Another Elon Musk Bet: Half of All Cars Built In 2032 Will Be Electric 359
New submitter cartechboy writes "Ears perked up when Elon Musk made another bold statement he'd be 'willing to bet on.' This time he says that in 20 years, half of all new cars sold would be plug-in electric cars. Believe him? The math looks a little fuzzy, and one research analyst is willing to take Musk up on the bet. 'It expects the U.S. plug-in market to grow at a 32-percent average rate from now through 2020. That takes sales to roughly 200,000 units in 2020. Even if that rate continued for another 12 years, which Hurst considers unlikely, that would only take plug-in cars to roughly one-third of the market in 2032, or about 5 million sales. But Hurst thinks 8 or 10 percent annual growth in plug-in sales is more reasonable, taking the total to 480,000 or 574,000 plug-ins sold in 2032 in the U.S.'"
I wanted to post this (Score:4, Funny)
I wanted to make a post from my electric car but I ran out of powe*&^%^@*&^#####
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Without fossil fuel, where can we get electricity?
Nuke plants that we have today (2nd to 3rd generation) produce to much radioactive wastes, and no one has built any 4th gen nuke plants yet
Eventually, when the fossil fuel runs out, all future inhabitants on this planet will have to go back to the old ways to move - like walking, or riding a horsey, or something like that
Re:I wanted to post this (Score:5, Informative)
http://gatewayev.org/how-much-electricity-is-used-refine-a-gallon-of-gasoline [gatewayev.org]
Re:I wanted to post this (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem with petrol is not this anyway, it's that a) it's a finite resource and becoming scarcer, b) it's releasing CO2 that was sequestered over million sof years in a short timeframe and that doesn't seem to be a good idea by any measure, and c) it's a very inefficient use of the energy it embodies.
If batteries could even get to half of the energy density of petrol, EVs would be a no-brainer. IC engines are really quite unsuitable for the task they are given.
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IC engines are really quite unsuitable for the task they are given.
That's odd, people seem to do quite a bit of traveling while being dragged around behind those ICs. I'm pretty sure they're capable for the task they are given. If you want to argue that the task they are given is stupid, you might have a point.
Re:I wanted to post this (Score:5, Insightful)
They work, because they have had trillions of dollars thrown at them for over a century. Nevertheless, they only seem suitable, but they're not.
Think how many components in the average car are dedicated to working around the IC engine's basic unsuitability. A car has to start at zero speed. No IC engine can run at zero speed, so you need a clutch of some sort. Then they have no power until they are revolving quite quickly, so you need to gear down the output. Then as soon as you're going at a few mph, they've run out of revs and you need a different gear. They are so inefficient that they get very hot indeed, so you need a large cooling system. The fuel/air mixture has to be just so, so you need a pretty complicated system to deliver that with any sort of control and frugality. The internal forces generated are enormous - really, think about how many g a piston pulls reversing direction - so they are big and heavy to contain those forces. And they are a one-way process, so there is no way to recover excess energy of the vehicle in any usable form - you have to throw it all away as waste heat. And when all is said and done, they turn in a measly 25% or so efficiency, which is crap.
An electric motor is perfect by comparison - efficiencies in the 90%+ range, reversible (i.e. it can recover energy back into electrical form), generates torque from zero speed and capable of delivering that torque over a usable range of speeds with no gearing. Sounds like a winner to me.
An IC car has been successful because of the convenience and density of its energy storage, not because of the Victorian engineering hack-job that converts that into motion. And it's only the lack of a suitable energy storage solution that holds back EVs, not motors.
The modern IC engine is a miracle of engineering, but that doesn't mean it's not a bunch of band-aids on top of hacks on top of an essentially unsuitable method for converting chemical energy into motion.
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Your car can theoretically run on algae fuel. In practice, it won't. Imagine replacing our cornfields, all of them, with fancy-schmancy algae incubators, and all the maintenance and labor that is going to require. We can get to about 20% of our current fuel consumption if we convert all of our corn to ethanol; if I give algae a 5x efficiency advantage, that's still all our cornfields. We can't grow it in open ponds, because there will be weeds that compete, birds that contaminate, never mind the loss of
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The ocean's a really hostile place for "civilized" stuff, and the desert is short on water.
It's the scale that's a problem more than anything else.
We also might want that desert for, say, photovoltaic panels instead.
And notice also how nobody (as far as I have heard) has proposed floating solar plants; for some reason they like to put them in flat places not filled with energetic waves and loads of random life (barnacles that encrust boats, sharks that bite cables, that sort of thing). (Which is not to say
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If the car hadn't ben invented yet, but other technology was at its present day level, and someone said he's invented the car, that would be fine. But if he then went on to describe how it worked and how it was fueled, he'd be laughed out of town and his patent would sink w
Re:I wanted to post this (Score:5, Interesting)
Fascinating link.
Alas, it's carefully overlooking a few key details.
One of which is that the energy of crude oil is in no way related to the electricity required to refine said crude oil.
What they're actually making a guesstimate to is the amount of electricity that could have been generated INSTEAD of making the gasoline.
And they're overestimating that by assuming that the making of electricity is 100% efficient.
Which it's not, in case you were curious.
Re:I wanted to post this (Score:5, Informative)
This is simply not true. The DOE and other groups have studied this over and over again. There is no problem generating enough power to switch over almost all of the US's vehicles to electricity, except a small shortfall in the pacific northwest** if everything was switched. The issue is that power plants spend most of their time sitting idle (in order to be able to meet peak demand), while EVs predominantly charge in off-peak hours. The net result is that EVs increase power plant utilization percentages and are thus a huge boon to grid operators (who unsurprisingly are big supporters of electric vehicles), as they get to sell more power without having to build new plants, and the power that they're selling is a nice even, steady draw.
There is one weakness in the link, but it has nothing to do with generation, or even bulk distribution. It's the final leg of the journey, neighborhood distribution. Several studies have shown that once neighrboods hit 10-20% penetration or so (which is still a long time from now!), you can start having problems with too much load on the local circuits. But this is nothing extraordinary; local circuits are upgraded all the time as neighborhoods grow and power usages change.
** - The pacific northwest, due to its heavy use of hydropower, doesn't have as much idle capacity sitting around at night as other regions. Hydropower doesn't care whether you use it during the night or the day; it's generally energy-per-year-limited, not peak-power-limited.
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Considering more power plants are being taken offline than built I think your math is slightly off.
Considering two electric vehicles would double the current electrical usage for the majority of homes.
And lastly the range of current electric vehicles isn't anywhere close to being useful. I live in the city where GM developed the EV. you barely see the cars in the summer and never in the winter as the range just isn't there.
100 miles sounds good in theory but if you turn on the air conditioning you get 50-
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Tell it to the DOE and PNNL [greenbiz.com].
Are you really not aware of the fact that much more power is used during the daytime than at night?
Clearly that has nothing to do with there being *incredibly s
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Headlights are far smaller than 100W with modern lighting technology, LEDs or otherwise. I expect the air conditioners in an electric car will be somewhat more effective because the engine itself is not barfing out enough waste heat to heat a house (*). The usual goal is to try to NOT vent that heat into the car itself, but it's hard not to have leakage, given that you're driving the car through the heat from the front, and the exhaust pipe and catalytic converter are routed underneath it. It's not like
Re:I wanted to post this (Score:4, Informative)
Factory HID ballasts are 35W each, so you're looking at 70W for headlamps.
Some vehicles (Audi R8, Audi A8, Lexus LS600H, Cadillac Escalade, some motorcycles, ) feature LED headlamps but there are problems with LED headlamp design - mainly cooling (see http://www.caranddriver.com/features/2010-audi-r8-led-headlights [caranddriver.com] ) and collimation/focus (it's not a single-point light source like HID, and it's not a filament like halogen incandescent, but an array of LEDs) but if a headlamp assembly is designed from the beginning to use LEDs it's not a problem.
It took a bit of searching but I found that one of VW's concept cars uses Osram's new headlamp module which requires only 19W, and Osram expects to get it down to 15W in a few years without sacrificing light output.
Re:I wanted to post this (Score:4, Interesting)
To some extent, yes, they do. To the best of my knowledge, all rechargeable battery technology exhibits capacity decay over time. The only question is whether they show significant loss of capacity after five years, ten years, twenty years, or some period of time that's long enough that nobody cares anymore. This, in turn, depends on not just the battery technology, but also on how you use it and how the car's charge circuitry was designed—deep discharges from long trips versus lots of very shallow discharges, continuous trickle charging versus letting the battery sag to 90% before you top it up, whether you always charge the battery or allow it to stay mostly discharged for a period of time (which promotes dendrite formation), etc. all play a role in how long a battery lasts.
As far as I can tell, we really have no idea how LiFePO4 is going to hold up in the real world; the sample size of LiFePO4 batteries that are more than a couple of years old is too small. But for older designs that use NiMH or older lithium ion chemistries, we know approximately how long they'll last, and it isn't pretty.
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And to some extent, an elephant is like a dinoflagellate. Sorry, but the sort of cells that go into laptops have completely different behavioral properties than the spinels and phosphates used in EVs (except Tesla's, but Tesla overcomes their issues by babying the heck out of their cells), everything from cycle life to temperature tolerance to power output to energy density to flammability and on and on down the line.
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Ah, but people use cars very differently than they use power tools. Most people keep one battery on a rapid charger, then swap it out when the one they're using goes dead. That's potentially a very different usage model than plugging in your car every night and trickle-charging it over twelve hours or more. You'll probably see a much broader variation of usage patterns i
Re:I wanted to post this (Score:4, Informative)
You can't just run a transformer at higher voltage, the core is limited in wattage. So if you doubled the primary voltage the core would saturate at half the current, with no net gain in power.
Re:I wanted to post this (Score:5, Insightful)
I may be getting old, but I always hear about some catastrophic effect that new technology will have. As CPUs approached 50Mhz, people were telling warnings about if their frequencies got faster, there would be widespread FM interference.
With the public availability of wifi, people made relations to the 2.4Ghz signal being so close to microwave ovens, that the world population would be sterile, we'd all die of cancer within a few years, and other false claims.
Ages ago, it was suggested if the population started (oh my gosh) having their own vehicles, the road infrastructure would fail. There simply wouldn't be room on the roads for all the cars, and if there were, there would simply be no usable area for anything but highways.
And lets not forget about oil shortages. The 1950's, 1960's, 1970's, 1980's, (I think we forget about it in the 1990s), were all going to be the end of the world, because there would be no more oil, or at least not enough to provide for consumer use. I doubt many people here remember WWII war rationing.
As for your assertion that there will be a conflict with electric vehicles and power grids, is irrational. Sure, if everyone bought an electric car today, and plugged them all in at 6pm, it would most likely cripple some areas.
We'll use the Chevy Volt as an example, since it is a newer plugin hybrid that is available to consumers.
http://gm-volt.com/2009/08/20/charging-the-chevy-volt/ [gm-volt.com]
For comparison, a 3 ton residential air conditioner draws about 14A@240VAC. A 4 ton draws about 17A @240VAC.
It could be equally claimed that building newer homes in excess of 3000 sq/ft with vaulted ceilings would have crippled the power grid. I may not have received the memo, but it looks like we all still have power for our computers, so I'm guessing the power grid survived. That gives a good impression of what the peak current is. For those who turn on their air conditioner (or heater, depending on location and climate) when they get home, make dinner, watch their big screen TVs, etc, etc, the peak power consumption is higher.
The only real problem would be if everyone bought new plug in electric cars within a *very* short time span. If I were to step outside, and look at my neighbors cars, I would see cars made from the 1970's through maybe 2010. I don't need to look right now, I did last night. I've also noticed similar trends just about everywhere I've been (which is an awful lot of places).
Just like the telephone and cable companies upgraded areas to support faster Internet speeds, the power companies will upgrade areas as needed to support higher demands.
The article makes a 20 year prediction that half of new cars sold will be plug-in electric. That doesn't mean half of homes will have them. That would indicate for half of homes to have them, you'd still be looking more like 50 years in the future. Now think, what was the spot you're sitting in now, 50 years ago? Where I am was a partially wooded rural area, a few miles off a 2-lane highway that was probably farm land of some sort. Now it's a residential neighborhood, surrounded by residential neighborhoods, off of a 6 lane highway, and a 4 lane bypass.
If you think back (or imagine, if you aren't old enough), households have grown, power needs have grown. A typical 1940s
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The problem with the article is that just because Musk made a statement "he'd be willing to bet on," people automatically assumed that he thought it was guaranteed to come true. This is incorrect.
Just because someone is willing to place a bet on something, doesn't mean they believe the outcome is 100% likely to occur. As an example, using one of the most common betting mediums of horse racing, if I thought a horse was a 3/1 (3-to-1 or 33%) chance of winning a race, but someone offered me odds of 5/1 about
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I would imagine riding a horse is far less energy efficient than driving in a car running on biofuel
Before you want to stake that claim of yours, I would advise you to do a more thorough research on the total energy input in producing biofuel
I do know what I am talking about, in this regard
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Sod the horse, there is already an invention that turns KFC directly into transport fuel. It's called a bike, and had a brief moment of popularity before the lazy fuckmobile was invented and killed all the transport infrastructure world-wide.
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Which biofuel though?
If you're talking corn ethanol, I totally agree with you. It's probably more efficient to corn-feed a horse (dietary considerations notwithstanding).
Without numbers in front of me, I'd guess that biodiesel is probably more efficient than horses ; the engine alone is more efficient (~ 45%) than horse muscles (~ 25%), plus you don't have the overhead of "idling" a diesel engine 100% of the time to keep it useful.
Producing a horse will consume 10 times it's mass in biofuel just for starter
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Horse oil.
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Hint: bring a shovel.
Large scale use of horses could potentially lead to large scale epidemics from organisms breeding in the faeces.
The smell probably won't be enjoyed either.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Lithium-Air (Score:5, Informative)
Developments in Lithium-Air batteries are rapidly making them viable, and are conservatively estimated to give ten times the power/weight [arstechnica.com] of Li-Ion.
There's also been a number of advances in high-surface-area electrodes that dramatically increase charge and discharge rates. Some of these have already made it to market, such as the MIT spinoff A123 Systems - which coincidentally enough has developed a Lithium Iron electrolyte that handles extreme temperatures [a123systems.com] very well..
There's a great deal of industrial interest in improving battery technology, and claiming that there's been no breakthroughs in years is simply ignorant, I'm afraid. If you're paying attention, the future of batteries looks pretty rosy.
Re:I wanted to post this (Score:5, Informative)
The one true statement in this paragraph, but not for the reason you think.
Remember what cell phones looked like 20 years ago? Remember that giant brick of a battery? Compare that to the battery on your smartphone today. Now look at what your smartphone is wasting power on beyond just maintaining a cell signal.
It's a common but utterly false myth that batteries haven't advanced much. They've been advancing dramatically and show no signs of stopping. Now, increasing power *consumption* on electronics tends to waste a lot of this, but as for storage, it's had a pretty consistent 8% energy density by mass gain per year. Power density has risen even faster.
Most automotive-style li-ions are rated for much more extreme temperature curves than lead-acid. I've seen some rated for as low as -50C, although -30C is more common. Ever tried to start a lead-acid vehicle in -50C weather? Yeah, that's what a block heater is for. And guess what? The block heater concept works with EVs, too. And yes, the same applies on the upper end of the temperature spectrum.
Again, automotive-style li-ions (which are a different chemistry than laptop-style li-ions, they're more akin to the li-ions in power tools) don't do this; they're amazingly durable. Something you don't seem to get is that there's not just one chemistry available in each family. Battery manufacturers have an array of tradeoffs they can make in chemistry selection, chemistry details, DOD (depth of discharge), and so forth. This radically alters the ratios between price, energy density, power density, and lifespan. For most consumer electronics, they're thought of as disposable. Hence price and energy density are typically highly optimized at the expense of power density and lifespan. For vehicles, lifespan is fixed at a target (usually something in the 7-10 years to 20% capacity loss range), power density is fixed at whatever the demand is (high for hybrids, medium for plug-in hybrids, low for pure EVs - basically, the more batteries you have, the less power you need per cell), and then the price/energy density tradeoff is adjusted for the vehicle's particular market niche.
Simply not true. Grid operators are dying to get their hands on used batteries from the EV industry which they could snatch up at bargain-basement prices. As if they care that they're only 80% capacity or less; energy density is practically irrelevant when your batteries sit in a warehouse in a fixed location, and 50-80% of the density of a li-ion is still way more than a lead-acid anyway.
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That's simply not true. As GM points out [gm-volt.com], most of the winter difference, which isn't as dramatic as you make it out to be (25-30 miles instead of the average/nominal 40 miles, with 45-50 in spring) has nothing to do with loss of battery capacity, and is simply that it takes more energy to drive a car of any fuel source in the winter, between increased tire losses, snow, harsher driving cycles, interior cabin heating, etc. In cas
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Actually, I'm not; I'm just using US figures because I know most of the people at this site are from the US. I actually live in Iceland (did you notice my sig?). And no, automotive-style lithium batteries have no problem with cold temperatures. Most are rated down to -30 or so, and I've seen as low as -50C. You're confusing automotive-style with laptop-style. Each type of cell is optimized towards its particular use.
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How did your drivel get modded up? Have you been living in a cave for the last decade, if you actually read the news you might have noticed the continuous stream of stories about improvements in battery technology.
The anti-new-energy-technology mindset on Slashdot is just sad, thankfully this doesn't matter because renewable energy is catching up pricewise with fossil fuels and large-scale energy storage is feasible. Renewables are the future whether nuclear and fossil fuel loving slashdot ignoramuses like
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Simple, just use electricity we currently waste on drilling, refining and transportation of oil.
Where is the plastic used to make the bits for the cars going to come from?
What a lot of people don't realise that the petrol their cars run on that they'd so like to get rid of is really just an inconvenient waste product that happens to have found a use.
Re:I wanted to post this (Score:5, Insightful)
Simple, just use electricity we currently waste on drilling, refining and transportation of oil.
Where is the plastic used to make the bits for the cars going to come from?
I don't know, maybe from all the oil we won't be burning?
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...the petrol their cars run on ... is really just an inconvenient waste product that happens to have found a use.
While the market for plastics is huge, it is dwarfed by the gas market. ... oil.
Once there's no need for gas - production will shift to converting petrol exclusively to plastics, wax, asphalt, lubricants, etc. You can create plastics from many sources - vegetable oil, sugar and
Re:I wanted to post this (Score:4, Interesting)
It is called hemp. You can make all of the plastic, paper, and cloth parts for the car out of it. The only problem is that the DEA currently prevents any industrial farming with it since it is also a CLASS I drug which means "It has no medical benefits" which most people disagree with.
Until we get our DEA problem under control, we'll need to import it from Canada which has police agents who are smart enough to tell the difference between an illicit drug growing operation and an industrial hemp field.
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So you can from linen, just as well. Without problems with DEA.
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Sorry for using the wrong word. I meant flax, of course.
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Hemp can grow like a weed. That's the thing it can do better. In a situation where resources are scarce, that's a valuable property.
Of course, this runs counter to the "I want the best, and I want it now" mentality that we've all grown into, but I get the feeling we are all going to have to give that up at some point soon.
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And is but one fiber/oilseed crop with this property. Honestly, hemp's stats aren't that impressive compared to a lot of its competitors. Yeah, it beats some common commercial crops, but there are other plants which beat it in the various properties people boast about for it (productivity, fiber strength, oil production, oil quality, etc).
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Cannabis sativa L. subsp. sativa var. sativa is the variety grown for industrial use, while C. sativa subsp. indica generally has poor fiber quality and is primarily used for recreational and medicinal purposes.
So, the type used for making things with is not the type the druggies like.
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..... but the idea that it is illegal primarily in order to prevent use of the wonder-material hemp is just silly.
You must be new here...
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I wanted to make a post from my electric car but I ran out of powe*&^%^@*&^#####
Yes, because no one ever ran out of gas, so your point pretty much demolishes the very idea of an electric car.
What's rather surprising is that no one has ever thought of this before. I expect the all powerful electric car lobby has bribed everyone to sweep this under the carpet.
Re:I wanted to post this (Score:5, Funny)
But when I run out of gas in the middle of nowhere, I just push my car to the nearest farmhouse and plug my gas tank into the gas socket to get enough gas to drive to the next refuelling station. Can't do that with electricity!
Re:I wanted to post this (Score:4, Funny)
Thanks - I appreciate it! You know, you should consider donating to my kickstarter page for developing a snark detector. We're nearly halfway to our goal!
Get a car that lasts 50+ Years (Score:4, Insightful)
1977 Mercedes-Benz, 300,000+ miles and still going strong.
I expect I will STILL be driving it in 2032 when I has 600,000+ miles on it.
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The car is gradually ceasing to be a status symbol anyway
Sadly, that is just wishful thinking.
All you need is one car. (Score:5, Insightful)
The first electric car with 200+ mile range and a less than $25,000 price will be the biggest seller in the market overnight.
Just those two items alone would probably cause Musk to be right. And that's what he's betting, that the battery range and price will come down to the point that everyone can afford an electric car and that it will have a range similar to that of a gasoline engine. If the market delivers those specs I think he'll be right, you can drive an electric car for about $0.10 cents a mile, the gas savings alone would so massive everyone and their dog would want one.
What could you do if you didn't have to buy gas anymore?
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Perhaps, though by 2032 "less than $25,000" would probably mean "less than $250,000", or "less than CNY159,350 [duckduckgo.com]" if China decides to choke more than just rare earth supplies.
Re:All you need is one car. (Score:5, Informative)
The rare earth thing is a red herring. Tesla, and pretty much all other modern EVs, don't use rare earths. They use AC synchronous motors, which don' have permanent magnets. And anyway, it's not that rare earths are only found in China; they can just produce them a bit cheaper than other parts of the world. The result of the stockpiling is that mines in other parts of the world are starting to be built / reopen (there's one in California, for example, that shut down years ago due to cheap Chinese rare earths that's now reopening).
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Tesla, and pretty much all other modern EVs, don't use rare earths. They use AC synchronous motors, which don' have permanent magnets.
This is not correct, and is evidently a point of much confusion on the internets. Synchronous motors (aka "brushless DC" motors) do indeed use permanent magnets. Virtually all hybrids and EVs on the road today use this type of motor, and absolutely employ the so-called "rare earth" magnets.
Tesla is fairly unique in that they (like AC Propulsion from which they sourced their technology) use AC induction ("asynchronous") motors, which do not use any permanent magnets.
While the stators are the same in both t
Re:All you need is one car. (Score:4, Informative)
Which would be relevant if Tesla and the others used a brushless DC motor. They use induction-based AC synchronous motors. Almost all older EVs used brushless DC and "neighborhood electric vehicles" (aka, glorified golf carts) still do, as well as most hybrids, nearly all modern, highway speed EVs being developed/on the road are now using AC synchronous motors, which have no permanent magnet. This includes not just Tesla's powertrain (which it also shares with a couple other auto manufacturers and was used in, for example, the electric mini and Toyota's new RAV4EV), GM's vehicles [allnewchevyvolt.com], Think's, Renault's, BYD's, etc. Nissan is the only exception with the Leaf, and I doubt they'll stick with it for long.
AC motors like this used to be grossly impractical, but this has changed with the advent of readily available high power switching electronics. "Brushless DC" motors are history as far as EVs go.
Re:All you need is one car. (Score:4, Informative)
Let me be clearer, then: I'm talking about inductive AC synchronous motors. The Leaf (and apparently the ActiveE, hadn't checked out their motor tech) are the only modern highway-speed EVs with permanent magnets in its motor. Is that clear enough?
GM does not use a permament magnet motor. I linked to a GM site for you, where they quite clearly say it's an induction motor. The difference in motors between it and the Leaf is one of the oft-cited differences, so I'm surprised that you don't know that.
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Where did you hear that the Volt has two electric motors? That's one of the most bizarre claims I've heard yet. It has a single motor and a gasoline engine.
Don't like that site about the Volt? Here's [popularmechanics.com] some [motortrend.com] more [nytimes.com]. Good enough for you?
You act like there's a ton of Japanese manufacturers out there. Toyota is going induction. Nissan is going brushless. The other two, Mitsubishi and Subaru, are bit players in the EV field with really minimalist vehicles; I don't think Subaru even has anything that can go hi
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The first electric car with 200+ mile range and a less than $25,000 price will be the biggest seller in the market overnight.
Just those two items alone would probably cause Musk to be right. And that's what he's betting, that the battery range and price will come down to the point that everyone can afford an electric car and that it will have a range similar to that of a gasoline engine. If the market delivers those specs I think he'll be right, you can drive an electric car for about $0.10 cents a mile, the gas savings alone would so massive everyone and their dog would want one.
What could you do if you didn't have to buy gas anymore?
The Chevy Volt already has a longer all-electric range than the average USA commute distance (and hundreds of miles of gasoline powered range) and "only" costs $30K (after tax rebate). Why wait for a 200 mile electric car when a Volt will get you to work on electricity alone, yet you can still drive it 200 miles to grandma's house (and you don't need to plug it in at her house and let it charge overnight).
I'd be surprised if a $25K 200 mile range electric made a significant difference in sales - sales over
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Why wait for a 200 mile electric car
How can one wait for a car that came out 4 years ago? The Tesla Roadster had a 244 mile range and is all-electric. The Tesla Model S (which began shipping this year) has up to a 300 mile range on the top end battery option.
The pricing is a bit higher for now, but it's coming down very fast and they're aiming for $30,000 on the next generation. That said, the 200-mile all electric car is a few years old now and they work great.
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The 230 mile Model S configuration is $70,000, they're not extended range hybrids so you're not driving out of state,
Oh, puhleeze, the OP might live in Rhode Island or the four corners area.
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Indeed, I think what needs to be seen for near-universal adoption of pure EVs is 700 miles highway-speed range at an affordable price. That's 12 hours of driving per day at an average speed of 60mph (most driving being faster, but people stop for breaks, food, etc). When you factor in that you can charge during breaks, you push that figure up a couple hundred miles per day. And lets say that you only have 10 hours plugged in at your destination before you have to leave again. With an efficient vehicle g
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And all the libertarian billionaires would still be able to drive their Ferraris, so it's a win both for freedom and socialism!
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25-50 miles on electric and starting at $40k is a long, long ways off from his spec.
For my part, they're going to have to be much closer to gas car prices, get more like 100 miles on electric, gas-extended so they have some utility beyond just work-and-back, and I need some way to charge one. Right now an electric vehicle wouldn't be an option for me if I had an unlimited car budget.
The Volt costs around $31k [wikipedia.org] after the tax rebate.
So maybe you have a 50 mile (or longer) one-way commute that's longer than 92% of USA commuters [bts.gov] , but 68% of commuters have a one way distance of 15 miles or less, 78% have a commute of 20 miles or less.
So for most commuters, they can already buy a car that will get them to work and back on a single charge.
My commute is only 8 miles each way, I rarely travel more than 20 miles from home on weekends, and when I do, it's often more than 100 miles, so even a 200
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So solve all that... and it's upgraded to a "maybe".
But only if they throw in a free pony and a set of car mats too.
Battery Electric's future same as the past (Score:2)
Battery powered electric cars were dropped in the past, and will be in the future. Without the vast subsidies propping up the things, they will simply not be built except in limited quantities.
Now if he had stated simply electric, and not plug-in electric, then I might have agreed. The future is electric - it's just not battery powered electric.
But the real truth is hydrocarbons dominate, and will be with us for a LONG time to come as a means of transportation.
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Battery EVs were dropped in the past because they were competing against early gasoline vehicles which hadn't been refined yet, wherein you couldn't trust that gasoline from one vendor would work in your vehicle, where you had to crank start, where the engine was constantly dying, where it was horribly loud and the exhaust untreated and nasty, etc. That's the only reason early EVs had a prayer of competing. Once gasoline got past this, they were easily left in the dust.
Gasoline's current problem is that w
Batteries (Score:3)
It's all about Battery technology really. If battery technology improves significantly and the price becomes more affordable then I think electric cars, particularly commuters, will start selling much better. Absent some big improvement they will remain a niche market.
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My favorite approach is the towable range extender, like the self-steering AC Propulsion "Long Ranger" trailer in its streamlined aeroshell. Seems an awesome concept - you have a generator when you need it but don't have to haul it around when you don't. A single trailer could be shared among a couple dozen people (aka, borrowing one from a neighbor like one might with a lawnmower, or a trailer-sharing service, or a rental service, or so forth).
A common misconception is that it's only the batteries that a
Fuel cell (Score:4, Interesting)
Hydrogen fuel cells will win out because you can refuel them in as much time as it takes to refuel a gas or diesel car.
Electric will be held back by the cost, limited lifespan, weight, and recharge time of the batteries.
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Re:Fuel cell (Score:5, Informative)
I worked with fuel cells for about 7 years, and I'm fairly certain they will never be used in cars on any appreciable scale. They were used as an excuse by the auto industry for a while. ("Don't make us do battery cars. Wait for fuel cells!") Now that battery cars are about to become economical, the excuse is no longer needed, so automotive fuel cell programmes will be scrapped. (There are applications where fuel cells do make sense, but cars is not one of them.)
The main arguments agianst fuel cells are:
* Efficiency. Making hydrogen from electricity on an economcial scale has an efficiency of about 50 %. Charging a battery is better than 90 %. Converting hydrogen back to electricity in a fuel cell is again about 50 % efficiency (so 25 % round trip). Discharging a battery is again better than 90 % (so 80 % round trip). * Complexity. A fuel cell needs a supply of moist air to function. This requires a compressior, a humidifier, a water tank, lots of pipes, etc. All of this costs money, adds weight, and introduces potential problems.
* Cost. Fuel cells require platinum catalysts that are expensive.
* Reliability. Fuel cells just aren't as reliable as batteries.
* Lifespan. Again, batteries are better than fuel cells in automotive applications, and since they are also cheaper, they have a much better price/lifespan ratio.
Modern batteries can actually re-charge quite quickly if you have a powerful enough charger. (A car draws much more power than a house, so residential chargers cannot be very powerful.)
I imagine in the future there will be robots at gas stations that switch batteries in your car faster than you could refill a gas tank.
By 1952 London will be 60 feet deep in horseshit (Score:2)
Fuel isn't the only problem. Traffic congestion is a nightmare in many places. I doubt we'll see hundreds of millions of electric cars i
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You missed his main point. Just like the car brought about a complete rethink compared to horses and carts, there could be some radically game changing technology introduced which makes cars redundant within cities. My personal bet is along the lines of robotic taxis...
Before thinking Musk is a fool... (Score:5, Interesting)
2008 - The Tesla Roadster is a $110,000 (base price) sports car with a 244 mile range.
2012 - The Tesla Model S is a $57,000 - $77,000 (base price) sedan with 160 - 300 mile range.
2015 (estimated) - Tesla Gen III Sedans are targeting $30,000 base price with comparable Model S ranges.
In addition, Tesla is rolling out a "supercharge" network to support changing away from home in convenient locations in target markets. The Model S has also been promised to include a 5-minute battery quick change option. Once that is available at (for instance) gas stations, it'll take as much time to refill your electric as it does to refill your gas car, except it'll cost a whole lot less.
This guy is actually delivering functioning, functional electric cars and building the infrastructure to support them. I wouldn't bet against him; everyone who's done that so far has been proven wrong repeatedly.
Price is really the major issue (Score:2)
If they can bring that down, the other issues aren't such a big deal. A big reason is that you can refuel an electric in your house, which means that range doesn't need to be nearly as large. Sure if you are the kind of person who does big road trips you'll need more range and the ability to refuel all over, an electric doesn't do that. However most people don't do that, they drive around the city.
160 miles will do nicely for that, provided you can refuel often. If you can do it every night, no problem at a
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Supercharging is not recommended on a daily basis. The batteries do not take the heat that comes with supercharging very well. They will be useful for extended trips, but they are no gas stations (atleast they will never be as prevalent as gas stations, even when 50% of the vehicles are electric).
50% is not necessarily a large number (Score:5, Interesting)
If gasoline powered vehicles become cost prohibitive to operate and electric vehicles are still expensive, total sales may drop as people are economically forced out the market. "Plugin" vehicles (which include plug-in hybrids) could still be 50% of the (smaller) market.
"Second, an oil price shock would have to drive gasoline prices to $8 or $10 a gallon"
Are these guys kidding? If the global economy wasn't in such a precarious state, gas would be over $5/gallon *now*! In 2032, $10/gallon gas will be a fond memory.
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lol ... I can't remember when gas wasn't 8-10 USD/Gal
in Europe.
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1.64€ per litre here (Finland), which makes it around 7.63 USD per gallon.
Gas is heavily taxed in Finland. Almost two thirds of the price is tax, so it's not really comparable
Which half? (Score:2)
Cars are dual use. (Score:3)
Most people have their car as a dual-use vehicle. First they commute to work, bring the kids to school and get groceries at shops nearby. This is something an electric car can do just fine. (except for really long commutes). But then they also use that same car to go to friends who live 200 miles away, or go on vacation 500 miles away. Those are things that electric cars are not good at. When it becomes accepted practise that you rent a car for this, that's when things can take off.
Markets are complicated things. If it is accepted that you pay $700 for a fancy phone, that's what people will pay. If it is accepted that you pay for owning and driving a car. that's what people will pay. If the prices to own and operate cars continue to rise slowly, then people will adapt and continue to pay rediculous amounts (according to current standards), even if it starts taking a significant portion of their income.
A sudden increase in say gasoline prices of say a factor of two will make a bunch of people think twice. Some will say F*** it and sell the car. Some will switch to electric. But most will adapt, and simply pay the higher price. A few years later a few percent of the population has changed their behaviour due to the increased pricepoint. But the majority continues the same old way.
The parallel here is cigarettes. Sometimes the government increases the taxes by a few percent causing a significant bump in the price for those things. A few people give it up and a few months later, everything is back to the way it was.
Where are the bigger electric cars. (Score:2)
I can't see how this will work when not a single electric car is aimed at families.
Living in London I am repeatedly told I should be driving a "green" car instead of my big Renault Espace diesel. The complaint I normally get is that diesel is dirty but as far as I can find while that is true for old diesels without modern filters (+10 years old) it isn't the case with the modern diesels.
Also I almost never drive anywhere with less than 6 people in the car and walk whenever the distance is within a mile and
PV comparison (Score:2)
I'm with Musk on this one. It's really easy to underestimate the growth of emerging technologies.
In the 2000 World Energy Outlook [iea.org], the International Energy Agency forecasted that the installed capacity of PV solar cells in Europe in 2010 would be 1.6 GW (see page 294). To hedge their bet, they also included an "alternative policy scenario" where PV capacity reached 2 GW in 2010, corresponding to an average capacity growth rate over 1997 levels (0.5 GW) of 11.3% per year. So, what really happened? In 2010, t
silent danger (Score:2)
But maybe by 2032 people would get smarter and build the Internet of things at last, not to drive 3000 pounds vehicle to sign a document or buy a bottle of milk.
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Re:Depends on the price of gas (Score:4, Interesting)
It makes more sense to pump diesel to everyone's homes and have them burn it in in a CHP system than to distribute gas or electricity/
Hint: I am European - when I say "gas" I mean a gaseous substance, and not a petroleum based liquid.
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Until you look at the amount of land you will need to grow that much algae.
I don't have the figures handy but they are less energy efficient per m^2 than the current generation photovoltaics, and that is before you take into account refining and tranportation costs.
You also need mass quantities of fresh water and feedstock to sustain them, just pulling hte carbon out of water that naturally absorbs from the atmosphere is not enough for the scale you are proposing.
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Not just a little less efficient, but way less efficient. The best yields reported in the literature so far are something like 0.5 gallons per square meter per year - and good luck getting near that in a real-world plant. But even that is 18MJ/m^2/yr. By comparison, Ausra's proposed CLFR plant would produce 177MW per square mile, and their pilot plant had a capacity factor of 27%, so using that number, we get 582MJ/m^2/yr. And to top that all off, your average gasoline car operates at about 20% average
Re:Depends on the price of gas (Score:5, Insightful)
Who would buy a second hand electric car? They are only good for land-fill.
[Citation needed]. I can see that the battery pack will eventually need replacing, and that can be a significant chunk of change (and will be factored into the value of the car), but I see nothing that suggests the rest of the car will be any less robust.
If anything, the EV drive-train is (or can be) far simpler than any liquid-fuel car, since a battery pack, some wiring and four electric motor/generators (one at each wheel) can replace:
- the engine block
- the fuel system
- the gearbox, drive shaft and differential(s)
- most of the axles
- much of the cooling system
- the air intake
- the alternator and starter motor
- the exhaust system
- etc
That's a lot of saved wear & tear.
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The way I put it, an electric motor is ten times better than a combustion engine. Having experienced the wonderfulness of a plug in electric lawn mower compared to a crappy gas powered kind, I can say gas power does not compare. The electric is lighter, quieter, simpler, safer, more durable and reliable, and has instant on/off.
But a gas tank is twenty times better than a battery. If we ever get that worked out, the electric car will sweep gas powered cars away. It'll be like the way LCDs vanquished CR
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Indeed, and that's the real issue.
Battery chemistry seems well poised to continue the 8% energy density increase per year it's been getting for the past couple decades. Price per energy density hasn't really tracked that, but it is going down. But the real question is, will there be a big jump at some point that can, over the course of a decade's worth of refinements, take us far beyond that?
It's not impossible. Even conventional chemical batteries are way far away from their maximum potential limits (the
Re:Depends on the price of gas (Score:5, Informative)
None of this is true.
1) Cost is the killer, not battery life. Most EV from major manufacturers are coming with 8-10 year warranties on the packs. Toyota and Honda have had no problems maintaining long lifespans on their hybrid packs, and hybrid packs are put through a *lot* more stress than EV packs (far more charge/discharge cycles, at faster rates)
2) They are not "only good for landfill". "End of life" is usually defined at about 80%, but you can obviously drive it beyond that. And even when they're not used for cars any more, you better believe that power companies would love to get their hands on cheapo used EV packs with 50-80% capacity left in them, to buffer the grid. Battery buffers are often useful for things you wouldn't even think of, not just the obvious ability to use more intermittents or deal with sudden losses in generation or surges in demand. For example, one of the rattlesnake lines out in Utah, which runs from Moab through Castle Valley and onward, has very limited capacity, but they keep getting new requests to hook up to it that they couldn't handle during peak times. Well, what do you do - build a brand new, expensive line in the middle of nowhere? Nah, they just built a big battery buffer halfway down it, which they load up during off-peak times and unload during peak times. Batteries are incredibly useful for the grid, but oftentimes these days, they're too expensive for a lot of tasks they'd be great at. Hence...
3) Automotive-style li-ions (which pretty much everyone except Tesla and their partners are using) are of chemistries that are so eco-friendly that you can literally dispose of them in with municipal waste after discharging in most localities. The CEO of BYD likes to show off his batteries by drinking the electrolyte from them for reporters.
4) Even algae is grossly, grossly inefficient compared to solar panels on the same land, orders of magnitude difference. And way too expensive.
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Current electric cars have comparable performance to equivalent petrol cars and ranges that cover the daily distance the average driver covers (30-50 miles in the US).
Consequently, since for the average person an overnight charge at home is easily sufficient to cover their needs, the importance of charging points outside the home is relatively low.
For the majority of drivers, an electric car is a drop in replacement today for the majority of their jo
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Europe already has expensive gas due to taxes and the roads aren't filled with electric cars. It'll still take some time.
OTOH we have roads filled with diesel cars. Diesel cars are usually more expensive to buy than gas cars. This shows that people *are* capable of looking beyond the initial purchase price.
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Of course, Europe already has expensive gas due to taxes and the roads aren't filled with electric cars.
Even though our gas is expensive, unfortunately so are our electric cars. There is still no purely economic argument for changing to an electric car. It's a chicken and egg situation, especially as regards the availability of charging stations.
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If not, they'll just go to ethanol, or in the worst case methane. Given enough power, it's easy to make a hydrocarbon.
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But, for many people the car is already sort of a part of their body, an artificial exoskeleton http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exoskeleton [wikipedia.org]
Asking them to not use a car is like asking to refuse a heart pacemaker, or a tooth implant. It is a complicated social and biological issue, which has not simple solution, if any at all.
The human species are changing, turning into a kind of a giant bug with an exoskeleton (car). The humans were changing all the time, from a moment they started to think and