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 competitive in price at the bottom chunk of the used car market. E.g. if a 2030 Civic EV is price competitive with a 2030 Civic gasoline then it'll be 2045 or later before they're both competing for the "cheapest cost per mile." Theoretically, the EV wins that hands down because when purchase price is so small the operating cost dominates the cost per mile (less maintenance, cheaper gas). The problem with that is that with current tech you won't be able to find a 15yo EV without trashed batteries, so the hypothetical $2k 2030 gas civic vs $2k 2030 EV civic comparison goes out the window because the EV needs batteries replaced or will need them replaced soon and you can't exactly buy used batteries at the junkyard (they wear out) so you'll need to shell out big bucks for that new replacement battery, and I'd bet that whatever a new battery costs in 2045 will still buy a heck of a lot of gas and maintenince...
"But storage tech will improve and batteries will be able to withstand a bajillion cycles without replacement" Sure, but why would the OEMs put a big battery that's good to 1,000,000mi in a car when they can get away with one that's good to half that, reduce cost, weight, etc
TD;DR, EVs will be cheaper soon the same way cars will all be driving themselves next year.
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 like most transitions, it's going to happen far more quickly than you think. In 1905 people thought that most people would still be using horses in a century, that cars were just too expensive and niche, that horses were good enough. 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.
EVs have been around for seven years, in a "real" form, give or take, their adoption rate is similar to that of the original gasoline automobiles when compared to horses.
I give it seven more years before they're dominant.
I'm also putting my money where my mouth is, and I've been buying up nice dirt cheap houses on busy, noisy, polluted roads. They'll be nice, not so cheap houses on less busy, quiet, clean roads in fifteen years.
>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.
If anything the move towards electric car adoption will make gasoline less expensive. Oil isn't running out anytime soon. We already have the distribution and refinement infrastructure. Saudi Arabia and other oil producing countries will want to sell the oil they have before the market disappears.
Maybe in 100 years when gas cars go extinct, gasoline would be expensive. But for the time being, it's not going to massively jump in price.
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.
I just posted a reply elsewhere in this tree that expounds my thinking on oil.
In short, I think uncertainty and credit risk will cause the oil market to collapse rather sooner than most anticipate. Read up on the current contango oil market - it's unnerving stuff.
Gotta call BS. Gas in my area is currently $2/gal. I think it's highly unlikely to go up "orders of magnitude" in a short timescale, unless you're intentionally using weasel words. There's plenty of oil around, wells are being capped due to oversupply/drop in demand.
Short of a revolution in Saudi Arabia, or something along those lines, oil/gas costs aren't going to go up 10x. Although gas isn't perfectly linked to oil prices, a barrel of oil isn't going to hit $450 anytime soon. There's far too much accessible oil at under $100/barrel for this to occur.
In addition, the fuel cost-per-mile (so I'm ignoring maintenance), is capped at about 30-40x that of an electric as we already know how to directly convert air and water into gasoline or ethanol substitutes at approximately that energy ratio (~10x the chemical energy, plus ~3-4x the thermodynamic efficiency of car versus battery cycle)
> 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.
Sorry, that isn't likely. We have basically "infinite" (50+ years worth) of Oil @ $100 [1] [2] [3] a barrel which is why all those shale wells came online when oil was priced higher. We've already been ~$100 for years at a time. Similarly, the shift to greener technologies is going to put downward pressure on it once it is back to the ~$100 baseline from years past.
> we're likely to see prices at the pump go up by orders of magnitude over a relatively short timescale
Do you really believe that in a short period of time gasoline is going to cost a few orders of magnitude more... that's 1,000x the current cost?
Post-fracking that's unlikely to happen. Prices may return to previous levels, but they won't move much more than that. Alternative energy will reduce demand for oil and therefor depress the price of oil, not the other way around.
Orders of magnitude doesn't mean 1000x - just 10x is enough.
As to fracking - the wheels have already fallen off, low oil prices forced a production hiatus, stop/start is inefficient and costly, and you need only look at the headlong rush in the UK that kinda petered out to get an idea of where fracking is going - nowhere.
The fossil sector is in big, big trouble - this chaotic oscillator will not stop until the market decouples from energy. The only question is whether they'll be allowed to collapse, or if we'll see state bailouts that keep them limping along.
As to reduced demand - that's also part of the problem. Oil prices are not purely demand driven, they have costs to meet, shareholders to appease, and massive capital investment needs that will not be met with a suppressed price, which will feed the death spiral they've been in for some five years now.
Where are you getting the information that stop/start is inefficient and costly for fracking? It's less than conventional oil wells. I've found a significant cost of fracking is establishing the wells.
If the price goes up that much, fracking is viable and will happen. The only way fracking is out of the equation if when low prices keep it from being profitable. Fracking presently functions as a cap on the price.
If prices vary wildly, then there are strategies to deal with that, and the variation needs to be explained. How does it come down so rapidly? Assuming healthy economics, probably because of fracking.
It doesn't make sense to say that market prices aren't demand driven just because other costs and factors exist. If suppliers will lose money at a given low price because of costs, eventually supply decreases and prices rise, etc.
Info mostly comes from banter with energy market traders who are getting ready for a mixture of feast and bloodbath. I used to work a futures desk, mostly on intermediates. I got a decent sense of the market in those few years, and watching it is an ongoing pastime. Re: the specifics around fracking start/stop - it's staff. You either retain salaried workers who are unproductive for stretches, or you work contractors, which is expensive. Either way it drives up cost.
Re the demand driven bit - I explained that poorly. Oil is a very "special" commodity, in that it has spectacular investment costs, incredible levels of state funding (and debt), and a price determined by anticipated demand more than anything else I'm aware of - you need only look at the volume curve across futures to see this - and the fact that we are still in a contango market. This adds up to the price of oil being driven by overall economic growth forecasts, which are theoretically demand, but aren't. This results in expenditure (exploration and exploitation), which has a several year time lag. Fracking has been oh-jesus expensive and may never turn a profit. Investors (states) are getting shy.
I'm still explaining this poorly - I'd need to write an essay to convey what I'm trying to get at - there are a few dynamics at play and I will be amazed if we don't start seeing even more instability.
Confidence in the market is very, very low. Talk to traders, not what the press says. Of course the press says it's rosy - nobody wants a premature sell-off, even if there could be some tasty dead cats in it for the vultures. We still need oil for energy for the time being.
I like how you got down voted for reporting your first hand knowledge.
I used to deal with a guy in the oil business. Reselling valves pumps and misc plumbing. Nothing in that business is cheap. Just remembered, Shell? did a drilling project few years ago in northern Canada. Spent $2 billion to drill deep wells into what looked like a large reservoir of oil and it was dry. And that wasn't $2 billion in paper funny money, that was $2 billion spent on stuff.
Nah, everything is clearly totally fine, and I, like the energy markets, are wrong. There has always been oil and demand for oil. There will always be oil and demand for oil. Oil without end.
Wishful thinking, and backtracking as well. Magnitude change isn't 10x, and short of an increase in taxation, the idea that my current $2/gal gas will become $20 is just inane.
Interesting idea buying property on busy roads, but why would they become less busy solely because of electric cars? Yes, they may be quieter and cleaner, but you still have the eyesore of a road, and the associated people that roads bring.
Because with EVs we will see the rise of autonomous vehicles - once you have a car that is run by a computer and powered by electricity, and self-driving tech is available and affordable, it becomes a no-brainer.
Once autonomous vehicles become prevalent, traffic volume should drop, as we'll see less car ownership and more car use, meaning fewer cars parking, better traffic flow, etc. I believe the future of road transport is going to be something very like uber, just with no human drivers, and cars that only ever stop to recharge and to let passengers in and out.
The latter part of the equation (autonomy and associated behavioural changes) will take longer than the transition to EVs, and will happen, barring legislation fighting it.
As to the eyesore bit - I should clarify - I've been buying property on polluted, busy, pretty roads. Think A-roads in town centres, with houses on one side and a park on the other.
> 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) because SDCs are pretty cheap as is, and people generally prefer their personal space unmolested by others.
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 the fact that many car owners will get a train preferably where possible suggests that there is a case for non-ownership.
I mean, ten years ago your man on the street would have found it inconceivable that they would own no movies, no albums, that they'd just rent them - yet here we are.
Behaviour changes quickly when it starts, but slowly enough that you don't notice the change until after the event.
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).
> 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.
No, the main reason is government policy, most obviously in town planning. There's simply no place to park, and enough traffic that the journey is neither fast nor relaxing. The result is that people who could easily afford to (e.g. my friends working at Google or Facebook, or in finance) don't own cars, and use public transport to get to and from work.
Walk round the suburbs of European cities on a weekday, and you'll see lots of parked cars, in rich and poor areas. People own them, but don't find them the best way to get to work. They use them at the weekend.
If you own a car, the marginal cost of an additional trip is low (basically just gas). If you don't have a car, the cost of each trip will reflect its true cost. Basic economics will tell you this will lead to less trips, trip consolidation, other modes of transportation (walking/bike) chosen as primary transportation because ride sharing is there if you really need it. The really big cost that most people consider is parking. If large wasteful parking lots are eliminated, cities can become more compact which in turn will cause even more people to give up cars and so on.
As to your point about sharing, at some point if you want to be in the car by yourself it will cost extra. Again, economics...
"Think A-roads in town centres, with houses on one side and a park on the other."
Where are those houses so cheap that it becomes profitable to bet on the emergence of autonomous EV's only? Cheap houses are cheap in most places because they're in undesirable locations. I can imagine houses in commuting distance of major job centers becoming more attractive with autonomous vehicles (I mean, the commuting distance will become larger, i.e. the 'ring' expanding) but that expansion won't be hundreds of miles. And houses within this distance aren't that much cheaper that it becomes feasible to buy in bulk and hoard (well maybe you're spending hundreds of millions, I don't know).
Think Bristol and the like. Plenty of period properties in great locations, but smack next to traffic lights on an a-Road, therefore noisy, dirty, 30% or more cheaper than one street over. Often unrenovated as nobody sees any point in investing in a place that has its value substantially diminished by traffic, so cheaper yet.
No, hardly a squillionaire, just mortgaged up to my eyeballs and have three so far, eyeing up number four. Live in one of them. They're my hedge against the apocalypse not happening.
The main goal of the car industry (actually almost every industry, but car is one of the most expensive things people buy in their life, with the biggest impact on environment) is to make people buy new car every few years, even if the old one is perfectly fine - they want you to feel like you're missing something in life by driving the "old model". I'm probably biased, because I drive a 1998 Mercedes, but I could easily afford a brand new one, yet I can't find a reason good enough to justify this - sure, it would be nice to have the interior in perfect condition, made from better materials, but everything else is just a gimmick. My car has 200kkm on the clock and is absolutely reliable, cheap to maintain, comfortable, safe and a blast to drive. If people would choose quality cars and drive them until they fall apart, there would be 10x less cars produced each year.
I drive a 1996 Civic and feel about the same way. I'll get a new car eventually (and getting an electric does sound awfully appealing, once they start selling models with good range for a reasonable price), but a lot of modern "features" like over-the-air updates seem awfully big-brotherish to me.
One of the things I like about my current car is that it can't be remotely bricked by the manufacturer, it doesn't have any built-in location tracking hardware, there's no way to wirelessly access any of the critical electronic components, and no need to apply security patches.
It's hard to think of modern cars as anything other than a rolling malware vector. Some of these cars will be on the road for thirty or forty years. What happens when the manufacturer stops patching their bugs after three or ten or twenty years?
Accidents remove a lot of cars every year. Other than that, I think self driving cars are going to push a few rounds of upgrades. Also, safety is still improving fairly rapidly so keeping a 20 year old car is probably a poor tradeoff.
The plural of Yaris would likely be Yares if it were Latin and Yarides if it were Greek. The initial “y” makes it sound more Greek to my ear, so if we’re going to have fun with the plural form, I’d suggest Yarides.
>>TD;DR, EVs will be cheaper soon the same way cars will all be driving themselves next year.
A used Nissan Leaf can had TODAY for around $10K in the USA. You can have a used Mistu imiev for as little as $7K. Yes there are limitations of range - but if some one is looking for a standard commuter, these fit the bill.
I'm a big fan of the economy/value of used cars, but I don't think that we'll be seeing 15 year old used lithium-batteried EVs being viable. The capacity losses from time on the Li batteries are just too severe over that timeframe, and dumping oil into a 15-year old IC engine is worthwhile. Renewing the battery pack on a 10-15 year old EV isn't worthwhile (or is worthwhile, but puts a floor on the used car price).
My household has a 190K mile, 2005 Honda CR-V and a 6K mile 2015 LEAF. That Honda is likely to be viable beyond when the LEAF is viable. (Assuming no accidents, rust will eventually get the Honda and battery capacity will get the LEAF.)
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 car out of a green light). 120 km of autonomy, which is good enough in the typical European city center, apparently 80 km/h max speed, which again is more than enough there. Very easy to park.
More important matters:
Would I survive a crash? They're very tiny...
How long to recharge?
Operating costs? I'm paying 19 Eurocents per minute, all included.
Do they compete with gas cars? The other two car sharing companies in Milan have gas cars and cost 25 and 29 cents per minute. I prefer the electric one: it's a shakier ride but cheaper and more fun because of the torque.
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 had much more survivable damage. Safety cages, and metallurgy have made cars much safer, even small ones. I drive a mid sized sedan, and feel that I have a pretty reasonable chance of surviving a crash so long as I am not hit by a vehicle that is so tall the bumper goes through my windows and doesn't hit any significant metal surface of my car.
This issue was covered in great depth when the Smart Car (e.g. Fortwo) got popular in Europe. Smart Cars have a lot of safety features, seat belts, airbags (4x), ABS, stability control, but the question was really about impact distribution.
They put in a tridion protection cell[0] and moved the engine to the back to offer SOME crumple at the front. The Euro NCAP rated it 4/5, IIHS rated it "good" but it later failed the partial frontal collision test ("poor").
A Smart Car likely would do alright in most collisions. Although it somewhat benefits from the large crumple zones of every other vehicle has on the road. If two Smart Cars collided head on, the results might be worse than if a Smart Car collided with any other vehicle type.
That all being said, just because Smart managed it, doesn't mean every small car is equally safe. Without the tridion cell and SOME crumple zone, it would be a much less safe vehicle.
If your driving in a city and never break 45mph then overall risks change significantly.
I drive a relatively small car for the US, and it's about the minimum I would consider safe at 70MPH. But, if you are spending 98% of your time in the city then simply renting a larger car becomes very viable. You can rent a mid size SUV at ~600$ per week and for a longer vacation you can upsize for minimal cost. Further, if your flying somewhere your car becomes meaningless anyway.
PS: Remember a tiny electric could end up saving you 250+$ / month.
FYI, the IIHS small overlap frontal test, which I personally consider as the "hardest" test today, is done at 40mph. By that saying, a crash in the city can be worse than the test result.
In theory you're right, but in theory nobody would attempt to crash at all. We have our car sharing services as well and just recently had a fatal accident where one customer was doing everything right according to road safety rules. But the truck driver didn't.
What I remember from driving class was that the risk factors change depending on urban, suburban, rural. In urban areas car vs pedestrian accidents are common. Accidents involving cars as you said are typically low speed accidents.
In Rural areas the opposite is true. High speed car vs car and car vs tree accidents are most common.
Though bigger doesn't equal safer. I remember someone else pointing out that large vehicles don't increase safety overall, they decrease it. If you consider two large trucks hitting each other is typically worse than two smaller passenger vehicles doing the same. It's only large truck vs small car that is slightly safer. Less than one might think because large vehicles tend to roll over more often.
The IIHS published a study[0] a little more than a year ago which found that the Smart Car wasn't actually that bad in terms of driver deaths per million registered vehicle years (2011 and equivalent earlier models, 2009-12).
In its class (which only had 3 cars), the Mini was safer than the Smart but the Hyundai Accent was much much worse.
But there were lots of bigger cars that were at the same rating or worse:
The thing 'size' gets you is crumple zones. A bigger vehicle has a lot more material that can be engineered to deform and absorb the energy of the impact, spreading the deceleration over a longer period of time.
A small car can be designed to prevent intrusion into the passenger compartment, but it can't do anything about the g-forces of the collision (which can seriously ruin your day...).
The thing 'size' gets you is crumple zones. A bigger vehicle has a lot more material that can be engineered to deform and absorb the energy of the impact
Not the only thing. Recall your high school physics. Crank through the basic motion equations for inelastic equations. The more massive object experiences less change in momentum. All things being equal, passengers of the more massive vehicle are going to experience lower g-forces.
Not to be overly pedantic, but I intentionally said "size" not "mass". As car manufacturers increasingly use aluminum and various composites in place of steel, bigger isn't always heavier.
g-force depends on acceleration (or in this case, deceleration) by definition. Deceleration is change in speed over time for it to occur. The whole purpose of the crumple zones is to maximize that time and thus reducing g-force.
Safety also works both ways in a multi car situation. You're better off hitting a new Golf in your 90s Corolla than another 90s Corolla.
Also, a little talked about statistic is that most vehicle fatalities occur in single car accidents. Turns out, even a big ol' SUV is more forgiving than a telephone pole.
This seems like relevant data. Particularly the "Driver deaths per million registered passenger vehicles" broken down by size in larger categories of car, pickup, SUV. Though I think they mix the data a bit w.r.t the contribution of mass vs volume.
It seems like if you are in an accident, an SUV as a class is indeed safer (but not necessarily the largest SUV interestingly enough). But the other thing that this data doesn't seem to say is if one class of vehicle has a higher accident rate than another. Without that it's difficult to say for sure if one is safer driving around one type of vehicle or another.
I understand your point that modern vehicles are relatively safe, but after seeing the result of a semi truck taking out a pickup truck on the Interstate yesterday I am seriously considering my choice to drive a compact vehicle. I assume larger vehicles have larger/longer crumple zones compared to compact vehicles and that higher vehicles have less chance of going under other vehicles? Of course it's zero sum if everyone drives larger vehicles but I can't force the local authorities to invest in better public transportation so I don't even need to drive to work.
I agree your point. larger cars have great advantage in a crash due to crumple zones. And even though some compact cars has great crash test result, it doesn't mean they're safe enough to survive a highway crash since most if not all crash tests are done under 50mph.
BTW, just a reminder that pickup trucks are body-on-frame structure which is design for more towing capacity. Unibody structure on most modern cars and SUV's are safer in general. If you check this list http://www.iihs.org/iihs/ratings/TSP-List you'll see pickup is worse than even compact cars in crash test.
If you want to minimize the effects of the impact with a semi then the only real option is another semi; a 1 ton car or a 3 ton car makes no difference being hit by a 40 ton truck, but the 1 ton car consumes much less fuel/energy.
It was hit from the side I think? The height of the pickup definitely made a difference because most of the cabin was sitting up on the median rather than squished into the barrier like the rest of the truck. Your point about the weight is a good one in most circumstances though!
Not to be a Debbie Downer - but about 5 years ago my two good friends were driving in a medium sized car in Brooklyn, when an Expedition crossed the double yellow going about 60 miles an hour and literally ran over the entire drivers side half of the car, flattening it.
The driver sadly died while the passenger went unscathed.
The next day, my Dad sold my sister's tiny, low-riding Saturn and got her a higher-riding CRV. I don't blame him, and now riding in low-sitting cars frightens me a tiny bit on the highways.
Have you seen the smart car crashes? Those cages can survive head on 60mph crashes to a brick wall. The issue here is that the soft human inside will not. Larger cars incorporate crumple zones, which absorb a ton of the impact, while small cars with extremely strong frames do not. The passenger absorbs all the energy = death.
That's just one of many areas where readers/viewers willingly suspend disbelief.
Superman is supposed to be able to do that; that's one of the benefits of being beyond human is (for him). A literal reality distortion field is actually the best explanation for all of the exceptions to physics that happen around him; Lois passing in to that bubble while being saved is just one more thing on the list.
Isn't the real test how likely you are to be injured/killed per mile driven? Larger vehicles like SUVs might be safer if you are in an accident but that could be offset if they are more likely to actually be in an accident.
Its pretty much assumed the rate of accident is proportional to the driving miles. Does that comment mean, because of the limited range, electric vehicles have smaller exposure to accident risk? I guess a bicycle would do even better then.
What I meant was that discussions of vehicle safety always seem to start with assuming you are in an accident - what if some kinds of vehicles are more or less likely to be in accidents (all other things being equal).
NB I have no idea what the answer is and I've driven everything from large(ish) SUVs to the old style minis.
Small electrical vehicles like that are going to be used mostly in slow moving urban environments and your chances of being killed are massively affected by impact speed so probably quite low.
Yet traditionally most accidents occur quite close to home. So they will be in many more accidents? Its the severity-probability product S(a)*P(a) that yields the 'suffering coefficient'
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 saying, "I wish they'd been in a larger vehicle that was more survivable."
Once, I was driving about 65mph on a state highway and a car pulled out of a farm road right in front of me. I had one or two seconds to react and swerve around them. They were probably going 10mph when I passed them.
I was driving a Toyota Camry. If I'd been driving a large truck, I probably couldn't have avoided the crash.
When I buy a car, I want to know both how likely it is that I can avoid a crash (manueverability, stopping distance, ABS, etc) and how likely it is that I can survive one if it happens. Both are relevant.
Consumer Reports' 2016 Automotive Edition had a lot of discussion about car safety. Most of it was centered on technology that helps to prevent accidents or make them less severe. Eg, if your car detects that you're about to hit something (Forward Collision Warning) and has Automatic Emergency Braking, you might not hit it, or hit it at 30mph instead of 60mph.
That could save your life. To say that the weight of your car is a safety factor but stopping distance isn't is just silly.
> To say that the weight of your car is a safety factor but stopping distance isn't is just silly
Size is not the same things a weight. Crumple zones are what size buys you in modern vehicle design, and you don't have to have a heavy car to have nice big cushy crumple zones.
How would your reflexes have helped in my scenario, when you are T-boned (i.e., hit from the side) by a speeding motorist running a light?
Maybe you have extraordinary reflexes and could have accelerated out of the way, or slammed on the brakes, but the average driver? I think not. I'd like to have some serious steel and crumple zone between me and that motorist under those circumstances, and the tiny little electric buggy is probably not going to have the same amount of protection as a large SUV.
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 downsides.
I suspect rearview camera/sensors are far better protection against bulldozing than small cars. No car is small enough to show a toddler under your tires.
Off subject, but I'm surprised better rear view cameras/sensors are not being manufactured right now. I'm not talking about just a camera though.
Could anyone imagine a a smart camera, with a display. The camera/computer would assist the driver in seeing better at night. Would calculate the odds of a police cruiser behind you. Would warn of potential danger, like an animal on the side of the road. Would warn you if you are being followed. Would be so well designed, you still used your rear view, but kicked in at the needed times? Would map out likely spots police hide? Could even be tied into physiological body sensors? "Today is not a good day to drive? Watch out for ice. Watch you temper?"
The camera/sensors would have to be easily installed, like a stereo?
I would buy one if programmed right, and the cost was justifiable.
Then again there's someting beautiful about a simple chrome rear view mirror. A driver knowing they need to drive with all senses fully engaged, with no assistance other than experience, and good coordination.
I'd prefer that they would have been not hit at all, which a more maneuverable vehicle with a shorter stopping distance might help with.
Also, the probability I'm interested in is not the survivability in an accident, it is the total survivability over my lifetime, discounted by some percentage for cost etcetera. In your argumentation, everybody should drive around in tanks on the off chance that somebody else might get drunk. In reality, nobody does that and tradeoffs are made. Have you ever tried driving in an old European city in an average (American) SUV? You literally would not fit in most parking spaces, let alone fit in some of the smaller streets.
I recently drove a European mini-van through Paris and it was a very tight squeeze... some streets were too narrow, and in one case a moped was parked 6" beyond the designated zone, which made the street impassible for me.
It was quite a fun experience, but in the future I'll rent a smaller vehicle.
Larger vehicles have larger crumple zones and more steel all around. Are you saying larger vehicles are no safer than smaller ones? This runs counter to decades of conventional wisdom based on thousands of crash tests. See Edmunds, Consumer Reports, and other reputable organizations for corroboration of this.
Compare the death rates of small, tiny, and midsize sedans (2011 data is the latest).
Then look at large SUVs. Huge difference. "All vehicles" = 28. Most of the large SUVs are single digits, most of the smaller cars are well above 28.
Curiously, Ford Expedition 2WD is above average and is an exception. I would love to understand why because it's a huge vehicle. The Ford Expedition 4WD is way at the other end, 5 deaths. Perhaps it has something to do with how people drive, or some flaw in how it handles.
Most trucks are pretty safe, but the Ford F-150 4WD has above average death rates, and is the most popular single model of pickup truck. I wonder if this is because lots of people buy this truck who don't really know how to drive a truck.
Anyway, some interesting data to explore there. Although as I pointed out, there are some outliers, in general the data lines up with the contention that larger vehicles are safer.
>Most trucks are pretty safe, but the Ford F-150 4WD has above average death rates, and is the most popular single model of pickup truck. I wonder if this is because lots of people buy this truck who don't really know how to drive a truck.
No, it's probably because it's a truck with a body-on-frame chassis instead of a unibody chassis like any modern vehicle, and was designed for towing and load-hauling rather than crash protection. If you want crash protection, you need to buy a vehicle with a modern chassis that was expressly designed for it. Same goes for the Expedition. And yes, handling could be a factor too: these vehicles have horrible handling and can't avoid accidents the way a good-handling vehicle can, and will frequently roll over.
I don't believe any American car will roll over in normal driving. They will skid. Unless a tire catches on a curb or something. So in normal highway driving rollover is very unlikely.
Depends on the engineering I suppose. The Smartcar which is just as tiny has a very high score in test crashes. Of course its twice the price of the car you quote and owned by Mercedes and gets all of Mercedes safety know-how. Until that Chinese car gets proper accident testing, I guess we won't know, but I think its safe to assume China's cheaper/faster/copy culture doesn't lead to safer products.
Yes but this car is not a Smart, so they may not enjoy the same accident survivability rates, specially given the price point, I'd want to see sanctioned crash test results before accepting they are equivalent to Smarts when it comes to occupant protection in collisions.
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 internal combustion vehicles. That further means lower construction cost for the most complex and costly part of a vehicle, and far lower maintenance cost.
While it is true, the engine and drive train has fewer parts, when I reduce it to motor and battery. But in fact every EV has a gear, including the Tesla. Yes, this gear is much simpler, but it is there and even runs with oil that has to be replaced every 100.000 miles like in every other car. The battery is as complex as an engine itself. Because you need to measure lots of sensors values and to control that it will not explode and not wear down to fast. Every battery, including the one in the Tesla, has a dedicated heating and cooling system just for the battery within the battery.
Then also lots of parts in car are the very same like brakes, steering, air condition, windows, and so. Remember that a current car is about 30% software and will be more in future. But there is only 1 engine control unit. The most of the parts are other things to control safety or personal comfort.
Electric vehicles, today, have lower total costs per mile than equivalent gasoline-powered vehicles, due to lower energy costs of electricity and the lower maintenance costs.
That neglects the fact, that most of the maintenance costs are not engine related. Like the brakes have to be regularly checked. It neglects the fact, that a battery will wear out sometimes between 3 to 6 years and has to be replaced, which is a huge cost related issue. The guarantee Tesla has, does not help, because you will pay for that guarantee otherwise.
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 Model S is projected to retain about 92 percent of its battery capacity and range.
So what "fact" you are relying on stating the battery will have to be replaced between 3 and 6 years is probably not very factual. Other, simpler EVs, lacking the rather sophisticated battery management system of the Model S might degrade quicker - especially in warmer climates, but nowhere near as fast as you state.
Other than that, you're right in that most EVs are almost as complex as a modern ICE. They need to be checked regularly and will need repairs.
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.
>There is a Dutch study which concludes the following
You should probably link to the study.
>3 and 6 years is probably not very factual.
3 years might be early, but I have a hard time believing that Tesla has hit on some magic as far as batteries are concerned. The drain on anything I have at home is far more than what you state; my phone battery certainly isn't much good after 6 years.. But I have no idea. I guess we'll see as the current Teslas age.
It's a completely different scenario from your phone battery. Your phone battery gets charged to 100% every day (if you're like most people), gets discharged deeply on a regular basis, and has no thermal management. Tesla batteries are typically charged to 90% or less, with the 100% charge level being reserved for long trips, they're typically not using a particularly large fraction of the battery (most people don't drive 200+ miles every day), and there's a sophisticated thermal management system that keeps the batteries at the optimal temperature.
What kills lithium batteries is time, cycle count, heat, and extreme states of charge. A Tesla battery has a massive advantage on three out of those four compared to consumer electronics, which is why comparing to your phone or laptop isn't very informative.
It is funny you should bring up brakes. On most hybrids and plugins brakes seem to last forever because regenerative braking is what is mostly used over using brake pads.
My Volt has 54K miles yet my brake pads look practically new.
Also, my Volt has only had its oil replaced once (because of how often the engine runs.) When I get my Tesla 3, I'll obviously never change my oil.
> When I get my Tesla 3, I'll obviously never change my oil.
Or your transmission fluid, or your spark plugs, or your muffler / exhaust pipe, or your catalytic converters, or your oxygen sensors, or about 100 other parts unique to ICE engines.. Many of which I've recently repaired on my 160k-mile car.
Many of those items aren't consumables, and you replace from wear and tear. Why wouldn't you think a temperature sensor in your Tesla battery will need to be replaced, similar to your O2 sensor in your ICE vehicle?
One thing often overlooked is that even if a battery pack has reached the end of it's useful life for a car (i.e. 50% of it's original storage capacity), it still potentially has utility for stationary storage purposes. It seems like Daimler is already working on reusing car batteries in this way:
http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/11/daimler-is-reusing-el...
... and I read once that Elon Musk talked about it, though I can't find a link.
> That neglects the fact, that most of the maintenance costs are not engine related. Like the brakes have to be regularly checked. It neglects the fact, that a battery will wear out sometimes between 3 to 6 years and has to be replaced, which is a huge cost related issue. The guarantee Tesla has, does not help, because you will pay for that guarantee otherwise.
It seems like the battery management of Tesla is pretty good. I'd imagine 10-year to 15-year replacement of battery packs... which is still far more expensive and costly than a transmission rework (ie: a 150k to 200k Camry).
> That neglects the fact, that most of the maintenance costs are not engine related.
It probably doesn't. Already today operators of taxi and bus fleets are doing the sums on full electric vehicles and deciding to spend more up front to save over the long term. Generally lower fuel and maintenance costs are cited as why they can afford to spend more on the vehicle. Possibly these multi-million dollar deals are signed without sufficient due-diligince by people who run vehicle fleets as a full-time job, but it seem more likely they know what they're doing.
This article has lots of false assumptions.
I agree.
In fact, this article is so preconcieved reading it's last sentence felt like: 'scrolling, scrolling to continue reading after the ads... aaaand... where is the reasoning-part and the criterion-part of this piece?'
Considering the article's lack of substance and the subsequent unquestioning cheering here on HN, this article delivers less enlightenment on the future of EV than it is a statement about the bias on HN towards EV. And probably about the bias in the valley as well.
Quite. In my life time of cars the engine and drive train has always required the least amount of maintenance out of anything in a car; meanwhile I don't think I've owned a car that didn't have a window actuator go out.
- Nearly all cars will be Uber, or something like it.
- Exceptions to the above will be owned by the same sort of people who currently own Ford model Ts. They will be lovingly maintained, proudly exhibited, and illegal to drive on the public highway.
Model T's are not illegal to drive today... And you've got a lot more public sentiment to overcome and a LOT more cars to replace than you think if you believe all of this will happen in the next 50 years.
As with film cameras, internal combustion cars have a long logistical tail that is highly dependent on the continued existence of the current volume of use. So when electric cars start squeezing them out, gas stations and repair garages will start to disappear, prices will go up for fuel and parts. Poor people with junker gasoline cars they really don't want to replace will be driving longer to find fuel and sooner or later will be driven to either convert their car or sell it for scrap. The only demographic that will be able to afford to run them will be moneyed enthusiasts. Once they effectively disappear from the roads (and the voting booth) the government will ban them.
I expect that taxis and trucks will be mandated self-driving before cars will, because the safety upside will be obvious and huge, and the government is used to meddling in those industries. Seeing the results of that, there will be a sustained public pressure to mandate it for cars, with each accident splashed on the news and reporters saying "if only". As above, they'll first become rare and then banned.
Highly unlikely in the US. States will gladly take your money in the form of registration and consumption taxes associated with driving old cars. They've already paid for all the infrastructure, so they might as well maximize their returns.
Though, some European nations might. Not the UK or Germany, but Denmark/Belgium could.
>- Nearly all cars will be Uber, or something like it.
I'm not entirely convinced this will happen. Certainly owning a car will be a luxury, but it will be an affordable one (since we can clearly already afford it). I think there are enough advantages to car ownership, like instant availability, and personalised space, that mean many people will still choose to own a car instead of taking taxis.
It probably will depend a lot on where they live. The less dense their location, the more popular personally-owned cars will remain. Uber is great and all, but if you have to wait 15 minutes for an Uber ride to arrive, that's not very appealing compared to just hopping in your car and going. But if you live in a much more dense area and an Uber ride will arrive within a couple of minutes, that's a lot more doable, and saves you from the trouble and expense of maintenance, parking, etc.
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.
Unlikely. You weigh a kilogram more after the reception, in a month you'll be 30kg overweight so you have to take that into account (unless you set your survey period to end mid-reception when you're at your funniest after a few beers, so your d(sense-of-humour)/d(weight) remains above 1. ;)
Auto internal combustion engines aren't that expensive to make. A base Ford engine cost about $100 to make in the 1980s. Today's cars have more cost in the electronics than in the powertrain.
The Tata Nano, the world's cheapest car, originally cost about $1500. But Tata discovered that the versions with more features sold better. It also flunked even basic crash tests.
When they perfect the fuel cells stack technologies then electric cars will get cheaper. The issue with batteries is their power to weight ratio is not good. Who wants 400kg of batteries added to the mass of every car?
BMW did show the direction the market will go to overcome that weight, composites for the rest of the car. Aluminum was good when it came about but composites are the only future.
I do think the 100 mile range city car is a good opportunity to exploit provided they get it to city car sizes (read: Smart) and make it cheap that its such a viable alternative you cannot say no. In the US this would be 10k to 12k new pricing but specifically they would always be leased which would further increase affordability. The key to acceptance is getting people to accept a smaller package single purpose vehicle
Don't forget that EV ownership effectively requires land ownership. If you rent your parking space, good luck getting a charger installed. If you park on the street, good luck convincing the city to install more than a small handful of token EV spots.
A house in the suburbs with a garage that I could do electrical work on would account for the vast majority of the cost if I wanted an EV.
That's a problem right now, but it's solvable. Cities that wanted to push EV adoption could easily pass a law requiring landlords to install chargers, and of course the city could install their own chargers for street parking.
Obviously this won't happen everywhere, so some cities will be much better places to have an EV than others.
Don't forget that as EVs become more popular, landlords who are EV-friendly will do better than those who aren't.
So, can an electric car (not counting the cost of the battery) be realistically cheaper than a gasoline one within the next 5-10 years? I know that the number of moving parts is smaller, but these parts that are there are kind of higher tech.
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 most expensive part of the car, and more expensive than many combustion engines.
{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.
There is absolutely no way you will achieve a 50% increase in torque (at any RPM) just by switching from ordinary port injection to direct injection. Do you have any references to this claim?
The efficiency improvements are possible, mainly due to the better atomization of the fuel, but 15% seems pretty generous if we're talking about improvements from DI alone. Keep in mind that many manufacturers are adopting multiple new technologies at the same time they're switching to DI. Newer engines with DI also tend to come with wideband o2 sensors and more modern ECUs, both of which can lead to improvements in efficiency which makes it harder to determine the true contribution of DI.
There's only one possible explanation for the 50% torque improvement claim:
Many cars are switching from larger naturally aspirated port-injected engines to smaller turbocharged direct-injected engines. Maybe that's what they were talking about.
Going from a naturally aspirated port-injected 3.8 liter V6 that makes 300HP and 280 TQ to a turbocharged direct-injected 1.8 liter 4 cylinder that makes 300HP and 350 TQ could very well explain those figures, but it's the turbocharger and smaller engine that are really the key here.
They can control and modulate the injection far more with DI, because they're not limited to intake injection. I cannot give you much in the way of credible sources on the 50% claim from DI, only that I've read it from multiple sources - so treat it as marketing speak.
But even if we're "only" gaining 5% efficiency from DI, it's a pretty big deal. I'm fairly sure a GP3 or GP2 engine supplier have stated that DI provides better mileage, power, and torque, especially with an FI engine, compared to MPI.
> Bereisa based his analysis on the base Model 3 being offered with a 60 kWh battery, like the Bolt, and on Tesla achieving a cost of ~$190/kWh. He estimates that Tesla’s current battery pack cost (cells, casing, cooling and entire pack) is at $260/kWh, while GM’s is at $215/kWh. GM’s cells and battery pack are manufactured by its partner LG Chem.
On Elektrek.co
Let's say you need a 50 kWh battery to have a usable range, and it costs $ 190/kWh, then the battery will cost $ 9,500 dollar.
And that is within the next 2 years. So.. it's going down extremely fast.
The article states that the cost of a complete electric vehicle will lower than the average ICE car in 2017 and cheaper than the cheapest ICE car in 2030.
So one can expect EVs to be able to compete fully with ICE cars in just a few years.
So you get an electric model of the same car.
It costs about double.
Even if fuel prices double/triple, you can easy fill up at least for 10 years off the difference.
Now, ask yourself how often do you replace your car. :)
The recharge time will be a major factor in EV adoption. Currently it takes a couple or so minutes to fully fill a gas tank. I will wait until Battery charging tech gets there.
The author should also show a decline line on the prices of the average (and lowest cost) cars on his graph because I am sure the cost will come down for all types of cars
The author believes that electric cars will be better for ride sharing services than gasoline cars because the cost per ride is cheaper.
I'm not sure I agree. Unlike private cars, shared cars are in use many more hours per day and charging time versus gasoline refill time should be considered.
Yeah. Except no one can figure out how the system would work.
The Roadster's battery pack costs $28,000. The Tesla Model S's battery pack is expected to cost $10,000+ AFTER the efficiency of the Gigafactory in 2020.
Swapping out a $10,000+ part and sharing it between cars is going to be a major, MAJOR business / economic question. How do you do it fairly? How do you ensure that the quality of the battery remains the same? Can people cheat the system?
In the sharing paradigm it is Tesla, or a large fleet service, who owns all the vehicles. In that case they have their own battery swapping sites and they own all of the batteries. Fairness only come into play if you are assuming private ownership of the vehicles.
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 shares most of its parts with a gas one
Definitely depends on how you qualify 'most'. An electric car has nearly none of the mechanical complexity of an ICE car. Look at the engine bay and undercarriage of a typical internal combustion car:
Gas tank, fuel lines, transmission, engine, drive shaft, spark plugs / distributor cap, muffler, exhaust system, fuel pump, engine, air intake, turbo/super chargers if necessary, oil pumps / reservoirs, etc. -- many hundreds of parts can be shaved off of full electric cars.
I'm firmly in the camp that Tesla is going to have a much more difficult time that people predict in shipping a mass-market car, but that doesn't change the fact that it's much easier to build an electric car than an ICE one.
> Gas tank, fuel lines, transmission, engine, drive shaft, spark plugs / distributor cap, muffler, exhaust system, fuel pump, engine, air intake, turbo/super chargers if necessary, oil pumps / reservoirs, etc. -- many hundreds of parts can be shaved off of full electric cars.
Battery software, Battery management, Battery coolant. Electric Drivetrain.
Note that modern engines have a lot of parts because we KNOW which parts wear out over time. Spark Plugs for example wear out, and its very simple to replace spark plugs to recondition an ICE engine.
What wears out in an electric vehicle? Do the permanent magnets in the induction motor require replacement in 10 years? Nobody knows! Probably not, but there's probably something in there that needs replacement (due to rust or whatnot).
Eventually, electric motors will grow to have more parts. Not because they NEED more parts, but because we will learn what parts SHOULD have replacing.
Replacing a $4000 drivetrain whenever "something" is wrong? That's a problem. Replacing the $1000 permanent magnet in the induction motor? Well, that will be a better problem, but will require long-term testing before Tesla is able to discover (let alone solve) those problems.
Consider this: Hard Drives have more moving parts than Solid State Drives, as do Tape Drives. Yet we place more trust in them than SSDs because we really don't know the failure modes of SSDs.
You may place more faith in HDD, but I place my faith in SSD, cause it lacks the failure cases that HDD's have. For instance, I can drop my laptop and not worry about the HDD, I don't have to worry about strong magnetic fields, and so on. And there has been extensive testing done on SSDs.
By "most" I'm thinking of things like the body, interior, wheels, bumpers, steering, etc. Since I'm ignorant of the cost breakdown of these components, I can't say for sure if it's over or under the 50% mark, but my gut says over.
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.
It's certainly believable that an electric car could someday cost less than a gas one. My only beef is in the methodology of calculating the magnitude and timing of the difference, which has a lot to do with whether this will be a disruptive technology or not.
If he's publishing some silly analogy instead of his actual reasoning, then he should expect it to be dismissed out of hand.
'Disruptive' means something worse and cheaper than eventually overtakes its more better, expensive competitors, like microcomputers versus mainframes.
When you buy a car in the US, most of what you pay for is fancy molded plastic and attractive sheet metal work, cleverly organized by the manufacturer into trim level "tiers" intended to create maximum perceived value.
The package is then financed or leased with incentive financing and the sights are set on getting you to replace it after 2-4 years whether it needs to be replaced or not.
I think a 6 passenger mini-van could be manufactured for the US market (electric or gasoline) for under $8K if all the frills were removed.
This would entail simple, rubber bench seats, no radio (just a plastic bracket to snap in a smart-phone, which would also be used as a speedometer, and the smallest allowable engine.
I'd like to see an open hardware platform for car chassis, perhaps modeled after a successful platform like some of the 1980s Toyota trucks, designed to use abundantly available OEM and 3rd party parts.
Of course, self-driving electric cars might leap into reality before any of this is relevant, but once we stop owning our own vehicle, firms can focus on cost cutting for their fleets in ways that will usher in similar platform-style improvements that are difficult when people pick cars for aesthetic and emotional reasons.
This isn't really possible to produce a sub $8k, even with an "open" platform.
The reason I know this is because the VW Minibus, which was engineered in the 40s has been sold in Brazil from 1953-2013 with very little change. Want to know how much a brand new van designed 60 years ago would cost you? $18,000 USD.
That's a vehicle whose engineering and equipment was paid for decades ago, that received numerous exemptions to tightening safety and emission standards and could be produced in a region with cheap labor. It was also the cheapest vehicle of its kind on the Brazilian market.
Super cheap cars like the Versa are really only possible because Nissan figured out how to build value without making money. The $11k stripper model is a good for marketing (i.e., inflated fuel economy #; generates interest in the low price, even if they aren't viable), money can be made on the back-end (financing), lowers lease residuals, it can be used to keep factories at full capacity, and helps negotiate lower prices with suppliers.
The Renault Lodgy is more a more appropriate comparison and it starts around 9 lakh ($13500/12000€)in India. Which is still substantially more than our $8k target price.
Right, but I can imagine Renault doing a van on the same basis. From 4000$(3500€) to 8000$ is a huge gap for changing only the auto body.
It is also funny to see that Dacia Lodgy is more expensive in India than here in France with more regulation where it cost 9900€ (http://www.dacia.fr/gamme-dacia/lodgy/), closer to your target price.
I like this idea, but as someone that recently survived a fairly nasty car accident at less than 60mph, I'd want to see what safety measures you also got for that money. Nothing makes me more happy than that I had the accident in my volvo. It was a decently priced 2nd hand car, but it's safety features are what saved me.
Indeed. It would be interesting to see what kind of star-rating could be achieved using inexpensive technology.
Things like crumple zones and steel reinforced panels are cheap, things like AWD traction control are somewhat more expensive.
In terms of overall platform cost, though, I'd expect it to be possible to design a very safe car without increasing the price significantly, perhaps somewhat at the expense of aesthetics.
Dacia-branded cars from Renault/Nissan are just like that. You can go to euroncap.com and watch their A-pillars crumple upon impact. But they still do pull off their quite decent three stars, and are considered quite safe cars as for third-world markets. They are engineered to have just enough safety for their target markets, and nothing above that.
You could use a standardised software like with a raspberry pi to provide entertainment and more: http://imgur.com/a/9Xpil
With Chinese sourcing, it could be possible to drive down the components cost even more (e.g. http://www.aliexpress.com/category/34/automobiles-motorcycle...). Obviously you need to be careful about quality, but bulk buying for a reliable supplier would really help drive down costs. You won't get the fanciest latest-gen stuff, but it would get the job done for simpler components like knobs and switches.
Sadly, safety regulations make what you're asking for nearly impossible in the 'Land of the Free'...
Sure, things like crumple zones are cheap because they're just metal and space, but regulation never stops. Mandatory tire pressure monitors, mandatory backup cameras (and no, your smartphone screen won't suffice for that requirement, must be fixed in the cockpit), mandatory LATCH, mandatory airbags, ABS, etc etc etc.
And that's just the list of things that have to be in a car today or in the near future. Regulations never shrink, so expect collision warning, lane departure warning, collision avoidance, etc to all be mandatory in vehicles in the span of time it would take you to develop one or two generations of your minivan...
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 competitive in price at the bottom chunk of the used car market. E.g. if a 2030 Civic EV is price competitive with a 2030 Civic gasoline then it'll be 2045 or later before they're both competing for the "cheapest cost per mile." Theoretically, the EV wins that hands down because when purchase price is so small the operating cost dominates the cost per mile (less maintenance, cheaper gas). The problem with that is that with current tech you won't be able to find a 15yo EV without trashed batteries, so the hypothetical $2k 2030 gas civic vs $2k 2030 EV civic comparison goes out the window because the EV needs batteries replaced or will need them replaced soon and you can't exactly buy used batteries at the junkyard (they wear out) so you'll need to shell out big bucks for that new replacement battery, and I'd bet that whatever a new battery costs in 2045 will still buy a heck of a lot of gas and maintenince...
"But storage tech will improve and batteries will be able to withstand a bajillion cycles without replacement" Sure, but why would the OEMs put a big battery that's good to 1,000,000mi in a car when they can get away with one that's good to half that, reduce cost, weight, etc
TD;DR, EVs will be cheaper soon the same way cars will all be driving themselves next year.