If you have an 80 km commute every day, the obviously an all-electric car won’t work.
But you could have a plug-in hybrid electric car. The car can run on batteries, and you recharge the batteries every night by plugging it in. Or, if you’re still driving, an onboard gasoline or diesel generator kicks in and recharges the battery. You get gas or diesel (or CNG or ethanol or whatever) at a regular gas station.
Now you can refuel as per normal, but you also can use your car in all-electric mode for short trips.
Most people don’t have 80 kilometer commutes.
I think many people are confused about how electric cars will replace gasoline cars. They want electric cars to perform exactly the same as current gasoline cars, and be cheaper and more convenient. Except that’s not going to happen. If electric cars were that much better, we’d have switched long ago.
We’re only switching because the cost of gas is going to increase over the next few decades, and so if you want to keep running a gasoline powered car, you’re going to have to get used to paying a lot more than you used to. The reason everyone focuses on range and recharge times are because we’re used to cars that can refuel in a few minutes. But this is not a mandatory feature of a personal vehicle.
First, there is not one type of electric car, there are several different ways to go electric. (Just as fossil fuel cars are Otto and Diesel engines).
There’s the pure electric car with battery, with the limited range problem. One possible solution: mandate that all batteries are the same size, charge etc. and build charging stations where people just swap an empty battery for a full one. That gets rid of the problem of waiting 8 hrs. to re-charge.
Hybrid cars, where the gasoline engine charges the battery like Toyota Prius.
Hybrid cars where a fuel cell burns hydrogen to produce power. (Mercedes is currently test-driving a hydrogen car across the world and is right now in the US. Their biggest problems is lack of hydrogen stations, so they haul a few hydrogen trucks around with them).
Etc.
I don’t understand the discussion about the efficiency of using electricity to get thermal energy = heat. Yes, since electricity is already a secondary power source, using it to get heat is wasteful. But that’s not what happens in electric cars! The electricity is used to turn the wheels directly.
A sensible, long-time approach is never about electric cars alone, but about the whole transportation infrastructure. The Deutsche Bahn (German Rail) is partnering with car rental and bike rentals already, and heavily looking at electric cars. Their vision is:
you take public transport in the city for daily trips and to the train station
the train for longer journies like holiday
when you arrive, you rent a bike or an electric car to get from the train station to your holiday place.
So trains for middle-distance, planes for long-distance (coast to coast) and cars for short distances (suburb-city) along with a good public transport system, is how the transport of the future looks like.
But that means a big investment in many branches and areas, long-term comitment, the willingness to make choice (not take the car for every 10 yards, but walk a bit more) and re-structuring (suburbs out in the boondocks might have to be given up in favour of living closer to the city).
Like what? Care to name a few? The US is currently letting bridges and roads rot and fall into disrepair (risking serious accidents); letting water pipes go to ruin (loosing drinking water along the way, despite the fact that a lot of the US is dry area); has not managed to upgrade and unify four different electric systems across the country (which would also be a preparation for solar, wind and other renewable energy to be shared across the country and prevent short-outs); not managed to rebuild New Orleans after Katrina; not managed to improve the general education; …
That’s not the only reason. There’s also the dependence on foreign oil and the meddling in geo-strategic wars this causes; the problem of CO2 adding to climate change and AGW; secondary effects of gasoline-burning on health of people.
And completly re-structuring your traffic system into a modern one would also accomodate a lot of people currently marginalized because they can’t afford a car or the gas, but could afford a monthly bus ticket if public transport existed.
22km = 13.67 miles, assuming I’m not using heater, air conditioner or headlights, all of which would drag the range down. Assuming my math is correct, according to this link, the average U.S. Postal Service vehicle travels something like 23 miles per day, 250 days per year, so even your typical letter carrier would need to recharge halfway through the route.
The longest commute I’ve ever had was 11 miles one-way, so I’d need to recharge each day at work. That also means I wouldn’t be able to use my car for off-site meetings, doctor’s appointments, or running back to pick up my sick kid from school.
It also means once I got home, I’d have to recharge my car before I could take it out to run errands.
And if all 25 employees at the business I worked at had electric cars, my employer (or someone) would have to invest in charging stations. Since recharging 25 cars every day would involve a not-insignificant amount of electricity, the charging station would have to have some sort of pay-as-you-charge feature.
In other words, neither the technology nor the infrastructure is there yet. Someday, probably, but not today.
Like the Volt, the plug in Prius still has a gasoline engine, so the 22km is the electric-only range. You would not have to recharge if you aren’t able to. The all-electric Nissan Leaf has an EPA rated range of 117 KM (73 miles).
Could they, perhaps. The range and recharging time seem to make some sort of at least a hybrid needed. And if that hybrid uses gas or diesel those types of engines require running and fuel usage so the fuel doesn’t go bad even if you travel always within the electric range. A range extender engine designed to run on CNG or LP gas would solve this and allow mainly electric use. Also a add on, either rooftop or ‘tow hitched’ type mount, of a IC gas engine that could be rented easily when traveling beyond electric range could also solve this. Or over come the limitations of electric vehicles.
The specific issue is that heating the cabin of a pure electric car uses electricity purely for heating, increasing operating costs and reducing range. A gas engine doesn’t have this problem - by its very nature it has excess heat to dissipate, so heating the cabin is essentially free - you just run a fan.
This has been already addressed, but I’d like to say again that electric motors are more powerful than the petrol ones. In my experience (as a passenger only) with trolleybuses (which are essentially standard buses with an electrical motor instead of the petrol engine), they are very silent and have excellent acceleration.
Yes, and that is undoubtedly what the near-term will look like. But that’s not what the OP asked about and not what the people arguing for an all-electric fleet are talking about.
This will not happen in any realistic future. Extrapolating off the links I gave earlier, I estimate that Americans take at least a billion long-distance car trips a year. Cut that down to 100 million? I don’t believe it. See below.
Germany has a total area of about 4% of the size of the 48 states. I have listened to train enthusiasts for 30 years and each year they leave me more disbelieving than in the past. Trains are not a viable solution for the U.S. Not only have the centers of population shifted to widely spaced cities in the south and west but most of the growth in population also takes place there. There are a few specific corridors that might work for trains, but as a general solution in the U.S. they aren’t suited for intercity travel and can’t be developed for use inside metro areas, almost none of which have the nodal densities of population or the needed public transit infrastructure to make fixed trains viable.
The distances between cities will require an increase in air travel, but our air system is already strained. I’d guess we need to double air infrastructure and greatly expand alternative landing spots around giant metro areas. But coast-to-coast travel is a tiny proportion of air travel in the U.S. There are more than 50 metro areas with at least one million population. The system that puts hubs into Atlanta, Chicago, and Dallas would have to be dismantled and replaced by a viable alternative. Trains are not that alternative.
The future is already written. Long-distance car trips will increase not only in raw numbers but as a percentage of overall trips. Car travel does correlate to a certain extent to gas prices, but the removal of gas from the equation and shift over to alternative energy sources paradoxically increases the number of trips, especially long-distance trips, because it makes the comparisons look better.
You cannot posit a future on fundamental shifts in behavior. You need to assume incremental changes over decades in the directions that rational choices dictate. For any foreseeable future that means cars in the U.S.
I wasn’t quite clear. Let’s assume a “long distance” trip is >50 miles from home or >100mi round trip. I’ll make up some numbers here:
>100mi RT - 1 billion trips/yr (10% of trips)
>250mi RT - 250 million trips/yr (2.5% of trips)
>400mi RT - 100 million trips/yr (1% of trips)
etc.
My thought is, whether or not someone takes a “long distance” trip is irrelevant, it’s how many trips do they take that exceeds the abilities of an electric car? Want to get down to 100 million trips? I don’t need to cut down the number of trips people make by car, I need to make an electric car good enough to handle a 400 mile round trip without recharging.
I say this because I don’t believe we can technology our way out of the problems inherent in recharging time. Recharge time is limited by power transfer, and that’s Voltage x Current, which means very high voltages and very high current or long recharge times. We can technology our way out of total range, you just need better batteries, and batteries are always improving, nobody has improved on copper wire conductors in 100 years.
I took a trip to China last year. Shanghai has put elevated expressways dwon several main streets to alleviate traffic jams; they razed an entire slum district and have built a brand new commercial district with skyscrapers among the tallest in the world. They have tunnels and bridges across the river. They have built a subway system that will rival London or Paris. The maglev trainfrom theairport to the edge of downtown hits 431km/h and turns an hour on the subway into a 7 minute trip. further out, they have a giant container port 10 miles into the bay and a bridge over 10 miles long. This is just one city, and most of this was done in the last 25 years. Meanwhile, the USA has beenpromising maglev off and on for 15 years and several governors turned down funds for high speed rail.
Yeah the plug-in Prius (testing) and Volt (limited availability) are able to recharge with built-in gasoline engines. The more you can do with plug-in power, the less gas you use. If you are lucky and your employer provides a plug-in at work (or they become parking metered features) then you use even less gas.
The problem is that the USA is too spread out for european-style infrastructure. Auto commutes in excess of 30 miles are common; perhaps when gas hits $10/gal people will make commute distance a consideration in location. NY/NJ has he rail infrastructure to handle a lot of commute traffic, but everywhere else right now, the auto is the only choice. It’s not just commutes- the corner grocery,or even the grocery a mile or to down the road, is replaced by the megastore 10 or more miles away. Downtowns have died because suburbs, expressways, and free parking lots offer a much better alternative. It will take a lot of rail infrastructure or some mighty expensive gas to change that lifestyle.
You can argue what percent of power comes from carbon vs. other, but any additional capacity will likely be coal or gas. The saving benefit of plug-in tech is that it may create an off-peak demand, which means that the existing infrastructure can be put to use outside of peak, meaning more efficient use of existing infrastructure.
I don’t think anyone is actually arguing that electrics could completely vanquish the gasoline car. By that standard, the car has yet to replace the horse and buggy! But electrics could very easily replace gasoline cars as the primary private commuter vehicles in the US. Something like 90% of private car miles are driven in day to day driving which, other than uncommon excessively long commutes, is easily within the range of current electrics. That electrics are not capable of that 10% of driving is not especially relevant because alternatives exist, not the least of which is the second car most people already have.
I suppose you can pick your own figure, but in my thinking electrics will have “replaced” gasoline cars when more than 50% of miles are driven on electrics, and that seems quite doable with current technology, though obviously not with current infrastructure or vehicle prices.
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Auto commutes in excess of 30 miles are common; perhaps when gas hits $10/gal people will make commute distance a consideration in location
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Only 8% of commutes are longer than 35 miles one-way, which means that up to 92% of commuters could use a current technology electric car. Granted 70 miles might be pushing it in the Leaf, but over 2/3rds of commutes are less than 30 mile round trips, which is very comfortably within its range.
I am a major exception then- my commute is just over 100 miles, one-way. Some folks just don’t seem to take into account how spread out the USA is, especially if you live in the Big Empty (Wyoming, South Dakota, Montana confluence).
There’s a problem with the whole “x number of commutes are within y miles, which would fit with a lot of people’s usage.” GreasyJack, your specific example would apply to me, I have a roughly 36 mile commute one-way. But here’s the problem. I have to drive 36 miles to work, then another 36 home. But several days a week, I have to go to one or more of my client’s sites, most of which are 15-20 miles away from work.
Oops. Now I won’t have enough range to be able to get home.
I came late to the party, and have only skimmed through. I do want to cover a few of points.
No, the electric car isn’t ready to do all that gas and diesel do.
As political, environmental, and economic costs mount, we may find ways to get by with less car and truck travel. Public transportation, telecommuting, living closer to your job and shopping, etc. I recently read that the strictly residential suburbs are going to be choked to death by high travel costs.
Yes, once you have electricity, it can be efficiently converted to heat. Much of our electricity now comes from converting something else to heat to produce electricity.
I am not going to take time to dig it up, but Forbes magazine had a feature on electric cars about a year ago. It made a good case for plug in hybrids. One of their points was that you can buy a KWH from your utility cheaper than you can generate it with your gasoline engine. Put a bigger battery in your hybrid, charge it over night, and use the gasoline engine less on short trips, but you still have unlimited range.
No we don’t have the infrastructure or electrical supply to go to electrical cars. It doesn’t look like we will manage to find enough oil to meet increasing demands either.
My thoughts? We will see fewer conventional cars and trucks, less driving, and more of many other things. Do we need to haul bodies downtown to sit in front of computers?
Not necessarily, or at least it’s not necessarily true that both cars get used equally. I suppose this is crossing into the realm of anecdote, but at least in my experience usually one car is heavily favored in multi-car households. This can be because the second car is only necessary for running relatively low-mileage errands when the primary car is in use, which is most obviously the case in (most) families with a stay-at-home parent. But even with multi-commuter households, many of them have some sort of carpooling or carpool/transit scheme that may not work every day, thus only necessitating the second car for use on some days or as a backup.
So in what (IME) represents a typical 2+ family, switching one car to electric would still result in using relatively little gas. If you can find any publicly-available data pertinent to any of the above, I’d love to see it. Besides, even if both cars are used equally, switching one to electric would still result in 50% fewer gas-powered miles.
[QUOTE=jz78817]
There’s a problem with the whole “x number of commutes are within y miles, which would fit with a lot of people’s usage.” GreasyJack, your specific example would apply to me, I have a roughly 36 mile commute one-way. But here’s the problem. I have to drive 36 miles to work, then another 36 home. But several days a week, I have to go to one or more of my client’s sites, most of which are 15-20 miles away from work.
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You’re already pushing the range with your commute, and most people don’t rack up a lot of miles on their personal vehicles during working hours. Obviously electric commuting isn’t for you (although if you had a slightly shorter commute and a second car you could drive on the days when you had to drive around at work, maybe).
I am not denying that there are people for whom an electric car would not work, I am just ballpark estimating based on what data we have that fewer than 50% of gasoline cars could not be replaced by electrics. I’m also not saying that this should or will happen, just that (as per the OP) it is theoretically possible.
The implicit argument of die hard advocates of trains and such is that people should not be allowed to live anywhere other than cities, with vast unpopulated areas in between them all connected by trains.
This sitehas a whole bunch of public data, but I’ll just mention the one piece of data that may answer the whole question.
The median number of miles driven per day is 29.1. Since the question seems to boil down to whether electric cars can replace half of America’s cars, the answer to me is, not until half of American drivers can go at least 14.55 miles on a single charge, and recharge quickly enough to do a return trip.