
The Electric Car Revolution Is Finally Starting - gricardo99
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_juice/2016/02/electric_cars_are_no_longer_held_back_by_crappy_expensive_batteries.html
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arprocter
A big thing which isn't mentioned in this article is charge time - if after
200 miles I have to stop and plug in for x hours then hydrocarbons will always
have the edge

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ForHackernews
That's really only an issue on a long cross-country roadtrip.

Most normal trips will end at either your house or your place of work.
Presumably both those places will eventually have charging stations.

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mtgx
> Thanks to continuous improvement, General Motors last year said the new
> lithium-ion packs now cost it about $145 per kilowatt-hour

This worries me, and I haven't seen any media entity talk about this, and they
seem to just take it for granted. But if even Tesla (which so far had the
cheapest EV batteries) said its batteries are no less than $300/KWh, while
everyone else was buying them for $400/KWh, and even with the Gigafactory
online it will only drop the price of the battery by 30%, I'm really worried
GM is cutting some corners here.

Tesla's battery has a warranty of 8 years and I believe 100,000 miles. It's
possible that GM used much poorer quality batteries that will die out after 3
or 4 years, just so the company can use such a large capacity battery and fit
into that pricing point.

Yes, I'm aware the article points to Tesla saying the Gigafactory will help
drive the price point of batteries to $100/KWh, but it didn't mean
_immediately_. It could've meant within 10 years, as it seems the price of
batteries for a given capacity drop by about 50% every 5 years.

GM claimed it already used $145/KWh batteries. I wish journalists would ask
them about how they got _that_ to happen. Because if that was real and they
were actually great batteries, it would be a much bigger game-changer than the
Bolt itself. But as I said, I doubt they're taking advantage of any
breakthrough, and they are likely to use batteries that have a much smaller
lifespan than the ones in Teslas, or Leafs, and so on.

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ForHackernews
GM is the world's second largest auto manufacturer. They employ hundreds of
thousands of people, and have factories on every continent except Antarctica.

I could easily believe that GM has access to economies of scale that Tesla can
only dream about.

