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Electric vehicle battery prices are expected to fall almost 50% by 2026

goldmansachs.com

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Re: Electric vehicle battery prices are expected to fall almost 50% by 2026

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok name an EV part you can be a DRM asshole with and tell me the mechanism by which you're enforcing the DRM and I'll bet it's equally enforceable with a similar mechanism on the gas vehicle.

Battery pack being DRM locked, while gas tank can't be.

Gas tank can be behind DRM, just as a battery can be.

They're both naturally rather simple affairs: In their most primitive forms, a fuel tank is just a container that holds fuel, and a battery is just a collection of cells.

But nothing at all prevents either thing from being rather more complex than that with the inclusion of necessary electronics that are DRM-locked.

Re: Electric vehicle battery prices are expected to fall almost 50% by 2026

#122
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As cool as an inductive charging strip would be, offhand, the inherent losses as well as practically microwaving the underside of the car, would probably both be too much. Now, parking lots where a robot lifts an underside contact up if there's a match, that might just work.

Wirless charging my phone is idiotic from an energy point of view, but convenient. I do thing the last 20.000 years of human progress has been driven by convenience (and security). I'd bet for the more convenient solution every day.

That's not a very fair comparison.

I'm not worried at all about the power efficiency of my phone's charging process.

Some napkin math suggests that my pocket supercomputer costs me at most about $1 per year to keep charged and running, or perhaps $5 over the life of the phone, when plugged in every night. I wouldn't notice or care if it were an order of magnitude worse than that at $10 per year or $50 over the life of the phone.

So wireless charging of my phone doesn't bother me a bit, and it is something that I use that when it is convenient.

An EV doesn't operate at that scale, though. I would care a lot about losing even 10 or 20% of charging efficiency with an EV.

Re: Electric vehicle battery prices are expected to fall almost 50% by 2026

#123

I've been calling this shot for years. The cost optimization runway for EVs is much longer than for gas cars. Their adoption will eventually be a pure numbers game as new electric becomes cost competitive with used gas. That's how the pragmatic adoption will happen. You don't need, for instance, catalytic converters or a bunch of other expensive, low tolerance parts and since the fuel storage is electricity, new chem…

Inductive road charging is pretty hard to imagine being feasible. The efficiency of inductive charging at a standoff distance while moving at high speed will be abysmal. About as hard to conceive of as UBeam working out.

You should do an Internet search for it. I haven't done the engineering on the numbers but it's already happening

Re: Electric vehicle battery prices are expected to fall almost 50% by 2026

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More rural places without electrification are the big long term use until renewable tech becomes better and significantly cheaper. In the future there will be off-grid unmanned free standing windmill or solar installations with a car charger hooked up to it. People will put such public chargers on their vacant land, say in the desert, for passive income, profit sharing with the installer. Their storage capacity, pric…

Small perk of the iron-air battery (such as the largest battery in the world, being built in Maine, https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/long-duration-energy-st... ), is that it's also bulky & heavy, which is harder to steal! Other future imagining: a bunch of wrecked or old EV's being used for their battery capacity, buffering power from solar. Charge station of old cars holding juice for new ones.

I'm sure there's going to be battery "rejuvenation" plants where they reset the chemistry on old batteries and refurbish them as new.

When we're talking batteries that cost in the thousands, it starts to make sense

Re: Electric vehicle battery prices are expected to fall almost 50% by 2026

#125
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's already sub $10,000 conventional form factor EVs such as https://electrek.co/2024/03/06/byd-launches-cheaper-seagull-... And then there's the immensely popular $4,000 Wuling Hongguang Mini EV https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuling_Hongguang_Mini_EV Meanwhile the average used car in the USA is $25,000 https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/buying-a-car/when-to-bu... So this is already a reality, we're just livin…

A used Dacia ICE is quasi unbeatable, you just can’t compare apples with oranges.

This isn't apples and oranges. The point of most cars being bought used is most cars are almost purely functional. If the math works out that electric is financially superior, it will come out ahead for those use cases.

That's why electric car adoption is an s curve

Re: Electric vehicle battery prices are expected to fall almost 50% by 2026

#126

The biggest problem in Germany at the moment is that a high percentage of chargers are broken. Here is a supermarket with chargers, broken for weeks now. Imagine the outcry if 50% of gas pumps were broken all the time.

All new industries are plagued by functional problems during the scaling stage. Electricity isn't inherently as unreliable in other applications so these problems will eventually be resolved and have approximately the same failure profile as normal electricity.

Re: Electric vehicle battery prices are expected to fall almost 50% by 2026

#127
I still wait here in Europe prices like https://asia.nikkei.com/content/1f9ed40b4b44745e1a39fafaf94b... for cars and BRICS-like prices for p.v. at least for those who want to self-construct.

My p.v. is only 5kWp/8kWh LFP because at 2019 prices that's a bit more than a wise economical choice, at BRICS price it would quickly evolve in a 10kWp/30kWh allow me to be nearly autonomous for large part of the year...

Re: Electric vehicle battery prices are expected to fall almost 50% by 2026

#128

I've been calling this shot for years. The cost optimization runway for EVs is much longer than for gas cars. Their adoption will eventually be a pure numbers game as new electric becomes cost competitive with used gas. That's how the pragmatic adoption will happen. You don't need, for instance, catalytic converters or a bunch of other expensive, low tolerance parts and since the fuel storage is electricity, new chem…

> I've been calling this shot for years You and literally millions of people. It was obvious to anyne paying attention. What was ludicrous, then as now, were the people saying Tesla was going to bankrupt every car company. Instead, if it wasn't for tariffs, the Chinese manufacturers would be eating everyone's lunch.

American car manufacturers have fallen greatly after the Jack Welshification of the industry over the past 50 years.

There was an intentional hollowing out of the US industrial base because pillaging and gutting for profit made stock go up faster.

Now we sit on top of wrecked husks: GE, RCA, GM, Motorola. It was all intentionally dismantled and sold off.

The problem isn't Tesla or electric cars, it's the conservative orthodox economists and their political lackeys that looted the industrial base in order to manufacture stock bubbles and claim it as progress

And it will never be addressed until people stop claiming drag queens and bathroom signs have somehow swindled their wealth.

Re: Electric vehicle battery prices are expected to fall almost 50% by 2026

#129
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everywhere is massive and spread out like US. In Ireland I can basically get anywhere in the whole country with one charge and maybe a top-up along the way. I'm more than happy with my 400km range.

I'm also in Ireland and while 400km might get you anywhere in the country, it won't get you home. Fast charging here is more expensive than petrol (over twice as much per km in many cases), the charging infrastructure is not reliable, and it's very easily overwhelmed. After the All Ireland semi-final this year, there were multi-hour queues for fast chargers on the M7. Multi-minute queues for petrol. This is reflected…

Yeah you have a point, but I also don't think it's fair to use a once-off surge in demand as your counterpoint.

If I am driving far enough to warrant a charge, chances are I'm spending some time at my destination before coming back. 4 hours at 7kW (slow AC charge) is 28kWh, which ~40% of my total battery capacity, or about 200km of range. It probably won't get me home but I can probably get to another less busy charger on my way home.

I do agree though, the charging infrastructure needs to be built out much more. I dream of a day where every parking space in every parking lot has a slow charging port, and there are much much more ~50kW installed. But the current level of build-out is not that bad, and when combined with home charging it's basically a non-issue ~80% of the time.

Maybe next time, get your car topped up before going to the game, and then afterwards you can just drive home, skipping probably the majority of the surge traffic. Or take the bus!

Re: Electric vehicle battery prices are expected to fall almost 50% by 2026

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also in Ireland and while 400km might get you anywhere in the country, it won't get you home. Fast charging here is more expensive than petrol (over twice as much per km in many cases), the charging infrastructure is not reliable, and it's very easily overwhelmed. After the All Ireland semi-final this year, there were multi-hour queues for fast chargers on the M7. Multi-minute queues for petrol. This is reflected…

I remember when the major advantage of EVs were “you won’t pay for gas anymore.” And now it switched to “well, it’s 10% cheaper than gas but the car itself is 3 times more expensive.” I don’t understand how they expect poor people to buy these massively.

When I use public chargers, I pay about €0.08 / km.

When I charge at home, I pay about €0.01-0.02 / km.

Assuming ~€0.10 / km for a reasonably economical diesel nugget...

That's a little more than 10% for home charging :)

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