At the International Battery Seminar in March, Jeff Dahn - the prominent
battery expert and exclusive research partner of Tesla - presented some re-
search on the longevity of EV batteries. He posed the question, if “electric
vehicles today are expected to last 500,000 miles, and this is expected to
increase to 1 million miles over the next decade...are Li-ion batteries equal
to this challenge?”
This scenario envisions a world in which autonomous EVs are con-
tinuously shuttling passengers around town all day, spending little time
parked, and racking up 100,000 miles or more per year.
Dahn shared the findings of a recently completed study that lasted for
over two years testing a “relatively generic Li-ion chemistry to see how
it performs.” After nearly 10 minutes of showing his work to a room full
of battery scientists - including all the detailed testing methodology - he
estimated that an EV with this particular generic cell could travel 870,
kilometers (about 540,000 miles) in 8 years, or even more with optimized
depth-of-discharge parameters.
“The reason that I did this was just to convince myself that this state-
ment about a million-mile lifetime for an EV, it doesn’t really sound so
outrageous at all,” said Dahn. He went on to explain the research methods
being developed to create chemistries optimized for EV cells with high
energy density that “are certainly going to last an incredibly long time and
an incredibly large number of cycles.”
“I think using methods like these and, of course, the long-term valida-
tion testing, you can convince yourself pretty quickly that 1 million miles
in an EV is not going to be that difficult.”
Meanwhile, the data crunchers at Bloomberg NEF recently released a re-
port on the cost of purchasing an EV. Each year the research organization
does a “bottom-up analysis of the cost of purchasing an electric vehicle
and compares it to the cost of a combustion-engine vehicle of the same
size.” Following the trend lines, the authors estimate the point at which the
upfront cost of an EV will be the same as that of an equivalent ICE vehicle.
In 2017, the Bloomberg NEF analysis forecast that the crossover point
would occur in 2026. In 2018, that point was adjusted to 2024. And, sure
enough, this year the latest analysis reveals that the EV cost parity point
will occur in 2020 for “large vehicles in the European Union.”
In other words, EV costs are dropping faster than predicted just two
years ago, partially because “large-volume manufacturing is only now be-
ginning for such parts,” writes Nikolas Soulopoulos, author of the research.
And, of course, it’s not just battery costs that are dropping - power elec-
tronics and electric motors are predicted to benefit from the economies of
scale and cost minimization that only the auto industry can deliver...when
it sets its mind to it.Christian Ruoff | Publisher
EVs are here. Try to keep up.EV batteries: Increasing quality and plunging costs
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