A market research company reckons electric cars will get cheaper by 2027

Electric vehicles will be cheaper to manufacture in the future, according to a new report by market research firm Gartner. It’s all to do with the cost of manufacture... though there will be a downside. More on that in a bit.

First, the positive. Gartner reckons that the batteries – the most expensive and heaviest component of EVs – are getting cheaper to produce, but that car makers are also concurrently changing the way they make other car parts.

Tesla has pioneered giga-casting to try and keep the weight of its all-electric models down. It’s an innovative manufacturing technique which involves molten high-strength aluminium alloy being poured at velocity into a cold-chamber mould, and it’s fast becoming the hottest trend in vehicle manufacturing globally.

That’s not the only cost-saving measure either. Pedro Pacheco, research VP at Gartner, said: “New OEM incumbents want to heavily redefine the status quo in automotive. They brought new innovations that simplify production costs such as centralised vehicle architecture or the introduction of gigacastings that help reduce manufacturing cost and assembly time, which legacy automakers had no choice to adopt to survive.”

In turn, that’ll mean there’ll be more price parity between EVs and ICE cars just beyond the middle of the decade. That date is sooner than expected.

Now, the downside. Gartner reckons that’ll come with a new consumer burden, because it thinks the repairs of those EVs will be ‘considerably costlier’. In fact, it’s calculated an increase of 30 per cent, saying EVs damaged in a collision are more likely to be written off.