Comment by nextparadigms | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nextparadigms | Hacker News Reader

I've noticed where they were going with their strategy a while ago. They're basically trying to cut the price in half or so for the next model, every 3 years. This worked perfectly considering they were a start-up and could only build a few one of them at first, and then as they become more demanded, they can build more.

We'll see a $30,000 model from them in 2015, and then a sub $20,000 model by 2018, with reasonable mileage. By then the country should also be covered with their solar-powered superchargers, that charge the cars for free. All of these factors should help them, and EV's in general, to become mainstream by 2020.

In regards to the author's last statement, when Tesla started pushing for Tesla Roadster I also thought they would eventually become the "GM of the new electric car industry". Tesla is the Apple of EV's, and GM is Nokia. And both incumbents were gigantic at first in their own markets, compared to the new entrants, but that quickly changed in a few years.

Electric tech is clearly developing and generating buzz.

And yet oil probably won't get too much more expensive for decades, while solar is ridiculously expensive without any clear prospect of becoming cheaper (currently parts are only as cheap as they are because the Chinese government is subsidizing their production, which can't last forever). Burning gasoline is not going to stop being economical and reliable any time soon.

Also, given the expensive reality of solar and the way we generate electricity, electric cars would still be getting their electricity from plants which burn coal. Perhaps in 20 years we will be using more natural gas than coal, which at least means we're not depending on the Saudis - but still we'll be using hydrocarbons, fracking, etc.

The only way electric vehicles will become mainstream is if the government mandates this. Seeing the way the Obama administration's "clean energy" agenda has tanked (even among the liberal base preoccupied with drones and Manning), there isn't going to be anybody to support this kind of action when it makes all transportation more expensive and thus makes everything more expensive. In a country which is physically very large, with an economy driven by domestic spending.

We're going to need something as fossil fuels run low and coal becomes increasingly stigmatized. Solar is an interesting field to explore, as is wind, hydro, tides, and other non-fossil energy sources. Sooner or later, one of those fields is going to generate electricity efficiently, even if only because fossil fuels (very eventually) get more expensive. Researching these things now means that there will be more options later.

Unfortunately it seems to be more politically rational to invest in existing inefficient green technology than R&D (see: Solyndra).

Fossil fuels can last a very long time. America's largest shale oil reserve isn't in North Dakota, it's in California in the Monterey Shale formation, currently unexploited.

There are lots of good arguments for electric cars. Fossil fuel supply is not one of them. At a bare minimum, we have 64 years of oil left, but that assumes that we will never be able to find any more or wring more oil out of fields than expected. History shows that both assumptions are not good ones to make.

Emissions, cost & the environmental impact of tar sand mining are better arguments for electric cars.

But these things have already been researched for some time. More than being researched, they have been put into practice. And this has already shown us that they are relatively expensive and hard to scale, while hydrocarbons are cheap and scale well and are not subject to much in the way of political risk or NIMBYism. And this will continue to be so for decades at least.

Any promoter of renewable energy really has to be aware of this or they will not be able to target their interventions effectively.

I'm actually more worried about flying than about individual transport. I'd argue that affordable intercontinental flights have had a tremendously positive effect on the world's society as a whole. The intensified relationships make war between industrialized nations very unlikely for the time being. Yet we don't really have any feasible alternative to fossil fuel there at the moment. The sooner we save it for those important matters the better, but unfortunately that's not how free market economy works. I expect we'll have a period where flying is a privilege again.

You don't want to hear it, but the answer is nuclear fission.

I do want to hear it, actually. Thorium looks especially good in the long term, though it's still in the research phase.

Wind is already cheaper than nuclear would be in Denmark (using prices from the UK). Solar is getting cheaper too. Whether they're viable or not depends on location, e.g. solar isn't really too great in Denmark, we're too far north. Storage is a problem, but not quite as big as you would think, and a multitude of solutions do exist.

Denmark has a plan of getting rid of fossils over the next decades, and we're well on our way. It's not a research plan, it's an investment/building plan.

Furthermore, while some subsidies are currently needed to cover risks and capital expenditures, the studies I've seen predict that we're probably going to end up with an infrastructure that's not more expensive, it may even be cheaper. Like energy from an old nuclear power plant is really cheap today because the capital expenditures have been covered many years ago (discounting insurance and other thorny nuclear issues).

On a naive per-mile basis, for short trips, electric cars kill gasoline powered ones. The "fuel" cost for overnight charging is approaching the golden age of $1/gallon. The real question is TCO. Whoever has the better TCO in the long run is going to win, and electric cars have some strong fundamental advantages in their favor here. The biggest stumbling block is the battery. A 40% improvement in TCO of batteries for electric vehicles seems likely, and would enable near future electric vehicles to be competitive on a TCO basis. I'm limited to short trips, but my vehicle becomes maintenance-free? Sold!

It was my understanding that one of the reasons that electric cars are greener is because power plants (oil, coal, whatever) are more efficient at extracting energy from fossil fuels than cars are, so even though electric cars run on fossil fuels indirectly, they do so much more efficiently. The other benefit is that the source can easily be exchanged for something renewable, while for a gasoline car, that is impossible. I don't have the numbers on this though, so if I'm wrong please correct me.

Of course, there are inefficiencies in charging/using a battery. Apparently when the source is coal, electric vehicles can have a carbon footprint comparable to some gas vehicles: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/automobiles/how-green-are-...

But replace that coal with nuclear...

> while solar is ridiculously expensive without any clear prospect of becoming cheaper

This is different from the impression I previously had, which was more along these lines:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/12/daily-c...

Where do you get your impression from?

Tons of effort has gone into PV cells for decades (they were being manufactured in quantity in the 70s). They are our dearest hope for renewable energy at scale. And they are still more expensive than any other source of electricity we actually use by such an embarrassing margin that even really impressive cost improvements will still leave them pretty much non-competitive (making steam is a little better). Recent price drops due to subsidies are not going to be sustainable unless the industry is weaned off the subsidies.

Most of the reduction in that Economist graph is after Obama takes office, before that the changes are not all that dramatic to really support a comparison to Moore's law (which has itself shown pretty flawed as a way of predicting the computing future).

So I just don't see any substantive, fundamental reason (i.e.: clear prospect) to suppose that solar generation will get so much cheaper that it will reach striking distance of natural gas, of which we have quite a supply. But I'm not saying it's impossible to have another opinion.

Meh, it's really more tons of research when into PVs in the 70s and then around 84 oil prices dropped and everyone forgot about them for 20 years.

How feasible is it for them to eventually reach sub-$20k pricing, given the significant cost of the batteries?

This will only happen if battery technology improves -- see my other post.

How much will the cost of these batteries go down as more and more cars need them?

With current battery tech, not much at all.

The current pricing for the different size batteries that Tesla offers implies a cost of ~$500 per kWh (the cost differential between the 40 kWh, 60 kWh and 85 kWh packs is $10k). I read "somewhere" (random stranger on the Internet alert) that the cost of raw materials is in the ballpark of $80 per kWh. Now, I'd think that the current scale of battery production (certainly at least millions of units in the 18650 form factor that Tesla uses) doesn't leave much room to handwave the magic "scale effect" wand. On the other hand, it does seem like there is quite a bit of headroom between $80 (if that is realistic) and $500.

If a large chunk of the delivered cost of a battery is attributable to fixed costs, like R&D, rather than the process of turning the raw materials into a finished battery, then maybe it isn't too implausible that the price could drop by a factor of two (or four). You might be able to glean some that information about that from carefully reading the SEC reports from public battery manufacturers.

I seem to remember in an interview with Elon, that he quoted the current raw material cost per kWh. I think it was quite low, and that suggests good potential reductions in $/kWh. I'll try to find the interview

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