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Originally Posted by Elli
I saw it last year. Quite eye-opening. And every other year since, GM has the balls to say "we have a new electric car in concept almost ready for production!" What a crock.
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The Chevy Volt doesn't look like a crock to me, they have laid a lot of money and staff on the project already and it will come to production rather soon and they are talking about at minimum 10's of thousands per year and quite likely over a hundred thousand a year being made. As much as I personally would love to get off oil, and think the Government and industry should be doing more to get off oil, the first EVs were destined to fail, and I don't think you can really blame GM for not dumping their money into something that was ahead of it's time. Battery technology just now is starting to become viable, and reality it is still around 5-10 years off being truly viable to power the average car.
Almost all the major car companies now have EVs in the works though, or REEV (Range Extended EVs) which generally travel something like 40-50 miles on battery power alone and than have a traditional engine kick in and take over if you need to drive further after that. Volvo (Ford), GM, Honda, Nissan, I believe BMW as well, things are just now starting to seriously move. In 5 years you will be looking at REEVs being produced and sold in the hundreds of thousands or millions (like the Prius), and in 10 years you will see pure EVs being sold in the hundreds of thousands or millions per year. I'd say it will be 12-15 years before pure EVs are really economically viable, and thus produced in large enough numbers to really get us off oil. But it's coming.
For information sake, the battery pack on that Tesla travels 220-240 miles on a charge, costs $20,000 (at present) to make and lasts something like 100,000 miles or 5 years before it needs replacing. They are saying both the capacity/range and cost of batteries are improving at a rate of about 8-10% per year. So in 10 years you'll get your 400-500 miles per charge, and by the time the battery needs replacing on the Tesla (in 5 years) it will cost you something like $12,000, and 5 years on from that (can't be fucked doing the math), but something like $6000-7000. In addition to that they have experimental charging stations in the work (at Tesla and elsewhere) that can charge these things in around 30 minutes, but obviously not from a home connection. That's when EV's will hit their prime.