Is hatred towards EV's due to the belief in a apocalyptic future?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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You’re speaking of the absence of downshifting, but what I also noticed during standing starts was that there is zero lag between mashing the pedal to the floor and obtaining full acceleration. This is noticeably different from ICE cars, in which the computer opens the throttle slightly gradually so that the fueling can keep up, resulting in a slight delay from pedal-down to full acceleration.

Don’t know about the Big Three, but these days the UAW still doesn’t like any foreign vehicles. Here’s a Google Maps streetview of a UAW hall in Wayne, Michigan.

There was a time, about 100 years ago, when the same was true for ICE cars. It’s certainly a reason for some people to say “not yet” for themselves; it’s no reason for anyone to say “never for anyone.”

Don’t need 'em. If you’ve got a battery EV, you’ll never need a coolant change, an oil change, or a exhaust system replacement. No engine trouble codes, because no engine. Your brakes will wear far, far more slowly because you’ll be doing most of your decel using regenerative braking (putting your kinetic energy back into the battery for reuse instead of pissing it away as heat in the brake rotors). You’ll never need a transmission fluid change. In fact, your transmission won’t ever break because you don’t have one; at most, you’ll have a single-speed gear reduction unit that’s far more reliable than any transmission.

If the engine goes bad in a used ICE car, it’s no different: a new engine can cost more than the car.

Although I enjoyed driving my dad’s Tesla Model S several years ago, I’m not sure my next car will be an EV. I have a lingering distrust of lithium-ion batteries, mostly due to extensive media coverage of them catching fire from time to time. To be fair, a lot of them were cheaply made hoverboards and e-cigarettes, but there have also been quite a few cell phones. Even Boeing almost lost a few planes:

It’s often pointed out that ICE cars have fires far more often than BEVs, but two thoughts come to mind:

  • BEVs are all late-model vehicles and are owned by people who tend to keep up on maintenance. The average age of ICE cars is much older and a fair number of them are owned by people who aren’t quite so diligent on maintenance. Not saying BEVs are as bad or worse than ICE cars, but I think that when age and maintenance are accounted for, the margin of superiority for BEVs probably isn’t as huge as the raw numbers suggest.

  • I have no data on this, but I suspect that most ICE-car fires happen while driving or crashing, and most BEV fires happen while charging. Which means charging your BEV in your garage overnight while sleeping elevates the stakes a bit.

One thing I’ve wondered about heavy-duty FC trucks is how they’ll handle downhill grades. If the battery is only big enough to power up small hills, then it’s only big enough to absorb the power from small descents. Diesels handle big descents with engine braking, something that FC trucks won’t have, unless they’re fitted with a load bank to piss away all that energy.

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I hate EV’s because they are really just an attempt to preserve the status quo for transportation. EV’s will not be able to replace ICE vehicles on a 1 to 1 basis. You are not going to have charging stations at every parking spot at work or at apartment complexes.

You are not taking the huge environmental cost of mining lithium or the fact that batteries can’t be recycled in account.

You don’t electrify individual cars. You electrify trains and buses and rebuild the trolley lines that used to exist. And not with batteries but with actual electric lines strung overhead.

For example, I live about 150 miles from one of the biggest cities in the world. There is no sane reason why my city is not connected to it by an electric train that runs 180+ mph.

Society has to change. We aren’t going to magic ourselves out of this situation by thinking we can sub EV’s for ICE’s.

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Trains have resistor banks to dissipate excess power in those situations. Not seeing a problem with using that, but IDK what is actually used.

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Having read this thread, I can say with some confidence that much of the hatred toward EV’s is due to the complete utter bullshit that some folks (including here) believe about these vehicles.

This bullshit is being pumped out into the media (and social media) by sources that currently make a lot of money out of pumping and refining oil.

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What bullshit?

How will the infrastructure be built for charging in apartments? Will every resident have their own charging station? How much will that add to the rent, if it could even be done.

Do it at work you say? Will that be one of your employee benefits?

What about the massive increase in the demand for electricity? You don’t think that will affect prices? I just watched a video showing an increase of household KWH use by 33% going on what the EV consumes. And that was with an expensive efficient EV .

You are trying to magic these issues away, trying to kid yourself we can live the same way we do now just by switching to EV’s.

You sir, are the one that is spreading bullshit.

126

There are certainly issues with scaling up charging infrastructure, but I don’t think it is the main concern with EV scaling. The main concern will largely be a combination of manufacturing capacity (this includes battery and raw material issues) and consumer demand, and of course the large used car market in ICE cars. These things combined will keep EVs as a low % of overall cars for many, many years, long enough a timespan that I think the charging infrastructure build out has a really long time to work with before it becomes the major limiting factor.

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It’s not so cut and dry and some real world factors have to be considered. First lets get this one out of the way:
Adjusted for inflation, electricity has been on a downward trend price-wise https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/electricity-prices-adjusted-for-inflation/

And this was during the times of buildout of renewables (wind and solar).

OK, now for EV’s, nighttime electric rates are so low because the power companies want to encourage nighttime usage. As it stands nighttime generation is inefficient due to the low demand, This raised costs of plant operation which is passed along to the cost we pay overall, if we can increase our nighttime energy draw it would increase operating efficiency and should lower costs per kWh.

But how much can we draw? Plenty. Our grid is based on peak demand. There is not much stored, and most has to be produced in real time. This is a horrible inefficient system where you need something akin to a top fuel dragster to hit those highs, but most of the time you are just puttering along. Using power more steadily would make everything run smoother and better and also incentives increasing our peak power production by making energy sales more common (like at night you can expect to sell your power).

And for energy storage, EV’s have lots of that, and EV to grid is a technology that is fairly easy to implement which will allow a EV owner to sell back power during peak times. This could be considered a grid upgrade in itself.

128

I’m a locomotive engineer and its true they use resistor banks called dynamic brakes or DB’s on the engines combined with regular friction brakes on the locomotives and the cars. The DB’s require massive amounts of cooling and are prone to failure. That means an electrical fire, similar to an EV battery meltdown.

You don’t want a simi truck hauling hazardous material using DB’s. Trains have strict placement rules that require hazmats to be place a certain distance from the locomotives for this reason.

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What bullshit have I spread in this thread?

Be specific please.

130

“I just watched a video”

Jesus.

I just saw a facebook meme that said we’re going to run out of lithium, accompanied by a photo of a copper mine in Chile.

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I appreciate this response, and I agree that that electricity prices are low now.

But we are talking about replacing ICE’s for EV’s on a 1 to 1 basis here, and I have not been able to find anything that suggests renewables will be able to make up for the increased demand that would come from this.

I totally disagree with your thoughts on demand. Everyone will be locked into the same cycle, charging at night, so I would think demand would increase.

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The FUD that lands on in my Facebook feed is often so far removed from reality that it would be laughable if it wasn’t for the thought that it’s the fossil fuel industry pulling the strings behind the scenes. The last thing I got was a cut’n’paste job that started with the assumption that electricity cost $1.20 per KWh. When you start off an order of magnitude wrong it’s hard to seriously read the rest of the message. And the glurge just goes downhill from there.

Someone here (I know, this is starting out a terrible cite) pointed out that the electrical use required to refine gasoline was on the order of 7 KWh per gallon. That’s enough electricity to drive 25-30 miles for me, effectively a 1:1 replacement. I don’t see these horrible grid issues lurking in the shadows.

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Well how do we learn anything then. I watched a video and then looked into the claims made and the charts used to back them.

What good is the internet if we can’t use all the information that is available on it? I should just go with your take on faith?

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That is the definitely the biggest issue with EVs. They’re just a more environmentally friendly way of maintaining our way of life, which may not be sustainable at all. The problem is that EVs can probably easily replace 40% of passenger cars, 90% of delivery vehicles, and 100% of city buses.

You think there are barriers to EV adoption, how will people feel about closing down the suburbs and moving everybody into high rise apartments? Dense living in modern buildings is by far the most environmentally friendly way to house people.

There are things that can be done, exactly as you say, improve mass transit. In many cases these are things that are technically (though not always politically) easy, such as changing bus routes to reflect where people actually want to travel. In other cases, it’s things that are very difficult, like building rail or subway systems.

Extracting oil also has a huge environmental impact, and you think recycling batteries is hard, try recycling a gallon of gas after it’s been burned. Lithium batteries are being recycled, I recently posted an article about BASF building a new recycling plant in Germany.

If all ICE cars were being replaced with EVs instantaneously, then the electric grid could have problems. That’s not how it works. EVs will slowly replace ICE vehicles, and the utilities will have time to build new generation and distribution systems as demand grows and changes. This isn’t even a new thing. Electricity use in the US grew tremendously in the second half of the 20th century, and utilities built to keep up then, they can do it now. Utilities make more money as the build more stuff, they want to build stuff so they can raise rates.

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Here you go. Not a video, so apologies for that.

the projected growth in e-mobility will not drive substantial increases in total electrical-grid power demand in the near to midterm, thus limiting the need for new electricity-generation capacity during that period.

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Ok so now you’re saying slowly. How slow, 5, 10, 20 years? I thought '25 was the year being pushed.

I don’t see the point of putting a battery on buses, and I think the impact of mining these rare earth minerals is being downplayed.

I’m fine with losing the suburbs.

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Read.
The.
Article.

138

Again real world factors. If EV’s did replace ICE’s 1:1, this would be over about a decade which does leave time to adjust, it’s not poised to be a ‘shock’ as the gas shortage of the 70’s were.

We are building out renewables true, but that is only a smaller fraction of our grid, we have natural gas as its biggest fraction, and coal and nuke the other share. This flexibility does add to national energy security and insulation from the afore mentioned gas shortage shock. If one leg of our grid was hurt (such as a coal strike), we might have trouble meeting peak power but should have still more than enough to cover average power draw and them some.

And this is where power storage comes in. Again EV’s have plenty (can run a average home for 2-3 days), add to that Lithium batteries actually have extended life when not fully charged that the owner may be able to sell power and also perhaps slightly increase the longevity of their battery under some limited circumstances (charge cycles life is a industry standard that was put in at the time of NiCd’s and highly appropriate for them, but lithium’s major life shortening is from time/temperature/state of charge from which cycle life is derived from now).

This seems a lot better for energy security than having the single source that oil/gasoline is. We’ve seen pipeline issues that shut off gasoline to an area. Also to add with home solar a person can recharge their own EV off grid and expect about 200 miles per sunny day for an average rooftop solar array (and about 50 miles if plugged into any standard household outlet for 12 hours). So it just seems to put a lot more security of being able to power the vehicle under multiple circumstance that give the owner far more options than a ICE. If you can get gasoline you can charge a EV, if you can get electricity you can’t do squat with an ICE.

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Buses are absolutely perfect for electrification. They travel known routes, so no need for extra batteries, just get them with the size necessary; they go slow with lots of stops and starts, which are ideal for electric motors and regenerative braking; they use lots of fuel idling, which is avoided with electric motors; and they park at a depot when not in use, so charging only has to be built at a fixed location. Additionally, they tend to be replaced on planned schedules.

The only downside right now is that electric buses cost about 2-3 times what diesel buses cost to purchase. That will change. An article I saw just this morning, talking about school buses, said that a diesel school bus costs $0.69/mile to run, but an electric costs $0.35/mile to run.

Delivery trucks and buses are a complete no-brainer for electrification.

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I agree that they are good for electrification, I said that. I just think it would make more sense to do it with overhead power than with a battery on every bus for the reason you state, they follow the same route and we know where they are going. You could have a central efficient power plant for them and trains.

I also think I’m being misunderstood again. I’m trying to explain why I disagree with the OP’s topic. My hatred for current EV thinking has nothing to do with any belief in an apocalyptic future.

I see it more as when they were pushing CFL, but it wound up being LED’s.