Guest essay by John Hardy
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
Part 1 of this series expressed the view that regardless of “the environment”, EVs are poised to inflict a massive disruption on the automotive industry, and outlined the strengths of the technology and some of the reasons that it is happening now.
Part 2 discussed the main issues for Western automakers in handling this disruption
Part 3 below is devoted to common misconceptions which cause some to mistakenly conclude that EVs will not be practicable in the foreseeable future.
The demise of the Western auto industry: Part 3 – common misconceptions
Misconception 1: batteries will never get us to acceptable range.
The combination of a 300 mile range and fast charge should be plenty. How many people routinely drive more than 300 miles without stopping for toilet and/or food? For most people, most of the time averaging 20 – 30 miles per day [1], charging could be done once a week. “Fast charge” needs to be fast however: 20 minutes from empty to 80% charge. The batteries are well able to handle this. The infrastructure uses well-understood technology (300+ Kw charging stations already exist in Beijing for buses [2]). Several current production EVs have a range of over 200 miles and some over 300.
Misconception 2: if EVs take off, electrical distribution networks won’t cope.
With an average daily mileage for private cars of 20-30 miles per day and 3-4 miles per kW-hr the average charge needed is 5 to 10 kW-hr a day, equivalent to running a 7 kW electric shower for 40 to 80 minutes or warming up a few storage heaters over 5-6 hours.
Another mistaken assumption is that everyone will come home and charge at peak time in the early evening. Once again this is highly unlikely to become a problem. Incentivising people to charge off peak is trivial, as is the technology. I have my car set to start charging at 1:00 a.m. when my electricity price almost halves.
Misconception 3: EV charging will require rewiring all the houses in the land.
UK standard sockets handle almost 3 kW. Recharging an average day’s driving just from a wall socket might take 2 – 4 hours. Electric showers may run over 10kW, so adding a 10kW EV wall box is no more complex than installing an electric shower and would recharge an exhausted battery in a 300 mile range car in 7-10 hours.
Misconception 4: Generating capacity will be insufficient
It is sometimes said that if EVs take off, a huge increase in generating capacity will be needed. In the UK there were some scary (and ill-informed) press comments on a document published recently by the National Grid entitled Future Energy Scenarios (FES). The National Grid looked at four different scenarios. One of them concluded that additional demand resulting from an all-EV world would be about 5 Gw. On the face of it, this doesn’t seem to compute: to recharge an EV like the Chevy Bolt or the Tesla Model 3 takes about 75 kW-hrs. 5 Gw over 24 hours is 120 Gw hrs or 120 million Kw-hrs, so 5 Gw extra sounds like it would cope with maybe 1 – 2 million EVs rather than the 30 million or so that would be on UK roads today if all our piston-engined cars became EVs overnight.
There are two factors at work here. Firstly as discussed earlier, EVs used as private cars need an average 5-10 Kw-hr per vehicle per day, so 120 Gw-hr would in theory support a population of 12 million vehicles.
There is another critical issue though: exploiting the variability of demand. Let us do some mental experiments:
Figure 1 is a graph of UK power requirements on a typical working day in winter. (The pattern and the numerical values will be different in Australia or the USA, but the principle is the same). The area under the line (the blue area in Figure 1) is the total electrical energy required during the 24 hours – 965 Gw-hrs in this example. Note that the power requirement varies greatly from a low around 30000 Mw (30 Gw) in the early hours of the morning to almost 50 Gw at 6:00 in the evening.
If the system was capable of sustaining 50 Gw for 24 hours, an additional 230 Gw-hrs could be generated (Figure 2):
230 Gw-hrs is 230,000,000 kw-hrs. Recall that to recharge an EV that has covered the UK average daily private car mileage, 5 – 10 Kw-hours are needed. So if we could put all the available 230 Gw-hrs into EV batteries we could, crudely and theoretically, service a population of between 32 million and 46 million EVs without any additional capacity. At the end of March 2017 there were around ~37 million vehicles licensed in Great Britain, of which ~31 million were cars [3]
Of course this analysis is simplified. It ignores a myriad of variables such as pumped storage, power imported from other countries, battery powered trucks, capacity currently used to refine and distribute petrol and so on, but as an order-of magnitude approximation it is useful.
Is it possible to manage demand like this? Certainly it is. All that is required is to give the control of “normal” charge rate to centralised automated processes (with appropriate over rides, agreed contractual arrangements and financial incentives). The technology to achieve this is straightforward.
But there is an even simpler way: between midnight and 7:00 a.m. the cumulative “energy available” is about 133 Gw-hrs: sufficient (theoretically) to do an average day’s charge on between 18 million and 26 million EVs. My electricity almost halves in price during those hours and my EV is capable of starting to charge at any time I wish; so I do most of my charging in those hours (Figure 3).
There is another consideration here. One of the juggling acts that the controllers of any grid system must manage is spikes and troughs in demand. Electricity must in general be consumed as it is generated: so a sudden change in demand may require the start-up of additional generating capacity, the use of pumped storage, reducing supply to a flexible consumer, additional imports etc. If they do it right, voltage and frequency stay steady and nobody notices. If they get it slightly wrong we have temporary brownouts. If they make a complete mess of things, or are hit by too many variables at once the system can collapse as happened recently in South Australia.
Figure 4 is an example of just such a peak. It is half time in a televised football (soccer) match. Within a minute or so the demand goes up by around 1 Gw. This is about the total output of the Sizewell B nuclear power plant, or a quarter of the capacity of the Drax power station – largest in the UK.
Wind energy complicates this juggling act because the output of a wind turbine is intrinsically variable and can change extremely rapidly. A sudden storm hitting a wind farm such as the London Array (630 Mw) could take ½ Gw off line in seconds. With the right technology and the right contractual arrangements between householders and the energy companies, 30 million EVs provide a powerful and flexible tool for the unseen (and under-valued) grid jugglers.
Time for another thought experiment.
Suppose our 30 million EVs had a battery capacity of 75 kW-hrs (similar to today’s Chevy Bolt and entry level Tesla Model 3). Suppose the contractual deal was that the grid managers could help themselves to (say) 10% of that capacity any time the vehicle was plugged in, provided that it was fully charged by a specified time. That would theoretically provide a 200+ Gw-hr buffer which could be dialled up and down almost instantly. In practice of course it would be less (not all the EVs would be plugged in and some would be less than 90% charged), but even (say) 50 Gw-hrs would be handy: it far exceeds the UK’s current pumped storage capacity for example.
[As an aside, whilst this sort of buffer would be very helpful in managing short-term peaks and troughs, the idea of 100% wind/solar with battery back-up for days or weeks is infeasible with current technology in the foreseeable future. Vey roughly UK demand in winter is around 1000 Gw-hr/day. If the sun didn’t shine and the wind didn’t blow for ten days, the UK alone would need ~10,000 Gw-hr of battery storage. That is 4-5 times the total battery capacity of a fleet of 30 million electric cars, and more than 300 times the total world output of lithium ion batteries in 2014]
Misconception #5: EVs will be constrained by a shortage of lithium
There is not enough lead around to power a large fleet of EVs, but there is almost certainly enough lithium.
Two factors in particular help
- Lithium is not like oil. Oil is dug up, refined, distributed and burned. The supply requirements are ongoing. By contrast, lithium is extracted, made into batteries and, er that’s it for ten years or so. It is then (at least partially) recycled. Once lithium is in the system it will (mostly) stay there.
- Lithium is not like lead. Very roughly, 60% of the weight of a lead acid battery is lead [4] and the energy density of a lead acid battery is about 30 watt-hours per kg; so a 75 Kw-hr lead acid battery (Chevy Bolt size) would weigh about 2,500 kg, of which 1,500 kg would be lead (that explains why lead acid EVs are experiments, not serious transport). Estimates of the amount of lithium used in a lithium ion battery vary greatly from about 80 grams per Kw-hr to 250 grams per Kw-hr [5]. These figures translate to a lithium content of between 6 and 19 kg of lithium for our hypothetical 75 Kw-hr battery. Either way there is about two orders of magnitude difference between the weight of lead and the weight of lithium used to produce a battery of the same capacity.
The US Geological Survey (USGS) suggests that “reserves” of lithium globally are about 14 million tons (this is measured as mass of an equivalent amount of pure lithium), but suggests a “Resources” figure of about 40 million tons [6]. At 13kg per car, 1 million tons of lithium would be sufficient for 76 million cars. One estimate is that global car production in 2016 was ~72 million [7]. If we assume the “worst case” of:
- No lithium recycling (there are plants already up and running, but let’s be devil’s advocate and assume this)
- Only 25% of reserves available for cars (the rest going into ceramics, commercial vehicles, grid storage etc)
- No substitution of lithium by other metals in batteries
- Only the USGS “reserve” of 14 million turned out to be available (i.e. the 40 million “resources” never materialise)
- No substantial increase in efficiency of usage (i.e. Kw-hrs per kg of lithium remains unchanged)
If we make all these assumptions we can make the case that there is only enough lithium to support 3 or 4 years of car production in a world where all cars are electric. This is however a false picture for several reasons:
· The price of a finished battery is very insensitive to the price of the lithium raw material. This means that the price for lithium can increase greatly without having a noticeable effect on battery prices. This gives lots of financial headroom for exploiting reserves that are not economic at current prices. If the price goes high enough, it would in theory be possible to extract it from seawater. One estimate put the amount of lithium in the world’s oceans at 230 billion tons [8]
- Over the years, reserves of oil have gone up very greatly (see for example [9]). It is not unreasonable to expect lithium reserves to increase in a similar way
- As hinted earlier, lithium is in fact reclaimed from old batteries. Again, if shortages develop there is financial headroom to increase the efficiency of this process
- Lithium is used in the battery cathode because it is the “best” element electrically. If shortages developed alternatives could be used (see for example [10])
Misconception #6 – No I’ll stop here
There are dozens of arguments fielded against EVs; I have yet to encounter one which stood up under examination. It is going to happen regardless of “the environment”; and if the Western manufacturers can’t or won’t adapt, the economic outlook for the rising generation does not look good.
References
[1] Average daily private car mileage in the UK is about 21 [https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/632857/nts0901.ods. 7,800 miles per year for privately owned cars = 21 m.p.d. [Company cars 18,900 = 51 m.p.d. but they are a small percentage]. In the US it is about 30 [https://www.afdc.energy.gov/data/10309, 11,244 miles per year for cars = 30 miles per day]
[2] “…The new station at the Xiaoying bus terminal in the Chaoyang district is home to 25 electric vehicle (EV) chargers operating at 360kW and five chargers operating at 90kW. Reportedly all 30 chargers can operate at once….” From https://cbwmagazine.com/bus-charging-beijing/
[3] See table veh0102 accessed from https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/all-vehicles-veh01
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93acid_battery
[5] http://evworld.com/article.cfm?storyid=1826 Note that this article is old and a bit dated
[6] https://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/lithium/mcs-2017-lithi.pdf. Note the heading “Data in metric tons of lithium content unless otherwise noted”. This is important as the material mined, and the materials used in battery production are not metallic lithium, but lithium compounds. Lithium carbonate for example is less than a fifth lithium by weight
[7] http://www.oica.net/category/production-statistics/
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium#Terrestrial
[9] http://www.indexmundi.com/energy/?product=oil&graph=reserves
[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnesium_battery#Overview
“How many people routinely drive more than 300 miles without stopping for toilet and/or food?” The question is how long does it take when you stop to replenish your fuel supply. In the case of my ic car, it is 5 min. In the case of an electric car, it is much longer. I will drag race my 97 rustbucket from Boston to DC over the newest TSLA and come in first every time.
If you are charging at home, you will need the complete nighttime to recharge your car for 200 miles of travel during the day. 200 miles is a lot, but there are folks who regularly commute 60 miles plus each way, and some that do over 100.
Nothing against a NEV, but they are a NEV in the final analysis. I have one in my back yard.
Is there any limited availability of other battery materials such as Cobalt? 200 to 300 miles would be under ideal conditions which most may not get to experience. Capacity will degrade over time, and especially underperform in cold temperatures. You could get 60% of that range in extreme cold.
There is a battery temp management system in newer cars (keeps them nice and warm) — cold doesn’t cut the range like you think
And that warmth comes from where? The heat fairies?
And what is the source of power for the battery temp management? Does that affect the range?
Karl, you need to expand on your statement about battery temp management. Got a source on it?
Tesla has a serious battery temp management problem that they’re not letting out. How do I know? I work at a thermo-electric company and they asked us to bid on a new system just 5 months ago because their current system can’t keep their batteries at the proper temperature (too cold in the winter and too hot in the summer). The batteries have to be kept at the proper temperature even when car is parked (oops is that another fire?). We didn’t get the bid because although we could fix their problem we told them it would cost money, use energy and add weight.
I’ve seen a few Tesla forum posts that keeping your battery warm will reduce your range, of course the power draws from the battery. So, it would be dependent on how long your vehicle is sitting in the cold not plugged in I suppose. I’ve also heard a few stories of EVs parked in airport parking lots for a few weeks and on the owners return they can’t get in to their vehicle because the battery is dead. Happened to my work buddy with a hybrid, he went to pick up his new ford hybrid and the dealership shouldn’t get in to the vehicle because the battery was dead. Some kinks to work out perhaps.
A Lithium battery loses about 5% per month under ideal circumstances. However the loss is almost always significantly greater because the battery balancing electronics must be active even when the car is switched off.
So, lets be clear. Its not 300 mile range. its 300 mile range, with 4 passengers and luggage, driving in 100 degree weather with the Air conditioner on, or driving in 0 degree weather with the heater on. Simply stating 300 mile range vastly understates the problem.
Speed also matters, that 300 mile rating is for a car going more like 30 mph.
At 70 mph, your total mileage drops dramatically.
The 300 mile rating is based on 65 mph highway driving
The 300 mile rating is based on 65 mph highway driving
Not according to this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldwide_harmonized_Light_vehicles_Test_Procedure#Class_3
it isn’t. That shows a range of driving, teh vast majority of which is less than 80km/h, 50mi/h.
Karl,
Realistically, hardly anybody drives 65, even when that is the ‘legal’ speed limit. Many western US states have legal speed limits of 70 and 75 commonly. (70MPH is even common on interstates in the Midwest.) Rolling resistance goes up with the square of the speed, wind resistance is proportional to the cube of the speed, and they are additive. So, that 65MPH rating for range is not realistic.
Karl,
When one drives from the Midwest to to the Mountain States, the drive may take 15 to 20 hours, with a constant uphill drive, gaining perhaps 5,000 or 6,000 feet elevation. You may get the energy back through regenerative braking on the way back. but as a practical consideration, your effective range will be reduced considerably on the west bound leg of the trip. That means, on the interstate from Sioux Falls to Rapid City, recharging stations, in the middle of West Nowhere, will have to be much closer than 200 miles apart (less than 80% of 300), to allow for AC/heating, diminished capacity of older batteries, and turning the radio up loud! Even if you hold the speed to 65 where currently almost everyone blows by you at 75+. If you have ever driven the stretch, there is little incentive to dawdle. Electric cars may be a solution for small island countries, or big sardine cans standing on end on the East Coast, but they don’t address the realities of Big Sky country.
Clyde Spencer
“the drive may take 15 to 20 hours”
I have to giggle at my fellow Brit. I drive from Kent in England to Ayr in Scotland, roughly 8 hours (400 miles?) with reasonable traffic. It took my wife and I twelve hours on one holiday weekend (we don’t do that now!) and I get gasps of incredulity from friends that we spend that long driving.
We have no idea in the UK what a long car journey is really like.
@HotScot
Back in 1990 I vacationed in Ireland. Chatting with the locals, they were astounded to find out my daily commute to work was 42 miles, one way, or roughly the distance from Dublin to Wicklow. And I didn’t have the longest commute, by any means.
Kerber: “So, let’s be clear.” Sorry, you stumbled onto a post promoting the takeover of the auto industry by EVs, where clarity ruins everything. They do like fake clarity, like just above, where Karl is very clear-“new battery management fixes all”, (by-the-by, Karl, if batteries are 10 yrs old and still going strong, why the need for new management systems?). Brian McCain quickly shows how false his clarity is. When Karl doesn’t like an EV stat, he just fudges hybrids into EVs. He does that over and over in these 3 posts. Clarity is fatal to Karl.
I just want my car to be a utility.
I don’t want it to be a religion….
Agree, EV is a cult not a religion, just read the lack of logic in this posting.
The IC engine has given us enormous flexibility in life, I would not give it up with the current EV technology.
Everything you say may be right, however, rather than run the analyses for an island that would just about fit in California, try the analyses for the US west of the Mississippi, or Australia. During my career, I never drove such paltry small mileages per day. Here in Southern California, I doubt the daily mileage figure being quoted are anywhere near correct – my commute was 50 miles each way, and mine was no where near the worst. (And recognize that commuting distances here are defined by where one can afford to live on local salaries, versus where the employers are located.)
Recently, someone expressed the concern of trying to evacuate the whole of Southern Florida all in EVs, having to stop after 200-300 miles for a recharge.
And how big would the recharging stations have to be on any interstate in the US west of the Mississippi?
I would love to see how practical an EV would be in places like Wyoming, Nevada, Colorado or Montana… especially in the winter. I think that would be quite the education for the urban virtue signalers.
A whole new industry would evolve to clean up all the blown minds.
And how long a wait for your turn at the charging station? I sometimes have to wait for 2 or 3 cars to refuel with gasoline if I shop for the lowest cost.
You don’t understand house wiring. The electric shower in your example does not magically turn off just because a car is plugged in. The car is in addition to everything else so that extra current can force a new electrical panel to be installed. Not to mention you can’t use the same breaker or wires those have to be new also.
EV’s are still dixie cups no matter how it is spun.
I froze my azz off this morning in my EV. Well that’s not entirely true because it does have a heated driver seat. I’m finding at 35-40 degF, using the onboard heater ~25% of the trip back and forth, the range is reduced as much as ~40%. I only use it to defrost the windows (using anti-fog really helps) and thaw my legs if necessary.
It doesn’t matter if the car had 300 mile range. The depreciation will still be much more rapid because it is known the battery at some point is going to fail. And it matters greatly how the vehicle is driven to determine the life of the battery. Conventional ICE car quality has improved immensely compared to the 1970’s junk in every way.
EVs are more likely to compete with mass transit and car bans in major cities with over crowding.
Except that the people living in the apartment blocks and row houses in major cities are the ones that cannot recharge their EV’s at home. Often any car parking is ‘residents only’ parking bays on the street. So the group that might use EVs can’t. The target for EVs is virtue signalling suburbanites with a double garage for the EV and a real car, who do not really do any real driving apart from a short run to the commuter mass transit and back each day. If they want to be green and healthy they should get a bicycle.
As I said after your Article 2, people in the power business would LOVE to sell electricity to millions of EV owners. That said, your idea that we can do this without a major increase in generating capacity looks rather widely off the mark.
Consider that on peak demand days, the utilities are publicly imploring people to reduce usage, including unplugging their unused cell phone chargers. The utility must be able to feed the peak, however high the peak gets. If you can’t feed it, the power company has no choice but to start opening the breakers and putting people in the dark.
Also, the utility system is — at least for the present — under tremendous price pressure. This results in building very little new baseload (meaning, reliable) generating capacity while being forced to accommodate intermittent (meaning, unreliable) green-gadget stuff like windmills and solar panels and pig manure gas generators. That means that every utility in the country is getting rid of generating reserves. They’re slimming way down, and reserves formerly considered essential to reliability are now considered too expensive. With the trend toward less reserve capacity, adding EVs into the mix will aggravate the threat of demand peaks which physically cannot be supplied.
And speaking of peaks, what do you do when highly populated coastal areas need to evacuate for hurricanes while, at the same time, generators and transmission lines are being taken down to prevent damage? At the moment when people most need their cars charged fully to 100%, the power company turns off the switch, and there you are, stranded and cussing your EV. The gargantuan evacuation from Florida for hurricane Maria should be instructive.
This is the real frightener EVs becoming bricks at random intervals in traffic jams on interstates as everyone is attempting to evacuate. Power went out in Volusia (along the I-95 where it meets the I-4) and that affected many gas stations. Traffic was bumper to bumper on the I-95 North bound even at 4am, traffic from Miami getting to your amazing 300 mile range would need to ‘charge’ in only 20 minutes but of course there was no power to charge the vehicles that went out early in the storm. Whereas those gas stations with generators had queues of waiting cars at least they could refuel. So now you have an interstate that will be littered with bricked EVs with no way of easily recovering them, their drivers and passengers. The owners cannot be loaned 30 miles worth of charge, in the way you can loan a gallon of gas. Each of those bricks become hazards and slow or stop the evacuation, increasing the chances of even more bricked EVs.
Your quotes of short drives in UK show that those drivers should really be using public transport – commuting into London for example makes little sense in your own car. You cannot use what might work for someone in a semi in Richmond with their own garage commuting to Staines and rarely doing any distance travel and then say as that works, EVs will be fine for someone living in an apartment block in Lambeth or for someone living in Wyoming or Montana.
I presume of course that you only drive an EV. It would be nice to know that all the EV proponents and supporting politicians were putting their backsides where their mouths are and were only driving EVs. After all there are absolutely no problems with EVs – only misconceptions – correct?
We had friends from the UK who thought a 2 hour one way trip requires an overnight stay. We told them we drove 75 miles one way on a whim just to go to a fast food restaurant we didn’t have locally.
One of my kids had an exchange teacher, from Australia.
We lived in Bristol, then.
She happily drove from Bristol to Canterbury [Kent] [Michelin says about 175 miles] for a dinner party, and back the same night, and was in school 0830 the next morning.
About 1993, so largely motorway.
We went to Australia, about 1996. Hired a car, and in four days drove about 1500 miles. And covered part of the small end of Victoria, the smallest Mainland state.
Even France took us two days – on holiday – to drive from Calais [NE] to Vannes – far NW. Six or eight hours a day.
Brits certainly have a problem imagining [let alone appreciating] how big some other parts of the world are.
London to Liverpool is three to six hours [depending on the traffic].
Above someone mentioned a climb into the Rockies of 15 hours!
My lodgers drive back home to Hungary – 1200 miles or so, mainly motorway/autobahn etc., in 20 hours or so.
Those are longer drives.
Auto
@auto November 9, 2017 at 4:38 pm
I used to regularly drive Amsterdam – Paris and Hannover – Berkshire as an evening drive leaving at 4pm and arriving before midnight. Those journeys would not be possible with an EV, as you would need to stop at least 3 times, even HotScot’s 8 hour drives to Ayr would become the worst day’s 12 hours. I can remember a drive from Speyside to London early morning to late afternoon, again impossible in an EV.
Someone should put EVs into a ‘London to Monte Carlo’ rally, to show how good they are.
auto
And conversely people in big countries don’t realise the UK is a small, congested place and we drive short distances (21 miles being the average daily UK distance)
I think EVs will fit a large proportion of driving needs.
An awful lot of UK housing in suburbs does have a drive/garage and people living in the bigger cities without one are much more likely to use public transport (which in London at least means no need to have a car).
(amusing to read how our country looks to visitors!)
Griff
“I think EVs will fit a large proportion of driving needs”
You are right and that is the problem with EVs, they fit a large proportion of needs not all of them. For many people an EV would have to be a second car. If you are worried about CO2 then promoting EVs is exactly the wrong thing to do as it is encouraging there to be more cars built.
“An awful lot of UK housing in suburbs does have a drive/garage”
And an awful lot of UK housing in suburbs does not have a drive/garage. Loads of new developments where there are houses do not have garages or drives, they have a parking area nearby.
“and people living in the bigger cities without one are much more likely to use public transport”
Says the man who lives in London and know naff all about anywhere else in the country. Public transport in London is very good, most other places in the UK have very patchy services (good on the popular routes, irregular or non-existent elsewhere).
“(which in London at least means no need to have a car)”
Tosh. My office is in London, I live in London, I travel to that office by public transport, I have a car. And the same can be said of everyone else I can think of.
I have a car not just because of the difficulty of bring home, say 100kg of cement on the bus, but to do things like drive to visit my in-laws. Each way that is c. 100 minutes by car and something like six hours by public transport, if all goes well. That includes walking from the neighbouring village as their village does not have any bus service at all.
BTW, that is a c. 230 mile round trip. I can easily do that on one tank of petrol, but not in an EV. There is no charging point in the village and, to the best of my knowledge, there isn’t one on the way.
+1. Power companies are also mandated to have a +15% margin above peak load. But all of this is their problem. We just want our power when we want it.
I found some interesting stats on fuel use by vehicle in UK (in million metric tonnes of oil, Mt) :
cars: 2003: 20Mt ; 2013: 12 Mt
trucks: 2003: 17Mt; 2013: 22Mt
total: 2003 37Mt; 2013: 34 Mt
And also some energy use:
oil: 2003: 73Mtoe; 2013: 66Mtoe
electricity: 2003:21 Mtoe; 2013: 20 Mtoe
1) cars are not the issue. Trucks are. Average Joe move roughly as much as 10 years before, but in a greater mileage per fuel unit car. The trucks that move things around for him, move much more, and even though they benefited from the same efficiency improvement than cars, they use more fuel. And that’ all economic growth is all about, so this will go on.
2) Adjusted for efficiency (electric engine use ~90% of electric energy, ICE ~30%), you need ~3X less electricity at home, but well to wheel efficiency is pretty much the same so you need as much as oil (or gas…) anyway. So the 12+22=34 of 2013 turns into 4+7=11 Mtoe electric at consumer door (but still 12+22=34 at powerplant)
3) can electric system provide +4Mtoe (for cars) from 00:00 to 07:00, without any upgrade ? That’s a +20% on the daily output (Notice that your figure are 133/965 = 14% and 230/965= 24%, not so different). I’ll say: this means it will work at full charge 24/365. I don’t believe in a 24/365 full charge grid. Do you ?
4) can electric system provide +11Mtoe (for cars+ trucks). that’s + 50%. doable with MASSIVE upgrade. ~15 GW utilities, and grid buildup. cost estimate: ~£30 G to boot, ~£3 G to maintain, 5x if econuts have their way (and i bet they will). Then again, that’s doable
If you don’t include trucks, the whole thing is vain
I was visiting our local electrical utility yesterday, in the foyer was an immaculate 1919 electric truck, battery powered that was part of the transport fleet servicing the city of Christ Church. They worked well then, and it appears they still work today, and getting better by the month. The oil and internal combustion engine monopoly influence pushed them aside. Now they are reborn.
They are, or something very like them is the way of the future.
Yes. they are great for short journeys which involve lots of stop-starts. The UK has similar vehicles, some still in use as milk-delivery vehicles.
For typical family use – forget it. There was a reason they were not developed past about 1920, and that reason still applies today. The only reason that there is development in the last few years is that your and my taxes are paying for it…
Dodgy
You will appreciate that the oil producers in Texas were receiving a rebate from taxpayers to compensate them for a reduced residual oil volume in the ground after they had pumped and sold the oil. What a great deal. Kennedy was going to stop that racket, they were none too pleased.
“The only reason …”
Don’t forget about carbon guilt. The constant stream of lies coming from the climate change cabal drives weak minded people to feel guilty about their choices.
It’s not a racket it’s standard accounting.
Everyone else get’s to depreciate the declining value of the property they own, why shouldn’t oil companies?
Depreciation allowances were (and are) standard practice in the minerals industry. Singling out the oil companies was strictly for political effect, pandering to people who have no understanding of economics.
In 1917 Henry Ford and Thomas Edison ALSO thought EVs were the wave of the future.
Edison built a very large battery manufacturing complex in Orange NJ that went bankrupt because he couldn’t produce an EV battery that actually delivered what Tom and Henry promised customers. Henry would have loved to build EVs for the mass market.
(A company named Exide picked up the pieces and very successfully built batteries for ICEs.)
Maybe by 2117? 🙂
“They are, or something very like them is the way of the future.”
That’s what they were saying in 1919 also….
Electric vehicles are the wave of the future…and always will be.
coal enthusiasts here might like to buy a restored coal powered steam lorry!
Hardy,
You said, “If we make all these assumptions we can make the case that there is only enough lithium to support 3 or 4 years of car production in a world where all cars are electric.” OK, in your worst-case, Devil’s Advocate scenario, you build cars flat out for 3 or 4 years. Then you wait 6 or 7 years for those batteries to fail so that you can re-cycle them and start building more cars. We did without new cars during WWII, so I guess we could do it again.
One important question concerning the replacement of gas and diesel by electricity is this one: how to compensate for the lost taxes on gas and diesel? Who will finance the maintenance and building of roads (a big chunk of the fuel taxes is (or should be) used for these works). In my opinion, the only valid solution will be a tamper proof logger in every EV which collects driven mileage and sends the data ( for instance via GSM) to a global handling center. So the future owner of an EV will first pay his relatively cheap electricity, but on top of that he should be prepared for a monthly bill coming from a state organisation. I can not imagine that our governments will simply say good-bye to the lost liquid fuel taxes…
If you live in NY, and drive out to Yellowstone for a vacation, who gets the road taxes?
“… who gets the road taxes?”
It’s generally the states in which you bought gas. Here in Ca, governor moonbeam just introduced an additional 0.15 per gallon tax on gas, presumable to cover road improvements, so those of us who require reliable transportation are now paying about .50 per gallon in taxes alone. The average price is now over $3 per gallon. Another reason to move to Nevada whose gas prices are lower and whose roads tend to be better maintained.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_taxes_in_the_United_States
Note that Federal Taxes are the same and it is the State’s that tax them more. Federal Taxes are for Interstate roads maintenance within the State the fuel is bought. State’s usually break their taxes into the county’s or district for road maintenance where the fuel is bought. Meaning the more roads in a given area and less fuel sold there will suffer with poorer road maintenance. Just as examples.
Precisely and there so called cheaper running costs suddenly increase by a factor of 2.5.
Misconception 1. That anyone says electric vehicles WILL NEVER be acceptable.
That is your first problem talking to any of us. You take the most ludicrous argument and start beating it down.
STRAWMAN ANYONE?
Electric cars will be great. Eventually. I doubt anyone disagrees with this statement.
Batteries are not at the point they are economical for it, YET.
Batteries are not at the point that they are energy dense enough, YET.
Batteries do not have the life cycle at the point they are appropriate, YET.
The energy grid currently does not have the capacity for it. YET.
No matter how ho mix it, the grid has finite capacity, and every single gallon of gasoline has to be replaced with generated electricity. We use a tremendous amount of energy in our cars. It has to come from some where if it is not coming from gasoline in the tank.
Lithium is going to be a problem, especially when people start looking to get permits to mine the stuff and your “environmentalist” lunatics go to prevent it. Just like everything they do.
If money is no object, and you can make the car as heavy and big as you like, electric sounds like a great way to go. Electric motors rock! But the batteries make it less ideal. Particularly for small vehicles.
The real solution to the problem is the hybrid electric which uses fuel in an engine connected to a generator to charge a smaller bank of batteries while powering the motors. Here you get your standard fill up, probably can get 600 to 800 mile range on the same tank that gets 400 miles in some cars today.
The engine can be small, since it is a generator, it can be fine tuned to be extremely efficient at the one speed it needs to run. This can get most of the benefits of an electric car.
Anyways, lots of effort you put into this. Too bad you think so lowly of those you think you are going to change the minds of. If you start with a more reasonable position to argue against, I could take more of what you wrote seriously. Since you do not… I do not.
Well no, lithium supply will come from all corners of the earth when the price signal and market volume summons it. That can be an inefficient process at times with false impressions of long run versus short run price and competing supply by that’s how it works in all mineral commodity markets including emerging sectors.
….but that’s how it works…
LOL, this whole conversation reminds me of Linux fanbois trying to convince Windows users how much better Linux is. They just don’t get it. Windows is fall-off-the-wall easy to use. It doesn’t require a relationship with an O/S to get done what needs to get done.
Linux is far more secure, robust and capable than anything Microsoft has ever sold, moreover; it’s free. If not for the sloppy Microsoft code, the multi-billion dollar anti-virus market wouldn’t even exist.
Apparently, you are not familiar with Ubuntu and other modern variants which are incredibly to install and use. If you want to develop code, Unix is the only way to go. There’s a really good reason why Apple chose Unix as the core of their operating system.
incredibly EASY to install and use
co2isnotevil
For once, I’ll contest you, on your point about Linux, and in particular, Ubuntu.
I’m not terribly conversant with technology, although I used to build PC’s for family and friends, so I’m not a complete Luddite.
I tried various flavours of Linux until I discovered Ubuntu, probably 7 or 8 years ago. Looked good until trying to connect it to anything else, then I had to search for days to find solutions that invariably meant I had to code, which I can’t, like most of the world. And I’m sorry, as sloppy as MS may be, I just plug most things in and they work.
The threats I get are invariably from email spam which is easy to spot. The occasional download of infected software is immediately spotted by Microsoft’s own virus scanner, and had I any sense, I probably wouldn’t download it anyway, but I do like the occasional fiddle.
I had a look at Ubuntu again recently, still no different. No viruses mind, but I spend my life searching different forums for answers to questions I don’t have with MS.
When I perform a forensic analysis of where spam originates, it’s inevitably from a compromised windos (not a typo) machine linked into a spam bot. We can also blame microsoft for the preponderance of spam.
I’m a very accomplished coder with many 100’s of thousands of lines of code to my credit and I didn’t need to write a single line of code to get Ubuntu up and running all my domains and talking to all of my devices, moreover; I’m running MTA’s, web services, DNS, a firewall, DHCP server and more. Trying to get any of these things up and running on a windos box is a nightmare, especially if you want it to be secure.
While all of the configuration may not be through a GUI, I would much rather edit a configuration file with Emacs than rely on a GUI that hides important details and limits capabilities. BTW, for a simple desktop application, the GUI’s do offer sufficient capabilities.
I definitely wouldn’t trust any microsoft code in a heart lung machine, much less a car.
I can echo this and say that all our in-house software for running our mechanized tools (“robots”) is developed on Unix machines.
I used to have a dual-boot (Windows/Linux) laptop for playing around on, but personally never really developed a need/desire to use Linux. But, computers aren’t my world, they’re just a tool in it, so on this I tend towards the path of least resistance. For me, currently, that’s Windows.
rip
co2isnotevil
I think you have illustrated my point.
I’m not an accomplished coder, and like 90% of the worlds population, you lost me when you mentioned “spam bot”. I have no idea what that is. Nor does 90% of the population of the planet.
The fact is, you know what your’e doing, the rest of us don’t.
I tried for about a year to get a Broadcom wireless connection to work on an Ubuntu system. It was a known problem because apparently Broadcom wouldn’t release the necessary code so software vendors could incorporate it. It was, at that time I believe, the most popular wireless hardware on the planet. No one in the Linux community could get it running reliably.
Times may have changed, I accept that, but when I last sampled Ubuntu, about a year ago, it was barely any more user friendly.
I buy a car, ICE, EV or otherwise, to enhance my productivity. As soon as I have to raise the bonnet to do anything more than fill the windscreen wiper bottle with water, I’m no longer interested. And I used to be a real petrol head nutter with grease under my for*skin. PC’s are the same. you may have the knowledge to connect an Ubuntu box to anything you want with a few simple keystrokes, I can’t do that. It takes me a week to find a solution.
Having said all that, I’ll try Ubuntu again, for the third time, just to satisfy my curiosity. But if I load it up without it recognising my broadband connection, my wireless connection, my NAS, and connect easily to my MS One drive account, my BT Cloud, my Amazon cloud account, iTunes, Apple TV, other Windows PC’s on my LAN etc. etc. instantly, then it”s no use to me.
And if I can’t manage it, I’m damn sure my wife and kids can’t do it either, in which case I’m in for a serious earbashing.
Nor am I stating these as facts of Ubuntu, just my personal experiences.
The fact that 90% of the planet doesn’t know what a spam bot does is why they are such a problem. A spam bot is a collection of compromised machines used as a distributed spam mailer. Most people who’s machines are compromised don’t even know that their machine and their bandwidth is being used to send spam to people all over the world.
You may have trouble connecting to things served by M$, for example, the M$ One Drive, largely because they prefer proprietary interfaces in order to lock you in to their platform. I should point out that much of their proprietary interfaces were reverse engineered and put into the Wine and Samba applications which you will need to interoperate with windos. Nearly all of the attempted hacks sent to my network (many per second) are trying to exploit vulnerabilities in the M$ file sharing interfaces, which is why you should always block the relevant ports at your firewall.
If you are connecting over the web, then there shouldn’t be any problems as most of this uses HTTP which is a standard protocol. Migrate to a non M$ browser like Chrome or Firefox first in order to solve any issues with plugins on your windos box first.
Yes, broadcom devices are a pain to deal with, again owing to proprietary interfaces.
I had that problem when I was running Solaris (Sun’s version of Unix), where I actually did have to modify a driver to get it to work. It’s my understanding that this is solved in Ubuntu, although I haven’t tried it as the laptop with the broadcom card is still running Solaris.
Unix can be made easy to use and Apple is the case in point. There are also a lot of apps available to make Linux easier to use, but they generally don’t come with the initial distribution. There are several places on the web that will give you a list of useful packages you should install to make life easier.
Of course, installing windos is not a picnic either …
co2isnotevil
You have just spent several paragraphs explaining something to me I don’t understand.
“Unix can be made easy to use and Apple is the case in point.”
Problem solved then. I can by an Apple laptop running a version of Unix, pay a vast price for it, but be happy in the knowledge it’s more secure than Windoze.
Not a bad deal really considering I don’t have to go grubbing around finding solutions to Ubuntu problems for days on end.
And the Broadcom issue was only one of many I found dealing with any Linux distro. But t was an examle that ran for years.
Bottom line. You’r happy with Linux because you know what you’re doing. Me, and 90% of the world don’t, so it’s really Windoze or Apple.
And try to get support or apps to work across a Linux, Win, Apple, Android mixed enviroment and you’re on plums, there are almost zero companies who support Windows never mind Linux.
My kids would be really chuffed with me if I told them to use a dysfunctional Linux music app instead of iTunes, amongst many others.
“co2isnotevil November 9, 2017 at 10:45 am
Linux is far more secure, robust and capable than anything Microsoft has ever sold, moreover; it’s free. If not for the sloppy Microsoft code, the multi-billion dollar anti-virus market wouldn’t even exist.”
So true!
I have been using Linux exclusively since 2007 and haven’t had the need or desire to go back to Windows. The distribution I’m using is Slackware, probably not what the average non-technical user would like but I’m not the average user. I like to program in C and write shell scripts! By all accounts distros such as Ubuntu are pretty easy for the average user to set and run if they accept the defaults and don’t try to meddle with the system. Having said that, if you’re not interested in technicalities then Windows and Mac are probably your best bet.
I’ve been using Unix since the mid 80’s when I convinced the company I was working for to purchase a Unix source license from Bell Labs (about $50K at the time) so we could replace VMS on the Vax’s with BSD Unix. The sys admin was not too happy, but eventually came around and was very happy about it when we started acquiring Sun workstations running the same OS.
My first encounter with anything Unix like was with Minix around 2000. Installed it on an old ‘486 and actually modified the keyboard driver and made extensive changes to its default text editor, Mined. Minix is what gave Linus Torvalds the inspiration to write the first version of Linux in 1991 and it took off from there.
@TheThread – note that we would not need so many auto mechanics if people only knew how to take care of their own cars.
*nix is secure – when you know how to take care of it. Windows is also secure – when you know how to take care of it.
The vast majority do not know how to take care of either their cars, or their computers. (The vast majority also do not WANT to know. They work. Or they don’t work, and they start yelling at them.)
Windos is secure if you air-gap it.
In 30+ years of running DOS / Windows, I have had exactly two problems. One was when an idiot child hard reset the router (note, NOT running any software from Microsoft) – which still didn’t let them get into my machine, but did let them upload a pirated video to a torrent (the company accepted my heartfelt apology, fortunately).
Now, I did have a Windows machine (not mine, the wife’s) completely hosed once. The execrable Windows Vista update. That was me being lazy; I hadn’t swapped it out for a proper version.
I have a friend from college that ran his original VW bug for well over 500K miles. Probably quite a bit more, he still had it years later, and drove twice a year from Oregon to Massachusetts to visit his folks. (I think he did have to stop that a few years ago, as the last time I saw him, he was in the process of acquiring a wife with ready-made kids.) The only other mechanic that ever worked on it, though, was his Dad.
co2isnotevil
PS. I had a couple of late model mid range Windows phones until a year ago. Best phones I ever had including high end iPhone and Androids, by a mile. But no app support, which I was convinced would improve, but it actually fell off. Nor am I a big app user.
I run a split system, with “Weenie-DOS” on one side, Ubuntu on the other. There are a few tasks that I prefer to do under Windows, but I usually can’t wait to get back to Ubuntu.
Here is the alt misconception list.
Alt Misconception 1: EV batteries and EV sales will be independent of consumer budgets and consumer research on battery life and replacement cost
Alt Misconception 2: The coping cost of electrical distribution will be independent of EVs taking off
Alt Misconception 3: EV charging will be free on board
Alt Misconception 4: Generation will maintain redundant capacity in all regulatory schemes
Alt Misconception 5: Lithium markets will be stable at all times and at all levels of real and induced demand
Alt Misconception 6: Rational market, technical, and public policy debate will end at misconception 1-5.
And Alt Misconception 7 is that Tesla will be there in three years with ongoing financial bleeding and excuse making.
Only battery swap tech can beat the 15 minute-to-charge barrier reasonably safely. And only that can be done thru robotics. And “20 minute charge”, is full of a canard’s feathers: 80% of how many kilowatt hours? Oh… it depends. A very light-weight car, getting way better than 1 mile per megajoule (i.e. 5+ mi/kWh) and having “only” a 200 mile range battery will have 40 kWh battery of which 80% is 32 kWh. Divide by ⅓ hour (20 min) and you get 96 kW charge rate.
See, that’s doable. Already in service, actually, at some specialized SuperCharge Tesla stations. 72 kW is more typical though. (30 min charge). But oh… only Tesla may use Tesla supercharge stations. Monopoly.
But what of a nice premium car – 400 mi range for non-stop convenience. Necessarily (today at least) heavy due to the extra-large battery. And all the supporting struts and so on to keep everything aloft. A 2,000 kg car, empty. Its mileage is closer to 3 mi/kWh. 400 ÷ 3 = 133 kWh battery. 80% is 106 kWh. This baby requires 1.5 hours of charge at a 70 kW SuperCharge station to fill up.
Thats not 20 minutes. More like 90.
Just saying, goats. You can have safe-charging or fast-charging, easily-handled cables or unwieldily ones. Just can’t do all the optimizations in the consumers’ favor.
GoatGuy
There are dozens of arguments fielded
againstfor EVs; I have yet to encounter one which stood up under examination.FTFY. If those arguments had any merit, subsidies and mandates would be unnecessary. There are two types of people touting the “benefits” of pure electric cars. Useful idiots with a solution in search of a problem, and those using the idiots to further their agenda of totalitarian collectivization, a major impediment to which is the individual autonomy engendered by robust personal vehicles.
I know young people who dream talk about Tesla models and then turn around a buy a used boat-sized car for the financial practicality and money savings accomplishment. That sums up the marketplace and consumer/saver preference for me—say one thing and do another.
Perhaps the future of electrical cars is cities – short journeys/ no pollution. I can see a time when the Congestion Charge in London is replaced with an ‘electric cars only’ rule. People living in the country or making long journeys will need to keep a petrol vehicle.
When the time comes, I doubt there will be such accommodation for petrol vehicles by place.
Criteria:
How about a liquid-fueled vehicle that can be refueled in less than 10 minutes?
It could have a range of over 400miles before refueling.
It could be supported by a very large distribution of refueling stations.
It could be affordable to the average family without government subsidies, which is merely a hidden tax.
It could be quiet and comfortable to drive.
It could be large enough to carry all sorts of gear into the mountains for a family weekend camping trip.
It could perform well in extreme cold (-25C) and extreme heat (+46C).
It could sit unused, unconnected to anything for long periods, ready to go at an instant.
Discussion:
So we already have everything in a liquid-fueled auto that an EV offers.
And then there’s the human element. Get in a rush at home one night and forget to plug in your car. The next morning you are royally screwed. That is no problem for a liquid fueled car.
Conclusion:
Fully EV autos are just expensive virtue signalling that provide zero value added.
“It could be affordable to the average family without government subsidies, which is merely a hidden tax.”
It’s also affordable even with massive unhidden taxes applied to the fuel. In California, there’s about 50 cents of tax per gallon of gasoline.
When we had our second child, she came 2 weeks early. And I didn’t fill up the car the night before. So I had to stop on the way to the hospital to put two gallons in otherwise we would have walked. Our daughter was born 9 minutes after we got to the hospital.
With an EV:
Me: “Honey can you hold on 20 or 30 minutes while the line at the supercharger clears?”
Wife: “She’s here…”
(And no…the EV would not have been charged in time at home because I did a 180 mile business trip that day and she woke me up 3 hours later saying it was time.)
Your wife is nice, mine would have thrown the afterbirth at me in that scenario.
Here in California, many people bought EV’s and hybrids because the state, in its infinite lack of wisdom, allows them to use the HOV lanes for free. This negates the only redeeming value they have, which is economical operation in stop and go traffic.
After seeing several cases this year of tiny Smart cars driving in busy interstate corridors among large trucks and other “normal” SUVs away from major cities, I think car buyers need to see photo catalogs of death scenes at wreck sites in place of just occasional statistics. The human trait of “it can’t happen to me” can be deadly especially when the cars are given to teenagers.
Yes, Smart cars are about as safe as motorcycles. They’re also wreck attractors as they have trouble getting out of their own way, especially on hills.
And in addition, Smart-cars have a petrol engine. Similarly to mopeds they are small, short-lived and polluting.
The US idea that small cars are more dangerous in crashes just seems nuts to an European driver.
anyone got any stats on that?
All cars these days have crumple zones, airbags etc.
Oh and near 100% seat belt use in the UK… and no stories in press about people getting trapped by them in wrecks either
I agree with the author that there are a number of misconceptions regarding EVs. There is plenty of lithium and cobalt for these vehicles, for example. To me there is only one real issue – battery power compared to fossil fuel power. Batteries were invented about the same time as the gasoline engine, more than 100 years ago. Both have had many R&D attempts to improve, so I consider both state-of-art. There is no use waiting for a break-through in battery technology any more than waiting for a break-through in the gasoline engine.
I used to own a VW TDI and regularly went almost 1,000 km on a single tank of fuel with the radio blaring and the heater turned on. EVs aren’t even close. Also note that most EVs are tiny and light. Where is the EV truck that tows 8,000 lb trailers up mountains where the gas stations are more than 100 km apart?
As an in-city commuter car EVs probably work. But once on the highway where traffic can be unpredictable and charging stations are far apart, I can’t see EVs as an option yet.
I’ve always seen EV and renewable technology as a scam anyway. It would make more sense to prevent trucks and SUVs from being used as commuter vehicles. This would reduce fossil fuel energy use without any need for new technology. But it would require law changes by politicians who would rather increase taxes to build wind turbines and solar arrays than solve the problem of energy inefficiency from which we suffer and is of our own making
But it isn’t battery power vs fossil fuel power. The other end of the EV charging cable connects to a smokestack. Even if it’s on a partially wind-powered grid. Even if every other issue is solved in a rational manner.
No one is asking how much the electricity from charging stations will cost. Will the rate during morning rush hour be higher? Will holiday weekend traffic EVs be gouged for juice that they have to have since the next recharge station is 50 miles further down the turnpike? How long will line ups be for your chance to spent 30 minutes recharging your own vehicle? How will road taxes + our GST + and any other costs be determined? Are oil companies going to make the huge investments into freeway charging stations using multiple charging units that will cost plenty or is the governments job.
If an entrepreneur decides to build a number of charging stations can he be expected to charge enough for the electricity to pay for the expensive project forgetting about what a homeowner pays for power at home in the middle of the night. Will there be competition among charging stations in close proximity and if so who pays for the extra substations and high energy electrical feeds.
I think that the electrical recharge market will be one filled with wildly different prices, gouging and ripoffs, just like the gasoline stations are accused of every long weekend.
If EV were to become a big thing, the oil companies would be among the first to offer recharging stations. They would most likely be the catalyst in forcing a standardization of plugs and all that. They are first and foremost about making money. And being the oil burning “denier” that I am, would love to see that happen.
John Hardy…After reading all 3 articles, I am disappointed you really had nothing to say about an Micro ICE generator. It is the solution to most of the problems everyone has identified. It should’t be a purist argument that there can be no ICE generator of any kind in an EV, making them effectively independent of the grid. A PHEV is a major solution that has gone unmentioned in any of your otherwise fairly well argued case for EV’s. Why no mention of a simple, small, generator that is ICE or turbine driven from a FF, or even a mini fuel cell? I am not talking about more complex engineering having this micro engine driving the wheels, just a real mini 10-15 Kw back-up generator to supply some electricity for charging when charging isn’t available or you want unlimited range? This is the solution that not many want to discuss. Why?
Perhaps a small gas powered engine put into the rear trunk area that drives an alternator which would supply all the electricity the car would need. I’ll bet if they put their minds to it the Germans could come up with such a car. They could call it the “people’s car”.
Ah, the VW, my first car. Mine was a semi-automatic – the clutch was in the shifter itself (no clutch pedal). It had a choke knob, for when it was cold and needed an extra rich mixture. Loved that car.
Or they could just call it “the Prius.”
“A PHEV is a major solution ”
What is a P[lugin]H[ybrid]E[lectric]V[ehicle] a solution to? Inquiring minds want to know…
So you can charge the battery wherever you are when a grid plug is not available, or have unlimited range while having superior mileage to a pure ICE car. Or have sufficient waste heat for cabin or battery warmth in winter. Or A/C in summer/fall when you escaping the oncoming hurricane. If you are biased against EV or PHEV, just say so. I am biased against large pure EV sedans, because they are a brick when you run low on battery power. So put a micro ICE generator in, and take the equivalent weight of batteries out. Win-win if you like the concept of an electric car. Not sure though, if there are any engineers up to the task of designing a small compact dedicated 10 Kw -15 Kw ICE generator that would be super efficient at just one speed, full output.
Superior mileage, yes, but not that superior. My ICE-mobile gets about 43 mpg hwy @ur momisugly 70 mph. Do hybrids get that much better mpg to warrant their extra cost (over $10k in my case), and replacement battery cost after not that many years? No, they don’t. I just recently considered a hybrid and redid the math @ur momisugly $5/gallon. The high MPG is seductive, but the cost savings is just not there. If not, then, just what problem do hybrids solve? Better fuel economy? OK. Well that’s for CAFE standards, not for the end user, unless maybe he drives an unusually large amount when gas prices are high.
Mazda/Toyota will have one out in two years, using a rotary engine.
Astonerii
And what is the power generation that produces the energy substitution equivalent of each gallon of petrol used?
I ask again, what is the justification for EVs unless they can compete against ICE’s on an unsubsidised basis? I can see congestion reduction in cities as a good reason but unless the fuel used in the power generation is renewable there is no advantage. Even in this dream world where renewables produce enough power to service all demands there has to be a base load or back up from nuclear or fossil fuel. It seems to me that EV’s are a solution looking for a problem and that the subsidy farmers are milking it.
I am on your side of the argument. I do not support current electric vehicles. They are not efficient. They are not ecological. They are not ready. On the other hand, electric vehicles have some compelling qualities, and when technology brings those qualities at a price that is good, I would certainly entertain buying one.
What on earth is an “electric shower”? It that British English for an electric water heater?
It is a shower that heats cold water on demand. Reasonably common in the UK. Lots of examples here
https://www.screwfix.com/c/bathrooms-kitchens/showers/cat820330?cm_sp=managedredirect-_-bathrooms-_-electricshower
Note. A clear majority of those are under 10kW.
No, it’s an instantaneous electrically heated shower using mains water pressure.
https://www.tritonshowers.co.uk/electric-showers