Brief news by Ryan Maue
The recent oil price shock likely hasn’t figured into the February sales numbers at GM or Nissan, which announced their electric vehicle sales numbers for the month. Actually, there wasn’t an announcement, but you can find the information buried in a PDF file:
GM “delivered” 281 Volts in February, which is a function of the extremely slow nationwide roll-out of the newfangled buggy. This is clearly the window of opportunity with the much higher gas prices to take advantage (of) consumers who may spring the cash for an electric car. Then, they can watch their new PG&E Smart Meter spin wildly in delight. Either way, it’s very early in the game.
Indeed, with gasoline prices soaring past $4 a gallon in California and elsewhere, the demand for the Volt and Nissan Leaf should continue to soar. Coupled with generous government subsidies provided by Uncle Sam, a new Volt may provide quite a charge to the US economy, or not. With the announcement of Ipad 2.0 yesterday by Steve Jobs, early adopters will be lining up again to buy a thinner, better version of favorite toy. It’s early in the game for the Volt, Leaf, and other electric buggies, but when supply ramps up to meet the burgeoning demand, we can expect the marketplace to expand with many more options. However, until then, outfits like Consumer Reports aren’t exactly enthused with the efficiency of the Volt of the Leaf, considering the sticker.
It gets worse. CR figures the cost of recharging the Volt would work out to about 5.7 cents a mile for electric mode and 10 cents a mile for gas. Yet a Toyota Prius, which gets about 50 miles a gallon, would cost 6.8 cents a mile to operate. A Prius costs half as much as a Volt.CR seems to feel a little better about the all-electric Leaf. It borrowed one from Nissan while it awaits delivery of its own. The $35,270 electric car had its range severely restricted by the cold weather that has gripped the East, much like the Volt. The range has been averaging 65 miles, not the 100 miles that Nissan bills. Plus the mileage gauge isn’t that accurate in the cold when electric heaters gobble up kilowatts. Instead of the 36 miles of range that the car said it had, one tester got 19.
Yet CR said other than range, it liked a lot of things about the Leaf. It accelerated rapidly and climbed hills well. It said it would be a good second car in urban area if it is in “a temperate climate.” Guess that rules out the Northeast, Midwest, deserts and a bunch of other places.
1) They make zero sense in a cold northern climate…urban or rural.
2) Makes no sense to substitute gasoline for coal..many of us only get coal power.
3) You can by (what?) three Ford Focus cars for the same price as a Volt.
4) Subsidizing people with above-average incomes is immoral. If rich folks want an electric car, let ’em go crazy … on their own dime.
A great idea with VERY limited application for many many people.
Clive
Alberta .. where are have been 15 to 20C below average for days…bah. ☺
Tesla reminds me of DeLorean. I think it’s a front for something.
Dan;
Right. Slipped a decimal point, sorry!
Poptech;
That’s household 110V current. Virtually all owners connect to 220V high amperage outlets they install at home, which cuts the time to 3½ to 8 hrs. (depending on amperage). Further, on a daily basis very few people use the whole range/charge, so most recharges are a fraction of that.
From the Edmunds article:
Gasoline engine-driven cars are not giving up. Chevrolet Cruze “Eco” achieves 42 miles per gallon highway (US measurements). http://www.chevrolet.com/cruze
Interesting how they did it. Lowered the entire car 10 mm (millimeters, almost half an inch), ultra-low rolling resistance tires, small engine with turbocharger, front air dam, smooth underpan to reduce wind resistance, blocked some air inlets at highway speed to reduce wind resistance, but most importantly, low gear ratio overdrive. With a 12.6 gallon fuel tank, it can achieve about 450 miles between stops for gas. And it costs considerably less than the electric offerings or hybrids.
In the few areas where there is pumped storage (e.g., Castaic Lake in LA county), a large number of electrics drawing current at night would make the pumped storage useless.
Jem, Actually I am in the battery business, but not in Li-Ion development. The Litium-Ion has only been around en masse in the market place since the early 90’s. If we look at one particular popular cell the Samsung ICR18650 it has gone from about 1 Ah in 1990 to 2.6 Ah today so it hasn’t actually double per decade. Also most of the improvemrnt is due to their ability to improve their materials and processes of manufacturing. This cell doubled in capacity during the first decade, but rate of increase is clearly diminishing. You can only push the existing chemistry so far. The expectation of ever greater capacities is unrealistic barring some astounding breakthrough. Heck, it takes more than 18 months just to develop and tool up a new battery.
http://www.electrochem.org/dl/ma/201/pdfs/0259.pdf
http://www.batteryonestop.com/baotongusa/products/datasheets/li-ion/Samsung-SDI-ICR18650-26A.pdf
Roger Sowell says:
March 3, 2011 at 6:49 pm
Gasoline engine-driven cars are not giving up. Chevrolet Cruze “Eco” achieves 42 miles per gallon highway (US measurements). http://www.chevrolet.com/cruze
Interesting how they did it. Lowered the entire car 10 mm (millimeters, almost half an inch), ultra-low rolling resistance tires, small engine with turbocharger, front air dam, smooth underpan to reduce wind resistance, blocked some air inlets at highway speed to reduce wind resistance, but most importantly, low gear ratio overdrive. With a 12.6 gallon fuel tank, it can achieve about 450 miles between stops for gas. And it costs considerably less than the electric offerings or hybrids.
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Kinda sounds like they talked to a NASCAR engineer.
Hmmm.
I always thought our elected officials had the answers.
Exactly, the solutions to some of the technical issues create other unacceptable problems for the user.
Electric cars are niche cars suitable for a specific driving profile and not flexible enough to accommodate those day to day issues that real families have.
If the electric car was your only means of transportation, and you spent the day running errands, pull in the driveway on a depleted battery pack and shortly after get a call that your daughter needs you to come pick her up at college because of some personal emergency, will you :
Tell her to wait for 24 hours you will come get her when the car is charged?
Drive your electric car over to a rental agency and rent a reliable gasoline powered car for the 300 mile trip?
Tell her to call a cab?
Call a friend and ask to borrow his gasoline powered car because yours is out of juice?
There are a countless reasonably likely situations where a single electric car simply will not get the job done outside of a core city metro environment. Here in the western U.S. many of us will drive 200 miles round trip to go shopping, or visit friends. I’ve driven 300 miles round trip to meet a friend for lunch, or to go to a special event like an airshow or auto race. If I wanted to go to the Cheyenne Frontier Days rodeo in Cheyenne Wyoming it is a 120 mile drive one way (240 mile round trip). If I wanted to take visiting friends up to the hot springs pool in Glenwood Springs it is a 140 mile trip one way, (280 mile round trip). Meet some friends in Colorado Springs then drive to the summit of Pikes peak, from where I live 80 miles each way plus about 25 miles 35 miles driving up to the summit and around the Cripple creek mining district (230 miles round trip).
These are not at all unusual day trips in this part of the country. None of them would be possible in an electric car, so at best it has to be a second car used only for short trips. Add in the charging delays and it becomes totally impractical for many drivers. I know quite a few people that commute 100 – 150 miles a day to work. My daily round trip commute is only 60 miles but that would leave the car nearly discharged and useless for hours after I got home from work.
Larry
Brian H, “That’s household 110V current. Virtually all owners connect to 220V high amperage outlets they install at home, which cuts the time to 3½ to 8 hrs. (depending on amperage). Further, on a daily basis very few people use the whole range/charge, so most recharges are a fraction of that.”
Except you can only count on a 110-volt outlet being commonly available if you are out and running low on a charge. So do you sleep in your car while it recharges? I can go to any gas station and be in and out in 2-3 minutes. The car is also absolutely useless for any trip beyond it’s driving range of 160 miles for the base model at $50,000. I can get a Porsche for $48,000, I would rather have a Porsche.
Also why would a “successful” company need a $465 million dollar bailout from the government?
I happened to have dinner with a Nissan exec this evening; they have a backlog in Japan and will fill that before shipping any more Leafs to the US.
A Leaf would work fine for me. Our second car never needs to drive more than forty miles in a day (usually under 10).
My TDI diesel gets substantially crappier mileage in cold weather, as well. On my short commute, I’m lucky to get into the low 30’s mpg. In warmer weather, on longer drives, it’s easily 40+. Nothing gets good mileage in cold weather.
The Tesla roadster is such a great feat of engineering that you have the possibility of losing control of the car due to suspension bolts coming loose and as a bonus it can catch on fire! I am so amazed.
Tesla Motors recalls 345 Roadster sports cars (Los Angeles Times, May 29, 2009)
Tesla Motors Recalling Roadster Over Fire Concerns (ABC News, October 8, 2010)
Maybe if the government injects hundreds of millions more these issues can be “addressed”. I mean with such “huge” production numbers already I can only imagine what greater feats of engineering genius we can expect if it was ever produced in larger quantities.
The business “geniuses” at Tesla Motors tripled their losses from 2009,
Tesla Motors’ loss widens 177% in 2010 (Los Angeles Times, February 16, 2011)
That is nothing that a little more government bailout money cannot fix!
juanslayton says:
March 3, 2011 at 7:10 pm
In the few areas where there is pumped storage (e.g., Castaic Lake in LA county), a large number of electrics drawing current at night would make the pumped storage useless.
Greetings JS– you’ve been very quiet lately but always make good points. I’m also familiar with a pumped storage development and scaling-up these things to be really useful is a problem. The one I know about (having visited when it was being carved out of the mountain top) can be seen using Wikipedia and Google Earth. This is Kinzua (kin-zoo) Dam in northern Pennsylvania. Read about it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinzua_Dam
Use these coordinates [ 41.839736 , -79.002619 ] in Google Earth. Zoom out until you can see the entire reservoir and compare it to the small circular storage basin on the ridge-top to the south. The reservoir extends into NY State but the photo color changes. Turn Photos on in the Layers menu. The single photo to the left (east) is a nice fall image when the trees have partly turned color. Can you scale this up to be really helpful? In whose back yard?
Brian H, “Batteries will work fine. Users of the TeslaMotors Roadster have almost no problems with charging or range.”
By no problem do you mean losing 30% of the car’s range after 50,000 miles?
My gas tank does not shrink after 50,000 miles.
From above:
“Which is better the leaf or volt was discussed over at Greentech media recently- http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/the-leaf-or-the-volt-which-is-better/
A comment in the post notes that some public charging places (and businesses) in the LA area are providing the electricity to charge your EV for free…………..”
No. The electricity in these LA charging places is NOT free. It’s just that somebody ELSE is paying for what the electric car user is stealing (er, getting) without paying for satisfaction of HIS peace of mind and eco-nicety.
Poptech says:
March 3, 2011 at 7:55 pm (Edit)
Brian H, “That’s household 110V current. Virtually all owners connect to 220V high amperage outlets they install at home, which cuts the time to 3½ to 8 hrs. (depending on amperage).
The charge for my 220 volt power cable for a welder (the 120 volt for the milling machine, drill press and lathe were already present) to the garage/workshop was 1.50 per foot for the cable, $20.00 – odd dollars for each of the connectors, and 350.00 for the electrician’s hours. The 220 volt double breaker was included in the electrician’s hourly charge, and I did NOT need an extra circuit breaker panel or sub-panel. (If those were needed I would have needed probably another 200+ dollars) I did not ask for, nor get charged for, the probable city inspection fee and building permit – since I am not inside a city limits.
And this was in private house already wired elsewhere with adequate wires and connectors and breaker panels for the extra current! (NOT an apartment building or open parking garage or open street or open lot susceptible to even more corruption and theft of the copper.)
How may cycles does a battery last? 1000 – 3 years with daily use.
http://www.mpoweruk.com/lithium_failures.htm#lifetime
Brian H says:
March 3, 2011 at 2:45 pm
Makes TeslaMotors’ strategy look good. It started at the top end, with a sports/supercar (Roadster) worth over $100K, with 230 (real proven in use) mile range. Next up a $58K (minus any rebates etc.) 7-passenger sports sedan. Its range will vary with battery options, up to 300 mi. (‘Model S’).
The folks at Tesla have indeed been very strategic in their planning. They’ve managed to acquire nearly a half a billion dollars of financing on the taxpayers nickel. They are lobbying for an essentially infinite extension of the buyer subsidies they have thus far enjoyed. BTW, perhaps you could explain the logic of, in a time when the government is borrowing almost half of every dollar it spends, subsidizing the automotive purchases of people who can afford vehicles in the $60K-$120K segment. Not to mention that if everything goes as planned the vast majority of their cars will be produced outside the country. Their website projects 20,000 units as a goal, but indicates their U.S. facility will max out at 5-7 thousand.
As I understand it their battery pack is composed of thousands of LI batteries similar to ones used in many of today’s modern technological wonders. They project these will be viable for 7 years or 100,000 miles. I don’t know if you own many of these toys, but from my own limited experience with the batteries in the ones I’ve owned, that seems extraordinarily optimistic. They are also quite coy about what the cost of replacing them will be. A 5 or 6 year old BMW or Merc which sold new for $60k still has a somewhat decent resale value. If your going to try and unload one of these beauties at a similar vintage, with the buyer facing the prospect of mandatorily replacing a very pricy battery pack in the near future, you’ll probably be looking at resale values on par with a Yugo, which makes the depreciation part of the cost per mile calculation somewhat problematic.
They also indicate that as a weight saving measure the body panels of the S will be aluminum stampings. Aluminum is indeed a nice weight saver, but I’m reminded of a very memorable incident on a vacation trip years ago. We decided to spend the day at a Concours D’elegance and I was trying to get some snaps of a lovely old Italian roadster when a passing mouthbreather decided to stop to remove some crud from the bottom of his shoe. To support himself in this endeavor he decided to lean his hand on the fender of the car, promptly creating the opportunity for several thousand dollars worth of body work and the purest example of near psychotic rage from the car’s owner that I’ve ever personally observed. Modern molded panels aren’t anywhere near as delicate as that Italian beauty’s hand beaten panels, but there is a reason they’re mostly limited to vehicles which aren’t likely to be subjected to the vagaries of a daily driver, and suggest another reason the long term depreciation on these things is likely to be dramatic.
” most electric cars would be charged at night”
The assumption made by many is that solar cells will charge the electric cars during the day, and that these same electric cars will power the grid during the night.
Otherwise, the charging losses from electric cars and coal fired power plants create more CO2 than simply running cars on liquified coal.
MikeEE says:
March 3, 2011 at 2:03 pm
They forgot to include the depreciation of the batteries in the cost per mile. Also, it will likely double in cost as the batteries age and their capacity diminishes.
Add to that the replacement cost of new batteries (if still available in five years) and environmental disposal costs, I presume you have them. Do you have a lot of spare generating capacity in the US? In OZ we are on the thin edge on hot summer days.
It is much the same logic as applied to public transit. A modern diesel bus creates about the same amount of pollution as 40 modern gas cars. A bus seats about 40 people. So, unless busses run full, and all cars carry only 1 person, there is less pollution if people drive cars than if they use buses.
When Al Gore and the president of the bus company, along with their wives and children start taking the bus every day then I’ll be a believer. They will always have an excuse why they don’t use the bus, and plenty of reasons why we should. Hypocrites one and all.
The idea of not having to use a refined liquid fuel to get from place to place has always appealed to me. However, early in my engineering career, I came to the conclusion that electric cars were not going to be practical until there was a break through in battery technology. Which is yet to happen. For a while I thought super capacitors had chance, but that doesn’t seemed to have worked out.
However, during the 20th century many other ways of storing the energy needed to move a vehicle down the road were investigated. My personal favorite is hydraulics. The energy is stored as high pressure hydraulic fluid. A hydraulic motor can run in reverse as a pump, so regenerative braking is possible. Also you don’t have to replace the energy storage container like you do a battery pack.
Over the years individual inventors have actually built hydraulic powered cars. But I don’t know why there hasn’t been more R&D on them.
@u.k. (us):
“Kinda sounds like they talked to a NASCAR engineer.
Hmmm.
I always thought our elected officials had the answers.”
Well. We (engineers) have always had the answers, many of which are developed by the racing teams as you so correctly point out. In fact, we know how to achieve marvelous miles-per-gallon on vehicles, well over 200 miles per gallon. The problem is how to achieve high miles-per-gallon while keeping the car affordable, meeting all government regulations, and having a car that is appealing to at least some segment of buyers.
Cutting vehicle weight is paramount to high mpg. Reducing wind resistance is also very important. Using a small engine with high horsepower is also key. Other factors include minimizing losses due to transmission and friction, also tire losses, recovering energy lost during braking, running the engine at low rpm, shutting off un-needed cylinders at cruising speed (the 8-6-4 strategy), and finally, not wasting fuel idling the engine. However, all these things cost money.
What does not cost money is to reduce the cruising speed, perhaps from 75 miles per hour to 60 miles per hour. That one step typically increases mpg by 15 to 20 percent, but it makes for a more time-consuming trip. I also was able to increase my car’s overall mpg 20 percent by purchasing new tires that are made from the low rolling resistance materials. The tires were on sale at no added cost compared to conventional tires, and have the same warranty so I bought them.
Who needs an electric car when you can run on walnut shells and wood chips?
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XPH3fV1Fd4&fs=1&hl=en_US%5D
C’mon now, I thought you boys were capitalists.
This is just a government “picking winners” and that always ends in tears because it is at best guided capitalism but usually just socialism with a decent haircut. Forcing people to want electric cars by using taxpayers dosh will never, ever work because people don’t want them.
People want cheap, reliable comfortable personal transportation. Ol’ Hank Ford didn’t get subsidies to put out the Model T. He just saw what people wanted and produced it at an affordable price. This “dirigisme” is doomed.