As we hurtle towards the end of 2018, it seems as though we are rapidly approaching the tip-over point where Electric Vehicles (EVs) begin to sell more than their Internal Combustion Engined (ICE) counterparts. The event that heralds the arrival of the tip-over is the news that Tesla delivered over 80,000 cars in Q3, 2018. This heralds the first time an all-electric car, the Model 3, has become a member of a top-ten list of cars sold in the US. The ICE is now officially on life support. But is this really true or is it just the case of another sensationalist writer getting over-excited by a scenario yet to be proven by evidence? Let’s discuss.
The Technology Basics
An EV is a relatively simple beast, especially when you compare it to an ICE vehicle. Anyone who has used a fan at home will immediately grasp the fact that those devices run for 12, maybe 18 hours a day, sometimes all day. When was the last time you took your fan in for a service? What about an oil change? Any belts? Valves? ‘O’ rings?… No? Well that is the point, entirely. An electric motor is extremely reliable, essentially an install-and-forget-it item. In an EV application, the motor will not even be required to produce its full power capacity for more than a few seconds each day, at most. Acceleration is, as you probably know, just one part of the driving experience. Heavy acceleration is most likely never needed in your daily drive, and there may never be the opportunity to ‘gun it’ in traffic anyway. The rest of an EV, technology wise, is made up of a battery pack, an inverter, an on-board charger, some control electronics and a cooling system. These systems have been widely used in a variety of applications and are reliable as well. Simplicity works for the EV here. It’s easy to understand and, most importantly, easy to maintain.
The basic layout of an EV - Mitsubishi i-MiEV shown here The Efficiency
It’s easy to see how inherently efficient an electric powertrain is compared to an ICE one. There is no ‘idle’, no motor running when you’re standing still. An EV uses power when you are moving and doesn’t use it when you aren’t. Simple. And if you wonder about the lighting and air conditioning, yes they are running when the car is standing still, if you have turned them on. But these devices are running off electricity from the battery, not off a belt driven alternator that depends on an engine turning over and burning fuel. At idle, an ICE car has enough power to roll or crawl down the road. Why do you need so much power just to stand still? It’s pointless. To add to this, fossil fueled engines waste most of the energy produced in the form of heat. Depending on the vehicle, the efficiency of an engine is between 30% and 45%. That means to generate a useful output of 37.5 kilowatts of power, your engine will drink the amount of fuel needed to produce 100 kilowatts. An electric motor lives in the 90% to 98% range for efficiency. A motor producing 37.5 kilowatts of power to the wheels would be using about 39–40 kilowatts to do so. It stands to reason that an EV is thus a lot cheaper to run than an ICE vehicle, something that will be explained further in this post.
If that isn’t enough, regenerative braking is an added benefit that EVs have. All such vehicles use the motor, essentially as a reverse thrust device, when slowing down. Instead of electricity going battery>motor>wheels, it goes wheels>motor>battery. A lot of the power, as much as 90 kilowatts in some vehicles, can be recuperated and stored for the next required movement. Hyundai and Kia have even provided steering-wheel paddles to modulate the amount of regeneration, so that you can avoid using the brakes as much as possible. Regeneration also reduces brake wear, because you aren’t actually using friction brakes while using “regen”.
The Price
The biggest barrier today for purchasing an EV is the price of the vehicle. There is no viable EV that costs less than $35,000. Your run-of-the-mill Hondas and Toyotas, big selling models like Corollas, Accords, Civics and Camrys typically sell for between $20,000 and $35,000. For mass adoption to occur, EVs need to be priced at the same or below their ICE versions. Tesla’s base model 3, priced at $35,000, will be delivered only some time next year. Even so, that puts the price range ($35,000 to $70,000) in BMW 3 series or Mercedes C-class territory, definitely one segment above the big selling cars mentioned here.
The price of an EV has been dictated by the cost of its batteries. Fortunately, the cost of this commodity has been rapidly falling. Tesla, who make their own batteries at their Gigafactory 1, have a greater cost advantage than other manufacturers at the moment. Battery prices per kilowatt-hour (kWh) of capacity have been dropping for years. Data shows that a single kWh used to cost $1000 in 2010. By 2020, Tesla will have this number down to $100. That’s a 10-fold reduction in 10 years, simply amazing. Why this matters is the fact that you need a relatively large battery to achieve the range that will keep most people comfortable. For Tesla’s own Model 3 Long Range, the 2010 price of the battery would have been $75,000. It’s now a lot closer to $7,500.
Cost per kWh for Lithium Ion Batteries. Source: Cleantechnica.com
So let’s actually compare apples to apples. In Norway, currently the world’s premier country for adoption of EVs, Hyundai sells its Kona compact SUV. The ICE version, with an 89.5 kilowatt engine starts at 299,900 NOK. The 150 kilowatt full electric version starts at 325,900 NOK. That’s a difference of just 8.5%, and there is a bit of an issue with the apples to apples situation here. It’s the same car, but the EV is significantly more powerful. Hyundai does have a 150 kilowatt larger gasoline engine that would fit in the Kona. It would be prudent to suggest that that version would cost at least as much as the EV version if not more. Range tests on this electric model have produced over 500 km (310 mi) in normal driving. This car is just one example. Price parity is coming across all sectors. It is easy to see that EVs will eventually become cheaper than their ICE counterparts. They are simpler to make, remember?
Hyundai Kona EV
Running Costs
As promised earlier, here’s a running cost comparison. While it’s already been explained that an EV is cheaper to maintain, what with it not needing any oil or filter changes, the actual energy cost of running the vehicle is the real headline news here. The Hyundai Kona, pictured above, averages an energy usage of about 130 watt hours per kilometer in steady driving. Even if you assume this figure to be higher, at 150 watt hours, that allows for 6.67 kilometers per kWh. The similar gasoline version of this car may achieve an economy figure of 6 liters per 100 kilometers. That equates to 16.67 kilometers per liter of fuel. In New York City, running the EV would cost you 1.5 cents per km. The fossil version would cost 4.75 cent per km, over 3 times as expensive as running the same car on electricity. With these numbers, running, say, 20,000 km (12,427 mi) a year would cost $950 in petrol and $300 in electricity. In most developed economies, electricity ranges between 8 and 20 cents whereas gasoline is between 1 and 2 dollars per liter. In Mumbai, the same 20,000 km would cost $1500 in petrol and $195 in electricity, a much larger difference.
(cost assumptions: New York: Electricity @ $0.10/kWh, Gasoline @ $3.00/gallon or $0.7925/liter. Mumbai: Electricity @ $0.065/kWh, Gasoline @ Rs. 90/liter or $1.25/liter.)
The Resistance
Traditional automakers have been pushing back against EVs for decades. An EV actually affects the existing business model of these auto company. If there are no serviceable parts in the motor, there isn’t any business in ‘after-sales-service’. Yes EVs will still need suspension work, tyres and brakes but that’s about it. There will be no steady stream of revenue from the ubiquitous annual service. Tesla has adjusted for this by charging customers for their software upfront. None of the other auto majors have done this yet. In the US market, as mentioned earlier, Tesla shipped 17,800 Model 3 sedans in August 2018. The next best EVs sales wise were the Tesla Model X and Model S, shipping 2,750 and 2,625 units respectively. The best performing EV from a traditional manufacturer is the Bolt from Chevrolet, selling 1,225 units. Whether you argue that Chevrolet has production bottlenecks or Tesla has pent-up demand, the fact remains that the world’s mass auto producers simply have not put in enough effort to build electric cars. If Tesla can, so can Volkswagen, Toyota, GM, Honda and anyone else.
To add to lack of currently available alternatives, customer perception about range and battery charging is a barrier, but one likely to fall away rapidly as EV adoption ramps up. The vehicles used as examples in this article all have driving ranges well over 350 km (235 mi) per charge. An average driving distance of approximately 20,000 km (~12,400 mi) is considered normal in the United States. That equates to a daily usage cycle of about 55 km (~34 mi). Even if you drive half as often (and double the distance), you could do three days worth of driving on a single charge. Home charging is the real deal-changer in this. For nearly every driver, it is possible to never have to worry about charging. Just plug in at home and you will always have range available. The range issue only becomes significant when we talk of long-distance road trips. It stands to reason that an average human on a long trip needs to stop every 3 to 4 hours to use the toilet and get some snacks or food. Tesla has addressed this driving lifestyle by having their superchargers placed at rest stops across the US, Europe and parts of Asia. A ‘supercharge’ gets you up to 80% range in about 30 minutes, the typical, healthy amount of time you should stop anyway. Electrify America, a company born out of Volkswagen’s dieselgate scandal is deploying a similar network across the US. New generations of this charging technology will bring the 80% time down to 15 minutes, making long trips even more viable. The EV lifestyle is simple: charge at home 350 days a year and use rapid chargers for the two weeks in a year that you actually take a trip (longer than 350 km/235 mi) somewhere.
A Tesla Home Charger
Finally, there are those who predict the meltdown of the grid and how everyone charging all the time will ruin the world’s power supply situation. That is demonstrably false. The growth of solar power generation and storage, including at home covers the added need for electricity to a certain extent. Furthermore, power usage at night, when most EV drivers charge, is always lower than at peak times. All EVs can be scheduled to charge at a particular time via their user interfaces. Off-peak power tariffs exist in places like the United Kingdom for the very reason that demand is low at, say, 2 a.m. Finally, the gradual shift to energy-efficient lighting and appliances means that there is surplus power available globally. This statement is backed by the fact that the total electricity consumption in the US has been more or less stagnant since 2005. That’s a dozen consecutive years at approximately 3,800 billion kWh per year. Each inefficient bulb or appliance replaced with an efficient one has taken care of the added demand that has been created by electronics and such. This trend will continue going forward.
Get On The Bus
A form of transport that has been ignored in this article, thus far, is the humble bus. Buses are actually even more suited to electric operation. They tend to operate in stop-start situations, highly inefficient when operated using ICE power. To add to that, buses tend to follow fixed routes, schedules and, thus, distances each day. It is easy to plan charging and battery capacity in such a situation. EVs are much quieter in operation than ICE vehicles, something that helps immensely with buses. No noise as it passes by, and no humming, gurgling, rumbling and popping for the passengers to suffer through.
Hyundai Elec City Bus shown as an example In Summary
The EV revolution is well and truly underway. It is now not a matter of if, but when the buying public will begin consuming more electric vehicles than fossil fueled ones. As with other recent technological trends such as digital cameras or smartphones, data suggests that we are at the point of acceleration on an ‘S’ curve of technology adoption. The reduced cost of running an EV will create mobility options for economically disadvantaged sections of society. Even if they can’t afford a car, at least their bus or shared van will be cheaper to run, and thus offer better service. This article has not even touched on the environmental aspect of these coming changes and how it would benefit densely populated areas on the globe, I don’t want to dissuade climate skeptics from reading this. While battery production and disposal may be polluting, the quest for oil and its refinement is not exactly clean either. The simple point of this article is: electric vehicles are better. What we do know now is that the dinosaurs in the auto industry will have to either innovate quickly, get on the gravy cable, or follow companies like Nokia and Kodak.