This is absolutely essential, not just for the further adoption of electric vehicles but for the actual survival of most old-line car manufacturers whose internal combustion engines are being legislated out of existence. If they can't complete the transition to making EV's that the masses can afford, they die.*
From Electrek, November 20:
Electric car battery prices are starting to go back down after a temporary rise along with inflation. And it looks like they are going back down faster than expected, according to new data from Goldman Sachs.
The EV revolution was enabled by lithium battery prices dropping significantly over two decades, but the trend was broken over the last few years, with prices actually going up amid a spike in the cost of some metals and general inflation.
Now, we are going back to a price drop and potentially a faster one.
Goldman Sachs updated its battery price forecast and noted that prices are starting to come down again:
Goldman Sachs Research now expects battery prices to fall to $99 per kilowatt hour (kWh) of storage capacity by 2025 — a 40% decrease from 2022 (the previous forecast was for a 33% decline). Our analysts estimate that almost half of the decline will come from declining prices of EV raw materials such as lithium, nickel, and cobalt. Battery pack prices are now expected to fall by an average of 11% per year from 2023 to 2030, writes Nikhil Bhandari, co-head of Goldman Sachs Research’s Asia-Pacific Natural Resources and Clean Energy Research, in the team’s report.
The firm believes that a particularly large price drop is coming in 2024:
That said we keep an eye on developments, as Intel's Andy Grove once said: "Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive."...