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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

#241

Post by Cthulhu_ »

testestx wrote: post #86
Doxin wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern gas car engines are already pretty much inaudible over tire noise at slowish speeds. Electric cars don't make any less tire noise. People will manage without artificially adding sounds to electric vehicles.

Car sounds are important for small children and animals in the street though.

At speeds below tire noise, drivers should be very careful about those anyway. Plus modern cars have collision detection hard- and software too. Do electric cars have better braking performance?

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

#242

Post by jdietrich »

mschuster91 wrote: post #213

Biggest problem I guess will be expanding the charger network, simply due to physics. On the country side, laying cables for 1MW peak load (4 superchargers @ 250 kW) will be expensive - the grid in rural areas is enough for some farms and small villages, that's it. In cities, electric-car chargers will have to deal with political obstacles (no one wants to sacrifice free-for-all parking spots!), in addition to the el…

Electric cars have the potential to be a key part of the solution to load management on a fully renewable grid.

The vast majority of people will usually charge overnight and don't need to regularly charge at peak times. Through intelligent charger management, you can distribute the load of charging across the entire off-peak period. The UX for this can be fairly straightforward - by default you charge at the cheapest rate, or you can press a button to get the quickest possible charge.

The real dividend comes from bidirectional charging, using the collective resources of plugged-in cars as a load balancing reservoir. In exchange for a discount on your electricity, the grid can take a small percentage of your EV's battery capacity when needed. A typical mid-range electric car has a 40kWh battery, which represents about four days of electricity consumption for a typical European household.

Nissan and the British utility regulator ran a two-year trial to examine the long-term impact of EVs on local grid infrastructure. The trial used intelligently-managed unidirectional charging. They concluded that about 32% of local electricity circuits will need to be upgraded by the time that EVs represent a majority of vehicles on the road. This figure could potentially be lowered further by bidirectional charging technology.

http://myelectricavenue.info/

America still has huge potential for efficiency savings, because of the immensely high average household electricity consumption. The average American household uses nearly three times as much electricity as the average European household. Air conditioning is only a small part of this disparity, representing about 18% of the electricity consumption of American households according to the Energy Information Administration.

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

#243

Post by Cthulhu_ »

skookumchuck wrote: post #79
_greim_ wrote: post #15

> Drivers will have to shed their attachment to the sound, smell and feel of gas-powered engines. I for one will not feel the least bit sad when continuous, smooth acceleration becomes the norm, and lurchy, awkward automatic transmissions fade into distant memory. I'll probably feel slightly nostalgic about the sound and smell of fuel-burning cars someday, but it won't inform my buying choices in the slightest.

Nobody cares about the sound of auto transes. But a 4-on-the-floor V8, that's another matter entirely. See the movie Bullitt for proof. I'll get an electric car like everyone else. But I dream about having a '68 Mustang :-)

A movie may not be an accurate representation of reality. But, point taken.

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

#244

Post by vvanders »

mschuster91 wrote: post #224
fjsolwmv wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The USA installed Cable TV, why would charging cables be harder? The USA spends $500Billion on cars and $400 Billion on gasoline every year. A onetime $trillon upgrade isn't an outsize amount.

> The USA installed Cable TV, why would charging cables be harder? Because a TV coax cable is 1cm slim and can be installed very easily. Run it over the air on poles, dig it into a small trench, run it via the sewers. Whatever fits best. A 10 kV or, worse, a 1 kA-capable 3x230V line, not so much. The 10kV (or more) line has special requirements in terms of distance to other cables, a 3x230V line at that capability is…

These arguments don't really hold up given that Tesla has already deployed a charging network really wide.

FWIW all of the chargers I've seen didn't require new transformers or lines. Heck they put in 20 spots in Centralia without even digging up the road.

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

#245

Post by nil_is_me »

fjsolwmv wrote: post #231
Retric wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

120miles is the capacity of affordable EV today. We hope it gets better.

Chevy Bolt is 240 miles..

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

#246

Post by sandworm101 »

Retric wrote: post #200
sandworm101 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You arent driving very far then. 250km is barely an afternoon on the road. Im doing some training next month in comox, 260km away from work. Im expected to drive there and back in the same day.

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

#247

Post by IanCal »

ahartmetz wrote: post #129
kuro68k wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am on my second Nissan Leaf and can tell you that your concerns are largely unfounded. Most charging is opportunistic, and when you do need to do a big evacuation a Tesla sized battery can last longer than you can safely drive. In fact in the EU legal limits on commercial drivers are already exceeded by battery tech. As for wearing out, taxi companies with leafs have over 200k on the packs and they are still good.…

"When you do need to do a big evacuation a Tesla sized battery can last longer than you can safely drive" This is plainly wrong. Let's say it's a Tesla Model S which has a real world range of about 400 km. That is about four hours of driving. I sometimes drive 600 km easily, with one longer break to eat and maybe a few shorters breaks to pee or just get out of the car and walk around a bit. Your other statements are…

The EU legal limit is

> a break or breaks totalling at least 45 minutes after no more than 4 hours 30 minutes driving

and

> 9 hours in a day - this can be extended to 10 hours twice a week

https://www.gov.uk/drivers-hours/eu-rules

The range of a 100KWh model S on the page for the UK ranges from 319 miles at 70mph (four and a half hours) to 514 miles at 45mph (eleven and a half hours). At 100KWh and 3+ miles per KWh (https://forums.tesla.com/forum/forums/real-world-range-new-o...) that's still 330 miles, plus.

Certainly seems like a reasonable claim that the battery can last longer than you can safely drive, particularly if you're not gunning it down a nice fast road.

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

#248

Post by bradleyjg »

deevolution wrote: post #235

I can't wait for the day where public transportation is replaced by more efficient, cheaper and more personalized ride sharing services. Public transit is horribly broken, at least in NYC... personaly I dont see my self ever sinking 35k into a new car unless it would be making me money.

I don't see how ride sharing services are ever going to be more efficient than public transit. Or how it will even be barely possible to replace the one with the other in a place like NYC.

Riding sharing is about utilizing a vehicle in a temporally more efficient way, but it does little to improve spacial efficiency during peak times.

The commuter rails, subway, and buses are far more dense than a fleet of self driving cars with one to two people in each can possible be. Even with the increased density that might plausible come from better driving and so more tightly spacing, it would simply be impossible to get everyone into and out of their offices across Manhattan during the communing windows without the density of mass transit vehicles and the utilization of underground space.

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

#249

Post by Cthulhu_ »

3chelon wrote: post #137

I'm totally in favour of electric cars, but I'm surprised the article never mentioned the problem of sourcing all the power. There have been a lot of contradictory claims over how many more power stations would be needed for a fully-electric future, with some sources claiming the UK alone would need an extra ten nuclear power plants, and other sources massively downplaying that, but clearly if everyone was driving an…

On the other side of the spectrum, there's been reports of some countries having a negative energy price at some points, thanks to all the windmills and such generating so much energy there's a surplus. Pump those into charging cars (during the day or night), and they can also act as components in the smart grid, switching charge on and off depending on peaks in the power grid / power generation.

I wonder if fusion power will become viable within the next 50 years, and whether it gives us fuck-you amounts of power at low cost. Probably not, nuclear power is far from free too.

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

#250

Post by Cthulhu_ »

jokoon wrote: post #84

Once global warming becomes a real problem and the politics are driving laws to be enacted towards using electric vehicles, the situation will change pretty quickly. I'm sure governments could sink a lot of money into battery research if the situation would make it so. Although I've read in several places that once global warming is engaged, you cannot reverse it because of stuff like melting methane ice spots in the…

> Although I've read in several places that once global warming is engaged, you cannot reverse it because of stuff like melting methane ice spots in the tundra.

I'm fairly confident that point of no return has already been passed. Permafrost has stared to melt a while ago, causing bacteria to take hold of things they couldn't for x amount of years, catching up on releasing co2 and such that would otherwise have been in the atmosphere a long time ago already.

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