This is a big problem. There isn't enough EV manufacturing capacity to meet demand. So, right now, EVs are being treated by auto manufacturers as a premium product with huge markups. Tesla never did ship a $35K car, and Ford's electric F-150 is substantially more expensive than the gas version. Worse, electrics tend to come with all the useless high-end trim options. Price the Jeep Wrangler EV.
I wonder if we will ever get back low-margin cars. Auto companies are getting addicted to high margins and post-purchase charges. The CEO of Stellantis is explicit about this.
The end result may be BYD replacing Chevrolet or Toyota.[1]
He thinks most manufacturers will go LFP, and increasing scale of LFP cell production plus the low material cost will crater the price of the battery pack. He also wants to go to direct online sales, and cut advertising:
>Ford, like Tesla, may not have to buy advertising to sell EVs, which now amounts to $500 to $600 per vehicle, Farley said.
Terrifically bad news for legacy TV, if true. It would certainly blow a hole in the NFL's budget.
Now that's good news. EVs ought to be simpler, but it takes a major redesign to achieve the simplicity. Which Ford is doing.
Like BYD' CEO, Ford top management sees lithium iron phosphate as the battery technology for low end vehicles. It's both cheaper and far less prone to battery fires. That chemistry does not have the thermal runaway problem.
I think Chinese (and other) pure EV brands will probably replace the existing car manufacturers.
However, charging what the market will bear in a tight market is not the thing that will doom them. Artificially limiting their production of EVs, through internal strife or plain bad planning will hurt them though.
Insufficient capacity is all that blocks EV market share from hitting 60-70% in an instant (rest will be diehard conservatives). So we will see it being the case for the next 10 years or so, naturally.
Grid capacity is what blocks EV market share and will continue to be the blocker for the foreseeable future.
A 2 person apartment where I live will consume ~400kWh of power in a typical month. Charging a 100kWh battery twice a month per person would double the power usage. We don't have the power generation, nor power delivery for that, nor will we have it for some time.
Not really, a car serves for ~15 years, so even 100% EV market share will mean only 6% or so annual replacement rate. Plenty of time for grid to adapt.
According to a random source (American Public Power Association), the US got about 30GW of new power from 2014 to 2021, and is projected to build another 41GW in 2022. The generation as of March 2022 was 1250GW, so about 2-3% increase per year. You'd have to add another 8.5% (12 year car replacement age, and it doubles consumption, so you need to double the total production in 12 years) on top of that and you'd have to start now, not in a couple years, when the problem becomes apparent.
Average age != average service life though, so what you are essentially saying is: Service life is something above 20 years[1]
The main thing about the electricity grid isn't so much that we need new capacity (that we actually have the production capacity to deal with), but that it changes the load distribution of the grid. And we have no (effective) way to communicate the load condition. If we could dynamically increase and decrease the consumption, then we could deal with building less excess capacity.
At least here in Germany, if you look outside you'll see nearly every new house having a complete array of solar panels and all of the currently added installations come with the option to redirect the power into local storage. This isn't widely deployed yet as battery capacity is still too expensive, but within the next couple of years this will be fixed and all of these buildings will "disappear" from the electric grid. They will (largely [2]) feed themselves and all remaining demand will be time-insensitive due to the available local storage.
These houses (and the associated EVs) will not put additional strain on the grid. And, if we manage to sort out the regulatory things and implement a reasonable user-interface, they may even take strain from the grid.
This is a rather long story for saying this: Don't equate "capacity added" with "production increase" with "actual amount of electric energy generated and consumed". The first to numbers differ by a load factor and the last one will (increasingly) diverge, due to net-metering and friends.
[1] assuming that all cars large the same time and none get "lost" by being in accidents or exported you'd get to 24 years if the half-life is 12, in practice I would assume a certain heavy-tailness and a peak somewhere around 20
[2] most houses will be _heavily_ oversupplied on a year-long basis, but will be consumers to the grid for shorter periods.
I wonder if we will ever get back low-margin cars. Auto companies are getting addicted to high margins and post-purchase charges. The CEO of Stellantis is explicit about this.
The end result may be BYD replacing Chevrolet or Toyota.[1]
[1] https://en.byd.com/auto/