I'm a white man who falls into that category, I'd never own a Tesla, they're too fucking expensive. Maybe I'll get an EV some day, but it won't be a Tesla. For now, I'll stick to my 6 year old car that still runs well and didn't cost me a second mortgage.
this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
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That's okay you can buy me a tesla
This is true for me, I have an S.
I'll also never buy another tesla again but I'll drive this until the wheels fall off. It's 5 years old now.
Are you me? Lol
No thats me, im u
Always refreshing to see somebody who owns one of these cars and hasn't immediately forgotten all expectations of build quality from an automotive manufacturer. I've seen intelligent and analytical people just turn their brains off at the suggestion that these cars aren't perfect, when the procedure for getting one repaired reads like it's from Apple.
How is the battery holding up? All Tesla owners I know sold theirs before the 2 year mark worrying that they might need to replace the battery for the price of a new car, always sounded like a misconception to me.
Holding up fine. I'm about 7% degradation, 2018 over 80k miles on it. 100D. I've been very happy with it as far as anything goes. Never serviced, just a few things like lights that I needed replaced.
IMHO Tesla is too unreliable. There are enough EVs available that are more reliable (and cheaper).
I just want an EV that is:
-Reasonably priced.
-User repairable/modifiable.
-No stupid luxury gimmicks (fake "self driving" or "self parking", 360° cameras for outside view, electronic locks that will most likely fail in a couple years, etc...)
-NO FUCKING SUBSCRIPTION SERVICES like those stupid heated seats!!
-User repairable/modifiable.
It'll have to run on a couple of AAA-batteries then.
This is why BEVs are fundamentally just a fad. It is a toy for rich white men and little else. It is fundamentally too expensive for normal people. They're not even the most important car in the household, and is usually just the second car.
There's plenty of BEVs that are competitively priced to any other new car: https://www.caranddriver.com/features/g32463239/new-ev-models-us/
They might not be the car you choose to take on a road trip, but most days, I only need to drive less than 20 miles anyway.
You're joking? The first one on that list is literally the Hummer EV. Completely unaffordable for most people. This is just more evidence that BEVs are a fad, not the other way around.
And there are 5 other cars below $40k. Just because 1 car is expensive doesn't mean others are.
The list is dominated by SUVs and pick-up trucks. The "below $40k" market is all subcompacts or compacts and are the equivalent of $20k ICE cars. It is not a competitive technology. If anything, it just proves how underwhelming BEVs actually are.
https://www.caranddriver.com/chevrolet/bolt-euv
So you just have a hydrogen full cell manufacturer's name as your username and post extensively in https://kbin.social/m/Hydrogen for fun or do you think you maybe have a conflict of interest here and are being disingenuous?
Because I want to tell the truth, not swallow marketing propaganda from Tesla. In reality, BEVs are a fad and no amount of wishful thinking will change that.
The name is a coincidence. I've used this name for a long time (from elsewhere to be clear).
Do you have anything to support this? EVs are increasing share of the market so when do you estimate that will end? Do you also think EVs are a fad in China?
In the 90's you could've written an equally true headline replacing "Tesla owners" with "PC owners". It's not an indication that BEV's are a fad, it's an indication that wealth inequality and sexism continues to this day.
There is no Moore's law of batteries. BEVs are always going to be fairly expensive compared to other types of cars. They will not magically improve like PCs have.
Not to mention BEVs are old technology. They literally pre-date internal combustion cars.
@Hypx There's no Moore's Law for batteries because they're a different technology. Transistors today are still fundamentally the same as the first transistor, made in 1947. Batteries, on the other hand, are constantly evolving. The first LiPo battery wasn't invented until 1997, and there are multiple new battery technologies currently being studied, like solid state batteries.
Are you seriously joking? A transistor today is much smaller and faster than what existed in 1947. That is what is driving Moore's law.
Batteries evolve only very slowly, and run into hard physical limits at every step. As a result, BEVs are very expensive and have major downsides like weight, long recharge times, etc.
@Hypx Yes transistors are smaller and faster, that's the literal definition of Moore's Law. But a transistor today is a smaller, faster version of the exact same technology as the first transistor, applying a small signal to pass current between doped semiconductor junctions, the only major difference being changing the semiconductor from germanium to silicon.
Batteries, however, are fundamentally different from when they were first invented. Yes, it's still storing electrical energy as chemical energy, but the chemistry has changed so much since the first batteries. The word "polymer" wouldn't even exist for another 20 odd years. And new technology is constantly being discovered, such as solid state batteries or supercapacitors.
And if you want to talk about physical limits, Moore's Law is essentially dead. We're nearing a point where you'd have to split atoms to make a smaller transistor. Batteries are limited by their chemical makeup, transistors are limited by the laws of physics.
That’s ridiculous. You basically admitted that we switched from germanium to silicon, but that this apparently doesn’t count as a difference.
Not to mention that this is massively off-topic. The point is that batteries do not improve as fast as transistors did in the 1990s. Hence why an analogy is wrong.
And if you are aware that Moore’s law is (more or less) dead today, then you should understand the problem that batteries are facing. They too are hitting hard physical limits. You talk of solid state batteries but they are nowhere to be found right now. Clearly, this is a hard problem and future batteries will not magically be far superior.
But ultimately, there are other green ideas not called the BEV. Including other types of EVs. This is why I try to make it clear that I am talking about BEVs specific. Not EVs in general. Once other people become aware of this fact, it will become much clearer that the BEV is a fad. It is an expensive and very limited idea. It is arguably an idea stuck in the mid-2000s, and its advocates have simply failed to move on.
I think the point that is counter to yours is that we are nowhere near the fundamental limits of energy density for batteries. It's probable we are near a fundamental limit for LiPo, but the point is that battery tech improves by changing technologies/chemistries. BEVs couldn't exist at all when the best rechargeable battery tech was lead-acid, but were enabled by LiPo. Theres most likely a type of battery you can't even imagine that has yet to be invented that could store >10x or more energy than current LiPo per unit cost or mass.
I would say that's pretty unlikely there will be a 10x improvement in battery chemistry. At some point, we will have to deal with the fundamental limitations of the technology. That will likely imply a different kind of EV. Other conversations in this thread have brought up the FCEV, which is honestly the mostly likely guess for what comes after the BEV. In other words, the solution is to move beyond batteries, not pretend we can just improve batteries ad absurdum.
Also, this is basically the point of the book The Innovator's Dilemma. Technology does not improve linearly exclusively. At some point, major shifts in the market will have to happen. If you think about this problem honestly, you probably have to conclude that the limitations of the BEV must be solved by a big leap forward, not incremental improvements in batteries. And if you can reach that conclusion, then you must realize that the BEV has to be a transitional technology. Perhaps, even a fad.
If we're talking approaching fundamental limits, Hydrogen fuel cell is not a great comparison. A high pressure tank can only get so light, even with linerless ultra high strength carbon fiber pressure vessels, the mass of the vessel is maybe 6-10x the mass of the hydrogen it carries. To increase specific energy there you need to go to cryogenics which is a whole technology leap and has its own set of challenges.
Battery tech has been improving more than you have seen, clearly. Since '08, lithium batteries have increased energy density by 8x (https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1234-april-18-2022-volumetric-energy-density-lithium-ion-batteries). The best LiPo batteries are around 0.9MJ/kg right now, but there's no fundamental reason a battery couldn't achieve 9MJ/kg. Lithium-air batteries could theoretically achieve way higher energy density than that even (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium%E2%80%93air_battery), and have already been demonstrated in a lab to achieve more than 5x what current commercial automotive batteries are doing.
Except those fundamental limits are far higher. The fact is that hydrogen stores energy at 120 MJ/kg. Even at 5% weight efficiency, that's 6 MJ/kg. Or 1,666 Wh/kg. At 10%, it is 3,333 Wh/kg. Far beyond any battery.
Your link is seriously lying. 8x is the gap between lead-acid and li-ion batteries. The claims are simply impossible. The author must be unknowingly comparing lead-acid battery powered cars to li-ion battery powered cars. I cannot see any other way his claim is true.
A lithium-air battery is literally a fuel cell. In fact, what did you think hydrogen fuel cells were this entire time?
On one had we've got links to the department of energy and to Wikipedia. And just some hand waving on the other hand.
It's wrong because li-ion batteries at the time were way better than what it claims:
https://news.panasonic.com/global/press/en091218-2
This is from 2009, and already we reached 675 Wh/L. So there's no way the DoE link is true.
Driving with something that power dense is incredibly dangerous. You're literally driving a bomb, dynamite is 4.6 MJ/kg
Calling them BEVs is misleading and damaging to EVs as a whole, because you're right, batteries do have their limitations, at least today's batteries. The proper industry term is FEV, fully electric vehicle. Choosing to limit EVs to only batteries is an arbitrary decision made for argument's sake, but instead of looking at how they can be improved, you're just focusing on why it'll fail. A "battery" is anything that stores energy, not just the traditional battery, and once EVs are the norm, they probably won't be using LiPos, they'll be using something that hasn't been invented yet.
Are you talking about FCEVs? You can also include directly electrified vehicles, but that is mostly mass transit.
And yes, electrification as a whole will succeed. But BEVs probably are not. I call them fads because they are just toys for the rich and they are unlikely to be affordable for most people.
I thought Tesla's were for poor kids who live in trailer parks
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