There is a fundamental truth you have to understand about car companies:They do not exist to make cars. They exist to make money. That distinction, analyst Kevin Tynan tells me, is why they’re not really interested in making affordable electric vehicles.
Perhaps that’s an oversimplification. Tynan is the director of research at an auto-dealer-focused investment bank, the Presidio Group, with decades of experience as an analyst at firms like Bloomberg Intelligence. What he means isn’t that automakers have no interest in affordable products. It’s that their interest begins and ends with winning customers who will eventually buy more expensive, higher-margin products.
One of the auto industry’s dirtiest secrets is that at scale, it doesn’t cost that much more to make a bigger, more expensive than a smaller and cheaper one. But they can charge you a lot more for the former, which makes this a game of profit margins and not just profits. In recent years especially, that’s a big part of why your new car choices have skewed so heavily toward bigger crossovers, SUVs and trucks.
Even if you don’t make them giant and obscenely inefficient, a 100kwh pack is gonna weigh over 300kg. Doesn’t matter if that gives it 1000 miles of range or 400 miles.
And how much does an internal combustion engine, a transmission, a fuel tank, a driveshaft, a starter motor, and an oil sump weigh?
Typically, less. EVs are consistently 10%-15% heavier than equivalent ICEs.
Weight is just not one of the advantages that EVs have over ICEs. This is not the hill you want to die on.
Fortunately, all the other advantages greatly exceed that weight penalty.
Probably about the same as such a battery, maybe a little less? The electric motor is still gonna push the EV weights above the equivalent ICE by a little. Either way, neither is gonna be comparable to the much larger vehicles on roads. Which includes buses (which I don’t think we should be trying to disincentivize although it should be considered in the planning stages of deciding between BRT and alternatives like rail). But due to the 4th power law, if we scaled taxes based on damaged done to roads, the only consumer vehicles (excluding things like trailers) that would even notice the tax would be a the few at the highest end.
3
You don’t need a 100kWh pack. Most of the smaller cars are closer to 60.
If you’re comparing an ICE vehicle that can get 400 miles a tank to an EV then you are being completely disingenuous to compare it to an EV that only gets 100-150 miles of range. They’re not comparable. An EV that gets even close to the same range is going to way much much more than a comparable ICE vehicle.
If you got 400 miles on a 100kWh pack you’ll be getting 300 on a 60kWh pack.
It completely depends on your drive configuration and aerodynamic efficiency rating. Also I don’t know why you think I said anything about getting 400 miles on a 100kWh pack. This conversation is about weight. You don’t just get to say “get a smaller battery pack and then the cars weight the same” because it makes them completely different cars. The average ICE vehicle (of the top25 sold) gets 460 miles of range. https://insideevs.com/features/527446/electric-cars-range-equilibrium/ (funny enough this article is literally what we’re arguing about!)
In any case, I’m not even arguing for larger batteries! I’m just stating that you can’t compare weight if you aren’t going to compare range. They go hand in hand.
2w old conversation, but what I was trying to say is that 100-150 miles (your example) isn’t the alternative to 400 miles in an EV (which will absolutely require a 100kWh pack). As you reduce the range through a smaller battery you get some range back through reduced weight.
No it’s not? 400 miles of range is completely unnecessary.
400 miles of range is 5 hours of driving (plus enough reserve to comfortably skip a busy, broken, blocked, or skeevy recharging point), recharge over lunch, and another 5 hours of driving. 400 mile range is where road trips become feasible.
400 miles of range, in the mountains, is 150 miles of range.
My ice has less range than 400 so this is a bit of an exaggeration.
ICEs can refuel during a bathroom break. EVs need a long lunch. Turning every bathroom break into a long lunch makes a 3-day trip into a 5-day trip.
I mean it’s not, we have two ICE vehicles with 400 miles of range, and one EV with 265 miles of range.
Weird, because I just did a several thousand mile road trip through the mountains last month with half that range.
And I can put in a leather gimp suit and have my partner spank me with a ping pong paddle. You don’t shame me for my masochistic kinks, and I won’t shame you for yours. Deal?
The overwhelming majority of us don’t have a fetish for recharging stations, and don’t want to spend 2 hours a day on our vacations to make short-range EVs seem feasible.
LOL I don’t have a kink. It’s really not a problem to stop every 3 hours to take a break.
Recharge every three hours?
Masochist.
It’s not. I own a very nice EV. I can make arguments for and against both EVs and ICE vehicles. If you are comparing battery size (which you did) then you are talking about range. If you are talking about range then you are comparing against ICE vehicles which have ranges from 350 miles to over 600. I used 400 because I own two ICE vehicles with that amount of range and one EV with 265 miles of range. The 265 miles is plenty for everyday stuff, it’s even good for road trips! But you made a comparison of weight. EVs are much heavier if they have equivalent range.
I wasn’t talking about range, I was talking about weight.
I certainly don’t and wouldn’t consider it. But if someone wants 1000 miles of range, we probably aren’t getting that without some major technological breakthroughs in material sciences any time soon without packs around 100kWh.
We don’t need 1000 miles of range…all we need is more charging stations.
What people need and what people irrationally want can be two different things
For the purposes of this conversation, only 1 of those matter. The point is EVs are not inherently heavier than ICE vehicles. They’re only heavier if you insist on unnecessarily large vehicles with unnecessarily long range. That’s why a Chevy Bolt weighs 3600 lb and a Hummer EV weighs a patently insane 9k lbs.
Lack of a need for that won’t stop people from getting them if that’s an option…
Economics of lugging all that extra battery weight around on daily commutes is why smart people wont go for the extra large pack.
Given what the top selling vehicles are in the US, I don’t expect people to be smart, even if they’re pay more upfront and long-term for their stupidity.
What people choose to buy does not make “EVs are heavier than ICE vehicles” true.
If you want an equivalent vehicle, you need that kind of capacity. If you want to match the range of a vehicle with a 24gallon tank (ie: if you want to convert a typical ICE truck into an EV), you probably need a 200kwh pack. If you want to match a ~12 gallon tank (ie: if you want to convert a typical ICE sedan into an EV), you probably need a 100kwh pack. If you had a car efficient enough to get 1000 miles on 100kwh, you’d be comparing it to a 3 gallon tank for an ICE equivalent. To match an 8 gallon tank (ie: a 2-seater car), you need about 60 kwh battery. Even if you want to compare a 80mile range fortwo EQ to a 300 mile range ICE fortwo, its already 300lbs heavier without even being close on the range and being quite limiting for even just normal commuting around here (assuming you don’t have a guaranteed charger at work).
Don’t want to, don’t need to.
Really the only thing that matters for the purposes of this comparison is physical dimensions.