Yes. But for those people who only travel occasionally, the lifespan loss is small. Also, as EV batteries drop in price, they won’t cost as much to replace and better EV batteries should have longer cycle lifespans.
For perpetual travelers, they have just the thing : Priuses.
I personally love the electric car, it’s the batteries that I think that are the Achilles’ heel to it. The electric engine is great, however. On the Tesla S model it puts out the equivalent of 362 HP, and only weighs 70 lbs, that’s it. Compare that to any petrol engine, and you can easily be looking at 5-12x that. And they have far less maintenace issues than petro or diesel cars. But the batteries for that particular Tesla model weigh 1,323 lbs at a cost of $12,000, and make up 28.59% of the total weight of the car. Costs of any all-electric car with the batteries puts it out of cost range for most folk. They are very impressive with their acceleration and top speed, imagine what it would be without hauling around that much extra weight. For efficiency, if every electric vehicle wasn’t having to haul around over a half a ton of batteries it would save a tremendous amount of energy, probably closer to a ton when you figure less weight for the engine and transmission too.
Seen a cite where we have 253 million cars in America. If all went totally electric using the batteries, multiply that by $12,000 and we’re talking over 3 trillion dollars just for the batteries. I read the battery pack only weighs 90-100lbs for the Toyota Prius hybrid, since the petrol engine is still taking a good portion of the driving especially on extended drives. That still translates to over 600 billion figuring if everyone went to that, and just using the $2,500 figure for their battery pack which would only be 90 lbs. I do like the Prius alot myself, just can’t justify it economically as most can’t.
Using running coach’s NHS figure of 164,000 miles, if costs were 1 million per mile, that was given, that would be $164 billion. I have no idea what kind of voltage we would be talking about, and it would involve other requirements than your typical overhead wire. Here’s a cite that estimated per mile costs after Hurricane Sandy to run wires, which was mostly comparing underground versus overhead line wire costs:
As unsightly as I think the overhead wires are, Voyager is probably right going with this vs underground wires due to cost efficiency. Guess that explains why some cities are sticking with overhead wires for their trolley cars.
If they opted for something other than overhead wires, our superhighways run about $5 million a mile to do one of those, but that is not needed from what I’ve read, and wouldn’t require taking it all out. And of course, more powerplants would also have to be built to power the millions of cars that would be using it daily if nearly all cars went with this. With powerplants costing a couple of billion a piece, how many needed would have to be determined by each day how many cars traveling x amount of miles on the NHS. Natural gas power plants are certainly cleaner burning that coal, and often been cheap to build compared to nuclear, don’t know what the wind farm costs are, or solar and other alternative cleaner energies, and what percentage of the load they could take; haven’t looked at that data in a long time. For the envirnoment, the electrified highway would easily win out over the petrol cars.
From that same cite, it also says this:
Using these figures to do all of the roads and all of the lanes, I could see the costs going out of control. Overall, it would be a major undertaking just concentrating on the 164,000 miles, no doubt. Perhaps, they would consider maybe a study of doing 10% of that.
My guess, is that China or possibly some European country may be the first to take this on a larger scale. In America we’ve got other issues we will be dealing with for at least the next 3 or 7 years, anyway, and a president with a large following that can’t be convinced the greenhouse effect is real.
Britain will no longer sell gasoline or diesel cars by the year 2040. France has taken similar steps, as have a handful of other European countries, but to my knowledge, most are still going with electric cars powered by the batteries. China has set a cap of 2030 on their carbon emmisions, and I also believe is already going to phase out the petrol car by a certain year not too long after that. Many are doing this because of the greenhouse-effect, but for other reasons as well.
Yeah, you absolutely need to bury the lines: if a semi rolls and takes out a power pole, now you have several miles of dead cars. Underground just makes more sense. And if there is a washout that breaks the lines, just as well, because that stops your car instead of the hole in the road.
I think 4 million miles of roads in the US includes the Hay Creek Rd I mentioned above, which is gravel, goes through trackless pasture and gets five or six cars a day. Embedded charging would probably only cover about a third of US roads. Which means it is an addition to the battery pack that you will still need to have.
Batteries are expensive as well as heavy. One battery pack costs thousands of dollars. In order for this to work, someone would have to invest a huge amount of money in swappable battery packs, so they’d be available on demand to any electric car owner who needed one. To recoup the investment, one would have to charge a lot for the service of swapping packs. You’d be competing against the price of recharging a car’s batteries by plugging the car in, which would certainly be a lot cheaper than swapping batteries.
Another problem is value. Batteries deteriorate over time, so when you swap one for another they may not be equivalent. That is, the driver could be trading in a battery that’s near the end of its life for one that’s new, or vice versa. I can see only two ways around this. One is for a single company to own all car batteries, so that no one is being short-changed by a swap of different-valued batteries. The other would be to have some way of keeping track of the value of each individual battery, and to add the difference in values to the transaction each time you swap batteries. Neither option seems good to me.
A third problem is compatibility. Currently (no pun intended) each make and model of electric car uses a different battery pack. To deal with this, a battery station would have to stock many different types of batteries. Either that, or there would have to be different stations for different cars. Standardizing battery packs would minimize this problem, but the technology is changing so quickly that I don’t think it’s a good idea to freeze things in place.
My guess is that you don’t live in an apartment (or condo or in a densely populated city that relies on street parking).
This isn’t a solution if you don’t/can’t park in the same place every day - which is true for a not small percentage of people who do live in urban areas. Even if you do, it is simply not possible to put a charging station in many buildings’ garages or lots.
I get enough jackholes parking in my dedicated parking space as it is - I don’t want them running up my electric bill as well.
Seems like by changing the anode, charging time can be reduced . @320kw, a 60kwh battery would recharge in ~11 mins.
And there is work also going on in solid state (solid electrolyte) batteries.
NCM811 cell will also make batteries more energy dense.
Future looks promising. Perhaps in next 7-8 yrs 30-50% cars sold would be EVs. Building more manufacturing Capacity would be the key…For ex. 300gwh annual capacity can produce only 5 million EVs of 60 kWh each…World annually sells arnd 80 million IC engine vehicles today.
Can’t have your cake and eat it to. The batteries have to be counted as part of the engine. If you had a flow battery, the tank of electrolytes would be the “fuel” and the “engine” would be the reaction cells where the electrolytes are reacted. It’s just that lithium batteries combine the storage and energy production into one fused unit.
As for those cost numbers, they are plummeting and will continue to drop. If you think about it, mass producing batteries is doing several thousand steps that are the same thing every single time. Make the robots doing it faster and less error prone and cheaper per unit of robot, and the costs to manufacture go lower and lower.
Right now, costs are down to $145 a kWh.
Once they hit $50 a kWh, the 60 kWh hour pack for a medium range EV (about 220 miles) will be just $3000.
For more range, I think that ultimately a lot of the long range EVs will have a range extending fuel burning engine.
Electric roadways will not happen because their costs cannot be reduced in this way, since unique labor and planning and construction must be done for every mile that is upgraded.
My car charger came with a padlock.
Did your parking space?
All the talk of EV’s being competitive with ice cars is just that. Until an EV can compete with the same ease of refueling they will not replace ice cars. That difference is a fast charging battery. When that happens their will be a stampede to buy them.
A new technology doesn’t need to be a drop-in replacement for the old one to be competitive. It does not even need to work for everyone. If it works for enough people, and do some things better, it will become popular. It may coexist with the old technology, but so what? (Here, “old technology” includes gas-electric hybrids.)
EV’s go all the way back to the earliest production automobiles at the beginning of the 20th century. It is not a new technology. ICE cars became the dominant technology due to cost and versatility. Hybrids would be the new technology.
When battery technology aligns EV’s with the cost and versatility of ICE cars it will replace that technology.
again, get out of the mindset of “I drive my car until the fuel is almost gone, then go somewhere to replenish it.”
if you have an EV, chances are you’ll do most of your “refueling” at home while the car is sitting there doing nothing. And having 250 or so miles of range per charge lessens the risk of “oh shit I forgot to plug in last night, I’m screwed!” thing.
We don’t necessarily need EVs to recharge as fast as filling a gas tank. we need more places to plug in while the car is idle. home, work, shopping centers, etc. My company is tripling the number of EV chargers available, and planning for more.
Dude. No. That’s not it. Nobody else agrees with you. Faster charging would be nice - but the only reason for fast charging at all is so that EVs can make long drives. This is so their owners, if they change jobs, can drive their cars, which is cheaper than having the car hauled to the new city in a truck. Also, so the owners can go camping in places a few hundred miles away, since it’s hard to fit that much camping gear in a plane.
This is only a tiny percentage of all drives.
Fast charging will never be the majority of all recharging for EVs. Nobody is going to electrify the roadways. Turns out, battery swaps are also a bad idea.
Instead, you just need to install smart chargers at most public parking spaces. Smart ones check a payment card wirelessly before dispensing power. They would cost a few hundred dollars in quantity. Apartments would either need to let their residents install them, or install them for every parking space, because the future of vehicles is EV. They can be much cheaper to operate and provide a more fun driving experience.
No, and no.
We just need cheaper, mass market batteries, and more publicly available L2 chargers.
I thought it was pretty obvious that we were talking about modern long-range EVs made possible by lithium-ion batteries.
And NOBODY is suggesting that EVs will completely replace ICE cars in the foreseeable future, so you are making a strawman argument here. Even when manufacturers and cities/countries talk about an “all-electric” future, when you read the actual statements it turns out they are including gas-electric hybrids. Except perhaps in city centers.
If gas electric hybrids are less than 10% of the fleet, I’d say that’s near replacement.
I know. Well, these things are getting discovered - some recently discovered and research work is going on for further improvements. What I meant is that they are not available for everyone since production capacity is currently being built (alongside further research).
The demand for EV’s vs ICE cars would indicate you’re wrong.
It’s not just the length of the drive, it’s the number of drives stacked together. Most people use their car for more than a single destination per day.
Again, the demand for EV’s vs ICE cars would indicate you’re wrong.
with 100% certainty fast charging batteries will dominate battery use in the majority of devices including EV’s.
That actually made me laugh out loud. You just got done saying people can do most of their driving without recharging.