Your numbers seem at odds with what most automakers are guaranteeing. Most warranties that I’ve seen on new electric cars are guaranteeing that the batteries will retain at least 70% capacity over an 8 to 10 year period, or 100k miles, whichever comes first. If 80% at 20 years is realistic then why aren’t they offering better warranties?
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I’m still amazed they’re allowed to do that for (lack of) safety reasons, much less that anyone thought it was a good idea.
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I didn’t look. Just based on the post before mine.
That still get’s back to this question then: Is there some routine replacing of batteries going on that I’m unaware of?
I can confidently state that the propulsion battery management and thermal systems in my car are significantly more advanced than those systems in my cell phone, tablet, or any car’s 12V battery system. There’s no comparing them. There’s really no good comparison to anther battery management beyond between different electric powered vehicles.
After my own heart. I’d love an EV with mechanical buttons 
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Availability and incentives. Here in BC there was a $6k incentive to scrap an old gas burner if you bought a new EV. On top of that there was another $8k in incentives from the federal government and… somewhere else that I now forget. There were no used EVs available at that time.
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Or Arizona heat, for that matter.
Just to clarify, these are in a tablet form factor, but the brains are probably elsewhere, right? right? /sarcasm
(who am I kidding, the manufacturers will have taken a OEM level industrial tablet, put their own firmware/software on it, and bolt it to the dashboard, more or less, where the radio, climate controls, and some other useful controls used to be located. Oh, and they want several thousand for the part by itself if your kids in the back seat decide to throw a toy at it and break the glass; Or you have a really vindictive ex that decides to smash every single bit of glass on the vehicle as a final EFF YOU before vanishing into thin air…)
PLUS INFINITY… AND BEYOND!!!
Agreement. Finding parts on the early 00’s autos is a challenge. (Hell, finding some of the more obscure OEM body trim parts for my '11 tundra is difficult as well. 
)
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That’s an excellent point that wasn’t mentioned in the CNN article. When the government offers cash incentives that only apply to buyers of a brand-new electric car, then the car immediately drops in value after purchase by at least the amount of the incentives, even if the owner tries to re-sell that car the very next day. I wonder how much of the drop in resale values can be attributed to that factor on its own.
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That’s why I like my Renault Zoe. Everything except the map function is controlled with physical buttons.
Another bonus is the 300mpg cost equivalent of charging it overnight at cheap rate electricity.
However I’m in the UK. Range isn’t a worry. 99% of car journeys in western Europe are less then 100 miles. I’ve done 150 to 250 mile journeys by stopping for lunch and recharging at the same time. (The Zoe’s range is about 200 miles.)
The US car ecology is entirely different, though.
If you’re worried about cheap Teslas, you should be practically frantic about BYD and the other Chinese manufacturers.
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So Chevrolet is sort of doing this internally with their Ultium platform. It’s a modular battery / chassis design that they’re going to put underneath their expanding EV line; the Equinox, the redesigned Bolt, Silverado, and Blazer. But the packs are mounted in the chassis, and certainly not user swappable.
The problem with the “swappable battery pack” idea that everyone seems to want is that they decrease range a lot. Swappable trays require extra material for strength to hold the mass of batteries rigidly enough to yank them in and out, they need support rails with precision alignment, and large reliable connectors that won’t corrode or come loose (typical sources of battery fires). They need coolant considerations (heating in the winter, cooling in summer) which is typically done with a liquid coolant circulation system. And they have to be located safely in the vehicle, protected from punctures in crashes. All that hardware reduces the space available for batteries, reducing range by 10%-20% or more.
And a car full of cells is heavy. Every EV on the market today carries over half a ton of batteries. Imagine asking a homeowner to swap 20 50-pound car battery packs every time they had to recharge. And every pack swap had to be precisely positioned and fitted. Not exactly user friendly.
Whole vehicle swappable car battery packs require a device like a hand operated floor forklift to replace them. An Israeli company ran a system like this where you could pull into a gas station-like garage where they’d swap your flat battery pack for a freshly charged one in just a few minutes. They did all the charging and maintenance on the packs. All you had to do was fork over cash.
The public isn’t ready for easily swapped batteries.
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This bit…
“You can think of every car we sell or produce that has full autonomy capability as something that in the future may be worth five times what it is today.”
That’s that’s not true of any day-to-day use car, nor of any immature technology. To say this about an immature-tech car is truly a reality-bending level of bullshit.
Undermining the industry, though? He’s undermining one particular hype bubble he built up; one of many. I suppose some people might call one hype bubble an “industry”, but it feels like a stretch.
Also…
Yep. He can’t hope to undermine this hype as fast as BYD.
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Even if they worked out the kinks for battery-swapping to make it more efficient and user-friendly I don’t think there’s a huge demand for it. Assuming you have access to a charging station at home or work, the only advantage of quick-swappable batteries is that they reduce the amount of time you need to stop for charging on a long road trip. But aside from truck drivers, who takes long road trips frequently enough to make that a deal-breaker?
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Come on guys. Are we really decrying the drop in prices of EV’s which will allow so many more people to afford them and therefore assist in saving our planet from its climate change induced disaster?
Sure Elon is an asshole. It’s dissapointing that he can have such a shallow, sel absorbed view of the world when he goes and does cool stuff like successfully disrupts and improves both the space and automobile industries.
Cheap EVs == Good thing.
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Because they know that they only rarely pay out.
A crowd-sourced study by Tesla owners in the Netherlands—using data from Teslas sold throughout the world—showed that the battery packs of Model S sedans were seeing an average rate of degradation of around 5 percent during the first 50,000 miles of driving. This curve becomes less steep as more miles are added, too, with the study indicating the battery packs of these long-range Teslas typically held at least 90 percent of their original charge after 150,000 miles of driving. Our long-term Model 3 lost roughly 6 percent of its battery capacity after the first 20,000 miles but then didn’t degrade any further all the way to 40,000 miles over 2 years.
Not a scientific study, but it’s some data.
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Well that would be great. Except car manufacturers have this weird idea that they actually have to make money if they design, build and sell a car.
So while cheap EVs are great to a point; if car manufacturers aren’t making what they consider to be enough from them, they will stop making the ones they don’t make money on and make more of the ones they do.
This is already happening in that most manufacturers are only making giant EVs.
Want a honking great SUV that still somehow has a top speed of over 100mph? No problem.
Want a small city runabout, say something the size and price of a Skoda Citigo? Good luck.
That is in part caused by the general decision to cut smaller form factors (again not enough profit for manufacturers) but the pressures at work there are much greater when it comes to EV given that you also somehow have to fit the battery pack in there.
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… it is like that, which is why we find that people talk a lot more about affordable housing than they build any 
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You’d have to look at (European) commercial vehicles there.
This is the dashboard of a Renault Kangoo EV.
The one we have at work (an older model than this) looks exactly like the ICE version, except that the fuel gauge has been replaced by an entirely mechanical battery charge gauge.
ETA: looks like it’s not just the commercial vehicles range at Renault
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Whenever you talk about electric cars? Every second person apparently.
I hear it here all the time, we need our big subsidised diesel because we don’t live in the city.
Country takes two hours to drive across motherfucker! Two fucking hours (and 14 minutes right now). You don’t need a diesel.
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There’s a grammar/style rule that irregular plural forms aren’t applied to other uses of the word, e.g., computer mouses.
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You definitely say computer mice in the UK. Might be an American thing?
Nope, looks like ‘computer mouses’ is not a thing anywhere: https://trends.google.co.uk/trends/explore?date=all&q=computer%20mouses,Computer%20mice&hl=en-GB
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