Electric vehicle saleshave grown exponentially in recent years, accompanied by dropping prices.
EVs and internal combustion engine vehicles are likely to reach sticker price parity sometime in the next decade.
The timing hinges on one crucial factor: battery cost.
Battery pack prices have been falling fast.
A typical EV battery pack stores 10-100 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity.
In 2010, the price of an EV battery pack was over $1,000 per kWh.
That fell to$150 per kWh in 2019.
The challenge for the automotive industry is figuring out how to drive the cost down further.
Top-down models predict cost based primarily on-demand and time.
Economies of scale and the experience an industry acquires overtime drive down costs.
Wrights law is generic.
It worksacross all technologies, which makes it possible to predictbattery cost declines based on solar panel cost declines.
For that, a bottom-up model is required.
Ouropen-source, bottom-up battery cost modelfollows the same structure as the battery manufacturing process itself.
Materials make up the largest portion of the total battery cost, around 50%.
This drives a stronginterest in commodity prices.
This results in a lower cost for other cell materials.
Inactive cell materials such as tabs and containers account for roughly 36% of the total cell materials cost.
These other cell materials do not add energy content to the battery.
Therefore, reducing inactive materials reduces the weight and size of battery cells without reducing energy content.
This drives interest in improving cell design with innovations such astabless batterieslike those being teased by Tesla.
The battery pack cost also decreases significantly with an increase in the number of cells manufacturers produce annually.
Abhinav Misalkar contributed to this article while he was a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University.
Candidate in Mechanical Engineering,Carnegie Mellon University, andShashank Sripad, Ph.D.
Candidate in Mechanical Engineering,Carnegie Mellon Universityunder a Creative Commons license.
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