Electric Vehicles (EV): One Man's Opinion

Absolutely yes. Automobile manufacturing will undergo huge change with the introduction of mass market Electric Vehicles (“EVs”). Manufacture of a chassis with the motor(s), batteries, drive components and computer controls will be relatively simple. Each of the sub components like motors and batteries will be procured from a high volume supplier. A few platform types will address 80% to 95% of vehicle design needs. These will be easy to create and there could be a large number of manufacturers that go into the business of supplying these finished chassis. It will likely be the least profitable part of the new automobile manufacturing business. Much of the profits will go downstream to the suppliers of components like motors, batteries and computer control systems. Each of these providers will have some protection from competition due to legacy experience, patents and high upfront cost of building the manufacturing facilities. A single electric motor or battery facility mig...

Google, probably Apple and all tier 1 automobile manufacturers will give Tesla a run for it’s money. And Tesla can be expected to lose what ever leadership it now has. Tesla has some leadership now in self drive and battery technology. Today, it can be argued that Google is more advanced in getting to the goal of a fully autonomous Self Drive Vehicle (“faSDV”) than Tesla. In software, mapping and sensor technology. The Tesla approach is more driver assist and likely to be limited to limited access highways. Tesla is heavily reliant on Panasonic with respect to battery manufacture technology. Maxed out, the Tesla Gigafactory for batteries will cost $5 billion. And Tesla needed a lot of outside funding to get this factory started. And maxed out, it can only make a few million vehicles. If Tesla met it’s goals, it might get to 2 million cars per year by mid decade 2020’s. Likely with additional investments in the tens of billions. But probably won’t even be 5% of world auto sale...

Details on why the cost of batteries and the weight of batteries are too high today for use in long haul trucking. Let's  do some math. A Tesla weighs 4,300 lbs and the battery is around 1,200 lbs. Based on this, let’s say that 1,200 lbs of battery is needed to move 6,000 lbs 200+ miles. A semi truck + trailer + 50,000 lbs cargo + 300 gal diesel will exceed 80,000 lbs. total. Three hundred gal of diesel weighs 2,250 lbs. Based on the Tesla battery to weight relationship 80,000 lbs will require 16,000 lbs of battery (based on a 5:1 relationship). Plus another 3,000 lbs of battery to move the battery. Rounding up to something like 20,000 lbs of battery to move the truck 200+miles. The best case for estimating Tesla battery replacement is somewhere around $20,000++. This would imply a current battery cost for a truck of something around $300,000+. For a truck that currently sells for around $100,000. Not going to happen any time soon and not needed to have a successful self d...

Gas. Gas/Diesel (Internal Combustion Engine Technology (“ICE”) is the only power source that can facilitate rapid self drive adoption. [1a] The early use of self driving technology will be long distance interstate travel. The most ‘valuable’ early use of Self Driving Vehicles (“SDVs”) are in the trucking/goods transportation. A key to successful SDV highway transport is distance. It will be easier and more economical to enlarge gas/diesel gas tanks than to build out charging stations. It will be easier to simply have a truck travel 2,000 to 3,000 miles without fuel issues. Electric isn’t going to do this job. Note, once driver hours are not an issue, trucks could travel at lower speeds and significantly boost fuel economy. [1b] Another early use for SDVs will be taxi/rideshare replacement. As a business the goal will be to have the SDV on the road for as many hours as possible. An ICE SDV fits the bill best for a long duty cycle. Hundreds of miles on a gas fill plus ...