Are We Getting Electric Cars in the US Anytime Soon, or Not?

Factual Questions
1

I keep hearing platitudes about how “eventually” and “someday” the US will “probably” be switching to electric vehicles (or at least, electric vehicles will share the roads with diesel hybrids, fuel cells, etc.).

Never mind that Revas are flying off the shelves in India, and Mitsubishi is planning an electric car for Japan. Most completely (not hybrid) electric vehicles in the US seem to never get beyond the floor of the auto show as a concept model.

What is the probability of me walking into a dealer, plunking down cash, and driving off the lot in a fully (not hybrid) electric vehicle in the next 12 months? If not in the next year, when is this scenario actually likely to occur?

2

The pure-electric Tesla Roadster has been on the market for a few months now. You can get one for the low, low price of just $98,000.

Word on the street is that the Chevy Volt will start production in 2010. It’s not a pure electric; it’s a plug-in hybrid, but most commuters will be able to drive to their job and back without using the gas tank.

Pure electrics are simply not feasible for mass-market yet due to the spreaded-out-ness of the US. Things are simply too far apart for a battery alone to get you there. If someone invents a battery with an energy density similar to gasoline, the world is your oyster.

3

Is that feasible?

4

Probably not. But fuel cells are much better, which is why there is so much development work being done on them.

5

If it is possible, no one knows how. There are things like ultracapacitors in development right now which are supposed to be coming on line by the end of the year. Most likely, these would need to work in some sort of hybrid arrangement. If used alone, they present a recharge problem. While capacitors can be charged quickly, to do so would require dangerously high voltage and current. You could swap one out for a fully charged one, but suppose you got a defective one which broke down in the middle of nowhere?

FWIW,
Rob

6

And not only do they have to invent it, they have to be able to manufacture and sell it. If it has some hard to get, expensive exotic material, it will drive up cost. If it can only built using laboratory equipment, then new machiney will have to be invented and deployed in order to fabricate it. All of this will drive the price up so much that it just won’t be marketable to you and I. Things like that start in industries and governments where there’s a need for it now, and eventually drives the price down. How long did it take the transistor to evolve into the newest Core Duo?

This makes me wonder how small we can safely control fission reactions? I don’t mean Mr. Fusion, but a micro fission reactor. Granted the things on Navy boats aren’t tiny, but they’re designed to run an entire ship, and they are much smaller than Fermi II or Palisades.

7

Pure electric just isn’t necessary, or (for the U.S. and Canadian markets) even good engineering. Here’s why:

Most driving people do is a commute to and from work, or for local shopping. In North America, 80% of all driving is done within 20 miles of home.

However, because we’re so spread out, and most of us can’t afford different cars for different uses, we still have a need for our vehicles to handle the 20% of trips that are more than 20 miles. So an all-electric car that only had a 40 mile range would not sell, except to niche markets. In addition, since cars take hours to charge, relying on all-electric means you could be stranded after you return from a long trip with an empty battery, and suddenly have to make an emergency trip elsewhere.

As a result, we demand cars that have ranges expressed in hundreds of miles. But a battery pack that can handle that kind of range is huge, expensive, and heavy. It means that during the other 80% of trips, you’re hauling around thousands of pounds of weight you don’t need, which cuts performance and efficiency.

This is where plug-in hybrids fit in well. You size the battery so that you can make those 80% of trips on electric power alone. You’re now carrying an optimal weight of battery for your most common driving. For trips that are longer, or trips that have to be made after you deplete the battery, you have a small gas engine act as a generator to provide power.

A car like this can be expected to average more than 200 mpg over its lifetime, and maybe as much as 500 mpg (0 mpg for 80% of trips, then 40-100 mpg for the other 20%). At 200mpg, we can afford to fill our cars with gas, both environmentally and economically. Or we can use bio-fuel (which makes no sense when you’re burning a gallon of it every 20 miles, but a lot more when you’re burning it every 200 miles).

I think this is where we’re headed - in 10-15 years, most new vehicles will be a plug-in hybrid of some sort (and a handful like the Volt and the Saturn Green-line plug-in will be on the market in 2-4 years).

We’ll only see all-electric vehicles in some niche applications like city commuter vehicles, urban delivery vehicles, and the like. The average family car will be a plug-in hybrid, unless we get an order of magnitude improvement in power density from battery technology.

The ideal platform, it seems to me, is to build a standard electric chassis/battery combination that gets a 30-50 mile range, coupled with a ‘power cell’ for longer duration. That power cell could be a flex-fuel internal combustion engine, a fuel cell, or even more batteries. Make it flexible, and easy to swap out, so as technology changes the fleet can adapt without wholesale changeout of all the vehicles.

8

Just for reference, check out these sites of companies developing electric vehicles:

http://www.aptera.com

http://www.flytheroad.com

J.

9

Electric cars are going to require an investment in the electric generation and distribution grid, too, I think.

I live in an apartment complex. There are currently no outlets near my parking spot, nor any near the spot(s) I get to pick from at work.

A recharge time more than 10 minutes kinda rules out the gas/power station type of setup, I think.

10

Sam Stone pretty much nailed it, but a fully electric car is impractical for many people because of range issues. We’re looking at getting a hybrid, but even if a fully electric car was available I probably wouldn’t go for it because I wouldn’t be able to use it for trips to see the family or whatever (which would be less of an issue if our current vehicle were more fuel efficient, but it’s an older truck that doesn’t run well on bio-fuel).

11

I think this is the most underappreciated shortcoming of electric vehicles.

12

You can handle a surprising number of cars on the current grid, because they would be charged at night when power demand is low. This would actually make power generation more efficient, as most plants are more efficient at higher duty cycles.

In addition, a plug-in hybrid gives you another feature - ‘smart’ charging. Since you don’t absolutely have to have the battery charged in the morning (you can run on gas if you have to), a simple ethernet or wi-fi connection to your car charger can allow the power company to offer discount rates when there is excess power available, and send signals to chargers to charge during those times. So you can decide how much you are willing to pay for electricity for your charge, and your car will only charge when the price is low enough. This allows the power company to use prices to control demand and make sure they are always operating at peak efficiency.

This doesn’t work with all-electric, because you absolutely have to have your vehicle charged by morning. If there’s not enough power available for everyone, people are stranded all over.

In addition, all-electric would be disastrous in the case of blackouts and brownouts. If the power fails for a couple of hours during the night, you may find your vehicle doesn’t have enough charge to get you to work. And since many people would try anyway, (or not notice), the day after a blackout would be punctuated by stalled electric vehicles all over the city.

Plug-in hybrid avoids all of these problems. It also solves the recharge time problem - if you run low and need to get somewhere, just switch to your gas engine and keep going.

13

It’s why home generators are so popular. Granted, I don’t have one, and probably the majority don’t have one, but enough people have them – portable and permanent installations – that you could fairly call them ubiquitous. It’s always good to have a backup source of power, because you never know what will happen.

Rating plug-in electrics in mpg is not really correct, though. Everyone forgets the price of electricity. If you never, ever use the gasoline engine because you’re always in range, then you conceivably can use infinite miles per gallon. But you sound like a loony free energy weirdo. Maybe miles per kilojoule or something would be more appropriate, or gosh, maybe a dual rating system?

14

I was talking about miles per gallon because it’s important to emphasize the difference between all-electric and plug-in hybrid, and how plug-in hybrid actually reduces your petroleum footprint dramatically over the life of the vehicle. Of course it costs money to drive even if you’re on electric power, and I didn’t say otherwise. But a plug-in hybrid should be even more efficient on electric alone than pure electric vehicles, because they can be built to be much lighter (don’t have to haul around batteries sized for the 20% case).

But MPG is the right metric to use when we’re evaluating vehicles for the purpose of reducing our consumption of oil. A plug-in hybrid vehicle infrastructure would reduce the need for gasoline by 80% or more.

But speaking of backup power… Another advantage of plug-in hybrids is that you can convert them into generators. GM has already shown a pickup truck called the ‘contractor special’, I believe, which allows you to run the gas engine on a remote job site and turn the truck into a generator. If everyone had plug-in hybrids and the right infrastructure in their homes, a power failure would just mean starting up the car, switching it to source power instead of sink it, and powering your home (at least to the level of the car’s output ability). This is a major feature.

You wouldn’t even need blackouts - if a spike in demand (say, unusually hot weather) caused an excessive load on the grid, the power company could ask people to start their vehicles and help supply power, paying a rate high enough to make it profitable for people to do so. Basically, you’d have a power grid made up of hundreds of thousands of small gas generators as backup. Very flexible.

15

Evidently they’re going to be selling hydrogen when they finish refurbishing a filling station near my house. If we could just come up with enough renewable sources of energy to purify all the H we need, we’d be golden. Just speculating as a layman, I would think there’s a huge potential for geothermal energy in the U.S.

16

Even if we had the renewable energy, and the fuel cells to use it efficiently, it’d be a headache to put the hydrogen infrastructure in place. Very few people will buy fuel-cell cars without an extensive network of hydrogen fuelling stations, and very few people will build the fuelling stations without the cars on the road to use it. It can happen, obviously, or we never would have gotten the gasoline infrastructure we have, but it’s awkward until it happens.

That’s one of the big advantages of plug-in hybrids: They use two infrastructure systems that we already have, the gasoline distribution system and the electrical grid. If we ever get practical fusion or economical solar power or whatever, you just build the new plants, plug them into the grid, and the consumer doesn’t need to change anything: Electricity is electricity.

I’m curious, though, why you think geothermal would be a viable option for most of the country. It’s currently only practical in a very few spots in the world, which are particularly geologically active. It’d probably work in the Yellowstone area, and maybe Hawaii, but elsewhere?

17

Chronos - I think it depends on what exactly you mean by geo-thermal energy. If you mean using it as a means of heating and/or cooling your home, it is extremely practical throughout the world. The infrastructure is not yet entirely in place everywhere, but interestingly, in rural locations, it is quite easy to set up - dig a long trench below the frost line, bury the pipes and all of a sudden your HVAC costs are based on the fan to blow the warm or cool air through your house, with a small amount of energy going into the heat exchanger unit. In cities, the solution is to dig down to about well-depth, and have the pipes go vertically instead of horizontally. The problem in cities is that we don’t tend to have well diggers because we don’t need them, so going vertical is far more expensive. Still, as the technology develops, it looks like it’s a better long term option than gas or electric furnaces with AC for the summer months, and the less demand on the grid for HVAC, the more power is available for other purposes, such as electric cars. Wikipedia link

In Ontario, there has been much talk about the ZENN (Zero Emission No Noise) which is a plug in car. Unfortunately, the talk has all been about how much difficulty the promoter has been going through to get the bloody thing past the government so that it can be registered to drive on Ontario roads. Zenn article

As the technology continues to develop, many of the hurdles to be overcome are more social in nature - our cities have evolved to have vast distances, and a car that can only do 40 km/h is just not practical without changing the rules of the road. I’d love to see a 30 km/h speed limit in place throughout Toronto (It’d make cycling a lot more pleasant, for one thing) but that’s a massive change to implement - arguably, too massive for most drivers. (Yes, I know not all electric cars top out as low as 40 km/h, but for the most part that’s around where the hybrids switch to gas power and for many rechargeable electrics, that’s close to their top end and beyond their best efficiency.)

18

Exactly. And if your vehicles can get 500 mpg, you don’t really need to go to exotic technologies like fuel cells - Bio-fuel can actually supply us with enough gas for our transportation at those kinds of consumption levels. That, and modest use of petroleum might be all we’ll ever need. Of course, the nice thing about plug-in hybrid design is that if fuel cells do become competitively priced, you can just replace the internal combustion engine in the architecture with a fuel cell, and everything else stays the same.

Actually, geothermal is becoming more and more common for individual dwellings in all kinds of regions. We’re not talking about hot springs here, but just using the fact that the temperature below the surface is moderate and consistent. We’re starting to see quite a few geothermal installations here around Edmonton. Basically, you just sink a bunch of pipes well below ground level and pump water through them. In the winter, if it’s -20 outside, the water gets heated by the ground (which acts as a huge, solar-supplied heat sink and maintains a constant temp year round). You run the warm water through a heat exchanger, and use it to heat your house. In the summer, if it’s 90 degrees outside you can do the opposite to cool the house.

Such a system is only useful when there are extreme temperature variations above ground - if the temperature outside were a constant 68 degrees, or whatever the underground temperature is, the system would do nothing for you.

Other geothermal systems run pipes underneath lakes or ponds. If you have a neighborhood surrounding a stormwater lake, you can run piping through it, cool down water, run it through a heat exchanger, and air condition your house with it for the energy cost of running the electric water pump.

These systems have been around for decades, but the low cost of energy made them cost prohibitive. However, at current energy prices, these systems can pay back their installation costs in 5-10 years or less. Couple that with government incentives for alternative energy, and lots of people are taking the plunge.

Here’s a good overview page from the Manitoba Government.

19

This is in no way harnessing geothermal energy. I have to believe that all definitions of geothermal energy mean harnessing the energy for doing useful work. In the case of HVAC, it’s just a more efficient exchange medium than the air is due to the constant sub-surface temperature. So it’s geo-thermal HVAC but not geothermal energy. Oh, and I’m not knocking it my any means. I’m absolutely thrilled with how cheap my ground-source heat exchanger is to run!

Ah yes, you’re right about the weight of course. But for all the hype about reducing one’s petroleum footprint, no one really cares. Well, some hippies in California. Okay, maybe a few more people than that, but the real, true thing that Americans care about is the affect on their pocketbook. We’ve not given up our Suburbans because we all of a sudden give a crap about petroleum use; we’ve done it because they’re expensive to operate. My geo system? Yeah, I take the equivilent of 10 cars or something like that off the road, but the true fact is it’s cheap as hell to operate. If gasoline were $0.98 a gallon still, no one but the hippies would give a crap about petroleum use. It’s misleading as hell to talk about MPG (and I mean the press and the intertubes in general) without talking about operating cost. Trust me, I’m not picking on you here; it’s an important factor.

20

Personally (and this may be moving this thread into IMHO territory), I would do just that. I would have a regular car for extended driving, and a NEV (neighborhood electric vehicle) for the commute to work, noodling around town, etc. Something small and no-frills like this couldn’t cost a whole heckuva lot, even new, could it?