Why electric cars will not work.

kreb wrote: Why do we make such sport of getting our Nomex® knickers in knots?

Fixed! Because too much alliteration is almost enough.

kb58 wrote: The EV topic comes up over and over, and while the industry is "getting there", they aren't there yet. The BIG PROBLEM is that there's a lot of marketing spin (lying) about car specs. What many overlook is the big picture, preferring to focus on the lack of a tailpipe as meaning there's zero emissions. No, oil comes out of the ground (or Uranium...), get sent in big ships to the U.S. where it's piped to powerplants, that burn it to boil water, to turn generators, to make electricity, which goes through 100s of miles of wires to your house, where the owner smugly charges his electric car. Every step in the process is an efficiency loss, nevermind what happens to the old battery packs that no longer hold a charge.

This argument that "electric cars aren't green!" comes up over and over. They're not truly zero emissions, but you can put much more advanced emissions control equipment on a building than on a car. Unless you're getting your power from a poorly regulated coal plant (using coal on such scales would be illegal at this point in a sane world, but that's another topic) it's safe to say an electric car is significantly cleaner overall - getting powered by a nuclear plant would make real (not the Greenpeace type) environmentalists jizz in their pants. And sending electricity over wires is a much more efficient way of moving energy than sending gas on trucks and trains.

As for batteries, they're recyclable. Yeah they're full of poison, but ICEs don't lubricate themselves with free-range unicorn piss either, and it doesn't seem to be a big issue.

I must have senses like some kind of super hero because I can always here hybrids running in electric mode come up on me from behind while I am running. They seem to make tons of road noise. Maybe it is the tires with tread compounds similar to that of a big wheel. They whir pretty loud too.

Giant Purple Snorklewacker wrote: A bit unrelated, but to the topic of the impracticality. Its a berkeleying electric car. If it has no nuclear reactor on-board its never going to have enough storage to equal the driving needs of this country.

Dude.

there are 200 million registered cars in the US alone. if an electric car were perfect for a mere 1 goddamn percent of the automotive owning public, it would be a rousing sales success. Even if one was perfect for 100% of the US motoring public, it would take 30-40 years of consistent maximum production to replace the entire fleet, and by that time, you'd already have to be replacing the first electric cars, too. being perfect for everyone not only is NOT a design requirement, it should not be part of the design requirement!

Why ANYONE even puts a brain cell to use complaining about how they aren't perfect for everyone is beyond me, as it's a completly irrelevant argument.

it's like complaining that Mazda is stupid for making an MX5 becaeu it won't tow your 4 horse trailer.

bravenrace wrote:

autoxrs wrote: Ohnoes, the EV doesn't make cool whoosh noises. Well the good ones that I've driven have this think Clarkson calls "torques" and boy do they work. Your average person drives less than 25 miles per day. An EV is perfectly capable of doing that. That's the driving needs of this country, but people seem to point at the outliers and scream bloody murder. No one states the EV will be your only car, it'll be a second car that you know you drive to work. I live 3 miles from work, and an EV would work just fine and dandy.

If that's all you're going to drive it, then why have it? You're not going to use much gas in that short commute either, so why put up with the downsides of an electric vehicle?

Might as well say the same thing about any economical car. If you're only going to drive less than 25 miles a day, might as well drive a big block Chevelle, as you're not going to spend that much more money on fuel, right?

If I had a Volt right now to commute in, at today's electric rates, it'd cost me about a buck seventy five a week to commute in "fuel." If I was the kind of person that was going to buy a new car anyhow, that sort of running cost savings while giving the added feel good benefit of not using foreign oil very much, could easily be worth it. I mean, it's the same justification of spending $15-18k on a new economy car to save fuel when you could have lower TOTAL running costs simply buying a, say, used E38 740iL.

4 cylinder turbo diesels FTW. Particulate matter is more of an aesthetic hazard than a real threat, and its virtually nil at idle anyway in a traffic jam environment. 40+ MPG, with TQ, fuel that requires less refining, easy to modify, doesnt require a overhaul of infrastructure, can run on a number of alternative fuels, is a well developed technology (where do you think most of the know-how for direct injection petrol engines comes from?) and it does not need a government subsidy to sell well. All it needs is to not be regulated into the ground. Which apperantly is impossible.

LPG generator powered hybrid electric using the train model of propulsion.

Put a high efficiency electric motor in place of the wheel driving the actual wheel section, every car is all wheel drive and the mass on the wheel is not actually as bad as a heavy wheel, because the hub/motor section is 16" and the wheel bolts to the outside of it.

kb58 wrote: No, oil comes out of the ground (or Uranium...), get sent in big ships to the U.S. where it's piped to powerplants, that burn it to boil water, to turn generators, to make electricity, which goes through 100s of miles of wires to your house, where the owner smugly charges his electric car.

One percent of U.S. electricity is from oil. From the DOE:

Full document here...

Twenty percent of our electricity is from natural gas. According to this DOE website, we imported 16 percent of our natural gas (2007). According to this DOE website, we import NG primarily from Can. & Mex., and to a lesser extent Egypt and Trinidad.

I can't see how any of this is going to end, but I will say I wouldn't mind one bit if I had to drive a Tesla Roadster around town. That power plant in a miata with half the batteries (meaning less range, not less power) to drop some weight would make a fun errand running car IMO. And does anybody only own one car? Or is it just people i know who have the habbit of collecting cars we "dont need"?

EVs are primarily "topped off" at night when a huge overcapacity of electical production exists. If a tipping point is reached where they start gaining significant market share, and people start plugging them in during the day, there will be supply issues in the summer. But that's a big "if", because there's really very little reason to choose an EV over a comparitively priced hybrid or diesel. Right now there are basically three types of EVs: home built, big bux, and crappy glorified golf-carts. Even in Green Berkeley, CA those companys who have tried to make it selling EVs have perished. Will things be significantly better for the EV crowd when you can purchase a $40,000 Nissan EV? Nah. That's not enough to warrant the hassle of plugging in and the limited range. When you can buy a high-quality EV for less than the cost of a similarly featured IC, they'll start grabbing some market share. In the mean time they make for fun conversation anyway

kb58 wrote:

autoxrs wrote: Your average person drives less than 25 miles per day.

Finally, proof positive that I'm "way above average."

I do that each way. Combine that with the cost of electricity in NY, and an EV is not my car of choise. But to any one who wants one, have fun.

glueguy wrote: After 1 mile the engine turned back on to recharge the battery. That was it - 1 mile range at 38 MPH. Yee ha.

The battery needs to be kept within a specific charge window for optimal battery life. IIRC for a lot of vehicles, it's around 60-80%.

They don't want the batteries running down, but they don't want them fully charged, either. Programming is a balancing act between fuel economy and maximum battery life.

Even if there was no electric motor, an auto shutoff/instant start engine would help city fuel economy greatly. Add an electric motor for creeping along for the times you don't really need a gas engine (the kind of traffic where, with a manual, you're constantly shifting between 1st and Neutral) and you have a general idea of how hybrids are supposed to work.

Electric vehicles, they ain't. The electric motor is just an assist and isn't intended to be the main drive, at least with most hybrids on the market.

In reply to erohslc: Well, that's true, and granted I found a way to "trick" it into electric mode, but consuming a charged battery down to the point of starting the engine to charge it in such a short distance surprised me. Over the 15 mile drive from the airport to destination, accelerating sloooowly from stop to keep in EV mode as long as possible, lifting and coasting as much as I could, netted 48 MPG for the trip.

GameboyRMH wrote: Wow. Was it fully charged to start with? That's pathetic...not even enough to make the electric powertrain practical for "city crawling."

It was fully charged per the dash gauge. I understand the concept of hybrid and supplement vs. a real electric car, but I guess I thought they would do more as an EV than they can at this point in the game. To drive the Altima with any sense of normal acceleration, the engine starts almost immediately and runs non-stop. It shuts the engine off at rest, and that's about it. Maybe the way it's designed, but again not what I had envisioned, especially after time in a Prius rental.

Your electric car is coal fired.

glueguy wrote: In reply to erohslc: Well, that's true, and granted I found a way to "trick" it into electric mode, but consuming a charged battery down to the point of starting the engine to charge it in such a short distance surprised me. Over the 15 mile drive from the airport to destination, accelerating sloooowly from stop to keep in EV mode as long as possible, lifting and coasting as much as I could, netted 48 MPG for the trip.

I could get the same mpg in my '84 Civic, running at 70-75, back & forth to school 4 hours away. And that's without Bob Costas-footing it, either

Chris_V wrote: Might as well say the same thing about any economical car. If you're only going to drive less than 25 miles a day, might as well drive a big block Chevelle, as you're not going to spend that much more money on fuel, right?

Yes, 90% of all commuters can use and electric car, and since they can, they can also use a 2 door sub compact commuter.

Yet, full size truck sales are 4-5x more than subcompacts. We'll ignore the full size SUVs, CUVs, sedans, etc etc- that all get <30mpg.

The only way that you will force people to buy only what they need is via laws. And I'm sure people will hate that solution.

There's what people need and what people want. Don't confuse the two.

Eric

I want an electric car that I can charge either during off-peak hours of with a solar array at home. I'd like to shoot for a real world 200 mile range and top speeds in the triple digits while maintaining that sort of range. When they can do this for me, I will be one of the first in line to buy one.

One thing that makes me wonder is why on earth don't they put solar cells on cars? I know the Prius has a supplemental solar cell as an option, but from what I understand, that's not for the drive battery, it's for the secondary systems battery.

I do like the idea of each wheel being driven. I know it would add weight, but you could keep an electric motor in its power band by using it to power a hydraulic pump to turn 4 wheel motors instead of to power 2 drive wheels. Makes sense in my head. It's not like that's an uncommon configuration for forklifts. You could probably still get a lot of regenerative braking out of that sort of setup.

The other alternative, which has been brought up already, is to have an electric motor in each wheel. Sounds like a stellar plan to me. It would reduce the loss of a hydraulic setup, and think of the packaging you could get away with. Move the brakes inboard, electric wheel motors at the outside, wheel bolted directly to the drive. Wasn't that the idea behind GM's prototype Hy-Wire car?

There's a military vehicle or three floating around with this concept: in hub e-drive at each wheel station. Standard steering for "most" occasions, with the ability to spin on a dime when necessary. It also opens up all sorts of exciting avenues for VDC...

I maintain that the only way North American's will buy what they need (per Alfadrivers description) is to make it fiscally irresponsible to drive a gas sucker. It's slightly daft that financially, it's better for me to drive 160kms a day to work than to move close to it.

I know this won't make me popular here, but I believe that fuel should be taxed more. Make it more of a user pay system, force people to rethink their "need" for a SUV/other, and use the money to improve public transit and the roadways.

IF people insist on driving guzzlers at the higher rates, so be it.

VanillaSky wrote: ...why on earth don't they put solar cells on cars?

They do - it's just that what they produce doesn't make anyone happy with the tiny output. Wanting solar-powered cars that go hundreds of miles on a charge is great, but so is wanting anti-gravity and faster-than-light travel; we just have to work at it. So get to work!

njansenv wrote: I maintain that the only way North American's will buy what they need (per Alfadrivers description) is to make it fiscally irresponsible to drive a gas sucker. It's slightly daft that financially, it's better for me to drive 160kms a day to work than to move close to it. I know this won't make me popular here, but I believe that fuel should be taxed more. Make it more of a user pay system, force people to rethink their "need" for a SUV/other, and use the money to improve public transit and the roadways. IF people insist on driving guzzlers at the higher rates, so be it.

What's really funny about this- if you live close enough to work that you can bike, then fuel cost becomes pretty light, no matter what you drive. So it becomes even LESS likely that you'll want an EV. You'll want a single car that can do more than commute, and since your commuting $$ are small between a subcompact and a full sized truck (relatively speaking)- more tend to get the larger vehicle.

For super LONG drives, people also tend to buy more luxury- all for comfort.

Not sure where the break even mileage is where gas is a strong cost factor vs. vehicle wants, felxibility, and comfort.

Eric

Chris_V wrote: Why ANYONE even puts a brain cell to use complaining about how they aren't perfect for everyone is beyond me, as it's a completely irrelevant argument. it's like complaining that Mazda is stupid for making an MX5 because it won't tow your 4 horse trailer.

Chris,

When are you going to get it through your thick head that because I either don't understand or am not the intended market for any vehicle or technology, the entire concept is invalid, Not only is invalid but and I am superior human being because I pointed out that it is not perfect for what I perceive my need to be. Don't you anything about internet discussions.

You must one THOSE people (everyone insert a social or political group you dislike)

njansenv wrote: I maintain that the only way North American's will buy what they need (per Alfadrivers description) is to make it fiscally irresponsible to drive a gas sucker. It's slightly daft that financially, it's better for me to drive 160kms a day to work than to move close to it. I know this won't make me popular here, but I believe that fuel should be taxed more. Make it more of a user pay system, force people to rethink their "need" for a SUV/other, and use the money to improve public transit and the roadways. IF people insist on driving guzzlers at the higher rates, so be it.

And why is it desireable (let alone ethical) to force people to drive an EV through taxes? Because it will stop global warming? Because it make some group feel good? Because god wills it? Because the government is so trust worthy and competent?

Will it be better for the environment to dramatically increase the demand for rare earth elements, increase the stress on an antiquated power grid running to a large extent on coal, and forcing the production of tons opon tons of new vehicles the require mining, refining, etc and basically penalizing anyone who does not have the ability to buy one?

Most vehicles will get charged at places of employment during the day because they will want to be sure they can get home while stopping for groceries, not at night. This is especially true if/when the cost of electricity goes up due to the increased demand and people try to get free fuel from work rather than their garage outlet. So that grid will certanly be under a tremendous strain.

This idea that gas is bad and government control is good simply does not compute.

EVs will continue to evolve and they will probably prove to be very useful to portions of the population, and will subsequently be bought. Awesome. But as it is right now they are not the answer, if there is even really much of a question.

In reply to alfadriver:

I agree to what you said. My point is that they are still viable as replacements for enough people to make it a strong business case. the truck has been to make them actually CAR-like, and up until this point, they have not. they have been like G-Wizzes, or backyard conversions on old Beetles, or worse, like this:

And you're not going to intrude on "proper" car sales by building crap like that.

But a real car like the Volt that has a major manufacturer warranty, doesn't cost a hundred grand, only costs a buck and a half a week to "fill up" and gives you the satisfaction of not using foreign oil? That's going to eat into "normal" mid range car sales for those people that realize that they don't normally drive very far each day (which still amounts to nearly 100 million drivers). Add the unlimited range of the fuel engine for when they NEED to go longer distances and you have a leg up on both full electric cars like the leaf and gas hybrids like the Prius that use more gasoline on a daily basis.