If you read the article, you see that implies full EV (though of course it's not always so clear-cut, with the i3 having the REX model where you have a built-in charger that uses a small gasoline engine).
If you click the first link to the IAA 2017 announcement with the original goals, it says “25 electrified new models until 2025 and 12 of them all-electric”
This announcement is just accelerating that schedule, so about half the models should be full EV and the others will be hybrid. I agree it would be nice to get more details regarding plug-in capabilities.
To look at this from one perspective, I wonder if this is because BMW assumes accelerating climate change (most scientific models use very conservative figures, meaning they assume best scenarios, and now scientists are being shocked that things are happening much faster than those models, e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jun/18/arctic-p...) will mean either regulation or market interests will shift much more quickly to electric cars, so they're also moving their target, because otherwise it'll be like selling great looking, great performing steam engines when everyone are more interested in buying Model T's.
So businesses making good decisions because of climate change... a good thing? But maybe too late?
There is not really a too late, at this point we need decarbonization regardless of what came before. Every ounce of CO2 avoided is a step in the right direction. Yes we will experience catastrophic climate events, but businesses still have time to accelerate into green tech, generate wealth, and lessen or prevent future problems.
It is though, we've built our society on the need to use it. The market depends on it, prosperity and food on our plate depend son it. The real problem is we have to fundamentally change society relationship with externalizing waste.
This will instantly make what we've been doing for 60 years untenable.
Two independent studies in Germany recently found that the expected reduction in CO2 due to electric cars will be very moderate over the next two decades even in the best case scenario. The electricity just needs to come from somewhere and that somewhere is not going to be 100% renewables. We need to end this narrative that driving a Tesla or similar car somehow is a heroic act and helping to save the planet.
About half of all crude oil is turned into gasoline (and that's only an indirect indicator of where the profits are). A world without ICE engines will still have an oil industry, but it will have an almost unrecognizably different one.
The same can be said about plastic, waste, recycling, water quality, air quality, ...
The general public is rarely the biggest cause, and even the best intentioned personal initiative like becoming vegan can fail to have any positive impact down the line.
That said, in democracies, personal attitude matters to politicians. Being associated to poluting industry become a career terminating scandal waiting to happen in a society composed of vegan, composting, plastic avoiding, electric car driving, eco-home living population. Similarly poluting companies become easy targets for a new generation of politicians.
"Being associated to poluting industry become a career terminating scandal waiting to happen in a society composed of vegan, composting, plastic avoiding, electric car driving, eco-home living population. Similarly poluting companies become easy targets for a new generation of politicians."
In society there are, however, needs that have to be covered by the said poluting companies, and I've encountered plenty individuals oblivious to the fact that we don't have working alternatives yet, unfortunately. I understand why the struggle against polution trend had to adopt religious attitude, but I'm a bit worried about the (current cultural stigma) collateral damage and especially about its eventual long term fallout.
Not only energy production is an issue. Electric cars also have a larg ecological debt at start. Nobody has anything on battery refurbishment and recycling.
One one hand you are lying to yourself if you think your new electric car is more environmental friendly, on the other hand you have to start somewhere perhaps.
"Nobody has anything..." is plainly not true. Li-ion battery used in most e-cars is so easy to dismantle to individual cells which can be easily resold, that it actually incentivizes theft. Legal refurbishment is equally easy plus there is huge demand for electricity storage which will keep for decades siphoning off any refurbished cells not suitable for vehicle use.
Battery recycling and reprocessing is already mandatory in many countries, to avoid contamination by landfill leaks. It is just question of scale.
T̶h̶e̶ ̶a̶r̶t̶i̶c̶l̶e̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶o̶l̶d̶e̶r̶ (didn't read the date correctly), but the inconclusiveness of the battery factor remains. Driving in winter with all electric gadgets turned on and you get additional numbers that are totally different compared to summer.
And dependable numbers on battery refurbishment will only be available in a decade or so. It is not just "easy".
I have had a tesla since 2012. it's fine in the winter. I go probably 15 weekend trips to ski areas around seattle. Don't forget that electric cars charge the battery when they come down that big hill. tesla's heat the battery which reduces the amount the range decreases significantly. It's not like the range goes away in some unknown schema.
Well, BMW's bosses' motives are probably profit/thriving as a car company (well maybe they'll pivot to something else?), so, if the customers are deluded that buying electric cars will save the planet, they'd be stupid to keep selling steam-engined cars and not offer electric cars.
Tragically even if you think you're helping with recycling, apparently that trash just gets shipped to Asia and be incinerated..
The greatest threat to human survival comes from the political and economic clout of petrochemical companies. Buying gasoline powered cars perpetuates that. Using electricity as an energy source for transportation means that wealth is no longer being sent to Saudi Aramco, ExxonMobil, Rosneft, etc. This decreases the ability of those companies to fund anti-global warming propaganda, bribe, encourage/wage war, undermine democracies, and cause humanity's eventual extinction.
So yes, I firmly believe that purchasing EVs is not just a heroic act, but one that is unquestionably necessary.
It seems that we have reached a tipping point on climate. The movement has grown suddenly strong this year, so if it wasn't clear before the writing is on the wall for all to see.
That said, I have read comment from the various motor show in the last 2 years and apparently the lack of apparent enthousiasm around electric was more a question of protecting the sales of the already designed last generation of non-electric car. Apparently the only interesting things auto-makers had to say was about electric.
This could be a case of BMW no so much as accelerating its plan rather than accelerating the publication of its plans.
And yet they won't invest a dime in charging infrastructure as Tesla has done. Which means the only electric car you'll be able to drive between cities remains Tesla. Until that changes Tesla will continue to sell 10x more electric cars than all other carmakers combined.
That's an overstatement, there will be non Tesla EVs with over 200 miles range and there are other charging companies. To say you cant drive between cities in a non Tesla EV is just false. Furthermore your 10X is way off, Tesla sells the most but historically Leaf and various plug ins put up comparable numbers in the 0.5 to 1X volume range compared to S and X. Model 3 is biggest volume EV of course, but only in the past 12-18 months or so.
So, let's get informed people. EVs matter for climate change but blatant disinformation gets us nowhere.
any luxury brand maker should be ashamed to have any EV in that space that gets less three hundred miles on the EPA system. The i3 gets a pass because it was introduced at a time when its initial range was average for most EVs.
today, mid to slightly lower than mid two hundred mile range EVs are where consumer priced EVs will reign. Everything else needs to exist beyond that to show value and seriousness because those range numbers still require fair to nice weather to achieve. In some countries there could be a good market for the one hundred mile club but that would take some seriously aggressive pricing to convince people
Plus "electrified" does not imply full EV. that is the cop out for PHEV. Worse their new Mini E is again a disappointment in range and cost. Considering where it landed it makes me wonder what BMW will need to charge for range competitive with a Tesla 3 LR. Audi and Jaguar did the EV movement no favors with their lack luster attempts
Go ahead and find the EVs that aren't Tesla that beat the 2012 Model S's 265 miles of range and are on the market right now. They don't exist.
The 2020 Porsche Taycan (300 miles), 2020 Mercedes EQC (293 miles), 2019 Audi E-Tron (204 miles), 2019 VW e-Golf (125 miles), 2019 BMW i3 (126 miles) still don't beat my 2018 Model 3 LR AWD (325 miles). On the most recent TSLA Investor's call, Musk said that Tesla isn't far from 400 mile batteries. Additionally, they just bought Maxwell Technologies known for their work on ultracapacitors to improve lithium ion battery efficiency. More electric vehicles also forces more policy makers to think seriously about EV charging infrastructure and helps sway public opinion. More EVs on the road is a net win for Tesla.
I have wanted to get into an EV and it is the long distance travel issue (for that 1% of the time) that has been keeping me (and I imagine a lot of people) from making the switch. Tesla is the only model to have come close to solving that issue.
One thing I have been waiting to see is a push to have gas stations adopt EV charging on a large scale. Gas stations, particularly ones along interstate routes, often double as rest stops and usually have large parking areas with small marts, and a couple of fast food options. If companies partnered with a major gas pump operator like chevron, shell or mobile to offer even a small number of charging stations with each gas station (even just 2 to 4 at each site in the 50-100kw range.. though the wiring would most likely need to be upgraded to support this) things would shift rapidly I think. I know charge times remain an issue, but if you are taking a rest stop anyway.. the 30-40 minutes of charge is not as big of an issue.
A government subsidy could also be introduced to help offset some of the cost of upgrading these gas stations. An increased tax on Gasoline could go towards paying for such a subsidy. Also I think we need to take another look at nuclear power to help charge those EVs, but that is another conversation.
Actually if you download the PlugShare app it has all kinds of charging stations, not just the Tesla Superchargers and I was honestly shocked at the number of chargers there are around the US, they are literally everywhere now. Many of the non-Tesla charging places only charge $1-$2/hour, so while it might take you longer your electric road trip is going to be a lot cheaper. I think you could easily do long distance trips in most electric cars in the US now with a little planning. Walgreens for example has level 2 J-1772 chargers at over 400 locations in the US, which are almost as fast as most Tesla superchargers:
Teslas come with a J-1772 adapter so you can charge them there as well. Many hotels, airports, malls and parking garages have chargers now as well. I really think we are at a tipping point, one of the annoying things now is when you get to a charger it's busy. Some of the busiest Tesla superchargers you have to wait 15-20 minutes sometimes for a spot to open up.
There is a big difference between Level 2 charging and the Tesla Superchargers.
Level 2 J1772 charging tops out under 20 kW, but most cars can only handle 7kW.
Most of the current DC fast charging points (ChargePoint etc) are 50 kW. Faster ones are coming, but most of the current cars (Bolt, Leaf, i3, Kia) can only accept less than 100 kW. Tesla Superchargers are currently 145 kW, but new installations are 250 kW.
That almost seems like the exception that proves the rule. For Ionity, they have what looks to be a few dozen chargers installed in Europe, a few dozen more under construction, but nothing in the Americas, China, or elsewhere.
The home charging units are nice, but not, I think, what people usually mean when they are discussing charging infrastructure. What people typically mean in that context is "chargers I can use when I am traveling." In that context, GPs "they won't invest a dime" statement is understandable in its sentiment, even if not entirely true. Auto manufacturers do not seem to be taking charging infrastructure needs seriously. Although it is good that this seems to be changing, it's not happening quickly enough.
If anything, the lack of progress on this front is further evidence that the traditional auto companies do not take EVs seriously, and have no intentions of doing so.
Electrify America is also partnering with ChargePoint to effectively unify their networks, the advantage being you can use one account across both networks:
How many gas station does BMW own? I don't think they need to invest in charging infrastructure as long as there is one. If there is a need and money involved there will be a lot down the road.
Europe is different, certainly in the UK. The charging network is being built and you can go cross country with an electric car.
From what I understand from watching the Fully Charged Show there is plenty of charging infrastructure being put in place in mainland Europe. However, we are more like two or three plugs at a motorway service station (with one broken) fifty miles away rather than every lamp post having a plug on it.
Really it is the electricity companies rather than the auto manufacturers who are taking that part up, much like how BMW et al. don't own petrol filling stations they don't own the charging infrastructure.
2-3 plugs is bad. Between potential breakage and use by other cars, I wouldn’t rely on any location with less than 4, and even that would make me uncomfortable. You really need at least 6, and 8+ is best.
The lamp posts are going to be good. You just call your electricity supplier and they put them in on your street - if you live in Hounslow. This is the no-nonsense solution for cities where people don't have off street parking and garages.
They are great in a few select places where they use actual lamp posts. But in a lot of the UK they are rolling out chargers like this that block the pavement to people doing using ACTUAL green transport (walking): https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/may/04/charged-compl...
Is this map [1] up-to-date? It shows some 150kW+ chargers in both Europe and North America, but I expected a lot more (given your claim).
It's probably also relevant that the usual mains sockets in a European house can provide around 3kW, around double the US. Installing a new circuit (with thicker wiring) increases that to around 7kW at a fairly low expense. That makes it much easier to charge at home (spend €150 to have the extra circuit installed), or when visiting a house/office (use the nearest normal socket).
I'm talking about real-world. If you actually go to the places on the map, half the time the place doesn't exist, or can't find it, or it's closed. That can't happen when you're down to your last 10 miles of battery range. Tesla's network is dependable and real, and there is accountability when something goes wrong. You know who to blame and who to call. If you're in a Jaguar I-pace or Audi E-tron, you're depending on third-party. There is no accountability. It doesn't give you a warm fuzzy feeling that you're not gonna be stranded in the middle of nowhere with your very expensive doorstop.
I'm sorry this is making me sound like a Tesla fan but I'm really not. It's just the current state of the world. Tesla showed these carmakers the way to go, and instead they decided to go the wrong way and put the burden on us the consumers. That stinks in my opinion and I'm just mad about it.
The Electrify America network looks very similar to the Tesla one. Let's see how well it works after they spend the $2B they got from the Volkswagen settlement.
It may look similar at a glance, but they're quite a ways behind in practice.
Tesla has over 1500 charger stations (and 13,000 stalls) in north america right now, Electrify america is planning 500 stations (2,000 stalls) by the end of 2019.
If you take a look at tesla's map they not only have significantly more coverage, but they have a lot more density around cities where from what I can see EA has just a couple stations. Not to mention that EA seems to only have a few stalls at each location, compared to 6+ in most places for the tesla superchargers that i've personally seen.
I'm all for more chargers, and I'm excited that EA is happening, but Tesla is pretty much unparalleled right now when it comes to charging infrastructure, by quite a large margin.
That's actually pretty awesome, but the ChargePoint chargers are only "Level 2". They're great for charging where you've stopped for a few hours or more, but it would be a nightmare to try and do any kind of road trip with them at any time except overnight.
Tesla has what they call "Destination chargers" which are a similar speed/level, and I don't know of any counts of them off the top of my head, but they probably outnumber the Superchargers by 3-to-1 (as a complete guess based on how many show up around me on the map).
If we're comparing DC fast charging to DC fast charging, neither of those really count, and if you're on a road trip, neither Destination chargers nor chargepoint chargers are a realistic option unless you are stopping for several hours.
I'm not personally familiar with that one, but as an owner this is the ultimate source of authority for me when planning trips. Hopefully more illustrative: https://www.tesla.com/supercharger
I was in Europe recently. I have no idea where people are planning on charging these things. Massive new infrastructure will be required. EG, automakers externalizing their costs onto society again. For what it would cost to roll out and maintain this infrastructure, you might as well just have free transit everywhere, and just keep a state-maintained fleet of rental cars. Would be much cheaper and more efficient.
Yep - I for one wouldn't mind getting an EV, especially to drive around London. But I live in an apartment building, with underground parking, with no outlets. At least Tesla have their chargers, I saw an entire section dedicated to them at a motorway service station, that serve double purpose as chargers and brightly coloured adverts...
Actually, I've seen plenty of people with cords running across the pavement to their cars from the house. Obviously run the risk of being sued for a trip hazard or someone unplugging it, but it's a bit of a stop gap.
Your comment makes no sense, you can't charge at home Tesla or any other vehicle, so what is your plan buy a Tesla and go to the mall and charge it? What if you don't have energy to start the car? AFAIK the only reasonable option for people that can't charge at home is to charge the car at work, going to a mall and hoping you will find a free port is not something reasonable IMO.
I think your are right. In the US, there are more driveways, a cable under the garage door is the most common solution. In Europe, at least the parts I know, on street parking is most common and the solution has to be building out chargers at work. A lot of them (I don't want to leave a meeting to move the car)
I don't have a plan to buy any, but my point was that at least Tesla is helping to build out the infrastructure to help support them, whereas very few other EV manufacturers are helping with the problem at all.
Also IMO it would be stupid to have BMW petrol stations, Renault petrol stations etc, the local authorities may need to give some incentives for the businesses to add generic charging stations, this could be like part of the petrol tax will go into subsidizing the chargers or putting public charging stations.
> Also IMO it would be stupid to have BMW petrol stations, Renault petrol stations etc
Wholeheartedly agree - but EV use is growing faster that local authorities can build out supply in some areas and flawed capacity planning means there are chargers going unused in others. There's fewer independent suppliers as there are with petrol stations so the market incentive for other companies to pick up the middle ground isn't clear yet (esp compared with at home/work usage).
Private companies could fix this if the correct subsidies are provided,here in Romania for example when you install a solar panel to heat water or solar photo-voltaic panel , the government will pay 90% of the costs, there are limits for total cost and the budget is limited(the funds come from the polution tax from petrol I think) , my brother used this to install the water solar panel and he put the paperwork to install the photo-voltaic one.
So a fair solution would be to get a percent from the petrol taxes and help people that want to install a charger. You can probably do similar programs for apartment associations to install chargers for the entire building parking space/street.
Its quite like going to get gas from a gas station. It just takes a while longer. You don't let the car run to empty before you fill it back up. Easy enough fix for your first issue. And for the second, you just wait for a port to come free. That's how supercharger stations are working all across the US.
Because at a gas station you spend around 5 minutes and you don't have to go as often as with an electric cars that will have less autonomy and you will have to spend more time charging. I imagine you would have to go more often to the mall (so consuming extra energy,spend time in traffic, and you may be taxed by the time you keep the charger occupied.
it may work for some people, but AFAIK the traffic at a mall is higher on certain days and hours so you may not find a charger, then what do you do if you are on low?
It's detrimental to the life of the battery to use fast chargers all the time.
Your underground parking already has an electricity supply, at least for the lighting. It's not impossible for the owner of the building to install additional circuits for charging cars.
I'm not saying it's impossible, just that infrastructure is needed. I don't see other examples of EV companies helping with infrastructure - even if fast charging isn't ideal, it's there.
Europe is a bit of a big place, and made up of a lot of countries with their own governments, so the charging situation varies from country to country.
I live in the Netherlands and the FastNed charging network is almost been fully rolled out, as well as charging stations from other vendors (like Shell, NLE, and Tesla).
Charging options are plentiful here, and most of them are fast (175kW) chargers.
Describe plentiful. Seemingly, you need an almost 1-1 ratio of chargers to personal vehicles if you expect 100% of vehicle owners to be driving electric. So, while it's currently a minuscule portion of electric to ICE, it doesn't say much about rolling out capacity to charge everyone's vehicle. So, you either need to roll out chargers to every residential area that currently utilizes street parking, or you need to erect some kind of charging garage.
1-1 ratio is crazy. there isn't a gas station for each gas car. Charging has gotten vastly more common and faster. range has increased too, which reduces the need for charging. New teslas are 370 miles.
I'm willing to be there's more chargers than teslas on the road. For every Tesla on the road, there's most likely a charger at the residence or where ever the car is parked overnight.
Well, I believe your claim is misleading but you do have a point. Since every electric car comes with some kind of charger by definition all home owners have a charger and the vast majority of single home owners have power in the garage. However common usage in the ev scene would be charger is a commercial station with higher power than 120v.
It's coming. There in The Netherlands they're putting in residential charging in an on-demand rate.
This kind of build out can go really quickly because the hardest part (the cables) are already there. We've got about 10 years now to build out the infrastructure which is plenty of time. Great for the economy too.
It's not an externality, because it affects the parties involved in the transaction (the car owners), not unrelated third-parties. And since there's no free lunch - every penny spent on infrastructure by car manufacturers will come from their customers -, you might as well unbundle the two, and let other companies compete for that.
Maybe it’s just the way this is written but it seems amusing to me. He has “called for sales of electric vehicles to increase by 30%”. Not Actually done something that would increase them, just called for it.
Are any of BMWs existing or 25 new electric cars any good though? I tried out the i3 but its range is tiny.
Also, BMW and intel need to have a chat and sort out some differentiation in the i numbers they use.
I love - beyond love - my i3. The range is just not a problem. Even my older model can do 60-70 miles (depending on temp - plus 2x on the range extender should I need it). So it's easy for me to do my 30 miles commute plus the occasional chore. Overnight it charges about 50 miles on a 110V level 1 charger (the kind that comes free with the car) so even if I forget to plug it in one night I'm still good.
The market for this is as a second car for commutes of up to 30-40 miles each way. Double if your work place has a level 2 charger. Add 30-50% for the newer models. I'm willing to guess that covers, what, 75% of two car households? Range is just not a problem.
It's also a pretty cheap car for the quality level. Mine was $20K, more then 50% off the $56K on the sticker, off a 10K lease with 2 years left on the warranty. Hardly used. There was a whole line of these off lease cars at the dealer. He preferred to sell gas vehicles - no need to talk about range.
I didn't mention the quietness, acceleration, build quality, low maintenance, etc. As you can tell I've become a bit of a bore about them and got two friends to buy one. If I have to drive my wife's SUV now I feel dirty.
The lease paperwork was in the glove box, from memory I think their lease must have cost them near $2 a mile, but BMW ate a chunk too. Dealer explanation is limited market due to range anxiety. Which as I demonstrated above is a non issue for most people.
Very light tax on electric cars (PHEV included) steers customers to electrified cars as well. I guess European manufacturers are forced to step in. I'd like to have powerful traditional combustion engine on my car but electrified PHEV makes much more economical sense due taxation.
I do love the irony of a luxury car company trying to be more green. I'm all for electric cars. I think BMW will make some great electric cars and I will want to buy one. But the real green decision is to not buy the luxury car, to go with a less energy-intensive option such as a smaller/simpler car.
The real option is autonomous cars which you can call with a Uber-like app when you need it. That way we would have less cars but we would maximize the utilization rate of the ones we'd keep on the roads.
Don't something like 80% of Americans live in urban or sub-urban areas? I live in a suburban area in Europe and have no problems getting around with public transportation. I get my groceries delivered by the shop.
Most American suburbs are not well served by public transportation.
Personally, I've lived in many cities, suburbs, and rural areas in the northeast US (population-dense, relatively friendly toward ecological initiatives) and tried to use public transit whenever possible. My experience is that public transport outside cities is practically nonexistent. In cities, there are only buses and they're annoying/slow/don't go where you need them.
Only now that I live in the immediate vicinity of Boston do I have useful public transit options, yet still, owning a car is a necessity to get to anything outside the city.
Sub-urban America is not 'no car' America, lacking public transport, the downright scale of American cities, and a car-focused traffic/zoning design makes bikes, walking, and bussing simply just not practical.
The definition of what a suburban area is in North America vs. Europe are so different they really need different words.
A typical suburb in the US will have no public transportation, and be so sprawled out that bicycling or walking between places would be impossible for a working adult.
"Exurb" isn't used enough to describe American suburbs, but is certainly appropriate. Suburban sprawl got so bad that the original suburbs of a lot of cities, that were built with public transit in mind, today Americans think of as "city core" or "inner city" and don't even recognize as suburbs anymore. Meanwhile most of what Americans imagine suburbs to be are more accurately exurbs, and exurban living is seen as more normal than the traditional relationships between cities and their suburbs for a number of unhealthy reasons.
Yeah it's only 90% of the county by land area. If you count by people it's probably a lot lower. But keep in mind that public transportation is terrible even in dense places where it could make a huge difference in the US.
I suspect that HN User gman is trying to make exactly that point. (I could be wrong though.)
I wonder if 30 to 40 years from now, we'll be having the same convo about electric cars that we are having about recycling plastic? Something that seemed good on the surface, but masked all kinds of externalities.
I mean, at least electric should be a bit better than ICE in daily use. But will making these things at scale in the first place cost too much in the way of carbon production? Or other forms of pollution that we as consumers don't even know about yet? You may say, "well it was your job as a consumer to know the impact your purchases were having." But I'm just not that knowledgeable about that stuff. I don't know if a billion electric cars are bad or good? And it might not even be the cars, just the fact that we have to make the roads may be polluting somehow? Or whatever? It's just too much for a consumer to know. Should I be buying electric? Or supporting mass public transit? Which is better? Or is it just a question of which is worse? There's a lot to think about there.
Just for full disclosure, I believe in climate change. But I'm not sure I believe that having electric cars is better than having electric trains or buses? I honestly don't think it's stupid for me to ask whether or not having electric cars is the best strategy for dealing with climate change.
It is an interesting question. The best option is almost certainly to not use a car (walk, cycle, or bus instead). The emissions are much lower[1] (absolute and per-distance) and you might get some health benefits.
If a car is needed it depends how you're planning to power it.
This answer[0] does a great job of looking at the energy inputs of building a car. I thought the up-front cost would be higher but the emissions from producing a car are comparable to the emissions of using the car for a few years.
So if the choice is between a used ICE car and a new EV and charging it with renewable energy, it's (surprisingly) probably worth buying the new EV.
If you're planning to charge it with power from a coal plant though you should probably get the used ICE car.
That depends. There are streets in the UK so polluted that jogging on them, breathing in lots more bad air, is actually worse for you than not jogging. Similarly, the violent accident rate for bicycle commuters is scary. I don't know of any regular commuter who hasn't been to hospital at least once.
I said violent accent, not cars. People commuting on bikes collide with other things than cars. Regular bike commuters can hit 50+kph. At those energy levels, hitting a curb or tree branch can put you in hospital.
Meh. We live in a town of 12,000 people (big town for the area, but in a very rural part of the US). My wife and I share one car, and walk/bike/take transit more often than we drive--the car is mostly for getting our daughter to daycare in the winter and for when my wife is on call at the hospital. There are plenty of folks in the area who don't drive at all.
There are certainly parts of the US where a car is necessary, but 90% is pushing it. It may well be that 90% of people think that they need a car, though.
You may find that due to your socioeconomic status it may be more feasible to be a one car-transit using family, but for many americans who may work two jobs with a hour break between them (or situation similiar) they seriously may only manage to be able to make their schedule work with a car. (Just an example situation)
Being car-less in America is hard, I lived in a the suburb of a main city and if I was to use transit options to get to work I would have spent 3 hours a day on commute alone. That's simply not feasible. Similarly I used to work a job from midnight to noon (and a year later noon to midnight) and there simply was no feasible transit option for such a schedule, and with the sprawling nature of the suburb carpooling wasn't much of an option either.
Or make the car very efficient (Tesla) and fuel it with renewables or other low carbon energy sources. Compromise is not always necessary.
My year old Model S is already surpassed by the new Raven powertrain architecture, providing another 40 miles of range per full charge versus the “old” version (330 miles->370 miles).
This is the "Reduce" philosophy. Not all agree with that philosophy - especially in the developing world who feel unfair if development and conveniences that the west got is denied to them. I personally moved from a energy non-intensive use country (India) to an energy intensive use country (Singapore) a few years ago and even though economic strata wise I've likely gone down a few notches, I wouldn't trade-in my current lifestyle & convenience for what I had back in India.
"Reduce" for the sake of reduction is just poor behavioral economics & hence hasn't actually demonstrably made much of a difference to this world.
Reduce as a side effect of a true benefit/efficiency (think how much lesser power is consumed per unit compute today vs. even 5 years ago) makes a lot of sense.
True and Singapore's government has been very systematic about broadening public transport access - not just for energy reasons but also for economic participation & health reasons (people walk a lot more).
But Singapore also air conditions everything which is a fairly heavy energy use in tropical climate much like how heating is a massive energy use in northern climates and spends a lot of effort/energy on keeping sidewalks, grounds and pavements manicured, watered & in good repair.
As the founder of Singapore argued, the lifestyle gain - though at the cost of consuming more energy is a massive competitive advantage in productivity and in attracting, developing & retaining talent. https://www.vox.com/2015/3/23/8278085/singapore-lee-kuan-yew...
Is there anything that can be done to keep an office a reasonable temperature in a tropical climate like Singapore? I guess if we were all hanging out under open air roofs with our flip flops and swimsuits on, but other than AC I don't know how they could do "business people" office stuff.
It is a little more complicated than that. Cars have all sorts of emissions beyond their engines (brake dust, tire rubber, micoplastics etc). The simpler, lighter, not-BMW car will have fewer of these emissions. Keeping and older car on the road longer, reducing the need to generate a shiny new vehicle, can also reduce emissions.
I'm not sure it is so much the luxury/economy car as the weight that you need to look at. Weight, often even more than drag, will be a primary driver determinant of fuel inefficiency.
While luxury cars are often heavier, and perhaps built without as much presumption that the owners will be concerned about fuel mileage/costs, there are many anomalies where apparently smallish cars are surprisingly heavy. And even 'economy' cars have become quite portly. Just look at the Honda civic hatch, from 1990-now going from 2165 Lbs to 2763 Lbs -- that extra 600Lbs is over 27% heavier -- a lot more mass to accelerate. Or, check out the Nissan Maxima sedan at 3676 Lbs! That's most of the way to my old BMW X5's 4100Lbs. Meanwhile a friend's C6 Corvette weighed in at ~3140 Lbs and got over 32mpg on the highway between the low CD and lighter weight. Look beyond the luxury to the design & build.
Hybrid and electric drive trains allow heavier vehicles to be more efficient. For example a hybrid RAV4 uses less fuel than a regular RAV4 even though it weighs more.
The actual Miata gets pretty poor fuel economy. The shape is not very aerodynamic and the gearing is fairly short so it runs at higher rpms more of the time. Great for fun, but bad for mileage.
Moreover, if we could have lighter batteries, the lighter hybrid or all electric would be even more efficient.
How many hybrids/electics do you see being made with lead-acid batteries (extremely reliable, proven, safe), vs Li-Ion? Basically none. Because the weight is so much of an issue that it makes them impractical.
Just because one factor (hybrid or electric drive train) can compensate for another factor (weight), does not make that factor irrelevant.
luxury doesn't have to mean enormous or resource intensive (in physical materials at least). a car with a well designed interior and good driving dynamics doesn't isn't necessarily worse for the environment than a prius.
The cheapest Tesla is three times the new price of the car my wife currently drives (£38,000 vs £12,500). That kind of implies the Tesla is a lot more carbon intensive than buying a cheap car, even over its lifetime.
Part of our trouble with climate change is that price is not strongly correlated with carbon, and our economic models are not carbon-sensitive. Cheaper does not mean "less carbon intensive", it just means presumably less demand and/or more supply of that model on the market.
In this case it means less material in the car and less costs in the supply chain.
You just need to look at the dance the price of oil and the health of the economy go through to realise money and energy are deeply intertwined. It’s not obvious to me that we can completely decouple them.
Without something like carbon taxes the supply chains and economy will never correctly account for carbon because it is an externality.
The price of oil itself has no correlation with carbon output. (Total production numbers might tell you something, but that is only vaguely related to price in market economics, given the competing forces of supply and demand. Total usage numbers would tell you a lot more, but isn't a statistic even tracked by economics and if it has any correlation on price depends on the type of demand [elastic versus static] whether it is following/lagging or pushing the price.)
Sure money and energy can be considered intertwined, but not all energy is carbon, don't forget that as much as business tries to underprice it, a lot of the energy reflected in a supply chain is labor (which admittedly people do also produce carbon, but exhalation effort is not something I've ever seen properly reflected in someone's wages).
So again: higher prices in EVs and EV supply chains absolutely does not correlate with carbon costs. EVs generally have less material because a) weight matters a lot more, and b) fewer moving parts / simpler drive trains.
Price differences likely reflect other market realities such as supply/demand and things like perceived luxury.
it's a loose correlation. a 911 gt2 rs costs about fifteen times as much as a Civic, but it's not fifteen times worse for the environment. there are SUVs that cost only 2-3x as much as a civic and are as bad or worse than the sports car.
The tesla paradox: which reduces more carbon, buying the expensive tesla or spending that money on solar panels on your house?
All in, over their lifetimes, those non-fashionable solar panels will save far more carbon than the tesla. So unless you have already maxed your solar options, the tesla is more fashion statement than "green" decision.
Either way you're reducing carbon emissions, which is good. Ideally you do both! It doesn't matter how many solar panels you have - if you're driving an ICE car you're always emitting carbon.
You're allowing perfect to become the enemy of good. People who buy luxury cars are not going to stop buying luxury cars. So the options are luxury cars that pollute the environment, or luxury cars that do not pollute as much.
"The real green decision" is whatever is more environmentally-friendly than what you would have done otherwise.
That's really informative but to me that's a little misleading since they are counting the Volt and other plug-in hybrids as electric cars when in reality they are burning gas.
Tesla has taken such a beating in the press about the Model 3 which is really misleading I guess when you look at these charts.. the Model 3 has stomped everything else on the market very quickly.
Have you had the chance to drive one yet, just out of curiosity? It's worth the effort if there is a store nearby you and you have any interest in manifestation of the product itself!
Once big auto moves to EVs, what will happen to Tesla? Will they have a significant foothold/advantage, or will their position erode? Will they get acquired or remain independent?
Will big auto magically have a network to charge on, or a lot of patents on it? Tesla famously "open sourced" some of their patents, on electric drivetrain, but they also didn't open source their battery chemistry patents or a lot of the other EV related patents.
Also keep in mind if you look at the new electric vehicles, there isn't a one out today that beats the 2012 Model S in range (265 miles). Why is this? Because of the battery chemistry and drivetrain work that tesla has done which is leagues ahead of anyone. More vendors doing EVs might also make it cheaper to source some of the various components. I think more EVs is a net good for Tesla honestly as it pushes them more into the mainstream.
>Why is this? Because of the battery chemistry and drivetrain work that tesla has done which is leagues ahead of anyone.
I doubt that. It's much more likely because something like the Leaf is nearly half the cost of a Tesla model S and are made at a profit. At one point Tesla had a big lead, but Nissan has been making hte Leaf for nearly a decade now. It's unlikely that any significant gap is there because of technology reasons.
I’ve always thought they’d be acquired if they fail or become a big enough threat. Usually downvoted for saying this. I think the Big 3 US/German makers figured EVs were a decade or two away after seeing Tesla and Leaf’s success they might be rethinking it.
Tesla’s software, engine tech, and battery production would be a nice addition to Big Autos stack.
It would for sure be a boon for them to copy Tesla's homework in this fashion but let's not forget that the culture that fostered such breakthrough would likely suffocate and die in that post-acquisition environment. For a group whose stated mission is to accelerate the adoption of sustainable energy, I see this outcome to be unlikely. However much it might help those entrenched entities save face and present a "Hello, fellow EV makers!" facade.
Big companies acquire for the product not the innovation. Smart big companies will even leave the entity alone as not to hamper innovation. Most of the time they absolutely kill innovation as seen with Google and a couple innovate/grow by acquisition FinTech MegaCorps I worked at.
I’ve seen a few teams or line of businesses rally “Let’s get back our unique culture” after the merge. Not gonna happen if MegaCorp bought you. Everyone else already cashed out or left.
- Tesla currently has a huge efficiency advantage[1]
- Tesla's Model 3 interior is highly polarizing; you either love it or hate it. That will help carve out a niche even if all else is equal
- but most importantly, it's all about the batteries. Audi had to scale back e-tron production for 2019 due to battery supply issues; what's going to happen when the big carmakers need several orders of magnitude more batteries? Tesla has their own battery factory. OTOH, there are a LOT of chinese battery factories being built right now, we may see battery prices fall through the floor if they are overbuilding. Anybody who's watched the DRAM market over the past few decades knows what happens when you need really expensive factories to build a commodity...
That statement makes no sense. Efficiency is a measure of energy required to move the vehicle a certain distance, as in Wh/mi.
Range is battery capacity divided by efficiency. You can give up range to protect the battery, by limiting the charging capacity or the discharge depth, but you cannot give up efficiency.
There are likely a multitude of factors from motors, to drivetrain, to drag, to gross weight which contribute to Audi’s lower efficiency e-Tron. They have a fairly large battery, although smaller capacity than Tesla’s largest, but only get ~200mi of range out of it. Their efficiency and range is lower than the 2012 Model S. This is one area where Tesla has an indisputable technical lead.
You could argue, for example, that Audi sacrifices efficiency to have lower interior noise levels, or that they had a body design with higher drag they weren’t willing to compromise. But drag and weight alone don’t fully account for the large efficiency difference.
Yeah batteries are a big if. They could just become commodity items where Tesla doesn't have the scale to compete and the factories just become mill stones. On the other hand, they could be a major competitive advantage.
I'm not convinced their superior efficiency is an unbridgeable moat either.
My biggest concern is their, and their CEOs approach to certain things, destroying goodwill to the point they cease being the tech darling. If you want to compete with BMW or Mercedes, you need the brand name and the engineering.
Batteries are key. Demand is expected to quadruple in the next 5 years, and battery manufacturers are going to struggle to keep up. As a consequence many auto manufacturers are going find their sales constrained by their battery supplies.
Tesla is at present way ahead of all the other auto companies here. That's because Musk realized a decade ago how important battery production is, and so Tesla and Panasonic built a battery factory that was about 10 times larger than any existing one. But who knows what the future will bring.
No reason why other auto mfgs (even as a consorcium of sorts) couldn't build their own factory in partnership with Samsung, Sanyo, Sony, LG. If 18650s or 21700s are truly the future, capital will follow. I don't think Tesla's lead here is as insurmountable (or even as large) as people are making it out to be.
Thing with Tesla is they have a few stuff they do better than others.
I hate the experience of buying a car. I hate going to a dealership. I hate haggling. I hate having to say no to every crap they want to sell me.
I think Tesla is a breath of fresh air in the car industry, and I think they're going to continue trying to do things differently than everyone else. We'll see how that spans out in the future, and if they're going to keep being able to fix these issues we've just come to accept with the traditional car industry.
I just recently shopped at a Tesla store. They weren't high pressure, but they were still definitely car salesmen. I got callbacks, I got attempts to dissuade me from waiting for a Model Y, etc. There are other dealers with a very similar style, not everyone is like a typical Chevy dealer.
> Once big auto moves to EVs, what will happen to Tesla?
I am very skeptical that this is ever going to happen, at least in any meaningful way. It's been pretty well established over the past couple of decades that corporations cannot steer away from their core profit centers, and thus far the auto manufacturers have done nothing to disprove this theory. So far, they have almost exclusively done nothing other than announcing future plans, but have not been able to pivot away from their core competencies.
There is a widespread belief that it is inevitable that Detroit, etc., will start producing EVs, and once they do so that Tesla will be crushed in very short order. I have seen no evidence to support this belief, despite Tesla having been in the market for over a decade.
I think this revolution will need to start from the bottom, new buyers need to realise that buying an ICE car does not make sense anymore, even if having EVs everywhere would only affect climate change by a small percentage, the benefits every city would get from them are far greater than keep filling roads with ICE vehicles.
Also governments at some point will start forcing their hand (and probably China will do that way before US given the current trend).
Yes but what about petrol (elec) stations? When will we see a similar surge of charging points that make it practical? Can have all the cars in the world, but unless some serious investment is made in the infrastructure, its a bit premature I think.
i wonder if this will increase BMWs reliability. BMWs, like many of the German brands, don't age well at all and start to have a lot of problems after 10 years. But with electrification, there should be less that can go wrong, in theory at least.
The big story is the electric vehicle revolution is finally starting to really take off. Thanks to rapidly falling battery prices, EV's will be as cheap as ISE's for the largest cars starting around 2023, and for successively smaller ones in the following years. In addition governments all over the world are pushing EV adoption with many sorts of measures.
In the last year the big car companies have finally realized this, and that they are in danger of going bankrupt if they get left behind, and so they are seriously getting behind making EV's. To give one outstanding example VW has signed contracts for 48 billion dollars worth of batteries.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 240 ms ] threadThis announcement is just accelerating that schedule, so about half the models should be full EV and the others will be hybrid. I agree it would be nice to get more details regarding plug-in capabilities.
I wonder what the motivation for this is.
https://europe.autonews.com/automakers/tesla-model-3-outsell...
I can't see BMW being worried about 1 month of sales by a competitor but its possible.
So businesses making good decisions because of climate change... a good thing? But maybe too late?
[0] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=327&t=9
That is honestly less than I expected.
The general public is rarely the biggest cause, and even the best intentioned personal initiative like becoming vegan can fail to have any positive impact down the line.
That said, in democracies, personal attitude matters to politicians. Being associated to poluting industry become a career terminating scandal waiting to happen in a society composed of vegan, composting, plastic avoiding, electric car driving, eco-home living population. Similarly poluting companies become easy targets for a new generation of politicians.
In society there are, however, needs that have to be covered by the said poluting companies, and I've encountered plenty individuals oblivious to the fact that we don't have working alternatives yet, unfortunately. I understand why the struggle against polution trend had to adopt religious attitude, but I'm a bit worried about the (current cultural stigma) collateral damage and especially about its eventual long term fallout.
One one hand you are lying to yourself if you think your new electric car is more environmental friendly, on the other hand you have to start somewhere perhaps.
Battery recycling and reprocessing is already mandatory in many countries, to avoid contamination by landfill leaks. It is just question of scale.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-how-electric-vehicles-...
T̶h̶e̶ ̶a̶r̶t̶i̶c̶l̶e̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶o̶l̶d̶e̶r̶ (didn't read the date correctly), but the inconclusiveness of the battery factor remains. Driving in winter with all electric gadgets turned on and you get additional numbers that are totally different compared to summer.
And dependable numbers on battery refurbishment will only be available in a decade or so. It is not just "easy".
Tragically even if you think you're helping with recycling, apparently that trash just gets shipped to Asia and be incinerated..
So yes, I firmly believe that purchasing EVs is not just a heroic act, but one that is unquestionably necessary.
That said, I have read comment from the various motor show in the last 2 years and apparently the lack of apparent enthousiasm around electric was more a question of protecting the sales of the already designed last generation of non-electric car. Apparently the only interesting things auto-makers had to say was about electric.
This could be a case of BMW no so much as accelerating its plan rather than accelerating the publication of its plans.
So, let's get informed people. EVs matter for climate change but blatant disinformation gets us nowhere.
today, mid to slightly lower than mid two hundred mile range EVs are where consumer priced EVs will reign. Everything else needs to exist beyond that to show value and seriousness because those range numbers still require fair to nice weather to achieve. In some countries there could be a good market for the one hundred mile club but that would take some seriously aggressive pricing to convince people
Plus "electrified" does not imply full EV. that is the cop out for PHEV. Worse their new Mini E is again a disappointment in range and cost. Considering where it landed it makes me wonder what BMW will need to charge for range competitive with a Tesla 3 LR. Audi and Jaguar did the EV movement no favors with their lack luster attempts
The 2020 Porsche Taycan (300 miles), 2020 Mercedes EQC (293 miles), 2019 Audi E-Tron (204 miles), 2019 VW e-Golf (125 miles), 2019 BMW i3 (126 miles) still don't beat my 2018 Model 3 LR AWD (325 miles). On the most recent TSLA Investor's call, Musk said that Tesla isn't far from 400 mile batteries. Additionally, they just bought Maxwell Technologies known for their work on ultracapacitors to improve lithium ion battery efficiency. More electric vehicles also forces more policy makers to think seriously about EV charging infrastructure and helps sway public opinion. More EVs on the road is a net win for Tesla.
BMW has a stake in the Ionity charging network, a joint venture of a few companies: https://ionity.eu/en/about.html
BMW also sells home charging units: https://charging.bmwgroup.com/web/360electric-international/...
Your claim is wrong.
I own a Tesla Model 3, my wife drives a BMW i3, my daughter has a leaf.
The ONLY car we can effectively travel outside of the greater Tampa area without major headache is the Tesla.
The ONLY car that I would try to drive to New York from Florida in is the Tesla. (Yes, we've done it.. but would only try it in the Tesla)
One thing I have been waiting to see is a push to have gas stations adopt EV charging on a large scale. Gas stations, particularly ones along interstate routes, often double as rest stops and usually have large parking areas with small marts, and a couple of fast food options. If companies partnered with a major gas pump operator like chevron, shell or mobile to offer even a small number of charging stations with each gas station (even just 2 to 4 at each site in the 50-100kw range.. though the wiring would most likely need to be upgraded to support this) things would shift rapidly I think. I know charge times remain an issue, but if you are taking a rest stop anyway.. the 30-40 minutes of charge is not as big of an issue.
A government subsidy could also be introduced to help offset some of the cost of upgrading these gas stations. An increased tax on Gasoline could go towards paying for such a subsidy. Also I think we need to take another look at nuclear power to help charge those EVs, but that is another conversation.
They're doing that in Europe:
https://electrek.co/2017/09/27/shell-new-electric-car-chargi...
Walmart and Target in the US are partnering with charging networks to put fast chargers in their parking lots:
https://electrek.co/2018/04/18/vw-electrify-america-walmart-...
https://electrek.co/2018/04/24/target-tesla-chargepoint-elec...
https://www.walgreens.com/topic/sr/sr_electric_vehicle_charg...
Teslas come with a J-1772 adapter so you can charge them there as well. Many hotels, airports, malls and parking garages have chargers now as well. I really think we are at a tipping point, one of the annoying things now is when you get to a charger it's busy. Some of the busiest Tesla superchargers you have to wait 15-20 minutes sometimes for a spot to open up.
https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/electrify-america-350-kw-...
https://insideevs.com/news/341596/evgo-launches-350-kw-ultra...
And in Europe Fastned and Ionity are also installing 350 kW chargers:
https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/ionity-launches-first-350...
https://fastned.nl/en/blog/post/fastned-opens-its-first-350k...
The home charging units are nice, but not, I think, what people usually mean when they are discussing charging infrastructure. What people typically mean in that context is "chargers I can use when I am traveling." In that context, GPs "they won't invest a dime" statement is understandable in its sentiment, even if not entirely true. Auto manufacturers do not seem to be taking charging infrastructure needs seriously. Although it is good that this seems to be changing, it's not happening quickly enough.
If anything, the lack of progress on this front is further evidence that the traditional auto companies do not take EVs seriously, and have no intentions of doing so.
They're part of IONITY (along with VW, Daimler, and Ford).
There are 668 Tesla superchargers currently open in the US alone and 20 were opened this month alone per: https://supercharge.info/changes
Ionity doesn't have any in the US. They're a European network. You're probably thinking of Electrify America:
https://www.electrifyamerica.com/
Electrify America is also partnering with ChargePoint to effectively unify their networks, the advantage being you can use one account across both networks:
https://media.electrifyamerica.com/en-us/releases/64
And don't forget that if you have a CCS car you can also charge it on any other CCS charging network, such as EVgo.
From what I understand from watching the Fully Charged Show there is plenty of charging infrastructure being put in place in mainland Europe. However, we are more like two or three plugs at a motorway service station (with one broken) fifty miles away rather than every lamp post having a plug on it.
Really it is the electricity companies rather than the auto manufacturers who are taking that part up, much like how BMW et al. don't own petrol filling stations they don't own the charging infrastructure.
It's probably also relevant that the usual mains sockets in a European house can provide around 3kW, around double the US. Installing a new circuit (with thicker wiring) increases that to around 7kW at a fairly low expense. That makes it much easier to charge at home (spend €150 to have the extra circuit installed), or when visiting a house/office (use the nearest normal socket).
[1] https://map.openchargemap.io/#/search
I'm sorry this is making me sound like a Tesla fan but I'm really not. It's just the current state of the world. Tesla showed these carmakers the way to go, and instead they decided to go the wrong way and put the burden on us the consumers. That stinks in my opinion and I'm just mad about it.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/05/inside-electrify-americ...
Tesla has over 1500 charger stations (and 13,000 stalls) in north america right now, Electrify america is planning 500 stations (2,000 stalls) by the end of 2019.
If you take a look at tesla's map they not only have significantly more coverage, but they have a lot more density around cities where from what I can see EA has just a couple stations. Not to mention that EA seems to only have a few stalls at each location, compared to 6+ in most places for the tesla superchargers that i've personally seen.
I'm all for more chargers, and I'm excited that EA is happening, but Tesla is pretty much unparalleled right now when it comes to charging infrastructure, by quite a large margin.
https://www.tesla.com/supercharger
And roaming agreements with other networks, such as ChargePoint:
https://cleantechnica.com/2019/06/11/electrify-america-charg...
Tesla has what they call "Destination chargers" which are a similar speed/level, and I don't know of any counts of them off the top of my head, but they probably outnumber the Superchargers by 3-to-1 (as a complete guess based on how many show up around me on the map).
If we're comparing DC fast charging to DC fast charging, neither of those really count, and if you're on a road trip, neither Destination chargers nor chargepoint chargers are a realistic option unless you are stopping for several hours.
No, they do fast chargers as well:
https://www.chargepoint.com/products/dc-fast/
https://www.chargepoint.com/products/network/
They've got quite a few! Thanks!
Also IMO it would be stupid to have BMW petrol stations, Renault petrol stations etc, the local authorities may need to give some incentives for the businesses to add generic charging stations, this could be like part of the petrol tax will go into subsidizing the chargers or putting public charging stations.
Wholeheartedly agree - but EV use is growing faster that local authorities can build out supply in some areas and flawed capacity planning means there are chargers going unused in others. There's fewer independent suppliers as there are with petrol stations so the market incentive for other companies to pick up the middle ground isn't clear yet (esp compared with at home/work usage).
So a fair solution would be to get a percent from the petrol taxes and help people that want to install a charger. You can probably do similar programs for apartment associations to install chargers for the entire building parking space/street.
Its quite like going to get gas from a gas station. It just takes a while longer. You don't let the car run to empty before you fill it back up. Easy enough fix for your first issue. And for the second, you just wait for a port to come free. That's how supercharger stations are working all across the US.
it may work for some people, but AFAIK the traffic at a mall is higher on certain days and hours so you may not find a charger, then what do you do if you are on low?
Your underground parking already has an electricity supply, at least for the lighting. It's not impossible for the owner of the building to install additional circuits for charging cars.
I live in the Netherlands and the FastNed charging network is almost been fully rolled out, as well as charging stations from other vendors (like Shell, NLE, and Tesla). Charging options are plentiful here, and most of them are fast (175kW) chargers.
This kind of build out can go really quickly because the hardest part (the cables) are already there. We've got about 10 years now to build out the infrastructure which is plenty of time. Great for the economy too.
- Ionity: https://ionity.eu/
- Fastned: https://fastned.nl/en/ (their blog is also interesting: https://fastned.nl/en/blog)
- ultra E: https://www.ultra-e.eu/
- Ovo Energy is putting charging points in streetlamps in London: https://www.ovoenergy.com/electric-cars/urban-charging
Porsche is putting in chargers for customers at its dealerships, etc.
Are any of BMWs existing or 25 new electric cars any good though? I tried out the i3 but its range is tiny.
Also, BMW and intel need to have a chat and sort out some differentiation in the i numbers they use.
The market for this is as a second car for commutes of up to 30-40 miles each way. Double if your work place has a level 2 charger. Add 30-50% for the newer models. I'm willing to guess that covers, what, 75% of two car households? Range is just not a problem.
It's also a pretty cheap car for the quality level. Mine was $20K, more then 50% off the $56K on the sticker, off a 10K lease with 2 years left on the warranty. Hardly used. There was a whole line of these off lease cars at the dealer. He preferred to sell gas vehicles - no need to talk about range.
I didn't mention the quietness, acceleration, build quality, low maintenance, etc. As you can tell I've become a bit of a bore about them and got two friends to buy one. If I have to drive my wife's SUV now I feel dirty.
Yikes, they didn't take a bath, they were drugged, bound up in a sack and thrown into the river.
Personally, I've lived in many cities, suburbs, and rural areas in the northeast US (population-dense, relatively friendly toward ecological initiatives) and tried to use public transit whenever possible. My experience is that public transport outside cities is practically nonexistent. In cities, there are only buses and they're annoying/slow/don't go where you need them.
Only now that I live in the immediate vicinity of Boston do I have useful public transit options, yet still, owning a car is a necessity to get to anything outside the city.
A typical suburb in the US will have no public transportation, and be so sprawled out that bicycling or walking between places would be impossible for a working adult.
In America, most suburbs are bad for walking, actively hostile to biking, and have either no public transit or nearly unusable public transit.
The cities are usually not much better, either. Only a handful in the US have public transit that can even be called decent, let alone good.
In the US only.
I wonder if 30 to 40 years from now, we'll be having the same convo about electric cars that we are having about recycling plastic? Something that seemed good on the surface, but masked all kinds of externalities.
I mean, at least electric should be a bit better than ICE in daily use. But will making these things at scale in the first place cost too much in the way of carbon production? Or other forms of pollution that we as consumers don't even know about yet? You may say, "well it was your job as a consumer to know the impact your purchases were having." But I'm just not that knowledgeable about that stuff. I don't know if a billion electric cars are bad or good? And it might not even be the cars, just the fact that we have to make the roads may be polluting somehow? Or whatever? It's just too much for a consumer to know. Should I be buying electric? Or supporting mass public transit? Which is better? Or is it just a question of which is worse? There's a lot to think about there.
Or maybe it's just me?
If a car is needed it depends how you're planning to power it.
This answer[0] does a great job of looking at the energy inputs of building a car. I thought the up-front cost would be higher but the emissions from producing a car are comparable to the emissions of using the car for a few years.
So if the choice is between a used ICE car and a new EV and charging it with renewable energy, it's (surprisingly) probably worth buying the new EV.
If you're planning to charge it with power from a coal plant though you should probably get the used ICE car.
[0] https://www.quora.com/How-much-energy-is-required-to-build-a... [1] https://ecf.com/news-and-events/news/how-much-co2-does-cycli...
That depends. There are streets in the UK so polluted that jogging on them, breathing in lots more bad air, is actually worse for you than not jogging. Similarly, the violent accident rate for bicycle commuters is scary. I don't know of any regular commuter who hasn't been to hospital at least once.
Having said that I have had a hospital visit.
There are certainly parts of the US where a car is necessary, but 90% is pushing it. It may well be that 90% of people think that they need a car, though.
Being car-less in America is hard, I lived in a the suburb of a main city and if I was to use transit options to get to work I would have spent 3 hours a day on commute alone. That's simply not feasible. Similarly I used to work a job from midnight to noon (and a year later noon to midnight) and there simply was no feasible transit option for such a schedule, and with the sprawling nature of the suburb carpooling wasn't much of an option either.
My year old Model S is already surpassed by the new Raven powertrain architecture, providing another 40 miles of range per full charge versus the “old” version (330 miles->370 miles).
"Reduce" for the sake of reduction is just poor behavioral economics & hence hasn't actually demonstrably made much of a difference to this world.
Reduce as a side effect of a true benefit/efficiency (think how much lesser power is consumed per unit compute today vs. even 5 years ago) makes a lot of sense.
America conciously builds sprawling suburbs that require private cars to get around.
We can choose to build a society that does not need as much car use.
But Singapore also air conditions everything which is a fairly heavy energy use in tropical climate much like how heating is a massive energy use in northern climates and spends a lot of effort/energy on keeping sidewalks, grounds and pavements manicured, watered & in good repair.
As the founder of Singapore argued, the lifestyle gain - though at the cost of consuming more energy is a massive competitive advantage in productivity and in attracting, developing & retaining talent. https://www.vox.com/2015/3/23/8278085/singapore-lee-kuan-yew...
While luxury cars are often heavier, and perhaps built without as much presumption that the owners will be concerned about fuel mileage/costs, there are many anomalies where apparently smallish cars are surprisingly heavy. And even 'economy' cars have become quite portly. Just look at the Honda civic hatch, from 1990-now going from 2165 Lbs to 2763 Lbs -- that extra 600Lbs is over 27% heavier -- a lot more mass to accelerate. Or, check out the Nissan Maxima sedan at 3676 Lbs! That's most of the way to my old BMW X5's 4100Lbs. Meanwhile a friend's C6 Corvette weighed in at ~3140 Lbs and got over 32mpg on the highway between the low CD and lighter weight. Look beyond the luxury to the design & build.
Drivetrain type is completely orthogonal to weight as a performance factor for a vehicle.
Weight will affect the efficiency of every drivetrain (unless you have a drivetrain that can zero out the inertial properties of nearby mass).
I was only suggesting that luxury is a less important factor than weight to consider for efficiency.
Moreover, if we could have lighter batteries, the lighter hybrid or all electric would be even more efficient.
How many hybrids/electics do you see being made with lead-acid batteries (extremely reliable, proven, safe), vs Li-Ion? Basically none. Because the weight is so much of an issue that it makes them impractical.
Just because one factor (hybrid or electric drive train) can compensate for another factor (weight), does not make that factor irrelevant.
You just need to look at the dance the price of oil and the health of the economy go through to realise money and energy are deeply intertwined. It’s not obvious to me that we can completely decouple them.
The price of oil itself has no correlation with carbon output. (Total production numbers might tell you something, but that is only vaguely related to price in market economics, given the competing forces of supply and demand. Total usage numbers would tell you a lot more, but isn't a statistic even tracked by economics and if it has any correlation on price depends on the type of demand [elastic versus static] whether it is following/lagging or pushing the price.)
Sure money and energy can be considered intertwined, but not all energy is carbon, don't forget that as much as business tries to underprice it, a lot of the energy reflected in a supply chain is labor (which admittedly people do also produce carbon, but exhalation effort is not something I've ever seen properly reflected in someone's wages).
So again: higher prices in EVs and EV supply chains absolutely does not correlate with carbon costs. EVs generally have less material because a) weight matters a lot more, and b) fewer moving parts / simpler drive trains.
Price differences likely reflect other market realities such as supply/demand and things like perceived luxury.
All in, over their lifetimes, those non-fashionable solar panels will save far more carbon than the tesla. So unless you have already maxed your solar options, the tesla is more fashion statement than "green" decision.
"The real green decision" is whatever is more environmentally-friendly than what you would have done otherwise.
https://twitter.com/masegoslin/status/1132389324140343297/vi...
And here they are grouped by model:
https://cleantechnica.com/2019/05/24/visualization-2012-2019...
BMW is in sixth place currently.
Tesla has taken such a beating in the press about the Model 3 which is really misleading I guess when you look at these charts.. the Model 3 has stomped everything else on the market very quickly.
Also keep in mind if you look at the new electric vehicles, there isn't a one out today that beats the 2012 Model S in range (265 miles). Why is this? Because of the battery chemistry and drivetrain work that tesla has done which is leagues ahead of anyone. More vendors doing EVs might also make it cheaper to source some of the various components. I think more EVs is a net good for Tesla honestly as it pushes them more into the mainstream.
I doubt that. It's much more likely because something like the Leaf is nearly half the cost of a Tesla model S and are made at a profit. At one point Tesla had a big lead, but Nissan has been making hte Leaf for nearly a decade now. It's unlikely that any significant gap is there because of technology reasons.
Tesla’s software, engine tech, and battery production would be a nice addition to Big Autos stack.
I’ve seen a few teams or line of businesses rally “Let’s get back our unique culture” after the merge. Not gonna happen if MegaCorp bought you. Everyone else already cashed out or left.
Not to mention that that sort of acquisition could be seen as "mission accomplished" given the right M&A voodoo or PR spin.
Tesla isn't immune to capitalism and is itself a product of it.
- Tesla's Model 3 interior is highly polarizing; you either love it or hate it. That will help carve out a niche even if all else is equal
- but most importantly, it's all about the batteries. Audi had to scale back e-tron production for 2019 due to battery supply issues; what's going to happen when the big carmakers need several orders of magnitude more batteries? Tesla has their own battery factory. OTOH, there are a LOT of chinese battery factories being built right now, we may see battery prices fall through the floor if they are overbuilding. Anybody who's watched the DRAM market over the past few decades knows what happens when you need really expensive factories to build a commodity...
1: https://electrek.co/2019/02/21/tesla-efficiency-range-test-a...
2: https://www.electrive.com/2019/04/23/audi-revises-production...
> As for Audi, I think that they are intentionally giving up their efficiency in order to protect the battery pack and get a higher charge rate.
Range is battery capacity divided by efficiency. You can give up range to protect the battery, by limiting the charging capacity or the discharge depth, but you cannot give up efficiency.
There are likely a multitude of factors from motors, to drivetrain, to drag, to gross weight which contribute to Audi’s lower efficiency e-Tron. They have a fairly large battery, although smaller capacity than Tesla’s largest, but only get ~200mi of range out of it. Their efficiency and range is lower than the 2012 Model S. This is one area where Tesla has an indisputable technical lead.
You could argue, for example, that Audi sacrifices efficiency to have lower interior noise levels, or that they had a body design with higher drag they weren’t willing to compromise. But drag and weight alone don’t fully account for the large efficiency difference.
I'm not convinced their superior efficiency is an unbridgeable moat either.
My biggest concern is their, and their CEOs approach to certain things, destroying goodwill to the point they cease being the tech darling. If you want to compete with BMW or Mercedes, you need the brand name and the engineering.
Tesla is at present way ahead of all the other auto companies here. That's because Musk realized a decade ago how important battery production is, and so Tesla and Panasonic built a battery factory that was about 10 times larger than any existing one. But who knows what the future will bring.
I hate the experience of buying a car. I hate going to a dealership. I hate haggling. I hate having to say no to every crap they want to sell me.
I think Tesla is a breath of fresh air in the car industry, and I think they're going to continue trying to do things differently than everyone else. We'll see how that spans out in the future, and if they're going to keep being able to fix these issues we've just come to accept with the traditional car industry.
I am very skeptical that this is ever going to happen, at least in any meaningful way. It's been pretty well established over the past couple of decades that corporations cannot steer away from their core profit centers, and thus far the auto manufacturers have done nothing to disprove this theory. So far, they have almost exclusively done nothing other than announcing future plans, but have not been able to pivot away from their core competencies.
There is a widespread belief that it is inevitable that Detroit, etc., will start producing EVs, and once they do so that Tesla will be crushed in very short order. I have seen no evidence to support this belief, despite Tesla having been in the market for over a decade.
Also governments at some point will start forcing their hand (and probably China will do that way before US given the current trend).
Why a subsidiary brand? Is BMW itself too cool for an EV?
On a more serious note, this is not the kind of message that makes me convinced they are really serious about EVs.
In the last year the big car companies have finally realized this, and that they are in danger of going bankrupt if they get left behind, and so they are seriously getting behind making EV's. To give one outstanding example VW has signed contracts for 48 billion dollars worth of batteries.