Quote:
Originally Posted by ron_jeremy
Thank you for a quality respons.
Obviously, you have a point. The EV batteries is not your standard AA battery.
That's a part of the "not mature enough tech and not as industrialized" as the ICE.
And my points is subjective, not facts. I find new tech exciting, the EV have suprised me, after having owned a 16' i3 for 9 months, i think it is the future.
Let's see what happens.
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I found your comment very interesting regarding the total manufacturing hours for total vehicle assembly, and it was one angle of the EV I'd not considered. It takes thousands of manufacturing hours to build a vehicle, it is just spread out over many suppliers, sub-assemblies, and final production. Being a manufacturing engineer by university-level study (not trade anymore) and my main focus of study was automotive manufacturing, I found your question intriguing. I will have to study this deeper. It's a great observation. Off to the SAE website I will go
I find EVs also intriguing because they drive great and have single-speed transmissions, along with the electric motor torque characteristics, emulates a well driven manual transmission'd car. I'm about as conservative as Fundguy and drive about as much as him too. He has many valid financial and market-based points IMO. I think EVs will have a place in the automotive marketplace. The design tech is pretty mature IMO and has been for a while. Tesla really just made a car with a big-ass battery to get the range. There's not much state-of-the-art tech to it. I think the lithium-ion battery format is close to maximum energy density as it will probably get. The real issue with adoption of the EV is getting the production cost out of it. 300-mile range is probably suitable for most people and the recharge rate acceptable for suburban homeowners (who are the majority of auto buyers), but the cost of the vehicles just does not make them economically viable in the USA at $2.00 gasoline (US). US government incentives really make EVs work for us here in the US. In Europe EVs are far more popular because of $8 gasoline prices and the less need for long-range capability. The head of Fiat-Chrysler said a few years ago that if the market was there, the large manufacturers could produce EVs fairly easily and put Tesla in the dust. I think he is correct. Tesla can be the niche EV manufacturer because it produces no other vehicle type and has none of the costs associated with supporting an ICE-based vehicle portfolio, and it's still not generated a profit.
And from what I've read on the release of the Model 3, the car costs $49,995, not $35,000. And the Model 3s being released for the first 20,000 or so units are the up-optioned 300-mile $50K vehicles. I'd bet a lot of those 400,000 "pre-orders" were made based on the promised $35,000 car. It will be interesting to see how many of the pre-orders (manufacturing slots) hang around, or request their $1,000 back.
I'm not going to shit on the EV concept, but I'm not as enthusiastic as others (although it kept me from buying Tesla stock back when it was $50
).