From Climate Home News, 30 July 2020 – The model developed by Viswanathan and his colleagues shows that battery packs are on track to cost less than $80 per kilowatt-hour by 2025, a projection in line with leading forecasts, like that from BloombergNEF (You can read more about their model in a 2017 journal article and in a recent post on The Conversation).
Now that the below-$100 benchmark is within sight, it’s important to specify what it means. It doesn’t mean that I can go out and buy an EV of any size and it will cost the same or less than it would for a gasoline model with similar features. But it probably does mean that I will be able to get a compact sedan EV for about the same cost and with similar features as one that runs on gasoline.
Viswanathan said cost parity will arrive first for small sedans that now sell for $30,000 or less. It will take longer for automakers to develop electric trucks and SUVs that cost about the same as similar gasoline models.
One of the big reasons we will need to wait longer for larger vehicles is that trucks and SUVs need a lot of power for towing capacity, which means larger battery packs and higher costs.
The fact that EVs will be cost-competitive should help to transform a market in which less than 2 percent of new vehicles sold are all-electric.
This change is coming, and it’s coming fast, and that’s good news for the climate because transportation is responsible for more than a quarter of U.S. emissions
