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EV Schadenfreude
If you would rather spend your vacation hunting for charging stations, calling customer support to try to get them to reset the charging stations, hunting for places to spend the night when your Ford Lightning runs of out charge and has to be towed, or trying to figure out why a fast charger is only giving you a trickle charge, than attending a car show in Colorado, an electric vehicle is for you!
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Published in Environment
And that’s how I invented a carburetor that got 400 miles per emptied bladder.
You were very, very, very brave. For the good of the Republic, I hope you produced many children. As a person who once owned a Peugeot diesel wagon, I doff my hat!
It actually had a full roll cage, under the fiberglass. And the batteries gave it a very low center of gravity, no way was it going to flip.
Sorry, retired lawyer here. What is an RTU?
Sorry I should haveveait RTG
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator
Hydrogen fuel cells are extremely efficient at producing electricity. The energy density of Hydrogen is extremely high. The efficiency of fuel cells is in the 40-60% range while IC engines are more in the 20-25% range.
Storage and transport of LH2 is not a simple affair. Hydrogen is so small that it can slip between metal and escape from containment. Liquefaction reduces that effect, but carries its own issues. The concern for ensuring that fuel systems full of LH2 do not rupture in a crash is a limiting factor of the technology, but the systems currently ddeveloped work quite well. It remains to be seen if a crash that ruptures an LH2 tank ends up being worse than a gas leak that causes a fire.
Production of LH2 in industrial quantities is a well known process the most popular method involves natural gas that is run through a process to separate the H2 by heating the natural gas and running it over a nickel catalyst which breaks down the methane into CO2 and H2. While the possibility of home electrolysis where one uses electricity to crack water into H2 and O2 exists, it isn’t as efficient or cost effective. Making LH2 industrially is a well known and inexpensive way to get H2. Once again transport and storage are the issues, and in vehicles. Right now practical range on a fuel cell vehicle is about 200 miles due to storage issues. Until they get it over 300 it won’t really compete. Then we have to build H2 stations everywhere to replace gas stations. It’s decades away from being practical, but is likely the best future vehicle power source.
The unreliability and unpredictability of available charging stations is striking. Until those reliability and predictability issues are near 100% resolved, universal electric vehicles is not going to happen, no matter how many charging stations are installed. The early adopters like the family in the video are willing to put up with a lot of variability and uncertainty that the majority of the public is not.
In fairness, I did once find myself unable to get gasoline at a gasoline station in a snowstorm that prevented the fuel delivery truck from making its delivery in remote eastern New Mexico. But otherwise we operate assuming with essentially 100% confidence that when we pull up to a gasoline pump, the pump will be able to deliver into our tank in just a few minutes enough energy to drive at least 200 – 300 miles.
And you can easily tote another 100 miles in your trunk/cargo area, and more in your garage. Helps to rotate stock once in a while.
Not a totally ridiculous idea, especially for routes like I-40 across Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas that have lots of trucks passing through but not making local deliveries.
When General Motors offered its first electric vehicle (the EV-1) in the late 1990s, a friend owned the regional franchise (the vehicle was offered through Saturn dealers). The information he got from GM included the possibility that some type of continuous feed of electricity, such as electric rails embedded in the pavement, would take care of long distance driving on the highways so the battery would be used mostly for local driving.
I always enjoy those highway signs in the West that inform drivers how many miles down the road the next fuel station is. I haven’t seen one for EV charging stations. Perhaps other R> folks have.
What a debacle that video is in the OP. I would dynamite my own truck before I allow my life to be dominated by the grinding stress that must accompany that much built-in uncertainty. These nice people are obviously putting the best face on the honeymoon phase of their zillion-dollar experiment with hauling kids and a dog around from charger to charger in an EOV, with many stations not working or so degraded that they spend hours instead of tens of minutes for enough to get to the next charger — if that one works.
I never had to call customer support in India for a tank of gas.
I’ll need an oxygen mask before I start laughing at that, or I may never stop.
They get paid by YouTube clicks and subscriptions.
Nice work if you can get it. Won’t help when their EOV is out of charge.
Isn’t it fine that they can get paid for delivering truthful information. Journalists used to get paid for that.
That idea, along with control guides for vehicles has been around for a long time. It makes a ton of sense because once you get enough vehicles using the control guides to drive their vehicles, then you can start to allow them to not only be driven remotely, but allow them to travel at high speeds and closer together since they can network with each other. GM demoed this with five sedans operating on a test track at 80mph travelling 1″ from each other. They would talk with each other wirelessly and take turns being the lead car and the others drafting to reduce fuel costs.
Centrally controlled vehicles is a great idea, until you tweet about FBI corruption, and the FBI just directs your car to your neighborhood concentration camp.
Also, have they come up with answers for what to do if one of the cars has low tire pressure, or low oil, or low fuel, or bad brakes, or….?
Or Chinese computer chips.
Most systems would refuse access to the system when that happens. Manual drive lanes would still exist.