Could cheaper batteries and Israeli drivers make electric vehicles the norm?
RNSDYBATS Real-Time Market Data by XigniteIs the market underplaying the electric car or are investors being suitably wary of a new technology that holds promise, but not necessarily profits? Old-fashioned gas-powered cars are one of academia’s favorite case studies on the unprofitable nature of disruptive technologies.
Add to that lesson learned the dot-com bust and the most recent financial crisis and perhaps financial markets should only be lukewarm on battery-powered vehicles. Yet Rod Lache of Deutsche Bank sees reason to think electric cars will spread faster than the public gives them credit for.
Article Controls
email
reprint
newsletter
comments
share
del.icio.us
Digg It!
yahoo
rss
Yahoo! BuzzBatteries are one of the stumbling bocks to making electric vehicles affordable. For consumers, range is a big issue and the hefty batteries that allow EVs to travel as far as gasoline counterparts don’t come cheap. But as with photovoltaic cells, demand and competition are helping bring prices down dramatically. Lache thinks battery prices will drop by a quarter in the next five years and by half in the next ten, even as performance increases. That would speed up adoption of electric vehicles, though the battery industry would suffer the fallout.
Building an infrastructure as ubiquitous as today’s gas stations presents an altogether different challenge. Here, Americans may lag other parts of the world when it comes to adoption. Better Place, a Palo Alto company, has garnered a lot of attention for its plans to build a network of battery-swapping stations so drivers don’t have to worry about charging up before leaving home. To the skeptics, Lache points out that the company’s Israeli dealership is receiving 50 orders a day for new vehicles from Renault ( RNSDY.PK – news – people ), though they won’t be available there until next year. Better Place plans 70 swap stations in Israel and 30,000 charging locations by the end of next year.
Israel is a test case, of course, a small country where major cities are at most a few hours’ drive and the politics favor reducing reliance on fossil fuels. There’s also no telling whether consumers in the U.S., the U.K., Germany or elsewhere will like Better Place’s charge-by-the-mile pricing. But Lache thinks that if gas prices soar again, perhaps to $4.75 a gallon in the U.S., drivers will see the economy of going electric.
Read more at
Source: forbes.com
Recent Comments