I wonder what a comparable gasoline car would have consumed in fuel if idled with the passenger compartment heat on for an identical 12 hour period of time in the same ambient temperature.
Assuming, for comparison, a V6 Toyota Highlander, approximately 0.5 – 0.7 gallons of gasoline burned per hour at idle, or 6 - 8.4 gallons of fuel burned in total. Fuel tank capacity is 17.9 gallons, so about 30%-50% would be consumed in 12 hours.
this is actually pretty impressive, one reason I kept myself away from purchasing an EV, other than price, is my worry about its battery life. this article definitely reduced my concern.
1: People were stuck in that traffic jam for more than 24 hours
2: It is an interstate heavily used by both commuters and through drivers. The odds of being at 100% charge, or even 90% are pretty slim.
3: After getting unstuck, you still have to get to a charging station, and how long will that take to get charged up? With gas, it is 5-10 minutes and you have 500 miles of range. With an EV, how long would you be there? This is relevant to this case as many/most of the drivers on that route are driving a few hundred miles or more. A shorter trip on that stretch would be Baltimore to Richmond, which is 130 miles.
4: The test was against a car with brand new batteries. What about batteries that are 5 years old?
Honestly I don't think EVs are the future. They are trendy right now, but are highly impractical if you have to drive a lot or are outside of a city. Besides the fact that a EV's battery pack is pretty much industrial waste after a few years time.
The future is likely hydrogen hybrids. All of the benefits of an EV and traditional ICE engines with none of the draw backs.
This is somewhat unobservant? Tesla sells a million EVs/year (and is on track to sell two million in 2022). A variety of Chinese electric bus manufacturers, in aggregate, sell ~60k battery electric busses annually. Electrical charging infrastructure is becoming ubiquitous (electric power is everywhere, from the lowly 120V outlet to the 300kw fast DC charger at your local business), while there is so little hydrogen infra we can safely round down to zero for our purposes. Finally, at the end of a battery pack’s life, it can be recycled (Redwood Materials, started by Tesla’s ex-CTO JB Straubel already has begun ramping production of anode copper foils [1] for, wait for it, Panasonic, Tesla’s US battery cell provider).
EVs have already won, having pulled ahead of combustion vehicles and hydrogen vehicles are still stuck at the starting line.
I think the future is EVs, but there will be a niche for EVs with on-board generators to extend the range out indefinitely. These already exist but they will look really different in the future. Maybe that fuel for the generator will be hydrogen.. but I doubt it, there’s no hydrogen infrastructure.
An EVs battery pack will generally last as long as the car. A common warranty is 80% capacity after 8 years, and degradation generally flattens out after losing the first 10%, so 16 year minimum lifetime is a reasonable expectation, and 20+ years seems likely. There are 10 year old Leafs with the original battery on the road right now, and that's pretty much a worst case scenario for an EV battery (older battery chemistry, no cooling, and low capacity meaning users cycle often between very high and very low charge)
EV battery packs are routinely reused for grid/industrial energy storage.
EV battery recycling seems to becoming profitable. It's a pretty ideal scenario for recycling (high volume of identical cells).
EV batteries won't be more of a waste problem than car lead acid batteries, one of the most recycled items in the world.
> All of the benefits of an EV and traditional ICE engines with none of the draw backs.
You won't have all the benefits of EV (low complexity, volumetrically efficient drivetrain).
If you're going to have a battery big enough that you can charge at home for daily driving, you're going to get an extremely costly vehicle.
Hydrogen is one battery breakthrough away from being dead for cars forever. If the cost is halved and range is doubled, the niche for hydrogen cars will be so tiny that hydrogen fueling stations will be unsustainable.
Hydrogen hybrid cars is essentially a solution that kills itself. Charging will always be cheapest, so you'll want to maximize charging over hydrogen fueling. It'll incentivize the construction of home charging, street side charging and fast charging at all kinds of shops, restaurants etc. Most people will drive pure BEVs, and those that have hydrogen hybrids might fuel a handful of times a year. Every time batteries improve, the niche for the hydrogen hybrids will decrease. It's a terrible economy to build hydrogen fueling stations in.
A hydrogen fueling station exploded near my home btw. I think eventually hydrogen will be completely safe. But it seems very likely that a few accidents like that will happen before then, which may kill any momentum hydrogen manages to build. Hydrogen explosions are scary, it can be heard for miles away.
The car lost 25% of its charge over 12 hours. If you want to extrapolate to 24, I don’t think it would be that hard to hazard a guess?? If you want to extrapolate to 36, 48, or any number of hours you have the information there to do so.
Also - being frozen in place for 24 hours straight basically never happens to any car or driver. This is an unlikely event to worry about.
If you don’t want one, don’t buy one. I on the other hand wondered about exactly this issue so I find this a very useful piece.
I was taught (in Canada) to always keep a candle in the car in case you get stranded in the winter. In fact, there was a candle made specifically for this purpose (it was flat, in a small tin - https://www.amazon.com/Coghlans-36-HOURS-SURVIVAL-CANDLE/dp/...)
Yeah, I had one always in my car. I live in Australia now, but still kinda tempted to get one.
The reason I find this article interesting is, how well would a gasoline car fair under the same conditions? I assume you'd not run it the entire time, but heat it up, let it cool down, and repeat through the test.
In the small space of a car, yes it is. Enough to heat the car so you don't freeze to death. It isn't going to be balmy, but you're likely in warm clothes, and it adds enough extra heat.
In the small space of a car, yes it is. Enough to heat the car so you don't freeze to death. It isn't going to be balmy, but you're likely in warm clothes, and it adds enough extra heat.
> I would sit in the car like I was stuck in traffic the entire time, keeping the cabin warm enough not just for me but for theoretical passengers as well, and see how much the range dropped in that time.
While the idea to control for the passengers is obviously a good one, I feel like I need to point out that in many cases adding more human bodies to an enclosed space will actually reduce the energy needed to heat it.
The general internet factoid seems to indicate that humans radiate between 80W and 100W of heat, but those stats are all based on napkin math and don't seem to take into account the heat trapped by winter clothes, so I don't expect the real heat output to be quite so high in this circumstance.
Still, even taking half that number, a full car of four people would radiate about 160W-200W of heat just by existing in the closed space. You need more ventilation in the car as you add more people, but I would think you'd end up spending a lot less energy if you actually had real passengers.
If we assume that clothing doesn’t impact how many watts a person produces (do cold people produce more?), then clothing doesn’t impact the energy imparted to the car. That 100W has to go somewhere, so if the person+clothing isn’t emitting 100W, their temperature will keep increasing until they do emit 100W.
and if they're actually wearing winter clothes you don't really need to heat the cabin at all. I assume the problem in Virginia was that people jumped into their cars with nothing but a sweater, assuming they'd be quickly transferring between climate controlled environments. Every time you leave the house you should be dressing like you're going for a walk in that weather.
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As much as I hate the new autostop in cars, it's smart enough to turn the engine on just for heat generation.
The bigger issue is the growing number of vehicles that turn themselves off after 20 mins in park, engine running or not.
2: It is an interstate heavily used by both commuters and through drivers. The odds of being at 100% charge, or even 90% are pretty slim.
3: After getting unstuck, you still have to get to a charging station, and how long will that take to get charged up? With gas, it is 5-10 minutes and you have 500 miles of range. With an EV, how long would you be there? This is relevant to this case as many/most of the drivers on that route are driving a few hundred miles or more. A shorter trip on that stretch would be Baltimore to Richmond, which is 130 miles.
4: The test was against a car with brand new batteries. What about batteries that are 5 years old?
The future is likely hydrogen hybrids. All of the benefits of an EV and traditional ICE engines with none of the draw backs.
EVs have already won, having pulled ahead of combustion vehicles and hydrogen vehicles are still stuck at the starting line.
[1] https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/press/an-update-on-our-anod...
EV battery packs are routinely reused for grid/industrial energy storage.
EV battery recycling seems to becoming profitable. It's a pretty ideal scenario for recycling (high volume of identical cells).
EV batteries won't be more of a waste problem than car lead acid batteries, one of the most recycled items in the world.
> All of the benefits of an EV and traditional ICE engines with none of the draw backs.
You won't have all the benefits of EV (low complexity, volumetrically efficient drivetrain).
If you're going to have a battery big enough that you can charge at home for daily driving, you're going to get an extremely costly vehicle.
Hydrogen is one battery breakthrough away from being dead for cars forever. If the cost is halved and range is doubled, the niche for hydrogen cars will be so tiny that hydrogen fueling stations will be unsustainable.
Hydrogen hybrid cars is essentially a solution that kills itself. Charging will always be cheapest, so you'll want to maximize charging over hydrogen fueling. It'll incentivize the construction of home charging, street side charging and fast charging at all kinds of shops, restaurants etc. Most people will drive pure BEVs, and those that have hydrogen hybrids might fuel a handful of times a year. Every time batteries improve, the niche for the hydrogen hybrids will decrease. It's a terrible economy to build hydrogen fueling stations in.
A hydrogen fueling station exploded near my home btw. I think eventually hydrogen will be completely safe. But it seems very likely that a few accidents like that will happen before then, which may kill any momentum hydrogen manages to build. Hydrogen explosions are scary, it can be heard for miles away.
The car lost 25% of its charge over 12 hours. If you want to extrapolate to 24, I don’t think it would be that hard to hazard a guess?? If you want to extrapolate to 36, 48, or any number of hours you have the information there to do so.
Also - being frozen in place for 24 hours straight basically never happens to any car or driver. This is an unlikely event to worry about.
If you don’t want one, don’t buy one. I on the other hand wondered about exactly this issue so I find this a very useful piece.
See: almost every attempt to scale up a small project.
Yeah, I had one always in my car. I live in Australia now, but still kinda tempted to get one.
The reason I find this article interesting is, how well would a gasoline car fair under the same conditions? I assume you'd not run it the entire time, but heat it up, let it cool down, and repeat through the test.
While the idea to control for the passengers is obviously a good one, I feel like I need to point out that in many cases adding more human bodies to an enclosed space will actually reduce the energy needed to heat it.
The general internet factoid seems to indicate that humans radiate between 80W and 100W of heat, but those stats are all based on napkin math and don't seem to take into account the heat trapped by winter clothes, so I don't expect the real heat output to be quite so high in this circumstance.
Still, even taking half that number, a full car of four people would radiate about 160W-200W of heat just by existing in the closed space. You need more ventilation in the car as you add more people, but I would think you'd end up spending a lot less energy if you actually had real passengers.
Bjorn Nyland (also on YouTube) often sleeps the night in whatever EV he's testing in Norway.