The total cost of ownership of an electric vehicle is usually lower than the TCO of the smoking alternative but that is just the beginning. As analysts IDTechEx predicted ten years ago, many pure electric cars will have lower up front costs by 2020. Later that will be true of larger and larger EVs.
There's more. IDTechEx also predicted that ranges would become much longer than those of conventional equivalents. On cue, this is also starting to be demonstrated not least in California. A Proterra bus and a Tesla car have recently gone over 1600 km on one charge but that was not to make official records. Los Angeles based company IT Asset Partners (ITAP) have therefore claimed the official Guinness Book of World Records title for the Longest Range of an Electric Vehicle on October 18th, by traveling more than 1600 kilometers at the Auto Club Speedway of California in Fontana over a two day
consecutive run using a car made for only $14,000.
Next, the IDTechEx Show! in Santa Clara, California November 15-16 has a conference, Electric Vehicles: Everything is Changing where BYD of China presents on its buses and other pure electric vehicles that regularly achieve over 200 km in tough urban conditions and achieve even more with the solar roof option. Alta Devices of California presents on its amazing thin film photovoltaics behind its parent company Hanergy's "perpetual" solar cars to be on sale in 2020. It has recently licensed the solar bodywork capability to Audi and 1kW/kg is in prospect.
California State University presents on "perpetual" unmanned solar aircraft for several purposes. Meanwhile many car companies see 500 km range as the norm for any on-road vehicle launched from 2019 onwards.
Raghu Das, CEO of IDTechEx, says, "We are in Silicon Valley for a very good reason! Indeed, this year our parallel Energy Harvesting conference at IDTechEx Show! is focussed much more on high power distributed energy for both vehicles and generally "off grid" where the major activities are now taking place, not least in California though we are a global event."