It's not the first nor will it be the last for some time to come. Enormous growing pains in the EV market. I can only hark back to my teenage years maintaining golf carts to still have a bad taste from dealing with EVs.
Family Annoyed When Replacement Batteries Costs More Than Electric Car (msn.com)

 

The inflated replacement cost of car parts is not new.
If you were to build a car from replacement parts it would cost many times the original car price.
Just think of a replacement special tail light lens for instance. They can cost a couple of hundred dollars to suit a particular car while a generic one like you would add to a trailer can be had for just a couple of dollars.

Prices will come down as more electric vehicles get to market. If I ever can get another car, it will be electric as the running costs are so low.
In my life I have only ever afforded to buy one new car and that one is still going after 14 years. It is a Prius hybrid and we have been very happy with it. The original battery is still ok, and the last time I priced one, it would cost around $1400AU so that is not as bad as I thought it would be.

 

In 1984 my Apple Macintosh set me back $3500 which is $10,000 in today's dollar.
Prices of the latest and newest high tech will always come down eventually.

 

In 1984 my Apple Macintosh set me back $3500 which is $10,000 in today's dollar.
Prices of the latest and newest high tech will always come down eventually.

Always? Maybe not. Probably better to say, "Widely adopted technologies get cheaper". For example, Google Glass, the Radio Newspaper, and cars with stainless steel body panels never really got cheaper.

So far with EVs, you pretty much get what you pay for (range, acceleration and farkles. I don't see a magical way of lowering the cost of a safe vehicle beyond cutting range by removing lithium and cobalt. We might see a Tesla Model 3 drop from $50k to $40k but that is doubtful with the rising cost of lithium and the rising cost of fossil fuels needed to extract lithium from brine or mines. No other battery technology is close to the lithium cell for weight to power and number of recharge cycles. Battery may be a short term stop-gap to other non-combustion engine technologies but I really doubt battery EVs will get much cheaper.

 

I actually do not see the range as much of a problem for most people.
A 100km range would more than suffice as the majority of folk travel way less than that per day. And if you have solar at home (I have 10KW) the running costs will be very low in the Summer at least.
Saying that, a 1000km range would be nice to have!

 

I actually do not see the range as much of a problem for most people.
A 100km range would more than suffice as the majority of folk travel way less than that per day. And if you have solar at home (I have 10KW) the running costs will be very low in the Summer at least.
Saying that, a 1000km range would be nice to have!

The range is not the issue, it's the time to recharge that sucks. Once you buy the electric car, you have the option of waiting for ever for a recharge while on an trip across one or more state lines. Alternatively, a waste of time and money to rent an ICE vehicle for longer trips and suffer from inadequate vehicles that are dirty and poorly maintained and not your vehicle.

 

Prices will come down for the future EVs, because the most efficient applications will be the urban stop and go, personal transporter. It's battery requirements will be low, and centralized parkades/ charging stations will charge while you shop and work. Carry your charge home and you have a buffer for utility interruptions. Embedded storage at the point of utilization removes the need for vast electrical system upgrades, while allowing generation to run steady state at the most efficient levels. Its our future and we need to get onboard. With that being said, we will be going through some growing pains.

 

Wonder to what degree Australia and Sri Lanka had embraced EVs?

 

Wonder to what degree Australia and Sri Lanka had embraced EVs?

There are not many EVs here in Oz. Even so, our town ( an hour and a half North of Melbourne) has a few charging points. And a local winery installed one a few years ago as an attractant to well heeled clients. Out ham radio club had a meeting that a fellow came down from Sydney in his Tesla to show it off. He had a banner in his talk showing all the charging points and there are many. A big advantage he found was here Tesla charging is free, and there is nothing to service, so his only costs were registration, tires and insurance. His Tesla has done over 200,000 km so that is a big savings in running costs.

Cars are expensive here anyway, and the EVs more so at the moment. An cheapest example car I found was ...

https://www.carsguide.com.au/ev/advice/cheapest-electric-car-in-australia-83651
"Although the Renault Zoe held the crown for cheapest EV in Australia for a good while, MG Motor has swooped in with its medium all-electric SUV, the MG ZS EV, to take the title of the country’s cheapest EV, with an original price starting from $40,990 (for comparison, the ZS EV is based on the petrol-powered ZS Essence, which goes for $26,490)."

Years ago, I wanted to convert a Honda Scamp I had to electric, and add a trailer with a generator for trips. It was just a dream as here in Australia, it is quite hard (costly) to mod a car and get all the engineering certificates required. We cannot just put anything onto our roads.
I do not know if the Honda Scamps came out in your country. At one time, I had a few, and one we used as our family car. It was the BIG one, a 600CC 2 cylinder motor. It was a great little car!

 

Remember EV and any other manufacturers are not to supply you with EV automobiles. They are there to make money.
If there was a law that mandates to supply parts for a number of years, they will still be there to make money.

 

Maybe it was a bad decision to pay $11,000 for a used EV as a first car, when a $2000 used ICE car would have done the job. Also, buying a rare used car that doesn't have donors waiting at any junkyard is asking for trouble. Ford sold less than 2000 of those cars per year in the US.

 

I learned my lesson about "Bleeding Edge Technology" years ago. Sure, it's nice to have something new and exciting, but I now tend to wait a generation or two for them to get the bugs out of the design before testing the waters of emerging technology. And, more than a few died out before I decided to do so. And EVs are nothing new. In fact, they have been around for nearly 200 years! They have never done well in a highly competitive market despite setting many records that ICE vehicles took a while to best.
A Brief History of the Electric Car, 1830 to Present (caranddriver.com)

 

The show stopping problem will be power. Right now the effort is to use wind and solar power, which work when the wind blows and the sun shines. And with some idiot states like california choosing to forbid using natural gas for anything, electrical power will be in short supply and thus horribly costly. AND there simply will not be enough power for life and industry both. All in the name of avoiding global warming, which is part of a sun driven cycle. Consider dinosaurs, which seem to have lived long ago, when it was warmer. Then it cooled enough for people to live while the dinos died from cold. Consider that maybe the solar heat output increased by possibly 0.01% a hundred years ago and now the planet has actually warmed a small bit.
But we are being told that we must give up a whole lot of freedoms to "save the planet", putting a gang in power that has a totally different agenda in mind.

 

All in the name of avoiding global warming, which is part of a sun driven cycle.

So you really believe that?
So CO2 has nothing to do with it?

we must give up a whole lot of freedoms to "save the planet"

Thanks to plenty of shortsighted people, it doesn't appear it's likely to be saved.
This summer's heat wave in Europe is just a start.
Well, I won't be around to see the results but our grandkids will.

 

I find it hard to understand folk on this forum who tend to be technical but do not understand the climate change that "man made" CO2 has caused. This is WAY beyond the natural cycles. It is like falling off a cliff and accelerating at 1000 feet per second. Yes, one does accelerate as you fall, but no where near as fast as this.
If the world governments would just say that all coal and gas fired power stations would be turned off in 10 years, then industry would get to it and get the alternate energy systems going. The delay in fixing this all comes back to money in the short time, not science. There is no doubt this is man caused.

 

Gentlemen, as with religion and politics, global warming is not open for discussion on AAC forums.

This thread is closed.