from Hacker News

Electric vehicle battery prices are falling faster than expected

by dakna on 11/17/23, 2:57 PM with 437 comments

• by hristov on 11/17/23, 8:17 PM

  This is very good news. Now I would like to see western car manufacturers lower prices of EVs in unison.

  Remember how in the 90s the intel pc completely overwhelmed and completely destroyed several layers of computing competitors. Intel and their PC manufacturing bretheren did that by providing a decent quality product at the lowest price. Then they used the benefits of manufacturing scale to improve the price quality ratio to the point where the intel PCs were higher performance than even the fancy work stations that cost 10 times as much.

  Well the chinese are about to do that with EVs. EVs are very similar to PCs in this respect, because they have a lot of potential for manufacturing efficiencies.

  Western manufacturers (other than Tesla) should drop their prices and try to get to scale as soon as possible. Tesla is at scale but it has a bunch of other problems. Elon should stop his public stage embarrassments (latest having to do with antisemitism and neo nazis) and should concentrate on making cars people like.

• by hshsbs84848 on 11/17/23, 8:13 PM

  “Goldman Sachs Research estimates the EV market could achieve cost parity, without subsidies, with internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles around the middle of this decade”

  That would be quite the milestone

  I’m curious at what point it will flip and EVs become cheaper than ICE

• by resolutebat on 11/17/23, 7:15 PM

  The article mentions lower cost of raw materials, but the other factor driving this is more efficient batteries. CATL is starting mass production of 500 Wh/kg batteries, about twice as dense as the ones used today, which reduces the need for rare materials as well.

• by xbmcuser on 11/18/23, 6:10 AM

  I am more interested how this is also bringing price of batteries down generally. With some chinese factories starting mass manufacturing sodium ion batteries this year. I think we are fast moving towards an electricity revolution because of how solar/wind and battery prices are falling and a lot of people have still not woken up to the fact. Cost of solar and battery is going to be half in 5 years maybe even 1/4 in 10 years. It is the similar thing as the doubling of processor speed we had for computer not as fast but similar.

• by wg0 on 11/18/23, 11:44 AM

  Same rosey picture fluff. That's Hallmark of almost any piece on fusion, self driving, AGI, VR, electric cars, electric planes and quantum computers etc. Oh, available tomorrow. Done deal.

  Find me a after the market Chinese cell phone battery that lasts 24 hours or an after the market laptop battery that lasts two hours on a charge and I'll be a devotee to Chinese electric cars for whole my life.

  This feel good tech utopia of endless possibilities where wind can power terra watts, sunlight can do wonders and such sells well but otherwise is irrational and non scientific. At the moment.

  Problems are harder than that.

• by fulafel on 11/18/23, 11:46 AM

  This is car-centric.

  Oddly e-bike prices have continued to rise without a real correction after the covid shortage constrained supply price spike, and the used market is kept from balancing it out through very high replacement battery pricing with various vendor lock in mechanisms. (eg: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1396568/average-e-bike-p...)

• by 2wrist on 11/17/23, 8:12 PM

  It is interesting. I read recently that the next generation of BMW's (2026?) will have a 50% reduction on the cost of the battery. Hope it falls further.

• by elihu on 11/18/23, 11:12 AM

  > "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."

  It wouldn't surprise me if BYD, CATL, and Tesla were already there now. Not sure if there's public information on that though. I'd imagine they'd keep it a secret if they can.

  Funny they mention nickel and cobalt, since they're not actually required. I think LFP cells are somewhere around half the EV-battery market these days.

• by dns_snek on 11/18/23, 4:25 AM

  Cool. Let me know when I can buy a used one for 10k and expect to drive it for another 10 years.

• by jjcm on 11/17/23, 8:02 PM

  No surprise there. Increased demand -> increased economies of scale over time. What I'm really curious about is if a new battery with increased density heavily disrupts this. If you double density, then naively you need half the batteries / half the materials, or half the cost.

• by sapiogram on 11/17/23, 8:07 PM

  Headline seems to contradict the article? It's predicting that prices will fall in the future.

• by endisneigh on 11/17/23, 8:41 PM

  I wish you could buy Chinese EVs in United States.

• by olddustytrail on 11/17/23, 3:18 PM

  Look at that chart. "40% by 2025 (from 2022)". That's pretty impressive.

• by londons_explore on 11/17/23, 11:18 PM

  I am dubious of these numbers.

  If I could really buy 1 kWh of cells for $130, I would expect to see them show up on eBay for not much more than that. (Or, even for less, because eBay has a lot of factory seconds, damaged goods, etc)

  However, prices for new bare cells on eBay is more than double the numbers quoted in this article.

  It makes me think there are market distortions going on, and the real price is differing from the advertised price.

• by fma on 11/18/23, 11:51 AM

  "Our analysts estimate that almost half of the decline will come from declining prices of EV raw materials..."

  Is Goldman confident this is a long term trend? I didn't see in their report that the decline in price is due to permanent increased supply or increased efficient extraction etc...

• by elzbardico on 11/18/23, 5:22 AM

  There's a lot of inventory right now in the industry, so there production cuts across the industry, thus lowering the demand for raw materials, decreasing their prices.

• by goodSteveramos on 11/18/23, 6:01 PM

  Headline is false. The data shows virtually no change over the last 4 years and PREDICTS prices will fall 40% by 2030.

• by ARandomerDude on 11/18/23, 1:43 AM

  Not total clickbait but close to it.

  The article uses words like “expect”, “might”, “could”, and “hope” throughout. Look at where 2023 is on those charts: way to the left on the x-axis.

  I hope batteries really do get cheaper in the future but this is optimistic prediction headlined as present-tense fact.

• by switch007 on 11/18/23, 7:01 AM

  What does past data about car prices and car manufacturers’ responses to falling costs tell us about how manufacturers price vehicles?

• by 6stringmerc on 11/18/23, 5:51 AM

  Doesn’t matter the engineering approach is still all wrong.

  Basic transport in the NEV class is far superior and benefits with tech true innovation.

  Bigger heavier more shit to break is what I see Lincoln advertise meanwhile in Texas car payment insurance gas parking tolls (sound familiar?) take a huge chunk of income. It’s dumb. Fix this first.

• by thelastgallon on 11/18/23, 3:24 PM

  This is incredible news!

  EVs provide the sweetest kind of demand for a grid, they are parked 23 hours a day, can charge whenever power is free and less than free. Power prices go negative 200 million times/year[1]. Batteries, Solar and Wind and still in the early stages, as volume grows, both will get a lot cheaper. Batteries add the much needed gigantic-distributed-storage-reservoir, soaking up all the excess production that is currently wasted.

  An insightful comment from a HNer (don't remember who), if there is excess production we have to either move it across time or across space. Across space requires building transmission lines (costly, takes a decade). Across time is easy, we just need more EVs, everywhere.

  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:3-Learning-curves-for-e...

  (2019 article) “Batteries will fall much faster than you are forecasting.” The key determinant of our forecast is the relationship between price and volume. From the observed historical values, we calculate a learning rate of around 18%. This means that for every doubling of cumulative volume, we observe an 18% reduction in price. Based on this observation, and our battery demand forecast, we expect the price of an average battery pack to be around $94/kWh by 2024 and $62/kWh by 2030: https://about.bnef.com/blog/behind-scenes-take-lithium-ion-b...

  Learning rate for Solar is 20%. According to this article (https://ourworldindata.org/learning-curve), the price declined from $106 to $0.38 per watt in these four decades. A decline of 99.6%. It looks like modules are a lot more cheaper, its now $0.14 per watt for TOPcon(28% efficiency) and $0.12 per watt for PERC (24% efficiency).

  A common critique that comes up is, we don't have electricity for all the EVs. This is nonsense.

  (1) Renewable energy is currently curtailed. A lot of production is wasted, because there is no demand at that time. EVs absorb all that.

  (2) See the calculations here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35845334

  (3) Electricity is used heavily in fossil fuel and oil production. We simply shift it to EVs. No additional demand.

  (4) Right now, everyone's energy is fragmented: natural gas for cooking, water heating, boiler for heating, gas for cars and electricity. When people switch to EVs, a lot of them switch to solar, consolidating all energy, saving ~$1000/month. And also lowering consumption from the grid.

  (5) We somehow found a ton of electricity everywhere for bitcoin, 127 TWh. We can definitely find electricity for EVs.

  But, more importantly, EVs can replace natural gas peaker plants (the costliest part of electricity) and make some money! Powerwall owners are making $150/day: https://electrek.co/2023/07/05/tesla-electric-customers-repo.... When virtual power plants start popping up, there will be a huge rush to buy EVs. A ton of people are buying homes for 500K+ to put them up on airbnb and they barely make 100/day. Owning an EV (replacing your existing ICE) and make $100+ per day just by opting in to participate in a VPP is the very definition of passive income.

  [1]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-30/trapped-r...

• by hunglee2 on 11/17/23, 7:26 PM

  New industries require a monopoly to create the infrastructure and standardisation to scale. Absent an Amazon or Apple-like private sector actor in EV's, it was the state which had to do it. Same goes with Small Reactor Nuclear, Solar / Wind / Wave, space exploration and the rest. Free market comes after