How Cheap Can Electric Vehicles Get? • Hacker News Board

Re: How Cheap Can Electric Vehicles Get?

#61

Post by tamana » Thu, Apr 28, 2016, 2:08 PM UTC

perbu wrote: post #11

PinguTS wrote: post #5

This article has lots of false assumptions. To phrase it positively, the article ignores a lot of facts. EVs are simpler devices than gasoline-powered vehicles. They have a smaller number of parts, making them easier to assemble. At similar scale to gas vehicles, electric vehicles should indeed be lower cost to built. In addition, EVs have many fewer moving parts (in the engine and drivetrain in particular) than inte…

I think you're overestimating the battery capacity loss. There is a Dutch study which concludes the following: Based on 84 data points from the 85-kWh version of the Model S and six from 60-kWh cars, the study concludes that the Model S will retain about 94 percent of its capacity after 50,000 miles, with losses thereafter shrinking to about 1 percent per 30,000 miles. That means that after 100,000 miles, the typical…

These numbers are almost certainly because the Tesla battery is overprovisioned and actually has something like 108% of a reported fully battery when new.

Also, batteries lose capacity with time as well as use.

Re: How Cheap Can Electric Vehicles Get?

#62

Post by akgerber » Thu, Apr 28, 2016, 2:08 PM UTC

S_A_P wrote: post #43

pmontra wrote: post #13

A car sharing service in Milan, Italy, is using small two seater electric cars from China. Prompted by this article I finally investigated and found them at http://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/China-eec-l7e-80-elect... They're quoted with a maximum price of $8000. They're definitely made for driving inside a city. Not very good suspensions (don't drive too fast on cobble stones) but good torque (easily beats a gas…

I feel like the size = safety is fallacious. Size can equal safety, but its not a guarantee. Sure I would not want to get hit by a 3 ton lifted SUV with ranch style bumpers on it. I would feel that way even if what I were driving was a 3 ton suv with the same bumpers. There was an NHTSA video a few years back of a modern chevy impala hitting a 1959 impala and the much larger 59 getting demolished, while the new one h…

The video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_r5UJrxcck

Re: How Cheap Can Electric Vehicles Get?

#63

Post by akgerber » Thu, Apr 28, 2016, 2:09 PM UTC

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #51

blisterpeanuts wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the real test is how survivable the vehicle is in a collision. Probability of suffering an accident is a separate discussion. If your family is T-boned in an intersection by a drunk driver who ran a red light, are you going to say, "Well, at least the odds of that happening were very small, since she rarely drives!" No, you're going to be dealing with serious injuries or possibly deaths and you're going to be say…

Or you'll be wishing that the drunk driver was in a smaller vehicle. Or you'll be the one running over a child (possibly your own) and you'll be wishing that your car was smaller or had better visibility as you reversed. Making up unpleasant stories is fine, but at some point actual numbers and statistics are required, and everyone getting larger and larger cars in some kind of arms race seems to have obvious downsid…

But it also has the upside of allowing American automakers to sell a lot of high-profit SUVs!

Re: How Cheap Can Electric Vehicles Get?

#64

Post by 05 » Thu, Apr 28, 2016, 2:16 PM UTC

madaxe_again wrote: post #46

05 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Once autonomous vehicles become prevalent, traffic volume should drop That's simply not true; not only will SDCs create 'empty miles' of 0-passenger cars, but they will make people more comfortable with longer commutes (you can sleep on the way to work now), and with average commute getting longer we'll get more passenger-miles. Sharing won't really pick up (except on the low end, displacing public transport) becau…

As I said, "more car use" - I.e. More passenger miles - but you can still paradoxically have less traffic volume, as journies become more efficient but more importantly as freight becomes more efficient. Re: the personal space bit... Not so sure. Many of the "younger" generation spurn car ownership so have no sunk costs, no personal space to lose. For the rest, it's going to be a question of marginal utility - and th…

The younger generation is using cars less exactly because driving/parking/owning a car is expensive and a hassle, not because they suddenly prefer watching bums on the subway to watching Netflix alone. Choosing between Uber and shared public transportation is a question of cost, and self driving cars will get the cost down so it's much less of a factor. In all the countries where the share of public transportation is significant, the main reason is economical. Gas is more expensive in the EU, free parking is scarce, wages are lower, etc. Actually walkable cities help, but it's not like europeans couldn't find a use for a car if they could easily afford one. Or how about private car ownership growth in China [1]?

The other point is that American society is pretty well-segregated, and personal cars and suburbs ensure there's minimal contact between the classes. Unless your shared car service has tiers that allow that segregation to continue, a significant amount of people won't use it. Physical security is a part of the equation - you're probably not getting sexually assaulted or burgled in a personal SDC.

On renting vs owning: again, it doesn't matter - if the cars are not shared, this doesn't really affect the traffic volume (driving between drop-off and the next pick-up are empty miles, but that's hopefully insignificant).

[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=16251

Re: How Cheap Can Electric Vehicles Get?

#65

Post by martythemaniak » Thu, Apr 28, 2016, 2:21 PM UTC

I was thinking about the same thing a few months ago, so I wrote a blog post, which then turned into a little calculator.

http://martin.drashkov.com/2015/09/how-cheap-can-autonomous-...

Paying 15-20 cents per kilometre to ride in an autonomous taxi seems achievable. This means that public transit could become slightly cheaper and self-sustaining. At this rate, it also means people will likely be travelling a lot more, so maybe the price will go up again because of congestion charges.

Re: How Cheap Can Electric Vehicles Get?

#66

Post by Unklejoe » Thu, Apr 28, 2016, 2:24 PM UTC

bagels wrote: post #7

hvidgaard wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A modern ICE is extremely high tech. The tech used for electric motors and controllers are so simple and prevalent that they're surely cheaper than a complex beast an ICE is. Battery is most likely the most expensive component of an EV.

Combustion engines are steadily increasing in technology too, due to emissions laws. Batteries are the single most expensive parts of electric cars for now. It was recently revealed that Tesla's Model 3 batteries will cost Tesla around $11,400 ($190/kwh * 60kwh) to make. This is likely much cheaper than current, as they expect the Gigafactory to bring their unit costs down. I agree that this is most likely the single…

{Combustion engines are steadily increasing in technology too, due to emissions laws.}

100.

If you ask me, it has reached the point of diminishing returns too (with respect to gains achieved vs added complexity).

Take direct injection for example. It provides marginal gains in efficiency, but with that comes a ton of added complexity and side effects.

Now you have to get your intake vales cleaned every 60k because there's no fuel spraying on them like with a normal port injection system.

Now you have a high pressure fuel pump that is a common failure point on many cars. In fact, I'm surprised they even last as long as they do considering the pressures they run at (I think like 3000 psi under heavy load). Just look at the BMW N54 as an example...

Also, the injectors are much more money to replace because of the pressures that they have to deal with (and they are known to go bad more frequently than port injectors).

There are a bunch of other complicated things manufacturers are doing as well. BMW Valvetronic essentially uses the lift of the intake cam as a way of throttling the engine. I'm not sure on the reasoning, but it's probably an efficiency thing. However, this is also another failure point.

Electric cars are much simpler mechanically. Sure, they may have more software and electronic complexity, but in reality, those types of failures are easier to deal with.

Sure, a failure of some expensive piece of electronic equipment will be expensive, but I feel that those failures will be way less frequent and probably limited to manufacturing issues.

Now, software on the other hand...

Re: How Cheap Can Electric Vehicles Get?

#67

Post by mizchief2 » Thu, Apr 28, 2016, 2:29 PM UTC

The Dumbass governments around the world are shutting down coal plants in favor of more expensive "greener" technologies driving up the price of electricity, while producing electricity is a fraction of the pollution cars make. Whereas if we focused on producing as much electricity as cheaply as possible, the transition to electric cars would happen faster and cut more pollution overall. Another example of how the market can react to problems faster and more efficiently than central planners.

Re: How Cheap Can Electric Vehicles Get?

#68

Post by brooklyndavs » Thu, Apr 28, 2016, 2:30 PM UTC

madaxe_again wrote: post #14

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #12

A cheap used economy car will still have the lowest cost per mile for a very long time.... When you factor purchase price into the equation gas vehicles win by a long ways since you need X years of EV economy cars on the market before you can get an X year old used EV. EV's will need to fill the same market segment as today's Chevy Aveos and Toyota Yarii (plural of Yaris?) for a decade or more before they're competit…

You assume a constant price for gasoline, which is a bold assumption, given that the oil markets are currently gyrating wildly, and have been for some time - we're likely to see prices at the pump go up by orders of magnitude over a relatively short timescale, which will provide a big push towards EV adoption, and will drive people away from older vehicles which guzzle gas. No, it isn't going to be overnight, but lik…

The irony, or market working I guess, is that as demand for gas and fossil fuel goes down so does the price. This keeps the incentive to keep burning gas. During this recent price drop larger vehicle sales with worse gas mileage increased. I live in a city myself and its hard to realize this when all you see are smaller cars around, but in suburban, rural, Texas, larger gas vehicle are still the rule vs the exception it seems.

> Horses were obsolete within 15 years of private automobiles being a thing - by 1920 more freight was hauled and more passenger-miles were travelled by internal combustion than horse, in the US.

I'm not quite sure the analogy fits exactly. This is because the production (breeding?) of horses wasn't the most profitable industry man has every created. Remember still some of the most profitable companies in the world are fossil fuel companies. Exxon is still #2 and Chevron is #5. Also, unlike a company like Apple, they have been this way for decades. Brutal dictators are propped from oil. Entire countries rely on oil for their very existence. Due the the shear amount of money involved I do not see fossil fuels going quietly into the night based on market forces alone. As long as they are cheaper and more convenient for humanity we will use them. What we really need, in my opinion, is to #1 end the ridiculous subsidies that fossil fuel companies get and #2 enact a carbon tax where we give the proceeds of this tax to fund renewable energy research and to help out the millions of workers who will loss their jobs from the transition off of fossil fuels.

Here's another way of looking at it. In the 90s we had the big tobacco thing. 7 of these executives lied under oath that tobacco wasn't addictive. After countless hearings, lawsuits with rewards of the billions of $$$, high use taxes around the world, some of these companies are still around. People still use their products. They are expanding into emerging countries, vaping and maybe even weed. They are using trade protections to expand into those emerging markets.

Now take an industry, make it more profitable and give it millions of federal tax breaks and subsidies. Oh and instead of an economy of say Virginia or North Carolina based off of it have economies like Russia, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Nigeria owe their development from it.

I'm not saying we can't migrate off of fossil fuels. It needs to happen, and happen very quickly. However, its important to understand the shear size of the problem at hand.

Re: How Cheap Can Electric Vehicles Get?

#69

Post by epistasis » Thu, Apr 28, 2016, 2:32 PM UTC

mark-r wrote: post #49

Such an interesting premise, such a flawed assumption... An electric car shares most of its parts with a gas one, so you can't expect any savings from economies of scale there. Going back to the Model T for the cost curve is just laughable.

An electric car has far fewer parts, simplifying the supply chain.

Also the battery in an EV is a massive amount of the cost, and will be dropping on its own curve.

I've been reading this guy for years, and complaints like yours are typical, but Naam has been far more right than his critics in the time I've been watching. If he feels this is a conservative estimate then I believe him. He didn't show his full work on why that's reasonable, but I believe it would stand up to scrutiny.

Re: How Cheap Can Electric Vehicles Get?

#70

Post by mizchief2 » Thu, Apr 28, 2016, 2:33 PM UTC

madaxe_again wrote: post #14

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #12

A cheap used economy car will still have the lowest cost per mile for a very long time.... When you factor purchase price into the equation gas vehicles win by a long ways since you need X years of EV economy cars on the market before you can get an X year old used EV. EV's will need to fill the same market segment as today's Chevy Aveos and Toyota Yarii (plural of Yaris?) for a decade or more before they're competit…

You assume a constant price for gasoline, which is a bold assumption, given that the oil markets are currently gyrating wildly, and have been for some time - we're likely to see prices at the pump go up by orders of magnitude over a relatively short timescale, which will provide a big push towards EV adoption, and will drive people away from older vehicles which guzzle gas. No, it isn't going to be overnight, but lik…

I see the daily-commuter car for dad going electric very quickly in your prototypical family of for. Electric car for the daily drive then still have a truck or SUV for mom to use on short trips during the day and for long drives beyond the range of a charge.