Who Killed The Electric Car

924guy wrote: ...and there are allot of people who want to be better on the environment as well...

I love this argument for the electric car, and it'll be cheaper than gas too! All of these numbers are based on current energy costs and current demand on the electrical grid, so the first EV car recharging at 2am every day will get cheap energy. Add 1,000 cars to the grid, and locally the price of energy goes up a few cents/kWh. Now Add 100,000s of EVs and watch the cost of electricity during these 'cheap' off-peak times become high peak hours, in the end, an economic balancing act will ensue and the price of electricity will more or less level off during all hours over the full 24/hr/day lifecycle.

So now electrical prices for everyone have gone up, here's the fun part, since our power grid is now running close to peak capacity 24 hours per day thing are going to break / wearout faster, guess what, power plants are regulated in their profits by the gov't, and if they can't make their 5-7%, they'll pass along the repair costs to the consumer via, you guessed it, higher priced electricity! "JUST BUILD MORE POWER PLANTS!" you say? And who's going to pay for that? More importantly, what type? A coal power plant can be built fast, but is polluting, exactly what you claimed to have been helping by buying your EV. Nuclear? I'm all for it but good luck with the red tape and regulations regarding construction and implementation, not to mention the cost, it'll take you 10 years to get it on the grid, all the while demand for electricity is going up and there's not enough supply, so prices go up to compensate, just another economic balancing act.

In the end, we're not using gasoline, we're burning more coal, producing more nuclear waste (which in this country we can't recycle because someone thought it was a bad idea). In the short term the solution doesn't 'shift' much of anything except that now we have a headache in the front instead of the rear. If we really wanted to be eco-friendly and whatnot we'd use nukes and recycle their waste, that'd buy us the most in the short term. Long term we need renewables or fusion, straight up, and we'd have limitless power. People can talk about solar cells, wind power, and all these great 'free' forms of energy, but the environmentalists who wrote the laws to prevent land development in pristine areas shot themselves in the foot so we can't put up solar or wind farms because they're 'unsightly' and disrupt/harm the local environment. Hell, we can't even put up wind farms off the coast because people would have to 'look' at them.

I could rant forever about this, as most do, but in the end, if everyone is a little more efficient in their daily routine, and cares a little more about their common man, we can make a dent today, without having to wait for someone on the other side of the country to force us...

Didn't we have the very same thread around a year ago? Actually this one is more civil.

Where GM can be faulted IMO is in developing an (admitedly unprofitable) product with so much potential, and abandoning it long before the technology had reached maturity. They had a dream team of engineers who could have morphed the EV into hybrid technolgy, thereby trumping Toyota and Honda, but simply didn't give them the chance. If you take things up a level, the real fault is American Corporate Culture which focuses on short term profits over long term. I'm sure there was a high-level meeting or three that could be summed up as "Let's see, we can keep on pouring money into EV technology, or we can pump up our advertising budget for Escalades (much laughter) yeah, I thought so. berkeley the hippies."

Meanwhile, until recently Toyota was spending around A MILLION DOLLARS PER DAY on battery R&D. Thew comparison is stark. GM acted as 95 percent of American corporations do - short-sightedly, and ultimately berkeleyed nobody so much as themselves.

Actually this one is more civil.

I'll take the 'under' on 10 more posts.

I did some interesting calculations:

From DOE: Average Total (Residential, Commercial, Industrial) Annual Energy Consumption: 313,023,356,397 kWh

From US Bureau of Transit Statistics: Total number of vehicles in US (2006): 250,851,833

Annual Passenger vehicle sales (2006): 7,667,066

Annual US vehicle fleet growth (2006): 3,700,000

Now comes some simplifying assumptions based on storage capacity and range averages of existing EVs: EV1: 26.4 kWh / 75-150 miles (take average = 112.5 miles) Tesla Roadster: 53 kWh / 244 miles

So the average is somewhere around 28kWh/100miles, we'll assume newer cars which are larger will benefit from increases in storage capacties to keep this ratio equal or better, and since no new EV will retain this level of efficiency over it's lifespan we can safely say the power required will live around here for awhile even with power density increases and moves to larger cars.

Now the typical driver drives 12,000 miles per year which equates to a total annual PER EV energy consumption of: 3360kWh to drive their car.

Now if ALL new passenger vehicles sold in the US were strictly EVs, next year the additional amount of power required of the grid would be: 7,667,066 cars x 3360 kWh / car / year = 25,761,341,760 kWh or about 8.2%, considering electrical capacity is only increasing at a rate of 2.X%/year and you can see how in just a few years the cost of electricity would soar due to significantly higher demand. If there were a new battery that allowed for higher power densities tomorrow and you could convert semis and other commercial vehicles over you would raise the annual increase in electrical power demand by many times over.

Technically speaking the US has the generating capacity to fill the need, but the cost to consumers would be significant, if the average price of electricity was $0.10/kWh in 2006 with demand level and growth in capacity at 2.X%/year with a profit of 5-10% (we'll assume the median, 7%) and you increase demand 8%/year even with additional capacity increases you're talking a 6% differential, which the power companies will be happy to supply, but it will wear out their systems faster and they will incurr cost to provide it, thus passing the buck on to the consumer...

This is a very rudimentary analysis that should be taken with a grain of salt...

matt wrote: and i never said the technology doesnt exist or the cars dont exist, i said the technology wasnt suffecient.

So you didn't say this? Are you sure?

matt wrote: soo, untill the battery technology exists thats long life like 10 years and super effecient and light weight and also is easy to make that doesnt require many trips back and forth over seas to make we wont see electric cars for the masses imo.

I suppose the stuff does travel over the ocean to get to your door step, but that's also how a heck of a lot of other stuff gets to you. Lithium Ion batteries surround you. As I sit at my desk I've got three lithium packs (phone, headphones, laptop) within arms length. You can keep telling me they don't exist, they're going to explode, they won't last, etc. and I'll continue using them and believing that they do exist. Tesla is proving that they can exist in cars (as well as a few other boutique car companies) and GM is well on its way to prove that they can exist in lots of cars. By the way, these have to be warrantied for many years and many miles, so you can rest assured that they'll be tested to actually perform up to the EPA warranty requirements.

Raze wrote: Now if ALL new passenger vehicles sold in the US were strictly EVs, next year the additional amount of power required of the grid would be: 7,667,066 cars x 3360 kWh / car / year = 25,761,341,760 kWh or about 8.2%, considering electrical capacity is only increasing at a rate of 2.X%/year and you can see how in just a few years the cost of electricity would soar due to significantly higher demand. .... This is a very rudimentary analysis that should be taken with a grain of salt...

Raze, don't you think basing our demand calculations on overnight EV conversion? I'm sure the EV manufacturers would love you for it, but that's a bit far fetched. ;) I think a huge hang up on the "Oh noze!" crowd is that they want to prove that everybody can't have an EV. Sure, not everybody will have one. Just like everybody doesn't have a gas/diesel/puppy/whatever. EVs are not a silver bullet solution...but for people like me who live within a few miles of just about everything, it sure would be a great solution. I keep my gas/diesel/WVO/whatever burner for long trips and use the EV for short trips. But wait, with something like GM's Volt I can use it just the same as an EV 90% of the time when I'm just piddling around in the city but burn gas when I want to take a road trip down to California for the West Coast $20XX.

Diversifying our energy demands seems pretty sensible to me. EVs are not a silver bullet, they won't happen overnight and even if they were available in large quantities and attainable prices RIGHT NOW, they still wouldn't get 100% penetration. (That's what she said)

Bryce

Now if ALL new passenger vehicles sold in the US were strictly EVs

That's a silly assumption, however. You might as well say If all PCs were made by Apple. Anti EV forces like to play that particular card. The bottom line IMO is that EVs are a viable piece of the puzzle. My comute is 15 miles round trip. My wife's about the same. For us, I'd be very happy with a four-vehicle family - 2 EVs for commuting, One performance car and one tow/vacation vehicle The Evs would be charged at night with excess capacity, and our contribution to local noise and polution would be significantly reduced.

""

Matt's exactly right: the current technology will allow for building EVs but it is not sufficient TO MEET THE NEEDS OF THE AVERAGE CONSUMER.

So when faced with the hard choice, Mr/Mrs Average are going to pick the solution to their problems which most closely matches their needs and is within their budget. So if the average car is $30K and goes `350 miles per tank of gas and the electric is $40K and only goes 150 miles per charge and they can't afford an extra car for long trips, guess what they are gonna do?

Yup. I thought so.

Matt, I'm trying to read your posts (despite the horribly difficult to read format) but when you outright contradict yourself it's hard to stay focused.

Say you take that same pack that gets completely discharged in 300 miles and you control it so that you actually can only get 150 miles on it. Then say you don't charge it to 100% but instead something like 75%. So now you're cycling it from 75-25% instead of 100-0%. Wouldn't you think you would DRASTICALLY increase the life of the battery? Now say you do that again, but you take your 300 mile battery and you only get 75 miles out of it going from 75-50% instead of 100-0%. Again, another drastic increase in battery life. Now, imagine that the vehicle actually only sees that 75 mile usage occassionally, and that the vast majority of trips are more like 20 miles. Another drastic increase in battery life.

This is what current OEMs are doing (with hybrids, etc.). They clearly understand the tradeoffs of depth of discharge, recharge, cycle lifes, temperatures, etc. Look to the Prius for a clear example of how long the batteries can stay in good condition with proper control strategies, there are tens of thousands of them out there and the failure rate is incredibly low. Sure, those batteries don't do a heck of a lot of work, but they're pretty small and were only intended to be a supplement to the gas engine. GM is using lithium for the Volt, which puts a much larger load on the battery instead of a gas engine, and as such the battery is a lot more significant. In another ten years, you'd expect to see continually larger storage capacities, etc. That's how technology gets developed, by taking the thing that is currently "not sufficient" and working on it until it is sufficient. By the time it is sufficient, customer demand changes and the bar is raised for what is sufficient. We're humans, nothing is ever enough.

Would a better battery be better? Of course. Can many people get by with technology that exists today? Of course. I don't think a time will ever come where people stop looking for a better energy storage medium. However, the technology is sufficient enough for a whole heck of a lot of people today. EVs are not a replacement for all gas vehicles, as I said, so it's silly to keep saying EVs need better batteries to compare to gas vehicles.

Bryce

Jensenman wrote: Matt's exactly right: the current technology will allow for building EVs but it is not sufficient TO MEET THE NEEDS OF THE AVERAGE CONSUMER. So when faced with the hard choice, Mr/Mrs Average are going to pick the solution to their problems which most closely matches their needs and is within their budget. So if the average car is $30K and goes `350 miles per tank of gas and the electric is $40K and only goes 150 miles per charge and they can't afford an extra car for long trips, guess what they are gonna do? Yup. I thought so.

What if they could get an average car for $30k that goes 350 miles per tank of gas or a range extending hybrid (aka Volt) for $40k that goes 40+ miles on electricity then the exact same distance as the $30k car on gas. Would Mr. and Mrs. Average pay $10k more for a car that they would only need to fuel up when driving on long trips? A car that would require 75% less maintenance? What if it was only $4k? What if it was the exact same price, but didn't have quite as many options?

Time will tell. As with current hybrids, tax incentives, public opinion (smug emissions!), etc. can sway things too.

Bryce

Memory isn't a lithium problem.

kreb wrote:

Now if ALL new passenger vehicles sold in the US were strictly EVs

That's a silly assumption, however. You might as well say "If all PCs were made by Apple". Anti EV forces like to play that particular card. The bottom line IMO is that EVs are a viable piece of the puzzle. My comute is 15 miles round trip. My wife's about the same. For us, I'd be very happy with a four-vehicle family - 2 EVs for commuting, One performance car and one tow/vacation vehicle The Evs would be charged at night with excess capacity, and our contribution to local noise and polution would be significantly reduced.

I agree with you my assumption was indeed silly, hence my qualifying statement at the end.

I was going to go further into refining my assumptions by calculating percentage increases year to year of hybrid cars and the real increase in the percentage of standard type they are replacing as well as percentage of the overall fleet increase they represent and then make assumptions regarding the more realistic 'ramp-up' toward EV we could expect to see, however other things like cost of the EV and the potential negative impact of battery cycle loss (thus increasing load demand over time vs miles traveled) and factors such as improvements in technology and power density, as well as potential environmental disposal costs down the road would all need to be thrown into the pot and adequate data may not exist. I mean SOMEONE is going to have to pay for disposal of these batteries, and in the end it's you, whether it be through gov't taxation, manufacturers passing it on as higher initial vehicle cost, or simply dumping it on you in the end it has to be consdiered as well. If I really had the time I could go through some serious assumption refinement to come to a 'reasonable' picture, but I provided my analysis simply for the sake of argument, so again, take it with a grain of salt.

That being said, by your commute standards, you would need a much less capable vehicle than the EV1, with much less range, I too am in that boat, commuting only 26 miles/day. I personally wouldn't mind a Volt (if it ever makes it to market) or equivalent by any other manufacturer because for the vast majority it satisfys both needs and would not strain the grid initially by having huge energy reserve capacites on each vehicle, the gasoline engine would provide the backup. I still say this is the best intermediate step, it's not a win-win, but it gives commuters the ability to not pollute and commute for less than it currently costs, but at the same time, they can drive 1000 miles in a day if they needed to w/o 2-8 hour stops to recharge. Long term my first post still applies, and I wish we could use renewables more, it's freakin free! I especially like wind and tidal, solar has potential. I'm not one for government mandated anything, but I think new home construction should require solar pannels, that would get us moving in the right direction and bring the cost down for all, and best of all, lower our total environmental impact...

matt wrote: oh, to clarify your theory of charge/discharge cycles. lipo's life expectancy is greatly improved if they are fully charged. even if you only use 10% you want to recharge it to 100%. if you dont they get memory.

Nobody is using lithium polymer for large scale EV stuff yet...to my knowledge....they're using lithium ion. There isn't any memory effect with lithium ion. It's on the internet, it must be true:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Volt
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery

Bryce

Nashco wrote:

Jensenman wrote: Matt's exactly right: the current technology will allow for building EVs but it is not sufficient TO MEET THE NEEDS OF THE AVERAGE CONSUMER. So when faced with the hard choice, Mr/Mrs Average are going to pick the solution to their problems which most closely matches their needs and is within their budget. So if the average car is $30K and goes `350 miles per tank of gas and the electric is $40K and only goes 150 miles per charge and they can't afford an extra car for long trips, guess what they are gonna do? Yup. I thought so.

What if they could get an average car for $30k that goes 350 miles per tank of gas or a range extending hybrid (aka Volt) for $40k that goes 40+ miles on electricity then the exact same distance as the $30k car on gas. Would Mr. and Mrs. Average pay $10k more for a car that they would only need to fuel up when driving on long trips? A car that would require 75% less maintenance? What if it was only $4k? What if it was the exact same price, but didn't have quite as many options? Time will tell. As with current hybrids, tax incentives, public opinion (smug emissions!), etc. can sway things too. Bryce

It's quite possible something like the Volt could sell under those conditions. It's a hybrid, just like the Prius.

Note that in my post (and matt's) we were both speaking of 'pure' EV's, which are the thread subject. As we both said, with current battery technology EV's won't compete with straight gas, diesel, hybrid or alcohol fueled vehicles.

According to the Wiki, lithium ion batteries do not have a 'memory' problem like NiCds. They do have a different problem which shortens their life:

[edit] Shelf life A unique drawback of the Li-ion battery is that its service life is dependent upon aging (shelf life). From time of manufacturing, regardless of whether it was charged or the number of charge/discharge cycles, the battery will decline slowly and predictably in "capacity". This means an older battery will not last as long as a new battery due solely to its age, unlike other batteries. This is due to an increase in internal resistance, which affects its ability to deliver current, thus the problem is more pronounced in high-current applications than low. This drawback is not widely published.[23] However, as this capacity decreases over time, the time required to charge it also decreases proportionally. Also, high charge levels and elevated temperatures hasten permanent capacity loss for Lithium ion batteries.[24] This heat is caused by the traditional carbon anode, which has been replaced with good results by Lithium titanate. Lithium titanate has been experimentally shown to drastically reduce the degenerative effects associated with charging including expansion and other factors.[25] See "Improvements of lithium Ion technology" below.

At a 100% charge level, a typical Li-ion laptop battery that is full most of the time at 25 °C or 77 °F will irreversibly lose approximately 20% capacity per year. However, a battery in a poorly ventilated laptop may be subject to a prolonged exposure to much higher temperatures, which will significantly shorten its life. Different storage temperatures produce different loss results: 6% loss at 0 °C (32 °F), 20% at 25 °C (77 °F), and 35% at 40 °C (104 °F). When stored at 40%–60% charge level, the capacity loss is reduced to 2%, 4%, 15% at 0, 25 and 40 degrees Celsius respectively.[26]

Jensenman wrote: It's quite possible something like the Volt could sell under those conditions. It's a hybrid, just like the Prius. Note that in my post (and matt's) we were both speaking of 'pure' EV's, which are the thread subject. As we both said, with current battery technology EV's won't compete with straight gas, diesel, hybrid or alcohol fueled vehicles.

The Volt isn't just like a Prius, the Volt will operate on pure battery power for an extended period at all speeds, not just low speeds like the Prius (40 miles is the number GM keeps repeating). The gas engine is not directly connected to the wheels, unlike the Prius. In that sense, it shares a whole heck of a lot with "pure" EVs, except instead of putting a trailer with a generator behind it for long trips, you have the generator under the hood. In reality, the Volt is probably the type of vehicle GM should have done instead of the EV1 back in the day, there were soooo many hurdles to jump with the EV1...as the movie points out.

Bryce

The Volt isn't just like a Prius, the Volt will operate on pure battery power for an extended period at all speeds, not just low speeds like the Prius (40 miles is the number GM keeps repeating). The gas engine is not directly connected to the wheels, unlike the Prius. In that sense, it shares a whole heck of a lot with "pure" EVs, except instead of putting a trailer with a generator behind it for long trips, you have the generator under the hood. In reality, the Volt is probably the type of vehicle GM should have done instead of the EV1 back in the day, there were soooo many hurdles to jump with the EV1...as the movie points out. Bryce

+1,035,654,765

Nashco wrote:

Jensenman wrote: It's quite possible something like the Volt could sell under those conditions. It's a hybrid, just like the Prius. Note that in my post (and matt's) we were both speaking of 'pure' EV's, which are the thread subject. As we both said, with current battery technology EV's won't compete with straight gas, diesel, hybrid or alcohol fueled vehicles.

The Volt isn't just like a Prius, the Volt will operate on pure battery power for an extended period at all speeds, not just low speeds like the Prius (40 miles is the number GM keeps repeating). The gas engine is not directly connected to the wheels, unlike the Prius. In that sense, it shares a whole heck of a lot with "pure" EVs, except instead of putting a trailer with a generator behind it for long trips, you have the generator under the hood. In reality, the Volt is probably the type of vehicle GM should have done instead of the EV1 back in the day, there were soooo many hurdles to jump with the EV1...as the movie points out. Bryce

I think one of the clearest ways to differentiate an Extended Range EV (Volt/Plug-in Prius) vs a Hybrid (Prius, Insight, etc) is choice.

A Prius driver and a Berkley driver have something in common. They run on gas. If your corner station decides to charge $4/gal tommorrow, then that owner will either pay the market price, or not drive.

Remember the email chain that always makes it around about boycotting * oil company next Tuesday to stick it to the man? Make him watch his daily profits drop and know that the consumer is in control? Know why that doesn't work? Because the consumer is not in control. The consumer is going out on Monday and Wednesday to fill his tank instead, because he is still consuming.

With your plug in/range extended solution, you have a choice between plugging in or paying the pump rate. You get to choose every day that you own this vehicle which solution you like better. Maybe its electricity every weeknight, and gas on the weekends. Maybe its gas only during the summer if electricity prices go skyhigh for whatever reason. Either way, its up to the owner at that point.

Jensenman wrote: During the '90's, Ford was experimenting with a very promising 'hot sulfur' (sodium-sulfur) battery which held the possibility of much greater storage density than lead/acid, NiCd or NiMH stuff but was considered unsafe. http://www.greencar.com/articles/fords-hot-ecostar-electric-car.php

Considered unsafe? Have you seen the operating and storage temperature on those things?

Raze wrote: I love this argument for the electric car, and it'll be cheaper than gas too! All of these numbers are based on current energy costs and current demand on the electrical grid, so the first EV car recharging at 2am every day will get cheap energy. Add 1,000 cars to the grid, and locally the price of energy goes up a few cents/kWh. Now Add 100,000s of EVs and watch the cost of electricity during these 'cheap' off-peak times become high peak hours, in the end, an economic balancing act will ensue and the price of electricity will more or less level off during all hours over the full 24/hr/day lifecycle.

Everything you say here is true. As demand rises, so will the price of electricity. The big advantage I can see for EVs is that they are the ultimate "flex-fuel" vehicle. Let's be real, electricity comes from some other type of energy, at least until someone figures out how to harness lightning. However, it's a form of common energy currency, and our technology infrastructure is built on electricity.

I can turn a generator with fossil fuels, water, wind, or get it from the sun. I can then use it to power a number of devices. If I could put my car on that list, then every device I own could be electric. If I have choices about where I get my electricity, or better yet am in a position to get wind or solar power, then I can control my energy costs to a degree. I would have far more control than I do over a single type of fossil fuel.

poopshovel wrote:

Actually this one is more civil.

I'll take the 'under' on 10 more posts.

Well done.

blizazer wrote:

Jensenman wrote: During the '90's, Ford was experimenting with a very promising 'hot sulfur' (sodium-sulfur) battery which held the possibility of much greater storage density than lead/acid, NiCd or NiMH stuff but was considered unsafe. http://www.greencar.com/articles/fords-hot-ecostar-electric-car.php

Considered unsafe? Have you seen the operating and storage temperature on those things?

Hey, it would save having to add a heat pump for winter use.

Nashco wrote:

Jensenman wrote: It's quite possible something like the Volt could sell under those conditions. It's a hybrid, just like the Prius. Note that in my post (and matt's) we were both speaking of 'pure' EV's, which are the thread subject. As we both said, with current battery technology EV's won't compete with straight gas, diesel, hybrid or alcohol fueled vehicles.

The Volt isn't just like a Prius, the Volt will operate on pure battery power for an extended period at all speeds, not just low speeds like the Prius (40 miles is the number GM keeps repeating). The gas engine is not directly connected to the wheels, unlike the Prius. In that sense, it shares a whole heck of a lot with "pure" EVs, except instead of putting a trailer with a generator behind it for long trips, you have the generator under the hood. In reality, the Volt is probably the type of vehicle GM should have done instead of the EV1 back in the day, there were soooo many hurdles to jump with the EV1...as the movie points out. Bryce

Allow the hairsplitting to commence. You are right on the money about an extended range hybrid being the best solution in the EV1 era. From what I see, the creation of the EV1 was driven by the 1990 Kalifornia mandate that there be 2% 'zero emission vehicles' on the road by, IIRC, 1998 or 2000. http://www.arb.ca.gov/msprog/zevprog/zevprog.htm That mandate has been rolled back several times. Unfortunately, an extended range hybrid like the Volt is not zero emission, just extremely low emissions. Hence the EV1.

http://www.greencar.com/articles/20-truths-gm-ev1-electric-car.php

Wally wrote:

poopshovel wrote:

Actually this one is more civil.

I'll take the 'under' on 10 more posts.

Well done.

Suite. What do I win? BTW, I killed the berkeleying electric car.

Listening to the discussion, it seems to me we always forget one basic priciple:

We don't require every vehicle currently on the market to be suitable for every possible use for every possible consumer. So why do we ALWAYS argue that ANY EV has to be suitable for EVERY use for EVERY consumer in order to be a viable product worth spending money developing and selling?

Even if a manufacturer were to produce 1 million EVS tomorrow, and all of them were sold next week, that only replaces on half of one percent of the total number of registered vehicles on the roads in the US. I'd bet that one half of one percent of the total number of registered vehicle are used in a manner that EVs would be perfect for. And selling a million of one model vehicle would be a hell of a sales number for any manufacturer, and a viable product worth spending money developing. In fact, 10 manufacturers selling a million examples each is still only 5% of the total fleet population.

At that rate it would take many, many years to convert a significant enough portion of the existing fleet to cause any stress on the existing grid, especially if most were equipped with a smart charger to charge in off-peak hours. While it would increase demand in off peak hours, energy plants would end up being more efficient for it, due to not having to be ramped down at night and ramped back up in the morning, as they are now. And it's impossible for there to be any sudden demand shifts, because it's impossible to make enough EVs at once to cause that sort of demand shift.

Ron Mexico killed it.