You're Being Lied to About Electric Cars
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It is a worthy investment to steer more money to EV production due to the simple fact that the stagnating effect innovation was not gonna go away. We should save petrochemicals for actual long term usage or actual critical uses like air travel.
It would be absolutely devastating for our future development if a major chunk of our fossil fuels was quite literally wasted on routine traffic when we could be using it to create novel materials out of it in 200 years’ time.
Carting around two tons of unnecessary random tech toys and the kitchen sink is inefficient regardless of the energy source. That's a separate problem.
Why argue a case when you have not informed yourself of the opposing view?
There is currently not enough copper or trace minerals (nor operational capability of mines) available for replacement of current vehicles in the US with EVs.
There is not adequate power infrastructure for charging EVs.
There is not adequate power generation for EVs.
What you are trading is the ability of most people to own and operate their own vehicle.
That's too much energy for the poors to have at their disposal.
Keep that in mind while you make uninformed arguments.
No fuel savings in the world can justify paying extra $20K for a car.
Tell me again there aren’t EVs at a lower price than $50k?
Tesla and Hyundai support faster fast charge rates than the Bolt. This does not disqualify the car from being useful to most folks who would otherwise consider an ICE car.
This assumes you recharge at home. If you recharge only at Level 3 (fast) chargers it costs more but it's still much cheaper than gasoline.
Routine maintenance is also cheaper for EVs.
I'm willing to pay a one-time premium for a car that costs substantially less to drive (not to mention being a lot more fun), so I'm a counterexample of one.
And I'm not sure why you think Tesla's supercharging network is a loss leader. They charge around 25-39 cents per kwh, and Tesla probably pays around 10 cents per kwh for that electricity. That doesn't sound like a loss leader to me.
In other words, you can't ignore fixed costs and cost of capital. If you take out a loan to buy $8 billion worth of land and deploy chargers there (about how much Tesla's network cost) - say 40,000 chargers, so a fully loaded cost of 200K per charger (land + equipment). At a 5% rate, that charger would need to generate a profit of $10K per year, but at a rate of 10% it would need to earn $20K per year.
Average electricity costs are 14 center per kwh, but in California or the Northeast, it's closer to 20 cents. Let's say Tesla makes 10 cents per kwh profit by adding 10 cents to their local costs, so it would need to sell 100,000 kwh per charger per year to break even at a 5% cost of capital, and 200,000 kwh at a 10% rate. This assumes zero maintenance, labor, or operational costs.
Assuming L3 chargers operate at 200 kw that means operating 500 hours each year at a 5% rate, or 1,000 hours each year at a 10% cost of capital. That's certainly doable, except you are not supposed to use L3 to regularly charge your car, as it kills the battery. This is why Tesla has been opening up the charging stations to other manufacturers -- it wants as many people to use their chargers as possible, even as it tells people to please not use L3 charging except in rare circumstances. In other words, the biggest factor limiting the viability of this system is whether they can get enough cars to regularly use what is supposed to be an emergency charging system.
We can also do the reverse calculation, and let's say the superchargers are humming at being used 8 hours each day 365 days per year, so ~3000 hours. That's a gross margin of $60,000. Subtract out the cost of capital -- say $10-20,000 and you are left with $40-50K of operational costs. That's money spent on labor, replacing worn parts, paying local taxes, etc. If each car is supposed to be supercharged only 20 hours a year, (road trip or emergency use case), then you'd need a fleet of 120 million cars to use the existing network of 40,000 chargers sufficiently to generate that 8 hours per day usage.
Again, a tough call. Obviously if you tweak these assumptions, you'll get different answers, but I did this to illustrate the types of trade offs needed beyond just looking at the energy spreads. My guess is that's it's too early to tell whether this pencils out for Tesla or not, but the key limiting factor is going to be the size of the fleet using the chargers rather than the electricity spreads. IMO this is a big bet on growth.
An EV can average 4 miles/kwh. Let's say I go on 4 road trips each 500 miles (charging at $0.35/kwh), and other times I charge at home where I pay $0.15/kwh. This yields $570/year, so savings of $830/year.
My ICE was purchased new with a 10-year warranty, and so far has been very reliable (fortunately). Maintenance involved oil changes and brakes, averaging $120/year. But EV will have more frequent tire replacements and higher insurance premiums, so let's call it a wash.
My ICE costs now ~$20K new. An EV with the same mobility* (500 miles of range with a reliable refueling network) is either the expensive Teslas or Lucid Air, costing $60-100K more. Even the cheapest Tesla, the Model 3 will cost ~$40K for the long range.
Even if the EV charged for free, it will take decades to recoup the upfront purchase price. Even for the cheapest EV, which does not provide the same mobility, it will take ~10 years.
Depreciation could differ, but since I will always need a car, it doesn't matter - any money I pay for a car will always be locked in it so not usable for other things.
Industrial mining activities leach chemicals into the soil, cause lead and mercury contamination, groundwater contamination, habitat destruction, and so on. Using dirty coal plants to power assembly lines puts smog into the air, ruining people’s quality of life, causes lung cancer and birth defects. The list of secondary effects is a mile long. On the other hand, driving a used car might produce more CO2 (Which the author is alluding to as being dirtier after X years of ownership) but has none of these secondary effects.
You're comparing a new EV to a used ICE car. Brand new ICE cars have similar pollution to brand new EVs. Sure, second-hand cars are better. Second-hand everything is better for the planet. But the world is full of people who will continue to buy brand new cars off the production line, and for those people, an EV is ultimately cleaner.
And for you and me, there are second-hand EVs out there which are even cleaner again than a second-hand ICE that continues to pollute with every mile it drives.
And the alternative is oil drilling and fracking. Not only co2 emissions. Oil production is an extremely dirty process itself, and oil spills aren’t uncommon.
It’s pretty laughable that you frame it as though oil is only about co2 emissions. Reading your comment makes one wonder why you left out the “windmills kill birds” comment. Not to mention in a lot of places coal is being phased out entirely, in my state coal is a fairly small component of the energy mix.
The largest of American mines are no longer even owned by US companies!
That may not be a concern to many, but keep in mind that for the entirety of mining in the US, these companies have had devastating effect on the ecology and local resources, such as water (possibly the single greatest commodity in the future dystopia of earth).
Tilting at windmills is an English idiom which means "attacking imaginary enemies", originating from Miguel de Cervantes' novel Don Quixote.
the headline of the NYT article he cites seems insightful and correct, and does not support his assertion of anti-EV bias or "lies".
that said, i do believe enough that, due to Jevons Paradox, we're all doomed -- with or without EVs -- as long as we allow the existing oil to come out of the ground.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
10 Greatest Car Engines Currently In Production
https://www.hotcars.com/best-car-greatest-engines-in-product...
There has to be some help transitioning “everybody” from ice to Ev. That’s way easier than pulling and making the power. But this, too, must be paid. I hope the political will is there.
> You've probably heard it all, too: A Prius is worse for the planet than a Hummer. EVs are coal-powered cars. Electric cars produce more CO2 than internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles. Lithium mining is uniquely bad for the environment. Cobalt mining relies largely on slave labor, if not child slave labor. Actually, that last part is sadly true. But the rest? Lies.
Later:
> Sure, more EVs will mean more batteries, but unlike gasoline, which always has to be burned, battery production can become (and is becoming) greener. Another way to look at it is the energy required to produce an average EV's battery is equivalent to about 74 gallons of gas.
Clearly the grid in Cali couldn't handle charging all the EVs if every ICE vehicle on the road today was magically replaced with an EV, but that will take decades to happen, during which the grid will be built up.
What happens when everyone pulls into a gas station “all at once?”
Throwing a load on a system at max is a bad thing. Switzerland is trying to make preparations: https://www.electrive.com/2022/12/02/switzerland-rumoured-to.... There’s only so much power out there right now and it’s often “elsewhere” than the major population centres (or mountain fastnesses).
Meanwhile everyone’s AC is going full blast at noon on a hot summer day meanwhile EV’s generally charge when rates are cheap.
A microwave takes 1000+ watts.
7,200 W * 1.5 hour/day = 7.2 kW * 1.5h * 4 miles per kW hour * 365 days ~= 15,768 miles per year.
7,200 W * 1.5 h / 24h/day = 450 W on average.
Plenty of EV home chargers are already internet connected and let you schedule when to start charging. Tesla for example let’s you specify to wait for low rates or use a specific time. https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/models/en_us/GUID-BEE08D4...
This level of flexibility let’s EV’s maximize the use of the grids existing infrastructure which will likely lower average costs per kWh.
Hundreds of millions of people aren’t all living in lockstep and many of them are trying to save money using demand pricing. A family might go on a long trip and use fast charging, but every family in the country isn’t going to be going on a trip that same weekend and try to charge at the same second.
There was that story a couple years ago about England's electrical grid and specific localities being stressed because apparently all of England would turn on their teapots at the same time after a TV show ended.
Some people charge at home, others at the office, and some exclusively at fast chargers.
Also, I'm not sure I can get behind the logic about peak times either way until we discuss how rolling blackouts would affect this.
It probably sounds like I have a side in this, but I do not. I do not currently own an EV, but that is due to up front costs (I do not even buy ICE cars new, the prices are insane for an asset that only depreciates). My daily commute makes me want to own one, actually. However, I do have an interest in making sure we are not saying flamboyant things like "electric cars cause less indirect pollution" without making even an attempt to quantify it, or saying unhelpful things about how the average load of an EV relates to whether a grid can support a lot of them.
I charged just fine to my normal 90% battery every day of that heat wave. Turns out that it's cheaper to charge overnight, so why would I charge during the peak anyway?