If someone forgets to “plug in” their electic cars before going to bed, are they SOL?
I believe early electric cars did have gas tanks, is that still the case?
There are lots of different cars out there.
The Tesla Model S is probably the most well-known pure electric car out there. It has a 200+ mile range. Most people don’t commute nearly that far, so you can go a several days without having to charge it. Depending on where you live, there may be a Supercharger station nearby, which can give you something like 50% range in 20 minutes.
Pure electrics don’t have fuel tanks by definition. However, there are a number of “strong hybrid” vehicles that have both a gasoline engine and a largish battery (the Volt and Prius PHV are examples). They can run on pure electric power for short distances, but have a gas engine for longer range jaunts. These may be more practical for many people (like apartment dwellers that don’t have a home charging station).
Electric cars don’t have gas tanks. Hybrids do.
Well, it’s a little more complex than that.
Hybrid - Like the original Prius, doesn’t plug in. Fill it with gas and the engine charges the batteries. Car mainly runs off the batteries.
Plug in Hybrids - Like the Chevy Volt, plugs in to charge the batteries but also has an engine that can be used to charge the batteries.
Pure Plug-ins - Like the Tesla, no engine. Batteries charged only via plug in. In your scenario, these cars would be SOL if the battery had drained.
There are different degrees of hybrids (HEVs).
A Full Hybrid can run on either batteries or internal combustion.
Mild Hybrid are pretty much cars that run on internal combustion with electric assist and other hybrid features like regenerative braking that make them more efficient.
Then you have your Plug-able Hybrids (PHEV) that have greater battery capacities than their Full Hybrid brethren and an internal combustion engine that kicks in when its needed.
The Tesla would be an example of a Battery Electric Vehicle (BEV) that is purely battery without an internal combustion engine.
I’m sure the day will come when inductive charging will take over and the physical plug will be no more. But until then, yes you are SOL for a few hours while your vehicle charges. Then again, you could always chance it and be overcome with Range Anxiety
IIRC, early Teslas, if the batteries were allowed to discharge completely, would turn into “bricks”, with total battery replacement ($40,000) required, not covered by warranty or your car insurance.
Call AAA and have them bring you a bucket electrons.
a Nissan Leaf
on a 220V 30amp circuit can charge 12 miles in an hour
on a standard 110 15 amp circuit they charge about 5 miles per hour
Some models have a heavier duty charger that can charge 20-25 miles per hour but need a 220V 40-50amp circuit
First part is correct. If you go 260+ miles, all the time ignoring the more and more insistent “Battery low, charge now”, and still keep going after the car drastically reduces power, and still keep going after all the screens turn black and climate control turns off, at some point the car will say enough! To prevent battery damage it will disconnect the battery.
The second part of your post is not correct. The battery isn’t dead, it is just disconnected. You need to call Tesla assistance and the car has to be towed to a service center where the battery can be charged and the disconnect reset.
Also, the Tesla battery warranty does apply under all circumstances, even if something you did damaged them. Only time warranty wouldn’t cover is if the battery was damaged in a collision (where insurance covers instead).
Maybe on later models. Not on earlier ones.
or
Yeah, it was a real problem early on. Tesla was “right” in the sense that this behavior could be compared to driving with no oil or filling a gas tank with diesel–relatively simple actions which would equally destroy a conventional car. But it didn’t take them long to realize that the problem could be fixed with a relatively simple change to the battery controller, and now they have a very extensive warranty on the battery.
Ok, by “earlier cars” you meant the roadster, not the Model S. Fair enough.
It depends on what kind of EV you have and how far your commute is.
I own a Mitsubishi i-Miev. It has a 16kWh battery pack and an estimated range of 62 miles. The fuel gauge shows how much of a charge you have, with little LCD bars. 16 bars is a full charge, 8 bars is half, and when you get down to zero bars you’re essentially on “Empty” which means you’re going into the reserve. There’s a yellow turtle icon which lights up and you need to find a place to plug in soon. There’s also a gauge for estimated miles remaining, which bases its estimate partly on your past driving and partly on how you’re driving right now. When you drive fast, it eats up the battery faster, but slow driving will take you a longer distance.
So, if you commute 7 miles each way, a typical week might go something like this. You start Monday morning with a full charge, drive 7 miles from home to work, and the fuel gauge says 14 bars (out of 16). Then after work, you drive to the grocery store, then drive home, total of 12 more miles, and now the fuel gauge says 11 bars (just under 3/4). You don’t bother to plug in. When you get up Tuesday morning, it’s still 11 bars. You drive to and from work, 14 miles, and now you’re down to 8 bars (half charge). At this point, you decide to plug in over night. But suppose you forget. Oops, now you’re starting off Wednesday with only 8 bars. You drive to and from work and on the way home you watch the gauge go down to 5 bars and the range meter says 23 miles remaining. No sweat. So then you plug in over night and Thursday morning it’s fully charged, 16 bars.
My rule is: if it’s below half, plug it in, otherwise don’t worry about it.
Okay, suppose you have to commute 22 miles instead of 7. Monday night you get home with only 6 bars left and you forget to plug it in. Tuesday morning, what can you do? Well, you can drive on in to work and now you’ve got just 1 bar remaining. Oh Noes! Well, pull out your 110V charger from the trunk and plug it in to an outlet while you’re at work. By quitting time, you’ll have about half a charge, more than enough to get you home. But wait, what if you forgot to bring your 110V charger with you? Then use your smartphone app to find the nearest Level 3 charging station. Oh look, it’s 6 miles away. Your range meter says you only have 4 miles left. No problem, just drive slowly and you’ll make it. Now plug in the CHAdeMO port and you’ll have an 80% charge (13 bars) in only 20 minutes. Then you can drive home.
In 2 years of driving, I’ve only run out of juice completely twice. Both times, I was so close to the charging station that I literally coasted the rest of the way. But if you do get stranded, you have several options, including…
- Call AAA and have them tow you home.
- Call AAA and have them tow you to the nearest charging station.
- Push the car to the nearest charging station.
- Push the car to the nearest 110V outlet and hook up your portable 110V charger.
Let’s imagine you chose option #4. Suppose you’re trying to get home, it’s 22 miles from work to home, and you almost made it but you ran out of juice 3 miles from home. If you can get your car up to a 110V outlet, plug in with your portable charger, it takes up to 26 hours to get a 100% charge. But you don’t need a full charge! You only need enough to get home, which is 3 miles away. That will only take about an hour. Or, if you don’t want to wait an hour, you could pay for a tow truck to carry your car those 3 miles and then plug in over night.
No, it’s not. The battery could be ‘bricked’ by just not having it on a trickle charger for a couple of weeks. One of the bricking situations involved an owner who left his Tesla in airport parking for a couple of weeks. Upon return, he found that not only was the battery completely discharged, but the electrolyte had broken down to the point that the battery could no longer be charged. This is a general problem with lithium-ion batteries. There was nothing in the Tesla-provided owner’s manual which indicated this could be a problem. And while Tesla has included warnings in their documentation and improved the battery management system, it is still a potential problem for long term storage (for all battery-powered electric vehicles, not just Tesla).
The problem with electrochemical batteries is that the rate at which they can be charged can’t dramatically exceed the rate at which they can deliver energy (by more than roughly an order of magnitude). They are constrained to operate at certain power rates and temperature regimes, and the ultimate energy density is governed by the physical properties of both the electrolyte (essentially the conducting medium) and the differential of the electrodes (where the energy is stored). Too fast of a discharge or too large of a difference will cause a breakdown in the liner or electrolyte. So you can never build an electrochemical battery that will charge in a few minutes and deliver power for many hours. It is a basic physical limitation of the materials that no amount of technology development will overcome. The other problem is that the chemical reaction rate is strongly tied to temperature. The rule of thumb is that the reaction rate will double with every 10 deg C increase, so a system that can operate at low ambient temperatures has to be way over designed (or have some external heating system) compared to a system that operates at typical ambient conditions for Southern California or Arizona.
Systems using a supercapacitor or something similar have the opposite problem; it can be charged very rapidly, but controlling the voltage output within a specified range for a long duration is very, very difficult. Hence while supercapacitors are useful for short term storage of energy for regenerative braking, but not generally good for delivering the kind of regulated power for electric vehicle applications.
Ultimately, the most desirable system is something like a fuel cell for which power can be finely controlled by regulating the amount of material involved in the reaction, rather than just the rate. However, the energy density of fuel cells versus delivery rate is a couple order of magnitude less than that of combustion-based systems. Ultimately, short of some technomagical innovation in either battery or fuel cell systems, some kind of high temperature combustion-based system–either internal combustion (the fuel is also the “working fluid” driving the mechanism), or external combustion (an external thermal source provides the energy to drive the mechanism–will required for anything more that medium range transit.
Stranger
Li-ion batteries definitely do not like being fully discharged. My limited experience is only with electronic devices, and it doesn’t seem too bad if they’re discharged to the point of no longer being able to power the device, then charged again, which is a sometimes recommended procedure for recalibrating the battery meter. But it’s grim if they are allowed to discharge and remain that way for some time, which I presume discharges them to a much lower level. I’ve had that happen both to a tablet and to my Kindle. Both recovered, thankfully, but it took some time and I was worried.
Not true. See this article. Or you can read the manual here, which makes it very clear (on page 5-2) that letting the charge drop to 0% will damage the battery and is not covered under warranty.
It’s not an unreasonable maintenance requirement that vehicles be trickle-charged in long-term storage. All machines, gasoline cars included, require preparation for and maintenance under storage. Gasoline cars will go for more than just a few weeks but not indefinitely.
That said, I think Tesla absolutely did the right thing in improving their controller and extending their warranty, but nevertheless the very few bricking cases were failures on the part of the consumers.
A “few minutes” is a stretch, sure. That doesn’t mean it can’t be improved over the current state of the art.
Eh, big deal. Modern electronics are good at voltage control. And capacitors do not have much energy left at low voltages due to the V[sup]2[/sup] coefficient. Their big problem is energy density. They are far behind lithium-ion and it seems unlikely they’ll catch up.
Unless I can fuel at home (which is unlikely unless it runs on natural gas), I’m not interested. A vehicle like the Model S would allow me to avoid fueling/charging stations all but a few times per year.
Also, current fuel cell systems have absolutely terrible power density compared to batteries. They almost certainly need to be combined with a battery or supercapacitor to achieve acceptable acceleration and hill-climbing. Of course, you want that anyway for regeneration, but at a certain point you’re better off just having a pure battery system.
The majority of homeowning Americans would already achieve a net time savings with a Model S. Long road trips would take longer, and the entire rest of the time they would charge at home and not have to visit gas stations at all. This will only get better over time.
You seem to think several-minute charging is a hard requirement for a widespread automobile powertrain. You aren’t alone in this belief, but I claim it amounts to a lack of imagination and not thinking clearly about the numbers. The time lost on relatively rare long road trips (especially when you exclude time spent charging overnight at the destination, or overlapping with rest breaks) is basically nothing compared to the time saved all the rest of the time–not just trips to the gas station, but all the maintenance that gasoline vehicles require. Oil changes, transmission fluid, belts, spark plugs, and so on. Hell, electric cars don’t even need brake replacements as frequently due to to regenerative braking! And people think that spending an extra couple hours on their annual trip to Disneyland is a dealbreaker? It’s crazytalk to me.
What about graphene?
How is this problem fundamentally any different from the problem of gasoline vehicles? If you forget to fill up the gas tank, you’ll also be screwed. Yes, you have to charge a battery car more often than you have to fill up a gas car, but that would mean that it would become more of a habit, and harder to forget.
Per the dead battery= ruined battery: did the cars allow one to run the battery completely down, 'cause that would be a bad design.
For long trips (and general use as well, actually) what about exchangeable battery modules? I’m thinking of my cordless drill. It has a battery pack that can be rapidly exchanged when depleted, substituting a more-charged one.
And I timed myself at the gas station, filling the tank on the Explorer. Took roughly 8 minutes, start to finish. If auto manufacturers could agree to an industry standard “battery pack” for vehicles, retail could offer both a charging station option, and a swap-out option. You pull into the “service station” (to use the old terminology) and your battery pack is removed and replaced with another. I’ll bet it could be an automated process, and I’ll further bet it could be completed (given reasonable attention paid to the matter in engineering) in under 8 minutes.
Customer could be charged for the amount of charge received in the new battery pack. And could be credited for charge remaining in the one taken out, so if you were planning a long trip, you needn’t run your car down close to zero before doing a swap, you could go in with “half a tank”, do the swap, and only pay for the half you gained in the net transaction. Such measurements and calculations of added charge minus remaining charge should be simple and immediately available to the automated machinery, coupled with the card-swipe point-of-sale machine. You just pay for the electrons of your net transaction.
Perhaps, given design choices and battery placement in various models of car, the entire battery pack might not be exchangeable. Maybe there’s a (now potentially smaller) “permanent battery suite” comprising 40 - 50 - 60 - ? percent (options available to the manufacturer, and potentially to the purchaser as well) of the total capacity, and a separate, standardized, easily removable supplemental battery pack (or packs) for the remainder. For routine use you ignore the fact of dual battery packs, they’re linked together and “transparent to the end user”, but the supplemental pack is discharged first. Then in a pinch, or on a trip, you can swap packs as often as necessary to achieve your total trip distance.
Swapping batteries is a nice idea for solving the two problems of [1] running out of juice on the side of the road and wanting AAA to bring you something which will fix your problem without actually towing you anywhere, and [2] driving cross-country on a road trip and not wanting to stop for twenty minutes to recharge every couple hours. But battery swapping brings its own set of difficulties like making sure that every car uses the same replaceable battery and making sure that the battery being traded in is in relatively good condition.
If you ask me, battery swapping is an expensive fix for something that’s not a serious problem.
For most people, commuting is a fixed distance. You know how far you will be going each day and you can plan ahead. If you buy an EV whose range is 10x as far as your commute, then you only need to charge it overnight about twice a week and you’ll never get stranded.
Most families have two cars. If one of them is a gas burner and the other is an EV, you can use the EV for commuting and running errands and then use the gas burner for out-of-town trips. EV owners rarely take their EVs on road trips.
Alternatively, you could have an EV as your only car and then when you want to go on a road trip you can rent a gas burner for the weekend.
The first couple months after I bought my Mitsubishi i-MIEV, I pushed the envelope a few times, trying to get the hang of it, learning what it can do and what it can’t. Once you get past that learning curve, it’s really no big deal. You get in the car, you drive to work. Twice a week, you plug it in overnight, which is EASIER than going to the gas station, and it’s about 1/10th the money.
I can’t speak to the question of why Tesla Roadsters had problems with bricking the battery. Frankly, it puzzles me why you would park the car at an airport for two weeks and not have the battery be at exactly the same state of charge as it was when you parked it. Did he leave the headlights on the whole time? That makes no sense. When I parked my Mitsubishi at the airport for a week with a 75% charge and then I came back, guess what, it still had a 75% charge. And I’ve run the battery down to zero twice with no ill effects. Anyway, all these stories about ruining the battery of a Tesla Roadster are irrelevant unless you’re planning to go back in time and buy one of those. If you’re contemplating buying an EV, you’re probably not going to get a Tesla anyway, you’ll get a Nissan Leaf or a Chevy Spark or a Fiat 500E or a Mitsubishi i-MIEV. But even if you do buy a Tesla, you won’t get a Roadster, you’ll get a model S. So let’s talk about what it’s like to drive one of those EVs.