From FT Alphaville:
Electric vehicle realities
Electric vehicles (EVs) are all the rage. But they’re also fast becoming the sacred cows you can’t criticise for fear of being shredded by the EV, renewable, and tech lobbies.
Questioning the cost structures of the industry in general is not allowed in public forums. My colleague Jonathan Ford discovered this recently when he dared to question the economic realities underpinning the renewable sector.
So what are the EV champions failing to tell us? Is it all good news? Or is there an element of public relations deflection to consider as well?
In the spirit of non-consensus thinking, it’s time for FT Alphaville to ask just how green electric cars really are. Are policies to ban diesel and gasoline cars at some arbitrary point in the future likely to unleash a barrage of negative externalities that no one’s yet even thought about?
Brian Piccioni and team at BCA Research offer a good starting point to our questions on Thursday, in a report entitled Electric Vehicles Part 1: Costs of Ownership.
The bad news for EV fans is their work determines that the cost of ownership of an EV still far exceeds that of an internal Combustion Engine Vehicle (ICEV), even after subsidies are accounted for.
With numbers crunched, a comparison between the Chevy Bolt EV and two equivalent ICEVs, the Chevy Sonic and the Open Astra, over 100,000 miles, shows that there’s no denying EVs are still more expensive than ICEVs.
Three points come up in particular.
1) Excluding subsidies, the net expense difference is about $16,000 in the US, $18,500 in Germany and $13,200 in France.With respect to the Bolt specifically, the analysts note GM believes it’s losing some $9,000 with every Bolt it sells. The automaker would need manufacturing costs to be cut by about $14,750 — 34 per cent — to make the vehicle competitive with GM’s Opel Astra in France.
2) After subsidies, the difference is about $6,600 in New York State, $13,900 in Germany and $6,000 in France.
3) Even if electricity were free (which of course it isn’t), after subsidies, the difference in cost of ownership in NY would be $3,400, $3,200 in Germany and $600 in France.
The numbers above can thus be adapted for a “What If…” scenario, wherein GM actually begins selling the Bolt at average corporate profitability.
In that case the numbers get even more bleak. Excluding subsidies, a Bolt would be $26,900 more expensive in the US than the equivalent ICEV, $29,300 more expensive in Germany and $24,000 more expensive in France.
So where’s the cost coming from?
There are additional manufacturing costs for “Pure Play” EV vendors like Tesla, meanwhile, because unlike integrated auto manufacturers, they can’t use many of the same components from ICEV production, limiting economies of scale.
But the common denominator for all EVs is the cost of batteries, say the analysts, since that’s a commodity. It’s also the key factor behind the faster rate of depreciation of EVs versus ICEVs.
Here, arguably, some significant issues are being overlooked. For example, while the consensus view is that EV battery prices have been experiencing price declines over the past few years (in the order of 8 to 14 per cent), the analysts themselves could not find any evidence to support that position.
Some confusion is probably also occurring on the comparables. While some reports claim battery cells cost $145/kWh, the analysts stress this is not the same thing as a battery pack, which comes as a fully assembled unit with wiring, electronics and a cooling system. In the case of the Bolt, GM lists the cost of its battery pack as $15,734, so about $262/kWh.......MORE
And do, if you have time, check out the comments, some of these folks are pretty whipped up.
