I also wonder if the maintainability of these engines will be the same as with diesel. That would be another big benefit.
Washington DC, for whatever reason, gets its electricity from a gasoline power plant. In Washington, the Model S gets 28 MPG.
This happened a while ago so I could be misremembering, but regardless I don't believe that the environmental value of electric vehicles has been realized. In a lot of places, your Tesla is still coal powered. Efficient internal combustion engines are still a worthy cause, and this will continue until more electricity is being produced than is normally consumed.
The reality is that anyone in the US, east of the rockies and not in texas will have the same 'mpg equivalent' for their Tesla.
The biggest nail in the coffin of the long tailpipe fallacy is that you can drive an EV farther on the power needed to refine a gallon of gas than you can drive a ICE car on that same gallon. So, even if you built a gasoline engine that had absolutely no emissions, and oil bubbled up into crude lakes right next to every refinery, EVs would still be more efficient.
Energy density of gasoline is 34.2 MJ/L: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density
This means there was 4.8 MJ of energy spent to create 1L of gasoline. The 70kWh(250MJ) tesla is reported to have 390KM range. 4.8 MJ would be 1.92% of the range, or about 7.5km. The Mazda 3 has a combined fuel economy rating of 33 MPG, which is about 14KPL.
As far s I can tell, your statement that an EV can go further on the power needed to refine a gallon of gas, than an ICE car can drive is off by a factor of almost two.
That said, arguing an electric car can go a certain distance based on inefficiencies of another unrelated process is not a very meaningful argument. You need to look at the efficiencies and CO2 produced for drilling/transporting/refining/burning gas vs producing/transmitting/storing/using electric power, and probably the costs of dealing with peak loads vs non-peak loads, and even then the argument is heavily weighted on where your power comes from.
Indeed.
However, look at it this way: which is easier to replace, the entire fleet, or centralized power plants?
Every time a new windmill or solar panel is added, your Tesla gets that much cleaner. And that's something you can do yourself if you want to. Electricity is fungible and your car could not care less where it came from.
Oil changes have a non-negligible impact for the environment as well. And then there are all those components that have to be replaced from time to time and end up in landfills (spark plugs/cables, timing belts, etc).
So I believe electric cars today are already a net gain. And, even if they polluted more, the pollution is centralized in the power plants, which is easier to do something about. There are problem health benefits from moving pollution away from population centers.
I make a point of going to parks with my EV. I know it's a token gesture, but I like to think I'm not blowing dirty fumes next to animal habitats. It helps that California is reasonably clean.
The entire fleet I'd think. It's certainly much more likely to happen first.
(Cars have a much shorter average lifespan than power plants; the natural gas power plants we're building right now have a designed lifespan of up to 50 years. Very few cars coming of the production line today will be on the road in 50 years.)
So it doesn't matter about any of the arguments about whether an electric car is more efficient or not when the electricity comes from coal.
What matters is that having electric cars enables us to move to a future of solar and wind and not notice the difference.
Plus having electric cars that don't pollute in cities where there are lots of people and generating the electricity with coal fired powerstations outside of cities where there are less people has immediate benefits.
EVs pollute less, but they pollute too, and in cities as well. They emit dust (including the most harmful particles: PM10 and PM2.5) from break discs and tires. Difference between CO2 in power plants and in city centers matters, but not that much. Once it's in the atmosphere the damage is done. As for NOx, the biggest offender in the dieselgate, Mazda's engines should not emit these.
Add a fact that in the current grid setup most of the energy is coming from coal, and that it's very unlikely it is going to change in a near future (mainly due to political reasons). Also, the waste from batteries is really ugly.
Given all that factors a 30% less polluting combustion engine is almost too good to be true. From a macro perspective the gain for environment is on par, if not better, than from electric cars.
My biggest problem is to believe in the numbers Mazda provides. Have to wait and see.
Citation needed. It seems obvious to me that a huge power plant is going to be less polluting per kWh than a tiny little engine in a car. Otherwise, we'd use tiny little car engines to power everything - which only happens at the moment in places where they cannot get electricity by other means (building sites etc).
I don't think it follows that just because we have historically centralized power generation, this was obviously due to efficiency. For example, centralization of management, investment, pollution control, logistical (fuel delivery), safety (nuclear) and reliability concerns seem far more obvious to me, although I don't doubt there could be an efficiency benefit to large-scale generation, I've just never heard of it.
Simple rectification has not so much loss, I think you are thinking about low voltage DC power supplies, and I think that chargers for large, high voltage battery piles are likely to be happy with rectified (maybe doubled) mains supply.
The low voltage supply is first rectifying the input, then using an inverter to generate high frequency AC, then rectifying and filtering this to give a DC output.
The simple "diode" rectification is no longer acceptable due to harmonics put on the AC side causing grid stability problems and emitted radio interference.
However, I have to agree that my previous comment _wrongly_ implied that burning coal at the plants to power the electric cars is the main issue we have to deal with.
Coal represents less than a third of North American power generation, and less than a quarter of generation in Europe. In Brazil (another major car owning country) coal only represents ~1% of their generation sources.
Really the only place your statement is true is mainland Asia, and even there the market share of coal is falling (and the number of cars there is dwarfed by the number in NA/Europe/Brazil).
I shouldn't have made the point about city pollution as it just diluted the main point.
Nevertheless, the brake discs won't be any worse in electric cars, so it is an absolute reduction in pollution in cities. I've also only heard such things getting raise ever since we started talking about electric cars. When everyone is worring about NOx we forget about all the other polluting steps.
Coal power stations are the worst case scenario for electric cars and even with this things are on a par. But back on my main point with electric cars we can switch to Gas fired power stations and then to our own solar powered roof. With a Mazda ICE you're stuck on petrol.
Plus petrol in the long term can only get more expensive and solar can only get cheaper. Petrol is eventually going to run out and before that happens it's going to get very expensive. Solar panels and batteries will only get more efficient and cheaper to produce.
Battery recycling is definitely an issue and Elon Musk has quoted at the gigafactory opening that they can take all Tesla batteries back an recycle them fairly efficiently as their robots can strip the batteries apart as they have the schemas. Whether other car manufacturers follow suit is open to question.
As far as political reasons go, if everyone is driving electric cars I'm sure there will be much more political pressure to remove the polluting power stations because now CO2 is primarily the fault of the power stations rather than people driving around in their cars.
While this is true, much as the rest of your comment, this sentence has made me think that pushing pollution away from the eyes of people is a really negative effect of electric cars. If pollution is not in my backyard, I'll certainly be less aware of it, and hence I'll certainly pressure less for reduction.
Also once people have electric cars the incentive to have solar panels on your roof becomes bigger. Then once enough electricity is generated through that the coal power stations just get turned off because they're not needed.
Plus there will still be the issue of CO2 generation, just that drivers won't be responsible any so like ex-smokers (who in my experience seem to be more anti-smoking than most) they'll probably be even more offended by the polluting power stations.
Now in winter gasoline/diesel cars have the issue of nearly always running rich on very short commutes as they strive to get to an optimal operating temperature. The EV just loses a serious chunk of range. Both of course can be preconditioned but the EV is more efficient there.
As for Mazda. None of the electrification upcoming laws exclude fuel powered vehicles, range extenders and hybrids all seem to meet many requirements.
older article about range/ev/winter http://www.teslarati.com/effects-winter-tesla-battery-range/ I hope they have corrected how regenerative braking works since then
People don't hold up BMW passenger diesels as the hallmark of maintainability. Heck, even the diesel offerings in American trucks are pretty bad from a reliability standpoint. Both Cummins and Navistar faced multiple CALs over reliability and warranty-related issues.
They also include traditional spark plugs and the engine automatically switches between modes. So, I fear that maintenance wise, it may be the worst of both worlds -- but with less wear and tear on the spark side, perhaps it will be better.
Backstory: Ford came out the gate with a new spark plug design for the 2004 F-150 3V Triton 5.4L V8 engine (after their previous spark plug design failure in the 2V Triton where the plugs would shoot out) and told everyone that the spark plugs would last 100k miles. Turns out if you let them go that long, they would get stuck in the cylinder head and break off when you tried to remove them, leaving stuck broken pieces of spark plug behind. Conveniently, 100k miles happens to be when most people's warranty expires, leaving people with a best case a few-hundred-dollars-extra tune-up bill, if not thousands of dollars if the heads had to be removed. Ford faced a class-action lawsuit over this debacle, and there are still companies selling special broken spark plug removal kits designed solely for this engine to this day. Of course the root cause of the problem is faulty design, but it would have been mostly avoided had they not claimed a 100k mile service interval for the plugs. So yes, Ford went from an engine where the spark plugs would shoot out of the cylinder head, to one where they would get stuck so hard they would break.
I know all of this not because I am an engine geek, but because it happened to me. Two spark plugs broke off while being removed and I came this close to needing to have the heads removed and machined. Fortunately those special removal kits I mentioned earlier really do work. Given how relatively cheap spark plugs are, you can bet it will be a while before I trust that 100k mile number :-)
This is the one with a "permanent air filter" so they were thinking about eliminating maintenance. Boy this is going to suck when it is clogged.
"Promises only bind those who believe them."
Wow, was that ever effective.