Quote:
Originally Posted by allanoue
This is a bad comparison liken to comparing the cost of a ICE to the cost of charging a battery. Yes Batteries are heaver then gas but to be fair you need to look at the whole system motor plus fuel. ICE do have an advantage but wait is not something I care about. What matters is cost of ownership and if Iran or Russia stops behaving themselves what happens to the cost of oil? Range and time to refill are the only issues now. Lets be honest the only real issue is time to refill.
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The problem with discounting weight and cost as problems, is that they are directly related to the problem that you don't discount, range. The reason one can't get reasonable range at reasonable cost is because batteries are crazy heavy and crazy expensive in comparison. If 1200 pounds and $20K of battery give the bare minimum of acceptable range, fixing the problem by putting in 2400 pounds of batteries isn't viable.
But even with that in mind, electric motors are now weightless in this comparison? To be fair one must be complete on both sides. They may be lighter than an ICE motor with all of its accessories, but nowhere near enough to make up for the difference in weights of their energy. Even with those comparatively light motors, electric vehicles of comparable performance are thousands of pounds heavier than comparable vehicles. You can also look at today's hybrids to see how it actually plays out. It turns out to be lighter, and cheaper, to include not only all of the electric propulsion components, but an additional ICE engine along with fuel, and the vehicle is still much lighter than a comparable BEV with any range at all.
I also don't think we'd need to remove the cost comparison of charging the battery as unfair. It does feel good to pay so little to refill, a few cents for an electric bike, a bit more for an electric car. But one would also have to include the few thousand extra it costs for the car option, and however much one wants to cost out the upgraded charging station in the garage. Include those and divide it over mileage, and even the "few cent" recharges can be seen as incremental charges on top of the significant one.