A new study from Boston Consulting Group shows that OEMs are in an interesting squeeze, needing to lower prices and improve performance in order to attract the next tier of EV buyers while also needing to make the vehicles profitable. According to this same study, only one car actually meets the median demand of carbuyers and it’s not a Tesla.
You like that little tease? Here’s something that doesn’t need a tease at all: low-interest rates have changed the behavior of car buyers and we’re probably not going back anytime soon.
I think I’m gonna wrap up this Morning Dump with a little Tesla union news and a Hyundai-Kia recall.
The Next EV Buyers Want Fast-Charging, 350 Miles Of Range, And Sub-$50k Cost
Boston Consulting Group is yet another one of these big consulting companies known for parachuting in, like, overpaid and under-experienced Wharton MBAs to tell companies what to do. Anecdotally, BCG isn’t as bad as, say, McKinsey, but always take anything a consulting company says with a grain of salt.
That throat-clearing out of the way, I think this recently published analysis/survey from BCG is pretty good and there’s a lot I want to dive into because it asks the important question: What do the next tranche of EV buyers need from an EV in order to be persuaded to actually buy one?
This is a fun graphic, even if it takes a second to grok. BCG identified the “next-wave” adopters of EV buyers and asked them what they want out of their next EV. As the subhead here points out, the big things are cost (duh), range (duh), and fast-charging (a little less duh).
The actual price people seem willing to accept is a little higher than I’d have guessed but represents that people strongly considering EVs seem to have a higher income profile than those who are less inclined to have an EV next. The range requirement is about where I’d expect it to be and is a real bummer because most people don’t really need 350 miles of range. The fast-charging is a nice-to-have, though if you can charge at home (as most next-wave people in this study can) it shouldn’t be as big of an issue.
Put all of this together and the Model 3 Long Range is super close to being what people want, but it’s actually the Hyundai Ioniq 6 SE Long Range that fits the bill. More next-generation EVs should meet many of these requirements, which is a good sign for adoption, which BCG puts at about 40% by 2030, which isn’t quite to the 50-60% that some automakers might need to reach 2032 EPA regs.
This graphic above, based on the BCG survey, shows the price-performance frontier, and while there’s a nice median at about $50k, note that there are a lot of people who seem to want a lower-priced vehicle and will be able to stomach slightly lower performance.
So, back to the headline (credit where it’s due, Automotive News had a similar one first), how are automakers going to do this if they keep losing money? From the analysis:
We estimate that most OEMs currently lose around $6,000 on each EV they effectively sell for $50,000, after accounting for customer tax credits. We also estimate that OEMs will only be able to close half of this cost gap by making the right technology choices; economies of scale as automakers ramp up production will help, too, but they won’t make up the difference. Then there is the impact of looming Chinese imports to consider; market prices will likely contract further, exacerbating the profitability challenge. At some point, it will become untenable for OEMs to lose money on every vehicle they sell.
Closing the cost-profitability gap will require help from elsewhere, whether through more aggressive efficiency programs, additional public support, or both. Policymakers could consider linking financial incentives to total range and range efficiency to incentivize OEMs to invest in the areas that matter most to customers. The charging ecosystem will also have to find a way to smartly invest in making a network of 350-kilowatt chargers more readily available and reliable, recognizing that the demand for these chargers may eventually dissipate over the long term as vehicle range increases.
All of that is reasonable and it also underlines an interesting point that doesn’t get talked about as much. EV adoption, at some level, requires more fast chargers. The more fast chargers, in theory, the more EVs we buy. The more EVs we buy, the more investment, the more investment the more range might increase, the more range increases… the less people need these fast chargers.
While granting that a lot of the analysis makes sense to me, I do think that Ford and Tesla’s plans to make a $25k EV that probably offers under 300 miles of range is what’ll get the next-next group of buyers.
How Interest Rates Are Impacting Car Buyers
Under-discussed reason why car prices have risen so much:
A decade of low interest rates that permanently shifted car buyer behavior.
Jessica Caldwell, Head of Insights at @edmunds, breaks down the issue:#EdmundsPartner pic.twitter.com/4bSLFpiBD3
— Car Dealership Guy (@GuyDealership) March 20, 2024
Forgive the Twitter embed video (you can also see it here), but I saw this post this morning from Car Dealership Guy and it’s important. Also, Jessica Caldwell from Edmunds, who is making the points, has historically been one of the best analysts in the automotive industry.
What’s she saying here? If you don’t want to watch the little video, which appears to be some sort of paid partnership with CDG, here’s a quick transcript of the important part:
“Consumer preferences have changed over the last decade because we’ve gotten used to lower interest rates, which got people into bigger cars because people always want–they want more amenities, they want more features, they want bigger in size.”
I’ve set it once before, but it bears repeating now: Buyers mostly care about monthly payments. That’s it. If a consumer was paying $600 a month for a Ford Explorer and, in a low-interest rate environment that same consumer could get an Expedition for the same monthly payment (maybe over a longer term) then they likely took that deal.
Now, with interest rates going up, the inverse is happening:
“They want the same thing and all of a sudden their dealer is telling them it’s $200-$300 more and they’re like “I have that vehicle, it’s the same exact one, why is it $300 more?”
Interest rates can have a profound impact on the market, unsurprisingly, and the egg can’t really be unscrambled at that point. It’s not easy to convince someone to go from the Expedition back down to the Explorer, or from the CR-V back down to the Civic. Which means…
So I think prices are going up, but the thing that can normalize things is more incentives…. but are we ever going back to an average industry cost of $30,000? No, that’s not going to happen.”
Not without some sort of dramatic change, at least.
Most German Tesla Workers Vote Against The Union
The way German labor works is a little different than the way it works here in the United States, which is a lot more binary. In Germany, any company with more than a handful of employees is required to have a works council if the workers ask for it.
Generally, auto plants have works councils represented by IG Metall (the German equivalent of the UAW) candidates. In the latest works council election at the Tesla plant near Berlin, the non-union candidates performed better than the union-affiliated candidates according to Reuters, though this doesn’t mean that the union didn’t show some gains:
The IG Metall union still expects to take 16 of 39 seats, making it the largest group in the new Tesla Gruenheide plant works council, the union said in a separate statement.
The top German trade union had hoped to gain greater influence over pay and working conditions after it accused the U.S. carmaker of inadequate safety provisions. It had put forward 106 candidates in an attempt to get a majority.
No one asked me, but putting forth 106 candidates for 39 seats seems like a bad strategy.
Hyundai-Kia Recall 140,000 EVs Over 12V Battery Failure
In my experience, the weakest part of any electric vehicle is not usually the main battery pack. It’s the 12-volt battery. Just a normal lead-acid 12-volt battery.
Why do these need to exist? The ECU, stereo, et cetera in an electric car (or any car) don’t require the kind of insane high voltage needed to move a car and you wouldn’t want that much voltage going to your stereo (plus all the off-the-shelf parts are 12-volt). Ergo, the most obvious solution is that almost all electric vehicles (Cybertruck aside) still have a regular 12-volt battery. When that stops working, the whole car stops working.
It’s no surprise then that Kia/Hyundai/Genesis is having to recall a bunch of its vehicles to fix an issue with the Integrated Charging Control Unit (ICCU), which has been failing on cars and stopping the 12-volt battery from charging.
From the recall safety report:
The Integrated Charging Control Unit (ICCU) may become damaged over time from transient high voltage and thermal cycling. A damaged ICCU may not be able to charge the 12-volt battery which can discharge gradually while driving with progressive reductions of motive power. If the driver ignores the warnings associated with the discharging battery condition and continues to operate the vehicle in a reduced power mode, the vehicle may eventually experience a complete loss of motive power.
The solution to this problem is to replace the ICCU/ICCU fuse if there’s any sign of damage and update the vehicles to the new software, which is designed to avoid this problem.
What I’m Listening To While Writing This
I was immediately a fan of Tierra Whack when her first album, “Whack World” debuted in 2018. It’s been a while but we now have “World Wide Whack.” It’s great. There’s a super David Byrne art school energy here I love, and I can’t help but be charmed by the accurate VW dash at the end of this video. If you like this video watch her short film from five years ago.
The Big Question
How much EV range do you need and how much EV range do you want if you want an EV?
I’d like 300 all-the-time miles (cold weather, etc) and access to the Tesla charging network. Hopefully the R3 gets close if I am still interested when it comes out.
That is a mighty fine forest green on that Kia.
Anyway, over 400 km is ideal. Enough to visit some friends in another city.
It’s a special edition color on that Kia, and it is gorgeous.
When I take a car loan, I know what the interest rate is, I know what my payment will be, and I decide if I can afford that. What’s killing me right now is that every 6 months my car *insurance* is going up 20%, and has been going up for the last 3 renewals. My payment for Feb-July 2024 was 25% of the retail value of the car. Everyone is talking about how interest rates are affecting car sales, but I’m not reading much about insurance rates.
They are going up everywhere, BUT, if you switch to a new company you often will get a deal. I switched our business this year and am saving like 6k in building insurance, after my agent swore there was nothing they could do. I also cut our two car insurance price down by 1k combined by switching.
Shop around, it sucks everywhere, but some companies are still hungry for business. Now if you live in a crime ridden city, you are probably just fucked because it doesn’t make sense for insurers to insure in those areas without huge payments to satisfy the risk.
I left my car/home/umbrella insurer of decades late last year because another company was offering rates 50% lower for the same coverage. It sucks that this may be the way of the future but I’d definitely shop around.
I was told during my search at the start of this years renewals that if you don’t drop your insurer every 5 years, you will be ripped off. After reading your comment, and what I found on my own, whoever told me that was right.
We have cars bundled without house and we live in a high fire-risk area. Many folks are being dropped by their insurance companies. So, we are loathe to make any changes to anything regarding our insurance for fear of being dropped. Interesting sidebar is that the only cars insured with them are our old hobby cars, not the newer cars.
And this will continue as long as cars continue to be built with repairability as priority #137. Also more exotic materials and parts that are expensive to replace. My dad’s insurance on his aluminum-bodied F-150 went up by some crazy amount the first year he had it because the insurers found out they were more expensive to repair than steel.
Range: 400km at -20c / 250 mi at -5f, and to be able to say that I still obtain that 10 years later.
This would cover everything I do excepting multi-day roadtrips. That’s a solid 3-4 hours of winter driving and, at that point, I’m willing (needing?) to pull over for a break and let it charge whilst I get my sanity back / feeling back into my legs.
I would be happy with a consistent 300 mile range that is still truly 300 miles when the car is older(!), operated in cold weather, warm weather, snow, rain, etc. and does not vary with external conditions – 30-40% or even more.
That would cover my normal vehicle use patterns 99.9% (except towing) and a 600 mile roadtrip with an hour-long stop midways to charge is acceptable.
I think having an “on-paper” range vs. real-world range is still a very significant problem.
Fix the charging infrastructure, and speed of charge and range won’t be much of a factor. I would be happy with 200-300 range, if I could charge back up in 5 minutes.
Hell, if you make me a commuter car for under 20,000$ with 150 miles of range that would be fine also. Then again, I can’t charge at home, so this whole post is mute. But if i could charge at home….
“so this whole post is mute”
It’s ‘moo’ not mute. You know, like a cow’s opinion, it’s moo, it doesn’t matter.
/s
Yes, I know, I just realized writing it again somewhere else ))
Easy there Joey.
For the record, my boss has mute points as well. I figured correcting him was moot.
Of course, he also calls Chernobyl Chernova as well as some other choice word substitutions.
Glad to see someone else making this point.
There is probably a graph that could illustrate how the speed of charging going up results in desired/needed range going down. I’m sure it would be a direct correlation.
I have a garage and the means to install a charger for home use. I disagree with Matt’s point that those who can charge at home need less range or are concerned about charging infrastructure. I use my car away from home often!
I think the point mainly is this: if you are the type of person spending $50k on a vehicle you also have expectations that the usage and lifestyle does not come with too many compromises, or at least that there is a benefit that outweighs those compromises. Right now in thinking about the various ways I use a car, I don’t think EVs meet that criteria.
“these big consulting companies known for parachuting in, like, overpaid and under-experienced Wharton MBAs to tell companies what to do.”
Pretty sure this is the main reason the headline reads as it does.
“Then there is the impact of looming Chinese imports to consider; market prices will likely contract further, exacerbating the profitability challenge. At some point, it will become untenable for OEMs to lose money on every vehicle they sell.”
Well if US OEMs want to pay me a duck ton of money I can tell them an easy way to raise their own profitability while killing that of their Chinese competition. All it will cost – aside of course from my own exorbitant consulting fees – is the low, low price of a few first class airline tickets from Detroit to Bejing.
Took possession of an Ioniq 6 on a lease this week – road tripped it ~500 miles home from where I picked it up. It’s a pretty normal car experience at this point. Charged 3x on the way home, I let each session go 25-30 min to take advantage of the free EA charging that came with the vehicle, but each stop probably could have been 10-15min.
Not quite gas station parity, but by the time you take a leak, grab a bite, stretch your lets…it’s fine.
Charging didn’t even hit its peak (I’m still figuring out the preconditioning) – I think I hit 190kw once.
It’s really good so far.
Honestly if I got an ICE range extender I can get by with like 15 miles of range, provided I like the car otherwise.
For example: A 2 Door Wrangler BEV.
You know, it’s too bad the Ioniq 6 looks like absolute garbage. Could be competitive otherwise. And VW’s ID line is now competitively priced but again, looks awful – especially the interior. Until automakers make a classically well-designed (and not full of screens and gimmicks) EV, I’m waiting.
Can someone explain to me why the Chinese EV’s are freaking people out so much? I know virtually nothing about manufacturing.
I can’t really understand how a Chinese company can make an EV at a massively automated Mexican factory so cheap and a US company can’t. People say subsidies from the government but they say that about everything made in China like the Chinese government has a massive magical trove of money they can use to make everything cheap and somehow make a profit on nothing.
The biggest issue is that China allegedly uses slave/child labor to source most of the parts for their vehicle, which is why they’re able to keep prices so low. It’s not the vehicles themselves, it’s the supply chain they use.
Slave labor is saving a few thousand dollars per car, at most.
More importantly, companies are vertically integrated. BYD makes their own batteries from raw materials, for instance.
There’s also some subsidy by the Chinee government, which is going t go broke.
This. The subsidies from the Chinese government is a huge reason for the cheap prices. But as TC said, China is going broke, so who knows if they will have the same subsidies in 5 to 10 years.
What a lot of people don’t know is that U.S. manufacturers also use Chinese slave labor for a significant number of their components, as well as some US prison slave labor.
I think we are aware, I mean Hyundai/Kia was just called out for it.
and don’t forget all the factories in the south employing children! I remember when I was younger and had to attend church weekly, we had a visiting priest and he opened our eyes to the amount of current slaves being used in America. I am not defending China and I don’t want their spy cars here, but we have some cleaning up to do as well like you imply.
The more I read, the more I learn that the US does exactly the same things we criticize, sanction, or even invade other countries for.
I don’t like US spy cars either, which is probably why I will never own anything made after MY2016.
They need a heart next to the smiley for these comments!
Not aware of slave labor in the US for auto makers.
Could you please expound on this? Thanks.
Non Chinese manufactures use such parts too:
https://www.motortrend.com/news/vw-group-porsche-audi-bentley-forced-labor-parts-western-china/
less R&D cost: the Chinese simply steal shit from their joint ventures
The overhead at US v Chinese companies is massively different. Others have pointed out the difference in labor costs. But it’s not just the people making the cars. The accountants, the lawyers, the project managers– the entire workforce is much cheaper in China than in the US. The Chinese government pays a huge portion of the bill when their companies build new factories. The companies have basically outsourced a major portion of their R&D budget over the past few decades by simply stealing IP from from the US and European companies that operate there. The balance sheets are just not comparable.
There should be additional incentives for cars that achieve 4mi+/kWh (maybe increasing to 4.5mi/kWh over time). That’s 260mi and 320mi respectively for the typical short range (65kWh) and long range (80kWh) battery packs. Trims or options that go below this threshold should be excluded, and no exceptions should be given to light trucks (crossovers). Nothing too big, perhaps $2k.
This number is already achieved by the top performers currently sold today like the Hyundai Ioniqs. It would encourage better aero and disencentivize draggy wheels and particularly inefficient AWD systems (the Ioniqs are guilty of both).
Additionally, another larger government incentive could be available for cars that hit lofty efficiency goals like 4.75-5mi/kWh to encourage innovation.
Maybe one day when the current EV incentives start getting phased out, they should start by adding minimum efficiency requirements to qualify for the credits, and continue by decreasing the maximum price.
For a streamlined long-wheelbase sedan capable of seating 5 people with the legroom and headroom of a limousine, 7-8 mile per kWh or more on the highway is doable with a small/light battery pack. The heavy more than two-ton Mercedes Vision EQXX concept gets slightly more than 6 miles per kWh with a roughly 90 kWh battery.
We should be aiming for inexpensive midsized sedans that do the above, but have 30-35 kWh batteries and target a curb weight around 3,000 lbs with a sub-$20k price tag. Modern sodium-ion batteries are only $60/kWh, extremely power-dense(small packs could make Hellcat-like horsepower numbers), and won’t catch fire.
Do you have a source for the 7-8mi/kWh number? AFAIK, weight reduction does not matter as much in an electrified vehicle compared to a pure ICE, as the additional energy needed to accelerate that weight gets recuperated from regenerative braking. There is still a friction penalty from the increased rolling resistance on the tires and bearings, but it becomes less of a factor at highway speeds where aero drag becomes dominant.
I based my numbers on a couple of efficient sedans I thought of off the top of my head, though I was using gross battery capacity (numbers below use usable):
Sedans:
Hyundai Ioniq 6: 361/74 = 4.87mi/kWh
Tesla Model S: 402/95 = 4.23mi/kWh
Tesla Model 3: 341/75 = 4.54mi/kWh
Lucid Air Pure: 419/92 = 4.55mi/kWh
VW ID.7: 386/86 = 4.48mi/kWh (high b/c WLTP)
Crossovers:
Hyundai Ioniq 5: 303/74 4.09mi/kWh
Tesla Model Y: 330/75 4.4mi/kWh
Chevy Bolt: 259/65 = 3.98mi/kWh
Toyota bZ4X: 252/64 = 3.93mi/kWh
While the best vehicles can currently get 4.5+mi/kWh, most crossovers struggle to get over 4mi/kWh even in their best configurations. That’s why I set the that as the threshold, and excluded poor performing trims to encourage better wheels and aero.
Sodium Ion batteries may be eventually available in the future, but currently they suffer from degradation issues that make them unviable, but the Chinese are working on it. However, sub $20k EVs are unfortunately impossible in the current industry. Current batteries cost around $6-7k for 65kWh and ~$10k for 80kWh ($115/kWh), and even if you completely subtract that cost from the vehicles above, few even get below $30k let alone $20k. Yes, there’ll be savings from having less beefy components from lighter batteries, but I doubt it’ll be enough.
Good data.
I do not have a source, just basic math, and the fact that there have existed prototype cars with Cd values into the low to mid 0.1X range. The cars you list above each have Cd values over 0.2, and are not near the limit of what is possible, plus they are all over 2 tons.
Consider the Aptera, which has double the efficiency of the Hyundai Ioniq 6. It has a Cd value of 0.13, and a slightly smaller frontal area than the Ioniq 6. There’s also the Solectria Sunrise, with similar Cd value to the Vision EQXX but even less frontal area than the Vision EQXX, but losing more than 1,000 lbs of mass, which in practice ended up being a 7 mile/kWh car. The GM EV1 could also do 5-6 mile/kWh depending on what source is cited.
Na+ batteries do have degradation issues. They last only 500 full discharge cycles. But they are relatively easy to recycle and very cheap. They are a consumable item, and in an efficiently-designed 200+ mile range car, should last 100,000 miles with the current offerings, and a lot longer once the technology improves.
In order to get the cost below $20k, we need smaller batteries, and we need more efficient platforms to extract 200 mile ranges from the smaller battery packs, and perhaps a shared platform that can accommodate an economically-produced ICE powertrain as well. That sort of EV price point is not happening with 2 ton+ luxobarges whose CdA values fail to best a 1996 GM EV1. A 3,000 lb sedan with the CdA value of a Mercedes Vision EQXX could probably do it.
The BYD Seagull with 38 kWh of battery is $11,400, for comparison. There’s a cheaper 30 kWh version for $9,000.
I doubt that the car buying public is willing to live with the form factor of those solar vehicles, kids and Costco runs and all. The EQXX’s sedan like shape is much more viable, though unfortunately probably still a stretch for the public until fashion changes. Currently, the crossover loving masses will likely only accept things like the ‘crossover coupe’ Model Y at best, putting an upper bound on realistically attainable efficiency numbers. Even if sedans become popular again, they’ll still need to seat 4-5 passengers (with space for cupholders, etc) and sufficient cargo space. If we consider the 0.21Cd Lucid Air to be a good example of that form factor, that puts a lower bound of Cd to be in the low 0.2s.
PSA: Drag = Cd * frontal area, which is often a forgotten, yet extremely important. Sedans gain most of their aero advantage over crossovers from their lower frontal area, rather than Cd which is usually only slightly higher (Ioniq 5: 0.228, Ioniq 6: 0.21). It’s also why the solar vehicles you mentioned have such low drag.
I think that Na+ batteries will eventually become popular in the 2030s after development to reduce their degradation problems, but they’ll be helped or hurt by their characteristics (i.e. Li-ion preferring 20-80% charge vs LFP that can simply charge to 100%, NiMH battery memory, etc.). I really doubt that the public is willing to swallow the idea of consumable batteries though, at current prices ($60/kWh as you said earlier) that’d be $4-6k for the cells only, excluding rest of the battery (cooling system), battery assembly, and installation labor costs. If Na+ cell prices are able to come down, I could see it greatly increase used car values.
Consider also the 2000 GM Precept with a 0.16 Cd and the 2020 GAC Eno146 with a 0.146 Cd. Both midsized cars. That sort of drag coupled with the frontal area of a roomy W123 Mercedes would probably be found to be more than acceptable, once the would-be buyer sat in it.
I built a sub-100 lb one-seater with a frontal area of about 0.5 m^2. It uses about 8 Wh/mile to hold 30-35 mph.
LiFePO4 is also an excellent and inexpensive battery choice, with greatly reduced fire risk vs. LiIon, and there are commercially available ones hovering around 220 Wh/kg.
Consumable Na+ batteries if the pack is small enough and positioned in an easy-access location that facilitates install/removal without specialized tools could save money vs using gasoline in the long term, as they are right now. They’re only going to improve.
Na+ prices will continue to come down with economies of scale, since their current price point isn’t anywhere close to their raw materials cost. The sunken costs to develop them are still being recouped.
They’ve been “incentivizing” EV’s for decades now (mostly just giving rich people fun toys) and they still can’t make money on them. Time to give up and go full european public transportation.
We should’ve been going for public transit from the start, as that’s the real solution to the problem for most of the population who lives in urban and suburban metro areas, but electrified vehicles are still needed for those who live in rural places where transit is not very viable.
We had an extensive light-rail network all over the US, in many cases even going to rural areas, up until the 1940s. Cars weren’t strictly a necessity and car ownership plateaued at about 0.4 cars for every person of driving age.
The auto industry, tire companies, oil companies, and their ilk was allowed by the U.S. government to purchase all of the infrastructure, then subsequently tear it down. The government wanted people to buy and use more cars to increase spending and help grow the U.S. economy out of the depression. The problem is, that most of the growth is always appropriated by the people at the very top, and everyone else gets to compete over whatever crumbs trickle down.
Since then, US car ownership rates ended up tripling.
Today, if you’re too poor in the US to afford a car, you’re basically screwed. Not everyone can scratch build their own custom microvehicles like I can and get around for cheaper than taking the bus with all the convenience of a car. That thing saved my ass financially when I was working a minimum wage job.
The same industries guilty of lobbying to tear out passenger tram/rail lines to be replaced by busses so they could sell more busses, fuel, & tires?
Those poor people need bigger bootstraps. Then they could afford to buy that F150 King Ranch.
I wish there was more of a push in the car community to replace all these appliance crossovers with public transit. We REALLY need to bring back those light-rail networks (the right-of-ways still exist in a lot of places) along with USABLE bike infrastructure (not a painted bike gutter, or a ‘share the road’ sign).
I don’t really care what the range of the vehicle is, as I’m probably not going to go further than 2-300 miles in one week on average.
The things I do care about is that I don’t want the car spying on me the entire time I’m in it and I don’t want to have to turn around and shell out an order of magnitude more than the worth of the car to fix a tiny dent (or god forbid some more serious damage)
My employ is under the American OEM umbrella, so if they do poorly in the next few years, my ability to afford any vehicle, regardless of powertrain goes down with them.
I’ll try to get something BEV when it makes sense to do so.
People have been paying attention. They now know that the rated range is fiction in real world conditions. They need 250 miles so they are asking for 350.
As for manufacturers losing money on EVs, that has been obvious for a long time. Making money on EVs is going to take scale to get the sourcing costs down, and a fundamental change to the way cars are made to take advantage of EVs opportunities. Only Tesla (and the Chinese) have been willing or able to get there so far.
So who should pay for these transitions? The US and European automakers think taxpayers should do it. Automakers might be willing to go all in but they know the product is not supported by market demand so they have to count on artificial demand (mandates or rebates). But, quite sensibly, they are not willing to trust governments to stick with the plan if there are regime changes or the voters get restless. So that leaves us in this valley of economic uncertainty and first generation non-optimal products.
This guy gets it. I have an EV6. Been generally good overall. Moderate climate and moderate speeds the range is as advertised if not a bit better (277 miles officially). If either or both of those conditions is not met, range drops precipitously. I commute 90 miles roundtrip/day and have free charging at my office. I also installed a 50amp 240V outlet on the front of my garage to charge at home when needed. I’m basically an ideal EV candidate. With the caveat that my wife has an ICE SUV and I also have a 1-ton diesel pickup for boat/camping/other duties.
When EV ownership is a bummer: Last week I had to go to a customer site that is ~200 miles from home. I go there probably 10 times/year. The drive is primarily just down I-5 in Oregon. Mostly flat with a couple low passes. Since I don’t drive a Tesla, I have 5 DC charges I can use along my route (all Electrify America which has been discussed at length on here as being little more than lukewarm garbage most of the time). They are spaced between ~16 and 60 miles apart in this scenario. I usually stop at the last one before my customer site that is 152 miles from home. Last Tuesday I left home with 100% SOC with the dash showing 230 miles of range. It was low 40’s outside. I had it in “Eco” mode. Heat on the lowest fan setting at 70F. Cruise control on I-5 set at 73mph. One stop for coffee and a fluid drain. I arrived at the intended charger with a 7% SOC and a 14 mile range. The last charger I could’ve stopped at, before the one I was at, was 56 miles back. The next one available was 81 miles ahead and well past my destination. I charged for 21 mins and went from 7% to 55% SOC. This was on a 150kW charger with charging peaking at 174kW. Adequate to get me to my destination and back to this charger for more juice for the trip home. On the way home I plugged back in at this same spot. This time on a 350kW charger. Went from 23% to 94% in 36 minutes with the charge peaking at 151kW. I arrived home with a 38 mile range. FYI: The EV6 and its eGMP cousins are supposedly some of the fastest charging cars on the market.
Fun note on the disparity in charging infrastructure. The Electrify America I used has four chargers two @ 150kW (1 with a 50 chademo) and two @ 350kW. On the way down one of the 350s was being used by a car that can only charge at 50kW and the other was out of order so I used a 150. On the way back I was the only car there and used the only operational 350 but still only got to 151kW anyway. 100 yards away from this Electrify America is a Tesla supercharger with 51 spots. 51?!?!??!?!! Can you imagine it?! There is another supercharger at the exit I take for my customer with 8 more ~30 miles away. No idea if there are others in between or not.
Thanks for the run down- Long trips with a non Tesla EV sound a bit stressful.
My major takeaway is that regardless of range, EVs can’t really be judged on their own merits until the sketchy charging situation improves.
Opening up the Tesla Supercharger network to all vehicles is going to be a game changer. I’m really interested to see how that moves the needle on EV take rates.
I watched an interesting video from Technology Connections about EV chargers, and one of his points that really resonated with me is that EV charging needs to become more like gas stations, and a big part of why they suck so much is they are relegated to the back row of random grocery store parking lots. If we treated gas pumps the same way, they would also be broken down half the time.
-Regular business hours with an attendant on site to monitor charger repair and user behaviour.
-A roof to keep the rain off your head!
-EVs need air pumps and windshield squeegees like any other car.
-A washroom?
-A handy convenience store to buy snacks?
As an ICE driver I take all these things for granted. I never really clued in that EVs still need to go to gas stations for some of those universal vehicle needs on road trips.
Which is why they are selling much better than all of the electric CUVs/SUVs/trucks with 100+ kWh battery packs.
Sedans, sports cars, and hatchbacks are really the best applications for EVs, IMO. You can streamline the aerodynamics of these vehicles without the consumer having to give up anything, for comparatively little additional cost per mile of range vs adding batteries. In turn, this will allow light and tossable fun cars to be made that weigh similar to or even less than their ICE counterparts.
I’d also like to add, that the first manufacturer to offer to the US market a reliable, safe, long-lasting BEV that can seat 5 people and exceed 200 miles range on the highway, with fast charge capability, for under $20,000 brand new, is going to sell a crap ton of them. The U.S. manufacturers had the technology to do this nearly 3 decades ago, but they didn’t want to. They saw the ICE-powered SUV/truck/CUV zeitgeist we have today as a more profitable direction, and that is the path they created with the help of government incentives that they lobbied into place and manipulated the consumer base into accepting. Changing that SUV/truck/CUV path to an electric-fueled one is even less sustainable in the long term. We really need efficient EVs, and the aforementioned sedans, sports cars, and hatchbacks are what allow for that efficiency.
Absolutely this. Biggest headache we’ve had with our generally near-faultless i3 was when the 12V battery went out. The horn started intermittently going off, the doors wouldn’t stay locked, the alarm went off at random intervals—all while the car was parked on our driveway, and of course this started happening at 9PM, and we weren’t sure of the cause. So we called AAA and had it towed to the dealer. Replacing the battery, which involves some kind of coding procedure, set us back an insane $1200.
There are apparently ways to DIY the coding, and the battery is a pain, but not impossible, to access, so it’s easy to look at that cost and say you’d never pay that much, but when the battery goes without warning late at night and you don’t have immediate access to the tools and know-how…what are you going to do?
To be fair any modern car can start acting wonky when the 12v battery gets discharged or fails. However it certainly is more frequent on electrified vehicles since they usually use a small capacity battery (for packaging, weight and cost savings) since in theory it only needs to boot the computers and close the high voltage contractors.
It’s also less obvious when the battery starts to go because you don’t get the slow crank condition as a warning. Even hybrids have this problem because they use the big battery to actually start the engine, the 12V is just to energize the electronics to get the high voltage system going.
Yup that is why I said electrified. My Hybrid did warn me. Like many cars it has retained accessory power and one day I got to my destination shut off the car and after 2-3 seconds of the radio playing and me not even having my seat belt off, the radio stopped and the screen said that it was shutting down due to a low charge on the 12v battery. The other thing that causes electrified vehicles battery to have a shorter life is that some mfgs don’t fully charge the 12v for example mine is set to charge to 80%.
That’s criminal. Did the $1200 include the tow? This site should investigate that since they have an i3.
Over 90% of the problems people post on the i3 reddit forum come down to the 12V battery. Speaking from my experience, the12V battery went out on my i3 three days after I bought it. (used). Luckily just before an off-ramp one away from my work, so I was able to coast up most of the offramp and pull off to the shoulder. It took me 20-25 minutes to change the next day after work (I had it towed to the work parking lot). I got a generic battery from Batteries plus at about $120. It is a basic motorcycle 12V battery in the i3. Now I could swap out that in 10 minutes. You don’t need to do the coding, although you can pretty easily with an OBD2 reader and the Bimmercode app.
Unless and until EV charging becomes as convenient and quick as filling a gas tank, I will not accept less than 500 miles of range at zero degrees F. I have no qualms about paying $100K for such a vehicle, but I absolutely refuse to accept less performance than my gas cars give me, which is 8 hours of 80 mph cruising in any weather conditions with a single 5-10 minute stop.
Gotta stop thinking about charging a car in the same way that you would fill up a gas take for an ICE one. Sure there will be super chargers but you don’t want to do that all the time because it will kill battery life. Leave those for long trips or potential running on <10% situations. You should be changing your habits to work with the different tool. You plug your car in at night, or leave it plugged in while you are home. Similar to how you use your phone, tablet, laptop. This causes a major issue for those who are in an apartment/renting though and we are nowhere near actually fixing that issue. Ultimately, we should have chargers at as many parking spaces we can so you can leave your car charging while you are in your apartment or shopping at the grocery store, etc.
I’m not talking about short trips, I would charge at home.
But any vehicle I buy needs to be capable of making that 500 mile trip that I do several times a year. I don’t think it’s too much to ask for an expensive new vehicle to be capable of the same performance as an “old” ICE one.
Here’s a car that could do it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hin8jtHbTcA
0.17 drag coefficient, 620 miles range, and a battery pack less than half the size of that found in the new Silverado EV.
Much lower than a 0.17 Cd value for a sedan is possible, if you don’t mind giving up looks. There are shapes that could be scaled to fit 5+ passengers in comfort that have Cd values approaching 0.10.
I like to imagine a next gen Citroen DS, a large car with a shape similar to the following, getting 1,000+ miles per charge on a < 120 kWh battery:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3FPK0KNZuc
Put it on sale, I’d buy it.
Put the Hummer battery in a sedan body, I’d buy that too. You literally couldn’t make a car with too much range for me.
A massive energy-dense 250kWh battery in a 5,000-ish lb luxury sedan with a CdA value around 0.25 m^2 could theoretically yield somewhere close to 1,500 miles range at 70 mph in good weather, and maybe 700 miles range in the winter under the same conditions with the underside covered in snow/salt/ice(harming drag) with the heat running.
Again, there’s no vision for this in the industry at this time. We get a 9,000 lb 250 mile range Hummer instead.
I expected that link to be some university project, but that Mercedes EQXX is rad.
I have no shortage of archived links to university projects and prototypes made by entrepreneurs who never got off the ground I could share, dating back to the 1970s…
Not to mention things I could reference from technical papers and books I read, that aren’t even available online, and sometimes, completely unknown as far as search engines are concerned.
what? there is human knowledge not accessible on the Internet???
Fast charging is only the answer for road trips, its a bad everyday solution, for the primary roadblock to most people having an EV, cost.
I would love to see some sort of large scale analysis on charging costs; at home, public level 2, and public fast charging.
Cause by me; public level 2 is 2x cost of home charging, fast charging is 4x. So if my EV gets 4mi/kw then at home it gets 100mpge, public level 2 50mpge, and fast charging 25mpge. This is all based on my local gas & electricity cost. I would like to see this analysis state by state or large metro areas.
Majority of people truly don’t give a shit about saving the environment which is why it’s already to late to stop it, cars are just functional appliances and they are not going to get a fancy new one if it costs them more.
Again, the only concern I have is road trips. An existing EV charged at home would work fine for me as a short range daily errand vehicle, but I would find it extremely wasteful to spend $50,000+ on something that isn’t capable of doing everything I need a vehicle to do. I’d still need to keep my van for road trips, so why buy the EV at all?
By that logic you should sell your Viper because it doesn’t carry your whole family.
I don’t pretend to be rational about my fun cars.
Nor should you be!
The problem of course is that the pricing can be so dynamic. Gas can go up and down day by day and can vary significantly from one station to the next. Electricity prices are certainly less volatile but some people have time of day pricing at home, others don’t. For public chargers many do charge per KWh but others charge by the minute based in tiers by vehicle’s peak charge rate even though it isn’t going to charge that fast for the entire or even most of the session. Some also have surge pricing based on the current demand at a particular station or high traffic times like Thanksgiving.
Two EV family here. We are fortunate enough to live in a home with easy access to charge at home. Wife has 80k on her 2020 model 3 performance and has had needs to charge at a supercharger station less than 15 times in that time period. The 300 mile ish range is generally enough but Tesla folks benefit from the comfort that superchargers are everywhere and that is Teslas secret sauce.
My Rivian R1S is also fine as long as you are not towing. Obviously lose 40% of your projected range as soon as you connect. They did recently sent an ota that allows you to identify what you are towing (boat vs utility trailer) so they it could actually learn just how much extra resistance is there to come up with a better read on available range. Not had a chance to use this feature since the ota so jury is still out on this.
All that to say 340-50 miles is enough imho.
Around 300 miles in theory to have 200 miles in the sweet 10%-80% charging curve.
What I found interesting the first time I took my car on a road trip, after 2 hours ish of driving I had to stop to charge. 30 to 40 min on average. Give me a 15 min stop that’s all I need, 15 min to continue driving for another 2 hrs is the sweet spot.
https://nyobolt.com/
200 (real world) so about 250 (which is about 200 in the winter since we keep the cabin toasty) is a good amount for me. Means I don’t have to charge every night if I don’t want to with plenty of wiggle room for unexpected trips around town. Handles 99% of my use cases. If battery cost and capacity were to improve more is always nicer, but I would rather take less weight and less cost instead.
I’m not willing to trade off all of the extra weight and cost just to know I can drive across the entire state if I wanted to.
This only works because we have a second ICE vehicle.
I wonder what % of American households are 1-car vs multi-car? What % of the multi-car households already have 1+ EV? Given our infrastructure issues, getting a 1-car home to switch to EV is probably trickier than getting someone to switch 1/2 or 1/3 of their fleet to EV (although there are 4 vehicles at my house and none are EV yet)
My sis has an ICE SUV, her husband has an EV. He uses it to take the kids to school, daycare, etc., and to commute for work. There really isn’t charging available where they live, so when he goes into work he plugs it in at the lot around the corner. He has to write reports on patient visits, so he does that in the car while it’s charging.
I like the idea of the EV as a local runabout/commuter and having the ICE for longer trips. I live in an apartment, and there are no chargers where I work, and I’ve literally never seen an EV charging lot in the areas between where I live and work (3 miles each way). Only chargers I see are a few randos at shopping centers and hotels.
I’m in zero hurry to adopt, though the R2S and R3 are the first EV’s that I can say I’d honestly consider buying. I love the R1S, but it’s way too spendy. The R2 has the 4Runner-style roll down rear window, so that could be a winner, esp if the next 4Runner eliminates that.
91.5% of US households had at least one motor vehicle in the 2020 Census. 59.1% of US households had at least two. There were 127M households total, so that’s 116M households with one or more vehicle. With an estimated 275M cars, trucks, and motorcycles registered in the US, that’s 159M vehicles that are ‘additional’ or commercial/fleet vehicles.
Most states have an average vehicles per household above 2, so it’s safe to assume the average car-owning household has at least 2-3 vehicles. The vast majority of people do not have collector, vintage, or project cars, so that’s well over 100M vehicles that are candidates for a a relatively painless EV swap.
If manufacturers are losing money on every EV then they should be flooded with investment and their stock should soar, right? It worked for Amazon and Tesla.
Once they get people to stop calling them “Manufacturers” and “Car Companies” and finally get the “Mobility Company” and “Mobility Solutions” to stick the stock really can only go up!
I could live with less range, say 200 miles, if fast charging ever reaches equilibrium with typical gas station refill times and infrastructure -at least along major highways – is sufficient to service to demand.
I think that a 350 mile range EV would make an EV possible for me despite living in an apartment with no charger and having no charger at work. With a 30 mile round trip for work I could charge once a week while I’m at the grocery store.
You might want to check advertised range vs actual, especially when you throw in weather like extreme heat and cold. I want an EV, but I get nervous when you hear stories of advertised 300 miles is actually like 270 in real world use in best case weather conditions, then winter comes and suddenly you’re lucky to get even 200 miles. 200 miles is a hell of a lot different than 300 miles.
+1 for White Stripes reference.