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The guide to real-world EV battery health

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Re: The guide to real-world EV battery health

#61

Post by graemep »

cogman10 wrote: post #54
graemep wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shoes have a lower environmental impact and cost than than steel, plastic, rubber tyres (which AFAIK use at least some synthetic rubber made from oil), etc. Walking does not use fuel so efficiency is not really relevant. It requires less physical extortion so is more efficient that way, but another way to phrase that is that it is less exercise.

Bikes require very little steel and the rubber tires end up lasting longer (typically) than the shoes you do. > Walking does not use fuel so efficiency is not really relevant. Ah, it is. You eat food, that's fuel. It's the major source of CO2 for both activities. Now, it can be insignificant. If the only food you eat is like oatmeal and beans that you grow yourself, then yeah it's going to have a non-existent impact.…

> Ah, it is. You eat food, that's fuel. It's the major source of CO2 for both activities.

That implies all exercise is a bad thing. i think you will find very few people are sufficiently keen to reduce CO2 that they will deliberately get less exercise and damage their health. I am certainly not doing that. At the moment I am trying to get more exercise.

> Bikes require very little steel

Compared to a car, certainly. Compared to shoes, an awful lot.

> a bike, which will outlast your children

The typical life span of a bike seems to be about five and ten year years. I really hope my kids last a reasonable multiple of the top end! The level of sales of cycles in the UK (well over 1 million a year) vs the number of people who cycle at least once a week (less seven million) implies a life of about five years. About half of that is leisure cyclists so not really comparable to people using transport to get somewhere.

Leisure cyclists want to get more exercise so by your argument about that being a bad thing they (and therefore half of all UK cyclists) are actively harmful.

https://road.cc/content/news/uk-cycle-sales-plummet-early-19...

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/64e71a4f20ae8...

Re: The guide to real-world EV battery health

#62

Post by Etheryte »

cogman10 wrote: post #7
Etheryte wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While buying an EV is a greener choice than buying an ICE, a better option still is to use the vehicle you already have for as long as reasonable. This also overlooks the fact that EVs are prohibitively expensive for the vast majority of the population. It isn't the case that people aren't buying them because of preference. Nearly everyone would buy a car that's cheaper to run and maintain if they could afford it.

Bike > walk == public transit > used EV > new EV > used ICE > new ICE That's pretty much the order of "greenness" in personal transport. New EVs will pay off their added carbon footprint in roughly 1 or 2 years in most locations. The ultimate determining factor of how fast that is the energy mix of your local power generation. The only time it'd probably be better to continue using an ICE is if that ICE is a moped or…

This type of thinking is flawed. Me buying a new EV does not take my old ICE out of circulation, it just puts it in the hands of someone else. Buying less, whether that's cars or anything else, is the baseline to aim for.

Re: The guide to real-world EV battery health

#63

Post by graemep »

thatguy0900 wrote: post #49
graemep wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is insane. Smaller vehicles are safer at a social level because they do less damage when they hit something - especially a pedestrian. Regulatory bodies should be encouraging them for that reason alone (let alone all the others).

Think the cybertruck effectively shows that noone cares about the safety of those outside of the vehicle too much

Manufacturers might prioritise the safety of their customers, and people are likely to care more about their own safety than that of others, but regulators should be looking at overall public safety which is definitely improved by encouraging small cars.

Re: The guide to real-world EV battery health

#64

Post by graemep »

303uru wrote: post #48
graemep wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is biking better than walking? New EV vs used ICE will depend on how much you drive and in what conditions. I would guess what I do (in the UK) is uncommon in the US but it must be possible but working from home plus living in a town rather than a city means I only do low single digit thousands of miles a year and that almost entirely on clear roads. People in much of the UK commute by public transport and use th…

Bike is the most efficient form of transportation, even walking doesn’t compare.

I want to get more exercise. Therefore I should walk rather than bike.

Re: The guide to real-world EV battery health

#65

Post by bryanlarsen »

happyopossum wrote: post #41

Important to note that this article is geared toward Fleet Managers , so terms like “average service life” may not apply. For example the average car in the us survives 12.6 years before being junked, totaled, etc. which is far longer than a car would be in fleet service at a company.

You're misreading that stat. The average car in the US is 12.6 years old. At 12.6 years they're only about half way to being scrapped.

Re: The guide to real-world EV battery health

#66

Post by bryanlarsen »

SR2Z wrote: post #56
snakeboy wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's more likely that Chinese EVs are banned in the US because they would absolutely obliterate the domestic car manufacturing industry.

To be fair, a big part of why is the magnitude of subsidies China has given its domestic EV suppliers.

It's less than the $7500 per car the US gave until very recently.

Re: The guide to real-world EV battery health

#67

Post by bryanlarsen »

margalabargala wrote: post #59
tbrownaw wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> doesn't need neck-snapping acceleration I thought this was mostly* a side-effect of electric motors inherently behaving differently than combustion motors. * Not that it can't be deliberately turned off since everything goes through a computer.

There are two different factors here. One, as you noted, is that electric motors can apply full torque from a stop, increasing perceived acceleration. The other, and more impactful, is that electric motor power scales with cost much more cheaply than gas motors, so vehicles will oversize their electric motors.

There's a third factor. Ev's need to support fast charging. So they need to do support super high voltages and currents. That's much of the expense of a powerful EV. A powerful motor is relatively inexpensive in comparison.

If you can charge a car in 20 minutes, the battery and some other circuitry can support discharging in 20 minutes, which is an insane power level.

Re: The guide to real-world EV battery health

#68

Post by cosmic_cheese »

happyopossum wrote: post #42
boplicity wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Affordable EVs exist and are widely available in some countries. They're effectively banned in North America, though.

That’s hogwash - affordable EVs from one country are effectively banned, but we have affordable EVs. It’s just that nobody wants to buy them.

This is likely confounded by the dealership model. Dealers have practically zero incentive to sell affordable cars, and especially not EVs that they’ll make almost no servicing money on. Some dealers also stock only a handful of EVs (or none) so they may not even have them to sell in the first place.

It’d be nice if affordable EV models were available from direct to consumer companies. If one could go online and buy a $22k electric hatchback that shows up in your driveway with zero haggling, it’s difficult to imagine it not selling well.

Re: The guide to real-world EV battery health

#69

Post by epistasis »

jeffbee wrote: post #12
epistasis wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's absolutely untrue. The majority of the environmental damage is from the ongoing use of it, not from production. Every time you fill up on 20 gallons of gas, that is 400 pounds of CO2 that will be dumped into the air. Used EVs are apparently very cheap. Most new cars are prohibitively expensive, the average new car cost is something like $50k now in the US. If anybody is concerned about cost of new cars, they a…

It is true though, in some cases. The embodied carbon of a Rivian for example is never paid back by operations. So you do have to exercise good judgement in which EV you choose. The category doesn't always win. In my case I already own a hybrid that I only drive 2000 mi/yr and there is not yet an EV that I could buy with so little embodied carbon that it would make sense to do so. At the rate China is decarbonizing,…

Thanks for linking that Rivian document later, but I think it doesn't support this claim. I'll stick with it's weird 155,000 mile lifetime for the comparison.

Rivian: 60,140 kg carbon per lifetime.

F150, at 20mpg: 78,740 kg carbon, for fuel alone.

So even ignoring the embodied carbon in an ICE vehicle, and paying comparatively high embodied CO2 cost of a new Rivian, it's better to switch immediately, (if CO2 were the sole concern, which it never is.)

Re: The guide to real-world EV battery health

#70

Post by [deleted] »

nritchie wrote: post #9

Hopefully, in coming years, we will see more practically designed EVs that are more affordable. A practical car doesn't need neck-snapping acceleration, every bell-and-whistle and room for a family of six with a dog. I'd like to believe that as batteries cost drop, the incentive to justify the extra cost will drop. Then we can get back to "just basic transportation" rather than a luxury product for the rich. While $3…

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