93
Electric cars will be cheaper to make than gas vehicles but with much higher repair and insurance costs
(www.notebookcheck.net)
this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2024
93 points (87.8% liked)
Technology
59201 readers
4009 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
They will never be cheaper. Just the costs of the battery, or they do shady bussiness tricks, like hooking you in cheap initial costs but horeandus repair/replacement bills.
An electric motor is SIGNIFICANTLY more simple to produce than an entire internal combustion engine. There are far fewer moving parts on an electric car than a gasoline one.
The battery is a significant cost, but not all cars need to have 300 miles of range. It is also possible that once the market is saturated (i.e. - several decades), that recycled battery packs will be cheaper to produce than batteries built from raw materials.
The major reason why electric cars are so expensive right now is because there are far fewer of them, and the ones that are being made have a target market of an upper-middle class household. They're luxury/status symbols as much as anything else. Secondarily, there isn't a large used electric car market yet.
There is a large potential for cost reductions. Assuming technology continues to improve, electric cars will drop below the price of gas and diesel for everyday driving. Internal combustion engines will most likely be reduced to specialty vehicles.
Also, as we realize that we don't need 400+ miles of range in a commuter car, cheaper battery chemistries make a lot of sense, despite their shorter range per kg or lb
If I buy an EV I would like it to do 400 miles, but I don't need 0-60 in 3 seconds.
Low 0-60 times are inherent to EVs. There's no transmission and the motor has a wide efficiency area. It's basically hard to make a non dual motor EV accelerate slowly. Single motor ones aren't quick, but you won't get AWD if that's a thing you desire.
It's easy to make a less powerful motor. As someone else said, the current market is for people who are looking for better performance and aren't concerned with price. I put a deposit on a Polestar 3 that does 0-60 in 4.7s which is slow compared to its competition like the Model X and BMW iX but I don't care about 0-60. It's a meaningless metric to judge a car by. My Challenger SRT 392 does the 0-60 in 4.2s but I bought that car for how nice it looks, not its 0-60.
I think trim packages or settings in the car that trade acceleration for range make a lot of sense.
That's not really how electric motors work though. They spin up crazy fast, which means fast 0-60 times. Think about an electric mixer in your kitchen; it takes more or less the the same amount of time for it get up to speed weather it's on the highest setting or the lowest setting since the motor is the only moving part. There is no fancy gearing to vary the speeds, it's based solely on the amount of energy being put into the system.
Yes, and varying the amount of power put into the system would increase or decrease the total range. A full power launch depletes the battery more quickly than a gentle, controlled acceleration to road speed.
I'm talking about limiting the amount of power that can be dumped into the motor at any given time, or limiting the power of the motor itself in order to get a more efficient experience.
That's entirely on the user at that point, and cant really be designed around. Anything you add to limit acceleration is just going to add more complexity and expense for no actual benefit. If you want better range, stop flooring the car out of every stop, same as an ICE car.
Ye canna change the laws of physics! Acceleration is proportional to force exerted (F=ma) and has nothing to do with the amount of energy stored, which gives you range. You might get a few percent efficiency bonus from lesser acceleration due to losses (so 2-3 extra Km per 100), but you can't "trade acceleration for range"
Most people want a car that can do everything they need a car to do. As otherwise they have to buy a SECOND car that can perform the jobs the first car can't. At that point people look at their finances and wonder why they have the first car at all, that first car has a monthly payment, insurance, and repairs. It would be so much cheaper to ditch it and just have the car that performs all the functions.
In that case, why not just have no car at all and use a bike or public transit and rent a car when you really need one?
The feasibility of that will be highly variable depending on where you live. Much of America is a public transit desert.
Thats not true. I guarantee that whatever town you live in has a robust public transportion system that hits every single residential area.
The problem is that only children are allowed to use it, and only twice a day.
Hah. As somebody that had to be driven to the bus stop because it was over a mile away, I call BS.
There are countless things that can’t be done without a car, even when you are a certain age or care for older family members. The reasoning of living without a car in property, in my humble opinion, is only valid at a certain time in life
Car rentals are expensive and time consuming affairs. This 'solution' is worse for the vast majority of people who currently own cars. It's why you don't see people doing it.
I drove a beater with no note for like twenty years and just rented for car trips.
Having two or three car payments a year is cheaper than twelve.
It's unconventional, but plenty of people do it.
When compared with the cost savings, in my personal case, renting when I need a car to drive 100+miles, is cheaper than buying a more expensive ev, or paying for fuel in a gasoline vehicle.
The time is negligible as well when I compare the time I don't spend at gas stations because I charge at home.
But the battery pack is far and away more expensive than the engine. Shit far and away more expensive than the engine AND transmission. Shit like half an EVs price is the battery.
Yeah, it's about the price of a full engine and transmission replacement for an internal combustion car.
Yeah, I'm not really sure what the path to the EV being cheaper to produce is. Every EV we have seen is more expensive than its ICE counterpart. And it isn't like batteries are some new tech that manufacturers don't know how to make well. No, these are being mass produced.
The higher repair costs come from the fact that while an EV pack is the single most expensive part of the car, and if it is damaged, you now have to replace the single most expensive part of the car.
Higher insurance costs flow from the higher purchase cost and the higher repair costs. So, those won't come down either.
Edit: One thing that could bring down repair costs would be if the EV manufacturers would stop making it so damn hard to swap in your own replacement parts. A battery and electric motor isn't complicated. But repairing either of these parts on an EV is complicated due to DRM and other anti-consumer design choices.
Every new technology is initially more expensive, then as it moves into mass production the cost goes down because of economies of scale - more suppliers, innovations in technique.
Battery costs have gone down an insane amount already, and it doesn't look like they're done.
Going further, what percentage of accidents affect the battery pack? The article seems to conflate Tesla manufacturing techniques that make cosmetic repairs difficult with all electric vehicles - just because Tesla has long repairs doesn't mean all manufacturers do.
It also talks about electric manufacturers going out of business, but is it 15% by number of businesses or by manufacturing volume? Lucid and Rivian aren't making that many cars in terms of absolute volume, but could go under. Hyundai, Kia, Chevy et al. make a lot more cars and seem unlikely to collapse.