A $95K Tesla Model S has plenty of range to qualify as a single car solution
but it just costs too darned much money.
Even assuming I can get the advertised 265 miles from the Tesla, it's still too short, especially considering the long recharge times and the rarity of the supercharging stations. My parents are a 4-hour car drive away, and I probably drive up and visit them a half a dozen times per year. I wouldn't want to have to give that up, or to have to arrange alternate transportation. (There are no superchargers along the route, and even if there were I still wouldn't want to have to add an additional 30-45 minutes each way)
Maybe this is an edge case, but I suspect that a non-trivial number of people have edge cases like these. An electric car might serve well as an everyday vehicle, but it can't truly be a single-car solution at the current time.
The article does mention a hypothetical battery that's twice the capacity and 10x the recharge rate. If that comes out, and if there is a significant buildout in the supercharger network, I could probably switch. However, battery technology has never increased at an exponential rate, and I suspect that it will be a lot longer than 2 years before we see cars that have those properties.
Interestingly, it's about 270 miles, just outside the quoted range. I might be able to make it by hypermiling, but I fear that Tesla's numbers are under ideal conditions. If it were cold out, or if I were going faster than 55 mph, I probably wouldn't make it, and I'd be stuck in the middle of nowhere, so I'd probably have to proactively find a place to charge it about halfway.
Yeah. That's getting in the scary "I don't want to run out of juice" range, especially if there's any range of problems. I actually thought the range of the Tesla was 300 miles and 265 for 'real' driving; but, again, all it'd take is for you to have too much fun for a little bit of the drive, and you're out of range 10 miles before you get home. A bit of a bummer.
Grabbing a meal halfway through there (if there were a supercharger more than 100 miles into the trip) and back might not be /that/ bad. That's an individual preference, though.
Actually, if they're not charging from flat, it might not even be 30-45 minutes.
On the other hand, my parents live only 90 miles away; my mother-in-law lives about 20 miles away, and my father-in-law lives 3,000 miles away -- I'm not driving to reach him.
I think that people who have relatively routine commitments more than 250 miles away but less than 500 miles away are a small enough segment of the market that you could reasonably describe the market as "disrupted" if those people remained on gasoline cars and most other people went to electric.
That said, I don't buy even a little bit that we're going to go from "no commercial versions of this technology at all" to "being produced in car-battery-sizes and gigantic numbers" in two or three years. If Li-ion batteries aren't good enough, then any electric car disruption is at least 5 years out.
Actually, if they had a super charger on the way, you'd only have to stop for 5-10 minutes tops (since you'd only need about 50 more miles of range to be comfortable). I'd rather stop for 5 minutes than pay for a whole tank of gas. Doesn't seem like a deal breaker to me. Hell, I'd do it right now in a Tesla and stop at a level 2 somewhere for an hour. Maybe get some lunch. Road trips are adventures. :D
"I wouldn't want to have to give that up, or to have to arrange alternate transportation."
Lets say that lots of people had all electric cars, and they had the same restrictions as the current model S. How long do you think it would take before someone opens a business where you drive your electric car there, park it and plug it in, and drive the gas powered car that is already parked there to your destination, when you return you park the gas powered car, walk over and get into your own electric car and go home? Think Zipcar for the Tesla Set. Pre-arranged membership, fixed price rental on a daily or hourly basis. Different kinds of cars (small, medium, van maybe). You provide gas and damage insurance and a small annual 'retainer' fee.
That kind of business emerges when you have a large cohort of electric car users in a specific geography. I'd start one in the Bay Area if I was bored.
I have to concur with this article. I was musing about what kind of electric car I would want if I had tons and tons of money. It wasn't a Tesla S, sadly. As much as I love Teslas and think they're amazing and awesome cars, they also say "I have money" quite loudly. No, I want similar range and performance, except in a sleeper car. There's 2 alternatives: the Leaf and the Chevy Volt, from my research.
The Leaf is a very ugly car, to me, for a young man (though I do know people who pull it off perfectly).
The Volt is almost there, except that its range on battery is about 40 miles (afterward it switches to gas, which defeats my idea). I want a car that can go 140+ (preferably 300+) on a single charge (or have super-fast, and still infrequent, charges) that I can charge at night, and has the prestige of anything less than or equal to a BMW.
There is a particular beauty, to me, in the idea of plugging in my vehicle at night and, the next day, having a new 300ish mile range to be able to use. It's has a beautiful feel to it. The inconvenience of getting gas, gone forever, and replaced by a considerable reduction in price. I love it.
The day that comes, be it in a Tesla family sedan or in a Leaf or BMW electric car or whatever other company ends up making the >= 50k, I will seriously consider and even actively decide that I no longer need a gasoline powered car as my everyday commuter and city and nearby attraction car.
I have a Volt as well. While I would like the 40 mile electric range to rise to 80 miles, I'm still very happy with it since it still has a 300 mile range and I wont' be screwed if I ever forget to plug it in at night, which has happened a few times already. Plus making it more affordable than a Telsa is nice too.
I'd say Volt's only problem is GM's less than stellar reputation. If it came from another car company, its sales would be much higher.
80 would put it into an almost perfect range, to me. The goal to me is to basically completely break from from gas in one car. 80 miles would meet 99% of my one-way driving needs, rather than around 90% of my driving needs (and that last 10% is recreation, so I'm not going to give up on that).
There's the Fiat 500e which you can lease pretty reasonably in california - though I think the range is pretty short (more comparable to the leaf). At least it looks a lot better than the leaf though.
Only someone who has not read Taleb's book could say that disruptive innovation is the same as a black swan. The black swan is something believed to be rare or impossible, which turns out to be more common than was previously believed.
"The better approach would be to abandon lithium-ion for a superior battery technology."
There have been dozens or hundreds or thousands of companies and teams and people working on alternatives to li-ion for 20 years. We're arguably not much closer to a "breakthrough" in energy storage. I'm mildly convinced saying 10x batteries are around the corner is analogous to saying a universal cure for AIDS is coming next week. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but I can pretty much promise you that no company is going to get that tech, design, produce, scale, and sell enough cars a month from now to be a "black swan" for Tesla.
I agree. It's closer than a lot of people think. It's hard to describe an electric car driving experience, but the best way is to say that the accelerator is exactly the opposite of the brake. In that, the more you push it, the more force pushes you into the back of your seat, exactly proportional and instant at all times. There's no lurching from downshifts, or waiting for RPMs for climb, then fall off, then downshift.
It's a neat experience, and everyone I know prefers it, but it's too damn expensive to get it. I don't think for long, though. And I don't think it's going to take some great battery breakthrough either. I'd say you need about 50 kWh in a sedan, minimum, for it to work well for trips (plus a bit of charging infrastructure). If you want to sell a car for $40,000 (which would be $33,000 after rebates, less in California), that means you probably can't have a pack that costs more than $20,000 (since you can buy a decent gas car for that, and that's before you remove all the gassy bits).
So, $20,000 for a 50 kWh pack == $400 per kWh, which is totally doable. I think when the Leaf first came out, the estimates were that it cost Nissan about $500 per kWh, but if they don't have it down below $400 by now I'll eat my hat. And Tesla probably already has the cost below $300, what with using commodity cells. I think they only reason Tesla doesn't put out a $40,000 sedan is because they know the demand would outstrip their battery supply by a factor of 200 (and murder demand for the Model S), so they have to wait until they build their own factory.
But! Nissan already has their own battery factory. Their batteries are not nearly as energy-dense as Teslas, so fitting 50 kWh worth in the Leaf may be their biggest issue right now. But there's a lot of wasted space in that car. I think they can do it just fine. And when they do, if gas has just tipped north of $4 by then, they are going to make a lot of noise.
They sent me a survey a couple months ago, and one of the questions asked how much extra I'd pay for EPA-rated 150 miles range (instead of the current 75). I was about to drag the little slider up to about $12,000, but it stopped at $5,000 (or $208 per kWh). That may just be a random question with no basis on their current engineering, but I think they're up to something.
As a LEAF owner, I know exactly what they're up to. Nissan has been promising for years that they'd switch to Lithium NMC (LiNiMnCo) chemistry batteries for 175% of current density per kg at 125% cost per kg. It's taken them awhile to get the new technology to production, but it's expected to grow their margin and their sales considerably.
TLDR: New lithium ion battery chemistry may add up to 60 miles more range to the current LEAF for only about $2000 marginal cost to Nissan while adding no more weight.
What happened to the Hydrogen option? A few years ago, everybody was talking about how it would be the best possible fuel and how much better than batteries it is, but I haven't heard much about it after.
From a distribution point of view, it seems like both batteries and hydrogen are pretty much equally bad. Is there something holding back the powertrain technology with hydrogen?
Hydrogen is difficult to store and transport safely, as it has to be highly compressed to get a useful amount into a fuel tank, and is obviously highly flammable. It also requires a lot of energy to extract (via electrolysis), which I imagine makes it, at best, of comparable energy efficiency to battery power.
the way for electric cars to get higher range and lower cost is obviously battery improvement. The metal-air (specifically zinc/air and Al/air) batteries sound like a natural way of doing so. These batteries can be thought as fuel cells "burning" zinc(or Al) instead of gasoline. Having lower cost and size than Li-ion they would be also good candidates for battery swapping stations. If only we as society were able to build such an infrastructure...
Right...because we haven't wanted better batteries for the past 30+ years, and it's just our lack of desire which is keeping it from happening.
SpaceX didn't do any new science in building their rockets, really. They took functional technology and a lot of great engineering and made it work. I don't think it would be responsible to bet Tesla's success on a battery technology which doesn't exist yet; 50% cheaper Lithium-Ion through Tesla/SpaceX style vertical integration and awesomeness is good enough.
If better battery chemistries come out, then sure Tesla could use them, but the planning for the next car needs to work even if they don't.
I think that there wasn't as much demand for batteries in the past as there has been this decade. Think of all the things that need batteries now that didn't exist in quite as large numbers 10 years ago. Laptops, phones, tablets, household devices, cars, power utility energy balancing, UPSes, personal sensors. Usage of these things in a battery-powered context has grown by several orders of magnitude, a really truly huge amount, and that level of demand is driving battery research forward. There also seems to be a shift from disposable to rechargeable.
It's also the other way around, too, of course. I would have thought it ludicrous in the 90s to have my primary vacuum cleaner be battery powered. But this year, I didn't even think twice about it.
If battery tech doesn't improve on the price any time soon, I'd like to see a slightly different financing option. I'd like to buy (or lease) the car, and then lease the battery pack separately, so you pay for it by the charge. Currently, it cost about $6 to "fill up" a 300-mile range battery, vs. $50-$70 for gas. So as long as the electric cost plus battery lease per charge costs than the cost of a tank of gas, I believe that would go a long way to solving the up-front vehicle cost issues.
I'd actually like to see a communications link between the battery and the charger -- when you charge it in your garage, you swipe your credit card and get billed for that charge. As long as it is, say, half the price of a tank of gas, then all is good.
But, I just ran the numbers -- a Tesla battery costs about 30 grand. If it lasts 10 years (120,000 miles), and gets 300 miles per charge, that is 400 charge cycles -- or about $75 a fill up. Adding in electric cost ($5 at the cheaper rates), and gasoline price of $3.60 per gallon, then you are looking at getting a car with the equivalent of 22 miles per gallon.
The biggest problem imho is the supercharging stations required for fast charging turnarounds. Charging a 50kwh battery in an hour requires more than 50kw of power. That's a very dangerous level of voltage and current (roughly the power of a good-sized radio station's antenna), enough to kill from a distance if the slightest thing goes wrong.
Maybe we'll have really safe, highly standardized supercharging stations. I hope so. But it's a Hard Problem.
edit: The next-gen Tesla supercharger stations will be 120kw. I don't think those can be free forever, although they're free to premium-paying Tesla customers now.
Power isn't really an indicator of how dangerous something is. You can kill someone on a watt. This is a solved problem, and the 120kW stations are already deployed throughout the country, without any reports of electrocutions.
Former ship's electrical officer here. We transfer 1000x that much energy to vehicles (ships) from stations (pierside "hotel" power) all the time.
Electrical transfer is far safer than transfering the same amount of energy in chemical form (e.g. gasoline) and letting any lunatic walk up to publicly accessible nozzles and point them whereever they want with or without a lit cigarette.
* charging leaves zero risk of explosive residue
* it's ridiculously easy to apply interlocks at every step of the transfer.
* the exact rate and requirement of energy transfer is very easily calculated and monitored and self-balancing. Ancillary variables like temperature and thermal expansion are equally cheap and easy to measure with very high precision.
* At scale, the marginal cost of solar power gets really close to free. I have plenty of neighbors who are getting rebate checks from the local utility instead of paying them.
* Energy density remains the biggest hurdle, but it's already provably good enough. The pricepoint is high only because of the small scale of production and the high-end stuff (leather seats, etc) wrapped around it.
I wonder what role rising oil prices play in this. I mean, it isn't just a matter of "electric needs to be cheaper." It needs to be cheaper/more viable in some way than the widely available alternative which is currently gasoline. As gas goes up, shouldn't those lines cross sooner rather than later?
Such a great buildup, only to completely miss the point. The adoption of computers at a large-scale didn't happen through some magic invention and science breakthrough right before the "revolution". The magic part was the invention of the transistor, everything after that was diligent and relentless steady work to morph it into an affordable piece of consumer gear.
That's exactly what the battery factory will do. That is what Tesla is doing: they are going the long way, not dismissing the technology while waiting for a black swan to appear at the end of a rainbow that will save them. Because there won't be one.
I think more to the point, the computer explosion came from them being useful to the vast majority of people, not just technical people. My old apple 2 or Amiga was not that. Electric cars will explode when they are as useful as gas cars for equivalent costs. If they retain tradeoffs, like range, they will have to be tradeoffs that impact very few people.
I do think that people in metro areas like NY, LA, SF, don't realize what it's like to like in the more sparsely populated parts of the country, and that is still the biggest limitation in my part of the world. 150 miles might be barely adequate _IF_ there were near instant recharges. If I want to test drive a new Ducati, I have to drive 500 miles round trip (and have done it in a single day multiple times)
The computer explosion happened not because of computers per-se but because of the internet. Email and the web, and later Facebook, Twitter, etc. made computers able to do useful things. If that had never happened, the majority of the public would have little use for computers.
So you're right, the electric car will become practical for people not because of any capability of the car itself, they are already more than adequate in that regard. It's the batteries. When we have some way to get similar range and speed and ease of recharging as pumping 10 or 20 gallons of gasoline, they will be practical for most people. Not really before and until that happens.
The recharges and station availability are more the problem. The Tesla Model S has longer range than a good number of popular gas cars including several Ford Mustang models.
The solutions already exist if we find a way to deploy them. We even have the technology today to recharge your car wirelessly while it's driving.
With wireless induction charging, you won't have to stop driving until it's time to rotate your tires or use the restroom.
Impending ? My local ASDA (Wal-Mart) has had electric car charging points for a year now. There are about 50 such equipped ASDA stores throughout the UK. Looking at the map, they are less than 50 miles apart and many of them open 24hrs.
Formula 1 is quite popular in the UK and that sport now has hybrid engine technology with 160 horse power of electric motor waiting at the press of a button, charged by the kinetic harvesting of the vehicle and the turbo powered 1.6 litre petrol engine. They complete the 200 mile race with only 130 litres of fuel.
The public charging stations I've seen in the USA are standard mains, 240V tops. They are not superchargers. They will give you a little top-up but won't recharge your car while you're shopping.
The amount of energy stored, transported, and sold as liquid automobile fuel is amazing. Current electrical infrastructure is not even close to being prepared to replace it on a "disruptive" scale.
Oh, God....
1. Telsa isn't building the Factory themselves. It actually Panasonic, which is currently the sole producer for Telsa Motor's battery, are PLANNING to build a Giant factory in partnership with Telsa.
2.Mass Manufacturing will bring down battery cost? No, Batteries are ALREADY being mass manufactured, and the margin on batteries are thin. very thin.
3.As much as everyone like Telsa and likes to fantasize the idea. Telsa are NO expect in battery technology. Panasonic, Sony are.
4. Batteries, due to the possible explosive nature, require a hell a lot of safety testing before it could be put to use. So basically any new battery invention you read now wont come into consumers hand for at least about 3-4 years. And that is already a unrealistic assumption of everything going straight forward and smoothly.
5. So no new battery tech coming. How about Lithium-ion? Well i can assure you Panasonic has been pushing this tech and incremental improvement are still on the roadmap. Just not the big 2 - 3 x improvement you would expect.
6. Lithium, as it stands today, isn't (yet) a variable solution to EV. A lot of articles will claim it is abundance, but that is the same as Hydrogen. It is the process is getting it. The largest Lithium reserve in the world, in Bolivia, while enough to sustain the EV uses, isn't producing any Lithium simply because the cost of extraction is multiple times higher.
That is why many producers like Toyota, and Nissan, or even GM say EV isn't a variable alternative yet. Not because they are paid by Oil Salesman as much as you want to believe. They love alternative energy as well, be it Hydrogen or Battery Powered Cars. It is the current battery isn't up to it. And even the expert in the battery field dont have anything in sight they could look forward to.
> Telsa are NO expect in battery technology. Panasonic, Sony are.
Here's where I think you're missing something. It pays to have a CEO with a degree in physics. His background allows him and those around him to ask brilliant questions that rapidly advance the state of the art. Like using lots of small cells and firewalling the groups. This comes straight out of the most basic understanding of thermal dynamics, but obviously that was beyond Boeing's engineers.
It's not so much the expertise at the bottom that matters in cases of strategic investment. It's having the expertise at the top where leadership can guide the course toward more likely and desirable outcomes.
"With dozens of groups working on the problem and an eventual market worth probably $1 trillion I have no doubt there will be a solution within the next couple of years." - people have been saying effectively the same thing about fusion for 50 years, and it still hasn't happened. Just because something would be nice doesn't make it possible or likely it will happen soon.
This is such a lazy article. The central premise is we're due a big breakthrough in battery technology in the next few years because there are many groups working on it. Using the same logic you could say we can expect a big breakthrough in cancer treatment in a similar time frame.
There are promising battery technologies being worked on, but there tends to be a big difference between lab research and what makes it as a viable product. Let's make the most of what we have now instead of waiting for a magic bullet.
Silly article, I wish I hadn't wasted time reading it.
Strangely, the author thinks it's an incredible prediction that electric cars and their associated energy-storage technologies will eventually get better, easier to manufacture and cheaper to own. That a point will be reached where the economics make sense for the middle class to start buying such vehicles.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 36.8 ms ] threadMaybe this is an edge case, but I suspect that a non-trivial number of people have edge cases like these. An electric car might serve well as an everyday vehicle, but it can't truly be a single-car solution at the current time.
The article does mention a hypothetical battery that's twice the capacity and 10x the recharge rate. If that comes out, and if there is a significant buildout in the supercharger network, I could probably switch. However, battery technology has never increased at an exponential rate, and I suspect that it will be a lot longer than 2 years before we see cars that have those properties.
Grabbing a meal halfway through there (if there were a supercharger more than 100 miles into the trip) and back might not be /that/ bad. That's an individual preference, though.
Actually, if they're not charging from flat, it might not even be 30-45 minutes.
I think that people who have relatively routine commitments more than 250 miles away but less than 500 miles away are a small enough segment of the market that you could reasonably describe the market as "disrupted" if those people remained on gasoline cars and most other people went to electric.
That said, I don't buy even a little bit that we're going to go from "no commercial versions of this technology at all" to "being produced in car-battery-sizes and gigantic numbers" in two or three years. If Li-ion batteries aren't good enough, then any electric car disruption is at least 5 years out.
"I wouldn't want to have to give that up, or to have to arrange alternate transportation."
Lets say that lots of people had all electric cars, and they had the same restrictions as the current model S. How long do you think it would take before someone opens a business where you drive your electric car there, park it and plug it in, and drive the gas powered car that is already parked there to your destination, when you return you park the gas powered car, walk over and get into your own electric car and go home? Think Zipcar for the Tesla Set. Pre-arranged membership, fixed price rental on a daily or hourly basis. Different kinds of cars (small, medium, van maybe). You provide gas and damage insurance and a small annual 'retainer' fee.
That kind of business emerges when you have a large cohort of electric car users in a specific geography. I'd start one in the Bay Area if I was bored.
The Leaf is a very ugly car, to me, for a young man (though I do know people who pull it off perfectly).
The Volt is almost there, except that its range on battery is about 40 miles (afterward it switches to gas, which defeats my idea). I want a car that can go 140+ (preferably 300+) on a single charge (or have super-fast, and still infrequent, charges) that I can charge at night, and has the prestige of anything less than or equal to a BMW.
There is a particular beauty, to me, in the idea of plugging in my vehicle at night and, the next day, having a new 300ish mile range to be able to use. It's has a beautiful feel to it. The inconvenience of getting gas, gone forever, and replaced by a considerable reduction in price. I love it.
The day that comes, be it in a Tesla family sedan or in a Leaf or BMW electric car or whatever other company ends up making the >= 50k, I will seriously consider and even actively decide that I no longer need a gasoline powered car as my everyday commuter and city and nearby attraction car.
I'd say Volt's only problem is GM's less than stellar reputation. If it came from another car company, its sales would be much higher.
There have been dozens or hundreds or thousands of companies and teams and people working on alternatives to li-ion for 20 years. We're arguably not much closer to a "breakthrough" in energy storage. I'm mildly convinced saying 10x batteries are around the corner is analogous to saying a universal cure for AIDS is coming next week. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but I can pretty much promise you that no company is going to get that tech, design, produce, scale, and sell enough cars a month from now to be a "black swan" for Tesla.
It's a neat experience, and everyone I know prefers it, but it's too damn expensive to get it. I don't think for long, though. And I don't think it's going to take some great battery breakthrough either. I'd say you need about 50 kWh in a sedan, minimum, for it to work well for trips (plus a bit of charging infrastructure). If you want to sell a car for $40,000 (which would be $33,000 after rebates, less in California), that means you probably can't have a pack that costs more than $20,000 (since you can buy a decent gas car for that, and that's before you remove all the gassy bits).
So, $20,000 for a 50 kWh pack == $400 per kWh, which is totally doable. I think when the Leaf first came out, the estimates were that it cost Nissan about $500 per kWh, but if they don't have it down below $400 by now I'll eat my hat. And Tesla probably already has the cost below $300, what with using commodity cells. I think they only reason Tesla doesn't put out a $40,000 sedan is because they know the demand would outstrip their battery supply by a factor of 200 (and murder demand for the Model S), so they have to wait until they build their own factory.
But! Nissan already has their own battery factory. Their batteries are not nearly as energy-dense as Teslas, so fitting 50 kWh worth in the Leaf may be their biggest issue right now. But there's a lot of wasted space in that car. I think they can do it just fine. And when they do, if gas has just tipped north of $4 by then, they are going to make a lot of noise.
They sent me a survey a couple months ago, and one of the questions asked how much extra I'd pay for EPA-rated 150 miles range (instead of the current 75). I was about to drag the little slider up to about $12,000, but it stopped at $5,000 (or $208 per kWh). That may just be a random question with no basis on their current engineering, but I think they're up to something.
http://insideevs.com/nissan-ceo-carlos-ghosn-second-generati...
TLDR: New lithium ion battery chemistry may add up to 60 miles more range to the current LEAF for only about $2000 marginal cost to Nissan while adding no more weight.
From a distribution point of view, it seems like both batteries and hydrogen are pretty much equally bad. Is there something holding back the powertrain technology with hydrogen?
ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_vehicle#Storage
SpaceX didn't do any new science in building their rockets, really. They took functional technology and a lot of great engineering and made it work. I don't think it would be responsible to bet Tesla's success on a battery technology which doesn't exist yet; 50% cheaper Lithium-Ion through Tesla/SpaceX style vertical integration and awesomeness is good enough.
If better battery chemistries come out, then sure Tesla could use them, but the planning for the next car needs to work even if they don't.
It's also the other way around, too, of course. I would have thought it ludicrous in the 90s to have my primary vacuum cleaner be battery powered. But this year, I didn't even think twice about it.
People started getting worked up about it because they can remotely disable the battery if you don't make the lease payments.
But, I just ran the numbers -- a Tesla battery costs about 30 grand. If it lasts 10 years (120,000 miles), and gets 300 miles per charge, that is 400 charge cycles -- or about $75 a fill up. Adding in electric cost ($5 at the cheaper rates), and gasoline price of $3.60 per gallon, then you are looking at getting a car with the equivalent of 22 miles per gallon.
Maybe we'll have really safe, highly standardized supercharging stations. I hope so. But it's a Hard Problem.
edit: The next-gen Tesla supercharger stations will be 120kw. I don't think those can be free forever, although they're free to premium-paying Tesla customers now.
Electrical transfer is far safer than transfering the same amount of energy in chemical form (e.g. gasoline) and letting any lunatic walk up to publicly accessible nozzles and point them whereever they want with or without a lit cigarette.
* charging leaves zero risk of explosive residue
* it's ridiculously easy to apply interlocks at every step of the transfer.
* the exact rate and requirement of energy transfer is very easily calculated and monitored and self-balancing. Ancillary variables like temperature and thermal expansion are equally cheap and easy to measure with very high precision.
* At scale, the marginal cost of solar power gets really close to free. I have plenty of neighbors who are getting rebate checks from the local utility instead of paying them.
* Energy density remains the biggest hurdle, but it's already provably good enough. The pricepoint is high only because of the small scale of production and the high-end stuff (leather seats, etc) wrapped around it.
That's exactly what the battery factory will do. That is what Tesla is doing: they are going the long way, not dismissing the technology while waiting for a black swan to appear at the end of a rainbow that will save them. Because there won't be one.
I do think that people in metro areas like NY, LA, SF, don't realize what it's like to like in the more sparsely populated parts of the country, and that is still the biggest limitation in my part of the world. 150 miles might be barely adequate _IF_ there were near instant recharges. If I want to test drive a new Ducati, I have to drive 500 miles round trip (and have done it in a single day multiple times)
So you're right, the electric car will become practical for people not because of any capability of the car itself, they are already more than adequate in that regard. It's the batteries. When we have some way to get similar range and speed and ease of recharging as pumping 10 or 20 gallons of gasoline, they will be practical for most people. Not really before and until that happens.
The solutions already exist if we find a way to deploy them. We even have the technology today to recharge your car wirelessly while it's driving.
With wireless induction charging, you won't have to stop driving until it's time to rotate your tires or use the restroom.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/green-tech/advanced-cars/...
http://your.asda.com/news-and-blogs/electric-car-drivers-can...
Formula 1 is quite popular in the UK and that sport now has hybrid engine technology with 160 horse power of electric motor waiting at the press of a button, charged by the kinetic harvesting of the vehicle and the turbo powered 1.6 litre petrol engine. They complete the 200 mile race with only 130 litres of fuel.
Electric cars are here and in the public eye.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/formula1/25158104
The amount of energy stored, transported, and sold as liquid automobile fuel is amazing. Current electrical infrastructure is not even close to being prepared to replace it on a "disruptive" scale.
2.Mass Manufacturing will bring down battery cost? No, Batteries are ALREADY being mass manufactured, and the margin on batteries are thin. very thin.
3.As much as everyone like Telsa and likes to fantasize the idea. Telsa are NO expect in battery technology. Panasonic, Sony are.
4. Batteries, due to the possible explosive nature, require a hell a lot of safety testing before it could be put to use. So basically any new battery invention you read now wont come into consumers hand for at least about 3-4 years. And that is already a unrealistic assumption of everything going straight forward and smoothly.
5. So no new battery tech coming. How about Lithium-ion? Well i can assure you Panasonic has been pushing this tech and incremental improvement are still on the roadmap. Just not the big 2 - 3 x improvement you would expect.
6. Lithium, as it stands today, isn't (yet) a variable solution to EV. A lot of articles will claim it is abundance, but that is the same as Hydrogen. It is the process is getting it. The largest Lithium reserve in the world, in Bolivia, while enough to sustain the EV uses, isn't producing any Lithium simply because the cost of extraction is multiple times higher.
That is why many producers like Toyota, and Nissan, or even GM say EV isn't a variable alternative yet. Not because they are paid by Oil Salesman as much as you want to believe. They love alternative energy as well, be it Hydrogen or Battery Powered Cars. It is the current battery isn't up to it. And even the expert in the battery field dont have anything in sight they could look forward to.
Here's where I think you're missing something. It pays to have a CEO with a degree in physics. His background allows him and those around him to ask brilliant questions that rapidly advance the state of the art. Like using lots of small cells and firewalling the groups. This comes straight out of the most basic understanding of thermal dynamics, but obviously that was beyond Boeing's engineers.
It's not so much the expertise at the bottom that matters in cases of strategic investment. It's having the expertise at the top where leadership can guide the course toward more likely and desirable outcomes.
There are promising battery technologies being worked on, but there tends to be a big difference between lab research and what makes it as a viable product. Let's make the most of what we have now instead of waiting for a magic bullet.
Strangely, the author thinks it's an incredible prediction that electric cars and their associated energy-storage technologies will eventually get better, easier to manufacture and cheaper to own. That a point will be reached where the economics make sense for the middle class to start buying such vehicles.
"Black Swan". Really ?!
They went belly up but there is something intuitive and compelling about the model.