A majority of auto executives still think battery electric cars will fail, survey says

When can we buy one like this?

 

sorry, you're not making sense. you're guessing at the future and applying costs as if you know what they will be.

 

No one knows.

I'm not guessing at anything. I'm applying costs of items available in the market today.

A Prime battery + a 12kW fuel cell + 8kg H2 tank will do the same job but cost and weight far, far less than a 150kWh battery, which today would cost around $30,000 and weigh nearly 2,000 pounds.

 

Battery technology is changing today at a faster rate than ever before. I have read of companies that claim to have batteries in the works that charge fast and have more energy density. Here is one example I have found.

Toshiba's new fast-charging battery could triple the range of electric vehicles

 

Such claims have been around for decades and very, very few have actually come to market. Hopefully, one of them will but right now, Li-ion batteries are the best available and they are improving very slowly year-over-year (single-digit percentages).

 

http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1114608_california-to-fall-short-of-100-hydrogen-fueling-stations-by-2020

 

I think that if Tesla model 3 will be a success, rest of the car industry will change their opinion on electric cars real fast. If Tesla will increase production, keep price at $35K and car won't have problems ....
Hard to predict the future, however I believe that popularity off clean cars will slowly win customers especially in green states like California.

 

why isn't anyone building one?

 

Probably internal political reasons combined with external pressures from government regulations.

 

but you think they'll all see the light in the future, and fuel cells will be the commanding vehicle over bev's.

 

The success of Tesla is an unanswered question. Even if sales are great, there are a lot of variables that have to line up to make Tesla a success. Key among the variable is cash flow.

 

I thought the swapping idea had some real possibilities. We might see it again. It would require battery standards that do not currently exist.

 

It's a bit more complicated than that. Batteries would have to become packaged commodities, with standard sizes, connections, capacities, etc. (like D cells, C cells, 9 volts, 2032's, etc.). That is not likely to happen with autos any more than you see standard fuel tank sizes, etc. Cars are engineered to an extreme standard to meet regulatory requirements, and something as fundamental as a battery pack is just not in the ball park for standardization.

 

My hypothesis is the executives bought into a myth that efficient car owners are rabid, clean air and water warriors willing to pay any price for "nothing but water" exhaust. In the case of the rapidly aging CARB board, it might be true.

Bob Wilson

 

I'm old enough to remember Ken Olsen. Didn't he introduce the mini-computer which IBM and other large mainframe computer makers thought was something nobody would be interested in? And, after dominating the computer market, didn't he later insist that the personal computer was something nobody would ever have a use for?

I often think of Tom Strelich's somewhat obscure 1986 play Neon Psalms. In it, one character observes about his ancient Studebaker which, with dreams of tomorrow, he bought new in 1953: "We knew how to have a future. And the future wasn't supposed to be like this... collectors' item. What kind of dumbass'd buy this junked-out wreck. Only thing a wreck like that is good for is to keep you from forgetting what you had."

Yes, the future rarely turns out the way you expect it to be.

 

IMHO, the fuel cell capacity is off by a factor of two:

A BMW i3-REx owner:

"W20K06U0 25 kW 647 cc, two-cylinder generator" - BMW i3 - Wikipedia​

This 25 kW engine sustains the car at 70 mph.

Bob Wilson

 

One of the big reasons I bought my 2008 Prius over ten years ago was the war in Iraq.
My thinking was if more people showed they wanted electric or hybrid cars maybe we could stand up to big oil
and get out of the middle east for good. It doesn't hurt our air quality either. No more wars over oil.

 

Though it's meant for the domestic Indian market, there's always this:

But it's not some lone inventor in a garage. Tata is to India what Samsung is to the Korean domestic market, or what Mitsubishi is to Japanese domestic market (enormous conglomerate that does/sells just about everything). I doubt I'll ever see one of these cars on the 405, but would love to see one in person...

Going back to EVs, if memory serves, in the early days of cars (ie Model T era or before) weren't there electric models as well? ICE cars won out then, but look what's come back around in the 21stC, as pollution indices reach all-time highs in India and China...

 

If this becomes reality, I agree it will change the industry in dramatic ways...
I'm not as confident in the timeline and worry that mass production of these magical storage technologies will show-up along with mass market cold fusion.
The amount of focus, money, determination being put into building a better battery is encouraging though...