Reimagining the EV for mass-market adoption

It’s no longer a matter of debate, we are firmly in the Electric Vehicle (EV) age with soaring market caps of Tesla and Rivian as evidence, yet market penetration by an EV below $35,000 is scarce and hard to imagine today. This coincides with the beginning of the end of the ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) age!

A quick comparison between the market caps of late 2021 vs the penetration in each country paints an uneasy picture.

In October 2021, Tesla achieved a market cap above $1T, while the US registered just a ~2% EV penetration. With China at 6% EV penetration and India registering less than 1% in EV sales, the stats convey that the market is nascent, while paradoxically the market caps of Tesla, Rivian, and Lucid soared in 2021.

What has been a trend is that almost all automobile manufacturers, old and new, introduce new EV models in the price range of $35k-$80k and offer between 200 to 350 miles of range (320 to 560 km). While these models suffice for range requirements in most countries for both city and inter-city driving (with charging infra ramping up), they only cater to about a 20% market in US and China and less than 5% for India, at these price points.

Thus, customer needs for an affordable 400km to 500km+ long-range electric car remain unmet.

The $5k-$35k mass-market EV segment is presently vacant, other than a few less than attractive?kei?(ultra-mini) car type EVs.

Let’s look at some data to get a better grip on this situation. Both Indian (2021 landscape) and a US (2022 expectations) scenario.

For India, what is actually achieved as on-road range lags far behind that as advertised, that, plus duties on imported vehicles will remain high, thus missing the affordability benchmark. US’s EPA range has better credibility, although the price points are largely in the $40k-$55k mark, which leaves a large Total Addressable Market (TAM) uncaptured in the $20k-$40k segment.

So, the question arises on how does one make an affordable mass-market car and still pack enough range for the savvy ‘electric only’ first-time EV buyer?

What can one change? Optimize for cost and/or efficiency?

Let’s look at batteries first. Especially, as batteries have been at the forefront of the EV revolution. Bringing down $/kWh and kg/kWh has been the holy grail pioneered historically by Tesla. LG and Panasonic drove this evolution with the leading automaker. More recently, SK, BYD, and CATL look to take a lead with cost-effectiveness, volumes, and especially prismatic/structural LFP/LFMP batteries. Sodium-ion and solid-state batteries are maturing, and while the former may lead to better unit economics, the latter is more suited to high performance and fast charging. The price of the LFP batteries is expected to come down to a nominal $85/kWh by 2024–25 timeframe, with sodium-ion chemistry proving stiff competition on the price.

Second: Optimizing motors, electronics (battery management systems, motor inverter, on-board charger, VCU, DC-DC convertor, etc) to a feasible price point for a mid-level entry car. We are reaching a steady-state curve on price, even as performance with high voltage architecture continues to pick up.

Even with the above increase in the battery pack and drive-train efficiencies and the cost drops, building a $35K car with a 500km on-road range is still quite impossible in the US and Europe.

Thus, we begin to ask ourselves:

What else can we further optimize if the top two innovations still don’t get us to a mass-market car??The answer we firmly believe lies in:

Structural Efficiency!

The set of questions in front of us:

“Fundamentally, why do we still insist on ferrying 75kg to 200 kg of passengers in a 2000 kg car?”

“Why should we propagate the Henry Ford era marriage of oil and steel today when the entire point of an EV is to move away from the dirty emissions of oil and steel?”

Find the answers in the blog penned on Medium here:

https://medium.com/@carsandrockets/reimagining-the-ev-for-mass-market-adoption-6833c6ff11eb

Leave your claps and/or comment here on LinkedIn with your thoughts!

Also, feel free to reach out and talk to us about our work in the last 12 months, how we have solved the pressing issues of supply-chain and built confidence with structural simulations. We have already begun work towards building the first engineering prototype.