Electric cars are like economic lights

Intro

We are now living in a world where incandescent light bulbs are almost completely replaced with LED lamps. LED lighting is everywhere, and delivers good results: good light quality, good price, excellent energy efficiency and pretty much 100% compatible with existing fixtures. But things were not always this great, the journey between now and the old incandescent bulbs is quite a bumpy one.

And speaking of a bumpy journey, this journey is a good example of what is happening in the car world, as we are now transitioning to electric  mobility.

It started with a ban

Some years ago, the EU and other countries started to ban incandescent lights in favor of more energy efficient ones and that made a lot of people very angry. While the intention was good, the products available at that moment were not so. People were coming with a lot reasons why the switch was not acceptable and unfairly enforced, but all had the same underlying cause: the quality and usability of new ones was worse than the older ones, despite being more energy efficient.

Still, technology prevailed and today things are doing a lot better than before and we have the best of both worlds: quality and energy efficiency, all at a price that is worth it. Let’s go through the timeline of economic lighting and see how that parallels with electric cars. There are three big stages: the classic incandescent bulbs, the early CFL and LED bulbs and the contemporary LED bulbs. In the same way, cars follow three stages too: the gas car, current electric cars and future electric cars.

Timeline of energy efficient light bulbs in parallel with a timeline of electric cars. Image sources here, here, here, here, here, here. 

Early years of eco lighting – where electric car are now

CFL

CFLs are the best example of taking some existing technology and bending it to serve a slightly different purpose. Just take the typical fluorescent tube, bend it around to make it more compact, add the electronics in a small base and add a bulb screw and expect them to be a drop in replacement for traditional bulbs. But, besides saving a lot of energy, they had a lot of problems: the quality of the light was bad, they were often too big to fit in existing fixtures and they did not deliver on the lifetime they promised. Add on top of this the long payback time and the pile of cheap brands that failed prematurely and you get a lot of skeptical people.

First LED bulbs

First LED bulbs followed, but took a while before they could be price competitive: the 60W equivalent from Philips launched at 60 EUR price and consumed 12W. They were solving some issues with the CFLs (long startup time, huge size), while still remaining rather large and expensive. The next years brought advances in electronics which reduced the size of the circuits inside and increase the efficiency of the LEDs. This made them smaller and they almost reached standard bulb size.

Current electric cars

The early years of CFL and first generation LED bulbs is the where we are with electric cars now. Old existing technology, like 18650 battery manufacturing equipment, was repurposed for building car battery packs. Small improvements in efficiency are being made, and significant reductions in cost as well. But by and large, current electric cars maintain the limitations of old CFLs: they are much more expensive and do not deliver on the same quality and comfort that is provided by the status quo they are trying to replace.

Contemporary LED lights – Future electric cars

Contemporary LED bulbs

You see, LED diodes, the things that actually make the light, require a low voltage to operate, almost 3V, which is comparable to what you get from a pair of AA batteries. This is about 100 times lower than the mains voltage, so we need a converter. Because of this, early LED bulb contain what is essentially a power brick in the form of a base full of Big electronics. That is where the next invention comes in:

Filament LEDs are a new way to manufacture LED diodes that is great for light bulbs: tiny LEDs are built together with connections in a series chain and embedded in a filament. This comes with 2 great advantages, besides a lower cost: chain about 100 together and you got an LED diode that works directly at the mains voltage – no more big electronic converter needed! And, because they are spread apart more, the heat is better dissipated without the need of a heatsink.

You now have the holy grail of incandescent bulb replacement: it’s cheap, energy efficient, high quality, all together a perfect replacement for the old incandescent. From the 60 EUR Philips light that consumed 12W we are now at 2 EUR bulbs that consume 6W, a 30X improvement in price and 2X in energy efficiency.

Future electric cars

Future electric cars require some fundamental inventions like the Filament LEDs: a better way to make the key component of the product, in this case, the battery. Cost has been reduced a lot with current batteries, but the main problem that remains is the low energy density of the battery.

Can you imagine a future Tesla model 3, with a lower price and same characteristics are the current one, but double the range? You can get that with a battery with double the energy density. This would make the car a lot more attractive to everyone. All of a sudden, it can go in longer trips, need far fewer stops at rapid charging and significantly reduce the hassles and worries current electric cars generate. Increased battery density will also mean that cheaper cars can be made which have an acceptable range, which is impossible now.

Conclusions

Converting heat to other forms of energy like light or motion is very inefficient. Electric lighting has moved from the energy inefficient incandescent to the energy efficient, contemporary LED bulbs. The problem of energy efficient lighting is solved, as we now have cheap and fully compatible replacements for the old incandescent bulb. There is no way in which contemporary LED lighting is inferior to the old incandescent for the average user, while they are cheap and have a much smaller running cost, making everyone finally happy about the change.  But there was a bad phase there in the middle: just when we moved to energy efficient lighting with old technology.

Current electric cars are now in that middle phase: they are not really a complete replacement for gas cars in function, let alone in price, just like it happened with the light bulbs. But given enough interest from the industry and enough inventions over time and they will become. The electric car of the future will solve the low range and high cost problems, while improvements in the external infrastructure will make them a complete replacement for gas cars which everyone will be happy with.