Quote:
Originally Posted by bimmer456
Quote:
Originally Posted by The Wind Breezes
No more transmission period. One gear is quite doable with the power density and torque curve of electrics, and once again, it's freaking awesome. I don't see the charging thing as an issue whatsoever. For the small amount of relatively well off people in a given complex who own electric cars, they can figure out how and where to charge and install additional electrical as necessary. By the time poor people in apartments are buying electric vehicles, well, the infrastructure will already be taken care of. Presumably that's quite a ways down the road unless battery technology takes a massive leap forward or we subsidize the hell out of EVs.
The power depletion is an issue of the car's software. They'll fix that for sure if they haven't already. To generalize, you can keep a lithium battery stored around 50% state of charge for quite some time and it will not only not self discharge to any significant degree but the quality will be maintained. And I don't know about other cars, but Tesla has a pretty sick unconditional warranty on their batteries, I think it's 8 years.
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After 8 years, the battery costs $10-15K to replace, negating the cost saving of electric charging vs. gasoline or diesel. In the meantime, your battery is gradualy declining, losing power and range until it is deamed below acceptable standard per Tesla. The hybrid cars will likely still have a transmission unless they're like the konegsegg regera which I don't see happening soon. |
The other dirty little secret no one really talks about is how nasty nickel mining is.
That aside, Volvo timing worked out perfectly. Nothing like a giant Chinese bankroll to finance all of the development costs here.