The Experience So Many Will Go Through… That Will Disrupt The Auto Industry
http://evobsession.com/experience-many-will-go-will-disrupt-auto-industry/I recently took a drive in a GMO colleague’s Tesla from New York to Boston. Now, I am about as far from a car freak as you will easily find. I just turned in a 12-year-old Volvo that unfortunately had been sideswiped, for otherwise it was good for years more. But I have to say that my recent Tesla journey was my #1 car experience ever. Three years ago I test drove a Tesla in Boston and it was a tinny, rattly, super-expensive toy. Its battery alone cost $50,000! Last month, its chief engineers suggested its cost today is $22,000. In three years they and other experts are confident that the battery will be less than $15,000 and probably its weight will have fallen also. The Tesla feels like the $75,000 vehicle it is and not simply adjusting for the fact that it is electric, but on its own merit. Many of you will know that this vehicle has a range of 150 to 270 miles depending on battery size and that it received two prestigious car of the year awards2 along with being given the highest crash ratings of any vehicle ever! Consumer Reports gave it the co-equal highest ratings in the magazine’s 77 years! Even more importantly for me, there was this series of what I can only describe as my first iPad moment: “Wow, that’s cool!” And cool it was as the extreme acceleration pushed me back into the passenger seat for the first time in my life, aided, it must be said, by an exuberant new owner at the wheel. We had enough charge to reach Boston easily, but out of curiosity and in need of a coffee break, we stopped to charge the battery at the one and only charging station halfway home. Twenty-five minutes later, we were back on the road, fully charged up. And for free! (Full disclosure: I regrettably have owned no shares in Tesla.)
Okay, “Enough!” you say. But at $10,000 to $15,000 per battery in three years plus some economies of scale, there will probably be a $40,000 vehicle that even die-hard cheapskates like me will have to buy. (Our stop-gap Jetta diesel, which gets an honest 41 miles to the gallon, was $24,000.) One can easily see that in 10 years there could be a new world order in cars…. The idea of “peak oil demand” as opposed to peak oil supply has gone, in my opinion, from being a joke to an idea worth beginning to think about in a single year. Some changes seem to be always around the corner and then at long last they move faster than you expected and you are caught flat-footed.
So, that was a stellar write-up of this Tesla/EV story—perhaps the best I’ve seen outside of what we’ve published on EV Obsession and CleanTechnica. But there are a few key points here that I want to talk about in my own way.
1. Tesla is in a league of its own. As Grantham notes, the Model S in 2012 and 2013 got a Consumer Reports score of 99/100, the best rating the magazine has ever given. That was a full 4 points above 2013′s runner-up. The car is not cheap, but it is the best car on the market. Furthermore, it’s only the second model Tesla has developed, and the first that it has fully designed to take advantage of its electric power source. Tesla is moving down the ladder from super expensive to affordable. It’s not going to make big compromises on quality as it moves down—the downward steps are essentially based on the falling prices of batteries… as well as improvements in Tesla’s manufacturing skills and economies of scale. All of this is why Tesla’s stock is sky high. Many, like me, even think it’s too high for the time being, but if you look at what Tesla is actually aiming to do, maybe not.
2. However, in many respects, Tesla’s secret sauce is available to all the other auto companies out there. An electric car is simply a much better drive, a much more efficient drive, and also a more convenient car. Grantham complained about the Tesla Roadster, but he also noted that he was “about as far from a car freak as you will easily find.” Furthermore, as implied above, the Roadster was Tesla’s first model, and the company wasn’t yet able to build a car completely around the benefits of an electric drive as it did with the Model S. What’s my point with all of this? I have two points, actually. My first point is that, despite its higher value, a sports car isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. However, as Tesla and electric cars as a whole make it into other market segments, more and more customers will have their “iPad moment” and jump into the electric car era. Furthermore, other auto companies can also create excellent electric cars, if they really try to. GM put a fair amount of effort into the Chevy Volt and also had amazing results in terms of customer satisfaction and product reviews. Nissan aimed for a lower segment of the market right off the bat, sacrificing range for a lower price in order to capture those early adopters who are ready for the electric thrill but don’t have the money for a Model S. The Nissan Leaf is the best-selling electric car in the world and recently passed 100,000 sales—much faster than the highly popular Toyota Prius passed that marker when it was getting started (and with good right, because not only is the Leaf super efficient—much more efficient than the Prius—it’s also a ton of fun to drive). As batteries improve and come down in price, more segments of the market will open up, the Leaf will come with greater range, Tesla will have a more affordable product on the market, and more and more people will come to think, “How did I ever put up with driving a gasmobile?” It’s not Tesla vs everyone, but Tesla + everyone. It’s just a matter of time.
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It won't run the virtual machines I run on mine today. Part of what has made them obsolete are the technical improvements made to various parts of the systems that will now not run the software we have today. For that matter I can put a working server or desktop online in less than 30 minutes, since it's all done in software now, dozens on the same machine.The vast majority of users would access them from cell phones (pretty good) and a growing number of tablets (still have a ways to go, but getting better). Makes that P4 nearly valueless, because I can create server after server for nothing more than the cost of a little more disk space and memory. No box, no power supply, no extra heating and cooling. They just plug into the wall or come in over the Internet and it is there. All they need is a web browser.
But even though I could create an entire data center, or all the working desktops for many users on a single machine with a lot of ram and storage, where are the customers to pay for it? It's fantastically cheaper, but where are the customers that can use all this capacity I have? And there are people with far more capacity than I, and they don't have customers for it all either.
I realize one can build an EV, like yours, or out of an old C-10 and a decent set of batteries, (put em under the bed, put it on hydraulic struts that tilt it out of the way). But too many people don't have even the money to try, and many are completely incompetent at the simplest mechanical things. But that's not the real hangup.
Your point is that things get cheaper, and I agree. But that only helps when incomes stay stable or rise, not when they are wiped out faster than they can be recovered by inflation or administrative policies of helping the rich get and stay richer, not funding enough infrastructure, not creating laws that prevent profiting by selling off our industry. The 15 million new families that have been added to the food stamp roles in the past 6 years aren't gonna be buying many of those. The people who have lost the tens upon tens of millions of good paying jobs only to find nothing, or jobs that pay 1/3 to 1/2 of what they were getting (and had the bills for) won't be buying any.
The technology improves and gets cheaper, but for the first time in our history it's not likely to happen faster than we as a nation become too poor to take advantage of it.
And that means it will sit on the shelf. Where too many people have been placed in the past few years.
I don't believe in miracles and hope. That's the stuff of lies and BS. I believe in planning and results, and I don't see the future where we win out over this, except in the sales brochures. 
(Just curious - is your two-wheeler highway safe and road legal? Range? I want en EV for a daily driver - probably would be a 40-mile round-trip C-10- but I want a cage around me more these days more than I used to. And two wheelers aren't too great in the snow, like the 5" we got yesterday.)
But never in my lifetime will I be able to buy a new car again, and not a car that has to spend 10K or more every three years for a battery. 10K is more than I can pay for the entire car. 
We need some kind of innovation to bring these costs down if we want the majority of drivers to be able to own one.
I finally saw the link to the other post, looks like about 25 miles one way. That's pretty good.
I am thinking that might be very useful as we look for ways to automate our daily tasks in the future we have in store...
I bet others are interested in that question as well, so I copied from my other answer.
Good work