The Electric Car • Hacker News Board

Re: The Electric Car

#241

Post by ams6110 » Tue, Jul 14, 2015, 6:09 AM UTC

butwhy wrote: post #239

toephu2 wrote: post #235

Seems that this article fails to mention that owning a house is a prerequisite to buying an EV (electric vehicle). If you rent a room in a house, it's unlikely the landlord is going to install a charger just for you, and the same goes for apartment complexes. So that already excludes a large portion of the population from buying an EV. I bet 90% of EV owners are not renting their residence. (The other 10% can charge…

If you're just commuting; charge it at your workplace? park it anywhere you can access a power outlet? If absolutely nothing is available, spend an hour of your time on the weekend using a supercharger.

Fine for the handful of spaces at work that have a charging outlet. Most workplaces don't have any. Nor will they want to pay for the electricity to charge everyone's car. It's all fun and games to do it for two or three cars as a novelty. It will be an entirely different matter to do it for hundreds of employees. And even if they wanted to do it, and have a payroll deduction or something to pay for it, the electrical grid will need to be upgraded to deliver that kind of power.

I believe that scaling up the electrical grid is going to be the biggest impediment to mass adoption of electric cars. It may happen, but not in 10 years. It will take many decades.

Re: The Electric Car

#242

Post by dzhiurgis » Tue, Jul 14, 2015, 6:17 AM UTC

_ph_ wrote: post #238

dzhiurgis wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must be joking mate. All movies since 90s tell me that most Americans can't even drive manual transmission. Modern automatic transmission is totally invisible. Some cars even have variator transmission. I get it, the car is more dynamic. So what? It's an incremental change. By the way, if you do not like pedals, there is even better technology, called cruise control.

Most electric cars have regenerative breaking. So just lifting off the power pedal will decelerate it (regaining energy for the battery). This means, in most situations you don't even have to switch over to the break pedal, which is quite convenient. For this reason I miss my old stick-shifted car which had a short gear reduction ratio. I could drive it in the city without breaking except for reaching a stop.

That is actually clever. Did not know that. Indeed that somewhat change the driving behaviour.

Does it add more value than the cost premium of the electric car? Doubt it.

Re: The Electric Car

#243

Post by hackuser » Tue, Jul 14, 2015, 6:17 AM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #158

hackuser wrote: post #20

The real story my be that car sales may decline, gas or electric: * People drive less; I saw a study showing that significantly fewer millenials are licensed to drive than their predecessors. * More people live in cities, where the cost of cars is higher (insurance and parking) and the demand for them is less due to the proximity of destinations and the availability of alternatives (public transport, taxis, ride-shar…

According to FiveThirtyEight, the urbanization trend is largely exaggerated. The more accurate statement is that college-educated millennials are somewhat more likely to live in a handful of particularly dense urban locations (think Brooklyn).[1] In fact, among all adults 25-34 the percentage in urban locations overall has actually declined. The data is a bit hard to interpret for a variety of reasons but the bottom…

Thanks; that's useful to know. I should point out that I wasn't only talking about millennials.

Re: The Electric Car

#244

Post by phillc73 » Tue, Jul 14, 2015, 6:19 AM UTC

krschultz wrote: post #181

powera wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a Tesla Model S costs $70000, even if electricity and maintenance are free (and there's no premium for self-driving) you would have to drive it 875000 miles for it to cost $0.08/mile. This seems like the type of thing that is literally unbelievable without more evidence than "I heard somebody on a panel say this".

What's crazy about 875,000 miles? Most personal gasoline cars last approximately 200,000 miles, but people rarely keep them that long because for the average driver the car is 10-20 years old. The interior will wear out long before the engine. If the car manufacturers built the drivetrain to last 400,000 miles, they would just be wasting money. If the car is running 24/7 at 30 mph, you would top 250k miles per year.…

I find it hard to imagine a conventional petrol powered car only lasting 200,000 miles. Which manufacturers only build cars to last 200,000 miles?

I can't think of a car I, or my family, have owned which hasn't lasted at least twice that long.

My current car is a 2002 BMW E39 530D. It has almost 900,000 kms on the clock and is still going strong on the original engine. The cloth interior is still in quite reasonable condition. There has of course been the need for minor maintenance (rear shocks were required at the last inspection). Right now I need new door seals and there is some minor rust attended to. However, at a consumption of approximately 7 liters per 100 km on the autobahn, I don't see any need to buy a newer car for quite some time yet.

Re: The Electric Car

#245

Post by rconti » Tue, Jul 14, 2015, 6:24 AM UTC

greglindahl wrote: post #71

rfrey wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think electric cars win on every metric except range and refill/recharge time. They have better torque, better efficiency, lower emissions, lower noise, simpler drivetrains, and more reliable motors.

For refill time, note that most electric car owners do almost all of their charging in their own garages overnight... not something that's common for gas-powered cars. Long trips are worse for electric cars, sure. But day-to-day driving? Charging is not an issue if you can charge in your garage.

For passenger capacity, note that most car owners utilize 1/4 or 1/5 of their available seats.

Yet while all 3 of my vehicles (2 cars and a motorcycle) are 2-seaters, virtually all of my driving is solo (and I'm not even talking about commuting -- I'm primarily a bicycle commuter. Okay, my other 3 vehicles have 1 seat and 2 pedals).

The "average" or typical use case is not how people choose their vehicle. They choose it based on the uncommon use case. The executive buys himself a Porsche not because it will get him anywhere any faster, or because she really knows how to drive it, but because it projects an image of what she could do. The SUV is sold on the promise of rugged camping trips and dodging boulders to transport the children safely back home under conditions that can best be described as "apocalypse". Hell, I have many car enthusiast friends who have bought practical, boring cars because they've got that 3rd row seating for hauling their kids' friends.... before they even have kids!

For 99% of use cases, yes, the electric car is cheaper and more convenient. But my next car will be a comfortable, powerful, gas-powered car with AWD. Why? Because today's weight (and efficiency) penalty for AWD is basically zero, and on the one trip to Tahoe a year where chain control is in effect, I won't have to freeze my digits off trying to fit chains (or, worse, get taken out by a vehicle careening out of control in the snow).. and I won't have to hunt down nonexistent charging infrastructure where I don't have a driveway, let alone a garage. It will be for the 2 roadtrips I take a year. It will be because, while the electric car is better for MOST of my driving, it doesn't accommodate the rare circumstances we really buy vehicles for -- Because the electric car isn't enough better at the 99% of use cases to make up for its virtual uselessness at the 1%.

I love electric cars. I've driven the i3, various hybrids, and the Tesla Roadster and Model S. Some day I will own an electric car, but I wouldn't surprise if the tipping point takes quite a bit longer to trigger than he expects.

Re: The Electric Car

#246

Post by ams6110 » Tue, Jul 14, 2015, 6:29 AM UTC

hackuser wrote: post #20

The real story my be that car sales may decline, gas or electric: * People drive less; I saw a study showing that significantly fewer millenials are licensed to drive than their predecessors. * More people live in cities, where the cost of cars is higher (insurance and parking) and the demand for them is less due to the proximity of destinations and the availability of alternatives (public transport, taxis, ride-shar…

Cars being expensive in cities is nothing new. Mass transit in cities is nothing new. Hard to say what energy prices will do but there's no clear trend[1]. Most people aren't really very worried about climate change[2].

[1] http://inflationdata.com/Inflation/images/charts/Oil/Inflati...

[2] http://www.gallup.com/poll/167843/climate-change-not-top-wor...

Re: The Electric Car

#247

Post by ams6110 » Tue, Jul 14, 2015, 6:32 AM UTC

krschultz wrote: post #175

threeseed wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you have missed the big population trends of the last few decades. More and more people are moving to inner city apartments every one of which is not designed with electric cars in mind. And with property prices reaching astronomical amounts in many places e.g. Australia, UK, Europe, HK, SG the lure of cheaper but smaller apartments is only going to grow. For me this is is one of the big advantages of hydroge…

It is massively cheaper to solve the problem of extending electricity 5 meters from the inside of the apartment building to the parking lot than it would be to build a global hydrogen distribution network.

It's not massively cheaper to solve the problem of the building itself requiring some multiple of its current electrical service supply once all the tenants want to start charging their cars there.

Re: The Electric Car

#248

Post by pkulak » Tue, Jul 14, 2015, 6:33 AM UTC

ylhert wrote: post #201

sremani wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The 2011 and 2012 were disasters for Nissan. Never buy one of those, especially in a hot climate. I've had my 2013 for two years now and haven't noticed any drop in range at all.

Re: The Electric Car

#249

Post by ams6110 » Tue, Jul 14, 2015, 6:52 AM UTC

jessriedel wrote: post #94

mikexstudios wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but there's at least one really expensive component of electric cars that needs replacement every 8 to 10 years: the battery. I think the current price is about $10000 for the battery if you order from Tesla in advance. Maintenance and repair costs of a gasoline vehicle over 10 years can be less than that.

That's not a very good comparison, is it? After 10 years you'd have a nearly-new electric car (from a reliability/repair standpoint) but you'd have a gas car that was vastly more likely to break down and need costly repairs than when you first bought it.

So the electric car doesn't have an interior that will be worn out? Or worn suspension components like ball joints, tie rods, bushings, steering rack? Or air conditioning?

Electric cars also have highly sophisticated power control equipment. In 10 years of sysadmin work, the overwhelmingly most common failures I've seen have been power supplies, voltage regulators, and capacitors. Remains to be seen how well these components will hold up in real-world use in electric cars.

Re: The Electric Car

#250

Post by Decade » Tue, Jul 14, 2015, 6:56 AM UTC

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…

The iPhone had a few more advantages than that. WiFi and "unlimited" data with an uncrippled web browser, when everybody else was nickel and diming you for WAP. Email that worked with every major email provider, and didn't require you to play with BES. Voicemail that came from the Internet era instead of the cassette tape era. Oh, how I hate old voicemail systems.

One of my biggest objections to gasoline cars, now that electric cars are practical, is pollution. Hydrocarbon + oxygen = carbon dioxide + water. Carbon dioxide and water are colorless and odorless. So if I smell anything coming out of the exhaust pipe, it's obviously poison. Why are we subjecting ourselves to poison? Gasoline cars have got to go.