Which brings to mind the recent meme that circulated on social media, which showed a quote for a replacement battery for a 2012 Volt that cost $30k. Which was valid, but only because the original manufacturer quit making those batteries.
I suspect this is the case. I see lots of beater Priuses on the road, and there is an aftermarket for replacement batteries, and such. That probably won’t occur for the Leaf, because in it’s best year it sold 30,000 cars, and usually half that, while the Prius could sell over 200,000 in a year, and didn’t drop below 100,000 per year until the Model 3 came out.
I doubt anyone is going to develop a replacement battery for a Leaf, let alone all of those California compliance EVs, when at very best you could sell a few hundred. And who would buy them without economy of scale.
Things might be different once we get to the Model 3 and Y. There might be enough cars there to support aftermarket rebuilt batteries and other components. If price of a replacement battery is equivalent to a good used engine or a rebuilt transmission, then it would be a similar repair calculation as with an ICE car.
What is still a complete fantasy, but could really make the used car market unpredictable is if replacement batteries based on new chemistry become available for old cars. A $15,000 battery swap to drop 300 pounds and double the original range would really add life to a 10 year old car.
That last paragraph of yours would be a game-changer.
Completely setting aside the tech part of that equation, I don’t see the business case coming together until complete car batteries are pretty much standardized modules across multiple models and ideally makes as well.
Nowadays lots of running gear and electronics are common across whole swathes of the industry. A Ford V-8 is still different from a GM V-8 but they may have the same alternator or even water pump. Were ICEs to have another hundred years to run, I could imagine Ford & GM eventually outsourcing even that to a common engine provider.
If batteries or at least major battery subassemblies and control hardware / software get to be standardized and commodified enough, that will reduce the non-recurring engineering enough to make drop-in replacements practical as a business matter.
When each model year of each make and model vehicle has their own custom from scratch battery, the aftermarket will never get going.
Of course all the OEMs and the major subsystems houses know this and mostly want this. For the US Big 3, Toyota, Nissan, etc., their own success depends on delivering a range of vehicles built from common innards. Otherwise they can’t build them cheaply enough to sell them for a profit.
But so far, more like rocketry than like aviation or like ICE automotives, getting adequate performance from each EV model while having to operate so close to the bleeding edge of tech requires lots of tailoring the battery system to just barely meet the mission requirements with no slack in the trade space to spend on inter-fleet commonality.
We’ll get there, but it’ll be bloody for awhile.
That is basically impossible unless car manufacturers actually agreed to build vehicles from a common chassis and drive platform. The battery in a long range BEV is such a large part of the bulk and mass of the vehicle, and in many cases integrated into the structure, that you can’t just have some kind of generic spec that would work across diverse product lines. It’s not physically impossible but the business case would be hard for manufacturers to accept because then there isn’t really anything distinguishing a Ford from a Skoda from a Hyundai except carriage and trim, and would also be regarded as adverse consolidation unless all manufacturers agreed to use the same systems.
It might be possible to create individual modules within the battery pack that are identical, or have some form factor that allows commonality in manufacturing and replacement, but most BEV manufacturers don’t want you breaking into their battery pack and ‘hacking’ the system or installing third party battery modules of unknown provenance because of the liability, and they (or their OEM suppliers) want the owners of their vehicles to come back to them for parts and special labor rather than to support some open market of external suppliers, so they don’t really care about using generic components except for very common parts like spark plugs, oil and air filters, sealed beam headlights, et cetera. Low volume automakers often do use parts from other large volume manufacturers because they can’t afford to do the engineering for door handles, interior parts, et cetera but it is the business model of the big makers to use specially designed parts even where some generic part would do.
Stranger
A timely and pertinent article on the topic:
But a new analysis, released Tuesday morning local time as world leaders gather in Dubai to discuss the progress in cutting emissions, shows the grim truth: The surge in renewables has not been enough to displace fossil fuels. Global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels are expected to rise by 1.1 percent in 2023, according to the analysisfrom the Global Carbon Project.
“Renewables are growing to record levels, but fossil fuels also keep growing to record highs,” said Glen Peters, a senior researcher at the Cicero Center for International Climate Research in Oslo who co-wrote the new analysis.
Stranger
Folks have already explained why that’s not true. In short, the total number of cars on the road is basically constant, so every electric car you put on the road replaces a gasoline car. Yes, that particular owner’s gasoline car will probably still be on the road, in someone else’s hands, but that pipeline does have a bottom eventually.
And that’s exactly why the mandates are needed. Leave it to the Invisible Hand of the Free Market, and those companies will never figure it out. Give them a reason to, though, and they will. Or maybe new companies will arise to replace them, but either way works.
On the other hand, U.S. emissions peaked in 2007, so clearly the shift to renewables/ electric vehicles has done some good.
I think the U.S. emissions peak was due more to the shift from coal to natural gas.
This is probably correct. No one will produce a battery pack specifically for the Leaf. What I do expect to see is for someone to create a generic battery pack to drop into a Leaf compatible housing. Or Volt compatible, or whatever other models are out there. One benefit of batteries over ICE is that voltage is basically universal. Easy to regulate and adjust parameters. The only real concern will be the physical dimension requirements. I can see having a dozen basic battery packs designed to be dropped into a housing for every EV, past or present.
I can see a generic battery pack as the new LS motor, and instead of an adapter plate there will be a smart harness that translates between the old car software and the new battery.
If society survives long enough, I’m sure that will happen. It might not be available for the relatively low volume EVs of the past 10 years, but will be available for the next 10 years of EVs.
The bolded statement is not correct, and even operable vehicles that are removed from registration in the United States are generally shipped overseas for sale in developing nations where they continue to be driven (often with emissions controls removed and poor maintenance) until they are no longer operable. Shipping emissions off-shore is a meaningless ‘reduction’ because greenhouse gases and the effects of climate change don’t stop at national borders. BEVs would eventually become dominant after a few decades of production and might make a statistically significant difference in emissions but developing nations without a robust electrical production and distribution infrastructure or a massive investment in localized renewable power, electric vehicles don’t even make much sense for that use case.
That is correct:
Electrical generation emissions have reduced somewhat (because coal has basically become too expensive) and slight reductions in industrial emissions (largely by offshoring really polluting processes) but transportation has been pretty steady. And even if we electrified a significant portion of the commuter and local fleet vehicles (say, 10% in the next decade), we’d still only see at most a few percent actual difference in the transportation sector because over 40% of greenhouse gas emissions by the transportation sector are shipping and air travel.
The biggest single changes we could make to have a real impact is to cut all non-essential air travel and move the medium/heavy duty OTR transportation to electric as fast as possible, but that won’t happen because of the economic impacts and entrenched business interests. And to be quite frank, any changes that can’t be implemented within the next decade are going to be ineffectual in limiting average global temperature increase to within the 2 °C threshold, and beyond that are probably not actually all that meaningful because emissions will be reducing anyway due to increased cost of transportation fuels. That constriction itself is a reason to increase the availability of BEVs or other transportation opens but at that point BEVs will have a negligible impact in terms of restricting emissions.
Stranger
That’s probably the majority of it. But renewables have also played a significant role.
In 2007, coal generated 2000 bKwH, natural gas 900 bKwH, renewables 350 bKwH.
In 2022, coal generated 800 bKwH, natural gas 1700 bKwH, renewables 900 bKwH. (Nuclear was steady throughout the period at around 800 bKwH.)
Source: Electricity in the U.S. - U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA)
So over that 15 year period it was coal down 1200, or -60% of its 2007 base, natural gas up 800, or +88% of its 2007 base, and renewables up 550 or +157% of its base.
Percentage-wise the growth is heavily in favor of renewables over natural gas. But quantity-wise the growth in NG was 81% larger than the growth in renewables. Said another way, of the combined growth in non-coal, it splits up ~60% NG, ~40% renewable.
And total production was up from 3250 to 3400 = 5%.
Darn good thing we have renewables, but still a lot of distance to cover to approach net zero.
And to repeat because it’s important: every improvement to our electrical infrastructure simultaneously make each electric vehicle better.
Something very wrong there. I suspect that’s just cars on commercial lots, not private sales. And at the low end, private sales probably dominate. I just searched on Kijiji in Canada for cars under $3000, I got 7587 hits. In Canada, where cars cost more and the population is 1/10 the size.
Here’s a 2008 Corolla that looks decent, has 168,000 km, for $2100. That’s about $1500 US.
Here’s a 2015 Hyundai Elantra with 173,00 km for $2800:
You don’t have to go all the way down to $3000 to say that electric vehicles aren’t affordable to a lot of people. My current AWD crossover SUV cost $12,000, and I’m willing to go up to $20,000 when it needs replacing given the current market (have $15,000 in the bank right now). Can I go out today and buy an AWD electric SUV with reasonable range and fast charging for road trips for that amount?
Of course not. You can’t get an EV with the features you want for three times that amount. But the question is whether used Evs will ever be that cheap, and how long it will take before used ones come down to that price.
Truth is, we have no idea. It might be that at a certain point the battery becomes more valuable than the car, and older evs will be scrapped for their batteries. Or maybe we’ll fiind out that battery swaps and such tend to lead to more fires and other problems, and they’ll be regulated out of existence, or that used Evs plummet in value because it turns out that fire risks go up dramatically as the batteries age, the vehicles suffer unreported damage and stay on the road, etc.
Or maybe we’ll find out that a 10 year old Ev with modern battery management is almost as good as a brand new one, and therefore lease prices plummet and they become very affordable.
Still lots of unknowns, and that’s probably affecting the market to some degree.
A very important point is that this only covers electricity, while we are concerned with all energy usage when we talk about net zero. In contrast to what one sees in so many places about the massive importance of renewables in the energy picture, when you look at the total picture you see how dinky the contributions of wind and solar are. So it’s not just “a lot of distance”, it’s more that we are barely out of the starting gate. See:
And that is just energy. Cement and ruminants inherently release GHG outside of the energy required in producing them. Although i’m not sure about the methane production of the default use of the land had it not been used for grazing and/or growing crops for ruminants (i.e. do the wild bison and deer that would have been on the land produced a lot of methane?)
Gas appliances like furnaces, water heaters, and dryers vent to the outside and aren’t a concern. Stoves are since the combustion gases aren’t vented.