Thread on viability of Electric Cars

In My Humble Opinion
1

There is no doubt in my mind that, aside from range everything else about an electric car is a better engineering solution than gas.

Just the fact that a gas engine needs to be oversized and hooked to a complex transmission just to overcome its limitations at slow speed makes electric motors a better choice. Being able to locate motors and batteries low in the chassis makes for potentially better handling vehicles. Replacing moving parts with electronics is a great idea. Eliminating the oils for engines and transmissions makes the vehicle cleaner for both the environment and mechanic.

I think electric cars are great, and anyone looking for a new car who has a place to charge and who mostly commutes within a city should seriously consider an electric car, or if you don’t have a garage or plugin, a PHEV.

Here in Canada it’s a little different. Electric cars lose a lot of range when it’s cold. Hell, it gets cold enough here routinely that standard electronics begin to fail. Electric cars can lose more than half their range in extreme cold, especially when you have to run the cabin heaters and battery heaters full blast constantly. We also dn’t have the extensive charging networks the U.S. has. But I’d still buy an electric for a city car if we had to replace one of our vehicles.

The biggest reason why electric cars will eventually take over is not because of government mandates or subsidies, but because very soon it will become obvious to most everyone that electric cars are a superior choice for kost use cases. When car hobbyists and racers start lusting for electrics over gas cars, the battle will truly have been won. That might take ten years, and then another 15 years for the older gas cars to leave the roads, but we will eventually get there.

There couod also be a tipping point style rapid change. Once electric cars become more common, you will slowly see gas stations thin out and charging stations appear to reflect the new demand mix, and that will further bias the market towards electric.

We could see a situation where people buy electric instead of gas because there are so few gas stations and you always have to drive out of your way for a fill up while uour friend with the electric car charges at home and watches with bemusement as you still cling to the painful old practice of having to drive somewhere every week or two just to get gas.

2

There are several Teslas driving around Saskatoon. Owners report they are actually nicer to drive in extreme cold conditions than ICE vehicles, because you don’t have to worry about them starting and the cabin heat is better. Loss of range, well, I do my level best to avoid road trips during cold snaps in the first place, and 50% range is still plenty for driving around town.

I’m hoping to buy electric for my next car, though the charging network in Saskatchewan is still really weak. Hopefully by the time I’m looking to buy that will have changed. The larger issue for me at the moment is cost. I can replace my old Fit with a new one for about $20k, but a Bolt or Leaf will run me $40k. But, while the Fit may be 11 years old it’s only at 105k km, so I can wait for battery costs to fall which should bring the price disparity down.

3

And yet in Norway, electric vehicles are outselling gasoline ones.

4

Estimates for the cost of battery packs today seem to range between $120 to $150 per kWh. The reasonable near-term (5-10 years) predictions have batteries coming down to somewhere between $65 kWh and $100 kWh.

Unfortunately, from what I can tell these predictions are little more than linear extrapolations based on the reduction in battery costs over the last 10 years, which have been pretty dramatic.

The thing is, those reductions are not due to better technology for batteries, or any Moore’s law type function. It’s simply that batteries went from being a small market to a huge one, bring in economies of scale for building essentially the same thing.

But there is a serious problem after that short time frame, which is that we may face shortages of the chemicals needed to make those batteries. The estimates for battery availability for cars don’t take into account the possible re-direction of battery manufacturing to grid batteries to fix the intermittancy issues of wind and solar. In a recent post I pointed out that the batteries required to back up Diablo Canyon for just a short period would equal the entire production of batteries for EVs today.

If we ramp up battery production, raw materials are going to be a limiting factor, and the cost of raw materials are going to rise. Normally I’d say the market would handle it and production and mining will just increase to account for it. But today, it’s extremely hard to open new mines in the west, so there could be serious production shortages.

There are some technologies coming that will make things a little better. New materials for anodes and cathodes may extend the life of batteries, so we don’t need as many new ones. New packaging techniques might shave a few percentage points here and there.

But there will never be a Moore’s law type improvement in battery tech. At least not until we find a whole new technology for storing energy.

That said… the industry is predicting that the cost of manufacture of EVs will reach parity with ICE cars in just a few years. It may already be there when you consider the total cost of ownership.

There

5

I largely agree with your analysis in this thread; hopefully the above means that recycling of batteries is a major component of the life-cycle from the beginning.

This thread has me rethinking my EV plans. I live in Boston and have to park on the street so charging is going to be inconvenient. I figured my next car would be ICE but 200+ mile ranges seem to be common now. There are also rumors that my neighborhood is considering adding some public chargers. This might actually work.

Has there been any recent analysis of TCOE of EVs? I’ve heard that repair shops are worried that EVs will need a lot less repair; has that proven true?

6

Here’s a really good article, using real world data, from Car and Driver:

https://www.caranddriver.com/shopping-advice/a32494027/ev-vs-gas-cheaper-to-own/

Quite a few caveats there, though. 45,000 miles is not enough to get you to the other side of the bathtub curve where parts start to wear out. On the one hand, after 10 years you might have to replace your EV battery, and that could cost you anywhere from $5,000 to $15,000. But in that time in a gas car you may have to replace your transmission, which in my vehicle is an $8,000 job. EVs don’t have transmissions.

In the end, it’s going to come down to quality. But not having to spend the money in the interim for oil changes, spark plugs, air filters, clutches, and other stuff that doesn’t exist in an EV should make up for all that. The above chart shows that day-to-day costs for those EVs is .02 or .03 per mile less than an equivalent ICE vehicle. If the vehicle lasts 200,000 miles, that will more than pay for a new battery.

We haven’t even touched the cost of gas vs electric charging, which favors EVs.

Depreciation is a big factor in the ownership of a car, but I’m not sure we really know what the depreciation will look like for many electric vehicles. The only ones 10 years old or older are also early EVs that don’t have anywhere near the range and charging speed of the new ones, so that will affect them. On the other hand, vehicles like Teslas, which don’t change their body styles every year and are electronically upgradeable may hold up really well.

So I’d say in terms of TCO, If we aren’t already there we are very close. With government subsidies we are easily there. If gas prices go up faster than electricity, we’re also already there.

One black flag on the horizon: don’t count on electricity prices staying low as we transition to other forms of generation. If electricity goes from an average of .12/kWh to $.50/kWh, charging a Tesla long range would go from $12 to $50. That could slow EV adoption. And so far, the jurisdictions I know of that have gone heavily for solar and wind have seen huge price increases. Ontario went from .08/kWh to .35. So it can happen.

7

That reminded me of the e-Power system Nissan is developing. It’s technically a hybrid rather than a pure EV, but in this system the wheels are always driven by the electric motor, and the ICE only drives a generator. That should allow the gasoline engine to be highly optimized to run at a specific speed, unlike a traditional car. From what I’ve read Nissan claims it will be able to achieve 50% thermal efficiency, while traditional car are more like 30-40%.

8

Katrina? Any major flood? Wildfires with the power out? Large scale evacuation orders that overwhelm the charging network?

Here in Canada, if a winter storm like we just had took down the power for an extended period of time and we didn’t have alternatives like gas heat and no way to escape, after the storm is over we’d be finding a LOT of frozen bodies.

9

Driving 200 miles would get you out of a lot of these. Granted, not all. I guess I didn’t factor that in. When we get a winter storm (rare) our driveway is impassable. (Steep, long, and curvy.)

If I did have to leave, and if it were possible, I can get as far as Portland Oregon (from near Seattle). If there is an outage that widespread, we’d be in trouble even with a gas car.

10

I hope this thread helps people understand why we aren’t getting to an electric vehicle fleet any time in the near future.

I can’t think of a more electric-friendly audience than the Straight Dope, and yet only 14% of respondents plan to get an electric car within 5 years. And all the problems are here: people who live jn apartments nd can’t charge at home, people with a relatively new car who can’t afford to switch over, people who have regular long car drives, etc.

I’d buy an electric car now as a second vehicle, because I think for city driving they are awesome. But my car is only 6 years old and I plan to drive it for at least another 5 years, and my wife’s car is a Saab 9-2x that’s now 15 years old but drives like new and is a sports/rally style car with AWD and a manual transmission and she loves it. So no electric cars for us.

A full turnover of the car fleet to electric will probably take at least two generation of car lifecycle. Modern cars stay in the market for a long time - the current fleet averages 11.8 years. So maybe we’ll have 50% of people in EVs in, say, 20-30 years. If they want them. Even if new sales go 100% electric in 10 years, it will take another decade before all the old gas cars are traded in for electric.

But 100% electric is not feasible. There are too many outliers - people with specific needs that can’t be met with electric cars. I think we’ll be lucky to get to 50% total electric vehicles on the road.

11

What an utterly bizarre reading of the poll. Did you miss that 16% already own an EV? Or that another 3% plan on getting one within one year?

Of course the dominant 60% is “not in the foreseeable future”. Probably ~60% of people wouldn’t buy a car of any kind in the foreseeable future, either because they don’t need a car or they have one that they plan on keeping for a while. That has no relevance whatsoever on whether EVs make sense for a given person.

Only 7% gave a flat no. That’s a much more useful take home. And a promising one.

What, like for all time? Nonsense, even leaving aside the fact that oil is a finite resource and we’ll have to go 100% EV at some point.

12

This is my me and my wife. We aren’t buying a car in the next 5 years so that was the only answer that fit. However, when we buy again, we are most likely going with EV only. I think the poll options could’ve been done better, particularly that response.

13

And it’s only in the past couple of years that practical, mass-market EVs really became available. There’s a mass of people who are interested in EVs but who bought their car 5 years ago when they couldn’t afford a decent one. They’ll be keeping their car for another 5 years or so, but the next one will be an EV–particularly since the models available then will be even more attractive (along with charging network deployment, etc.).

14

Look, I think EVs are great. From an engineering standpoint they are simpler and you don’t have to jump through hoops like having a transmission to match the power curve of the engine to the needs of the driver.

But I’m also a realist. EVs are not going to sell to people who travel long distances regularly. They aren’t going to sell easily to people who do not have garages for overnight charging. They are going to be a hard sell to construction workers, farmers, salespeople, etc.

Yes, I know there are EV trucks that they are trying to market to construction workers and farmers. They even have nice features like using the battery to power a job site. But having worked in both farming and construction, I think there will be a lot of resistance. A pickup truck on a farm can run all day, on unimproved fields and carrying heavy loads. Charging at night isn’t an option during harvest, and your truck always has to be ready to go on short notice if emergencies crop up.

Maybe EVs can handle all that, but I’m just saying adoption in these areas is going to be slow.

Then there’s the simple matter of cost. There are lots of people who simply can’t afford ANY new car, let alone an expensive EV, and they won’t be in the market for one until others buy them and use them for anywhere from five years to ten.

The obvious market for EVs right now would be two-car families with garages, or single city dwellers who don’t travel long distances and who have a garage or parking spot with a charging station.

I think that market might get to 50% penetration in 5-10 years. Maybe even more. But that makes up a small fraction of the overall market for vehicles.

When you get into commercial vehicles, they stay in the market for a lot longer, and will subsequently take longer to replace. The average lifespan of a Semi-Truck is 16-18 years, and the fleet of semis is currently only 7-8 years old. So the current fleet will need close to 10 years before half of it is turned over.

If people are still buying diesel trucks by then, those ones will be on the road for an average of 16-18 more years. So just through attrition it would not be possible to replace all trucking with EVs within 25 years, and probably not within 30-40. What could change that could be heavy incentives or massive fuel taxes, but that would impose a serious cost on the industry.

15

Chargers are cheap to install. It isn’t going to be very long before they’re all over the place for street parking, apartment parking, etc. It’s also going to be legally mandated in many places. Already in CA, apartment dwellers have the right to ask their landlords to install a charging station (for a price). Homeowners don’t need a garage, just something attached to the house with a long enough cord. Parking in the driveway or in a carport is fine.

We’ll see how the commercial sector evolves. So far, the necessary vehicle types aren’t available. But once they are, I expect a rapid adoption for economic reasons alone. It’ll be stupid to run an expensive diesel truck when electricity is so much cheaper. They are much more sensitive to running costs (and better motivated to take the costs into account) than general consumers. Plus I expect ICE commercial vehicles to be the first to be banned from cities for pollution reasons. Trucking companies can choose to get new trucks or not get business. Easy choice.

Yes, some of this imposes a cost on the industry. That cost however is negligible compared to the unpaid cost they impose on the rest of us in the form of air and noise pollution. The various subsidies and enticements just narrow the gap a tiny bit.

I find that in almost any EV discussion, these externalities get casually ignored by the fossil fuel camp, even though it’s the single most important factor in the decarbonization of transport. You simply cannot talk about the costs of EVs without also talking about the costs of fossil fuels. The fact that the latter costs aren’t being paid in dollars doesn’t mean they aren’t being paid by someone.

16

I won’t live long enough to enjoy the reduction I would love to not-hear: No more aftermarket exhausts on motorcycles, Subarus and other “tuner” cars, lifted trucks, dirt bikes, loud as fuck snowmobiles, etc. Future generations will have a much quieter world except for the freaking Canadians and their red Barchettas.

17

Garbage trucks are my bane. I have a dumpster area not far from my window. The trucks are loud enough when driving, but they have to rev up the engines to power the hydraulics. It’s obnoxious.

18

You could always artificially manufacture hydrocarbons if you’ve really got it in for the atmosphere and economy.

19

We’ll probably have to do that for long-range air flights. But it’s still an EV, just an indirect one. And the only reason to do that is if you are totally constrained by energy density (as long-haul air is). In every other respect, you’re worse off. For ground transportation, there’s zero reason not to just go for batteries. EVs are superior vehicles to ICE even with current tech, with their only downsides relating to having over a century of fossil fuel infrastructure and only a few years of EV infrastructure built up. But this is all changing rapidly and the landscape will look very different in a decade.

Rockets are another application where you simply can’t work around the energy density of chemical propellant. But they can burn hydrogen and methane, and those can be generated electrically.

Toyota is still pushing its fuel cell vehicles. But they’re stupid; they have massively worse infrastructure problems than EVs, and the hydrogen still comes from hydrocarbons. They’re better than ICE but worse than BEVs. Yeah, in principle the hydrogen can be generated from solar/wind power, but that’s not how it works now. And the poor end-to-end efficiency compared to an EV means they will always be worse than just using the electricity to charge a battery. Hydrogen might make sense for aircraft and container ships.

20

The New York Times ran an article last week (paywall warning) about how the Japanese car industry is planning to keep going with hybrid vehicles rather than going into EV development. The article suggests that if they’re wrong to do so, they’ll become irrelevant, much as Japanese consumer electronic brands are.