My issue is unrelated to battery stuff of course. I don't know how it can be fixed.
It can be fixed if the charge times, efficiency, and cost all improve "enough". As I understand it, your critical hold-up is the cost (and perhaps time) of charging away from home. Well there are multiple ways that can be alleviated:
- Charge rates: Charge rates of solid state batteries are faster. For example if you can go from 10-80% in 9 minutes, that's close enough to on par with filling up a gas tank that one of the critical concerns with away-from-home or road trip charging is no longer a concern. Also when charge times are so fast, it alleviates range anxiety.
- Efficiency: Solid state batteries are more energy dense. While some talk about the idea of "600 mile range", the opposite way of looking at this is that you can have a car with a 300 mile range, fast-charge capability, and a much lighter battery pack. Reducing vehicle weight will go a long way to improving efficiency, as measured by how much range you get per kWh of electricity. So you get more miles out of the same amount of money spent on public charging than today's EVs.
- Acquisition cost: Here is the harder aspect, and the least well known. When you look at BEVs, you're looking at them being more expensive than ICEVs today for a comparable vehicle, so even if the "fueling" of the car is saving you money, you have a higher initial expenditure to recoup over time (which is much harder if you rely on 100% public charging networks). However, although solid state batteries TODAY are much more expensive, this may come down closer to parity over time--and because they're much more energy dense, you can have smaller battery packs to achieve the same range. So again instead of paying more than today's EV price for a 600-mile range vehicle, you may end up paying less than today's EV price with the new technology for a 300-mile range vehicle. Depending on how the technology matures, at some point it may cross to be cheaper than an ICEV. Now even if "fueling" is a wash between public chargers vs gas stations, you're saving money buying a less expensive BEV than a comparable ICEV.
We've seen this in my industry. In the PC world, HDDs have been eclipsed by SSDs. Why? Because while HDDs are actually still MUCH cheaper on a $/TB basis when you're talking about large-scale data center acquisitions, most PC users don't need terabytes of local storage. They need maybe 250-500GB of local storage, and MANY can get by with smaller, say 120GB. The issue with an HDD is that there's a certain floor of cost that you can't get below, and that floor today is at a capacity point (1TB) beyond what most users need. So while SSDs are still "more expensive" than HDDs on a $/TB basis, if you don't need the minimum capacity of an HDD, the actual $/unit cost can be lower. When you then add in the other advantages of SSD in a PC environment (higher performance, lower power, smaller size, less weight, no moving parts, no noise, etc), it then becomes an easy decision, and it's why HDDs simply do not ship in notebooks and desktop computers any longer except in very rare applications.
If we hit a tipping point with solid state batteries where the powertrain becomes cheaper than ICEV for "adequate" range, AND we see charge rates that are close to parity with filling your gas tank, that's the tipping point where BEVs will see extremely rapid adoption IMHO. It will be significant savings for anyone who can charge at home off the grid, and close to equivalent cost for those who can't, potentially better if they can make use of slower[/cheaper] public L2 chargers rather than rapid chargers.
