Electric motors are much simpler to build and maintain. An electric motor also obviates the need for an exhaust system. The reason for the high price of electric cars is that the battery costs a fortune. Is it possible for batteries to become cheap enough for electric cars to become cost competitive?
You can always hope for some kind of breakthrough, but better batteries have been the goal for a long time now, and progress over the last few decades has been at a frustrating snail’s pace. At this point there’s not much hope that it’s going to do anything but continue at the same slow pace.
keep in mind that battery tech matters to a lot of industries other than cars. Consumer electronics, industrial systems, and aerospace are all clamoring for better battery tech too.
at any rate, once the Bolt and Model 3 hit the market, we can say they’re price competitive to an extent. but I doubt either GM or Tesla are going to make any money on either one for a while, so cost competitiveness is a ways off.
oh, BTW, electric motors may be “simpler” in principle, but they use higher-cost materials. There’s probably a lot of copper in them, and some designs use (expensive) rare-earth permanent magnets. Also, an electric motor is useless without something to control them, so another costly part of EVs (and hybrids) is the power electronics. You need expensive semiconductors to 1) convert the battery DC to polyphase AC, 2) vary the AC frequency to control the motor speed, and 3) be robust enough to handle the high power levels involved.
Electric motors aren’t cheap, and neither are the lightweight parts needed to make electric vehicles practical now. Electric vehicles are on the small end of car sizes and for larger vehicles don’t come close to competing. Add to that an oil glut that is maintaining relatively low prices until the next major crisis in the Middle East and we’re not going to see electric cars cost equivalent with gasoline powered cars for quite a while, but for the niche market that exists now for electric they could be considered competitive already. Some people may be paying more because they believe they are saving the environment or other causes, but to some degree they must be reasonable in price or sales would be much lower.
Let’s remember that the price of gasoline is subsidized through a great deal of indirect government costs. That applies to electricity also, but I don’t think at quite the same level, so with more subsidizing of the electric vehicle market through the cost of electricity or otherwise we could get the technologies much closer in price.
If you ask me, we have already passed the point where EVs are cost effective compared to ICE, but you get different answers depending on which numbers you use. For example, if (like me) you live in a part of the country where electricity is cheap and gasoline is expensive, then the added cost of batteries (which are getting cheaper at about 8% per year) is already offset by the difference in fuel cost over the life of the vehicle. This is especially true if you believe that gasoline prices will rise significantly in the future.
I read an article that says the TCO (total cost of ownership) for a VW Golf is around $8,000 per year but the TCO for a Chevy Bolt is $9,000. How Soon Can Tesla Get Battery Cell Costs Below $100 per Kilowatt-Hour? | Greentech Media But those numbers assume that [a] you don’t live in the Pacific Northwest where electricity is cheap, and ** you buy a car with a friggin’ huge battery pack like the Chevy Bolt, rather than an EV with a relatively small battery pack like the Mitsubishi iMiev, and [c] that gas prices won’t rise a whole lot during the lifetime of the vehicle.
What I’d like to see is a 10 year cost differential between EV and ICE. That way you can account for major repairs on an ICE that you don’t have with an EV. I bet long term the EV is very cost competitive.
Lifespan on most EV batteries is far short of ten years. Possibly short of five, in certain situations. I don’t have any battery pack costs at hand, but I’ve seen figures in the range of $5k to replace those in hybrids like the Prius.
Up against most decently built ICE vehicles which require little more than dusting off and fluid changes for 100k miles and ten years.
on the contrary, Prius batteries regularly go beyond 10 years. And there are Escape Hybrids in taxi service with 500,000+ miles on the original battery:
EVs and hybrids generally have a charge/discharge strategy intended to treat the battery as gently as possible. They never fully charge, never fully discharge, and rigorously manage temperatures.
As soon as they equip highways with an electricity delivery system.
That way you only need a small battery for city driving, making the car cheaper and lighter and thus even cheaper.
Explosion engines are huge but have a tiny fuel tank. It’s the opposite for electric motors and their batteries. Too bad you can’t combine the advantages of both.
Buses in Seattle (and other cities I’m sure) have a pole that sticks out of the top and hooks onto an electric cable suspended above the street, and draws power from it. I imagine you could have a similar system for privately-owned vehicles on highways, unless such a system doesn’t scale that well.
I’m sure you’ve seen the bus stopped in the middle of an intersection while the driver gets out and re-routes the pole on the overhead wire. It’s probably fine for buses, where there aren’t that many of them, and they have a skilled and trained driver to deal with problems that go wrong, but for general purpose, they’re a terrible idea.
Another thing that happens is that certain segments of overhead wire are ‘dead’ (near spots where the substation providing power switches.) Drivers learn their routes, and make sure to have momentum to carry them past the dead points.
The newer generation of electric trolley buses in Seattle will have small batteries, so they can get past the dead spots more smoothly and deal with reroutes (and presumably pass other, stopped electrics, though I’m not sure the strategy for getting the poles back onto the overhead wires after engineering such a pass.)
I would say that EVs are cost competitive right now, at least if you are looking at used vehicles. I bought a 2012 Volt with 35k miles on it for less than half the price of new. I get about 35 miles of range per charge and then it switches to gas. My office lets me charge so I can make my 50 mile round trip without using any gas at all. Even though the battery is 4 years old, it still gets the same rated range as new. As economies of scale come on line for battery production, I think you’ll begin to see big drops in battery prices and new tech like solid state batteries promise even more range.
Batteries…Pfft…
Flywheels are the future Boys!
Dead spots and wire-changing aren’t a problem unless the catenary wire is the vehicle’s sole source of power. Make it primarily a battery vehicle that charges from the catenary when available, and all that matters is that it’s available a significant fraction of the time.
It might be possible: You put a gas tank in a car, but then instead of exploding the gasoline, you consume it in an air-breathing fuel cell. The fuel cell produces electricity, potentially at a much higher efficiency than an internal combustion engine, and the electricity in turn drives an electric motor. Now, fuel cell technology is far from making this a reality, but there’s also a lot more room for improvement in fuel cells than there is in batteries, which are already (probably) nearly as good as they can get.
The answer to the OP changes dramatically depending on what assumptions you make. For example…
- How many miles do you drive per year?
- Is it mostly city miles or highway miles?
- What is the cost of electricity where you live?
- How much will the cost of electricity go up in the future?
- What is the cost of gasoline where you live?
- How much will the cost of gasoline go up in the future?
And that’s just getting warmed up. Now we have to tackle the tough questions about trying to make a comparison between car A and car B to see which one is cheaper. Ideally, we’d compare an EV version and ICE version of the exact same car, but those are hard to find. Alternatively, we could compare the “average” ICE with the “average” EV. Or, we could compare the car you are driving right now with a hypothetical EV that you might be thinking about buying.
That still leaves more assumptions which affect the calculation…
7. Do you want to compare used cars or new cars?
8. How fast will the cars depreciate?
9. How long do you intend to keep the car?
10. If you buy an ICE, how likely is it to need a new engine at some point, and how much will that cost?
11. If you buy an EV, how likely is it to need a new battery at some point, and how much will that cost?
Focusing solely on question #11 misses the big picture.
In order to make a fair comparison, we need to calculate TCO (total cost of ownership) including all expenses, such as depreciation, maintenance (including tires), repairs, insurance, and fuel, then divide by the number of miles driven.
Most of the articles I’ve seen online where they try to tackle this question do so by comparing a brand new EV with a brand new ICE, assuming that you’ll drive 12,000 miles per year (about half highway and half city) and assuming that the price for gasoline won’t go up dramatically in the future, and they come up with answers like “An ICE costs $8,000 per year and an EV costs $9,000 per year” but the truth is that nobody is “average” and the real-world answers are all over the place.
Let’s suppose gas costs $3 per gallon. You might buy a 1994 Honda Civic that you drive 12,000 miles a year for just 2 years and have it cost you $9,100 total, or 38 cents per mile. Or, you might buy a 2016 Fiat 500 which you drive just 9,000 miles per year and keep it for 4 years, so your TCO is $17,800 or 49 cents per mile. Or you might buy a 1998 Ford Explorer and drive it just 4,000 miles per year for 3 years so your TCO is $9,500 or 63 cents per mile. The values are all over the place. Now consider buying a 2013 Nissan Leaf and driving it 8,000 miles per year for 5 years and suppose your TCO is $24,400 or 61 cents per mile. Did you save money or not? There is no simple yes/no answer to that question because there are so many unknowns.
The difference between the Total Cost of Ownership of an EV and an ICE is smaller than the difference between one ICE and another ICE. We have already reached the point where some EVs are cheaper to drive than some ICEs, depending on how many miles you drive per year and how much gasoline costs where you live. The factors that make the EVs look more favorable are driving more miles and keeping the car for a longer time and living somewhere that gasoline is expensive.
Range is a big problem for the EV. While the vast majority of trips are short, a major chunk of the population takes one or more long trips in a year. So how long does it take for recharging to go 600 miles in one day?
I used to be fairly sanguine about the possibilities of portable fuel cells, but the hangup is fuel storage, to wit, if you can’t tolerate cryogenic hydrogen (which is not feasible in a consumer vehicle, nor is a “hydrogen economy” fuel infrastructure practical for transportation) it really doesn’t make a lot of sense, and methanol fuel cells don’t offer the kind of mass to power output to make sense for passenger vehicles.
The electrochemical battery is within about half and order of magnitude of theoretical energy density. Now, that sounds pretty good; we could possibly get three to four times the energy density of current batteries. However, current batteries are about two orders of magnitude of energy density below gasoline (gasoline gallon equivalent is about 0.01). There are, as others have noted, significant efficiencies in electric drive vehicles that compensate for this in some way, but getting the kind of range that is comparable to a gasoline vehicle even with a small gas tank requires the bulk of the vehicle to be battery pack, as the Tesla Model S is, and you are never going to charge a vehicle as fast as you can fill up a gasoline tank, not withstanding the temperature impacts on battery performance.
Which is why electric vehicles make sense for low to medium distance commuters, but will not serve for long range trips or OTR heavy hauling. Where they do make sense is places where you can’t drive very far to begin with, and while on vacation on Hawai’i I was set to wondering if the islands, which are always temperate and in which you can only drive at low speed (mustachioed private investigators not withstanding) and for distances typically numbering in the few dozens of kilometers, wouldn’t make an excellent test case for a sustainable electric vehicle infrastructure for all but a small niche of heavy haul applications.
Stranger
In a Tesla you drive for 2-3 hours and then stop 20-30 minutes. So it depends on your road trip habits. Some people see it as an endurance race and feel they absolutely must go 500 miles before stopping for no more than 5 minutes. Others (like me) are more relaxed and take frequent breaks.
Christchurch to Queenstown? Definitely taking frequent, long stops. Texarkana to Laredo? Not interested in stopping at all.
The first scenario inclines me to suggest that campervans (most of which are the uncommon-in-the-USA class B type) would be an ideal candidate for electrification. A VW Crafter or Ford Transit (the real Transit, not the Connect) easily have the space for huge batteries, and when you pull into a holiday park (campground) you can abuse the power connections to charge those giant batteries back up.
Without doing the research, though, I’m confident that the market for campervans is even smaller than the market for Teslas, though.
Spending ~20% of your transit time idling around a recharging station (even assuming that there is one on your selected route and that a charger is open) is not an insignificant impact, especially on drivers who drive for work or who are transporting a family across long distances. And this is a fundamental limitation of electric vehicles; unless you have vehicles with swappable battery packs (all efforts in this vein have beer economic or technical failures so far) or some other method of rapid recharge, the advantage for long range travel will still be to liquid hydrocarbon fuels. And electric vehicles will not replace internal combustion in cold climate conditions regardless owing to electrochemical limits on reaction rates at low temperatures.
Stranger