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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
Seems appropriate to me. Those are the folk who tend to think humanity is a plague on the world. They would simply be living up to their ideals by “volunteering” to be wiped out.
I can see one in a big city if I only had to drive five or ten miles each way to work.
The problem with DC has to do with motor and generators. The brushes always seem to get gunked up and need to be replaced. Maybe some new material will be developed (or has been) to alleviate this . . .
Compared to my Camry:
Approx 500 miles on the motor-battery combination, but only about two miles on the battery alone. I posit my hybrid does more to “save the planet” than the Volt.
OTOH, hybrids and all-electric cars have their own significant environmental impacts when you look at the materials and energy required to make the cars . . .
True, but it was programmed to be an all-electric vehicle first, then an all-gasoline vehicle once the battery depleted (I’m not sure the motor charges the battery in the Volt).
You can stockpile electricity, but who wants to try and hook up 100,000 AAA batteries to his Tesla? Hehe . . .
It may be she bought a lemon. No type of vehicle is safe from the Monday morning assembly line . . .
Thanks a lot, Gary! (coffee sprayed through nose on keyboard)
That’s only energy density. There is potential cost reduction still available. We do not need Moore’s Law level reduction. 10% per year for 5 years would be massive.
Again, there are probably some small improvements available in cooling and charging optimization.
Huh? Internal combustion engines are a quite mature technology. There is little room for improvement absent breakthrough or paradigm shift (e.g., burning natural gas instead of gasoline).
I could easily see this going as electric cars being a perfectly fine second vehicle for going to or front work or on short errands in urban areas … but urban legislators who know what’s best for everybody will then decide they’re perfect for all drivers, and try to legislate internal combustion engines out of use or slap onerous taxes on them, as with cigarettes. That will leave people in outer suburban or rural areas either paying huge prices for their cars or going with electrics where range in unacceptable, making trips longer due to time at the charging stations, or with vehicles whose battery life is shortened, meaning faster vehicle deprecation than ones with gasoline engines, or facing costly battery replacements.
That’s actually a big part of my “bug out” plan. I bought a bicycle carrier for the car specifically for that sort of situation. I’m still shopping for a collapsible bicycle trailer to toss on the roof rack of the car to haul stuff if something bad happens.
The time it happened too me I was able to buy a small gas container, but hanging on to it was difficult while riding. I don’t remember why I didn’t put a pannier on the bicycle to hold it. I never travel with my bicycle without one.
I haven’t lost anything in a city.
Exactly. So what happens is that upper-middle class people purchase one as a second car/Object of Virtue.
. . . to go with light rail. They want everyone out of cars altogether. This would be fine with me if:
They didn’t cost so much to build (heavy taxpayer burden).
They didn’t cost so much to run (heavily taxpayer subsidized).
They didn’t become unionized (strikes to cripple the individuals’ as well as the city’s economies just to get more $$$ and benefits).
Most people I know buy second or even third cars for specific reasons. Trucks are very common around here, and the four-door truck doubles fine as a hauler and a family vehicle. Minivans (or “Mommyvans”) are vital if you have a whole bunch of youngun’s. Because no one size fits all, we diversify what we purchase. GM probably sees the demise of the sedan (as well as Ford). OTOH, I bought one last year because for long trips for just two people, they’re perfect.
As an example, our family has:
A sedan.
A minivan,
An SUV.
Another sedan.
And (until daughter’s wreck), a four-door pickup truck.
I wanted a Volt but they screwed it up. I almost bought a Ford Escape hybrid but settled on the little Transit Connect minivan. Best decision I made in 2011, that’s for sure. I get 36 mpg and I have a ton of cargo space. This is the little van you see delivering flowers and stuff, so it’s designed for the driver who spends his life in the seat, and it is very comfortable. I love it, am about to hit 200K miles, and plan to drive it for at least another five years.
When I got it I specified a motor that was LPG ready (hardened valve seats, special O rings, a computer programmed for it). If gasoline hits $4 a gallon again I can spend $200 on a tank and a valve and be running on liquid natural gas (hug a fracker!) or even propane. Since I heat with gas, I could install a compressor in the garage and fill up right there. It would run on moonshine right now. Better living through chemistry.
Dueling headlines at the WSJ today:
On the editorial page:
TRUMP’S GM COLLISION
Railing against the company can’t change car-market realities
Actually, the WSJ editorial board is at best ignorant of history. Canute’s thing with the tides was a rhetorical gesture:
On the news page:
GM is betting on China. It’s not economical for GM to keep the plants in question open in the US. If GM wants to build profitable big vehicles here, great.
But if GM is betting on China and investing heavily to expand production there rather than in the US, and GM then decides to close unprofitable plants in the US that build gas powered vehicles, should the US government be subsidizing GM’s electric car business (or Tesla’s, for that matter) which are also not profitable without said subsidies?
Thanks to California mandates (and the mandates of a few other hotspots), there is a massive and expensive push to make big trucks hybrids, but work trucks don’t work as hybrids in the conventional sense because they don’t drive enough – they’re parked and idling instead, so “hybrid” here does not refer to the drive train, but to anything else the engine powers by way of a clutch pump or PTO (Power Take Off – a gearbox mounted to the transmission to sent power to compressors, generators, hydraulic pump systems, etc).
And it’s the idling that the greenies are going after. So these trucks are now having to carry around massive battery packs (which reduces their mileage), and go to all-electric PTO systems. So far…. it’s not doing so well. For one, these trucks still cost a good 30% more than their conventional counterparts (which is down from 200%, admittedly), but the real deal breaker is this: they only work in a narrow temperature range. If the truck is operating in a hot or cold climate, the hybrid PTO systems and hybrid hydraulics fail (and fail in different ways, depending on the temp).
We’re a long long way from this sort of tech being viable outside of a few niches.
Agreed. And there is nothing intrinsically wrong with buying a jumped-up golf cart for tooling around town. Indeed, it is wise to buy vehicles that fit different uses.
My objection is only that these vehicles are subsidized and the people who buy them don’t need them. I get subsidizing stuff for the poor. I don’t get subsidizing stuff for the middle class (except when I do, of course).
And there is nothing wrong with building special-use vehicles for a limited market, and then trying to improve the product so it can be marketed more widely, etc. I’d like to see it happen. But subsidies and industry mandates, no. Mandates on using only low-emission vehicles in certain urban environments, maybe. Let the states and cities decide.
In the last 5 or so years, the fire service has been going hard over on battery powered tools and equipment. Even in a small fire department like ours we have battery powered extrication tools (Jaws of Life), and battery powered scene lighting. It’s faster to deploy than gas powered stuff and battery swaps are simple (FYI Hurst Jaws batteries are $500.00 and look like really big cordless drill batteries). We are probably going to leave the built-in generator on our engine but add some inverters and replace things like our gas powered exhaust fan with battery powered versions.
However: the big dog at any fire is the water pump. Most are powered directly off of the truck engine by a special transmission or a PTO. And we spend hours idling.
So here is a good example of where appropriate technology made huge inroads into a market because it’s a genuine improvement, and yet it’s not even looked at for a related purpose for which it is insufficient.
How markets should work.
The biggest land vehicles of all, freight trains, are driven by diesel electric motors. Have been for decades. Using a strong hybrid with diesel would solve turbo lag, and give you the extra boost for a tough hill, while being a better neighbor in heavy urban traffic. Of course, multiple truck makers are working on pick-up trucks with gasoline-electric hybrid power plants.
There have been electric-assist bicycles for a while, but they seemed like clunkers with limited range for touring, and difficult to ride when the battery ran out. I didn’t pay them any serious attention.
There have been vast improvements, it looks like.
We haven’t actually tried one yet, but it looks they have now become a real thing, with realistic range for touring, enabling partners with lesser strength and stamina to keep up with strong riders such that a tour can be enjoyable for all concerned.
In a few months we might look for a rental place in south-central Texas so Mrs R can give one a try. I could see using one myself when I get older.
One difficulty: If you want to take your e-bike to Europe, that can be done but the airlines do not want to transport your lithium-ion battery. The process is difficult enough to deter a person.
There may be a battery that can make it doable, but I don’t own one and have never tried it. One other factor to consider is that there is a limit on motor power permitted for ebikes in Europe. Many bikes sold in the US have bigger motors.
There have been true hybrid locomotives – batteries and all – for almost 130 years.
Almost all of them have been passenger trains or standalone self-powered cars, though, and only a few have entered full service.
Diesel has emissions issues. Ask VW.
Diesel is not well matched to hybrid in cars due to several factors. One is expense. The second is poor torque match. Diesels are torquey. For hybrids, the electric motor lets you use a less torquey cycle. Thus, gasoline hybrids often use the Atkinson cycle.
Ret,
What do you think about this?
Regards,
Jim
Detroit is in our DNA.
I think people are going to wind up stuck in the middle of nowhere. IIUC, the N380 transmission is rated for 350 W (or 250W on a cargo bike;) the bike you link to has motor options from 2kW to 4kW.
High power ebikes have been destroying earlier NuVinci drives for years. Maybe I’m wrong about the N380 specifications, but my first impression is: I don’t think it’s anywhere near massive enough for that much power. I would absolutely love to be wrong but I ain’t even going to run 750W through one until other people prove it can take it and keep on taking it.
UPDATE: typical reports for someone running a Bafang (8Fun) 500W+ mid drive through an N270 or N360 went something like “worked great for (several months, a year or so) and then (started to make strange noises, leak, something else) and then it stopped working.”
I really wanted that clean chain line of an internal gear hub; if I coulda I woulda. Maybe a Rohloff (the rear wheel will run $1500 or more.) There’s a new IGH out of Norway that sounds promising but… I’ll wait and see.