I just realized Brad Templeton isn’t going to writing much new stuff about robocars for awhile. He is doing consulting on robocars for Google.
A few answers to questions earlier asked -
The current grid could handle 80% of cars being electric as long as they were charged in “trough” times.
The net CO2 savings depends on the power generating mix. Obviously the more that is nuclear and/or renewable electricity generation, the better. 100% current dirty coal not so much so.
Batteries are expected to last the life of the vehicle and to then have a second life tied together as stationary storage units (they are still functional for that purpose even when they have lost enough capacity that they are no longer fully functional for their original intended use.) Both the GM Volt and the Nissan Leaf have 8 year/100K warranties. The makers think they will last much longer than that.
How much will that residual value be and how much will a replacement cost if you got to 8 plus and needed to replace? Most experts are fairly sure that by then they will be below $250/kWh which would mean about $8K for the Nissan Leaf. (Minus its residual value) That’s just on the basis of economies of scale and commoditization. If metal air or some other technologic break through does become a reality then much less than that. Then again it might be worth $8K for a new battery as there little else to wear out on an EV and getting another 8 years out of it is very likely.
Figure maybe 8 kWh for a 40 mile day (the Volt aims for 40 miles going from 70% to 30% of its 16kWh battery) and $0.12/kWh, so a bit under a buck a day for the charge. Maybe significantly less if there is discounted charging at night.
Electricity costs are likely going to be less volatile than gas prices and less likely to spike quickly. The grid is likely to get less CO2 intensive as time goes on.
The batteries used by Tesla are the classic cobalt based lithium ion batteries tied together into larger packs; most other makers are using lithium polymer with titanates and spinels and LiFePO4 large format packs which are amazingly safe.
Long term future of transportation several of those who post here believe that cars will become more semiautonomous, able to participate in machine to machine communication and form ad hoc platoons or “car trains” for much of the trip. That has little to do with EVs per se however.
The adoption of full EVs is expected to be somewhat gradual in America but much faster in China where the government has declared it as a major part of their future plans. That market will likely drive the economies of scale for the battery makers.
So would a nuclear powered car. It isn’t cost effective.
Chrysler has the right idea. They are not making hybrids right now because they are not financially viable. They are going to bring over the Fiat electric/hydraulic valve technology which should provide hybrid level fuel economy at a much reduced price.
I thought the thread was about whether an electric car is an ideal form of transportation or not. But if you feel this way, I apologize for the hijack and stop this line of argument.
Funny, I live in a suburb, and my daughter can catch a bus pretty much anywhere she wants to go. I believe that’s true in just about any large city or suburb in America, with varying degrees of inconvenience. And elderly people have these handi-cab things they can call, which will take them where they want to go for free or for a nominal fee. I can also call a cab any time I need one and be in it within 15 minutes. When the weather is good, the kids ride bicycles to school or to their friend’s places. Don’t exaggerate the issue.
When I was a kid, my family didn’t have a car. I got along just fine with typical city services - buses, biking and walking, mainly. My mother shopped for groceries at a store that had a delivery service. It worked fine. My mother still doesn’t drive.
It seems to me that cities already have a mix of transportation services that people like, based on how they spend their money and how they vote. So how are you going to achieve your goal? Through force? Tax their cars until they get rid of them?
And what are you trying to achieve with mass transit? What problem are you ultimately trying to solve? Save the environment? Reduce road congestion? Improve the quality of life for most people? Or what?
If it’s the environment you’re trying to save, you’d better be careful. If you overbuild your mass transit and can’t fill all the buses and trains, you could easily burn more energy than those dastardly cars did. If you are trying to reduce congestion, just remember that when roads are free to use, congestion becomes the limiting factor. So if you convince 10% of the people to ride the bus, that will just increase the marginal value of the less-congested roads for everyone else, which will stimulate more road use anyway. That’s why Europe has great mass transit - and its roads are still congested.
In any event, when you talk about other countries that have great mass transit, you’re generally talking about small, densely populated countries in Europe, or very large, highly populated cities. The efficiency of mass transit is closely correlated with population density, so you should be comparing countries with similar population density in populated areas, population density in the cities, and road distances between cities. How about comparing the U.S. to Australia, New Zealand, and Canada? Do those countries have advanced mass transit systems, high speed rail, and all the rest?
It seems to be about electric cars being the ideal form of transport given pretty much ideal technology and circumstances and a lot of assumptions. No apology needed for me, I just didn’t want to side track the discussion away from where the OP seemed to want to go and what they seemed to want to discuss.
-XT
Solar charging of car batteries is a good idea, but only for trickle-charging, maintaining a top-up, and for use in helping maintain the battery in good condition. If you might not be driving your car for a month or two, a solar trickle charger might be a reasonable investment.
But a reasonable solar panel isn’t going to be charging your car up very much. An average rooftop solar system might provide 1kW of power when the sun is shining. The Ford Focus electric has a 23 kW/h battery. Assuming you work at night so you can charge your car during the day, and you get an average of 50% of rated output of your panels during the day (cloud cover, dirt, sun angle, etc), and assuming 70% charging efficiency, and 8 hours of daylight time per day in which your car is being charged, your rooftop solar system can put a full charge into your car in 8-9 days. 1 kW solar system will set you back maybe $5,000-$7,500. Not a great investment.
I’ve lived in various suburbs all my life and there is no way public transportation serves the community at large. If by some bizarre coincidence a bus goes near a useful location they are a tremendous inconvenience to use. It would be a prison sentence of limitations to rely on them.
I can’t imagine hiking to a bus stop in the cold of Winter, the heat of Summer, or the rainy days of Spring and then repeating the process at a transfer point only to hike to my final destination under the same conditions. Basic grocery shopping would mean hauling bags of food all over hell’s half acre and there is zero transportation nodes that could handle anything large. It would all have to be delivered at my expense.
The reason I started this thread and emphasized the battery angle is partly because about 60 years ago I read a book that listed “100 inventions that are sorely needed and would change the world,” or some such title. The only one that I still remember is the one that said, “A far superior battery or other electrical power storage.”
I wish I had that book now. I suspect many of the proposed inventions have come true, but this one seems to lag behind. If you compare a tube-type portable AM radio of the 1950s with its large and multiple batteries to a pocket radio of today powered by a coin cell, much of the progress is in the lower power drain and greater features of the electronics.
I realize the technical problems with super-fast charging compared to filling up a gas tank, but that seems like the ideal. If an electric tank could be filled in 2 minutes, no one could object to the recharge time. In a practical sense, an hour or two isn’t all that bad – let’s say you are taking a long trip and 300 miles is all you get on a charge. If you stop for a bite to eat and your car could be charged while you munch, that’s not a huge imposition on your travel style. But a 10 hour charge could make the vehicle impractical.
There are so many battery research projects going on I expect one of them will bust through with a high density/rapid charge system that is a fraction of the cost of current versions. When that happens it will be a game changer. I look forward to energy independence. It would be nice to see all that money pouring out of the country stay in domestic circulation.
There’s an interesting NOVA program called Making Stuff Cleaner that discusses different battery technology both for cars and also power plant storage.
Oh yeah, battery technology improvements can change our entire infrastructure. Not just for cars, but for just about everything else. We wouldn’t have iPhones and iPads if it weren’t for the development of Lithium-ion batteries. Cordless power tools, disposable electric toothbrushes, and all sorts of modern devices rely on small, high capacity batteries.
With enough energy density, it becomes feasible to electrically heat your clothing. Robots become more useful. Electric airplanes and tiny remotely piloted vehicles become possible. Disposable digital newspapers become possible. RFID-like powered transmitters can be used as tags without having to have the RFID scanners and such. Materials can use Peltier coolers and heaters to keep themselves at optimum temperatures. Cell phone radios can have more power, allowing more bandwidth. And so it goes. But the most exciting things are the inventions we don’t even know about because the battery technology doesn’t exist to make them feasible. Batteries are an ‘enabling’ technology for a whole lot of things.
But here’s the cold water: We don’t really know how to do all that much better than what we’ve got now. Lithium is the most reactive element and the lightest metal, so in terms of energy density it’s as good as we know how to make. So in the near term, improvements will probably come along in terms of improving the cell itself to provide for faster charge times, longer shelf life, more charge cycles, etc. For example, Lithium-Polymer batteries don’t really have a better charge density than lithium-ion, but the solid polymer electrolyte means the battery can be formed into different shapes, making it easier to package into various devices.
The only battery chemistry I know of that promises a greater charge density than lithium ion is Zinc-Air. These batteries can produce much more energy per unit weight and volume than lithium batteries, because they use the air itself instead of having to package a polymer or liquid electrolyte into the battery. But they have so many shortcomings and problems that it’s hard to see them coming into widespread use. For example, they have a very high internal resistance, which means they can’t release their energy very fast. Maybe they could be used in a hybrid battery where they slowly release energy into a faster-discharge battery - like it has its own trickle charger. But there are other issues as well with those batteries.
I live in the frozen wasteland of the upper Midwest USA. On a chilly morning like this one, what happens to my ability to get to work? (18 miles). Can I run the heater while I commute? I get it that electrics are good for warmer climes…
An article about electric car battery power loss due to temperature drop appears here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/27/AR2011012706170.html
In short it says they don’t perform as well with even a 10 degree Fahrenheit drop.
It completely negates the use of a pure electric in northern states. And while a Volt is a hybrid and can utilize a gas engine it must produce enough power to drive the primary electric motor because of the way the transmission is set up. Even in coupled mode the gas engine relies on the electric motor to spin one set of the planetary gears. The car’s performance would be reduced substantially if the car was stuck for any length of time in freezing conditions. This article says the car gets 30 mpg after the battery is depleted. What is more important in a cold weather emergency is the car’s ability to produce heat to stay warm and enough hp to propel the car forward at speed. In mountainous terrain that would become a problem. I wouldn’t want to drive a Volt through Donner’s Pass.
And the real world experience based rebuttal to that article.
He wasn’t stuck in traffic so his rebuttal is his opinion.
To be fair I found the 50% reduction in power in a 10 deg drop of temperature to be a non-statistic. It lacked a range to work with. 50 degrees to 40 degrees? Zero degrees to minus 10? It makes a big honking difference what the range is.
I certainly hope so. It brings to mind a similar revolution in hard drive technology ca. 1995-2000, when drive capacities took a jump up and are still rising. What a difference that made.
Solar photo voltaic cells are another technology that seems to be creeping along in improvements, not making a leap in progress like hard drives did.
I was hoping the painted-on solar cell project would have been a little farther along. Right now I’d like to see tax rebate money diverted to geo-thermal where I think there is a better return on investment. My state mandated the power companies invest in alternative energy sources and so far the money spent on solar fields seems like a poor return on investment. It would a huge electrical savings if geo-thermal became the standard replacement for home heating/air conditioning.
Right now I’m following the Fiat valve train solution to ICE engine efficiency. If they can produce a true econobox with hybrid fuel efficiency then that should be dumped on the market yesterday.
The Ford Focus electric has a battery encased in a heating/cooling shell. Part of the battery’s energy is used to maintain a constant internal temperature.
This would work if the energy required to keep the battery at peak operating temperature is less than the energy lost if the battery gets cold. Without knowing the various efficiencies behind that, it’s impossible to say how a Focus electric would perform in cold weather. But I’m sure cold weather trials are underway as we speak.
The big risk would be if you have to shut off the car and leave it outside in the cold for a long time. I don’t know what that would do to the battery’s efficiency, or whether the charge level would come back after you start the vehicle and warm up the battery pack.