badnewswade wrote:At the end of the day, Lithium batteries are three or four times the price of SLAs but they aren't three or four times better than SLAs. The insane price of the technology is what's hampering take-up of them and of EVs- unless prices go down, EVs will always be a niche product and Lithiums a niche-within-a-niche.
Rant over!
Ah now I have to disagree here.
I like you was very pessimistic about the whole Lithium thing, I still am to a degree when it comes to the really large ones, but since making my first purchase of a Ping 24v 15ah pack, the whole lithium thing has suddenly become a LOT more interesting
I can safely say they ARE 3-5 times better than SLA's. Since fitting a set of these to my bike its just made the thing ridiculouse, its lighter by a 1/3 and the range has .........well I dont know what the range is, as I've yet to get to the point when it stops
the orginal good SLA's would fade away after around 7miles, with a lot of care and a bit of pedaling I squeezed 11miles from them. Todate from the LiFePO4's I've ragged around 24miles out of them and at full bore the whole time and they didnt seem to even flinch, I'm sure you would be really surprised at the improvements.
badnewswade wrote:I've seen that site, and unless you're rich it doesn't make any sense. With shipping that battery costs arond £700. It costs me around £160 per year to run my bike on comparable SLAs.
So I'd have to use that cheap, gaffa-taped Lith for over four years just to break even. That's four years without an accident, theft, or simple change of circumstances - you're locked in to using it, if something better comes along or prices drop, you've wasted your money. If anything goes wrong with that very cheap battery, you've wasted your money, and worse still have to throw good money after bad repairing it...
I know what your saying but if you look at it in a slightly different way then your looking at 4 yrs of trouble free running, no more hunting out new SLA's to replaced dead ones every year, no more messing about swapping batteries in and out every year or sooner and lastly look at the investment, almost certainly you would be able to recoup a lot of the expense if you had to sell up.
badnewswade wrote:When you take that into account, SLAs are miles better - I mean nobody pays their electric bills four years in advance do they? In fact people prefer the pay-as-you-go way of buying things, as it takes changing circumstances into account. Remember, I already have an electric moped, and the whole point of having the thing is that it's cheap, both up-front and in running costs. The high-cost, hope-it-doesn't-break-down-for-years-on-end economics of Lithium fly in the face of that.
I agree with you ....to a degree, like yourself the main reason I drive EV's is due to their cheapness, however I also dont like driving a naff EV, I want mine to be fast, reliable and go a reasonable distance.
I know what your saying about paying your electric bills in advance but thats exactly what happens in a EV, its only we have become so pay-as-you-go with petrol that doing it any other way seems a bit odd, you have to pay for the energy somehow, while the energy is quite cheap the storage isnt.
I will admit I am still taking a slight gamble on them, but after doing extensive research I evaluated that it was a calculated risk and worth the potential gain, and gain I have got
ChrisB