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The Electric Car

blog.geoffralston.com

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Re: The Electric Car

#281

Post by monort »

eru wrote: post #227
krschultz wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Of course you won't see 24/7 usage on most cars, just like you don't see 24/7 usage on all electrical power stations. Unless someone finds an economic activity that you can throw basically unlimited car-hours at in the night time. The yield can be low, but it has to be higher than the variable cost of one more car hour.

Surplus of night time car-hours can support a market for cheap delivery.

Re: The Electric Car

#282

Post by yetihehe »

phillc73 wrote: post #244
krschultz wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I had 2001 Suzuki Swift MKII 1.3. I think it had 65,000km on odometer in 2007 when I bought it, but can't be sure because odometer was only going to 99,999km. Now at (1)24,000km it's still going but I had to weld chassis or it would snap in half. Engine is still in very good condition though, only minor expected fixes were required. But yes, Suzuki DOES make cars which are not expected to last more than 100,000km. I've also recently got 2004 Opel Astra H which had already 209,000km and it's in perfect condition both engine and body, so YMMV.

Re: The Electric Car

#283

Post by SQL2219 »

One point not addressed in this article: gas will get cheaper and fuel efficiencies will rise. Internal combustion will not just lay down and disappear.

Re: The Electric Car

#285

Post by paganel »

rfrey wrote: post #43
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…

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.

> I think electric cars win on every metric except range and refill/recharge time.

And price. Maybe everyone on here is a millionaire or about to become one, but $70,000 is a lot of money. Hell, even $20,000 is a lot of money for me (I live in Eastern Europe), even though for most of the people in here it looks like small change. And if it matters I am currently living a sort of middle class life in these parts of the world.

Re: The Electric Car

#286

Post by Brakenshire »

chrisguilbeau wrote: post #207
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…

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.

Second hand electric cars, as long as the battery is solid, should be an excellent deal if you're in the sweet spot for commuting distance. 50 miles a day equates to $1000 a year in US gas costs, and £2000 ($3000) in UK petrol costs. Especially in the UK, if you can get a used Leaf for £10-12k* , that's going to be by far the most economical way of running a second/commuting car.

* That seems to be the going rate for a two year old Leaf on Autotrader.

Re: The Electric Car

#287

Post by nicboobees »

reustle wrote: post #224

> Thanks to Sam Altman for having read an earlier version of this post. Does this add anything to the article, or is it just a way to say "I'm friends with Sam". Do people proofreading a short article expect this sort of thing?

It's there to suggest that he agrees completely with the article, and if you disagree with any of it, you must be crazy.

Re: The Electric Car

#288

Post by paganel »

threeseed wrote: post #161
greglindahl wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of places don't have super-expensive real estate, unlike the Bay Area and Manhattan. More and more places over time will require apartment garages to have chargers -- already a law for new construction here in Palo Alto. Personally, I charge at the city parking garage a block away.

The world is bigger than just the US. Housing affordability is a major problem in almost every developed country.

> The world is bigger than just the US.

Sometimes it doesn't feel that way, at least according to people here on HN. I live in an apartment block which looks like this (https://www.google.com/search?q=bucharest+communist+flats&bi...), where normal people have actually starting physical fights, with fists and police intervention, over parking spots situated between those buildings, there's no way you could, I don't know, somehow charge your car when you live on the 7th floor.

Re: The Electric Car

#289

Post by TeMPOraL »

nnethercote wrote: post #195
harshaw wrote: post #165

I wish people would be slightly more honest about technological change. Smartphones are very special. They are very cheap, easy to mass produce, and you can iterate on them very quickly. Cars on the other hand have a much longer life cycle, involve much more capital, and in general are going to follow an elongated investment / replacement cycle. Comparing these two systems, while enthusiastic and great for a college…

Indeed, the fact that phone contracts effectively force most people to upgrade every two years is an unusual, important, and often-overlooked characteristic of the smartphone market. It's a big part of why Apple makes such incredible amounts of money from iPhones, but their iPad revenue has dropped off significant.

This is probably the part of it and it probably used to have stronger effect, but right now I think the reason people change smartphones often is the same reason people changed their PCs every two-three years - software increases in features / bloat so fast that if you don't upgrade, you'll quickly be out of the loop (and God forbid you actually update your software - then it will gradually stop working as authors make it bigger and slower).

Re: The Electric Car

#290

Post by dsr_ »

patrickk wrote: post #280
harshaw wrote: post #165

I wish people would be slightly more honest about technological change. Smartphones are very special. They are very cheap, easy to mass produce, and you can iterate on them very quickly. Cars on the other hand have a much longer life cycle, involve much more capital, and in general are going to follow an elongated investment / replacement cycle. Comparing these two systems, while enthusiastic and great for a college…

I hope things pan out the way the article predicts and I'm a massive optimist for EV adoption in the long term. However, there's some obvious wrenches in the plan for such quick adoption, including: - No great options currently for charging in apartments. Virtually the entire world is on an urbanisation trend, so this segment of potential EV owners is really important for adoption, and isn't being currently served. -…

The key technology is battery storage. The energy storage density of gasoline/kerosene/jet fuel is immense, at least 6-7x the best available batteries.

When someone announces a mass-production electrical storage system with 5-10x improvement, we can have electric aircraft as something other than a novelty.

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