Ones from the 1970s. Most electric cars nowadays use lithium ion batteries.[sup]1[/sup] That being said, I think the two weakest links for electric cars are the Batteries and the electrical grid.
Batteries are terrible ways to store energy. A one pound lithium ion battery might store as much energy as a half cut of gasoline.[sup]2[/sup] That is easily made up for by the highly efficient electric motor. I know the Nissan Leaf uses an A/C motor, which means more energy is lost in the conversion from the D/C to A/C. They did that because D/C motors have bushings that will wear out, and they wanted a no-maintenance motor. I understand that new technologies, including some sort of carbon-fiber capacitor type thingy, are coming down the pipe. Whoever is able to build a cheap, fast charging, high-capacity way to store electricity will be the next Nelson Rockefeller.
As Sateryn76 noted is barely up to the demand we have now, and could buckle under the additional load of a million electric cars. However power companies recognized the problem after the massive blackout in the North-east a couple of years ago, and have been slowly improving the grid. Also, most cars will be getting their charge at night, when demand is at its lowest.
Progress Energy (before their buyout by Duke power), Nissan, and the NC DOT were partnering to build 440 volt charging stations along I-40 from Raleigh to Wilmington. A lot of gas stations are all for this idea, even though it’s illegal to re-sell electricity in a retail setting in North Carolina, because while a Nissan Leaf is charging at the 440 volt charger for 15 minutes, there will be customers in their convenience stores ready to buy snacks and sunscreen for their beach trips.
1 - I know this is what you were getting at, TM, but it was a good lead into my post.
2 - This is purely a guess. I’m sure we have some chemical engineers on the board who would be able to give actual numbers.
And of course in America the biggest growth of plug-ins is in the PHEV segment, which of course can run just fine if no electricity is available. Start off topped off both tank and battery in the Ford C-Max Energi and you can go 620 miles before you need to fill up either again, and either will keep you going.
PHEVs are far superior in disaster performance. The one problem - you really don’t want sea water flooding your electrical circuits.
Separate subject but I suspect that part of upgrading the grid long term will be more distributed power generation. Some as individual home owners put on solar panels, wind turbines, and residential fuel cell heat and power co-generation (as prices go down). Some at neighborhood and industry levels. It avoids the weak link in disasters and even day to day - the transmission infrastructure. Especially (but not exclusively) in that scenario wide spread use of EVs can be useful, especially if they have V2G (vehicle to grid) capability: they can buffer the systems, charging when the systems produce excess power and allowing small amounts of their power to be borrowed to deal with short term local spikes in demand.
No idea, but I imagine the same will be true of Lithium-based batteries as is true of Lead-based - it’s very likely it will be significantly cheaper to recycle them than to refine Lithium from ore.
Either you’re confusing a core charge with a recycling fee or you live in a very strange place. Automotive batteries are sold with a “battery price” and a “core charge.” When the old battery is returned to the seller, the core charge is refunded, making the net cost the battery price. For example, if it’s listed as $90 for the battery plus $10 for the core, you pay $100 to walk out with the battery but get $10 back when you return the old one. It’s exactly the same as if they simply priced the battery at $100 while offering to buy your old one for $10. They are paying you that $10 for your old battery. You’d pay $10 to keep your old battery, not to recycle it.
If you’re actually paying $10 to have someone take an old battery you’re getting taken big time.
Is it not feasible that at some point in the future as the technology advances that electric cars (and their batteries) can in fact be 100% recharged by the wasted kinetic energy generated by braking and even coasting down hills?
I know that current generation hybrids do this now to a degree, but am I out in left field or missing some fundamental law of physics that would prohibit - if/when we advance far enough - technology could make use of kinetic energy to make range almost infinite?
More significantly, in the future all of that electricity will be coming from renewable sources, which for the most part produce electricity (hydroelectric, wind, solar, geothermal), so does nuclear - if you want liquid fuel, you have to devote large tracts of farmland to grow crops (there’s better ones than corn though, but this will become less viable as food demand increases, already is a shame how much of the U.S. corn crop goes to making automobile fuel when it could be exported to Africa or other areas that need it, or stockpiled in case the U.S. has some major disaster like a drought much worse than this year’s), either that, or use electricity to make hydrogen.
I did not think my scenario called for a perpetual motion machine but perhaps I am mistaken now that I think about it.
Perpetual motion involves no external energy source and I guess my thought was that a combination of braking and gravity could potentially generate enough kinetic energy to recharge the batteries but I see the flaw there. I completely understand that perpetual motion is quackery, but I was thinking that coasting down hills generates kinetic energy that is external and could be stored.
Obviously though going up hills would require more energy than is created.
Perhaps in a few decades we could see something approaching 90% regeneration with braking a very efficient AC motors plus solar and gravity providing the difference.
I’m in the camp that batteries commercially available must improve in many ways to make electric cars practical, in which case they would be a great improvement over ICE. There are a number of advances in battery technology that will marginally improve batter performance in every category, but not enough overall to be desirable. Something like the Volt or Honda’s upcoming plug in are where it will be, assuming the batteries will last a dozen years. That is a big assumption.
I’m of the opinion that advanced battery technology (allowing 350-400 mile ranges) is still some years away. The best alternative right now is CNG, driving a small turbine/generator setup. A turbine is at least twice as efficient as an ICE, and these turbines can now be made at reasonable cost.
Yes. Electric cars are here to stay. Fundamentally, we will run out of non-renewable fuels like gasoline and diesel.
That said, there are short-term hurdles. As noted, the grid isn’t as green as people seem to think. Growth in renewable power generation is needed.
Cost is the great question. Electric car prices need to fall and prices for gas needs to rise. This will occur, but the timeframe is unknown. It’s encouraging that electric car prices are already competetive at the higher prices, but large-scale adoption will require lower prices.
I don’t see any significant chunk of the fleet in North America becoming all-electric anytime soon, but in 20 years I could see it happening.
when prices of batteries comes down and they charge faster AND another technology doesn’t overthrow it I think battery powered cars will be the norm for awhile.
My cousin lives in Illinois, somewhat in a rural area, and his electricity goes out during ice storms or large snowstorms. They are on the bottom of the rung to be repaired as they are so rural.
This year he invested in a natural gas powered electric generator. It wasn’t wildly expensive, and now he knows that in the week or two weeks it will take to get his electricity up and working again, everything in his house will work just fine.
If I had the bucks, I would buy and electric car today! I don’t drive that far every day to begin with, and it would be great to just never have to buy gas again and have a quiet, efficient, ecologically sound vehicle. Count me a a potential buyer when they come down in price!
You’ll be waiting a long time. The Tesla Model that won MotorTrend Car of the Year costs about $90,000. Fisker has made some noises about designing a car that costs ~$30,000, but given the dire straits they’re in I wouldn’t hold my breath. Even if they had the money (and time), they’re just not that competant. As far as I know, Tesla isn’t planning any cars that are not aimed at the high end of the market.
Also, there’s no reason to believe the price of gas will rise significantly from where it is now, at least not in the forseeable future. Quite the contrary: thanks to shale oil, fracking, and other new technologies, the US is expected to outpace Saudi Arabia as the world’s top oil producer in about 5 years. Don’t expect to hear much about “Peak Oil” in the future.
You do need to forget about gravity - the energy you gain coming down is no more than the energy you used going up, and that’s before you account for inefficiency and waste. The ideal set-up would be perfectly level ground, and anything else is going to waste some energy for you somewhere.
Not sure how high it’s even theoretically possible to push regenerative braking, but you have to remember that at least some of the energy you use is spent on pushing air out of the way, and there’s no way round that.
That may be, but for now “A study of pollution in 34 Chinese cities has found that the electricity generated by power stations to drive electric vehicles leads to more fine particle emissions than petrol-powered transport.”
