Originally Posted by
Phredd3
I expect this is mostly about scarcity. The hybrid battery for the Infiniti is under 2KWh. My Prius Prime, which unlike the Q50 is a plug-in hybrid with an all-electric operation mode, is 8.8KWh and "only" costs $10K-$11K to replace. There's no reason in terms of battery capacity why the Infiniti battery should be that expensive.
FWIW, I expect to get about 4,000 full charge cycles out of my Prius Prime battery before it drops capacity enough to need replacement, based on various estimates I've read. With a Prius, I don't expect scarcity to be much of an issue. I currently get about 33-35 pure electric miles per full cycle, so I expect around 100K pure electric miles, and possibly more. At current battery and fuel costs, the break even point for the battery to pay for itself would be about 35mpg. That's a pretty conservative estimate, except it doesn't include the cost of the electricity. It also assumes that liquid fuel prices stay constant relative to battery prices, which I would find surprising. There are too many variables to know for sure, so I've just been assuming that the final cost will be roughly a wash. I'd love to see a hard data study from a reliable, peer-reviewed source on that, but I haven't found one.