Is the Tesla Model S Green?

Didn’t we discuss this sort of chain-of-energy 5-7 years ago before WUWT became the internet phenomena is so richly deserves to be? (Congratulations on the 3 year consecutive Best Science Blog award, by the way)
Nothing has changed. As true today as it was back then, even without the chain of loss to deliver electrical energy.

To see the innovation of the Tesla S compared to the 1956 Citroen DS19, the most inovative car of the last century, watch Motor Trends Head to Head competition. You will have to watch the entire 12 minute segment to see which car wins >>
You http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6CS9eBn0O8

And they just fired most of their workforce.

In all fairness, they should also calculate how much CO2 is used in the production of the typical non-electric, non-hybrid car. . . . .

Lady Thatcher had a minor degree in chemistry. I know of no other politician that has had any background in science (not including social science) beyond high school. Therefore governmental agencies act within a void of scientific knowledge and reasoning. Idealists can promote their venue with little or no pragmatic challenge. Where are today’s Benjamin Franklins and Thomas Jeffersons ?

Government subsidizes a rich person’s plaything. Just one of the many major distortions and abuses rampant in our government.

Same as the Chevy Volt claims…
http://climatesanity.wordpress.com/2009/08/20/i-was-partially-wrong/

Despite these woeful energy consumption figures, Professor David Mackay, a UK government advisor, is still pushing the lie that electric vehicles are 5x as efficient as fossil fueled cars.
Free pdf book on renewable energy (for government ministers):
Claim is bottom of page 120.
http://www.withouthotair.com
What the disingenuous professor has done, of course, is to ‘massage’ the figures:
a. He has assumed the fossil fueled car is a US gas-guzzler.
b. He has assumed that the electricity for the electric vehicle comes free – with no costs or inefficiencies of electrical power generation.
Now that is plain deceitful. And since Prof Mackay is the chief scientific adviser to the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change (sic), and this pdf book was designed for government advice, this is tantamount to “Misconduct in Public Office” and the good professor should be charged under that statute.
http://www.cps.gov.uk/legal/l_to_o/misconduct_in_public_office
.

“The EPA tells us 51% of total CO2 emissions result from motor vehicle use.”
The EPA says 1/2 of the world’s auto C02 emissions come from US cars.
US vehicles, including boats, planes, etc., produce about 1.2 Billion metric tons of c02, annually.
Electricity generation causes about 2.4 billion metric tons of C02, annually.

And yet still we have Professor David Mackay, the chief scientific adviser to the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change (sic), claiming that electric vehicles are 5x as efficient as fossil-fueled cars.
Free pdf book from this site.
The claim is on p120
http://www.withouthotair.com
What the professor has done here, is to assume that:
a. The fossil-fueled car is a bit of a gas-guzzler (not a diesel).
b. That the electricity for the electric car come free, with no costs of inefficiencies of production from fossil fuels.
Claims like this are highly disingenuous, to say the least, as in normal circumstances an electric car is actually some 30% less efficient that a European diesel. (And that is without taking the lithium battery manufacture and inefficiencies into account.)
Since the professor is a chief scientific adviser and the publication is for ministerial usage, it is likely that Professor Mackay is guilty of ‘Misconduct on Public Office’, and should be charges accordingly.
http://www.cps.gov.uk/legal/l_to_o/misconduct_in_public_office/
.

“$82,000 average list price luxury sedan”
Hmmm. Time to trade in the DeSoto.

It should be easy to extend their range:
Simply hook up a trailer full of spare batteries. 😉

So I have spent a good amount of time in the Santana Row Tesla showroom; even spent $26 on a Tesla hat; but only because it happened to be Subaru blue.
But I do have to say, I was quite impressed with a lot of the Tesla model S design, and I told them so. But I also told them what a silly idea it is, when you can store so much more energy in a gallon of gasoline.
One incomprehensible design choice, didn’t make sense to me, and stll doesn’t. If you look at the rear of the chassis (they have a complete body less chassis there), you will see they have two electric motors axially arranged behind the step down trasmission gears that drive the two rear wheels.
Well that is what you think you are seeing. The two L&R step down gears, are actually a perfectly ordinary differential, except direct drive to the cage, and no right angle drive. So why the hell the complication, and inefficiency of a differential, when you have two separate motors.
Well the answer is simple; you DON’T have two separate motors. You only have one motor in fact, a 290 KW three phase AC motor. The other “motor”, is actually a DC to three phase AC rotary inverter. It’s about 60 years, since I knew exactly how to do that, so I don’t know, what that is all about.
Well you see, if they had just put in the parallel step down gears, sans differential, and two identical brushless DC motors; they probably would have to change the name to the model S EDISON.
So any of you modern electric geeks out there (I know you are there), can yo splain to us, how the rotary inverter works, and why go that way, rather than brushless DC ?
I did ask why they didn’t go with in board disk brakes at the rear, just like the 1954/5/6 Mercedes W196 formula one GP cars, and the 300SLR sports cars of the same vintage. I’m thinking they also went inboard brakes at the front, but my mind is fuzzy on that. Yes I know I can giggle it up and find out.
Naturally, the Tesla chap had absolutely no idea, why the hell you would want inboard brakes on a sports car, even if only on the rear. I can see eschewing them on the front, so you don’t complicate the steering; but Tesla brags about their astronomical tree climbing torque. So if you have so much drive torque; it likely equals or exceeds the maximum breaking torque; both of them being limited by the tire coefficient of friction.
So then you don’t have to worry about braking torque shearing the drive shafts, if you put the brakes inboard. Well they still didn’t understand why you want to do that if you have room.
So when you build the model GES Tesla, Mr Musk. I’d like a no differential twin brushless DC motor job with in board rear disk brakes. I’d also like it if your engineers, can find a less vulnerable crash resistant location for the modest battery cooling heat exchanger (radiator).
It’s a very nicely done car: but it is still a silly idea. But the capitalist in me says people with more money than sense, should be separated from it as fast as you can clean them out. But how about giving us taxpayers a break, and make your yuppie customers foot the real bill for their spendthrift ways. And I really liked the old Roadster model too. You should build it again.
Makes the chevy Corvette look like the piece of junk, it is.

With all the talk of “green” vehicles lately, I was beginning to feel a bit guilty about driving my large pickup truck and two 500+ HP Porsches, but now I will sleep soundly!

I am confused.
I am Canadian and I live in Vancouver which is under siege from the likes of Suzuki Corporation err .. I mean Foundation. The ‘Sustainability’ zealots are working hard to ‘get us out of our cars’ and have managed, for now, to grab hold of the levers of municipal government so that ANYTHING for bikes and against driving is lauded and paid for with my taxes. But.. just for a minute.. let’s imagine they succeed in removing every single fossil fuelled car off the road in all of Metro Vancouver.
A single car manufactures, according to the EPA, about 5 tons CO2 per annum.
Our government run insurance scheme reports about 1.6 million motorized vehicles in all of Metro Vancouver, so taking ALL of them off the road would offset 1.6 million x 5 tons = 8 million tons CO2 per annum.
Right? Well not exactly.. you see, except for aviation fuel which is refined right here, most of the fuel we are burning is refined in the USA and imported into Vancouver. So we would not only have to take all the cars off the road, but we would have to continue to buy the gasoline and diesel from those Americans and store it somewhere in tanks FOREVER, since you could never be sure that those business minded Americans wouldnt sell it to themselves instead of us, or failing that, ship it off to the largest consumers of automobiles on the planet… the newly well heeled Chinese. Neither would sequester the fuel, methinks.
Now… displacing a gasoline car off the road with a Tesla, amounts to the same thing. Unless the fuel you WOULD HAVE burned is sequestered forever, then surely it will eventually be burned somewhere else, maybe next week or maybe next year, but it will be burned.
So here we we’d be smug in Vancouver..feelin’ green, pedalin’ bikes in the rain, and destitute since we can’t do business anymore, and have to pay massive taxes to finance public transit ( electric buses, elevated trams and subways only dont you know ).
Meanwhile…let’s look at what taking all our fossil burners off the road would accomplish..
1 coal fired electric plant emits somewhere between 10million and 20 million tons CO2 per annum.
For the sake of argument, let;s peg an ‘average’ coal fired electric plant near the middle at 16 million tons CO2 per annum.
So that means if this medium sized city and all its municipalities took every single car off the road AND sequestered all the fuel they would have burned, then and only then could it offset the CO2 emissions from 1 half of 1 average coal fired electric plant.
Now according to the Guardian(Tuesday 20 November 2012, Damion Carrington), a green/left leaning organ, China is in the process of building a planned 363 coal fired plants while India plans 455 coal fired plants. The Chinese alone bring an new one onstream every 5 days.
So we could get ourselves ‘out of our cars’ 100%, build some tanks to hold the fuel we would continue to buy and sequester, and then we really can proudly choose which half of one coal fired plant will offset of the 1200 or so being planned worldwide. .. Half a Chinese one? or Half an Indian one?
Perhaps the optics would be better than if we chose one of those new German ones. You know.. the ones they are building to use when the wind doesnt blow since they are closing down the nuke plants.
So.. I am confused. What happens to the fuel when you buy a Tesla?

There have been about 5000 Tesla cars sold sold far, the lowly Chevy Cruze has sold 250,000 units in 2012 alone. The thing is, everyone seems to like electric cars but almost nobody actually buys them.
If electric cars ever become competitive with gas/diesel cars I’ll but one, but I don’t expect them to become competitive for at least another 20 years.

The CO2 produced by each subsidized dollar also needs to be factored into the total equation. People and companies consume energy in order to produce the wealth that is taxed and then subsidize the vehicles. It’s worse when you consider that much of that money is borrowed from less efficient places like China. Borrowed subsidies effectively continue consuming CO2 because it takes energy to produce the dollar to pay the interest. It goes on and on.

John Parsons says:
April 10, 2013 at 11:24 am
“How much CO2 is produced building that SUV drivetrain? This author has an ax to grind. Instead, he should be sharpening his pencil. JP”
John, there is a reason EV’s are at least 2.5 times as expensive as comparable ordinary cars (comparable as longs as you don’t wanna drive more than the battery makes; and it is warm enough to not need a heating, and cool enough to not need an A/C, I should add). Part of that reason is the resource usage; and the price of any resource is a direct expression of energy usage in getting and processing the resource.
So, if E/Vs needed, say half the energy in the making than an ordinary car, I would expect them to be about half as expensive. And in that case I would already own one, because I need to be thrifty. Besides, I would love driving a vehicle with an electric motor due to the simplicity, robustness and high torque starting at 0 rpm.
Unfortunately, no EV maker will sell me a new car for 5000 EUR. Instead they want 25,000 EUR (if they actually grant you ownership of the battery). Some of them are desparate to sell EV’s – they made so many of them, you know. Renault and Nissan for instance.
So why can’t they sell them for 5000 if the resource usage is as low as you claim, John? Enquiring minds want to know.

And I should add, the mechanical simplicity of an EV should give it even more of a cost advantage.

The “greenness” could become more true if the electricity was generated by nuclear facilities. I once believed this was Sam Bodman’s motivation for going ahead with the ridiculous ethanol subsidies while he was Bush’s second term Secretary of Energy. I just imagined a behind the scenes quid-pro-quo of “I’ll subsidize corn gas if you get serious about nukes”.

Just another White House (desperation sets in months before Der Führer and the High Command commit suicide in the Richard M. Nixon situation room) propaganda urban legend.

“even spent $26 on a Tesla hat;”
No doubt a far better investment than the vehicle itself. You will be able to sell this on Ebay a few years from now for thousands!

Well done for doing the maths and publicising it. I always wondered but have never seen it laid out so clearly

Electrics are the way to go! You get preferential parking next to the door at Ikea, free electric power by others (at least in Vancouver mandated recharging stations) and endless subsidies for the roads and services you use, all financed by the gasoline taxes other motorists pay for you.
Watts (pardon) not to like?

george e. smith says:
April 10, 2013 at 12:01 pm
I had a rotary converter some 50 years ago. It was a double ended dynamo. You drove one end with a/c and picked dc off of the other end of the isolated rotating armature. Power the other end with dc and you could pick of a/c and the opposite end. Sadly I had to throw it as part of a deal with my wife on one of our many house moves.

I’m not going to argue about how energetically efficient electromobiles are – they are not very efficient. However the comparison provided here is not very fair.
The “effective CO2” comes from current average CO2 production per unit of energy – where? In the US? Or is it average world value? If you charge your car from a nuclear reactor, you make zero CO2 emissions, for instance. So the relative CO2 emissions depends on where do you charge your car or what technology is at present used to generate that electricity. If you charge your car in France, you are definitely generating less CO2 than e.g. in China.
Moreover, if you calculate how much CO2 is generated on making the battery, you should also calculate how much CO2-expensive is making of a normal car motor and add that up to its account, too.
There’s just no good way to compare these two.
The good thing about electric cars is – they don’t generate pollution (and I don’t mean CO2 here) at the place where they are used. And that’s a blessing for cities and any crowded areas in general.

Is the Tesla Model S Green? – NO

They are super fun to drive/ride in – acceleration is amazing. If you are a speed junkie, they are pretty awesome. The original sportster model is even quicker

I have often wondered, in my naïve layperson capacity, why GM didn’t continue to make Chevrolet Geo Metros. I have two: a 1991 station wagon, now off-white, that cost $7,000 new and still gets 52-55 miles per gallon of regular gas (possibly a bit less with the ethanol), and a 2000 mostly red runabout ($11,000 used with 17 miles on it) that gets 42-48 mpg. Both are still good cars, though the 91 is looking well used by this time. It seems to me that, if we had the technology in 1991 to get 55 mpg in a nice car, it is a crying shame to expend so much time, energy, money, and resource capital to produce more expensive vehicles that don’t do as well. I may get the 91 Geo painted one day soon; we’ll see how it does the next 22 years.

My simple calculation is as follows.
Add up the total real cost of a product, including all subsidies it has gained.
See how much coal this money would buy.
That is a fair ball park measure of the CO2 produced by the existence of this product.

“in a nice car” re Geo Metro
I expect you are in a very small minority in this sentiment. Cars are about so much more than transportation and MPG.

Wow, that Tesla is quite a stylish looking electric coal-powered automobile. I prefer gasoline-powered ones though. Anyway, here is some earlier news about their electric coal-powered competition …

Revived Detroit Electric to unveil Tesla Roadster rival on April 3
Detroit Electric, a brand responsible for building electric cars in the early 1900s, has been revived after more than 70 years of inactivity – or as their marketing team would prefer: Recharged, Rebooted, Reborn. The company plans to unveil their first all-electric car in the modern era on April 3 in Detroit.
[…]
As such, it comes as little surprise at the new Detroit Electric sports car would resemble a Lotus. The car may retail for around $135,000, we’re told.

http://www.techspot.com/news/52023-revived-detroit-electric-to-unveil-tesla-roadster-rival-on-april-3.html

Jim Smothers says:
April 10, 2013 at 10:40 am
/////////////////////////////////
Jim
The Citroen was a great car, but the most innovative car of the last century was the Lancia Lambda. That was the brith of the modern motor car as we would recognise it today..
It was the first car to have
(i) unitary construction (almost every car has such construction whereby the bodyshell is effectively teh chasis) leading to a light but stronger vehicle.
(ii) a trasmission tunnel that lowered the centre of gravity rather than having the body built up high, thereby greatly improving road holding by the reduction of roll
(iii) to have independent front suspension (all cars now have independant front suspension)
(iv) whilst not a first, it was one of the few cars to have brakes on all 4 wheels.
It also had a narrow angle v engine which gave a compact engine and allowed much more passenger space length for length of car.
Electric cars will only be green when people can charge them via solar, off grid. Wind of course is no good since wind requires nearly 100% backup by conventional generation which puts out CO2.
My Dad had an electric some 25 years ago. It was not very practical because of its limited range. However, since it was a novelty whenever he went out to a restaurant or to a pub, they would run out an extension lead so that he could re-charge his car whilst eating. Just as well since in the winter especially at night, the car would lose performance after about 20 miles (my Dad lived in a hilly part of the country and there was a noticable drop off in climbing up hill).

By the way, Tesla claims that their battery plan involves a provision for recycling the batteries for the lithium. I used to recycle scrap gallium arsenide, and gallium arsenide phosphide (from LEDs) to get six and seven nines purity raw gallium. We supplied about 50 % of our total gallium input from recycling.
Know nowt about lithium chemistry, but is recycling any more difficult than cycling rocks to get it in the first place. But that’s another energy input problem.

To merit the name Tesla, that car should be able to go back & forth 60 times a second.

The Tesla S AC motor produces 290 -300 KW ; well actually they don’t say whether that is AC power in or rotary power out. Well that is 400 horsepower. My high compression 3.4 litre 1956 Jaguar XK 140 hard top coupe came up with 210 BHP, and that was enough to scare the horses.
So if you use your Tesla S for zero local pollution round town, when do you get to use the other 360 HP ??
But as I said before, I am quite im[pressed by the quality and cleanliness of most of the TS engineering design, which doesn’t change the fact I think it is a silly idea.
That 300 mile (epa says 276 I think), is really only 138 mile range, because your own garage is the only place you know you can recharge it.
Even fighter pilots know that you need to get back to the carrier to refuel; betting on the air tanker, can get you wet.

“””””…..peter_dtm says:
April 10, 2013 at 5:05 pm
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/04/10/is-the-tesla-model-s-green/#comment-1271486
Why use 3 phase motors and go to the trouble of running an invertor to go from DCVolts (not to mention the loss of efficiency) ?…..””””‘
Well Peter, I will take your word for it. I did say it’s been 60 years since I seriously studied rotary things. And if you say it’s best this way, that works for me.
So let’s say I can make an efficient constant speed DC-three phase AC motor drive power inverter. Why would I want to integrate it into the AC motor itself, rather than put in a pair of AC motors, 86 the differential, even possibly the step down gears, and directly drive the separate drive shafts from separate motors. Then the rotary inverter can be located anywhere; no need to be part of the drive train. Close so no long wire runs.So does the AC run at fairly constant frequency: it would seem you would want to, but don’t need precision frequency control.
As I recall, magnetic type things are most efficient, when copper (resistance) losses are equal to Iron losses, (hysteresis, and eddy current losses), and efficient small magnetic things do run hot.
Tesla are confident they don’t have the Boeing dreamliner battery problem. Battery is liquid cooled, so it has a radiator heat exchanger, which is modest in size, but seemingly vulnerable right out in front, in the fender bender zone. I think they could find a safer place, given what a loss of coolant failure might do to the battery; not to mention the car. BUt EM IS a smart guy, so I am sure they tried out in spirit, all the possible architectures. It’s a royal frustration, walking into the showroom, and finding nobody who knows the design. They ALL were enthusiastic folks, and they didn’t mind me photographing the chassis, up the ying yang, which I did.

peter_dtm says:
April 10, 2013 at 5:05 pm
Why use 3 phase motors and go to the trouble of running an invertor to go from DCVolts (not to mention the loss of efficiency) ?
Well I woudl guess that it would be to do with speed control.
Also torque, (that pete did mention) I work with elevators and for the last 10 to 15 years all the DC motors and drives are being replaced with 3 phase AC motors and drives. The buzz word is Vector drives with encoder feedback, which alows for full torque at 0 rpm. The DC motors and drives can’t meet that low rpm torque control.
I don’t know what the other dc motor is for unless they are using it for regenating power back to the battery, but some ac drive put regerated power back on the grid now, so one would think it would be easier to do that electronically.

George/ pete
My typing took to long & missed your last comments,
An Ac drive will change the voltage and frequency signal for proper control.
The speed of an AC motor is related to the frequency of the supply, ie a 60 HZ motor run at 30 HZ will run at 1/2 full speed. the voltage is also adjusted roughly in line with the frequency (voltage is changed for proper control).
A DC motors speed is related to the voltage, a 100 VDC motor will turn at half speed at 50 volts,

Plus, drives hooked up to the grid, will take AC in, turn it into DC, and convert the DC back into a digital AC signal for exact control of the frequency.
To add math, an AC motors speed is calculated by RPM = (Frequency x 120)/Poles.
RPM= revolutions per minuet, frequency in HZ and number of poles in the motor(always an even number). so a 4 pole motor @ 60 HZ will run at 1800 RPM, there is some slip so actual will be around 1750 +/-.

“””””…..DJL says:
April 10, 2013 at 6:38 pm
George/ pete
My typing took to long & missed your last comments,…..”””””
I believe you are correct on that DJL. A DC motor winding; assuming a permanent magnet motor, has near zero resistance (ideally), so at zero speed (clamped) the current draw is astronomical, so it creates enormous torque, so unclamped it starts turning in a hurry, and once rotating, it acts asa generator, and generates a back EMF directly proportional to rotation speed. That opposes most of the applied Voltage. So you have I = ( V – BEMF) / R and the speed will run up until the current is reduced down to what is needed to maintain the load torque.
In the AC case, you get a rotating field at the drive frequency / pole pairs Ordinary AC motors run at a slip frequency so as you say a 60 Hz two pole does about 3500 rpm instead of 3600, and < 1800 for the four pole. Then there are AC synchronous motors, that have no frequency slip, but have a rotor phase offset, that grows with load, so the 4-pole locks onto 1800. Since the force- phase slip relationship is non-linear, and depends on field and pole geometry, the actual phase offset is a property of that motor design.
I have two AC synchronous motors, one is two pole 3600 rpm, and the other is six pole 1200 rpm.
Both designed for 24 Volts rms at 60 Hz. They are little jewels; size 5 motors ( 0.5 inches diameter). They drive a pair of worm gears on the ends of a differential, that then drives a big 360 tooth spiral bevel gear to run a telescope drive. The both motors runs off a crystal controlled roughly 60 Hz two phase drive to run 26 seconds per day slower than the earth's rotation rate. That compensates for the atmospheric refraction for about three hours each side of the zenith, so you can follow a star for about six hours total with only about one arcsecond error. The 3600 rpm motor is used for fast slewing back and forth. The 1200 rpm motor drives a single start worm, while the 3600 rpm drives a four start worm, so they actually have a drive ratio of 12, between drive and slew.

Lomborg also referenced a study by the BBC about the practicality of charging times and long trips:

Consider the Nissan Leaf. It has only a 73-mile range per charge. Drivers attempting long road trips, as in one BBC test drive, have reported that recharging takes so long that the average speed is close to six miles per hour—a bit faster than your average jogger.
To that I have a Solution: ** U-Haul Battery Pack Trailors !!! **
Instead of waiting for an hour for a recharge, you check in one trailer and get another. Once you get good at it and are a customer in good standing, It ought not take more than 10 minutes. There will probably be a Full Service Lane, too. It also eliminates lots of problems with battery packs that get old. Of course, the theft risk of towing a $20,000 trailer will give you pause. And there is the chance that a trailer isn’t available when you drop one off.
Finally, there is that pesky image of a Tesla pulling a U-Haul. (Sweet!)
I won’t be able to look at a Tesla without the mental picture of it pulling that trailer. 🙂

Lomborg also referenced a study by the BBC about the practicality of charging times and long trips:

Consider the Nissan Leaf. It has only a 73-mile range per charge. Drivers attempting long road trips, as in one BBC test drive, have reported that recharging takes so long that the average speed is close to six miles per hour—a bit faster than your average jogger.

To that I have a Solution: U-Haul Battery Pack Trailors !!!
Instead of waiting for an hour for a recharge, you check in one trailer and get another. Once you get good at it and are a customer in good standing, It ought not take more than 10 minutes. There will probably be a Full Service Lane, too. It also eliminates lots of problems with battery packs that get old. Of course, the theft risk of towing a $20,000 lithium-ion battery trailer will give you pause. And there is the chance that a charged trailer isn’t available when you drop one off.
Finally, there is that pesky image of a Tesla pulling a U-Haul, even if it has racing stripes. I won’t be able to look at a Tesla without the mental picture of it pulling that trailer. 🙂

If you buy a Tesla you will need to walk a lot whilst it recharges. Trips over 50 miles are out at night or in cold weather. A horse is better.

John Parsons says:
April 10, 2013 at 11:08 pm
“And just how low did I claim they were Dirk?”
You evaded any such claim; so is 50% too low? Whatcha say? 75%? I’d go with that as well; I have use for a sub 100 km range car.
“The author adds the CO2 cost of the batts on the EV, “based on our assumptions”. That “assumption” needs some supporting documentation. He also talks about “idle” losses of lithium ion batteries in the 20-30 percent range. Lithium ion batteries are known to have very low “idle” losses. It’s why the can sit on a store shelf 10 years and still be guaranteed.”
Google the difference between a non rechargeable Lithium cell and a rechargeable Li-Ion battery. You know not what you are talking about.
“Anyway you cut it though Dirk, an emerging technology is going to cost more than a mature technology. When economies of scale become equal, that equation can reverse.”
The ingredients of an EV are mature technology. For Renault and Nissan, building the vehicle around those ingredients is mature technology. Some parts like the transmission and the generator fall away, reducing the cost.
Setting up an assembly line to produce a new kind of car is something the bulk producers do every five years for each of their lines; i.e. ALL THE TIME. This is their CORE EXPERTISE; they stay in business because they know how to set up the next assembly line.
I don’t care whether Tesla’s are handmade and bespoke and whatnot; I was explicitly mentioning the Nissan/Renault products because they have intentionally targeted a bulk production, trusting in promises by EU politicians to have a million EV’s on the road real soon now. So they tried from the start to reap all the economies of scale you aim for when setting up a car factory. They now have two years worth of production sitting on parking lots. If they’re halfway smart they haven’t installed batteries.
As for the Li-Ion batteries: I don’t know what Tesla puts into the Tesla S but they crammed thousands of notebook batteries into the Tesla Elise or what it was called. They did this BECAUSE the notebook batteries were a mature mass produced item.

Here in the UK we have the ludicrous situation of tax incentives being given to company car drivers to drive these low-CO2 emitting vehicles (not to mention large cash discounts funded by the taxpayer). The figures used to determine the tax base for the cars are, of course, the manufacturers idealised numbers, assuming the cars are driven economically. In the real world, company car drivers don’t generally have time to drive like saints, so my taxes are wasted.

“Lithium ion batteries are known to have very low “idle” losses. It’s why the can sit on a store shelf 10 years and still be guaranteed.”
Others have already pointed out that this does not apply to rechargeable Li-ion batteries, where losses are more typically something like 10% a month (if the battery is in good shape), which is still better than rechargeable batteries..
Furthermore a multiple-cell system must have a load-balancing system, otherwise some of the cells may be damaged or even have a thermal runaway if the battery is rapidly discharged or charged. This system must be on even when the car is idle, since the cells will self-discharge at slightly different rates. The load-balancing will inevitably use some power, so a multiple-cell system will actually discharge faster than a single cell.

For this to be a true comparison, one should consider all the non similar parts between a gasoline and electric vehicle. You cannot simply add the battery to the EV’s equation and compare it to ONLY the tailpipe emission of a gasoline vehicle.
A truer comparison would be:
EV: emissions of electricity to charge, emissions to produce batteries, emissions to produce electronic motors
Gasoline vehicle: tail pipe emissions, emissions to refine oil, emissions to build an engine/gas tank/alternator/possible other components not found in an EV.
Beyond the ‘green’ factor in an EV, it also takes away reliance on refining oil for our vehicles (which they say is running out? or at the very least, is becoming more and more expensive to refine). An EV can get electricity from renewable sources like hydro, wind, solar, etc.
Also, the emissions is a per mile equation but batteries is fix variable. If you amortize the battery missions over 100,000 miles as opposed to 200,000 miles (or life of the EV), the ‘effective CO2 emissions’ will be much lower.

_Jim:
And just what are those ‘losses’ that everyone claims yet no one quantifies (esp. with DATA)?
Start here:
http://www.energy.ca.gov/2011publications/CEC-200-2011-009/CEC-200-2011-009.pdf

I can understand people being resistant to change. But let’s play a little game. If every car on the road were powered by batteries. And these batteries were a standard 200kwh pack. And every gas station was actually a solar station. And everyone had solar panels on their roofs as a grid contribution thing. I’ll be willing to bet that not only will the global individual carbon footprint drop considerably it would also be greatly localized.
You are asking us to throw away something that works for something where the benefit is speculative and possibly even false (ie, continued CO2 production is somehow going to destroy us or maybe only make more plants grow.)
I think you have to get real. Give us real numbers on the benefits. Tell us the real cost not some scary made up scenarios.

_Jim: Any particular page in that doc applicable to the issues at hand?
Well, now, lemme see. If your interest is finding real data (which seemed to be the case from what you wrote) then I would recommend a quick scan of the whole document, including references to other sources.
On the other hand, if you simply want to reply to Smith, take a look at p. 19. It suggests the complexity of the problem, revealing that losses vary widely from one utility to another. But if you read the whole document you discover that losses from out-of-state generators to the state line may not be included. (There is an interesting discussion toward the end of specific losses from Hoover Dam, Palo Verde, etc.)
Do the losses they use or assume come close to the losses claimed by Smith above?
So far as I read, Brother Smith did not put forward a specific figure, so I can’t say whether this document refutes him or not. But the worst performer on p. 19 is Los Angeles Water and Power, with projected losses of 11.89%.
.
Just gonna ‘throw the document’ at me huh? (Not expressly an RC trick eh?)
RC is like my cardiologist. I try to stay away from him as often as I can.
: > )

David says:
April 11, 2013 at 7:31 am
get real people
THE given driving factor for moving to ev is CO2 emmisions reduction.
So given that all evs claim to have ‘zero tail pipe emmision’ we need to examine that claim in reality (get real !)
So it is most hightly relevent how much CO2 is actually generated from birth to death of a vehicle.
And if; as appears likely; the total birth to death savings of CO2 is marginal then the whole thing is a dream (dreams; of course are not real)
Batteries are an older technology than ICE. So are electric motors. ICE didn’t require subsidies to get the world moving. EVs will only be usefull when the battery power density starts to meet that of petrol/deisel and soem way is found to enable fast charge or battery swap out. SWAP battery packs for an EV ?– go on; just how much does that battery pack weigh ? Power density again means the ‘easy solution’ is an engineering; material handling nightmare. Get real; most people don’t know how to handle 50kg properly never mind over a tonne.
EVs are GOOD for some things; as mass transport providers they are rubbish; and to be quite realistic; they are likly to remain so for the forseeable future

Hi Richard, Just got back from the dentist, so I wasn’t dodging you. I appreciate that you don’t “bail”. I’ll reply to your comment(s) once I catch up. Looks like I largely agree with what you’ve said. See ya. JP

richardscourtney
Hi Rich, Thanks. The only pain was the bill. A 140 dollar Carmel candy. Should’a known better.
Rich, I basically agree with you. The only real point of difference is that I can see the new work on battery technology as emerging tech. But your point is well taken.
My real beef is this author’s obvious bias. I mean comparing a Tesla S with a Honda Civic? A fairer comp would be something like a Mercedes S. About the same price and accoutrements (although the Tesla blows the doors off the Merc).
Merc 15/21mpg
Civic 28/36mpg
Civic 0-60 ~9 sec
Merc 0-60 ~7 sec
Tesla S 0-60 ~4 sec
If the author compared apples to apples, his own “assumptions” (which I’d like to see) would show the Tesla with much less CO2 emissions than a comparable gas burner. Not even close. JP

“fracking” Thanks a lot spellcheck. JP

Here is an interesting chart showing various battery technologies on a semi-log graph of
Y-Axis: Specific Power W/kg
X-Axis: Specific Energy Wh/kg
http://www.e-transportation.eu/catalog/img/p/71-412-thickbox.jpg
It shows various flavors of LI-ion, NIMH, NICd, with an apparent emphasis on the Gaia HE 60Ah Li-Ion
http://blog.genport.it/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/ragone.jpg
A similar chart that shows more families of battery technologies, including super capacitors, Lead-Acid, Ni-Cd, NiMH, Na-NiCl2, Li-Polymer, Li-Ion in three configurations (High Power, Mid Range, High Energy (low power)) The chart very well shows the trade-off between Power Density and Energy Density.
What is missing from this chart? Hydrogen-Oxygen Fuel Cells, Coal, Methane, and Gasoline. Where would they plot?
Coal and the others are way off the chart! The batteries top out at 180 Wh/kg. Coal has a thermal energy of
6700 Wh/kg. Burn it in a 40% efficient coal fired power plant and you get 2680 Wh/kg coal in delivered electical power. Take the width of the chart, expand it 14 times to the right. Coal plots in the upper right corner.
That energy density gives you 1 GW-day per 100 car, 10,000 ton coal unit train. That train, if filled at the Black Thunder Coal Mine, a 70 foot seam in the Powder River Basin of Wyoming, will cost you about $120,000 at the mine, less than $300,000 delivered.
To store 1 GW-day in Li-Ion batteries, you would need a battery bank of 140,000 tons. Picture 14 coal unit trains filled with Li-Ion batteries and wiring. At 2.5 Whr/US$ and 180 Whr/kg, that’s $72/kg. Times 140,000 tons is US$ 10 billion. All to save $300,000 worth of delivered coal for a GW-day of on-demand electricity? To break even, you need to recharge that battery bank 33,600 times — 92 years of charge and discharge every 24 hrs. But there is another problem: LI-Ion batteries cannot cycle a tenth that many times.
Now, to be fair, we are only counting the coal weight. A battery’s weight is composed of the cathode and anode. Were we to count the oxygen used in the combustion of the coal, the specific energy at 40% efficiency for electrical generation would be 730 Wh/kg (C+O2), 6 times bigger than the best battery. But coal isn’t rechargable — just cheap and
plentiful! And the air is free.
What about H2_O2 fuel cells? Hydrogen is 143 MJ/kg = 40 KWhr/kg H2 But that is only 2 parts of the 18 (2+16) parts of the H2O.
So that would be 4400 Whr / hg (H2O) Practical efficiency is 40-60%, Theoretcial maximum eff is 83% without heat recapture. So a fuel cell could deliver electrical power at 2200 Whr / kg (of 2H2+O2). It is a theoretically rechargeable system
However, if we include the weight of the storage tanks and the fuel cell, then 580 Whr/kg (for 5000 psi H2 composite tanks) can be reached. (Fig 3) The trouble is you cannot mine, pump, or grow hydrogen. You must make it.
Methane is 55.6 MJ/kg. = 15.4 KWhr/kg (CH4) CH4 has a weight of 16. combustion products are CO2 + 2 H2O. So add 2 O2 = 64. Total weight is 80. Methane converted to electricity at 40% efficiency = 7 KWhr / kg (CH4) or 1400 Whr/kg (CH4 + 2 O2)
Gasoline is 46 MJ/kg = 13 KWhr/kg Gasoline is about C8H18 (weight 114). It takes about 25 O to combust it. Use a 40% electrical conversion, 5200 Whr/kg gasoline (not counting the air) Or 1150 Whr/kg (gasoline + oxygen) Unlike Hydrogen or Methane, gasoline is a well behaved liquid at room and operating temperatures. It has a much higher KWhr/liter energy volume density than either liquid hydrogen or LNG without their handling problems. Only coal has a higher energy per volume density without going nuclear.
So when it comes to energy storage in vehicles, it is pretty hard to beat gasoline at 5200 Whr/kg of fuel. Use it in a 40% efficient air breathing gas turbine generator that powers a car and tops off and replenishes 180 Whr/kg Li-Ion batteries for peak power and regen breaking energy capture.

Worst, most biased article I have ever read in my life…