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Are electric cars too expensive to tempt motorists away from petrol vehicles?

theguardian.com

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Re: Are electric cars too expensive to tempt motorists away from petrol vehicles?

#131

Post by oceanplexian »

PaulKeeble wrote: post #54
zhrvoj wrote: post #13

Beside all of that, if you convert let's say 1/10 of cars with internal combustion engines to electric motor cars, there is no electricity to charge them. Which also leads to envirnonmental problems - creating so much electricity (+ CO2 emmision from thermal-electric plants). Just count average low electric car consumption 15kWh/100km.

While true if you haven't noticed it Solar and Wind are taking off at a staggering rate for electrical production. At prices around $15 per MWH they are substantially cheaper than gas/coal/oil electrical production. The economics just work out now in a big way and renewables are so much cheaper fossil fuels days are numbered. Besides if you just car about the economics and not the potential reduction on the planet th…

If renewables are substantially cheaper, why did the UK and the rest of Europe have an energy crisis and record energy prices?

The two things don’t add up, on one hand you have people claiming renewables are cheaper than ever, on the other you have skyrocketing electric bills. If renewables don’t actually decrease energy prices for consumers then claiming it’s cheaper is misleading.

Re: Are electric cars too expensive to tempt motorists away from petrol vehicles?

#132

Post by Nextgrid »

marcusverus wrote: post #125
helij wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our car was £40k new. We've been paying £400/month for 2.5 years now. It's a 4 year lease. We still owe £22k. They gave us £7k for our old car - that was the difference between how much we owed and how much previous car was worth. Now the latest one we can buy for around £18k once the lease is up I think. Currently I'm being offered £31k for it. So, rough calculation is that the car cost us £120/month in the last 2.5…

> if you take a look at the numbers above it's not that bad and we drive a new, safe, no issues (free servicing) car every 3-4 years. Driving a new car every few years is incredibly decadent. If you bought a car, paid it off in 5 years and drove it for another 10, you’d be saving thousands every year. Repeat that cycle every 15 years and invest the savings, and you’re talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars in…

> drove it for another 10

What about maintenance? There's a lot of moving parts (often the labor to get to the part costs more than the part itself) and a stroke of bad luck can quickly balloon into 4-digit sums.

Paying a flat monthly fee for transport sounds like an attractive option to not have to worry about any of that.

Re: Are electric cars too expensive to tempt motorists away from petrol vehicles?

#133

Post by okaram »

badpun wrote: post #97
edent wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the flip side, using PCP means that you get a brand new car and it has a warrantee. You could buy a banger for £500 - but then you're always going to be wondering if today is the day it'll cost you £££ to repair. And if you can't get in to work, that'll cost you dearly as well. £300 per month to basically not have to worry about any unexpected bills seems reasonable to me. Plus you get the social value of having a…

You don’t have to buy a banger, just buy a new car and drive it for 20 years. You will save vast amounts of momey.

Same difference, after 7-10 years, it becomes a banger, or at least it has enough problems that you worry.

Re: Are electric cars too expensive to tempt motorists away from petrol vehicles?

#134

Post by FooBarBizBazz »

ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #70
mg wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that "waste" heat still warming the planet? Isn't turning a cold planet into a warm planet a good thing and therefore the "waste" heat is still "used" for something useful?

No not really. There's a known problem with the atmosphere starting to retain too much heat (as opposed to radiating it out into space) due to the amount of CO2 (and other gasses) that people are dumping into the atmosphere. Far from being useful, it's likely to collapse our current civilisation.

Global warming is not caused by waste heat. It is not caused by energy use per-se (indeed, energy is never used, but always conserved). It is caused by a shift in the equilibrium temperature, at which the amount of energy radiated by the Earth equals the amount of incident sunlight. The surface of the Earth gets hotter to radiate the same amount of energy (picture an incandescent light bulb), because greenhouse gasses form an insulative barrier. Burning fossil fuels releases CO2, which increases the amount of insulation. It does also release heat, but that hardly matters; if that were all it did, the heat would ultimately be radiated into space as infrared. The problem isn't "energy use". Nuclear, for example, wouldn't appreciably increase planetary temperatures (I say this not to be a booster for nuclear power, but just because it adds heat that does not come from the sun without creating greenhouse gasses, so it works as an example.). The problem is greenhouse gasses.

Toy ODE model:

dx/dt = -k x + a + b.

Here, x is temperature, a is solar heat input, and b is heat input from human sources. I'm dropping some coefficients that would make the units strictly work. We have a >>> b. The coefficient k says how easily the Earth radiates heat. Adding greenhouse gasses makes k closer to zero.

At equilibrium, dx/dt = 0. Solving,

x = (a + b) / k ~= a / k

Again, b is tiny relative to a. So almost the only thing that matters is k.

Re: Are electric cars too expensive to tempt motorists away from petrol vehicles?

#135

Post by Nextgrid »

thelastgallon wrote: post #108

Expensive only in EU and US. In China, VW has to sell cars for 16K, which are sold in EU/US for 35K - 45K. Legacy carmakers don't know how to make electric cars, rely on regulatory capture to keep prices high. VW cut prices of ID.3 down to $16,500 in China, while in Europe the same vehicle starts at nearly $43,000: https://www.arenaev.com/volkswagen_cuts_id3_price_in_china__... China reveals just how bad things are f…

Is there a reason nobody is taking on this arbitrage opportunity? Such a huge price difference should cover the cost of transporting the physical car and leave still plenty of margin for everyone (including the buyer) to get a good deal.

Re: Are electric cars too expensive to tempt motorists away from petrol vehicles?

#136

Post by matthewdgreen »

badpun wrote: post #106
baq wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re assuming petrol won’t be more expensive. It might be, it might not.

Right now, the price of oil is still not set by market prices, but kept artificially high by the OPEC cartel. Petrol could be much cheaper if the oil producing countries wouldn’t optimize the production (and hence, price) for maximum gains.

It could also be a lot more expensive if we included even a fraction of the extremely dire externalities burning it in a 20% efficient ICE engine produces.

Re: Are electric cars too expensive to tempt motorists away from petrol vehicles?

#137

Post by oceanplexian »

wazoox wrote: post #98
cpursley wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Petrol fire is much easier to extinguish than a battery fire. Yeah, touch interfaces is a disease on most modern vehicles (but especially electric). The infrastructure is the weakest link after the raw material chain required to build them. Oh, and recycling/disposal.

Petrol fire is much more common than battery fires, which are vanishingly rare. The oil infrastructure must be dismantled as fast as possible. Recycling of batteries is a chicken-egg problem : it's ramping up, but is necessarily lagging behind EV market penetration. It's an eminently solvable problem -- lead batteries are recycled way over 95% already. Remember : a vehicle lasts about 12 to 14 years. in 2035 (12 year…

Petrol cars don’t burn your house down in the middle of the night while the car is turned off. This happened several times with the Bolt EV (A car I owned) until GM had to recall them all and eventually cancel the entire line and stop manufacturing it. These batteries are extremely dangerous and lithium fires can’t be extinguished like a gasoline fire since the reaction creates its own oxygen.

Re: Are electric cars too expensive to tempt motorists away from petrol vehicles?

#138

Post by Nextgrid »

whatevaa wrote: post #21
mg wrote: post #8

This reminds me of the discussions some years ago whether one should invest in an SSD when buying a new laptop or stay with a spinning disk. Nowadays, barely any new laptops are released without an SSD. When it comes to electric versus petrol, I often think about the fact that the sun sends more energy to earth in an hour than all of mankind uses in a year. I guess that in theory, all that energy could be captured wi…

SSD only became mainstream after 3D TLC was invented, bringing costs down. Planar MLC was okay but was still somewhat expensive, tech enthusiast thingy. So for petrol, sure, if we just had as energy dense batterry as fossile fuels. No, current tech is not there yet. The big range vechiles are stupidly expensive, and the inexpensive ones are daily commuters only, mostly. They also charge slowly. Most people don't own…

It doesn't help that greed means that even though electricity is everywhere and is the most fungible form of energy, we're putting arbitrary limitations to buying it, way more than gas/petrol despite the latter actually requiring significantly more infrastructure.

With a gas car I am confident I can drive up to any gas station and get fuel with my credit card. I'm not confident I can do the same with electric cars - even if I do find a charge point, I'm worried it's not going to let me pay & charge until I download a stupid app, provide a ton of data to hundreds of data brokers and still remain stranded when all this mess of moving parts breaks down somewhere and doesn't let me proceed.

Re: Are electric cars too expensive to tempt motorists away from petrol vehicles?

#139

Post by throwaway5959 »

drivingmenuts wrote: post #71
ghusto wrote: post #68

When we can buy second hand electric cars _with reliable batteries that aren’t near end of life_ for 2k, we can have a discussion. Arguments of affordability before that point will rely on cherry picking, and I call bullshit on every one of them. I know many people pay way more for cars, even buying ones they can’t afford with loans, but most of the people I know aren’t in that group.

I agree. Until there’s a cheap electric option, the bulk of drivers won’t switch. Their car is paid for, or mostly so, it works and. With some payout, can be kept running indefinitely. It’s easy to convince rich people to buy into EVs, but try getting the people who can’t afford to blow a huge chunk of money on something that has less range, less perceived power and can’t be fixed by a cousin under a tree.

The average new car price in the US is around $47k, well above the Bolt, Kona and Leaf.

Re: Are electric cars too expensive to tempt motorists away from petrol vehicles?

#140

Post by throwaway5959 »

PaulKeeble wrote: post #50

There is a big shift in prices coming with Sodium Ion batteries. At about 1/4 the price of Li-ion they save substantial money all be it a little less dense. For all but the highest range cars Sodium Ion is going to do the job and BYD is talking about $12000 cars. Not quite a cheap car yet but still given the savings electrical vehicles bring on running costs its a significant step. Its not just volume production the…

Sodium Ion energy density isn’t the best, it’ll probably impact grid storage more. For cars that need less than 200 miles of range I agree though.
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