You have to love the people in the comments section there. Few seem to understand that one of the major points of electric cars is decoupling the energy generation and expenditure. Sure, if your country generates all its electricity with coal then of course electric cars aren't going to do anything for you at first. The whole concept is that you reduce the number of sources of pollution so that you have less things that you have to replace in the future.
Even if 101% of your electricity is coal generated, you are head of the game with EVs.
My gen-1 Volt travels about 27 miles on the electricity/energy it takes to refine one gallon of gas. Basically, if you stopped refining gas, you could power almost all of the EVs on the road with the same energy.
Yes the meme of the "coal powered car". TBF, I wouldn't mind that at all. That means we could be domestically self sufficient with our energy needs. Not to mention it's a lot easier/cheaper to have one big coal plant with one set of emissions controls, rather than thousands of gas engines with controls in various states of maintenance and disrepair.
Imagine the converse. If we had electric cars today and were proposing moving to liquid fuels. No one would recommend it. "Hey what if we brought all the pollution closer to us and where our families live. That sounds like a great idea!"
I can't wait for electric cars to become more common and competitive with conventional cars. I believe we're going to look back car's emissions the same way we look back at the pre-sewage treatment days - when people used to dump their sewage out the window and into their drinking water!
That being said, we haven't reached the EOL for this first generation of electric cars, and figured out what happens next. Will replacement batteries cost a reasonable price? Or will manufacturers use this as an opportunity to try and get you to buy another car? Maybe you'll be able to replace the old battery with a new one from a 3rd party, or maybe you won't because its loaded with DRM.
Battery prices may go down for automakers, but perhaps consumers won't see a huge benefit. A replacement battery for my hybrid still runs a few thousand dollars and its only about 1 kilowatt-hour.
>Will replacement batteries cost a reasonable price? Or will manufacturers use this as an opportunity to try and get you to buy another car?
The standard for now seems to be a lifetime warranty or similar on battery failure. Hyundai and Chevy have both done this to sell the Ioniq EV and Bolt EV respectively. Whether or not that holds as these cars truly go mainstream is doubtful though.
This isn't true, in the sense that recovering lithium from batteries is more expensive than mining new. The main reason for that is that lithium mining is extremely energy efficient and hence cheap.
> I believe we're going to look back car's emissions the same way we look back at the pre-sewage treatment days
We will look back like that when we finally ban cars out of cities. Electric cars are less horrible than combustion cars, but are still horrible, because they are still cars.
For those of us city dwellers with on-street parking, there doesn't seem to be much talk about getting public infrastructure to charge them. Public charging stations? I'm not sure that will help a lot.
It seems like a future for those with suburban homes. I think those in cities don't drive that much, so maybe those car bound people are a better place to start.
There's always at least one person in every electric car thread saying "but it doesn't work for me!"
Many city dwellers who own cars don't park on the street, but it really varies by city. There are a few on-street chargers out there, maybe there will be more in the future if people advocate for them.
On street parking in a biggish city sounds like a nightmare to me anyways. It's really living on the edge of street cleaning, time limits, and so on...
Lately, they've been adding them to mall parking structures as well as at hotels and some national parks.
It's coming along, but not the best.
Personally, I'd like to spoke and hub it with an eBike for the last mile to make my footprint even smaller than with just my Leaf and solar panels.
Basically, I want a safe place to park an ebike overnight (or a scooter, or what have you), near light rail. Then take the ebike the last few miles and back from work.
Until you can go on a road trip in an electric car without a lot of thinking about where and when you'll fuel up they are not going to make headway as primary vehicles.
People buy cars in order to have a fast mode of transportation available with good uptime. The prospect of having a hr delay every several hundred miles in the middle of an overnight trip to see a dying relative or in the middle of a cross country vacation is a prospect that will cause many non-urban households to retain fossil fueled powered vehicles for longer than some would like.
The HN crowd will buy electric econoboxes and fancy Teslas while they run the SV rat race but when it comes time to raise kids in teh suburbs and really put on the miles the convenience of range and fuel time will cause many people to have at least one in the household fleet.
For commuters with reasonable commutes of less than an hour each way, EVs make perfect sense. People living in the boonies commuting 2 hours each way...no way. I only use my car occasionally (a tank of gas a month) walking to work instead, so I'm not the ideal target for an EV.
My dad used to work in grand gulf nuclear station but lived in Vicksburg. 42 minutes each way according to google maps. I thought he was crazy for doing it, but it felt much longer when I was younger.
So ya, you could do that with a bolt or tesla. I guess I have to redefine what I mean by boonies.
42 minutes could mean say 40 miles. That's near the upper level limits for a round trip without recharging for older generation cars like my Leaf.
The newer Leaf will make it with plenty to spare. Same with the BMW. Next generation Leaf coming up will go 200+ as well. So things are changing and costs are dirt cheap.
For most of my time owning my car, I charged only at work on the weekdays. It was free. Think I've personally saved over $8K in fuel costs total.
So for me, the total cost of ownership is around 27K. For an civic, I would probably be well above 30K by now.
Get an electric car if you can swing it. Total savings is great!
Ever sit down and figure out the cost of taking your own vehicle: amortized cost, maintenance, extra expense of gas (versus driving EV) when you're not on a road trip, things like that? I'm not saying it'll come out to 400 Euros, but it ain't free.
If the EV saves that over the year, the total yearly cost still comes out below. Plus, you don't have the wear and tear of a long trip on your own car.
Electric vehicles just feel and sound like shit. Auto racing is dead, for example, if we move to all electric. No more rib rattling exhaust, the wonderful smell of 2 stroke exhaust burping out of a bike, and the general feeling of driving seven thousand contained explosions every minute.
Before a Model S, I owned a WRX. Both were a joy to drive. Like all cars, electric will have a mix of fun and boring. But I can promise you that instant torque and low center of gravity is not "boring" :)
I'm surprised you don't find it fun to be in an accelerating Tesla.
Sure, spectators at an all-electric NASCAR would keep their hearing, but the rest of the excitement would be there: the close calls, the crashes, the thrill of racing.
Horse racing is fun despite it not vibrating your seat.
FWIW, I'm having a lot more fun watching Formula-e than Formula 1. It's the awful sound of current F1 cars, coupled with the Indy-like equality of Formula-e cars. Lots of overtaking, very competitive, very dependent on the pilot. Formula-e is proving to be quite fun.
I'll concede it's not F1, and I'll also concede that I'm a disgruntled ex-fan of F1.
You only have to tow your boat to the lake a few times a month before commuting in a pickup truck is the best option.
You only have to go on a road trip a few times a month
Fielding a fleet of the minimum number of vehicles that do everything poorly is almost always cheaper than fielding a fleet of anything but the minimum number of vehicles. Throw the non-free parking that HN seems to love into the mix and it disadvantages specialized vehicles even further.
This is why crew cab trucks and crossovers/wagons are so popular.
FWIW, I've driven from Portland to Yosemite twice in a Model S and the charge times were no problem. At the time I had two small kids and their needs (food, bathroom, stretch) surpassed the charging time in all but one stop, and even then it was only an extra few minutes before we were ready to go.
Obviously air pollution is the main thing to tackle here, but even noise pollution is a nice benefit of electrics. When I test-drove the Tesla Model S I was excited for a quiet future.
ICE cars simply produce far too much noise. They've disrupted my local downtown area, making it undesirable as the 18-wheelers roar by. If not for the emissions damaging public health, I'm surprised to see municipalities tolerate this scourge of deafening noise.
And the death of artificially-loud pickup trucks will receive an ovation from myself.
I don't buy the noise argument. Above a certain speed, wind and tire noise far exceed ICE noise. The pickups I've seen are mostly due to the use of course off-road tires that buzz as they go down the road and the motorcycles won't give up their not-super-legal aftermarket exhausts until people collectively agree to stop running them over.
In a downtown area the speeds are likely not high, and the traffic is likely stop and go, with lots of opportunity for revving engines as drivers jam the accelerator down from a dead stop. My previous apartment had a busy highway on one side, and a busy street with a stop light right before an onramp to said highway. The furious acceleration of cars going from a stop to highway speeds as fast as they can was much worse than the monotonous general highway whooshing sounds.
I've heard this called "breakthrough noise", and whenever I'm walking around and hear an obnoxiously loud noise from a vehicle I exclaim, "My Tesla doesn't make that noise!" Fortunately my walking companions generally find that amusing.
At least on major boulevards around my home and office, where speed limits range from 30 to 40 miles per hour (~64km/h), engine noise is dramatically more significant than tire or wind noise. These major boulevards with three to four lanes per direction are conduits for rigs, buses, and utility trucks with large diesel engines. As a pedestrian, when these things roar by, all I hear is engine noise. Grinding, roaring engine noise. Yes, they have tires, and yes, there must be some wind noise, but right down there at street level, it's all drowned out by the engine.
I agree with the grandparent, if we see these larger vehicles go electric in my lifetime, I will be very happy at the reduction in noise.
The main thing at (near) steady state noise at higher speeds is how well the car is at mitigating the road noise. At city speeds, having both a Leaf at home and a Toyota Sienna, that the noise from the Leaf is near nothing.
If I'm accelerating to make sure I make it through the yellow light, I never get a roar, an downshift, or anything of that nature. On my Toyota or any large car, that flares up and the noise is appreciable. If you floor it on an ICE at 60 to pass someone, that noise is quite loud, even against the road noise. On my Leaf, it's just road noise. I don't get a loud revving of the engine, just more road noise.
There is a safety issue though. I can't tell you how many times I've almost been killed by an electric bicycle while living in Beijing. You can't here them coming at all.
I think this is an issue better-resolved by separating traffic modes. Strapping noise makers on to a vehicle to make it safer is a sort of "pseudo-solution" which hops around solving the core issue.
Electric bicycles traveling that fast probably shouldn't be permitted on the same channel/road that foot-traffic uses. Though I don't live in Beijing so I can't speak to their decision (or lack of) for that.
Likewise, in the U.S. I've seen a few downtown areas try to be "green" by simply throwing some bike lanes on a 5-lane road. It's quite dangerous to ride a bike along that because of the traffic going 35-40mph. Separate that bike lane with bollards, at minimum, or build a separated "sidewalk" for e-bikes and scooters. Putting bicycles on the same road as 3,500 lb vehicles hurtling at 40mph is a joke.
One reason to like Seattle is that they actually have bike trails, not just lane separation with car traffic.
Beijing used to have a lot of such bike lanes in 1999 when I first visited (the land of the sea of bicycles) but sadly all of this has been turned into parking for cars.
Tire noise, specifically, from the rubber flexing and air whooshing as it gets compressed out of the contact patch.
An electric 18-wheeler though could actually wind up a lot quieter- the noisiest thing about them is the Jake brake, and regenerative braking could do that silently.
One of the biggest drawbacks for electric cars is charging. I am not taking about super charging – Tesla has shown that you can go almost anywhere with an electric car.
I'm taking about home charging for people who rent apartments and park in the street. For those, charging is a real problem because I do not think it is practical for them to use quick charging all the time. Quick charging is great for road trips. They give you enough power to go for another few hours while you have a break (which you should take anyways after driving for a while).
Quick chargers are impractical for home charging for a couple of reasons:
1. They are going to be crowded because people will spend 40min there on average (see SF where a lot of people already do that).
2. It sucks to wait for the car to finish charging. Going to a gas pump is already annoying but charging a car for a extended amount of time is just inconvenient and impractical.
Electric cars should really be charged just like mobile phones. When you get home, you plug in the car. When you leave the car is full (or at the desired charging level). This makes electric car superior because you do not have to worry about "is my tank full enough for me to get to work and to the next gas station or am I gonna be late in the office".
But until we have that, electric cars are unfortunately infeasible for a lot of people who live in apartments.
What we need to do is provide charging and parking solutions for them. They need to be able to park for 17+ without getting into trouble while charging. One way to do that is by providing normal charger at people's work, so that they arrive, plugin and wait until they have finished work and go home.
Another interesting solution is to use the power of street lamps. A British startup is already working on that [1].
What we need IMO is to have both. Some people will charge in the streets and some will at work. But until we have that (which might take the longest because it is very expensive to install so many chargers), EVs are going to be impractical for basically anybody who does not have a garage (and incredible useful for those that do).
There are also a couple of other ways, though, im not sure how feasible they are in the short term future: increase the speed of quick charging (I don't think it is possible to charge a 70kwh battery in 5min without killing it in the long term)
Have the cars charge them autonomously at big charging parks at night. While this is my favorite we have yet to see when this really happens for non luxury cars (the hardware for autonomy could already increase the purchase price by many thousands of dollars and I don't know when all car manufacturers are ready – I sincerely hope Tesla will not be the only car maker to have feasible electric cars because seeing mostly Tesla would be kind of boring and kill competition sooner or later which is always bad for the consumers).
On the plus side at least Matt3o12_ pointed out solutions! Still, he/she appears to think that this is a huge issue because that's their personal situation.
Cities are already and will always be hybrid transportation hubs. There will be walkable areas, there will be car-required areas, and a wide range of in between mixes. These serve different markets and attract different citizens. One thing that will not work will be to force a one-type-fits all transportation strategy to all cities or all city areas.
I agree. America has generally forced a one-type-fits all transpo strategy - personal autos. This is causing lots of problems regardless of the fuel source of the car - oil, natural gas, or electricity from the grid or rooftop.
One detail usually overlooked with having a fleet of electric cars is the added weight of the battery and the extra wear and tear this will create on our highways. There is a rule of thumb that says that highway damage goes up by the 4th power of the axle weight. So an electric car that is 33% heavier than the an ICE car, will cause (4/3)^4 = 3.16 times as much damage.
So if we all go to electric cars and if batteries do not become lighter, then expect road to not last as long. Also, concrete production itself is a serious CO2 source.
67 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 126 ms ] threadMy gen-1 Volt travels about 27 miles on the electricity/energy it takes to refine one gallon of gas. Basically, if you stopped refining gas, you could power almost all of the EVs on the road with the same energy.
Again, my EV goes the same distance as the average fuel economy for the same amount of energy.
ICE double dip.. plus more.
Imagine the converse. If we had electric cars today and were proposing moving to liquid fuels. No one would recommend it. "Hey what if we brought all the pollution closer to us and where our families live. That sounds like a great idea!"
That being said, we haven't reached the EOL for this first generation of electric cars, and figured out what happens next. Will replacement batteries cost a reasonable price? Or will manufacturers use this as an opportunity to try and get you to buy another car? Maybe you'll be able to replace the old battery with a new one from a 3rd party, or maybe you won't because its loaded with DRM.
Battery prices may go down for automakers, but perhaps consumers won't see a huge benefit. A replacement battery for my hybrid still runs a few thousand dollars and its only about 1 kilowatt-hour.
The standard for now seems to be a lifetime warranty or similar on battery failure. Hyundai and Chevy have both done this to sell the Ioniq EV and Bolt EV respectively. Whether or not that holds as these cars truly go mainstream is doubtful though.
kilowatt-hour is the measure of energy storage capacity.
kilowatt is a measure of power.
http://insideevs.com/zero-first-generation-chevrolet-volt-ba...
We will look back like that when we finally ban cars out of cities. Electric cars are less horrible than combustion cars, but are still horrible, because they are still cars.
It seems like a future for those with suburban homes. I think those in cities don't drive that much, so maybe those car bound people are a better place to start.
I guess I can get an eBike at some point.
Many city dwellers who own cars don't park on the street, but it really varies by city. There are a few on-street chargers out there, maybe there will be more in the future if people advocate for them.
Forgot to put your sunglasses away? Have fun replacing a window!
It's coming along, but not the best.
Personally, I'd like to spoke and hub it with an eBike for the last mile to make my footprint even smaller than with just my Leaf and solar panels.
Basically, I want a safe place to park an ebike overnight (or a scooter, or what have you), near light rail. Then take the ebike the last few miles and back from work.
People buy cars in order to have a fast mode of transportation available with good uptime. The prospect of having a hr delay every several hundred miles in the middle of an overnight trip to see a dying relative or in the middle of a cross country vacation is a prospect that will cause many non-urban households to retain fossil fueled powered vehicles for longer than some would like.
The HN crowd will buy electric econoboxes and fancy Teslas while they run the SV rat race but when it comes time to raise kids in teh suburbs and really put on the miles the convenience of range and fuel time will cause many people to have at least one in the household fleet.
The newest generation, like the Bolt, gets 230 miles. Are you saying you are driving over 100 miles in each direction a day?
So ya, you could do that with a bolt or tesla. I guess I have to redefine what I mean by boonies.
The newer Leaf will make it with plenty to spare. Same with the BMW. Next generation Leaf coming up will go 200+ as well. So things are changing and costs are dirt cheap.
For most of my time owning my car, I charged only at work on the weekdays. It was free. Think I've personally saved over $8K in fuel costs total.
So for me, the total cost of ownership is around 27K. For an civic, I would probably be well above 30K by now.
Get an electric car if you can swing it. Total savings is great!
It would have been ironic if the nuclear plant my dad worked at didn't have electric car chargers. Well, I mean now, he retired a decade ago.
Electric vehicles just feel and sound like shit. Auto racing is dead, for example, if we move to all electric. No more rib rattling exhaust, the wonderful smell of 2 stroke exhaust burping out of a bike, and the general feeling of driving seven thousand contained explosions every minute.
Electric may be nice, but it's boring as hell.
Sure, spectators at an all-electric NASCAR would keep their hearing, but the rest of the excitement would be there: the close calls, the crashes, the thrill of racing.
Horse racing is fun despite it not vibrating your seat.
Lots of ICE cars with turbos already pipe fake engine noise into the car cabin, all you need is loudspeakers and a stereo.
If I want to see an event with electronic music that might involve carnage, I watch SpaceX launches.
I'll concede it's not F1, and I'll also concede that I'm a disgruntled ex-fan of F1.
How often do people drive to work?
You only have to go on a road trip a few times a month
Fielding a fleet of the minimum number of vehicles that do everything poorly is almost always cheaper than fielding a fleet of anything but the minimum number of vehicles. Throw the non-free parking that HN seems to love into the mix and it disadvantages specialized vehicles even further.
This is why crew cab trucks and crossovers/wagons are so popular.
ICE cars simply produce far too much noise. They've disrupted my local downtown area, making it undesirable as the 18-wheelers roar by. If not for the emissions damaging public health, I'm surprised to see municipalities tolerate this scourge of deafening noise.
And the death of artificially-loud pickup trucks will receive an ovation from myself.
I agree with the grandparent, if we see these larger vehicles go electric in my lifetime, I will be very happy at the reduction in noise.
If I'm accelerating to make sure I make it through the yellow light, I never get a roar, an downshift, or anything of that nature. On my Toyota or any large car, that flares up and the noise is appreciable. If you floor it on an ICE at 60 to pass someone, that noise is quite loud, even against the road noise. On my Leaf, it's just road noise. I don't get a loud revving of the engine, just more road noise.
Also, here's a reference for interior cabin noise found here: http://www.auto-decibel-db.com/
Are you speaking as a pedestrian/cyclist/driver? What kind of speeds are people driving at?
If it's an electric bicycle, then since it's now "motorized", simply cannot ride on the sidewalks.
In China, it seems like almost anything goes. ;)
Electric bicycles traveling that fast probably shouldn't be permitted on the same channel/road that foot-traffic uses. Though I don't live in Beijing so I can't speak to their decision (or lack of) for that.
Likewise, in the U.S. I've seen a few downtown areas try to be "green" by simply throwing some bike lanes on a 5-lane road. It's quite dangerous to ride a bike along that because of the traffic going 35-40mph. Separate that bike lane with bollards, at minimum, or build a separated "sidewalk" for e-bikes and scooters. Putting bicycles on the same road as 3,500 lb vehicles hurtling at 40mph is a joke.
Beijing used to have a lot of such bike lanes in 1999 when I first visited (the land of the sea of bicycles) but sadly all of this has been turned into parking for cars.
It was incredibly eerie how quiet it was, just the sounds of the tires against the pavement, no ICEs running.
The engine noise plays a very small role at higher speeds.
An electric 18-wheeler running down the highway will not be significantly quieter than one with an ICE.
An electric 18-wheeler though could actually wind up a lot quieter- the noisiest thing about them is the Jake brake, and regenerative braking could do that silently.
Yellow is trucks, blue is cars. Full line is total noise, broken line is noise by wind and tires, dotted is noise by the motor.
I'm taking about home charging for people who rent apartments and park in the street. For those, charging is a real problem because I do not think it is practical for them to use quick charging all the time. Quick charging is great for road trips. They give you enough power to go for another few hours while you have a break (which you should take anyways after driving for a while).
Quick chargers are impractical for home charging for a couple of reasons:
1. They are going to be crowded because people will spend 40min there on average (see SF where a lot of people already do that).
2. It sucks to wait for the car to finish charging. Going to a gas pump is already annoying but charging a car for a extended amount of time is just inconvenient and impractical.
Electric cars should really be charged just like mobile phones. When you get home, you plug in the car. When you leave the car is full (or at the desired charging level). This makes electric car superior because you do not have to worry about "is my tank full enough for me to get to work and to the next gas station or am I gonna be late in the office".
But until we have that, electric cars are unfortunately infeasible for a lot of people who live in apartments.
What we need to do is provide charging and parking solutions for them. They need to be able to park for 17+ without getting into trouble while charging. One way to do that is by providing normal charger at people's work, so that they arrive, plugin and wait until they have finished work and go home.
Another interesting solution is to use the power of street lamps. A British startup is already working on that [1].
What we need IMO is to have both. Some people will charge in the streets and some will at work. But until we have that (which might take the longest because it is very expensive to install so many chargers), EVs are going to be impractical for basically anybody who does not have a garage (and incredible useful for those that do).
There are also a couple of other ways, though, im not sure how feasible they are in the short term future: increase the speed of quick charging (I don't think it is possible to charge a 70kwh battery in 5min without killing it in the long term)
Have the cars charge them autonomously at big charging parks at night. While this is my favorite we have yet to see when this really happens for non luxury cars (the hardware for autonomy could already increase the purchase price by many thousands of dollars and I don't know when all car manufacturers are ready – I sincerely hope Tesla will not be the only car maker to have feasible electric cars because seeing mostly Tesla would be kind of boring and kill competition sooner or later which is always bad for the consumers).
[1]: http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/london-street-lamps...