How long until electric cars become cost-competitve with gasoline?

Factual Questions
41

Teslas are not “great winter cars” by any stretch of the imagination (range, ground clearance, high inertia, lack of engine heat which requires additional battery power for cabin temperature control, et cetera).

First of all, there are economic and social reasons why Norwegians have been buying the Tesla (discussed in this Freakonomics podcast) but it boils down to large financial incentives (waiving registration fees, income tax deductions, et cetera) and social pressure (environmental awareness). Despite crossing high latitudes, most of the population of Norway is clustered on the west coast and in the south around Oslo, Moss, Tonsberg, and Bergan (on the west) where the climate is more temperate (often above freezing even in the winter). Commute distances in Norway, as with most of Europe, tend to be modest compared to American suburbs and exburb commuters who may travel a hundred miles or more on a daily round trip, so the range impact is not as significant. However, if you lived in the Twin Cities of Minnesota or the Michigan Upper Peninsula, I think you’d find that the range and performance impact of months of unrelenting frigid temperatures would render the Tesla (or any other battery electric vehicle) a very expensive hanger queen for the season.

Stranger

42

My understanding is that the Model-S does have swappable batteries, but the battery swap program has been a failure. From this article quoting Elon Musk:

43

I’ve wondered too - Canada can get quite cold; for the original beetle, for example, I recall a Volkswagen add-on - a gas heater. Desperately needed in cold weather. I’m not sure what a serious cabin heater would do to an EV’s range.

Obviously, if your commute pushes 100mi then an EV is not (yet) for you. As an example, typical commutes might be say, Okotoks to downtown Calgary or Georgetown to Downtown Toronto - 35km and 42km respectively as the crow flies. I see an advantage for stop-and-go traffic, EV’s don’t “idle” and an do some regenerative braking. Plus, vehicles are more efficient at lower speeds with minimal air resistance. But it does get below freezing, and often down to 0F (-17C) in winter, so some form of internal heat is mandatory for a 1-hour commute, if only to stop window icing. However, if there were a plugin at the office destination, this would not be a difficulty. However, non-commute driving, like a Saturday going downtown and around, or driving from Calgary to the mountains to go skiing? (A 2-hour drive, and gravel parking lot at destination so no charger) Still not quite ready for EV’s.

44

I live in an American suburb, and know of only one person who had a 100+ mile daily commute (50-something miles each way). He loved the job but hated the commute enough to change jobs. He now has a 30 mile daily commute.

In any case the cold weather range loss in a Tesla is only 20% so it will still go 200 miles on a charge.

With all-wheel drive and winter tires Teslas have excellent traction. The smooth power of the electric motors make them capable of going when most other cars are stuck.

I happen to own a Tesla and have gone up ice covered hills on summer tires with absolutely no drama while the cars around me were struggling. And I have the older RWD version.

45

Wow, you must drive pretty fast.

46

It’s not a big deal. Teslas use around 300 W-h/mile, which at 60 mph means a steady 18 kW.

A 1 kW electric space heater keeps a small room reasonably warm (you want more power to warm up the cabin initially, but that isn’t sustained). It should be more than sufficient to keep a car warm, even given the reduced insulation compared to a house. So I wouldn’t expect more than a 1/18 =~ 5% range impact. You can reduce this further with seat heaters (they’re more efficient than cabin heat).

The AWD cars are fantastic in the snow, and have inherent advantages that an ICE can’t match, such as the ability to apply a precise amount of torque to the front and rear wheels independently and instantaneously.

47

You inspired me to look up this:
https://www.teslamotors.com/blog/blowing-hot-and-cold
Sounds quite serviceable.

My BMW’s have had fancy traction control, controlling torque on each wheel (no doubt through complex transmission gizmos). Works quite well, although on sheet ice, the first RWD one had a tendency to royally screw up when both wheels lost traction.

48

I work with at least a dozen people who have a commute of 70-100 miles. I had a typical commute of 100 mile round trip for about six years.

When you say the “cold weather range loss in a Tesla is only 20%” that doesn’t really quantify what is meant by “cold weather”. Temps in the ~0 °C range won’t show as dramatic a different as temperatures in the -10 °C or -20 °C range that are commonly experienced in places like Minnesota or Montana for months on end. Musk’s famous claim that the success of the Tesla Model S makes combustion engine vehicles obsolete is pure bombast; electric vehicles like the Tesla vehicles are certainly suitable, and potentially even superior to internal combustion vehicles for certain applications, but they are not a uniform replacement everywhere for every driver.

The weight of the Tesla (with suitable tires) does offer good traction, but also makes for more inertia when the car breaks free (e.g. on hardpack or black ice), and the low clearance of the Model S (~6 inches) renders it unsuitable for heavy snow. Of course, you could build an electric vehicle with higher clearance, but because of the heavy weight of batteries this makes the vehicle dynamics less favorable, as does the effect of heavy unsprung mass of motors in the wheel hubs compared to conventional transmisision cars. Again, this is a case where the Tesla may be comparable or superior for certain applications, but I wouldn’t want to drive one down an unplowed rural road or singletrack, even with higher clearance offered by air suspension.

Stranger

49

There are plenty of conventional internal comubstion powered vehicles on the market that have independent torque distribution to the front and rear wheels, as well as using traction control and ABS braking to control vehicle traction and wheel spin. This is not a feature unique to the Tesla or electric vehicles overall.

Stranger

50

However, with auto-pilot approaching impressive levels of usability, a single driver could easily knock off twice that 600 miles, half-awake or napping for hours long, tedious interstate. The upside offsets the downside. The biggest downside to superchargers is that they really ought to used sparingly, because they put extra stress on your batteries, shortening their life; and your stop-over place better have a 240v hookup, because charging at regular outlet current will take you more than two days.

The heavy weight of batteries is rather comparable to the weight of an ICE drivetrain, at least at the scale of a model S – get to Navigator mass and you might start to see the batteries exceeding the mass of an ICE. As to the unsprung weight of hub motors, Tesla does not use hub motors, they use one central motor per driven pair, with a differential.

51

They aren’t independent. They’re a complicated, coupled system. Now, obviously ICE AWD systems do have some control over front-rear torque distribution, but there are limits–and due to the fact that they tend to use clutches or viscous couplings, the split is probably better thought of as a ratio instead of two fully independent systems. Some AWD cars actually have very low limits to how much torque they can send to the front wheels.

And of course it’s instantaneous on the EV. Clutches and differential braking take hundreds of milliseconds to respond. Electric motors don’t. Granted, the left-right split is also via braking on the Tesla–maybe we’ll get per-wheel motors one day.

52

Your point still stands, but I’d up the number a bit. I’ve had a few leisurely (10-hour limit) cross country trips, and my average speed certainly got me father. There are a lot of long stretches with high speed limits.

53

I think were going to see more blending of the different options- it doesn’t have to be just this or just that.

The 2017 Prius Prime is an improved Prius hybrid with an added electric vehicle charging system. They say it will get 22 miles in EV mode, which will get most people to where they are going, and is equal to 120 MPGe.

The current MPG for a Prius hybrid (a non-electric hybrid with EV option) is about 47-52, with an EV mode range of about 2-10 miles.

The Prime will also default to EV, where the default was hybrid before.

54

Hybrids are always a compromise and I think they will be short lived. When in EV mode you’re lugging around an ICE drive train that is doing nothing. When in ICE mode you’re lugging around a battery and electric motor that does nothing.

The future for regular cars is battery-electric. ICE will stick around in niche-applications such as small. light weight, sports cars and big diesel trucks. But eventually those will switch to electrics also.

Someone earlier in the thread said batteries are not improving much, and that just amazes me. I remember the batteries of 15 years ago and they were utter crap compared to what we have today. Price, weight, energy density… all are vastly improved in only 15 years. Give it another 15 years and it will be difficult for anyone to claim batteries are not the logical choice for a car. Of course there will still be some that will never accept anything but ICE.

55

How is that different from a Telsa lugging around that huge battery commuting every day just so you can have those couple of road trips every year?

The advantage of a hybrid is that both the explosion motor and the battery can be small, but you still get range and regenerative braking. Remember that diesel locomotives (electric trains have been around for more than a century now, BTW) use their diesel engine to run a generator that powers the electric motors rather than have the diesel engine power the wheels more directly. So apparently there’s utility in hybrid designs.

Another solution is to have two cars, one (internal combustion) mostly for long trips and one (electric) for short trips.

56

Contrary to the statement that “Hybrids are always a compromise and … will be short lived,” hybrid electric powertrains have had a wide history in a number of applications where the steady operation of a gas turbine or diesel engine can achieve maximum thermodynamic and mechanical efficiency. They can only be considered just a compromise for automotive applications if you are assuming a full-sized car engine ganged onto a very large and heavy battery; most well-optimized hybrids like the Prius or Civic Hybrid have a very small engine running a modified Atkinson cycle at high efficiency to charge a modest-sized battery pack, and there is further optimization to be done. (That some other hybrids like the various Toyota Camry/Highlander/et cetera only see modest improvements in gas mileage is because they are not really optimized for hybrid operation.) Hybrids offer the promise of essentially unlimited range with refueling without concerns about finding a charging station or sitting for hours waiting for a charge from a standard 120/240 V power source.

It is true that batteries have improved over the last couple of decades, albeit more in terms of their longevity and depth of cycling that they can tolerate. Some of this is due to improvements in materials and processing of electrodes and the polymer electrolytes that resist breakdown (when operated within acceptable temperature ranges) but much of the improvement has just been better characterization of charge/discharge cycles and more sophisticated controllers than were previously available. Absolute capacity has not improved all that much between nickel-metal hydride, lithium ion/polymer batteries, and as I noted previously, we are approaching the absolute theoretical maximum chemical energy density and power throughput rates of electrochemical battery materials. Despite the obtuse application of the so-called “Moore’s Law” by many, there are real physical limits to how much energy you can store in an electrochemical system, and by nearly all estimates we are within half an order of magnitude, leaving the battery at around 0.03 to 0.05 gasoline gallon equivalent (GGE). Without some new means of storing energy requiring revolutionary developments in exotic materials such as Ryberg matter or metastable chemical excimers, chemical batteries are limited in their absolute capacity per unit mass and volume by the fundamental chemistry behind them. And despite the notion that building a giant fab facility will drop prices of batteries dramatically, most of the cost of modern batteries is in the fine processing of materials which is already at a near maximal scale of economy; doing more doesn’t make it cheaper any more than McDonalds could sell cheaper hamburgers by making ten times as many.

The future of some automobiles is strict electric, either batteries or fuel cells (though the latter has its own issues with cost, maintenance, and technical feasibility in mobile applications); in particular, electric vehicles are desirable in moderate range commuting and fleet applications where the low costs of maintenance and ability to schedule recharging into the daily duty cycle don’t require special considerations. One can easily imagine a fleet of autonomous electric cabs, for instance, which operate for a few hours and then swap out for a recharge cycle with a fully charged cab. But there are plenty of applications and users for which the practical range of a battery-powered electric vehicle is a deal-breaker; salespeople and technical representatives who travel long routes, servicepeople who haul large/heavy equipment for their work, long-distance (200+ km/day) commuters, and as noted above, people who have to operate vehicles in continuous cold (-10 ºC and lower) temperatures.

It is a little ironic that “lightweight sports cars” are identified above as vehicles not suitable for transition to electric because Formula E (all electric) racing is one of the up and coming racing classes, and because of the lack of technical maturity of electric vehicles there are a lot of opportunities to play with the regulations to optimize a race vehicle. The cars themselves can be designed with the batteries packs sitting as low in the chassis as possible and because of the reduced concern about fire and explosion damage (batteries can catch fire and explode but the mitigations are easier, and polymer electrolyte won’t flow and cover the track like gasoline or methanol fuels) can be located around the driver and even used as protective structure. In terms of absolute acceleration performance and design flexibilities, electric cars offer genuinely revolutionary opportunities. Big diesel trucks and other heavy haul applications are also amenable to hybrid electric or (for short range fleet operations) all-electric operation. Long haul transportation will still require liquid hydrocarbon fuel engines (either all combustion or hybrid-electric powertrains) for the foreseeable future, but the ultimate goal should really to find a way to move long range hauling to dedicated high speed rail rather than the slower and less energy efficient over the road (OTR) hauling. The advent of fully autonomous cargo hauling vehicles will likely facilitate this.

Anyone who is relying on Elon Musk or other all-electric vehicle advocates for their information about the relative merits of battery electric versus hybrid or sustainable low-emission hydrocarbon fuel vehicles needs to appreciate that they are getting a very narrow viewpoint from an inherently biased source. Just as petroleum companies have done everything in their power to shout down the benefits of solar power and electric vehicles, the developing electric vehicle industry is trying to claim that their products are the one and only solution, when in fact there are many different needs for which electric vehicles are a suitable option for a certain subset.

Stranger

57

the whole point of hybrids is to improve economy by shutting off the gas engine in cases were it would be operating least economically. e.g. what good is an idling gas engine doing sitting there burning fuel just to keep itself spinning? none, so shut it off at stops. Recapture some of the energy lost via braking to help get the car moving. etc.

locomotives went diesel-electric for decoupling purposes. A mechanical transmission which would be both strong enough and have enough ratio spread to do the job would be hilariously enormous and failure prone. diesel-electric neatly eliminates the need to couple the power plant to the drive wheels.

besides, there are operating conditions where it’s more efficient to have the power plant directly drive the output. It’s why the Chevy Volt incorporates a way to couple the engine to the transaxle under certain circumstances; it’s more efficient/economical to do so. Of course, that didn’t stop the EV purist nerds from losing their shit when GM revealed that.

58

The “hybrid synergy drive” in the Prius is really quite elegant. The transmission is a single planetary set that achieves CVT by putting the back-load into a generator: when the engine needs a lower gear ratio, the generator takes the excess spin and feeds it into the battery or the electric drive motor so that more work energy can be used for actual work. There is not much of a “compromise” there, it does a darn fine job.

59

Read the link. The Tesla heats (or cools) the batteries for optimal performance. I’ve seen a Tesla or two in areas of Canada that exceed Minnesota in climate. I actually suspect now that air conditioning power requirements in southern states in summer could be an equal power drain problem.

While perusing the website, I saw an option for air shocks on one model that allowed it to raise and lower the chassis to road conditions.

The problem, as I mentioned - in an area like Calgary, it’s a two hour drive to the ski hills in the mountains. The large gravel parking areas there are unlikely to have “charge while you ski” as an option for a while, and 400km/250mi in cold weather may be pushing the capabilities of an EV at this time. I suspect you can show similar weekend driving habits for a lot of areas of North America. OTOH, I was in the Hilton in Minneapolis (Bloomington) a few years ago, and they have a parking spot near the building that’s an EV charging station… so the change is coming.

60

Electricity is something like 75 cents for the energy equivalent of a gallon of gasoline.

Assuming you spend 2500 a year on gasoline, that is close to 17k in savings over 10 years. Assuming a car lasts 20 years on average (that is about the right number, that means almost 34k in savings assuming gas in the mid $2 range ($2.50 per gallon vs. $0.75 for an equivalent of electricity). However if the battery needs replacing that could add to it. But at the same time, fewer mechanical parts in the electric car.

So in conclusion, I don’t know. However fuel costs should be 50-80% lower in the electric car.