I see the new Chevy Volt is Motor Trend’s Car Of The Year. Considering it is not even on the market yet, it is already becoming the hot new item and I am sure sales will be huge - especially considering the price, while not cheap, is not outrageous for a new car.
Granted, this is not a totally electric car and does have a small gas engine, but assuming it does well, my guess is that more and better versions of electric cars will be following suit quickly.
The question is, do you think electric cars are going to begin taking over the market and become the norm in a few years, a decade or longer, or in your lifetime?
The Volt is not an electric car. It’s a hybrid, just like the Prius, Fusion/MKZ, Escape, Civic, and so on. Despite the early press, the gasoline motor does drive the wheels once it kicks in. If there’s one thing it does different versus the majority of the hybrids is, it stays electric only at even up to low highways speeds, as long as the battery is sufficiently charged. But you find a car geek to reprogram your Prius, etc., to do the same.
The Nissan Leaf, though, is an electric car, and is $8,000 cheaper than the Volt, to boot. The electric Focus will be even more favorably priced.
As to the rest of your question, I’d say electric cars will outsell ICE cars (new car sales) within 20 years. Hopefully enough new investment in mines will prevent skyrocketing battery prices, otherwise we’ll be just like we are with fossil fuels.
I consider the Volt an ICE car, because it has an ICE, which frees it from the most limiting aspects of pure electric cars, range.
In order for electric cars to command a majority of the market, they will need to sufficiently cover 95+% of the average person’s driving needs, at prices comparable to ICE cars. If I need a second car to cover trips to Grandma’s house, or our vacation to the Jersey Shore, then 50% of the market is going to be ICE. I can see electric car owners renting a car once or twice a year to cover long trips, but no more often than that.
I don’t see this happening until the range goes up maybe 4 fold over the Leaf, ~400 miles on a charge. With that kind of range, you can make moderately long trips without having to worry about on the road recharging.
Stopping mid trip to recharge is a non-starter. It takes too long to recharge, you’ll need large numbers of high voltage high current charging stations which are tied up a half hour+ at a time, and which most people will avoid using because it’s cheaper to do at home. At best, one could hope to have charging capability at your destination, to do an overnight charge for your return trip. For instance, a hotel can set up charging spaces for guests, paid on their room account.
I’m not so sure. I think 100 mile range electrics can get pretty close to 100% of the car (not overall vehicle) market in pretty short order. In my demographic, it’s normal for households to have multiple vehicles, and it’s common for one of the excess vehicles to be a full-sized truck or SUV (we all have boats or snowmobiles or jetskis or travel trailers to pull). Those aren’t likely to go pure electric any time soon. The transition to a 100 mile range electric vehicle would a no-brainer for those families.
And it wouldn’t be 50% of the market. A virtually unused car doesn’t need to be replaced at the same rate as your daily driver. And at $45,000 for a truck/SUV, they’re not as affordable to replace as a daily driver!
Here’s a recent article from Wired covering some of the electric car offerings out now/soon. Also a large feature article on Elon Musk and his Tesla cars. Long article, but a lot of information on the ups and downs of trying to get electric cars into the mainstream.
Whether electric cars do or do not take over completely is up for debate. Personally I think they will once a tipping point of usability is achieved.
I’m not sure what that will look like but they already have good performance, capacity and refuelling costs but they need to work on purchase price, range and speed of refuelling.
The first will come with economies of scale and the second and third with technology improvements.
The real effect that the efficiency arms race is having can be seen in the improvements to the internal combustion engine.
Right now I’m looking to replace my family car and in Europe at least I am spoilt for choice.
I have a choice of loads and loads of cars that accommodate my family in comfort, can cruise at 80+ mph and return averages of better than 50mpg. I expect those figures to get better in the coming years and it will be difficult for purely electric cars to compete with that for awhile yet. (and 70+ mpg is not unusual for the smaller diesel city cars)
You end up with 700 mile ranges and five minute fill-up. Hard to argue with it.
Years ago, I read of a very powerful battery-it used silver and zinc as the electrodes. Supposedly, this battery has a very high energy density-it could provide a range of over 200 miles.
Has there been any new development of this battery type?
I’m gonna say the tipping point will be 15-20 years from now. It won’t be much sooner, because of all the infrastructure we need in terms of being able to plug your car in wherever you stop for any length of time. But it won’t be much longer than that, because at some point, oil is going to get frightfully expensive.
Silver-oxide batteries are quite common, but IIRC lithium is more energy dense. Do you have any idea where you read it? I’d be good to look at, because maybe it wasn’t a common silver-oxide battery (silver-zinc, same battery), and under which conditions would it be good for 200 miles? What type of car? Weight? Battery weight?
For example, the Leaf (lithium batteries, 600 lbs of weight) is reported capable of a 100 mile range. Let’s say we add 125% more battery, giving us 1350 pounds of battery weight. That’d probably give us around a 200 mile range. Without knowing all of the other details, a 200 mile range doesn’t mean much, though.
Baring some massive government regulation (which can’t be discounted since Democrats love to run people’s lives outside the bedroom where the Republicans love to intrude), they won’t. All-electric cars failed when they were introduced 100 years ago and they will continue to fail. The internal combustion engine is far superior in providing horsepower, distance, ease of refueling and lower maintenance. Hybrids to supplement a gasoline power engine could become more popular. But I give electrics the same chance to become massively popular as I do Beethoven outselling Lady Gaga to teenyboppers in the next decade. 0.0000001%
I could easily use a 100mile range electric vehicle for most of my needs, and if I could charge most of the places I go it would be even more tempting. that said every hybrid I have driven has been an underpowered hunk of crap with a ton of crappy or just plain bad aspects that make them irritating as hell to drive.
I am willing to have my mind changed on the topic but seriously a car that does the things cars are supposed to do and isnt terrifying to merge onto the freeway would be a great start.
It should also be noted that Motor Trend solicits payments for awarding Car of the Year status. Manufacturers receive prime ad placement throughout the year for their entire line as well as all the fawning over the specific model being hailed. Unless a car is highly innovative and can’t be ignored, they choose whomever is willing to commit to the most ad spece for the year.
Electric cars are currently not practical for the majority of Americans. A longer range will make them more useful but widespread adoption will require more power plants. Construction of same will raise rates and cause arguments over placement. Since most are coal-fired, it will do little to save the planet, and force the nuclear argument again.
Hydrogen fuel cells are still not viable and may never be. My bet is on the continued use of the internal combustion engine with synthetic gasoline.
Until they are forced on people they won’t use it. Look at analog TV. Digital TV stations were for the most part, up and running by 2000 yet it took 9 years and a force shut down to get people to accept it. Then for way too many digital was a disapointment.
Being a hot item isn’t saying much. The iPad is a hot item, but do you see it everywhere? To date in my travels in Chicago I’ve seen, one. Now I travel with public transit, so that seems to say the iPad is still limited. I agree the iPad is cool, but it is something to spend EXTRA money on, not something for your first choice. And that’s OK for what it is.
But when you’re spending for something that will take five years to pay off being “cool” isn’t going to mean much.
The USA still has cheap gasoline, especially compared to the rest of the world. If gas prices rise a lot, that is when you’re gonna see electric or hybrid cars take off.
Outside of a few cities like NYC, Chicago, Boston, etc, public transit is dismal. Electric cars are going to have to be priced exactly the same as gas driven cars to compete. Poor people are going to buy the cheapest, even if an electric car is a better value over the years, poor people who need transport will need the car tha cost least, up front, not over the long haul
To answer this, I would say, when are gas prices in the US going to go up so high people will want to switch? What price will this be? And how long will it take to get there? Then will we see electric/hybrid cars come down to equal (not similar but equal) pricing with gasoline cars? Answer these questions and you’ll find out when electric/hybrid cars will become mainstream.
The EPA just rated the Leaf at a range of 73 miles. What a disappointment.
I think that depends on how you define “practical” and “majority of Americans.” The majority of Americans live in urban settings where their daily commutes would fit within the use for a purely electric vehicle. Of course if these people don’t use cars, then your point is valid. But remember that electric cars command a price premium, too (i.e., they’re not targeted at the poor), and so they’re not going to be a family’s only car.
There’s currently excess generation capacity in the United States, and not all plants run at 100% all of the time. Consider that the load on the system is variable. The real bottleneck is the grid system itself. So called “smart charging” when the demand is low (at night) will use some of this excess capacity and allow better grid management. There might be a problem if somehow 100% of the US fleet became electric overnight, but that’s not what’s going to happen. Additionally, coal plants (and natural gas, and nuclear, and hydro) are all cleaner per passenger mile than ICE.
Poor people buy used cars, so they’ll be in the market for electrics in 10 to 15 years, not tomorrow.
Lincoln has started selling its hybrids at the same price as pure ICE. That’s an interesting start, because it kind of points the way towards price equality for pure electric vs. ICE down the road.
The short version is that electric cars aren’t really viable now, but with better battery technology it will be a whole new ball game. I usually put the line at getting a battery that stores more than 1 KWH per Kilogram.
What he is saying is that the EPA overstates the MPG of electric cars by assuming perfect conversion of heat into electricity. The DOE assumes about 13KWH from the conversion of the equivalent of one gallon of gallon into electricity. That would lower the MPG equivalent of the leaf from 99MPG to 36MPG.
The Volt will do 100 mph in electric mode. When it’s within it’s 25-50 mile electric mode range, it’s operating as an EV.
The Prius NiMH battery is 1.3 kWh and the Volt’s lithium-ion battery is a 16kWh (10.4kWh usable). You’re not going to find a car geek that can make a Prius do the same as a Volt with software changes.
I’m going to guess that my demographic is quite a bit different from yours, as I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a snowmobile, jetski, or travel trailer around here. Having said that, there are more SUVs than cars in my neighborhood (upper middle class suburbia), and it’s not unusual for me to be in a line of six vehicles at a traffic light with me being the only one in a non-SUV. I think they could drive right over my Honda Fit without even noticing the slight bump.
And every one of those SUVs has one person in it.
Si I’m going to guess that I won’t see many electric vehicles around here until they start making them in SUV size.