Honda Works On Second EV, Quits Diesel, and Puts Hydrogen On Hold (electrek.co) 148
Socguy writes: In late October, at Honda's "Electric Vision" event in Amsterdam, the company said it was "electrifying" its entire product line, which mostly means hybrids. "We will bring further battery-electric products to the market," they said. At the same time it would seem, diesel and hydrogen are on the way out. Katsushi Inoue, Honda Europe's president, said: "Maybe hydrogen fuel cell cars will come, but that's a technology for the next era. Our focus is on hybrid and electric vehicles now." Diesel is also on the way out as in September, Honda said it would phase out all diesel cars by 2021. In addition to the all-electric Honda E, which is launching in Europe next year, the company will introduce a second EV that's expected to be revealed by 2022.
It was never "Honda Diesel" to start off with (Score:2)
It was a testament to the quality of Isuzu engineering and the muppetness of Honda. Mine was installed so badly by the Honda factory line that it was a miracle of biblical proportion that it worked at all.
Re:It was never "Honda Diesel" to start off with (Score:5, Funny)
They were rebadging Isuzu/GM diesel engines during the period when I drove a diesel Honda (I had an FRV as a company car).
It was a testament to the quality of Isuzu engineering and the muppetness of Honda. Mine was installed so badly by the Honda factory line that it was a miracle of biblical proportion that it worked at all.
Must've been some kind of natural defense mechanism, with the cars rejecting the shitty tractor engines.
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Shame no-one is talking about the Honda e here. It's a great car, with just the right balance of physical controls and touch screens.
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with just the right balance of physical controls and touch screens.
IMHO the right balance in a car would be "no touch screens whatsoever"
Questionable (Score:3)
Now don't get me wrong, not needing a battery with all the cons that brings would certainly be nice but I have doubts that anyone will seriously look into hydrogen cars once all electric has been established.
Refueling for all electrics are everywhere and fast chargers are rolling out as we speak. With new battery tech (and it does look like we have some promising things coming that aren't perpetually 2 years from mass production) ahead, any reason to implement hydrogen seems to get less and less relevant.
I could see them installing a small emergency fuel cell for emergencies and grocery stores selling charges for that (like they wanted to do for smartphones) but beyond that? Hydrogen seems rather redundant...
Re: Questionable (Score:2)
Personally, I can only see hydrogen fuel cells taking off when you can generate the fuel either in the car itself overnight, or in a cheap home generator that can fill your cars tank whenever you are home before fast charging gets to the point where it takes no longer than filling a gas tank. The filling time for long range trips is the only real advantage it has over battery electric now, but most car usage is short range commuting and running errands, where the freedom from having to deal with gas station
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That is exactly my thinking.
It is probably that charging will be faster and batteries will have more capacity per volume. I mean the technological advance in this are isn't just waiting for hydrogen to come along, you know?
Also efficiency, I assume, is much better with EVs than hydrogen. I doubt very much that generating hydrogen and turning it into power again will have better efficiency that charging a battery and then powering the motor directly.
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A hydrogen car is refueled 10 times if not 100 times faster than a battery is charged. So there will most like be a market for fuel cell based hydrogen cars.
At the moment however hydrogen is expensive, so you might be right and there never will be a true market, and they will be a niche.
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Of course refueling is faster for hydrogen if you go from an empty tank. But you don't usually let your battery go empty on an EV. That's the whole point. With very few exceptions, you start each day with a full "tank" on EVs.
And as mentioned, charging and range are improving by the year, too. Of course there will always be cases where that won't be good enough so yes, hydrogen might have a market but it is equally plausible that these will be fringe cases and so few and far between that we can easily keep
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You describe a niche market. But do you really think that hydrogen fuelling stations will be installed (at very high cost) to serve that niche? I think it is unlikely that hydrogen fuel cell vehicles will ever reach critical mass for any kind of adoption.
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Charging Counts (Score:5, Interesting)
The appeal of an EV is directly proportional to the charging network that the buyer can rely upon.
It's not enough to go electric. The only player who has addressed charging in the US is Tesla.
As a leaf owner, the lack of reliable access to charging prevents me using it for journeys over 60 miles. It's fine for what I use it for and has saved me a crapton of money, but the next car (on order) is a Tesla.
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A Tesla supercharge station takes 30 minutes for 150 miles of range (I'll be generous and exclude
Addressing the problem (Score:2)
Consider how many gas stations and pumps are located near freeways.
Here around (Switzerland) a sizeable proportion of them are deploying charging stations.
(Most freeway rest area don't benefit that much from the gas they sell, they benefit the most from the food and drinks they sell. A gas pump is just a way to attract more people to the restaurant/coffeeshop next to the gas stations. Building a charging station is just basically a variation on the same customer attraction strategy).
Now consider it takes about 4 minutes for a car to pull up, fill up on gas (approx 300-350 mile range, call it 320), and pull out. {...} A Tesla supercharge station takes 30 minutes for 150 miles of range (I'll be generous and exclude time to pull up and pull out).
The thing is, most human being needs to take breaks (and some of those who are professional
Re:Charging Counts (Score:5, Informative)
Currently deployed chargers can pump 140kW. That will add range at a rate of 525mph for a Model 3. That's 150 miles of range added in about 17 minutes. Tesla is now starting to deploy V3 stations which can pump up to 250kW. Your data is a few years out of date. Yes, it still takes a little longer than pumping gas, but I don't even have time to eat a fast food burger before the car's done charging and it's time to leave.
The second flaw in your argument is assuming we will need an equivalent number of supercharging stations to gas stations. The use case is entirely different. The ONLY time a Tesla uses a supercharger is on a long road trip. For daily use, people are plugging them in at home to charge them overnight, every night, like a mobile phone. Imagine how many fewer gas stations would be required if everybody was able to just fill up their gas tanks at home overnight.
Re:Charging Counts (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm also imagining something like a Sonic where you could just have an entire peninsula or island of chargers where you order your meal and eat there for 20-30mins and you're topped off.
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I'm also imagining something like a Sonic where you could just have an entire peninsula or island of chargers where you order your meal and eat there for 20-30mins and you're topped off.
Boy, do I wish I had a couple of million to develop THAT idea! Hey, Shark Tank...!
But how do you handle the horseshit with non-standard charging connectors? Does every car then have to come with a set of Dongles (sorry, couldn't resist!) to adapt to Sonic's chargers, vs. McDonald's chargers, vs. the-gas-station-down-the-street's chargers? Because the only way that would be practical is if the charging-rate is such that at least a typical 50% charge could be had in the about 30 minutes it takes to order and
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You forget that people mostly charge their EVs at home or work, where as your only choice for filling up an ICE car is to go to the petrol station. You only need rapid chargers when going long distance, and even that will decrease as battery sizes continue to increase.
Still, there will need to be more chargers than petrol pumps, that's true. But it's also not a problem because unlike petrol pumps you don't need a large tank of flammable liquid and controlled save environment to operate them in. There are ve
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So what is more likely, that all gas stations get closed and somewhere some people build charger stations, or that those gas stations simply convert to charging?
What about parking lots of Walmarts etc. would it not be a natural development that they over charging? Or bigger restaurants with a parking lot?
Anyway, most charging will be at home or at the company, no idea why people are so concerned.
Charging is not like refueling a gasoline car ... it is charging, you can do it everywhere.
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So what is more likely, that all gas stations get closed and somewhere some people build charger stations, or that those gas stations simply convert to charging?
The former, because most of those gas stations aren't in the right locations for charging stations, and don't have the right infrastructure available. Some gas stations along highways may convert. The vast majority will just close.
What about parking lots of Walmarts etc. would it not be a natural development that they over charging? Or bigger restaurants with a parking lot?
I think so, though I'm not entirely sure. I've been an EV owner for seven years now, and I don't see much value in chargers at stores. One of the grocery stores in my area has chargers, and I've used them, but it mostly seems like a waste of time to connect the charger and aut
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You made a fatal assumption that every gas station pump needs to be replaced with an EV charger, which undermines your entire argument. I've had an EV for 3 years and 99% of my charging more more happens at my house and the same can be said for most EV owners.
ALL petro cars fill up gas stations. ONLY EVs travelling outside their range fill up at fast chargers. Even if people spent 20% of their travel outside their EV range, meaning they drove more than 200 miles per day, that's still 80% less vehicles ne
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No, instead, consider how many garages either have or could easily have installed a 220V outlet and compare that to the number of gas stations.
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Likely the owners are using or renting a gasoline ICE car for their longer trips.
I'll gladly accept a future where everyone uses EVs for their daily commutes and we rent ICE vehicles for long trips. That sounds almost utopian. I can imagine the headline where some pundit complains that there aren't enough gasoline refueling stations along some routes.
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What happened to the investment VW was supposed to be putting into charging in the US as punishment for the diesel emissions scandal?
I guess the problem is that the US is simply so large. In the UK and much of Europe the networks are already good enough. I've done 250 mile trips in a Leaf 30 and while I did lose some time to charging stops I was okay with that because I don't do it regularly and save a fortune on petrol and maintenance the rest of the year.
I tried the Model 3 but it was too small and the Ki
Re: Charging Counts (Score:2)
The new VW settlement-funded stations are showing up in my area. I don't see much talk about the cost to use them though, which I've heard is not cheap.
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I don't really care if they're expensive. The aren't cheap things to install and run and I would only use them on longer trips.
I do care that they are actually available in sufficient quantity that I know I can get access to one when I need one, otherwise longer trips are not an option and the utility of the car is restricted.
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capacity of recharge in own garage
Seattle is doing away with residential garages.
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Actually the main player who has addressed this are the vehicle owners. The overwhelming majority of cars never travel further in a single trip than the range provided by an EV, you bought a Leaf already and by all metrics it has absolutely shitty range compared to the rest of the market.
When 90% of America is driving an EV then we can start taking about charging networks and ranges as being the limiting factor. Until then it's something else that is the problem, be it economics, FUD, or the wasteful practi
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> you bought a Leaf already and by all metrics it has absolutely shitty range compared to the rest of the market.
Yep. I got it used and paid accordingly. I'm not complaining.
My expectations for my next car is that I can use it for the longer journeys (every two weeks ish with a planned road trip in our near future). I don't see the more capable non-Tesla options as being particularly compelling when you compare the Tesla supercharger network with the sparse hodge podge of different charging companies for
Hydrogen? For the next era? Seriously? (Score:5, Interesting)
Even a theoretically ideal fuel cell has more than an order of magnitude more loss than a battery, even if you factor in months of and that's before you consider the conversion loss producing the hydrogen. It will always be a lot more efficient to just store the power in batteries (~99% real-world efficiency), and short of some new physics, that's not likely to change. Ever.
The only even slightly sane approach is to create hydrogen by cracking petroleum, but you're still releasing all the same emissions that you would if you burned the petroleum, and you're barely even getting an efficiency win (a theoretical maximum of just 62% for fuel cell + steam reforming vs. 58% for burning the natural gas directly). The real-world efficiency is even worse; you're basically giving up half the energy.
If you really must use petroleum for power, batteries are ever so slightly less efficient than a theoretically ideal fuel cell; right now, the most efficient natural gas power plants are achieving about 60% thermal efficiency, i.e. you'd get about 4% more power through a theoretically ideal fuel cell with current-generation steam reforming. By the time fuel cells even approach the theoretical ideal, though, natural gas generators almost certainly will have improved in their efficiency by more than 4%, i.e. there's just no realistic path forwards in which hydrogen fuel cells can ever by more efficient than battery-based storage, even if you start from the assumption that you must use fossil fuels as the energy source, much less if you factor in solar power or other clean sources of energy.
Don't get me wrong. Hydrogen fuel cells are a neat idea, and in some weird environments, such as space travel, where the waste product of conversion (water) is a useful byproduct that you would otherwise have to carry with you, it might even make sense on a power-per-pound basis.
But for storing energy to use in an automobile on a daily basis, where the waste product really is waste, hydrogen cannot ever possibly make sense, period, no matter how you do the math. And any notion that it is something for a future era seems rather absurd.
Re: Hydrogen? For the next era? Seriously? (Score:2)
Hydrogen is only going to make sense when it can either be harvested from the air or split out from water using the same or less energy from the grid than you are going to use driving. The mistake car makers made in pursuing hydrogen fuel cells over battery technology was assuming that customers want the gas station experience. But EVs got enough toehold before they could come to market that people start to see the advantage of overnight charging at home, with fast chargers available to top off during a mea
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They are hedging their bets. The Japanese manufacturers are hoping that hydrogen cars prove popular in some markets, particularly the US where the need for long distance travel and consumer scepticism of EV charging is high.
All of them except Nissan came very late to the EV party and so a lot of the patents are held by competitors and have to be licenced. Their domestic parts manufacturers, the ones who make the drivetrains, are also struggling to make the switch. Hydrogen offers them a chance to get in ahe
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Electric cars, as in modern cars and not form 150 year ago, we have or had basically in all car companies like the 1970s
Except for Teslas battery balancing/heating electronics there hardly can be any patent in the world that has any influence on the market.
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Battery chemistry, battery management system, the drivetrain that has to both feel familiar to drivers of fossils and also be efficient, smooth and quiet. In a modern EV the pressure you put on the accelerator has only a limited correlation with the amount of energy flowing into the motor, and of course the motor drive is complex to get good performance out of it.
The BMS is the big one though. Obviously manufacturers don't want to see massive numbers of warranty claims for new batteries but at the same time
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Tesla's patents are open for everyone to use:
https://www.tesla.com/blog/all... [tesla.com]
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the most efficient natural gas power plants are achieving about 60% thermal efficiency, i.e. you'd get about 4% more power through a theoretically ideal fuel cell with current-generation steam reforming. By the time fuel cells even approach the theoretical ideal, though, natural gas generators almost certainly will have improved in their efficiency by more than 4%
That does not make any sense. Any burning fuel is obviously 100% thermal efficient. Or does heat suddenly vanish into a hyperspace?
The electric ef
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You can't capture 100% of the energy, though. The thermal efficiency of a power plant is typically defined as the percentage of heat that gets converted into actual meaningful output.
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I'm pretty sure the comment about hydrogen being a "technology for the next era" is more about saving face than making a prediction. Honda was pretty big on hydrogen powered vehicles, but the writing on the wall is very clear now, so they are sensibly changing direction to avoid being left behind in the EV market. This is a good decision.
However, by making out hydrogen to be a technology whose time just hasn't come yet, they are able to save face for their strategic mistake. They just saw further ahead, but
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you can carry much more energy per weight/volume
Not really an issue for most vehicles. Battery weight isn't a big consideration for a Tesla. Maybe for an electric airplane.
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Also, compare the weight of a Model 3 to that of a Toyota Mirai.
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Yep, hydrogen is practically a scam, and definitely a scam when applied to mass adoption electric vehicles. Hydrogen vehicles have only a few main uses:
1. Hoover up government research grants
2. Allow auto companies to look like they're doing something with electric vehicles, without changing much about their drive train or overall car architecture
3. Slow down research into battery vehicles by diverting research money to pointless hydrogen fuel cell projects
Um, the "drive train" and "overall car architecture, once you get past how the power is STORED, is exactly the same for a chemical battery based EV and a Fuel Cell based EV.
It just comes down to the fact that chemical batteries just suck slightly less than fuel cells.
But just wait until there is a Lithium shortage (real or created)... Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the Universe. Lithium? Not so much.
Stupid, stupid, stupid! (Score:5, Interesting)
We have shitloads of free solar energy and deserts that can turn CO2 and water into fuel at any efficiency rate.
We have fuel cells that can turn fuel into water and CO2 and nothing else.
It is a perfectly clean cycle!!
If you want, you can even collect and compress the CO2, instead of using the atmosphete as a transport medium. The added efficieny of production pays for more than just the cost of compression.
Batteries, on the other hand, have ridiculously bad energy densities, and always will, due to simple physics. If they wouldn't, they would essentially have become fuel cells with gasoline or something alike built-in again. (Or fission/fusion/anti-matter drives.)
So they either don't get you far, or they weigh a ton. Literally.
On top of it, they use rare earths, that are extracted in extremely dirty processes, and often poisonous too.
Plus, they get worse over time. And since they are so heavy and large, they are of course fully integrated into the chassis. Meaning you can throw away the entire car after a few years. Or, to improve longevity, have even more batteries with even smaller cycles.
And of course once they burn, they burn, and unless you completely submerge them, there is no stopping it.
Humanity ... once again completely and utterly retarded.
I wonder how many decades or centures it takes, to undo this particular idiocy.
Re:Stupid, stupid, stupid! (Score:5, Informative)
We have shitloads of free solar energy and deserts that can turn CO2 and water into fuel at any efficiency rate.
What is the efficiency of creating hydrocarbons from CO2 and H2O ? Note that the Sun is free, but setting up the plant is not.
On top of it, they use rare earths, that are extracted in extremely dirty processes
Are they inescapably dirty or can we use a clean process if we spend more money ?
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On top of it, they use rare earths, that are extracted in extremely dirty processes, and often poisonous too.
That is nonsense.
There might be places where this is the case, I know no one, do you?
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This was a valid argument up until the part where you called everyone who disagrees with you "retarded."
Stalling for time (Score:2)
A Honda-E will be my next car... (Score:2)
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re:Electric is clearly the future (Score:5, Interesting)
Having said that, I do not think batteries are the way forward. In their current form and with our current infrastructure, they are a terrible idea. Firstly, lithium batteries are very hard to recycle.
Citation needed.
Right now, it isn't cost-effective to do so, because lithium is relatively cheap, so most batteries just end up being stored until the price of raw materials goes up enough to make it worth doing, but that's not the same thing as saying that it is very hard to do. There are a number of companies doing it already.
Charging a car takes a long time for "most" people. Most people do not live in a single family house with a garage where they can park their electric car and charge it up. Most people live in apartments, townhomes and things like that where there is no access to a charging port. Sure, you could wait an hour at a charge port, assuming there is one free. But when shall you do it?
These days, with newer charging tech, you can gain 180 miles of range on 15 minutes of charge [tesla.com]. Sadly, those aren't rolled out very broadly, but that's another matter.
Also, most drivers can charge off of a 110V outlet at home. Even the relatively power-hungry Tesla Model X can gain up to 64 miles of range overnight (16 hours @ 4 MPH, assuming a 20A circuit, a 20A outlet, and a 20A charging pigtail).
Most people who can afford an electric car also have a family. After work, I sure as shit don't have an hour to kill. I need to pick up my kid from day care.
You keep talking about an hour. If you really need to charge for an hour, even at one of Tesla's older V2 superchargers, that means you're adding 250-ish miles of range. If your commute really is two hours each way every day, you have bigger constraints on your time than the hour spent charging, and I feel sorry for you. :-)
let's say they solve that problem and it now only takes 5 minutes to charge your car. So... How the fuck are we going to charge all those cars? Where is the power coming from?
Realistically, most charging happens overnight, when power demands are at their lowest. So moving en masse to EVs doesn't actually put any strain on the grid. Right now, 13% of San Jose new car registrations are electric. No problems so far.
California cannot even keep the lights on in the summer because there isn't enough capacity on the grid.
Also not true. The rolling blackouts a decade back were caused by poorly thought out deregulation of power generation, resulting in generator companies deliberately taking power generation offline so that they would get more money for the power that they were willing to deliver. It was basically a giant scam, and Enron was at the heart of it. At no point was there an actual lack of power generation, much less distribution. It was all just speculators playing dirty pool.
I think fuel cells are a better idea. There are loads of new breakthroughs to enable us to produce hydrogen without it being a byproduct of hydrocarbon processing.
Even if you achieved perfect 100% conversion efficiency from electricity to hydrogen (impossible), you would still run headlong into the maximum theoretical efficiency of fuel cells, which is only 83%, versus batteries at 99% (right now). Fuel cells are a technological dead end. They made sense on the shuttle because water was precious, and carrying water meant carrying less of other things. But for land-based vehicles, they are, in every sense of the word, a joke, and their only real purpose for existing in that context seems to be as a means of bilking R&D money out of taxpayers and corporations that are foolish enough to spend money on it.
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Found the EV apologist. ^^^
Right now, it isn't cost-effective to do so, because lithium is relatively cheap, so most batteries just end up being stored until the price of raw materials goes up enough to make it worth doing, but that's not the same thing as saying that it is very hard to do. There are a number of companies doing it already.
"hard to do" is matter of your choice of metric. Yes we know from a technical stand point the process involved. As you say right now it isn't cost effective. Hmm why is that? Might it be because the amounts of input energy needed are large and the safe disposal of the remaining byproducts remains a challenge. In other-words negating a lot of the supposed gains from EVs. As the grandparent points out we might be just setting up the next crisis with batteries.
These days, with newer charging tech, you can gain 180 miles of range on 15 minutes of charge. Sadly, those aren't rolled out very broadly, but that's another matter.
Ah yes if only the operating environment was completely different my solution would be perfect. Great argument....
Tesla Model X can gain up to 64 miles of range overnight
bahaha what a joke; I bet its less to if you need to use the heater. For a lot of people a round trip to work + side trips to lunch and a grocery store visit and 64 miles isn't going to cut. The range anxiety for the rest will be severe. Need to make a surprise trip to the kids school in the middle of the day...oh crap sorry honey you'll just have to stay in the nurses office all afternoon mommy cruchy-mobile doesn't have enough juice to come get you!
Realistically, most charging happens overnight, when power demands are at their lowest.
Yes until every house hold is maxing a 20 amp circuit all night... and then?
No batter electrics (at least as we know them today) are a FAD they will go away. They will be the hotness for 5 years or so here going forward and then either the technology will undergo a massive shift or everyone will come to their senses and realize ICE with synthetic fuel or fuel cell electric is probably the right way.
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I note that you didn't try to refute his arguments, though.
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Even if you achieved perfect 100% conversion efficiency from electricity to hydrogen (impossible)
Not really impossible. Perhaps impossible for human engineers to do.
The laws of physics demand a 100% conversion is possible and actually: the norm.
you would still run headlong into the maximum theoretical efficiency of fuel cells, which is only 83%
Currently, but sooner or later we have efficiency in the same range for fuel cells.
Fuel cells make sense in many places, e.g. on boats or ships. Perhaps even on air p
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Fuel cells make sense in many places, e.g. on boats or ships. Perhaps even on air planes.
No idea why people like you ditch something by looking on one facette of a gem that has 20 or 30 facettes.
They decide something, then they work their way backwards. And this decision is typically from an inertia perspective. Electric cars or fuel cells are bad because of that one facet.
Electric vehicles are terrible failure because after all, everyone hops in their cars and makes cross country trips every day. Solar power generation is terrible because the sun goes down. The wind stops some time so we should not even think about wind turbines. Fuel cells are bad because fuel. Electric cars don't work if it's
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Fuel cells are bad because fuel.
Fuel cells are bad because if you produce hydrogen from fossil fuels, you aren't helping the environment meaningfully, and if you produce them from water, the energy loss is anywhere from about 50% to 75%. Lost. Versus 1% lost if you use a battery. Any hope of getting away from fossil fuels, then, cannot possibly come from fuel cells, because if the grid and power generation can support n FCVs, they can support 2n to 4n BEVs. And the best they could ever even theoretically do is a 4:5 ratio. Practicall
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Fuel cells are bad because fuel.
Fuel cells are bad because if you produce hydrogen from fossil fuels, you aren't helping the environment meaningfully, and if you produce them from water, the energy loss is anywhere from about 50% to 75%. Lost. Versus 1% lost if you use a battery. Any hope of getting away from fossil fuels, then, cannot possibly come from fuel cells, because if the grid and power generation can support n FCVs, they can support 2n to 4n BEVs. And the best they could ever even theoretically do is a 4:5 ratio. Practically speaking, that they will always use 20% more power, no matter what you do, and thus they will be 20% more expensive to operate.
You are missing my poiint completely.
All energy production mechanisms have issues. Every single one of them. There is no exception, and even though many of us summarily dismiss anything but petrofuels, they have some terrible issues as well.
But we spend all of our time making perfect the deadly enemy of good. So what do we do when petrofuels become so expensive that most of us cannot afford to operate one of them? Fold up the tents and committ mass suicide?
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We use batteries (or, possibly, supercapacitors, if the energy density improves considerably).
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No, not really. The laws of physics just demand that it can be fully converted to some other forms of energy without loss, not that it can be fully converted to a single form of energy without loss. Converting energy from one form to another is inherently lossy, because the conversion process always ends up releasing some energy in a form that isn't useful for what you're doing (e.g. heat). Pedantically, it's not that perfect
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These days, with newer charging tech, you can gain 180 miles of range on 15 minutes of charge [tesla.com]. Sadly, those aren't rolled out very broadly, but that's another matter.
That's good enough for commute vehicles, sans the part that you need to charge it every other night, like it's a friggin cell phone, instead of filling gas something like once a week since most gas or hybrid vehicles have fuel tank big enough to drive about 400 miles.
However, such range is still a pain for a lot of people who need a
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Someone who regularly drives 300-600 miles just to attend a party is a pretty extreme outlier. The last time I drove more than 250 miles in one direction was over 5 years ago- and I live in Texas. A high range Tesla will get you to San Antonio, Dallas, Austin, and points in between. I haven't had a reason to go to El Paso in over 10 years- I wager most Texans have never been there. Anything more than a 250 miles or so, and I'm booking a plane ticket. It's often cheaper anyways.
In any event, I totally unders
Re:Electric is clearly the future (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, there's less and less lithium in lithium ion batteries these days. A 100 kWh Tesla battery probably has about 4 kG of lithium, which is less than 1% of the battery, by weight.
Meh. A V3 supercharger uses a 2500KVA transformer. That's only O(5,000) amp service, which is the equivalent of 2 to 5 large office buildings. It's really no big deal. I mean, it's a lot of power, so you can't literally put it anywhere, but it isn't that much power. You should be able to get the necessary three-phase 480V 2500KVA service in pretty much any commercial or industrial area. Tesla sticks them in random parking lots of Target stores and shopping malls in California.
Besides, most people don't use superchargers as their main source of charging. That's what your home outlets are for. Putting superchargers on major highway routes (based on where power is readily available) gets the job done.
It seems likely to me that their analysis was wrong, but even if we assume that it is impractical to shift trucking to electricity right now, nothing is stopping delivery vehicles from remaining on diesel or natural gas for the foreseeable future. Without cars sucking down most of the oil production, diesel will probably get cheaper and cheaper. Also, if self-driving tech happens, demand for large trucks could be greatly reduced, which would bring down the cost even further.
Uh... nope. Achieving parity with gasoline is a non-issue. The only thing that matters is whether you can achieve high enough density so that you can pack enough energy into a real-world vehicle to drive the distances that most people drive. Because the drive motors are so much smaller than gasoline engines with their transmissions, drive shafts, emissions control systems, large radiators, alternators, fuel pumps, etc. under the hood/body, it turns out to be quite possible to do that, despite the relatively poor density. So although increasing the density further might make for great headlines, and will certainly make cars lighter, more efficient, and cheaper, that small efficiency loss really isn't a big deal, particularly given how much cheaper per mile electricity is than gasoline.
Why? Even in the best case, you have to grow something to produce the alcohol, and you end up using more petroleum to grow the corn or whatever than you get back out in terms of
Re:Electric is clearly the future (Score:4, Interesting)
I do see an issue with home charging.
Public transit will need to dramatically improve in a lot of areas if we're going to go all electric.
I live in a small city (Wilmington, DE) and I'd be shocked if even a quarter of the residents could charge at night. Even if they require apartment complexes to have charging, i'd bet that 50% of the residents are in houses with street parking only.
In my current situation my 12 minute drive could be a 45 minute bus ride with a three block walk to transfer.
I built a driveway for the sake of an electric car (next year's budget), but I doubt the city would have let me if I didn't just get it done in a weekend off a back ally (I'm pretty sure code requires driveways to be 2 car, and my yard is only 19 feet wide encroached with walls on each side with a telephone pole 4 feet into it from one side).
When I lived in Philadelphia the situation was very similar, a LOT of people outside of center city have only street parking (transit was decent to center city and back, but there were no crosstown buses again leading to 10-15 drives being hour plus bus rides).
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Why is street charging a problem? Just install charging posts. RFID to bill it to the right person.
You already have street lights, a lot of the infrastructure is already there. You can add charging points to streetlights themselves, in fact.
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Awesome; tear up the sidewalks and run emough amperage; 100,000amps@480v ought to do... for each block, at least.
A mini nuke-plant in every other neighborhood ought to do it. ;)
For overnight charging a modest level 2 charger is all that's needed. Remember, you can trade off time for wattage; Superchargers need 480V and lots of amps (though far, far less than 100K), but that's because they need to deliver a lot of energy very quickly.
For overnight charging, where you have, say, 6 hours (usually more, but lets be conservative) to restore, say, 45 kWh (150 miles @ 300 Wh/mi -- both conservative numbers), you need 34A@220V. Assuming there's room for 50 vehicles per block, that's 1
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I kind of wonder what kind of upgrades residential neighborhood electric grids will need to support majority (say, over 60%) electric vehicles.
There's probably 50 houses on the block, with 2 cars per house, 100 cars, that's 180 KW at level 1 charging. At roughly 10 blocks to the mile, that's 100 blocks per square mile.
I mean suddenly you have 18 megawatts of power consumption in a square mile. This is a non-trivial level of power consumption residential power grids weren't really built to supply.
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Exactly - most people in a city aren't commuting very far, it's the people in the exurbs that rack up the miles. Even 16A L2 charging points would be more than enough for overnight use, and most people would only need to do that every 2-3 days in a city. Add in some smart chargers which can stagger the times and it doesn't have to be crazy amperages.
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Your estimate seems wildly off by a few orders of magnitude.
A basic charger is 16A 230V. Let's say 100 chargers per block, that's only 1,600 amps.
Some simple control electronics will make it even less of an issue. At the most basic you could have a cycling system which gives each user a few hours a night, for example. Better would be to have a smart system that automatically balanced available power.
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Even if they require apartment complexes to have charging, i'd bet that 50% of the residents are in houses with street parking only.
I don't understand the problem. Two people in my apartment building bought electric cars, put down a deposit, went to the government, and they had street chargers installed before their cars were even delivered to them.
Seriously street parking with EV chargers is incredibly common unless you live in a city / country with arse backwards policies constantly trying to prevent the steady state of human progress.
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Without cars sucking down most of the oil production, diesel will probably get cheaper and cheaper.
Do you have any clue where diesel actually comes from? It's a byproduct that they found a use for, a byproduct from making gasoline.
So yeah, I'm SURE reducing the demand for gasoline drastically will will make diesel cheaper /s
Re:Electric is clearly the future (Score:5, Informative)
Without cars sucking down most of the oil production, diesel will probably get cheaper and cheaper.
Do you have any clue where diesel actually comes from? It's a byproduct that they found a use for, a byproduct from making gasoline.
So yeah, I'm SURE reducing the demand for gasoline drastically will will make diesel cheaper /s
It will.
It's not really accurate to say that diesel is a byproduct of gasoline production. Both (along with kerosene, fuel oil and some others) are a result of distillation of crude oil. Ignoring cracking, a barrel of crude contains a certain amount of gasoline and a certain amount of diesel. But you can't ignore cracking, which is a technique used to break the longer hydrocarbon chains of heavier distillates to produce more of the lighter distillates. Much of what would be diesel in a world without cracking is cracked to produce more gasoline, so there is a direct tradeoff between diesel and gasoline, at least until gasoline consumption falls below its natural fraction of crude (which actually varies from one crude to another).
However, even that is an oversimplification, because while fluid catalytic cracking reduces the amount of middling distillates (like diesel) and increases the amount of lighter distillates (like gasoline), hydrocracking reduces the amount of heavy distillates (like fuel oil and tar) and increases the amount of middling distillates -- like diesel. Refineries in the US mostly use fluid catalytic cracking because the demand for gasoline is high. As it drops, they can stop cracking to produce less gasoline and more diesel, and as it drops further they can switch to hydrocracking to further boost diesel output -- depending of course, on the demand for fuel oil and tar.
So, yes, it's entirely reasonable to expect that a decline in the demand for gasoline will increase the supply of diesel, and therefore reduce its price, assuming a constant price of crude oil.
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Of course, there's less and less lithium in lithium ion batteries these days. A 100 kWh Tesla battery probably has about 4 kG of lithium, which is less than 1% of the battery, by weight.
Considering mass alone is a bit misleading since not all components have the same density, importantly lithium has a very low density - according to Wikipedia it has the lowest density of any element which is solid at room temperature.
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Basic chemistry and Lithium is not particularly cheap by the way
Sodium and potassium work just as well.
Re:Electric is clearly the future (Score:5, Informative)
Most people live in apartments, townhomes and things like that where there is no access to a charging port.
Many parking lots have charging ports, including parking at apartments and townhouses. As EV ownership increases, more ports will be installed.
Most people who can afford an electric car also have a family. After work, I sure as shit don't have an hour to kill. I need to pick up my kid from daycare.
My EV has a range of 240 miles. My commute is 20 miles round-trip. So when I get home, I have 220 miles of range to run errands. Or I can top up during the workday with the charging port in the parking lot where I work and have even more range.
Your silly rant shows you have no idea what EV ownership is like.
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There is also what it can be like with EV. They do make the overall car design far more adaptable and more compact. A compact two seater roadster, effectively a recliner chair on wheels, achieving the most functional possible design, with far more effective design.
For example it makes absolutely no sense for the battery packs to be internal. They really should be in an external housing mounted to the vehicle, so they can be readily changed, this makes battery commercial battery swapping viable. Selling mor
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I don't think battery swapping is a good idea. Batteries are heavy and it's a good idea to put them behind heavy protective plating, so either you have to make the plating part of the battery pack (making it even heavier) or you have to somehow make the plating removable. Plus you need additional weight and complexity for the latching mechanism. And then there's the strangeness of swapping a component which is much of the value of your vehicle. Perhaps most!
It's not impossible, but I don't think that'
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Tesla actually did this with the Model S. The batteries are in the floor and can be swapped as a single pack. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
It works, obviously, but it's really not worth the effort, complexity and design compromises. Outside of like a Cannonball Run scenario, a Supercharger will do just fine for quickly filling up an electric car.
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Most people live in apartments, townhomes and things like that where there is no access to a charging port.
Many parking lots have charging ports, including parking at apartments and townhouses. As EV ownership increases, more ports will be installed.
Most people who can afford an electric car also have a family. After work, I sure as shit don't have an hour to kill. I need to pick up my kid from daycare.
My EV has a range of 240 miles. My commute is 20 miles round-trip. So when I get home, I have 220 miles of range to run errands. Or I can top up during the workday with the charging port in the parking lot where I work and have even more range.
Your silly rant shows you have no idea what EV ownership is like.
Or perhaps he lives in a area where a charging port is uncommon. being honest in my area i have yet to ever see one. but the closest "City" to me is only 40,000 people. EVs may be covenant for you but small town Middle America they would be a pain in the arse.
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Most people live in apartments, townhomes and things like that where there is no access to a charging port.
Many parking lots have charging ports, including parking at apartments and townhouses.
nah.
as of 2018, there are ~60k public charging stations in the US [evadoption.com]; therefore, to say "most" parking lots have a charging station, the US could only have ~30k parking lots nationwide.
no idea how many parking lots there are, but it's said there're at least 105 million parking spaces [nytimes.com]; so if only 30k parking lots nationwide, that means every parking lot would have at least 3500 parking spots.
charging port adoption for apartments/townhomes nationwide is likely far, far lower (at least it was in tech-happy CA a c
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I think you may want to talk to an EV owner someday.
My friend bought a Renault Zoe even though he only has an outside parking space at home with no possible way to charge the thing. He was allowed by his boss to plug into an outlet at work. So not only is the wattage not optimal, he also has much fewer hours to charge.
Ya know what? It's enough. That combined with charging at the mall when he goes grocery shopping is enough for him. No range anxiety either.
So excuse me for thinking that is a way better data
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Not so clear cut. (Score:2)
Firstly, lithium batteries are very hard to recycle. So, after 15 years when the battery needs to be scrapped, it is likely going to make an insane amount of e-waste- Dirty e-waste at that.
On one hand, Lithium and all the various other component found in various battery chemistries *are* somewhat a problem, but which is far from being specific to BEV. Nowadays every shitty little gizmo has it's own battery from the laptop your currently typing this own, to the tablet you'll be watching netflix this evening after work, to the smartphone in your pocket, the bluetooth earbuds you use to talk (because not having an audio jack is "courage !"), the e-bike/e-scooter you're rent-sharing with an app,
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You're still thinking in terms of time-efficiency related to filling up with gas, where the majority of the time involves just pulling up to a pump and paying. Of course you're going to top off the tank.
With electric cars there is no need nor expectation you will be charging them completely every time you decide to "fill up". My friend has a Chevy Bolt and even on 120V he can charge 64mi of range in 8hrs. (And with overnight rates that costs him less than a dollar) If he installed a 240V circuit that would
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I pay the same rates day and night. My utility offered me a special Electric Vehicle rate on coal and natural gas generation, and it would cost me about 2.8x as much to charge that way versus charging on 100% solar-wind-geothermal power with one rate all day.
Seeing as I don't want a $500 electric bill, I stick with 100% clean energy at 8 cents/kWh instead of paying 27 cents during the day and 6.5 cents at night for my utility's special electric vehicle plan.
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"Sorry I'm late boss, I forgot to fill up and ran out of gas on the highway. Had to wait 30 mins on AAA."
But I wouldn't do that / I have spare gas in the trunk
And a responsible EV owner isn't going to forget to charge it the night before work either. Your mistakes are your mistakes, own up to them.
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Most people who can afford an electric car also have a family. After work, I sure as shit don't have an hour to kill. I need to pick up my kid from day care.
Finally we got a wont somebody think of the children moment!
The auto manufacturers have reviewed your case Pablo, and have decided that since you need to pick up your kid, they are going to cancel all EV production. They also offer their profound apologies.
Do I leave an hour early from work and let my kids sleep in the car while it charges so I can still be to work on time?
let's say they solve that problem and it now only takes 5 minutes to charge your car.
Where on earth did you ever get an idea like that to ask a question like that? Why would you not have your car charged already? Do you only plug in your refrigerator once a day and have to wait a few hours before it gets cold? Do you only plug in your s
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Do I leave an hour early from work and let my kids sleep in the car while it charges so I can still be to work on time?
If you work so far from home that this is a limiting factor on even some of the lower range EVs on the market then you made some pretty shitty life choices.
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Most people do not live in a single family house with a garage where they can park their electric car and charge it up. Most people live in apartments, townhomes and things like that where there is no access to a charging port.
As far as I can tell, in the US at least, around 16-20% of people live in apartments/condos. Single family detached houses are ~60% of the housing stock. A garage is not needed for charging, just the ability to park near a power supply.
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>Most people do not live in a single family house with a garage where they can park their electric car and charge it up. Most people live in apartments,
Actually it's not quite so bad. In the U.S. people are fairly evenly divided between rural and city living. And rural people almost always have a driveway where they can run a charging cord without creating a hazard in public crosswalk right-of-ways. So that's about half the population right there. Add in the suburbanites, who mostly also have drivewa
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Not sure if you are using Fahrenheit or Celsius but -5 isn't really all that cold. How does the EV vehicle work at -30 or -40 Celsius. It is hard enough getting a gasoline powered car running at those temps even after being plugged in overnight (block heaters are a must around here)?
I don't own an electric vehicle and don't know any one with a full electric in the area so I would seriously like to hear if anyone is using a full electric vehicle in these types of conditions.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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I know you are just being snarky, but I'm going to respond anyway.
There's no EMF field generated by a battery. Current-carrying wires and electric motors, yes. Shielding humans from EMF is a very old discipline and very well understood. You'll get far more EMF from the unshielded wires in your house - you are literally surrounded by them - than while driving an electric car. And if that worries you, the insane amounts of powered pumped into the aether by radio stations will really upset you. The only p
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Hydrogen is worse than clean energy. By source it wil be, by definition, always more expensive than electric, because clean hydrogen comes from electricity, so a larger chain that just use electricity directly.
And how many "conversions" do you think the "chain" is, in going from natural gas in the ground to the electricity going into the EV motors?