I certainly agree; as EV penetration gets to high levels there are some complications, particularly with the grid itself moving to clean energy. None of these are insoluble or even particularly difficult problems, though. We’ll need some storage; we’ll need some smart grid tech; we’ll need to look at the mix of generation; we’ll probably want to beef up the various grid interties. It’s all doable and all these things have a ton of people working on them already.
That’s not really true. There are of course places where coal power is so prevalent that the GHG benefits of EVs are reduced, but typically, these still put a car like the Model S on par with the best small hybrid sedans. It does much better than comparable large luxury sedans.
That’s in coal country–the worst-case scenario. Just about everywhere else, whether there’s a lot of wind/solar/nuclear or just a lot of gas, EVs do significantly better. And coal will only continue to die, being replaced with gas if not something better.
Less range than a Tesla, higher cost, worse acceleration, the range extended model has a noisy gas engine that barely adds any range because for bullshit legal reasons it has a gnat sized fuel tank, sad looking exterior, BMW’s legendarily bad reliability?
What positive attributes overwhelm that rather damning list of negatives?
Right. Early Model 3’s had an Alcantara headliner–that’s a kind of ultrasuede material. The door accent panels still have it. It’s a nice-feeling material, though sometimes it doesn’t look at great because brushing against it changes the shade slightly (think about a lawn that you mowed in random directions).
The replacement headliner material (which mine has) is a kind of fabric. It’s a nice fine weave and better looking than the common cheap felt-like material in many cars. It should be easier to clean than Alcantara and is likely more durable. Some people were disappointed because fabric isn’t thought of as quite as “premium” as Alcantara, but I think it looks totally fine.
Gimme a bit and I’ll take some close-up shots of both.
:). Honestly, it’s not that I think the i3 is terrible for what it is. It does what it says on the box, so if the limitations are fine–and they are, for many situations–then it’s a fine vehicle. It’s just that BMW isn’t known for their econoboxes; they’re known for their luxury sport sedans and coupes–sleek, fast, luxurious, and great handling. They should have an EV in this category and they don’t.
As you can see, the Alcantara has kind of a mottled appearance since I haven’t brushed it super carefully in one direction. As an accent panel it’s fine, but I think I prefer the fabric for the main headliner material. The Alcantara does feel nice, though I don’t really plan on touching every possible surface all the time…
Yes, of course my idea is terrible, that’s why it’s going to be what we get. I know it’s impossible to see the sarcasm in what I wrote. Grouped chargers with some sort of power line based or near field wireless communication that can operate independently of any external computer would be ideal. An app or website to set default policies and exceptions is fine, but worst case should be the default policies are followed when no external data connection is available.
I kind of view this as similar to the discussions around dial-up internet in the 90s. “If more households get online, not everybody will be able to dial in, because the phone system was never designed to handle all those home phones in use at once,” was a common prediction. Of course, instead of the phone system getting a major upgrade, home internet moved to DSL and cable, while home phones moved to cellular.
I know it’s not a completely accurate analogy, because we aren’t going to charge cars with cell towers scattered around.
The point is, more demand will (hopefully) bring investment, and the available money will be used to solve the new problems. A grid with a large amount of its capacity derived from distributed solar and local storage will look much different than what we have today. Maybe most cars will charge where they park during the day, maybe your home battery will top off your car battery at night. There are lots of options available over the next 20+ years.
The existing infrastructure will increasingly be supplemented by decentralized energy clusters of a mix of renewables and traditional utilities. It’s the only way I can see that can accommodate the increase in EVs and future growth. Add in a rebate to have solar installed on your house and you have a mix of public, private, and corporate funds building your capacity.
. Dr S, have you had an opportunity to load up the car with 4-5 adults and see how it performs yet? Both in terms of the suspension bottoming out and acceleration/range.
Again, not sure where you get your facts, but House Republicans were bragging just a few weeks ago that they added $21 billion to infrastructure spending across the government, with Department of Transportation spending going up by like 40 percent compared to last year’s level.
Now, I’m pretty sure that President Trump is going to try to eliminate some of that spending, but I’d say a $21 billion increase in infrastructure spending is a respectable start. If only Republicans would stop cutting taxes that could pay for more roads and bridges…
The problem is that if the data connection goes down, the breaker blows. This is why you don’t use anything but a reliable method of data transmission. OR your charging speed goes to crap because the chargers are afraid to blow the breaker, not knowing what their peer chargers are doing.
An industrial serial bus - RS 422 or RS 485 - is what you need to use. I was suggesting ethernet, but for a mass produced product, it’s worth the hassle of protocol design to use a lower level bus that has more robust hardware and lower cost of components.
With a dedicated wire, you just set it up once, and then it keeps on working, probably for decades. If electric cars became fully adopted, most residential garages would have a charger on each wall.
For my recently purchased EV, if I charge during the day it’s from solar, and at night it’s from the Powerwalls. With the tax credits and local credits, my powerwalls will yield a net credit (they’re paying me). I didn’t know about the local credit and if I did I would have bought more!
My concern is that they will be designed with the level of care and foresight that goes into the typical Internet of Things device, not that goes into a proper industrial control component (which are also often terrible from a security perspective, if not from a safety and reliability perspective). Yes, they will be handling large amounts of power, but the electricity in a typical IoT 120 volt AC receptacle is still enough to kill you or burn down your house.
Just a short drive, but yes. With 600+ lbs of people, the impact to acceleration was just barely noticeable. Still very zippy feeling. We have some crazy speedbumps around the office parking lot and did not experience any bottoming out–that’s something that I usually have to be very careful about and it wasn’t a problem at all. Obviously I didn’t test the handling limits on public roads, but I did take turns faster than I usually would and there was basically no extra roll at all. Can’t comment on range since I didn’t go very far.
I guess there’s some kind of shortage as well, which may explain the switch.
I think the main complaint was that it was some kind of bait-and-switch, since at some point the Model 3 website imagery was of full Alcantara and some deliveries weren’t getting it. I configured already knowing what I’d get, so I can’t work up any outrage.
Yeah, I think it’s a loose but fitting analogy–the point is that the overall context has changed, so the original constraints now seem laughable. We have more of a problem with landline underutilization than overutilization now. And likewise, we’ll probably have more problems with electric grid underutilization in the long run, because local and neighborhood generation+storage will be cheap and widespread. And if not–well, that’s fine too because it means there will be plenty of money available for grid upgrades.
People don’t really get how quickly things can happen as soon as certain thresholds are hit. Not to mention political will as soon as there’s a faintest sign of things going wrong. CA changed governors when a few blackouts happened. Hopefully future problems will be solved before reaching that point, but if not then heads will roll and things will happen.
Passed a car transporter with a load of Teslas yesterday. I think they were the cheap ones, and a couple of the expensive ones. Truckee, California, heading east.
Agree. Cheaper batteries, which required by definition for mass market EVs to be possible, would greatly reduce all these grid problems.
If there are never cheaper batteries, EVs will remain a niche product. Though they are almost cheap enough already to build a car around a ~60kWh pack and sell it at Toyota Prius prices. Just need another halving in cost.
With cheap batteries you could sell Samsung brand Powerwalls at home depot. Next time your roof needs replacing, get it upgraded to solar. Or add the panels on top.
The battery banks could act to reduce the peak load on the grid and thus on the wiring. The solar panels reduce the total watts drawn by each house per day. (since it doesn’t do any good to reduce peak load if the average load is very high)
The last key element you have to have is communication. The power company needs to be able to communicate “hey, all you battery packs wired in? Please emit <a floating point number> percent of your capacity”.
Then the power company would ramp up the request to the battery packs until the grid balances. You do this smoothly and slowly. Battery packs would begin to drop out, charge depleted, if you did this for hours, but you could increase the request if you had to.
This could prevent a brownout and buy you hours for the sun to come up, maybe a whole day to fix a generator.
And worst case, if the grid does brown out, every important home, business, or medical facility would have these battery backups set up as UPS units.
Yeah, all the people screaming about how they were going to cancel their reservation over the headliner material, and whining about how the new fabric is less “premium” (whatever that means) than alacantra just left me puzzled. Alacantra/micro-suede looks tacky to me. I bet in an alternate universe where it was never marketed as a “luxury” fabric with a fancy name that makes it sound like it was somehow harvested from free range alpacas high in the Andes, those same people would be screaming about any inclusion of that “cheap synthetic suede crap.”
On a separate note, I just got my invite to configure too! I figured since I was about ~100,000 in line, I wouldn’t even be able to get the process started for another few months, so i was completely surprised when I logged into my account.