This was already discussed a few days ago, and the price of the battery went up substantially from the original estimate. While I'm sure this will be a favorite story to quote among those against EVs, this is more a story about estimate padding (and borderline insurance fraud) than anything else.
>While I'm sure this will be a favorite story to quote among those against EVs
I don't think anyone is ever arguing against EVs, that they're not better for our air quality than sticking to ICEs, but the mass adoption issues come when the rubber hits the road.
EVs range is still way behind ICE and drops like a rock in cold weather, and the ones with fast charging and the range close to a cheap ICE cost an arm and a leg, charging networks are still way too sparse and have shit payment UX plus the incoming charges for loitering after your car is charged, while fast chargers being even more sparse and Tesla's prices has continuously been higher than what Elon originally promised in his announcements.
All this make EVs still not a drop in replacement for ICEs for the general public with small budgets and who don't live at their own house where they have a charger in their garage. Depending on where you live, public charging infrastructure today is a nightmare in most places making the charging experience much more annoying and time consuming than tanking gas.
For example, I bought my 4 year old used ICE car with just 36K KM on the clock for only 6k Euros including another set of wheels with the mandatory winter tires. There are currently no low mileage EVs on the used market anywhere remotely in this price range, and that's before I run into the issue of the smaller range making vacation in Southern Europe nearly impossible, and not having any chargers where I live and park my car. Basically for me right now and others like me(most people in the country), a switch to an EV would be an expansive downgrade, and it doesn't look like pricing is going down and range and charging infrastructure is going up fast enough to match ICEs by the time they're banned from sale in 2030, meaning there will be a lot of angry voters priced/ranged out of EV ownership at that date meaning we might realistically see the ICE ban deadline extended until we sort out the infrastructure and the overly optimistic range/price reaches the values that were said we would reach years ago(basically a More's law for EVs).
So nobody in their right mind is against EVs, but since they're too far away in term of range, price and convenience from ICEs for the general masses they need to hit in order to make the transition a smooth reality, I think the correct wording here is people are against a forced premature transition to EVs when they're not yet the drop-in replacements they need to be in order to not negatively affect the lives of people who depend on their cars for work and leisure.
None of what you said is necessarily incorrect (right now at least), but that's not the point I was making. Many pick the most extreme piece of "data" they can find, and use it as an argument as if were a universal truth, as opposed to the practical argument you are presenting here. A quick check across Twitter shows plenty of tweets doing exactly as I predicted.
This is because critical thoughts are at a premium and it’s easier to pick a side and pad it with whatever arguments augment it than arriving at conclusions by actually evaluating the wide set of facts and reasonable adjunctions.
You say your last purchase was a 4yo car. A good choice for budget conscious buyers. In that case the ICE ban will not be relevant for you until 2034.
Depending on what country you’re in, the ICE bans being proposed does not encompass hybrid or plug-in hybrids. I’d be quite confident that the infrastructure is good enough by 2030 that most people would want a plug-in hybrid anyway. Think about it: at some point in the transition you’ll realise that your car will rapidly become worthless if it doesn’t have a plug. We’ve already started seeing gas stations close down or reduce the number of pumps here in Norway. I don’t think that point will be any later than 2035.
You say you don’t think the cars or infrastructure will be ready by 2030. I find that surprising. When I bought our Kia EV in 2015, non-Teslas had maximum 30kWh and had no benefits over gasoline cars, fast chargers were maximum 50kWh and there were very few of them. Now 60-70kWh has become the norm. Newer EVs have huge benefits over ICE cars (I LOVE being able to pre-heat the car no matter where it is parked in winter). 150kW chargers are standard and 250-300kW chargers are becoming increasingly common. Price for new cars is still an issue but i suspect it’s mainly because all the car companies launched their new EV product lines with luxury models. Their budget variants are starting to come out now.
By 2030 we will probably be getting a completely new generation of models. Look at what Hyundai is working on with their uni wheel system: with the next generation it’s plausible that EVs will start having motors on all four wheels, with independent torque vectoring on each motor, and steering on the rear wheels, while having even better interior space.
Okay, that’ll be mostly relevant to high end vehicles to start with. But the halo effect will probably be significant. By 2030 I think nobody can deny that EVs are inherently superior. You’ll probably have some with 1000km range if you throw enough money at it.
So what about budget models? We’re starting to see LiFePo becoming common for cheap batteries, and sodium-ion is being rolled out on a commercial scale. Hybrid batteries (combining two chemistries to get the benefits of both) are opening new possibilities. There are several dozens of giga-scale battery factories being built right now. All points towards massive pressure to drive down costs by 2030.
I suspect geopolitics will drive a massive shift towards EVs around 2030 as well. Imagine being the first country to be fully electric: you can shut down most of the gasoline supply chain freeing up a lot of resources. You’ll be fully energy independent. Swings in oil prices will not bother you. And you’ll have all the lithium and copper within your borders to keep your economy running forever. All you need is some battery recycling and manufacturing plants and you’re completely independent in terms of transportation energy infrastructure.
People rant about Tesla non stop, but they’ll approve my 100kw battery replacement for $10k-$15k and I’ll be on my way. I can even do it through the Tesla app. Most people can’t afford this themselves out of pocket; that is a call to provide financing with the battery as collateral, just as we do with the entire vehicle today. Even with a battery replacement out of warranty, you come out ahead total cost of ownership due to fuel cost delta between electricity and petrol.
Is this because Hyundai simply don't want you to replace the battery, and would prefer you buy a new car?
Batteries are not like most other car parts which can be manufactured by a dozen different companies.
It sounds like a right to repair issue, where car companies should be able to supply replacement parts at reasonable prices for n number of years after the car was sold.
Even if you force companies to provide them at cost, they could conceivably end up more expensive than a new car.
If you sell a vehicle model for 5 years, you don't keep the production lines for spare parts around for another 20 years. Instead you predict how much you will need and put that in a warehouse somewhere to ship out over the years. That's naturally expensive, often more expensive than the production cost. Not a massive issue for the smaller stuff, but if you take a part that is massive and makes up a significant fraction of the cost of the vehicle you get headlines like this.
Imho that's a sign it shouldn't be a replacement part, its something that should be serviced and have smaller individual replacement parts (EV battery packs are more than a bunch of cells, after all)
> you don't keep the production lines for spare parts around for another 20 years
As a controls engineer who supports a number of automotive manufacturing lines, this is not accurate. They're still running many of those production lines, just at lower volumes, or just shuttled to less important locations. They may eventually transition to alternative (more manual) production methods, and yeah, some new-old-stock exists, but they don't stop after 5 years.
In particular, I loathe the lines where they used polyurethane moisture-cure hot-melt adhesive. It's awesome for bonding wood veneers to plastics, and it's not a huge deal when you're in production running 2 or 3 shifts weekdays and one on weekends (it somewhat reacts with itself and cleans out the lines), but even when the supplier buys the expensive purge compound from Nordsen and purges it after they run the line for one shift a month, the next time they go to start it up after sitting idle and cold, something's going to be plugged up.
When you sell equipment to an automotive manufacturer, you have to design it for a service life of at least 10 years. And they'll use it for every one of those, and they'll hold you to it.
We do have a standard. Most EV manufacturers use the 18650 battery cells, which are cylinders 18 mm in diameter and 65 mm long. You can buy a wide range of 18650 batteries from different sources.
The problem is that those have to be assembled into packs for vehicular use, and it's not really practical to develop an efficient standard form factor for packs given the enormous variance in vehicle designs. When a pack suffers collision damage then in theory it could be possible to reuse any undamaged individual 18650 batteries in a replacement pack, but in practice this is just too risky and labor intensive. So, the entire pack has to be replaced.
When we went to Nissan's dog-and-pony show before the Leaf was released, they went on about how, by the time the 2011 Leaf battery needs replacement, that prices on batteries would come down, the old batteries would be recycled to $UNDEFINED_BATTERY_STORAGE, etc.
Twelve years later when I went to look at replacing the battery, the prices had barely budged, and good luck finding a shop that would actually do the job. It would seem that those battery cells make more money in a new car than in a replacement battery pack. It was incredibly disappointing.
And people are being surprised that the same battery and software DRM lockout anti-consumer practices we see in mobile devices make their way into EVs, combined with the already existing planned obsolescence of the auto industry and their service networks, and why people who aren't rich are still holding on to ICEs with their 20+ year lifespan, as they can't afford to be early adopters on the yet unproven EV future hype train?
I think "leaders" have lost touch with reality. Actually, people in general have lost touch with reality, with instagram and tiktok influencers essentially saying you are a loser if you don't have these luxury products that "everyone" has.
Were they ever in touch? Whenever reporters ask most leaders in my country, what the minimum and average wages are and what the ballpark prices of electricity, gas, eggs, milk, meat and bread are, they have no idea if they weren't schooled beforehand by their advisors.
New cars are generally a luxury good. The introduction of EVs hasn't changed this.
Roughly now the first generation of mainstream EVs are entering the second hand market for people who buy 3 year old cars. They're still in short supply as EV sales have grown rapidly since 3 years ago. People who would only buy older cars will need to wait even longer.
Leafs and other first gen EVs are available too, and are fine if you can cope with their shorter range.
I know this is very mildly complicated and that's enough for an unhinged right-wing conspiracy to be born, but I'm still amazed people have the confidence to repeat such obvious nonsense on HN as if it was a boomer Facebook group.
> New cars are generally a luxury good.
Man, I sure hope the next Fiat Punto Grande MK <n+1> costs less than that raggedy old Porsche in my garage!
Brainwashed and absolutely wrong.
A new car doesn't have to be advanced. Give me a comically simple car. Weak. Mechanic. Bare minimum electronics. Whoopsie! Price is low as dirt.
Electric cars have been around for A LOT longer than the popularised EVs of today. They were weak, perfect for cities. But they have all but disappeared and no one's heard of them today.
But, that's not where corporations make money. And they only need to market it so people are convinced there is no alternative.
Like phones!
"Oh, sorry, Citizen #95810041, we simply HAVE to release 41 additional cameras in the next iteration. You were asking for hardware akin to the S1? You don't need 5TiB of memory just to read emails and communicate thought some app? Oh gee wiz golly my, no good obedient citizen, that's just impossible! No one can do that. What's that; the Pinephone is cheap as shit and just good enough? No, that's illegal. You need to subscri... I mean BUY what we spew!"
I'm glad the elitist, liberal car that everyone laughed at in 2005 is working so well for you, and that decades later you can laugh at a new generation of elitist liberals in their very expensive, not very green, pointless EVs.
Who, other than virtue-signalling liberals of course, could have predicted in 2005 that adding batteries to cars would work so well?
> to sum up then, its a very expensive, not terribly green, slow, cheaply made, and pointless way of moving around..
Is how the Top Gear review of the Prius went in 2008.
When you say barely budged, I'm curious whether this is in nominal or real terms. e.g. I think a battery costing $10k in 2024 would be around $7k in 2011 dollars. So, if it was $10k in 2011 and it's still $10k, thats about $4k cheaper than it would have been had it kept pace with inflation.
Fair question; inflation-adjusted ballpark number that I pulled out of my butt because I'm not about to go look up hard numbers. But, yes, twelve years later the replacement battery was higher than, say, a few years after we bought ours (2011). Whether the price paced with inflation, I cannot say.
Additionally, as another commenter points out, one might choose to go to a Nissan dealership for this replacement. Except, much like that other commenter, Nissan dealers are why we bought a Hyundai when we went to go get another electric car. Because we loved the Leaf, but Nissan dealerships still have everything you "love" about dealing with dealerships.
In newer cars the battery is a structural component, thus replacing it entails disassembling almost the entire car adding a ton of labor costs to an already extremely expensive replacement. EVs are a death sentence for the used market that all poor and middle class people rely on.
That has not been my experience at all. I've owned a Leaf and a Bolt that both had to have their entire battery replaced/recalled.
The Leaf was one of the worst service experiences I've ever had. They made sure I'd never consider Nissan as a brand ever again. It took forever to get a battery, and I was without my car for the actual replacement for more than a week.
The battery in my Bolt was a completely different experience. Once they had my replacement battery, Chevy replaced it in less than a day. Dropped off my car in the morning, done by the early afternoon. Clearly designed to be serviceably replaced. Far less involved than replacing an engine - the ICE equivalent end-of-life that also happens.
This is a major problem that will plague EVs during the second half of their lifecycle. They are cheaper to maintain up until they need a battery replacement, then they are essentially e-waste. Will that happen before or after their bodies rust into dust?
I bought a used EV back in 2016 (2013 Leaf, certified preowned from dealer, just off 3 year lease), and negotiated 25% off asking price, coming in at $9k.
I have had $0 in maintenance costs, the battery health meter (and approx range) is still exactly where it was when I bought it, despite tripling the miles. I drive it every day for in city driving.
Meanwhile my Jeep of the same era required a new crate motor be installed after a cooling failure, and I’m pretty sure the transmission will need replacing in the next 5 years. The repair costs on this vehicle have been well over $10k. We ended up giving it to my sister in law after fixing it up, then bought a Subaru (which the assisted cruise control on is basically highway self driving, so good for long trips!).
A lot of ICE cars end up as junk too. The EV is actually more promising to me BECAUSE of the battery swap. I can put a battery in my Leaf from a newer vehicle and increase range to a couple hundred miles (I’ll do this eventually, maybe in another 10 years). This increases the longevity of the vehicle (it’s a great car aside from range).
Honestly, the Leaf was the best car purchase I’ve ever made (I’ve owned 7 in my life, all for > 10 years, aside from the latest car and another which was stolen). I’d highly recommend people buy used EVs (but I would do a certified preowned vehicle from the dealer again, you want to know that it doesn’t have said costly damage to the vehicle, but that’s true of ICE cars that require major work too).
PS: we use the EV for city driving (easily 90% of our car use) and the ICE car to go long distances (visit relatives, camping, road trips), and only leaves the garage 2-5 times a month (but packs on the miles!).
“I can put a battery in my Leaf from a newer vehicle … and increase range to a couple hundred miles“
I think you’ll find putting a battery from a newer LEAF generation is not going to be trivial or cheap. Cars invented planned obsolescence, computers have nothing on them, so there’s likely to be non-trivial differences between batteries.
Wrong in this case. It's a straightforward common swap on these, at most needing some brackets and an intermediary on the can bus, and stronger rear springs depending on the exact swap.
There is more than one company out there shucking old Insights and Leafs for their battery modules for stationary storage applications, check with them wrt resale value if they're procuring in your area before DIYing or trading the vehicle in to a traditional auto market maker.
If you can afford it, I recommend folks buy new EVs and leave old EVs to be repurposed for stationary storage (as current grid demand is voracious for storage, which will drive fossil generation out of the electrical mix faster). If you can't afford a new EV, certainly, a used EV is fine if you can live with the reduced range and fast charge challenges.
Wow nice deal! I wish I could keep a car for 10 years. I have had some cars that are pretty old, like my 2001 Ranger, but either major mechanical failure or crashes have taken them all from me within less than a decade of ownership.
The equivalent car to your 2013 leaf today would be from 2019 or 2020. I wonder if I could find one of those for under $10k. That would be pretty awesome. The truck could get demoted to living outside and I would save some cash and CO2 when I drive around town.
Tesla will happily replace the batteries in your car for around $10,000. However generally they retain 80-90% of their capacity after over 200,000 miles and 15 years of driving. Lithium ion batteries can be reconditioned and remanufactured. ICE cars have been rusting in junkyards since the outset at much fewer miles and more expensive overhauls of their major systems for generations. The ewaste battery meme stuff is just folks hanging onto the age of fire unreasonably. The age of Maxwell is upon us.
N.b., Other car makers, YMMV. But it’s not intrinsic to the technology. If there are issues like this, it’s brand dependent. Caveat emptor.
>They are cheaper to maintain up until they need a battery replacement, then they are essentially e-waste. Will that happen before or after their bodies rust into dust?
Modern EV lithium batteries last a very long time. Tesla numbers are showing >80% capacity remaining on a 10 year old car. Yes there will be people who want to swap out at that point to restore their range. But the reality is that the degradation is acceptable for most people and still leaves you with plenty of usable range.
Tesla actually has reasonable pricing for the battery replacement.
Part of the price you pay for the car is what we in Norway called "pant", so when you replace the battery this price is subtracted since it's the price tesla buys the old battery back for.
For my X it would cost $10000 to replace the battery, however after 5 years and 100.000 km it's still at 95% of the original capacity..
The problem is that shops are basically replacing the whole engine because a head gasket swap is too hard for them.
It’s perfectly possible to swap faulty cells in an EV battery, but it requires specific skills and tools. Most shops don’t bother. It’s easier to swap the whole battery.
Swapping the whole thing is reasonable if you get the full value of the "dud" battery.
There's specific factories that buy and refurb these, only replacing specific cells and/or modules and then selling them on again as replacement parts.
Even the totally mashed parts (from a crash perhaps) have some residual value as scrap.
Fairly certain similar has happened when I've mailed off Xboxes for warranty repairs. I've got someone else's refurbed unit sent to me and mine then enters the refurb process before being returned to someone else.
It used to be common. In the 1950s engines didn't last as long so you would do such a thing. Now when I hear of it I assume a mechanic ripped someone off. Though race cars do abuse engines enough that a swap is worth it for them.
Nio, a Chinese EV manufacturer, allows batteries swap instead of charging.
They have swapping stations where you just drive the car in and the battery is swapped through an automated process in under 5 minutes, then you drive off with a full charge.
Modern gasoline cars are remarkably well designed to have everything fall apart at once. They come with an 5 year / 100,000 mile warranty and fall apart at 15 years / 200,000 miles. This not-a-coincidence is a combination of both increasing the reliability of unreliable power train components over the decades and cost cutting in others.
But an electric motor can easily last 1,000,000 miles, and we've got some battery technologies (LFP) that can also get close to that. The rest of the car could be engineered to go that far, but isn't because there has been no demand for it.
But taxis, Ubers and self-driving cars do, so I wonder if we'll see cars with a 250,000 mile / 5 year warranty. What kind of premium would the market for such a car bear?
I drive a mercedes diesel van whose engine is likely to last 1M miles. The problem is that engineering the rest of a vehicle to last even half that is incredibly challenging. Suspension systems, steering, braking, even just body panel fit over 500k miles are all subject to incredible demands. At this point, I feel that the 1M target is a bit silly. Given technological change (often but not always progress), a 20 year target seems like a sensible compromise.
Yeah, it is clearly possible. But trucks have the benefit of generally accumulating huge amounts of highway miles, which is substantially easier on the entire vehicle than family hauling and commuting. Those taxis are amazing, but I wonder if that's the right model given technological change over their lifetimes.
Also, particularly for trucks, the economics of a vehicle used to make money look a bit different than one that is purely for transportation utility.
When I lived in the Bay Area I used to use a driving service to go to the airport and the owner had an early Model S. We had several conversations about how many hundreds of thousands of miles he already had on it and how well it was holding up. He said that he wouldn’t be surprised if it lasted a million miles. Obviously the battery was degrading over time but the powertrain was so much more reliable than an ICE.
Dealers aren't called Stealerships for nothing. My friend had a rat chew through a fuel injector wire. Dealer quoted $8000 for a new wire harness. My friend said there's no way he can pay that. They said "don't worry, file it with your insurance and it'll be covered since an outside action did it" with a smile.
My friend has a $1k deductible, and doesn't like filing claims he doesn't need to.
He and I soldered the wires back together and protected them. Took us about 30 minutes. Been 4 years since.
Why can't the dealer offer a professional version of that at $200 an hour for 1 hour? Because they'd prefer to sell 40 hours of wire harness replacement.
Depending on the brand, the dealership likely has agreements in place to only do formally approved work, and I doubt "soldering wires together and wrapping them in electrical tape" is covered in the manufacturers tech manual.
More than that, they may not have wanted to risk overlooking a different wire that may have been partially chewed through, sending the car back only to have it short out again the next day. Replacing the whole harness is "safer" (and certainly more lucrative).
You're giving dealerships a lot of credit. The reason my friend called me was because I spent 10 years working at dealerships. And am a decent mechanic overall too. Luckily this didn't need much.
Dealers constantly throw half measures and guesses at repairs and send them on their way only for the customer to have issues miles or days later.
This is simply a revenue maximization scheme and that's it.
This could be it, but it could also be the case that a streamlined repair pipeline (including parts and labor) simply isn't in place for the vehicle yet. Hyundai/Kia isn't exactly the most reliable/responsible car marker (just ask the Kia Boyz).
So, a financial write off? Happens all the time, with all kinds of cars for all kinds of reasons: repair costs more than the cars value, insurance pays you the amount needed to buy an equivalent car. If it wasn't for EVs and batteries, I guess it wouldn't even have made the headlines.
This is a great opportunity for an aftermarket business. New LFP battery cells are plummeting in costs. LFP cells are also very reliable. Other than the battery, electric cars are very durable. Some electric car models (i.e., older Tesla Model S's made during the Mercedes partnership) are actually much higher quality than the current versions.
So somebody should reverse engineer the BMS for a popular old electric car model, create a new LFP based battery pack with a new BMS that is a drop in replacement for the old one (that means it is the same physical dimensions and the same electric and mechanical properties), and make the replacement.
This will probably void the warranty, but people that need a battery pack replacement are usually already out of warranty.
The LFP cells are less energy dense than the NMC cells that are used in most US sold electric vehicles, but they would probably be more energy dense than the completely used up, broken down NMC cells of a pack that needs replacement. So say you have an old 100KWH tesla model S, but the pack is completely screwed and you are getting 40 kwh out of it. The same weight in LFPs should come out to about 70 kwh. Well, people would gladly pay 6-7K for a new 70 KWH pack and a chance to keep their car, than having to shell out 80K for a brand new Model S that is made at a time of cost cutting and decreased production quality at Tesla.
It seems like complex thing to do, but it is entirely possible. All the parts are available. Power electronics are no longer back-ordered to oblivion. And it seems something that is much more useful and potentially lucrative than dozens of crazy dumb car modification projects I see people do for views on youtube.
That DARPA electrolyte fluid replacement idea the other day really seems like the best way forward for large batteries, hope they can make it work, well actually they did make it work I guess the hope it to make it cheap.
It is the pricing model for car parts vs cars - say you take a car and order all the possible parts from the factory/dealer the costs is way more than the car itself by a factor of 3 I reckon.
Keeping parts around and stocked is very expensive for the distributor - you have to handle multiple model years and various trim levels.
Which models have a titanium skid plate? Model 3s have a "skid plate" made out of cardboard. A quick search doesn't reveal what other models use.
And, frankly, I ask partially because a titanium skid plate would be ungodly expensive for my motorcycle, let alone something big enough to cover a Tesla battery pack.
