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The Electric Car

blog.geoffralston.com

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Re: The Electric Car

#181

Post by krschultz »

powera wrote: post #88
erikpukinskis wrote: post #24

I don't think people full comprehend the price drop that is imminent. The total cost of ownership per mile for a car in the U.S. right now is about $0.60. I was watching a panel the other day where someone calculated the cost per mile of a fleet of self-driving on-demand electric cars at $0.08. That an 86% reduction. People might have their misgivings about any of this stuff... electric, self-driving, carshare, and o…

If a Tesla Model S costs $70000, even if electricity and maintenance are free (and there's no premium for self-driving) you would have to drive it 875000 miles for it to cost $0.08/mile. This seems like the type of thing that is literally unbelievable without more evidence than "I heard somebody on a panel say this".

What's crazy about 875,000 miles?

Most personal gasoline cars last approximately 200,000 miles, but people rarely keep them that long because for the average driver the car is 10-20 years old. The interior will wear out long before the engine. If the car manufacturers built the drivetrain to last 400,000 miles, they would just be wasting money.

If the car is running 24/7 at 30 mph, you would top 250k miles per year. I imagine they will design the cars to last more than a year, potentially a few, so 750,000 miles is not off the table.

Also in the world where a car is an autonomous income producing asset, initial cost matters a lot less and total lifetime cost matters a lot more. Businesses will do the math and buy vehicles that minimize their cost. Automotive engineers will put more effort into reliability because fleet owners will have data to measure.

It's a different world. A lot of our current assumptions will get rethought.

Re: The Electric Car

#182

Post by krschultz »

tomtang0514 wrote: post #170

I can't believe he said electric cars are more fun to drive. There're fun to drive electric cars such as tesla and fiat 500e, but they're never more fun to drive than most (if not all) other cars in it's price range. The only advantage of an electric car in terms of performance is torque. And it doesn't necessary has more torque. Yes electric cars has maximum torque at 0 rpm, but do anyone actually bother looking at…

Do you own one? Everyone I know that owns a Tesla says it's insanely fun to drive. That includes a couple guys I know that own gasoline powered race cars in the same price range as well as Teslas.

Re: The Electric Car

#183

Post by Aloha »

sixothree wrote: post #95
stuaxo wrote: post #83

"Ten years ago a prediction that this would be the future would have been met with scorn or laughter" ... this sounds like bollocks, I guess I am an outlier as I worked on J2me apps at the time, but mobile phones where everywhere in 2005, the US was a bit behind, but certainly in the UK mobile wasn't the future, but the present - many of those people used apps and games, they just didn't know what an 'app' was althou…

Specifically smartphones. The landscape for which in 2005 was absolutely abysmal. The iPhone was revolutionary in almost every way down to the silence switch and visual voicemail.

The iPhone was evolutionary, not revolutionary, it pulled together a bunch of ideas from a ton of different places (visual voicemail for example was seen in various TAPI applications in the 90's) - what made the iPhone slick, was not what it did - a 2006 era palm did everything the iPhone did - its that it worked better than all of its progenitors.

Re: The Electric Car

#184

Post by krschultz »

stcredzero wrote: post #155
mikexstudios wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but there's at least one really expensive component of electric cars that needs replacement every 8 to 10 years: the battery. I think the current price is about $10000 for the battery if you order from Tesla in advance. Maintenance and repair costs of a gasoline vehicle over 10 years can be less than that.

There was a US govt study cited by the Car Talk guys many years ago that found that the annual repair bill for most cars stabilized at an average of $600/yr, until the car died. (Not counting oil changes and regular maintenance.) I wouldn't be at all surprised if batteries for a car like the Tesla got down to $6000. At that point, the value proposition is already much better than gasoline cars.

$600 a year or $6000 a year?

I think just brake pads, tires, and regular maintenance exceeds $600 a year if you amortize it. Every older car I've owned then started having problems. Even if it's just the A/C compressor or the muffler, you are always replacing something every few months.

Re: The Electric Car

#185

Post by waterlesscloud »

ninkendo wrote: post #177
toomuchtodo wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The truth is we're really not that close to fully-autonomous cars. Google cars are pretty damn close to level 4 autonomous vehicles. They've driven more than a million miles fully autonomously, and Google runs their self-driving vehicle algorithms against simulated virtual worlds constantly (with data previously collected from their self driving cars). We are so much closer to fully autonomous cars than people thin…

The number of miles driven autonomously doesn't really matter if drivers have to intervene even for a second to resolve an issue. If the car is driving by itself 99% of the time, that's not good enough for the "share an autonomous car" use case. It's no good at 99.9% either. Or 99.99%. It's a lot more interesting if google's cars actually had no steering wheel or way of intervening. Because that's what we're talking…

"It's no good at 99.9% either. Or 99.99%."

That's not completely right.

If that 99.9% covers 100% of certain use cases, they will be used for those cases.

It's like much else in tech, it's not an instant change, it's going to be all about expanding the uses cases over time.

Re: The Electric Car

#186

Post by wagner12 »

philwelch wrote: post #54

This might happen, but I think Geoff is a little too breathless here. Smartphones cost up to $200 with contract. (Approximately nobody buys unlocked phones in the US.) Almost anybody could scrape up $200, and for those who can't, there are $0-with-contract smartphones by now and The Tesla Model S costs $69,900. That is a hilarious amount of money to spend on a car. That's $18,000 more than a Mercedes-Benz E-Class. $2…

$20,000 more than an Audi A6.

I don't know where you're getting your numbers, but my A6 I bought 8 YEARS AGO cost more than $49,900. $70k is a lot of money without a doubt, but it's not out of line for a mid-range luxury car. Unfortunately I don't find the Model S to be as nice to drive or ride in (except in terms of acceleration) as the gasoline cars in the same price bracket. That will change, it's not a knock against electric cars in general, but I don't think the Model S is there yet for the price.

Re: The Electric Car

#187

Post by waterlesscloud »

philwelch wrote: post #143
dragonwriter wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will probably have facilities for identifying that condition and either self-cleaning or notifying the central dispatch system that it needs to be taken out of the rotation until cleaned. Pretty much the same thing as a human-driven cab. Worst case, all those things fail, and a dirty cab shows up, and you reject it on the hailing app with an explanation of why, leading to some delay till you get the next available…

People are still disincentivized from soiling taxis by the presence of the driver. Though at the very least, you'll have to have a membership/accountability system in place, and that becomes harder and harder as you scale.

As much as I don't like the idea, it seems virtually certain to me that cars owned by a corporation to shuttle around random members of the public are going to have always-on video recording of the passenger compartment.

Re: The Electric Car

#188

Post by D_Alex »

laurentoget wrote: post #166

If this prediction is right, the electric grid will have a tough time catching up. Power plants take a long time to plan, fund and build.

But the electric car can be the tool to enable wider use of intermittent-supply renewable energy, like wind or solar! With some smarts, the cars can be charged at high supply/low demand times, and even feed energy back to the grid when demand is high and supply is low.

There is money to be made in making this happen, people!

Also, I did the math once on how much extra power a city will need if all cars go electric. It is not that much: take Perth, Australia, as an example. We have about 5.5 GW installed power generation capacity (there is a huge gap between this and the actual usage which peaks at less than 3.5 GW usually, but that is another story...). We have say 500,000 cars, driving 40 km/d on average... that's 20 million km driven, at 5 kwhr/km we need an extra 4 million kwhr/day. If the charging is spread over 20 hours, that is an extra 200 MW required to supply them all. A 200 MW power station is small-ish.

Re: The Electric Car

#189

Post by RodericDay »

philwelch wrote: post #54

This might happen, but I think Geoff is a little too breathless here. Smartphones cost up to $200 with contract. (Approximately nobody buys unlocked phones in the US.) Almost anybody could scrape up $200, and for those who can't, there are $0-with-contract smartphones by now and The Tesla Model S costs $69,900. That is a hilarious amount of money to spend on a car. That's $18,000 more than a Mercedes-Benz E-Class. $2…

> If electric cars are the future, I'm going to despair that in the 21st century, we're still hauling around individual 300 pound Americans in 4,000 pound, 16 foot long cars. The trends towards young people returning to the city center and not owning cars are both better trends to encourage and more powerful trends than the trend of selling a really nice, $70,000 electric luxury car.

Fully agreed. I wish this perspective was far more prominent. There's so many sides to pick, this is certainly not a two-pole issue.

Re: The Electric Car

#190

Post by sremani »

reedlaw wrote: post #156

I can't believe he's comparing a $70,000 electric car to a huge bucket labeled "old-fashioned gasoline cars". Of course the $70,000 car is better in almost every way. I've driven a lot of electric cars in the $5,000 to $10,000 range and I assure you they are not better than "old-fashioned gasoline cars". Our last gas-powered car was a used Lexus that cost us $8,000. It's an extremely comfortable luxury car that seats…

For 10K (+3) if you live in USA, you can buy a Nissan Leaf that came out the 3 year lease, and it is a decent car that seats 5 people with a range of about 80+ miles. Batteries are expensive and will continue to be till the turn of this decade and not a whole lot can be done. The better analogy would be laptops vs desktops, laptops gave mobility but they were heavy did not have the power etc. but by 2004 - 2006 they started to eclipse the desktops, EVs will slowly eclipse, they are expensive with range limitations but as they mature over couple of generations the efficiency gains coupled with economy of scale would make them eclipse ICE. 10 years from now, you will not find a Pure ICE vehicle in new cars, every car will have battery of some meaningful size.
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