Thanks

but Nissan (I think) is trialling a system where they take car batteries and repurpose them for home use once their performance drops below a certain output.

Someone is offering a Powerwall style thing which has two prices, one with new cells and one with ex-car cells, which is a bit cheaper…..

Nissan Leaf’s are interesting – pretty much one of the fastest depreciating cars you can buy. Obviously most of the public are not too keen. The newer 125-150mile range cars look great if you are doing lots of shorter trips but only when you get to over 200miles plus does range anxiety seem to disappear.

That said I read blogs from people who drive the higher range Teslas and it still seems to be a PITA to drive them longer distances.

“Nissan Leaf’s are interesting – pretty much one of the fastest depreciating cars you can buy. Obviously most of the public are not too keen.”

Absolute rubbish.

Forget about the nonsense list prices. A Nissan leaf 30kwh Acenta bought direct from a dealer costs about 20k and a 1 year old one with around 10k miles is 15k. My 3 year old 24kwh Tekna cost about 22k new and is now worth about 9-10k

No different to a conventional car. People only think that they depreciate faster because they have inflated the list price to take into account the PiG and that distorts the depreciation tables. Plus people are also confusing battery leased versions which much lower resale as people don’t want to be tied into a lease (understandably)

very few were actually sold with a rented battery, only the early ones.

pretty much one of the fastest depreciating cars you can buy. Obviously most of the public are not too keen

Good news for the likes of me then. Once they drop to around £5k or so they enter second car runaround territory where a 200 mile range is of no use.

Obviously most of the public are not too keen.

Quite a few in my neighbourhood, pass three within 500 yards of the house…

Yes, but you can get a lower spec Golf for less. You can’t get a lower spec Tesla for less. You can also get VWs at varying price levels down to £8,340. When you can get a new Tesla for that price, that’ll be an achievement.

Yes it will be an achievement, but give them time, although it might not be a Tesla at that point, the goal is after all to stimulate an EV revolution, not be the sole seller… Don’t forget we’ve had ~100 years of ICE development to get them that cheap and affordable, the first ICE weren’t cheap either.

We may also need to look at them a bit differently. If you break it down and make some (relatively sensible) assumptions:

– chassis/interior costs comparable to normal car within reason
– means the ‘extra’ cost is in the drivetrain

So, is that extra cost in the batteries, motors, or peripherals for them)?

I believe it’s mostly in the batteries, and certainly given time and scale there’s little reason that motors and the peripherals shouldn’t be cheaper than an ICE and it’s many more peripheral parts

That leaves batteries, if we can crack the cost of batteries, or mitigate it by making them a lifetime/recyclable element you’re left with producing a cheap hatchback chassis with some motors in it instead of an ICE and gearbox, preferably divorcing the concept of batteries from the car itself if possible.

^ that should be cheaper (especially in the long run), and the batteries can then be dealt with as a ‘lifetime’ cost, either portable between cars if we could ever get that level of standardisation, or recyclable/leasable and treated as an ongoing cost like petrol/diesel is now.

What isn’t happening enough yet is co-operation and inter-working between manufacturers, and little standardisation.

We’re in the fledgling tech stage at the moment where all the companies are all trying to kind of do their own thing, eventually there will be some winners and some losers and some standards will develop (I hope).

Yes it will be an achievement, but give them time

What makes you think they’ll become cheap? Some things just are expensive.

Economies of scale make a huge difference in things like normal cars, because they are all made of cheap metal and it’s the tooling and processes that make them expensive.

Li-ion batteries are not new tech, we’ve been making them by the bucketload for years but a laptop battery is still £100. If someone invented a car powered by diamonds, you wouldn’t be predicting how the cost of diamonds would plummet would you?

Everyone hand-waves this problem away but it’s the bottom line here.

We’re in the fledgling tech stage at the moment

Don’t think so. None of it’s new tech.

Li-ion batteries are not new tech, we’ve been making them by the bucketload for years but a laptop battery is still £100.

The adoption of Li-ion cells by cars / power walls will massively increase volumes which will help lower prices.

Also, Laptop battery prices, when bought as spares, aren’t related to the cost of cells – which are about £12 for 6 cells (bought in volume). It’s the cost of stocking / handling small orders etc.

A Tesla car has over 1700 cells…

Also with Tesla, I think the big picture is the most impressive bit: electric cars + solar cells on roofs + power walls, a complete ecosystem (as long as it’s sunny).

We’re in the fledgling tech stage at the moment

Don’t think so. None of it’s new tech.

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OK, fledgling market 😉

Yes it will be an achievement, but give them time

What makes you think they’ll become cheap? Some things just are expensive.

[/quote]

Did you read my post fully, I did put forward a potential workaround for that. I never said the batteries had to become cheap, if they will always be expensive that’s where the alternative approach could work.

The batteries become your lifetime fuel/running costs, with the cheap ‘shell and motors’ bit being more of a commodity. Imagine that setup, you buy/lease an expensive battery, and then it gets inserted into the (cheap) box on wheels appropriate to your needs.

If your needs change you buy a bigger/smaller box on wheels and shove your battery in. Bigger box needs more oomph? that’s OK, the big ones have two battery slots 😉

When the battery wears out or reaches a point where performance is degraded then it can be swapped/refurbed/recycled, (an entire industry would spring up around that) but ultimately you treat it like the fuel cost.

The analogy would be buying like buying a portable ICE, and just sticking it in a new car each time. Once you have your power plant the difference in cost between a bargain golf and a posh Golf is purely down to the trinkets you spec it with.

Decent collaboration, standardisation and modularisation (easier with things like batteries and motors as they are already pretty standardised and modular) could make this kind of thing a reality IF we worked at it.

I’ll grant you at the moment we’re not doing anything like that, but part of the problem at the moment is that people are trapped by the existing concepts. We need to look at how it could work, not how it currently doesn;t work.

The adoption of Li-ion cells by cars / power walls will massively increase volumes which will help lower prices.

Unless lithium is a limited resource…

Let’s see shall we? 🙂 Although I reckon it’ll take a different tech to make the breakthrough.

An interesting point about longevity. Batteries may have a short life but I bet the rest of it is going to last ages.

Unless lithium is a limited resource…

Supposed to be millions / billions of tonnes in Bolivia (a lot anyway), below the world’s flattest salt lake.

Another fear of mine is how explosive those batteries are, possibly not more than petrol, but I’ve seen the videos of people piercing phone batteries!

Well Nissan sold 18,000 Leaf’s in Europe last year (just looked it up) and it’s discounted very heavily (which granted skews the depreciation figures – although depreciation figures just work on list prices) which makes it a bit of a sales disaster. Sorry Winston you seem to be an offended Leaf owner.

Actually I like them and I’m considering a £7-8k Leaf as runabout.

Another fear of mine is how explosive those batteries are, possibly not more than petrol, but I’ve seen the videos of people piercing phone batteries!

A lot less that you’d think…

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0IHNrW0QOA[/video]

dougiedogg

What happens when the reach their estimated battery life?

What happens when your ICE reaches it’s estimated life?? (they are designed for 10 years and 150kmiles)

The reason a car depreciates, other than not being “the latest thing” and hence not as fashionable as it once was, is because it has less life left in it. Own a ICE with 100kmiles and it’s basically 2/3 knackered, and at some time something expensive may fail and right the car off, hence your 100kmile hatchback is worth about £3.

The difference, is that an EV battery TELLS YOU how knackered it is! Press the right buttons on the dash, and you are told exactly how worn out it is!

What happens when your ICE reaches it’s estimated life?? (they are designed for 10 years and 150kmiles)

The ICE isn’t a single component. Your turbo *might* fail, your EGR *might* fail, etc, but it’s by no means a certainty and when they do fail it’s a matter of hundreds of quid to replace. Much less if you can do it yourself.

The battery on a Tesla will definitely fail, and it will definitely cost many many thousands. And doing it yourself wont’ save any money.

The battery on a Tesla will definitely fail, and it will definitely cost many many thousands. And doing it yourself wont’ save any money.

It will degrade over time rather than catastrophically fail. When the whole battery gets below a certain rated charge, it will be replaced. Current plans are to swap out the cells to Powerwalls for another x years then recycle them when they really are end of life.

I suspect Li-ion cell longevity will improve as they find better tweaks to the chemistry / construction.

But, yes, like everything man made, it will eventually reach end of life.

Interestingly Tesla sell a range of batteries with different capacities, but most are the same model with SW limits on how much you can use. They could, in theory, recycled used 100 kWh batteries as lower capacity models.

Shame the OP’s intended thread subject matter only lasted for the first two posts.