Ridiculous battery prices

[gim1952]

Hi, Electric car battery prices have come down from £700 kWh to £150 kWh in five years, so my 0.4 kWh bike battery should be about £60 plus the case and electronics so let's say a fair price of £120-150. A replacement battery for my bike is £600, we are being totally ripped off.

 

[Steve Bowles]

Until there are as many e-bikes as there are electric cars the prices will continue to remain high. Supply vs demand. Manufacturing costs for a limited sales return.

 

[flecc]

A replacement battery for my bike is £600, we are being totally ripped off.

That's Bosch for you, all German products are expensive. Many good e-bikes have lower battery prices.

However, the e-car and e-bike markets for batteries cannot be compared. The car makers are working with governments to popularise e-cars and encourage much bigger takeup. To do that the batteries are being priced at basic cost and they are making next to nothing on the whole e-car side. Not only that but there's the matter of scale. Huge e-car batteries use very large numbers of cells which keeps their price down, aided by the cars containing most of the managing electronics.

E-bikes don't need to be popularised, they already sell in millions so loss leader selling isn't necessary. And the bike batteries are proportionally much more expensive to produce, since they need a fancy casing to look ok, have all of their electronic management internally and need detachable attachment arrangements. Add the manufacturer's profit margin, then the bike dealers margin, then the much larger VAT amount on that new total and the total price can look very expensive.

Once e-cars are being very widely used and sold in far greater number, watch their battery prices zoom up again as the makers seek to regain all their profit losses during their earlier years.
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[Woosh]

Hi, Electric car battery prices have come down from £700 kWh to £150 kWh in five years, so my 0.4 kWh bike battery should be about £60 plus the case and electronics so let's say a fair price of £120-150. A replacement battery for my bike is £600, we are being totally ripped off.

bike's batteries tend to have high energy, high gravimetric density cells, more expensive than those used in cars.
You also have higher cost of distribution.

a replacement 24kWH battery for the Leaf costs about $7,600 or $316/KWH, roughly £240/KWH + VAT = £300
Unless you are locked into buying a specific brand and model, a typical 500WH bike battery costs about £300 with Samsung cells, roughly twice the cost of of car batteries.

 

[Kinninvie]

This is why I like my Lipos, bought 710Wh of 12S for £180 .
Of course these are not recommended for newbies as they can be dangerous in inexperienced hands.
Luckily I have a stone barn well away from the house to keep them in.

 

[vfr400]

This is why I like my Lipos, bought 710Wh of 12S for £180 .
Of course these are not recommended for newbies as they can be dangerous in inexperienced hands.
Luckily I have a stone barn well away from the house to keep them in.

Don't forget that you have to include the cost of chargers and mo itoring system. Also, they have a shorter life than normal lithium batteries, and you have to take into considerationconsideration that it's easy to brick them. Everything considered, the cost works out the same, but you get more hassle. I think they're great as a short term solution.

 

[sparkysx]

yeah you can brick them but people who look after their lipos don't let this happen. I'vegot a lot of lipos and run fast rc cars, never lost a lipo. Chargers are cheap and so are good lipo alarms.

 

[vfr400]

We all know how to look after lipos. There are a few people on this forum that have used lipos in electric bikes extensively, including myself. Ask any of them how many they bricked. I'm in an RC aero club and have also been using lipos in my planes for many years. I'm certainly not the only member that has bricked them from time to time. Sure, if you do everything right, it won't happen, but it's too easy not to get things right.

 

[georgehenry]

Mine is a Yamaha 400Wh battery on a 2015 hard tail Haibike and is four years old and has covered 10750 commuting miles so far and is still working well which I do not see as too bad. If I bought a Yamaha replacement battery when it dies it would be expensive but there is the option to have them re celled.

By working well I mean that it uses pretty much exactly the same amount of its capacity on my commute now as it did when new. I know the capacity must be reducing but using it to commute I never use more than half my battery on my 10 to 14 mile off road journey to work where I can charge it back to full and then about the same on my faster 10 mile road ride home.

It gets brought into the house and left at about 60% charge until I next need it to go to work.

 

[harrys]

How many cells in a Tesla. 5000-7000? In a car, the cost of the 18650 cells is the major portion of the cost of goods, so as the price per cell came down, less $/KWh.

You have 40 to 78 cells in an ebike battery. The cost of labor, case, connectors, and BMS is a larger component. Also, margin is higher, so that increases price.

I started ebiking in 2015. I would say ebike batteries are 20-30% lower in price today, except for the low cost packs that used cheaper cells. Those were at some minimum and have stayed there,

 

[RossG]

When we're talking of production costs you have to remember China are churning Lithium cells out in their billions these days.
They have fully automated machinery with raw materials going in one end and batteries coming out the other, they look like gigantic ovens.
I've no idea what it cost them to produce a single Lithium-Ion cell but it would be only pennies in our dosh. I know you can get a 36v 11.6 amp battery for £100 from China and you can imagine how much money they're making out of it.
ok many of the batteries coming out of the far east are of dubious quality to say the least, but that said many are not. If you can locate a decent source you're on a winner.