You get a better Model Y today for $50k than the Model S I bought in 2018 for $90k. These batteries will outlast the chassis. There is no material battery waste stream for recycling because the batteries last so much longer than expected. Auto consumers will ride the battery and EV learning curve where the price continues to decline and the power train improves over time.
(Have supercharged my model s almost exclusively over 5 years and 110k miles and still only have 8% degradation, 100kw pack, n=1)
Meh, they’ll figure it out like they always do. Engineering and manufacturing is hard. They’ve got $20B cash equivalents on hand and an $800B market cap, with a 2M unit/year run rate. I bought my S when I was concerned about their ongoing viability, but no longer concerned. The brand has strong enough legs, they’ll survive almost anything now. I’ve been hearing the rumors of Tesla’s death since the first roadster.
Nobody's talking about Tesla's death (they're the most heavily subsidized US company today outside of military contractors/weapons manufacturers). But Tesla specifically has consistently ranked as one the least reliable brands of any automobile manufacturers. Even if you only look at EV manufacturers
Doesn’t matter what they’re ranked, they sell every car built at margins higher than any competing automaker. All that matters is the balance sheet, opinions can be ignored unless materially impacting volume.
Global auto market is 80 million units a year. Tesla will be able to sell into a market somewhere, even if a market softens. They also sell $20B-$25B/year of stationary storage, and are sold out for the next 2 years.
Subsides are good if you believe in climate change. The top 40% (by income) of Americans pay federal income tax, they can afford to provide EV subsides. If you don’t believe in climate change, there is no value in a conversation.
FWIW this person has been driving that car for 5 months now without any issues. Supposedly Tesla's engineering department looked at the details and said the cracks are not a problem. I'm not a licensed engineer that specializes in chassis design nor metallurgy so I can't assess that claim.
Tesla's customer service org still needs improvement. If I were the service manager and assuming engineering really signed off on the structure being OK as-is... I'd just have one of our welders patch up the cracks. Even if it doesn't affect the structure it would give the customer peace of mind.
If you think these kinds of issues are unique to Tesla prepare to be surprised. Traditional dealers deal with this crap on half the new cars they receive. When I bought an Infiniti a few years ago it came with a couple of flaws from the factory (lest you think the Japanese manufacturers are better) - the dealer issued me a "we owe" sheet with a promise to repair the issues which they did once parts arrived.
The lauded BMW sold me an M3 with defective journal bearings that grenaded the engine at 20k miles. At least a missing brake reservoir cap can be easily replaced! The replacement block alone was billed to BMW at $14k excluding other parts and labor. That same M3 ate its differential bearings not long after. The service tech's explanation to me was that "Hans must have come into work hung over that day".
My point is: if you go looking for problems you will find them. With every make and model. You can't point to one person's possible problem and say "ah-ha! That car maker produces garbage!"
Apologies for prior terse response, I wasn't talking about a personal experience, just the almost-goes-without-saying truism that japanese brands are the most reliable and have dominated pretty much every car reliability rating since the 70s. You used a single anecdote to make a very broad claim so the burden of proof is on you to back that claim up.
The data is really easy to find. Here's two examples of CR results:
Woof. An EV battery produces between 2.5 and 16 metric tons of CO2. About 9% of emissions for a combustion engine vehicle is in the initial manufacturing alone (compared to ~35% for an EV). An EV's battery is by far the most polluting in the process and manufacturing of the battery alone produces more emissions than the entire manufacturing process of an average combustible engine vehicle.
If people are replacing their batteries every 8 years, we _REALLY_ need to optimize our grid and figure out a real solution to recycling EV batteries ASAP
>If people are replacing their batteries every 8 years, we _REALLY_ need to optimize our grid and figure out a real solution to recycling EV batteries ASAP
We already have both figured out and have for quite some time, at this point it's just a combination of scaling up (for recycling), and political will for rapid expansion of renewables and bringing new nuclear plants online.
Recycling EV batteries would continue to produce CO2 (by the shady metrics people use to attach CO2 production to a process which does not include any emissions directly from the manufacturing process, unlike say, concrete production).
But people aren't replacing their batteries every 8 years.
Modern solar panels are usually rated to 90%+ production at 20 years. Mine are rated for 92%. It turns out all the sturm und drang about having to replace solar panels and "oh-my-god manufacturing emissions will outstrip the benefits produced over their lifetime" ... was bunk. Rounded down: no one ever replaces their solar panels. In all likelyhood even 100 year old panels will still be producing >50% of their rated output. For the rare case where someone replaces panels the old panels are re-sold to a new user... they are very rarely junked.
Batteries don't last quite as long but they have similar characteristics. People forget about range anxiety and just drive the vehicle. It turns out most people don't see capacity reductions anywhere near the dire predictions. They often don't notice the capacity reduction nor care even when they do notice. Even when someone wrecks an EV the batteries are often not recycled - people buy and use them either as replacements for their own vehicles or for power backup systems. Fleet stats are in the early stages but so far even after driving for 10+ years most Tesla owners are on the original battery and happy with it.
much more relevant than OP's unsourced speculations I think!
The first link is not "speculative". It's projecting from the current (very high) rate of landfill waste to try to predict how much will be going to the landfill with the ongoing boom
It does no such thing. Why would you lie about that when anyone can just go and read it?
> Using real U.S. data, we modeled the incentives affecting consumers’ decisions whether to replace under various scenarios
They model replacement, and assume that the replaced equipment is going into a landfill, which is exactly the OP's point that it won't. It's entirely speculative, and based on assumptions OP says aren't true. Why would you post that?
My information comes from installers and dealers of used panels.
The rate of solar panel replacement is extremely low. Very few people replace their panels. Modern panels also don't degrade very quickly, often warrantied for less than 0.5%/year. Most people who do replacements are the much smaller number of early adopters.
These are just facts. The supposed "avalanche" of old panels has not appeared. In other words if you compare # of panels produced per year to # of panels being thrown away it is more favorable than most products. Not that any of the articles you posted even make an attempt to run those numbers.
I stand by my point: both solar panels and batteries have been steadily improving year after year. They last longer than people think and are not creating a tide of waste as the nay-sayers keep predicting in order to squash these technologies to promote burning fossil fuels.
Why? Obviously less degradation is better, but I have done a couple Northern Oregon to Central California trips in an EV. The total charge time for the trip was ~2 hours (on top of ~10 hours of driving), and I have a relatively low end, slower charging vehicle (<100 kW). If I lose 10% of my range, I'll add about about 15 minutes of charging time to the trip. That's doesn't really seem like that big a deal. And slightly higher end cars (and likely all cars sold a few years from now), will have even less.
Yes, but decreased range only matters on long trips (like the one I describe), and the only thing it does it make you have to charge more frequently. I described how much that would actually matter on a real trip.
As for your second sentence, the entire point of this article was that that's not true.
> As for your second sentence, the entire point of this article was that that's not true.
1. It was not my claim, I was just clarifying OP's claim.
2. "That's not true" is an oversimplification. The article is basically saying that the software vehicles have to prevent damage from fast charging generally seems to work and minimal damage is occurred. But it still cautions against fast charging in high temperatures for example
That's where the used market comes in: if you really, really need 200 mile range, when it drops below that there will be a market of buyers who only need 150 miles. That has the added benefit of making EVs affordable for more people.
ICE cars don't really lose range, but they do degrade faster in ways that EVs don't.
> ICE cars don't really lose range, but they do degrade faster in ways that EVs don't
I understand ICE have more moving parts, but this doesn't really hold up. If you DON'T INCLUDE battery costs, then EVs begin to be cheaper in maintenance after ~3 years (in the first 3 months they cost ~2.3x more in maintenance and this figure gradually reduces). However, there have not been significant studies that go beyond this range which is when battery issues/replacements start to factor in. I wouldn't be surprised if after 10 years maintenance costs for EVs would again be higher than for ICE
That sounds more like a BMW problem unless you were putting huge mileage on it. Lots of 90s vehicles on conventional oil would go over 300,000 miles without replacing any major parts. Just alternators, plugs, and $10 sensors. Anything newer running on full synthetic is a total piece of shit if it isn't hitting 400-500,000 miles
average ice car life-cycle is 12 years. EV lifespan is comparable.
It's a weird attack angle for the anti-EV rhetoric. People talk about the longevity of an EV and somehow either don't realize or acknowledge its comparable to an ICE vehicle and then put this worried look on their face.
If the data here is to be believed, then cars 2009 and prior make up 44% of of all cars on the road today, or or very roughly around 127 million cars.
There really isn't that much to be said about EV longevity because to be frank, they isn't really enough data right now. There's not enough that are not old enough.
Well sure we don't have the actual full numbers yet but we have about a decade of data and everything I've seen suggests that the bathtub curve is statistically indistinguishable from a conventional ice car.
There could be some phenomenal unprecedented cliff that defies the durability life cycle of all manufactured goods but the fundamental assumption here is they're going to behave like typical similar products for the rest of the cycle.
I'm certainly not a professional in the automobile waste stream but from what I've read, transmissions, which are the key difference here, have a failure rate that is far longer than the normal distribution of car lives.
That means the car gets junked mostly for other reasons, probably a compound of various reasons such as the style being outdated, the interior being worn, the body suffering various damages, parts of the drivetrain wearing, hard to replace sensors going bad, accidents, and multiples of these things
I spent the past 7 years of my life in telematics logistics and fleet operations of hybrids, hydrogen, CNG and EVs so I know some things but I can only personally speak for the couple hundred that I worked with and what I've read
Practically that isn't a problem for the majority of people though. Yes, you lose 9% of range after 1,000 days. Go into the purchase expecting that, the same way you'd expect that you aren't going to get the EPA rated gas mileage you see on the sticker in the window.
In a model Y with 340 miles of rated range, you'd be down to ~310 miles of range. And what happens from there? This study shows the same effect that others do - range loss pretty much levels off at a certain point. 300 miles of range is more than sufficient for 90% of people, especially when they can wake up with a fully charged vehicle every morning if they are charging at home.
I am curious of this study as it goes against the common idea that fast charging is bad for battery health. I'm a little sad they used Tesla for the data source as their range values are alleged to be flawed, but understandable due to the high sample size.
I was curious too, but it sort of makes sense. What batteries dislike is not charging per se, but heat. When you use fast charging in a Tesla, it actively runs a liquid cooling system, so the battery is probably heating up a lot less than the one in your phone and damage is correspondingly less. Also, phone batteries only have a couple cells, Teslas have several thousand: the wear of charge/discharge cycles can be spread out over all of them.
Had no clue Tesla had liquid cooling system, but makes sense. Do that also have a way to heat batteries or other components for cold weather environments?
The Tesla Y introduced a heat pump for this purpose, and earlier models included heaters. There's some impact to range for running the heater but it helps for sure.
I get the impression that Tesla has some of the best in the business battery management. That impression is from following Tesla users a bit, including the stories of some of the taxi/limo fleet users, but only passingly. It seems like users were seeing evidence that the batteries would last a million miles with 20% degredation, that was back in 2017/2018, not sure if the battery chemistry has changed that at all.
But, it makes me wonder if the other car companies will have similar levels of battery management or suffer from early death. Considering how large a proportion the battery is of the total cost, it makes sense to have some great management.
What about the impact of fast charging on power grids? Where I live there are power outages on hot days because of people running the AC, I can't imagine how it would hold up with a large percentage of houses charging a car. Sure, they could install a secondary battery pack to charge the car and avoid overloading the grid, but batteries would have to be really affordable.
It would be a complete and utter waste of money which would be a net loss at best over about a 40 year period.
It's not hard to calculate the economics of batteries for residential solar (I've done it repeatedly), but I can save you some time: it's pointless. Because if it was viable, then it would cheaper and more efficient for utility companies to build their own grid batteries (which they do: but not for long-term energy storage, they use it for grid stability).
The price you pay for off-peak power, will always be slightly less the minimum cost of battery ownership. Because if batteries were cheaper to own, then you would get that price via your electricity bill anyway.
2. The grid mostly doesn’t care how far the battery is from the panel.
3. Lithium ion is an incredibly inefficient means of storing power that doesn’t have to be portable. Grid storage doesn’t use Li ion because it isn’t cost effective.
In summary the major misallocation of resources is using lithium batteries to store grid power at all. At home solar is the next Great Leap Forward for humanity. It's about as logical as making steel at home.
I’m with you on the inefficiency of wide-scale at home solar and your three list items but don’t understand the connection to the Great Leap Forward unless you’re just saying they’re both bad and involved (or would likely involve) ill-calculated intervention and mis-allocation. If anything I think the right analogy is that home solar is to small scale private farming as large solar farms are to large scale agriculture. I think a modern Great Leap Forward more worthy of the name would be an aggressive failed attempt to build massive solar farms and dismantle home solar systems through forced labor after home solar had already achieved ubiquity.
In stationary scenarios some aspects really don't matter.
Mass, doesn't really matter unless we are over what single truck can deliver or can be installed at time. Meaning tens of tons.
Volume, some limits, but still I think few cubic meters is in reasonable space. Compare to oil and gas.
Cost per kwh and cycles is the important ones. They should result in less than grid costs.
Also I would consider safety to be important. Is there risk of fire? In event of fire does it keep burning? Does if off gas something toxic that stays also after? Etc.
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