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Electric vehicle battery costs rapidly declining, Tesla cited as leading

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Re: Electric vehicle battery costs rapidly declining, Tesla cited as leading

#181

Post by pmarreck »

Tesla is going to be a gigantic company one day.

Disclaimer: I own one (Model S P85+, about 2 years old). And everyone I let drive it (yes, I am crazy enough to do that... As a fan who pushes the bleeding edge, it's important to share the experience in order to change minds... Anyway, my insurance covers me even when I'm a passenger!) cannot stop talking about it afterwards. I actually think Tesla's market is limited right now not only by the people who can't afford one, but by the people who haven't even had the opportunity to drive one yet and have thus not yet had their eyes opened...

Driving is believing. If you have any opportunity at all to experience driving one... Do not hesitate. It makes everything else feel like a noisy clunker.

The older guys I let drive it, like the real car guys of old... they have the best reactions. The look of shock and disbelief on their faces... The stories they start telling about their first muscle cars... The whooping and "OH MY GOD"'s and whatnot... It's totally awesome

Re: Electric vehicle battery costs rapidly declining, Tesla cited as leading

#182

Post by rz2k »

audleman wrote: post #178
outworlder wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I find it amusing to see so many people questioning why Tesla didn't release a cheap Tesla sooner. The answer is: They don't have the batteries to do that. That's why they are building the GigaFactory. Interestingly (for me), when I leased my leaf the sales guy was talking about how Nissan could make a car with a much better range, but chose not to. It was amusing hearing it from a (otherwise backwards) dealership.…

> Interestingly (for me), when I leased my leaf the sales guy was talking about how Nissan could make a car with a much better range, but chose not to Wait, what? How did he justify that? That sounds like saying Apple could easily make a laptop with much better battery life but chose not to. Why would they ever do that?

For the sake of argument, Lenovo, Dell, Asus, HP, Samsung, Sony, and Toshiba are among the manufacturers that have managed to release a ~13" laptops with Skylake processors, and Apple still may not next week. They also haven't made any meaningful updates to the workstation Mac Pro since 2013.

Re: Electric vehicle battery costs rapidly declining, Tesla cited as leading

#183

Post by bunkydoo »

The big problem lies still in the fact that most electricity is generated from coal and nuclear. Every Tesla on the road today is effectively a coal powered car with the potential to be converted to green energy. Solar panels likely being the equilibrium. But the decline in battery cost is good, means it won't be long before they stop losing 1k on every car sold

Re: Electric vehicle battery costs rapidly declining, Tesla cited as leading

#184

Post by msandford »

walrus01 wrote: post #76
narrator wrote: post #17

I find it amusing to see so many people questioning why Tesla didn't release a cheap Tesla sooner. The answer is: They don't have the batteries to do that. That's why they are building the GigaFactory. People don't get that, on a large industrial scale, you actually have to think about supply. They think you just spend money and supply shows up because they are used to thinking on a household scale where supply is ge…

Energy STORAGE is a huge bottleneck issue for anyone that follows renewable energy news as well... Solar power itself has been cheap enough to be viable for a long time, 330W 72-cell panels for roofs have been $0.64/watt for several years now. You can quite economically cover the roof of a building in enough high-efficiency 60 or 72-cell panels to generate far more kWh in a year than the building will consume in the…

> but you need to use many of your 1200-1400 kWh/month at night

As air conditioning, but there are other solutions! Ice has neigh-infinite charge/discharge cycles and big institutions have been doing this for years. If your "campus" is more than a few hundred tons of AC it's probably cooled by ice.

It's not been terribly economical to do this at a small scale but as solar gets cheaper and batteries don't there are people working on the problem.

https://www.ice-energy.com/technology/

Re: Electric vehicle battery costs rapidly declining, Tesla cited as leading

#185

Post by PakG1 »

Retric wrote: post #160
outworlder wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a true statement. However, you should not compare car batteries (usually LiFePo, LiMn or whatever it is Tesla uses) with standard laptop batteries. Electric car batteries can endure thousands of full cycles before their useful capacity drops down to 80%. That figure can be as high as tens of thousands, depending on who you ask. Suprisingly, for LiMn, temperature and age have a much greater effect on lifetime…

2,000 cycles sounds great, but at just once per day that's only 5.5 years. Grid storage needs to be really cheap AND last for 20-50 years. Which is why capacitors and pumped hydro are both used. Capacitors can discharge 1,000's of times a day to maintain the proper wave form and hydro can discharge 1-3 times a day to handle changing demand. PS: The real advantage of hydro is you can invest in capacity or peak load as…

2,000 cycles sounds great, but at just once per day that's only 5.5 years. Grid storage needs to be really cheap AND last for 20-50 years.

5.5 years is about the lifespan of servers in a datacenter. What's wrong with managing energy storage the way we manage datacenters? We don't expect servers to last 20-50 years. And no doubt, as battery tech improves, the lifespan will improve too. But the infrastructure to get good storage needs to start somewhere. Run them as datacenters for now while waiting for battery tech to get better.

Re: Electric vehicle battery costs rapidly declining, Tesla cited as leading

#186

Post by Caprinicus »

josephg wrote: post #180
audleman wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Interestingly (for me), when I leased my leaf the sales guy was talking about how Nissan could make a car with a much better range, but chose not to Wait, what? How did he justify that? That sounds like saying Apple could easily make a laptop with much better battery life but chose not to. Why would they ever do that?

Apple could easily make a laptop with better battery - it would just be bigger, heavier and more expensive. Elon Musk claims the same thing about Tesla - that he could easily increase the range on Tesla's cars if they wanted to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsixsRI-Sz4 . But with a range of ~300 miles he thinks they're fine.

It's like when apple got to 7+ hours with battery life, their laptops started getting drastically smaller instead of continuing to have longer lasting batteries. I'd like to have a 400 mile tesla, but I'd like to have a tesla that doesn't weigh 40 tons first.

Re: Electric vehicle battery costs rapidly declining, Tesla cited as leading

#188

Post by synaesthesisx »

sremani wrote: post #18

caution. 1. a tesla accessory site. 2. the report is full of projections and hard to understand what is wishful and what is not. 3. GM: $145/kw Oct 2015 - Tesla $100/kw in 2020, how is Tesla killing it?

Purely speculating here, but once the gigafactory is operational they'll unveil the massive trick up their sleeve - Musk will announce new custom cells based on high density sodium-ion technology. Tesla will become a world leader as an energy company rather than an automative one.

Re: Electric vehicle battery costs rapidly declining, Tesla cited as leading

#189

Post by Aelinsaar »

ethbro wrote: post #34
Aelinsaar wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eventually we're going to go through some version of the "Great Filter" like wet tofu through a shredder, but this gives me hope that it won't be in our lifetimes.

Unless we already happened to go through that when life magically transitioned from monocellular, simple competitive organisms to multicellular, complex cooperative organisms...

That seems unlikely, since that transition happened multiple time along multiple pathways, and we observe that just on the single planet we know to have life.

Re: Electric vehicle battery costs rapidly declining, Tesla cited as leading

#190

Post by dmix »

bunkydoo wrote: post #183

The big problem lies still in the fact that most electricity is generated from coal and nuclear. Every Tesla on the road today is effectively a coal powered car with the potential to be converted to green energy. Solar panels likely being the equilibrium. But the decline in battery cost is good, means it won't be long before they stop losing 1k on every car sold

Depending where you live and draw energy from it could very well be 90%+ renewable energy (such as a few European countries and most of Ontario/Quebec from hydro).

The IEA/OCED world energy production sources for 2015 [1]J:

    41.3% Coal
    21.7% Natural gas
    16.3% Hydro    
    10.6% Nuclear
     5.7% Other
     4.4% Oil
And given the improvements in batteries and solar these numbers will continue to shift away from coal.

Additionally, you could also invest in a solar setup at your own house and Tesla is working on converting Supercharger stations to solar [2].

[1] http://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication...

[2] http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1096926_teslas-first-sol...

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