A new generation of electric cars on the road. Can they replace gasoline cars?
If so? Why doesn’t the U.S. finance that idea, to get rid of oil for good?
It would require new technology that does not exist and an infrastructure that does not exist of a size and scope of the gas station network that exists. All for the benefit of a very few cars.
Batteries that would allow a driving range comparable to a gas powered car.
Recharging stations that can recharge the batteries in a time similar to filling a gas tank and the battery tech to make that possible.
Or, universal fit battery packs that can be swapped out in a few minutes.Which would require a redesign of existing electric cars and an agreement to a standard shape and size.
They will replace a lot of gasoline cars over time. The range issue is the biggest problem if it’s your only car…most people take some longer trips occasionally. Most families have multiple vehicles so at least one could be electric for around town & commuting. Price is the other obstacle but the govt. is providing tax incentives. Fleet cars are perfect candidates for transition to electric…no infrastructure needed, just plug them in overnight.
The Prius and other Toyota hybrids use a simple trick - to guarantee the batteries don’t die from too many drain-and-charge cycles, the power management computer never allows the battery to drain below 85% capacity. So 85% of the battery weight is wasted because the current technology is not up to current use requirements.
The other consideration is this: most power in the USA comes from oil, coal and natural gas. Replacing gasoline carbon emissions with similar pollution in a less efficient manner (by turning it into electricity first) is not much of a step forward.
Also, most North Americans want powerful cars, which means that it’s difficult for electric cars with todays technology to compete with the power, range, and flexibility (i.e. quick refueling) that gasoline engines provide.
Electricity is the most inefficient way to heat something; heat in gasoline cars is a simple byproduct of operation. For half the time, some drivers need heat. Even when air conditioning is needed, it will add extra power demands to an electric car that is already struggling to meet requirements simply for driving.
Plus, a purely electric car would need some time to charge, barring any wonderful new technology. Even if the infrastructure is there, will most people put up with that hassle? If your cell phone does not charge, well, you can live without a blackberry for a few hours; not so simple if you have to go from A to B. I suspect a hybrid, like the Prius or Volt, will be with us for a while as the best compromise.
Toyota is field-testing a plug-in Prius that will go 22km before it needs a charge. If you can find a charge at work, many people could use that as their commute car with almost no fuel consumption.
Granted, range and quick refueling – gas machines have it made, for now. However, I take issue with your insinuation that electric cars are wimpmobiles. Electric engines pack more power into a smaller cubic space than gas engines; they dissipate less waste heat and create less noise and other pollutions. They require less extra baggage (starter motors, carburetors, transmissions, etc.) Their big drawback is lack of cheap, efficient power storage. If a battery or other electrical storage device is ever invented that is, say, 4 times the capacity of today’s batteries with a 5 minute recharge time, the electric car is the one to have.
It can replace some cars right now but they don’t have the towing capacity/range of a liquid fueled car.
[Grandpa Simpson]They’ll never standardize LP gas tanks and it will take waaay too much infrastructure for cell phones to replace land lines.[/GS]
Power is not the problem. Dollar for dollar an electric car will run rings around a gas engine. It’s the range and recharging time that blows chunks.
Do you have a cite for this? A quick google search show your post being the only place making that claim. While the Prius (or any other hybrid or electric car) doesn’t fully use the batteries to extend the life, they use far more than 15%. And anyways, newer electric and plug-in hybrids use lithium based batteries, with a different set of limitations and advantages compared to the nickel-metal hydride ones used in the Prius.
First of all, very little electricity in the US comes from oil; and a good portion of the US’s power (about 30%) comes from nuclear & hydro power plants, which don’t emit CO2; secondly large scale power plants are vastly more efficient than small ICE engines, so even after converting the power to electricity, and sending it down the grid, and factoring in that burning coal releases more CO2 than gasoline for the same amount of energy (and natural gas less), the amount of CO2 produced ends up being about the same or less, for an electric car. And building more nuclear, wind, or solar plants could easily cut down the amount of CO2 the grid produces.
For example, when fed from an average of the American grid, the Nissan Leaf will produce a bit more CO2 per mile than the Toyota Prius, and less than pretty much every other car on the road. And I will wager than the Telsa Model S, which comes out next year, will produce far less CO2 per mile than any of the large luxury sedans it will be competing with.
And ignoring the environment for a moment, there are plenty of good economic and security reasons to drastically cut back on oil, which is mostly used for transportation. The USA has vast reserves of coal, natural gas, and uranium, while the amounts of oil we have are not so vast. The US spends hundreds of billions of dollars each year on imported oil; if that money instead went to West Virginian coal miners or nuclear plant technicians in Illinois, it would be a considerable boost to our own economy.
You are right about the quick charging, as there doesn’t seem an easy fix to that, aside from battery swapping, which provides its own sets of challenges, or going with a plug-in hybrid, like the Chevy Volt. As for power, the Nissan Leaf is only a little under-powered compared to other compact cars, and the 73 mile range (per EPA estimate) will cover most people’s commutes. The Telsa Model S will have a 160 mile range in the base version, and up to 300 miles in the more deluxe models. It will also be able to do 0-60 mph in 5.6 seconds.
Personally, I think the way forward is a mix of all electric commuter cars (and the occasional full on luxury car) and plug-in hybrids. Plug-in hybrids can drastically reduce the amount of oil used, while still maintaining the flexibility of a gas car. Of course, the price of batteries has to come down first, but they are steadily dropping.
And to answer the OP’s second question, the US government is already financing electric cars/plug-in hybrids, with a $7500 tax credit to anyone who buys a qualifying vehicle.
Yes. Next question?
Seriously, technically electric cars are possible, and have been possible for several years.
Do they have their problems re: maximum speed and how far you can go? Yes, obviously.
Do they require a new infrastructure? Yes, obviously. (Same as when gasoline cars were introduced).
Can those problems be overcome? Yes, if there’s the will.
Because currently the US is in a “can’t do” mode for most of the major problems. Compared to what the US managed to achieve previously, that’s saddening.
Yes, that’s not the same engineering as for electric cars - but the attitude behind is either “we can do something to change things” or “that’s too big and causes trouble (and OMG spending money!), lets avoid that”.
they can if americans are limited to city driving. no long-haul buses, no city-to-city commuters using cars, no trucking.
better for people to adjust the way they live to reduce dependence on motorized personal transport.
Well, exactly. To get usable range, most electric vehicles (admittedly, non-mainstream so far) sacrifice performance; although I am impressed with the new hybrid technology.
As for how much a Prius uses on battery - my hybrid Camry goes about 30 feet before the engine kicks in. You can’t even get out of the parking lot just on battery. OTOH, they guarantee the hybrid system for 8 years. The electrics seem to be for acceleration and for recapturing braking energy. The important things are - it uses a small engine for a big car, still has good pickup, and consistently gets highway mileage results even in stop-and-go traffic. For that alone, the technology is worth it. Compared to the Audi it replaced, in city driving it uses about half the gas and regular, not premium.
You can fix range, by getting denser cheaper and lighter battery technology. Recharging time is another story.
The energy transfer rate you get from a gas pump is ridiculous in comparison to electric power. Pump 10 gallons of gas in 2 minutes and you’re pushing the equivalent of 2-3megawatts through the pipe (including ICE inefficiencies). You can’t do that with electricity in a gas station type environment, not with anything that resembles current technology. So, on-the-road-refueling is going to be a long and drawn out process taking up over 25% of your travel time.
OTOH, if you increase range significantly (400-500 miles), you all but eliminate the need for on-the-road-refueling, since you will almost always do at-home-refueling.
Imagine if everyone had in their home a gasoline maker that could put out 5 gallons of $2 gas every night, would you EVER go to the gas station?
A better solution for the time being is the hybrid option where both electric and gasoline can be used, electric for city use and gas for longer trips or higher power requirements. It wouldn’t surprise me if all cars had batteries included in them in a decade.
Oil is used for a lot more than the production of gasoline, so converting to electric cars would not “get rid of oil for good”.
Yes, every time I went on a trip.
That’s why people talk about the need for a new infrastructure. No matter how true it is that the majority of trips are within the limited range of electric engines, that other 10% is a killer.
The AAA does regular surveys of holiday travel. Last Thanksgiving it reported:
That’s down from peak before the recession, which means it will rise this year. For all major holidays - July 4th, Labor Day, Christmas/New Year, Thanksgiving, add your own - 10-20% of the population will need a car that requires refueling.
The National Household Travel Survey (pdf) data is a bit old, 2001-2002, but long-distance travel - defined as 50 miles or more - accounts for hundreds of millions of business trips by car.
Although a personal vehicle may only be needed a few times each time by the average household, the structure of travel in the country is determined by it.
To counter this, you have a number of alternatives, each of which means major restructuring.
-
Instant electric recharge infrastructure is put in place all over the country, as accessible as gas stations.
-
Electric car range is extended to 500 miles, plus a smaller network of instant charging stations for longer trips.
-
People switch to rental vehicles for all road trips.
-
Networks of vehicle swapping or other devices are developed for one-time trips.
The issue is not so much whether these can be done, although the first two are dubious without some breakout technology, as whether they can be done in a
reasonable time frame.
Despite what constanze wrote, the U.S. does enormous projects every day. But the country is so enormously bigger than in Galveston’s day, any individual project is swallowed by the size of the whole. All of the systems we take for granted with regards to automobiles, from the very roads we drive on in cities and outside them, to the gas and service stations, to the restaurants and hotels, developed over many decades. You can go back and read how horrendously hard it was to travel by car any distance in this country until after WWII.
Developing those systems in the first place was hard. Replacing them will be even harder, because half systems are inefficient and resistance to change is both logical and emotional on the part of those being replaced.
We will need decades to switch over to a new personal transportation economy. We don’t even know what that should look like yet. Maybe hydrogen-fueled vehicles would be the better choice. Maybe no individual technology will ever serve for a country as large as varied as the U.S. That means multiple sets of infrastructure simultaneously with multiples of the cost.
The only known known is that simple answers are wrong.
This might be true in some countries, but in the US only a third of car-owning households own only one car and another third own more than two. Many 2+ car families already have a frugal commuter car and a roomier SUV or minivan for family trips. For most commutes, that commuter car could easily be replaced with an electric.
Actually, electricity is a darned efficient method of generating heat, as it is essentially a 100% conversion of electrical energy to thermal energy.
22km? Okay, that won’t even get me to the highway from my house… What about the other 57km to get to work? The return trip would be a problem as well.
The first two aren’t even dubious. Instant charge stations are not going to be doable at the power levels required for a vehicle with a 500 mile rating, no matter what battery technology we come up with. For that kind of power, you would need to use a non chemical energy storage method, like a capacitor, but ultra high capacity capacitors are also still severely limited in charge/discharge rates due to internal heating.
A 500 mile rated vehicle just MIGHT be able to be completely recharged in a couple of hours via an electric ‘pump’, but the more likely method would be either swapping out the entire humongously heavy battery pack, or draining and replacing the electrolyte (which still leaves a problem with the plates).
And, batteries in pure electric vehicles really do not hold up that well. The precision power control in the Toyota Synergy and the Honda Hybrid systems do use more then 15% capacity, but never drive a cell into deep discharge. Deep discharge cycles kill just about all kinds of high capacity batteries out there today. And who can afford to change the batteries out every couple of years? They aren’t inexpensive.
This is not correct. I don’t have the exact numbers, but the strategy is that on a new battery it will not discharge to below 30% or charge to over 80%. AFAIK as the battery ages it gradually “expands” the % of available capacity used once the cells begin to lose capacity (which happens to every rechargeable cell.)
In fact I think all current vehicles with electric drive do something like this.
Or the Chevy Volt can do that right now.
Anyway, to the OP’s question, undeniably electric cars are viable right now for some people. For many others, they won’t be until either a) storage tech advances to the point where a 950-lb battery can store more energy than 1.5 gallons of gas, or b) can recharge in a reasonably short amount of time.
You’re showing your ignorance about where gasoline comes from here.
Refineries use ridiculous amounts of electricity to produce gasoline. So when burning gasoline you have emissions at the power station and in the car engine. An electric car only creates pollution at the power station.
Perhaps, perhaps not. Let’s say you can refill at your destination, a hotel. You could drive 400 miles to the hotel on Friday, recharge overnight Friday and Saturday, and be fully charged for the return trip on Sunday, even if you drove around a bit on Saturday seeing the sights.
The trick isn’t creating new infrastructure, it’s reducing that 10% to 1%. When you’re at 10%, most people have an easily identifiable need to exceed the range limit, and it becomes a nuisance to overcome. Get it down to 1%, for a huge swath of people it’s essentially 0%, and the others can choose Hybrid, regular gas, or another way around the range limitation, because it would be once a year instead of 5 times a year.
Absolutely. Even if someone came out with a 500 mile electric vehicle next year, it would take a long time for enough charging options to get installed to make it easy to take long trips. Until then, it would be like the old days of gasoline cars, you have to plan very carefully to be sure you will have the ability to recharge. These days, though, that planning will be much easier, as the internet will put every charging location at your fingertips.