You are right about these being income producing assets. That's why response will be much sharper in this space than the private vehicle market.
I like the idea of auctions. That actually minimizes the potential for asset stranding. The auction price has an equilibrium at the present value of the vehicle as an income producing asset. So this eliminates the price per mile advantage that early adopters would otherwise enjoy. Moreover, the value of that price advantage is effectively transferred to the truck maker.
For example, assume a 25c/mile savings at list price (and assuming charging infrastructure is in place needed to realize that savings), then spread that out over say 8 years, 125k miles per year. At an 8% discount this has a present value of $194k. Thus, a buyer that is fully convinced of this value would be willing to bid upto $194k over the $180k list price. Tesla pockets the premium bidders are willing to pay, while trucking competitors that lose the auction are not at a serious cost disadvantage to those who won.
And I figure in practice, using your example, the auction price is likely to fall somewhere between 0 and $194k, and be closer to $194k the longer the queue is and that a company will need to wait to get to the head of the queue (especially with queue jumpers paying extra to jump the queue).
I was, without doing any math, thinking that there'd be a $50k premium worth paying to move up. For a high volume use truck, I expect we'd see something like 1/2 to 3/4 (pays for the infrastructure, and still captures some of the value for the truck buyer - how high is too high before truck buyers stop paying the premium?
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The thing is - with as big of an opex advantage as I'm expecting, even when the industry is producing 300k units/year, there will still be a queue due to aggressive retirement (at least from the really high volume installed base) that will stretch for years into the future. 300k/year just handles today replacement level, so there will still be value in conducting an auction to allow queue sitters to buy there way to the head of the list.
One element of the auction that I think is important, is to make it as transparent as possible. For this reason, I would tend towards frequent small auctions, over infrequent large auctions. So weekly auctions of 6k units (given an annual build rate of 300k), over monthly or quarterly auctions.
And make the bids (anonymous) - price and volume - public information (at least to the bidders) so everybody knows what bids won last week and can better play the game this week based on the price action in the past.
Lastly - the truck maker needs to show that extra revenue going back out (mostly at least) as capital equipment and rapidly expanding capacity.
The thing about 300k units / year - I'm assuming an average of 1MWh worth of batteries per truck (some will be lower, some will be higher, though I realize even longer range trucks haven't been announced yet); that's 300GWh/year worth of batteries needed for that market. Tesla, or whoever, is producing those trucks has a lot of expansion in their battery production to serve that market.
I think a better estimate of the consumption of battery packs in the commercial truck market is more like 2-4x that 300 GWh/year. I get there figuring the electric class 8 market will get to at least 600k units / year (replacing the installed base aggressively, plus cheaper stuff will be more widely used than are used today), and then all of that consumption gets matched again by the class 3-7 markets (many more units, with big but smaller batteries in those trucks).
There goes that TWh/year consumption - did you want some batteries for SX3Y Roadster and the Class 1/2 pickup truck?
Or for any other market than North America? Damn - we're gonna need ANOTHER TWh or 2 / year. (On a current worldwide battery production of more like 100 GWh/year for transportation).
