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SkiingAway t1_iye7noy wrote

Reply to comment by moofunk in Competitors chip away at Tesla's US electric vehicle share by Sorin61

Estimates vary, but most I can find peg the EV1's at $80k+ in production cost per car, which would be more like ~$150k+ today.

Are you going to pay for $150k for an early Nissan Leaf with even worse battery longevity? Probably not.

Now, you can argue that the cost would have come down somewhat further with bigger production scales, but it's still quite far from where it needed to be for what they had to offer.

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moofunk t1_iyea3sq wrote

Yeah, though I still think the battery itself wasn't the issue. The EV1 was only manufactured in around 2000 units and thus never warranted cost optimization, and its demise just screams politics. All cars were hand built in a facility that built specialty cars, which is very expensive to do.

Even today, tiny electrics with mediocre specs that are hand built, are crazy expensive.

Say Tesla had started everything 7 years earlier, developing the Roadster between 1998 and 2003.

They would have been more limited by the power electronics early on than the batteries. It would have been more expensive, but would have been better positioned for cost optimization, even though it was also hand built.

Power electronics development today is continuing and helps to make modern EVs cheaper and with better specs.

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