Magiver, you can spank a Volt all day too.
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Don’t be silly. the technology is obviously in its beginning stage. In the future ,it is very likely going to make inroads into the ICE market. No conspiracy. Do you see those everywhere?
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I don’t see conspiracies anywhere, remember? 
I agree…in the future something, whether it be all electric, hybrid, electric fuel cell or something else will replace the hydrocarbon burning ICE. It’s just not ready for prime time today for the vast majority of people who drive cars today.
No, it’s a good thing. If he can afford it, he should buy one. I would if I could afford to purchase one just to drive to work with…I only live 15 miles from work. The trouble is that the ROI (figure I’d save perhaps $100/month on gas), even though I wouldn’t have to pay for gas, would be years and I don’t have the extra money to purchase something like that.
And we come full circle. If most people drive less than 40 miles a day, and if these vehicles are able to meet ‘most people’(s) needs and save them the gas money, then why aren’t they being bought in droves and already making inroads? There must be other factors you are missing (I can think of several off the top of my head), right?
Again, I’m all for the things. If I could afford one I’d buy one tomorrow…for the coolness factor if nothing else. But you are talking about paying $10’s of thousands of dollars more than a conventional car of similar performance and options to save me perhaps a hundred dollars a month (probably less, but we’ll go with that). That’s $1200/year. In 10 years the car MIGHT save me $12k…if I don’t have to do any major maintenance on it or replace the batteries in it during that time frame. If the car costs me just $10k more than a conventional car of similar performance and options then I haven’t even broken even, unless I buy the car cash.
When gas gets to be $5/gallon, or $10/gallon then that equation will radically change…and these things and other alternatives will be ready to step up and start making serious inroads. In the mean time, I’m seriously psyked that there are niche markets for the things, and that people are buying them in increasing numbers, because that will encourage the manufacturers to A) Continue building the things and B) Be willing to invest more and more in development of alternative technologies.
-XT
You can go here to check out parking rates for near that address in DC - that’s actually cheaper than usual going rates for parking round there.
And there is more infrastructure being built than that - a fun bit that I’ve linked to in a previous thread on this subject is Cracker Barrel’s blanketing of the Tennessee Triangle, “a 425 mile stretch of highway connecting Knoxville, Nashville, and Chattanooga”, with EV chargers, half of which will be level 3 “Blink DC Faster Chargers that can charge a plug-in hybrids battery to 80% capacity in just 20 minutes.”
There is also this planned roll out in the Northwest.
Still, for interstate travel you can’t beat a gas station fill up. Even if they get to a point that level 3 chargers are widely located, you are talking about taking a 20 minute coffee/bathroom break every 90 to 100 miles with the current capacity mass market pure BEVs (the Leaf and the Ford Focus BEV planned for later this year).
Until there is a significant advance in technology EVs sales will be restricted to:
- one car families with predictable driving habits that are comfortably within the vehicle’s range
- families that have another vehicle already that can meet the occasional need for distance travel or who are comfortable renting for that purpose
- fleets that will custom size a battery to the needs of their vehicles’ routes and/or who it is cost effective to build their own fast charge or battery exchange points
Of course that’s still a fair share of the new vehicle market.
Making people stop for a break every two hours or so is probably a nice side-benefit. People need to recharge, too.
No you can’t. You’ll go through the battery in minutes if you try to hot rod it.
Which is another way of saying you can’t get where you’re going in a timely manner and will be on the road for hours more than necessary when traveling long distances.
However, we need to keep in mind that if gas prices increase radically, the underlying reason is due to petroleum prices rising. This will push the price of all related fuels up, which will cause the price of most electricity to rise, too, since most electric power is generated by petroleum.
People can recharge quicker than cars. Grab a sandwich from a quick stop and you’re back on the road in 5 minutes unless you have to wait 4 hours for your car to fill up.
Magiver, so what if you use up the battery faster spanking the Volt. For those days you want to hot rod all day you’ll be using more gas keeping the battery fully charged. Your gas free period will only be a small part of your day’s fun that day but you will get your full day’s spank in. With the Volt.
Musicat. No. most electric power is not generated by petroleum. About 1% is. In America 44% is coal, 23% is natural gas, and about 20% is nuclear. 10% renewables (including hydro). Most new generation has come from renewables, specifically over 63% of new capacity gains came from wind. Natural gas use is also on the rise.
Moving along …
If two vehicles both meet your needs what premium over a comparable ICE is justified with an EV at different gas prices?
Nissan Leaf gets roughly 100 miles per recharge (depending on driving habits) and uses up about 16kW in the process. Assume 12,000 miles per year. That’s 1920kW/year. Let’s assume that electricity stays fairly constant at $0.10/kW so that’s $192/y for the electricity.
The comparable Sentra runs about maybe 450 gallons for the same year. Let’s use that.
Let’s use the 5 year average ownership of a new car and assume the same depreciation per vehicle. Don’t forget that the ICE needs service (oil and transmission fluid changes brake pads, etc) that the pure BEV does not. We’ll ignore the value of your time, just count about $400 a year ballpark. Heck, lowball it to $300. Over 5 years $1500. Tires and others stuff they both have so we will ignore those ongoing costs. Ignore externalized costs, like energy dependence and GHG emissions.
What combinations of decreased battery cost and increased gas costs put the EV ahead?
450 gallons at $3/g =$1350/y. 5 years comes to $6750. Total $8250 running costs.
at $4/g = $1800/y. 5 years comes to $9000. Total $10,500 running costs.
at 5/g = 2250/y. 5 years comes to $11,250. Total $12,750 running costs.
The Leaf over the 5 years is $192/y. 5 year running costs $960.
So the premium for the battery can be $7290 at $3/g, $9540 at $4/g, and $11,790 at $5/g.
Currently the difference between the two vehicles is about $12,800 without the tax credit and $5,300 with it.
So for the consumer, who gets a tax credit, it pays to buy the Leaf today over the comparable ICE even at $3/g gas and at $4/g gas they’ll save over $4000. To make sense without tax credits the cost spread needs to come down by $5500 assuming gas drops back to $3/g and stays there over 5 years, by $3300 assuming the current $4/g is the average for the five years, and still needs to drop by $1000 even assuming an average price of $5/g over the five years of ownership.
Now I personally think gas is more likely to average higher than $4/g from 2012 to 2017 than less, but assuming the $4/g mark is the average over that time and beyond, will getting volumes up lead to economies of scale enough to get price differentials down by $3300, such that the tax credit is no longer needed by the time it phases out? Given the fact that battery prices have dropped from over $650/kWh in 2009 to about $450/kWh in 2011, and that phase out does not begin until a manufacturer sells 200,000 vehicles and is at 50% for the next 200,000 and 25% for the 200,000 after that, and that battery prices are expected to continue drop at a rate of 7.5%/year or more annually from here, I would think so.
(Of course significant increases in ICE efficiency would change that calculus. How much better will ICE’s run 5 years from now? There are some good diesels utilizing start stop technology in the EU …)
That statement is simply incorrect, at least for the US. Very little electric power in the US is created by from petroleum - coal, nuclear, natural gas, and hydroelectric plants produce more than 95% of the electricity for the US. CITE. Even wind & solar produce more electrical power. Now, petroleum based fuels are needed to transport coal & uranium, but even a large increase in transport cost would increase the price of electricity slightly, since the transport cost is such a small portion of the overall operation.
And if you are going to compare the Chevy Volt to any conventional car, the closest equivalent would be the Chevy Cruze, which shares the same underlying platform as the Volt.
You promoted the hp of an electric car and that is a misnomer in the real world. The energy density simply is not there.
And while we’re on the subject of the Volt, what do you think is going to happen when the car loses 20% of it’s battery capacity in the first 5 years? The real world mileage of 35 miles to a charge is going to go down to 28 in the summer and the 27 miles per charge in winter is going down to 22 miles.
Well apparently ,in your mind, no technical improvements and innovations are possible in electric cars. They will not get better batteries or develop longer range.
I suppose you should tell that to companies that are working hard on batteries. There are several that are investing millions in the future of electric cars. I did not know when the Volt was offered ,it would never get better .
Magiver the Volt was compared to the Aveo. That’s not its performance peer and is a silly comparison. The torque of EVs is impressive. Now one is free to complain that their zero to sixty is not so great compared to muscle cars, but in the real world most of us are not caring about that. Real world driving experience is mostly about torque. And there EVs kick ass.
RandomLetters, yes it is based off of the Cruze platform, but its electric motor does circles around the Cruze’s ICE. The Cruze only produces 123 pound-feet of torque. Driving a car that produces 273 pound-feet, like the Volt does, is a whole 'nuther driving experience. And some want to pay a premium for that experience.
What happens as the batteries capacity wears down incrementally, Magiver? They adjust the software to expand the range that it operates out of. They have the battery operating in a fraction of its capacity, avoiding deep discharge to extend life - once it starts to degrade they can extend it deeper. If it doesn’t last the eight years doing that then they replace it under warranty and, again, they’ve priced in doing that once for each vehicle to be conservative. That’s part of its inflated price. Once the batteries prove they last as advertised they can figure replacing fewer of them.
As far as the price comparisons. Put it another way less appealing to American car buyers but being consider by Renault for the EU.
Sell an EV at the same exact price as a comparable ICE and lease the battery. At the current $450/kWh the Leaf’s 24kWh battery has $910,800 to amortize over its expected 8 to 10 year life. Call it 8 years. That comes to $112.50/month. At $4 gallon average that lease could be $160/month and its a wash.
Alternative-Energy-News.info domain is for sale | Buy with Epik.com here is just some of the battery innovation in the future. The Volt opened the door. It will eventually close on ICE .
If you’ve followed what I’ve written in these threads you’ll know I’ve been watching alternative fuel technology since the 70’s. It’s been a reading passion of mine for 40 years. If I had the money I would build an electric car right now. The Volt is not practical and is basically a reworked and over-priced Prius. I’ve explained this in detail. If the goal is a reduction of gasoline then currently (I say again CURRENTLY) we would be better served by a fleet of 40 mpg cars sold in the mid-teens then a bunch of expensive $40K toys that don’t fill the full spectrum of driving. A volt SUCKS when it’s not on batteries. It’s advertised range is “up to 40 miles” on a charge which is a nice way of saying 35 in summer and 27 in winter in the real world. They are money losers right now. Chrysler is absolutely right with their decision to abandon them until the technology catches up.
We could be driving 60 mpg diesel Fords RIGHT NOW if we rolled back our diesel EPA requirements. These are cars real people can afford which means more people buy them which means the intended purpose of lowering our oil use actually happens. So far the Volt has sold a few hundred each month. From a functional standpoint it’s an overpriced joke at the tax payers expense. Cudo’s and bragging rights to people who can afford such a car but they are not moving technology forward with the purchase. It’s old technology that hasn’t been perfected yet and they are promoting wasted resources that could be put into building something useful.
battery technology is not where it needs to be right now. We would be better off with hydraulic hybrids for the same cost and better still with the high mileage cars already on the market.
I , GM and almost all auto companies disagree. The time to start electrics is at least now, since GM aborted the EV long ago.
Should they have made higher mileage diesels a long time ago? Sure.
Are you seriously claiming coal is not petroleum? Let’s define Petroleum:
So that would be oil, gas and coal or oil shale (solid material).
According to this site, electric generation by coal, gas and oil in the U.S. is about 69%, not 1%. Not including coal and gas is not only deceptive, but very wrong.
So, most US power is generated by petroleum, as I originally claimed.
Do you seriously think that power generation by nuclear, hydro and other sources will be sold for the same price if oil goes up? Wouldn’t that contradict the law of supply and demand?
There is no law of supply and demand. We control markets to increase profit regardless of the available supply. Oil has gone up a lot since the unrest in the middle east. The Saudis said don’t worry about supply, we can keep it level. But speculators drove the price up .
Who is this “we”? The Illuminati? AFAIK, all attempts to repeal the Law of Supply & Demand, like the Law of Gravity, have been doomed to failure.
No, coal is not petroleum. Hence the DOE’s having a separate pie wedge for “petroleum” and “coal” and “natural gas”. And your own link as well which state that petroleum is 1% of electricity generation. They are all “fossil fuel”, not all “petroleum”.
But presuming that you really somehow were functioning under the delusion that coal is “petroleum”, then your point is very very stupid: the “petroleum” that is coal does not increase in price because the “petroleum” that is, well, petroleum, and used to produce gasoline, also known in some parts as petrol, goes up in price. Significant price rises in oil prices do not directly effect electricity prices. (Oh, some indirect effects. Shipping costs are higher, new plant construction costs go up … but no direct effect.)