“IS THE RANGE good enough?” “It is so much more expensive.” “I will have to spend lakhs on a new battery after a few years.” These are most likely the top three reasons why consumers nowadays are reluctant to buy electric cars. The true cause of the issue is charging anxiety, which leads to the true fix: quicker charging.
Battery degeneration, upfront costs, and range anxiety. Global automakers and battery producers have struggled with this conundrum, particularly with regard to the first two issues, which appear to be mutually exclusive.
To alleviate range concern, larger batteries are installed, but that increases expenses. They use economies of scale and efficiency to reduce prices, but in the end, they have to accept that the battery can account for up to 40% of the cost of the vehicle. It might not be immediately apparent that “range anxiety” is really charge anxiety, or what occurs when lengthy charging times are combined with sparse, unstable networks. Consider a car that runs on gasoline. Nobody is concerned about the “range” of a full tank. They know where to find a gas station quickly, that it will always be open, and that they can fill up in a matter of minutes rather than hours.
When you can get a full charge in 10-15 minutes or less with a large, reliable network of rapid chargers, you don’t worry about how far you can go on a single charge.
It also addresses the affordability issue as automakers can now drop battery capacities to make a vehicle lighter and cheaper. When it comes to battery degradation, regular consumers shouldn’t have anything to worry about. For personal cars and two-wheelers, the life cycles of current batteries are fine for the majority of customers.
For heavy use commercial vehicles — 10% of vehicles in India, but ~70% of the energy used — batteries wear out faster because daily utilisation is far higher. The technology is in place today to deliver rapid charging without higher battery degradation over thousands of cycles. We can up the number of cycles a battery can handle, while simultaneously delivering much faster charging. We believe these two things — faster charging and longer life — are what the automotive industry needs to accelerate EV adoption at an exponential rate. Let’s drill deeper into each point.
The waves of EV growth around the world have so far been largely driven by buyers who can park and charge at home or are buying two-wheelers — i.e. initial customer segments have been satisfied with medium-speed public charging.
But that approach will hit a wall — arguably, it’s already happening, with headlines like “Electric Vehicle Boom Hits a Wall of Consumer Ambivalence” doing the rounds. Analysts at Goldman Sachs broadly attribute this to costs, policies and, more importantly, buyer concerns around range and charging infrastructure.
And rapid charging doesn’t just unlock entire markets for the vehicle side of the industry, it also radically changes the economics of charging networks. A rapid charger can charge way more vehicles in a day than a conventional “fast” charger. This means the rapid charger can sell more energy, which means it can charge less per unit of energy.
By charging many more vehicles, throughput improves and revenue can go up. This can help build out networks that are sustainable businesses—poorly maintained chargers because of poor economics are a big issue today.
Plus, with virtually unlimited range, OEMs won’t have to compensate for customer anxiety. Rapid charging, then, also unlocks the option to go smaller on the battery.
Naturally, this has big cost implications. Lithium-ion battery prices have been dropping for years, but those gains have been slowing down as the technology matures. BloombergNEF’s latest annual battery price survey put average EV cell costs at USD 139 per kilowatt-hour in 2023, and prices have been only reducing slowly over the past four years.
Imagine a car with, say, a 50 kWh battery and about 350 km of real-world range. With 15-minute charging, you can knock off 10 kWh and the range comes down to 280 km. But now you have no anxiety — and the OEM saves around $1,400 in battery costs, or around Rs 1.2 lakh. That can easily translate to a Rs 2 lakh reduction in sticker price.
Vehicles equipped with 3,000-plus-cycle batteries can last decades in the average Indian driver’s usage.
This also has a knock-on effect of giving lenders the confidence to give better terms for vehicle financing. That’s another win-win for vehicle buyers, with an outsized impact for commercial vehicles, where monthly financing costs are key.
On the whole, longer battery/vehicle life paired with truly fast charging will make electric vehicles — from autorickshaws to cars to buses — viable for a huge customer base that’s currently left out. Killing the underlying problems that cause charging anxiety is the first step towards an all-electric future.
