All else being equal, average age should be exactly half of the average lifespan. To illustrate, consider the simplest case, where all cars last exactly 10 years and then die. At any given moment, then, some people are riding around in cars that are less than a year old, and still have plenty of life in them, and some are in cars that are over nine years old, and are starting to keep an eye out for a replacement. Likewise, some cars are between 1 and 2 years old, and some are between 8 and 9 years, and so on, with the same number in each category. And the average of all of those will then be 5 years.
Now, it’s possible that all else is not equal. For instance, car quality (and thus expected lifespan at “birth”) might change with time. And the times when people tend to buy cars might be clumped (a marginal vehicle might be scrapped in good economic times, but dragged out as long as possible during a recession when the owner can’t afford to replace it). And when you’re looking at cars of a particular technology, you can’t have any on the road that are older than that technology, no matter how well-made they are. But it should still be the first-order rule of thumb.
It was a jab at the pie-in-the-sky concept car. The key word was “concept” which could just as well have been “fantasy” for all the chances it has of success.
You walk away from a money losing venture until such time as it becomes viable . Maybe you’ve forgotten the 2010 Malibu hybrid already? That was new technology. They were smart enough to walk away from that disaster.
It seems to me that businesses can take a few different tacts to “product development” and the best analogy is thinking of kids playing soccer.
What you seem to be a supporter of is chasing where the ball is. The Volt was instead an attempt to try to get to where the ball is going to be.
No doubt sometimes players read the field wrong and and the player who tries to anticipate ends up in completely the wrong place. But at a certain level of competition chasing where the ball is will never lead to victory, because it most assuredly won’t be there by the time you get there. The car industry is at that level of competition. IMHO.
Hmmm, maybe you could do me a favor and fight my ignorance with a link that explains this. I just don’t see why 8 cells would behave in the way you describe.
Where I am really going with this is for use with commercial vehicles like semis and maybe farm equipment. People treat it as preposterous that an over-the-road trailer could be an ev as it would take all day to charge it up. But, with 8 cells charging simultaneously, this doesn’t have to be a problem. If it truly can’t work that way, go with 8 separate batteries instead. Hear me out.
I figure the Volt carries the equivalent of about 1 gallon of gas in its battery. It is a 16kwh battery but only uses half the capacity. A semi can go through 100 gallons of diesel in a day. So, comparing to the Volt, 100 gallons= 800-1600kwh of required battery capacity. At a projected cost of 4 cents/kwh for solar generated power, you’re talking a max of $64.00/day for fuel.
8 batteries in one vehicle, plus the charging equipment would indeed be expensive. But then 100 gallons of fuel a day is also very expensive, and more so all the time. If the thing can be rapid-charged the way I describe, I think an ev semi is actually more practical than an ev passenger car. Why?
1- The additional weight of the batteries doesn’t make as much of a proportional difference, since these rigs plus a load can weigh tens of tons to begin with.
2- The additional cost of such a fancy electrical vehicle is not proportionally as significant since these things are already very expensive, especially considering:
3- The additional cost of the vehicle is not as significant since using electricity for fuel can save hundreds of dollars every day. Run it 6 days a year=312 days* $500/day for fuel = $156,000 spent on fuel in a year. In a decade you can save well over a million dollars on fuel! These things get a lot of maintenance and commonly last 30 years, so one could really save a lot.
So you see, the math in my admittedly amateur’s example is much more forgiving for an electric commercial vehicle than with a passenger car.
oh nonsense. Even at their most hoped for sales figures GM would have lost money on the car. Since it’s nothing but a regular hybrid with more batteries it was pointless to produce it until it was viable. They haven’t fronted any new technology in this car. Toyota is sitting on the exact same equipment and will certainly cash in it’s history of success when the time comes.
There are electric trucks albeit delivery trucks used for predictable routes. And indeed they are expected to have 75% less operating costs and a host of other advantages that probably could offset their higher initial cost. The issue however is having a grid that can handle the flow required to charge 'em:
Also figure out how much a battery for a semi going at least 400 mies between a rapid charge would weigh. Energy density about 200wh/kg.
Magiver, you are aware that Toyota is currently selling plug-in hybrids now too? True theirs does not really have any true gas free operation, and has a smaller battery (really just trading on the Prius name), but it is selling quite well (albeit a fraction of the Volt’s monthly sales). As far as there being no new technology in the Volt … GM’s 135 cleantech patents in 2010 “represent almost 14 percent of the total 1,881 received by 700 entities.” But none of them were really “new” …
Getting the cost down is a function of getting the battery cost down. Getting the battery cost down is a function of economies of scale. Economies of scale can only occur when cars are already selling. You have to make them to sell them. If you do not build the volume those battery costs won’t come down no matter how long you wait.
The Tesla Model S pack is more like 155 Wh/kg, so that’s probably more fair. Also, truckers may drive 11 hours in a given day, which at 60 mph is 660 miles.
Let’s assume that a gas equivalent to the Model S would get 30 mpg. In practice, it goes 260 mi on a 85 kWh pack, or 325 Wh/mi. A semi truck, OTOH, gets around 6 mpg (on diesel, admittedly, but this is just a ballpark estimate). So it requires about 5x the average power as the Tesla–say 1.625 kWh/mi. Over 660 miles, that’s 1.07 MWh. Divide by 155 Wh/kg and we get 6.9 metric tons.
That’s a big pack, but then again the truck can haul at least 20 tons, so it’s not utterly unreasonable. Some weight will be saved by ripping out the huge diesel engine and all that. Longer trucks will lose less cargo as a proportion of the total. Charging the sucker could get interesting, though.
FWIW, the small town I live in, Paris, has launched an interesting (if SOSHULIST!!1) initiative with electric cars, following on the success of a similar one involving bikes: they’re basically available in the streets for anyone to take.
Well, not anyone: you need to subscribe to the service up front to get the widget to unlock the doors. But other than that: pick a car, any car at a recharging stand (of which there are all over the city and in some of the suburbs), drive to wherever you wanna go, park it at another stand, get on with your day.
There are a few logistical hiccups, namely that (like the bikes before the cars) the vehicles tend to gravitate towards certain places over time, which led to the creation of a secondary service - people whose job it is to ferry the cars around from where they are left to where there are too few :D.
But other than that, it’s a cool little initiative IMO. Surprisingly little theft, too.
you’re leaving out aerodynamics in this equation. Semi’s are bricks traveling at highway speeds almost excusively. And as you add weight of new batteries to a semi you need to add more batteries to compensate for the additional weight. It would make more sense to electrify railways and create a system that allows for quick offload of the trailer. From that point on pull it locally with an electric tractor.
Don’t buses fill this need already? Well not from a literally standpoint obviously and the fair to ride exists.
From a personal POV it seems like a novelty because I never make one way trips. If I can’t depend on the car to be their for a return trip I don’t see the functionality of the car.
Yes DSeid, we talked about that a long time ago. It’s not going to happen in cars. It’s too big an additional cost compared to a commercial truck.
Yes DSeid, we talked about that also. And I agree with you that it was an attempt to trade on their name. Toyota is not putting a serious effort into it nor should they. That’s been my point from the beginning. Electric vehicles lack a viable battery.
Those weren’t Volt patents; they were the combined patents of GM. Certainly some (many?) of them are related to the Volt and certainly GM had a good year in this metric. The transmission will get some because it’s a rework of the Prius which they probably needed to do anyway to get around Toyota’s patents. But from a technological POV I’d put the new 7 and 8 speed dual clutch automatics as more of a challenge. And from a simplicity POV I’d put the Honda Hybrid system ahead of the Prius/Volt system but I’m also going to claim ignorance on which is more viable. I have hunches but they’re only hunches at this point.
I disagree. We have large scale manufacturing of batteries. We just don’t have the batteries we need. Economy of scale (plus competition) will always bring the cost of something down but IMO this is a technology issue. The batteries we need don’t exist.
Heck, an electric train makes even more sense than an electric semi. One or two of the train cars can contain municipal batteries and drive the things where you want to go. You can have fully-charged train-car batteries waiting at the next stop to eliminate any wait for charging. If you want to get fancy you could put solar panels on the roofs of the train cars- times 100+ cars that is a lot of surface area.
The bigger the scale, the better an idea it is. Remember, the world’s largest vehicleis an ev.
This is a big part of why I envision using municipal-scale batteries for large charging jobs. I believe they are free of some of the discharge/power limits of the grid, and also you can have many of them in place at once to work in parallel. They can take all day to charge as long as they are ready to go when it is “show time”.
DSeid, you’re preaching to the choir about the future of transportation. I can’t emphasize more that I’m a big fan of the new innovations I see. I spend a great deal of time reading about engines for cars, planes, boats, tractors, trains etc… I can’t walk by an engine on display without visually crawling all over it.
I don’t see the Volt as particularly innovative technologically. I understand that GM wanted to front an extended range hybrid to get a jump on the market but Toyota already owns the hybrid market. They would have been better served to wait and concentrate on getting their conventional hybrids out successfully in preparation for a functional battery pack. The 2010 Malibu was a huge mistake. They need to establish a reputation for reliable efficient hybrids.
Their consortium on hybrid technology makes sense. It spreads out the cost among other countries. That is the direction I think GM should take.
Cars deteriorate on a ‘bathtub curve’. During the warranty period early defects are uncovered. Then the number of defects levels off and stays low for a long period of time, then starts to ramp up as parts wear out. So in fact they’re closer to your scenario where they all last for 10 years and die, rather than failing randomly throughout their lifespan.
Again, a good way to tell how long cars really last is to look at used car residual values. Once that value drops to the level of its scrap value - the cost of needed repairs to keep it roadworthy and reliable, the car goes to the scrapyard.
Most used cars reach that point in anywhere from 10 to 15 years, and for large repairs like engine and transmission failures, they can reach it much earlier. No one’s going to put a $6,000 transmission into a car that, after the transmission is installed is still only worth $5,000. At that point, you’re better off junking your car for scrap and buying another one on the used market.
Sure. But Paris is a very dense, busy, packed up city. Buses, subways, even taxis - at peak hours they’re consistently Japan-full. Very uncomfortable and annoying to ride. Also, the subway shuts down at night and bus traffic is severely reduced too, so party people get grumpy.
But really, the program is mostly aimed at people who drive regular cars and won’t use public transportation for one reason or another, even in traffic as congested as Paris typically gets and in a city where parking is a notorious headache. So the goal is not so much to help people move around who couldn’t before as it is to reduce the amount of polluting cars in the streets ; on the cheap for the ecologically conscious consumer since the yearly pass is much, much cheaper than buying their own electric car (or even just a golf cart :p).
People try it as a novelty, find it enjoyable and reliable, maybe ditch their cars down the road.
Well, you can - it probably won’t be the *exact *car you left earlier, but it’s a reliable bet there’ll be one waiting for you somewhere on the block when you need/want to make the return trip. Honestly, the most common problem is the other way around: finding parking spots in popular areas for the darn things 'cause all the stands are already occupied !
Seems like a VERY expensive concept. I mean really really not remotely feasible expensive. Now the gulf cart idea isn’t too far off. Electric bikes that can be rented with a bus pass.
Most trains are diesel electric (the diesel engine generates electricity which runs an electric motor, reason being the torque available at low rpms) and hybrid diesel electrics are well beyond concept phase.
