Lots of incorrect info here. GM and LG’s battery plant partnership didn’t fail. They already have 3 plants with one operating in Ohio, another scheduled to open this year in TN, and another scheduled to open in MI in 2024. The recent news was about a 4th plant that they’d planned to open in Indiana but could not reach an agreement (this article provides some possible reasons why: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/20/gm-lg-indefinitely-shelve-plans-for-fourth-us-battery-cell-plant.html). And, it sounds like GM plans to move forward with another partner. I’m having trouble understanding how the loss of a plant that was only in the planning stages could lead to a battery shortage?
“Prices have risen dramatically…” Meaningless statement without evidence. GM dropped the price of the Bolt over $6k between 2022 and 2023. There is currently a buying frenzy on the Bolt with people taking advantage of the $7,500 federal tax credit. I see posts every day on EV message boards about how difficult it is to locate vehicles in stock and complaints about dealer mark-ups of thousands of dollars.
What are the unkind reviews about? Longer charging times and faster discharging? That’s the only thing I can think off off the top of my head. But the longer charging times should get ironed out as manufacturers find better ways to warm the battery for charging. Faster discharging? Meh. Even in the dead of winter I’m still paying about half what I’d be paying to drive the same distance in an ICE car.
And, for so many of these problems, real or imagined, people seem to forget that this technology is very much still in it’s infancy. We’re likely to see huge advances in just about every aspect of this over the next 10-20 years as more and more people buy into it.
You try living through those two weeks where it doesn’t go above -25 (Saskatoon had a similar temps) and then you can come lecture us about how talking about an entire month below -20 is hyperbole. Because by the end of that second week it feels like it’s been two entire months.
Even if extended proper cold snaps are relatively rare, they’re common enough that western Canadians are going to view performance during them as a non-negotiable necessity. Remember, if your car strands you in the middle of nowhere at -35, that could easily be fatal.
I’m not overly concerned about range loss at really extreme temps (talking -40ish here) because I’d welcome the excuse to cancel a road trip at those temperatures. But functioning at -25 is just routine, because every winter there are at least some days that don’t get any warmer than that, and if you tell someone native to this part of the world that it’s too cold to travel at -25 they’re going to look at you as if you’re an alien.
That said, by and large I agree with you. For many drivers, EV cold weather performance is already adequate. I have been concerned by reports of vehicles with cabin heat reliant on heat pumps failing, because that’s going to be a hard deal-breaker for me. Easily solved with emergency resistive heating, of course, but that’s only if manufacturers put it in.
One driver of price increses was the stupid EV subsidy. In a supply-constrined market, subsidizing demand just drives up prices. I predicted it when the subsidy was first brought up, and that’s exctlynwhatnhappened. Most EVs went up in price by almost the exact amount of the subsidy. Subsequent price increases were about the rise in material costs.
This will get worse if EV demand grows, becuse we are very short of critical materials that go into EVs.
For just about every commodity in history, increased demand has decreased prices in the long run (the Simon-Ehrlich wager being a famous example here). There’s no shortage of lithium around the world, and most of the other elements that go into EVs are not actually critical (cobalt and nickel are not required for batteries; rare-earths are not needed for motors; copper is required in some places but can be reduced significantly).
The prices of current EVs are high because demand is outstripping supply. Demand outstrips supply because everyone but Tesla is bad at making EVs profitably, and so they are ramping up slowly. That probably won’t be true forever, but it’s true now. And Tesla, while they are highly profitable, can only expand so quickly.
When other manufacturers figure out their cost issues, that will solve both the supply problem and allow manufacturers to cut prices. It just takes time. But I expect it’ll be years, not decades.
Incidentally, here’s the top 10 vehicles sold in California for 2022:
Mainly severe loss of range. In cars with heat pumps, less range is lost but the heat pumps stop working at low temperatures. If the car has radiative heating it sucks battery life.
Heating the battery takes a lot of energy. Manufacturers recommend pre-heating the battery at home before venturing out in cold weather, but that isn’t always possible. Especially for work trucks, which sit outside on job sites all day.
Then there are winter tires, which impact range quite a lot, and snowy roads you might have to plow through, which impact range even more.
F-150 Lightning owners are reporting 50-60% range losses in extreme cold weather with winter tires. Worse if you start with a cold battery. That’s withiut carrying a load. Try towing something, and your 300 mile range Lightning may only make it 50-60 miles.
Then there is the common use case for work trucks of driving to a job site, sitting cold for a couple of hours, driving out for lunch or to pick up materials, letting the vehicle sit and cold soak for another four hours, then driving home. That type of usage will destroy range as the energy used to heat the battery dissipates while it sits.
Sure. In the long run this is true, unless NIMBYism continues to kill us. But the short term will be measured in years, not months, as we need to ramp up mining and that takes time. In the west it takes an average of ten years to go from a mining plan to a working mine.
Another problem is that about 90% of the special materials that go into EVs (Nickel, cobalt, lithium, rare earths, etc) come from countries we’d rather not be trading with, or at least putting our transportation infrastructure in their hands. If we or they start sanctioning EV materials, the high prices and short supply will remain.
Nah, you just leave your diesel vehicle running. In extreme cold, if you shut down your diesel you may not get it started again. That’s when you beak out the Herman Nelson propane heater…
That’s the thing about EVs, as long as you have enough range to cover a day or two of driving, you’re fine. My range is about 300 in summer and closer to 200 in winter. Even when it’s below zero out, I still end up only charging it every few days. I, and most other people, simply don’t drive 200 miles in a single day regularly enough for it to impact our car buying decisions. And, FWIW, I wouldn’t recommend an EV to someone doing Amazon deliveries or regularly driving 100+ miles a day.
And, as I mentioned earlier, even when it’s cold and the range drops, I’m still only paying about half of what I’d be paying for gas in an ICE car.
Is that not the case with ICE cars? How many people even use winter tires anymore? I mean, I’m sure we all know a few people, but for the most part it’s not a thing. At least not without a specific reason.
Is it? I haven’t looked very closely at that car. It should be noted, however, that the Lightening does have a way to extend the range. IIRC, it’s essentially a portable generator to keep the battery charged.
And how common is that? Even with ICE vehicles you have to upgrade if you’re going to be hauling stuff around.
Stop focusing on these extreme cases (low temperatures, low temps with radiative(?) heating, work trucks sitting on job sites in the cold all day, winter tires, winter tires on snowy roads, towing something on a job site when it’s cold etc etc). If you’re using your vehicle in a way that you lose 90% of the range before you even drive it, then there’s no question that an ICE vehicle is a better idea. No one is arguing against that.
I’m going to guess that you don’t live in Canada. Distances here are long, and for months at a time temperatures can be what people in the lower-48 would consider ‘extreme’.
In Canada? In many places winter tires are mandatory. Legally, in Quebec. All vehicles must have winter tires during the winter season. You aren’t even allowed ‘all-season’ tires. In other places winter tires may not be mandatory, but highly recommended. My wife’s car gets its winter tires put on in October, and then the summer tires go back on in April or May, depending on the weather. My car has special compound mud and snow tires that aren’t quite as good as dedicated snow tires, but much better than all aeasons. Anyone who has summer tires on their car in winter here is suicidal or looking forward to getting stuck a lot. Summer tires get rock hard in Canadian winter temps and lose a huge amount of traction, even on bare roads.
It’s a feature they teased, but it’s nowhere to be found yet. It also takes up half the truck bed and will no doubt cost many thousands of dollars if it’s released.
It happens all the time. My brother worked on an ‘upgrader’ - a retrofit of a refinery. I dropped him off there one day, and there was a field beside the facility that was just full of work trucks. I’d say a couole of hundred of them, sitting all day in a cold field.
In Canada, 70% of light vehicle sales are pickup trucks. Workers who live in the city often commute long distances. My brother’s commute to the upgrader was about 30 miles each way, and lots of people came from much farther. The road from Edmonton to Grande Prairie is constantly congested, and 90% of the vehicles on it are trucks of one sort or another. The drive is 457 km. My brother used to make that drive probably ten times per year, including in the dead of winter.
In Canada, that’s called “Monday”. These are common, everyday things we deal,with. They are not extreme or rare. Anyone driving a vehicle to a job site is leaving it outside during the day. Especially pickup trucks. Most don’t even fit into home garages.
Any primary vehicle that cannot function in these conditions is worthless.
We have a federal mandate that 20% of our passenger vehicles must be EV by 2026, 60% by 2030, and 100% by 2035. We can’t do it, but that’s the mandate - decided by people who live in the warmest, most densely populated places in Canada like Vancouver and the GTA. The rest of us on the prairies, who grow the food and mine the resources and travel long distances can apparently just suck it.
Cold impacts range. This is not new. Anyone considering an EV should carefully evaluate their needs. That includes usage cases that might involve towing and use in cold weather climates. Oh yeah, but Canada.
Some made up drama between LG and GM.
Price increases. GM lowered their Bolt price by $6800 and then raised it $900. EVs are hardly alone in adjustments due to production shortages and other issues. Even with increases, the sales numbers don’t support your implication that they are impacting sales.
New V8. Not seeing how that’s any sort of indicator of GM’s (waning) commitment to going full EV by 2035. Why would they not want to use a more clean and efficient engine in their full size SUVs, trucks, and sports cars in the meantime?
How cold for how long, how exactly does it change the range? I’m not saying you’re wrong, but you make a lot of statements with very little in the way to back them up.
Lower rolling resistance tires are actively being worked on. My brother works at 3M and they have a lot of resources put towards improving EV tires. One day I mentioned how loud a set of my (ICE) tires were and he mentioned they had a team of X people (10? 15?) just working on making tires quieter for EV use. If winter tires make that much of an impact, I’m certain they’ll (not specifically 3M, just ‘they’ in general) will figure it out.
But, again, if it doesn’t work for you, it doesn’t work. But since it doesn’t work for you, that has nothing to do with how well they work for other people.
Have you seen pictures of it? I was under the impression it was closer in size to the big tool boxes people mount on their truck beds. Something like this.
What happens all the time?
Huh?
So? I’m not sure what this has to do with anything. But, rest assured you made your point. EVs don’t work in Canada. Got it.
“The regulations will require that at least 20 percent of new vehicles sold in Canada will be zero emission by 2026, at least 60 percent by 2030, and 100 percent by 2035. These targets will help increase supply so that more Canadians who want a ZEV can buy one.” From here. Elsewhere, your government says, “ZEVs are typically considered battery-electric vehicles that are fueled only with electricity; fuel-cell electric vehicles that operate using hydrogen; and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles that can run exclusively on electricity for a specified minimum distance before they transition to operating as hybrid vehicles, using both liquid fuels and electricity.”
I never said EVs don’t work in Canada. They make fine city cars, especially for a second car. In-city contractors might be able to use an EV truck. I have considered buying an EV for that purpose. They are okay if you make the occasional trip on a major highway where charging stations can be found. But if you are a farmer, an oil worker, heavy duty mechanic, insulator, or other industrial worker, an EV truck is a really hard sell.
Last year, 345,000 passenger cars were sold, and 1.3 million trucks. If EV trucks don’t work here, we aren’t getting above 20-30% EV penetration.
Again, the goal isn’t for the percentage of all vehicles on the road to exceed twenty percent by 2026, but the percentage of new vehicle sales to exceed twenty percent.
Yes, I know. I never said otherwise. My point was that we can’t get past 30% of sales of EVs if EV trucks don’t take hold here. And to get to 30% would require 100% of passenger cars to be EV. That won’t happen either. But some trucks will be sold. We probably have a hard cap on EV sales somewhere under 30%, I’d say.
No one thinks all cars on the road will be EV any time soon. Not for decades. Maybe not ever. Cars have an average age of 12.1 years right now, but plenty of 20,30,40 year old cars are still on the road here. My wife’s car is a 2005, and will be on the road for many more years unless it gets in an accident.
