Tesla Motors

[Joel N. Weber II]

The Tesla Model S, in its higher battery capacity version, is expected to be $65,000 with a 300 mile range battery.

That may be as much as $45,000 more than a similar gasoline powered car.

If the buyer has to amortize that $45,000 over 100,000 miles, that's $.45 per mile in extra costs for a car that uses a ``cheaper'' energy source. Even if gasoline costs $4/gallon and the gasoline car gets 20 miles per gallon, the gas only costs $.20 per mile. I suspect most Americans find the current pump price per mile to be considerably less than $.20 per mile.

If 2010 model year Tesla pricing were going to be the best that could ever be achieved in battery powered car production, we probably would be looking at gradually increasing costs of owning and operating single occupancy automobiles as time goes on (unless biofuel takes off).

But I suspect Tesla Motors, for their 2010 production run, is going to be buying lithium ion batteries whose price per watt hour reflects the economies of scale of manufacturing those batteries that we get when the typical American might buy a cell phone battery or a laptop computer battery once every couple years.

If battery powered cars start becoming popular, we might see lithium ion battery watt hours producted for American use be something like 1000 times greater in 2018 than in 2008.

The interesting question is what this will do to the price per watt hour. What if it turns out that every time 10 times more watt hours are produced, the price per watt hour drops in half? We might end up with battery powered cars which only cost $.05 or $.06 extra per mile of usable life to manufacture, and if electricity is cheaper than gasoline by enough, that might turn out to make electric cars very competitive, even ignoring the environmental issues and potential for government incentives.

At that point, there might be little reason to buy a new gasoline powered car instead of a battery powered car. Maybe people who don't want to have to stop in the middle of a day of driving to get a bite to eat while waiting for the 45 minute ``quick'' charge would prefer a gasoline car they can refill in five minutes, and antique collectors may want to continue to operate their gasoline cars, but I'm not sure anyone else would really benefit from having a gasoline car at that point.

If that happens, the price of gasoline may also start to drop due to declining demand, and we might need some sort of government incentive program to make sure that gasoline cars really do get phased out.

If we manage to replace 99% of the gasoline (and diesel) cars on the road today with battery powered cars, I think it turns out that there would be a plentiful quantity of oil being drilled on US soil to power all the airplanes we could possibly want flying to and from US airports.

Looking at the Tesla Model S and thinking about what might happen to prices as battery production ramps up makes me doubt that mass transit and high speed rail investments are needed to nearly eliminate US energy imports.

That said, there are plenty of reasons why we may still benefit from rail investment. Copper catenary is probably more environmentally sound than the lithium ion battery. Removing automobile demand for petroleum may make Jet A less expensive, but it won't make it any less poluting, and it won't eliminate congestion at crowded major airports. Changing the fuel source of single occupancy vehicles isn't going to reduce highway congestion in major cities, and commuter rail is probably a cheaper option than highway widening which is also likely to have a smaller environmental impact from land converted to transportation use and lithium ion battery production. And we shouldn't forget the benefits that good mass transit provide for those who for whatever reason can't drive.

 

[Joel N. Weber II]

johnny pointed out in AU chat this evening that ``lithium is in short supply''.

The battery pack in a Tesla Roadster apparently weighs roughly 1000 pounds; if we assume that roughly a tenth of that weight is lithium, a ton of lithium would produce 20 Roadsters. The Lithium Wikipedia article says several things about available lithium, and it's hard to figure out which is most significant. There's this not too optimistic statement:

The total amount of lithium recoverable from global reserves has been estimated at 35 million tonnes, which includes 15 million tons of the known global lithium reserve base.

I think there are roughly 300 million automobiles in the US, and 15 million tons of lithium is probably roughly the right amount to produce 300 million Roadsters, so that 15 million tons would be great if nobody in the world outside the US wanted an automobile.

But the Wikipedia article also states:

Seawater contains an estimated 230 billion tons of lithium, though at a low concentration of 0.1 to 0.2 ppm.

Roughly 200 million tons of lithium ought to be enough to produce roughly 4 billion Roadsters, which is probably way more automobiles than the world really needs. So if we can figure out how to extract 1 / 1000 th of the lithium in the oceans to put in car batteries, we could convert all automobiles to lithium ion batteries.

Feel free to check my math. I haven't done any terribly complete double checking.

There are also environmental concerns with extracting large amounts of lithium, but my suspicion is that if we can find a way to process seawater, it can be done without significant environmental damage. I'm also not sure if anyone complaining about environmental damage from lithium extraction has done a good job of comparing it to the environmental damage from petroleum consumption. Remember, wind farms kill birds, but not building wind farms will probably kill bird species.