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What Needs to Happen Before Electric Cars Take Over the World

nytimes.com

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Re: What Needs to Happen Before Electric Cars Take Over the World

#191

Post by audunw »

ransom1538 wrote: post #164

"About 65% of this electricity generation was from fossil fuels" These EV cars should be renamed "Coal Cars" so people understand the true harsh carbon footprint. Because you plug the car into a wall doesn't mean the energy is clean. https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3

> These EV cars should be renamed "Coal Cars" so people understand the true harsh carbon footprint.

That's just incredibly dumb. If you do this, you have misunderstood the entire point of EVs.

An EV could be fuelled by coal today, and wind/solar tomorrow. They are extremely flexible and becomes greener as the grid does.

If you're concerned about the environment and green technology, you're obviously going to fight for both EVs and a cleaner grid. Both those solutions are absolutely necessary to solve the problems.

Meanwhile, an ICE is just not part of any viable solution at all.

The only time perspective that matters for the environment, is the long term. It doesn't matter what 100'000 EVs emit today. What matters is where we are in 20 years: hopefully with 100s of millions of EVs charged by a mostly clean grid.

This "EV fuelled by coal" talking point is primarily pushed by the fossil fuel industry btw. They are not concerned about the environment. They're just interested in protecting their industry. I haven't heard anyone who actually cares about the environment focus on this, because if you do care, you know better.

Re: What Needs to Happen Before Electric Cars Take Over the World

#192

Post by Cthulhu_ »

Retr0spectrum wrote: post #148
paol wrote: post #33

These articles keep omitting a pretty big barrier to adoption: street parking. (Maybe it's a function of US being suburb-centric? But at least the New York Times ought to know better.) One of 2 things needs to happen, either charging technology improves to the point where you can charge at a gas station in a span of time comparable to refueling a conventional car, or all street parking spots need to be fitted with ch…

In the slightly more distant future, when we have perfected autonomous driving, it could be feasible for a car to drive itself to a large parking facility on the outskirts of a city, for example. Assuming people still want to own their own cars by then.

The low-tech version of that already exists - a lot of big cities offer P+R, that is, you park your car outside of the city and get cheap public transit the rest of the way.

Still only feasible if you're okay spending an extra half an hour traveling and your destination is hard to reach / expensive park at though. If that's automated it'd be neat. I mean it already sorta is if you have a good bus network, but those generally aren't door-to-door. There's also taxis, that is, if you're rich enough you can afford to take a taxi to work every day. Might even be the gig economy / uber becomes cheap enough to make it compete with public transit.

Re: What Needs to Happen Before Electric Cars Take Over the World

#193

Post by will_hughes »

paol wrote: post #88
mikepavone wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This gets mentioned a lot, but I think the point is really over stated. First, there's a huge amount of room for growth in electric vehicle adoption even if we assume that EVs are a non-starter for people who park on the street at night. The problem is worth solving, but we're no where near the point in which it's the main obstacle to further adoption. Second, cars that are being used will generally spend a fair bit…

> we're no where near the point in which it's the main obstacle to further adoption Sure. I'm talking about universal adoption because the article is ("take over the world") > We don't drive especially far in a typical week This is a good point, EV range is already long enough that many urban drivers will not need to charge every day. > For some subset of street parkers, enough of that parking time will be spent at f…

> Tricks like going to that one Whole Foods store that has the fast chargers won't work when a significant % of cars are EVs, there simply will need to be a lot more public chargers

Sure, same as it used to be awkward to have to hunt around for a power point in a coffee shop/mall/etc or to figure out where had wifi. Now that's pretty standard fare.

Just like EV charging is today - in most countries there's quite a lot of places you can go to charge at. Soon it'll be every mall and shopping centre, because (at first) it'll be a way to attract customers, and then eventually it'll be expected.

Re: What Needs to Happen Before Electric Cars Take Over the World

#194

Post by saturdaysaint »

igravious wrote: post #111
bigbugbag wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are batteries part of the powertrain though ?

If they are, they oughn't be. Batteries are like a really really expensive fuel tank. The fuel happens to be way cheaper. That's the trade-off. The article fails to mention this, which is odd. ICE: powertrain + fuel tank ~$6,000 (or whatever your local currency) … EV: powertrain + fuel tank ~$16,000 … That makes more sense, but then you'd need – cost of fuel per mile/kilometre ICE: 10¢ a mile EV: 1¢ a mile (or someti…

At the the cost/mile rates that you list, it would probably take 6 years or so to break even (also factoring in the cost savings from oil changes and belts). For the U.S. middle class, at least, that's probably too long of an investment horizon (it's amazing to me how many people lease and buy brand new cars without even doing the math about a used vehicle).

So I imagine that there will be a significant uptake in the U.S. when people can expect to save money within the life of a lease, which could be as soon as 3 years with a few bumps in fuel prices.

Re: What Needs to Happen Before Electric Cars Take Over the World

#195

Post by Cthulhu_ »

stephengillie wrote: post #184
jmnicolas wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I never understood : why don't they create cars where the battery is removable and when you go to a "gas" station there's a machine that just change your empty battery for a full one. In fact I thought about patenting the idea 10 years ago but I didn't have the know-how.

The size of battery needed to propel a full-size car makes swapping mechanically prohibitive. It would be like swapping a 4U rackmount server loaded with HDDs.

It's doable, I've seen prototypes where you just drive your car onto a platform and robots do the replacing.

Re: What Needs to Happen Before Electric Cars Take Over the World

#196

Post by smudgymcscmudge »

sandworm101 wrote: post #154
tomxor wrote: post #151

Price? (for normal people) Yes there are EVs cheaper than teslas at a comparable price to ICE cars, but they don't seem to have comparable performance and utility. I can't make an economically minded decision to buy an EV today unless i'm an EV enthusiast or I have lots of money to spend on luxury. (That was Elon Musks whole point of Tesla in the first place, but the market doesn't seem to have substantially shifted…

Every EV owner in my area seems to also own a gas car too. My landlord commutes in an EV but his wife has a normal suv for all the kid stuff. (Im in BC where long higheay trips are very much the norm.) EVs are fine if you can afford to keep a second vehicle to cover all the things they cannot do.

I know two couples who have replaced one of their ICEs with Nissan Leafs. Now one of them is economically commuting in an EV daily and they retain the ability to take road trips in their partner’s car.

But I don’t see a reasonable way for a single person to have only an EV in my area either. There’s just too much >50 miles away.

Re: What Needs to Happen Before Electric Cars Take Over the World

#197

Post by Cthulhu_ »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #78
paol wrote: post #33

These articles keep omitting a pretty big barrier to adoption: street parking. (Maybe it's a function of US being suburb-centric? But at least the New York Times ought to know better.) One of 2 things needs to happen, either charging technology improves to the point where you can charge at a gas station in a span of time comparable to refueling a conventional car, or all street parking spots need to be fitted with ch…

Note that as battery prices drop, just having a larger battery that only needs charged once a week becomes more and more possible. People in suburbs need to drive further for a daily commute, but have easier overnight charging. People in urban centers have more trouble charging but need to drive less distance (and often in the kind of start-stop traffic that EVs work so well for, which changes their range in comparis…

Larger batteries are prohibitively heavy though; electric cars are already pushing the weight up, compensating it with being more powerful, but at the same time they cost more energy to get in motion, which lowers battery life.

Lighter and higher capacity batteries would be ideal, but I'm not sure how feasible that is with current battery tech. I gathered one manufacturer was working on solid state batteries for use in cars, which should give more capacity at the same weight? not sure.

Re: What Needs to Happen Before Electric Cars Take Over the World

#198

Post by Cthulhu_ »

IndrekR wrote: post #152
explainplease wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is so much easier to make electric vehicles self-driving compared to the ICE vehicles. Why?

Faster response time in motor control, high torque in low revs. Makes math simpler.

Automatic gearbox cars are easy enough to control, for both electric and fuel cars the input is a throttle.

Re: What Needs to Happen Before Electric Cars Take Over the World

#199

Post by dragonwriter »

dalbasal wrote: post #186
tomxor wrote: post #151

Price? (for normal people) Yes there are EVs cheaper than teslas at a comparable price to ICE cars, but they don't seem to have comparable performance and utility. I can't make an economically minded decision to buy an EV today unless i'm an EV enthusiast or I have lots of money to spend on luxury. (That was Elon Musks whole point of Tesla in the first place, but the market doesn't seem to have substantially shifted…

I agreed. It's about prices Musk realized the economics and decided (best underpants plan ever) to start at the enthusiast-luxury end with the sports car. But, his crucial point was that for people already in the luxury market, he'd be able to quickly drop the enthusiast requirement. The cost of batteries that compete with a fuel tank on range does not scale with the rest of the car. Tesla now competes on a side-by-s…

> Subsidies don't make sense anymore. The innovation has been stimulated already.

Debatable; subsidies can make sense for other reasons (internalizing externalities unrelated to innovation) than stimulating innovation.

Re: What Needs to Happen Before Electric Cars Take Over the World

#200

Post by Retric »

sandworm101 wrote: post #154
tomxor wrote: post #151

Price? (for normal people) Yes there are EVs cheaper than teslas at a comparable price to ICE cars, but they don't seem to have comparable performance and utility. I can't make an economically minded decision to buy an EV today unless i'm an EV enthusiast or I have lots of money to spend on luxury. (That was Elon Musks whole point of Tesla in the first place, but the market doesn't seem to have substantially shifted…

Every EV owner in my area seems to also own a gas car too. My landlord commutes in an EV but his wife has a normal suv for all the kid stuff. (Im in BC where long higheay trips are very much the norm.) EVs are fine if you can afford to keep a second vehicle to cover all the things they cannot do.

Over the last 20 years a 250+ mile range electric would have worked fine for every trip I have actually taken. (Assuming the current charging infrastructure.) Now, with slightly different habits renting an SUV 0-4 times a year is minimal effort and cost.

So, yea if you do 1000+ mile trips monthly without flying then electric is not going to work, but that's unusual.

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