…performance, acoustics, interior space, pollution, safety, comfort…
I should add: yes, if you have street parking or an apartment without charging stations, and you can’t charge at work, then electrics are a bad bet. That’s a significant fraction of the population but still a minority.
All these are only true if fast charging stations are ubiquitous. There are virtually none around where I live, and I’m in the 11th largest metropolitan area in the US. I also routinely take a road trips of over 300 miles. I can do that on one tank of gas in any petroleum powered vehicle I’ve ever owned. Current electric capacities would have me stopping at least once, for at least 30 minutes, to charge up. Not gonna happen. I’m all for alternatives to petroleum. I seriously investigated converting my car to compressed natural gas, but the same issue exists - nowhere to fill up except at home. A range of 350-450 miles would have to be achieved before I would consider electric. Not impossible, but not here yet.
Except - a gas station with one pump can service 20+ cars in an hour, a fast charger can service 2. For every extant gas pump there would need to be 10 times more fast chargers available to service the same number of vehhicles.
Serious question - what safety and comfort features do electric vehicles offer that do not exist in petroluem powered vehicles? And interior space? A 300 mile range battery pack would be as big, if not bigger, than most fuel tanks.
And, as ralphy noted, electric is not really solving issues so much as replacing them with others.
You don’t need more fast charger stations because most people do most of their charging at home. Fast charging damages batteries. (each fast charge cycle puts as much wear on the battery as 5-10 or something regular charge cycle)
I predict that inductive charging pads will become popular, because this would eliminate the need to remember to plug in, and you could have them installed in parking lots all over the place. Inductive charging has losses.
A proper setup - when the user pulls into his home driveway, an inductive charging pad is on the garage floor. It came standard as part of a kit. A reminder appears on the screen and a soft chime indicates that the car is recommending the user plug it in using the plug, since inductive charging loses some of the energy which costs money.
If the user forgets or doesn’t care, he goes into the house. After a delay, the car begins recharging using the inductive charge pad - losing 20% of the energy is better than not recharging.
In the morning, the user gets into the car. The interior is heated or cooled, as the car turns on it’s AC/heat pump in anticipation. He or she drives to work or takes the kids to school, etc. At work, there are special EV charging spots. I suspect in many states, they’ll be in the front row right behind the handicap spaces - it might be a legal requirement that they be in the front, to encourage EV adoption. These use inductive charging pads only. It would be an offense comparable to parking in a handicap spot to park your gas guzzler in these spaces. You park, get out, go to work.
The trendier stores - Whole Foods Market and the like - will also have EV charge pads. Once they are cheap enough, Walmart might get in on it to improve their company image. Same deal, except your car asks the pad what the rate is, and automatically purchases electricity on your behalf if the rate is below a number you set.
The reason you gain interior space is the battery pack isn’t just the fuel tank. It’s the fuel tank + some of the engine itself. You can think of the chemistry happening in parallel in all the batteries as kind of like the combustion reaction in an engine, it’s just more efficient in that all the products of that chemistry remain right where they are. Since you have many thousands of cells and the rate that chemistry occurs at is regulated electrically, you can easily get energy very suddenly without any revup. That’s why Teslas have such good 0-60. (it’s also why they burn so spectacularly) An electric vehicle drivetrain is 4 main parts : the electric motor, the fixed gear differential/transmission, the battery pack, and the power controllers.
The power controllers are these thin boxes that are on the order of the size of a pizza box to a suitcase, depending on various factors. The electric motor is about the size of a watermelon. The fixed gear differential/transmission is about the same size as the differential on an IC car.
Batteries are also dense, in that they weight a lot per kilogram, and the battery pack itself has limited voids. (there are cooling channels).
An IC car, there’s the engine, driveshaft, transmission, fuel tank. As you know, all those parts are huge.
I’m uncertain if the total volume of the entire engine and drivetrain and fuel tank is less on a Tesla, but I suspect it is. They have packaged it all underneath the car so that you have a forward trunk now (a frunk) and there’s no driveshaft hump in the middle. (some electrical cables are serving the equivalent role)
So you have more interior space and more total trunk space vs an IC sedan of similar size.
It gives Teslas better crash ratings because the frunk is nothing but crumple zone - there’s no engine to shove itself into the passenger compartment and crush you in a crash.
The other reason why Teslas crash so well is because the company, as a new automaker, started with less existing infrastructure, and so they choose different construction methods and design decisions than the older automakers tend to prefer.
This forum thread says that statistically 20 people should have died at this point driving a Tesla. Only 1 person has been killed, and he was ejected from the vehicle. (so the Tesla fans in that thread gleefully point out that he died outside the Tesla)
Of course, it’s being driven by a small elite group of wealthy people who are probably more cautious as a group (not many teenage males get their hands on a Tesla - even rich parents tend to give their kids cheaper cars for high school). Obviously, it’s not deathproof, someone will get hit by a semi sooner or later.
I agree, there are issues to be solved for battery swap. But I think they can be solved without too much trouble. Tesla knows what the lifetime of the battery you turned in was and what the lifetime of the battery they’re giving you is. When possible, they’ll just match as closely as they can, and they’ll always track the difference. And you sign an agreement when you start using the battery swap service that says that if you stop using the battery swap, either the balance will be paid, or you’ll have to come in one last time to swap out your battery for one with a similar age to “your” battery.
That, plus a warranty on the battery, should be enough.
The problem with that is EV batteries don’t have predictable lifespans. Whoever’s running the station can’t just say “oh, this battery has about 60% life left…” It’s much more of a random-but-made-somewhat-more-likely-by-age-and-misuse failure mode like, say, a transmission than it is a regular wear and tear item. That’s generally a good thing since batteries usually last the life of the vehicle, but it makes the battery swap scheme dicey. Imagine a situation where you had to trade transmissions every time you filled up your gasoline car. Sure, they very rarely go bad and the swap shop could take some basic steps to try to assure it’s at least currently working, but in the end would you really want to trade such an expensive part for one of unknown history?
And, yeah, the only way Tesla’s battery swap pilot program worked (or, well, didn’t) is that all the cars were new enough to be under the battery warranty, but unless that warranty were to be extended into perpetuity you’d eventually get the above problems. Or I suppose you could only make battery swaps available for cars that are still under warranty?
I agree… rather than going in for a charge, you’ll go in for a battery change.
Unless there’s some safe way to dump the sort of power that would power an EV for 400 miles at 75 mph into a car’s batteries in 5-10 minutes, it’ll still look disadvantageous to filling a car with gas or diesel. But battery swaps could conceivably do it as fast or faster.
I bet that eventually there will be some kind of robot that will do it for you- you drive over a pit, and a hatch opens up, a robot pops up from underneath and swaps out the battery pack for you. Of course, this might take some kind of standardized batteries and positioning hardware to make sure it doesn’t just rip the bottom off your car, but that’s fairly trivial stuff.
I agree it can be done logistically, but a battery swap station has to contain some expensive robotics, an underground bay for the batteries, and so on. You’re talking millions of dollars each one and high operating costs. And, electric car batteries will probably always remain relatively expensive - they are 20 or 30 grand now, they might drop to 5 grand, but that’s still a big chunk of change.
Wonder if microturbine rental stations will be the solution instead. You don’t give strangers your expensive battery, you just rent from somewhere a range-boosting microturbine for that one time you really need to drive nonstop for hundreds of miles.
This is true; the infrastructure still needs work. However, I’m surprised that there would be virtually none where you are. Which are is it? (Wikipedia says the 11th largest metro area in the US is the CA Bay Area, but that’s not it…).
In the Tesla, the battery pack is a flat sheet on the bottom. It takes up zero interior space; it only elevates the car by a few inches. The motor itself is tiny and fits under the rear seat. So you get storage both in the rear and under the hood. When comparing to a rear-wheel or AWD car, the difference is even greater, since there’s no transmission or driveshaft tunnel taking up interior space.
Comfort: it’s just shocking how pleasant and smooth the drive is. There is the quiet of course, which I mentioned separately (and factors into interior and exterior comfort). But there is also the fact that there is no shifting at all. Cars with transmissions feel like a lurching mess in comparison.
The strong regeneration effect also encourages comfortable driving behaviors. You hardly need to touch the brake pedal at all until coming to a dead stop.
Safety: the Tesla is a very safe car, though most of that is due to good conventional design. However, there are a few factors exclusive to electrics. One is that there’s no big engine under the hood, and so that space can act as an enormous crumple zone. Conventional cars are limited in this respect because they have a huge block of metal in that space.
Another factor, relevant for the AWD version, is that the dual front-and-back motors have virtually instantaneous response time, and this has significant benefits for the traction control system. Conventional AWD cars are slow when it comes to sending engine power to the front or rear wheels, and furthermore they can only send a limited amount of it. The Tesla can apply maximum torque to either set of wheels.
Yes, but sometimes to move forward we must replace an unsolvable set of problems with problems that can be solved. Petroleum engines can only get so efficient, and will never be pollution-free. Electrical power–although still polluting–at least has a path forward to becoming pollution-free eventually. And it’s already more efficient than gasoline.
I think they might be a lot more predictable for Tesla. They know how long it’s been run for, how many miles you’ve driven between each charge, how hot it is where it’s parked. I’m sure they have detailed models of how each of those things affects battery longevity, and they can get a good enough estimate of battery life to work.
And whoever’s running the station is Tesla. I have no illusions that this is going to work with some 3rd party vendor.
That’s good enough for now. Tesla model S currently has an 8 year warranty. And if this is a plan for the future mid-market car, that gives them plenty of time to figure out what to do for the people who keep their cars after that.
I think this is just a case of it taking time to get used to a new idea.
Every time I go to a gas station, I take the risk that I’m going to totally destroy my car’s engine (a pretty expensive part) by putting who knows what into it. But I don’t seriously worry about that, mostly because I’m used to it, but also because I generally trust the legal and regulatory system and petroleum suppliers to ensure that I’m not getting dangerously adulterated gas.
I’m probably not going to stop by Crazy Eddie’s Discount Battery Pack Swap Station soon, but that doesn’t mean that no one can run a battery swap with sufficiently high levels of trust to do just fine.
I’ve long thought this would be a great solution. Just rent an engine on a trailer when you need to go long distance. But the fact that it hasn’t happened makes me think there are worse engineering tradeoffs than I’m imagining.
Cells have very predictable lifetimes if you look at them closely enough.
If you have a spare hour or so, you might want to watch this video. The tl;dw version is that doing standard discharge/recharge cycles does not give you very much information, and furthermore takes forever. However, if you track the current and voltage very precisely, and control the temperature, you can understand what’s going on in the cell even within a single charge cycle. The researcher, Jeff Dahn, is currently employed by Tesla.
And of course there are the factors you mentioned; that Tesla has very good telemetry systems and knows exactly how many times a pack has been recharged, and at what rates and environmental conditions.
So, what, every brand of electric car has to have its own chain of battery swap stations?
Yes, tl;dw, but I’m assuming similar content to this: What causes Lithium-ion to die? - Battery University
The gradual degradation of batteries over time is a different issue from outright battery malfunctions. The former is indeed somewhat predictable and likely could be quantified with careful measurements, but the batteries simply failing is a lot harder to predict. With our now 15-odd years of experience with hybrids, it seems those sorts of failures are pretty rare but considering the high replacement cost they happen enough for them to be a cause of some minor concern for the owners. Again, not unlike a transmission or internal engine failure on a conventional car; they’re rare enough that you’re not going to lose sleep about them but they’re not a total non-issue either. Constantly handling the battery modules also might make things a little worse.
More generally, my whole argument is that it’s not like any one aspect of the battery swap scheme would be insurmountably difficult, it’s just that all of it taken together makes it a far cry from the intuitive solution to the range problem it would seem at first glance. That combined with the fact that the ever-growing collection of real world experience seems to show that people are usually pretty okay with adapting to the strengths and weaknesses of plug-in cars (despite often initial skepticism) makes me think that the battery swap idea is really just an overcomplicated solution to a problem that may not really need solving at all.
Atlanta, GA metro (link goes to USDoE map of charging stations in the metro area). I live east of the city, hence the “Virtually none in my area” statement. Where there are public charging stations, they tend to be at places like auto dealers, the airport, GA Power locations and arenas - not exactly places I want to stop on a road trip. Walgreens drug stores are slowly getting on the bandwagon. That would be better since they tend to be located close to restaurants so one could plan charging stops around meal times (of course, if everyone else does the same…).
The thing is, though, I’ve seen no studies that indicate going to electric cars will be a net plus for the environment. Converting all of the US to electric vehicles will reduce world petroleum use by less than 10%. That’s really all we know. How much particulate pollution reduced by electric cars will be offset by a huge increase in battery manufacturing? What environmental issues will battery disposal and vast increase in electricity generation create/excaberate? I just don’t think we have enough answers to put all our eggs in the electric basket.
My long term bet is on hydrogen…
Batteries are sealed. When a battery wears out, all of the materials that went into the battery are still in it. It just takes energy to recycle the battery back to a brand new battery.
Probably quite a bit of energy, but there’s long life batteries so it doesn’t have to be done very often.
Hydrogen has the serious drawback of being terribly energy inefficient. When you electrolyze water to get hydrogen, at best that process is 64% efficient.
Then you compress the hydrogen to a high pressure gas. This has a huge drawback in that the gas bottles have to be much larger than the gas bottles for compressed natural gas to store the same energy - you end up swapping the problem of having a battery pack to the problem of having a gigantic hydrogen tank.
Then, you burn the hydrogen in a fuel cell. Those fuel cells have a very, very high manufacturing cost (and possibly a large energy cost). Most require large quantities of platinum. They are between “40 and 60 percent efficient”.
Calling it 50% as average, at best, 32% of the energy goes to electricity. Battery-electric vehicles are better than 85% efficient, wall to battery to drive power.
This is why Elon Musk is confident enough to call hydrogen a dead end and a joke. Batteries are three times as energy efficient. Also, the actual prototype vehicles that Honda has been testing cost about a million bucks each - the reason the Tesla Model S isn’t mass market is the battery costs something around 20-30k. Fuel cells are hugely more expensive than that.
For now? Yeah.
It’s not like the batteries in different models are going to be compatible for a long time (possibly ever), so a battery charging station will need model-specific batteries and changing equipment. There’s probably not much in the way of economies of scale to having multiple sets of different equipment on one lot anyway.
Car and Driver recently released an article about a Tesla S Road trip that confirms my suspicions that the network of superchargers is not yet sufficient to make long distance trips a seamless experience:
Just getting off the freeway and going, say, a mile on city streets before plugging in is probably going to turn those 30 minute stops into closer to 50 minutes.
Sometimes, you can’t combine charging stops with other stops you might want to make.
Can you make this work? Sure. But I have enough time dealing with cranky passengers on road trips to put up with a cantankerous car as well.
I’m totally bullish on Tesla. I can’t wait to buy one (once they get a lot cheaper), and I think they’re on a trend to be a great solution for almost anyone. But they’re not there yet.
Well, yeah, the problem with the supercharger stations is that there’s not enough of them yet. There’s currently zero operational battery swap stations. I’m not arguing fast chargers are currently a comprehensive solution, but that once the network gets more extensive it should be a perfectly workable one.
Plus the issue C&D mostly had on their trip wasn’t the superchargers so much as the really shitty Tesla navigation system that gave them really bad advice about how often and how long to charge the car, and rerouted them past superchargers they didn’t even need. The author mentioned at the end that if they’d just guesstimated a route themselves, the trip would have been way faster. And of course, again, the reason for the longer driving time even on that route is that they had to go WAY out of their way to find the superchargers, which are of course in big urban areas they wouldn’t have otherwise had to go through. If they’d been able to do it directly it would have been about 600 miles, which means they’d only have to stop and charge for a bit over 60 minutes on the whole trip. Once the network gets a little better, that trip’ll be a cinch.
But thou speakest not of the enormous amount of energy required to manufacture the battery in the first place. If you’re going to factor it into one equation, it must also be in the other. 
And for reasons stated in this thread, among others, Forbes magazine is confident enough to call BEV’s “an extraordinarily bad idea”. Multitudes of “expert” opinions can be found on both sides, mainly because we don’t have a clue of the long term impacts of either.
I could probably be persuaded toward compressed natural gas (CNG), except many of the same infrastructure/fueling problems would have to be overcome - and CNG, while currently plentiful and cheap, is non-renewable.
It isn’t nonrenewable. It’s actually a solid, practical way to package hydrogen.
I don’t put credence in the opinions of a guy that apparently doesn’t understand that electric cars don’t idle. Unlike gas cars, the car itself doesn’t use any juice just sitting there in traffic. Yes, the heater draws energy, but the Leaf’s heater uses a maximum of 5 kW–and even in a snowstorm you wouldn’t be using anywhere close to that, since it’s designed to heat the cabin quickly upon starting out. The battery is 24 kW-h and in practice you could probably stay in the car comfortably for a day, and still have enough juice left for the 10 mile commute.
I do expect though that as more BEVs hit the roads, we’ll have charger trucks on demand for emergency use. It’s trivial to fit a 1 MW generator to a large truck, and one could fast-charge 10 or more vehicles at a time.