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The Electric Car

blog.geoffralston.com

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Re: The Electric Car

#201

Post by ylhert »

sremani wrote: post #190
reedlaw wrote: post #156

I can't believe he's comparing a $70,000 electric car to a huge bucket labeled "old-fashioned gasoline cars". Of course the $70,000 car is better in almost every way. I've driven a lot of electric cars in the $5,000 to $10,000 range and I assure you they are not better than "old-fashioned gasoline cars". Our last gas-powered car was a used Lexus that cost us $8,000. It's an extremely comfortable luxury car that seats…

For 10K (+3) if you live in USA, you can buy a Nissan Leaf that came out the 3 year lease, and it is a decent car that seats 5 people with a range of about 80+ miles. Batteries are expensive and will continue to be till the turn of this decade and not a whole lot can be done. The better analogy would be laptops vs desktops, laptops gave mobility but they were heavy did not have the power etc. but by 2004 - 2006 they…

a used leaf will likely only have <50 miles of range. My dad has one and it has been a disaster for him -- the range keeps decreasing and he can do less and less with it.

Re: The Electric Car

#202

Post by brc »

curiousjorge wrote: post #31

I think the article is overly optimistic and derives some sort of future prediction based on a simplified past performance of a totally different market. Tesla is a luxury , many of us can't afford it and if we could we would most likely opt for BMW or Benz. The reason these other car makers aren't moving yet is they are learning from Tesla. You don't want to be a first mover in this industry, you want to move so sli…

BMW has already launched their electric car range. They have moved - you can walk down and buy one today.

The i3 is even more innovative than the Tesla in a lot of ways - it intentionally does not look like a regular sedan, and has been optimised for city driving with upright position, small footprint, tight turning circle etc.

The i8 is a high performance hybrid with a ridiculously low fuel consumption pattern and the ability to drive as an all-electric.

BMW is not waiting for Tesla - it's out there competing in the marketplace where Tesla is not present - compact city cars and high end sportscars.

Tesla is unilkey to go out of business as it has built enormous technical knowledge which will be licensed to other manufacturers, either in IP agreements or by contracting out key personnell.

Companies like Lotus and Porsche make significant money consulting with other car makers just for things like ride and handling. The same thing will happen with electric drive and Tesla.

Re: The Electric Car

#203

Post by Qwertious »

cowsandmilk wrote: post #47
mahyarm wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The electric car is actually fairly inconvenient if you don't have a garage or a parking spot that you rent / cannot install an outlet on. The cycle time on vehicles is far higher than a cheap smartphone mainly due to their expense. And a large amount of the article's bullet points are not something that would be unique to an electric car. When you take public transit, as long as the train/bus isn't loud, would you c…

Boston has added hybrid buses to their fleet. They are much quieter. I'm a fan. But I agree about the parking spaces. Even now in new construction, it is considered forward thinking to have 2 or 3 spaces with outlets out of 100. For the future of electric cars, they should at least have conduit to spaces where outlets could be installed.

>Boston has added hybrid buses to their fleet. They are much quieter. I'm a fan.

That sentence sounds really weird - one second you're talking about buses, then you suddenly (apparently) claim to be a device for pushing air around. I know what you actually mean, but damn, "I'm a fan" sounds really weird like that.

Re: The Electric Car

#204

Post by reedlaw »

sremani wrote: post #190
reedlaw wrote: post #156

I can't believe he's comparing a $70,000 electric car to a huge bucket labeled "old-fashioned gasoline cars". Of course the $70,000 car is better in almost every way. I've driven a lot of electric cars in the $5,000 to $10,000 range and I assure you they are not better than "old-fashioned gasoline cars". Our last gas-powered car was a used Lexus that cost us $8,000. It's an extremely comfortable luxury car that seats…

For 10K (+3) if you live in USA, you can buy a Nissan Leaf that came out the 3 year lease, and it is a decent car that seats 5 people with a range of about 80+ miles. Batteries are expensive and will continue to be till the turn of this decade and not a whole lot can be done. The better analogy would be laptops vs desktops, laptops gave mobility but they were heavy did not have the power etc. but by 2004 - 2006 they…

The $8,000 price I quoted is after heavy subsidies. I imagine that used Nissan Leaf price is also after subsidies. If electric cars become mainstream I wonder what will happen with subsidies.

Re: The Electric Car

#205

Post by ekianjo »

higherpurpose wrote: post #76
JTon wrote: post #18

> The reason electric cars will take over our roads is because consumers will DEMAND them. Electric cars will be better than any alternative, including the loud, inconvenient, gas-powered jalopy. The iPhone demonstrated that smartphones are infinitely better than the feature phones which dominated the world in 2007. The smartphone revolution analogy makes me cringe. Electric cars are currently playing catch up to the…

That's not quite true. In 2007 you would see 90% of the Internet comments talk about how feature-less an iPhone was compared to the Nokia N95 (or whatever was its Nokia competitor at the time). In fact there were some memes comparing the iPhone with a rock . The original iPhone didn't have video recording, had only 2G support (Nokias supported 3G for a while), didn't support MMS, and it didn't even have apps! And of…

> and have the potential to use 100% renewable energy in the future.

Except when it comes to manufacturing them.

Re: The Electric Car

#206

Post by Qwertious »

krschultz wrote: post #184
stcredzero wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a US govt study cited by the Car Talk guys many years ago that found that the annual repair bill for most cars stabilized at an average of $600/yr, until the car died. (Not counting oil changes and regular maintenance.) I wouldn't be at all surprised if batteries for a car like the Tesla got down to $6000. At that point, the value proposition is already much better than gasoline cars.

$600 a year or $6000 a year? I think just brake pads, tires, and regular maintenance exceeds $600 a year if you amortize it. Every older car I've owned then started having problems . Even if it's just the A/C compressor or the muffler, you are always replacing something every few months.

$6000 a decade, so $600 a year. Interesting note: Engine maintenance costs are way higher on ICE cars than on electric cars.

If they can get battery costs down, which they're doing at a speed of 10% a year IIRC, then they can decrease that figure to about $200/year a decade from now.

Come to think of it, perhaps in a decade we'll finally have a reliable carbon price, rather than it being an unpenalized externality. That'd make ICE cars fairly uncompetitive quickly.

Re: The Electric Car

#207

Post by chrisguilbeau »

sremani wrote: post #190
reedlaw wrote: post #156

I can't believe he's comparing a $70,000 electric car to a huge bucket labeled "old-fashioned gasoline cars". Of course the $70,000 car is better in almost every way. I've driven a lot of electric cars in the $5,000 to $10,000 range and I assure you they are not better than "old-fashioned gasoline cars". Our last gas-powered car was a used Lexus that cost us $8,000. It's an extremely comfortable luxury car that seats…

For 10K (+3) if you live in USA, you can buy a Nissan Leaf that came out the 3 year lease, and it is a decent car that seats 5 people with a range of about 80+ miles. Batteries are expensive and will continue to be till the turn of this decade and not a whole lot can be done. The better analogy would be laptops vs desktops, laptops gave mobility but they were heavy did not have the power etc. but by 2004 - 2006 they…

We just bought a used leaf for 12k at carmax. It was a 2013 with 16,000 miles on it and it easily gets 80 miles to a charge. All of the great things you read about them have all been true for us, super quiet, surprising acceleration, convenience of charging at home. It was hard to get our hands on one as they kept selling them as soon as they'd come in at carmax.

Re: The Electric Car

#208

Post by kumarski »

I think this is a tough discussion to have without discussing the following engineering realities and understanding how the needle moves for each of them over time.

Key Metrics:

Specific Energy Density

Cost/ Unit of Specific Energy Density

Liquid Hydrocarbin Energy Density vs. Galvanic Battery Density

Simplicity and Maintainability

http://qr.ae/7L89on (everyone should read this post.)

Re: The Electric Car

#209

Post by chillingeffect »

tikhonj wrote: post #120

> The Tesla Model S has demonstrated that a well made, well designed electric car is far superior to anything else on the road. I think this is a bit of an exaggeration. What the Tesla Model S has actually shown is that a startup-designed $100k electric car can be comparable to $100k luxury cars (S-class, 7-series... etc) and that classic car makers got complacent on certain features (like electronic UI elements). Mu…

Too true. It's classic case of "seek and ye shall find."

OP wanted to see all the reasons why something he hopes is true, and he found them all.

He did not want to see any reasons why his hopes might not be true, so he sought none of them.

Re: The Electric Car

#210

Post by lern_too_spel »

danhak wrote: post #12
toomuchtodo wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The truth is we're really not that close to fully-autonomous cars. Google cars are pretty damn close to level 4 autonomous vehicles. They've driven more than a million miles fully autonomously, and Google runs their self-driving vehicle algorithms against simulated virtual worlds constantly (with data previously collected from their self driving cars). We are so much closer to fully autonomous cars than people thin…

> They've driven more than a million miles fully autonomously Zero of those miles were at a speeds > 25 mph. And the cars have averaged > 1 accident per 100,000 miles.

You've confused the prototypes that have just started driving on public roads with the existing vehicles that have been driving for years. The prototypes are limited to 25 mph. The existing vehicles drive at freeway speeds.
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