Will Electric Vehicles Be Viable? When?

[henry]

henry. So 7000$ for a 22 kWh battery? That truck has a 180 kWh battery. How's your maths?

Fine. Thanks for asking.

[Greg Locock]

Incidentally, Rivian have form

"In Rockledge, another company is taking the Space Coast in a different direction: designing and manufacturing a new type of car called the Rivian.

R.J. Scaringe is the 28-year-old CEO of a start-up car company. At the company's headquarters, he shows off what he calls Rivian's launch vehicle: a sleek sports car he expects to have on the road by the end of 2013.

"As you can see, it's a two-plus-two configuration, so a four-passenger vehicle set up with rear wheel drive, mid-engine," he says. "So really, truly a performance vehicle. Very aggressive looks in terms of the styling. We tried to go for a look that gets you excited looking at it."

Scaringe says it was built not just for style and performance, but also with fuel efficiency in mind. This model gets more than 60 miles per gallon and will be priced as he says, in the mid-$20,000 range."

[henry]

Very interesting. Too good to be true wallah.

I think I see a problem with our exchanges. It’s possible you think I’m trying to justify the $70000 price tag and I think we’re having a discussion of the price points of batteries.

I don’t think there’s any way Rivian can turn a profit on that vehicle at that price. From my figures the battery retail price, your metric, is likely in the region of USD55000.

Do you want to say where your $80000 figure came from or shall we just move on?

[Greg Locock]

Oh, I pulled it out of thin air, based on the price of some other large battery packs. It's misleading to look at the cost of cells, the entire battery pack is quite a bit more expensive, and then you need to add the markup to the showroom floor. You seem pretty well aware of that side of it. It may surprise Andres that the average sold price of a new truck in the USA in 2018 is $48377.

EVs are predicted to reach some sort of price parity (I suspect based more on reasonable range rather than equal range) in around 2020-2025.

Cell price then will be around $70-150/kWh. I wish I could buy batteries at that price for my off-grid house. I wish I could buy lithium batteries at 4 times that.

[djos]

EVs are predicted to reach some sort of price parity (I suspect based more on reasonable range rather than equal range) in around 2020-2025.

I was bored at work today and was playing with Excel (so it looked like I was working), anyway I was interested in TCO specifically and discovered that here in Australia a theoretical electric car that costs $4,000 AUD more than it's equivalent Petrol/Gasoline car would be $275 AUD cheaper to own over 5 Years.

If they were identically priced, the Electric car owner would be $4,275 better off over 5 years.

This is based on a weekly Fuel Bill of $30 for the ICE powered car and $5 a week for the Electric Car. The Servicing Costs are $365 (averaged minor/major) for the ICE powered Car vs $160 per year for the Electric Car.

I was mainly interested in finiding out at what point would the higher Capex of an electric car draw even with the higher Opex costs of an ICE powered car - I didnt bother including insurance costs for either and assumed they were identical. I'm not an accountant so I didnt bother getting too crazy with calculations.

[Cold Fussion]

Would be interesting to turn those calculations into a fuel cost vs total lifetime cost. I imagine fleet would have a much fast ROI but might also be the larger battery vs vehicle costs of something say a long haul truck might offset those gains with current battery costs.

[Andres125sx]

Oh, I pulled it out of thin air, based on the price of some other large battery packs. It's misleading to look at the cost of cells, the entire battery pack is quite a bit more expensive, and then you need to add the markup to the showroom floor. You seem pretty well aware of that side of it. It may surprise Andres that the average sold price of a new truck in the USA in 2018 is $48377.

Not at all, what I find surprising is your calculations of the cost of an electric SUV assuming an irrational price for the battery, and even more irrational for the car itself

So the average truck, with an ICE inside, costs $48k, but the shell of a similar car without ICE or battery is $50k?

[Andres125sx]

henry. So 7000$ for a 22 kWh battery? That truck has a 180 kWh battery. How's your maths?

Probably better than yours no offence but numbers don´t lie, you said $80k and those numbers say around $50k, around a 40% cheaper than your estimations.

But they´re saying there are batteries from 100 to 180kWh so not sure if the $70k price refers to the biggest battery or not. If not the 100kWh battery will cost around $30k

Then the car, if an average truck with an ICE cost $48k, without the ICE it may be.... $35k?

Then they still can earn $5k with each truck

PS: I´m not saying these numbers are real, just trying to illustrate Greg he should do some maths before criticizing others calculations

[Andres125sx]

Oh, I pulled it out of thin air, based on the price of some other large battery packs. It's misleading to look at the cost of cells, the entire battery pack is quite a bit more expensive, and then you need to add the markup to the showroom floor. You seem pretty well aware of that side of it. It may surprise Andres that the average sold price of a new truck in the USA in 2018 is $48377.

EVs are predicted to reach some sort of price parity (I suspect based more on reasonable range rather than equal range) in around 2020-2025.

Cell price then will be around $70-150/kWh. I wish I could buy batteries at that price for my off-grid house. I wish I could buy lithium batteries at 4 times that.

I wish I could buy a differeent technology, lithium batteries are far from ideal for that task, they suffer when fully charged or fully discharged, so far from ideal for a house

In that sense, traditional lead-acid batteries are bettter, but then if you discharge it too much only once they´re dead so... and even if not, they´re expensive and don´t last too much


Have you considered Flow Cell batteries? I´m not sure if there are companies installing these technology, but I think they´re a lot more appropiatte for a house

[djos]

Would be interesting to turn those calculations into a fuel cost vs total lifetime cost. I imagine fleet would have a much fast ROI but might also be the larger battery vs vehicle costs of something say a long haul truck might offset those gains with current battery costs.

I'll post the sheet later for folks to play with, the calcs are pretty crude but reasonable imo.

[loner]

VW’s Electrify America opens California’s first 350kW ultra-fast charger
https://electrek.co/2018/12/06/electrif ... alifornia/

[subcritical71]

VW’s Electrify America opens California’s first 350kW ultra-fast charger
https://electrek.co/2018/12/06/electrif ... alifornia/

That is very impressive.

To put that into F1 perspective; Using ballpark numbers...Realizing they wouldn't charge for an entire hour and the F1 guys do ~2 hours, but it makes the calculations easier. In one hour VW are charging just about 1260 MJ. Using the average of the fastest 2018 Q3 time (1:25.43) an F1 car would generate/deploy 337 MJ in an hour assuming a total of 8 MJ energy transfer (4 MJ deploy and harvesting 2 MJ from K and 2 MJ from H each lap!). This VW charger and the car it is charging would be outperforming the F1 tech by almost 4x.

Using race lap times and a more realistic ES strategy I would guess F1 tech is being outperformed by a factor of just over 4 maybe close to 5x.

[loner]

For the first time in history, Russian nuclear scientists, using gas centrifuges, enriched the radioactive isotope Nickel-63, which can be used to create so-called "nuclear batteries."
the Electrochemical Plant in the city of Zelenogorsk, Krasnoyarsk Territory, made the gas centrifuge method of the radioactive nickel-63 isotope to a level of more than 69%."
“In 2019, specialists of JSC ECP, as part of their research and development, plan to achieve an enrichment of the nickel-63 isotope at more than 80%. The initial nickel-62 for these works is currently being irradiated in the RBMK-1000 power reactor at Leningrad NPP"
A non-naturally occurring nickel-63 radioisotope has the unique properties of soft beta radiation without dangerous gamma radiation.
https://tass.ru/nauka/5913056

[henry]

VW’s Electrify America opens California’s first 350kW ultra-fast charger
https://electrek.co/2018/12/06/electrif ... alifornia/

That is very impressive.

To put that into F1 perspective; Using ballpark numbers...Realizing they wouldn't charge for an entire hour and the F1 guys do ~2 hours, but it makes the calculations easier. In one hour VW are charging just about 1260 MJ. Using the average of the fastest 2018 Q3 time (1:25.43) an F1 car would generate/deploy 337 MJ in an hour assuming a total of 8 MJ energy transfer (4 MJ deploy and harvesting 2 MJ from K and 2 MJ from H each lap!). This VW charger and the car it is charging would be outperforming the F1 tech by almost 4x.

Using race lap times and a more realistic ES strategy I would guess F1 tech is being outperformed by a factor of just over 4 maybe close to 5x.

I think there are a few factors that need to be taken into consideration when doing the comparison.

An important one is the c-rate. In F1 the typically charging and discharging at 120kW into/out of at most 20MJ. It may be as high as 200kW for short periods. In contrast the 370kW is likely targeted at around 100MJ. So the difference in c-rate is 1.6:1 in favour of the VW installation.

There will also be differences in component sizes. The F1 implementation aims a minimum weight and volume, there are fewer restrictions on the VW installations.

The F1 installation will need to focus more on efficiency. As we have discussed in the Ferrari PU thread battery management efficiency may be an issue for performance.

It will be interesting to see what is needed to deal with cooling of the equipment in the car. At 99% efficiency it will need 3.7kW cooling and 99% seems pretty ambitious. That’s a lot of hot air leaving the vehicle during charging. Maybe they’ll heat sink it.

[Big Tea]

For the first time in history, Russian nuclear scientists, using gas centrifuges, enriched the radioactive isotope Nickel-63, which can be used to create so-called "nuclear batteries."
the Electrochemical Plant in the city of Zelenogorsk, Krasnoyarsk Territory, made the gas centrifuge method of the radioactive nickel-63 isotope to a level of more than 69%."
“In 2019, specialists of JSC ECP, as part of their research and development, plan to achieve an enrichment of the nickel-63 isotope at more than 80%. The initial nickel-62 for these works is currently being irradiated in the RBMK-1000 power reactor at Leningrad NPP"
A non-naturally occurring nickel-63 radioisotope has the unique properties of soft beta radiation without dangerous gamma radiation.
https://tass.ru/nauka/5913056

Strange, I saw this this morning. No figures for it, so its interest only I'm sorry


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6ME88nMnYE