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From the Mobilist Inbox This Week
Affordable EVs, Tesla’s Jeff Dahn, the EV market, and future jobs
The meaning of parity: Last Friday, I wrote about the expected coming of cost parity, when electric and gasoline-propelled vehicles will cost roughly the same to manufacture. As I have reported numerous times, the signal for parity will be when lithium-ion batteries drop below $100 per kilowatt-hour, expected in 2023 or 2024. At that point, when there is no price difference between the technologies, we will know whether large numbers of ordinary motorists want to own EVs, or whether they will remain a niche, green product.
But, from his home in Berlin, Mobilist reader Frank Wunderlich-Pfeiffer tweets that technical parity and actual parity are two different things. What matters, Wunderlich-Pfeiffer argued, is not when EVs and combustion cars both can be had for $30,000 or so, but when they reach the average price that most people around the world usually pay — around $10,000. “Honestly, calling $100/kWh ‘parity’ is overly optimistic,” he writes. “Parity is when you can build a basic car with 500–700km (300–400 miles) range for $10,000 and turn a profit. Parity is somewhere between $20/kWh and $50/kWh.”
Jeff Dahn speaks: In yesterday’s post, I mentioned Tesla senior battery adviser Jeff Dahn, a professor at Dalhousie University…
