It is sad that gm essentially sold their entire "skateboard" platform they abandoned to SAIC, who now functionally own Cadillac/Buick. For all those who claim this was some kind of deception, it wasn't. Years of myopia, from the Motorola corvette to the EV-1 to the abandoned skateboard to the squandered volt and neglected bolt, GM is like Polaroid. They stopped being a "car" company and became an "engine" company, like how Polaroid stopped being a "camera" company and was a "chemical" company. This could shape up to be like JVC and its former parent, RCA, would the US gov bail them out again?
They (probably) also had a chance to buy out A123 instead of letting it go to a Chinese company in bankruptcy, then they would have had control over LFP in general (word is CATL used a lot of ex-A123 industrial secres)
I want to agree with you that the "corvette absolves a lot of sins". But GM is still operating like they are "too big to fail", I hope we don't bail them out again. They make some amazing products and have a long history of advancing manufacturing and technology in their sector. Even with their engineering prowess, almost in spite of it, they continue to make some of the most mediocre vehicles that have ever existed. I swear the only people that buy their cars are former employees and relatives of said employees.
>I swear the only people that buy their cars are former employees and relatives of said employees.
I regrettably had to use a rental GMC of theirs, it seems car rental companies have quite a stock of them, to say nothing of their quality, felt like driving a wheeled takeout container.
> I swear the only people that buy their cars are former employees and relatives of said employees.
Coworker loves loves loves the corvette even though its one of the worst vehicles electrics wise. Two people he convinced to buy vettes traded them back in within a year of purchase for electrical issues.
Brand loyalty is a big part of the American mindset and I think GM rested on those laurels to the point where even after the bailout they still have the same mindset.
>Two people he convinced to buy vettes traded them back in within a year of purchase for electrical issues.
Why on earth would you take a bath on a trade-in instead of using the lemon law if there were unfixable electrical issues?
Also - this sounds pretty anecdotal to be honest, long-time corvette owner who follows the forums and I've not seen any widespread complaints of electrical issues with the c8 besides a battery drain issue caused by OTA updates that was resolved.
C7's, and this was just before COVID. They were bought preowned from dealers. One had the entire electrical system shit itself after driving through a puddle and the other kept killing the battery at random.
Given you responded to a quote about the C8 platform redeeming GM - it'd probably pertinent to specify you're talking about literally a completely different car other than the name. The C8 was a ground up redesign.
That being said, the C7 also had no known electrical issues. A certified pre-owned would still be covered under lemon law. "driving through a puddle" sounds like more than a bit of an understatment if it took out the entire electrical system. I have driven my car through many, many rainstorms and had exactly 0 issues. I'm also not clear how he traded in a car with a non-functioning electrical system, no dealer would touch that with a 30 foot pole.
>the other kept killing the battery at random.
That could literally be anything, and again wasn't a widespread issue with the C7 platform or there would've been a recall, just like with the C8.
Mid-engined is most useful as a transition step to a modern skateboard design EV. Gets the center of gravity low and closer to the actual center point of the car, which a skateboard design then improves.
Corvette can't admit to aspirations of a Pure EV this decade (thanks, politics), but in my opinion, that's the only way to absolve a lot of the GM executive sins on being wishy washy about EV futures.
> Corvette can't admit to aspirations of a Pure EV this decade (thanks, politics)
I wouldn't attribute it to politics, but rather, the fact that the Venn Diagram of performance car enthusiasts and people willing to buy an EV are basically two entirely separate circles. When you consider cars that have a very big loyalty to the brand, like Corvette does, it gets even worse.
I personally would LOVE to buy a Corvette EV convertible. But I don't have my hopes up of it ever happening. The demand just isn't there.
There's a reasonable sized overlap there. EVs might not interest the "I love the sound inefficiency as literal sound walls" crowd, but the performance car enthusiasts that love torque curves and min/maxing them will eventually begrudgingly admit that EVs have some very lovely torque curves and many of them even know and salivate that most of those curves are software-defined making min/maxing them a fun videogame to play (possibly hazardously while driving, though that's part of the sport of Formula E) rather than buying and installing expensive aftermarket parts.
Brand loyalty I'll give you in that I have heard a lot of "the day Corvette makes an EV is the day Corvette is dead to me" hyper-masculine statements, but hyper-masculinity is political. (So is hyper-partisanship in many cases.)
I think the path forward for GM, and most other companies that still make engines is plug-in/gas hybrids. The electric transmission (should be?) more desirable to car enthusiasts, and the engine can still be a moat, though I'd say it quickly starts to feel redundant(to me).
I still think 2019 GM was correct in killing the Volt that hybrids are a worst of both worlds in engineering trade-offs and strictly one or the other is the best approach for both. I also still partly agree that 2019 was about the right year to end that "transition tech" phase, at the very least as a political message (that wasn't correctly received).
(I say that as someone who still owns a 2012 Volt as my only car, but mostly not because I still think I need a hybrid but because I want an full electric, reasonably sized sedan or hatchback, and all the car companies decided Americans only want EV crossovers/SUVs/assault tanks/land yachts this decade.)
All hybrids (Prius included, and especially noted) are just sub-par Full EVs with extra weight albatrossed around their necks when gas gets hard to buy and it does seem like past time to stop sinking good money after multiple decades of sunk costs in ICE car engines.
I think it would be more obvious if the US had more of the cheap EVs that China and Europe are producing, but we all know the US right now isn't politically aligned to have nice things.
The closest Polestar dealership (er, "retail location") is still a long drive or plane ride away for me. The Polestar 2 does seem the closest to what I want in the current market, though 2" wider isn't ideal and the Polestar 2 has a boxy Volvo thing about it that I don't quite like aesthetically (and that 2" wider does give it a bit of a land yacht feel to me), so it doesn't seem worth that sort of distance trip just for a test drive.
(Also, and this is a silly complaint/wishlist item, but I had friends describe an old Volvo buying experience where you could pay a premium on top of the car purchase to include a factory tour and week's stay in the Swedish Alps; they said it was one of the best vacations they ever had. If Polestar offered that I'd be very much more inclined towards Polestar.)
The Mach E strikes me as way too big for just me. Those inches add up, it seems way bigger than Volt I have. More than half a foot taller is a huge difference. Maybe I'm just a bad American because I use my car so rarely and mostly alone, and everything about the SUV form factor seems absolutely ridiculous to me for a solo driver mostly out to get groceries or visit family for a few hours. I'm not just making fun of the Hummer-sized monstrosities, I'm absolutely confused by the American love affair with the SUV entirely. It's way too much.
(Not to mention I have almost been wishing I could downsize to a nice coupe or compact and that is entirely off the US market to even consider getting my hopes up. I've had love affairs from a distance with the Honda e and BYD Dolphin. Those are cute looking cars. Not really possible to put on a US road, and one company wouldn't sell me one even if I tried because their US arm is a Truck company now, and the other isn't allowed to sell cars in the US at all through trade tariffs and embargoes.)
I get what you're saying about the American love affair for SUVs, it's insane how large so many people think their cars need to be to have a car seat and a dog and groceries.
But I also think it's disingenuous to lump a car like the Mach E and Ioniq 5 in the same size class as a Chevy Suburban and Honda Pilot and Ford Expedition. They're far closer to the hatchback of yesterday than they are to any of those monsters, and yet they're both called "SUVs".
And I do wish there were more smaller cars on the market. You're absolutely right, if it's pretty much only you or maybe you + 1 with a small bit of cargo even something like a Mach E (or even the Volt) is pretty much oversized. I do think people should have more choice in right-sizing their vehicles.
> But I also think it's disingenuous to lump a car like the Mach E and Ioniq 5 in the same size class as a Chevy Suburban and Honda Pilot and Ford Expedition.
There's an inflation factor here. The Mach E is about the size of the 1990s Ford Expedition or Chevy Suburban (and the Honda Pilot didn't yet exist). Everything has gotten bigger. Everything keeps getting bigger "just a couple inches" at a time.
The ("hot") hatchback of the 1970s, which defined the class, was closer to the size of a Geo Prism than a Chevy Volt, much less a Mach E.
In my view the lower end of the SUV class has been relatively consistent, it's just gotten so much wider as class (just like the cars) and shifted huger with all sorts of inflation.
I don't think I'm disingenuous here: I feel consistent. I was dismissive of the class as too large when it broke out in the 1990s. I'm dismissive of the class today. The fact that the class has become so dominant and inflated so largely hasn't changed my baseline of when a car seems "too big" even if it seems to have raised the floors of so many other people. I drove a Geo Prism for a decade and change. I've now driven a Chevy Volt for another decade and change. I've been here the whole time, it seems to me SUVs as a class that's gotten worse.
> The Mach E is about the size of the 1990s Ford Expedition or Chevy Suburban
This is untrue. The Mach E is 186" long, 64" high, and 74" wide. The 1997 Ford Expedition is 205" long, 75" high, and 79" wide. More than half a foot is a huge difference but nearly a foot is about the same size, and the Expedition is a foot and a half longer. 2" is way too much to add to the width but 5" is about the same size.
A Geo Prizm is 173" long and 53" high, and was considered a very small car for the time in the US market. So the difference in length of a Prizm to a Mach E is 13". The difference in length of the '97 Expedition to the Mach E is 19". The height differences are both 11" So yes, the Mach E is closer in size to the Prizm than it is to the first-generation Expedition. And its laughable to compare it to a modern Expedition, its far closer to the Prizm.
Even if you were to say "well, what about the early SUVs like the Bronco", and yeah sure they actually aren't as long as a Mach E was, but they were only 7" longer in length than that Prizm and yet were once again about 10" taller than the Mach E while your standard of 6" is a huge difference in height. And obviously the Bronco was going to have a short wheelbase, it only had a single row of seating.
That you seem to think the Mach E is about the same size as the 90's SUVs once again really points me to the failure of both kinds of cars having the same category. They're very different sizes. And I'm not trying to argue the Mach E is any kind of compact car or anything, but its downright tiny compared to "real" SUVs like Suburbans and what not.
As someone who daily drove a large SUV and a Ford Focus Hatch, the Mach E I drive today is considerably closer in size to the Focus than it is the older SUV. Definitely a bit bigger than the Focus, but it's not even close.
It will be interesting to see when sodium ion production ramps up in the US and EU. China is far ahead with this. As it was with LFP for the last few years. CATL is actually ramping up production for their second generation sodium ion battery already. They've been producing the first generation for a few years already. Sodium ion is going to be double digit percentages of the battery market in a few years. Like LFP is today. In China at least.
The advantage is not only cost but also longevity. LFP and sodium ion batteries might have decades of useful life. With thousands of charge cycles, you could be charging them on a daily basis and it would be fine. NMC only has about 1000-1500 cycles. Some LFP batteries do 3-4x better than that. Sodium ion even better.
Sodium ion is more useful (relatively speaking) for grid backing than cars. Weight and power density aren't so much of an issue in that application, longevity and price definitely is. So they can probably pivot if the administration starts trying to mess with the electric car market.
Depends, people think in terms of sports car level performance that they desire. But there's a reason the Ford Pinto used to be more popular and common than a Ferrari. It's actually a good enough car for many people.
For the average cheap clunker that you drive around town you neither need a big nor a fast battery. Chinese cheap cars (the type the US consumer can't even imagine is feasible) come with cheap batteries. Which means LFP or sodium ion in China. Cheap here means 5-10K$. For the car. With the battery. Not just the difference between the cheap and the more expensive battery upgrade (as is common in the US). Making a car cost effectively at those price levels means compromises. It's not going to have seat warmers. And you might have to open the window manually. And it won't drive to the moon and back on a single charge. But it will get you to work just fine.
Something like the Slate truck doesn't need top spec batteries. It just needs a decently sized battery. The cheapest one will have a 52kwh battery, apparently. LFP would be a good default. But it would still be a decent truck with a cheaper, lower capacity sodium ion battery. And since there is a 84.3 kwh option, there is some wiggle room for variations in size, weight, and energy density.
At 52kwh, it's not going to break distance records. If you need that, get the bigger battery. But otherwise lots of people get by with cars with ranges below 100 miles. Anybody that has an old Nissan Leaf falls into this bucket. They shipped with something like 60-70 miles of range. If you replace the battery you'll double the range because batteries have improved over time. Loads of them still drive with their original batteries. Nice car to buy second hand for next to nothing. Useful range. Dirt cheap to own and drive. Really affordable at this point.
The notion of buying the battery you need at a reasonable price vs. the range monster you think you need because you are a nervous and range anxious wreck is distorting this discussion.
People: I absolutely must have >500 miles range because I never stop and have a bladder of steel and easily can go without breaks for eight hours. The notion of stopping for 30-40 minutes freaks me out. The horror! I absolutely must have this and I'm going to sell my kidney to get it.
Reality, mr. Joe Average is middle aged, needs to go to the bath room regularly (especially after drinking coffee) because middle aged people just are like that. He isn't super wealthy and he lives 25 miles from work. Which is where he goes every day. He might go on a weekend trip. 50-60 miles is the bare minimum of what he needs. With a safety margin and some convenience, 150 would be fine and also accommodate for cold weather and unplanned excursions. 200 would be comfortable. 300 miles would mean the car lasts the whole week and only needs to be charged on the weekend. He drives his average 12K miles per year (230/week).
Some people genuinely need more. Most people (the average ones) really don't. They just think they do.
Also worth keeping in mind that "degradation" usually means the battery holds 80% of original charge. Basically your range shrinks from 300 miles to 240 miles. Automobile with 240 miles range is still a very useful car.
> when sodium ion production ramps up in the US and EU
The Ultium announcement isn't Li-S related but but number of battery plant announcements over the past 5 years in the US (as well as Japan) have been plants that can support both LFP and Li-S battery manufacturing.
Japanese, Korean, and American automotive and battery vendors have been aligned on this from a capital and IP perspective for a LONG time.
It is sad that gm essentially sold their entire "skateboard" platform they abandoned to SAIC, who now functionally own Cadillac/Buick. For all those who claim this was some kind of deception, it wasn't. Years of myopia, from the Motorola corvette to the EV-1 to the abandoned skateboard to the squandered volt and neglected bolt, GM is like Polaroid. They stopped being a "car" company and became an "engine" company, like how Polaroid stopped being a "camera" company and was a "chemical" company. This could shape up to be like JVC and its former parent, RCA, would the US gov bail them out again?
https://www.jalopnik.com/chevy-and-motorola-teamed-up-on-a-c...
https://carnewschina.com/2022/03/06/the-big-read-saic-6-6-th...
https://www.scmp.com/business/china-business/article/3308575...
They (probably) also had a chance to buy out A123 instead of letting it go to a Chinese company in bankruptcy, then they would have had control over LFP in general (word is CATL used a lot of ex-A123 industrial secres)
I have a MG4 that uses that "skateboard" platform.. its just a cheap EV, but damn the driving experience is just so nice!
It drives like a mid engine Lotus.. low and perfectly balanced center of gravity.
The modern corvette absolves a lot of sins imo. It was a big decision making it mid engined.
I want to agree with you that the "corvette absolves a lot of sins". But GM is still operating like they are "too big to fail", I hope we don't bail them out again. They make some amazing products and have a long history of advancing manufacturing and technology in their sector. Even with their engineering prowess, almost in spite of it, they continue to make some of the most mediocre vehicles that have ever existed. I swear the only people that buy their cars are former employees and relatives of said employees.
>I swear the only people that buy their cars are former employees and relatives of said employees.
I regrettably had to use a rental GMC of theirs, it seems car rental companies have quite a stock of them, to say nothing of their quality, felt like driving a wheeled takeout container.
> I swear the only people that buy their cars are former employees and relatives of said employees.
Coworker loves loves loves the corvette even though its one of the worst vehicles electrics wise. Two people he convinced to buy vettes traded them back in within a year of purchase for electrical issues.
Brand loyalty is a big part of the American mindset and I think GM rested on those laurels to the point where even after the bailout they still have the same mindset.
>Two people he convinced to buy vettes traded them back in within a year of purchase for electrical issues.
Why on earth would you take a bath on a trade-in instead of using the lemon law if there were unfixable electrical issues?
Also - this sounds pretty anecdotal to be honest, long-time corvette owner who follows the forums and I've not seen any widespread complaints of electrical issues with the c8 besides a battery drain issue caused by OTA updates that was resolved.
https://www.tsbsearch.com/Chevrolet/N242435630
C7's, and this was just before COVID. They were bought preowned from dealers. One had the entire electrical system shit itself after driving through a puddle and the other kept killing the battery at random.
Given you responded to a quote about the C8 platform redeeming GM - it'd probably pertinent to specify you're talking about literally a completely different car other than the name. The C8 was a ground up redesign.
That being said, the C7 also had no known electrical issues. A certified pre-owned would still be covered under lemon law. "driving through a puddle" sounds like more than a bit of an understatment if it took out the entire electrical system. I have driven my car through many, many rainstorms and had exactly 0 issues. I'm also not clear how he traded in a car with a non-functioning electrical system, no dealer would touch that with a 30 foot pole.
>the other kept killing the battery at random.
That could literally be anything, and again wasn't a widespread issue with the C7 platform or there would've been a recall, just like with the C8.
Mid-engined is most useful as a transition step to a modern skateboard design EV. Gets the center of gravity low and closer to the actual center point of the car, which a skateboard design then improves.
Corvette can't admit to aspirations of a Pure EV this decade (thanks, politics), but in my opinion, that's the only way to absolve a lot of the GM executive sins on being wishy washy about EV futures.
> Corvette can't admit to aspirations of a Pure EV this decade (thanks, politics)
I wouldn't attribute it to politics, but rather, the fact that the Venn Diagram of performance car enthusiasts and people willing to buy an EV are basically two entirely separate circles. When you consider cars that have a very big loyalty to the brand, like Corvette does, it gets even worse.
I personally would LOVE to buy a Corvette EV convertible. But I don't have my hopes up of it ever happening. The demand just isn't there.
There's a reasonable sized overlap there. EVs might not interest the "I love the sound inefficiency as literal sound walls" crowd, but the performance car enthusiasts that love torque curves and min/maxing them will eventually begrudgingly admit that EVs have some very lovely torque curves and many of them even know and salivate that most of those curves are software-defined making min/maxing them a fun videogame to play (possibly hazardously while driving, though that's part of the sport of Formula E) rather than buying and installing expensive aftermarket parts.
Brand loyalty I'll give you in that I have heard a lot of "the day Corvette makes an EV is the day Corvette is dead to me" hyper-masculine statements, but hyper-masculinity is political. (So is hyper-partisanship in many cases.)
I think the path forward for GM, and most other companies that still make engines is plug-in/gas hybrids. The electric transmission (should be?) more desirable to car enthusiasts, and the engine can still be a moat, though I'd say it quickly starts to feel redundant(to me).
I still think 2019 GM was correct in killing the Volt that hybrids are a worst of both worlds in engineering trade-offs and strictly one or the other is the best approach for both. I also still partly agree that 2019 was about the right year to end that "transition tech" phase, at the very least as a political message (that wasn't correctly received).
(I say that as someone who still owns a 2012 Volt as my only car, but mostly not because I still think I need a hybrid but because I want an full electric, reasonably sized sedan or hatchback, and all the car companies decided Americans only want EV crossovers/SUVs/assault tanks/land yachts this decade.)
All hybrids (Prius included, and especially noted) are just sub-par Full EVs with extra weight albatrossed around their necks when gas gets hard to buy and it does seem like past time to stop sinking good money after multiple decades of sunk costs in ICE car engines.
I think it would be more obvious if the US had more of the cheap EVs that China and Europe are producing, but we all know the US right now isn't politically aligned to have nice things.
A Mach E isn't much bigger than a Volt. Its 5" longer, 3" wider, and 7.5" taller. A Polestar 2 is only an inch longer, 2" taller, and 2" wider.
There are many EVs out there roughly the same size as the Volt. Its not like all EVs are about the size of the Hummer EV.
The closest Polestar dealership (er, "retail location") is still a long drive or plane ride away for me. The Polestar 2 does seem the closest to what I want in the current market, though 2" wider isn't ideal and the Polestar 2 has a boxy Volvo thing about it that I don't quite like aesthetically (and that 2" wider does give it a bit of a land yacht feel to me), so it doesn't seem worth that sort of distance trip just for a test drive.
(Also, and this is a silly complaint/wishlist item, but I had friends describe an old Volvo buying experience where you could pay a premium on top of the car purchase to include a factory tour and week's stay in the Swedish Alps; they said it was one of the best vacations they ever had. If Polestar offered that I'd be very much more inclined towards Polestar.)
The Mach E strikes me as way too big for just me. Those inches add up, it seems way bigger than Volt I have. More than half a foot taller is a huge difference. Maybe I'm just a bad American because I use my car so rarely and mostly alone, and everything about the SUV form factor seems absolutely ridiculous to me for a solo driver mostly out to get groceries or visit family for a few hours. I'm not just making fun of the Hummer-sized monstrosities, I'm absolutely confused by the American love affair with the SUV entirely. It's way too much.
(Not to mention I have almost been wishing I could downsize to a nice coupe or compact and that is entirely off the US market to even consider getting my hopes up. I've had love affairs from a distance with the Honda e and BYD Dolphin. Those are cute looking cars. Not really possible to put on a US road, and one company wouldn't sell me one even if I tried because their US arm is a Truck company now, and the other isn't allowed to sell cars in the US at all through trade tariffs and embargoes.)
I get what you're saying about the American love affair for SUVs, it's insane how large so many people think their cars need to be to have a car seat and a dog and groceries.
But I also think it's disingenuous to lump a car like the Mach E and Ioniq 5 in the same size class as a Chevy Suburban and Honda Pilot and Ford Expedition. They're far closer to the hatchback of yesterday than they are to any of those monsters, and yet they're both called "SUVs".
And I do wish there were more smaller cars on the market. You're absolutely right, if it's pretty much only you or maybe you + 1 with a small bit of cargo even something like a Mach E (or even the Volt) is pretty much oversized. I do think people should have more choice in right-sizing their vehicles.
> But I also think it's disingenuous to lump a car like the Mach E and Ioniq 5 in the same size class as a Chevy Suburban and Honda Pilot and Ford Expedition.
There's an inflation factor here. The Mach E is about the size of the 1990s Ford Expedition or Chevy Suburban (and the Honda Pilot didn't yet exist). Everything has gotten bigger. Everything keeps getting bigger "just a couple inches" at a time.
The ("hot") hatchback of the 1970s, which defined the class, was closer to the size of a Geo Prism than a Chevy Volt, much less a Mach E.
In my view the lower end of the SUV class has been relatively consistent, it's just gotten so much wider as class (just like the cars) and shifted huger with all sorts of inflation.
I don't think I'm disingenuous here: I feel consistent. I was dismissive of the class as too large when it broke out in the 1990s. I'm dismissive of the class today. The fact that the class has become so dominant and inflated so largely hasn't changed my baseline of when a car seems "too big" even if it seems to have raised the floors of so many other people. I drove a Geo Prism for a decade and change. I've now driven a Chevy Volt for another decade and change. I've been here the whole time, it seems to me SUVs as a class that's gotten worse.
> The Mach E is about the size of the 1990s Ford Expedition or Chevy Suburban
This is untrue. The Mach E is 186" long, 64" high, and 74" wide. The 1997 Ford Expedition is 205" long, 75" high, and 79" wide. More than half a foot is a huge difference but nearly a foot is about the same size, and the Expedition is a foot and a half longer. 2" is way too much to add to the width but 5" is about the same size.
A Geo Prizm is 173" long and 53" high, and was considered a very small car for the time in the US market. So the difference in length of a Prizm to a Mach E is 13". The difference in length of the '97 Expedition to the Mach E is 19". The height differences are both 11" So yes, the Mach E is closer in size to the Prizm than it is to the first-generation Expedition. And its laughable to compare it to a modern Expedition, its far closer to the Prizm.
Even if you were to say "well, what about the early SUVs like the Bronco", and yeah sure they actually aren't as long as a Mach E was, but they were only 7" longer in length than that Prizm and yet were once again about 10" taller than the Mach E while your standard of 6" is a huge difference in height. And obviously the Bronco was going to have a short wheelbase, it only had a single row of seating.
That you seem to think the Mach E is about the same size as the 90's SUVs once again really points me to the failure of both kinds of cars having the same category. They're very different sizes. And I'm not trying to argue the Mach E is any kind of compact car or anything, but its downright tiny compared to "real" SUVs like Suburbans and what not.
As someone who daily drove a large SUV and a Ford Focus Hatch, the Mach E I drive today is considerably closer in size to the Focus than it is the older SUV. Definitely a bit bigger than the Focus, but it's not even close.
It will be interesting to see when sodium ion production ramps up in the US and EU. China is far ahead with this. As it was with LFP for the last few years. CATL is actually ramping up production for their second generation sodium ion battery already. They've been producing the first generation for a few years already. Sodium ion is going to be double digit percentages of the battery market in a few years. Like LFP is today. In China at least.
The advantage is not only cost but also longevity. LFP and sodium ion batteries might have decades of useful life. With thousands of charge cycles, you could be charging them on a daily basis and it would be fine. NMC only has about 1000-1500 cycles. Some LFP batteries do 3-4x better than that. Sodium ion even better.
Sodium ion is more useful (relatively speaking) for grid backing than cars. Weight and power density aren't so much of an issue in that application, longevity and price definitely is. So they can probably pivot if the administration starts trying to mess with the electric car market.
Depends, people think in terms of sports car level performance that they desire. But there's a reason the Ford Pinto used to be more popular and common than a Ferrari. It's actually a good enough car for many people.
For the average cheap clunker that you drive around town you neither need a big nor a fast battery. Chinese cheap cars (the type the US consumer can't even imagine is feasible) come with cheap batteries. Which means LFP or sodium ion in China. Cheap here means 5-10K$. For the car. With the battery. Not just the difference between the cheap and the more expensive battery upgrade (as is common in the US). Making a car cost effectively at those price levels means compromises. It's not going to have seat warmers. And you might have to open the window manually. And it won't drive to the moon and back on a single charge. But it will get you to work just fine.
Something like the Slate truck doesn't need top spec batteries. It just needs a decently sized battery. The cheapest one will have a 52kwh battery, apparently. LFP would be a good default. But it would still be a decent truck with a cheaper, lower capacity sodium ion battery. And since there is a 84.3 kwh option, there is some wiggle room for variations in size, weight, and energy density.
At 52kwh, it's not going to break distance records. If you need that, get the bigger battery. But otherwise lots of people get by with cars with ranges below 100 miles. Anybody that has an old Nissan Leaf falls into this bucket. They shipped with something like 60-70 miles of range. If you replace the battery you'll double the range because batteries have improved over time. Loads of them still drive with their original batteries. Nice car to buy second hand for next to nothing. Useful range. Dirt cheap to own and drive. Really affordable at this point.
The notion of buying the battery you need at a reasonable price vs. the range monster you think you need because you are a nervous and range anxious wreck is distorting this discussion.
People: I absolutely must have >500 miles range because I never stop and have a bladder of steel and easily can go without breaks for eight hours. The notion of stopping for 30-40 minutes freaks me out. The horror! I absolutely must have this and I'm going to sell my kidney to get it.
Reality, mr. Joe Average is middle aged, needs to go to the bath room regularly (especially after drinking coffee) because middle aged people just are like that. He isn't super wealthy and he lives 25 miles from work. Which is where he goes every day. He might go on a weekend trip. 50-60 miles is the bare minimum of what he needs. With a safety margin and some convenience, 150 would be fine and also accommodate for cold weather and unplanned excursions. 200 would be comfortable. 300 miles would mean the car lasts the whole week and only needs to be charged on the weekend. He drives his average 12K miles per year (230/week).
Some people genuinely need more. Most people (the average ones) really don't. They just think they do.
> The advantage is not only cost but also longevity. LFP and sodium ion batteries might have decades of useful life.
> NMC only has about 1000-1500 cycles.
200 miles per cycle and you’re at 200,000 miles, which is decades for a lot of people.
Also worth keeping in mind that "degradation" usually means the battery holds 80% of original charge. Basically your range shrinks from 300 miles to 240 miles. Automobile with 240 miles range is still a very useful car.
> when sodium ion production ramps up in the US and EU
The Ultium announcement isn't Li-S related but but number of battery plant announcements over the past 5 years in the US (as well as Japan) have been plants that can support both LFP and Li-S battery manufacturing.
Japanese, Korean, and American automotive and battery vendors have been aligned on this from a capital and IP perspective for a LONG time.
Sodium is not very good chemistry. High degradation for instance.
Citation needed.
CATL is promising 10k cycles for their latest sodium ion cells.
The batteries from this plant are also being used by Honda, as Honda and GM are working on sharing their BMS and platform
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