Electric Cars Are Already Cheaper To Own and Run Than Petrol Or Diesel, Says Study (theguardian.com) 474
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Electric cars are already cheaper to own and run than petrol or diesel cars in the UK, US and Japan, new research shows. The lower cost is a key factor driving the rapid rise in electric car sales now underway, say the researchers. At the moment the cost is partly because of government support, but electric cars are expected to become the cheapest option without subsidies in a few years. The researchers analyzed the total cost of ownership of cars over four years, including the purchase price and depreciation, fuel, insurance, taxation and maintenance. They were surprised to find that pure electric cars came out cheapest in all the markets they examined: UK, Japan, Texas and California.
Pure electric cars have much lower fuel costs -- electricity is cheaper than petrol or diesel -- and maintenance costs, as the engines are simpler and help brake the car, saving on brake pads. In the UK, the annual cost was about 10% lower than for petrol or diesel cars in 2015, the latest year analyzed. Hybrid cars which cannot be plugged in and attract lower subsidies, were usually a little more expensive than petrol or diesel cars. Plug-in hybrids were found to be significantly more expensive -- buyers are effectively paying for two engines in one car, the researchers said. The exception in this case was Japan, where plug-in hybrids receive higher subsidies. The study has been published in the journal Applied Energy.
Pure electric cars have much lower fuel costs -- electricity is cheaper than petrol or diesel -- and maintenance costs, as the engines are simpler and help brake the car, saving on brake pads. In the UK, the annual cost was about 10% lower than for petrol or diesel cars in 2015, the latest year analyzed. Hybrid cars which cannot be plugged in and attract lower subsidies, were usually a little more expensive than petrol or diesel cars. Plug-in hybrids were found to be significantly more expensive -- buyers are effectively paying for two engines in one car, the researchers said. The exception in this case was Japan, where plug-in hybrids receive higher subsidies. The study has been published in the journal Applied Energy.
Corrects its own headline in the third sentence (Score:5, Insightful)
At the moment the cost is partly because of government support, but electric cars are expected to become the cheapest option without subsidies in a few years.
So it's cheapest -- as long as you ignore that pile of money over in the corner that someone else is paying, and one we promise will go away Real Soon Now. Good grief.
Re:Corrects its own headline in the third sentence (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe there should be a healthcare tax on diesel.
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There should be one on gasoline as well, but certainly diesel's should be higher.
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Why? Last I heard diesel looks and smells worse (at least in the typical American engine), but gasoline exhaust was a significantly larger health hazard.
Re:Corrects its own headline in the third sentence (Score:4, Informative)
No, we've just gone through this in the UK. Diesels were given a tax break (less tax on fuel) for decades because of the lower CO2 emissions, and now we've got dangerously high NO2 levels everywhere and lots of health problems attributed to particulates from diesel soot.
And that's all with Euro spec diesel and diesel engines. With the bunker fuel they sell as diesel on your side of the pond and lax environmental regulations, it's a health hazard to be anywhere near a diesel powered vehicle.
Re:Corrects its own headline in the third sentence (Score:5, Informative)
And that's all with Euro spec diesel and diesel engines.
Guess what? That's inferior to US spec, where you wind up having to have a catalyst and inject DEF — thereby eliminating almost all NOx emissions. Meanwhile, direct-injected gasoline engines can produce NOx just like diesels...
With the bunker fuel they sell as diesel on your side of the pond and lax environmental regulations, it's a health hazard to be anywhere near a diesel powered vehicle.
On our side of the pond, most of the diesel is now ULSD.
Re:Corrects its own headline in the third sentence (Score:5, Interesting)
On our side of the pond, most of the diesel is now ULSD.
Oh lol. Talk about picking on the spec that wasn't a health hazard and holding it high above your head. *golf clap* But since you're so proud of it, let's compare. ULSD in the USA contains 15ppm sulphur, introduced in 2006. A commendable effort. On our side of the pond the requirement was ULSD be 10ppm and available as of 2005 and was mandated as a requirement from 2009. No doubt by the time you'll shave off those 33% we'll have banned diesel vehicles.
And to reply to your quote out of order:
Guess what? That's inferior to US spec
You're not even close. Never were. The USA has been a very distinct follower rather than a leader in the west when it comes to fuel standards. Not just in sulphur spec, but also in your much lower cetane (where the EU was 17 years ago), higher ash content (where the EU was 12 years ago), higher water content (this was actually at one time better in the USA), and the GP was right your thick diesel gunk has much more in common with bunker fuel than the higher cut-point EU specs.
where you wind up having to have a catalyst and inject DEF
You see you're conflating two issues. The diesel in the USA is garbage compared to that in the EU, but all of that is actually not relevant to NOx, or PM2.5 emissions which is the battle against diesel. These are a direct result of vehicles in the rest of the world focusing on fuel economy. So while a european car will produce more NOx and more PM2.5 emissions regardless of if you buy your diesel in europe or the USA, your lovely all American soot mobile will blast PM10, CO, and that wonderful global warming inducing CO2 out the tailpipe like it's going out of fashion.
Just like your large CocaCola in the USA is much larger than the large in the EU, so are your vehicle's insatiable thirst for fuel. I'm sure in 5 or 10 years you guys will catch up too, start producing fuel efficient engines, realise NOx is a problem, start peeing in the exhaust pipe to try and control the emissions and then stand there wondering why the EU fought a war against diesel vehicles (my own city has gone from 730000 registered diesel vehicles in 2006 to 120000 in 2016 and we're much better for it).
Join the craze man, being able to breath is like cool and stuff.
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Maybe there should be a healthcare tax on diesel.
Why single out diesels when gasoline cars produce both more soot and more dangerous soot than diesels [slashdot.org]?
Re:Corrects its own headline in the third sentence (Score:5, Funny)
"Your EV wastes more energy than my diesel."
Are those your numbers or Volkswagen's?
Re: Corrects its own headline in the third sentenc (Score:2, Insightful)
If you're going to factor in the production and transmission efficiencies of electrical power, you need to do the same for gasoline or you are comparing apples to oranges.
Re: Corrects its own headline in the third sentenc (Score:5, Interesting)
Or instead, instead of playing amateur scientist on the net, the GP could listen to actual scientists who've studied the issue. [acs.org] ;)
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Yeah because the math is different for them and everyone shouldn't reach the same conclusions.
I love this new science.
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Most electricity is generated from fossil fuels
Most electricity from fossil fuels does not pump massive amounts of NOx in the very centre of densely populated spaces. This isn't a CO2 emissions argument, he directly called out healthcare, something spectacularly bad about diesel emissions made even worse by the location of those emissions.
But thanks for playing.
Re:Corrects its own headline in the third sentence (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, more to the point, new electricity generation in the US (and most of the developed world) is a mix of wind, solar and natural gas [wordpress.com]. Modern natural gas baseload plants (combined cycle), BTW, are around 60% efficient, not 40%. Coal is dying. [eia.gov]
When you add new load to the grid, they're not filling that load with coal; they're filling it with renewables.
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Most electricity from fossil fuels does not pump massive amounts of NOx in the very centre of densely populated spaces.
Neither do modern diesels. The combination of catalysts and urea injection all but eliminates NOx output.
But thanks for playing.
Back atcha.
Re:Corrects its own headline in the third sentence (Score:5, Informative)
Most electricity is generated from fossil fuels, so it would be hit by the same tax.
Why? Powerstations, even coal fired ones, don't dump huge amounts of very nasty particulates into the air at ground level right in the middle of densely populated cities.
Do note that EVs are not more efficient than ICE vehicles. Take the ~40% efficiency of an electricity-generating coal plant, multiply it by 90% transmission losses, by the 75% battery charging efficiency, and approx 85% electric motor efficiency, and you get (0.4)*(0.9)*(0.75)*(0.85) = 0.2295. Or 23% energy efficiency for EVs.
So basically, you get much better pollution control without any loss in efficiency? Sounds like a huge win to me.
Except...
That's if you have an old coal plant. If you have a combined cycle plant you'll hit 62% thermal efficiency on the front end, never mind if you use nuclear or renewables.
Your figures for charging are pessimistic. Charging is more like 80-90% efficient.
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/doc... [ieee.org]
Distribution losses are more like 6.5% in the US not 10% that you quoted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
And even some random low power cheapo electric motor easily beats 85% efficiency:
https://www.acdcdrives.co.uk/t... [acdcdrives.co.uk]
And larger motors are almost always more efficient.
And even if we take your incredibly pessimistic numbers, you still have the advantage of electric braking. But more realistically, the efficiency is more like 42% plant to wheel (47% taking the more optimistic end of the range).
So penalizing technologies solely based on pollution emissions is equivalent to penalizing higher energy efficiency. Higher efficiency and higher pollution come as a package deal with combustion processes.
Which is a phenomenally good argument for electric cars. If you want the efficiency, you want to put the relatively dirty place a long way from people and all in one place so you can have effective scrubbers on the output.
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It may surprise you to learn that diesel ICE cars and trucks are 30%-40% efficient.
That would surprise me, if it were true. It's not, that's peak efficiency. The efficiency of the most efficient diesel in the world is only around 50%, and that's a container ship engine with cylinders large enough to walk around in. It represents the best-case for diesel efficiency. When a semi truck is on flat ground and traveling at a fixed speed, it might approach 40%. When it's doing anything else, there is absolutely no way.
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An EV is about 4 times as efficient than an ICE. ... and why they apply for an EV but nit your lights, your cooking oven and your TV.
No idea where you got that 90% transmission losses from
And where did you get the 40% for an diesel engine from? It is just around 20% and gasoline is slightly below.
Only very few specialized engines are touching or even exceeding the 40% margin.
No idea who pays you to spread such nonsense/FUD.
Re:Corrects its own headline in the third sentence (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, and I strongly suspect that somebody just can't do arithmetic as well. Perhaps SOME electric cars are less expensive than SOME gasoline cars, but there is a huge range of prices for gas cars, even in a given class. If you compare a high end luxury gas car to the cheapest electric, add in the subsidy, and make negatory assumptions about the probable price of gasoline over the expected lifetime of the car, you can probably fudge it to make it come out a win, but if you compare apples to apples without subsidies, it isn't so clear. Suppose a car goes 12,000 miles in a year. At 20 mpg, that costs 600 gallons of gasoline, or around $1500/year. Over a ten year lifetime, fuel costs are only around $15,000, so if electric cars ran FREE you'd need price points for CHEAP electric cars to match those of CHEAP gasoline cars within around $12,000, allowing for the cost of money. But the cheapest electric cars are easily this much more than the cheapest gasoline cars, and even the study only allows for a 10% difference in maintenance costs, which really remains to be seen as these costs are highly variable by manufacturer. But electricity is NOT free -- even if it is being provided "free" in some places it is really just another subsidy, and costs SOMEBODY somewhere between $0.10 and $0.20 per KWH.
I ran into the same difficulty with our Priuses. The first Prius we bought was $40,000. At the time, we could have easily gotten a similar size/class car for maybe $20,000 to $25,000, one that got around 30 mpg. There is no way we paid off the difference in financing costs over the lifetime of the car with the marginal savings on gasoline at around 50 mpg. New cheap Priuses are better -- close to break even -- but electric cars IMO have a ways to go.
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Re: Corrects its own headline in the third sentenc (Score:5, Informative)
eGolf lease deposit - $4000
Lease monthly payment - $50
Price to drive to work 12000 miles at 4m/kWh and $0.11 per kWh - $330
Total cost of ownership over 3 years - $6740
Golf lease deposit - $3000
Golf lease monthly price - $170
Price to drive 12000 miles at 36mpg and $2.60 per gal - $867
Price for yearly service - $300
Total cost of ownership over 3 years - $12451.
Re: Corrects its own headline in the third sentenc (Score:4, Informative)
Also, I'm curious where you were able to find it for a $50/mo lease payment. When I almost leased one a couple years back, the lowest price I could find was $79/mo.
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The Prius is a hybrid, and the article's graph says yes, they are more expensive, but it also shows electric is cheaper right off the bat. So they agree with your analysis of the Prius and don't have your lack of data on electrics.
Costs are different in the UK. Mostly they're higher -- labor, electricity, manufactured goods. But they have different choices in cars than we do, and those cars tend to be lighter.
From their analysis, it's pretty clear that in the US, where electricity is cheaper, electric c
You're more right than you realize (Score:2)
> At 20 mpg, that costs 600 gallons of gasoline, or around $1500/year. Over a ten year lifetime, fuel costs are only around $15,000
The cost of 600 gallons of gas is $1,260. Forty cents a gallon per gallon is TAX, which pays for things like subsidies to people buying electric cars, "free" charging stations, etc. It's paid buy people using gas cars, but it's the cost of electric car subsidies, roads (used by freeriders in electric cars), etc.
Paying income taxes on INCOME is not a subsidy (Score:3)
They pay taxes like every other business does. No business pays federal income taxes on EXPENSES. That's the main thing the people trying to trick you call a "subsidy", which is just friggin ridiculous. Here's how it works:
Your local bookstore starts out with $100,000 dollars.
They buy a bunch of books for $100,000.
They sell half the books for $75,000.
They now have $75,000 plus half a shipment of books, worth $50,000. That's $125,000
They started with $100,000 and ended with $125,000 so that's a profit of
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Also, it's not just the finance costs on the downside, it's the capital costs on the upside, if you could have put that $17K delta to work for you over the same period (even in an index fund).
My kids learned "the time value of money" before kindergarten - how can a professional economic analysis ignore it?
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Also, it's not just the finance costs on the downside, it's the capital costs on the upside, if you could have put that $17K delta to work for you over the same period (even in an index fund).
Most people are buying a car on credit, so that money is being put to work, but it's being put to work for the financing company, since they're the ones who actually have it. No matter how hard they try, the consumer is not going to be able to invest money they don't have.
My kids learned "the time value of money" before kindergarten - how can a professional economic analysis ignore it?
You ignored the basic realities of the situation to try to make a really killer point, which turned out to be nonsense. Over eighty percent of vehicles are financed.
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The thing with Prius is that one should consider the additional cost as insurance paid against gas price fluctuations. And, like most insurance, you hope you don't need it.
If we had (or have) major issues in the mideast or the gulf (war, hurricane, etc.) that caused gas prices to bump back up to $5/gallon or more, then your Prius could more than paid off the difference in price. We didn't, but that was hard to foresee a few years ago.
You also need to factor in maintenance costs, yes? We just spent $300 repl
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And doesn't Prius have one of the highest resale values out there? There's more to your purchase than just the price of gas.
Re:Corrects its own headline in the third sentence (Score:4, Informative)
That's actually a problem with how the U.S. measures fuel efficiency. MPG is actually the inverse of fuel efficiency. So the bigger the MPG number, the less fuel you're saving. The rest of the world uses liters per 100 km to avoid this problem. e.g. Suppose you needed to drive 100 miles. How much fuel would you need to use?
6.25 MPG tractor trailer = 16 gallons
12.5 MPG full-size SUV = 8 gallons
25 MPG sedan = 4 gallons
50 MPG Prius = 2 gallons
100 MPG supercar = 1 gallon
Notice how every time MPG doubles, the fuel saved over the previous step is halved? Economy cars like the Prius are the worst place to put a hybrid engine. It's already a very fuel-efficient vehicle without a hybrid motor. Adding a hybrid motor and batteries doesn't save you very much fuel. Say a non-hybrid Prius got 33 MPG (3 gallons per 100 miles). Converting it to a hybrid only reduces its fuel consumption to 2 gallons per 100 miles. That +17 MPG may look big, but it's only saving you 1 gallon per 100 miles.
The best place to put a hybrid motor is in the gas guzzlers - tractor trailers and SUVs. Precisely the vehicles the environmentalists scoffed at hybridizing. If you can improve a 12.5 MPG SUV's mileage to 14.3 MPG (+1.8 MPG), that will save 1 gallon per 100 miles. Exactly as much as putting a hybrid in a Prius-type vehicle. The +1.8 MPG and +17 MPG represent the same fuel savings. (Yes you can save more by switching from the SUV to the econobox, but that has nothing to do with hybrids nor is it a viable option for people who might need the SUV.)
Likewise if you can improve a tractor trailer's 6.25 MPG to 6.67 MPG (+0.42 MPG), that also saves 1 gallon per 100 miles. This is why Elon Musk was so insistent on developing an electric tractor trailer. He understands that MPG is the inverse of fuel efficiency, and that the best way for the country to reduce it's fuel consumption is to improve the efficiency of low MPG vehicles.
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We're also ignoring the cost of the damage caused by CO2 and by exhaust particulates. Good grief.
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Might have been before, but now electrics are getting CO2 emissions similar to 50-150 MGP cars, depending on your local electric company's mix.
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Nevertheless, it's a good point. I mean, one is syphoning money out of someone else's pocket and the other is making the planet warmer, with unknown consequences. But they both cost others.
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News flash to Americans: there exists a world outside America.
Meanwhile, let's compare the Tesla Model 3, without any subsidies, to the similarly sized BMW 3-series. First off, which models to compare?
Model 3 SR: 0-60=5,5s; BMW 330i: 0-60=5,4s
Model 3 LR: 0-60=4,8s (Motor Trend)-5,1s(official); BMW 340i: 0-60 various measured at 4,8 and 5,1s.
So now we have our comparison points; let's do the comparisons. Note for the below that the 3-series all have a 15,8gal tank,
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Oh, I should probably add: one of the options coming out next year for the Model 3 is the performance package. The pricing and specs aren't known, but based on a spy video, plus typical performance and pricing of options on Tesla's other lines over the years, most people are expecting it to be something like $15k and give a 0-60 somewhere in the 3-4 second range. That would be on top of the base LR (I doubt the SR pack could support it), so something like $60k. But we'll have to wait and see. As a genera
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When you say "build quality", what aspect do you refer to? If you refer to reliability, Consumer Reports ranks the Model S "above average", the Model X "below average" (heavily dinged on the falcon wing doors), and expects the Model 3 to be "average" at the time of its launch. They're pretty much the authorities in this regard.
And I'm sorry, but some of BMW's engineering these days is humorously bad [youtube.com].
Re:Corrects its own headline in the third sentence (Score:5, Insightful)
People pay piles of cash to subsidize ICE vehicles too.
There are in fact two big piles, in fact. The first and larger pile is the non-governmental pile: this is the least visible pile because it's spread out over the population in things like medical bills. Air pollution in the US causes 16,000 premature births, and that alone costs the public 4.3 billion annually.. Overall cost to the US health care economy from ICE air pollution is on the order of $40 billion a year, conservatively. That's not counting the subjective costs of being sick or dying prematurely, it's straight up health spending.
Many of the public costs of ICE nobody so far as I know have even attempted to quantify, like the cost of noise. The noise cost of ICE vehicles is mind-boggling if you think about it: just take the difference in value of a real estate property located on a noisy street vs. a quiet one and multiply that by all the properties which are exposed to high levels of traffic noise. Surprisingly noise pollution has a health cost too, estimated in the billions [ajpmonline.org] for heart disease alone.
The second big pile is the government spending pile. This takes some explicit forms, such as the costs of drafting, monitoring and enforcing vehicle pollution regulations. But most of it is squirreled away under other headings. Do you really think that we'd spend a dime in the Middle East on defense if there were no oil there, or if oil were as worthless as sand?
The externalized costs imposed public by internal combustion engine car are staggering. They're just as much public subsidies as any government program, and they're much larger than e-car subsidies. The only difference is that they aren't gathered into a single line item in the budget, which means we don't automatically have to argue for or against the fairness of that subsidy every year. In fact the burden distribution for ICE vehicle external costs is wildly arbitrary and unfair. It's just easy to ignore that.
The whole point of e-vehicle subsidies is to bring down net externalized public costs for vehicles all types in the long term.
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I think that electric is in our future but issues with the grid, infrastructure, refueling time will be persistent problems.
Much like cell phones, removable battery packs would solve a lot of issues, particularly for the give-it-to-me-NOW generation who can't stand having to wait for anything, even if it's a 15-minute "quick" charge. A 5-minute battery swap that will likely become fully autonomous when you pull up to the "pump" is the future.
What do you do if the power is out for a day to a week with an electric vehicle? Right, you charge it with your gas generator.
The better solution would be to be able to charge it with solar panels, because the small handful of gas stations still operating during an extended no-electric apocalypse will inevitably b
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removable battery packs would solve a lot of issues
No, they'd solve one issue, but create a bunch of new ones. Removable battery packs requires a standard size, which will stifle progress in battery tech. Standard sizes don't work very well with different models of car, requiring bigger or smaller packs. Also, making a removable battery removes a lot of design freedom, and forces a suboptimal battery placement and connection. It required bulky and complicated battery replacement robots, and a bulky storage facility for batteries. And you still need a beefy
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Another 800 pound gorilla is the fact that new vehicles have a large carbon footprint. Part of the goodness of a used vehicle is that it doesn't have be made again.
A standardized battery pack would be great. Increasing energy density would be a good short-term goal. It's not unlike the gas-tank, and with a little finesse in engineering, could be made modular and easy to change, just like a fill-up. It's then the charging station's choice of how to re-up the electron store in the battery pack, solar, wind, w
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A standardized battery pack would be great
If you don't need the battery pack to be replaceable, there's no need to restrict yourself to standards.
Re-use is very important.
You don't need standard battery packs for that. You could make standard battery cells, like Tesla is doing. Rip open the battery, take out all the cells, and re-use those.
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Making the pack user- serviceable is all important for rapid change-out. Has to be stupid-simple and done in a way that it's all easily audited as well as the weight compensated for.... because people can't lift them. Think of it as a docking station. Eject the old one, insert the new one.
But I want them standardized so that they're not proprietary, and therefore a million battery packs that *are* interchangeable. Lacking that, there's a sea of some marketing department's vision of the ultimate, rather than
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Making the pack user- serviceable is all important for rapid change-out. Has to be stupid-simple and done in a way that it's all easily audited as well as the weight compensated for.... because people can't lift them. Think of it as a docking station. Eject the old one, insert the new one.
What you're asking for is shitty cars. Making a big enclosed battery pack and inserting into the vehicle as a part of its structure makes the whole car better, and you want them to stop doing that.
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Does your car have a gas tank?
What are you trying to prove with this example ? Gas tanks are not interchangeable, not all the same size, and carefully designed to fit one particular model of car.
Compared to a gas tank, a battery pack is huge and heavy, so it's even more important to carefully integrate the design of the battery pack with the car. Also, the connection between battery pack and car is complicated due the large voltages and currents, as well as some systems that circulate coolant throughout the pack, which may be attached t
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It does not "stifle" battery improvements
Yes it will. Compare the old Tesla battery pack with the new one. They made a ton of improvements and changes with respect to temperature control, charging electronics and physical packaging. In some cases, they moved functionality from the battery pack to the car, or the other way around.
And that's just two generations from a battery pack from the same vendor.
Imagine if the old battery pack was standardized, then they could not have made any of these changes without breaking the standard, and requiring an
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Fast charging is a problem that can be solved with better battery technology.
If that's all you think is holding it back then man are you in for a surprise if you ever research this.
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Don't keep us in suspense, what are the biggest challenges for fast charging ?
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There was a company called Better Place that had automated battery swaps that would take a few minutes.
And they're bankrupt now (or if you prefer, they went to a better place)
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Really? Having your car out of power in a natural disaster means you can't easily go somewhere else for a little while to wait for them to fix basic infrastructure. If something is significant enough to knock out power for a week, being able to use the car would be one of my largest concerns.
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Re: Corrects its own headline in the third sentenc (Score:4, Informative)
Meanwhile, here's what its actually like [dailykos.com] to have an EV in a natural disaster.
Re:Corrects its own headline in the third sentence (Score:5, Informative)
In a few years, EVs will be cheaper anyway, even without any subsidies. The price of battery storage (in $/kwh) has been declining steadily at about 15%/yr for the last couple of decades. By 2022~23 there will be several EVs on the market for around $20k, simply because the batteries will be that cheap by then.
At that point, it's getting close to 'game over' territory for the ICE vehicle market. If EVs are cheaper all around, they will win. (Not to mention that they also tend to be far more reliable, because they only have a few dozen moving parts, rather than thousands.)
A Stanford lecturer, Tony Seba, wrote a book about this upcoming market shift, called "Clean Disruption." He also does a lecture on the topic, which you can find on YouTube. [youtube.com] Pretty interesting stuff.
Re: Corrects its own headline in the third sentenc (Score:3, Insightful)
Given the tax bill the republicans just passed, ahahahahHhahahhahahahahahahahahahaha
Re bailouts: Started on Bush Jr watch (Score:3)
Yo Sparky,
Apparently 9 years ago is "history", and I infer from your comment that you didn't do too well there.
The bailout began on Bush Jr's watch. Bernanke and Paulson brought a single-page set of required steps to the U.S. Congress in October 2008 to prevent an immediate and complete meltdown of a worldwide financial system.
Following up on the Bush bank bailout, Obama had a challenge: Continue supporting the bailout of the motherfuckers that almost took out the world economy, or put up with the fallout o
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The true cost of gasoline -- huge! (Score:5, Informative)
To support AC's point:
http://www.dollarsandsense.org... [dollarsandsense.org]
https://www.energyandcapital.c... [energyandcapital.com]
https://www.huffingtonpost.com... [huffingtonpost.com]
From the first one, discussing the US defense-related costs as just one aspect: "Put all these numbers in perspective: The price of a barrel of oil consumed in the United States would have to increase by $23.40 to offset military resources expended to secure oil. That translates to an additional 56 cents for a gallon of gas, or three times the federal gas tax that funds road construction. If $166 billion were spent on other priorities, the Boston public transportation system, the âoeT,â could have its operating expenses covered, with commuters riding for free. And there would still be money left over for another 100 public transport systems across the United States. Or, we could build and install nearly 50,000 wind turbines. Take your pick."
But there are many other external costs to fossil fuels like health care costs (the legacy of leaded gas is still taking a tremendous toll on our society, but air pollution in general is a killer). For example:
https://thinkprogress.org/here... [thinkprogress.org]
"The average cost of a gallon of gasoline in the U.S. right now is $2.47. If that cost took into account the environmental and human health costs of burning the gasoline, however, it would more than double, according to a new study. The study, published this week in the journal Climatic Change, created models for the âoesocial cost of atmospheric release,â a method of determining the costs of emissions beyond their market value. According to the study, accounting for the social costs of burning gasoline would add an average of $3.80 per gallon to the pump price, raising the price to $6.27. Diesel has an even higher social cost of $4.80 per gallon. The study also measured the social costs of other fossil fuels not used at the pump. Coal, for example, would jump from 10 cents per kilowatt hour to 42 cents per kilowatt hour, the study found. And natural gas, which has emerged in recent years as a cheap source of fuel, would see its price rise from 7 cents per kWh to 17 cents per kWh."
And on the legacy of leaded gas (and how it has contributed to the USA's huge prison populations): http://www.motherjones.com/env... [motherjones.com]
A related essay I wrote in 2009 on "Why luxury safer electric cars should be free-to-the-user":
https://groups.google.com/foru... [google.com]
"This essay explain why luxury safer electric (or plug-in hybrid) cars should be free-to-the-user at the point of sale in the USA, and why this will reduce US taxes overall. Essentially, unsafe gasoline-powered automobiles in the USA pose a high cost on society (accidents, injuries, pollution, defense), and the costs of making better cars would pay for themselves and then some. This essay is an example of using post-scarcity ideology to understand the scarcity-oriented ideological assumptions in our society and how those outdated scarcity assumptions are costing our society in terms of creating and maintaining artificial scarcity."
But the real answer (if maybe not politically acceptable) is not to subsidize electric cars. It is to tax *all* the externalizes of fossil fuel use at the point of purchase, bringing the cost of gas to, perhaps, US$10 a gallon or more. The tax could be redistributed as a basic income to everyone.
Perhaps the deepest irony about all this (mentioned in the above essay) is mentioned here by B
Re: Increased electrical burden (Score:2)
A recent analysis from Bloomberg New Energy Finance suggested that electric vehicles could account for half of all new cars sold by 2040. While electric vehicles consume electricity, they can also export power to the grid as mobile energy storage units. An increase in electric vehicle adoption may mean more flexibility for the grid to respond to supply and demand.
Re: Increased electrical burden (Score:2, Funny)
Wow, that seems totally do-able, I can't think of a better way to move electricity than in battery packs in electric cars...
That's why I use gasoline (Score:5, Funny)
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You jest, but that's a universal truth. Everytime someone mentions the price of "gasoline" you know they are paying far less for it than those people talking about the price of "petrol".
At least in the west.
Taxes (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's not forget that in most markets electric cars get a free ride on public roadways. Gasoline taxes are collected to pay for the infrastructure combustion engines drive on, electricity has no such taxes so plug-in electrics pay no taxes based on usage, and hybrids only pay minimal taxes, based on the gasoline they use when the charge runs out.
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More like a double or triple ride. As you pointed out, there's no taxes being collected by gas. The electricity in the charging stations is "free" and I use that term loosely, because the actual cost of it is coming out of general taxes, or municipal taxes which have to offset that cost. There's also generally "transmission" taxes, and then taxes on the electricity itself which aren't being paid by people who are driving them.
If electric car owners had to pay the price for electricity when using those st
Re:Taxes (Score:5, Interesting)
Think of it as another way to subsidize new technology that may improve our future lives. Currently, there's not enough drivers using the free charging stations to create a taxing imbalance. When tax revenue is ultimately an issue for highway maintenance, one thing you can count on your local, state, and federal governors to do is figure out a way to tax electric vehicle usage.
Advantages:
The delivery logistics alone for petroleum-based fuels cannot economically compare to the efficiency of the national electrical grid.
Electric vehicles can be charged during off-peak generation hours.
Environmental savings alone by reducing/eliminating ICE emissions would more than offset electrical general pollution even if all new power was provided by the dirtiest coal buring plants.
Battery technology is currently in its infancy, and whatever current efficiency projections are, it seems a safe gambit future electric vehicles will improve in efficiency dramatically.
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Uhhh... LiIon hasn't improved significantly since the 1990s? What the hell are you talking about man?
In 1990 a LiIon battery could store around 75Wh/kg, today a LiIon battery can store around 260Wh/kg... Further to that, the price has dropped by about 5 fold in the last 5 years alone.
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He should have said modern battery technology, and you're -- pardon my French -- being a pedantic idiot.
Modern lithium-ion batteries are currently declining in price by 15% YOY.
And advancements in battery technology are coming at a rapid clip. Be it carbon-nanotube electrodes that cut charging time by 70% and increase power density by 150% (Samsung), or graphene-based super capacitors that promise 7 minute recharges and 500 mile ranges (Fisker), efficiency improvements are coming.
Too much modern technology
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And the combustion engine dates to Hero of Alexandria's Aeolipile in the 1st century AD. Your point?
What's that? His engine doesn't resemble modern combustion engines? You're right. And neither do 18th century batteries and motors resemble modern ones.
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Current superchargers are $0,20/kWh. But megachargers are announced to be $0,07/kWh. How? Wind and solar are dirt cheap nowadays, but you have to have some sort of peaking or storage with them, which ups the price. Super-high-power chargers need a battery buffer so that they don't have to pull crazy amounts of power off the grid at random intervals. When you combine the two, you get a two-for-one - the same buffer that buffers charging also buffers solar and wind. Also, Tesla's battery costs have been
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Gasoline taxes are collected to pay for the infrastructure combustion engines drive on
Gasoline taxes are just collected. They don't even remotely cover the cost of infrastructure maintenance let alone the creation of new infrastructure, and there's no law saying exactly what they are to be spent on or that no other forms of funding for infrastructure exists.
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Yet those taxes don't come close to paying for that infrastructure [uspirg.org]. And that is only one way that gasoline cars are subsidized.
Inconvienence (Score:2, Interesting)
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Yes, as soon as the kid has grown up, it has to do exactly that. Until then, we don't force the kid to work and don't tax him. Just like human kids.
Bert
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Considering the lurking question mark that exists the moment over your head
We already do. When we buy and use EVs we think of that lurking question mark that exists over *your* head (anti-EV fluffernutter's head), and then we laugh at the ridiculousness of your statements.
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Considering the lurking question mark that exists the moment over your head when you buy an EV, "Will there be a situation where my car is not charged when I really need it?",
Not really. Not owning a car raises the question "is there some time I need a car right now and don't have one", and the answer is "perhaps, but I deal with it". Even when I did own a car, I can't think of a single time when I had a huge emergency for which I had to travel right the fuck now right after a long journey.
That kind of thin
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The thing that makes it uneven (and even unfair) is the fact that the public is paying for your use of that vehicle in terms of road maintenance costs you aren't contributing to and subsidies you are getting.
If you find that upsetting, consider that virtually all road damage caused by vehicles is done by heavy trucks, but they hardly pay more to offset that. Those costs should be paid by transportation companies and wind up baked into the cost of goods, which would permit purchasing decisions which reflect the true state of the world. Instead, everyone has to pay those costs, even people who don't buy goods which are transported long distances.
Cheap, huh... (Score:2)
How much does an electric minivan cost, what's it's passenger capacity, and how much does it cost?
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This is the UK, not the US. Yes, they have those: https://www.nissan.co.uk/vehic... [nissan.co.uk]
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"The maximum NEDC range of the Nissan e-NV200 is 106 miles"
LOL. That won't even get close to cutting it on our (one day, one way) 1000 km drive this Christmas.
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Not for long (Score:2)
The tax revenue loss for gas will have to be made up somewhere. Roads don't pave and maintain themselves.
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We could say the same for CO2. The current level of CO2 world-wide CO2 emission is not sustainable and we will have to drastically reduce the number of ICE cars.
You are not paying the full price when you drive an electric car. But neither are you when you drive a gas car when you count the pollution.
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...The tax revenue loss for gas will have to be made up somewhere. ...
The is already talk of moving to a tax per mile per weight of vehicle type of system.
Cost of battery disposal? (Score:2)
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Look at your current 12 volt automotive battery: It's worth some scrap value when you can no longer use it in the vehicle. Recycling batteries shouldn't cost anything, since it typically saves over the mining of replacement materials.
Preppers will gladly take old automotive battery packs off your hands, and you can bet there will be a "core" charge when you have to purchase a new one.
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Indeed. Nobody is going to throw away a giant box of nickel, cobalt, lithium and copper. People aren't in the habit of throwing away money.
EVs are great, but they don't solve everything. (Score:2, Insightful)
I also wonder if they have factored in the cost of installing high output charging outlets in homes to accommodate electric vehicles.
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Fossil fuels are going to run out, so the switch to electric is going to happen anyway. The earlier we start upgrading the grid, the more time we have for the transition.
The big advantage of electric is that you become flexible in energy generation, and with a big fleet of electric cars charging on the net, there's plenty of room to soak up excess solar and wind (which aren't very expensive as you claimed).
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EOL (Score:2)
>"Electric Cars Are Already Cheaper To Own and Run Than Petrol Or Diesel, Says Study"
Is that INCLUDING replacing a $20,0000+ battery pack when it gives out after warranty? What exactly is the "trade-in" value of an electric car at that point? Is the 5-year-old car essentially "totaled"? Will it disposable like phones now seem to be?
I love electric cars, and want one. They have far fewer things to replace and "maintain" compared to ICE cars, and electricity as a fuel is cheap compared to gasoline. Bu
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Is that INCLUDING replacing a $20,0000+ battery pack when it gives out after warranty?
Buy a Hyundai, they are offering a transferable lifetime battery warranty.
But massive, complex battery packs are VERY expensive.
Who told you that? They're a small fraction of the cost of the unibody.
Attention poor people of the world (Score:2)
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A friend owns a Tesla though, and is expenses are hard to get lower: he pays around 12 euro per year for maintenance. I think wiper fluid was his biggest single expense. Fuel is provided by solar panels and thus pretty cheap.
I suppose tires don't count.
And why do tesla offer maintenance plans that are around 500 euros per year? Is it a scam?
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Yeah, it seems the absolute cheapest way one can drive - if the range is sufficient for them - is a used Leaf. They sell for almost nothing (unlike Teslas, which hold their value surprisingly well) and cost almost nothing to operate.
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Most people lease cars now-a-days, don't they? They'll just lease a new one. It's someone else's problem. The *used car market will become a pile of dead batteries, but hey screw the little guy he doesn't count.
* Sorry to be correct it's now 'pre-owned'.
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