Uk is going to stop sales of gas and diesel cars by 2040 (Now 2030)

Great Debates
41

The “plan” as it were for the range problem is neither of the above.

Once autonomous vehicles are common, it won’t make any sense to own one. The reason is simple. The manufacturer of the autonomous vehicle must pay for every crash. This in turn means that the manufacturer must demand that you maintain your autonomous vehicle fully, replacing any parts that are worn or failed, and regularly inspecting it. Otherwise, the autonomy shuts down. In addition, eventually the manufacturer is going to update the autonomy software suite to the point that they won’t want to support old vehicles. So your autonomous car would need to return itself to the manufacturer for a computer upgrade or to be recycled and replaced with a model with more sensors.

This sounds an awful lot like leasing to me. In practice, since the autonomous car’s main features aren’t usable if you aren’t constantly paying money, and after about 3-5 years the whole car (or at least the electronics) will need to be replaced, it makes sense to just lease it from the manufacturer. This lease will be kind of expensive, so it makes sense to have someone else pay the lease, and you just rent rides when you want one.

Some people will still own autonomous cars, and some people will lease them for their personal use despite the cost, but I’m saying that most of them will be owned by large fleet owners who are using them for mass taxi services.

Anyways, long distance trips are an easy problem on this model. It’s real simple.

a. User pulls out their phone and summons a ride to a destination.

If the destination is close by, an electric vehicle shows up. If the destination is far away, a hybrid or pure gas burning vehicle shows up.

There is no reason to own a vehicle that can cover every situation if you can just rent the vehicle you need on demand and it costs mere pennies a mile. Suddenly need a vehicle that can haul 8 people? Summon that. Suddenly need a vehicle with a truck bed? Summon one. Need something sexy for your date tonight? Summon one. Just want to get to work? Summon a streamlined eco-pod that is cheaper. And so on.

In some cases, if you want to go somewhere 1000+ miles away, what would happen is that the autonomous car would take you to a walmart parking lot at the limit of it’s range. Another autonomous car would be waiting and you’d switch vehicles.

42

Charge density and power density are still limiters. You can make the pack free, but you still have to have somewhere to put it be able to push the weight around.

Which is why I asked how their plan addresses heavier vehicles where batteries are more challenging to implement.

43

Tesla, Mercedes and Daimler are already looking into it. Tesla had said that they expected to announce something mid-2017, but you know how ambitious Musk is with his announcements.

A semi can carry one helluva battery pack. If one could drive 2-3,000 miles on a charge and swap out the pack in a couple of hours at most, trucking companies could send them everywhere and control their own battery pack inventory. Hell, once again, companies like Love’s and Flying J (major truck stops) could probably get into swapping packs like we swap LP tanks at Walmart right now. Drive in, they pull out your 4-500 mile pack and throw in a fully charged pack. No worries for the driver about charge times and they can go eat while it gets done. New jobs for pack swappers too.

44

So four megawatt-hour packs weighing in at what, 5 tons each? Class 8 maxes out at 40 tons. So like I said, maybe ok for drayage. Unless you’re going to charge while driving or add a fuel cell, there’s only so much lightweighting you can do to counter the pack weight.

45

It doesn’t take that much energy.

One example from that page;

“2014 international lone star empty mpg has been reading 7-8 . loaded is around 6.1-6.5. I’m hauling 43,000 in the box and going through the West Va mountains still is above 6 mpg. This maxxforce is a brute compared to the dd15 I had.”

So this guy is getting 6-6.5mpg with a fully loaded truck carrying 43,000 pounds of cargo over mountain roads.

From that; “Electric Semi Truck requires approximately 1200 kwh for 600 mile range”.

So then a 600kwh pack in a semi, swapping out every 300 miles, which has you stopping every 4-5 hours, depending on your speed.

Now obviously, at current battery prices, those packs would be about $75k each and weigh 8500 pounds each. Hence the need for the Gigafactory and further battery refinements to bring those down.

So yes, I will agree with you that right now, the weight and the price points are not there for full conversion of cross-country trucking to all-electric.

46

Which is almost exactly a megawatt-hour for your 500 mile pack. So yes that much energy.

As opposed to the current 1200-1800 miles between refueling for long-haul, let alone the 2000 you just proposed a few posts back.

8500 lb for 600 kWh is 7 tons for your 500 mile pack. A 30% weight reduction gets you to the 5 tons I guessed at. The Gigafactory will absolutely help with price; that is wonderful and exciting. But it is also an admission at defeat re: battery innovation because you don’t build a Gigafactory to make new battery chemistries. You build it to make a whole lot of old batteries.

47

I’m complaining about heavy trucking but everyone should note that that is a small component of transportation energy. In the US, freight trucks use 5.5 quads vs 15 quads for light-duty transportation.
The UK is obviously a different country with different transportation needs, so YMMV.

48

With trucks, there are several things you can do :

a. Just go to a hybrid drivetrain.

b. A robot trucks’ time is not as valuable as a humans. Just have it stop every 300 miles (aka 5 hours) and charge it’s pack at a truck stop. It would need to recharge 300 kWh. Current Tesla supercharger is 120 kW, so it would take just 2 and a half hours to recharge. During this time, contract mechanics might look the robot truck over, maybe wipe off the sensors, etc.

Since the robot truck doesn’t need to sleep, it could still be rolling at highway speed 112 hours of the week - human drivers can only do around 75 hours a week max.

Also, realistically, the robot truck would probably spend much of it’s time in line at the destination waiting to be unloaded, or waiting at the unloading bay. Integrated chargers in unloading bays would obviously be something some companies would find worthwhile to invest in.

One cool thing about the ~360 kWh pack the truck would use - it would just be 4 of the 90 kilowatt hour packs that a top tier electric car would use. (the highest Tesla trim is 90 kWh)

So you’d divide the truck into sections, probably separating the battery packs by firewalls so that an uncontrolled battery fire at most kills 1/4 the truck’s battery. Possibly even just have the exact same form factor battery modules used in a passenger electric car packed into the truck somewhere.

As for cost, well, GM let slip that the Volt pack is $136 a kwh. So the truck battery would be $49,000. Given that brand new big rig trucks are $200,000, and the battery is basically most of the engine and most of the fuel system, it’s almost at the point of feasibility today.

I mean, obviously what you want is quad supercharger bays at each truck stop for these things. Say 240 kilowatts charging power per truck, and the ability to charge 4 trucks at once. So yeah, you’d need a megawatt just for the truck stop. That doesn’t sound totally out of line - there’s only so many major truck stops out there.

I don’t think battery swaps make any sense. The battery is essentially most of the truck at these prices, everyone would rather the battery stayed integrated with the vehicle I think. Also it’s kind of a fire waiting to happen, and unbolting and bolting the battery constantly sounds like a bad plan.

49

I suppose you could tractor swap instead of pack swap.

50

And Tesla isn’t sitting on their butts with current technology. They work with a number of battery researchers trying to increase energy density and find new materials.

51

Diesel car sales are down 20% in the UK.

Electric cars have increase from 3.3% to 5.5% of total sales in a year.

It is still early days but the market is changing and national a local government policy seems to be singing the same tune. The air pollution issue is a widespread concern and politicians know there are votes to be lost unless they come up with policies to fix the problem.

The big question is whether there will be a government sponsored diesel scrappage scheme where drivers are compensated for trading in their polluting vehicles.

It needs a combination of carrots and sticks. In Europe the VW emissions fixing scandal led to a big shift in public policy, the car lobby found their influence much reduced.

It must be an exciting time in the motor industry, redesigning and tooling up for a complete new drive chain. I expect the grid power generation business also has a lot of planning to do.

Unsurprisingly it looks like California leads the way in the US.

When a new technology gets to a tipping point where it becomes a viable replacement for an established technology, it creates an opportunity for innovators. Usually companies with a big investment in the established technology fight back however they can. Sometimes they rollout performance innovations they have been sitting on for years. Often they use their political influence to undermine the development of their new rivals, anything that threatens their investment.

I think in Europe that battle has been won and lost and the big car makers can read the writing on the wall. I am not sure about the US, uptake of EVs seems sluggish outside of California, which seems to be the exception. Maybe it has the worst air pollution in the US?

52

You’ve also got to work out what will happen to said batteries when they run out of cycles and give up the ghost. If they are lithium powered, such as what is in your laptop, you’re going to have a hell of a lot of lithium batteries going to waste. Not to mention that replacement battery packs will be extremely heavy, as well as expensive.

If a laptop battery with 6 lithium cells (and 44Wh capacity) costs about £10, or more, then how much will a high current, high capacity car battery with hundreds or even thousands of lithium cells cost?

53

Currently, both gasoline and electric cars have advantages and disadvantages. A customer who’s basing a decision purely on utility will have to weigh those advantages and disadvantages. With current conditions, that ends up meaning that the utilitarian decision for most customers is a gas car… but even today, there are some for whom the electric already makes more sense.

As time goes on, some of the drawbacks of the gasoline cars will increase (mostly due to rising cost of fuel), while the drawbacks of electric cars will decrease (due to improving technology, especially in the batteries or other energy-storage systems). As this happens, the electric share of the marketplace will gradually grow.

Right now, the biggest advantages of gasoline over electric are range, safety (it’s actually a lot harder to get gasoline to explode than a battery), and price of the car. Range and safety for batteries are constantly improving, and range also becomes less relevant as more charging stations become available. It doesn’t necessarily even need to be quick-charge stations: If it takes 8 hours to charge, you can do it overnight. If your workplace also installs chargers of the same sort, then you can also charge at work, and the distance you can commute has just doubled. And the price of the vehicles will decrease as we move beyond the early-adopter stage and the engineering in general matures.

Electric vehicles, meanwhile, also have advantages. The most well-publicized, of course, is lower fuel costs (on a dollars-per-mile basis). And of course, they’re lower emissions (possibly even zero emissions, depending on where you get your electricity, but lower even if you use coal). But electric motors are also mechanically simpler than gasoline, and so need less maintenance. And they’re easier to start up, quieter, and provide more consistent performance over a range of operating conditions.

54

One thing to consider (Stateside, anyway) is that long-haul drivers can only drive 11 hours per day anyway. When I was driving long-haul, my truck was governed at 65 mph max, per company policy, so I could only pull 715 miles per day on a cross-country trip, followed by a 10-hour rest period; perfect for charging.

Quick-swap packs would still be needed for team drivers, and eventually automation will remove the needs for rest periods. At that point, I would assume the robots will either make use of a quick-swap station or infrastructure would have to be set up to allow the robots to plan routes and charge stops to maximize hauling efficiency.

55

Tesla’s 85 kWh pack has 7,104 of 18650 form factor cells. I would expect their cell cost to be lower than the per-cell price of a consumer laptop battery, but I don’t have a trustworthy pack cost.
The Model 3 will have a 75 kWh pack using the 2170 form factor, which are supposedly cheaper. I’m seeing numbers like 21 Wh per cell. But good luck getting a cost.

56

[QUOTE=Chronos]
Range and safety for batteries are constantly improving, and range also becomes less relevant as more charging stations become available.
[/QUOTE]

I agree safety is improving, but I can’t find any cites demonstrating a constant improvement of range. They look pretty flat to me, even taking into account high-end systems like the Tesla. What is the current rate of constantly improving range and what is it projected to be in the future? I thought the current tech was pretty much at it’s limits wrt battery technology and it will take a breakthrough in said tech in order to get even in the ballpark of performance wrt ICE engines.

57

Thank you for bringing some experience into the conversation. Do you know how often “team drivers” are used?

58

Missed edit window.

I also like the idea of tractor swaps vs. battery swaps. Large company fleets would be able to handle this well, though I don’t know how most drivers would like it, and then Owner/Operators would definitely be phased out, as they would not be able to compete (long-haul, anyway). They would likely be relegated only to drayage.

59

And of course this thread started with discussion about the UK, and Penzance to Thurso is 817 miles. So my complaints about long-haul trucking are much less relevant to the actual thread topic.

60

A lot of large companies use team drivers to maximize efficiency.

I drove for CRST, and company policy mandates team driving, so I would drive 11 hours (max drive time, federal regulations) then sleep while my team mate drove the next 11 hours. I know that Swift Transportation also mandates team driving.