Revisiting the Electric Car

I started this post six months ago but did not know how to conclude it. 
Then today the Economic Times published an interview with the iconic venture capitalist and famed green tech guru Vinod Khosla. He has invested billions of dollars in alternative energy companies. More personal wealth committed thus than any other individual in the world.

He expects to be wrong  most of the time in his choice of companies or technologies to back. He also hopes to make up for it by succeeding wildly with one or two blockbusters. So right or wrong in his choices, he has to keep track of the alternative technology train.
But we will get to Vinod Khosla and his link to this post in a moment. 
I posted The Electric Car Humbug in May 2009. Since then the two companies I wrote about have changed a bit:

• TESLA is in talks to tie up with Toyota, which has faced a public relations disaster in recent years involving recall of many models including the hybrid Prius. Meanwhile, Tesla has stopped booking orders for its only production model, the $100,000, Li-Ion battery powered Roadster.

• REVA was sold to Mahindra & Mahindra the Indian tractor, commercial vehicle and low-end SUV maker. Reva became a low cost image upgrade exercise for them. Soon after the take over, with big industrial house clout, Reva got a government subsidy  of 25%. Since then no new products have been launched to augment the $6,000, Lead-acid powered REVA-i.

Other car makers, notably Nissan with Leaf and Mitsubishi with i-MiEV, have made some progress. World-wide sales are, however, still in five figures and there  is no game-changer in sight.
The big change is that all electric car development is now in the hands of major car makers. These guys have the most invested in internal combustion technology. And the most to lose if electric cars succeed. 
I keep track of developments in green tech space but obviously do not have the resources to track everything.

Along comes Mr Khosla and in his interview, already widely quoted elsewhere, he has this to say:

Quote
Electric cars are toys. They're for rich San Franciscans and rich Germans. They don't make sense for normal people. They're too expensive. What is important is cheap cars. If you add $10,000 worth of batteries to a car, it's silly. But that's what every electric car does, and environmentalists keep pushing it. 
One of the fundamental problems is environmentalists keep pushing solutions to the press, such as solar cells and electric cars that make no economic sense. They defy the laws of economic gravity. 
I keep saying we need to produce products at the 'Chindia' price--the price at which people in India and China will buy it--without subsidies. You can't subsidise energy on a large scale. It would bankrupt any government. Every government that did that would end up like Greece. 
Unquote 

Reading this interview I realised that I have a draft sitting in the blogger and decided to post it.
 
Update December 2020: Worldwide, there's still no decent electric option under $ 25,000. That would be roughly Rs. 20 lakhs before import duties in India. Even in richer countries the adoption pace is glacial. In fact, thanks to climate change, glaciers are moving faster.

Reva sales in the meantime tapered off to zero after years of three digit stagnation.

TESLA talks with Toyota broke off because TOYOTA wasn’t convinced that all-electric was the way forward. They declared increased commitment to hybrid cars!

Update February 2023 TESLA is going strong, but there’s still no under $25,000 option to IC cars with comparable lifetime costs and equal range! 

TOYOTA continues to plough a lonely furrow for hybrid cars. The Chinese EV car makers have emerged major players but I don’t know enough about their products and their game plan, other than the fact that they now control some 80% of battery production.

Issues with battery raw materials, battery manufacturing as also with used battery disposal remain basically unchanged.

Issues with electricity needed to charge the EVs remain generally unchanged!