WHERE IS MY ELECTRIC CAR?

dp

Electric usually means "coal-fired,"  depending on where you live.  We need a better way of generating electicity before electric cars become an improvement on protecting the environment.

Ha. The Jetsons were whom I was thinking of when I made that post. Saw part of their movie a few days ago.

Um, heLLO? Magic anti-gravity air suspension bubbles to be invented?

In the future they think of everything.

Oh well, this could have been a good thread.

It must also be remembered that a gallon of gas takes a lot of electricity to produce.  i have heard estimates that the electricity required to process a gallon of gas is enough to power an electric car 12 to 40 miles.  Even at the low end the additional load on the electrical grid is not a major factor compared to the reduction in immersions.

Here are some rough but useful rules of thumb:

Electricity sourced from coal fired plants nets the GHG effect of driving an electric vehicle to about zero.

Since most power generation is not that bad, you might think that electric vehicle use is generally speaking a net positive. But you have to think of where that specific incremental power generation for charging the batteries came from. In favour for that- most battery charging can be off peak.

Here and now there is a huge difference between having enough electric vehicles that it in impacting the electrical system, and where we will be for some years yet: working out the bugs of just using and charging the things. Big picture wise: time and effort and commitment have to be put into that end.

Electria vehicles are inherently neither good or bad for how they impact the power generation system. They can be a tool for decentralizing the production end of the system. But if we just follow laissez faire, they will probably exacerbate the failures of the existing system. So the problem is with letting laissez faire unfold, not the effects of the electric vehicles themselves.

City planning improvements that allow for alternative transportation would probably do more for our air quality and fuel-use reduction than any gizmo right now. 

In fact, the next generation of electric vehicles should produce their own fuel, with their own solar collectors, so the battery is only for backup. Of course, this means, they have to be built differently from the cars we have now: they'll have to be light, agile, probably slower and more fragile - airbags, yes, accordion-front-end, no. They may be made of recycled plastic and paper and look more like golf carts: low and flat, very stable in turns, but not good at impact, so we'll simply have to become more careful, law-abiding drivers. (The police have no problem cracking down on political dissent - why not put some of that abused power toward preventling highway carnage?)

All of our new gadgets should be self-powering. Like the summer hat wherein the solar panel outside drives the little fan inside. And our homes will need to be earth-sheltered styrofoam block with their garden on the sides and generator on the roof and furnace in the sub-sub-sub basement. Nearly every town in Canada was built on a river and could have its own little hgydro plant where the original mill was (and it can be a grist-mill again, as well).

The biggest problem in designing something new is to stop thinking in terms of the old.

ETA No, i mean stop thinking in terms of the present  -  thinking about what worked in the past is good. We have the entire recorded ingenuity of our species to choose ideas from, to compare and adapt, as well as emergent technology.

To take a turn on another comedian (some guy from Texas I saw on "Just for Laughs"), it isn't the type of cars we drive, it's that we drive cars.

Meanwhile, until those desired EV vehicles are made affordable, convenient, comfortable, and reliable with a decent resale value - North Americans will continue on with internal combustion engines - especially with cleaner combustion and higher mileage. If you read the car mags, we're a long way from converting the majority of North Americans from their beloved internal combustion monsters.* There's one extreme right wing comic (Dennis Miller)  that says, "hell, we'll drive cars and trucks as they are until all the oil is used up - what, 100 years from now?"

*the car mags are in fact reviewing EV vehicles and the best low-polluting internal combustion engines - because they can see what the future holds. Dennis Miller doesn't get much support, if any, from these mags.

Okay, I think I know who you mean - he was in a movie a few years ago. Can't remember his name, either. But it was Lewis Black who uttered that line - I distinctly remember it. It's a staple of his show.

Boom Boom wrote:

Meanwhile, until those desired EV vehicles are made affordable, convenient, comfortable, and reliable with a decent resale value - North Americans will continue on with internal combustion engines 

They may not have a choice much longer. Between trashing their economy and failing to reign in legal crime, North Americans probably won't be able to buy gas for the old cars, and fewer and fewer will be able to buy new cars, or even used cars (... or disposable diapers, or cell phones, or lawn jockeys)

Add the weather doing what it's been predicted (for four decades that i've been aware of) to do, travel over long distances is growing more difficult and chancy, as well as more expensive. Those lucky enough to live in a relatively safe and fertile place won't wander too far - will grow all their food and produce most of their necessities within a few kilometers (... well, all that's in the best-case scenario, without climate wars or mass migration)

In medium-term planning and design, i'd be inclined to think of vehicles with a smaller range, lower speed, and greater adaptability to various functions and terrains: they'll have to go on unrepaired roads, through axle-deep water, in snow, sand and mud; they'll have to carry trade goods to market, materials to cottage industry, harvest in from fields, children to school and first aid to neighbourhood emergencies.

Yeah, I remember Ron White - saw a concert movie of the three Blue Collar Comedy guys. But it was still Lewis Black who made the comment I referred to - I saw it on HBO just a few weeks ago.

Boom Boom wrote:

I agree we'll see drastic changes in the future, maybe not in my lifetime, but certainly with the next generation. Speaking of which, my nephews and one niece - all under 14 - just got new iPads (whatever they are) for Christmas. I remember my first electric pocket calculator (Texas Instruments) which was a very big deal back around 1968 or so - and thr first truly scientific pocket calculator a few years later. Now kids younger than I was when I got my first calculator all have laptop computers, iPads, iTunes, hi-def TVs and sophisicated video games and God knows what. I saw downtown Tokyo on the tube a couple of days ago, all lit up like some nightmarish scenario from the far future. How much longer can keep pushing the limits of our greed for the newest and latest most sophisicated junk???

The more things change the more things stay the same.  I spent the weekend watching a couple of shows where some historians spent a year living on a farm circa 1850's to 1880's in Britain.   Really interesting show. What I found the most fasicnating was what was going on technologically at the time in terms of the gidgets and gadets that were appearing around the dawn of steam power and before electricity due to the industrial revolution.  The focus was mostly on farm equipment  and gadgets but there was a lot of looking at what the women were doing around the house.  At first it was hard to look at the things as the height of new tech (as we look at it today) but the show did a pretty good job transporting the viewer back in time to illustrate how many of these things, even for the the poorer rural folk were highly desireable and sought after.  Many things had their detractors as well.   It wasn't long before I was drawing parallels to today.  My conclusion...not a whole lot has changed on this front.  New and sometimes better and quite useful tech and sometimes not, appear and people want it.   Then time moves on the useful tech is kept or evolves and the less useful or more novelty tech gets junked.  The desire itself  nothing new.   The differences between then and today is the amount of stuff and the number of people that can reasonably afford more of it.   The drive isn't much different though.

At one point they talked about the mechanical sewing machine, in this case a tredle machine.  It was considered a novelty when it first appeared but soon and mostly for women was considered a technological marvel and most every woman desired one for their households.  Now they're just a common appliance that's taken for granted and many spend more time in closets or stashed in a basement whereas in a victorian household, especially in the lower classes it would have held a place of honor and cherished the same way many cherish their high tech electronics or appliances today.   Coal stoves, hand powered sheep shearers, funky mechnical food processing equipment and all sorts of other fascinating gadgets I'd never seen before all came into existence at that time and then relatively (compared to other eras) quickly progress on different tech continued on from there. 

My nephew has used a computer since he was two.  I'm old enough to remember being awestruck by this amazing new thing.  It still boggles me at times when I think back to how much it's coming to the masses has changed things.  I also remember the VCR(you mean I can choose when I want to watch something, wow!) the microwave and the cordless phone. And cell phones!  For my nephew these things are all just the way things are and are just fairly mundane tools.   Kinda how I think of my sewing machine and washer and dryer.  For the victorian era, rural woman who spent on average FOUR DAYS!! doing laundry, by hand, the thought of being able to throw a load in and actually leave it to do something else would likely have been unimaginable or at least the stuff of dreams.

I remember being a teen and going to my nieghbours to play his Apple IIe computer which I thought was fucking amazing (he was a programming wizz at UofT at the time)

I remember getting a Atari ST for christmas when I was in University and it was the most amnazing thing I had ever seen or had. And its hard to believe that was over 20 years ago and now I have a computer with a hard drive bigger than all my previous computers put together

Boom Boom wrote:

My satellite dish receives more TV programs than all the televisions (cable and antenna) I've watched in the past put together.

 I still can barely ever find anything good to watch....  :)

Here are some figures that show how battery costs totally drive the costs, and indications of how those will change.

First of all, not only is no one making money on EVs yet, but they are quite a ways off the sales and production levels for breakeven. And that is true no matter what strategy the either the Nissans or the small companies use.

The closest to breakeven, the most serious, and the most public about their strategies are Nissan and Tesla.

Tesla makes the roadster that is rightfully dismiised as rich man's toy. But thats their entry strategy- essentially for learning production, costs and energy. And other companies are using Tesla as a partner. So they are not a novelty.

Nissan says they can break even with the Leaf at 500,000 per year. They likey figure that they'll never get there with the current car. Because the only way to sell more is when the cost of the battery pack goes down... and changes in that could change the car quite a bit.

Ironically, Tesla has decided to leapfrog the means of getting to the cheaper battery pack. The maker of the ridiculously expensive toy is going to switch to using battery packs made up of existing laptop cells... because the really mass based production application is already there. So the expensive toy is going to have lower priced battery pack than the Nissan Leaf, which is only going to meet its targets by selling more cars to a price driven market.

Tesla says that with the battery pack switch they can break even at 20,000 units. Granted, they have more margin in setting the price of their EV, than does Nissan with the Leaf. But that is a 40% drop in sticker price. The short term logic of the move is a no brainer. But even the longer term- when that battery pack they are switching to is guaranteed to be completey outmoded- that makes sense too.

All that detail bolls down to something simple: why there arent more EVs available is chicken and egg. It costs money- net- to sell all EVs. They can only sell more when they can make LOTS more, and the price is WAY too high to sell in the numbers required. Creeping increase of sales and production volumes will gradually drop the price of the battery packs. But this is a game for DEEP pockets, good strategy, and luck in the strategy choice working.

Most of the automakers are waiting for Nissan and Tesla to take all the bruising, before they get in seriously. [Ford is just keeping its hand in, mostly with Magna initiative and engineering. Ditto for Daimler and Volkswagen.] Nissan/Renault strategy is to catapault into dominance when EVs themselves become the mainstay, by paying their dues now. Tesla isnt a big company and I guess plans on making money much sooner, and then lots by being the venture partner of choice.

Boom Boom wrote:

If what you say is true, isn't that an incentive for automakers to just improve their current fuel efficiency numbers and build better emissions controls for their gasoline/diesel powered vehicles - instead of funding pure EV research?

That is probably so, in the short term. Very short, since gas prices are going up, and even the tamest of capitalist media pundits are predicting sharp, steep rises (while western average income, if it changes at all, goes down) and they don't even talk about when petroleum runs out altogether - sooner than previously predicted, as per most forecasts, and especially if they keep spilling billion of barrels into the oceans. So, by the time they make traditional cars as efficient as they should have been all along, there won't be a market. No, i really don't think China and India will go the same route as the earlier industrial nations. Can't, for a start, because circumstances are quite different, and might - longshot, but might - learn from others' example.

How do electric cars do in cold weather?  I've read that at -15C or thereabouts the mileage drops by half.  Is this true?  What about -30?  I'd think a lot of the energy produced would go to heating and demisting.  Does anyone know?

absentia wrote:

That is probably so, in the short term. Very short, since gas prices are going up...

On another thread, there's talk of Quebec Hydro raising their electricity rates - I suspect electric rates are going to go up right across the board everywhere especially as demand intensifies, so there may not be significant cost-savings associated with EV as compared to IC (internal compbustion) vehicles. And length of rechargeable battery life may be a concern as well - what happens to all the batteries that die out, can they be 100% recycled?

Electricity production, distribution and usage will have to change drastically. So will industry in general, and the transporting of goods as well as people, the growing and moving of food and the construction of buildings and cities.... 

We keep thinking as if the present were going to last - in terms business as usual -  even though we see, daily, the air traffic snarl-ups and tornado damage, ice cpas melting and deserts growing, mining accidents and energy production catastrophes. We urgently, desperately need to get our heads around a future - and i don't mean Star Trek, because that's never going to happen; i mean a  medium-distance future, in our children's lifetime - that's different. I realize that we have to go from here, from the technology and economy we have right now, but we can't plot any kind of forward path without some realistic idea of a destination. 

Of course. We should have been going in that direction for decades. Centralized energy production is crazy. It requires extensive infrastructure to store and distribute; the grid can break down at any point, for any number of reasons, for any lenght of time; every plant and junction is vulnerable to sabotage, overload and incompetence; the repair and expansion of the overcomplicated system is difficult (esapecially in the kind of weather that's more frequently knocking it out) and far too expensive, and its reliability diminshes, even as dependence on it grows. Decentralizing is the only thing that makes sense, but megabusiness won't allow that to happen: it would give communities and individuals too much aoutonomy.

Boom Boom wrote:

Wasn't there a thread here recently that explained how to get off the grid with your own power generation and in fact sell your excess power to the hydro company?

Net metering, or selling your excess power back to the power company is not the same as getting off the grid.