"CARMAKERS’ ANNUAL PROFIT: $400 billion" This seems hard to believe. Revenue, maybe?
The car industry is one of the biggest industries of the world, so I'm not surprised. That + the oil industry.
What Needs to Happen Before Electric Cars Take Over the World
261–270 of 460 posts
Re: What Needs to Happen Before Electric Cars Take Over the World
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
In terms of rural areas, this will be an interesting challenge. When you drive cross country in the USA, you can expect to find gasoline reasonably close to even the most remote areas. The distance to the next gas station from anywhere in the USA is well below the range of the typical car. However, in regards to cities, you are presenting a situation where the charging station comes to the parked car, rather than the…
> if the charging times are rapidly decreased Charging times have an upper bound: physics. 250 kW is an insane amount of power and still you'd need around half an hour to fill a 100 kWh battery, to get even close to the 5-10 minutes of charging like at a gas station you'd need megawatts of peak power... and as there are two steps of conversions involved (grid => HVDC => battery voltage), even with 99% efficiency you…
I believe our supercharge yesterday gave us 50kwh in 25 minutes.
I'm not disputing your point. It's a HELL of a lot more juice than people are used to thinking on a day to day basis. And it's going to change our infrastructure in fundamental ways.
Re: What Needs to Happen Before Electric Cars Take Over the World
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
Parking spaces in dense areas already act as a huge subsidy toward cars, so I don't think electrical cost is a deal-breaker. Or you glue on half a parking meter to turn the electricity on and off.
> I don't think electrical cost is a deal-breaker. Do you have any numbers, or are you guessing?
If you are talking about pure electrical cost, the average cost per kwh in the US is about 12 cents according to NPR.
An average Nissan Leaf battery is about 24kwh (although some cars have much smaller or larger batteries). So if you assume an average Leaf is totally empty, and charging to completely full, that would be a little less than $3 of electricity for roughly 84 miles of range.
To charge a car quickly takes a lot of electricity. But to trickle charge a car takes very little electricity. You can charge cars on as little as 120 volts at 8 amps -- that's less electricity than the average plug-in space heater.
A small parking lot could easily handle 20+ cars simultaneously charging overnight, with just a single standard US household circuit. (100 - 150 amps).
Re: What Needs to Happen Before Electric Cars Take Over the World
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
But how would you move around? Public transportation cannot reach everywhere. I would just stop seeing my family without having a car.
Walking, bikes, trains and other public transportation. Maybe carpooling. But in countries built around roads and cheap oil such as the U.S. the consequences of those choices will be harsher. Specially as the people in charge know of this but did and still do nothing to address the issue.
I live in a country with a good public transportation network. It takes takes 1.5 - 2x more time to get around, at only a slim financial difference. I used it primarily for a couple of years, but it was only viable because I was lucky to live in cycling or walking distance of a train station. Right now it's just not viable anymore; my commute would be 2 hours instead of <1 if I were to try it with public transit, and would involve two buses, two trains, and a lot of waiting in between.
Re: What Needs to Happen Before Electric Cars Take Over the World
#265I'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 p…
Well this brings up another related but often unmentioned aspect to the debate. Governments get heaps of revenue from taxing fossil fuels. If people managed to sidestep that by using renewable (yeah, or fusion!) power, what will governments do? I'm about 100% certain that in the UK they will slap a massive tax on all electricity used to charge EVs. TANSTAAFL, as Robert Heinlein said.
Re: What Needs to Happen Before Electric Cars Take Over the World
#266These 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…
London is installing electric car charging stations inside lamp posts for street charging
https://electrek.co/2017/11/14/london-electric-car-charging-...
Re: What Needs to Happen Before Electric Cars Take Over the World
#267Earlier 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.
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.
250 miles is 402 km. It's well over 3 hours at highway speeds, which IMO is the limit for any reasonable day trip as a recharge while you're there means it's really 6+ hours per day of driving.
Granted, this assumes you can charge at that location, but EV charging stations are plentiful.
Re: What Needs to Happen Before Electric Cars Take Over the World
#268These 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…
First world city streets already have electricity supply (for the street light and for the buildings). Setting up charging ports is already rather cheap and once cities realize that they can - drastically reduce air pollution - make more money selling electricity than just charging for parking they will quickly start installing plugs everywhere. Battery range is already at around 500 km for Tesla model S and X and th…
"First world city streets already have electricity supply" powering a light bulb in 100 street lights and having enough capacity to charge 100 electric cars are 2 totally different animals and will require significant infra. upgrades.
Re: What Needs to Happen Before Electric Cars Take Over the World
#269Biggest 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…
Great comment!
Currently utilities buy power during peak times from other utilities, or fire up expensive peaker generators to manage the load.
A network of charging cars could be managed as another resource with a price attached to it that may be cheaper than the alternatives. I like the concept of varying the price of the charge based on your participation in the network.
At least in Florida, USA, most residential electric meters are flat-rate (same price per KWh, no matter what time of day you are using). A good portion of commercial meters have a peak and off-peak rate, as well as a single line item charge, based on peak demand, that is often 30-40% of the entire bill. The off-peak rate is often 50% or more cheaper than the peak rate.
Since most people would charge at night, it would probably make sense to have these residential services switched to a demand and time-of-day based meter, which would further reduce the cost of electricity. If someone spends a significant time at home, the charging car could buffer peak loads during the day to offset the additional draw of the nighttime charging.