Full disclosure: I own an electric car, and I think they are useful for city transportation. However, having owned one for a decade, I can say that it hasn’t been practical or cost-effective. John Hardy believes they are the future, I’ll let you, the reader, decide. – Anthony Watts
The demise of the Western auto industry: Part 1 – the basics
By John Hardy
Preamble
In the West, almost all climate change activists consider Electric Vehicles (EVs) important because they are believed to emit less CO2 per mile. In contrast, many (but not all) climate sceptics consider them a waste of space because they regard them as a solution to a non-problem: they believe that all that EVs are good for is virtue signalling.
Actually, and quite regardless of “the environment”, EVs are poised to inflict the mother of all disruptions on the automotive industry. This can’t be explained (or dismissed) in a soundbite, so this is the first of three posts setting out why this might be so. This first post is mostly background. The second addresses the problem for the established automakers. The third addresses some misapprehensions about EVs.
The LA times reported in 2009 that the outgoing CEO of GM said that the biggest mistake he made was to kill the electric EV1 and throw away the technology lead that GM had acquired[1] , [2]. It isn’t just GM. The turgid response of all the big Western automakers leaves them at risk of being overtaken by agile Eastern competitors in the same way that the Swiss (mechanical) watch industry was overtaken in the 1980s by agile Eastern competitors making cheap accurate quartz watches[3]
What is so great about electric motors?
The internal combustion engine (ICE) is a complex beast which needs lots of air, lots of cooling and which generates large volumes of smelly exhaust. It has a high parts count, is a high maintenance device, and is plagued by noise and vibration. Worst of all it has an absurdly narrow torque band and won’t run at all below (typically) 500 r.p.m. or so. A lot of the complexity and expense in a modern ICE car is focused on minimizing these deficiencies.
By contrast, an electric motor is a model of flexibility and simplicity. Figure 1 shows the floor pan of the Tesla Model S.
The entire drive train consists of two metal cans, sandwiching a fixed-ratio final drive. The motor revs to about 15,000 r.pm. It produces good torque at zero r.p.m. and (in some models) peaks at over 400HP. No clutch, torque converter or variable-ratio gearbox is needed. The motor is an ordinary AC induction motor. It has no brushes and (apart from the bearings) one moving part. It contains no rare earth magnets. The inverter is solid state. No exhaust system, turbocharger, oil pump, coil, distributer, intake air filter, complex vibration damping or heat shields; no pistons, valves, pushrods, camshafts, lifters, catalytic converters……….
The end result is smooth, seamless but ruthless acceleration and whisper-quiet cruising. Some models have a smaller drive train between the front wheels. The two together can accelerate a 4,000lb car at around 1G from standstill to 60 m.p.h. in under 3 seconds.
There is more. The inverter can adjust the motor torque in milliseconds so traction control is far more accurate than for a piston engine. (Elon Musk once Tweeted “Tesla dual motor cars are also all-wheel drive. Main goal of dual motor was actually insane traction on snow. Insane speed was a side effect” [4] ).
The motor can also act as a brake, which recovers energy (much of the energy used to climb a hill is put back into the battery rolling down the other side). The same characteristic makes it possible to drive on just one pedal; press to go, release to stop. It also saves on brake wear (one example was an electric taxi that did over 100,000 miles on the original brake pads).
Why now?
Electric drive dominated the early years of the automobile, and the electric motor has never ceased to be vastly better than a piston engine for driving a vehicle. There were however two big snags and one lesser one with electric drive. All three have been solved in recent years.
The first problem was energy storage. Piston engines may be inefficient, but motor fuel packs a huge amount of energy into a small volume. Once a distribution infrastructure is in place, the fuel is easily and quickly replenished which allowed essentially unconstrained travel. By contrast the lead acid batteries that dominated electric traction until recently were totally outclassed on both counts; too little energy and too much time to replenish.
Enter the lithium ion battery. Compared with lead-acid, this stores maybe three times the energy per unit of weight or volume (some a bit more, some a bit less). It has a far longer life than a lead-acid battery, is tolerant of partial charging, has no significant memory effect problems and (critically) can be charged very fast. 20 minutes for 80% charge is easily achievable with little effect on cycle life using modern batteries if you can suck power out of the wall fast enough [5]
The second big change has been the development of power electronics. Until the 1970s, electric motors were hard to control [6]. At worst they were either on or off. At best, control was lethargic. That all changed with so-called Vector Control. Inside a modern motor controller (sometimes called an “inverter” if the motor is AC) there are a number of huge transistors, capable of switching hundreds of amps. With cunning and some capacitors these can produce virtually infinitely variable output. A modern EV can be inched along at a creeping pace with far more precision than an ICE car equipped with a clutch, and with less effort: no clutch slipping needed.
The third, lesser, but still important change has been the growing capability of digital processors to do complex calculations in real time. Until quite recently, electric motoring has depended upon series (brushed) direct current (DC) motors. These work well at low speeds but they tend to run out of torque at high r.p.m. and are more difficult to cool. The advent of modern microprocessors has made it possible to synthesise three phase alternating current (AC) at the necessary power levels from a battery. This in turn allows the use of simple induction motors – no brushes to wear out and better cooling. An induction motor is essentially a hunk of iron on a stick inside a tube containing some electrical windings. Machines don’t come much simpler. [Some manufacturers prefer permanent magnet motors. They are smaller and lighter yet, but rely on rare earth magnets which creates supply issues. These motors can also terminate themselves in a sudden melt-down if they get too hot. I am not a fan.]
What remains to be done?
Several things need to happen before EVs become acceptable as a complete replacement for piston engine cars: broadly price, range and fast-charge
Firstly price. This is partly an issue of scale. If you make a million of the same model car, cost per car is a lot less than if you make 10,000. The financial services company UBS recently tore down and analysed a Chevy Bolt. Their conclusion? “total cost of consumer ownership can reach parity with combustion engines from 2018” [7]
Secondly range and thirdly fast charge. The average private car in the UK does about 21 miles a day. In the US, it is about 30. Most people do most of their driving either commuting or local driving. The problem is the half-dozen trips a year to visit granny or go on holiday. There is also a small percentage of users who do a high daily mileage as part of their work.
My personal opinion is that a 300 mile range should work fine for almost everyone, so long as fast charge to 80% capacity takes no more than about 20 minutes. This is just based on the idea that I wouldn’t want to drive more than 300 miles without a coffee and a potty stop.
Tesla’s high-end cars are well past 300 mile range. Even the (relatively) humble Renault Zoe which initially had a 130 mile range has (or soon will have) a 250 mile range option. Fast charge has some distance to go yet in practice, but there is no intrinsic problem in reaching a 20 minute charge.
Price, range and fast charge. EVs are a “whole system” problem that goes far beyond just making a better box for the punter to sit in.
Conclusion
This has been a quick run-through of the theory of EVs. If you are not convinced, go and drive one. Trickle along at three miles an hour listening to the birds sing then floor it. By the time you reach 30 you will be convinced.
Part 2 of this series looks at the problems this creates for the established Western automakers, and part 3 considers common misconceptions which lead some people to conclude that EVs will not be viable in the near future.
References
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F#Response_from_General_Motors
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_crisis
[4] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/560900676453433344
[5] Tests run by the author using a 3C charge rate and lithium iron phosphate cells showed a rate of capacity loss only slightly steeper than similar cells at a 0.5C charge rate [1C is a charge rate numerically equal to the Amp-hr capacity of the battery e.g. 40 Amps for a 40 Amp-hr battery]. A 3C is nominally a full charge in 20 minutes (1/3rd of an hour)
[6] http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1325757
[7] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2017/05/19/electric-vehicles-cost-conventional-cars-2018/
there are a lot of ifs….
If you can charge an electric car 80% in 20 minutes..
If you can manufacture an electric car for the same price as a gasoline fueled one…
Reminds me of wind power…..it will work IF there is storage for the surplus power when the wind really is blowing……
Who cares how simple an electric motor is.
IC engines last well over 100K miles. Batteries don’t last half as long and cost a lot more to replace.
Replacing an ICE is $5k and up. Transmission is $3k and up. Don’t forget about the alternator, starter, cooling system, etc., all of which fail periodically, not to mention needing substantial periodic maintenance. A Dexos oil change on my Chevy pickup is about $70. I’ve paid $0.00 for maintenance on my Leaf.
Battery replacement cost is roughly $3k to $5k currently, and going down.. The EV components are mostly electrical or electronic and have shown very high life spans so far. We’ll have to see how that works out in the long term.
The original thought was that when the batteries wore out, the vehicle would be junked, but that isn’t happening. People seem to buy a used pack or a new pack. It is also possible to replace just the few degraded/failed batteries in a pack and get lots more life out of it. That service is just starting to be available.
$70 for an oil change. You were being ripped off bub.
Ditto for the rest of your numbers.
Try getting an oil change for a 6 or 7 litre diesel engine MarkW. You can barely buy the 10 litres for less than $70 (2.5 US gallons) or more for the synthetic oil.
I searched on ICE replacement, I found a range of figures for a rebuilt – not new – engine from 2.5K to 4K. Battery packs are 3-5K and coming down. And you haven’t factored in items like alternators, radiators, belts, universal joints in your ICE analysis. Nor the time you must do without your car.
Here’s one question:
EV’s are good for Urban driving is the big selling point. However, there is already a pretty good solution for urban driving out there- its called “Public Transportation”. I can’t speak for its energy economy- but most larger cities have an infrastructure for this (I will refrain from calling it a “Good” infrastructure- living in the Washington DC area that I do)
Having stated that- what does an EV do that Public Transport doesn’t? Save for operating those few hours when its closed?
Interesting question.
The are large parts of London where any sort of car is not necessary… so too in many European cities.
I gues sit is in the suburbs and fringes of the city where people do commute 20 or 30 miles a day each way that the EV comes into its own.
(There is a massive difference between the US an Europe in terms of distance driven and commuting – and cars in urban areas generally. For example, you will not find an affordable parking garage anywhere in London… plus you may need to pay a congestion charge. Public transport only sensible option)
Griff
“The are large parts of London where any sort of car is not necessary”
Please, there are innumerable places in London where the car is almost barred from entering, and some completely barred. Walking, public transport and cycling are almost necessary to get around London now.
And public transport still sucks, the underground is overheated and foul in summer, and cold and foul in winter. Buses are unreliable and although frequent, they are old, badly maintained, cramped, smelly and uncomfortable. And the bendy bus ‘revolution’ was a complete disaster. Trains are marginally better in that they have, eventually, been modernised, but commuting is expensive, getting a seat is a lottery, and the trains are run during the day virtually empty, with the same number of carriages.
How can anyone in their right mind consider London public transport good?
Nor is their a single, major power station sited in London, they are all in rural areas, yet Londoners bitch about pollution. Were they to suffer the emissions of their own activities they might not live in the damn place in the first place.
Get you where you want to go, when you want to be there…
” can be charged very fast. 20 minutes for 80% charge is easily achievable with little effect on cycle life”
Reading such things, I know that the author is full of it or is wishfull thinking. Charging 80% in 20 minutes corresponds to a charge rate of 2C, a huge rate for a LiIon battery which will divide by at least half its useful life. Last time I check the state of the art (e.g. http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/charging_lithium_ion_batteries) and at the best vendors (I mount myself my battery packs), there is no Lithium technology that can sustain a 2C charge rate without great harm to its life expectancy.
I know it for using an electric vehicle for my daily commutes. It’s the most efficient, convenient, fun, cheap and “green” mode of transportation, and most of time faster than a car. But it’s an electric monocycle (yes MONOcycle), for my town commutes of less than 30 km/day. That’s all the electric motor is good at for commuters, so far and in any predictible future.
Charging in 20 minutes?? Stop dreaming.
It would be possible, but it will have an impact equivalent to running any car at max motor speed for 20 minutes, saying there is “little effect on cycle life” is a lie.
And yet people owning a tesla frequently do this. The key thing you missed is that all the cells in the car are not all charged at the same time. The tesla battery manger software charges one group of batteries initially and then switches to another group when the first is done. The charger also facts in temperature current stat of charge and other factors into the charging. As a result the larger will charge to 80% capacity in 20 to 30 minutes. Full charge takes 1 hour. After 30 minutes the charging rate slows dramatically.Full charge takes 1 hour. And there is no significant loss of capacity or battery life with frequent use of the charger.
https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/how-bad-for-the-battery-is-supercharging.72073/
An interesting read, especially the Prof. Jeff Dahn presentation. But reading comments from Tesla owners, I believe two things are clear:
1. Many Tesla owners “nurse” their battery to try to obtain a reasonable lifespan, by carefully setting up their charge rates and making sure that they don’t charge their battery fully.
2. This battery “nursing” is incompatible with obtaining the maximum driving range.
In short, yes, you can adopt charging regimes that will maximise your battery lifespan, but you cannot also obtain maximum driving range.
Frederic 20 minutes is 3C and if you bothered to read the footnotes you would see that I have personally conducted long term tests on precisy this (3C)
Please forgive me if anyone else has mentioned this and I’ve read over their comment.
Just how do you achieve regenerative braking with an induction motor? To operate an induction motor as an alternator (look up ‘induction generator’) the stator winding has to be excited with alternating current of an appropriate frequency.
When your move a wire through a magnetic field you get electric current though the wire. There is no place on earth with a no magnetic field. The earth has one and the metal used in the car has one. The rotor of a tesla is steel with a copper winding. When it rotates these stray magnetic field induce current in the rotor wire creating a striver magnetic field the magnetic field will continue to build until it saturates. At that point your can use the store coil to extract some of the energy to recharge the battery. This is how the large induction generators at conventional power plants work.
The Earth’s magnetic field is not strong enough to do that.
The induction motor uses a “rotating magnetic field” in the stator (outside, stationary winding) by Faraday’s law of magnetic induction to “induce” a magnetic field in the rotor (inside, rotating steel cylinder with fat copper windings embedded in it). Then the rotating magnetic field of the stator attracts the induced magnetic field in the rotor to make it go. Neat trick and it took a not-social-normal Serbian person to figure this out.
For the induction motor to produce torque, the rate at which the stator magnetic field rotates has to be not too much faster than the rate the rotor rotates (not too much “slip”). Induction motors fed with 3-phase 60-Hz (50 Hz in Europe and parts of the East) work best when their shaft rotates just a little bit slower than would be the 60 Hz rate, and these motors are only suitable for near-constant speed applications in factories and commercial buildings supplied with a 3-phase connection to the power company. In the Tesla, named after the not-social-normal Serbian person, a power electronic module supplies a varying frequency 3-phase current to the motor windings to allow the motor to run over a wide range of speeds.
If an induction motor shaft is driven faster than the rotating magnetic field, the motor shaft undergoes mechanical resistance that represents power back fed into the stator coil. You still need some way of “exciting” (energizing) the stator coil with the correct frequency to make this happen, but the effect is that the induction motor is now acting as an induction generator.
Just to add to Paul Milenkovic’s comment:
In order to self generate the magnetic field in the armature so that it can act as a generator, the proper phase between voltage and current must be met in the armature. The stator winding must be capacitively loaded so that mechanical energy can induce the armature magnetic field. This is the same phase angle between the stator and armature when the machine acts as a motor. See AIG – Asynchronous Induction Generator
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induction_generator
Mr. Hardy’s claimed advantages of EV: “The internal combustion engine (ICE) is a complex beast which needs lots of air, lots of cooling and which generates large volumes of smelly exhaust. It has a high parts count, is a high maintenance device, and is plagued by noise and vibration. Worst of all it has an absurdly narrow torque band and won’t run at all below (typically) 500 r.p.m. or so. A lot of the complexity and expense in a modern ICE car is focused on minimizing these deficiencies.”
1. When I was young (many years ago), cars weren’t expected to live beyond 100,000 miles (and to have a “ring and valve job” along the way). Oil filters needed changing at 3,000 mile intervals. With Synthetic oil, modern engines are happy at 25,000 miles (more than manufacturers recommend, but true). Yes, gasoline engines are MECHANICALLY more complex than electric motors (motor controls, not so much). Nowadays nearly all junked cars have engines with years of service life left and tune-ups just aren’t needed because your car will tell you what’s hurting (you still should check belts and hoses). Whole lotta research has gone into gas vehicles and improvements continue. And no, the “expenses and complexities” of modern cars are due to regulations, not mechanical engineering.
No, modern gas engines aren’t “plagued by noise and vibration” nor dependent on high maintenance.
2. Yes, gas engines have a narrower torque range than electric motors. That’s what transmissions are for.
3. What car manufacturers ought to do is to revisit the 42 volt system (a hot topic when I was younger). They gave up on it because they didn’t have the electronic parts we have today that would enable the car to run the drive train at 36v and the rest of the car at 12v. (The biggest unsolved problem back in the day is that switches that were fine with 12v suffered arcing at 36 and didn’t last very long).
If they redesigned the starter motor (and bell housing) so that it became a motor/generator (alternator, really) and could push the vehicle nicely in stop & start driving — and shut it’s engine off when the vehicle is stopped, they’d have a hybrid that’s truly the best of all worlds, even with 3 12 volt lead acid batteries in series. And, it would be far more efficient than EV (what efficiency do you really think is achieved when you add in generation and transmission costs to get the juice to your battery?)
My ’86 F150 is currently around 250,000 miles. The truck has many issues, but the engine is not the worst. My ’09 VW Rabbit has 65,000 miles and has more expensive issues than the old truck.
Just my .02.
The battery in a Tesla is wired together from a bajillion individual cells. Sort of like SNL’s Julia Louis-Drefus pitching the “Mercedes AAA Class” https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=SNL+mercedes+aaa+class&&view=detail&mid=F3C63990C78C1EB35F06F3C63990C78C1EB35F06&rvsmid=4B075BB04CE50B2B83D74B075BB04CE50B2B83D7&FORM=VDQVAP.
One reason for this (Tesla’s car with rechargeable lithium cells, not SNL’s disposable alkaline cells) was to piggy back on the economy-of-scale afforded by the laptop computer industry’s use of a small battery cell.
So the ICE engine has one form of complexity, the EV has another. Tesla’s answer to the complexity of their battery pack in the Gigafactory, where automation and modern mass production methods are expected to give this company a “first-mover” advantage over the existing auto companies building EVs from batteries sourced by other companies. On the other hand the existing auto companies have used the past 150 years or so to manage the complexity of the ICE engine with automation and mass production methods to get us to where we are today.
Were gasoline to be expensive and batteries to remain expensive, perhaps a plug-in hybrid vehicle would be the best approach. Tesla is betting on the “cost curve bending down” for batteries, making the full electric car the desired end point where gasoline is expensive, either because of Peak Oil or because the policy response to Climate Change concerns is to put high taxes on gasoline.
I have read the claim that the Tesla battery pack is “good” (in some sense of not degrading into uselessness or failing in some high percentage of high-mileage cars) for 3000 charge cycles — I think I remember that if you could get 500 cycles out of a lead-acid battery under favorable conditions. Considering 200 miles on a full charge, they were claiming that the battery is good for 600,000 miles. If this is well in excess of what a Tesla owner would hang on to a car, maybe they want to reuse the battery pack in their Power Wall product?
Another claim is that battery prices are trending towards $100/kWHr storage capacity. If a battery is good for 3000 cycles, you are talking 3 cents/kWHr stored over the lifetime of the battery, and that would be a game changer not only for EVs but also for renewable energy.
One has to be careful here because are they talking about 1 kWHr charged into the battery and some lesser amount drawn out or the other way around, and with what efficiency do you “round trip” energy through a lithium battery? The EPA rates the Tesla at “100 EMpg”, taking into account that a gallon of gas is 120,000 BTU (HHV), 3400 BTU in a kWHr, a car at a constant 60 MPH being a “reasonable” proxy for the EPA Highway test, the Tesla consumes 21 kW or 28 HP under those conditions. (YMMV and indeed EPA “derates” their Highway test to better represent lead-footed consumers, but I don’t see the raw and derated numbers in the case of EVs on their Datafiles.) The Tesla S is pretty heavy but it is low aero drag, but if 100 lbs of total drag is reasonable at 60 MPH, it should take 16 HP at the “wheel rims”, so the efficiency of a Tesla from charging port to the road surface is under 60 percent? This number is consistent with what is reported for certain French EVs, largely “mini cars” size class. I have seen claims of “92 percent” efficiency for the lithium-ion cell itself, but it appears the charger port-to-road surface efficiency of current generation EVs is much lower.
Now $100/kWHr doesn’t address the concern about what if you drive in the mountains to go skiing, what if you drive to Green Bay for the Packer game and everyone wants to find a Supercharger station at the same time, what do you do in winter (use a propane heater, that may offend some purists, but is that worse than a gasoline/electric hybrid in enviro-virtue points?). But $100/kWHr would be a Big Thing, and the naysayers claimed that $1/peak watt would never be reached with solar cells, although the big cost with solar cells is not the cells but paying the pirate, er I mean contractor, to put them on your roof without making your roof leak rainwater.
If the fanbois are right, I only have to wait a few years for a nicely affordable electric car, and if they are wrong, 50 MPG highway ICE cars are in the pipeline, again because of policy influence by Climate Change concerns, but you will be able to get gasoline engine cars with very good fuel efficiency in that time frame.
There is to my knowledge only one potential technical solution to the inherent limitations of LiIon batteries for EVs, the best that exist. That is the Fiskers Nanotech LiC (lithium ion capacitor),which is a hybrid device with a novel LiIon battery anode and a supercap cathode both based on 3D laserscribed graphene. Wrote about it in a previous guest post at Climate Etc : ‘Vehicle decarbonization’. Each piece of the LiC puzzle has been demonstrated. Whether it can be put together in a commercially practical EV sized way remains to be seen.
Otherwise, EVs are mostly much ado about nothing. They simply haven’t got the temperate climate capability, range, and cost to be anything other than a virtue signalling urban rich person’s toy.
ristvan
“They simply haven’t got the temperate climate capability, range, and cost to be anything other than a virtue signalling urban rich person’s toy.”
Didn’t they say something like that when the motor car was proposed as an alternative to horses?
I like the idea of EV’s, but the cost to the taxpayer for the infrastructure is eye watering. Nor do I like the totalitarian intervention of a (UK) government telling us all we will drive EV’s by 2040, when the market is telling us otherwise.
Socialism is rife with cartels, price fixing, supply control, elitism etc. and that’s what will happen when the UK government departs from it’s usual stance of evolution over revolution.
The road of unintended consequences from government diktats is littered with failure.
I’m a devoted petrol head, brought up by a motor racing family, but it’s time we moved on, not because socialist governments tell us to, but because we collectively work with industry to reach a satisfactory conclusion.
HotScot since you were “brought up by a motor racing family” could you tell me if this is poor, good or excelent? https://www.wired.com/2014/05/garlits-electric-drag-record/
“Didn’t they say something like that when the motor car was proposed as an alternative to horses?”
No. The electric car began to take over from horses, then the ICE car took over from the electric car because the electric car had a limited range and took an age to charge.
Little has changed since then.
MarkG
Did I say anything about ICE motor cars? The statement was restricted to ‘motor cars’ whether the motive power was electric, mechanical or otherwise is inconsequential. Horseless transport was condemned in the past, in the same way many are condemning EV’s now.
BTW, I think you’ll find steam was the first iteration of the horseless carriage.
Rob Bradley
Seems reasonable, especially for an 82 year old man. But then I’m judging it from a journalist’s PR report from 2014.
What’s your point?
HotScot, no “point,” I’m just clueless regarding 183 MPH……I asked because I thought you would know.
Rob Bradley
Anyone with the courage to drive a car at 183 mph is to be admired, especially an 82 year old man. If he’s only 7mph or so off the record, my opinion is, at that age, he should be given the benefit of the doubt and carried from the podium shoulder high.
If I reach 183 mph at 82 years old it will probably be on the express route to hell.
Rob Bradley
Apart from all his other achievements, the guy’s driven at 270mph.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Garlits
The vehicle, not the driver.
“could you tell me if this is poor, good or excelent?”
The first time I ever saw an American drag racer was in 1963 at Church Fenton in the UK when the Americans brought half a dozen cars across the Pond to show us Limeys what REAL acceleration looked like.
Up to that point I had never appreciated that watching a car accelerating for a quarter of a mile in a straight line could be damn scary!
After the warm-up runs by boring Mini Coopers and the odd E-type Jaguar in double figure second elapsed times, Big Daddy Don Garlits (nice to know he’s still driving!) did the first run of the Double A Fuellers, went by at around 190MPH in under eight seconds with the wheels still spinning (that was in the days before slipper clutches).
Awesome!
So the electric dragsters are pretty close to equal to a fossil fuelled dragster in 1964.
However, I’m sure they will catch up eventually, but without the unbelievable sound and fury of an 8,000+ BHP nitromethane burning V8, they’ll never ever manage to get close to the spectacle.
The car became inexpensive when mass production was introduced.
Mass production is already available for EVs.
The Ecoult UltraBattery, consisting of a combined Lithium ion cell and a supercapitor, is currently being used in a large-scale battery backup power generation system on King Island, Australia, and will also be used in similar installations around Australia.
Here’s the link to Rud Istvan’s post. It’s worth reading:
https://judithcurry.com/2016/11/02/vehicular-decarbonisation-two-new-technologies-to-watch/
“The average private car in the UK does about 21 miles a day. In the US, it is about 30. Most people do most of their driving either commuting or local driving.
My personal opinion is that a 300 mile range should work fine for almost everyone.”
Beware of averages. For a city dweller, there are advantages that disappear for anyone else, and EV’s must compete with mass transit options. The FHWA says that male drivers age 35-54, a key market for autos, drive 18,858 miles per year, an average of about 52 miles per day… No doubt some of this is daily commute, but there is also significant longer distance driving where range would be a show stopper. 300 miles isn’t going to cut it on game day, let alone vacation.
It is only 400 miles from London to Edinburgh…
The UK isn’t a big place: so on my UK vacations I would be very unlikely to drive as much as 250 miles to get there…
I’d surely stop somewhere on the motorway too for half an hour… long enough to recharge
Really here it isn’t going to be a problem.
When current car needs replacing, I’ll surely consider an EV.
Griff
assuming you can afford a £50,000+ Telsa which will do 300 miles on a charge.
Lucky you if you can.
I too would consider an EV if it could manage 300 miles with a 20 minute stop to recharge, assuming it cost me the same as an £8,000 Vauxhall Corsa, which will do at least as well with a five minute refuel.
And if you imagine yo’re clever ignoring me, you’re not. You are like a spoiled child who won’t deal with the arguments.
There’s another factor to consider, HotScot.
In the fifty-odd years I’ve driven the length and breadth of the UK, often through the night – and quite a bit of Europe too, come to that, I can’t begin to count the times I’ve had my bacon saved by a gallon can of fuel in my boot, and I’ve saved the bacon of a fair few other drivers too, come to that.
Nor is it always due to lack of foresight, unforeseen detours due to road closures, unexpected filling stations in the Welsh mountains that are usually open but not this time with two kids asleep in the back of the car, all sorts of mishaps can end you up with an empty tank at thoroughly inopportune moments.
So until I can get a gallon can of electrons to carry about in the boot, I’m going to give EVs a miss.
Then there is the small matter of it taking me about two minutes to put over half a thousand miles’ worth of diesel in my Merc, of course…
Griff,
It is 363 miles (584 km) from Athens, GA., to Jacksonville, FL., where the “World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party” occurs each year around the game between the Florida Gators and Georgia Bulldogs.
That’s 363 miles (584 km) ONE WAY.
EACH STATE IS LARGER THAN ENGLAND, and put together they are 50% larger than the United Kingdom.
And they are mid-size states, with Florida ranking #22 in size, and Georgia #24. Texas itself is about 3.33 times the size of the UK.
During American football season hundreds of thousands of people drive well over those piddling EV mileage ranges for their teams. For the Florida-Georgia game the stadium holds over 64,000 fans. My guess is that easily over half travel well more than 300 miles round trip on game day, with a large percentage not in some flashy sedan, but pickups or SUV’s or RV’s.
This is just one example, but I think you are missing some context of driving distances here in the US. It is not uncommon to drive 6, 8, 10, 12 or more hours here. I make a 640 mile trip (9.5 hours) to visit children and grandchildren, at least once a month.
I’ll bet more vehicles travel over the EV limit each Saturday just for football games than Tesla has built.
Forget about opposition to subsidies, in most, if not all, countries the current electric grid would not have been formed when it did without government support, if not owning the total infrastructure.
The early carbon fueled generators were no good at all at converting energy into electricity, compare that to range and recharge times for EV’s today.
If governments would have given up on electric power generation then, for these reasons, we would all still be gathering firewood and dung.
Let the technology develop, in 20 years time it will be normal.
Market shake ups are good. Embrace the new technology.
Costs, range and recharge issues will get solved over time. And no in the long run it will not be cheaper, the government will make sure of that.
However, EV’s only make sense if we can sort out the limited Lithium availability, we need a viable alternative before this gets under way properly, and the “clean” power generation issue, without blanketing the planet in wind farms or solar panels.
Without both sorted it will be dead in the water and/or will make no difference whatsoever to so called “AGW”.
In every country that I am aware of, the electric grid was built 100% by private companies.
There was no government support.
Well, there is the issue of the easements that were provided…
MarkW…all grids in Canada were built by Gov’t. Only Alberta recently de-regulated and is semi private, along with recently Hydro1 in Ontario going public on the stock market with a small part of it’s Generation T&D being private, but the majority of electric grids are still owned and operated by the Gov’t. They are Crown Corps, but just an arm of an Gov’t being 100% owned by the provincial Gov’ts. Most countries had massive Gov’t involvement in the early days, just because of the capital involved, and invoking a stat right of way.
If the easements were on private land, they were paid for.
“In every country that I am aware of, the electric grid was built 100% by private companies.”
How many countries is that?.
it is definitely not true in Texas. Most of the state was wired under F.D. Roosevelt era rural electrification programs, and the local utility is purportedly a cooperative.
Locally, in parts of Lyndon Johnson’s old district, it was something of a bail-out of bankrupt utilities construction contractors. A local hydro-electric dam was being built by Brown Brothers (Buchanan Dam), and the Brown brothers financed LBj’s first house race to try to assure a Federal takeover of the project. Brown Brothers eventually became part of Halliburton.
“What is so great about electric motors?
The internal combustion engine (ICE) is a complex beast which needs lots of air, lots of cooling and which generates large volumes of smelly exhaust.”
Where to begin? How about: “…lots of air,…”? So what? What possible difference does needing ‘lots of air’ make? Will IC engines deplete all the air in the Earth’s atmosphere? This argument is silly.
How about: “…lots of cooling…”? True, the IC engine does need cooling but there’s the side benefit that the cooling system can provide cabin heat during winter. And, it needs to be mentioned that the batteries on Teslas require fairly complex temperature management which involves circulating liquids around them – not all that dissimilar to an IC engine after all. And, that’s only the batteries. I have little doubt that the electric motors get searing hot and may very well need to be cooled as well.
Finally: “…generates large volumes of smelly exhaust.” Huh? Can you smell it? Can your pet dog (with the best nose on the planet) even smell it? A modern car has an IC engine with pollutants reduced by over 97.5%. Is that better or worse than the coal or natural gas or oil fired electric power plant charging up the Tesla? I think not.
I work in central London and boy, can I smell it… and if I go to the top of the building, I can see it hanging over the streets… and if I blow my nose (sorry for this distressing detail) I can see the soot…
Typical Griff, sees a problem and completely misdiagnoses it.
That haze didn’t come from cars.
Except that is not from Passenger vehicles is it Griff, or haven’t you read the report?
Yeah, Griffy, I live near Chicago. I can see the skyline from the shore of Lake Michigan. It’s a city with a larger commuting population than London and there IS NO pollution from ICE-powered vehicles. On any clear day, and there are many of them, ZERO pollutant clouds.
Perhaps the UK should stop using diesel-powered vehicles and turn to gasoline, which does not release the pollutants you’re talking about.
That’s because the Greenies pushed diesel cars which create more real pollution but less fairy CO2 pollution.
Griff
the haze is from the heating and air conditioning you enjoy whilst in your office in central London.
How many bandwagons are you on, by the way?
“I can see the soot…”
You obviously need a better supplier. hey griff.
I can often smell the car or bike I’m following. And the point about air is that it has to be filtered and the filter has to be periodically replaced. But mostly I phrased it that way to help you see the ICE through the eyes of someone who had not encountered one.
Tom,
Thanks for those questions and answers it exposes how irrational the statements are and exposes how few facts are in the article.
” “What is so great about electric motors?
The internal combustion engine (ICE) is a complex beast which needs lots of air, lots of cooling and which generates large volumes of smelly exhaust.”
Where to begin? How about: “…lots of air,…”? So what? What possible difference does needing ‘lots of air’ make? Will IC engines deplete all the air in the Earth’s atmosphere? This argument is silly.
How about: “…lots of cooling…”? True, the IC engine does need cooling but there’s the side benefit that the cooling system can provide cabin heat during winter. And, it needs to be mentioned that the batteries on Teslas require fairly complex temperature management which involves circulating liquids around them – not all that dissimilar to an IC engine after all. And, that’s only the batteries. I have little doubt that the electric motors get searing hot and may very well need to be cooled as well.
Finally: “…generates large volumes of smelly exhaust.” Huh? Can you smell it? Can your pet dog (with the best nose on the planet) even smell it? A modern car has an IC engine with pollutants reduced by over 97.5%. Is that better or worse than the coal or natural gas or oil fired electric power plant charging up the Tesla? I think not.”
Nissan LEAF Charge Time
1.Charging a Nissan LEAF from empty with a standard 3 pin plug takes between 12 to 15 hours.
2.Charging with a home charging point takes only 4 to 6 hours.
3.Nissan LEAF can charge with a 3.7kW or 7kW charger.
Nissan LEAF Charger | Pod Point
https://pod-point.com/landing-pages/nissan-leaf-charging
a Gerry can or two with no etoh gas and stabil provides me reliable transportation regardless of what the grid does. I’d love to buy an EV someday, but for now I’ll stick with my 40mpg Hyundai (to save wear and tear on my 11 mpg suburban). That 12-15 hours must need some awesome circuit breaker.
My Leaf typically recharges in 5 hours off of a 15 amp circuit. But I never drive it until empty either. Nobody does.
I similarly use my Leaf to save wear and tear on my Suburban!
Solar, wind and hydro can usually be produced locally. Buy land near highways. It will be used to generate clean power.
I was always skeptical about alternative energy bu not now. The main reaso is the cost. It has come down a lot. PV cells have fallen by 90% since 2000.
Pray tell, how are you going to produce hydro locally, in the desert?
How are you going to produce solar locally if you live more than 20 or 30 degrees off of the equator?
PV cells, after government subsidy may have fallen, but the cost of the entire system hasn’t.
Of course it has. Panels can be had for less than $0.50 per watt. Mounting and inverters are not expensive either.
Average house uses 30kw per day. Sun factor of 6 means you need around a 5kw system so $2500 for the panels (about 15 of them) plus $1k for racking and $1k for inverters. Plus a day or two for installation. Switching to LED lighting and paying a little more attention to appliance efficiency, etc. gets you to a 3kw system.
1) That’s price after the subsidy.
2) That price is for the panel alone, it doesn’t include the mounting brackets.
3) If you think inverters are cheap, then you haven’t bought any.
4) The panel only produces 5Kw for a short time during the middle of the day. Less if there are clouds, so you need a substantial increase in the number of panels if you are expecting to power your entire house.
5) You forgot to include the cost of batteries, unless you are planning to force others to store that energy for you as you did earlier.
6) The output of those panels starts going down the day they are installed. The PV itself degrades, plus the covering gets dirty and scratched.
John Kirby
How many wind farms do you see in cities? How many solar arrays? How many conventional or nuclear power stations?
The areas that place the most demand for power on the grid don’t want the inconvenience that comes with power generation of any sort.
London, one of the most power hungry cities on the planet has not one wind farm within it’s greater London catchment which extends over 20 miles beyond its centre. Not one solar array, nor even a functioning, significant power station of any description, coal, gas, nuclear or otherwise.
So the pollution London produces is displaced, and Londoners bitch about air quality.
I would be fine with renewables if the people that demand them suffered the consequences. I would also be happy if they suffered the consequences of conventional power production if it was in their back yard. They could bitch and moan all they want then.
John Kirby
PV cell manufacture is clean? When did that happen?
And disposal of PV and wind turbine blades? Clean?
Will wonders never cease!
There are some new battery technologies being developed. It’s early days.
Do you have some details, or are you just making this up as well?
Hi Mark, Battery research is big thing now in universities. Necessity is the mother of what was it?
See this article.
Best Regards, John Kirby
http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/130380-future-batteries-coming-soon-charge-in-seconds-last-months-and-power-over-the-air
Just because some is researching something is not evidence that big changes are just around the corner.
As I thought, you were making it up.
Please enlighten us. I covered all the then extant developments in guest post intermittent grid storage at Climate Etc in 2015. My comment above covers the only credible potential development since.
Here’s the link:
https://judithcurry.com/2015/07/01/intermittent-grid-storage/
Yaah, okay, John Kirby, new battery technologies are great. What about disposal of same? At some point, the rechargeable factor is dead and gone and those wonderful batteries are poisoning a local landfill.
Sara, batteries can be recycled. In fact, the common lead-acid battery in most vehicles today are made from the lead from old batteries.
At some point, they can NOT be recycled and have to be disposed of. They still leach metal poisons into the ground.
RB,
They are recycled out of necessity because the last lead smelter at Doe Run, Missouri was shut down a few years ago because of environmentalist’s concern about the toxicity of lead.
The fact that lead acid batteries can be recycled is not evidence that LiIon ones can be as well.
@ur momisugly Sara
There is no real point that Lead Acid, Nickel Metal Hydride, and Lithium Ion batteries can’t be recycled.
You are mistaken.
Why would I buy now with new and improved just around the corner.
There are many. One example is the pumped electrolyte battery that an oil company looked at in the 1970’s.
Here: http://www.allaboutbatteries.com/VRB.html
and here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_battery
Oil was cheap back then and there was no market, but if such an idea could be made practical, tou could fill up the car by exchanging the cntenst of the electrolyte tank…
“I picked up my Leaf for just $9k with 21k miles on it. It has required no service in 3 years. No oil changes, no brake pads, nothing.”
I picked up my ’89 Ford Ranger for $1200 with 200k miles. Drove it for 15 years. I changed the oil once a year with synthetic when the annual safety inspection was done. The only other maintenance was batteries, starter, and alternator. It was still running strong when I sold it to a friend.
It is nice to have a second car for short trips. Just not for $9k.
Owning older claptrap vehicles can be great financially as long as they don’t encounter major mechanical failures. And they will, sooner or later. Plus you need to be willing to deal with the reliability issues.
I have a 1965 vehicle that is completely reliable. But I rebuilt/restored all of the mechanical components so it would be.
0x01010101,
There is also the issue of what the electronics industry calls “infant mortality,” where discreet components fail early, if they are going to fail at all. I’ve had the same thing happen with a brand new vehicle, where an early off-road excursion quickly found the design flaws, such as a weak retaining clip on the clutch linkage. One always has to be prepared for a break down. The trick is either having the breakdown close to someone who can repair it, or carrying tools and spare parts with you to take care of the most likely parts to fail.
There is no reason to think that BEV will not have major mechanical and electrical failures sooner or later.
“There is no reason to think that BEV will not have major mechanical and electrical failures sooner or later.”
Yes, there is. Far, far fewer moving parts. What mechanical issues are you referring to?
Well done. Excellent overview of the current state of EVs including advantages and challenges.
Thank you Whereismycoffee
Hi Mark,
I do not think all sources of energy will be available everywhere. In mountainous areas massive amounts of hydro power just runs down the hillside. You don’t need a dam. Just a pie to contain the flow. I live near the Columbia gorge and there are thousands of creeks and streams with a 4000 ft head. You don’t need a big flow with that sort of head.
It is called Run of River small hydro. Probably generates more Mw/hrs of electricity globally than wind/solar combined because when it does have water, it is a base load product with 100% energy density. There is enormous potential for ROR small hydro in many hilly/mountainous area’s of the world that is undeveloped. A typical project is anywhere form 100 Kw to 50 Mw. That is a lot of solar panels for the same annual output.
Bad news John, you need a really good lawyer to [get] past the watermelons. Then you need an EIS because the Salmon in the Columbia River are listed as endangered.
Should I go on explaining why good ideas fail.
Well, you do have a good point there Kit, since the environmental approvals required with anything to do with water are almost impossible to navigate. Even if you are just going to use the water for 5 minutes in a penstock and release it to the same creek you took it from up above. And a lawyer won’t even help much because you are dealing with Federal or State/Provincial law, and hard to win against Big Brother. There is a lot of potential energy in small hydro, high head with minimal impact on the environment, but yet in our 3rd world Gov’t in the west, some things are nearly impossible. Maybe in some poor countries that really want some reliable electricity, and the ‘watermelons’ haven’t taken over yet.
In other words, yet another source of unreliable power.
You get power in the spring when the rains come, the rest of the year, not so much.
You get base load for the entire season that is wet, not similar to solar and wind that is dependant hour to hour on the weather. Or snow melting at higher elevation all summer. Or tropics where it is raining all the time. Or you have water storage behind a dam. It was you MarkW just last week complaining that California didn’t even consider any hydro renewable. I had to correct you on that too, since it is only the projects over 10 Mw in California that are not considered renewable. Stupid that 10 Mw is some threshold for deciding if something is renewable, I know.
And you don’t have to worry about the 2nd Law of thermodynamics. No waste heat to get rid of.
If you are using energy, there is always waste heat to get rid of.
Why don’t you just go hang a sign on your neck declaring your basic ignorance of science.
Stop calling Leftest Liberals, and Anti CO2 people Green…
Leftest are Totalitarian, and More CO2 = More Green stuff…
I agree Mat,
Radical environmentalists are the great killers of our time, ranking with Hitler, Stalin and Mao. One example of this criminal malfeasance is the ban of DDT, which has greatly increased malaria in the tropics – a global scale holocaust based on false environmental alarmism. A more recent example is global warming hysteria and their war against cheap, reliable, abundant energy, which is the lifeblood of society.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the environmental movement was taken over by extreme leftists… and evolved into the watermelon outfit it is today. Dr. Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace, wrote this article circa 1994. It still rings true today. Read the section “The Rise of Eco-Extremism”.
http://www.ecosense.me/index.php/key-environmental-issues/10-key-environmental-issues/208-key-environmental-issues-4
Extreme leftists (aka Marxists) come in many packages with many labels – for example: Trotskyites, Leninists, Maoists, Stalinists, Shachtmanites, etc.
When I was at McGill in the 1960’s. there were about a dozen different Marxist groups – so many that their group names were extremely long – just to differentiate them.
In general, we observed that they fit into two groups:
1. The make-love-not-war, dope-smoking Harpo Marxists,
and
2. The nasty, angry, violent Groucho Marxists.
Most climate alarmists have embraced a Harpo Marxist approach and a few are Groucho Marxists – they just do not realize it – they all think they are “Progressives”.
Regards, Allan 🙂
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/08/06/aussie-liberal-press-notices-the-importance-of-reliable-electricity/comment-page-1/#comment-2573966
The Groucho Marxists are the leaders – they want power for its own sake at any cost, and typically are sociopaths or psychopaths. The great killers of recent history, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot. etc. were of this odious ilk – first they get power, then they implement their crazy schemes that do not work and too often kill everyone who opposes them.
The Harpo Marxists are the followers – the “sheeple” – these are people of less-than-average education/intelligence who are easily duped and follow the Groucho’s until it is too late, their rights are lost and their society destroyed. They are attracted to simplistic concepts that “feel good” but rarely “do good”. George Carlin said: “You know how stupid the average person is, right? Well, half of them are stupider than that!”
One can easily identify many members of these two groups in the global warming debate – and none of them are skeptics.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/08/16/the-great-carbon-scam/comment-page-1/#comment-2583687
OMG – Hillary and I agree on something – the ease of manipulation and stupidity of the average Democrat voter – and half of them are stupider than that!
Once again… DDT has never been banned for fighting malaria and is still in use for that purpose
and I’ve just visited Berlin’s DDR museum, where the extreme pollution in the Socialist DDR was a feature of a set of exhibits. Climate change and renewables don’t have anything to do with the left.
Nonsense Griff (as usual)
Read this and many other similar articles:
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=1259
I take a very dim view of radical environmentalists, who are the great killers of our time, rivaling Stalin, Hitler and Mao, each responsible for the deaths of 50 million or more souls.
I regard these people as criminals who belong in jail.
Oh, where can I buy Lithium futures? (a cert)
One word: cobalt.
https://www.ft.com/content/ebf70f78-b014-11e7-aab9-abaa44b1e130
Will EV’s find a way over or around the “cobalt cliff”? Eventually… probably. But that will require genuine disruptive innovation.
Before EV’s can even dream about disrupting the oil markets or automobile industry, they have to disrupt numerous mineral supply chains. Cobalt and lithium being the two most prominent obstacles.
DM, there are non-cobalt LIB cathode chemistries. But not in EVs (yet) because of inadequate power density (relates directly to charging time).
There are always work-arounds. There just aren’t fast work-arounds.
All EVs need to do is remove a couple barrels of daily demand from the market and the market will return to a state of oversupply and thus crash.
Which is one of the reasons oil prices are reasonable again. Lots of solar and wind power that replaced energy that used to have to come from oil and coal. The growth has been exponential.
Maybe. Looks like they might be headed back toward $70+ by the end of the year.
0x01010101; 1:32 pm: “Which is one of the reasons oil prices are reasonable again. Lots of solar and wind power that replaced energy that used to have to come from oil and coal. The growth has been exponential.”
That statement boggles the mind! Unless you live in remote, near Arctic regions, or Hawaii, almost no electricity, if any at all, is generated with oil. And, since coal fired steam locomotives have not transported anything commercially for almost 70 years, coal demand or consumption has no bearing whatsoever on fossil fuels which are used almost, if not solely, for transportation in the US.
The decline in oil prices is strictly because of frakking on private lands. There’s absolutely no other reason. The hydraulic fracking revolution and sideways drilling opened up tremendous resources in relation to demand. What planet have you been on?
“A couple of barrels”?
Yea, just enough to slow down demand growth YoY.
The world consumes 96 million barrels of crude oil per day. “A couple of barrels” per second wouldn’t even be a rounding error.
Obviously, I don’t mean two. But the point is that electric vehicles don’t have to be EVERY vehicle in the road to have a huge impact on the market.
If the world banned the production of ICE vehicles in 2030, by 2050, there would still be 1 billion ICE vehicles on the road (about the same number as there are today).
There are currently about 2 million EV’s, 0.2% of passenger vehicles. EV production has been increasing by about 225,000 vehicles per year. EV’s aren’t on track to disrupting oil markets before the 22nd century. Even under IEA’s unrealistic EV forecast, oil demand won’t peak before 2040.
IEA is delusional, they keep focusing solely on passenger vehicles even as entrants into other segments of the transport industry arrive. Fleet managers are going to stampede to electric buses and trucks as they become more available and those are vehicles that will really reduce demand.
IEA forecasts that EV’s will grow from the current 2 million vehicles to 160 million by 2030 (8% of all vehicles). Even with that growth, it won’t put a dent in oil consumption.
Freight, as in big trucks carrying heavy loads over long distances, is not amenable to PEV conversion, despite Telsa’s latest Ponzi scheme…
What size battery could propel a semi 300 miles? Cummins has already unveiled a concept vehicle with a 100-mile range.
A 140 kWh battery pack, which weighs as much “as the engine, gearbox, emissions treatment system and fuel tank in a conventional tractor,” yields a 100-mile range… presumably hauling a 75,000 lb load. At $200/kWh, that works out to $28,000 worth of battery. Triple that price tag and weight for a 300-mile range ($28,000), sextuple it for a 600-mile range and you get a semi with a $168,000 worth of batteries that can’t haul much more than its own battery packs… Brilliant! A new diesel tractor trailer runs “anywhere from $110,000 to $125,000 for a new tractor and $30,000 to $50,000 for a new trailer.” A tractor trailer averages around 6 mpg and has a total fuel tank capacity generally between 100 and 300 gallons. This yields an unrefueled range of 600 to 1,800 miles.
If we use an average fuel capacity or 240 gallons (2 x 120-gallon tanks), a typical tractor trailer can haul a heavy load 1,440 miles. If a 140 kWh battery yields 100 miles of range, it would take 14.4 140 kWh battery packs to yield a 1,440-mile range. Even if the cost of batteries falls to $73/kWh and the energy efficiency doubles by 2030, the 1,440-mile battery pack would cost $146,765 (2,016 kWh @ur momisugly $73/kWh) and it would weigh 7.2 times as much as “the engine, gearbox, emissions treatment system and fuel tank in a conventional tractor.”
Obviously, the technology doesn’t yet exist to provide a 1500 mile range out of an electric truck, but most truck trips aren’t that long to begin with. For regional trips, that range is plenty, especially if the company in question has a central facility where the trucks originate from. They can charge at the depot and potentially at the various drop points along the way. An electric truck can easily provide savings of $30/100 miles, so any operator that can benefit from that will jump at it and I realistically expect that even over-the-road carriers will find a way to make that work for them.
Let me see if I have this right.
The fact that we are using less coal means that oil prices have collapsed.
Almost no oil is used to generate electricity.
BTW, wind and solar haven’t reduced the use of coal and natural gas at all.
The reason is simple once you get your simple minds around to dealing with reality.
Since wind and solar are unreliable, those coal and nat gas plants have to be kept running ready to take over at a moments notice.
No, you don’t have this right. No one said anything about coal usage, though if you want to broach the subject, then I presume that you are aware that its use in electricity generation is way down largely due to natural gas. Solar and wind aren’t “unreliable”, they just don’t work at certain times. However, they produce way more than necessary at others. The obvious solution is to store that excess and release it to the grid later when the solar or wind isn’t producing. Solar, wind, and battery storage are complimentary to each other and basically eliminate the need for other types of power plants.
Mark W
Wind and solar have actually in creased the use of oil and coal by the simple fact that all of their components are made from oil products, use oil products and coal and its products in their manufacturing to their installation and maintenance to delivering it to the main grid and return lines…and use electricity from all sources in their creation.
By the way, you haven’t been tracking oil prices lately, have you.
I have. The higher they go, the easier it becomes to justify getting an electric.
You bring up an interesting point, however, are you ALSO aware that young children in the Congo are used to mine the cobalt? Do the environuts pushing EV technology realize their fancy rides are on the backs of four year old children? http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4764208/Child-miners-aged-four-living-hell-Earth.html
Might bring this up with Griff…..
Only about 75% of cobalt is mined by children for $0.25/month.
But, that’s an ethics issue and not really relevant to supply chain limitations.
Besides… 600 million EV’s are required to save us from Gorebal Warming… If saving the planet from DDT justified killing millions of children, surely, saving the planet from Gorebal Warming justifies child slave labor… 🙈🙉🙊
I’m well aware of it…
I recommend this book to all:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2184798.Blood_River
Is cobalt King Leopold’s zombie?
https://www.amazon.com/King-Leopolds-Ghost-Heroism-Colonial-ebook/dp/B004KZOWEG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1509978700&sr=8-1&keywords=king+leopold%27s+ghost
Lithium iron phosphate cells and induction motors. No cobalt.
There’s a reason why almost all EV’s currently use cobalt oxide cathodes…
Lithium Nickel Manganese Cobalt Oxide (LiNiMnCoO2 or NMC)
http://www.batteryuniversity.com/_img/content/li_6(1).jpg
Lithium Nickel Cobalt Aluminum Oxide (LiNiCoAlO2)
http://www.batteryuniversity.com/_img/content/NCA-web.jpg
And not…
Lithium Iron Phosphate(LiFePO4)
http://www.batteryuniversity.com/_img/content/li-phosphate-web.jpg
http://www.batteryuniversity.com/_img/content/BU-205_chart-2-web.jpg
http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/types_of_lithium_ion
NCA, LCO, NMC… C=Cobalt.
Undoubtedly, human ingenuity will find a way over or around the “cobalt cliff”… But that’s not likely to happen quickly.
“There is also a small percentage of users who do a high daily mileage as part of their work.”
Hey, pally boy, would you let me know what planet you’re living on? Tune into any Chicago station (WGNTV, ABC7 Chicago, NBC 5 Chicago, WFLD 32 Chicago)
some time during morning or evening rush hour. Those lights you see are people driving INTO the city for work or driving OUT OF the city after work. It should be real interesting now, especially since winter approaches slowly and cloudy skies morning and evening make commuter traffic lights much more obvious. Almost all the people who work in Chicago and commute from the outer neighborhoods or from the suburbs DRIVE, not to mention cargo/commercial transportation of goods like FOOD, which is kind of a BIG necessity for people who work ahd/or live there.
Here’s a bit of personal experience, Buzzboy: I worked IN Chicago for 30 years. I lived there form 1976 to 2005, when I got fed up with city landlords and moved to the suburbs. I took the bus to work morning and evening until I moved to the ‘burbs and started DRIVING to the train station, took the TRAIN into the city, and took the BUS to work from there and BUS to TRAIN to CAR when I went home. Got that part so far? If you live in the suburubs of almost any US city, you have to have a vehicle to get around. Fortunatley, I have found that the buses and taxis where I live are very reliable, on time, and affordable, but I still have to walk over a mile to get to the bus stop and get home.
Your notion that this will all somehow be resolved by using electric vehicles completely ignores the simple fact that not everyone has a place to recharge a car or truck, that a commuter vehicle like a taxi doesn’t have an 8-hour time span to recharge to go pick up the next passenger, and that crappy weather like we usually get in the northern parts of Illinois – well, the whole state, really — is NOT conducive to the use of electric vehicles.
If, for example, I decide to go visit my sister, I have to drive there. Airfare is ridiculously overpriced and not worth the cost to me. There are NO trains from Chicago to where my sister lives. Therefore, to get to her house from my house – a distance of some 325 miles – means that an electric vehicle is not only NOT a good idea, but would leave me completely stranded in the middle of the cornfields, wondering if I can make it to some farmer’s house in the distance to recharge the stupid thing, while I wait 8 freaking hours for that to happen, never mind the return trip.
I don’t know what you’re smoking, but please stop and spend some time in the real world.
That’s where the rest of us live.
And if my comment annoys you, that’s tough bananas. I deal in reality. You do NOT.
Personal insults removed Mod.
Thank you mod.
Above Griff brought up the subject of London, so let’s talk about the UK shall we?
Not only are the Vehicles Subsidized, but currently the fuel for them is also subsidized as well.
The price of a litre of petrol is made up of various components, one of which is taxation, which is approximately 60% of the overall price.
The tax on Electricity is 5%.
So when they say Electric vehicles are slightly cheaper to run than FF vehicles, how much more expensive would they be if the users of EVs had to also pay the extra 55% Taxes?
The next question is how are the Government going to replace the current 60% fuel taxes which they use to balance their books?
“The next question is how are the Government going to replace the current 60% fuel taxes which they use to balance their books?”
By mileage charging using the GPS systems that are fitted to most/all new cars?
There are all sorts of options there of course, time of day and density of traffic surcharge spring to mind.
Precisely, hence Evs will no longer be more economical to run.
The UK govt tax take if there’s no petrol to put it on is a good point.
(are they hurting from the decline in smoking, given tobacco taxes???)
Lithium is element number 2 and very common in the earth’s crust, and cobalt isn’t rare; but changes will come in battery technolgy. It has become the holy grail of Physical Chemistry.
Hydrogen is 1, helium is 2, and lithium is 3.
Hi Rob,
Yes, No3,
I stopped reading at the straw man description of an internal combustion engine. Why should I read your (possibly) ill-formed opinions on electric vehicles when your actual ill-informed opinions on ICEs is readily apparent.
Try again.
Like it not, EV’s are the long term future, especially as the next cycle in oil prices takes place. Anyone who thinks that oil prices will stay cheap forever will have their head handed to them. We have seen this movie before, so many times, but demand will balance out supply soon, as we already see oil creeping up past $55. Everyone is pumping more oil to make the same money from a lower price, and that will not last long. As every other oil cycle has shown us. We are not running out of oil anytime soon, just very cheap oil. And that will dictate the price efficiency of EV vs. ICE over the long haul (10-15 years) and advances in overall efficiency in EV price and technology will come from scale, also over time.
The pendulum is swinging in favour of EV’s over the long term, just as the pendulum is swinging in favour of (realistic) hard climate data over CAGW. When temperatures don’t match models as we already see with the Pause, the jig will be up for AGW from CO2…unfortunately you never get rid of the Catastrophe because that is human nature, hard wired into our collective consciousness from…constant human catastrophe over our evolution. Get used to that monster under the bed.
The obvious solution for the modern EV is an ultra small onboard innovative 15-20 Kw (25-30 Hp) ICE generator or mini fuel cell running at max efficiency. That gets rid of about 90% of the actual EV problems such as winter driving, range, heating and/or AC. There are technical solutions to a lot of things that any good team of mechanical engineers will be able to sort out. Highways will have an induction rail buried in the pavement that will charge EV batteries on the fly, and new electrical infrastructure can be installed over time to meet charging requirements in rural and business districts. There is absolutely nothing that can be overcome right now, if an ultra small onboard innovative 15-20 Kw (25-30 Hp) ICE generator or mini fuel cell can be installed as an option for the modern EV today.
Camping, or off grid cabin at the lake, will be really cool with unlimited electric supply wherever you go with your Plugin Hybrid EV Jeep, although for most of the time, these vehicles will operate as plugin Battery EVs. Best of everything!
“ultra small onboard innovative 15-20 Kw (25-30 Hp) ICE generator or mini fuel cell running at max efficiency”
Magical thinking. As long as you are are at it, why not just wish for Mr. Fusion?
+100 Paul!
Kind of an ignorant reply Paul. Equating fusion with a 25 Hp ICE generator? Show your bias much?
One of these perhaps (12kW micro turbine with air bearings), the Jaguar looks nice!
http://www.bladonjets.com/
http://www.bladonjets.com/applications/automotive/jaguar-c-x75-concept-case-study/
Earthling2, this from the guy who invisions induction coils under roadways powering cars?
Google ‘buried induction charging’ MarkW. This isn’t science fiction. Any electrical engineer knows exactly how it works. The latest iPhone release is using it to charge without plugging in. Just amazes me that there are people here that don’t know how stuff works. https://www.caranddriver.com/features/going-wireless-how-induction-will-recharge-evs-on-the-fly-tech-dept
Hang around here another 10 years MarkW, and you will see that induction charging is not science fiction. I will bet on that one. It is not a leap to put them in roadways, charging moving vehicles. The tech is already being used commercially in stationary applications to charge an electric bus fleet while at rest at bus stops.
Making that commercial to a moving car with buried induction coils in roads is the next logical step.
You probably never thought the internet would amount to much 25 years ago, or we would ever need more than 64K of RAM in our computers either. Just like Bill gates said. You obviously don’t have a futuristic bone in your body, and can’t think of anything new ever becoming practical. Complete failure of imagination.
Earthling2,
The point I was making is that it’s easy to *claim* that some new innovation right around the corner is going to make your argument valid. But that’s just a cheat. Wishful thinking. As long as you are in that mode, may as well go big, like Mr. Fusion. Look, I was a young lad when Neil Armstrong was on TV bouncing around on the moon. We were all sure that by 2001 we would have real space stations like in that movie. And in the 70’s everybody was sure the fuel shortages would encourage someone to come up with the 100 mpg carburetor. Neither happened, along with a pile of other predictions which seemed very reasonable at the time. I’ve learned to be very careful of extrapolating current trends too far into the future. Reality has a way of biting you in the behind.
I’m sure that someday we’ll have practical electric vehicles which will replace most of the ICE versions, but it won’t happen any time soon. So I tell you what, why don’t we table this discussion for a few years and then we’ll get back together and see just who is the ignorant one.
“ultra small onboard innovative 15-20 Kw (25-30 Hp) ICE generator or mini fuel cell running at max efficiency”
As I mentioned upthread, Mazda is working on this and says it will release it in 2-3 years, using a small rotary engine.
The Chevy Volt does this. I do not understand why it is so expensive. The drive train is simple.
But the mpg goes up, so there is compensation for that assumed oil/fuel price increase. The times of the old gas guzzlers are coming to an end. It is fuel efficiency that, in that race, finishes first.
With advances in fuel efficiency the big SUV and trucks have made a comeback. Now manufacturers are putting V6’s in place of V8’s that have nearly the same fuel mileage, because it takes as much power to move the same amount of weight and when under a loaded condition get worse mileage than the V8’s had. If the V8’s run at lower rpms at a sustained speed than the V6’s do at higher rpms the whole purpose of the V6 is defeated. An ICE engine that is bigger than needed for the vehicle can achieve lower mpg when driven without fast acceleration, than an under powered engine that requires higher rpm just to get it moving and maintaining higher speeds if the gear ratio is not adequate. Newer vehicles have addressed that with more than 3 or 4 gears that older vehicles had. Now 6 to 8 gears or levels in automatic transmissions is common to reduce rpms at most driving speeds.
@ur momisugly johchi7
Here is a quite interesting table, althogh not up to date it yet shows the trend.
Earthling2
“Highways will have an induction rail buried in the pavement that will charge EV batteries on the fly”
Ain’t science fiction wonderful. Describe for us how this rail induction transmits energy to the vehicles. Do you have an operating frequency in mind? How much current will power a highway full of cars? How do you overcome the huge reduction in efficiency resulting from the necessary air gap? Tell us how you achieve induction without coils. And there’ll be a whopping power factor so you’ll need a shipload of capacitors. Or a flux capacitor, yeah that should do it.
Slacko November 6, 2017 at 5:19 am
Get with the program Slacko…it is already being done commercially with the last iPhone release. Some electric bus routes in Italy are already doing it commercially at extended bus stops where the bus parks above induction coils and recharges its batteries. The next phase to put buried induction cabling under roadways is definitely not science fiction. Google key words ‘buried induction charging’ and inform yourself how the technology actually works.
https://www.caranddriver.com/features/going-wireless-how-induction-will-recharge-evs-on-the-fly-tech-dept
Beyond that, how do we get sufficient power to those induction coils to keep 10’s of thousands of cars zooming along at 60+mph?
How much is it going to cost to rip up the millions of miles of road in this country in order to put induction coils under them?
At present, an induction coil where the two coils are about 12 inches away each other will be less than 10% efficient. Electric motors are so efficient because the stator and rotor are tiny fractions of an inch apart.
I love it when dreamers start telling us how there vivid imaginations are actually visions of the future that will surely come to pass if only we spend enough OPM (Other People’s Money) on it.
Induction charging on the move was demonstrated years ago. I have no opinion on it either way
Thankyou Earthling,
So now it’s coils, not a rail. I’m greatly relieved that induction therefore looks possible. I’ve known about the coils buried at bus stops for quite some time. A bus is usually stationary when it is stopped, yes?
But like MarkW I’m still wondering how much power would be required to charge thousands of moving cars at once on a single stretch of road.
Cellphone inductive charging and inductive charging of cars is not the same thing. Cellphones use low voltages, cars would require much higher voltages to be useful. The coils in the cellphone charging system are just a few millimeters apart, whereas cars will be anywhere from 10 to 20 centimeters. Since charging efficiency decreases with the square of the distance, the coils will have to be massive to make it worthwhile. You can’t change the laws of physics by imagining some new technology either. Building massive inductive coils into all the major roads is impractical. What we need is better portable power storage systems. That’s not an easy task either, but it is doable – eventually. As much as I wish it were true, practical electric cars are NOT right around the corner.
I love it when people who demonstrably know nothing, tell us with 100% certainty what the future holds.
MarkW…you obviously know little about engineering of any kind. For the length of time you have been here on this blog, I thought you would have at least learned something by now. Snark and snipe at other people, is almost your only quality. Never an original thought out of you, and usually some lame one sentence reply. Complaining and whining is how you sound most of the time.
I love it when people write thousands of comments – actually 10s of thousands – attacking other people’s work while never, ever producing links supporting their criticism. Just make claims and try to get away with it. Sad.