One thing that is fascinating about the last decade or so is the extent to which the narrative that the media is pushing as "obvious" and "inevitable" is out of synch with what the actual facts on the ground are or what is realistic or actually technically or economically feasible. Some examples of farcical media narratives:
humans will settle Mars soon.
-Not happening. Primarily due to radiation and general life support problems.
driverless cars are just around the corner.
-No they are not for various, obvious technical reasons that should be apparent to anybody who both understands technology and the real world of driving.
solar power is inevitable and will be widespread and cheap
-solar power will always be lower energy density than chemical power or nuclear power. It will always have higher fixed costs per unit generated than large scale hydro. Solar takes a lot of space and is expensive to produce low density power.
Battery power electric cars are going to be in broad demand by consumers soon.
-I doubt it. Range is limited. Battery technology has not advanced significantly in the past decade. I think more widespread public transportation (e.g. trains) is more likely as hydrocarbon fuels become more expensive.
Run away global warming is inevitable or it is a human tractable problem that we can solve by spending money on new technologies.
-It is actually really complicated. There are very complicated feedback loops at work. It is not as simple as more CO2 in the atmosphere higher temperatures. For one thing as CO2 concentrations increase plants grow faster and turn more CO2 into solid compounds. Ditto for temperatures. Additionally there is a tragedy of the commons effect about CO2 emissions.
The Earth has had much higher CO2 in the past and life has survived and often thrived. Also sometimes CO2 did increase rapidly such as when there were massive flood basalt eruptions for example.
>No they are not for various, obvious technical reasons that should be apparent to anybody who both understands technology and the real world of driving.
Wanna explain to me why? From what I've seen, a driverless cars within the next 10 years is feasible, and a driverless car within the next 20 years seems likely.
> Wanna explain to me why? From what I've seen, a driverless cars within the next 10 years is feasible, and a driverless car within the next 20 years seems likely.
> Weren’t they saying the same thing 10 years ago.
Doesn't matter. Physicists are often accused that "thermonuclear energy plants are promised soon since 50 years ago". Yet there is steady measurable progress by Lawson criterion, and ITER is being assembled as we speak. Estimations can be wrong, but that doesn't mean progress is impossible.
>Estimations can be wrong, but that doesn't mean progress is impossible.
No but it does mean, when estimations or estimators are consistently wrong, that they should lose credibility.
If estimates are wildly wrong what good are they besides gas-lighting malinvestment? Theranos estimated that it could do blood tests on a very small sample. Juicero estimated that it could sell a several thousand dollar juicer...
Biggest media farce I forgot: where the heck are Amazon's flying delivery drones?
See the fallacy "false dilemma." Estimations can be wrong and progress can be possible. Both can be true.
> No but it does mean, when estimations or estimators are consistently wrong, that they should lose credibility.
There could be different points of view regarding Mars expeditions - as well as self-driving cars - and while some groups announce 10 years achievements, others could be more cautious.
I remember how just some 15 years ago groups interested in Mars were collecting criteria for what would constitute readiness to fly to Mars - not when we'll fly, but what we'll need to know to estimate when we'll fly. List of items wasn't short. Given that SpaceX was in its infancy, no tools of Starship caliber were given much weight.
Now we're in seriously different situation - and that's regarding self-driving cars too, we came a long way from 2005 DARPA challenge. We can estimate better - both Mars advancements and cars autonomy perspectives.
Even with visible lane markings, in the day time, Tesla FSD can't do very basic maneuvers like taking left turns that cross the opposite traffic. Or stopping at red light reliably. Autonomic cars are still inferior to human drivers and it will take years to change that.
> -Not happening. Primarily due to radiation and general life support problems.
You don't really understand the science here. The radiation effects are vastly overstated and the media loves to fearmonger them. Secondly the life support issue is a solved problem if you have the mass payload ability. Yes if you don't have a large rocket capable of taking many tens to hundreds of tons of payload to Mars, then there's life support issues, otherwise there isn't.
> -Not happening. Primarily due to radiation and general life support problems.
You must be kidding. We have fastest progress in launch systems since 1960s. Seriously, when was the last time multiple spaceships for human spaceflight carried tests at the same time in USA alone?
Radiation and weightlessness - two biggest roadblocks for interplanetary flights - are known for quite some time, there are some plans and propositions, even though experiments are mostly long-term ISS flights. But it's hard not to see progress - would you say, for example, that Moon flight can't be used as a stepping stone in preparing Mars expeditions?
No. The key word is settle, not "visit" or "explore". You won't have meaningful numbers of people wanting to settle there, because there's no "there" there.
Actually surprised it's only 1 in 5, because we don't have anything close to a useful charging grid deployed in this country, and it will take some time before we can get one. If PEVs can retain 80% of the people who try them with the current lack of supporting infrastructure, that's a pretty good outcome for PEV manufacturers.
I also wonder how much of it is due to the dearth of decent ranged vehicles - my only option for my daily commute is still a Tesla unless I have guaranteed access to charging, which I don’t.
It wouldn’t take too many “well I can’t get home unless I find a place to plug my car in and wait an hour” before I went back to gas
I think this highlights the point that we need more charging stations. Ya, I know it sounds obvious but someone is going to get very rich solving this problem. There is no question that gas automobiles are going to be replaced by electric ones. The question is, "who is going to get rich replacing gas stations?" Talk about a problem asking to be solved.
I think it would be nice to have a Chinese style removable battery that you can drive to a station and they'll swap it out with a fully charged one. Say enough to give you 50 miles of range and get you home.
A dual-charger Chargepoint is something like $12k, so for a large tech company it's straightforward to throw in a dozen or so when they're putting up a new building and parking lot/garage.
For the bay area, though, I think the major constraint is actually transmission -- how many amps the utility can deliver to your campus. PG&E has some technical debt here, as the public safety power shut-offs and fires of the last few years have shown.
$dayjob often has a waitlist of folks waiting for the finite EV chargers; folks with backup gas tanks (plug-in hybrid EVs) and Teslas have to give priority to folks who need to charge to get home.
Beyond "just add more chargers" it would be nice to make the apps better reflect ground truth. I'll find chargers that are listed as available in the app but are actually unavailable: Chargers in basement levels that have been closed due to lower COVID-induced parking volumes. In garages that are only open 9-5 M-F. Or ones that are broken and wrapped with caution tape.
I think every long-distance-EV-drive story I've seen has at least one case of "just having enough range to make it to a charger" only to find the charger is broken.
> "Standard home outlets generally put out about 120 volts of power at what electric vehicle aficionados call "Level 1" charging, while the high-powered specialty connections offer 240 volts of power and are known as "Level 2."
Does anyone here know someone (in California) who purchased an EV between 2012 and 2018 and then went back to a gas car? The results of this study do not jive with my anecdotal experience.
what kind of cars did people you know buy? Nissan leaves with small batteries and poor cooling tech, or early Tesla models (which were much more expensive than the Model 3).
Frankly I'm surprised the number isn't higher. It bodes well for the new class of vehicles like Model 3's and Chevy Bolts which have longer range, better cooling tech, better prices, and faster charging options.
As the charging networks get built out, the retention rate will only improve.
Leaf, eGolf, and Volt leases. And Model S and X purchases. I think you make a great point though that the time period didn't include many Model 3s. I think a follow up survey might see even less going back to ICE
Yes, me. I did it, but I enjoyed the EV and will very likely buy another.
I bought a used gen 1 Leaf (2 model years old) in 2013 and traded it in for an ICE VW in 2019 after I was faced with the decision to either buy a new gem 1 Leaf battery pack at full price (it was out of warranty so 0% pro-rated) or get another car. The car I wanted at the time was a VW and I didn’t think the e-Golf was a mature enough platform. I can’t explain why I didn’t go with another brand EV except that I like to buy used with very low miles and only 2-3 years old (my preferred sweet spot of value).
As mentioned elsewhere, the gen 1 Leaf had inferior battery management which likely contributed to the shorter battery life and lower battery value. I was also a little peeved that gen 2 and 3 battery packs were not available for the gen 1 body/drivetrain so it felt like an inferior investment to put 50% of the original purchase price into a new battery pack and still have to deal with the same old car body. It was also getting a little tiresome to have to remember to charge it _every_ day. A gen 3 would have avoided this issue and charging stations at my work place would have alleviated some of the anxiety of forgetting to plug it in (only happened 2 times, but both impacted my ability to commute).
Finding charging stations can be a challenge, and if you are renting an apartment you likely don't have access to a garage. And if you want and affordable car, then you are stuck with older used EVs with poor range. And if you are in a colder climate, the vehicles don't hold much of a charge in winter, although that may not apply in most of California.
All of these are solid reasons for someone to find EVs impractical.
In many areas of the world EVs are more expensive to buy, much more expensive to repair, and not really cheaper to drive, because electricity is about the same price as gas. Add to that they are less convenient and slower on large distances because of the time wasted for looking for a charging station and then charging, and I can see how most people don't want them now.
Meh you could take that position, or you could recognize that the charging networks are sparse, and we are only just now getting EVs with decent ranges at decent prices.
I certainly couldn't deal with a Ford Focus Electric or Nissan Leaf. But a Model 3 or a Bolt has >3x the range and they charge faster.
When motor-propelled was first invented, gas stations weren’t readily available everywhere and there were lots of things that remained unstandardized. I feel like some of the EV->ICE reversion is justified, but as these issues are ironed out, there will be fewer motor-powered experiences which are inferior to the buggy-powers ones of the time, so they will be rarer.
I can see maybe an early limited-range EV being a little more challenging to use for the rest of the family. Usually the person who buys it is technically aware of everything, but a teenage kid can get into trouble balancing nav and charge.
But for cars with a reasonable battery size:
- teslas are usable everywhere - they have fast charging and lots of chargers - and the nav system integrates charging into your trip.
- non-tesla SAE/chademo fast chargers are not as bad as they used to be - with charging reaching acceptable levels of predictable and more plentiful.
Another change is that businesses have figured out chargers attract business. They've figured out how to get charging working with people's lifestyles. There are lots of malls and stores like target/walmart with chargers now, and people come to overlap charging and shopping. "I need to charge, maybe I will pop by the store and do both" is pretty powerful.
Thanks for the link that's a good case study.
However that was a bit early compared to the actual market.
Wondering if a brand of petrol stations could disrupt the market by suddenly introducing this.
Without an existing network by the roads or a very large investment, it must be very hard to penetrate the market.
I think it's something like Holy Emperor. Or maybe some special type of volt like the Redbull energy drink.
Sarcasm aside, there are a lot of mistakes made by electronics engineers when they use a "power source" of 5V or current source of 12V. Details are tough.
Universal swappable battery packs with loaners and original return service is the way to go. Remember the Model S had that capability but it was never deployed.
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[ 0.76 ms ] story [ 96.2 ms ] threadhumans will settle Mars soon.
-Not happening. Primarily due to radiation and general life support problems.
driverless cars are just around the corner.
-No they are not for various, obvious technical reasons that should be apparent to anybody who both understands technology and the real world of driving.
solar power is inevitable and will be widespread and cheap
-solar power will always be lower energy density than chemical power or nuclear power. It will always have higher fixed costs per unit generated than large scale hydro. Solar takes a lot of space and is expensive to produce low density power.
Battery power electric cars are going to be in broad demand by consumers soon.
-I doubt it. Range is limited. Battery technology has not advanced significantly in the past decade. I think more widespread public transportation (e.g. trains) is more likely as hydrocarbon fuels become more expensive.
Run away global warming is inevitable or it is a human tractable problem that we can solve by spending money on new technologies.
-It is actually really complicated. There are very complicated feedback loops at work. It is not as simple as more CO2 in the atmosphere higher temperatures. For one thing as CO2 concentrations increase plants grow faster and turn more CO2 into solid compounds. Ditto for temperatures. Additionally there is a tragedy of the commons effect about CO2 emissions.
The Earth has had much higher CO2 in the past and life has survived and often thrived. Also sometimes CO2 did increase rapidly such as when there were massive flood basalt eruptions for example.
I could go on on topics the media gets wrong...
There's no doubt that life in general will survive, but there is doubt that the comfortable post industrial life that most of us enjoy will survive.
Adaptation usually happens over the course of generations, but thethe changes occurring are happening over the course of a single organism's lifetime.
Our ecological systems will lose so much diversity and genetic history.
Wanna explain to me why? From what I've seen, a driverless cars within the next 10 years is feasible, and a driverless car within the next 20 years seems likely.
Weren’t they saying the same thing 10 years ago. As an example this Google video is just a little over 10 year old: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bp9KBrH8H04
Driverless cars are a classic example of last 10% taking 90% of the time.
Doesn't matter. Physicists are often accused that "thermonuclear energy plants are promised soon since 50 years ago". Yet there is steady measurable progress by Lawson criterion, and ITER is being assembled as we speak. Estimations can be wrong, but that doesn't mean progress is impossible.
No but it does mean, when estimations or estimators are consistently wrong, that they should lose credibility.
If estimates are wildly wrong what good are they besides gas-lighting malinvestment? Theranos estimated that it could do blood tests on a very small sample. Juicero estimated that it could sell a several thousand dollar juicer...
Biggest media farce I forgot: where the heck are Amazon's flying delivery drones?
See the fallacy "false dilemma." Estimations can be wrong and progress can be possible. Both can be true.
There could be different points of view regarding Mars expeditions - as well as self-driving cars - and while some groups announce 10 years achievements, others could be more cautious.
I remember how just some 15 years ago groups interested in Mars were collecting criteria for what would constitute readiness to fly to Mars - not when we'll fly, but what we'll need to know to estimate when we'll fly. List of items wasn't short. Given that SpaceX was in its infancy, no tools of Starship caliber were given much weight.
Now we're in seriously different situation - and that's regarding self-driving cars too, we came a long way from 2005 DARPA challenge. We can estimate better - both Mars advancements and cars autonomy perspectives.
Testing in cities with grid street systems and visible lane markings during fair weather in the daytime is not informative.
> -Not happening. Primarily due to radiation and general life support problems.
You don't really understand the science here. The radiation effects are vastly overstated and the media loves to fearmonger them. Secondly the life support issue is a solved problem if you have the mass payload ability. Yes if you don't have a large rocket capable of taking many tens to hundreds of tons of payload to Mars, then there's life support issues, otherwise there isn't.
> -Not happening. Primarily due to radiation and general life support problems.
You must be kidding. We have fastest progress in launch systems since 1960s. Seriously, when was the last time multiple spaceships for human spaceflight carried tests at the same time in USA alone?
Radiation and weightlessness - two biggest roadblocks for interplanetary flights - are known for quite some time, there are some plans and propositions, even though experiments are mostly long-term ISS flights. But it's hard not to see progress - would you say, for example, that Moon flight can't be used as a stepping stone in preparing Mars expeditions?
ok buddy.
It wouldn’t take too many “well I can’t get home unless I find a place to plug my car in and wait an hour” before I went back to gas
For the bay area, though, I think the major constraint is actually transmission -- how many amps the utility can deliver to your campus. PG&E has some technical debt here, as the public safety power shut-offs and fires of the last few years have shown.
$dayjob often has a waitlist of folks waiting for the finite EV chargers; folks with backup gas tanks (plug-in hybrid EVs) and Teslas have to give priority to folks who need to charge to get home.
Beyond "just add more chargers" it would be nice to make the apps better reflect ground truth. I'll find chargers that are listed as available in the app but are actually unavailable: Chargers in basement levels that have been closed due to lower COVID-induced parking volumes. In garages that are only open 9-5 M-F. Or ones that are broken and wrapped with caution tape.
I think every long-distance-EV-drive story I've seen has at least one case of "just having enough range to make it to a charger" only to find the charger is broken.
'volts of power' is a new one. Sigh.
Frankly I'm surprised the number isn't higher. It bodes well for the new class of vehicles like Model 3's and Chevy Bolts which have longer range, better cooling tech, better prices, and faster charging options.
As the charging networks get built out, the retention rate will only improve.
I bought a used gen 1 Leaf (2 model years old) in 2013 and traded it in for an ICE VW in 2019 after I was faced with the decision to either buy a new gem 1 Leaf battery pack at full price (it was out of warranty so 0% pro-rated) or get another car. The car I wanted at the time was a VW and I didn’t think the e-Golf was a mature enough platform. I can’t explain why I didn’t go with another brand EV except that I like to buy used with very low miles and only 2-3 years old (my preferred sweet spot of value).
As mentioned elsewhere, the gen 1 Leaf had inferior battery management which likely contributed to the shorter battery life and lower battery value. I was also a little peeved that gen 2 and 3 battery packs were not available for the gen 1 body/drivetrain so it felt like an inferior investment to put 50% of the original purchase price into a new battery pack and still have to deal with the same old car body. It was also getting a little tiresome to have to remember to charge it _every_ day. A gen 3 would have avoided this issue and charging stations at my work place would have alleviated some of the anxiety of forgetting to plug it in (only happened 2 times, but both impacted my ability to commute).
All of these are solid reasons for someone to find EVs impractical.
I certainly couldn't deal with a Ford Focus Electric or Nissan Leaf. But a Model 3 or a Bolt has >3x the range and they charge faster.
Very inefficient, and the difference is several orders of magnitude.
A horse needs 2-40 acres of land: https://horses.extension.org/how-much-land-do-i-need-for-a-h...
Photovoltaic panels can generate 500 kilowatts on 2 acres. Tesla's V3 supersharger is 250 kilowatt, adds 170 miles in 15 minutes of charging.
If the sun is shining for 6 hours, photovoltaic panels on 2 acres charge Teslas to drive 8000 miles. For a horse, the figure is like 40 miles per day.
Edit: You can also do multi-level agriculture, unlike solar panels
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silvopasture
They take 4 years to produce. They eat a lot during that time, that's a lot of energy.
Horses include some weird minerals too (copper, molybdenum, nickel, cobalt, strontium, chromium, selenium), biologists call them "microelements".
> unlike solar panels
Same with solar panels: https://cleantechnica.com/2020/11/19/solar-panels-agricultur...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_performance
But for cars with a reasonable battery size:
- teslas are usable everywhere - they have fast charging and lots of chargers - and the nav system integrates charging into your trip.
- non-tesla SAE/chademo fast chargers are not as bad as they used to be - with charging reaching acceptable levels of predictable and more plentiful.
Another change is that businesses have figured out chargers attract business. They've figured out how to get charging working with people's lifestyles. There are lots of malls and stores like target/walmart with chargers now, and people come to overlap charging and shopping. "I need to charge, maybe I will pop by the store and do both" is pretty powerful.
Would it be so difficult to establish a standard to achieve a similar thing? - stop at a station - swap the battery - go
Even faster in theory than gas...
Wondering if a brand of petrol stations could disrupt the market by suddenly introducing this. Without an existing network by the roads or a very large investment, it must be very hard to penetrate the market.
It's critical to killing ICE to get EVs right.