- Robert Luis Rabello Amen to that! But shouldn't it be: suck, squeeze, bang, belch . . ? (The writer in me just can't help it!)
- Alan Petrillo Nah. The "belch" is what the Atkinson cycle engine of my Honda does just before it closes the intake valve. The "fart" goes out the exhaust.
- Robert Luis Rabello I can't find a working link for Hybrid Industries . . .
- Robert Luis Rabello Odd . . . That's a dead link from here.
- Robert Luis Rabello Oh . . . NOW it's working!
Back in 2003, when my car was built, batteries were expensive. Really expensive. They aren’t anymore, on a dollars per kilowatt-hour basis.
My car is a 2003 Honda Civic Hybrid. The stock IMA battery was 144V at 6.5 Amp-hours. Running the numbers, that’s 936 watt-hours. In 2003 that was considered a Really Big Battery for a car. Back in 2003 that battery pack was $8000. Today, Honda still wants $4700 for a new IMA battery for my car. Fortunately, there are options.
Aftermarket companies have stepped into the breach, with some considerably less expensive options. Greentec, which seems to be the major supplier of aftermarket battery packs, now offers three options. A reconditioned pack is $1400. A remanufactured pack, with all new cells, is $1900. Reading between the lines, that $500 difference between the reconditioned pack, with mostly original cells, and the remanufactured pack, with all new cells, tells you a lot about the actual price of the cells.
But it gets better. Greentec also offers an upgraded pack, with new 8Ah cells, for $2200. Running the numbers that comes out to 1152 Watt-hours. That doesn’t sound like much of a difference, but operationally I can tell you, driving this car in stop and go traffic that extra 216 Watt-hours makes a difference.
So already we’ve gone from $8000 for a little under a kWh to $1900 for the same size pack new, or about a 76% reduction in price.
But it gets even better. The core charge on the exchange is $750, meaning that is the approximate value of the frame and case of the battery pack, with the remainder of the value of the remanufactured pack being the cost of the cells and labor. So of that $1900, only $1150 is the cells and the labor to install them. Since skilled labor is expensive in the United States, figure half of that price is the labor to remanufacture the pack, so a cheap quick and dirty estimate is that only around $600 of that price is the cells themselves. That would make it around a 90% reduction in price.
But it gets yet better. Looking to other cars, and other battery chemistries, there is a company called Hybrid Industries that offers an upgrade for the Nissan Leaf, which places an additional 24kWh battery in a custom enclosure in the trunk. The cost of that upgrade is $6500. That works out to a gross cost of $271/kWh. Rounding up to make the math easier, that works out to a 97% reduction in the price of batteries in terms of cost per kilowatt-hour, in the past 13 years.
The upshot of all this is that, despite the best efforts of the automobile manufacturing industry and the petroleum industry to kill them, electric vehicles are the way of the future. The days of the dominance of the internal combustion engine in passenger vehicles are numbered, and the counter is counting down. Trucks aren’t far behind them. Long-haul big rigs as well, with the advent of the Nikola, and its massive 320kWh battery pack and an option for a fuel-cell or turboelectric drive train. Eventually internal combustion engines will be limited to a few special applications in which nothing else will do.
The days of suck, squeeze, bang, fart are coming to an end, and they can’t end soon enough.
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