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you don't own the battery in a Tesla, they do.
[citation needed]
Renault offer both lease and purchase for the battery in France, but only lease in UK. Nissan's Leaf started leased-battery, then added a purchase option. I've never read anything about Tesla's car batteries being leased anywhere that wasn't an anti-EV FUD site.
Emyr
h2o
There are large parts of the world where public transport is unlikely ever to be good enough to replace car ownership, specifically rural areas.
2040 is also the same target the French have set. Given the amount of time it takes for the car fleet to be renewed, it's not an unreasonable time frame. They're also maybe being conservative about when EVs will reach price parity with combustion engines.
BNEF (full disclosure, I worked there a long time ago) has published an forecast of costs which is downloadable if you give them some details https://about.bnef.com/blog/electric-cars-reach-price-parity-2025/
They're projecting 2025 for price parity, based on the experience curve seen in other technology sectors - the cost of semiconductors, solar PV wafers, and wind turbine nacelles have all fallen along a similar trajectory. Here's an explanation of the experience curve from the Economist: http://www.economist.com/node/14298944
BNEF's application of the experience curve to solar wafers and wind nacelles was novel, and allowed them to make quite bullish predictions that in the end proved to be quite accurate. I suspect that it will also work with electric battery costs, but one of the reasons I left was because they didn't realise that the economics of car fleet renewal were much more complicated - as greenhell notes, it's much harder for poorer people to change their cars. (I was working on transport fuels for them). Anyway, they've projected 300mn EVs on the road by 2035: https://about.bnef.com/blog/electric-vehicles-accelerate-54-new-car-sales-2040/
By contrast, Exxon and BP are projecting roughly 100mn EVs on the road by 2035 (although those forecasts predate the France/UK policy change). That's more in line with industry thinking about the pace of fleet renewal. But maybe they're wrong and BNEF is right, I guess we'll find out as the years go by.
PS there are new business models emerging around the batteries. For eg, you don't own the battery in a
TeslaNissan, they do. When the discharge rate falls too low to be able to provide the torque the engine needs, they'll swap it out for a new one. The old battery is still perfectly good for use in the home, though - you can use it to store renewably generated power during th day and discharge it at night.Edit - this is actually something Nissan is doing, not Tesla.