A new peer-reviewed study revealed that the cost of electric car batteries is tumbling much more swiftly than originally anticipated, meaning more affordable electric cars may not be far off.
Buying an electric vehicle such as a Tesla seems like a pipe-dream for most people, but researchers at the Stockholm Environment Institute discovered that the cost of Li-battery packs used by leading manufacturers like Tesla and Nissan are falling by roughly 8 % per year.
Their data was obtained by systematically reviewing over 80 cost estimates of lithium ion batteries published between 2007 and 2014, which encompass between 25% and 50% of the cost of electric cars in the market today.
According to MIT Technology Review:
The authors of the new study concluded that the battery packs used by market-leading EV manufacturers cost as little as $300 per kilowatt-hour of energy in 2014. That’s lower than the most optimistic published projections for 2015, and even below the average published projection for 2020. The authors found that batteries appear on track to reach $230 per kilowatt-hour by 2018. Depending on the price of gas, the sticker price of an EV is expected to appeal to many more people if its battery costs between $125 and $300 per kilowatt-hour.
Obviously, society is going to need to get past EV range anxiety, but that should come in time if giving up gasoline is a smart move in the long run financially.
Scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab found that batteries can easily meet the daily travel needs for more than 85% of US citizens, even after they lose 20 percent of their originally rated energy storage capacity.
Ready or not, electric cars are coming, and with powerful people like Elon Musk at the forefront, EV’s will most likely become mainstream sooner rather than later.
The big whopping question is how these new energy projections will hold up to lend to more affordable electric cars being available to the general public in the near future?
