Robotaxis will do a lot of their work during the three weekday peaks, which are morning and evening rush hour, plus the lesser peak of lunch. In fact, you can reduce depreciation so far that it becomes secondary to other costs like energy, risk, maintenance and logistics. Depreciation of the battery has been one of the largest costs of operating (and fast charging) an electric car. If you can make the vehicle last that long, you seriously reduce the depreciation part of the robotaxi economics model and thus reduce the cost of a ride, since today depreciation is the largest cost factor in operating a car. A taxi with a more normal 250,000 mile life (which is how long New York taxis last) is worn out in 4 to 5 years. The average New York taxi is driven around 180 miles/day - average urban speeds during core driving hours are just 12 to 20 mph including stops - while the average private car does only 40.Īt 200 miles/day, a car would rack up a million miles in just over 13 years. Put into heavy use, it can be doing 200 miles/day or more - even more if it does a lot of highway travel. The important difference with the robotaxi is that its wear happens fast. Frames and electric motors might very well last. I doubt any car interior is ready for a million miles, nor is the exterior ready in some climates. It also reduces the embedded energy in making the batteries and the cost of recycling them. Even if the car falls apart after half a million miles, you could still move that pack into a second car. While no car today has a million mile lifetime (Elon Musk has claimed Teslas do) more battery lifetime is always good. Today's batteries do best on a 20-80% discharge cycle, so you get 66% more range from the same pack if you can safely do 0-100%.įirst of course, such a battery would be good for regular electric cars. In addition, these batteries do well even when run on a 0-100% discharge cycle. The paper forecasts such batteries are good for robotaxis. The latter has not been shown and is hard to predict. Professor Dahn knows very well the difference between an interesting battery result in the lab and much more involved tests, and the further difference between the involved tests and a battery in high volume production with high quality and good prices.
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