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<p style=”text-align: left;”>I don’t know a lot about electric cars so does anyone know why EV are more expensive than petrol or diesel cars?</p>
A lot EVs which have a petrol or diesel equivalent model seem to be thousands of pounds more, I mean some of them are over 10K more.I know battery’s are expensive and most car manufacturers don’t make them but it can’t be the only reason.
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Not just the cost of batteries but there’s a tremendous amount of related technology in an EV that costs a lot and has had to be developed and those development costs have to be paid for too. Looking at the VW ID3, the accountants have pared down the cost and quality of all the traditional parts of the car to get it to market at the price it is. The interior plastics are worse than my 15 year old Honda Jazz
Agree, Wigwam. The current supply of lithium and cobalt will not support the major switch to EVs promised by politicians wishful thinking. New battery tech needed. BMW are introducing a new model with less rare earths, but starting at £69,000. To provide a good/acceptable power to weight ratio in a DC brushless motor, it requires Neodymium mixed with ferrous Permanent magnets. Mostly mined in NW China, doesn’t come cheap.
They say by 2030 and with economies of scale, EVs will become cheaper than their petrol counterparts.
At the moment the batteries are hugely expensive, but also like any new technology it commands a premium price due to the novelty “being first” to own one factor.
Without a breakdown of costs no one can say. Long term though, scarcity of specific materials is likely to be the defining factor, combined with the R&D costs of finding alternatives. Its complicated by the geo political dimensions which means that, rare earths like wolfram, becomes a bargaining tool. With rare earths its even more complicated, since, China, has significant deposits, but needs it for its burgeoning electronics sector. It won’t be lost on the Chinese either that the same countries that are all for banning Huawei are asking for more rare earths to develop their own electronic sectors. Moral of the story is, sucking up to Trump and jumping to stop Huawei was not, perhaps the best long term plan. Of course Trump had his own reasons for being happy to see EVs run out of source materials, the oil lobby and its campaign dollars.
Should be a comma after rare earths, wolfram isn’t, but it was a bargaining chip and launched a nationwide search for it in the US, same as the scramble for rare earths has done. Stand by for tearing up antarctica, then where will the EV supporters be……….run an EV and save the earth, destroy the last wilderness. Isn’t life complicated. And I recycle everything too.
Before we go too far down the rare earth & other ores debate, ores are the deposits which are economic to extract these elements from, what surrounds them are usually more deposits which are currently uneconomic but may become so due to a raise in prices, or, a change to a more efficient extraction technique.
Available ore deposits are also a bit tricky to define, because as soon as the price rises then exploration increases & more will be found & possibly come into production.
Also, eventually recycling will become the most important ore source for some of these elements as they are not consumed in the same way that a fossil fuel is consumed, they are still in the same place they were put within batteries, motors etc.
Whilst not doubting any of the factors mentioned above, all of which I am sure are true, the cynic in me says that one of the reasons for the very high prices of EV’s is down to the various grants and subsidies available on them, which encourages manufacturers to charge over inflated prices. Exactly the same thing has happened in the UK new house building industry with the various incentives in recent years. House prices have rocketed, so the consumer hasn’t benefited, yet house builders are making record profits!
It’s been interesting reading the posts.
I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s got a lot to do with manufacturers greed, sorry profit margins. I agree theirs development costs but that also true for ICE cars, manufacturers don’t have to develop more efficient diesel /petrol engines and drive trains, their’s got to be a cost saving in that. Batteries are coming down in cost, I think Brydo posted an article about it.
So for me as I said at the beginning I think it’s down to profits.
I think its a mix of everything, R&D has been huge, demand initially was low, but that’s changing and should start to be reflected in pricing, subsidies will probably artificially raise prices and in the end, they are business, if you can sell a product for a higher margin, why wouldn’t you!
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