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Battery powered cars will soon be cheaper to buy than conventional gasoline ones, offering immediate savings to drivers, new research shows.
Automakers from Renault SA to Tesla Inc. have long touted the cheaper fuel and running costs of electric cars that helps to displace the higher upfront prices that drivers pay when they buy the zero-emission vehicles.
Now research from Bloomberg New Energy Finance indicates that falling battery costs will mean electric vehicles will also be cheaper to buy in the U.S. and Europe as soon as 2025. Batteries currently account for about half the cost of EVs, and their prices will fall by about 77% between 2016 and 2030, the London-based researcher said.
"On an upfront basis, these things will start to get cheaper and people will start to adopt them more as price parity gets closer," said Colin McKerracher, analyst at the London-based researcher. "After that it gets even more compelling."
The secret is in the battery.
(Score: 2) by Lester on Thursday June 01 2017, @09:09PM (2 children)
Those are things that are in electric cars also.
I don't know if electric motors need less manteinance than gas motors, but, leaving aside motor, electric cars have the same mecanic problems than gasoline cars... plus an expensive battery instead of oil change.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 01 2017, @10:37PM (1 child)
I probably shouldn't have put brakes in there -- I was thinking of the reduced wear from regenerative breaking (the usage most destructive of friction brakes is exactly the usage where regenerative breaking most xompletely substitutes for them), but it was too much trouble to explain that argument in detail, so I should have removed it entirely.
As for the others, nope. Electric cars typically don't have clutches (most in fact have single-ratio gearing), the exceptions being some homebrew conversions of existing manual-transmission cars, where the gearbox and clutch are retained, and the electric motor fitted with a bogus flywheel. Everyone knows this is a mechanically silly arrangement, but hobbyists don't have a lot of options.
As for engine rebuilds, if you don't know, why are you asserting that engine rebuilds "are in electric cars"? Even if you're using a brushed DC motor, we're talking a 15-minute job, and that's the only routine maintenance needed. The bearings will eventually need replaced, but because they don't see the literal hammering that goes on every rotation of a piston engine, they need replaced far less often -- and it's a much simpler task, too. To say that any part of this is the same as a gasoline engine rebuild is just ridiculous.
(Score: 3, Informative) by frojack on Friday June 02 2017, @07:01PM
Drive Unit replacements have been common in early Tesla cars.
Some users have had as many as 4 replacements. All at no cost to them.
Tesla Forums thread documents 271 such replacements, mostly with early models:
https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/drive-unit-replacement-poll.29834/ [teslamotorsclub.com]
Most of these are minor noise issues, but Tesla will apparently swap the DU on the slightest complaint, until they found out that many of them were due to the need of a 50 cent shim.
Unsubstantiated horror stories of $15,000 replacement aside, apparently Tesla internally bills a Drive Unit replacement [teslamotorsclub.com] at around $6000, but the customer walks away not paying a cent.
The warranty goes to 8 years and 128,000 miles, but apparently DUs are covered much longer than that.
So lets say you had to have a DU replaced on Tesla after some LONG period of time. At $6000 its not substantially different then buying a new crate motor to drop in your car.
The thing is, you can easily expect 200,000 miles without an ICE engine rebuild (top only in most cases), to say nothing about replacement.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.