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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.
Published in General
As someone who’s region was without power for over a week several times in the aftermath of hurricanes … the gas stations with Honda generators do just fine running the pumps.
Mickey Kaus and I used to make fun of Arianna Huffington’s hybrid; nineteen years ago, hybrids were so new that it was worth posting on her website (this is back when she was on the Right, incredibly enough). Hybrids looked to us then like an interim technology, unlikely to be around long, with unnecessary duplication of drivetrain parts, and their batteries don’t last forever either.
But, I have to admit, it looks like ol’ Huff got the better of us. The tech became improbably popular, and millions of people have saved a lot of money on gas. I still say it’s an interim technology, but its sunset point is probably around 2030.
As someone who’s spent forty years living in a region with major earthquakes…the electricity comes back on long before the gas stations are back in business.
YMMV.
Edison was pushing DC power and competing with Westinghouse who was pushing AC. It may be apocryphal, but the story I heard was that Edison tried to get “Electrocution” by Electric chair renamed to being “Westinghoused” to put the idea that AC was deadly in the public mind. Didn’t work. AC had too many advantages in transmission.
A few of other points:
Over ten years ago I read a neat Instructables article about converting an old motorcycle to electric. It seemed like a neat idea.
https://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-build-a-96-Volt-Electric-Motorcycle/
One would presume that it would be even easier to pull it off today, and with better specs, what with the advances in electric tech since then.
Well, sadly electrical engineers are a small population sampling.
Interesting, about 7 years ago the company I worked for got an electric car. This was after they laid off several employees. The Electrical Engineers were unimpressed with it. The Board was confused, “But it’s an electric car. You’re electrical engineers! You should like it!” Even in Californian company where most the engineers were very left on environmental issues, even the electrical engineers were unimpressed with it at the time.
My mother in law has a hybrid Camry. She is finding it very expensive and inconvenient to repair. My husband was helping her try to figure out what was wrong with it this time and she muttered ”I should never have bought this car.”
I’m not sure it’s more or less prone to breakdown than other vehicles, but for people who like to fix things themselves to save a bit, (and possibly get it done faster) it may not be a good option.
Due to CAFE, we are getting hybrid trucks, but they are soft pedalling the hybrid.
The problems of durability and repairability are potentially even worse with hybrids than EVs.
Try to find the word “hybrid” regarding the eTorque system in Ram 1500 https://www.ramtrucks.com/ram-1500.html
Same with Silverado eAssist https://www.chevrolet.com/previous-year/silverado-1500-work-truck
Retro-conversion used to be a big deal, until the factory-built electrics came on the market. There are guide books to removing all gas-related parts and installing a motor and batteries. Nowadays few bother, unless you’re a well to do gearhead who wants to impress the local drive-by cruise with a fully electric 1962 Bonneville.
There’s always a garden hose and suction.
One of the “waste” products of rare earth mines is an enormous amount of thorium. It could be used to generate lots of electricity, but instead it has to be disposed of as hazardous waste.
True, but getting it out of a tank that’s buried five feet down could challenge even Stormy Daniels.
The Chevy Bolt wasn’t a bad name though.
Its the subsidies, the crony deals, the inherent corruption of all Federal subsidies for anything, not the technology. Just get rid of the subsidies and let the market sort it all out. That includes subsidies for oil and gas not to mention ethanol, wind and solar panels. Government can subsidize basic research, advanced education and some limited demonstration projects and prototypes because markets under invest in such matters, but even that should be tight enough to make companies and universities compete vigorously for such support.
It was a terrible name in a world where they had been selling the “Volt” for several years.
Yabbut, converting a motorcycle’s way easier, and yet the only electric bikes you ever see on the roads are wimpy scooters and mopeds.
On the other hand, Harley-Davidson is putting out an electric bike next year, but still it doesn’t really look like a Harley. They went with the sports bike form factor instead. Why would someone in the market for a sports bike want an “economy mode”? That makes way more sense for a cruiser.
Personally, I prefer the look of the conversion from that Instructables link. It’s got a BMW vibe, and I really like the styling on BMW bikes.
Interestingly, this is not so in some areas.
Let’s be honest, GM is pretty terrible at naming cars in general, not just the electric ones. Their only good names are taken from their classic models. e.g. Malibu, Impala, Camaro, etc.
Maybe they should start going with an alpha-numeric naming convention.
“The Chevy 9001. It’s over nine thousand!”
And since most electric energy in the US is produced by fossil fuels, those costs can be added to the direct subsides.
Huh. “e-Torque” seems like a fairly manly trademark. Good job, Dodge.
You can always trust Chevy to come up with much lamer marketing.
“With Ram, you get torque. With Silverado, you need an assist.”
They did that with Pontiac in the Eighties, with model names like 6000STE and 6000LE, otherwise known as “Goostie and Gooly”
the point is that they do not want to use the word “hybrid”.
It only works if the car isn’t lame (usually). Ford wouldn’t slap a “GT” or “F-150” badge on a Fiesta.
The images projected in advertising to sell to liberals are often cutesy to the point of repellent. GM used to have an ad of a middle aged dad convincing his eco-minded eleven year old daughter that his great big truck was a hybrid too, and so dad was doing his bit to save the polar bears. Yeah, there’s sometimes a smug preciousness to the marketing that puts me off; a sing-song, vocal fry superiority, as if all their customers are from Berkeley.
You know who else uses smug, cliche-driven marketing? Anyone selling trucks to conservatives. For those ads, get the most guttural voiced, southwestern, southern or Appalachian man to growl that “Chevva truuucks are touuugh because we build ’em for touuugh Amurrricans”, as if all their customers were from Hollerin’ Hollow.
My question would be is the battery life based on years ar X amount of driving per year, or a flat yearly number? Tesla’s been busy the last few years narrowing the gaps between their rural area charging stations here in West Texas (it’s about 90-130 miles now on the interstates), but I can put 30,000 a year on my Escape easily due to the distances involved. So a battery with an absolute 10-year lifespan would be more and more viable outside of city areas as the number of charging stations rise, but a battery with a 10-year lifespan based on 15,000 miles per year is going to wear out a lot faster and either make an earlier replacement necessary or drastically lower the future resale value.
Wait. Tell me more about this Chevva truuuuck. Your southern drawl has lured me in.
Ford would go a long way towards beefing up the image of electric motors by making the next generation of GT a hybrid. If it’s good enough for McLaren and Ferrari, it should be good enough for Ford. As mentioned above, there’s no need to call it a “hybrid” or an “e-vehicle” if they can come up with a sexier trademark.
How about the “Ford GT with ElectroTurbo”?
“Electro” sounds dangerous. Like the Spider-Man villain.
Chrysler could market hybrids as being equipped with an “ElectroHemi”.
GM shall, of course, continue to market their hybrids as requiring e-assistance, like when your gramma calls asking for help with her computer.
Aside from some old Better Place cars and some BMW i-cars, there are no full-electrics here in Israel.
If they made sense anywhere, they’d make sense here. There are no long-range drives, no long open roads without potential charging stations etc… They’d even get tax rebates for having smaller engines.
But somehow, there seems to be no demand.
hmmm…
https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-israel-lags-world-on-electric-vehicles-report-1001224936
Fuel injection “died” in 1959. It was a flop. Air bags “died” in 1974; it was an experiment that didn’t catch on. Multichannel home theater systems “died” with quadraphonic in 1975. There are no final victories in the world of tech. There are a few final defeats, but not as many as we think. You don’t see any steam-propelled cars on the road. When circumstances change, we change with them. Electrics weren’t practical in 1966; they are now.