The problem is that if they made a sub $10k vehicle now, "everyone" would buy it. That sounds great, but there's simply not enough battery factories to make the batteries for that many vehicles. The demand for expensive vehicles is still high enough that most of the EV battery factory output of the world can go to those expensive high margin vehicles, so of course the car makers haven't focused on low cost.
There are several dozen giga-scale battery factories coming online in the next few years. That should be a huge enabler to make cheap cars. Once they start to flood the market, the car makers will have to make budget vehicles to stay relevant.
There are also still a whole bunch of expensive R&D work still going on to optimize EV cars. Look at the cyber truck with its 48V and ethernet architecture. It made sense to launch that with an expensive vehicle so they can get a return on their R&D investment sooner. But now that they have it, they can apply it to a budget car and that should help lower cost by reducing the amount of copper wires needed.
Feels like everything is coming together for an explosion in EV growth. We're at the bottom of the ramp of the technology S-curve (logistics curve). We're in what feels a bit like a "false start" phase, but this phase is important for ironing out the kinks for the true mass-scale rollout.
I keep on seeing this problem reduced to the market or a business decision, but is it simply physically possible?
These vehicles require much more energy to produce. And without a reduction in consumption, almost the entire economy accounts for the availability of the same materials in the near future to meet carbon emissions targets. It's not just cars in vacuum.
It feels like we simply don't accept yet that the time of cheap energy is over...
I don't think ever before we had significant periods of time where we actually get paid to use energy from the grid due to overprovisioning with renewables. Plenty of times during the past several years I've had negative electricity cost.
Energy seems to be more and more available as we expand the infrastructure.
> I don't think ever before we had significant periods of time where we actually get paid to use energy from the grid due to overprovisioning with renewables
Yes, because storage isn't factored in and production is intermittent... A world relying fully on solar panels is also relying fully on batteries, whether it's lithium, hydro or something else, we need to account for that in the price.
> It's literally free after building the infrastructure.
That's a gross oversimplification of the problem at hand. The entire supply chain from mining to manufacturing to shipping relies on fossil fuel... The investments to renew all that will have to come from somewhere.
It is not "literally" free, it is free only if you ignore the global industrial complex required to build and service them.
Do you have a source? I think you may be referring to the peak production price without storage. Oil comes with storage: put it in a jug, and use it whenever.
There are several dozen giga-scale battery factories coming online in the next few years. That should be a huge enabler to make cheap cars. Once they start to flood the market, the car makers will have to make budget vehicles to stay relevant.
There are also still a whole bunch of expensive R&D work still going on to optimize EV cars. Look at the cyber truck with its 48V and ethernet architecture. It made sense to launch that with an expensive vehicle so they can get a return on their R&D investment sooner. But now that they have it, they can apply it to a budget car and that should help lower cost by reducing the amount of copper wires needed.
Feels like everything is coming together for an explosion in EV growth. We're at the bottom of the ramp of the technology S-curve (logistics curve). We're in what feels a bit like a "false start" phase, but this phase is important for ironing out the kinks for the true mass-scale rollout.