Electric Cars – it's all about the battery

Chico is warm, flat, and relatively compact. It rarely snows. Electric vehicles are a good fit, as are bicycles, scooters, and walking.
For those of you saying that an electric vehicle won’t work for you, don’t buy one. However, please don’t think that your own personal situation is a universal condition.

“You wouldn’t buy a VW to haul topsoil, would you? You don’t buy an electric car to replace a pickup or dump truck. You buy it for local commuting. – Anthony”
Which is fine if you never leave your town, or if you can afford two cars, which by itself destroys any notion of being more environmentally friendly.
It is far more practical and efficient for me to run one small diesel car for 10 years, than to waste money and increase my carbon footprint by getting an electric car.
Electric cars cannot even come close to competing with gas powered cars, on any front!

I would concur with Warren Waldman – batteries of the size for cars are potential bombs if they short or are involved in a crash – electrical fires are worse than petrol fires, injured passengers risk being electrocuted as well as burned.
Re exchanging batteries at service stations, another problem: they would be an easy target for thieves, each battery being the value of a gold ingot!

I have just looked up the price of one of these electric cars in the uk. The bog standard car, a Nissan Leaf, costs 28,000 pounds sterling. I have worked out that this amount of money would allow me to purchase approximately 258,000 miles worth of diesel for my car.
That is about 20 years worth of driving. For this I get reliable, convenient, practical, long distance motoring in a manner which is more environmentally friendly than electric.
So for the opportunity to pay a minimal and trivial amount to an electricity company, for car ‘fuel’ I would have to pay out almost 30,000 pounds. To get the car to allow this.
Or I can keep my reliable little diesel and get to London and back (330 miles each way) inside one day. that would be impossible in an electric car.

Watch what happens when one of these cars get hit by another car and the Lithium Ion Batteries explode.

I’ll buy one when it can get from my bit of rural Essex in England to the in-laws’ bit of rural Perthshire in Scotland.
But I think I’ll be waiting a long time.
On the other hand, the “end of oil” holds the tempting, golden promise of no more visits to the in-laws!

DirkH says:
February 23, 2011 at 1:53 pm
“There is no “Moore’s Law” for battery technologies.”
Yep.
“All occurences of such exponential growth (transistor size, CPU power, memory size, harddisk size, communication bandwith…) happen in information technologies.”
There’s one other. Biotechnology. It’s the most important, far reaching one IMO. Microscopic organic self-reproducing programmable robots. The technology is already billions of years old and very well proven. Our challenge isn’t invention but rather reverse engineering. It’s getting really close to reality now and the pace of technological advance is itself accelerating. For example the first complete sequencing of a human genome completed in 2001 took 10 years and a billion dollars. It now takes 10 days and $10,000 dollars. Assembling DNA from mail-order code snippets into error free genomes is progressing at a similar time/cost reduction pace. Before too much longer we’ll be designing custom programmed bacteria on engineering workstations like we design microcomputers today. The critters will be able to build just about anything with atomic precision. The race is on right now to get genetically engineered cyanobacteria producing hydrocarbon fuels out of wastewater, CO2, and sunlight. One startup called Joule Unlimited was just issued a patent for one that produces tank-ready diesel at a rate of 20,000 gallons/acre/year anywhere the sun shines strong and nutrient rich water is available (municipal wastewater is like ambrosia for these cyanobacteria) at the equivalent price of diesel produced from $30/bbl crude oil. They claim to be able to plug different genes into the same critters to produce a wide range of hydrocarbon fuels – diesel was just the first one. They’re building a pilot plant about 20 miles from where I live in south central Texas right next to a municipal wastewater treatment plant. This is where our fuels will come from in the not very distant future and CO2 will become a commodity with restrictions on how much you can remove from the atmosphere instead of how much you can add to the atmosphere. Keep in mind that once synthetic biology is mature you’ll be able to build anything that can built out of carbon compounds starting from a microgram of pre-programmed bacteria. Carbon and carbon compounds are exceedingly flexible construction materials. You won’t build a house out of wood anymore, for instance, you’ll grow it out of soil, air, sunlight, and water just like you grow a tree. Being able to produce just about anything almost for free using atmospheric carbon as the basic construction material means atmospheric carbon becomes a limiting factor and there will have to laws about how much you can harvest. Sounds like science fiction but it ain’t.

David L says:
February 23, 2011 at 3:49 pm
“What I want to know is that in the summer when everyone had their AC running full blast and brownouts start occuring, what happens when millions of people start plugging in their car? Do they have to turn off the AC? Or do the brownouts turn into blackouts?”
What happens is the law of supply & demand kicks in. The price of electricity rises until demand falls to what the grid can supply. Increasing the capacity of the grid (it would have to have several times current capacity if a lot of people start driving electric vehicles) is prohibitively expensive because it has to expand horizontally. You can’t just string more or bigger wires in the existing space nor can they be stacked vertically as high tension lines need too much separation. Thus the only solution is to widen the footprint putting more towers parallel to existing towers. That in turn requires acquiring additional right-of-way in many cases buying it from private property owners (through voluntary sales or more often through condemnation and remuneration at fair market value). Obstructionism from reluctant private property owners makes this a long expensive process. This is one of main reasons I’ve not been very excited about electric vehicles aside from the price of niobium and copper to make all the drive motors and the price/performance of batteries. Electric vehicles are as much of a boondoggle as ethanol from corn if not moreso. I think you are perfectly right that they hold very little potential widespread interest unless some sort of science-fiction power supply like Iron Man has in his chest becomes reality. That’ll happen right around the time we begin using matter-transporters like they have on Star Trek which would then make electric vehicles obsolete anyhow. 🙂

Here is my worry.
For those of us who live and work in spread out rural areas, we will not have sufficient voting power to keep from getting shafted. This happens all the time in Oregon. The I-5 corridor dictates what we in rural areas have to suffer financially so they can feel good about saving Bambi. All the while, we need to eat Bambi because that is food grazing out our back door while the packaged stuff is 10’s of miles away. The price of oil, if we refuse to dig, will turn us rednecks into rather angry rednecks.

To whoever was asking about the power/density of batteries compared to liquid hydrocarbon fuels…
Let me know right away when an electric passenger aircraft goes into production. Except for a couple of very exotic expensive solar powered low speed single passenger experimental planes there ain’t no such animal. Electric powered aircraft are restricted to R/C model planes because you can’t begin to approach the energy/density of liquid (at room temperature so they don’t require exotic storage tanks) hydrocarbon fuels with batteries no matter how much you are willing to pay for the batteries.