Let’s Parse the Crazy Week That Upended the Central Math of Batteries and EVs

Questions are raised about price, including whether it’s important

What if the Tesla Model 3 cost $25,000? Photo: Courtesy Tesla.

For a little over half a year, the battery and electric vehicle communities have been in ferment: Companies that no one thought twice about have gone Spac and are worth hundreds of millions and even billions of dollars. New gigafactories have been announced by the week. Legacy automakers have torn up and remade their five-year plans, only to do so again within weeks or months. In total, they have announced hundreds of new EV models.

But no episode amid the general mayhem has generated more whiplash than the discovery this week of the industry’s sudden, wholly unannounced recalculation of the key metric driving everything: The relative cost of EVs and combustion vehicles. For a decade or more, the orthodoxy has been that if you could profoundly lower the cost of the battery, the most expensive part of an EV, you would bust through the sticker price of combustion vehicles and bring on a new electric transportation age. A figure was attached to this destination — a battery costing $100 per kilowatt-hour. And the milestone has seemed within sight. By the middle of the decade, it has been thought, $100/kWh will be the average battery pack cost.