I'm on track, somehow, to do 20,000 miles in my Model 3 this year. That's significantly more than most cars do. I've had to charge out in the world four times total for a grand total of about 40 minutes. The thing is, until you start actually tracking your mileage, you don't realize how little you actually do on a daily basis.
Oh, and our Leaf that gets a total of 80 miles of range gets driven an average of 12,000 miles a year too.
Quoted from jawjaw:Few will be able to buy new and doubt there will be much market for old, high mileage electric cars.
I think that both of these will start to change in the future. First, prices will come down. Secondly, the market for old, high mileage electric cars has been climbing. It's weird - when I bought my 2013 Leaf two years ago, I bought it for $7600.
The exact same car in my area now regularly sells for $10,000+. I know because I have known FIVE people who have bought one since I did. One got a screaming deal for $6600 (on a Leaf with a replaced battery pack to boot!). Everyone else paid more than I did for the same car that I got.
The thing is, there is practically nothing that wears on them. With the exception of the battery packs - which keep coming down in price and if / when they wear out, companies will start stepping up to replace them - as a matter of fact, both Nissan and a new third party called Fenix is doing just that with old Leaf packs in the past year or so. Oh, and it turns out you can put more batteries in a Leaf than it originally had, this article from last week talks about it:
https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/26/a-2013-nissan-leaf-with-380-miles-of-range/
The program is in it's infancy, but you'll see more of this stuff happening soon.
Quoted from jawjaw:Right now you can go buy a $5000 used Toyota Corolla or something like that and still drive it for many miles.
Sure you can, but that Leaf that I bought for $7600 has already in two years saved me about $2500 in fuel cost reductions (I tracked weekly in the first year and it saved $1256) and that doesn't include any maintenance. It has had one bearing issue in a year. I'll pretend the Corolla only needs oil changes, and that's a wash. In the next month, my Leaf would have a cheaper cost of ownership than the Corolla for as long as I hold onto it, and it will only get better.
If that Corolla *ever* needs service too, the Leaf starts crushing it in cost.
Quoted from jawjaw:The idea that battery technology will just get infinitely better and vastly cheaper is not based on any reality.
Well, except it is. I can't find it now, but I've read that batteries experienced a 35% cost reduction in 2018 alone. If you read through Wikipedia on their electric vehicle battery page, they have a bunch of info about how in 2010, it was somewhere between $400 and $1700 for a kwh of usable energy.
Companies guard their battery prices very carefully. GM in 2015 stated they expected battery costs of $145 by 2016. According to a Bloomberg (from Wikipedia): "According to a study published in February 2016 by Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), battery prices fell 65% since 2010, and 35% just in 2015, reaching US$350 per kWh. The study concludes that battery costs are on a trajectory to make electric vehicles without government subsidies as affordable as internal combustion engine cars in most countries by 2022."
Tesla has alluded to achieving $100 per kWh already.
This means that my Leaf's 24 kWh battery pack (mine is a 2013, but they started production in 2010) would have cost *minimally* $9600 in 2010, which was also over 38% of the cost of the entire car. Today, if Tesla's numbers are to be believed, that same battery pack would cost $2400, a 75% reduction in the main cost of the car. Even if it only has gone through the 65% price reduction that Bloomberg found in 2016, we're talking about Nissan shedding $6000+ off the price to produce the car in six years.
It's also worth pointing out that the 2019 Leaf uses the *exact same* form factor as my Leaf does and fits 40 kWh of power into it, a 66% increase.
So, in 10 years we have reduced the price of batteries minimally by 65%, and we have increased the density of the power they store by 66%.
There are *no* components on an ICE car that have that sort of price reduction in the past 10 years, much less the thing that costs the most for the car.
Quoted from jawjaw:One example I can think of is Harley Davidson. They are fixing to sell an electric motorcycle for $30,000. It might be absolutely wonderful and make other bikes seem antique but you can buy a Harley sport bike for less than a third of that cost. Doubt oil changes and fill ups are going to save you more than $20,000. I'm sure there will be some buyers who love electric bikes and will pay the premium. That doesn't mean all bikes will be electric in a few years.
Milwaukee native (Harley HQ is in town!), I indirectly know someone who helped design the electric Harley bike, and here's the thing...
The $10,000 sport bike you're referencing would be a used model. Their new models run between $20-$30k. The new electric bike will compete with those, and it is a higher end bike for now.
But here's the other thing that should be known - Harley's sales have *cratered* lately. Here, I'll take it straight from the mouth of Harley themselves:
"Harley-Davidson international retail motorcycle sales for the full-year finished slightly ahead of 2017. U.S. retail sales fell 10.2 percent behind ongoing declines in the U.S. motorcycle industry. Worldwide retail sales decreased 6.1 percent in 2018."
Harley is not exactly in great shape with their ICE equivalents. The belief that seems to be out there is that younger buyers aren't interested in getting a bike to work on it in the garage and do their own oil changes and whatnot. And a 10% decline last year followed an 8.5% decline in 2017, and a 3.9% decline in 2016.
Maybe an EV bike isn't what Harley riders want. But doing nothing sure isn't working for them.