The Best, and Worst, Places To Drive Your Electric Car 212
sciencehabit writes For those tired of winter, you're not alone. Electric cars hate the cold, too. Researchers have conducted the first investigation into how electric vehicles fare in different U.S. climates. The verdict (abstract): Electric car buyers in the chilly Midwest and sizzling Southwest get less bang for their buck, where poor energy efficiency and coal power plants unite to turn electric vehicles into bigger polluters.
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The Missing Link (Score:2)
http://news.sciencemag.org/cli... [sciencemag.org]
Location, location, location (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, at least the pollution they caused wasn't being ejected into city centers where people would immediately breathe it in, but instead at a centralized location where big bucks could be spent to achieve big gains of pollution reduction.
The main benefit of electric vehicles is the ability to move to an electricity-based society, at which point the problem that would remain is getting clean electricity. Filling a desert with solar power plants would probably do it.
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where big bucks could be spent to achieve big gains of pollution reduction.
Indeed, they certainly could... :p
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No one is claiming that CO2 levels will approach anywhere near toxic levels. The danger with CO2 is almost exclusively global warming, though sometimes you do hear ocean acidification raised as a possibility. Unlike with your crisp packet, plants just adore extra CO2 and it does not harm animal life at the levels we are talking about.
I agree that it is a pollutant, but I don't think your thought experiment about the sealed room is persuasive.
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it's not just a possibility it's a basic chemical reality based on partial pressures. the acidity of the oceans has already increased by 30% since the start of the industrial revolution.
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/s... [noaa.gov]
http://www.wunderground.com/cl... [wunderground.com]
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Yes, but - and this will probably simply expose my ignorance - shellfish and coral existed back when atmospheric CO2 was high.
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All I needed to do was to show that CO2 is toxic and that we don't want it when we combust fossil fuels, we want the energy.
It's not toxic at all in any quantity that will be released from the burning of fossil fuels. It's a red herring and you do the whole debate a disservice by even mentioning it.
Nope, if that were true, we'd not have rising CO2 since those plants "who just adore extra CO2" would be taking it up.
Well, they are taking it up - just not as fast as we can burn it. They take it up on the geological time scale - we are burning it all in a few centuries.
And, yes, it DOES harm animals at this level: Climate change, dumbass.
Climate change is likely to help some animals and hurt others.
No animal likes to be in a species that goes extinct: it's quite harmful.
No, but the remaining species are quite fond of the newly-plentiful resources.
I'm not in any way arguing that man-made c
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But how much pollution is created with the creation of solar panels?
Large scale solar power plants don't usually use solar panels. They are of the Concentrated Solar Power [wikipedia.org] variety. The environmental impact of producing the large number of mirrors and motorized mounts required for these plants is pretty small.
Electric vehicles have other advantages too (Score:2)
No one is focusing on co2 as a pollutant (Score:2)
go ahead flamod me as I crashed in flames on the last ev article, but yes if you live in a few select areas (80% of the world dosent) or have a custom solar installation then yes electric
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You don't need to upgrade plants or build more.
First of all 60% of your power plants are ideling at 5% load or less at night, or are completely offline.
Secondly even if all your cars over night would turn into EVs, the amount of power they need is abysmall.
The Tesla has a 85kWh battery, loading that in 2h draws 22kW. A million cars will draw 22GW (if they all load at the same time). With smart grids you can easy manage the loading, you use the cars as balancing power. If a great amount of power users (or bi
And how does it compare to gas engines? (Score:2, Interesting)
I know that my current gas vehicle (2010 Elantra) gets about 360 miles per tank in summer, and goes down to 280 miles per tank in winter, due to (Canadian) road conditions and temperature.
If an electric only gets 15% worse, as the article seems to imply, this is still an improvement over my increased gas consumption in winter...
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Don't forget the fun that is "winter gasoline". The change in formula to bring about easier winter starting and combustion scrapes some number of MPG off the chart (10%? I'll admit I don't know, but that seems right.)
prius in winter: 30mpg. prius in summer: 65mpg (Score:2)
i heard of someone who bought a prius: they live in scotland (south west, near ayr). they noticed a huge drop in fuel economy (down to 30mpg) so recorded it, and year after year they found a clear correlation between winter and the drop in fuel economy. the extra cost of the vehicle, the insane pricing for replacement batteries (over $1200 per battery and there are 30 of them), and, finally, the fact that they were not actually getting better fuel economy than an equivalent ICE car, they sold it... and us
Myth of EV pollution (Score:2)
It's all to often claimed that EVs just shift the pollution to the power plant, however even to the very limited extent that is true (EVs are much more efficient than ICE cars, and so are the power plants) that fails to account for the energy cost of producing the gas in the first place, which is comparable to what EVs consume on a per-mile basis: before an ICE has even burned the fuel, it's already used as much energy as the EV will just by filling the tank.
Tesla and Leaf are different (Score:2)
The study seems focused on Leaf, but the Tesla has an active cooling system that the Leaf lacks. Some Leafs in hot climates had a lot of battery degradation. That doesn't seem to be happening with the Teslas, nor should it.
Li-ion cells do degrade with both time and charge-and-discharge cycles. Data coming in from Teslas seems to indicate time is much less a factor, and charge cycles are the main determinant. The implication is that a bigger battery pack will last longer, since it takes more driving mile
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Also depends on how you charge it. The fast chargers will kill a battery faster. The chemicals in the goop do migrate, and though they start out evenly distributed, the uniformity of the chemical density degrades over time. Fast charging on a regular basis accelerates the degradation.
Understated problem (Score:2)
Almost anywhere more than 50 miles away from your garage.
No big surprise but nice to see numbers (Score:2)
Whenever an electric car starts making the rounds, immediately all the ranges are "up to" whatever. In fact, on discussion forums, some electric zealots will usually march in and talk about how I don't *need* a range of X (where X is 80 miles, my round trip to and from work).
The other big piece is that it's not exactly obvious how the range shrinks with age. Personally, I have zero interest in an electric car until it can do 80 miles on a charge under ALL circumstances- snow, cold, 10 years old. Anything
it missed funding of terrorism (Score:2)
Re:No story? (Score:5, Informative)
I'm guessing that this is the link: http://news.sciencemag.org/cli... [sciencemag.org]
Re:No story? (Score:5, Interesting)
Read the actual numbers... "(170 Wh/km), whereas the upper Midwest fared the worst in terms of energy efficiency (196 Wh/km; red)". We're talking about a 13% difference - the article uses the 15% figure from 170, cheating IMHO. BFD, one way or the other, yet the graph varies from green to BRIGHT RED!!!!
More numbers; even if you power your electric car on 100% coal, its about twice as clean per mile than a gasoline engine. The math is trivial and I suggest everyone try it themselves:
https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2013/02/22/wells-to-wheels-electric-car-efficiency/
Re:That's unpossible. (Score:5, Interesting)
He's right, EVs are ideal in our temperatures and very popular in northern Europe. A low centre of gravity makes them handle well on slippery roads and pre-heating is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Range is reduced a little but as long as your name isn't Broder and you planned for that they are wonderful.
Speaking as a Leaf owner in northern Europe.
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pre-heating is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
What is pre-heating and what has it got to do with electric cars?
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Of course, gas vehicles can be pre-heated as well, you just start them up a bit before you depart ( but you don't want to do that in a closed garage!)
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Pre-heating is heating up the interior while it is still charging ... Of course, gas vehicles can be pre-heated as well, you just start them up a bit before you depart ( but you don't want to do that in a closed garage!)
Why is this particular to electric cars? I understand that in really cold countries like Russia and Canada, gas cars have electric heaters in the cooling water circuit that you plug in on a timer to pre-warm the engine (and hence the passenger heater too). I am in the UK and during very cold weather even I put an electric fan heater inside the car the previous night on a mains extension lead, which I switch on from the house 10 minutes before I use the car next morning. It would not be very hard to build
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OTOH gas cars use the engine waste heat for heating.
What do you do with that waste heat in the summer?
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Heating in gas cars is accomplished by diverting some of the engine coolant to a small radiator in the cabin ventilation system. In the summer, you simply don't run hot coolant through the cabin and run it all through the radiator outside of the cabin.
As Hog said, you waste it all in the summer. It's an added efficiency to the whole system in the winter.
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As Hog said, you waste it all in the summer. It's an added efficiency to the whole system in the winter.
Rather, I'd say that it's a somewhat reduced inefficiency during the winter. An efficient system wouldn't produce the waste heat to begin with.
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An electrical outlet is not at the boundary of a closed thermodynamic system. With an electric car, the waste heat is produced at the power plant before the energy is converted to electricity and sent on its way to you in the first place.
Of course. And there are also transmission losses. However, large plants have significantly higher efficiencies than small engines. Net, EVs powered by oil-fired power plants use less oil per mile traveled than gasoline engines, by a large margin, even when you include electric cabin heat.
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That's another way of stating it, I suppose. All systems produce waste heat, though. Even looking at the EV as a closed system, you don't see 100% efficiency. Any time you can use waste heat to do meaningful work, you're increasing efficiency or reducing inefficiency.
Politics aside, there's no difference between increasing efficiency and decreasing inefficiency. Both statements mean the same thing. Increasing the efficiency in any system is good, even internal combustion engines and even in light of electri
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If I come out and directly say that I like electric vehicles and wish that we could stop burning gasoline in cars, could I get some replies to my comments that are actually replying to my comment and not refuting weird arguments that I'm not actually making? I see now why people put those disclaimers at the end of their posts to try and head off these kinds of replies.
You do see that nowhere, in any of my posts in this thread, was I comparing the efficiency of gas engines to electric drive systems, right? I
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An efficient system wouldn't produce the waste heat to begin with.
Let me know when you figure out how to burn something without producing heat.
There are lots of ways to generate power that don't involve burning anything.
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But there are no ways of generating power that don't produce waste heat.
Some produce much more than others, though.
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Rather, I'd say that it's a somewhat reduced inefficiency during the winter. An efficient system wouldn't produce the waste heat to begin with.
Not going to happen without violating the second law of thermodynamics.
Obviously, some waste heat will always be produced. Internal combustion engines, however, waste 75% of the input energy as heat.
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> Why is this particular to electric cars?
Electric cars will generally have a 230V/30A connection, rather than 115/15. So they get four times the power.
They also have electrically powered heaters. So they can turn on the interior heat without having to start anything else.
> gas cars have electric heaters in the cooling
These slightly warm the fluid or oil. They are useful, but don't heat the interior.
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Why is this particular to electric cars?
Its not. I hope I didn't imply it was, I was just answering the question.
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> So electric cars have electric heaters; I had not thought about that aspect before. That would be a considerable inefficiency;
To some extent. The main problem is that it flattens the battery more quickly and impacts range in winter time, the actual cost of the heater for an hour or two is generally relatively trivial compared to the other costs of running the car.
The newer electric cars have much less of an issue though. Instead of using electric heaters they run the air conditioner in reverse (it's an
Re:That's unpossible. (Score:4, Informative)
To give you an idea my Leaf loses about 5% range if I have the heating and air-con (dehumidifier) on. In other words, about 5 miles of range. It's really not a big deal.
Having said that, I rarely keep the heater on for very long. The car is pre-warmed or warms up quickly. The AC has a dehumidifier so the windows defog in less than 10 seconds. The rear window heater uses the 12V battery so does not impact range at all, as do the heated seats and heated steering wheel.
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So electric cars have electric heaters; I had not thought about that aspect before. That would be a considerable inefficiency; OTOH gas cars use the engine waste heat for heating.
You have an odd definition of inefficiency. The fact that ICEVs generate a lot of waste heat is the real inefficiency, even if it does provide a "free" solution to the problem of cabin heat. An efficient vehicle doesn't waste energy and then sometimes apply a small percentage of the waste to do do something useful.
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That's less for comfort and more for not breaking the engine. Generators tend to have a coolant heater as well.
If the coolant system is frozen, it doesn't work, and the "ambient" heat transfer from the engine to the auxiliary equipment isn't fast enough. The engine will damage itself before the coolant system is thawed enough to begin functioning.
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'Pre heated' gasoline cars usually have a special heat reservoir close to the engine, that is heated up during driving and conservs heat for about 2.5 days. It is used to hear up the engine and the interiour of the car.
Preheating the engine in cold climates ensures prompt starting as well as a huge cut in fuel spendings during the 'warming up' phase.
The car needs to be special equipped for that.
In north europe that is standard. No idea about the USA or Canada, would make sense to have it as standard there a
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Basically you have a timer that you can programme to turn on the heating. I have mine turn on Monday to Friday 15 minutes before I go to work. When I come out the car is nice and warm inside, and any mist/ice on the windows has been cleared. Because the car is plugged in it doesn't drain the battery at all.
I can also activate it remotely via a web site or phone app.
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But why is this an advantage of electric cars? I have a button on my gasoline Camry key fob that starts the car and runs it for 10 minutes. When it is 0 degrees F outside, you get into a toasty car.
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It's not exclusive to EVs, but it does cost you less in them because electricity is much cheaper than petrol. It often works better as well as ICE cars usually rely on the engine to provide heat, meaning they need to waste time waiting for it to warm up before they can begin warming the cabin. EVs usually have some other method of generating heat for the cabin, such as the heat pump in my Leaf.
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Well, they cost you less if you ignore the massive capital investment :)
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The car. It would be far, far cheaper for you to install an electric resistance heater in your gasoline car and plug it in than it would be to purchase an electric car.
Versa: MSRP $12,000
Leaf: MSRP $29,000
Yeah, yeah, tax credit brings it down to $21,500. $9500 still buys you a lot of gas and morning 10-minute idles.
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pre-heating is the greatest thing since sliced bread
Well electric block/interior heaters is hardly exclusive to EVs and diesel cars can generally do this without a grid connection using its own fuel. But yes it does come "free" by having to plug in the car to charge anyway and you have to if you want the advertised range. From what I gather if you're at a cabin with no/solar power and can't plug your EV in it'll use a lot of power just to get started in the cold.
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Way to misunderstand it.
Engine Block heaters, heat the engine block, they do not heat the interior of the car. When you have an eletric car, they heat the seats, not the air. It uses less power.
ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) vehicles rely on the engine running, even if it's electric HVAC. Electric cars, especially late model ones have entirely eletric HVAC.
But in the end, it's never about heating the car, it's about how inefficient it is to maintain a stable temperature. If you can start the car and not t
Re:That's unpossible. (Score:4, Interesting)
Way to misunderstand it.
Consider your post is the clueless ones and mods have sent it from 0 to +3, well...
Engine Block heaters, heat the engine block, they do not heat the interior of the car. When you have an eletric car, they heat the seats, not the air. It uses less power.
All heaters help, which is why I said block/interior. Even a block heater will help the usual warming system deliver warmer air much faster, interior heaters warm the entire interior and there's the "full package" that does both. And the last car I saw without electric heating in the seats was in the 90s, still doesn't change that windows fog up, your hands get cold and so on. This "seat only" warming is a power saving measure since using power for heating steals range. How comfy do you really think it is to have one hot side - your backside - and one cold side?
ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) vehicles rely on the engine running, even if it's electric HVAC. Electric cars, especially late model ones have entirely eletric HVAC.
*facepalm* Take a look at DEFA warmup [defa.com], ZeroStart [examiner.com] or any other of a ton of integrated or not so integrated solutions to do what you say they don't. Do you live in California or something? The exact same kind of pre-heating solutions have existed for decades.
But in the end, it's never about heating the car, it's about how inefficient it is to maintain a stable temperature. If you can start the car and not turn the heat/cooling on you get better milage... even in a ICE vehicle.
That is blatantly false [nrcan.gc.ca]:
At -20C, the use of a block heater can improve overall fuel economy by as much as 10 percent. In a test program conducted by Environment Canada, a vehicle sitting at -25C was warmed using a block heater and then driven over a simulated urban driving cycle. This resulted in a 25 percent reduction in fuel consumption compared to cold-starting the vehicle and driving it over the same route
For the metric and Google-impaired, -20C and -25C is -4F and -13F respectively.
However because of the heat generated by the engine being added to the heat generated by driving and the ambient heat, electric cars will perform poorer in hot environments because the parts get hotter and can't be cooled as effectively.In a ICE, the thermal limit is higher, but even regular ICE vehicles will suffer in a desert.
Deserts are kinda the opposite end of the scale here. In cold weather, ICE cars perform weak and electrics worse. And yes, electrics like Nissan Leaf use an electric heater to heat the battery when it's too cold. Tesla doesn't, which makes it sluggish the first minutes in the cold. And heating the interior will use electric power that could have been used for range in both. In ICE cars it'll just sap a little of the battery that'll recharge as you drive, in EVs it's a real drain.
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EVs use no power to start. There is no starter motor, they don't work like that. The motor stops completely when the car does, it's not like an ICE that has to keep rotating all the time or be electronically re-started.
In other words, EVs don't use any energy to start and don't have any problem starting in the cold either. There can be some loss of range when batteries are very cold (like below -10C) but it recovers as they warm up while driving, so even that isn't a big deal. More over, for most EV owners
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and pre-heating is the greatest thing since sliced bread
I think betty white is the best thing since sliced bread
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If I could have I'd gladly pay extra for the heatpump system in my e-up.
My pure resistive electric heater in the e-up is 6kW meaning if I don't use pre-heating before driving to work my short 11km commute changes from a 12kWh/100km to 16-17 during cold winter.
In summer I do it on 11kWh/100km due to no heating and less rolling resistance on tyres.
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I don't think the average Tesla buyer buys the car because it's 'green'. They buy it because it's electric sports car. Being electric, the (peak) power output is much much higher than achievable with combustion engines.
Then, the battery problem will likely solve itself over the next decennia. We may not have reached the optimal solution, but Tesla clearly shows there is a market for what is available with current-day technology.
Other car manufacturers are going the hybrid road to increase efficiency. But i
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"Decennia" is plural, so presumably he means over the next couple of decades.
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Probably ;D ... multiple tenth of thousands of years.
But from the sound of it he perhaps ment multiple decadons of millenia
Re:Electric not the answer (Score:4, Insightful)
This isn't USA Today - he should be able to use his full vocabulary - it is trivial to right-click the word and learn something.
Re: Electric not the answer (Score:5, Interesting)
Wrong, wrong, and wrong. (As a Tesla owner.) Charge time is largely irrelevant. I plug in every evening (just like with my phone) and next morning have full range available. Meanwhile, my wife often has barely enough gas in her car in the morning to be able to get to the gas station. And battery technology is going to continue to improve. Why wouldn't it? With solar in my roof and a battery buried in my back yard, I will soon be living with free energy. As long as those who want us all to continue to live in the past don't blow us up first, anyway.
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With solar in my roof and a battery buried in my back yard, I will soon be living with free energy. >
You got all that for free?
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I take it that either
a) the nearest gas station is ~100 miles away, or
b) your wife is an idiot?
Face it, it's not that hard to stop at a gas station on the way home from work rather than drive till there's teacup of gas left in the tank.
For that matter (anecdotal evidence from where I live) there are half a dozen gas station within five miles of where I live - it takes even the worst performing
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Yeah, that really is an apples to oranges comparison. His wife's issue doesn't center on the gas station vs the charger plugging. If she neglects filling up the tank when it gets low, she'll likely also neglect plugging in the car at night. Both types of vehicle are capable of running out of fuel and yet most people manage to not run out of fuel.
In fact, the reinforcement of habit aside, a spacey or forgetful person is more likely to get in trouble with a vehicle that needs to be attended to every day than
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If she neglects filling up the tank when it gets low, she'll likely also neglect plugging in the car at night.
If this is a problem, it's fairly easy to mitigate, assuming you have a dedicated parking spot (e.g. a garage): Install wireless charging. You take a hit on charging efficiency of about 25%, but considering that electricity is 1/4 the cost of gasoline that's not a killer. With that, every time you park at home, you're charging.
I've seriously considered installing it for my Nissan LEAF. It's kind of pricey, though, about $4K for a system. That would be okay if I were certain I could use it for 20 years or
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A loss of 25% efficiency in wireless charging is hard to believe.
Did you mean efficiency drops to 25%? That makes much more sense.
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No, filling with gas isn't something you do every morning, dumbass, therefore you can find that you run out (or worrying about running out) because you haven't seen or taken an opportunity to fill up.
Pliugging in every day IS done.
So if she forgets to attend to fueling her vehicle one in five times, she'll not make it to work once a week with an EV instead of once a month with a gas vehicle?
I like EVs, but your situation seems to more about your forgetful wife than different vehicle technologies. Most people manage to keep their vehicles fueled.
Re:Electric not the answer (Score:4, Informative)
1500 Tesla's were sold in the Netherlands last year out of 400k in total, or around 0.4% [link [autoweek.nl]]. However, in total electric+hybrid cars were about 4.3% of total [link [rolandberger.nl]]. So, while they are obviously not the majority, they are certainly not rare either. Amsterdam has almost 500 public charge locations [link [chargemap.com]] and in the center (where parking space is scarce) there are designated parking spaces for electric cars where they can charge, see e.g. this street view [goo.gl] of what would be the closest parking spot to my house if I had an electric car. There are two taxi companies that use electric vehicles exclusively, which is good news since taxis have disproportionate impact on air pollution, one drives Nissan Leaf and the other Tesla. As far as I know they are not directly subsidized apart from general subsidies on electric cars, so they must be commercially viable.
All in all, electric cars are not some sort of pipe dream, they are out there and have small but growing market share, and infrastructure is growing with it. For each consumer a different tradeoff will be in order (e.g. I use my car a couple times every month so got a small gasoline car instead, while a friend commutes 50km every day so he got a Tesla). It still uses some government subsidy, but honestly, so do oil and traditional car makers.
Re:Electric not the answer (Score:5, Informative)
I think unless batteries get much better in capacity vs weight and someone can figure out how to recharge them a lot faster. We will never see EV's as a viable solution to the masses.
I have an EV (Honda Fit). I think that they're already useful for something like 3/4 of the population. Lots of parts to the equation. Right now they're better as the second car of a two or more car family, but they can be the only car depending on your driving pattern. They're great for someone who has a defined commute, as opposed to someone who drives to work and then drives around as part of their work. They're better when you have a garage or dedicated driveway, probably not so good right now if you have to park curbside. Right now some of them suffer pretty big range loss in cold weather (mine has about 50% range in the dead of winter compared to summer time and that definitely needs to be addressed, but I don't see why it can't be improved substantially).
Charge time is only an issue in rare circumstances; the problem is that people who don't drive an EV tend to think of recharging like going to the gas station; something you do when the tank runs low. That's not how most of us use the EV, though. Typically I use it on trips which I know I can make without recharging. (in warmer months I can drive 100 miles without recharge). The recharge happens at night, or between trips. A typical trip for me is to drive 50-60 miles and get home with 1/2 charge. I plug in to the dryer outlet in my garage and within 90 minutes it's full again. So, I may run some errands, go home and grab lunch, and by the time I'm done with lunch the car is fully charged again, ready for more errands. Or, if I commute to work I get home with 1/2 charge and again, within 90 minutes it's fully charged if I want to go out to dinner etc. Even if I use the full charge (which is very very rare) I typically recharge overnight so by the time I wake up in the morning it's ready to go. My point is that with a few exceptions you don't notice the charge time because it charges while you're doing something else. This means that I almost never have to wait for the car to charge. That said, if I had to do a road trip I could see myself doing it if I had to spend 20 minutes recharging every 200 miles. I'm sure high speed charging will improve, and by the time we hit 10-15 minutes to recharge after 200 miles of driving I think we hit diminishing returns, i.e. it'll be short enough I won't care whether they make it any faster or not.
Similarly, many non-EV people worry about the number of charging stations. Again, my typical use is that I don't have to use a charging station because I plan my trips so that I can make the full trip without recharging, but as an example if I need to drive into Boston (35 miles) I can make it there and back without a recharge, but if I also need to do another stop that's going to require more than another 20 miles of driving, then I'll plan to park in Boston at a charging station. If I've used 35 miles of charge, it only takes 20 minutes to fully recharge, so unless I'm running an especially short errand in Boston the car will be fully charged by the time I get back to it. One way to measure what percentage of my trips are EV friendly is to look at when I use the EV versus the gas car. During the summer, I find I use the gas car about once a month. That's about how often I have a trip to make that the EV doesn't have the range for. My next EV will have at least 200 miles of range and at that point I expect only 1 or 2 trips a YEAR won't fit the profile (and I'll just rent a car for those 2 trips).
All the calculations I've done show that my direct operating costs (i.e. cost to "fill the tank") is about 1/5th of what it costs when I drive a gasoline car. I also save on maintenance - there are no scheduled oil changes or tuneups... just a tire rotation that the dealership did for free. So, it's actually costing me quite a bit less than 1/5th of operating my gasoline car (Subaru Imprezza STi). Right
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I think the greatest unknown for EVs is resale value, and maybe cost and frequency of battery replacement.
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Not only cost though.
People just like having great cars. Electric cars are quiet, zippy, reliable and easy to use. When you go back to a fossil fuel car afterwards, it's like going back in time.
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I would not assume "the motor does not wear" in EVs. They certainly will wear, but it is also very possible that they may last a lot longer than ICEs. We'll see in 10 years when we have a lot of cars with a lot of miles on them under a lot of different conditions. Body resilience & condition is a large part of resale value as well.
Very few cars are scrapped because of engine failure. Engines don't generally break unless you do something stupid to them.
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Re:Electric not the answer (Score:4, Informative)
Do your calculations include the cost of a replacement battery?
No, and this is not well understood yet. When I was a kid cars seldom lasted more than 60,000 miles. Now 200,000 is pretty common. So, a good question is what's the average life of a gasoline car, and how many battery swaps might you expect in an EV over the same mileage?
Another thing to consider is that many people believe the cost of replacement batteries will decrease substantially over time, so how long it takes you to put 100,000 or 200,000 miles on the car may substantially change what you end up paying to replace the battery pack.
According to Wikipedia:
The Fit EV employs Toshiba's SCiB batteries that can be recharged to 80% capacity in 15 minutes and can be recharged up to 4,000 times, more than 2.5 times that of other Li-ion batteries.
So, that could mean up to 400,000 miles if you believe them, but I'm skeptical of hitting numbers like that. But it might suggest that 150,000 to 200,000 miles on a battery pack is a reasonable expectation. Unfortunately, because my Fit is a compliance/lease-only car I'll never get to find out - I'll need to return it long before I can put enough miles on it to see the battery degrade. But I'll get back to you after I put a couple hundred thousand miles on my next EV ;-)
Re:Electric not the answer (Score:4, Informative)
There are taxi companies in the UK that use Leafs. Some of them have 150k miles on the clock, mostly rapid charging which is the harshest for the batteries, and they are seeing around 10% degradation after about 2.5 years of that kind if punishment.
Tesla have tested their packs up to 750k miles with about 16% capacity loss. It was an artificial test of course but suggests that battery life isn't going to be an issue for most owners, and meets the spec of the cells they use (300 miles from a full charge, 3000 cycle lifetime = 900,000 miles to 20% capacity loss).
Basically, unless you pack has some kind of fault lifespan should not be an issue for most people. Nissan offer replacement packs for $4000, but no-one has ever bought one. Even when the pack does get to 80% capacity it could still be useful - a Tesla will still do 200+ miles on that, or it could be used as a storage system for a house.
I'd say you are no more likely to need a new battery than you would be to need a new engine in an ICE car. Most people never will, unless they are very unlucky or do so many miles that the savings over an ICE will have paid for the battery many times over anyway.
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Actually rapid charge isn't that bad; you normally only rapid charge to 80%. It's rapid charging to 100% that's the most problematic.
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Lithium Titinate batteries are bad ass, wish they were more available at the consumer level
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It strikes me that the Chevy Volt is a pretty good compromise. The advantage that it has is that it can be driven as a battery only electric but has the range limits of a gasoline car. The Volt's battery is a lot smaller than the Tesla model S which reduces the battery-only range, but for a lot of short-drive use cases may be adequate.
It'd be interesting to see what it would be like if they could scale the Volt up in terms of battery capacity to push all-electric range closer to 100 miles. That kind of r
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The Leaf's sales numbers are probably all about price -- at $35k, it's much more in the range of the typical middle class income. I think the Tesla gets the most focus because of cool factor and also because it seems to have the fewest compromises -- long range and it's pretty big.
I think a lot of people look at it from a perspective of having it "just work" with their lifestyle. Enough range for pretty much any metro area driving and enough size that it would be comfortable.
The Volt would work for me sin
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I have a Volt, for almost 1 year now. I've been getting 38-40 miles on a charge, and that's even driving on hilly terrain in the San Francisco coastal mountains. On longer drives, or trips where I don't have time or opportunity to plug in and charge, the gas generator is getting about 36 mpg. That's not too shabby. Overall, in the last year the car calculates 191 mpg. Doing the numbers differently, considering cost of electricity/mile and cost of gas/mile, it's more like 140mpg. Fluctuating gas and ele
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What's the Volt like for interior comfort? I'd guess that its better than most small cars simply because you don't have to listen to a lawnmower engine scream for mercy, but what about seats, climate controls, ride, noise, etc?
I'm pretty spoiled now, my current car is pretty much the opposite side of the automotive equation -- a Volvo S80 V8. Mileage is awful by any standard, about 18-20 for my typical driving (pure long-haul highway is about 25).
But about 2/3rds of the time my daily driving is 60 miles o
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"We will never see EV's as a viable solution to the masses. The trouble right now is no alternative is getting large numbers of people onboard which is required to be successful."
Sounds likr you nrrf electric buses if you want to get "large numbers of people onboard"
They do have electric buses in some countries, (the overhead wired type known as trolleybuses) and battery power could work for school buses.
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The EV sales accounted for 12.5% of new cars sold last year where I live - it's already mainstream.
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The economics of fossil fuel is also hidden. We're do not pay to offset the environmental it causes. Gas should be at least $10/gallon, probably >$20.
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Show us the math that got you there. Otherwise 78% of statistics are made up on the spot...
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New cars registered last year: 144 202
Zero emission cars: 18 094, of which 4 were hydrogen and 18 090 were EV.
100 * 18090/144202 = 12.54%
Source: http://www.ofvas.no/aktuelt-1/... [ofvas.no] (in Norwegian)
There's also a Wikipedia page in English with statistics for parts of 2014:
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What subsidies? I keep hearing about them but never details. Are you talking about the ones like R&D and capital building that every company gets?
Well, subsidies besides trillions spent on useless middle east wars based on lies.
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The electric car is hugely more efficient than thermal-engine based ones... we should develop non-polluting methods of generating electrical power and solve the power for once and forever
The elecric motor it is just one link in a chain. You might even better say that an axle shaft is 100% efficient so we should develop non-polluting methods of putting power into axle shafts and solve the power problem for ever.
but we keep saying the gas motor is better out of pure laziness
Yes, l'm a lazy bastard. I don't want to push my Tesla the last 130 miles of a 400 mile journey after the battery runs out.
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What do you do differently when your internal combustion engine vehicle runs out of fuel?
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What do you do differently when your internal combustion engine vehicle runs out of fuel?
It goes the 400 miles.
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Oil refined to petrol burnt in an engine of an ICE to move it can be compared to coal burnt in a power station to produce electricity stored and used in an EV.
Wow, tell me about it.
PS Top Gear faked that Tesla running out. .... Except you appear to be far more gullible than top gear think anyone is who watches their show.
I haven't the faintest idea what you are talking about. Faked what Tesla?
Elon could take your post and use it to reopen the case and likely win.
LoL! 400-130 = 270 miles. The FTP-75 figure for a Tesla's range with a 85kWh battery is 265 miles.
Well done, you gullible shitheat!
Wow, LoL! My original post wan't really that serious, but it obviously all went over your head. When the OP talked about "laziness", a completely wrong and arrogant assumption about the motives of anyone with contrary arguments, I immediately thought of walking instead, and then of pushing a car. You really need
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Electric cars can be charged during off peak hours by wind or other non-carbon producing energy production.
Re:no link? (Score:5, Insightful)
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- Tesla tend to deliver in batches to different markets, so they get some real good months in the statistics.
- Added benefit for electric cars, like free parking in some areas(e.g privately regulated parking). And being alowed to drive in bus lanes(With heavy comuting from wealthy areas, you get many who can afford a Tesla to get an edge in the morning trafic).
- No general road tax and free