What would be the cost? Electric cars shouldn’t have engines, transmissions, and I’m assuming a variety of other mechanical parts. Then again I’m guessing they do have parts other cars do not.
I read that batteries could drop to $100/kwh by the next decade, and a 40-80 kwh battery should be enough for most people.
If an economy car with an IC engine starts at 12k, I’m wondering what an electric car would be w/o the batteries, since hopefully battery prices will continue to drop.
They most certainly do. First you’ve got a pretty powerful electric motor which is full of copper, and if it’s a permanent-magnet design, it’s also full of copper. The electric motor is conceptually a lot simpler and has fewer moving parts than an IC engine, but is made out of much costlier materials. Second, they do need a transmission though in most cases it can be a fixed gear ratio instead of multiple speeds, and you can integrate the differential into it. So the transmission would likely be a good bit cheaper, all else equal.
The power electronics in an EV are pretty costly, for example the motor control hardware in the Tesla Model S has to handle 320 volts at about a thousand amps.
Well, a quick google shows a battery for a Nissan Leaf goes for $5,500 plus a $1000 core. The car itself goes for about $29k, so figure $22.5 without the battery?
The copper in the electric motor is not very expensive. Copper is about $2/lb and copper wire is virtually the spot price of copper. The motor in a Model S weighs 150 lbs, so at a maximum that’s $300 in copper; in reality it’s probably less than half that. A more reasonable car will be proportionally cheaper yet.
There’s an interesting tradeoff between the cost of power electronics vs. the transmission. If you have a 1-speed transmission, you need to support extremely high peak currents, which tend to be the driving factor in the cost of power electronics. Having two or more speeds reduces this requirement, since at zero RPM you can get away with less torque, and torque is basically proportional to current in an electric motor.
In the Model S, they obviously went with an extremely high-current system. The Leaf also has a single-speed transmission, but it’s a low-performance car. Future mid-range cars might make a different compromise between mechanical and electronic costs.
The cost of the power electronics are going to be serious.
A typical 75kW capable variable speed motor controller for general industrial use is about $12,000 itself. Then that has to be hardened and packaged into something that can hold up in a vehicle… not cheap at all.
The copper cost is irrelevant. The actual cost of the motor itself however, isn’t. Again, a standard industrial duty, run of the mill three phase inverter duty motor with encoder runs abou $7000 for 75KW (approximately 100 HP).
An equivalent (actually, more powerful) internal combustion engine is about $2000 new to a consumer.