Battery Electric Vehicle News / Enjoying the Transportation Revolution

pile-o-stone

andrewf75 wrote: »

The next step should be people paying a monthly cost for the shared use of a car, therefore reducing the numbers of cars on the road drastically.

That'd be great for a road near us. It's effectively a one lane main road because people park on the road outside their houses. It's a nightmare having to reverse back because a bus is coming at you!

GreatApe

pile-o-stone wrote: »

As you say, it's true of every technology. I remember when CD drives for a desktop computer were over £300 and now they're £15!

My pal bought a DX2 processor for his PC for £400 and I got one about a year later at a quarter of that price. VCRs were hundreds of £s and can now be gotten for free at the dump

With cars it'll be a set price for a while but with larger and larger batteries for the same money. Eventually as they go mainstream the price will fall. With a lot of people using PCP instead of actually buying cars, its the monthly payment they're concerned about not the price of the car as they will never own it. I was offered a Nissan Leaf at £300pm. I have no idea what its purchase cost was.

Arguments of the price of DVD players or computer chips don't apply to bulk manufactured goods

Transistors get cheaper because it's akin to writing on paper
If I sell you a piece of A4 paper with 100 words on it for £1 I'm charging you 1 penny per word
If I now sell you a piece of A4 paper with 1,000 words on it (smaller font) for £1 I'm charging you 0.1 penny per word
If you look at it in terms of words per page you've got 10x the value even though you still only got one sheet of paper

It's how exponential computer technology works
You're not really getting more silicon you're getting smaller font
And the amount of font on the silicon can keep on doubling every ~2 years as you can just write smaller and smaller and smaller without signifcant cost growth per page

This doesn't apply to manufactured goods
Tesla can't sell a model 3 that's half the size in 2022 and then half the size again in 2024 and then half the size again in 2026 etc

Also a lot of the manufacturing cost improvements we've seen over the last 30 years was swapping workers in the west getting £15 an hour with workers in the east getting £1 an hour.
This is both directly eg the Chinese giga factory workers will be on 1/10th the wage as the American ones but also indirectly in that the Chinese workers that built the building were paid 1/10th as much as would have American workers


Anyway to counter your argument of technology always rapidly gets cheaper...

What about solar PV panels what was the price of a 4KWp system five years ago Vs today?

What was the price of a model S seven years ago Vs today?

GreatApe

andrewf75 wrote: »

The next step should be people paying a monthly cost for the shared use of a car, therefore reducing the numbers of cars on the road drastically.

But that's if the government are actually seriously about addressing the problems rather than simply selling us more stuff....

This would work well but there is a chicken and egg problem. You need a very large fleet which would cost £10 billion plus

It can be overcome with a company with very big pockets

Like one of the big auto companies or one of the big tech companies

Say VW drops 1 million rental polos in England

Go up to any of them open and start with an app use for when you need it and park anywhere where it's legal and free to park

Something as low as 60p a mile would be very profitable
12p a mile for the car (assuming only 5 year 100,000 mile life)
10p a mile fuel
Leaves 38p a mile to cover maintenance insurance and profit

1 million is so many cars that there would be literally one every 30 homes
Every street would have one or multiples


Instead of being used 7,500 miles a year
Perhaps they would be used 25,000 miles a year
This also makes BEVs far more compelling

NigeWick

andrewf75 wrote: »

The next step should be people paying a monthly cost for the shared use of a car, therefore reducing the numbers of cars on the road drastically.

It will be Transport as a Service with Autonomous Battery Electric Vehicles. Possibly a subscription plus a couple of pence per mile, or, like a taxi at a few pence per mile. The number of personal cars should go down by up to 80%. All this according to American academic Tony Seba. His projections on BEV costs have proven accurate so far and he reckons we'll have 200 mile range BEVs at about £12,000 within 5 years. With the way batteries and charging are going (350kW), it will only take 5 minutes to put in over 100 miles of charge.

JKenH

It’s not just about saving money and the planet

https://www.which.co.uk/news/2020/01/why-electric-car-owners-are-the-happiest/

almillar

How can you disagree with it? (raw materials)

I've already explained. You say more raw materials are needed for an EV drivetrain, including battery, than for an ICE drivetrain. There, we agree. Where we disagree is that I think that EV batteries (the most raw materials in an EV) have got cheaper. I think they will continue to get cheaper. I do NOT think they will freefall. I also think that as ICE production numbers reduce, they will get more expensive, just as EV numbers increase, and economies of scale will make them cheaper. You have rejected these ideas with no good reason that I've seen. Don't tell me again that Teslas haven't got cheaper, or that things are being subsidised.

Sure but not a lot hence why you can build and sell ICE cars at a profit for under £9,000 eg i10

How do you know Hyundai aren't subsidising the i10 with their more expensive models. Just to bounce your own ideas back on you.

I'm saying I'm confident it won't happen before then, not that it will happen by then or at all

OK, that's grand, and a reasonable view, we can leave it there.

What about solar PV panels what was the price of a 4KWp system five years ago Vs today?

An easy one, that you argue yourself - you missed the period during which they DID fall in price. They stabalised, maybe they're improving in efficiency instead of getting cheaper. You're absolutely right that we shouldn't be comparing batteries to chips, but again, using your own argument, you can only get so small on the chips. Then the price will stop dropping.

GreatApe

almillar wrote: »

I've already explained. You say more raw materials are needed for an EV drivetrain, including battery, than for an ICE drivetrain. There, we agree. Where we disagree is that I think that EV batteries (the most raw materials in an EV) have got cheaper. I think they will continue to get cheaper. I do NOT think they will freefall. I also think that as ICE production numbers reduce, they will get more expensive, just as EV numbers increase, and economies of scale will make them cheaper. You have rejected these ideas with no good reason that I've seen. Don't tell me again that Teslas haven't got cheaper, or that things are being subsidised.

This idea works until it doesn't
Why haven't PV kits fallen in price over the last 5 years or so?

As for ICE numbers falling why do you think this is likely
The world will build more ICE cars in 2030 than in 2020
Also the idea of lower numbers resulting in higher prices doesn't work for contracting industries in fact it's the opposite. If ICE numbers contract, which won't happen this decade, ICE will get cheaper because they will be running down their industry. In the same way when the Saudis flooded the market to push oil prices down. Did the US shale industry go bankrupt or cut costs?
The same would happen with ICE cars
They will cut costs not go bankrupt

How do you know Hyundai aren't subsidising the i10 with their more expensive models. Just to bounce your own ideas back on you.

Why would they? They are not a charity
While EVs are subsidised both directly and indirectly
Tesla sold close to $2 billion in zero emmissions credits since 2012 that's your subsidy right there
Plus the direct subsidy like the $7,500 per car federal tax credit etc

An easy one, that you argue yourself - you missed the period during which they DID fall in price. They stabalised, maybe they're improving in efficiency instead of getting cheaper. You're absolutely right that we shouldn't be comparing batteries to chips, but again, using your own argument, you can only get so small on the chips. Then the price will stop dropping.

We both now agree !!!! doesn't just keep falling in price
The only exception has been computer tech
And that's because you are effectively buying a pattern
And companies can always (or at least for a very very long time) just draw patterns on the same A4 sheet of pattern with smaller and smaller font

So the question is where are we on the EV cost curve
Still at the point prices just keep falling rapidly
Or near the point prices stabilise and stop falling?
Neither of us know the answer to this
But with the model s price not having fallen for 8 years one wonders how much EV prices can fall from here......

Now I think there are indeed price falls to be had
Mostly because manufacturing costs can be reduced quite a lot by paying Chinese people $3 an hour rather than $20 an hour to American workers (or even $1/pH to Indians). In the same way OV prices fell a lot when it went from Germans making them to low wage Chinese making them. But this is only a one off

My best guess is we have two generations of price falls 5-10 years and then that will probably be it. My guess is the price point at that stage will still be higher than ICE. I think the sweet spot will be plug in hybrids with 90-99% of the emmissions benefits at a fraction of the weight and cost

With a wild card of NG powered hybrids allowing huge fuel price reduction for motorists
With NG costing 1/7th of what petrol costs. $1000 petrol bill becomes a $150 NG bill. The difference can be used to install solar to improve hosting insulation and efficiency

zeupater

almillar wrote: »

What about solar PV panels what was the price of a 4KWp system five years ago Vs today?

An easy one, that you argue yourself - you missed the period during which they DID fall in price. They stabalised, maybe they're improving in efficiency instead of getting cheaper. You're absolutely right that we shouldn't be comparing batteries to chips, but again, using your own argument, you can only get so small on the chips. Then the price will stop dropping.

Hi

Agree on this point, it's a devised argument based on a flawed premise ...

The issue at hand is that over the preceding five year period the price of a typical fully installed 4kWp system in the UK fell from >£20k to <£5k, so around 75%.

Taking this argument forward, any argument based on price movement over the past 5 years would need to ignore the reasons for this ... mainly retrofitting on existing roof spaces does not allow for leveraging of both ... (i) Solution synergy (ie not duplicating roofing materials) -and- (ii) Shared labour/infrastructure (ie labour & scaffold on site) ... for new build properties, this artificially introducing inefficiencies which would not be apparent within a true cost comparison ... proof for this is easily obtainable through comparing PV farm scale development costs over the entire period through their main logical proxy ... contracted supply prices per MWh ... where reported prices continue to fall.


I think that one of the issues that is often missed is that it is the highly vertically integrated structure of Tesla that gives them a cost advantage over many of their competition. Buying components from a supplier where there is in-house expertise & no volume related cost disadvantage simply results in lost opportunity on administration & fixed overhead recovery as well as paying towards someone else's profit margin.

It's not that legacy manufacturers don't know this, they've been in business for long enough to understand where sourcing components from the supply base is cost effective, but the BEV sector is different in so many ways ... there simply isn't an established technical supply base for the required components in the required volumes at the moment, so they effectively have limited options ... denial, wait for supply chain development, financially support supply chain development -or- take responsibility through a more vertically integrated manufacturing strategy ... guess what the majority of sector players have chosen not to do & how that impacts on the cost/price/competitiveness of their product offerings? ...

This is why Tesla are widening the time-gap (/lead) between themselves & most other manufacturers ... when growth in the BEV market starts to accelerate it's likely that many companies will run up against severe supply constraints whilst additional supply-chain capacity is laid-down, whereas others will continue to leverage their strategic advantages to maintain a price competitive edge! ...

HTH
Z

GreatApe

zeupater wrote: »

Hi

Agree on this point, it's a devised argument based on a flawed premise ...

The issue at hand is that over the preceding five year period the price of a typical fully installed 4kWp system in the UK fell from >£20k to <£5k, so around 75%.

Taking this argument forward, any argument based on price movement over the past 5 years would need to ignore the reasons for this ... mainly retrofitting on existing roof spaces does not allow for leveraging of both ... (i) Solution synergy (ie not duplicating roofing materials) -and- (ii) Shared labour/infrastructure (ie labour & scaffold on site) ... for new build properties, this artificially introducing inefficiencies which would not be apparent within a true cost comparison ... proof for this is easily obtainable through comparing PV farm scale development costs over the entire period through their main logical proxy ... contracted supply prices per MWh ... where reported prices continue to fall.


I think that one of the issues that is often missed is that it is the highly vertically integrated structure of Tesla that gives them a cost advantage over many of their competition. Buying components from a supplier where there is in-house expertise & no volume related cost disadvantage simply results in lost opportunity on administration & fixed overhead recovery as well as paying towards someone else's profit margin.

It's not that legacy manufacturers don't know this, they've been in business for long enough to understand where sourcing components from the supply base is cost effective, but the BEV sector is different in so many ways ... there simply isn't an established technical supply base for the required components in the required volumes at the moment, so they effectively have limited options ... denial, wait for supply chain development, financially support supply chain development -or- take responsibility through a more vertically integrated manufacturing strategy ... guess what the majority of sector players have chosen not to do & how that impacts on the cost/price/competitiveness of their product offerings? ...

This is why Tesla are widening the time-gap (/lead) between themselves & most other manufacturers ... when growth in the BEV market starts to accelerate it's likely that many companies will run up against severe supply constraints whilst additional supply-chain capacity is laid-down whilst others will continue to leverage their strategic advantages to maintain a price competitive edge! ...

HTH
Z

Lots of words saying nothing much at all

We all agree prices don't fall continuously forever
The question then becomes are we still at the stage where large BEV price falls will happen or is that in the past?

One can point to the model s price not falling for 8 years.....
Or the model 3 for nearly 3 years now no price falls....

Personally I think there WILL be price falls from here but that the price point will still be significantly above ICE cars once prices stop falling. Anyway none of this matters much what will be will be

ASavvyBuyer

DPD targets 1 in 10 electric van mix with new Nissan deal


https://www.motoringresearch.com/car-news/dpd-300-electric-vans-fleet/