Most out-of-warranty service isn't done at dealers, because they tend to massively overcharge compared with independent garages. Most out-of-warranty repairs are done with parts salvaged from wrecked vehicles, i.e. they are factory parts.

Repair for $4k + labor or replace for $9k. Still not a write off.

Nissan Leaf batteries can be obtained for $4,000 to $14,500, depending on capacity. I assume that is plus installation, but not certain. That's considerably less than what the resale value would be after the repair, so not a write-off.

Okay, sure, in Canada, where the number of EVs is already low and access to used parts is almost nonexistent, someone scrapped a single copy of an extremely unpopular toy EV with a tiny battery that sold only 22,000 units in total that model year worldwide.

That's not an EV problem. It's an ultra-rare car problem. Rare ICE cars have the same problem.

FWIW, when you can actually get them, used batteries for that model of car cost only about $4k. But you'll probably spend another $2,000 on shipping it by boat from Europe, because there are more people living in my immediate neighborhood plus the one across the street than there are 2017 Ioniq EVs in all of North America.

So let me restate that. There are no *popular* EVs that are getting scrapped because of the cost of battery replacement. After all, you could make that battery from scratch today for about $3,000, give or take, if somebody actually cared to do so. But they don't, because there's no market for it. You could also replace all the cells in that battery for under $3k, not including the labor. So a $50k estimate falls into "don't make me laugh" territory. It's a ludicrously inflated price, probably because they don't actually have any of the batteries left, and would have to spin up a production line just to build more. :-D

These are not use cases. These are driver incompetence.

First, modern EVs typically have support for telling you how much range you have left at your current speed, and telling you whether you need to slow down to reach a supercharger without running out of juice. The number of times I've had range anxiety in almost a decade of driving my Model X is in the single digits, and I've never run out.

Second, most people charge their EVs overnight, which means you aren't ever waiting for for the vehicle to charge. Or they charge at work while they are working. Five minutes for a refill is an eternity compared with the roughly zero minutes that the average EV user spends.

No, the problematic use cases are:

• Towing. This depletes batteries or fuel a lot more quickly, and EVs just don't have the battery capacity to do it well. What is needed here is a universal standard for powering cars from a secondary battery in the trailer.
• Apartment dwellers with no access to at-home charging. This is mostly solvable through a combination of incentives for apartment complexes to provide charging, laws requiring new apartments to have charging, and market pressure, but it doesn't happen overnight.
• Ultra-high-miles-per-day driving. If you're driving more than the range of the car every day, an EV might not be for you.

For approximately every other use case, EVs are better hands down.

WTF are you talking about? People replace EV batteries all the time. They also rebuild packs by swapping out modules. There are companies that specialize in doing so, and have a high rate of success. They charge single-digit thousands of dollars to rebuild a Tesla battery, depending on how many modules have to be replaced and other factors.

The number of EVs written off because of battery repair costs should be within the margin of error of being zero, because there are no used EVs that are worth less than $10k at this point. Even the cheapest, low-end EVs with a tiny battery are worth that much.

And if the number isn't zero, it is likely because some cars have such an undersized battery pack that nobody would want the car even with a refurbished pack, and therefore it isn't worth the effort to do so. While this might be a good reason not to buy short-range EVs (under 200 miles of range), it isn't a reason to avoid EVs in general.

You might want to read up on how current hybrid vehicles actually work, 'cause it seems you have more than one misconception going on.

I have. For instance, my latest vehicle is the Ford F-159 XLT,, the full-hybrid model of the F-series pickup truck line. Power train is:
  - 6 cylinder dual-turbo engine. (runs low power but approoximately doubles output when a lot is needed.)
  - 47 HP motor-generator "pancake" on the engine side of the ttransmission, to scavenge / return power to./from a 1.5 kWhr lithium battery.
  - 10-speed automatic transmission, working with the lithium battery;s main alternator to fine-tune match the engine/mogen to the current driving situation. Max power of engine plus hybrid mogen; 430 hp.
  - full four wheel drive.

So it's primarily a gas-engine power train with an electric-car motor mechanically coupled to the engine shaft. Many other hybrids, from the venerable prius onward, are similar, with plug-in variants having a big scavaging/peaking battery good for pure electric operation of tens of miles rather than a minute or so and a wall-powered charger added.

What I'm looking for is essentially a pure electric - totally electronic "transmission" consisting of alternator(s) between the batteries and the motor(s), plus a tiny engine-generator able to burn gas and feed some teens of KW of charging power into the batteries when running down the road or parked near it.
 

Do the Waymo batteries use one of the lithium chemistries including cobalt, or a non-cobalt chemistry such as lithium iron phosphate?

Cobalt chemistries have a higher power/weight and energy/weight ratio, which made them the go-to chemistries for vehicle batteries. But they also produce oxygen when the cells overheat, leading to an unextinguishable runaway fire hazard: A burning cell makes enough heat to ignite the adjacent cells, so the whole assembly of them goes. Bad enough when it's a car's worth, but a disaster if it's a shipping-container sized module of a utility energy storage site. (And even worse when the site is a building full of racks, which someone had "protected" from fire with water-spraying, equipment-shorting system, so the whole site burns up, as happened recently with one in California creating a toxic mess.)

That's why purpose-built stationary lithium energy systems use non-cobalt chemistries - heavier, but a shorted cell just kills itself without getting hot enough to light off its neighbors.

I want to see inexpensive plugin hybrids.

But not like the current ones, which are primarily an engine/tranny powertrain with a motor/generator + small battery for scavenging downhill/braking energy for later accelleration/uphill/cruise/power-boost.

I want ones that are primarily a battery-electric with a small aux engine-generator (say 15-20 HP range), big enough to power crusing with a bit left over for gradually charging. That would let you range-extend by the size of your gas tank plus fillups (i.e. indefinitely if only gas is available) or go from battery empty to back on the road in a couple tens of minutes.

The backup engine would only run at max-efficiency speed and could use an atkins-like cycle (see "liquid piston engine") to get the max power out of the fuel. Most operation would use power-grid charging (when available and cheaper than fuel).

First, both Zvezda and ICM have propulsion. That was the entire purpose of those modules. So I *think* that such a mission could at least ostensibly involve the old Russian module giving the rest of the Russian segment a small push with its thrusters, followed by a push back the other way to stop the motion away from ISS, followed by undocking, followed by Zvezda doing a deorbit burn to pull it downwards and away from ISS, followed by ICM doing the same basic set of maneuvers in reverse.

Second, even if that is determined to be too stressful on the interconnections between modules, the ISS has Canadarm2 permanently attached, which is what was used for most of ISS construction. As far as I know, the shuttle's arm (Canadarm) just moved each piece or module out of the Shuttle's bay and handed it off to the ISS arm, which put them in place. Note that Zvezda wasn't brought up by the shuttle, and nothing would necessarily require a self-propelled module like ICM to be launched in a shuttle, either. Even when fully fueled, it is well within the weight capacity for a Falcon 9 in its reusable configuration. It's slightly lighter than an fueled crew Dragon capsule. They would probably need to give it some sort of protective shell or something, but it seems like it should be a pretty straightforward lift.

It's probably worth noting that apparently ICM was never fully completed, and it could take as much as 2.5 years to finish it, but it is still in storage at last check. And apparently others have proposed a similar solution for keeping ISS operational without Zvezda, so this isn't an entirely crazy idea. :-)

For a moment, I read that as "supercriticality" and was more than a bit concerned. :-D

But seriously, that's great — both that it successfully reached that point and that it did so on the first try.

Seems like Zvezda should just be scrapped. Launch the ICM that NASA built in case Zvezda wasn't ready; presumably it is still sitting in a NASA warehouse somewhere. Then jettison Zvezda and connect the other Russian modules wherever you can fit them.

Sheesh. Wasn't the total failure of Stargate Universe enough to demonstrate why this is a terrible idea?

That's one of the things that made Stargate work. Even the characters that weren't the most highly educated were still by and large intelligent, or at least capable of logical thinking.

There are a few of episodes where characters were genuinely stupid — not just uneducated, but failing to listen to logic outright. Those episodes were sometimes a bit cringe, but they were also rare. And none of those episodes were written that way just to add artificial drama to make people feel things (ugh), but rather invariably ended up in a teachable moment demonstrating the folly of willful ignorance and not using your head.

You mean like the first episode of season 1?

It's bizarre that the various streaming services don't just pick up the director's cut of Children of the Gods and make that the default first episode, and serve up the original one as a separate "show" so that they don't have to have the "nudity" caption on every episode all the way through season 10.

SG-1 poked fun at the concept of a younger, edgier version in season 10... and then three years later, the studio actually did it. I believe the word is "harbinger".