EV's are dead - says Morgan Stanely

Various versions of this story floating around, here is one - http://auto.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/auto-technology/electric-vehicles-are-dying-but-tesla-will-live-on-because-theyre-just-too-exciting/35774853

some talking points (from various versions of this story) -

Toyota is ending its parts contract with Tesla (implying the CA only Rav4 will be scraped)
FFE was 0.07% of Ford's Q1 sales
Honda limiting FIT EV to 1,100 units
Would be lucky to see EV's at 1% of market by 2020
Volt sales down 7% Year over Year
Tesla only sells because it is a high performance car

Not sure I agree with their doom and gloom analysis, but certainly EV sales (and product selection) are going to be slim pickings for some time. Most people I know could easily live with a BEV as one of the two vehicles in their household, and (given the current incentives, which will of course expire) would save a ton of money and time by driving an EV. Unfortunately it will probably be another 10 years before commercially available battery technology has advanced enough to make range/price/performance attractive to the average buyer.

Hard to say, but I think the article is a bit bold and based more off of personal preference than fact. A lot of people like the concept of the BEV but issues of range and charge times always come up. Tesla addresses these issues and is partly why they are successful, but I do agree that the articles statement about the coolness factor of the car is true. However, if the Tesla had half the range, I don't think anyone would seriously consider it at the price. As for charging, they put out the free quick charge stations and the possibility of a battery swap in the future.

People don't embrace other EVs quite so much due to diminished looks, range, re-charge time, and cost. Because of these issues, the demographic is much smaller. You do gain some interest from those who are "green" or simply like EVs, like myself.

Diminished Looks: Some of the BEVs being introduced just looks odd to me...but to each his own. I personally didn't want a Leaf because of the looks and was willing to wait. When the FFE came out, that was sufficient for my tastes, so I became more interested.

Range: Some people genuinely need more range; many do not. But even if the range is sufficient for most their driving, I think people would like to be able to do a cross country road trip if they wanted too. Why do I have an unlimited data plan on my phone when I rarely use 1GByte? Why do I have 32GB of storage on my tablet if I can't even fill 1/4 of it with apps, photos, and music? Because we like versatility and options even though they may be impractical. Anyway, as batteries get better, range will improve and pull more people into the BEV market.

Re-charge time. Somewhat tied to range. If you want to go a long distance, a long recharge will not make the trip any more fun. Longer range and battery swaps will help battle this hurdle as well as fast chargers...but will definitely improve with time.

Cost: It seems costs are already seeing a drop. I remember seeing a flat screen TV...back before they were officially introduced. Price tag was $25,000...I think. Anyway, you can get them now for a few hundred bucks. Give it time.

So, will it be 10% market penetration by 2020...I still think there is a good possibility. With my 30mi daily commute and free charging at work, I can't complain....especially when I'm in the carpool lane blasting by my coworkers...definitely, I can't complain.

I think the author just cherry picked the vehicles to make his argument.

No mention of how well the Leaf is doing, or the fact that more and more manufacturers are making more EVs--each year new ones are being introduced (at least in that article).

Sure Sergio has said "don't buy our EV": he has always said that they didn't want to make an EV, and like most companies they want to turn a profit. Their EV doesn't make any money--and shipping more means losing more money...duh!

In addition the only manufacturer that is really pushing Fuel Cells is Toyota not sure where they get "increasingly more manufacturers are turning to Fuel Cells" from one?

Looks to me more like someone has an axe to grind against EVs.

What a terrible article!!

BEVs aren't for everyone. A single-car household will probably never be able to have a BEV because of range restrictions. I know that when my wife & I had just one car it was only used for long distance driving. We both walked to work and thus only drove our car in the evenings & on weekends and on road trips. A BEV doesn't work for road trips. I don't agree with Tesla's claims about Superchargers & road trips because 1) there are no superchargers where we live & where we would travel 2) while in our hybrid we might sometimes go 90 miles between stops & other times 200 miles between stops, in a Tesla you're forced to stop at Superchargers whether you need a bathroom break or not.

I expect that in the future there will be three main types of vehicles on the road: hybrids, plug-in hybrids & battery electric vehicles. Hybridization can lead to huge fuel savings on all vehicles, even heavy trucks. It will be possible to make more efficient and less expensive hybrids as battery efficiency improves. PHEVs are great for people like my parents who usually drive less than the 20-40 mile EV range of existing PHEVs in a day, but they want the ability to hop in their C-Max Energi & drive 200 miles one way should they have the desire. It's a lot better than driving their Murano. Actually, they would have bought a full electric car last summer had their been a BEV SUV available for a reasonable price. BEVs are great as a secondary car in the household. This is what we're trying to accomplish in trying to get a Focus Electric. It's rare that we drive more than the ~75 mile range of the Focus in one day. For the days that we would drive too far we have our Fusion Hybrid as our long distance car. But, we will try to drive the FFH as little as possible and try to drive the FFE everywhere. It's fairly rare that we need to drive both cars at the same time, less than once per week. This means that we could conceivably use the BEV for >95% of our normal city driving, saving the hybrid as our long distance vehicle for road trips.

I don't anticipate Fuel Cells becoming popular for a number of reasons: 1) until the cost of a Fuel Cell vehicle is equal to or cheaper than a hybrid they won't sell in high volumes 2) the efficiency must be equal to or greater than a hybrid before they'll sell in volume 3) the refueling infrastructure must be equal to or better than the current diesel infrastructure before they'll sell in high volumes. None of that will happen.

The fourth type of car that I expect will stick around are diesels. Diesels are the most fuel efficient vehicles for highway driving. Even hybrids like our Fusion or the Prius can't beat diesel fuel economy at high speeds. While diesel particulates are considered some of the most dangerous for humans, I expect that diesel cars will still be around and that they will be geared toward long distance highway driving. The manufacturers could further optimize their diesel vehicles for highway speeds, tweaking aerodynamics, transmission gearing, ECU programming, etc to make diesels even more efficient on the highway. They should then be marketed toward people who do very little city driving. In a state like MN with lots of wide open spaces, diesels should be popular. The average Minnesotan drives over 15,000 miles per year, much of that at speeds > 55 MPH. I don't understand why people aren't buying diesels... I especially don't get why anyone would buy a VW and not buy a diesel VW. That just doesn't make sense to me.

Jamie - I think the Fuel Cell comment is because Toyota, Honda & Hyundai have all committed to Fuel Cells, disregarding BEVs.

Hybridbear: Hyundai seems to be hedging their bets for either:
http://insideevs.com/hyundai-launch-first-bev-2016/

Also note that Fuelly doesn't work for the FFE! I tried to put mine in but there is no way to track your electricity efficiency like there is for gas cars:
http://www.fuelly.com/driver/jamie350/focus-electric

And yet several states are pushing to get 3+ million on the roads:
http://www.freep.com/article/20140601/BUSINESS0104/306010056/Heard-Autosphere-Electric-cars-Google-prototypes

And yet, EVs are selling better than hybrids were at the same point in their lifecycle...

twscrap said:

And yet, EVs are selling better than hybrids were at the same point in their lifecycle...

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Oh, and hybrids were dead at this point in their lifecycle. Will never make sense until gas tops $3. :lol:

In California, plug-in-hybrids are no longer eligible for carpool stickers. I wonder if that will give incentive to some to purchase a BEV instead of a hybrid.

during my ~10 mile commute home today I saw:

1 FFE (not counting the one I was driving, so make that 2)
1 Volt
1 Tesla (strange, I usually see 3-4)
~20 Leafs (I stopped counting at 20, not sure how many there really were)

And I'm sure I missed several. I couldn't even begin to count all the hybrids - seems like every 10th car was a Prius and I keep seeing lots of cars with hybrid badges I never even knew existed (is there really a Chevy Tahoe Hybrid?)

Oh, and all the top cars in this year's Leman's 24 hour race are hybrids.

Yeah, its all just a fad. Annalists :lol:

Yes they made a Chevy Tahoe Hybrid (it is a "mild hybrid").
http://usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/cars-trucks/Chevrolet_Tahoe-Hybrid/

Here in the home of the "big 3" I typically see:

• Two or three FFE's (counting mine and my coworker's)
  About 1 Leaf if I'm lucky
  Maybe a Tesla Model S--I know of about two that I see regularly
  Too many Volts to count: they are very common around here

TexaCali said:

Toyota is ending its parts contract with Tesla (implying the CA only Rav4 will be scraped)
FFE was 0.07% of Ford's Q1 sales

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Toyota has long stated that the RAV4 EV was limited and for compliance in CA only. Toyota has put all its eggs in the fool cell idiocy. This is no surprise here.

TexaCali said:

Honda limiting FIT EV to 1,100 units

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Again, Honda never intended to make one unit more than 1100 units. That is what Honda stated going into production. Again, Honda is placing its bet on fuel cells. There is no surprise here.

TexaCali said:

Would be lucky to see EV's at 1% of market by 2020

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Hasn't this guy read about the requirements in California for zero emission cars? It is a patently stupid comment to make when California and its 7 partner states alone will require 9.5% of all cars sold to be zero emissions by 2020. Since these 8 states make up more than 1/4 of all auto sales in the U.S., you would think this guy could do the math.

TexaCali said:

Volt sales down 7% Year over Year

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The Volt has not changed since it was release in 2011. GM has already stated that the Volt 2nd generation will be released in 2016. Sales are expected to diminish until then. On the other hand, Leaf sales continue to break records.

TexaCali said:

Tesla only sells because it is a high performance car

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Funny, I don't see this in the surveys. While a majority of buyers may not be primarily interested in the Model S because it is an EV, a very substantial portion of buyers purchased the car because it IS an EV.

In the end, there will always be articles like this, just as there are global warming deniers. These articles hardly merit a response, but in the interests of setting the record straight, I am pointing out the obvious fallacies in the article. The person that wrote this article clearly has NO basic understanding of EVs or EV sales.

jmueller065 said:

Yes they made a Chevy Tahoe Hybrid (it is a "mild hybrid").
http://usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/cars-trucks/Chevrolet_Tahoe-Hybrid/

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I don't think it's a mild hybrid. It has two electric motors just like the Prius, Camry Hybrid, Fusion Hybrid, etc.

Ah yeah you're right: it was the old Malibu's eAssist that was a "mild hybrid"

TexaCali said:

during my ~10 mile commute home today I saw:

1 FFE (not counting the one I was driving, so make that 2)
1 Volt
1 Tesla (strange, I usually see 3-4)
~20 Leafs (I stopped counting at 20, not sure how many there really were)

And I'm sure I missed several. I couldn't even begin to count all the hybrids - seems like every 10th car was a Prius and I keep seeing lots of cars with hybrid badges I never even knew existed (is there really a Chevy Tahoe Hybrid?)

Oh, and all the top cars in this year's Leman's 24 hour race are hybrids.

Yeah, its all just a fad. Annalists :lol:

Click to expand...

I am seeing Leaf's all over the place too. ...not surprising since we are both from Texas. =P Are you from the Metroplex? You have to admit, that area is near PERFECT for electric vehicles.

Given that demand seem to exceed supply,, at least for the FFE,, I find this hard to believe. Now, if gas prices drop, sure, demand will drop a lot. But what if gas prices increase? Double even? ...which will happen. Sooner than you think!

Pikes Peak hill climb record for motorbikes is held by an electric bike.

Monster Tajima, held the 2011 record of 9:50 minutes with a crazy car. That gas record has been eclipsed by a Peugeot Gas car at 8:30 minutes Approx. Still Tajima last year ran electric and beat his own record form 2011 in 2013 with electric.

This week is the Ilse of Man TT and they run the TTZero electric bikes. The Fastest full-on sport bikes run a 37 mile lap at avg speed of 132.2mph. In practice, the electric bike from Honda Mugen, the Shindin San, avg 115 mph. Granted range is good for one lap, and the sport bike on Gas do 6 of those laps.

Formula E is coming around this fall with races globally. Today Solar Impluse 2 maiden flight was successful. Big Daddy Don Garlitz put down a 7.32 second Quarter mile at 184 mph and is shooting for 200mph later this month.

There's lots to go around and it all has its place. The revolution is gaining momentum. 3000 leafs sold last month. and today I even saw a Coda!
H

Well, EV sales hit an all time high last month (May 2014) - 12,053 cars, which includes plug ins as well as pure electrics.

http://insideevs.com/monthly-plug-in-sales-scorecard/


Nissan punched right though the 3k/mo figure with the Leaf, up over 50% from last month and 100% from a year ago. Ford sold 177 FFE's, vs 116 the prior month and 157 a year ago. I still can't understand why they aren't trying harder to sell these cars - the FFE is superior to the Leaf in many aspects, but everyone I talk with is looking at the Leaf not the Focus.

BTW - looks like total EV (plus plug in) sales since 2010 is around 200K vehicles (most of which occurred in 2013/2014). While the number is growing, that is still less than 0.1% of the ~250M registered vehicles on US roads. We are still very early days.....

Actually that 177 is a pretty good number! Maybe we'll hit 200 before the summer's out! LOL

As long as it keeps going up! That said the BMW i3 sold 336 in May, and it just came out (and looks funky and is expensive). I think BMW looked at the Leaf and said, "that is the best selling EV and it looks funky" and then looked at the Tesla and said "and that is a great selling EV and it is expensive" and then decided "we will make our EV funky AND expensive!" Ford obviously missed the market by making an EV that was neither odd looking nor expensive. :lol: