Faculty News

Prof. Melissa Schilling discusses the future of electric cars

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Excerpt from The Brian Lehrer Show -- "Some of the barriers [to the adoption of electric cars] are really significant and are going to be pretty difficult to overcome. One of the biggest barriers is cost... battery technology cost does not come down very quickly. If you think about Tesla, one of the fascinating things about Tesla is that they use the 18-650 battery, which is the same small-format battery you would have in laptops. And the great strength of this is that it was a mature technology where the cost had already been driven down and we knew how to produce them pretty efficiently. So the strength was that it was already mature, already cheaper. The weakness is that it's already mature and it's already fairly cheap compared to where it can go. So there are not big expectations of driving the cost of that down a lot further. And right now the incremental cost for putting a battery in a car ranges anywhere from $10,000 - $40,000."

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