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Electric Car – It Dies Anew!
In February of 2012 I wrote a brilliant, prescient, and far-too-early prediction of the death of the electric car.
A123 is toast. Fisker is toast. Tesla is done for. All these hyped battery and superduperhypercapacitor companies are running aground, on the hard ground of a simple reality: gasoline/diesel are far, far, far better energy storage media than anything else. It is not even close.
….
The upshot is that the industry is falling back: it will adopt only those technologies that pay. Start-stop technologies work. Perhaps a series hybrid will pay,
And May of 2017, I doubled down, admitting that I was still too early, but still right.
And now…. The Chevy Volt was just cancelled.
Six years ago, President Barack Obama promised to buy a Chevy Volt after his presidency.
“I got to get inside a brand-new Chevy Volt fresh off the line,” Obama announced to a cheering crowd of United Auto Workers activists. “Even though Secret Service wouldn’t let me drive it. But I liked sitting in it. It was nice. I’ll bet it drives real good. And five years from now when I’m not president anymore, I’ll buy one and drive it myself.”
Now it looks like Obama will not get his chance to make good on the promise. General Motors announced Monday that it would cease production of the hybrid electric plug-in Volt and its gas-powered sister car the Cruze. The announcement came as part of a larger restructuring by the car company as it seeks to focus production around the bigger vehicles in favor with U.S. consumers.
And if the government subsidies would be pulled, I think the original prediction will still hold true: the cost-benefit analysis for electric (not hybrid like the Prius, but pure electric) makes it a terrible business on the basis of utility. The market will remain for people who have enough money to overpay for an inferior product in order to show their superiority.
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Went to a Tesla showroom recently. You could pull up a display and price a model with the options you wanted. They then subtracted the various rebates (this is CA) and showed the bottom line price. The kicker was they also subtracted the cost of gas you would not be using in the bottom line cost! We got a chuckle out of this.
I’ve driven a Camry hybrid for almost a year now, and the technology (to me at least) is superior to that of a totally electric
golf cartcar.The battery in a hybrid provides nowhere near the range of the electric cars, but it’s not designed to do that. Rather, it stores what would be wasted energy from normal driving and uses it to augment the motor under heavy load (typically acceleration, or going uphill).
Yes, the hybrid does cost more than a regular gas-powered vehicle, but the lack of frequent trips to the gas station combined with the range more than makes up for it (to me).
Electric cars have a good future in Europe and China. The US is too big to go all in on electric now, but hybrid is viable now. In another 20 years, batteries will make all electric superior. While the Volt is canceled, the Bolt will keep being built. It was dumb to have those two names, so problem solved.
I doubt it. Batteries have always been the technology of the future, and they always will be.
Working in electrical engineering, I can tell you that for a long time, we’ve been assured the DC power will eventually prove superior to AC power. Pretty sure that was the case since the days of Edison and Tesla and we’ve yet to see DC power overcome.
Volt was a plug-in hybrid. It also was a poor execution.
Battery price and power density have gotten to the point where strong hybrids (i.e., where the electric motor is big enough to propel the vehicle normally) are nonsensical. The cost of bumping up the size of the battery pack to make a pure EV is lower than the cost of the redundant internal combustion powertrain.
When will we get a chance to remove the government subsidies and see for sure?
Don’t forget to use the phrase “corporate welfare.” If you want to make any headway in your campaign and fend off the entrenched constituency, that needs to be part of it. As long as conservatives shy away from it, they probably won’t get the chance you ask for.
Just peeked at the Volt on the Chevy website. It said range on all electric, battery only mode … 47 miles. Then another 300+ on the gas engine.
That’s not a viable car. That’s a publicity stunt.
It seems to me that electric cars make most sense in the urban environments where charging them is also the most problematic.
iWe,
You’ve got it exactly. The subsidies are baked in. That is where the profit for all the green thieves comes from. They could care less about actual performance. As long as people continue to buy into the magic need to subsidize a technology that can’t stand on its own because the technology is magically good, this nonsense goes on forever.
We haven’t even figured in the real cost of disposing 5 or 6 million giant spent battery packs per year. There is nothing more polluting than the heavy metals involved in battery production & disposal. Of course, that’s OK too because electric = good and gasoline = bad.
Start with a completely false premise, ignore it entirely, and surprise it will be the demise of the whole project.
Regards,
Jim
There’s no official conservative position about propellers versus jets, synfuels versus oil, sleeve bearings as opposed to ball bearings, or AC vs. DC; you use the tool that best fits the job. Where I live, a fairly flat city with a warm climate, the electric car does a terrific local job far cheaper than gasoline, yep, even with all of the externals built in, including battery manufacture and power generation. (My most recent previous cars were a Jaguar XJ8, a Pontiac GTO, and a Chrysler Crossfire built in Germany; I’m not exactly opposed to gasoline on principle).
Now, if you live in a cold, mountainous place of long distances, you’d look damned foolish driving an electric. It’s not for you. Then again, if you drove down the street here in a raised 4×4 that weighs 4500 pounds, you’d also look damned foolish. But I do see five foot tall women weighing all of 105 pounds driving them because they make them feel secure. (Against what? Aggressive grocery baggers at Whole Foods?) It’s a virtue signal. She is proclaiming: I am an empowered person; after all I sit higher than you. Yeah, it looks silly.
i don’t get why conservatives care, frankly. Your neighbor is vegan? Is it bothering you? Why? If you’re letting environmentalists live in your head, rent free, why not evict them?
But the Volt is a hybrid. A small, overpriced, hybrid.
Wasn’t the Ford Escape the best-selling hybrid before it was discontinued in 2012? Since then, it seems that all the hybrids have been sedans and compacts.
Maybe the problem isn’t the technology, but rather the form factor. Truck guys tend to like technology, and hybrids are chock-full of cool tech.
Also, don’t electric motors have fantastic torque? Hybrid should be a perfect technology for marketing trucks. I can see the tv commercial now: Gas engine for the highway, electric motor for hauling a great big boat trailer out of the water.
For 130 years, electric enthusiasts have said “We’ve got everything but the right battery! It’s right around the corner!” It got old. But then it came true. Driving range has expanded slowly, much more slowly than boosters like to admit. But it has expanded to the point where most new electrics have decent range. DC charging can “fill” the car in 20 minutes; that’s new.
The real progress is batteries cost less than they used to and last twice as long as they did even ten years ago. You no longer have to pony up a third of the cost of the whole car every four years; now, it’s more like a fifth of the cost of the car every ten years. Ten years is more than the economic life of most cars.
Quibble: That’s down mostly to consumer preference rather than to the quality of the cars. It’s easy to keep a car running way past 10 years if you maintain it properly, and the sort of person who maintains their car properly looks at the cost of replacement parts when making their buying decision. Therefore, it suggests that the market for electric cars is rich folk who don’t buy vehicles to last. That’s fine, as far as it goes, but it doesn’t bode well for widespread adoption of electric by people who can’t afford a new luxury vehicle every decade.
A reasonable quibble, but the real world effect is, most owners dump the cars when the battery falls due, so second owners can pick them up cheaply enough to make the battery replacement worth it. With either gas or electric, a car can be maintained forever if you’re willing to pay.
Hmm, I’ve never investigated the market for used electrics. Is it possible to replace the dead battery with a superior model?
Do they add back in the price of electricity in the buyer’s jurisdiction ?
That also includes subsidies (direct or indirect) on hybrids.
Because we have to pay for it in the form of gigantic subsidies.
I’m perfectly content with people buying any technology they want on their own dime.
You did not read far enough in that article about the Volt being cancelled. So are a bunch of gasoline sedans. The article said they were being discontinued, and five GM plants being shuttered, in favor of autonomous (self-driving, not-even-approved) and electric vehicles. GM is doubling down on electric.
One big thing you need if you have an electric car is Electricity. What happens when there is a natural disaster, and power is out for an extended period? Your $100,000 Tesla becomes a hunk of junk, and totally useless. Your gasoline vehicle can not only take you places, its lights can help someone else do what they need to do, and you can transport others. You can stockpile gasoline, but you can’t stockpile electricity.
Truck guys like to drive into the wilderness. And over punishing terrain. And through water. And on really long highway drives that would exceed a charge.
Electrics, instead are really really good for delivery trucks like the post office or FedEx. Good use of regenerative braking. Can use central charging at home base rather than needing a distributed infrastructure.
In reality I’m less anti-electric car than I am anti-subsidy for this. Electric cars have more or less survived the market by subsidy and the problem is that government has ruined the market. Electric cars should take the path most technology takes: first the very wealthy get it and have the old, clunky versions with an astronomical cost. As that market grows, the cost goes down and down until it reaches somewhere the average consumer can afford (or pay a decent car loan in the case of vehicles).
Instead, the Left has had an vested interest in making sure that electric cars replace fossil fuels, their thing to hate of the late 20th/21st century. So very quickly the government raced in to make sure there was a market there. The problem is that as the subsidies go, the market dies because people who could afford the real ticket price don’t want to suddenly pay more, and the people who could only afford it after tons of tax rebates and subsidies can no longer afford it at all.
Essentially, electric cars can indeed be a good option for the urban setting, but the feds and state governments ruined the market by trying to artificially create a market.
Modularity of EVs makes them potentially much more repairable than gas cars. The key is economy of scale. Even if Tesla goes under in 2 years, they will have produced enough cars to support a repair infrastructure.
Mis,
As always real market concerns are of no interest to the magic green faith. Everyone just needs to be put in Chinese Communist re-education facilities till their minds are attuned to the green right think.
One of the most amazing aspects of all of this is that when a new technology has promise but only in a niche market the greenies could care less. Thus a host of really great opportunities are lost. One of them that is available right now are l.e.v. Stands for light electric vehicle. Let’s cut to the chase, this is a bicycle with an electric hub motor and a small advanced battery pack. The battery pack is recharged on any standard 110 v outlet. The top fully assisted speed is 25 miles an hour. This means that it still retains bicycle status and isn’t a motorcycle. No insurance. Range, with a second battery pack at work, and using 100% assist (if you peddle a little it goes farther) is at least 10 miles. With decent saddlebags, you can get 25lbs of groceries back to your apartment or pick up your prescription at the drug store or…etc.
If you’re going farther, like to the airport with a big suitcase, call Uber. At the end of the year even with an Uber ride twice a month your cost will be fantastically lower than owning a car or even just a Vespa. For a real greeny, this isn’t good enough news. They want everything and they want it right now. If they don’t get everything it’s because some bad people are stopping them from having their magic green nirvana. Physics means nothing. Manufacturing cost means nothing. Regulatory overhead cost means nothing. Let’s face it if you’re a greeny everything means nothing but your childlike fantasy.
Pleasant dreams.
Regards,
Jim
You can, but you won’t. The amount of gas you can safely store above ground is small, maybe a tankful. Only a tiny number of homeowners can afford, or want, underground gasoline tanks in their backyard. Heck, if they’ve got that much dough, they can use the gas to run a Honda generator to charge an electric if they really wanted to.
If the electricity goes out, so do the pumps in all the gas stations; they have no way to pump it out manually.
Kissing Saudi rear end for 50, 60, 70 years has not exactly been cost free either. We’ve fought two wars in the sandbox in the past 30 years. We maintain armed forces to protect the stability of the oil market. We’ve also spent a fortune on catalytic converters and other pollution mitigation. There are tradeoffs with any technology.
That raises the issue of sustained load vs. short term load.
One further problem is that it is quite expensive to make an EV with the equivalent of a tow package to allow an EV to handle a broad range of sustained loads..
One reason Tesla put gull wing doors on the Model X was to prevent use of a roof rack which would increase drag and thus load on the powertrain.
It depends on the brand. To take one example, any Nissan Leaf made after 2012 can accept the new battery pack and get extended range.
Remember, I’m talking about hybrid trucks, not electric trucks.
Again, I’m talking about hybrids, not electrics.
Supplemental electric motors aren’t only useful for fuel efficiency. They can also boost power. Just look at the hybrid supercars they make in Europe, like the Porsche 919 EVO, the McLaren P1, or the Ferrari LaFerrari for example.
“It’s like weaponizing a wind farm!” – Jeremy Clarkson
(I realize those are slightly older models, but my knowledge of the latest supercars is almost non-existent ever since the BBC fired Clarkson & Co.)