them part of an emerging virtuous cycle, where more people see an opportunity to save fuel and maintenance costs, so they get bikes, so there are more bikes on the street, so there's more demand for bike infrastructure.
This pattern has emerged in every city that has a bikeshare or other micromobility scheme: Consumers can dip into the waters and try it out without being "cyclists" and worrying about theft or maintenance. They can put up with poor infrastructure in other respects as a result and use it for the subset of trips where they feel it's appropriate to do so. And the operators(who are in a profitable, growing market) can provide the financial muscle to sway City Hall's policy and make the infrastructure better - because the resulting network growth goes right back into their pockets. And with learning effects, it becomes increasingly easy to deploy at a larger and larger scale. The first few years when these companies emerged and spilled e-scooters all over the streets made for disastrous PR, but their execution has improved greatly since then, with sturdier vehicles, better battery lifetimes, and closer working relationships with cities to address safety.
> Solving for battery chemistry is cheaper and faster than rebuilding all of America (outside of a few metros where cars aren’t needed) around mass transit and walkability.
I don't think it's an either-or thing. I think we can have long lasting and high quality electric cars and also build so that we don't have to rely on cars as much or at all. A lot of people think that reducing reliance on cars means building skyscrapers and density like Manhattan, but it actually means building medium density mixed-use development where biking and walking and perhaps a streetcar are how you accomplish 90%+ of your day-to-day mobility needs. Then you have a car for when you need a car. This means you don't take a car to a grocery store that's half a mile away, you walk or bike. It means you don't take a car to a grocery store that's half a mile away because you have a small grocery store in your neighborhood that has everything you need for day-to-day living (you don't need to stock 16 different brands of cereal).
It also has some nice benefits where you can better participate in your local government or other civic institutions. One of the other insidious problems created by automobile-only infrastructure is that it weakens society. You can't protest when you have to figure out where to park first. You can't meet your local representative when you have to pay to park and it's a 30 minute drive each way. Etc.
LFP Also has much more cycle life and can be cycled 0-100% with much less degradation than NMC meaning a much longer lasting battery. The LFP Tesla it is recommended to charge to 100% always rather than only doing 80% except on long trips on the NMC Teslas.
LFP is also safer with much less chance for thermal runaway. So safer, cheaper, longer lasting, easier material sourcing, only downside is lower energy density (about 20% hit for same weight) but there is a huge effort to improve that.
You can LFP's pretty cheap now for home backup or RV use. I replaced my RV house batteries with LFP for 4 times the usable capacity in half the weight of my old lead acid for about 3 times the cost. You can get 48v 19" rack batteries very cheap for power backup uses. I think LFP's are going to take over most uses in including cheap commuter automobiles.
True. Though the damage is low from hitting 100% which is part of the reason why this is a "just leave it at 100%" rather than a "hit 100% once a week".
That said, I'd probably do 90% as the max and 100% on the weekend if I owned an LFP vehicle.
The average American, buying a ~250 mile range EV, would only need to plug it in to charge once a week. Maybe twice. So, just charge it to 100% every time you charge it.
Not like they are just using battery voltage for SOC, they are coulomb counting with a shunt, so you only need to charge to 100% once in a while to account for drift.
LFP gets 2x the cycle count at 100%-0% as a NMC does at 80%-20%. Due to its lower cell voltage it has less voltage driven aging than NMC.
Elon: "I’d personally slightly opt for iron pack, as it wants to be charged to 100%, whereas nickel prefers ~90%."
There’s also a downside to LFP batteries: They charge significantly slower. There was a report in Germany about Teslas with LFP packs only achieving 73kW on average. For some trips this means 50% longer charging times.
I believe there was an issue with earlier software but current models meet or exceed the NCA batteries in charge rate with a 80kw average. Also 73kw is not 50% slower.
Gotion is supposedly going to release 200+ wh/kg LFP this year, which since LFP needs less thermals can do 90% cell-to-pack, the numbers I saw they may get 200 wh/kg at PACK level.
CATL is releasing some LMFP chemistry that will do 200+ wh/kg into production soon.
200 wh/kg with Tesla efficiencies should enable cheap scalable 400+ mile cars (I believe that current cobalt chemistry Tesla batteries can't break 200 wh/kg at the pack level due to thermals, but don't quote me).
And IF the stories about 140 wh/kg sodium ion are true, that may go into production next year, which means a lithium free 200-300 mile car, although I don't know as much about the endurance and thermals of sodium ion chemistries.
Charging infrastructure is now in "ball is rolling" phase. Demand for EVs is high thanks to the gasoline price spike, and LFP/Sodium Ion should in theory enable the cheaper-than-ICE car (not TCO, retail price).
We really need a new volume-independent subsidy. I'm thinking 10,000$ straight rebate (not tax credit) for two years and then it drops 1,000$ per year.
Solid state batteries should be able to take over in 5-10 years, but the new LFP/sodium ion means that big auto should not be as constrained as they were.
Tesla needs to double down on quality, software, and scaling, but I think they'll be fine. Current stock price fine? Eh.
What American auto makers need to concern themselves with is scaling their operations before the Chinese automakers invade the US like they are in Europe.
How much room for improvement is left on the consumption side? Electric cars seem to require around 15-20kWh/100km. Can we get that below 10 for regular highway driving, say at 130km/h? What are the numbers for city driving like?
You can make a self driving truck/electric vehicle lane where the speed limit is 80km/h. Paint a green line in the middle of the ev-lane and it should make self driving more easy to implement. Reason for slower speed wind resistance is far less at 80km/h. Energy use is quadratic concerning speed. So make a movie streaming ev-lane.
Also one could fit cars with rail gear and run them on rail tracks on the highway which would lessen the tire friction roll resistance losses. Technology for allowing cars to run on rail tracks already exists for railway maintenance cars. Self driving on rail track is also much easier to implement.
If people wanted to travel 80km/h they could do so today. It is well known that going slower improves fuel efficiency. I'm asking for things like improved drivetrain efficiency and better aerodynamics.
The laws of physics inconveniently get in the way.
If your 90% efficient drivetrain-tyre system uses 20 kWh per 100 km, then improving that to 95% efficient maybe reduces that to 17 kWh.
Pencils and javelins have lower drag coefficients than cars. Unfortunately people don't fit inside them. A javelin-shaped vehicle big enough to fit a person comfortably inside is a train.
I like to drive a little slower to conserve charge/fuel, but it would be too discourteous to all the other drivers on the road, so I just go at the prevailing speed. If there were a separate lane for lower speed driving I would use it.
If it's a self driving only lane, the speed limit should be increased, not decreased. Self driving on a highway where all the cars are self driving is already a solved problem.
> Can we get that below 10 for regular highway driving, say at 130km/h?
Probably not with normal-sized cars.
For the Model 3, the theoretical minimum is 13.8 kW. This increases linearly with drag coefficient and area (as seen from the front). You would have to build a significantly smaller (flatter, narrower) car and improve the drag coefficient (0.2 has been achieved) to get there.
15-20kWh/100km is a gasoline equivalent of about 1,5-2l/100km. At 130km/h there is little room for improvement (thinner wheels, better aerodynamics). All the individual electric components in the car are like ~98% efficient.
I guess 10kWh/100km is possible at 90km/h on cruisecontroll behind a big truck.
EVs biggest problem are the inefficiencies in the electric grid, there is like a 50% margin for improvement.
Happy Ford is using more environmentally friendly Iron based LFP batteries. Cobalt in more traditional batteries is neurotoxic for humans and the mining of Cobalt is dirty. Very good that a large car manufacturer such as Ford is switching to Iron LFP. You should be able to fast charge LFP which will compensate for the lesser energy density. Since lfp is more stable they should be able to take the charging better than cobalt-based chemistries. Also Iron lfp is a more stable chemistry than cobalt-based so far less likely for battery fires.
BYD has integrated heating elements to drastically reduce degradation in the winter. Charging speeds is just a result of cheaping out somewhere at the scales we're talking about.
I'm not sure why we aren't making EVs with small but upgradeable batteries.
Like for example a $20k car with a 10kWh "good enough for now" starter battery that can be bought today. Still good enough for 90% of trips and upgradable to 50kWh with additional after market battery modules should the user decide. As simple as upgrading the RAM on an (old) laptop.
I think when it comes to the car this idea could be viable but I think the risk is potential change with the weight distribution. You could probably have some weights that are replaced with batteries when you upgrade to keep the weight constant but then you are reducing your range.
Laptop batteries and EV batteries have a completely different performance profile. The data we have suggests that the battery will retain 80% of its maximum capacity for about as long as the rest of the car is expected to survive.
Big batteries have much more sophisticated battery management systems that are designed to be as kind as possible to the cells. Also they reserve a capacity of 10% on either side, leaving 80% usable capacity available to the user. Li-Ion batteries don't like being fully charged or fully discharged.
Also due to their capacity most EVs are charged at about 0.1C whereas phones (especially with rapid chargers) are charged anywhere between 1C and 3C.
Most people don’t buy new cars. Most people buy second hand vehicles. They now risk degraded batteries and a huge incidental cost.
My car cost me £5000 second hand. The cheapest EV battery replacement here is £12,500. I could write that car off twice for the price of a battery and still have enough money to go on holiday.
When you buy the bottom end of the second hand EV market which is realistically what most people will have to spend on, you’re looking at the 160 mile range leaf. With an 80% battery that’s 128 miles of range. Which is near useless for the average user. I couldn’t even drive to see my mother in it without charging twice on the way.
I will not own an EV as the incidental risk trade off is too high and the up front cost of a new EV is too high.
The main cost for cheap 2nd hand cars is the fuel in my experience. So you can have a cheap fuel commuter car and a "real" car for trips and towing your boat.
Requires parking for two cars though. But since we are talking about an EV it requires a house anyways since most apartments have no charging.
Yeah but you can manage the fuel within your cash flow. Difficult to get credit and manage the purchase of a large expensive car. And having two cars is too expensive as well.
We have two combustion cars, a Corolla and an Outback. The Corolla gets everyday use, the Outback goes on long trips or if I need to haul some furniture.
An EV to replace the Corolla would be ideal. Perfect spot for this scenario.
They do below a certain point yes. But at that point you just buy another one and drive it until the engine falls out. This is how most people operate.
On my vehicle an engine costs about £1275 to put a refurb in it. Gearbox about £550.
There is no rust anywhere on my 8 year old vehicle.
People run like this out of financial necessity. They don’t have enough income to run an EV.
So batteries on EVs generally don't fail dramatically, they slowly lose range over time.
So someone buying a used EV will presumably buy something with enough range for them to get around, and then over time if they notice the range starting to decline to the point that it might be an issue, they'll have some time to save up & trade in their car for a better one. Their current car won't be worthless on the used market and someone who doesn't have as large of range requirements (e.g. a 2nd car for commuting) will still buy it.
There are other issues that can prevent an EV from charging at all, but they have usually cheaper fixes than a whole battery pack replacement like you're talking about.
May be UK is especially cheap for car repair but costs you mention are unrealistic for major repairs on those components. I had gearbox problems on 10 year old car and independent mechanic suggested to sell car to scrap yard - in his opinion trying to fix it will end up costing more than car is worth. It was before Covid inflated used car prices though.
From quick check in google: If you are extremely lucky, you’ll get your transmission replacement completed for $2,500 all in. If yours is one of the more expensive types, it could easily range to $6,000 or even more.
My EV is 1/10th of the cost to run and maintain than my diesel car. I’m more than happy to spend an extra 20-30 min charging on a 4 hour drive when I choose to drive the EV.
My diesel has also done just over 340,000km and it’s pretty shot. Hard to start on cold mornings and I’ve had to sort out some leaky injectors and seized joints on the driveshaft. There’s another couple of hundred thousand kilometres left at best.
The EV is coming up to 100,000km and it stills drives just as spritely as the day I got it. The battery is showing 100% state of health and I’m convinced it’ll happily do a million kilometres or more.
Sounds perfect for the average American as a daily commuter / errands car. Yes, no road trips without inconvenience, but that still doesn’t make it useless, it makes it a great secondary car instead.
EVs aren't for everyone, especially if you have long range requirements. My daily work commute is under 6 miles round trip.
That said, 20% degradation after 10 years isn't a huge deal for me. I'm sure in that time, battery replace/refurbishment will be much cheaper. There is a company in Oregan that will replace a 40kwh Leaf pack for $7000 .
> Just out of curiosity: is a car really the best option for a 6 mile round trip? That's a distance where I'd consider walking.
Walking!? So 1.5-2hrs each way to get to work? On really hot or cold days, that’s going to be torturous. Had you suggested riding a bike or maybe a scooter/moped I’d have not said anything, but suggesting folks walk that distance felt a bit off the mark.
> The data we have suggests that the battery will retain 80% of its maximum capacity for about as long as the rest of the car is expected to survive.
How long is the rest of the car expected to survive?
I rarely do long range driving, and my commute was short for years (a couple miles each way) for about a decade before we switched to work from home a couple years before the pandemic, and I'm not interested in travel so my usage is not going to up much when I retire in a few years. I anticipate a need for at most 100k over the rest of my life, which almost certainly will be less than 25 years.
Would a current EV be likely be able to handle that with just reasonable maintenance?
I'm currently driving a 2006 Honda CR-V that I bought new and could probably reasonably keep driving another 10-15 years. That's what I want out of an EV.
I’d love a car with a tiny battery for 99% of the time when I’m just driving locally and the ability to have an extra, large battery that can be slotted in when I want to make a longer trip. With only the short range battery most of the time, my car’s weight is low and efficiency high.
Maybe I could keep that battery in my house and use it to store solar electricity most of the time. It seems like it should be possible to design a system for slotting it in that doesn’t require me to physically lift its weight.
I’d also be happy to drive into somewhere local that rents me that long range battery and slots it in with machinery designed for the purpose.
I think you're correct, my Fiat certainly doesn't. That is, however a firmware update away provided the type2 or CCS protocol can distinguish between a mobile or static charger, or be extended to do so. My OP was a slightly off the cuff post to highlight the use of a trailer for say cheap city cars, rather than a removable battery.
I have heard of proof of concept camping trailers that not only have batteries but also motors in the wheels so the can provide extra power when you drive (restoring the range you loose when towing) and also regen braking. Not low tech, but would be really useful https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1133124_towing-with-an-...
I love the idea of using those extra cells for solar or perhaps renting them.
I can't see why no one is exploring this gap in the market. It might only appeal to nerds at first but that is true with most technologies in their infancy.
We need what is effectively a giant version of a double AA battery. Yes we also need battery management systems and heating/cooling to go with these things but these are solved problems, just not standardised yet.
I don't know if any company is exploring what you are mentioning, but battery swapping for electrical scooters (Gogoro) is in common use in Taiwan. Instead of you charge your scooter, you drive to a battery swap station and exchange your empty battery for a full one. see [1].
But some companies are also investigating battery swap stations for cars. So, you might not be able to swap a short-range battery with a long-range battery yourself, but I imagine that would be possible with those battery swap stations. See [2]. Battery swap stations means that you have full range again for the same time it takes to fill a car with gas. But obviously, you need to have enough of those stations to make it usable. And if every car brand is gonna create its own mechanism for battery swapping, then that would probably only be interesting in city areas where it's worthwhile for the manufacturer to run those stations.
Sure, but there are jacks that can be purchased for home use that can easily lift a ton or two. If this was a thing, the battery would have to self-lift itself into place, or have home-installed battery swap station.
Or you just rent the battery for the trip. Sort of like propane tank exchanges. Drive to the station add a 600 mile battery, drive somewhere, swap or charge it and drive back. Most people would only need 40/50 miles of range 90% of the time. And that range could charge very rapidly as well.
Tell that to Chevy Volt owners. It's amazing how much all electric driving can be achieved with just a little bit of careful driving. I barely use my range extender now, it's just for the odd long trip.
Modern EV design has the batteries integrated into the structural frame of the car. This is because the batteries are the heaviest part of the car, so you want them to be close to the ground and secure from impact. This also makes it very inconvenient to replace.
Lots of companies (even Tesla) have attempted the replaceable battery concept but none have been able to make it work efficiently.
Would it not be significantly easier if we're using 4 or 5 independent modules instead of a giant monolith? Aren't cars routinely lifted into the air when being serviced?
I understand that the structure of the car's body may be suboptimal and require extra reinforcement but if we're really serious about EV adoption and reducing battery cost then perhaps a trade-off worth making?
For an EV the main design constraints are aerodynamics and weight. If you need to add additional reinforcement to make up for the battery packs that haven't been installed, you're carrying that weight around all the time and taking a range penalty.
So assume your vehicle has 3 packs. You normally run it with just one pack because that's all you need to commute and run errands during the week. When you go visit the relatives in Florida, you install the other two packs to get the additional range. The car needs additional structural elements to meet safety standards when the extra packs aren't installed and they add 5% additional weight. That's weight you're carrying around every day, and that has a range cost.
Could it be worth it to swap out the extra structure elements when you install the extra packs, so at least you aren't taking the range penalty while driving long distance? Yes, but the manufacturer isn't going to want the liability of a customer removing what is a passive safety device, and then forgetting to reinstall it when they go back to city travel using only one pack.
NHTSA will also have input to this. From what I can tell - the applicable FMVSS is this one that deals with EV side impact protection, electrolyte spills, and electric shock.
Tesla was never serious about replaceable batteries. They could get more tradeable credits for replaceable batteries, so they told everyone they’ll do that, got the credits for the cars that were supposed to have replaceable batteries, and never followed up with the actual tech.
I did recall Tesla wasn’t serious about battery swapping but can’t find any information about getting credits for doing that, let alone just announcing it. Can you back that up?
The statement is worded critical of Tesla, but IIRC there's some truth to it. They engineered the Model S to be battery-swappable, and there was some advantage wrt. the regulatory credits to doing so. Can't find a link, but I remember reading it.
They rolled out this service to a couple of spots in California, which was probably sufficient for the the credit regime, but ended up not expanding the program further and terminating it after a few quarters. The official explanation was that it was not widely used.
There may have been other business reasons. I have no idea what was discussed on the executive level but wouldn't be surprised if they considered some tradeoffs of complexity, costs and customer attractivenes to not be worth it. Honestly, it's very rare that you actually need or strongly prefer to have this kind of service rather than just recharging at 150kW for 15 minutes. So if it adds considerable cost or complexity, I could understand the decision to drop it.
A short time later, they started welding an extra metal shield onto the bottom of the Model S, to act as an extra layer of protection against collisions with highway debris that caused some high-profile battery fires. I had the impression that this precluded battery swap, so at that point the business decision must have been made to not expand the program further.
If the regulatory incentives was key in the decision to do this and then later drop it, that's a fundamental property of incentives to do something that might not be a good idea in isolation.
I am critical of Tesla, as it success was largely due to to public subsidy, and I believe we should hold such enterprises to the highest of standards, to guarantee the public made a sound investment. But I digress.
That's FUD as far as I'm concerned. If they were just aiming for regulatory credits it weighs have been far cheaper to use human labor to do the swaps than to develop the robotic apparatus they developed.
Tesla did a decent market test on batteries, the test failed and they moved on.
The "market test" was a shack across the street from a 100% free Tesla Supercharger station. To use said shack, you had to be one of a select group invited, make an appointment days in advance, pay a fee, and risk that you're trading your $20K battery for a worse one out of someone else's car. They invited a couple owners and journalists to do a few swaps for the magazines, collected their extra ZEV credits, and then disconnected the phone and let the one person staffing the place go back to his normal job. If that looks like an honest market test to you, then I don't know what else to say.
We'd only need a compromise here. The concept that failed, afaiu, was batteries you'd swap at the gas station on a trip, which you probably want to take no longer than refilling your good old ICE car took. That seems impractical for several reasons. But if you had a range extension pack that you could add/remove in 30 minutes before a longer trip, maybe that would be more realistic?
I wonder if a good solution is a smaller fixed battery for lower cost then "range extenders" like this for the bike you can swap in for longer journeys or a topup on a busy day type thing.
Compare the weight of a Tesla Model 3 SR (most popular version) and a BMW 3 Series (its most comparable model to the Tesla Model 3). Weight difference is negligible.
BMW sold 50,000 3-series in 2021 whereas Tesla sold 900,000+ Model 3/Ys.
Compare the Model 3 to a Camry (300k units), Civic, (260k units), Corolla (250k units), or Accord (200k units), and you'll see the lightest model 3 available weighs more than the heaviest trims of all four, and the 3 is on the lighter side of 250+ mile EVs by a pretty decent margin.
Is the BMW causing just as much road damage as a Model 3? yes.
Does the weight of the average sedan go up substantially as we convert to EV? Absolutely
It's almost as if EV is just an excuse to get the consumer to spend waaay more than is needed, wasting all the energy in production in producing cars that cannot be upgraded, than about about minimising the environmental impact. And that's because it is.
Corporations do not care about the environment, but they do know a good story when they see it. If they can get you to buy the same car multiple times, this is great business for them. If they can lobby governments to encourage the scrapping of old but serviceable cars, eg by fining non-EVs for their emissions, that means you will be forced to buy sooner.
It's all business. Neither corporations nor the governments that service corporations care about either the people or the environment. I wish people would recognise this fact, but corporate-government schooling/science/culture has everyone believing that government is here to help!
10 kWh is less than 40 miles / 60 km. It's good enough for grocery shopping but it would be akin to always running with your fuel light on and with 1/20th of the fueling stations (ok you would charge at nighttime). I wouldn't be comfortable with that unless I am going to pay for it half of an equivalent ICE car.
I've used a PHEV with 40km of range on electric. It was 100% enough for doing daily driving. I would love to see a small town-oriented not shitboxy EV that's cheaper than fiat500/mini-e.
Sure, but it's plugin so there's a backup. The parent didn't mention plugin, and a pure electric with a 10 kWh battery might not even be enough to pick up someone at the airport or to visit a friend in the weekend.
We already have upgradeable ICE engines. How legal is it to swap a more powerful engine from the same model car? Car companies hate that sort of thing because anything that extends the life of a used car directly translates into a lost new car sale
Batteries are limited by charge/discharge C rates, which is relative to the size of the pack. Which means not only would your range go down, but so would performance and charge speed.
You can push batteries harder, but they’ll generate more heat and degrade faster (lower cycle life). This ends up counterintuitively in a higher long term cost of ownership.
Good news is C rates are getting better over time.
I think we should start thinking in battery cargo trailers. When do you want extra range and battery? When you're going on holiday. What do you want apart from extra range when you're going on holiday? Extra storage space!
So why not just start selling battery cargo trailers which can provide your main car with extended range when needed?
It's also much easier to swap and rent out physically, financially and emotionally than your main car.
Most drivers can't handle trailers. The roads would be so much more dangerous if trailers were commonplace.
Trailer hookups can be legitimately difficult. Even in the simplest case, they can be time-consuming.
Humans are notoriously bad at backing up with a trailer attached.
Heavy trailers (batteries) are extra dangerous -- tail-wagging can be scary!
Cars with trailers don't fit in parking spaces.
...
A replaceable battery has to be in the underpan of a car. Or split across several battery modules, but keeping the center of gravity low, and between the axles.
At least at the moment, it's usually more efficient to recycle the good cells from an old pack into a new pack for automotive use. The chemistry between automotive and residential use diverges significantly because they are optimizing for different things: Car batteries minimize weight and maximize power input/output. For residential, weight barely matters at all, but # of discharge cycles and thermal stability matter more*. In 10 years, who knows what the economics will turn out to be though.
Actually, the vast majority of LFP batteries are still perfectly fine and not in any need of recycling. There's indeed nothing to recycle yet. At least not a lot. And it will be some time before that starts changing.
Recycling of failing batteries and discarded cells that did not survive quality control in the factory is of course a thing. These don't end up in land fills. The materials inside them are way to valuable for that.
The mantra goes "reduce, re-use, recycle". In that order.
Recycling is a last resort. Please don't jump to it first. That's what people who want to virtue-signal do, not what smart people do.
Electric cars definitely cause less harm to the natural environment and people's health wellbeing than fossil fuel powered cars, so "reduce" is covered, even if not optimally.
People are also definitely re-using lithium batteries.
Since lithium batteries are a new thing, there is not yet a great enough flow of worn-out batteries to justify recycling at industrial scale as yet. Those as exist are being stockpiled for this, though. And a lot of R&D work is being done to set up for recycling.
Each kilogram of battery in an EV removes a need for about a 100kg of gasoline.
I'm sure they'll be recycling those batteries in about 25 years when they'll be starting to wear out, but even if they don't we're still leaning hard on the "reduce" in the three R's mantra.
The only thing that tops range anxiety for me is battery degradation anxiety. I would probably be totally fine with a lower range if I know that my battery can do 100 000 cycles.
At the battery control system design stage, these two factors are mostly trade-off-able.
For example, you'll get far far more cycles out of a battery if you only charge up to 80% and discharge down to 20%. Early hybrid cars used this to an extreme - and always kept the battery between 45% and 60%. By doing that you can get 50,000 cycles necessary to recharge and discharge every time you go up and down a hill.
For a practical car, 200 to 500 full charge cycles per year is all that could happen. 200 for a suburban family car, 500 for an urban commercial vehicle.
(200 cycles per year would be perceived by an owner as being "every day", because the days she's away on holiday or sick at home or WFH are not remembered. Nor would she remember that she only charges once on weekends.)
100_000 cycles is therefore 20 to (more likely) 50 years' use.
That's a family heirloom, well outlasting the body, suspension, steering and interior of any car. I'd like to have that too.
Edit: Er, that should be 200 to 500 years. Outlasting several chassis and interiors. Definitely heirlooms.
I think 20 years of use would be cool for a car! Of course you might be right that the steering would break first - but shouldn't that be replaceable? I can't see a reason while the car's body or the electric motors would not last that long.
A full charge cycle is 0 to 100 and back. If you only do 20 to 80 as most owners do you get about ten times as many cycles. So a typical owner does well under 100 per year. 250,000 km is a reasonable expectation.
The LFP batteries in the article have an expected life of 6000 cycles, which in real world usage corresponds to about 750,000 kilometers. (6000 is worst case cycle, which never happens in a car with a proper BMS).
You're asking for a battery with an expected life span of 12.5 million kilometers.
Due to crazy car prices I was able to sell my 2021 Tesla for the same price as a 2022 factory new Tesla with lfp battery. I’m really excited to get it and be able to charge to 100% all the time and also have a much longer battery life at the same time. The previous battery was a nightmare of having to micromanage the battery charge for long trips and constant worry about if the battery pack was going to crap out after the warranty.
I think the car is a bit slower with the lfp but I really don’t care.
> Automotive giant Ford is shoring up its battery supply chain — partly by importing lower-cost, iron-based batteries popular in China — as it sprints to increase electric vehicle production.
Old geezer's perspective: Back in its heyday, Ford Motor was one of the most vertically integrated (large manufacturing) companies in the world. They owned and operated their own fleet of ore carriers (cargo ships), to haul iron ore from the mines to the steel mill that was part of their all-Ford integrated manufacturing complex. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_River_Rouge_Complex - though Wikipedia barely scratches the surface on this. ) Back in the early 90's, I knew a couple guys who had spent their careers working on those iron ore carriers.
Current-day Ford Motor having to go begging to China - for a major, iron-based component needed to produce more cars - that is laughable, and beyond pathetic. In a dark, miserable sort of way, if you care about America or its future.
> Current-day Ford Motor having to go begging to China - for a major, iron-based component needed to produce more cars - that is laughable, and beyond pathetic. In a dark, miserable sort of way, if you care about America or its future.
Sounds similar to Boeing where accounting for personal gain (promotions / raises) of upper managers and executives took effect over the long term advantage of the company.
But there was no McDonald Douglas absorbed into Ford to explain this shift. Yet it seemed to happen during a similar timeframe (late '90s, early 2000s).
Funny you should mention Boeing. Alan Mulally went to Ford in 2006 after working for Boeing for 35+ years. In my opinion he was a net positive for the company, securing a credit line just before the 2007 recession so that Ford did not have to get bailed out by the government. He also sold off Jaguar/Land Rover just in time before gas prices spiked and their sales slumped.
I think he is one of the "good" Boeing execs, unlike the ones that came in with the McDonnell Douglas merger and mismanaged production of aircraft like the 787 and 737-MAX
Story my dad told of McDonald Douglass merger was that they intentionally hired a drunk incompetent ceo to scare away all of their business. So that the merger with Boeing could be approved.
He had many stories to tell of engineering non sense there. Supposedly they just trained whomever to be an engineer. They offered to make my dad one since they liked him.
And I figured that people that don't know the difference between McDonnell and McDonald can be ignored when it comes to their views on that particular merger.
> In my opinion he was a net positive for the company
That opinion is well founded. In the book American Icon by Bryce Hoffman (Detroit News journalist) he chronicles that entire time period.
Mulally pulled off one of the greatest challenges, a bonafide turn around. They had a company culture that was all about individuals protecting their own interests. Mulally changed it to one where they focused on making vehicles people want and thinking about the long-term.
For example, Mulally held a weekly executive meeting and each head would give a color coded report of their domain's status (green for good, yellow for issues, red for caution). For weeks in this meeting every single executive reported their status as "green" for good. This in a fiscal quarter when Ford had a $6 billion loss! Mulally managed to change that culture, which for anyone who has work experience should speak very loudly.
Ford was never going to take the bailout: GM and Chrysler were prohibited from paying dividends, while the Ford family receives income from FoMoCo stock.
It was more than that. GM went bankrupt and wiped out all the stockholders' equity. If Ford did that, it would have ended the two-tier stock structure that gives the Ford family control.
> Sounds similar to Boeing where accounting for personal gain (promotions / raises) of upper managers and executives took effect over the long term advantage of the company.
Executive pay is out of control in general in the USA, and performance is equally trash.
China spent the last two years demonstrating that they're "fair weather partners" when it comes to trade. And winter is coming.
So obviously it's not bad _per se_ to rely on China ; but if it's not possible to diversify sourcing, this is begging for a disaster next time whatever geopolitic hits the fan.
I meant that in any situation where china has to choose between interior market / upholding CCP plans / régional partnership vs trading with the global west, they will chose the former in times of crisis. Which is not a bad thing, again, it's just that everyone is relying on them as if they are an infinite factory of everything with unlimited supply, and it seems that, well, it's not true any more.
But if they decide to stop trade with Russia tomorrow, I'll reconsider.
How did they spend two years demonstrating they are fair weather partners? Was it the part where they locked workers inside of factories producing goods for America to make sure that the Americans got their shipments in spite of the Covid-0 policy? Or was it how China is actually upholding most sanctions against Russia, despite giving less than 0 f's about Ukraine?
IMO the real disaster would be a total de-link between Chinese and American economies. Neither country can currently engage in any kind of meaningful hostilities while 10%+ of their economies are linked in trade. Trade prevents war because war would mean decimation of their economies and lead to likely depressions, although I suppose the results of Russia's invasion and how their economy handles de-linking will inform this logic going forward
They won't stop trading with Taiwan supporting countries. They don't have any plans of that as far as anyone knows and never threatened it. The threat is that the US executes it's public plans of sinking ships trading with China in such a contingency.
That will sound tongue in cheek, and to some extend it is, but if the last few years have shown us anything, it's the perils of starting a sentence by "xxx won't yyy" (for several values of x and y.)
That's an extrapolation. There hasn't ever been in a country that decided to sanction themselves within wartime from most of the world economy, and leaked documents show that one of the reason China wants Taiwan to begin with is to make their trade more secure.
I don't even know what the first sentence is supposed to mean. Germany knew they would be blockaded by the Brits in WW I and II and proceeded to go to war anyway, so didn't they "decided [sic] to sanction themselves within wartime from most of the world economy"?
Japan continued with their China war in the 1930s, despite sanctions from the US and the West, so didn't they?
As for the "leaked documents", the claim on Taiwan is that it is an inseparable part of China, and not that they want "to make their trade more secure."
You lost the plot of the original comment. The original point was that somehow China would stop trading with any country that didn't agree Taiwan was Chinese by their own volition. This never happened is in no way analogous to to Japan or Germany being blockaded.
And no, the leaked documents don't just claim that Taiwan is an inseparable part of China, that's the public position. The leaked documents detail how control over Taiwan is necessary to be able to project sufficient naval power to break any attempted blockade especially by submarine due to the low depth of waters within the first island chain.
So they tell their population and the whole world that Taiwan is an inseparable part of China, and have been doing so since Nixon and Kissinger went to China, but the real reason is to break an attempted blockade?
OK, if that's what you want to believe. Seems kinda implausible, though.
In WW I, the Germans didn't move to "unrestricted submarine warfare" until 1917. The fact that the CCP doesn't plan for it now means absolutely nothing.
First of all, this isn't WW1. Secondly, there is a difference between using violence to impose an embargo on someone else (what Germany did and what the US threatens to do) and embargoing yourself, which no country has ever done ever.
I think you are just embarrassing yourself now. You say "This isn't WW I" but then you claim that there hasn't ever been something. Either history is relevant, or it isn't.
Edit: you can't "impose an embargo" on another country. That's a misunderstanding of the word. You can "blockade" them. Blockades are a feature of almost every war.
> Was it the part where they locked workers inside of factories producing goods for America to make sure that the Americans got their shipments in spite of the Covid-0 policy?
They did this because it would cause their economy to collapse and there are social repercussions against the CCP if that were to happen. Had 0 to do with the US or the West or any sort of altruism. They also welded doors of apartments shut so people inside couldn't leave during the initial lock downs. China has a much more robust class system than the US and the lower class/rural people are taken advantage of at an astounding rate because they aren't the right kind of Chinese.
> Or was it how China is actually upholding most sanctions against Russia, despite giving less than 0 f's about Ukraine?
China is essentially the sole reason Russia is still occupying Ukraine and they have been skirting sanctions left and right; even going as far as partnering with Russia on a new inter-banking system. They've also used the Ukrainin War as a way to test the waters in the South China Sea and step up their territorial claims over international waters in violation of international law.
So then yes, you agree completely with the statement that was made, which was "It is a mistake to do business with nations that don't share your values".
Democratic nations which abide by international trade agreements. Nations you can do business with which are governed by the rule of law instead of the whims of a political party or dictator.
> We just had president who was white supremacist who called other countries shitholes.
America can turn itself into whatever it wants to be. If America can no longer be trusted in business then it's correct not to do business with it.
> When business with China was good nobody cared they still had communist party ruling the country.
What the heck? Do you somehow only watch the super opinionated stuff on both Fox and CNN, giving you polar opposite trash talk from both sides of the aisle? Lol
If anything The first one wasn’t a white supremacist because “he had alot of Mexican friends” and the other isn’t cozying up to a dictator because our gas supply offset wasn’t shifty to Saudi backed oil supplies, not to mention all his work his son has done with sketchy characters that he tries to distance himself from.
The comment you replied to was unkind to both sides (appropriately) and you turned it into my team good, your team bad. This is why we can't discuss politics here because it goes tribal and off the rails.
Our relationship with SA is fucked up and that is regardless of party in office.
Parting shot: if you really cared about corrupt nepotism you'd acknowledge the prior son-in-law's self dealing with the SA as well (e.g., a recent $2B "investment"). Let's investigate both sides, eh?
Edit: shitting on Trump in the OP also didn't help (because while true wasn't germane to the corruption/foreign relations).
- "We must travel to the most-distant place in the world, and the only source of $Thing, which we cannot survive without!" That sounds great, if you're writing epic fantasy quest stories. If you're talking supply chain management...maybe there is something profoundly wrong with your company?
- Even if the CCP would never dream of squeezing Ford's battery life-line...the battery factory there could be shut down for yet another COVID outbreak, or the US could squeeze it (due to domestic politics or "Taiwan Troubles"), or etc.
- The giant mess (huge delays, staggering price spikes, etc.) that global shipping has been in the past few years. Shipping car batteries from China to the US via air freight does not sound like a money-making plan. My old World Atlas suggests that shipping by rail is probably not an option.
Great quip, but it's more complex. The Chunnel is delicate infrastructure, with neither a backup nor a short repair time if something bad happened. I have not examined their Dangerous/Forbidden Freight List for "bulk rechargeable batteries" - but such lists can change. OTOH, there are dense freight rail networks on both sides of the Channel, and similar for ports, shipping, etc.
Vs. you'd need to build a few thousand miles of freight RR in Siberia, Alaska, and other places "unfriendly to economical RR construction and operation" in order to ship from China to the US via rail.
> Current-day Ford Motor having to go begging to China - for a major, iron-based component needed to produce more cars - that is laughable, and beyond pathetic.
They're lucky China is answering. They're incredibly late to the EV game; considering that they're doing remarkably well.
>They're incredibly late to the EV game; considering that they're doing remarkably well.
When you're not the trailblazer, it's easy to make catch-up progress to those that went before you in much much less time. Why this is constantly a source of amazement is funny to me. By the time Ford got involved, the path was no longer a beaten down path, it was fully paved 8-lane highway. Instead trying to figure out how to make an electrified car, they just took all of the learning before them and then turned it into something fancy. While Tesla is "working" on self-driving and not doing well with it, Ford said, nah, we'll just turn our batteries into a generator for the home. They built an actual truck that looks like the same truck everyone is used to and say here it is as an electric. That's easy to do when you are riding coat tails
All of this is true except for the part where no other manufacturer (other than Tesla) has a reliable source of batteries -- so they're subject to intense supply chain constraints that limit inventory drastically. And so they were unable to meet the consumer demand for EVs. Hence you simply can't even get a Ford F150 Lightning even though it looks like a great vehicle.
This all pre-dated the COVID related supply chain issues, BTW. Lack of battery supply is behind the lackluster inventory (and therefore sales) of all non-Tesla vehicles for over half a decade.
I say all this not as a Tesla fan, but as a GM electric vehicle owner. GM was unable to produce more then a few tens of thousands of Bolts a year -- not because consumers didn't want them, but because there was simply no way for them to get them from LG Chem. VW/Audi group has had the same issue. They're both not late to the game on EV tech or production, but very late to the game on battery production.
Being late to the game in this case has a huge cost. And various governments wasted time and money providing consumer subsidies for EV purchases thinking this would lead the market to magically "solve" the EV supply issue by increasing consumer demand when the issue that really needed solving was volume and cost of battery production.
If we were going to involve public dollars in getting EVs to market we should have invested massively in encouraging battery production. Some governments are waking up to this now at least.
Ford believes they have the battery supply for a 600,000 EV/year run rate by late-2023 and are shooting for 2,000,000/year by 2026.
Bloomberg projects VW selling more EVs than Tesla by 2024 and they are planning to have 240GWh/yr of in-house battery production by 2030.
BYD in China is fully vertically integrated on EV production, moreso than Tesla who relies on 3rd party mining and on Panasonic for chemistries/cell production. BYD is now the largest PHEV+BEV manufacturer in the world.
Tesla might have had a head start but There has been a lot of catching up going on, and as we get closer and closer to resource constraints instead of production constraints they aren't in much better of a position than any other manufacturer.
so what you're saying is they are not only copying the good parts of Tesla (Electrification) but also the bad parts (lying about future production?).
Ford made 30k electric vehicles in 2021, 600k means a growth rate of %1900 in the span of 2 1/2 years (They need to be at the run rate in 2026)?
Battery packs were a problem to Tesla in 2018 and now they've moved onto the bigger problem that no one is talking about.... There isn't enough lithium and nickel production to even make this possible.
That's why Tesla launched its own mining operations in Nevada.
Also, its not like Elon hasn't been screaming about lack of nickel and lithium production since like 2018, just no one seems to be paying attention.
I think Mach-e is the only BEV Ford sold in 2021. The E-transit and F-150 Lightning both started sales in 2022. They were selling anumber of PHEVs but many people don't count those as "EV" production.
For one, Ford also made 1.7 million total vehicles in 2021 (down from 2.5 million pre COVID) so using their EV only rate doesn't necessarily capture the whole picture.
But mainly, they don't need to actually make 600k EVs in 2024 for it to be true that they have contracts in place to purchase that many batteries if needed.
As for Tesla's mining chops, they bought mining rights in 2020 and as of April 2022 they haven't even broken ground, with Elon saying "price of lithium has gone to insane levels! Tesla might actually have to get into the mining and refining directly at scale, unless costs improve."
I guess while Elon has been screaming about it other companies like BYD and CATL have been the ones actually scaling global production.
> In May 2016 Tesla told its suppliers that it intended to double earlier-announced[clarification needed] Model 3 production targets to 100,000 in 2017 and 400,000 in 2018 due to demand
> In October 2016 Tesla said its production timeline was on schedule.[115][116][117] Again in February 2017, Tesla said that vehicle development, supply chain and manufacturing are on track to support volume deliveries of the Model 3 in the second half of 2017.
> As of February 2017, Tesla planned to ramp up production to exceed 5,000 vehicles per week in Q4 2017 and reach 10,000 vehicles per week in 2018.[111]
> By early November 2017, Musk had postponed the target date for manufacturing 5,000 of the vehicles per week from December 2017 to March 2018.
- 100,000/yr in 2017: fail, occurred in 2018
- 400,000/yr in 2018: fail, occurred in 2020/2021
- Volume delivery in in 2H 2017: fail unless you consider 1764 to be volume
- 5000/wk in Q4 2017/March 2018: fail, produced 187/wk, probably first broke 5000/wk Q1 2019 (total quarterly rate was almost 5k/wk)
- 10,000/wk in 2018: fail 4,722/wk Q4 of 2018, probably first broke 10,000/wk at the tail end of Q3 2020 (total quarterly rate was almost 10k/wk) as long as we include model Y production as well
Now I wouldn't call this lying, but its definitely not consistently hitting production goals either
Bloomberg's terrible analysis depended on Tesla standing still. But it is not doing that. Quite the opposite.
Also, this was the entire point of Tesla. To do exactly this. Getting other automakers on board the EV train was a stroke of genius.
> That's easy to do when you are riding coat tails
No, that really isn't easy to do when you're running something as large as the Ford Motor Company. In fact it is much easier for a new entrant to make such big changes.
I think you’re precisely identifying why Tesla is well and truly fucked. The big automakers know how to make cars at scale and once they decide to it’s easy. They may be slow giants, but Tesla lost the advantage of being small and quick.
German, Japanese, and American manufacturers were the biggest national security components of WWII. Tesla is a second tier interest of a CEO who prefers to be an online troll than keeping up with the auto industry.
Sorry, this is just absurd. Tesla is the only company designing for massive scale and ruthless simplification from the start. Their entire DNA is based on YAGNI.
Every other legacy automaker is pinned between their dealerships, their dependence on consumer debt, their own massive debt, and the fact that they'll need to cannibalize existing business to pivot to EVs.
No other company owns their own destiny by being more in control of their supply chain than Tesla.
> Tesla is the only company designing for massive scale
In 2020 GM sold 6.8 million vehicles. The other manufacturers are already operating at massive scale. Or are you arguing the automotive market will suddenly dramatically increase in a way existing manufacturers can't deal with? That consumers will suddenly be flush with cash to buy more brand new cars than they are already buying and Tesla will be the most popular option? This is very hard for me to imagine.
> their dependence on consumer debt
??? Teslas are not cheap. I will not be able to afford a Tesla for the forseeable future. Unless Teslas comes down below 25k, no Teslas are in my future, another ICE car or hybrid will be. How is Tesla not dependent on consumer debt? Or do you mean something else by this?
> When you're not the trailblazer, it's easy to make catch-up progress to those that went before you in much much less time. Why this is constantly a source of amazement is funny to me.
That sounds logical but it doesn't often actually happen that way, which is why I think there is amazement the few times it does.
For example, Nokia could have just caught up with Apple after they released the iPhone? Motorola etc. could have just caught up with Nokia in the 90s when Nokia made phones people actually wanted? Apple of the 90s could have just caught up with Microsoft and Windows right?
Incredibly late? EV are still tiny % of global sales. And compared to what some EV startups want people to think, building good EV isn’t that hard for traditional OEMs, once company commits to it. F150 and MachE are very good EVs.
They are missing out on the easy part of the S-curve of adoption, and will have a far far harder time securing key competitive tech and supply chains by entering too late
There are currently ~8 major battery manufacturers, and right now a large bevy of battery startups. But right now is probably the last time in history to enter the market, because you can't just innovate on electrolyte or anode or cathode and enter the market, you have to do it all. And the lead times for development of new products, even in wel established companies with solid pipelines, is around five years.
The US did innovate quite a bit in this space, but political interference and strange political beliefs about batteries, like the physics prevents them from being used in all the ways we are currently using them, has significantly held back the US from leading as much as it could have in this space.
This is I n large part because industry leaders like Ford were so anti-scientifically anti-EV.
We kneecapped our future to let current rentiers, masquerading as gigantic industrialists, collect rent.
You don’t need to be manufacturing batteries to make EVs. Even vertical integration darling, Tesla, is buying most of their batteries (and the tech behind them) from suppliers like BYD and Panasonic. Their in-house efforts so far are not yielding any massive success.
Batteries at the core are commodities, where you have laser thin margins and supplier model that is pulling R&D costs from many companies is basically only long term way to go.
Electric part of an EV is easy. It’s a car that’s hard part.
I would argue that might have been true 5 years ago, but now it's proving to be the competitive advantage. Batteries and the materials that produce them are no longer selling at 'Razor thin margins' because the 'Commodity' is extremely constrained. No EV manufacturer can get enough batterys to produce the cars they sell.
It’s a temporary state. There’s nothing at the core that would make batteries not a commodities, production just needs to pick up (and both suppliers and raw materials producers are making huge investments to make that happen). Plus we’re in a weird state where COVID supply chain issues and overheating of economy makes it very hard to reason about true state of the market.
But please tell me who has that competitive advantage? Tesla? They’re Panasonic/CATL shop, with negligible amount of in house production.
When batteries are the primary bottleneck on production, the primary source of innovation, change, and price drops, then in that case batteries are not mere commodities but a key technology in the car.
The rest of an EV is pretty simple. Drivetrain is no longer a really hard component, as electric motors are far more straight forward.
> > It’s a car that’s hard part.
Countries that try to kickstart a new car industry often outsource the drivetrain, as it's the most difficult part to build.
With EVs, batteries are by far the touchiest and most difficult part to build. Companies that outsource battery design, or at a bare minimum are not intimated involved with the batteries for their own packs, will be left behind.
Vertical integration builds up a resiliency against supply chain issues. You have a guarenteed supply of materials and components for a reasonable price no matter how crazy world markets get.
It’s often not even about cost. Vertical integration works great if you can always make right R&D decisions. If you bet on wrong horses (even if you have money) you’re hopelessly stuck as you cannot “easily” shift to different suppliers that made better R&D choices. Just look at Intel.
"Current-day Ford Motor having to go begging to China - for a major, iron-based component needed to produce more cars - that is laughable, and beyond pathetic. In a dark, miserable sort of way, if you care about America or its future."
I could not have summarized it more differently. Vertical integration and monopolies are absolutely terrible in many ways. Globalization and inter-reliance are very good in many ways! The ideal system for everyone (workers, buyers, the business itself, the society it resides in, and the world itself) is probably a healthy middle point.
I'll go so far as to say this: if the US did not inter-rely on China over the past 30 years since they opened up their markets, with multi-national US corporations beginning to rely on various Chinese resources or products, then the US would be at a hot or cold war with China right now, just like they were with the USSR a generation ago.
It was a really well run marketing campaign, complete with clever nicknames (e.g. Government Motors)
The truth is a bit murkier. The car division was not bailed out, but the financial arm did accept government assistance like all the other car loan companies.
IIRC, Ford explicitly said that if it hadn't been for the effect of the bailouts of an other manufacturers on shared supply chains, it would have needed a bailout.
Say GM and Chrysler weren't bailed out. Then they wouldn't be able to support the trade between other third party car parts manufacturers that rely on them. Those companies would lose economies of scale and/or go out of business too. Then wouldn't Ford be able to make their cars without those third parties and would need bailing out to not go bankrupt also.
Totally made up example (with easy to follow numbers):
Let's say GM, Chevrolet and Ford all buy 12V car batteries from BatteryCo at the rate of 1,000,000 a year (each). BatteryCo has fixed annual costs of $3,000,000 and per battery costs of $1. Right now, Ford pays $2/battery. If GM and Chevrolet both go out of business, Ford's 1,000,000 batteries need to absorb the whole fixed operating cost of $3,000,000. Therefore, Ford's per battery cost doubles to $4/battery.
You can imagine other numbers and other parts of the supply chain all working similarly.
Ford bought New Holland back in the 80s. New Holland was very vertically integrated and Ford, after taking the reins, declared that they were going to teach New Holland how to become recession proof by outsourcing as much as possible and pushing the risk onto the suppliers. Yes, there is some logic in that plan, but on the other hand, it comes with a whole other set of risks.
Ford is building other battery plants. Huge plant going up in Tennessee, "Blue Oval City", for lithium-ion batteries.[1] The battery technology comes from S. Korea. The lithium will come from Ioneer in Nevada.[2] Another plant is going up in Kentucky.
Plus there's existing electric production at the Rouge plant in Detroit. Ford is serious about electric trucks.
Tesla's Cybertruck initial delivery was just delayed another year.[3]
> But Ford also wants to produce LFP batteries in North America, and plans to open a 40-GWh LFP cell factory by 2026. (That's in addition to three previously announced battery plants in Tennessee and Kentucky.)
The west completely ignored graphite + iron phosphate as electrode combination for cars while China researched it for decades. Packing innovation from China made that combination feasible to use in electric cars. Those packaging innovations are way more impressive then what Tesla is doing. </Context>
This move solves this year’s problems but doesn’t address the lithium shortage that is already showing up in the price of lithium going up 5x. Analysts predict that by around 2025 lithium will limit the battery market that is trying to grow 40x to meet electrification demands. Note that opening a new lithium mine takes 7 years. Maybe Ford will be able to start selling sodium based batteries then.
According to Musk, the bottleneck is refining the Lithium, not mining it. I imagine it's faster to open a refinery than a mine, but it'll still be a years long process. Expanding existing refineries is probably faster.
Following the story of a family who bought an eight year old ford ev. $11,000. Needs a new battery, $14,000 plus labour and isnt actually available because Ford have discontinue it. A bit scary. https://www.ntd.com/battery-replacement-of-familys-ev-ford-f...
If the answer to your supply chain "hell" is to switch to a supplier with cheaper prices and a product that is in some respects better then I'm not sure it qualifies as "hell".
"However, an electric vehicle with aluminium batteries has the potential for up to eight times the range of a lithium-ion battery with a significantly lower total weight."
To me it seems that batteries in EVs make less sense than e.g. alcohol fuel ICE or hybrids.
The main consideration is energy density, but alcohol is easy to make and handle, carbon-neutral, and the exhaust is non-toxic.
This wouldn't make sense for the whole of car traffic because we use way too much fossil fuel to replace it all with e.g. industrial ethanol. But it could work as part of a transitional strategy. Fuel co-op as part of a CSA farm.
It's pretty straightforward to convert existing ICE cars to burn alcohol instead. You don't even have to wait for anybody else, or any new technology to be developed.
A gallon of gas has about 34 kWH of energy in it. Let’s say a ice passenger vehicle gets about 35mpg - so it takes about 1KWH of gas to move the car a mile.
A Tesla 3 has gets takes around 25kWH to go 100mi. So about 0.25 KWh per mile.
The ICE engine limitations cause it to use 400% more energy to go the same distance e. So even if gas is more dense, most of the energy is lost to engine thermodynamic limitations in using that gas - and yes mostly wasted energy in the form of heat dumping out the tailpipe.
Alcohol is not really carbon neutral. Plants don't produce alcohol. They produce sugar. The farming and transport also produces emissions and you lose a ton of energy on the way.
Plants build sugar and starch molecules out of air and water, the carbon atoms come from the atmosphere, not underground, that's the crucial difference.
> The farming and transport also produces emissions and you lose a ton of energy on the way.
Yeah, you have to do it as part of a system that makes sense overall. E.g. small-scale local integrated CSA that also provides N gallons (or liters) per member of fuel per month as well as groceries. Something like that.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 112 ms ] threadNot unless we can get into small vehicles real quick- and given that the chicken tax has been imposed by executive order since 1964 I don’t see that happening.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax
What an unbelievable waste. Why hasn't this cold-war relic been long abolished?
Plug in series hybrids might be a good stop-gap, as they're cheaper and solve some of the range and size issues current EVs have. You can have a smaller car, still capable of good speed and range, and at half to a third of the cost of an equivalent performance EV.
For anyone not aware of the term, a series hybrid is an EV drivetrain that has a smaller battery and an auxiliary petrol generator onboard to fill the battery if it gets low, or you demand more power from it. At first thought, that sounds ridiculous, but we're talking about compromises to fit specialty requirements here, and in that context they make a lot of sense. (also good EV conversion potential, since all you do is upgrade the battery and ditch the petrol engine once battery prices make sense)
All diesel trains do this to avoid needing giant gearboxes, mining trucks use it to cut weight, modern ships use it to enable articulating motors.
Now we are slowly reaching the point where it becomes desirable even for car-sized vehicles.
Hybrids have a role in the market for the brief period of time that battery production capacity is not large enough yet to replace them with cheaper EVs. But they are inherently more complex and costly to manufacture and drive. So, that's not going to last long.
How do you make a big car move further? Simple, you put a bigger battery in it. Those nice trucks that Ford is producing now come with enormous batteries. The main issue with that is that it drives up the cost and reduces the market size. So, Ford is doing what Tesla is doing: find cheaper/heavier batteries and offer the same product with less range in the lower price segments and reserve the premium batteries for the more expensive models. That way they can sell big cars to people that want to buy the biggest car they can afford. Never mind it will only go for 150 miles or so. You want 300+? Buy a better car. With a lot of the EVs in the market, you can spend tens of thousands of dollars on extended range versions. The difference is mainly the battery size and weight.
With respect to range anxiety, pretty much every EV in the 200 to 300-mile range is sold out. (I was looking.) And Ford deploying LFP doesn’t mean it has to go 100% LFP in every vehicle. Just having the extra vehicles will win it market share.
(As to why now, the last of the patents in a critical suite expired in April [1]. Steve LeVine writes excellently to this topic [2].)
[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1167178/000104746912...
[2] https://subscriptions.theinformation.com/newsletters/the-ele...
https://www.timesnownews.com/auto/car-news/article/toyota-mi...
Of course, you can't readily buy or charge one yet, but you don't have the battery problem (at all).
Japanese car manufacturers aligned on that, but weren’t keen on building the necessary infrastructure.
You could lease a hydrogen fuel cell car in CA. There was even a lot of state incentives if you did. But very few fueling stations (iirc, only two in the whole Bay Area)
Upgrading fueling stations seems much easier than mining all of the copper needed to add all of the extra lines for EV charging, and then upgrading the whole national grid.
Supposedly one company has claimed 95% efficiency on creating hydrogen from electrolysis:
https://newatlas.com/energy/hysata-efficient-hydrogen-electr...
Power that by nuclear energy, and it's a green & clean winner.
Hydrogen is a smart hedge to pursue. But thank goodness it’s mostly Japanese tax dollars doing it.
Why Japan encourages hydrogen is not very related to nuclear (except that the gov want to feed jobs to heavy industry companies that worked on nuclear), but related to lack of every local materials/fuels. I think hydrogen research should be encouraged, but Toyota should release more PHEV/BEVs early.
Their homes were built expecting them to be able to pull 150-200A of power. It doesn't take that much power to charge an EV overnight. Mine charges way faster than it needs to on 32A 240V.
You're wrong.
And claims of energy loss!! Sure, no loss to heat in batteries? And batteries lose charge if they sit idle!
How do I know this? Because you haven't even specified where the h2 came from.
There is power generation from Ng, and there is h2 from Ng. Which do you think is most effective?
Ng -> steam generator -> power transmission -> charging loss
Or, Ng -> h2, delivery, fuel cell (fuel cells are highly efficient)
As an aside:
https://financialpost.com/commodities/energy/electric-vehicl...
Again the scale of hydrogen fueling stations needed would be massive
Larger and more popular gas stations can do about half a million in revenue per month selling gas, which they only have about 2% margin on. Hydrogen has the electric cost eating into margins, but even then it should be pretty profitable and much much higher than 2%.
Although it's a big up front cost commitment, the economics definitely seem feasible if hydrogen fuel cell cars start getting more popular over the next decade or more.
Most of the time it isn't a green fuel at all and is just a way to keep mining coal.
With the added benefit of not requiring an overhaul of the electrical grid to be able to handle everyone charging their cars.
EVs are nice in short term but battery issues like these illustrate their (should be obvious) shortcomings.
WRT to this battery technology, ironically the same sector being targeted by hydrogen might benefit, i.e. rail tech - if you stick a high number of cheap batteries onto a large, heavy motorcar, the energy differential is almost negligible as you make up for it in part through momentum, but also just scale (more passengers transported per watt, more charge available per trip).
Much lower up front investment and none of the huge downsides of nuclear.
https://www.iea.org/reports/the-future-of-hydrogen
See section on production.
The most commonly used process creates a mixture of steam, hydrogen and CO2. The water is condensed and the CO2 removed to purify the hydrogen product. The CO2 is a concentrated stream. This is sometimes captured and sold as a byproduct (eg food grade CO2 for beverages or dry ice).
https://newatlas.com/energy/hysata-efficient-hydrogen-electr...
In the past most catalyst improvements have run into problems with maintenance.
Luckily we have an even better option available for transport so we can focus green hydrogen on replacing all the other uses of fossil fuels.
This is just a start, Hydro Quebec will expand production if demand comes.
https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/green-hydrogen-market
Just a single government providing grants for h2 refueling infra can dramatically change things.
As it stands, I will not be buying any EV, you will have a very hard time convincing me otherwise, too many drawbacks to not enough range, ridiculously high charge times, expensive battery repairs, in addition to not being much better than a gasoline vehicle as far as ECO costs.
https://financialpost.com/commodities/energy/electric-vehicl...
> you don't have the battery problem (at all).
The Mirai still has a small lithium battery like a hybrid since fuel cells cannot put enough instantaneous power (only 128kw and has start up time) for normal driving they need a buffer battery that is recharged by the fuel cell. Since this battery is so small it can't benefit as much from regen like a normal BEV and has pretty poor performance as well (182hp). All this in a car that weighs more than an equivalent BEV due to heavy 10,000 psi hydrogen tanks and complexity with the fuel cell and buffer battery.
I personally believe hydrogen is a dead end for automobiles, the end to end efficiency is much worse (creating and compressing hydrogen) vs just charging a battery not to mention the issues of storing a transporting hydrogen safely [2].
1. https://electrek.co/2018/05/27/tesla-model-3-range-new-hyper...
2. https://www.volkswagenag.com/en/news/stories/2019/08/hydroge...
But note, they do actually have batteries, similar to ICE serial hybrids.
They key thing of course, is that building lots of batteries is not a 'problem', and it's lack of being a problem is exactly why BEVs are better than fuel-cell hydrogen cars for basically everything, except maybe long distance air transport.
The place where BEVs have yet to prove themselves is when energy density is absolutely critical. Long distance transport of any sort (air, sea, train, semi) is really the next places for them.
Semi is a maybe at this point. Train MIGHT make sense, but, IMO it'll probably make the most sense as an energy capture/getting the train up to cruising speed aid rather than as the sole power source. Heck, for train, it'd make sense to instead electrify the rail system. Sea seems unreachable (Sails make more sense at this point which is sort of wild). Air, IDK, there are definitely projects to hit it, but I don't see a large commercial plane doing BEV. Perhaps for smaller regional hops it'll make sense.
Europe could pull it off due to its density, but the stretches of American highway which would benefit the most from it, would be a huge challenge.
https://youtu.be/UB298IXBvtU
https://youtu.be/m6x9Y5YElxk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFyJg6f9v84
> Rapid battery cost declines accelerate the prospects of all-electric interregional container shipping
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-022-01065-y
But society will disintegrate if we move away from using cars, as opposed to disintegrating if we keep using them.
why?
Personally, I would love if urban planning was structured in a way so that all new development was anti-car, and redevelopment slowly transitioned away from prioritizing automobiles, but that doesn’t appear to be in the cards.
This pattern has emerged in every city that has a bikeshare or other micromobility scheme: Consumers can dip into the waters and try it out without being "cyclists" and worrying about theft or maintenance. They can put up with poor infrastructure in other respects as a result and use it for the subset of trips where they feel it's appropriate to do so. And the operators(who are in a profitable, growing market) can provide the financial muscle to sway City Hall's policy and make the infrastructure better - because the resulting network growth goes right back into their pockets. And with learning effects, it becomes increasingly easy to deploy at a larger and larger scale. The first few years when these companies emerged and spilled e-scooters all over the streets made for disastrous PR, but their execution has improved greatly since then, with sturdier vehicles, better battery lifetimes, and closer working relationships with cities to address safety.
I don't think it's an either-or thing. I think we can have long lasting and high quality electric cars and also build so that we don't have to rely on cars as much or at all. A lot of people think that reducing reliance on cars means building skyscrapers and density like Manhattan, but it actually means building medium density mixed-use development where biking and walking and perhaps a streetcar are how you accomplish 90%+ of your day-to-day mobility needs. Then you have a car for when you need a car. This means you don't take a car to a grocery store that's half a mile away, you walk or bike. It means you don't take a car to a grocery store that's half a mile away because you have a small grocery store in your neighborhood that has everything you need for day-to-day living (you don't need to stock 16 different brands of cereal).
It also has some nice benefits where you can better participate in your local government or other civic institutions. One of the other insidious problems created by automobile-only infrastructure is that it weakens society. You can't protest when you have to figure out where to park first. You can't meet your local representative when you have to pay to park and it's a 30 minute drive each way. Etc.
LFP is also safer with much less chance for thermal runaway. So safer, cheaper, longer lasting, easier material sourcing, only downside is lower energy density (about 20% hit for same weight) but there is a huge effort to improve that.
You can LFP's pretty cheap now for home backup or RV use. I replaced my RV house batteries with LFP for 4 times the usable capacity in half the weight of my old lead acid for about 3 times the cost. You can get 48v 19" rack batteries very cheap for power backup uses. I think LFP's are going to take over most uses in including cheap commuter automobiles.
That said, I'd probably do 90% as the max and 100% on the weekend if I owned an LFP vehicle.
LFP gets 2x the cycle count at 100%-0% as a NMC does at 80%-20%. Due to its lower cell voltage it has less voltage driven aging than NMC.
Elon: "I’d personally slightly opt for iron pack, as it wants to be charged to 100%, whereas nickel prefers ~90%."
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1431040308943364097?lang...
https://insideevs.com/news/514857/mic-tesla-model3-srp-charg...
CATL is releasing some LMFP chemistry that will do 200+ wh/kg into production soon.
200 wh/kg with Tesla efficiencies should enable cheap scalable 400+ mile cars (I believe that current cobalt chemistry Tesla batteries can't break 200 wh/kg at the pack level due to thermals, but don't quote me).
And IF the stories about 140 wh/kg sodium ion are true, that may go into production next year, which means a lithium free 200-300 mile car, although I don't know as much about the endurance and thermals of sodium ion chemistries.
Charging infrastructure is now in "ball is rolling" phase. Demand for EVs is high thanks to the gasoline price spike, and LFP/Sodium Ion should in theory enable the cheaper-than-ICE car (not TCO, retail price).
We really need a new volume-independent subsidy. I'm thinking 10,000$ straight rebate (not tax credit) for two years and then it drops 1,000$ per year.
Solid state batteries should be able to take over in 5-10 years, but the new LFP/sodium ion means that big auto should not be as constrained as they were.
Tesla needs to double down on quality, software, and scaling, but I think they'll be fine. Current stock price fine? Eh.
What American auto makers need to concern themselves with is scaling their operations before the Chinese automakers invade the US like they are in Europe.
Also one could fit cars with rail gear and run them on rail tracks on the highway which would lessen the tire friction roll resistance losses. Technology for allowing cars to run on rail tracks already exists for railway maintenance cars. Self driving on rail track is also much easier to implement.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road–rail_vehicle
Safety from car crashes would also be far safer at 80km/h than higher speeds.
Germany has a short section of highway testing that setup for trucks
https://www.sustainabletruckvan.com/pantographs-for-trucks-s...
If your 90% efficient drivetrain-tyre system uses 20 kWh per 100 km, then improving that to 95% efficient maybe reduces that to 17 kWh.
Pencils and javelins have lower drag coefficients than cars. Unfortunately people don't fit inside them. A javelin-shaped vehicle big enough to fit a person comfortably inside is a train.
or a cybertruck.
And if people cared about efficiency enough to drive at 80 they'd do it now. Low efficiency stsrt/stop driving is the problem to solve.
Probably not with normal-sized cars.
For the Model 3, the theoretical minimum is 13.8 kW. This increases linearly with drag coefficient and area (as seen from the front). You would have to build a significantly smaller (flatter, narrower) car and improve the drag coefficient (0.2 has been achieved) to get there.
Here's a calculator in German (sorry) for experiments: http://spare-benzin.de/Fahrphysik/Luftwiderstand/Luftwiderst...
I guess 10kWh/100km is possible at 90km/h on cruisecontroll behind a big truck.
EVs biggest problem are the inefficiencies in the electric grid, there is like a 50% margin for improvement.
Mercedes did in the Vision EQXX:
https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/new-cars/mercedes-benz-vi...
https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/mercedes-vision-eqxx-ev-c...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BS1SBhBjAHY
https://lightyear.one/lightyear-0
Initial model is > $300k but they plan a $30k model in the future.
It charged much slower and had worse performance degradation in winter.
This might be due to the software limitations Tesla put on the BMC, but since then it didn't improve by much.
I wouldn't expect LFP be the panacea, but it should make EVs more affordable and is definetly in the "good enough" range for most families.
Like for example a $20k car with a 10kWh "good enough for now" starter battery that can be bought today. Still good enough for 90% of trips and upgradable to 50kWh with additional after market battery modules should the user decide. As simple as upgrading the RAM on an (old) laptop.
I think when it comes to the car this idea could be viable but I think the risk is potential change with the weight distribution. You could probably have some weights that are replaced with batteries when you upgrade to keep the weight constant but then you are reducing your range.
I’ve owned enough second hand laptops to know what second hand EV ownership is going to feel like.
Also due to their capacity most EVs are charged at about 0.1C whereas phones (especially with rapid chargers) are charged anywhere between 1C and 3C.
Most people don’t buy new cars. Most people buy second hand vehicles. They now risk degraded batteries and a huge incidental cost.
My car cost me £5000 second hand. The cheapest EV battery replacement here is £12,500. I could write that car off twice for the price of a battery and still have enough money to go on holiday.
When you buy the bottom end of the second hand EV market which is realistically what most people will have to spend on, you’re looking at the 160 mile range leaf. With an 80% battery that’s 128 miles of range. Which is near useless for the average user. I couldn’t even drive to see my mother in it without charging twice on the way.
I will not own an EV as the incidental risk trade off is too high and the up front cost of a new EV is too high.
Maybe if that is your only car. As a commuter or grocery car it would be fine.
The main positive factor of vehicle ownership is destination and route flexibility and if you trade that away then the advantage is gone.
Requires parking for two cars though. But since we are talking about an EV it requires a house anyways since most apartments have no charging.
Maybe so, but the average American family has about 2 cars. Lots of sources for that, but here’s one from top of search results:
https://housegrail.com/how-many-cars-does-the-average-americ...
Show me where I said or even implied that? Why must you argue and pick battles with everyone? Maybe time for a break?
An EV to replace the Corolla would be ideal. Perfect spot for this scenario.
That's usually the cause of scrapping a vehicle in places where structural rust didn't get it first.
What would it cost to replace the engine or gearbox of your car?
On my vehicle an engine costs about £1275 to put a refurb in it. Gearbox about £550.
There is no rust anywhere on my 8 year old vehicle.
People run like this out of financial necessity. They don’t have enough income to run an EV.
So someone buying a used EV will presumably buy something with enough range for them to get around, and then over time if they notice the range starting to decline to the point that it might be an issue, they'll have some time to save up & trade in their car for a better one. Their current car won't be worthless on the used market and someone who doesn't have as large of range requirements (e.g. a 2nd car for commuting) will still buy it.
There are other issues that can prevent an EV from charging at all, but they have usually cheaper fixes than a whole battery pack replacement like you're talking about.
From quick check in google: If you are extremely lucky, you’ll get your transmission replacement completed for $2,500 all in. If yours is one of the more expensive types, it could easily range to $6,000 or even more.
My diesel has also done just over 340,000km and it’s pretty shot. Hard to start on cold mornings and I’ve had to sort out some leaky injectors and seized joints on the driveshaft. There’s another couple of hundred thousand kilometres left at best.
The EV is coming up to 100,000km and it stills drives just as spritely as the day I got it. The battery is showing 100% state of health and I’m convinced it’ll happily do a million kilometres or more.
Sounds perfect for the average American as a daily commuter / errands car. Yes, no road trips without inconvenience, but that still doesn’t make it useless, it makes it a great secondary car instead.
i know i am not an average user but that's like a month of driving for me.
That said, 20% degradation after 10 years isn't a huge deal for me. I'm sure in that time, battery replace/refurbishment will be much cheaper. There is a company in Oregan that will replace a 40kwh Leaf pack for $7000 .
Walking!? So 1.5-2hrs each way to get to work? On really hot or cold days, that’s going to be torturous. Had you suggested riding a bike or maybe a scooter/moped I’d have not said anything, but suggesting folks walk that distance felt a bit off the mark.
How long is the rest of the car expected to survive?
I rarely do long range driving, and my commute was short for years (a couple miles each way) for about a decade before we switched to work from home a couple years before the pandemic, and I'm not interested in travel so my usage is not going to up much when I retire in a few years. I anticipate a need for at most 100k over the rest of my life, which almost certainly will be less than 25 years.
Would a current EV be likely be able to handle that with just reasonable maintenance?
I'm currently driving a 2006 Honda CR-V that I bought new and could probably reasonably keep driving another 10-15 years. That's what I want out of an EV.
Maybe I could keep that battery in my house and use it to store solar electricity most of the time. It seems like it should be possible to design a system for slotting it in that doesn’t require me to physically lift its weight.
I’d also be happy to drive into somewhere local that rents me that long range battery and slots it in with machinery designed for the purpose.
Low tech FTW.
Smartrail is still a better soln but we have to be realistic here.
I'm pretty sure Tesla's Rivians get locked into park when the charger is connected.
That’s what I was wondering too. Like you, I’m pretty sure the major EVs don’t let you drive while charge, but I haven’t actually tried it.
I can't see why no one is exploring this gap in the market. It might only appeal to nerds at first but that is true with most technologies in their infancy.
We need what is effectively a giant version of a double AA battery. Yes we also need battery management systems and heating/cooling to go with these things but these are solved problems, just not standardised yet.
Please someone take note and do this!
That would however subject the smaller battery to more charge/discharge cycles for obtaining the same mileage. Wouldn't that shorten its life?
But some companies are also investigating battery swap stations for cars. So, you might not be able to swap a short-range battery with a long-range battery yourself, but I imagine that would be possible with those battery swap stations. See [2]. Battery swap stations means that you have full range again for the same time it takes to fill a car with gas. But obviously, you need to have enough of those stations to make it usable. And if every car brand is gonna create its own mechanism for battery swapping, then that would probably only be interesting in city areas where it's worthwhile for the manufacturer to run those stations.
[1] https://www.electrive.com/2022/01/18/battery-swapping-statio... [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-61310513
Edit: typo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9aEWxexrMI
Just started raising VC this year lol
That's utopian. These things weigh a ton, you'd need a forklift.
That's basically what an electric cargo bike is, functionally.
>I’d also be happy to drive into somewhere local that rents me that long range battery and slots it in with machinery designed for the purpose.
Rent the whole car...
>my car’s weight is low and efficiency high.
...and you don't have the weight the rest of the time.
NIO is:
https://insideevs.com/news/591837/nio-battery-swapping-stati...
https://insideevs.com/news/392660/nio-battery-swap-loved-by-...
https://insideevs.com/news/583809/nio-baas-battery-swapping-...
https://insideevs.com/news/596640/nio-500kw-ultra-rapid-char...
> Like for example a $20k car with a 10kWh "good enough for now" starter battery
10 kWh wouldn't get you very far in a car. In a scooter or quadracycle 10 kWh can be useful.
> 10 kWh wouldn't get you very far in a car.
Tell that to Chevy Volt owners. It's amazing how much all electric driving can be achieved with just a little bit of careful driving. I barely use my range extender now, it's just for the odd long trip.
Lots of companies (even Tesla) have attempted the replaceable battery concept but none have been able to make it work efficiently.
I understand that the structure of the car's body may be suboptimal and require extra reinforcement but if we're really serious about EV adoption and reducing battery cost then perhaps a trade-off worth making?
So assume your vehicle has 3 packs. You normally run it with just one pack because that's all you need to commute and run errands during the week. When you go visit the relatives in Florida, you install the other two packs to get the additional range. The car needs additional structural elements to meet safety standards when the extra packs aren't installed and they add 5% additional weight. That's weight you're carrying around every day, and that has a range cost.
Could it be worth it to swap out the extra structure elements when you install the extra packs, so at least you aren't taking the range penalty while driving long distance? Yes, but the manufacturer isn't going to want the liability of a customer removing what is a passive safety device, and then forgetting to reinstall it when they go back to city travel using only one pack.
NHTSA will also have input to this. From what I can tell - the applicable FMVSS is this one that deals with EV side impact protection, electrolyte spills, and electric shock.
https://www.nhtsa.gov/document/final-rule-occupant-protectio...
They rolled out this service to a couple of spots in California, which was probably sufficient for the the credit regime, but ended up not expanding the program further and terminating it after a few quarters. The official explanation was that it was not widely used.
https://youtu.be/H5V0vL3nnHY?t=57
There may have been other business reasons. I have no idea what was discussed on the executive level but wouldn't be surprised if they considered some tradeoffs of complexity, costs and customer attractivenes to not be worth it. Honestly, it's very rare that you actually need or strongly prefer to have this kind of service rather than just recharging at 150kW for 15 minutes. So if it adds considerable cost or complexity, I could understand the decision to drop it.
A short time later, they started welding an extra metal shield onto the bottom of the Model S, to act as an extra layer of protection against collisions with highway debris that caused some high-profile battery fires. I had the impression that this precluded battery swap, so at that point the business decision must have been made to not expand the program further.
If the regulatory incentives was key in the decision to do this and then later drop it, that's a fundamental property of incentives to do something that might not be a good idea in isolation.
A short summary of the extra government subsidy Tesla got out of the non-existing battery swaps is here: https://seekingalpha.com/article/2724835-after-earning-tens-...
Tesla did a decent market test on batteries, the test failed and they moved on.
https://youtu.be/yGwmPcClWrE
I wonder if a good solution is a smaller fixed battery for lower cost then "range extenders" like this for the bike you can swap in for longer journeys or a topup on a busy day type thing.
Compare the Model 3 to a Camry (300k units), Civic, (260k units), Corolla (250k units), or Accord (200k units), and you'll see the lightest model 3 available weighs more than the heaviest trims of all four, and the 3 is on the lighter side of 250+ mile EVs by a pretty decent margin.
Is the BMW causing just as much road damage as a Model 3? yes.
Does the weight of the average sedan go up substantially as we convert to EV? Absolutely
Corporations do not care about the environment, but they do know a good story when they see it. If they can get you to buy the same car multiple times, this is great business for them. If they can lobby governments to encourage the scrapping of old but serviceable cars, eg by fining non-EVs for their emissions, that means you will be forced to buy sooner.
It's all business. Neither corporations nor the governments that service corporations care about either the people or the environment. I wish people would recognise this fact, but corporate-government schooling/science/culture has everyone believing that government is here to help!
You can push batteries harder, but they’ll generate more heat and degrade faster (lower cycle life). This ends up counterintuitively in a higher long term cost of ownership.
Good news is C rates are getting better over time.
So why not just start selling battery cargo trailers which can provide your main car with extended range when needed?
It's also much easier to swap and rent out physically, financially and emotionally than your main car.
Trailer hookups can be legitimately difficult. Even in the simplest case, they can be time-consuming.
Humans are notoriously bad at backing up with a trailer attached.
Heavy trailers (batteries) are extra dangerous -- tail-wagging can be scary!
Cars with trailers don't fit in parking spaces.
...
A replaceable battery has to be in the underpan of a car. Or split across several battery modules, but keeping the center of gravity low, and between the axles.
It's not peanuts, but getting very close to it.
> 0 matches
It feels like we are trading one poison for another from a climate change perspective. Just passing down the buck.
Recycling of failing batteries and discarded cells that did not survive quality control in the factory is of course a thing. These don't end up in land fills. The materials inside them are way to valuable for that.
The mantra goes "reduce, re-use, recycle". In that order.
Recycling is a last resort. Please don't jump to it first. That's what people who want to virtue-signal do, not what smart people do.
Electric cars definitely cause less harm to the natural environment and people's health wellbeing than fossil fuel powered cars, so "reduce" is covered, even if not optimally.
People are also definitely re-using lithium batteries.
Since lithium batteries are a new thing, there is not yet a great enough flow of worn-out batteries to justify recycling at industrial scale as yet. Those as exist are being stockpiled for this, though. And a lot of R&D work is being done to set up for recycling.
I'm sure they'll be recycling those batteries in about 25 years when they'll be starting to wear out, but even if they don't we're still leaning hard on the "reduce" in the three R's mantra.
https://brandessenceresearch.com/blog/top-5-lithium-ion-batt...
For example, you'll get far far more cycles out of a battery if you only charge up to 80% and discharge down to 20%. Early hybrid cars used this to an extreme - and always kept the battery between 45% and 60%. By doing that you can get 50,000 cycles necessary to recharge and discharge every time you go up and down a hill.
(200 cycles per year would be perceived by an owner as being "every day", because the days she's away on holiday or sick at home or WFH are not remembered. Nor would she remember that she only charges once on weekends.)
100_000 cycles is therefore 20 to (more likely) 50 years' use.
That's a family heirloom, well outlasting the body, suspension, steering and interior of any car. I'd like to have that too.
Edit: Er, that should be 200 to 500 years. Outlasting several chassis and interiors. Definitely heirlooms.
You're asking for a battery with an expected life span of 12.5 million kilometers.
How many cycles does a normal car battery do?
Unless you fast charge to 100% regularly.
I think the car is a bit slower with the lfp but I really don’t care.
Old geezer's perspective: Back in its heyday, Ford Motor was one of the most vertically integrated (large manufacturing) companies in the world. They owned and operated their own fleet of ore carriers (cargo ships), to haul iron ore from the mines to the steel mill that was part of their all-Ford integrated manufacturing complex. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_River_Rouge_Complex - though Wikipedia barely scratches the surface on this. ) Back in the early 90's, I knew a couple guys who had spent their careers working on those iron ore carriers.
Current-day Ford Motor having to go begging to China - for a major, iron-based component needed to produce more cars - that is laughable, and beyond pathetic. In a dark, miserable sort of way, if you care about America or its future.
Sounds similar to Boeing where accounting for personal gain (promotions / raises) of upper managers and executives took effect over the long term advantage of the company.
We’re shifting to a new era where cash is king. That’s why Amazon built their own UPS and Apple will be a bank in a few years.
I think he is one of the "good" Boeing execs, unlike the ones that came in with the McDonnell Douglas merger and mismanaged production of aircraft like the 787 and 737-MAX
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Mulally
He had many stories to tell of engineering non sense there. Supposedly they just trained whomever to be an engineer. They offered to make my dad one since they liked him.
Pray do tell more about that merger!
“Downfall: The Case Against Boeing” is the documentary title.
That opinion is well founded. In the book American Icon by Bryce Hoffman (Detroit News journalist) he chronicles that entire time period.
Mulally pulled off one of the greatest challenges, a bonafide turn around. They had a company culture that was all about individuals protecting their own interests. Mulally changed it to one where they focused on making vehicles people want and thinking about the long-term.
For example, Mulally held a weekly executive meeting and each head would give a color coded report of their domain's status (green for good, yellow for issues, red for caution). For weeks in this meeting every single executive reported their status as "green" for good. This in a fiscal quarter when Ford had a $6 billion loss! Mulally managed to change that culture, which for anyone who has work experience should speak very loudly.
Executive pay is out of control in general in the USA, and performance is equally trash.
So obviously it's not bad _per se_ to rely on China ; but if it's not possible to diversify sourcing, this is begging for a disaster next time whatever geopolitic hits the fan.
What do you even mean, it wasn't them whom started the whole tradewar... It was the US gov
But if they decide to stop trade with Russia tomorrow, I'll reconsider.
IMO the real disaster would be a total de-link between Chinese and American economies. Neither country can currently engage in any kind of meaningful hostilities while 10%+ of their economies are linked in trade. Trade prevents war because war would mean decimation of their economies and lead to likely depressions, although I suppose the results of Russia's invasion and how their economy handles de-linking will inform this logic going forward
1913 is calling and wants its optimism back.
If the fertilizer hits the fan re Taiwan, the CCP will not hesitate to cut off all trade with everyone who supports Taiwan.
Japan continued with their China war in the 1930s, despite sanctions from the US and the West, so didn't they?
As for the "leaked documents", the claim on Taiwan is that it is an inseparable part of China, and not that they want "to make their trade more secure."
And no, the leaked documents don't just claim that Taiwan is an inseparable part of China, that's the public position. The leaked documents detail how control over Taiwan is necessary to be able to project sufficient naval power to break any attempted blockade especially by submarine due to the low depth of waters within the first island chain.
OK, if that's what you want to believe. Seems kinda implausible, though.
In WW I, the Germans didn't move to "unrestricted submarine warfare" until 1917. The fact that the CCP doesn't plan for it now means absolutely nothing.
Edit: you can't "impose an embargo" on another country. That's a misunderstanding of the word. You can "blockade" them. Blockades are a feature of almost every war.
Of the ~780 million Chinese who work, ~200 million support the export economy.
So the CCP will put 25% of their workers out of a job over Taiwan?
Feel free! Their regimes lifespan will be measured in months if they do.
This is why trade prevents wars. China has to solve the "200 hundred million jobs" problem before they can start a war.
They did this because it would cause their economy to collapse and there are social repercussions against the CCP if that were to happen. Had 0 to do with the US or the West or any sort of altruism. They also welded doors of apartments shut so people inside couldn't leave during the initial lock downs. China has a much more robust class system than the US and the lower class/rural people are taken advantage of at an astounding rate because they aren't the right kind of Chinese.
> Or was it how China is actually upholding most sanctions against Russia, despite giving less than 0 f's about Ukraine?
China is essentially the sole reason Russia is still occupying Ukraine and they have been skirting sanctions left and right; even going as far as partnering with Russia on a new inter-banking system. They've also used the Ukrainin War as a way to test the waters in the South China Sea and step up their territorial claims over international waters in violation of international law.
https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/china-turns-to-lobsters-wine-and...
China has made it clear that it is an unreliable business partner.
It is a mistake to do business with nations that don't share your values, as Russia is also currently demonstrating.
Yeah that's the point.
Democratic nations which abide by international trade agreements. Nations you can do business with which are governed by the rule of law instead of the whims of a political party or dictator.
> We just had president who was white supremacist who called other countries shitholes.
America can turn itself into whatever it wants to be. If America can no longer be trusted in business then it's correct not to do business with it.
> When business with China was good nobody cared they still had communist party ruling the country.
Yes, that's a mistake.
If anything The first one wasn’t a white supremacist because “he had alot of Mexican friends” and the other isn’t cozying up to a dictator because our gas supply offset wasn’t shifty to Saudi backed oil supplies, not to mention all his work his son has done with sketchy characters that he tries to distance himself from.
Our relationship with SA is fucked up and that is regardless of party in office.
Parting shot: if you really cared about corrupt nepotism you'd acknowledge the prior son-in-law's self dealing with the SA as well (e.g., a recent $2B "investment"). Let's investigate both sides, eh?
Edit: shitting on Trump in the OP also didn't help (because while true wasn't germane to the corruption/foreign relations).
- "We must travel to the most-distant place in the world, and the only source of $Thing, which we cannot survive without!" That sounds great, if you're writing epic fantasy quest stories. If you're talking supply chain management...maybe there is something profoundly wrong with your company?
- Even if the CCP would never dream of squeezing Ford's battery life-line...the battery factory there could be shut down for yet another COVID outbreak, or the US could squeeze it (due to domestic politics or "Taiwan Troubles"), or etc.
- The giant mess (huge delays, staggering price spikes, etc.) that global shipping has been in the past few years. Shipping car batteries from China to the US via air freight does not sound like a money-making plan. My old World Atlas suggests that shipping by rail is probably not an option.
Is that the same atlas that says there's not an option for rail from UK to France as well?
Vs. you'd need to build a few thousand miles of freight RR in Siberia, Alaska, and other places "unfriendly to economical RR construction and operation" in order to ship from China to the US via rail.
They're lucky China is answering. They're incredibly late to the EV game; considering that they're doing remarkably well.
When you're not the trailblazer, it's easy to make catch-up progress to those that went before you in much much less time. Why this is constantly a source of amazement is funny to me. By the time Ford got involved, the path was no longer a beaten down path, it was fully paved 8-lane highway. Instead trying to figure out how to make an electrified car, they just took all of the learning before them and then turned it into something fancy. While Tesla is "working" on self-driving and not doing well with it, Ford said, nah, we'll just turn our batteries into a generator for the home. They built an actual truck that looks like the same truck everyone is used to and say here it is as an electric. That's easy to do when you are riding coat tails
This all pre-dated the COVID related supply chain issues, BTW. Lack of battery supply is behind the lackluster inventory (and therefore sales) of all non-Tesla vehicles for over half a decade.
I say all this not as a Tesla fan, but as a GM electric vehicle owner. GM was unable to produce more then a few tens of thousands of Bolts a year -- not because consumers didn't want them, but because there was simply no way for them to get them from LG Chem. VW/Audi group has had the same issue. They're both not late to the game on EV tech or production, but very late to the game on battery production.
Being late to the game in this case has a huge cost. And various governments wasted time and money providing consumer subsidies for EV purchases thinking this would lead the market to magically "solve" the EV supply issue by increasing consumer demand when the issue that really needed solving was volume and cost of battery production.
If we were going to involve public dollars in getting EVs to market we should have invested massively in encouraging battery production. Some governments are waking up to this now at least.
Bloomberg projects VW selling more EVs than Tesla by 2024 and they are planning to have 240GWh/yr of in-house battery production by 2030.
BYD in China is fully vertically integrated on EV production, moreso than Tesla who relies on 3rd party mining and on Panasonic for chemistries/cell production. BYD is now the largest PHEV+BEV manufacturer in the world.
Tesla might have had a head start but There has been a lot of catching up going on, and as we get closer and closer to resource constraints instead of production constraints they aren't in much better of a position than any other manufacturer.
Ford made 30k electric vehicles in 2021, 600k means a growth rate of %1900 in the span of 2 1/2 years (They need to be at the run rate in 2026)?
Battery packs were a problem to Tesla in 2018 and now they've moved onto the bigger problem that no one is talking about.... There isn't enough lithium and nickel production to even make this possible.
That's why Tesla launched its own mining operations in Nevada.
Also, its not like Elon hasn't been screaming about lack of nickel and lithium production since like 2018, just no one seems to be paying attention.
source? all i could find was this https://insideevs.com/news/596347/us-ford-ev-sales-june-2022
> H1 production of nearly 34,000 units is below the level from 2021 in the same period.
which is just talking about mach-e production, not other EVs.
But mainly, they don't need to actually make 600k EVs in 2024 for it to be true that they have contracts in place to purchase that many batteries if needed.
As for Tesla's mining chops, they bought mining rights in 2020 and as of April 2022 they haven't even broken ground, with Elon saying "price of lithium has gone to insane levels! Tesla might actually have to get into the mining and refining directly at scale, unless costs improve."
I guess while Elon has been screaming about it other companies like BYD and CATL have been the ones actually scaling global production.
If you actually look at their guidance, it's "50% growth on average," and they've consistently hit it.
> In October 2016 Tesla said its production timeline was on schedule.[115][116][117] Again in February 2017, Tesla said that vehicle development, supply chain and manufacturing are on track to support volume deliveries of the Model 3 in the second half of 2017.
> As of February 2017, Tesla planned to ramp up production to exceed 5,000 vehicles per week in Q4 2017 and reach 10,000 vehicles per week in 2018.[111]
> By early November 2017, Musk had postponed the target date for manufacturing 5,000 of the vehicles per week from December 2017 to March 2018.
- 100,000/yr in 2017: fail, occurred in 2018
- 400,000/yr in 2018: fail, occurred in 2020/2021
- Volume delivery in in 2H 2017: fail unless you consider 1764 to be volume
- 5000/wk in Q4 2017/March 2018: fail, produced 187/wk, probably first broke 5000/wk Q1 2019 (total quarterly rate was almost 5k/wk)
- 10,000/wk in 2018: fail 4,722/wk Q4 of 2018, probably first broke 10,000/wk at the tail end of Q3 2020 (total quarterly rate was almost 10k/wk) as long as we include model Y production as well
Now I wouldn't call this lying, but its definitely not consistently hitting production goals either
No, that really isn't easy to do when you're running something as large as the Ford Motor Company. In fact it is much easier for a new entrant to make such big changes.
German, Japanese, and American manufacturers were the biggest national security components of WWII. Tesla is a second tier interest of a CEO who prefers to be an online troll than keeping up with the auto industry.
Sorry, this is just absurd. Tesla is the only company designing for massive scale and ruthless simplification from the start. Their entire DNA is based on YAGNI.
Every other legacy automaker is pinned between their dealerships, their dependence on consumer debt, their own massive debt, and the fact that they'll need to cannibalize existing business to pivot to EVs.
No other company owns their own destiny by being more in control of their supply chain than Tesla.
In 2020 GM sold 6.8 million vehicles. The other manufacturers are already operating at massive scale. Or are you arguing the automotive market will suddenly dramatically increase in a way existing manufacturers can't deal with? That consumers will suddenly be flush with cash to buy more brand new cars than they are already buying and Tesla will be the most popular option? This is very hard for me to imagine.
> their dependence on consumer debt
??? Teslas are not cheap. I will not be able to afford a Tesla for the forseeable future. Unless Teslas comes down below 25k, no Teslas are in my future, another ICE car or hybrid will be. How is Tesla not dependent on consumer debt? Or do you mean something else by this?
Maybe you missed the footage of FSD perfectly navigating San Francisco during rush hour [1]. I'd say they're doing pretty damn well.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yh8AV3OMWYs
That sounds logical but it doesn't often actually happen that way, which is why I think there is amazement the few times it does.
For example, Nokia could have just caught up with Apple after they released the iPhone? Motorola etc. could have just caught up with Nokia in the 90s when Nokia made phones people actually wanted? Apple of the 90s could have just caught up with Microsoft and Windows right?
https://www.iea.org/commentaries/electric-cars-fend-off-supp...
They are missing out on the easy part of the S-curve of adoption, and will have a far far harder time securing key competitive tech and supply chains by entering too late
There are currently ~8 major battery manufacturers, and right now a large bevy of battery startups. But right now is probably the last time in history to enter the market, because you can't just innovate on electrolyte or anode or cathode and enter the market, you have to do it all. And the lead times for development of new products, even in wel established companies with solid pipelines, is around five years.
The US did innovate quite a bit in this space, but political interference and strange political beliefs about batteries, like the physics prevents them from being used in all the ways we are currently using them, has significantly held back the US from leading as much as it could have in this space.
This is I n large part because industry leaders like Ford were so anti-scientifically anti-EV.
We kneecapped our future to let current rentiers, masquerading as gigantic industrialists, collect rent.
Batteries at the core are commodities, where you have laser thin margins and supplier model that is pulling R&D costs from many companies is basically only long term way to go.
Electric part of an EV is easy. It’s a car that’s hard part.
I would argue that might have been true 5 years ago, but now it's proving to be the competitive advantage. Batteries and the materials that produce them are no longer selling at 'Razor thin margins' because the 'Commodity' is extremely constrained. No EV manufacturer can get enough batterys to produce the cars they sell.
But please tell me who has that competitive advantage? Tesla? They’re Panasonic/CATL shop, with negligible amount of in house production.
The rest of an EV is pretty simple. Drivetrain is no longer a really hard component, as electric motors are far more straight forward.
> > It’s a car that’s hard part.
Countries that try to kickstart a new car industry often outsource the drivetrain, as it's the most difficult part to build.
With EVs, batteries are by far the touchiest and most difficult part to build. Companies that outsource battery design, or at a bare minimum are not intimated involved with the batteries for their own packs, will be left behind.
[1] Lost cities #10: Fordlandia – the failure of Henry Ford's utopian city in the Amazon https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/aug/19/lost-cities-1...
[2] Wikipedia Entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordlandia
That title is extremely loaded.
Ford rubber mining operations in the amazon fail when synthetic rubber is invented is the true story.
http://www.miningartifacts.org/Michigan-Iron-Mines.html
"Current-day Ford Motor having to go begging to China - for a major, iron-based component needed to produce more cars - that is laughable, and beyond pathetic. In a dark, miserable sort of way, if you care about America or its future."
I could not have summarized it more differently. Vertical integration and monopolies are absolutely terrible in many ways. Globalization and inter-reliance are very good in many ways! The ideal system for everyone (workers, buyers, the business itself, the society it resides in, and the world itself) is probably a healthy middle point.
I'll go so far as to say this: if the US did not inter-rely on China over the past 30 years since they opened up their markets, with multi-national US corporations beginning to rely on various Chinese resources or products, then the US would be at a hot or cold war with China right now, just like they were with the USSR a generation ago.
That was impressive at the time and it made Ford look like solid well-run company that planned ahead.
The truth is a bit murkier. The car division was not bailed out, but the financial arm did accept government assistance like all the other car loan companies.
Let's say GM, Chevrolet and Ford all buy 12V car batteries from BatteryCo at the rate of 1,000,000 a year (each). BatteryCo has fixed annual costs of $3,000,000 and per battery costs of $1. Right now, Ford pays $2/battery. If GM and Chevrolet both go out of business, Ford's 1,000,000 batteries need to absorb the whole fixed operating cost of $3,000,000. Therefore, Ford's per battery cost doubles to $4/battery.
You can imagine other numbers and other parts of the supply chain all working similarly.
Tesla's Cybertruck initial delivery was just delayed another year.[3]
[1] https://www.commercialappeal.com/story/money/business/2022/0...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/ford-b...
[3] https://observer.com/2022/07/tesla-cybertruck-production-del...
https://youtu.be/5v-DTS-ibow
"However, an electric vehicle with aluminium batteries has the potential for up to eight times the range of a lithium-ion battery with a significantly lower total weight."
It just needs silver for a catalyst. :-(
[1] https://financialpost.com/pmn/business-pmn/ford-to-buy-cheap...
The main consideration is energy density, but alcohol is easy to make and handle, carbon-neutral, and the exhaust is non-toxic.
This wouldn't make sense for the whole of car traffic because we use way too much fossil fuel to replace it all with e.g. industrial ethanol. But it could work as part of a transitional strategy. Fuel co-op as part of a CSA farm.
It's pretty straightforward to convert existing ICE cars to burn alcohol instead. You don't even have to wait for anybody else, or any new technology to be developed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_alcohol_fuel
A Tesla 3 has gets takes around 25kWH to go 100mi. So about 0.25 KWh per mile.
The ICE engine limitations cause it to use 400% more energy to go the same distance e. So even if gas is more dense, most of the energy is lost to engine thermodynamic limitations in using that gas - and yes mostly wasted energy in the form of heat dumping out the tailpipe.
C6H12O6 (Sugar) -(Enzymes)-> 2C2H5OH (Alcohol) + 2CO2 (Carbon Dioxide)
> The farming and transport also produces emissions and you lose a ton of energy on the way.
Yeah, you have to do it as part of a system that makes sense overall. E.g. small-scale local integrated CSA that also provides N gallons (or liters) per member of fuel per month as well as groceries. Something like that.