211–220 of 328 posts
Following the story of a family who bought an eight year old ford ev. $11,000. Needs a new battery, $14,000 plus labour and isnt actually available because Ford have discontinue it. A bit scary. https://www.ntd.com/battery-replacement-of-familys-ev-ford-f...
Hopefully in 10 years all of these car batteries with 50% capacity left can be deployed as residential batteries for peanuts.
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You don’t need to be manufacturing batteries to make EVs. Even vertical integration darling, Tesla, is buying most of their batteries (and the tech behind them) from suppliers like BYD and Panasonic. Their in-house efforts so far are not yielding any massive success. Batteries at the core are commodities, where you have laser thin margins and supplier model that is pulling R&D costs from many companies is basically o…
>Batteries at the core are commodities I would argue that might have been true 5 years ago, but now it's proving to be the competitive advantage. Batteries and the materials that produce them are no longer selling at 'Razor thin margins' because the 'Commodity' is extremely constrained. No EV manufacturer can get enough batterys to produce the cars they sell.
But please tell me who has that competitive advantage? Tesla? They’re Panasonic/CATL shop, with negligible amount of in house production.
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Ford believes they have the battery supply for a 600,000 EV/year run rate by late-2023 and are shooting for 2,000,000/year by 2026. Bloomberg projects VW selling more EVs than Tesla by 2024 and they are planning to have 240GWh/yr of in-house battery production by 2030. BYD in China is fully vertically integrated on EV production, moreso than Tesla who relies on 3rd party mining and on Panasonic for chemistries/cell p…
so what you're saying is they are not only copying the good parts of Tesla (Electrification) but also the bad parts (lying about future production?). Ford made 30k electric vehicles in 2021, 600k means a growth rate of %1900 in the span of 2 1/2 years (They need to be at the run rate in 2026)? Battery packs were a problem to Tesla in 2018 and now they've moved onto the bigger problem that no one is talking about....…
But mainly, they don't need to actually make 600k EVs in 2024 for it to be true that they have contracts in place to purchase that many batteries if needed.
As for Tesla's mining chops, they bought mining rights in 2020 and as of April 2022 they haven't even broken ground, with Elon saying "price of lithium has gone to insane levels! Tesla might actually have to get into the mining and refining directly at scale, unless costs improve."
I guess while Elon has been screaming about it other companies like BYD and CATL have been the ones actually scaling global production.
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so what you're saying is they are not only copying the good parts of Tesla (Electrification) but also the bad parts (lying about future production?). Ford made 30k electric vehicles in 2021, 600k means a growth rate of %1900 in the span of 2 1/2 years (They need to be at the run rate in 2026)? Battery packs were a problem to Tesla in 2018 and now they've moved onto the bigger problem that no one is talking about....…
>Ford made 30k electric vehicles in 2021 source? all i could find was this https://insideevs.com/news/596347/us-ford-ev-sales-june-2022 > H1 production of nearly 34,000 units is below the level from 2021 in the same period. which is just talking about mach-e production, not other EVs.
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Replacing major components of an internal combustion vehicle will frequently cost more than the car is worth. That's usually the cause of scrapping a vehicle in places where structural rust didn't get it first. What would it cost to replace the engine or gearbox of your car?
They do below a certain point yes. But at that point you just buy another one and drive it until the engine falls out. This is how most people operate. On my vehicle an engine costs about £1275 to put a refurb in it. Gearbox about £550. There is no rust anywhere on my 8 year old vehicle. People run like this out of financial necessity. They don’t have enough income to run an EV.
From quick check in google: If you are extremely lucky, you’ll get your transmission replacement completed for $2,500 all in. If yours is one of the more expensive types, it could easily range to $6,000 or even more.
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> McDonald Douglass merger Pray do tell more about that merger!
It’s mentioned in a well made Netflix documentary about the downfall of Boeing I think. “Downfall: The Case Against Boeing” is the documentary title.
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Hydrogen fuel cell cars are in fact better than gasoline. A fact that I think often gets overlooked. But note, they do actually have batteries, similar to ICE serial hybrids. They key thing of course, is that building lots of batteries is not a 'problem', and it's lack of being a problem is exactly why BEVs are better than fuel-cell hydrogen cars for basically everything, except maybe long distance air transport.
> why BEVs are better than fuel-cell hydrogen cars for basically everything, except maybe long distance air transport. The place where BEVs have yet to prove themselves is when energy density is absolutely critical. Long distance transport of any sort (air, sea, train, semi) is really the next places for them. Semi is a maybe at this point. Train MIGHT make sense, but, IMO it'll probably make the most sense as an ene…
I'm not sure why we aren't making EVs with small but upgradeable batteries. Like for example a $20k car with a 10kWh "good enough for now" starter battery that can be bought today. Still good enough for 90% of trips and upgradable to 50kWh with additional after market battery modules should the user decide. As simple as upgrading the RAM on an (old) laptop.
I’d love a car with a tiny battery for 99% of the time when I’m just driving locally and the ability to have an extra, large battery that can be slotted in when I want to make a longer trip. With only the short range battery most of the time, my car’s weight is low and efficiency high. Maybe I could keep that battery in my house and use it to store solar electricity most of the time. It seems like it should be possib…
The only thing that tops range anxiety for me is battery degradation anxiety. I would probably be totally fine with a lower range if I know that my battery can do 100 000 cycles.
For a practical car, 200 to 500 full charge cycles per year is all that could happen. 200 for a suburban family car, 500 for an urban commercial vehicle. (200 cycles per year would be perceived by an owner as being "every day", because the days she's away on holiday or sick at home or WFH are not remembered. Nor would she remember that she only charges once on weekends.) 100_000 cycles is therefore 20 to (more likely…