Electric Vehicles Are Overwhelmingly More Energy Efficient
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Perhaps I am naive, but I would be surprised if it takes that long.
There are so many obvious benefits* to electric cars that the only thing holding them back from Mass adoption (IMHO) is the price of batteries. With such significant investments being made, and such steady progress being made, it is hard for me to imagine it will take almost 20 years to get to this point.
* Yes, range anxiety, cold weather's affect on performance and lack of charging infrastructure are all problems, but they start going away when cheaper batteries make electric cars cheaper to own/run, and more cars are on the road to justify businesses to start installing charge stations in carparks.
Already today, the expensive versions of Model S drives 370 miles / 600 km on one charge. If you live in a country with superchargers on main roads, this will be enough for all driving scenarios, whether it's the daily commute to and from work or it's the long vacation drive in mountainous regions or cold weather.
In 3-4 years, similar range will be achieved by mid prized cars, and in 6-8 years, the higher end of the low prized cars will have that range.
And at the same time charging networks expand rapidly, with Tesla's just being one of several.
So around 2030, if you buy a cheap EV, range will simply not be an issue.
However cars do tend to last a while so I imagine the lag between “most new cars sold are electric” and “most cars on the road are electric” will take a while, and “all cars are electric” may take a lot longer, or not happen at all if you consider niche vehicles.
I just feel that the prediction is almost laughably conservative.
My prediction: When the price hits parity (my gut says in less than 5 years), the convenience of electric will see mass adoption over a period of a few years. It will be the transition from film to digital cameras all over again and the change will be rapid. More than 50% of new car sales will be EV sometime before 2030.
I feel that in both my comments I have been quite clear that I have been talking about new car sales only.
At the risk of repeating myself, I agree that it will take a while for all petrol cars to come off the road, even when the majority of new car sales are EV.
What a fantastic comparison. Early electric cars like the Leaf feel like the really early 0.3 MP digital cameras or 32 MB MP3 players or Windows Mobile 3.1 telephones.
Once you can buy a Model 3 type car for the price of a VW Polo then Ford will be the new Kodak.
However, concerning cities, I’d like to see a lot of emphasis on _not_ driving a car at all in the city
I also predict that there will be a healthy aftermarket converting ICE vehicles into EVs (or maybe even official manufacturer solutions).
At present about once a week I stop and get gas. It’s no big deal if I ever forget because filling up is a five minute process. Twice a year I get an oil change.
If I get an EV I have to remember to plug it in every night. If I forget, it is a much longer process to recharge.
What exactly is the incredible added benefit I as a consumer am getting from an EV? People tout reliability, but Tesla isn’t selling me on that and the powertrain is not a high failure item in the first place - you can easily expect 250-300k miles with minimal maintenance. The stuff that goes wrong in cars is invariably the other crap - electronics, sensors, computers, anti-theft systems, climate control, power windows. Getting an EV doesn’t save me from that.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-04-16/the-world...
Meanwhile in US(seen as pillar of pollution by most EU countries) you somehow get huge rebates.
How we are not making EV’s tax free is beyond me.
VED has a complex history but the emissions part is fairly recent, and the luxury part even more recent (this year!).
(+) I think this is still true at time of writing but may be affected by Brexit
The truth is that there just aren't enough people who can afford a model 3 to make a dent in global warming. The model 3's effect is in terms of dealing with the risks involved with mass production without investing the amount of money needed for a truly disruptive model( think 15-25k cost, that would take A LOT more orders).
The US isn’t as energy efficient as it could be, but the air quality tends to be better than much of Europe. New York for example tends to have cleaner air than London or Paris.
You are drastically over-estimating the propensity for change of the majority of the population. In Europe we have diesel versus gasoline wars with supporters of each side declaring that the other is pure crap. The idea these people would just run the numbers, see that electric is more efficient and go to the dealers to pickup an electric car is funny.
We aren't even in the first phases of consumer adoption, we haven't seen the first waves of cheap knock-offs that try to capitalize on the trend and possibly set the public expectations about electrics to low levels. What we have is an american tech startup building a highly advanced and expensive car, and the major manufacturers hedging their bets and announcing electric models to make sure they are not caught off guard.
It's ironic reading something like this on a technology website, an industry where scale and rapid development have delivered astounding value. Cars are just the latest product to be gobbled up by the same hyper-efficient industry.
My prediction is the car industry will look like the PC industry in the future. Complicated drive trains have been replaced by simple motors close to the wheel. You don't have to architect a car around them anymore. Scaling will produce more generic and interchangeable parts at much better prices. Soon we'll be talking about our latest build, but it will be a car, not a computer.
This has already started with enthusiasts transplanting reclaimed Tesla innards into other shells:
Your link to people transplanting Tesla innards into other shells: people have done this since the 1930s. Back then it was called a Hot Rod, today aftermarket parts in the US alone is a $300+ billion industry.
Diesel's growth for private vehicles here in Europe came about purely from changed incentives, and changed sales rates almost immediately. That's for a switch to an alternative with all the refuelling and associated infrastructure already in place.
As electric infrastructure - and crucially vehicle choice - continues to expand, with comparable incentives there's no reason it couldn't achieve as significant a switch in similar time. For most it's the car that makes the sale, not the fuel or number of cylinders.
It's my most petrol-headed friends who also seem to have become the most enthusiastic about EVs.
Assuming that you want a diesel, do you still want it if you don't know whether you'll be permitted to drive that thing in the place where you want to go on vacation?
It is hard to explain just how unexpected it was, having lived in rural towns most of my youth there was simply no part of my experience that said "better hope there isn't a tesla charging station underneath those gum trees"
And range anxiety is something that mostly afflicts those who do not have an electric car. Once you have one it turns into what I call range awareness. You cease to be anxious about it, you simply reorganize things a little.
> the only thing holding them back from Mass adoption (IMHO) is the price of batteries.
I think it is a combination of price and the belief that one needs a lot of range. Here where electric cars are comparable prices to equivalent ICE cars people buy them but in the UK where they are typically a lot more expensive people don't
> lack of charging infrastructure
Experience here in Norway suggests that this is a minor problem for most people, most of the time, because most electric cars are fully charged by morning every day. It's only when you use the car to travel more than half the range away from home that it becomes a problem for most drivers and as most daily uses are considerably less than the range of even a first generation leaf this is fairly rare.
And of course the infrastructure is being created, petrol stations here are staring to install chargers (Circle K in particular). And plenty of local authorities and even supermarkets are installing chargers in parking bays (usually 7 to 11 kW).
I would never have thought of doing this. But once you've seen it, it's an obvious cheap, quick and non-intrusive solution.
The other obvious option is paying an extra fee at multi level car parks.
The thing I really want governments to mandate is for new apartment buildings with underground carparks to be built with provisions in place to move it way to get charging to a apartments reserved spot. With a bit of forward planning, a lot of money/effort will saved.
This is creating a lot of demand in a market that is supply limited (e.g. batteries). So that means that short term they have less of a need to actually be in a hurry to scale down to cheaper models.
Margins at the high end are pretty sweet and Tesla has shown pretty convincingly people are willing to buy their products at a premium. Like Apple is not interested in selling cheap phones, Tesla may not be that interested in selling lots of cheap cars with much smaller margins.
The drama around the 35K $ Tesla has shown Tesla dragging their heels there. Technically it's a software limited version of a product they sell at much higher prices. The only way it makes sense for them to not take the extra money is if they would have a demand problem for those more expensive models. They don't. Everything they build ships and they are building and shipping as fast as they can already in a market that is outgrowing their capacity to grow.
So, I think 2038 is pretty reasonable. In the time between then and now, many existing manufacturers will disappear allowing the remaining ones to milk the market a bit longer. E.g. GM closing many of their product lines last year helps other manufacturers as it removes a competitor from the market. Meanwhile it just takes time and major investments to ramp up new production capacity. This won't happen overnight. IMHO much of that capacity may end up being created by new companies. ICE production capacity is a liability at this point. GM did the right thing of ripping off that band-aid and taking that pain early.
Except Elon Musk stating his intention is the exact opposite.
He sees ICE cars as a threat to the future of this planet and want them replaced by something less harmful as quickly as possible, and Tesla is the means to that end.
Everything they’ve built so far has been done to prepare for decent mass-market EVs, like the Model 3.
The high-end market is lucrative though and therefore this is where he’s starting to get competition from traditional auto-vendors, now that he has proven for them the viability of selling luxury EVs.
Turning off those features only makes sense when you can't sell at the higher price. Basically you sacrifice margins for volume. Turns out that so far they get away with not needing to do that and they definitely need the cash. So they built the 35K model 3 and then realized they could be selling it for 45K+. As long as they can sell as fast as they can build these things, why would they lower their prices?
It's not a sound way of doing things at all, but it helps Teslas short-term objectives. Delivery takes a long time to Europe and China when the cars are made in California and Nevada. By limiting the hardware variation (but not eliminating it, as you seem to believe) you can make cars and ship them before they are ordered and be reasonably sure somebody will buy cars that match, perhaps with different software configuration (a different license, really).
As you say yourself, it wouldn't make sense to sell the lower-priced versions unless you've run out of demand for the more expensive ones. Why you don't conclude like everyone else that they have indeed fulfilled the demand for the more expensive versions is unclear. I'm pretty sure they have.
What's more, they now have the problem today their cheapest model is also the best. Model 3 is especially a much better grand tourer than the S or X, it's efficiency making it go farther and charge faster.
A company improving its products so fast that they cannibalise the old ones isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it works better if you've made back the investment you made on the old product first!
I really hope Tesla makes it through the storm (I own one, so it would be something of a catastrophe for me if they don't!), but it's much more important that regulators follow through and ensure EVs are adopted ASAP. They are good for the national economy as well as the environment, at least if you're not Germany.
His hyperloop is similarly a scam, with massive technical problems nobody knows how to solve. It's also a 150 year old idea Elon just rebranded and pretended was his own!
In 2013 he told investors, as Tesla CEO, they wouldn't need to raise more capital. Then they raised more capital. He did it again in 2016. And again in 2018.
In his latest idiotic play, he says Tesla cars would appreciate and used ones would be worth $250,000. I own a Model 3, so I have every reason to wish it was true. But I'm not a moron. If he could demonstrate to financial institutions that his cars will no worth just $100k, why should he have Tesla pay 6-8% on the bonds Tesla issued in this last round (the biggest so far, three months after Elon said they didn't need any capital)? It makes no sense, and the reason is that it's nonsense.
He said a Tesla would drive autonomously from coast to coast by the end of 2017. He said from the beginning the cars had the hardware to be fully autonomous; we now know for sure the version one, two, and two point five hardware can't, and don't know if version three can.
He said Tesla's acquisition of SolarCity was a "no-brainer". It is still a drag on the balance sheet and the income statement.
He said he had secured the funding for taking Tesla private. He hadn't discussed it seriously with anyone.
He said a British diver taking part in the rescue operations in Thailand was a pedophile, seemingly to just say something hurtful back after said diver said Elon should put his sub where the sun doesn't shine.
He's revealed in biographies and interviews that Tesla was very close to insolvency on several occasions. He never said so at the time, to his investors, whose money he is supposed to be managing in their best interest (that is the law, whatever the company might say about its goal being to save the planet).
In short, Elon routinely says big things and note often than not it just isn't true, and pretty often it is sufficiently ridiculous that anyone with a skeptical bone in their body who does a minimum of fact-checking quickly comes to the conclusion he doesn't even believe his own words. Which is to say he is quite simply a liar. If you can somehow square his rocket talk with the sustainable energy tune, I think you may need to ask yourself if you are just a little bit too enthusiastic.
Elon-rant done.
The high-end market in the US has definitely felt the impact of Tesla. Here in Norway, too, but that hardly matters because it's about the same scale as the car market of Hamburg. But there's an important perspective missing in what you're saying. Nobody, including Tesla, which has the biggest scale, is yet making any money on making and selling EVs. (Just to be clear, I use EV in the only proper sense, which is BEV. Hybrids, including plugin hybrids, are hybrids, not electric vehicles.) The expectation of everyone is that electric cars will take over, as a matter of necessity because we all need to make huge cuts in our GHG emissions.
If the external costs of vehicles are included, EVs are already much cheaper than ICE vehicles. Fossil fuels are at least as expensive to burn as they are to extract, refine, and distribute, but only the latter costs show up in the accounts. That will change, because the external costs are becoming obvious and much greater than they used to be.
So while Tesla may be playing some role in pushing incumbents in the car industry towards EVs, there are very good reasons to think that the regulatory context and how that's expected to change has much more to do with it. Norway's parliament has adopted a resolution establishing as a goal that only zero-emission vehicles should be on sale from 2025 onwards. Sweden's parliament has outlawed fossil cars from 2030, and is trying to get the rest of the EU to follow its lead. The European commission has grown very impatient with the auto industry's all to successful lobbying and evading of regulation — first by gaming the NEDC norm and type approval system, and then by pulling new tricks out of the hat with the new norm WLTP, undermining the regulations enacted by the commission. It has even sued several member countries for failing to enforce emissions regulations, after dieselgate prompted investigations revealing far greater problems than the much-publicised VW scandal.
If you want EVs to be adopted faster, you'd be a lot more useful if you placed the responsibility and your hopes for a solution where it actually belongs. It's the government's job to regulate markets so that capitalism works as intended — i.e. to ensure that it's profitable for corporations to do what's profitable for society. It's the job of corporations — by law, no less! — to maximize the profits to their investors. Being a fanboy for a company may not do much damage in itself, but the cultural norm that has taken hold where people are pointing fingers at corporations, and failing to hold regulators accountable, is a disease that paves the road for lobbying corporations keen to prevent any major changes.
You can't have charging stations at the same level you have gas stations today, because it takes half an hour to charge (at a minimum) but only a couple minutes to get a tank full of gas, which means you need at least 10 times the number of charging stations that you currently have gas pumps.
An electric car powered by nuclear power would be awesome -- effectively unlimited range, completely clean, but anything powered by less will just suck.
If we are really going to do something drastic for the environment, lets ban offices and enforce 100% remote in knowledge work. That should drastically cut down on CO2 due to transportation and free up time.
Now more than ever we need fusion to be less than 50 years away - by the sounds of it, much less... .
There are a number of forces pushing the change. For one, EV's are just better, including a much lower operating cost. Secondly, governments are pushing the change because of global climate change, and also because it reduces local pollution, and also having to pay for gas imports for the great majority of countries that produce little or no petroleum. Finally China is pushing EV's hard because it wants to dominate the auto industry.
I am sure the Bloomberg New Energy Finance people are quite aware the revolution is going to come much earlier. I think they are pretending it won't because they are under pressure from auto and petroleum advertisers.
Not every article about EVs needs to mention Tesla.
Battery packs—Tesla have shown that with sufficient battery management (stable thermals, avoiding charge state extremes) their packs can last extremely long distances. And they wear very gradually; an electric car with 70% of its original range is still a very useful item.
Motors—I recall these were a high-fault item in earlier models, but as far as I'm aware these problems have been mostly solved and the reliable units have long lifespans. (And if they don't, they're comparatively trivial to swap out compared to an ICE drivetrain anyway.)
Seats/Interior materials—I have no idea how durable Tesla's materials are compared to the competition. Does anyone have any insights on this?
The models with all-aluminium chassis (because it's more valuable than steel and has an inherently long lifespan) makes them worth refurbishing. It would be cool if Telsa could license a third party to perform refurbishing on existing models—replacing older parts with newer equivalents. The benefit to Tesla is that improving a car's residuals increases its value and therefore "lowers the price" compared to competitor cars.
Review of wear on Model S with 450k miles.
Most people in cities here live in flats, terraced houses or other houses without driveways. Charging therefore needs to be on-street or in centralised locations. We have a handful of electric car charging points, but these are often full even now, when electric cars make up a tiny proportion of the fleet.
The amount of investment needed in street charging and supercharger like stations before electric cars can be the majority is absolutely vast here. It's going to need a lot of political will to happen.
I think the situation is similar across much of Europe and the rest of the world. The US model - a driveway for every house across most of the country - is quite unique globally.
They have screens and card readers, and loads of relays and switches inside. Some models (like Tesla superchargers) have a lot of very expensive power electronics in.
They'll only be successful when someone can come up with a sub-$100 model which is integrated into a kerbstone.
I imagine people will charge at work, or supercharge for 20mins once a week
On charging infrastructure, here where I live in London, a lot of the light poles now have EV charging points. They are very subtle: just a blue LED, a small black charger cover and a small Siemens logo. Everything else is inside the preexisting pole (diameter about 4 inches).
https://www.fleetnews.co.uk/news/car-industry-news/2018/08/2...
I would never have thought of doing this. But once you've seen it, it's an obvious cheap, quick and non-intrusive solution.
Since I became aware of lamppost charging I've been counting the lamppost to car ratio. It's generally somewhere around 7-10:1. Even if you convert every lamppost you're still only 15% of the way there.
There's also the power distribution problem. To charge a lot of cars takes a lot of power. A typical residential house uses 4760kWh/year in the UK - that's about 500W average. It's maybe 3x as much in the US - call it 2kW. The most basic, 13A electric car charger will draw maybe 3.1kW. A more reasonable electric car charger might draw 7kW. A supercharger is somewhere between 50 and 150kW. at the very least, you're doubling the amount of power you need to distribute to residential streets, at worse you're increasing it by a factor of 75.
Total UK electricity production is around 300TWh/year. We consume 46 billion litres of transport fuel a year - that's around 51GW, or 447TWh/year. Even accounting for the improved efficiency of electric cars, you're still looking at doubling the electricity production, and distributing that to 30 million cars, each of which is down a very long wire.
I'm all for electric cars, but there's some serious infrastructure issues we have to deal with before they're physically able to be ubiquitous.
If load exceeds tolerances, the EV plugs apply a "rolling blackout" that oscillates through the network every N minutes, to give every car at least some juice?
Also, typical EV eMPG is double an ICE. LEAFs are 124/90 eMPG City/Highway, for example. That makes your math for doubling electrical production a bit less scary. The fact that EV charging is commonly off peak also makes it more convenient for the grid.
In countries with 110V, the car charger that comes with your EV is a trickle charger. Non-teslas (like a LEAF) only charge at 3-6 miles of range per hour, and Teslas are almost half that, over standard 110V.
Interesting.
Or even something better Cogeneration plants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogeneration
Yes, it's in the 30s for typical petrol engines, and over 50% for large 2-stroke diesels.
Does that also hold for hybrid electric vehicles?
Hybrids just recapture the heat from the brakes, another major loss point, but unrelated to the engine. If you want to actually get better energy efficiency you need plug-in hybrid or fully electric.
I think hybrids can also make some trade offs losing power density and torque for higher efficiency.
Hybrids are much better in the city due to the stop and go nature allowing lots of braking regeneration and idle savings.
On the highway much of their advantage is lost especially if comparing to say a diesel.
Lithium is very abundant, and I have read that it is easily recycled. Not sure about the other inputs to the mix.
Expect to see old EV cells redeployed into large scale grid storage rather than recycled for their raw materials.
Even then, it doesn't mean they won't get recycled close to 100%, just that you will have a rolling lithium stock twice as big. At some future point, they will still be removed from grid storage and recycled for raw materials.
The question is going to be whether lithium batteries are going to be more like aluminium (recycling is cheaper and better for environment) or more like plastics (recycling is more expensive and more carbon intensive).
I'm not suggesting companies are going to start making grid storage out of random cells. I'm suggesting that they will take EV batteries with precisely known origins and integrate them into grid storage because it will be so cost effective.
When the supply of old battery packs becomes a seriously meaningful number (in 5—15 years) this will be a big issue.
> Recycling works so well
Does it? I have read varying reports on the cost effectiveness of recycling these batteries.
Remember, they've only lost N% of their inherent value. I doubt it is economically feasible to recycle and re-manufacture lithium batteries to merely double their capacity. Remember, only a fraction of the battery material will be recyclable and if that fraction is less than N% then you've failed economically before you've spent the first dollar.
At current prices and technology, the raw material price for lithium carbonate is around $600 per car, (60Kg at about $10 per Kg) and that price can give you an idea of the environmental impact, probably on par with the 1 - 1.5 tonnes of steel required to build the car and costing similarly.
Of course, "environmental impact" doesn't really mean anything unless you put it in perspective. We could talk about CO2 emissions during mining and refining - and we could reduce that to near zero by using electric mining equipment and clean energy. We could talk about the impact mining companies have on some beautiful South American salty desert, and I really have no answer there because it's all relative to how you value desert landscapes compared to urban mobility. Some people will surely claim it's unacceptable and we should all switch to bikes.
>> 20% of the known reserves
So, the luxury car market will shift to full EV a lot sooner than 2038. IMHO that's happening right now and will largely have happened by 2025 already. It's the rest of the market that will take a bit longer. Not because of a lack of demand but a lack of supply: it will that long to build enough production capacity. And while capacity is limited, the high end of the market is more lucrative to use the capacity for. A Tesla model 3 with 20% margins selling for 40-60K is more interesting than say the equivalent of a Ford Pinto for 15K with 5% margins. The economics of that are different if you have enough capacity to do both of course but that is not the case yet. As long as battery production is a bottleneck, people will be looking to put them in high margin products rather than low margin products.
Also there could be a used EVs marketplace where the battery can be serviced or even rented out (making it less riskier)
Diesel engines are not getting cheaper/better by a similar rate. Worse, investments in that are at this point being shelved in favor of EV investments. Diesels right now are about as good as they will ever be.
Unfortunately, that's in the ballpark for a used LEAF.
What bugged me most was:
> [...] it matters where the electrons going into an EV come from; coal-fired power is [...] less than 40% efficient on average. [If ...] we lost 6% in transmission, it would still add up to only 10 million barrels a day in oil terms. The efficiency gain is overwhelming.
No! What about losses in the electric grid? What about losses in the battery? As far as efficiency is concerned, electric cars are just as bad as ICE cars, given their electricity comes from thermal power plants. Plus, a lot of rare earths are required to manufacture them, mainly for the permanent magnets in the synchronous motors and the batteries.
Battery losses are extremely minimal and the rare earth thing is a red herring. There aren't any rare earths in batteries btw.
they're common in motor design, especially motor-in-hub designs.
To play devils' advocate : batteries are filled with so-called 'conflict materials', and the places that export things like lithium and cobalt have famously bad worker conditions.[0] The popularity of such materials is only going to make their conditions worse unless they're accommodated somehow.
[0]: https://blog.ucsusa.org/josh-goldman/electric-vehicles-batte...
https://www.bmwblog.com/2018/12/28/upcoming-electric-motors-...
Car manufacturers are also making an effort to reduce the amount of cobalt used in batteries and are trying to increase the transparency of the supply chain to avoid sourcing cobalt from conflict regions. Volkswagen and others are using IBM's Blockchain Platform to document the cobalt supply chain:
https://www.electrive.com/2019/04/23/volkswagen-joins-blockc...
The problems are real but car manufacturers are working on them.
Carry on with IC cars? I'm sure those same Africans will thank you when climate change destroys the lives, livelihoods, and nation in various ways.
Car manufacturing and battery production aren't fly by night operations. As such it will be relatively easy for western consumers to put pressure on these companies to do something about the situation. Also I believe Tesla at least are intending to remove all cobalt from their batteries at some point.
This is very small.
Toyota's new Dynamic Force Engine is 40 percent efficient which very good .
But that's over half of the energy wasted .
Compared to EV it can go up to 98% and depending where you live it's from 8 to 15 percent . Regarding cobalt ,current batteries use much less of it and with newer tech we wouldn't need it anymore .