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Are You Clamoring for an Electric Car?
(With my apologies to Gary McVey, prepare for one of my incendiary posts.)
Is a Tesla or a Chevy Bolt, or a Nissan Leaf on your Christmas list this year? Can you hardly wait to ditch that gas-guzzler in the driveway and replace it with a vehicle that you can “fill up” from an installation in your garage, at a lot less than a tank of Regular?
Well, if that’s what you see in your future, so do most of the world’s car manufacturers. There probably isn’t a car manufacturer who isn’t working on designing and building an electric car, either purpose-designed or just replacing the internal-combustion engine in a model they already build with a big battery. General Motors has already announced their coming “All-electric future.” The European Union is mandating more and more strict emissions rules for vehicles sold there, and their carmakers like BMW, Renault, Daimler, Fiat, and Volvo are all touting their electric vehicles.
But you might wish to wait a moment before you go all-in on electric, especially if you live in the United States outside of a central large city. First, let’s check out the price of that electric car versus its gas-powered brother. The Nissan Leaf retails for about $30,000. Its near twin, the Nissan Versa, costs about $19,000. An electric Chevy Bolt will set you back about $36,000. Its similar brother, the Cruze, is about $17,000. See a pattern developing here? In the past, you could rely on a nice Federal tax credit for your electric car, to help mitigate that huge price differential, but not anymore. Most carmakers have sold enough cars that they don’t earn any tax credit now. So, it looks like GM’s All-Electric Future will be a lot more expensive than its Internal Combustion Present.
That nice home charger in the garage will set you back another $700 or so. However, unlike the five-minute fill-up of your gas-powered ride, it will take you up to 3-4 hours to recharge that electric car. And the “range” of an electric car is a lot smaller than the range of miles you can get from a tank of gas. So, you’ll probably want to forget those long road-trips in your new electric car. And if you get caught in an unexpected traffic jam, that electric car’s range might just shrink. If you get caught with your battery down in the middle of a busy street or freeway, it might be pretty embarrassing to have AAA send a truck to hoist it up and carry it to the nearest charging station. And there’s no guarantee that there will even be a nearby charging station! They are still pretty few around the country today.
Also, what about that wildfire in your area, when the police or highway patrol comes to your house and tells you to evacuate? What? Your electric car is out of charge? It won’t get you very far when you need to evacuate? Too bad, it becomes a hunk of junk when the fire reaches your house, and you really can’t carry much on your back. Then, what about that power failure in the next thunderstorm? Your car needs a charge? Impossible with no power! That’s especially worrying when you are a rural resident, where you are already far from most services.
Now, I’ll bet that new electric car might not seem like such a good investment. And electric cars are so new, there’s really not much of a market for used ones. And big Li-ion batteries don’t last forever, and eventually need to be replaced, at a cost far above that of an internal-combustion engine. So your electric car might not be worth very much when its battery wears out, and you might be out one-third the price of the car for a new one. Oh, and batteries don’t perform very well in the cold, so if you live in a northern state like Minnesota, your car will need to be kept indoors so its battery doesn’t freeze or get drained by the cold weather. And beware of the company parking lot while you’re at work — your car might not run when you come out to go home at the end of the day.
My own viewpoint is that I will never, ever, buy or drive an electric car. I appreciate being able to get in my gas-powered car, and go wherever I want, whenever I want, with no “range anxiety.” I like long car trips, without the worry of how long I have left before my car dies. Gas stations are everywhere, and if you keep a full or close to full tank, you can even drive around during a power outage. And when you are forced to evacuate, you can fill up the trunk with your goods and just drive away. I’m betting that most Americans aren’t clamoring for an electric car, and that GM’s future might not be so prosperous if it expects most Americans to want one.
An electric car will not be in my future.
Published in Economics
I was told airbag deployment also activates cutters which sheer the battery from its cables, thus allowing the jaws of life and other tools to be used without a problem. But I could be wrong, as my wife often reminds me . . .
The primary purpose of hybrid race cars is the reclamation of kinetic energy. Since there isn’t a little oil refinery inside that can produce gasoline from the energy normally lost at heat through braking, they put in an electric system. Now F1 cars cost millions and millions of dollars to design, build and race. The don’t care too much about the economics of the energy. That is to say, is the energy from gasoline more cost effective than the energy from a battery. They care about reclaiming energy that is lost, so they can go faster.
We would of course care about the economics: is it cheaper to just use more gasoline? Or to put in a bunch of systems to reclaim energy and store it? Well one is far more complex than the other so that today it is clearly cheaper to just burn more gasoline. But, for one reason or another, the reclamation systems will continue to drop in cost (as tech generally does) and gasoline will continue to rise in cost (for lots of reasons).
So maybe one day it is more economical to drive a hybrid.
Who cares about CO2?
Looking at this story from Car & Driver, it looks like the latest EVs do have the devices to in some way disconnect the battery so that first responders don’t suffer shocks. Apparently the bigger threat now is more from the persistence of lithium battery fires, which have to be combated different than a gasoline fire.
I don’t know if this is true or not, but I know that when the hybrids first came on the scene in the WEC, stewards were told to await instructions before rescuing drivers from wrecked cars. This led to a tense moment after a spectacular crash at Le Mans in 2012. If you watch the video you’ll see the stewards in orange standing back and not rescuing the driver. I believe they have this solved at this point, but I’m not sure the details.
Plants. They snort the stuff.
Plants don’t care about anything…they haven’t the capacity…
Speciesist!
Plants emit a scream when cut.
I’m no longer speaking to you…
That’s right. Vegans are cruel beasts who don’t care just because their hearing is not acute enough. Ever wonder why cats eat animals? It’s because they are easier and faster to kill than plants. They don’t suffer for long.
What did I do?
You never were, just typing in his general direction.
Also,
Baxter Black!
I believe the rule is that if you want to institute tolls on previously “free” interstate highways the state has to pay back a significant portion of the federal money that went into building them in the first place.
This phenomenon starts showing up in industrial power electronics around the 10 to 15 year mark. Premium brands may go 15-20. So we’re not there yet for mass-produced EVs. But soon. It’ll add to the battery-lifespan induced EV resale problems.
Yes.
And a third recall.
Tried to do some digging. I did find mention of a relay which disconnects the big battery, but does not cut the cables. Even if true, rescue teams have a lot more to deal with in a hybrad or all-electric crashed car.
If I had a dollar for every recall there’s been on my truck. Some are pretty significant, including software issues that might cause the truck to shift gears when driving along. Another one that where they sold aftermarket seat covers that impede certain air bags.
As Scotty says: “The more they overhaul the plumbing…”
Tendency for catastrophic failure, or will there be a graceful degradation as is often the case with IC vehicles?
Lithium-ion batteries are hazardous, but to be frank, so is gasoline. Gasoline is one of the most hazardous commercial fuels. Kerosene or diesel are safer to handle.
Once upon a time there was a limited movement to use H2 for fuel: It has its advantages. (For example, like recharging batteries, you can recharge your vehicle at home with nothing but water and electricity.) Dangers from, e.g., a rear-end collision were regularly highlighted as making it too dangerous to use: The consequence was lots of research and design of fuel tanks that significantly abrogated the danger of a puncture or an outright fracture. Wonder if the same level of work has been done on gasoline or natural gas fuel tanks in vehicles?
Industrial power transistors tend to fail catastrophically. I’ve been present for failures that sounded like gunshots. And left shattered, smoking debris. (A bad batch of a to-remain-anonymous premium brand’s bookshelf spinneret drives.)
Modern gas tanks have self-sealing rubber liners and are required to be placed/mounted in the vehicle to minimize the change of crush failure in any but the most catastrophic collision. They dribble when punctured, no gushing. They have to be sheared to release much fuel.
Alas, both natural gas and hydrogen must be highly pressurized to store useful quantities. (LNG needs constant refrigeration.) There’s no practical technology to make such containers puncture proof. Hydrogen is particularly troublesome because most metals are effectively porous to hydrogen. Anyways, careful placement in the vehicle is the only defense. I’m not a fan of either due to this basic issue.
Propane is an interesting fuel. It liquifies at normal ambient temperatures under modest pressure. Useful quantities do not require huge tanks or extreme pressures. Propane tank manufacturers claim their products are an order of magnitude more puncture-resistant than standard gasoline tanks. If it were a little cheaper, it’d be highly attractive.
This is another internal contradiction of California politics. For a tangled mess of reasons, blame on multiple fronts, the power grid is shut down deliberately in the name of preventing wildfires, sometimes for days. Days. This means you need to plan in gas or diesel generators for your home, and means you will run a diesel or gas engine for hours to charge up your car battery!
On the other hand, an electric car with now common 200+ mile real charge life is just fine for daily driving in places like central and southern Arizona. I know a real estate agent whose first new-new car was a Tesla. He traded it in on the newest model a year ago. The range is perfect for his work, on the road all over the very large valley. One more important fact: our electricity is largely generated by a nuclear power plant, so we get very stable and relatively affordable pricing.
Longer range driving is a hybrid or petro only task. For long commutes with significant traffic jams and stop and go, hybrid makes good sense, an important part of why the taxi fleets went Prius and full time Uber/Lyft drivers prefer hybrids.
Methane is better for buses and trucks where the massively built tanks are not as much of a problem.
It’s simpler to turn it to methanol and burn that in an engine. Methanol is both more and less of a pollution issue than gasoline. Gasoline floats on water, reducing contamination. On the other hand, methanol burns cleaner & is readily biodegradable.
Can we stick to ethanol instead?
You want us to keep burning food? What do you have against Mexicans?
Hey, they’ve got tequila, don’t they?
And from today’s KOMO report, the state of Washington is contemplating taxing drivers per mile driven as a substitute for the gas tax that is not bringing in enough revenue lately, due to more fuel-efficient cars and EVs (very popular around here). Read the whole story.
Maybe, but a lot of that tax revenue supports Mass Transit and not roads.