I have to disagree with many points in that article. My point of reference is the German grid, so it might be different in the US.
- switching all cars to electrical would increase the total electricity consumption by 20%, while currently we export about 10% of our production. All the changes are going to happen over a timeframe of more than 20 years, because that is how long it takes to replace the cars at minimum, a long time to make any necessary adjustments to the grid.
- in general, electrical cars should be rather beneficial to the grid. There is no reason to charge them at dinner time. Electrical cars have timers and current control, it is very easy to have them charge at times where the grid is underloaded. Many power companies have rebates at night anyway to get rid of excess electricity. (Assuming a car with a reasonably sized battery, like the Model 3)
- long term, the speed of charging could be controlled remotely by the power company (for a rebate) so they could use this further to stabilize the grid.
- The Model X is available with a tow hitch, and it seems that the Model 3 might have one too (Elon tweeted something to that extend)
- Most Tesla owners seem to be happy with the combination of range and the Supercharger network, and the range is going to improve by about 5% per year.
> No reason to charge them at dinner time. Timers and current control & remotely adjusting by power company
My main issue is with your notion that the cars should, somehow, be limited to only charging at certain times. The issue becomes, "OMG I CUT OFF MY FINGER". "Oh, sorry, cars not charged yet." "Oh, I want to go to Walmart and grab some chips." "Sorry, cars not charged yet." "Oh man! I forgot about a meeting I had with my realtor!" "Sorry, cars not charged yet"
> "There's no reason to recharge them at dinner time."
The issue is that this could be a problem now. Instead of me just being able to put fuel in my car whenever, now I have to be like "Oh yeah, it's dinner time and I'm home. Can't recharge my car yet!"
AND, when everyone has an electric car, it will very quickly become like a busy cable network in your neighborhood. "Well, it's estimating 18 days until the ~download~ charge is done."
Refueling with an ICE takes no time at all and can be done anywhere. Even if the car is out of gas in my driveway, I have a chance to walk and get a can of fuel and put fuel in my car (in probably less time than it would take to recharge it).
I would bet that the "power company's night time rebates" would go away really fast when they were struggling to meet the sudden demand of charging everyone's cars.
> Most Tesla owners are happy with their range and it will improve by 5%/year.
Even if their current range is 300 miles, that's 15 miles the first year. That's not really significant.
Lastly, your disagreements all seem to be either flawed or they seem to be with the less important issues (tow hitch, range) and ignore the more important (charge time, accessibility, cost, cost of infrastructure, etc).
You are stuck in a gasoline mindset where you drive until empty, then you put some more dead trees in. That is not how you use an electric car, at all.
Very few people will use the entirety of 200+ miles every day, and as such, their car will not be empty. It will then simply recharge every night. Also, nobody is saying you can't recharge when you want. It's just that 95% of people won't care when exactly in the day their car recharges the 50 odd miles they drove, and so that will then happen at a useful (for the grid) time.
Assuming a car with a reasonably sized battery (Bolt, Model 3), you rarely are going to arrive "empty" at home. And if thats the case, of course you can charge immediately. But not every car owner has to do it, most are going to wait for the cheaper night rates. So there is a good chance of the grid not collapsing.
> Refueling with an ICE takes no time at all and can be done anywhere.
So right.
It is truly amazing that more people don't realize the disconnect here between current motor fuels and electricity. The average gallon of gasoline contains 33 kWh of energy. You can pump about 15-20 gallons in 5 minutes or so. That's equivalent to around 6 MWh or 21,000 MJ of energy, every hour. Less if you allow for the time between cars. The average household electrical supply in the US is 200A at 240V which can supply a paltry 48 kWh or 172 MJ each hour. And that's if one were able to use the supply at full capacity.
Electric cars require 1/4 to 1/3 of the energy as typical ICE counterparts, but the fuel delivery systems are separated by factor of over 100. We're still well over an order of magnitude apart on the fueling convenience factor. Installing three phase 480V 400A (1.2 MJ per hour) service to homes would help solve this, but would be much more dangerous to work with - even if the charging systems on the EVs could use it.
An average car in Germany would require about 10kWh per day recharge, this can be done on a plain wall socket. Even if you drive twice that range every day, you would not need anywhere close to the powers you are talking about.
The comparison about the energy transfer speed between gasoline and electricity is misleading. First of all, an electric vehicle is about 3x as effective, so you would need only a third of the energy transfer speed.
Then, with a gasoline vehicle, you have always to drive to a fuel station and wait for it to be filled up - there speed matters. With an electric vehicle, the common case should be overnight recharge, so charge speed does not matter much there. This also means, that you are likely to start with a completely filled battery every morning. So unless you are doing long distance travel, you never have to recharge except over night (or, if your work parking facilities offer electrical outlets, during work time). And for long distance travel, there are Superchargers. Yes, those do take longer than refueling gasoline, but unless you travel long distance every day, this might be a good tradeoff.
> The comparison about the energy transfer speed between gasoline and electricity is misleading. First of all, an electric vehicle is about 3x as effective, so you would need only a third of the energy transfer speed.
I stated that in my original reply.
> With an electric vehicle, the common case should be overnight recharge, so charge speed does not matter much there.
I know here in the DC metro people have 100 mile per day commutes - and more. That is 1/3 to 1/2 (all in some cases) of the battery capacity of most EVs. A regular 20A wall charger has no chance of replenishing that overnight, and at 85% charging efficiency, a level 2 charger or whatever would struggle to supply 40+ kWh over night as well.
Slow charging EVs may work for some, maybe even most - but definitely not everyone. Especially in the rural United States.
This looks like a Europe vs US comparison problem?
In Europe you're unlikely to be travelling vast distances on a regular basis, whereas it's much more common in the US, so the range problems become much more important in the US than they are in Europe.
In Europe we also have 230V power as standard, so the standard 32A EV wall chargers provide 7kW - more than enough to charge any EV overnight. Even a standard UK wall socket can provide about 3kW.
In Germany they have 3-phase wiring right into homes, so even faster home charging is possible there.
Audi have been talking about 800V, 300kW charging - or 250km of range in 10 minutes. That's less than the time it takes for a bathroom break and a coffee. The difference between filling an ICE vehicle and fast-charging an EV becomes pretty negligible at that point.
(The CCS plug standard has been future-proofed to support these kinds of speeds)
All of this is only a concern, of course, for long-distance road trips. Which for most drivers are relatively rare events.
One of my friends with a Tesla described it in exactly the opposite way: "I never have to think about it because I never have to stop for gas; the car is always just ready to go." He drives somewhere, plugs the car in, does his thing, drives somewhere else, plugs it in, etc. The charge level never goes to zero, so he basically just drives it and the charging takes care of itself as long as he remembers to stick the plug in.
This is not the type of in depth though that I expect from this author, whom I usually find to be brilliant. These are first-level concerns of somebody who just realized electric cars exist and is looking for the "problems", however in practice most of these are mitigated by tech curves, and the true problems are going to be far different.
Yes, tech curves will take care of some of these. But an all-electric future is something that I don't see happening any time soon. It's interesting that most of the comments here seem to focus on the situation in the developed world but the world is actually quite a large place with a lot of different levels of infrastructure development. Rich countries and countries with easy access to vast amounts of hydropower will take the lead here, poorer countries, countries with aging and strained infrastructure or countries that have less favorable conditions in terms of population density and such will have a far harder time converting and will quite possibly and up with an even larger gap they need to bridge to achieve parity.
It's not exactly as if I started looking at EVs only recently, I've spent quite a bit of time on keeping up with industry publications, owned one of the first hybrids when they first rolled off the line and try very hard not to spout nonsense. Tech curves definitely will play an important role in mitigating these issues but are in and of themselves probably not enough to allow for a complete electrification of our transport needs.
> the true problems are going to be far different.
I think he sort of suggests the "true problem" in the beginning by questioning the premise of even owning a car. He decided, perhaps wisely, to not go down that rabbit-hole.
We are all interested in how technology will change our lives and solve problems but many folks aren't willing to consider that actually solving some problems requires living in a way which is intrinsically different. It might very well be possible that "tech curves" will eventually solve the problem of transitioning everyone now driving gasoline cars to electric but that is perhaps a localized optimization.
Maybe to _REALLY_ solve the problem requires us to re-consider the way we're living. Is it really sane to live 20-50 miles away from where one works and drive a car in bumper-to-bumper traffic as a daily commute? Sure, if the cars were electric, a larger fraction of the energy wasted doing this would be "renewable" or at least "greener" but what about the wasted time, erosion of well-being, and the continued waste of space. Yes, even electric cars need highways, parking lots, and cities which force themselves to be car-scaled rather than human-scaled. How much would we really solve by the transition to electric cars?
These are not considerations which are easy to talk about, but they're the "true problems" which are being swept under the rug by techno-optimists.
Presumably at least some techno-optimists would agree, but suggest that transitioning to electric cars is a step towards making our bad situation better. Restructuring our cities, getting everyone to bicycle, walk, or use public transit (and killing off the auto industry, which is a significant chunk of the manufacturing economy) would be much harder to accomplish in the near future.
The path we as a society ultimately take isn't up to any one entity making decisions (not even Elon Musk :-) ).
Certainly lifestyle transitions will require decades, after all, it took decades to cities to become car-centric. But can happen even within a generation. Many millennials eschew car ownership and are moving back to cities, whereas for baby boomers the car was a rite of passage as well as its concomitant house in the 'burbs.
Transitioning entirely to electric vehicles will also take decades (admittedly it would be less time because car-years are much quicker than people-years).
What will happen is some mixture of both of these along with random jags of reactionary fascination with the happy-motoring era and who knows what else.
Ultimately, we only have a finite quantity of fossil fuels and there is no "free-refill" for the planet. At some point, lifestyles will have to change drastically to accommodate this limitation as population continues to grow.
Is it really sane to live 20-50 miles away from where one works
Even though my commute is quite pleasant: a 20-minute drive on quiet country roads then a 30-minute bus trip followed by a 10-minute walk to the office, I think about this quite a lot. Especially during the "drive on country roads" bit.
I live in a rural area and I really like it where I live, for any number of reasons. I have absolutely no desire to move back to the city that I work in, even though when I was living there I had a lot of fun.
Life is better when it's simpler and one way I can make it simpler is by either working remotely (not a possibility with my current employer), or becoming self-employed. Wasting time commuting, no matter how enjoyable the commute, is still wasting time.
I agree, this article was disappointing and is attracting the reaction I expected once I finished reading it. Ultimately the author pointed out the minor infrastructure development requirements of EVs, a bizarre point about hauling trailers and the (eventual?) decline in tax incentives for EVs across the globe, which may or may not be the case given the economical and environmental savings governments accrue in the future. Then the author provides the simple solutions which many commentators are providing in the conclusion.
Maybe more interesting angles could have been supplying the gigantic increase in demand for metals required to produce EV batteries, or the regulatory/industrial battle the EV industry faces with the traditional auto and oil industries (notably the Koch brothers).
I find Jacques' concerns to be well thought out, showing that he has actually dug into the numbers. However, I'm interested to know what you see are even more significant problems.
Its sort of an amateurs discuss tactics and generals discuss logistics kind of problem.
Oddly enough for HN, its a scalability problem (LOL). If you turned the entire known planetary stock of economically useful lithium ore into present gen batteries with 100% efficiency (LOL) and eliminated all competing uses (LOL), depending who's goofy numbers you use, you could give every human on the planet roughly one electric car. Once. There on its relying on recycling, or the market absorbing dramatically more expensive sources of lithium, or income inequality making a car lifestyle unavailable to most people, etc.
Its a kin to the argument of take the amount of copper in the infrastructure of the USA and divide it by the number of people in the USA and multiply that by the population of the undeveloped world, and you end up with more than the worlds known copper reserves. Africa, for example, will never be electrified at least as we in the west understand electrification. Perhaps new technologies or new ways of looking at things... but just picking up the plans for the TVA and dropping them in the 3rd world is literally not physically possible with existing known metal reserves.
Universal EVs are no problem for every status signalling coastal yuppie, theres just not that many of them. If the developed world retains hegemony we MIGHT be able to switch as a culture completely to EVs. But "the world" is not switching to EVs unless the global population shrinks to fit the global resource limits or ... ?
Note that my numbers assume 100% of the world supply is mined AND 100% efficiency (LOL) and there are no limits. I'm not claiming that 1% of that is realistic, but I am claiming its the very hard upper bound is too low even in some kind of star trek post singularity magical handwave world. Maybe you could fuse hydrogen atoms into lithium in a fusion reactor for a hundred years to make the worlds most expensive battery...
I'm not even sure we can pull it off with low range lead acid batteries in low range cars. When discussing infrastructure type stuff, there are only so many pounds of "stuff" currently economically available given current refining technology per human being. There IS enough iron to give us all cars (maybe not crude oil, but at least iron won't be the limiting factor) but there is literally not enough economically lithium recoverable on this planet, at the current technology level.
This is not really a practical objection for two reasons: demand increases mineral reserves, and we're unlikely to ever have 1 car per person globally.
Right now there is very little demand for lithium compared to the economically recoverable reserves. But the way mineral discovery works, as demand increases more money and effort is invested in finding new resources. There is absolutely no danger that ever-expanding lithium reserves will ever be exhausted by any reasonable vehicle production numbers. It's not even a given that per-pound prices would have to increase, as shown by the success of enhanced oil recovery having a break-even in the $30/bbl range now.
Lithium is also just about the least expensive part of battery production. The cost of lithium in the market could increase by an order of magnitude and only affect battery cost by perhaps 10-20%.
It's not reasonable to project 1 vehicle per person globally for many reasons. Economics, geography, the built infrastructure, and demographics affect vehicle ownership. The techno-society changes such a massive increase in vehicles would bring are enormous and unlikely to evolve soon. Transport paradigms that work in one area, say the US, aren't likely to work in all others. Using US vehicle numbers as a world-wide projection just isn't reasonable.
A more reasonable thought exercise would be to replace all the vehicles in existence with electrics. At about 1 billion vehicles on the road today, there's plenty of lithium to do so, even at current known reserves.
EVs may end up coinciding with the rise of automated cars, which may give rise to a large portion of people accessing vehicles on-demand (and not owning them). It that bcomes true, it's very possible that the world very much won't need even one EV per person...
How much is "economically useful or available" lithium is interesting as what makes sense to access now with current technologies changes as demand increases. More expensive techniques get pioneered and then the access cost drops for the technique as it gets optimized - much like the recent fracking boom.
Sodium-ion appears to be practical enough (just not as attractive as lithium ion, so less developed). Sodium ion beats lead acid for specific energy and sodium is rather more abundant than lithium.
Also, 1 car per person is probably more than is necessary.
This is a pointless analysis unless you can provide the numbers for the status quo, and somehow that works much better. As I understand it, we wouldn't be able to extract enough gasoline for that number of ICE cars either, so your point is totaly moot (LOL!).
Every EV that replaces a regularly driven ICE vehicle is a net win on its own (less pollution in cities, less energy use, works well with renewables etc.) The more the better.
EVs have lots of benefits for developing nations too, EV scooters and electric bikes seem to be big business in certain areas.
Hmm. All problems that could have been set at the door of internal combustion when it was new. They'll be solved as EVs make up a larger percentage of what's on the road.
Are EVs the endgame? I suspect not. Apart from anything else I think it's going to prove far, far harder to replace trucks than buses and cars with EVs.
Would we be better investing in public transport that's convenient and reliable enough people want to use? Certainly. But we like personal vehicles. They're not going to go away easily.
In fact just like horses and steam trains became a leisure pursuit, I suspect ICEs will also become something for play. The old v8 classic, the motorbike, the quad. You might have increasing difficulty getting fuel, so start lugging 5g jerry cans around in your EV to fuel the Mustang weekend toy. EVs can't beat the soul and sound of a v8 or Triumph triple.
I think it's going to prove far, far harder to replace trucks than buses and cars with EVs
The economics don't stack up today for long-distance EV trucking, but it's quite possible that they will in a decade or so, with ongoing incremental improvements in battery costs and energy density.
The limitations now are cost and infrastructure, not technology. If we imagine, say, an HGV with a 500kWh battery pack then it should be able to haul a typical load for hundreds of miles between charges. Fast chargers can be installed at existing truck stops.
HGV drivers in Europe are legally required to take rest periods every 4.5 hours (and can drive for a maximum of 9 hours per day), so stopping for charging on a similar schedule would not have much impact on existing work practices.
350kWh packs are already being used today for double-decker busses in London, which can run all day without recharging. So 500kWh (or more?) packs in HGVs are not unrealistic.
The only exceptional case I can think of is extreme long-haul trucking in remote, off-grid locations (think Australian Outback, or Ice Road Truckers). Those may be the last hold-outs for fossil fuelled vehicles.
I think the best solution involves evoluton of the delivery network, so maybe EV haulage is closer than I think..
An EV light truck is perfect for the final delivery to home or shop, and doubly so in congested inner cities with pollution charges, like London.
I could be wrong, but I thought the London Routemasters were hybrids?
HGV delivery might evolve to a combination of more rail, longhaul diesel HGVs and EV light trucks, or even full EV HGVs where the range is lower. Like making several supermarket drops in a city. Whatever way you look at it, we're already making excellent, and suprisingly quick, progress.
We already see a few EV delivery vans around (Nissan have one based on the Leaf technology). They need to get a bit bigger and have longer range before they'll start replacing all the diesel vans, but we are indeed making progress.
There's various problems with using intermodal rail for things like supermarket deliveries, though, at least in the UK. It's not really compatible with the just-in-time model that supermarkets and other retailers operate, where the supermarket places an order every day based on their real-time sales data which is fulfilled overnight from their large regional distribution centres.
Consider a shift from truckloads of goods to intermodal container loads: you'd be going truck-rail-truck, with all the inefficiencies of transferring between modes. You'd need intermodal freight depots on the outskirts of cities, shunting yards, etc which just don't exist any more. You wouldn't actually be cutting down on city traffic, since the same number of local trips would need to be made anyway.
And the distances involved from distribution centre to supermarket are usually relatively short, so there just isn't a huge fuel saving to be made in using rail.
Refrigerated trailers powered by a separate on board diesel engine have been a thing for decades... attaching a small gen to a small charger that supplies more long term average KW than the truck needs, turns an electric truck into a hybrid, for those ice road guys.
I would not be surprised to see something on a small scale for u-haul type rental where a rental trailer would come with a small gas generator and a SAE J1772 charger connector on a cord giving you infinite moderate speed range, or at least infinite until 100 miles after you run out of gas. Possibly people would rent those trailers to travel long distances even if they have nothing to actually carry, just to get infinite range. For most of the population, traveling very long distances is very unusual.
Renting trailers is a COTS business model, ditto renting generators, and even the business model of renting medium size building contractor generators mounted on a trailer. Other than adding a weather proof fairing, a larger gas tank, and a COTS plug in EV charger, there's nothing obscure about this fairly obvious future business model.
You might need a software update for the car, so the car understands its safe to drive away with the charger cord still attached.
ICE cars will go first. Most personal cars are only driven a small mileage per day and don't need to carry much weight. Needing to go more than 350 miles in a day, or needing to tow a trailer are statistical outliers to most users. Anyone who occasionally needs to go really far or carry more weight will find another solution.
As you said, I doubt ICE cars will go away completely. There's too much hobby/enthusiasm behind them for that to happen.
Trucks, buses, and planes will take much, much longer to phase out because of their extreme needs; e.g. light, compact power with a huge range.
Any other problems outside the vehicles themselves will be solved very quickly as they gain more market share.
Quite so. The Honda Accord, or Ford Focus family car that takes the kids to school, a 30 mile daily commute and a few trips to the shops is the low hanging fruit. They're easy to replace.
If you need something to haul a big caravan for holiday, or trailer for a move. Just rent - the rental shops will expand to fit nicely. Probably a nice big diesel.
The v8 offroader that actually works offroad, the truck, and shipping are on diesel for the forseeable.
I don't even see the space requirements to cater for EVs charging needs as much of an issue. We already have service areas on motorways in Europe. Huge spaces with a petrol station in the far corner. We'll have to adjust to 500 mile journeys including a couple of rest/coffee breaks. If you have young kids they already do. Only difference is plug the car in before going inside.
We might have to resurrect a few diners (with charging) along the way on rural or non motorway roads. I think I like that.
Anecdata: I (almost) bought a used Nissan Leaf (~ $10K) a while back. For taking my daughter to work (about 20 miles round trip), it was great. Just put it back on the charger, which was only a 15 amp 110 V charger, and it was ready to go again in a few hours. (edit: it still had 2/3 the battery left, but was fully recharged in just a few hours)
Unfortunately, my commute is a bit further (almost 50 miles), which left almost nothing in the slightly aged battery, and caused a "non linear" increase in charge time (without getting a 220 V upgrade charger)
The car (Leaf) was plenty peppy, but the range dropped considerably when going 65 to 70 MPH on the freeway, vs 30 to 50 MPH through town. The maintenance schedule was something like "check the break system every 6 months; get new tires every 3 years; replace the battery every 8 years" (or something along that line).
Still, if you have a short commute, or, as a "mom-mobile", getting a used EV is a no brainer (especially if you have cheap electricity like under Sac's SMUD utility). Just rent the vacation car twice a year. When we fly, that's what we do, anyway.
Good choice, I have a leaf and 50 miles round trip at with a good chunk of highway speeds is doable with a new battery. Once it gets a little age you'll be white knuckling it, especially when it comes to winter (depends how cold).
If you had a 220 at your destination then its a no brainer. My parents and in laws are 47 and 42 miles apart respectively. I installed 220v outlets so I can bring my charger with me.
There's an interesting synergy with other technologies. For example, its pretty trivial to prove you'd have to cover the surface of the earth with a ridiculous number of sunflowers to grow enough oil to power the world with biodiesel using existing vehicles.
However, if 99.9% of car miles driven were solar electric, if not more, then its quite realistic to power every rental truck in the world off biodiesel.
My lifetime driving so far is around 200K miles, and I've driven the home depot truck, enterprise rent a car, and u-haul trucks a total of perhaps 200 miles, so a thousandth of miles driven being biodiesel powered doesn't sound terribly unrealistic on average.
This pretty much boils down to "if overnight we replaced 100% of cars with electric it would cause these problems."
Let's take a more realistic scenario: That tomorrow all of the existing two car households have one electric car.
> 1. Your average town does not have the power infrastructure to deal with an extra draw of a whole bunch of commuters arriving home roughly around the same time (say, between 5:30 and 7 pm) and all of them plugging their cars in to recharge.
This has easy solutions, e.g. you tell the charging station what time you need the battery charged by and in 95% of cases it ends up doing the charging from 10PM to 6AM, which makes the power grid very happy.
> Rapid charging is actually not so rapid, highway re-charging stations will have to be much larger than current gas stations
But you will also need fewer of them because you can't currently buy gas at home but you can charge your car there. So you're really only talking about the gas stations on major highways, i.e. truck stops, which are already quite large because it's typical for people to stop and eat there already.
And in the one out of two cars scenario, for long trips you could take the gasoline powered car.
> Every highway would be more or less automatically accompanied by a bunch of power infrastructure
Most of the existing high voltage power infrastructure already follows the highways because both go to population centers and are installed in places which are cheap and efficient to claim with eminent domain.
And needing to build infrastructure is only a problem if we build electric cars faster than we can build power infrastructure, which we probably won't.
> Re-charging will not work nearly as well when vehicle utilization goes up due to sharing
Which is only a problem for the subset of vehicles used for sharing and there is no reason they can't be hybrids instead of pure electric.
Alternatively the people who purchase cars for this purpose could use cars with swappable batteries and leave one charging while the other is on the road and then swap them as needed.
> If a substantial chunk of our energy consumption due to transportation needs is going to shift from being directly petroleum based to being mostly based on the timely delivery of electrons in vast quantities and to a very large number of locations then we will have to invest massively in both generating capacity and grid capacity.
That isn't necessarily true. If most electric vehicles are charged at night then they'll be using the idle capacity of the existing grid rather than requiring new capacity to be built.
Of course some new capacity may be necessary, but that doesn't seem like any kind of insurmountable problem. We already know how to do that.
> Range
This is a problem exactly where it's a problem. Future electric cars may or may not solve it, but in the meantime you know what kind of driving you do. If you take long trips for business, buy a hybrid. If you have a two car household, buy one electric car and one hybrid and take the hybrid on long trips. There is no law that says 100% of cars have to be electric; they can work where they work.
> Trailers
Range when towing a trailer is generally not that important because even if a lot of people do it periodically, they don't do it very often. And this is again solved by having a family buy one EV and one hybrid and using the hybrid for what the EV is bad at.
> Service
This is clearly a problem exclusive to early adopters. If electric cars were half of all cars it wouldn't exist.
> Tax Breaks
I'm not sure how this one is even supposed to be a problem. All else equal, tax credits increase tax rates because the money has to come from somewhere. If everybody buys an EV then everybody gets the credit and the government raises the tax rate so that everybody ends up paying what they would have without it. If half of everybody buys an EV then the government raises the tax rate half that much and there is a significant tax advantage if you buy an EV, which was the whole idea. The credit can never bankrupt the government because the government also sets the base rate.
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 universally applicable.
The car was affordable: $12k second hand. The solar was $0 down and half the national grid per kW. My commute is at the edge of viable for a first gen electric car (really looking forward to the 200mile range of 2nd gen).
I do the vast majority of my charging is at home. My only issue is that the current system (sic) takes DC power converts to to AC only rectify it back to DC in the car. There is still a need for charging stations, but for rare 100 mile journeys. Drive 80 miles charge for 20 minutes, drive 80 miles. 2nd gen it's 160 miles, charge for 40 minutes. We have family in Western MA, which is 150 miles away. With a 200 mile range we'd do it in a single charge and recharge at their house. The use of a charging station is really rare, not part of the routine of ownership, like it is with ICE.
We don't have the infrastructure? We don't need the infrastructure. You can run an electric car almost entirely from energy reclaimed from the environment around your house. It will even store it for you in those handy, replaceable lion batteries it has, solving some of renewable energies gnarlier problems.
Whilst I understand that electric cars don't work well for people who travel more than 100 miles without a 20 minute break, that number is about to shift to 200miles... and that is virtually nobody. The infrastructure problems are solved by local generation (either municipal renewables or home solar). The recharging problem, even at 100mile range isn't a problem, you just charge it at the end of your journey.
I live in an apartment there is no way to plug in a car or build a solar panel. Basically without a means of owning an outlet no plugin hybrid is possible.
This is a much easier problem to solve. You can put solar wind on apartments and you can run outlets to the street. It just involves cooperation and a little group altruism. So... OK I see your point.
Anecdotal, of course. And I'm bitter because I wanted to get an EV. :-D
I live in a "green" (LEED certified at some level) high-end apartment complex built in 2014 just south of downtown Denver, CO. There are zero electric car charging stations in the gated, enclosed garage. If my apartment complex didn't have the foresight to build at least a few charging stations I can't imagine the hope of retrofitting on some 10, 20, or 30 year old building. Nevermind the vast number of apartment complexes that simply don't have the garage space.
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.
It's really only cities that have a generation problem, and it's mostly American cities that combine city living with car ownership.
The electric cars problems are mostly magnified by American urbanites. Boston is no exception. It might help if zip cars were predominantly EV, although my urbite friends have mostly replaced Zip with Uber
> So. Can we please stop rolling coal burning power plants into the electric car equation as if it is universally applicable.
Unfortunately most of US citizens power comes from non-renewable energy sources. So, I think rolling power plants into the electric car equation is more applicable than not.
"In 2015, renewable energy sources accounted for about 10% of total U.S. energy consumption and about 13% of electricity generation" [0]
If you commute, I assume your car isn't at home during the daytime on weekdays and so can't actually use most of the energy you generate for charging. How much of the 6-8kW of charging you do actually comes from your solar panels, and how much comes from the grid and is simply subsidized by your power provider being forced to buy your power at retail prices?
Who's to say that the power I generate during the day isn't being used to charge my car. The grid is also a pretty useful battery.
It really doesn't take that long to charge the car after the commute. In winter, chances are that it's from municipal power, summer it's probably from my solar. Either way I'm offsetting my car use with clean, local power.
Electricity is fungible. If you weren't charging a car, you'd be pumping the electricity back into the grid and reducing the need to burn coal to supply the grid.
This was why I thought the Chevy Volt had the right idea; having a gas-tank there as a backup, but depend on electricity 95% of the time.
But, in my opinion, the best thing to do is to move to a big city and use the trains, or campaign for a good train system in your city, which obviously can't work for everyone.
Chevy Volt goes a step further and has the gas powered engine hooked up to the wheels. I prefer the approach taken by the BMW i3 where the (optional) gas powered range-extender is purely used to generate electricity, but there's room for both in the transition period and PHEV (plug-in hybrid electric vehicles) seems like it might be an important market segment.
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.
"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
Yes, this was the explanation I saw when my Girlfriend purchased a used volt last summer. We explain it to most people that the gas engine is there to act as a generator and charge the battery and act as a generator. Not to directly power the car. She loves her car.
This is not correct, also from the Wikipedia link above, describing the Volt driving modes: "Dual motor extended – The electric motors are used again in dual configuration with increased efficiency at higher speeds. Additionally the gasoline engine contributes propulsion power via the planetary gear. While power is drained from the battery the amount is less than in mode 2 for the same propulsion power, thus extending the range."
The problem with this approach (called a "serial hybrid powertrain") is that it's much less efficient than a parallel hybrid like the Prius. You can see it in the fuel economy figures: the Volt gets much lower highway fuel economy when it's running on gas than the Prius does, and only makes up for it on shorter trips where it takes advantage of its relatively large all-electric range. If you're doing a lot of highway driving, the Prius is a much better choice, both for fuel efficiency and for price.
Using a gas engine just to generate electricity, and then running that through some conversions and battery storage before using it to run drive motors just isn't as efficient as using the ICE to drive the wheels directly. Or maybe GM does a crappy job of it, but the fuel economy figures speak for themselves.
Yes, it's less effecient if you're actually using the engine but the aim would be to not use the engine, and purely use battery storage as much as possible.
There's graphs of average driving distance, the idea would be to get 90+% of those miles (daily commutes etc.) done with grid-supplied electricity, and the gas engine to be a once in a while thing (assuming you even need one, it is after all an optional extra that you need to pay for on the i3).
At that point you can start to save on the engine expenses too (I think the i3 one is repurposed from a motorbike?)
>Yes, it's less effecient if you're actually using the engine but the aim would be to not use the engine, and purely use battery storage as much as possible.
Yes, but a parallel hybrid powertrain like Toyota's shouldn't be any worse here. The Prius also has a plug-in version which can run on battery alone for a certain distance, and it only spins up the engine when needed for more power or because the battery is too low. Of course, the Prius doesn't have the Volt's all-electric range, but it also has a much smaller battery (and lower price).
To compete with car ownership, the possible solution should be:
— available end-to-end (no waiting for the train and changing lines)
— allowing for some privacy (in a car, I am always in good company; not so much in trains)
— protect from the elements (riding a bike uphill in cold rain is less than pleasant)
Trains, buses and bicycles are quite inferior options in this regard. Only Uber provides a tolerable alternative (but owning a car is still way cheaper).
I'm pretty sure that the trains are "competing" pretty well with cars in New York, despite a lacking the features you metioned, considering that there are actually less households that own cars there than households that do.
But generally speaking, I agree. To convince the average person of a public transit/driverless/generic-alternative-to-driving, privacy and end-to-end-ey-ness is probably important.
I think this guy over estimates how much burden electric cars will put on the grid. For a round trip of 20 miles to work and an efficiency of 200 Watt-hours per mile, you get 8kWh which can be charged slowly at 1kW over 8 hours. Think of that in comparison to air conditioning or electric dryers.
I can't find the paper, but the US DOE has a report from 10 years ago that ~77%~ 84% of light vehicles (cars) can be moved to the electric grid using existing generation resources.
Consider that wind and solar installations are accelerating (and that wind is so cheap in parts of Texas, its free at night!) and I can assure you, there is no electrical grid burden.
"The UK Department of Transport and teh Royal Academy of Engineering (2010) have both estimated that if the UK switched to battery electric vehicles, electricity demand (kWh) would rise about 16%. The US Electric Power Research Institute modeled 60% of US vehicle use being electric and found a 9% increase in electricity demand. As can be seen from the graphs above, this need not increase the system's peak capacity if most charging is off-peak, thereby greatly increasing the proportion of total generating capacity supplied by base-load plant – see below. A study conducted by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory for the US Department of Energy in 2006 found that the idle off-peak grid capacity in the USA would be sufficient to power 84% of all vehicles in the USA if they all were immediately replaced with electric vehicles. Areva has calculated that if 10% of cars in France were electric it would increase base-load demand by more than 6000 MWe ("four EPRs", or 10% of nuclear capacity). In the above diagrams, assuming significant move to electric cars mostly charged off-peak, the base-load demand is increased by about 35%."
Not sure why you are downvoted, but 77% of light vehicles does not equate to 77% of total consumption. 77% of the light vehicles are likely exactly that 77% that is used rarely, it's just the Pareto principle at work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle , the bulk of the consumption will be done by a relatively small number of consumers. And so a very large number of those consumers could be converted to electricity without much impact on the grid or generating capacity but that would not be a huge impact on total consumption of fossil fuels.
"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.
People using their cars for 50K to 70K km per year are not exceptional (professional use), private individuals using their cars for < 5K km per year are not exceptional either.
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).
It's a simple function of the total power required to get the current levels of transportation converted to electrical use. Whether that's 1 trip of 200 miles or 10 trips of 20 does not matter, in the end it is the total number of miles driven by everybody multiplied by the energy consumption per mile. That's a substantial amount of power, and I did what I could given the data that I could find to put a figure out that has some basis in fact. If you can improve on the number with hard data I'll be more than happy to update the post but comparing air conditioning and electric dryers to extra load on generating capacity and infrastructure is not helpful.
But in most cases it is very easy to arrange charging when you are not running your electrical dryer or air conditioning, mainly in the late evening or night. It would be trivial to control your charger such that the total electricity drawn by your house connection never exceeds a set value.
A typical hairdryer is about 1KW, it runs for a few minutes at most, similar to an electric kettle. AC units for domestic (normal sized houses) are from 2 to 5 KW, actual use depends on the temperature differential, humidity, the size of the house and any leakage.
Recharging a drained car battery would use as much power as running a large AC unit for 15 hours, but if the car has driven only a small distance it will use much less power. It all depends on the distance the car needs to drive (logically...).
Solar installations will double every two years (globally), so let's hope that will be enough to keep up with EV growth.
I still think the bigger bottleneck will be the installation of chargers, though, even though it shouldn't be because they aren't that expensive. But Tesla is just one small car maker installing its own, and the other manufacturers don't seem all that interested in building them for the same reason they've been rather slow in pushing EVs on the market, too. I think governments should have a bigger role in building EV infrastructure.
I think the real issue is that the 1 charge range is not yet all that attractive, especially given the cost of the vehicles. As range goes up and price comes down, demand for chargers will increase (that demand can be coming from people who'd like to buy an electric, it doesn't have to be owners).
Neither number is intended to be all that precise. In a sunny spot, the $5000 would probably be quite a bit more than 1 kilowatt of output. It should anyway probably be 250+ days, so I accidentally controlled for that error.
I would certainly factor the different cost structures in if I was doing the calculation for real (gas could be $4 in a couple years, who knows).
This is all true. However, I think it would be better to put the strain on the grid than continue to do so with companies that squeeze oil out of rocks. The grid can utilize natural gas, coal, solar, wind, hydroelectric, geothermal, wave power etc.. Electric cars are the future and will force us to invest heavily in renewable energy.
Electric cars are actually more or less a natural sink for wind energy and solar because they add storage capacity to the grid, something it currently does not have.
"A Texas Utility Offers a Nighttime Special: Free Electricity"
"The women are just three of the thousands of TXU Energy customers who are at the vanguard of a bold attempt by the utility to change how people consume energy. TXU’s free overnight plan, which is coupled with slightly higher daytime rates, is one of dozens that have been offered by more than 50 retail electricity companies in Texas over the last three years with a simple goal: for customers to turn down the dials when wholesale prices are highest and turn them back up when prices are lowest.
It is possible because Texas has more wind power than any other state, accounting for roughly 10 percent of the state’s generation. Alone among the 48 contiguous states, Texas runs its own electricity grid that barely connects to the rest of the country, so the abundance of nightly wind power generated here must be consumed here."
Several of the author's arguments center around what exists today in terms of infrastructure. Yes, if necessary grid/stations don't exist the average EV purchaser might have trouble getting recharged, kWh prices might go up, etc...
Deep eye roll at stuff like this.
I hope the author realizes that at some point there wasn't a network of gas stations across the country, there wasn't much of an electrical grid, or a highway system for that matter.
Some of the solutions to these potential challenges are related to public investment, many can be solved by private investment and there is a profit opportunity, thus solutions will come. Better solutions in my mind.
Here's the most missed point I see in all this infrastructure discussion. The most costly piece to next-generation recharge infrastructure already exists, and it is the natural gas "grid". It's massive and empowers much cleaner (than coal) local electricity generation. Today you can buy a small plot of land alongside the highway, pour a concrete pad, install a natural gas generator, purchase gas at bulk rates, and charge EV's for $$$. Even the smallest towns in America have NG lines running near or through them. The highest cost I've seen to have a bulk gas line brought on to a business' property was in the low tens of thousands. You can spreadsheet this, there's profit in this model and it requires NO improvements to the electrical grid and suffers practically no energy loss.
Most of what the author sees as problems others will see as investment opportunities and solve. In fact I think I'm going to go take a look at the map of supercharging stations right now...
> I hope the author realizes that at some point there wasn't a network of gas stations across the country,
Not much of an argument. The ICE won out over electric drivetrains for the express reason that liquid fuels are far easier to provide logistics for than batteries. Most electric car makers stopped production at some point in the 1910s. It's not that electric vehicles were never tried out. They were. Gasoline was just a way better fit.
Until and unless something fundamental changes about batteries, sure. If you can figure out how to charge a battery at the same rate as filling up a gas tank, then that would qualify. If you can quadruple capacity, and therefore range, that would also qualify.
Right now and for the foreseeable future, EVs are a promising alternative to regular cars, but if everyone hops on board, the logistics will murder us.
EVs won't work until they're actually better than ICEs in every way. Not just some of the ways, all of them. Because only that will make the economics of replacing our entire gasoline-based infrastructure work.
The author forgot well to tank efficiency when looking at ICE efficiency. You don't get gasoline out of the ground, you get crude oil. In the middle of Nigeria or Venezuela. Which then has to be transported, refined, and transported again. Gasoline well to tank efficiency is somewhere around 80%, which means ICE well to wheels efficiency is somewhere around 14-16%.
If you consider that EVs have A) large batteries w/ efficient charge/discharge cycles, B) efficient high-capacity inverters, and C) are plugged in (somewhere) for large fractions of their life, and D) very often have capacity far exceeding their next expected trip duration, then:
It is inevitable that Tesla (or someone else) will implement Grid-tied battery backup as a standard option on these vehicles.
When that happens -- the Grid gets "free" multi-GWh battery-based load shedding.
Why is this not considered an inevitability? Am I missing something obvious here?
This assumes the cars are plugged in when there is the most 'extra' capacity being generated from , say, solar thermal/pv. This is when most cars are out at a workplace, not plugged in.
This is also when industrial consumption/ac use peaks, so why would you over produce and feed a battery rather than run a plant/keep places cool...
This is a good debate, Purist vs Practitioner. The Purist point of view is Autos are horrible, Cities designed for autos are horrible etc. But for the Practitioner, the world we live is not our choice, we are given a shitty hand, so lets improve it 10% at a time, in that world PHEVs and EVs are a solution working towards improvement.
edit: I do not mean, Purist in any disparaging way, the actual cost of roads (and their maintenance) is enormous. Please read Purist as one who sees the Core or Central problem.
Problem 1: Transportation will load the grid and generating capacity in rather nasty ways
Maybe. It depends on exactly where. He cites simultaneous draw from many commuters at once. If the utilities incentivized slower charging overnight through pricing (which is something that they already do for power intensive industries) then this would be greatly ameliorated. Also, in many places, as noted by the op, people will start charging after getting home from work. If charging is delayed by just 3 hours, they will merely be using capacity that already exists for running air conditioners.
Problem 2: Rapid charging is actually not so rapid, highway re-charging stations will have to be much larger than current gas stations
Op is assuming the same structure as gas stations. No need for this. What if the car companies implemented a "charge crawl" feature, where a charging car would slowly inch down a track for a half hour while charging, attached to an overhead suspended cable? Actually, there's no need for that. Just have lots of parking, with each space with a charger. Most road trip rest stops take about 1/2 hour anyhow -- and that's when I'm in drill-sergeant mode with my passengers.
Problem 3: Gas stations are not generally in the neighbourhood of electricity generation stations.
Tesla is already building stations that get power from solar.
Problem 4: Re-charging will not work nearly as well when vehicle utilization goes up due to sharing
Consumers may not want battery swaps yet, but car-share companies might well want it.
These are relatively minor problems however. The gas station problem for example is solved by charging your car at home or work. Gas stations exist because we can't refuel our cars at home.
That doesn't work for longer trips however. So what's going to happen when EVs take over is that local gas stations will disappear, as people will just recharge at home or at work.
But for long trips, what we'll like see (well, it makes the most sense anyway) is highway rest areas where there's recharging stations and eating areas in one complex. Most people can't go more than a few hours in a car without stopping to go to the bathroom or get something to eat and walk around anyway; it's just screwed up now because we have these different functions separated instead of putting them all in one place together.
This isn't a new idea by any means. There's several of these rest areas on the New Jersey Turnpike now. They have a gas station plus a mini-mall with gift shops, fast-food eateries, bathrooms, etc. It's basically like the "quick-stop" gas station, like Wawa, where you get gas and then go inside and get drinks, sandwiches made-to-order, use the bathroom, etc., except at the Turnpike rest areas, you have the choice of several different shops to go to, all in the same building.
So in a future where many people are driving EVs that need 30 minutes to recharge, I predict we'll see more of these kinds of rest stops, catering specifically to people taking road trips that are beyond the range of a standard EV that gets charged at home.
There's no particular reason you can't install curbside chargers. It's just a matter of convincing the powers that be to allow it, and that is just a matter of EVs becoming common enough for there to be demand for it.
There's no particular reason we can't install a gas pump on every street corner, and in every office parking space, either - except for economies of scale, environmental reviews, HOA opposition, theft and vandalism...
These are not insurmountable problems, but they are expensive, or very time-consuming ones.
You also can't just run a power cord from a wall outlet to the street. You'll need to tear up the sidewalks, to connect the charging stations to the grid. In many places, power isn't underground, so you'll have to bring it down from the power lines to the underground - maybe through the buildings?
This quickly starts running to far more then $1000/charging station, and closer to $10,000/charging station.
This is what curbside parking looks like where I live:
It would cost a fortune to wire that up. Better yet, if only half the streets in the area were wired up, due to the saturation of parking spaces, it would be close to worthless.
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 doesn't have to be particularly hard. It's not so easy you can ignore it, but nor is it a particularly big deal, not when looking at a timespan of decades.
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 until you do, having chargers on ~20% of the streets would be next-to worthless. There is a dire shortage of street level parking in this neighborhood - if you limit your possible spots to the ones where chargers are available, it's quite unlikely that you'll be able to get a space.
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.
To all the people replying "curb chargers", how much do you think it would cost to equip tens of thousands of street parking spaces (per town) with them?
I don't see that happening any time soon, and if it does the huge capital expenditure will have to be passed down to the consumers, reducing the economic attractiveness of electrical.
With economies of scale I'd estimate about $1,000 per spot. As things stand right now I think it's more like $3-4,000 per spot, but the cost of EVSEs will come down, and the cost of installation will be lower per unit if you're doing a whole street at once.
That may still sound like a lot, but the parking spot itself typically costs $2,000 or so, and you're saving on the cost of the gas pump that this charger helps to replace.
Yes, you have to account for the cost of charging infrastructure when looking at the total cost of an EV, but it doesn't greatly change the picture.
we have heating blocks for cars that park outside in north america. If you can install a street light, it's not that hard to install a curbside charger
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 insurmountable one. Replacing batteries is something Tesla played with for a while but ultimately abandoned. Super Chargers charge a car in far less than an hour. There are probably other interesting solutions out there. These are all fixes for problem 4 as well.
Problem 3 and 5 seem like the same problem - we need to build more infrastructure as we build more cars.
6 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.
7 is an interesting one, because most gas cars actually don't allow you to tow a trailer. My Honda Fit stated in the manual that towing a trailer would void all warranties. My Hyundai Sonata says "Towing with this vehicle is not recommended." Lots of larger cars that you think would be able to tow something can't, usually due to undersized cooling for the automatic transmission. Also, adding a trailer to an EV will hurt the range, but adding a trailer to a gas powered car hurts the range too; you just don't care because it's easy to refuel more frequently. See problems 2 and 4.
Problem 8: Service. Yeah. Xerox said they had nothing to worry about when it came to Japanese companies producing cheaper photocopiers, because none of them could match Xerox's humongous service infrastructure. You couldn't get a Canon tech down to your company to fix your Canon photocopier. Who makes your photocopier?
> 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.
2 hours is too much, that's way too much overhead on a day. Hills don't help and besides costing you a lot of time they will (depending on the grade) also make you sweat quite badly, which is not the best way to arrive at work.
One of my family members does 30 km to work and back again in the evening, it takes him about an hour but he's in top shape and there are no hills.
Also, adding new emission controls at the power plant automatically upgrades the entire electric vehicle fleet.
EVs will be very good for places with wind power as they can easily tailor the load to what is being produced so you don't have any more cases where the price of electricity goes negative.
While the electrical grid as a whole may be able to handle the load, can the average US residential service?
My house has a 100A 240V service which is barely adequate as it is. I’m sure it could handle a single EV if I charge it overnight, but what happens when the rest of my family switches to EVs?
If I remember correctly, a charger for a Tesla requires a 50A 240V dedicated circuit, which would be half the capacity for my entire house just for a single car. Additionally, many homes don’t have such a circuit, so one would need to be installed.
This can be easily solved by upgrading my service, but that’s another cost.
In the end, it’s not a show stopper, but it’s certainly another hurdle that will cause a slowdown in adoption rates.
Perhaps codes should be passed which require the garage of new homes to have such circuits installed by default
If EVs really take off, I wouldn't be surprised if workplaces started putting in more chargers in their car parks. It's an obvious solution to the problem of home charging.
The other option is leased batteries which solves a whole host of problems. It would probably cost a bit more, but you would never need to worry about the state of your battery pack. This would require standardisation though, unless everyone drives a Tesla.
In addition to that, home charging is only an issue if everyone decides to do a full charge every single night, which is unlikely. Most people will only need a daily quarter or half charge, city drivers much less.
Even if electricity doubled or tripled in price to compensate for the grid upgrade, it would still be cheaper than gas (at least in this country).
All of these problems strike me as temporary. The only barriers here are current technology getting cheaper and more efficient, which always happens over time - especially the timescale needed for EVs to go mainstream.
The tone of this article seems to think we will be stuck with current levels of technology.
Some future possibilities with in 20-30 years:
* Battery capacity doubling, tripling, or more.
* Widespread solar panel use for recharging at home (maybe they even come with solar panels as an upgrade?)
* Solar panels integrated into the car itself for continuous trickle charging (on the rooftop, for instance)
* Companies offering free charging while patronizing their retail locations (ala free Wifi)
* Parking lot charging via installed solar panels
Those are just the first few I could think of off the top of my head. I know there will be others as time goes by.
Battery capacity has a long way to go. For vehicles, one efficiency measure is Watt-Hours (energy) per kilogram. For Lithium batteries we're at 220. Gasoline for comparison is 13200. So about two orders of magnitude to go, before gas is obsolete.
Good news: metal-air batteries can achieve close to gas efficiencies! If we can only build an efficient portable reactor, and then an efficient fungible way to refuel with metal.
I want to quickly point out that these appear to be short-term problems, and have been addressed by Elon Musk many times. The manufacturing of EVs is, right now, not a clean process, but this is planned to be remedied by self-sustaining factories with solar and storage.
I am encouraged by the progress made so far. I point to the documentary "Who Killed [GMs] EV-1?". That movie had a laundry list of the technological and political obstacles to EVs in the 1990s. Many of those have been reduced in the 2010s.
Most of the problems listed in this article are, in my opinion, only temporary and would be solved if the technology becomes widespread. As in many technological shifts, what is required is either 1) evolved technology or 2) demand (which would trigger more technological improvements). I remember a similar discussion about SSDs some time ago: they were slow and expensive and a few commentators were quite skeptical about their widespread adoption.
Problem 1: Transportation will load the grid and generating capacity in rather nasty ways
But not in specific times of the day, as A/C does. Granted, we're talking about much more power.
Problem 2: Rapid charging is actually not so rapid [...]
Yet.
Problem 4: Re-charging will not work nearly as well when vehicle utilization goes up due to sharing
If sharing makes usage of a vehicle go up to ~100%, it will only be a matter of having a few more vehicles. If a vehicle spends even 10% of its time recharging, we'll just need ~10% more shared vehicles. This only drives up production by 10%.
Problem 5: We don’t actually have all this infrastructure yet
Yet. The technology won't be too convenient for the next few years.
Problem 6: Range
That would make adoption easier in more densely populated regions.
Problem 7: Trailers
That's a problem for a small percentage of the population (at least here in Europe).
I'm really surprised by this article. Electric cars shouldn't be discounted just because they aren't as green as the seem/are advertised to be - they are still by all accounts more efficient than ICE vehicles (even with our terrible electric grid and issues with demand).
Load demand will be solved with local and utility scale energy storage, something which is occurring already in Hawaii where solar is so widely deployed that utilities have placed a moratorium on storage-less solar deployments because they can't handle the demand changes when a cloud rolls through town.
The issue with our electric grid is recognized at the highest levels of our nation. President Obama brought this up largely unprompted during his recent interview with Destin Sandlin.
Destin: "These huge technological projects that you're talking about, stuff America builds with our hands; I'm thinking of the Hoover Dam, the Eisenhower interstate system, Kennedy launched Apollo... Am I gonna to see that, ever again, in my generation?"
Obama: "I would like to see it - you know - in that order for us to do that, it requires a common vision of some of these big projects - now, I'll give you an example of an area where we should be investing, and that is creating a smart grid. This is something I've been interested in for a while. The way we link up energy is hugely inefficient in this country ... but the basic electricity grid that we have wastes huge amounts of energy."
This leaves us with only the range/changing issues which will both resolve as battery tech improves. Either of increased range or faster charging batteries will help, and we are seeing both. The demand for the Tesla proves we are already at parity.
Electric cars are charged at home most of the time. Let's assume that it takes 10x as long to charge a car at a supercharger compared to filling it with gas. (3 vs 30 minutes). But if you charge at home 90% of the time, then refueling stations can be the exact same size. And I'm fairly sure that people will be charging at home or at work much more than 90% of the time -- it's probably closer to 99%.
Short-range EV only works in cities however especially in central Europe there is such a good public (and green) transportation system in place, that there is no benefit in (co-)owning an expensive EV that also needs special charging ports installed on at least "one end". Even the number of <30 year olds without having a driver's license is growing. You don't need a car here anymore!
Given that you need invest a couple of 1000$ to install a charger (per parking slot) and also limit yourself to one type of EV (there are competing standards) and also your Employer ("Destination") needs to do the same…
So we're down to a irregular usage of vehicles, like car rental, car sharing or uber, all of which need to be flexible. EVs are not the right thing.
The only useful EV usage I can come up with is for commercial usages in pre-defined distances/routes. E.g. last mile delivery operated in a pool that justify setting up a central maintenance location, battery chargers/or swapping systems and more or less fixed usage time (=> loading batteries/servicing cars during the night or via spare cars)
You don't need to limit yourself to one type of EV. In the US, a J1772 charger can charge every EV on the road. In Europe, the Mennekes connector does the same.
Fast DC charging has a bit of a standards war going on. There's CCS, CHAdeMO, and Tesla Supercharger, which are all mutually incompatible. But for routine AC charging, you can install one charger and work with every car.
My Model S takes about 9 hours to charge from 0-100% on my home 240V charger, and you rarely need 0-100%. For it to take 24 hours, you'd have to be limited to pulling 14A. And, well, don't install something so ridiculously slow!
Grid saturation: smart charging to flatten the demand curve (overnight), daylight charging with more chargers in parking spaces at the office, west-facing solar panels and grid storage to smooth the duck curve.
Lack of chargers on the highway: increase in charging speed (15 minutes breaks are recommended after 2h of driving), increased battery range, platooning with autopilot can save 15% of energy [0], very low cost of expanding supercharger networks, auto-pilot to tolerate longer drive, auto-park to accept longer pauses, battery swapping
Energy sources far from charging stations: don't underestimate the predominance of home charging; south-facing solar panels and wind turbines along highways; grid storage; battery swapping
Car sharing: battery swapping again; autonomous fleets to dispatch charged car and auto-park cars (with snake-like charger to auto-plug)
Infrastructure investment: large public program for distributed generation with solar panels and grid storage
Range anxiety: 250 miles might be the average range for EV in 2020, supercharging and battery swapping to the rescue
Trailers: battery swapping again, and battery integrated in the trailer (might turn into a backup battery once at home)
Lack of servcie: EVs require far less maintenance than ICE, Musk intend to make a 1-million miles powertrain and reuse battery for grid storage; also industry-wide standardization
Tax break: they will somehow be extended to balance the externalities of fossil fuels (health, environment); EV will reach cost-parity very soon too.
A world where all cars are EVs will need many changes from the world today, but we have decades to make those changes. Take the grid capacity problem. Household electricity usage has already increased by a ton throughout the history of electrification. The grid can adapt. It takes a long time to build out this sort of infrastructure, but we have that time. Grid capacity needs to increase by 20% over the next 30-50 years? Ok, and?
The article also can't seem to make up its mind about whether EVs are suitable for long distance travel. It talks about how highway charging stations will have to be much larger than gas stations because charging takes longer. Then a few points down, it says that range and recharging time are incompatible with charging while traveling. Which is it? If it's incompatible, then you don't need highway charging stations in the first place....
This is actually a list of 9 pretty solid research ideas: the current re-charging stations are too small? Find out how to make them bigger. Can't toe with an electric vehicle? Invent one that can do just that.
Seems like the first reaction of most people here is to debate that problems exist in the first place.
The major concern from my perspective is how ecologically damaging battery production is. That said I'd still choose it over fossil fuels. Fossil fuels pollution is uncontainable, spewing out into our atmosphere, while the pollution from rare earth extraction is largely localised.
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 adjustments, sometimes these adjustments can be overstated.
The actual energy usage for many appliances and industry is going down. LED light bulbs and other technologies are lowering the load to the grid. It's not a simple equation. It's a very complex equation and I don't think anyone has spent the time to factor that. At least I have not seen any studies on that.
This electric vehicle movement is not just about electric cars. People are rethinking their transportation. That's very healthy. It would be great if we continue to improve mass transit in America, so that less vehicles of all types are needed. I think many Americans would like to see that.
We're still also in the very early stages of electric vehicle's engineering. It's not a good idea to extrapolate out into the future based upon the technology of today. It's likely these electric vehicles become even more efficient in the future. As we see more volume in the industry, third-party players will also come in with unique ideas and improvements.
This mix of electric and internal combustion is really exciting. I think it's terrific that people are being lured from internal combustion to electric vehicles. The whole system seems to be going in a good direction. I don't agree with the naysayers. The outlook looks very promising.
These electric vehicles continued to sell even though the price of fuel for internal combustion's has fallen. The price of electricity is much more stable than the price of gasoline. This may also help people in making their decisions.
I suspect in the future we will see families with both electric cars and internal combustion. It will not be either or.
- 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!").
I want public transport and walkable cities to win over electric cars. A lot of people take the need for cars for granted, and gush over the electric car future as optimum. This means that their transport utopia is something where you have these wide streets, click a button in your phone, and an Uber-Tesla picks you up and drops you off anywhere.
For me, this is the "faster-horse" of transportation.
I want more radical changes towards walkable cities with more space for people and less space for vehicles. Roads take up an insane amount of space, and self-driving electric cars don't make things much better.
The car should be more like a family appliance used in weekends for holiday trips.
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).
Can somebody explain how are EV, and especially Tesla, batteries different from, say, my laptop batteries, which normally degrade to the point of being unusable within 4-5 years, and have to be replaced?
EV batteries are treated much better than the batteries in your laptop.
First, EV batteries typically have active thermal management. Heat kills lithium ion batteries. When you charge your laptop, the battery gets hot, and this accelerates degradation. When you charge your car, the cooling system engages and keeps the battery at the optimal temperature. (The LEAF doesn't have an active cooling system for its battery. It also suffers much worse battery degradation than other EVs. Coincidence?)
Second, EV batteries are somewhat de-rated from their full capacity. Lithium ion batteries don't like spending time at the ends of their capacity. They want to live in the middle, not be fully charged or fully discharged. Laptop and phone makers tend to view their products as short-lived, disposable items, so they'll optimize for maximum running time on the battery by charging to 100% and draining to 0%, at the cost of battery longevity. A car will wall off some of the capacity so that when you're at 100%, you're really at, say, 90%, and when you're at 0% you're really at, say, 10%. At least some of these cars take it further and let you limit the maximum charge so you only use what you need. For example, I normally charge my Tesla to 90%, which is all I need for 99% of my driving. When I need that last little bit, I can charge it all the way to 100%.
Third, a large portion of degradation comes from the number of actual cycles you use, and deeper cycles are worse. A typical battery might last 300 100%-0% cycles before it degrades beyond usability. If you only use 50% of the capacity each time, then it might last 800 cycles. (Very rough number, totally pulled out of my nether regions, but you get the idea.) Long-range EVs are typically not driven to the limits of their range every day, so the batteries are treated well. Most days, my car might go from 90% to 80%, then get charged back to 90%. My phone, by comparison, goes from 100% to around 20% and back to 100% each day, which degrades the battery far more.
Excellent writeup. Also worth noting is that there are many different types of battery chemistry used by different lithium-ion cells: laptops may have cells with chemistries optimized for a certain lifetime/capacity/power tradeoff, whereas EVs may use a completely different chemistry with very different properties.
Also, EV batteries do have after car uses. They're able to be used for home energy storage, for example.
And when they're no good for that they're recyclable. Although currently it's cheaper to dig lithium out of the ground than reclaim it there's other stuff (cobalt particularly) that is reclaimed.
I'm not super-knowledgeable on this but as far as I understand it, they improve battery lifetime significantly by having low per-cell draw, not running the batteries all the way down or charging them all the way up, and having a fancy cooling setup to prevent cells getting too hot. They still degrade noticeably, but at a slower rate than your typical portable device (where the relevant marketing metric is battery life from a full charge down to zero, rather than battery longevity).
Well thought out points but he's suffered from a common mistake when comparing a revolutionary technology with a current, well proliferated, technology. The rules of vehicle ownership have changed and will continue to change as we move to EVs.
As to points about the grid: The electric companies already manage unexpected peeks/valleys using several techniques. Interruptable power used to cut people's AC off in the summer when the grid is suffering by offering participants a steep discount in electric rates will likely see its first expansion into recharging ports. Off-peek/On-peek rates will change. Even surcharges for vehicle owners charging at certain times could be implemented -- all before the first changes to the grid take place.
Refueling: This fell victim to thinking of EVs as having the same limitations as ICEs. With the current crop of EVs, 99.95% of my travel would eliminate the need for a refueling station. I can charge at home and a look around my area, it's easier to find an EV charging parking space than it is to find someone driving an EV (Metro Detroit). More of these will appear -- the incentive to install these at retail locations is that you'll potentially increase your traffic and those who are there "just to refuel" will be there until they're sufficiently charged giving you ample time to make a few sales in the process. Cities are adding them as well and it's probable that this will become another revenue generator by having the car owner pay a rate above the electric rate/maintenance rate. For long-haul travel, these stations will now have something they never had before: a captive audience stuck there for the duration of the charge and their incentives will be similar to retail locations adding "EV parking spots"
The remaining problems fall under the category of "EVs are new and not as common as ICEs." Service stations will become more familiar with the products as more of them appear on the road. Add in self-driving, which seems to be growing just behind EVs, and you end up with a model where disabled passengers can be met with a new "rental" while their vehicle is towed to a location that can service them.
Because of a simple change to the fuel and engine, EVs don't suffer from some of the pain points of ICEs and require us to think about the similar problems that they share with ICE vehicles very differently.
I think electric BIKES, not cars, is the future. We're already seeing bikes with 1000W engines and batteries which have enough for 60 km range. It takes much less energy to transport one human on a bike than one inside a "steel cage".
For longer trips, you still need mass transit or perhaps car pooling services of some sort. But for commuter trips, I think electric bikes or trikes will absolutely replace cars in the near future.
The Model S is very popular in the crescent park neighborhood of Palo Alto. There were brownouts until they upgraded the neighborhoods supply and transformers.
Just some food for thought. Most neighborhoods simply are not wired for overnight charging of a significant number of EVs. I would expect EV interconnect fees or time sensitive tierd electric consumption independent of your net metering deal.
Or hyper-local generating capacity based on natural gas...?
> Problem 1: Transportation will load the grid and generating capacity in rather nasty ways
Electric cars are not a _complete_ solution on their own. They are _part_ of the solution, along side more renewable power sources like solar and wind. I drive an electric car and I charge it almost exclusively with solar panels at a local free charging station provided by the Tennessee Valley Authority. (I live in Chattanooga, TN.)
Also, as for putting load on the electric grid, electric cars actually help with that. Many can be configured to feed power back into the grid, and as a result, they can balance out the grid load throughout the day with their batteries.
> Problem 2: Rapid charging is actually not so rapid, highway re-charging stations will have to be much larger than current gas stations
Shift your thinking! Electric cars won't be charged at gas stations like gas cars of the past. Most electric drivers charge at home in their own garages or driveways. I have neither, but I still manage to charge my car in street parking with an extension cord, an exterior wall outlet, and a few of those little safety mat things so strangers don't trip over my cord.
Charging stations will still be important for cross-country trips, but the average driver doesn't travel that far often enough for it to clog up charging stations across the country.
> Problem 3: Gas stations are not generally in the neighbourhood of electricity generation stations.
See above.
> Problem 4: Re-charging will not work nearly as well when vehicle utilization goes up due to sharing
See above.
> Problem 5: We don’t actually have all this infrastructure yet
Well, duh. That's why we need to build it. That's not an issue with electric cars themselves. That's a problem with our infrastructure that we need to fix.
> Problem 6: Range
This is something we need to work on, but it's not as big of a problem as people realize. More than 90% of US drivers drive far less than 100 miles per day. The few times I do need to travel farther than that, it's actually kind of relaxing to stop at a mall or restaurant with a charger, plug in, and have a 30 minute lunch while I charge.
> Problem 7: Trailers
Really? This is problem for most drivers? This is a niche problem for the few people that actually need to haul trailers. So those people can just use regular cars.
> Problem 8: Service
I drive a Nissan Leaf, and I am very active in the Leaf driver community. I have never heard of a Leaf having major maintenance problems. Chevy Volt's are known for having some issues, but in my opinion, that's your fault for buying something from GM.
> Problem 9: Tax Breaks
How is this a problem? Tax breaks will eventually go away? So what? The whole idea is to make these cars cheaper now until manufacturing gets cheaper and the prices start to go down on their own. This is really grasping at straws.
> Problem 2: Rapid charging is actually not so rapid, highway re-charging stations will have to be much larger than current gas stations
Shift your thinking! Electric cars won't be charged at gas stations like gas cars of the past. Most electric drivers charge at home in their own garages or driveways. I have neither, but I still manage to charge my car in street parking with an extension cord, an exterior wall outlet, and a few of those little safety mat things so strangers don't trip over my cord.
-> I agree to an extent, however, I think you over estimate the discipline of the average person with respect to them always remembering to charge their car at night. The time it takes to recharge an EV to a significant capacity is still too long for people to easily transition, not to mention the massive current demands that would be required for such a quick charge. In an ideal world, people would plug their EV into an outlet every night when they come home from work, but we all know that the average person isn't as deterministic as that. How many people wake up in the morning and realize that they forgot to plug their cell phone in at night? This is why there's such a push for rapid charging technology in those devices.
In order for people to easily make the switch, I think we would need vehicles capable of charging to a ~100 mile capacity in under 5 minutes; similar to how long a refill for a gas vehicle takes. I’m not up to date on the latest EV news, so maybe we’re already there.
Nonetheless, I find myself many times in the morning on my way to work, glancing down at the gas gauge, realizing that I forgot to refill last night. This forces me to make a quick stop on my way to refill, which only adds about 8 minutes to my total commute. Waiting at an EV charging station for 30 minutes would require a significant change in my lifestyle.
People like the average HN user are generally responsible enough to make appropriate accommodations, but my 68 year old father wouldn’t go through the hassle.
Another hurdle I see with overnight charging is the mess it would cause in cities like Philadelphia where you aren’t guaranteed to end up in the same parking spot every time. The people there can’t even handle shoveling out a parking spot without shooting each other, so I expect a few issues when there are extension cords in front of everyone’s house and you need your specific spot to charge your car. This could easily be solved with a universal charging infrastructure that includes chargers every 10 feet, but that infrastructure will only come when adoption reaches a certain rate where the _massive_ costs can be justified. This is the obvious catch 22.
Of course, these issues will slowly go away as EVs become a part of everyday life, but I’m specifically talking about the transition period.
First of all, if you really want to improve the environment the best way to do so is to not buy any vehicle at all.
It's pretty clear to me that I will be unlikely to ever own a car again. But this Tesla is the one I expect will be my self-driving taxi for many years to come and before the decade is out.
The arguments pointed out is rather week. Most can be solved given time and effort. With regards with the environment concerns, I think it's easier to solve the dependency of fosil fuel when all consumers is located in power stations compared to in individual transport unit.
The US grid is currently about one third coal, one third natural gas, and one third zero emissions (mostly nuclear). I doubt diesel is cleaner than an EV given that, even if you don't account for the fact that coal emissions happen far away from most people, while diesel happens in your face.
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 don't create all the secondary waste products like used engine oil, coolant, etc. LiOn batteries are highly recyclable.
Adoption of EVs has been and will continue to be gradual, and our power grid will continue to expand to handle the load.
Just as a personal anecdote, I currently have a Nissan LEAF and when we got it we expected our power usage to jump dramatically. It did not. But our savings on fuel (not to mention maintenance) did jump. Even with current cheap gas prices, it's still way cheaper to drive the LEAF than our 30mpg CR-V.
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.
You must have missed out on the HN policy against name-calling, you did that and then some and were - and are - completely off the mark, on top of that you refused to take it back and doubled down on it. If that caused your karma to nose-dive then that's the system working as intended, I did not bring in 'any of my friends'.
Cars are an antiquate mode of transportation that are dangerous and inefficient. Something truly disruptive would be transportation systems where cars and trucks don't exist.
This reads a bit like something a staffer on one of those listicle sites got asked to churn out, the last three (listicle items 7 through 9) in particularly seem very weak.
If everyone had a horse these days, the environmental impact would be massive, from the infrastructure required to generate the food for them (there probably isn't enough land area in the world to grow enough grass), and the amount of methane they emit.
We do the same with cows and other animals we eat. Plus we feed billions of pets (for which we have no use). Someone will have to do the numbers, but it's possible that, at a small density, they're a green alternative for short distances. Plus it's easy to share them.
Even in the late 19th century, cities like London and New York had major problems dealing with the massive volume of dung that horses were leaving on the streets.
The population of New York City was 1.5 million people in 1890. It's 8.1 million today.
I'm guessing Jacques lives in a large European city because this piece reads like someone who has absolutely no understanding of how a typical American uses an automobile. Land use, city planning, public transportation and highway management in Europe are all completely different from that of America, or specifically the United States. Accepting that you can't just give up your car, he then enumerates short comings of EVs that just don't add up.
The implication that simple lifestyle changes would enable most American's to do away with their automobiles is utterly ridiculous and demonstrates complete ignorance to the suburban environment surrounding all cities in the United States and other parts of America. If a large number of people did vacate the suburbs for the city, this would create a housing market crash in the suburbs that would draw just as many people out of the cities into the suburbs. Without revising land use policies in the United States, there's no way to support this. Just look at gun control polices if you need any more evidence of how ridiculous this notion is.
His argument that everyone will be charging their EVs at peak times and will overload the grid is ridiculous and completely ignores the fact that most people today are aware of peak vs off peak electricity rates and specifically charge their EVs during off peak hours to avoid paying higher rates. This is analogous to driving a few extra miles to save $.05/gallon on gas. People are cheap and won't do that for financial reasons.
He then goes on to make a number of points about the lack of charging infrastructure that would make EVs unfeasible but these completely ignore his first assertion that most people will be charging at home. More than 90%* of commuters have a commute of less than 36 miles one-way which means that only 2 EVs on market (i.e. Mitsubishi i-MiEV, Smart Electric Drive) would be unable to cover their daily commute. Which means that in most cases the need for charging stations would be radically diminished. Another thing to consider is that petrol stations exist in their current form because of regulator requirements around the storage of hazardous materials (i.e. petroleum products). There's no such restrictions around EV charging stations and in a world with 90%+ EVs it's not hard to imagine every parking spot having a charge station.
The assertion about vehicle maintenance being an issue is also equally ridiculous. He states that most EV systems will be unservicable at the average garage which is debatable. The power train will probably remain unserviceable but an EV's powertrain is significantly more reliable than your typical ICE. All of the other major and minor systems (i.e. drivetrain, environmental, braking, etc) in an EV are similar to those of an ICE vehicle and thus serviceable at a regular garage. Considering that most EVs will be daily commuters, the likelihood that you'll find yourself with a powertrain failure in a location where your EV can't be serviced is also highly unlikely.
Misses numerous the historical examples and present day analogies.
Prob 1 is solved by the death of 9-5 full time work. Its just not relevant to most of the population anymore. The problems of deploying EVs in Levvitown in 1949 are not relevant to 2016+. Also "smart" grid connected battery chargers are more advanced than the typical 1949 "battery rectifier".
Prob 2 insists that what he calls fast charging would in the industry be called medium-slow charging. Also it strawdogs that a significant fraction of people will every require it and be willing to pay the likely "just under the cost of a SUV's tank of gas" they'll charge as a convenience fee. Finally he misses how rest stops along interstates actually work in recreational states like where I live... its just not a practical issue.
Prob 4 overestimates the popularity of sharing. Its kind of like wife sharing, many talk and think about it, only a tiny fraction do it, but its not unusually popular, nor growing, and not a significant population issue. Among certain extremely small subcultures its popular, but much like rurals who commute over 100 miles per trip, they're just going to be ignored and frozen out of the EV market. They can buy hybrids and the remaining 95% of the market will buy EVs. For a gas analogy, the fact that my micro-sub-compact can't tow a 37 foot sailboat turns out not to have eliminated its sales from the market, no matter how important that ability is for owners of 37 foot sailboats, or at least those who aspire.
Prob 5 carefully ignores historical infrastructure growth examples, population shifts in the USA, suburban sprawl, and ignores the slow rate of ramping up EV production. Basically, we have decades of experience building new infrastructure faster than we can possibly build new EV assembly lines. NIMBY areas will suffer, nothing new there, but I couldn't care less about them, and a little suffering might improve their views a bit.
Prob 7 is the great towing conspiracy (google it) where existing gas mfgrs try to protect suv and truck sales by pretending that magically only trucks can tow in the USA. Its pretty crazy, my (gas) car is rated to tow 2000 pounds in Canada and of course 0 in the USA, because they have to protect truck / suv sales. It is true, if you need to tow in the USA you already must buy a truck to do it legally while insured. So not being able to tow with a commuter EV isn't a downgrade from commuter gas cars that already are legally rated as zero (in the USA). Further when I do need to tow, its usually 3 miles to home depot or 5 miles to the lake, not crossing the Rockies in a blizzard.
Prob 8 is absolutely comical, like an anti-hybrid troll from over a decade ago or an anti-import troll from when I was a kid. When that tired argument is the best they can roll out...
Overall its mostly problems that exist primarily in the mind of opponents where 99% of the population won't care no matter how many times the talking points are repeated, much like the tired saw that no EV range is acceptable other than (max_currently_available) + 50 miles for all available ranges from 10 miles (homemade lead acid conversions) on up.
I think the OP is overselling the following problems and/or failing to understand the problem EVs are relevant to:
1) Grid strain - By the time EV cars are popular enough for this to be an issue, installed home solar capacity is likely to be large enough that it is likely to look more like this:
2 kW worth of solar panels
1 Battery Pack (possibly interchangeable with the car)
Battery pack is drained when you get home and charge the car.
This will cost you ~$15,000 which is cheaper than the car and will last ~20 years (minus the battery pack which you'll need to replace every 5-10 years). This might go as low as $7.5k depending on technology improvements, incentives, sunny days, etc.
On cloudy days, it'll just charge from the grid over 6-8 hours while people are at work.
You'll want a system like this with 1+ EVs simply because you'll be using enough power it'll start making financial sense in most of the US.
2) EVs are primarily commuter cars so as long as their battery back lasts long enough to return home, it'll work. The rare instances where you'll need to recharge at a station will largely be irrelevant for day-to-day activity. Cars used for long distances ( 180+ miles ) regularly will likely remain hybrids or fossil fuel for decade(s).
4) Sharing will largely also be a non-issue since even when utilization goes up, we are talking ~3 hours of drive time to ~1 hour of charge time. You'd need to have greater than 50% utilization before charge time is likely to create issues. Similarly, as tech improves, that ratio will improve.
6) This is largely solved by the fact EVs are primarily going to be local commuter cars. Replacing commuter cars, in and of itself, is a worthy goal as it improves city air quality substantially which is linked to problems like asthma and cancer. I honestly don't care if long distance trucks which largely are spending their time in rural areas remain fossil fueled. I care about city air quality.
>> Apologies for breaking HN etiquette but I've really had it, blame my lack of sleep or whatever is convenient but comments like yours really make my blood boil.
After all these years you've spent on HN I'm actually wondering why you would even bother to get your blood to boil. HN is a great place for discussion and to keep up-to-date with what's going on in tech, startup culture and all things connected to them, but it's quite obvious that the comments section has always been full of groupthink, non-sequiturs, echochambers, strawmen and ad-hominems, right?
I found your analysis informative, well-researched and to the point. I can't say I agree with everything (e.g. I don't think the power grid will be the biggest obstacle, I still believe we'll figure out a way to decentralize the grid and produce enough power wherever it is needed without relying on big power plants). But I do agree with the overall sentiment that EV's are not going to completely replace ICE's anytime soon (if ever).
By the way, I'd like to point out that the percentage of PEV's sold in the Netherlands is a very misleading number. The percentage is relatively high but the majority of these cars are hybrids that almost always run exclusively on gasoline. The reason for this is that most new cars sold in the Netherlands are lease-cars, most of the brand new cars you'll see on the road here are not privately owned but part of the compensation package of many middle- and higher-class jobs. Car manufacturers have been very smart to play into the tax system, strongly pushing PEV models that ended up in low tax brackets ('bijtelling', a monthly tax payed by everyone driving a lease car, based on a percentage of the list price of each lease car, where the percentage is based on how 'clean' the car is considered to be). Previously, hybrid PEV's that were terribly inefficient when driving on gasoline (such as the Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV) used to have a very favorable 'bijtelling' because they could in theory be used as EV. In practice, nobody drives an Outlander on electricity because the range is horrible, and most lease car drivers have an all-inclusive contract where their employer pays for the fuel. Recently tax regulations have changed to only include pure EV's in the lowest brackets, and all these hybrid PEV's are now taxed almost as high as non-EV's. I would not be surprised to see the percentage of PEV's sold in NL to actually go down.
I see you've already called out to one HN comment. This sentence appears to be missing a negative:
being without power meant that our house would be inhabitable almost instantly
Really interesting article (and disagree with the HN negatives too - you make some good points, though I see that a few of them have been answered in comments to a reasonable degree of my satisfaction, particularly the "plug in for the night and the power company controls when it gets power for a cheaper charge" - the tech for that must be pretty close to ready to roll out to garages.
Yes, some of the comments here have definitely been helpful, in particular, I wasn't aware that was technology that was already being worked on so that's definitely a gain for the day.
- switching all cars to electrical would increase the total electricity consumption by 20%, while currently we export about 10% of our production. All the changes are going to happen over a timeframe of more than 20 years, because that is how long it takes to replace the cars at minimum, a long time to make any necessary adjustments to the grid.
- in general, electrical cars should be rather beneficial to the grid. There is no reason to charge them at dinner time. Electrical cars have timers and current control, it is very easy to have them charge at times where the grid is underloaded. Many power companies have rebates at night anyway to get rid of excess electricity. (Assuming a car with a reasonably sized battery, like the Model 3)
- long term, the speed of charging could be controlled remotely by the power company (for a rebate) so they could use this further to stabilize the grid.
- The Model X is available with a tow hitch, and it seems that the Model 3 might have one too (Elon tweeted something to that extend)
- Most Tesla owners seem to be happy with the combination of range and the Supercharger network, and the range is going to improve by about 5% per year.