Overview of Early Electric Cars
lowtechmagazine.com
lowtechmagazine.com
First EVs were too expensive. Then they were too slow/couldn't tow. Then the range was too small.
Now people are griping that they can't "refuel" in 5 mins.
I guess we will see what the next excuse becomes for people to continue polluting and why EVs "aren't ready" for their hypothetical/once-a-year/niche needs.
Sigh.
Public transport can't get you anywhere, on your own terms? Sounds familiar.
The cheapest Model 3 isn't cheap, but definitely getting there.
I think that everyone would instantly switch to EV if it had the same properties but had a battery instead of a tank. They are faster, silent, cleaner, but it's up to leaders to bridge the gap making them economically viable.
Prices are heading in the wrong direction at the moment:
https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/tesla-model-s-model-3-mod...
Traditional car manufacturers simply don't want our money. It needs new companies like Tesla to actually make and sell the damn product.
Same discussion, different technology. We all know how it ended ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
https://ev-database.uk/#sort:path~type~order=.price~number~a...
In the winter I get about 90 miles on full charge, so not only am I stopping to charge, but I have to be at full charge when I leave. Also consider that the only fast charging station on my route is right around 30 miles in, and I'm running "on fumes" every trip.
I know there are cars with bigger batteries that will make it. But I also know they are another ~$10k, which is a significant upcharge.
- direct car purchase subsidies (almost exclusively electric)
- oil production subsidies. You might want to have a look at [0].
- wind and solar electricity production subsidies.
- road infrastructure building and maintenance.
- Road and fuel taxes do not cover this.
- Usually higher for the same size electric car because heavier. That could change with battery and charging tech improvements though...
One could also argue that the following heavyweights should be included:
- oil wars.
- untaxed negative environmental externalities:
- oil spills
- CO2 and other harmful gas emissions
- car tire particles from both ICE and electric cars ...
Outside of that I'm still concerned about the carge time. If I drive out of town to visit my folks and I'm low on gas I can just fill up mid trip no problem. How does that work if it takes an hour (a generous guess based on my phone) to charge?
That said I think the tech is cool and am looking forward to the price coming down.
So the real misunderstanding isn't with anti-EV people, but with pro-EV denying that there's a future beyond EVs.
Fuel cell cars are EVs.
EV's weight penalty is going away as battery energy density relentlessly increases. EV's capital expense penalty is also going away due to mass manufacturing improvements.
Charging infrastructure for EV's is basically a last 50 foot problem. Running 30 amp 240 circuit from a breaker box to an external outlet. Compare with the infrastructure needed for the 'hydrogen economy'. Every bit of it needs to be designed and built from scratch. Countries have built stuff like that but it takes decades. We don't have decades.
The other thing is that we still have to pay attention to fundamental limitations. There are hard limits to battery energy density that likely to never be crossed. Extremely fast-charging will probably always be limited by its high power power draw. Meanwhile, fuel cell technology is advancing extremely quickly in its own right. We could be seeing fuel cell cars that cost as much as a Corolla[1], and cost only $1.5/kg[2] to refuel (or about 2-3¢ per mile). In a world were fuel cell cars cost <$20k and are cheaper to run than EVs, while also delivering 400 miles of range and 5-minute refueling times, EVs quickly lose much of their luster.
[1] https://www.thedrive.com/tech/26050/exclusive-toyota-hydroge...
[2] https://renewablesnow.com/news/nel-aiming-at-green-hydrogen-...
In reality, we're nearly at the point where hydrogen is a solved problem, but batteries will be a very long ways away from being a car for everyone. In particular, you've ignored the limits on battery energy density which will likely limit battery powered cars to either expensive luxury cars or short-ranged urban cars.
Superconducing wires are already and increasingly used in practice. Even without superconductors we can just keep raising the voltage and use copper, there are new silicon carbide power transistors that make it possible. We aren't near physical limit yet.
Other assertions of yours are likewise unfounded, too.
I can totally see hydrogen airplanes but for cars it's too little too late.
And the "special alloys" really just mean certain types of steel alloy, and "nonmetal materials" really mean certain types of plastics. This is not a big challenge.
You still need very low temperatures and exotic materials for superconducting cables. Not to mention the power generation needed to sustain that level of power draw. This is a long-term problem that we're nowhere near solving.
As I said before, this is not a race and there is no finish line. There's nothing stopping fuel cell cars from displacing EVs at an arbitrary point in the future.
Electricity is a solved problem, most obstacles to additional power generation and transport are bureaucratic in nature.
Hydrogen is pretty much a solved problem too. Most of the critics are just stuck in 2010 or earlier.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_pipeline_transport
Lithium's energy density is 11,600 Wh/kg.
> In reality, we're nearly at the point where hydrogen is a solved problem, but batteries will be a very long ways away from being a car for everyone
I can buy a battery powered vehicle today. Seriously it's 5pm on a Sunday. However the dealer is open till 7pm and they have a couple of dozen Chevy Bolts on the lot.
You can buy a fuel cell car today too. I've notice that many of you guys are stuck in 2010 or so. Fuel cells cars are far beyond your outdated viewpoints.
Like I said, you're repeating many arguments that are a mirror of the arguments made against BEVs. It's pretty ridiculous to just repeat anti-EVs for something else while being pro-EVs.
The other thing is that this viewpoint is increasingly outdated. A lot of these "facts" date to the 2010s or earlier. These are more inline with a person being out of touch than someone that is informed.
[1] https://www.greencarcongress.com/2021/03/20210307-topsoe.htm...
This comes from the inherent thermodynamic inefficiencies of compressing something, letting it expand, and then compressing it again.
Most of these arguments are increasingly outdated, as I mentioned before. We're at the point where hundreds of billions of dollars are being spent on hydrogen right now[2]. So naysayers are more accurately described as being out of touch with latest events and not people with any special knowledge.
[1] https://www.hydrogen.energy.gov/pdfs/9013_energy_requirement...
[2] https://www.jwnenergy.com/article/2020/7/8/europe-unveils-pl...
We could make new gas stations rent batteries. Pay a subscription fee and you can drive around with a BP battery and exchange it at any BP. 5 minutes work and a tidy sum to avoid long charging times.
There's actual transit and the local government has their act together though so I don't drive at all.
Because of that it has been said that what made gasoline cars take over was the invention of the electric starter for gasoline cars.
Article on 'speed switches' for old golf carts.
http://www.golfcarcatalog.com/golf-cart-blog/golf-cart-speed...
Wiring diagram.
https://wiringall.com/1984-ezgo-marathon-resistor-wiring-dia...
Basically you use resistors to control the current in the motors field coil. Because the field windings have a lot of turns the current is much lower than in the armature. The armature is connected directly to the battery via a forward reverse switch.
But the good news is that batteries are improving year by year. Probably by 2025 there will be large scale production of EVs with solid-state batteries with better energy density, safety, and charging speeds.
It'll also be good to see cars start to make use of ultra-capacitor buffers to more efficiently recuperate braking energy. The more you can protect the main battery with a capacitor buffer, the longer it'll last.
I just don't think people realize that batteries actually are plenty good enough now. No breakthrough is needed. It's about driving down the cost to as low as possible and scaling out charging standards and networks. And ultimately, just banning new conventional cars outright (starting out by requiring all new vehicles to have a plug in a few years).
Curious how you are calculating this. I usually spend about 60-120 seconds refilling my tank once every 300 miles. (15 gallon tank, about 30 mpg).
Because gas stations are everywhere, I never have to plan a specific route based on availability of gas stations, or use an app to find where the stations are, or even think about how much gas I have, as I know there is a station on the way to wherever I am going, and all I need to do is pull over. I even have the luxury of refusing to stop at gas stations on the left side of the road because there will be another station a block down on the right side.
But with electric you have to go out of your way to find a charging station and it takes longer than 100 seconds to fully charge your car. So how can it be less time overall?
If you can charge at home overnight (or at work during the day) then you won't need to go anywhere else.
An electric car needs only electricity to operate, which is already distributed via wires to everyone’s home.
Both cars need tires; electric cars also need significantly less scheduled maintenance. No oil changes, no timing belt, etc.
People who have never owned electric cars just don’t grok this. Yes, some people live in apartments which often have no outlets for charging your car (altho they definitely do some places), but this is a minority of people in the US and so it’s fair to say that overall you likely will spend a lot less time charging than a typical gas car owner spends at gas stations. It’s a perfectly defensible statement.
It really is more convenient than gasoline!
Most people would like to have a charging station always nearby so that it becomes stateless for them, so that they don't need to think about how much they drove that day, and they want the charging to happen within a minute or so to view it as equally convenient as gas.
PEV have many advantages, but let's be realistic -- the convenience of charging is a disadvantage.
This does nothing for, say, most apartment buildings which don’t have charge points, or people who park on the street.
Building codes have had to be adjusted to accommodate, but new housing is a fraction of the total building supply in any given area, and retrofitting can be nearly four times the cost of a new installation. And these building codes usually target a <10% amount of EV spaces. Anecdotally, I work in an office building that meets these codes and is all LEED-compliant and stuff, yet demand for the limited EV spaces outstrips supply and you basically get rationed access to it on a first-come first-serve basis.
In contrast, if you have a plug at your house, you spend well under a minute to plug and unplug.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/31274/more-teslas-on-the-road-...
No car on the road at the moment is capable of making full use of 350 kW CCS chargers (the Porsche Taycan comes closest at 270 kW). Ideally you'd want a flat charging curve at 350 kW to allow for more cars to be served by each charger.
If you had a flat charging curve at 350 kW it would take about 13 minutes to go from 0 to 80% state of charge on a 100 kWh battery. Still slower than fueling an ICE car and still not full battery capacity, but you should be able handle 4 cars per hour per charger.
It's still abysmally slow.
For example, if you're on a road trip you might DC fast charge during the day and then slow charge overnight at a hotel so you start the day with a full battery.
My office had maybe a dozen, which is already not enough—EV drivers were required to go outside and move their cars after a few hours. I don't know how often someone who needs one is screwed.
BTW, 63% of US housing units have a garage or a carport. That doesn't even count those that have just a driveway. I have a garage, but I solely park and charge outside (my garage is my COVID work-from-home office space away from the kids...). In a place that experiences 4 seasons.
Charging scales better than any other new load we’ve added to the grid (such as air conditioning) as the vast majority of charging will be flexible within roughly 24 hours. After doubling like once a decade or so for a century, electricity demand has been constant or even falling for the last 5-10 years, which has been a major strain on utility finances. The extra flexible demand from electric cars is going to be hugely important for funding the maintenance and upgrading of our electric grid.
Nio has succeeded where Tesla failed. Nio does swapping and charging:
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a33670482/nio-swappable-ba...
https://insideevs.com/news/448165/nio-completed-1-millionth-...
Current electric cars do about 90% of their charging at home. As the battery size increases, this number would (for the same people) actually INCREASE. I do DC fast charging for my 80 mile range Leaf, but for well over a year I haven’t gone more than 100 miles from home with it. If I had a 250 mile Bolt or whatever, I would’ve had no reason for any away from home charging. 300, 400, and 500 mile electric cars (like Tesla offers) have even less reason to charge not-at-home.
And Level 1 and 2 charging at home or work or other destinations is WAY cheaper per watt of installed charging capacity than DC fast chargers. So if you want ubiquitous electric cars, the solution isn’t to just scale out DC fast charging, but instead make exterior outlets ubiquitous. Add a relay-controlled outlet to every light pole and parking meter. All apartment parking lots. Many business parking lots.
Cost per watt for DC fast chargers is around $1. For a home charger, it’s about $0.10 to $0.20, and often essentially “free” as you just use the included charger and plug into an external outlet or a drier outlet in a garage.
DC fast charging stations should be reduced in cost, but you don’t need to increase the speed that much as there are diminishing returns to doing so. Just add more slots.
It is on long trips where DC fast charging is largely unavoidable, but even still, 500 mile range covers quite a lot of area and all but likely-multi-day trips. If I can charge at my destination, I don’t necessarily need a fast charger.
The solution is to make sure there’s enough L1 (external outlets, which are only like $100 apiece) and L2 chargers (can be bought for as low as $200 now... with installation cost no more than, say, an RV or drier outlet) so that you DON’T need such massive DC fast charging infrastructure.
This is hard when few people have electric cars but becomes much easier when most people do as apartment complexes will install outlets on parking spaces as a matter of course. Same for workplaces, metered parking spots, etc.
A cheap IOT-controlled-relay external outlet is something that would really help make this more practical. Hard to get traction when electric cars are a small portion of overall cars.
Nope. It's the practical reality of what needs to happen when there are ever more electric cars on the road.
I think I'll still go with the autism causing, dinosaur burning dumpster fire on wheels for now.
I figured they thought about this a long time ago, so I'm just wondering.
A Tesla battery pack is 100kw/h. So under perfect conditions you'd need 100 hours of charging to get one charge.
Here are some examples of solar cars and their solar range estimates:
- Aptera: https://www.aptera.us/never-charge
- Lightyear One: https://lightyear.one/technology
- Sono Motors Sion: https://sonomotors.com/en/solar-integration/
- Toyota Prius experimental prototype: https://newatlas.com/toyota-prius-solar-roof/60461/
- The Hyundai Ioniq 5 has a small panel as an option, but you won't get much range out of it: https://pvbuzz.com/hyundai-ioniq-5-solar-panels/
* Can you get the car serviced at an independent mechanic or do you have to go to the dealer and pay whatever they decide to charge you? No amount of battery innovation will overcome $1000 bills to replace a door handle. Check out Rich Rebuild's youtube channel for a description of the service costs of keeping a Tesla running out of warranty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nq5c4jGR2gM&t=302s
* Is there a large eco-system of after-market parts and third party warranty issuers? This is required to drive repair costs down.
* Do we have good data on the lifetime of critical parts under actual use? This is required for consumers to estimate the operating costs over the life of the vehicle (whether or not they plan on selling it doesn't matter, as they will pay for those operating costs either in depreciation or in paying for repairs themselves)
* Is there a robust country-wide charge network that compete with gas stations?
* Is there a system to quickly get energy when you need it -- e.g. either very fast (10 min) charging or a swap-in battery system to give you a quick 100 miles of range.
These are not issues that require breakthroughs in solid state science. If the batteries don't last long, make it easier to service them or swap them out. If the range isn't so great, create a wider network of chargers. If the parts don't last as long, make them cheaper and easier to service by independent mechanics. Force a right to repair and diagnose for PEVs as we have for gas powered cars.
IOW, rather than waiting on breakthroughs in materials science, infrastructure upgrades can solve these issues, but lack of infrastructure can't be solved by breakthroughs in battery life. As long as Tesla is a monopoly provider of parts and service, and as long as the infrastructure isn't there, upping the power to weight ratio of batteries by 30% isn't going to do much to reduce ownership risk to consumers, and PEVs will remain a niche market dominated by wealthy consumers who can bear ownership cost risk better than middle class people.
* And of course, the electric grid needs a massive upgrade.
All of the above is well within the reach of existing tech. Whether it's financially feasible is another question.
What we SHOULD do is: take a step back and ask "what do we REALLY want to achieve".
We don't really want long range and fast charge. We DO want worry-free power wherever we choose to go. It isn't a novel concept to suggest: inductive charging from the road into the car (as you drive). There are probably other more practical ideas, too, but - and this is critical- you have to start asking the right questions.
On typical phone chargers efficiency is about 60-70% max..and it goes down with distance.
Yes we do. As the article demonstrates, they were making the same arguments 100 years ago.
Lack of range and charging speed is why electric cars lost out to ICE cars 100 years ago. ICE cars simply took you further, faster (and still do).
Electric is already far superior for every day driving and close to parity for long distance (super charger is fast, but not yet quiet as fast as pumping gas - but if you have kids you'll welcome the break)
No, 400 miles is about right as an average range as long as your charging is fast. ICE cars achieve that easily. The Toyota Prius has 640 miles of range.
> faster than a Model S
Yes.
> close to parity for long distance
It isn't. There's no point pretending the situation is other than it is. You can do long distance driving in an EV but you are going to spend more time charging than you would spend fueling. That's just a practical reality.
The Porsche Taycan is the fastest road tripping EV at the moment. It's helped by its fast charging capability:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFsjMvCFlig
It's an expensive sports car and on price alone it will never be a mass market vehicle. EVs still need to charge faster than the Taycan.
> super charger is fast, but not yet quiet as fast as pumping gas
It's nowhere near as fast as pumping gas.
Society can't (for $REASONS) even get potholes reliably fixed in roads. The probability of something like installing inductive charging on every mile of interstate is effectively zero.