Would everyone switch to electric cars if good cars with good range could be made for much less than $10,000? What technology could enable those prices?
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Aerodynamic lightweight electric solar cell cars like Aptera and Lightyear could become an electric production and storage unit, while their range could significantly increase with less amount of batteries depending on aerodynamics, weight (materials), improvement of batteries, drivetrain, solar-cell technology and other kinds of non-mechanic electricity generation. This could automatically increase the electric infrastructure and decrease the need for charging especially for short distances. Also sodium-ion or sodium solid state batteries could also lower the prices of electric cars.
Lithium Manganese iron chemistries are good enough. Once lithium mining is at full scale it’s going to be cheap.
Most power distribution and transmission lines Don’t use copper. Not quite as good was copper. Additionally wires.IF you need reduce power losses due to resistance more increase the voltage reduct the current. Most of the power loss comes from resistance and current. IF you increase the voltage without increasing the current you can double the power transmitted without increasing losses. distribuiton lines run at about 10,000V AC. Transmission line run at 100,000V to 500000V AC or DC.
10 k not because inflation in the last years.
15k perhaps if they get battery cost down a lot.
It would have to be simple one, without all that fancy stuff and tons of features. Just basic ones, minimalistic and reliable enough to get you from A to B.
As main component costs like batteries and electric motors fall and it’s possible to build BEV hardware cheaper than ICE, the cost of Robotics AI hardware for cameras, sensors and inference compute will also be getting dirt cheap (as earlier generations did for low end smart phones). AI/Robotics software will also get cheaper with lots of competing NNs and teams of NNs both running locally and cloud accessible via 5G, 6G.
The trend won’t be for dirt cheap owner-driver vehicles for very long but a faster transition to the market where transportation as a service is so cheap and efficient that owning a self driving vehicle doesn’t make sense for most people.
The same trends will mean a faster transition to robotic economy because humanoid, vehicle, specialty, industrial robots will all use the same cheap hardware/software components.
This is really dreaming, I think. The most realistic way to get “prices” below $10,000 for a good electric car would be sky high subsidies. Utterly unsustainably high subsidizes, mind you, because people would buy them.
“Costs”? Almost certainly not happening. Trivially, of course, because of inflation: $10,000 buys less all the time. But also because, by the time you pared off enough features to reach that price point, you’d have to wipe out about 30-40 years of accumulated regulations that have been driving those rising costs.
A $10K electric car is basically a glorified golf cart. New mid range ‘street legal’ golf carts come in at about that price point. They’re not, of course, capable of highway speeds, let alone safe in a collision.
In the case of ICE cars, you can get into a LOW end one for under $20K, and some rolling back of regulations probably could get the price down to $10K, with the features that were common in cars in the ’60’s.
Also, remember: The powers that be are actually trying to wean the masses off being used to being able to travel freely, and hardly would do anything to make private transportation cheap. You can’t turn the masses into serfs if they can travel freely!
So the powers that be (Biden?) are trying to wean the masses from being able to travel freely. Is that like quickly rebuilding a damaged bridge or like red states trying to prevent women from fleeing to blue states for medical care? Do you just make your opinions out of whole cloth or do you have examples?
Yeah I was going to say it’s more important to get a “good” 500 dollar electric bike, and bike lanes with proper protection for cities. Perhaps with rain cover over the main bike paths. In the country you could get away with golf carts if all cars were reasonably well automated so that you don’t have to worry about getting hit.
An electric domesticated gocart would probably be it. No computer, no display, no internet crap, no automatic everything that can break down.
ABS can’t be avoided. Otherwise, just you controlling the engine and a minimal amount of sub-systems like back in the days.
With the instant torque of an electric drivetrain, this would be gocart fun and nobody will fall asleep behind the steering wheel. I’m surprised no manufacturer tried to implement this in a sports car package already.
Not legal to, essentially. The list of mandatory features keeps growing every year, and the crash test requirements alone rule out anything cheap.
And, as I point out, there’s a strong sentiment in left-circles to wean people off of having cars, anyway, so they’re hardly going to tolerate anything that makes them more affordable. And the left utterly dominates the regulatory agencies.
What imaginary left wing circle have you been fantasizing about? Don’t try tagging democrats with your tunnel vision conspiracies. We love having less expensive transportation!
It’s hardly my fault you live in a bubble.
https://azfreenews.com/2023/08/phoenix-mayor-leading-globalist-effort-to-ban-meat-dairy-and-private-cars-by-2030/
A good range is 700 miles while towing a generator and 30 gallons of fuel.
Solve the low end battery acceleration issue with regen-braking that channels NRG to capacitors. And solve the battery cost issue with expandable battery packs — that is, an “around-town” EV with a 80 to 100 mile range battery pack becomes hugely attractive to many homes if the pricepoint is proportionately downward impacted. Especially so if the battery packs can be affordably expanded as newer trch arrives andcost for the same drops significantly.
Solve the battery weight/volume/recharge time issue by yanking most of it out and replacing it with a genset and gas tank…
Hybrid cars seem to work very well, and can operate in full electric mode for local trips.
How much longer would I have to stop at the charging station compared to a gas pump? Because my landlord will never put charging stations in our parking lot. Never. Well, if he could mark up the charge on the power by a lot… I mean a huge amount, he might.
I take it the weather doesn’t get really cold where you live. The parking area for the apartment building I live in (Calgary) has outlets for plugging in block heaters. This only gives 120 volts so it would probably only be good to charge a battery overnight to take a car 50 to 100 km, but for plug-in hybrids that would be fine.
I would pay 20k if they just made them where they are feasible to repair. That includes access to manuals, parts and any software tools needed for diagnostics and configuration.
[1] $10,000 … cost? Dominated by battery + electrics + comforts + safety + regulations + body-and-buckets, kind of in that order.
China internally achieves these (and lower) costs. The key to going further on less battery (which really is most of the calculus of optimizations) really boils down to “ridiculously smaller, and therefore markedly lighter”. Short-changing the regulations until caught, shortchanging comforts (weak A/C or none, and crâhp heater), and balancing durability of panels with lighter weight materials.
Likewise, as long as rational upper velocities and lower ultimate accelerations are tolerated, there’s a chain reaction on smaller (lighter, cheaper) motors, electronics, and ultimately batteries and their remarkable masses, too.
[2] MARKUP to feed the distribution-and-return chain. Not every car ordered by a dealership gets sold. But they ALL get repurchased (almost instantly) as fungibles in the distribution chain network of car sales. Its rather remarkable. There can be 250 cars on a large lot (going out of business) and basically the next morning, they’re ALL gone. Not a single one left. Its pretty breathtaking.
[3] CREATIVE INDUCEMENT FINANCING. Let’s face it. There are a lot of buyers — in any market — that don’t have anything like the up-front cash required to outright buy an economy grade vehicle, gas powered, electric or burning dried cow or camel dung chips. They need monthly payments. The ‘factors’ (title of companies that underwrite these typically non-commercial-bank loans) either dub the loans ‘leases’ or just independent car loans. Factors typically want between 7% and 15% of the agreed price of the vehicle in euphemistically named “financing fees” up front. Creatively, they often pay their issuance commissions by loaning the consumer 1.1 to 1.2 x the price of the vehicle, then having the dealership ‘cut back’ a check for the 7% to 15%, keeping the remainder as their off-book cut.
GOVERNMENT FEES — not so much here in the USA, but in other countries there are a lot of “well, we can’t tax our citizens any other way, so we’ll tax their vehicles a lot” taxes.
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Between all of these though, it isn’t surprising at all to me that a cost-to-produce of $10,000 for a vehicle may well be $35,000 “out the door” to the consumer on the other end.
And working that backwards, if the point is to have a $10,000 out-the-door car, then it’d have to have a manufacturing-all-in production cost of less than $4,000 to ‘make it work’.
⋅-⋅-⋅ Just saying, ⋅-⋅-⋅
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I would argue that the best way to reduce costs is to advocate for extensive electrification of cities and main highways so that cars could be constantly connected to the power grid while traveling (like trams/trolleys in many European cities). In this case, you could afford to have a very small battery (let’s say 50 km range), making the car very light and therefore more energy efficient. One could, however, argue that private ownership of cars might decline in the future if the trend is to use “cars as a service”. Uber and similar companies pushed the trend in that direction, allowing private car owners to utilize their car as a service (and source of revenue), but if these services become more and more utilized, the number of private car owners will decline (because the final user might opt for a such services instead of buying a car) so that you will end with big taxi (and eventually robotaxi) companies buying hundreds of cars at the time. These companies do not buy cars at the usual retail price, so they might very well end up paying 10k for a batteryless electric car for their fleet.
We already saw something similar in private transport when people used horses and coaches: at the beginning, everybody that traveled (mainly aristocrats and merchants) had their own coach and horses, but that was quite expensive, the more people moved from the countryside to the cities the more were developed coach services, then you end up with centralized public transport like the London’s trolleys pulled by horses that could pull a 50-60 person coach,
For many decades, car ownership has been a status symbol, but that view is somehow surpassed now (not completely obviously). I am not saying that people do not like cars, and many buy vehicles because they require them for work, but if you need a car just to move, you might prefer an alternative that does not require you to own a piece of equipment that starts to depreciate the moment you buy it, that requires maintenance, and that might require you to be stuck in traffic and spend hours trying to find parking. If you build such an alternative in an extensive way, the demand for cars will decrease.
This long rambling comment is just to say that I think there might be cars that cost 10k in the future, but I am not sure that they will be privately owned.
3D printing a whole car would greatly reduce prices.
If a car company could make a car for 100 dollars, it would still sell it at the highest price the market would bear, so 50,000 dollars.
Quite. We see something similar with houses…
Yes, if that car company were owned by the government or government oligarchs, and thus competition is made illegal.
Free markets are anathema to rent seeking elites.
Charging infrastructure would be prohibitively expensive. Why? Because you have to provide a continuous connection of copper between the generator and the charger. That’s a lot of copper, and copper is getting scarcer due to EVs and green energy gimcracks.
Gasoline can be distributed via tankers. Electricity cannot. Think about it.