Chevy Volt a Failure - GM to Layoff 1,300

That isn't very profound.

There have been way more attempts to market things that never found a market than there are things that caught widespread use, such as cell phones and TVs.

You essentially told me that where there is demand, supply will find it. OK. And I'll say that 130 years (or whenever it was) after the first electric car was manufactured, and people are still largely driving around in cars with internal combustion engines, that it's a technology -- randomly subsidized at all of our expense recently -- that has not found that demand.

Also, to state the obvious, the advent of cell phones and the advent of TVs weren't attempts to replace. ... cell phones and TVs that already existed. If you want to pull that kind of thing off, you had best provide a cell phone or TV that is as good or better than the existing cell phone or TVs and do it at a price that is as good or better than the ones that already exist. Which again, is why EVs right now are still niche products.

 

It is?

Cause the price of cobalt, just one thing that really makes lithium-ion batteries so expensive is only getting more expensive. I just looked. When this thread was started, the cost of cobalt was less than $31,000 per ton. Today, it is north of $55,000 per ton. At times during that time frame, it has spiked as high as $95,000 per ton.

Everyone involved in that industry, including Elon Musk, would love to get cobalt out of their batteries. But they have not come up with a way. The cobalt is what gives those batteries any amount of life cycle, and that is the only thing that even makes those cars viable -- when you don't have to recharge them every 25 miles. In order to offer any sort of value to induce anyone to buy one of the cars, they guarantee that their batteries will retain 80 percent of their original capacity for 8 years. It still makes it a losing proposition financially, for anyone comparing an EV to a gas-powered vehicle. Over 8 years, or even 10 years or even 15 years, you aren't going to make back the additional cost of the car in gas savings. But those are the warranties they offer. If the battery can't do that, they will replace it under warranty. And that is more expensive than any savings they can gain from reducing the amount of cobalt in the batteries. On top of that, to decrease the amount of cobalt, they have to increase the amount of nickel. Which makes for much hotter batteries, which can create a safety issue, because there is a chance of those batteries catching fire. And it's also still pretty expensive, because manufacturing low-cobalt batteries needs a really dry environment, which runs up the manufacturing cost.

Unless you know something about battery technology, that nobody else seems to know, and which hasn't been solved in 130+ or more years since they have been trying to power cars with them, I have no idea why anyone would be so sure that the costs are going to come down. Perhaps an entirely new energy technology will emerge that can power a car, but if that is the case, I get back to the opportunity cost of having had clueless politicians hand-picking the wrong technology all of this time, essentially funneling capital away (forcing all of us in the process) from potentially more cost-efficient technologies that have been disadvantaged and could have been way farther ahead by now.

Either way, I have no idea why anyone would be so sure today that the cost of lithium-ion batteries is going to get cheaper. The people who would most benefit from that, such as Elon Musk, haven't been able to figure out the problem and they have been really trying. We are hundreds of years beyond when battery technology was first discovered, and nobody has figured out a way to get decent capacity out of a large battery (one big enough to power a car) in a more cost efficient way than existing fuel sources. I am not saying that won't change someday. But there is nothing right now to suggest that is on the horizon.

 

I just read this.

What I am aware is that there is little evidence that a proliferation of electric vehicles -- even at a large economic cost relative to how we get around currently -- would have any effect on fossil fuel consumption or carbon emissions. The power plants that create electricity run on fossil fuels. The manufacture of those cars have a pretty big carbon footprint, too. Battery disposal, if we had a billion + EVs driving transportation in the world, would have a huge environmental effect.

The choice to throw money at that particular technology (instead of potentially more viable technologies that were disadvantaged as a result) may not have been random, per se. But these were political decisions made at best for emotional or evangelical reasons, and at worst due to corruption -- politicians lining their pockets. Even within that microdecision to force all of us to subsidize the EV industry, why did Elon Musk get a half a billion dollar freebie, plus the benefits of several other subsidization schemes, from a dollar-for-dollar credit at the consumer level to the ZEV credits that forces other car makers to subsidize his company. ... when Bright Automotive spent three years begging for even less money from the Energy Department, but they were turned down? Elon Musk is a bullshit artist who knew how to grease politicians. He has now blown through other people's money to the tune of billions of dollars. It has been incredibly wasteful, and his company is just a vanity project / money pit. John Waters was a businessman who didn't know how to play the graft game. When the "government sees value" in something, as you put it, and it forces people to hand over what they have earned to fund who the politicians that make up the government decide in their wisdom to enrich, we all pay a price.