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The Problem with Electric Vehicles

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Re: The Problem with Electric Vehicles

#151

Post by NLips »

jacquesm wrote: post #135
NLips wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"77% of the light vehicles are likely exactly that 77% that is used rarely" I won't use the word 'extraordinary', but that's at least a strong claim, so needs strong evidence to back it. Why wouldn't 77% of vehicles mean 77% of the load?

I don't think that it is that strong a claim at all, not all vehicles are used to the same degree by their owners, every second hand car website can tell you that. Cars that are 5 years old can have anywhere from 20K to 300K km on them. It all depends on the usage. Lots of good data here: http://www.solarjourneyusa.com/EVdistanceAnalysis7.php People using their cars for 50K to 70K km per year are not exceptional (pro…

You didn't claim 'not all vehicles are used to the same degree by their owners'. You claimed that if a report says 77+% of cars could be electric using the current grid, it probably means the least-used 77%. That's the strong claim.

Re: The Problem with Electric Vehicles

#152

Post by mikeash »

vkou wrote: post #142
mikeash wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your point? The expense and danger of gas pumps make them completely incomparable to EV charging stations. Replying to your edit: If you're installing them for a whole street at once, then the cost of bringing power down from a pole or digging under the sidewalk gets amortized across them all. We already hook every house up for water, gas, electricity, and communications. Providing power to every parking spot…

Most of the houses in these areas are already hooked up for water, gas, electricity, and telecom - and the power comes from throwing a power line to the roof. Bringing it down to ground level would be cheap-ish if you're already tearing up the street, but there isn't all that much new construction, either. Yes, you can slowly convert the whole area to support street-level chargers over the next few decades - but unti…

Sure, I know they're already hooked up. My point is just that these utilities, which are generally more difficult to connect, managed to be run to every dwelling, showing that hooking stuff up on a large scale is doable. It's an existence proof.

There does seem to be a chicken-and-egg problem as you describe. Making the spots with chargers EV-only would mitigate that, although I'm sure it would be unpopular with the non-EV owners. It would help if cities got out of the business of subsidizing parking for their residents, but that ship sailed long ago.

Re: The Problem with Electric Vehicles

#153

Post by dreamcompiler »

I'm seeing at least an article or two per day like this now: Scary FUD-filled headline suggesting that we are stupid to pursue EVs because they're not completely benign, while the body of the article itself eventually acknowledges that in almost every respect they're a helluva lot more benign than ICEs today, and will likely become even more advantageous in the future. There's only one science problem remaining for EVs: Better batteries. All the rest are relatively straightforward engineering problems, and a big chunk of those already have scaled-out solutions (e.g. Tesla's superchargers).

Re: The Problem with Electric Vehicles

#154

Post by jwalton »

jacquesm wrote: post #55
jwalton wrote: post #28

1 isn't a problem; it's awesome. Most people are going to plug in their cars at about 5:30-7, but most people don't actually care when, overnight, their car charges, so some smart software can stage charging, and we can use this to smooth out the peaks and valleys in demand. The electric company here in Ontario already tries to do this by charging less for electricity off-peak. 2 is a problem, but not an insurmountab…

> is a non-issue for many people. I drive 15km to work every day, and then 15km home. I'd be happy with a car with a 100 mile range, to be honest. You should cycle if that's an option where you live. That's not a distance that I would consider taking the car for, but then again, nl has excellent bicycle infrastructure.

I used to cycle quite a bit in the summer - a habit I need to get back into. In the winter, there's many feet of snow on the ground, the bike paths are buried, and the roads involved aren't in very good shape when the weather is good - I suspect I would die. :P Also, it would suck trying to stop my bike from rusting away.

Re: The Problem with Electric Vehicles

#155

Post by Grishnakh »

ebbv wrote: post #37

This is a bunch of fallacies that have been brought up again and again and have been addressed. The biggest canard is "If everybody switched to EVs tomorrow our power grid couldn't handle!" Yes and if everyone went outside right now and pooped in the street we'd all drown in shit. Neither scenario is actually going to happen. The reality is that EVs are far, far more efficient than ICE vehicles. Not only that, they d…

Exactly correct.

Just wait though, I said the exact same thing above and the author told me to "fuck off", and the HN hivemind is heavily down-modding any comments critical of this guy.

Re: The Problem with Electric Vehicles

#156

Post by jacquesm »

NLips wrote: post #151
jacquesm wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that it is that strong a claim at all, not all vehicles are used to the same degree by their owners, every second hand car website can tell you that. Cars that are 5 years old can have anywhere from 20K to 300K km on them. It all depends on the usage. Lots of good data here: http://www.solarjourneyusa.com/EVdistanceAnalysis7.php People using their cars for 50K to 70K km per year are not exceptional (pro…

You didn't claim 'not all vehicles are used to the same degree by their owners'. You claimed that if a report says 77+% of cars could be electric using the current grid, it probably means the least-used 77%. That's the strong claim.

It's the claim that makes most sense. You'd take the least used vehicles because their usage patterns will match current production EV sweet spots best (always assuming we are talking 100% electric and not hybrids).

Re: The Problem with Electric Vehicles

#157

Post by Grishnakh »

jeromeflipo wrote: post #125
RP_Joe wrote: post #105

The problem I have with these arguments is they compare all electric vehicles to all internal combustion engines. I don't think that's realistic. Everyone is not going to convert to electric vehicles. I think it's terrific that there is diversity in the energy base for transportation. This is very healthy for the economy and for the country in general. While it's true, that these new technologies may require adjustme…

As more and more people will adopt EVs, you can expect: - gas stations and car dealers to go bankrupt - price for maintenance and spare parts to jump - investment in oil extraction to drop (as demand for oil decreases) - gas prices to increase at the pump, due to diseconomies of scale within the oil industry and carbon tax This could quickly translate into a vicious circle, and make ICE as luxurious as horse riding.

I disagree about several of these.

- spare parts: assuming you're talking about spare parts for the new EVs and not the old gas cars, I don't see why. They'll still need spare parts for crash repair, mechanical wear-out, etc. There's more to a car than the propulsion unit, and things will still need to be repaired. It'll be the same supply-and-demand we have now.

- maintenance: maybe. With less overall maintenance being necessary, there might be fewer mechanics and prices could then be higher. But it's easy to do non-engine-related maintenance on cars anyway, and they still need their tires changed, brake pads replaced (though not as much), etc. Tire shops won't see any change at all, I'm sure.

- car dealers: I don't know about this. People still have to buy cars somewhere, and while they might keep EVs a little longer, people usually replace cars now because the interior is getting old and nasty, the paint looks bad and repaints are expensive, it has dents and dings, new models look nice and have fancier electronics, etc. They could go to buying directly from dealers a la Tesla, but that's really orthogonal to gas vs. EV.

- gas stations: small local ones, yes. Interstate rest stops, no. We'll see more large rest stops with charging stations and restaurants all in one complex, so people can recharge for an hour while going to the bathroom and eating lunch/dinner on their road trip. We already have stuff like this, like on the NJ Turnpike. We'll probably also see other businesses integrating food and recharging in one spot: sit-down restaurants that are popular with travelers will likely add recharging facilities, and will advertise this (you'll see a billboard on the highway that says "next exit: Cracker Barrel now with 30 charging stations!").

Re: The Problem with Electric Vehicles

#158

Post by artimaeis »

tclmeelmo wrote: post #38
artimaeis wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Chevy Volt and BMW i3 are identical in the regard of the function of their petrol engine. The Volt is using Chevy's Voltec drivetrain, so there's no way for the engine to put power to the wheels except through charging the battery - the same as the i3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Volt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GM_Voltec_powertrain

"When the engine is running it may be periodically mechanically linked (by a clutch) to a planetary gear set, and hence the output drive axle, to improve energy efficiency."

Yeah not sure how I skipped that part so effectively. I've since looked through what else I can find about that Voltec drivetrain and it's clear that the planetary gear can engage in such a way that the petrol motor can provide assistance to the electric motor.

In case anyone's interested, here's a fairly good and simple explanation of the 3-clutch system which allows the petrol motor to provide some power to the wheels when in the correct scenario: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80E1fOp95rA

Re: The Problem with Electric Vehicles

#159

Post by emilecantin »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #124
tsmarsh wrote: post #45

I have an electric car, a leaf. I also have solar power from Solar City. I live in sunny MA, where in the winter we average 15kWh generated to the summer we average 50kWh. My commute is 60 miles per day which is around 6-8kW depending in traffic and weather. Also, my local power is a mixture of nuclear and wind. So. Can we please stop rolling coal burning power plants into the electric car equation as if it is univer…

When you are looking at electric vehicles globally or even nationally you must take the power plants into the equations. Whilst you may get electricity from renewable sources, and that is good for you, when you look at the country as a whole, renewable sources make up a small percentage of the total electricity produced.

I think that electricity generation, while a perfectly valid concern, is a completely separate issue, and I think that it's better debated separately.

Why? As the grand-parent post mentioned, it's definitely not applicable everywhere, and transportation is the sector where we are the most closely tied to petroleum as an energy source.

Just decoupling that, even if there aren't any gains for the environment in gas-powered regions, is a win in my book. Once we're decoupled, we can start looking at these problematic power plants, and replacing them with greener alternatives.

Also, in regions like Canada, we're all mostly hydro-powered anyway, so the gain would be immediate. Even then, a gas power plant would probably pollute way less than the equivalent fleet of cars, due to the fact that we're always running our engines cold in the winter, which pollutes a lot more than an engine running at the proper temperature.

Re: The Problem with Electric Vehicles

#160

Post by dang »

Grishnakh wrote: post #61

You find this guy to be "brilliant"? I only skimmed the article, but it's just the same old, tired, ignorant anti-EV talking points I see from Luddites and oil industry shills every time I come across some kind of anti-EV rant. This article is just better written, but it's the same crap. If I were being extremely generous, I would just say that it's obviously not written by an engineer or anyone who really understand…

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11422369 and marked it off-topic.
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