Starting at 27,000 dollars though. I wish more effort was put into dropping the price as low as possible. The industry knows that a cheap car would sell huge volumes, but with CAFE, small cars are not where the profit is.

Batteries and electric motors are still pretty expensive to manufacture. I don’t think a budget EV would be available until a new, cheaper battery tech comes out.

You’re right they are expensive components, though I’d point out the battery tends to be the cost leader of the drive train by a significant margin. The motors are increasing over time, but not enough to surpass the battery.

Drive traintrain cost breakdown:

With this in mind, the average electric car has range of 200 miles, with the most popular model pushing beyond 300. The battery could easily be cut in half in order to lower the vehicle cost.

Don’t get me wrong, I know half the battery doesn’t mean the car would be half the price, but it would be a good chunk. And in today’s market, every dollar saved matters.

I agree with the reduced battery idea, but you’ve got to consider that would significantly reduce the life of the battery and slightly reduce max torque output as well. For me that wouldn’t be as important, but for many people that’s a huge negative. They expect the battery to last as long as, say, a manual transmission.

I haven’t seen any data suggesting degradation is worse in smaller capacity batteries, but even if it is, degradation as a whole isn’t as a big a deal as might be believed. It was significant ten years ago, but insignificant today.

I’ll take your word for it on the torque point. I don’t remember much about EV torque comparisons but it makes sense on the face of it that if you lose a bunch of the energy, some of the torque goes with it.

On battery replacement due to degradation:

Across all years and models, outside of big recalls, only 2.5% have been replaced. This increase from last year is entirely due to older cars. For cars older than 2015, replacement rates are 13%, but under 1% for cars from 2016 and newer.

Non recall replacements (by year of manufacture):

• 2011 - 30.00%
• 2012 - 15.94%
• 2013 - 9.81%
• 2014 - 6.81%
• 2015 - 3.90%

That’s an order of magnitude improvement in half a decade, and the best of that is already ten years old. Battery technology is only getting better, and with better batteries, we could afford to put smaller ones in a commuter car and sell them cheaply.