GM paying $145 per kilowatt hour

Yay... this will bring such a mundane controversy and disputes......

 

i've seen this happen in other industries. it's a break in confidence and trust. gm's loose lips and bravado eventually come back to haunt them, it will never change.

 

The thing is, for car parts, we never quote wholesale price to the dealer for bumpers and things like that. If we did we'd be angry about the mark-up needed to sell the parts to the public.

 

...may be wishful thinking, but I agree with what Autoline says about Consumer Reports on their Model S reporting fiasco.

 

My guess is LG is probably selling GM cells at a loss today, expecting their costs to come down quickly. This happened a lot in semiconductors, bid the cost of the project, which is bellow today's cost, and get the wins. Then you have the volume for R&D. LG is competing with panasonic and samsung and nissan/NEC on car design wins, and is willing to sacrifice today for tomorrows profits. Rumors are nissan may put LG's in some models of the gen II leaf, Renault their partner already does for their plug-ins. The volt and bolt are key design wins. LG doesn't want to provide cells at the same cost to smaller volume customers.

Bad on GM for screwing their supplier. My guess is some idiot at gm was responding to some of the fuel cell hype, that batteries are too expensive, but fuel cells will be cheap. Tesla is less expensive still, projecting $175/kwh for the full battery pack next year when the gigafactory goes live. I'm not sure the delta between cell and pack. Jeffrey's securities analyst thought tesla could drive down pack prices to $135/kwh in 2020. Tesla's CTO thinks it will bellow $100/kwh by 2025. LG and Tesla/Panasonic seem to be driving down battery prices quickly. Maybe GM with the balance of the pack will be at $225/kwh, but again this should go down in the future.

At $200/kwh the volt pack of 18.4 kwh would cost $3680, but the volt still needs an engine similar in size to a hybrid, but downsized compared to a non-hybrid vehicle. A 50kwh will cost you $10,000 and get close to 200 miles. I doubt the cost of motors and inverters are that much cheaper than engine and pollution control and gas tanks on a conventional car, but ... we have another metric gasoline costs.

Compare Side-by-Side
A volt using today's epa will save you about $2750 over 5 years versus a similar gasoline car (I subtracted the cruze savings), a tesla $4250. If you don't need the convience of filling up with gas the tesla is getting close to parity at today's battery prices. That should also be true about the bolt, 200+ mile future nissan (using 2020 projected lg battery costs). The phev will still extract a premium, but allow you to fill up with electrons at home and gas when you want to.

 

GM said $145 per kWh cells in 2016 projected to fall to $100 by 2022.

Tesla CTO has said "he will be disappointed" if the GF doesn't result in cell prices dropping to $100 by 2020.

I haven't seen pack prices for either GM or Tesla based on 2016 cell prices but I think it's fair to say the they are both on a similar pricing track over the next 5 years. Tesla's prices won't meet their 2020 goals until the GF is built-out to near full capacity. GM is getting discounts from LG due to early customer status, volume, and potential volume growth.

 

we have some accounting trickeration with tesla. Tesla is projectiong 500,000 battery packs for 2020, but analysts don't expect them to meet that number of cars,. Say its 200,000 instead. They still have power walls they can sell at a lower profit margin. They can sell to other car makers for their plug-ins. I don't think volume at the gigafactory is a problem.

Panasonic may be more of a problem if they don't want to go along. Tesla could then get samsung or lg or even domestic jci to produce cells to their specification in the gigafactory. It is aligned to be quite modular. Tesla seems to have the edge in low production costs.

LG though seems willing to lose money to bring about big sales in the future. They are not far behind, and may get design wins in gm, nissan, and ford vehicles. We were supposed to be in an area of lithium glut, and low investment, but LG and Tesla are investing a great deal in the future.

The Nevada tax breaks, low cost of labor and electricity in nevada, are likely part of the gigafactory pack

Details on variable costs
Analyst: With Gigafactory, Tesla Battery Cost Will Fall Below $100 Per kWh

Now once it is going full blast and they figure things out, projections get even rosier

Note LG can achieve the same scale. Lower priced cells with better liquid conditioning. Better nano materials and manufacturing improvements. Both LG and Tesla seem to reduce pack volume about 20% in a 5 year period, that means likely a pack with the same capacity in 10 years - 2025 will only be 64% as big.

 

I don't know how a single number like this makes sense.
For example, let's say a battery is $100 per kwh and 25 kg per kwh, while another is $200 per kwh but only 5 kg per kwh.

Mike

 

You mean like Bob Lutz's comical statement, "hybrids (prius) are for geeks" ??
. . . . still, this revelation gives corroboration as to how Tesla's Power Wall can be sold as inexpensively as it is. Between the cost of super high efficiency inverters and batteries - I'm guessing (hoping) this will signal the death knell to natural gas/hydrogen auto transportation - because battery prices do seem to keep coming down.
.

 

would love to see a solar wind push, but not likely with arab price control.

 

The Bolt batteries.

 

My guess is bolt and volt will be the same for cells. Spark ev and volt are the same. cells. The price cut probably doesn't start until the bolt volume comes on line though.

 

Do you mean the Volt and Bolt cells will be the same cost per kWh or that both cars will use exactly the same cells? Or something else?

I suspect the Bolt cells are different from the 2016 Volt cells.

Typically, BEV cells are different than PHEV cells because PHEVs have needed a higher ratio of power to energy (kW vs kWh) than a BEV but this may be less true of the Volt since it has a fairly large PHEV pack.

Because BEV cells have less power density but more energy density than PHEV cells they are also typically cheaper per kWh.

 

I expect that they will use the same cells, with the volt adopting the bolt cells in a refresh. That would be the most cost effective for both lg and chevy. There may be a short period inbetween.

Yep with the big pack both the spark ev and volt used the same cells No reason to believe the bolt will need lower powered cells than the volt ;-) The bolt will likely accelerate better than the volt, unless they go cheap on motors and inverters.

The gen II volt appears to have about 6 kw/kwh. I assume that is well within the range of LGs less expensive cells per kwh. The ford susion hybrid is 25 kw/kwh, the gen III prius nimh is 21 kw/kwh, prius phv 8 kw/kwh. Sure the bolt could be more like 3.5 (tesla 90kwh) but my guess is it would not be much different in price or volume. I guess we need to wait and see. My guess is tesla increase the power to capacity in their next gen so that can charge more for a P model option with a smaller (50kwh-60kwh) battery pack.

 

AUTOLINE HAS A THEORY: The $145/kwhr price is actually a "package price" which includes the battery + motor + infotainment center + heater + DC/DC modules. If they sold just the battery alone, the pricetag would probably be double.

Don't think of Volt as a plugin hybrid. Think of it as a 50-mile range EV and you'll see why it would need the same battery type as any other 50-60 mile EV (500e, spark, IQe).

 

it all depends on gasoline price vs electricity price. i'm hearing from PIP owners it's cheaper to burn gasoline at the current price vs recharging at home in some energy markets. even if the fuel cost eventually goes up, the energy price will do so too.