Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

March 7 news, analysts said that factors such as the decline in battery prices have made electric cars cheaper and cheaper, and the total cost of owning and using them has been roughly the same as that of gasoline cars. Coupled with the increasing number of models available on the market, more consumers begin to choose electric vehicles.

The following is the translation of the source Pexels:

For consumers who buy cars, an indisputable fact is that electric cars are getting cheaper and cheaper.

With the recent price reduction of many electric cars, the cost of owning electric vehicles is now roughly the same as that of gasoline cars. Massive government subsidies for electric car buyers have played a part. Even excluding these, the overall costs of electric and gasoline cars are roughly the same.

Although many electric cars are still priced higher than equivalent gasoline cars, the gap is narrowing. Although Tesla has played an important role in promoting the continuous introduction of new models in the automobile industry, electric cars made by other brands sell at the same price as gasoline cars. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said at the Investor Day last Wednesday that Tesla was trying to cut production costs, but did not announce the next generation of cheap electric cars that many people were looking forward to.

Other reasons why electric cars are getting cheaper are the improvement of charging technology and the popularity of public charging piles. But the main reason for the narrowing cost gap is the decline in the price of car batteries. Battery pack is the most expensive component in electric vehicles, and it is also the main reason why electric vehicles are more expensive than traditional fuel vehicles.

The decline in battery prices has benefited from two points. One is economies of scale. Battery production is expanding, and market research firm Adamas Intelligence predicts that car battery production in 2023 will meet the demand for 20 million electric vehicles.

Another equally important factor is the continuous technological progress in the battery manufacturing process over the past decade.

"Battery costs are the biggest factor in the overall cost change of electric vehicles and the biggest reason why electric vehicles are more expensive than gasoline vehicles," said Paul Augustine, head of sustainability at Lyft, a ride-hailing service. "Battery costs have fallen by 90 per cent from 2010 to 2020."

At the beginning of the advent of electric vehicles, industry insiders believed that most people were unlikely to replace electric vehicles until the price of electric vehicles was the same as that of fuel vehicles. Musk reiterated this view on Wednesday, saying: "people have a very high desire to have Tesla, and the limiting factor is their affordability."

The importance of batteries makes researchers focus on reducing battery costs. Scientists and engineers have been studying not only how to reduce the cost of making batteries, but also learning to make new batteries that use less expensive metals, such as lithium iron phosphate batteries that do not contain precious metals such as nickel and cobalt. Some models made by Tesla already use this kind of battery, and Volkswagen and Ford will also use it in the future.

Ryan Castilloux, managing director of Adamas Intelligence, said that the growing use of these new batteries in global electric vehicles had also helped to prevent the prices of metals such as nickel and cobalt from spiralling out of control. Lithium iron phosphate batteries currently account for nearly 1/3 of global electric vehicle battery use, and that proportion is likely to continue to grow, Castillo added.

Robbie Ovis (Robbie Orvis), an electric and conventional car, is the senior director of modeling and analysis at Energy Innovation (Energy Innovation), an energy and climate policy think tank. A paper he recently published found that, on a monthly basis, many new electric cars have lower ownership and driving costs than equivalent gasoline cars.

Take Mach-E, Ford's popular electric cross-border SUV Mustang. The basic model sells for about $46000 in New Jersey. Assuming the buyer gets an one-time tax credit of $2000, taking into account depreciation, insurance, charging and maintenance costs, the total five-year cost of owning such an electric car is about $46000.

Comparing it with Toyota RAV4, a gasoline-powered car of the same class, the RAV4 costs about $34000 if the buyer also buys it all in New Jersey. But taking into account the cost of gasoline, the total five-year cost of owning a RAV4 is about $45000.

Assuming gasoline prices remain at current levels, and users choose Mustang Mach-E over RAV4, it will only cost about $200 more a year. If gasoline prices soar, electric cars can save users a lot of money.

The same is true for low-end electric cars. For example, the cheapest electric car in the United States, the Chevrolet Bolt, is priced at $26500, about $2500 more than its gasoline-powered Hyundai Kona. Assuming that the owner drives 15, 000 miles (24000 kilometers) a year after buying the Chevrolet Bolt, mainly charging at home, the fuel savings in a few years will make up for the price difference between the Chevrolet and the modern Kona. And this calculation does not take into account the state and federal tax subsidies available to buy a Chevrolet Bolt.

Cheap batteries according to data on transportation and renewable energy, the price of electric vehicle batteries rose 6.9% in 2022 compared with the previous year. The main reason for this is the soaring price of most key elements in batteries, including lithium, nickel and cobalt. The price of cobalt has risen particularly sharply.

This has raised fears that the electric car revolution could be limited in the coming decades. But as mining companies that exploit these key mineral resources quickly embarked on new projects, they began to rein in price rises.

At the same time, the automotive industry has been accelerating the adoption of iron-based battery technology, an alternative to traditional battery technology that still contains lithium but does not contain nickel or cobalt and is therefore not affected by price fluctuations in related metals. "Iron-based batteries are mainly responsible for electrification," Musk said at Tesla's recent investor day. "

The first research that made iron-based batteries possible was carried out by Arumugam Manthiram in the John Goodenough laboratories of Oxford University and the University of Texas at Austin in the mid-1980s. Gudinav won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2019 for lithium-ion battery research.

Manilam said he studied iron-based batteries because he predicted as early as the mid-1980s that how to get large amounts of nickel and cobalt would be a problem if batteries were widely used in energy storage.

Chinese battery makers such as the Ningde era have established the capacity to produce iron-based batteries on a large scale. Today, most electric cars in China use lithium iron phosphate batteries, which are also used in some Tesla Model 3 in the United States. Ford has promised to import lithium iron phosphate batteries from China and use them in some models. Ford also plans to work with Ningde Times to invest $3.5 billion in a plant in Michigan to produce lithium iron phosphate batteries.

Both traditional lithium batteries and iron-based batteries have their own advantages and disadvantages, which means that two kinds of battery-powered cars will exist at the same time in the future. Traditional lithium batteries containing nickel and cobalt have a higher energy density, which means cars have longer mileage. But iron-based batteries are cheaper, stronger and last longer.

Cheap electric cars in the near future, electric cars may be cheaper than traditional cars.

Global automakers will invest more than $500 billion in manufacturing and developing electric vehicles by 2026, which will further boost economies of scale of electric vehicles, according to AlixPartners, a market consultancy.

Augustine of Lyft says drivers who have driven thousands of kilometers a week for years have found that existing electric cars already have lower ownership and driving costs than gasoline cars. As the price of electric cars continues to fall and more models come on the market, more ride-hailing drivers will choose electric cars, as will family car consumers, he added.

"four years ago, the only models people could afford were the Bolt and Leaf," Augustine said. "now there are nearly 12 electric cars on the market that sell for less than $40,000. by the end of 2024, there will be a dozen more models on the market. By 2030, there will be more than 100 electric cars on the market.

As a result, consumers who buy gasoline-powered cars may soon be in an unprecedented embarrassment: they will have to spend more money to stick to the previous generation of technology.

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