You could buy a used EV for around the same price

That’s why I don’t really care that much about new EVs getting cheaper. I do want EVs to be competitive on price and features and longevity with the midrange ICE vehicles, though, because today’s midrange care becomes tomorrow’s budget car in the used market.

No worries. I just think pricing dynamics are neat and I wanted to talk about them.

what you said doesnt negate what i’ve said.

Not every reply to a comment is intended to do that.

Don’t forget the cross subsidies from co-products.

If ground beef (aka beef mince in the UK where this story is running) is the cheapest trimmings that remain after all of the expensive cuts have been processed, it’s entirely possible that the low price for this byproduct is partially subsidized by the high prices for the premium product (expensive steaks, moderate expense whole cuts). Plus things like hides for leather.

For now, the plant-based competition is aiming at the types of meat that are easier to mimic or replace with plant-based foods. And unfortunately, those happen to be the cheaper types of meat. If we get to the point where there is significant plant-based competition to filet mignon, that product will have a lot more room to work with in being price competitive.

Pricing inputs get complicated, and government subsidies are only a piece of the picture.

Yes. Kias are on the same e-GMP platform, all of which seem to suffer from the ICCU issues. It’s also unclear whether the software updates have fixed the issues, or whether more recent model years have fixed the hardware.

But Kia/Hyundai have at least extended the warranties on the ICCUs to 15 years in most countries, including in Germany where OP lives.

Nuclear you are looking a decade before it starts being operational and then another couple decades to recoup the cost.

By the time a new nuclear plant breaks even on the capital expenditures to build it, a competing solar plant has already been built, operated for a few decades, and been torn down/decommissioned for even newer tech. That 80-year nuclear plant has to compete with like 3 successive generations of solar plants/batteries, advanced geothermal, and maybe even commercialized fusion. Building a new nuclear plant is a decision to saddle your grandchildren with a payment plan on locked in costs of construction today.

Ah yeah, the ability to pass power in both directions at arbitrary rates seems pretty important for that use case. Otherwise you’d have to charge the battery with the sun, discharge the battery into the car (while presumably wasting good sunlight). The setup you have sounds like it avoids most of that.

So a good sunny day is good for what, 3 kwh into the car?

I think you’re mixing things up, where you assume that the past is part of an inevitable exponential growth in our future.

There are two exponential curves happening, neither of which is inevitably going to continue:

1. Global human population growth has historically been exponential across many periods of history. There are signs that this is slowing down and might reach a period of zero or negative growth, almost purely off of social changes.
2. Per capital consumption of resources has been growing exponentially since the industrial revolution. But when you dig in, that’s largely only true of certain resources, and some rich populations have reversed growth for certain resources (coal in the West, beef in the United States). This is where the fight is, and where we can work to reverse the trendline for fossil fuels generally.

Humanity doubled each 43±6 years

From this source , that really has only happened twice (48 years from 2b to 4b, and then 47 years from 4b to 8b). Before that, it was much slower (about 120 years from 1b to 2b). And might not happen again, where I doubt the world will ever see 16 billion living people on the planet, and where projections for 50 years from now are around 10 billion, with a peak and decline shortly after that.

The main work that needs to be done is on stopping the exponential growth in consumption of physical resources per capita, or the exponential growth in environmental damage per capita. And we’re working on it: recycling loops of our raw materials like steel or lithium batteries or glass or copper, pursuing zero emissions energy sources, switching certain land use and ocean extraction to be sustainable indefinitely. There’s a lot more to do, and we haven’t been successful on every front, but the fight is winnable and losing isn’t inevitable.

Does the 2kWh battery go 0% to 100% in a single day? Or can you simultaneously charge it while discharging it by feeding a level 1 inverter to the car?

I was under the impression that giving the motors the ability to put torque back into the wheel doesn’t add any significant weight over the existing regenerative braking systems.

Plus there’s still plenty of moments where there is actually traction to spare, where being able to push each tire closer to its traction limits for a larger percentage of the time during a race would surely improve performance.

I can believe it might not be worth the tradeoff, but don’t believe that adding the capability would always categorically be a mistake.

The front tires have a finite amount of traction that needs to be reserved for cornering.

To borrow an analogy from computer RAM, unused traction is wasted traction. Yes, when cornering, all of the available traction should be devoted to steering. But for the straights, why not use the available traction for acceleration?

Hp is a fake number based on torque and RPM from ICE.

You can convert it to watts if you prefer, but it’s very much a real unit, denoting how much work it does per unit time. Torque alone is insufficient (just as force measured in newtons alone would be insufficient) for showing whether a particular machine is more powerful than another.

I think it’s much more important what the big economies do that don’t have that option: Europe, China, India, Africa.

It’s worth pointing out that China in particular uses an enormous amount of coal.

Electrification is good, as both a bridge to cleaner energy and as a way to reduce dispersed pollution from many different fossil fuel sources (like almost every vehicle on the road). But electrification is only one step that needs to happen. The other is to decarbonize the grid itself.

So China burns more coal than anyone else in the world (with India at the number 2 spot), and is dramatically increasing its renewable power generation, but the overall increase in overall energy and their strategic interest in energy security and energy independence has them continuing to not only mine coal, but to continue constructing new coal power plants, and to slow down the actual decommissioning of old coal plants.

So although disruption to the global oil market will cause most countries to rely less on fossil fuels, the countries with domestic production of fossil fuels (Chinese coal, American oil) won’t feel the pressure as much.

Why?

GAC Aion prices the Aion RT Super at 88,800 yuan (around €11,050), but excludes the battery from the base cost. Instead, the company requires customers to lease the swappable battery as a subscription, lowering the upfront price while adding ongoing monthly costs. The battery cannot be purchased separately for this model.

Oh I don’t like that subscription model one bit. What assurance does an owner have that their subscription price won’t change over the life of their vehicle?

Sweet corn is primarily harvested at a young stage, so it’s not just the variety of corn, but also the choices of how and when to harvest and process.

A lot of the edible varieties are different cultivars, generally categorized as flint corn or flour corn. Flint corns can be processed into grits and coarser cornmeal, while flour corns can be processed into corn starch and corn flour.

Field corn/dent corn is the majority of what American farmers grow, and is generally not intended for direct human consumption, unless heavily processed into bourbon and corn oil and corn syrup.

Even the stuff that is processed into ethanol (for whiskey to drink or for fuel or other industrial use) is still converted into animal feed and corn oil after the fermentable carbohydrates are extracted.

That’s true, although a fuel tank is also really simple to build while a rechargeable battery and related charging controllers/equipment get pretty complicated to manufacture. Some of the complexity gets pushed elsewhere.

Also the price difference thing is more or less gone now.

It’s just always been hard to compare like for like, because pure EVs compete on different features than similarly priced ICE vehicles. Is a Tesla Model 3 more like a $30,000 Toyota Camry or more like a $60,000 BMW 3 series? Which is the nearest ICE competitor to the Rivian R1S?

In the past 5 years we’ve seen a lot of new models released by different manufacturers, we’re also seeing more directly comparable models.

One interesting thing is that Toyota is soon releasing EV versions of vehicles they also offer as ICE vehicles. Sometime in the next month or so, the Lexus ES will be offered as either a pure EV or a hybrid, and the EV will actually be cheaper. And there’s an EV Highlander coming later this year, with a price comparable to the hybrid Grand Highlanders.

And obviously my comment is very much U.S.-centered because that’s the market I know, but most of the ICE manufacturers rely on global manufacturing and supply chains so that we can try to see patterns and trends more broadly. European brands like VW, BMW, Volvo, Mercedes, etc., have also been pushing electrified models that sit somewhere in the long spectrum between cheap economy cars and expensive luxury/sport cars.

ICE engines are cool because of how complex they had to become in order to become even as remotely as reliable as Electric Engines are fundmanetally.

I remember in the 90’s when a lot of carmakers were developing variable valve timing where the valve timing would adjust based on RPM, using the different parts of the camshaft for each cylinder’s timing, so that it could maximize performance/efficiency for a wider range of RPMs without trying a one size fits all approach for the whole range. And each carmaker used a slightly different approach, trying to do something to squeeze out just a little bit more performance out of the same size engine.

Or consider the nature of the transmissions, and the rise of the automatic transmission, which allowed carmakers to start going into 6-10 gears (or the continuously variable transmission) because shifting gears could be abstracted away from the driver’s perspective.

The history of a lot of the other engineered functions (getting power from the engine to 2 or 4 of the wheels while allowing different rotational rates, getting fuel into the cylinder, cooling and lubricating the engine, getting the fuel/air mixture right, etc.) shows that it’s so many different things to worry about just to make the car go, reliably and safely.

I wonder if there’s hysteresis where the slope of the curve depends on the prior charge history.

Like, if you charge from 1% to 100%, does the 20-80% part of the curve look different than if you discharged down to just 20 and started charging to 80 from there?